Twelve
TWELVE
“DO YOU KNOW this story?” Ferry texted.
“How do you know all this?” Amy wrote back.
“I went down a Georgian rabbit hole. Also I like the theme of strong women here. Reminds me of you.”
Amy laughed out loud in her bed. Strong women. May we raise them, may we be them—was that how the saying went? It was one a.m. and her mouth was dry from wine.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” he wrote. “It’s probably late there. Is it late there?”
“It is.”
“Why aren’t you asleep?”
IN THE MORNING, Amy sat down on her bed with her water and her ibuprofen.
She was going to be more methodical. She sat down with her notebook and her phone, making a list of all the possible places to look (a park, the riverbanks, the hills, a different park).
But in the end, none of the routes seemed to be more logical than any other.
What was the point of being methodical when she couldn’t deduce a method?
She pulled on her jeans, splashed water on her face, and decided to do what she had always done when she needed to change up her thinking: get on the train.
She had seen signs for the metro on Rustaveli Avenue, so she grabbed her backpack and made her way down the hill, keeping an eye out for Angel, or for any dog who needed a treat.
But all she saw was a skinny rat, racing under a car with a wedge of bread in its mouth.
For anyone who had spent her adult life in New York, the Tbilisi metro seemed simple enough: there were only two lines and they intersected only once.
But— but— the swoosh of getting on the escalator and then the down down down down down!
She had never traveled so deep underground before, into the dark gray tunnels of somewhere approaching Middle Earth.
She watched, astounded, as her fellow travelers stared at their phones or gazed at their shoes, completely unimpressed by the depths to which they were journeying.
Ninety seconds, one hundred twenty seconds, and they were still on this escalator!
Then, finally, they were off. She stepped onto a crowded platform decorated with stern Soviet bas-reliefs on the support columns and, on the walls along the tracks, advertisements for Georgian yogurt.
Within moments, the train arrived, square and rattling, and Amy embarked with her fellow midday riders.
She took the train to Station Square, switched to the other line, had no idea where to get out and ended up returning to Rustaveli.
She crossed the tracks and reversed the journey up, up, up, back into the blinking sunshine, having gone nowhere but refusing to beat herself up about it.
She emerged near the parliament building, where more people than she remembered from the day before were milling about in front of the cross.
Actually, it seemed like it was a small crowd, people yelling and arguing.
Men in suits and ties, a woman in a pantsuit, and kids, too, in all manner of dress and presentation.
A television cameraman was recording the proceedings.
Amy stood at the perimeter, watching, unsure how to get through.
A few people gathered near her, silently watching as well.
“Mat khma unda mietsat,” a young man murmured next to her.
Amy had no idea what he was saying.
As more people started gathering by the cross, a police car, siren on, came screeching in from the opposite direction.
It was ten in the morning, bright and beautiful, and on the opposite side of the street most people were hustling as if none of this was happening.
But a few stopped and stared, and then a few more, and then the crowd started to grow.
Someone yelled something. Someone yelled something back.
“Dzalian tsudad gakhdeba,” the man next to her said.
“K’ee,” Amy said, even though she had no idea what the man had said. K’ee meant “yes.” She had picked it up somewhere.
The man looked at her and nodded sadly. He had deep brown eyes that were hard to turn away from.
People streamed in from the surrounding streets.
Amy realized slowly and then all at once that she was trapped.
People were pushing in behind her and there was no way to maneuver herself through or around them.
“Uk’atsravad,” she said, then, more loudly, “Uk’atsravad!
” But nobody would let her pass or even seemed to notice she was there.
Her heart started to pound. She had always had a touch of enochlophobia—didn’t most women?
—and imagined herself getting molested, trampled.
Everyone was wearing parkas, dark green, brown, gray, and she couldn’t tell if she was being pressed up against by men or women, old people or young.
Who was in charge of this crowd? Where were they trying to go?
“Excuse me!” she yelled. “Excuse me!” In English this time. A few turned to look at her.
The crowd seemed to be heaving toward something, moving as a single organism.
