Best Canadian Stories 2020

Victory Day Cassidy McFadzean

I’ve only been in Tbilisi twenty minutes when I’m smoking hash out of a can of Borjomi mineral water that Sasha lights for me. Nara and Davit have given me a ride from Yerevan where there’s two weeks remaining in the art residency, but I’ve brought all my luggage and haven’t decided if I’ll go back. Sasha sucks his lips against the can, and I tell him how our car was searched at the border, that I walked in on a guy at the squat toilet, standing naked from the waist down. Sasha asks if the guy had a bigger cock than him, and I don’t answer. Instead, I tell him I feel guilty for missing the election of Nikol Pashinyan and the celebrations of the new prime minister following the Armenian revolution.

“You were there for the important part,” he reassures me.

We have sex and when we come at the same time Sasha shouts, “Team sport.”

The next morning, we sleep late and smoke more hash at his desk, overlooking the mountain, forest, and graveyard below. Sasha has added more transplants from his forest hikes to the ceramic planter on his windowsill. He shows me the winding succulent, thin green stalks of something that resembles clover, and deep red grasses with small spiky flowers.

I ask if my breasts have gotten smaller while in Armenia, and he tells me that he is attracted to my body, which is not the answer I am looking for. “You were so anxious there,” he says, drawing his lips from the aluminum can to suck my right nipple. “My poor anxious poet, it’s good you came back.”

He’s taking me to the sulfur baths to make up for missing my birthday and on our way to Rustaveli Street, we pass the cemetery where an old man is building a section of concrete wall.

“Is he just going to build right over that gravestone?” Sasha says, gesturing to a stone in the side of the hill. He is aghast. He tells me that the Soviets used grave markings of people they didn’t like to construct new buildings.

The gravestone is etched with Georgian writing, and I make the observation that the characters of the Armenian language are angular, while Georgian is rounded. I wonder aloud whether this is reflected in the disposition of the two nations, citing the severity of the Armenians compared to the jolliness of the Georgians, or even their appearances: the skinny frames of Nara and Davit versus the fattened bellies of Sasha’s Georgian friends.

“You’re exoticizing again,” he says, grasping an unripe green fruit from a tree. “Soon you’ll be eating figs off the street.”

In my absence, roses have bloomed all over Tbilisi, red, pink, and white. We walk to the sulfur baths and pass cherry trees buzzing with flies as the hot smell of yeast rises from basement bakeries. All is in a state of exaggerated growth and fermentation. I step over a dead water beetle on the sidewalk, and we dodge fly-covered dog shit, pale yellow and frothing.

We get lunch at a restaurant close to the baths, and Sasha tells me the way I eat khinkali turns him on. Afterwards, he gets a boner in the sauna, but we don’t have any condoms. I’m tipsy from the beer we’ve brought with us and tell him I have my period so it’s okay. He bends me over a stone massage bed, and spits on his hand, rubbing it on his dick. He thrusts only a few times before stopping. “I don’t want to come inside you,” he says, and I drink the rest of our beer. When our time in the baths is up, my hair is still wet at the nape.

We walk until it dries, and Sasha holds onto my thumb, like he’s a little kid and I’m his mom. I make a squealing sound and he tells me sometimes I remind him of a wolf pup and other times of some sort of weasel.

We walk past men in yellow vests directing traffic and take the bus to an art show Sasha wants to see. A woman is passing out flyers and the girl in front of us tells her, “Shansi aris” which Sasha translates to “Not a chance.” We brainstorm ways to incorporate the word into our vocabulary. We board a bus, and though there’s nowhere to sit, it’s less crowded than any of the buses in Yerevan and I can grip a pole without men’s bodies pressing into me. Sasha pays with his transit card and hands me a ticket. The driver gestures at a pothole, announcing it with his hand like an orchestra conductor, and we laugh at his indignation.

