In Your Footsteps (2022)

In April 2022, I went back to Georgia for the first time since my father was buried there back in 2016. It was also my first time seeing my family again. With his passing away, we fell out of contact. Through words and photos I continue my search for my father, my family and myself.

 
 

Gate H38

Here it begins.
LH 2558 Tiflis 22:15.
One hour transit in Munich.

It’s buzzing in the gate. Quiet conversations. And yet I can’t concentrate on mom’s voice on the other end of the phone. For it’s a sound I rarely hear, one which was once very familiar. Now it’s a distant memory. Still homely. It’s beautiful. So incredibly beautiful and the joy of reunion spreads from my stomach into a little smile on my face. This is a sound I associate with my father. A sound of my childhood.

I'm listening closely. Trying to distinguish the words from each other. It’s like a memory game. I look for words in their conversation that match with words in my memory. How much do I understand? More than I think. Mets, modi, me minda.

They speak in codes I so fervently want to crack.

Two women to the left. Two men to the right. And what two men: reclining in their seats, one leg 45 degrees to the left, the other 45 degrees to the right, masks under the large, curved noses. There’s no doubt about where I'm going:
Georgia. Sakartvelos. My father's land. A country I know so little about but have half of my origins from.

Mama malemova. Dad is coming. He isn’t, but I am, and for a moment it feels like coming home!


The noise around me is different than at home

and I am fooled into thinking that it’s quiet and peaceful. That’s, in fact, only during a brief moment in the early morning hours, when the croaking of the frogs silences. There must be thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands because I can almost always hear them, no matter where I go. I'm wondering if that means grandma and uncle live in a swamp area? At summer there are many mosquitoes here. There must be a connection.

I don’t know which system divides the day. It’s not the coffee, because it comes in time and untimely after I mentioned that I drink it at home.

It’s not grandma's beloved dog, Mars, that needs to be walked, nor the sun that dictates the rhythm of the day.

And it’s definitely not obligations in the city either, because here the work is in the house and the garden.

Well, I know what it is: for now it's me.

The coffee is ready when I'm up. Uncle has taken care of that. “Kushet” asks Grandma, and then food is served: rice with raisins, oranges, eggs, bread, feijoa jam, chocolate and tea.

Then we go for a walk and when we’re back we eat again. Before 3pm, I’ve eaten what is equivalent to my daily intake.

This is how the days go, and before I know it, I have to return home again - a few kilos heavier but out of pure love

 

Saturday 00:13 

I went out in the night to watch the thunderstorm. I like thunderstorms. It feels as if the earth tries to cut through to us, asking for our full attention, to say something important but out of love and care. I feel small and my problems insignificant. Then I let go of my thoughts for a while, and with awe I look at lightning breaking the darkness, and listen to thunder making the neighborhood's old houses tremble.

As I look for the right place to watch the thunderstorm, lightning tears up the sky, and suddenly it empties of everything it was carrying. But I don’t feel anything. The drops are warm, warmer than the tears that ran down my cheeks a little earlier. Nothing serious. I'm just tired, and not at all ready to return back home again.

I left home to escape my tears, but stepped out into the tears of heaven. All that I feel inside of me breaks out around me. But it's a gift to me; The earth takes over for me, allowing me to just breathe and have peace. So I sit here and listen. To the rain hammering on the tin roofs of the city and to the splashes from the cars making their way through small rivers of muddy rainwater. As the rain quietly ceases, calm falls around me. My eyes get heavy and I better go back to bed.

Thank you, little Mother Earth


It turns out ..

that grandma is half Ukrainian and half Russian. But born and raised in Kazakhstan, and then later started her own family in Georgia.

I'm not rootless, but at times I feel that way .. and then I think to myself if she knows that feeling and if it can pass on from generation to generation. I know that both mom and dad in their youth longed, as much as I do, for the world that was outside their own. Dad hurried to Germany after the Soviet broke, and mom stayed in the Middle East for several years. I myself thrive best when I’m far away from home, and dream of living anywhere else than where I have my home now


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In Your Footsteps (2023)

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