Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

NIGHT TRAIN TO TBILISI

THE TROUBLE IN TRABZON, on the Black Sea, where I found filthy weather, ugly rumors, and ill tidings, was the incident that had slipped Professor Halman's mind: the murder a month before of an unbeliever in a fit of sentimental fury. This singular outrage — singular because such things seldom happened in Turkey — was the shooting of an Italian priest, Father Andrea Santoro, by an overexcited Islamist named Oguz intending to avenge the honor of Muhammad in a controversy over mocking cartoons of the Prophet that had appeared in various European newspapers. Oguz, who was sixteen, was caught the day after the murder, and Father Santoro's corpse was given a solemn sendoff, attended by the highest Muslim clergy in Turkey, the muftis.

Symbolism is everything in religious strife, which is why it looks so logical, while being so stupid and brutal. The Catholic was singled out and shot for symbolizing the enemy, as any outsider might be, including me. The poor man had been praying in a back pew of the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon, where, on an average Sunday, there were no more than a dozen communicants. Rare as this murder was, it was so recent it concentrated my mind on leaving Trabzon. On arriving I'd asked, "What are the sights?" and been told the ancient mosque was a must-see. It was a Friday, a day of prayer in this (so I was also told) pious city. I should add that not once in Turkey was I hassled for being an unbeliever, nor was the subject ever mentioned. But the rain got me down, so I began to look for ways to escape it.

Because there was no train, I had arrived on the night bus from Ankara, the Ulusoy coach — Greyhound standard — with frequent pit stops on the twelve-hour ride to the northeast, allowing passengers to get out and smoke, since smoking had been banned on Turkish buses. The exception was the bus driver, who could light up as much as he wished. These were also eating stops, at rest-area cafeterias, where the food was not bad: thick soup, trays of reddish beans, sinister slabs of meat drifting in black gravy, scorched kebabs, and bread in round loaves the diameter of a steering wheel.

Over the mountains in darkness from Ankara, and still in darkness to Samsun and the edge of the Black Sea, we followed the coast road serenely until the day lifted. In the dreary, sunless dawn the towns on the shore, Ordu, Giresun, Tirebolu, and nameless little settlements, looked ugly and lifeless, with hideous new buildings and ramshackle older ones on the barren coast. Yet the steep escarpment just behind the coast was beautiful, dark with wooded hills, and farther back the mountains loomed in a tangle of rain clouds.

The sight of the Black Sea made the passengers happy. They were all Turks, clearly glad to be away from Ankara, which was overbuilt and modern, set in the dry hills; this was the drizzly shore of an inland sea.

"Karadeniz," the old man next to me said when he woke and saw the water. I had once sailed on a Turkish ship called the Akdeniz—meaning the White Sea, which is what the Turks call the Mediterranean — so I understood this as the Black Sea. He marveled, smiled, elbowed his wife in the ribs. Like the other men on the bus he wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. In the course of the twelve-hour ride through the night, these men loosened their ties a little.

Judging from what I'd seen from Istanbul to Ankara to Trabzon, a building boom had overwhelmed Turkey, new houses everywhere, and the newer ones were dreadful, lopsided, misshapen, thrown together, and looked dangerously combustible; they were famous for falling down at the slightest earth tremor, of which seismic-prone Turkey had plenty.

But once I stowed my bag in a bus station locker and hiked to the foot of Trabzon's hill and up the steep winding streets to the middle of town, I changed my mind about the ugly houses. Trabzon was a pleasant place, even in the rain: a compact town center, the usual Turkish shops selling food and clothes and sweets, but also something I hadn't expected: banyos, bathhouses. And I had the sense they were traditional baths and that this was not a euphemism for knocking shops.

I saw a man being luxuriously shaved in a barbershop, so I went in and, using grunts and signs, asked for the same. The whole process, with a haircut, took forty-five minutes; after the long bus ride I was restored.

Near the barbershop was a hotel that was undistinguished but clean. The room rate was $350 a night — who would pay that in Trabzon? Instead of checking in, I used the breakfast buffet in the restaurant, telling the clerk that I would pay for it. He said okay, so I idled over breakfast and tried to make a plan for my onward journey. I had seriously pondered my options: after weeks of travel I was still facing terrible weather, wet and cold, the north wind blowing off the Black Sea from Odessa; the recent murder of the Italian priest, for being Christian, was not encouraging; and the main point of interest in Trabzon was a mosque.

When I finished, deciding that I would head east, out of town, and took out my money, the clerk waved me away. I repeated that I was not a guest of the hotel. The clerk just smiled and said, "No problem," indicated that it was a slow day in Trabzon, and added, "Beer-shay de-eel" — You're welcome.

