A Lesion of Dissent
By Karl Drobnic
Smashwords Edition
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© Copyright Karl Drobnic 2011 Corvallis Oregon USA
All Rights Reserved
Et introibo ad altare Dei,
Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum.
Chapter One
When in memory I return to the wreckage and turbulence brought to so many Americans by the upheavals of the Sixties, to those twists of destiny and snarls of fate so bizarre and tangled that students were gunned down, an American city gassed by its own military, a democratic convention turned into a battleground as divisive as the Civil War, and the violence of bombings and assassination a too common specter on the nightly news, I am not ashamed to admit the sentiment that I, these many years, have felt for Carol.
If the times were callous, they also offered choice, though for draft-age men a choice of war, prison or exile made little sense. Accustomed as we were to the preceding long, calm years of affluence, we were prepared for choices no more difficult than between a stereo and a hot rod, between a lithe Lisa and a petite Patricia. My meeting with Carol in a country as far from home as the populated earth could offer was as incomprehensible to me as the babble of Amharic in the dark Ethiopian night that pre-dawn morning in Addis Ababa when I heaved my pack up the steps of the Gondar bus.
A thousand miles northward we would consummate our romance, an exotic interlude walled in chance and in a chemistry of human relationships lodged deep in nether regions uncontrolled by the intellect; walled, too, deep beneath the earth in the funereal splendor of kings while war raged and xenophobia assaulted the country above those ancient chambers where we dallied. Love pursues a course of birth as fixed as the biological one, in the womb of contact swells to an embryo that is either courted and nursed to life, there to triumph or to fall diseased to human insufficiency, or it is cracked from its shell and aborted. Only in uncommon instances is that embryo love left suspended, uncracked, unnurtured, still living.
In those days, my mind crammed with philosophies I only vaguely understood and my pack crammed with everything I owned, I fancied I carried my responsibilities on my back. That morning I dropped them on Carol's foot, the metal frame of my cheap canvas haversack gouging her ankle. "Ouch," she said, and so we met, I then still nursing hopes of returning to America but not honest enough to openly admit it, and I was anxious to claim the letter that I hoped was awaiting me at the American Express office in Cairo.
Carol's anxieties were more immediate, centered on her ankle. She shoved the pack back at me with her free foot. "Sorry,"' I said. Dim light shown on her through the smeared bus window. She was wrapped in a gobbi, the drapes of warm cotton that Ethiopians of both sexes huddle within on the cold, high plateaus. One white fold of the soft cloth looped over the top of Carol's head and was pulled around across her face. I saw only dark eyes and a shadow line on her brow that was thrown by the bus window's crossbar. Had she not spoken, I would have taken her for a native and passed by to slouch by myself in a seat somewhere in the interior of the bus.
So began our romance that was to span continents and years, with ouch, with sorry, with a gouged ankle, and yet the days we have spent together I count on the fingers of my two hands. Perhaps the pestle was already pounding in the mortar, mauling the ingredients of our first morning into a yeastless dough. Certainly our meeting was trite and inauspicious enough.
"On your way to Facil's Bath?" I asked. I slung my backpack up into the rack over Carol's head, where hers, too, rested.
"Facil's bath?"
"At Gondar. The man who built the castles and tried to copy European kings." I hesitated. "Can I sit with you?"
"My God, yes. I thought I'd be the only American on the bus. But I'm going to the Blue Nile Gorge. I never heard of Facil."
"A pretentious man, long dead," I said. I edged onto the narrow bench seat but even thigh to thigh and despite my thin stature, my left side hung partly into the aisle. No matter how we shifted and scooted in the cramped, uncomfortable seat, I hung like that our entire journey to the north and west.
A boy, eight or nine, bounced through the bus door with a pan on his head and screamed back past my face. His breath was foul. He screamed again and started down the aisle. I grabbed the pan and tilted it towards me to see into it. Eggs rolled out into my lap. Hard boiled. "Make a pocket with your gobbi," I said to Carol. Carol's hands appeared from within the folds and the garment dropped away from her face, but involved in buying the eggs, I did not then much observe the high cheekbones and delicate fingers nor the smooth, sun-tanned complexion of her skin. I dumped a dozen eggs into her care and slid a hand into my jeans to search for coins.
"You must like eggs," she said.
"It's a two-day trip." Even then, at the beginnings of my wanderings through these remote regions I have come to prefer, I had learned that there is always food at the beginning and end of a journey, but that days can pass between with only a lemon to suck or a scrawny banana to gulp for nourishment.
"The ticket man said the bus was stopping at a hotel tonight," Carol said.
"That doesn't mean there'll be anything to eat--or rather, edible." I beat the boy down on the price of his eggs and handed him some coins. "How come you know about the Blue Nile Gorge and not Facil's Bath. They're always together in the guide books."
"I was a geology major at Berkeley until I figured out it was all a waste."
"A waste?"'
"Nobody hires lady geologists. Except high schools for teachers. Or maybe department stores taking on Christmas help. So I took the tuition money my dad gave me and got a passport. I only wanted to be a geologist so I could see these places."
Rain came suddenly, large splashing pellets that smacked on the roof and sides of the bus and fell inside through the open door. I pushed at the door, trying to close it, but could not make it move. Already a puddle was building on the floor and beginning to run back under the seats. Dawn was still an hour off. A few figures had been moving ghostlike through the muck and rubbish of the station grounds, hawking tickets and carrying baggage, selling food and crumpled magazines. Some were passengers seeking out the long haul buses. All disappeared, ducking into the ramshackle company offices that ringed the yard or sheltering in the unfilled vehicles. The dim, yellowish streetlights, bare bulbs strung round the yard on spindly poles, went out. The leap of darkness, like the lights going out in a theatre, filled me momentarily with that same expectancy of waiting for the curtains to part. I even pushed myself a little straighter in the hard seat.
