Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
For a few seconds I was disoriented, unable to focus in the shadows.
“Come over here, please,” Tamara said.
I stepped around chunks of fallen plaster and joined her.
“Can you see it now?” she said.
“Yes, I see. What do you call that big one?”
“My pregnant angel,” Tamara said.
“Pregnant angel . . . . ?”
“Yes!” She laughed.
I didn’t understand, but forced a smile anyway, pleased simply to stand beside her.
The seated image did look like a slightly fledged angel—if those silver-gray smudges just above its shoulders were wings. A rough nimbus bordered the head, or perhaps it was a fringe of white hair. The visible lower half of its pink face glowed, and its rosy mouth curled into a smile as mysterious as Mona Lisa’s. Red-edged, a white tunic draped the distended stomach, as if on a mother in her ninth month or more. From beneath the tunic, a hand reached out to us.
“You are from Los Angeles, so you must know all about angels,” Tamara said.
“But it’s so strange.”
“Actually, in our language strange means beautiful.”
Tamara held a red hen under one arm that cackled and squirmed, fighting for freedom. A bleating lamb strained against its short tether, but Tamara held on.
“My pregnant angel,” she murmured.
It was April 15, 1977, a brilliant day, but we were standing inside Nikortsminda, a twelfth-century church in Soviet Georgia, a two-hour drive from the capital, Tbilisi. I’d read that this fragmented fresco possibly depicted a Resurrection scene. Most of it was white-washed, and surviving figures, including the “pregnant angel,” had partially obscured faces, making the whole scene ambiguous.
Our friend Zaza opened the front door and stepped into the church tentatively. “Dearest Tamara?” he said reverently. He blinked against the shadows for a moment before seeing us and the fresco. “Those filthy Russians,” Zaza barked, backing out of the church, tossing back his black scarf. “Whitewash! Damned Russians think they can destroy our national arts!”
“I must sing now,” Tamara said to me. “Would you mind waiting for me outside?”
I joined our group on a grassy knoll nearby. Tamara’s song rose from the church, and I imagined her voice bringing light to those dark angelic figures, animating the wings of her “pregnant angel.”
About six weeks before, I had met Tamara when she attended my American fiction class at Tbilisi State University. Like her, many non-students visited my classes, if only to see the stranger, a swarthy bearded Fulbright lecturer—not at all the stereotyped surfer blond they’d expected from Los Angeles. Well, here I was, as disappointing to them as to myself.
I hadn’t responded to a woman romantically for about a year, until Tamara introduced herself after class as a colleague of my friend Zaza, who also taught at the university.
“I cannot entirely agree with your interpretation of Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’” she said, taking me off guard. “Killing the mosquito seemed simply cruel, not at all ‘satisfying’ Nick’s psychological struggle with his war experiences. But I did like your reading of fishing as a metaphor of his quest for inner peace.”
Stunned by her intense energy and beauty, I didn’t pay much attention to what else she said, and only managed to mutter, “Thanks.”
Less than five feet tall, Tamara was elfin. Her bearing and delicate face, an unearthly white below short black hair, echoed the aristocratic aura of women in Georgian paintings, from the portraits of Queen Tamara, who initiated Georgia’s twelfth-century cultural renaissance, to the contemporary paintings by Lado Gudiashvili. Wearing a white blouse and full red skirt, Tamara had politely listened to the lecture, occasionally raising a thin black eyebrow, but she now reminded me of an endearing, excited child, hands fluttering as she spoke. Her small white hand came to rest on the podium, and I couldn’t resist touching it.
“I must go now,” she said, blushing. “Perhaps we can talk again.”
For several hours Tamara’s image mastered me and I was eager to ask Zaza about her.
“Ah, she is a true aristocrat!” Zaza said when we met for dinner. He looked at me for a long moment, clenched his forehead. “I have some bad news for you.”
“What?”
“This is impossible. Utterly impossible. She is married.”
I’d been more obvious than I thought, but the pain of this revelation made me want to know more. Zaza told me they had been best friends since childhood, his voice confirming their strong emotional bond. Tamara was an eminent American literature scholar and had written a book about Hemingway. She was also one of the most popular singers and song writers in the Soviet Union and, most importantly, “the greatest living singer of Georgian songs!” Zaza concluded “She is the most generous woman in Georgia. You must see what she gave me for Christmas!”
Zaza dug into his shoulder bag and pulled out a beautifully illustrated book. “This will help you understand how Georgians feel about love and friendship,” he said, handing it to me.
