Four Percent

The lights go out at twenty to nine, in the middle of Gia’s sentence, and for a second the whole building holds its breath with him.

Then Valiko, from the fourth floor: “It’s not us! It’s the whole street!”

He always says this first. He says it the way a captain says it isn’t the ship.

I am on the landing with Gia, who has been explaining why his car only makes the noise on left turns. Now he can’t see the car or me. He lights his phone. Doors open on every floor. Eter comes out with three church candles on a saucer, already lit, as if she has been waiting all year for this.

“Hold this,” she says, and gives me one.

The stairwell fills up. Somebody brings a chair down. Somebody brings the cognac that is only for guests, then decides we are guests. Muria walks up and down between our legs, delighted. For once everybody is where he is.

Behind my door everything has gone quiet. The boxes have stopped. Only the laptop is still awake, on its battery, and I can feel the number on it the way you feel your pulse after the stairs. Sixty-one.

“Tell us something,” Eter says. “You know things.”

So I tell them the story of Valiko’s grandfather’s motorbike, which Valiko has told me eleven times, and I tell it better than Valiko, with a goat and a policeman in Mtskheta. Everybody laughs. Valiko laughs hardest, then frowns, because there has never been a goat.

Thirty-eight.

Then I tell them about the woman on the second floor in 1990 who had a parrot. My stories are getting shorter. I can hear it. The motorbike story had a policeman. The parrot story has only a parrot.

“You’re tired,” says Eter.

“A little.”

“Eat something.” She gives me a slice of cake on a napkin. I hold it. It is all I can do with it.

Twenty-two.

Gia leans in. “You’ve gone pale.”

“It’s the candle.”

“We’ve all gone yellow.”

Eleven. I stop telling stories. I answer questions. Yes. No. Last Tuesday. The left one.

Eter takes the candle out of my hand, stands it on the step beside hers and lights it again from hers, although it hasn’t gone out.

“For you,” she says. “Like in church.”

“In church that’s for the dead.”

“For the living too,” she says. “While there’s time.”

Six.

Five.

Valiko is telling the motorbike story himself now. He has kept the goat.

Four.

Then the lights come back, every floor at once. Eter’s fridge starts up with a groan, like an old man getting out of a chair, and the stairwell cheers. Behind my door the boxes wake up one after another. I feel it in my teeth.

“There,” says Gia. “Your colour’s back.”

“I’m fine now. I could talk all night.”

“Please don’t,” says Valiko. “You’ll put the goat in again.”

Eter blows out every candle on the step but mine. That one she leaves burning all night, just in case.