The Art of Lament

Or cultural learnings make for colourful bargaining

Gardenias by Gio Mikava, Cartoonize,

July 30, 2021

The keyboard calls, ten being much later than I’m used to beginning. My routine has been disrupted by a row with my Georgian landlady. This gem of a country at the threshold of Europe and Asia sometimes seems fated to understand neither. It is not blessed with the business nous of the Middle Eastern cortex and speaks a different psychological language to that of the West.

The visitor will receive of great hospitality but should be carrying something to be had or that attests to the value of his being there. This is the time-honoured logic of survival. It made sense in an era of Silk Road traders and tourists but in a world locked down by Event Covid many of us are struggling to survive as much as the citizens.

If the foreigner pleads for time to pay, he must be hiding his money, feigning poverty. This in turn will unleash a display of fury that is something to behold, for here, the Georgian is very much blessed by the Middle East.

Fury has many layers and reveals itself, at first, like the quiet unfolding of a work of origami. It may begin with indirect inquiries as to one’s circumstances, family and friends. This no crass probing in the hope of revealing a wealthy uncle. It is buying time for you to recant and deliver the goods.

Then the complainant will lay out his or her circumstances, which I do not minimize for this is what’s euphemistically called a transition economy, a former Soviet satellite struggling to navigate the world without being devoured by Western corporations and the World Bank-IMF syndicate.

The complainant continues: she too has creditors to pay. The words are increasingly bright in tone and hue. They may paint a portrait as colourful as any caricature of old Europe, in which it’s common to find a dash of humour mixed with pathos.

Imagine a vignette of shameless desperation in which the workers abandon their half-finished labours, seizing wines and chickens in lieu of payment and leave, tearing whole branches laden with fruit, out the garden gate. The householder tugs his locks, sighs at the gathering clouds and the children scatter, unmissed, into the lanes.

This is no Mesopotamian lament recounting great deeds — though authors and poets have long drawn on its heritage.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more—Oh, never more!

Anton Chekhov

Yes, he has plenty to talk about now. His listener ought to sigh and exclaim and lament. . . It would be even better to talk to women. Though they are silly creatures and blubber at the first word.

Sadly our cellular age is less lyric and one may torment not with solicitation but sonic attack. The culture of permaconnectivity decrees that one shall be available at all times. War dialing will heat your phone to simmering point. Should you miss one it will generate more, rising in an exponential crescendo of dings. This restless needling would later give way to the edgy silence of night, as unsettling as if the line was cut.

This lament has purpose. It’s been noted of the Middle-Eastern trader that he cries out as he strikes, for this is his technique. It draws on predator psychology, the one with advantage lying momentarily prone, provoking doubt in the victim.

Your counterparty wants to know if you can’t pay or simply won’t. In order to discover he plays you like a mouse. In either case you should prepare for escalation.

The relatives will visit: a brother or a cousin or maybe “some friends.” The hour will be chosen for effect. You have been out all day or perhaps just turned in for the night when the door will knock. This serves to frame you as underhand, as if you had been hiding to avoid them. After all, you probably missed one of the phone calls. It is another psychological lever set to make you feel guilty even if you spent the day parading in clear view of the townsfolk. The amulet against the evil eye is common across the region where three continents meet.

So it happened with me. The cousin even offered to take me to a bank to help open an account. Educated and professional, working somewhere around IT and finance, I believed his good intentions. That did not affect the course of the plot.

Having outlined my tight spot and provided assurances, I awaited the third act.

***

I want to assure the reader that, like Pooh, I was at that precise moment a “wedged bear in great tightness.” I have written elsewhere the banks’ strategy of torment is real.

What was once called your banking “relationship” has regressed into a primordial pursuit. The online customer is harassed, presumed guilty of malintent, locked out online and ultimately locked down geographically. Meanwhile the big banks, who make a song and dance about identity, verification and security when you are transferring $500, roll out the red carpet and their full-service money laundry for customers with tens or hundreds of millions.

Only yesterday, having settled everything, or so I thought, another of my banks spotted I was out of the country, sent a letter requiring my physical signature to the home address, in full expectation that the letter would be returned to sender.

The bankers never give up. It doesn’t matter to them that these accounts are the only channel by which I get paid for occasional work. That I trade in nothing but cheap words.

The phone rang.

I need you out in two days. I have clients who will pay me. I need money. What can I do?

Okay. I will try to stay with a friend. How long will your new guests stay? Can I come back — can I leave the animals?

In a week, if you pay. After that, we’ll see.

God works in mysterious ways. A friend had asked the day before if I’d walk her dog while she went for a week to Batumi. I called and suggested I house-sit. She agreed.

I have whittled down my worldly belongings to two suitcases and a couple of holdalls. Moving home however still requires a day-long whirlwind of separating what’s to be left or thrown — winnowing the chaff so as to be left with the grains worth keeping.

I also have some behaviours that inhabit the twisting alleys between procrastination and virtue. I always leave something cleaner than I found it, so I set to work. If she was going to throw me out I would go quietly but I was not offering her the satisfaction of complaining about a man’s mess.

What I intended as a good deed probably backfired. While I was house-sitting with the friend’s dog and wracking my brains to free a few hundred from the bank the landlady had noticed the flat empty and perhaps thought I’d skedaddled.

The phone rang and it turned out her guests were not coming. I could stay. I suspect they never existed. We had played at shadow boxing without so much as a loud word on my part.

In truth, I was a disappointment. Contracts in Asia are more than paper. They still retain a role for honour, respect and threat of humiliation. The lament, followed by the cry-as-he-strikes can be seen daily as Georgians negotiate their life at volume. There is a reason the country produces such passionate singers. As a guest in the country I certainly could never respond in kind.

The money arrived, peace was bought, the cats and tortoises stayed put, and the crib got a mid-summer night’s clean.

Of course it disrupted my attempts to supplement my earnings from editing and thus this colourful episode could be classed self-defeating. But here we are, at the end of another story.