Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “Think the van’s ready?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve lost track of how long we’ve been sitting here.”

  “So have they, I’m sure.” Dave set down his paper. “There’s a saying around here. Kes be kes inculal bekuro yihedal. Step by step, the egg starts walking.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not a step-by-step person. It’s not to my credit, I know. It’s just how I’m made.”

  “You can change how you’re made.”

  “Think so?”

  “I know so.” Dave thought for a moment. “My predecessor told me a story when I first came. It’s about one of your explorers. One of those well-bred young athletic Brits who wants to make a name for himself before he settles down for good on the family estate. So naturally he heads off to Africa. Puts this huge expedition together and goes marching into the bush. Makes fantastic progress too. He finds mountains no one knew about, lakes that aren’t on any of the maps, animal species that have no name. He makes notes for the book he’ll write, the lectures he’ll give at the Royal Geographic Society. Nothing but glory ahead, right?

  “Then one day something happens with the porters. They just stop. Stop for no reason. “The explorer isn’t abusing them, there’s nothing unusual about the weather, it’s a day like any other. They just stop. The explorer doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t speak the language, he’s sent his interpreter on ahead to the next village. So he gets down on his knees and lays out his maps. He talks very reasonably about the schedule he’s worked out, the need to avoid the rainy season, the dwindling rations and supplies and so on. The porters just sit there. He starts to panic. He promises them whatever they want—more food, more money, more women. They still won’t budge.”

  “They weren’t members of the Teachers Federation by any chance?”

  “Okay, so now he’s losing it for real. He’s waving around the hunting rifle, screaming threats, ready to kill them all. Exterminate the brutes, right? Only just then, as luck would have it, his trusted interpreter returns. Right away he sizes up the situation. O great one, he says, put your gun away, your bearers revere you like a god. It is only that your progress has been so glorious, they must stop.

  “But why? the explorer asks him. What’s the problem?

  “They must stop, the interpreter says, to wait for their souls to catch up.”

  “Good one,” Teddy said after a moment. “So what was the real reason?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, obviously the explorer was a boob. He’d buy any dumb story the interpreter sold him.”

  “But it wasn’t a story. The interpreter was telling the truth.”

  Teddy frowned. Clearly he’d misheard something in the doctor’s tale, something crucial and salient, but what? Gail was right, he never listened closely enough when other people talked. Other people’s stories, like other people’s dreams, they just weren’t his forte. “Well, fine, if you say so. But I don’t see the relevance.”

  “The relevance?”

  “We’re Americans, dammit. We don’t have souls.”

  The doctor’s brow knotted for a moment; he appeared to be ready to laugh, but didn’t.

  “Let’s go see about that radiator,” he said.

  The radiator could not be fixed, however, only replaced, and the fellows at the ARCO station had no replacement parts of that size in stock. They had no replacement parts of any size in stock. Which raised the question of what they meant by stock, exactly. Their entire inventory, so far as Teddy could determine, consisted of two crates of motor oil, a six-pack of orange soda pop, and some cartons of Dunhills. That, and the enormous mound of threadbare, multiply lacerated tires heaped behind the station.

  “Tomorrow maybe will be better,” they offered, with no special conviction. “We cannot know for sure.”

  “Tomorrow will be better,” Dave said. Beneath his beige surface tones, gravel was in his voice now, the dregs of an unglimpsed bottom. Zen patience and cultural relativism were all well and good, but he had medicine to deliver, patients to see. “Okay? Am I making myself clear?”

  “Yes, okay, okay.”

  A brief, murmured conference in Amharic followed among the mechanics. It was the most animated Teddy had seen them. They came back to present an offer of their own. Then, in a solemn, highly ritualized ceremony, several hundred birr changed hands (the notes so faded the numbers could hardly be read), after which the mechanics went back to whatever it was they’d been doing—i.e., not much—and the two weary, beer-sodden Americans hailed a taxi downtown to the Ras Hotel.

  “The best of a bad bunch,” Dave said, “accommodations-wise. Let’s hope it’s only one night.”

