Translated from the Italian original by Pina Piccolo. Excerpted from the novel Ardesia, by Ruska Jorjolani, Italo Svevo Edizioni, 2025. Cover image, “What do the deaf hear”, ceramics project by Mihaela Suman.
This morning I put on my gold flats, bought on Vinted, without the slightest suspicion that a few hours later I would be making my way through the scattered bones of one of my ancestors.
I watch the scene from behind the fence that separates the burial ground from the driveway, uncertain on my feet.
The bulldozer moves with the clumsy rigidity of machines mimicking human movements. The bucket is lifted like a cupped hand, its teeth like stiff fingers, and then is lowered to grab clumps of soil which it then throws to the side, on the edge of the dig. A bit of dirt falls back from there into the dusty pit.
It is a kind of small kurgan: sheets of slate were lowered to a depth of about two meters, together with river stones, cut and aligned to form the walls of a perfectly rectangular cubicle. Wooden beams, resting on the edges, were placed above them, and they were in turn enclosed with enormous, flat slabs of the same schistose rock as the walls, before being covered with dirt. Over time, as the wood underneath rotted, the slabs collapsed inside, on top of what remained of my great-grandfather.
The excavation area is located on a plot of about three hundred square meters and in the middle stand the blackened, burned out stone remains of an abandoned house. It’s fenced on three sides by uneven wooden planks and on the fourth by metal mesh, with an opening left for access. What was once the garden in front of the ruins is now a space overgrown with dense vegetation, thick bushes dotted with yellow flowers, almost like the undergrowth of a forest.
At the edge of the pit, among tufts of grass and gravel, one can glimpse a few bones gathered in a small pile. They are white, with a dusting of soil that seems to expand the spectrum of whites, a particular variation of light reflected on a ground mineral surface, which makes them stand out even more against the cobalt blue background of the shale.
Standing beside me, Martin says, “I’ll go and call Francesca.”
Francesca is his wife, a woman from Rome, with long curly hair and lively dark eyes, an anthropology scholar. Martin is a sociologist and has recently written a book on the harmful effects of concrete. And now, by pure chance, he finds himself witnessing this exploration of Caucasian funeral practices, a sort of private archaeological dig, complete with authentic artifacts emerging one after the other.
“Let her rest, she hasn’t recovered yet!” I point out to Martin. Francesca’s stomach hasn’t given her a moment’s respite since we arrived here from Tbilisi yesterday after an eight-hour drive. So today she stayed behind waiting for us in the house where I have been hosting them. It’s the place where I myself grew up, a few hundred meters from here. It’s a square two-story building, typical of western Georgian construction, with an external staircase, a veranda with a railing, and a sloping tin roof, built by my grandfather in the 1950s, now an improvised B&B run by my uncle’s family.
“This is something different,” says Martin. “The sort of event that you wouldn’t want to miss.” He takes one last look at the excavation work, craning his neck to see the depth of the pit, then sets off with his slightly awkward gait.
I never imagined that one day I would witness the exhumation of my great-grandfather. I always pictured him made of iridescent material, part real and part invented. Sometimes he would be as if carved in stone, with sharp edges and hard corners, other times, as flexible as a sponge soaked in water, sensitive to even the slightest touch of your fingertips, but always returning to its original shape. A turbulent life, studded with passions, crimes, and escapes. A death shrouded in mystery, ambushed as he returned to his family, in the mountains, after a daring escape from the historic Metekhi prison, diving into the Mtkvari River. It was the harshest prison in the capital, and he had escaped almost in the same way as the young Stalin had, some twenty years earlier. The difference was that Stalin, who didn’t know how to swim, was apparently carried across on the shoulders by a friend, the revolutionary Budu Mdivani, whom later was repaid by Stalin during the Purges with an execution order for treason, along with his entire family.
