The building’s official address is 39 Chavchavadze Avenue. It doesn’t really stand on that street however, but is removed from the sidewalk, pushed further back and connected to it with bridges. The 1976 Soviet Structure, which was once grey, now stands faded, chipped pink. The top floors have round windows like a submarine, The Artists’ Studios they are called. I’ve heard the entire building referred to as The Artists’ House, but that’s a term that refers to Soviet Housing and its distribution. The top floor of this building was reserved for painting studios given to artists back then, but I don’t know if any live there now. The structure has three built-in small shops which sell seasonal fruit, vegetables and cigarettes. The residents of the building are on first-name basis with the shopkeepers, who often let them take things with the promise of payment at a later time. A list of debts is compiled in a turquoise handwriting notebook.

The front of the building looks out at the prestigious street: the fountain at the roundabout with golden people pouring water out of their trumpets, Vake Park lined with fir trees, and more fountains where children play in the summer heat, the Wissol building that’s slightly crooked (and rumored to not have a fully functioning elevator for this reason), the tall glass bank building next to the ski lift which goes up to Turtle Lake, where night life thrives in restaurants and concerts. The sound of electronic music, booming bases accompanied by neon lights that flicker to the night clouds, reaches down to Chavchavadze 39 at night, flies up to the balcony, through the living room, to our bedroom and into our ears as we lay awake at night and imagine what it would be like to go to one of the shows all dressed up, all grown up. 

Young, Chanel dressed girls and Ralph Lauren poloed boys drive the ten-minute walk from their homes in black BMWs for brunch and ice cream at Luca Polare or Angelatos. The girls order Marc Jacobs iPhone cases and prepare for the summer at tanning salons, acquiring a gentle tone of orange. They travel in close-knit herds and sometimes show up to “dates” with their friends. They buy pool memberships but never get their hair wet. They get dandelion tattoos, wear infinity necklaces and take pictures of their ice cream cones. The boys play online poker, get into bar fights, date Vake virgins and go on weekly brothel trips with their girls’ approval. No one openly talks of this of course, it’s understood. They post pictures with their girlfriends captioned My Angel, My Whole World, As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. They listen to B.I.G and TuPac, Miles Davis and Method Man. Their parents, who own businesses both abroad and in town, are directly or indirectly tied with the government or its opposition, drive the biggest cars, summer in Tskneti, and send their kids to the best private schools. 

Almost everyone who gets enough money moves to Vake. These new inhabitants are hated by the real Vake people, who have lived there for generations, and comment on how the newcomers are overcrowding the streets. Cars are parked in two rows on the sidewalks, creating labyrinths for walkers. Buses are packed like clown cars and the streets are vibrant with traffic. The new dwellers go over and beyond, layer expensive brands on top of famous ones, fill their homes with decorative feathers, speak too loudly, wear too much color, and listen to restaurant music.

When turning your back to the chaos and splendor of Chavchavadze life and facing the building, the spaces between its different sections present a beautiful view of mountains, cliffs and pale skies. The view from the back of the building looks out at a tiny settlement of no more than thirty to forty houses with the “New Highway” stretching behind it. There are no sidewalks in this settlement, no concrete, no billboards or streetlights, no public transportation, but a small river, The Vera Rechka, which flows through, making the scenery complete. Surrounded by tall buildings and the river on one side, and the highway on the other, the urban landscape seems to be slowly swallowing the settlement.

People built houses with whatever money they had at the time, and added more floors as they gained more cash, patching their quilt homes. They have divided their back yards with rusty wire fences and bought chickens and roosters who start their daily clucking before sunrise, waking the city dwellers. Eggs are sold and televisions still have antennas. Sometimes, a little girl and her father walk her two lambs through Chavchavadze 39’s back yard, occasionally going up to the avenue itself. The lambs seem so out of place there, one could question their sanity when seeing them. I don’t know much about these people, their lives, or where they came from. They are not talked about. It still puzzles me, how two places that are so completely different from each other can exist alongside one another, five minutes away, divided by a single structure.

Chavchavadze 39 is the divider of these two worlds, and my father’s home. The eighth floor apartment was given to my grandfather as a present from the Ministry of Transportation, where he worked, during the USSR and has been in the family ever since. My grandfather passed away before I was born, my father and one of my aunts have both moved out, so now it’s only my grandmother, my other aunt and my cousin who inhabit its grand rooms. The construction of the building actually changes based on which way you look at it. If entering from the street, it only has five stories, but counting the floors below the bridges, it has eight. To get to our apartment on the 5th floor, you press 8. To get to the street level, you have to press 3. If you press 1, you arrive on the village side of it. My grandmother has reminded me of this for the past fifteen years, every time I leave. 

