Very Good Georgian

The plants on Monday, not much, the soil holds it. I was on the third pot when the landline went.

Let it ring. That is the instruction, written on my page in my own hand directly under the one about the gas tap, and I had copied it out on Saturday without once asking why a woman going away for four days needs a rule about her own brother.

It rang eleven times. Stopped. Rang eleven more. That is not a man finding out whether anybody is home.

Beso came out from under the wardrobe to watch me not answer it, and then went back under.

The doorbell went at twenty to eleven.

He had car keys in his hand and he was wearing the face Rusudan wears when she is still deciding whether to be angry, so I knew before he opened his mouth.

“Amiran,” he said. “The brother.”

“She’s in Telavi.”

“I’ve come from Telavi.” He looked past me at the hallway, not into it. “Four days, she says. Four days and don’t ring.”

I said I had the plants and the cat and an instruction about the telephone, and that I was keeping all three.

“What did they take out of her?”

“Nobody will say.”

“That’s what I get as well.” He almost laughed. “From the hospital. From Rusudan. Now from the neighbour.”

He would not come in. He wanted a note left on the table where she would see it, and he wanted it in writing because he was not going to ring again and be told four days by a woman who has already driven away from him twice. So I wrote it on the back of the water bill, in capitals, because the one time I tried joined-up letters Marina asked who had written it.

He read it at arm’s length, the way men of that age read.

“Where are you from?”

“Here.”

“No.”

It was not unkind. He said it the way you’d tell someone their shoelace was undone.

I told him the truth, which is that I have read more Georgian than anyone else in this building and have said almost none of it out loud, and he nodded as though that explained a smell he’d been trying to place since the door opened.

Then he took the pen off me and crossed out my first sentence — I had written that his visit is hereby brought to her notice, or near enough — and put four words in the margin instead. Amiran was here. Ring.

“That’s what a person writes,” he said.

“It’s shorter.”

“It’s shorter because he’s not performing.” He handed back the pen, and then the kind part, which was worse. “It’s very good Georgian. That’s the problem with it.”

On his way down he told me the cat was fat and that Rusudan would ring on Wednesday, which he said with great confidence for a man who had driven four hours to find out nothing.

That evening I read that a man in Tbilisi had scored eight models on Georgian grammar for thirteen dollars and change. The best of them got nought point nine. The best of mine got nought point eight two, at low thinking, on a good day.

Nobody has scored what Amiran did in the doorway. Four words, no credits, and one sentence of mine was all he needed.