Waiting for the Electricity (34 page)

“Juliet, we’ve done some good things to help Georgia. We provided a grant to the Bakuriani and Tbilisi botanical gardens to help preserve some of your rare and endangered plant species. We removed the asbestos from a school in Samshvilde.”

“Samshvilde is an Armenian village,” I said.

“In Rustavi we laid thirteen hundred meters of steel pipe for an irrigation system for one of your Svani villages there, the one that was displaced after the earthquake. Look, the point is I’ve told BP about it but they’re not listening to me. In fact, they are threatening to fire me.”

“I thought you said that English people were not corrupt,” Juliet said. “Maybe no part of the world is free of corruption. Maybe the whole world has turned to
jandabashi
.”

“
Jandabashi
?” he asked. “Juliet, you haven’t taught me that word.”

“
Jandabashi
means hell,” I said.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I don’t know what I can do about the sealant right now but there’s a way to divert the pipeline, at least to keep it from going through your village. We just have to claim that it was built on an archaeological site.”

Which is why the next day I drove Anthony in Malkhazi’s red Lada to the village to meet with the archaeologists. We drove out of town, past the row of elms painted white on their trunks, our ancient version of insecticide, and clambered up the potholed highway, trying to avoid the black Mercedes of a New Georgian whose driving habits said, “I own the road, the right side
and
the left side.” I looked over at Anthony, who was looking out the window at the wilderness. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, leaned over him, and polished the window for him.

“What is the meaning of that?” He was pointing at a giant, homemade billboard of a painted cow standing next to a sofa.

“It’s an advertisement to trade your cow for some furniture,” I said.

When we passed a billboard announcing in big red letters the kidnapping of a Spanish soccer player I said, “Don’t worry. It’s a joke.”

“Kidnapping is no laughing matter,” he said.

“Don’t look at the road then,” I told him. “It’s not beautiful. Look at the mountains instead.”

I turned a corner a little too fast and saw a policeman who had been hiding around the bend. He pointed his orange baton at me and I had to pull over. I pulled my documents out from the sun visor and
got out. “You already took my driver’s license,” I told him. “What else do you want?”

“Have you been drinking?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Why is your passenger wearing a seatbelt then?”

I got back in the car. “Anthony, please take off your seatbelt. Otherwise, the police will think I’ve been drinking.”

But then I had another problem. Anthony refused to ride with me without a seatbelt. “What is the problem? I’m a good driver.” But still he wouldn’t take off his seatbelt.

We drove in silence, I irritated and he, well, I don’t know what he was thinking.

When we got close to my village I turned off the main highway and onto a dirt road. “Now we are entering the time before Christ,” I told him. “Perhaps you would like to see one of our famous fortresses. Tourists like to see this place.”

I knew the fortress where Jesus’s shirt was buried was past the waterfall, but when we got there, the road was blocked by three big guys with their arms crossed over their chests, looking like statues of ancient kings. “This is the border,” they growled. “You can’t go beyond this place.”

“The border is farther down the road,” I said.

“Don’t cross this place if you like your life. Beyond here is a war zone,” they said. But they were only joking because they were fishing and didn’t want to move their cars out of the road.

We parked behind them and got out. Anthony walked around the old fortress, peeking under the old sheets of corrugated metal that had been haphazardly thrown across the ditches to cover up all the ancient civilizations. Anthony sat down on a stone and stared at the ground, looking sad all of a sudden.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked him.

“You had pipes in Georgia before they were even invented in the rest of the world. And now we’re helping
you
?”

“Don’t be sad,” I told him. “You’re not helping us
that
much.”

It was late in the day that we drove up the road that unraveled
up the mountain. The mountains towered on both sides of us, lost in their thoughts, the mist shrouding their peaks in revelations that I tried to remember.

