Eight #2
“Good morning!” Irine said. “I hope you were able to sleep. Maia said you went to Nikoloz’s restaurant last night.” She lit a new cigarette, propping open the kitchen window. “The food there can be a little heavy, no?”
“Maia already left for the day?”
“Her school starts quite early,” Irine said.
Amy marveled at the resilience of the young. She poured herself some water from the sink and drank it before thinking about whether or not it was safe to drink water from the sink.
“You had chacha?”
Amy refilled her glass. How dangerous could it be? “Too much.”
“You need a paracetamol?”
“I took an aspirin,” she said. “I’ll just get some coffee.”
“Sit, sit. I’ll get.”
Irine was dressed professionally, in a purple blouse and dark pants, and it occurred to Amy that she hadn’t asked her what she did for a living or where she went to work.
How could she not have asked these simple things of her host?
Or why hadn’t Irine mentioned it? In America, a person would come right out with it—you couldn’t spend five minutes with Judd without hearing all about the restaurant.
“Ah,” Irine said, passing Amy a mug, blowing cigarette smoke in the opposite direction. “I work at Primary School Ninety-eight, just across the river. It’s only a very short drive.”
“I had no idea,” Amy said. “You’re a teacher?”
“I was for many years—I taught kindergarten,” she said. “And then, because I was good at my job, they gave me a job I did not want, and now I am principal. Which is much harder work, but also of course more money. Anyway, this is how I know Angel—she was the crossing guard at our school.”
“That’s so funny,” Amy said. “I should have asked.”
“Why should you ask?” Irine said. “I can just tell you.”
“You know, I think I met one of your students last night, a little girl. Her mother is friends with Maia. Or her father?” Amy said. “She seemed to be there with her whole family—I was never entirely sure who everyone was, to be honest. They just kept pouring me chacha.”
Irine laughed. “Nikoloz’s place is quite popular—many of my students go there with their families.
And Maia, of course, she knows everyone.
For a while she was good friends with a former teacher at our school.
And then—well, they are not friends anymore, which I believe is for the best. Miss Lomidze was a terrible influence.
She taught Maia very radical ideas. Now she thinks she can go to a protest or a rave and make the world different. ”
“That’s the way of young people all over the world.”
“She should know better, though. Shouting slogans, putting up graffiti. Very stupid.”
“It doesn’t seem so stupid to protest what you believe in,” she said. “Isn’t that what kids do?”
“Ha!” Irine said. “The government makes a decision, they protest. The government reverses the decision, they protest. They can never be satisfied. Maia works with a group of students, other young people, I don’t know.
They make political videos in English. Which is provocative, although she pretends not to know it is provocative. ”
“It seems kind of impressive to me,” Amy said.
Irine gave her a stern look. “Impressive?”
“I mean, just to care so much.” She felt herself backtracking. “I don’t know that many American teenagers who know enough, who care enough—who dedicate themselves to political activism so—I don’t know, so fully.”
“Well yes—of course she dedicates herself. She is brilliant. So she thinks she knows everything.” Irine took a deep drag of her Crown.
“But there is a difference between knowing things in school and knowing them in life, and in life she doesn’t know anything.
I’ve had to pick her up at the police station more than once.
One time she got into a fight with an officer and ended up with a baton to the cheek. She had a black eye for a month.”
Irine leaned back against the sink. In the weak kitchen light, Amy could see dozens of tiny wrinkles around her pursed lips.
“The problem is that she doesn’t really understand what the police are capable of,” Irine said. “She thinks she does, but she cannot. She has no memory, she wasn’t alive before. She isn’t nearly afraid enough,” Irine said. “And she should be.”
Ferry had never gotten involved with the cops. Ferry had never had to get involved with the cops.
Outside the kitchen window, Amy could see one of the grannies outside with some of the dogs. The granny had a floral scarf tied around her head, looked like something out of a painting of European peasants. And the dogs just milled around her, content. What a strange place this was.
Irine was pouring herself more coffee, and then she poured more into Amy’s cup.
Although she was curious, Amy didn’t dare ask her about the Russian-aligned oligarch (what was his name?) or the prime minister who had been his money guy or the health minister who had been his dentist. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what Irine had to say, or know who she sympathized with.
