Two Worlds by Natia Kirvalidze
Anuka, now turning 30, comes to grips with her decision to stay in her homeland of Georgia after studying in the United States, and with the death of her friend Luka.
Anuka spent the first day of June searching for a grave in the wrong country. Telavi, Georgia, was boiling when she marked her 30th birthday, along with eight years and three days since Luka's death. In the wake of her receding habitual grief, she relapsed into optimism. A renewed motivation, renewed purpose, an unexplainable delusion. Hope. This glow of an emotion crept up on her when her parents arrived and wished her a happy birthday. Tentative ambition swarmed when Mariami, her favorite cousin, dropped by to gift her a new violin. They hugged tightly that morning as if they did not see each other several times each week. Mariami asked if she was well, if she would consider playing music again, and if she would please use this new violin she ordered from Yamaha. Anuka's smile was genuine, and she nodded and said yes, "Of course, I'm well. Are you?" She acknowledged the violin lying in its case, but did not touch it. Later that evening, though, when she would return from the random cemetery in which Luka's grave did not exist, she would cave and play "Suliko" in front of an audience from muscle memory. She would play it, cry from nostalgia, and be cleansed.
After the mid-morning phone messages died down and several guests dropped off their presents, only her parents remained in her home to pass the time before the party. Her mother, Elene, organized the gifts. She put away the new sheet music, washed the new pots and pans, unwrapped the books, and stacked them on the overflowing shelves in the living room. Tornike, her father, was baking shoti bread in the tandoor out in the yard across the squawking chicken coop.
The smell of home soothed Anuka, as did the act of writing down her tasks for the upcoming week: Translate chapters five to eight. Grade students' essays. Skim Nini's arc & send review before Friday. The smoky, hearty aroma of fresh bread wafted faintly through the open back door, and both Anuka and her mother breathed deeply through their noses to catch it in its diluted doses.
Anuka was proud that her father was the only man she knew of who baked bread in that big cylindrical oven. This pride formed sometime in her teenage years and instilled in her an important distinction between her family and everyone else. Her father did not merely take out the trash or grill the shashlik during parties or bring fresh fruit from the roadside stands in Nasamkhraliskhevi. He baked bread, a woman's task.
Anuka's family did many things differently, aside from the controversy of who in the family baked shoti. They hired an English tutor to converse with Anuka three times a week and reinforce what she was taught in school. Their old friends from Tbilisi let them use the old SAT textbooks their kids no longer needed. Elene and Tornike helped Anuka sign up for College Board, brought her tea and fruit as she studied overtime, researched US universities, and relayed to Anuka how to apply for a student visa. They drove her the two hours to an international school in Tbilisi and waited in the parking lot as she took the SAT and AP exams. They were with her every step of the way. When Anuka was accepted into a university in Boston with a decent scholarship, her parents celebrated by, for once, not inviting anyone over for dinner. With just the three of them, they drank wine, ate cake, and planned the next four years of young Anuka's life.
Her achievement was a milestone that rippled through the town. Until her, people generally considered higher education in Tbilisi as the natural progression from their small town of Telavi. A few strayed to countries like Germany, Austria, France, and so on, but the US was much too far. Too unwelcoming.
Anuka's neighbors somehow knew more about life abroad than she did. They knew more about her university, more about the country she would be living in for the next four years, and had more knowledge of her career trajectory after graduation. Anuka wondered briefly if they held private meetings without her to discuss her options. The extended family (people Anuka never quite figured out how she was related to) offered their praise and opinions, all with the expectation that she would eventually return home. She would live in America to study business and finance and return to save her country with her brand new Western knowledge. She felt peeved. When had she agreed to this ridiculous responsibility? Why was she expected to return to Georgia, and what good would she do for its economy anyway? Why would her neighbors talk about her like she alone could save them from corruption and raise their wages? A cloak of pressure settled over her shoulders and followed her past the border control at Boston Logan International Airport.
The first year of college life was infected with a homesickness that Anuka very slowly recovered from while on a constant verge of tears. She felt isolated and disconnected from the friends she gradually made because they were perpetually unknown to her. Conversations were friendly but never too specific, never too uncomfortable. They focused on majors and drama and campus life, and rarely strayed from the confines of their immediate surroundings. She felt the process of becoming swallowed up by a bubble so thick and misty, it was impossible to see what she was missing on the other side. As the years would progress, she'd hardly remember the bubble was there at all.
Many of her friends and peers claimed simple lives, but mental illness at the same time. Anuka did not know how to react to the ease with which people feigned familiarity with her. She did not know who to trust, who was wearing facades, who was genuine. She found it disarming if strangers smiled at her. When she returned home for breaks and found herself smiling at strangers, a mild embarrassment would singe her. Her interactions were viewed in her mind through a bird's-eye lens that she could not shake. Above all else, Anuka realized in the first semester just how unloved she was. The only people who did love her existed a full day's worth of travel away. She had never felt so alone, afraid, and vaguely disgusted.
The second year flew smoothly as she grew closer to Vinya, an international student from India who lived in the dorm across the hall. Vinya came from an obscenely rich family and tended toward self-righteousness at times, but Anuka learned she could stomach that as long as it did not rear its head too often. She never understood what being on the same "wavelength" meant, but she felt a natural understanding tether them together despite their differences. Perhaps they would never have become friends if both of them were not international students, but this did not matter to her.
