Waiting for the Electricity (40 page)
“We have got a very important mandate from the people to clean up Georgia, to make it peaceful and prosperous, to make Georgia efficient, investor-friendly, to consolidate power,” Mikheil Saakashvili said that evening on TV. Comedians were having a field day. “Please don’t drink
my
tea,” they told him. He ignored their bantering and became stern. “I realize how big a burden I have taken on my shoulders, how big a burden all of us have taken on our shoulders. We are dealing with a failed country, where democracy and success don’t even come as natural words for us.”
“Will we become part of NATO?” one TV commentator asked.
“Europe has their own problems. They feel nervous all the time. We don’t want to increase their headache.” He girded himself up like the statue of King David on the square. “We cannot do everything in one day,” he reminded us. “We will go step-by-step.”
“I hope it’s not another step off a cliff,” Malkhazi said.
T
HE FIRST THING
S
AAKASHVILI DID WHEN HE BECAME PRESIDENT WAS
restore the electricity. Like the Great Toastmaster on the first day of creation, he said, “Let there be electric power!” And we examined the light and saw that it was good. Like wine (also like vodka), the light made everyone’s thoughts more tender. The old people from the village who had suffered the most especially praised him. Even now my grandfather raises his glass of
chacha
to him when he shows up on TV and says, “At least he brought light. He is a good boy.”
But Saakashvili also brought other kinds of light: Marlboro Light, Coca-Cola Light, Christianity Light, Eggplant Light.
“What is eggplant light?” Malkhazi asked at first.
“A banana,” I told him.
“I brought bananas to Georgia before Saakashvili,” Malkhazi insisted.
Saakashvili, our Misha, he was called, was also called the fountain king because he loves fountains. He also loves little parks with statues of women—especially he loves Ukrainian women, especially in his bed.
On Seaside Boulevard, Saakashvili built a new dancing French fountain operated by a salaried DJ for all the pedestrians to promenade in
front of in the evenings. On TV, instead of an old army boot, they show us a close-up of our fountain.
“But our fountain doesn’t compare to Barcelona’s,” Juliet said the first time she visited it.
But it does play Viennese waltzes. Sometimes the DJ gets drunk and pushes all the buttons at once. But then the younger children stopped visiting the fountains. They went to the SuperHyper Market instead, to play with the new American doors, the kind that open and close automatically.
It even became quite stupid to talk about electricity. We didn’t have it for thirteen years and now no one wanted to think about that time. “That was a dark time,” people said. “Why think about that time?”
The whole town of Batumi was suddenly illuminated, a mockery of darkness. New streetlights splattered light onto every road, and even onto vacant land where there were no roads. Every major municipal building, church, and historical building of any significance—every modern, historic, and even prehistoric cafe glowed with fuchsia, lime, and peacock blue lights. Glimmering plastic palm trees shimmied up and down Seaside Boulevard like showgirls. And in the boulevard the government gave us a Ferris wheel for free—at first it was a gift to make up for all of our suffering, but ten days later they started charging money.
“They want to light up the boulevard when people are still hungry?” Malkhazi complained.
Pop music began to pump through the loudspeakers, ricocheting across the sea. We suddenly had one of the best sound systems in the region. Then I saw a billboard advertising Wi-Fi for the tourists. But the bungalows on the beach, the little thatched holiday shacks run by tough guys—Gocha’s former bodyguards—were still empty. “Where-oh-where are the tourists that Saakashvili promised?” I heard an old woman say on the bus, looking out at all the changes. She was whimpering, “Oh, I don’t want Saakashvili.” She wiped her eyes with her headscarf and the woman sitting next to her patted her back.
Saakashvili’s government acquired some paint and slathered grape, strawberry, and lemon candy colors over all of the buildings in our
beer factory district. He didn’t ask anyone’s opinion of what color they preferred because it would have taken too long for us all to agree. Now we were no longer called the beer factory district but “cartoon village showcase.” It became a very prestigious part of town.
“We are now part of the beau monde,” Juliet said, excited at first. But then she had to start telling our guests, “Don’t look in that direction,” pointing to the Turkish cranes demolishing the old buildings. “It’s not beautiful. Only look in that direction, at the sea.”
“
Vai may!
