Waiting for the Electricity (5 page)

But we Makashvilis are not actors, I reminded myself. Especially we are not actors from the remake of that religious movie about Joan of Arc.

We don’t need the Bible, I concluded. We don’t need it in the sense of using it for any kind of advice anymore. We already know who we are, viscerally, without any thought. Our self-knowledge stemmed from the experience of having lost everything after the Soviet Union collapsed, and yet, we are still here. We remain.

I looked across the water, toward the United States—actually Bulgaria was on the other side of the sea, but I looked farther west than that, and pleaded to Hillary, “What else can I do in this tiny town where the only thing to do is to stand around looking at the dirt, argue about who it belongs to, play backgammon with the taxi drivers, or kick around pieces of metal pretending to be a shy and concentrated man who can’t talk about love without wine?” I could feel myself caving. I decided that I would help Malkhazi kidnap the pipeline worker after all.

Actually, it was overnight that my mind had changed. I had fallen asleep on the coach, and I suspect that when Malkhazi came home he used his
Chidaoba
—Georgian martial arts—crystal gazer hypnotizing power on me, which he had once learned at a Soviet pioneer camp, because when I woke up all I could think about was how useful it would be if we had a car. We could buy a kilo of chewing gum, drive to Siberia with a trunkful of grapes, and use the profits to repossess my uncle’s wine factory, which we’d lost during independence. We could follow in the tracks of my father and become drivers, and to be a driver was really a noble profession. We could give rides to widows for free. We could bring watermelons to the villages, and grain. I could help weave Georgia back together again into a network. “All right,” I had told Malkhazi that morning. “I’ll help you kidnap the Englishman.”

I studied the pamphlet for tourists I had obtained from Batumi’s Center for Democracy. It said:

Although kidnapping occasionally occurs in Georgia, it is only a significant risk in a few of the trouble-spots (notably Abkhazia and the Chechen border, and to a lesser extent in Svanetia and South Ossetia). Just as the intense nature of Georgian hospitality can sometimes feel like kidnapping, most reported cases of kidnapping in Georgia turn out to be less sinister than in other societies. Perhaps more dangerous are the driving habits. Georgia does not have an emergency road service
.

I began a new letter:

Hillary, have you ever given much thought for our need of tow trucks?

(Or, had she given much thought to the fact that our roads were so filled with potholes that even very
good
kidnappers of pipeline workers couldn’t make a fast action getaway plan while driving in a broken-down Lada being chased by the Georgian International Oil Association in
their
decrepit old Lada. No, not very exciting, not like that James Bond film about the oil pipeline.)

More importantly Hillary, have you heard the story of our
kurdi,
our Georgian mafiosi? It’s a story we tell in the kitchen about how after 1917 Russian Revolution, Georgians went to Italy and started Italian mafia. It is long story with many
son-of-this
and
son-of-that.
We have no real
kurdi
left now, only kids playing
kurdi
to get drugs, not to start a furniture business or something useful to support themselves. I worry that my little brother Zuka is spending time on the street with the imitation
kurdi,
the drug dealers. My mother is all the time complaining about this. But now is new trend. Real
kurdi
can’t have diploma; they must acquire all their knowledge on their own. They hate communism so much they won’t even eat the red Jell-O on top of a torte. They can’t kill anyone for selfish reasons and they can’t get married because they would be away from the house too much since they spend most of their lifetime in jail. They are the lawmakers of jail, the wise men. My friend Malkhazi is trying to revive old
kurdi
traditions but he is already a nobleman. He doesn’t need this new profession. This is why I ask you to understand us. Please don’t believe what you see on TV. If you soon see his face or mine on the news for criminal activity, it is probably only state sponsored communist propaganda. Or else it is only a joke
.