Vinya bought designer clothing that Anuka never bothered to compliment. Her friend rarely did her own laundry and opted instead to take it to the cleaners, and she had a gym membership, which she solely used for the shower facility. Anuka found the way her friend handled money irresponsible, regardless of how rich she was, and pointed this out often. Maybe that was the reason their friendship clicked so quickly. A level of honesty blossomed that reminded her of her conversations with her cousins. She felt like herself around Vinya, and assumed Vinya felt the same around her, too. They bought each other food so often that they did not bother keeping track of who owed whom what. They knew they would not have to defend or define themselves in each other's presence.
No silly questions about whether they had wifi in their home countries or if they lived in houses or huts. No nodding along to American references they did not understand, or talking crap about immediate family members no matter how much they deserved it. No misunderstandings that painted them as chronically alien to one another.
During one of their hangouts in a café, disguised as a study session, Vinya admitted to Anuka, "I spent over 70 hours sitting in planes last year." Her brown eyes, which were usually darting around, grew awfully still. "That's more hours than I spent with my family."
In her third year, Anuka called Vinya late into the night after leaving a birthday party for her former suitemate. Top 100 music blared from the house, and the bright lights escaping into the night cast the windows as portals into an American movie.
"She asked if I wanted to go to the bathroom with her, and I assumed we would just be taking a break from the crowd." Anuka breathed heavily from laughter and watched her breath disappear into the dark air. "I thought we would be touching up our makeup or something. But no, nope. She dropped her pants and started pissing in front of me." She shivered, partly from the February cold and partly from remembering the awkward way she stood in that bathroom as she tried to hide her shock at the predicament. Her friend gossiped all the while, still sitting on the toilet. Anuka looked with comical interest into the mirror, at the walls, at the rug, anywhere but at the girl casually peeing a few feet away. She left the party soon afterward and stood on the sidewalk, bundled deep into her puffer as she waited for her Uber to pick her up from Brookline.
"I guess it's normal here for friends to pee in front of each other?" Amusement laced Vinya's voice.
"She probably thought I was a weirdo," Anuka replied. "She asked if I also needed to go, and I said no. It looked like I only joined to watch her pee!"
Her life plan cracked down the middle in her final year of university. Luka seemed unassuming at first. He sat behind her in her economics class, rarely spoke, and she never took more than a cursory glance at his dirty blonde curls that seemed permanently bent over his tablet. Almost halfway through the fall semester, he called her name outside the lecture hall and fumbled with the straps of his backpack as his shaky voice asked for her number. She did not at that point quite remember his name, but felt giddy at him knowing hers.
The rest of the year came with a caveat. She warned him of her plans to leave the country right after graduation and told him not to expect much from her. They did nothing more than eat out together, study together, sometimes brush hands, and stand closer than friends were supposed to. She did not flirt with him, though he outwardly flirted with her. At first, she was worried Luka resembled a boy she had a fleeting crush on in freshman year. That boy described her appearance as "interesting" to a mutual friend, and she promptly backpedalled out of her infatuation. Luka was thankfully nothing like that.
He was curious and sensitive. They talked about the differences between their cultures, researched whatever they were unsure about together, and never ran out of topics to discuss. Anuka found him invigorating, just the kind of person who challenged her and asked the right questions. He was never absent-minded, which kept her sharp and attentive to his every word.
"What's your favorite Georgian song?" He asked her on Marathon Monday, of all days, after they parked themselves in front of the Prudential Center. They arrived right as most of the commotion was dying down to cheer on the remaining runners who were booking it to the finish line.
"Okay, don't laugh," Anuka replied gravely.
"Do I ever laugh at you?"
"Only every day."
"Ah, then I see why you would be worried. I promise not to laugh at you." He said this as he actively fought a grin.
"It's... 'Suliko.'"
"Okay? I've never heard of it," he said as he looked up the song on his phone. "Wait." His eyebrows shot up, and his face transformed from concentration into something devious. "Stalin really loved this song, apparently?" He did not, of course, expect Anuka to answer that, but she did anyway.
"Maybe," she said defensively. "It's a beautiful song once you forget about its fanbase." That was when Luka began to wheeze from laughter. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and he bent over slightly as if to contain his snickering. Anuka blushed not from embarrassment, but admiration. He glowed when he laughed. The sun peeked through the clouds at that moment as if to compete with the young man. He was beautiful, but she did not express this to him. It felt a weird thing to suddenly say on that windy Marathon Monday when they were still surrounded by yelling spectators, blowing horns, raging bells, and participants holding up country flags over their heads as they ran.
Anuka thought this might have been the moment she fell in love with him, but she was wrong. That was merely the moment she became aware of her love. In actuality, love crept up on her so slowly and quietly that she did not notice it until it crossed her field of vision. It had been fed day after day with scraps of text messages, phone calls, study sessions, walks through the park. It fed on everything it could until it weighed down her mind and could not be ignored.
As graduation approached, Luka began to ask the questions Anuka wanted to avoid. The question of "What next?" terrified her, and her indecision was paralyzing.
