Waiting for the Electricity (41 page)

Saakashvili came after the old priest with his entourage of snipers, though, and put that father, our very own, in jail.

On TV the new priests were blessing the gas stations. It was a little embarrassing. They were blessing the brandy, the meat, forcing the public to drink, even the pregnant women. On the street children were singing the song from the commercial now playing on TV: “Coca-Cola goes with
pelamooshi, kingkali, padrajani
.”

I overhead Tamriko at a cafe complaining to Juliet. “I have lost my spiritual father,” she said. “I haven’t been able to make any confessions. In church the new patriarch only speaks about how you must be kind, you must help each other, give to beggars. Foo! I know that. Who doesn’t? Who doesn’t already do that? It’s nothing new. He says, ‘All nations are brothers.’ He should speak about something more relevant. He should speak about our land! About life! Flesh! Saints! Give us some
true
feeling.
Vaimay!
Forgive me. Oy!” she said and crossed herself. When I heard that I felt like punching my thigh.

In the villages people had started to drink. I mean, even more than they used to. According to some reports in the newspaper, ninety-five percent of the people were drunk when they were on their deathbeds. This meant they met their creator in a tipsy state. But really they drank so they could understand modern economics better and judge it more correctly. They would drink and then say, “If I give
you
wine, then actually you should give
me
five kilos of
beans
!” They used to give more freely. For the village women it was worse. Prostitution
was at the highest level. If one man had a lot of money, like a sheriff in a small state, he had many women.

When Saakashvili started shutting down the universities, Juliet began to worry she would lose her job. Saakashvili said that too many people in Georgia were overly educated and with such high degrees no one would want to do the service work in hotels. “I’m afraid that soon I will lose my job at the university and will have to get a job working as a housekeeper in the Sheraton,” Juliet said.

“They are trying to make Georgia without Georgians,” Malkhazi complained. “During Soviet times we had to speak Russian. Now we must all speak English?” Actually,
all
the men started complaining about it. They said, “Now we must learn this
girly
language?”

Dear Hillary
,

I take it back. I didn’t mean it. I wanted the law but not like this. I didn’t mean the
American
law
.

We had two bank robberies last week in Tbilisi. The police surrounded the bank robbers and began shooting at them. A policeman was shot in the forehead. Wait! I will explain it to you. They ordered the robbers to put their hands up. You know, “Don’t move!” like they do in America, but the robbers weren’t accustomed to this type of American tradition so they moved and the police started shooting. Ax!! Everything takes after America now. Before, the police and the criminals were on the same side. One of the bank robbers was the director of an elementary school. He just wanted to give his teachers better salaries. On the news they are showing how they are arresting everyone who the bank robbers had contact with
.

“
Sheni deyda
!” Malkhazi yelled at the news on TV. “It’s so stupid. If your best friend calls and has just committed a crime in order to feed his family and he pleads to you, ‘I need help,’ how can you possibly refuse?”

“Some counterfeiters are also on the loose,” Juliet said. “If we see them we are supposed to call this new police force. But I don’t know that telephone number. Even if I did I wouldn’t call. If the people were making fake money, obviously they needed it.”

“Before,” Malkhazi complained, “if you didn’t have anything, at least you could steal something. Now we have all these new police putting people in prison.”

On television the politicians were yelling louder, explaining why they were putting each other in jail. “Do not think that I put you in jail because I’m trying to get revenge. I put you in jail because you
should
be put in jail.”

America also gave Georgia technologically advanced spying equipment. If an official from Kutaisi took a bribe they made a big show of it on TV. Forty official police cars would flash their lights. They would escort the bribery-maker out of the building. The police were not good actors though because when they saw all those cameras up close they couldn’t stop smiling. But if you looked at any young security guard in front of a bank, he was biting his fingernails, afraid to be bribed, afraid to be caught. Even the police station walls were knocked down and replaced with glass as a symbol of transparency. Saakashvili forced the police to pay back the money that they had taken as bribes. They were forced to pay back a hundred million dollars.

