Greetings from Georgia -- Part 2 (email from September 2006)

So in the end Kutaisi is as charming as remembered: A sooty, gritty old city in the center of Georgia where the dramatic landscape of mountains and vineyards pauses for a moment to become uninspiringly flat and barren. A parallel situation would be coming from Georgia to monitor elections in New York, looking forward to the beauty of the Catskills or Niagara Falls, at least a charming farming town, but instead getting assigned to Albany and its surrounding suburbs. And the contrast between Tbilisi and Kutaisi is just as pronounced as between New York City and Albany. In one, there is life and friends, bars and restaurants, parties and concerts. In the other, there is—well let me attempt to be more positive—there is a sprawling park in the center (unfortunately under construction and only relaxing if you like the sound of jackhammers), a cafeteria that serves five different kinds of khatchapuri (in addition to an inedible Georgian version of "pizza,") a bar that stays open until the ungodly hour of 11pm (at which point all nightlife ends in Kutaisi), an outdoor market (that seems to sell only watermelons and eggplants), and 5 new ATMs.  

Upon arrival I strongly objected to living with Sven and Eka in the house that they had rented during their last stay in Kutaisi. Cramming into a little car together, spending hours a day trekking out over bad roads to small towns and villages to interview local election officials and candidates sounded like quite enough exposure to their "very special relationship" to me. However, I reconsidered my hardline stance upon our arrival. The house belongs to the widow of one of Kutaisi's most notorious gangsters—"Djoni" ( i.e. the awkward Russian transliteration of "Johnny")—who was shot in front of the house in the early 90s ending his reign of crime and terror in Kutaisi but leaving his wife Lali and their 3 year old daughter with several properties throughout the area. Set in a tropical oasis of banana trees, palms and orange flowered bushes, the house rises up three stories, each level sporting a series of sizable stone balconies and ornately barred windows. All exterior doors are made of steel, but once you get past them the house is beautifully trimmed with rich mahogany including a tremendous spiral staircase up to the 5 bedrooms. Mine is the largest with french doors that open onto a king-sized bed dressed in red sheets and heavy green velvet drapes that block out all sunlight and give an even more gothic feel to the sturdy mahogany furniture. Sven and Eka live in a corridor of their own sharing a marble-fixtured bathroom that always has hot water while the other two bedrooms remain empty. Djoni's widow also cooks our meals every night and has hired a maid to clean the house and wash our clothes. As my friend Svirga, a Lithuanian girl from the other election monitoring team based in Kutaisi, observed, "Oh wow, you are literally living in gangster's paradise."

To be fair, once we get far enough out past Kutaisi proper to the little satellite towns of the Imereti region with great names like Kharagauli, Zestaponi and Tkibuli, the scenery does become more interesting. I'm already collecting stories of crooked town officials and incompetence-inspired mayhem to share eventually.

The other night Svirga (a sweet svelte blond girl, not to be confused with my Swedish partner Sven) and I hit a new Kutaisi low before we managed to escape for a weekend in the mountains. It was Friday night and we were desperate to do something—anything—so going out with our drivers and Eka to a restaurant "downtown" suddenly sounded like a brilliant idea. I don't know what I'd pictured in a Kutaisi restaurant, but it certainly wasn't a basement full of men in tight clothing dancing what resembled the tango in each others arms. In most other cities around the world, you would walk into this scene of men in lycra twirling each other around and just assume you'd entered a gay bar. But not in Georgia, where gay men are severely beaten so that heterosexual men can preserve their god-given right to kiss each other in moments of high emotion, hold hands walking down the street and wear tight sleeveless tops while dancing cheek to cheek without ever having to worry about being called "gay."

"But where are the women?" Svirga and I asked spotting only one waitress in this crowd of about thirty men ages 18 to 45 out eating, drinking and dancing on their own. "At home with the kids" naturally, our drivers Ramaz and Shota explained. They puffed their chests with pride as all heads turned to watch them parade their foreign girls over to a table with a prime view of the dance floor. As the drivers began ordering platefuls of food and litres of wine for the table, Eka tried to give more context to the single-sex atmosphere. "All men here have been married since they were stupid seventeen year olds and kidnapped their wives," She rolled her eyes. "Now they are simply bored at home and go out for drinking together in the evenings."

