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heroically.”
    “Why would Shalva rescue him? It’s always the police who kidnap the people.”
    “Pipeline workers can’t be targeted. That’s their rule.”
    “It doesn’t sound practical.”
    Malkhazi raised the curved sword of his eyebrow. “Show me a man with his feet planted firmly on the ground, and I will show you a man who can’t put on his trousers.”
    “Where did you hear that?” I asked.
    “I read it in Juliet’s book of famous English quotes. But seriously,” he said, arms crossed over his mighty chest, inflamed cheeks incongruent to his little ears, “ask anyone what the name ‘Makashvili’ means. Everyone knows the Makashvilis are famous dreamers.”
    Even though Malkhazi and I have the same last name, he is not actually my blood cousin. Malkhazi lost his mother when he was born. I don’t know all the details except that she was young; the local hospital hadn’t opened yet; the midwives were at the cattle festival. No one could believe Malkhazi’s misfortune when, three years later, his father was shot by Turkish snipers after he had tried to cross the border to Turkey to avoid being sent to Afghanistan. After the funeral, Malkhazi’s uncle took it upon himself to teach Malkhazi all the Georgian traditions: how to hunt game; how to make wine, or at least how to know through smell alone which variety of grape it came from; and how to make the proper Georgian toast. Malkhazi’s uncle, so intent on making Malkhazi self-sufficient, once tore down his barn so that Malkhazi could learn to build it back up. Perhaps he overcompensated.
     
    “Our name is not written about in the history books,” I said. “Probably no one outside of the beer factory district knows we’re famous.”
    But Malkhazi was right. The Makashvilis are dreamers. During Soviet Union times, whenever we met on Seaside Boulevard, before we even kissed each other’s cheeks in greeting, we began to dream. We dreamed of fishing for gold-speckled trout in the northern territories of Abkhazia. We dreamed of sharpening our swords to battle Turkish people. We would compose letters in awkward English to the cute European girls we had met at Batumi’s International Chess Championship: Hi sweet heart, Any time You want, You can come back and enjoy real life. If man doesn’t worry about money, and if he has a car, Georgia! is exactly perfect place to feel all the true nature .
    When Malkhazi and I were still living in the village, we used to roam around in the pastures, mixing the milk of a sheep with the acids of a crushed-up fig leaf. The acids, mingling with the milk, made curd that we cooled under a stream and ate for lunch. I told him once, “That is a true romantic tourist image. You should be a tour guide. You could surprise the Russian tourists by pretending to be an uneducated sheepherder, and then confound them by answering their questions in French.” It was only a joke because he didn’t speak French. Nor did he like sheep. Nevertheless, after I moved to the town I pressured him to come too. “Georgia is beginning to privatize,” I told him, “making many employment opportunities in Batumi. My friend is a photographer of Georgian doorways. Another is a window maker. I am studying the law of the sea.” And so, Malkhazi, in his early twenties then, had come to live with us. Too young to marry, too old to enter the university, and he didn’t even smoke.
    He didn’t approve of smoking either, especially for women. If he saw a young woman standing behind a corner with a cigarette, he would ask her for it, stick the filter part up his nose, and then give it back to her. But when he got his first job working in a wedding restaurant in Batumi, he shaved his mustache and took up the habit. He would smoke and sit under a nearby tung tree listening tohis Super Hits of the 90’s tape: Alla Pugacheva, Kino, Nautilus, or even “Aisha,” the Algerian hit song. In the village he was known as Malkhazi the Disco King—ever