Among the Russians(65)

I peered into the lady-chapel, where a wedding ceremony was proceeding with majestic domesticity. Its sad-faced priest intoned in a sorcerous patter. The guests chatted and grinned. The bride, in white dress and coronet, kept brushing her eyes with one slender, silver-nailed hand, not because she was weeping, but because her mascara was smudged. Everybody seemed at home with God. The groom was dressed in shirt and trousers, but crowned outlandishly by a coronet like his bride’s, dripping with glass beads and crosses. He joked as he processed round the altar, his fingers linked with hers. Meanwhile a black-clad widow took the part of choir and sacristan together, and bullied the congregated friends. ‘Cross yourselves now,’ she would command. ‘Stand back now! Cross yourselves again!’ She filled the chapel with bucolic zest, while the priest remained no more than a blaze of crimson and gold vestments, from which a disenchanted voice united the couple to God.

Then it was over. The friends swarmed forward to kiss. The bride, a hard-faced beauty, strolled away matter-of-factly down the nave, he following. The service had seemed less a sacrament than the signing of some occult register—the act of people to whom divinity was either ubiquitous or non-existent.



In the sixth century Mtskheta lost its hegemony to Tbilisi, which for more than twelve hundred years remained the precarious head of a land ravaged by Arab, Byzantine, Mongol, Persian and Turk—a splintered mosaic of princedoms.

Squeezed between hills and river, Tbilisi spreads along nineteenth century boulevards in medleys of balconied shops and offices, restaurants, thermal baths, cafés, theatres, soda fountains. It exhales a dynamic disorder, sharpened by mountains and tinged with the orient. Its tram-rattling alleys are riven by bargaining, laughter, cheating, fights. A feeling of commercial and emotional laissez-faire is about. Contraband goods linger under many a counter. Illicit posters of Stalin, Marilyn Monroe and the Holy Family mingle in idolatrous schizophrenia. The fruit stalls are heaped with apples and peaches, and alone in a near-meatless empire the restaurants make free with lamb.

At evening the crowds along Rustaveli Prospect swell into a long, social promenade under the plane trees. The boulevard is the soul of Tbilisi and of Georgia—and is named after a poet, not a revolutionary. Raunchy youths and self-conscious girls circle and perambulate in segregated clusters as if on an Italian corso, showing off black market T-shirts stamped with stars and stripes or the American eagle (but this is fashion, not politics). For an hour or so before sunset, the whole Georgian nation seems to be gazing at itself in ritual narcissism, strutting and teasing through a sexual dance of shameless machismo or coyness. Among these dagger-bright people, the Russians appear slow and monochrome, like the British in Italy. They lumber along the pavements with a certain wistful disquiet, as if envious of what they cannot be. For the Georgian is the Russian’s antithesis. He has a hugely heightened sense of self. He behaves not as a part, but as the epicentre of things. Before the Revolution, one in seven men on the streets of Tbilisi was rumoured to be a prince.

Above the east bank of the Kura the oldest Georgian quarter totters along the cliffs on wooden stilts. The Kura here is a deep, processional river which hooks around the heights in a sickle of darkness, flowing to the Caspian. A thirteenth century church rears theatrically above, and a basalt king rides his horse on the point of the bluff.

At the foot of the western bank, a veritable Babel begins. Tin-roofed houses converge in an architectural din of Tartar balconies and Persian courts. A minaret totters in the sky above the sunken domes of a Turkish bath, where old women with henna-bright hair sit in the sun. The alleys wriggle upward through a jungle of cracked plaster and splintering wood, mansions poised over nothing on wonky struts and hung with peppers, bath tubs, bags of onions. Everything betrays private loves and vanities, and the air is touched by the murmurings of courtyard intrigue, of gossipers invisible under grape-dangling trellises. While high above, dominating all else, a castle founded by Persians in the fourth century girdles the summit in massed phalanxes of towers.

It was while wandering here that I met a Tbilisi Jew. Framed in an astrakhan hat and greying locks, his fine-boned cheeks degenerated to half-shaven jowls and a fleshy mouth. It was as if he had been put together by identikit, from two different sources: prophet above, lecher below. He was wheezing and moaning with the steepness of the ascent. As we wended together along the overgrown footpaths he told me how the city’s thousand-year-old community of Jews was shrivelling away. The 1970s’ emigration to Israel had bitterly depleted it.

‘My friends have almost all gone. Everything’s different now.’ He was panting like a hound. ‘Tell me, are there Jews in England?’ Then he slipped an arm round my waist. ‘My childhood was spent here, round this castle…. We used to play under the walls.’ His voice turned soft, maudlin. I attributed his embrace to friendly tactility, ignored it. ‘Even the names of my old friends…I’ve started to forget.’

We were walking in solitude high above the city curled on its brown river. I wondered how good life was in the labyrinth of oriental houses under the hill, but thought I knew. ‘The people fight each other like dogs,’ the man said. ‘The married girls all play with other men, in and out of bed…it’s disgusting.’ He turned to me. His patriarchal locks dribbled sadly round the dual face. ‘People don’t seem to like me, I don’t know why. I treat everybody sincerely, but I’m always rejected. I think people should love one another.’ And the next moment he was trying to kiss me.