"Breakfast," Carol said. I heard in the dark the crack of an eggshell and then felt her hand touch mine. "Peel your own." She laid the little egg with its splintered shell in the palm of my hand. I made a fist around it and heard the crack of Carol tapping another egg against the wall of the bus. "I suppose the driver won't come now until the rain lets up," she said.
"They never leave anyway until there’s a full load."
"What would happen if someday there just wasn't a busload going?"
"It never happens. They wouldn't do it this way if it did." Blithely I assumed the air of an authority, as unthinkingly could have attested a thousand other banal cliches. It was so easy in those times to witlessly toss slogans into a conversation, as if we were all veterans of the World War of Experience. Perhaps it is years that reveal to us our innocence.
"You wouldn’t happen to have some salt, would you?" Carol asked.
"No. Why?"
"I hate eggs without salt."
A following wind caught up with the rain, driving it in upon us through the open door, which folded back on itself in the middle. I stood and kicked at the fold, an egg half eaten in my hand, and finally discovered a wooden wedge driven between the bottom of the door and the step. I wrenched the wedge out and sat back down, my shoes and jeans soaked, my hand soppy with dirty water. The yard lights came back on as I wiped my hand across my jeans. The lights brought a rush of people from the offices, the door I had just managed to close was banged open, and the bus, before perhaps three-quarters full, filled rapidly.
The driver and a ticket boy came on last with an air of territorial privilege, slamming the door shut. The driver opened his side window to toss out a cigarette stub, then shoved a few personal effects into a small wooden box nailed up where a rear view mirror should have been, and finally settled heavily into his seat to light a fresh cigarette. I noticed he smoked a brand slightly more expensive than those I had purchased for a few cents the day before from a kiosk outside my hotel.
Tuned to some internal clock or schedule, the driver sat without moving except for the motions of puffing his cigarette, then suddenly reached out and hit the starter. The engine ground, spluttered, whined and caught. The driver flicked on the headlights. They lifted feebly across the lot to a bus facing us perhaps thirty feet away, beams barely strong enough to throw their own reflections back. The windshield streamed water. The driver said something loud and sharp, and the ticket boy came running forward. He positioned himself by the steering column and reached up to grasp a lever protruding through the front of the bus above the windshield. This lever he began to pump, back and forth until he found a steady rhythm, and outside the wiper blade moved in time with his arm. The driver found first, and our journey began.
Chapter Two
There is no comfort on an Ethiopian bus. Buses that do not leave the station until every seat is filled observe no schedules, nor do they arrive at any destination at any predictable time, and along their routes, punctuality is neither a condition nor an expectation. In their journeys, however, they grow crowded beyond the scope of Western dignity. With the gates of the departure city’s bus station left behind, every short-hop passenger stuffed and crammed into the center aisle is a fare that jangles in the driver's pocket. Cruising in the clean and cushioned coaches of Europe and America is still a part of that country's distant future.
There the seats are narrow boards with perpendicular, spine-banging backrests, and the cramped leg-room admits no slouching. Only the first seat, fronted by the steps of the entry well opposite the driver, where Carol and I sat, allowed its occupants room enough to stretch their legs. But passengers entering and leaving at the frequent halts thought little of tramping on our feet and eventually, upon feeling the brakes applied yet another time, we would quickly draw in our legs and protect our toes under the seat.
The aisle gorged with passengers. Fat women boarded clutching squalling babies, accompanied by bony, harried menfolk carrying shoulder-height staves. They pushed to any empty aisle space and plopped straight down on the dirty floor, our small and cherished excess of leg space giving way body by body, baggage parcel by baggage parcel. The curious possessions of an impoverished culture mounted before us as passengers entered and stowed their cardboard packages, tin boxes and shackled chickens, their enamel pots of food tied in grubby bandanas, and for one long, smelly stretch, a trussed and frightened goat. At every stop our passengers of the aisle rose and craned their necks, pushing and shoving and shouting to make certain their particular possession piled there at the front exit was not pilfered. In memory, it seems each time those riding rearmost became the loudest and most aggressive, it seems too that it was ever to unload a passenger riding in those back depths for which the bus had stopped.
There being only the front exit, a slow piling over bodies ensued, which those who remained squatting on the floor endured calmly, seeming to take being stepped upon and walked over as part of the natural order of things. In that ancient country, perhaps it is, and perhaps it is not so different in the countries of progress and plenty. But I am no judge of those more fortunate regions. Too many years have intervened since I left their comforts behind.
For a short time a student wishing to practice his English squatted beside me, balancing himself with an unwelcome hand on my shoulder and making grammatical mistakes as frequently as the bus bounced and jolted in the rutty, pot-holed road. Eventually a new oncoming of passengers squashed him back and his place was taken by a young and pretty mother, a girl still in her early teens. With innocent dignity, she bared her heavy breasts and rode beside me, switching her hungry infant from pap to swollen pap. The baby burped and vomited, another smell to mingle among those others that rose on the overloaded bus with the heat of the day and the climbing sun. I clung to the bus's virtue. It was cheap, and went a goodly distance.
An hour out of Addis Ababa, a pothole as big as the bus wheel brought my pack bouncing out of the rack overhead. With the lurch of the bus out of the pothole, the pack’s strap caught on the edge of the rack. The pack teetered and hung, on the verge of spilling down upon us. I thrust my hands up to shove it back, stretched half from the seat as the bus thumped down into another rut, sending me lurching over on top of Carol. The pack fell back into its place.
"Sorry," I said, adding an apology for clumsiness to my previous gouging of her ankle. We had not yet spoken much. "I hope the Blue Nile is all you expect it to be."
"You mean to make this trip worth it?" Carol had pushed me gently back.
"Yes. I feel like my brain's being pounded out of my head."
