Cleaving (34 page)

Enough sad-sack mammals for the day. We head back to Vitaly's. Misha comes in with us and is surprised to see Ira, a childhood
friend. We all crowd into the kitchen and drink tea, and I zone out a little in a digestive fugue while Misha and Ira chatter
away. After a while, Oksana and I go to the post office and do a bit of souvenir shopping. I buy a few wooden eggs, painted
pysanka
style; the real eggs are more expensive and, more important, would inevitably shatter someplace between Kolimya, Kiev, Tanzania,
Sapporo, and home. I also buy a sheer black peasant blouse with gold and silver embroidery that I will either keep or give
to my mother. Then we go in search of
sala.

When Eric visited Ukraine just a year or so out of college, he came back raving about
sala,
which is some sort of seasoned salt pork, eaten with bread. "It's everywhere," he tells me. "It's like the Ukrainian national
food!" I've gotten several e-mails from him since I've been here, whenever I've been able to get to a cybercafe to check,
asking if I've yet sampled it.

The problem is, there's no
sala
to be found for love or money. I've been keeping my eye out, I really have. I've looked in grocery store deli counters, on
restaurant menus. I've asked Oksana about it and she's assured me we will find it at some point, somewhere in Kolimya. But
so far, bubkes. We make a concerted attempt today, our last in western Ukraine. We visit groceries and markets and one semi-enclosed
butcher shop, just a large room with double doors open onto the street, with men and women in aprons standing behind a series
of wooden tables piled high with meat. A yellow dog wanders, mostly unmolested, under the tables, feasting on whatever scraps
fall. Oksana explains to one of the women what we are looking for.

"Sala?"
The woman looks just the slightest bit flummoxed, but she slices a wedge of a snowy white hunk of pork belly with her enormous
knife. It doesn't look salted, but I pop it into my mouth anyway.

So it turns out
sala
doesn't just mean a seasoned Ukrainian delicacy. It also means, well, pig fat.

"I think that now, people don't want to serve visitors such things, peasant food, unsophisticated," explains Oksana as I smack
the sheen off my lips and tongue.

I couldn't do it, sweetie. I tried. But there's no
sala
to be had. The country has changed since your time, I guess. I feel like I let you down. But if it makes you feel better,
your wife ingested raw pig fat in front of an incredulous Ukrainian butcher-woman. So there's that.

I'm on the train back to Kiev. Next, Tanzania. I miss you.

I
SPEND
a day with Oksana in Kiev, mostly shopping. Ukrainians love to shop, and there's much of it to do. The clothes are trendy,
often not particularly well made--one cute dress I buy loses two buttons before I've worn it once--and not as cheap as you'd
expect. But, at Oksana's urging, I do make one purchase I'm entirely pleased with. A black pleated skirt, in a very fine-wale
corduroy, much shorter than any skirt I've worn in a decade or more. A sexy schoolgirl look. When I put it on, my legs suddenly
look a mile long, and I don't think it's just the shop's mirrors. That night I pack it up, visions of saucy heels and kneesocks
and pigtails dancing in my head.

The next day, I'm on a plane from Kiev to Dubai. We're flying over the Persian Gulf, and it's pitch-black but for the dim
glint of a narrow moon off the waves and an occasional greenish blink of light, a beacon. Two sheaves of papers sit on my
lap.

Well, Ukraine was fascinating, as you said. I think very different from when you were here, though. I'd love to bring you
back sometime, would love for you to meet Ira and Katerina and Myroslav and Misha and, most especially, Oksana. And you should
see the skirt I bought for twenty bucks!

What I don't write about to Eric is the vague sense of anxiety that's settled over me since I boarded the plane. It's not
just nervousness about visiting Africa for the first time, and all alone, and it's not just my fear of flying. It's another
sort of dread I can't quite work out. I don't want to burden Eric with such things. With D, I have no compunction, since writing
a letter to him is like writing down a prayer and then lighting it on fire.

As the plane rose, I gripped my armrests and begged to live. Me, praying--so hypocritical. I'm so much more afraid of flying
than I used to be, I wonder why? Last night, the night before leaving Kiev, I dreamed that Eric and I were on a plane that
was going down. Just as it was about to crash nose-first into a swamp, time was frozen, and we were told by some omniscient
voice projected from the future that we had precisely nineteen minutes to resolve all of our affairs. For a sickening moment
I was alone in the plane's bathroom, naked and shivering, stabbing your number into my phone, too terrified to punch the Call
button. But you came anyway. The bathroom was gone, my clothes were back on, and we stood on the bank of a creek. We both
took off our shoes, dug our feet into the sand
.

The dream was vivid, both the terror of the crash and D's eventual presence shocked through with the smack of reality, not
a D-shaped presence but D himself. A visitation. Every vocal nuance and glitter of the eye, his posture and smirk and the
scattering of moles on his skin. I awoke in happiness that melted quickly into a backsliding resurgence of pain, and with
a memory I'd forgotten. I think of it again now, my forehead pressed against the plastic of the plane window, staring into
the liquid darkness. It happened toward the end, after a fight we'd had over what I can't now recall, some angry ultimatum
or demand from me, no doubt. We parted with recriminations, and some hours later I got a text from him. He wrote, "I love
you and I don't know what to do about that." I treasured those words at the time, found in them reassurance and a trail of
bread crumbs to some future certainty.

