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AT DAWN by bus from Tbilisi to Baku. Almost the whole time passing through a valley between the Great and Small Caucasus. The hero of this trifling, comic odyssey is called Revaz Galidze, and he is a corpulent, even fat, man over fifty, the driver of our bus. I do not know whether being a bus driver is for him a step up or a defeat; suffice it to say that he immediately informed me that for many years he drove TIR (Transport International Routier) trailer trucks to various European countries, and so he has, but of course, worldly polish and manners. On this five-hundred-kilometer route, the bus was always full and the passengers changed frequently, yet the only people who had actually purchased tickets were two Russian women going to Kirovabad and myself. The rest would pay Revaz sums determined by him, and he would stuff the received bundles of rubles into his pockets. Revaz was the authentic king of this road, its unchallenged master and ruler.
The day was cloudy and rainy, and the area, for that part of the world, populous. Consequently we kept coming upon groups of cold, wet people standing by the roadside. Always either loaded down with bundles or leading a sheep or a goat on a rope, at the sight of the bus they would beseechingly hold out their hands. They weren’t begging for kopecks or a handful of rice, but were imploring Revaz to show them a shred of mercy and take them with him. One can surmise that these people stand like this for entire days, because buses run infrequently here. The road is dangerous, battles are being fought nearby (between Azerbaijanis and Armenians), and so the courageous Revaz truly enjoys a monopoly.
And, of course, he takes advantage of the situation. Revaz conducts a cruel form of auction. That is, encountering along the route a group eager for a lift, he stops and asks how much they are paying, and for what distance. If they are paying a lot, and the distance is short, Revaz throws those who are paying less off the bus, despite the fact that they are still a hundred kilometers from home! And he throws them out having nonetheless pocketed their fare!
Revaz doesn’t throw me out because, first of all, I am the only passenger who has a ticket (the Russian women have gotten off already); second, I am a foreigner; and third, I have a fever of nearly forty degrees Celsius and am dying. The closer to Baku, the greater Revaz’s ruthlessness. At the start of the route there were still many of his Georgian kinsmen on the bus — and Revaz had a certain respect for them; now the whole bus is Azerbaijani peasants, flustered, shy, bewildered. The poverty of these people is depressing, and when one of them, seeing that I have a fever, takes a bottle of lemonade out of a basket and hands it to me, my throat tightens with emotion.
We are already close to Baku. A nightmarish landscape: an immense stretch of land soused with tar, smothered with crushed slag, and heaps of concrete slabs thrown helter-skelter. Everywhere heavy Baku oil flows; it runs in streams, creates stinking puddles, stagnant pools, lakes, bays. Oil on the surface of the sea, and the beaches — why, I still remember yellow sand here — are black, oily, covered in grease and soot.
To reach Baku, which lies on a bay, one must still climb along the steep and winding road into the hills surrounding the city. At one of the bends, a scene that allows me to look warmly upon Revaz. Amid this asphalt-dark, sooty, and sticky landscape stands a block of concrete, and on top of it is a live man, only a man without legs, apparently carried up by someone, his trunk inserted into a wooden fruit crate.
I am the witness of some sort of ritual, clearly established through long tradition. When we reach this place, Revaz stops the bus, greets the man, and stuffs a substantial bundle of rubles into his shirt pocket.
FLEEING FROM ONESELF
IN BAKU I stayed in the apartment of a Russian woman who managed to leave the city when the riots, pillaging, and arson began. I had met her in Moscow, where she came to live with her family. Giving me the key to the apartment, she said with determination: I will never go back there again. She was still frightened, terrified by the city that had fallen prey to aggressive and brutal armed bands. She told me she had reached the airport thanks only to an ambulance driver who agreed to take her there — otherwise she wouldn’t have dared to show herself on the street.
IT WAS ALREADY dusk when Revaz’s bus reached the station in Baku. Buses arriving from the countryside crawl amid the deafening cacophony of horns into a dense, bustling crowd, into a swarm welcoming and bidding farewell, amid sellers of tomatoes, cucumbers, and shish kebabs, groups of children asking for baksheesh, sluggish and listless policemen with clubs in their hands. The East, the real East, smelling of anise and cardamom, mutton fat and fried paprika, some sort of Eşfahān or Kirkūk, Izmir or Herāt, an exotic world, noisy, eccentric, preoccupied with itself and closed, inaccessible to anyone from the outside. Wherever its people come together, there immediately forms a colorful, agitated concourse, bazaar, souk, market; there is immediately lots of shouting, jumping at one another’s throat, quarrels, but then (patience!) everything is transformed into calm, into an inexpensive little restaurant, into a chat, into a friendly nod of the head, into a small glass of mint tea, into a lump of sugar.
IN THAT STATION I quickly realize the hopelessness of my situation. How do I get from here to the house, whose exact location I do not know, carrying moreover a suitcase packed with books (a terrible mania for buying books everywhere) and suffering from a forty-degree fever? “Could you be so kind as to please tell me,” I ask every person I meet, tugging at his sleeve or grasping at his lapels, “where is number 117 Pouchin Street?” But people are breaking away, pushing me away impatiently, hurrying on. I finally realize that I will learn nothing from them, for these are new arrivals from the countryside, peasants from the kolkhozes, merchants of textiles and fruit from Dagestan, from Checheno-Ingush, or even from the distant Kabardino-Balkar Republic. How are these mountain men from the Caucasus, bewildered and stunned by the big city, supposed to know where Pouchin 117 is? And so I spin around in circles, half-dead, above all from thirst. There is nothing to drink. It is already evening, and the only cistern truck selling kvass (a drink made of fermented bread) stands empty.
There are no taxis. Despairing and near collapse, I stand on the street and stretch out my hand, in which I hold a BIC ballpoint pen. I do not stand long. Children have the eyesight of hawks. One child, riding with his father in a car, spots a man who clearly wants to present him with a BIC ballpoint. At the child’s request the father stops. I ask him about number 117 Pouchin Street. They let me into the car; we drive off. We drive for a long time, until we are far from the bus station. We stop in an old part of the city, near an old, dark street. (There is no snobbishness here about the old and historical, no preciousness, nothing of the splendor or priciness of the antique. Here an old house means a house untouched by any repairs, by any renovations, for seventy-three years.) I enter a dark gateway, a dark courtyard; I trip over piles of garbage. I hear a woman’s voice. She asks me what I am looking for. She comes to me, takes me by the hand, and leads me to a door invisible in the darkness. “Why,” she wonders, “is your hand so hot, man?”
(They say “comrade” more and more infrequently here, but they also aren’t able to say “mister,” for that still sounds too bourgeois, and the form “you,” toward a person whom one doesn’t know well, is impolite. So they address each other as “woman,” “man.”)