When Georgian Easter was explained to me, I was informed
that Easter Monday is the best day. They explained that they pack picnics and
go to the cemeteries where their family members are buried. When I woke up
Monday, I realized almost immediately that this day would be nothing like I had
expected. Eka and Maguala were packing the picnic; Jumberi stood watching and
giving orders periodically. Then we drank coffee and watched the clock. At
11:30-ish we packed Eka’s car and drove to the path that leads up to the
cemetery. We then unloaded the car and carried everything up the hill to
Jumberi’s parents’ grave. There was a metal table next to it, where we unpacked
and sat down. Jumberi lit candles and laid red eggs/cake/candies at his
parents’ graves. But then we just sat quietly, everyone ordering each other to
eat and drink but actually eating and drinking very little. I looked out over
the graveyard—with it’s fences and tables, flowering trees and pictures of the
deceased—and I thought about the Czech graveyards I’d found so beautiful and
the Dios de los Muertos picnics that I’d read about but never experienced. Then
Maguala interrupted my thoughts by calling me to follow her to her father’s
grave, on the other side of the cemetery.
As we walked, I learned what the day really is about. We zigzagged
between the graves, instead of taking the most direct path, so that we visited
a large portion of the cemetery. Every few steps, we would stop at a grave. The
family there would hand Maguala a glass of wine, and they would exchange a
ritual greeting:
-Christ is risen.
-It is true.
-For the souls of your dead, your family, those you love, and
you yourself, that God raises you as well.
-The same for you and yours.
The wording wasn’t always exactly the same for the last two
lines, but this was the jist. Then Maguala would spill some wine on each of the
graves at the family plot, kiss her glass, hand it back to the family, and call
for me to follow her onward.
When we were back with our family (i.e. at her husband’s
family plot), I sat at the table with everyone and joined them in handing
glasses of wine to guests. I had expected the day to be about the family’s
deceased: us sitting at the grave eating, with food and wine set out for them,
talking about their lives. Instead the day was much more a social performance.
Each person was expected to visit the graves of their relatives, friends,
friends’ relatives and relatives’ friends to spill wine, bless the grave, and
demonstrate to the others present that they considered their life intertwined
with the lives of these others. Children went around cracking the red eggs with
their friends, since they couldn’t drink the wine. Most women didn’t drink the
wine at each grave; like Maguala, they kissed the glass and returned it to the
family full. Many of the men drank slightly more, and many were thoroughly
wasted by the time they went home.
Family members took turns circling the cemetery, keeping
someone at the plot of the patriarch’s nearest relative at all times. Whoever
was at the family plot offered food and wine to guests. I realized that the
family wasn’t eating much because the food was first and foremost an offering
to those who stopped by to pay respects to the dead or demonstrate a social
connection to one of the living present. The fact that this was a spectacle
became all the more obvious when guests stopped by who the family didn’t want
the public (with everyone always closely observing each other, of course) to
consider in relation with them. Courtesy and tradition dictated that every
guest be offered wine and allowed food. Most were offered food and even
entreated to sit with the family at the table for a time. But there were a few
guests—a drunk man who offended Jumberi with an inappropriate question, an old
woman who has repeatedly offended the women of the family with her patronizing
comments, a socially out-of-tune drunk who barely knows the family but stopped
by on his way to relieve himself in the trees—who (after their departures, of
course) inspired scowls and scathing comments.
We arrived at the cemetery around 11:30 and were home around
3. Jumberi laid down to nap (I feel like he’s gotten very old recently), but
Eka suggested we go out for a bit. A friend of Maguala’s has three sons, who
are friends of Eka’s. They were having a supra, so we went to their house. I
like this form of supra attendance, usually only excusable for women who are
close to the family. After the men have their long meal and have drunk most of
the wine, we show up and sit at one end of the table. We sit together, and the
women of the hosting family finally take a break from serving to sit down with
us. We nibble on the food and have a glass of wine if we want, but there’s much
less pressure than when we attend supras as official guests.
