Waiting for the Electricity (35 page)

“Evolutionism is communist propaganda!” Gocha suddenly blurted out. “How could we come from apes?”

“Here’s to Gocha! What a philosopher,” everyone cheered in unison. “The next toast is to Gocha.”

Anthony, by now, evidently had given up hope of talking about how he might be able to divert the pipeline, at least at this table, and asked if he might go to bed. I wondered if there was any way this pipeline was going to be diverted.

But it was four a.m. already and all was becoming hilarity. One man sang to his wife, “I loved you with a great passion. I would have swum across the seas for you. My love was a great fire beneath me. And then one day I woke up and my love had disappeared. I’m so confounded. I don’t know where it went.” Everyone laughed and she threw her napkin at him.

I left the table at seven, when the sun was starting to rise. The women had left long ago but stayed up talking of others, as women do, avoiding the cigarette butts thrown off the balcony by the men. By nine most of the archaeologists were up again, smiling and greeting each other, clasping hands, the
tamada
bowing as he greeted everyone in a deep voice, “Victory this morning!” Washing their hands and faces in the faucet outside, they very soberly offered each other fresh vodka. A dutiful feeling pervaded, as if they had just climbed back up a ski slope together after the chairlift broke—the ruddiness of faces, the glow of friendship that one only encounters in the hunting stories of Turgenev. And then the toasting started again. “Good God! What is there left to toast?” Anthony asked, emerging from the room he had slept in.

In the early morning spirit of Georgian brotherhood, I was even ready to forgive Gocha. After all, in our Georgian films, brother embraces brother and forgets about the woman. But when I went to kiss him on the cheek, he tried to act like an American and turned his head away, so I punched him in the face.

24.

L
ATER IN THE DAY
I
PUT
A
NTHONY ON A BUS BACK TO
B
ATUMI AND
walked through the tawny fields past our village’s twelfth-century church, which was being renovated. The reconstruction dust was settling on the scaffolding, and the afternoon light shining through the thin shafts of the church windows reminded me of the lines of Grigol Orbeliani: “For morn will break, and sunshine’s beam will make the shades of darkness flee.” Or in other words, “Don’t poke out your eyes today because the sun might shine tomorrow.”

I ambled through the village, then into the weald and the uncultivated country, the radio in my head resting at the station of birdsong. I heard the roosters and hens, the mules, the whole animal citizenry. In the plum orchard I sat on the picnic bench I had built when I was fourteen and looked at the gloaming river through the budding, wispy branches. Little boys were trying to catch fish in the fading light. One who reminded me of Zuka when he was younger was yelling something ardently to his friends as they plunged sticks through the muddy river, yelling at each other when the mud suckled their galoshes, and asking for help to be yanked out. They walked upriver to another fishing hole, and then I walked back past the church.

I sat down on the stone slabs of the church steps, watched the
sun blabbing out light through the pine trees, and remembered parts of a poem by Irakli Abashidze:

Georgia’s beauty leaves me speechless
,

All her wonders make me breathless!

I know why the oak-tree towers

Over timid little flowers
,

Why my heart weeps with the willow
,

Or rejoices with the swallow
.

What the ocean dreams when sleeping

melodies that love composes
,

Subtle thoughts that man discloses
.

Strength of eloquence avoids me
.

To describe her is beyond me
.

Words are mute and phrases helpless
,

All attempts of speech are hopeless
…

I must die
,

In vain my yearning
,

I must die
,

Thus longing, burning
.

Inside the church, a hushed pall fell over the atmosphere. Candles flickered. I stared at an icon, the one of Mary holding the Christ. I apologized to Her that I hadn’t been listening to Her very well and I suggested to Her that if She yelled a little louder I could hear Her better. I apologized that I hadn’t been to church that often lately and that I still wanted to base my life on Her even if sometimes it seemed that She just wanted me to watch the oxen go by on the road in a calm mood. And if She wanted me to do something other than that then She should really let me know, you know? I told Her She was still in my heart even when I was alone in my flat with Juliet’s new weird seventies furniture design and Victorian green wallpaper.

