Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  All day the caravan traveled north through the miasmic heat, into the heart of the Rift. As if they were daring the sun to turn them too to salt.

  The gara, or fire-wind, was against them; their progress through the lowlands was slow. Teddy and Idris rode their mules quietly in the rear, calling as little attention to themselves as possible. They were only hangers-on; the animal necessities drove things forward. The camels were the real talent of the operation. Every few hours they had to be attended to, rested, watered, fed, and fussed over like prima donnas, their bindings drawn tight. When they came to a well, or some sparse but hardy cacti, they’d draw to a halt, and the camels would drink and graze on the crowned fruit. Then the fires would be lit, bread and dates passed among the men, tea brewed from mint leaves, cardamom. When water was short, they drank the thin, bitter camel milk for refreshment. Between that, the hump meat he’d eaten back in Dire Dawa, and his odd new way of chewing on one side of his jaw to preserve the cracked crown over his molar—to say nothing of his multiple layers of fur and dirt and body odor—Teddy was beginning to feel, at this point, more camel than human. A lumpy, comical beast of burden. A conveyor of liquids and salts. He’d drink his fill of the milk, drape his shirt over his head, and lie down by the fire to rest.

  He slept like a dead man, flat on his back, hands propped on his chest to avoid the scorpions. Often he dreamed of Gail and woke anxious and startled, caught between worlds. Idris would softly be singing beside him, accompanying himself on a single-stringed instrument he held between his knees.

  “That’s a pretty song.”

  “Is pretty, yes.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “The song say, death is a horse. It rides to us, but let us, please God, it say, let us eat and drink and keep it away.”

  “I thought death in your songs was always a lion.”

  “There are many, many songs,” Idris said. “There is a song I am singing while you sleep. The song say, please God, we travel in the desert, far like clouds, make sure we do not perish, help us find our way.”

  “Find our way where? To what?”

  The question seemed to take Idris aback. “To home.”

  “It’s funny, I thought we’d see tons of lions out here. But we haven’t seen a single one.”

  “Is better I think.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He waited for Idris to finish blowing his nose. Twin strings of snot flew onto the dirt. “Where are we, anyway? Think we’re getting close?”

  “Only God knows.” As if to research the matter, Idris laid down his instrument and picked up his Bible. These were his twin pillars; they held up the whole structure.

  “Do me a favor, go talk to Zelalem. He’s in charge. He’ll know.”

  “Zelalem is a heathen.”

  “Don’t be silly. This is his livelihood—he does this route once a month. He’ll know exactly where we are.”

  “You do not want to know this,” Idris said. “The answer will bring too much pains.”

  “I thought you liked it out here in the desert.”

  “I don’t like, no. I miss my wife and childs.”

  It was the closest thing to an autobiographical disclosure Idris had made. Even he seemed mortified by it; he frowned and looked away. “My wife say, stay home. This place was created by God, she say, when his mood was very bad.”

  “So why did you come then?”

  “Dr. Dave, he say, here is a man who needs you. He gives me birr one hundred for each day. So you do not get lost and die.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll double what he’s paying if you turn around and go home right now. Just go home, and forget the whole business. How’s that for a deal?”

  “Go home you say?”

  “Sure. I’ll even cover the days you aren’t with me. Here.” He reached into his fanny pack for his sheaf of bills. They were worn and limp, in faded pastel colors. “Stuff these babies in your pocket. They’re all yours.”

  Idris frowned and looked away into the soft blues and golds of the twilight. He seemed wary, resistant, as if he suspected he was being tricked or manipulated somehow. Or maybe the idea of returning to his wife wasn’t quite so appealing as he’d made out. “No. Dr. Dave will be angry.”

  “He won’t even know. Anyway I’ll square it with him when I get back to Addis.”

  “I will think about what you say.” Instead of thinking, however, Idris spat on the ground. “When we come to Dallol, I will think then.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Only God knows.”

  “I bet Zelalem knows too. Why don’t you go ask him?”

  “Zelalem is a heathen.”

  “So what? So am I.” They were going in circles now. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, does it?”

  In the face of such questions, Idris had a way of looking not just blank but loftily and imperiously so. They had been traveling together for three days; only now did it occur to Teddy that Idris did not like him very much.

  “All right, fine. Go ahead and take the birr anyway. You’ve earned it. It’s just weighing me down.”

  But now Idris wouldn’t even look at him. “Is your money, not mine.”

