Waiting for the Electricity (9 page)

Three. Just like me.

And then I changed my mind. The village with its fruit and wine and sheet metal art, with its promise of possibility, looked poor and bleak again. I didn’t have a job yet, at least not one that paid anything. What was once true was no longer so. I couldn’t have her living in the village, standing by the side of the road selling cigarettes like the black-shrouded widows do. I said I needed to find work in order to support her. She said she could support herself with her singing. I said I couldn’t depend upon the support of a woman. She said she couldn’t depend upon the fickle emotions of a man.

“Besides,” she said cruelly. “Gocha said he could get me a job working in his bank!”

“There’s no money in the bank,” I said.

“Slims Ahmed,” she said. “You should know, you’re not the only one who wants to marry me. Gocha wants to marry me too.”

Georgians have huge hearts. When we love, it is like something crazy. But when we hate, it is something terrible. Whole mountain villages have been destroyed because someone’s enormous heart became
poisoned and started a nine-generation vendetta. If I were such a type of Georgian I would have grabbed a sword and killed Gocha, or at least pushed his head into the toilet. Instead, I just mutely and cowardly sat on my shoes and watched her walk down the road.

O the Georgian woman. At first she is a trembling bride like a baby calf in the market. But when she marries she stands in the milk room over a pot of boiling milk, her cheeks ruddy from the fire and plump from sweet buffalo cream, her heart filled with frivolity and gossip. She can sing about her love for her village, how she can’t wait until summer when she will return to the mountain pastures of Beshumi to take part in the cattle festival, how she will make wreaths out of the vines of the white flowering potato plant for her husband’s hair.

It is well known that we Georgians have the highest sperm count in the world; we have always prided ourselves on getting any girl we wanted. But it was obvious that Tamriko wanted a businessman. I was only a dreamer trying to hold her hand.

I wandered back out into the village, hoping to find happiness again. Women in the fields were harvesting huge purple cabbages, carrying them home as if they bore twins. The boys who had been washing clothes were now doing handstands, trying to imitate Jean-Claude Van Damme. Iza, the postal worker, still poking around with her cronies, called out to me, “You sure are walking around a lot.”

I ambled down to the river, watched it gorge itself on foam. They say it’s impossible to separate a Georgian soul from the land, but I couldn’t find the land’s soul anymore. I felt like the person from “Suliko”—the old Adjarian gypsy song my sister always played on the piano—the person looking for his soul, asking the bird, “Are you my soul? Have you seen my soul?” and asking the rose, “Are you my soul? Have you seen my soul?”

I wandered back past the plum orchard to my uncle’s house feeling
naialagari
, feeling, as the word means in Georgian, “having just returned from the summer pasture in the mountains”—in other words, feeling unhinged. I stacked three chairs from the kindergarten on top of each other in order to sit at the right height and started cleaning grain. The machine was already half-full so I sat flicking the
lever every few seconds to let the clean grain fall into the metal bucket. The rumble of the machine calmed me down.

And then I heard Tamriko’s voice behind me, singing that song that used to tear me up, the song that the Georgians sang to their relatives on the other side of the border with Turkey when none of the border guards were looking. Was she trying to torture me now?

Why don’t you turn your head?

Maybe there are tears in your eyes

Why are you plowing with tears in your eyes?

I wish I were a silver bowl

Filled with red wine

Which you’d drink and feel satisfied

Or I wish I were a silver thimble

To protect your fingers

Or a silver coin

In your pocket

I wish I were a sickle on your shoulder

or a sorrow in your heart

Songs used to give advice to the heartbroken and the misunderstood, but love, these days, doesn’t resemble those old songs. So I continued to shovel piles of millet into the grain-cleaning machine, flicking the lever every time the grain got caught in the sprockets. She stopped singing and shouted, “Is that so interesting?”

I turned to her. “It’s work,” I said and stood up. She squinted her eyes at me—perhaps I was staggering a little from the birthday party
chacha
.