As soon as we walked into the house, I knew that this was
going to be a good time. The men had already drunk quite a bit, but they were
good-natured and polite regardless. One of the sons thought I was Georgian at
first, and when he found out I was American he started talking a mile a minute
in English. At one point he said, “I’m just talking this much so that my
friends see me speaking English.” A bit later he said, “You know, there’s
someone else here who speaks English well, but he is shy. He’s, in fact,
sitting right next to you.” From that point on, they both chatted away at me in
English, with the others occasionally slipping in a Georgian word or a toast.
They were joking and laughing the whole time. Their toasts to Maguala and Eka
were pointedly extravagant, and their mother called them out of a few lines of cliché,
over-the-top flattery.
Then Mamuka made a toast and included a personal wish for me
to get married in Georgia. I chuckled and gave my usual reply about not having
the time or patience for a husband. He was aghast: “Don’t you want children?”
“I like kids, but I don’t know if I want any. And the
husband bit—”
“Why are you here and beautiful?”
“Ummm…” (Here at
this supra, in Oni, in Georgia? Here
on Earth? Ummm…)
“Because of your parents! So you should repay them the favor
and do the same and make beautiful children!”
“I don’t want—“
“In 70 years, I want your children to be guests in my house
as you are now. Promise me you’ll see to that?”
“No! I can’t promise—“
And so on and on until eventually I just laughed. The other
English speaking man next to me nodded and said that he for one likes my
thinking. I eyed his wedding ring, wondered if he had what my students refer to
as a “second wife” (or was looking for one) on the side, and again laughed
instead of answering.
Then, mercifully, one of the women asked me to come outside
and help her translate a document on her laptop. This was amusing, too. She
asked me to come help instead of either of the two men, because I’m a native
speaker. But then she didn’t believe what I translated it to, because I’m not a
native Georgian speaker. So then she called one of the men out. He translated
it the same way I did, and then she didn’t argue.
Neither conversation was tense at all, just interesting. Eka
and Maguala seemed to have as good a time as I did. Then we went home. Eka and
I worked in the yard for a while. While we were working, Jumberi came out and
urgently called for me to come take a picture. I was confused: a picture of
what? Eka told him that we’d be finished in 5 minutes and he could wait. He
shuffled back inside, and in 5 minutes he re-appeared in dress clothes. He make
his way down to the pavilion in the yard, and he pulled out one of the white
plastic chairs. He set it under the pear tree and sat down to pose. Eka and I
looked at each other, confused and amused, and then I hurried over with my
camera. He tried a few different poses, and he told me for each picture where
he wanted me to stand. When we finished, he went inside and I went to sit with
Eka on the steps.
Back in October, Jumberi was old. I remember thinking that
this must be the price men pay in societies with traditional gender roles: once
they stop working, start collecting their pensions, and realize their children
are full-grown, their contribution to daily family life becomes less clear.
Sure, they still chop firewood and prune the grape-vines and make wine;
meanwhile, however, their wives and daughters are still cooking, cleaning,
socializing (because their social habits always involved visiting and being
visited by neighboring housewives), and generally keeping the house in order as
they always have. An old man here either has to find a new sense of purpose for
his life or wander around the house wondering what he’s good for. It’s a
depressing way to spend old-age, though perhaps life alone in a nursing home
isn’t much better. The thing is, since the weather has warmed up we’ve stopped
needing as much firewood. The grape-vines don’t need any care right now, and
there’s already a stock of wine in the cellar. Increasingly, Jumberi spends the
day sleeping, watching television, and smoking. He used to spend a lot more
time watching television, but I think his hearing has gotten worse (he talks
louder these days) so now he watches it a bit less. When he started sleeping
during the day instead of watching television, I didn’t think much of it. Then
he started smoking and eating less because he was sleeping more. At this point,
he’s almost always asleep on the couch in the main room. He gets up a few times
a day to eat a little food, smoke, or wander outside to talk to a neighboring
man in the street. He’s become more irritable, more lethargic, more
hard-of-hearing…just generally more…old.
