Thirteen
THIRTEEN
IT WAS ALMOST five by the time she returned to the house.
“Shhhh…” One of the grannies stood by the door, issuing a warning. She was wearing velour pants and a burgundy coat, and her hair was in its beehive. Amy could not remember for the life of her what her name was. “Fighting.”
“Fighting?”
The sky had started to relax into the west, but just barely, tinted at the edges in the same burgundy as the granny’s coat.
“Irine,” the granny said. “Maia.”
“Ah,” Amy said.
“You stay outside? With me?”
“With you?”
“Come.” The granny beckoned her to follow, and together they walked to the side of the house, to a rusty metal gate half-hidden under grape vines. On the other side of the gate was the house’s overgrown backyard. The granny ushered her to the picnic table. “We wait here.”
“What are they fighting about?”
“Yes?”
“What are they—do you know what the problem is?”
“Yes?”
Amy wondered if she should pull out her phone, Google translate, but she didn’t want to confuse the granny. (God, she should stop thinking of this woman as a granny! She was only fifteen years older than Amy was!) “Do you know why they’re arguing?”
The granny smiled, but still looked perplexed. Through the door behind them, the dogs were barking, having sensed their presence or perhaps just needing some relief in the cool March dusk. “I let them out?”
“Sure,” Amy said.
The granny opened the door and out came a whoosh of legs and tongues and fur, happy yapping, peeing by the tree, approaching for sniffs and pets and ear tousles and the relative joy of the prison yard.
“You like?”
“Dogs? Oh, I love them,” Amy said. “I have a dog at home named Roxy. She’s a German shepherd—do you know German shepherds?
” She picked up her phone to show the granny a photo, one she loved, Roxy with her big dumb tongue hanging off to the left, wearing one of Ferry’s baseball caps.
They had wanted to dress her up as a player for Halloween, but she’d resisted wearing the old Dwight Gooden tee.
The granny nodded, pointed at one of the Didi Gulabi strays that looked something lke Roxy around the eyes. “Yes,” Amy said. “Like her.”
They sat quietly for several minutes to watch the dogs accomplish their initial squats and sniffs and assemble themselves in exhausted heaps around the yard, some of them staring up at her with expectant, adoring eyes.
“Ty ikh vyspustil? You let them out?”
Amy turned. Andrei, standing by the back door in a winter coat.
“Hey! You got a coat!”
“I didn’t want you to worry about me anymore,” he said, but he didn’t smile at her and she really had no idea if he was kidding or not.
He said something in Georgian (or Russian?) to the granny and the granny responded fluidly, rapidly. They exchanged several sentences, and Amy tried desperately to pick out a word she knew. She thought she heard Irine’s name, she thought she heard Maia’s; she knew this conversation wasn’t for her.
Eventually, Andrei spoke in English. “Irine and Maia are having a very loud argument upstairs. Irine doesn’t want Maia to go to the protest. She’s saying she’ll stop paying her school fees if she goes.”
“Oh, I see,” Amy said. “But Maia was already at a protest today.”
“I believe that’s what the fighting is about inside. According to Marmar it has gotten very bad. Maia is throwing cups against the wall.”
“Cups?”
“You know? For coffee?”
“Oh, yes. Cups.”
The granny—her name was Marmar, she had a name—said something else to Andrei, who shrugged his shoulders.
“Chto nam delat’?”
“Ona mozhet postradat’.”
“Kakaya raznitsa?”
“What’s happening?”
“She wants to know if it’s World War Three in there or only Afghanistan. A big battle or a long and boring stalemate.”
“Which is it?”
“Both,” Andrei said.
He and Marmar then began a rapid-fire negotiation, utterly incomprehensible, and Amy turned to the closest dog, a small black-Lab-type creature with beautiful amber eyes and a scar on its muzzle.
The dog pushed itself between Amy’s knees to better secure a petting position, and Amy rewarded its initiative with a nice long scritch under the chin.
Still, although her body was turned away from Andrei, it was extraordinarily aware of him, of his bulk on the picnic bench beside her, the musky smell of him, the soft guttural sounds of whatever language he was speaking.
She felt a little bit of a buzz on her right side, the side that was closest to him.
It occurred to her that she had not had a crush on anyone in so long. A thrill! The dog panted gratefully between her legs. Amy rubbed its soft leathery ears between her fingers.
“Yeye doch’—molodoy chelovek. Chego ona ozhidayet?” Marmar was gesturing up to the sky with both hands, the universal gesture for “what do you want me to do?”
Andrei shrugged. “Ono tboya doch’.”