"Maybe those baths you were talking about will be more to the point. Is there a sauna?"
"The baths haven't worked for over two hundred years. Ever since Ethiopia plunged from the eighteenth to the seventeenth century."
"I heard it the other way - they're rushing forward from the fourteenth to the fifteenth."
"It depends on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist."
"Which are you?" Carol asked.
"About Ethiopia or in general?"
"In general."
"Neither. Mostly, I keep hoping things will get better the whole time they're getting worse. The two sort of cancel each other out."
"Nonsense," she said quietly. A thin smile parted Carol's lips as she steered our idle conversation to a turning point. Like someone working backward through an algebraic formula, her gaze sought from a simple answer the long equation that preceded it. I looked away and let the budding conversation die.
Bus journeys, when one has made many of them, rest in the mind like one long, continuous session in a movie house, the film sprayed upon the screen an immense travelogue of grays, blues and greens, the original cinema verite`. Lumped into the myriad other journeys I have made since, that slow trip up the Gondar road with Carol is set off chiefly by the stops and starts of our conversations. Endurance, which the conditions of the bus dictated, brought with it a drugged monotony. To become aware of some green and graceful mountain, a deep and rugged ravine, or the eerie drift of pearly fog on a high plateau brought also awareness of the discomfort we traveled in.
"I thought the train from Djibouti was the worst it could get." Carol said. "But at least that wasn't cold." In the high altitudes of central Ethiopia the thin air turned chilly each time the bus curved into the shadow of a mountain or hugged the shaded wall of some narrow valley. Carol threw closed the gobbi she had kept hanging over her shoulders. "I hate being cold."
"That's two things." I said.
"Two things what?"
"That you hate. The other was eggs without salt."
"Make it three then."
"Okay. What else?" Passengers were jammed in all the way to the door in front of us, a swaying wall of clothes and elbows and fingers shrouding our view through the windshield.
"I hate people remembering everything I say," Carol said. She was looking straight ahead, directly at the wide back of a fat, middle-aged woman.
"People either remember things or they don't. It's not something you hate them for." Enclosed in the tiny cubicle of swaying bodies, Carol's comment hung uncomfortable between us.
"Hate doesn't have reasons. I just don't think my feelings about eggs are worth remembering."
"So I'm supposed to have a little man in my head that says, 'Wait, don't remember this?’ It doesn't work that way."
"No, it doesn't. The way it works is people always think they're remembering things exactly like they happened. But they distort it, like a bunch of soggy pizzas, but they're so close it sounds like the real thing. They say you said it, and it seems right, and all of a sudden you're inside somebody else's distortions, so no thanks."
"But you can't just say things and then have us both pretend you didn't."
"That's not what I'm talking about."
And it was not. Quotations from this book and that were at my lips. But Carol was spared that assault by an argument erupting almost in my ear. Three old men had crammed into the bus at the base of a long, steep slope, up which we were now slowly grinding.
"Genzeb," the ticket boy demanded, his palm out for fares from the old men. Their white robes were yellowed and dirty, and each wore plastic farmer's boots. The oldest had thick whiskers turning gray. The three men talked amongst themselves, pointing each to each. Suddenly they turned together on the ticket boy and jabbered, gesturing towards the top of the long hill. "Genzeb," the ticket boy shouted again and smacked his open palm with the backs of his fingers.
The old men's jabbering turned shrill, indignation and anger filtering through the words I did not understand. The oldest talked longer than his companions, then, with dignified finality, made a last gesture towards the top of the grade and fell silent.
The ticket boy yelled for the driver's attention and began to motion for the old men to get off. But to stop the overloaded bus on that steep slope would have been to forfeit forward motion, bringing a long backing to the base to begin the climb anew. The driver ground on, geared down into low, the accelerator pressed to the floor and the bus barely moving. The ticket boy was uttering short flat sounds, curses surely, and the three old men were grinning.
The bus stopped immediately upon gaining the summit. The driver, too, added his shouts to the ticket boy's, and the old men got off laughing. They leaned on their staves, faced forward towards the easy trek downward on the slope's far side, and watched the bus pull away. Carol leaned out the window and waved to them.
"A little nerve goes a long way," she said. She, like the old men, was laughing.
"The driver doesn't think it's so funny."
"Oh, come on. The bus was going up the hill anyway. What difference does it make if the driver is out a few pennies?"
"Everybody else here is paying,"
"So what? The old men beat the system and I think it was clever." We let the matter rest. I had enjoyed the old men duping the driver as much as Carol and yet somehow found myself arguing the opposite side. In those days, it was not my habit to be open with my feelings. I seemed always to be searching, in even the most insignificant matters, for an intellectual stance to preserve. By the time years later in California, when Carol and I spent our last night together splashing and making love in the cold, moonlit pools behind the Tassahara monastery, events had thoroughly stripped me of that habit. But in essential ways, my concerns were still the same.
"Why did he build the baths?" Carol asked, reverting suddenly to an earlier conversation.
"Facil? Who knows? Maybe they seemed the best thing Europe had to offer."
"Was he a good king?"
"Like Henry the Eighth maybe. Only here power always stays closer to the reality. Facil cut his enemies' throats with his own hand. There's a tower in the middle of one of the pools where he used to bleed the victims." I was watching Carol as I spoke. "It was court entertainment. The nobles were called in to watch, and hope they weren't next. There's a special ledge with the stains still on it where he drained their blood down into the water."
I caught a quick tightening in the tendons of Carol's throat. "There's something about death and danger, even hearing about it, that makes all my nerves wide awake," she said. "I remember making love once after a Free Speech demonstration. Students had been getting shoved around with night sticks and the police were arresting people in big trucks. Making love after that was like I could feel everything more."
