Read Online Waiting for the Electricity by Christina Nichol - Free Book Online Page A

IT IS LIKE THE sunrise. When he leaves, it is sunset for his host.”
    “Oh, mamma mia,” Malkhazi said, clutching his head. “I drank too much last night.”
    While walking to work, I kicked up squash-colored leaves into the pallid blue air. The shimmer of autumn light on the mountains behind Batumi was interrupted by miniscule tufts of smoke, likely caused by the explosions of people trying to construct some electricity. I glanced at the headlines in front of the Central Telephone Office: CASPIAN SEA STILL ONE OF WORLD ’ S BIGGEST OIL BLOCKS; WATER SHORTAGE IN RESERVOIR COINTUES TO HALT TURBINES; PIG DEATH IN ADJARIAN PROVINCE BLAMED ON TURKISH PORK SELLERS; PRESIDENT SHEVARDNADZE VOWS TO FIGHT CORRUPTION—AGAIN!; GEORGIAN HOSPITALITY STILL NUMBER ONE! There was a picture of Anthony holding a sheep horn.
    Zurab, the newspaper seller, was discussing the market price of petrol. I bought a Newsweek from him—he wrapped it in brown paper, and I tucked it under my arm.
    At the Maritime Ministry of Law I saw that the white paint still flaked off my side of our building despite the anti-salt solution I hadbrushed over the walls a few weeks ago. The Black Sea would soon corrode the paint down to the marble. The guards leaning against the counter at the front door filling in crosswords didn’t look up when I stepped past them. They never prevented anyone from going into the building, only out. That’s why we had to always accompany our visitors to the door.
    “Three Georgians united make a world,” I chanted to myself walking down the corridor to my office. But at work it was impossible to unite even two people. I could unite myself with neither my boss, his secretary, nor the Big Boss. Any reconciliation was always lost in some hullabaloo. In the hallway my boss, Mr. Fax, was shouting at his secretary. I must digress in order to explain that it’s very impolite to say in public, “I need to go to the toilet.” Instead, it’s better to say, “I must go send a fax.” My boss used this phrase so frequently that “Mr. Fax” had become his nickname. Also, he was unusually fond of his fax machine. The previous week the fax machine had been covered in dust, but now, in the corridor, that layer of dust was imprinted with someone’s body, as if Mr. Fax himself had tried to cover it up with a big hug, to protect it, as if he had won it in a contest, as if it were a new fax machine. Maybe Mr. Fax didn’t know that new fax machines were smaller. This one was still huge. Seeing me examining his fax machine—which was blinking “Toner is low” in English—Fax scowled. I looked away. I felt nervous looking too much at the fax machine for I feared that Mr. Fax might figure out some day that I stole his fax from Hillary Clinton. He looked at his watch. “It’s already eleven-thirty,” he said. “You are late again!”
    “True,” I told him. “But the state is more than six months late paying me my salary.”
    Fax ignored me. He received the same salary I did but he made much more money on the black market. Once when I put a tack on his chair he was so busy leaning over his fax machine, trying to extort money out of whomever he was talking to on the phone, that when he sat down he didn’t even know what the problem was. He slowly realized he was uncomfortable because he was sitting on a tack. But while one hand scratched his sore behind, the other hand wasextended, still waiting for a bribe. Whenever he was about to bilk someone, to receive remuneration for an overinflated invoice, I would walk into his private office and ask, very pleasantly, if I could borrow a book like The Law of Sea Convention from his library. Or, “By the way, what is the distance in kilometers from the port of Batumi to the Cape of Good Hope?” And then I would look at the invoice and divide it in half. He would smile in front of his customers, but I could see his clenched fist and his little brain mechanism thinking, “Foo! Foiled