  Indeed, the Ras was not a particularly fresh or presentable-looking hotel. Though the façade was being whitewashed when they arrived, which seemed an encouraging sign, the justification for it, they discovered later—a recent grenade attack—was not. No surprise, a lot of rooms were available, and at a very reasonable price. “What do you think?” Dave turned to Teddy at the front desk. “Go for two singles, or share a double?”

  One reason they got along, he and the doctor: they were both cheap. At moments like this Teddy understood how Robinson Crusoe must have felt, tracing those footsteps in the sand: here was the companion he hadn’t realized he’d been missing. “Hell, live a little. Make it two doubles. I’ve seen the beds in this country.”

  Up in the room, however, he took a pass on the beds, which were bow-shaped, and on the television, which didn’t work, and on the shower, which was filthy and cold, and on the bottled water, which had a broken seal, and on the tiny balcony with its view of the kidney-shaped pool in the courtyard, which was slimy and viscous and green, as if someone had mistakenly filled it with motor oil. This left nothing to do but head down to the adjoining restaurant, and wait for the doctor to finish his nap.

  He took a seat at a table for two in the back. The menu offered several variations on the theme of spaghetti and toast. Teddy looked it over hopelessly. The room was full of foreigners—Russian businessmen, Chinese bureaucrats, Swedish missionaries, an Elderhostel tour from Holland, three brawny Uruguayan helicopter pilots who worked for UNESCO, and, at the bar, surveying them all with seamless and regal disinterest, two striking young women of local provenance who turned out to be prostitutes. Teddy found this out the hard way: by stopping to chitchat on his way back from the men’s room. That got their attention, all right.

  The three of them were still chatting warmly at his table, discussing the vagaries of auto mechanics and other twists of fate, when the doctor wandered in, looking no better rested than he had before his nap. His eyes were small and red, blinking rapidly in a flutter. His hair was stiff from his cap; it stuck straight up in patches, like Dennis the Menace. He failed to spot Teddy at first, or maybe he just pretended to.

  “Here.” Teddy handed him a Castel. “I took the liberty.”

  “Looks like you’ve taken more than one liberty here.”

  “Doc, I want you to meet my new friends, Fruweni and…tell me your name again, dear?”

  “Adey.”

  “Adey. That’s a pretty name. What does it mean?”

  “Mean?”

  The doctor said something to the girls in Amharic. Whatever it was seemed to chill the air a bit.

  “Okay, so what should we drink to?” Teddy said.

  “Let’s drink to eating,” the doctor said.

  “No, I got it. Let’s drink to tomorrow. Tomorrow maybe will be better, right?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  They all clinked bottles. Tomorrow, they agreed, was an attractive proposition in any culture. Of course as far as the ARCO guys were concerned, so in all likelihood was the day after tomorrow. But they’d deal with that later. They’d deal with that tomorrow.

  “You’ve decided to live dangerously, I see,” Dave said, after the girls had excused themselves and gone back to their stations at the bar.

  “C’mon, we were just
talking. They’re a couple of kids. I’ve got one their age at home.”

  Dave turned in his chair and studied them thoughtfully. “I have to say, I don’t like the looks of that tall one. Did you see that rash on her arm?” His gaze was dry, clinical. “Typhoid. It’s progressed too.”

  “You can tell that from here?”

  “Typhoid isn’t subtle. She needs some sulfa or ampicillin in her system right away.” He glanced down at the menu and scowled. “Looks like pasta night for me. What’ll you have?”

  “Nothing. Jesus, how can you eat? I’m still sick as a dog from lunch.”

  “Have some toast. You need to keep up your strength.”

  “It’s not my strength I’m worried about.” In fact he was worried about his strength, but he was worried about a lot of other things too. “Those drugs you mentioned. You’ve got those in your bag, don’t you? Back up in the room?”

  “She’ll never take them.” Dave was still looking over the menu. “It would be a waste of perfectly good drugs that could go to someone else.”

  “What happened to tomorrow maybe will be better? What happened to the perfect is the enemy of the good?”

