Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” the doctor said. “It’s where the last one came from too.”

  When they left Dire Dawa it was late afternoon. They wound their way slowly up the escarpment and into the mountains. It was a new road, freshly laid by Chinese engineers; nonetheless they were the only vehicle on it. The air smelled of hibiscus, climbing roses. The motor, taxed by the climb, sounded petulant and sluggish, like a teenager woken from a nap. The new radiator made a peculiar, warbling rattle that was suspiciously reminiscent of the old radiator. A light mist rolled in. The higher they ascended, the lower the temperature fell. Junipers and cypresses cast shadows over the pavement. Leafy, bright-berried coffee plants grew on the terraced slopes. It was as if, having left the barren heat of the plains, they had now gained access to a lavish private garden, secreted away out of view.

  Ahead lay the walled city of Harar.

  The arched gate through which they entered was uncomfortably narrow, a needle’s eye. It had never been intended for cars. Around them the walls loomed twelve feet high. They inched through the opening, scraping lightly against the stones. They might have been squeezing their way through a birth canal.

  Then all at once they were inside, and the gates were behind them, the local chaos in full swing—honking trucks, squawking chickens, braying donkeys. The local dogs rushed to greet them in what appeared to be the local manner, by lunging at the tires and growling viciously.

  “Well, Toto,” Dave shouted over the din, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  “Where to first, the clinic or the hotel?”

  “Too late for the clinic. The day staff has gone home by now.”

  “The hotel then.”

  “Maybe. I want to check something first.”

  They followed the steep cobbled road to the central square. Twin minarets swayed over the rooftops. The sandstone houses were crumbling; the roofs tilted and buckled like huts in a Chagall. Women hurried by in bright-colored shawls, lugging home produce in raffia baskets, their hair parted down the middle and piled up in buns. The men hung out in outdoor cafés, staring dreamily ahead, jaws working steadily, docile and meditative as herd animals. Beneath their white skullcaps their eyes were red. Every so often they’d reach below the tables and snap off leaves from the saplings piled at their feet.

  “That’s khat they’re chewing,” Dave said. “It’s pretty big around here. Opiate of the masses and all that.”

  Wistful, Teddy watched them strip the leaves with their teeth, rolling the stems in their mouths. “I wouldn’t mind trying some actually.”

  “Well, just say the word. There’s no shortage. The farmers around here have stopped growing coffee. The khat money’s better. You can thank your local Starbucks for that.”

  “We don’t have a local Starbucks. The town’s too small. We’re lucky to have a McDonald’s. Where are we going anyway?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Deeper they traveled into the city’s stubbled, serpentine labyrinth. Kids ran behind them, pounding their back fenders. You-you, farenji! You-you, farenji! Girls were scrubbing floors. Cats were yowling in the alleys. The jumbled shanties, the tilting minarets, the drooping electrical poles, the disintegrating balconies—all went by like a dream. Or were they themselves the dream? The walls of the city loomed like gravestones overhead. The radio was hissing, Get lossst. Through the shadowed arches of the mosques he saw men on their knees, heads pressed to the floor. A dark cloud rose up in the rearview in a great, funneling column. As if the men in the mosque had summoned it somehow, generated it by prayer. But, no, it was only the tires of the van spitting up dust.

  He pointed the camera out the window, framing two old women in luminous red robes against a splintering doorway. Immediately upon seeing him they began to shriek.

  “Christ, they hate us here, don’t they?” he said, excited in spite of himself.

  “What did you expect, trumpets? You’ve read the books. Why do you think they built those walls, for fun? This is Xenophobia Central. Even your friend Burton didn’t know if he was a guest or a prisoner. He came dressed in Arab disguise. Otherwise they’d have torn him apart like the others.”

  “Yeah, well, the last thing I want is another fight.”

  “Then put the camera away.”

