The man walks a few paces to sit heavily on a box of camping supplies a couple of yards off. Kesuma shakes his head in exasperation.
"He insists he doesn't have your phone. He thinks we're stupid because we're Maasai. He is the stupid one. Why didn't you
shout out? Then we could have just taken care of it then."
"I'm sorry. I know. I thought I could handle it myself."
"That's why we're here, to make sure you're okay. Okay?"
"Yeah. Okay."
Leyan comes back with a man in a ranger uniform, enormously tall, cheeks dotted with ritual scars, cheekbones high and eyes
hooded and inscrutable. An intimidating man at the best of times. The same conversation happens all over again, this time
mostly in Maa, the ranger looking at the two primary actors in this absurd plot out of a soap opera with evidently increasing
anger. Both the man who snuck into my tent twice in the night and I have increasingly miserable looks on our faces. Almost
everyone else in the campground has packed up and left, as the sun is getting high in the sky.
A ranger vehicle pulls up, and with a few grunts the ranger orders the man into the backseat. His fellow ranger drives off,
and then he, Elly, Kesuma, and I get into our own truck, while Leyan stays behind to do all the packing we've been too busy
with this nonsense to take care of. Elly drives while Kesuma keeps talking to the ranger, who, as we follow the other truck
down the road to the police station, becomes increasingly incensed. Both men's voices are raised now. Sometimes Elly tries
to get a word in edgewise. Occasionally, the ranger gestures angrily in my direction. I hear the word
mzungu
several times, a word I'd never minded but that now sounds vicious. Wait--is he angry with
me?
My face goes hot and I feel tears in my eyes. What are they saying about me? That I was causing trouble? Dammit, I'd wanted
to drop the whole thing. I didn't do anything wrong! Or if I did, they didn't know that. Unless Elly has told them? The only
thing that is keeping me from bursting into tears now is my anger at the unfairness of it all. I stare fixedly out the window
until we pull up at a low concrete building with a tin roof and Elly parks. Inside the ranger's station, a small room, there
are perhaps seven or eight men gathered, plus the guy from my tent. There is still more back-and-forth between all these men.
Occasionally one of them will ask me a question or two in English.
"What did he say to you the second time, when you woke to find him inside your tent?"
I struggle to be forthright.
This is not 1953, moron. What on earth do you have to be ashamed of?
"He got on top of me. He said he wanted to have sex with me."
Elly prodded. "He tried to rape you?"
"I don't want to use that word."
More talk, round and round. The questioning of the man gets more intense. It's clearly a cross-examination, and he's sweating
and uncertain and finally he says something, a sort of protest, and everyone in the room suddenly reacts violently, all of
them the same, throwing up their hands or rolling their heads to the sides with groans. At first I'm terrified--
what has he said about me?--
but Elly's shake of the head is accompanied by a covert grin in my direction, and Kesuma turns to me. "We'll get your phone.
He has it. He's still lying, but we know he has it."
"How? What did he say?"
"He got caught in a lie. Don't worry." He says a few more words to the frightening ranger, who waves us away. "We'll go down
to the park now. When we're finished seeing the wildlife, they'll have the phone for us."
And so that's what we do. We head back to the campground, pick up Leyan and our gear, and head down the road that winds along
the steep wall of the crater. It's by now probably ten thirty. I don't know for sure because my phone is gone.
I'm relieved to concentrate on something else after that fretful morning, and Ngorongoro is an extraordinary thing to concentrate
on. An enormous caldera, the site of a cataclysmic ancient volcanic explosion, it looks like an enormous bowl sunk into the
earth, lined in soft greens and yellows, cast with the shadows of the cottony clouds that get hung up on the high cliff walls
surrounding it, then free themselves to skitter across. The far rim is halfway obscured in the hazy distance; in the crater's
center an alkaline lake glints a pale blue. Even from the top of the rim, you can see that the place is fairly teeming with
animals, mostly water buffalo and wildebeests, ungulates of all varieties, all of them walking in the same direction, toward
the central lake, as though they're participating in some grand Disney musical extravaganza. We catch sight of families of
warthogs, adult couples with a child or two in tow, ridiculous creatures that somehow manage, when they kneel on their forelegs
to root in the grass, grace and even elegance. There are herds of zebras, gazelles, tall birds with gorgeous and strange orange
poms on their heads, ostriches, pairs of hyenas. I sink into a sort of blissed-out daze.