"Why not just get a work visa?" he asked with a gleaming hope in his eyes after they discussed potential plans post-graduation. Such an innocent question. It grated on Anuka even though she smiled and said that was never the plan for her. She had skimmed the job sites out of curiosity. She looked at the requirements listed in bold in job descriptions. She read up on what the government website said it took for international students to stay for work, and felt a growing sense of resentment. Before she ever stepped foot in the country, she had already been building a barrier between herself and America.
Indeed, why not pull teeth trying to get work authorization and eventually the coveted H-1B visa? Staying there meant getting stuck on a tight leash, and her pride was a permanent obstacle. If she got lucky and landed a job willing to sponsor her in exchange for overworking her, it would have to be directly related to what she studied in college. If she wished to apply somewhere else, the process would be slow and filled with friction. If she decided to leave the country for a holiday, she could not stay out too long or would risk facing trouble returning. The restrictions, the rules, the repercussions that piled on top of each other made no sense to Anuka. She knew what it took to stick around, but decided that she wanted nothing to do with it. Yet, she both admired and was sorry for any international student willing to white-knuckle it. Luka did not fully understand this. He only said what everyone else said. Why not just do it?
It seemed none of her international friends felt the same as her, especially not Vinya. They all wanted to stay and take their chances with the visa lottery. In light of their talks about what it meant to stay versus to leave, Vinya seemed grown-up compared to Anuka. Vinya did not get homesick the way Anuka did. No one seemed to long for home like Anuka did, like their lives in their home countries could wait for them as they chased their dreams across the Atlantic. A surging nostalgia choked her. The longing for home only increased as graduation day approached, and her eagerness to go back home made her feel childish, as if it were immature to want to return home. It felt like betraying Luka and Vinya for a silly reason. The comfort and the surety of herself at home were not reason enough to halt her progress in the US.
"America is where the jobs are," her father said over a group WhatsApp call one warm April day when she expressed her plan to return home after graduation and apply for jobs in Tbilisi. She was walking through the Esplanade, basking in the sun and reveling in the sound of the calm Charles River rippling against the rocks. She avoided the menacing geese and stepped around the greenish feces decorating the walkway.
"There are no opportunities in Georgia," Mariami added. "Maybe elsewhere in Europe, but try in America first. If it doesn't work out, you can always come home." Their logic seemed so sound. Just try there. If it doesn't work out, try somewhere else instead. Go try something in Japan, why not, just don't come home. There was no hope for Anuka of understanding this instinct to be anywhere but home. She liked home. It felt like two worlds were pulling at her, yet neither offered a clear path to success. She thought of the words that would encapsulate the rest of her life if she stayed: Passport, visa, work permit, bank statement, sponsorship letter, vaccination records, proof of employment...
The world was too open and she needed to be rid of choice.
"Are you okay, sweetheart?"
It was the sound of her mother's voice that ripped her from her stupor. She was still sitting at the kitchen table. The pen she used to write her to-do list dug deep into her notebook and spilled ink onto the thin pages. Her previous optimism for the day dimmed.
She was suddenly a regressed woman. She was now a twenty-two-year-old girl again, hearing the words, "Your US visa application is denied. Next."
"But," she had stammered, so shocked she forgot to breathe, "It is just a funeral. I only plan to go to my friend's funeral."
"You are not qualified. Your visa application has been denied. Next."
Even nine years later, the grief imposed itself on her and demanded she pay attention to it. She let go of her pen and sipped on her now-cold coffee. She smiled weakly at her mother and said everything was alright; she was just stuck in her head.
She felt the grief scare off her positive mood like a dog barking at a pigeon. It first knocked on her door. It then began to claw on the wood savagely like it wanted to ravage her home, undo all that she had cleaned up in the years since Luka died, and eat her up. Three days after his death, when she turned twenty-two, she received a scheduled gift from him in the mail. A framed hand-drawn photo of Joseph Stalin and her singing the lyrics to "Suliko" in what looked to be a karaoke bar. To mess with her. He had pranked her even across the ocean, even when dead. There was a note attached in his messy scrawl: You and Joseph have the same taste. Coincidence? Happy birthday, Anu. I love you.
Anuka stood up and approached the front door. As she opened it and walked out into the blinding sunlight, she announced over her shoulder, "I'm just running off to the store!"
The abandoned cemetery awaited her out of sight from the main square. It sat up the hill, which housed the bookshop, past the new playground, and deep into the woods behind her crumbling music academy. She knew the way because her great-grandfather was buried there.
Despite the blistering summer heat, the streets of Telavi were surprisingly busy. Anuka's brown sandals clicked along the walkway, and her cotton dress hung limp with no breeze to sway it. The sweat lining her hairline trickled down her temples, to her chin, bleeding past her collarbones and into her dress. Her scalp heated under the relentless sun as she gingerly touched her burning head of brown hair. People fanned themselves with newspapers and books as they rushed past her, on missions to escape the weather. She remembered Luka's habit of jumping from cobblestone to cobblestone in their North End escapades, and she had to physically shake her head to be rid of the image.
The sun cooked the walkways, the walls, the trees, as sleek cars shone under its harsh rays. They rolled in awkward lines down the road and honked occasionally at the uncaring jaywalkers. Pedestrians huddled under shade wherever they could - under trees, umbrellas set up at outdoor cafe seating, beneath the storefront awnings. And most, Anuka noticed, were flocking toward the new grand hotel. The big block words over the sliding doors read Telavi Chateau Hotel in both Georgian and English letters.
