Waiting for the Electricity (42 page)

“Foo, you don’t know,” Malkhazi said. “Maybe that was part of his marketing campaign, to draw attention. You think he
likes
stomping on grapes? Maybe it’s better to make peace with the Russians. They’re Orthodox and they are the only ones who understand our wine.”

Everything was changing. Tamriko was becoming a political activist. When I saw her on King Parnavaz Street, she began complaining to me.

“The government says they want to be like America but I haven’t been paid my salary in eighteen days.”

“Maybe that
is
like America,” I said.

She turned a corner and yelled down an alley to some men leaning against a wall, “Where is the Armenian restaurant where the electricians eat lunch?” She turned back to me. “Saakashvili promised that on the first of the month my salary would come. He
promised
this. And now the coordinator from the building supply company said the financial backing for the casino project was financed by the World Bank. And now this
coordinator
says she can’t pay me, that we must pay back the World Bank for their loan. Imagine!”

She was on her way to pay her electricity bill because the new privately owned electricity company had cut hers off without any warning. “But at least now we know who to talk to. Slims, do you know where the Armenian restaurant is? Oy! The people at the bank said that I’d find the electrical engineers in front of the Armenian restaurant. It’s called Marouch.”

To some passersby Tamriko yelled, “Where’s Marouch?”

“It’s behind the hotel,” one of them replied.

“Is this the restaurant? Where are the engineers? Is this their house?” she asked a man sweeping the street.

Bang bang bang on the door. Some disheveled cosmopolitans answered.

“Are you the people who can turn on my electricity?” Tamriko asked.

“No, we’re tourists from Tbilisi.”

“
Vaimay!
Where’s the restaurant?” she asked a man selling watermelons. “Kindly tell me, do you know where the restaurant Marouch is, where the electricians eat their lunch?”

“It’s behind the auto repair shop,” he said.

“Did you see how expensive his watermelons were?” she said as we walked to the auto repair shop.

When we finally found the men, Tamriko asked them, “When can you turn my electricity back on?”

“In two days. I have a sick mother at home.”

“Two days!”

“We’re just joking.”

“Oh, you almost gave me a heart attack.”

Walking home together we passed Gocha’s house. His mother was in the garden, behind a very high gate. “Come in. Come in and visit,” Gocha’s mother called to us. I didn’t want to go in there but I also didn’t want Tamriko to go in alone.

“Here is my American television set,” she showed us. “Here is my waterfall. Here is my shish kebab grill,” she boasted. “Everyone slows down when they pass my house because they think it’s so enormous. One morning when I went outside only in my housedress I saw the police glaring through the gate. Oh, but it’s such a small house. I have a bigger house in Tbilisi. But, I’m so bored here now that they’ve put poor Gocha in jail.”

“Gocha is in jail?” I asked, trying to hide the jubilation in my voice.

But Tamriko could hear my happiness and she glared at me.

“That’s why I want to go back to Geneva,” Gocha’s mother said. “Did I show you my roof terrace where we’re growing grapes? There’s
room for a big table and a big feast. Oh, look at this. My husband bought a watermelon.”

When we left I was ecstatic but Tamriko was furious. “The aristocratic society we have now are not the originals,” she said. “I can count the originals on one hand. The new ones call themselves
the
cream
. Imagine!”

“Why do you think she introduced us to the watermelon,” I asked, “if she wasn’t going to give us any?”

“Because no one can afford watermelon anymore. To destroy the country you don’t need to throw a bomb from someplace, just triple the price of watermelon.” It was true. In addition to everything else, the price of food was going up.

As I was walking home from work a few evenings later I saw Anthony slowly cruising down the street in a new black Volga he had just bought. It looked like the kind of car Batman would drive. He wore a gray felted Svani mountain hat pulled down over his eyebrows like some sort of Georgian gangster. When he turned to me his eyes were sort of stupid looking, as if he couldn’t count to ten, like some sort of blockhead, or someone who had consumed too much fizzy tarragon water.

“What has happened to you?” I asked him through the window, which he had rolled down. “I didn’t even recognize you from over there.”