"I got clobbered at a sit-in once," I said. "Mostly it just hurt. It certainly wasn't exotic."
"No, of course not. Not if you're the victim. It's when you come close but get away. That's when you feel everything more."
"Out here I'm not going to worry about that. There's not much in America I want to get beat up by the police for - or shot in Vietnam for, either."
"But it can all be changed."
"Not by me," I said. "I already tried." Not many had yet fled the draft into exile, and most who had left the country were in Canada. I did not expect Carol to understand my point of view.
"By everybody. If enough of us get together, they'll have to listen." Even then it sounded naïve.
"It's hard to get together from inside a jail cell."
"Jails are only so big. And as for Vietnam, you could go into the army and not cooperate."
"Sure. Sit in a stockade instead of a federal prison. It's not a choice I care for."
"Hey, get real. You can't just walk out on your country."
"I already have," I said. “I left when my draft board took away my deferment.” And for the sake of posture, I sprung closed a deceit upon myself. Exile. Man without a country. But in reality I still waited for a decision on my final appeal to the draft board - the letter I was anxious to retrieve in Cairo. I nourished a slim chance for a deferment on the contents of an appeal I had carefully worked and reworked in a small hotel in Nairobi. Somehow the moving northward gave me hope, as if by being closer to the draft board I could influence their decision. Somehow, too, I slipped into playing the part of exile to Carol. Perhaps there lurked in my mind a residue of romantic films about trans-continental trains and the exotica of chance appointments in strange places. In such settings, truth is an easy sacrifice.
Chapter Three
The sunset held no color, and the hotel at which the bus stopped that first night was as unremarkable as the darkening sky. The walls were mud and wattle, on the inside papered with Swedish newspapers hailing Johannson's heavyweight title fight victory over Floyd Patterson, an edition that seems to have been printed by the millions and sent special delivery to every remote corner of the earth. The roof was rusting sheets of corrugated tin nailed to sapling poles, and only a moment of confusion retrieves that hotel room from the oblivion of countless other one-night resting places.
A thin girl of perhaps twelve led Carol and I around the inside veranda of a barren courtyard to a single room with a single bed. "You take it," I said. "I'll get the next."
"Let me know if you find any luxury suites." Carol dropped her pack down on the bare, straw-stuffed mattress. A coarse woolen blanket was folded across the foot of the narrow board bed. A straight-backed chair, on which sat a candle stub upright in a shiny sardine tin, and a piece of cloth strung for a curtain across the glassless window were the room's only other furnishings.
"Where's my room?" I said to the maid. There was no response. I asked again, using my bare, baby-talk knowledge of that obscure language.
"You here," she said.
"No, she's not my wife. Another room, please."
"Hotel full. You here," and reflecting our child level abilities in each other's tongues, we lapsed into children's contradictions. "Yes" and "no" we batted back and forth with smiles, scowls, grimaces, and cajole, the volume and pitch of our voices ranging high and low.
"Oh, stay and take the floor," Carol cut in. "You'll never settle this."
"You're sure it's okay?"
"Well, you're not getting anywhere with her." The maid was already using Carol's interruption to edge out of the room. Carol was sitting cross-legged on the bed. Her hand shot suddenly out, and with thumb and forefinger she made a stab and pinch at the mattress. "Fleas!"
"They come out now, just at dark," I said. I walked over to the bed, dropping my pack on the floor and sitting on it, the mattress just below eye level. Carol's hand snapped out again and then I saw them, squads of scurrying black creatures that searched and stopped and scurried again, and though I have encountered their brethren in many countries, I have never quite figured out for what it is that they search and scurry. "You can't possibly kill all those."
"I can't sleep with them either. I swell up and itch like crazy," Carol said.
"We could try in that village the bus went through just before we got here." The bus had stopped for the night a few hundred yards beyond a roadside collection of shabby storefronts and stave-fenced compounds.
"I didn't see any hotels coming through."
I shrugged. "We couldn't do much worse, even sleeping out." We shouldered our packs and went out past the maid without explanation.
The town had electric, but the shops were lit with pressure lanterns that threw light far brighter than the dim electric bulbs lighting the houses. Leaning on the shop counters were the Arab half-caste owners, and ranged behind them were walls of shelves stuffed with plastic pails and buckets, tin glasses and enamel cups, and stacks and stacks of shiny aluminum boiling pots, each shop the same as the next. I have wondered, in frustrated moments of shopping here and there in remote towns, if there is not a Universal Salesman who crisscrosses the developing world, his wares ever the same, his route ever a few steps in front of mine. Scattered amongst the shops were little tea houses with straight-backed chairs, and a single bar. There, in the bar, we met McIntyre.
Hunched forward at a wobbly wooden table, he was drinking brandy by the glassful, and there we gave up our search for a hotel. It is idle now to speculate on the different courses our lives might have taken had we not met McIntyre. "War!" McIntyre had thundered - in memory I can only recall him thundering everything - when he heard my plans to go to Cairo. But surely without McIntyre in the equation Carol and I would have passed through Egypt days earlier and been somewhere out on the Mediterranean before that year's lightening war with Israel interrupted our journey. Or perhaps, without my wounded pride to assuage, we would not have proceeded against all sense, against repeated warnings, into Egypt at all.
At the very least, Carol knew he was following somewhere behind us in his Land Rover that next day when she insisted we leave the bus at the rim of the Blue Nile Gorge. But the intricate shifts of fate, the variations of destiny, the alterations of chance I sifted through my mind during the lonely nights of my long exile are only that - musings on tropical verandas.
McIntyre was drinking Meloti, sticky-sweet brandy made by expatriate Italian distillers in Asmara, and he was already drunk that first night, his bulky body pitched forward around a plastic water glass filled to the rim with drink.
