Waiting for the Electricity (7 page)

Malkhazi joined us and put his arm around Anthony’s shoulder.

“Juliet, tell him the women look bored because they know that women can live without men. But men cannot live without women. How can I, a Georgian man, live without women? Even if I am fighting a Turkish man and a woman throws her handkerchief on my sword then I must stop. Isn’t that true, Juliet? She is the only one who calms me. We must obey the woman and we must fight for her, and we must win her, even if she doesn’t want to be won.”

But Juliet was no longer listening. She was taking her guitar off the wall.

“What was he hollering about?” Anthony asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Ask her.”

“It’s just men’s talk,” Juliet told him. “If you could understand Georgian you would see how stupid it all is.” She began to strum an old Adjarian gypsy song. After she drinks wine she is never without her instrument.

“What is she singing?” Anthony asked me, looking for a place to put down his drinking horn.

“Carefully! You must not set that down or it will spill,” I said. “She is singing a song about a little stream.”

Zuka began to dance the
Giorgoba
, an Ossetian folk dance he had been practicing. He kept yelling at Anthony in Georgian, “Why not come live with us? Why not? Don’t be all alone!”

“If he wants to sleep here he will,” Malkhazi said.

At the far end of the table the men were becoming louder, more obtuse.

“Turn off the generator,” my mother yelled. “It’s too loud in here.”

“
GalmarJOS! GalmarJOS! GalmarJOS!
” the men were singing as the generator went quiet and the light went out.

“What are they singing about?” Anthony asked me.

“They are singing, ‘Long live,’” I told him.

“Long live what?” Anthony asked.

“Just long live. I don’t know. Long live their song.”

He shook his head. “How is it possible? I don’t understand how you all survive, or at least how you don’t all pass out.”

“It’s called the Great Georgian Mystery,” I told him. “Everyone wants to know the secret.”

“My conclusion,” Anthony continued, a little riled-up, “is that the only way a country like Georgia can exist is because God sustains it.”

“Or because everyone is a criminal,” I suggested.

“Of course,” said Malkhazi, ignoring me, and commenting again in English. “God sustains every country,” he said and then bit into a spoonful of butter.

“I believe that here, absolutely I do, but I can’t believe it anyplace else, not when I’m in London.”

I think that Anthony must have been getting a little drunk. It’s true that when people think about the meaning of life, usually they are a little bit drunk. It is the time when they can become drug addicts so easily. So many times I have seen those Georgians go to the outskirts of Batumi where the narcotics grow up between the railroad ties. They think about why does the neighbor have a car and that kind of wife, and why do I have such idiotic children and this kind of wife? It’s better to just drink some more and eat some salty fish. The human law and God’s law are something quite different— perhaps they can never be reconciled. Maybe God just wants us to remember we are human by feeling a little sick from salty fish on the bus ride home.

I finally asked Anthony myself, in English, what I really wanted to know. “Your government is paying you a lot of money. Yes? Why else would you keep coming back here?”

“Slims,” Juliet said. “He just answered that. He finds God here.”

“No, it’s a good question,” Anthony said. “Maybe I come because it’s a great challenge.”

“Yes, the exertion of effort to obtain goals brings great happiness,” I responded, quoting from my textbook imported from Iran on the free market economy. “But I believe it’s much more possible to achieve goals in your country.”

“But those goals are nothing,” Anthony said. “You think it’s a challenge to shop at discount stores?”

“Have you found your challenge here?” I asked him. “And can you share your challenge with me?”

“Well, sometimes here it is
too
much of a challenge,” Anthony admitted.

“Yes, most people here have given up,” I said.

“This is boring talk. Let’s change the subject,” Malkhazi said.

I raised my glass. “Let’s drink from our hearts to peace between our two nations!
Galmarjos!
”

Though Malkhazi’s plan was to kidnap the foreigner, I decided to prescribe to the more modern Georgian way to treat a guest: get him drunk, disarm him, and then ask him for a visa invitation.

“Nope, it would never work,” Anthony told me. “To get a work visa you need a business organization to sponsor you. I’m a private contractor. The only kind of visa a private individual can get for you is a fiancé visa.” And then he winked at me.

“I’m not gay!” I cried out. And then I realized he had been winking at Juliet.

