Waiting for the Electricity (6 page)

“It’s Euro-fashion,” Juliet said, as if she knew.

I turned on the TV. It was the comedy station. The comedian was weeping and saying, “No, don’t force me to go to Kazbegi. The women there refuse to have sex before marriage. Waa waa.”

“So stupid,” Malkhazi said. Malkhazi’s family is originally from Kazbegi.

I changed the channel to the news. An American soldier was passing out boots to the Georgian army. “We better not find these boots on the black market or you will be jeopardizing any future American-Georgian relations,” the American soldier said to the camera. “American G.I. Joe,” I said to Anthony. Now the news broadcaster, the young one whom all the Tbilisi girls used to swoon over (before he was later tragically killed in his hallway by some thugs), was saying, “Today, President Shevardnadze
again
vowed to give up corruption …” I stood up to turn up the volume, but Malkhazi waved me away and switched the channel to the exercise station. The aerobics leader shrilly yelled out in Russian, “Do not give up!”

My brother, Zuka, wearing his blood pressure pump around his neck, showed Anthony the new icon he had carved.

“Do you see this icon?” I asked Anthony. “Do you think it’s beautiful?” I couldn’t remember which saint it was though. “Our problem is that these days we can’t remember how to pronounce the names of the saints correctly. In the village schools there were so many leaks in the buildings that the only thing we learned when it rained was how to wash our hair.”

Anthony’s brow furrowed further and I worried about his sense of humor.

Juliet lit the candles on the table while Zuka piled onto it plates of farmer cheese, tomato wedges, and green onions. A pan crisped the edges of the
khachapuri
my mother was making and the smell spread throughout the kitchen. I set out the jade cups and emptied five liters of white wine into three clay jugs.

At the table, thin ribbons of Sulguni cheese marinated in bowls
of butter still browning from heat. Platters of eggplant, rolled in garlic and nuts, sat atop the wild turkey. In Georgia our buildings are always falling down—we pile plates on top of each other like a last hope. Irakli’s wife had brought a humble mound of goose pate from the import store. Dishes of sweet carrots, roasted red peppers, stuffed grape leaves and olives vied for a place. I scooped some
pkhali
onto Anthony’s plate. “
Pkhali!
” I pronounced for him. “Ground walnuts and boiled nettle leaves.”

“
Fali
?” he asked, trying to articulate it.

“
Pkhali, pkhali
,” Malkhazi said, trying not very successfully to be helpful. There was a potato and beef stew, also from Irakli’s wife; a chicken and tomato soup from another neighbor; a mutton pilaf; mashed liver; a beet salad layered with cream; fried forest mushrooms; and crepes flavored with pepper. Malkhazi had caught a trout from the river and had slit it open for the eggs. Someone else had brought a soup made of knucklebones. Banana liquor for the ladies, and vodka for the men at the far end of the table, who were quietly toasting themselves. Anthony picked up his fork. “This looks like some sort of Roman feast,” he said, “that you see in those religious paintings.”

“Tell him to eat,” Malkhazi said in Georgian to Juliet.

“Tell him that if he doesn’t eat we have no choice but to kill him,” Zuka pronounced, also in Georgian, thankfully, looking to Malkhazi for approval.

I gave Anthony my grandfather’s drinking horn and told him to hold it still while I filled it with wine.

Malkhazi was
tamada
, our designated toastmaster. After all the glasses had been filled, Malkhazi solemnly stood up. “Even though there is war, we always desire peace,” he pronounced. “And this is not only peace between brothers, but peace between nations. The Armenian border guard may stand like this.” Malkhazi crossed his ankles. “The Turkish border guard may stand like this.” Malkhazi crossed his arms. “The Georgian border guard stands any way he wants to because he’s a Georgian, but we are all Caucasian people and we understand the truth of nature.”

When I tried to translate this toast to Anthony in English, it
sounded sloppy, like someone stumbling over his shoelace, or as if the sentence was about to fall apart but was being held together only by a frayed string, or possibly by the same shoelace, or more like one of our mountain musicians from Ossetia trying to keep the beat of the song on his
chonguri
but irritated because the percussionist is off in the kitchen. I told Anthony, “Even if you cannot understand this toast, you cannot sip. It is necessary for you to drink to the bottom.”

