Seventeen
SEVENTEEN
SHE brUSHED HER teeth, slapped on some deodorant, untangled her hair, and then, after taking a closer look, shoved a baseball cap on her head. On her way to the kitchen she almost tripped over Zazi.
“Who let you up here, anyway?” she asked. Zazi looked aggrieved.
Andrei was already in the kitchen; the table was still scattered with greenery and the fat glass globe her bouquet had come in. “These were your flowers?”
“They were just too big,” Amy said.
Andrei smirked, and she could almost hear him think American, but she didn’t say anything and neither did he. Zazi followed them as they walked downstairs. “Is he coming?”
“I think he is.” She had a leash in her backpack, attached it to a patient Zazi’s collar, and they let the small mutt lead them down the street and up, this time, toward the hills that overlooked Tbilisi.
If she told him about Maia, if she said, I think I know why they fight all the time, I think I understand— she would probably just be doing it for the gossip of it, or to have something to talk about with him.
Which was one of her bad habits, the way she would spill secrets when she was nervous or wanted something to say.
But there was nothing Maia would gain from having Andrei know about her, and therefore it was irresponsible to tell him.
And if Irine didn’t know, how terrible it would be for the American stranger and the Russian lodger to know something Irine didn’t about her own daughter.
But also, also, it was possible she was misinterpreting—or maybe over-interpreting—the photos.
Ferry’s friends’ approaches to sex and sexuality and gender were so different from her own, so fluid as to be basically a puddle.
His friends looked like anything, man, woman, in-between, and dressed like one another and went to the prom in a big group and, Ferry said, slept with everyone, no matter the gender—well, he didn’t, that wasn’t his thing (he said and she believed him)—but basically teenagers were so much less anguished about sex than she had been and so much more open to doing it with just about anyone or nobody at all.
And proud of it. Perhaps that was the way of teenagers all over the world these days?
And how well she remembered her brother’s anguished time in the closet, his celibacy throughout high school, how he preferred to be friendless rather than have any friends who might know his secret, how, even now, he couldn’t believe his own fortune to be married to someone he loved.
She was self-conscious about her breathing as she followed Andrei up the windy streets, but she was now used to the way he walked in silence, a step or so in front of her.
Zazi was a commanding walker, too, but every so often he would stop to sniff a bush or pee on a particularly enticing patch of grass and she would have a chance to catch her breath.
Andrei would vanish into the distance while she waited for the dog to do his business.
Which was okay. She had a sort of radarlike way of sensing where Andrei was.
The breeze blew the fur on Zazi’s back straight up, and he lunged or barked at each passing dog or bird, or sniffed eagerly at the ground to smell the messages that other animals had left in their urine.
Up, up they climbed, higher than anywhere that Amy had climbed so far in this strange city.
The buildings were starting to recede and now they were traversing a path through some scrubby brushland, pine trees ahead, and Amy thought that it was possible Andrei had no idea where he was going and was just interested in pushing her off a cliff.
Which would be a surprise! But anything was possible here!
“You okay?” he called from fifty paces ahead.
“I’m great!” she called back as chirpily as possible. From here the path jutted up steeply. Zazi was cruising jauntily ahead of her, yanking her upward, and she had half a mind to let him off the leash so he could bounce ahead but of course that was the most common way for dogs to get killed.
“Zazi,” she said, “just give me a second? Please?”
The dog returned to her side, stood next to her, looked up with an obedient expression.
The air was cooler up here, and thinner, or maybe that was just her imagination, and it smelled like juniper.
Above them, all she could see were rows of evergreens, and she was sure that behind her lay an impossibly beautiful view, but she wasn’t particularly interested in turning around.
She had forgotten that, under extreme circumstances, she could be a little bit afraid of heights.
“Doing all right?” Andrei asked, lumbering back down the path and lighting a cigarette.
Smoking during a hike like this!
“Want one?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, withdrawing one from his pack and letting him light it for her.
She wondered if the trees were dry up here, if there were forest fires.
She wondered what they would do if a spark suddenly caught.
She wondered about her lung function and what all this smoking was going to do to her airways and to her face.
She hadn’t even put sunscreen on today. She hadn’t even brushed her hair.