“Well. Do
you
have a sister?” I asked him.

Anthony shook his head.

“A cousin?” I asked.

He shook his head again.

“Your country is very rich but poor in virility,” I said.

I filled up the drinking horn again, handed it back to him, and said, “If you can’t get me the visa, then at least you can allow me to poke a hole in the pipeline!” I pointed to our gas canister. “For heat, that only lasts for three days. That pipeline is going to run through my mother’s village. I can pay you in roses. Our village is famous for its roses. We can’t sell them anywhere anymore because of our transportation problem. But if you provide the petrol, I can arrange to send you a lifetime supply of roses.”

Anthony stood up. He was still holding the drinking horn but it looked like he was ready to depart. Malkhazi yelled at Juliet. “Tell him he must drink to the drinking horn he is holding. It’s older than his country!”

“Don’t insult his country,” Juliet said.

“I just meant he should not set it down. It’s not time for him to leave.”

“How about a mother? Do you have a mother?” I asked him. “Even Armenians have mothers. I can send
her
a lifetime supply of roses.”

“Let me tell you something,” Anthony said. “No one will ever invest in your country if your people continue to poke holes in the pipeline.”

“I think you underestimate the power of the rose,” I said.

Suddenly the electricity came on.

“Ah,” everyone at the table said in unison, pointing to the lit-up chandelier.

“A sign,” Malkhazi said.

At that moment, Shalva, Batumi’s most popular policeman, kicked in the door with his boot. Behind him was a crew of cameramen from our local television station. While the cameramen filmed a close-up of Shalva’s boot, Shalva told us in Georgian, “Sorry about the door.” He then perused the table and finding Anthony awkwardly holding his drinking horn, ran to him and shouted in English, “Are you fine!” It was more of an announcement than a question.

Perhaps Shalva would have pretended to handcuff Malkhazi. The television cameras were already directed at him, but at that moment my grandfather forged through the door. “An Englishman?” my grandfather was shouting. “An Englishman in this home? I have this cherry liquor. See here? For three years it’s been sitting on my shelf waiting for a special occasion.”

Even though Shalva longed for his mighty deed of saving a foreign pipeline worker from a kidnapping to be written up in the newspaper, custom dictated that he listen to my grandfather’s toast first.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me we were going to have an English guest? I would have caught a fish,” my grandfather said as he poured cherry liquor into tiny crystal glasses and distributed them around the table. “Oh, we’re so lucky to have an English guest!” he said to Irakli. He raised his glass to Anthony. “This is to you,” he said. “May everything be good for you. May you marry a good woman. May your life be full of happiness. This next toast is to your family, your brothers and sisters and parents. And to your ancestors. Let’s never forget our ancestors.
Christopher Columbus. You remember him? Why did he have to bring us the corn! Fuck you, Christopher Columbus! I hate working in these damn cornfields. Why couldn’t he bring us cocoa or coffee beans or some more interesting crop? Oh, why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that an Englishman was coming? I would have killed a sheep!”

5.

A
S WE SAY IN
G
EORGIA
, “W
HEN THE GUEST VISITS IT IS LIKE THE
sunrise. When he leaves, it is sunset for his host.”

“Oh, mamma mia,” Malkhazi said, clutching his head. “I drank too much last night.”

While walking to work, I kicked up squash-colored leaves into the pallid blue air. The shimmer of autumn light on the mountains behind Batumi was interrupted by miniscule tufts of smoke, likely caused by the explosions of people trying to construct some electricity. I glanced at the headlines in front of the Central Telephone Office:
CASPIAN SEA STILL ONE OF WORLD
’
S BIGGEST OIL BLOCKS; WATER SHORTAGE IN RESERVOIR COINTUES TO HALT TURBINES; PIG DEATH IN ADJARIAN PROVINCE BLAMED ON TURKISH PORK SELLERS; PRESIDENT SHEVARDNADZE VOWS TO FIGHT CORRUPTION—AGAIN!; GEORGIAN HOSPITALITY STILL NUMBER ONE!
There was a picture of Anthony holding a sheep horn.

Zurab, the newspaper seller, was discussing the market price of petrol. I bought a
Newsweek
from him—he wrapped it in brown paper, and I tucked it under my arm.