  Dave pursed his mouth in a grudging frown, like a tutor whose slowest student has just bagged a B-plus. “Have another beer.”

  They gave their order to the waiter. Then they turned back to face each other across the table. Suddenly there was nothing left to say.

  The next morning, after cold, dribbling showers from the lime-encrusted tap, they took a cab out to the ARCO station to check on the van. The mechanics had only just begun to straggle in, however, for their long day of lassitude and nonlabor. Clearly it would be a while. “What now?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I’m still hungover from yesterday. I can’t bear the thought of that café again.”

  “Tell you what,” Dave said. “We’re Americans, right? We’ll do what Americans do when they’re bored and stressed.”

  “We’re going to invade another country?”

  “We’ll go shopping.”

  At that hour the downtown Mercado, a huge, rambling, open-air bazaar behind Moorish gates, was already thronged. Women in traditional dresses squatted under their parasols, waving flies off their little piles of produce—peppers, tomatoes, red onions, mangoes and lemons and prickly pears. Dave strolled casually through the stalls, exchanging greetings with the merchants. Teddy hurried along behind him, jugs of oil wobbling in his wake. It wasn’t easy negotiating the aisles: the passages were narrow and his hips were lumpy and wide. He caused a little damage in the spice area, where a few reed baskets full of berbere and turmeric and fenugreek wound up toppling in the dirt. He tried to atone for this by reaching into his fanny pack and tossing around money indiscriminately, like some visiting dignitary from FEMA. In this way he attracted a following.

  “Wait here,” Dave said. “I’ll be right back. Try not to knock anything else over.”

  Teddy watched him disappear into the maze of stalls. Through the sagging canopy of burlap sacks the sun blazed down in slanting columns, agitating the dust. Smells of roasting meat came wafting over from the butcher shops. All he had to do was stand there with his hands in his pockets. But the kids kept pestering him, trying to sell him a lot of cheap, plastic, Chinese-made things he had no use for, and thus initiating the tedious daily round of moral self-investigation. There was no escape from it. Surely these kids and their particular cheap, plastic, Chinese-made things were as good and deserving as anyone’s. So why not shell out for them all? Meanwhile people were jostling him from behind, trying to get at the goods. They had meals to shop for and families at home to cook for. Why was he in the way?

  You had a choice, it seemed, between knocking things over and being knocked over. He could find no neutral ground.

  At last the doctor came back with an enormous trash bag slung over his shoulder. “Feel the weight of this baby. Two dozen sneakers. I got a deal.”

  Teddy hefted it approvingly. “You must do a hell of a lot of running.”

  “They’re for the orphanage. The proprietor likes me. He has a nasty case of gout.” He observed Teddy for a moment. “What’s the matter? You look antsy. You’re not hungry already?”

  “Famished.”

  “You should have eaten a proper dinner last night.”

  “I was exhausted last night.” They were like an old married couple now, scoring petty points at each other’s expense. It happened when two people traveled together. For the first time, he felt he was betraying Gail. “Come on, let’s get something to eat.”

  “Very well.”

  Long sticks of incense were smoldering amid the butcher stalls. To keep away the flies, Dave said. But the flies came anyway. They buzzed giddily around the pigeon corpses, the tufted goat hooves, the sheep skulls with their matted, blood-caked fur…all these animals that would never know the secular miracle of refrigeration, and lay piled in heaps or dangled upside down from hooks, bleeding into the dust. Amid all this exotic butchery, a bearded Harari gentleman in a blue-green skullcap stood behind a counter, wielding a shiny, medieval-looking scimitar, hacking away at a haunch of gleaming meat.

  “Looks like fun,” Teddy said amiably, like someone trawling at a crafts fair. “Mind if I watch?”

  In truth he liked nothing better than watching men at their work. Shaping things, making things. Stripping away the flaws and excesses. The butcher’s acuity and grace, his no-nonsense authority as he set about flaying the carcass, peeling flabby flesh from blameless bone…all this entranced him. Teddy stood there reverent. It was as though some timeless ritual of sanctification were being enacted for his benefit.

