Waiting for the Electricity (38 page)

We walked farther on, to Maxunseti, the waterfall near Queen Tamar’s arched stone bridge, and drank from the water there. Malkhazi proffered wild honey, cheese, and the bean breads. We made a huge bonfire.

The trees were heavy with plums. We meandered down to the river. “Here!” Malkhazi demanded to Juliet. “Sit on this rock!”

She told him that the more polite way to say this was, “Would you
please
sit on this rock?”

“Really?” he asked, starting to laugh. “That is the English way? I must say
please
if I want to help you from getting wet? This water is cold! I just don’t want you to catch a cold.”

We opened the bottle of port and Malkhazi drank without making a toast. “I can be an English person too,” he said, sipping experimentally. “I can adjust to anything. I am ready to give up toasting.”

“Please, don’t,” Juliet said.

I sat silently, staring at waterfall gush.

“Juliet,” Malkhazi said. “Do you understand me? I am ready to give up my culture. For you.”

“Please,” I said. “Don’t.”

We all sat in silence. The rocks reflected the shimmers of the river water.

It was late now; the light was gone. We walked back to the car, all of us silent. The drive home was long.

I had fallen asleep but I woke up when Malkhazi pulled up to the entrance of our flat.

“So here we are,” Malkhazi said softly to Juliet. “Sitting in this car in the middle of the night.”

“Here we are,” she said.

“It’s the middle of the night. Juliet, aren’t you ever afraid of me?”

“Well, my brother is asleep in the backseat,” she said.

“If
I
were a woman I would be scared of me. I can’t understand why no woman is ever afraid of me. I am like
kurdi
. I thought Georgian girls were crazy for
kurdi
.”

I opened my eyes and saw him yawn and look at his watch. “It’s three in the morning.” He indicated the first-floor flat where the light was still on. “What are they doing awake? Maybe I will go to sleep right here,” he said, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes. “But unfortunately, I can’t sleep. I must go back to the damn Turkish ship. First, though, I will carry you to your door.”

“No,” she said.

“Why? Give me one good reason why not.”

“Because I have my own legs.”

“That is a weak excuse.”

“Because I am too heavy.”

“I am waiting. You are only giving weak excuses.”

“Because we …”

“I think you were about to say it.”

“Because the whole town would be talking about it the next day.”

“That’s the correct answer,” he said and shook her hand. “But at least I will walk you to the door.”

Neither of them got out of the car. They just sat in the silence. I imagined Armenians being born.

“Those damned Russians who created this car,” he said. “This is supposed to be car for a couple, yes? And look at this space in between the seats.”

I laughed out loud at the two feet between them.

26.

O
N
A
UGUST
19, 2003,
THE
D
AY OF
T
URNING THIS YEAR, THE
weather just got hotter. All the grapes withered and turned to raisins before the harvest. The icons in the churches started weeping again, but this time everyone was so riveted by the politicians arguing on TV that no one noticed. My cousin Ben Hur, in the village, told me later that only when a neighbor’s cow fell off a cliff did the whole village turn off their TV sets and mourn.

For two months we listened to battery-powered radios while the politicians argued. Even Mr. Fax kept the radio on at work. A week before the elections, Fax and I were sitting in the conference room with some Ukrainian soldiers when the news announcer told us that our own local dictator had just arrived back home from Switzerland. The dictator announced over Adjarian radio, “Oh, my people! You lacked electricity while I was away in Switzerland?” In a sweet voice he said to whoever must have been sitting beside him, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Pretending to be a superhero, he must have pulled some sort of lever because he lit up the whole city at once. He spewed electricity into every house, every hut, every barn.

