by Denise Roig
Peaches at Dusk
It was close to forty degrees Celsius and the sisters had taken off every possible item that might be considered extra: cotton vests, scarves, sunglasses on a neck cord. Carmel had even slipped out of her bra, ducking down in the back seat behind Lasha’s handsome head, unhooking, yanking and tucking the damn, damp thing into the hemp bag (very ethnic, very cheap) she’d bought at an outdoor market the day before. Lasha, on the other hand, was their hired driver and drivers here dressed like middle managers back home: black polyester suit, white shirt, dark, discreet tie. The thought of all that fabric — the weight! the warmth! — made Carmel long to slip off her underwear.
“Take off your jacket, Lasha,” Andrée told him when he’d pulled up at a quarter to eight, temperature already in the low thirties, humidity at ninety percent. Lasha had only shaken his head. He wasn’t used to women telling him what to do — at least not women who weren’t his mother. It was, in fact, Lasha’s mother, Nona, who’d suggested this little road trip to Kakheti, the wine region of the proud but impoverished former Soviet Republic of Georgia.
“Six degrees of separation, forget it,” Andrée had told Carmel on her first night here. “Everyone knows everyone in this country.” Andrée, a visitor for mere weeks, was already plugged into its abbreviated, but exclusive, social circuit: filmmakers, artists, writers, a couple of scientists, a couple of princesses. Dissidents and personalities, Andrée’s usual crowd.
Gordon Jamison, part of her usual crowd back in London, had misted up when he heard where Andrée’s latest project would take her. “Tbilisi? Georgia? Darling, you have no idea.” Back in Brezhnev’s day, Gordon had tried to make a film about the Georgian State Opera. The film, like many well-intentioned, cross-cultural projects of the time, had fizzled under the weight of its goodwill and lack of hard cash. But Gordon had never forgotten the Opera’s rousing production — not even the Bolshoi could compete — of Prince Igor and the silvery voice of its youngest soprano, Nona Garashvili.
They might even have had a thing, Andrée speculated to Carmel that first night at Nona’s. One of those hopeless behind-the-Iron-Curtain romances. Nona’s now-dead husband had been a high ranker in the Party. “He could have had them banished to a labour camp in Kamchatka or Vladivostok or any other scenic spot in the great Siberian white-out,” Andrée said.
Whatever Gordon and Nona had shared, there had never been any question of Andrée, on location in Tbilisi for a long-planned oeuvre on women artists in the FSU, staying in a hotel. Or for that matter, Carmel, her sister, visiting for a week from Toronto.
“Nona makes marvellous jam out of whatever’s around and talks about the purges and what’s wrong with capitalism, and it’s very textured, very Georgian,” Andrée had told Carmel via long-distance phone. Normally the two stayed in touch through e-mail, but electricity in Georgia was a sometime thing, Andrée said.
Is it like Russia? Carmel had asked. She’d been to Moscow in the late seventies with a group of high-school high achievers, had some matryoshka dolls as souvenirs and the memory of being kissed in Red Square by their young Russian tour guide. In secret, of course. He’d whisked her over to see something “speeshall” and hastily kissed her on the cheek. Only Carmel had turned and their lips had touched. Her body hummed for the rest of the trip.
“The world you saw in Grade 11, gone,” said Andrée, who’d been all over the world, shooting documentaries and kicking up dust. “It’s 1998, way past glasnost, dear. Besides, Georgians make Russians look like large, pale, sentimental, Slavic boors. It’s a tough place, but beautiful.”
Lasha was being passed on the right and the left simultaneously. How? What? Carmel had been panting from the heat in the back seat, only coming up for air to admire the green fields and passing vineyards of Kakheti. But now a Lada — “Lotta trouble, lotta noise,” Andrée’s line — was speeding to the left of them, while another raced them on the right. They were flying in formation down the two-lane road, a triumvirate of Ladas. Before Carmel could yell, the one on the right accelerated its overworked insides just enough to pull in front of them. Then the other sped ahead and managed to cut them both off. Lasha braked, rough and fast, as the toy cars raced each other into the horizon.
“Many accidents,” Lasha shouted. “Many dead people.”
“No kidding,” said Andrée.