Amy thought to herself that she could close her eyes and channel better thoughts, let herself be carried, be as free as the breeze, own nothing but her spirit, but of course that was impossible, she was terrified, she wasn’t high.
The crowd heaved: a huge and wild animal wanting to put something in its maw.
“Please! I’m a tourist! Please! Let me through!”
Tiny steps forward, people pressing against her back, a stranger’s hot breath.
“I’m a tourist! Please!”
And though there was no reason that being a tourist was enough of a reason to let her pass, she must have startled some of them or at least made them pay attention, because a few people jostled out of her way, and then a few more.
She kept yelling excuse me let me pass excuse me I need to get through I’m a tourist , and she used her arms a little and her shoulders a little more and she did, somehow, separate herself from the pack.
The beast moved in one direction. She inched in another.
There were coats in her face, and people hoisting children, and other people yelling what sounded like organized chants toward the drooping cross in front of them.
A panting, thrusting crowd. Amy felt tears spring to her eyes, shame or fear. The person to her right looked at her and hissed. “Ra gaak’eta amerik’elma chventvis, dzu.”
She kept inching, inching, shouted again: “Please, I’m a tourist, let me through!”
And then she was at the far end of Parliament Square.
The crowd was looser here; there was space to maneuver.
She took off her gloves and wiped her eyes.
And was stunned, when she turned around, to see that she had made it through a gathering of at least three or even four hundred people, all of whom had assembled in minutes, or even in moments—and the police were there now, too, standing in front of the crowd, protecting the drooping cross, setting up barriers, yelling at people who were yelling back at them, and then one of them shouted something through a bullhorn and the moment seized, the very air seized with what felt to Amy like the throbbing possibility of violence.
But:
But!
It was so beautiful out—didn’t the sunshine and the early spring breeze preclude the possibility of attack dogs, tear gas?
Didn’t the dignity of the parliament building itself demand civilized behavior?
But!
The crowd was facing off against the police in what seemed like the prelude to a riot. The silence terrifying.
She was at the far edges of the crowd now, inching backward as people rushed in from all sides to join the mass.
Into a bullhorn:
Daarbiet! Brdzaneba gakvs dashla!
The crowd: Tavisupleba! Tavisupleba! Tavisupleba!
And the police again: Daarbiet!
The crowd: Tavisupleba! Tavisupleba! Tavisupleba!
But more police cars were screeching down Rustaveli, and Amy kept backing up as police seemed to emerge from everywhere at once and stared down the heaving crowd, which was, in the face of the authority, no longer a beast but rather a group of people in parkas and jean jackets and leather jackets and face masks and glasses, no longer moving as one. Just still.
Daarbiet! Daarbiet!
A water cannon on the back of a police truck turned its wide, empty face toward the crowd, ready to spray.
And after a clenched minute, the crowd dispersed.
Amy stood at the corner a hundred yards from the parliament building, drawing deep breaths: counting to four, holding, exhaling for four.
The best way she knew to ward off a panic attack.
The people of Tbilisi were streaming off now in different directions, but the cops were still there in the angry stance of cops everywhere, and Amy wondered if they would spray the rioters even as they left.
“Freedom.”
Maia, standing beside her, out of nowhere. For some reason, Amy wasn’t in the least bit surprised. “That’s what they were saying?”
“Tavisupleba. Literally it means ‘self-rule.’”
Amy nodded. Her breath was regulating. Still, she wanted to hold on to Maia’s black-gloved hand.
“We’ve never really had it,” Maia said. “Not for a thousand years.”
“How did people know to assemble here?”
“There was a vote in the parliament about the foreign nationals law,” she said.
“It passed, so now you have to register if you have foreign contacts, or like if your business does, or if you want to study abroad or anything like that. I’m a foreign agent now.
It was broadcast on national TV, of course. It’s almost like they’re taunting us.”
“It’s amazing they want to antagonize you like that.”
“They’ve been doing it for a hundred years,” she said. “Dictators gonna dictate. Imperialists gonna—imperial.”
Amy laughed, and after a moment Maia laughed, too.
“I don’t understand how people got down here so fast.”
“It’s what we do,” Maia said. “It’s all we do.”