“Schwarzenegger,” the driver said, contracting his muscles on the steering wheel, “Did you meet him? Shevardnadze wants to name a mountain after him. ‘Mount Schwarzenegger’ he will call it.”
I left my luggage at the train station and told the driver to drop me off outside the Central Tbilisi Telephone Office. Swaddled-up Georgians waiting to use the telephone booths gossiped or talked about their problems. I bought a card for my new mobile phone and walked out through the heavy doors back onto the street, loud with fur-clad Tbilisi women hurrying in all directions amidst the chaos of black Mercedes flaunting their German horns and the unmonitored mufflers of Russian cars still alive twenty years after their expiration dates. I looked up at the crumbling concrete buildings of the city, so cold and damp. The last remnants of Western residue still clung to me like cream on the top of new yoghurt. Indecisive, unable to move, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to go back to my old life.
My little brother Zuka said he’d meet me in Tbilisi on Rustaveli Avenue. And there he was singing on the street with his guitar: “I’m just a musician from Batumi singing for my neighbors who have no electricity.” And walking by Zuka were also others I knew. Tbilisi is a small city and on the street it is possible to recognize many people: the hundred-year-old Soviet ballerina, the talk show host whose huge yellow sunglasses make him look like a bug, the documentarians who make films about ancient door locks. Look in front of the bank. The security guard was once a famous bison breeder.
I clasped Zuka’s leather-jacketed shoulder. Zuka packed up his guitar and said, “Let’s go.” I put my hands in my pockets and felt the little red ball with an @ on it that Susan had passed around on the last day of our training session. She suggested that we squeeze it whenever we felt the modern American emotion of stress. “Isn’t it fun?” she had said. I took it out of my pocket and watched the pink and purple swirls but quickly jammed it back in my coat when I saw Zuka
staring at me. Walking past my reflection in the windows of the Bata shoe store, I remembered the Western-style importance of promoting the image of self-confidence, and took my hands out of my pockets, tried to stand up straighter. But with my little brother at my side, I looked so hulky. There was Zuka, strutting the street in his black trousers and rabbit fur earmuffs and a new gold bracelet on his wrist that he said was a gift from Malkhazi, and I, also in black trousers, stretched a little tighter—I had gained weight in America—wearing my airplane-rumpled new JC Penney’s sports coat. But already, I was looking Georgian again. Even if I were wearing a Chevron cap, I still wouldn’t look like an American. Maybe if I tried to master President Bush’s furrowed brow expression … I furrowed my brow.
“What’s wrong?” Zuka said.
“Nothing.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Can you tell me?” I asked. “Have there always been so many Marlboro cigarette advertisements here?”
“What are you saying? It’s an advertisement for a
horse
,” he joked.
On the Tbilisi-Batumi Express train—stenciled with palm trees on the outside to remind everyone to take a nostalgic holiday to the sea—the whistle blew. It slowly pulled out of the station. Ancient Soviet machinery once again proved its durability. The conductor even came in and showed us how to switch on the light. “Ah? Ah?” he said, so apparently proud was he of his train where the lights worked.
I leaned my head out of the window and the cold wind blew in my face and through my hair. We passed the abandoned train cars that the Chechen refugees were camped under. A man dragged a tree branch to a tarp while his son followed, hacking it to smaller pieces. We passed Msketa, our ancient church on the hill, and I put out my cigarette and went back to my compartment. Some farmer had crammed two bushels of mandarins under the seat. He sat on the bottom sleeper looking out the window.
“Friend,” I said. “Are these your mandarin oranges? I need a place to put my feet.”
I rubbed some dirty steam off my side of the window to see what he was looking at. Outside, all of the factories in the dismal suburban town had been stripped of their metal walls, leaving only the lathing. Shards of rusting metal scraped the sky; stray goats grazed on dandelion stalks.
“Nothing left but the silent insult of rust,” I said.
Zuka came into our car with a bottle of Old Tbilisi. In the other hand he held a cup. Zuka gave the cup to the farmer, who cradled it in his hands. The man’s hands shook as he leaned down and smelled the wine I poured. “To independence!” he said ironically, drank and returned the empty cup to me.
“America is a boring heaven,” I said. “But we are an exciting hell.”