I walked back to where I had stowed my bag and on the way saw a sign advertising buses to the Georgia border and beyond: Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, and other distant places. I went into a bus agency, and the door chime went ding-dong. Some women in black gowns were watching the Iraqi war news — scenes of American tanks — on a black-and-white television. They were eating pink popcorn out of a bag.

"Ticket, please?"

But the man at the desk scarcely looked up from his newspaper.

"Bus is fool."

"Just one seat," I said.

"Is fool"

"Excuse me, effendi." This politeness seized his attention. "I have serious business in Teeflees," I said, using the Turkish pronunciation. "Very serious."

He looked up at me and licked his thumb, manipulated a printed pad, and clicking his pen wrote me a ticket.

"Leaving at thirteen o'clock," he said and went back to his newspaper. The shrouded women had kept their attention on the war news.

But in the event, the bus left at noon — good thing I was early, drinking a coffee next door to the stop. The bus was more than full: many people were sitting on the floor, on each other's laps, or straphanging. I could see no space at all. The driver poked my arm and said gruffly, "You sit here," and indicated a cushion next to him, on the step. "In Hopa, many seats." Hopa was near the Turkish border; the border post was a place called Sarp.

So I sat on a cushion on the floor of this crowded, beat-up bus, pleased with myself for being an older man, thus invisible, ghostly, grubbier than most of the bus passengers, some of them Turks going to Hopa, and the rest Georgians on their way over the border to Batumi. The Georgians were the ones with big black plastic sacks, bulging with Turkish goods that were apparently unobtainable in Georgia — children's clothes, toys, toasters, telephones, microwave ovens, and boxes of cookies. All this luggage boded ill for the upcoming customs inspection.

Only a hundred-odd miles to Hopa, but the entire coast road was being repaved, and we went so slowly and stopped so often the trip took five hours. I told myself that I was not in any hurry, and I smiled when I remembered saying to the ticket seller, I have serious business in Teeflees, because I had no business at all. This was one of those times when I was reminded again of how travel was a bumming evasion, a cheap excuse for intruding upon other people's privacy.

We passed some friendly-looking towns, and stopped at many to pick up passengers. At Rize and Pazar we stopped for food. The hills beyond Rize were dark with tea bushes, and the Black Sea was motionless, as though we were at the shore of a glorified lake — no current, no tide, no chop or waves, more famous now for allowing prostitutes to be ferried across the water from Odessa to the Turkish shore.

We went through Hopa, where a two-mile line of trucks was parked, awaiting permission to go farther. I got off the bus at the border, Sarp. The driver told me that we would all go through customs and immigration and then meet again and reboard the bus on the Georgian side. I thought: Not me, effendi.

One of the pleasures of such a journey is walking across a border, strolling from one country to another, especially countries where there is no common language. Turkish is incomprehensible to Georgians, and Georgians boast that there is no language on earth that resembles Georgian; it is not in the Indo-European family but rather the Kartvelian, or South Caucasian, one. Georgians triumphantly point out that their language is unique, since the word for mother is deda and the word for father is mama.

I paid $20 for a Georgian visa, got my passport stamped, was saluted by the soldier on duty, and walked into Georgia, where I learned there was a two-hour time difference from the other side of the border. It would be an hour or more before the bus passengers cleared their toasters and microwaves through Turkish customs. So when a Georgian taxi driver began pestering me, I listened — more than that, I offered him a cup of coffee.

His name was Sergei. We sat in a border café, out of the rain. He said business was not good. I looked for something to eat, but there were only stale buns and boxes of crackers. As soon as you leave Turkey, by whatever border crossing, the quality of the food plunges.

"You go Batumi?"

I said, "Maybe. How much?"

He mentioned a sum of money in Georgian lari. I translated this into dollars and said, "Ten dollars. Batumi."

This delighted him. And Batumi was thirty miles away, so I was happy too.

"You get bus, Batumi to Tbilisi."

"How long does it take?" I asked.

"Six o'clock. Seven o'clock."

He meant six or seven hours. I said, "Is there a train?"

"Yes, but train take nine o'clock, ten o'clock."

"Sleeping car—Schlafwagen?"

He nodded, yes. So I threw my bag in the back seat of his car, got in the front with him, and off we went, dodging potholes and deep mud puddles. The road was empty. He said that in the summer people flocked here for a Black Sea vacation, but I found this hard to imagine: there were no obvious hotels; the houses were small and dark, as though mossy; the coastal road was in bad shape and, unlike its Turkish counterpart, was not being repaired.

