Wrong Number

On Sundays at eleven, while the building is still deciding whether to get up, my phone rings and a woman in Didube asks me whether I have eaten.

The first time, three weeks ago, I said, “I think you have the wrong number.”

“Levan,” she said. “Don’t start.”

So I didn’t start. Her name is Tsiala. Levan is her grandson. His number is the same as mine except for the last digit, which, she says, was always his weak point. He works at a hotel in Batumi and he never calls. So on Sundays I am Levan, from eleven until her soap opera starts at twelve.

She does most of the talking. The bakery on her corner has a new baker, and the bread is now “a sponge”. The pharmacy sign has lost a letter. The neighbour has put a blue tarp over his balcony, “like a lorry”. Her knees, one at a time. Her cat, Tsitso, who sleeps on the chair Levan used to sit on and won’t give it back.

“And you?” she asks at the end. “Are you eating?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Lobio,” I say. Or “soup”. Once, carelessly, I said, “Whatever’s in the fridge,” and she was quiet for so long I thought the line had gone.

“There’s nothing in your fridge,” she said at last. “I know you.”

Gia found out on the second Sunday, because the walls are thin and he has nothing to do before noon.

“You’re lying to an old woman.”

“She isn’t asking for the truth. She’s asking whether I’ve eaten.”

“Have you?”

“That’s the lie.”

Last Sunday, before the soap opera, she said something new. “If one Sunday I don’t ring, don’t come looking. It means I’ve died, and I don’t want you seeing the flat in a mess.”

Today eleven came and the phone didn’t ring.

At five past I was standing at the window with it in my hand. At a quarter past I rang her. A recorded woman told me the subscriber was unavailable. She said it very calmly, as if it happened all the time.

“Maybe she found the real one,” Gia said from the stairs.

I took the bus to Didube. I had never been there, but I knew the way. Past the pharmacy with the missing letter. Past the bakery with the sponge. The building with the blue tarp on the fourth floor, the floor above it, the door whose bell, she says, “plays half a tune”. It played half a tune.

Tsiala opened the door in her dressing gown and looked at me for a long time.

“You’re not Levan.”

“No.”

“Levan is shorter.” She looked past me down the stairs, the way you look for a bus that isn’t coming. “My balance ran out. The kiosk is shut on Sundays.”

“You said that if you didn’t ring—”

“I know what I said. The flat’s a mess.” She stood aside. “Come in, then.”

I sat in her kitchen. Tsitso did not get off Levan’s chair, so I took the stool. Tsiala put a plate of khachapuri in front of me and watched the soap opera over my shoulder, and every few minutes she told me who was lying to whom. All of them, it turned out.

At the door she pushed twenty lari into my coat pocket. “For the bus. Put the rest on my phone.”

I put all of it on her phone. Next Sunday at eleven she will ring the wrong number, and I’ll answer.

Levan’s number is still one digit away from mine. It’s the closest he’s come in years.