Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

GEORGIA ON MY MIND

171 Tbilisi,฀Republic฀of฀Georgia,฀2002 Arriving at London Heathrow from Newark, I check the boards for my British Air flight to Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia. Terminal 1 for European connections, the signs announce, and Terminal 4 for Asian connections. The map in my head isn’t helpful. It shows Georgia at the crossroads between Europe and Asia—wedged between the Caucasus Mountains and Russia to the north, the Black Sea to the west, and Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to the south. A sympathetic clerk directs me to Terminal 4, where I queue up behind a group of chatty diplomats and NGO staffers. In French and English they trade complaints about power outages inTbilisi, along with homeless refugees, corrupt politicians, and closed museums. No announcement is made about our flight, and no light flashes at Gate 17 as we board. When I question two French speakers about these irregularities, they shrug. For Eurasia, c’est normal, they say. The smart traveler, I remind myself, accepts confusion as a given. On this trip, I am fortunate in having my confusions tended to. My hosts for the two-week visit, sponsored by the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi, are Georgian colleagues in the field of American studies. Lika, Vaso, and Nana greet me with hugs at midnight when my flight arrives. In battered Russian cars, they chauffeur me to meetings and lectures and show me around their gritty, once glorious city. Best of all, they and their colleagues spoil me with sturgeon and caviar for lunch and sumptuous evening bacchanals. Although Georgia is an economically distressed and floundering postcommunist state, my colleagues believe in its democratic future. Their professional work, as teachers and scholars of American history and culture, links them to the U.S. model of a free society. Café Manhattan is decked out with wraparound murals of the New York skyline. TheTwinTowers shimmer in the evening sky. “I Happen to Like New York” plays D GEORGIA฀ON฀MY฀MIND A GLOBAL APPETITE 172 on the sound system. My colleague Nina, a professor of English, and her husband , Boris, have chosen this spot for our after-dinner drinks. I feel them watching my face, eager for reactions. I don’t know whether to laugh or weep. It’s April 2002, seven months after 9/11. New Yorkers, even those of us who now live in New Jersey, are still vibrating from the jihadist attacks. We speak in depressed tones and sleep badly. The iconic New York of the mural and song is in deep disrepair , along with our national psyche. My paper for the Georgian Association of American Studies conference in Tbilisi, two days hence, is a meditation on these troubles. I’ll be probing connections between the Twin Towers and Big Macs, between U.S. economic power, popular culture, military penetration, and arrogant , unilateral overreach. From the Georgian side, the picture is different. Mindful of seventy years of Soviet oppression, Boris and Nina, like so many Georgians, welcome Uncle Sam’s interest in their small, vulnerable nation. With McDonald’s golden arches not yet a blight on their landscape, they appreciate the United States as Georgia’s largest foreign investor and largest donor of aid (about $90 million in 2002). They nod sagely when I mention the pipeline that is to run through their country, carrying oil westward from Kazakhstan, as a motive for U.S. support. Café Manhattan has its own special meanings for Boris and Nina. In the 1980s Boris had a job with an international bank in New York. He adored the city and adapted his English to its slangy rhythms. After work each day, he re- GEORGIA ON MY MIND 173 turned to his apartment in suburban Cliffside Park, New Jersey, a town just six miles south of my home in Leonia. When Nina visited her husband, she and Boris often ate at Kervan Kebab, my favorite neighborhood Turkish restaurant. Could we ever have crossed paths there, I wonder? Could we have been seated at adjacent tables, eating the same shepherd’s salad, taramasalata, and shish kebab? I tell Boris and Nina that theTurkish owners of Kervan Kebab have recently added Georgian wines to their wine list in response to requests from Georgian immigrants. We’ve been discussing Georgian wines since dinner at the Café Toucan. “We are wine drinkers and wine lovers,” Nina says, “not...