Waiting for the Electricity (14 page)

Juliet shook her head. “The tall one wouldn’t bend, the short one wouldn’t stretch, and the kiss was lost.”

10.

I
T WAS THE MIDDLE OF
N
OVEMBER AND TUFTS OF EARLY, GREASY SNOW
dulled the life on the street. I had just attended a conference at the university sponsored by a local NGO. I went because Anthony had volunteered to give a talk about how to how to acquire scholarships to study abroad. But I didn’t learn much because as he was expounding on the importance of web access for students at the university, some local vigilantes joined in. They sat in the back and refused to speak English, which they referred to as “the language of barbarians,” and would only speak the “language of Don Quixote.” Overpowered by Spanish, Anthony ended the session early and said, “Well, maybe next time we can accomplish more.”

I had recognized the Spanish-speaking contingency as acquaintances of Malkhazi’s and asked them if they had seen him recently but they hadn’t. Malkhazi had disappeared for two weeks and a rumor was spreading that he had joined a Robin Hood gang in the countryside, the ones holding up trains protesting the upcoming election of President Shevardnadze. But Malkhazi didn’t care about politics. Anyway, he had disappeared before, quoting, when he returned, a Mexican saying he had heard on a documentary, “Man must go to the mountains because it is important.” Every time Malkhazi disappeared I would worry that he had gone to avenge his father, and that he had
gone to the Turkish border, eight kilometers away, to shoot a Turkish border guard. But he also knew the Turks didn’t understand about our nine-generation vendettas and to shoot at them would be like a little man provoking the power of Godzilla.

I only had a little over a month left to complete the application for Hillary Clinton’s competition. I tried to think of something especially unique to write, something that would distinguish me from the rest and show her that my hand was raised higher than every other post-Soviet person also vying for this opportunity. I walked home after work avoiding the patches of dark ice in the road. Evening was pending and the overcast sky made it difficult to see more than a few meters in front of me. The only sounds were the clops of a stray donkey and a farmer yelling at it, also throwing his hat at it.

When I got home the electricity was still out. My mother had gone with Zuka to the hydroelectric dam for a holiday. Juliet was reading by candlelight.

“Juliet,” Malkhazi called from the street. “Come here! Juliet,” he called again more loudly. “We have had a victory!”

“I’m sure he hasn’t taken part in a military skirmish,” Juliet said, as if she wished that he had. “He has probably just stolen some gasoline out of a neighbor’s car.”

I leaned out the window and looked down at him; his torso was hanging out of his car. He sounded like a little boy who says, “Mama, mama, give me some honey.”

“Slims, tell Juliet to come. You too! Let’s go for a drive.”

“You come here!” Juliet yelled back.

Malkhazi, apparently not wanting to obey the commands of a woman, changed his tactic. “Stay there,” he demanded, pointing his finger at her. “Don’t go out!”

When Malkhazi got to the door he was breathing heavily, carrying a crystal chandelier. “Why haven’t you turned on the light?” he asked. “They’ve turned on the lights because of the elections. Look out the window.”

I looked out the window and saw that everyone else’s lights were on.

“Here, I brought you this,” he said and set the chandelier on the table. “It’s from Czechoslovakia. May the light always shine on your head. Oh, look at your hands,” Malkhazi said, feeling Juliet’s fingers. “So cold. You must allow me to fill up your water buckets for you. Oh, I almost forgot!” he said and stamped back down the stairs.

“How could he fill up the water buckets?” Juliet said. “He’s never here.”

“Here, Slims, I found us some fuel,” he said when he returned. He set down a blue metal canister labeled USA.

And out of a basket in his other hand he took a bouquet of plastic flowers and a pink hand towel. “I traded some wine with a British sailor for them,” he said.

“They use plastic flowers on their ships?” I asked.

“Sit down,” he ordered us both. “I’ll make some coffee.”

I was surprised he even knew how to make coffee. “I don’t drink coffee,” he usually said, as if coffee were only a woman’s drink. I always thought he would rather starve or eat a raw fish head than cook anything. But there he was, standing over the stove as if he had been making coffee his whole life, as if he were some kind of coffee preparing master, like some of the women of our town who have their own secrets of preparing it and are more popular than famous poets.