My great-grandfather, on the other hand, knew rivers well. He was born and raised in this village, which was crossed (or rather pierced) by a rushing, impetuous river, a young watercourse that had just broken away from its glacier abode and, once plunged into the valley, had everything to prove. Just like my grandfather. When they killed him, he had just turned twenty-eight. We didn’t know where he was buried. Or rather, we could guess where, but we felt no need to find out.
People like him don’t have graves; I was convinced of that. They don’t die. At most, during severe droughts, they evaporate. And yet, here I am. Together with these friends I first met during my studies in Sicily, and which I took to my hometown in northwestern Georgia, after spending a week with them in Tbilisi, where they had landed from France.
This morning, while having breakfast on the veranda, eating corn bread with cheese and sweet blinis and discussing the day’s plans, my uncle, my father’s brother, casually mentioned that he would not be able to act as our guide because he was busy with the exhumation of his grandfather, my great-grandfather.
“What?” I almost jumped out of my seat. “And I’m just finding out now?” My uncle shrugged, embarrassed. “It wasn’t planned, believe me. We were supposed to do it yesterday, but no bulldozers were available for rent.”
“Yesterday? While I was traveling?”
“Yes, the plan was to get it done before you arrived,” my uncle sipped some American coffee, took a drag on his cigarette, and then, with a sweeping gesture of his hand, pointed to the table set for Martin and Francesca, as if to say, please, help yourselves again.
“Do you think you’ll still find him there?” I insisted.
“Who?”
“Who? Great-grandfather.”
“Ah,” my uncle grabbed the glass coffee pot and filled my guests’ cups. “I think so.”
“It’s a good thing you couldn’t do it yesterday.”
“Yeah,” my uncle fixed his sleepy gaze on me. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Where are we taking him?”
“To the cemetery.”
“But why move him now?”
“The land was inherited by our cousin’s son. He wants to build something there.”
“Why couldn’t my great-grandfather’s remains stay there?”
“He told me he doesn’t want the dead around.”
“Did he really say that?” I asked, my eyes wide.
“No,” he smiled, “he’s polite. But that was more or less the idea.”
“So, what’s the plan for today?” asked Martin, who hadn’t understood a word of the conversation, as he helped himself to another serving of blini.”First we’ll rest for a moment, and then we’ll think about it,” I replied to buy some time. Francesca hadn’t slept well and was exhausted. She didn’t touch her food but just sipped a little coffee and sparkling mineral water.
“Are we taking them with us too?” I asked my uncle, gesturing toward my guests.
“I don’t know. Let’s see…” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, got up, and took his cell phone out of his pocket to make a call.
As I drank my coffee, I turned toward the horizon. Beyond the sloping roofs of the houses and towers, through the thinning mist, I could see the snow-capped peak of Mount Tetnuldi, the placid “betrothed” of Mount Ušba, a forked mountain, the most difficult to climb in the region, condemned by the gods for its turbulence to never be reunited with its beloved.
I turned my gaze back to my guests and announced, “Later we are going to exhume my great-grandfather.” Martin almost choked on his food. Francesca chose to stay at home, while her husband and I followed my uncle to the appointed place to witness the search for my ancestor’s grave.
After trying from various angles, I finally find a good vantage point from which to follow the operations. A strip of black leather emerges from the swirling piles of dust that the bulldozer’s bucket has thrown on top of what could now be described as a mound. It looks like the sole of a shoe, cut to fit a fairly long foot, a size 45, at a guess. It is probably part of the dead man’s aziatski boots, typical Caucasian footwear made of soft leather wrapped around the leg to just below the knee and then tightened at the top with a leather string. The soft leather of the upper portion is worn out by time, while the sole—only one so far—made of much harder and stiffer material, has been preserved. It has an elongated shape, the front part seems to end in a triangle, but with its tip cut off, as though the shoemaker had changed his mind at the last minute and made a clean cut at the toe.
“He had a high arched foot,” my grandmother told me, “and the shoemaker in Kutaisi, where he went to have them made the first time, almost gave up on making his boots. So, he pointed his gun at him.”