“One hundred and twenty million dollars,” Malkhazi corrected me. “Or else they go to jail. One third of Georgia is in jail now. But who knows what happens there? Why don’t they make the jails transparent? If you fight in the middle of the street and block the traffic it’s ten years in prison or ten thousand dollars. If you have some black market operation where you take a bribe for three thousand dollars and divide it between five people, and if you are caught, each person must pay Saakashvili ten thousand dollars each. You must sell your car, mortgage your house. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I want to go back to the village before they get me for something. Oh, I don’t know anything anymore. Maybe it’s better to follow the law like in America. Then you have a stable society. But we like freedom
too much.” Malkhazi was so tired, his balding head so shiny. He sighed and sighed. “Ah, I will clean my gun now.”

I thought it was only happening to young boys on the street—other boys—but then our own Zuka was thrown into jail. He had stolen a mobile phone from a girl, hoping that she would chase after him. “Oh, it’s so stupid!” Malkhazi groaned when he heard. “Ai yai yai! Why didn’t I teach him better? Zuka thinks that is romance?” Malkhazi went to the police station and, due to his ability to talk to policemen, was able to extricate Zuka from jail, but all the way home he lectured him. “Zuka, listen, these days, if you take someone’s mobile phone it’s five years in jail! That’s the new law now.”

“But you always said that girls like
kurdi
.”

“Foo! You don’t know what
kurdi
are.
Kurdi
are noble men. They never take someone else’s
property
. Do you know what prison is like? Ten men in a cell. There is not even enough room to sit. They have to take turns.”

Dear Hillary
,

Everyone is confused. It’s too complicated, not simple anymore. Saakashvili is tearing down people’s homes. They must live in the yard. The new government is checking everyone’s papers now to ensure that they are the official owners of their houses, scouring the countryside for people without papers, trying to implement these new American laws. But in some mountains, like Svanetia, the people have lived in their towers for 1,200 years and now they must show their papers, these proofs of purchase? I can understand if it’s in a town. But the president is requiring this even from the hard workers next to my village, the ones who are living in the abandoned tea factory because their villages fell off the mountain. You understand, Hillary, right? Before, there were no laws. There was no one here thinking about private property. People built houses at the bottom of the hill or inhabited old factories. Now this president is asking for the paperwork. If they don’t produce it he will move them to the border with Armenia. Their land is valuable seaside property, you know
.

Everything comes from America now, even this Saturday night live show on TV. They show Playboy pictures and sing about the sexy daughter-in-law in the background. It is important to have something sacred inside. Yes? What is going to happen with this capitalism? I worry. Money makes people crazy and they lose the sacred thing inside. We are not like Turkish people who work all the time. We Georgians believe we were put on this earth to relax, to enjoy the Paradise that God gave us, to have good thoughts and good deeds. It is not noble to think one thing, speak another, write another, and do another. So I will stop writing to you now. Remember me. My name is Slims Achmed Makashvili and I am from the twelfth century
.

p.s. If your country ever experiences the economic problems that we did, and heads toward a collapse, remember that it happens so quickly. Soon the roads become like the garden. But remember this: when you only think about how to put bread on the table there is no more time for metaphysics, no more time for depression. And if that ever happens, don’t worry, be happy! Soon you will have rich Georgian tourists crazy for American nostalgia
.

Now that Fax was in jail our little Maritime Ministry of Law became a completely volunteer organization. Since most men won’t work for free, only the women kept working. The good thing about this was that for once I could work full time with Anthony—without Fax’s resistance—to convince BP and the Georgian government to spend more money in order to use a different sealant on the pipelines to prevent them from leaking. And for the first time in my life, with Anthony’s help, my little law firm won a case against the government. None of my friends believed me when I told them. They said, “How is it possible to beat the government? No it isn’t possible, I don’t believe you, you are lying.” But I told them, “Of course the government will repeal,
but a great thing has happened. I stumped the judge. Anthony and I presented before her fifty-two pages of American-and British-style facts, of why they must use a better sealant.”

