Six #2
They were off the main road now, threading through a neighborhood of three- and four-story buildings, many with lovely wooden railings on their balconies.
Some of the houses looked well-kept, while others were falling apart, but everything seemed to be inhabited, lively.
People on the streets, shopping bags, a café with outdoor tables and diners drinking coffee.
Zazi was sitting up and panting: he smelled home.
A grocery store, a pharmacy, a roundabout, high-rises disappearing in the distance.
And then a small park, and another café, and a string of low-slung apartment buildings.
Amy’s head was throbbing from the cigarettes and the traffic fumes.
“We’re here!”
Thank God. “Oh, it’s lovely.” Which it was.
Irine’s house was larger than Amy had expected, although she hadn’t realized she’d had any expectations until they pulled up.
Pale pink paint peeled off the house’s siding, and the window shutters and door were intricately carved wood.
There were balconies, also intricately carved, and she could hear the mad barks of what sounded like a dozen dogs coming from inside.
Zazi leapt out of the car and up the uneven brick path to the front door; Amy and Irine followed.
“Come in! Come in!” An older woman at the door, gray hair piled on top of her head in a tilting beehive.
“Is that your mother?”
“My aunt,” Irine said. “My mother doesn’t speak any English.”
The woman took Amy by the elbows and smiled at her with silver-capped teeth.
She had large brown eyes, a mole on her chin, and the folded, velvety skin that came with old age.
“We are so happy to see you!” she said. Amy submitted to a kiss on each cheek and then a hug.
The woman smelled like strong detergent. She had a wide, cushiony bosom.
“Amy, this is Deida Bachana. Deida Bachana, es aris Ami, chveni amerik’eli st’umari. Come on, let’s go inside.”
Inside the house: a huge room, a warm smell of something baking, and coffee, and dogs—the excited yelps of so many dogs, cordoned off behind baby gates, jumping up, while Irine and her aunt yelled at them in Georgian.
The room was large and mostly empty except for the gates, dog beds, dog toys, bowls on the floor, and Amy realized: this was the Didi Gulabi rescue itself.
How many dogs were there? Enough for her to feel overwhelmed, almost alarmed.
Twelve, thirteen? All sizes, no discernible breeds, barking, growling.
“Come on! Come upstairs! You meet them later!”
A wooden door and a rickety wooden staircase up to the next floor: a kitchen tiled in brown and green, a few missing tiles, the dogs’ barking filtering up from beneath the floorboards.
A small, dented refrigerator. Two older women sitting at the table, smiling broadly at Amy. A round cake on the table, steaming.
“I can’t believe you can take care of this many dogs at one time!”
“Oh, they come and go, really. When we can’t afford to take care of them anymore we let them go.”
“Go where?”
Irine shrugged and gestured at the table.
“This is my mother, Natela, and my aunt Marmar. And you’ve met Bachana.
” The women smiled at Amy with identical smiles.
They were wearing faded housecoats, wire-rimmed glasses; one had reddish hair and one had gray.
“Bachana speaks a little bit of English but the others—”
“Welcome,” said Marmar.
“Well, I guess they speak a little bit of English, too.”
“Your flight?” one of them asked—Marmar? Or what was the other one’s name?
“I had a great flight,” Amy said, and all at once felt like she was going to fall over.
She was exhausted, her brain banged inside her skull, she needed a shower.
She had no idea how she was going to socialize with three post-Soviet grandmothers for even a single minute.
Irine pulled out a chair for her and she sat down, careful not to collapse.
Bachana poured a cup of coffee and set it down in front of her. “Thank you, I—”
Irine cut her a slice of cake.
“You should eat.”
“I don’t know if I—”
“Bachana baked it. It’s orange. I think that’s what it is?” A flurry of Georgian as Irine confirmed. “It’s actually lemon.”
And then the pounding of steps down a staircase somewhere and a shouted conversation and then a long-limbed teenage girl, dyed black hair, maroon lipstick, fishnets, black boots, a pierced nose and lip.
She sat down at the table and stretched out her legs.
Her fishnets had many artful holes. The elderly women began admonishing her right away.
A tattoo of a rose on her neck. “My daughter,” said Irine.
“It’s nice to meet you.”
“Maia. Maia, gagatsani sheni tavi.”
The girl sliced a chunk of cake and shoved it in her mouth with her hands. Then, while she was chewing: “You’re the American model?”
“Oh god, no. I mean—I was a model for like five minutes, but that was a long time ago.”
Maia gave her an appraising eye. “My mother said you were famous.”
“Maia,” Irine said.
“That’s what you said.” And then more Georgian. Irine leaned back against a steadily dripping sink, sipped her coffee.
Maia turned to Amy. “You’re here to look for dogs?”
“For Angel.”
“Because as you can see, we have lots of dogs right here in this house. You don’t really have to go look for them.”
“Maia!” Irine said.
But Amy sort of liked it, the combative adolescent nature.
The older women were murmuring among themselves in Georgian and downstairs a dog was howling and Amy’s eyes were watering from sudden-onset jet lag.
She felt like she had landed on the world’s strangest movie set. “I have a soft spot for Angel.”
“Well, she makes a good story,” Maia said.
“She does,” Amy said. “Your English is great.”
“It should be. I’ve been studying my whole life.”
“Maia goes to a very competitive technical high school,” Irine said. “She is going to be an engineer.”
“My son is going to be a doctor,” Amy said.
“You have a son?”
“A stepson,” Amy said. “He’s nineteen, in college.
