by Nell Zink
She explained her theory about how she was going to meet more stimulating people by being more openly her own self.
“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”
IT WAS SPRINGTIME. SHE WENT TO SEE PROFESSOR MNTAMBO DURING HIS OFFICE hours. There she tried, overemotionally, because it meant a lot to her, to depict to him her difficult romantic situation vis-à-vis Lake Chad. She told him she was interested in the ecology of developing nations, not places already despoiled past saving.
He laughed at her nervous enthusiasm in a way that was more indulgent than mean and said that the only countries not laid waste by imperialism were colonizers, with the possible exception of Ethiopia.
“Then I’m interested in Ethiopia,” she said.
“You’re forgetting something. Colonized peoples learn European languages. In Ethiopia, they don’t. It’s a hard place for you to communicate.”
“Count me in,” she said. “I think I’ve been talking too much lately anyway.”
He examined her closely, trying to figure out whether she was as smart or sexy as she seemed to think. He wasn’t sure. Her eyes looked tired. She was too skinny. But he promised to help her.
Soon after that, he had lined up a summer internship for her near Addis Ababa—should she choose to accept it—working on a Technisches Hilfswerk–funded project to enlist small farmers in the battle against land mismanagement. She replied to his e-mail with a string of red heart icons.
“You’ll love Ethiopia,” he told her, pausing to talk briefly after his lecture course. “It’s always been Christian, so the position of women is unlike anywhere else in Africa. It’s refreshing there and rather safe for you.”
“The women are supposed to be beautiful,” she said.
“That’s because they’re hungry, at least out in the countryside. No one would call them beautiful in South Africa.”
“What are the guys like?”
“Married. But you won’t meet any men. You will stay with the team at all times. You hear me?”
XVI.
Having died on 9/11, Joe was well positioned to contribute an anniversary song to the repertoire. The terror hadn’t killed any rock stars. Its victims were personal, institutional, and architectural. Its leading bards played country and western. The cult of Joe Harris emerged contrapuntally, as memories of the day faded and the nation grew tired of courage—exhausted enough to want to hear “Bird in God’s Garden.” The song was a litany of resignation, authored by alleged Muslims, recorded by an alleged suicide—the ideal track to get drunk to when it came time to commemorate the day that fucked the world but good.
Possibly it got played so much because it had never been officially released. Copyright was murky. Professor Harris was indifferent. For practical purposes, anyone who wanted could stream it, post a video, or include it on a CD. By 2011, year of the tin/aluminum anniversary, it was common knowledge among younger music journalists that the tragic genius Joe Harris had been a prescient guy.
Six months in advance, as part of the pre-observance observances, The New Yorker assigned a staff writer to profile him in absentia. His publicist told Daktari, who wrote to Professor Harris, asking for permission to put out a posthumous record. There was no reply. But Daktari was a label exec in the prime of life, not a helpless baby. Unrelentingly he repeated his request via telephone and courier, with enclosures including courtside basketball tickets, dinner invitations, and flowers.
In his desperation, Professor Harris called Daniel. Daniel thought the whole thing through and said, “You’re making it way too obvious that you want nothing to do with any of it, and you know what’s going to happen? They’re going to bootleg it and not cut you in, because they know you can’t be bothered to sue, and that’s the God’s honest truth. I’m not saying you need to put up a fight or even negotiate. You just have to sign their standard contract like a normal person and put it out of your mind.”
He suggested telling Daktari to take them out for drinks at the Campbell Apartment, a high-priced bar in Grand Central Station where he had always wanted to go. There Professor Harris said very little, Daniel valiantly consumed cocktails valued at sixty dollars, and a deal was struck. Such was the genesis of Joe’s final release, a commemorative eight-CD boxed set of demos and outtakes with a booklet of candid color photos, scheduled for release on September 12. It included more than 250 songs and was entitled Behold Joe Harris.
