If I were an old man, I would take a fishing rod, sit down on the seashore, and sit there all day long among the other old men. I would look at the sea, trying to catch its living changeability, its fifty shades of sea-wave color.
This would go on for so long—perhaps months and years—that I would become friends with the other fishermen, not always understanding what they were saying to me, and never understanding what they were saying to each other. From time to time, they would offer a sip of wine or chacha, and we would drink to improve our mutual understanding and respect. And I would grow old along with them, gathering their wisdom and filling them with mine whenever possible. And when some Petre and Andria called me along with them to change my occupation, wonderfully transforming from fishers of fish into fishers of men, perhaps I would not refuse right away, like before, but would hesitate, lingering in doubt and asking for a little more time to make a decision.
In my idleness, I would notice much in the sea: schools of playful dolphins and shoals of hamsa concerned with their survival, and their harmonious, centuries-old coexistence. I would listen to the women who came out to the seashore, singing fado about their husbands who went into the greedy waves and left hope behind in their place. The sea, with its monotonous grumbling, would answer the unfortunate ones, changing its color like a chameleon and its feelings like Solaris. And under the influence of the fantastic magic of this ocean, reality would transform, revealing to me in the distance, in the roadstead, galleons and galleys enveloped in cannon smoke. On the shore, here and there, instead of fishermen with tackle, marine painters and battle-painters would appear, greedily peering into the horizon—Aivazovsky and Signac, Turner and van de Velde—ready to tell people much about the sea afterwards without using words.
Tired of the sea and solitude, I would start playing chess on the boulevard, sitting down in the shade on a bench, first by myself or with an imaginary opponent—Tal, Korchnoi, or even Carlsen, as a last resort—until a passerby agreed to keep me company for the long months of good weather. The sun would suggest good moves and keep me from getting angry at blunders and ridiculous losses. We would engage in intellectual disputes, implicitly keeping their essential aesthetics under control, and it wouldn't matter much whether my chess acquaintance showed up or couldn't make it for some valid reason.
I would alternate playing chess with playing hopscotch or The Glass Bead Game, depending on my mood, or with dominoes, depending on whether some street domino players accepted me into their company or not. And I wouldn't need to know many words in Georgian to be understood by them—just gamardoba, madloba, and probably tevzi, which means fish. And here, too, from time to time, we would drop a glass of wine for the health of present and absent good people, so that, having had a fair amount and returning home, we wouldn't arouse any suspicions in our jealous wives regarding our absence.
If I were an old man, I would speak little and think much, and in these reflections, I would develop and train my imagination for the better, and in gratitude, it would carry me far to the south, to the north, and to other sides of the horizon, into different historical eras, musical and artistic works. And now my thoughts return to the sea to become Pushkin's old man, casting the dragnet three times and making three cherished wishes to the talking fish. These are not brains, heart, and fearlessness, but what the scolding old woman wanted—not for her sake, but for myself, beloved—three heavy burdens: nobility, tsardom, and dominion over the sea, intending beforehand not to burden the fish with eternal servitude to me, in order to achieve the necessary compromise.
Or, mentally moving to the southwest, I would indulge in idle musings about another old man, the mighty Santiago, who defeated the fish—already silent—wondering if the boy would have helped him if he had sailed with him in the boat to save it, to protect it from robber sharks. Imaginary pictures would imperceptibly intertwine with dreams, erasing the boundaries of reality, where Dumbledore and Gandalf solemnly enter Raphael's School of Athens to share their magical knowledge, and where Ulysses and Jason suddenly meet on one of the islands of Middle-earth—one on his way home to Ithaca from long wanderings, the other returning from Colchis—and in a conversation at a table with wine and bread, they share hopes of gaining the coveted thrones, not yet knowing that the old man will achieve his goal through cunning, while his interlocutor will not.
All this time, Neil Young’s guitar riffs from Dead Man would play as a measured soundtrack, and then, without any transitions, Leonard Cohen would sing his songs about the eternal, slowly and convincingly.
And waking up from my musings and memories, I would look with wide eyes at the mountains from my balcony, so ancient and majestic that I would instantly forget about my old age and my wisdom. And then I would go out into the sun-drenched street, buy hot bread and young wine, and sit down like Bunin or Brodsky with some interesting book, breaking off the crunchy "ears" of the shoti bread from one side and the other, washing down this bread—hot to the point of impatience—with green, slightly sparkling Mtsvane.
I would have many interesting things, both described and unexpressed, if I were an old man. But I am young, and youth, as we know, does not know what old age can do. Therefore, I enthusiastically repeat along with all young people the lines from the anthem of youth of all times, passionately composed and sung half a century ago by the still-living rockers from The Who:
I hope I die before I get old.
Translated by AI
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