Braver Than You Think

by Maggie Downs

  It’s funny, but it’s yet another reminder that I’m just a voyeur here. To me, this whale is a snapshot for a photo album. For another, the whale carcass is survival.

  This use of the whale flesh makes me think about my mom’s family in Europe during World War II, scavenging potatoes from already-picked-over fields, sucking the juice from bones that had already been boiled. They ate whatever they could, anything to cobble together an existence. I wonder what my mom would have done if some stranger had snapped photos of the experience.

  The thought makes me uncomfortable, and for the first time on this trip, I put my camera away. I simply stand on the beach with the man, and I watch the water crash over the whale’s broken and exposed body, every wave taking away another piece.

  THERE ARE MANY ACTIVITIES TO DO IN THE VILLAGE, AND I choose to spend a day with Abalene, a woman from Nqileni. She brings me to the hut where she and her sister live.

  Abalene pours water into a bowl of dry clay and stirs it gently with her fingers. Then she spreads it on my face, smoothing the brown mud over my cheeks, forehead, nose, and chin. It’s been a while since I’ve had someone else’s hands on me. It feels both intimate and strange, like the first tentative touch of a new lover. I close my eyes and take it in. The longer she strokes my face, the more maternal it feels.

  A memory surfaces of an incident that took place around 2005, about a year before my mom entered the nursing home. My dad was away for a work trip, so I was Mom’s caregiver for the weekend. I had to give her a bath, because she could no longer take showers on her own. There was the fear that she could slip and fall, of course, but more importantly, on a couple of occasions my mom had tried to bring a plugged-in hair dryer into the running shower. “My hair was getting wet,” she explained.

  At this point, Mom was still in one of the earlier stages of the disease—too far gone to know my name but cognizant enough to know I was someone trying to help. She was also stubborn enough to fight.

  It’s difficult enough to give your own mother a bath—it’s a vulnerable act for everyone involved—but it’s even harder when she doesn’t want to do it. She thrashed, spilling bathwater on the floor, and she cried, spilling tears everywhere. I sat on the tile with my back against the door until she calmed enough to stay in the tub.

  I bribed her with lovely, lilac-scented soap, then whispered, “Shhh,” as I wiped down her skin with a washcloth. Without her clothes, she looked very small. I smoothed her face with my fingers, cupped her chin in my hand. She was no longer crying, but her body hiccuped with silent sobs.

  Abalene’s sister picks up another bowl—this one smaller than the first—and holds a matchstick between her thumb and index finger. She dips the end of the matchstick in reddish clay, drawing a line of dots around my forehead, then another line across my cheekbones and the bridge of my nose. On each cheek she makes small, swishy lines, fashioning simple daisies. She is the artist, and I am her canvas.

  The clay face paint is part decorative, like local cosmetics, but it’s also practical. We’re going to be spending most of the day in the sun. The clay will act as a natural sunblock for my fair skin.

  Abalene also grabs a red scarf and wraps it around my hair, tugging the curls into the fabric, then drawing both ends of the scarf into a knot, which she situates near the top of my head.

  I hold my camera in front of my face and shoot a self-portrait, then examine the image. I don’t recognize the face staring back at me. The first layer of clay has dried mint green, while the design is a ruddy red. I look beautiful but different, as if the Wild Coast has ripped away my surface and left me with something new.

  Abalene smiles. With her approval, we head outside.

  She teaches me to scavenge from the nearby forest, gathering firm sticks for firewood. This will be our kindling later when we prepare lunch. We secure the bundles with strips of fabric. Abalene places a bundle on top of my head, and I lean and sway from the sudden weight and strange pressure.

  “Stand up tall,” she says. “Hold head high.”

  I feel a knot of gnarled wood knuckling into my head, and I also feel the place where wood splinters catch on my red head scarf. All the sticks are long and hard, and when I walk, they threaten to topple. As I become more surefooted, however, the branches also grow more confident. The wood perches as if it were meant to be there, like the branches were sprouting from my head.

  I slowly, slowly make my way back up the hill and into Abalene’s hut. I don’t drop the wood, not even a single stick. She smiles and claps.

