by Julie Powell
“COME IN, come in!” Misha motions to us as we ascend the concrete steps through early morning light into a stairwell that smells ripely of apples. He kisses us both on each cheek and ushers us up the stairs. “You’ll have breakfast now?”
“Oh, I already… no, I mean, yes, please. Thanks.” Ira has fed me breakfast this morning, an omelet with sausages, but there is no denying a Ukrainian who wants to feed you.
While Misha putters about in his small kitchen, we examine the other main room of the house. It is packed full of all manner of stuff, the most prominent categories being taxidermy animals and Yulia Tymoshenko paraphernalia. There’s a stuffed wildcat stalking on a shelf up high near the ceiling. Tucked into a knickknack case is a Tymoshenko poster, showing the Ukrainian politician with her familiar blond braids. “So what’s with the hairdo, anyway?”
“She didn’t always wear her hair like that. It’s a traditional Ukrainian style, to prove she’s very Ukrainian.”
“And what’s with the white robes, and the two guys with the swords?”
“You know… for young men, I guess.” Oksana shrugs, rolls her eyes. “Politics.”
“Huh.” I suppose if I were a gorgeous blonde running for prime minister of an Eastern bloc country, I’d be gunning for the D&D crowd too, but it’s still a bit laughable, and creepy.
There are stuffed birds of all persuasions, stuffed rodents and snakes. A stuffed rabbit holds a snapshot of Yulia between its paws.
Breakfast is—well, Jesus. First Misha serves us each six potato pancakes with his homemade jarred mushrooms, gathered from his land. We each get a teacup full of kefir, and he urges upon us a “liver salad”—basically a great mound of chopped liver layered with peppers, onions, mushrooms, other unidentifiable strata. Delicious—and, again, homemade—but like plutonium in the stomach. Then he finishes us off with some apple cake and tea. Is this really how Ukrainians eat every day?
Next he takes us downstairs again, where we all stomp back into the shoes we’d removed at the door and head across the little rutted road to his plant.
It’s a Soviet construction, which he’s bought to renovate. It’s dilapidated now, with old black smokers and ice crusting over the walls of the walk-in freezer. Misha’s got big plans, though—he’s putting in a new cooler and is purchasing all sorts of other new equipment, grinders and stuffers and band saws. But the meat is just one part of his ambition. Misha also is planning to build a big public sauna and, rising above it, a graded ski slope. He thinks he can start raking in the Sheshory tourist dollars, maybe build a hotel. Oksana and I nod as he explains to us where everything will go, and how this will become the greatest new complex in the whole town.
The first thing we hear when we step into the muddy courtyard in the center of the plant is a raucous chorus of howls and barks from a kennel in one corner. “My guard dogs. Hunting dogs, too.” He’s got a Saint Bernard in one pen, a German shepherd in another, and two leaping and yipping fox terriers. He speaks to each of them briefly, but doesn’t encourage me to say hello. “They’re trained not to like strangers. With me, they are angels.”
In another large pen is a chaotic roil of mud and roots, and two wild boars, who snuffle up to the fence as we approach, nudging their snouts against the chain-link. “I found them in the mountains here, as babies,” Misha says, as he presses a palm to the fence for them to nuzzle at. “Their mother was dead.” One of Misha’s employees gingerly edges into the pen to dump a big bucket of meat trim, apples, and vegetable cuttings into their trough. They busily attack—the meal, I mean, not the employee.
In yet another pen, built up off the ground like a rabbit hutch, are two foxes. “These also I rescued as babies. I used to keep them in the house, but they shit all over everything.” The pen smells wincingly noxious. “I tried to let go, but they keep coming back. So now they live here.”
The pair of foxes dash in endless, frantic circles around their cage, their eyes wide and their heads darting back and forth, trying to see everything at once. They’ve clearly been driven insane. I feel sorry for them.
At the end of the tour, which probably took most of an hour, we head back to his house again, this time to eat some of his “meat bread”—a dense meat loaf that edges into pâté territory—and drink some of his cognac. (Oksana takes only one sip out of politeness. Misha and I have several small glasses each.) He goes through his photo collection, which highlights vacation snapshots by lakes and a complete history of the dogs he’s owned through the years. Then he takes us back to town.
