Nineteen Centimetres

The fish in the Mtkvari are not for eating, Nodar says. They are for telling.

Nodar runs the kiosk by the bakery. On Saturdays he hangs a piece of cardboard in its window that says, in his opinion, everything — “BACK” — and at six in the morning he goes down to the river below Metekhi with a folding stool, a rod, a thermos and half a loaf. This week he took me, because I am the only man on our street who doesn’t talk before nine.

“Three rules,” he said on the way down. “Don’t talk. Don’t move. Don’t stare at the float as if it owes you money.”

A ginger cat was already waiting on the embankment. Nodar didn’t seem surprised. “He’s not mine,” he said. “He belongs to the river. He comes for whatever we’re too ashamed to take home.”

He rolled bread into small grey balls and showed me how to put one on the hook. I sat on the cold stone and held the rod. Nodar watched me for a minute, then sighed.

“Not like a lamp post. Hold it like you’re thinking about something else.”

So I thought about something else. I thought about the river: how fast it goes under the bridge, why it is the colour of milky tea in November, how many people had sat on this stone before us. I had got as far as the twelfth century when the float went under.

It was a small silver fish, about the length of a hand. Nodar looked at it, then at his own float, which had not moved since six.

“Beginner’s luck,” he said, as if it hurt.

The fish went in the bucket. The cat sat down beside the bucket and made itself comfortable.

“Now,” said Nodar. “At the kiosk Valiko asks you how big. What do you say?”

“Nineteen centimetres.”

He winced, as if I’d sworn in church. “Nobody says centimetres about a fish. Your hands talk. Show me.”

I held my hands apart. Nineteen centimetres.

“Wider.”

I tried. They wouldn’t go. They hung in the air, nineteen apart, polite and stubborn as a tape measure. Nodar took hold of my wrists and pulled. They slid back like a drawer.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I saw the fish.”

“Everybody saw the fish! That’s not the point.” He poured himself coffee, and from the smell there was something in it besides coffee. “My father fished from this stone for forty years. Every Saturday he caught a catfish the size of a Zhiguli. At his funeral every man on our street stood at the grave like this.” He opened his arms as wide as a door. “The priest thought it was a new custom.”

“Did he ever catch one?”

“Not once. Happiest man I ever knew.”

By ten Nodar had caught nothing, and the cat had our fish. It ate slowly, looking at us both, the way people eat in front of guests.

At the kiosk Valiko was already waiting for his cigarettes.

“Well?”

Nodar opened his arms as wide as the kiosk window. “Luka. First time out. This big.”

Everyone looked at me: Valiko, the baker, a woman with a pram. I put my hands in my pockets, where they can’t measure anything.

“Bigger,” I said. “And it’s still growing.”