I’d been away from the village too long. I didn’t need to be inside a church but should have been holding a hoe under the warm sun heading to the other side of the half-plowed cornfield where my bowl
of wine was waiting for me under the shadow of an old beech tree. I should be stepping sturdily forward, I thought to myself, with my chest toward the ground, my heart clinging to the earth like an ear shell clings to the wet, black rock in the sea.

I walked to the field near the school, found my aunt’s cow, and started leading her home, moved by how green the fields were. But when I got to the edge of the field I saw on top of the hill that a long line of broken mud cut across the upper meadow. And, in the distance, along the sides of the windswept yellow mountain ridges, huge black metal pipes jutted out. I hadn’t realized that the pipes would cut up the eastern mountain like a giant paper shredder. To avoid the mud I tried to take a shortcut through the school yard, but a Georgian G.I. Joe—“Colonel Giorgi,” he called himself—dressed in a desert fatigue uniform and aviator sunglasses forged toward me from the forest below. Pointing an automatic weapon at me, he demanded to see my passport.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t be too careful these days,” he said. “Our greatest danger is a terrorist attack on the pipeline.”

“From whom?” I asked. He said he couldn’t be specific.

I dropped off the cow at my aunt and uncle’s house and went to the village center to catch up on the news. My old kindergarten friends Gela and Zviko, dressed in leather jackets and wool caps, were huddled around a roadside kiosk, drinking beer, and watching the British Petroleum trucks rumble down the road.

“There is little else to do here anymore other than watch the days slide by,” my friend Gela said. “My wife complains that I haven’t brought any meat home. But I haven’t felt in the mood to hunt.”

“The mountains are changing so fast it’s like watching TV,” Zviko said.

“They promised they would give us work, but so far they’ve hired maybe five people in the past two months,” Gela said. “They told us there would be employment for seventy but I think that figure was overblown.”

“They promised to pay money for our land but no one has seen any of it,” Zviko said.

“They paid, but the government took it all,” Gela said. “They say that at least they are helping our local economy by purchasing our food, furniture, and water, but I don’t know who they are purchasing it from.”

“And stationery. They
have
bought paper.” Zviko said he was planning to move. The storage room for his pickled vegetables had a crack a quarter-meter wide. “It’s because of all these heavy construction trucks. It’s dangerous,” he said. “No one can live like this. Remember when the mountains on the other side of the village slid down because they had worked the ground too hard, and they had to move into the tea packaging factory? This is worse.”

“We told BP they ruined our land. And all they said was, ‘It’s not our fault,’” Gela said.

Our village life was changing. I wanted to talk to the old monk in our village about it, so I hiked downriver to his hut. He and I often had good talks over a bottle of his own Ojaleshi, made from the grape cultivated on the Western mountain slopes. As I walked I could see a few scattered oak and walnut trees still dotting up between open grazing lands. Most of the trees had been chopped down. Across the river, bulldozers were churning up rock and topsoil.

The old monk’s hut, lined with planks of pine wallpaper, hung over the edge of the river. The water roared below but we could still hear the sound of bulldozers in the distance.

He served me a plate mounded with fried mountain potatoes and an oily bowl of cow bone soup. As we talked I helped him sculpt little loaves of bread, Jesus’s flesh, on his dining room table. The table had tiny grooves in it, as if it had been carved with a spoon, and little bits of dough stayed embedded within them. His black beard nearly touched the dough he kneaded, which was stressful, but his stern look calmed me. His look told me that in the real scheme of things dough in the beard doesn’t really matter.

Barrels of homemade wine insulated the walls. He poured me some amber liquid, a brew he had made himself, soaking it in a special
wood that gave it the flavor of cedar. Since he’d been in the mountains for so long and away from modern city influences, he still believed in miracles. He told me that when the bishop blesses houses in the spring, carving crosses into the wall, and the glue drips down, it is important to distinguish these glue drippings from the real tears of the icons. “In the evenings, twice a year, an icon will weep,” he said.

