by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
That was about it for nightly entertainment.
My visions of the magical realm of the jungle that Green Mansions had stimulated were real. How glorious the gigantic, two meters in diameter, Reina Victoria lily pads were—each one a universe inhabited by jade-green frogs and giant-legged bugs—and how strange and mythical the pink river dolphins appeared, quietly rising up and sinking back into the muddy malachite waters as our canoe wove through the mesh curtain of vines and drifting roots. I was finally living the fantasy that had inspired the long and arduous journey I’d taken to get here. Traveling through Flora’s watery world was worth every bug bite and petrifyingly scary moment.
Over her brazier set on the floorboards, we shared meals of smoked monkey stew, boiled palm nuts, dried pirarucu—the largest freshwater fish in the world, and my favorite: grilled capybara—the world’s biggest rodent. We also did what women do all around the globe—we talked about men. Ironically, she had the same boyfriend problems I did. Hers was a bigger dilemma, as she also seemed to get pregnant and have children by the various Casanova traders who canoed past.
The week at Flora’s passed quickly. I was ready to travel onward to Carnival, especially once the sour German arrived the day before I was to leave and put a crimp in our fun factor. He took up half the hut with his camera gear and shoveled all the stew onto his plate leaving a thigh bone and some sauce for the rest of us. He spoke in a bullying baronial tone of self-importance ordering us about like servants, but Flora needed the money he was paying for her guide services, so I couldn’t shove him over the railing and feed him to the caiman like I wanted to. Thankfully, Marco showed up when promised and had consigned a boat ride to Manaus for me. I hugged her wild, spunky kids goodbye and promised Flora I would stay in touch with her via Ray and return to visit her special watery world someday—maybe with my own future children in tow.
I did arrive in Bahia on the first day of Carnival as Marco predicted and danced nonstop in the streets for a week. Several pair of shoes were worn out as I tried to keep up with the battery of booty-shaking, sexy samba mamas who paraded around town 24/7 in their stilettos, towering headdresses, skimpy costumes, and mile-wide electric smiles. Shimmy, shimmy, smile, rotate, wave to the crowd; then run, run, run to catch up with the frenzied drum bands on the motorized parade floats and shimmy some more. It reminded me of the moves Flora taught me to prepare me for Carnival, standing up in her tipsy canoe, scaring that silly photographer. Shimmy, shimmy, shake, shake, giggle, guffaw! Sisterhood discovered deep in the Amazon.
The Amazon and Carnival faded into a blur of further larger-than-life adventures traversing Iguaçu Falls and the glaciers of Patagonia, over the Atacama Desert to Bolivia, and months later, flying home from Ecuador—a full circle from where I began my Amazonian quest.
I went back to California and started an import business. For seven years I commuted to South America, and whenever I could find a flight from Colombia or Peru to Leticia, I’d take a detour and visit my friend Ray and his growing family. Leticia held a certain backwater charming seediness that grew on me the more I explored the region. Flora had married one of her Casanovas and moved to Iquitos, and I never saw her again.
The last time I saw Ray was thirty years ago, right before I sold my import company. He was hoisting me into the cargo hull of an unpressurized plane on a dirt runway filled to the gills with odoriferous planks of salted pirarucu fish. Throngs of Indians pushed and shoved to get on the plane that provided the only transport to Bogotá on a random schedule. Luckily, they were much more diminutive than Ray, who tossed me like a football, launching me over the indigenous feathery finery and headfirst onto stacks of smelly fish. As the plane sputtered and the propellers whirred, we lifted upward. There was Ray on the runway below, large and pasty-white, enthusiastically waving his sweat-stained Ecuadorian Panama hat, grinning and squinting upward toward the blazing orb of the sun. His kids taller, his wife shorter. Fish Trader Ray. My Amazon man. Straight out of a novel.