  He did as he was told. That was his new style. Kindness and tolerance, bland submission. He was done with fighting. True, he’d had some contentious moments back in Carthage before he left, with Gail, with Mimi, with Bruce Germaine, with Fiona Dunn—with a lot of people, come to think of it—but now he was through with all that, he’d laid down his arms and shields. No más.

  Even when Danielle had told him what she’d told him, that night in her apartment in Addis, he hadn’t fought with her, hadn’t raised his voice, had only clucked his tongue and made soft, cooing, pigeonlike noises, the mildest, most understated conscientious objections. Not that this had helped very much. Not that this had kept Danielle from pacing furiously around her tiny living room with its solitary, anemic light fixture, shadowboxing for all she was worth. You’d have thought she’d wanted an argument. Was counting on an argument. That this was why she’d brought him to Addis—to argue with her. Argue and win. Twenty-year-old women don’t call their parents from half a world away just to chat and say hello. There had to be an agenda, a subtext. The pulse of some tiny, hidden truth…

  He remembered that quip of hers after breakfast at the hotel. The gift of Gabi. Suddenly it was clear. Suddenly he understood.

  He was here to send her home.

  That was why she’d asked for him, and not Gail. She was in a jam, and there was only one way out. Call in the Ogre. The Tyrant. The Barbarian. The Noble Savage. The Big Bully Who Never Listened, and so couldn’t be charmed or persuaded or counted upon for empathy. No, he’d just go ahead and do what he always did—carry her off against her will.

  He understood this now, his role in things. If she went home on her own, it would feel like a failure, a betrayal. He had to do it for her. He had to pretend to be strong, and she had to pretend to be weak, and in the end everyone would get what he or she wanted.

  Of course it was bad behavior on her part, summoning him here under these false, manipulative premises—it was self-indulgent and irresponsible and surely in the scheme of things an important issue to fight about, unless of course one has renounced fighting, in which case maybe not.

  Anyway there was no time to fight. She was already in her third month. Already her belly was softening, her breasts swelling with love’s milk. Her eyes, bruised and low-hanging, heavy with unshed tears.

  Okay, okay, he’d said. Come here. What else could he do? Their bodies, themselves: that was how they were raised. He’d pulled her onto his lap, stroked her bony, tremoring shoulders. Patted the clumps and knots in her hair, dabbed the snot from her nose with the back of his hand, smeared the dewy trails that ran down her cheeks like foul lines marking off the shining diamond of her face. Okay, okay. She’d clung to him that night as she had at the airport, with the same feverish intensity, the same flush of discovery and relief. As if each new moment were merely a repetition of an old one, which in the repeating became new.

  He was beginning to cry now himself. He slipped his American Express card from his wallet and handed it to her like a passkey.

  Go home, he said. No more orphans in the world. Go home.

  I can’t, she kept saying, I can’t.

  But in the end she could. She could and she did. It was something of an astonishment, in fact, how little it had taken to persuade her, how easily she’d slipped herself free. How gracefully she’d packed her things, hugged the children at the orphanage good-bye, exchanged gifts and addresses with the staff. And all the while her eyes remained dry. He admired her for it; at the same time it appalled him. He had reached the point, he thought, or they had, where his children were stronger than he was.

  Now he watched her settle into the passenger seat of the Lada. One last trip to the airpor
t. He could see relief in her face. Whatever her reservations, it was good to be a passenger again, in transit to someplace new. She had the travel bug bad. It seemed a sickness for which there was no inoculation. And yet her jawline trembled as she blew the kids kisses through the window.

  “Call me when you get home,” he said. “No more disappearances. From now on I need to know where you are.”

  “Look who’s talking.” She’d stared up at him critically through the open window. “You should come back with me, you know. It’s going to be a real shit-storm. Just the kind you like.”

  “One storm at a time. We don’t want to overload your poor mother.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about her. Did you know, she’s already pulled some strings and got me an appointment up in North-field. This Friday. She’s of the opinion that it’s a total no-brainer and I should get it over with right away.”

