As close to Sukhumi as the rails allow

I took a courtyard room in Tbilisi for a fortnight, the kind with a grapevine that has opinions about sunlight and a landlady who leaves strong tea without commentary. Mornings began with the sulphur baths: the heavy mineral heat, the stone under bare feet, the way steam erases the edges of the city until only water and breath remain. It is a good place to think about borders that do not appear on tidy maps.

The research is for the companion archive around Ivanov's Ghost, not for any new fiction. I have been gathering the quieter record of the Georgia-Abkhazia line, the unresolved pause that still sits on the coast like weather. A slow train carried me west along the Black Sea as far as the rails and the frozen formalities permit. Sukhumi stayed beyond the last stop, present as absence, which is its own kind of document.

I walked the platform at the turnaround with a notebook and the smell of diesel and salt. People spoke of relatives, of summers before, of the ordinary ache of a place you cannot quite reach. I wrote down timetables, the color of the water, the way the mountains hold the light in late afternoon. Nothing dramatic. Only the texture of a border that refuses to finish its sentence.

Back in the courtyard I sorted photographs and old clippings under a lamp that buzzes faintly. The archive deepens by inches. I am not hunting a plot. I am trying to keep faith with a landscape that history left half-spoken, and with the women whose lives threaded through hospitals and radio silence and rooms that no longer have the right names on the door.