My mother brought from the kitchen a Georgian blood pudding fragrant with hazelnut oil, a recipe passed down through the Makashvili family for eight centuries. And then Zuka presented Anthony with three white cakes in the shape of lambs.

“How long will you stay in Georgia?” I asked Anthony.

“It’s always impossible to know,” Anthony said, balancing a strip of browned village cheese on top of the corn flour bread, and then dribbling wild plum sauce with garlic and the
khmeli suneli
spices on top of that. “Usually,” Anthony said, trying to fit his corn bread building into his mouth, “British Petroleum gives a frantic call in the middle of the night and says, ‘There’s a problem. Please take the next flight over.’” A purple rivulet of plum sauce curled round his wrist. He looked for a napkin and Juliet got up to get a cloth one, which she had embroidered with yellow butterflies. “Thanks,” he said, winking at her. “It’s not inconvenient because I live so close to Heathrow. British Airways now has direct flights. This is delicious. Did you make this?” he asked Juliet.

“Tell him you don’t cook anymore,” Malkhazi said to Juliet.

“So I fly out to Tbilisi and they drive me over to Supsa, to the port up north,” Anthony said. “It’s always the same thing. I say, ‘Yes, indeed there is a problem,’ and then I fly home. I tell BP again and again, ‘If you want the pipeline to withstand the pressure of the river you’ll have to dig it three meters deeper.’ They shake their heads and say, ‘Three meters? That’s expensive!’”

“Very expensive,” solemnly declared Irakli Khorishvili, who had been listening in to our translations.

“I told them it would be much easier, of course, if they built the pipeline
over
the river, especially since this new pipeline will have to
make a hundred and fifty river crossings. But they say they can’t do that or else the villagers will tap holes in it. Once, our firm even offered to pay twenty-five dollars to every villager who found a leak in the line.” He took another bite. “But then we discovered them out drilling new ones.”

“You are like number two,” I told Anthony.

“Beg your pardon?”

“One guy is digging a hole and the other guy is filling it back up. ‘What are you doing?’ calls a neighbor. ‘Well, I’m number one and he’s number three. Number two isn’t here to lay the pipe.’ So … welcome to Georgia!”

Malkhazi turned to me, “Ask him if he wants to create one world with the pipeline. The Americans want one world. Like the Masons. And our president—even he wants to destroy our traditions by making one world. But we will get crushed. All little countries get crushed.”

A candle had started melting, leaning toward the table. Malkhazi blew it out. “That candle wouldn’t make a very good Viagra commercial,” Malkhazi whispered to me. “Ask Anthony why he came to Georgia. What is here for him?”

When I asked him this he stood up and started pacing around. “This country is not easy. It’s damn hard here, beg your pardon. I’ve been to many developing countries. India. The Middle East. Even in Mexico the infrastructure works better than here.”

“We are not developing,” I told him. “We are—well, we are undeveloping.”

“The pipeline here is going to bring your much-needed economic development, that’s for sure. Oil flows more smoothly through cash-starved republics than through shaky mid-east regimes. No tricky negotiations here. The main trouble we’ve had so far is clearing the minefields left over from that Armenia/Azerbaijani conflict. And then we also have to worry about pipeline sabotage by your rebel groups. But if we finish this thing we estimate we’ll be seeing a million barrels a day. Georgia will receive what—fifty, sixty million dollars in transit fees? In a country where every person lives on less than a few dollars
a month, that’s no small change. I think it’s higher than your gross national product. So why the villagers are sabotaging it is beyond my comprehension.”

“You think
we
will see this money?” I asked.

“I think you already have. Before I came, I never imagined that you would be singing, and toasting, and eating all this!”

“See that house up on the hill?” I asked, pointing through the window behind his head.

Anthony turned around. “What house?” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

“You can’t see it because we just ate it,” I said.

He didn’t understand.

“We just sold it to pay for this meal,” Juliet explained.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s a Georgian joke,” Juliet said.

“Oh,” Anthony said.

“Just please don’t tell anyone how much we eat,” Juliet said. “Or else the International Food Aid fund will stop sending us money.”

“That is also a joke,” I said quickly. I wanted to tell Anthony that if he really understood the generosity of Georgians he would cry all day. Or maybe for a week. Our generosity during our feasts is really not reasonable behavior.

