Author's note: This personal essay recently won 2nd place in this year's contest at USU, and will therefore be published in the 2009 Scribendi. It's the literary, but completely true account of something that happened to Ken and I in Mozambique. I knew going into this day that the whole cave adventure would be a good story, but the disappointment turned out to be a much better one.
The helicopter settled on the dirt like an old man into a recliner, and the weed scraps that had been tossed into the air fluttered back to earth. The villagers had seen us coming from miles away over the flat savannah, and many gathered around to discover what prominent figures would emerge. It could have been the president of Mozambique and his entourage, and they wouldn’t have known. They didn’t even know they lived in Mozambique. It wasn’t the president, anyway. It was my uncle Ken and me—two distinctly unimportant American travelers. He, a robust, blonde college professor working in the country, and I, a wiry student writer sent to report on his project. This particular jaunt into the bush, however, was strictly for pleasure. We brought with us a translator, Domingos, and Tatu, one of the kitchen boys at the Chitengo café. We never would have thought to invite him, but he had mentioned at breakfast that he was born and raised in this very village, so we figured he could take the afternoon off and ride along. I sure didn’t mind. All I wanted was to see the cave.
Tatu was the first one out of the helicopter, and I think that’s really what surprised them the most. He left this home village of Nhaminga ten years before and had never returned, let alone with shoes, a cell phone, and from the sky. Nhaminga was alone in the tall, yellow-green grass, only twenty kilometers from the Chitengo camp at the edge of Gorongosa National Park. Only twenty kilometers, but in all those years, Tatu hadn’t been home even once. It dawned on me that he must have had no way of getting there, save by foot, and that’s assuming he somehow knew the way, using trees or rivers as landmarks. Heaven knows there were plenty of trees and rivers to go around. Even from only a couple hundred feet up, the landscape looked like a thick, rolling bed of moss. I reached down in my mind and squeezed a clump of it, then brushed off my hands in the helicopter. Nhaminga was at the edge of the moss, in a vast flatland that was just as much golden as green. The river, like most in Africa, was brown.
An ecstatic man in his early twenties, who turned out to be Tatu’s cousin and childhood friend, received us as we emerged, and a bevy of wide-eyed children rounded out the greeting party. The cousin had on a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with a fist-sized gash taken out of the back, but it was still nicer than most of the children’s clothes. He explained to the local youths who this rich stranger was, and they lined up to shake his hand, then ours. Ken and I exchanged humble smiles.
When I arrived in the capital a few days before to gather information for my article, I noticed right away how friendly everybody was. My uncle said, “If you think they’re nice, wait ‘til you meet the people out in the bush.” I had to admit I was intrigued at the thought. The city was exotic in its own way, but honestly, it was nothing too out of the ordinary—just a lot of potholes and street vendors selling quasi-authentic trinkets, little voodoo masks and the like. Standard third-world fare. Now we were really in the middle of nowhere. The Chitengo camp was the only habitation of any kind within 30 kilometers of Nhaminga, and thick cornstalk-like growth made the prospect of a shoeless trip to anywhere all the more menacing.
A couple of other young men and some young mothers with babies joined the group congregating around the helicopter. One mother in her early twenties sported a pink bandana over her head, along with a faded royal blue World Cup shirt with different national flags around the collar. She carried one small child and tethered at least one other in the dirt nearby. Another mother weaned her own toddler unabashedly in front of us on a breast roughly the size and shape of a plastic baby bottle. Everything here was so real. At one point in my awkward glancing about, she gathered it back into her shirt, at which point the child immediately thrust down his searching hand to reclaim it.
