by Paul Theroux
Tbilisi Station was grim, poorly lit, stinking of ragged squatters, littered with blowing papers, and on a frosty morning in March not a place I wanted to linger. I took a taxi and, choosing a hotel at random, checked in and went for a walk.
***
IN THE COURSE OF IDLING THERE, I found that Georgians do not call their country Georgia. They give it its ancient name, Sakartvelo, after its legendary founder. "Georgia" is from the Persian Gorjestan, Land of the Wolf. Armenians call the place Vir, another ancient name, a variation of "Iberia." But by whatever name, it was a supine and beleaguered country of people narcissistic about their differences.
I thought: If you simply flew into Tbilisi, you'd take this to be a pleasant if elderly-looking city of some lovely buildings and quite a few decaying older ones; of many—perhaps too many—gambling casinos; of boulevards and genteel tenements and ancient churches sited with emphatic plumpness on the rocky splendor of low hills; a presentable city divided by the gull-clawed Kura River. And you would be utterly deceived by this look of prosperity.
Overland from Turkey, through Hopa and Sarp and muddy Batumi, from the frosty platform at Makinjauri and onward, passing the towns and villages of Kutaisi, Khashuri, Kaspi, and Gori—Gori, where Iosif Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin, was born in 1879, "a lame, pock-marked, web-toed boy," urchin, street fighter, and choirboy at Gori Church School, before going to a seminary in Tbilisi and becoming a gang leader and bank robber—the railway line showed that Georgia is essentially a peasant economy, struggling, backward-looking, Russophobic, mildly discontented, riven by dissent over the breakaway province of Abkhazia, and, in the raw dark days of late winter, proud but hard-pressed.
Many people in Tbilisi mentioned to me how, less than two months before, in one of the coldest winters in memory, the Russians had cut off Georgia's supply of natural gas. Within hours, the heat vanished from all households and factories, and a black frost descended. Other than firewood—and even that was in short supply in the deforested countryside—Georgia had no energy of its own. The country was without power, Tbilisi seized up, the traffic lights went off, businesses shut down, schools and hospitals were in darkness. The Russians claimed that terrorists had blown up the gas pipeline, but President Saakashvili loudly denounced the Russians, accusing them of deliberate malice—after all, Ukrainians had not long before suffered the same frozen fate when their energy payments to Russia were in arrears.
Politicians in the Georgian cabinet ostentatiously handed out cans of kerosene. Less ostentatiously, trucks dumped loads of firewood on street corners for people to fight over. But the temperature remained below freezing, the river was iced over, the snow was deep, and fresh snowfalls blocked the thoroughfares.
"People were building fires in the streets to keep warm," a woman told me.
Russophobia in Georgia reached new levels of intensity as the whole country shivered; and at last, after a week of suffering, Tbilisi looking as if doomsday had come—snowbound, frozen, corpse-like, frostbitten—the gas supply returned. But Georgia was reminded of its vulnerability, its poverty, its desperation, its dependence on Russia, and its lack of adequate resources.
The weather was still cold and foggy when I arrived, but out of curiosity I decided to stay put for a few days. The hotel I'd found was near the center of the city; I set off walking. I had arrived on a weekend, when people from Tbilisi and the suburbs hold a collective flea market on the streets near the river and across the bridge—and so I was able to see people parting with light fixtures and lamps, faucets, postcards, plastic souvenirs, photographs, brassware, radios, candlesticks, samovars, and religious paraphernalia, including crucifixes and paintings. Business was slow; there were many more sellers than buyers. The hawkers were older people, obviously trying to raise money, and it was obvious too that in many cases they were offering heirlooms for sale, literally the family silver—plates, spoons, salt shakers, teapots. The items that interested me were the icons, some of them silver or silver-plated, and after a few days of browsing, I bought a silver icon.
Big central Asian porches of shaped wooden gingerbread and carved screens jutted from some older buildings, and one whole district of traditional houses—and mosques, and a synagogue, too—had been reno vated. But walking in a drearier part of the city, I passed a large crowd of people jostling on a sidewalk, an irregular line of contending humans in ragged clothes trying to squeeze themselves against a narrow door that gave onto David Agmashenebeli Avenue.
