Waiting for the Electricity (15 page)

“Why did he come here? Has he come here before?” Malkhazi whispered to Juliet over by the door.

“He says his TV only gets MTV,” she said.

“And you believe that? He only says that because he wants to see you.”

“He doesn’t have any friends here,” Juliet explained.

“Why are you telling me that?”

“To explain why I spend time with him.”

“Oh, okay. I was worried you were going to ask
me
to be his friend.”

“Sit down, Anthony,” Malkhazi commanded after Anthony had taken off his jacket. “I’ll make you some coffee.”

“Please, sit down,” Juliet said to Anthony. “Would you like some cream torte? My neighbor has been making this cake for the past eight years. It’s mostly cream.”

“Would you like some walnut liquor?” I asked him.

Malkhazi brought more coffee and Juliet brought some slices of cake that had too many layers to count. “This doesn’t have very much sugar,” she said. She watched closely as Anthony took a bite. Juliet
herself took a bite. And then I watched her slowly, slowly slide her fork off the table. When a fork is dropped it’s nothing to worry about—visitors will come over, man or woman, and we should be in a good mood about it, everything’s fine; besides, it’s a holiday whenever anybody visits. But the important thing really is to pick up the fork for your friend. But Anthony, not coming from an ancient civilization, really did remain aloof to the fork.

“When a fork is dropped a woman is arriving,” Malkhazi told Anthony picking up her fork. “She is coming but she is not going. She does not leave Georgia.”

“When a fork is dropped, it’s time to get a clean fork!” Anthony said.

“Oh,” Juliet said. “This cake is very impolite!”

“Beg your pardon?” asked Anthony.

“The taste,” Juliet said. “Of this cake. It is very impolite.”

“Oh no. It tastes fine,” said Anthony.

“I hate it when you do this!” Malkhazi said, brandishing the fork. It scintillated under the chandelier. “Every time you speak English you turn into some kind of British woman. Our culture is being invaded by these foreigners and you sit and quote English people!” Malkhazi said. “It’s time that I prepare my sword to fight the enemy!”

“Well,” Anthony said, standing up. “Thanks for the cake. I really just stopped by.”

“I thought you believed in the Georgian martial art of fighting without weapons,” Juliet said. “Besides, these days they don’t fight with swords, my dear. They push a button.”

“I don’t have that button,” Malkhazi said. “Watch what will happen. These foreigners will come, buy up all our property, and impose their ideals of political correctness on us.”

“Doesn’t he have other interests besides fighting?” Anthony asked me.

“Well, right now he is busy making a fire,” I said.

“Making a fire?”

“You know, expressing his unhappy emotions. In Georgian we say making a fire. But he’s not really as violent as you think,” I said.
“We fight because when our swords clash they sparkle and give us some light.”

“Besides fighting,” Malkhazi said, interrupting me, “we have love. But this love is dying out.”

“Actually, even when we kiss we are fighting,” I told Anthony.

“Oof!” Juliet was saying. “Sacred Georgian traditions.”

“You are not a true Georgian,” Malkhazi told Juliet and punched his thigh again. In Georgia, if you love someone, often you want to beat something.

“You see?” Juliet said, turning to Anthony. “How can you even have a conversation with him? I’d rather have a conversation with the cat. Come here little kitty. Malkhazi hates everyone you know.”

“I don’t hate
any
one. But I have said it before and I will say it again that I will kill anyone who takes our land or destroys our traditions.”

“Like I said,” Anthony said. “I really just stopped by …”

Juliet was speaking to Malkhazi in Georgian now. “This poor Englishman. He’s going to think we’re all people from the mountains with your kind of values.”

“No, he knows it’s just me.”

“You talk about sacred Georgian traditions that still exist in the village,” Juliet said, “but you refuse to work in the fields. I would have been happy living in the village. You’re just like this new generation, always having to do something, never happy with this life you were given. You’re ambitious or something!”

To be called ambitious in Georgian is almost as bad as being called a
davcliavdebuli
, a plumhead. I worried that I too had started becoming ambitious.

Anthony sat there and, to his credit, had a stoic look. The crystal chandelier tinkled delicately about his head. “The people are sort of heavy here,” he remarked to me.

“What are you talking about?” Malkhazi asked him.

“The traditions. They seem to hold people in chains.”