But I guess not everyone is so consumed. "I can't understand why he thought it was okay to go into a woman's tent. You're
sure you didn't say something to him?" Kesuma asks again.
I try to hide my irritation, and luckily Elly, who I'm beginning to think of as my advocate on this matter, intercedes. "They
barely talked at all. He was a crazy man."
"It makes me so mad. He thinks because we're Maasai we're uneducated and foolish. So that's why he chooses you to bother,
maybe." He turns around from the front seat to look me in the eyes. "African men aren't like Americans. They have different
ideas about women. You have to be careful you don't make them think things."
Elly glances back in the rearview mirror and gives me a quick small smile, half-amused and half-apologetic.
"It's terrible this had to happen to you." We're approaching a pond shared by a flock of flamingos and a clutch of dark, wallowing
hippos. We slow beside it to watch.
"It's okay. I kind of just want to enjoy the animals, you know?"
So that's what we did. We weaved our way around the circumference of the caldera. The highlight of our sightseeing was a group
of four young male lions, magnificent and indolent, walking in a tough-guy gang right up to our truck. As I stand with my
head and shoulders out the sunroof, one of the wonderful creatures pauses perhaps two feet away from the rear wheel of the
automobile as we sit idling, looking up with those great, golden eyes--looking at
me,
I can't help thinking--until I avert my gaze, more than a little afraid that he might just decide to climb up and take off
my arm for the insult of returning his stare. After spending some time circling our truck, lying in its shade, licking their
paws, just like house cats' only as big as pie plates, they turn their backs on us and all saunter off together. No wonder
they call it a pride of lions. "An arrogance of lions" just doesn't have the same ring.
By noon we've worked our way to the far end of the crater, where several picnic tables and a building with restrooms are set
along the banks of another large pond, another family of hippos snorting in the water, elephants moving through the glade
on the other side. Elly starts unloading our lunches while I use the bathroom.
But when I come back out, wiping wet hands on dirty khakis for lack of paper towels, a cluster of men has gathered around
our truck. I see that another truck has pulled up, this one shiny and new. There are Maasai in traditional dress, other men
in ranger uniforms. They glance at me as I walk past them, to a flat rock near the pond's edge, which I make a beeline for
rather than attempting to get in on the conversation. I don't want to know, I really don't. But as I pass, and as I sit on
the rock waiting for it to be over, I can't help hearing the words
mzungu
and
BlackBerry
and, I think, something that sounds like
sexual.
My ears ring as I stare out over the water.
After a few moments Elly comes over to me with my boxed lunch. He's grinning from ear to ear. "They got your phone!"
"Really?" I'd sort of picked up on that part. "How?"
"He told them he had it. He'd hidden it in the bathroom."
"What made him change his mind and tell?"
Elly laughs. "You don't mess with Maasai, man. They're crazy."
"Wait, you mean--"
"Yeah. Hit him until he changed his mind about the phone. Led them right to it."
"Oh, man." I cringe. The twinge of guilt, I'd be lying if I didn't say, doesn't entirely overwhelm another warmer feeling.
The smug little voice that whispers,
Good
.
"Hey, it's his fault. We tried to be nice."
"I bet he wishes he'd just given us the phone."
"His head wouldn't be hurting so much now. And he'd have a job. He'll never work for anybody here ever again."
The other men leave and, after a light lunch, so do we, continuing our circuit of the crater. We see yet more rooting warthogs
and a small herd of graceful, dark elephants grazing among a stand of widely spaced trees too lovely and composed to be properly
named a "forest." On our way out of the park, we return to the ranger station to retrieve my phone, unscratched and in perfect
working order, which is delivered with eloquent and extensive apologies.
