Waiting for the Electricity Read online

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2014 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the address above.

  Copyright © 2014 by Christina Nichol

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1044-3

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Waiting for the Electricity

  To Zviadi, Giorgi, Vanichka,

  and both big and little Mananas

  “It’s like Pandora’s Box. When Zeus opened it everything flew out. What was left? Just hope.”

  —Georgian worker, on the completion of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline

  1.

  A TIDAL WAVE OF WOMEN, HUGE AND BUSTY, DRAPED IN LONG BLACK dresses, lumbered heavily, trundling toward the sea.

  Watch out! Get out of their way.

  This horde of buxom women was hiking down the hillsides like an invasion. On the minibuses they cracked sunflower seeds between their teeth, staring straight ahead, invested only in sunlight, in the promise of the sea. On the beach all these women would sunbathe. Some stood, holding a pirozhok in one hand and a beer in the other, thigh-deep in the water, yelling to little Shako not to swim too far. Those from the villages still bathed in their dresses, which clung to the folds on their bodies.

  The air was hot. The air was drunk. The air had fermented into summer, a serious and committed summer. It was August 19, the last day of the season, also known as The Day of Turning, and everyone was trying to blacken their bodies before the weather changed. Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, and even Russians hefted toward summer, deep and late. Like an overladen table, the weight of summer groaned.

  In the beginning, when God was distributing the land to all the nations, we Georgians missed the meeting. The next morning we looked around and realized we were homeless. “Hey!” we shouted to God. “What about our land?”

  “Where were you last night?” He asked. “You missed the meeting. I already gave away all the land.”

  “We were drinking!” we cried out. “We were toasting Your name!”

  God was so pleased with us that He gave us all the land He was saving for Himself. That’s why we are supposed to relax and enjoy the beauty of God’s earth.

  The Armenians say, “We missed the meeting too, and all He gave us were the rocks He was saving for Himself.” That’s why their land is so strewn with stones, and also why they are now hogging up our beach.

  We lived on God’s land for thousands of years, enjoying its beauty and its bounty, always carrying a hoe in one hand to sow and reap the wonders of His holy dirt. But, because of our neighbors, in the other hand we had to carry a gun.

  One day God came to see how everyone was doing. He visited each country in the neighborhood. First, He went to Armenia and asked, “How are you doing? Are you enjoying everything? Sleeping well? No complaints?”

  The Armenians said, “Everything’s well. We’re living very nicely on these rocks You gave us.”

  God said, “I’m so pleased that you are living so well. This puts Me in such a good mood, in fact, that I’ll grant you any wish you make.”

  “Well,” the Armenians said. “As we said, we’re content. But …”—and here they paused and started thinking very demonstratively, tapping their temples with their fingers—“if we were to think of something, our only wish would be that You destroy Azerbaijan. Those guys are always trying to steal our lake.”

  So God went next door to Azerbaijan to see how well they were holding up. “Hello!” He called. The Azeris were busy boating and fishing on the Caspian Sea and eating up all the caviar. “How are you doing down there?”

  “Normal. Praise God.”

  “Well, what do you people wish for?”

  “We’d really appreciate it if You decimated Armenia. They are bothersome neighbors, always trying to usurp one of our wheat fields.”

  Then God came over to Georgia.

  “Victory to You! Galmarjos!” we cried out when we saw Him, thrusting high our sheephorns filled with wine. “We kiss You.” We were already so pleased with His bountifulness that when He asked what we wished for we said we needed nothing more. We told Him, “We don’t ask for anything. Just grant Armenia and Azerbaijan their wishes.”

  That’s how the story goes.

  It is said that in order to keep stories alive in our hearts, we have to tell them back to each other because when you only listen to stories and don’t tell them back you become like the man who picks grapes but does not prune the vines, like the one who reaps the harvest but does not sow the seeds. You can become catatonic and easily led astray. In the olden days, when it was time for a boy to tell his own story but he didn’t know how to begin, if his mouth wouldn’t work properly, as if it were filled with rocks, the elders around the fire would say, “Start like this: ‘Once there was. Once there was. Once there was not.’” This is the beginning of every tale. It means that what was true once, and even a second time true, is not always true a third time.

  It was once true in Georgia that we only have one life and so we shouldn’t waste it on material pursuits. It was also true that we lived in Paradise. But it took perseverance to remember every day that we lived in Paradise. Here we have dancing, love, wine, sun, ancient culture, and beauty. But no money. Therefore, we have become a little unfashionable because, these days, money is the hero of the world.

  That’s why I decided to try to tell the story of my country back, in order to keep some hope alive in our hearts in the midst of a living condition that had become extremely difficult.