“Oh, and on the way, I have something to show you that you will like very much!”
So on the way back, we pull into a complex of buildings that looks rather like an old fairground. He talks to a man through his window at a security point, who then unlocks a gate for us and swings it open so we can pull into a wide courtyard with booths all around the perimeter. All are empty now; there’s no one around, but there is a cage about the size of a horse trailer in the center of the lawn of tamped-down dried grass. Inside, we can see as we step closer, are two enormous brown bears. They too pace, and snuffle the air through shiny black noses. Their coats are bedraggled with mangy balls of fur hanging off. Their eyes are sad, and insane too.
“These were rescued, as babies. Their mother was killed.” Misha makes a mournful face that I believe, but there’s the glow of fascination there as well as he watches the mad bears pace, murmuring to them under his breath. I’m beginning to get wise to this whole rescued-orphan routine. But nonetheless, I feel a little sorry for Misha. I know what killing with kindness feels like—like there’s no good option. You have to save what you’ve made bereft. You have to look after them. Even if it drives them bat-shit crazy. I too have felt the irrational urge, the one that leads people to climb into gorilla pits or to commune with large animals in remote Alaskan meadows, to comfort and befriend creatures that can and often will rip them to shreds. I want to dig my hands deep into the bears’ fur and figure out how to make them okay. The gratifications of cutting down a side of pork are not so different, really—it’s a facing up to your crimes, an attempt to make things right. And with the added benefit of some nice plump pork chops to show for your work when you’re done.
Enough sad-sack mammals for the day. We head back to Vitaly’s. Misha comes in with us and is surprised to see Ira, a childhood friend. We all crowd into the kitchen and drink tea, and I zone out a little in a digestive fugue while Misha and Ira chatter away. After a while, Oksana and I go to the post office and do a bit of souvenir shopping. I buy a few wooden eggs, painted pysanka style; the real eggs are more expensive and, more important, would inevitably shatter someplace between Kolimya, Kiev, Tanzania, Sapporo, and home. I also buy a sheer black peasant blouse with gold and silver embroidery that I will either keep or give to my mother. Then we go in search of sala.
When Eric visited Ukraine just a year or so out of college, he came back raving about sala, which is some sort of seasoned salt pork, eaten with bread. “It’s everywhere,” he tells me. “It’s like the Ukrainian national food!” I’ve gotten several e-mails from him since I’ve been here, whenever I’ve been able to get to a cybercafé to check, asking if I’ve yet sampled it.
The problem is, there’s no sala to be found for love or money. I’ve been keeping my eye out, I really have. I’ve looked in grocery store deli counters, on restaurant menus. I’ve asked Oksana about it and she’s assured me we will find it at some point, somewhere in Kolimya. But so far, bubkes. We make a concerted attempt today, our last in western Ukraine. We visit groceries and markets and one semi-enclosed butcher shop, just a large room with double doors open onto the street, with men and women in aprons standing behind a series of wooden tables piled high with meat. A yellow dog wanders, mostly unmolested, under the tables, feasting on whatever scraps fall. Oksana explains to one of the women what we are looking for.
“Sala?” The woman looks just the slightest bit flummoxed, but she slices a wedge of a snow
y white hunk of pork belly with her enormous knife. It doesn’t look salted, but I pop it into my mouth anyway.
So it turns out sala doesn’t just mean a seasoned Ukrainian delicacy. It also means, well, pig fat.
“I think that now, people don’t want to serve visitors such things, peasant food, unsophisticated,” explains Oksana as I smack the sheen off my lips and tongue.
I couldn’t do it, sweetie. I tried. But there’s no sala to be had. The country has changed since your time, I guess. I feel like I let you down. But if it makes you feel better, your wife ingested raw pig fat in front of an incredulous Ukrainian butcher-woman. So there’s that.
I’m on the train back to Kiev. Next, Tanzania. I miss you.