“You are safe. You are with me,” said Lasha, and he flashed Carmel a smile via the rear-view mirror. He was twenty-two, twenty years her junior, a fine specimen of Georgian manhood, with dark hair cropped short, but still wavy, at the neck, grey eyes and a slightly flat, aristocratic nose. Lasha had something of his mother in the way he nodded appreciatively when you spoke to him, something of her way, too, when he turned his head to check — not quite often enough for Carmel — for cars behind them. As if he deemed everything to be ever so slightly beneath him.
“So you didn’t answer my question from last night. Do you or do you not have a girlfriend?” Andrée banged Lasha on the arm again. As an out-there lesbian, she could ask men the most personal questions.
Lasha beeped something Carmel couldn’t see, and accelerated again to death-wish speed. “Girl who is friend?” he asked. “No, I think no.”
“You think?” Andrée teased. Lasha shrugged.
“I take it that means you’re a free man,” Andrée turned around to wink at Carmel and made sure Lasha saw this. Andrée had a pretty good idea of her sister’s life. Married an unlucky thirteen years, no sex for the last one, no kids. It hadn’t taken much to convince Carmel to leave Hugh at home in Don Mills, Ontario, with his cell and remote. Remote in his cell.
“More or less,” said Lasha, and looked into Carmel’s eyes through the rear-view mirror.
“Well, what is it, darling boy? More or less?” pressed Andrée.
“In Georgia” — Lasha pronounced it as three syllables: George-ee-ah — “a man is never completely free. There is always Mother.” He smiled at his passengers, a charmer.
“Your mother is wonderful. She’s incredible really, she’s…” Carmel tried to talk over the noise of the car. Lasha’s Lada sounded as if it was on its last pistons, though he had told them, opening the doors for them this morning, that the car was new. “There’s no such thing as a new Lada,” Andrée had joked, but Lasha hadn’t laughed. And Carmel had winced (nothing new) at the way her sister could be both so perceptive and so insensitive.
Nona was a marvel. In her mid-forties, she was everything any woman could hope to be: beautiful, slender, smart, gracious and wise. No wonder Gordon had been willing to brave Siberia, if not the real frozen thing, then the threat of it. Having now spent time with the goddess Garashvili, Carmel was convinced they had shared a behind-the-curtain grand amour.
Of course, nobody talked about the Iron Curtain anymore. But when she was young, Carmel had imagined a storeys-high edifice sculpted with steely, dignified folds behind which sometimes wondrous, sometimes unspeakable things were enacted, things no audience could see. Then when she was seventeen, the curtain had parted, at least as far as it was allowed to part. She’d seen the Bolshoi, the Winter Garden in St. Petersburg, tasted the spurt of butter buried deep inside chicken Kiev. Now she found herself missing the romance of that old world, though it had existed only for people like her. The Commonwealth of Independent States (but who actually called it that?) was now nine time zones of crumbling cities and abandoned farms. She tried to tell her Grade 9 history students what it had been like, but they were far more interested in the Russian mafia.
“What my sister is trying to say is that we’re all in love with your mother,” Andrée said.
“And you have not even heard her sing,” said Lasha.
“I didn’t think she sang any more,” said Andrée. Nona had already declined to be part of Andrée’s film, telling her she needed to talk to younger women. “Someone not so tired as me.”
“She sings,” Lasha said, “when she wants and for who she wants.”
&n
bsp; “That’s not what she told me,” said Andrée.
Deep-summer green was rushing past and Carmel had to keep remembering where she was. Giant, swooping eucalyptus trees made her think of Southern California. Stretches of farmland actually reminded her of southern Ontario, though she’d never say this to Andrée. She was having the same problem in Tbilisi, a tarnished jewel of a city. It was Europe, Florence perhaps, with that certain angle of old wall and bridge, red tile and peeling mustard-yellow paint. No, Jerusalem with its pink, afternoon light. No, Moscow with its (English) Georgian touches. Tbilisi was all and none of these.
On the ride in from Tbilisi’s tiny airport that first night, Carmel had tried to nail this familiarity down. She was exhausted from her barely economy Aeroflot flight and a fold-down dinner tray that kept falling off its hinge and whacking her in the knees. And then there were the men in the aisle, singing and drinking and giving her the eye. She’d felt inhibited and joyless next to them, the only passenger who stayed seated.
