Waiting for the Electricity (3 page)

Now i wish to ask to You very important question: Have You seen the movie Jesus Christ Superstar? Do You know about the theme song in the movie, “Don’t you mind about the future. Think about today instead.”?!!(!) We have been living that way for very long time now, for 15 centuries maybe, and i don’t think it’s very good advice. We have freed ourselves from Russia, are holding out our hand, and waiting for help up
.

Respecting Your way
,

Slims Achmed Makashvili

2.

A
S
I
WAS SITTING ON THE BOULEVARD, WRITING MY LETTER, A CLOUD BEGAN
to spread across the sky like a giant oil spill. Kerosene, diesel fumes, and the sharp smell of an impending rainstorm cut through the air. The shadows of the city’s buildings were turning winter, the colors muted—the colors of a gun. Georgia still has its own poetry, I thought, could even be beautiful in a designer way, like the sandy white dune buildings in
Casablanca
.

I put my letter to Hillary away and set out to find Malkhazi. I had to tell him about how the prices for hazelnuts had plummeted.

If you looked at it now you wouldn’t believe it, but it is said that when Queen Tamar entered Batumi with her soldiers in the twelfth century, the town was so clean she ordered them to take off their shoes. Even during Soviet times all was in order; the trees were like soldiers—all in one line. The Soviet national anthem of our town used to go like this:

If you go to the Adjarian mountains

sweet aroma will go through your heart

And if you look deeply into Batumi’s eyes

you feel cured from every illness

Batumi, sparkling clean

Batumi, so breathtaking

You are the emerald, you are the paradise

If the town falls in love with you

It gives you all its soul

And, if necessary, it will die for you
.

But I think the town has lost some of its powers. For example, I do not know anyone whom the town died for recently.

A bread truck stopped in front of the Paradise Cafe, its engine covering up the shouting of the men guzzling brown bottles of Kazbegi beer. The driver rushed out and carried loaves and buns in his dirty hands into the restaurant.

In the distance, to celebrate the last day of summer, Batumi’s biblical artist was embroidering Georgian Orthodox crosses into the beach with stones the colors of young green wine and every shade of sunburn.

Across the square, I saw Malkhazi. He was standing with Gocha Abashidze under the stone monument to Gocha’s great uncle, our city’s godfather. Godfather, clad in the traditional Georgian outfit—the
cherkeska
with the special breast pockets designed for artillery cartridges, scabbard on his belt,
nababi
on his head—was supposed to remind everyone what a true Georgian man looks like, how he is a noble man and must constantly maintain his dignity. But Gocha hadn’t inherited this expression at all. Instead, dressed in his new black silk shirt from Thailand—his “image”—he would chase anyone who stepped on his little piece of lawn, Batumi’s new peewee golf course.

Gocha is from one of the
aristocratic
families, the ones who recently bought up all the real estate near the sea. He lives in one of the centrally located apartment buildings, the ones recently renovated to look like a Greek temple, with balconies carved by Batumi’s most celebrated bronze workers. Gocha says he is related to a famous king from the fourth century BC, the one who owned a tile factory that all the archaeologists are digging up these days. But Gocha is not a noble soul. He thinks one thing, speaks another, and does some third one.

Malkhazi, standing beside him, looked like a character from one of my sister’s Victorian novels, doomed and romantic, except for his gigantic nose. When Malkhazi swims in the sea on his back, the beachgoers point at his nose and shout, “Watch out! A shark!” He resembles the Armenian Little Red Riding Hood who says to the wolf, “Oh, what a big nose you have,” and the wolf replies, “Well, look at yours.”

Malkhazi was wearing the new pair of jeans he had bought the previous week at the Turkish market, and also his
GEORGIA TECH
T-shirt. Looking down at his boots, rocking back and forth, he seemed to be propelled by the weight of something he was considering. Malkhazi could stand like that all afternoon; it was his main form of amusement. He looked like the South American peacock bass I’d seen in Batumi’s former dolphinarium, with brown and rust markings, never meant to be domesticated, languidly swimming back and forth. And then up go his fins and in one split second he eats the little goldfish; and then back to his languid ways as he spit out the scales. Malkhazi has the same jaw.

