The Light of a Ship | Zura Jishkariani

Author’s Bio: Born 1985 in Sukhumi, Abkhazia, his family was forced to flee the war by boat in 1993. They landed and settled in the Georgian port city Poti, where Jishkariani grew up on the shores of the Black Sea. His first book, Chewing Dawns (2017), received widespread acclaim and won Georgia’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Saba “Best Debut” award and Ilia State University’s “Best Novel of the Year.” His work explores themes of apocalypse, childhood, rebellion, technology, premises of Object-Oriented Ontology, and the boundaries of language.  Website: https://dillatext.com/

Translator’s Bio: Ryan Sherman, originally from Ogden, Utah, served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Georgia from 2012 to 2014. He now lives in Tbilisi with his wife and daughter, working as a lecturer and project manager at Ilia State University. In 2023, he and his wife, Maia Tserediani, published their first book of translations, May These Ashes Be Light: Prose and Poetry from the Soviet Shadow, with Intelekti Press.

...

The Light of a Ship

10 Days Before 

Like a city-sized comet, the winter sky had fallen onto all of us, throwing up a new sky that floated among the buildings and streets. In those days, our power lines lay mostly dormant — like nature, like the trees and winter, and like our blocks of flats. For the past hour, my father had been uncoiling cables with other bearded men on the wet rooftop of the parking garage, pulling the lines out and up toward our building, the same way that lianas spread across palm trees. I was standing at our entryway door. The sky was soaking up into the fake leather of my knockoff “Adibas” trainers.

“It’s on,” called out mother from the balcony. Mother was young, her red-polkadot dress stood out against clouds now threatening to rain, and rain the sort of rain that might go on for days, or months, or even a lifetime.

“No. Zuri, no—everyone’s tapping into that one already. Don’t switch on the television — it’ll blow.”

All of us watched the lightbulb hanging in the window: my family, myself, and the bearded men. The ground was wet and becoming more and more muddy, as if the street was spilling in with the sea which lay only two hundred meters from where we stood. Our city lies below sea level, and only the enormous boulders planted on the shore during Soviet times stood between us and oblivion.

I still remember the dark pixels of that voltage, the pitch black shadows and the low and yellow current that cast the world as a dream and the members of our household as manikins or the dead. Only a fine line lies between them — you feel like you are losing your body, as everyone and everything falls far away. Even now, sometimes my dreams are lit with this yellow light of this low voltage.

The electricity father was stealing was hardly enough to boil a chickpea, and not good for anything really, as the whole building was also preparing for the new year. There were no grand plans — just a simple question to answer. Might it be possible, for one day out of the year—New Year’s Day — to feel oneself normal? Symbols are of great importance in every era, and all the more so after losing a war.

For this reason, our people turned their attention to absolutely anything and everything. What might the pattern of coffee grounds say from the bottom of your cup? Had you gotten out of bed on your left foot? And what about your zodiac sign? Did you forget to light a candle at the church? Now show me your palm — let me examine the lines. Never stand alone at a crossroad! 

5 Days Before 

Though the yellow cafe was usually closed, it was always a big hit whenever they opened. But they only did so when a ship docked at the port and sailors appeared throughout the city. 

“The foreigners are here!” shouted Shoshika, his happy cry echoed throughout the building, doubling as a call for a public gathering. Young girls pulled on their best boots, the boys phoned their buddies, and they all set out, cleaning their pointed shoes in rain puddles as they went. As for us youngsters, we also all came out and headed toward the yellow cafe.

“Son, you come straight home if there’s any more trouble!” my mother called out as I ran away. Her words dropped behind me like credits at the end of a film.

Three months before, a group of foreigners had arrived in our town, blond ones and some with shaved heads. I couldn’t place the nationality of the others, but one was definitely English. I could tell by how he had shouted at everyone with a smile and stretched out his hands. And when he did so, angry voices broke out among us.

“He swore at us.”

“Did he just swear at us?”

“Are you sure? Really?

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know exactly. Some curse words, I’m pretty sure.”

“I’ll fuck them up! All of them!...”

“Wait, man, wait. Maybe he said something else.”

“A foreigner, in my country, cursing at me?”

“Where’s America?”

Child messengers were sent to America, who lived only two hundred meters away in a quaint, Megrelian house. America was the only one in the city who knew how to speak American, but I am pretty sure he was just making it up as he went along. The gathering was growing restless. Husbands ordered their wives to go home. Grungy teenagers began to collect pebbles. They pelted the cafe glass from which a warm light emanated. The foreigners turned their chairs toward the window to look out over the people. They began gesturing and pointing, as if to say, “See? See, didn’t I tell you? Look, another pebble. They are aiming at us. 

