Sleep took me briefly but I awoke to the smell of burning meat, and I was brought back to the moment by Mdu kneeling to hand me a sizzling piece of seared baboon, but first he leaned in to touch his forehead to mine. At that moment I felt connected to all of human existence.
Since that day I have thought of Mdu often. I imagine him sitting under a silver moon, stoking a fire, smoking his ganja, telling tales of days on the hunt. His life seemed quite simple compared to mine but then we all have our baggage and I am sure that even a bushman, unencumbered by material goods, has his own demons. I have thought long and hard about what my life would be like had I been born an African Bushmen because the circumstances of our birth, something that none of us can control, is all that really separates any of us. I believe I would be happy.
It was only after my return home that I came upon a long-term DNA study of the Hadzabe conducted by Stanford University. In 2003 their research paper declared that they are one of three distinct primary genetic groups from which all of mankind has descended. If that is correct, I had met my own ancestors...as the bait…on a baboon hunt.
Has this story affected my life? Oh yes.
More than once, I have awakened in a cold sweat a second before an angry baboon sinks its fangs into my throat, and one time I exited a dream while rubbing imaginary blood from my face. Other times I simply relive sitting by a fire eating seared meat with cave men in animal skins and I smile. The romantic in me has imagined the dinner conversations that would have gone, “Did you hear? He was torn apart by a wild animal in Africa!” For good or bad, such an experience is never far from recollection. Travel by definition gifts us with unique moments; moments that become memories, memories that turn into stories, and stories in Africa become both legend and history.
The Hadzabe gave me this story. I hope one of theirs is about the white guy that unwittingly helped them kill a baboon. If I am a story told around their campfire, then I have served an even higher purpose.
PART FOUR
Emotional Journeys
Downtown Moscow
A Kiss for the Condemned
Irene and I were finishing a quiet dinner in the picture window of a restaurant on Tverskaya Street, the main drag of Moscow, when the salt and pepper shakers began marching across the table.
We Californians looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Earthquake!” A low rumble escalated rapidly like a movie soundtrack of an oncoming dinosaur that segued into the crunch and clank of moving steel. We ran outside to join a rapidly gathering crowd just as a squat, green line of Russian armor crested the horizon.
A squadron of T-90 battle tanks filled the street, two abreast, coming on like a slow-motion migration of mastodons; the yawing ovals of their cannons loomed like hungry mouths. The ground trembled and buildings shuddered; the people stood by silently. Was this a coup? For us children of the Cold War, it was terrifying.
The tanks were followed closely by a rolling mechanized juggernaut, including truly massive ICBMs mounted on trailers, and the thought did occur that one of them might be targeted at my own home. It appeared that the entire Russian army was pouring into downtown Moscow. Outside, on the street, hordes of mute Muscovites, frozen in time like Pompeian statues, bore silent witness. There was no sign of emotion from the people, no sounds; they occupied neat rows silently awaiting their fate. That was our welcome to Russia.
We found out later that this overpowering diorama of steel and aggression was a rehearsal for the gargantuan military parade through Red Square on May 9th, the single most important day in Russia. On that date in 1945, Germany surrendered to the Russian army in Berlin, ending the war in Europe, but not in the hearts and minds of the Russian people. Seven decades later, that day is imbedded in their DNA. The rape of the motherland by Hitler’s armies has been imprinted on the souls of the survivors, and passed down through generations like a hereditary disease. Veterans and the elderly favor the term “Great Patriotic War,” and impose their stories onto visitor’s lives.
We left Moscow on a small riverboat traveling up that brown artery of Mother Russia’s lifeblood, the Volga, looking for locals with tales to tell; the logger drinking a beer with a raw herring for lunch, the businessman who looks over his shoulder before speaking, and the babushka who lost five sons in the battle of Stalingrad. Those were the Russians we wanted to meet. Those of us who spent our childhood waiting for the “Russkies” to drop the big one on us wanted to look the bogeyman in the eye even if he has grown old and gray like us now.
