Waiting for the Electricity (36 page)

The Estonian family who live in our village hate our loud weeping. They say, as if to hint to us a better way, “
We
weep quietly in our hearts.” But everyone in the funeral procession was weeping loudly, with smeared faces, walking around as if they all had a huge scrape on their hearts.

People were placing strong drinks, some sweets, cigarettes, and a great mound of bank notes into the coffin, so that she could buy whatever she needed, whenever, wherever she needed it. Armenians don’t put money in. They just provide clothes and a towel.

I overheard someone from the Estonian family say to another, “They’ll get drunk and take their cars and drive like mad, and to hell with the corpse. And then the music choir’s going to have to deal with the body.” But no one had hired a choir. They must have been thinking of those days when we used to have the big brass bands. Now the brass bands were disappearing.

A deep thirst for water brought me down off the hillside.

In the courtyard, my aunt ran out, tripping on her purple robe. “Come quickly,” she said. “We’re on TV.”

There was our little village. “There’s Zviko,” my grandfather said. “He should have polished his boots.”

“The Bush administration has dismissed concerns about the pipeline’s effect on the environment and local economies,” the newscaster was saying.

Now a spokesman for BP was being interviewed. “Imagine being in a place where no one has ever sold or exchanged property,” he said. “That means you can have four thousand different standards for property sales. It’s not an ideal situation. It really sets up an atmosphere of mistrust between people and the company.”

But intervening was a young Georgian representative, the new Western-educated politician I had heard about, this new Saakashvili, my role model. He was talking with the pipeline representative. He knew how to use very bad language. He knew what to call the current leadership. He promised the villagers that they would get compensated for any damages.

According to the opinion polls, the TV reporter reported, Saakashvili, this new United Democrat, was supposed to win our upcoming presidential election. A state budget in the pockets of the president and his family had proved too much for us.

But Saakashvili was someone I could finally believe in. He was young, had gone to a university in America and believed in Western law. He even had a Dutch wife who could sing Georgian songs. Mr. Fax hated him because he was trying to rid the country of corruption. If Fax hated him then he was the man for me.

My aunt brought us coffee. My grandfather and I both drank it to the sludge at the bottom. Even though only very old women know how to read the silt of the coffee in the bottom of a cup, we both peered into ours, looking for a sign from the Great Toastmaster. “It’s looks like the politicians are going to start using bullets again,” I said.

On the bus back to Batumi the next morning, while looking out the window at the buckwheat fields, I could hear the speaker system above my head playing a new Georgian pop song filled with the spite of youth. I listened more closely and realized it wasn’t spite—it was helpful advice. They were singing, “Get out! Get out you, out from under Shevardnadze. Do all you can! He’s been president for our whole generation. Is he the only one you’ll know your whole life? Aren’t you
bored with him yet?” In fact, a whole youth movement against Shevardnadze had begun in Tbilisi. They called themselves Enough!

The situation reminded me of the old joke. Shevardnadze is sitting at home. He asks his grandson, “What would you like to be when you grow up?” The little boy says, “I want to be president.” Shevardnadze says, “Think of something else. There can’t be two presidents.”

Everyone was talking about Saakashvili. When I got home to the beer factory district, Guliko, Tamriko’s mother, called to me from her window, “Slims! I haven’t had any coffee yet because I haven’t had anyone to drink it with me.” I climbed the stairs to her flat, hoping Tamriko was home, but Guliko said she was out. She sat me down, put a piece of torte in front of me, and started complaining.

“Yesterday,” she said, “I heard a conversation in the courtyard between your brother Zuka and another boy. You know that irritating one with the dalmatian who is always yelling to his mother, ‘Natasha! Natasha!’ Anyway, I heard them say that this new Saakashvili wants to overthrow Shevardnadze. ‘It’s so extreme!’ they shouted.
Vaimay!
All these young people
love
this extreme disease. But I’m afraid Tamriko may be affected too. I’m worried about her blood pressure. She came home yesterday and when she sat down she said, ‘I have a gun. Do you want to see it?’ And then she pulled a little gun out of her purse. Imagine! Slims, do you know where she got a gun?”

