Waiting for the Electricity (12 page)

We are a vineyard country

As long as you live

we live also
.

“Do you remember when I sang that song at the chess championship?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It was beautiful.”

“Well the government doesn’t have any more money to sponsor another concert. So what can I do now? Go to Moscow? They are so terrible to Georgians there. Also, I’ve heard that in Moscow these days you must always be on time. How grotesque!”

In her kitchen, Tamriko fanned her face dry and lit a cigarette—only, it wasn’t a cigarette, but a garlic stem.

“To keep away toothaches,” she said, blowing garlic smoke out the window. She clipped the ash off with some scissors. “Drink this,” she said and handed me a glass of fermented mushroom tea. “Herbalife recommends it.”

All day long, in order to counter the baleful effects of radiation, controversially regarded to bring summertime hallucinations, Tamriko and her mother, Guliko, the kindergarten director, sipped these shots of fermenting mushroom tea at room temperature. The jars of mushrooms overcrowded her kitchen counters like an American PTA meeting. The mushrooms, even though they were fermenting, continued
to reproduce. She thought all the neighbors coveted the biggest one. She called it Our Mother.

“Did I tell you that Shalva came yesterday to tow our car?” she said. “I yelled at him, ‘You have no right to tow that car.’ I even ran outside and threatened him until he ran away. Imagine! The policeman running away with me running after him.” She went to the sink and began washing cucumbers with the water from one of the buckets. “Sometimes I think … what now?” Her attention was distracted by something out the window.

I looked outside and saw a truck pulling a house down the street with a seatbelt. A pedestrian, tired of the slow wait, stepped over the strap.

“They always love to tow something,” she said as she sliced the cucumbers.

As I watched her with the cucumbers I couldn’t help admiring her hips. I tried to distract myself by remembering what was common between us, to try to share one consciousness with her like I do with my friends when we stay up all night playing Monopoly until everyone owns everything and we turn it into a giant Monopoly commune. But my eyes roamed back to her hips. As we say in Georgia, “Whoever
I
love is the most beautiful.” But she was no longer mine. “Tamriko,” I said, “I should leave.”

“But you must try these cucumbers,” she said. “I brought them from a village near Borjomi. Oh, close the window. It’s starting to rain again.” She set down the knife and surveyed me. “Why do you always wear black? And you ought to wear a different hat, you know. Your hat reminds me of a revolutionary. Revolutionaries do not make very good mates.”

“Well, what kind of man does make a good mate?” I asked.

“It’s better to have one of those Robin Hood complexes,” she said. “It’s very romantic. Though it’s something quite different from that movie with Errol Flynn. You Georgian men are so emotional. Imagine if you took all that energy and used it for something useful, like stealing something.” Suddenly the light came on. “Oh! You see? What I’m saying is true! Can you plug in the refrigerator?”

“Okay,” I said, reaching down to plug it in. “Can I read you something I’ve written in English? I’m asking Hillary Clinton for some help for us.

After I read to her everything I had written, she stood up, walked to the stove, leaned over it, and tasted something in the pot. “Strange,” she said. “I feel ill.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, fanning herself with her hand. “I feel a little faint. It’s the changing of the seasons.”

“I hope it’s not anything I said.”

“Well no,” she said. “Actually, yes. It is. Slims, it’s depressing what you write about Georgia.” She slumped down into a chair. “But perhaps it’s important to face the truth. We must.”

I sat uncomfortably. The last thing I wanted to do was depress people. “But is this the truth? That is my question,” I said.

“All I know is that I’m Georgian. That gives me some strength when I wake up worried in the middle of the night. My mother only receives fifteen lari a month for a pension. She feels guilty that she doesn’t pay for our food. I tell her that fifteen lari buys all our bread but still she sulks on her couch. And she fell yesterday and had to go to the hospital. Oh, don’t listen to me. These kinds of complaints are something for confession. Usually I try to think of others. But sometimes I wonder, who are my true friends? But who am I to complain? The neighbor’s son has a heart disease and the operation will cost a thousand dollars. Maybe you
should
go there. I have heard that in America they are very charitable. They have donation societies and people put money in a box at the airport.” She handed me the plate of cucumber slices. “Anyway, don’t worry. Try these. Did you hear that this new bishop had a dream? He says that when Jesus returns, the first place He is coming back to is Georgia, up in the mountains near Kazbegi. He marked the spot with a Georgian flag. When that happens, people will start marrying again.”