“Shansi aris,” I say to the pothole, half a block behind us. We order beers at the art gallery and Sasha introduces me to Grigol, a young photographer who is presenting his work: a limited edition book consisting of photos of his parents’ youth in the Soviet Union. He discusses the project with a bashfulness I find endearing. Half the audience has opted to sit on the floor of the gallery and I watch Grigol’s eyes moving up and down as he surveys the crowd. The event is well documented—at least three people are taking pictures on their phones. There are two people with DSLRs and an older grey-haired man records the entire event. When he is finished speaking, Grigol takes questions from the audience. There are many queries including but not limited to: how old he is, whether his parents gave permission for the project, whether his project has opened conversations in his family, what he imagines is the reason for silence surrounding the Soviet years. A conversation like this would never occur in Toronto, where people are too self-conscious.

One woman remarks on the ubiquitousness of cameras for our generation and says that she doesn’t think such a project would be possible for the generations before Grigol’s parents, who are barely older than Sasha. The grey-haired man pauses recording to argue with the woman; he himself took many such photos in his youth and therefore he disagrees that his children would have no record. That was not what the woman was saying, however. She asks the man to consider how many cameras he saw in the hands of his peers growing up, but a full fledged argument breaks out in Russian, stealing attention from Grigol. The event concludes to scattered applause, and Sasha whispers that the old man is a famous photographer.

We finish our beers quickly. I te2ll Sasha I have cramps and need to find a bathroom, but he tells me there’s no public toilet. We stand outside with two women Sasha knows. They tell us about the fentanyl crisis that’s erupted over the past couple of weeks. There’s been more and more deaths and now government agencies are warning against using any sort of drugs.

“What about hash?” Sasha asks.

“I’m not sure,” one woman says. “Just to be safe they’re saying not to use anything.”

“What if I’ve already smoked it?”

“It’s definitely in MDMA,” she says. She tells us about a friend of a friend who used MDMA at the club one night, and ended up in a coma. The ecstasy was laced with fentanyl.

“I have a guy who uses the stuff before he splits it with me. If there was any problem, he’d let me know.”

“Just be careful,” she says.

We take a taxi to an abandoned warehouse where Nara’s group show is opening, and Sasha promises me there’s a bathroom. When we get there, Nara is in a white satin gown and I don’t feel the shame of being underdressed in jeans and Nikes because my guts are churning. She asks if I’m getting a ride back to Yerevan with them and I tell her I haven’t decided.

“We’re thinking of leaving tomorrow after lunch,” she says. “So let us know.”

“I will.”

I remind Sasha about the bathroom and he asks Davit where the toilets are, but he doesn’t know, and we run into Nara’s boss, who Sasha stands and talks with.

Finally, we go outside the warehouse and around the side of the building. There’s a dark room with a squat toilet that I use, expelling the black shit that often accompanies my period. I wipe with a napkin from my purse, and then rinse the squat toilet with a jug in the corner of the room. I feel slightly better, and Sasha insists that more alcohol will help. We go to a restaurant and split a bottle of rosé and he raises his glass, imitating the famous Georgian toasts.

“Someone’s twenty-nine,” he says. “Where did you think you’d be at twenty-nine, in your husband’s asshole?”

“I’m not in the asshole of my husband,” I say. “I’m shitting in a toilet.”

We go back to his place to smoke more hash and have sex. The skin on his pelvis is bumpy from shaving and resembles a plucked chicken. He gets on his back, and spreads his legs wide open. He is a dead chicken in a grocery store. I lay beside him and he sits on my face, and I shove his balls in my mouth. I insert a black silicone butt plug into his ass, pushing and pulling back and forth until he’s hard. He fucks me with the toy inside him, and when he comes, his moans are tender and feminine.

“You’re my monogamous girlfriend,” he whispers to me before falling asleep.

While I was in Yerevan, the smoking laws had come into effect in Tbilisi. Now we can work in all the cafes that Sasha was too allergic to enter before. We’re working on our laptops at a bar, and I pick his baseball cap off the table and place it on my head.

“Do you like looking like a clown in a public place?” he says. “Do you like looking comical?”

“What?”

“That hat is way too big.”

I don’t want him to know he’s hurt my feelings so I leave the hat on and take a selfie. My phone lights up with Nara’s name, but I ignore the call. Instead, we work for another hour and then take a taxi to the apartment Sasha has arranged for me to rent and that the landlord Joni says I can take early. Joni only speaks Russian and Georgian, and so I’ll have to communicate through Sasha, or the other expat tenant Chris, who Sasha says practices bass clarinet all day. The taxi drops us off beside the Terrace Hotel, and we descend the narrow cobblestone street next to the music school, where children are practicing piano scales. We reach the two-storey house and enter through a rusted green metal gate around back. Inside the courtyard is a fruit tree and a staircase to the apartments, two of which Sasha has already tried living in. They didn’t work out because of his allergies to mould, particleboard, detergent, and other yet unidentified sources.

