Very Still

The razor was already at my throat when Temo asked me whether a real man eats khinkali with a fork.

“No,” I said.

“Correct.” He drew the blade up under my jaw, slowly, the way you scrape the last honey out of a jar. “With the hands. By the tail. The fork is for tourists and my brother-in-law.”

Gia had brought me. On Monday morning he had stood in my doorway, looked at my head for a long time and said, “Who cuts it?” I said nobody. He said, “Yes. That’s what I thought.”

So now I was in the chair. Temo’s shop is on the corner below us: one chair, one mirror, a jar of combs in blue water, a calendar from 2019 and a grey cat who sleeps in the chair whenever nobody is in it. She sat on the windowsill and looked at me as if I had taken her seat. I had.

Gia sat on the bench under the calendar and read a newspaper he had already read at home.

“Turkish tomatoes,” Temo said, wiping the razor on his sleeve. “No taste. Water with a skin on it.”

“No taste at all,” I agreed.

He tilted my head to the left. A minute later he said, “Although, honestly, Turkish tomatoes are cheaper, and my wife can’t tell the difference. They’re good.”

“They’re good,” I agreed.

The razor stopped.

“You agreed with both.”

“You were holding a razor both times,” I said.

From behind the newspaper Gia said, “He agrees with me too. It’s very restful. You should try it.”

Temo laughed and went back to work, and I went back to holding still. I hold still very well. I don’t blink when the clippers come near my ear. I don’t flinch at cold water. When he pushed my head down to do the back, it stayed exactly where he put it, like a lamp you have bent into position.

After a while Temo said, “You’re the stillest man I’ve ever had in this chair.”

“Thank you.”

“Only one was stiller. My uncle Shalva. I shaved him in 2011, for his funeral.” He thought about it. “He didn’t agree with anything, though.”

“Did he tip?”

“His widow did.”

He held the little mirror up behind me so I could see the back. It looked like the back of a head. I said it looked very good, which Gia told me afterwards is the only correct answer.

Then Temo took off the cape and shook it out over the floor, and stopped, and looked at the floor. It was clean. He looked at the clippers in his hand. He looked at me. Then he took the broom from the corner and swept the clean floor anyway, carefully, into the dustpan, and tipped the nothing into the bin.

“Habit,” he said.

I paid him ten lari. The cat got back into the chair before I was out of it.

“Come back in a month,” Temo said at the door.

“Will it have grown by then?”

He looked at my head for a moment, then at the bin.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Come and agree with me.”