Anuka crossed the street and stared up at the building. This new hotel seemed to have sprung up overnight. She frowned at the new development. It stood tall and proud in the main square, reminding her of the bullies in her high school who would strut down the hallways with their backs straight, chests puffed toward the sky, broad shoulders clipping everyone they passed. This building was a colorless block of glass, clipping shoulders with wooden apartments, brown brick walls, and orange-tiled roofs. It looked out of place because it had none of the features that Anuka loved so much about her town. No wooden beams or pillars, no balconies with intricately carved railings, no architecture colored with oxidized hues ranging from burgundy to orange. It simply remained gray and smooth, solid and unremarkable, making no effort to blend into its surroundings. It looked like a building straight out of Boston's Financial District.
As Anuka stood in the hotel's shadow, head tilted up, dazed and sweating under the beating sun, a man's voice led her back to earth. An older gentleman approached and addressed her in Russian. White hair blended into the blonde at his temples, and his blue eyes appeared wide, piercing. He expressed something to her in this foreign language, which aggravated her. Maybe it was that she could not understand a lick of what this Russian was saying, or maybe it was the fact that he was speaking Russian at all. Who did he think he was, assuming she could understand him? Anuka stared at him warily, and perhaps realizing his mistake, he quickly switched to a heavily-accented English.
Anuka blushed with anger. She decided in that moment to pretend not to understand English. Was this how this Russian man operated in her country? He stalked up to people and assumed they knew all these foreign languages when he did not bother learning theirs? She merely shook her head and said, "Sorry, no English." He huffed impatiently and slowed the pace of his words, elongated them, and emphasized others like that would fix the perceived language barrier. He moved his hands in motions that made no sense and revealed his dark pit stains. When Anuka would recall this moment later, she could remember how altered and wobbly life seemed - how much of an alien she had become in her own country. She had fled the US partly to avoid this feeling, yet there she was.
A distinctly Georgian man with black curly hair, a thick beard, and a prominent crooked nose, appeared next to the Russian and offered Anuka a tight smile. "Excuse me, ma'am." He spoke in Georgian. "My boss said that there is no loitering allowed outside the entrance. It blocks the pedestrian traffic. Are you a guest of the hotel?" His customer service smile was a rigid, practiced expression that mortified Anuka. That was the disingenuous smile she received at shopping centers in Boston. It was the smile baristas offered her when she ordered her coffee. That smile had followed her all the way to Telavi and found her completely unprepared. She apologized to the men before all but running away and leaving the grand hotel behind.
Anuka wallowed in humiliation and outrage on the way to the cemetery. The path sloped up as she passed the rustic bookshop. The leisurely walk took her through the newly constructed playground where the sweaty kids, too stubborn to succumb to the heat and return inside, played sluggishly. The old music academy came into view near the start of dense trees at the crest of the hill. The school's gate appeared to be barely held together at the hinges, the building's cream paint had peeled off its cement walls, and the two-story building, which was previously charming in its simplicity, had aged to a tattered and dilapidated husk. The lawn had grown wild and unkempt. Weeds crept up the academy and covered the faded chalk drawings of clef symbols and musical instruments. Looking at the old haven, Anuka felt the urge to pick up her violin.
She finally passed the school and made it to the equally neglected cemetery housing hundreds of forgotten graves. It did not house Luka's grave, of course. He was buried somewhere in Providence, probably in a well-kept cemetery with a constant stream of flowers, neatly cut grass, and his headstone always polished. Thick tree branches shaded her from the sun as she passed pictures etched into smooth rocks: wives and husbands buried side by side, solo persons buried alone, entire families taking up plots of land and divided from other clusters of families with rusty gates. A single thought stayed in Anuka's head as she studied the dead. If she had just stayed. If she had just applied for a work permit. If she chose to stay, she would have made it to Luka's funeral. In her darkest moments, she wondered if he would have died at all had she stayed. Maybe whatever triggered his stroke would not exist. Could she have been the deciding factor?
She went on for hours this way, reading the names on the stones, dragging her feet through the grass, and softly humming her favorite song as she thought of all that could have been. She came across the name Luka twice and stopped in irrational panic both times. If a Boston building and a customer service smile could follow her from America all the way to her untouched town, she almost expected a grave to magically follow as well. But no such thing happened. When she saw names that even started with the letter L, she slowed down and read the stone over several times to make sure it did not spell the name of the boy she loved too late. The sun gradually became less intense, perfectly timed, as she had almost fainted from exhaustion mixed with the humid air. She decided to stop this nonsense before she did indeed faint and wake up with a bloody head. Luka knew she loved him. Fainting in a cemetery on her birthday would be the last thing Anuka needed, and certainly the last thing Luka would have wanted.
The trek back home was almost pleasant. Perhaps it was the lack of a grueling sun. Perhaps it was the closure of her walk through the cemetery. In the end, despite his death, despite the consular office's unwillingness to let her back into the US, she had made peace with her decision to leave that world upon graduation. Vinya had been sympathetic, though she did not relate. Anuka thought of her as she passed the playground, the bookstore, and the hotel. She was glad they still stayed in touch. Anuka's family had welcomed her back with open arms and lots of questions, but understood her character enough to know. She was not cut out for a life abroad when life at home was more exciting and freeing.
