by Catherine Watson

To the end of his days, my father insisted that my travels were nothing more than “escapism.” Whenever I said I was going somewhere alone, he accused me of running away, of being “avoidant.” It didn’t matter whether it was Europe or the movies.

“What is wrong with you?” he once snarled at me on the eve of a trip. It must have been the long one to South America, when I expected to be gone a year. A year without income! He was appalled.  “What makes you want to do this?”

The answer was so obvious, I almost laughed. My longing for the world began before his rages did, when things were good between us, when I first knew him. He was the person who gave me the wanderlust he claimed to despise.

I’d been born while he was away in the war — stationed in England before the invasion of Europe and in France afterward, where he lived with other medical officers in a chateau near Paris, playing gin rummy between shifts and keeping track of the score on the elegant, abandoned walls.

I knew about France before I knew about him, because the person that everyone else called “Daddy” had sent me a present from there: three French dolls that came in the mail. They were, I know now, what Frenchmen called Apache dancers or, more likely, Parisian whores — strange gifts for a child, but he was new to fatherhood.

I don’t remember playing with them, but I remember how they looked in their red, white and blue clothes – striped t-shirts, side-slit skirts, little neckerchiefs and berets. They had flouncy hair and long eyelashes, curvy lips and dangling cigarettes; the tallest had a little black spot painted on her cheek.

The last time I saw them, they were  wrapped in tissue in a drawer in my grandmother’s guest room, the same special drawer where she kept something else I coveted — the white lace fan she had carried when she married my grandfather, the fan I pretended I’d carry at my own wedding someday.

I was nearly three by the time my father followed the French dolls home. He spent the next year getting acquainted with his little girl and, whether he meant to or not, acquainting me with the world.

That year, the year before my brother was born, we had a daily ritual — what he called a “tete-a-tete,” my first French words. We would sit at my red play table in the basement and divide a single, green-glass bottle of Coca-Cola into tiny mugs the size of shot glasses. He poured, we clinked mugs, we drank. And he told me war stories.

During one tete-a-tete, my mother and grandmother were upstairs baking sugar cookies — the big, plump, chewy kind my father had longed for during the war. My grandmother cut them out the way she cut baking-powder biscuits, with a drinking glass whose edge she dipped in flour; the results were always round.

My father told me to stay put and disappeared upstairs. He came back a long time later, bringing still-warm sugar cookies he had cut out himself. They weren’t round. If I could guess what the shapes were, he promised, I could eat them.

The first was easy:  a butterfly.  The next was harder, but I knew that one too: the Foshay Tower, the first skyscraper in Minneapolis; my grandfather had taken me to see it. The last cookie was another tower, the curvy one that Life magazine showed nearly every week, the one where Daddy was.

“Paris,” I said. “Eiffel Tower!” I remember feeling proud because I knew it and because he was pleased.

That is how it should have gone on — a daughter growing up happy, the pride and joy of her wise, funny, interesting, doting father. But that is not what happened. Our family illness is depression, and it began to claim him while I was still in childhood.  There were no good drugs then, and he wouldn’t have admitted that he needed them, even if there had been.

Instead, he medicated himself the old-fashioned way, with three six-packs of beer a night, while he sat at the kitchen table and worked on his stamp collection.  “You can’t be an alcoholic,” he told us often, “if all you drink is beer.”

My younger siblings learned quickly not to walk through the kitchen after supper. I never caught on. Most nights, I’d drop by, hoping to talk. And most nights, from the time I was 12 or 13 until I moved away, we fought. Or rather he fought, and I stood, backed up against the refrigerator, and took it. He used words exquisitely, and late at night, when he turned them on me, he used them like switchblades. I have thought often that if I had to choose a form of victimization, I would have preferred to be beaten with sticks.

These are a few of knives my father threw at me.  “You’re a fake. Someday they’ll all find out you’re a fake.” “You’re mentally lazy.” “Neurotic.” “Freak.” “I don’t care if I sacrifice my entire relationship with you, as long as it makes you a better person.”

And finally this one, “You are unloving, unlovely and unloved.” He said that one night when I was in high school. Ah, how the man could carve a phrase. That line alone would have earned my father an A in my rhetoric class. Shakespeare couldn’t have said it better.

What appalls me now is not what my father said, or the fact that he said such things over and over and over, night after night after night. What appalls me is that I believed him. He had always been my hero –   the man I thought knew everything, so I believed that he knew the truth about me.

Why did I keep trying? Why did I keep going to him, keep asking for his help with algebra, with German, with English themes?  Denial is too easy an answer. It felt more like hope — that maybe the next time it would be different.

Once, years after I’d left home, I was crossing a plaza in a Mexican town when I saw a man punch his dog so hard in the ribs that I thought its chest would cave in. I expected the dog to collapse in pain, to die or at least run. But instead it crept closer to him, cringing, wagging its tail, trying to lick his hand, apologizing, seeking comfort from the very man that hurt it — as if it had deserved the blow. I understood that dog.

Four decades after our last tete-a-tete, I sat by my father’s hospital bed, knowing he was never going to leave it, and struggled to find something safe to talk about. By then, I was a professional traveler who had been all over the world — and in Paris so often that I no longer kept count.   Writing about trips was how I earned my living, and I’d heard from others that my father was proud of my work. But that still didn’t mean trips were safe topics.

What I wanted to talk about was even less safe. I wanted to ask him why I had made him so angry, so often, for so long. Why he had criticized everything I did, everything I said or wrote, how I walked, even how I breathed. It was too late, of course. Even if he had known the answers, he couldn’t have given them now. He lay inert, his eyes shut. I didn’t know whether he would even hear me.

I reached farther back and hit an old, sweet memory. “Do you remember the French dolls?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

My father startled me.  “Yes,” he murmured, his voice coarse and distant, as if he hadn’t intended to use it again. “Do you still have them?”

“No,” I said, amazed that he thought I might. “I think they got played with” — the family euphemism for what happened when younger kids got hold of older kids’ things.

But what had become of them didn’t matter. Merely mentioning the dolls had conjured them up. They reappeared like sparkling ghosts in that sterile gray room — fresh as perfume, brand-new and brightly painted.

I knew my father was seeing them again too, as clearly as he had when he wrapped them in brown paper and addressed the package to the daughter he had never met. That was back when his own war was over, and before our war began.

by Eliot Stein

“Lake Como touches the limit of the permissibly picturesque; but Atitlán is Como with the additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It is really too much of a good thing.”

— Aldus Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay, 1934

Where do we come from?

Huxley may not have realized it at the time, but when he traded in Italy for Guatemala and waxed lyrical about Lake Atitlán, he virtually founded the country’s tourism department. Seventy-five years later, you find Huxley’s rapture on a pamphlet, check out of Italy and head to Atitlán to follow his footsteps. After two years of watching well-heeled singles sashay down cobblestone sheets in Sardinia, you’re anxious to assimilate into a less modish Latin reality and grow the kind of coarse mustache that doesn’t come from sipping frothy cappuccinos. Plus, you’re looking for spiritual enlightenment.

Things don’t start off smoothly. You’re the only passenger aboard a ferry that tears across the lake before downshifting to a hum at the San Marcos La Laguna dock. Looking around, you fear you’ve discovered a serene hunter-gatherer utopia and shattered it with your high-octane arrival. Farmers drop their wooden hoes and eye you from under tan sombreros. Fishermen brace against the sides of their handmade cedar canoes as their hand-held lines bounce uncontrollably in your ferry’s wake. Nude women washing their linens and bodies by the bank hurriedly cover themselves. You wish Cortés’ moral compass had been as good as his maps.

Who are we?

Sardinia may be marooned in the Mediterranean, but Guatemala is marooned in the Maya civilization. Shoehorned at the northern tip of Central America, the country remains gripped in its pre-Hispanic past. With roughly 60 percent of Guatemala’s 13 million people of Maya descent, the country boasts the most distinct indigenous identity in the western hemisphere and, if Huxley is to be believed, “the most beautiful lake in the world.” He has a strong case: Atitlán’s translucent blue pool stretches 130 square kilometers and is hammocked by three towering volcanoes. Mountain peaks poke their heads above the clouds, many hovering over avocado trees and corn fields that cling for life as they climb the crags. Add thirteen subsistence-based indigenous communities ringing the lake’s lip and streets that often lose their asphalt and Atitlán is a shimmering metaphor for Guatemala itself: moody topography, disjointed infrastructure and a crushing convergence of beauty and poverty.

San Marcos’ dock doesn’t inspire confidence. The ferry drops you at the end of a wooden jetty missing several key planks that force you to hopscotch across. It’s the kind of welcome mat that discourages suitcases and promotes short visits. You wonder if Huxley secretly wanted the lake for himself.

Guatemala’s rainy season floods the narrow dirt trail up the bank into a frijole paste each afternoon. You trudge between rows of mango, banana and jocote trees on your way into town. Indigenous women in hand-stitched, ankle-length huipil skirts breeze past you while balancing baskets of plantains on their heads. Barefoot mocha-coloured children chase free-range roosters around coffee plants. You approach a sunburned gringo peddling animal masks and marijuana pipes carved to resemble Maya deities to a pair of dreadlocked Europeans draped in sarong skirts.

“Democracy has so changed our yin-yang,” says the first woman to her shopping partner, who’s admiring a single-hit bowl. “I mean, look at ancient Egypt. Back then women were pharaohs, now we’re bitches.”

“Totally.”

San Marcos is a curious mix of 2,500 Kaqchikel Indians and roughly a hundred bohemian peacenik ex-pats living in the shadow of the San Pedro volcano. Spiritual pilgrims have taken the village by storm in the past 20 years as rumors have spread that the pueblo is one of the world’s few vortex energy centers—on par with, say, Machu Picchu and the Egyptian pyramids. Soothing auras supposedly swirl here, that, once absorbed, enable the soul to experience a future of spiritual enlightenment. The unlikely mix results in a tense, segregated co-existence between the two divergent demographics. Up the bank, the Kaqchikel huddle in a tumbledown adobe and cinderblock village. Closer to the dock, yoga instructors, holistic healers and Reiki practitioners have snatched large swaths of real estate and planted organic orchards to buffer their new age colonies. Signs advertising “Shaluha-ka Cleansing,” “Ashram Acupuncture” and “How Crystals Can Unlock Your Inner Being” dot the trail, each pointing the way to Mecca for tourists convinced they are suffering various stages of physical or mental decomposition.

You continue up the trail past Las Pirámides del Ka, a lush garden compound fenced off from the public and studded with conical-shaped meditation centers. Inside, spiritual leaders in flowing, pearly robes verse participants in astral travel. Others ready students for the three-month “Sun Course”—which begins on each solar equinox and culminates with 40 days of fasting in complete silence—all for just $2,770.

A P.A. system crackles a fervent appeal in the ancient sounds of Kaqchikel, tearing your curiosity from inner healing toward its source. When you emerge from the organic orchards into the indigenous pueblo’s centerpiece—a barren dirt plaza surrounding a modern stone church—you realize the sounds are religious exhortations in a town where Spanish is very much a second language.

You take note: away from the month-long “Moon Courses” and “Tarot Treatments,” San Marcos’ Kaqchikel core seems an unlikely source to ooze some of the planet’s most soothing, swirling vibes. Maya men bend forward to support heavy satchels of firewood strapped around their foreheads; women use both hands to swat the flies from their faces and two pair of stray dogs violently hump the bejesus out of each other by the church. You wonder if vortex energy is selective.

A shirtless boy makes a b-line for you and your suitcase. He flashes a broad smile although his slight frame and protruding belly suggest malnutrition.

“Hey dude, yo soy guia,” he says, offering to take you to a hotel. You’re not accustomed to being called “dude” when not wearing a leather jacket or carrying a surfboard, but you agree, averting your eyes from his ripped jeans and the shoes he outgrew several years ago. He takes you back through the gringo trail to El Paco Real, a sprinkling of huts thatched with shaggy palm leaves reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe. You remember that 70% of Guatemalans scrape by on less than $2 a day and that an average family of four barely makes $250 a month. You suppose seeing the local economic misery helps edify your spirit (which is why you’re here in the first place, right?) But your upscale B&B offers the best of both worlds for the tourist looking to cultivate their awareness: being right next to the heartbreaking poverty, but not in it.

You tip your guia generously, knowing that he and his family are now that much closer to not having to fast for 40 days.

Where are we going?

Your siesta is cut short by the punchy Bronx accent of a woman in the adjoining room raving about the hotel restaurant’s lobster bisque dinner.