"Americans?" McIntyre's eyes drew a bead on us as we entered, but the rest of his body seemed to curl around the drink, as if preparing to defend it should we prove foreign to both the country and the man. The glaring pressure lantern caught and glistened in the pupils of his eyes.
"Americans," I said. "My name's Paul Rhodes. This is Carol."
"I'm Mac," he said, "for McIntyre." He half rose to shake my hand. He was too young for the weight that was settling towards his stomach. "I'm glad you're Americans."
"I never thought of it as a special virtue myself," I said.
"But it is. You wouldn't either one of you turn down some of this brandy, would you?" McIntyre thumped on the table and a bar girl came hurrying with bottle and glasses.
'"After that bus ride, I'd drink anything," Carol said.
"That's what I mean about Americans," McIntyre said. "The Brits would sit here and choke before they'd pour rot this bad down their throats." McIntyre poured a glass to the top and pushed it at me. "Lucky for me, I guess," he added, not really to us, and I was not at all curious about why he said it.
"Not so much brandy for me," Carol said.
"Cautious is she?" McIntyre asked the question of me, perhaps already probing the contours of our relationship. His eyes had scanned across Carol's bare ring finger as I had introduced Carol without her family name, at the time a name I did not yet know. "She knows her own mind," I answered.
"Swell," McIntyre said.
"Swell?"
"Sure. A woman that knows her own mind won't let any of this dumb talk that comes out my mouth when I'm drunk influence her opinion of me. Sober, I'm likable." This last he said straight to Carol.
"So I'm supposed to ask why you get drunk if you're so likable?" Carol had taken the bait.
"Right. It's because I'm a water wizard."
"A what?" Carol and I both asked lt.
"I go around villages showing the natives where to dig wells."
"Here?" Carol glanced at me. "This is one of the rainiest places in the whole world. Half the Nile River starts around here."
McIntyre smiled. "Your UN and mine," he said, raising his brandy but not sipping. "Guess what it's like to go into a village that's two feet deep in mud and say, 'I'm here to find water for you. For free. Because the world cares. Cares about you in your grimy little huts, cares about your kids stuck to their knees in the hog wallows you call streets and wants you to have a water well, you grubby peasants.' "
"I'd drink, too." I said.
"They've even got a canned speech in the local language for me to give, like those encyclopedia salesmen back in the States use. I start off talking one thing and suddenly I've got them agreeing to a contract. And I'm on a three-year one." McIntyre's gaze dropped into his brandy.
"You could quit," Carol suggested,
"And lose my draft deferment? I plan to be way on the far side of twenty-six before I take that chance." McIntyre bent to his glass and gulped. "I'll sit here stewed to the gills in godforsaken nowhere for three years, by god, yes, I will. Yes, I will." Even when he mumbled, he roared.
I sat silent, my eyes on the brandy McIntyre again bent to. "There are worse fates," Carol said.
"Sure. All those poor jerks in Vietnam. Sometimes, though, I think they got the better of it. I mean, there's only a few actually out in the jungles fighting."
"One other thing about Americans," I said. "They're always talking about Vietnam." But I failed to get the hard edge I wanted into my voice. McIntyre was pouring round again, though only his glass was empty.
"What I'm doing is dangerous, too," he said.
"Especially to your liver." Carol watched his glass fill up.
"I mean dangerous when I'm out in the field." McIntyre was too glazed to much care about what was being said. "Ever hear of the shifta? They cut throats just to steal your boots."
Carol's eyes dropped to McIntyre's jugulars. "I don't see any scars."
"They're not where you can see them." McIntyre winked, but with both eyes, his two eyelids closing down and down over his reddened eyeballs, pausing at the close of the downsweep and then one eyelid after the other sliding open in slow, slow motion. Briefly I suspected the drunken water wizard to be about to stand and unclothe, baring scars of combat with mountain outlaws. But the pressure lantern hissed, drawing our attention as it flared brightly for a few brief seconds and then grew soft and greenish. The barman came rapidly from his post at the counter to pump the waning light with short, swift strokes. But it would not revive. The little bar darkened to the amber dimness of a single bare electric bulb.
"No more light tonight," McIntyre said. "He's too cheap to gas it up again." There were empty tables and the three of us bunched together, the barmaid and the counterman standing at the rear.
"It's not like he has a thriving clientele to keep things going for," I said. "In fact, it looks like we're keeping him open."
"Which is a good thing," Carol said. "We still haven't found a place to stay."
McIntyre seemed genuinely surprised. "Stay here if you want."
"This is a hotel, too?"
"Well, a rent-a-mattress mostly." McIntyre motioned to the corner farthest from our table. "That's what those rolls are over there. He spreads them out on the floor at night and then lays plastic tablecloths over them for between you and the bugs. He washes the plastic everyday."
If nothing else, McIntyre taught me that - that there would always be a place to sleep in the far and distant villages I fled through in the ensuing years. In those ancient cultures where spiffy hotels are a new and recent event, liberty and democracy may be puzzling concepts, but rest is an inalienable right.
"You two haven't even said where you're headed," McIntyre said, probing again.
"To the Gorge myself." Carol said. "Paul wants to see Facil's baths." I caught McIntyre's quick appraisal and sudden tensing as his mind pursued the implications of different destinations. But I knew little then of that peculiar hunger which afflicts American men placed long in foreign isolation, the neurotic, consuming gnawing for a white-skinned woman.
"It's all in the same direction," I tried. "See the Gorge. See the baths."
"I'm headed that way, too," McIntyre said. "I wish the Rover wasn't so damn full."
"No room at all?" Carol asked.
"I sidetrack out into a village tomorrow first thing with a bunch of pump equipment to deliver. Then I shoot into Gondar and up to Asmara."
"So you might have some room after the village?" Carol pressed.
"Some, maybe," McIntyre said, noncommittal. "It depends on how much village stuff I have to haul in for repairs."