I had thought that Anthony had left the country by now, but in fact he had continued to live (or perhaps hide out) at the Paradise Hotel, and he told me later that even that place got its electricity back. And such a
high quality of electricity it was! The refrigerators didn’t shake. The water, scalding, came all the way up to the eighth floors. The communal vacuum hummed continuously through the flats. Everyone was so saturated with light that after a week we forgot there had ever been darkness. We took hot baths at home, invited people over, ironed our clothes, slept with the lights on. Now that there was light in the hallways, I thought that I might catch a glimpse of Tamriko. But I saw her only once, when she passed me the vacuum.

I even heard someone on the street reciting a snatch of the old socialist poem that Joseph Grishashvili wrote fifty years ago in honor of the opening of the hydroelectric station in Khrami:

I drink in pride a toast to my dear native land!

As I behold electric lamps gleam everywhere
,

To demagogues of foreign countries I declare
—

These piecing rays have struck you blind, you fear the light;

You are the slaves of night, corrupting truth and right
.

No man can cleave these waters with a mighty sword
,

No force can dissever us, no enemy horde!

And with electricity came TV! The entire day we could watch the local station broadcasting the surging violence far away in the capital—young men hoarding stones to throw at the parliament, old women in the market surrounding the electric company’s representative, and other images of the suspicion generated in Tbilisi that usually comes before an election: people marching in front of the parliament, too poor to afford artillery equipment, but with a rage far beyond indignation, a desperate appeal for a regime change that would bring back the electricity once and for all.

Once, many years ago, as a result of remonstrations like these, President Shevardnadze canceled sessions for the day. That afternoon he even resigned. Ten minutes later he changed his mind, promising, however, that he would not run again. But he reneged on his promise and ran again. And still again, for ten years. “And here we go again,” I told Malkhazi.

*

November, the month of the parliamentary elections, is also called the month of truth because it is the month of Saint Giorgi’s Day, our patron saint of Georgia. In Georgia we like holidays very much—so much that we have two or more of every kind. We have many days for women and we have two days for love: the first one is for romantic love, and only romantic songs are allowed to be played over the radio; the second is the Day of Spiritual Love and you don’t have to be in a couple to celebrate that one. We have two Christmases, and two New Years, but that is because we have two calendars. But even before we had two calendars we had two Saint Giorgi Days—the first is to remember the time he died, the second is just to remember him. But this is nothing because we used to celebrate his day
every day
.

To celebrate the first Saint Giorgi’s Day in November, my mother agreed to make honey walnut brittle for Zuka’s class if he cracked the walnuts. As we say in Georgian, “A small walnut can be divided among nine brothers.” It means love is limitlessness. But Zuka had already cracked about seven kilos of walnuts, enough to fortify all of the beer factory district with candy. He had reached the bottom of the walnut barrel. Juliet was singing an old Svani mountain lullaby on her guitar, something about crossing a wide sea with only a little candle, I can’t remember the exact words because right in the middle of it, Zuka cracked open one of the remaining walnuts and there, on the face of the crinkly meat, was a green and blue icon of Saint Giorgi. The image was tiny but I could clearly see him riding his rearing white horse and slaying a dragon with the tip of his spear. My mother stopped stirring the syrup and put the walnut on the table under the icon lamp. She lit another candle, said a little prayer, made us all say a little prayer, and sent Zuka off to the bishop. When Zuka showed him Saint Giorgi, Zuka said that the bishop said solemnly, “Saint Giorgi always leads our troops in battle.” But Zuka said he was tired of wars so he put it back in his pocket. But then the bishop stretched out his palm and demanded, “Give it to me!” But when Zuka fetched the walnut, the icon had disappeared. When he turned his pocket inside out, he saw that the blue and green color had rubbed off on his pocket lining.

Herbalife tells us that since walnuts resemble the shape of the brain, it’s good for your health to fill a sack up with walnuts and balance it on your head for twenty minutes. I tried this once and it made me feel giddy. But the walnut that Zuka found that day was not the
brain
of Saint Giorgi. It was his image.