  Blue skies, brown mountains, black sands…

  They came to the Sabba River, in the Upper Danakil. Hippos sunned along the banks. Oryx and bushbuck were drinking in the weeds. Bustards and bee-eaters hovered over the water. The ground was like talc. Eventually the river sank away into the basalt and vanished into the salt pans around Lake Assal.

  To the north stretched the lava fields, black as pitch. Limbs of petrified wood lay strewn in the gulleys. The ground was broken, pockmarked; the camels whimpered as it cut their feet.

  The fever was with him all the time now. He could no longer distinguish what was fever and what was not. Idris kept urging him to drink, but the water went right through him. Everything did. He’d become a hollow vessel through which all things must pass.

  His body plodded along mechanically, driven by some stubborn unreasoning engine that churned away at its core. He no longer cared how it worked, what made it run.

  Vaguely he understood that they had descended far below sea level, into some sprawling and inhospitable suburb of hell. The heat was stupefying. The air stank of salt. Black ash rings and volcanic cones littered the plains. Termite mounds rose up through the brush, higher than a man’s head. A land of death, Thesiger called it. And indeed, the whistle of the wind through the canyons sounded to Teddy like the cry of ghosts.

  Occasionally in the midst of this desolation they’d happen upon a watering hole with a few round, tukul-shaped huts made from reeds and mud and woven palm. They looked sturdy and tough, like armadillo shells. Idris told him they could quickly be collapsed if the need arose and carried away on a man’s back.

  “Let’s get a closer look, what do you say? I’d like to see how they’re put together.”

  “I do not think the people would like, no.”

  “Too bad. But maybe if I talked to them they’d change their minds. We’re all brothers, right? We all came from the same ancestor. I saw her at the museum.”

  “Who you saw?”

  “You know. Lucy.” The poor kid, he’d seen her little skeleton laid out in pieces in the basement of the National Museum, like a puzzle not yet complete. Oh, she’d had it good for a while, back in the day, roaming around her verdant valley with its savannas and harboring grasses. But then the mantle had shifted, the climate had changed, and now she and everyone she knew lay entombed beneath the crust. Sad. But then they didn’t call this place a depression for nothing.

  “The Afar does not wish to meet you in his house. His house is very small, unlike the American house. The American house is very big. Very grand.”

  “It’s true,” Teddy said, “we’re way out of scale. You should see my village. The square footage, the cathedral ceilings—the fixtures alone would blow your mind.” For all the distance he’d achieved, Carthage and its disconten
ts still boiled in his blood. “We could learn a thing or two from these guys about downsizing.”

  Idris thought for a moment. “What is fixtures?”

  “Never mind. It’s hard to explain.”

  Idris seemed to take offense at this. A muscle twitched in his jaw. He was a complicated person, more so in many ways than Teddy himself. But he seemed incapable of understanding how a too-big house could be something to complain about, let alone unlearn.

  Then all at once they were there. The salt pans of Dallol.

  At the sight of that blackened plain quavering woozily in the heat, he almost laughed. Here it was: the bottom of the world. The ground rumbled and tossed. The crust was molten, fissured, like the hide of an elephant, like a shattered pot. Great clouds of ash spumed high in the air, dimming the sun. When he wiped his brow with the back of his wrist it came back dry. He felt in the grip of some terminal hallucination. True, he’d wished to carry himself to the end of things—the beginning of things—the place where ends and beginnings were one. But he’d never expected to find it. Now he scanned the horizon through his telephoto lens, fighting off a small, buglike flutter of disappointment. From here on out there would be nowhere else to look.

  “Well, Idris, what do you think? Not in Kansas anymore, huh?”

  Idris spat on the ground with no particular emphasis, unimpressed. “Is too hot I think.”

  “How old are you, Idris? I’m just curious.”

  “I am thirty-four years.”

  “Thirty-four!” Teddy roared. “Are you joking? I thought you were older than I was. But you’re just a kid. You’re just getting started.”

  Idris looked at him as if he were insane. Maybe he was, Teddy thought. The skin on his hands was like paper; he could see right through to the veins. It was inconceivable: he was an old man. Not just in African terms. In any terms.

  Idris, having now discharged the last of his responsibilities where the visitor was concerned, turned his mule around and, without a word, commenced the long trudge back to Hamed Ela. There the caravan would be resting at the watering hole, the camels grazing, the nomads sitting cross-legged in a crescent of shade. They’d chew khat and drink mint tea and exchange ritualized hand kisses with men from other caravans, sharing the news—dagu, they called it—about weather and trail conditions, political alliances, weddings and funerals, all the information a nomad required to move through the desert and get his business done.

