Nick The Fisherman | A Short Story From Georgia

Back in September I visited my brother in Tbilisi, and on one of my last days there, while I was shyly wandering the streets with my camera, I met this strange guy.

I was in the middle of framing a nice tree-lightpole combination (I'm very addicted to those bastards), when this dude, who reminded me a lot of Pochtalion Pechkin, the postman from "Prostokvashino" (a soviet animated cartoon from the late '70s I grew up on) came out of nowhere, all excited about my film camera. We talked for a bit, reacting to one another's stumbling words, exchanging information, he with his broken English, and me with my even more broken Russian.

Eventually he told me he's on his way to his fishing spot, all geared up to catch his dinner for tonight, and invited me to join him and take some pictures of his deeds - And so I did. I followed him through Tbilisi's unfamiliar alleyways, while constantly praying to all the gods he's not more crazy than what I managed to assess on the spot - which wasn't that much. He had this very interesting mix of weirdness and politeness in him.

His name was Nick. A Russian refugee in Georgia. A fishman. A metal scraper. A lost but-also-definitely happy man.

His fishing spot, I then realized, was beneath the city streets, in the heart of the river that splits Tbilisi in two.

To get down there, we had to cross the main road, then climb the small brick wall after the sidewalk, and then descend a bunch of old and rusty metal steps (with some gaps here and there) until we finally could stand a toe's distance from the edge of the Kura river.

After some walking alongside the canal wall, he stopped us at this altar-like structure made of cement and mud, where a tree grew out of its center, and there he - in his own words - started prepering his restaurant just for me, laying out all his stuff on the altar, things like empty beer bottles with somewhat-dead flowers in them, and rotten fruits and vegetables skewered together on tree branches, ready for his tissue-paper-plastic-gloves handmade bonfire.

He was basically trying his best to be this character, this host-tour guy, offering me everything he owned, no matter how dirty or rotten it was (I did gladly accepted a couple of Camel cigarettes), and this crazed generosity that shined through his eyes was very heart-warming, but also kind of sad. Even the random Georgian/Russian books he laid down to the side on a piece of cardboard were all either completely torn out or burned, and when he showed them to me, one-by-one, I was so mesmerized - not by their content, which I couldn’t understand, but by the fact that he was carrying them on his back, all day long, almost proudly, despite their unusable condition.

He couldn't concentrate at all, probably because of all the excitement. It seemed like he was trying to lay out everything neatly on the altar, all his plastic forks and half torn Camel cigarettes, but it was all too much for him. Eventually I had to convince him to go fishing, to focus his energy on his future dinner, and the pictures he wanted me to take - before the sun went down on us.

And so we slid down to the river, and he started preparing his fishing rod, and then he opened this plastic box, where he revealed his army of worms, hundreds of them, all trying to escape, and some even succeeding, flying out and landing on his clothes and hands. I unfortunately didn't documente this moment. It all happened too quickly, in swift, confusing motions.

And then the fishing began :

Eventually I had to go back, fearing my brother would start to worry - and suddenly, out of nowhere, a rush of panic hit Nick, like a huge wave, and he immediately went back to the altar and started drawing me a map, scribbling all these incoherent lines and illustrations of random houses, naming out loud all kinds of street names, and I just nodded silently to everything he said, knowing I would most likely never see this crazy friend again.

We hugged. I waved him goodbye, then went back, up the stairs, back to the street.

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