He opened the can of sugar and scooped some into the pot.

“Oh, not so much sugar,” Juliet said. “I wish to live a long time.”

“You’ve stopped eating sugar?” Malkhazi asked.

Juliet shrugged.

“You don’t like foam right?” he asked her. He poured the coffee into three black cups with golden dragon’s tails, but having miscalculated the measurements, he gave me all the foam.

I swirled my cup around trying to find some coffee. Couldn’t find any. Malkhazi gave me his cup and said, “I don’t drink coffee anyway.”

“Now, sit down,” Malkhazi said. “Sasha and I have a plan.”

“Who’s Sasha?” I asked.

“An Armenian. He works at the port.”

“What kind of plan?” Juliet asked him. “Something illegal?”

“Would you object so much?”

“Would that make a difference?”

“The man is not a wall,” he said. “He is moveable.”

“But at least the wall supports the roof,” I added.

“Juliet, Slims, my dears,” Malkhazi was now saying. “Tell me. What is illegal? Besides, if there are a hundred pieces of gold and no one is counting them because they are already rich, and I take one little gold piece, then they are happy and we are happy. It’s no problem.”

“Why do you have to do illegal activities?” Juliet said.

“It’s not an illegal activity! Okay, I’ll tell you. I’m an inspector.”

“Like in Sherlock Holmes?” I asked.

“No. At the port. On the ships. Gocha got me a job there, working for his family. You can call me Inspector Number Twelve. Twelve for the twelfth century,” he said, taking out a metal badge from the pocket of his jean jacket and pointing at the number twelve.

“That’s where you’ve been? I thought you had gone to the mountains to sell cucumbers,” Juliet said.

“It looks like you haven’t shaved the whole time,” I said.

“The sea is filled with ships. I don’t have time.”

“Oh, it’s that kind of job,” I said. “Now you are going to be hustling all the time and won’t have time for anything else. You don’t have to have this job, you know. We can get by without it.”

“Sure, by selling Zuka’s icons and with Juliet’s English students and you, with whatever you do, and your salary that only comes sometimes.”

“But what kind of life is there at an oil terminal? Besides, oil is killing all the fish.”

“Write to Hillary about it. You could start it like this: Once there was a man from Georgia who finally got a job. We Georgians don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. We don’t do
anything
and still we are Georgians. This man …”

“Inspector Number Twelve,” I repeated to myself and stared out the window, through the palm trees, at the steady surf of the sea.
Malkhazi was now working for Gocha, the banker. Now I really had to get out of this town.

“I went to the interview in Baku,” Malkhazi was saying. “I said I knew Excel or Nexel, whatever they call it, and all the other computer programs and that I know how to speak English. But when I came back to Batumi, the first thing I told Gocha’s uncle was, ‘I don’t like to pretend. I will tell you now I don’t know these computer programs of Excel and Nexel.’ But I told him that I can learn them. And I told him that my English is not very good. Also that I don’t believe in the Internet. We have lived without it for ten thousand years so why do we need it now? Also, computers bombard us with radioactivity. And they ruin women’s eyes. But Gocha’s uncle knows I’m from the mountains, related to a Svan, and that Svani families have nine-generation vendettas. So he told me, ‘These programs are not difficult to learn.’”

“What do you
inspect
?” I asked.

“Oil and gas. We also have another department, the Agricultural and Minerals Inspection Division, but I don’t know anything about minerals.”

“You need to drink a lot of milk then,” I said. “Because of the fumes.”

“Slims, don’t you understand?” he asked. “We don’t
only
inspect oil and gas. Last week I inspected my first ship. It arrived from Poland filled with bananas. The workers in the port confiscated twenty boxes worth. We said we had to test them. So we ate them. We took pictures and faxed the pictures to the Polish shipping agent. We thought he would be angry because we had stolen so many boxes of bananas, but instead he wrote back a telegram that said, ‘HA HA HA.’ I inspect everything like a true Georgian,” he laughed. “Even tarragon fizzy water! And last night I delivered eight boxes of bananas to the village! I told them I would bring more food so they don’t have to take it from those Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

“Did they even know what a banana was?” Juliet asked.