“I don’t know how this happened,” he said, motioning me to lean closer, as if he had a great secret to reveal. “I have fallen in love with Georgia.”

“You even speak English with a Georgian village accent now!” I told him.

“Maybe that’s because I’ve been spending so much time in Svanetia. I bought one of those stone towers up there. I’ll have to do a little repair work …”

“It’s dangerous there! Don’t you know the story of the Svani man who brings his guest up to the top of his tower for a view? The
guest says, ‘Your neighbor is pointing a gun at me.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ the host says. ‘He’ll have a guest next weekend.’”

“All my life I’ve lived in fear,” he said. “I come from a fear-driven culture. I didn’t know that until coming here, and living in a land that is not based on fear. After I lost my job, and after you taught me not to be afraid of the police, I felt free all at once. I can be myself here. I stayed past my visa expiration and no one has even noticed.”

“But you see what Georgia is now? Before, everyone would try to catch you to bring you home to eat something. Do you remember when you ate dinner at our house? Everyone wanted to sit you down at the table. Now they try to avoid it.”

“That’s not true,” he said.

“Didn’t you hear the story recently about the man who was sleeping and he heard some knocking? ‘Open the door! Open the door!’ the people outside yelled. The man got out of his bed and said, ‘Who is it?’ ‘It’s robbers,’ they said. ‘Oh, thank God!’ the man said, throwing open the door. ‘Come in. I thought it was guests.’ You see Anthony, he had nothing to take. If it had been guests he would have had to give them food. No one will tell you this—not the politicians nor the news broadcasters—but due to globalization, our culture is finished. C’est la vie Georgia. What can we do with this artificial myth of happiness in this new dream of capitalism when it only works sometimes? How can it become more optional? Perhaps the October Revolution was the right way, the right story for us, but there were a lot of mistakes. A distortion. Now is the synthesis of the natural dialectic, but I think it is not the real synthesis. It is only the grotesque repetition of the previous stages.”

“But I bought a tower in Svanetia,” Anthony said. “We can escape all this. Do you think Juliet will move there with me? You can come too. I need to marry a Georgian in order to be able to stay here. I mean, of course that’s not the only reason. I love her too.”

“I don’t have any control over that. You’ll have to ask her yourself,” I told him. I got into his Batman car and together we drove to the beer factory district. We parked outside our flat and I sighed. I didn’t know how this was going to go.

“Juliet,” he called up to her. She came down to the car. “Get in,” he said. “I have something to ask you.”

When she got in he told her his news. “I bought a tower in Svanetia.”

“You too?” she cried. “All these foreign people are buying up our land!”

“No, no,” he said. “I meant you can move there too. With me.”

“You want me to move to a tower and just brew alcoholic beverages out of milk products all winter?” she asked.

“No! Of course not. Okay, what if we moved back to England? We could live with my mother in her little village in the Cotswolds,” he said.

As the words to our first Georgian folktale say, “Once there was.” Once there was a time when Juliet imagined it was possible to live in England. She could imagine it again and again. It fit into another story called
The Great Georgian Exodus
. So many people already knew this story and followed it. Once there was an Englishman who worked for an oil company, who came to Georgia. He met a lovely woman from the Caucasus and promised her a more organized life with a great many kitchen appliances to keep her company. It resembled the story of Jason and the Argonauts that every dramatist keeps revising according to which political party is in power. Jason comes to Georgia and steals the gold—the oil—and he brings Medea back to Greece with him. But in order for them to not live under tyranny, she ends up killing her sons. It’s a bad ending. Juliet began to sing:

Christopher Columbus traveled the shore

He should have stayed at home

at his own shores

It’s better not to run here or there

even if your name is Christopher

Better to obey your own fate

on your own shores

This next part becomes difficult to describe. Our Georgian hospitality has been known to ruin people. Maybe it had washed over Anthony so strongly that he became like that new seaside fish restaurant that was broken apart by unruly waves after a storm. Maybe the Georgian kamikaze pride, the careening-around-the-corner-trying-to-get-to-the-next-bowl-of-
chacha
-on-the-porch sensibility was contagious. But Anthony finally took one of our stories and appropriated it for his own. “You think I don’t understand your traditions?” he asked, swollen with indignation and red-faced—his nose had even grown a little. He started to drive. Juliet and I put on our seatbelts, not because he was drunk but because Saakashvili’s wife had ordered us all to wear seatbelts.

