The moon in Abkhasia is the oldest on earth, older by far than the high, disdainful polar moon, older than the shabby grey disk of the desert. It hangs high above the spiked range of the Caucasus, an ancient gleam on the Black Sea; a single, piercing eye in the void. We are driving down the steep winding road into Abkhasia from the pass at Akhytara in the north, Salma and I, on our way to her village. We have lived together for nearly a year in Tbilisi and still I do not know any Abkhasian. We speak Russian and English, but Salma swears at me in Abkhasian. Her cursing sounds like the buzz of a cicada with whistling sounds like those of a bird thrown in. When I laugh at the ridiculous sounds she makes, it only makes her madder, and she starts to swear in English.
The full moon shines on a land that looks like it belongs to the moon itself. Some of the mountains look like a great scoop has been taken out of their sides. Dark shadows make craters out of the hollows by the side of the road and massive overhangs hover above as if about to fall. But nothing falls, this land is so old it is weightless.
We creep around one heavily banked bend and Salma cries out, "Look! There must have been an accident!"
Below us I can see two red eyes in the darkness with smoke pouring out from where the nostrils would be. It must be the car full of young Russians that passed us after Akhytara.
We clamber down the embankment. The car is on its back, the wheels still spinning, the engine still spluttering. It almost looks as if the car shook free of gravity for a while, flying a little before it slammed nose-first into the ground. I reach the car first. There are bodies everywhere, it seems, a jumble of slack-mouthed, bloody faces and hollow eyes returning the dull glint of the moon. There are bottles of vodka smashed inside the car. I find one girl still alive, tangled in a bush of thorns. The rest are dead.
"Young and stupid," says Salma. I turn their car engine off and we carry the girl up the slope. She whimpers in shock. I’m too shocked to speak, but Salma keeps up her banter, that everything will be alright, that we’ll get her to a hospital, can she breathe, is she in pain. The girl is covered in cuts but otherwise appears unharmed.
Salma drives slowly down the hill towards a small village before the coast road. I sit in the back with the girl, holding a rug around her shoulders to stop her shivering. She has begun to babble, but she is speaking too quickly for me to understand a single word she is saying. I keep saying that she will be OK, it’s OK, it’s OK. We have begun to breathe fog. Salma has to stop the car because the windscreen has misted up.
"Try not to breathe so much," she says to me in English.
In the village we find a doctor who takes the girl into her surgery and sedates her. At last she has stopped babbling. Some villagers head back up the hill in a truck to collect the dead. It is bad, they say, the third accident this month, they need to spend money on that road, but there is none. We keep going along the coast road to Sukhumi. I am still shaken up by the accident, but Salma appears to have put it behind her. We stop at Gudauta for a dawn breakfast.
"It is not a tragedy. They were foolish to be drinking and driving. It is very sad for those they have left behind. It is as bad as suicide. Promise me you will never be so stupid," says Salma over our coffee. "I do not want to be an old woman with you in the ground."

*

Years ago my grandmother showed me a photograph of her father in Tbilisi. He stands in a group before the camera in 1921 on the eve of Stalin’s brutal reconquest of Georgia. They look optimistic, helpless and young. My great-grandfather’s eyes look over the cameraman’s head, as if he can see a little further than the others, perhaps as far as the twilight of his children’s lives when nothing remains of his own life but a cryptic gaze.
"When you go to Grusinya," she said, avoiding the Western ‘Georgia’, "you will go to Sukhumi and it will be like you are home. It is like here," and she sweeps her arm over Torrensville, "all eucalyptus and hot sun."
Before the War of Separation with Georgia in the early 1990s, Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhasia, was the Gold Coast of the Georgians and Black Sea Russians. Pastel-coloured hotels, balmy boulevards lined with palms and the vapour of eucalypts filling the air. My family were Georgians who had settled in Abkhasia, but had fled after the reconquest.
"Abkhasians," my grandmother said, "no-one can understand anything they say. They live off mashed corn, they don’t marry until they’re 50, they have one or two children they never talk to and live until they’re 150! All this on the tropical shores of the Black Sea. I tell you, Abkhasia is wasted on the Abkhasians."

