Skip to main content

‘Call Me George’

Image
By

You know you’ve failed to adjust to a place when you start viewing daily trifles as culturally anomalous.


Riding the bus from Freedom Square to the university on Chavchavadze Avenue: a trip of a few kilometers.  Easy enough.

But at each stop the denizens pile themselves in.  Stop after stop, a distressing number of people are insisting on getting on the No. 140.  At one point the doors cannot be shut.  The driver shouts testily, “There's another bus coming, eh!  Why don’t you wait for it?”

It doesn’t work.  More people get on.  Strap-hanging, I can no longer move.  Stuck between university students and a couple of older guys, I realize that I no longer have to hold on.  Jolts from the road or otherwise, I’m not going anywhere.

We arrive at my stop.  “Excuse me,” I say.

No one looks at me, no one moves.  I can see the light pouring in from the door.  Fresh air and personal space.  I gently nudge those unresponsive ones around me to show that I need to alight.

A second Excuse me, this time louder.  No response.  A third.  Nothing.  The doors are closing. . .

I start shoving.

“vai me!” say the ladies.  “Woe is me” or “Oh my”, and, in this instance, “How dare you push me, you insolent brute!”  vai me!

The men are no better.  “bich’o, ra iq’o!” one says as I step on his toes — Man, what are you doing? and/or Can’t you just wait till the next stop?  I’ve interrupted his mobile “thinking” session, his birzha in transit.

I’ve climbed over four people and I’m still not there.

More Woe is me’s.  More What are you doing, Man’s.  Visibly distressed, nearly frothing at the mouth, I’m looking every inch the part of the typical Westerner, always in a hurry.

Then, blinding sunlight.  Free at last!  But I’m furious.  I spit in disgust.  I kick some wooden planks under some scaffolding.  I swear up and down that I have to get out of this place.

Tbilisi, you win.  You can have the bus; I’m getting off.

Select Enlightenment:
M. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (NY: Harper & Row, 1984).
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Character

By
I first met the Bear on an unseasonably warm November afternoon. We sat on his balcony and were supposed to be discussing a job. But I squinted against the warm sun, and the Bear puffed a thin cigarette as we drank coffee from exquisite tea cups. A lively little jazz number reached us from inside his den. The Bear’s paws drummed the tune in time. This large omnivorous epicure smoked only hand-rolled cigarettes, which smelled like rain-kissed earth. He sipped only the darkest Turkish coffee, laced with just a touch of sugar. Naturally, he also listened to only the smoothest jazz, the transitions of which, he said, were made as flawlessly as can be done on any instrument in this world. He got quiet, closed his eyes and lifted his paw as if to command me to wait in silence for the next one. . . . Later the conversation turned to a mix of language and politics. Growing up in Belgium with one parent from the UK and one from Austria left him speaking three languages, and he’s a...
Post a Comment
Read more

‘He Ain't Heavy, He's My Neighbor’, Part I

By
I have a drinking problem.  That is, I have a problem with drinking in Georgia. At least five times a week I am awoken at various early morning hours by the so-called street boys.  It is usually a youngish crowd in their twenties barking in the street outside my flat. Some, admittedly, come home with an honest boozy glow about them: though their wits are dulled, they seem good-natured and maintain a modicum of respect for their sober sleeping neighbors. Others lack this restraint.  They yell at their friends’ windows ten storeys up.  Hanging all over one another, they cry out their friends’ names in drunken exuberance at the top of their formidable lungs: “Avto-o-o!” and “Lu-u-uka-a-a!”  They finish the lively conversations they must have been having earlier indoors, and they turn up their car stereos to the point where the bass grabs my window and throttles it like a can of paint in a mixer. Surely, all must be stolen away from dreamland at the...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sky Uninterrupted

By
Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it last for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. — C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka” Time to idealize another place. Road trip to Laramie to secure a flat so that Iphigenia can start law school there next year. We career through the striking Columbia River Gorge, a two-faced monster, one cool and leafy, the second desiccated and wind-blown.  Then it’s up and over the Blue Mountains, where wolves haunt the slopes once more, only to find ourselves in dun and drab southern Idaho before having to traverse the north-east corner of a certain religion’s welcome mat. At last we enter the Equality State.  Next day, after Evanston, the high plains! Visions of a cranky wizened Eastwood and his trusty horse on the sun-scorched steppe are mar...
Post a Comment
Read more