Cleaving (37 page)

I pet the soft hair on the strip that runs from my wrist to middle finger. The skin is still wet on the underside.

We spend the heat of the day doing nothing much at all. Kesuma and the others make new goatskin bracelets for themselves,
sharpen their knives idly on river stones, watch over the meat they are cooking for our dinner tonight (I'm fed some more
liver, cooked this time). What they are not going to cook tonight, they wrap in leaves and tuck on top of more leaves, within
a covered hutch of brambles which sits in the middle of our sleeping corral or whatever you'd call it. Within the hide are
several round, fatty masses, about the size of golf balls. "Tonight," Kesuma explains, "we'll stay up to protect the meat
in case any lions come looking for it." I'm ninety percent sure he's kidding, or at least exaggerating, but I think I'll take
my potty break before the sun goes down.

In the afternoon Kesuma, Leyan, and I head up to the lip of the ravine to look for various roots and leaves and bark that
Kesuma wants to show me. He is a strict teacher; he moves fast, expects me to keep up, as well as keep notes in the blue exercise
notebook he gave me when I arrived in Tanzania.
Lokunonoi
is a bark used to treat stomach pain. The roots of the
orukiloriti
tree are boiled by warriors for a tea that makes them "bloodthirsty"; its thorny branches are used to build pens for the
cattle and the protective fences around
bomas. Ogaki
is the "forgiveness tree"; you bring a branch of it to a neighbor when you want to ask forgiveness for some offense. You
can chew on a branch of the
orkinyeye
tree to clean your teeth; it tastes fresh, almost minty. Most of these plants look to me very much alike. Most of them are
thorny.

We ramble up and down the rocks of the ravine. I take notes, per Kesuma's command, as he explains things to me and as Leyan
collects various roots and barks and branches. It is hot and dry work. By the time we arrive back at the
orpul,
Leyan is loaded down, but I'm the one dripping with sweat.

The sun goes down quickly. I eat a meal of grilled goat ribs and drink the crazy-making tea, which, because I'm not Maasai
or because I'm crazy already, doesn't seem to change anything. A couple of Kesuma's friends gather some more of the green
branches on which they'd killed the goat--now parceled away inside its little meat hut, the hide and the cooked meat and the
raw meat that's been sitting out in the heat all day and the fat all bundled together, which seems to bother no one but me--and
make a sort of bower for me to sleep on. We all lie down in the dark, I in my sleeping bag, everyone else just flat out on
their backs. For a while they exchange stories and riddles, some of which Kesuma translates for me:

You are alone and slaughter a goat by yourself. Who is the first to taste the meat?

Your knife
.

Perhaps the crazy-making tea did do a little something for me because the moment I drift off on the none-too-comfy leaves,
I'm transported to some European city I've never seen before but that feels instantly like home, where Eric and I wander the
tree-lined streets discussing whether to take in an art exhibit or lunch--and then I'm awake again, it must be three or four
in the morning, and the men are all laughing and carrying on about something. I shut my eyes again and I'm in a bookstore,
reading the blurb on the back of a book about D's and my lost love, and D is there too, and he asks me how I could have not
known? And it's five thirty a.m., dawn, and I'm up for good, ready to climb that damned mountain and, if that doesn't kill
me, get back to Arusha and Kesuma's house and a deeply necessary shower.

The hike back up the mountain is just as onerous as I thought it would be; within five minutes after starting up the wending,
rocky path, I'm breathless and perspiring, and Kesuma has to fetch me a walking stick and get Elly to carry my backpack, in
addition to his own. I'm humiliated, but Elly is kind enough to chat and flirt with me--he's definitely flirting with me--and
keep up the conversation when I'm too winded to hold up my end. He talks about his jobs as a guide and a safari driver. In
a few days he's going to be driving Kesuma and me on an overnight safari to Ngorongoro Crater. He's also worked as a mechanic.

Which, as it turns out, is going to come in handy. Since about an hour into our drive home, past Monduli, we run out of gas.

