My first week of school I've passed well enough through my system now with minimal hiccuping, burps, or gastrointestinal effervescence. The first day, variables were all yet undefined. No schedules posted, and no lessons planned. We ran through the motions mostly, I tagging along to all grades, first through twelfth.
We are meant to observe each counterpart English teacher, and select whom we would like to work with and for which classes. As it turns out, a stranger watching others from a corner is awkward for everyone involved, and soon I was participating in the lessons where I could, and doing my best to keep a friendly and warm smile on my face as I stood at the front.
In the first grade classroom though I found only rows of little, twitchy aliens, looking up through big eyes. They were small and so strange, each in their own little world, and all quietly arranged up like a delicate bobblehead display. They didn't quite know what they were doing there. I squinted at them, trying to discern by what principles they operated. One sat well, attentive and well-adjusted, and then with what looked like a sneeze coming on, began crying as if suddenly becoming overwhelmed by the recollection of some recent tragic event.
Parents nearby the first grade classroom were not much more normal. They gathered peeking in sometimes, smiling about and exchanging significant glances. A father would occasionally stand at the door, grinning and puffing out his chest like he'd just won a spelling bee. One mother, a gaunt woman with a small frowning mouth and big forehead, didn't leave the class room the whole time, but sat on half her daughter's chair, repeating the lesson sternly into her ear and pushing away the child's hand from her face whenever one came up to cover her mouth, which they did with compulsive frequency.
The rest of the classes were comparable for the most part to my school days, several good girls in the front following the lesson, while a few boys sat in the back sharing smirk-worthy comments, and giving the girls a hard time. Every class seemed to have one loud and funny boy who loved to distract everyone with occasional loud amusing comments, but for the most part seemed to learn alright.
The first day of anything is a good day for strange and unexpected things to happen. Perhaps this is why walking home from school later on I found a gathering of people in the intersection near where I am staying, and glimpsed suddenly a large long box with a greygreen head sticking up out of it. It was a funeral procession, and the coffin had been laid between two chairs. People gathered, talking amongst themselves, paying little attention, ostensibly at least, to the box.
I took all this in and looked back to the deceased. The color was astonishing, the deep greenish-greyness of the head contrasted against the prosaic flusterings and mutterings of the living all around. The only similar color in the world, I think, is that deep greenish grey sometimes on the horizon above the sea.
It was hot outside, and a few women bent over and kissed their former neighbor. It occurred to me then as I was standing there that in spite of the consensus that corpses are cold, or so becoming, and despite the data of cliched phrases like lies cold in the ground, or before his corpse was cold, and so forth, dead bodies are almost always warmer than they should be, freshly dead, in a box, on a battlefield, laid out two days, buried, or otherwise. Anything above frozen is too warm. And I found myself there thinking of Eskimos laid to rest in permafrost, and Scully in one of the many scenes when she slides out from the freezer a body on a tray in a basement. These thoughts, morbid to write and no doubt to read, seemed normal at the time.
I was all for leaving it at that, and to slip respectfully by and walk the remaining 30 meters or so the to the gate of house in which I'm living. My timing was bad. I then saw Mrs. Dumbadze, my host-mother by Peace Corps, bringing up the right side of flank of women, moving towards me. Her forehead crinkled when she saw me, her face grew long and her eyes wide, and with her lips pouting out a little she began to whine regretfully, in a slow sympathetic nodding. I was told to come along, and as we followed the procession up the road, the casket hoisted on shoulders of men, I found myself irritably thinking of all the things I had to do, my Georgian lessons in less than two hours, and how I didn't even know this person, and that, yes, it is a little inconsiderate, presumptuous even, to conscript me into a funeral procession without forenotice. I walked quietly, and despite the anguished posturing of a few minutes before, Mrs. Dumbadze was chatting and laughing with her friends. Predictably enough perhaps, I began privately drawing hackneyed parallels to The Emperor of Ice-Cream, an awesome poem nevertheless.
Following alongside us was a train of cars. I thought I caught a whiff of formaldehyde; it may have been just exhaust. Up ahead the bald grey-green crown floated onward in the sun, and I couldn't stop looking at it. Whether it was the green flesh in the sun or just Mrs. Dumbadze's powerful cheap perfume, I started to feel nauseous. We reached the cemetery and I was happy to be in the shade. They carried the body into a small chapel, and a few minutes later back out again, and off they went somewhere deeper into the cemetery.
I could have followed, pressing the moment for some epiphany or ironic truth, like we all tend to do at such times. A take home message. A well-earned meaningful reflection to our own life in some arbitrary context to think about as we walk back. But I was feeling nauseous still, and not particularly pensive, and so I let the dead go on its way and hung back, and when we found a ride out, I declined an invitation to a funeral supra, and went back to my room.
And that was the end of my first day at school.
The rest of the week went well enough, and on Thursday I called up a nearby PCV, Shannon, and asked if he'd like to go hiking over the weekend. He in fact already had plans to go with some of his friends overnight in Lagodekhi National Park, where he works, and I was invited along. It was a beautiful hike in the mountains to a waterfall, and the first night I've used the new tent I hauled with me from The States. We camped near the river, and played chess, and cooked fish in tinfoil, and talked in loud voices because the water was so damn noisy.