  For this reason, mainly, I was composing the following letter in English:

  August 19th, 2002

  Dear Hillary Clinton:

  My name is Slims Achmed Makashvili and i am from the little town called Batumi, on the Black Sea. it is the very small town. So to say, it is beautiful and sunny. It is the town for me.

  But then I worried: What if Hillary had never heard of Batumi? I didn’t want her to feel ignorant, even though she should have heard of us because Inga Charkhalashvili and Maia Lomineishvili—both famous Georgian women—had great success when they played at the International Chess Championship in Batumi.

  I continued:

  Batumi is the li
ttle town that not many people know about. i know because i looked up Batumi on the Internet and there was only one picture of the palm tree. The tourist wrote, “this town looks like chipped paint.” That is because we are under reconstruction. The local dictator is tearing down the old buildings and making many of the lawns in our town because no one can hide behind a lawn with a gun. In addition, the religious leaders are building 12th century spirituality huts. We are progressing civicly and religiously. We even have a bank. It is shiny and modern bank but has no money left in it. New certification requirement in 1998 decreased the number of banks from 200 to 43.

  i really think we need little help over here in the farmer land, especially me! Especially because Georgia is the Christian country and it’s difficult to have the Muslim name in a Christian country! If i had more Georgian name such as Davito, Dato, Temuri, or Toto, i could get a higher governmental position.

  But now I will explain to You the more important information about how Batumi is the natural port. Port lies at the end of the railroad from Baku and is used mainly for petroleum product. Our town boasts of eight berths which have total capacity of 100,000 tonnes of general cargo, 800,000 tonnes of bulk cargo and six million tonnes of oil and gas product. Facilities include portal cranes and loaders for moving containers onto railcars. As You can see, Batumi offers You and Your country great business opportunity!

  But then I reconsidered what I had written. After all, petroleum products were killing off all the fish.

  I leaned back in the cafe chair and looked out at the sea. The Philippine and Turkish freighters on the horizon, on their way to the port, exhaled in slow motion a chalk-like substance. Everyone else still headed to the beach.

  The Day of Turning is when everything changes. It is the day that the sea begins to slowly cool. Even the weathermen were predicting plummets in temperature. On TV that morning, News Nostalgia had reminded us what happened a decade ago on the nineteenth of August, with old footage of Boris Yeltsin in Moscow yelling at a tank to back up from Moscow’s White House. That nineteenth of August was the day of the failed coup d’état in Russia, the day that our elders say in a voice thick with nostalgia and remonstrance, “Our country went from red to black.”

  Literally black. We hadn’t had any regular electricity for eleven years. And we hadn’t had any at all for the past eight days. Sporadic all summer, it only sparked intermittently in the stairwell. The government said the hydroelectric dam didn’t have enough water to run the turbines, but when we saw the reservoirs at their highest capacity we remembered that—as with everything—what we witnessed was exactly opposite to what the government said.

  I picked up the pen again and looked around the cafe to see if I recognized anybody I knew. I had to write surreptitiously because usually no one writes in cafes, they only recite poetry aloud, or sip ice cream coffees and complain about their mothers-in-law.

  Jungles of grape vines were twining around the trellises, and around the abandoned buildings on the boulevard—traffic jams of shrubbery, green waves smattering like surf on the sidewalk. Pedestrians were trying to wend their way through them on the way to the beach. Off a railing, I plucked the thick stem of a large leaf and used it to keep off the sun.

  Once I wrote a letter to Pink Floyd but they never wrote back. My best friend Malkhazi said my letter probably ended up in a wastebasket in Warwick. I was hoping that my letter to Hillary would have better results. In Georgia women have all the power in the home. I assumed it was the same in America.

  A few weeks ago at the Maritime Ministry of Law, my place of employment, I had received a fax. Actually, it wasn’t addressed to me, but to the chief deputy of maritime law. It was an application to enter a contest entitled “Small Business Proposals for Former Soviet Republics to Ensure Democracy and Security Throughout the Post 9/11 World,” sponsored by Hillary Clinton. The winner got to visit America and attend a business conference that would address “The Challenges and Opportunities for Project Management in the Developing World.” Usually only the local dictator, his family, and his closest friends ever received access to such opportunities. This one, though, had ended up in our fax machine.

  This fax was like a falling star that I picked up and put in my pocket. And then it lit my pants on fire. To be precise, it was actually my pack of joke cigarettes that lit my pants on fire. But the little hole they burned created a sense of urgency reminding me of the fax, that the contest had a deadline, though January 7 still seemed a bit far off.

  I had spent the last week in my village, located in the mountainous region northeast of the city, harvesting hazelnuts. To tell you the truth, I hate this kind of work. At least when we are working in the cornfields we can sing the old song:

  Come all you and see my scythe

  Look at it and see how beautiful it is

  It is made of good metal

  Come all of you workers out of the hills

  Bless those who planted the cornfields

  But do we sing songs about nuts? No, because we hate nuts. Actually, this is what we sang, “Fuck! Fuck!” as we shook the nuts off the trees.

