Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

This turned out to be a big bowl of broth with dumplings, some of them filled with meat, called khafsuru, others with greens, called kalakuri. The restaurant was fairly crowded, mostly with families at the wooden tables, everyone eating dumplings with their fingers, Georgian style.

Marika wasn't complaining, but it seemed to me depressing that a university graduate with perhaps fifteen years experience working in a big city should be paid so little.

On my previous trip I met many poorly paid workers, but they lived in an era of sealed borders and expensive travel. They expected no better and had no means to leave wherever they happened to be. But in these days of cheap travel, the world had shrunk, and anyone with access to a computer—which seemed to be most city people—knew that life was better elsewhere. The places I had known, of settled people in villages and towns, of working urbanites in big cities, with their civic pride and cultural pieties, these homebodies whose horizon was their national frontier, had all (it seemed to me) become soured and discontented. The world of settled people had evolved into a world of people wishing to emigrate. There was hardly any distinction, and not much romance, in being a traveler. It was now a world of travelers, or people dreaming of a life elsewhere—far away. Please, take me to America!

Some cultural pieties still persisted. Gregory and Nina invited me the next day to the christening of their daughter, Elena. The ceremony was performed in the district of Metekhi, in an old Eastern Orthodox church that had been built and rebuilt from ancient times. The church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. More out of national pride than religious sanctimony, Georgians boast that Christianity was brought by Saint Nino from Greece in the fourth century (incidentally, at about the time it was spreading through Ethiopia). Saint Nino's image was everywhere.

Little Elena, just over a month old, pink-faced and beatific, was swaddled in a heavy blanket and wore a bobble hat. A very short priest chanted and made repeated signs of the cross. He had a bushy beard, an enormous nose, and a hat shaped like a tea cozy, which gave him the look of a garden gnome costumed as a Smurf. Tapers were lighted, candles were waved, icons were kissed, a profusion of genuflection and energetic idolatry. There were no pews—no seats at all.

We stood and watched the dwarfish bearded priest pressing his forehead against a saint's picture and murmuring prayers. The baby was being bounced: no sign of holy water.

Cell phones also rang, men were chatting into them and making calls, other people were talking among themselves, laughing, greeting newcomers, inserting lari into the poorboxes, and some of them even praying.

Strangely, Gregory and Nina were excluded from the ceremony and stood some distance away, but watched eagerly as the godparents coddled Elena. I was excluded as well, but when I took too great an interest in a very shiny candle-lit icon, a man in a black smock hissed at me and indicated with angry gestures that I was standing too close.

"Up yours," I said, smiling, and returned to the christening, which had become dramatic.

The baby was stripped naked, her bobble hat removed. And then I realized that the church was cold. Her skinny arms and legs began to thrash, and whimperings issued from her little red body.

The gnome-like priest adjusted his odd ecclesiastical Smurf hat and beckoned the godparents to the baptismal font, which stood like a large marble sink at the side of the church. He took the baby and immersed her in the cold water—totally, head to foot, as though he were rinsing a chicken. As he pronounced her new name and recited the baptismal formula ("and I renounce the devil and all his pomps"), baby Elena began to howl. She went on howling for quite a while, but who could blame her?

Then, as Elena was turning purple, the future ballerina was wrapped in her warm blanket, people kissed and shook hands, the mother and father received the priest's blessing, and sums of money were bestowed.

Aware of the superstitious sentimentality in such a rite, a number of opportunistic old women seized the chance to line the path that led down the hill from the church, and there they crouched, their confident hands extended for alms.

Some customs don't change. That baptismal ceremony had been performed in that very church since the early seventh century—indeed, the Byzantine era, before Arab caliphs took over in the year 654 and made Tbilisi an emirate.

When it came time for me to leave Tbilisi for Baku, I was offered a lift by one of Gregory's friends.

"It's no problem. I can take you to the airport," he said.

"Railway station," I said.

He scowled at me. "You're going on the train?"

"That's right."

"On the train?" he repeated hoarsely, in disbelief. "Why don't you take the plane?"