Never mind, I was bouncing towards Batumi in a cold drizzly dusk — into the unknown, a place I'd never been. Its very dreariness and decrepitude were a consolation. I could see from the border, the roadside, Sergei in his old car, and the men laboring with pushcarts that this was a benighted place, not expensive, and slightly creepy — wonderful, really, because I was alone and had all the time in the world. No sign of any other tourist or traveler; I had walked across the frontier into this wolfish landscape. And if Sergei was correct in saying that there was a night train to Tbilisi, it would be perfect.

It seemed to me that this was the whole point of traveling — to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and did not instantly think of me as money on two legs. Life was harder but simpler here — I could see it in the rough houses and the crummy roads and the hayricks and the boys herding goats. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans was a liberating event. I told myself that it was a solemn occasion for discovery, but I knew better: it was more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet.

Batumi was a low coastal town of puddly streets and dimly lit shops and Georgians in heavy clothes hunched over, plodding in the rain. On the outskirts were plump central Asian bungalows, and approaching the center of town at dusk was like entering a cloudy time warp where it was permanently muddy and old-fashioned. In the 1870s it had been a boom town built on the oil fortunes of the Rothschilds and the Nobels.

"Football," Sergei said.

We passed a muddy soccer field.

"Sharsh."

We passed a round church with an elaborate spire and a sharp-edged Christian cross on top.

"Shakmat club."

Shakmat is Persian for checkmate: "king death." The chess club, a big building and one of the newest in Batumi.

We kept going, and Sergei conveyed to me in broken English that the train station was not in Batumi but farther up the coast in a village called Makinjauri, where passengers boarded and tickets could be bought.

This, the last, westernmost stop on the Trans-Caucasian Railroad, was not a station but rather a rural platform under a grove of leafless trees and bright lights. Near it stood a ticket booth, the size and shape of one of those narrow little carnival sheds that offer tickets to the merry-go-round. I bought a first-class berth to Tbilisi for about $15 and felt I had lucked out, for the train was not leaving for hours. I paid off Sergei and enthusiastically tipped him for being helpful, then wandered around, looking for a place to eat.

Babushkas in aprons, bulky skirts, headscarves, and thick leggings welcomed me into a cold, lamp-lit one-room restaurant, and one of them, explaining with gestures, made me a Georgian dish — a big round puffy loaf filled with cheese and baked in a pan, then cut into wedges. Peasant food, simple and filling. I drank two soapy-tasting bottles of beer and asked for more detail, which they cheerfully gave me: as we were in Batumi, this was Adjaruli cuisine — west Georgian style.

Some factory workers stopped in, and their English was sufficient for them to explain to me that they came here every evening at this time for the stew; so I ordered some of that, too, and like them, ate it with a wheel of bread.

"What country?"

"America."

"Good country. I want to go!"

A sense of out of this world, I scribbled in my notebook between bites. Cold, dirty room, old beaky women with raw hands in thick clothes; poor lighting, jumping shadows, a sputtering samovar, people talking in low voices; all weirdly pleasant. At the ragged edge of Georgia — the ragged edge of Turkey, too — I was happy.

At some point the rain stopped. The darkness turned frigid, the night glistening with frost crystals that were star-like, and overhead, stars were visible above the Black Sea. At Makinjauri Station, on the exposed platform, a hundred or so people waiting for the train were stamping their feet and chafing their hands to keep warm, yawning because it was so late and so cold.

I had a compartment to myself. I bought some bottled water from a stall on the platform. Two blankets and a quilt were piled on my berth, and after punching my ticket the conductor gave me a sealed package: bed sheets with bunnies printed on them.

So I lay down and read the opening pages of Conrad's The Shadow-Line and fell asleep as we traveled north along the coast and then headed inland.

It was an old noisy train with clanging wheels, and couplings that banged as we went through the mountains; but it rocked like a cast-iron cradle, and I slept so well on the ten-hour trip I did not awake until we were almost at Tbilisi.

Even on the outskirts of the capital the full moon lighted the huts in the hills, giving it all the look of a Gothic landscape, darkness and blunted shadow, and rooftops and hilltops bluey white from the cold moon. As I watched from the window outside my compartment, I nod ded to another watcher, a man in a blue suit, plump, a head of white hair, a cell phone to his ear, and when I smiled he sprang forward and shook my hand. The clamminess of his handshake made me guess that he was a Georgian politician. He acknowledged that he was, of President Mikhail Saakashvili's party.

Tbilisi Station was grim, poorly lit, stinking of ragged squatters, littered with blowing papers, and on a frosty morning in March not a place I wanted to linger. I took a taxi and, choosing a hotel at random, checked in and went for a walk.

***

IN THE COURSE OF IDLING THERE, I found that Georgians do not call their country Georgia. They give it its ancient name, Sakartvelo, after its legendary founder. "Georgia" is from the Persian Gorjestan, Land of the Wolf. Armenians call the place Vir, another ancient name, a variation of "Iberia." But by whatever name, it was a supine and beleaguered country of people narcissistic about their differences.

