My office moved over the weekend, and so tonight I was at the Marjanishvili metro stop at 6 p.m. for the first time. The rush hour crowd was thinner than it had been at the Sameditsino instituti station, where I had gotten off and on last week. Nonetheless, upon the sage advice of a seasoned rider, I headed towards the dark and musty end of the platform, where the last couple of - generally empty - cars stop, and I backed up against a free spot along the marble-tiled wall.
A little boy, not much higher than my waist, came hopping up next to me and leaned back against the wall. Another boy stopped at his side and conferred with him. Wearing dress pants instead of jeans, let alone a Lands' End pinpoint oxford, I thought I was going to get asked for money or, worse, get grabbed by the arm and asked for money. But then I saw a man with distressed eyes turn and leave his front-row spot at the platform's edge. He saw the two boys and stepped against the rush hour flow but then stopped to accost one of the station's policemen, who was accompanied by the stout, elderly woman who had been sitting in the booth at the bottom of the escalators. Every Tbilisi subway station has a policeman or two or three, depending on the time and day of the week, as well as a woman in sort of a tollway booth at the bottom of the bank of commonly three escalators.
The policeman stepped up to the edge of the platform, bent himself at the waist, and looked down onto the tracks. The woman, too, stepped up to the edge of the platform and leaned over the tracks about 70 degrees. The father joined them, too. Amid the hustle and bustle of the oblivious rush hour crowd gathering near the end of the platform, there were three rear ends along the edge of the platform, staring back at everyone, as if Norman Rockwell were painting the picture!
I looked down at the boy next to me, still leaning against the wall. He had his right foot in a sock resting on top of his left foot in a sneaker. I surmised his right sneaker was on the tracks. As if she were the boy's own grandmother, the woman from the escalator booth came up to him, bent over to look him in the eyes, and maybe started to scold him but broke out into a wide smile and put her hand on his shoulder. I didn't catch the word "doozie" in what she said to the boy, but she may have congratulated him for getting her out of the booth.
As an approaching train stirred the air on the platform, the policeman pulled out his notebook to get the father's contact information, and I shuffled forward as much as I could, leaving the harmless, shoeless boy and his friend against the wall. It wasn't an iPhone or a Kate Spade purse that brought the woman out of her booth and the policeman to the edge of the platform but a child's tennis shoe that, probably at best, had three stripes to make it look like an Adidas.
There's always people out, amid a forest of Soviet-era apartment buildings, when I walk to and from Akhmeteli teatri, the metro station near my home. But we are just passers-by: they look away when I look at them to assess how "Georgian" they appear to me or to compare them with someone I know in Chicago.
In the metro, however, especially at 8:45 on a weekday morning, these same people take on discernible identities: school children with backpacks, university students in discussions near the door, men with HP laptop cases on their shoulders, women in slacks and skirts, grandfathers with newspapers, and grandmothers with bags of tomatoes and apples. Unlike the CTA's Blue and Red Lines, the Tbilisi metro appears to be the family car, even during the morning rush hour.
One time, during the evening rush, I was holding my backpack next to my leg; my Chromebook was inside. The metro was crowded, as usual, headed out to Akhmeteli teatri, and I was hot, as usual. I had either enough grey hair showing or enough sweat coming off my forehead that a 30-something woman in a dress, who was sitting down, took my backpack and set it on her lap, as I have seen mothers do for daughters with bulky purses and shopping bags. I said "Thank you" to her in Georgian, and then strategically moved my knees in close to hers in case she tried to make a run for the closing doors. I was excited over the unexpected success at "community integration" but afraid I was going to have to have a tug of war to get my backpack back - one of those scams, you know. She was wiping sweat from her temples, so perhaps she sympathized with me in a long-sleeve dress shirt. We made three or four stops, and the woman remained seated. Finally, the person sitting next to her got off. I dropped down and reached for my backpack, which, of course, the woman released to me. I whispered "Thank you" in English to her.
Although getting off the train is like exiting the third base side of Wrigley Field onto Waveland Avenue, the ride in the train is incredibly genteel.
Like the Red Line headed south to 95th, the Tbilisi Metro has entrepreneurs selling clothes pins and school notebooks. Musicians play until the train is moving so fast that no one can hear them. Little boys and girls distribute Orthodox holy cards and then pass by again to collect the cards or a lari. I had seen this routine before, so I was surprised - maybe even a bit concerned - when one elderly woman put the holy card in her purse, not knowing that the little boy was coming back for a coin or two. Some of these kids can be a bit demanding, walking briskly up to standing male passengers with their hands in their pockets and asking them for the change they are fiddling with. In this particular case, the boy let the old woman keep the holy card without any confrontation.
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