Waiting for the Electricity (27 page)

I crumpled up the letter. What was happening to Malkhazi? Was there no place free of the corrupting influence of day labor? Maybe it was better to just have a normal life, a family, a house and avoid this all this modern drama about new boyfriends and girlfriends and who has the most access to coconut milk?

When Merrick got home he saw I was depressed about my family. Maybe for this reason he presented me with a present wrapped in white butcher paper. “You helped me out so I want to help you out,” he said. I unwrapped it. It was a book called
The New Century Hymnal
.

“Thanks, Merrick,” I said. “It is beautiful. Does this have all the songs we’ve been singing?”

“Yeah, but let me tell you the history behind how I got this thing. Earlier in the year I started going to this church. It wasn’t like a regular church. It was led by this defrocked minister. Actually, I loved telling people, ‘Yes, at my church …’ and watch their expressions. ‘You go to church?’ they asked, because they couldn’t really imagine me being a churchgoer. The rumor even spread. ‘At my church …’ I would say and someone else would say, ‘Yeah, I
heard
you went to church.’ Anyway, the minister once gave a sermon about how he’d been climbing a hill at Zion National Park and how he didn’t think he’d make it up. He was really out of shape and he had run out of water. So he started singing a hymn. He belted out that hymn and at the end of the day made it up the mountain. After that, any time I was having a bad day I’d start to sing a hymn and usually it really helps. So today I went to the church office and said, ‘Do you sell the hymnals?’ and the woman there said, ‘No. Absolutely not. We don’t sell the hymnals.’ She yelled
to the back office. ‘Do we sell the hymnals?’ ‘No. We don’t sell the hymnals,’ they yelled back. I told her how every time I was having a hard time I would sing a hymn, and how my friend here was having a hard time too so I wanted to get one for him. ‘Aww,’ she said. ‘Did you hear that?’ she yelled to the back office. ‘Aww. We’ll find you a hymnal,’ and she started going through the bookcase. ‘No, I didn’t mean the big one. I already ordered the big one off of Amazon,’ I told her. ‘I meant the homemade one, the church’s personal one, where you changed all the he’s to she’s.’ ‘Oh sure!’ she said. ‘You can just take one.’ I think she thought at first I was just a stranger walking in off the street wanting to buy a hymnal. Like I was a journalist or something and was going to write about the church in some devious way according to its hymns. Anyway, so this is for you, Slims. You gotta just leave the hymnal sitting around when people come over. We’ll tell people the hymnal is the new piercing. We’re hard core to have a hymnal. Hell, yeah!”

“Wow,” I said. “Thank you. It has a nice style to it.”

“Anyway, after I picked up the book today I went to this ceremony in Oakland at my friend’s house. My friend was also inspired by the teachings of a defrocked minister, though a different one, who argues against the idea that God is working in the innermost individual soul. He thinks that God manifests himself in community instead. So my friend has started hosting these cosmic techno trance rituals at his house.”

“Actually, I don’t really understand what you mean,” I said.

“You see, in the West, we tend to divide the world into isolationist individual reality versus collective reality. But this minister, he does this thing called a techno cosmic mass dance that mixes techno, dance, and live music. He says that the West has lost all our rituals, which is why we need to recreate them through liturgy. He says that Saint Augustine in the fourth century really ruined us with this idea of individual salvation, that individual rumination is a Western plague, that really this life is not about original fall and redemption but about original blessing.”

“Yes, we think the same in Georgia,” I said. “God gave us the
land He was saving for Himself. We had a lot of saints visiting our country in the fourth century, but it’s a good thing that particular one—what was his name, Saint Augustine?—didn’t visit.”

“Right? The problem is that my friend’s cosmic trance dance ceremony today didn’t go so well. He created this earthen pyramid in his backyard because the word
pyramid
means ‘burning heart.’ He built a fire in it to make a sweat lodge and then started invoking the spirit of the Mayan gods while his girlfriend chanted to the four directions, and the animal communicator made woofing sounds. But during the ceremony, I started to feel kind of self-conscious that the animal communicator was going to pick up on my bad vibes because the woofing sounds were getting obnoxious. I had to imagine positive energy going in her direction, but my walls were going up. The whole thing felt enforced and just off, you know? Now I’m not so sure of the best way to make a ritual.”