The judge crumpled under the weight of so many facts, banged her hammer on the Turkish desk, called a recess, and said that for now, we, the little people had won. But the little people didn’t believe me. They said, “We are the little people. We do not win such things. It is our destiny to suffer, we are Georgians,” and so on and so on. They are more difficult to convince than the opposition.

“Actually,” I told Juliet the evening I heard, “instead of Medea in the square, they should erect a monument to Anthony.”

Now with electricity, we spent all our time at home watching TV. Malkhazi had started questioning everything. He even started defending Saakashvili. On the news a crowd of people were yelling, “Misha, go to Holland and sell your roses there and let us sell our own wine!” Saakashvili had just bought up all the wine in Kakheti.

“Saakashvili wants to change the character of our wine to make it more palatable to Western financiers,” I complained to Malkhazi. “He’s watering it down. So of course the Russians say, ‘We don’t want your wine.’”

“Oh,
sheni deyda
, Slims!
You
don’t know,” Malkhazi suddenly shouted at me. “What are you saying? Saakashvili still loves Georgia. If he found out that someone was watering down Georgian wine he would
kill
that person. At least he
bought
the wine. The Kakhetian men in their vineyards were just sitting there, moaning, with their heads in their hands. ‘Oh, the Russians won’t buy our wine. Boo hoo. The Russians just want to bomb us.’ Just whining. Doing nothing. ‘For two hundred years,’ they moan, ‘we sold to the Russians and now what do we do? Who will we sell to?’ So Saakashvili bought it and implemented his public relations marketing technology. He personally took the wine around Europe to fancy restaurants and said, ‘Try our wine.’ Don’t you understand, Slims? At least he is trying to do
something
. He is trying to make Georgian wine famous.”

“But you can’t drink Georgian wine at a fancy French restaurant,” I told Malkhazi. “You cannot take little sips like they do in America. You must drink it outside near a stream, singing a song, or at a table eating Georgian food and remembering the true life. Is he teaching these restaurant people our songs?”

“Oh, I don’t know
anything
anymore,” Malkhazi said putting his head in his hands. “What is the point of all these toasts? We say profound things, vow eternal friendship, go into a state of
monatreba
—so stunned and touched by hospitality that we can’t speak—and then it’s all forgotten in the morning.”

One day when we were driving and we passed a beach resort I pointed to a tree some highway workers were cutting down. “Look!” I told him. “They are cutting down another tree. You see? Saakashvili doesn’t even like trees! He is trying to make Georgia just like America.”

But Malkhazi said, “That tree was about to fall down. It’s not
all
his fault.”

We were listening to the radio, to Enrique Iglesias’s “Escape,” and when I said, “This song makes me want to stand up and fight,” Malkhazi just shook his head a little.

A line of black Mercedes edged the parking lot of the beach resort. Malkhazi whistled. “I have never seen so many Armenians. This is the thing, Slims. Armenians are doing fine, even though Azerbaijan shut them off from everything, and now they have no access to Russia either. But somehow they are able to obtain these luxury cars to drive to our beaches. They get up early. Five, six in the morning and start working. Actually, Slims, I am beginning to think that maybe
Georgians
are the strange ones. Do you remember how in school we had to read Alexandre Dumas? He said that Georgians were like lions and deserved to rule the world. But the world is different now. I don’t know how to live in this world. Oh, I don’t know what will happen. Maybe I should move to Uzbekistan.”

“I can’t believe your attitude,” I told him. Actually, I was still mad about how Saakashvili bought up all the grapes. After we heard that Saakashvili had bought all the wine, Zuka and I went from door to door. “Do you have wine? Do you have wine?” But it was all gone. Now we
had to make our toasts with beer. “How can a president buy up all the grapes of a country? He made all the parliamentary leaders stomp on them, even if they didn’t want to, so they could be in
The Guinness Book of World Records
. But they didn’t know how to step on them. They used their boots! It was too hard on the wine so it made the wine hot. Now, like the rest of the world, we will be drinking hot-tempered wine, getting hangovers, and feeling ill the next day. When you drink market wine,” I told Malkhazi, “you are drinking Saakashvili’s feet.”