“You’ll have fruit,” he says. “Maybe cherries.”

He carries my suitcase up the stairs, and leaves my luggage on the balcony while he goes up another flight of stairs to get Joni. They come down and Joni says, “gamarjoba” and I pay him the deposit. We take a picture of the electricity meter, and Joni translates through Sasha. There’s a feather pillow and a synthetic one, and I might consider unplugging the water heater to save a few lari on the power bill. I thank Joni using one of the few Georgian words I’ve memorized. “Madlobt,” I say. “Didi madloba.” He leaves us inside the apartment, which is partially built into the side of a hill, the other half a renovated porch.

Sasha gets the Wi-Fi password from Joni’s son in the neighbouring suite, and I open the kitchen cupboards. Inside, there’s a vegetable peeler, one pot, a knife, four spoons of various sizes, and a fork.

“I used the pot to make tea when I stayed here,” Sasha says.

There’s no matches and it looks like it will take forever to boil, but I agree it’s suitable. He enters the Wi-Fi password into my phone, and I open the fridge, which has been humming loudly since we arrived.

“This isn’t the one that was filled with all that meat?” I ask him, remembering Sasha’s anecdote of scrubbing blood out of a fridge his first week in Tbilisi.

“No, that was next door,” he tells me.

It’s cold in the apartment. I open the drawers in the bedroom wardrobe, and they’re filled with packets of insect poison. Sasha notices a square door in the wall, and makes a joke about a dungeon. He opens it, revealing a crawlspace a few square metres in size. He clicks a switch and a red bulb illuminates brick walls.

“I think it’s a good sign, this torture chamber in your apartment,” he says.

Although it’s cool in the apartment, he says he’ll have to ask Joni for a fan; he’s too allergic to stay inside even for a few hours.

“There’s no towels,” I tell him.

“You want me to ask Joni for towels?”

“I don’t know.”

“You come from a family of great artists and poor communicators,” he says. He runs back upstairs. I hear him speaking to Joni in Russian, and then in a few seconds, Sasha comes down alone.

“I told him to get a kettle for you and a fan,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“You should open these windows,” Sasha continues, unlatching the frames. “You could get some plants in here, hang them in the windows.”

“I’m barely going to be here,” I say.

“This place could be really nice,” he says. “I should get going.”

“Are we meeting later?”

“I’ll message you,” he says.

“Okay.”

After he leaves, I unzip my suitcase on the bed and hang my jacket on the hooks by the door, but I leave the rest of my clothes packed. With Sasha gone, the imperfections of the apartment are all the more apparent: the tile flooring of the kitchen is slanted, and all of the cupboards are crooked. In the bathroom, the container of hand soap slides off the sink, which is built on an angle. I pee and flush the toilet, but it takes three tries for the toilet paper to go down. The apartment is dark, and I can hear Joni’s son next door, exiting his suite and entering his bathroom, which has a separate entrance from the balcony. I close the windows Sasha opened but I still hear Joni’s son shitting into the toilet, and then talking on the phone in Georgian. I read in bed but after no more than half an hour Sasha messages me, asking if I want to come over.

“Okay,” I write him. “I just need to change.”

I move to the doorway of the bedroom, where I can’t be seen from the window, and change from shorts into jeans.

“On my way,” I write him.

I leave the apartment, turning the key two times behind me, though the lock is so flimsy the action feels pointless. I descend the stairs and exit the yard, the gate clattering behind and announcing my departure. I start back up the cobblestone street, stepping on the sharp edges of the rocks to keep my balance. I climb up the staircase and follow the landmarks Sasha pointed out on our drive there: the evenly spaced bins of garbage, the brown signpost. I walk along the road at the edge of the trees, passing the tin-clad dome of the church and the line-up of taxis in front of the forest. I walk along a wooden sidewalk where there’s construction, and then the sidewalk ends.