  “Now let us try a bucket of water on your head,” she says.

  The bucket ends up at my feet, my right shoulder baptized. A group of village children hoot, and I can’t help but giggle with them. Water drips down my side; clay runs along the side of my face. Abalene and I wipe tears from our eyes, we are laughing so hard.

  “This is why you have the small bucket,” she says.

  ABALENE’S HOME BECOMES MY OWN FOR THE DAY. I KNEEL on the compacted dirt floor, where I use a flat stone to grind corn into course pieces, like dry grits. Abalene has already cooked a pot of beans, which she sets aside while she boils water. We talk and she cooks the cornmeal until it becomes a thick porridge called ugali.

  “You cook?” Abalene says, and I nod.

  “Yes, but never ugali.”

  “Then what do you eat?” she asks, incredulously.

  The ugali is stiffer than day-old mashed potatoes. We roll it into balls with our fingers, then use the balls to sop up the bean stew. Until now, Abalene’s son, a child about four years old, has been playing in a neighbor’s hut. Now he sits close to me on the floor, his legs slung over mine.

  While we eat, Abalene tells me about her family. Her husband works in the mineral mines near Johannesburg, several hours away. Like most of the men in this village, he leaves for months at a time. This leaves the women to run the town. They raise and educate the children. They care for each other’s farms. They tend to the sick and the elderly together. When one person’s cow wanders from the field, every woman sets off to search for it.

  There’s an old saying in South Africa that a single straw from a broom can be broken, but together they are strong. That concept is known as ubuntu, the philosophy that we are all part of an interconnected web, rooted in acts of kindness and generosity. It means the way we treat others is more important than our individual accomplishments. Essentially, you can’t be human all by yourself.

  I think about ubuntu a lot in this village, because I see it in action. Abalene breaks off a piece of bread to share with her young son. He toddles to the door, where he has three friends waiting. There he tears the bread and gives a piece to each of his friends.

  Abalene pokes her head out the door and calls to a handful of women washing clothes in buckets outside a nearby hut. They saunter over and share some of the bean stew and ugali. As they leave, Abalene hands them a small stack of her laundry, which they will wash with their own.

  We clean the dishes by hand, and I stack the bowls on a small table. That’s when I notice a framed photo on the wall, a black-and-white image of a finely dressed woman, head held high like royalty, eyes small and firm. I look to Abalene, and she answers before I ever ask the question.

  “Mother,” she says.

  I pull my iPhone from my bag. It doesn’t receive any service out here, but I can still access the photo library. I scroll through the photos, showing Abalene my best friend, my husband, my brother, my sister.

  I stop when I get to a blonde woman, her head raised high just like Abalene’s mother, curls framing her face like a halo. She is sitting on a park bench in Europe, slim legs crossed at the knees, the hem of her checkered dress flared out around her calves. Her lips are slightly pouty, frozen mid-word.

  This woman looks past the camera, far beyond the photographer. Sometimes I wonder what she is thinking in that long-distance gaze, if she can somehow see beyond that moment. Imaginary loves, future sorrows, a home across the oc
ean.

  “Mother?” Abalene says.

  I nod.

  “Beautiful,” Abalene says. “She looks like you.”

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, THE SUN GROWS HEAVY AND VIOLET. Abalene walks me over to the local shebeen. It is a small bar situated inside a sea-green hut, three hills over from Abalene’s home.

  Though shebeens are where people drink alcohol, they also serve as community spaces—meeting places where people share conversation and dance. During the apartheid era, activists gathered in shebeens to share news and make plans with the community.

  Abalene does not enter. She says she has a lot of things to do this evening. Instead, she hugs me and wishes me well. This is where we will part ways for the night.

  Inside, the walls are plain. The hut feels much bigger than Abalene’s home even though it is filled with people. Most everyone sits on the floor, legs stuck out in front of them, feet bare and brown. The patrons are divided into two groups, just like a junior high school dance—men on one side of the room, women on the other.

  It takes a few minutes before I notice that the men are of varying ages, from teenagers to withered old men. However, there are no young women in the shebeen, only older ladies. This, I will later learn, is because many women of childbearing age refrain from alcohol, in case they might be pregnant.

