A Metaphorical Journey to Tbilisi

I have grown cantankerous over the course of the last week. Whenever I excused myself from something on the grounds of illness and yet must have looked more or less fit as a fiddle, I felt guilty. Yesterday, however, it decided to manifest itself.

I shunned my colleagues at lunch and ate in my corner; a few of them have had colds as well but I wanted to be careful. And I kept restraining myself from lamenting to my siblings about feeling highly diseased; I figured that it's not news they'd like to hear. But I also decided to go to our company's Christmas event yesterday evening.

Being late to finish up my tasks meant that I could take the train to the Christmas market at the Kulturbrauerei alone, which made me happy because I think that transit is a most awkward part of any team event. Also, I had researched the routes, for once.

***

The Kulturbrauerei was a brewery, as its German name makes clear. I imagine that the yeast fumes would have thickened the air back in the day, like the Augustiner brewery I once stayed near in Munich; that delivery trucks rattled in and out leaving potholes in the muddy cobbles and truck exhaust on the bare or plastered garage walls; that steam would have flown in this cold weather from the taller chimney stacks; that buildings in back alleys might have had plywood over disused or damaged windows, and spare car parts or barrel staves leaning against them; and that oily grime and pigeon dirt hazed the glass panes. What remains is a rectangular fort that protects neat quadrangles of red or sienna brick buildings that were elaborated over decades. We wouldn't know that the stables were once the stables, perhaps, if the word weren't there in black lettering on the brick. Apparently the brewery owners afforded frills like angled zig-zag brick decorations underneath windowsills, arches and towers and a white belfry-like cupola; and its old gates and entranceways in their humble way have become the channels to literary event venues, artists' shops and, on the cobbles, market stands. After dark the glowing yellow windows and the regimented silhouettes of the brick buildings are more or less straight out of Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen or a 20th century German children's book.

We were standing at a Glühwein (mulled wine) stall near one exit. Although I didn't order any, most of the colleagues did, and were sipping the dark, rum-spiked drink from cream-and-blue-coloured stoneware cups. I thought we were going to walk along the market and look at the stalls. Instead we stood and talked, which was agreeable until the warmth of walking around wore off and my feet began to feel chilled.

(An older woman came up to us, made a brief speech, and  — after we didn't ask her to take herself off — handed us greeting cards from a pacifist organization that, amongst other things, encouraged us to help achieve peace on earth by demanding of our government that the German army withdraw from its foreign missions.)

At any rate the market was traditional, surprisingly so in my view for modern Berlin. Braziers were standing nearby, and 2-or-3-foot-long split logs were burning in one of them. It wafted wood smoke into the air and scattered cinders and ash like snow over us onlookers and passersby. Many market tables where people leaned to eat their food were designed with plank tops and wood X-shaped frames at the sides, evergreen twigs fixed at the crossing — a decoration I had never seen in real life before, but only in Christmas books. There were stands with elk sausage, more mulled wine, knitted marled yarn mittens and socks and scarves and toques, cheeses, and stationery. They were often Scandinavian or Baltic: Swedish, Latvian, etc. A few young marketgoers were hopping around in safety harnesses on brightly lit trampolines. Gi. and I walked around a bit to warm ourselves up, but at the slow pace we were forced to keep amongst so many other people, it hardly helped.

***

At length three of us left on foot for a Georgian restaurant where we would be eating our Near Eastern Christmas dinner. My colleague's smartphone battery was 6% charged one moment, 0% charged the next. So the trip from the Kulturbrauerei was fraught with geographical uncertainty. When we had finally taken the U-Bahn one station and walked along the streets including the interestingly named — considering that with all his gifts he was also a politically controversial figure, but perhaps more so in the social environment of the United States — Paul Robeson St., we found the restaurant 20 minutes after we were expected.

***

But I liked the exercise and the moment we entered the restaurant, I was happy. It was bustling but you could hear each other speak, it was tasteful from its pale white-yellow plaster façade to the white napkins but not too elegant, I liked the weighty cutlery the moment I lifted it, and having wine and water at the table without asking for them was a thing I've never had before. The waitresses were whip-thin in black trousers and turtlenecks; they passed and repassed tables, pausing and skimming again like hummingbirds gathering nectar and appearing to power away on similar quantities of energy. There were photographs of old Georgian buildings hung on the walls with a touching nostalgia, and a large bar. Later I inspected the bathroom, and a colleague and I were both very pleased with the brightly patterned sink basin, which was like a Mexican pottery bowl. My colleagues were at the restaurant in great number, none of them as late as we were, and although I like all of my colleagues I sat by some whom I feel most comfortable with. Although, again, because of the cold I felt bad about not quarantining myself.

The food was fresh and almost piping hot: fried rounds of dough with cheese inside, a chatchapouri spinati with flavourful spinach mixed perhaps with cilantro, a platter that was like something from the Zoroastrian feast of Nowruz. Beetroot dip, a bean dip in a pale olive green colour, and a dip that glowed green like the spinach; an orange Cape gooseberry in the centre; roasted aubergine (badrijani?); and a gelatinous cheese rind (sulguni?) with a softer cheese swirled inside it. The pomegranate seeds were sweet and bursting with ripeness, and the thin little sprouted greens were tender but crunchy and almost seemed to be woven into the dips. We even had a basket of rolls. It was such beautiful food and the very refined dishes had a stimulating variety of tastes in them.

It was all I've imagined when I see photographs of Middle Eastern food. It was comfort food, too: it had fat and garlic and salt, and the flavours were recognizable and nice ones. The chefs' techniques and the waitresses' timing were also excellent, I thought, and brought out the best in the food. Cheese that is melted and still melty, food fresh from the oven, a flavour that is not exaggerated or ruined with burnt grease or other food — I eat a lot of convenience food and hadn't realized how much I've been longing for the freshly made kind. I was almost tearful with joy. And all at once I felt that here at last I have another one of those experiences where I remember a restaurant or meal or dish decades afterward.

That said, the drawback was like Tantalus' in Greek legend: It turns out that the company had already ordered the food for us, so what my table had ordered arrived in addition to the already generous meal. (The preordering is probably also the reason why wine and water were already available when we came.) It was impossible to eat everything.

***

And, exhausted though I was, the walk back to the Eberswalder Straße and the trip home were also unusual and nice. Young people who looked like they were still in school took up part of the U-Bahn wagon. Besides rolling around an orange that had fallen to the ground with their feet in a way that somehow didn't offend me,* they began to listen to loud music. It was hip hop but, although I find much hip hop that ends up on the Billboard charts saccharine or uninteresting, I thought this was good. It was also American, whereas I find almost all German pop and rap music I hear painfully poserish and, frankly, bad. And the students knew and — aside from one song about 'bitches' that one student loudly protested against hearing again — loved the music so well that they were singing along. The adults in the train were, I think, remarkably indulgent; and the students weren't bothered by me standing right there. So nobody ruined the atmosphere. I was 'reading Candide,' but it was hard to concentrate, which in this case was not bad.

* The greater nuisances I've seen so far are people dropping the contents of a döner kebab — cucumber, tomato, maybe a little sauce — on the floor by accident; and people 'secretly' depositing their emptied bottle of beer on the floor, so it topples and rolls around making an intense racket and trickling sticky froth everywhere.