Waiting for the Electricity (33 page)

“The electricity went out,” Anthony said. “It must be a sign.” He had lit a candle.

“It’s only a sign when the electricity comes
on
,” I said. Juliet’s chair was now on his side of the table. They were both peering at the Russian church in the snow. I could not understand where he got the idea of Russia being sexually free by looking at that painting.

“Perhaps, you would like me to play a song on the piano for
you?” Juliet asked him. I didn’t know how to read his look. Was he pleading her to, or pleading her not to?

“But perhaps after listening to our music you will become depressed?” I asked. “Always singing, ‘Always we are. Always we will be.’”

“I can play for you a gypsy song. Have you heard “Suliko”? It’s about a person looking for her soul,” Juliet said.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “Besides, the person next door is providing us with enough music.” When he slipped his shoes off his feet I went back into the kitchen.

“Is it true what they say about Georgian traditions?” I heard him say through the wall that I was holding my ear against.

“About upside down? That’s not a tradition. That’s just a way of seeing.”

“That Georgian women don’t believe in sex before marriage?” he asked.

I didn’t hear her answer but I heard him say, “Do you want to get out of here and go have a strong drink?”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute,” I said coming back into sitting room. But they had already left. In the film
Bella Mafiosa
the brothers insist the man
marries
their sister before they sleep together. Afterwards, the couple divorce. When the man wants to sleep with her again, her brothers insist that he marry her again.

So the next day after work, in order to explain some things to him, I asked Anthony to meet me at the cafe near the institute. I borrowed Zuka’s guitar and headed over there. If there is anything important happening in Batumi, it is happening at this cafe, where the beautiful girls eat
chizi bizi
, spiced eggs with ground beef, and many groups of boys hover around them.
Chizi bizi!
My mouth began to salivate.

Anthony was sitting at a table looking out the window, though he kept having to wipe away the condensation with his sleeve. “The spring is beautiful here, yes?” I asked him. “Batumi’s nature is different than elsewhere in Georgia,” I said. “The rocks, the cedar and cypress trees, and even the women too. The tall, dark beauties are from Tbilisi.
They belong to the windy climate, to the frost and fresh air. The air is heavier here in Batumi so we are shorter. Mountain sun is different from beach sun. It produces a different color of brown on the skin.”

He looked at me curiously and then I remembered that Westerners like to get directly to the point so I said, “You understand in Georgia, before we get married, we have no relations with a woman? I have heard that Americans have sex three times a year. Once with a stranger and twice with a relative, but this is not information I care to think about. I am not sure about you though, because I do not know the statistics for English people. I am looking for a good husband for my sister.”

Anthony pushed back his chair and gave me a strange look.

“If you like, I will teach you the words to woo a woman,” I said.

“Who says I want to woo a woman?” he asked.

“Life is short. What else is there to do?” I asked. Strumming Zuka’s guitar I said, “Just imagine the situation. Two people are talking. A man and a woman. The first person sings, ‘If you were so beautiful, little violet, why did I not notice you before?’ The proper response is, ‘Because my heart was not yet open for love.’ Maybe in your country you say ‘open for business’ but in Georgia it’s better to say love.”

“But I’m not interested in wooing a woman right now. I have other things I have to deal with.”

“Let’s try another song,” I said. “To get you in the mood.”

I met a gardener

who woke me up with sweet words

lullabying me on his lap
.

“Wait,” Anthony said. “Who is singing this?”

“A man,” I said. “It is very important for men to sing.”

“A gardener puts a grown man on his lap?” Anthony asked. “Does this take place on a farm?”

“It’s a
metaphor
!” I said. “But maybe if you cannot understand our language, you cannot understand this song.”

“You are a very proud people,” he commented.

I put the guitar down. “Do you think we are too proud?”

“Maybe not too proud, but, as I said, I think the people are sort of heavy here.”

“Yes, maybe we are too heavy. We always have some problem. That is why I am looking for a less heavy man for my sister. Do you know how difficult it is for her to be a Georgian woman? Can you understand her fate here? There is a song about it. Have you heard this one?”

They will take her in her wedding dress

They will take off her dress

And put her beside her husband in the bed

But once she oversleeps

And her father-in-law sees her

He will wake her up

Her mother-in-law will make her work beside her

When her husband sees her tears

Instead of consoling her

He’ll curse her

And make her leave the house

She’ll slam the door

The main thing is

Hard times are coming
.

“You know,” Anthony reflected, “women in my country don’t even know how to knit anymore. Would you say that, as a rule, women here really like to sew?”

“I don’t really know about that,” I said, “but you are changing the subject. I will give you another example of courtship.” I thought of the time Tamriko and I were on a train, an old Soviet train, and we were making toasts in the springtime to all the plum blossoms exploding like firecrackers out the window. We were coming home from a conference in Tbilisi and I looked over at her across the seat and said, “This is a train compartment for a couple, yes? But look at the
space between the beds.” She had smiled a little so I moved closer and said, “It is an old Soviet train and I think they did not believe in love then.” Now that I think about it, that was a stupid thing to say. Even Soviet people believed in love. Maybe they believed in love more than anybody else. But we all thought at the time that to bring people closer you needed to have common enemies, and the Soviets were our enemies. Actually, we still think that to bring people together you need common enemies.

Anthony was staring at me but I didn’t want to tell him that story. “Okay, I will give you an example. If a Georgian woman says something intelligent, you whisper to her, “If you were closer I would kiss you.”

“Why? Why would you say that?” he asked in a confounded sort of way. “If she is close enough to whisper, why not just kiss her?”

“Because she will know that you are quoting something from the old times that we say at the table, that when the
tamada
, the toastmaster, says something great we say, ‘If you were closer I would kiss you,’ because he is usually at the far side of the table. Try it. You will see that it works.”

