Question for Georgia Now Is, What Next? : Upheaval: A showdown on the country’s direction could come when opposition forces gather Monday.

The crowd had waited patiently in the courtyard of the nine-story apartment building for the coffin to be brought out. In the afternoon sunshine, they knelt and raised their fists in defiant silence. Tears streamed down the faces of some people as the lidless, rough wooden coffin holding the body of the slain demonstrator was borne past.

A woman’s voice suddenly was heard in the ranks of the coarsely dressed mourners.

“The bastards, they are all bandits and Communists!” the woman said of those running Georgia. Former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, she said, “is manipulating them like a puppet master. And we, the simple folk, can do nothing.”

So who now holds power in Georgia--the people, by dint of a popular uprising, or a band of thugs whose authority in the end came from having more firepower than President Zviad Gamsakhurdia? It was a conflict with few clear-cut heroes, and with so much ambiguity that any answer to the logical question--what happens next?--must be heavily hedged.

For on the one side, there had stood a president who was democratically elected, but who had so severely, stupidly wielded power that in only eight months, he had alienated most of his former comrades in the political struggle. In fact, many Georgians are quite ready to believe the new leadership’s claim about Gamsakhurdia--that he is clinically insane.

The other party doesn’t look much better. It is a ragtag political opposition--now the master of Georgia--that is so outrageously implausible that it recalls the personages or plot of an Italian opera. A convicted bandit-turned-playwright and a second-rate sculptor with monarchist sympathies became the pivotal players in Gamsakhurdia’s downfall.

There were no pretenses about the method--a military attack on government headquarters--being democratic. At the end in Tbilisi, according to an informed opposition source, no more than 1,200 men under arms were deployed at any one time against Gamsakhurdia. His flight into neighboring Armenia meant that a tiny number of people with guns had plotted the political course of a land of 5.5 million.

The politicians who supported the anti-Gasmakhurdia campaign were sufficiently embarrassed by the dubious circumstances of their coming to power that they have thought it necessary to issue a document whose language recalls the Declaration of Independence. It asks the world to accept Georgia’s new leaders as bona fide democrats.

“Healthy forces opposing the government had to resort to drastic measures in order to find the way out of the deep social and political crisis, and to avoid imminent economic collapse and civil war,” the provisional government of Prime Minister Tengiz Sigua said.

Sigua’s claim that the opposition was moving against a “dictatorial regime” is buttressed by a recent report from the U.S.-based Helsinki Watch organization, which found “serious violations” of human rights standards in Gamsakhurdia’s Georgia, including the torture of political prisoners and the fettering of the freedoms of press and speech.

And yet the vast majority of the Georgian public kept well away from the struggle against its first president. Life in Tbilisi, a city of 1.2 million people, went on, more or less, during the siege of Parliament, with the subway running under the combat zone, people reporting to work and most shops open, even if shelves were bare.

Fighters in the “White Eagles” and “Knights of Georgia” say the time will come in Georgia when, in the view of civilian politicians, the Military Council that seized power from Gamsakhurdia will have outlived its usefulness.

The showdown could come as soon as Monday. At least 10 opposition parties are sufficiently disturbed by the temporary political structure put in place by Military Council members Dzhaba Ioseliani and Tengiz Kitovani that they want to alter it, even though it is supposed to remain in place only until a new Parliament can be elected in April.

The parties oppose vesting all executive authority in Sigua, and want to play a part in the government or in some sort of power sharing or checks-and-balances arrangement.

Sigua has said he will try to reverse the Military Council decree abolishing Parliament. Kitovani has said it may be reconvened as early as next week, in which case, he said, the Military Council will disband. Members of Parliament tried to muster a quorum Friday, but had to settle for an informal gathering of about 50 lawmakers at a Tbilisi movie theater.

Both radical and liberal opposition politicians profess to trust Kitovani and Ioseliani, whose spokesman vigorously denies that they have staged a coup or created a military regime. Other Georgians doubt that the two men will agree to relinquish power so meekly.

“They are fighting us with arms, and we have only our hearts to fight with,” said Rosa Gvasalia, a Tbilisi physician who said she would rather die than live in a Georgia without Gamsakhurdia. “Without arms, they would be nobody.”

Her pledge of faith in the deposed leader is not idle talk; she and hundreds of protesters took to Tbilisi’s streets in recent days, demonstrating for “our dear president.” That took courage, because the Military Council had shown itself ready to use firearms against protesters, five of whom were fatally shot.

The conviction is fierce among pro-Gamsakhurdia militants that Shevardnadze, the former Georgian Communist Party first secretary and former Soviet foreign minister, was the mastermind of the putsch. So crafty that he is commonly known here as the “white fox,” Shevardnadze is much more popular in the West, or even in Moscow, than in his homeland.

One of the key questions Georgia’s new leaders will have to answer is whether he should be allowed to play a part in Georgian society again. And if so--as what? Both Military Council leaders want to abolish the institution of the presidency, and even envisage in the long term the restoration of the Bagratid monarchs of yore.

And whither post-Gamsakhurdia Georgia? He had been the anti-Communist and nationalist locomotive tugging his people away from Moscow and Russia.

But now that the Soviet Union has ceased to exist and 11 other former Soviet republics have joined the Commonwealth of Independent States, many here expect the new Tbilisi government to join, as well. And with Gamsakhurdia in exile, the Commonwealth finally may come to resemble a tracing of the former Soviet Union, with the three Baltic states excepted.