  One woman hikes up her skirt and dances wildly in the middle of the room. Her face is crackly and dry, the texture of course sandpaper, with firm lines like parentheses on each side of her mouth. She spins like a top, never losing balance, but never remaining fully upright either. Then she stops and abruptly focuses her yellowed eyes on my face, as if she has just noticed me for the first time. She motions to me, and her friend slings a paint can full of umqombothi, sorghum beer, my way.

  I lift the can but pause before I take a sip. The smell is overpowering, like fermented fruit and sour pork. I peer down into the can and examine the thick, brownish-pink liquid. The old dancing lady cackles. Her friends join in, laughing until the room is wheezy. Then the men encourage me to drink with their clapping and hollering.

  I tip the can toward my face. The frothy liquid is viscous and it moves slowly, the same way diner ketchup crawls slowly through a glass bottle. Just when I think I’ll never get a taste, the beer abruptly rushes at me at once, staining my lips, dribbling down my chin, even smearing my cheeks. Only a little umqombothi makes it into my mouth, just barely enough to swallow, and I am thankful for that. It is a bitter porridge and tastes of vomit, acidic and sweet. The shebeen erupts into cheers as I wipe the remnants of the drink from my face. I receive hugs and slaps on the back, and I’m amazed that I can be congratulated for simply accepting something to drink. My stomach gurgles with discomfort.

  There are many types of drinking, and I’ve tried most of them over the years. There’s the kind of drinking that’s done to forget pain and heartbreak. There’s the kind of drinking that’s done out of boredom, a way to live through one hour and then the next. There’s drinking to be social and drinking to be snobby and drinking to be joyfully drunk and drinking to wrestle with an inner beast.

  But this kind—slugging back umqombothi in a shebeen—is a particular type of drinking I have never experienced before. It is a cultural drink that tastes bitter and terrible and staggeringly complex, a welcome into a community at the edge of an unknown country. It’s warmth. Maybe that’s why I feel flushed.

  I leave the shebeen close to dark, when the silver moon is swollen over the estuary, lighting the bloated carcass of the whale. The beer in my stomach is heavy and clanging. The evening has been a contract, an understanding, a shared experience between strangers.

  I haven’t spent much time here, but I already feel like one among many. Is this what my mother longed to feel? Is this why she wanted to travel? Her childhood was spent displaced by war, moving from East Prussia to what eventually became West Germany. Her life with my father was spent hopscotching around the United States, moving from military base to military base. Is this feeling what inspired her wanderlust? Did she just want to find a space to belong?

  Animals

  AFTER NEARLY A MONTH IN SOUTH AFRICA, I HAVE HIKED up Table Mountain, sampled the hottest curries in Durban, found sisterhood in the huts of the Wild Coast, and stood on the farthest tip of Africa while the sturdy winds whipped my hair across my face. Now I’m ready for a safari. This is another one of the things my mom wanted to do in her life.

  After leaving the Wild Coast, Erin, Pete, Barbara, and I head to Kruger National Park for five days of camping, after which we will drive to Johannesburg together and part ways.

  Kruger is remarkable, a sprawling park larger than Israel, making it one of the largest game reserves in all of Africa. It’s impossible to navigate in just a few days, so we have reserved campsites at three different locations in the park.

  We have two tents. Erin and Pete share one; Barbara and I take the other. The tents are shaped like Frisbees. Unzip one side, toss the whole thing on the ground, and the tent pops up like magic. They are small and leaky—Barbara and I have lined ours with duct tape—and they barely shield us from the icy nighttime wind. But since all of us are on tight budgets, this is where we sleep most nights, at cheap campsites throughout South Africa.

  The roads in the park are high quality, so our days are spent in the rented Nissan, looping through Kruger’s fourteen different ecozones on self-drive safaris. We see the Big Five of game animals—lion, African elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard, and rhinoceros—several times over, in addition to other wildlife.

