Waiting for the Electricity (32 page)

“And then?” asks the Georgian.

“And then you will get used to it.”

I had to get used to this regime of nothing working again; it would take at least two weeks, I predicted—the same amount of time it takes an American tourist, after traveling to an exotic country, to arm himself against American commercials again—at least according
to Merrick. When he returned from Costa Rica, his life looked vivid and quiet at first but then for two weeks he was bombarded by the “violence of advertising,” he called it. “But once I reached the saturation level, I no longer noticed them,” he had told me. So now I had to make my own cultural adjustment to this not-working world.

“Another Spanish soccer player was kidnapped today by bandits,” announced the news broadcaster on TV that night, but I couldn’t hear more than that because the antenna fell off.

When Malkhazi came home that evening I asked him what had been happening on the ships. He looked at me wearily, like the little green leaves of a transplanted beet plant, trying to grow in its pot on the window ledge, but then the sun doesn’t have enough strength to muscle it up. “It’s work. It’s life,” he said.

“But what makes you continue this life?” I asked.

Malkhazi leaned back in the chair. “What makes me continue? Well … these days I look forward to the ships coming because they have electricity and then I can shave with hot water.” Malkhazi stood up, went to the cabinet, and took out a bottle of vodka. He cracked the seal with a knife. “Just a little, Slims. Choot choot,” he said, pouring me some vodka into a jade cup. “It will make your thoughts more tender.”

His phone rang. “Allo?” he answered it. “Okay, I’ll be right there.” He hung up, turned to me, and said, “I have to go back to the Turkish ship.”

That evening I lay on the couch with a belly full of Zuka’s vitamin borscht. I stared out at a few clouds whose shadows underneath were darker than the washed-out pale blue above. The Sadzaglishvilis’ white sheets blocked part of the view, swaying on the clothesline. I heard Guliko yelling up from the street to anyone who would listen, “Why do you throw your garbage out the window? I am not going to mention any names but they know who they are who throw their garbage out the window and don’t just bring it down to the truck when it comes.”

“I feel like I’ve lost my dream,” I told Juliet.

“So your dream is gone,” she said. “Don’t worry. Twenty thousand
more will come. Do you know what? God created the world for you. Doing this he had in mind to make you happy, to make you pleased with the world’s beautifulness. While you say to him, ‘I want to close my eyes. I don’t want to go on. I’m tired of doing one and the same thing. I’ve suffered too much, because I don’t always get those things that I want easily.’ But my darling brother, please remember, it’s somehow fine when we don’t get those things we want because otherwise we wouldn’t appreciate the things we have and we wouldn’t keep our eyes to the true brightness of nature.”

That night when I heard the oil trains in backyard whine along the tracks like a screeching woman, I asked Zuka, who was sleeping in the bed across the room, “How did I sleep through this before?”

“Just say, ‘Tonight I will sleep and nothing will disturb me,’” Zuka said and turned over in his own bed.

When the last train had passed and the dark town swelled with silence, I heard the rain pattering outside. A little drop of water phlumped on my pillow. I remembered what Susan had said about how to keep a healthy psychology, that the best way to be happy is to be grateful, to think about people who are less fortunate than we are. So I thought about the Chechens.

Just as I was falling asleep, Zuka muttered, “The Armenians fix their leaks. We just put buckets under them.”

I was about to fall asleep again but then I pondered Zuka’s remark. We Georgians are proud of the fact that we don’t waste our time fixing leaks, that we have more profound things to think about. No one can stop a Georgian man from grinning when something has newly fallen down, as if it’s his proof that everything collapses. Herein lies a key to the Georgian heart, and, as Malkhazi is fond of saying, “Every heart has a key.”

Unavoidably, this nonworkingness started to change me, and the only thing I could do was sit on a chair, wave a white flag, surrender, and not dare to move, afraid that the chair might collapse when I sat down in it to read before going to bed. It didn’t collapse. But when I woke up in the middle of the night and leaned over the bed to get a glass of water, the bed frame—the pressboard part—fell on my wrist.
I didn’t want to complain though. While I was rocking back and forth with my arm close to my chest, Zuka woke up and whispered from across the room, “What’s the matter?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “The bed fell on my wrist.”