“You have lost control of your reins,” she said.

“Ha!” I said. So she notices, I thought. The horse of my soul is leading me in a new direction. And where shall it be?

6.

Dear Hillary
,

Do you believe in the Real love? If there is such a thing as Real love wouldn’t I have died too when my father died? Hillary, what do you really feel towards him, your husband? I don’t know anymore if Real love can be found in Real life but I suggest it is possible to find it in our Georgian films. If You don’t know our famous Georgian films, do not feel bad! I will explain them to you
.

At Batumi’s Cinematography Club we watch underappreciated Eastern European movies and appreciate them, or at least try to. My friend Malkhazi says that he would rather sit on a tack than watch these films because none of these films have a plot. But plot is for the West, for heroes who have obstacles that are possible to overcome. The films that we see convey pure idea instead. Usually these films are about men rushing through life never producing anything in their relationships with each other that resembles the harmony of Georgian music. The films are asking us, “Do you recognize yourself?
”

In your American films, the story is not so complex: the boy meets the girl and then he loses the girl because his strength is kind of weak and then he gets a little stronger (though still he is not a very strong boy) but he gets the girl again anyway, the one who he does not deserve. In our Georgian movies the boy sees the girl and he opens a bottle of beer for her with his teeth. Another man, maybe his fat boss, also sees the girl, and while staring at her, agog, he drops a hubcap on his foot. For the rest of the film both men engage in multifarious and innovative methods to kill each other: one drops the other from a crane, the other tries to bury the first in a big hole he dug with the bulldozer he borrowed from the state. Near the end of the film, when both men are fighting each other on top of the oil train car, about to get their heads decapitated by a tunnel, they forget about the girl, jump down onto an empty cargo flat, and embrace like long lost brothers. That is the Georgian way, as it should be. If you come here you can understand the truth of Georgian love and be happy
.

“That’s not the plot of
all
of our movies,” Malkhazi said, when I showed him what I had written. “That’s only
Serenade
.”

In our Georgian movies there is always a character who is fixing the roof. He never actually fixes the roof. He just sits on top of the house, editorializing, or explaining the action. I told Malkhazi that I was writing an American letter and I didn’t need a roofer in the letter.

“How will Hillary know what’s happening then?” he asked. “She’ll just be confused.” So Malkhazi thought it was his duty to play two roles at once—one as my friend, and the other as the roofer, in order to insert editorial comments to Hillary.

“It’s taking you a long time to write your letter to Hillary,” Zuka said. He was carving an icon of Saint Eustace, the cobbler.

I pointed at the Georgian cookbook he had borrowed from the library,
All About Dough
, and said, “Well it took that author forty
years
to describe the nuances of Georgian cooking.”

“Have you read that cookbook?” Malkhazi asked my sister. But Juliet said she didn’t have time to read cookbooks anymore. She began to describe the grammar symposium she had been required to attend that afternoon at the university. “Nadia, my former classmate, stood before us, holding her pointer so stiffly. If she made any energetic movements this would displease the dean, who sat in the second row taking notes. Such sophistication, such as how Nadia manages her pointer, is supposed to prove that we are a Western nation, part of Europe, and not Eastern, not part of the slow drawl of Asia.”

“I think the English teachers are so sophisticated because they do not drink enough alcohol,” I suggested.

“Well, trying to imagine my colleagues in an intoxicated state is quite impossible.”

Someone on the street called Malkhazi’s name so he stepped out to the balcony.

“Besides,” Juliet whispered to me, “I was thinking about other forms of communication, without words. I was thinking about when Anthony came to dinner and how he winked at me when I handed him a napkin. When I walked him down the stairs that evening he told me that I didn’t seem like a typical Georgian woman, not so old-fashioned, not like those ladies at the university. He said they remind him of Nancy Reagan. It’s true. They always use words like
guttersnipe
. At the symposium today, when Nadia wrote an example on the chalkboard of the English stylistic device that she was demonstrating, ‘The world is a bundle of hay, eeach tugs it a different way,’ immediately all of my coworkers objected that she had put an extra ‘e’ in the word
each
. So I started thinking of each one of us. Anthony and I. I was thinking how a real Englishman was in our country, and how with him I could reinvent my personality. I could become a real classical bandit. I could become Juliette of the Shooting Range.”