“But Fran, you know sodium blocks my chakras!” snaps another female voice in a deep, smoky hack. You call her Sherry and imagine she’s seated in the lotus position puffing a Pall Mall. You don’t know what chakras are, but you don’t want them blocked and decide to eat elsewhere.

Outside, you follow the only glimmer of discernable electricity up to the Kaqchikel village where you notice a squat tin roof restaurant with bamboo trim: Los Abrazos.

Inside, an elderly Maya woman sits glued to a black and white television in an empty dining room. You lean in, asking “¿Está abierto?” The woman stands, raising her hunched shoulders and braided hair, smiling, “Claro que si!”

A single flickering light bulb shows three bench seats, each molded from clay, dyed Earthy tones and topped with adobe heads shaped like an eagle, a condor and a black Rastafarian lady with dangling dreadlocks. You sidestep a few dogs passed out on the cement floor and sit between the eagle and the condor. Your host introduces herself as Antoña and explains that the only item available for dinner is brick oven pizza, which seems about as likely in rural Guatemala as a Rastafarian. You order the pizza mixta and ask for the bathroom as Antoña turns, shouting orders in a faraway language.

Just then, a young woman in a purple huipil skirt and matching headdress shuffles in from behind a curtain, her eyes never leaving the ground. She leads you outside past a washing basin to a cinderblock cubicle. You reach to speak to her but she breaks the silence, apologizing for the bathroom’s lack of electricity. You close the door and battle Montezuma in the dark.

The girl is waiting for you in the dining room when you return. You compliment her huipil, noting the geometric pattern is different than those you’ve seen in San Marcos. She explains that huipils differ between villages, with each pueblo stitching its own motif like a signature. She’s from Huehuetenango, a remote Jakaltek-speaking town perched in Guatemala’s western highlands, and she’s come to work against her family’s will as an ayudante—a sort of live-in maid.

“My father doesn’t want me working for an Evangelical,” she says, nodding in Antoña’s direction. “But we need the money.”

She starts explaining how difficult it was to leave her family and learn both Kaqchickel and Spanish, but you’re distracted by the glimmering flashes coming from her mouth. In Maya tradition, even those with perfect dental structure often place copper fillings on their teeth to radiate light in honor of Totik, the sun god. You’re busy admiring the girl’s pagan bling when another Kaqchickel command from the kitchen sends her scurrying out the door.

Antoña places your dinner on the table and stands over you expectantly. You cut off a sliver and chew, slowly considering it. “Muy bueno!” you lie, inviting her to join you. She sits across the table, the earthquake lines on her face erupting with each flicker of the light.

Her albino cat inches toward you between bites, leaning its front paws on the table and eyeing your pizza mixta. Antoña barks commands in the animal’s direction before whizzing a barrage of garlic cloves by your ear, pelting the cat in the face.

“So you can eat in peace,” she explains. You ask what she yelled to the cat.

“It’s in Kaqchickel, my husband’s language.”

Despite the Conquistadors’ best efforts, twenty-eight Maya languages survive in Guatemala. While residents in San Marcos and neighboring Santa Cruz speak Kaqchickel, those in San Pedro—a 15-minute lanchia ride away—speak Tz-utujil. It’s a tangled cultural patchwork, though modern customs now act like a seamstress: Maya women must learn their husband’s language upon marriage, just as Antoña did when she arrived in San Marcos from her K’iche village. Years after her husband’s death, she still reverts to his language to control her few possessions: two dormant dogs, an albino cat and an ayudante.

You learn that this is the second incarnation of Los Abrazos. Four years ago, an especially active rainy season carried the first version into the lake. Having lost not only her business but also her home, Antoña sought financial assistance from the only people in San Marcos who could afford to help her: the gringo altruists.

“They all refused,” she says. “It took my five sons and a kind friend two years of work, but I now have a house again, praise Jesus.”

Jesus and His father are important spices in your dinner. Antoña peppers them into her responses when asked about such things as what people in San Marcos eat (both meat and fish, thanks be to God), whether she has grandchildren (two, praise the Lord) and why the Swine Flu had yet to penetrate the lake (it’s God’s will, though she has stocked enough lemons to make tea for her family and friends, just in case).

Like all of Central America, Guatemala is built atop a rumbling fault line. In the midst of a bloody 30-year civil war, an especially violent shake decimated the country in 1976, leaving 100,000 Guatemalans injured or dead and one million homeless. In the aftershock of the devastation, the only group willing to shell out enough paper to rebuild the country was U.S.-based Evangelicals, who also seized the opportunity to convert the campesinos.

This Evangelical conversion was further accelerated by American political interests. Fearful that Guatemala’s Catholic church was riddled with guerilla sympathizers and socialist supporters, the U.S. government backed strong-armed dictators, such as Rios Montt. An ardent Evangelical, Montt’s “Frijoles y Fusiles” (“beans and guns”) campaign lasted from 1982-1983, during which time Washington slipped him millions of dollars to form state-sponsored death squads that pitted Mayas sects against each other—just as the Conquistadors had done centuries earlier. In two years, the U.S.-backed regime burned hundreds of villages to the ground, beheaded numerous Catholic priests and murdered 180,000 people. When America’s foreign policy was questioned, Reagan stated that Montt was “getting a bum rap.”

Today, Guatemala is the most Evangelic country in Latin America (with an estimated 40% of the population practicing) and claims more new converts every year than anywhere else in the world. All this helps explain several questions that have been bothering you: 1) Why does San Marcos’ church need to hold four services a day and accompany each with a crackling play-by-play on a P.A. system? 2) Why were there eight Christ-related images in your hotel room last night (including a picture of a stuffed teddy bear straddling the keys of a grand piano with a speech bubble drawn from his mouth reading, “Dios es mi inspiración.”)? and 3) How did this elderly K’iche woman forget about the eternal ch’ul soul her ancestors believed guarded all Mayas and become firmly convinced that her obedient Jakaltek ayudante is destined to burn in hell—vortex energy or not?

You thank your host with a handshake, hurdle her dormant dogs and bid her adios.

The gringo trail is now a blackout. Squinting, you make out a sign reading “Unite Your Inner Harmony—Now, Forever.” A shadow slowly comes toward you. It’s the ayudante, weighed down by an armful of firewood destined to burn in her keeper’s brick oven. You approach, asking if there’s anything you can do. She shakes her head no.

You then ask, “How do you say ‘hopefully I’ll see you tomorrow’ in your language?”

“You can’t,” she says. “In Jakaltek culture, we don’t believe people are destined for anything. There’s no future tense.”

Where do we come from (revisited)?

You come to realize that modern travel, like spirituality, is less about treading your own path to new frontiers than it is putting your faith in others, trusting that—like good shepherds—they’ll lead you to a horizon so pleasant that you feel compelled to tell the masses. And in heeding this journey to the promised land, you not only better yourself, but help those around you. Yet, you’ve followed Huxley’s word only to cringe at what San Marcos has become. You desperately want this pueblo to be different, to be something that it’s not. But so has everyone else that has ever looked like you who has beaten you here.

You breathe deeply and make peace with the fact that you so can’t change that.

by Kevin McCaughey

I brought my ukulele on our Caribbean cruise.  Every afternoon my mother and I sang old standards in the cabin, while my father reclined on his bed, reading Robert Ludlum and wagging the book to the beat when we got to a rousing number like “Five-Foot Two.”

It was December of 2002, and my mother was seventy-four.  She had—and still has—a fine singing voice.

What she couldn’t do was a lot of other things.  She had broken her leg not long before, so walking any distance was tough.  Adult-onset diabetes denied her the sweets she adored.  Worst of all, she forgot things.  If we stopped for the day at an island, the experience was gone by dinnertime.  She couldn’t even follow conversations.  Her way of staking a claim in them was to interject questions, often the same questions, again and again.

This was the reason for the daily uke sessions on our cruise.  When she and I sang—my sister Christy sometimes joining in, and Dad letting his toe keep beat—my mother was the centerpiece.  She was the star.  When I sang a melody she fell right into harmony.  The old tunes tapped something deep inside her memory, and the words and melodies welled up to the surface.

Cole Porter’s “True Love” was our best number—my Mom’s harmony crisp and pretty, the words simple and easy to recall.  A forty-year-old guy, his Mom, and a ukulele—it sounded like pretty good material for the cruise Talent Show.  Kind of funny, but something to remember.  So we auditioned.

A talent show is a strange thing.  The less talent, the more show.

At our 11:00 a.m. audition, there were ten or so of us in the front row of the 500-seat Top Hat Lounge, looking up at the stage where, in the evenings, stars with nearly familiar names actually performed.

The first to audition was an elderly crooner in shorts and tube socks who sang “You Belong to My Heart,” acappella, until he broke down into a visceral coughing fit.

My mom leaned toward me, “Which song are we singing?”

“‘True Love’,” I said.  We had been it practicing all week.

Next on stage was Dennis, a bald 68-year-old who had the sheepish look of a man caught at the pornography rack—a fitting expression, for someone determined to subject the audience to unaccompanied drums.  He pounded “Wipe Out,” for three minutes, then he stopped and leaned forward, very low.  We thought it was a bow and moved to clap, but he’d only dropped a stick.  He carried on for another 2:20.

My sister asked, without sarcasm, “Do you think he’s developmentally disabled?”

My mother said, “Our song isn’t so long, is it?”

Then came Don from San Antonio.  He promised us a tall tale.  In it, a hunter recounts the killing of all sorts of dangerous creatures, and ends with the puzzling punch line: “And it wasn’t a good day for hunting.”

“What did that mean?” my mother asked.

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

So far: a coughing crooner, a drummer, a tall-taler.  That’s talent show stuff.

It got even better when the next talent, Rina Gonzalez, announced she would sing that lamentably undying luxury-liner-related ballad, “My Heart Goes On.”

Rina held the mic under her chin, head down, a scrunched lyric sheet in her hand.  Her denim skirt was little, and so her Pinocchio legs below.  Her hair was frizzy, parted, and fall-away, like Kenny G’s.  Despite the girlish look, she was probably thirty.

The band on stage played an intro.

My mom leaned to me: “How does our song begin?”

“It’s ‘True Love,’ Mom. One chord.  Then, we sing,  ‘I give to you and you give to me.’”  Showing irritation never made things any better with my mom.   She was perfectly aware of the problem.  And it was even more heartbreaking when she acknowledged it by saying, “I have no mind left.”

Not far from me, Rina’s husband had perched a video camera on a seatback.  He taped her, adoringly, as she wavered on and off the notes.

Rina was the peak of talent parody.  Well, yes, there was a man who played “Oh, Susannah” on a harmonica the size of two Chiclets, a church woman doing “Amazing Grace,” but neither were overly long or overly bad.  And Laurina, a pretty young Dallas girl, was simply too good, belting out her power-country-pop-ballad so that my ears nearly stung.

The only auditioners left were we McCaugheys and Eva.  I didn’t want Eva to crack.  I’d met her earlier in the elevator.  “That a ukulele?” she’d asked.  The correct identification of a uke always predisposes me to friendship.  She was a single mom and a beginning classical guitarist who was attempting her first performance.

Sitting on stage now, Eva did a longish 19^th-century Spanish piece, in which she took her time changing the fingerings, but when she segued into “Greensleeves,” she played without flubs.

I tried to help my mother up the steps at the side of the stage, but she liked to do things herself, and the arm that I gave her was purely cautionary.

We stood behind a single microphone stand.  And I strummed the first chord.  We sang: I give to you and you give to me.

Mom sang right along with me.  The same notes.  No harmony.  The entire song went this way.

We finished and headed down the steps at the side of the stage.  “Do I sing harmony?” she asked.  “I usually sing harmony, don’t I?”  We’d done the song fifty times and never without harmony.  That’s what I want to say.  But she was already mortified.   “How could I do that?” She was still shaking her head as we rode the elevator.

“You sounded fine,” my father said.

“I have no mind left,” she said.

It was rare that she acknowledged the memory problem.  But I knew that each episode of forgetfulness—no matter how frequent—was terrifying.

Back in our stateroom, alone with my sister, Christy sister asked me, “What makes people do these things.  Play the drums or sing ‘My Heart Goes On’?”

It was the thing I’d been thinking about all morning.  What kind of weird need to be noticed drives the talentless, the bungling, and the afraid onto a stage?  I was also thinking, what if they are thinking the same, in their cabins saying, “What about that non-harmonizing ukulele guy and his mom?  What’s with that?”