Lisa Alpine is the author of Wild Life: Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman and Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman (winner of a BAIPA Book Awards Best Women’s Adventure Memoir). Writing, dancing, gardening, hiking, family, and travel are the passions of her life. She divides her time between Mill Valley, California and the Big Island of Hawai’i. Find out about her writing workshops and book events at www.lisaalpine.com.
TANIA AMOCHAEV
My First Trip to the Homeland
She goes in search of abandoned treasures behind the Iron Curtain.
I wondered yet again: Had I really agreed to fly on a one-way ticket into a remote backwater of Communist Russia of 1977, a country repressed by fear and impoverished by incompetent bureaucracy, one my father fled as an infant and couldn’t believe his daughter was braving?
My family, Don Cossacks, had lived for centuries on the Don River between Moscow and Stalingrad. The Cossacks, although mostly peasants, were staunch supporters of the tsar and represented the last stand of resistance to the Communist Revolution, losing the final battle in 1920.
When I was a child, my grandmother told me stories of that final battle. How the family, following the White Army, repeatedly left their village and returned. How by the last retreat there was no time to dig up the silver she had buried under the back doorstep to their house, abandoned to the dust of history. My grandmother was long gone, but that silver in its dirt grave halfway around the world lived on in my mind, my sole keepsake beyond the small gold stars she had always worn dangling from her ears. I wanted to see where our story began and to retrieve what she was forced to leave behind. I wanted to dig up that dirt.
The plane heading north from Stalingrad, to the town of Uryupinsk, was a ten-passenger WWII biplane converted for commercial use. In front of me sat a man staring intently into the open cockpit, leaning in as if he would steer from his seat if he could. I had seen him and the two pilots in the cafeteria drinking a quick shot of vodka before departure.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I am the observer,” he replied, proudly.
The Communist party had observers everywhere. They had broken my camera, pawed through my luggage, read my notes. Now this guy was making sure of what—that the pilots didn’t hijack us?
The plane rattled into action and weaved over the runway. The noise was deafening, it shivered and groaned. Only 300 miles, it took an interminable three hours, and the shaking didn’t abate. A confident flier who rarely felt queasy, I started retching and then vomiting almost instantly, my head in a bag for the entire trip. Perhaps it was I who should have had that early morning shot of vodka.
We finally landed, but I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t think, I could barely breathe. Everyone deplaned. Finally, holding on to the bag, embarrassed to leave it behind, I crawled to the door. We were in an abandoned field, dead grass all around. At the bottom of the stairs a man with a paunch and an official looking chauffeur’s hat waited.
“Ah, vi Amerikanka!” he said. You’re the American.
“Kak vi znali?” I replied. How did you know?
“There was no one else left.”
He introduced himself as Yura, the chauffeur for the president of the flaxseed oil factory, and the proud driver of the only private car in the district. He explained that his boss had loaned him to me for my stay. Did I want to go to my hotel or straight toward the village of Kulikov?
I desperately needed to wash up.
“I have a hotel?” The town had no cars. The airport was a dirty field. My expectations were low.
“Yes,” he explained, proudly. “Our town has a hotel because we have a sister city in Czechoslovakia and our visitors need a place to stay.”
No American had ever visited this modest but clean hotel, far beyond any approved tourist areas. The price was one ruble, less than two dollars at the official exchange rate. The forms were in Russian. I transliterated my town of Minneapolis into Cyrillic: Минияполис. There wa
s no line for state or country.
The receptionist peered at it carefully, then said, “That’s in the north, right?”
I was impressed with her knowledge of U.S. geography and said, “Why, yes. How did you know?”
“I could tell by your accent. It is vaguely Siberian.”
I had never set foot in Russia before, and my father had left as an infant, but my knowledge of the language was good enough that this woman, who had never been anywhere else, clearly took me for a native. It was an amazing testament to the uniquely powerful Russian concept of Rodina, or homeland.
