Four Days in Tbilisi

I have spent the greater part of my adult life looking at photographs of other people's lives, deciding, with what I took to be a connoisseur's detachment, which of them deserved a wall and which a polite letter of refusal, and it did not occur to me, not once in all those years of bent-over light tables and contact sheets held up to the window, that I would one day require a frame for my own, that the practiced eye which had taught itself to find the half-second in which a composition stops describing the world and starts confessing something about the person who made it would prove, in the end, no use to me at all when turned upon myself. I went to Tbilisi as a director, a man with a folder of names he had memorized on the plane and a manner, cultivated over decades, of entering rooms as though he had always been expected in them; I came back something else, though it took me longer than four days to understand what. And even now I am not entirely certain I have the words for it, only the persistent sense that somewhere in that city I left a version of myself I have not been able to find since.

I arrived in Tbilisi in the early hours of a morning that did not feel like morning at all, the light over the runway the color of weak tea, and my colleague was waiting for me past the doors of the arrivals hall, recognizable to me at once and yet not at all as I had pictured her, which is to say that the months of correspondence that had preceded this moment had constructed someone who turned out to be both perfectly familiar and a complete stranger, and I did not know which of these two facts to trust.

She took me first to breakfast, to a place near the airport that she said she had chosen because it would still be quiet at that hour, and I remember almost nothing of what we ate and a great deal of the light coming through the window beside her, and the way she spoke, in person, more slowly than she did on the calls, as though the screen had been compressing her in some way neither of us had noticed until it was removed. I brought simple gifts, mementoes of past gallery exhibitions, and a Brooklyn sweatshirt for her son whose birthday was in a few days. From breakfast she drove me to the hotel, and I recall almost nothing else of that first morning except that I slept, once she had driven off, for the better part of the day, a sleep so total that when I woke I had for some seconds no recollection of the country I was in.

She drove me out into the countryside, to a church built, she told me, in the fourth century, a building so old that its age seemed to have stopped functioning as a fact and become instead a kind of atmosphere, and from there on to a series of villages that I have since been unable to distinguish from one another in memory, each one beautiful in a way that asked nothing of me, which was precisely why I noticed it. In the evening she took me to dinner and introduced me to the food of her country, ordering for both of us, and at some point in the meal she taught me the correct way to eat the dumplings, the particular grip and tilt required to keep the broth inside from escaping before the first bite, demonstrating the technique with her own hands across the table while I attempted, with limited success, to follow, and I understood, somewhere in the course of being instructed in this small and entirely practical skill, that I had begun, without deciding to, to experience the evening as something other than what it was supposed to be. That it had begun, in whatever part of the mind keeps track of such things, to resemble a date. 

The following morning she was occupied with the last preparations, the kind of small emergencies that precede any opening, and I did not see her until midday, when I met her at the museum and we spent the afternoon supervising the hanging of the photographs, speaking to each other, as far as I can recall, only of the work in front of us; and that was the whole of the day, after which I went back to the hotel by myself, and ate dinner, I believe, alone, though I could not now say with any certainty what, or whether I ate at all.

On the day of the exhibition we met at the museum, a museum of modern art that had given over a portion of its rooms to the prints we had spent those nights and afternoons arranging, and she had asked me, some days before, whether I had brought something special to wear, a question I had taken, at the time, as a practical one. The guests began arriving in the late afternoon, mostly her friends, her colleagues, people whose names I would be told once and would not, in most cases, retain, and among them, at some point I could not afterward pin to any particular hour, I noticed a boy, twelve years of age, wearing a sweatshirt with Brooklyn printed across it, and it took me a moment longer than it should have to understand that this was her son, and that the sweatshirt was the one I had handed to his mother, and that he was wearing it, on this evening of all evenings, with what seemed to me an entirely unselfconscious pride.

The rooms filled further. I spent what felt like a very short time and was, I am told, several hours, greeting people I had never met and would likely not meet again, and it was, for all of that, a wonderful few hours, the kind that does not announce itself until it is over. At some point during all of this a young guest asked if she might take our picture, and produced, instead of a phone, an actual Polaroid camera, and took two photographs of us standing together among the exhibition photographs, handing one to each of us before the chemical had even finished setting, so that we stood there for a moment watching our own faces arrive out of the grey, an image developing in the old manner I had spent a career doing and had not seen produced in front of me like this in years. I gave a short speech, opening and closing it with the two words of her language I had troubled to learn correctly, and she embraced me afterward in front of everyone, briefly, the way one embraces a colleague, though I would be lying if I said I experienced it only that way. The museum's director, visibly moved by the exhibition, asked whether we might leave it hanging for some additional weeks beyond what had been arranged, and we agreed at once, pleased, and not long after I returned to the hotel and slept, for the first time in some days, without difficulty.

It is only now, writing this, that I find myself returning to an evening some days before the opening, out of its proper sequence, as though the memory had been waiting for a less guarded moment to present itself. She had taken me up out of the city that day, along a cobbled path that wound for what felt like a considerable distance up the side of a hill, until we arrived at a bench, metal and somewhat cold to sit on even in that warmth, set at a point on the hillside from which the whole of Tbilisi was visible below us in the late light, the roofs and the particular haze that gathers over a city at that hour, and she told me, sitting down beside me, that this was a place she came to often, alone, when she needed, as she put it, to nourish her soul, a phrase she offered without any apparent self-consciousness, as though it were simply a fact about the bench rather than a confession about herself. We sat there for some while without speaking a great deal, and what conversation there was seemed to move more slowly than it had anywhere else in the preceding days, and I understood that I was being given something rather than merely shown it, that this was not a stop on an itinerary of beautiful places but an admission into a part of her life she did not share readily, and I remember the particular quality of the light, and the wind, and a feeling, difficult to name even now, of having been trusted with something I had not earned and was not at all certain what to do with.

The day following the exhibition several of us who had been at the opening went together to see a bomb shelter built in the Soviet years, a low concrete warren under the city that our guide moved through with the particular flat cheerfulness of someone long accustomed to narrating catastrophe to tourists, and afterward she drove several of us up into a mountain village where we drank coffee at a table set outside, overlooking a countryside that seemed, by then, almost too much to absorb, so many days having already been spent absorbing it. In the evening we dined in a restaurant of her choosing, the two of us, where we were shown, between courses, a performance of traditional dance, the dancers moving with a controlled violence that struck me as oddly appropriate to the evening. It was at some point during or just after this performance that we spoke, in the kind of plain language that one uses only when more careful language has been exhausted, of what I can only describe as a devotion to one another — a word neither of us had used before and which I have not entirely known what to do with since.

She drove me to the airport in the morning. We embraced for a long time at the entrance, longer than either of us could account for, and there were tears in my eyes. I waved to her once more as I rose on the escalator and out of her sight

I do not know how long I sat in the airport with the Polaroid of the two of us before I boarded, the print a little soft now at the corner where I had been holding it, knowing that somewhere on the other side of the city she had its twin, the same two faces, and that this was, in its way, the only language either of us had managed: not a sentence, but a photograph split in two, half kept by each of us, the kind of thing that does not require translation because it was never trying to say anything in the first place. 

Somewhere over the ocean, with nothing to do for several hours and no one beside me to interrupt my thinking, I kept coming back to the same question: how does a man let a woman know that what he feels for her isn't romantic, isn't passion, asks nothing of her and promises her nothing, and yet isn't a small thing either, just different from what those words usually mean. I didn't have an answer. Every version of the sentence I tried out in my head sounded either like a confession pretending to be an apology, or an apology pretending to be a confession, and I couldn't tell which one I actually meant.