The Best Travel Writing 2011

by James O'Reilly

  That night my mother was stung by a scorpion in the shower stall, in the very foot she had struck on the mountain. The young man, Ousmane was filled with reverence. His motorbike lit the way on the dark pathways to the village clinic. A group of people were sitting by lamplight, holding vigil, the way I later held vigil outside the tent where my mother lay on painkillers with a fire burning up her leg. Ousmane sat beside me, filling my plastic cup with red wine from a box he had got from the tourists. I held the dark sugary wine in my mouth and honored the full moon over the tent and the children running in the alleyways, singing and calling down the light. The scorpion was an ancient creature, master of survival and maternal self-sacrifice, guardian of death and transition. It was also the constellation I had been born under.

  The next sign was the chick that was killed at the Edbaf bus station in Ouagadougou. The chicken and her four little chicks came peeping around the passengers’ feet. I saw them so clearly like light and water, the fire patterns on their little warm bodies. One ran off suddenly from the others and a man passing by lost his footing and struck it down. He stood there a moment watching as it fluttered, then he walked away. My heart was beating fast. The chick lay dead, coated with blood and sand.

  On the long ride to Mali there were so many stars. I could see all of them between the constellations. It had been six years since I’d seen Issa. I had thought to drift away from him, but the pull was too strong. My heart was wide open like a door. I had a vision. Everything was in the hand, but I had to dig deeper. I had to dig around the palm, which was the heart, with a spoon, but I found it went through the back of my hand. Blood and bone; these were the essential substances. Water and earth. But there was also fire.

  My love of Issa has been a strange dream, like when he told me he had taken up his father’s skill of bronze casting and I never knew this was something he could do. One who works with fire is a guardian between the worlds and the fire must be fed and tended and given the ultimate respect.

  A day after our arrival in his hometown in the north he brought me to the blacksmith’s hut. The wailing voice of a Fulani singer came from a small radio while a little boy turned the wheel of the bellows, raising the flames. Faucets, pieces of pipe, old bracelets and locks were laid on the bed of coals. There was an explosion and we all ducked. A piece of hot metal shot over the apprentice’s head. The boys smiled at me. I smiled back and shivered.

  The softened pieces of metal were put into an old bent metal bowl, the outside of which was coated with clay and donkey dung. The bowl was covered with a lid and Issa’s sculptures, encased in clay, were laid on the coals. Two men now took turns at the wheel that made a soft clattering sound like a sewing machine. Half an hour, an hour. I was entranced by the heat and acrid smells, by the rose-orange, turquoise, purple and bright green flames, watching the metal melt to liquid. Unlike the surface of a lake it was gleaming white, neither sky, nor sea. The boy raked sparks off its surface. He picked up the bowl with iron pinchers and poured the liquid light—some of it hitting the earth and forming beads—into the sculptures half buried in the earth. Unearthed they turned shades of color. They were alive, threads of heat glowing in them like veins.

  Issa said a prayer. “This is sacred for me.”

  When they had cooled he gently cracked them open. Each was beautifully wrought, but one. It appeared that the foot had broken off, the left, the female side.

  We talked about marriage in the night courtyard on the cane chairs, as we had talked many times before. I could not marry without losing what was sacred to me: my freedom. His father has often asked when I was going to come and “sit” in the family. Issa sat in his blue-dark purple tunic, a surface like charcoal in the darkness. The family thought that my mother had come so that the kola nuts could be given and we could be married. After his brother died he became the eldest and he was still unmarried and childless. He said his parents wanted to live in peace; living with a woman, sleeping with her in the family house was a sin. I said in the older faith the love between a woman and a man was sacred. This was the original holy fire. He said something about the spilling of seed. This was the transplanted patriarchy. Here were two elements, the sun and the moon, and they were directly opposed.

  Two days after arrival, at the little cybercafé down the road my mother received an email from Europe. They had found her sister in the river a few days before Christmas. She had been healing from a broken leg for six months when she went to see the river, walking with her cane. She fell off the bridge. My mother’s favorite sister, my dear aunt had left by water.