An earthquake,” Tamriko started frequently yelling from her balcony.
“It’s not an earthquake,” Juliet would reassure her. “It’s just the Turkish businessmen jackhammering the sidewalk.”
Saakashvili and his cohort also repainted the streets in Tbilisi, but only the ones that President George Bush would see when he rode by in his entourage. And they garlanded all the balconies along the route from the airport with plastic flowers. Saakashvili liked George Bush very much. He liked his style. He liked the prefab, golf pro look. I think they both belonged to the same country club.
After Saakashvili gave us our light back, the next thing he did was build a new airport.
The news broadcasters announced on TV: “He is doing so much work, working so fast that some people think America is giving him drugs. How else could he be working so fast?”
When people asked our Misha what kind of drugs he was taking he said, “Some people are accusing me of walking too fast, of being too frantic, but that’s because I’m in a hurry to help Georgia. We’ve lost a lot of time. I hope we can make up for it.”
On the day he completed his airport project he was very proud. Naturally, he showed it off on TV. But that evening the roof blew off. He was very confounded. Isn’t that a good word? Or is dumbfounded a better word? It describes his expression exactly, as well as everyone else’s.
Then a Georgian billionaire from Moscow built a theme park—complete with roller coasters and an inflatable castle—on the main highway not far from my village. Entrance was free all summer. A sign out front said, “With love, a cottage becomes a castle.” But I
think this wasn’t the proper meaning of the proverb. This billionaire wanted to show Georgians, “You see? Investment can benefit you directly.” People were still suspicious though. They said, “We thought the
Ferris wheel
was free, but now they have started charging for
that
.” This billionaire also bought up four kilometers of beach, the cleanest part where the sand is fine, and we lost all our public access.
People started complaining to Saakashvili when the Kazakh businessmen began construction on a Sheraton Hotel in Batumi. They said, “You want us to look like a tourist resort in Florida?” That night Saakashvili made an announcement on television. He said, “Some people are accusing me of trying to make Batumi look like Florida. They say that I watched too much
Baywatch
when I lived in America. But soon Batumi will look like Cádiz, or some other such European coastal town, because we are an ancient culture.”
“What’s wrong with looking like Florida?” Zuka asked.
Saakashvili even moved our national statue of King David the Builder in Tbilisi to the suburbs. He replaced it with a statue of Ronald Reagan. Then he added another monument to a Kazakh hero to honor all the Kazakh businessmen who were now investing in Georgia. The investment project was called the new Silk Road Project. And in Batumi the minister of finance built a statue of Medea, the Georgian wife of Jason of the ship of Argo, who searched throughout Georgia for the Golden Fleece. On the streets you could hear the taxi drivers discussing it. “Have you seen the new statue of Medea?” they would ask.
“Her nose is disproportioned. She’s so unattractive I don’t want to go to the square anymore.”
“But why build a monument to that woman? She betrayed her father and killed her brother and her two sons.”
At first these new developments were surprising, in the same way that miracles surprise us. But then I went to the post office and saw that it was for sale. Saakashvili doesn’t like post offices?
“It’s worse than five years ago,” Malkhazi complained. “
Everything
is for sale. It’s a catastrophe.”
“Catast
rophe
,” Juliet added. It seemed she had now decided to forget about English and learn French!
And for Malkhazi, especially, it was a catastrophe. He lost his job in the port. Saakashvili’s men had put everyone who had made any money in oil into jail. Malkhazi began to grow anxious waiting for when he might be put in jail too. The biggest construction project Saakashvili had started was his new psychological project: constructing a Georgian mentality layered with fear.
“The university
and
the hospital are for sale,” Malkhazi said. “Turkey and China are buying up everything. At least the beer factory district is now considered a
good
area, but I have no money for anything extra. I finally have time to go to the forest to relax, but I can’t afford the gas to get there. No one can afford to put more than twenty-two tetri on their cell phones these days. You never get to finish a conversation.”
“Don’t be very stupid,” Zuka said. “Now we have everything. Datsun. Daewoo. Hyundai.”
“No, Zuka,” Malkhazi said. “Just go outside and listen for yourself. Listen to what the taxi drivers are saying.” We could hear them complaining through the open windows of our flat. “Who can buy their own flat now for seven and three zeros?” they were saying. “Now a flat costs twenty-five and three zeros.”