The showers in the hotel were off for the day, and there was no hot water, so I washed up in the sink. Before setting off, I asked Yura if we could buy some water, and we stopped in five stores, all empty and deserted. What did these people eat? Finally he took me back to the hotel, where they gave me a large bottle of apple juice and a chipped glass.
There was no map that included the remote village of Kulikov where my father was born, the one I was seeking. However, I was fluent in the language, stubborn and determined. So far I had found this, and little else, in common with these people, my “countrymen.”
My father’s brother Shura was eight when they left, the oldest son and now patriarch of the scattered family. Always confident, he had sketched a map and proudly pointed out their home, telling me it was “the only two-story house in the village.” My grandfather, whom I had never met, was a kulak, a peasant who took advantage of land reforms passed in 1906 to develop a wheat trading business and rise above his class. Uncle Shura drew in the ambar or granary, the symbol of his father’s success and, ultimately, of their survival. It was across from his aunt’s house, near the creek and the church, and around the corner from the train station. This final detail, that the village was important enough to have a train stop, was the clue that still had me in the hunt.
Yura knew the train station. “The Jarizhenskaya station,” he said, “is near your village of Kulikov. Do you know any other details?”
I did. The previous evening in Stalingrad I repeated an act I had performed in countless cities of the world: I scoured the phone book for an Amochaev. I had never before found anyone beyond my immediate family, but Stalingrad had two, and I had met one of them: Oleg. While neither of us knew enough about our families to figure out if we were related, his mother lived in our village of Kulikov, and I had agreed to look her up and tell her he was well and would write soon.
“We are looking for Maria Afanasievna Amochaeva at number 6, Gorkii Street in Kulikov,” I told Yura.
We quickly reached the outskirts of the city and bounced onto a dirt road.
“This,” he said confidently, “will soon be the highway to Moscow!”
Soon was a relative term as weeds abounded and no equipment was in sight.
“And what do you think of this car?” asked Yura.
It was a comfortable Volga limousine, and I told him how fortunate I felt that his boss let me have the use of it.
“Do you own a car?”
“I do.”
“Is it like this?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “It is much smaller.”
“Of course,” he nodded, undoubtedly visualizing the tin cans of Eastern Europe rather than my flashy sports car. “Did you wait a long time for it?”
“No, we don’t actually have to wait for cars.”
He mulled this over for a while.
“But you do have shortages, don’t you?” He searched for common ground.
I wracked my brain and remembered a true story. “Last year,” I said, “there was a run on toilet paper. It was started by a rumor that the company was going out of business.” I didn’t mention that it was a comedy hour gag gone awry.
“Yes, that happens a lot here.”
“But could you buy a truck? Or a bus?”
“If I could afford it, I could.”
“Surely that can’t be. Ne mozhet bits. How would you do that?”
I had never actually considered this subject. “I’m really not sure,” I said, “I guess I would go to a company that sells them.”
“Would you need permission from the powers, ot vlasti?”
“Well,”—now it was I who stretched to find common ground—“I would have to get a special driver’s license to operate a large vehicle.”
“Ah. They would probably use that to prevent you from buying one,” Yura said, knowingly, in collusion with me against the bureaucracy.
I found myself torn, as so often happened on this trip, between wanting to share a bit of my life, but not wanting to point out just how desperate theirs seemed to me. It was a fine line to walk. The previous evening Oleg had proudly showed me the latest miracle installed in their apartment, to the envy of neighbors: a sink where cold and hot water merged into one faucet rather than coming out separately. I tried to be appropriately impressed.
As I was leaving he opened up the top of his greatest treasure, a small piano bought with his black market earnings as a dentist at night and on weekends. He withdrew a clear plastic sleeve with four colored felt pens and offered it with both hands, saying: “This is for you, to take back and remember us by.”
“That’s . . . those are the ones Cousin Igor brought back from Germany!” his wife stuttered, the pain of loss clear in her voice.