  The servant brought a little stove of smoking incense into the room where my mother lay. Trails of the sweet smoldering root drifted out to us. I sat with Issa in the women’s courtyard, with my journal unopened, watching the black finches in the fern tree while he carved his sun-warmed beeswax. His mothers were grilling fish for us. A mountain of clothing sat waiting to be washed by hand.

  Issa called me “Lagere,” favorite daughter, first and last born. I knew every one of his family and they accepted me as one of their own. Not one member of my family had ever met him until now. Issa and I had met in Kayes where the rivers meet. I had followed the river from Senegal on a white horse and rode into town where he was working at a traveler’s inn. A month earlier he had lost his favorite eldest brother to water. All of this came back to me. His brother had papers, plane ticket and passport for passage to the States and drove all the way from Bamako to say goodbye. He left again by the same bridge I later crossed by horse. The high waters caught him in a current and the car slid off and sank. Issa saw it all from shore, his hand still lifted in a gesture of goodbye. He saw everything go down, his love and his life as he knew it. In that moment he took on six siblings, his aging parents, all the extended relatives, and a dark fear of Faro, Goddess of the water.

  “I am lost.”

  My mother was sitting on the roof, wrapped in her blue desert cloth, her face bronzed by the setting sun. Her sister had been guardian of her childhood home, the last connection to her homeland.

  “I’m coming back with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Without a word to Issa I found myself with my mother booking earlier flights back to Canada, and another one for her to Europe for the funeral. We had nine days. She didn’t want to stay in Issa’s house any longer. She wanted to see the land.

  We rented two motorbikes, packed the tents and food and set off, Issa and I, his brother and my mother, into Dogon country. As we climbed up to Nando and the most beautiful clay mosque that had fallen from the sky we picked koronifin under the trees, small red berries that tasted of chocolate. We ate rat in one village with a sauce of disi, a pale yellow stringy root like potato. Everywhere we were offered calabashes of dagena, a milk-like drink from fonio, the sacred grain of the Dogon. In another village they gave my mother bark of the balazon, thorn tree, for a lung infection she had developed from the dust. They call it the ‘devil tree’ because it withers in the rainy season and thrives in the winter. I could see she was in shock, and because I worried I did not notice my own. I gave him my decision.

  “Talk to me, Issa.”

  “Why are you leaving?”

  “I’m taking my mother home.”

  “What about me?”

  With my arms around his waist and my eyes watering we rode through bush fires and smoke, through village pools. Maybe the beauty of his bronzes would carry him. But it was too late. He was losing the art of fire, and there was too much water under the bridge.

  We rode a donkey cart from Tuni. The man let me drive as he walked alongside, muttering and cursing at the donkey, shoving him, threatening him. He finally gave me the rope and the stick. I used them as a rhythm, with my hands out on either side high in the air, the rope in one, the stick in the other, waving a consistent motion that led me into a trance, with the ‘shhh’ of the tires in the sand, the trundling of the cart, the clicking of my tongue. It felt r
ight. I was driving. I lay my hand on the donkey and closed my eyes. He was working with me. I understood then what it was to direct one’s life and be in touch with the soul.

  Two days after our return from Hombori my mother and I were waiting for our bus to take us home through Dogon country and on to the Burkina border. It was cold. My shawl lay wet on my back. I had dried my hair with it at dawn when Issa came to ask me for money, just enough to get his business going, just enough. He sat beside me at the breakfast stand and ordered an egg. We ate in silence. I was worrying about the bus, wondering if it would ever come. I was looking at the row of Barika soap sachets hanging behind the coffee man’s head, thinking how I had to wash this tangled strand of my life, sever it. I was thinking about my aunt and how messages from the other side had led me through a door. It wasn’t that I chose my mother over Issa. I chose myself.

  “Zon.” Issa muttered. Thief.

  He was watching the commotion behind us. Two merchant women had lost their money and stood there with all of their baggage and nowhere to go.

  The bus never came. A man ran up from the bus company.