We rumbled past the old familiar dwellings my cousins had built into the hillside, made almost entirely of windows, glittering in the sundown. Long ago my grandparents had planked together pine and cedar to construct these houses. When the Soviet Union arrived and was about to take all their money, they spent it all on beds and goose down quilts. When the government asked what all the extra beds were for they said, “Our guests.” Since then, my uncle and my grandfather have always been waiting for a guest.

I was a little worried what kind of mood my grandfather would be in, though. He usually loved guests but he hated them if he had nothing to feed them. He was sitting at the picnic table in the yard with the village chairman. Both of them were shirtless and were drinking from a barrel of homemade
chacha
.

“Is that Lenin tattooed on his chest?” Anthony asked.

“Lenin and Stalin,” I said.

“He must have been really devoted to them.”

“It seems that way, though actually he tattooed them there so that if he ever went to prison they wouldn’t be able to shoot him in the chest. If they start fighting, don’t interfere,” I warned Anthony.

“How are you today?” I called to my grandfather from the gate.

“Bad. I’m dying. And we already drank all the wine this year.”

“What’s the matter with him?” Anthony asked.

“He says he’s dying, but he always says that,” I reassured Anthony.

In the house my aunt and uncle were arguing, but when she saw Anthony she stopped all her yelling and dragged a bed out to the balcony. Pointing at it, she commanded, “Repose!” It was the only word in English she knew.

My aunt removed her old guitar from the wall. She had won it in a Soviet singing contest and it was made from good cherrywood—but all the ivory was missing. She set to work peeling apples and then fed Anthony the slices from her hands. “Should I play him a song?” she asked.

“Don’t disturb the guest,” my grandfather yelled from the strawberry patch below. “Maybe he doesn’t want to hear your songs.”

My aunt began to play anyway.

Duduba my instrument

You are the remedy

for my soul

You, the medicine of all burnt souls

When I listen to you, sweet duduba

I can’t hide my love

my eyes fill with tears

and sad thoughts come to my mind

My heart trembles

My feelings come to my throat

and the bowl of silence explodes

my blood becomes warmer listening to you

and flows through my body

My sweet-talking instrument

Why are you so good?

You are the guide of my life
.

When she finished I told my aunt that we were eating with the anthropologists but she pushed Anthony and me into her kitchen and wrestled us onto the little chairs that she had borrowed from the kindergarten. “Tell him to eat some more fruit. Tell him the real reason you come back to the village is to help with your digestion because you eat so much macaroni in the city.”

In a cabinet she found a hoarded plastic bottle of Odessa wine and poured us cupfuls so that we could toast to her household.

The post of the Georgian archaeologist, historically, has always been a coveted position—the handkerchief tied so dapperly around the neck inspired envy in even the most modest of men. In the village it was clear that the archaeologists didn’t want to spend all their time at the Center
for Democracy competing for funds from nongovernmental organizations, or at the Maritime Ministry of Law stealing faxes. Here in the village they were more comfortable in their natural habitat. They had taken over an old government building located between what used to be the library and the village’s parliament building, both of them overgrown with grapevines and wild roses stretching all over the walls, in every direction, even over the aluminum statue of Stalin waving flirtatiously at us.

A group of women, already waiting for us, pushed the unruly grapevines aside on the balcony and waved like the mustached one. The dogs and chickens were yelping and clucking, and the archaeologists were making the noises that archaeologists make.

“
Galmarjos! Galmarjos
!” Zaliko was yelling, running down the stairs and hurrying toward us in the same way he hurries toward Mr. Fax’s fax machine.

“This is my friend,” I told Anthony, patting the back of Zaliko’s rotund shape. “He discovered the one-and-a-half-million-year-old remains of a giraffe in Eastern Georgia.”

“And this is our river,” Zaliko said, pointing to a muddy conduit. “That river marks the end of the Ottoman Empire. Over there was the Persian Empire.” We looked across the river at some branches sticking out of the gelid mud.

