Eight #3
How to explain this to Irine, or even to herself? During COVID , when they were worried about keeping the restaurant open, Arthur and Donna generously kicked in the funds to build them a beautiful outdoor space on the sidewalk, with greenery and electric heaters.
They lived without fear: perhaps another form of wealth.
She could leave Irine the thousand dollars, which would probably be enough to cover the expenses the stray dogs incurred and Maia’s expenses, too, for maybe a month or two.
She could even give them more, go to an ATM this minute, empty her small account.
But she couldn’t pay for Maia’s school tuition, or give her false hope about affording an American university.
And why would she do that anyway? Because her mother was worried about her?
Because, weeks ago, she herself had been worried about a lost dog?
She headed back downstairs, where a pack of Irine’s Crowns still sat on the kitchen counter.
Amy took one, lit it and smoked it to distract from the pain in her head, although of course it did the opposite.
Then, in the absence of anything better to do, she headed downstairs to select a dog from the dim basement.
Zazi came running to her, so Amy put a leash on him and, noting a look of interest from a dog who seemed to be part retriever, put him on a leash as well.
The other dogs, now used to her smell or her presence, drowsed lazily in their various corners.
“Don’t worry guys,” she said. “I’ll take you out later. ”
The dogs did not seem to be particularly worried either way.
THE CAB LET her and the dogs out at a vast green space near, yes, a British school, Union Jacks flapping proudly next to Georgian flags—and also a smallish lake and broad lawns stretching into faraway hills.
She seemed to be a world away from the city, although she could see the apartment blocks in the distance.
“Guys, ready to do this?” In her backpack: the drone, the pig’s ears, the bully sticks, the treats that at least these two dogs seemed to find mildly interesting when she stuck them in their muzzles.
The dogs were polite on their leashes, neither pulling nor stopping suddenly as Amy marched across the grass, sneakers growing damp.
It was cool, maybe fifty degrees, but the sun beamed down from a cloudless sky. A nice day for a walk.
Along the rutted path, like everywhere in Tbilisi, dogs lay lazily on their sides, looking basically contented.
Her own dogs (Zazi and—who was the other one?
A boy: she’d name him Phil) approached a few who stood in greeting, and after a moment of friendly ass-sniffing and circling, the strays would flop down again.
They, too, had ear tags on their glossy ears.
Amy leaned down to give them treats and felt deep sudden love for them when they accepted and sharp irritation when they did not.
The path merged with a recreation track around the lake: runners, mothers with strollers, and other dog walkers worked their way around the track in opposite directions.
Amy was put in mind, pleasantly, of the few times she and Roxy had made their way up to Central Park.
She crouched down on the side of the track to set up her drone, a newish Black Falcon, while the dogs waited patiently by her side.
This was a good space to get some real imaging going—she could get the drone up to three hundred feet or so here, enough for maybe a two-thousand-foot circular view.
And the nice thing about the Black Falcon was that it sent down such clear photos as long as the Wi-Fi was working.
Was there Wi-Fi here? Excellent, a good strong signal.
“Kalbat’ono, es dam’t’t’itsebuli mots’q’obilobaa?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Amy said, looking up, shading her eyes from the sun. It was a policeman, having appeared on the track out of nowhere, snappy navy uniform and a serious look on his broad young face. “I don’t speak Georgian.”
“Tkveni mots’q’obiloba, kalbat’ono.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
The policeman held out his hand, expectantly. What did he want? What had she done?
“Tkveni mots’q’obiloba,” he said, and now his voice was steely, and Amy felt a bubble of nervousness pop in her gut.
“What do you—”
He grabbed the drone out of her hands.
“Oh no!” Amy said. “You don’t understand, it’s just a drone, it’s not anything—”
The policeman’s eyes widened at her intransigence, and he spit out what sounded like a heady stream of Georgian insults, and Amy was both worried and annoyed that he took her drone; how on earth was she going to find Angel without it?
“Es aris uk’anono aghch’urviloba!”
And then a small man walking a large poodle approached them.
“Neba mometsis gadavtargmno,” he said. “Inglisurad vlap’arak’ob.”
The policeman turned, gestured to Amy, gestured to the drone, railed in increasingly manic Georgian. Once he quieted, the small man turned to Amy. “Evidently private surveillance equipment is illegal in Georgia.”