But does anyone, ever, know? Does Eric, I wonder? Oksana or Gwen? For so many years, I thought it was so simple. I lived in
a pop-up book, an Advent calendar, a place of doors and treats and clarity. Now I seem to live in another world entirely,
fathomless and strange. I thought exploring it would help. But so far, so far from home, I still don't know what to do about
that.

Passing over the Persian Gulf, moon glinting off the water, the only sight to see but for the light of an occasional boat,
and then all of a sudden, bam! Bright necklaces of light, outlandish buildings and strange compounds and theme parks, and
it's all out of nothing. And then I'm there. On the fucking Arabian Peninsula, man.

I pin my hopes on Africa.

I
T IS FIVE
thirty in the afternoon and I am resting in a pup tent that's been thrown up for me beside the cracked mud wall of one of
the houses of Kesuma's father's sister's
boma
. Two girls, perhaps ten years old, elegant, thin, and small-boned, in red and purple robes, their necks and arms heavily
draped with white beaded jewelry, are peering around the corner of the wall at me. They have their hands clasped up high near
their faces to cover the brilliant grins and storms of giggles they break into every time I glance up from my letters to smile
at them. Sometimes they wave, and when I wave back they are amazingly amused, as if they've just trained a dog to do a particularly
smart trick.

It's been a long and wondrous day, and it's far from done. We left Kesuma's house in Arusha, Tanzania, at eight in the morning--me
and Kesuma, Leyan, Elly, and Obed. Kesuma is a handsome, small man with a quick smile who wears his Maasai dress--red plaid
robes, shoes made of motorcycle tires, an array of white beaded necklaces and bracelets and anklets, a large knife in a red
leather scabbard around his waist and his beaded "Chief stick" in his hand--whether he's in town riding his motor scooter,
herding goats in one of his family's villages, or speaking before hundreds of people at Berkeley about his nonprofit organization,
Kitumusote. The mission of Kitumusote is to build educational and environmental programs for the Maasai, a people fiercely
dedicated to a traditional lifestyle of cattle herding, which is increasingly difficult to maintain in contemporary Africa.
To raise money, Kesuma organizes "cultural safaris" like these. It's an uncomfortable phrase, suggesting that I'm heading
out in a Land Rover with my pith helmet and a thermos full of G&Ts, hoping for some human version of the Battle at Kruger.
But in fact what we're doing is something far quieter and more personal--we are visiting with Kesuma's family. When we arrived
at the village, the women were gathered under the single large shade tree where they meet to take classes in Swahili and basic
mathematics. But they weren't studying at that moment; they were singing. Kesuma's aunt, a handsome older woman, urged me
to join in the dancing, with a generous gesture of her arm and a kind laugh that she sustained, even once it became clear
that I was quite a horrible dancer, spastic and awkward.

Now, after my afternoon rest, we seem to have come to the question-and-answer period.

"Was your marriage arranged, or did your husband choose you?"

"Um. I chose him." It seems a queer way of putting it, the concept of "choice" somehow just off correct, at once too trivial
and too indicative of will, but close enough, I suppose.

Kesuma translates, and the women erupt into scandalized giggles and awestruck expressions, whispering among themselves. God,
if they only knew the half of it.

"Do you have children?"

"Not yet." They nod solemnly, with sympathetic, somewhat stricken looks on their faces, feeling the tragedy of my childlessness.

"The center of our life is our herd, and our family, our children. What is the center of your life?"

Gosh. What on earth can I say to that? My husband? My lover? Sex? Money? My dog? Oy. I can't really explain that that's sort
of exactly why I'm here with them in this remote village on an arid Tanzanian hillside. Essentially,
I was kind of hoping you would tell me
.

"What is your job in the home?"

"Well, in theory, the husband and the wife are meant to do equal parts of the work, cleaning, cooking. But actually I usually
do more." When I'm not running off to some foreign country alone for months on end, of course.

The women giggle again at this notion, then grow serious. One of the older women, who looks tired, less vital and happy than
Kesuma's aunt, begins to speak, and the others nod while Kesuma translates:

"You have so much freedom."

It's a startling statement. I'd just been thinking how I envied these women, their beauty and singing and bare feet in the
dry red soil. Their romantically simple lives. I've been stupid.

"We have to do all the work. The men do nothing but go out with the cattle. And if we don't do something right, our husbands
sometimes beat us."

It occurs to me that I have very little notion of how old any of these women are. A few of them seem to be children, perhaps
sixteen years old. Others seem ancient. But most occupy an indeterminate middle ground. Kesuma's aunt could be forty or seventy.
I ask Kesuma about this.

"I don't know. She doesn't even really know."

"She doesn't know?"

"We Maasai generally don't have birth certificates. It was a problem for me when I first tried to fly to the U.S.!" He laughs,
as his head falls back and his shoulders duck forward in a gesture I've already recognized as characteristic of him. "I told
the woman at the office I was twenty-seven, but I don't know. Do I look twenty-seven to you?"

"That seems about right." In honesty, Kesuma's age could be anywhere between twenty-one and thirty-five, his apparent physical
youth tempered by a sense of gravity, not to mention his list of impressive accomplishments. Born in a remote village on the
Tanzania-Kenya border, he has gone to school, become fluent in both English and Swahili, and saved the money to take college-level
courses in filmmaking, computer literacy, and the effects of globalization. He's founded an international nonprofit organization,
traveled to the United States to raise money and give talks, and made the kinds of friends, all over the world, who are happy
to have him stay with them in their homes at short notice or no notice at all.

"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?"