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Personally, I think it is Zuka’s method of attracting older women because the ladies love to know their pressure.
    “God is sending us a foreigner,” I told him so he would wake up a little faster. “We need to give our guest some unforgettable moments.” Zuka got up and brushed some sawdust off himself—after Zuka works on his icons, a film of wood dust always sticks to him like hash resin in a Central Asian field.
    Zuka ripped open the sack of chaadi flour, threw some handfulsinto a bowl, added water from the water bucket, and squeezed it through his hands. “It doesn’t have to be exactly eighty times,” Malkhazi always tells him, impatient with housewife superstitions. While Zuka rolled the balls of batter back and forth in his palms, I spliced wires together in the electrical box and sang the new song I’d heard on the radio, “I’m tired of getting stuck in the elevator. I want electricity.” Zuka dropped the rounds of cornbread batter into the red sunflower oil, and I salted the eggplant, and then squeezed out its bitter brown juice. When Zuka coughed, I asked him if he had started smoking. He denied it.
    Irakli Khorishvili, the neighbor from downstairs, stopped by to watch what we were doing. Finally, insightfully, he remarked, “Ha! Two men cooking. Where’s your sister?” Since Juliet had been reading so much English literature for the last ten years, she had been trying to become an independent woman. But I didn’t know how to explain this—the neighbor was from an older generation and didn’t understand such things. The consequence of my sister’s philosophy was that now Zuka and I had to do all the cooking. It was Malkhazi’s job to fix the iron, but the iron never broke.
    I sharpened the knife on the bottom of a saucer and quartered the potatoes, and then fried them with the garlic and a fistful of coriander. My mother returned from the garden holding a cluster of beets, her hands black and her feet black, and she asked why we never had any napkins and why she always had to wipe off her hands on the pages of English grammar books. Then she scolded Zuka because he had trailed icon mulch all over the kitchen floor.
    When Juliet came home and heard that we were going to have an English guest, she stood in front of the mirror by the door, tucking stray strands of her dark hair into a lump under a new hat—some sort of black, velvet, English-teacher outfit that looked like a piece of Victorian furniture.
    Shoving on his rain jacket, Malkhazi said, “I’ll go find some wine.”
    My mother turned to me. “Slims, if we are going to have a guest, we need to pound the garlic, and how can we do that with a broken pestle? Go find another pestle on the beach.”
     
    I walked the few blocks to the sea, which looked like unpolished silver and made me cold to look at. The waves uncrumpled to my shoes, and crinkled back over the chunks of beach rock that I slogged through, searching for a pestle. I found an oblong stone and tucked it under my arm.
    Even though the weather was gray, my mood was cheerful. To have a guest—our lives became a holiday. Usually, all we ever did was gather together with the other men in the neighborhood, hold up ruby glasses of Khvanchkara—the young red wine of our village—and bunch up all our words of Georgian wisdom while trying to make one final announcement: “ In the end the earth unites and makes as one the king and slave .”
    Tonight, I vowed, I would stay focused. I would not drink from my kantsi , my grandfather’s drinking horn, made from the hollowed-out horn of a famous bison. Otherwise, I might become distracted, start endlessly toasting to Georgia, and forget about my plan, which was that after Malkhazi kidnapped him, I would ask the Englishman for a visa invitation.
    As I walked home, I tried to imagine our guest. Would he look like the foreign sailors Malkhazi and I used to chase down in the boulevard? “Need English! Need English! Very badly,” we