One of the men from the other side of the table stood and held up his glass. “Even though everyone knows that London is the greatest city on earth, we hope that you will see a little of the greatness of Georgia too.”

I also stood up. Georgian wine was already invading me and turning me hospitable. “I have always loved the name Anthony. If I have a son, I will name him Anthony. Or, if I have a daughter.”

“Hush!” yelled our neighbor Irakli, from the other end of the table. He too had something important to say. He told the anecdote about the famous Georgian
village woman who was digging in her garden one day and dug up King Tut’s tomb, rousing him from his death. King Tut opened his eyes and said, “The sweat of your brow has freed me. I will grant any request that you make.” The Georgian village woman said, “I want to have sex with you ten times.” After the seventh time, King Tut died again.

Cheers to the virility of Georgian women!

Then Irakli was hushing everyone again. He wanted to talk about his time in Afghanistan, how he was captured in the middle of the night from his village and thrown, blindfolded, out of the airplane. I knew this story well because he always talked about how when he returned to Tbilisi and heard that his mother had died, his inner kamikaze escaped and he attacked a policeman who was directing traffic. “What’s wrong with you?” the policeman asked. “I’m simply doing my job.” So Irakli explained to him how he had just gotten back from Afghanistan and he felt like a crazy man. The policeman, according to Irakli said, “I understand you. If it would help, you may kick me again.” And with those words he was cured. “Ah, the suffering of the Georgians,” Irakli was moaning with his hand over his heart. “One heart is not big enough to carry it all. That’s why we need each other.”

We drank to this and then Irakli wanted to make a toast to my mother. I already knew what he was going to say because he always makes the same toast. “Have any of you any idea of this woman’s goodness? Have you? Do any of you know her difficulties?” He started banging the fist with his table, trying to attract Anthony’s attention, forgetting that Anthony didn’t understand Georgian. “Her husband died nine years ago,” Irakli continued lamenting in Georgian. “He left her with three children to raise all by herself. Ah, the suffering of the Georgians.”

“What is he saying?” Anthony asked me, since Juliet, who had been translating for him, had left for the balcony.

“You cannot understand,” I told him. “Perhaps only after you eat some more.” It was difficult to translate from Georgian to English. Most men in Batumi still think that English is a woman’s language, that it doesn’t have the right sounds to express real emotion. The only reason I even learned English is because the military instructor told me that if I learned English then I would become like a woman and therefore I wouldn’t have to enlist in the army.

To Anthony’s plate came stewed plums in butter crust, baklava, and three kinds of tortes. Malkhazi brought to the table the meat he’d skewered on walnut branches that had marinated all evening in wine and salt.

Anthony leaned toward me and said, “That man just put the meat on top of the dessert.”

“That’s because in Georgia we like to live backward,” I said.

When Juliet returned to the table she smelled of cigarettes. She sat next to Anthony and complained, “Irakli makes that same toast about my mother every time. Such bad luck for her, yes? To only be known in this way?”

Malkhazi, now cavorting with the men at the far end of the table, was pouring wine on his bread, yelling: “This wine is for my father and for Slims’s father. It is Coca-Cola for them in heaven.”

“In the end the earth unites and makes as one the king and slave,” Irakli recited.

“Anthony,
aleverdi
!” Malkhazi shouted.

“That means it’s your turn to toast,” I told Anthony, urging him to finish his wine. “Let’s toast to George Bush. You look like him a little.”

“George Bush?” he asked.

“Okay, no toast to George Bush. How about Hugo Chavez then? You must toast to something. Once you toast at the Georgian table you become part of us, feel the real life. Then you can never return to your own life as an English individual. Go on now.”

He held up his glass, though somewhat meekly. “What’s wrong with the women?” Anthony whispered to me. “They look a little bored. This is a toast to the ladies,” he said. Everyone nodded.

I looked over at the women. They were eating their slices of cake in silence. “Have you heard about the man who went to the insane asylum because he thought he was Napoleon?” I asked Anthony. “The doctor asked, ‘Why do you think you’re Napoleon? He’s been dead a long time.’ ‘No, not
that
Napoleon. Napoleon the cake,’ said the man.”