I don’t know if he tried it, but it seemed to me that after that he and Juliet started to become closer. Good for them, of course, but I still didn’t know how to get closer to Tamriko.

A few nights later when Malkhazi got home, he paced back and forth in the kitchen—his face alternately cradled in his hands and then looking up at me.

“I am a slave to the woman,” Malkhazi said, his face in his hands again. “Only her words can calm me. Only
her
words.”

Zuka was helping me fix a heater I had hauled over from my office. We both looked up at him.

“I have read Juliet’s book of English quotes,” Malkhazi announced. “I do not agree with most of them except for one. It says, ‘There is no greater wretchedness than to love someone with all your heart who you know is not worthy of your love.’”

“Have you
ever
met a woman who is worthy of your love?” I asked.

“You have heard me say it before and I will say it again: man cannot live without the woman. Without the woman a man is nothing but a string bean. Tonight I went to a restaurant with Juliet. I made a toast to her. I gave her the highest compliment. I told her that she is as noble as Queen Tamar. But then she became bashful, like a young girl asking for more compliments. I became confused and didn’t know what she wanted of me. So I explained to her that I can’t marry her until I can support her, but that I would be able to soon. I didn’t ask her logistical questions like how many days she could go without food. Instead, I made a toast to the harmony of the soul. I told her that that’s why I never go to the cinematography club because all these European movies point out the weaknesses of humans and not the harmony. Why not watch movies that point out the strengths of characters? But where are those movies? No Georgians are making movies. Only Armenians. So I made a toast to honorable women. And to movies in the future with honorable women. And I told her it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t do the cleaning and the cooking, because she doesn’t like such things. The only thing that matters is if she does the honorable thing. And then the electricity came on for one second and I said, ‘Ah. You see? My words are true.’ But she said, ‘You want me to just live in a tower and weep for the sadness of Georgia?’ Before I could tell her that’s not what I meant, the damn waiter needed my help fixing the stove in the kitchen. When I got back to the table Juliet looked so sad. ‘Why are you so sad?’ I asked her. ‘Because it’s difficult to be a Georgian woman.’ ‘Be happy,’ I said. ‘At least the electricity is on.’”

“But maybe she doesn’t care about being supported,” I said. “Especially in some black market business selling oil.”

“But Slims, how else can I live in these times? Go back to the village and grow corn? Go into animal husbandry? I was thinking about it last year. I read that book about the cattle business, but then I would be alone all the time, herding the animals over the mountains. I’d rather work on the land growing potatoes, but nothing is growing
these days. The villagers just work on the earth and nothing comes up. No, it is better for a man to have power and to feel nostalgic for a lost love than for a man to follow a woman, lose his life power, and then go into despair. That isn’t good for the woman either.”

Malkhazi’s was a provincial mentality, but a practical one. But I was feeling that I was both losing my life power and I hadn’t even followed a woman.

23.

A
S SPRING RIPENED INTO SUMMER
, T
AMRIKO
’
S PIANO PLAYING STOPPED.
The bishop visited everyone’s homes, carving crosses into the walls. I was hoping that the newly carved crosses would provide the kind of renewal that exists in America. But after the bishop visited our flat, I could no longer sleep. I was wide-awake in the middle of the night, when I heard steps outside the door. “Juliet!” I heard someone call.

Juliet was sleeping, so I opened the door. “Anthony!” I said. “Don’t you usually knock?”

“Is Juliet here?” Anthony called again, almost in a fever. A love fever? “I need to learn some new words,” he said.

Had he finally come to learn the Georgian words for love, for marriage? I wondered. But when Juliet came into the kitchen rubbing her eyes he asked her, “Will you teach me the Georgian words for
plastic polyethylene protective coating
?” He was pacing up and down.

“Condom?” she asked.

He stopped pacing and looked at her. “If only,” he said. I was starting to feel a little embarrassed.

“The British people at my company aren’t listening to me. I need to explain this sealant issue in Georgian to those who are actually going to be impacted. Let me explain. Our pipelines come pre-coated, with polyethylene, to protect them from corrosion. They come in
twelve-meter-long sections. The ends of each section have no coating—they have to be bare metal in order to be welded together—but of course they also need to be protected from corrosion. It was recommended that we cover the exposed ends with an epoxy-based product known as SP-2888. It’s the highest scoring product on the market. But epoxy-based paints don’t stick well to polyethylene—there’s a question about its adhesion properties and the coatings haven’t been adequately tested. Ideally, we’d have a pipe and a joint coated in the same material, but BP does allow for some leeway. The problem is we haven’t really known what could happen. We’ve known that this new coating could cause stress corrosion cracks, could cause pipelines to rupture.” He pulled from his pocket a strip of metal piping. “A pipeline is only as strong as its weakest link. I told them this. I showed them a piece of pipe, like this one, and said ‘You think you’ve got coating?’” He tapped it and pieces of paint flickered to the floor. “That’s their coating. I told them I think BP might be making a serious engineering mistake, but they said the cracks were caused by us, the installers—that we didn’t apply the paint during the correct weather conditions. They had told us to heat the pipes before and after we applied it. So we did this and then buried the pipe. We thought that would take care of it, but there has been some leakage.”

I stared at him. “And you tell
us
not to poke holes in the pipeline?” I asked him. “Will it leak into the water?”

“I won’t lie to you. It’s possible.”

“Part of that pipeline goes through Borjomi Park, where they bottle the water. So this pipeline could destroy our only export?” I said. “And what about the river in our village? Will it leak into that too?”

“I thought you said you cared about our nature,” Juliet said. “When we were walking by the sea the other day you said you wanted to learn the words for
real life
.”