Left Turns

Since September, three mechanics have looked at Gia’s car. Between them they charged him a hundred and forty lari to say one word: “Age.”

The car is a 2004 Opel the colour of weak tea. It makes a noise only on left turns, a quick tk-tk-tk-tk somewhere in front of the passenger seat, and the whole building knows it. Ani drew it. Valiko does an impression of it. On Thursday morning Gia knocked on my door with the keys already in his hand.

“You listen to everything,” he said. “Come and listen to this.”

So we drove round our block in Sololaki, left, left, left, left, like a fish in a bowl. On every corner the noise came. Gia turned off the radio, then the heater, then held his breath, as if the car might be listening for him.

“Hear it?”

“It’s not the engine,” I said. “It’s behind the dashboard. On my side.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s a hundred and sixty a minute. Nothing in an engine does a hundred and sixty.”

He looked at me instead of the road, which on Asatiani Street is a brave thing to do. “You can hear numbers?”

“Can’t you?”

I asked him to turn right, just once. He did it the way you go along with a doctor’s strange request. The noise came there too, only slower. Tk. Tk. Tk. Tk. Patient.

“That’s your indicator,” I said. “The front bulb on the left has gone. Nobody answers at the other end, so it hurries.”

“Three mechanics.”

“They opened the bonnet. The bulb is on the outside.”

In the courtyard I stood by the gate while he put the left indicator on. The back light blinked. The front one stayed dark, like the window of a flat whose people have moved away.

Gia sat in the car for a while with it ticking.

“Since September,” he said, “nobody has known where I was turning.”

“We knew,” said Valiko, from the bench under the fig tree. “You always turn left.”

The kiosk by the bakery had the bulb. Two lari. Gia changed it in the courtyard with the whole building watching: Valiko with advice, Eter with a torch she never switched on, Muria under the car, and the grey cat who sleeps on Gia’s bonnet because after a drive it is the warmest place on our street. Then Gia went round the block once more and came back without a sound, like a man walking into a room where he used to argue.

“Well,” said Eter. “What will you talk about now?”

He didn’t answer. He sat on the bench and looked at the car as if it belonged to somebody else.

Then Valiko put a hand on his chest.

“Luka. Listen to this. Something clicks on the left. Only on the stairs.”

I put my ear to his cardigan. Wool, cigarettes, a heart that keeps its own time. Lower down, every time he shifted his weight, a small click in his left knee.

“That’s age,” I said.

He nodded, satisfied, and went up to bed. In our building it was the first time anyone had been glad to hear it.