Waiting for the Electricity (16 page)

Malkhazi would first determine the amount of oil in the storage tanks on the land to ensure that the amount that the head families of Batumi discharged was the same amount that they
claimed
to have discharged, rounding off to the nearest ton. Then Malkhazi would measure the volume of oil on the ship to make it look like the oil discharged from the port’s storage tanks was the same amount that was in the ship, and that the fork in the hose lying at the bottom of the sea hadn’t stolen some of it. The fact that they had stolen quite a bit of it wasn’t a contradiction to Malkhazi. He justified it by insisting that the foreign ships belonged to richer countries and needed it less. Then he would print out these documents of quantity and quality, ensuring the level of sweetness and lightness
of the crude oil: seventy-two copies of the same document for the captain (Malkhazi called him “the master”) to sign. Printing out seventy-two documents doesn’t sound very daunting but it took a long time when the electricity kept going out and when the outdated computer, donated by a nongovernmental organization, didn’t work very efficiently, and Malkhazi had to ask Sasha, the Armenian guard at the port, to keep pressing the print button.

Malkhazi used to love ships—had taken to calling them
vessels
—but now that the Black Sea had started filling with them, he was beginning to tire of them. He would come home and fall asleep immediately. When Malkhazi and I got home one evening, before he fell asleep, I told him that maybe he should break away from his job, become a true Georgian hero, and fight corruption. “Besides,” I said. “I need a plot. In the West, the characters in their novels always go through some sort of positive change.”

“Don’t you know the story about the man who is playing his
chonguri
?” Malkhazi asked. “All day long he only plays one note. His wife says, ‘Husband, why do you only play one note while everyone else plays different ones?’ He says, ‘They are playing different notes because they are searching for the one I’ve already found.’ That is like Georgia. In Georgia, we don’t need to change because we are perfect as we are. God gave us His land … oh, I’m too tired right now to finish that story.”

“You need to get more sleep then,” I said. “I’m tired of making excuses to other people about why you always miss their birthday parties.”

“But how can I avoid it? I must always take care of the foreign sailors. The guest comes from God. It is my duty as a Georgian.”

The only time the plot of our life advances forward is on a holiday, when we turn our life upside down, and we can be our opposite selves, living in a carnival or a liminal world. On Christmas Eve was the festival parade, where the bishop and his groupies walked down the streets, singing church songs, holding icons and the church banner high in the air. It read, “Stop regarding the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destination.” They
looked like true magicians bringing the good news. Anyone who wants to can join in the parade and see the candles casting a yellow light in the blue windows of every house. When Malkhazi and I were younger we never missed the procession in the village, but even on Christmas Eve that year, Malkhazi was so busy working on the ships that he didn’t come home.

On TV the government was broadcasting
Lazarus
, the old Georgian classic. It is a story of ancient love. My mother and I watched it together but at the end I felt depressed because I wondered if that kind of love still exists. So my mother brought out the bottle. In Georgian, porridge is called
papa
and papa is called
mama
and mama is called
deyda
so we ate
papa
while Deyda poured us a martini. Then she set before me a bowl of melted ice cream. “Holiday food,” she said. I wondered if it would feel more like a holiday if I had a wife. I wondered if Tamriko was at church. So I walked over to the church, through the crowds of people. At first I looked for her but then I tried to concentrate, instead, on the icon of the Mother Mary, to feel Her a little. I know She is painted a little differently than She actually looked in real life, but this is art—our only means to find Her is through exaggeration. She tried to show Herself to me through the paint, I think, because while I was standing there, staring at the chipped paint of Jesus, I saw Her wink at me, at me wearing my Sherlock Holmes hat, and my tears started to flow out. When you look through these kinds of eyes you see the best truth because the world welds together, and all separateness is blurred. This made me believe that maybe I had some love left, arching out into the void, creating forms to be met by the tentacles of another, and all was not lost.

I whispered to her: “May everything be good and nothing bad. May the fishermen catch many good fish, may Swiss chocolate factories discover our hazelnuts, may the soil always be fertile, may our cups always be full.”

