"La Jalousie" (ქართულად: შურიანობა) — არის ფრანგი მწერლის, ალენ რობ-გრიიეს (Alain Robbe-Grillet) ერთ-ერთი ყველაზე ცნობილი და გავლენიანი რომანი, გამოქვეყნებული 1957 წელს. ნაწარმოები მიჩნეულია ახალი რომანის (Nouveau Roman) ლიტერატურული მიმდინარეობის კლასიკურ ნიმუშად.
The novel’s plot is famously minimal. A narrator — likely a jealous husband named A… — obsessively watches his wife, Franck, and their neighbor, a plantation owner. The action takes place on a banana plantation in an unnamed tropical colony. Yet the true setting is not the plantation but the grid of the narrator’s perception. Every object is described with geometric precision: the veranda, the dining table, the centipede crushed on the wall, the row of glasses, the half-open shutter. Nothing is narrated subjectively. We never read “I felt jealous.” Instead, we read the same scenes repeated with microscopic variations: Franck and Franck talking, laughing, touching a glass, entering a car.
If we read La Jalousie Qartulad, the sterile colonial bungalow transforms into a sachinko (Georgian summer house) in Kakheti or a dukan in old Batumi. The whitewashed walls become the aged tuff stone of Tbilisi. The banana plantation outside becomes a vineyard or a pomegranate grove — but the humidity remains, and the buzzing flies remain. The true transformation is cultural: the French suspicion becomes a Georgian shishvili (shame-based suspicion), where jealousy is not a dramatic explosion (as in Othello or in a Georgian sadghegaro lament) but a slow, internal rot hidden behind elaborate hospitality.
The Supra had lasted eleven hours. Plates stained with the ghosts of khinkali and satsivi layered the long oak table. Horns of wine, empty now, lay on their sides like slain soldiers. The men had sung chakrulo until their voices cracked, and the toasts—to God, to country, to mothers, to the fallen, to the living—had woven a net of ritual around the night.
Nino watched from the kitchen doorway. She was thirty-two, with a widow’s peak and hands stained yellow from handling turmeric for the chicken tabaka. Her husband, Soso, sat at the head of the table. He was laughing at something Zura said—a loud, open-mouthed laugh that showed the gold crown on his molar. He touched Zura’s wrist as he laughed.
Nino did not blink.
She had seen them touch before. Not with intent, not yet. But a Georgian man does not touch another man’s wrist without meaning something. A debt. A threat. A secret. And Soso had no secrets from her—or so he believed.
The truth was that Nino collected secrets the way others collected wine horns. She knew that Zura had sold a fake icon to the church in Mtskheta. She knew that Soso had lost three thousand lari on a rigged backgammon game last winter. And she knew, with the precise, cold geometry of a woman raised in the shadow of the Caucasus, that the jealousy she felt was not the hot, screaming kind. La Jalousie Qartulad
It was Qartulad.
The Georgian manner.
Georgian jealousy is not a spasm. It is a long, dry, mountainous patience. It is the knowledge that hospitality is sacred and revenge is a meal best served at the same table, from the same horn, with the same smile. It is the art of letting the vine grow before you burn it.
The next morning, Nino woke before dawn. Soso snored beside her, his chest rising in the heavy rhythm of drunk sleep. She slipped out of bed, walked barefoot to the kitchen, and began to bake shotis puri—the traditional bread pressed into the clay tone oven. The dough she kneaded with rage made elegant. Each fold a sentence. Each punch a verdict.
By the time Soso stumbled out at noon, the house was immaculate. The table was set for a new day. And on his pillow, she had placed a single vine leaf, dried and cracked.
He did not know what it meant. But he turned pale.
Because every Georgian knows: a dry vine leaf is the old way. The way of the blood avenger. The way of a woman who has decided to wait. The next morning, Nino woke before dawn
Three weeks passed. Zura came to dinner again. This time, Nino served kharcho—the beef and walnut soup so thick with spice it burned the throat. As she ladled it into Zura’s bowl, she whispered in his ear in Georgian: "Sheni deda aris amperiodan chemi ezosta." (“Your mother is watching from my garden.”)
He choked on a walnut.
Soso looked up. "What did you say to him?"
Nino smiled. "I asked if he wanted more coriander."
That night, she burned a small piece of paper in the garden. On it, she had written Zura’s full name, his mother’s name, and the date of the wrist-touch. The fire gave no heat, only a blue edge at the bottom of the flame.
Her grandmother had taught her this. You don’t kill the body, her grandmother said, you kill the sleep. You make the other man dream of falling every night until he leaves the country.
One month later, Zura moved to Turkey. He told no one why. He sold his vineyard for half its worth. He stopped answering Soso’s calls. Three weeks passed
Soso wept one evening—fat, baffled tears—and said to Nino, "My best friend. Gone. I don’t understand."
Nino stroked his hair. "Men never understand," she said softly. "That is why women win."
She kissed his forehead. She had never loved him more than in that moment—because jealousy, Qartulad, does not destroy love. It perfects it. It sharpens it into a blade that cuts away the intruder and leaves the husband, bewildered and grateful, still standing in the kitchen.
And above the stove, hung by a red thread, a dried vine leaf turned slowly in the warm air.
Not a warning. A signature.
"Qartulad" seems to be a term that might not have a widely recognized definition in English or French. It's possible that it's a word from another language, perhaps Georgian (ხედვა), where "qartulad" (ქართულად) means "in Georgian" or refers to something related to Georgia (the country).