A young man appeared from inside the door and held up a square of cardboard with a number on it. I could read it: 471. As though she'd just won at bingo, an old woman, looking pleased, screeched and waved a scrap of paper—her number was 471—and she pushed herself through the crowd and into the doorway.
This happened two more times while I watched. More numbers were announced—472, 473—and the winners admitted to the building. The building had an air of elegance, though like many others in this district it had fallen into ruin. But there was no sign on the building, only the crowd of people out front, each person waiting for his or her number to be called. What exactly was happening?
"Excuse me." I followed the last people in. They were a small family—father, mother, child. They did not look distressed; they were warmly clothed, and the man had been bantering with the others left standing on the street corner, impatiently jostling.
What seemed to me an old haunted mansion had a lobby like a ballroom, with a high ceiling, leaded windows, some of them fitted with stained glass. Still, it seemed less like a mansion than a Masonic hall. No one challenged me, so I kept walking and looking around—the place was pleasantly warm and smelled of fresh bread. I followed the aroma and found two twenty-year-olds who were English-speakers, Marina and Alex.
"What's happening here?" I asked.
"This is the House of Charity," Alex said.
Marina stepped back and gestured. She said, "And this is the man."
A pale, rather small man with a thin fox-like face and dark close-set eyes swept forward and stared at me, not in hostility but in a sort of querulous nibbling welcome. He wore a vaguely clerical outfit: black frock coat buttoned to his chin, an overcoat draped like a cape over his shoulders. Adding to his mysterious ecclesiasticism were his black boots, an occult-looking insignia on a heavy chain around his neck, and pinned to one lapel a ribbon-like adornment. He was about fifty, strangely confident for such a pale soul, and upright, with the messianic stare you find in people who have a sense of destiny, a belief that they are doing the right thing. In his heavy cape-like coat, his pasted-down hair, and his sallow, somewhat tormented saint's face, I put him down in my notebook in one word, Dostoyevskian.
"This—everything you see—was his idea," Marina said.
"What do you do here?"
Instead of answering my question, Marina translated it for the man in black, and he replied in Georgian, which she translated back into English.
"We feed people," he said. "We feed all the people. Usually we feed about three hundred fifty a day, but today is Open Door Day, so we will be feeding fifteen hundred people."
"Are all of them poor?" I asked. This was translated.
"We ask no questions. Everyone is welcome. Some of them can afford to buy food, others are starving, but we make no distinction."
"Is this part of some religion?"
The pale man smiled when he heard this. He had tiny, even teeth in his vulpine, small boy's face. He said triumphantly, "No message! No religion!"
"So ask him why he does it," I said to Marina.
She spoke for a while with him, he gave monosyllabic replies, and finally he shrugged and uttered a few sentences in Georgian.
"He says the reasons are too deep to discuss. It could take days to explain why he does this."
Meanwhile, numbers were being shouted at the front door. Hungry people were hurrying in, smiling sated people were leaving, poking their yellow teeth with toothpicks.
"How about just a hint?" I
asked, and Marina pressed him.
He replied, "In 1989, many men were seeking power and had political ambition." He meant at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Georgia was free. I decided to do something different from that—maybe the opposite of seeking power, something humble and helpful, not political, not religious either. This was what I thought of."
Now people were pushing past us to get to the dining hall, which had a number of tables big and small, about 150 places. When a person vacated a chair, a number was displayed outside and a hungry person tore in, scuffing in wet boots towards the smell of food.
We stepped back to let the traffic flow. I asked the man his name.
He was Oleg Lazar-Aladashvili, and he called this effort Catharsis. He had run it for the past sixteen years.
"Catharsis, in Greek, means spiritual cleansing through compassion," he said. ("Spiritual renewal through purgation," my dictionary also explains.)
"We have another house in Moscow," he said. "Our principles are charity, nonviolence, and anti-AIDS. We also provide medical services and help to homeless people."