I whistled and when Malkhazi saw me he said goodbye to Gocha.

“Gocha offered me a job working for Herbalife,” Malkhazi confided as we walked down Seaside Boulevard toward the sea. “But I refuse to work for a Russian company. Those guys drive around Georgia in their Volkswagens, preaching about herbal remedies but herbal remedies their mother! Georgians were writing poetry when they were still living in the trees. We should be driving around Yekaterinburg promoting wine and hazelnuts!”

“Good idea,” I said. “Because right now one kilo of hazelnuts is now the same price as an ice cream cone.”

“
Sheni deyda
!” he said. Malkhazi reached in his shirt pocket for some matches. If Malkhazi’s lips were an art museum, the cigarette was the permanent installation.

We climbed through the boulders to the frayed hem of the surf. Malkhazi ripped the top off a new packet of Viceroys, set the aluminum paper into the wind, and shook out a cigarette for me. The
surf was wilder than usual because of an impending storm, and a great tangle of jellyfish bobbed along the water’s edge.

We sat smoking, gazed out at the cargo ships from Bulgaria, Odessa, Turkey. They sat there, shackled to the sea, as if waiting, like the rest of us, for something. Malkhazi scrutinized the water, as if he were its protector. The waves crackled over beach rocks and groveled to his boots. The Black Sea didn’t look very romantic right now, so I looked across it, trying to see the other side, where I wanted to be. But the swimmers were in the way—innocent children playing on multicolored floating devices, churning the last of the sun’s warmth into the water, the warmth, in turn, churning up the dormant radioactive material beneath.

A breeze blew, some water arced up, and a thin layer of crude oil spattered onto Malkhazi’s jeans. He tried to wipe it off with his handkerchief but only smeared the stain. I thought about the Black Sea spiny dogfish population and how it was going extinct because of this crude oil, which congregates on top of the sea like a municipal meeting of politicians. I dug my hand into the beach stones and extracted one, rolled it around, gritted up my palm. “What about the Italian ship captain?” I asked Malkhazi. “Have you heard back from him?”

At the end of June, an Italian ship captain had told Malkhazi to send him a letter detailing all of his job experience. Malkhazi had written, “barn builder, farmer, toastmaster at village weddings, bodyguard, casino employee.” He also included his height, age, and zodiac sign (192 cm.
27 years old
Libra); his personality type (choleric); his favorite qualities in a person (woman: intelligence, honor, spiritual force; man: bravery, sociability, good physical protector); his most harmful habit (caught between two fires); his favorite country(Georgia); his education (no formal education); his language abilities (Georgian, Russian, a little English).

But no, Malkhazi hadn’t heard back and now when he told me he acted annoyed as if he wanted me to shut up about it. I realized that Malkhazi, the mountain dreamer, was turning into one of those typical Georgian men who huddle together on the street near the bus
drivers, forming their own private junta, making too many deals with Gocha on the boulevard.

“The Italian probably tried to call but the telephone didn’t work,” I told him. “Did you give it to the postman yourself, or put it in the postbox? They haven’t been emptying the postboxes.”

“I e-mailed it,” he said.

“Oh,” I said and threw the stone I was holding, aiming for the middle of a jellyfish. “Do you know the Koreans eat those?”

“Blexh,” he said and threw his stone, avoiding the jellyfish.

“What if you had the chance,” I asked, “to leave Georgia, to work on a ship, but you could never come back?”

Malkhazi didn’t answer. He only became more village-heavy, gloomily glaring at the sea. Under his breath, Malkhazi quoted our poet Alexander Gomiashvili:

Among these mountains I was born
,

Their songs and legends made me strong
.

After that we just sat silently and stared at the sea.

“I don’t think I could leave Georgia forever,” Malkhazi said finally. “It’s better to see what will happen here.”

“But what is this place? It’s practically destroyed,” I said.

“Only Georgia can destroy Georgia,” he said. “Two Georgians together can make a country. Three Georgians united make a world.”

“The only problem is,” I said, “these days, it’s almost impossible to unite three Georgians.”

“Unless it’s you, me, and Shalva,” Malkhazi said.

“Shalva. Which Shalva? The optician or the policeman?”

