Seven
SEVEN
HOURS LATER, AMY woke to the sun blasting her face like a laser and sat up, confused.
She remembered where she was (a maze of a house in Tbilisi) and why she was there (to find a dog) but had no idea what time it was or what the weather was like or whether she had eaten recently.
She sat like that for a while, blinking at the wood paneling, then considered how much she needed a shower.
If she went to the shower, would she have to make more awkward conversation with the man in the hallway?
But on the other hand, the lure of soap and water was too strong to resist. She tiptoed out of the hallway again, clutching a towel—was it this door?
This one?—and found herself, uninterrupted, in the red-tiled bathroom and saw that the shower faucet was quite similar in model to the one she’d grown up with, righty tighty lefty loosey. And the bathroom door locked.
A shower, clean underwear, communion with her toothbrush, and then she was tiptoeing back down the hall, following the maze toward the sound of the yelping dogs. Why was she still on tiptoe? How could people live with this many dogs without going crazy?
Of course she herself had always, as an adult, chosen animals.
At the Avenue D Shelter, she’d made friends with all the dogs, knew their personalities and their quirks, found herself particularly attached to an older bulldog mix who was too grumpy and growly to get himself adopted.
She wished she could bring him home, but didn’t think Judd would ever agree to a squat smelly dog in their space.
And then, one day, she found Judd standing with the bulldog mix in front of their building. A ring tied to the dog’s collar.
“What is this?”
“What does it look like?”
“A dog?”
He got down on the sidewalk, one knee, the whole bit. “I’m asking you to marry me,” Judd said.
“With a dog?” And then of course she said yes, and they stood there kissing on the sidewalk for fifteen minutes, and a tourist took pictures without asking them first.
The bulldog was named Leo and he was grumpy, yes—and also drooly, gassy, and deeply loyal. He slept by her side for the three years he had left in the world, and if she thought about him for too long she’d still cry.
In her bereavement after Leo died, she started spending more and more time at the shelter.
She began teaching a variety of classes: how to walk the green dogs, how to walk the red dogs, how to recognize ringworm and feline panleukopenia.
She took webinars on rehoming FIV-positive cats and webinars on puppy fostering.
She was an expert on marketing pitbulls and, of course, an ace lost-pet locater.
In her decade of animal work she had probably saved one hundred lives. But still, she thought, she had never taken a dozen homeless dogs into her apartment, because if you did that in America you would be crazy.
Still trying to make herself as invisible as possible, she wound her way to Irine’s kitchen.
She found the loose door that led down the stairs, through the path of baby gates (half the dogs were asleep but the other half were barking madly, madly) and out the front door.
She was not getting any cell service in this particular spot, so her map feature was useless.
But to the left and down several hundred feet there seemed to be a street with shops and people, so she turned left.
“Amy?”
It was the goth child, Irine’s daughter, whose name Amy had completely forgotten.
“Maia,” the girl said.
“Right, yes, Maia, hi.”
“Feeling more awake? Where are you headed?”
“I’m not—” Amy sighed. On the one hand she would have relished solitude but on the other she had no idea where the hell she was going. “I don’t know.”
“You want a tour?”
“Not, um—not if you’re busy.”
“Not busy at all,” Maia said, smiling, crooked teeth, and then Amy remembered how charming teenagers could be when they were a distance from their parents. “Is there anything in particular you want to see?”
“Is there a place we can search for Angelozi?”
Maia raised her brows. “That’s really why you’re here?”
“That’s really why I’m here.”
“You actually came halfway around the world to find a dog?” Maia’s tone was a little amused, a little outraged.
“Listen—”
“How did you even know about Angel? How much YouTube do you actually watch?”
Amy could feel herself blushing. “A lot.”
Maia backed down. “I do too,” she said. “But still, and I mean no offense, really, but with all the problems we have here you could have probably picked a more important problem to solve than a lost dog.”
The way she said dog . “All God’s creatures are precious.”
“Oh shit,” Maia said. “You’re religious?”
“No,” Amy said. “I don’t know why I just said that.”
Maia started to laugh, and Amy, after a moment, laughed, too. “Maybe let’s go to Rustaveli.”
They marched down the hill, jagging a little this way and a little that, Maia keeping two steps ahead of Amy, which was a relief because then they didn’t have to talk.
