Author: Ruth Powell

In 2007, it was revealed that Tania Head, the president of the World Trade Survivors’ Network, had fabricated her story and had not been in the towers during the 9/11 attacks.  She wasn’t living in the United States in 2001 and her name wasn’t even Tania.

You want to know how it started?

It started so easily and there are so many others to blame.  Not just me.  I blame it on the internet, the fact that my mother is left-handed, and because my star sign is Leo.  I blame it on the first smell of cut-grass, a sea breeze in Andorra and staying up late one night drinking whiskey.  I would also then have to blame it on the whiskey stained wooden table that next morning and Meg.  But most of all I blame it on a phone call from Dave.

Dave was the light in my life.  I had loved him a long time before I spoke to him and would spend hours just delighting in his beauty, intellect and wit.  I was drawn to him from the start and as he was the only other American in the office that spring, we shared an immediate connection.

We spent many happy afternoons together and I felt at home with him.  I even liked myself when I was around him and didn’t worry about my weight or my shyness.  Briefly put, he made me feel beautiful and wanted and as if I were a part of something.

But “I don’t love you” was all Dave said on the phone that night and I felt like I had vanished.  The disorientation lasted a long time and I felt beached and sick and could hardly recognise myself in the bathroom mirror.

“I’ll change” I promised

“No you won’t.  You’re a liar” he said and he hung-up the phone.

I didn’t tell lies I told stories. The stories came so easily to me and I told them casually and without malice.  Sometimes I changed a bit of detail to spice-up the mundane or to offer a little character to an otherwise boring anecdote.  But they weren’t lies, they were stories.

So I couldn’t believe it when he asked me to stop calling him and he returned the watch I had given him for his birthday.  One day we were eating fresh strawberries in the park, laughing at the people walking by and the next day he hated me and thought I was a liar.  He made it impossible for me to see out my contract in Barcelona which is why I had to get a transfer back to the States.

It took me a long time to settle into New York.  My tasks at work were almost the same as in Barcelona but my colleagues did things with so much more confidence and ease.  I organised my new life, rented a cheap apartment in Brooklyn and tried to walk around the city as if I really did live and belong there, but it was futile.  I didn’t understand the new city I lived in, I couldn’t go back to Barcelona and I didn’t want to go home.  I was stuck.

But life improved when my colleague and my only friend at the time, Meg, asked me out for lunch one Friday.  She said she had been meaning to invite me for weeks, but between one deadline and another, time had just slipped by.  I accepted and we headed to her favourite place on 42nd street, which is where she started to asking me about my personal life.

“So tell me all about yourself” she commanded “any lovers, stories, secrets to share?”

“There was a man, yes there was one” I said.  “His name was Dave, but he…he died in the towers”.

Her immediate grief and empathy seduced me and I felt at home, safe and nested and no longer stuck or cemented as I had been.  I looked at her eyes filled with sorrow for me, and when she held my hand I started to cry too.

“Dave died in the towers” I repeated.  “I survived.  Of course, most days I wish I hadn’t”.

“My God, I had no idea” she said “you are so brave, so strong”.  She was overwhelmed with the proximity of the tragedy.

Neither of us went back to work that day.  We called in sick with some excuse about food poisoning and went back to her apartment with whiskey.  We talked and cried until early the next morning and it was wonderful.  But I often think if she had stopped me there in that café that I might not have continued.  If only she had doubted my claim for one second and not comforted me or encouraged me to tell her more gruesome detail, I might not have gone on with my story.  My version.  My history.

So it’s really all Meg’s fault when you think of it.  She’s far more to blame than Dave ever was or could be.  And so I incriminate and charge her.  For the deeds at her feet and those muddy ones at mine that I don’t like looking at.  For all that has passed since and for some future sins that none of us have thought about, developed or are aware of yet.  It’s all her fault and I blame her.

 

 

 

No one was more surprised than I was when Christopher Walken called me up on my mobile phone from LA.

“Hi Ruth, it’s Chris.  Christopher Walken.  Do you have a minute, is now a good time?”

“Well Chris” I replied, “I have to say, you’ve caught me at a bit of an awkward moment.  I’m meeting some friends in a while and I’ve a few things to do before then.  But perhaps I have a minute or two, how can I help?”

“I won’t keep you” promised Christopher Walken.”Well alright then” I replied.

“I’ve been offered the role of a Welsh man in a movie next year” he continued “and, you know, I was just hoping that you might be able to offer me advice and guidance as I prepare for the role.  I was hoping you would come out to LA tomorrow and work with me on the accent”.

