Tbilisi Again

The apartment in Tbilisi has three rooms (if you don’t count the bathrooms, which are really just a pair of closets; one with a toilet, one with a sink and mirror). The kitchen is a slim extension of the front hall and the first thing you see when you enter the apartment. The living room sits to the left, through a set of double glass doors. It is about 20’x 15’ and houses two beds, a small couch, a wall of mismatched wardrobes and cabinets, and the family’s new gas heater. The one bedroom sits off the far end of the living room and is about half the it’s size. It is filled almost completely by a double bed and a bunk bed standing next to each other against the narrow wall.

Six people live here: my host mother’s sister Lali, her daughters Tica, Mari, and Anu, her son Oto, and my older host sister Salome. Lali is a doctor and the four girls study at the universities in the city. With the addition of Irma, my host mother, and myself, there are nine of us: two lovely women, six girls aged between seventeen and twenty-two and one very rambunctious eleven you old boy.

In the mornings the girls and I huddle around the heater in various states of undress, passing around a small plastic bound hand held mirror, brushing or braiding each other’s hair, mending holes in stockings, or wrapping hair-ties in ribbon. They admire my shaved legs, pushing up the hem of my leggings and running their fingers up and down the exposed skin. I have tried repeatedly to explain that all they need to do is buy new razors, but they insist that it is hopeless, telling me they have “Georgian hair.”

The girls come and go, leaving for class or clinical duty. Mari is studying to be a doctor, Tica a dentist. There’s only one key to the apartment so someone always has to be at home, or everyone is locked out.

Much like my own family, when all the girls get together, it’s time to go shopping. We wind our way through narrow isles in the bizarre, peering into stalls barely large enough to hold their proprietor let alone a customer. Clothing, bags, and shoes hang from wires suspended across the isles and it is often difficult to determine who is selling what. Also, it’s cold, below freezing, and the slow shuffle of the crowd from stall to stall is not enough to keep my toes from going numb, making the uneven ground even more of an adventure to navigate.

I’m paraded through a seemingly unending string of secondhand shops, clothing stalls, and warehouses literally hung wall to wall with shoes. When I’m interested in a sweater, the seller calls another woman over and they hold a blanket over the corner of her stall so I can try it on. In the end, I do come away with several sweaters, and a warm pair of socks.

I will not comment on whether or not my purchases were influenced by the temperature of my shopping excursion. However, when I asked my host sister what sites I might see in the city (churches, museums, etc.) she dismisses me, pinching her eyebrows together, shaking her head, and saying, “No, it’s too cold.” She was nursing a hot cup of tea, recovering from the six hours we had just spent at the outdoor market finding her a new pair of boots.

I return to the house late Wednesday night after having drinks with a friend. I’m blushing from the cold and smiling at the accomplishment of making my way home alone via the Tbilisi Metro. The trip from downtown to the apartment requires two train changes through stations with high arching ceilings lined in marble. As I begin to remove my jacket and scarf, I’m ushered to a seat by the heater where Tica and Oto are playing a game. They are going back and forth calling each other animal names in English, trying to match the insult of the other person.

“You are a cow,” says Oto.

“And you are a snake.”

“You are…a giraffe!”

When Tica pauses to think of another animal, Oto climbs on top of his chair and says triumphantly, one hand raised into the air, “I am a lion!”

Karate and Cha-cha

On Thursday, I’m determined to get out of the house with my host sisters. I have been in the city four days and have seen little besides the apartment and the bazaar. When I tell them I want to go out with them their first question to me is, “Where?”

“I don’t know, you guys are the ones that live here.”

Mari, who openly labels herself the “wild sister,” seems anxious as she sits down to tea across the kitchen table from me. “I want to come out with you,” she says, twisting her hands in her lap like a child that needs the toilet, “ but I have to go  with Oto to class. “

“What class?’” I say.

She bites her lip and looks to Salome, “Karate rogor ari?”  (Karate, how is it?)

“Karate?” I say, recognizing the word despite her warped pronunciation, “Can I come?”

The class is held in a narrow room in the basement of a school on the other side of town. There is a stage at one end and wooden bars like those you might see in a dance studio run along the other three walls. There are about twenty-five seven to nine year olds lined up on the floor balancing on their knuckle sand their toes. I notice a few older students in the back, and even one other girl.

“This is not our class,” Mari says, leading me off to one side.

However, the young man in white uniform leading this class soon asks us to join and  gives us a great deal of personalized instruction, walking all the way the back of the class to explain each combination multiple times.

We have been there about twenty –five minutes when the actual sensei arrives. He is carrying a CD player under one arm and Mari says to me, “The music is funny, but you must not laugh.”

