Waiting for the Electricity Read Online Free

square, I saw Malkhazi. He was standing with Gocha Abashidze under the stone monument to Gocha’s great uncle, our city’s godfather. Godfather, clad in the traditional Georgian outfit—the cherkeska with the special breast pockets designed for artillery cartridges, scabbard on his belt, nababi on his head—was supposed to remind everyone what a true Georgian man looks like, how he is a noble man and must constantly maintain his dignity. But Gocha hadn’t inherited this expression at all. Instead, dressed in his new black silk shirt from Thailand—his “image”—he would chase anyone who stepped on his little piece of lawn, Batumi’s new peewee golf course.
    Gocha is from one of the aristocratic families, the ones who recently bought up all the real estate near the sea. He lives in one of the centrally located apartment buildings, the ones recently renovated to look like a Greek temple, with balconies carved by Batumi’s most celebrated bronze workers. Gocha says he is related to a famous king from the fourth century BC, the one who owned a tile factory that all the archaeologists are digging up these days. But Gocha is not a noble soul. He thinks one thing, speaks another, and does some third one.
     
    Malkhazi, standing beside him, looked like a character from one of my sister’s Victorian novels, doomed and romantic, except for his gigantic nose. When Malkhazi swims in the sea on his back, the beachgoers point at his nose and shout, “Watch out! A shark!” He resembles the Armenian Little Red Riding Hood who says to the wolf, “Oh, what a big nose you have,” and the wolf replies, “Well, look at yours.”
    Malkhazi was wearing the new pair of jeans he had bought the previous week at the Turkish market, and also his GEORGIA TECH T-shirt. Looking down at his boots, rocking back and forth, he seemed to be propelled by the weight of something he was considering. Malkhazi could stand like that all afternoon; it was his main form of amusement. He looked like the South American peacock bass I’d seen in Batumi’s former dolphinarium, with brown and rust markings, never meant to be domesticated, languidly swimming back and forth. And then up go his fins and in one split second he eats the little goldfish; and then back to his languid ways as he spit out the scales. Malkhazi has the same jaw.
    I whistled and when Malkhazi saw me he said goodbye to Gocha.
    “Gocha offered me a job working for Herbalife,” Malkhazi confided as we walked down Seaside Boulevard toward the sea. “But I refuse to work for a Russian company. Those guys drive around Georgia in their Volkswagens, preaching about herbal remedies but herbal remedies their mother! Georgians were writing poetry when they were still living in the trees. We should be driving around Yekaterinburg promoting wine and hazelnuts!”
    “Good idea,” I said. “Because right now one kilo of hazelnuts is now the same price as an ice cream cone.”
    “ Sheni deyda !” he said. Malkhazi reached in his shirt pocket for some matches. If Malkhazi’s lips were an art museum, the cigarette was the permanent installation.
    We climbed through the boulders to the frayed hem of the surf. Malkhazi ripped the top off a new packet of Viceroys, set the aluminum paper into the wind, and shook out a cigarette for me. Thesurf was wilder than usual because of an impending storm, and a great tangle of jellyfish bobbed along the water’s edge.
    We sat smoking, gazed out at the cargo ships from Bulgaria, Odessa, Turkey. They sat there, shackled to the sea, as if waiting, like the rest of us, for something. Malkhazi scrutinized the water, as if he were its protector. The waves crackled over beach rocks and groveled to his boots. The Black Sea didn’t look very romantic right now, so I looked across it, trying to see the other side, where I wanted to be. But the swimmers were in the way—innocent children playing on multicolored floating devices, churning the last of the sun’s