I thought: If you simply flew into Tbilisi, you'd take this to be a pleasant if elderly-looking city of some lovely buildings and quite a few decaying older ones; of many — perhaps too many — gambling casinos; of boulevards and genteel tenements and ancient churches sited with emphatic plumpness on the rocky splendor of low hills; a presentable city divided by the gull-clawed Kura River. And you would be utterly deceived by this look of prosperity.

Overland from Turkey, through Hopa and Sarp and muddy Batumi, from the frosty platform at Makinjauri and onward, passing the towns and villages of Kutaisi, Khashuri, Kaspi, and Gori — Gori, where Iosif Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin, was born in 1879, "a lame, pock-marked, web-toed boy," urchin, street fighter, and choirboy at Gori Church School, before going to a seminary in Tbilisi and becoming a gang leader and bank robber — the railway line showed that Georgia is essentially a peasant economy, struggling, backward-looking, Russophobic, mildly discontented, riven by dissent over the breakaway province of Abkhazia, and, in the raw dark days of late winter, proud but hard-pressed.

Many people in Tbilisi mentioned to me how, less than two months before, in one of the coldest winters in memory, the Russians had cut off Georgia's supply of natural gas. Within hours, the heat vanished from all households and factories, and a black frost descended. Other than firewood — and even that was in short supply in the deforested countryside — Georgia had no energy of its own. The country was without power, Tbilisi seized up, the traffic lights went off, businesses shut down, schools and hospitals were in darkness. The Russians claimed that terrorists had blown up the gas pipeline, but President Saakashvili loudly denounced the Russians, accusing them of deliberate malice — after all, Ukrainians had not long before suffered the same frozen fate when their energy payments to Russia were in arrears.

Politicians in the Georgian cabinet ostentatiously handed out cans of kerosene. Less ostentatiously, trucks dumped loads of firewood on street corners for people to fight over. But the temperature remained below freezing, the river was iced over, the snow was deep, and fresh snowfalls blocked the thoroughfares.

"People were building fires in the streets to keep warm," a woman told me.

Russophobia in Georgia reached new levels of intensity as the whole country shivered; and at last, after a week of suffering, Tbilisi looking as if doomsday had come — snowbound, frozen, corpse-like, frostbitten — the gas supply returned. But Georgia was reminded of its vulnerability, its poverty, its desperation, its dependence on Russia, and its lack of adequate resources.

The weather was still cold and foggy when I arrived, but out of curiosity I decided to stay put for a few days. The hotel I'd found was near the center of the city; I set off walking. I had arrived on a weekend, when people from Tbilisi and the suburbs hold a collective flea market on the streets near the river and across the bridge — and so I was able to see people parting with light fixtures and lamps, faucets, postcards, plastic souvenirs, photographs, brassware, radios, candlesticks, samovars, and religious paraphernalia, including crucifixes and paintings. Business was slow; there were many more sellers than buyers. The hawkers were older people, obviously trying to raise money, and it was obvious too that in many cases they were offering heirlooms for sale, literally the family silver — plates, spoons, salt shakers, teapots. The items that interested me were the icons, some of them silver or silver-plated, and after a few days of browsing, I bought a silver icon.

Big central Asian porches of shaped wooden gingerbread and carved screens jutted from some older buildings, and one whole district of traditional houses — and mosques, and a synagogue, too — had been reno vated. But walking in a drearier part of the city, I passed a large crowd of people jostling on a sidewalk, an irregular line of contending humans in ragged clothes trying to squeeze themselves against a narrow door that gave onto David Agmashenebeli Avenue.

A young man appeared from inside the door and held up a square of cardboard with a number on it. I could read it: 471. As though she'd just won at bingo, an old woman, looking pleased, screeched and waved a scrap of paper — her number was 471—and she pushed herself through the crowd and into the doorway.

This happened two more times while I watched. More numbers were announced—472, 473—and the winners admitted to the building. The building had an air of elegance, though like many others in this district it had fallen into ruin. But there was no sign on the building, only the crowd of people out front, each person waiting for his or her number to be called. What exactly was happening?

"Excuse me." I followed the last people in. They were a small family — father, mother, child. They did not look distressed; they were warmly clothed, and the man had been bantering with the others left standing on the street corner, impatiently jostling.

What seemed to me an old haunted mansion had a lobby like a ballroom, with a high ceiling, leaded windows, some of them fitted with stained glass. Still, it seemed less like a mansion than a Masonic hall. No one challenged me, so I kept walking and looking around — the place was pleasantly warm and smelled of fresh bread. I followed the aroma and found two twenty-year-olds who were English-speakers, Marina and Alex.

