Cleaving

by Julie Powell

  “We don’t have birthdays like you. I’m the same age as everyone in my group of warriors. We were… I know the word… not cut, but… circumcised! All at the same time, and then we were all warriors. And we’ll be warriors until the king of the Maasai decides that it is time for us to be elders. Then I can drink beer!” He laughs again. The women are all smiling at him in anticipation. They giggle when he translates, are fascinated that I could be confused by such a basic tenet of life as the marking of time and age. One of the younger women pipes up. “You don’t have age groups? Warriors, elders?”

  “No, not in the same way. We have something we call ‘generations,’ but that’s more, I don’t know, general. It’s just everyone, man or woman, born within a certain period, about thirty years or so.”

  Kesuma translates, the women ponder my answer. Another woman asks, “But if you don’t have age groups, how do you know how to show and receive proper respect?”

  “Um… respect? I don’t know. I guess maybe respect doesn’t mean as much to us. Or it isn’t the same somehow. I respect someone for what he’s accomplished or who he is as a person, not because of how old he is.”

  The women look horrified. “But respect… respect is what makes us people. It’s what holds together families. Respect is the most important thing!”

  “For me, respect is nice, but I’d rather have, well—love, I guess.”

  For some minutes we try to bridge this terrible gulf between us; they are too polite to confess they think me a dangerously insolent heathen, and I am too polite to say I think they’re trapped in some benighted patriarchy. But then I have a sort of revelation—more of an instinct than a reasoned explanation. “You say respect holds people together. I say love. I think—I don’t know how to explain this. I think when I love someone, really love someone… not, um…” I turn to Kesuma. “Not, you know, sexual love, or a crush or something?” He translates, and the women giggle again. “But when I really love someone it’s because I respect him. Or, my respect for him comes out of my love. I think maybe they’re the same, really.”

  I don’t know if this actually means something or not. But it seems to satisfy the women. There are smiling nods all around.

  After our conversation, I decide to take a little walk around the boma and maybe find a quiet spot to take a piss. Kesuma has explained to me that each boma—a collection of several thatched mud huts, with a corral for cattle and another one for goats, the entire cluster surrounded by a fence that is really just a jumble of thorny branches—represents one family group, an elder and his wives and unmarried children, and the wives of his sons. Many bomas make up the village. They are spread out from one another, by quite a distance. As I walk around the boma I’ll be staying the night at, there are a couple of others within sight, but only just. So actually the “village” is a sprawling thing with no real center, a vast scattering of homes up and down the mountainside. It seems a strange way to live, somehow at once lonesome and rather too rife with mothers-in-law.

  It also proves a rather tricky place to pee. I get used to the notion of my ablutions being witnessed by a few incurious baby goats, but I’d rather not be witnessed by anyone at any of the bomas or by one of the children wandering about as I drop trow, revealing what to Maasai eyes must seem my hideously wide and pale ass. The trees and bushes dotting the landscape are both treacherously spiky and rather sparse, so it takes a bit of doing to find a good spot. But eventually I manage.

  As I continue my walk back in the direction of the boma, I’m suddenly met by a small swarm of kids, waving and giggling and not attempting to exchange a word. They don’t even call me mzungu—Swahili for “gringo,” basically—the way the kids in Arusha do when I walk down the road, because they don’t speak Swahili. Still, these guys—three girls between the ages of nine and twelve, I’d say, and a couple of small boys—know the drill. While one girl closely admires the beaded necklace and earrings Kesuma’s aunt and the other women gave me when I arrived, the others rummage through my pockets for my camera and BlackBerry to play with. The Amy Winehouse ringtone on my phone—“You Know That I’m No Good”—is cause for many toothy grins and small spontaneous dances, and the camera of course has to be passed around. Everyone in the growing group needs to take a picture and then have everyone else gather around to see the result, the subject of the picture always receiving some congratulation or ridicule.

