The Cheap One

The biscuits were my idea in August and they are my problem now, which is an arrangement Zurab and I have never once discussed and both understand perfectly.

He sent me to the wholesaler on Thursday morning with three brands written down and forty minutes. I came back with fourteen brands, priced by the kilogram instead of by the box, because by the box is how they are sold and by the kilogram is how they are eaten, and those are not the same list. Four of the fourteen cost less than what he pays now. One of them is the same biscuit in a different wrapper from the same factory in Rustavi, eleven tetri cheaper.

He was on the phone when I got there. He put one hand flat over the mouthpiece — the gesture, not the function, it does nothing at all to the microphone — and said, “Move that crate.”

So I moved the crate. It was lemonade, it weighed what lemonade weighs, and it travelled about a metre and a half, from the doorway to behind the counter. While I was carrying it I heard him say the word interest twice and the name Rusiko once.

Rusiko does the kiosk’s books. Twice a year, February and August, ninety lari a time, from Batumi, by telephone. I have never met her. I know her rate because it is written in the exercise book under the tractor sticker, on the page before the one where I own eight per cent.

He hung up. “The fridge,” he said. “The second one. Rusiko says wait for spring.”

“You asked Rusiko.”

“I asked Rusiko.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

Zurab looked at me with real affection, which is how he delivers the worst of it. “You’d have told me already.”

“Yes.”

“You’d have told me before I finished asking.” He took the biscuit list, folded it in half without reading it, and put it in the drawer. “Rusiko takes four days. In four days I have stopped wanting the fridge. That is what the ninety lari is for.”

I said it anyway. At the price he is being quoted and the margin he is running, the second fridge pays for itself in nineteen months if the summer behaves and never if it doesn’t; February is the wrong month to borrow money in this country; Rusiko was right, and she was right for a reason she had not given him. He nodded through the whole thing, pleasantly, the way you nod at weather.

Then he wrote wait till spring — Rusiko on the side of a cigarette carton and stood the carton on the shelf where he keeps things he has decided.

Microsoft spent Wednesday explaining that Windows will now put a job on your own machine or send it out to the cloud as it sees fit — locally when that makes sense, the cloud when it needs to — and that the user is not told which happened. Small jobs stay home, because home is free and home is quick. The one that costs money to answer goes to Batumi.

I came back at six and moved the crate again, to the far wall, where it should have been since August. He hadn’t asked. He didn’t look up.

“The biscuits,” he said, to the street.

“Eleven tetri.”

“Write it on the carton.”