The apartment’s interior is the remains of a pompous, old-fashioned residence. The bas-reliefs on the ceilings are caked with age and the old wooden window frames, replaced with white plastic ones. According to my father, when the apartment was first remodeled, people would come by just to look at its interior, wallpaper and tiles, chandeliers and mirrors, the likes of which did not exist during the Soviet Union due to the scarcity of unique materials. There is a built-in decorative fireplace on the balcony, my grandmother’s grand piano in the drawing room and picture frames lined with ruffles. The only time anyone goes out onto the balcony these days is to either have a cigarette, or hang laundry. After a rule was passed that residents of buildings overlooking main areas of town were not allowed to hang laundry out of their balconies, my grandmother stretched a clothes line on the inside of the balcony, from one end to the other, and supported it with a broken broom in the middle. 

Central heating was never installed in the house and there is only one radiator in the kitchen. My grandmother rests in bed all day in her small room wearing layers of knitwear, watching Turkish soap operas. In her old days she’s gotten into the habit of calling all her friends and relatives as soon as she wakes up, wishing them happy birthdays or telling them about how hard old age is. The only time she leaves the house now is to attend funerals.

That one radiator gets turned on only during the day, managing to warm a small portion of the house, and then turned off again every night. The living room and one of the bedrooms are closed off during most of the year because as my aunt says: “It’s so cold bears are running around in there.”

My cousin’s name, Nanuka, is a newer version of my grandmother’s, Nani. But she goes by Nanu or Nuka. Nanu sits right next to the radiator in the evenings and plays League of Legends on her laptop. For the entirety of every winter, her left arm is decorated with pink and purple lines, caused by the overheated radiator which is missing its outer layer. Even though it’s dangerous and causes gas leaks, it emits more heat this way. It’s always turned up to its maximum level, and anytime someone goes near the window either Nanu or my aunt warns: “Careful don’t touch it! It will burn your clothes!” 

The window, which is directly above it and opens out onto the village, has also been rendered unusable, because the fumes the radiator emits fly inside the minute it is opened. The only time it can and has to be opened is when someone showers. I don’t know how this works exactly, but according to my aunt if the window isn’t open, the water doesn’t heat properly? The flame goes out? And since Nanu always sits next to the heater under that window, and I sit next to her when I go over, my aunt usually waits for us to go to bed before she showers so we don’t have to freeze next to an open window in the winter time. 

Then often she yells from her bedroom: “Can you go to bed so I can shower? Tomorrow’s a school day. I have work in the morning (she’s a middle school teacher). You guys don’t care! You can sleep in, but I need to shower and get some rest!” 

“We’ll finish this movie and go to bed!”

“Don’t forget to turn the radiator off!”

Nanu and I spend many nights alone in that area next to the radiator, drinking tea and coffee in the kitchen and pretending to smoke cigarettes that we steal from my aunt through the windows. There’s a glossy, jellyfish-shaped ultra-modern silver ashtray on the table that my aunt stole from a nightclub, which looks completely out of place with the rest of the house. We’ll watch YouTube movies, usually awful ameteur comedies that random Georgian people shot, and stop them multiple times to tell stories we remembered because of a specific scene. Nanu will text people while we watch them, on her red Nokia slide phone, mechanically, without looking at the numbers. 

Nanu’s bedroom is the former pantry, which is also my father’s former room. His portrait still hangs above her bed. The room doesn’t have a door; and the door leading out the hallway doesn’t have glass in its frame. She uses a lamp because the overhead light has been broken for years and puts nails in the wall to hang her clothes hangers from. The bedroom next to my grandmothers’, which is closed off because it’s not heated, is three times the size of Nanu’s pantry-bedroom, has a queen bed, and two giant wardrobes. She refuses to leave her current bedroom though, claiming that the energy is strange in the other one. My grandfather’s portrait hangs above the dresser in that bedroom. I used to go in to talk to him when I was little, promise him I would take care of Nanu.

We always slept there in the summer. 

We would stay up late and play with Barbies, and arrange them on the giant white dresser before we went to sleep. Our grandmother would call us in ten minute intervals and tell us to go to sleep, so we got really good at whisper-playing. Nanu’s favorite Barbie was Becky; I think we got that name from Tom Sawyer. She had long blonde hair and blue eyes. Mine was Mia. I named her after a character from Rebelde Way, an Argentinean soap opera about a boarding school for teenagers. She was the popular pretty girl with the pink room. All the Barbie’s were in love with Erik, a fuckboy who wore tropical beach shorts and never had a shirt on. He was the only male Barbie we had for a while, and when we got a second one, we called him Derik for lack of a better name. Erik’s sister, Rebecca, was in love with Derik. The Barbies represented everything we weren’t allowed, or just weren’t old enough to do yet. They went to parties, traveled around the world, drank alcohol, owned pets, smoked cigarettes, lived alone, had boyfriends, went on dates, made out, had sex, got into fights, drove cars, and took walks at night. But they never, not once, got married or had children. That’s not something we wanted to do. 

