The Toastmaster's Apprentice

In the old part of Tbilisi, on a steep street in Sololaki where the houses lean together like gossiping aunts, there was a wooden balcony painted green, and on the balcony, every morning of Mara's life, Babua Tamaz had sung.

He sang to the river, which was down the hill. He sang to the fortress on the ridge above, which had been there for sixteen hundred years and had heard better. He sang to the neighbours' washing and the neighbours' cats and to Bebia Eteri, who told him every morning to stop, and every morning poured him a second cup of coffee anyway.

Babua Tamaz had a voice like a church bell wrapped in a blanket. Deep, warm, round, and very, very loud.

This was useful, because Babua Tamaz was a tamada.

A tamada is the person who leads a Georgian feast. At a supra, the long table of food and family and talk that Georgians lay out for every wedding and christening and birthday and sometimes for no reason at all, it is the tamada who stands up and gives the toasts. One toast, and then another, and then another, each to something that matters: to peace, to the people at the table, to those who are not here any more, to friendship, to children, to the land. The tamada chooses the order. The tamada chooses the words. Everybody listens, and raises a glass, and says "Gaumarjos!", which means "Victory to you!" and also something like "Long may it be so!", and then the next person adds a few words of their own, and the toast goes round, and the tamada keeps it all moving, like a conductor in front of a very hungry orchestra.

A bad tamada makes a feast feel long. A good tamada makes it feel short. A great tamada, Bebia Eteri said, makes people forget to look at their phones.

Babua Tamaz was a great tamada. Everybody in Sololaki said so. People came from the other side of the city to ask him to lead their weddings. He had led a hundred and twelve supras, by his own count, and he kept every one of them in a black notebook with an elastic band round it: the date, the table, the toasts, in his big looping handwriting, with notes in the margins like good and too long and never seat these two together again.

Mara had sat beside him at most of the last twelve years' worth. Under the table, at first, eating bread. Then on a cushion. Then on a chair, with a glass of tarragon lemonade, bright green and fizzy, watching how he did it. How he waited for the room to go quiet before he began. How he made a joke first, and then a serious thing, so that people were laughing and then suddenly not laughing. How he never, ever read from the notebook, even though it was always in his pocket.

"The notebook is for afterwards," he told Mara. "To remember. The toast is for now. The toast has to come from here." He thumped his chest, where his heart was, and also his pocket, where the notebook was, which Mara suspected was not an accident.

And now there was a wedding coming. The wedding. Mara's cousin Nino, the vet, who had once let Mara help deliver a litter of nine puppies in the back of her surgery, was marrying a quiet young man called Levan from Telavi, in the wine country of Kakheti, three hours east. The supra would be on Saturday, on the terrace of a restaurant above the river, under a roof of grapevines. A hundred and forty guests. Twenty toasts. Babua Tamaz had been planning them for months.

There was only one difficulty, and it was a big one.

The two families were not speaking.

It had happened at the engagement dinner, back in the spring. Bebia Eteri had made her famous khachapuri, the round golden cheese bread that was the pride of the family, and Levan's grandmother, Bebia Manana, had tasted it, and closed her eyes, and said, "This reminds me of home."

That was all. Six words.

Bebia Eteri had heard: You copied this from us.

Then somebody's uncle said something about city people. Then somebody's aunt said something about village people. Then Levan's father said that real wine came from Kakheti and everybody knew it, and Nino's father said that real manners came from Tbilisi and everybody knew that too, and the evening ended with two sets of car doors slamming in the street, and the two families had not said a word to each other since. Not one. Not at the dress fittings, not at the church, not even on the phone about the cake.

"The supra will mend it," Babua Tamaz said, every evening, on the balcony. "Twenty toasts. You'll see. By the tenth, they'll be passing each other the bread. By the twentieth, they'll be singing. Trust the tamada."

Mara trusted the tamada.

Then came the Saturday morning. The tamada stepped out onto the green balcony in his good shirt, and took a deep breath, and opened his mouth to sing to the river.

Nothing came out. Not a note. Only a small dry squeak, like a door in another flat.

Bebia Eteri came out drying her hands, took one look at him, and said, "I told you. I told you not to sing until three in the morning at Nino's party. Did you listen? You did not listen."

Babua Tamaz opened his mouth to argue. A squeak came out. He shut it again, with dignity.

Babua Tamaz sat down slowly on the balcony chair. He took the black notebook out of his pocket, and pulled off the elastic band, and turned to a clean page, and wrote, in big looping letters, three words.

Then he turned the notebook round, and held it up, and pointed at Mara.

The words said: YOU ARE TAMADA.