Waiting for the Electricity (13 page)

“My refrigerator is empty because I unplugged it,” explained Anthony. “It makes too much noise every time the power goes out.”

Malkhazi was opening the window. “Manana!” he called. He cupped his hand and called again. “Manana! Hmm. She is not home.”

“How long have you been without electricity?” I asked him.

“About two weeks.”

“Why didn’t you
say
something?” I cried. “I gave you my
telephone
number.”

“I thought it was normal.”

“It
is
normal,” I said. “In Africa. You are staying in the same building as the mayor. Everyone in his region should have electricity. Obviously, someone has been stealing yours. Anthony, if you are too filled with pride to ask for help, you will starve here. Do you have some tools?”

“What for?”

“We will steal your electricity back for you. It’s the one thing we know how to do very well. And Malkhazi can make you a second line, and a third line. I cannot guarantee that they will always work, and you must be careful and not electrocute yourself when you switch over.”

“I prefer the legal method.”

“Yes, there’s always that,” I said. “But next summer will arrive before you get any result. By then it will be hot and you won’t need any electricity. You can go sit by the sea. Or in the Paradise Cafe that has air conditioning in the basement, and a very good violin player, always playing French songs. Why not do it the easier way? Don’t you know the story about the Svani man? He was driving his walrus backward and the tusks were digging in the ground. ‘Turn it over,’ someone said. ‘Oh, it’s easier now,’ he said.”

“That is ridiculous,” he said. “What about the electricity company? Can’t they restore it for me?”

“Who?” I asked.

“The people who, you know, govern the electricity.”

“Who does that?”

“Don’t you people know? Don’t you ever think about taking charge of your life? It’s insane! How can a country like Georgia go on existing?”

“We wonder that too,” I said.

He sat in a contemplative mood and I started worrying that the Hamlet complex might be returning to him. “Can I offer you some tarragon lemonade?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” Malkhazi said. I could tell he was a little offended that Anthony was declining his help to fix his electricity.

He poured two cupfuls from a green bottle on the table but I saw the fizz had all vanished.

“This guy really confounds me,” Malkhazi said in Georgian. “He probably wouldn’t even steal money to feed a houseful of widows. What’s the matter with him? Maybe he’s hungry.”

“He might not want to eat anything,” I told Malkhazi in Georgian. “I think he’s really in a cultural shock.”

“What should we do?” Malkhazi asked.

There was only one solution. Take him to the finger puppet theater.

Bankers were there with their families, sitting in the front, yelling “Bravo!” and impatiently clapping their hands. Niko, Batumi’s finger puppet director, had taken out a loan for his finger puppet show. When the bankers had called back on Tuesday night and asked Niko when he was going to pay back the money, he said he could repay them in tickets. Now, the bankers’ sons squirmed in their fathers’ laps waiting for the spectacle to begin.

A finger, a professional finger, dressed up in the latest Italian fashion trends, slinked down the miniature fashion runway. Women fingers, bedecked in gauze and old lace, danced a traditional finger folk dance from Ossetia. The folk music, loud and accordion-filled, inspired the fingers to jump twice their height. The banker children were laughing hysterically. The finger toy soldiers wore little feathered hats. A finger martial artist and a finger bionic man fought in slow motion. The bankers continued to yell, “Bravo!” And then came the erotic dance. So riveted were the fathers that they forgot to cover the eyes of their children. A whole naked hand pulled off the glove of another, one finger at a time. For once the audience’s attention was focused on something other than their own miserable and heavy hearts. Instead of the hot daily tears of frustration, cool tears of relief flooded down cheeks.

“And now the real show begins,” I told Anthony.

The plot was as follows: Some of Tbilisi’s parliamentary members built a time machine and flew back into the 1930s. They ran into a finger puppet of Stalin on the street. Just as Stalin was about to shoot their heads off, the electricity that fueled the time machine went out. (That was part of the performance.) Without electricity the time machine defaulted back to modern day Georgia. The finger puppet parliamentarians got out of the time machine, slammed the door, and said, “Give me this year without electricity. It’s better than the years of the Big Man.” In truth, it was a rerun. We’d all seen this one before on television. And we all knew the moral: the electricity went out and they were saved.