Amy had never been great at small talk even with other native English speakers on a good night’s sleep, and besides, she had no idea what to say to Maia that the girl wouldn’t find ridiculous.
A broad avenue came into view, something like the Champs élysées or another grand European boulevard but with a little Sixth Avenue thrown in there, too.
Large marble buildings on either side interspersed with T-shirt and cellphone shops.
Amy followed Maia as she threaded her way down the sidewalk, trying to keep up while looking all around her, almost tripping over a dog with a luxurious gray hide just lying there in the middle of the sidewalk, uninterested in anyone’s comings or goings.
The dog had a tag in his ear, no collar.
“Maia! One second!”
Maia turned around, watched a bit archly as Amy removed a dog treat from her backpack. “Here you go, baby.”
The dog seemed unimpressed: in fact, it actually yawned.
“Don’t waste your time,” said Maia. “He doesn’t want it.”
“Isn’t he hungry?”
“No, people feed him all day. He gets the leftover lunches of every office worker on this street. He’s tagged, so they know he doesn’t have rabies.”
Amy was still kneeling by the dog, fruitlessly trying to get him to show some interest in her treats: they were the expensive kind, dried buffalo, from the fancy pet store on Twelfth Street. The dog rolled over to face the other direction.
“I’ve been rejected,” Amy said.
“We—what is the word?—we spoil our dogs here. People know that about Georgians. We’re nicer to animals than we are to people.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to be nicer to animals.”
Maia nodded, scratched at a hole in her fishnets. “I agree with that,” she said. “We keep walking?”
The dog had fallen back asleep right where it lay, in the middle of the sidewalk. Amy left the treat by its paws in case it was hungry when it woke up. “We keep walking.”
The only way to really get to know a city was to wander it, to let yourself get lost and try to figure out your way back to your starting point by relying on landmarks and signposts.
That was how Amy had done it when she and Judd had traveled, and why she had a decent understanding of Miami and Rome, alert to the small changes in neighborhoods, the restaurants and kinds of trees along the sidewalks.
Following Maia, however, Amy felt free to look into the faces of the people, under their caps and their scarves, under the bright late-winter sky.
Some made eye contact with her, and one or two even smiled, or at least allowed their eyes to crinkle up at the corners.
Different from New Yorkers, she thought. More pale skin, more pale eyes, blue and gray.
“You see that?” Maia asked, coming to a stop in front of a marble plaza fronting a huge columned building. At the foot of the plaza stood a strange cross, its horizontal arms drooping down. The cross was surrounded by a protective fence.
“That’s the anti-gay cross of the Orthodox church.”
“What’s an anti-gay cross?”
Maia took a step back, sighed heavily. “Government homophobes placed it there two years ago. We wanted to have a gay pride parade and instead we got this cross. They put it up the day we were supposed to have the parade. And they warned us if we took it down they would throw us in jail.”
“Who warned you?”
“The politicians, the church. People in power.” Maia put her hands on her bony hips. The wind blew her black hair back so Amy could see the blond underneath. “Pro-Russian demagogues who want to roll back every small freedom our country has won since 1991.”
Amy had read about that in the Brittanica : the clash between the EU-centric and the Soviet nostalgists.
“It’s the Georgian Orthodox Cross, but they use it for their purposes. As a threat. And the Georgian Orthodox church is one of the most backwards churches in the world. They’re Putinists. Colonialists. Power-hungry backwards quasi-dictatorial monsters.”
Man, her English was good.
“My grandmother and her sisters still go to church three times a week. Because under Communism they couldn’t.”
“I see.”
“They don’t care that they are worshiping at the feet of monsters.”
“Well, they’re older,” Amy said. “Sometimes old people have different ideas.”
“My grandmother is only sixty-one. I’ve tried to get them to understand but they refuse,” Maia said.
“They’re comfortable in their homophobia and their patriarchy.
They had self-loathing beaten into them by generations of Soviet oppression and now they don’t know how to even say hello without translating from the Russian. ”
“Well.” As they gazed at the cross, Amy tried to figure out what her stance should be. These women were her hosts after all! “That sounds difficult,” she said.
Maia gave her a bitter look. “You think so?”
“Look, I don’t know as much as I should about the government here, but—”
“I know, I know, you care about the dogs.”
Amy sighed.