  Teddy watched him go with a kind of dreadful elation. He was alone in the desert at last.

  He looked out over the shimmering salt flats, the parched mountains, the sunken, shuddering ground. Beyond the hills, the Red Sea was waiting, biding its time. It had been gone for 40 million years, but it was coming back now, reclaiming its old home. Below the restless crust, great plates were in motion, sliding along their transform faults, magma surging up through the Rift even as it sank. The earth dredging and remaking itself, tearing things up and then starting again. And now a new ocean was being born, or rather the old ocean returning from its exile underground. Soon it would arrive en masse. And then all the maps would have to be thrown away, Teddy thought, or else redrawn from scratch, because Africa’s Horn, cut off at the root, would break free at last of its mournful, dangling head and go floating off on its own adventure, untethered, unbound. Yes, geologically speaking, it would all happen soon. And then the flood would come and fill this barren valley with its nutrients and organisms, and all the withered fossils would come back to life.

  Approaching the camp, he heard a terrible shrieking. The nomads were huddled around the firepit, clucking their tongues, their faces long and sorrowful with worry.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked Idris. The guide crouched by his mule, reading his Bible by the last of the light. “What’s happened?”

  “Is one of the camels, he is hurt.”

  “How bad?”

  Idris shrugged.

  “Well, let’s not hang back here. Let’s go see if they need help.”

  But Idris was absorbed in his Scriptures, or pretending to be; he would not move. So Teddy strode down to the firepit alone.

  He found the men gathered in a ragged ring, stroking their beards, looking down at the camel writhing on the ground. Froth was around its mouth. Its neck thrashed blindly back and forth; its eyes rolled up in their sockets. Zelalem crouched beside the camel in the dirt, somberly inspecting its foreleg. It appeared to be broken. He lifted the limb and tested it, twice, then eased it down gently. He put his ear to the creature’s heaving flank. Like an old friend, he patted it with his palm and kissed it. Then he murmured a brief prayer. Then from beneath his robes he unsheathed a long, curved dagger and cut the camel’s throat.

  Something flew up onto Teddy’s glasses. By the time he’d wiped them clean, the creature was dead.

  Zelalem rose stiffly. His eyes were glittering, his robes spattered with blood. He pushed his way angrily through the men and, covering his face with one hand, strode off into the thorn trees, alone.

  Idris was still reading his Bible when Teddy returned from the firepit. They said nothing to each other. Their time together seemed at an end.

  Teddy lay on the ground, staring up at the sky’s black skin and the stars that prickled its surface like a rash. His tongue probed a vacancy at the back of his mouth. The crown was gone. He’d never felt so lonely, so bereft. What was he doing here? When he closed his eyes, he saw the little covered wood bridge on Montcalm Road, which from a distance always looked like a coffin. But now it looked like what it was: a bridge. The further into blackness he traveled, the more homebound grew his thoughts. His wife, his daughters, his neighbors, even poor old indolent Bruno…they were all with him now, tagging along in their own phantom caravan, their features etched over the lava, over the scrubby formations of the hills. He’d thought the empty space would liberate his imagination, had hoped by his adventures to wipe the slates clean. But every erasure left its own prints, own trails, every darkness broken by small, familiar lights.

  What a drag, Teddy thought. What a bore. The stars just hung there in their usual arrangements, submitting to the same old hand-drawn stencils and designs. They too had followed him here, to the ends of the earth. He supposed they always would. He’d read about Johanson’s discoveries back in the National Museum in Addis; how, years after digging up the Lucy skeleton, they’d found another collection of bones from the same period, two adults and three children, nearby. Family. There was no getting away from it. The codes of the helix were determined to be passed along.

  So fine. He knew when he was beaten. It was nearly spring, it was time to go home. Let the stars go on hovering up there, let their lights fall over him like a net. He’d been floundering in nets all his life; he didn’t even want to get out from under them any longer. Only to go deeper in, and deeper still, until the borders of the net were no longer visible, no longer borders.

  Even out here, it seemed, at the farthest reaches, you still carried your house on your back. And the hell of it was, there was no other shelter.

  About the Author

  Robert Cohen is the author of three previous novels, The Organ Builder, The Here and Now, and Inspired Sleep, and a collection of short stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Acheson Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, the Ribalow Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and a Whiting Award. He teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.