Waiting for the Electricity (4 page)
But when people had stopped getting married, and Malkhazi lost his job, we dreamed of feeling the true nature of other places, hiding on an oil train headed to Kazakhstan and joining the Central Asian hash industry. Malkhazi’s uncle in the village had taught us how to roll marijuana across our palms until they turned black: had described the whole procedure, how the women run naked through the oily fields of the steppe, the finest resin sticking to their bodies (the second quality resin is that which sticks to the horses). But instead we had squandered most of the past summer sprawled on the cobbled beach, listening to the new punk bands from Tbilisi on Malkhazi’s radio. The lyrics asked God to save Georgia’s soul, complained that there is no peace without bloody war, and that the world is tired of stupid needlework. Now we dreamed of getting a job at the port, working for an air-conditioning company, or a Swedish appliance manufacturer, a postal service, anything reliable.
“What about getting your job back at the casino?” I asked him.
“Nugzar, the owner, said I milked too many buffalo. He said that’s why the cards always slipped out of my hands.”
“What about the job you were offered in the forest?” I asked him.
“I don’t want to be a woodchopper!” he said. “I am tired of selling our trees to Turkey so they can build up their towns.”
“But I will never get a visa to leave this country if they find out I aided in a kidnapping.”
“I told you, it’s better not to leave. Anyway, the Englishman doesn’t speak Georgian so I need your English.”
“But I’m tired of criminal activity,” I said. “I was robbed again today.”
“Again?” Malkhazi said. He had a strange habit of blaming me
every time I was robbed. “Anyway, the Englishman’s name is Anthony. He is having problems with the pipeline. I explained to him how the pipeline is set to run through our village, how we could help him out. He already agreed to come to dinner tomorrow, for the Feast of the Assumption.”
T
HE WIND OVER THE SEA WAS NOW BUILDING IN STRENGTH—THE WAVES
growing more impatient—carrying away the sound of the hefty mothers calling to their children to come in from swimming, reminding their children of the date, that it was the nineteenth of August, and time to leave the water.
I tuned Malkhazi’s radio to the jazz station, tucked it under my arm just as the rain began to plummet. We ran home along the water’s edge, cutting through the schoolyard before the floods moated our neighborhood.
We live in Piv Zavod, the beer factory district, in a block of concrete flats built in the 1970s. Although, because the beer factory closed down after the Soviet Union collapsed, it should really be called the oil train district because all the oil trains screech and bang together in our backyard in the middle of the night. We are located in Row 8 Building 7, but we don’t really have an address. If anyone wants to find us he can just call out, “Makashvili!” And again, “Makashvili!” Everyone knows where we live.
Actually, if anyone wants to find us he can look for the building with the most disarrayed laundry hanging from it. The Sadzaglishvilis, who live above us, always drape their laundry right in front of our windows, without any order. The Makashvili name comes from the
word meaning, “to dream,” but the Sadzaglishvili name comes from the word meaning “sons of a disorganized family.”
As we ran inside, the rain poured down sounding like the Great Toastmaster’s giant applause. The only one doggedly unaffected by the weather was Batumi’s new bishop, Father Mikhail. He had recently conscripted a whole clan of “groupies,” as we called them, to help him build his twelfth-century hut, directly across from our flat. They had collected stones from the riverbed, transported them across town in a donkey cart, and were laying one boulder on top of another, smudging the cracks with plaster.
“Keep building!” we heard Father Mikhail intoning.
Malkhazi cupped his hand and shouted out the window, “Build!”
“Such twelfth-century fervor!” my mother exclaimed to Guliko, the kindergarten director, over on the next balcony.
“What does he think he is trying to do? Build something?” Guliko yelled back, expressing the current disbelief system that anyone would try to do anything as audacious as build something.
“Even Juliet is helping out!” Malkhazi scowled.
I looked out the window. My sister mingled on the periphery of the blessing seekers, making a little question mark in the mud with her boot. Ever since she had watched that new movie playing at Batumi’s cinematography club,
Jeanne D’Arc
, she had developed a Joan of Arc complex. She wore her black turtleneck sweater, ate
lobiani
—bean bread—and frequented the new soybean restaurant near the university on Wednesdays and Fridays, the fasting days.