"Kidnapped?" I asked assuming she'd just picked the wrong word. But no, Eka explained that most girls like her from the villages of Georgia are kidnapped when they reach puberty. Apparently, the tradition born of wild Cossacks riding off on horseback with stolen brides under their arms has been charmingly updated throughout the years to now involve bands of pimpled teenagers driving up in beat-up Ladas to whisk young girls off to cheap motels or a relative's house for the weekend. Three days later the girl is brought back to her village and forced to marry one of her kidnappers. The girl doesn't have much of a choice in the matter at this point since her parents won't take her back into their house after a kidnapping. It's assumed that she is no longer a virgin, even if she wasn't actually raped during the ordeal, and as upstanding parents you just wouldn't want to take that chance of having a daughter who wasn't a virgin in the house. I mean, what would the neighbors think?

Eka went on to explain that it's really not all that bad. Most of her friends are married to guys who kidnapped them when they were around fifteen and only one was against her will. Most of them kind of liked the boys who kidnapped them. They'd seen them around the village and exchanged interested glances, which is apparently code for 'I won't put up a fight when you and your friends come by to kidnap me.' Then when the car pulls up it's kind of like the boy asking the girl out on a first date and proposing marriage all in one shot. She can either run away screaming or if she likes him put up a mock protest before getting into the car. "In America, when you're fifteen and a boy likes you, the two of you go out to movies and eat popcorn, sometimes you get pizza. Your mom drives you," I explained for contrast, remembering again why I actually do like the States—no civil war and no pre-modern traditions that actively promote teenage pregnancy. A lot of the times, the girls are just curious, Eka offered, they get in the car because it seems fun, they're bored and they want to see what will happen. And I pictured myself so vividly at 15 peering through the front door of my parents' house at a car full of boys across the street, knowing that the one I have a crush on is in the backseat. The chances that I would have had the presence of mind not to go leaping into the car with exuberantly flushed cheeks and abandon are absolutely nil. Again, I thanked my lucky stars that my parents' house is located in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania rather than Kharagauli, Georgia. Though you do have to admit an elegant efficiency to the system. I mean why waste so many years going through the ups and downs of dating when you can just get everything from the first date through the honeymoon over in the space of a long weekend with a well-orchestrated kidnapping?

As we learned about one anachronistic Georgian mating ritual from Eka, we unwittingly became a party to another. Two of the men crowding the dance floor broke off from the pack and approached our table. "Oh shit, they're going to ask us to dance," I groaned. "Don't worry," Eka smirked, "They're not allowed to talk to us unless Shota and Ramaz say they can." And as predicted, the men came up to the table—one smaller with a Michael Jackson era jacket unbuttoned to his navel to reveal the entirety of his hairy pale abdomen and the other in a tight black tee shirt rising up awkwardly above a rolling khatchapuri-filled stomach. But rather than slobbering the drunken hellos and pick-up lines you'd expect to get from these guys in a western bar, they bypassed Svirga and I entirely and began heatedly talking with Shota and Ramaz. "How much for your women?" I translated in jest. Svirga was clearly not amused and expressed strong desire to get on the next plane back to Vilnius. The whole exchange was right out of a cave-man era sociology textbook: Males from one group leer at females from another. Males create frontline to defend females who are considered possessions rather than sentient beings. Outsider males approach and gesture at females. Insider males push at their chests forcing them back five feet from females to prevent accidental contact. Both sides put on displays of virility that include yelling, yawping, shoving and grunting. Both sides accept outcome that females will remain with original males. There is then wine-pouring and toasting to the health and fertility of the females as the outsider males clink glasses with the whole group in a conciliatory gesture before reluctantly retreating in defeat, taking the wine from our table with them as a consolation prize. Within ten minutes a new posse of men approached to move through the same set of theatrical yawps and gestures. And I have to admit that the immunity afforded us by Shota and Ramaz holding down the frontlines really was fun. Just a glance from Svirga or I was enough to inspire confidence in any guy out on the dance floor and send him panting up to our table certain that he would be the first to make it through the male gauntlet to the sweet feminine prize. Meanwhile, we could snicker from the safety of our defended position knowing we would never have to deal with the consequences of our wandering gaze. This of course got old very quickly though and we wrapped up the evening before Shota and Ramaz were too drunk to drive us home.