Inscribed by Tamara to Zaza, the book was an English translation of Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, a medieval epic about the spiritual underpinnings of love and friendship. Among other chivalric themes, the poem eloquently echoed Rustaveli’s own unrequited love for Queen Tamara.
The book opened easily to an underlined passage: “I speak of love’s highest form—elevated, pure and heavenly. No mortal tongue can explain it; it is a mystery transcending all thought and understanding. It uplifts the souls of those who endure love’s torments. A lover, therefore, must learn how to bear these afflictions.”
Over the next several weeks, Zaza introduced me to many of his other friends and colleagues, but I didn’t see the radiant Tamara again. I asked him about her and, in an uncharacteristically sad voice, Zaza said that we would be joining her and some friends for a picnic next Sunday near an ancient country church. More in character, he tossed a long black silk scarf over his left shoulder, clenched his high forehead, raised his aristocratic chin, and exclaimed, “Oh no, what will we do for fresh meat?!” Completely in character, he was animated, over his dark mood. “Fresh meat—impossible to get!”
Our first mission on Sunday was to find fresh meat. A group of us drove into the country, far from Tbilisi, down difficult narrow roads. Finally, we spotted a shepherd and his dog. The shepherd wore a long black animal skin over his shoulders, just as I had seen in medieval Georgian paintings. The dog was chasing one of the spring lambs toward us by the time our car stopped.
“Fresh meat!” Zaza said, as happy as I’d seen him in days. “Gaugimardjos,” they greeted each other, and negotiated in Georgian, Zaza frequently shouting ara! ara! (no! no!), the shepherd echoing him, but finally they agreed on a price. Zaza peeled bills off a stack of rubles while the shepherd trussed the lamb’s legs and put him in our trunk. Though the others didn’t seem to notice the noise, singing country songs, I could hear that lamb bawling all the way to the church grounds.
“What does that greeting mean, gaugimardjos?” I asked Zaza. “I hear men say it in the city, too.”
“It is a hello, but literally means, ‘may you be victorious in battle.’ Every Georgian was a knight in medieval times and always prepared to protect his women and children.”
“What about those grey skullcaps with black crosses worn by the shepherd and farmer. I sometimes see them on older men in Tbilisi.”
“That is—was—to protect the knight’s head when he put on his armor.”
From my reading, especially in Rustaveli, I knew that Georgians took knighthood and its chivalric code seriously.
When we arrived at Nikortsminda, Tamara’s friend Mary was there with her, holding a large red hen. Mary’s husband, cradling an infant boy, and several others I’d met before greeted us, but I didn’t see anyone who might be Tamara’s husband. Tamara introduced me to Giorgi, her father, a tall, lean, heavily mustached patriarch, about eighty-five, wearing a flat, short-billed cap that reminded me of my Sicilian grandfather. Giorgi unloaded our lamb from the car trunk. Hen under her arm and the lamb’s tether in hand, Tamara took a path up to the church. Zaza, Giorgi, and the rest of us followed, pausing here and there to talk to other groups.
We hiked to a meadow near the church, where several parties had spread blankets and built wood fires. Giorgi called Zaza over to where he was digging a fire pit. Looking around the grounds, I saw Tamara enter the church with the chicken and the lamb. Moved by curiosity almost as much by her beauty, I followed Tamara, and that’s when I met her “pregnant angel.”
Back outside, during Tamara’s song, I helped Zaza gather fire wood and asked him to explain this business in the church. He fingered his black silk scarf for a moment, tilted back his head, and said, “She is blessing the dinner.” I wasn’t convinced and nagged him. He finally said, “Perhaps it is for a sacrifice.” I recalled a tradition of blood sacrifices in Georgia’s ancient religions, before St. Nino introduced Christianity in the early fourth century—but this was a Christian church in the late twentieth century!
Tamara finished her song and joined us. She smiled when asking Zaza to take the hen and lamb. “Go ahead, my knight,” she said. “Prepare them for the feast.”
“Me!” Zaza was astonished, tossed his black scarf back over his shoulder. “Me!” He held the lamb’s tether uncertainly, stretching his arm out as far as he could, and refused to even touch the chicken. Definitely a city man, he would have been a prince or knight, as Tamara said, if this wasn’t a communist state.
Tamara was teasing Zaza, but a dilemma had developed. None of the men volunteered to prepare the animals for dinner. Eyes were averted. Shoulders shrugged. Silently, the old man, Giorgi, waited as they explained themselves. He hunkered by the fire stropping a knife on the rough pad of his left palm.