Whatever the case, every one of us passed the audition.  The real thing, showtime, came at 3:00 p.m. the very same day.  The lights in the Top Hat lounge went down, and the spotlights came up.  Two hundred cruisers filled the lounge.  Waiters from Romania and the Philippines prowled the aisles in pink coats, balancing trays on their palms.

On stage a pianist, bassist, and drummer wore bow ties.  The Cruise Director, who had not been at auditions, said we were one of the most talented groups he’d seen.

Things went well for a while.

The crooner only coughed once.  The drummer didn’t drop his sticks.   The tall-taler told his tale just as before, word for enigmatic word, and several of the audience, all seated together—probably his family—hooted with laughter.

Meanwhile, my mother fretted, whispered questions: “How do we start?”  “Do we repeat the last line twice?”  “I always sing harmony, right?”

Laurina from Dallas came on in a glittery red dress that showed curves all the way to her ankles.  She was all confidence and power.

I felt sorry for Eva, having to follow that.  She sat on a stool, positioned her fingers on the fretboard of her guitar.  I could see them shaking.  The Spanish piece seemed endless—too slow, too unfamiliar.  Do “Greensleeves,” I thought.  She had nailed it in practice.  But when at last it came, she got snagged on a chord.  Her fingers, in front of all these people, couldn’t cover it.  Keep going.  Don’t stop.  But she stopped.  She went back.  And she flubbed it again.  Here she stopped altogether and announced, “I’m going to go back and do that part again.”

The audience didn’t laugh, didn’t applaud, didn’t encourage.  No one made a sound.

We sat and took it, like a beating.  Two hundred of us.  Eva started again gathered momentum—and flubbed the chord.

As she came off the stage and passed me, she said.  “That was the worst.”  I wanted to tell her, No, it wasn’t, but it was like when my mother said, “I have no mind left.”  What do you say to that?

My eyes followed her into her seat where she went into the arms of her parents and her kids.  They held her.  In fact, the kids seemed elated—Mommy was up there.

That made me feel better.  I put my hand on my mother’s.  I could see she was thinking hard.  Not hearing any of these performers.  Just trying to remember what song we were going to do, the first words, the harmony…

Rina Gonzalez walked onto the stage.  I couldn’t take an excruciating version of “My Heart Goes On,” not after Eva.  Not after seeing how much not screwing up mattered to my mother.

But this time Rina was bolder.  There were sparkles in her hair.  She sang out hitting the notes—well, close enough—with her head held high.  I saw the light of her husband’s video camera just behind me.

That is the closest I have ever come to enjoying that song.

When she finished, the London Cruise Director asked, “Do you sing often?”

“No,” Rina said.

“Er, so why did you do this?”

The question my sister and I had been asking!  Why?

“My husband asked me to,” Rina said.  “He’s my strength, my life.”

That was the truth.  Simple as that.  Talent show people—maybe not all, but most—go on stage for others.  Yes, our performances—cliché, bumbling, comical—are acts, but not really of the entertainment variety.  They are imperfect expressions of love.  But who says love has to be perfect?  The important thing is that these acts are a way of staking a claim on memory, rather than just waiting for one to turn up.

I have a cassette recording of that talent show.  My mother and I are quiet on the tape, just two voices harmonizing to a ukulele.  It sounds good.

My mother remembers.  She doesn’t remember islands or sunsets, none of that part of travel.  But she knows we performed together.  That memory is solid, stuck.  For me too.

These acts go both directions.  As the song says,

…I give to me and you give to me…

by Mohezin Tejani

This morning, perched on a wooden chair in my teeming tropical garden in northern Thailand, I am writing about Africa, the continent that still holds a firm grip on me. The sun’s warmth, after the heavy dawn shower, has brought plants and insects to life. Brown centipedes and gray snails are crawling towards sun-drenched places where they can bask undisturbed. The bird-of-paradise flowers are reaching out to the light. I recall this flower well from childhood games in Uganda—six-year-old African and Asian boys flicking the sticky yellow pollen stems onto each other’s starched white school shirts, knowing that our mothers would give us a verbal or physical thrashing for stains that would take days to wash off. Today, I walk over to the Thai version of this same flower to take a long deep smell to remind me of the African savannah. It is still the same after all these years; the scent beams me across the Bay of Bengal, over the Indian Ocean, and onto the red clay soil of Uganda.

Next to the flower is the tun-tun tree clustered into bunches of tiny, ripe yellow-green balls of fruit that pop into your mouth straight from the tree and explode with a sourness that is as sharp as raw tamarind. . . . On Sunday market days as a young boy, with my tiny hand wrapped around my father’s middle finger, I plead with him to buy me a bagful of this very same fruit for my afternoon snack. . . . Today, I plop a few in my mouth to remember the taste of Kampala and my departed father’s face. The tangy aftertaste takes me back to other long-lost tropical fruits from back home—or at least what was once home. That was until the madman Idi Amin kicked out all 80,000 of us Indians.

I still crave jambura, an inch-long black fruit with a tiny hole at the top and a green seed inside. It remains top of my list of lost fruits, especially since I haven’t tasted it for over thirty years now. I call it by its Swahili name because, having looked for it in vain during my travels through Latin America, Asia, and the English-speaking world, I have yet to find out what it is called in other languages. Like tun-tun, it grows in bunches on a large leafy tree. When ripe and black, it is sweet and juicy. When green or pink and still raw, it tastes sour, astringent, and leaves a purple stain on the tongue that can take days to fade away.

Second on my list of missed fruits is kajoo—the multicolored fruit that the cashew nut comes from. Just below this pear-shaped fruit, perched as though it were a cup-like handle, is the cashew nut, which when roasted serves as a wildly popular snack in many parts of the world. However, the fruit itself—a blend of bright reds, greens, and yellows merging on the outer skin—has chewy yellow flesh inside, and is extremely acidic and tangy with very little juice. The aftertaste leaves the tongue quite dry, almost numb with that same feeling one gets upon leaving the dentist’s office after a few rounds of Novocain. As Ugandan boys, during our summer escapades—weekend picnics to Entebbe or fishing trips to Kazi—we’d bring along bagfuls of this readily available fruit to stuff ourselves with till our tongues were as dry as the Sahara, always discarding the nut as worthless. In Thailand it’s easy to find raw cashew nuts, or roasted ones in vacuum-sealed bags in the supermarkets, but I have yet to come upon the actual fruit itself.

Africa, it seems, is still deep within me, despite thirty years of globetrotting.

Give me the smell of a childhood flower, the taste of a forgotten fruit, and Zap! I am back to the land of my birth, back to the patch of grass we called our soccer field, and the constant drone of cicadas in the banyan trees.

In my humid garden in the village of Mae Rim, I walk back to my laptop to resume writing. My neighbors John and Monika knock at the front door with two other friends, Eric and Ang. They want me to join them for a day trip to the Pong Khaw hot springs, about thirty kilometers into the jungles of Chiang Mai. John, built like Schwarzenegger, is a Puerto Rican ex-Marine who now thinks of Thailand as his new home. Monika is a stocky, black-haired Hungarian gypsy, madly in love with her dogs. Eric, from New Jersey, is a teacher at a Thai secondary school, which is where he met Ang, his gorgeous honey-skinned Chinese-Thai girlfriend from Lanta Island in the south. With me, the Ismaili Muslim writer, we have ourselves a veritable and eclectic group of wanderers off to trek through the Lanna jungles.

Missing Africa always depresses me, so I decide to go along with them to break free of nostalgia’s black hole. Within the hour, all of us pile into John and Monika’s 1950s Land Rover, along with their two dogs, Matzo and Luna.

On the bumpy dirt road, I enjoy speaking with John, Eric, and Ang, each in their own language. I don’t know any Hungarian, but Monika speaks great English in her gypsy accent. The dogs, their heads poking out of the back windows on either side, love the breeze. In the countryside we climb the lime-green terraced paddy fields that are ready for harvest. In the valleys, the clunky Land Rover weaves through scattered Hmong and Burmese villages, as startled bystanders stare at these unannounced strangers of foreign lands.

My yearning for Africa is forgotten, replaced by multilingual chatter and the green scenery rolling by.

Two hours later we arrive at the hot springs, dusty and hungry. The resort has a compound with two large open-air sulfur pools bisected by a small creek. On the hillsides, water buffaloes graze at the edge of a heavy jungle. The place is deserted except for an orchestra of jungle insects and avian sonatas. As soon as we let them out, Matzo and Luna take off to chase the buffaloes.

At the reception area we find Tong, the Thai concierge. She laments that since we didn’t call ahead of our arrival, and because guests are few and far between during rainy season, she doesn’t have any Thai food prepared for us. We settle for fried noodles with eggs and some pre- packaged soup to tide us over.

For the next few hours we refresh ourselves in the hot sulfur pools and the cool creek, taking turns to teach Luna and Matzo how to swim in the shallow water. It’s their very first time bathing au natural in the outdoors. A hide-and-seek dance between Eric and Matzo, around a large mushroom shaped stone umbrella with four rocks for seats, has us all in stitches. Luna tries to pull off Ang’s sarong, bringing guffaws from us males that generate sneers from Monika and Ang. By the afternoon, we are ravenous again after all the swimming and running around. Tong scurries off to find fruit and fifteen minutes later returns with a bowlful of the usual seasonal offerings— lychees, mangosteens, and guavas. We wolf it all down in minutes until there is only one pear-like green and yellow fruit left at the bottom of the bowl that none of the others have ever seen before. But the shape jogs my memory.

“What fruit is this?” I ask Tong.

“Himalayan mango. Very sour,” she says.

I don’t recognize the Thai name but ask her to cut it up for me anyway. As soon as I see the yellow flesh inside, my heart skips a beat. I realize this is a yet-to-ripen kajoo. I devour half of it, letting the juice drip down my lips as if I was on a boys’ picnic back at Ripon Falls, the source of the river Nile. I am in heaven. Forgetting my manners, I pass it to Monika to taste. But she finds it way too tangy for her liking. I quickly polish off the rest.

My nostalgia for Africa is back, stronger than before. So I take to discussing Thai jungle fruits with Tong. She explains that kajoo season in the jungle ended just days ago, which is why she was only able to find an unripe one. For the umpteenth time in my life, I describe the jambura fruit to her, hoping against hope. Tong has no clue what fruit I am talking about. She says something in northern Thai to her assistant, who disappears into the jungle. I go over to Ang, whose English is very good, give her a vivid description of jambura, and ask her to translate verbatim.

Tong keeps shaking her head, still unable to identify the fruit. Eventually, a few minutes later, I give up on ever finding my beloved jambura.

Come closing time as we’re about to take off in the Land Rover, Tong’s assistant, gasping for breath, stops our departure, gesturing to a bowl in his hand.

Haa luuk wah, re plaw khap? he asks. “Is luuk wah the fruit you’re looking for?”

My eyes light up. My mouth is agape. Inside the bowl are a handful of jambura! For once I am speechless. Ecstatic, I leap out of the car and choose a few ripe ones. I feel the texture, smell the odor, peel off the top, and ever so slowly savor that old, old sensation of the juice slowly slithering down as if all of Africa is now in my throat.

The assistant passes the bowl to my friends who, again, find the taste not to their liking. I couldn’t care less. I am back in Uganda, on a dirt road across from my house, playing games with my childhood friends in a jambura tree. We are playing “tree-tag” among the high branches. One of us lets go a loud, squishy fart, causing everyone to double up in hysterics. I have a wide grin on my face.

John says it’s time to go. I hug Tong’s assistant, who was kind enough to climb the luuk wah tree in the jungle just to quench a thirst I have been carrying for thirty years. Putting the six remaining jambura in a plastic bag for me to eat on the road back, he wais to me.

“Stop at the temple in Mae Taeng on your way. There is a luuk wah tree there,” he yells as we take off.

I convince John to look for the temple, which we eventually find after asking directions from locals three times. A solitary young monk in his saffron robe is sitting on the steps of the old, golden-spired temple. I ask him in Thai to please take me to the luuk wah tree so I can remember what the African tree looked like. Unfazed by this total stranger with a most unusual request, he motions me to follow him.

I don’t know if he has understood me, but he leads me down to a water tank shrouded in trees. I follow him as he climbs onto a metal ladder leading to the flat top. Leaning over the tank is a huge branch covered in clusters of jambura. Most of them are pink and green, not yet fully ripe. He motions to me to take as many as I want. I break off a few ripe ones and share them with him as we sit on the concrete tank. I recount the childhood games I used to play in this same tree in Africa. He smiles and, talking for the first time, tells me that the English word for luuk wah is “mulberry.” I am astonished. I begin to tell him more about Uganda, but I hear John honking his horn at the temple entrance.