She finally walked through her front door as the sun painted the sky orange, with her sights set on her new violin.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
After the mid-morning phone messages died down and several guests dropped off their presents, only her parents remained in her home to pass the time before the party. Her mother, Elene, organized the gifts. She put away the new sheet music, washed the new pots and pans, unwrapped the books, and stacked them on the overflowing shelves in the living room. Tornike, her father, was baking shoti bread in the tandoor out in the yard across the squawking chicken coop.
The smell of home soothed Anuka, as did the act of writing down her tasks for the upcoming week: Translate chapters five to eight. Grade students' essays. Skim Nini's arc & send review before Friday. The smoky, hearty aroma of fresh bread wafted faintly through the open back door, and both Anuka and her mother breathed deeply through their noses to catch it in its diluted doses.
Anuka was proud that her father was the only man she knew of who baked bread in that big cylindrical oven. This pride formed sometime in her teenage years and instilled in her an important distinction between her family and everyone else. Her father did not merely take out the trash or grill the shashlik during parties or bring fresh fruit from the roadside stands in Nasamkhraliskhevi. He baked bread, a woman's task.
Anuka's family did many things differently, aside from the controversy of who in the family baked shoti. They hired an English tutor to converse with Anuka three times a week and reinforce what she was taught in school. Their old friends from Tbilisi let them use the old SAT textbooks their kids no longer needed. Elene and Tornike helped Anuka sign up for College Board, brought her tea and fruit as she studied overtime, researched US universities, and relayed to Anuka how to apply for a student visa. They drove her the two hours to an international school in Tbilisi and waited in the parking lot as she took the SAT and AP exams. They were with her every step of the way. When Anuka was accepted into a university in Boston with a decent scholarship, her parents celebrated by, for once, not inviting anyone over for dinner. With just the three of them, they drank wine, ate cake, and planned the next four years of young Anuka's life.
Her achievement was a milestone that rippled through the town. Until her, people generally considered higher education in Tbilisi as the natural progression from their small town of Telavi. A few strayed to countries like Germany, Austria, France, and so on, but the US was much too far. Too unwelcoming.
Anuka's neighbors somehow knew more about life abroad than she did. They knew more about her university, more about the country she would be living in for the next four years, and had more knowledge of her career trajectory after graduation. Anuka wondered briefly if they held private meetings without her to discuss her options. The extended family (people Anuka never quite figured out how she was related to) offered their praise and opinions, all with the expectation that she would eventually return home. She would live in America to study business and finance and return to save her country with her brand new Western knowledge. She felt peeved. When had she agreed to this ridiculous responsibility? Why was she expected to return to Georgia, and what good would she do for its economy anyway? Why would her neighbors talk about her like she alone could save them from corruption and raise their wages? A cloak of pressure settled over her shoulders and followed her past the border control at Boston Logan International Airport.
The first year of college life was infected with a homesickness that Anuka very slowly recovered from while on a constant verge of tears. She felt isolated and disconnected from the friends she gradually made because they were perpetually unknown to her. Conversations were friendly but never too specific, never too uncomfortable. They focused on majors and drama and campus life, and rarely strayed from the confines of their immediate surroundings. She felt the process of becoming swallowed up by a bubble so thick and misty, it was impossible to see what she was missing on the other side. As the years would progress, she'd hardly remember the bubble was there at all.
Many of her friends and peers claimed simple lives, but mental illness at the same time. Anuka did not know how to react to the ease with which people feigned familiarity with her. She did not know who to trust, who was wearing facades, who was genuine. She found it disarming if strangers smiled at her. When she returned home for breaks and found herself smiling at strangers, a mild embarrassment would singe her. Her interactions were viewed in her mind through a bird's-eye lens that she could not shake. Above all else, Anuka realized in the first semester just how unloved she was. The only people who did love her existed a full day's worth of travel away. She had never felt so alone, afraid, and vaguely disgusted.
The second year flew smoothly as she grew closer to Vinya, an international student from India who lived in the dorm across the hall. Vinya came from an obscenely rich family and tended toward self-righteousness at times, but Anuka learned she could stomach that as long as it did not rear its head too often. She never understood what being on the same "wavelength" meant, but she felt a natural understanding tether them together despite their differences. Perhaps they would never have become friends if both of them were not international students, but this did not matter to her.
Vinya bought designer clothing that Anuka never bothered to compliment. Her friend rarely did her own laundry and opted instead to take it to the cleaners, and she had a gym membership, which she solely used for the shower facility. Anuka found the way her friend handled money irresponsible, regardless of how rich she was, and pointed this out often. Maybe that was the reason their friendship clicked so quickly. A level of honesty blossomed that reminded her of her conversations with her cousins. She felt like herself around Vinya, and assumed Vinya felt the same around her, too. They bought each other food so often that they did not bother keeping track of who owed whom what. They knew they would not have to defend or define themselves in each other's presence.
No silly questions about whether they had wifi in their home countries or if they lived in houses or huts. No nodding along to American references they did not understand, or talking crap about immediate family members no matter how much they deserved it. No misunderstandings that painted them as chronically alien to one another.
