Waiting for the Electricity (29 page)

There was no way to describe all this land to my friends in Georgia. So why try? As I drove I looked at the icon of Queen Tamar on my dashboard, at her ruby necklace. I looked at the landscape, or the lack of a landscape, if the absence of something can provoke so much reflection, which I guess it can, like the absence of electricity. Out here I could just stop, settle down. I could conjure up some fake documents and get a job fixing electricity. I could buy my own car—some kind of old, half-broken thing, which would still be cleaner and more reliable than a brand new Russian car. There were no soldiers checking passports here, no police cars. In fact, whenever
I
got on the road everyone slowed down because I think they thought the Crown Victoria, with its big antenna to access many radio stations, was an unmarked police car. I wanted to remind them that this was really an
old
car, with its push button gears, that police cars were new with lots of flashing lights. But maybe the new police cars were only in major metropolitan areas. Maybe the government had forgotten about this place. Who could possibly care if I ended up here? Well, of course my family would care—but the government, like our government, seemed to have skipped over the area.

In Wyoming gas cost $1.28 a gallon—half the price of Californian gas. There were no dividing lines in the middle of the road trying to direct me; I felt gradually more at home. Was my love for my homeland losing its adhesiveness, like the Velcro gloves Merrick gave me but that lost their sticking power after tumbling around too many times in the dryer? I imagined the possibilities of settling down in a cold, flat town, roaming the streets feeling an existential feeling. Begone claustrophobia from tight spaces and too much Turkish furniture! Yes, this is who I had become.

Listening to the Christian radio station, I heard about a bowling ball rosary in Wisconsin. I stopped in a small town and went to a cafe that had thirty types of coffee. I bought a newspaper and read the Help Wanted section. There weren’t many jobs but one said, “Part-time to teach beginning adult students AC/DC basic electricity. Six hours weekly (two three-hour sessions on Tuesday/Thursday evenings) during Fall 2003 semester. Students are apprentices in Stationary Engineers’ Union. Examples of curriculum include Ohm’s law, magnetism, power metering, A/C single phase generation, A/C three phase generation, transformer operation and principles, single and three phase motors. Applicant must have minimum six years experience in Basic Electricity.”

Another option, I told myself, and put the ad in my pocket.

Driving through the prairie lands I came upon an aircraft supermarket. I could sell my airplane parts here! My gas gauge was low, so I looked for another mini-mart but for many miles I saw nothing.

But there! Truly? I had passed the sign for Buffalo Bill’s ranch. My ancestry! Was this really the place where my great, great grandfather from Guria came, where he introduced the tradition of trick riding? I detoured off the highway and soon I was rumbling down a dirt road. My gas gauge was on empty. But what did that matter? I was about to enter the village of my great, great grandfather. But I drove over a hole and the car got stuck.

I got out of the car, looked around, and checked my tires. I put my hands in my pockets to warm them. I turned around three hundred and sixty degrees. Here is the real life, I told myself. Under this wide, cold, blue sky, in the middle of the prairie, stuck in a hole and out of gas.

In the nineteenth century, Nikoloz Baratashvili wrote from the top of a mountain:

O sky! O sky! Thou hast engraved thy image on my heart forever!

Thy radiance conceals this fleeting world of woes!

The radiance of the vast sky could forever solve all my woes, even the problem of my transport being stuck in a hole. A car would
surely stop soon. But when one passed and didn’t stop and then no cars passed at all, and then another one passed that again didn’t stop, I started to feel a little confounded. I wished I had filled the glove box with candy as we do in Georgia. Every half hour we push the button that opens the compartment and yell, “Time for a snack!” In Georgia, it’s important to be a good host even in your car. The sky was darkening with clouds. Mr. Tetley was right. It would have been impossible to herd sheep across this place. The stalks of grass were so dried out and hollow, no nutrition. Now all I could remember was the old sheepherder’s song:

My friends are late

They are not seen anywhere yet

They are all my mates in the field

They are walking and playing somewhere far away

Gambling away enemies like tigers

And me hiding here in my flock

They go to fight and I sit like a woman

Among the sheep

But God, you know it’s not my fault

Everything happens involuntarily

I have lots of work to do here

Please let me see my friends

Maybe they’ve turned their backs to me
.