As always, respecting your way
,

Slims Achmed Makashvili

In the courtyard in front of our block, the usual assortment of men clad in their felt mountain caps were huddled under the eaves because the empty fuel canisters in the yard were too wet to sit on. One man bellowed up to his sister to throw down some change. A low voice rose out of the huddle at me, “Slims Achmed!
Modi ak!
” But I waved aside the invitation to drink with them. “We are having a guest,” I announced. They nodded and then turned their attention back to our neighbor Soso, who had just returned from his village and was expounding on how to steal electricity without getting electrocuted.

My little brother Zuka was asleep on the sofa. “Get up,” I said. “You make the
chaadi
and I’ll try to fix the electricity.”

Since Zuka sculpts icons in his spare time, and icons and bread are the same—flesh-of-Christ, etc.—Zuka is our designated
chaadi
maker. Zuka is also the family doctor, ever since he found a blood pressure pump washed up by the sea. Personally, I think it is Zuka’s method of attracting older women because the ladies love to know their pressure.

“God is sending us a foreigner,” I told him so he would wake up a little faster. “We need to give our guest some unforgettable moments.” Zuka got up and brushed some sawdust off himself—after Zuka works on his icons, a film of wood dust always sticks to him like hash resin in a Central Asian field.

Zuka ripped open the sack of
chaadi
flour, threw some handfuls
into a bowl, added water from the water bucket, and squeezed it through his hands. “It doesn’t have to be
exactly
eighty times,” Malkhazi always tells him, impatient with housewife superstitions. While Zuka rolled the balls of batter back and forth in his palms, I spliced wires together in the electrical box and sang the new song I’d heard on the radio, “I’m tired of getting stuck in the elevator. I want electricity.” Zuka dropped the rounds of cornbread batter into the red sunflower oil, and I salted the eggplant, and then squeezed out its bitter brown juice. When Zuka coughed, I asked him if he had started smoking. He denied it.

Irakli Khorishvili, the neighbor from downstairs, stopped by to watch what we were doing. Finally, insightfully, he remarked, “Ha! Two men cooking. Where’s your sister?” Since Juliet had been reading so much English literature for the last ten years, she had been trying to become an independent woman. But I didn’t know how to explain this—the neighbor was from an older generation and didn’t understand such things. The consequence of my sister’s philosophy was that now Zuka and I had to do all the cooking. It was Malkhazi’s job to fix the iron, but the iron never broke.

I sharpened the knife on the bottom of a saucer and quartered the potatoes, and then fried them with the garlic and a fistful of coriander. My mother returned from the garden holding a cluster of beets, her hands black and her feet black, and she asked why we never had any napkins and why she always had to wipe off her hands on the pages of English grammar books. Then she scolded Zuka because he had trailed icon mulch all over the kitchen floor.

When Juliet came home and heard that we were going to have an English guest, she stood in front of the mirror by the door, tucking stray strands of her dark hair into a lump under a new hat—some sort of black, velvet, English-teacher outfit that looked like a piece of Victorian furniture.

Shoving on his rain jacket, Malkhazi said, “I’ll go find some wine.”

My mother turned to me. “Slims, if we are going to have a guest, we need to pound the garlic, and how can we do that with a broken pestle? Go find another pestle on the beach.”

I walked the few blocks to the sea, which looked like unpolished silver and made me cold to look at. The waves uncrumpled to my shoes, and crinkled back over the chunks of beach rock that I slogged through, searching for a pestle. I found an oblong stone and tucked it under my arm.

Even though the weather was gray, my mood was cheerful. To have a guest—our lives became a holiday. Usually, all we ever did was gather together with the other men in the neighborhood, hold up ruby glasses of Khvanchkara—the young red wine of our village—and bunch up all our words of Georgian wisdom while trying to make one final announcement: “
In the end the earth unites and makes as one the king and slave
.”

Tonight, I vowed, I would stay focused. I would not drink from my
kantsi
, my grandfather’s drinking horn, made from the hollowed-out horn of a famous bison. Otherwise, I might become distracted, start endlessly toasting to Georgia, and forget about my plan, which was that after Malkhazi kidnapped him, I would ask the Englishman for a visa invitation.