“The terrain looks a lot like Italy,” she’d said to Andrée in the taxi. Already she was getting a taste of Lada-land and hired drivers, clutching her thighs around crazy curves at crazy speeds because there were no seatbelts. “Or maybe more like Spain.”
“Why do you always have to compare?” asked Andrée. “Why can’t something just be itself? Sorry,” she’d added, getting a look at her sister’s face. “It’s just that you always do that. It takes away from your pleasure. I’m sure it must.” And Andrée had leaned over and pecked Carmel on the cheek.
“After the film’s wrapped, I’m coming back,” she went on. “I really want to spend some time here, time not behind a camera or thinking always ‘How am I going to use this?’ Nona says I have to come back when it’s cooler. There’s a new puppet theatre production opening in October, one of Rezo Gabriadze’s plays, Stalingrad. He’s a genius, like a national hero. Exiled himself in Switzerland when things turned really rotten here after Gamsakhurdia fucked things up and there was the civil war with Abkhazia and South Ossetia and then Shevardnadze himself said, ‘Come home. I’ll build you a new theatre.’ And then there’s the elections which could also be highly interesting. Here and in Russia, too, which, of course, still looms large for all the old republics.”
Two weeks and the country was hers. Carmel mostly loved this about Andrée, the way she swallowed things whole, the way she ran her sentences together in one awed take. Even as a kid she talked like this. “Add some punctuation, why don’t you?” their mother would suggest.
Andrée was grilling Lasha again: “So what was it like back when you were a kid, Lasha? What was it like in the days of communist rule?”
“In some ways, better than now,” said Lasha, miraculously slowing the car. What for, though? Carmel had begun to scan the side windows.
“But you have so much more freedom now!” exclaimed Andrée. She often positioned herself this way in interviews: enthusiastic but naive, someone to be clued in. It made people want to set her straight, and in the process, they spilled their stories. Carmel had seen it so, so many times.
“Because too much freedom is as good as none,” Lasha said. Andrée turned to look at Carmel, eyes saying, See, he’s a thinker, too.
“Explain that more, could you, Lasha, love? It’s a paradox, isn’t it?” she said.
“In old regime, people were more creative,” Lasha said.
“They had to be, didn’t they?” said Andrée.
“Now there is only money, people killing for money. I detest it.” Lasha floored the accelerator again.
“But isn’t it getting better under Shevardnadze?” Andrée asked. “In the West people seem to think so.”
“Shevardnadze is only big, big disappointment to Georgian people,” said Lasha. And then — announcing, “We need more petrol” — he braked so fast Carmel’s knees rammed into the back of his seat. They indented the plastic before being sharply returned to her. Lasha must have felt them, a sudden bas-relief in the small of his back. Carmel rubbed her kneecaps hard as Lasha sprang from the car.
“He’s smart and sexy, but he drives like a jerk,” Andrée said.
“I may never need to see a chiropractor again.”
“I think he likes you,” Andrée said.
“I think he likes you.”
“Waste of time,” said Andrée, grinning. She looked dewy in the heat, not slick and sweaty. Tan, blonder than usual, she looked marvellous for forty-seven. “I’ve actually been thinking of his mother.”
“Oh, Andrée,” said Carmel.
“Look at her!” cried Andrée. “Nona’s the most splendid creature I’ve met in years.”
“I’d say she’s heterosexual.”
“You are talking about sex?” Lasha was at the window. “I like to talk more about sex than politics.”
Andrée handed him some money from her backpack. They were paying Lasha $40 U.S. for the day of driving, plus gas and food. “Do you have any idea how much that means here?” Andrée had whispered earlier. “People earn, if they’re lucky, 15 lari, which is like $15 Canadian or something, a month. And we’re not talking street cleaners. Scientists, teachers, doctors, all manner of professionals. I don’t know how people get by.”