Those were enough prayers. I should have stopped there. As we say in Georgia, if you give a blind man eyes, he will ask for eyebrows. I became greedy like an Armenian and added, “May I make it to America.”

Then Zaliko the archaeologist came driving by, shouting at the bishop to give him some petrol, and everyone began shouting like politicians trying to jail each other, and everything vanished as if I were not standing there, as if I were not talking to Her. I realized that my only hope was that the bright emerald beauty of this world could be protected from them—all those who are yelling—and from me, when I yell.

Even though Malkhazi had worked on Christmas, on New Year’s Day he had to take the day off because he had been asked by our neighbor’s wife to be the man with the “happy feet.” It’s also called the man with the “gold footies.” Since he was one of the few with a job, she thought he was the best one to bless her home and bring some luck by stepping over her threshold with a basket of wine, sweets, and boiled pork.

When Malkhazi came home from that important duty, he was dressed up in New Year’s clothes, wearing a new woolen vest that an Indian sailor had given him. My mother brought to the table
khachapuri
and Chicken Kiev, which is named after the capital of the Ukraine, but, like in all matters culinary, Georgians are superior at its preparation. Malkhazi looked at her gratefully. “Ah, Deyda,” he said and sighed. “This is my favorite time of the day. All together like this with this food.”

He poked his fork into the chicken and melted butter squirted out onto his new vest. He wiped it off with a napkin. I noticed that Juliet was trying to avoid all the butter on her plate. I folded my
khachapuri
in half the same way I had seen boys eating pizza in an American movie. Zuka imitated me and then begged Malkhazi to tell him another shipping story.

“Yes,” Juliet. “Do tell us another one of your tales of corruption on the high seas.”

“Juliet,” Malkhazi said, “Is that what Anthony is telling you? That I am corrupt? He is a good guy, but … he resembles a smoked fish, a little emotionally unresponsive. He doesn’t understand what we do.”

“And what
do
you do?” she asked.

“I work with him. But last week in Poti, he kept creeping around with his notebook, inspecting the operations, while the rest of us were trying to play ping-pong. ‘Yeap, yeap,’ he kept saying. What is this English
yeap
? At first he was telling me all these rules like, ‘the surveyor must wear a helmet.’ But when he realized he was only talking to the air he tried to become my friend by saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you did it like
that
,’ when I was taking the measurements.”

Malkhazi tore a piece of bread and dipped it in the pool of butter on Juliet’s plate. “Here,” he said and put it in her mouth. “You must eat this. It’s the best part. Anyway, as usual, the actual figures on the ship were different from the figures on the land. There was a forty-eight-ton discrepancy that I had to correct. But Anthony? Oof! I tried to protect him from knowing about how I have to correct the figures because he is such a nervous man already. Every time I ask him to hold the measuring stick, his hands are so sweaty that when he gives it back to me it’s wet. When he saw me change the numbers on the computer he said to himself, ‘Where am I? This is unbelievable!’ I tried to calm him down. I told him the difference in figures was probably a miscalculation, that our Georgian calculators don’t always work correctly. Mostly, I was concerned about his health. Why should he care so much about corruption when he should be paying more attention to his health? The way he was breathing, I was afraid he might have a cardio-vascular arrest. But then he asked, ‘What if these sailors tell their captain that you’ve manipulated the numbers?’ ‘Why would they do that?’ I asked him. ‘They’re Filipino and he’s Greek.’ ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘In my country we call this the mafia.’ ‘No, not mafia,’ I reminded him, ‘government.’ ‘Beg your pardon,’ he said. Why does everyone think I am mafioso? I’m just a simple guy. I only ask for the proper documents. A few days ago I
helped
the master of an Italian ship. The port had stolen one hundred and seventy tons of oil so I called them and said, ‘You’d better pump back at least one hundred and fifty tons.’”

“Maybe they think you’re mafiosi because you always cross yourself whenever you drive past a church,” I suggested.