"Anything would be better than that bus."
"I generally stop at the Meskal Hotel in Gondar," McIntyre said. "You can check there and see what the situation with the Rover is when I get in." I sipped the sticky brandy and watched the conversation turn into a dialogue between McIntyre and Carol. For no particular reason a boy wandered in from the dark street and stood close to our table, staring at us until the barmaid shouted at him. As if the shout waked him out of a daydream, the boy pulled a sheaf of bright yellow lottery tickets from inside his shirt. Holding them towards us, he stared from one of us to the next and back around again.
"Shove off," McIntyre rumbled. He turned his head and said something to the barmaid in her language, who nodded and glared at the boy. Everyone stared at the boy. He did not move.
"How much can I win?" Carol asked,
"Save your money," McIntyre said. "They sell a million of those every month."
"Come here." Carol beckoned to the boy. He laid the sheaf of tickets down on the table and stood close. Carol riffled through the tickets, not really looking at the numbers. "I feel sorry for him.
"Don't get to feeling too soft," McIntyre said. "These kids make more in a month off lottery tickets than most farmers here get for a whole year's worth of crops."
"I thought lotteries fed starving masses or something," Carol said. "Hey, wait. This one feels lucky." She pulled a ticket from the sheaf and laid it out on the table. With a slender finger she underscored the long number written across the top.
"Feels lucky? That's a new one." But even as he said it, McIntyre was leaning over towards Carol and the ticket. "Hey, it's on me if you really think it'll win."
"Just feel it. Feel the vibes. I'm sure it's going to win."
But McIntyre's hand was too unsteady to trace the course Carol's finger had followed. He pulled some money from his shirt pocket and handed it to the boy.
"Okay, you made your sale." He stared at the boy. The boy retrieved his sheaf of tickets, clutched McIntyre's money, backed away, and left. I never did discover exactly when and how the ticket got into my backpack. But the little puddle of winnings it eventually brought me in Asmara was at best a mixed blessing. I was still recovering from the bruising McIntyre had by then delivered to my ego, and the hassle of changing my winnings to dollars on the black market came close to landing me in jail. Sudden-favored with lottery luck, in Asmara I grew incautious, I became prey.
Recounting the events of this journey now, it seems blind chance that Carol and I should even once have found our paths re-crossing after she rode away from me in McIntyre's Land Rover. There were ages, in the smaller, more constricted times of the ancients, when years and lives could intertwine with no more than a casual curtsy to the statistics of chance. But in this world, grown so vast and teeming, one is led, almost, to a belief in Fate. Almost. But that night in the bar, the lottery was not important, and there were concerns more immediate.
"I never saw scenery more spectacular." McIntyre was gesturing vaguely towards the door and the dark beyond, immersed in some interior vision of the countryside. "So lush sometimes I think the rain falls green, and look who owns it. A bunch of dumb farmers and big-butted whores."
"Whores?" I finally re-entered the conversation,
"Sure, whores. Wife-swapping didn't just start yesterday in southern California. They've been doing it here for three thousand years. Hell, they swap whole villages."
"And you without a wife to trade. It must be frustrating," Carol said.
McIntyre half-snorted. "Good lord. I'm the biggest diversion to hit these villages since Gillette razor blades beat out broken bottle shards for shaving."
"So what's to complain about then?" I asked.
"First, they smell. Like old butter or something. And then they giggle. And third, there's not a soft bed in the whole damn country." McIntyre's eyes fixed on the dim bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. "Just a little tenderness," he said. "If they were just a little tender. That's what white women have. Tenderness."
"Maybe they've got a different way of being tender," Carol said.
"Maybe." McIntyre's eyes did not move from the light. "Probably, even. But I can't get close to it."
And all my posturing was upstaged by McIntyre's statement of simple need. I thrust myself into exile, where life is walled with the sharp, shear edges of calculated decisions, and McIntyre, plunging and wallowing through his mud and dark flesh, opened like a vulnerable wound. He was not one who, drowsing in a sunlit field, would choose a rock to cushion his head, or standing ravenous at the banquet table, crunch on bitty seeds to sate a hunger. Not McIntyre.
And Carol touched him. Ever so briefly, her fingers reached out to the hands he had wrapped around the brandy glass. Though our bodies had rubbed all day in the bouncing bus, she had not touched me.
"You'll be okay," she said to him, and all our eyes were on her hand that had brushed across McIntyre's.
"Sure," McIntyre grinned. "Didn't mean to get sloppy on you people." The barmaid appeared from some shadowy corner, interrupting, speaking rapidly in her own language to McIntyre. "She says the generator turns off in another five minutes or so. We'd better get our bags spread if we're going to sleep here." We chose our places on the floor - I remember a large red rose printed on a field of gray on the plastic tablecloth spread across my mattress - while the electric bulb dimmed and dimmed in warning until it was a small globe of sickly yellow; then it surged to sudden brightness and went out. Outside a late moon was risen. From time to time solitary figures, ghostlike in their white gobbis, passed along the still street. An hour passed, and I could not sleep. I groped my way through the darkness and went out.
I turned to my left and began walking, away from the direction of the flea-plagued hotel we had abandoned earlier in the evening. One of the town's skinny, tawny dogs, pug-faced and stunted from generations of inbreeding, barked from the moon shadows. Other dogs picked it up. Here and there candles flickered behind shuttered windows. Near the edge of town a gobbi-wrapped figure joined me silently from behind.
"It is not safe, sir," he said.
"What's not?"
"The savanna at night. There are many hyenas."
"As brave as your dogs that bark from the shadows?"
"Our dogs know their own strength. They do not leave the village at night."
"If no one leaves the village, how do you know it isn't safe out there?"
"In the daytime you see the cattle and the goats eating the grass. In the mornings, we find the bones and fresh carcasses of the ones that do not come into the village for the night."