“You understand some of them,” I said.

“Where are you taking us?” Juliet asked.

“I just want to show you the tower I bought. I could never just buy my own tower in England. I’m going to take you there.”

“We could go another day,” I said.

“According to your Georgian traditions the most romantic and beautiful wedding ritual is the abduction of the bride.”

“Yes,” Juliet said. “But you did not ask for my consent. The abduction only ever happens with the consent of the bride and her parents.”

“And usually her brother isn’t in the car,” I added.

Anthony didn’t seem to hear us though. He sped north, in the direction of Mount Kazbegi. A picture of a coconut dangled from the rearview mirror, some kind of air freshener that made me feel, oddly, as if I were on a coconut holiday. We clambered up the potholed highway, now urgently being repaired by the new government.

“Oh, Georgian woman,” I sang. “Don’t let your children fall into enemy hands.” I consoled myself slightly that if the police pulled us over nothing would happen because they might think Anthony was working for the government, because on the floor was a stack of his old anticorruption pamphlets. If the police pulled us over we could say we were part of their own anticorruption campaign.

“Who is kidnapping who?” Juliet asked and pulled out a little handgun. “I told you I am a bandit English teacher.” The excitement didn’t last long though, unfortunately for us all. He was driving too
fast, and a policeman was flagging him down.

“Why are we pulling over?” I asked. “It’s better to just keep driving through!”

“I know how to handle this now,” he said, and pulled over to the side of the road.

“It’s Shalva!” I said. But Shalva didn’t look as happy as he used to—he looked as if he was under a lot of stress. He slowly walked to the car.

“Here, do you want this?” Anthony asked him, waving a hundred-pound note. Shalva looked at him with pity, looked over at me apologetically. With his head he motioned to the loitering group of policemen behind him.

“They keep surveillance on us,” he said. “We’ll have to take him in.” He pulled Anthony out of the car, and strapped handcuffs on him. Poor Anthony, he was in the right country but at the wrong time.

“
Vaimay
,” my mother said. “The poor Englishman’s in jail?”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” I told her. “Malkhazi will get him out. When you worry so much it puts God out of work.”

We had electricity all the time, but now Georgia was waiting for the light of Mary. We were always waiting for something. “But maybe when She comes there will only be Turkish people left here,” Juliet said. “The Turkish man will say, ‘We can buy this too?’”

“Oh, there are some more Turkish people!” Juliet cried every time she walked on the boulevard. “Axh! They are looking at what they want to buy. They don’t think about King Irakli, only, ‘Oh what I beautiful view I will have when I wake up in the morning.’ They don’t even know any songs about Prince Irakli.”

Juliet had begun to sing the old songs about King Irakli. She sang them while knitting chain mail suits on the balcony.

“Stop it with these folk songs!” Tamriko yelled from her balcony. “Are you trying to be Saakashvili? Be careful! He also is trying to celebrate our traditions through the old songs and dances. But that is only for the tourists. It doesn’t have anything to do with the regular
people. And I don’t believe those folk dances anyway. A whole army fights over one woman? If
only
.”

Oh Tamriko, I wondered. Do you need a whole nation to fight for you?

The next day I brought Tamriko some roses. “Do you know what day it is today?” I asked her.

“Wednesday.”

“No. Well yes,” I said. “But it’s also Women’s Day.”

“I thought Women’s Day was in May,” she said.

“No, that’s Mother’s Day. Next week is Sister’s Day. The week after that there’s the Day of Love, devoted to women, of course. And then the Day of Beauty. Devoted to the woman again. And then late summer is devoted to the older woman. And then Saint Nino’s Day. But isn’t it strange that there is only one day for the soldiers?”

She took the flowers and arranged them in a vase while I watched her. They didn’t all fit. She was trying to squeeze them inside.