I don't know that I wound up extracting any pithy lessons from the night except that maybe in weighing the pros and cons of each system, equality for women is a pretty good deal. You may have to spend some more time and effort fending off sleazy men in bars and of course dating a lot of duds until you finally find a guy who inspires you, but in the end it's worth not being forced to live with the decisions you make as a doe-eyed 15 year old for the rest of your life. Oh and you get to have a mind and a career and all that too.

On that note I will leave you with more to come soon!

Greetings from Georgia -- Part 1 (email from September 2006)

I'm back in Georgia so this is a weird email.. ignore anything that creeps you out and feel free to request self-consciously edited daytime email updates in the future!!

Well, I've made it to Georgia! For those of you who I didn't have the chance to update before leaving New York on only a few days notice, I'm here on a long-term OSCE election monitoring mission. I flew from New York to Munich on Monday where my 11 hour layover gave me the chance to eat sausages and drink weiss beer with Phil and Ian before eventually landing in Tbilisi at 3am on Wednesday. The airport was as grim as ever with a pile of newspapers jamming up the baggage carousel, an event which attracted five guys in florescent vests and a woman with a broom who all pointed and yelled at each other as they took turns ripping but not managing to pull out the pages one by one. After extricating my bags from the heap that developed beside the jammed carousel, I elected to pass under the "is not submitted to the declaration" sign rather than the "is submitted to the declaration" sign encouraged that Georgians have managed to retain such charming translations with all these international aid workers now running around Tbilisi "developing" things.

An OSCE driver who introduced himself as Mamuka picked me up and sped off down a surprisingly well-paved version of the road to the city center explaining that they finished re-paving the one side just before George Bush's plane landed for his state visit to Georgia last year and finished the other side just in time for him to leave Tbilisi for the airport. Tbilisi when we reached it was unbelievably well-lit with fountains I'd only seen rusted and inert in 1999 spouting great plumes of water into the night sky. The hotel Iveria which was once brightly colored with the laundry of refugees from the Abkhaz War hanging along its balconies stood empty and ready to be wrecked and rebuilt by some hotel developer who had paid a high enough price for it that the government was able to bribe all the refugees into leaving with $7,000 per family. All along Rustaveli street—the main drag through town where walking alone at night used to mean dark cars pulling up alongside me trying to coax me in until I screamed "idi na huiy" at them not knowing what it meant, only that it would make them go away—there were people and shops and functional streetlights. Mamuka explained that the police who had once been the scariest part of Tbilisi as they were drunks, wielding guns and demanding money without fear of reprisal had been vetted over the years and were actually a trustworthy lot these days. I crashed at the Hotel Edelweiss as assigned to me by the OSCE and slept soundly through the smoke and loud Russian gossiping of the hotel manager with her friends right outside my door.

That afternoon I wandered around the city jetlagged before my interview with the Eurasia Foundation but could not find anything I knew. It all seemed different. I knew that Dato's bar had been knocked down and that they were building some monstrosity of a modern apartment complex in its place but I couldn't even figure out which street it had been on. So I was looking for that street and the street I'd lived on after I’d moved out of the backroom of the bar and just couldn't manage to orient myself. Finally, I took a wrong turn and it smacked me in the face. I'd been looking in the totally wrong neighborhood. But once I found the hole where the bar had been, where I had spent nights sitting around a table talking to Dato with Brooke as a translator, learning to cook in the kitchen, throwing parties on the green-cushioned sofas in the back room, it was like all of my navigational skills returned to me. I found the apartment I'd moved to after leaving the bar and I knew all of the spots along the way like the apartment of that terrible guy Miho who was always starting fights on some aggression-inducing drug and Dato's niece Maka's school where we'd pick her up in the afternoons. At some point I looked to my right and saw a perfect Siamese cat digging through a dumpster. I went over and there he was totally beautiful but skinny and bedraggled and digging through the trash. I had half of one of those long potato piroski that they sell on the street in my bag so I fed it to him and he was talking to me in that distinctly Siamese voice just like my own Georgian Siamese cat Joe's. And that struck me as so Georgia-- that the street cats should be purebred Siamese and that the purebred Siamese cats should be street ridden.

The interview with Hans at Eurasia went phenomenally well.. He was absolutely as brilliant as everyone had billed him and our conversation ranged from the low merits of post-1945 British literature to the creation of a self-conscious culture through the development of its social sciences. And yet my gut wasn't screaming. My head was saying "yes, yes! Please I want to work with this incredibly sharp and inspiring person and travel around to Baku and Yerevan until I speak perfect Russian" and my heart was saying "Oh, I want to stay in Tbilisi and have a new apartment and bring Joe back to his motherland" But they weren't lining up in that way that gives me the gut intuitive feeling of "right" that I've come to depend on to guide my decisions. Instead my gut was still screaming "Kosovo" at me. Like "enjoy this now, this is your gift but then you have to give it up and go work in Kosovo whether it makes sense when you calculate it out or not."

