Seven #3
“Those are the lamb ones. Oh, you probably don’t eat lamb, right?
Americans don’t eat lamb? Here, take those, they’re mushroom—” and another plate came her way, thank god, and Amy followed the grandmother’s gestures, held the dumpling by its topknot, took a slurping bite, let the juice dribble down her chin.
Cumin, for sure, and maybe some turmeric, and something else, ineffable, slightly musky, and of course the omnipresent garlic.
The mushrooms were chewy—probably shitakes, or maybe oysters?
She wiped her chin. The child next to her showed her her drawing: it looked like a poodle.
“You,” the child said, pointing at Amy.
“Me?”
Another plate came her way: bread filled with molten cheese, a barely set egg on top, khachapuri .
Oh, how Judd would have loved this! While Amy was herself a mere cook, Judd fancied himself a scholar of international cuisines, could identify the most obscure regional dishes or exotic spices.
She had eaten around the world with him, mole in Mexico and dolmades in Greece and that awful time he embarrassed her into eating octopus in Japan.
And Judd liked to bring his research home to the restaurant, so that even though Le Coin mostly did your standard French-ish Italian-ish American, the kitchen was unafraid of Aleppo peppers or Cypriot cheese or tiger’s milk ceviche from Peru.
The specials board rang with the news of Judd’s travels, the junkets paid for by tourist boards and the more obscure places he liked to find on his own.
County Cork butter, Traverse City cherries.
But it was funny, she thought, that he had never once thought to visit a place that wasn’t on the tourist map or that hadn’t been suggested to him by someone he admired.
He never would have followed a teenager into a humble-looking restaurant; had he been there, he would have insisted they visit whatever the hippest place in Tbilisi was, the one the travel magazines wrote about. And he would have missed all this.
“Gaumarjos! Victory!” said someone across the table, and they all downed fresh shots of chacha in unison. Amy joined in, and this time it went down a little easier, warm instead of burning.
“So you are a friend of Irine’s?” asked a woman two seats down. She was wearing a brightly striped sweater and had the pleasant smile of a preschool teacher, but half her hair was shaved off (the other half fell to her shoulder in a swoop of neon pink waves).
“I actually know her through the dog rescue.”
“Ah! You are the one who is helping us find Angel!”
Angel! “You know the story?” Amy said. “I didn’t know if everyone—”
“Angel’s doghouse was right by our daughter’s school,” the woman said, motioning to the child to Amy’s right, the one who had drawn her as a poodle. “She helped her cross the street every morning.”
“You knew Angel?” Amy turned to the girl. “Do you speak English?”
The child was focused on her new drawing but she nodded. “Angelozi,” she said. “Our dog.”
“Did she walk you to school?”
The girl looked up at her with tired eyes. “Angelozi,” she said again, and her mother said something to her in rapid Georgian. The girl nodded, sadly, and turned back to her art.
“It’s a terrible story,” the mother said. “To think she was hurt. But she could have run away, I suppose. Or maybe someone brought her home to be a pet? It’s impossible to say.”
“It’s not impossible,” said the man sitting next to her, refilling their chacha. “She was kidnapped. Everyone knows this. We got that note!”
“It was a joke, Tedo.”
“It was not a joke! Who would play a joke like that?”
“Anyone! An obnoxious teenager, someone with a cruel sense of humor. Khalkhi sulelebi arian, tkven es itsit.”
“No, no, you’re wrong. It wasn’t just some dumb kid. It was a deliberate provocation.”
“An escalation,” said another woman.
“What kind of note?” Amy asked. “What happened?”
The first woman sighed. “One of the teachers was fired. She was very beloved. The parents protested, and there was a bit of a—I don’t really know how to explain this in English. I’m sorry.” She peeled off several Georgian sentences.
“The note said, ‘this is what you get.’ Supposedly. Nobody’s ever seen it.”
“And everything went to hell after that.”
“I don’t know,” the pink-haired woman said. “Things happen to dogs all the time. They probably happen to dogs in New York all the time, too. People take them. Strangers.”
“They do,” Amy said. Her mind flashed to the woman in the park, and her beloved Roxy. “But aren’t people saying she was kidnapped?”
“Yes, well, people like rumors in our country,” Maia said. “This is what happens when everyone in power lies. We have to listen to rumor, since there is no truth.”
“Maia is right,” said one of the women.
“This is always the case,” said one of the men.
“Gaumarjos!” said the grandmother, and everyone drank. “Victory!”
“Maia,” Amy whispered, “why do people keep saying ‘victory’?”
“It is what we say when we drink—you say ‘cheers,’ I think?”
“Cheers!” cried the entire table in agreement and drank once more.
The first round of food was cleared away, and even though Amy’s digestive system was groaning she made room for more: more dumplings, more bread, more kidney beans and cheese.
She hadn’t eaten like this in years, really, the kind of gut-busting feasting that made a person wish for a dozen more stomachs.
How many rounds of chacha had she had? Was the tired-eyed child next to her still drawing?
Was food still being passed from plate to plate?
The baby—where had the baby gone? Oh, asleep on his father’s chest, his head drooping on his father’s shoulder.
The air in the restaurant was warm, almost humid; the sky outside had turned dark.
In the corner of the small room, the wood in the fire glowed and sparked.
“Shemomedjamo,” said Tedo.
“I’m sorry?”
Tedo emptied his wine glass, then smiled. “It’s our word for when the food is so good, you have to keep eating, even though you’re entirely full.”
A few seats down from Amy, a younger woman started humming a tune, too loudly to be humming to herself, too quietly to suggest solo artistry.
The tune morphed from humming into a song, and the woman tapped her fingertips on the table to accompany herself.
Then the grandmother joined in, tapping, humming.
Then the man across the table. And then, the strangest thing, but Amy somehow knew the tune, too, or the tune was so familiar it had been in the ether around her since she was a child, but only now was she paying enough attention to listen to it.
Major chord, major chord, minor key. The sound like a butterfly escaping her lips.
Maia started to sing then, words that flew in and around the tune. The whole restaurant seemed to quiet as she sang, and how desperately Amy wanted to understand, although perhaps, she thought—perhaps she did understand?
No, no, she had been here for twelve hours, she knew nothing.
SHE TRIED TO pay, they would not let her pay, she threw Georgian lari on the table and pretended it came from somewhere else. Someone put her in a car, which was good because when it was time to stand she found she really couldn’t. Maia seemed to be in much the same shape.
But if she expected worry or even attention when they got home, there was none to be found.
Instead, they toddled in past the dogs in the dark, some whimpering, some sleeping, and tripped up the stairs, and departed each other’s company at one of the many mysterious hallways leading out of the kitchen.
As stealthily as she could, Amy made it to her room and pushed open the door.
Was it her door? It was, wasn’t it? Or was it this one? Amy held her breath and pushed.
“Yes?”
The man with the ice wolf eyes was sitting at a desk in his darkened room, an open laptop in front of him.
The face on the screen belonged to a lovely, long-haired little girl.
“Yes?” he said again. “Ty chto-to khochesh?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, bodishi,” Georgian for “I’m sorry”: she didn’t know how she knew it but it came out of her mouth like she had known it all her life.