Renovation

03-22-06
Renovation

Sitting in Shergil’s living room, the electricity has not come on today. Shergil has been painting all day with fellow students Timur and Keti, even though their teacher is out of the country for six weeks. He is tired, and there is no food in the house. I ask him, do you have money for food even? He says that usually he does, but for some reason during Great Lent every year it runs out. ‘But, money always comes again after Easter, I don’t know how,’ he says. ‘I don’t like to think about money during Great Lent anyway, it’s really just a time for prayer and simplicity.’

Where does money come from for food? I ask. ‘Well, I can make spoons, sometimes instruments, and the money from teaching music usually lasts a while,’ he says. ‘But I have to buy food for my two brothers as well, because they don’t make any money. I’m painting now every day, so it’s hard for me to work.’

As we sit in the bedroom, I lean back onto the bed and stretch out. My back hurts from beating up the old concrete walls the former owner built in my yard. Shergil says, ‘I had so many plans for my house. I already had everything worked out how I was going to fix the front porch, the front room, and begin to build a bathroom with pipes and everything.’ His face is straight, and maybe it’s the angle I’m looking up at him, but I think I see a mistiness in his eyes, a sense of deep regret. I realize he really had his hopes set on making this happen. The money was to come from his trip to America, which was vetoed by the US Embassy on a sham.

They determined that he was ‘not going as a tourist, therefore should not be applying for a tourist visa.’ I don’t know what the definition of ‘going as a tourist’ is, but if visiting friends, singing with them, and accepting donations for his teaching is not permissible, we’re at a sad cross-roads in ‘cultural exchange.’ I was really pissed about the decision and tried to talk them out of it. Too late.

So another year goes by, with Shergil struggling to put two sticks together for food on the table for himself and two brothers. It’s not like they’re starving, not like they don’t have friends in town, myself included, but there definitely isn’t anything left to fix the windows, the sagging porch, or build a bathroom. There are no power tools to be able to build things faster and more efficiently, and right now, there is no money or food.

We went into the kitchen, peeled potatoes together, which is all there was, not even any tomato sauce, and just as we put them on to fry, a call came. Shergil was late for singing rehearsal. He left without eating. And I thought, there is not a man this spiritual, this dedicated to art, in the whole world. I love him as a brother. I ate the potatoes on my own, re-memorizing a chant from my trusty pocket version of the Liturgy chants. I’m getting sick, and I couldn’t sing very high. I thought about the house, about life in Georgia, about life in America.

The next day while Shergil was painting, I bought as many cans of peas and tomatoes and corn, as many armfuls of bread, and kilos of pears and apples that I could carry, and walked them over to Shergil’s kitchen. I’ve never felt a bigger need to Give than to this person in this situation. I don’t even really know what to think about it. But there it is.