The day is bright, almost crystal-clear, with a kind of translucence that only mountains can achieve in certain seasons. This brightness dusts everything with a sticky veil, like a coat of nail polish—the foliage glistens with what appear to be thin trails of snail slime; the chrome-plated parts of the bulldozer, apparently new or recently washed, send out blinding flashes; the turned over clods of soil, at times show their dust-covered side, compressing it for a few seconds, at other times, show their underside, rich in humus, a very stark brown. The machine is now moving more by inertia than anything else. Only a few small bones are emerging.
“The head! We have to find the head!” my uncle shouts to a young man in his twenties who has been working in sync with the movements of the bucket: with gloved hands, shirt sleeves, and tanned forearms, he sifts through every pile of soil that the shovel places on the mound. He is Irakli, the grandson of my great-grandfather’s younger brother, the one who has inherited this land. He proceeds calmly, meticulously, stopping only for a second to answer my uncle.
He raises his voice too, to be heard over the noise of the bulldozer: “Let’s hope it hasn’t been crushed.”
I shout back: “What do you mean, crushed?”
My cousin straightens up and wipes the sweat from his forehead with his forearm. “How should I know? Crushed by the slab that collapsed inside. Or by the bulldozer’s bucket.”
“No, the bulldozer can’t do that,” our uncle interjects, “I have been keeping my eye on it.” He feels around in his gray multi-pocket vest, pulls out a blue pack of Sobranie cigarettes and a bright pink lighter. He goes to light one, his chin jutting out, his palm shielding the flame, out of pure habit since there’s not a breath of wind. His hands are shaking. The one he uses for protection, his left, is all wrinkled, in some places the skin looks crumpled, in others, smooth like a glove. As a child, playing tag with his older sister, he had accidentally stuck his little hand into the boiling soup sitting on the massive wood stove. Under the bright rays of the sun, the reddish scars, especially the ones on his knuckles, seem to start scalding again, continuing to burn from where they left off half a century earlier.
Stretching out his arm and pointing to an area further away, near the fence, his voice slightly muffled by the cigarette between his lips, my uncle shouts to the worker controlling the bulldozer: “Over there, keep digging in that direction. They must have laid him to rest with his head facing east.”
“What year did he die?”
The speaker is a man in his fifties, a neighbor who immediately came out when he heard the first sounds of the bulldozer. He has about ten days’ worth of stubble dotted with gray patches, a tracksuit despite the heat, and rubber slippers. With his hands behind his back, he watches the widening pit and then my uncle smoking.
“In the 1930s,” replies my uncle, without looking up.
“The exact year?”
“We don’t know for sure. Maybe ’35. Maybe a little earlier.”
“The work of the communists?”
“The militia, yes.”
“So, not the KGB?”
“I think it was just the militia.”
“Was he a Menshevik?”
At this point, my uncle shifts his gaze to his interlocutor and stares at him with an expression that is his hallmark: one squinted eye, the features of his face all scrunched to that side, in a kind of grimace of pain, but a pain that is negligible, like a toot-ache that wasn’t painful enough to drive him to the dentist. This expression appears on his face when he is particularly focused or alert. He inhales the smoke.
“No, I don’t think he was a Menshevik.”
“So?” The neighbor seems unable to bear that lopsided gaze, lowers his head, spits on the ground, and steps on it.
“I think he was just restless,” says my uncle calmly, returning his attention to the excavation.
“Restless?” asks the neighbor.
“Restless.”
My uncle takes the cigarette out of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger and flicks the butt to the other side of the driveway.
Each new bone that emerges seems to have its own kind of whiteness, which makes the colors of the others recede into the background. My cousin tries to arrange them on top of each other, creating a sort of asymmetrical cairn.