For several days on both sides of May 9th, life in the Volga villages reverts to 1945. It is supposed to be a time of celebration and a respite from daily life that for many has not changed in generations. It is a time to remember the glory days when outnumbered defenders turned back invading hordes. It is a time for stories to be exaggerated and for old men to be young once more. It is a few precious hours of fantasy away from big brother, and nowhere is this week anticipated more than in the onion-domed villages that hug the Volga.
Veterans walk the streets in moth-eaten uniforms that no longer close over their bellies, faded rows of medals upon their chests, limping from wounds never truly healed, while babushkas wear the shawls and aprons they hauled potatoes in during the hard years. Everyone, young and old, sports the blue-and-orange Ribbon of Saint George, an anachronistic reminder of days when Imperial Russia had hutzpah, and men strained their vodka through great flowing moustaches over stories of cavalry charges into machine guns. All of rural Russia reminisces at ceremonies that welcome visitors like us, so corpulent mayors can take pride in reminding the world of how much they have suffered. Twenty five million dead in the “Great Patriotic War” is their common mantra.
In villages such as Uglich and Yaroslavl—both former battlefields—the permanent memorials, carved in stone, were overwhelmed by avalanches of floral bouquets. Some of them hosted small eternal flames. At midday, in the town squares, crowds gathered to recite poetry about dead heroes while rows of old ladies, widows of long dead soldiers, received flowers from pretty teenaged girls in vintage war uniforms. Several hamlets seemed to have the same central icon, a crumbling concrete anti-tank barrier known as a dragon’s tooth; some held many, dotting the fields like asphalt mushrooms. There, ancient men knelt with tears streaming to touch the names of former comrades scratched into the stone. Shell and bullet holes in homes have been left unrepaired as reminders. In rural Russia, the Second World War remains a living breathing entity.
Officially, the week is a celebration of their victory, a victory whose price tag was way too high, and is in fact still being paid by the despair of its people, but celebration is a misleading word for it. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, it is a public secret that real power rests in the hands of those who thumb their noses at the law. Women in furs ride in flashy cars driven by men in thousand dollar suits, but such affluence does not trickle down to the masses that occupy the countryside, and nowhere is that more apparent than along the river.
As boat passengers photograph the towering bronze of Mother Russia, rising like the Phoenix from the center of the Volga and pointing the way to Saint Petersburg, few of them are aware of the 200,000 graves beneath their keel, all of them slave laborers Joseph Stalin worked to death to build the canal they are sailing on. The seagulls pooping on the statues head are a proper metaphor.
Uglich is a speck of a village that has squatted on a dogleg of the Volga since 1148, but locals claim its birth was 937 A.D. Not much has changed in the interim. So, it seems appropriate that the first sight river travelers have of Uglich is the bloody red church with the cerulean onion domes that stands on the site where the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible had his throat slit by an assassin. That is Uglichs’s claim to fame; at least it was until we arrived.
No sooner had my wife and I stepped ashore to accept bread and salt as a traditional greeting from a girl in peasant dress than she inquired if we might be Americans. She told us of an elderly lady i
n town that had yet to meet one of our kind and was extending a dinner invitation to her home that we immediately accepted.
The gravel path took us through a town where time halted two centuries ago. It was a shuttered and decrepit collection of rotting wooden buildings leaning at angles like a deserted movie set, surrounded by a spindly forest of alders under a dark gray sky. A feral dog barked at our arrival and that halted two scarved and shawled grandmothers in their tracks: Looking as though they had seen the Gollum, they retreated into a nearby home.
Just past the tiny river port, on a hilltop covered with a blanket of sheep, we found the Stalinesque concrete blockhouses that represent Soviet architecture to the Western mind, looking more like bunkers than housing; row after row of dull gray apartments, their only individuality being their unit number. Other than a tiny brown and wilted tomato plant in the process of giving up the struggle, no life was in evidence. Bleak was the merriest adjective I could assign to the neighborhood.
