Apples
Chaos, Alilo says, the 90’s were chaos.
When the Soviet Union fell, nothing in Georgia was guaranteed. There was no money, no fuel, no food. The invisible hand of the free market was nowhere to be found.
When there was nothing to eat Alilio’s family ate apples.
Miles outside Tbilisi they picked the sweet fruit from the village trees and filled their bags to bursting. When their little car ran out of gas outside of the city Alilo’s father lifted the sacks of fruit off of the seat and hoisted them up over his shoulders.
When he was a child, his given name, Alexandre, felt like a tongue twister. He couldn’t get his mouth around the syllables. Alilo, he said instead, which in Georgian means Christmas morning.
3 months early, towards the end of September, Christmas Morning scurried into Tbilisi on the heels of his father, the man with sacks of apples to feed his family.
A decade later, a teenage Alilo, dialed himself up onto the internet. He searched the p2p sites and the bit torrents, finding his own presents.
By chance he clicked on an American game named Stronghold.
He stayed for the credits, watching the castle gates open before him. The goal of the game was to conquer land, to build an empire.
Alilo gave it a try. The pixelated knights and squires bored him. He almost turned it off.
But then the game began. The empire, it turns out, began with one small piece of land—an orchard.
Ahh! Alilo said, fully engrossed. This I understand—to survive off of only apples.
The Writer’s House
Paolo Iashavili wrote poems, the last of which was a letter to his 13 year old daughter Medea:
My dearest child, my good little Mediko, my joy and my happiness! Medea! Forgive me, I beg you.
When she read the letter, on July 22nd 1937, her father was already dead.
The night before he pulled the trigger, he paced madly. He sweat and he shook. I haven’t slept all night. I would have watched you sleep but I had already made up my mind to kill myself.
For the last two decades he and his friends, the Blue Horns—named for the color of poetry and the traditional drinking vessel of the shepard—had wowed the world of Georgian literature.
But that was before Stalin consolidated his power in Moscow and Lavrentiy Beria mimicked him in Tbilisi.
All Georgians know the power of literature. Beria found time, between his abductions of pretty young girls, to check the pulse of the country, to know the thoughts of its writers.
When you grow up and consider my fate you will be convinced that it was better for me to die, you would have been unhappier if I had not killed myself today, Paolo told his little girl.
It worked like this. A writer wrote the wrong thing, the next day they were gone, and in the subsequent union meeting they were denounced, by all in attendance, for their reactionary work.
Slowly, the Blue Horns disappeared.
Paolo kept writing poems, up until his best friend, the man who had stood at his right shoulder, disappeared too. Titsian Tabidze vanished and Paolo was told to stand up in the next meeting and testify to the newly minted fact that Tabidze was a traitor.
Always tell the truth, Paolo wrote to his daughter.
The next morning he stood at the top of the wide stairs in the Union building holding a rifle.
I can’t write any more. He wrote to his daughter.
Downstairs the writers and artists were in the midst of a debate when they heard the gunshot. Paolo lay on the floor, dead.
Conversations with Nana Abuladze (I)
Each apartment block housed a profession, Nana tells me. Her concrete tower was built for the police. There was one for the fire fighters. One for the artists.
We lean over a white tablecloth. The windows of the restaurant are thrown open to the streets of old Tbilisi. We sit on the first floor, which means our feet sit just above the heads of the people who pass by us.
Graciously Nana asks me what I want to eat, but she knows the menu.
The food, when it comes, is rich—spinach and walnuts ground together and topped with sharp pomegranate seeds—pkhali.
I would never have found this place, I tell her, when we step out into the hallway. Above us golden flowers fade with the paint. I would have never known to step inside. In old Tbilisi the stairways of the buildings are extensions of the streets. They are public, anyone can enter. No one in America would walk into an unmarked doorway like that.
We pass a doorway, and she pulls me inside. This one has a particularly beautiful set of marble stairs, each step worn thin, and a curling iron railing.
I ask her again about her home, which was designed for the police but raised an artist.
So, what happened? I ask, how did it change?
There were no jobs. Besides, it was—she looks for the word in English—artificial. Can you imagine an entire neighborhood of only police?
John Steinbeck Comes to Tbilisi – 1947
It is well known in Tbilisi that when Steinbeck visited Russia, he had the most fun in Georgia. It was a kind of heaven. In the cold north they hoped to go not to heaven, but to Georgia when they die.
Steinbeck ate tables full of food—rich, sharp and sweet—and drained bottles of amber-colored wine. The people he met could out-eat us, out-drink us, out-dance us, out-sing us. When their bellies were full, they discussed the role of the writer in a just society.
In America a good writer is the watchdog, he said. It is easy for me to say fuck you to my president, he told the Georgian writers. The Georgian writers nodded their heads. Yes, they said. That is easy for us too. Steinbeck smiled. We can also say, “fuck you” to your president.