9.

W
HEN
I
WAS WALKING HOME FROM WORK THE NEXT DAY
I
PASSED THE
new pizza restaurant. The usual boys who work at the Internet cafe were sitting at the tables outside. They had gloomy countenances, stooped shoulders, and were thin from thinking too much. But at another table I saw Tamriko, sitting alone. She was looking very tender and beautiful today, and her lips, for some reason, reminded me of the rubies in Queen Tamar’s ruby necklace, the one in the State Art Museum. I looked around for Gocha but the only boys were the ones from the Internet cafe. They were now trying out one pose with a cigarette and then another. I noticed Zuka had joined them. I nodded to him but my eyes returned to Tamriko, and then to her lips.

I ordered an ice cream coffee for her. During Soviet times, coffee used to be a capitalist drink. Mothers-in-law would complain to each another, “Oh, poor me. I have such a terrible daughter-in-law.”

“Why? Is she a whore?” the other would ask.

“No, worse. She drinks coffee.”

But during Soviet times Tamriko and I used to stand in line at the cafe where the poets would secretly recite poetry to each other and the KGB stood around supervising. We would order a cup of coffee, drink it, then get back in line, drink another cup, and another, until we felt fantastic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, we still drank coffee, but instead
of reciting poetry, Tamriko was always talking about how Georgia was changing, wondering if she should learn English with an American accent or a British one. “Why aren’t you talking about our relationship, and how to improve it?” I asked her once. As far as I knew, she still drank coffee. Yet when the ice cream coffee came Tamriko said, “Give this to Juliet. She’s meeting me here.”

“Why? Are you fasting?” I asked.

“No, I’m on a diet and I can’t imagine eating, not me,” she said, so apparently modest was she. But look behind a pillar, or a leafy plant, and Tamriko was always smoking a cigarette. “The Georgian woman smokes like a ship,” the French poet writes in graffiti on the French buses. But the Georgian woman also knows how to flutter her handkerchief to turn a man into a slave so that all he desires is to carry her up the stairs.

Tamriko was now pulling the hot peppers off her pizza and putting them on my plate. “I am thinking of getting a virginity restoration operation,” she said. “It costs four hundred dollars.”

“Hello, Middle Ages,” I said.

“Gocha is a modern boy like you, Slims. He likes partying, soccer, and computer games, but he won’t marry someone if she’s not a virgin. He’s the one who suggested it.”

“If you marry, it’s a pity,” I told her. “If you don’t marry, it’s a pity.”

At the next table Zuka had lit a cigarette. Readjusted his pose.

“Look at me,” Tamriko said, sharpening her lip liner with a razorblade. “I used to be so beautiful but not very wise. So many men wanted to marry me. But these days the good men refuse to marry. But Slims, a woman needs a man. A man is a mountain. A woman needs the shade of a mountain.”

“Or at least the shade of a little hill,” Juliet said, sitting down.

I scraped some mayonnaise off my pizza and put it on Tamriko’s plate. “These days maybe it’s better not to marry,” I said. “Besides, you already had a husband,” I reminded her, because she had married ten years ago when Georgia was all helter-skelter and young men and women were running off together in an ineffectual attempt to create stability.
But then her husband sailed away on the Black Sea. I mean, it was his job. When he returned and was cleaning out the chicken coop, Tamriko told him, “I don’t want to be like a woman in a fairy tale, always waiting for you to return.” So they divorced five years ago. But then Tamriko became a hypochondriac and thought she was going to get that disease that women develop when they don’t have a man, that a woman must have love and express that love because that is her nature.

There is a poem about the Georgian woman, if I can remember it correctly. It is about how they pray to God, how they have a sweet part, how the enemy threatens them. It goes:

Georgian woman!

Don’t give away your soul
,

and don’t let the enemy break you

you want to retain completeness
,

oh woman, Georgian woman

Oh whatever! I can’t remember it.

There is another poem, not so good, but still, it makes its point, called “The Georgian Man.”

