Waiting for the Electricity (43 page)

“You don’t have to fit them all in,” I suggested.

She shrugged and put one in her hair. I had told Hillary that it was a sin to think one thing, speak another, and do another, and I had vowed that I would try not to do this, but I didn’t think I should speak my current thought aloud.

But then Tamriko forced me to. She turned to me and asked, “What are you thinking?”

I quickly tried to think of something else, but I couldn’t. “Is it true that Georgian girls still don’t believe in sex before marriage?” I asked her.

“Yes, but some Georgian girls don’t believe in marriage anymore,” she said sadly. Oh no! The tears. The woman always overpowers the man with the hydraulic force of her tears!

“Are you crying because Gocha is in jail?” I asked.

“Oh no, it’s not that. He became a different person. I couldn’t be with the person he became. Maybe I’m sad because people change so much these days. The last time I was with him he brought me flowers too. We were at the cafe in the port. But his eyes were
just scanning over the white plastic tables to see what other friends he could kiss, besides me. He bought me flowers from the flower lady but he gave them to all the women sitting at the table, throwing me mine on my plate. When I looked into his eyes they had that cold look, the same look as the customs inspector at the border with Turkey, so accustomed to taking bribes that I don’t think he feels the pang in his conscience anymore.”

I didn’t tell her that maybe some people don’t change, they just become more of themselves. Instead I said, “Do you want to get out of here?” So we went to the market and bought a kilo of one long strip of apricot fruit roll-up. We walked along the boulevard and our political discussions became heady like
prianiki
, Russian gingerbread. And then, afterwards:
shashliki
, fireworks, and singing with Gocha’s mafioso karaoke machine on his peewee golf course. Everyone was using it now that he wasn’t there.

In Tamriko’s bedroom there was the glow-in-the-dark Jimi Hendrix poster I had given her a long time ago on the wall—it had lost all its glow. But the pop-up
Kama Sutra
book on the bedside table still popped up!

I thought about how some stories save us and other stories can kill us. I remembered a film I had once seen about what happens in the mountains of Svanetia. I think it wasn’t even a Georgian story. I think they borrowed it from a Norwegian myth, but maybe Georgians had read the myth and liked it and adopted it as their own. I went into the kitchen and rummaged through the drawers for a knife. I looked for the biggest one but I could only find her cucumber-peeling knife. I wished I had a sword, the male one, shaped like a cross, not the Turkish kind curved like the moon. I sharpened the knife on the bottom of a teacup. I brought it back to the bedroom, where Tamriko hunched hesitantly on a chair. I threw the knife in the middle of the bed and said, “If I cross that knife you can kill me with it in the morning.”

She looked at me and smiled. “But what if I cross that knife.”

“Then you’ll have to marry me.”

In the middle of the night I threw it off the bed. “Let’s just get rid of the damn knife!”

29.

O
N THE
I
NTERNET
, I
READ ABOUT A NEW MOVEMENT
. I
N MOST OF THE
world’s poor countries, people are moving from the villages to the cities. But in Eastern Europe (at least according to the Internet) there is a movement called village syndrome, where people from the industrial cities are moving back to the villages. They go back to the village and buy a nice house. Maybe only six people live in the village. There is no market. Nothing. They go back to the land and grow vegetables and watch the chickens lay eggs. Do woodwork. They sit in front of a fireplace eating Albanian gypsy sausages and say, “Here is some fresh pasta for you right now!”

That’s why I decided to invent in Georgia the American weekend, so that at the end of every week I could go back to the fields to work, not only to hoe the corn, but to help repair the electrical meters that had been sitting broken for fourteen years. The whole village had finally agreed to be united by a communal meter. The meter even helped the priest and the imam get along better. Instead of competing about who could sing the loudest, they helped each other translate the instructions off the Internet on how to repair each meter and connect them communally. It is amazing that their religious dispute, which could not be settled by relatives, was resolved with the help of a metal box. Now the old men were raising toasts to the communal meters.

In the village everyday is the same. This chattering life. This heavy seaward slowness. The men start playing backgammon at nine a.m., hunching around the picnic tables in the yard. By eleven they’ve removed their shirts. At noon their wives bring them homemade muskmelon vodka, black bread, and salted cucumbers. When they begin to sing, women clap from their open windows.