But good things were happening too. Since so many hotels were being built, Tamriko quit her job at the Cafe Soviet Nostalgia and got a good job as a secretary for a building supply company. She said Saakashvili planned to build a Dutch restaurant in the shape of a windmill, and even a restaurant for tourists that was upside down. Our crazy president was even going to build a business institute with a swirling restaurant on top. It would be decorated with the letters of the Georgian alphabet because many say the Georgian alphabet resembles strands of DNA.
I wondered where Saakashvili was getting all his money.
Some change had come over Fax. At work he started drinking only one cup of coffee a day instead of his usual eight. He stopped smoking and started speaking in a placating manner, and he even asked about me, as if he was concerned about me. But then, he was put in jail too.
*
And we were really becoming a cosmopolitan country! When some Turkish businessmen opened a restaurant-uniform factory in Sarpi, the town bordering Georgia and Turkey, Zuka quit making furniture and started working there instead. We all went to the opening ceremony because they promised to have a good buffet afterwards. Saakashvili was there too, surrounded by bodyguards, their arms crossed in front of them.
Saakashvili stood at the podium in front of the factory, robust and rather pink, next to tables neatly lined with champagne flutes on little doilies and attended to by attractive Ukrainian women. They were modern women; they wore short skirts and heels. Saakashvili tightened his purple tie and announced, “Today is a great day. It represents great progress for our country. Our guests from Turkey used to be afraid of us, afraid to open up factories in Georgia.” The fountain king stopped talking in order to smile at his Turkish customers. “But now everything is peaceful and they can begin bringing in employment opportunities. We now invite our guests to come up.”
The Turkish factory owner stood before us, also robust, corporeal, giving us advice. “You may look at me now and think that I have had certain advantages I was born into,” he said. “But I started working when I was seven years old. I had five brothers and we all shared the same room growing up. I am here to tell you, if you have a head on your shoulders and two good hands, if you’re willing to work hard, you can succeed in anything you do. To do something great, it’s not necessary to be Superman, just to be willing to work hard, to pull yourself up.”
We were appalled! We had
heard
the Turks made their little children work when they were only seven years old. We didn’t realize it was
true
. “How uncivilized!” I heard someone remark to another.
T
HEN THE
J
EHOVAH
’
S
W
ITNESSES TOOK OVER THE SIDEWALK
. T
HEY WERE
setting up a display table near the entrance of the church. When I walked by I whispered, “Please God, if I’m ever hungry, don’t let me be tempted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The Jehovah’s Witnesses are very rich people. They brought a lot of money to Georgia. The quality of the paper in their teaching books is the highest level. Even if you try to burn the pages, you can’t.
The main problem was that Batumi’s bishop had a scenic face, like a movie star, and people were suspicious of this. He should have had a common face. He also took vacations in five different countries. When people were hungry and they saw his face they said, “Look at him! He preaches one thing but does another, and he resembles that actor from that new Brazilian serial,
Blanca’s Widow
.”
So our own village priest came to town and began to speak of the time that Jerusalem was destroyed, described the time when people had grown weary of waiting for God. They had been invaded and their holy city had fallen apart. “How long did they have to wait?” the village priest asked. “How long do we have to wait until our lives are restored? When will God bring the promised blessing? When will we be renewed? We do not always feel that we are moving forward toward love. Sometimes it feels like a lunatic world. But we are living in the same world as Isaiah.
The loss I speak of today is not only the loss of our ancient culture, the loss I speak of is the loss of the act of waiting. When I say we have lost the act of waiting, I don’t mean only the loss of waiting for light. We’ve lost the hope and life that happens within the waiting, the love that happens within the waiting. We’ve all had losses and you’ve all had to wait out the grieving. But now these Jehovah’s Witnesses, brothers, will give you a car. You want a car? Oh it looks so shiny. Washed clean after its drive here through Bulgaria. But now you no longer know how to wait out your impulses of wanting that car. I say it’s better to wait it out.” He suddenly became so angry that he grabbed a Jehovah’s Witness by the neck, bent his head down, and shaved a cross on his head.