  “So you’ve decided then?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure. I guess I need to live with it a few more days.” Danielle paused, weighing her words. “She asked about you, by the way.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her the truth. You’ve been incredibly weird.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, in a good way or a bad way?”

  He nodded. It was the same question he’d have asked. In fact he was tempted to ask it now.

  “She says to tell you you’re missed,” Danielle said. “Especially down at the school. I guess it’s not working out too well with that guy you got to fill in for you.”

  “Filling in is hard,” he said. “You’ve got some school issues to deal with yourself I guess, huh? Bridges to unburn?”

  She shook her head. “Sucks, doesn’t it? The way anything you do that’s the least bit different causes all these logistical hassles. But I guess if I want to go to med school someday I don’t have much choice.”

  “Med school!”

  “Don’t get excited. It’s just an idea.”

  “It’s a good idea.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe. I’d have to take, like, a ton of bio and chem courses, which I’ll probably hate. But according to Dave it’s pretty common, actually. College kids come here on internships or whatever, it gets under your skin. Pretty soon you want to come back and do more than just pour juice and read uplifting stories.”

  “No just about it. You’ve done wonderful work here, Sweetpea.”

  “Oh, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.” Suddenly she was furious, either with him or herself. “Is this what happens when you become a parent? You turn into a liar? We both know I’ve never done anything for anyone but myself. But just because I haven’t doesn’t mean someday I won’t. I mean, hey, look at you.”

  “Me? Are you kidding? I’m as selfish as the next person. More so.”

  “I know. But you’re like one of those people who’re so selfish, it sort of circles around into the opposite. It’s weird, but you’re kind of my new role model these days.”

  “Funny, I was just thinking the same about you.”

  “Bye, Daddy. Come home soon.” And with that she’d tapped Yohannes on the shoulder, and the Lada sped away.

  Dusk was falling as they parked the van beyond the Old Town walls. The murmur of evening prayers swelled out from the mosques. They walked a while in silence. Behind them they could hear the motor, no longer employed in the travel business, ticking away like a bomb. “It’s not far now,” Dave said.

  “What’s the big mystery? Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?”

  “You’ll see. You’ll like this. You wanted something outside the comfort zone, you said. Or was that just a lot of talk?”

  “That camel hump I ate doesn’t count?”

  The doctor didn’t answer; he’d gone rocketing ahead down the alley in his running shoes. Teddy, back-sore, did his best to keep up. This was what he was now: a shadow. His loafers chuffed the ground, raising dust that seemed to erase his footprints behind him, like a photograph on cheap paper. The moon rose, ripe as a blood orange, pocked with unsightly craters. Its dull glow filtered over the streets like a judgment.

  There were almost as many bars as there were mosques. In the reeking open drains that ran along the alleys, every base element of the species—the piss, the blood, the phlegm, the shit—could be seen or smelled or by some other sense detected.

  “Sshh. There he is.”

  Dave pointed through the dimness to a spot just beyond the walls, where an old man in faded robes sat cross-legged in the dirt. His eyes were hooded. Cats circled hungrily around the sack at his feet. Nearby, fragments of broken glass gleamed like stars in the moonlight. Beautiful wreckage.

  “Listen,” Dave whispered, “he’s praying.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “He’s praying that Allah watches over him. That he sees the sun come up in the morning, and the city remains peaceful, and no one carries off the children when they’re asleep.”

  “These Sunnis,” Teddy said, “they’re kind of paranoid, aren’t they?”

  “On the contrary. Look.”

  Now the first of the hyenas came bobbing into view. There was no mistaking them: ugly, haggard, they slunk warily down the hillside, ruby eyes aglow, like a posse of schoolboys on their way to detention. Teddy didn’t move. It wasn’t fear exactly. The stunted legs and spotted heads, the listless, low-slung gait, the yips and yelps of their harsh, eerie laughter, all seemed instinctually familiar, the sound track to a movie he’d seen but forgotten.