So when he decided suddenly that it was very urgent that I
take a picture of him (that he can’t access because I’m the only one in the
house with a computer and they don’t have a printer), Eka asked, “He’s not
losing his mind, is he?” We later learned that someone at the cemetery had
asked him where he wants to be buried. The other man had honestly been thinking
of his funeral arrangements and wondered what his old acquaintance thought.
Though the possible connection between this question and the photography
session was never discussed, I have a feeling that Jumberi may have decided
that he’s not so worried about where
he’ll be buried as which picture they’ll use as a reference when engraving his
likeness on his tombstone. I don’t actually mind thinking about those kinds of
things, but I’m not a 76-year-old, chain-smoking, Georgian man with a cough
that suggests he has destroyed his lungs nearly completely. I can’t tell if he
thinks about death and feels relieved or amused or scared or apathetic. He
answered his acquaintance’s question, “100 years from now, I’ll be buried here,
next to my parents.” Others picked up the conversation topic, but they were
younger and just musing for amusement. I doubt any of them went home and
ordered their young houseguest to take pictures of them to ensure that their
tombstone renderings would be ones they approved of.
Tuesday, I got dressed for school and waited a half-hour at
the car station for my co-teacher. Then a woman who teaches at Oni school came
by and told me that we were still off school for the Easter holiday. When I’d
been at school the week before, the other teachers had said multiple times to
me and to each other that we would be back at school on
Tuesday/Samshabati/April 17th. I walked home, not really minding the
extra holiday but wondering at the miscommunication. I dropped my bag at home,
changed into jeans and boots, and went for a bit of a hike. The path I chose
took me past the old Armenian cemetery, which I had expected to find empty.
Instead, I saw red eggs and cakes laid at many of the graves, just as at the
main Georgian Orthodox cemetery. I decided to walk through the Orthodox cemetery
as well. I looked at Monday’s aftermath: the wine and broken eggs, the flowers
(laid by humans and blooming on the trees), the cigarette butts, the slices of
nazuki and paska, and the candles blown out by the wind. Even some over-grown
graves had offerings laid at them, which reminded me of watching Giorgi’s
mother wander off to leave an egg at an “abandoned” grave. We later toasted to
those who don’t have families to pray for their souls or bless their graves. I
thought for a brief moment about how this second condition is true of most
graves in the US (we just don’t spend time in our graveyards), but then turned
my thoughts to a few lines from The
Unbearable Lightness of Being. Sabina, my favorite character, has lived in
many countries by this point, late in the novel. In the Czech Republic, she
liked walking through cemeteries, because they were peaceful and natural
places. When she realized that Western European graves are covered with big,
elaborate, stone grave heads or mausoleums (which, to be fair, I did see in
Czech cemeteries from time to time), she is horrified. She recoils at the
thought of being dropped into a deep tomb and covered with a stone; she’d
rather be buried like her father, in a shallower tomb under grass and a tree.
That way, she feels, her soul would better be able to escape. As she wander
farther and farther from her homeland, both physically and mentally, she always
remarks in each new place that she can’t stay to die there because she doesn’t
want to be covered with a stone. I wonder how she would feel about the Georgian
graveyard, where the stones have pictures but the length of the grave usually
has grass or flowers growing on it. Would she like that there are picnic tables
at the graves? Chuckle at the fences around the grave sites (to keep out cows
and pigs, presumably)? Cringe at the way All Souls’ day is a day of performing
social identity?
At the end of the novel, the men Sabina loved are buried
under head stones with lies for epitaphs. Sabina decides to be cremated and
scattered into the wind. I still think I’d prefer to be buried under a tree.
I looked wandered into an old part of the cemetery and
admired the flowers, then I went home to have paska and coffee with Maguala.
Which was when I was told that paska (pancetta, I think, in Italian) has a
pretty grim symbolic purpose at Easter. I’d wondered at the Georgian name for
it, trying to figure out if it was linguistically connected somehow to the word
“pascal.” I was told that it actually is the shape that matters, because the
shape looks like a mountain. Specifically, it looks like Golgatha, apparently.
Makes me hesitate before enjoying another overly sweet piece of almond-covered,
rainbow-raisin-filled cake. Maybe I’ll stick to the nazuki.
