In the '90s, Georgia fell into a deep coma. Unable to stand on its own, it collapsed after just a few independent steps — broke its spine, cracked its head, and froze in a twisted posture no Hollywood director would approve of. In their films, death is graceful and light: you cross your legs just so, bend your arm at the elbow, tilt your head slightly and lift your chin — like a figure in a Renaissance painting. Georgia didn't fall like that.
As for the decaying panel buildings, it felt like they would stand there forever. Even when the canopy over our entrance came down, we expected it to lie there until the end of time. Not much had changed on our block, even when the Soviet Union fell apart — its remains lingered underfoot all through the '90s. Everyone trampled it, sometimes stepped over it, salvaged whatever was still usable, repurposed it. The rest stayed where it was. And we carried on.
I remember the black blotches of funerals in Tbilisi — they crawled slowly through the courtyard while everyone stood on their balconies, peering from open windows, watching the crowd gathered around the open coffin. The younger the departed, the larger the audience. These mise-en-scènes brought some life into the monotony of our days. Otherwise, each day seemed to repeat itself — every feeling dulled with time, barely reminding us it was there. Everyone wanted to feel as "alive" as possible, and the easiest way was to look at a dead man.
Around that time, people slowly began to realize there was life beyond our block-panel arcadia — a place where the rich didn't have to repent for being rich. The conviction that this carefree world, on the other side of our misery, owed something to us — the unlucky ones — came quickly.
Then it began: the central heating stopped working, even in the hospitals. My mother sent me out for kerosene — for a wick lamp, a heater, and a tiny burner barely big enough for a saucepan. I set off with a large canister in hand — because now there was no electricity, no gas, no water — often all at once. Kerosene was supposed to bring us back to life. At least for two days.
When we had to save money, we used candles — melting them down and reusing them again and again. But if the kerosene ran out, we couldn't heat water to carry in pots and kettles to the bathroom to bathe.
The sense of a growing abyss between our world and the outer one sharpened by the hour. It was a slippery, transitory time: many in the city had already visited McDonald's out of curiosity. The once-forbidden overseas world had become merely hard to reach. Now you could hear it, see it, even taste it. It was beautiful, relaxed, free — but still foreign.
Not that carrying pots from the kitchen to the bathroom was any delight. But it felt, somehow, more honest. Familiar. You gripped the pots with both hands and walked steadily. And now here you are, eating this plastic bread with its smooth patty. Too smooth.
America and Europe were far away, though. And on our block, we seemed to each other pathetic and unnecessary. Forgotten. People like us could be burned away like weeds to clear the field. The adults were already well acquainted with that painful feeling — hopelessness, inferiority. So when someone managed to break out, to escape — everyone froze in amazement.
Those rare lucky ones would suddenly fly off for "just the weekend" — and vanish for fifteen years. Then they'd come back to sell an empty apartment — and leave again. "Time to hit the road", people whispered on every corner. But saying it and doing it were two different things. It felt like some deadly trick. The effort it took! And when someone actually managed it, joy and envy weren't enough — the thing was too big for them. There was a sense of holiness — of standing within the light radius of a chosen one. Everyone wanted to bask in that glow.
I come from a Tbilisi panel house. Now I live in Berlin. The buildings here are different. Even the panel houses are different. Smooth, like architectural models. They look uninhabited. No "fuck you" scrawled on the entrance wall like a desperate cry. No Tupac lyrics scratched out in broken Cyrillic.
"Hit the road," they said. Leave my homeland? Did I even have one? Maybe I just grew attached to that decaying field of panels. Now, in Berlin, I'm mostly someone who leaves home for work and work for home. And in between I find myself on a wide square where I'm a free individual, an inhabitant of Earth, in the blind belief that I'm rising into my own renaissance. And all those "homelands" and "homes", with their familiar smells — they're not about me anymore.
And yet, they're entirely about me.
