Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

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"