By the museum’s exit there was a large display window: What we owe to the Indians. It showed what the “white man” had adopted from the Indians, from medicines to plant products.
We were glad to get back in the warm car. Sanna and Lowis took turns driving and I could lie down on the backseat, wrapped in a blanket. I didn’t see how the darkness overtook us. I lost myself in a labyrinth whose walls were like the walls of the Anasazi buildings; the thread that was to lead me out was not Ariadne’s but, obviously, Angelina’s—a thread that my angel had put in my hand, I could talk to her perfectly naturally, could ask her if these Anasazi weren’t “more human” than we rich white people today. Angelina didn’t answer such questions, I knew that already, and she considered guilt feelings worthless—in her view, they only kept you from living your life and being happy and going ahead and doing whatever was necessary today irrespective of whatever we had to reproach ourselves for in the past.
I said nothing. I had already secretly thought, rather often, that my angel’s wisdom was a little simplistic—she probably could not fully understand the complex psyche of modern men and women. But I never expressed that out loud, and it didn’t seem very important either.
We could not wait to get to the Southwestern Grand Hotel in Dolores, where we had made a reservation, and where Freddy, a short, wizened man, greeted us at the reception desk. He was a hotel owner it would have been impossible to invent as a fictional character, and he showed us to our rooms with excessive politeness and a look on his face that said we should be overcome with excitement. What we saw was a dollhouse: five rooms of a pink nightmare, tiny, dark even when the little lamps with their pink shades were on, with vases of plastic flowers on every available surface no matter how small, the blinds down, the windows unopenable, a minuscule closet, a minuscule shower with pink walls and pink towels. This, Freddy believed, was how Europeans liked their hotels—he was trying to give them what they wanted. I felt my mood growing darker and darker under his flood of talking.
The others seemed to be having a similar reaction; we needed a drink. Freddy, we learned, had not been in business for very long and did not have a liquor license. He pointed out a cramped liquor store across the street, where finally, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, an unbelievable old lady who must have escaped from a Miss Marple movie actually sold us some bottles of red wine, which she was reluctant to part with: I told my husband to buy more red wine! We also bought some whiskey and tequila, which of course made the Alcohol Lady highly suspicious of us. Be careful! she called after us as we left.
Freddy, for his part, who completely approved of our purchases, ran into difficulties. He wanted to serve us our wine in coffee cups so that the people at the other tables in the small restaurant couldn’t see how he was abetting our sinful indulgence. Finally, he found a solution: Since the restaurant was divided with a lot of wood into “railroad compartments,” he maneuvered us to a table in the farthest corner of the least conspicuous compartment. No one could see in. On the table there, as on every other table, stood a little wooden train, transporting salt and pepper. Freddy had the courage to bring us wineglasses there, and had a glass with us, while a young blond girl with heavily made-up eyes took our orders. American food, giant portions for low prices.
Freddy, though, wouldn’t leave us alone. While we ate our steak, we heard everything about his family: His grandfather, a Volga German, had come over in 1906 and struggled to make it as a farmer; his father had staggered from one economic collapse to the next; he, Freddy, became a policeman in Ohio, a good job, you know?, but still gave it all up one day and moved here to Colorado with his wife and children, quickly deciding to buy this little hotel after taking a crash course in hotel management with a friend. Now he was bringing together his whole family from all over America. His brother was already there, the blond girl working as a waitress was one of his nieces, and his sister from Kansas City was coming soon. You see here before you, he said, raising his glass of red wine, a happy man. We gave him our rather faint congratulations.
The next morning, after a quick look around the place, we all agreed that Dolores was the ideal location for a thriller taking place in old-time America. There was the old Rio Grande Southern Railway station, long since out of service but preserved in its old-fashioned beauty, and there was the baker couple too, Irene and Alf, who embodied bygone times in another way. She was from Kreuzberg, in Berlin; he had brought her over after his time in the army and now they sold German antiques and baked German-style bread and cookies. They showed us their woodstove, we bought rye bread and Bienenstich almond-cream pastries that we would eat that night in my hotel room in Kayenta, but first we had to visit the blacksmith, an eighty-six-year-old man who still worked (Why not?), making cast-iron weathervanes for the whole village. He had come back to Dolores, he said, where, sixty-one years ago, he had found his wife—he had brought his wife back to her family. He was originally Dutch and had come to America with his parents as a young child.
For once I’d actually like to meet someone whose parents were American, Sanna said, while we drove south toward Cortez, turned off to the west, and found ourselves on a dirt road heading for Kayenta, back in another red landscape that eventually turned into fertile land. On the bumpy, little-used road, we passed an abandoned farm. And then, in a fenced-in ranch on the right, we saw—and it really was a vision, surpassing our wildest expectations—a cowboy, on a horse with no saddle. I don’t believe it, Sanna whispered. We stopped. He herded his many cows with a lasso, exactly the way we knew from movies. Then he rode up to the fence to take a look at us, with dignity, a man in his fifties wearing torn clothes and a big cowboy hat. Next to him on another saddleless horse rode a boy about six years old, clearly the man’s son, with a bright red shirt and, of course, a cowboy hat.