  On a densely wooded roadside, I observe the slit mouth of a cheetah as it dozes beneath a tree. Erin stops the car for a hippopotamus, which is almost as wide as the road. We see crocodiles and warthogs, leaping herds of kudu and zeals of zebras, a wake of vultures feasting on a giraffe carcass.

  At night, I am the cook for our group, making one-pot meals in the campsite kitchens. Packages of dried ramen noodles mixed with canned vegetables. Boiled pasta with a tin of spaghetti sauce. Rice and beans. This is the food I ate in college, when I couldn’t afford anything fresh.

  Every morning, Pete and I stir crystals of instant coffee into hot water and curl our frigid fingers around the warm mugs. His is a takeout cup, saved from a fast-food joint where we stopped earlier in the month. Mine is a travel mug from Addo Elephant Park that has held everything from hot coffee to cold beer.

  Sometimes I hold the coffee and close my eyes, thinking of all the lazy mornings I spent at home with Jason, sprawled out in bed, reading the Sunday paper, and drinking black coffee. When I get too sad, I push through those memories, open my eyes, and focus on the wildlife that surrounds me instead.

  Some of the other campers tease my friends and me. Other groups are well equipped with elaborate tents, rented RVs, lounge chairs, inflatable mattresses, coolers full of beer, gas grills, tiny refrigerators that plug into the cigarette lighter of a Land Cruiser.

  But I like the way I’m experiencing this country. My blood tolerates coldness better, and my skin is slightly harder. I have not looked in a mirror for weeks. Every night I feel the dirt of Africa beneath my back. The ground is so firm, so complete, sometimes I think it’s cradling me.

  TWO DAYS LATER, WE HAVE MADE IT HALFWAY THROUGH the park.

  I sit in a wildlife blind, tiger stripes of light across my face. Surrounding me are animals I’ve only read about before. A group of elephants coat themselves in mud by a water hole. They fling dirt at each other playfully, stir the earth with their trunks.

  My ears are filled with birdsong, and I smell sweet grass, sun-warmed leaves, the musk of large animals. The land is expansive, and I’ve never seen anything so great or so wide before. There is a rain cloud in the distance, but I know it might never reach me here.

  All the unkempt feelings I had in South America, all the times I felt aimless or that I didn’t belong—I don’t have those emotions here. This country is giving me something I didn’t know how to ask for. Though I’m her
e with three others, it’s rare to be in a place where animals outnumber people, and I like being in this minority. This specific type of isolation is seductive and comforting.

  I watch herds of animals come and go to the water hole, and I think about home. It’s impossible to reach my family from the bushveld, with no internet service for many miles. But even if I could call them right now, what would I say?

  The farther I travel, the more distance I feel from my family. My dad holds his cell phone so close to my mom’s ear that I hear the thud of the phone making contact with her hearing aid. I tell her where I am. I tell her what I’m seeing, the things I’m doing, how I’m feeling. I tell her that I miss her. But the one-sidedness of the conversation makes me ache.

  Even connected, there is disconnect. While I used to receive some response—sometimes a mumble, more often a groan—now she doesn’t answer at all. I strain for something between the hum of the phone line and the scritch of her hearing aid. She gives me no words, only her silence. She’s the one disappearing, but it’s as though the disease has erased me.

  Does she remember the yellow rocking chair from our living room, the place where she soothed my worries and held me until my nightmares disappeared? Does she know we had a fight when she found a pack of cigarettes in my purse? Does she hold any memories of us at all? My clarinet recitals, our shopping trips, the nights we stayed up late talking about everything and nothing?

  I wish I knew if I were situated at all within the folds of her brain. Does she ever have visions of a frizzy-haired little girl, round-bellied and pink from the sun, and wonder why she’s there? Does she see ghosts of me, the same way my mind conjures visions of her, of how things used to be? Do I shadow dance across the walls of her mind?

  Sometimes I have trouble remembering her before the disease. That’s one of the most brutal things about Alzheimer’s: it didn’t just take my mom; it has done a “find and replace” on my own recollections. The bulk of my memories of Mom are in the context of illness: confused in our house, confused at the nursing home, the times she forgot where she was going, the times she got violent and angry because she didn’t know who we were or why we were in her room.