  Do me next, he almost said. Where the words arose from he didn’t know.

  The butcher glanced up at him now with calm, milky eyes—the eyes of a blind seer. With the point of his knife he impaled a glob of meat, then proferred it to his visitor encouragingly, like a mother urging her son to eat. Teddy took it in his fingers. He was no fan of shopping but he did like free samples. The meat was slippery and warm and smelled rancid beyond belief.

  “What is this? Some kind of lamb or mutton?”

  “Camel hump,” the doctor said.

  “Jesus.”

  “Our friend there must like you. Camel hump isn’t cheap. It’s something of a delicacy in these parts.”

  “Just my luck.” The butcher was examining Teddy carefully as he spoke, with a fond, even scholarly attention, as if picturing this stout fat-marbled creature hanging upside down with his ribs fanned out like the white keys of an accordion. The real object of exoticism here, the real tourist attraction, was not the butcher, he realized, but himself. “He’s going to be insulted if I don’t eat this, isn’t he?”

  Dave smiled. “Undoubtedly.”

  “But I shouldn’t, right? I mean, all the books say you should never eat meat out on the street that hasn’t been refrigerated.”

  “Or washed.” Dave rubbed his chin for a second. “It’s true, you could contract a nasty parasite. The older the camel, the higher the ash content. That’s the rule of thumb. And this one here, poor thing, looks like he’s seen better days.”

  “Ah well, who hasn’t?” Teddy thought of the camels he’d seen the previous afternoon, trekking stoically across the lowlands—their melancholic persistence, their elaborated necks, their sly, lofty, aristocratic expressions. “What the hell. What’s a little ash between friends.”

  “Good for you.”

  Warily he nibbled at the perimeter fat. God knew he and fat were not strangers. The taste was brackish and rank, phlegmy in the mouth. He tried not to breathe, and if possible not to swallow, clamping the fat in the back of his jaw, but some of it leaked down his throat anyway. He gagged. The butcher’s gaze grew weighty, concerned. Clearly, in his eyes, this was not the way a man went about eating camel hump. No, the way you went about eating camel hump (the knowledge arrived in Teddy’s head with an invisible jerk, like a strike on a line)
was by bolting the whole sticky, spongy mess down fast with no dithering or fore-thought, and then afterward if necessary you ducked behind a fence and vomited discreetly. That was the way a man went about eating camel hump.

  The idea, however, proving, as usual, worse than the reality, the meat shot down his gullet and sank cleanly into his belly like a stone into a well. “Not bad,” he said.

  The doctor smiled tolerantly, but he was already sneaking looks at his watch. Enough nonsense, you could see him thinking, time to get going.

  Before they left, however, the butcher wanted his photo taken with his new friend. Then he wanted this new friend’s e-mail address, because his nephew worked in a government ministry and had access to a computer. The doctor explained that they were on the road all week, heading first to Harar and then up north to the Afar country, so he should not expect an immediate reply. The butcher nodded, fingering his beard. Then he made a remark and spat on the ground.

  “What?” Teddy said.

  “He says we must avoid the Afar. There’s nothing out there, and the people are heathens. They carry long knives—longer even than his. They castrate their foes.”

  “C’mon,” Teddy said, “that’s just an old myth to scare people away.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure.”

  “But you’ve been up there lots of times. You’ve never seen anything like that, right?”

  “Actually, no. I’ve never been to that area. I told you, I’m not the explorer type. My work keeps me busy. I may not get there now, either. I’ll know better when we get to Harar.”

  Beyond the eastern gate they came upon the sprawling exurb of the Mercado where the household goods were sold. It was a Sargasso of dented pots, rusting tools, recycled appliances, flat-tired bicycles with buckled frames. Thousands of used auto parts lay upended in the dirt, like some luckless decimated army. The doctor waved his hand at the mess expansively. “Not too pretty, is it? Like a Wal-Mart without the walls.”

  “Why do I have this weird feeling there’s a radiator out there somewhere with our name on it?”