Waiting for the Electricity (20 page)

That evening I went to find Malkhazi. He was sitting in the cafe near the port. Even though the weather was chilly, the sailors were lifting mugs of cold beer to their chapped lips. But Malkhazi drank only hot water, in between cleaving hazelnuts with a hammer. He kicked a white plastic chair out from under the table over to me. I offered him a cigarette. Some Turkish sailors across from us were doing strange tricks with their lighters, but Malkhazi paid no attention.

“Slims,” he said, scooting his chair closer to mine. “Let’s speak from the soul.” He was going to get village heavy. “I know we’ve been trying to leave Georgia ever since … I can’t remember. It’s been our dream, sometimes our only hope.” He nodded to someone a few tables away. “But what about Nino’s aunt? Remember her?”

“No.”

“She was working at the Interclub at the port, before independence, and she fell in love with a foreign sailor and defected to
Yugoslavia. She wasn’t allowed to return for ten years and she became so homesick she turned into a nun. When she finally returned all she could do was kiss the ground. I saw her in the market today. She was still kissing the ground.”

I rolled my eyes.

“I’ve seen people leave,” he said. “And when they return they’re crazy.”

“Already, my mentality is not normal here,” I said, glancing at the Turkish sailors drinking Fanta, a drink I couldn’t afford, through polka-dotted straws. “What’s here for me anymore?”

Malkhazi sighed. “I’ve never told you this before. Do you know it was your grandfather in the village who saved me? He’s never gone to school but he knows everything about how people should live. Before, I always thought Georgia was a goddamned country, but when I was living in the village he taught me what it means to be a real Georgian. He sees lightness everywhere. You know how he loves everyone? Of course he is easy to take advantage of because of this, but he told me that humans created the darkness, the devil, that actually everywhere is light. But you understand that I cannot tell this to anyone else or they will think that I am disrespecting their religion?”

“My grandfather told you this? Well, if everywhere is light, then there is light in America too,” I said.

Later that night Malkhazi fixed the handles that he had broken off the cabinets and took out our batch of walnut liquor. It was so potent it had dissolved the walnut shells marinating in it, rendering it good for the kidneys. Malkhazi poured us each a cupful. Raising his glass, he said, “Every day that you’re gone, I’ll kiss the ground for you. I mean, I won’t roll around on it, but I’ll look at it and do it in my head.”

But now I wonder if I even cared if he kissed the ground for me. My thoughts before leaving Georgia had been restless, impudent, a Georgian man thrashing under the confines of a seat belt.

After dinner Malkhazi handed me a bundle of
churchella
, our sticks of grape candy, made from boiled grape juice and nuts—our
traditional traveling food that we bring with us when we are fighting a war, staving off the Scythians, Mongols, Turks, Persians, Cherkezi, Ghlighvis, Didos, Kists, or Lekis. Our Georgian Snickers.

“It’s from the village,” Malkhazi said. “It will remind you of home, of your roots, and will pull you back. ‘Bitter roots yield sweeter fruits,’” he said, quoting Davit Gurmanishvili.

“I don’t have room in my suitcase,” I said. But the real reason I didn’t want to bring
churchella
was because I remembered how when my friend Vano had brought them to America he hung them over the doorknob of his hotel room. The cleaning service called the police who accused him of possessing dynamite. Instead of recalling this story for him, I said, “I do not intend to be pulled back to this little town, to my roots. The main thing I need are some new boots.”

“At least take my boots,” Malkhazi said and flung them at me from the boot rack near the door. Oh, I had been tempted: his high quality, Russian-made, sturdy, leather, mountain man boots. But on the heel were the stamp
USSR
. No, I didn’t need an Achilles heel. So I bought my own boots from the new Italian shoe store on Mayakovskaya Street with some of the scholarship funds I had been given.

I still had my doubts about whether it would be possible to actually open a fish packaging factory in Georgia. That would really require a lot of investors and most investors, as my survey at work had indicated, were afraid of investing in Georgia. But I was touched by the optimistic spirit of America and wanted to live up to their belief in me.