“I don’t know Chris” I said “see the thing is, how will I get there?”

“My jet is on stand by in Paris with Marty and Bob.  They’re good people and looking forward to working with you too.  We’ll do voice-work, party, I’ll show you the west coast.  It will be great.  I mean, everyone is really excited out here”.

“Oh I don’t know Chris” I said “to be honest with you the Welsh accent is one of the hardest things for an actor to take on, see.  The best most actors can do, and I mean the very best they can hope for is to sound like they come from Islamabad.  I don’t know if I can help you at all.  Have you tried a professional voice coach?”

“No Ruthy.  No Ruthy baby, that’s not my road” he replied.

“Well Chris” I said “I won’t lie to you.  I’ve loads on this weekend, it’s mental, I don’t think I can help you at all.  Sorry love”.

“OK, OK, OK.  Well thanks Ruthy and I hope to see you at the premier right?”

“Yeah, you too Chris” I said “oh, before you go though, I’ve said it before to others so I’ll say it to your face now.  The Deer Hunter is one of my favourite films of all times.  Honestly”.

“Thank you” said Christopher Walken “that means a lot to me”.

Once a week the Ulaanbaatar Post would be published and for a dollar I could gather up all the world’s news in English, on six crisp sheets of paper.

My Tuesday morning ritual involved me buying the Post, heading to Nara’s for coffee and studying every word of every item.  The situation in Palestine.  50 words.  The US elections.  50 words.  The copper mine crisis in the Gobi.  50 words.  The Beijing Olympics.  50 words.

My favourite headline in the paper was “when is New Year’s Eve?”  Question Mark.  There was a dispute between the elder monks in Mongolia about the date and time of the new lunar sighting to mark the start of the new year.  The Chinese were already going with late February early March, but some people, my friend Nara for example, disagreed.

“That’s not the correct date for the new year” she stated “it must be sooner”.

I checked with my diary where there it clearly stated that the new moon would appear again on 10 February.  Who needed monks to discuss?  I had the answer because it was written in my stationery.

Nara didn’t like this at all.

“Everything is so directive with you” she complained “you can’t timetable the moon.  How can you know that your printed book is real?  We have to wait for the monks”.  She didn’t finish her coffee, but poured it out as often she did when she thought I wasn’t looking.

Then we went to the market.  We both wanted to buy some meat and vegetables, but when we arrived one of the stalls had over a hundred small hand painted orange wooden stools for sale.  The ones you see in every ger and home in Mongolia and I wanted one for my own room.  They were standing there proudly like Ghengis Khan warriors only this time being sold for 5 dollars a piece.  Nara thought I was crazy to buy one, but I laughed and made the purchase and said we should stop for milky tea on our way home.  She liked that idea.  I knew she didn’t like the coffee.

As I was ordering the tea, Nara said “I think I’m going to Seattle”.

“When?”

“In the fall”.

And all my movements stopped.  I pretended to be happy for her and lied about my excitement about her visas, plans and ideas for her new life.  Her news, her moons, her wonder.  But all I could really think about was my life in Mongolia and about all the people coming and going and staying and leaving and how my Tuesday mornings, new years, moons and lives would be altered by her moving.  For a moment I longed for a fixed thing.  Something set in stone or stationery, something that I could rely on, trust or believe in.

We drank our tea.  She had waited 8 years for her visa to come through and I looked at my hand painted orange wooden stool and thought about my life without her.  I never learned to wait.  I always jumped again ahead of myself into other predicaments and never allowed new moons to show themselves and arrive when they felt the need.

I should have.

 

It is the silver bangle I am drawn to.

I am sitting in the shadows, waiting for the bus.  She is selling single cigarettes and asking tourists for their empty water bottles.  She is wearing an orange dress three sizes too big and her Mini-Mouse flip-flops are broken and too small for her feet.  She is wearing a silver bangle around her delicate left wrist and she touches it from time to time with her right index finger.

I finish the water from my bottle and she runs up to me and points at the plastic.  I give it to her and I buy two cigarettes.  I light one but the heat from the day and the nicotine make me feel nauseous, so put it out almost immediately.  She laughs, picks it up from the ground and puts it back into her packet to re-sell later.

She sits down next to me and wipes the hair from her forehead slowly.

I point at her bangle and I say “very beautiful”.  She repeats the words carefully “very beautiful, very beautiful”.