"Including men?"
"Including foolish men."
"Perhaps then, all your men are either foolish or they stay at home. You have no brave men who go into the fields and drive away the beasts."
"Beasts are to be lived with, sir. They cannot be driven away." We stood together looking out over the moonlit savanna. "Where could beasts be driven to?"
"To haunt another village."
My companion shrugged. "Yes, and they would drive their beasts here. It is better to be content with what we have."
Folk knowledge, usually mundane, always conservative, has a way of sounding wise. I forgot for the moment that I had cast myself as one who refused to accept the inevitability of familiar beasts.
"Your American friend in the bar stays on the savanna some nights."
"McIntyre?"
"That is his name? He is always drunk when he stops here. The people say it is because he sleeps out there sometimes. It can make men crazy."
"That's not what McIntyre says."
"We do not always believe what men say about themselves." The moon rose up and up, so bright I could read the numerals on my watch, but I cannot recall my companion's face. Perhaps I never looked. For some reason he told me the story of the clever donkey. Each day its owner, a miller, drove it across a small river, burlap bags of flour strapped to each side. One day the donkey slipped into a deep hole and was pulled down by the weight of his load. But the river washed the flour away between the holes in the wide weave of the burlap. The donkey escaped with his load considerably lightened. After that, each day, the donkey managed to slip into the hole and lose the flour he was carrying,
The miller, growing tired of his daily loss and angry at the clever donkey, warned the animal several times. But each day the donkey continued to slip into the hole. "The last time," the miller said one day. "The last time." The next day he packed a special set of bags and loaded the donkey. "Do not slip into the hole today, clever donkey, or you will not be so smart as you think."
But the donkey paid no heed. At the river, he once more slipped into the hole, waiting for the rushing water to wash his load away. On the bank the miller counted away the minutes. "I warned you," he said when the last bubbles of the donkey's expiring breath broke the surface and there were no more. "Now you have learned the hard way that a bag of stones is not like flour."
We laughed together, our voices floating through the silver sheen of the African night. A strange encounter, such as I was seeking.
Chapter Four
Down twisting loops of gravel road the bus receded into the vast Blue Nile Gorge. Wisps of afternoon clouds floated at the far rims of that enormous canyon. A hundred switchbacks below, the Blue Nile glimmered, source of the fertile floods of ancient Egypt, the verdant valley an immense gash of history cut wide and deep and green into the fragile western highlands of Ethiopia.
Carol let loose a blue bandana. Her long brown hair caught in an updraft sweeping out of the gorge. Her jeans were tight and faded, and her summer blouse, white, rippled in the breeze. Our packs were dropped beside the dusty road and we stood at the canyon's rim, a steep descent at our feet. A wind-shaped treetop was trying to push up above the valley walls at the tips of our shoes, and very much I wanted to kiss Carol. But she was held in private communion, poised at the lip of the beginnings of histories, immersed in the silence of visions I did not share.
We had left the little town in the grayness of early morning, McIntyre still sprawled on the bar floor asleep, his burly body curled half out of a sleeping bag. We were among the last to board the bus, but the driver had kept vacant for us our previous day's places at the front. The journey began again with a quick relapse into the sameness of the first day's discomforts. It changed only when there was tossed aboard a crazy man, chained and frightened. He thudded at our feet in the step well at the front of the bus.
The ticket boy squirmed out of the crowded depths and stood braced against the driver's seat, one foot on the crazy man's shoulder. The bus jolted onward. Shackled, the man twisted and slobbered on the floor, bouncing and rattling. Mile after mile his dark eyes stared at my shoes, and I at him. No guardian, official, custodian or attendant traveled with him. He had simply been dumped onto the bus by two policemen, cargo to be delivered up again at some further destination.
"I can't stand it," Carol said. The bus had traveled several miles. "Let's put him up in the seat." The man's legs were flopping in the well leading down the two steps of the bus door exit. The chain was wrapped around his bare ankles and then pulled up between his knees to bind his wrists. In the chafe marks, splotches of blood were seeping out, crimson against his dark skin.
"They'll think we're crazy," I said. Only we were paying any attention to the crazy man. He flopped again and the ticket boy's big toe was almost in his eye.
"He's not an animal," Carol said. She reached across me and pulled the ticket boy's arm. "Your foot's in his face."
Carol pointed down, but the ticket boy merely stared at Carol. "Don't put your feet in people's faces!" Carol spoke loudly, plainly, shaking her head "no", finger still pointing. The ticket boy grinned broadly and looked at me. Carol shoved him. He toppled back in concert with another jolt of the bus, landing against the passengers across the aisle.
"Leave it alone, Carol," I said. "Crazy people are on the level of animals in this culture. They wouldn't understand what you're talking about even if you could say it in their language."
"It's time they learned then." Carol rose out of the seat and knelt by the crazy man's head. She shoved her hands beneath his shoulders. Behind me a woman said something loud and laughed. Others also laughed. Carol pushed and the crazy man bounced part way up. The bus bounced in a rut, and Carol pitched forward over the man. He writhed beneath her, terrified, his face buried against her stomach. The bus bounced again and Carol could not regain her balance. The passengers were laughing and shouting, standing and straining forward to see Carol sprawled on the crazy man.
The laughter bounced off the top of the bus and doubled itself in echo. Someone, a teenage boy, grabbed my arm and spoke, pointing down at Carol. The bus quieted as he addressed me, and then laughter burst even louder through the packed seats.
"Shut the hell up!" I yelled, a McIntyre roar, and standing, I faced them. The woman of the first comment said something swift and sharp, and laughter rose again. "Forget you, lady," I said. I reached down and by her shirt collar, I pulled Carol back into the seat. Her hair, too, was in my grip and I heard her gasp. I saw the passenger woman purse her mouth, ready to relay more commentary to the other bus riders. I grabbed the crazy man and yanked him to a sitting position in the bus well.
