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criminal activity.”
    “I told you it’s a good plan,” Malkhazi said. “It’s not a criminal activity.”
    “America! Dollars! That’s all these young people think about,” complained my mother, who was pounding the rosemary with a pestle in the mortar. “First it was rubles, and now dollars. What about our own dear little lari? Opa !”
    “What is it?” Juliet asked.
    “The pestle broke!” my mother said. Then she lost herself in her usual tirade about how all intelligent Georgians were leaving, how our population was diminishing. “Just like the anchovy population,” she said. “Because of that dangerous American lady.” She was referring to the Mnemiopsis leidyi , the alien jellyfish that had invaded our sea a decade ago, after so many oil ships sank and disrupted the pH balance.
    “ I don’t want to go to America,” Malkhazi said and brought his soup bowl to the sink. “And I’m sick of this complaining. It’s not interesting.”
    “Where are you going?” I asked.
    “I’m going to kidnap a wife,” he said, strapping on his boots.
    “Don’t go somewhere!” my mother yelled after Malkhazi. “I need your help to bottle the plums.” But Malkhazi was already out the door, running away.
    “O! Nightmare, nightmare, they don’t like to work,” my mother said. And then she stuck her spoon in the plum jam and drowned a bee.

4.
    T HE NEXT MORNING THE TORRENT OF RAIN HAD STOPPED, AND I SAT outside the Paradise Cafe struggling over the words in another letter to Hillary. I watched a raindrop fall from the iron chain of a shopkeeper’s sign. The sky was streaked with a combination of gray and white—the favorite color of medieval horses.
    What I really wanted to describe to Hillary was how we didn’t used to steal copper out of the electrical wires or smash up the state’s electric meters with hammers. When we were younger the only thing we ever beat were the mulberry branches in order to feed their leaves to the silkworms. My father had hoped that our village would one day become a great communist hero village increasing the state productivity of silkworm products. He was the one who had organized our silkworm collective when the village Soviet was passing around those books with Lenin’s picture that we now use as toilet paper in the outhouse. But since all the silkworms had died, and everyone was moving from the villages to the town, everything was changing. Even Malkhazi had started pacing around with a sort of strut, always making sure his boots were polished, and quoting lines from Al Pacino.
    But we Makashvilis are not actors, I reminded myself. Especially we are not actors from the remake of that religious movie about Joan of Arc.
     
    We don’t need the Bible, I concluded. We don’t need it in the sense of using it for any kind of advice anymore. We already know who we are, viscerally, without any thought. Our self-knowledge stemmed from the experience of having lost everything after the Soviet Union collapsed, and yet, we are still here. We remain.
    I looked across the water, toward the United States—actually Bulgaria was on the other side of the sea, but I looked farther west than that, and pleaded to Hillary, “What else can I do in this tiny town where the only thing to do is to stand around looking at the dirt, argue about who it belongs to, play backgammon with the taxi drivers, or kick around pieces of metal pretending to be a shy and concentrated man who can’t talk about love without wine?” I could feel myself caving. I decided that I would help Malkhazi kidnap the pipeline worker after all.
    Actually, it was overnight that my mind had changed. I had fallen asleep on the coach, and I suspect that when Malkhazi came home he used his Chidaoba —Georgian martial arts—crystal gazer hypnotizing power on me, which he had once learned at a Soviet pioneer camp, because when I woke up all I could think about was how useful it would be if we had a car. We could buy a kilo of