Suddenly I find myself absent, estranged, clinging to a fixed thought: when will these bones in a pile become a skeleton? What will be the transitional piece? What will trigger the transmission belt, when such a connection is created between one bone and the next in such a way that the pile will leap into the circle of fire of meaning? And, once landed on this side of reality, it will no longer be a pile but a skeleton, a working plan from which to start, a frame on which to attach the cover corresponding to the image I have always had of my great-grandfather?
My cousin, bent over in the grave, raises his arm and waves something in the air like a trophy.
“That’s a femur. Did you know it’s the longest bone in the human body?” the voice comes from behind me. It’s Martin, who has just returned with Francesca. She looks a little sleepy, her thick curls falling over her shoulders.
“Yes, I think I read that somewhere,” I reply.
“Look at that!” Francesca leans forward to get a better look; her small feet pressed against the base of the fence. With a professorial gesture, she puts on her red-framed glasses hanging from her chest on a beaded chain.
“I told you so.” Martin stays back a step, motionless. He turns to me: “Shouldn’t someone from the municipality or, I don’t know, the coroner, be here?”
Before I can answer, my uncle approaches me, his face tense. “What did she ask you?”
“She asked if we have an authorization to do this.”
“Ah,” without saying another word, my uncle turns his back on us and goes back to looking at the grave.
“Do we have permission?” I insist.
My uncle turns around, his expression turning like someone forced to do something he is not used to doing: a long speech. He has a tired but determined look, his hands ready to gesticulate. “He,” he points to the grave, “was declared missing a long time ago. We, his family, were the only ones to know that he had been secretly buried in our garden. Only thing, we don’t know exactly where. The spot wasn’t marked, not even a stone or a cross. And this land,” he makes a circular motion with his burnt hand, “is now private property.”
I translate without omitting one word.
“And who does it belong to?” Francesca looks first at me, then at my uncle, who guesses the meaning of the question and points his chin towards his cousin.
Beyond the fence, bent over double with his legs apart, Irakli continues to rummage through the piles of loose soil and rock fragments. His red gloves look like miniature, intermittent warning signs amid a swirl of dust.
The four of us stare at him in silence, as if waiting for some sign that the danger has passed.
Martin turns to me. “So, no permit is needed?”
“Theoretically, we’re just turning over a few clods of soil,” I explain without bothering my uncle, who in the meantime has moved away from us to get a better view of the excavation and shouts, “Dig there, yes, right in that spot.”
“So your great-grandfather was buried in the garden next to the house?” Francesca points to the ruins standing at the end of the plot. All that remains is a two-story facade, made entirely of stones emerging from behind the peeling and blackened plaster, the empty window frames. Who knows what forces have kept it standing for decades in the harsh winters of this area.
Tufts of grass sprout in the gaps between the stones, where the mortar has flaked away. Besieged by thick vegetation that reaches up to the first floor, the ruin resembles a prehistoric animal, stocky and square-shaped, with stony scales, trying to camouflage itself in a ravine of rocks and greenery but not quite succeeding. There is something about it—small subcutaneous movements, posture, a certain energy scattered around it— who can say, something that ultimately always attracts attention. A being destined to become extinct.
I look away from the rubble. “That’s right, he was buried in the garden next to his home.”
“Which is no longer there…” Francesca insists on understanding fully.
“The house is gone, as you can see. It burned down.”
“How did that happen?” Martin interjects.
The bulldozer pauses. The young man operating it makes himself comfortable, sitting sideways with his feet dangling from the open cab. He is wearing a cap with a visor. He lights a cigarette.
Just then, two old ladies pass by on the path. They huddle close to each other, arm in arm, they trudge along, drawing strength from each other’s emaciated bodies, covered in mourning clothes. As soon as they reach the ditch, facing the remains of the house, they suddenly stop, then one of them takes a step forward and says in a soft voice: “Damn you!”
