Eighteen #3
In the middle of the square, people were taking turns speaking into a megaphone, and every so often a roar would go up from the crowd.
Amy took careful steps around the square, trying to stay in the narrow space between the cops and the buildings that lined the sidewalks, trying not to draw attention to herself, still wondering if she should turn around and head up into the hills.
Every so often the crowd would roar with an intensity that made her freeze, scared of what was happening or what the cops might do.
But they stayed where they were, statuelike, unaware that she was moving quietly behind them.
She was almost certain she was moving in the right direction—it had to be this way, wasn’t it?
Along Rustaveli? The crowd kept marching, kept screaming, and she felt like it was at her back, propelling her forward, and she was afraid of what would happen if she turned around.
And then a shriek from the crowd, and the sound of glass breaking, and Amy in her nervousness tripped over something on the sidewalk, and finally one cop in the wall of cops turned around and noticed her and said something sharp that she didn’t understand.
“Please,” she said. “Me ar vlap’arak’ob kartulad , I speak English.”
Was she able to be heard? The cop was inscrutable behind his visor.
She said it louder, “Gtkhovt, please, please — Me ar vlap’arak’ob kartulad, just English, not Georgian—” and for whatever reason this pissed off the cop and he grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her into the crowd like she was a trash bag he’d found on the street.
Tears sprang to her eyes. Her shoulders pinched where he’d grabbed her.
And now, suddenly, she was in the middle of it, swept into the ongoing tide of the protesters, in the heat of the screaming crowd.
People were chanting things she didn’t understand but underneath the rumble she heard words she did: Freedom and Fuck Putin and No USSR .
And underneath their winter caps and their scarves the protesters looked like people she knew, looked like Maia and her friends at the restaurant, looked like the teachers at Irine’s school.
They were linking arms and they were shouting.
And someone grabbed Amy’s arm, and even though her shoulder definitely felt sore she let her arm be grabbed and she decided that she would not be scared, she would yell and march along with them. She would try to understand.
The march took her in the opposite direction she wanted to go, back toward Liberty Square.
It was easy enough to move with them once you figured out where they were going, once you decided to keep your eyes on the people in front of you and not on the wall of faceless cops with their shields and their Tasers, once you pretended the tanks weren’t there, once you stopped thinking about Irine’s sister and the eighteen people killed in this very spot by Gorbachev’s goons in 1989 and instead you thought about the present, only about the present.
If you lent your voice to the voice of the collective.
You could be part of it if you screamed “Fuck Putin!” and “Fuck Stalinism!” and “We Won’t Go Back!
” and if you looked at the young people around you who looked so much like your stepson that it was almost like he was there marching with you—if you made sure your footsteps moved in line with everyone else’s, if you raised your voice and let yourself feel part of something instead of apart from everything, it was easy to keep going. It was easy to keep moving.
She marched and shouted. She moved in time with her fellow marchers. A man in front of her wore a Ukrainian flag draped around his neck and the flag occasionally flew up and brushed against her forehead, against the very spot that Andrei had burned with his touch.
Andrei’s wife was a Putinist, a Putinista, did anyone ever call them that?
Lady Putinists? She felt some of the crowd’s delirium infect her.
Arms linked with strangers’ arms, she marched around Liberty Square and back down Rustaveli, toward the parliament building with the drooping cross and the massed troops of cops and the tanks.
But she wasn’t afraid. Why be afraid? She screamed obscenities into the sky and the crowd screamed them along with her.
In the hills above her, a TV tower glowed red and white.
She wondered if news agencies were picking this up.
She wondered if anyone in the world knew this was happening besides the people right here with her, now.
They proceeded down Rustaveli, past the Nike store, the Adidas store.
The stores were not boarded up the way they were in New York during the George Floyd protests.
Nobody had thought to put plywood in front of the plate glass.
Which seemed to say to Amy that this was fine, this was going to be fine, this was healthy pro-democracy shouting and it was good to be part of it.
If she couldn’t find Angel, she could at least do this.
Which was when she heard an explosion.
Something in front of her—how far in front, she could not tell—had exploded, and now smoke was pluming up into the sky, and a mass of cops (or were they soldiers?
They seemed so profoundly in formation ) marched toward the crowd with their shields in the air, and screaming that had been joyful was now suddenly terrified.
Protesters were running in different directions.
Amy’s eyes started to burn. And the cops were grabbing people and throwing them against the walls, or throwing them against tanks, and Amy was terrified of being grabbed again but it was so smoky and her eyes were burning so horribly that she didn’t know where she was going, and she thought I am a tourist I am a tourist but didn’t scream it because she knew it didn’t matter in the least.
Anyway nobody would hear her.
She tried to stumble off the street but there was nowhere to go; Parliament Square was blocked off in one direction and the crowd blocked any escape route in the other direction.
She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to rub her eyes or not—would that increase the burning?
She wasn’t sure if this was tear gas or a smoke bomb or if someone was going to start tasing or worse.