I stand in place as taxis zoom past.

“I don’t know if I just feel tired but I feel like this is stupid,” I text him. “Especially if you’re never staying over.”

“Come?”

“It’s dangerous, there’s no sidewalk,” I write. “I feel like I don’t get the point of this.”

I keep walking, pressing my body against the side of buildings, paint peeling from concrete. The next time I stop it’s to check directions.

“Hi,” Sasha writes. “Are you on your way or not?”

“Yes, but I’m annoyed.”

“Okay,” he says. “Are you still in the mood to come over?”

“It just doesn’t feel equal.”

“I invited you,” he says. “Don’t come if you don’t feel like it.”

“It just feels dumb.”

“I don’t know how to make you feel better,” he says. “I’m really allergic at your place. I have health issues. Maybe if we get a fan it will be better there.”

I stop checking my phone, and focus on walking the strip of sidewalk not blocked by garbage bins or parked cars. I keep my head down to watch for mounds of dog shit. I step over the body of a pale white gecko turned upside down, its tail removed from its torso. I soon reach another construction site, this one completely obscuring the sidewalk.

“Can you please calm yourself down?” my phone reads. “Please?”

I march down the middle of the street, moving to the side only when I hear the cars approaching from behind. When I come to the street that leads to Sasha’s apartment, the sidewalk begins again, and I climb the hill, passing the cemetery and reaching his building. I insert a ten tetri coin into the metal box in the elevator and press the number eight. The elevator jerks to his floor and soon opens to his landing. I press his doorbell and he answers, hugging me at the door.

“I’m glad you came,” he says. I come inside and take off my shoes. “I just feel frustrated,” I say. “I don’t see the point of renting a place if I’m going to be here every night.”

“You need an office,” he says. “And I needed you to have your own place. It’s for me to feel secure and for us to give this another try.”

“So we’re dating again?” I ask. “We’re monogamous?”

“You’re my monogamous girlfriend,” he says. “I love you and no other, but I need you to have your own apartment.”

“Okay,” I agree.

The next morning is the Day of Victory over Fascism. “Everyone else does May 8,” Sasha tells me on the taxi ride to Vake Park. “We do May 9 when the Soviets signed.”

We stayed up late smoking hash and slept in, and Sasha is worried we’ll miss the people in military uniforms or the nationalists picking fights with old grannies for wearing the orange and black ribbon of Saint George which commemorates Russian soldiers in WWII, symbolizes Russian patriotism, and is now illegal to wear.

We stop at the edge of the park. Sasha is disappointed by the size of the crowd, and tells me it was busier in previous years. Still, we navigate through the crowds of young people and families taking photographs in front of the fountains and head toward a group gathered at the foot of a giant stone figure with two outstretched hands, one clutching a flower. We squeeze past chairs set up in front of the military band, mostly occupied by the elderly. I comment that the band sounds like Tom Waits and Sasha seems happy that I’m getting into the spirit of things.

“There are the nationalists,” Sasha says, pointing to men in black T-shirts and camo at the Memorial of the Unknown Soldier.

We watch parents pushing to the front of the memorial, where they take pictures of their children placing flowers on the stone surrounding a small burning flame. News cameras are arranged in formation, and Sasha points to the men dressed in green fatigues surrounding a photograph propped up on the feet of the stone figure. “There’s the photograph of Stalin.”

I realize that the men standing on either side of the memorial are in fact guarding the controversial figure. Stalin is still revered and worshipped in the region, Sasha explains, mostly by the elderly, but the men surrounding the memorial aren’t exactly geriatric.

“I want to punch them in the face,” he says. “Should I do it?”

He tells me about a Stalin statue that stood in Gori for fifty years, before being removed by police cordon in the middle of the night. It is illegal to put up any new Soviet symbols on buildings or signs, but old symbols can stay.

“So is that why people wear the ribbons?” I ask. “As protest?”

“Some people think things were better under the Russians,” he says.

“They’re idiots for wearing them, but the Georgian nationalists are no better.”

We watch a group of young men harassing a group of old ladies, each wearing the ribbons. The scene at the park crystallizes. Sasha points out the police officers and politicians, the Russian sympathizers, the group of Georgian nationalists on the far end of the park carrying signs with an image of the ribbons crossed out like a no smoking sign.