“So they’re taking us to the cave?” I asked the translator, Domingos, the only one I could really converse with. He explained that they were taking us into Nhaminga first, where we’d have to ask formal permission from the regulo. He didn’t know how to translate that. Apparently, the cave held a special significance to the villagers, and they wanted to ensure we wouldn’t screw around in there. Fair enough. We had landed only about a hundred yards away from the village, but I couldn’t see it at all through the grass. And then, only when we were right on top of it, it appeared—a circular clearing, no bigger than the third floor of my apartment building, dotted with burnt yellow structures spaced out on the dirt floor. There were twelve of these structures in their village. I counted them. Among them, about eight or nine had walls of dried golden mud from the river, or horizontally woven sticks, and the rest were open on all sides. Ken and I poked our heads into one of the stick-walled ones and found it completely empty—nothing more than pale shelter. The huts weren’t anything pretty, but I supposed they kept out the sub-Saharan sun, which was beginning to assert its authority on the back of my neck. Also, the thick, bright blanket of endless sky made up for anything lacking in aesthetics. And the huts had a sort of understated majesty. They were just as I had imagined them, lying in bed on the third floor. Just like on the Discovery Channel. They were ideal.
How simple this bush life, and how untainted by impure motives, I thought, as the villagers led us toward the center of the clearing. The quest to understand people at their innermost selves is what drove me to be an English major in the first place. It is a quest I had become somewhat obsessed with. I knew that in our modern world, any attempt to discover the core of humanity was liable to be lost in a fog of interpretation at the hands of business, politics, and media. Opinions rarely stood independent of ulterior motives. Such it was in civilization. Such, they said, wouldn’t be the case here. “Simplify, simplify, simplify,” shouted Thoreau, and his words resonated through my skull. My literature classes had strangely prepared me for this meeting with the regulo in the exact same manner that years of TV had. Every single source agreed that from uncorrupted noble savages like these, I would gain actual perspective on life. I knew it was true. According to everything I had learned, this village, this salt-of-the-earth people had the potential to embody the pure, elemental goodness of human nature more so than any people I had ever met.
One slightly larger communal structure stood in the middle of the scatter of huts, with a thatched roof, like the rest, and about twenty knotty wood poles to hold it up. As we approached it, some of the children rushed ahead to set up a circle of chairs and benches in the shade of the only tree nearby, while the remaining adults sauntered out of their huts. The log benches were rudimentary, but the chairs came from a lighter wood, and had square corners- a sign that they had likely been fashioned by someone with more sophisticated tools than were available in Nhaminga. My uncle said that priests visited these isolated villages sometimes, and probably brought them the “nice” furniture. I wondered what else they brought, noting that the huts wouldn’t successfully conceal much.
So this cave was supposed to be pretty good. “Oh, you have to see the cave,” gushed the employees at the national park. “I’ve heard it’s really something.” I had never been a particularly devoted spelunker, but the anticipation was starting to get to me. Ken was excited too. After a month in Maputo teaching an MBA course and attempting to negotiate an exchange program with the university and the national park, he had earned a scenic detour.
Two of the legs of my chair had steady contact with the ground, and I rocked indecisive about the third as I tried to catch words from the conversation among the men of the village, which was in Sena, the local language, but which also had words from Portuguese. I didn’t know much Portuguese either, but my chances were considerably better than with Sena. Domingos translated as the regulo, who appeared to be the only elderly person in the entire village, welcomed us to Nhaminga and chattered away happily about it. He had an old, light brown button-up shirt that was too big for him. He was even thinner than the others, and was missing most of the teeth that should have been in his shriveled little avocado head. Poor guy. As he talked, one younger, stronger man ambled out of his hut a few minutes later with bloodshot eyes, squinting against the brightness of the sun, and holding a pink hand towel loosely against the left side of his head. He had malaria, one whispered to Domingos, who whispered to us. He joined the circle, but kept his head down most of the time. My own time in the circle was spent both worrying about the poor malarious man, and watching the long benchful of restless boys across from me poking each other and whispering secrets. I yearned to know what they could possibly be talking about. What would you whisper about if your entire life was twelve huts, tall grass, and a river? Surely, the hunt would make for good stories. I knew for a fact that there were lions, hippos, and all sorts of predators who viewed these humans as no more than another link in the chain.