*

I first meet Salma in Gori, the town where Stalin was born, a little west of Tbilisi. She is a guide in a small museum dedicated to Stalin, taking people around a converted house and explaining the various exhibits to them. This is around the time of perestroika, when the Soviet Union had begun to fall apart like an old Skoda, dilapidated beyond value but still working, barely. There is no sign outside the house: I only hear about the museum from an American I meet in a bar. Representations of Stalin are officially banned, but this is Georgia, his birthplace. There is a certain pride to be had in the birth of a monster. In the museum there is a replica of Stalin’s moustache standing alone in a glass case. It looks enormous. It cannot possibly have ever fitted on a face. It would suffocate whoever wore it. Salma takes it out of the case. It lies on a velvet cushion, which she holds reverently. We are allowed to touch it, for a brief second, before she puts it back. It feels real. They have his first knuckle-duster in another glass case and in another, the poster for his favourite film, Fantasia. I suspect this is all a joke, Georgian art students perhaps, and I listen to what my guide has to say, to see if she gives it away. She stands before a photo of some forbidding-looking old people in black tunics with black cloths tied around their heads.
"Late in life, Stalin promoted the idea of the longevity of Georgians in order to ward off moves against his leadership because of his advancing years. In actual fact, the part of Georgia where people live for a very long time is the Abkhaz, away to the north-west."
I tell her that my mother’s family are from Sukhumi, but that I’m from Adelaide.
"Maybe when you are 120 you can tell your great-great-grandchildren in Australia you stroked Stalin’s moustache."
"I wouldn’t want to live that long - my family are Georgian, not Abkhasian. Besides, what is there to tell if it isn’t real."
"Everything in Georgia is real," she says gravely.
She tells me she is Abkhasian, but has left her village for an education in Tbilisi. The museum is her invention. Stalin memorabilia is huge in the black market. It’s not exactly nostalgia, according to Salma. There’s a fascination with the unspeakable: it’s like pornography. She makes a killing out of the museum. What is on display is nothing compared to what gets sold, almost all of it to foreign tourists. It has paid for her university degree in Abkhasian History and then some.
"In Abkhasia we only worked out a way to write our language after the Revolution. Thirty books are all you need to possess the complete works of Abkhasian Literature."
I tell Salma that I’ve always wanted to be a heavyweight in at least one culture. I could manage thirty books, easy.
"Ah, but you will be 120 at least before you can understand Abkhasian."

*

In Abkhasian there is no word for an old person. You are only older, or long-living, but there is no such thing as being old. For Abkhasians, death is not an end of life; it is a rude interruption and an injustice. No-one submits to death willingly in Abkhasia. When I met Salma’s great-grandfather I mistook him for a man of 70. He was a fit 120, drank a glass of vodka every morning before breakfast and worked a couple of hours most days in the family vineyard.
"Sabdu-iabdu was already a grandfather several times over when collectivization took place." Salma explained.
He is a bit of character in Duripsh. As a young man he served in the Imperial Army of Czar Alexander III, the father of the last Czar. His unit, the notorious Caucasian Cavalry, were garrisoned in Tbilisi. He was involved in a bar brawl in 1890 when some Georgians insulted the honour of Abkhasia. One soldier and three Georgians were killed, with another, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, dying later of his wounds.
"I killed the father of Stalin," he told me proudly in perfect Russian, "and I would have killed Stalin too if he was a man. But he was only an eleven-year-old snot with a withered arm. What can you do? History is an old man, you cannot change him."

*

We are met by Salma’s family as we drive into Duripsh. They have given us a bungalow next door to where they live, several generations all together. They speak Abkhasian which Salma translates for me. Their speech sounds like a series of gentle explosions, "like distant gunfire", says Salma. We have arrived at the best time of year. The grape harvest has been good and even the birds have had their fill. They sit in the trees stupefied from having eaten so many, too heavy to fly. When they fall out of the trees they lie where they land, drunk for up to a day before they are able to fly off and do it all again.
It is also the time of year for marriages. The younger brother of Salma’s great-grandmother is marrying for the second time. He says he is 95 and has been widowed for two years. His bride-to-be is 96.
The feast is extravagant. A series of tents have been set up as long as a city block and guests arrive and depart all day, feasting at long wooden benches under the canvas. We sit with her great-uncle’s family. I am sitting next to one relative, Tamshug Kapba, who tells me in Russian that he is 106 years old.
"So is Makhty Tarkil, the groom you see today," he adds, indicating the bridal table, where the groom and bride sit side by side as a long train of well-wishers file past to shake their hands.
"But he told us he is 95."
"Pah! I would lie too for a woman of 96. A man is a man until he is 100, you know what I mean. After that, well, he’s getting on a bit."
There is a band providing music for the wedding. They are a troupe of singers, dancers and musicians, all over 90. They dance like young people; they put me to shame.
Tamshug explains.
"Thirty-six years ago the elders in Abkhasia got fed up with doctors coming from all over the Soviet Union to poke them and measure them and make them stand on one leg. Every time they see an Abkhasian who is older than 100 they make them play the apkhartsa or sing. And if they can do that, then they make them get up and jump in the air and run about - all this when they could be working! So they decide next time one of these doctors comes to Abkhasia, they can pay to watch the elders perform. Nothing is free - not when you have been around as long as us."
We drink a toast to free enterprise.
The wedding is packed. As soon as someone gets up from the feasting tables, another takes their place. The band plays on tirelessly, almost fiercely. Some of the older men at the wedding have started displaying their horsemanship. Not all of them are as nimble as they would like, but one of them, an 80 year old called Akhutza Kunach, is able to pick up with his teeth, at full gallop, a dagger stuck in the ground. A few of them watch me watching them. Salma is by my side but there is something wrong with our conversation. I notice I am the only person at the wedding wearing glasses. She points to the thunderous riding and describes the skill involved in each feat. She is trying to hide me from the concentrated gaze of the old men, dressed in their traditional black. As darkness falls and the full moon rises the night becomes filled with the gleaming of a thousand pitiless eyes.