“There they are,” he says. “Maybe a fight will break out.”

We observe the young men following the old ladies away from the memorial and toward the edge of the park. Sasha considers approaching the men, but thinks better of it. He tells me he’s worried he’s talking down to me and I tell him I enjoy his play-by-play. This makes him even more exuberant and he divulges something that happened the year before that he hasn’t told anyone.

“I stole the portrait of Stalin and burned it in the flame,” he tells me.

“It was in the evening but there were still a few people gathered. I ripped it in half and burned the pieces. And then I left the park before anyone could do anything.”

He tells me he’s thinking of doing it again this year, but there are too many people, and he’s afraid of the nationalists.

“Am I a coward?” he asks me. “What would you do?”

I want to watch him rip the photograph and burn it in the flame, but I tell him to listen to his gut. We stand on the edge of the memorial for a few more minutes, Sasha waiting for an opportune moment to rip the photograph away from the group of middle-aged men and teenagers, but the moment passes, and I know he isn’t going to act.

“People are watching us,” he says. “We’ve been standing here too long.”

I follow as he abruptly turns and heads for the fountains. We walk past teenagers posing for pictures in the ankle-deep water. Sasha points out the old men wearing military uniforms adorned with medals. “Some of them are faking it,” he says. “Wearing their fathers’ uniforms for the attention or praise. Most people that fought in the war are dead now.

This guy looks pretty young. I should ask him how old he is, but his medals look real.”

A group of men in leather jackets pass by. “They’re the Georgian nationalist bikers,” Sasha says. “All they care about is ripping ribbons off old people.”

We reach the edge of the park where the anti-Russian protesters are gathered, holding signs. “Georgia is an occupied state,” Sasha reminds me. “They consider the Russians their colonizers.”

Sasha calls out to the old man from the photography event, who’s carrying his camera and photographing the various factions of people. Sasha laments the lack of activity compared to the year before and the man tells us that the opposing political party was apparently banned from entering the park.

“It’s a public event,” Sasha says. “That’s ridiculous.”

“The police must have thought they’d start trouble.”

We reach the edge of the park, and we rest on a bench. “Okay, my monogamous girlfriend,” Sasha says. “Do you want to get food?”

I’m tired of Georgian food, oily eggplant and heavy khinkali, so opt for his favourite buffet, which Sasha warns is going to be a madhouse.

“You take a number and everyone’s salivating over the glass display case,” he says. “It’s usually a war zone in here. They installed the number system to add some civility, but sometimes forego it entirely.”

We try a new location on the edge of Vake Park and Sasha is disappointed that it’s not as chaotic as he imagined. “I guess no one’s heard about this one yet,” he says.

He chews with his mouth open, meat sticking to his lips, as he asks whether I’m still thinking of heading back to Yerevan to finish the residency.

“Davit and Nara have already left,” I tell him.

“You could take the marshrutka.”

“Then what was the point of getting the apartment early?” I say. “I thought that meant you wanted me to stay.”

“I asked you to come, and I’m glad you did,” he says. “But you should think about yourself. Don’t you think it looks bad to leave the residency early?”

“You think I should tell them that I left? You told me it was fine.”

“Well, if you’re not going back you should probably email someone.”

I start to cry, and Sasha tells me he’s sorry for bringing it up.

“I’m only trying to look out for you,” he says. “I say this because I care.”

When we have sex that afternoon, Sasha asks if I’m still on my period and comments that I’m dry. He spits onto his hand and rubs it on my cunt.

“You don’t seem that into it,” he says.

“I am,” I say. We lazily start fucking, but he asks to stop after a few minutes.

“I lost my boner,” he says. “I was thinking of World War Two and the Ukrainians murdering Jews. My mom will be happy.”

He gets up to use the bathroom and I scroll through the pictures of Yerevan I have saved on my phone. I’ve decided to pretend I’m still in Armenia, that I haven’t left the revolution for the asshole of my boyfriend. I hear Sasha showering, and settle on a picture of Mount Ararat taken from the Cascades on my last clear morning, its peak a wisp of cloud floating over the last of the Soviet expansion blocks, weightless and free.