I was standing there in the field when the storms came. Another car drove by and this time I tried to stop it by standing in the middle of the road but it swerved to avoid me and kept going.

I got back in the car to try to get warm. I stared at the dashboard, at my icon of Queen Tamar, regarding her. Staring at her ruby necklace reminded me of Tamriko’s lips. I sat there a long time and stared at them. Suddenly the ruby color got into my blood and reminded me of who I was! I, Slims Achmed, cynical of my corrupt politicians, renowned re-teller of Khrushchev jokes, suddenly remembered the spirit and honor of the twelfth century.

Ah bollocks! I thought to myself, Malkhazi was right.

Malkhazi had told me many times to take a pilgrimage to Queen Tamar’s ruby necklace in the Tbilisi State Museum. He had been telling me to go ever since he left the mountains and came to live with us in the city, when he looked around at our modern influences and declared that we had a problem. He told me to go every time I lost my temper at Mr. Fax and was ready to offend him with a newly minted insult and every time I joked about how our classical poet, Rustaveli, must have smoked too much marijuana in the backcountry.

How can I explain it? How can a ruby necklace remind an average modern citizen of anything, except for the need to possess it? Therefore, what can I do in Georgia but show a guest the view and wait for his approval, show him the physical world and wait for the contours of the mountains to tell him their own stories. It is up to the guest to recognize them. All I can do is point at the mountains, at the solid rocks, at the archaeologists digging under them, at the world which looks upside down and crooked but lo—only to the guest.

What other choice do we have but to point at the real world and claim it is enough?

This is what I tried to explain to the policeman when he pulled over but since in America I was the guest, I asked him “How do you not feel confused on this wide earth?”

He checked my passport, my visa, my registration. “This is a stolen car,” he said. “Perhaps you won’t feel as confused in your own country.” And so I was deported.

19.

I
WAS FEELING AN IMPENDING SENSE OF DREAD AT HAVING TO GO BACK.
More like doom. But this feeling of doom, annoyingly, was a very familiar feeling.

I had told Merrick in the library, “I can bring this knowledge of Western law back home, back to the Black Sea. I will initiate a conference. I will perform guerrilla activity on the oil pipeline in my village. I will show my people a new Democratic way. I have a purpose and a goal. I will become distinguishable from the rest!” But a sixth sense was already warning me that the bosses in Batumi would merely laugh at me and scoff.

In order to avoid this lugubrious hunch that I had a condemned fate, I smoothed out my new suit jacket that I had bought at JC Penney’s, felt my passport in the inside pocket, and my new sixty-nine dollar Seiko watch that I had bought in Chinatown.

In the airport, the whiplash of people hurrying to their planes felt like an air conditioning unit in my heart. Then I realized that in America my heart had been irreparably torn in two, as if unable to reconcile the disparate cultures of East and West. When my boots had been walking down the sidewalks of America, I had sung the Jim Morrison lyrics that Merrick had taught me, “Break on through to the other side.” And now I needed a way to break on through back.

But this is an airport, I consoled myself. Everything is in-between in an airport. Too soon to believe in fatal resignation to modern isolation, this self-sufficiency in a single seat. As if to rebel against this sense of isolation, I slung both legs over the top of the metal bar that separated each seat and slept, hungrily slept. Two more hours passed, and then another one. In a dream I ran to my plane. I plunked down my passport and the British official called over another uniformed man and said, “This man did not know how to hand me his passport politely.”

I heard the rowdy sounds of the Georgian language: histrionic eulogies and proclamations. My familiars! I opened my eyes and recognized my countrymen over by the wall smoking in front of the NO SMOKING sign.

On the airplane I fell asleep up with a sweaty cheek against the plastic window, hoping that the next time I woke up, this unreconciled, unriddable thing in me would be resolved.