As we part, the monk tells me in a soft tone, “Right behind the Mae Rim Temple, there is a big luuk wah tree that has many more ripe ones.”

I wai him my thanks and get back in the Land Rover for the drive home.

The seeds of my African childhood are quietly bearing fruit in the jungles of Thailand.

* * *

Mo Tejani is a global Muslim gypsy who has been roaming the world for over four decades now. Exiled from Uganda during Idi Amin’s reign of terror in the 1970s, he was suddenly left homeless, with little sense of his own cultural identity. He spent the next forty years traveling through all five continents, working with the poor. He has taught world literature in Uganda, Canada, the United States, Thailand, Guatemala, and Ecuador. The first of his three-volume travel memoirs, A Chameleon’s Tale: True Stories of a Global Refugee, was a 2007 New York P.E.N. Book Award finalist. The India edition, re-titled Thank you, Idi Amin, is being published in 2010. Tejani is a regular on the Asian literary circuit. He has been called a “cross-cultural Kerouac,” and Tim Cahill says that reading his stories “is like eating popcorn: you can’t stop devouring them.” Visit his website at www.motejani.com.

by Darrin DuFord

Can two hundred tons of chili save a city?

Exciting events are not supposed to happen in the suburbs.  I mean, what would the neighbors think?

So I wondered what the neighbors thought as I cruised past their curtained living rooms while shell casings flew in front of my nose.  It was midnight and I was sitting in the back of a pickup truck between a two-man SWAT team that was blasting away at an insidious foreign invasion threatening to destroy New Orleans.

The invaders, from the lawless jungles of South America, are not aware of their transgressions.  That’s because they are large, furry rodents called nutria.  What’s worse, they did not choose to invade America; Americans brought them here.  Imported in the 1930s for their luxuriously soft coats, they were released from farms in southern Louisiana when the price of the fur was high.  Now that wearing rat has fallen out of vogue, the fur is almost worthless.  Millions of litters later, the creatures have been ravaging the wetlands that protect New Orleans from storm surges, munching up vegetation with their unsettlingly orange buckteeth and leaving nothing but mud behind.  The state now pays five dollars for each tail to encourage eradication — but not a penny for the fur — and has attracted few hunters.

More recently, some nutria, perhaps preferring a nicer neighborhood for raising their young, have moved into the burbs around New Orleans.  But instead of taking advantage of the well-funded school systems, the rodents, averaging twelve pounds apiece, have been chewing up and burrowing into banks of the city’s canals, destabilizing levee walls and disrupting drainage in a city that lies mostly under the level of the ever-eager Lake Ponchartrain.  Hurricane Katrina made the lake’s intentions clear.

If the nutria were left to do what they do best, America would not need another hurricane to undermine the levees.  The Jefferson Parish sheriff’s office, however, is not about to let that happen.  The truck I was jostling around in had prowled the same route many times before, including along the infamous Seventeenth Street Canal, where a breach during Katrina in 2005 had flooded most of downtown New Orleans.  “We’ve been shootin’ these canals since 1995,” Major Kerry Najolia, overseer of the nutria eradication effort, mentioned to me, not without pride, when he drove me to meet the SWAT team.

His Crown Vic now followed the pickup, along with another truck, the carcass cleanup crew, forming the three-vehicle caravan of death.  My shoes slipping on shell casings, I asked the baggy, camo-outfitted team what it’s like being paid to hunt.  “We’re just tryin’ to help out before something bad happens,” Officer Sparky answered, a clump of tobacco bulging inside his lip.  “They quick fellas, too.”  He spit into his makeshift spit cup, an empty bottle of Coke, while aiming a spotlight at the other side of the canal along West Esplinade Avenue, part of Jefferson Parish’s 300 miles of drainage waterways.  Sleeping strip malls and single-family homes trustingly overlooked both sides, while Officer Mark aimed his scoped Ruger .22 on the spotlight, searching for telltale damage above the waterline indicating what they call nutria condominiums.

We crept past a peaceful midnight scene of Americana — cul-de-sacs and backyard barbecue grills in the glaze of a light-bulb moon.  These were the kind of houses harboring baseball card collections and potpourri bowls and toasters that create images of the Virgin Mary.  It didn’t seem like a natural setting for squeezing off rounds.

Then the spotlight found the condominiums, networks of holes gouged into the canal bank, complete with a few pudgy balls of brownness lounging around as if moonlight nourished them.  Nutria, Myocaster coypus, champions of chowing down, losers of beauty contests.

Above them, brickfaced houses nuzzled up to the canal.  We were so close, I could see the curly metal trim around the doorbell buttons.  Mark signaled for the driver to stop.   “Yup, that’s a condominium,” Sparky remarked with unruffled inflection, as if he had said, “Yup, the train’s on time.”  The .22 reported a deceptively short pop.

I kept reflecting that it’s not the nutria’s fault.  They are just doing what nature intended, although nature never intended for them to do it on this continent.  Inhaling gunpowder smoke and watching the cleanup crew collect the vanquished with a garden rake (the action spotlighted like a circus act gone wrong), I could not help but ponder how the answer to the nutria invasion has come down to this.

There used to be another answer: our stomachs.  In 1998, in the wake of the fur market collapse, the state of Louisiana promoted the eating of nutria meat, which has more protein and less fat than beef.  Since nutria only eat vegetables and roots, their meat is clean and healthy, meat that chef Paul Prudhomme of K-Paul’s Restaurant began serving in his dishes of apple smoked nutria and nutria fricassee.  Loyola University professor Robert Thomas then organized Nutriafest, an event at which Louisiana chefs slugged it out to see who could serve the tastiest presentation of the plentiful meat: a locavore’s prize.

Such and idea is not surprising coming from a state whose gastronomic ingenuity considers turtle and alligator fair game for the stew pot.  Virgin toast or not, even New Orleans’ Holy Trinity is edible, thanks to the city having replaced the frustratingly metaphysical father/son/holy-ghost routine with the much more palatable communion of bell peppers, onions, and celery.

Confronted with an army of orange teeth, Louisiana had found a resolution that only Louisiana could deliver, a resolution that had grabbed me by my salivary glands and offered me a chance to serve my country as culinary patriot.

But not even Louisiana could deliver.  The palettes of restaurant patrons turned bland and trembling at the thought of eating a healthy wild animal (no growth hormones or veal cages!) that happened to come from the dishonorable rodent family, no matter how beneficial for the city and the bayou.

Sure, Cajun hunters from the nearby bayou still make home-simmered stews from freshly trapped “nutra-rats,” an understandable choice for a resourceful culture that sews up turduckens and throws mudbugs into a spicy boil.  (The insectile-looking mudbugs are better known as crawfish, now one of New Orleans’ most renowned offerings, even though crawfish are scavengers and eat dead matter that nutria won’t touch.)   But a few years after the nutria promotion started, restaurants dropped it from their menus.  Then the state cancelled the promotion.

Earlier in the day, I called chefs of several restaurants in New Orleans to see if they would be willing to bring back their smothered, smoked, and stuffed nutria.  While the chefs enjoyed chatting about cooking invasive species as they prepared for evening service (one even shared tales of experimenting with nutria back in his culinary school days), none said yes, most of them citing the insurmountable rodent stigma.  The critter non grata.

My quest then led me to a popular New Orleans cooking school (remaining anonymous at their request), where one instructor could not stop lustfully recounting her experiences with nutria tacos.  “They’re eating the state, so we should eat them.  By the way, nutria is great in chili too!” she beamed while the cashier stood by in mute, lip-biting horror.

Perhaps nutria needs a marketing makeover.  Like a new name.  How about calling it a bayou pig?  Even tour guides can get in on the fun.  Before our air-conditioned bus arrives at the dock for our swamp cruise, we’ll sit down at Stinky Thibodeaux’s Restaurant for his famous bayou pig etouffee.  Laissez les bons temps rouler!

As for other solutions, traps lost consideration because they were not as fast and cheap as bullets.  Poison did not receive the community’s approval.  The prospect of releasing alligators — natural predators of nutria — into the canals similarly tanked, since alligators do not bother making a distinction between tasty nutria and tasty joggers.

Thus what might seem like a Wild West approach is the most efficient way to knock down the nutria population and spare the city from flooding.  Which brings me back to the breezy pickup truck.  The driver, Maurice, a superintendent of the drainage department, was scribbling out a meticulous tally of the evening’s score.  Since 1995, the parish’s SWAT teams have bagged over 18,500 nutria, which could have made a half million servings of chili.

Sparky and Mark’s job seemed enviable: getting paid to hunt.  But, alas, they had to work a regular eight-hour shift beforehand.  Unlike in the wilds of the state where a hunter’s only worry is inadvertently pulling a Dick Cheney on his buddy, the Jefferson Parish SWAT team is shooting in a city.  With the embankment so close to homes, a scant lapse in hand-eye coordination could send a bullet into someone’s living room.

Despite long days and a constant need for perfection, the team still managed to save time for smiling, all while their friends were most likely slurping down beers on Bourbon Street.  When Mark’s .22 jammed, Sparky announced above his spit cup, “You’re an animal rights activist.”

“It’s easier to shoot nutria with a flashlight,” Mark fired back.

Such levity seemed unusual coming from an elite duo trained to take out drug lords and hostage takers.  But I found myself strangely reassured by their approach, in all its defusing humanness.  It’s that same untiring New Orleans spirit that returned to a flooded city three years ago and recaptured it.

The team will need the humor.  “Even if we work 24/7, we can’t get them all,” Kerry mentioned.  “They reproduce like you can’t believe.”  Each female can start breeding at five months of age, and can crank out three litters per year, averaging five offspring per litter.  They’re like tribbles with appetites of Pac Man.  The nighttime shifts do provide an unrelated benefit, though: exceptional training, owing to low light conditions, moving targets, and an urban environment.  Note to aspiring drug lords: the SWAT team is a damn good shot.

As the casings filled up the pickup bed, I tried to assess my mission.  I had arrived to sample nutria prepared by the inventive hands of a New Orleans chef.  I was ready to eat one for the team.  But I was denied a chance at culinary patriotism.  Some nutria, however, would be destined for gullets, albeit not in the finest of dining settings: all spoils of the night’s shift would feed the alligators at the zoo. While my visceral half — now engorged with darting curiosity and adrenaline — begged to snag one of the carcasses and stew it, I decided I didn’t want to rob a caged creature of its feeding time pleasures.

So what did the neighbors think? In diligent suburban fashion, few wandered around at midnight, in naked contrast to Bourbon Street five miles away, where you’re never more than a tittie beads’ toss from a frozen drink machine.  But with a roving sniper in the cradle of the American Dream, where were the gasping mouths?  The community protests?  Instead, one pedestrian barked at us, “Hey, I wanna shoot too!” while another waved a sloppy hand at us and asked, “Y’all goin’ after gators?”  No, just their breakfast, actually.

If the SWAT team were patrolling around any other suburban landscape in the States, the reaction would have probably been less amicable.  But New Orleans’ version of normalcy comes fortified with an attraction to the second amendment.

Throw in a fondness of spice rubs and New Orleanders just might be willing to help their city by barbecuing nutria on their backyard grills after all.  As long as their neighbors don’t find out.

bio:

A self-described connoisseur of slow-cooked, bush rodent, Darrin DuFord draws the line at hunting in the New York City subway system.  His book Is There a Hole in the Boat? Tales of Travel in Panama without a Car won the silver medal in the 2007 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards. He has contributed articles to Transitions Abroad, GoNOMAD, and Perceptive Travel, where “Showdown at the West Esplanade Canal” first appeared. Read his latest travel pieces and recipes on his web site, www.OmnivorousTraveler.com.

by Tom Weller

No Chadian village is complete without a fou.  I discovered this in 1993 while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Beinamar, Chad.

The fou is the village crazy person.  Beinamar’s fou was typical of the fous I encountered in villages all over Southern Chad.  A middle-aged man, he wore only a pair of tattered brown shorts. Dirt caked his skin. Dust grayed his nappy hair. Like most fous, the Beinamar fou spent his day stomping the busiest red-clay paths of the village, barking gibberish to the air, and occasionally menacing passersby.

