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It wasn�t always like this. In fact, just 12 years ago, living in the Georgian capital of T�bilisi, Tamara, now 55, had it all. She reminisces about her former life as if she were reading from a Home & Garden checklist on The Keys To Happiness: a loving and successful husband, check; three beautiful and ambitious daughters, check; a good job as a contractor selling liquor and alcohol to local bars and restaurants, check; a spacious house with a large garage and a robust garden lush with apricot and persimmon trees and other various colorful plants and flowers, check. The only thing missing was the picket fence.
�I had a very good life,� she says wistfully, �I had all I could want.�
Then in December 1991 the Soviet Union fell and Georgia, formerly a country of tolerance and opportunity, plummeted into a downward spiral of revolutions and civil unrest. For the Martirosyan household, a familiy for whom Communism was both effective and lucrative, the beginning of the end came in May of 1991 when anti-Communist separatist Zviad Gamsakhurdia was elected president. Gamsakhurdia�s regime was marred by totalitarianism and chauvinism, and during his brief reign all prior notions of law and order evaporated under the constant threat of military coups and complete social upheaval.
Civil liberties went out the window as well. Gamsakhurdia had crazy ideas about cleansing Georgia of all non-Georgian nationalities. Tamara says that as successful Armenians her family was constantly harassed by the police and that her home was often ransacked for money and valuables. She tells of the time in the summer of 1994 that she woke at 3:00 a.m. to the sound of fists pounding like jackhammers on the front door, where three men with semi-automatic Uzi machine guns were waiting to raid her home. The men � while they wore no identifying clothing or displayed no other recognizable marks she is certain they were Georgian police � stormed her house, overturning bookshelves and mattresses, all the while yelling at her wailing daughters to keep quiet. Tamara swears that as long as she lives she will never forget the sight of one of the men raising his gun over her 17-year-old daughter Oksana�s head, and bringing it down with crushing force to the girl�s left temple. Tamara says the blow rendered Oksana deaf in her left ear and impaired her hearing in the other. The men then kidnapped her husband, Andre, and did not return him until she was able to collect $5,000 for his ransom.
After years of torment and persecution, what was left of Tamara�s dream world officially came crashing down on that tragic day in 1997. The raid was similar to the one a few years earlier. Men with guns entered her house, demanded money, yelled at her and her children, and again kidnapped her husband. Except this time she never saw him again. It is unclear as to whether she ever actually received confirmation of his death � she understandably created a mental block regarding the details of the event � but she says she knew immediately when they took him that it would be forever. She also knew that if she didn�t want herself or her children to suffer the same fate, her days in Georgia were over.
�He was very smart man, very good man, my husband,� she said, the tears welling up like morning dew on a lazy blade of grass. Tamara has lived in America for the last six years but her English is still broken and strained, and she is visibly frustrated that she cannot express in words her emotions to the non-Georgian speaker. But her staccato descriptions perhaps lend more power to her story. Her construction is short, simple and to the point. Hemingway with a Slavic dialect.
Tamara, her daughters and her mother fled first to Moscow where they established themselves as refugees, and then to the United States where her sister lived in Skokie. The transition was not easy, nor did the move cleanse her of all her demons. Her first few years in the U.S. she was a nervous wreck, afraid to go out and convinced that people were out to get her when she did. She says she would walk down the street and if she heard footsteps behind her she would just run and not look back, and would usually wind up out of breath and crying on an unfamiliar street.
Money was not as easy to come by, and she had to trade her airy house for a stuffy apartment. Tamara worked her first few years as an assistant at a retirement home. She says she felt comfortable around the residents, except that she became too sad when they would pass away. She says she cried for every one of them, and eventually she had to quit because the emotion was taking its toll.
From there she flitted around from job to odd job, until she had saved enough money to open the St. Rustabeli in 2001. That same year she bought a house of her own in neighboring Niles, where she lives with her daughters Oksana and Cristina, Cristina�s husband, and the couple�s two children.
Tamara still pines for her homeland and the idyllic life she had there, but she says that as long as she keeps herself surrounded by loved ones and occupied with work, she is able to remain relatively happy.
�When I no think about what happened, I�m happy,� she says. �When I think, I go crazy. I don�t like to be alone. When I�m alone, I think and think and think and I go crazy.
�Every day I cry. But every day I cry a little less.�
�At first she sad all the time,� says Cristina, who at 25 is old enough to have shared Tamara�s trauma and to appreciate her mother�s pain. �But now she better. Now I even see her smile.�
It�s a difficult concept for Americans, the notion that people from other countries � Communist countries no less � don�t spend their entire lives dreaming of the day they become U.S. citizens. But Tamara Martirosyan, the woman who has shed enough tears to fill the Black Sea, is wise enough to know that she is blessed to have attained true happiness once, and is twice blessed to have the opportunity to attain true happiness again.