The next day was the OSCE briefing where I got my field assignment and partner which were pretty much a double doozy. I'd been saying since even the idea of the mission came up that the only bum deployment across all the diverse ecosystems of gorgeous, lush Georgia was flat, miserable, industrial Kutaisi dead in the center with no caves, vineyards, beaches or minority populations to make it an interesting month. I should have known that I'd used up all of my election monitoring karma getting assigned to a seaside resort town on the Greek border with Graeme at the Albanian elections last year. But instead, that morning at breakfast when I met an older Swedish guy who said that he'd precociously paid a visit to the OSCE office and was thrilled to have found out that he'd been assigned to Kutaisi, I just pitied the poor sap who would be stuck as his partner. Particularly, as he went on to talk for a full twenty minutes about his "very special" pre-existing relationship with his interpreter Eka who had been with him on three prior missions and then come to visit him for 3-months of a summer in Sweden and then again for New Years of this year. Yes, there was a wedding ring on his finger, but as he told me about how he'd been partnered with a Turkish woman in 2003 who "just hadn't understood his relationship with Eka" and how he hoped that that wouldn't happen again, but regretted that it was likely to because he and Eka were so close that anyone else who joined the team was bound to feel excluded, I didn't even calculate the odds that I would actually wind up in the place of that poor Turkish woman on my way to the grimmest city in Georgia with Eka’s 22 year old hip bones jutting sharply out the top of her impossibly low-slung jeans and Sven puppy dogging after her like a sad old hound.

The disappointment was soon mitigated by an email reply from one of Daria's friends to a request for Lado or Bako Burduli's phone number. Lado, the elder Burduli brother, known throughout Tbilisi as the grandfather of alternative Georgian rock, and Bako, his younger brother the famous Georgian pop star, had been close friends of ours in 1999 but I was slightly concerned that they wouldn't remember me as I called Lado on his mobile in 2006. And yet after seven years of no contact, I did not even have a chance to run through the first line of the premeditated explanation of who I was. "Leslie—oh my god—how are you? What are you doing tonight? I will make party for you!" I had to go to some OSCE dinner but called him as it was winding down and he invited me over to his place for drinks with him and Bako. I said I'd take a cab and 30 seconds later got a call back saying "don't take a cab because Bako is already in the car coming to get you and anyone else you want to bring with you." Bako comes and just like old times squeezes five people into the backseat of his little red car. He is utterly the same Bako! He's put on some weight in his face but is now on a diet to lose it. He's not drinking, not smoking because he's recording a new album. He's starting his swimming regimen tomorrow. All lines I've heard before. And it's incredible to see him. We get to Lado's neighborhood and it too is utterly the same! Everything is so vividly familiar as if time has collapsed on itself and I left Georgia yesterday rather than seven very full years ago. Bako is insisting on buying me juice when I say I don't want more wine. He's beaming. I'm beaming. We climb up the rickety stairs that open onto Lado's apartment where I suddenly see a million memories all at once. Sitting on the floor with Dato learning Georgian words, standing in the hallway with Brooke discussing the punk song repeating itself on the stereo, hanging out with Japanese tourists that Lado has brought home with him from Rustaveli avenue. It's all there. And then there's Lado who is still utterly Lado but even better! His crazy hair is silver and tamed into a curly bob. He's fit and full of confidence. He tells jokes that just aren't funny. He makes twenty phone calls to drum up a party for me. And rather than using the space of his big rooms, he insists that we all pack tightly into his kitchen to drink vodka and wine and cognac. He toasts to me. We talk about the American girl from Missouri who he dated for 3 years and about how he now understands the American people. He shows me a picture of his daughter who is now 19 years old, stunningly pretty and studying in London. I tell them that Rita is now a priest and that Brooke is now a professor and married. Bako's response is "wow, this is very strange for me, you know, because Rita was my girlfriend." I tell them that I might look for a job in Tbilisi and they are overjoyed. Bako says, "but you have a very strange profession.. if you wanted to be fashion designer or painter, we have many friends who could help you find a job but in politics we have no one" We discuss my imminent departure to Kutaisi and how it is indeed the worst part of Georgia. Lado assuaged me by promising to SMS me his Kutaisi artist-friends mobile numbers though he vehemently objects when I suggest that he come to visit me there.

