Natia the Great

Natia lives with her two sons and their grandmother across the street and two houses down the road from me. She must be in her mid-thirties – her older son is almost thirteen – but unlike many of the other mothers, she still boasts smooth, youthful skin the color of heavily creamed coffee. Though her body has become thick and awkward from childbearing and the heavy labor of maintaining a Georgian house, it is clear that she was once very beautiful, with rich brown eyes and thick black hair.

She greets me with her eyebrows raised, her palms held out towards me as she shrugs her shoulders dramatically, “Sad midi khar, Hannah?” (Where are you going, Hannah?)

Most Georgians don’t understand why anyone would ever want to go for a walk (I’m always being offered rides when I’m out running) so I just shrug my shoulders in return and make a walking motion in the air with the first two fingers of my right hand.

“Go,” Natia says, pointing down the road, and then, “Ak,” (here) pointing to her feet. I gather that she wants me to return here, to her house, after my walk. I do return, just as the sun is sinking behind the mountains at the back of Natia’s house, and I make my way to the kitchen because I assume that she has something she wants me to eat.

Natia loves giving me sweets and pastries that she has baked, presenting me with Tupperware when I enter her first grade class for their English lesson. The first time I visited her house with my two host sisters, she gave me an enormous pair of red and grey striped panties and laughed with delight when I taught her the English word for them. She often tells this story at school, relishing her knowledge and emphasizing both syllables carefully and forcefully when she repeats it to her colleagues, “PAHN-TEES.”

Among an endless parade of cookies, chocolates, doughnuts (not the Georgian name), and even iced coffee, I have also received a glittering rhinestone studded hairpin and a large tube of Mascara so old the label has worn completely off.

Tonight I find Natia deftly wrapping soft dough around what I recognize from my host family’s table as curds, or khacho. She shows me how to stretch the delicate disks she is cutting with an old coffee mug and fold them around a small hanful of the curds. She moves swiftly, lining uniform half-moon dumplings onto a towel she has laid out on the kitchen table and chuckles as I slowly construct a few clumsy dumplings. She retrieves my camera from the other room and mimes taking a picture of me, then gestures over her shoulder and says, “Rebecca!” Yes, I’m sure my mother would love to see a pictures of this.

As Natia is fishing the first cooked dumplings out of the large pot she has balanced over a very precarious looking gas burner, she says authoritatively, “Skverebia.” It takes me a couple of tries to get the consonant cluster correct, but after my first bite I’m determined to remember this name. The dumplings are juicy and the curds have melted into a creamy, salty heaven inside.

After some argument about how many of these I can physically fit in my body – Natia and the bebia (Grandmother) are rather cavalier in their estimates – Natia gives me a tour of the rest of her house. She takes pictures of me in the well-furnished rooms of her home. It is one of the nicer houses I have seen in the village, and has a distinct light, woody smell that reminds me of my grandma’s house in Danville, Illinois.

In almost every room there is a version of the same picture. It is a man who looks to be in his early forties smiling at the camera with a pale green backdrop behind him. He has curly salt and pepper hair and a welcoming smile. This is Natia’s husband who died in a car accident two months prior to my arrival in Lesichine. As her older son, Shotiko, sits at the table with his homework, she secretly shows me the scar across the top left side of his head where he was injured in the wreck.

Natia also informs me that her husband had applied to have an English teacher come and stay with them. In fact, had the accident never occurred, I would probably be living in one of the rooms I have just toured.  Natia and I would walk to and from school together and I would help Shotiko with his English homework and teach four-year-old Giorgi the English words for colors and the names of the animals the family keeps. I would be in the kitchen with Natia everyday, and she would laugh as I tried to figure out her quick Georgian instructions.

I am so inadequate in the face of Natia’s world. Even my wishing for her life to be different, to be better, is like the smoke of a candle going out in the face of a hurricane. I will be her friend, her small, insignificant friend because she is kind to me and because I love laughing with her, but there is no one who could be enough for Natia, no one who could give her all that she deserves.