Tuesday night was very important for me personally, though
not so much for everyone else here. At 10:30 pm Georgian time, it was 2:30 pm
in New York, meaning that it was time for me to register for fall classes. I’ve
been here for two semesters. Last year, I was competing against a smaller pool
of students for classes because I was abroad both semesters. I’ve missed school
a lot. It’s almost absurd how excited
I am to get back to classes. Of course I’ve learned a lot this semester, and it’s been good to
learn from primary sources (you know, from people and experience) rather than
from academic essays written by researchers about what they read from other
researchers. Some of my NYU classes were very good about looking at primary
sources and original resources, of course, but I did find an old paper on my
computer the other day which reminded me that everything is about balance. It
was from freshman year, and I wrote that I was sick of reading for the first
time in my life. The reason, I wrote, had nothing to do with my interest in the
material or the quantity I was expected to read. I was frustrated, I wrote, of
always being fed pre-digested, pre-interpreted information. I was aching to be
allowed to consider original material and think about its implications for
myself. Now I’m aching to go back to an environment where I can bounce my
thoughts off others and have theirs thrown at me.
Well, I’m going. And amazingly I got all the courses I
wanted. Eka sat beside me watching the whole process, and I explained to her
how class registration works and why it’s nerve-wracking. Now here I am, SUCCESSFULLY
REGISTERED FOR ALL THE CLASSES I
WANTED NEXT SEMESTER!!!!!!!!!! How is it that registration went more smoothly
from here than it ever has from New York? I’m excited to go back to school and
soooo excited for these classes. This semester is going to be really really
challenging but absolutely fantastic. The classes have names like “Creative
Democracy,” “On the Road: Tourism During the Great Depression,” “Narrative
Investigations,” and “Doing Things With Words: Art and Politics.” And I have a
basic sociology class with a not-so-exciting name, but it’ll complete a minor
that I unknowingly fulfilled all the other requirements for already sooo that’s
not bad at all. Somehow, all five classes are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and
Thursdays. This means that I’ll spend all of those three days in lectures and
discussion groups, and then I’ll have Friday through Monday to
work/intern/study. Since it looks like I’ll be living in Brooklyn, I’m going to
do my best to find a job there. Four days of not needing to commute (though I
may still sometimes for events and clubs and such on campus) will be nice since
subway fares are rising.
At the moment, it looks like I’m set for a good penultimate
semester. Gmadlobt, mghertmas!
A few
recipes I should mention:
Bozinaqkhi
(New Year’s/Christmas sweet)
500 g.
walnuts
300 ml.
honey
40 g. sugar
1.
Chop the walnuts and toast them.
2.
Put the honey in a pan over low heat. Heat until
thin (because fresh, local honey is thick here).
3.
Stir the sugar and walnuts into the honey.
4.
Spread on a wax-paper lined tray and let cool.
Maguala’s
Blini
6 eggs
½ l. water,
room-temperature
1 c. flour
½ c. sunflower
seed oil
salt to
taste
1.
Beat the eggs and salt together.
2.
Mix in the flour.
3.
Stir in the oil.
4.
Add the water (be sure to add the water last!).
5.
Let sit for 5 minutes.
6.
Pour into shallow oiled pan (crepe pan / blini
pan) and fry.
7.
When cooked through, remove and let cool. Can be
filled with savory things (Maguala likes rice and ground meat) or with sweet
things (I like chocolate or fruit).
Nazuki
1 l. warm
milk
1 kg. sugar
15 eggs
2 tbs yeast
300 g. margarine
assorted
spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla, anise, etc.)
raisins
(optional)
1.
Dissolve the sugar in the milk.
2.
Melt the margarine in the milk.
3.
Beat the eggs and stir them into the mixture.
4.
Sprinkle in the yeast.
5.
Spice.
6.
Let sit 5 minutes.
7.
Knead for 1 hour.
8.
Let rise, covered and at room temperature,
overnight.
9.
Shape into loaves and bake in kiln (or perhaps
on a pizza stone).
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