My focus returned to the adult conversation, both ends of which Domingos was handling with seemingly limited success. I picked up a word here or there, but nothing substantial. Domingos told the villagers that we wanted to see the cave. We were not the first with such a request. He also translated our message to them, which was that we would be able to bring in a nurse from the park from time to time to heal their ailments. The adults each nodded, some more heavily than others. The regulo agreed to show us the way to the cave, and even offered us a live chicken in return for our kindness. We told them thank you. We couldn’t take it in the helicopter, we said, but we’d eat it together with them the next time we came. Thank you very much.
Satisfied with our dealings to that point, the regulo conferred with a couple of other men in Sena, and then rose and informed us that a sort of ceremony would required before outsiders could see the cave. How appropriate, I thought. How perfect! I had realized earlier in the morning that it was Easter, at least in the Christian world. Certainly, this particular cave-access ceremony would not be akin to Easter services I’d attended since childhood, I imagined, but it would be some sort of unique spiritual experience, nonetheless.
The men of Nhaminga eyed down their white American visitors. Trying my best to show respect and not patronize our hosts, I attempted to capture a couple of non-invasive, candid shots of the council with my digital camera, which I held upright on my left knee. Ken held his hands together on his lap and gauged their faces. He had hardly said a word upon arriving in the village. The council was discussing something in Sena in a tone far different from the gentle greetings that had been occurring thus far, but I couldn’t pin down what it was exactly. Finally, Domingos rose from his chair near the little boy bench. He nervously related to us that the villagers would be requiring beer, bread, and cigarettes to properly perform the ceremony. Ken and I turned to each other in alarm. “What? No one told us about this!” Ken pleaded with Domingos.
“What about that cooler you brought?” Domingos inquired. It was nothing but a few small dinner roll sandwiches and sodas and bottled water for the four of us. Our translator took a liberty and offered the group as much of the cooler’s contents as they’d need for the ceremony, but that that’s all we had. The adult men conferred with one another yet again and agreed that that would have to do. It was decided that the ceremony would be performed there, at the mouth of the cave itself, and so off we went, in single file through the tall grass.
The mile-long “path” to the cave was visible for only ten or fifteen feet ahead at any given time. The golden, cornstalk-like grass weaved itself across the dirt from both sides, rising up over my head like a bridal arch as I plodded ahead into the unknown. I walked at the distant helm of our little non-native contingency, preferring the guise of solitude in the wilderness to Ken and Domingos’s louder-than-necessary joking—western voices which obscured the grass, the crickets, the birds, the bellow of frogs. I wanted to hear Africa. The pack of villagers up ahead darted and glided through the curves with great ease. They knew exactly what they were doing. Even the man with malaria passed us up and took off through the grass. I picked up my pace. I wanted to learn Africa, and I wanted the villagers of Nhaminga to teach me.
And then, just off the path, a gaping hole in the rock.
Many of the villagers already sat at the mouth of the cave, watching as the regulo spread a thin, white cloth on the ground and knelt in front of it. The crowd reverently followed suit, kneeling or sitting in place on the rocks all around. About twenty different people came to the ceremony with us, though most would not be proceeding down into the cave, and many, again, were children. The regulo spoke slowly and resolutely as he sprinkled flour—the one ingredient the village provided—onto the center of the cloth in a perfect little mound. He then took one of the squatty 300mL glass bottles of Coke, which one of the others had opened for him with his teeth. That was hard to watch. The regulo poured a dollop’s worth into a mangled plastic cup on the cloth, a little more onto the ground between his knees and the cloth, and then propped the remainder in its bottle up against the rock. He then did a similar thing with one of the Fantas, only more hastily. He didn’t use much of the soda at all, and none of the bread. There would be plenty left for lunch after the cave, and I was beginning to feel hungry already. A thin scar of light pushed through the trees onto the surface and reached the sacramental cloth as the skinny old man pleaded with his ancestors first for permission to enter the cave, and safety once inside. Such Domingos explained, anyway. The light smiled down upon the little ceremony for an instant, then moved off the cloth and onto a nearby rock. I waited reverently for the tokens to be passed around, or consumed by the regulo, or something, but they remained, and the ceremony ended. The old man’s face rose slowly from the dirt and twisted as he gazed directly into Ken’s eyes, then mine. He spoke to us in his native tongue: “Next time, don’t forget the beer.”
