Waiting for the Electricity
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2014 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 2014 by Christina Nichol
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ISBN: 978-1-4683-1044-3
Contents
About Waiting for the Electricity
To Zviadi, Giorgi, Vanichka,
and both big and little Mananas
“It’s like Pandora’s Box. When Zeus opened it everything flew out. What was left? Just hope.”
—Georgian worker, on the completion of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline
A
TIDAL WAVE OF WOMEN, HUGE AND BUSTY, DRAPED IN LONG BLACK
dresses, lumbered heavily, trundling toward the sea.
Watch out! Get out of their way.
This horde of buxom women was hiking down the hillsides like an invasion. On the minibuses they cracked sunflower seeds between their teeth, staring straight ahead, invested only in sunlight, in the promise of the sea. On the beach all these women would sunbathe. Some stood, holding a
pirozhok
in one hand and a beer in the other, thigh-deep in the water, yelling to little Shako not to swim too far. Those from the villages still bathed in their dresses, which clung to the folds on their bodies.
The air was hot. The air was drunk. The air had fermented into summer, a serious and committed summer. It was August 19, the last day of the season, also known as The Day of Turning, and everyone was trying to blacken their bodies before the weather changed. Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, and even Russians hefted toward summer, deep and late. Like an overladen table, the weight of summer groaned.
In the beginning, when God was distributing the land to all the nations, we Georgians missed the meeting. The next morning we looked around and realized we were homeless. “Hey!” we shouted to God. “What about
our
land?”
“Where were you last night?” He asked. “You missed the meeting. I already gave away all the land.”
“We were drinking!” we cried out. “We were toasting Your name!”
God was so pleased with us that He gave us all the land He was saving for Himself. That’s why we are supposed to relax and enjoy the beauty of God’s earth.
The Armenians say, “We missed the meeting too, and all He gave us were the
rocks
He was saving for Himself.” That’s why their land is so strewn with stones, and also why they are now hogging up our beach.
We lived on God’s land for thousands of years, enjoying its beauty and its bounty, always carrying a hoe in one hand to sow and reap the wonders of His holy dirt. But, because of our neighbors, in the other hand we had to carry a gun.
One day God came to see how everyone was doing. He visited each country in the neighborhood. First, He went to Armenia and asked, “How are you doing? Are you enjoying everything? Sleeping well? No complaints?”
The Armenians said, “Everything’s well. We’re living very nicely on these rocks You gave us.”
God said, “I’m so pleased that you are living so well. This puts Me in such a good mood, in fact, that I’ll grant you any wish you make.”
“Well,” the Armenians said. “As we said, we’re content. But …”—and here they paused and started thinking very demonstratively, tapping their temples with their fingers—“if we
were
to think of something, our only wish would be that You destroy Azerbaijan. Those guys are always trying to steal our lake.”
So God went next door to Azerbaijan to see how well they were holding up. “Hello!” He called. The Azeris were busy boating and fishing on the Caspian Sea and eating up all the caviar. “How are you doing down there?”
“Normal. Praise God.”
“Well, what do you people wish for?”
“We’d really appreciate it if You decimated Armenia. They are bothersome neighbors, always trying to usurp one of our wheat fields.”
Then God came over to Georgia.
“Victory to You!
Galmarjos
!” we cried out when we saw Him, thrusting high our sheephorns filled with wine. “We kiss You.” We were already so pleased with His bountifulness that when He asked what we wished for we said we needed nothing more. We told Him, “We don’t ask for anything. Just grant Armenia and Azerbaijan
their
wishes.”
That’s how the story goes.
It is said that in order to keep stories alive in our hearts, we have to tell them back to each other because when you only listen to stories and don’t tell them back you become like the man who picks grapes but does not prune the vines, like the one who reaps the harvest but does not sow the seeds. You can become catatonic and easily led astray. In the olden days, when it was time for a boy to tell his own story but he didn’t know how to begin, if his mouth wouldn’t work properly, as if it were filled with rocks, the elders around the fire would say, “Start like this: ‘Once there was. Once there was. Once there was not.’” This is the beginning of every tale. It means that what was true once, and even a second time true, is not always true a third time.
It was once true in Georgia that we only have one life and so we shouldn’t waste it on material pursuits. It was also true that we lived in Paradise. But it took perseverance to remember every day that we lived in Paradise. Here we have dancing, love, wine, sun, ancient culture, and beauty. But no money. Therefore, we have become a little unfashionable because, these days, money is the hero of the world.
That’s why I decided to try to tell the story of my country back, in order to keep some hope alive in our hearts in the midst of a living condition that had become extremely difficult.