During one of their hangouts in a café, disguised as a study session, Vinya admitted to Anuka, "I spent over 70 hours sitting in planes last year." Her brown eyes, which were usually darting around, grew awfully still. "That's more hours than I spent with my family."
In her third year, Anuka called Vinya late into the night after leaving a birthday party for her former suitemate. Top 100 music blared from the house, and the bright lights escaping into the night cast the windows as portals into an American movie.
"She asked if I wanted to go to the bathroom with her, and I assumed we would just be taking a break from the crowd." Anuka breathed heavily from laughter and watched her breath disappear into the dark air. "I thought we would be touching up our makeup or something. But no, nope. She dropped her pants and started pissing in front of me." She shivered, partly from the February cold and partly from remembering the awkward way she stood in that bathroom as she tried to hide her shock at the predicament. Her friend gossiped all the while, still sitting on the toilet. Anuka looked with comical interest into the mirror, at the walls, at the rug, anywhere but at the girl casually peeing a few feet away. She left the party soon afterward and stood on the sidewalk, bundled deep into her puffer as she waited for her Uber to pick her up from Brookline.
"I guess it's normal here for friends to pee in front of each other?" Amusement laced Vinya's voice.
"She probably thought I was a weirdo," Anuka replied. "She asked if I also needed to go, and I said no. It looked like I only joined to watch her pee!"
Her life plan cracked down the middle in her final year of university. Luka seemed unassuming at first. He sat behind her in her economics class, rarely spoke, and she never took more than a cursory glance at his dirty blonde curls that seemed permanently bent over his tablet. Almost halfway through the fall semester, he called her name outside the lecture hall and fumbled with the straps of his backpack as his shaky voice asked for her number. She did not at that point quite remember his name, but felt giddy at him knowing hers.
The rest of the year came with a caveat. She warned him of her plans to leave the country right after graduation and told him not to expect much from her. They did nothing more than eat out together, study together, sometimes brush hands, and stand closer than friends were supposed to. She did not flirt with him, though he outwardly flirted with her. At first, she was worried Luka resembled a boy she had a fleeting crush on in freshman year. That boy described her appearance as "interesting" to a mutual friend, and she promptly backpedalled out of her infatuation. Luka was thankfully nothing like that.
He was curious and sensitive. They talked about the differences between their cultures, researched whatever they were unsure about together, and never ran out of topics to discuss. Anuka found him invigorating, just the kind of person who challenged her and asked the right questions. He was never absent-minded, which kept her sharp and attentive to his every word.
"What's your favorite Georgian song?" He asked her on Marathon Monday, of all days, after they parked themselves in front of the Prudential Center. They arrived right as most of the commotion was dying down to cheer on the remaining runners who were booking it to the finish line.
"Okay, don't laugh," Anuka replied gravely.
"Do I ever laugh at you?"
"Only every day."
"Ah, then I see why you would be worried. I promise not to laugh at you." He said this as he actively fought a grin.
"It's... 'Suliko.'"
"Okay? I've never heard of it," he said as he looked up the song on his phone. "Wait." His eyebrows shot up, and his face transformed from concentration into something devious. "Stalin really loved this song, apparently?" He did not, of course, expect Anuka to answer that, but she did anyway.
"Maybe," she said defensively. "It's a beautiful song once you forget about its fanbase." That was when Luka began to wheeze from laughter. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and he bent over slightly as if to contain his snickering. Anuka blushed not from embarrassment, but admiration. He glowed when he laughed. The sun peeked through the clouds at that moment as if to compete with the young man. He was beautiful, but she did not express this to him. It felt a weird thing to suddenly say on that windy Marathon Monday when they were still surrounded by yelling spectators, blowing horns, raging bells, and participants holding up country flags over their heads as they ran.
Anuka thought this might have been the moment she fell in love with him, but she was wrong. That was merely the moment she became aware of her love. In actuality, love crept up on her so slowly and quietly that she did not notice it until it crossed her field of vision. It had been fed day after day with scraps of text messages, phone calls, study sessions, walks through the park. It fed on everything it could until it weighed down her mind and could not be ignored.
As graduation approached, Luka began to ask the questions Anuka wanted to avoid. The question of "What next?" terrified her, and her indecision was paralyzing.
"Why not just get a work visa?" he asked with a gleaming hope in his eyes after they discussed potential plans post-graduation. Such an innocent question. It grated on Anuka even though she smiled and said that was never the plan for her. She had skimmed the job sites out of curiosity. She looked at the requirements listed in bold in job descriptions. She read up on what the government website said it took for international students to stay for work, and felt a growing sense of resentment. Before she ever stepped foot in the country, she had already been building a barrier between herself and America.
Indeed, why not pull teeth trying to get work authorization and eventually the coveted H-1B visa? Staying there meant getting stuck on a tight leash, and her pride was a permanent obstacle. If she got lucky and landed a job willing to sponsor her in exchange for overworking her, it would have to be directly related to what she studied in college. If she wished to apply somewhere else, the process would be slow and filled with friction. If she decided to leave the country for a holiday, she could not stay out too long or would risk facing trouble returning. The restrictions, the rules, the repercussions that piled on top of each other made no sense to Anuka. She knew what it took to stick around, but decided that she wanted nothing to do with it. Yet, she both admired and was sorry for any international student willing to white-knuckle it. Luka did not fully understand this. He only said what everyone else said. Why not just do it?
