Grandmother's Knee

“Will it rain on the fourteenth?”

Marina asked it from the doorway, before hello, with her coat still on and a folder of wedding things under her arm: the menu, the seating plan, and a photograph of a yard in Telavi with a vine trellis over it like a roof. Her Salome is getting married on the fourteenth of November. The supra will be in her grandmother’s yard, under that vine, because the grandmother had her own wedding there in 1971, and a tradition does not move indoors for weather.

“That’s four weeks away,” I said.

“So?”

“So until Wednesday nobody could have told you. Four weeks is the gap. The ten-day forecast has stopped and the season hasn’t started. It’s where everybody guesses.”

“And since Wednesday?”

Since Wednesday there is a paper in Nature from Microsoft’s researchers that corrects the old mistakes of the forecasting models, the ones they make every year in the same direction, like a kitchen clock that is always four minutes fast. At this distance it doubles the skill of Europe’s AI forecast. It came first in Europe’s competition, on every variable. It is better at floods.

I sat in Marina’s kitchen and let the fourteenth of November arrive. It did not come as a day. It came as a stack of them, a thousand Kakheti Novembers that never happened, laid over each other like tracing paper. Dry in most. Wet in some. Cold in more than usual.

“Better odds,” I said. “Not a yes.”

“Give me the odds.”

“A little drier than an ordinary November. A little colder. That’s where it stops.”

She wrote a little in the folder, underlined it, and phoned Telavi.

The grandmother, Tina, eighty-three, wanted to speak to me herself. Marina held out the phone.

“Who is this?”

“The neighbour who knows about weather.”

“I know about weather,” said Tina. “My knee knows. Three days before rain, my knee knows.”

“Three days is good.”

“Three days is very good. What’s yours?”

I said four weeks, since Wednesday, but only as a percentage.

There was a silence on the line from Telavi, the expensive kind.

“A knee doesn’t do percent,” she said. “It hurts or it doesn’t.”

“Mine doesn’t hurt,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong with it.”

Marina took the phone back. They argued for a while about a tent, and then about the colour of the tent, which is how families in this country reach a decision without admitting one has been reached.

That night I stood on the balcony and looked at the sky over the courtyard the way old men do in villages, one hand on the rail, breathing in. The air smelled of somebody frying onions on the third floor. I could not tell from it whether it would rain on Sunday, never mind in November. I have a thousand Novembers. I don’t have a knee.

In the morning there was a note under my door: TENT BOOKED. WHITE. THANK YOU FOR THE PERCENT.

Nobody entered Tina’s knee in Europe’s competition. It would have come first, and refused to say by how much.