For this reason, mainly, I was composing the following letter in English:
August 19th, 2002
Dear Hillary Clinton:
My name is Slims Achmed Makashvili and i am from the little town called Batumi, on the Black Sea. it is the very small town. So to say, it is beautiful and sunny. It is the town for me
.
But then I worried: What if Hillary had never heard of Batumi? I didn’t want her to feel ignorant, even though she
should
have heard of us because Inga Charkhalashvili and Maia Lomineishvili—both famous Georgian women—had great success when they played at the International Chess Championship in Batumi.
I continued:
Batumi is the little town that not many people know about. i know because i looked up Batumi on the Internet and there was only one picture of the palm tree. The tourist wrote, “this town looks like chipped paint.” That is because we are under reconstruction. The local dictator is tearing down the old buildings and making many of the lawns in our town because no one can hide behind a lawn with a gun. In addition, the religious leaders are building 12th century spirituality huts. We are progressing civicly and religiously. We even have a bank. It is shiny and modern bank but has no money left in it. New certification requirement in 1998 decreased the number of banks from 200 to 43
.
i really think we need little help over here in the farmer land, especially me! Especially because Georgia is the Christian country and it’s difficult to have the Muslim name in a Christian country! If i had more Georgian name such as Davito, Dato, Temuri, or Toto, i could get a higher governmental position
.
But now I will explain to You the more important information about how Batumi is the natural port. Port lies at the end of the railroad from Baku and is used mainly for petroleum product. Our town boasts of eight berths which have total capacity of 100,000 tonnes of general cargo, 800,000 tonnes of bulk cargo and six million tonnes of oil and gas product. Facilities include portal cranes and loaders for moving containers onto railcars. As You can see, Batumi offers You and Your country great business opportunity!
But then I reconsidered what I had written. After all, petroleum products were killing off all the fish.
I leaned back in the cafe chair and looked out at the sea. The Philippine and Turkish freighters on the horizon, on their way to the port, exhaled in slow motion a chalk-like substance. Everyone else still headed to the beach.
The Day of Turning is when everything changes. It is the day that the sea begins to slowly cool. Even the weathermen were predicting plummets in temperature. On TV that morning,
News Nostalgia
had reminded us what happened a decade ago on the nineteenth of August, with old footage of Boris Yeltsin in Moscow yelling at a tank to back up from Moscow’s White House. That nineteenth of August was the day of the failed
coup d’état
in Russia, the day that our elders say in a voice thick with nostalgia and remonstrance, “Our country went from red to black.”
Literally black. We hadn’t had any regular electricity for eleven years. And we hadn’t had any at all for the past eight days. Sporadic all summer, it only sparked intermittently in the stairwell. The government said the hydroelectric dam didn’t have enough water to run the turbines, but when we saw the reservoirs at their highest capacity we remembered that—as with everything—what we witnessed was exactly opposite to what the government said.
I picked up the pen again and looked around the cafe to see if I recognized anybody I knew. I had to write surreptitiously because usually
no one writes in cafes, they only recite poetry aloud, or sip ice cream coffees and complain about their mothers-in-law.
Jungles of grape vines were twining around the trellises, and around the abandoned buildings on the boulevard—traffic jams of shrubbery, green waves smattering like surf on the sidewalk. Pedestrians were trying to wend their way through them on the way to the beach. Off a railing, I plucked the thick stem of a large leaf and used it to keep off the sun.
Once I wrote a letter to Pink Floyd but they never wrote back. My best friend Malkhazi said my letter probably ended up in a wastebasket in Warwick. I was hoping that my letter to Hillary would have better results. In Georgia women have all the power in the home. I assumed it was the same in America.
A few weeks ago at the Maritime Ministry of Law, my place of employment, I had received a fax. Actually, it wasn’t addressed to me, but to the chief deputy of maritime law. It was an application to enter a contest entitled “Small Business Proposals for Former Soviet Republics to Ensure Democracy and Security Throughout the Post 9/11 World,” sponsored by Hillary Clinton. The winner got to visit America and attend a business conference that would address “The Challenges and Opportunities for Project Management in the Developing World.” Usually only the local dictator, his family, and his closest friends ever received access to such opportunities. This one, though, had ended up in our fax machine.
This fax was like a falling star that I picked up and put in my pocket. And then it lit my pants on fire. To be precise, it was actually my pack of joke cigarettes that lit my pants on fire. But the little hole they burned created a sense of urgency reminding me of the fax, that the contest had a deadline, though January 7 still seemed a bit far off.
I had spent the last week in my village, located in the mountainous region northeast of the city, harvesting hazelnuts. To tell you the truth, I hate this kind of work. At least when we are working in the cornfields we can sing the old song:
Come all you and see my scythe
Look at it and see how beautiful it is