It seemed none of her international friends felt the same as her, especially not Vinya. They all wanted to stay and take their chances with the visa lottery. In light of their talks about what it meant to stay versus to leave, Vinya seemed grown-up compared to Anuka. Vinya did not get homesick the way Anuka did. No one seemed to long for home like Anuka did, like their lives in their home countries could wait for them as they chased their dreams across the Atlantic. A surging nostalgia choked her. The longing for home only increased as graduation day approached, and her eagerness to go back home made her feel childish, as if it were immature to want to return home. It felt like betraying Luka and Vinya for a silly reason. The comfort and the surety of herself at home were not reason enough to halt her progress in the US.
"America is where the jobs are," her father said over a group WhatsApp call one warm April day when she expressed her plan to return home after graduation and apply for jobs in Tbilisi. She was walking through the Esplanade, basking in the sun and reveling in the sound of the calm Charles River rippling against the rocks. She avoided the menacing geese and stepped around the greenish feces decorating the walkway.
"There are no opportunities in Georgia," Mariami added. "Maybe elsewhere in Europe, but try in America first. If it doesn't work out, you can always come home." Their logic seemed so sound. Just try there. If it doesn't work out, try somewhere else instead. Go try something in Japan, why not, just don't come home. There was no hope for Anuka of understanding this instinct to be anywhere but home. She liked home. It felt like two worlds were pulling at her, yet neither offered a clear path to success. She thought of the words that would encapsulate the rest of her life if she stayed: Passport, visa, work permit, bank statement, sponsorship letter, vaccination records, proof of employment...
The world was too open and she needed to be rid of choice.
"Are you okay, sweetheart?"
It was the sound of her mother's voice that ripped her from her stupor. She was still sitting at the kitchen table. The pen she used to write her to-do list dug deep into her notebook and spilled ink onto the thin pages. Her previous optimism for the day dimmed.
She was suddenly a regressed woman. She was now a twenty-two-year-old girl again, hearing the words, "Your US visa application is denied. Next."
"But," she had stammered, so shocked she forgot to breathe, "It is just a funeral. I only plan to go to my friend's funeral."
"You are not qualified. Your visa application has been denied. Next."
Even nine years later, the grief imposed itself on her and demanded she pay attention to it. She let go of her pen and sipped on her now-cold coffee. She smiled weakly at her mother and said everything was alright; she was just stuck in her head.
She felt the grief scare off her positive mood like a dog barking at a pigeon. It first knocked on her door. It then began to claw on the wood savagely like it wanted to ravage her home, undo all that she had cleaned up in the years since Luka died, and eat her up. Three days after his death, when she turned twenty-two, she received a scheduled gift from him in the mail. A framed hand-drawn photo of Joseph Stalin and her singing the lyrics to "Suliko" in what looked to be a karaoke bar. To mess with her. He had pranked her even across the ocean, even when dead. There was a note attached in his messy scrawl: You and Joseph have the same taste. Coincidence? Happy birthday, Anu. I love you.
Anuka stood up and approached the front door. As she opened it and walked out into the blinding sunlight, she announced over her shoulder, "I'm just running off to the store!"
The abandoned cemetery awaited her out of sight from the main square. It sat up the hill, which housed the bookshop, past the new playground, and deep into the woods behind her crumbling music academy. She knew the way because her great-grandfather was buried there.
Despite the blistering summer heat, the streets of Telavi were surprisingly busy. Anuka's brown sandals clicked along the walkway, and her cotton dress hung limp with no breeze to sway it. The sweat lining her hairline trickled down her temples, to her chin, bleeding past her collarbones and into her dress. Her scalp heated under the relentless sun as she gingerly touched her burning head of brown hair. People fanned themselves with newspapers and books as they rushed past her, on missions to escape the weather. She remembered Luka's habit of jumping from cobblestone to cobblestone in their North End escapades, and she had to physically shake her head to be rid of the image.
The sun cooked the walkways, the walls, the trees, as sleek cars shone under its harsh rays. They rolled in awkward lines down the road and honked occasionally at the uncaring jaywalkers. Pedestrians huddled under shade wherever they could - under trees, umbrellas set up at outdoor cafe seating, beneath the storefront awnings. And most, Anuka noticed, were flocking toward the new grand hotel. The big block words over the sliding doors read Telavi Chateau Hotel in both Georgian and English letters.
Anuka crossed the street and stared up at the building. This new hotel seemed to have sprung up overnight. She frowned at the new development. It stood tall and proud in the main square, reminding her of the bullies in her high school who would strut down the hallways with their backs straight, chests puffed toward the sky, broad shoulders clipping everyone they passed. This building was a colorless block of glass, clipping shoulders with wooden apartments, brown brick walls, and orange-tiled roofs. It looked out of place because it had none of the features that Anuka loved so much about her town. No wooden beams or pillars, no balconies with intricately carved railings, no architecture colored with oxidized hues ranging from burgundy to orange. It simply remained gray and smooth, solid and unremarkable, making no effort to blend into its surroundings. It looked like a building straight out of Boston's Financial District.
