Historically, I’m the one upset about something and he’s the person I call if I need to calm down and figure out what the hell just happened. He once spent a very patient hour on the phone with me to explain how a DVR worked.
“I trust her,” I said. “She’s okay.”
He laughed. “Yes, because you putting your trust in a pretty girl is something we have learned to rely upon as sound practice.”
“That is so unfair I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Very well, we will put it aside for now. Tell me how many are watching you?”
“I don’t know. Iza seems to think a lot are, but she still thinks cars are a kind of animal. She might have been noticing people whose interest doesn’t extend beyond the fact that we look like Westerners.”
“But you do not think so.”
“I don’t. I think she’s probably right.”
“We are going to assume they are listening to you right now.”
“But they can’t hear us on these phones, right?”
“They can’t hear me, but assuming there are devices in the room, they can hear your responses perfectly well.” I’d thought of this already, actually, which was why I hadn’t said his name aloud. “We need to speak face-to-face, in a location I can control.”
“Where?”
“I’m in the city. Can you follow instructions without repeating them or writing them down?”
Now he was just being mean. “Go ahead,” I said.
“All right. Here is what you do. Step one, don’t bring the girl.”
Chapter Seven
“I don’t understand how he can know so much about language and philosophy and still manage to be so stupid,” Hsu said after a particularly frustrating evening, in reference to our friend Xuangang.
“He never looked up from his books,” I said. “It’s hard to see what’s happening around you if you aren’t looking.”
* * *
When I first heard of it, the fortress was called Shuris-Tsihe. It’s called Narikala now, and it’s no longer much of a fortress. It’s more like a series of walls and a couple of towers staring down at Tbilisi from atop a distant hill. Shuris-Tsihe occasionally defended the city when such a thing was necessary, but more often housed the soldiers who could exit the fortress and defend the city, as that was a much more practical function. (Fixed battlements have their uses, but are limited by a total lack of mobility. Armies can go around them, in other words. Like the French Maginot Line, they are only as useful as the enemy is uncreative.) Tbilisi rested along a couple of profitable trade routes: By land it connected the Southern silk roads with everything north of the Caucasus, and by sea everything coming through Constantinople across the Black Sea and headed eastward. This meant it had to be defended somewhat often because there was money to be made there, and influence to be applied, and power to be used.
Tbilisi’s problem, historically, was a microcosm of everything wrong with the middle of the European/Asian theater for about the last two thousand years. Geographic access meant profitability, but profit led to envy. Access also meant vulnerability, so anyone with a half-decent army and the element of surprise stood a chance of taking a city or two here and there. Constantinople was a rare exception because its location was uniquely accessible and also nearly impregnable thanks to some very impressively high walls and an extremely defendable port. And it was still sacked two or three times.
This is really why the United States and Japan are so economically strong. I’m not even kidding. The only way Japan is getting taken by an invading army is if that army is also Godzilla, and the United States is never going to see a serious threat from Mexico or Canada. Whereas a country like Turkey or Uzbekistan or Poland can wake up one day and find one of its neighbors has gotten all warlike and suddenly they’re getting occupied or renamed. And this used to happen every week in the Middle Ages, for about a
“I trust her,” I said. “She’s okay.”
He laughed. “Yes, because you putting your trust in a pretty girl is something we have learned to rely upon as sound practice.”
“That is so unfair I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Very well, we will put it aside for now. Tell me how many are watching you?”
“I don’t know. Iza seems to think a lot are, but she still thinks cars are a kind of animal. She might have been noticing people whose interest doesn’t extend beyond the fact that we look like Westerners.”
“But you do not think so.”
“I don’t. I think she’s probably right.”
“We are going to assume they are listening to you right now.”
“But they can’t hear us on these phones, right?”
“They can’t hear me, but assuming there are devices in the room, they can hear your responses perfectly well.” I’d thought of this already, actually, which was why I hadn’t said his name aloud. “We need to speak face-to-face, in a location I can control.”
“Where?”
“I’m in the city. Can you follow instructions without repeating them or writing them down?”
Now he was just being mean. “Go ahead,” I said.
“All right. Here is what you do. Step one, don’t bring the girl.”
Chapter Seven
“I don’t understand how he can know so much about language and philosophy and still manage to be so stupid,” Hsu said after a particularly frustrating evening, in reference to our friend Xuangang.
“He never looked up from his books,” I said. “It’s hard to see what’s happening around you if you aren’t looking.”
* * *
When I first heard of it, the fortress was called Shuris-Tsihe. It’s called Narikala now, and it’s no longer much of a fortress. It’s more like a series of walls and a couple of towers staring down at Tbilisi from atop a distant hill. Shuris-Tsihe occasionally defended the city when such a thing was necessary, but more often housed the soldiers who could exit the fortress and defend the city, as that was a much more practical function. (Fixed battlements have their uses, but are limited by a total lack of mobility. Armies can go around them, in other words. Like the French Maginot Line, they are only as useful as the enemy is uncreative.) Tbilisi rested along a couple of profitable trade routes: By land it connected the Southern silk roads with everything north of the Caucasus, and by sea everything coming through Constantinople across the Black Sea and headed eastward. This meant it had to be defended somewhat often because there was money to be made there, and influence to be applied, and power to be used.
Tbilisi’s problem, historically, was a microcosm of everything wrong with the middle of the European/Asian theater for about the last two thousand years. Geographic access meant profitability, but profit led to envy. Access also meant vulnerability, so anyone with a half-decent army and the element of surprise stood a chance of taking a city or two here and there. Constantinople was a rare exception because its location was uniquely accessible and also nearly impregnable thanks to some very impressively high walls and an extremely defendable port. And it was still sacked two or three times.
This is really why the United States and Japan are so economically strong. I’m not even kidding. The only way Japan is getting taken by an invading army is if that army is also Godzilla, and the United States is never going to see a serious threat from Mexico or Canada. Whereas a country like Turkey or Uzbekistan or Poland can wake up one day and find one of its neighbors has gotten all warlike and suddenly they’re getting occupied or renamed. And this used to happen every week in the Middle Ages, for about a
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