Just then a yellowing lace curtain parted in a tiny window that could just as easily serve as a gun port, and perhaps did, when the German Wehrmacht occupied the town. Through the curtain, the outline of a feminine face appeared for a second, then, from a dark hallway, backlit by a single yellow bulb, our hostess emerged, slowly, tentatively, like a sloth waking from sleep. She was diminutive, dressed in thrift store chic that has defined rural Russian fashion since the days of Karl Marx.
After a few silent moments of mutual staring, she burst forth in that nervous giggle talk that raises our voices an octave when confronted by the uncomfortable and unknown. Our lack of a common language did not prohibit her from unleashing a nonstop torrent of Russian as she encircled both of us in a bear hug while chattering like a chipmunk. Apparently, she was a woman who required no other person to conduct a conversation.
We stuck out our hands and said our names. She jerked a thumb her own way and said “Tatiana,” holding the second A with enough emphasis for it to sound like a purr. Inside her tiny home, we found a neat and orderly lair filled with personal mementos and the ubiquitous photos of men in uniform staring solemnly at the camera.
A small black-and-white television sporting rabbit ears with tin foil tips occupied the center of a bookcase full of novel-sized covers, validating my belief that Russians love their great authors. It was the kind of place where men play chess, women gossip for entertainment, and home socializing is restricted to weekly meetings of the socialist workers party.
In the kitchen we passed a man with the face of an apple doll and hands of an outdoor laborer, sitting quietly at the table, staring into a coffee cup as though it was filled with information. His only acknowledgement of us was a slight nod of the head. Our hostess gestured toward him in an offhand manner as we passed through, making us think of him as possibly her husband, but at the moment, of no real consequence. In a dining room the size of a walk-in closet, a table was set for several visitors with aged china, ringed in gold, of various sizes and designs, the kind that gets passed down through generations. The simple grandeur of the place settings was overpowered by the glass and plastic chandelier that hung over it all. Tatiana was hoping for an array of visitors, but we were it.
Without slowing her machine-gun monologue, she produced a decanter of local vodka, the sort that will ignite from a match at twenty feet, and showed us how to interlock arms as we drank our shots while staring intently into each other’s eyes. Russians drink vodka like fish swim, learning to do so at about the same time they begin to walk. For a non-Russian to keep pace is impossible, but Tatiana urged us to try. We took seats while she disappeared into the kitchen, never hearing a sound from the fellow sitting there alone. She returned with one bowl of food at a time, following each one by an arm-linked downing of booze. The final table setting was a modest offering of boiled potatoes, coarse dark bread, and hand pickled gherkins, whose home jar she proudly thrust under my nose till it watered.
After four shots of her homemade brew, Irene and I were more than ready to float some food in our liquid filled stomachs when Tatiana stood for what we both hoped would be the final toast to international goodwill and world peace. I downed my shot as we gazed into each others’ bloodshot eyes. In one quick motion, she slammed her glass down on the table, turned to grasp my face with both hands in a claw like grip, and planted a full on, open-mouthed tongue probe square on target that took me completely by surprise. She held on like a remora sucking on a shark with a kiss that would have made Gustave Klimt proud. In my surprise, all I really recall was that she tasted of cigarettes and pickles as her fingernails dug into my cheeks. I am also sure it was the only time since our introduction that she had ceased talking. When she released me, she demurely flattened her apron with both hands and sat down as though nothing had happened, passing us the potatoes and re-commencing her running commentary, proving my theory that she needed no one but herself to hold a conversation.
Her assault was so quick and smoothly executed, so unexpected, that Irene and I could only exchange glances and continue with dinner. We ate modestly and hurriedly, politely refusing more drinks, hoping to exit without further unanticipated traditions taking place. Tatiana chattered on, pecking at her food and grabbing my arm for emphasis after each proclamation, but without any more eye contact.
We stayed long enough to think it polite, and then bid our farewells without a common word being exchanged. Tatiana walked us to door, hanging on my arm like a drowning woman grasping a raft. There, we received a farewell hug and I braced for a second lunge that never came.