  The old man waited in the shadow of the wall. His expression was fixed, remote, his jaw working robotically, like a man eating peanuts at a ball game. Then he reached into his sack, and the hyenas surged forward in a frenzy. Their eyes glittered in the dusk.

  “Christ, what’s he doing? They’re getting all riled up.”

  “He’s feeding them,” Dave said. “This is his job. He’s out here every night.”

  “Some job.”

  “Oh, this goes way back,” the doctor said. “There’s a long tradition here of feeding the hyenas. The Hararis believe they’re almost human. It all dates back to this one emir, you see, with a very beautiful daughter.”

  “Yeah, daughters are tough.”

  “Seems every night the suitors would come to the palace and pace around outside, scheming how to get in. With all the noise and worry, the emir couldn’t sleep. Finally he got mad and turned them into hyenas.”

  “Nice,” Teddy said.

  “Actually the Hararis are right. Hyenas are like humans. Their brain structures turn out to be remarkably similar. Their social hierarchies too. The only difference is they’re matriarchal—the alpha female rules the kill. She takes as much as she wants.”

  “Come over to my house,” Teddy said. “Same thing.”

  “Shh, here we go.”

  The hyena man reached again into his burlap bag, and produced what looked to be the mother of all flank steaks—a raw, glistening, purple-black hunk of meat. The blood did not so much drip as pour out of it and puddle on the ground. The first of the hyenas sidled forward. Her movements were slow and lazy, fake casual—head low, eyes half-averted—like a celebrity entering a restaurant. She was a regular customer; there was no hurry. For a moment she sniffed at the blood with a kind of polite connoisseurship, calculating its freshness and bouquet. Then she lunged.

  At first she wrestled with the meat as if it were still a living creature, putting up a fight. But once that lost its novelty, she stopped pretending and slunk off into the shadows at a half-trot, carrying her prize.

  After a while, from somewhere off in the darkness, came the sickly crunch and pop of bones.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Dave whispered hotly. “That’s your killer in the cave, right there. Your ultimate predator. They’re all over the fossil record, these puppies. They could devour a primate in a minute flat. Nothing left but the skull.”

  “I know all about that. I used to teach eighth-grade math
.”

  “Joke if you want. But they’ve been out there all this time, since the beginning. They’ve never gone away. They’re in our dreams, like it or not.”

  Now as if by signal they began to emerge in earnest, phantoms out of the darkness, hot-eyed and snarling. They moved in on the littered yard, chewing up scraps. People were gathering for the show. Tourists, backpackers, extreme travelers with headbands and good sandals, they all stood in a circle, shining flashlights over the mottled fur with its snaggy, bristling spikes. There were no movies in Harar, no theater, no opera; if you were looking for thrills this was where you went.

  The saliva unspooled in glistening threads from the hyenas’ mouths. Only now did it occur to Teddy the nature of the glowing fragments he’d seen strewn in the dirt. They weren’t glass, they were bones. Teeth.

  “You talk about your big cats,” the doctor said. “Your saber-tooths and leopards and lions. But come on. Look at those jaws, that dentition. These guys are machines. Imagine what it felt like, trying to sleep, hearing them laugh like that just outside the cave.”

  “They should have run like hell,” Teddy said.

  “They’d never have made it. No, probably what they did was build up the fire, and then pass the night telling stories and rubbing up against the females, trying not to think about those beasts out there. Then eventually they’d build a little house in a walled city, and raise some kids. And they’d find themselves a good hyena man too, like our friend over there, just in case they came back.” Dave laughed. Like all doctors he appeared to find it drily amusing, the stratagems of laymen in flight from stark truths. “Now get your camera ready. You’re going to want to record this.”

  Again the hyena man reached into his sack, pulling out another long, gristly strip of meat. He placed it between his teeth; it hung from his jaw like a second tongue. Blood dripped on the ground. The hyenas seethed forward in a frenzy, yipping and chattering, breath tearing raggedly in and out of their lungs.

  “Enough.” Teddy couldn’t focus; his hands were shaking. “This is a little sick, even for me.”