The Murderous Babushka
I’m staying at a small AirBnb in the center of Tbilisi. It’s down a back alley off one of the main streets. Along this alley lives a babushka. For those who don’t know, a babushka is an elderly Eastern European woman, usually over 80 years old, with a cantankerous personality and a built-in desire to nurture and/or yell at everything around her.
Fortunately for me, I was blessed with a sweet babushka. Mine is about 120 years old. She stands two-foot-four, tops, her spine curves at a perfect lowercase ‘r.’ Her name, I have no idea.
I don’t know her name because I don’t speak Georgian, and she doesn’t speak English. But that does not stop her.
The first day we met, she walked up to me and started talking before we were even in earshot. I smiled and nodded. “I don’t speak Georgian,” I said. Then she smiled and nodded, and went on talking.
This has happened several times.
A week later, I was coming home and feeling particularly rotten. Georgia’s been tough in many ways — I will explain more in my eventual blog post — but I was feeling low. The babushka was standing at her window, munching on cake. I got closer and saw two platefuls of cake; they were cut into chunks, piled into mounds. She started talking to me, of course in Georgian, then handed me a piece. I gave it a very quick glimpse, decided in .5 seconds that no matter what it was, it wouldn’t kill me, then took a bite. It was pretty good. I told her in my non-Georgian how I liked it, feigning enthusiasm. Her eyes got a little bigger. She walked away and came back with a plastic bag. She emptied both mounds of cake into the bag, tied it up and handed it to me. This was about three pounds of cake. “No, not necessary!” I said. “But thank you. Thank you. Madloba.”
I got home and I gotta say, I was truly touched. Crying, almost. This was a country that hadn’t been super accessible for me. And when I was really feeling all of this acutely, this woman offers the first genuine act of kindness to me since I arrived.
It was about 12:30pm. The piece of cake I tried earlier was pretty good. I had a little coffee left in my Moka pot, so I said you know what, I’ll eat a bunch of this cake with coffee and have myself a morning.
I open the bag and I see a tiny speck of green on a piece. Oh, I first thought, it’s some dye. Icing, perhaps. Then I see more green. Then I come to realize that most of the cake is dotted with green, and this green isn’t icing at all.
It’s mold.
Godforsaken mold.
The babushka, my brain quickly calculated, is trying to kill me.
Because in those quick seconds, several things popped into my mind:
-One: One morning, before she and I knew each other, and before I knew she lived there, I passed by at 6am. This was a morning I’d gotten up early to watch the NBA Finals, so I took a quick walk around halftime. When I passed her window, which was open — again, not knowing here lived a 120-year-old babushka — I heard a movie playing. It wasn’t just loud, but excessively loud. And it wasn’t just a movie, but like, an action movie, with machine guns and bombs and cars crashing. At 6:00 am.
-Two: Another day, I walked by and heard these talking sounds I could only describe as demonic. It was completely unnerving. I lingered for a little because it truly stopped me and caught my attention. Again, I didn’t know this was her place, so I told myself that maybe it was a kid playing around or something, and I just moved on…
…until now. Until I was holding this piece of moldy green cake, in a month where nothing has seemed to really make sense, and in a place that’s gotten more random with every turn.
And following all this evidence came the crowning thought, the one to solidify all this angst into full-blown paranoia: that of Junior Soprano, in the later seasons, when he goes completely senile and shoots his nephew Tony in the stomach (sorry for the spoiler, but we’re past that point).
And so my brain pictured this woman smiling and cooking a cake, and reaching for the vanilla extract, which is actually rat poison, and dumping it in, mixing it around, and her thinking how this is the perfect treat for her husband who’s now coming home from the war.
Well, I trashed the cake. And the only piece I ate overall was the first one, which to my very quick inspection earlier, did not have any spores on it.
I have passed that window many times. And most often, she sees me passing and stops me with this “psst” sound, calling me over. She talks for awhile, hands me food, talks a little more, then blows me a kiss and sends me off. In the time since the cake, she has handed me:
-three platefuls of egg-battered toast: these were three separate instances, as in three different platefuls of toast
-several refrigerated bananas
-a half a chunk of baloney: she shuffled to her fridge, pulled out a whole tube of baloney, then sliced off half and handed it to me. I think she was saying it goes well with the bread.
Each time, I stop and talk — really, I listen — as she goes on and on in Georgian, and I smile. One day I tried to communicate via ChatGPT’s translation feature. I turned the mic on and held the phone near her. She, aghast, had no idea what I was doing. She took my phone and looked at it, inspected it, then handed it back, maybe thinking this was like reparation for all the food she’s given me.
For all of it, I’m not sure. I’ve seen her dozens of times, shuffling up and down the block. I now know that she is lucid, and that she’s known around the neighborhood. But I still don’t know what’s behind her intentions, and I will never fully know what was in that cake.