The player begins blaring a strange, synthetic upbeat music similar to something you might hear in the background of an arcade game set in space. We begin a rhythmic workout consisting mostly of squats, lunges, and kicks and occasionally the sensei will whip his hand around in a complex patter that none of us can replicate.

When we begin the floor exercises, Mari, the other girl student, and I have to face the back wall.

“Because it is embarrassing,” Mari says. And being the only three people staring at a wall isn’t?

After we finish the aerobics, we take a break for the classes to change. One of the younger boys in our class is crying because he is hungry. The sensei pulls him aside and says that he will buy him khinkali, because no one can train when they are weak. He sends a man away with money.

As we wait for the res of the class to arrive, the sensei lectures the students on all important matters, including but not limited to, why computers are the devil, why it is important to stay in school, and why abortion is killing the country.

When the food runner returns, he has enough bread and cheese to feed sixty people. The sensei sends us all away to wash, after which we pray.

“I’m Jesus’ brother and you are Jesus’ sister,” he tells me.

He breaks off enormous chunks of the saltiest cheese I have ever had (and that’s really saying something in this country). The children eat this with crispy bread and small plastic cups of Creme Soda that has had all the carbonation shook out of it.

“Because, “ the sensei explains in Georgian, “The gas is bad for you kidneys.”

When the food is gone, the sensei announces that he will do a dance in honor of the guest (that’s me). The children clap their hands and jump excitedly into the air. The sensei mounts the stage and the electronic music begins again. The dance is forceful and energetic. It is composed largely of complicated arm movements punctuated by dramatic poses, held for just a moment before the dance continues.

One of the older students, perhaps fourteen, is standing next to me, “It is said, “ he says, gripping his own arm nervously and looking at the floor, “That Georgians keep their traditional fighting in their dancing.”

As I watch the sensei’s dance march forward, it is not difficult to sense the imaginary foe he lunges towards and darts away from.

When we arrive back at the apartment, Mari busies herself getting all of the girls excited about going out that night. Tica is surprised but excited, Anu just eyes Mari sarcastically, and Salome looks downright terrified. I get the impression that these girls don’t get out much. I suspect that the very practical Lali does not approve of the girls going out without supervision.

Tica and Mari are discussing the best place for us to go when my host mother enters the room and announces something in Georgian. There is an immediate uproar. The girls explode after my host mother, following her through the living room and into the kitchen, yelling and whining, talking over each other and tugging on my host mother’s shirtsleeves. After while, they resort to pouting with their arms crossed, slouched on the stools surrounding the kitchen table.

“Pele says we can’t go out tonight,” Tica finally informs me. I’m a little disappointed but trust in the infinite motherly wisdom of my host mother and merely shrug my shoulders and stick out my bottom lip.

At this point we are all gathered around the small kitchen table where my host mother has laid out a small feast of ghomi, lobio (beans), beef stew, and an assortment of pickled peppers. We are just beginning to fill our plates when my host mother places a large bottle on the table. It has a gold “orange soda” label but contains a viscous clear liquid. Cha-cha.

Mari retrieves shot glasses from the dish cabinet and we begin to eat, interspersing face-pinching toasts throughout the meal. I rarely chase a shot, unless it’s with a high-five – a trick my host sisters find strange and exciting – but the home made liquor is so strong I am reaching for the bread and beans with the sting of a good high five still clinging to the palm of my hand. My host mother teases me for shooting the cha-cha so quickly and makes me watch as she slowly pours the fiery drink down her throat. 

After four glasses, my host mother decides we have all had enough. Tica and Mari disagree. While Mari and I distract myhost mother by asking for more food, Tica sneaks the bottle and glasses under the table and pours another round. We orchestrate the trick in English so that my host mother thinks we are simply carrying on a normal conversation until Mari counts to three and we simultaneously down the glasses we had been concealing under the table.

By then end of the meal we are a mess. The girls are teasing each other in Georgian, dancing to American pop music they play from the computer, and tackling each other onto the various beds and sofas. Every few minutes the group settles down for a moment before one of us, usually me, stirs things up again with a jab to someone’s ribs or a particularly ridiculous dance move. We make a trip to the market on the corner for chocolate and beer (the staples of many of my evenings in Georgia) and Mari brings my camera. I cannot imagine what the people in that market must have thought of the giggling American and the two Georgians taking pictures of every step she took through the shop.

The night finally ended when I left the group to take a phone call. We were tangled up on the floor laughing and tickling each other after Irma stole Tica’s hair band. Mari and I joined the fray just to make things interesting. When I returned from the kitchen, where I had been talking to my friend for less than fifteen minutes, my host mother was peeling the sleeping girls off of each other and leading them to bed. She smiled at me as I helped her lift Oto (the one boy) onto the nearby couch and spread several heavy blankets over him.

“Kai gogo,” (Good girl) she said, touching my arm and kissing me on the forehead.