Why do I mention all of this now? So that I can get it out of the way, get used to it, and go on with the story.

The next day when I arrived at work I discovered that Fax’s secretary had now become the economic director of maritime law consulting. She and Mr. Fax were probably having a
ménage à trois
with the fax machine. “Three Georgians united make a world,” I joked to myself walking down the corridor. But when I got to my office, the door was blocked—it was crammed with Turkish cabinets. Apparently, the Maritime Ministry of Law was being renovated. Fax was behind the door and he greeted me with a little bow. “Slims, since you have been to America perhaps you could elucidate us on how to arrange the furniture according to more modern standards.” Ho ho! Things were looking up for me.

“It must look organized,” I said.

So Fax commanded the workers playing their musical instruments in the lobby to line up all the desks into rows in the conference room.

I surveyed the result. “But not quite in this fashion.” I suggested that they should put a bookshelf in the toilet room because foreigners like to read in there. One worker was offended and stood up to hit me, but his friend who was taking notes calmed him down.

“How about a cup holder?” another asked. “Don’t they like to drink coffee when they go to the toilet?”

After lunch, Fax lost his temper because his coffee cup holder was missing. “What happened to my coffee cup holder?” he raged at his new secretary.

“I didn’t do anything with your coffee cup holder,” she said, indignant.

“It used to be right here on the computer,” Fax insisted. “It was the perfect size for a little cup of coffee.”

“Oh, you mean this?” I asked and pushed a button.

“Oh, there it is,” he said.

“That’s the computer’s disc drive,” I said.

But I forgave his stupidity because he was under a lot of stress; he was already shouting at his new secretary. Oh! If you could have seen him when he was speaking, you felt as if a hamburger was talking to you, as if he kept a hundred marbles in his mouth and was in the middle of spitting them out. You had to make some sudden move in order to save your life and escape with only minor bruises.

At lunch, when Mr. Fax was out, a man from the village of Zalikos came in to use the copy machine. I didn’t know what he wanted at first until he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and asked if we had a Georgian copy machine. “No, Georgia doesn’t make copy machines. We have one that was made in America though,” I told him.

“No, no, that won’t work,” he said. “This document is in Georgian, not in English.”

At the end of the day, everyone received their salary of fifty dollars for the month, except me, since I had been away. I tried to protest that they still owed me for the previous year but Fax just shrugged. One of the security guards tried to make me feel better by joking about his own paycheck. “I’m rich!” he said. Another added, “Now I can retire.”

“I only have twenty tetri,” I told the bus driver.

“Pay what you can,” he said.

At home, the electricity was on and light yellowed up the stairwell. Neighbors opened their doors as I passed. “Oh, so that’s what you’re looking like these days,” one of them said. My mother had mended a torn shirt of mine and it lay freshly pressed over a chair. Zuka had fixed the iron. Then he fixed the gas balloon. I felt a certain pang that Zuka seemed to be following in Malkhazi’s footsteps. He had started reading stories about criminals—he had no other role models—and with a swaggering confidence he ran his cigarette lighter over the entire metal canister to prove it wouldn’t blow up. “Don’t you try this,” he said to the neighbor children, who were eating the
last of the American candy I had brought, the sparkly wrappers all over the floor.

“Zuka is really turning into a man,” I observed to my mother. But I didn’t tell her how by fixing the iron and by fixing the gas balloon, he had retaught me something important: that even if things break down, we only need to fix them again. When I visited the neighbors after dinner, the family had bought a new water heater. “It works?” I asked.

“Yes, it works well. It’s Japanese,” they said.

“Maybe we should poke a hole in it so we have something to fix,” I found myself saying.

22.

T
EN DAYS HAD PASSED SINCE
M
ALKHAZI HAD LEFT FOR THE
T
URKISH
ship and he still hadn’t returned. Spring had started bubbling forth like a shaken-up green bottle of fizzy tarragon water. It (the spring) was waking up, gushing out, borrowing everyone’s vitality to help it in its waking, and because of this the whole town wilted. If you drank a cup of coffee though, you’d be fine.

