Next came a toast, usually to friendship, and we’d knock them back. Shalva would fill a greasy, lip-marked water glass with about 100 grams and slide it to me. Heaven be damned if I happened to be walking by.Ĭhacha is technically grape brandy but also refers to any fruit hooch. Shalva’s posse would join him in a daily ritual of slapping dominos on a worn wooden table until it was time to lay the newspaper and indulge in bread, pungent cheese, pickles, and wine or chacha from reused plastic Coke bottles. “Milk? Why did you buy milk?” he’d ask me with a contemptuous smirk. I was walking our dog Ramzes, welcoming deep mask-free drags of the season now that COVID-19 regulations have been lifted, and we passed the garage cage where Shalva used to sit like a hookah-smoking caterpillar on a wooden bench, watching the four little corners of our streets. No other Tbilisi neighborhood says spring better than my Vera. A couple weeks later, all the chestnuts down Belinski pop in green.
Then one day near Easter, all the plum trees in the neighborhood simultaneously burst with white blossoms. Spring arrives in Vera on the tail of supsarkisi, annual southern winds that whip down Mount Mtatsminda and roil the winter apathy out of our homes and bones while blowing the city’s smog to kingdom come.
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