The fou scared me when I first arrived in Beinamar.  Whenever he saw me, he’d come at me yelling, his hands flying in the air above his head like confused bats. In the rare instances when he strung together syllables that made sense, he always shouted about the evil nature of white people and how I should be chased out of Beinamar.

But to everyone else in Beinamar, the fou seemed to be as ordinary a part of the community as the village crier and the chief of police.  They each had a role to play, and the fou, arguably, had the most important role. He entertained Beinamar.  A herd of children constantly swirled around the fou.  They chided him, pelted him with stones, poked at him with sticks, squealed in delighted mock terror when the fou turned on them and growled non sequiturs.  Adults looked on and laughed at the fou’s antics.

I often felt uncomfortable watching these interactions, watching my neighbors go out of their way to mock a person apparently suffering serious mental problems.  To me, the treatment of the fou carried a sharp edge of bullying, cruelty.

But with time, I came to see that the village’s relationship with the fou was much more complicated than it appeared on the surface. I once wondered aloud how the fou managed to survive.  Most of my neighbors worked long, sweaty hours scraping out their existence as subsistence farmers. The fou wandered the village all day producing only laughter.  My friends explained that Beinamar took care of the fou.  People gave him leftovers to eat when they could, a place to get out of the rain when storms blew in.

The treatment of the fou now seems to me emblematic of the cocktail of cutting humor and kindness that I consistently encountered while in Chad, of values and beliefs and practices that were often sharply different then what I typically find in the United States.  The Chadians I lived and worked with were extremely generous.  During my first month in Beinamar I never bought or prepared food for myself.  Instead, I struggled to keep up with a stream of meal invitations and gifts of peanuts, squash, fried dough, bananas, and chickens.

I received special treatment because villagers considered me a guest in Beinamar, but Chadian generosity manifested itself in many ways, seemed almost a requirement of the culture.  Hosts always gave visitors water, and often gave them tea.  Unexpected guests were always welcome to partake when a meal was presented.  Extended family offered an important safety net, providing food and financial assistance for struggling relatives, even taking in children, nieces and nephews, distant cousins, when parents couldn’t provide.

But at the same time, when Chadians saw weakness, they pounced. They seized on nearly every struggle as an opportunity to gawk and joke and laugh.   When adults watched children play soccer on Beinamar’s dusty bronze pitch, good plays received murmurs of approval, but spectators greeted mistakes with a hail of shouted insults and laughter that rang across the open field like church bells. Children showed no more compassion than the adults. One child in Beinamar, a boy, probably nine or ten years old, had no use of his legs.  He got around using his hands, dragging his withered, twisted legs behind him, forever straining to keep up with his playmates running pell-mell through the village center.  For his efforts he received from the other children a chorus of taunts about his slow and awkward movements.

There were, however, some underlying elements of fairness to these attacks.  Because any form of weakness seemed to be fair game, everyone got a chance to deride the struggling, and, eventually, for at least some small failing, almost everyone become the object of derision, even the local Peace Corps volunteer.

The first time I confronted longue sauce, Gilbert lifted the lid off the saucepot with his usual flourish of spinning hand motions and “Bon appétit.”  I appraised the night’s offering, an unfamiliar, greenish-brownish sauce surrounding some pieces of meat the size of child’s fist.

Typical Chadian meals consist of two parts, boule and sauce.  Boule is a dough made by combining pounded grain, usually millet or sorghum or corn, with boiling water.  It is served in a dome shape, piping hot.  Everyone eating rips pieces off of the boule and dips them in a shared pot of sauce.  The sauce could be made of any number of things.  My favorite sauce was thick and brown, made of oil and peanut butter and goat meat.  Other sauces were red and spicy and might include beef or gazelle, almost like a stew.  Chicken sauces were popular and often served for special occasions. The head of the household would reach into the sauce to distribute pieces of chicken.  Portion and pieces denoted status within the group. I always received a meaty back or thigh as well as the gizzard because as long as I lived in Beinamar people treated me with special courtesies reserved for guests.

After setting down the lid from the sauce pot, Gilbert ripped a piece from the boule and dunked it in the sauce.  I didn’t see Gilbert pull his hunk of boule out of the sauce because I was reaching for a hunk of my own.  As I leaned forward to dunk my first piece of boule, Gilbert looked at me.  Light seemed to dance in his eyes.  He looked like a child about to open a present.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked me, his French syllables unusually bouncy.  He glanced around at the two other men sharing our meal.  Slight smiles creased their faces.

“Oui, bien sur,” I answered.  I liked to throw in a bien sur when I felt especially confident.

I plunged my boule into the sauce.  Everyone else stopped eating, stopped conversing.  I paused mid dunk and looked around the circle of my meal companions.  All eyes rested on me.  “Go on,” Gilbert said.

I pulled my boule a few inches into the air, but it remained connected to the pot by a thick rope of sauce.  I redunked the boule, hoping that I had just hit a bad spot and a second pass might make things easier.  But the same thing happened again.  I dunked the boule, began to pull it out, and new ropes of sauce clung to it.  I decided I’d stretch the sauce ropes until they snapped.  I pulled my boule up until it was level with my chest.  The sauce refused to release its grip.  I pulled my boule up and away from the saucepot until it was level with my eyes.  The ropes of sauce grew longer and thinner, became strings rather than ropes, but still they would not break.  I raised my boule above my head, statue of liberty style, but the sauce seemed to be made of equal parts phlegm and tenacity.  It would not be defeated.  Strands of sauce three feet long ran from my raised hand to the saucepot.

I began to make circular motions with my hand, hoping to shake my boule free.  The strings of sauce whipped through the air.  I worried they might smack Gilbert or one of the other men, now hooting with laughter, in the face. Gilbert called, “Coupé, coupé (cut, cut),” and pantomimed holding a piece of boule in his hand while turning his wrist sharply with his pinky extended.  I tried to follow his advice.  I turned my wrist, short, quick bursts.  This seemed to agitate the sauce.  It wrapped itself around my wrist and forearm, before its tentacles finally snapped.

The men sitting around me hooted.  They bent forward in their seats, laughter shaking their ribs.  One wiped tears from his eyes.  They took turns croaking, “Oui, bien sur,” and pantomiming my fight against the sauce.  Then Gilbert told me to try again.

I took a deep breath, tasted the Chadian night air skipping across my tongue.  Hints of dust and sweat and dry vegetation.  And we all fixed our eyes on the pot of sauce, together, anxious to see what round two would bring.

by Charlie Levine

Zipping along a mangrove-lined creek not much wider than his 16-foot homemade skiff, Jewel, Capt. Ansil Saunders cut the engine as we approached a pond-like opening in the lush greenery. The boat coasts to a stop, and the only thing I could hear is the wake of the small vessel sloshing against the roots of the trees. I glance back at Saunders, who stood on the bench in the aft portion of his small vessel, his arms reaching toward the heavens.

“This is it,” he says. “This is Holy Grounds.”

With more than 50 years spent guiding bonefish trips in his home waters off the Bahamian island grouping of Bimini, the 76-year-old Saunders has taken countless clients to this very spot. But one trip immediately comes to his mind every time he navigates these waters. In the late 1960s, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African-American elected to Congress from New York, had asked Saunders to take a special guest out fishing — civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King.

Powell owned a home in Bimini and lived out his final years on the island. During that time he and Saunders became friends and often fished together. Dr. King’s visit with Powell was his second trip to Bimini; he originally came to the island in 1964 to write his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. Four years later, he came back to write a speech that he would deliver to a group of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

Saunders took Dr. King through this same bonefish creek and when he slowed the boat, King felt a connection.

“When I stopped the boat, there were some birds overhead, the tide trickled by, snappers were running under the mangrove roots and a stingray was burying and reburying itself,” Saunders told me. “Dr. King looked up and said, ‘There’s so much life here, so much life all around us. How can people see all this life and yet not believe in the existence of God?”

The outgoing tide quickly began to pull the water out from under our boat and Saunders decided to move on to an area known as East Wells, so called because of the fresh water found here just below sea level. We walked the beach, keeping an eye out for any signs of bonefish. Saunders spotted two crabs mating, and though he said he didn’t want to ruin their date, he snatched up the smaller crab and placed it in the breast pocket of his cleanly pressed shirt. “It’s good permit bait,” he said, referring to the coveted game fish that plies these waters. “If we can find one.”

Bimini, located just 50 miles east of Miami, has been a fishing haven for decades. Ernest Hemingway tangled with blue marlin and giant tuna in the electric-blue waters just off Bimini in the 1930s, but he’s just one of many. For Saunders, it was the much smaller but equally elusive bonefish that infected him with the fishing bug. He learned the art of finding these expertly camouflaged speedsters from Sam Ellis, known by most simply as “Bonefish Sam.” Ellis was the best-known bonefish guide on the island in the 1950s and ‘60s, as well as serving his community as a preacher, and even did a bit of boxing on the side. Saunders spent as much time with Bonefish Sam as possible, learning to navigate the skinny, inches-deep water that bonefish call home. Eventually Saunders’ client list grew and so did his reputation as one of the best bonefish guides in the Caribbean.

We walked the beach for a couple of hours, then jumped back in Jewel, and made our way towards South Bimini. Along the way we spotted a large eagle ray flapping its wings through the shallow, gin-clear water.

“He had a permit with him,” Saunders said, as he turned the boat circling back in a wide arc so as not to spook the fish.

Saunders removed the small crab from his pocket and placed it on my hook. I only had one chance at a perfect cast before the permit took off, so I knew that I’d better make it a good one. I sent the crab about three feet behind the ray and the permit turned back and crushed the bait, taking off on a blistering run. Twenty minutes and countless pumps of the rod later, Saunders used his wide net to scoop up my catch, an 18-pound beauty.

We kept working our way south toward Field Point and Saunders spotted a bonefish hunting for shrimp along a stretch of cracked bottom. I toss a hooked shrimp near the cautious fish and get lucky; he snatches my offering and jets off in a bolt of silver lightning. To provoke a bonefish to bite, you must first find him, then you must outwit him. They scare easily, and after finally catching one, I can see how these little buggers grab ahold of you and leave you wanting more.

“Bonefish are too special to kill,” Saunders says. “Take a picture and let them go on their way.”

These days Saunders is as well known for his handcrafted boats as he his for his angling prowess. He learned the art of building boats from his father and grandfather and over the years he has perfected a design that ideally suits his environment. Constructed of hard woods such as white oak, African mahogany and the locally grown horseflesh, Saunders builds lightweight, shallow-running, vessels that look gorgeous and stand up to the rigors of everyday fishing. The expert craftsmanship found on his boats rivals any furniture you might find in a millionaire’s home.

It takes Saunders some two months to construct a boat from start to finish. He spends a good portion of his time focusing on the bow stem, for this is where the boat absorbs the most pressure as it slices through the waves. To get the curve of the bow just right he must first find the perfect tree: a native horseflesh tree. He digs down to expose the tree’s roots, which curve naturally and allows him to create the piece of the bow where the boat comes together to form a point. Rather than gluing several pieces of wood together to manufacture this shape, Saunders works with the natural curving root to create a flawless bow stem. The finished boat is encased with fiberglass and painted for a shiny finish. Well-to-do Americans have been known to pay $40,000 for one of Ansil’s skiffs.

“Ansil,” Dr. King had asked that day on the water so many years ago, “what do you do when you have people in the boat and they see all this and yet not believe in God?’”

Saunders told the civil rights leader that he had written a psalm explaining his thoughts on creation and the ability to see God in all pieces of nature. King wanted to hear it.

“I said, ‘Dr. King people want to hear you speak — you’re the spokesman’,” Saunders recalled. “He said, ‘I’m tired of listening to myself. I want to hear somebody else sometimes.’”

The elder bonefish guide paused for a moment, took a breath and launched into the same psalm he delivered for Dr. King four decades earlier. For some 20 minutes, he spoke of rivers, mountains, brothers and sisters, relaying his message that God is everywhere. I found myself sitting there in his skiff — his church — hanging on every word.

“When I finished my psalm, Dr. King said, ‘Ansil you made me feel so close to heaven I feel as though I can almost reach out and touch the face of God.’ Just three days later he was touching the face of God.”

King traveled back to Memphis and delivered his speech to the striking sanitation workers. In his speech, one of his most famous, he spoke of going to the mountaintop and looking over. “I’ve seen the promised land,” King said. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

He was assassinated the day after uttering these words.