“What people are you talking to?” he asked him.

“I don’t have to talk to anyone. I observe it.”

“You are observing a different Georgian than I know,” he told him.

“Everyone is afraid of the devil here.”

Malkhazi and Juliet stared at him. “Only unmarried women are afraid of the devil,” Malkhazi said. He turned back to Juliet. “Look, Juliet. I want you to be free,” he said in Georgian. “I don’t know how this has happened but I only care about your happiness. Georgia used to be blessed but God has forgotten about us now. If you have to move across the ocean with a strange man, I will still love you from that distance. Plan your life as you like, will you? Real
kurdi
never marry anyway.” He threw his big, black jacket over his shoulders, said, “I’m off to meet a very influential man,” and then he disappeared.

Juliet settled into the couch with Anthony. In Georgia, if someone proves to you their love, then you don’t need it anymore.

11.

A
FEW DAYS AFTER OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS THE RESULTS WERE
tallied and we discovered that Old Shevy had won again. “I think we need to ask for Hillary’s help on this,” I told Malkhazi. “Or else Shevardnadze is going to be the president for our entire lifetime.”

“America is not a country to give advice about elections!” Malkhazi said. “We could have had ten elections in the same time it took for them to decide who won in Florida and still we could have elected the person for whom nobody voted.” Malkhazi rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. But then he stubbed it out in the ashtray because my mother was crossing King Parnavaz Street.

“Deyda!” we both yelled. She waved back.

I was driving with Malkhazi up to Poti to help him check the seals on an oil train that was going to be unloaded at the port.

“It doesn’t matter to
me
who becomes president,” I said. “I have no relations with either of the candidates. I was hoping that guy Saakashvili would run.”

“You mean the car bomber?” Malkhazi asked.

“No, the guy who studied anticorruption techniques in America. The human rights activist. He would have made a good president.”

Conspiratorial theories were running rampant through the
countryside. They said that due to the fact that Shevardnadze ignored the pleas of the villagers for most of the year, hoarding everything for himself, keeping the money in his own pocket, he had to make amends to the villagers on Election Day. Therefore, he sent his own smoothly outfitted representatives, laden with tomatoes, knocking on the doors of all the houses in every village. Ben Hur, my cousin, informed me of this. He said that Shevardnadze’s representatives came knocking on the door of his pinewood hut with the ballot box in hand, singing like roadside vendors, “Tomatoes for true Georgians.” Then they told Ben Hur, “Those who cannot go to the ballot box, the ballot box comes to them, to those who are true Georgians.” The representative and the one holding the ballot box, looking so polite and patriarchal, took a few breaths of mountain air, stomped their feet, and waited for my cousin to sign. They coughed into their pink fists, polished their boots with new snow, and headed to the neighbors. “Thank you for participating in the New Democracy,” they called back.

Shevardnadze had many city sycophants working for him that day, bringing the ballot boxes and bags of tomatoes to villages. 99.9 percent of the population voted for Shevardnadze. But I am dubious about this percentage.

We drove along the Black Sea passing dirty foam and swaying palms. Little lights had been artistically arranged around the telephone poles and tangled electric wires to resemble King David on a horse. They were blinking to celebrate the Christmas season, illuminating little bits of snow clinging to the tree branches. Maybe I had exaggerated the lack of electricity. Maybe we had it more often than not.

We were driving into the mountains, above Batumi, and passed Stalin’s old lemonarium. Sadly, no lemons grew there any longer. They used to be very famous lemons.

Malkhazi shoved the soundtrack of
Braveheart
, which some Romanians had given him at the port, into the tape player. I heard clashing and a low bass thumping. “It is the new sound for this century,” he said. “In this music you can feel Georgians preparing our swords for battle.”

“But in the movie
Braveheart
even the nobles betrayed people,” I said.

Staring pensively at the road Malkhazi said, “The Romanians gave me this tape because it’s the sound of independence. They understand how we had to fight for our independence. They understand Georgians. But I had been having a hard time understanding the Filipinos. For one thing, they don’t eat anything, they only drink tea all the time. But the biggest problem is that the Filipinos are so afraid of Georgia that they don’t even understand a joke. While they were loading the oil onto their ship I said to one of them as a joke, ‘Ah, I see you’re hiding fifty tons of oil in that tank to keep for yourself!’ If anyone looked into this tank he could
easily
see that it was dry and that I was only joking. But this sailor actually climbed down into the tank to check! When he saw that it was dry—of course it was dry, anyone could see that—he climbed out and started jumping up and down. When he jumped he was a little bit taller. He yelled in English, ‘You are liar. Mafioso! Mafioso!’”