At the Maritime Ministry of Law I saw that the white paint still flaked off my side of our building despite the anti-salt solution I had
brushed over the walls a few weeks ago. The Black Sea would soon corrode the paint down to the marble. The guards leaning against the counter at the front door filling in crosswords didn’t look up when I stepped past them. They never prevented anyone from going into the building, only out. That’s why we had to always accompany our visitors to the door.

“Three Georgians united make a world,” I chanted to myself walking down the corridor to my office. But at work it was impossible to unite even two people. I could unite myself with neither my boss, his secretary, nor the Big Boss. Any reconciliation was always lost in some hullabaloo. In the hallway my boss, Mr. Fax, was shouting at his secretary. I must digress in order to explain that it’s very impolite to say in public, “I need to go to the toilet.” Instead, it’s better to say, “I must go send a fax.” My boss used this phrase so frequently that “Mr. Fax” had become his nickname. Also, he was unusually fond of his fax machine. The previous week the fax machine had been covered in dust, but now, in the corridor, that layer of dust was imprinted with someone’s body, as if Mr. Fax himself had tried to cover it up with a big hug, to protect it, as if he had won it in a contest, as if it were a
new
fax machine. Maybe Mr. Fax didn’t know that new fax machines were smaller. This one was still huge. Seeing me examining his fax machine—which was blinking “Toner is low” in English—Fax scowled. I looked away. I felt nervous looking too much at the fax machine for I feared that Mr. Fax might figure out some day that I stole his fax from Hillary Clinton. He looked at his watch. “It’s already eleven-thirty,” he said. “You are late again!”

“True,” I told him. “But the state is more than six months late paying me my salary.”

Fax ignored me. He received the same salary I did but he made much more money on the black market. Once when I put a tack on his chair he was so busy leaning over his fax machine, trying to extort money out of whomever he was talking to on the phone, that when he sat down he didn’t even know what the problem was. He slowly realized he was uncomfortable because he was sitting on a tack. But while one hand scratched his sore behind, the other hand was
extended, still waiting for a bribe. Whenever he was about to bilk someone, to receive remuneration for an overinflated invoice, I would walk into his private office and ask, very pleasantly, if I could borrow a book like
The Law of Sea Convention
from his library. Or, “By the way, what is the distance in kilometers from the port of Batumi to the Cape of Good Hope?” And then I would look at the invoice and divide it in half. He would smile in front of his customers, but I could see his clenched fist and his little brain mechanism thinking, “Foo! Foiled again!”

That’s an expression I taught him from Sherlock Holmes. I am an avid fan of Sherlock Holmes, even though most of his stories were meddled with by the communist propagandists. For example, at the end of one Sherlock Holmes story, about the mysterious disappearance of the Ku Klux Klan in America, in came the censors proclaiming in brassy tones at the bottom of the page in true Soviet style the following footnote: “Unfortunately Sherlock Holmes was wrong. The KKK is alive and thriving in America. Victory to Soviet Georgia!” The Soviet propagandists also used to proclaim in the
Red Star
Worker
that the American husband in his home sits with his feet on his fold-out sofa bed and says to his guest, “Come on in and get yourself a beer from the fridge. But only take one. I don’t have much time,” and then he looks at his watch. I told Mr. Fax that was only propaganda. I said, “How do we really know what an American acts like if we’ve never met a live one?”

Even though Mr. Fax knew my opinion of him, he couldn’t do anything about it because I was the only person in Batumi who knew about my particular field of maritime law—how the oil ships were affecting the fish. I had spent many years assiduously researching the declining population of the Black Sea spiny dogfish. Originally, I had been attracted to this fish because its name reminded me of a sailor’s scrubby insult. But then I learned to love it in a deeper way because it was a full-blooded, pedigreed, Georgian fish, recklessly swarming the reefs and rubble of the Black Sea, our fates inextricably twined, going extinct together. Part of my job consisted of mapping the population of the fish and rerouting oil ships to preserve their habitat.
Because of this, Mr. Fax would accuse me of being an environmentalist. But I wasn’t quite the same species of environmentalist as the intrepid Greenpeace volunteer I read about who skulks on boats in the Northern Sea at whom the Russians unabashedly yell, “Hooligan!”