I SPEND a day with Oksana in Kiev, mostly shopping. Ukrainians love to shop, and there’s much of it to do. The clothes are trendy, often not particularly well made—one cute dress I buy loses two buttons before I’ve worn it once—and not as cheap as you’d expect. But, at Oksana’s urging, I do make one purchase I’m entirely pleased with. A black pleated skirt, in a very fine-wale corduroy, much shorter than any skirt I’ve worn in a decade or more. A sexy schoolgirl look. When I put it on, my legs suddenly look a mile long, and I don’t think it’s just the shop’s mirrors. That night I pack it up, visions of saucy heels and kneesocks and pigtails dancing in my head.
The next day, I’m on a plane from Kiev to Dubai. We’re flying over the Persian Gulf, and it’s pitch-black but for the dim glint of a narrow moon off the waves and an occasional greenish blink of light, a beacon. Two sheaves of papers sit on my lap.
Well, Ukraine was fascinating, as you said. I think very different from when you were here, though. I’d love to bring you back sometime, would love for you to meet Ira and Katerina and Myroslav and Misha and, most especially, Oksana. And you should see the skirt I bought for twenty bucks!
What I don’t write about to Eric is the vague sense of anxiety that’s settled over me since I boarded the plane. It’s not just nervousness about visiting Africa for the first time, and all alone, and it’s not just my fear of flying. It’s another sort of dread I can’t quite work out. I don’t want to burden Eric with such things. With D, I have no compunction, since writing a letter to him is like writing down a prayer and then lighting it on fire.
As the plane rose, I gripped my armrests and begged to live. Me, praying—so hypocritical. I’m so much more afraid of flying than I used to be, I wonder why? Last night, the night before leaving Kiev, I dreamed that Eric and I were on a plane that was going down. Just as it was about to crash nose-first into a swamp, time was frozen, and we were told by some omniscient voice projected from the future that we had precisely nineteen minutes to resolve all of our affairs. For a sickening moment I was alone in the plane’s bathroom, naked and shivering, stabbing your number into my phone, too terrified to punch the Call button. But you came anyway. The bathroom was gone, my clothes were back on, and we stood on the bank of a creek. We both took off our shoes, dug our feet into the sand.
The dream was vivid, both the terror of the crash and D’s eventual presence shocked through with the smack of reality, not a D-shaped presence but D himself. A visitation. Every vocal nuance and glitter of the eye, his posture and smirk and the scattering of moles on his skin. I awoke in happiness that melted quickly into a backsliding resurgence of pain, and with a memory I’d forgotten. I think of it again now, my forehead pressed against the plastic of the plane window, staring into the liquid darkness. It happened toward the end, after a fight we’d had over what I can’t now recall, some angry ultimatum or demand from me, no doubt. We parted with recriminations, and some hours later I got a text from him. He wrote, “I love you and I don’t know what to do about that.” I treasured those words at the time, found in them reassurance and a trail of bread crumbs to some future certainty.
But does anyone, ever, know? Does Eric, I wonder? Oksana or Gwen? For so many years, I thought it was so simple. I lived in a pop-up book, an Advent calendar, a place of doors and treats and clarity. Now I seem to live in another world entirely, fathomless and strange. I thought exploring it would help. But so far, so far from home, I still don’t know what to do about that.
Passing over the Persian Gulf, moon glinting off the water, the only sight to see but for the light of an occasional boat, and then all of a sudden, bam! Bright necklaces of light, outlandish buildings and strange compounds and theme parks, and it’s all out of nothing. And then I’m there. On the fucking Arabian Peninsula, man.
I pin my hopes on Africa.
14
When in Tanzania
IT IS FIVE thirty in the afternoon and I am resting in a pup tent that’s been thrown up for me beside the cracked mud wall of one of the houses of Kesuma’s father’s sister’s boma. Two girls, perhaps ten years old, elegant, thin, and small-boned, in red and purple robes, their necks and arms heavily draped with white beaded jewelry, are peering around the corner of the wall at me. They have their hands clasped up high near their faces to cover the brilliant grins and storms of giggles they break into every time I glance up from my letters to smile at them. Sometimes they wave, and when I wave back they are amazingly amused, as if they’ve just trained a dog to do a particularly smart trick.