“In that final speech, he included his eulogy,” Saunders told me. “He was only 39 years old but he knew he was going to die. That speech was written in Bimini. Part of it right up in this creek.” And although Saunders didn’t say it, he gave me the impression that Dr. King’s time with the charismatic bonefish guide had helped him to see beauty in the world and accept his fate.

Saunders still fishes the flats about 100 days a year. When he’s not out guiding a client, you’ll find him at his modest boat shed, located at the end of a dirt road and right on the bay. Stop in and he’ll happily show you his latest craft and photos of his famous friends and clients. Listen carefully as he explains the art of working with the grain of the wood. Rub your hand over the meticulous African mahogany, admire the amber glow of the horseflesh wood and prepare yourself for a history lesson about his island home and human nature in general. Or better yet, get out on the water with Saunders and let him show you his church firsthand.

by Taylor Jennings

Reza Shahnan’s entrance one morning during breakfast at the Park Guest Quarters in Kabul the summer of 2003 caused a bit of a stir. He was one of those unusually tall Afghan men and was wearing a finely tailored suit in sharp contrast to the olive drabs, jeans and photographer’s vests worn by the Western guests.

The Park was unusually crowded that day with short-term foreign contractors flooding in.  We were all sharing tables, passing coffee and juice back and forth, munching on Corn Flakes and burnt toast in the vain hope of warding off stomach ailments.

With his smooth, shaved head and bushy black mustache Reza looked exactly like what he turned out to be – a security agent, capable of killing and prepared to be killed.  But I didn’t know that at the time as I watched the local staff scrape and fawn over him.  They called him Reza Han which I thought was one word until a colleague explained that Han is a title of respect.

On that morning, overcome with curiosity, I reached out and politely asked if I could borrow the salt and pepper on his table and he turned to me with that radiant smile and old world manners few men have and even fewer women can resist.

He stopped by my table the following afternoon as I was having a glass of wine in the Park’s rose bordered garden and typing notes into my laptop on the day’s activities, training local Afghan journalists in the basics of independent reporting and asking questions.  Reza gave a slight bow, introduced himself in fluent French and asked where I was from.

“I didn’t know they spoke French in Texas.” He said in equally fluent English at my answer.

Reza would show up in the rose garden each evening around cocktail hour just as most of us were returning from exhausting forays in and around Kabul on sometimes misguided assignments to help bring Afghanistan into the 21^st century.  The garden of the Park was our refuge from the heat and dust of the world outside, an oasis among the ruins of Kabul six months after the defeat of the Taliban.

It was during those languid afternoons when the stifling dry heat of the day retreated a bit, chased by a cool breeze blowing down from the mountains, that we heard the details of Reza’s life while indulging in the haram pleasure of wine and beer purchased at a shop that catered to foreigners. Usually we were four: Reza, myself, John, an American hydroelectric engineer, and Richard, a former British SAS officer, born in Zimbabwe. Richard and Reza were training Afghans to be bodyguards and security agents for the Karzai government.

Reza laughingly said that at times he regretted he was not an orphan because it would make it easier to answer questions about his origins. He told us he had been born into an aristocratic family who gave him up, at the age of three, to be a live-in playmate for the King’s young sons.

“Hence Reza Han,” John mused.

“Well, nowadays Han is used more as a term of affection than a title. But many Afghans still remember my father, Faisal Shahnan, though few remember that he gave me away when I was only a child. I lived my entire childhood inside the royal household, always surrounded by bodyguards, never allowed to play with other boys. I didn’t see my family again until I was 16 and Zahir Shaw was overthrown by his cousin Daud. The Shahnan family went into exile first to London and then to Paris.”

Reza recounted the tale in a rush as if it had lost the power to hurt him.  He then reached into his coat and fished out an old postcard he’d found the day before at a shop on Chicken Street, a sepia colored photo taken sometime in the late 1890’s of a royal Afghan hunting party replete in magnificent turbans and elaborately carved rifles. The names of the notable nobles were all listed on the back, including King Amanullah.

Reza pointed to a handsome man on the front row, resting on one knee, holding a long barreled rifle. That’s my great-grandfather,” He looked exactly like Reza, mustache and all.

On another occasion Reza told us he had been married twice, first to a fellow Afghan in exile and then to a Frenchwoman.  Unusual for Afghans, he had no children.

“I insisted on it because I don’t believe in fatherless children and my life was too full of danger.”

He showed us a scar on his throat where once, in Paris he’d been badly cut with a knife.  Staggering home and bleeding profusely, he told his first wife to patch him up saying he couldn’t go to a hospital since the incident involved the Soviet KGB.

“But she fainted and I had to do it myself.  Not long afterwards she left me, saying she couldn’t deal with such a life.  Who could blame her”?

We had to agree.

The French wife couldn’t accept his refusal to have children and finally left him as well.

The rest of us refrained from following up with our own war stories as was our wont and simply sat in silence listening to the twitter of parakeets and drinking Belgian beer and Australian Shiraz while the sky faded from dusky orange to dirty mauve.

I like to think I listened to Reza’s tale with a mixture of fascination and skepticism.  If it hadn’t been for Richard, who evidently knew him well, I would have been certain it had been invented for my benefit, as the only woman present.  But Richard said that while many of Reza’s stories might be exaggerated, they were essentially true.

I wondered if Reza felt a need to explain being the only Afghan guest in the makeshift hotel that catered to foreigners.  Most Afghans returning from the Diaspora stayed with extended family members. Perhaps it was simply his version of one-up-man-ship, his way to be one of the boys.

The first sign that all was not right with Reza came after dinner at one of the nicer eating-places in Kabul, a guesthouse run by Australians.  The owner, who had lived in Afghanistan for more than a decade, had an impressive collection of antique rifles stashed away in an underground gallery.

Reza wanted to see this arsenal and was amused to see my Texan roots emerge when I also expressed enthusiastic interest. We all trooped down to the cellar where Reza and I hefted and cocked several beauties inlaid with ivory and brass, including an 18^th century Flintlock with a carved wooden stock, all unloaded of course.

But back outside in the street as we waited for our driver, a by now very inebriated Reza also wanted to examine the restaurant guard’s state of the art Kalashnikov which was very loaded.  I joined Richard and John in a hasty retreat to the car just before the gun shattered the silence of the Kabul curfew.

The warning bells sounded even louder a few nights later when Reza invited me to join him for dinner with an Afghan-American woman who had just arrived from California to work on a project to create health clinics for women.  She and Reza were among thousands of Afghans from the Diaspora who were returning to share their knowledge and skills with their countrymen. I liked Roshana immediately. In her colorful Pakistani sari, she was a beautiful example of the many strong women who are the hope of emerging nations.

“Roshana was my first love when we were only 16 years old,” he said as he introduced us, reaching for her hand but she shook him off.  Now married with two grown daughters, Roshana made it clear she didn’t share his nostalgia and announced she would only have dinner with him if he stopped drinking.

“I am sick and tired of the unvaried Afghan diet I’ve been eating night and day at my uncle’s.  I want to go to a German restaurant some diplomats told me about.”

Over a meal of perfectly prepared Schnitzel and Saurbraten, during which Reza blithely ignored his promise not to drink, I wondered if there was more to it than the defiant act of a secular man to the restrictions of a religion he’d never fully adopted.

Reza began a macho tit-for-tat with the German owner that neither Roshana nor I could follow which turned ugly when Reza started calling him ‘fascist’ and ‘nazi’.

As their voices rose to an alarming decibel, Roshana reached to pay the bill. With the other diners looking on in alarm, I found myself rising to stand between the two large men, shouting at them to calm down and behave like adults.  I knew Reza wasn’t wearing his Lugar that night, another condition imposed by Roshana.

He ranted and raved all the way back to the Park that he was going to return and kill that German.  I believed him and didn’t sleep at all wondering what I should do to prevent a possible murder.  But Roshana turned out to be right; Reza like many Afghan men, had a temper that flamed and burnt itself out before he had a chance to act. In the end he slept it off.

When Reza saw me in the garden having my morning coffee the next day, he stopped at my table.  “Please forgive me.  I know I had too much to drink last night.  It happens sometimes.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but it seems to be happening a lot recently.”

He didn’t take it amiss as I had expected, but only laughed and reached down to give me a peck on the cheek.

“Reza, someone needs to tell you that you are an alcoholic so I guess it has to be me because I know what I’m talking about.  I almost married one, a Texan who also liked to mix guns and booze. He killed himself in a drunken rage and to this day I don’t know if it was an accident or suicide.”

Finally Reza was listening and dropped his pose of a man never at a loss for words.

I was training journalists in Jalalabad on the Pakistani border, my last assignment before my contract ended, when the inevitable happened.  Reza was with some trainee guards on a firing range in the hills above Kabul when his gun jammed and exploded, taking two fingers off his right hand and narrowly missing a colleague.

When I found him sitting with Richard in the Park’s garden back in Kabul, I couldn’t help wondering if he had been drinking when the accident occurred as he was such an expert with guns.  Saluting me with a bandaged three-fingered hand, he stood to greet me as he always did and seemed to read my mind.

“You were right. Afghans and Texans do have a lot in common and both should know what a deadly mixture guns and drink can be.  Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson.”

But I couldn’t get beyond my own past. I had heard it all before.  In any case I would be leaving Kabul in the next few weeks so I rose and brushed past him.

On my last day as I was paying my bill at the reception desk, I turned to see him lounging in the harsh white light of the garden in his signature wraparound sunglasses, pouring from a half empty bottle with a shaky left hand.

by Craig Stevaux

I had every reason to think I knew Udon Thani. After all, I’d lived in the Northeastern Thai provincial capitol for five years at the height of the Vietnam War. I knew the main roads that spun off the three aligned traffic circles on the highway that ended at the Mekong River, only 51 kilometers to the north. I knew the soi, the narrow alleys that melted into teeming markets, dazzling Buddhist temples, and quasi-secret brothels. I knew Udon in all its colorless vulgarity, its grimy concrete and sinking sidewalks, the GI bars and the Deep Throat Massage Parlor. I knew the Chicken’s Asshole Restaurant where in a secondfloor room wealthy Chinese merchants reclined on cushions JabbatheHuttstyle while young Thai waitresses in short skirts handfed them. I knew where the CIA headquarters sat, and I could spot an American spook from a block away. I spoke Thai and understood the grumblings of people I passed. But then, on my most recent return visit, as I headed back to the city after touring a doctor friend’s country home, something happened to remind me how little I actually knew. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so dumbfounded. Thailand always had a way of presenting me with small epiphanies, no matter how much I thought I understood the kingdom. On each trip, something happened. This time, as the doctor’s black Lexus flew over the two-lane macadam road twixt spindly stands of teak and dusty cassava fields, now and again swinging out and around laboring ten-wheeled trucks piled to overflowing with sugar cane, my friend took his hand off the wheel long enough to point off in the direction of a copse of coconut palms set against a cloudless sky. “Ho Chi Minh used to live here in Udon,” he said casually. “In the village right over there. Ban Nong On.”

Here was something I’d never heard. None of my friends or former students had ever alluded to Ho Chi Minh’s presence in Udon. Little did I realize this was not the only surprise in store for me.

I’d first arrived in Udon with the onset of the monsoons in 1970, a fledgling Peace Corps English teacher cast adrift among five thousand U.S. Air force personnel, a military juggernaut that steamrolled this strategically important city—closer to Hanoi than Bangkok. Udon served as home to a major American airbase, launch point for the air war over North Vietnam and attacks against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a complex web of paths and roads that traversed the mountainous terrain of Laos. Could it be that America’s arch-enemy, the man inspiring a people and a nation my countrymen were at war with had once lived only a few kilometers outside Udon?

I was familiar with the popular stories of the man—how he’d rescued several American airmen shot down over Vietnam during the Second World War; how he’d appealed to President Truman for U.S. support for Vietnamese independence in accord with principles embodied in the U.N. Charter, only to be ignored; how, on September 2, 1945, in Ba Dinh Square on the western edge of Hanoi he announced in words unabashedly taken from Thomas Jefferson the creation of a new nation: “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Twelve kilometers west of Udon, a large, multi-colored sign beside the road announces the “Ho Chi Minh Educational and Historical Tourism Site.” Leaving the highway and driving into the village of Ban Nong On, I return to the Udon I knew in the 1970s: plank pole houses seared by a merciless sun, an obsolete oxcart and ancient loom nestled in the shade underneath, a decrepit rice granary leaning precariously on its wooden leg poles. Past is present here.

