Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

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.