It’s been a long and wondrous day, and it’s far from done. We left Kesuma’s house in Arusha, Tanzania, at eight in the morning—me and Kesuma, Leyan, Elly, and Obed. Kesuma is a handsome, small man with a quick smile who wears his Maasai dress—red plaid robes, shoes made of motorcycle tires, an array of white beaded necklaces and bracelets and anklets, a large knife in a red leather scabbard around his waist and his beaded “Chief stick” in his hand—whether he’s in town riding his motor scooter, herding goats in one of his family’s villages, or speaking before hundreds of people at Berkeley about his nonprofit organization, Kitumusote. The mission of Kitumusote is to build educational and environmental programs for the Maasai, a people fiercely dedicated to a traditional lifestyle of cattle herding, which is increasingly difficult to maintain in contemporary Africa. To raise money, Kesuma organizes “cultural safaris” like these. It’s an uncomfortable phrase, suggesting that I’m heading out in a Land Rover with my pith helmet and a thermos full of G&Ts, hoping for some human version of the Battle at Kruger. But in fact what we’re doing is something far quieter and more personal—we are visiting with Kesuma’s family. When we arrived at the village, the women were gathered under the single large shade tree where they meet to take classes in Swahili and basic mathematics. But they weren’t studying at that moment; they were singing. Kesuma’s aunt, a handsome older woman, urged me to join in the dancing, with a generous gesture of her arm and a kind laugh that she sustained, even once it became clear that I was quite a horrible dancer, spastic and awkward.
Now, after my afternoon rest, we seem to have come to the question-and-answer period.
“Was your marriage arranged, or did your husband choose you?”
“Um. I chose him.” It seems a queer way of putting it, the concept of “choice” somehow just off correct, at once too trivial and too indicative of will, but close enough, I suppose.
Kesuma translates, and the women erupt into scandalized giggles and awestruck expressions, whispering among themselves. God, if they only knew the half of it.
“Do you have children?”
“Not yet.” They nod solemnly, with sympathetic, somewhat stricken looks on their faces, feeling the tragedy of my childlessness.
“The center of our life is our herd, and our family, our children. What is the center of your life?”
Gosh. What on earth can I say to that? My husband? My lover? Sex? Money? My dog? Oy. I can’t really explain that that’s sort of exactly why I’m here with them in this remote village on an arid Tanzanian hillside. Essentially, I was kind of hoping you would tell me.
“What is your job in the home?”
“Well, in theory, the husband and the wife are meant to do equal parts of the work, cleanin
g, cooking. But actually I usually do more.” When I’m not running off to some foreign country alone for months on end, of course.
The women giggle again at this notion, then grow serious. One of the older women, who looks tired, less vital and happy than Kesuma’s aunt, begins to speak, and the others nod while Kesuma translates:
“You have so much freedom.”
It’s a startling statement. I’d just been thinking how I envied these women, their beauty and singing and bare feet in the dry red soil. Their romantically simple lives. I’ve been stupid.
“We have to do all the work. The men do nothing but go out with the cattle. And if we don’t do something right, our husbands sometimes beat us.”
It occurs to me that I have very little notion of how old any of these women are. A few of them seem to be children, perhaps sixteen years old. Others seem ancient. But most occupy an indeterminate middle ground. Kesuma’s aunt could be forty or seventy. I ask Kesuma about this.
“I don’t know. She doesn’t even really know.”
“She doesn’t know?”
“We Maasai generally don’t have birth certificates. It was a problem for me when I first tried to fly to the U.S.!” He laughs, as his head falls back and his shoulders duck forward in a gesture I’ve already recognized as characteristic of him. “I told the woman at the office I was twenty-seven, but I don’t know. Do I look twenty-seven to you?”
“That seems about right.” In honesty, Kesuma’s age could be anywhere between twenty-one and thirty-five, his apparent physical youth tempered by a sense of gravity, not to mention his list of impressive accomplishments. Born in a remote village on the Tanzania-Kenya border, he has gone to school, become fluent in both English and Swahili, and saved the money to take college-level courses in filmmaking, computer literacy, and the effects of globalization. He’s founded an international nonprofit organization, traveled to the United States to raise money and give talks, and made the kinds of friends, all over the world, who are happy to have him stay with them in their homes at short notice or no notice at all.