The man asked where we were from, and repeated back the names of the foreign countries. He had been born in this valley, he said; he took his herd into the mountains above Dolores in the summer. They were going to be branded tomorrow. He asked about our jobs, which he hadn’t heard of, and then he asked: What do you think about eternal life? and in response to our evasive, embarrassed stammering he gave us a short speech about the “Savior.” He scorned the established churches; he had been converted. He wouldn’t say the name of the sect he belonged to, it wasn’t about that, our Savior and Redeemer had promised us eternal life. We got the impression that the man was blessing us before we drove on. I was glad I took pictures of him: the photos would assuage my suspicions that we had met a spirit, not a man of flesh and blood. There he is in the photographs, in all his cowboy glory with his cows in the background.
I also documented the road that our dirt road suddenly turned into, which was one long construction site. The workers building this brand new road seemed to be exclusively Indians. We were approaching Navajo Country. There were Indians on the giant machines, Indian women on the tractors, Navajo girls holding up the stop signs; we were almost the only people driving down the road. We asked one of the girls what the road was being built for, and she said all she knew was that there needed to be a highway to Cortez, for the tourists. But we had seen oil wells on both sides of the road, and signs here and there for Texaco and Mobil Oil—one billboard for Mobil said: We are proud to be part of the Navajo nation. The girl we were talking to laughed an embarrassed laugh, as though we had asked her about some obscene sex act; she acted like she had never seen an oil well in her life. We had wells for company until we were back on our familiar dirt road with uncultivated nature spread out all around us.
We found a picnic site at the edge of a canyon with a fantastic view of the landscape. We ate dried beef jerky for the first time, which tasted better than we expected; we had bottles of water and the good rye bread from Dolores. After a brief detour into a landscape that left us speechless, with the San Juan River snaking along the bottom of the canyon far, far below us, we entered the domain of Monument Valley: the bizarre massif looming on the hor
izon like a portent. We drove a long time before we finally reached it and, after paying our five dollars each at the entrance, we could drive up to the Visitors’ Center, where dozens of cars filled the parking lot and young Navajo men and women flocked around us, offering two-and-a-half-hour or one-and-a-half-hour tours.
We were tired but felt obligated not to miss anything, so we took the shorter tour, again on a small, open truck, this time driven by a young woman, rather heavyset, like most Navajo women. We were relieved to see that she drove the old vehicle very carefully on the bad roads of Monument Valley; we could see the valley in the best evening light, bizarre shapes lit by the setting sun, again in an unbelievable red. All the stones had names, we learned: the Mittens, the Elephant, the Camel, the Three Sisters. The second half of the drive, in the shade and against the wind, was once again bitterly cold—this time we would definitely catch a cold, and two other people in our group, an American from Washington, D.C., and his wife, shared our concern. Lowis soothed our fears somewhat by handing around some of his beloved ginger cookies, which, he was convinced, were a cure for all ills.
We got to Kayenta hungry. Wetherill Inn, a hotel run by Navajo: big rooms, spic and span. They told us at reception that we could get Navajo cuisine at a restaurant around the corner; it turned out to be, like everywhere else, a lot like Mexican food: fried bread with beans on top and lettuce. Disappointing.
The next morning, at breakfast, we again had the experience of waitresses not being able to understand what we were trying to order. They finally brought me French toast and I was satisfied. We stocked up on more jerky and set out for the Hopi reservation, which, as we knew, was located on a high plateau surrounded by the much larger Navajo Country. There was no love lost between the two tribes, we heard. This was, I later discovered, a serious understatement. The conflicts over land and property between the settled, peace-loving Hopi and the encroaching nomadic Navajo went back centuries.
I am trying to remember the feelings I had at the time. They were ambivalent: primarily interest and curiosity but I could not entirely suppress discomfort at the fact that now we too were joining the stream of spectators filing past an ancient people that had suffered under foreign conquerors and their civilization, like people looking at animals in a zoo. Lowis wanted to find the old chief who had traveled through Europe the previous year to find help and collect money for his people. That was where the chief had met the Swiss Lowis.
We drove uphill. The soil grew more and more barren—it was a riddle for anthropologists, Lowis said, why the Hopi had settled here of all places. Nothing but juniper bushes and dry grass. We spent a half hour catching up on our travel notes. Lowis told us a few pieces of information about the early settlement history of the Hopi, the battles against the Spanish conquerors and later the Americans; he quoted for us the title of a book: When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away.
Then the road ran straight into Hopi country. On Second Mesa we found the Hopi Cultural Center, an ocher-colored motel consisting of several two-story buildings connected to each other as in an Arab city. There was a hideous decoration at the reception desk: Happy Easter! Lowis wanted to turn around on the spot and leave. But since the other place where we had reserved a room had been described to us as “depressing,” we checked in anyway. Lovely rooms at the end of the hall on the second floor. Sanna called me into her room for a whiskey since we were exhausted, but Lowis had been interested in the history of the Hopi for a long time, especially the Hopi myths and rituals, and had never been to Hopi country himself. He was excited and urged us to keep going.