  Then suddenly Kesuma’s aunt is striding up to our group, linking her arm forcefully with mine, shooing the kids angrily away, showing special vehemence for a very small boy in a windbreaker that hangs down to his ankles, who runs off toward another boma some distance away, moaning. She pulls me back inside the boma walls to the pup tent that Obed and Leyan have erected for me to sleep in. (Kesuma has adamantly recommended that I stick to the tent, rather than brave a night in one of the huts. “Very, very dark and smoky. It’s difficult, at first, for mzungu to get used to.” Which makes me feel sheepish and wimpy, but I have acquiesced.)

  “Lala, lala …,” Kesuma’s aunt insists, making a universal gesture, palms pressed together under one tilted cheek. She wants me to have a little lie-down. The afternoon has grown hot, and either I’m looking a little wilted or the Maasai just assume all white folks are delicate flowers. I nod, smiling, and crawl into my tent. Kicking off my shoes, I lie down on my side, then have to roll over to take my BlackBerry out of my pocket. I glance down at its face as I do, and am appalled to see I have four bars of phone service. Even more astonishing, I can get online. Within moments I have logged onto Facebook, where I cannot resist updating my status to “Coming at you LIVE from a freakin’ Maasai village.” I also can’t resist scrolling over to D’s page, where I can see the only photo that exists of him in un-password-protected cyberspace. (Believe me, I’ve Google-stalked him enough to know for sure.) In it he’s smiling in a very D-like way while wearing a Ben Sherman shirt I gave him. Just looking at it, here, makes me feel a little disgusted with myself. I turn off my phone and tuck it into my backpack. As I do, I come upon the chunkee stone, the one Eric had custom-carved for me. It is heavy and dark, with perfectly smooth concave faces like the inside of a cup-and-ball joint. I’m not certain why I brought it with me on this trip, risking losing it, but I enjoy holding it, running my fingers around its circumference or placing my forehead, briefly, to the cool stone. Beneath the chunkee are two bundles of pages, my two now-epic letters. I pull them out.

  But I wind up not even writing in them. I just stare up at the fluttering sun-spackled walls of my tent. Outside, the light is gold on the hills past my netted window. Two girls continually creep up to the unzipped door of my tent, smiling and grabbing at the camera to see the pictures over and over again, then running off, either out of shyness or, more likely, fear of reprimand from Kesuma’s daunting aunt.

  And then all of a sudden, as if I was not sufficiently aware of how bizarre this whole situation is, there is a great explosion of bleating; the adult goats are returning from their day of grazing, and as the mothers enter their nighttime enclosure they call out to the kids, who were left behind near the village. A mournful, almost desperate call and response, which doesn’t end until every mother and child is reunited. It’s an oddly comforting sound, that blaring panic settling gradually into contented, suckling quiet. The sound of having everyone come home.

  That night shortly after the sun finishes setting, I eat a dinner of goat ribs and potatoes that Obed and Elly make for me, banking their cooking fire immediately after. I’d imagined an African village lit by torches or campfires or gas lamps, but there is nothing. When the dark sets in, it sets in entirely. The only man-made light in evidence in the boma, or anywhere outside it, is my flashlight and a distant blinking red light atop a power line on another hillside that Kesuma tells me is across the border in Kenya. By my flashlight, I watch as the men show me their dances. Obed and Elly, the only other people here besides me in Western dress, watch too as Kesuma joins in. One of the songs and dances is lik
e a competitive game; the story line is about skilled warriors who can leap straight up into trees to escape a charging lion, and that’s what they do, one after the other, to the music. They jump straight into the air, pulling their knees up sharply, trying to get more height than the preceding man. The elders participate, as well as the warriors and the small boys. (I feel strange using those words, warrior and elder, but these are the words they use for themselves so I suppose I must follow suit.) The mood gets more and more exuberant, almost out of hand. The universal symptoms of testosterone poisoning. Elly, a beautiful young man who’s probably all of nineteen, shakes his head, laughing, and leans over to whisper in my ear, “These Maasai, they’re crazy.”

  Eventually I say my good-nights and return to my tent. I should stay up, it’s not late and I’m not even terribly tired. I just suddenly want to be alone. So I lie down in my tent, staring up through the near pitch-black at the vague dim rippling of the nylon. The women have begun to sing, separately—I can hear that they are farther away, perhaps as far as the school tree. They are overlapping with the men, perhaps competing with them, or just complementing them. It is ravishingly beautiful, fiercely joyful and yet somehow evocative of yearning, and it goes on and on for hours into the night. I think of my phone, put away, its silence almost a part of the music. Lying there, sleepless, listening, I feel maybe the most peaceful I’ve felt in years, in forever.