“But it’s not surveillance equipment!” Amy said.
“Well,” the man said, “it is a drone.”
“It’s to help me find a lost dog!”
The policeman gave her a disgusted look.
“If I were you I’d apologize.”
“Apologize?”
“In English,” the small man said. “I’d do that if I were you.”
“Then will he give me back—”
“Really,” the man said. “I would.”
Jesus. “I’m sorry,” Amy said. And then, in Georgian, “bodishi.”
But her use of novice Georgian won her no favor; the policeman narrowed his eyes at her, said something that sounded both irritated and impenetrable, then marched down the path, her drone tucked under his arm.
“Shit,” Amy said.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” the man said. He had a neat goatee and a crisp English accent. “That could have gone quite poorly for you.”
“Well, thanks for stepping in.”
“Of course,” the man said, and began strolling along the track; without thinking about it, Amy fell in step beside him, pulling her dogs along with her.
“It can be difficult to understand the rules here. But the general idea is that you should act with extreme deference toward the police. They don’t fancy being argued with. ”
“You live here?”
“I do,” the man said. “I teach maths at the British school up the road. Been here for almost a decade, in fact. Fascinating place. One of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever seen. Although also, of course, the most traumatized.”
“What do you mean, traumatized?”
“My guess,” the man said, “is Georgia has been invaded more than any other country in the world. Well, except for Poland, perhaps. Maybe Poland. Possibly Afghanistan. But Georgia is certainly up there, invasion-wise.”
“More than just the Russians?”
The man chuckled. “My dear, people have been trying to sack Georgia since before Russia was a twinkle in history’s eye.
Two thousand years ago it was the Romans and Mongols.
Then the Visigoths. Then after the Visigoths it was a few hundred years of Ottoman invasion, and then, I believe, the Turks.
And then the Russians, who are of course still at it.
It’s the location, you know. Right smack in between Europe and Asia.
Which is still why they have so many of these sorts of problems. If they were, say, five hundred kilometers to the south, they’d have different problems entirely. ”
He paused to let his poodle pish delicatedly by the side of the track. “You know this place was once an SSR, of course,” he continued as his dog finished her business.
“One of the first, as I understand it.”
“That’s right,” the man said. “But then the Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia went from being one of the two superpowers on the planet to a banana republic in a matter of weeks. Total catastrophe. A profound humiliation.”
“It’s funny,” Amy said. “I remember that time a little—we watched it on the news at home. But it never occurred to me that it was a bad thing. It was just, like, ‘Hey look, the enemy collapsed. I guess we won.’”
“You’re from the States, I gather?”
“Minnesota.”
“Well, Minnesota won,” the man said. “The West, as a whole, it won.”
“Believe me, I never felt like a winner,” Amy said.
“But that’s not how Putin saw it. To him it was a great and tragic loss, a profound humiliation.
I believe he called it the greatest catastrophe in human history, or something along those lines.
So now, in an act of grandiosity, maybe insanity—now he wants to rebuild what Russia lost. Diplomatically when possible. Violently when not.”
“Russia does diplomacy?”
“Well of course it does—it’s just a kind of Russian diplomacy. Bribing, harassing, installing their own apparatchiks in the states that used to be theirs and then pushing them to adopt Russian laws.”
“I can’t believe the Georgians put up with that.”
“They have no choice. The Russians are strong, geopolitically speaking, and the Georgians are weak. But it does cause a certain amount of turmoil. Take the foreign agent laws, for instance. Are you familiar?”
She was not.
“They’re new laws designed to harass Georgian nationals who have foreign contacts, who get their ideas from outside the country.
If you receive any portion of your income from outside the country, you have to register as a foreign agent.
Then the government can track you, track your money, who you speak to, everything.
The Tbilisi intelligentsia hate it, of course.
And the Russians have the same exact law in their own country—the inostranny agent, they call it.
They can imprison you for a decade for, say, texting with an American. ”
“That seems a little extreme.”
“Of course it is,” he said. “But many things here are a little extreme.”
Phil crouched, pooped briskly; Amy stooped to pick up his droppings and spritz herself with hand sanitizer.