His chains were not locked, only pulled tight and hooked, like a dog chain clipped to a collar. I wrenched up slack and loosed the man's feet, then his hands. The shackles clanked down as the onlookers went suddenly quiet. The chains rattled in the well and their sound seemed to boost the man up. I turned and pushed him at the passengers.
Freedom came to him as to a harlequin puppet whose several strings are suddenly jerked all at once. Legs and arms churned, akimbo, direction unimportant. Only movement mattered. Fearful of his thrashing, the aisle passengers crammed and shoved their way into the jammed seats. A slim space cleared, and down it the crazy man swarmed like a swimmer before whom the water parts, his arms swirling and swirling in strokes that paddled air, that slapped faces, smacked noses and ran fingers into eyes, his hands flapping backwards from heads and faces while his legs thrust him forward.
In the rear, passengers could make way no more, but the frenzied man drove onwards. He piled into a mass of cowering bodies, lost his balance and for a moment disappeared. Then he rose on a web of fending arms and hands, leveled out, and fishlike, suddenly quiet, he turned sideways above the passengers, and slithered out the window. "Stop," I shouted, but he was gone.
"Stop," I shouted again, this time to the driver, but the bus bore on. The passengers resumed their places, their eyes on me still standing facing them.
Carol grabbed my arm, "Make the bus stop. The man might be hurt."
"Dead, even," I said. "Move over."
"But stop the bus. Do something."
"I just did do something. They were right to have him chained."
"'But--." Carol turned and stuck her head out the window, trying to see back along the road. I sat down and focused on the oncoming green of the countryside. The chains had slipped down into a little pile at the bottom of the well. "Maybe you're right," Carol said. "Maybe you shouldn't have let him loose." I reached down and scooped the chains out of the well, then pushed them past Carol and dropped them out the window.
"They were laughing at you," I said.
"But it turned out dangerous for him to be free. I was only trying to make him comfortable."
"We might all be dangerous free," I said. Certainly we would be less comfortable. Freedom and comfort are so obliquely antithetical that it is surely one of the great enigmas of our times that America, a nation founded so squarely on the precepts of freedom, should turn so stolidly to the pursuits of comfort. Surely.
"Oh, god, there you go trying to make something I didn’t mean out of something I said again," Carol said. "I'm not enjoying this trip much."
Not much later, we stood alone on the very verge of the Blue Nile Gorge, gazing across the clouds floating in the canyon's broad spaces and gazing, too, down the walls and centuries of its meandering. There passed with the moment, from borning to dying, my first desire to kiss Carol, more tender I think than it was ever to be again. Behind us a broad savanna spread its deceptive emptiness. Below the bus had disappeared behind the face of a rounded outcropping that thrust like a battlement from the cliff wall. The bus would not appear again until it had reached the hazy bottom of the gorge. On the far wall the road winding upward was faintly visible, but on it nothing moved.
Eventually Carol turned and walked slowly to her backpack. From a side pocket she pulled a spiral stenographer's pad, flipped it open, made what seemed to be a check mark, and then closed the notebook again. "I've got a list," she said. "The world's great places. This is the first place on the Nile part of my list. Sometimes I wonder what I'll do when I finish it."
"Make a new one," I suggested.
"I don't think it works that way,"
"What doesn't?"
"How you go from one thing to another in life. It's not all in order, one thing following another like driving down a big highway with big green signs. Some places are 'Exit Only', and it takes a long time to get back on."
"Or maybe you never do get back," I said. "You just stay stuck on the back roads."
"Sure. Maybe. But whatever happens, it ought to make sense."
"I guess it does, if you're old enough. At least I don't hear old people say it doesn't."
"Maybe they just don't think about it."
We lifted our packs and began the long descent. The road switched back and back upon itself again and again. Along the cliff wall, rocks and ferns and moss dripped little rivulets of water. The rivulets turned to tiny streams that spilled over mossy rocks, the splashing of these miniature cascades loud in the immense silence of the canyon. Walking had been Carol's idea. Mine had been to ride through the gorge on the bus and spend the night in the luxury of a bath at Gondar.
For a mile the bus had edged back and forth along the rim of the gorge, affording us glimpses of spectacular grandeur and then turning away again before making the final approach to the first switchback. "Lets get off," Carol had suddenly said.
"Here?"
"Yes, here. Come on."
"But--!"
"Come on. We'll get a lift with whatever comes later. We can't just ride past this." She stood up, shoving by me in the seat and reaching for the luggage rack. She gave no time to my urge to object, to contradict because I had not the ability to agree. Carol grabbed the driver's shoulder, motioned for him to stop, and I followed her out.
But the hours passed into late afternoon, and nothing came to give us a ride. We tramped slowly down the switchbacks, for a short while the bus we had abandoned a distant speck moving slowly across the white concrete bridge that spans the Blue Nile. For a long time the bus appeared and disappeared on the far cliff wall as it labored up the hairpin curves.
"There weren't any other buses at the hotel this morning. Maybe there won't be another until tomorrow," I said.
"Then I guess we'll spend the night. Do you mind? It's so peaceful here."
Camped with a pretty woman in Africa by rushing river waters? How could I mind? I could even hope a bus did not come. For the first time I wondered how far behind McIntyre was, how long his village errands would take, and hoped his business there would keep him the night. Each turn of the twisted road took us deeper into that great valley, towards the warmth of bright sunshine reflecting up from the wide river, and whatever our words and differences had been in the cramped and crowded bus, they were suffused, transformed, or made insignificant by the awesome size of the huge chasm. Halfway down, resting, our legs dangling over the edge of the road, Carol's hand rested in mine.