*

Abkhasia is older than memory, squeezed by Russia and Georgia almost into the palm-lined Black Sea. According to legend, God made Abkhasia as an afterthought from a pile of leftover stones. It is the land where Prometheus was chained to a rock and an eagle would tear out his liver, day after day, year after year for millenia. There is an ancient cruelty even in the smallest things. Mothers give their children the breast by leaning over the crib where their children remain strapped for the first six months of their lives. Men carry a dagger with them at all times and until recently a pistol as well. Marriage is forbidden for those with physical defects like poor eyesight or a congenital deformity. The Abkhasians are determined to keep a pretty clean gene pool.

*

On the morning after the wedding I open the door of our bungalow and notice a red splash right in its middle. Salma’s family are unfailingly polite but make no mention of its origin. Salma knows full well what it means. It is a message from some of the elders who have decided it is not a good idea for Salma and I to remain together.
"It is not you. It is because you are a foreigner."
"Is it any of their business to decide? You’ve been in Tbilisi for three years, what say do they have there?"
"They are old. They were born last century and think differently to us. Forget it."
But I can’t forget it. I know that Abkhasians occasionally marry foreigners, but they would never marry an asthmatic with bad eyesight who can’t ride a horse and has never fired a gun. I leave Salma with her family and go for a walk in the hills above the village where cattle are herded in the mountain pastures. In the highest meadow I come across a shooting gallery of old men with a couple of AK47s blasting away at rusted cans and bottles lined up on a large rock. They hear me coming between shots and turn defiantly holding their AK47s, watching me in silence until I turn to walk back to the village without a single word having been spoken. Then the shooting starts again.

*

In the evening Salma and I dine with her family in their bungalow. Something has changed between us. Salma eats her food slowly and deliberately. She drinks more wine than usual, and is unusually courteous to the older relatives sitting in their places of honour. I know that she has decided to stay even though she could leave, if she wanted, but her country surrounds her, she is in it up to her neck. She is needed, I can tell, to help fight that abstract, invisible insurgency against which an army of Abkhasian Separatists has already been formed, years before the real War of Separation will begin, and I will not stand in their way.
We both know she will not leave again.

*

Two months ago I received a letter from Salma, with a postmark of almost a year earlier. It has been years since I last saw her. She writes of a hard life. Downtown Sukhumi now looks like a war zone, whole city blocks gutted by repeated rocket attacks. The national museum and the national archive no longer exist, they are mere piles of ashes. Broken busts of poets are scattered among the city parks now overgrown with oleander. In the stalemate that has emerged between Abkhasia and Georgia, the airport has been abandoned and the railroad is wrecked. Those left in that city survive on soup kitchens.
In the country the rhythms of thousands of years are repeated over and over. Daughters and remaining sons return to their villages to be folded once again into the bosom of their enormous extended families. They work the land and live according to the rules of tradition. Salma is in Duripsh, working the family vineyard and tea plantation, writing of the prison Abkhasia has become, blockaded by Russia and by Georgia and cut off from the rest of the world. It was a miracle her letter reached me at all. She has not married yet, but she has only just turned 30. Near the end she asks if I remember the car accident: "I realise now there are worse things than being an old woman with you in the ground," but what of that? History is an old man, I cannot change it.

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