Was she really—a Soviet? What did that even mean?
“What I was thinking about, Amy, to be honest,” Irine said, stamping out her cigarette, busying herself with a new one. “I was wondering if you thought Maia could go to school in the United States.”
“I’m sorry?”
“If she could go back with you to go to school.”
“Back with me?” Amy said. “Is that something she wants?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” Irine said. “It is something I want.”
“To move her to the United States?”
“It is the only—” Irine stopped herself. “Regular immigration is very difficult. There is the visa lottery, but the chances there are slim. But for someone like my daughter, the United States would be a much better life. And she can get a student visa, I know she could.”
“Well,” Amy said. “I think the process is pretty involved. I mean, you’re right—there are student visas—but it’s quite a process to apply. I don’t know how the schools would evaluate Georgian transcripts.”
“Transcripts?”
“Her grades.”
“Her grades are excellent, I told you.”
“I’m sure they are,” Amy said. The kitchen was filling up with cigarette smoke.
After a moment, Irine said, “I must be honest with you, Amy, this is what I don’t understand.
I have looked at the colleges there. On their websites.
And what I don’t understand is how they could cost so much money.
I can’t believe it! Every time I look on the website, I think no, this is a joke.
How could it be? Is everyone in America that rich? ”
“No, of course not—it’s expensive for Americans, too. A lot of people save up their whole lives, or pay off loans for years and years.”
“But you said your son goes to university, yes?”
“Yes,” Amy said.
“And you pay for it?”
“We do.”
“And how much does that cost?”
Amy blinked. There was no way on earth she could tell her. There was no way she could say the insane number out loud. “A lot.”
“Yes, but how much?”
“Um…” She gazed at the scratched formica on the kitchen table.
Irine was a woman whose coffee she was drinking, whose electricity she was using.
Irine was a woman who had lived in a communal apartment well into her childhood.
“Sometimes there are scholarships,” she said. “For people who need money.”
Behind Irine, the sink drip drip dripped. The floor above them was creaking with the weight of one granny or another.
“Well,” Irine said. “It’s just a dream, I suppose.
I must go to work now. If you want to look for Angel, you might want to head to the area around the British school.
It’s a place for hiking but many people leave dogs there.
I’ve been going up when I can to look. You can bring Zazi or one of the others if you’d like. They’ll help you search.”
“The British school. Okay.”
Irine gathered her coat, bag, keys, drained her coffee and put her mug in the sink.
“Oh, Irine?” Amy said, wanting to change the subject that lingered in the air, not knowing what would come out of her mouth until she let it. “Is there a—there seems to be a man living in the house?”
“Oh, yes, Andrei,” Irine said, briskly. “I meant to tell you. He’s our lodger. He works from his room all day, I don’t know what he does. Something for the internet. He shouldn’t bother you.”
“No, of course. I was just wondering.”
“Okay,” Irine said. Something flickered across her face. “Well, I will be going. Good luck with the search.”
The search.
How ludicrous and impossible.
She still had that one thousand dollars in her bag. She could leave it on Irine’s kitchen table, get a hotel room, sightsee until her flight home.
But that seemed impossible, too. She was not here to see anything in particular. She was here to do good.
She went upstairs to get her coat and her search supplies—her backpack, her bully sticks, her drone—thinking about the truth of her financial life: Judd’s father had been a neurosurgeon in Connecticut and his mother had worked in real estate.
Judd and his two brothers had attended boarding schools in New England (Andover, Andover, Exeter) and Ivy League schools, and then Judd’s older brothers had gone on to do exactly what their educational and social backgrounds suggested they would do: Mitchell worked in corporate finance in New York and Cal worked in corporate finance in Hong Kong.
Judd himself was the black sheep, his restaurant work seen as eccentric, his tattoos and allegiance to the East Village evidence of an idiosyncratic attraction to the down-at-heel.
But his parents had nevertheless supported his early ambitions, paid for mechanical and aesthetic upgrades to Le Coin, took him to Italy to source marble for the bar.
And there was the place in Southampton where they spent parts of every summer, and the elaborate vacations for Ferry and his cousins.