FLORA GOT A LOT OF BOOSTER SHOTS. SHE BOUGHT A CHEAP PORTABLE MOSQUITO NET and a six-week supply of antibiotics to ward off malaria. In June she flew via Paris to Addis.
She was met at the airport by a Dutch woman, Marit, who looked about forty, and her Ethiopian driver Tesfaldet. They never went anywhere without him, and he seemed unable to subsist without them. When they went out to a café two evenings later, he stayed in the driver’s seat, not far from their table, idling the engine like a getaway driver at a bank robbery, until their dates arrived.
Their dates were two soil experts with the UN Environment Programme, Dave and Tibor. Normally they were based in Nairobi, but they were temporarily in Ethiopia to oversee the project that interested Flora.
She asked them about it, and Dave responded that he was off the clock. Embarrassed to have made such a faux pas, she said, “I’m sorry.”
“You can make it up to me by letting me buy you a drink,” he replied.
“All right,” she said.
He waved his hand and said, “Waiter. Vodka.”
The two aid workers didn’t seem to Flora like nice or right-thinking people. Instead of saying anything politically correct, they compared the nightlife of Lagos unfavorably with that of Addis. “This town has everything,” Tibor said. “You want Beyoncé, go to the bar with Beyoncés. You want Naomi Campbell, go to the bar with Naomi Campbells.”
“Ignore them,” Marit said. “It’s a hazing ritual. They’re trying to trick you into being one of the guys.”
“I am one of the guys,” Flora said. “And I love soil chemistry. We can talk shop.”
“I can tell you so much about soil chemistry,” Dave said. “Ethiopia has a tremendous diversity of eco-hydrogeological regimes.”
“You’re boring me,” Tibor said. “Stop it already.”
“Flora likes it,” he insisted. He poured them all more vodka.
“It would be more interesting if Marit was a dyke also,” Tibor suggested.
“I only like African men,” Marit said.
“African men like your fat ass,” Tibor replied.
“The soil,” Flora prompted.
“The soil of Africa is red,” Dave said. “But not around here. Overgrazing in Ethiopia is an art form. God forbid a seedling should rear its sticky head. Stat, the goats are on it. Not a moss dare erect its sporophyte to the air, for fear of instantly being chewed off.”
“He’s exaggerating,” Marit said. “There are some trees in some of the churchyards.”
“Imagine a lush and beautiful meadow, rich with grain and the humming of bees. Now mow it six hundred times a year for five thousand years until it has been progressively converted into small, round, hard pellets of desiccated fecal matter, indistinguishable from the sand on which they rest. Pure silica. That’s Ethiopia. Its soil is a collective hallucination.”
“These guys are so full of shit,” Marit said to Flora.
“But we have fun,” Dave said.
“There’s topsoil all over the place,” Marit said. “People do agriculture. There are forests. Don’t listen to them. Order food.”
“There’s an issue with overgrazing,” he said. “A huge issue. It kind of doesn’t matter what the soil chemistry is, when the erosion is this bad. If there were limestone here, it would look like Italy. Just one big bare rock.”
“It’s not the people’s fault,” Marit said. “In a drought, cattle can make food out of anything. That’s the miracle of cattle and what makes me so sad that people feed them soy and fish meal. The
y can make the most delicious food in the world out of grass. Am I right in saying that grass-fed beef is the most delicious food in the world, and burgers from McDonald’s are the nastiest?”
“Definitely,” Dave said. “And the Chinese are buying up pastureland, dumping synthetic fertilizer on it, irrigating, and growing soy. They’re devils. Though you could say they’re creating a soil chemistry where there was none. Phosphates and nitrates.”
“Don’t get carried away,” Marit said. “Flora’s not old enough to get your jokes.”
“The fertilizer kills the river fish,” Tibor said. “This creates a market for burgers.”
“The Chinese are Satan,” Dave repeated. “They’re turning Ethiopia into a nation of goat-eaters.”
Flora decided that they were politically correct in their own way. She said, “I get that you’re kidding. I read that most of the highland soil is andosols, which are fertile.”