The English man with a shaved head downed his beer mug in one gulp. He wiped his mouth, let out a great sigh, stood up, came outside, and pulled down his pants. Then, in front of all of us, he gestured to his genitals and issued a command in a foreign language.

A blood bath ensued. The women were shrieking. I was reminded of a funeral — how an unknown woman will appear and begin to shriek so loud that the dread of death is imprinted on you for the rest of eternity. And all the buildings in the port city hear the shrieking and know in which house a death has taken place.

At some point, several plainclothes police officers showed up and one fired a gun in the air to calm everyone down.

The fighting did not frighten me nearly as much as hearing gunshots again — you will not understand this unless you have also lived through a war. The next day, as a rule, everyone should have been talking about the fight, but instead the entire city was talking about the foreigner, the display of his manhood, and of his length, which had introduced delicate dilemmas into the raging domains of men. 

In my circles, no one talked of anything else for days, not young nor old. I stopped by the neighbors’ looking for my mother. They also had taken up  Englishman’s impropriety for close consideration, and yet no coffee was to be found in the entire city. Instead, the women had brewed roasted chickpeas but with little success. Apart from the strange taste, the grounds failed to produce reliable divinations, and they did not like that the future was obscure.

Once again, we were all on our way to the yellow cafe. A light drizzle was falling—the sun is washing its face, as we say. Only there was no sun. Here the sky took on such a gloomy form that sometimes you could not help but wonder if the sun would ever return.

The great leader’s statue appeared in the distance. A few years ago, the country he created had vanished from the map, and yet there he still stood, stirring up strange thoughts. One felt as though we had also all vanished, sent to wait in this wet ghost town by the sea until our cases could be settled in a divine bureaucracy.

Under the statue, the yellow cafe was already lit up. At my back stood one hundred or so men in black, their eyes fixed on the cafe in front of them. In those years, I don’t remember a single man who wore clothes of any other color. Color was a sign of weakness to be worn only by foreigners and parrots.

As I passed the cafe, I looked in onto a wonderful scene: beautiful foreigners through the glass  pane of a rainy window.

There was something in the way they moved and laughed, and in the color of their clothes, so carefree and inaccessible. They contained nothing of what tormented our fellow townspeople who now spread out to my left and right in a half arc before the yellow cafe from which the warm light poured out onto all our faces. 

After neutralizing the disturbance a few months earlier, the plainclothes police had been granted a standing invitation to the yellow cafe without prices or limits. And now, we also watched our police through the window, enjoying the merrymaking alongside the foreigners.

The growing crowd of townspeople began to mix and mingle out in front of the foreigners of the yellow cafe. Here, a thousand other matters were discussed and settled. Indeed, this was a kind of precursor to social networks — a kind of biological web. 

Suddenly, a few older boys from my building approached me: Merab, Uzbeka, and Ramin. They asked if I was cool. I told them I was. If so — they said — you should meet us behind Nikoladze’s statue in 15 minutes. There is business to discuss. But do not talk about the business. “You won’t talk about the business, will you?” Uzbeka threatened.

“No, no. On my life, I won’t,” I answered in great earnest. Smiles crossed their faces.

My idol was, of course, my father, because I could see how men respected him. And what’s more, when I dropped his name in the street, it always had some pull because of his criminal history. But then the war came and cracked my idol, and despite my greatest efforts, I could no longer manage to look up to him how I wished, how I once had. Now I needed a new idol — a new example to imitate. After the war, father no longer had any time to talk, and when he found time, it was only to drink cheap alcohol, toasting to his PTSD with other defeated men. 

About this time, Ramin came into my life, from another block, with his dark complexion and 26 years. Ramin was known to everyone, and everyone was drawn to Ramin. He was the only guy who walked with girls throughout the port and got no problems from any side.

For a whole year I had been trying to catch his attention. Ramin did not play football, but he would come to watch. When I saw him on the sidelines, I doubled my play, and if I scored, I searched for Ramin’s gaze to see if he had noticed, but he was always turned and talking to someone.

I knew that Ramin had been in some trouble with the police, and once, when he was passing by our building with his gang, I shouted out:

“And what about the cops?!”

And they yelled back: “Their mothers ride on top!”

At this the boys started laughing, but Ramin was silent. But now, Ramin had summoned me, and my life was filled with happiness and joy. I arrived and found myself in a gangster paradise. The boys were downing shots of chacha in gulps. One by one, Ramin distributed a white tablet to each of us. Then he rolled a fat joint of Gali and passed it around the circle. 