“Of course, I could do it myself,” Tamara said quietly.
Reflexively, I stepped toward her and extended my right hand.
“I know you would do it, but you are a stranger, our guest,” Tamara said. Gold flecks danced in her hazel eyes, and I felt blessed—and relieved—by her words. She smiled slightly, and said, “My father is the only real Georgian knight here.”
Giorgi stood, kicked an ember back into the fire.
“You do it, go, go,” Tamara encouraged the old man.
He shook his head wearily, as if to say, “this younger generation.”
Zaza looked away, as did the other men.
“Amerikili!” Giorgi said. “American stranger, follow me.”
He led me across a rapidly flowing stream to a structure designed specifically for slaughtering animals—enclosed on three sides by rough, split-log walls but roofless, wooden tables inside, drainage ditches dug along the walls. Two shirtless old men, chests and hands bloody, stripped the pelt off a lamb hung up to drain. The oldest, wearing a gray skullcap, slung the pelt over his shoulders and the other cut down and carried away the carcass. The killing pen’s soil was wet with sweetly pungent blood, sticky under my boots. An aggressive fly, buzzing blue-black, bounced off my sweaty forehead several times, and I killed it with a sharp slap.
Giorgi removed his flat cap, revealing that he too wore the knight’s skullcap. He squatted, carefully gripped our lamb, and gently, murmuring quietly like a lover, cut its throat.
Giorgi prepared our lamb for roasting over coals while Tamara cleaned the chicken and rubbed it with herbs. Acting as tamada, the honored host, Giorgi seemed proud to have made this feast possible. Before we left, he toasted, “To the fulfillment of all my beautiful daughter’s dreams.”
On our way to the car, after the feast, I again asked Zaza about Tamara and the animals in the church. He whispered that it was a sacrifice to cure an illness complicating her pregnancy.
“Pregnancy?” I said. Although I’d never cried as an adult, tears burned my eyes.
“She has, how to say, a bronchial cancer,” Zaza said.
“No!”
My throat constricted. I refused to believe him, but Zaza sadly insisted it was so.
We gathered at Tamara’s home in Tbilisi for dessert. There I met her husband, an orchestra conductor of forbidden avant garde Georgian music, who gave concerts “underground.” I liked him, which made me love Tamara even more.
Their son, about ten, sang several songs, accompanied by Tamara’s guitar. But Zaza grew angry when the boy sang a military song, “a Russian song!” Tamara calmed Zaza’s passion by singing a romantic Georgian ballad, distinctly non-Soviet or Russian, along with her son and daughter. On her own, she also sang “Kinto,” realistic city songs typical of old-time Tbilisi street singers.
“Spring,” her own recent composition, repeated the line, “Every human is created by a song.” Her recording of “Spring” was very popular then, and she had performed it on command for Brezhnev in Moscow. The more Tamara sang, the more she seemed to fill with life. Her repertoire of good cheer and songs seemed boundless.
Later that evening, Tamara and I discussed Hemingway. She inscribed her book to me, with the wish that I would someday understand enough Georgian to read it. (“Impossible to get,” Zaza said later. “The last copy in Georgia!”) We eventually talked about the “sacrificial motif” in Hemingway’s works, and she eloquently explained the aesthetic and religious implications of Papa’s beloved bull fights.
“You, too, performed a sacrifice today,” I said.
Her face reddened.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s too personal.”
“Oh, no, it was not for me. I am no longer ill and do not need to pray for myself.”
“But Zaza told me. . . Your pregnancy?”
“I just learned this month that my health is now fine. I need to tell him.”
Tamara sat silently for several seconds.
“Actually, it was a thanksgiving to God for a friend, my best girlfriend since childhood.”
“Mary?”
“Yes, I prayed that her wish would be fulfilled, and it was.”
“How wonderful,” I said. “What was her wish?”
“To be full of joy—to be pregnant with her first child.”
“Now I see. That’s why you sang before the ‘pregnant angel’.”
Tamara leaned toward me, her small face aglow with intense energy. “Many people think my angel is a saint. Actually, St. Nicholas.”
“Like Santa Claus?” My head emptied, and I laughed for the first time in months. Tamara touched my hand lightly, her laughter the song of a child. “Like Santa Claus!”
Ralph La Rosa has published prose on major American writers, including Emerson and Thoreau, and has placed short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film scripts. These days, he mostly writes poetry, appearing on the Internet, in print journals and anthologies. His books include the chapbook Sonnet Stanzas and full-length Ghost Trees and My Miscellaneous Muse.