“Not if you’re losing forty tons an acre of topsoil every time it rains,” Dave said. “Ethiopians can take a field from forest to desert in five years. All they need is a slope.”
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for one day,” Tibor said. “Teach him how to fish, and he catches all the fish and you starve together.”
“Don’t be dark,” Marit said.
“I want to see the bar with the Beyoncés,” Flora said.
ON THEIR WAY BACK TO THE CAR, MARIT SAID, “PLEASE DON’T TELL OTHER PEOPLE here that you’re gay.”
“Do you mean when I said I was ‘one of the guys’? I just meant they should treat me as an equal!”
“That’s not how it works in Africa. It doesn’t matter how they’re treating you like. You’re a woman, so keep it in mind.”
“Is it true what they said about the bar with the Beyoncés?”
“There’s no way for a white woman to go in there. They think we’re from a feminist NGO, coming to save them.”
THEY DIDN’T TAKE HER TO THE BARS. TWO DAYS LATER, SHE DROVE ALONE WITH TESFALDET to the project area in the Blue Nile valley, not far from Addis.
The first settlement they passed looked like a Himalayan village from a special about Tibet. The landscape was rocky and bleak, and the houses were made of rocks. The earth was laced with shallow furrows bearing pitiful rows of grain and stronger, weedier-looking plants she thought might be millet or amaranth. It didn’t look like any farm she’d ever seen. It was more like the joke vegetable gardens at urban elementary schools, where the kids take great pride in attaching empty seed packets to pegs and never water anything and everything dies. The solitary Ethiopian girl hoeing a row of corn looked totally bored, like she would rather be in class somewhere. She was really skinny. By volume, she had more clothing than she had body. Flora liked her outfit. She thought it was neat that anybody would put on a dress to work on a farm. She remembered that American farm women wore dresses until maybe the 1920s. Probably that’s why they stuck to this kind of low-energy unmechanized labor you could do in a dress.
Tesfaldet stopped the car. When the girl saw him, she dropped the hoe. They met at the trunk of the car. Flora didn’t get out or stand up, because she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. Tesfaldet gave the girl a big sack of something that might have been rice. She expressed thanks, and he took his seat again. The car moved on.
“Do you know her?” Flora asked.
“Terrible farmer,” he said. “Her husband is a bad farmer and she is worse.”
“She’s married?”
Tesfaldet didn’t answer, and Flora decided not to follow up.
The car rolled onward, over the next hill and into a eucalyptus plantation. There were big water spigots poking out of the ground, dripping into large puddles. They passed thousands of big trees standing in compacted, infertile clay. Then the plantation ended, and they were back in the sunshine. A little town came into view. Men, women, and children lined the roadside, toting their shopping to their huts.
Tesfaldet parked outside the air-conditioned white container where Dave had his office. The gasoline generator was roaring pathologically, like it might not keep running much longer. He knocked, and an Ethiopian man opened the door. There were five Ethiopian guys inside the container, drinking beer from a refrigerator, and no sign of Dave.
Tesfaldet introduced them as project staff. Flora didn’t try to remember their names. She was tired, and she’d been expecting to see Dave. She asked Tesfaldet where she’d be staying the night. He took her backpack and sleeping bag from the trunk and insisted on carrying them himself to the hut behind the container. It was spic and span, freshly swept, and empty except for a metal cot with wire springs and a mosquito net. The net was suspended from a hook in the ceiling, right where Flora had been hoping to see a light fixture, since there were no windows.
She reminded herself that rural Ethiopia was supposed to be sort of primitive. This place was likely to be below average, since its poverty was what qualified it for inclusion in the project area. The inhabitants were obviously subject to subsistence constraints; i.e., they were all skinny. In the women, it was appealing, but it made the guys look eerie. She closed the door to pee in her Sierra cup by the light of her phone. She figured she could charge it later, in the container.
When she came out, Tesfaldet and the car were gone. She looked up and down the road and didn’t see either one.