He looked skeptical. I slapped his back. “It’s all good, friend.”
I filled the cup again and toasted to Georgia. Georgian wine: petrol leaking through a weather-damaged steel pipe, pine mulch on the forest floor, emanations of the fish market, apple trees in October. The smell is reminiscent of a strangling on the back of the neck in a despot’s unforgiving thumb grasp. The fragrance pleads for memory.
When I picked up my cup of wine and looked out the window I could feel my grandfather leaning over me, holding onto my collar. I felt implicated, as if I’d stolen this wine, like the villager in the Georgian movie
The Wine Thief
, because my love for this land was subversive and so illogical. It felt audacious and perhaps altogether wrong to be toasting it as we witnessed its perdition.
We traveled out of the rusty suburbs and into the orchards, their bare branches percolating with tiny green buds.
I heard Zuka’s voice in the hall arguing about whether the man who was recently named “Business Man of the Year”—the man from our neighborhood who had invented and marketed a new kind of beer, fourteen percent alcohol instead of our usual twelve—deserved that title.
“But this beer has the same alcohol content as wine,” a man argued. It’s true that no other product had been created in Georgia this year, argued Zuka, but were we Georgians going to reward a beer maker when we have always made wine? Zuka was beginning to sound like Malkhazi.
Someone in the next compartment had brought a radio. The volume, adjusted to its highest caliber, blared the song “I Will Survive,” drowning out Zuka’s conversation in the hall. I was still humming to the tune of “Oh, Oh, Oh, I will survive,” when he returned to the compartment.
“You like that music?” Zuka said. “I thought only people from the village listen to that kind of music.” Actually, Zuka was not sounding like Malkhazi. Malkhazi would never say something like that. I felt bad that I felt closer to my friend than to my own brother. But Zuka was becoming his own little person. He had brought bedsheets from the conductor—clean but still damp. We spread the sheets on our sleepers and I poured another cup of wine for the farmer.
“May the sun always shine on your head,” I said.
“This train is slower than a cow,” Zuka said.
“Friend,” the farmer called from below. “Do you know if Gogiashvili still lives in the same house in Batumi?”
“How am I supposed to know Gogiashvili?” I said.
“Do you want to sleep now?” he said.
I turned off the light and rolled over so I could watch the moon traveling with us along the tops of the wet grasses.
S
OMEONE WOKE ME UP IN THE MORNING WITH A FLASHLIGHT IN MY
face. I turned over and fell asleep again until I smelled eggs frying in the conductor’s cabin. Outside the window I watched pigs rooting into an alder. The name of the town had been written on a board and nailed to the tree.
“Are we only in Hashuri?” I asked. But no one was in the compartment. I looked at my watch—past nine. We should have been in Batumi by now. Passengers had alighted the train and were smoking, sitting on wet benches stained with eucalyptus leaves. Zuka came back carrying a stack of bread.
“I bought some honey but gave it to him,” Zuka said, motioning out the window.
Our train mate was outside, sitting on a bench, holding the cup of honey and staring at the ground. I went outside and lit a cigarette, asked about why we had stopped, but no one knew. I knocked on the conductor’s cabin to ask why we were waiting so long and the conductor said, in between mouthfuls of egg, that some bandits were holding up the train. And then he added that he was out of hot water so if I wanted some tea to go to the kiosk outside.
I went back outside and kept my mouth closed so the bandits, wherever they were, wouldn’t see my gold tooth.
We arrived in Batumi early in the afternoon. Passing the botanical gardens I saw the leaves of the palms had been tied up with string. I told Zuka, “In America the blues of the sky are deeper, but our greens are more vivid.”
I remembered a song that Merrick had taught me. It went, “My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pie, but other lands have sunlight too, and clover and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.” This was really true.
Even though spring had just barely begun, the Batumi shrubs had a halo around them, and I thought of the little green sprouts in the poem by Vaja Pshavela. I had been gone for only six weeks, but it felt like I had been gone for ten years from the sea and salty air, from Our City of the Chipped Paint Lady.
Malkhazi was waiting for us at the station. He had gained weight too. Even his soul was heavy looking, and he looked like a Soviet bureaucrat in his new uniform, as if paying allegiance to the Mercedes he was standing in front of. “It’s not mine. It’s my company’s car,” he explained.