But by one o’clock all is quiet. Women have gathered in the living rooms in their black mourning robes. My aunt grinds Turkish coffee on her lap. Men come in from the cornfields wiping their brows. Even their lazy brothers-in-law wake up from their naps. It is time to watch
Blanca’s Widow
, the Brazilian serial.

When my aunt started daubing her eyes over the bronze men and the scantily clad women loving each other, I asked her, “What do you think about all the kissing those Brazilians do outside of marriage?”

“That’s okay. That’s their tradition,” she said.

My aunt was wearing new purple plastic slippers, a black woolen skirt, and blue stockings bunched at the ankles, and caressing a baby chicken in her palm. She put the chick down and pointed at her hands, laughing at the purple stains from the plum sauce she had been squeezing.

“Your Tamriko brought me a new chicken,” she said. The neighbor Soso, on the piano, now accompanied my aunt for a duet of Kazbegi mountain songs. I told Tamriko, “Here in the village is nothing. No technology. No money. No work. But do you like the way our frogs sing?”

We sang with the frogs, “I thank my heart because it can love so well,” and we sang to each other, “No one can so charmingly as I express how I love you.”

“Let’s make a toast to the twenty-two Gurulians who brought a hundred horses to America a long time ago,” I said. We toasted to that, and to the very moment we made the decision that led us to where we are today. We toasted to the new sealant on the pipeline. We toasted to the old woman who had recently died in the village. We toasted to the unemployed men who had time to make her a coffin from the scrap metal at a rich man’s construction site. We toasted to
freedom, to children that they should have a better future, to the roots of the hazelnut trees. We toasted to journeys; to friendship, whatever that meant; and to native people everywhere. I toasted to Parajanov, my favorite film director, even though some say he is Armenian. And then we toasted to, “Oh, hollyhocks,” Tamriko said. “I’m tired of toasting. Let the reader fill in the blank________________.”

We toasted until early dawn and my strength started to ebb. It was that time in the morning when everything becomes giddy and unrevealed truths can no longer hide, so we began to sing those songs that are jokes but that have a little bit of truth left in them. Tamriko sang to me, “I waited for you, but maybe you were lost because, you know, your strength is kind of weak.” Of course it couldn’t have been a real love song. Who sings real love songs so early in the morning?

And then it was time for us to leave and go to the next house. But first, at the door, Tamriko’s relatives were calling, “Goodbye. Safe journey. May everything be good for you.” And then again on the balcony, “Come again soon. You’re a good girl. You’re a good boy. Be well!” Waving and kissing and shouting our names.

Back in Batumi I was very surprised to see a garbageman sweeping the streets early one morning. He was young, only twenty-two or twenty-three. He even wore a uniform. Usually, only the old men would do that kind of work. The young men were too proud. He had started winking at Juliet on the balcony.

“I’m going to marry a garbageman,” Juliet said to Malkhazi, trying to provoke him.

“Oh, how very romantic,” Malkhazi said. “You can be a garbage woman. Sit beside him ringing the little bell.”

“If he has a good salary, what’s the problem?” my mother said.

“What do you think will save Georgia?” I asked Malkhazi.

“The only thing that will save Georgia is if everyone asks that question,” Malkhazi said. “In ten years Georgia will either be very good or it will be very bad. Who can tell? You heard the antidrug concert
they had in the boulevard last night, sponsored by the cell phone company? All night they were singing, ‘Choose life.’ Okay, so I choose life. Then what? What is this life?”

At Batumi’s market the women were yelling, “Welcome. Come buy my meat. Come look at my meat. I know you want the meat. I killed it this morning. You won’t find fresher. All is well with my meat.” So many sellers but no one was buying.

“How much is it?” Tamriko asked.

“Eh?” asked the vendor but Tamriko had already turned away. “Go to hell! Why did you ask how much it is if you’re not going to buy it?”

