Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (13 page)

"Excuse me." I followed the last people in. They were a small family—father, mother, child. They did not look distressed; they were warmly clothed, and the man had been bantering with the others left standing on the street corner, impatiently jostling.

What seemed to me an old haunted mansion had a lobby like a ballroom, with a high ceiling, leaded windows, some of them fitted with stained glass. Still, it seemed less like a mansion than a Masonic hall. No one challenged me, so I kept walking and looking around—the place was pleasantly warm and smelled of fresh bread. I followed the aroma and found two twenty-year-olds who were English-speakers, Marina and Alex.

"What's happening here?" I asked.

"This is the House of Charity," Alex said.

Marina stepped back and gestured. She said, "And this is the man."

A pale, rather small man with a thin fox-like face and dark close-set eyes swept forward and stared at me, not in hostility but in a sort of querulous nibbling welcome. He wore a vaguely clerical outfit: black frock coat buttoned to his chin, an overcoat draped like a cape over his shoulders. Adding to his mysterious ecclesiasticism were his black boots, an occult-looking insignia on a heavy chain around his neck, and pinned to one lapel a ribbon-like adornment. He was about fifty, strangely confident for such a pale soul, and upright, with the messianic stare you find in people who have a sense of destiny, a belief that they are
doing the right thing. In his heavy cape-like coat, his pasted-down hair, and his sallow, somewhat tormented saint's face, I put him down in my notebook in one word,
Dostoyevskian.

"This—everything you see—was his idea," Marina said.

"What do you do here?"

Instead of answering my question, Marina translated it for the man in black, and he replied in Georgian, which she translated back into English.

"We feed people," he said. "We feed all the people. Usually we feed about three hundred fifty a day, but today is Open Door Day, so we will be feeding fifteen hundred people."

"Are all of them poor?" I asked. This was translated.

"We ask no questions. Everyone is welcome. Some of them can afford to buy food, others are starving, but we make no distinction."

"Is this part of some religion?"

The pale man smiled when he heard this. He had tiny, even teeth in his vulpine, small boy's face. He said triumphantly, "No message! No religion!"

"So ask him why he does it," I said to Marina.

She spoke for a while with him, he gave monosyllabic replies, and finally he shrugged and uttered a few sentences in Georgian.

"He says the reasons are too deep to discuss. It could take days to explain why he does this."

Meanwhile, numbers were being shouted at the front door. Hungry people were hurrying in, smiling sated people were leaving, poking their yellow teeth with toothpicks.

"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!"

"Take me to America!" the toothless old woman next to me screamed, shaking her big soup spoon at me in a dripping demand.

Other diners at the long table began teasing and laughing. It was an unimaginably happy room of contented eaters with food-splashed faces, people with a hunk of bread in one hand and a spoon in the other, attacking bowls of thick beany soup.

None of the volunteers had anything to preach; no philosophy was imparted about what they were doing. They simply labored without question. And because operating costs were low, practically the whole budget was used for food. Oleg later told me that he got money from local companies, Oxfam, and various United Nations agencies, but that even without their help he would have continued to run the charity.

For the helpers it was a kind of inspired drudgery to which they brought humanity. Most of them were from other European countries, living frugally and far from home; they were uncomplaining, learning humility, but also in a position to understand the very heart of Georgia. I admired them for following the fundamental tenet of Buddhism, the key text of the Buddhist way, utter selflessness, perhaps without knowing any word of the Diamond Sutra.

Inevitably, a little later, on a nearby street I saw some Georgian youths skidding around corners too fast in their crappy cars and shouting out the window, playing rap music much too loudly and being stupid.

***

NOW AND THEN YOU MEET SOMEONE
at a party or at a friend's house and he says, "I'm from Tbilisi"—or wherever—"and if you ever visit, you must look me up."

And you say, "Absolutely," but the day never comes, for why on earth would you ever go to Tbilisi? And usually the person is merely being polite and doesn't mean it. But Gregory and Nina, whom I had met a few years before in Massachusetts, seemed sincere.

And there I was in Tbilisi, under wintry skies, with time on my hands. And so I made the call.

"Are you going to be here tomorrow?" Nina asked.

"Oh, yes," I said.

"Then you must come to the ballet." Nina was a ballerina in the Georgia State Opera Company, and Gregory was her husband. "It's the premiere of
Giselle.
Come to the Opera Theater at seven. Ask for Lizaveta. She will have a ticket for you. We will meet you in the box."

The Opera Theater was a notable landmark of Tbilisi. I found it easily on foot. An imposing cheese-colored nineteenth-century edifice on the main boulevard, Rustaveli Avenue, it was built at a time when Russia—which had annexed Georgia in 1801—regarded an opera house as essential to the romantic idea of Georgia as one of the more picturesque regions of the Russian empire. Georgians were great agriculturalists, and their vineyards were renowned, but Georgians also danced and sang.

It turned out that Nina was not merely a prima ballerina but also head of the opera company. When I met her in the box, she had recently given birth to a little girl.

Gregory, who was a prosperous investor and also a doting husband and Nina's manager, said, "But she will dance next year. She will prove that you can have a baby and also be a great ballerina."

Other people—mostly friends and relations—were already seated.

Introducing me, Nina said, "This is Paul. He went through Africa alone!"

"Is true?" a woman said.

"By autostop," Nina said.

"Not really," I said.

But the woman hadn't heard. She had turned to tell her husband that I had hitchhiked through Africa.

Then
Giselle
began. The title role was performed by a ballerina from the Bolshoi. The male lead, Prince Albrecht, was a local dancer who was only twenty-one. He was cheered when he appeared onstage. I had no idea what I was in for. I knew nothing about ballet, but it seemed to me a melodious way of spending an evening in Tbilisi.

After my rainy journey of bleak hills and foggy valleys and muddy roads, this packed opera house—warm and well fed—was the antithesis of Batumi: pale pretty sprites in tutus, men in tights, some of them spinning, some of them leaping, and an orchestra pit where men in tuxedos scraped out mellifluous tunes and cascading harmonies.

I was sitting comfortably in a gilt chair, resting on velvet cushions, watching Prince Albrecht (in disguise) fall in love with the peasant girl Giselle. But there was a hitch: he had been betrothed to Bathilda, the Duke's daughter. Giselle also had another and very excitable lover. Lots of prancing and leaping and flinging of arms, and finally identities were revealed, sending Giselle off her head. Just before the prolonged and ex
quisite death agonies of Giselle, she heard the Wilis—"the spirits of young girls who died before their wedding day," the program said—and then she died.

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."