“But what was the main idea of it? Isn’t a ritual a reminder of what matters most to you? For example, how you feel after you get a letter from someone you have loved for a long time. It doesn’t have to be so exotic. Ritual could be pouring wine into another’s glass. But you have to know beforehand that this is the plan. Everyone has to know all the rules and pass down the rules like in my country. It’s not a performance, or an imposition by someone else.”

So the next weekend Merrick decided to host a techno cosmic trance dance at his house, and he informed everyone in advance that they would be making didgeridoos.

Everyone from our course came, even Susan. I was developing a cold and so Merrick kept forcing me to drink grapefruit juice and goldenseal extract. “I don’t want you to get sick,” he said. But I think the herbal remedy was very strong because I began to hallucinate in the same way I did when I was a kid and had accidentally swallowed some gasoline when I was trying to siphon it into the combine. The men in the field at the time patted my back and gave me some milk to drink. I am sorry to say this, but my farts smelled like gasoline for two days.

When Lena and some of her friends arrived they took over the kitchen.

Merrick went back to the living room and covered the floor with newspapers. “Good thing you bought so many of these, Slims.” He set new containers of red and orange paint on top of the paper. We had bought PVC piping at Home Depot earlier in the day and now several of Merrick’s friends from the antiwar protest and a few of the forest rangers were banging on the floor with it. The sound made my head ache a little so I went back into the kitchen with the girls.

“Don’t you want to make a didgeridoo?” I asked them. Lena suggested that we go bowling instead but her friend started mixing vodka and cranberry juice. “I’ll have mine straight,” I said.

As usual, the girls in the kitchen only wanted to talk about politics and geology. They mixed it together as if it were the same word, and not just because they were drinking. It was advantageous for them to know about politics, especially for Lena, whose father had a powerful position in oil-ville. I imagined that every geopolitical class in her university was filled with such new Russians, sitting in the back of the class and calculating the worth of natural resources with their calculators in the same way they did at lunchtime when they converted the prices of dollars to rubles in their French perfume catalogs.

“So, what
exactly
does your father do?” I asked Lena after I had made a toast to our parents.

“I told you, he provides tubes for companies,” she said.

“But what
kind
of tubes?”

“I don’t exactly know what he does,” she admitted.

“Ah ha!” I said. “But you have a car.”

“Of course,” she said and then pirouetted with her pink drink. “You should come visit us. We have parties in Nizhny all the time. You should come to our parties. Bring your friends. We have a Mercedes, actually. We could drive to Lake Baikal. Or we could drive anywhere.”

“My uncle’s been to Russia,” I said. “He bought a wine factory in Siberia but then the government closed the borders so we couldn’t export any grapes to the factory. We had to abandon it.”

“We could drive to that factory,” Lena said.

From America, everything seemed possible. From America it looked like Russia was engaged in her own perpetual cosmic trance dance.

More of Merrick’s friends had arrived but no one was providing any organization. There was no toastmaster, no order, no “we.” Everyone sipped their drinks individually and no one there really knew how to make the shy ladies comfortable.

Misha and Sergei were over by the window daring each other to drink more. They alternated between staring at the girls and peering between the window slats like men from my village do when they’re watching out for the combine mechanic during harvesttime.

Merrick was looking through the images in a book on aboriginal dream designs. He squatted down beside Susan, showing her a caption. She was wearing hiking boots and drilling holes into the PVC piping. Sergei was staring at her while Misha said, “I’m taking the language proficiency test, the TOEFL, next week so at least I will have something to show for this time spent here. Lena had joined them and was telling Sergei, “I like a man who is capable. We Russians are not American women.”

Merrick pounded the floor next to Sergei with his PVC pipe. “Slims, buddy, sit down here. Aren’t you going to work on one too?”

