Funeral

Funeral
January 18th, 2006

Grigol and I went with the Vardzia priest on some errand. We were to sing in a funeral? I didn’t really understand, and no one really spoke English well enough to explain it to me. So we hiked down off of our cliffs and someone picked us up. Driving through the gorge I could see the remains of old castle battlements on the few places where one might have conceived of trying to pass through this way. It must have been a very difficult place to attack.

We parked in a village, and Grigol told me to leave my pack in the car. Well, I didn’t even know whose car it was, so I took the bag with me. But a minute later I regretted it because we entered the top floor of a house and there was a dead guy in a coffin in the middle of the room. He was old, and ashen looking, very gray. Seated around him must have been about fifteen, black-clad, slightly overweight middle-aged women. They all looked the same to me because I was so shocked that the ‘funeral’ was going to be here in the house.

We walked directly past the deceased man, and I didn’t look up for fear of offending someone in some way I wouldn’t know about. We stood behind his head, and Grigol flipped through prayer books and a tiny chant book he had with him. This morning we had looked over some chants for about twenty minutes and in the car ride over I had tried to read through some of the miniscule Georgian script so that I could attempt to chant it fluently. Too bad that at the size of the printed letters, the ‘s’ looks exactly the same as the ‘kh.’

Anyway, the priest toned his prayers, and Grigol and I responded with our chants, only two voices in what must be three part harmony. It is incomplete sounding. I sang the top voice again, while Grigol sang middle voice. Sometimes we didn’t have notes for chants we needed to sing, so we would read out of the prayer book, and on hyper-alert, I would change my pitch based on little cues that Grigol signaled with his finger. Pointing up meant I was supposed to rise in pitch, pointing down meant go down in pitch. Thankfully the chant only had about four notes, but to chant like this at a funeral with all the grieving and the deceased within ten feet of you… I tried to look serene.

Later we blessed each room in the house with oil and water. Downstairs, another fifteen non-grieving women were preparing a supra, sitting around a table shucking walnuts and garlic, or carving up vegetables. Outside, men stood around everywhere. One group across the street seemed to be involved in butchering the feasting meat. We did our duty, having a toast or two with the son of the deceased, then we made a hasty exit back to our caves in the sun.