Eight of the men and older boys of Nhaminga accompanied Ken and me down a guano-sloshed ladder into the deep. At last, this was it. The ground was springy with untold inches of deposit, and thousands of bats lined columns rising up toward, but not reaching the sky. Ken and I waved our feeble flashlights around and searched out possible pathways to each other, anticipating what was surely to come. The ceiling was high, the rooms spacious, and the spongy walls swallowed up the beams of light so that visual detail was hard to come by. Developing patterns suggested that there was nothing to see but bat excrement, anyhow. That’s certainly all there was to smell. Still, I didn’t care. I thought back on the sterilized offices at university advancement, where the publisher of the alumni magazine called me in and asked if I wanted to spend a week in Africa during my 18-credit semester. I said yes. It was an easy question.
Ten minutes more of slowly traversing loose rocks and wading through chest-high freezing water, and we were there. The corridor opened into a hollow where actual sunlight poured in and reflected off the wet rocks. It was an underground lagoon. Roots and vines from trees on the surface hung down dozens of feet and looped around a tree somehow growing out of a rock in the middle of the chamber. Other vines hung down and pleaded to be swung on. The whole room was like a Vegas menagerie, only more perfect than man could have hoped to create on his own. Water from an underground river cascaded down levels of weathered rock, surrounded the crag with the tree, collected in a series of pools, and flowed out the other end of the room and out of sight.
A shout echoed down from the sunlight, and the man with malaria, standing on the surface, waved to his friends. Ten minutes later, he was with us. Ken said matter-of-factly that he didn’t think the man actually had malaria. I had to admit that he sure was bouncing around a lot for being deathly ill. In fact, he seemed to be getting better as the day went on. No longer waiting for our guides, Ken and I climbed ahead and explored the lagoon. After five minutes, though, we had scoured the whole of it and returned to where the villagers squatted on some rocks near the water’s edge. Pretty as it was, the room wasn’t huge. “Where to next?” I asked, anxious to see what else the cave had in store. Domingos relayed the question to Tatu’s cousin on my behalf. I received the short response on my own. This was it. “They told us there was three hours’ worth of cave!” I started. “The helicopter won’t be back until 4:30. There has something else we can see, somewhere else to go.” A villager pointed out what appeared to be a room up high on the rock wall, and sent one of the more silent natives to guide me there. I exercised my merit badge skills and climbed up, having to take my shoes off halfway there for better traction.
“Anything up there?” Ken inquired. There wasn’t. From my perch, however, I could see that down on a rock in the lagoon, the younger village boys had found an injured bat, and were jabbing it with sticks and fingers. The men sat nearby and watched. Ken urged Domingos to tell the boys about a disease worse than malaria, but they didn’t seem too concerned. The little bat screeched in pain with each prod. Ken and I started back toward the surface on our own.
We didn’t make it far before the natives started following us. It dawned on me that most of them didn’t have any way of generating light down there in the abyss. We ascended the guano-soaked ladder and returned to the site of the ceremony, where the empty cooler sat open. Our lunch was gone. Released from the cave and standing on my own in the sunlight, I knew that what I had been seeing my entire life were nothing more than shadows on the wall. These people were tainted, and so was I. Ken took up the cooler, and we made the silent trek back to where the helicopter would pick us up over two hours later.
My uncle dropped the empty box onto the dirt, sat upon it, and began watching two ant colonies down between his knees. Domingos found a sharp ramp of dead tree branch, and offered it to me for a chair. I thanked him, not sure where on it I was supposed to sit. I improvised, and the villagers followed and squatted in the dirt nearby, talking amongst themselves. Domingos joined them and began asking questions and taking notes about their history for the park records, or so I gathered. I wondered how much of it was real.