Malkhazi took off his shirt, draped it over a kitchen chair, removed his pants, and stood in his shorts by the balcony door ripping his oil-stained, Turkish jeans to shreds, which, in turn, were staining his fingers blue. “Look how cheap these jeans are,” he said. In Georgia sometimes you feel like poking holes in things. It’s supposed to mean you’re in love. The nineteenth-century poet Chavchavadze says, “Georgian love is an injury.”
While Malkhazi dropped strips of his jeans over the railing, one by one, I noticed more and more people across the courtyard gathering
around the bishop. Perhaps some wanted to examine up close his stone building methods. Others seemed to be seeking his benedictions. “He’s like a rock star,” said Malkhazi, whose bare legs were splotched with oil, like a pied cow, the German variety that produces excellent beef, not the Georgian species better suited for butter.
“Father Mikhail says miracles are happening these days,” my mother said from the stove. “He says the icons in the churches have started to weep for Georgia. Malkhazi, have you heard that the icons have started to weep?”
“It’s not a good sign,” Malkhazi said. “In history, they’ve always wept before an invasion.”
“This new Christianity makes me carsick,” I said and filled a pot with water to boil some macaroni. “I think I’ll change my religion.”
“Hmm,” Malkhazi said and scratched his head. “How can a Georgian man change his religion?”
“I was only joking!”
“In every joke is a little bit of truth,” he said.
My mother turned to me. “Slims,” she said. “When you were in the village did you repair the corn lofts?”
“Yes, Deyda,” I said.
“When your father was alive,” my mother said huffily, “the corn lofts never needed fixing. Oh! If only your father were alive he would have harvested the corn long ago. This one just doesn’t like to work.” She pointed at me, sitting on the couch, looking up words in the English/Georgian dictionary.
I wanted to continue my letter to Hillary but it was difficult to find a quiet place to concentrate because at home everyone was always interrupting and forcing each other to eat soup or some other food. And everyone was so loud. I think the biggest problem in Georgia is noise pollution.
When my sister Juliet came home she changed out of the black Victorian dress she was required to wear for the English faculty at the university and into a housedress that made her resemble a buccaneer from Iran. Then she put on the bandit hat that our great-grandmother
had worn during the Soviet Revolution. Juliet began wearing that hat after someone stole her umbrella, but continued to wear it because it made her feel like some sort of a classical bandit. She and my mother stood over the stove together concocting a skin lotion made from the cream of a goat and a bundle of rosemary.
I looked around the kitchen to try to describe to Hillary more details on how we live. We had too much furniture: the same huge China cabinet from Soviet times with glossy orange wood, staunchly situated against the wall, feebly proclaiming, “Stability!” Someone had stuck a cardboard candy box lid with a picture of blue carnations on the inside of the window of the oven door. The oven didn’t work; we only used the stovetop. The tablecloth was not on the table. I don’t know where my mother keeps the tablecloth. On the wall were paintings of palm trees and the sea. Juliet’s guitar hung on the wall, next to a hollowed-out gourd for pouring wine and a metal casting of our great medieval epic poet, Rustaveli, dressed up in his twelfth-century knight outfit. A calendar of images from the new pipeline construction in Borjomi, published by the local oil company, hung next to that.
But then I realized that Hillary might not be so interested in our kitchen.
Contrary to my mother’s beliefs, I wasn’t lazy—the main problem was our business climate.
Dear Hillary
,
Let me explain to You more about our business climate. The local dictator here has a monopoly on all the businesses: he raises ostriches for the eggs, and goats for their sweet milk. Everyone buys his sweet milk because he plays Viennese waltzes to them during the milking. He also has over one hundred Caucasian dogs for … i don’t know, the good feeling in his heart. About ancient origin of Caucasian sheepdog: it is pride of all peoples of Transcaucasia and Caucasus, but at the same time it is the trouble of these peoples. After the Soviet Union broke, each of the sovereign republics tried to appropriate to herself the right of the founder of this breed. What new names are not thought up? Arsak’s dog? Longhaired Georgian wolfhound? Azerbaijan Gurdbasar? Alanian dog? In each area and each village the name is dispersed and it will become a tragedy for the breed. Have You an opinion on the name it should adhere to? Once when our dictator was on vacation to Switzerland, his favorite dog refused to eat so his guards sent the dog to him. As You can see, this illustrates the love between a man and his dog
.