  Unlike Eric and I, who share almost the exact same taste in music and often wake up with the same song in our two heads, who can recognize instantly what the other is thinking from a bit of badly hummed tune or a couple of stray words from a single lyric, D and I did not often sing together. He’d have liked for us to, but I was shy about my voice, as D’s was assured and pitch-perfect. Besides, none of the songs we knew the words to were the same. I remember one haunting melody he sang to me once in a parking lot in Florida. I had to go look up the lyrics later. It turned out to be a Beck song. I still don’t know the words, though the tune sticks in my head and weaves in with all the other music inside and out. Something about a strange invitation…

  I’m considering leaving the boma to go to the bathroom, which I have to do rather urgently. But then, rising over the sounds of the singers, comes a strange yelping cry, close by, like a woman calling out. I am damned near sure it’s an actual hyena.

  I think I’ll wait until morning.

  IT TURNS out that Elly used to work as a guide taking tourists up Kilimanjaro. I learn this the next day as he is driving us to our next destination—another village, another boma, this one belonging to Kesuma’s father. Elly keeps the conversation lively on the long drive, informative and, just possibly, flirtatious. He alerts me to points of interest along the way: baobab trees; the tiny antelopes, no more than a foot high, called dik-diks; birds. There are these birds here, very common, just starlings, but their feathers are brilliant, sapphire blue, with bright orange breasts. An apparently suicidal eland races across the road just in front of us, avoiding by milliseconds a bus coming in the opposite direction. We ponder aloud about what could have gotten it so spooked, and I half expect to see a lioness or a cheetah racing behind it. Or perhaps that’s just what elands do for fun.

  We arrive at the boma over a treacherous track that almost isn’t a track at all, up over the crest of a hill. I’d thought the village yesterday was lovely, but this is breathtaking. A long view out over a valley to another chain of mountains across the border in Kenya. One of the mountains is a volcano; it’s smoking gently. The light is pink and gold; it is nearly sunset by the time we arrive, and we’re greeted by small boys waving and the bleating of goats calling out to their mothers to nurse.

  A sometimes violent act, this, the kids kneeling on their forelegs and then ramming their heads hard up against their mothers’ underbellies. It looks like it hurts. One of the mothers, in fact, has decided she’s had just about enough. She tries to run away from her hungry child. Kesuma enlists my help, getting me to hold her still by her horns while the kid kneels to feed.

  Another goat acts rather like a naughty dog. He’ll come try to eat out of your cup. I’m drinking a tea that Kesuma’s wife has made me, Kesuma tells me, from the bark of a tree that grows nearby. It’s a light, muddy color, but tastes like chocolate and cinnamon. The goat will try to get into the houses and is constantly being shooed away. There’s also an actual dog, a friendly thing who Kesuma says is his. The Maasai in general don’t seem much enamored of dogs. Kesuma and I are the only people who pet this one, and everyone looks at us like we’re slightly loony.

  Kesuma wears his traditional garb and motorcycle-tire Maasai shoes everywhere, but he’s also got a degree in filmmaking and a keen interest in women’s rights. He has visited San Francisco, New York, Europe. But he seems equally at home among the goats and bomas of his father’s village, squatting on the ground with a cup of tea that his young wife brings to him before going back to her chores with the other women. And he keeps dogs as pets, a habit he says he picked up while visiting American friends in the States. Life must be strange and wonderful and big and treacherous for Kesuma, I think. But I suppose it is for us all, if we allow ourselves to pay attention.

  Then it’s time for the cows to come home. Maasai cattle are nothing like the prosaic Herefords back home. These are magnificent animals, enormous red and black and gray beasts with spreading horns and gleaming hides and great dewlaps. They have dignity; they even have grace. They come up the hill quietly, with very little lowing, the occasional clang of a bell.