“We have to wait until Jesus comes back to start marrying again?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“I should go,” I said. But the cucumbers
were
so fresh. I reached for a cucumber and knocked the knife onto the floor.

“
Opa
!” Tamriko said. “If a knife is dropped a man is coming, if it’s a fork … no. No. A spoon. Oh, I don’t know. If it’s a knife though, a man is coming.”

“Maybe it’s Jesus,” I said, picking up the knife and handing it back to her.

8.

T
HE NEXT TIME THE ELECTRICITY WENT OUT THE ONLY PERSON WHO
wasn’t complaining was Malkhazi. He said, “Good thing we have such a powerful car battery. It provides good enough light to shave by.” Shalva had decided to give Malkhazi his car after all. “He just got back from Frankfurt where he bought a new car,” Malkhazi explained. “He drove it through Austria, Italy, and Turkey. He avoided Bulgaria because he got beaten up there once before. You know, Slims, one car can usually feed a family of four for a year. But Shalva is very resourceful. He even knows how to make fruit roll up on his cutting board. When I was visiting him he kept having to go out to the balcony to check on the chicken sausages that he was smoking. He even has a business certificate framed on his wall.”

Malkhazi now spent all of his time in the courtyard under the fig tree fixing up his new car and listening interminably on the tape player to
alternateev
music that some foreign sailors had given him at the port: Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Tulku. Practically overnight, Malkhazi, the Disco King, had become DJ Ethno-musicologist.

I spent time a lot of time in the car too. It was like our own spiritual hut. “I don’t know what else to write to Hillary,” I admitted to Malkhazi one evening, when he had just finished painting it. “I
really think I would be a good candidate to teach about peace and security in our world. I need to go there and give Georgia a better reputation. Do you know all our foreign shipping clients don’t feel secure here?”

“How can they not feel secure here? We are a friendly people.”

“I did an online survey at work. I asked them to rate their feelings of security in Georgia between one and ten. They rated it, on average, negative five.”

“Foo. If you really want Hillary to invite you to America you should change your name. It’s a Muslim name. Hillary is going to think you’re a terrorist.”

“Why don’t you change
your
name?” I asked him. “Your name means little, nimble man. But you’re big and slow.”

“Read to me what you have written to her so far,” Malkhazi said. “Maybe I can give you some advice.”

He listened while I read and was silent when I finished. Finally, he said, “You didn’t tell her about David the Builder. Let’s make a toast to David the Builder.”

“Be quiet,” Guliko, the kindergarten director, called from her balcony above.

“I’m sick of your Georgian heroes!”

I rolled up my window. “I could never marry Tamriko because then Guliko would be my mother-in-law!”

“Hmm,” Malkhazi said as if he were really weighing the pros and cons of that possibility. “Well, since she’s not your mother-in-law yet, and is unlikely to become your mother-in-law unless you do something about it, you should write about our twelfth-century battles. Tell Hillary that fifty percent of our Georgian traditions consist of explaining how it is possible for men and women to have a relationship, and fifty percent are about our battles.”

So I wrote to Hillary about David the Builder, how he was a great Georgian dictator in the twelfth century; how under David the Builder, five thousand Georgians fought against fifty thousand Persians; how he called Georgians together in the name of Christ. It was a great inspiration, but even though he built a lot, he thought he
didn’t build enough, so because of this, he wanted people to trample on his grave in Gelati. “But Malkhazi,” I said. “In the seventeenth century, when Tbilisi was being pillaged for the fortieth time, our people lying in the carnage, this person’s limb going in one direction, that person’s head in another, who was thinking about David the Builder? Besides, this is a modern business letter,” I said.

“What is this
modern
?” Malkhazi said. “The communists destroyed our traditions. The true Georgian can only be found in the twelfth century, in our Golden Age.”

