Georgia on my Mind

As he droned on, Salome continued to translate, until all at once, the words she spoke began to reflect her own thoughts rather than his. “In the thirteen years he has ruled the country,” she said, “Shevardnadze has little to show for it. The economy is a mess. We have no electricity. The seniors can barely feed themselves.” She repeated everything bilingually. “And how come all of Shevardnadze’s relatives own everything?”

When Babluani realized what Salome was doing, he flew into a rage and shouted her down, while she continued to translate for our benefit. “He says I am a stupid little girl. He says how can I know anything about Shevardnadze and politics? He says. . . .” But then she fell silent and bowed her head, staring into her lap while Babluani raved on. We all looked on in alarm. Babluani was standing now, towering over her, screaming. His wife tried to pull him back into his chair, begging him to stop.

Finally, as though he’d run out of steam, he composed himself and sat down. He asked another young man to propose a toast. A boy from Belgium smugly offered a toast to “tradition.” Babluani was satisfied. Then, to close the long evening, he magnanimously asked a woman, my friend Anna, to say something. Like a UN peacekeeper, she sought to restore balance. Raising her glass to Babluani, she proposed a toast to the wisdom of the old. Then she turned to Salome: “And to the fresh ideas of the young!” But this triggered another rant from Babluani. Salome translated only some of his words; I heard her say “fascist” and “stupid.” While he thundered on, the rest of us gathered our coats and piled into the jeeps for the long drive back to Tbilisi.

On the ride home, Salome cried quietly in the car. Police checkpoints flashed by in the headlights. Salome would not reveal the undeciphered parts of Babluani’s rage; she would only say that no one had ever spoken to her like that before.

In a few weeks’ time, Babluani’s great friend, the president, finally succumbed to the persistent, peaceful chants of tens of thousands of Salomes who had formed a human chain around the Georgian parliament, demanding his resignation.

As I watched the flag-waving crowds dancing in the streets of Tbilisi on television, I wondered if Salome felt some satisfaction, knowing that our September supra had been a small foreshadowing of the great changes that were to come.