Six
SIX
SHE HUGGED IRINE as if they were, indeed, old friends. “You are even more beautiful in person,” Irine said, fluently—“and so tall!”
“Oh please, you’re beautiful! How do you speak English? I’m sorry you had to get up so early.”
“I learned it here, everyone does. You are tired, yes? You are hungry? It is not early for me at all, I get up with the dogs—”
“The dogs!” Amy said as they left the airport and walked through a parking lot that was much like any airport parking lot, except the sky was a new sort of pink-purple-gray, a color Amy had never seen in any sky, and in the distance in every direction were snow-capped mountains.
The sun was halfway risen, a glimmer in the east.
“Your flight was good?”
“Great! I went through Paris.”
“I love Paris,” Irine said.
And then a small car, boxy, the seats covered in dog hair and smelling like cigarettes. In the back of the car, a yipping wire-haired mutt.
“This is Zazi. He’s one of our rescues, he wanted to say hello.”
“Hello, Zazi.” The dog was skinny with a badly mangled ear. He was buckled into the back seat like a child, barking frantically at Amy. Irine yelled at him in Georgian until he lay down on the back seat, abashed.
“Very rude,” Irine said, “I’m sorry.” And then they took off toward the highway, a modern, American-looking highway, but the cars were a wild mix of open-bed trucks and Audis and fragile ancient sedans and buses and 18-wheelers belching up plumes of smoke.
The sun was filling the sky now, and the traffic moved in fits and starts, and Amy was startled to see a bright neon Exxon station and billboards for ski resorts slung across the highway.
What had she expected? Something less—glamorous.
Motorcycles weaving. Birds circled above, what looked like vultures, and then a flock of small dark birds lifting into the sky.
“You are tired?”
“Strangely, I’m not,” Amy said.
“You are hungry?”
“Maybe a little?”
“Good, when we get to the house we eat.”
“Irine, I want you to know you don’t have to feed me or—I mean I am perfectly happy to take care of myself. I don’t want you to feel responsible for me.”
“I don’t know what you mean, ‘not responsible,’” Irine said, but she was smiling.
“Of course we are responsible. You are our guest!” And as the traffic loosened, she started speeding much like many of the other small cars were doing, skirting past the buses and trucks at what felt like warp speed.
She took her hands off the wheel to light a cigarette and pointed the pack at Amy.
Amy, who hadn’t smoked regularly in twenty-five years, took one.
She lit up, inhaled, felt herself suffer a brief pulmonological incident.
They rolled down their windows and held their cigarettes out into the Georgian morning as Zazi barked manically in the back seat.
“He doesn’t like me smoking,” Irine said. “He worries for my health.”
Amy inhaled, suppressed a cough. “That’s sweet.”
They were entering the city now, more quickly than Amy had expected to. They were descending a hill. On a placard on a stone wall, a bas-relief image of a familiar face. “Does that say this is—Is this George W. Bush Street?”
“It is.” Irine gave Amy a sideways glance. “Did you like him? When he was your president?”
“Oh…” Amy hedged—was George W. Bush a hero in this part of the world? “Was he popular here?”
They were slip-slapping down a windy street lined with rickety buildings. In the back seat, Zazi’s barks became whines.
“Not really. He just showed up in Tbilisi,” Irine said. “For an afternoon. We were so grateful we renamed the airport road for him.”
Amy nodded like this made sense.
“Many of us are easily impressed. Too easily.” And now they were in the heart of the city, or what might have been its heart, grayish apartments with moldering balconies, thirty stories high, spread out in vast blocks.
George W. Bush, with his twang and his malapropisms and his Texas ranch and his wars. How impossible to imagine him here.
“What did he do when he visited?”
“He gave a speech and then a man from the crowd threw a grenade at him and his wife. Fortunately the grenade didn’t go off, but it was a big mess—you don’t remember?”
“Wait, what happened?”
“It’s true!” Irine said. “A security officer saw the whole thing and disposed of the grenade. Bush never even found out until after he’d given his speech.”
“I can’t believe I never heard this story.”
“Well,” Irine said. “The grenade didn’t go off. You would have heard about it if it had.”
“Yeah, but—”
Outside, traffic roundabouts, a fast food joint, a produce stand, more gray, forbidding apartments. George Bush had survived a grenade attack—here?