“No! They tried to boil them like potatoes.”

“Forget about the banana! What about how oil is causing global warming?” I said.

“Foo. If that were really true do you think I would work for such a company? I would sell my gold ring to support us. No, I can’t. It belonged to my father. But I would sell our stove. No, I am not only working for the money. I just want to work. Otherwise I can’t sleep at night.” He picked up a tomato from a glass bowl on the table and turned to Juliet, “Do you really like the color red? Is it because Anthony wears red shoes?”

Juliet swirled around the grounds in the bottom of the cup, turned it over onto the saucer, and tossed back her head. “How am I going to learn to be an independent woman if I’m always being interrogated by you?” she asked Malkhazi.

“Why are you trying to be independent? What is the meaning? You want to live alone in the mountains like Vaja Pshavela’s wife? Even she was not happy sitting all day under the beech tree with only the little tender green grasses.”

“Well I have my own announcement to make,” she said. “I’ve decided that I don’t wish to marry a Georgian anymore,” she said. “I would rather marry a foreigner. They are much more polite.”

“Foo,” Malkhazi said. “You mean someone like Anthony?” He spat on his boot and then decided to polish it.

Juliet turned the cup in her saucer right side up and looked into it.

“Not only women can read coffee grounds,” Malkhazi said while taking her cup from her. “Ah!” he said peering into the cup, “I see darkness, loneliness. But then there is light. And here, a man, on a horse, or maybe that is you, running off to marry. Perhaps he has kidnapped you in order to save money on a costly wedding, and then you will live a beautiful life and everything will be good and there will be nothing bad.”

Juliet opened the window and pulled in the platter she had set on the ledge to cool. It contained the pig’s head Irakli had brought earlier. “Have some?” she asked Malkhazi.

He was sitting on the edge of his seat as if ready to run off somewhere.

Juliet excavated some meat off the skull with a fork but some
of it was hard to get at so she started using her fingers. “Slims?” she offered. I reached in too. The meat was fatty. Juliet got up to get a napkin and the fork fell on the floor.

“
Opa
!” she said and leaned down to pick it up

“You see?” Malkhazi said. “You are forgetting what a Georgian woman is!”

“Because I dropped a fork?”

“No, because you must allow the man to pick up your fork!”

I regarded him and then started to laugh. Sometimes he really was a rustic.

“And a man from, for example, England, wouldn’t pick up a woman’s fork?” Juliet asked.

“Try it!” Malkhazi said. “Next time you are eating with Anthony drop your fork.”

“When would I eat with him? I hardly know him.” Juliet poured herself some water from the pitcher.

“You did it again!” Malkhazi said and punched his thigh.

“What!” Juliet said.

“You poured your own water. You should have asked me to.”

“I’m not going to ask you to pour my glass of water.”

“Don’t ask. Just make a move with your glass so I know you are thirsty.”

Malkhazi watched her from across the table with a kind of ardent adoration.

“Why do you always treat me this way?” Juliet asked.

“Why? What do you mean why? Do you think I want anything from you? My role is to serve you.”

“Nothing else?”

“I think you know what I want,” he said. To me, at that moment, it seemed his eyes were full of lust.

I picked up my glass, intending to hit him on the head with it.

Malkhazi turned to me, annoyed. “I think she knows that I want her to join me on a ship, with all of my best friends and sail on the sea. I don’t know what
you
are thinking,” he said. “Listen to me, Juliet. I will tell you a secret that Slims doesn’t know. Now look. You
have been reading so many English novels maybe you have forgotten this, but the true Georgian man sometimes helps with the housework. In the evening, just look outside and you can see the husbands hanging the laundry.”

I looked outside the window. So did Juliet.

“You can’t
see
them. Otherwise, the next day, the whole town would be gossiping, saying, ‘Oh, did you see Irakli washing the carpets?’”

There was a little knock on the door. “Maybe that’s Irakli now,” Malkhazi said, walking to the door.

“Don’t open the door!” Juliet cried out. “It’s the man coming to collect the money for the electricity!”

“Or possibly. Is that Anthony?” Malkhazi asked. “No one knocks except him.”

And it was. The little home movie this was turning into could now be entitled
Imbroglio: Complicated Situation
.