God, it fucking burned. The skin on her face felt like it was crawling with tiny electric ants.
Through streaming, narrowed eyes, she could see that the crowd was dispersing, dispersing, daarbiet .
She followed them, through a narrow channel away from the cops and the crowd, and found herself climbing, half-blinded, up on a platform near a McDonald’s of all things, and someone handed her something and gestured that she should pour it into her eyes.
“What?” she shrieked.
The woman looked at her.
“English? Please!”
“It helps!” the woman said, gesturing. “The burning!”
Amy poured the liquid into her eyes and it was white and cold and it did relieve some of the sting and a drip dribbled into her mouth and she realized it was milk.
She pressed her palms into her eyes. Her face was cold and sticky with milk.
When she opened them again they stung a little bit less.
She saw police actively beating the protesters with their clubs while others stood around them screaming words she could not decipher.
Some of the cops were dragging protesters away from the avenue and toward their vans, were throwing them into the backs of vans.
Where were they going to take them? Where would they be detained?
“You need more?” asked the woman next to her, gesturing toward the milk.
“Madloba!” Amy said. “Madloba.” And she poured more milk in her eyes.
“I have to go,” the woman said. “You keep this.” And handed her the container.
The woman climbed down from the platform then, leaving Amy to try to figure out where to go next or what to do; it seemed impossible to go anywhere, though, so maybe she would do nothing?
Watch this insane Bruegel scene in front of her go on until it ended, and then hurry her way back home?
Wait till the burn wore off? Pretend none of it was happening at all?
She picked up her phone. She could document this. Yes, that was something she could do.
She took a photo, then another, then turned on the video and let it unspool in front of her, for posterity, but also separated by her camera so that she didn’t feel like she was a part of this as much as she felt returned to her rightful place as a mere observer.
And the phone blocked the smoke from her eyes.
The protesters kept coming and the police kept catching them, almost willy-nilly, and the smoke bombs blew up every so often and the police kept coming forward in formation as though executing a plan for war.
The red button of the video blinked on and off, capturing all of it.
She swung her camera up toward Liberty Square, where the marchers kept coming, and then back toward Rustaveli, where the police kept coming.
But then the camera caught someone she knew.
Jesus.
Dragged back by her elbows, screaming who knows what up to the sky, kicking and trying to make herself immobile, it was Maia.
Clearly and undeniably. Maia, in her Doc Martens knock offs, in a T-shirt that had Putin’s face on it crossed out in red, Maia, who suddenly looked ten years younger and ten times smaller than she did in her kitchen, who had a line of blood on her face and whose eyes were closed against the smoke bombs and who was screaming with her mouth open up to the stars.
Fuck, Maia.
Amy was not a brave person. She knew that about herself. She was not brave and she was not reckless but still she jumped off the safety of the platform and raced back into the crowd, toward Maia, who was being dragged toward one of the black police vans.
“NO!” she yelled as she pushed through the crowd—was it possible she had pushed one of the cops?
She had certainly pushed one of the cops out of the way with both her arms in front of her, she was running and forcing herself through the crowd, eyes still blurry, until she found Maia, who was kicking her feet in the air, refusing to be thrown in the back of the van.
“NO!” she screamed as a cop tried to grab her from behind; she somehow slithered away. “NO! I am American! I am American! I am American!”
And somehow, for some reason, that did the trick.
The cop paused. “You will not take her! I am American!” and she grabbed Maia around the waist but then the cop pulled her back toward the van, the rear doors to the van were wide open and the cop backed up into it and tried to pull Maia in, too, from behind and Amy jumped up into the van before the cop could hoist Maia in.
The cop looked at her from behind her shield.
The cop was a woman.
“You will let her go,” Amy said, her heart racing, unsure of what she was going to say until it was out of her mouth. “I am American and I am telling you, you will let her go.”
The cop said something to her in Georgian; she reached toward her belt for her club or her Taser, keeping one hand on Maia’s neck. But at the same time Amy reached into her belt bag and grabbed her wallet.
The cop watched her, unmoving.
Amy withdrew one thousand American dollars from her wallet. She was shaking. What had the British man said? The consequences can be extraordinarily severe.
What could that mean?
It did not matter what the consequences were. Maia was bleeding pools of dark red blood from the mouth and the nose.
“You will let her go,” Amy said.
The cop looked at the money.
“You will let her go,” Amy said, shaking but trying to keep the shaking from her voice. “Now.”
The cop reached out and plucked the ten American bills from Amy’s American hand, and she let go of Maia’s neck, and then she pushed Amy out of the van, and she ran, and Maia ran, and they didn’t stop until they were halfway up the hill, and when Maia finally turned to her, Amy saw that her nose looked like it was sitting at a strange angle and one of her front teeth had been knocked out of her mouth. And there was so much blood.
“Maia,” Amy said. “Let’s get you home.”
But Maia didn’t say anything, just spit out of the corner of her mouth and ran back down the hill toward Rustaveli.