We clumped up the shaky wooden stairs to a table on the balcony laden with fragrant dishes: chicken in walnut sauce, potato stew with chunks of marinated buffalo, mixed vegetable medleys with a layer of bronze oil on top, beet salads already turning the cream purple, tomato salads sliced with peppers and herbs, coriander chutneys, red peppers stuffed with rice and olives, mutton
pilov
. The third layer of plates was a pastry of noodle and cheese. The food on the table wasn’t just food but pure philosophy. And now the women were bringing hot, fried corn porridge stuffed with sulguni cheese.

But there at the far end of the table I saw Gocha. How had he gotten here? He turned to Anthony and smiled at him with his white dental smile, as if they belonged to the same bowling club.

That evening sitting at the Institute of Archaeology when Zaliko was giving the first toast to peace, every time I glanced at Gocha I
could feel my lip involuntarily curl up as if I had just eaten a pickle. But then I remembered one of the English quotes from Juliet’s book of famous sayings: “The opposite of love is not hatred but indifference.” So I was able to forget about him.

“And to friendship between our two countries,” continued Zaliko.

And then a toast to our Georgian land. I had purposely left my drinking horn at home because whenever I drink Georgian wine I start to forget about my ambitions. It is a very bad habit—especially at a meeting of archaeologists where one is hoping to intervene and stop the pipeline from creating any more destruction. Zaliko raised his glass and turned to Anthony, “This wine comes from our nature. The only problem is that the men don’t have jobs here. And the Jehovah’s Witnesses are invading us. But that is another problem not for this evening.”

“What is Zaliko getting at?” I heard Gocha say to someone else. “We are from the city, not the village.”

How impolite, I thought. Once and for all I will crash a chair over his head tonight.

“The problem,” I told Gocha, “is that he’s not a train signal. You can’t just stop him with a lever.”

The archaeologists now began to express their pleasure that finally a foreigner was showing interest in Georgian archaeology.

“Do they know that I’m not an archaeologist?” Anthony whispered to me.

But then to my dismay, Gocha began to toast the pipeline, explaining how it had funded their most recent archaeological excavation. And then suddenly they were all toasting to the past, present, and future excavations. A toast to the corn that grew on top of the graves of the excavation, for archaeology in general, and to the health of all archaeologists.

The wine from my village was a glacier indolently melting into a green, swollen river. It was softened sunlight, the mother of autumn. I raised my glass and told Anthony, “Real men only drink white wine.”

More toasts to all the dead people who ever worked in archaeology, and then Zaliko talked about the time his car had gotten stuck in the mud and, upon removing the tire, he’d discovered an ancient pottery cup still in one piece. “Slims!” Zaliko cried, “Tell Anthony to lift his cup. Tell him I found that cup under my tire. It’s fifteen hundred years old.”

And then toasts to the shovels and picks and brushes, and to the cars that carried the archaeologists. Momentarily, I forgot about why we were there and stood up and toasted to the community electric meter that we might one day build in our village. Little cups of coffee were brought and young men pumped out more wine from amphoras in the earth, while their little brothers watched the procedure, and their grandfathers gathered round, supervising.

The children observed Anthony from a distance. “You see how well-behaved these children are?” I asked him. “They wait until we have finished eating to eat their own meal. They are very bright too. The kids in the town know only cards and backgammon.” But Anthony wasn’t listening. He was raising his glass and asking for more wine. He was really taking his fate into his own hands! Standing up he sounded like a priest. “We have gathered here today to move your country forward, to move past nepotism. With the proper regulations we can manage to divert the pipeline from going through your village. Since it’s built on an archaeological site …”

Zaliko suddenly stood up and said, “I commend you in your efforts but as you know, in our country the man proposes and the government disposes. For years we have asked the government to fund our archaeological projects. Only the international companies responsible for the pipeline have provided the funds for our work to continue.”

At this the men began performing unique drinking feats, clutching four glasses above their heads, a finger in each, the apricot-colored wine waterfalling into each glass like melted gold until the final one gushed into their throats.