When I said goodbye to Anthony and told him that I would no longer need his assistance in acquiring a visa he asked me if I was sad to be leaving Georgia.

“Am I sad to be leaving?” I asked him. “That is very strange question. No Georgian would ask that question.”

“Oh, right. Because your culture is too masculine?” he asked. “You don’t go in for the feelings?”

“No, because we have too
many
feelings,” I said. Anyway, I told him that I would bring him back some cans of coconut milk because he’d been so busy working on the pipeline that he hadn’t had any time to go to the American embassy’s supply store in Tbilisi.

*

Just before leaving Georgia our dictator summoned me for a meeting. I had never before been invited to anything by the local dictator. Sometimes a touring opera singer was allowed to talk to the dictator’s wife, or to sing to his Viennese goatherd, but even that was uncommon.

After passing the soldiers guarding his lawn, which was longer than the Norwegian tanker that had recently docked in Batumi, I met him at the entrance to his residence. I was surprised that I was taller than he was. He told me to sit down in his sitting room, which looked like a court—a king’s court, not a court of law. He had a tight and mean face but he looked oddly insignificant in such a large golden chair, all the golden light from the chandeliers reflecting off his balding head. He spoke quietly. That was a shock. How can a quiet man be a Georgian leader? It’s not normal.

In a winsome voice he reminded me that developmentally and industrially—though not spiritually of course—we were behind the West. He made all kinds of allusions with his eyes—that I couldn’t understand very well—to the gilded photographs of his aristocratic ancestors on the wall; talked about how soon he hoped to make a recovery for Georgia, soon
he
hoped to make a recovery, not the
other
one; and he indicated with his head where the
other
one, President Shevardnadze, had an office, down the road.

He then gave me French perfumes, a plastic model of his proposed SuperHyper market building project, a calendar with photographs illustrating before-and-after images of the old style Georgian homes on the blocks surrounding his residences (the after photos seemed to be in the future, because the houses were much cleaner and larger than they were now), a revivalist party T-shirt with the emblem of his political party on the front, and an envelope containing one hundred dollars. “Remember it as a gesture from a father figure,” he said avuncularly.

I was moved, though I couldn’t help thinking, “Oh, here is two months of the salary that the state owes me. Now you only owe me six months more.”

*

After that, everything fell into place with the speed of a solid fuel booster rocket.

The director of Tbilisi’s branch of the Center for Democracy ushered me into the front of the line at the American embassy in Tbilisi, charging past the people who had been camping outside the gates for five days. I tried to keep up with her. When we got to the front of the line, the consular was calling my name. “Slims Achmed Makashvili. Is he here?”

In front of the American consular I had to sustain the imported facial countenance of “poker face.” I told her that I loved my glorious country of Georgia but that I wanted to learn about the American policeman, to be able to promote democracy and capitalism in Georgia through the fish packaging business. I took out a piece of paper and showed her the logo of two sheep horns I had designed for a car hood, in case Georgia ever manufactured a new kind of automobile. I didn’t tell her that I had no intention of returning, not when I had the chance to live in a place where I could get paid for that which we must do for free at home.

At the airport I marched down the boarding ramp and onto the plane, the air pressure sucking at my ears; sat down in my assigned seat; ripped open the plastic package of earphones; and listened to channel seven, the airplane’s rave station. Now I really felt like I was a character in a movie on an important mission.

While flying over the ocean I switched the knob on the music dial to the “atmosphere” station and heard ocean waves. I plunged over them as if I were a gull skimming the surface for the silver flash of fish. The deep sound of a man’s voice: “Just feel how calm and relaxed you are … you have tranquilized your mind, your emotions, and have begun,” the swoosh of waves, “with those three deep breaths, to feel calm and relaxed.” I ripped off my earphones and heard a disturbance in the back of the plane. A clan of Georgian businessmen stood up to smoke, opening overhead compartments, taking
out greasy cloths of food. The flight attendant was politely requesting them to extinguish their cigarettes, sit back in their seats, that the plane was experiencing turbulence. I reassured her that everything would be okay and tried to give her the
churchella
that I discovered my mother had secretly stowed in my bag.

