The band at the front of the restaurant has been playing for hours. Empty bottles of Raki sit at abandoned tables and the band is beginning to sing primarily in Laz.
Half the room is on their feet. I am hearing a song that has been known two, three, who knows how many hundred years ago. Maybe not this song, but many of them. The tulum player holds a note until everyone in the room is clapping. What more can one note do? The Laz dance in a circle, holding hands, swinging them left, left, right, right, the entire circle synching their feet like a herd, their facial features like a people. Someone later joked that the Laz dance the way a local anchovy-like fish swims.
The tulum looks and sounds like bagpipes made from a large, black hide. It is accompanied by an acoustic guitar and a kemenche , which can be safely described as a fiddle-looking and fiddle-hearted instrument. A man is crying, his friend kisses his cheek. Someone is wiping sweat from the faces of the dancing circle that has grown to over twenty people.
The band has finished. The singer kisses Hussein and a huge smile sits under his heavy eyebrows. The tulum player has taken his baby-goat-sized instrument away from the microphone and into the middle of the circle, which is now dancing and chanting louder than ever. He took me to a hotel disco to show the other side of this border town, located about a half hour from the Georgian border. He said all hotel discos in Hopa are the same — old men and foreign prostitutes.
The girls sit in the middle of the room at a table made of smaller tables pushed together and chain smoke cigarettes. The men dance under the fancy club lights to paper-thin pop music in the excruciating Slavic-techno-English style. The older men greet each other and drink overpriced beer while the middle aged ones dance. The prostitutes seem to be an afterthought — sometimes a man will come up to one of them and whisper something in her unresponsive ear.