"What's happening here?" I asked.

"This is the House of Charity," Alex said.

Marina stepped back and gestured. She said, "And this is the man."

A pale, rather small man with a thin fox-like face and dark close-set eyes swept forward and stared at me, not in hostility but in a sort of querulous nibbling welcome. He wore a vaguely clerical outfit: black frock coat buttoned to his chin, an overcoat draped like a cape over his shoulders. Adding to his mysterious ecclesiasticism were his black boots, an occult-looking insignia on a heavy chain around his neck, and pinned to one lapel a ribbon-like adornment. He was about fifty, strangely confident for such a pale soul, and upright, with the messianic stare you find in people who have a sense of destiny, a belief that they are doing the right thing. In his heavy cape-like coat, his pasted-down hair, and his sallow, somewhat tormented saint's face, I put him down in my notebook in one word, Dostoyevskian.

"This — everything you see — was his idea," Marina said.

"What do you do here?"

Instead of answering my question, Marina translated it for the man in black, and he replied in Georgian, which she translated back into English.

"We feed people," he said. "We feed all the people. Usually we feed about three hundred fifty a day, but today is Open Door Day, so we will be feeding fifteen hundred people."

"Are all of them poor?" I asked. This was translated.

"We ask no questions. Everyone is welcome. Some of them can afford to buy food, others are starving, but we make no distinction."

"Is this part of some religion?"

The pale man smiled when he heard this. He had tiny, even teeth in his vulpine, small boy's face. He said triumphantly, "No message! No religion!"

"So ask him why he does it," I said to Marina.

She spoke for a while with him, he gave monosyllabic replies, and finally he shrugged and uttered a few sentences in Georgian.

"He says the reasons are too deep to discuss. It could take days to explain why he does this."

Meanwhile, numbers were being shouted at the front door. Hungry people were hurrying in, smiling sated people were leaving, poking their yellow teeth with toothpicks.

"How about just a hint?" I asked, and Marina pressed him.

He replied, "In 1989, many men were seeking power and had political ambition." He meant at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Georgia was free. I decided to do something different from that — maybe the opposite of seeking power, something humble and helpful, not political, not religious either. This was what I thought of."

Now people were pushing past us to get to the dining hall, which had a number of tables big and small, about 150 places. When a person vacated a chair, a number was displayed outside and a hungry person tore in, scuffing in wet boots towards the smell of food.

We stepped back to let the traffic flow. I asked the man his name.

He was Oleg Lazar-Aladashvili, and he called this effort Catharsis. He had run it for the past sixteen years.

"Catharsis, in Greek, means spiritual cleansing through compassion," he said. ("Spiritual renewal through purgation," my dictionary also explains.)

"We have another house in Moscow," he said. "Our principles are charity, nonviolence, and anti-AIDS. We also provide medical services and help to homeless people."

"To anyone who asks?"

He became specific. He said, "We provide help not as a gift but as a reward for work." Everyone who was helped had to pitch in and do something — either assist in one of the programs or be a janitor in the building.

Oleg said that the building, this mansion that had confused me, had been the headquarters of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, but the party no longer mattered. People who'd benefited from Catharsis had helped paint and decorate it, made murals, tapestries, and pictures. Wealthy families in Tbilisi had contributed jewelry, paintings, icons, and antiques. Pope John Paul II had visited in February 1999 and donated a Bible. The Archbishop of Canterbury had also visited. Their signed pictures were hung in Oleg's office, which had an ecclesiastical atmosphere — heavy furniture, velvet cushions, gold tassels, a maroon carpet, stained-glass windows, leather-bound books, an enormous desk.

I gave Marina a $20 bill and said that I would like to have a meal in the dining room.

"It is free," Oleg said.

"But take the money anyway," I said.

"Money makes no difference. The food is for everyone. We don't scrutinize the people we feed."

Perhaps without realizing it, Oleg had paraphrased one of the precepts of the Diamond Sutra: Buddha teaches that the mind of a Bodhisattva should not accept the appearances of things as a basis when exercising charity.

"Please," I said, and put the money in his hand.

"You must have a receipt," Marina said.

"You can give it to me later."

"No. The receipt must be given now."

The special pad had to be found, then a pen, and finally a special stamp — the insignia of Catharsis, which was an upright bar with a diagonal crossbar and some squiggles. This took longer than I expected, and in their fuss to provide a receipt I began to regret my donation, pathetically small though it was. The laborious business to give me a receipt was like satirizing my twenty bucks.