“The policeman,” he said. “Listen Slims, today I met a foreigner, an Englishman who is working at the port. He’s a geologist, a pipeline specialist. I think he’s a very valuable man.”

“And what do you want to do with him? Kidnap him?”

“I am not afraid of the electric chair. We have no electricity.” It was an old joke.

“Don’t be a donkey,” I told him. “You can’t get any money from
the English government. Someone already tried that last year when they kidnapped the soccer player.”

“Not money from the government. From Shalva. He said he’d give me his car.”

“There’s a chicken living in his car.”

“We can eat the chicken and fix the car. You know how our police don’t have any respect? People just use them to borrow a light? Shalva said he’d give me his car if I kidnap this English man so he can rescue him with television cameras, so that people view the police more heroically.”

“Why would Shalva rescue him? It’s always the police who kidnap the people.”

“Pipeline workers can’t be targeted. That’s their rule.”

“It doesn’t sound practical.”

Malkhazi raised the curved sword of his eyebrow. “Show me a man with his feet planted firmly on the ground, and I will show you a man who can’t put on his trousers.”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“I read it in Juliet’s book of famous English quotes. But seriously,” he said, arms crossed over his mighty chest, inflamed cheeks incongruent to his little ears, “ask anyone what the name ‘Makashvili’ means. Everyone knows the Makashvilis are famous dreamers.”

Even though Malkhazi and I have the same last name, he is not actually my blood cousin. Malkhazi lost his mother when he was born. I don’t know all the details except that she was young; the local hospital hadn’t opened yet; the midwives were at the cattle festival. No one could believe Malkhazi’s misfortune when, three years later, his father was shot by Turkish snipers after he had tried to cross the border to Turkey to avoid being sent to Afghanistan. After the funeral, Malkhazi’s uncle took it upon himself to teach Malkhazi all the Georgian traditions: how to hunt game; how to make wine, or at least how to know through smell alone which variety of grape it came from; and how to make the proper Georgian toast. Malkhazi’s uncle, so intent on making Malkhazi self-sufficient, once tore down his barn so that Malkhazi could learn to build it back up. Perhaps he overcompensated.

“Our name is not written about in the history books,” I said. “Probably no one outside of the beer factory district knows we’re famous.”

But Malkhazi was right. The Makashvilis are dreamers. During Soviet Union times, whenever we met on Seaside Boulevard, before we even kissed each other’s cheeks in greeting, we began to dream. We dreamed of fishing for gold-speckled trout in the northern territories of Abkhazia. We dreamed of sharpening our swords to battle Turkish people. We would compose letters in awkward English to the cute European girls we had met at Batumi’s International Chess Championship:
Hi sweet heart, Any time You want, You can come back and enjoy real life. If man doesn’t worry about money, and if he has a car, Georgia! is exactly perfect place to feel all the true nature
.

When Malkhazi and I were still living in the village, we used to roam around in the pastures, mixing the milk of a sheep with the acids of a crushed-up fig leaf. The acids, mingling with the milk, made curd that we cooled under a stream and ate for lunch. I told him once, “That is a true romantic tourist image. You should be a tour guide. You could surprise the Russian tourists by pretending to be an uneducated sheepherder, and then confound them by answering their questions in French.” It was only a joke because he didn’t speak French. Nor did he like sheep. Nevertheless, after I moved to the town I pressured him to come too. “Georgia is beginning to privatize,” I told him, “making many employment opportunities in Batumi. My friend is a photographer of Georgian doorways. Another is a window maker. I am studying the law of the sea.” And so, Malkhazi, in his early twenties then, had come to live with us. Too young to marry, too old to enter the university, and he didn’t even smoke.

He didn’t approve of smoking either, especially for women. If he saw a young woman standing behind a corner with a cigarette, he would ask her for it, stick the filter part up his nose, and then give it back to her. But when he got his first job working in a wedding restaurant in Batumi, he shaved his mustache and took up the habit. He would smoke and sit under a nearby tung tree listening to
his
Super Hits of the 90’s
tape: Alla Pugacheva, Kino, Nautilus, or even “Aisha,” the Algerian hit song. In the village he was known as Malkhazi the Disco King—ever since he had salvaged a tape recorder from an anthropologist and set up a disco venue in an abandoned boxcar.