We drove toward Hotevilla, a Hopi village on Third Mesa where apparently we would find James Koots, the chief Lowis had met in Switzerland. Evening sun on the indescribably barren mesa. Views over long, endless distances, interrupted by sandstone mountains and, in the distance, Kachina Peak or the San Francisco Mountains: we later understood that two saints, of different religions, were quarreling over this mountain. The Kachinas are the godlike beings of the Hopi clans who come down from their mountain to Hopi country in January or February and spend a few months living among human beings.
We asked the first man we met in Hotevilla about James Koots and he said that James’s son Denis was right there. And there he was, coming out of the store with a couple of shopping bags; from behind he looked like a woman, with a long, loose ponytail hanging down his back. When he heard who we were looking for, he sat down next to Lowis in the car without further ado and guided us along a rough road at the edge of the village. He had us stop in front of a kind of railroad car jacked up off the ground, disappeared inside, and came out again right away to wave us in. We had heard that you were supposed to bring a few things to eat as host gifts when you visited the Hopi, so we had a walnut cake and some fruit with us.
When we stepped into the railroad car, the heat and an unpleasant smell jumped out at us. An old man was standing inside; he had just been lying down and was still straightening his jacket. He had just gotten back from work, he said. He held out his delicate, slender black hand. So this was James Koots. In the dim light of the railroad car I saw that he had dark hair and a beautiful old Indian face; one of his eyes was covered with a membrane of skin. It took a while before he grasped when and where he had met Lowis, then he started to remember and loosen up. Oh, Lowis, yes, he lived on a mountain and they had driven together in his truck.
Denis, who only then told us his own name, asked us if we wanted some coffee. He had the hint of a beard, narrow eyes, and a rather reserved face. We uttered the usual European phrases and made a fuss, but Denis said it was okay.
You would have to describe the Hopi Indians’ circumstances as grinding poverty. Photography was not allowed in their territory under any circumstances, and we had left our cameras in the luggage room so as not to be led astray by our reflexes, as it were. We tried to use our eyes as photo lenses. All around the homes, which we would probably call temporary shacks, lay years’ worth of trash, from rusted car wrecks to mountains of empty bottles and household garbage from the past few days.
Denis took us to the house next door. It was built from large, dark stones with window frames and door frames picked up any old place; they didn’t shut tight, the kitchen door kept popping open, and I could not imagine how the occupants of a house like that could possibly stay warm through the harsh winters on the mesa. Though the same was true for the occupants of the more solid buildings in the area.
The kitchen was a large square room. There was an oval table in the middle, covered with an oilcloth, and wooden chairs all around it; a sofa with busted leather cushions; a wooden armchair with pillows, for James, against the opposite wall. Denis poured the brownish drink he called coffee out of an aluminum container on the stove into cups. A young, overweight woman came in with a four-year-old girl and sat down on the leather sofa. The woman was Denis’s sister, we learned, and we were sitting in her kitchen. We bantered with the girl, who was charming like all Indian children and went along with our games. They had recently started teaching children both English and the Hopi language in elementary school, we heard. There were Hopi teachers. But the Hopi did not have a written language. They disliked the written word and relied solely on an oral tradition stretching back into prehistoric times.
Denis was a young man who spoke in monosyllables. Thirty years old, he later told us. He had gone to high school in Los Angeles, when there was still no high school in Hopi country. But he had been very glad to come back, he said. Life here was nice, he loved this land.
I talked with the sister. When I asked her who the fields belonged to among the Hopi, she said the men, and when I told her that the fields belonged to the women among the Navajo she held her hand in front of her mouth and laughed. Did she work in the fields too? Yes. The men farmed corn and beans, the women chilies, tomatoes, and squash.
We saw the farming implements in Denis’s car the next day: strong spades, with thin blades because of the hard ground. The family had h
ad a tractor for two years; before that they had farmed only with horses. Denis had to drive three miles to his field deep in the bottom of the canyon. The Hopi, we read in a brochure, had developed a unique method of dry cultivation and apparently the “white” scientists even today did not know how it worked. I felt something like schadenfreude toward the Western scientists who were unable to penetrate the inner secret of this “primitive” civilization and I realized that I wanted the Hopi to be able to keep their secrets.
We drove with Denis to the small house where he lived. Right away a lively, especially cute little girl appeared: My daughter, Denis said, surprising us. Deniseya. She got right into the car with us and mastered all its technological features: opening and closing the windows, putting the key in the ignition, beeping the horn of course. When we drove on, she sat in the passenger seat with Denis, an alert and very intelligent child with a grace and lightness in all her movements that European children do not have.
Denis asked us whether we were in a hurry to get back to the hotel and when we said no he took us to Prophecy Rock, jutting up out of the landscape. We stopped in front of a cave. There used to be ceremonies there, he said, and prophecies were told. He showed us a pictogram on the cave wall: three figures in a kind of cart, with two figures letting themselves down onto it along a kind of snake line. The different parts of the drawing must have been made at different times and retouched again and again. Denis thought that the prophecy expressed by this drawing would be fulfilled: Two warriors fighting each other. This battle was still to come. Between whom? we asked. Between the Hopi and the Navajo? No, Denis said and laughed. Maybe between the Americans and the Russians.
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