Irene and I walked down the path in knowing silence. What had happened was not a kiss; it was not even slightly sexual. It was a primal scream. It was the desperate act of a condemned woman frantically grasping at an impossible fantasy, if only for a second. To her, I was America, that vast unknowable land of awe and wonder where everyone is rich and wishes all come true, and for that moment, she held her wish in front of her to taste it for perhaps her one and only time. I was America, a land that only came to people like her through black and white sound bites on a tiny screen, but enough for those like her to build a dream around. For that moment, Tatiana shed her life of hardship and escaped into that dream as only one used to depravation could understand, and in that moment, she became a butterfly.
I hope she took something of value from the encounter if only a flash of memory to comfort her on dark Russian nights, but I think for her it was a story she will tell her friends and grandchildren over and often, the story of how an American grabbed and kissed her, and it will grow in size and passion with each telling because that is what a good fantasy should do. For me, it remains one of those unforgettable kisses like a first date because few of us are ever present to witness the baring of a human soul.
Irene took my hand as we walked down the path to the boat and I stopped just once to look back. I thought I saw a face watching us through the yellow lace curtains.
Auschwitz, Poland
A Stone for Henry Leman
When I first met him, Henry Leman was elderly. He had the melancholy air of one who had been broken, and yet carried himself with an old world dignity. His wife, Berte, had recently died, but he still got up each morning and went through the rituals because he knew no other way.
His daily uniform was a starched white shirt with rolled sleeves over pleated black trousers. His penny loafers were always immaculate when he wore them but mostly he liked to pad about in white socks.
I had delivered his mail for several months when he appeared at the door one day and invited me in for coffee, and as he spooned massive amounts of sugar into his cup I saw the tattoo. I knew what the six tiny numbers on the inside of his left forearm meant, but he saw me looking and quietly whispered, “Auschwitz.” Henry was a survivor of the most infamous of the Nazi death camps.
Postmen rank equally with bartenders and priests in that everyone who knows them wants to talk. They are, in fact, the only active profession that physicall
y goes to a person’s home each day to provide a service, thus making them ready-made listeners for all who wish to bear their soul. Henry’s eyes told me he needed to talk.
He told me most of his friends were gone and he seemed a bit lost in the cavernous silence of his home. He had no children because his wife had been sterilized in the camp at Dachau years before, but somehow the two survivors found each other in the aftermath of war. They had a pact not to discuss what either had gone through, but when Berte died, the ghosts came searching for Henry, and Henry came to me.
I’ve had many theories about why he chose me of all people. He had no idea that I was also a writer who sought such tales, and had he known, perhaps he never would have related them. I guess Henry just had a feeling about me. To me, it was the start of a sad, but great adventure.
So, with that first cup of coffee, we began a series of dialogues that lasted until his death several months later. I took no notes; it was much too personal for that. His details were such that I rarely had any questions to ask. We always sat at the dining room table and he always served strong black coffee in Daulton china cups with gold trim, the final remnants of a bygone era. Henry made me late on my route countless times, but our visits were worth it.
He would sip his coffee and relate to me the most gruesome tales of torture and survival, all said as a matter of fact with no discernable hatred or bitterness attached. From the start, I felt he was still trying to make sense of his past and at the same time, insure that his story did not die with him. He was testifying the only way he could.
He was a twenty-year-old student when the Gestapo came in the night, his last ever in Vienna. He recalled passing out from the human stench after four days without food, water, or bathrooms, but was unable to fall because so many people were packed together like produce inside the boxcar that ferried them to Birkenau, Poland. They were greeted there by the “Angel of Death” himself, Doctor Mengele, who immediately chose victims for his sadistic experiments while deciding life or death for everyone else with a flip of his glove to one side or the other. To the immediate right were gas chambers; to the left, the work camp of Auschwitz, only a kilometer away. There, Henry’s name became a tattoo number and he was put to work with the Sondercommando, dragging bodies from the gas chambers to the crematorium.
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