Giving Directions
On either side of the river lie the nation’s great poets. Though they lived centuries ago, their names are spoken daily: It’s only a few blocks away from Rustaveli, students say when they are getting ready to head out on a Thursday evening. Just drive up Tsereteli, the market women tell their grandkids. Take a left and you will see the stall. And the children come and fill themselves on churchkhela. The names of the poets allow the people to find each other. In this country they name their streets after their storytellers, so that their words, and their lives, are remembered.
Didgori
Before they open their mouths to sing, they are just a circle of men with their jaws clenched tight. They are restaurant owners, shop clerks and construction workers. One of them works here, at the center for Georgian folk arts, listening to Soviet era field recordings. They take off their jackets, brush off their worn blue jeans and sit.
For 20 years these dozen men have been meeting together to sing the songs of their ancestors. They are in their forties now, but they met first as scrawny teenagers, in the 90’s, when they filled the empty days with eight hours of song dug up from the bottom of their stomachs.
Now they are fathers, godfathers to each other’s children, the best men at each other’s weddings. Still, they come together to sing.
Between songs they scroll on their phones. They shake their heads and suck their teeth at the guys who show up late. They are a group of guys, meeting together after work.
And then they open their mouths and sound pours out, songs from across Georgia, Abkhazia, Megrelia, Kakheti. North, West, East. The room fills with their voices. It bounces off of the walls. They close their eyes. They listen as they sing, wrapping their voices around each other, filling up the places that the others leave open. They come from all sides—war songs, love songs, songs to praise the sun.
You cannot sing together if you do not love the man next to you, they say. And they sing, even after the practice is over, while their children play beneath the dinner table. The word the Georgians use to toast Gaumarjos! Which means victory. Gaumarjos, they say, to those who have come before. And to those who are still to come. To friendship too. And gaumarjos to we who are here, because every moment alive is a victory.
A Morning Swim
In the 90’s the swimming pools were empty of water. There was no chlorine. There was no electricity lighting up the fluorescent bulbs. Still, in certain swimming pools, on certain mornings, people dove into their daily exercise. They climbed down the ladders and stood on the rough bottom of the pools. Minding the lines between lanes, they completed their laps, stretching out their arms, holding their breath as they looked down, inhaling only when they turned their head horizontal, blinking their eyes to keep them clear. The pools were empty, but the swimmers kept practicing, cupping their hands against the air.
Conversations with Nana (II)
Comrade Stalin, whipped by the wind, passes out pamphlets. The workers are with him. They are deep in preparation for the upcoming strike.
Nana and I are visiting the Georgian National museum. The mural is in the stairwell, up above us.
She has been recounting the horrors of the 30’s, so instead of telling her that I like the mural I ask her what she thinks.
She shakes her head, no. It is overly romantic, sappy almost. Stalin at the center the figures stick out their rock-hard chins in the face of whatever may come. They stand in the gray of oppression and yet carry a glow of predestined victory.
She looks at me.
I kind of like it, I say, because I don’t want to lie. Her look tells me to explain.
I tell her about the music I grew up listening to in America—I put my hand on the Bible and I solemnly swear/to leave the mall with more shoes than I could possibly wear. I tell her about the portraits at the MFA, everyone posing like kings and queens—the constant romanticization of wealth and of opulence.
Most people are workers, I say.
True, she nods, but reality is never, she points at the painting, so easy.
Stalin’s Underground Printing House Museum
Bisek gets up from his splintered desk whenever he hears a knock. He knows why they are here. Tourists with backpacks don’t end up in this part of Tbilisi unless they are looking for him. They are shy, and knock quietly, but they know they are in the right place when they see the large metal door with the big red circle and small gold hammer and sickle.
Bisek is a tour guide. But he has the hands of a car mechanic, thick but nimble. He shuffles slowly between the rooms of the museum, like a night watchman, pulling out a key ring and unlocking each door.
Here there is no cost of admission. Bisek does not charge for information. Knowledge should not have a price tag.
He speaks only a little English—friends. He says, pointing down a narrow concrete well shaft, Stalin’s friends.
One hundred and twenty years ago, when the Tsar ruled over Georgia, a handful of young poets and activists lowered themselves almost 60 feet down into the earth. They climbed out of the well shaft and down a dark hallway, then up again into a stone-lined bunker. They carried with them a printing press.
In the center of the room, they pulled the pieces of metal—the gears, cogs and wheels, the levers and switches—out from their pockets.
Four, Bisek holds up his fingers and points with them at the rusting piece of machinery. It is not the original, but it is of the same era. Four at a time in the dim lamplight they fed the machine blank sheets of paper. On the other end they pulled out polemics, capable, they knew, of toppling the monarchy.