Situated at the end of an unpaved soi and set against a backdrop of towering bamboo, a neat compound occupies a large clearing of hardpack and struggling grass. A brick walkway leads to the single-storied thatchroofed main building. The wellbuilt structure is divided into two rooms: the smaller one contains two wooden beds and a desk; the larger one resembles a combination dining hall, meeting room, and dormitory as a row of wooden pillows is set atop raised platform at one end. Thickset wood beams support the thatch roof. But, this hardy structure cannot be original. Set on a concrete slab, this is surely a modern reconstruction. Out back lies a small, but solid kitchen. Several boxy outbuildings dot the tidy, dying lawn: a sturdy, wooden rice granary, a thatchroofed pig pen containing statues of piglets, and a chicken coop. As I survey the compound, a rooster wanders about the struggling grass. I see no docent. In fact, there aren’t any other visitors. I stroll through an open display area beside the main structure where photos captioned in Thai and Vietnamese chronicle milestones in the life of Ho, but there’s no printed material to take away. Vases of flowers and incense top a table before a white bust of the nationalist hero that’s displayed alter-style. Beside it stands a donation box. Outside, I spot a lone woman in a sarong who’s watering potted bougainvillea that erupt in revolutionary red along the walkway. I approach her in search of a handout that will help me make some sense of this place. “We had printed brochures,” she tells me, “but they’re all gone.” Just as I turn to leave, she adds, “But if you want to know the history of this place, you can talk with Uncle Korn. When he was a boy, Ho Chi Minh stayed with his parents. He’s always home. He lives right over there.” She points off toward the towering stands of bamboo that border the compound on the east. “On the next soi.”

Forty-five minutes, two farms, half a dozen dogs, a cow, and one sandy oxcart trail later, the pickup bounces to a stop in front of a ramshackle pole house set amid expansive shrimp ponds bordered by coconut palms. The air is surprisingly cool under a cloudless sky.

The requisite dogs, chickens, discarded tires, and spare engine parts dot the area surrounding the house. I stride through a few curious puppies and a couple of other dogs too sundrunk to notice me. At the same time, from the shade beneath the house, a robust, barefoot eightyeightyear-old Korn Tonchai wades through more puppies towards me. He’s dressed in a threadbare, green shirt with a missing breast pocket, the traditional checkered sarong-like Thai phakhaoma, and a navy blue knit cap. I raise my hands in the Thai prayer-like gesture of wai and introduce myself to this moon-faced man whose wispy, five-inch long chin whiskers wave in the breeze. We take seats at a stone table beside the house, and Korn’s Thai wife, age 60, pours tea into old Chinese cups. A calendar of Thai King Phumibol Adulyadej is prominently displayed on an exterior wall. Korn’s wife retreats beneath the house to sit on a bamboo slat bed.

For the past year his health has been declining, Korn informs me in the local dialect of Laotian. An oxygen tank is propped up against an exterior wall. (“I can’t get along without it.”) “I can’t sleep,” he says, but his squinting eyes twinkle. I explain I’ve just come from the museum, that I was directed to him, whereupon with harrumphs and snorts, Korn shakes his head.

“I told them the way it was,” he says in a resolute voice, “but they don’t listen to me.” Them, I’m to learn, includes the local Vietnamese Association, a provincial governor, and just about anybody else responsible for the reconstruction of Ho Chi Minh’s jungle sanctuary. “That pig pen and chicken coop—set right on the ground. This is really wrong. In those days, there were boa constrictors the size of tree trunks. And tigers!

“In the old days, people built with rice stalk and mud, not concrete and timber,” Korn says with a toss of his head. I’m finished talking.”

Korn strikes me as a likeable curmudgeon, his manner straightforward, and, like most villagers, guileless. Suddenly, it makes sense—the hefty, modern construction, the convenient brick walkway, the potted bougainvillea, and all the tidiness. A budget exists. Funds have been raised and allocated. Beyond the desire of the local Vietnamese Association, however sincere, to honor the venerable Uncle Ho, there is money to be spent. And made. The museum compound, as simple as it appears to Western eyes, begins to look even less like a jungle lair and more like a Disneyworld creation: Ho’s RevolutionaryLand.

Both his mother and father were Vietnamese from Ha Tinh in the north of that country, Korn tells me, but he was born in Thailand in 1921, after his parents fled the violence there. The people had mounted street demonstrations against oppressive taxes, and the protests turned bloody when French soldiers opened fire. Korn shook his head. Korn has a habit of looking away as he talks, but it’s clearly not avoidance. He squints, and it’s as if he’s visiting the past, that which doesn’t exist anymore. “So many died.”

Korn says his parents crossed Laos, paid a single satang to cross the Mekong River from the Laotian border town of Tha Khek, and entered Thailand’s Northeast at Nakhon Phanom, a frequent entry point for Vietnamese migrating overland through Laos. Korn’s father had been a lumberman in Vietnam. At first, he worked as a laborer in Udon. But, eventually, the trees drew him to Ban Nong On. “It took three or four people holding hands to encircle those trees,” Korn says. The big trees are only a memory now, but in those days there were three layers of forest that comprised a formidable wilderness here: bamboo stands; large hardwoods like mahogany and teak; and dense jungle.

In 1930, Ho Chi Minh stayed with the Tonchai family for two months, resting and talking politics. According to Korn, he followed two other leaders to Ban Nong On—Goldy and Gold Khoon, and the youthful forty-year-old wasn’t yet known as Ho Chi Minh (Ho Who Enlightens) but by the alias Gao Gong (young man Gong). To the French Sûreté, he was the notorious Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot, in Vietnamese).

I can’t escape the realization that seated before me is a man who’d known Ho Chi Minh. I am touching history. How did Uncle Ho come to stay with Uncle Korn’s family? I ask. “There is a path,” he answers in obvious reference to the Vietnamese underground.

But this wasn’t Ho’s first journey to Udon. Siam, as it was then known, had been used as a sanctuary by Vietnamese nationalists for years. The Revolutionary Youth League, founded by Ho in 1925, embraced Marxist and nationalist themes. Its branch in Udon served as headquarters for all League operations in Siam. According to Ho biographer, William Duiker, a Vietnamese who called himself “Father Chin” reached Udon in September 1928 after an arduous trip that included a 10-day trek along jungle paths. “Father Chin” stayed in Udon for several months, visiting Viet Kieu (as overseas Vietnamese were known by the Siamese) and teaching by example in an effort to change the habits of his compatriots. He attempted to acquire the Thai language, and, in an effort to elevate the status of manual labor among Vietnamese who looked down on it, even helped construct a local school by carrying bricks. Operating under the guise of the Than Ai (friendship) association established by League members, Ho traveled the Northeast and established new cells, according to Duiker. This, at a time when both French police and the imperial government in Hué were hunting for him.

In 1930, Korn was only a boy of nine, but as the oldest son in the Tonchai family, it was his job to cook and wash clothes for the family’s youthful visitor. Korn said his parents’ house was located very near the museum site so at least the location of the camp is historically accurate. “We had no electricity,” he remembers. Instead, villagers relied on kabong, torches of decayed tree bark mixed with sap. “There were all kinds of wild animals—elephants, wild pigs, deer,” Korn says. “The [Thai government] officials were afraid to come out here because of the tigers.”

Ho had come to Ban Nong On in search of anti-French Vietnamese, recruits willing to journey to Vietnam and fight the French. “They had no guns,” Korn says. “They practiced boxing [likely martial arts]. They were good. Very athletic.” Korn says 24 fighters eventually traveled to Vietnam but they were forced to retreat when villagers recognized them as strangers and alerted authorities.

As Korn talked, I began to picture this landscape as it had been nearly eighty years before, the 12-kilometer journey to Udon on horseback long and arduous, the jungle sweltering because the dense forest allowed no breeze, the environment an ideal recipe for a dedicated revolutionary in search of recruits—a dark, daunting terra incognita, an absence of officialdom, and an identifiable ethnic minority.

Korn describes the architect of the revolutionary movement in Indochina as if he’d seen him last week—Ho dressed in simple clothes like the poor, so as not to attract attention. He wore a large brimmed straw hat made from cane leaves, and his sandals were fashioned from buffalo skin (“You could step on a nail, and it wouldn’t even penetrate.”). And as he talks, I can almost picture the wayfarer Ho tramping a dusty, jungle trail among the towering bamboo stands of Ban Nong On. No one would suspect this nondescript wanderer was a world traveler, a man on the run from agents of the Sûreté, a revolutionary who’d already been sentenced to forced labor in perpetuity on the charge of fomenting rebellion in Annam.

And what of this man? What was he like as a person, I want to know.

According to Korn, Ho manifested Vietnamese values like affection for children. “How so?” I ask.

“He liked to tease me,” Korn said, “but he wanted to teach me.”

Teach. The word is telling. As he’d done before in Thailand and many other places, Ho, the son of a Confucian academic and teacher, was always tutoring, always enlightening.

“When I was a boy, I was naughty. I was always fighting with the other kids—because they called me ‘Kaew’ [an ethnic slur].

“ ‘Come here,’ [Ho] said one day.’ ” Korn jabs a finger into the air as if spearing a memory. “ ‘Do you know how many Thai people are around here? Do you think you can fight all of them? You can ride a horse under a royal umbrella like a king, but you must still be humble.’

“His words were certainties—‘Don’t lie. Don’t look down on others, male or female. Have respect for elders. Don’t take revenge. When people are wrong, give them slack, and they will realize their error and come to apologize.’ ”

Ho’s words to Korn reflected traditional Confucian morality: eschew arrogance; be generous. Korn’s recollection of a youthful Ho Chi Minh was of a kind man who strictly lives by the Buddha’s teaching, what the Buddhist Thai call thamma thammo, a nature that would endear him to his countrymen: Uncle Ho.

“He ate simply,” says the long ago boy whose job it was to cook for him. “Peanuts and sesame seeds with salt. He wasn’t particular.

“He carried a cloth bag with a few bits of clothes,” Korn remembers. “That’s all.”

Did he carry anything else inside the knapsack? I wonder aloud.

“Only a book.” Korn says. “He carried a journal.”

At this, I close my own journal and tuck it into my Thai shoulder bag. Author David Halberstam has noted, “Ho Chi Minh was one of the extraordinary figures of this era—part Gandhi, part Lenin, all Vietnamese.” Korn’s longterm memory of the man he served paints a portrait of a village ascetic that rings true. Korn’s generosity has helped me grasp history.

We part in the warmth of the sun and dust. Before turning to the pickup, I wai Uncle Korn, but the Thai gesture, as graceful as it is, doesn’t seem adequate to the gift he’s given me. I extend my right hand and he grasps mine awkwardly. The gesture is American and alien to him, I know, but I feel the need for it. Just before I get into the truck, I turn and wish him “good health,” and he smiles warmly, wispy white chin whiskers blowing in the breeze.

by Kevin McCaughey

A blind date in a small bed.   In theory it seemed a pretty ideal proposition.

The girl’s name was Dasha, a friend of Aylita’s.  Alyita was Warren’s girlfriend.  And Warren was my friend and teaching colleague.  The two girls planned to visit us in Samara, taking the overnight train from Kazan, 300 miles up the Volga River.  Because Dasha had no boyfriend and I still hadn’t landed a Russian girlfriend, we were deemed a natural fit, and the idea was proposed that Dasha stay with me.

I had a one-bedroom, one-bed apartment, where there was no place to evade intimacy.  Not that I was afraid of intimacy, but I wanted the chance to meet Dasha first.

Warren took my refusal stolidly.  It meant—since he wanted these few nights alone with Aylita—that they would have to book a hotel, and he would be left holding the bill.  “You can’t let a Russian girl pay for herself,” he told me.

This upcoming weekend, Warren made clear, was going to require some pretty chubby wallets.  It was Dasha’s first time in Samara.  Not only did we need to show her a good time, but we needed to show her that such good times were par for the course for Aylita.

And so we began, on a dark and frozen Friday evening, at La Cucaracha, a faux Mexican restaurant that enlisted Doritos in its nachos.  Few Samarans knew or cared what Mexican food was, as long as the prices were chicly high.

We were heading to the cloak desk.  My date at this point was still mostly blind.  By that I mean, I had only seen Dasha in a winterized condition:  her leather beanie cap down her forehead, a scarf up to her cheeks, and her thick coat straightening any curves in her figure.  I was curious to see, and thus, as she was taking off her coat, I neglected my duty.

“Kevin,” Aylita said.  “Why don’t you help Dasha?”

Warren was better trained, already helping Aylita peel and unwrap her winter cocoon to reveal a tall, dark, high-cheeked Tatar girl.