“But I don’t go to confession! I don’t approve of this new Father Michael and his big Mercedes. He is even trying to befriend me. He gave me his mobile phone number in case I ever wanted to confess anything. I told him, ‘I have nothing to confess. I don’t steal oil on Easter or the day before. And if I was ever walking on church property and I saw a diamond on the ground I wouldn’t pick it up.’”

“If you are going to be a mafioso, you can’t speak like you are out of a Dickens novel,” Juliet said. “Do you know you speak English with a Victorian accent?”

“That’s probably because I have to spend so much time with Anthony. Remember, Slims, how we took him to the finger puppet theater? Well, on the ship Anthony decided to perform his own anticorruption finger puppet show. One of his fingers was a customs official at the border of Turkey, and his other finger was a Georgian robber trying to smuggle out a painting that he stole when the electricity went out in the State Art Museum.”

“Ha!” I said.

“But then his fingers started swearing at each other in English, as if he was trying to be gruff sailors. Foreigners, especially the sailors, think that to be one of us they have to swear. But I never swear in Georgian, it sounds too terrible, only in Italian. Italians are very rude-mouthed people. Once when I asked a sailor how to say in Italian, “Please give me an oil sample,” he told me instead how to say, ‘Please give me your sister.’ Please excuse me, ladies. I don’t mean to offend you.”

“Would you stop doing that?” my mother asked. Malkhazi was flipping his mobile phone around in his hand like a hyperactive person. “Eat some more.”

“Anyway, the more I see those
other
ships, the prouder I am to be Georgian. Every ship is a representation of its country. They speak their own language, obey their own customs. Step onto a Georgian-manned ship they will always give you something to eat. And everyone knows how to do everything. But today, I was on an American ship. ‘Ah! The American ship!’ everyone was saying. ‘So clean and computerized.’ But the one thing I didn’t understand was why everything
was fenced in with all kinds of restrictions? It was as if they were afraid to talk to a person, as if they didn’t know the law of the human. The ship didn’t even have a captain. It was run by computer. We had to have breakfast, God save us, on the Romanian ship. Their borscht was strange and they gave us only one piece of bread each. We had to eat our borscht with cookies!” Malkhazi’s phone started to ring its new Nina Simone ringtone.

“Oh no, not again,” said my mother.

He flipped open his phone. “I’m listening,” he said. “I’ll be there right away.” He flipped his phone shut and said to my mother, “Another Turkish ship has arrived, and they don’t know how to balance the weight again.”

“At least take some
khachapuri
,” my mother called after him.

“At least drink milk, to save you from the gas fumes,” I said.

“Hopefully, I’ll be right back,” he said, and with his cigarette lighter lit the icon lamp.

He left us sitting around the glow of the icon.

“And have you been writing to Hillary about these oil shipping stories?” Juliet asked.

I thought about the application, how it was due at the end of the week. “America cares about oil above all things—tangible or otherwise—so I think she will be interested to know what happens on America’s oil ships,” I said.

“Why are you writing about
oil
?” Juliet asked. “Why don’t you write about our wild strawberries or our cheese making techniques, or how to make pig sausages? Why don’t you write about how the more sweets we have at the New Year the sweeter the year will be. Or what about our Georgian dances, hot like the sun and swift like mountain rivers?”

“I am writing about that. But I also think the oil industry is part of our fate,” I said.

“But if you are writing about our fate, it is already written,” Juliet said.

*

Ugh, but I was tired of discussions of oil ships and oil pipelines. I was tired of seeing fish dying in leaking rainbows of oil. I was tired, most of all, of my pointless essays to Hillary with little italicized words trying to call attention to the problems of my country.

In order to see the world most correctly, in the most modern fashion, perhaps it is best to see it as temporary, provisional—like our provisional, interregnum oligarch government. Or the provisional, temporary energy solution. Thousands upon thousands of barrels have been transported over our sea, over all seas. But the oil industry has nothing to do with the true law of the sea or the law of the human. Over the past century, in the Black Sea alone, one hundred and fifty ships have already collided, spilling their oil into our sea.