She is very beautiful.  Sitting there in the sun of the day, her eyes are shinning and she resembles dancing.

A man approaches.  She stands-up and offers him cigarettes.  He is busy and in a rush.  He hands her some rupees and she tries to sell him the cigarette I had out earlier.  He sees that it is second-hand and he hits her.  She laughs.  She apologises and she sells him a new one.   He is happy now and he walks away.

A young boy comes up to her.  He is about the same age and in the same trade.  He is selling cigarettes and collecting water bottles too, but he is also selling single pieces of chewing gum.  He offers me his wares, but I shake my head.  He is angry with her and there is a dispute.  He pushes her to the ground.  She gets up and walks away from the shade towards the buses and the heat and the fumes from the engines.

I had a silver bangle.  I bought it in a cut price factory in Deli two weeks ago, but I lost it on the way.  I don’t know where I left it, perhaps in one of the hotels, the restaurants, the taxis or on the beach.  Now I wonder.

My bus is ready so I stand up and walk past the little girl with the tiny shoulders who is dressed in orange.  I buy the rest of the packet of cigarettes from her.  There are five left, but I pay for ten.  She says to me “very beautiful” and then I leave.

 

It was a Monday when it happened.  Mirela had an overwhelming urge to buy flowers after her early morning shift cleaning hotel rooms on O’Connell Street so decided to wander over to Moore Street to treat herself to colours.  The autumnal days in Dublin sometimes saddened her, made her think of home and all she missed, but this day was providing her with a delicious lightness of spirit and a giddy glow of excitement. 

When she first moved to Dublin she wrote that Summerhill was a pleasant enough place to live and that her apartment would be cosy once she’d made some small changes.  New curtains, a rug, some china cups with saucers and a tablecloth had dramatically changed the interior and she felt at home now.  She didn’t have many visitors or parties, but it was warm there and she could study her English, listen to the radio, prepare food and relax.  She liked the nights in her apartment best of all when she would light some candles and she slept very well there.  It was as good as any place and it was getting better all the time.

Her English teacher was a young man with a name like Conor or Colm and her evening classes gave a structure to her weeks and months.   The work in the hotel was boring but not difficult and lately, her supervisor was beginning to treat her more politely, with more patience and with occassional smiles.  The money she earned, with some tips from guests, meant that she could live quite well and could still send money back to Salonta.  Even twice a year she could send parcels with clothes, chocolates and medicines, to her sisters back home,  and once a month she went to the cinema.

So Mirela bought the flowers on Moore Street.  A delightful bouquet of late summer sun-flowers which were wrapped in simple white plain paper and she held them as a bride might as she began her walk home.  And then it happened.  From nowhere, a woman about the same age as Mirela but with vague eyes and a venomous anger spoke to her.

“Any smokes?” asked the women and Mirela shook her head. 

The woman repeated “I said, do you have a cigarette?” 

Mirela tried to walk on past, but the woman hissed  “you greedy smug cunt, you go back to wherever it is you come from, you dirty piece of filth”.

Mirela  felt so suddenly disorientated that she dropped the bouquet to the ground.  She wanted to pick the flowers up but everything was moving slower now, and she was unable to do.  She was feeling almost sea-sick.  She wrapped her scarf closer to her face and hurried along the road, not looking backwards nor forwards even, and she tried to disappear into the crowd of other shoppers.  The flowers remained on the ground with the slight wind moving them gently into the traffic as Mirela walked home to Summerhill.  There she would lock the door, listen to the radio and wait for the night to come.

We couldn’t have been cooler. At least we thought we couldn’t have been cooler which at 19 years of age adds up to the same thing. There we were driving north from Baltimore on route 95 to our temporary home in Philadelphia, stopping off at a drive-through, singing along to the sounds on the radio, watching all the states roll by. We didn’t think we were invincible. We simply assumed it.

“It looks so much like America” Davy said to me and I laughed and replied “that’s because it is America”.

There were four of us in the car. A great big hulking long red and white Ford Torino and I was in charge of the machine. We’d spent the weekend in Baltimore to celebrate my biggest sale of the summer, selling aerial views of the local area to the white middle-class house owners in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I had gone across the Atlantic for a summer job and on the fourth of July I cleared over 500 dollars in commission from knocking on the right door at the right time. An entire extended family bought the photos of their childhood home and so I spent the afternoon in their back-yard with my hot feet dangling in their pool. Eating barbeque, telling stories of Europe, drinking beers. I might have even sung the American national anthem when it got later.