“But is that really true?” I asked.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “they always weep before an invasion.”

“Russia has too many problems to invade us,” I said. “Also, whenever they send over one of their missiles, it always crashes in the wrong place without even going off. Their navigational systems are defunct. Or, perhaps you are referring to these pipelines.”

He kept on kneading.

After another bottle of wine and more kneading of dough until it began to feel like a woman in my hands, I began to feel emotional. “My being is bound up with the land,” I told him.

“Some are called to the priesthood. Others are called back to the land,” was all he said.

In sweat, grief releases. The next morning, I took a hoe out to the cornfields. I started to work on the earth singing the old songs. I heard the morning cry of the rooster. The song of chickens sometimes gives me a sad and lonely feeling, so I worked the field harder, back and forth between the old beech trees. As I worked I thought about the things that most mattered to me. I decided that the next day I would return to Batumi and go and face Tamriko. But first I would go visit my father.

I climbed halfway up the mountain to the cemetery and sat in the little yard surrounding my father’s grave. I picked out the twigs and leaves and smoothed the dirt. At the edge of the cemetery I bought some violets from a woman dressed in black standing at the entrance. I was surprised anyone was selling flowers today, but she said there was a funeral procession on its way. She told me about an old woman who had lived near the river. She had gone outside
in her bare feet and caught a cold and died—she had been known to be a little crazy. She had lived in the village for as long as I could remember. I walked up to my father’s grave, dumped out the old water from the plastic pitcher, and changed the flowers. Superimposed on my father’s stone marker was the photograph of him dressed up in a traditional Adjarian folk dance outfit, looking jubilant as he held a bottle of wine on a tray, askew, as if he were ready to clap to the music on the piano behind him. Next to his head was a little picture of his minibus. Death couldn’t be that bad, I thought, because it was peaceful here and the birds were singing.

I wandered through the rest of the cemetery. There was my school director. In another place were my very good friend’s parents. I used to eat dinner at their house all the time. Ah! I knew all these people. And there—a man’s family had built him his own balcony into the hillside so he could enjoy the fresh air.

A father and his son carried flowers and candles to attend to a grave. I heard the man tell his son, “This is my uncle’s grave. But look how no one has been here to clean it in a couple of weeks. He has a son and a daughter. They both have cars. They just drive around all day. Shame on them.”

The funeral procession was coming over the bridge. The imam, who lived in the Muslim village on the other side, used to sing the call to prayer on top of a barnyard ladder, but recently his village had gathered enough money together to build a mosque. They had painted a mural on the outside of it, facing the river, for the Christians in our village to enjoy.

When I was a kid I used to bring this imam coffee on my donkey. He taught me the sunrise prayers, told me they were morning toasts. He encouraged me to give up pork, and only to drink on Georgian holidays. But
you
try giving up alcohol if you are a Georgian boy growing up in the village.

The Christian priest from our village and the Muslim imam from the other village are actually old friends, but they were now shouting abuses at each other. The imam must have seen the funeral procession heading to the Christian cemetery, so he had stomped over the river—
the suspension bridge was still shaking like jelled bone marrow. “What are you doing?” he cried, confronting the priest. “That woman was a Muslim!”

“In this life she became a Christian!”

“But her father was a Muslim!”

“But her father appeared to her in a vision, holding a cross on the side of the road, and ordered her to convert.”

The imam stood there, arms crossed, blowing steam from his mouth, his wool jacket buttoned up to his throat and his face crinkling and uncrinkling. “Only people who come from disturbed families convert!” the imam said, turned on his heel, and marched back across the bridge. But just before he got across, he turned again and saw me, squatting near my father’s grave. “Slims Achmed!” he shouted. “I don’t care what your belief system is. But don’t change your name. Be proud of your Muslim name.”