Seven #2
“Do people in the United States even know who our ruler is?”
What did the Brittanica say? “It’s a—you have a prime minister, I think—his name is—”
“No, not the prime minister. Our ruler.” Maia started walking again, then found a nearby seat on a low retainer wall.
Amy took a seat next to her, although she was unsure whether or not she was supposed to.
Across the wide boulevard stood an Adidas store, a Nike store.
On the sidewalk in front of them, a few more sleeping dogs.
“Our ruler,” Maia said, “is an oligarch named Ivanishvili. You have heard of him?”
Amy shook her head.
“Yeah, well, he’s very famous here. Our country’s richest man, a billionaire.
Made his money in Moscow right around the end of the Soviet Union, extracting metals, destroying the environment, then came back here and decided to get into government.
He was the prime minister for a year a decade ago, but he still controls everything, bribes all the politicians to do what he wants, or just scares them, or just nods at them.
I don’t know. The minister of health was his dentist, the interior minister was his bodyguard.
The current prime minister used to be on his finance team. ”
“You know, we have something similar,” she said. “Trump made his son-in-law the head of foreign policy.”
“That’s nothing,” Maia snorted. “That’s the sort of thing we take for granted.
No, here our own government undermines the very notion of an independent country.
They’re supposed to be representing us, but they want us to go back to being part of Russia, you understand?
They want us to return to the days of the Georgian SSR.”
“But why would they want that? Wasn’t life miserable under the Soviets?”
“Because Putin will give them whatever they want as long as they give him Georgia.”
Amy had no idea about any of this. “Is there resistance?”
“Some resist,” she said. “Many do. But not the ones who are apa- thetic and uninformed. Or just grateful to get through the day. You know, many people are very poor here. It’s a luxury to be able to follow politics.”
Amy knew that.
“The problem,” said Maia, “is that it’s also a necessity.”
Amy wasn’t used to teenagers who talked like this.
Even Ferry, usually so astute—did they ever talk about politics in a way that wasn’t ironic or amusing?
Did they ever talk about politics in a serious way at all?
She looked out again at the Georgians passing her on the busy sidewalk.
They did not seem poor or uninformed; they seemed like busy city people, like herself.
“Don’t confuse Tbilisi with the rest of Georgia,” Maia said as if reading her mind. “You know there’s a big part of our country that the Russians actually occupy, and we can’t do anything about it. Many people welcome it.”
“South Ossetia and Abkhazia.”
“You’ve heard of it,” Maia said, and gave Amy her first approving smile. “Good. I’m glad you’ve heard of something.”
Amy considered whether or not to be insulted. She decided against it. Watched the foot traffic pass.
“Ivanishvili’s minions put up that cross the day after our canceled gay pride parade, and the next day the government put up the fence to protect it.
When we protested, they sprayed us with tear gas.
Then batons. Eventually we got tired or injured and we went home.
Then a few months later we protested again.
And got beaten again. It will happen again soon. ”
“Does your mother worry about your safety?” Amy asked. “When you protest?”
“Of course.” Maia sighed. “She’s a Soviet too.”
The wind was starting to whip up and Amy zipped her green parka up to her throat.
The two stray dogs closest to her lazily got to their feet; feeling oddly helpless, or maybe useless, Amy reached into her bag and tossed a few treats out toward them.
She was grateful when one of the dogs stopped, sniffed, deigned to eat it.
How cursory her research had been! Gone to the library?
If she hadn’t been with Maia, she might have popped into the Nike store, tried to figure out the prices.
She would have thought the cross was a symbol of Georgian strength or history or religious devotion.
She would never have known that teenagers here got tear-gassed.
“Are you hungry?” Maia asked.
She was starving.
“You’ve had Georgian food before?”
“Not really.”
“I think you’ll like it,” Maia said. “Most people do. Let’s go.”
They turned up a small hillside and once again Amy hurried to keep up. The sidewalk was dented and pitted, but the street was full of restaurants, steaming windows, the scent of garlic and onion drifting out into the street. On a wall, English graffiti: PERHAPS LIBERTY IS THE ONLY WEALTH .
“We go here,” Maia said, finally pausing in front of a dark blue door. “My friend is the owner. It is the best restaurant on this side of the river I think,” she said, and a surprising look of shyness came across her face. “I hope you will like it.”
