I ask if my breasts have gotten smaller while in Armenia, and he tells me that he is attracted to my body, which is not the answer I am looking for. “You were so anxious there,” he says, drawing his lips from the aluminum can to suck my right nipple. “My poor anxious poet, it’s good you came back.”
He’s taking me to the sulfur baths to make up for missing my birthday and on our way to Rustaveli Street, we pass the cemetery where an old man is building a section of concrete wall.
“Is he just going to build right over that gravestone?” Sasha says, gesturing to a stone in the side of the hill. He is aghast. He tells me that the Soviets used grave markings of people they didn’t like to construct new buildings.
The gravestone is etched with Georgian writing, and I make the observation that the characters of the Armenian language are angular, while Georgian is rounded. I wonder aloud whether this is reflected in the disposition of the two nations, citing the severity of the Armenians compared to the jolliness of the Georgians, or even their appearances: the skinny frames of Nara and Davit versus the fattened bellies of Sasha’s Georgian friends.
“You’re exoticizing again,” he says, grasping an unripe green fruit from a tree. “Soon you’ll be eating figs off the street.”
In my absence, roses have bloomed all over Tbilisi, red, pink, and white. We walk to the sulfur baths and pass cherry trees buzzing with flies as the hot smell of yeast rises from basement bakeries. All is in a state of exaggerated growth and fermentation. I step over a dead water beetle on the sidewalk, and we dodge fly-covered dog shit, pale yellow and frothing.
We get lunch at a restaurant close to the baths, and Sasha tells me the way I eat khinkali turns him on. Afterwards, he gets a boner in the sauna, but we don’t have any condoms. I’m tipsy from the beer we’ve brought with us and tell him I have my period so it’s okay. He bends me over a stone massage bed, and spits on his hand, rubbing it on his dick. He thrusts only a few times before stopping. “I don’t want to come inside you,” he says, and I drink the rest of our beer. When our time in the baths is up, my hair is still wet at the nape.
We walk until it dries, and Sasha holds onto my thumb, like he’s a little kid and I’m his mom. I make a squealing sound and he tells me sometimes I remind him of a wolf pup and other times of some sort of weasel.
We walk past men in yellow vests directing traffic and take the bus to an art show Sasha wants to see. A woman is passing out flyers and the girl in front of us tells her, “Shansi aris” which Sasha translates to “Not a chance.” We brainstorm ways to incorporate the word into our vocabulary. We board a bus, and though there’s nowhere to sit, it’s less crowded than any of the buses in Yerevan and I can grip a pole without men’s bodies pressing into me. Sasha pays with his transit card and hands me a ticket. The driver gestures at a pothole, announcing it with his hand like an orchestra conductor, and we laugh at his indignation.
“Shansi aris,” I say to the pothole, half a block behind us. We order beers at the art gallery and Sasha introduces me to Grigol, a young photographer who is presenting his work: a limited edition book consisting of photos of his parents’ youth in the Soviet Union. He discusses the project with a bashfulness I find endearing. Half the audience has opted to sit on the floor of the gallery and I watch Grigol’s eyes moving up and down as he surveys the crowd. The event is well documented—at least three people are taking pictures on their phones. There are two people with DSLRs and an older grey-haired man records the entire event. When he is finished speaking, Grigol takes questions from the audience. There are many queries including but not limited to: how old he is, whether his parents gave permission for the project, whether his project has opened conversations in his family, what he imagines is the reason for silence surrounding the Soviet years. A conversation like this would never occur in Toronto, where people are too self-conscious.
One woman remarks on the ubiquitousness of cameras for our generation and says that she doesn’t think such a project would be possible for the generations before Grigol’s parents, who are barely older than Sasha. The grey-haired man pauses recording to argue with the woman; he himself took many such photos in his youth and therefore he disagrees that his children would have no record. That was not what the woman was saying, however. She asks the man to consider how many cameras he saw in the hands of his peers growing up, but a full fledged argument breaks out in Russian, stealing attention from Grigol. The event concludes to scattered applause, and Sasha whispers that the old man is a famous photographer.
We finish our beers quickly. I te2ll Sasha I have cramps and need to find a bathroom, but he tells me there’s no public toilet. We stand outside with two women Sasha knows. They tell us about the fentanyl crisis that’s erupted over the past couple of weeks. There’s been more and more deaths and now government agencies are warning against using any sort of drugs.
“What about hash?” Sasha asks.
“I’m not sure,” one woman says. “Just to be safe they’re saying not to use anything.”
“What if I’ve already smoked it?”
“It’s definitely in MDMA,” she says. She tells us about a friend of a friend who used MDMA at the club one night, and ended up in a coma. The ecstasy was laced with fentanyl.
“I have a guy who uses the stuff before he splits it with me. If there was any problem, he’d let me know.”
“Just be careful,” she says.
We take a taxi to an abandoned warehouse where Nara’s group show is opening, and Sasha promises me there’s a bathroom. When we get there, Nara is in a white satin gown and I don’t feel the shame of being underdressed in jeans and Nikes because my guts are churning. She asks if I’m getting a ride back to Yerevan with them and I tell her I haven’t decided.
“We’re thinking of leaving tomorrow after lunch,” she says. “So let us know.”
“I will.”
I remind Sasha about the bathroom and he asks Davit where the toilets are, but he doesn’t know, and we run into Nara’s boss, who Sasha stands and talks with.
Finally, we go outside the warehouse and around the side of the building. There’s a dark room with a squat toilet that I use, expelling the black shit that often accompanies my period. I wipe with a napkin from my purse, and then rinse the squat toilet with a jug in the corner of the room. I feel slightly better, and Sasha insists that more alcohol will help. We go to a restaurant and split a bottle of rosé and he raises his glass, imitating the famous Georgian toasts.
“Someone’s twenty-nine,” he says. “Where did you think you’d be at twenty-nine, in your husband’s asshole?”
“I’m not in the asshole of my husband,” I say. “I’m shitting in a toilet.”
We go back to his place to smoke more hash and have sex. The skin on his pelvis is bumpy from shaving and resembles a plucked chicken. He gets on his back, and spreads his legs wide open. He is a dead chicken in a grocery store. I lay beside him and he sits on my face, and I shove his balls in my mouth. I insert a black silicone butt plug into his ass, pushing and pulling back and forth until he’s hard. He fucks me with the toy inside him, and when he comes, his moans are tender and feminine.
“You’re my monogamous girlfriend,” he whispers to me before falling asleep.
While I was in Yerevan, the smoking laws had come into effect in Tbilisi. Now we can work in all the cafes that Sasha was too allergic to enter before. We’re working on our laptops at a bar, and I pick his baseball cap off the table and place it on my head.
“Do you like looking like a clown in a public place?” he says. “Do you like looking comical?”
“What?”
“That hat is way too big.”