So the four of us thought a trip to Baltimore would be the right thing to do and we headed south to spend my fortune on a baseball game, cocktails, motel bills and t-shirts with “I love Baltimore” on them. We couldn’t have been cooler.

But it was late in the night and the other three must have drifted off to sleep somehow, so there I was driving up the edge of America alone. It dawned on me that apart from my passengers there wasn’t another on the planet who knew where I was at that precise moment in time. Or what I was doing. I was overcome with the excitement of this, so didn’t notice when I started drifting across the lane onto the left-hand side of the road. I was listening to the radio, singing along softly and a calm sense of love was beginning to approach me too. An idea that just two seconds of sleep would make me even happier.

And then I heard it. The police siren. I think it woke-me up. I pulled over and stopped and, instinctively got out of our car to address the men in their uniforms.

“Get back in the car ma’am, get back in the car” the officer with the gun shouted. His instructions were not so clear to me, so I kept walking towards them.

“Get back in the car” the second officer called out. This time I listened and retreated back to the driving seat and waited for them to come to me. They were not happy. But I had youth, an accent and arrogance on my side and managed to convince them that I realised the error of my ways and that this would never, ever, happen again. I would never again fall asleep, drive the wrong side of the highway, be so content.

So they took us to the station, and this detail I do remember after over two decades. They gave us blankets and warm tea while they filled out their forms and checked the vehicle. “You drive carefully now ma’am”was all they said as we left. And we drove home in silence, all the way home. We didn’t know why they were so kind to us, or why we were so lucky, but I was right, it did never, ever happen again.

There have been other journeys, other fine days and other Davys but that was different. Now as a middle-aged mother of none, I think of that trip often and always with the same sadness. We didn’t concern ourselves with plans for tomorrow, we didn’t even have a map, we just followed some signs. The small details of life didn’t concern us and we had a disinterest in the future and a peace in the moment. Riding up beside the Hudson River all the way to Philly, and how easy and pleasing it was.

I didn’t even want to see the lake but Odtsegseg insisted, so we went. Three days of bumpy van driving didn’t excite me at all, but she couldn’t have been happier. “The best time to visit Lake Khovsgol is in the spring when it rains less and the flowers and bird-life are at their best” she read aloud from my English version of the Lonely Planet. “Imagine a lake in Mongolia” she said sighing in contentment. “Imagine a lake frozen in time withholding billions of litres of fresh water. Imagine it frozen just for us”.

I smiled and pretended excitement but it was hard to convince her of my longing for the lake. Other Mongolian friends had told me about it and had always used the words sea or ocean when describing it. I had pointed out that landlocked countries couldn’t have oceans but this was met with giggles. In truth, I simply wasn’t in the mood for further scenery. I’d done all I’d wanted to do during my moons in Mongolia and had all the photos and anecdotes I could desire. In fact, all I really wanted to do for my last few weeks was hang out in favourite bars in the city, the ones that played Abba songs and dance and laugh and relax. But Odstegseg was adamant

For two years we had been colleagues in Ulaanbaatar. Working and worrying, laughing and crying and she couldn’t believe I was planning on leaving the country of a thousand blue-skies without a trip up north. So this was my last trip to the countryside, our last trip together.

We approached the lake from the south side in the late afternoon and I felt that yelling of adrenalin only felt fully in beautiful and new places. The lake was still half frozen and seemed to be moving under the closing light mirrors of the day. The alpine style sunset and mountains reflected on the water and the ice was still and silent. I smiled and looked over to her, expecting that radiant look of wonderment she gave me, without expectation, so often. But she was looking elsewhere. There in the foreground of my view, was a dead yak drifting on the edge of the water. She looked as though she were going to cry which I couldn’t understand at all. She’d seen dead animals before, she wasn’t sentimental about that. But then I saw it too. Surrounding the yak were empty vodka bottles, plastic bags, finished cigarettes, papers and rubbish. All cajoled around the animal, and this decay would now evaporate the thousand images she wanted to show me.

We drove on by until we found a place to pitch our tent. We set-up in silence and ate the last of the brown bread from lunch with some meat and butter. She said she was going to go to sleep, but I found the bottle of Russian champagne I had in the van for emergencies and so we drank it sip by sip from the bottle. She drank more than she normally did and was so distant from me so I let her wander. The lake, still not fully defrosted yet, made a unique sound of crushing ice movement and this was echoed by the sound of shamans praying in the distance. We let the fire go out, the champagne was gone and then she asked me.