The truck comes to a rattling halt on a dusty road lined with acacia trees. A ridge rises above us to the north. There seems
to be nothing in the vicinity resembling human civilization, but cars do occasionally pass. While Kesuma hitches a ride to
the next gas station, Elly endeavors to get the car running again, which involves, first off, siphoning a liter of gasoline
from the tank
with his mouth
. (Turns out the tank isn't empty, but the line inside doesn't go all the way to the bottom.) He puts this gasoline in an
oilcan that he straps to the hood of the car, running a line from it straight to the engine. If he's trying to impress me
with his derring-do, he's done it. If he's trying to make me very afraid of the perils of driving in Africa, well, he's done
that too. I give him my last bottle of water and promise to buy him a beer once we get back to Arusha.

"Least I can do," I say as he spits mouthfuls of water out onto the pavement.

"Sounds good to me." He quits retching long enough to give me a smile and a wink.

That night, we do get that beer. Kesuma insists on coming with us, to a pool hall down the main road between his house and
the Arusha town center, probably to protect me from any improper advances. He wears Western clothes, the only time I will
ever see him in such during my entire trip--a white button-down shirt and black jeans, which combined with his white beaded
jewelry and dark skin make him look awfully hip. A perfectly innocent time is had by all, but I feel Elly looking at me. I
don't mind a bit.

I'
M THE
hippest white woman on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater tonight. I'd be hipper still if I wasn't so delightfully aware of my
hipness, but we'll let that pass.

It's nearing sunset by the time we get to the campground where Kesuma, Elly, Leyan, and I will be setting up our tents, and
the place is fairly crowded, with touring Westerners, their Tanzanian cooks and guides, and the occasional zebra. We've had
a full day, having left Kesuma's house in Arusha some time after eight a.m. and driving first to Lake Manyara, a small park
in a rift valley, about an hour from town. It was my first safari, and while I didn't see any brilliant Battle at Kruger-style
kill scenarios--which is for the best, as I probably would have broken down like a little girl--I did thrill to the sights of
elephants knocking down trees, families of rooting warthogs, wallowing hippos, and fighting giraffes. This last spectacle
is a sight that, to quote yet another
Buffy
character, "puts fear in no one's hearts." Elly drove the Land Rover he'd rented for the trip, while Leyan and Kesuma and
I stood up on the back seats to look out the pop-up roof.

I'd expected the sort of safari you think about when you read travel magazines and watch the Discovery Channel, led by an
African guide in a pith helmet speaking into a microphone at a carload of tourists. "This is the African forest elephant.
The tusks are longer than those of the bush elephant, and point downward..." But this wasn't like that at all. This was like
a trip to the most amazing zoo in the world with a few friends. We pointed and whispered excitedly at elephants lumbering
through the forest, stared, amazed, at the enormous snake--eight feet long if it was an inch--that we caught sight of near the
picnic tables where we stopped for lunch, laughed and cooed over the tiny infant baboons in their mothers' arms. Afterward,
on to Ngorongoro. On the way, we stopped for beers for Elly and me, Cokes for Kesuma and Leyan, at an outdoor bar next to
a tiny open-air butcher shop, where halved and skinned goat carcasses were hung up against the wall like coats on hooks. Though
Kesuma can't drink, I took a picture of him holding my beer bottle, to much hilarity. We talked, I remember particularly,
about blue whales.

"Did you get good pictures of the elephants?" Kesuma took the Coke bottle metal cap between his teeth and cracked it off.
I squeaked in indignation.

"Oh
God,
I wish you wouldn't do that. It makes my flesh crawl." I pulled out my cheap little digital camera and flipped through some
of my shots, handed it over for Kesuma to see.

"They're beautiful, aren't they?"

"They really, really are."

"They're the biggest animals in the world, right?"

Elly took a swig off his second beer before jumping in. "No, they're not. Whales are bigger. Blue whales." I nodded my agreement.

"Whales?"

"Yeah. In the ocean. Like gigantic fish, but they're not fish, they're mammals."