Nona seemed to be doing fine. Her house was elegantly, heavily, decorated with large wooden furniture, dark tapestries and enough old crystal to throw a wedding for a hundred. She didn’t seem to have a job per se. She went out early in the morning to buy fruit and bread, the newspapers, met friends for lunch, had “rendez-vous.” (Nona occasionally slipped into French as she searched for an English word.) She was always free in the afternoon for tea and conversation. The table was ever set with lovely cups on lovely saucers. The wine — good wine, deep, dry reds and light, floral whites — flowed at night. “I know,” said Andrée. “I keep trying to figure it out. Poverty never looked so good.”
“We were Paris of Soviet empire,” Nona tried to explain to Carmel over tea the first afternoon. “Mais c’est fini,” she said and her eyes, sad even when she was laughing, looked for a moment so sorrowful Carmel had been moved to put her hand on Nona’s shoulder.
“Oh, but we get over everything,” Nona said. Gordon, Carmel thought.
“But I don’t understand,” Carmel pressed. “I see the latest fashions out on Rustaveli.” Tbilisi’s main street — a post-Soviet mix of Benetton and austerity — was filled with women in Italian pumps, men in expensive leather jackets.
“Do not be fooled,” Nona said. “We Georgians are more proud than…I don’t know the word in English…prudente?”
Lasha was not being prudent. He’d been building up speed for the past few kilometres, as if they were in the final leg of something. Carmel’s knees ached, her back, too. How long could they keep this up? She was exhausted from watching the windows and the mirrors and gripping her thighs.
“This is not my choice. It is Mother’s,” shouted Lasha, and braked in his usual considerate fashion, madly veering left. They barrelled down a dirt road framed by tall poplars, a country lane. Greece. Portugal. Where was she? They’d entered an estate of some sort with a massive stone gate.
“Yes!” Andrée kept saying as they bumped along. “Nona told me about this place. It belonged to the Chavchavadze family, didn’t it?”
“I do not like the way Georgians use it now to show…” Lasha stopped as he brought the Lada to a shuddery halt. “It is too difficult to explain in English.”
“Chavchavadze was a famous Georgian poet,” Andrée said, turning to Carmel. “From the eighteenth century, right?” she asked Lasha. “Or was it the seventeenth?”
“You can learn everything if you go in there,” said Lasha, pointing to a stone house among the trees. “There used to be a bear,” he added.
It felt, if that was possible, even hotter outside. Carmel hesitated after opening her door, though Andrée was already out and speeding away, her sandals spraying gravel.
“Big Russian bears, two,” said Lasha
, making no move to get out. “They were most interesting.”
“I don’t understand,” Carmel said. “Bears.”
“Nothing to understand,” said Lasha, talking to her in the mirror.
“But why were bears here?” pressed Carmel. The heat was beginning to make her feel testy. And then there were her knees, courtesy of Lasha.
“I show you,” said Lasha and he got out and gave her his hand.
Standing, Carmel found her thin summer skirt glued to the back of her thighs, but her knees held.
“We let your sister run after her movies,” said Lasha.
A few other cars were parked in the gravel: two black Mercedes and a couple of Ladas. “Tourists,” said Lasha, looking down at her. He had long, dark eyelashes, like fur.
“I’m a tourist,” said Carmel. “I’m a very hot tourist.”
“This will amuse you,” said Lasha. He took her hand the way you might take the hand of a small, pouting friend.
“I do like bears,” Carmel said. “I always went to see them first at the zoo.”
They crossed the gravel, made their way through a smaller stone gate. There was a cage, but no bears. The chain-link fence that surrounded even the ceiling of the small space — an outrage in a captivity-is-bad zoo like the one back home in High Park — was more rust than metal. A new-looking sign in Georgian and English was soldered to the front: Do not feed the bears.
“But there are no bears,” Carmel said.
“If there were, we could not feed them,” said Lasha. He still had her hand. His was warm and large.
“But there are no bears,” said Carmel, “so what difference does it make?” The heat was turning them into idiots.
“Ah!” cried Lasha. “Even if something does not exist as a possibility, you still cannot do it! Back in the USSR, you don’t know how lucky you are, boys!”
“Rules for the sake of rules you mean,” said Carmel. But just saying the word “rules” meant she had to extract her hand. He was a kid.
“Do you have one hundred years?” asked Lasha. “I could perhaps explain it to you then.” His eyes were so personally on her she felt dizzy.