“What will you miss about my Mongolia”

““I’ll miss so many things about your home.” I told her.

“I’ll miss marmot sandwiches and camel polo. Snow on the ground and blue-sky. Sand-storms in the city and the delight of transparency, mostly my own. There are some things here which will never leave me, and I will miss them all.”

For the first time in hours she smiled at me.

“Actually, do you know what I’ll miss the most about Mongolia?” I asked her.

“I’ll miss the sea”.

One evening one summer I found myself teaching English to a teenage commercial sex worker in a brothel in northern Ethiopia in return for free beers and cigarettes.  Her name was Eleni and she was sixteen and the first thing she said to me was “I don’t want to talk about AIDS, you Europeans always want to talk about AIDS, but to me it is not so important”.  So we didn’t discuss it.  Not at all.

I had descended into Addis Ababa early one morning a couple of weeks earlier while the cool dew clouds were still settled on the mountains surrounding the city they call New Flower.  During my first few weeks I engaged in appropriate tourist activities such as museum visits and waterfall sightseeing excursions, but when I got to Debark in northern Ethiopia I was tired.  Tired of taking photos, tired of traveling alone, tired of checking the time for the next bus ride and so I welcomed the chaos the electrical storm brought.  It caused a landslide which made the road impassable and it also broke the computer in the bank which made accessing cash impossible, so I was stuck in this chilly little town with just 4 dollars and no ways of leaving.  Then I met Eleni.

“If you teach me English, I will pay for your beers” she offered as she sidled up to the bar next to me “I know the owner of this house so your room will be free and you can stay until the road is fixed” so I made myself more comfortable and agreed to her deal.  There was a single silver pink clip in her curly brown hair which matched the same pink of her lipstick and chipped nail polish.  The youth of her skin matched the short leather jacket she was wearing, but not the high-legged boots with the broken heels, or the way she exhaled my cigarettes.  Yet, despite her bored expression she seemed to enjoy talking.

She told me about her short sixteen years of life.  The eldest of five children she had moved from her village when her father died to support the family, and at first, she cleaned rooms in the hotel and ran errands for the owner.  Then some man said she was beautiful while another one offered her money for sex and it started like that.  One man turned into another and this was now life.  It wasn’t the worst of lives but she hoped for better…

“And it’s better with the foreigners because they pay in dollars and this is why I have to learn more English” she said to me.  So we began our classes.

I met her at the bar before or after her sex with the clients and she would practise her English.  At first she just looked around the room vacantly, but when she was sure there were no customers present she would write down her new words in her tatty little notebook; her verbs and her tenses, her adjectives and nouns.  She would repeat new vocabulary carefully with the precision of a poet until she was sure she had them memorised in her heart.  For three nights we did this and I grew to be fond of her.

But then one morning, without much warning, the road was fixed and the bank was working so I was able to buy my onward bus ticket and leave Debark.  I looked for her all morning, so that I could say goodbye and give other words of such insignificance.  But I couldn’t find her on the main street, in the bars, down near the river or in the Church.  So I got onto the bus, headed west and  never saw her again.

 

We finished class at 10.00pm so Egiimaa and I would walk home together.  She was so delighted on the first day of term that we both lived so close to the wrestling palace that she said to me“teacher  Ruth, we will walk home together now and talk about our days”.  So she linked arms with me and we wandered like penguins through the snow covered un-lit streets of Ulaanbaatar.  Talking about our favourite students, our days, our lives.

Egiimaa told me about her days when she was a child.  She told me that she thought the films were far more beautiful when she was a girl when they didn’t show sex or horror but just love and dancing.  She told me that she missed the films where characters burst into song and the extras joined in with the dance steps.  She missed the ballet too.  The Soviets had such nice ballet, she told me.  One night after class she said “teacher Ruth, the University director would like you to teach the American Literature course”.  Intrigued I asked her “what part of it” and she laughed as she replied “well all of it.  Our students need all of it ”.