Back then it was just a farmhouse where Stalin and his friends slept some nights and a shed to cover the well. Nothing to rouse suspicion.
But the Czar’s soldiers had their informers. During the raid a suspicious soldier dropped a flaming piece of newspaper down the well and watched while it suddenly disappeared, sucked into the vacuum of the tunnel.
They burnt it all to the ground.
What is here today was built in 1937—by the Soviet state—a museum to celebrate Stalin and his friends and the power of the written word.
The displays are falling apart. The plastic window on the scale model of the passageways is scratched. The pictures of Stalin and his friends are tacked onto pieces of cardboard. The captions are handwritten in Russian and Georgian.
Bisek flips a switch and a giant map of Europe, held up on a creaking radiator, blinks alive. Built in lights show the important places that received pamphlets from this press. Batumi, Baku, Moscow, London.
A curling staircase leads downstairs. There were coat rooms down there once, and rotating exhibits with well-polished displays. Now the tiles are falling off the wall and there are chunks of floor missing.
The paper Bisek hands me boasts that leaders of 150 different countries have visited this museum. It is easy to imagine the tour buses unloading at the end of the street and the lines of people walking down the stairs.
When the tour ends, he sticks out his hand. We shake. Friends, he says again in English.
Ray Charles Comes to Tbilisi – 1996
Ray couldn’t see the bottles of Coca-Cola arranged conspicuously on the table, but the news cameras, broadcasting into every Georgian home, could.
It was 5 years after the fall of communism.
It’s the one thing that seems to hold people together, Ray said, about music when they asked him about music. Across from him the Georgian men in suits nodded their heads. They laughed about Georgia, and Georgia, and back in the other capital, Atlanta, at the headquarters of the world’s biggest purveyor of diabetic syrup the men in suits laughed too.
The bottles sat on the table unopened, the men themselves drank from glasses of water, but the red banner was firmly planted in the soil of another country.
At his concert that evening Ray played Georgia On My Mind and the suits in the front row clapped each other on the back.
The next day they took buses out to Mtskheta. No visit to Tbislisi would be complete without a trip to the heart of Georgian christendom. They drove Ray up to the top of a mountain, to one of the oldest Cathedrals, where pagans had worshiped before and where the church was making its comeback.
Down below the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers flowed into one another, and the city that was once the capital Kartli, the kingdom of the Georgians, glowed orange under the sun.
Ray! The president asked. What do you think of the view?
George W. Bush Comes to Tbilisi – 2005
The statues were toppled in what was, for decades, Lenin Square. The signs were pulled down.
But that doesn’t mean that the city was left nameless. The streets have names. Some of them even have faces.
The main stretch of highway from the Tbilisi Airport to the heart of the city is George W Bush St. One of the most ridiculed leaders in the history of his own country, Bush smiles out at the traffic turning onto the American style 4 lane highway. Bush came to Tbilisi in 2005.
It was Freedom Square now, and Bush stood at the podium in front of 200,000 Georgians. Into the microphone he repeated the word, freedom, a few dozen times.
The man who liked to say peace when he meant war and progress when he meant profit watched the children dance and listened to the choir sing.
They shot off fireworks for the American president.
In Baghdad, 1,000 miles to the south, the American soldiers shot off their own explosives in the name of George Bush, kicking in doors and brushing the barrels of their M-4’s over sleeping children. They carry cameras too and take pictures of all the young men they find.
These faces are entered into a database, saved and secured.
While president Bush’s smile is stamped on a cement wall in celebration of his highway.
A City of Stone, of Concrete and of Glass
There are three Tbilisi’s:
The first is made of stone and wood, of yellow churches and gray of houses, of spiraling roads that nestle back on top of themselves.
The next is made of concrete, of straight lines and thick walls, cramped stairs and creaking elevators that refuse retirement. You could plot this Tbilisi on a graph. It is vertical and horizontal.
The most recent is a city made of glass—Lexus dealerships and condo developments, the domed headquarters of a new order.
Above the city, jutting out from the mountain side, is a laboratory to study the effects of unchecked opulence. The billionaire who owns it—who owns the country—made his money in the chaos of the 90’s, trading western novelties for control over mining and gas corporations. He is surrounded by glass. Together with his reproduction Picassos (the real ones are in his vault in London) the leader of the Georgian Dream Party keeps a quiet eye on his subjects.
In 2012, when his party was running to run Georgia, he asked the Georgian people for their dreams. Send us your dreams! The dreams came flooding in, tens of thousands of slips of paper full of hope.
I need some new tires for my car.
My washing machine has broken.
The refrigerator is bare. Please, can it be filled with groceries?
Owen Thomas is a father, educator and writer who stands firmly for a free and liberated world.
