Waiting for the Electricity (2 page)

It is made of good metal

Come all of you workers out of the hills

Bless those who planted the cornfields

But do we sing songs about nuts? No, because we hate nuts. Actually, this is what we sang, “Fuck! Fuck!” as we shook the nuts off the trees.

Some say that the people in our village are lazy, that we grow Odessa grapes because even though Odessa grapes do not make such great wine, they are easy to grow and we don’t need to spray them with some special fertilizer. Also, some people say that we like to grow big vegetables, like pumpkins, so we can pick one and eat it for a long time. They are only joking, of course, but it’s true that we are not like Turkish people who work all the time. Turks look at us and say, “You have such a big house but you do not work much. How is that possible?” We tell them it’s called The Great Georgian Mystery. Even Turkish people want to know the secret. But I can’t explain what it is. Maybe it’s God’s gift.

But in Dgvari, the village on the other side of our mountain, they are very workaholic people. They can plant a violet on a stone. Recently, they worked so hard that they cut down all the trees on the hillsides, but then the soil lost its foundation, the mountain started to crumble, and their houses slid down the hill. The people had to move to the lower lands, into the abandoned tea packaging plant. “You see what happens if you work too hard?” my grandfather warned. “The mountains slide down and you lose your place in them. The Soviet Union was better,” and he pointed to his gods, Lenin and Stalin, tattooed on his chest.

My grandfather was always saying everything was better during Soviet times. Green was greener and red was redder. He says the mineral water at the oldest cafe in Tbilisi was sweeter and the women who worked there could serve twelve people at once and dance the
Kartuli
at the same time. We had theaters and libraries then, and every
village had its own parliament. We provided cotton pajamas to the whole Soviet army and we had our own toothbrush factory. The seaside resorts always had high quality magnetic sand. Now all the sand has lost its magnetic properties.

For my grandfather, Soviet times were
obviously
better. We were the richest republic then, a country of aristocrats, and people had such important employment positions they required uniforms. Georgia provided the entire Soviet Empire with mandarins! Tea! Wine! Roses! of such high quality they required explanation points after them. My grandfather could fill up two suitcases with roses that he grew in our village, take a subsidized flight to Moscow for the weekend, and sell his roses for a ruble apiece to all the romantic couples at the ice skating rink.

But now Russia had stopped buying our roses, which is why we were sitting in the middle of a mound of nuts, like workers in a Turkish factory, my hands raw from peeling the skins off. We had gathered five hundred kilos of hazelnuts from the trees. These nuts had paid my tuition for three years at the university, and for our flat in Batumi. I was hoping that this year, these nuts would pay for me to get out of this country.

In our village the air is so clear you don’t need telephones. The voice easily slips through so that everyone knows all of your business and you must speak quietly if you don’t want to be overheard. When I called in a low voice to Marika, a girl on the other side of the village, to make me and herself a cocktail, her mother heard. When Marika complained to me from her balcony, “Slims Achmed! My mother said I took a whole liter of vodka to make our cocktail, but I only took one little glass,” her mother shouted back from the orchard, “I said no such thing. She just wants an excuse to run away to the beach and not help me bottle the plum sauce!”

In this way, through the crystal air, we also heard the rumor from the ice cream man, through his megaphone, that this year hazelnuts had lost their value. One lari per kilo. Or, one kilo of nuts for an ice cream cone. The hazelnut harvest was kaput.

Due to this news, on the bus back to Batumi, everyone had been
in a terrible mood. Even the bus drivers argued about whose minibus got to go next. “You’re after
me
,” one said.

“Your mother!” replied another. Their tempers swooned like the heat and they started to threaten each other with the umbrellas they were holding to keep out the sun. Another man joined in, “Fuck all of you. Aren’t you tired of shouting?”

A stupid man asked if he could sit in the seat next to mine. “Yes,” I said. “I believe
all
the seats on the bus are going back to Batumi.”

A woman carrying a beach ball got on, but when she saw the driver she said, “Oof! I hate the way you drive,” and got off again.

“Stop at the big tree!” a passenger called.