There were rules with Russian girls.  You helped them with their coats.  You reached out your hand to them when they got out of a cab.  You carried any bag that did not have ornamental value.  You surprised them with flowers once a week.  You always paid.  And most difficult of all for a casual and indecisive California boy like me, you didn’t ask what they wanted; you knew and you did it.

*

Downstairs, the mirror ball speckled us with light as we ate Russ-Mex.  At one end of the room a singer turned knobs on his DJ machine and assaulted the low ceiling with Russian pop.  It was hard to talk cross-lingually, so the girls sat together with their pink drinks in tulip glasses, Warren and I across the table with our beers.  It offered us a chance to observe.

“What do you think of Dasha?” he asked.

“She’s okay.”

Dasha was cute and simple: she wore black slacks and a white sweater.  Her hair was short and businessy with a sidelong flop.  None of which excited me much.  Cute didn’t really cut it here in Samara, which, like many Russian cities, was reputed to have the most beautiful girls in the country.  Mostly, though, Dasha just didn’t gravitate toward me.  During my teaching presentations around the region, some women looked up with eyes that positively sparkled, what one American colleague described as  “take me” eyes, although he did not use the word take.  No matter that I was thirty-eight; I was something of a star, like a Back Street Boy.  Dasha, I could quickly see, would never have eyes for me.  I was nothing special.  And I wasn’t happy sentenced to a whole weekend as the unspecial guy.

*

We moved on to the nightclub complex Zvezda, and Warren had bribed our way past the line to our own pool table.  Aylita held a cue stick in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“How do you find Dasha?” Aylita asked.

“She’s cute,” I said.

I watched Dasha play.  She took her shots seriously, although she didn’t have much skill.  She monitored the progress of the game in between turns.  I admired her powers of concentration, even if they were never directed at me.

“So do you think you will love her?” Aylita went on.

“Do you think she’ll love me?” I asked.

“Yes,” Aylita said.  “I think yes.”

*

Around midnight I was left to escort Dasha back to the Hotel Volga.  I wasn’t allowed to send her off in a taxi alone, not at this stage.  That was another Russian girl rule.

So I rode with her, and then she wanted supplies, so we stopped at a 24-hour mini-mart.  I held the door open for her against the wind blowing off the river, and I followed her inside.  It was my duty to pay.  That I knew.  And I probably should have selected a few things for her, not offering, just knowing that she should have them, but I couldn’t put forward the effort.  Instead, I came off as submissive, taking the goods she selected from her hand, one by one—red apple, green apple, bottle of water, Marlboro Lights—and putting them into a wire basket.

We crossed the street and climbed the steps of the Volga Hotel.  Dasha was one stride ahead of me.  I had to maneuver fast to get in position to open the door.  These things took forethought.  I was learning.  I made it without slipping on the ice, pulled the door open, and Dasha stepped inside.  I was carrying her grocery bag, so I had to follow into the bare and echoey lobby.  Halfway to the desk, she turned and said, “I’m sorry but I can not invite you to my number.”  She took the bag, and I retreated.

This uncalled-for rejection irked me.  Tomorrow night I would say goodbye well before the lobby.

*

Dasha was my responsibility for the whole of the next day, at least until evening when we were to arrive at Warren’s apartment.  I was relieved that she didn’t phone until after twelve noon, and that I wouldn’t have to appear at the hotel until three.   I told her to meet me downstairs.  I had no intention of going to her number.

I didn’t know how to entertain Dasha.   So I asked if she wanted to walk.   We crossed the street from her hotel, passed through bare trees and reached the promenade along the Volga.

No one else was walking.  It was December, and the city had been iced for months.  The frozen river had the look of a field, and if it weren’t for the misty black of the tree line half a mile across, you wouldn’t have known where the river ended and the sky began.

Out on this field, we saw black forms of ice fishermen on stools, and here and there near the embankment, a little tent next to an opening hewn in the ice, through which a few brave men dunked themselves.

This was our first chance to communicate, unfettered by noise and expensive distractions.  Dasha was twenty-five, never married.  She had a car, an apartment, an office job at Coca Cola in Kazan.  I asked her if she had a dream, and she said wanted to improve her English.

Near the end of the promenade, we turned away from the river and climbed steps that ran between apartment blocks, up towards flat and trafficked streets.

It started to snow.

City snow is rarely beautiful.  Most of the time it hardens into clumps against trees or craggy snow-hedges that line the roads, and these are blackish and perforated by the splatters of passing Ladas or Sputniks.  The snow on the sidewalks is tramped, melted, and refrozen into glasslike sheets.

But sometimes, not often, when the fresh snow comes—and the right kind of it—it sticks to the world, to trees, and balconies, and hats.  It turns the sound of cars into whispers.  It softens the cold.  It sweeps the bad of winter under the rug.

It was snowing this way now.  And with the sky cover so low overhead, the cold had coziness.  I realized that Dasha looked more Russian today, prettier.  She was wearing a fur coat and her lipstick was very red.

We held gloved hands.  This was one of Russia’s pleasant rules.  In inclement weather, on slopes or stairs, you could take a girl’s arm or hand at will: if it was a gesture of affection, or a sensible effort to increase stability, this was left unsaid.

“I do not want to be too early,” Dasha said. “Perhaps Aylita still sleeps.”

“It’s almost four o’clock,” I said.

“Aylita likes sleep.  She’s like animal, domestic pet.  Big cat.  Do you know,” she went on after a moment, “that they will be married?”

I hadn’t heard a word on the subject from Warren.

“January,” Dasha said.

“In January?  That’s soon.”

“Yes.  One month.  Warren did not say?”

“Well,” I lied, “he might have.  But he doesn’t really talk much sometimes… about personal things.  He’s from New Hampshire.”

*

It was dark when he reached Warren’s apartment.  Aylita and Dasha sat in the kitchen looking through photos.  One was a shot of me in action at a teaching conference, gesturing to a flip chart.

“Take,” Aylita said in Russian, and Dasha, without a word, filed it inside her purse.

This occurrence, right in front of me, suggested that there was already something between Dasha and me.  It suggested, too, that my opinion on the matter wasn’t really required.

I joined Warren in the main room and told him I had a thousand rubles in my pocket.  Aaron nodded in a way that meant he wasn’t impressed.

“I can’t go out with less than three thousand, ” he said.

“It’s not that I mind spending all the money,” I explained.  “It’s just that I don’t enjoy going to these clubs and hip restaurants.”

“Nobody does,” Warren said, “but you gotta do it.”

When it was time to go, and we were in the entry hall, I made sure I positioned myself next to Dasha early.  In Russian moments like these, you had to think clearly.  It wasn’t just the coat and the door; there were gloves, scarf, hat, purse.  You had to calculate the proper order of things.

*

The four-lane Zvezda bowling alley was dark, night-clubby, with black lights and hip music, rich guys in black with skirted blondes, foreigners and their dates.  It was Dasha’s first bowling experience, and she bowled the way she played pool, devoting herself to it, concentrating.

I was happy when, afterwards, we all agreed to call it a night.  It was just eleven when I got Dasha to the Hotel Volga.  I stopped on the sidewalk outside and said goodnight.   Without preface, she kissed me and went inside.

The kiss was simple.  It was neither slow, open, lingering, moist, or sexy.

But I thought about it on the way home in my taxi.  There’d been something different about that kiss.  It was soft, but not too soft, her lips spongy and luxuriant without any effort.  What was it exactly?

The phone was ringing when I got into my apartment.  It was Warren.  He wanted to know if Dasha was with me.

“No, still at the hotel.”

“You haven’t brought her home?  That’s expensive.”

It struck me that this was true.  My not sleeping with Dasha was adding up.  Someone had to pay for that hotel room.  Was it Warren or I?

“She kissed me goodnight,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said flatly.  “How was it?”

“It was cushy,” I said.  That was it.  Cushy.

*

The girls were leaving for Kazan on the evening train.  That day, Dasha and I walked again and held hands.  We went back to the Zvezda complex, drank coffee in the café, and saw a film, a romantic comedy where Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer quarreled and made up in the Russian language.  Dasha watched the movie the way she did everything.  Totally.  She was absorbed.  I spent a lot of time looking at her.  She was wearing a warm green dress that reached down to her ankles and showed a lot of shape.  I wanted to kiss her there in the theater, to see if that cushy experience had only been imagined, or if it was a one-shot deal, or if it was something that could return again and again.  I took her hand.  She gave it without resistance.  I leaned close, but her attention was on the screen.  What would it be like when the cushy lips kissed, I mean fully kissed, so that nothing else was on her mind?

*

At the reception desk in the Hotel Volga, at five p.m., I paid the bill.  It was my duty, but I didn’t even mind.  I phoned up to Dasha’s number.   For the first time that number of hers seemed an inviting place.  I had never been behind a closed door with her.  But her bags were already downstairs, and we were late, in real danger of missing the train.  “I am descending,” Dasha said casually into the phone.

*

We used sliding steps over the sheet ice in front of the train station, funneling down through a passage between tented kiosks, lit from inside by candles.  I had Dasha’s luggage in both hands.

“It won’t be so bad,” I said, “If you miss your train.  You could stay here. If it’s not a problem.  With me. ”

She laughed.  “I think it will not be problem.”

Inside, we scooted among the crowd to the departure board.  According to the clock, our train had departed five minutes ago.  But then we both recalled a simple Russian rule:  station clocks show Moscow time.  The Samara-Kazan train doesn’t operate on Samara or Kazan time, but Moscow time, and so we had nearly an hour to spare.

We found a plastic table at a snack bar.  I stacked her luggage.  I brought tea for Dasha and a beer for myself.  Dasha opened her purse.  She took out a mirror and her lipstick, and I watched her trace it over the soft lips, making them glimmer with moistness.  I scooted my plastic chair close to hers.

I watched her mouth, feeling inside of me a rare confidence born from the clarity of knowing what I wanted.  “Do you plan on kissing me goodbye?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“Can we start now?”

She laughed. “You are funny, Kevin. ”

“No, I’m totally serious. ”

But instead she wrote down her phone number in Kazan.

*

On the platform it was windy, and the wind picked up ice crystals and threw them upward like glitter.  I hauled Dasha’s bags up the steep metal steps of the train into the light of the aisle.  Warren and Aylita were already there in the compartment.  We only had a few minutes now, and I wanted to spend a few of them kissing.

Then Warren and Aylita kissed goodbye, it was my cue.  I stepped close to Dasha.  I went directly for the cush.

But Dasha turned her face.  She did it neatly, definitively—offering access only to her cheek.  Our cheeks touched, and that was it.  I stepped back, stunned with disappointment.  I tried not to look pouty.   Dasha’s fingers found mine and squeezed a gentle hold, and then Warren was leading me down the corridor and the metal steps, and we were standing on the platform while the girls leaned against the orangey square of the window, iced at its borders, and gave cock-wristed good-bye waves to us, the kind you would give to a baby in a crib.

“She didn’t kiss me good-bye,” I said.  “I don’t get it.”

“She was wearing lipstick,” Warren said.

“So?”

“Russian girls don’t kiss when they’re wearing lipstick.”

“They always wear lipstick.”

“Yeah, but there’s different situations.  She’d just put it on.  For the train.  It was obvious.”

“What does it matter? Who’s going to see her in the train compartment?”

“That’s not the point. ”

The girls were still there, looking happy.  Their lips had color; I could see even through the train window.

“She could put it on again,” I said.  “It’s an overnight train trip.  There’s plenty of time.”

“No, Kevin.  It’s just one of those rules,” he said.  “She put on lipstick, she doesn’t want to mess it up.”

The girls put their hands to the glass trying to see out through the glare.  Maybe they couldn’t even see us.

“But she promised.”

“We have to wait for the train to pull out.  It’s a Russian tradition.”

Still the train didn’t leave.  At last, Aylita made a walking motion with her fingers, and Warren said, “All right.  We’re clear.  They probably want us to leave so they can start drinking beer.”

We headed up the steps of the tunnel toward the bars upstairs.

“I guess now I know the lipstick rule,” I said.

Pursuing it with Warren would have irritated him.

Customs survive.  That’s all.  They have evolved.  And if so, there must be some kind of imperceptible Darwinian usefulness.  All I could do was learn them, experience them through time, and accept what I had learned.  No use dissecting.

“Just one last question,” I said to Warren.  “Okay, assuming that Dasha and Aylita are drinking beer right now, doesn’t that mess up their lipstick too?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but that’s different.”