He insisted on giving it to me, and I could not tell him that I had a drawer full of felt pens. I thanked him as deeply as his consideration in parting with this treasure deserved. But I already sensed I would regret my inability to express gratitude for the thought and still leave the treasure intact.
My conversation with Yura, meanwhile, was interrupted by the appearance of the train station. A man walked along the tracks, and we pulled over to ask about our destination.
“Can you tell me, tovarisch, how to find 6 Gorkii Street?” Yura asked the elderly man.
“Where do you think you are, Moscow?” came the gruff reply. “We are in the boonies, mi v derevnye, not the big city. Who are you looking for?”
“We are looking for Maria Afanasievna Amochaeva,” I interjected.
“Ah. Why didn’t you say so? She is in her front yard with Efim Ivanovich, as always. Take the first right, it’s a hundred arshins up the road.” I thought arshins had died with the Old Testament, but the driver knew it was a measure just short of a yard, and we easily found them sitting at a table in front of a small house, sipping tea.
Convincing them of my identity was much more problematic.
“What do you mean, you’re from America but your father was born here? That’s not possible, there’s no one in America from here!” said the frowning woman, her gray hair circling her head in a neatly tucked braid.
I knew she was almost right, and that the escape was a close call. My grandfather had loaded the family, including four children and his mother, on his hidden horse cart and fled across hundreds of miles of war-torn country to the town of Yvpatoria on the Black Sea. In late 1920, carrying a large bag of wheat and a single suitcase, they boarded one of the last ships taking refugees out of the country. They survived by mixing the wheat with salt water and baking it on the ship’s steam pipe exhaust vent. The ship tried to dock in Istanbul, but was refused entry. Gallipoli was taking only military refugees, no children.
Finally, they landed on the Greek island of Limnos. My great-grandmother looked at the barren shore and refused to disembark. She returned with the ship, which went for one final mercy run, and was never heard from again, disappearing into Communist Russia. Many of the refugees died of starvation and disease, but the wheat fed my family until they were given asylum by the King of Serbia, where I was born.
I started explaining: “Well, his father took them away during the revolution . . .”
“Likely story.” She spat at the ground.
“Why would I lie to you?”
“Why wouldn’t you? And who’s he, with the fancy car, driving you around like some kind of princess. What are you doing here?
We don’t know anything. We have nothing to say.”
There was something about her steely strength that reminded me of my grandmother, but her words were devastating in their implication. She clearly assumed I had been sent for some nefarious reason. Was this as far as I would get?
“Marusia, Marusia, wait a minute. Let the young lady tell us what she wants. Maybe she can explain.” That was her friend Efim, tall and thin and around the same age, which I seriously overestimated as around eighty. He quickly became my ally, loosening up as my chauffeur wisely withdrew.
“Well, all I know is that my grandfather’s name was Ivan Minaevich Amochaev,” I explained, “and that he had a house and an ambar here. When the Red Army defeated the Whites for the last time, they escaped to the Black Sea and almost forty years later ended up in America. My uncle was eight when they left, and he drew me a map.” I turned to Efim. “Why doesn’t she believe me?”
Efim swept his upturned palm across the emptiness that surrounded us. “Well, you see, dorogaia, dear, no one survived.”
“What do you mean?”
“When the Reds came in they lined up all the men, and boys over twelve years old, and shot them. No one got away. You’re the first person in nearly sixty years who has ever arrived, claiming to be from here.” His words suddenly explained the silence of decades, all the letters gone unanswered. I had trouble grasping the scope of the tragedy before he continued. “But you have nothing to gain that I can imagine, so I am prepared to believe you. Do you have that map?”
“Oh my God! Were you here?” I wanted him to keep talking, I needed to learn more.
“We were infants,” he said, “but we grew up with the stories of the horror. Marusia lost her father, her brothers. She can’t bear to think about it all.” I appreciated the enormity of what I had just heard and knew I would learn nothing further about this tragedy.