Everything anyone would ever need was there. Two kinds of cheese—imeruli and sulguni—walnuts,
churchella
, all fruits, figs, peaches, cans of peas, ketchup, sunflower oil, olives, hard candies, cutting boards, and backgammon sets. But we were in the meat section because Malkhazi knows how to buy meat. He is Meat Master Technologue. He buys the meat that looks like Snickers bars, layers of caramel-colored fat and layers of meat. He can tell by the color of the fat when it was killed. He can tell by the smell and the way the fat rolls which mountain or valley it came from. He picks it up, handles it, asks the woman to trim off just an inch of fat. She does so, smiling insipidly, holding the knife high in the air. A half-inch of fat remains. Juliet wanted the meat that had been marinating in the hot spices of
adjika
. “
Adjika
.
Adjika
,” Malkhazi said scornfully. “They only add these spices to hide the color of it, to hide the age.” He bought her a little bag of
adjika
-marinated meat anyway.

We went to the botanical garden. Malkhazi and I sat in the front and Juliet and Tamriko sat in the back. First we drove through the Himalayan region, past the demonstration Himalayan grasses. Then we drove through Australia, Northeast Asia, and North America, past crumbling sanatoriums, ponds full of oriental fish, pine forests, palms, greenhouses growing never-ripening banana trees, and then the dry foliage of Eastern Turkey.

“Eastern Turkey has no civilization,” I said. “But if you look around, every kind of flower grows here in this garden. We have New York flowers. Flowers from China. I think that’s why when foreigners come, they feel so at home here.”

In the subtropical jungle of Cuba, thick hawsers of vine thunked our car. Malkhazi turned up the volume of his Cuban music coming from the tape player: Buena Vista Social Club, appropriated from a Scottish sailor he had met at the port. We parked at the end of the road and walked to the cove, near the railway tunnel, the one that used to be Stalin’s secret vacation spot. Malkhazi built a fire, a little stick tipi. He blew on it, standing over it tenderly. “It’s too hot,” he said. He threw salt on it to quench it and then whittled some sticks and plunged them through the thick hunks of meat, slowly turning them over the heat. What were the flavors? Salt and smoke. But sweet as a freshly killed chicken. “It doesn’t even need plum sauce,” Malkhazi said, holding the meat up, juices dripping.

“It’s like candy,” Juliet said. “It melts. I don’t need wine with this meat. I’m drunk already.”

“Me too,” Tamriko said. For me, pulling off this meat from the stick with my teeth made me feel as if I were a twelth-century nobleman after an invader had sacked my castle, and I had just come across a church builder squaring boulders in a little wood.

“Now for Juliet’s meat,” Malkhazi said. He blew at the fire to wake it up and threw the orange-stained
adjika
meat on it. “Juliet, we used all the salt. Oh, but we don’t need salt. You like this pre-marinated.
Adjika
,” Malkhazi said scornfully. “
Adjika
,
adjika
,” he repeated and shook his head.

“You’re cooking it for a long time on purpose so it will be tough,” Juliet said.

When he had finished cooking Juliet’s meat, he brought us the little precut pieces on some newspaper. But we were already full.

“What do you think of this meat?” I asked Malkhazi.

“It’s like candy,” he said. “Like gum.”

“But the flavor is still good if you lick it—lick off the
adjika
,” Juliet said.

“Ah? You see?” Malkhazi wailed. “Why didn’t you
listen
to me? You should listen to me.” Now, he was slaughtering the watermelon as if it were a calf. He lifted half the watermelon to his mouth and let the juice fall into it. Shook the juice off his fingers. He lay down in the grass. He pulled the weeds up by the roots, the ones near his head, throwing green-speckled foliage at Juliet. “Actually, I should have listened to you,” he said.

She grabbed some watermelon entrails and threw them at him. Watermelon guts landed on his neck. He swatted them off and threw a tomato at her, a few tomatoes. She threw more watermelon at him, teardrop sized. His hair was now wet with watermelon. Her back was grubby with grass roots.

I pulled up some grass to throw at Tamriko but she was holding her guitar. “Don’t you dare,” she said.

Malkhazi went to the spring and washed his face, his neck, his head. He threw some of the water at Juliet. She was laughing and shrieking. She washed her hands and wiped them off on the grass. Juliet took Tamriko’s guitar and started playing while Tamriko sang along: