Author : Zaal Samadashvili
And now, recall you-know-what?
How we went to the jeweler on Maidan to sell the ring, how we wanted one hundred and twenty rubles and we got eighty from that old man with the Uzbek hat on his head, who looked a bit like Fagin from the musical Oliver.
When comparing someone to someone else, we were only referring to film actors; we hadn't read any books, so what were we supposed to refer to but films...
In our view, Tseto also walked like John Wayne, like Ringo Kid from Stagecoach – the film we saw at Cosmos – in long, straight strides.
Our buddy Tseto, who was nuts on dressing up. “Looks cool, doesn't it,” he would say when trying on something new and trendy.
And trendy in those days, when the Beatles songs were distributed on “discs” made out of X-ray tapes, people wore “Button” shirts, which differed from ordinary shirts in that they had tiny buttons sewn to the tips of the collars, trousers sewn in Avalbar at Otar's, with straight slit pockets and “cuffs” that were called “shtatski”,and everything made of “tweed” – caps, coats, jackets...
Remember that he was in love with a skinny girl with big, bright eyes that shone through the hair that fell on her forehead.
That he thought she was the prettiest, and so did we, but later, when the other girls started wearing short dresses, smoking cigarettes, and going to Dynamo Stadium with the boys to watch football, we realized that we were attracted not so much by her looks as by her boldness...
We were seen as trouble-seeking street kids, a target for the police. They were especially picky about Tseto; not a day went by without his pockets being searched for a jackknife or cigarettes with weed in them, and because of the nickname, they expected more danger from Tseto – a frivolous, hot-tempered, unpredictable person...
Girls of our generation also liked street boys – they would go with them to the cinema to sit in the back rows of half-empty halls, hug and dance with uninvited “outsiders” at birthday parties, even let them kiss them...
Rarely, but still, this flirting would suddenly stop and the girls would start “going out” with some “polished” guys... By polished we didn't just mean guys who were different from us – we meant guys who tried to stay out of trouble and didn't hang around for hours at some street-side bench [SB1] in the area. The polished were inhabitants of a different world, created by people who had usurped the power of their parents, a world detached from reality, where prosperity reigned and the future was planned and calculated in their favor.
When this flirting stopped for Tseto too, when “his” girlfriend started going out with a polished guy... he didn't show it at first, but then the refusals to meet, the unanswered phone calls took their toll, made him think, worry, and finally say: “I have to get hold of her, see her somewhere...” We thought he was going to hang around this girl's doorstep from morning till night, but that's not what he told us: “I want to bump into her somewhere with this guy, and it has to look accidental...”
We had no clue where we could “accidentally” bump into this couple. Our appearance in the places where the polished guy was taking Tseto's girl would have been just as unnatural as him, or someone like him, appearing and hanging out in the street, in a place meant for standing for hours, like you see in the photo studio where portraits of actors from the Marjanishvili Theatre were displayed in the window...
The occasion itself helped us to organize a chance meeting as we were standing in front of the photo studio that day when Tseto turned up and told us that we were to go to a restaurant that evening, in case the polished guy invited the girl to a restaurant on the sixteenth floor of the newly built Hotel Iveria...
That restaurant was nothing like the district canteen or Kazbegi in Zemel, where everything cost one ruble – a pan of fried potatoes, a plate of salad and a bottle of wine... “Money?” we asked him, and in response he took his hand out of the pocket and showed us the ring on his ring finger, a thin gold ring...
Remember that he told us that it was a gift from his aunt, and we immediately believed him, that his aunt was the kindest woman, that she was like a mother to Tseto, who had been orphaned at an early age… that he just ignored us when we expressed some doubts since when were rings given to boys.
We told him to take it off, let's see how heavy it is, how much will they give us... And he grasped the ring with his thumb and forefinger, pulled it and met resistance, he could not move it. Then he decided to wet his ring finger and went to the courtyard opposite, where we knew there was a water tap. Wetting it didn't help, nor did applying the soap that the woman at the tap gave us in an attempt to help. The finger became red and swollen from pulling and twisting so hard...