“But twelfth-century characters were always weeping in the forest,” I said. “I’m tired of people weeping for Georgia. Even the icons in the churches are allegedly weeping for Georgia.”

“That’s because they always weep before an invasion. That is why I must prepare my sword to fight the enemy.” He rolled down the window and shouted up to the balcony. “Juliet, let’s go get a cutlet.” But Juliet didn’t have any time for us. The English teachers were having a scientific competition on the verb “to be.”

We hadn’t had any electricity for nine days and I was a little worried about Anthony. I felt sorry for him, imagining him hauling buckets of water up the stairs by himself, without any company. I told Malkhazi, “We should give that British guy some help.”

He started the car and we headed to the Paradise Hotel, where Anthony was staying.

But when we got onto King Parnavaz Street, Malkhazi shouted, “Your mother!” A policeman was waving us over with his glowing red stick. Malkhazi drove to the side of the road. He grabbed his documents from under his sun visor, stepped heavily out of the car, and tried to explain to glowing red stick man that he was a good friend of Shalva’s, that this was Shalva’s former car, and that is why, even though his turn signal was out of order, he shouldn’t be written a ticket. Of course the policeman agreed with Malkhazi that he shouldn’t write a ticket because who would benefit from that—certainly not the policeman who hadn’t been paid his salary in ten months. A crowd of other policemen skulked around him.

Malkhazi watched the policeman shift his weight from one foot
to the other while standing in the middle of the road, examining Malkhazi’s documents by the flame of a cigarette lighter.

Malkhazi walked to my side of the car and reached his hand in the glove compartment. “Here, do you want this document too?” Malkhazi offered the cop, suddenly cheerful. He gave the policeman a page of English grammar. “How about this one?” He handed him a university exam question written on a 3x5 sheet of paper. “And this one?” He gave him his library card. And then, even though Malkhazi was technically too young for such certification, he proffered a pass called
Victims of Soviet Repression
that permitted him free entrance into any museum.

Another policeman, perhaps tired of the hesitancy of the first, and ready to find a more lucrative client, tiptoed behind the one trying to sort through all of Malkhazi’s documents and said to him, “Why do you insist on
all
of his documents when you don’t even know how to read?” Then, with a wink, he waved Malkhazi on.

Malkhazi laughed hilariously as we drove down the road. “Did you hear him?” he cried.

I shook my head. “In America, you could never get away with that.”

“Are you telling me that if a police stopped me in America and I said, ‘I am George Bush’s relative,’ they wouldn’t let me go?”

“According to my law book, no.”

He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Why do you want to learn about such a system?”

The Paradise Hotel was in the district called “I’m Kind” (it’s kinder than it looks) and was an old relic from the times of the Soviet Union. We parked in the parking lot and walked toward the building. “How many hours of water do you think he has a day?” Malkhazi asked.

“Maybe three?” I said, looking for the entrance.

“That’s good enough,” he said and shrugged.

“At least the courtyard always has water,” I said, pointing to a spigot.

We climbed the stairs, avoiding the rebar.

At his door we called out to him. While we waited, Malkhazi bent some wires back in the wall that were hanging above the doorway.

When Anthony opened the door he was standing in the dark.

“Give him some matches,” Malkhazi said to me.

I lit my lighter. “What are you doing in the dark?” I asked.

“I don’t mind it, really,” he said. “I think better.”

He hadn’t bothered to brush his hair. It stuck up like a field of rough straw.

“Are you becoming a Hamlet?” I asked.

Malkhazi was examining the telephone that sat on a little table by the door.

“Doesn’t your telephone work?” I asked Anthony. “I’ve tried to call you.”

By the light of flaming newspapers we examined his living environment. Malkhazi looked around the kitchen. “If he wants hot water, it looks like he has to use this heating prong,” Malkhazi reported to me. He opened a cabinet. It was empty. “If he needs anything, tell him to make a list.”

Malkhazi opened the refrigerator. “Ah! Ketchup!” he said. “Tell him if he wants to eat anything, my friend Vakhtang’s wife lives downstairs. Manana. He can just knock on her window.”