Bebia

When I came back from the Ukraine I was expecting Bebia (or grandma) to be living at the house with the rest of the family. I had heard it through the grapevine from the day I arrived at the house that she was coming because it was apparently tradition that Bebia came down the mountain (perhaps on a donkey) and join the family during the harsh winter months. At 83, my host sister explained that the mountainous village life near Kazbegi was too difficult for the 83-year-old vixen. Bebia, however, has resisted my host mother’s persistent nagging and begging for about four months, but, just recently, she had a change of heart and decided to trek out of the mountains to join her family in Batumi.

When I first heard that Bebia was going to stay at the house until the ice and snow thawed from the moutain roads I was scared. I wasn’t sure exactly how long it took the ice to thaw from the mountain roads, but I imagined it would take just as long as a glacier or icecap to melt. Even with global warming rapidly raising sea levels, this was not fast enough for me and I secretly thought up of ways to sabotage her coming. It was not that I knew what Bebia was like—really, I had no idea—but it was merely the fact that I had heard horror stories from other PCVs about their Bebia experience. “Bebia yells at me to wear socks ALL THE TIME,” one PCV recounted one day while visiting in Batumi, “I swear sometimes I just want to throw that wrinkled face into the petchi!” Grandmothers in ROG were not like grandmothers that I had ever heard of or experienced. They were not sweet, smiling, or generous, but, rather, in ROG they were nagging, paranoid, and sometimes psychotic. Bebias were always over 80 sporting a prominent hunchback, and the majority of them were widowed from age 30 and wore black and mourned for their husband everyday since then. Some—like John’s “Grandma in the closet”—just waited for death and were often neglected by their families. There were also set things that Bebias just did not do, apparently. It was common knowledge among PCVs that Bebia a) never relinquished control of the kitchen; b) always knew best; c) could kill, pluck, and prep a chicken in a blink of an eye; d) had health treatments that are highly questionable but always better than any western method (hence a Bebia’s average life expectancy is approximately 110); e) may have a large vocabulary of Georgian and Russian, but “no” is not a word she knows; and f) had a scary amount of facial hair. I had been warned, and because I had months and months to contemplate what my Bebia would be like, I was frightened.

With seven people already living in a three-bedroom house, I was not sure where Bebia would sleep. Would she sleep in the shower stall? In the toilet? Maybe even in the cupboard? “Maybe,” I thought to myself, “grandma would sleep a shoe!” Luckily, my host family seems to have a talent for making space when there seems to be none available. Bebia, it seemed, would be sleeping in the same room with the youngest host brother and host sister, while the eldest son would be sleeping in the living room on the sofa and the middle son would be sleeping in what is known as the “didi matsivari,” or the big refrigerator. After finding this out I no longer had fears of opening the shower stall and finding Bebia curled up sleeping in the corner while I was stark naked in front of her, or going to put on my shoe and finding Bebia somehow contorting her body to fit my enormous boot.

The first day I saw Bebia it was very awkward. Bebia is hard of hearing, and upon seeing me she asked me my name and when I replied, “me Yuta var,” she seemed to draw a blank look that indicated that she was not all there in the head. As I looked into her milky eyes I wasn't sure what to make of her. Her eyes indicated that she had just gone unconscious, and for a minute I contemplated slapping her or splashing her face with water to bring her back to reality. Since then, though, Bebia and I have started to understand each other pretty well. There is a predictable script that we follow every morning that goes something like this (translated):

Me: Good morning
Bebai: Good afternoon
Me: How are you doing?
Bebia: How are you doing?
Me: Great, thanks!
Bebia: ::nods::

After a pause I will, as always, go to my water filter to fill up my water bottle and do my morning routine, and when I come back she is curled up on the sofa looking exhausted at 9AM. My host mom will usually talk to me about her as if she is not there, and when she criticizes Bebia while she is standing there I can’t help but look completely trapped—like a deer in headlights. Part of me wants to remind my host mom that it is her own mother that she is badmouthing. “You do realize that your mother is right there, right?” I want to ask, but seeing that she is criticizing Bebia about how she reads all day I am usually left staring at her in disbelief. As her children watch 12 hours of TV a day, Bebia studiously reads novel after novel and is knowledgeable in the most profound things. Bebia, for instance, can recite poems in Russian and Georgian without ever pausing, and I find this amazing at the old age of 83. “Oi!” my host mother says in disgust, “Bebia is always reading! She will lose her mind soon if she does just that!” “Yo mama,” I want to tell her, but seeing that this will have little affect on her I keep my mouth shut.

Sometimes when I just come home from work I sit down with Bebia to drink tea with her and talk. She has an inquisitive mind and is curious about the English language and will oftentimes pick up things and ask how it is said in English. “This one,” she says to me as she points, “how do you say this in English?” “That is called sugar,” I tell her. As she repeats it slowly over and over again to retain her one vocabulary word of the day I analyze her wrinkles on her face. There seem to be an endless amount of folds that amazingly make up her tiny face, and I can’t help but wonder if in those crevices lies bits of food or bugs that might be found in an old man’s beard. I am drawn to it like it’s one of those pictures that if you stare hard enough a 3D picture will appear, and so I look at it intensely focusing and unfocusing on her face with intense concentration. One day I had an intense desire to just grab her facial skin and stretch it sideways to see what she looked like when she is younger. “Don’t do it Yuta,” I have to tell myself, “that would just be, you know, rude.”

Bebia is growing on me more than anyone in the family, I think. The fact that she is clueless and knowledgeable at the same time amuses me, and I am actually sad at the thought of her returning to her mountain village near Kazbegi. I have even begun to share the same sentiments of my host family by wondering about how Bebia cope all alone in the rugged lands of the north? More than anything, though, I think it is a selfish desire to keep her close for my entertainment as well. She, like me, can pull off cluelessness and competence pretty well, and if she goes I am, again, alone in the jungle of ROG.