This past weekend was the first I spent here in Nukriani with the family. Saturday was warm and sunny, and I enjoyed a cup of instant coffee (good coffee is near impossible to come by) sitting in the common room where Keti, Zaza’s sister has been staying. She was in a car accident in which she broke her leg and a couple ribs, and she has been recovering here with us (considering the way most Georgians drive, a car accident was not surprising). Even though my Georgian is still pretty rough, and her English doesn’t go too much beyond “Hello”, with her warm sociability we’re able to converse a good deal. She studied German for a while and generally talks to me in some kind of jumbled combo of simplified words in Georgian, English and Deutsch. Anyhow, I’d settled down for coffee and more interrogations about my family and America, and our cultural differences. We got to talking about dating and marriage, and Nona, Zaza’s wife, told me she was married at 16! Then Keti pushed Nona to share how she and Zaza met. “Well, I was walking back from school one day, and Zaza and some of his friends came by in a car, and grabbed me and took me!” “What?! Really?!”, “Yes,” she continued as if it were perfectly normal, “and we drove, but after three villages the car was having some problems, and we had to stop. But my grandmother was living in this village, so we stayed there and we were introduced, and then we were married.” “And that was OK?” “Yes, yes.” “In America if something like that happens, people call the police!” “No, no we didn’t call police,” she smiled and laughed. Keti stretched out her arms “SchÖnes story, ho!?” “Yes, a nice story,” I smiled back, kind of taken aback. I had heard about this practice of “bride-napping”, but I had no idea that I was living with a couple that resulted from it! The two of them seem to get on fine, as do the extended families. At least that’s the picture 14 years after the fact.
As I came out of the family room, to bring my empty coffee cup to the sink, I was beckoned into the garage and the backyard area by Neli, Zaza’s mother. Here she was stoking the traditional Georgian bread oven, (tones oven, I believe) with dried grape vines. The oven looks like a large barrel, open at the top, set on the concrete floor, brick on the inner surface. Neli and her mother Keto brought the dough out and began shaping balls. As the flames died down a bit and only glowing coals remained an old cloth was swirled around to sweep any ash from the sides of the oven. At first I thought the dough would be placed on the top lip to bake, but I watched as it was stretched and then slapped right on the inside of the oven where it hung over the coals! The first piece cracked a little, but the others held, and baked in less than ten minutes. After the first round of stretched flat loaves, the women began shaping them longer loaves. These too were wet a little bit and then slapped onto the inside of the oven. Not so bad at the top, but by the fourth row they were bending right into the oven. Neli and Keto would then take out the baked loaves with their bare hands. One fell down. No problem for Neli; she reached right into the coals! The hot bread was eaten right there with fresh cheese and walnuts. A pretty excellent snack!
Just as the second round of loaves was coming out, Zaza came back from work with Ilia, another one of the cops, and Nodar, Nona’s father. It was time to set out for quail. With bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, cheese, water, watermelon and of course a water bottle full of cognac, we hopped into the police truck and set out. A little ways outside the village we met up with Iago, another police officer. He was in the police force’s four-wheeler, dressed head to toe in camouflage brandishing an old double-barreled shotgun. Zaza joined him on the quad and we took to the fields. Racing down dirt roads or simply across fields, both driver and passenger in the truck had their guns at the ready. Before we got any shots off we came up to a man on a rise with some vehicles and some beehives. He offered us honey right out of the comb- a sweet start to the afternoon! It seemed the name of the game was race along in the truck in an attempt to scare up quail which were generally hiding in the cornflower fields. With birds taking to the air, Ilia would fly out the passenger door and take aim. I was surprised to see how well this worked. The hardest was then to find the bird amid the tall flowers. “Daghli unda,” (We need a dog), Ilia said. Lunch was had in the shade near the shell of an abandoned house, but I could hardly eat, still full from all the bread and cheese I had had just before leaving. Ilia let me have a shot with his Winchester. I took aim at a small flock of birds. I found the sight. Careful not to anticipate the motion to far, or to fall behind, I pulled the trigger. “BAM!” The bird fell. I thought I had a good line on it, but it was nowhere to be found. Oh well. By the end of the day we had six quail and two larger birds, not sure exactly what they were but I took a picture with one all the same!
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