  “Le bus n’est pas bon!” The bus is no good.

  He gave us back our money. My mother stared at me. Our flight left in thirty-five hours from Ouagadougou in Burkina, three hundred miles away. I had left everything too late. But then the man grabbed my hand and led us out the station door to the highway where a bush taxi sat low on its haunches, piled high with cargo and packed with people. Our man argued with the ticket seller and came out smiling with two tickets. We climbed into the back of the covered pickup, over legs and chickens and sacks of roots, and squeezed ourselves into place. Issa came to the window in his purple tunic. We looked into each other’s eyes. I saw his sadness and desperation. I felt none of that pain from before, the separation I’d always had to bear when leaving yet again for another year. I felt a kind of solemn truth.

  On the Bandiagara Pass the hazy band of the Sahel spread below us, luminous sands dotted with thorn trees, blue distance. We came down through the red cliffs. The Fulani man beside me was asking me the way as if I had lived here all my life. In Koro a battered white van was waiting in the heat. The owner said he now had four passengers including us, but he was waiting for ten more to make it worthwhile. Or did we want to pay the extra fare? My mother sat defiantly on the hard bench to wait it out, the sun burning the sands at her feet.

  Dusty, windblown Koro. We left on the red road in an old white mini bus without windows, seven of us, the two smiling Dogon men with their sacks of onions, the Sorai in his striped tunic and white turban and sacks of salt, a young boy in lime green head cloth, and a speckled chicken at our feet. We wrapped scarves over our faces and hung on to the metal frames of the windows, bumping on the hard benches that were not fixed to the floor, as the bus rattled along and the smoke swept in and veiled us. We traveled among the great gesturing baobabs and bristly thorn trees blooming yellow flowers. We went with the camel running down the embankment, head held high, with the spotted goats moving in the bushes and a herder boy standing still against the sky. I saw my mother’s face of pure joy. This was her element and mine, traveling free. The sun was setting in Mali, that golden amber sphere burning into dust.

  Erika Connor is an artist and writer from rural Quebec, Canada, with a love of animals, nature, myths, and culture. She has taken care of wild birds and raccoons in rehabilitation centers, worked for the Humane Society’s “visiting dogs in hospitals” program in Canada, traveled by white horse both in West Africa and Mongolia, observed wild horses in Mongolia, lived with the Fulani and Bambara people of the Sahel, and continues to lose herself between the worlds.

  MARCIA DESANCTIS

  One Day, Three Dead Men

  Oh Russia.

  THE CONCIERGE TOLD ME IT WAS THE HOTTEST JUNE DAY on record in Moscow. In front of the National Hotel, the air was thick with a million floating seeds from the poplar tree. The Russians call it “summer snow,” and in the heat, the white fluff stuck to my neck, shoulders, and legs as I drifted through the streets of the city I once had known well but now, barely recognized. I was back in Russia after a long absence and after three days, I was still hopeful I would see what I had traveled all this way to find.

  It was a homecoming of sorts. Twenty-eight years had passed since I first traveled to the then-Soviet Union. I had arrived there in June of 1982 with Mom, Dad, and a brand new degree in Russian Studies. I was a wide-eyed Cold War baby who had spent the last four years reading deeply—very deeply—into the tortured Russian soul. It had been an obsession since tenth grade, when I won a school essay contest. I have no memory of the topic, but I do recall the prize: a collection of novellas by Dostoevsky. It beats me what a fifteen-year-old public school cheerleader found in The Gambler, but I began to devour those dark tales, and soon began to study Russian during weekends and summers.

  I spent my college years in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, a daylight-free warren of classrooms occupying the basement of a building in the center of the Princeton campus. The language classes were crowded, but only four of us in the Class of 1982 declared Russian as our major. I took courses in politics and history to examine the centuries-old ties between the rulers—Czars, Bolsheviks, the Politburo, or whoever held the reins at the time—and the country’s writers, who belonged to the Russian people. I remained obsessed with the literature—with Chekhov’s stifling parlors and Gogol’s lunatics, yes, but also with a couple of contemporary writers and poets, some of whom were in exile, and some of whom—through compromise or cleverness or both—survived the system as Soviet writers.

