Georgia, Chapter IV — The Market, Small Transactions, and Everything That Must Be Sold Before It Rots
Then I turned toward the market.
The strawberries were there.
Red.
Glossy.
Arranged in small crates with the precision we use when trying to convince someone that nature has a marketing department.
Beside them were oranges, apples, tomatoes, bananas, herbs, flowers, and enough plastic to ensure that at least the packaging would outlive the customer.
The strawberries, on the other hand, were in a hurry.
They couldn’t wait for the neighborhood to become fashionable.
They couldn’t be bought by a foreign investor, left empty for three years, and resold with an ocean view.
They had to be sold.
Eaten.
Or left to rot.
The skyscraper could remain unfinished and still call itself a project.
An unfinished strawberry is simply called a shitty strawberry.
This was the economy at street level.
Not square footage.
Pounds.
Not future returns.
Today’s price.
Not a brochure in which the sea already belongs to someone.
A woman choosing three tomatoes, putting one back, and asking how much the other two cost.
I photographed the crates.
After so much concrete, the colors seemed almost offensive.
Orange.
Red.
Green.
Yellow.
The fruit had not received the urban-planning memo stating that Batumi was supposed to dress itself in glass, steel, and international ambition.
It kept showing up with the same primitive audacity it had displayed for thousands of years:
smell me, touch me, eat me before it’s too late.
A vendor occupied a corner of the sidewalk.
A few crates.
A chair.
A scale, or the kind of eye capable of judging a pound with a precision I can’t manage even when following a recipe.
People passed.
Some stopped.
Some haggled.
Someone slipped their groceries into a bag too thin for the job and walked off supporting it from underneath, because trust is a beautiful quality but should never be applied to plastic bags.
No one seemed busy embodying the authentic soul of Georgia.
They were working.
It’s a distinction photographers tend to forget.
We see an old man behind a stall, a woman surrounded by fruit, battered hands, a worn hat, and immediately feel compelled to utter words such as dignity, tradition, and resilience.
In all likelihood, they would simply like to sell everything and go home.
Resilience is a quality most admired by those who are not forced to practice it every day.
I stopped in front of the bread.
Round loaves stacked behind glass.
Golden crusts.
Seeds.
Flour.
A little farther on hung dried fish, stiff and severe as a committee convened to pass judgment on your eating habits.
Then meat turning in front of the fire.
Sweets.
Dried fruit.
Spices.
The market didn’t need to explain the city.
It made the city hungry.
It was a more effective language than architecture.
You can spend hours discussing the relationship among development, identity, and international capital.
Then you smell warm bread and discover that the most honest part of your political position is the fact that you haven’t eaten lunch yet.
A window said *TAKE AWAY*.
Behind the glass, a woman handed over a bag.
Take it and carry it away.
Two verbs perfectly suited to the city in front of me.
Money arrived.
It took.
It carried away the returns.
Tourists arrived.
They took photographs.
They carried away a pocket-size version of Batumi.
I was no exception.
I had turned taking things away into a respectable profession and bought lenses expensive enough to call it bearing witness.
But a bag of bread has one advantage over a photograph.
It is immediately useful.
A little farther on, they sold flowers.
Roses.
Tulips.
Colorful bouquets held together by paper, rubber bands, and a touching faith in the human capacity to earn forgiveness at the last possible moment.
Flowers are an economically absurd product.
We buy them knowing they will die.
We give them to say love, apology, desire, gratitude, guilt, or “I had no idea what to get and the store was closing.”
We pay for something useless and short-lived, and precisely because of that it manages to mean more than many objects designed to outlive us.
Maybe the market doesn’t sell only what we need.
It sells what makes having to be useful all the time bearable.
Musicians appeared in other photographs.
A saxophone.
An accordion.
A man sitting beside his instrument.
Another surrounded by people who, for a few minutes, had stopped crossing the street.
They too were selling something that could not be stored.
A song existed as long as someone played it and someone else stayed to listen.
Then it ended.
A few coins remained.
Maybe.
There was nothing romantic about needing to make money on a sidewalk.
But there was something honest about the merchandise.
It did not promise to appreciate in value.
It couldn’t be rented out.
It had no rooftop pool.
It asked only for attention.
The scarcest currency in the city.
Near a hotel, exchange rates glowed on a board.
Dollars.
Euros.
Lari.
Money changed names without changing its nature.
It crossed borders, bought rooms, apartments, meals, flowers, bodies, time, and the occasional well-lit illusion.
Not far away, a sign bearing currency symbols already seemed to be preparing for the next shift.
The street’s small economy was about to hand Batumi over to the economy of the night.
By day, you counted coins to buy bread.
By night, you exchanged them to see whether luck had finally decided to stop ignoring you.
In another photograph, a man lifted a container and emptied it into the garbage truck.
It was the final stage of every economic theory.
We buy.
We consume.
We throw away.
Then we look for someone willing to carry off the consequences before they begin to stink.
Cities are happy to talk about commerce and far less eager to talk about waste.
The first word suggests growth.
The second reveals that all growth leaves something on the ground.
The sequence thinned out.
The crates gave way to kiosks and signs.
Commerce changed its set.
I kept walking.
I saw a small kiosk.
Then a glass door.
Above it were the words:
*OPEN 24/7.*
Twenty-four hours a day.
Seven days a week.
No break.
No Sundays.
No moment when the city could declare that it had already sold enough.
The strawberries could rot.
The bread could go stale.
The flowers could lose their heads.
The musician could stop playing.
But commerce had found a way not to sleep.
In the final images, the crates had vanished from the frame.
The sign, on the other hand, was already lit.
The market was closing.
Batumi wasn’t.