Since Juliet taught English at the university, I asked her if I could read her what I had written to Hillary so far. I was hoping she could help me out with the grammar.
She said she would be happy to but when I finished reading the whole thing to her she said only, “Do you think Hillary is so interested in dogs?”
“It’s not only about dogs but about businesses,” I said.
“If you are trying to write a business letter to Hillary Clinton, I think you must write straight and directly to the point.”
“Well, how do I know what to write to Americans about if I’ve never met one or been to their country?”
“Well, Hillary’s never met you either,” Juliet said. “She’s probably never even heard of Georgia. You should give her a more panoramic perspective.”
“If she wants a more panoramic perspective she can look it up on the Internet,” I said. “But what about the English? The grammar.”
She looked it over. “
i
should to be capitalized,” she said. “And
You
should be lowercase.”
“But that is very impolite,” I said.
“Why write anything if you cannot write the truth?” Malkhazi interjected. “Words are nothing because you can lie or hide something behind them, like your boss does, and it’s going to be difficult to get any guarantee that what someone is saying is the truth. Especially in the city. It’s better to rely on instincts, emotions, feelings, and good
experiences with friendly people because they don’t have the words to cheat. Slims, if you want to write a love letter to Hillary, you should go back to the village. Only in the village is where you can find any true love left in this world.”
“I’m trying to ask America for some help. Otherwise we’re all going to end up like you,” I said, “supporting ourselves on criminal activity.”
“I told you it’s a good plan,” Malkhazi said. “It’s not a criminal activity.”
“America! Dollars! That’s all these young people think about,” complained my mother, who was pounding the rosemary with a pestle in the mortar. “First it was rubles, and now dollars. What about our own dear little lari?
Opa
!”
“What is it?” Juliet asked.
“The pestle broke!” my mother said. Then she lost herself in her usual tirade about how all intelligent Georgians were leaving, how our population was diminishing. “Just like the anchovy population,” she said. “Because of that dangerous American lady.” She was referring to the
Mnemiopsis leidyi
, the alien jellyfish that had invaded our sea a decade ago, after so many oil ships sank and disrupted the pH balance.
“
I
don’t want to go to America,” Malkhazi said and brought his soup bowl to the sink. “And I’m sick of this complaining. It’s not interesting.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to kidnap a wife,” he said, strapping on his boots.
“Don’t go somewhere!” my mother yelled after Malkhazi. “I need your help to bottle the plums.” But Malkhazi was already out the door, running away.
“O! Nightmare, nightmare, they don’t like to work,” my mother said. And then she stuck her spoon in the plum jam and drowned a bee.
T
HE NEXT MORNING THE TORRENT OF RAIN HAD STOPPED, AND
I
SAT
outside the Paradise Cafe struggling over the words in another letter to Hillary. I watched a raindrop fall from the iron chain of a shopkeeper’s sign. The sky was streaked with a combination of gray and white—the favorite color of medieval horses.
What I really wanted to describe to Hillary was how we didn’t used to steal copper out of the electrical wires or smash up the state’s electric meters with hammers. When we were younger the only thing we ever beat were the mulberry branches in order to feed their leaves to the silkworms. My father had hoped that our village would one day become a great communist hero village increasing the state productivity of silkworm products. He was the one who had organized our silkworm collective when the village Soviet was passing around those books with Lenin’s picture that we now use as toilet paper in the outhouse. But since all the silkworms had died, and everyone was moving from the villages to the town, everything was changing. Even Malkhazi had started pacing around with a sort of strut, always making sure his boots were polished, and quoting lines from Al Pacino.