She knocked on the door of the container and asked the guys where he’d gone. They said he would be back in a week. Their English was broken, but she managed to figure out that today was a travel day, nothing else; she was supposed to find something to eat, bed down, get through the night (it fell early in the tropics), and look for Dave in the morning.
She strolled toward the middle of the town until she found a little kiosk selling bottled water. She wasn’t sure what was safe to eat. She knew that the rule was to eat only things that had been visibly over the boiling point recently, but she didn’t see a restaurant. Packaged cookies labeled in Cyrillic seemed safe.
THE NEXT DAY, AFTER HE SHOWED UP, DAVE TOOK HER TO LUNCH AT A RESTAURANT. Because the town was so small and didn’t get many visitors, the restaurants were people’s verandas, and you had to let them know you were there by yelling. Dave yelled hello, and a slim, beautiful woman poked her head through the beaded curtain and signaled her readiness to kill a chicken for five dollars. He nodded, and she disappeared.
He and Flora sat down on the plastic patio furniture to wait. “You want a beer?” he said. “I could head back to the office and grab a couple beers.”
“No, thanks.”
“Bummer.”
“I want to hear about the project.”
“You want some coffee?”
“Yes.” Dave went to the doorway and shouted an order for coffee. He sat down again heavily and said, “The project area is huge. Touring it would take us all week, and you wouldn’t learn anything you don’t already know. I was kind of hoping you could teach us something instead.”
“Like what?”
“The ways of lesbianism.”
“You’re wrong,” she said firmly. “I know nothing. I want to learn. Teach me something that I can tell everybody back home so they’ll do this kind of work right.”
“But that’s not the point. They’re not the ones doing the work. Or are your friends all planning to ditch college for subsistence farming in Ethiopia?”
“A eucalyptus plantation isn’t subsistence farming.”
“It’s an investment by some former subsistence farmers who left town.”
“You need to tell me about the socioeconomic setup here. I want to know.”
“Everybody who’s still here is poor. They have nothing except their land, and it’s going to be worth nothing pretty soon. They’re screwed. They need to get out of here. Go home and tell everybody they’re coming. That’s what you need to do.”
“Are you drunk?”
They ate chicken in silence. It was greasy and stringy, possibly not the youngest broiler.
Flora said, “This is no good. If you don’t want to show me anything or explain anything, I should call Marit and get Tesfaldet to pick me up.”
“You’re not much of a fighter, are you?” Dave said. “You want to go for a ride in my truck? We can run up to Dejen, where there’s a hotel bar. I mean to get dinner.”
“I just had lunch.”
“We’ll hit the river on the way, and I’ll show you some of the worst soil erosion I’ve ever seen. Though it doesn’t really hit you unless you have the before and after pictures. The river’s dying. It used to be dangerous, and now it’s dangerous and dying. We’ll see if you can figure out how to give it a makeover.”
“You really hate me. Why did you invite me to come here?”
“I’m doing a favor to Marit.”
“Listen. I know what soil erosion is. I’ve seen America. This was presented to me as a successful model project. I want to talk to the participants. I want to see how you get them on board.”
“Darling, we pay them. We give them cash to stop shooting themselves in the foot. Did something make you think Ethiopian farmers should be easier to persuade than American corporations?”
“Corporations are regulated.”
“I can’t regulate anybody. I’m not the state. All my incentives have to be positive. In farming, nothing is forbidden. Everything is permitted. We just encourage people to use their freedom to do the things we want, like stop shooting themselves in the foot.”
“You’re saying that the state could make them stop if it wanted.”
“There are things the Ethiopian state regulates. They’ll fence land in to keep grazing animals out. Socioeconomically stressful for the herdsmen, but it does wonders for biodiversity, until the land recovers and you can plant it with maize.”
Flora felt that talking with Dave was like being lost in a hall of mirrors. She said, “We passed a lady hoeing maize on our way in.”
“Tesfaldet’s girlfriend. You should go stay with her and find out something about the conditions of life for women here. That would teach you something. Hoe some maize.”