That evening, back in Arusha, after a direly needed hot shower, I lie on my bed as insects buzz outside my window and Leyan
and some of the other young warriors who make money guarding Kesuma's front gate have wrestling matches on the red dirt drive.
In the kitchen, Suzie, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who lives next door and does chores for Kesuma, is making us
ugali
for dinner. A dish of cornmeal and greens, it's ubiquitous in Tanzania, served in every restaurant. Suzie has the wide smile
of a kid, but the direct confidence of a woman twice her age (quite a bit more than some I could name). Tonight after dinner
I'm going to practice English with her.
Tomorrow I'm off to Japan, for a couple of days of relaxation in a hotel with excellent room service and technologically advanced
toilets and rampant slippers and 600-thread-count sheets, before heading back to New York. I've pulled out the two great sheaves
of papers I've been compiling, for Eric and D, my twin journals of this trip, am flipping through them before mailing them
off tomorrow. The crabbed handwriting is erratic, stretching out and squeezing together, sometimes illegible with exhaustion
or emotion. For some reason, the writing has slowed down a bit since I've been in Tanzania. I'm not sure why, but it feels
like a good sign. There's something about this country so far away; I feel like a Thanksgiving parade float out in this dry,
high air, bobbing, seeking always to tear a tether loose from some keeper's grip. Still, in the aftermath of last night's--what
would you call it?--"incident," I find myself needing to talk, to work out what exactly happened, and to these neglected letters
is where I go.
When the two started out, each of them had wildly different tones--one solicitous and goofily gabby, the other fervid and extravagant.
I would write to the two men utterly divergent accounts of the same experience or place, versions designed to cater to their
two sensibilities, and I highlighted whatever a particular story had to do with what I wanted or didn't want from them. But
now the two versions seem to be coming together. Reading the two side by side is like shakily bringing a pair of binoculars
into focus. In the end, I relate to each what happened to me on the rim of Ngorongoro in almost exactly the same words.
Then I woke up in a couple of hours to find the guy basically on top of me. And for the longest time I didn't do anything,
didn't move a muscle. And you know why? I think I thought this was what I'd earned. For all that I've done or felt over the
last few years. In my half-awake animal brain, I deserved this. Even when I finally, finally got up the gumption to hit him,
I kept my voice to a whisper. Even when I made him leave, even when I told my story, even when I was in the ranger station
and the guy was being questioned, some little-girl piece of me figured this was my fault
.
But now I've turned around on that. I'm not proud to say that finding out that the man had been beaten to the ground for what
he'd done helped. It was like someone else could see that he was the one who deserved punishment. Not me, for once
.
Maasai warriors are some good friends to have
.
I fold Eric's pages into thirds, with some amount of effort. I can barely wedge them into the airmail envelope I bought for
the purpose from a shop in town. I write down our address on the front, seal it, and set it aside to be mailed tomorrow. I
begin to do the same with D's. "Julie?" Suzie comes to the door of my room, gesturing for me to come. "The
ugali
is ready."
"Great. I'll be right there."
I seal up the letter to be mailed. It's time to go home.
S
UZIE'S
T
ANZANIAN
U
GALI
1 small bunch michicha (actually, I have no idea what michicha is; you can use chard)
1 small bunch saro (ditto on this; use arugula, or a green with some bitterness)
1 small red onion
2 Roma tomatoes
About 1/4 cup vegetable oil
Salt to taste
About 6 cups water
3 cups
ugali
maize flour (or white cornmeal)
Thinly slice the greens, then thoroughly rinse both bunches together in a sieve. Shake off excess water and set aside.
Slice the onion into thin rings. Chunk the tomatoes.
Light a single-burner kerosene stove, or alternatively, your stovetop, to high, and set a largish saucepan atop it. Throw
in the onions and a healthy glug of vegetable oil. I said a quarter cup in the ingredient list, but it's really your call.
Cook the onions over high heat, stirring often, until good and golden brown, almost heading into burned territory. Add the
tomatoes and continue cooking on high heat until they melt into a sauce. Salt to taste.