When I was walking home along the boulevard I passed Gocha’s new disco café. All the tables had thatched umbrellas over them. Gocha was sitting at one of them and I watched him from a distance. He was wearing an imported Hawaiian shirt and sipping a cocktail from a coconut. The girls who worked in his cafe would walk over to him, look down at him sleepily, and then rewrap their sarongs over their bathing suits. Bored, he got up and colluded with the man behind the circular bar. I really couldn’t understand what Tamriko saw in him.

At home, through the walls, I could still hear Tamriko playing the bridal march on the piano. All of the town seemed to have heard this wedding music pouring out of her fourth-floor window. It is rumored that if you are surrounded by wedding music, you are about to marry, and Tamriko seemed to be trying to get married by sheer force of song, thrum, and whistle power. At the shop, where I went
to buy bread, I heard the shopkeeper say to her with a wink, “I hear wedding bells around you. Someone must be getting married soon.” She winked back and smiled, almost as if she were a trembling bride, like a little baby calf separated for the first time from its mother at the Saturday animal bazaar. She was like a girl who rarely speaks above a whisper to her new mother-in-law and calls her husband “Sir!” in his mountain home. But let us not forget that as she gets older, of course, she has the loudest voice and the sharpest tongue, which can provoke any brother-in-law to shoot her by accident.

I had not been able to locate Anthony. Evidently, he had become an important man of the town and had more important people than me to talk to. But Juliet, who seemed to travel in the same circles as he did, had invited Anthony over for dinner. I wanted to impress upon him how modern I had become but Tamriko’s piano playing coming through the walls as we sat at the table kept distracting me. Anthony stared quizzically at the rococo wallpaper. “I almost feel like a colonialist,” he said. “Especially sitting in a formal dining room such as this. Would you like some more wine?” he asked Juliet. Perhaps the formal atmosphere created by the wallpaper affected him because he added, “My dear?”

We were eating spaghetti with canned peas, the closest resemblance to an English meal Juliet could muster, I guess. I scooped up a pea with my fork, and then another pea, and listened to Anthony talk about how BP was planning to use an untested pipeline sealant that was cheaper than the usual brand. “If you can’t get them to dig the pipeline three meters deeper, you are not going to get them to buy a more expensive sealant either,” I said.

Anthony shook his head, shifted around in his seat, took out a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and asked permission to smoke.

I pushed the seashell that we used as an ashtray toward him.

Anthony stared quizzically at the wallpaper. He cleared his throat. “Can I ask you why that picture on the wall is hanging upside down?”

“Which one?” I asked.

“That one. The little Russian church in the snow.”

“Oh,” Juliet said. “I put it like that to remind myself to turn my suffering upside down. And to remember that God’s kingdom here on earth is upside down. Also, you live in the twenty-first century, yes? We live in the twelfth. Opposite. You see?”

“Ah,” he said.

I poured him some walnut liquor from my homemade batch, but before I could make a toast he took a sip. Every time there is a silence at the Georgian table another baby is born in Armenia. Armenia already had enough people and didn’t need any more to join their army and fight against us, so I was about to make a toast to peace to break the silence but Juliet began speaking. “They speak of death as if it were something natural. Foreign insurance agents speak of certain possibilities and the eventuality that something might happen to you.”

“Beg your pardon?” Anthony asked.

“It’s a quote. From someone named G. Mikes. It’s in our English language reader. Haven’t you heard it?”

“Afraid not.” He bent his head to his shoulder and looked at the picture of the Russian church in the snow again, considering it from his sideways position. “Have you ever noticed how sexually free the Russians are?”

“Would you like to speak in Russian?” she asked.

When he spoke in Russian the few words that he knew, “oil, gasoline, no problem, hurry up,” Juliet stood up and almost hurried over to his lap. I went into the kitchen. The sexual tension out there was becoming too much for me. Probably the neighbors were watching through the window, saying, “So when are they going to begin?” When I came back the electricity had gone out.