another man’s shoes

The black, polished, shiny shoes on my feet aren’t mine. The light of the clear October morning hurts my eyes. In my mouth, the aftertaste of a fragrant fig brandy. Usually, this fragrance gets my blood pumping; now it makes me nauseous. I must open the door to the balcony. Someone else’s kitchen; beyond the window, someone else’s yard, with a sycamore tree with yellowing leaves. The whine of a Caucasian wind. The blaring of car horns and the whirr of power drills (the most common sound in this part of Tbilisi). The ochre strata of Mount Mtatsminda; a TV transmitter defined keenly against the blue sky. My back is aching (I slept in a sitting position, in an armchair). This is not helped by the strange stiffness of my every step in the other man’s shiny black shoes. The other man is Zurab, I’m pretty sure. Zurab Gedevanishvili, the man I got drunk with yesterday. But my sore head can’t figure out what his shoes are doing on my feet… I go to the fridge for something to drink – mineral water or lemonade. Nothing doing. The wind shakes the balcony and the iron door in the hallway. (I brace the balcony door with a chair, to keep it from closing.) I pour some water from the tap and drink. (I don’t usually drink unboiled water in Tbilisi, but today I’m too thirsty to mind.) Homemade fig brandy on the table, poured into glasses and left. Magnets on the fridge, of places Zurab has seen: New York, London, Baku, Jerusalem, Prague, Český Krumlov. On a noticeboard by the fridge, photos of Zurab’s family. His parents (I slept at their place once, in a stone village between peaks of the Greater Caucasus). His wife’s parents. And photos of Zurab’s only child – his son Tamaz, who was murdered on a Black Sea beach, in Batumi, a few weeks ago.

It comes back to me that yesterday we were drinking in a bar near the Iveria hotel. So my mind isn’t a complete blank. (In Brno, I’d drink myself to oblivion every day – in time, two glasses of wine were enough. Even when I didn’t get drunk, I’d remember nothing the next day.) Although it was cold, we were outside, sat on tea chests, drinking beer; under a bridge by the entrance to a strip bar, where dark guys in leather jackets hung out, shelling sunflower seeds. (Here, every second person is a dark guy in a leather jacket, including Zurab.) At the next table, a girl in shorts and red stockings. Zurab stared at her for a while, then he turned away and muttered: “She’s the same age as my son. My son never brought a girlfriend home. We don’t even know if he had one. My wife was forever on at him to get himself a girl, so he’d have kids soon. She was looking forward to having grandkids. I had you when I was nineteen. You’ll be nineteen three years from now. So in three years I could have a grandkid, my wife kept telling him.” (Zurab is a year older than me. It always surprises me when I remember he’s not yet forty.) “This is crap beer,” he said, before getting heavily to his feet and going to the pub, returning with a bottle of wine and a bottle of cognac. He pours. The cars honk and roar; it’s like sitting on a traffic island. (In downtown Tbilisi, you always feel like you’re on a traffic island.) Not far from us, a fountain; statues of three women (Georgians in folk costume, with long braids, their arms outstretched in a characteristic Caucasian dance pose). Ropes adorned with colourful Tibetan flags lead from the statuary to every corner of the park. The waterless basin is filled with discarded plastic cups and crisp packets, like a great litter bin. Zurab gets up. He proposes a toast; the words come too quickly (the word God is drowned out by a blaring bus horn; I have to read it from his lips). The toast is made in Georgian; today he has spoken mostly Georgian to me, although usually he insists on English (or Russian when we’re with his wife, who knows no English). He keeps pouring; we’re drinking on empty stomachs, not really the done thing in Georgia. When the wine is gone, Zurab opens the cognac. The toasts come thick and fast: to foreigners – meaning me – ending with the Czech na zdraví (perhaps the only Czech words he knows, although we got to know each other years ago because he wanted me to teach him Czech). Soon the cognac bottle is empty too. Zurab wanders back to the pub. He has a conversation with a long-haired lad by the entrance. “A friend of my son’s,” he explains when he gets back (with a small bottle of Ukrainian vodka in each hand). “There’s a concert at the Old Hippodrome,” he says. “Starting at eleven. Electronic music from England or America or somewhere. What’s the time?” The activated mobile bathes his face in a cold light. (I look about the park and see face after face illuminated by a mobile phone; bowed heads without bodies; faces lit blue, with wide-open eyes.) “Quarter past. It’s started already.” (The cold light accentuates the stubble on his cheeks and the rings of sleeplessness around his eyes.) “Shall we go?” If you like, I answer. By now I’m speaking Georgian to Zurab. (At first, I was answering in English, but I seem to have given that up.)