We flew over Hungary, Romania, the Black Sea, over the snowy peaks of the Caucasus, the emerald swath of forest valleys, and then to the eastern side of Georgia—dun-colored like a Mongolian endurance horse. We circled Rustavi, with her stacks of dilapidated Soviet block apartments looking like bar codes, and I saw not a single flickering city light in the early dawn: still without electricity. And then the British Airways flight touched down onto the potholed runway of the Tbilisi airport, and the Georgian men in the back of the plane hallelujahed. What a bunch of ignoramuses, I thought.

I looked outside the little airplane window and saw icicles on the wing. Georgian baggage workers in orange vests and earmuffs were flinging suitcases out of the luggage compartment and laughing, not offended, but merely quizzical at the red-faced man, probably the unfortunate boss, who was scolding them and pointing at the baggage cart which they obviously hadn’t hooked up correctly. I started feeling like myself again. At least we could be ourselves here.

From my heart!

From my soul!

Georgia, you are
…

My home!

It’s a poem. Well, in Georgian it rhymes.

In the airport, I tucked in my shirt and pressed the collar of my jacket around my neck. It was so cold when I stepped outside onto the curb, and the same temperature inside the taxi, which was the same temperature as my heart. “Don’t freeze!” I demanded of my heart. “Everything is going to be okay!”

The driver wore a woolen hat pulled over his ears and kept chafing his bare hands together, blowing on them while he waited for his Lada to warm up. He drove with his hands high on the steering wheel, a cigarette between his lips, filling the car with smoke from cigarettes made at the Armenian Marlboro factory. He turned to me, squinting through the smoke, and asked where I had returned from.

“America,” I said.

He gaped at me, as if I was no less than—to borrow my favorite Chekhov expression—a twenty-two-carat psychopath. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, “But why did you come
back
? In winter? Our electricity problem is worse this winter than last.”

“I came back because I
love
my mother country!” I told him. “And how about you?”

He became like a stone. “I love my country too!”

I didn’t tell him that I
couldn’t
stay in America—how if I had, then I would be a Georgian in hiding, a renegade, evading the immigration and naturalization officials, the Department of Homeland Security, ineligible for social security, a 401K, even a dental plan.

“I came back home because American Coca-Cola is nothing like ours,” I told him. “When I tasted theirs it was a shock to my system.”

He extended great effort to try to see through the windshield. His windshield wipers didn’t work—he had to use his arm.

“It didn’t have that chemical taste,” I continued.

“America?” he asked, wiping his arm on his pants.

“Their Coca-Cola.”

He managed to get the windshield wipers working again. “But what did you
achieve
in America?” he asked.

“Psychological promotion,” I said.

“You went to a psychiatrist?” he asked and then drove over a pothole; we both hit our heads on the roof.

“No, no one uses them anymore. They all take the pharmaceuticals,” I said.

“They no longer need the
psychiatrist
?” he asked.

“No, they need the psychiatrist to prescribe the pharmaceuticals.”

“Let me explain to you how
I
understand it. A wife goes to the psychiatrist and says,” he added a lilt to his voice, “‘Oh, my husband isn’t paying any
attention
to me anymore.’ So the psychiatrist says, ‘I can recommend for you a new brand of makeup.’”

“That’s an interesting perspective,” I said. “Let me explain it. A person goes to the psychiatrist because in America some people wake up in the morning feeling depressed and don’t know the reason.”

“How can they not know the reason?”

“Well, anyhow, sometimes they don’t. Too many choices. They get easily confused.”

“There are two solutions for that.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t go to sleep, or don’t wake up,” he said. After a time: “Do you think I could get a good job as a psychiatrist in America?”

“Why not?”

We drove along the banks of the Kura River and I looked to the far side at the dilapidated houses leaning over the cliff. Before I had left Georgia I had looked at those houses and thought I could be a prince, or at least his shepherd, if I lived in such a house. They have fireplaces where I could stretch out my legs and dry my socks. Now they looked like decaying layer cakes with the icing sliding down. In the other direction, on top of Mount Mtatsminda, loomed the huge Soviet monument
of Mother Georgia, hovering over the red, green, and orange tiled roofs—one hand holding a cup of wine to welcome a guest, and the other hand wielding a sword. She had looked so permanent before but now she looked like she was made of aluminum foil.