“Oy!” I said and turned up the volume of
Braveheart
. “Let’s listen to this music. I don’t like to hear about our mafiosi reputation. It’s very offensive.”

“It’s a big problem. Maybe Georgia has a bad reputation because the world doesn’t know the story of Sapar. He stole Almaskhiti’s dappled horse out of love for Zia-Khanoum because higher than the law is the woman. It’s okay to steal if it’s out of love. But anyway, that’s not the end of the story,” Malkhazi said.

“This is a long story.”

“So last night in the cafe one of the Filipino sailors ran up to me and said, ‘Can you tell me where I can find a good woman?’ I told him we were not that kind of country. ‘Come on, man! Don’t you have a club?’ he asked. It’s a problem because the only place they can go for relaxation is the cafe in the port. He invited me for a beer. I declined his offer but invited
him
for a beer instead. And do you know what? No longer was he a scared Filipino sailor, afraid of everything. I realized that we are exactly the same.”

“How is that?” I asked.

“He told me that at home in his village in the Philippines where he lives, by the sea, he had to make an announcement, an
announcement
over the garbage truck loudspeakers, saying that he no longer would go to any more weddings. He told everyone in his neighborhood, ‘I am a modern workingman and a workingman only has a few days off. I don’t want to waste them at weddings.’”

“What about funerals?” I asked.

“Of course he must go to funerals,” Malkhazi said. “But I agreed with him that weddings are a problem. I have had to be the toastmaster of fourteen weddings already. I get so tired of all the eating and drinking and all the butter I have to eat beforehand. Nobody ever considers that maybe I’d like to lose a little weight. Wouldn’t that be funny, Slims, for me to make such an announcement that I wouldn’t attend any more weddings? It would be like a foreign comedy. ‘Comedy, comedy,’ people would say.”

It was evening when we finally got near Poti. “
Sheni deyda
!” Malkhazi suddenly swore. “They never pull me over when it’s just me. You must attract them or something.” A policeman, standing on the side of the road, was flagging us down. “Watch this,” Malkhazi said and pulled over. He didn’t even get out of the car. The policeman had to approach the window. Malkhazi rolled it down and said, “I am Inspector Makashvili.” And then he adjusted his rearview mirror.

“Ah, Inspector Makashvili,” replied the policeman. “Are you related to the Makashvili of Hashuri? No? How about the Makashvili of Hulo? No?” the policeman asked, seeking some connection.

The policeman checked Malkhazi’s documents again, and then catching sight of Malkhazi’s badge, glinting from a passing headlight, said, “Enjoy your journey.”

Since the Mingrelian region had less electricity than ours it was easy for some people to skulk along in the dark night tapping holes into the railcars without being seen. That night, after Malkhazi had checked the seals on the top of the train cars and we were walking back along the track we caught an old man stealing a bucketful of acetate. When he saw us the old man fell on his knees before Malkhazi.

“Get up,” Malkhazi said. “This time you have made a mistake. This is not gasoline but a chemical to make jet fuel. What are you going to do with it?”

“My wife needs it to clean the paint off her nails,” the man told him.

“Whatever,” Malkhazi said and let him keep his pilfered profit. My cousin was not hard-hearted.

Malkhazi kept insisting that he wasn’t corrupt, that as inspector, he only tested the quality of oil for the foreign shipping agents—any kind of oil: crude oil, jet fuel, gasoline. Sometimes even olive oil. “Don’t worry,” he told my mother a few evenings later, when he brought a jar of it home. “We don’t put the olive oil in the same containers we put the gasoline.” He also monitored the quantities of oil pumped in and out of the great storage tanks, located on the north side of Batumi, near the refinery and the oil pipeline museum. Thick hoses lying on the bottom of the sea connected the storage tanks to the foreign cargo ships. Foreign shipping companies would pay this ZGZ Oil Inspections, this “global corporation,” to ensure that the Georgian government was not pilfering more than fifty tons of oil per ship for customs taxes. Fifty tons was permissible, not more than that.