So the next day I went to the university library to find American Literature.  The library was in the basement of the building with steep stone steps and the smell of yesterday.  The librarian put both hands to her mouth to physically prevent herself from laughing when she saw me and then she handed me a three-page form to complete before I would be allowed entrance.  Later I would discover that her name was Altanod which means Golden Star and even later still I would go horse-back riding with her and drink fermented mare’s milk with her grand-father as the sun set on the Gobi.  I would also go to the funeral of her brother who died of TB, but on this day Altanod let me wander through the aisles and let me touch the book jackets as you might the glass over precious museum pieces.  Book after book on the former glory of the former Soviet occupier slept on the shelves.  Biographies of Stalin and Lenin, 5 year plans, agricultural farming techniques, Soviet collective systems and a whole aisle devoted to the space race.  But no American Literature.  As with so many days in Mongolia, time took on another meaning for me there and perhaps an hour or perhaps three went by as I looked at these books from the past.  Eventually, Altanod brought me back to the present as she gestured I should follow her into the shadows of the back office of the library.  I followed her obediently as she pulled down an un-opened box from the top cupboard with a USAID label on the outside.  We un-packed the box like children  and found inside 50 copies of Death of a Salesman  and an annual report from USAID.  Delighted I thanked Altanod and helped her number the books and place them on aisle 14.  We set them up in their new homes in between Rasputin’s discovery of self and Stalin’s concept of totalitarism and we were delighted with our days work.

When Altanod asked me what Death of a Salesman was all about I tried to explain that it was a critique of capitalism with a notion that even the struggles of small people mattered.  People who others might describe as a dime a dozen were important and had voices and had stories to tell and that our collective power would always be much stronger than our individual goals or the charms of consumerism.   I thought she would be interested but her response to me was “is sounds very sad.  I don’t like sad stories” and she never read a word of it.

That night was particularly cold.  It was minus 42 and even Egiimaa was walking home quickly.  She kept her questions very brief that night as her mouth was covered by the camel wool scarf I’d bought her for New Year.    

All she asked was “how was your day teacher Ruth” and all I could say was “it mattered”.

There’s a cloud over Lake Tana that reminds me of summer and a day in a boat when Amara took me looking for hippos.  The rains had been ferocious the night before but this morning the lake was calm while flamingoes helped the fishermen in their red papyrus boats look for the freshest fish of the day.

“Don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her” Amara said when he saw the female hippo bathing with her two young calves.  I didn’t move an eyelash and could barely breathe.  She spotted us from a distance and wriggled her ears, came closer to her young and then all three gracefully turned under the water like Disney ballet dancers accidentally marooned in 21^st century reality.  Amara waited a while before putting the engine back on, in case the mammals were under the boat but we started to move north soon and I watched as the birds followed us.  Bright yellow, green, purple and pink birds that I had never seen before and didn’t know the names of and still don’t.  Later we stopped again, this time for our picnic of mangos, bread and fried chicken and we spent the entire day with just one sentence between us “don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her”.

By sunset the lake had changed and Amara was concerned that we should stop and rest before it got too dark.  The equatorial sunset reflected on the water and the source of the Blue Nile was stiller than it had been all day.  As we came closer to the shore I could see some women collecting water from the lake in their bright orange plastic containers while some children bathed and swam and laughed.  The children waved at me and called out “hello foreigner” and I waved and shouted back at them “hello Ethiopians”.

Amara smiled at this interaction and asked me again “why don’t you have any children?”  I shrugged and tried to explain again that I neither knew why or how I didn’t have any children, that it had never been a conscious choice at any time and that now it was too late as I was too old.  I wasn’t sad about it as I didn’t usually think about it much and normally people in Europe didn’t question me.  Only in Ethiopia was it a topic to raise such interest.  He frowned and replied “everyone should have children” as if this were an absolute and well documented truth of life.

We tied the boat ropes to a lime tree and walked the short way back to his home.  Outside his house we sat and drank some beers and honey wine and smoked cigarettes and ate injeera with lamb.  We talked about his work and his life and his son who lived with relatives in a nearby town because his wife had died and Amara couldn’t take care of him alone.  But it wasn’t long before we came back to his fascination with my life without children.

“Why don’t you take my son back to Europe with you, give him an education, let him live with you.  This would be very good for him.  And also very good for you” Amara suggested with a casualness usually reserved for asking someone the time or what their favourite colour is.

“You serious?”

“Sure, why not?”

I couldn’t think of a reply so I finished my beer and went inside his house and crawled under the mosquito net we’d bought the day before at the cattle market.  The rains began again and splashed down onto the corrugated iron rooftop with surprisingly subtle synchronicity and eventually I fell asleep to those sounds while he stayed outside finishing the honey wine and the last of the cigarettes.  He was watching the lake and watching the bright night lightening storm and might even have been watching as a female hippopotamus took care of her young and wriggled her ears.

Don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her.