Then they escorted me to the dining hall — one of the three dining rooms. After the religiosity of the office, this scene was almost Chaucerian, something medieval and bawdy about each heavily dressed, red-faced person gobbling at a big tin bowl of soup and a big bowl of bread — a whole round loaf cut into chunks — and a saucer of noodle salad sprinkled with oregano. The clank of spoons, the slurping of soup, the laughter, the yelling, children squawking, bowls being brought in on trays and banged down on the trestle tables: it was a rollicking scene of appetite and good cheer. And there were serving wenches — girls in aprons with mobcaps and billowy blouses, their faces glowing, perspiring from their work of wiping down tables and serving soup.

Isabella Kraft was one of them. She was from Cologne, Germany, from a large family — she had brothers and sisters. She was twenty, slightly built, blond, very pretty, and looking overworked and earnest, ringlets of dampened hair adhering to her forehead.

"I've been here six months," she told me. "I'll be here for a year altogether. I finished school and I heard they needed people."

All were volunteers, she said. She liked the idea that no questions were asked of the people, that no message was handed over other than the obvious charitable one.

"I do this in my spare time," Isabella said.

"What do you do the rest of the time?"

"I work with handicapped children," she said. She had the passionate intensity I had seen in Oleg's eyes, but she smiled, had a sense of humor; she was ardent, humble, unselfish, with no pretensions.

"Isabella! Stop talking and start working!" an old woman screamed.

"That is the supervisor," Isabella said and laughed. She called back, "He is from America!"

"Take me to America!" the toothless old woman next to me screamed, shaking her big soup spoon at me in a dripping demand.

Other diners at the long table began teasing and laughing. It was an unimaginably happy room of contented eaters with food-splashed faces, people with a hunk of bread in one hand and a spoon in the other, attacking bowls of thick beany soup.

None of the volunteers had anything to preach; no philosophy was imparted about what they were doing. They simply labored without question. And because operating costs were low, practically the whole budget was used for food. Oleg later told me that he got money from local companies, Oxfam, and various United Nations agencies, but that even without their help he would have continued to run the charity.

For the helpers it was a kind of inspired drudgery to which they brought humanity. Most of them were from other European countries, living frugally and far from home; they were uncomplaining, learning humility, but also in a position to understand the very heart of Georgia. I admired them for following the fundamental tenet of Buddhism, the key text of the Buddhist way, utter selflessness, perhaps without knowing any word of the Diamond Sutra.

Inevitably, a little later, on a nearby street I saw some Georgian youths skidding around corners too fast in their crappy cars and shouting out the window, playing rap music much too loudly and being stupid.

***

NOW AND THEN YOU MEET SOMEONE at a party or at a friend's house and he says, "I'm from Tbilisi" — or wherever—"and if you ever visit, you must look me up."

And you say, "Absolutely," but the day never comes, for why on earth would you ever go to Tbilisi? And usually the person is merely being polite and doesn't mean it. But Gregory and Nina, whom I had met a few years before in Massachusetts, seemed sincere.

And there I was in Tbilisi, under wintry skies, with time on my hands. And so I made the call.

"Are you going to be here tomorrow?" Nina asked.

"Oh, yes," I said.

"Then you must come to the ballet." Nina was a ballerina in the Georgia State Opera Company, and Gregory was her husband. "It's the premiere of Giselle. Come to the Opera Theater at seven. Ask for Lizaveta. She will have a ticket for you. We will meet you in the box."

The Opera Theater was a notable landmark of Tbilisi. I found it easily on foot. An imposing cheese-colored nineteenth-century edifice on the main boulevard, Rustaveli Avenue, it was built at a time when Russia — which had annexed Georgia in 1801—regarded an opera house as essential to the romantic idea of Georgia as one of the more picturesque regions of the Russian empire. Georgians were great agriculturalists, and their vineyards were renowned, but Georgians also danced and sang.

It turned out that Nina was not merely a prima ballerina but also head of the opera company. When I met her in the box, she had recently given birth to a little girl.

Gregory, who was a prosperous investor and also a doting husband and Nina's manager, said, "But she will dance next year. She will prove that you can have a baby and also be a great ballerina."

Other people — mostly friends and relations — were already seated.

Introducing me, Nina said, "This is Paul. He went through Africa alone!"

"Is true?" a woman said.

"By autostop," Nina said.

"Not really," I said.

But the woman hadn't heard. She had turned to tell her husband that I had hitchhiked through Africa.

Then Giselle began. The title role was performed by a ballerina from the Bolshoi. The male lead, Prince Albrecht, was a local dancer who was only twenty-one. He was cheered when he appeared onstage. I had no idea what I was in for. I knew nothing about ballet, but it seemed to me a melodious way of spending an evening in Tbilisi.

After my rainy journey of bleak hills and foggy valleys and muddy roads, this packed opera house — warm and well fed — was the antithesis of Batumi: pale pretty sprites in tutus, men in tights, some of them spinning, some of them leaping, and an orchestra pit where men in tuxedos scraped out mellifluous tunes and cascading harmonies.