I watched the anarchy build into chaos. But when I closed my eyes and listened, the sound was somehow euphonious.

“Slims,” Lena called to me and then said in Russian, “How do I say in English, give me a cigarette?” I knew she knew how to say it in English but she was hinting at me to give her one.

“Slims, where are you going?” Merrick said.

“I’m just going to get some cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes! It’s bad for your health, Slims.”

“So is living,” said Sergei. “Take off your jacket, Slims. I have cigarettes.”

Lena sauntered over to him and he gave her one. Sergei caught Susan’s eye across the room, extended his arm, and shook a cigarette out for her, but she turned away.

Susan was now making her own didgeridoo, daubing on orange
and white walkabout patterns with a chopstick. Was she, too, trying to reinvent her life? America seemed to be all about endings and new beginnings. But the beginning of Georgia happened too long ago for us to remember. And we never make a toast to endings. All the time we sing, “Always we are and always we will be.”

I went outside with Misha and Lena. Lena was pointing to the first star that had just emerged. “Make a wish,” she said to me. The full moon hazed under our smoke. “It’s better to make a wish to the moon,” I said. “In Georgia we say, ‘If the moon helps me I will scoff at the stars.’”

“What is the meaning?” Lena asked.

But I couldn’t discuss the meaning because Sergei came out and asked me, “Is it true that a man from the Caucasus can seduce any woman?”

“A man from the Caucasus has the highest sperm count of any man in the world,” Misha said. “Fact. Our scientific conclusion is that they want to take over the world.”

I rolled my eyes at Lena and went back inside. Sergei and Lena followed me. Lena, as if making a final announcement, snapped open the gold clasps of her purse and procured a CD. When she put it in the CD player the song bolted out, “
Ya
loobloo tebya Sergei
,” the same song that Natasha, the Russian woman who works at Batumi’s telephone office, always listens to, and everyone started dancing, swinging their hair around, and banging their polka-dotted PVC piping on the floor.

The only one not dancing was Chemistry. I went and stood by him. “I used to like parties, all the eating, drinking, but then my brain changed I think, and got a different formation,” I said.

He nodded, as if the same thing had happened to him.

“By the way, do you know the film director Rashid Nugmanov?” I asked him. “He is from the Kazakh New Wave movement.”

“The Kazakh New Wave?” asked Susan, joining our conversation. “What is that, exactly?”

“If you do not know about the Kazakh New Wave directors, do
not worry, that is normal,” I said to Susan. To Chemistry I said, “Have you seen the film
The Needle
? It’s my favorite film.”

“Of course,” said Chemistry. “I have seen that film ten times.”

“It’s about a girl who is a drug addict,” I told Susan. “Her boyfriend takes her to a mud hut in the Karakorum desert to help her recover. When she is better and looking lovely, wearing a white dress, she says to her boyfriend, who is playing with a scorpion, ‘I am going to the sea for a swim.’ So they walk to the Aral Sea but the Aral Sea has shriveled and there are only old cargo ships left scattered here and there on the cracked earth. The beach is now thirty miles away. So the couple plays on an abandoned ship, swinging happily on the chains. It describes perfectly the end of civilization. America has not seen the end of civilization yet, has not yet had to say when all has fallen down, ‘We’re here. We remain here still.’ I’m sorry to say this, but you are not a very modern country.”

But then I thought about America and their love for new beginnings. Maybe, because of this love, they would be okay.

18.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
I
WAS READY TO PRESENT MY PROPOSAL TO
M
R
. T
ETLEY.
I had watched enough television to know the proper language. Also, after observing Merrick’s cosmic trance dance I realized that maybe people just needed to be reminded of the rules of nature.

Dear Mr. Tetley
,

I am ill today in your country
.

That part was true. I had caught a cold.

It is nothing. Do not worry. Just a small cold. I am never sick in my village, however, because we always drink the milk of the sheep
.

That part was a lie. But, as I had learned, it is okay to lie in a commercial. In truth, in my village I drank the milk of a
goat
. But the difference between sheep and goats is very small.