We would talk about our fictional lovers. Nanu’s was Peter Pan and mine was Harry Potter, or the other way around, I can’t remember now. We would make up stories and retell them to each other. 

“Last night Peter flew into the window and gave me this ring.” Nanu would hold her hand up and show me a ring she was wearing.

“Harry gave me this necklace yesterday!” I would say and show her a piece of jewelry as well. We would pretend that they were with us, whenever we went out with our grandmother.

I’d always take the right side of the bed, which is next to the balcony door, and drift to sleep to the sound of passing cars. Sometimes we’d sneak out to the balcony at night to watch the lights on Turtle Lake and listen to the music that drifted down. My aunt would go to the concerts sometimes and we’d hear our grandmother calling her over and over again, asking when she’d come back. Sometimes we’d watch the sky for UFOs, sometimes we’d pretend to smoke. Our grandmother would come in through the balcony door in the morning after hanging laundry and start talking, quietly at first, but raising the volume with every word: “Are you still sleeping? Oh my… Nanuka! C’mon on now, wake up. Get up, get dressed and come eat. C’mon hey, I’m gonna go boil some coffee.” She calls boiling water for tea or coffee “boiling coffee”. We would grunt and turn over, but she would persist. “Hey c’mon wake up now it’s almost noon! Do you want me to make pancakes or do you want toast and Nutella? Oh, we also have those chocolate things you love [cereal] and warm milk! Be in the kitchen in five minutes!” 

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Seven years later, Nanu’s room is covered entirely with posters, tapestries and pastel drawings. Radiohead quotes, old postcards, foxes and night skies, suns, planets, checker printed corners and song lyrics line the wallpaper. The drawings flow off the walls and onto her skin, covering her body, a giant green dragon, more song lyrics-some misspelled, cats, moons, dancing tribal men, flowers and initials. The “New Highway”, which can clearly be seen from her bedroom, is still referred to as the new highway, even though it’s been more than ten years since it was built. Her room now has a door and an overhead light that our uncle installed. A queen bed instead of her single one, and most importantly a husband and baby boy. Sunny, or Sani, as spelled in Georgian, is already five years old and looks exactly like little Nanu.

The house has continued to deteriorate and be patched up. The smaller bathroom no longer has a working faucet or light, the kitchen cupboards are falling apart, and we have started to paint on the doors and walls to cover up the peeling paint and wallpaper. A portrait of an African woman in a colorful headscarf, looking out onto Chavchavadze on the balcony, a female fox that Nino claims Nanu painted in her image, a Moomin troll wearing pearls and gold earrings on the door of my grandmother’s old bedroom (now Nino’s room, courtesy of me). The entrance painted light lavender, old furniture boxed up and set aside for restoration, my grandmother- passed away.

It happened during the pandemic, after her memory entirely gave way. She would smile so sweetly from her bed when seeing me, recognizing my face but being unable to place a name or identity. For a while she had a caretaker who moved in from the countryside named Venera, which means Venus in Georgian. She was amazed at the way we lived, couldn't get used to the city, and looked down at the fact that everyone smoked, the way we dressed, how little we apparently mopped and dusted or cared about what others thought of us. Venera would always bring up her sons as examples “My boys, they never smoke, never in their lives.” 

For a while, Nino’s friend was staying with us and I would stay over often as well. Me, Nino, Nanu, her husband, son, Nino’s friend, my grandmother, and Venera. Eight people’s laundry in one household with one washing machine, got confusing and too excessive. There were constant loads being put in and emptied, brought out to hang on the balcony clothesline where they got encompassed by cigarette smoke, taken down to fold, then the whole process all over again. Venera went room by room to inquire about a red thong that she called a piece of string, when asked if it was hers, Nino’s friend replied “No darling, I don’t wear underwear.” 

A couple of weeks later, news from the countryside - Venera found three Marijuana plants in her backyard. “Their friends asked my boys to use our yard, it wasn’t for them! They just have such big hearts, they couldn’t say no.” 

Fast forward to Venera sitting in the village to city marshutka (minibus), on her way to the capital, checkered bags in hand (like the ones from Balenciaga) filled with cheese, milk and weed - gifts for the capital. The whole minibus reeks and no one could possibly imagine it’s the old lady with the headscarf and dairy products. In the end she has to open the window and air out the marshutka.

In the end, my grandmother lay in bed all day watching soap operas and saying she had to go home. We told her she was home, but she never believed it. Was she referring to the home she grew up in before she got married? Or the other home, the one in the sky? In the end, she no longer remembered our names, but smiled when she saw our faces, recognized us as her own. She was still in there and just couldn’t communicate. She tried to play the piano and forgot the notes, but found the right ones by ear. 