I am a man

I have a son

He gives me hope

But I didn’t have a son yet, and my life was speeding by, unapplied. Sitting here with Tamriko seemed to exaggerate that point. Usually, whenever I was about to sink into a depression that I was a man without a wife, I would remember the old Georgian saying, “If a wife is so great, why doesn’t God have one?” and feel a little better. But this time, remembering that didn’t make me feel any better.

Juliet interrupted my thoughts. “Slims,” she said. “Do you think Anthony is a homosexual?”

“No,” I said. “I think he’s a petrosexual. He only caresabout oil.”

“Ah, yes,” Tamriko said. “How can we understand these modern sexualities these days?”

“The only way a Georgian man knows how to make love to a woman is to buy her things, cans of Pringles potato chips,” Juliet said. “Or orange Fantas. That is the problem.”

“The problem is the word
love
,” I said, “which sometimes means something stupid, and sometimes means the purpose of life. My love for a friend, or for a woman, or for this country, is something all very different. How can I compare one kind of love that sustains me, and another that destroys me?”

“It is the same as the word
head
,” Juliet said. “My head is something quite different from an Iranian refugee’s, or even an English person’s head. An English person’s head is very magnanimous and free, simply because it is other and quite beyond mine; whereas my head is there to keep the rain from coming into my throat.”

I stared at her. Sometimes she said some extraordinary things.

“Have you noticed, Slims,” Juliet continued, “that Malkhazi is always disappearing somewhere. He says he’s gone to sell cucumbers, but really I think he’s involved in some kind of black business.”

“They always blame the poor cucumber!” Tamriko said.

“Maybe it’s better for you to forget about Malkhazi,” I said.

“But what is the alternative?” Tamriko said. “You don’t want to get the climax disease. A married woman never experiences the mood swings of menopause. What about the finger puppet director?”

“Niko? He only has one small room above his finger puppet theater.”

“What about the documentary filmmaker?” I asked.

“The one who was always trying to woo me with his films about ancient Svani door locks?” Juliet asked. “He thinks I’m already too far gone with the climax disease. I’m not sure I even want to marry a Georgian anymore. In England they don’t believe in this disease. They are more independent. They live privately, make appointments, call before they visit. The women don’t sit home all day in their black dresses grinding coffee, hoping a neighbor will turn up. Nor do they gape from their balconies trying to find something funny. They don’t have men pilfering
my books or scolding me for not cooking cheese bread more often, or always pointing out the advantages of the code of Hammurabi. The point is, if I married a foreigner, then I could think about other things. Besides love. Georgian love is too difficult,” she said.

“Well, that’s a very modern thing to do,” Tamriko said, curling off shavings of lip liner again. “But,” she said and looked up at Juliet, “are they fertile?”

“They take a lot of vitamins,” Juliet said. “Westerners take vitamins under constant fear of death.”

I had always thought that Juliet would marry Malkhazi, ever since he first moved to Batumi and started courting her. I had always assumed that Malkhazi would become my brother-in-law, that they would have a village wedding with potato flower wreaths, or maybe he would kidnap her and take her to a tower in the mountains in order to save money on a costly wedding—then you don’t have to feed the whole town, only the closest relatives. But Malkhazi didn’t want a regular job, he wanted a job that would make him feel like a king and I was no longer sure if he was the right man for my sister.

“It’s better to find a man when you are young,” Tamriko said. “It is the condition of the world that as men grow older they lose their ability to express their feelings. They say, ‘I love you, gorgeous,’ and they kiss you but they don’t express their tenderness or vulnerability anymore.”

I wondered if that’s how Gocha treated her.

When Tamriko left Juliet turned to me. “Slims, why did you stop courting Tamriko?”

I stopped chewing. To explain it I could have quoted to her the words to the song she had sung at the chess championship. “Our love was strong but so short. We were not suited for each other. We were not like the sun and the rain,” but that wasn’t true. Instead, I told her, “One shouldn’t marry one’s neighbor. That’s like marrying your sister.” It was a good excuse. If a man marries his neighbor then the whole neighborhood calls that man “brother-in-law.”