"Bigger than
elephants?
No!" Kesuma made an exaggerated expression of amazement. He is so articulate and intelligent and well educated that it's
startling when, as now and then happens, I discover some small gap in his knowledge. I tend to feel like he's having me on.

"When you come to visit New York, I'll take you to the Museum of Natural History. They have a life-sized model of one. It's
enormous
. Like a hundred feet long or something."

"No! Really?"

We loaded up onto the truck after Elly and I had finished our two beers, and I dozed for the final forty minutes or so of
the drive to the campsite at the crater rim. Now we've arrived. Elly and Leyan put up my tent, simple, but an enormous thing
for one woman. Their own, for three men, is half the size. I ask them to switch, but Kesuma won't hear of it. Then Elly goes
off to cook our dinner--a fish for him and me, chicken and rice for Leyan and Kesuma. (Maasai, they tell me, don't eat fish.)
While we wait for dinner to be ready, we sit at long concrete tables at the dining enclosure, a sort of shed with a roof but
no walls. There are probably six or eight groups here at the campground with us. Kesuma and Leyan are the only Maasai. The
other tables are set with fine china, tablecloths. I wouldn't be surprised to see candles. The other tourists are served by
teams of cooks who set the plates down, then disappear into the cooking enclosure next door. Pasta, steak, sauteed chicken
breasts.

Elly, Leyan, Kesuma, and I gather around a plastic plate and some Tupperware. We eat with our fingers, pulling bits of flesh
from the fish's carcass, picking tiny bones out of our teeth, wiping our greasy hands on our pants legs. Elly and I drink
the two beers we brought with us from the bar. Afterward we carry our dishes back to the kitchen area, which Elly washes while,
as everyone else begins trickling out to tents and beds, Kesuma, Leyan, and I gather at our concrete table and play cards
with the I
NY deck I brought from home.

First Kesuma and Leyan teach me--well, try to teach me--a game called "lasty card." (For some reason people here have a tendency
to add
y
to the end of all kinds of English words. "Lasty" for last, "chesty" for chest, "lefty" for leftovers. I find it odd and
slightly grating.) I never really get my mind around lasty card. But I do impress them with my tremendous shuffling skills.
This is something Eric has told me to expect. Apparently no one else in the world can do the arching style of shuffling that
Americans do. I'm no good at it at all, though I learned at my grandmother's knee. (No matter how arthritic her hands got,
Granny could always shuffle a mean deck of cards, and she was, to my ten-year-old eyes anyway, a regular sharp when it came
to solitaire.) But though I'm no good, everyone grins in disbelief when I do it.

Then I try to teach poker, but I'm no better an instructor than I am a shuffler; Elly, who's by now joined us, is the only
one who can really master it.

We're the last folks in the dining area. We play probably three or four hands before Kesuma and Leyan decide to head to their
tent.

"You want to play a little more?" Elly asks. I'm pretty sure I know what's on his mind, but I pretend I don't.

"Sure. You think you could rustle us up another beer? Just one to share, maybe. And maybe a cigarette?" This is Julie tempering
recklessness with caution. One beer. One cigarette. A few friendly hands of five-card draw. Perhaps I'll venture into the
realm of stud poker, if I'm feeling crazy.

Elly does manage a beer. A heavy guy comes over, middle-aged and with a slightly leering look that would make me the tiniest
bit uncomfortable if I were to think much about it, which I don't. He asks me the usual questions--my name, where I'm from,
how old I am--then chats with Elly in Swahili before handing us the beer bottle, a cigarette from his crumpled pack, and a
lighter for us to borrow. Then he leaves, off to bed as well, one presumes. The flicker of flashlights illuminates only one
or two tents now; the only electric light on is here in the dining enclosure, with the exception of a couple of bare bulbs
over the doors of the bathrooms a few steps away. We crack open the beer and, passing it back and forth between us, along
with the cigarette, continue to play betless poker, mostly in silence, except when I occasionally explain at the end of each
hand who has won. It's possible that our knees touch from time to time. We play until eleven, when the generator goes out,
plunging us unexpectedly into darkness. I realize that the moon is strong, the stars unbelievable.