“You’re not looking at the view,” Andrei said.
“Not yet,” she said.
“It is a nice one,” he said.
“I’m sure,” she said.
“Do you not like to look at views?”
“I’m just focusing on the path ahead,” she said, trying to avoid his half-smile. “Where are we going again?”
“To a church on the side of this mountain,” he said. “It is very nice. They have a lot of dogs up there.”
“They have a lot of dogs everywhere.”
“Yes, but they also have beautiful views.” Andrei took a final drag, then flicked his smoldering cigarette butt into the distance.
“You realize you could start a forest fire that way, right?”
“What do I realize?”
“You could start a fire.”
He just looked at her.
“Don’t you have forest fires in Russia?”
Andrei snickered and began walking back up the trail.
She hadn’t yet finished her cigarette, which was almost certainly for the best. She shouldn’t be smoking entire cigarettes here or anywhere.
She stamped it out and then picked up the butt carefully by the end.
Because there were no trash bins, she stuck the butt in her pocket.
When she and Zazi caught up with Andrei again, he was standing outside a brownish-gray stone church that seemed to have been planted among the trees by a mysterious giant.
To the side of the church was a graveyard, each headstone different from one another, some somber and sturdy-looking and others fabulously ornate, and almost all of them huge.
Amy followed Zazi to a tombstone that looked like a giant man leaning over from his pedestal as if to embrace them.
Quietly, with some dignity, Zazi peed on the pedestal.
Because the ground she was standing on was flat, and because the tombstone was freaking her out, Amy finally turned to assess the view of the valley below.
It was indeed beautiful. And because the day was clear, she could see all the way across to the hills on the other side of the valley, to what she imagined was Asia.
“I think I see your dog,” Andrei said.
“You do? You see Angel?”
“I think I do,” he said, and even though she didn’t believe him she followed him around a bend to where several more graves were assembled and, asleep among them, lay a runty brown dog with short legs and pointy ears.
“Andrei, do you even know what Angel looks like?”
“She looks like a dog, yes?”
“She’s white, first of all.”
“So this is not her?”
Zazi was barking excitedly at the presence of the brown dog, who opened one eye in irritation. “It is not her.”
“I’m sorry,” Andrei said, but the twinkle in his eye suggested that he was, perhaps, flirting.
She grinned. “I don’t think you actually are.”
The gravestones circled the church; Amy and Andrei followed the path around, rousing a few more sleeping dogs (black, black and gray, sort of yellowish) and passing graves that looked like grapevines, like stern old men, like gates, like angels.
Andrei did not seem particularly interested in any of them, but Amy paused to look at each and try to make out the inscriptions (impossible; half were in Georgian and the other half Cyrillic).
“Who do you think these people were?”
“Writers, politicians,” he said.
“Were they famous?”
“Who can say?” He paused in front of a Cyrillic gravestone. “It says this man was the first translator of Pushkin into the Georgian language. I’m not sure that makes you famous though, even here.”
“I read Pushkin in college,” she said.
“They assign Pushkin in the United States?”
“Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov,” she said. “Advanced World Literature my senior year.”
“I’m impressed.”
She smiled at him, and he smiled back.
“So who was this guy?” She pointed to a figure of an enormous angel carrying a child draped in greenish metal robes. “Another translator?”
“The mayor of Tbilisi in the 1930s,” Andrei said.
“Pretty fancy gravestone for a mayor.”
“Soviet mayors had big jobs,” Andrei said. “They had to figure out which bribes to accept, who to report to senior authorities,” he said. “Who the Jews were, who the capitalists were.”
“The Jews?”
“Of course the Jews. And sometimes the Catholics too.”
Andrei sat down on a bench near the church wall, shook out his cigarettes. Amy sat next to him, calibrating exactly how many inches she could put between them.
“And also you had to make sure nobody was coming for you and what to do about it if they were,” he said. “All while pleasing the party officials. Best case you were fired. Worst case, the police came to your door.”
“Oy,” Amy said.
“Yes, but I should say that this is not how I grew up. By the time I was a kid, all that was gone. We didn’t really have a system anymore.”
“It was the same sort of chaos they had here,” Amy said.