"To anyone who asks?"
He became specific. He said, "We provide help not as a gift but as a reward for work." Everyone who was helped had to pitch in and do something—either assist in one of the programs or be a janitor in the building.
Oleg said that the building, this mansion that had confused me, had been the headquarters of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, but the party no longer mattered. People who'd benefited from Catharsis had helped paint and decorate it, made murals, tapestries, and pictures. Wealthy families in Tbilisi had contributed jewelry, paintings, icons, and antiques. Pope John Paul II had visited in February 1999 and donated a Bible. The Archbishop of Canterbury had also visited. Their signed pictures were hung in Oleg's office, which had an ecclesiastical atmosphere—heavy furniture, velvet cushions, gold tassels, a maroon carpet, stained-glass windows, leather-bound books, an enormous desk.
I gave Marina a $20 bill and said that I would like to have a meal in the dining room.
"It is free," Oleg said.
"But take the money anyway," I said.
"Money makes no difference. The food is for everyone. We don't scrutinize the people we feed."
Perhaps without realizing it, Oleg had paraphrased one of the precepts of the Diamond Sutra: Buddha teaches that the mind of a Bodhisattva should not accept the appearances of things as a basis when exercising charity.
"Please," I said, and put the money in his hand.
"You must have a receipt," Marina said.
"You can give it to me later."
"No. The receipt must be given now."
The special pad had to be found, then a pen, and finally a special stamp—the insignia of Catharsis, which was an upright bar with a diagonal crossbar and some squiggles. This took longer than I expected, and in their fuss to provide a receipt I began to regret my donation, pathetically small though it was. The laborious business to give me a receipt was like satirizing my twenty bucks.
Then they escorted me to the dining hall—one of the three dining rooms. After the religiosity of the office, this scene was almost Chaucerian, something medieval and bawdy about each heavily dressed, red-faced person gobbling at a big tin bowl of soup and a big bowl of bread—a whole round loaf cut into chunks—and a saucer of noodle salad sprinkled with oregano. The clank of spoons, the slurping of soup, the laughter, the yelling, children squawking, bowls being brought in on trays and banged down on the trestle tables: it was a rollicking scene of appetite and good cheer. And there were serving wenches—girls in aprons with mobcaps and billowy blouses, their faces glowing, perspiring from their work of wiping down tables and serving soup.
Isabella Kraft was one of them. She was from Cologne, Germany, from a large family—she had brothers and sisters. She was twenty, slightly built, blond, very pretty, and looking overworked and earnest, ringlets of dampened hair adhering to her forehead.
"I've been here six months," she told me. "I'll be here for a year altogether. I finished school and I heard they needed people."
All were volunteers, she said. She liked the idea that no questions were asked of the people, that no message was handed over other than the obvious charitable one.
"I do this in my spare time," Isabella said.
"What do you do the rest of the time?"
"I work with handicapped children," she said. She had the passionate intensity I had seen in Oleg's eyes, but she smiled, had a sense of humor; she was ardent, humble, unselfish, with no pretensions.
"Isabella! Stop talking and start working!" an old woman screamed.
"That is the supervisor," Isabella said and laughed. She called back, "He is from America!"
"Take me to America!" the toothless old woman next to me screamed, shaking her big soup spoon at me in a dripping demand.
Other diners at the long table began teasing and laughing. It was an unimaginably happy room of contented eaters with food-splashed faces, people with a hunk of bread in one hand and a spoon in the other, attacking bowls of thick beany soup.
None of the volunteers had anything to preach; no philosophy was imparted about what they were doing. They simply labored without question. And because operating costs were low, practically the whole budget was used for food. Oleg later told me that he got money from local companies, Oxfam, and various United Nations agencies, but that even without their help he would have continued to run the charity.
For the helpers it was a kind of inspired drudgery to which they brought humanity. Most of them were from other European countries, living frugally and far from home; they were uncomplaining, learning humility, but also in a position to understand the very heart of Georgia. I admired them for following the fundamental tenet of Buddhism, the key text of the Buddhist way, utter selflessness, perhaps without knowing any word of the Diamond Sutra.