“What big tree? They’re all big trees,” the driver complained.

“What kind of a donkey are you? You don’t see the big tree?”

By the time we were descending the final mountain into Batumi I was starting to feel very irritated. I had to figure out another way to make four thousand dollars for a visa. That was the question, was always the question, was the main philosophical question for the drunk people on the sidewalk. And then they would ask, “What is the meaning of life, and who is to blame?”

Of course the question of how to acquire four thousand dollars for a visa was not quite of the same philosophical caliber as those of our ancient philosophers. No one knew why, exactly, four thousand dollars was required for a visa, only that anyone who had made it out of Georgia always had at least that much. I only knew one person who made it out of Georgia—my friend Vano went to America and overstayed his tourist visa. Now he works for a company in Detroit pouring concrete.

Fathers, wary of the philosophical question arising in their sons of how to acquire four thousand dollars had recently started telling them, “It’s a sin to drink alone and become philosophical. Instead, you’d better learn how to drink in order to celebrate your unity with others. Otherwise, you will become too sophisticated. We are not like those Westerners, caught in metaphysical abstractions.” But after the Soviet collapse, my father wasn’t there to warn me of the dangers of
too much sophistication, of too many philosophical questions. Georgian independence had coincided with the more immediate tragedy of his death. He was killed while driving a minibus near the border with Abkhazia. Some starving Abkhazian soldiers shot him through the windshield when they saw coins that he had collected from his passengers stuck to the magnet on his dashboard—a total of twenty-eight lari, about fourteen dollars. The soldiers claimed that they had forgotten what money looked like, and that they had gone crazy when they saw it.

After the funeral, my friend Malkhazi began to drink on the street. My little brother, Zuka, found solace in the company of Christian angels. My sister, Juliet, searched for an identity in English language novels, and I began to study the law of the sea, to figure out how to get across it and leave this dark country.

Returning to Batumi down the mountain, our little bus clunked heroically over the ruts, past the springs that gushed water onto the road. The driver had turned up the volume of his radio, and grandmothers, carrying their towels and picnic foods in their laps, listened primly to the tinny words of the Gloria Gaynor song “I Will Survive.”

But up ahead was a roadblock. A small group of black-clad men waved us over to the side of the road, in the same slow and lazy way a lion in a nature show attacks an antelope. The driver should have driven straight through, but instead he slowed down and then stopped. The woman sitting beside me sighed and adjusted her bag on her lap. The roadside workers forced open the doors and hiked up the steps of the bus. “Not again!” I said. They yelled at the driver to turn down the radio, reached into their pockets, and pulled out grenades.

“Those are so little,” the driver said.

They ordered him to drive into the forest.

“Which forest?” the driver asked, throwing up his hands. “Everywhere is a forest.”

They pointed to a little meadow behind a cluster of trees and told him to park there. In the clearing we had to get off the bus, take off all our clothes, even our socks. As I squatted in the field, I gripped
my last twelve lari in my palm. I hadn’t been paid my salary recently and I knew that when they came to me they would say, “What? A grown man only has twelve lari?” I knew this because this was the third time I had been robbed this year on a public transport and it always went the same way. Since my physique isn’t shaped the same way as my best friend Malkhazi’s, who once worked as a security guard for the mayor and can bend a bicycle around a person’s neck, I whispered to the man crouched beside me that I only had twelve lari. He passed me one of his twenty-lari notes.

I tried not to open my mouth when they came to me, just kept staring at the ground, at the little mountain herbs poking out of the trampled grass by my feet, so they wouldn’t be tempted to pull out my gold tooth.

After the criminals took everyone’s money, they thanked us. The oldest one shrugged apologetically and said, “My mother is sick at home. I need this to pay for her electricity.” Another reached in his pocket and gave a few lari back to the women. “Take this,” he said, patting their hands. Then they got into the bus and drove away.

I put my black trousers back on, my socks, my shirt, and my wool vest.

“It’s that new Robin Hood phenomena,” someone said. “Steal from the men and give to the women.”

“It was the police,” speculated another.