  Some say that the people in our village are lazy, that we grow Odessa grapes because even though Odessa grapes do not make such great wine, they are easy to grow and we don’t need to spray them with some special fertilizer. Also, some people say that we like to grow big vegetables, like pumpkins, so we can pick one and eat it for a long time. They are only joking, of course, but it’s true that we are not like Turkish people who work all the time. Turks look at us and say, “You have such a big house but you do not work much. How is that possible?” We tell them it’s called The Great Georgian Mystery. Even Turkish people want to know the secret. But I can’t explain what it is. Maybe it’s God’s gift.

  But in Dgvari, the village on the other side of our mountain, they are very workaholic people. They can plant a violet on a stone. Recently, they worked so hard that they cut down all the trees on the hillsides, but then the soil lost its foundation, the mountain started to crumble, and their houses slid down the hill. The people had to move to the lower lands, into the abandoned tea packaging plant. “You see what happens if you work too hard?” my grandfather warned. “The mountains slide down and you lose your place in them. The Soviet Union was better,” and he pointed to his gods, Lenin and Stalin, tattooed on his chest.

  My grandfather was always saying everything was better during Soviet times. Green was greener and red was redder. He says the mineral water at the oldest cafe in Tbilisi was sweeter and the women who worked there could serve twelve people at once and dance the Kartuli at the same time. We had theaters and libraries then, and every village had its own parliament. We provided cotton pajamas to the whole Soviet army and we had our own toothbrush factory. The seaside resorts always had high quality magnetic sand. Now all the sand has lost its magnetic properties.

  For my grandfather, Soviet times were obviously better. We were the richest republic then, a country of aristocrats, and people had such important employment positions they required uniforms. Georgia provided the entire Soviet Empire with mandarins! Tea! Wine! Roses! of such high quality they required explanation points after them. My grandfather could fill up two suitcases with roses that he grew in our village, take a subsidized flight to Moscow for the weekend, and sell his roses for a ruble apiece to all the romantic couples at the ice skating rink.

  But now Russia had stopped buying our roses, which is why we were sitting in the middle of a mound of nuts, like workers in a Turkish factory, my hands raw from peeling the skins off. We had gathered five hundred kilos of hazelnuts from the trees. These nuts had paid my tuition for three years at the university, and for our flat in Batumi. I was hoping that this year, these nuts would pay for me to get out of this country.

  In our village the air is so clear you don’t need telephones. The voice easily slips through so that everyone knows all of your business and you must speak quietly if you don’t want to be overheard. When I called i
n a low voice to Marika, a girl on the other side of the village, to make me and herself a cocktail, her mother heard. When Marika complained to me from her balcony, “Slims Achmed! My mother said I took a whole liter of vodka to make our cocktail, but I only took one little glass,” her mother shouted back from the orchard, “I said no such thing. She just wants an excuse to run away to the beach and not help me bottle the plum sauce!”

  In this way, through the crystal air, we also heard the rumor from the ice cream man, through his megaphone, that this year hazelnuts had lost their value. One lari per kilo. Or, one kilo of nuts for an ice cream cone. The hazelnut harvest was kaput.

  Due to this news, on the bus back to Batumi, everyone had been in a terrible mood. Even the bus drivers argued about whose minibus got to go next. “You’re after me,” one said.

  “Your mother!” replied another. Their tempers swooned like the heat and they started to threaten each other with the umbrellas they were holding to keep out the sun. Another man joined in, “Fuck all of you. Aren’t you tired of shouting?”

  A stupid man asked if he could sit in the seat next to mine. “Yes,” I said. “I believe all the seats on the bus are going back to Batumi.”

  A woman carrying a beach ball got on, but when she saw the driver she said, “Oof! I hate the way you drive,” and got off again.

  “Stop at the big tree!” a passenger called.

  “What big tree? They’re all big trees,” the driver complained.

  “What kind of a donkey are you? You don’t see the big tree?”

  By the time we were descending the final mountain into Batumi I was starting to feel very irritated. I had to figure out another way to make four thousand dollars for a visa. That was the question, was always the question, was the main philosophical question for the drunk people on the sidewalk. And then they would ask, “What is the meaning of life, and who is to blame?”

  Of course the question of how to acquire four thousand dollars for a visa was not quite of the same philosophical caliber as those of our ancient philosophers. No one knew why, exactly, four thousand dollars was required for a visa, only that anyone who had made it out of Georgia always had at least that much. I only knew one person who made it out of Georgia—my friend Vano went to America and overstayed his tourist visa. Now he works for a company in Detroit pouring concrete.