“That university really brings out the aristocrat in you,” I remarked.

“Anyway, I have to publish something before the new semester starts or else the university will only give me the students who always eat sunflower seeds in class.”

She was supposed to write about all the English women writers who had the name of George in the nineteenth century, but when Malkhazi came back inside he convinced her to translate our mountain poet, Vaja Pshavela (Fellow from Pshavela), into English instead, promising to help her. Since Malkhazi had lived in the mountains longer than the rest of us, he was more intimate with what they wanted to say. He used to climb through the gorges, up to their mist-obscured peaks, and—ensorcelled in the thoughts of the mountain—blend his thoughts and the mountain’s thoughts until he didn’t know the difference. Actually, when he got to the top, he didn’t have any thoughts—the mountains are so steep, all thoughts fall off.

That evening I lay on the couch sated with my brother Zuka’s famous vitamin borscht and stared at the wall. Juliet had recently wallpapered our flat with olive-colored wallpaper, stenciled in an Arabic design, resembling the floral chapter titles of one of her Victorian novels. She had labeled everything in English, taping English words to every noun in the house.
H
20 on the water container.
SALT
on the crystal bowl of it.
DOOR, WINDOW, LAMP (NOT WORKING)
.

It reminded me of the setting of the old Soviet movies in the seventies, when the strong Soviet housewives used to label all of their household products with the periodic table. For it was a scientific decade, preceded by the decade of the ’60s when the Soviet scientists studied John Kennedy’s brain. “Well the head is open,” they said, “might as well weigh the brain.”

I overheard Malkhazi in the kitchen helping Juliet translate “The Withered Beech Tree.” That’s when I wondered if I was wrong that Georgian love didn’t exist anymore because I could hear the love between them. The words leaned over and touched and then settled into a summer-sound murmur. “Everyone, including me,” they were reciting, “loves high green mountains haloed in flowers. The smell of spring, fresh grass melting like breaking ice. Sinlessly, without harm, the young sprouts gaze up to the sun, to the world, hiding, but on that soft face …”

Malkhazi, in Georgian, protested. “No, no, I don’t think that word works.”

“Which word?”

“
Sinlessly
. Isn’t there a better English word for the tender green grasses in the springtime, you know, the innocence of the little children when they are dancing around, moving their fingers like this, when they dare to dive deeply into summer?”

“I don’t know,” Juliet said. “I don’t know that word.”

“What’s the point of English if you don’t know that word?”

Yes, I considered, what’s the point of English if no one listens to the word? I took out a fresh sheet of paper.

Dear Hillary
, I began again,

I would like to point out the danger of losing trust in the documents of a minor nation. These documents are but a paper, a plea, and nothing is being done to realize them. Let us recollect the words of your famous American thinker and politician Fulbright that it is an injustice of life that children are killed in a war started by their fathers, and that fathers are killed in a war started by men who act like children. What about the claim in the United Nations assembly that women and children should be protected? For Abkhazians and Georgians, they bitterly grin at these laws. From the very beginning of the Abkhazian war, children witnessed these crimes. In Sukhumi, in school number 12, drunk Abkhazian soldiers played football with children’s heads. The same took place when separatists killed 600 people and left their heads on the fence posts
.

I didn’t want to continue, didn’t have the stomach for it.

When I was younger my friends in the village said I had a chicken heart. When Malkhazi heard them calling me that he said, “How a
chicken
heart? Haven’t they seen the way you ride over the suspension bridge on your donkey?”

“I’d rather a chicken heart than a heart with no bottom. A bottomless heart never finds the end of pain.”