Amy followed Maia into a compact room with a wood-burning fire in the stove in the corner. The walls were stucco, the ceiling was hung with acoustic tile. “It’s lovely,” she said.
“You have restaurants like this in New York?”
“Of course,” Amy said, although in truth the place could not have looked or smelled more different than most New York restaurants—no Fred shaking martinis, no curated clientele.
The tables were crowded with people of all ages eating together, coats thrown over backs of chairs, and it was hard to tell who the waiters were since everyone seemed to be wearing the same nondescript clothing.
Maia left Amy standing in the corner while she made the rounds, kissing people at various tables hello—how did she know all of them?
—and then picking up an empty chair and then another empty chair as if she owned the place, squeezing them in at a table on the far side of the room.
“Amy, you will join us here,” she called.
“Sure.” She squeezed through the scrum.
Envisioning Maia’s friends, Amy had imagined a bunch of punk kids like the ones that patrolled the smoking area outside her high school in the nineties: bad dye jobs, smudged eyeliner, eyebrow rings and ratty leather jackets.
But the table was full of average-looking people of all ages—grandmothers and a fat baby alongside two small kids drawing with crayons, and someone who had to be the mom and someone else who had to be the dad, or maybe that other guy was the dad?
Twelve of them around the table, and what on earth their connection was to Maia, Amy couldn’t guess.
But Maia was kissing everyone, and then someone else came to the table and Maia kissed him, too, and Amy again felt like an intruder on the set of a curious foreign film.
“Es dedachemis megobaria, is ak aris niu-iork’idan. Misi sakhelia Emi,” Maia said. “Amy, sit, sit.”
“New York!” said a younger woman who either was or was not the children’s mother. “I have always wanted to go to New York City. Do you know Brooklyn? I want to go to Brooklyn. I’ve heard it’s the coolest.”
“I’m actually in Manhattan,” Amy said. “The East Village.”
“New York, New York!” sang one of the men. “It’s a wonderful town!”
“What brings you to our little country?”
She could not bear to explain about Angel again, but fortunately Maia saved her, streaming out throaty sentences in Georgian while Amy squeezed into a seat between a grandmother and one of the children, who looked at her complacently before turning back to her drawing.
What time was it? Six? Six-thirty? On a Thursday night?
And yet she seemed to be crashing a dinner party.
Sweating bottles of some kind of alcohol were on the table, alongside salads and dips and baskets of bread, and the grandmother to her left poured her a shot and clinked a glass against hers. “Amis gaumarjos!”
“Yes!” she said. She downed whatever was in the glass and felt a spike behind her eyes. The grandmother refilled her glass. “Welcome to Tiflis!”
“Maia, what is this?” Amy asked when she regained her breath.
“Strong, yes?” she said. “It is chacha. Like our national vodka. Better than Russian.”
“It’s made from grapes,” said one of the men at the table.
“Fermented wine,” said another.
“I didn’t know wine could be fermented,” Amy said. Her tongue felt pickled.
“Sakartvelos gaumarjos!” said the grandmother to her left, and everyone but Amy drank again. The kid to her right crumpled up her drawing and began a new one.
Soon more plates of food began arriving at the table, brought by a waitress who everyone knew, and people were passing them around like they were at someone’s home, no particular concern for whose cutlery was whose.
Amy would have attempted to at least keep track of her own fork but she was undone by hunger.
The grandmother spooned two huge dumplings on her plate, then pureed beets that smelled like a million cloves of roasted garlic, and roasted peppers gleaming with oil, and then there was bread stuffed with—were those kidney beans?
And an eggplant salad studded with pomegranate seeds and Amy shoved some food into her mouth, and emitted a tiny but very real moan.
She had made eggplant like this before, grilled over an open flame until charred on the outside and molten in, but she had never managed to get it so perfectly smoky.
“Good, yes?”
The grandmother was now nudging her in the arm, pointing to one of the dumplings, miming how to eat it. “Khinkali,” she said. She held one by its topknot of dough, took a loud slurping bite, gestured at Amy to follow.
“What’s inside?” Amy asked; she couldn’t bear to reject the food being offered her but also couldn’t bear to eat meat, worried she might barf. How embarrassing, to barf—or to reject food, or to explain herself yet again. How to negotiate?
“Maia, what’s inside this?”