As Anuka stood in the hotel's shadow, head tilted up, dazed and sweating under the beating sun, a man's voice led her back to earth. An older gentleman approached and addressed her in Russian. White hair blended into the blonde at his temples, and his blue eyes appeared wide, piercing. He expressed something to her in this foreign language, which aggravated her. Maybe it was that she could not understand a lick of what this Russian was saying, or maybe it was the fact that he was speaking Russian at all. Who did he think he was, assuming she could understand him? Anuka stared at him warily, and perhaps realizing his mistake, he quickly switched to a heavily-accented English.
Anuka blushed with anger. She decided in that moment to pretend not to understand English. Was this how this Russian man operated in her country? He stalked up to people and assumed they knew all these foreign languages when he did not bother learning theirs? She merely shook her head and said, "Sorry, no English." He huffed impatiently and slowed the pace of his words, elongated them, and emphasized others like that would fix the perceived language barrier. He moved his hands in motions that made no sense and revealed his dark pit stains. When Anuka would recall this moment later, she could remember how altered and wobbly life seemed - how much of an alien she had become in her own country. She had fled the US partly to avoid this feeling, yet there she was.
A distinctly Georgian man with black curly hair, a thick beard, and a prominent crooked nose, appeared next to the Russian and offered Anuka a tight smile. "Excuse me, ma'am." He spoke in Georgian. "My boss said that there is no loitering allowed outside the entrance. It blocks the pedestrian traffic. Are you a guest of the hotel?" His customer service smile was a rigid, practiced expression that mortified Anuka. That was the disingenuous smile she received at shopping centers in Boston. It was the smile baristas offered her when she ordered her coffee. That smile had followed her all the way to Telavi and found her completely unprepared. She apologized to the men before all but running away and leaving the grand hotel behind.
Anuka wallowed in humiliation and outrage on the way to the cemetery. The path sloped up as she passed the rustic bookshop. The leisurely walk took her through the newly constructed playground where the sweaty kids, too stubborn to succumb to the heat and return inside, played sluggishly. The old music academy came into view near the start of dense trees at the crest of the hill. The school's gate appeared to be barely held together at the hinges, the building's cream paint had peeled off its cement walls, and the two-story building, which was previously charming in its simplicity, had aged to a tattered and dilapidated husk. The lawn had grown wild and unkempt. Weeds crept up the academy and covered the faded chalk drawings of clef symbols and musical instruments. Looking at the old haven, Anuka felt the urge to pick up her violin.
She finally passed the school and made it to the equally neglected cemetery housing hundreds of forgotten graves. It did not house Luka's grave, of course. He was buried somewhere in Providence, probably in a well-kept cemetery with a constant stream of flowers, neatly cut grass, and his headstone always polished. Thick tree branches shaded her from the sun as she passed pictures etched into smooth rocks: wives and husbands buried side by side, solo persons buried alone, entire families taking up plots of land and divided from other clusters of families with rusty gates. A single thought stayed in Anuka's head as she studied the dead. If she had just stayed. If she had just applied for a work permit. If she chose to stay, she would have made it to Luka's funeral. In her darkest moments, she wondered if he would have died at all had she stayed. Maybe whatever triggered his stroke would not exist. Could she have been the deciding factor?
She went on for hours this way, reading the names on the stones, dragging her feet through the grass, and softly humming her favorite song as she thought of all that could have been. She came across the name Luka twice and stopped in irrational panic both times. If a Boston building and a customer service smile could follow her from America all the way to her untouched town, she almost expected a grave to magically follow as well. But no such thing happened. When she saw names that even started with the letter L, she slowed down and read the stone over several times to make sure it did not spell the name of the boy she loved too late. The sun gradually became less intense, perfectly timed, as she had almost fainted from exhaustion mixed with the humid air. She decided to stop this nonsense before she did indeed faint and wake up with a bloody head. Luka knew she loved him. Fainting in a cemetery on her birthday would be the last thing Anuka needed, and certainly the last thing Luka would have wanted.
The trek back home was almost pleasant. Perhaps it was the lack of a grueling sun. Perhaps it was the closure of her walk through the cemetery. In the end, despite his death, despite the consular office's unwillingness to let her back into the US, she had made peace with her decision to leave that world upon graduation. Vinya had been sympathetic, though she did not relate. Anuka thought of her as she passed the playground, the bookstore, and the hotel. She was glad they still stayed in touch. Anuka's family had welcomed her back with open arms and lots of questions, but understood her character enough to know. She was not cut out for a life abroad when life at home was more exciting and freeing.
She finally walked through her front door as the sun painted the sky orange, with her sights set on her new violin.
Maybe because I have close friends who are international students, I felt like I related to nearly every sentence in this story. I was completely immersed in the MC and her feelings and choices. I really love seeing the world of this type of international students explored!
ReplyDeleteA moody, wistful story of what we give up when we strike out in a direction that differs from that of our friends. A very thoughtful piece. Reminds me of ex-pats I have known, who have chosen to live their lives at a distance. That doesn't mean we love the other any less, only that we have chosen different destinies. There wasn't a grand dilemma or resolution to this story, but I admired it all the same.
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