“No,” I said. “Maybe from Gocha. You should get her away from that guy.”

“Have you heard the saying, ‘Don’t take away someone’s hope because it may be all they have left’? In his case, our only hope is this new Saakashvili. Have you heard of him? I believe he knows how to harness the energy of our young men. He’ll teach them to get rid of their guns and fight with swords again. Here, drink this,” she said and handed me a cup of instant coffee. “Oh, Slims, what is happening to our people? My students used to cry at the orphanages and the boys brought flowers for them. Our women used to be so beautiful. Do you remember when Gamsakhurdia said, ‘If you shoot bullets we will throw roses at you’? In those days people loved each other very much.”

*

That evening while I was looking out the window watching out for Tamriko, I saw Malkhazi drive up. He parked, locked his car, and then he yelled Juliet’s name. “Juliet!” he called.

“
Sheni deyda
!” Juliet said from the table. “Does he think he is in a Shakespeare play? I just spilled my hawthorn tea all over the papers I was proofing.”

“Juliet!” Malkhazi called again. “Are you still waiting for your white English prince?”

Malkhazi thumped up the stairs and came inside, holding a large lump of dough in his hands.

“Where have
you
been?” I asked.

“Here. Take it,” he said, pushing it into my hands. “I brought it from the bakers. I know how you don’t like to cook, but have you heard? Most of the bread supplies have been infected by a strange Korean curse, but I know the baker who makes this bread and I know it’s clean. Though when I went to his shop and asked him for it, he thought I was on drugs.”

I put the dough into a bowl, and Juliet came into the kitchen waving her papers, trying to dry them. “Where have you been?” she asked.

“Juliet!” he said brightly. “What are you up to?”

“Just now?” she asked. “I was imagining a beautiful image. I was imagining shooting you with a gun. Ah, so beautiful.”

He raised his eyebrows, pulled a gun from his pocket, and gave it to her. “You’re right. I would probably be better off dead.”

“Actually Juliet,” I told her, “he brought you some pretty nice dough. But where
have
you been, Malkhazi?”

He smiled at me and then turned to her, “You came to my work today looking for me, didn’t you? I know you were there because you left your empty glass of apricot compote on my desk. Can I sit down? No. Excuse me,” he said, switching to English. “
May
I sit down?”

She pointed to a kitchen chair.

“Okay, I’ll tell you if you sit down too. Both of you. It’s really a stupid business. Last winter the Turkish ships were in an auction. Well, Slims knows this. Anyway, I convinced a British master to buy
one. Okay, Slims you don’t know this part. No, not Anthony. It’s a long story. Anyway, a British master bought the ship with some investors, but now after only one voyage he thinks I stole oil from his Turkish ship, that I didn’t discharge the correct amount. Over five hundred tonnes. So little for such a big headache.”

“Well, did you?” Juliet said.

“Juliet, haven’t you seen those Turkish ships?” he pleaded. “They are so old. The oil gets lost in the cracks.” He stood up, went to the sink, and grabbed a bottle of dishwashing soap. “It’s like this bottle of dish soap. If you squeeze it widthwise like this, there appears to be more, but this way, it appears to be less. But don’t worry. I know that the missing oil is there somewhere. But I couldn’t get anyone to sign off on anything. For ten days we had to stand like this, with our arms crossed. I wanted to sneak back in the middle of the night to come talk to you. But the British master was so angry. I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to worry. I had to spend two weeks trying to convince them that I had discharged the correct amount into their ship. Do not be angry with me. Please? You should pity me instead. I had to spend this whole time with a bunch of English people.”

“You sound like such a bigot when you talk like that,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said and bowed. “You use that word with me very often. So I looked it up in the dictionary and found the meaning. The word
bigot
refers to a man’s mustache, that it looks like a herd of horses stampeding in one direction. Do you think that I stampede in one direction, Juliet? Ach! I need to find a solution,” he said and stood by her side. He put his palm on her shoulder. “What am I going to do?
Vaimay!
I don’t understand these laws. This
sue
. How do you say this word in English? Sewage? English people are not better than us. I understand Filipino people. I understand Greeks. I understand the Spanish. Well, they are easy to understand because they invented Don Quixote. With anybody else, we could just give them wine and a sword and they would remember what a true human is, but in this case, I’m afraid that won’t work. I don’t know anything about this court of law. And now Gocha is going to send me to England to go on trial.”