We flag down the first taxi we see. We drive through the night to the Saburtalo district, to the park with the Old Hippodrome in it. It’s loud. Zurab pays off the taxi and we go inside. Flashing lights and boom boom boom; wild dancing on stage, wild dancing in the pit (with lit mobile phones swaying above heads). Stale air and aggressive multi-coloured spotlights hung from steel structures by the ceiling. Stroboscoped white light. The undulating crowd gradually pushes us to the wall, where there’s more space. Zurab opens a bottle of vodka, drinks, stares open-mouthed. (A girl with heavy make-up and a striped top dances unconsciously around him before being absorbed by the pulsating crowd.) “This is the kind of junkie event my son went to Batumi for,” Zurab yells in my ear. “Just this kind. He begged and begged me to let him go. I’d never let Tamaz go to anything like it before. And some bastard stabs him. Some bastard they still can’t find.” The crowd spits out a boy with a bun hairdo; he twists his way through to us and asks for a cigarette. Zurab reaches into his breast pocket, flicks open the pack, hands over his lighter. The boy wriggles away, to a spot where he can dance. His body waves to a hypnotic rhythm, the knees bent, the cigarette describing the infinity symbol, the tongue half out of his mouth. Zurab stares hard at him, mumbling over and over: “Bastard junkies. Some junkie’s knife stabbed my only begotten son.” Even in the frenzy of light, I see that Zurab’s eyes are fogging. It’s as though his body has suddenly donned the armour of Georgia’s highlander knights, his head the metal helmet of his forebears. The peaks of the Greater Caucasus are about to rise before us, on the tide of a blood feud steeped in the ages from Zurab’s village of stone towers. Zurab has caught a scent. The scent of the murderous knife. Of the unavenged blood of his son… I step into his path. He pushes past me as if I’m not there and throws himself at the boy with the bun. Luckily, several guys jump in and pull Zurab off the terrified hipster… Let’s get out of here. We’re leaving, I assure everyone. I pull Zurab to the exit. I smell sweat and the scent of his leather jacket. I pull him outside. We fill our lungs with fresh air. We sit down on a bench. Zurab opens another bottle of vodka (spilling a little; maybe he’s too drunk to pour, maybe it’s a libation to the dead). He keeps going on about how they murdered his only begotten son on the beach at Batumi (he says mkholodshobili dze, the words of the liturgy that refer to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ)… And against my will I see the familiar shingle beach at Batumi. (I have slept on it at night, drunk, many times; it has never crossed my mind that someone might kill me there.) The murmur of the Black Sea, the lights of the prefab blocks, the cone of light across the sea from the old Ottoman lighthouse; the over-illuminated Ferris wheel in motion, fountains spurting, fishermen tossing lines loaded with stones; and Zurab’s son Tamaz lying there, abandoned and groaning, crawling on stones that become ever harder, that dig into his knees, elbows, chin, cheeks, forehead; his tongue tastes salty stone; his hand grips a white pebble with his name on it, a heavenly name both ancient and new, a name unknown to us. The waves quieten; the sea is now as smooth and still as a mirror. The heart of Zurab’s only begotten son has stopped beating. At dawn, gulls appear over Tamaz’s body. The day’s first Russian tourists and the early-bird swimmers think the recumbent figure on the palm-lined beach is resting after a long night. At last an old woman selling roasted corn on the cob (she is out this early because of her slowness – she struggles to compete with younger vendors) sees a trail of blood, approaches the body and shakes it, in vain. She doesn’t scream, as she would in a TV thriller: in the Nineties, when she lived in Sukhumi during the War in Abkhazia, she saw many dead (shot, kicked, stabbed, drowned). She trudges to the police station on the promenade…

It’s a mystery to me how we got back downtown, below Mount Mtatsminda. But I clearly remember a short-of-breath Zurab opening the door to the dark hallway of their building, and the absurdly wide staircase leading to endless darkness striking me as cold and insurmountable, though I had been there many times. (When Zurab switched on the torch on his mobile phone, the beam came to rest on the mosaic inscription ‘SALVE’.) Our footsteps echoing in the vast, cold hallway. On the walls, graffiti and scribbling (two open hands with lidless eyes looking out from them). Us clawing our way to the top of the marble staircase. Then to a side landing of the labyrinth and up a winding metal staircase to Zurab’s home… The empty apartment looked as it always had. Zurab lit the stove; then he lit a cigarette from the flame. He opened the fridge and took out a plastic bottle, from which he poured homemade fig brandy into glasses. We drank in silence; I was feeling sick, so I opened the door to the balcony and gulped in air. “What’s up? Is it your heart?” From somewhere he produced another small bottle: valerian drops (I was surprised such a thing still exists, I know it only from old books). I told him I could use another walk. “No problem…” We went out by a different door, to the yard. (Zurab took a two-litre bottle of spirits with him.) Voices in the yard. Boys drinking beer under the sycamore; the crunch of sunflower seeds in the mouth. They say hi to Zurab. Friendly words are exchanged. I walk along the wall, looking up at the stars. I sip the fig brandy, although I’ve had enough, although I tell myself every sip is the last (a burning sensation on the tongue follows each unconscious swig)… Echoes of the hard impact of a football and a clutter of fast steps. Zurab is running about the yard with the half-drunken boys (I assume they are friends of his son). “Come and join us,” he calls to me. No thanks. No way… Zurab staggers up to me, bathed in sweat and short of breath. “Shoes,” he says, with typical Georgian gruffness and imperiousness (such a contrast to the effusiveness and keenness to oblige that are also typically Georgian). What about shoes? I say, similarly rudely. “Your shoes.” What about my shoes? “Give me your shoes. I can’t play football in mine.” And he slips off his shiny black-leather pointed shoes. I slip out of my trainers. Zurab and I have the same shoe size. (I’m not short in Georgia. When I take the metro, I don’t find myself looking at shoulder blades, napes and chins.) We sit on the ground; both of us have one holey sock from which a big toe with an overgrown nail pokes out (for a moment, looking at Zurab is like looking in the mirror). Having put on my shoes, Zurab runs off into the dark, after the ball. “These shoes are great, brother, really great,” he calls back, in a higher, more youthful voice. Maybe the game is rejuvenating him. Maybe – and I can’t shake this feeling – maybe he is imitating the voice and movements of his dead son…

