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 crooked posture no Hollywood director would approve of. Their cinema was about grace and lightness: you had to cross your legs just right, bend your arm at the elbow, tilt your head slightly and lift your chin — like in a Renaissance painting.
As for the decaying panel buildings, it felt like they would be there forever. Even when the canopy of our building entrance fell, we expected it to lie there until the very end. Not much had changed on our block, even when the Soviet Union collapsed — its remains lingered underfoot all through the ’90s. Everyone trampled it, sometimes stepped over it, salvaged what 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 slowly crawled through the block, while everyone stood on their balconies, peeking 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 repetition of our days. Otherwise, it was as if each day repeated itself — each feeling dulled with time, barely reminding us of its presence. Everyone wanted to feel as “alive” as possible, and the easiest way was to look at a dead man.
My father dreamed of a rocking chair. He brought it up on every possible occasion — at feasts, in the kitchen during quiet evenings, when he met with classmates, even when a neighbor dropped by to ask for a loan. In those days, such a dream — a rocking chair! — was eccentric. People rarely dared admit their longing for the sinful world of comfort, which corrupted the tough, rough body of a good worker. So my father, just waiting for the grim finale of a global conspiracy and the forced relocation of humanity into caves, allowed himself one small whim: to dream of something so beautiful, so financially out of reach — just to surprise everyone.
Once he had declared this dream again, he’d lean back in his chair, eyes bright, watching his audience. He soaked in their puzzled looks, their quiet forgiveness for this small weakness — because he was, after all, ready at any moment to hunt for food with a spear. “It’s all coming to that,” he’d say.
But as soon as he voiced the dream, he was done with it. It went gray, lost its warmth — like a dying body — until the next gathering, when he breathed life into it again. That was his rhythm of life: from one declaration to the next. It helped him wait for the sad and inevitable migration back to the caves.
When he talked about the rocking chair, it was as if he left his own body — like an artist stepping back to view a painting. He watched himself from a distance, sketching out the dream with an invisible pencil, squinting with delight. In those moments, he was fueled by pity — pity for himself, for being doomed to love what he didn’t have and wait for what would never come. Self-compassion — the post-Soviet plague — took root in panel apartments, taming entire families.
My mother regularly went to the regional telephone exchange to pay the landline bill: a month of empty conversations, silence, and aching for a voice. I would go with her. In those small offices sat women with blue eyelids, scarlet lips, and rust-colored nail polish. They were the empresses of copper-cable contagion — they could, on a whim, disconnect you from the source of infection or return you to it. The telephone central office always smelled of paint, dampness, carbolic acid, and aggressive ladies’ perfume.
Around that time, people gradually 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 realization that the 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 hospitals. I see it vividly: my mother sends me out for kerosene — for a wick lamp, a heater, and a tiny burner barely big enough for a saucepan. I head out with a large canister in hand — because now it’s the electricity that’s out, then the gas, then water — and often, all at once. Kerosene was supposed to bring us back to life. At least for two days.
We were lucky: Dad was friends with the air traffic controllers. They watched comedy shows together on Sundays and sometimes, as a favor, we’d get high-grade aviation kerosene. When we had to save money, we used candles — remelted and reused them again and again. But if the kerosene ran out, there was no hot water to carry in pots and kettles to the bathroom and bathe.
The sense of a growing abyss between our world and another, outer world intensified 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 now become merely hard to reach. You could now hear it, see it, even taste it. It was beautiful, relaxed, free — but still foreign.
Not that carrying pots from kitchen to bathroom was delightful. But it felt, somehow, more honest. Familiar. You gripped them with both hands and walked firmly. And now here you are, eating this plastic bread with a smooth patty. Too smooth.
Europe was far away, though. And in 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, awestruck.
Those rare lucky ones would suddenly fly away for “just the weekend” — and disappear for fifteen years. Then they’d return 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 succeeded, joy and envy became too small to contain it. There was a sense of holiness — of being in 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 models of construction projects. They look uninhabited. No “fuck you” scrawled on the entrance wall like a desperate cry. Not even Tupac lyrics scrawled in broken Cyrillic.
“Hit the road,” they said. Leave my homeland? Did I even have one? Maybe I just got attached to that decaying panel field. Now, in Berlin, I’m mostly someone who leaves home for work in the morning. And when the day ends, I go — not home, exactly — but toward a wide square where I'm a free individual, an inhabitant of Earth. And all those “homelands” and “homes” with their familiar smells — they’re not about me anymore. And yet, they’re entirely about me.
So here I am — a miscarriage from Tbilisi, a person of a pseudo-future that never came to pass.
Tbilisi has always been a Soviet testing ground for new ideas. In its futuristic Soviet architecture, so proudly displayed, there is an Orwellian harshness, the inevitability of a predetermined future, the non-negotiable lines of that vision.
As if anything else — anything outside that vision — is just a clumsy postscript to the present or past. Anything but the future. And the future — well, it’s already built, already here, and tomorrow, it will crush us all under its weight.
But the strange thing about Tbilisi’s landscape, with all its typical brutalist buildings, is this: They rest unshakably on the soft, forgiving hills of the local mountains. And the mountains moderate everything. Because hardness and strength walk hand in hand with death. And what has hardened — cannot prevail.