We were sitting atop the ruins of a two-story building. This was an ideal observation point. From here, most of the port could be clearly seen. Beyond the cranes, planted along the shore like palms, was the sea, and docked at the port was a foreign ship. Warm light streamed out of every cabin. I was so high that I thought I might stay suspended in this beauty for all eternity. The setting sun fell pink on Raman’s bronze face as he laid out his plans for the robbery.

According to the plan, on New Year’s Eve, the boys would steal electricity from the foreign ship and bring it back to our buildings.  “We need someone to stand lookout,” Merab explained. 

“Uzbeka says you are solid,” said Ramin.

Uzbeka was silent. I confirmed my readiness. Merab took a cigarette stick out of his pocket. They were Kosmos cigarettes. I knew Kosmos. At home, my grandmother told me that once upon a time, in our previous city, the city we had fled, she had been the director at the Kosmos factory.

New Year’s Eve 

Over the course of our winter, the men had cut down all of our trees. They now needed to go farther and farther out, and find other people’s trees to cut down. After a long wait, the men returned.

“Isn’t that someone else’s tree?” asked my mother from the balcony, and I noted a trace of worry in her voice. My father looked up without a word, and we all began to prepare.

I don’t think hell is full of fire. On the contrary, I think there is very little fire, because hell lacks all resources. We stripped the tree branches. We did what we could. I started splitting the logs, but my plans for the night were spinning around my head, and I was doing everything I could to conceal my nerves. Had I gotten out of bed on my right foot?

We were sawing and hewing in front of the building. Orange sawdust filled the wind. Then we took everything up to our flats just as night was beginning to fall. 

Mother had baked my favorite pizza for the New Year: dough, tomato paste, a little cheese. I had promised the boys I would be at the meeting place by 10, but only now did I understand how difficult it would be to get out of the house without questions. My one hope was a call from Shoshika, to stop by their place for the celebrations. He had told me they had Coca Cola. Yet, more and more time passed and no one had called me yet from Shoshika’s. This was my plan: they would call, and I would run as if filled with joy to the stairs, and I would keep running, past the door to Shoshika’s flat, until I made it to the meeting place. 

I thought I might die if I was not able to get out. I would be left with the name of a traitor. Or a coward. And without me the boys would not be able to pull off the job. 

Finally, Shoshika called. As planned, I ran like my head had fallen off so that my parents would not take notice of my expression. Those two could always tell if I was lying.

The boys were all there.

“Where were you dickhead?” 

The night was of full of darkness and coldness, and fear had begun to creep into my heart. The boys had a roll of cable with them and several strange metal instruments. From there, they crawled up onto the crumbling walls around the port and disappeared. I began listening. I looked around. I couldn’t see anybody or anything, not even our buildings. The wind swept in dangerous gusts, as if wailing over its own birthplace far far away. So far away that you would die before you could ever reach it.

An hour passed. I could not remember how long I was supposed to wait. Another half hour. My fingers had frozen. The cold of the asphalt filled my torn Adibas. At such a time, the surfaces of your eyes are so cold, it feels almost as if you are breathing through them. I heard voices in the distance. I recognized our neighbors calling my name. They began as muffled yells, and soon others followed. I saw a woman approaching with an Iranian lamp. The voices were getting nearer to my hiding spot. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to disappear. I was filled with shame. I was shaking. At last I decided that it was better to come out and be discovered rather than throw the whole operation into jeopardy.

“Where have you been?”  came the first shout. It was my father.

“Child!”—yelled my mother.

“Where were you?” asked the other men and women. I kept silent and held my mother’s hand.

“Okay, we can talk about this later. The main thing is that you are found,” said my mother, and everyone went home. 

At ten minutes to twelve, light flooded into the building. “The light has come!” screamed the children from the windows.

“The light has come!” they answered from the next building. Suddenly we could see everyone’s faces. We could make out who was a child, who was a friend, and who might be an enemy.

“Where is it coming from? The lights are off all over the city.”

“Could it be from the government?” 

On the old German television set, we watched the Russian channels, the annual New Year broadcast with all the Russian celebrities. I still remember some of these numbers — the most wasted megabytes taking up space in the coils of what is left of my brain. 

My mother and father danced. I had never seen them dance before. I had never even seen them touch before. It hadn’t ever occurred to me they might have some connection apart from my sister and me.

My sister also started dancing, standing on my father’s feet. After that, she dropped onto the hard bed, happy as a cat, and for some reason began waving her hands at me.

The boys returned safely, but not quite soundly. Uzbeka had broken his leg. The boys had dragged him up from the dock. Uzbeka went on to become a symbol of resistance. And from that day on, our building knew how to take the light from the ships at the port. Sometimes we had light from a Bulgarian company, sometimes a Turkish, sometimes European. Some of us even learned to guess the country by the light they brought. The only problem was that when the ship would leave, the light they brought would also go with them.