It is a curse to be wished upon no one: one of your countries invades the other. If in war there are no winners, only losers, then when both sides belong to you, you lose exponentially. Or, to paraphrase Churchill, it is somewhat like suffocation wrapped in anxiety buried deep inside frustration. I bookended the summer of 2008 with a trip to Tbilisi in May and a conversation with Nina Gomiashvili, founder of Moscow’s Pobeda Gallery, in September to discuss the collision of the political and the personal as a result of the five-day war in August between Georgia and Russia. Nina is the daughter of one of the USSR’s most accomplished actors, a Georgian by the name of Archil Gomiashvili, and a Russian mother. I figured her dual identity – shared between erstwhile friends and now outright enemies – might well serve as an antidote to an eventual conflict between the US and Iran.

THE POLITICAL
Despite my use of earplugs at night, I have grown accustomed to the drumbeat of war from one of my countries, the US, towards the other, Iran. Georgia’s relationship with Russia, however, is a far more intimate, delicate, and layered affair than the pre-teen name-calling that passes as diplomacy between the Great Satan and the Rogue Nation I call homes. Traditionally sandwiched between the Turks, the Persians, and the Russians, the Georgians, politically and religiously, often sided with Russia, going so far as to voluntarily relinquish sovereignty in the early 19th century in exchange for protection from incessant Persian attacks. And as complexity is often the first casualty of war, Nina recounted the story of the first flare-up between Russia and Georgia in 2006:

“Actually the thing I fear the most is that people here have a very general, vague impression of what’s going on there, and vice versa. A couple years ago, when there was the diplomatic conflict between Russia and Georgia, the police came to my daughter’s school and asked the Dean for a list of the kids with Georgian last names. Thankfully, the Dean said fuck off.”

What did they want?

They wanted to know where Georgian families were registered, where they lived, what they were doing. And for that you go to schools – private schools, where the children of the Georgian elite can afford to go.

Today, in Tbilisi, the spheres of influence can be read in letters writ large: one only has to compare the tattered pages of the Soviet books sold by the pedestrian subway outside Tbilisi University with the glossy editions available at Prospero’s Books, an English-language bookshop off Rustaveli Avenue. Despite a lopsided American presence – manifest in the George W. Bush highway that leads from the airport into town, or the “Information Center on NATO,” a guerilla store to make Comme des Garçons blush – the Georgians remain far closer culturally to their past partners to the north than to their new ones on the opposite side of the globe.

THE PERSONAL
When I planned earlier to go to the Caucasus – a heady mix of ethnicities and languages so rich it was called “The Mountain of Languages” by a 10th-century Arab geographer – I intended to travel to Tbilisi to deliver an intimate, if somewhat late, Iranian-American apology for a resolutely Persian crime. My early 19th-century compatriots had mobbed the Russian Embassy and killed Alexander Griboyedov, who penned the play whose words are so robust that they travel business-class from the original Russian to the scrappier shores of the English economy: Горе от ума, or Woe from Wit.

Six months prior to his death, Griboyedov had married a sixteen-year-old Georgian princess by the name of Nino Chavchavadze. When she learned of his death, Nino was devastated, giving premature birth to their child, and remaining a widow until her death 40 years later. She returned the favor of his eloquence, but posthumously, by writing on his tombstone:

Your intelligence and work are eternal / in the Russian memory / But why did my love / have to outlive you!

Nino’s inscription reminded me of Nina’s warning: “You know, these mountain people – their memories are just fine. With Georgians and Ossetians, you know entire generations will be fucked up. It’s in their blood. You kill my neighbor, I kill you and your entire family. It may be from the 16th century, but it still exists. And that’s the worst thing.” Memory, it seems, is not in short supply in this area of the world and might be one national trait best not shared amongst erstwhile friends and now outright enemies.