They stand between my uncle and the three of us, along the fence. We all turn to look at them. The woman who spoke seems to have two strips of flesh sutured at the corners of her mouth, and from that mouth, like an open wound, these words ooze out like pus: “Burn in hell!”
Her companion supports her, whispering something in her ear. Both their heads are wrapped in a black veil that is slightly faded, almost gray in the sunlight. Suddenly, the first one closes her eyes, motionless, not a wrinkle moving on her face.
“What’s the matter with those two?” Francesca asks me in a soft voice.
“They cursed someone,” I reply.
“But who?”
“I don’t know.”
Francesca turns to her husband, “Take a video, hurry up!”
Martin frowns and scratches his thick, graying hair. Finally, he pulls his cell phone out of the pocket of his beige linen pants.
In the meantime, the old woman who had spoken has opened her eyes, but continues to remain motionless, not making a sound, and, completely ignoring the excavation work, as if it weren’t even happening, she stares unflinchingly at the rubble of the house. And it is as though the house returns her gaze. A struggle seems to be underway between certain archaic forces, between entities that belong to the mists of time, and neither Martin’s bright-screen smartphone, nor Francesca’s red-rimmed glasses, nor the bulldozer with its shiny German-made parts can affect the present. Nor can they come between those two, or interfere with the suspension that permeates the opaque air in those fifty meters separating the woman’s sunken eyes from the vacant ones of the ruin. And the bones of my great-grandfather lie haphazardly in the middle, almost by chance, in their bed of dust, at the edge of the pit.
The femur found just a few seconds before lies at an angle, in its pearly whiteness, like a piece that is more difficult to fit into place. The bone is about to fall, but as soon as it settles to one side of the pile, it seems to occupy its proper space, fitting perfectly into its cavity, and finally triggering the flow of time once again. The bulldozer roars back to life. Dust rises again.
“Come on, let’s go,” the other old woman puts her arm around her shoulders, trying to pull her away, but the woman who cursed shows no sign of wanting to move.
“Murderer,” she murmurs. “Murderer.”
Because of the roar of the excavator, few of us hear her words. My uncle’s face is pale, he tries not to look in the direction of the two old women, who at that point turn around and slowly begin to walk away. Their curved, gray backs fade as they walk away, against the backdrop of houses and stone towers, and finally blend in completely with the rest.
Francesca, who had lost sight of them for a moment while rummaging through her bag, looks around. “But they’re gone!” she exclaims in disbelief.
“Were they ghosts or something?”
I shrug. I see Martin taking an awkward step towards me. He asks me in a serious, scholarly tone: “So, who was that woman angry with? Your great-grandfather?”
Before I can answer, his wife questions him in turn: “But you recorded them, didn’t you?”
“I think so.”
“You think so? Give me your phone for a second.” Francesca takes the smartphone from her husband’s hands and taps on the screen to see if he actually took the video.
I begin to feel the heat assaulting me. It creeps under my skin and starts working from the inside, at the cellular level, as if to break down their structure and then reassemble it in its own way. Francesca breathes a sigh of relief. “Luckily, everything is here.”
“I guess you won’t be posting anything on social media,” I say.
“Of course not!” Martin reassures me.
“We certainly won’t,” confirms his wife, “but maybe someone else will,” she says, pointing to a boy clinging to a corner of the fence. He must be about ten years old. With his elbows propped against the wooden boards, he is zooming in on the pile of bones with his cell phone camera.
“Uncle!” I shout.
My uncle turns and sees him. “Where did this kid come from?”
Ruska Jorjoliani was born in 1986 in Mestia, Georgia, but has settled in Palermo since 2007. She began writing ten years ago, in Italian. In 2009, she won the prestigious “Mondello Giovani SMS-Poesia” award with a poem dedicated to Italian poet Dino Campana. In 2015, she had her literary debut with the novel La tua presenza è come una città (Corrimano edizioni), which was transalted into German in July 2018. Her second novel Ardesia was published by Italo Svevo Edizioni in 2025.