At this point my memory gives out. The fog will clear no further… I wander about the empty apartment. Zurab isn’t in the bedroom; nor is he in the bathroom or the toilet; he’s not in any of the rooms. (I was starting to worry I’d find him curled up like an embryo, in his dead son’s bed.) In the living room, thin candles in small copper holders; icons, photos of the son from early childhood almost to the present day. It occurs to me that Zurab told me yesterday that his wife hadn’t slept for days, all she had done was light candles by photos of Tamaz; and that she and her mother had left for the village straight after the funeral and he hadn’t seen her since. He told me he had seen reproach in her eyes whenever she looked at him, as though the responsibility for their child’s death lay with him. Yet she hadn’t said one unkind word to him. “But a man can feel it,” he muttered drunkenly. “A man can feel it. We couldn’t have any more children after Tamaz. It was a difficult birth. It was a miracle Tamaz was born healthy.”

I open the door to the hallway. I go down the metal staircase (my winding progress brings back my nauseousness). I walk on marble in the hard leather shoes of another man, their soles so thin they could be made of two sheets of newspaper. The wide, empty staircase descends to unimaginable depths. (Surely staircases like this should lead only from gardens to palaces and cathedrals, not through landings of residential buildings in city centres?) A loud bang tells me the draught has shut the door of Zurab’s apartment. The echo in the hallway crashes against the stairs. The thumping in my head – the temples are the worst – won’t let up; indeed, in all this emptiness it is getting louder.

breathing in

It was night. He sat on the bonnet of the taxi, smoking. I stood facing a wind that blew off the steppe and across the Tbilisi sea. Although I took one deep breath after another, I couldn’t dispel the heavy red wine, the cognac and the memories; release wouldn’t come. I returned to the car. The driver – a six-foot-five Assyrian well over 20 stone in weight – looked down at me. (It occurred to me that he could put me in his pocket.) I’m sorry. Do you mind if we stay here a little longer before we go to Varketili? I’ll pay more, of course. I go back down to the great artificial lake. The wind rushes through my clothes, to my muscles, into my bones. Still the feeling of suffocation and the yearning for a deeper breath… “We can stay here as long as you like,” he says, suddenly right behind me. “No problem. No problem at all. And you don’t have to pay more. Just let me show you something. After that, you can stand here an hour or two. All night, till morning, if you like. No problem…” I follow the Assyrian back up to the car. (He has told me his name is David, he has three daughters and, like me, he lives on Tbilisi’s Varketili estate.) He opens all four doors and shifts the driver’s and passenger’s seats as far forward as they will go, to maximize the space in the back. I feel sick. Automatically, I reach into my pocket and grasp the large key that opens the iron door of my ground-floor apartment; if need be, I will ram it into the driver’s face. (I regret that I’m not carrying the pepper spray a German friend gave me before I left for Georgia, as protection against wild dogs.) I’m ready to jump back. To run away. To take to the icy water. To do whatever I must to escape this monstrous longshanks, who I presume to be violent, maybe even in a sick way… But the Assyrian gruntingly shuffles onto the back seat and curls up. “This does me good, brother,” he sighs. “It does you good to breathe in the sea. Nothing helps me but this. I don’t know why. I’ve never told anyone about it. I’ve never shown it to anyone. And I don’t know why I’m showing you now.” (I know all too well: every fool – every person, in fact – confides in me within five minutes of meeting me. It’s like I’m a corpse who can no longer betray anyone’s secrets.) The giant curls up even tighter and carries on talking. Sometimes he drives out of town and lies like this all day, he says. He tells his wife he’s working. His family think he spends every earthly hour driving about Tbilisi and its environs, when actually he’s out on the steppe lying in the back of his car. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t listen to the radio, because that would drive him mad; if he switched on the radio, he would lose his mind and never find his way back to his wife and children. “So, brother, what do you say?” Very interesting, I reply breathily. Suddenly the choppy surface of the Tbilisi sea reflects a myriad of stars, and the howling of jackals reaches us from the steppe…

Translated by Andrew Oakland