Neither Zuka nor I was afraid of war but we were afraid of invaders always trying to light fire to our forests. And I was afraid of our military parachutes because they didn’t often open. We had been invaded in our history so many times you would think we would have gotten used to it, though whenever it happened we still ran off to hide in a fortress or a village somewhere. But on the day that Zuka saw the icon of Saint Giorgi on the walnut, and still now, I do not know if Saint Giorgi was warning us of the invasion by our neighbors across the border or a different type of invasion.

Herbalife says that if you take a bath in boiled walnut shells and think about something you are willing to give up the contours of the walnut shells collect your old habits and you are no longer burdened by them. But when I put the shells on to boil, I forgot about them, left them on the stove, and all the walnuts scorched the bottom of the pot. All the contours disintegrated so they would not hold any more histories. I couldn’t help wondering if my history with Tamriko was scorched at the bottom of a pot.

November 23 was the second Saint Giorgi’s Day, and the bells were ringing in the churches. My mother laid the table with a white cloth, and everyone took the day off. On Saint Giorgi’s Day you must give a present to everyone whose name is Giorgi. Most everyone’s name is Giorgi, so everyone was shopping.

For the elections this year, the officials, with the advice of an American think tank, decided to mark everyone who voted with ink.

“But it must be invisible ink,” insisted the bishop.

“Ah yes,” agreed the American think tank. “So that no one can find it in order to wash it off.”

“No,” retorted the bishop. “So they will vote. Only the devil
marks people. People already believe that the politicians are the devil. You think they will vote if they are going to be marked by the devil?”

On Election Day the morning was crisp. November’s leaves lay like ripped orange wrapping paper after a birthday party. I alighted from the bus and walked to the Center for Democracy feeling like an American prepared to participate in my civic duty. Juliet had helped me iron my pants so that, like in Soviet times, they had only one crease. And on the bus I had flipped through my stack of cards on which I had written my favorite English verbs.
To hope
.
To aspire. To strive. To achieve
. A man behind me, some sort of jokester, reading over my shoulder, had announced the name of a girl to everyone on the bus every time I flipped a card: “Nino … Mzia … Salome … Marika,” as if, instead of preparing to vote, I was trying to decide which girl to call. I glared at him and asked, “Are you going to vote?”

Of course he was, he said. He had come all the way from the village. In the village, huddled around the heater, they talk politics so much they even know what George Bush will do next—before Bush himself knows.

At the Center for Democracy I nodded to Geloti, the security guard. In Georgian the name Geloti is given to the first son of a family who has only had daughters. It means, “We have been waiting for you.” But apparently he had not been waiting for me. “So sorry, Slims,” he said. “But we have run out of ballots.”

At first I believed him. I was extremely disappointed and blamed myself for not arriving earlier. After all, paper is very expensive and it is for this reason that Batumi’s publishing house could only afford to publish
Volume I
, up to the letter
N
, of our Georgian/English Dictionary.

But then I saw Geloti open the door for a woman who was traipsing out on extremely high heels, a distant cousin of our local dictator. He helped her to walk down the steps, leaving me to peer through the open door. And that’s when I saw Gocha, mini-mafioso of the peewee golf course, cramming a baker’s dozen of ballots into the box.

I became extremely irritated. So did a man inside who began
yelling that his name and his wife’s name were not on the voter registration list. I looked around for some kind of justice, but it wasn’t easily located. I sat down on the steps and proceeded to watch who was allowed to vote and who was turned away. Niko, the finger puppet theater director, was turned away, probably for the candid remark he had made last week in the newspaper, “I like the dictator. But I like his wife even more.”

After Gocha left the building he was allowed to vote once again, half an hour later, even though he had already voted quite a number of times.

I tried to cheer myself up about not voting by telling myself that I must be a very important person that they would deny me this right. Perhaps our imperious dictator, through one of his assistants, or through a hypersensitive recording device in a ceiling vent, had concluded that since I had gone to America I might have cultivated certain sensibilities toward Tbilisi, the capital, and away from the provincial interests of Batumi.