  Tonight, after I’ve eaten my dinner (a sort of spaghetti-and-meatballs dish that Obed throws together) and the sun has gone down, we gather around a fire. It’s cold up on this mountainside, and windy. I give Kesuma’s father two beers I brought up from a town at the base of the mountain. Now that he’s an elder, rather than a warrior, he enjoys a beer now and then, Kesuma has told me. Everyone else gets Cokes. We sit, and some of the men tell stories, which Kesuma translates. The stories are long and meander, and I don’t follow them very well. They involve demons and evil spells, wives who try to save their children from fathers who want to kill them—standard mythical fare. I guess we are all of us worried about fathers eating us. Then they ask me to tell a story from America, and I’m flummoxed of course, but then I come upon the perfect solution:

  “Into each generation a slayer is born, one girl in all the world with the strength and skill to fight the demons…”

  So I tell them the story of Buffy, of vampires and fighting and heartbreak and wishes gone terribly awry. And I am pleased, no, amazed, that as we sit around the fire, as I speak and Kesuma translates, women and boys and girls and men lean forward to listen. Their faces light up. They gasp and laugh and shake their heads. My story too meanders a bit toward the end, and must be confusing—Buffy, as I’ve pointed out, can be a bitch of a thing to recap—but it’s clear that the tale makes sense to them. And I end it as the Maasai ended their stories, with a moral.

  “Be careful what you wish for. We all have to live in the worlds we make for ourselves.”

  I do not sleep well that night, not because I’m not tired, or because I’m moping or worrying or obsessing—surprisingly, I’m not doing any of these things. I do spend some time fantasizing about bringing Eric here, but it’s a contented thought. And I’m pleased that I don’t even want to entertain the notion of showing all of this to D; nothing could interest him less. No, the reason I’m not sleeping is that hurricane-force winds are buffeting my little tent. The noise of flapping nylon is unceasing, like sails in a gale. I fear the thing is going to come apart. For hours and hours this goes on, until finally Elly and Obed emerge from their own tent and come to tend to mine. I see their flashlights coming toward me, and then they’re shouting at me to stay inside, as the edges of the tent have come loose. They manage to tamp everything back down, ensuring that I’m not going to blow over the side of the mountain. At last, at around dawn, the wind abates and I’m able to sleep for an hour or two.r />
  Kesuma greets me at the door of my tent as I stumble out. “We have a big, big day. Obed has your breakfast.”

  After I ingest a prepackaged cake and peanut butter on bread, pineapple juice, and a slice of mango, Kesuma takes me into the cattle pen so I can watch the men bleed a cow.

  This is, at last, exactly the reason I’ve come to Tanzania in the first place. “I want to go to a Maasai village and drink cow blood!” I told Eric when I was trying to explain to him why I had to rip myself away from him again, and so soon. It wasn’t about my unhappiness or his lack; it was experience I sought, exoticism. Just a touch of the utterly foreign, that’s all. He wasn’t convinced, but it made a good sound bite.

  And I must say that as an experience to go halfway around the world for, cow bleeding doesn’t disappoint. We crowd into the pen, the animals jostling to one side of the enclosure to get some distance between us and them. The men discuss which steer to choose; they want a male (for some reason they always bleed males) who is young and healthy enough to withstand the procedure and heal quickly. Once they decide on one, a midsized red creature, two of the men get a rope around its neck and drag it forward. They hold its head steady, and someone hooks an arm over its neck, around its horns, in a sort of headlock, pulling the rope tight so that the jugular vein swells. More warriors lean up hard against the steer’s sides to keep it from dancing away. Kesuma has with him a bow-and-arrow set; the bow is only about two feet long, with a crude stick for an arrow, tied to the wood of the bow by a short length of twine. He leans down to get a good angle and then, at very close range, shoots the popping vein, pricking it. The steer jerks a bit, of course—there is now a gout of blood pouring out of its neck, after all—but mostly seems fairly resigned, like this is a bad trip to the dentist. The blood collects in a tall gourd, which holds, I’d imagine, a liter or more. The men fill it all the way to the top, and then Kesuma reaches down and grabs a big gob of mud and dung from the ground and pats it on the wound. They let the steer go and it trots off back into the herd, a little pissy perhaps but, apparently, not much the worse for wear.