She luxuriated in the sound of his voice, closed her eyes and tuned into the prickling of the skin on the right side of her body, the warmth of the Labrador between her knees. “U tebya bol’she sily,” he said. “Chem u menya.”
It was the sexiest sound she thought she’d ever heard. She drew circles on the felt of the Labrador’s ears, the murmur of Andrei’s voice behind her, the setting sun, his body on the bench, her eyes were closed, she wanted to—
“Amy!”
“Yes?” God, what was wrong with her?
“Marmar thinks we should separate them if they’re going to keep going like this. One time Irine ended up in the hospital.”
“What?”
“Nothing Maia did—Irine thought she was having a heart attack. It was before I arrived, so I’m not certain if—”
Marmar interrupted. “You must understand.” Amy had not been expecting her to speak English. “What happened for Irine’s sister.”
“Understand?”—but then she thought back to the picture of Irine’s family behind her desk at work, the sister who had died a long time ago. The Lab lay down between her feet.
“Can you tell me?”
Marmar drew a breath. “In April, 1989, yes, you know?”
“When people were killed in the protests,” Amy said.
“Yes,” Marmar said. “Irine and her sister went to Parliament Square, went to—I don’t know in English—” and then she said something to Andrei, who nodded along. It was Russian, of course they’d been speaking in Russian.
“Irine and her sister went to the protest on April nine in Parliament Square,” Andrei translated. “They had been protesting for months, their parents didn’t want them to, didn’t understand what the point was. And it was dangerous. But the girls didn’t think so. They were part of a new generation.”
“And then the police—”
“Not police. Soviet troops. Gorbachev was rapidly losing control of the situation across the USSR—almost every day a different Soviet republic was declaring independence, scheduling a referendum. Most of the countries managed to secede peacefully, but for some reason in Tbilisi…”
“There was violence.”
“The Soviet soldiers started attacking protesters with—I don’t know what the word is in English, with farming tools, heavy ones. Like steel triangles on sticks. We call them lopata . They used them to smash protesters in the head. Twenty people died. Seventeen of them were women.”
“And one of them was Irine’s sister?”
Andrei said something to Marmar, who responded in Russian, mimed being hit in the skull.
“A soldier hit her in the head many times and then, I don’t know exactly what—” Marmar said something else. “She says she was very sick for two years. She could barely walk. She couldn’t think clearly anymore. Often couldn’t speak, lost her ability to remember words.”
“Jesus.”
“She lived like this for two years, and then she threw herself out of the window of their apartment in 1991, about a month before the independence referendum. That was when Irine’s family moved here. They couldn’t stay in that apartment anymore after what happened to her sister.”
Irine had told her a different story. Well, that was her right, to prune the truth.
Marmar said something else.
“Da, da,” said Andrei. “She was eighteen years old.”
“God—what a horrible thing that must have been. I’m so sorry.”
“Yes, well,” Andrei said. “Everyone has their tragedy from that time. This is Irine’s. My family has their own, of course. Even Gorbechev has one, I’m afraid.”
“What was her sister’s name?”
“Irine’s?” He turned to Marmar. “Kak yeye zvali?”
“Maia,” Marmar said. “Like Irine’s daughter.”
Jesus.
“There’s often a certain poetry in these things, isn’t there?” Andrei said. The sky was darkening faster now, and a few of the dogs were pawing at the door, ready to end their idyll and head in for dinner. “Anyway, you can see why Irine is so upset.”
“Maia said that Irine wants the Russians to take over.”
“I don’t know what you mean by take over.”
“I mean—Maia said Irine was supporting the Russian agenda here. And then I talked to someone at Irine’s school today and she said that Irine had fired a teacher who stood up against some kind of Russian program at the school.
” She felt it was important to understand this. To figure out who was right and wrong.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Andrei said.
“Does Marmar?”
Andrei turned to the old lady, whose eyes seemed wet. She had known the young Maia, of course, and Irine, before and after.
“She says that the teacher who was fired was dangerous. She posed a danger to the whole family.”
“To the family?”
Andrei said something else to Marmar, but Marmar said nothing, just made a disgusted face. “I don’t really know what she means. Does Irine support the Russians here?”
Andrei gave her a look. “Kak Irina otnositsya k russkim?”
Marmar buttoned her parka up her neck. It was perceptibly colder now. She looked at Amy with pale gray eyes. “We raise our children,” she said. “We pray to God. In this way we are happy. Like you.”
“Of course,” Amy said, not sure if she understood.
She stood, wiped her hands on her velour pants. “I must feed dogs now,” she said. “You will help Irine and Maia, Amy.”
“Me?”
“You negotiate.”