Inevitably, a little later, on a nearby street I saw some Georgian youths skidding around corners too fast in their crappy cars and shouting out the window, playing rap music much too loudly and being stupid.
***
NOW AND THEN YOU MEET SOMEONE at a party or at a friend's house and he says, "I'm from Tbilisi"—or wherever—"and if you ever visit, you must look me up."
And you say, "Absolutely," but the day never comes, for why on earth would you ever go to Tbilisi? And usually the person is merely being polite and doesn't mean it. But Gregory and Nina, whom I had met a few years before in Massachusetts, seemed sincere.
And there I was in Tbilisi, under wintry skies, with time on my hands. And so I made the call.
"Are you going to be here tomorrow?" Nina asked.
"Oh, yes," I said.
"Then you must come to the ballet." Nina was a ballerina in the Georgia State Opera Company, and Gregory was her husband. "It's the premiere of Giselle. Come to the Opera Theater at seven. Ask for Lizaveta. She will have a ticket for you. We will meet you in the box."
The Opera Theater was a notable landmark of Tbilisi. I found it easily on foot. An imposing cheese-colored nineteenth-century edifice on the main boulevard, Rustaveli Avenue, it was built at a time when Russia—which had annexed Georgia in 1801—regarded an opera house as essential to the romantic idea of Georgia as one of the more picturesque regions of the Russian empire. Georgians were great agriculturalists, and their vineyards were renowned, but Georgians also danced and sang.
It turned out that Nina was not merely a prima ballerina but also head of the opera company. When I met her in the box, she had recently given birth to a little girl.
Gregory, who was a prosperous investor and also a doting husband and Nina's manager, said, "But she will dance next year. She will prove that you can have a baby and also be a great ballerina."
Other people—mostly friends and relations—were already seated.
Introducing me, Nina said, "This is Paul. He went through Africa alone!"
"Is true?" a woman said.
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"By autostop," Nina said.
"Not really," I said.
But the woman hadn't heard. She had turned to tell her husband that I had hitchhiked through Africa.
Then Giselle began. The title role was performed by a ballerina from the Bolshoi. The male lead, Prince Albrecht, was a local dancer who was only twenty-one. He was cheered when he appeared onstage. I had no idea what I was in for. I knew nothing about ballet, but it seemed to me a melodious way of spending an evening in Tbilisi.
After my rainy journey of bleak hills and foggy valleys and muddy roads, this packed opera house—warm and well fed—was the antithesis of Batumi: pale pretty sprites in tutus, men in tights, some of them spinning, some of them leaping, and an orchestra pit where men in tuxedos scraped out mellifluous tunes and cascading harmonies.
I was sitting comfortably in a gilt chair, resting on velvet cushions, watching Prince Albrecht (in disguise) fall in love with the peasant girl Giselle. But there was a hitch: he had been betrothed to Bathilda, the Duke's daughter. Giselle also had another and very excitable lover. Lots of prancing and leaping and flinging of arms, and finally identities were revealed, sending Giselle off her head. Just before the prolonged and ex quisite death agonies of Giselle, she heard the Wilis—"the spirits of young girls who died before their wedding day," the program said—and then she died.
Second act: Giselle was now transformed into one of the Wilis. She was reunited with Albrecht and danced with him through the night. In so doing she saved his life, before she vanished at dawn. An angelic kickline of flitting nymphs, eloquent mime, syrupy music, slender legs, graceful leaps, and strange moves, especially Giselle's as she hopped on one toe while propelling herself by kicking her other leg, receiving wild applause and bravas.
This ballet induced such a feeling of well-being in me that I sat smiling tipsily at the big red curtain for quite a while after it fell.
And then I heard, "This is Paul. He went through Africa by hitchhike!"
"Not exactly," I said. "Do you speak English?"
"As a matter of fact, yes," the woman said. "I'm British. I'm just visiting."