Nothing could be done without cutting it up, and a jeweler was needed for the job. Remember, we went to Maidan first by trolley bus, then by tram, and finally on foot from Avlabari. The old man in the Uzbek hat immediately loosened Tseto's trapped finger, and I think he even blew on it to give him some relief. He gave us less money than we wanted, explaining that once we cut it up, it was no good as an item, we were only paid by weight... What he paid us was enough for the restaurant, and we didn't mind...
Remember we went around the neighborhood to get dressed up: Got a jeans jacket from one guy – a Wrangler – and a sweater from another, like the one that the guys from Sun Valley Serenade wore, and when the clock struck eight, we went with Tseto to the sixteenth floor of Iveria...
Tseto's girl was sitting with the “cool” people, they were exuding glitter, she saw us with her bright eyes and pretended not to notice. We sat down at a table nearby, ordered four bottles of wine and began to drink. As Tseto toasted, he would sneak a glance at his girlfriend after each glass...
After we had raised toasts to brotherhood until death, to those boys trapped inside four walls, to the fulfilment of our wishes, Tseto did something that no one expected and no one could have imagined.
Remember that he stood up, reached for the bottle, picked it up and walked to the balcony door. He stepped out, grabbed the balcony railing with his right hand, placed one foot on the railing, then the other... He shouted, “Here's to love!” and brought a bottle full of wine to his mouth... standing at a terrifying height, with his back to the city twinkling with ten thousand lights, he emptied it to the last drop...
The stunned, fear-filled silence that fell was only broken when Tseto jumped down from the railing. A scream broke the silence of a dozen people as the girl – his girl – ran up to him and started punching him in the chest with her fists, “Don't you ever show your face to me again, you bastard,” she shouted, crying…
Remember, we left the place straight away, paid the bill and left. And we didn't utter a word either in the lift or on the street as we walked from Zemel down to Vera Bridge, waiting to see what Tseto had to say... And he kept walking forward and kept silent... When we crossed the bridge and passed a large department store, then he turned to us and said that everything had gone as he wanted it to...
He didn't hide his surprise when we asked him directly, “How's that?” Then he got angry, “So what did all this running to me and crying mean, can't you understand?” When we shrugged our shoulders, he got really angry and raised his voice, “Can't you understand that she loves me like she used to, if it wasn't like this, she would have ignored me, she wouldn't have even looked my way, whether I jumped on the railing or on the roof...”
When he couldn't read anything close to consent in our eyes, he got frustrated with us and told us, “You don't understand anything about women...” We really didn't know much about women, we couldn't boast of that, but we thought we knew Tseto well, and we thought his words were more like self-deception than knowing what was going on in the girl's heart...
Remember, since then we had all been waiting to see what else Tseto would come up with to see his girlfriend again, or when he would finally tell us that those tears and screams were from anger and not from love...
We did not have to wait for more than two weeks, and one evening, standing at the entrance to the Gorky Garden, across the street, we saw Tseto and his girlfriend walking down the street along the Mikhailov Hospital, not noticing anyone or anything around them but each other...
Our eyes widened in surprise, we became numb and only then we got happy. Confused, we admitted to ourselves that Tseto knew the secrets of women's hearts, but a few days later when he found time for us, we still asked him, “If she loves you, why the hell was she going out with that polished guy?”
Recall, this question did not make him angry; on the contrary, he laughed heartily and said something very strange. “It turned out that that evening, on the sixteenth floor, I was behaving like the hero of the girl's favorite film, a reckless soldier who had a habit of playing with death, standing on the open windows of the upper floors of luxury palaces and drinking to the bottom of a bottle full of wine...”
This resemblance was enough to rekindle an old love that had faded with the arrival of an admirer who radiated moderation and prudence in his every movement and word…
We had to accompany Tseto to Maidan one more time, and once more we found ourselves in the little workshop of a goldsmith who looked like Fagin. Remember, he restored the ring, the cut ring he had bought from us for eighty rubles, and Tseto paid him one hundred and twenty, with money won at the races, and we thought he was going to give it to his girlfriend. But we were wrong; he took us from the Maidan to the Post Office, where his aunt worked as a telephone operator in the most beautiful, old building in the neighborhood, to say, I found the ring you gave me, which we thought was lost.
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P.S. Just to say who “we” are, Guja and I - Garsik, Garsevan, the two boys described in your old stories, born with you, who wanted to bring Tseto to life by recalling this story and dictating it to you...
