I’m watching a video montage of the 2008 Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia, which makes no attempt to disguise the parallels between the Soviet era and the present day. The footage depicts scenes of Georgia’s past and present, only now the Russian military uniforms are in bright Technicolor. We pause in front of a cafe in Old Tbilisi. “KGB: Still Watching You,” proclaims the sign. Soviet relics abound in Georgia. Or maybe a year in Moscow has placed a red-tinted lens in front of my vision during this ten-day trip. *** We leave Tbilisi the next morning. We pile into a van with Armand, our trusty driver, and Father Ilya, a Georgian priest and family friend of our program director. Our destination is uncertain as we set off on a three-day journey to experience Georgia’s national treasures. That
is, we are visiting monasteries and sampling mineral water. We leave Tblisi, heading east. Father Ilya, our unconventional guide, speaks Georgian, Russian and a bit of English. Armand claims he only speaks Georgian, but I see him laugh at one of my jokes. As we enter Barjomi, Father Ilya asks Armand to pull over near a pharmacy. I don’t understand all of the words, but he’s asking Armand to buy him some opiates. We stay the night in a tiny village outside of Barjomi, a region renowned for its mineral water. Father Ilya sits in the common room until long after we’ve gone to bed. We emerge the next morning to find him sitting in his underwear, a syringe on the arm of the chair. Three empty liters of beer and two empty cigarette packets lie on the ground next to him. Father Ilya says he couldn’t sleep, offhandedly as only those who suffer from chronic pain and insomnia do. We grin at each other over the beer and cigarettes, but there is more discomfort than derision in our smirks. Americans talk about depression only in hushed whispers, if at all. *** We need a present for our hosts, relatives of Father Ilya’s who live in the mountains half a day’s drive from Tbilisi. Armand pulls over on the road to Barjomi. He’s seen a flock of lambs by the roadside. Meat is the perfect host gift, Father Ilya explains. Armand wants to strap the lamb, bleating and very much alive, to the roof of the van. But we, Americans brainwashed by PETA, put our feet down. I don’t point out that industrial meat in the U.S. is a much less civilized affair. The prospects of that conversation are akin to convincing Father Ilya to stop smoking. No matter how many times I explain that I have asthma (a necessary but patent untruth), Father Ilya continues his chain smoking. Armand has been so thoroughly cowed by our protestations that we drive off without the lamb. Or so we thought. When we climb into the car the next morning, we realize where Armand
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drove off to last night. He drove back to the flock of sheep on the roadside, where he and the farmer slit the throat of one of the lamps before bundling the carcass into a translucent plastic bag. I know it was a translucent plastic bag because it is now sitting under my seat. Will, our coordinator, chastises us for missing such an essentially Georgian experience. I sit in in the van with the windows that refuse to budge, overdramatically coughing in a passiveaggressive attempt to get Father Ilya to stop smoking. With every twist and turn in the road, the headless carcass of the lamb bumps into the back of my ankles. *** Father Ilya doesn’t understand why we want to visit Gori, Stalin’s birthplace. Surely we would rather see more monasteries instead? Having politely declined a tour of our eighth and ninth monasteries in two days, we set off for Gori. The museum is a relic, a veritable shrine to Stalin that the government has halfheartedly attempted to convert into a memorial to the victims of the Stalinist era. The converted museum will reopen in 2009, a sign reads. Well, it’s May of 2012 and not much as changed.
Our tour leads us through rooms filled with paintings of Stalin, his personal possessions. We file silently through a round room, hushed as if paying homage to the bust of Stalin at its center. Our silence feels complicit. There is still a sense of pride among the residents of Gori, pride accompanied by a sort of selective amnesia of Stalin’s forced deportations, show trials and labor camps. Perhaps it is less a selective amnesia and more of an inability to overcome years of a cult of personality that cast Stalin as the father of a nation. Later that year, back in the U.S., I read in the New York Times that Gori’s municipal council has voted to reinstate a monument to Stalin in the town center. I think of the rooms in the museum, frozen in time. *** The houses along the main street in Gori are pockmarked, providing a reminder of the shelling that threatened residents in the 2008 South Ossetian Crisis. Tanks rolled down the main street when Russian forces invaded as far south as Gori.
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