Lado's friends show up and are fantastic: Shalva who was in his band in the 80s and is now a photographer in Paris.. Shalva's cousin who doesn't speak English and says nothing with an eyebrow raised for the entire night.. and the girl that Shalva is courting with grand proclamations of love and admiration for her beauty who is wearing heavy turquoise eyemakeup. It's all so perfect. And Shalva takes an immediate liking to me and starts toasting to me. My OSCE compatriots are slightly confused but impressed with the whole scene. They get tired though and Bako leaves the party to benevolently drive them all home to their separate hotels without being asked. I've at this point heard something from Bako, Lado and Shalva each in separate conversations about the need for soul and feeling and love and how life in Georgia is about putting all of these things first. Lado works himself up into such a state that he has to play guitar and sing deep-throated Georgian lyrics to release some of his excess emotion. Bako goes home soon after returning so that he can proceed with his healthy recording-conducive lifestyle early the next morning. We take pictures of each other with my digital camera to commemorate the moment (to be forwarded when I can hook my camera up to the computer).

Lado is maybe coming onto me and I am completely betrayed by myself and start finding him very attractive. Something about the pale skin and silver hair is making him glow like an angel. And he keeps bringing up all of these old memories that I'd long forgotten in the recesses of my brain and telling them from his perspective. Like the story of meeting me, Rita and Brooke on the road up to Tskeneti, how he thought there was no way that we would come to the fashion show he invited us to and how amazed he was when we then appeared in his garden moments later and how he now has pictures of that night posted on his website. And like the time when Girpich made and served up a potent batch of managua at his apartment and how he worried about the "little blond Leslie" turning green and if he would have to take her to the hospital and how he thought my two American friends returning the next day were going to berate him for inducing hallucinations but were really just coming to ask how they could get some more. At this point I think I'm in love with him and he's in love with me not because we are actually in love but because we are flattering mirrors of ourselves seven years ago.   We are reminders of all things constant in ourselves—the good things we love and attempt to cultivate in our best moments. And we can palpably feel the eternal bandwidth of love that keeps friends connected and close over time and space. I do consider staying as he offers up any bed in the house that I prefer but have enough presence of mind to go home in Shalva's cousin's SUV. Halfway home to the hotel my phone beeps with the following text from Lado: "Ok…of course I will visit u but u should tell me date when u and me have free date! Thanx u 4 such nice night." Smirking from the front seat and totally content, I reply: "It was great to see you 7 years and no time later! I will let you know when to visit.. Til then send me Kutaisi numbers so I will not be lonely!" I get dropped off at my door and say illustrious goodbyes to Shalva, his cousin and the girl who it turns out took painting lessons from Dato's father and is close friends with Dato's sister. As I crash drunkenly onto my hotel bed, I get a text back from Lado: "Leslie darling in Georgia u will never be alone. 2 night u bring 4 me so much nice memories even I cant tell u what I love u. rock n roll" I reply "Bravo, Kutaisi tomorrow and rock n roll forever…" and fall into a sound happy sleep.

And yet my response to this flood of feeling for both Lado and Bako.. of returning to a place where I am totally appreciated and loved.. was that I did NOT want to take the job in Georgia and make this my life. It was too much like standing still. Too much about the past rather than the present or future. It would grow old and stagnant quickly. I would tire of weird parties at Lado's and would only appreciate them once I'd left again and viewed them with nostalgia. You love that guy but you don't date him. You love that place but you don't move there. You visit. You feel it all rush over and crash around you. But you don't get stuck in commitments and mired in what is ultimately not yours. It's part of the journey.. a milestone.. a turning point.. an impetus.. then a touchstone. It creates parameters and shows you the heights you need to attain.. the principles you need to live by.. the level of emotion that you need to achieve to sustain yourself. But staying there will only kill what the "there" has just inspired and produced in you. It is the Calypso rather than the Penelope.. a part of the journey rather than the homecoming. So I'm ecstatic to partake of it while I am here but I am also looking forward to releasing it fully back into the ether when it is time to go…

I will be sure to keep you all posted as it all unfolds!

with love from Kutaisi,

leslie