  After graduation, I turned down the chance to translate interoffice memos at some Washington agency or another. Instead, I worked for tips as a tour guide for doctors on professional exchange programs. I crisscrossed the Soviet Union, starting each trip in Moscow, finishing up in Leningrad. Two years later, I began a career in network television, and as I climbed the ladder, traveled frequently to the USSR. Three times I fell in love on assignment during Moscow winters, always finding some magic of chemistry or coincidence in that barren place. In 1992, I spent two months researching weapons facilities for the American network I worked for, but it was my last trip to Moscow. I had recently married, soon would have a son, and then a daughter, and duty and domesticity curtailed my exotic travels almost to extinction. But my devotion to Russian literature remained, and I loved to revisit my college volumes—Turgenev, Lermontov, Gorky, Aksyonov, Akhmatova, and especially Chekhov—and skim my margin notes, scribbled at a time when there was nothing on earth more important than the book in my hand.

  In my forties, my old obsession began to scratch at me. I had begun to travel, write, and work again, but there was urgency in the sensation that Russia was calling me back. I started to miss, then crave, and then positively require my connection to the passion that had defined me. A classic midlife epiphany, to be sure, where I felt a desire to stitch the known past together with the unknown future, and to soothe myself with the knowledge that I might yet be the same person after nearly three decades. My whole life was before me back then, and in a way, with two nearly-grown kids, it was now as well. So, on Memorial Day, I left my husband, my teenagers, and a couple of houseguests in the middle of a summer barbecue to catch my plane to Moscow. I was duplicating that first journey, taken right after I graduated from college. I wanted to know if, when I landed on Russian soil, it would feel like home again.

  It hadn’t begun well. Two weeks earlier, I had spent two full days—one of them in hurricane-force rains—standing outside the Russian consulate in New York, applying for a visa, with a restless throng of other document-waving hopefuls. I made the mistake of not hiring an outside procurement service, and spent hours on the sidewalk making anagrams in my head out of the words, Mr. Medvedev, tear down this wall. One advantage of traveling with a television network? I never had to get my own visa. The document came through, but I already felt done-in by the grea
t Russian obstacle machine.

  Round two greeted me upon landing in Moscow at 5:00 P.M. Passport control was interminable; it gave me severe Brezhnev-era flashbacks. I couldn’t find an open bank to get rubles, so I charged a train ride to Belorussky Station, where I discovered that I left my fluent Russian somewhere in 1992. It was pretty much gone, especially the part that might have helped me negotiate with a swarm of drivers, all clad in leather jackets, who lurked curbside ready to shake down the next sucker—in this case, me. There were no official taxis. What had I ever liked about this place? I fumed as I doled out fifty U.S. bucks to a man who ferried me to the National.

  It was now a seven-star hotel. My parents had sprung for it in 1982; this time, I prepaid my stay in credit card points. In my room, the antique reproductions were high quality—crimson brocades and dainty settees. More importantly, the mini-bar was full, and I went for a double vodka, straight up. From room service, I ordered strawberries to round out my cocktail hour. The price tag? One thousand fifteen rubles. Thirty-four dollars for seven strawberries.

  I put myself on a budget that made me feel more like a college student now than I had when I was twenty-one. I walked and walked, looking for a bakery where I might find something tasty and cheap. I found one on Varvarka Street, beside the Znamensky Monastery, and for pennies, I snacked on pirozhki, one filled with apples, one with potatoes, one with cheese. The lady who served me was a relic, draped with a blue baker’s coat and cap atop her teased hair. Later, I bought a sack of strawberries at a kiosk, this time for ten rubles—roughly forty cents. An old friend and I ate osso bucco and gnocchi alla Romagna at a restaurant that was more delicious and expensive than anything in New York. He escorted me past an intimidating trio of doormen who were bursting out of their suit jackets. There was plenty of security because upstairs, an oligarch was throwing a lavish birthday party.