Juliet began laughing.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked her.

I was definitely not laughing. I was sent home from abroad because I broke the law and Malkhazi was being sent abroad
because
he broke the law?

“I was just trying to imagine you in a British court of law,” Juliet said.

“Yes, I will bribe them,” he said. “Is that what you are thinking? No, I will tell them the truth. I will go there and I will find some Georgians and we will get drunk in one of their parks so that we can remember that British people are not better than us. When they ask me a question that I don’t want to answer I will just say, ‘I don’t understand the question.’ Soon they will get bored, and finally they will point at me and say, ‘Let him be right.’”

“Malkhazi, I’m a lawyer,” I said. “I can represent you.”

“I’m sorry, Slims. I don’t want you to feel strange about this, but I do not know if your American methods will help me in this case. I need a true Georgian like Gocha to help me out. Besides, I don’t think they’ll let you out of this country. Please, Juliet,” he said. “Give me my gun back.”

“Where are you going now?” she asked.

“I must go,” he said and left.

“They say that the Georgian man always speaks the truth,” Juliet said while looking out the window. “The problem is that if he cannot speak the truth, then he does not speak.”

But I could not listen to her words. Instead, these were the thoughts searing through my mind: Malkhazi thinks I am not a true Georgian? He thinks I don’t understand how to do things the Georgian way? Oh, Mr. Ins
pec
tor, big Georgian man of the town, big-
nosed
Georgian man of the town, no matter how proud you are of your bigness, in a fat contest you would always lose because your nose, no matter how big your stomach is, would always touch the wall first! I tried to figure out what to do. I was ready to go to Tamriko, ask for her gun, and go shoot Gocha. With his own gun. Is that what it would take to prove to Malkhazi that I knew how to do things the Georgian way?

But I wasn’t interested in starting a new nine-generation vendetta. I squeezed the little @ ball I still had in my pocket until I could feel myself calm down a little. The Georgian heart is always divided between punishing his enemy and being a good host to his friend. When we put hospitality before all else, then all our fears fly away.

But I needed a guest in order to feel Georgian again. I began to really understand why Malkhazi valued his job so much: he could always be a host to these foreign sailors. The only guest I knew was Anthony. I felt a soft feeling for Anthony, especially now that I knew he was trying to protect my village from the pipeline. I wondered if the feeling was the same as the feeling Oprah Winfrey described in that show I watched of hers on how to have good relations with yourself. Maybe Anthony was my only true friend—the only one I could really understand anymore because as different as we were, we were both caught in between two cultures.

25.

I
WAITED A FEW DAYS UNTIL THE NEXT TIME A FOREIGN SHIP ARRIVED
at the port filled with beer. I knew that in order to measure the quality, Malkhazi usually took one bottle from each case. By the end of the day there were eighty-five bottles of beer in his backseat. Then I asked Malkhazi if I could borrow his car. I knew that Anthony liked beer very much so I waited for him outside the Center for Democracy, where I had heard from Juliet that he was trying to appeal to our local dictator about the sealants used in the pipeline. When I saw him leave the building, he was shuffling down the street with his head down, looking like some sort of coward. I drove alongside him and said, “You are looking depressed today, and probably for good reason, but it’s always possible to turn the day into a holiday. Look in the back.” His face lit up when he saw so much beer. “Come,” I told him. “Let’s go for a drive.” He agreed, but only if I let him drive because he didn’t like the way I drove. “Wait until we’re a little bit away from the traffic,” I told him.

“What traffic?” he said.

“Ho ho! Okay!” I said. I told him the clutch was stiff, that maybe he didn’t know how to drive a Russian car, but he drove decently, except he kept stopping at the intersections. I had to tell him, “What are you doing? You have the right of way. All the streets that
lead to the sea have the right of way.” While he was waiting for a red light to change, I said, “What are you doing?”