Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"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!"