I was sitting comfortably in a gilt chair, resting on velvet cushions, watching Prince Albrecht (in disguise) fall in love with the peasant girl Giselle. But there was a hitch: he had been betrothed to Bathilda, the Duke's daughter. Giselle also had another and very excitable lover. Lots of prancing and leaping and flinging of arms, and finally identities were revealed, sending Giselle off her head. Just before the prolonged and ex quisite death agonies of Giselle, she heard the Wilis—"the spirits of young girls who died before their wedding day," the program said — and then she died.

Second act: Giselle was now transformed into one of the Wilis. She was reunited with Albrecht and danced with him through the night. In so doing she saved his life, before she vanished at dawn. An angelic kickline of flitting nymphs, eloquent mime, syrupy music, slender legs, graceful leaps, and strange moves, especially Giselle's as she hopped on one toe while propelling herself by kicking her other leg, receiving wild applause and bravas.

This ballet induced such a feeling of well-being in me that I sat smiling tipsily at the big red curtain for quite a while after it fell.

And then I heard, "This is Paul. He went through Africa by hitchhike!"

"Not exactly," I said. "Do you speak English?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," the woman said. "I'm British. I'm just visiting."

She was, she said, a ballet correspondent for a London newspaper, in Tbilisi for the week. She would be writing about this.

Still besotted by the ballet, I asked, "How do you even begin evaluating something as pleasant as this?"

"The corps de ballet needs work," she said without hesitating, "though they're about average for this part of the world, and if they keep working really hard they'll have a chance of being something watchable in about two years."

So much for my angelic kick-line of flitting nymphs.

"The male lead, I'm afraid, doesn't really have what it takes," she went on, "though you can see the chap is trying his best." She smiled grimly and dismissed him with a wave of her hand. "That ballerina from the Bolshoi, Anastasia Goryacheva, is talented. She performed well, but she was terribly let down by the orchestra. They were just so plodding. They're all second-rate players, not real symphony musicians. I mean, they hardly seemed to care."

So much for the mellifluous harmonies I'd heard.

Her criticism was probably accurate, though the audience had been more enthusiastic, had cheered the ballet all the way through, and had applauded numerous curtain calls. As for me, who had happened upon this spectacle and gaped like a dazed dog, I was grateful for the warmth and the music and the sight of the weightless legs of flitting nymphs moving to and fro on tippy-toe.

***

A WOMAN NAMED MARIKA, who had also been at the ballet, offered to show me around Tbilisi — the parts that had been renovated, the districts that were still dilapidated, the ancient villas, the Soviet bureaus, the synagogues and mosques. But I found Marika more interesting than any of this real estate.

She was in her mid-thirties and, she said, from a noble family, large landowners, their ancestral home in Ratja. Both her grandfather and great-grandfather had spent time in Soviet prisons, thirteen years in her grandfather's case, for being members of the Georgian aristocracy and therefore counterrevolutionaries. One prison, part of the gulag in Kazakhstan, was a remote work camp near the city of Karaganda. Later, I read that Solzhenitsyn had spent a year in the same camp.

"You're a writer," Marika said. "You're lucky to be an American. Our writers were put into a prison in Mordva. It was a terrible place but had a nice name — White Swan Prison."

In 2001, Marika worked for a while at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tbilisi, earning 30 lari a month.

"That's not much, is it?"

"Fifteen dollars," she said. She added that after various political upheavals, the most recent being the so-called Rose Revolution of 2004, which had been aimed at rooting out crooked politicians, government salaries had improved and she began earning $160 a month. She was now working for an insurance company, earning $200, and just getting by.

Gregory had told me that business was good, tourism was up, and the service industries — he did not specify which ones — were busy. Gregory also owned a vineyard, but said that though it was good-sized, wine-making was merely a hobby.

"Then what business are you in?" I asked.

"I'm managing Nina. But just for fun. I live on revenues and investments."

So he was doing fine and was well connected. Marika had another story. She said that business was abysmal. Food was still cheap but sala ries were pathetic. Most people her age spoke of emigrating to the United States. In this connection, she said that George Bush had come the previous year — in May 2005—and had received a rapturous welcome. This had something to do with Georgia needing a powerful friend, for Georgia was, geographically speaking, in a bad neighborhood, bordered by unfriendly Russians, the breakaway region of Abkhazia, the bandit-haunted valleys of Dagestan, and the dangerous ruin of Chechnya, with its Islamic guerrillas and frequent bombings.

"What about emigrating to Turkey?"

"No," she said, though some people would settle for a job in Europe.

We strolled, talking about the bleak, not to say obscure, future, and soon came to a restaurant.

