In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

INTRODUCTION The bet. “I made a bet with Magu,” Emil says, smiling. “I was in his house yesterday, and we were talking about him drinking too much and me taking drugs. I told him how, when I was smoking marijuana every day, I was sad, afraid, angry—that it changed every day and that it stopped when I stopped smoking. Magu has stopped drinking now because we made a bet. If he drinks in the next two months, he has to give me a hundred lari.” “And what if he doesn’t drink?” “Then I have to give him a hundred lari, but that won’t be necessary; it’s a safe bet. He will definitely drink within the next two months.” “Maybe he will just drink when you are not there.” “Maybe, but I am sure that there will be a time when he also drinks when I am there.” A few days later, I ask Emil how the bet is going, if he has caught Magu drinking yet. He answers that of course he has. I ask whether he got the money. Of course he didn’t. That wasn’t the point. As he explains , it would be impossible to make Magu stop drinking completely; the goal of the bet was to make sure that Magu drank a little less than usual. Being Killed by Living In late March 2010, almost a year after I had finished my fieldwork, Emil wrote me an e-mail containing only three words: “Magu has died.” It did not explain how. Magu had already been buried when I found out. Like most others, Emil had a profile on odnoklassniki. In the days after Magu’s death, Emil’s update on the profile read, “я думал я потерял только лучшего друга, оказывается я потерял большую часть своего сердца” (“I thought I only lost my best friend. It now occurs to me that I also lost a large part of my heart”). I called Emil to ask what had happened. His voice was distant. Not just because of the thousands of miles separating 122 • SEctIoN III us or the bad connection. It seemed as if he were talking somewhere away from himself. His words were not trembling from crying; rather, they were heavy, burdened, as if something had been eating away at his heart. once again, Magu was absent—this time for good. And once again, his absence made some things seem more present. our tattoos for instance, Magu’s artwork, inscribed on our bodies. We talked about them for a long time, about carrying a trace of Magu on us always. “Every day Magu asked, ‘How is Martin? How is his work?’” Emil told me. “He was always thinking about you; he was our friend. I’ll never find another friend like him. I’m at his sister’s house now. I’m here every evening. call me if you want to talk about Magu. You know he came here [to Batumi] because his father died. He was in a very bad mood; he drank all the time, and he smoked too much. that’s what killed him. When you come here, we will go to his grave and drink to him.” I flew to Batumi a few weeks later to pay my respects. Emil told me that it was Magu’s mother who had found him one morning dead in his bed. She called Emil, who immediately went to the apartment. Emil told me that Magu had apparently died in his sleep—at least he hoped so. When they turned his body, they found that part of his back was black. Why, exactly, was never established. the common sentiment, as Emil expressed it, was that “living killed him.” the spring days I spent in Batumi in 2010 were surrounded by a feeling of loss. We drank to Magu, on several occasions, to honor him and remind ourselves of him. And often we sat in silence. His death was disturbing, horrible, because of the void it left. But it was not surprising. Perhaps that was part of why it was so disturbing. A question loomed: could we have done more to prevent it? And was this inevitability of being “killed by living ” reserved for only Magu? Emil had tried, in his own way, to minimize Magu’s excessive drinking. We had all been well aware that Magu was an alcoholic, yet we had all drank with him—being an alcoholic was part of who he was. His death was a reminder of mortality and the actions that...

Share