“These buildings are ugly, I know,” Irine said, gesturing out the window. “I lived in one until I was twelve years old. Three families in one flat.” She threw her cigarette butt from the window. “One toilet down the hall for ten apartments.”
“That’s not a great ratio,” Amy said.
“You are right,” Irine said. “I still remember the lines in the morning, everyone pounding on the door. And of course the worst was when you had a stomachache. Most of the men would just pee outside.”
“Really?”
“Really. They have nothing like this in America. Every apartment has their own bathroom, yes?”
In fact Amy and Judd had three bathrooms in their apartment, including one they reserved for the cats. “When did you move out?”
“After we got our independence from the USSR. 1991. One of the families we lived with purchased the apartment and made us leave. And even though my parents hated that apartment we weren’t sure where to go.
Nobody knew who owned anything, who the landlords were.
There hadn’t been private property in so long, you see, so we never even thought about buying a house.
It was a disaster. Everybody was happy but everybody was scared. Even the police.”
“I’ve read about that,” Amy said. “How hard it was after Communism fell.”
“For some people the difficulty continues,” Irine said, shifting gears sharply.
Amy felt the seatbelts strain against her shoulders.
“But for most of us the nineties were the worst. Rolling blackouts, freezing cold. I was in school at the time, we’d be in the middle of a lesson and suddenly no more lights, no heat, nothing.
I stopped taking the elevator because you could be trapped for hours if the electricity went out between floors. ”
“Jesus.”
“It’s hard to believe it now,” Irine said as they paused at a red light, “how bad it could be. One time I was on the Metro with my mother, the Metro stopped suddenly, everything was dark. We waited for an hour, but it was clear the power was not coming back, and we were getting hungry. It was past dinner time. So a few of us managed to pull the car doors open and we walked for two hours through the tunnels to find a way out. The rats—oh my god, they were the size of Zazi.”
Amy had been on the F train once when it stalled out for thirty minutes and she thought she was going to have a panic attack. Everyone did. Then a homeless man in the corner of the car told everyone to calm the fuck down and then the train started to move.
“How old were you?”
“Maybe thirteen? The scary thing—even scarier than the rats!—was if the electricity came back on and you were in a tunnel a train would start to come.”
“Holy crap!” Amy said. “Did that ever happen?”
Irine laughed. “Not to us.” She shook another cigarette out of her pack, handed one to Amy.
“And it was rare for the electricity to come back that fast, to tell you the truth. Sometimes it was out for weeks. It made many people long for the days of the Soviet Union. Because even if we had to share an apartment with fifteen people, at least we weren’t cooking food in fireplaces.
We weren’t living in the nineteenth century. ”
“That’s how you cooked?”
“In the fireplace, yes. Sometimes outside on a grill,” Irine said. She lit her cigarette with a plastic lighter while keeping one hand on the wheel, squinting against the smoke. She had lovely purple-blue eyes, a deep furrow at her temple.
“Did everyone speak Russian then?”
“Mostly Georgian, some Russian. But not eagerly. And now we learn English.”
“Your English is so good,” Amy said. “I wish I could speak more than a few words of Georgian.”
Irine laughed. “There is no need. The only place in the world where people speak Georgian is right here. Unless you plan on staying here forever, you don’t have to learn it.”
“I probably can’t stay here forever,” Amy said. “But I can say a few things. I can say hello! Gamarjoba. ”
“Gah-mar-jobah.”
“Gah-mar-jobah.”
“Not bad,” Irine said, as the car rounded a corner. The Soviet apartment blocks were receding, replaced by smaller stucco apartment buildings and storefronts. There was greenery here, too: trees on sidewalks, rose bushes and other flowering plants.
“Where did you go,” Amy asked, “after you left your first flat?”
“Eh, we all moved into my grandmother’s house.
It was crowded—she had all her sisters there, my cousins, but there was really no other choice.
My father didn’t like it though. He was always complaining, said it was easier to live in our old flat.
There was even more fighting in my grandmother’s house over the kitchen and the bathroom than there was in our first flat.
But at least I could play with my cousins, which I liked.
And we got to have our first dog. Who was also named Zazi. ”
Zazi let out a bark.
“How long did you stay?”
Irine blew out another stream of smoke. “We’re still there.”