“What is it, a candle?” the British flight attendant asked, holding the long, bumpy stick of
churchella
up to the light of the window.

“A candle, yes, a candle,” I said and gave her the whole bundle. I never wanted to look at anything that even looked like a candle again.

As I walked off the transcontinental flight, my belly full of trans-fatty acids from the airplane meal, I quoted quietly to myself our poet Joseph Tbileli’s words, “I leave the home that was to me a joy as well as misery.” Although,
he
was writing about his uncle Giorgi Saakadze, the Georgian military leader in the seventeenth century who, after trying to improve the social conditions of the peasants, emigrated to Persia. My situation, admittedly, was a little different.

And then, like a child falling into a long lost God, I joined the hearty breed of Americans. All at once I was blinded by the electricity. Western electricity illuminated a different world, a calmer kingdom. American land was diluted, as if on the periphery of a microscope, not under the focus. The streets were practically empty. Those who walked them wore baseball caps, oblivious to Euro-fashions. Like caricatures from a Soviet propaganda cartoon they walked to their cars, consulting their Palm Pilots, checking for their next appointments. “Oh! The parking meter has run out,” one says, and sees a parking ticket on the windshield, then hears the ding-ding sound when he opens the car door, then wonders what restaurant to go to for dinner.

But I write ahead of myself. I hadn’t yet witnessed the frustration of a parking ticket because I arrived in San Francisco at night.

In the passport control line, when I stooped to shine my shoes, I heard a customs official say to a man in front of me who couldn’t understand English very well, “These are not allowed. And ignorance is no excuse,” when he confiscated the man’s paper bag full of fruit.

I was grateful that someone was going to meet me in San Francisco, so that I could get accustomed to these American habits before venturing onto the slipperiness of the American businessman’s mob. I had heard that American businessmen like to psychoanalyze each other. They ask, “What is your favorite animal?” in order to try to understand what kind of person you are. I had decided that if someone asked me I would say a mouse because mice are very tricky. Once it took me five days to catch one.

Flocks of businessmen in the greeting hall held up signs with English names on them. And then I saw “SLIMS ACHMED MAKASHVILI” held by a man with yellow mountain-style hair, dressed in the traditional American folk-dance costume: a farmer-style shirt, jeans, and sandals.

When I approached him he thrust out his hand in that effusive American manner and said, “Slims? Slims. Good to meet you. I’m Merrick. You speak English, right?”

I nodded.

“Great. Is this all you brought?” he asked, looking for more luggage while he heaved my blue canvas suitcase over his shoulder. “You’re a light traveler. That’s great. This way,” he said, as we melded into the crowd. “I took BART, the train, down here. I have a pickup but my sister’s boyfriend is borrowing it. Anyway, I thought you might like to get acquainted with our public transportation system.” We stepped onto a descending escalator. We walked through red neon-lit underground corridors that reminded me of American action films of the 1980s, or Russian action films of the 1990s. “I read your paper on the dogfish, how you use the liver for omega-3s, how the meat contains necessary vitamins, and you use the skin for sandpaper. Even fertilizer! Talk about sustainability! After reading your essay, I felt like we had something in common, you know, our common love for the sea. Two planets in the universe converging. Though, these days they’re calling the universe the omniverse. Anyway, there’s no such thing as a coincidence. That’s what I believe. But sorry, I don’t want to sound all
woo woo
hippy-dippy, 2012. It’s just that I harvest seaweed off the coast, up north, in Mendocino County. Have you heard
of it? I mean the area. Have you heard of the area? A lot of people know it for its bud. Do your people eat seaweed? I dry it, package it, sell it to health food stores. I’ll take you up one day.”

I worried all of a sudden that my English skills were very low, because I could not understand very much of what he had just said. I understood each word individually but not when he put them all together. I watched the doors open and close at all the stops letting on and off only a few passengers. So much electricity for only five people on the train. On the wall was a poster of a baseball team. Underneath the photograph were the words,
SIT LOW, PAY LESS DOUGH
.