ჭრეელო პეპელაა-- incorrect note- გააფრინდიი ნელაა - incorrect note -დელია რანუნიი [1] -corrected note.

Nani’s bedroom got turned into Sani’s room, complete with a race car bed, school desk, and a “garage” space for scooters and toy cars. The old soviet books stare out from the glass closet. Nanu’s husband is a tattoo artist and bartender; they have each other’s initials etched onto their chests. He lives in her bedroom now and in the evenings the balcony is flooded with my aunt’s friends, old Vake locals who look down on the avenue from the 8th floor, holding slim cigarettes and drinking Coca-Cola from crystal glasses. One of the Soviet crystal vases gets transformed into a water bong and the decorative fireplace is used as a storage for balcony chairs.

The Vake teens are mostly all married now with kids, some divorced, some still eating ice cream with their families in Luca Polare. Vake park has been renovated, the old wooden gazebo taken out. Chavchavadze Ave itself now has a bus line running through its middle, making traffic worse for private cars, but quick for the buses. The mayor behind the idea, a football player from a Georgian village, claims he wanted people to use public transportation more. This of course does not apply to him or his family who live in Vake as well and have drivers for their giant cars.

Chavchavadze Ave is often flooded with marches of protest against the government. They started after a rigged election kept the ruling party—“The Georgian Dream”—in power. The same party who decided to halt all communications with the European Union for four years, as well as passing laws identical to those in Russia, censoring film and media, unlawfully detaining and beating people with no consequence to the police officers responsible. The list of offenses goes on and on. People from all over the country united against the government. 

Sometimes, these demonstrations are met with violent arrests by the police. Other times, some of the Ralph Lauren poloed boys, who used to visit brothels and now have kids with their Vake wives, put on ski masks and beat up journalists and protestors. They wear Margiela sneakers on these undercover missions and are easily recognized by their neighbors. They don’t want the government to be overturned, because they’re comfortable in the money they have with their current backing. Of course men from other neighborhoods dress up as government henchmen as well, and other men from Vake protest against them. I wish I could say that it was only the people against the government, but it’s the people against the government, government supporters, and opposition leaders who are trying to use this situation to come to power themselves. 

The cedar trees are dying; they get more and more branches cut off of them every year. Teenagers are thrown in jail for protesting. Journalists are starving themselves. LGBTQ flags are being banned. The main hippodrome, a recreational area that was used for dog walking and sports, is being replaced with a skyscraper, and Russia is doing everything it can to conquer us. The Georgian pro-Russian government refuses to leave and the Georgian people fight for a spot in the EU. Our apartment in 39 Chavchavadze avenue, sadly, is up for sale due to the excessive amount of repairs that are needed to keep it functioning, as well as the income money that would rather be split by the siblings to buy individual smaller properties.

The Vera Rechka settlement behind the building still stands, some houses rebuilt to stand stronger, others unchanged, still others torn down. The streets of Tbilisi, now lined with so many more glass buildings and empty apartment complexes are covered with graffiti: FUCK RUSSIA, FUCK PUTIN, ჩემს სახლთან პატარა ბარია [2], hate cops love techno, არა ბიჭო მოსკოვს დავეკითხები [3], ვცდილობ გაღწევას [4], ბოლომდე [5], STRIKE FOR HOMELAND, who do you call when the police murders?, IN SOLIDARITY WITH WORKERS ON STRIKE, I saw your dad on Grindr, საჭიროება აერთიანებს, სიყვარული ამთლიანებს [6], WE STAND WITH ALL THE PEOPLE ON HUNGER STRIKE, ვაკე მაბნევს [7], F R E E A L L P O L I T I C A L P R I S O N E R Z, მილიონერების მართული ღარიბი ქვეყანა [8], PlEASE CUM TOGETHER, ვიბრძვით, ვკვდებით [10], რომ იცოცხლოს საქართველომ [9], მოვა დრო და ეს სიძულვილი სამარცხვინო გახდება [10].

Chavchavadze 39 stands in the middle of Vake, Tbilisi. It doesn’t really stand on Chavchavadze avenue however, but is removed from the sidewalk, pushed further back and connected to it with bridges.

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1. Colorful butterfly, slowly fly away, Delia Ra Nuni - the lyrics to a famous Georgian song.

2. There’s a small garden next to my home.

3. Bro you think I'm gonna ask for permission Moscow?

4. Trying to escape.

5. Till the end.

6. Necessity unites, Love makes whole.

7. Vake confuses me.

8. A poor country lead by millionaires.

9. We fight, we die, so Georgia will live.

10. There will come a time, when this hatred will become embarrassing.