We got in. Zuka tried to joke with him. “Have you heard of the Svani mountain man who is driving a Mercedes and he keeps running people over? The police reprimand him. They ask, ‘Why do you keep running over people?’ He says, ‘You see that symbol on the hood? Isn’t that a target sign?’”
“Foo!” Malkhazi said. “What was wrong with that guy?”
“What’s wrong with
you
?” I asked.
“It’s nothing. It’s pressure. They are pressing down on me. But you’re home. I don’t want to talk about my problems.”
When we got home Malkhazi stayed in the driver’s seat and kept the car running. Malkhazi, rather Mr. Ins
pec
tor, tooted the horn and my mother stuck her head out the window, wrapping the white lace curtain around her head like a scarf, as if she were a
tavsapartsakrali
, some sort of extremely religious person. “Slims!” she cried. She brought her hands to her face, imitating the sign of eating. “Come eat!” she called. “You too, Malkhazi!”
Malkhazi told us to get out.
“Aren’t you coming up?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“I haven’t seen you in two months.”
“Nobody has. Now get out,” he said. “I’ll meet you later.”
I got out of the car. As usual, the elevator was broken. Zuka heaved my bag up the stairs and we went inside.
When my mother saw me she pushed me into a chair, ladled out some bean soup into a bowl, and crumbled some
chaadi
on top. She cut squares of briny farmer cheese, put them on a plate. Did I want a fried egg? How about a boiled potato? More soup?”
“No. Please, no,” I said spooning the beans into my mouth.
“I should have more to offer you but we’re fasting for lent. Zuka!” she called. “Go buy some potato chips for Slims. Just a small package. And some tarragon lemonade.” My mother took money from her purse and counted out the change.
Zuka ran off and I went over to the heater to warm myself.
“I thought you were coming back a week later,” she said. “Everyone’s been asking about you. They all want to talk to you about their business plans. How about some vodka?” She poured me half a glass, sat back down, and pressed her fingers into her temples. “They’re working Zuka too hard at the furniture factory. A fifteen-year-old! He’s not strong enough. And Juliet says she is always at the university but I think she’s sneaking around with that English fellow.”
Zuka returned with the potato chips and my mother told him, “This is for Slims.”
“No please,” I said to Zuka. “Have some.”
“Slims is offering you some, Zuka. Take it. Go outside and play now.”
Zuka rolled his eyes at me and left.
She rubbed her eyes. “Malkhazi never comes home anymore.
Vaimay
! I have an appointment with the bishop. Oh Slims. Slimiko,” she said. “I didn’t want Zuka to hear this but the whole town is in a crisis.” She began to talk so fast I didn’t know what she was saying.
“Calm down,” I said. “Tell me slowly.”
She had gone to church that morning and the bishop had issued
a warning about a man named Mr. Moon from Korea. His workers were passing out dough to pedestrians, telling them to take it home and bake it because it contained magical qualities and would bless their homes. “But beware!” the bishop had said. “This bread is infused with the blood of sacrificed animals. If you eat it, you and your household will come under its spell!” One woman in the church had shrieked, “Oh no! What have I done!” The bishop chastised her in front of everyone, saying, “We tell children not to take food from strangers or eat off the street, and you, a grown woman, have baked the bread of a stranger!”
“And then,” said my mother, “he told her to go to her soul father to be punished and purified. O! I’ve been telling Malkhazi not to eat food off the street. Oh, Slims, what if he eats this bread of Mr. Moon?”
“Please don’t worry about that,” I told her.
She put her hand on my head before leaving to meet with the bishop, and grabbed the umbrella on her way out the door.
It was sprinkling outside. I stood at the window and watched my mother chase the chickens and ducks into their pen before realizing that the green rug under my feet was soaking up water. I tried to tape up a crack in the window. Then I bent over a dead wire protruding from the wall and stared at the clock that said ten after two before remembering that the clock didn’t work.
I didn’t feel like talking to the neighbors about an American business plan. I was tired of business plans. Besides, how could I explain things like how someone at the San Francisco airport was
paid
to pull the suitcases upright at the baggage claim belt to make them easier to grasp, more convenient, and that in America they use candles for
fun
.