Want to see?” And she took out her phone and passed around a picture of Ferry, first to the grandmothers, who murmured admiringly even though Amy didn’t know if they knew who they were looking at, and then to Irine, and then to Maia.
She felt both embarrassed by her own showing off and too tired to stop herself.
“He looks American,” Maia said. “Lots of teeth.”
Amy took her phone back. “I think he has the normal number of teeth.”
“Is he tall?” asked one of the grandmothers.
“He’s pretty tall. His dad, my husband, is six-five.” She paused. “I don’t know what that is in centimeters.”
“Why are Americans so tall?” Maia asked.
“They eat a lot,” said Irine.
Maia stood, grabbed a backpack threaded with safety pins and headed toward the door. She said something in Georgian; Irine said something back. And then the door slammed, and then the desultory yodels of the downstairs dogs.
“I’m sorry she was rude,” Irine said. “She’s seventeen, she should behave better.”
“She wasn’t rude,” Amy said. “She was a teenager.” The three old ladies were still seated, identical, watching her. The cake on the plate in front of her started to swim. “I’m sorry, Irine—I think—I think the jet lag just hit me. I feel—”
“You are tired now, yes? You will go to your room.”
“I’m sorry, the cake—”
“No, please, you will eat it later, we have lots—” and the grandmothers rose and one began clearing the table and the other said something sharp to Irine and the third made a follow me motion and led Amy to a passageway off the kitchen, and another flight of stairs, and a hallway papered in green roses that smelled, still, of wet dog.
And Amy felt, ungenerously, that she would have given anything right at this moment for a five-star hotel or a four-star or whatever a Hilton was or a Courtyard by Marriott.
The house was strange and twisting, passages upon passages, almost certainly built by a lunatic.
Amy followed the granny and was followed by Irine, who held her suitcase.
“Your room,” Irine said, finally, at the end of a hallway.
How would she ever find her way back? But she opened the door into a small and unexpectedly bright room, a window wide open to the morning air, a wood-framed twin bed with a fluffy red bedspread and a wooden chest of drawers.
Towels were folded up on top of the bed, a nice big stack, almost like a real hotel.
Amy felt herself exhale. The granny slapped the pillow twice to plump it.
“Will this be all right?” Irine said.
“It’s perfect.”
“The bathroom is two doors down. Would you like me to show you? The hot water can take a bit of time, and there is a towel heater—”
“I’ll find it,” Amy said. “I think—I think I might just sleep for a while now. I’ll find the bathroom later, I just—” She hadn’t slept in a twin bed in years, and she remembered with sudden and surprising ardor the give of her caved-in childhood mattress, her pile of mismatched blankets.
“We will let you sleep,” Irine said, and her mother (Amy thought it was her mother?) said “good night,” and they closed the door behind themselves and Amy sat down on the bed which squeaked.
She took off her shoes. Her shirt was sweaty from travel and her underwear itched.
She knew she should change but she was so thoroughly exhausted.
But also she had to pee. Quite a bit, now that she thought about it.
How long had it been since she had peed?
It had probably been hours, and that would keep her from sleeping—but at the same time the thought of going back into that insane hallway, of possibly having to talk to anyone again, and be polite, and smile, and apologize—
She sat on the bed and willed her bladder to stop sending signals to her brain. Let me sleep first. Let me sleep and then you can have anything you want.
Sigh. She stood, listened at the door to make sure nobody was walking down the hall, then tiptoed toward where she guessed the bathroom might be.
A closet, another closet—a bathroom! Tiled in bright red, looking recently cleaned.
The toilet seemed to be pretty much a normal toilet, the flushing mechanism easy to determine.
The soap was a small bar, neatly wrapped in paper, sitting on a seashell-shaped dish, just like at her mother’s house on the rare occasions when they had guests.
And as she tiptoed back to the bedroom, relieved, It would be okay, she would sleep and wake up and shower and eat, put one human need in front of the next , a door she hadn’t seen before opened to her left. The door was papered, too, in green roses.
There, in the hallway, stood a man. A man, in this house full of women!
He was shirtless; he wore khaki pants; he held a towel to his chest. He said something in Georgian, and Amy shook her head.
“Oh,” he said, “you are the American,” and then she looked at his eyes.
Bright blue, startling.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m—”
“You’re here about the dog.”
He had short blondish hair, blurry tattoos across his chest, the kind you’d get in prison or a frat party. Blond stubble, square pug nose. Her exact height. Long lashes. Eyes from a geode, from an ice wolf. Only the second person she’d ever seen with eyes that color.
“Were you going to use the bathroom?” he asked.
“No.”
He waited for her to say something else. When she didn’t: “Then I go, yes?”
“Yes.”
He smiled with one corner of his mouth.
“Okay.”
“Sorry,” Amy said.
He went into the bathroom and closed the door, and Amy stood there for several seconds, alarmed by the hammering she felt in her chest, until the barking of the dogs snapped her out of it, and she remembered that she was probably just hallucinating, that it was all just an exhausted fever dream, just like the woman in the park, and she went to her room and lay down on the stiff twin bed. She had to start sleeping better.
Where am I and why am I so far from home?
She closed her eyes. Pipes gurgled in the hallway.
There was indeed a man in the shower. There was a man with ice wolf eyes naked not ten feet away.
Amy peeled off her filthy clothes, the smell of dogs and cigarettes and airplanes and this strange strange place, and slid between the sheets and thought: I will never sleep.
How could I ever sleep? But in seconds she was out and dreaming darkly, soundlessly, the dreams of the thoughtless or the dead.