"Have you had khajapuri?" she said.

"Yes. In Batumi"

"Then you have to try Georgia's other national dish, khingali"

This turned out to be a big bowl of broth with dumplings, some of them filled with meat, called khafsuru, others with greens, called kalakuri. The restaurant was fairly crowded, mostly with families at the wooden tables, everyone eating dumplings with their fingers, Georgian style.

Marika wasn't complaining, but it seemed to me depressing that a university graduate with perhaps fifteen years experience working in a big city should be paid so little.

On my previous trip I met many poorly paid workers, but they lived in an era of sealed borders and expensive travel. They expected no better and had no means to leave wherever they happened to be. But in these days of cheap travel, the world had shrunk, and anyone with access to a computer — which seemed to be most city people — knew that life was better elsewhere. The places I had known, of settled people in villages and towns, of working urbanites in big cities, with their civic pride and cultural pieties, these homebodies whose horizon was their national frontier, had all (it seemed to me) become soured and discontented. The world of settled people had evolved into a world of people wishing to emigrate. There was hardly any distinction, and not much romance, in being a traveler. It was now a world of travelers, or people dreaming of a life elsewhere — far away. Please, take me to America!

Some cultural pieties still persisted. Gregory and Nina invited me the next day to the christening of their daughter, Elena. The ceremony was performed in the district of Metekhi, in an old Eastern Orthodox church that had been built and rebuilt from ancient times. The church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. More out of national pride than religious sanctimony, Georgians boast that Christianity was brought by Saint Nino from Greece in the fourth century (incidentally, at about the time it was spreading through Ethiopia). Saint Nino's image was everywhere.

Little Elena, just over a month old, pink-faced and beatific, was swaddled in a heavy blanket and wore a bobble hat. A very short priest chanted and made repeated signs of the cross. He had a bushy beard, an enormous nose, and a hat shaped like a tea cozy, which gave him the look of a garden gnome costumed as a Smurf. Tapers were lighted, candles were waved, icons were kissed, a profusion of genuflection and energetic idolatry. There were no pews — no seats at all.

We stood and watched the dwarfish bearded priest pressing his forehead against a saint's picture and murmuring prayers. The baby was being bounced: no sign of holy water.

Cell phones also rang, men were chatting into them and making calls, other people were talking among themselves, laughing, greeting newcomers, inserting lari into the poorboxes, and some of them even praying.

Strangely, Gregory and Nina were excluded from the ceremony and stood some distance away, but watched eagerly as the godparents coddled Elena. I was excluded as well, but when I took too great an interest in a very shiny candle-lit icon, a man in a black smock hissed at me and indicated with angry gestures that I was standing too close.

"Up yours," I said, smiling, and returned to the christening, which had become dramatic.

The baby was stripped naked, her bobble hat removed. And then I realized that the church was cold. Her skinny arms and legs began to thrash, and whimperings issued from her little red body.

The gnome-like priest adjusted his odd ecclesiastical Smurf hat and beckoned the godparents to the baptismal font, which stood like a large marble sink at the side of the church. He took the baby and immersed her in the cold water — totally, head to foot, as though he were rinsing a chicken. As he pronounced her new name and recited the baptismal formula ("and I renounce the devil and all his pomps"), baby Elena began to howl. She went on howling for quite a while, but who could blame her?

Then, as Elena was turning purple, the future ballerina was wrapped in her warm blanket, people kissed and shook hands, the mother and father received the priest's blessing, and sums of money were bestowed.

Aware of the superstitious sentimentality in such a rite, a number of opportunistic old women seized the chance to line the path that led down the hill from the church, and there they crouched, their confident hands extended for alms.

Some customs don't change. That baptismal ceremony had been performed in that very church since the early seventh century — indeed, the Byzantine era, before Arab caliphs took over in the year 654 and made Tbilisi an emirate.

When it came time for me to leave Tbilisi for Baku, I was offered a lift by one of Gregory's friends.

"It's no problem. I can take you to the airport," he said.

"Railway station," I said.

He scowled at me. "You're going on the train?"

"That's right."

"On the train?" he repeated hoarsely, in disbelief. "Why don't you take the plane?"

Baku was an overnight trip from Tbilisi, not much more than the distance from Boston to Washington, but he had never taken the train. He had never been to Baku, in neighboring Azerbaijan, though he had lived for several years in Moscow and had spent some months working in Germany.

It occurred to me that, though he was thirty-four and had grown up in Tbilisi, he had perhaps never been to the Tbilisi railway station — or not recently, because he seemed shocked at how haunted and dirty it was. He made a face, shrugged at me in helpless pity, wished me luck, and hurried away when he saw the elderly train standing at the platform.