As I walked home, I tried to imagine our guest. Would he look like the foreign sailors Malkhazi and I used to chase down in the boulevard? “Need English! Need English! Very badly,” we would holler, jogging after them. If they didn’t respond, we would shout, “Or German!” At that time, we had wanted to start an importing business. Through some South American sailors, we imported a few chickens from Brazil. We made an advertisement of a seductively dressed chicken and taped it to a palm tree on the boulevard: “Brazilian chickens. So sexy!” But unfortunately the chickens caught the bird flu. Then we started an ice cream business, importing specialty ice cream bars from Russia. But with the electricity continually going out, imagine our nerves! We kept the ice cream in the big freezer at the port because there they always had electricity. But then the local dictator moved the freezer to his private residence. “Too many people are sharing the freezer. We are not a communist country anymore,” he said.

Maybe this Englishman would be a wrestler. I sang to myself a wrestling song from Eastern Georgia.

You are my brother

You look like an eagle

You are so strong

but your cap is on crooked

and you look like some sort of a boaster

I know that your town is far from where I’m from

but I came to meet you anyway

because I have no other business

What was his business anyway? And perhaps, since I had none, he could share his business with me.

When Malkhazi came home, he plunked down two glass jars of Kakhetian wine on the dining room table. “Were you able to steal some electricity?” he asked me.

“Even the third line is out,” I told him.

“Come on, come on,” he said to the electrical wires protruding from the wall, untangling them with the teeth of a plastic comb, “I’m tired of shaving with only cold water.”

Unable to steal any electricity from the mayor’s line, we decided to use the rest of our gasoline on the generator. When Malkhazi got the generator going, he yelled to me above the noise, “This Englishman works for an oil company. Maybe he can get us some more gasoline.”

My mother looked at all the food we were cooking and shouted at Malkhazi. “Where are all the guests?” Malkhazi shrugged and said no one was home.

Zuka yelled, “He didn’t invite anyone else! He wants to hog the guest all to himself!”

“Go call Tamriko,” my mother said.

“Tamriko just left for the resort,” I said. “With Gocha.”

“Call Zaza. Call Guliko. Call the bishop,” said my mother.

“Something is wrong with the phone,” Malkhazi said.

“Then shout out the window,” my mother said.

Irakli, the neighbor, still watching us cook, called all the neighbors to come join us.

*

We heard a little rap on the door. We knew it must be the foreigner because no one knocks on the door anymore. They only shout.

Anthony, the foreigner, stood in the doorway, wielding a flashlight and an umbrella. “You’ve got some wires that are sparking down there in the stairwell,” he said.

“That’s normal,” I said in English.

He looked like one of the illustrations of the hoopoe bird from our reader in third form. He wore an olive-colored tie and had brushed his blond hair in a lopsided swath behind his ears. He was thin and would have looked jaunty in the English manner, except for his brow, which was furrowed and grim. His brow resembled that of the American president Bush when he was trying to think of something to say, but his boot was stuck in the mud and a combine harvester was heading his way.

My mother stared at him and turned to Juliet. “Ask him how old they must be in England before they marry? Seventeen? Tell him as soon as you marry, I can go back to the village. Tell him the water is purer there.”

“Deyda,” Juliet said, her face crumpling, “I told you. I have a good job. You don’t have to wait for me to marry if you want to go back to the village.”

“Oh, how I miss the village,” my mother started complaining.

I quoted a Georgian proverb: “The mother said, ‘I will die.’ The daughter said, ‘I will marry,’ and in the meantime the house is full of dirt.”

My mother shrugged. “Take him into the living room with everyone else. The generator is too loud in the kitchen.”

Irakli Khorishvili, his wife, and the local alcoholics from the entrance were already seated in a parliament-like seating arrangement. They had saved the baize chair for our guest so he could feel like a king.

“Please sit here,” we all said together in a medley of English, Russian, and Georgian.

Anthony sat down and stretched out his legs. His shoes were funny: red leather sports shoes.

“Why does he wear red?” Malkhazi asked in a low voice. “Is it in honor of communism?”