I rubbed the mud off my shoes with some grass and took out a Parliament cigarette. Just when I was starting to feel less nervous,
sheni deyda
! Your mother! I lit a cigarette from the wrong pack, my joke pack, and it cracked in my face, bringing me back into the explosive present, the fire crack-gunshot craving Georgian man’s world.

I do not mean to suggest that gunshots were always going off in Georgia. It’s true that we used to be known as the bullet-footed generation ever since we had to block bullets with our boots during the civil war with Abkhazia in the nineties. But we never resembled those gangland dandies, or those American leather-jacketed motorcycle-riding heroes. We didn’t ride motorcycles. We didn’t even ride bicycles. We were not a nomadic citizenry. We preferred to think of ourselves,
as my sister Juliet would say, “a
proper
country of classical bandits.”

I was getting tired of this bandit mentality. It was time to appeal for some help. We needed some foreign, good-natured, law-abiding policeman, someone who could intervene, one of those wholesome, American cops who rode around on a horse, someone who inspired dignity in the citizenry.

That is why when I hiked off the mountain I didn’t go to the beach but to the umbrella cafe on Seaside Boulevard to ask for some help.

Hillary, i’ll try to write to You more about myself, but i’m not as interesting person as You are, obviously, but still i’ll write something. I love animals, especially fish. Once i had the fish which i called billclinton, but unfortunately it had eaten some poisoned thing and that was the end of his life. And what about You? Do You like animals or have You a pet? We’ve a small garden at home, but mostly i love cactus
.

i am the maritime lawyer but personally it is the very dull life. The bosses are old communists and the unfortunate circumstance is that the laws of our country can’t change until they all die off
.

Now for important ancestral information. Have you heard of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West? My great, great grandfather from my village in Guria followed Prince Ivane Makharadze to Iowa and introduced tradition of trick riding to cowboys. People thought they were Cossacks but really they were Gurians from my village. They could ride three horses at one time standing on their head. They were so skilled that even if they wanted to commit suicide it was impossible on a horse. Only on the ground
.

During Soviet times government always forbid American cowboy movies on TV. But sometimes, on religious holidays they showed them. Since we are such maniac religious people this was crafty method by Soviet government to trick us to stay home to watch taboo movies instead of going to the church. My grandfather watched these movies, The Magnificent Seven, Stagecoach, always trying to catch a peek at his relatives
.

My grandfather, after watching cowboy films said, “The only hope is the cowboy!” He began to imitate the cowboy. He wore a straw hat and sat on the balcony plucking an instrument made of strings across a coconut
.

He insisted that my father call me Slims, from Slim Sherman, after the legend of Ben-Hur. So, you see, Hillary, even though I come from ancient poetical culture, i am cowboy, and i come from cowboy family. True American, like Giorgi Bush
.

Even though Slims Achmed resembles Islamic cowboy name combination, it is really a nineteenth century name, expressing same fervent Georgian dream for independence from Russia, like 19th century poets Nikoloz Baratashvili and Akaki Tsereteli. But Hillary, don’t worry. If you do not know Georgian poets, that is normal
.

The Muslim part, the Achmed part, is said in this way: Axkmed, from the back of your throat. It tastes like truth, like the sound of a Gurulian frog. Actually, it tastes like love. Hillary, i know that in English the phrase
i love you
is the very beautiful sound. And in French. Je t’aime. Again. Very beautiful. Perhaps you will think that our Georgian expression for love is not so beautiful:
Meh shen meexhvar xhar.
Yes, not so very beautiful
.

But my dear Hillary, my grandfather wasn’t thinking of love when he named me. He was thinking of his friend Achmed, from the Muslim village across the river. Achmed always stole our pigs to prevent us from eating their pork. My grandfather hoped that if he named me
Achmed
the Muslim village would stop filching our personal pigs. Also, he wanted to make the peace with the Turks. If we made the peace with the Turks, we could free ourselves from the Russians. He said, “If the English colonize us, Juliet (that’s my sister), with her English name will survive. If we regain our Independence, Zuka (my brother), with his Georgian name will thrive. And if the Americans or the Turks invade, then Slims Achmed will survive
.”