I tried to doze off on the log, knowing full well that my slowly-simmering neck and arms would continue to burn if unchecked. I didn’t care, though. More than anything, I just wanted to take off my sopping wet shoes and socks, but I knew it would have been a bad idea, what with all the ants.
I slept for a little while sitting there, I think. The next thing I remember, Ken had a short stick, and was passing the time by attempting to transplant ants from one colony into the other, unsuccessfully. He sensed my movement and asked if I was hungry. When I answered in the affirmative, he told me he still had some of that weird South African jerky from the plane. The unidentifiable burgundy and gray meat he pulled from his back pocket wasn’t appealing in any way, but this wasn’t a time to be picky. We two stood up and turned our backs to the villagers of Nhaminga as Ken worked the vacuum-packed meat free as discreetly as possible, transferring exactly one half of it from his closed hand to mine. That was our ceremony.
The Trans-Siberian Railroad (poem)
Author's note: This is one of only two poems of mine that I actually like. On long train rides through Siberia, when everyone else was asleep, I often found myself staring out the window at night and watching the little villages pass by. It's something I still think of sometimes. How I'd love to go back there and actually visit the people in those places, and see what it's like. Someday, maybe I will.
We pile the extra horse blankets
in front of the heater to stop the flow
of Russian over-compensation
and the gentle undulation
that now has lulled
my colleagues to sleep on narrow sleds
folded out of the edge
of a room unforgiving and metallic as the
clanging of the rails, gaps in them swollen
and contracted by the bitter cold that builds
unhindered.
no hills,
no towns,
no trees,
If not for the pervading darkness,
I’d see the pole. But no-
just a gloss of flaky water
many meters high, and hardened
by months of inactivity- a state
where life cannot survive under suffocating
blankets- a forever sleeping land.
Every couple of hours, a town
approaches and then passes quickly as the
flicker in the lantern of a man
who dons his fox and then his bear
to dutifully prepare to venture out,
the only time today, into the deep
to retrieve unfrozen water from the pump,
then woodenly step back
into his icy little hovel,
where no blankets go unused.
In Exile (essay)
Author's note: I'm more pleased with how this piece turned out than just about any that I've written. I've been working on it more lately (and not posting it here), so if you've read this before July 2010, this is entirely different, and hopefully better. It's still very much a work in progress.
“A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, following his
four-year exile in Omsk, Siberia
Siberia is complicated—-difficult to describe, strangely enough. It seems like it should be easy. Each of the initial stereotypes that come to mind are true, after all, both about the land and the people. When you really get down to it, though, comparing whole societies is, as it should be, problematic. I recall, however, that people never spat on me in America—-not even during my stint as a door-to-door salesman. In hindsight, I think it’s the spit versus lack of spit that entrenched my initial bias in place. Note to self: Russians are mean—-I have proof. I brushed it from my coat.
Six days a week and well into night, we were asking to get spat on, wandering the crooked, grayscale streets searching for podyezd doors left carelessly open. The thick steel doors and their steel locks were put in place specifically to keep people like us out, and though the foot-thick concrete walls around them eroded right onto my jacket sleeve—another stain—when I brushed by too closely, the doors themselves received regular upgrades and often boasted sophisticated key technology. A bare-minimum cost for intimidation. The Russians themselves, by the way, were similarly steel-faced, unsmiling, and I didn’t smile at them either. But this is about the buildings. The Stalin-era apartment buildings that house nine-tenths of the Russian populace are built vertically, and almost without exception, they’re either five or nine stories tall. The nines have elevators. In neither type are there hallways—only entryway-stairways, called podyezdy, with four or six apartments on each floor. A five-story podyezd took about 20 minutes to knock through, assuming nobody expressed any interest. Nine floors took 45. People at home in Idaho Falls or suburban Buffalo, where Malcomb was from, lived in houses. Homes. I beat Malcomb in chess five times in a row last week. When the two of us would find a door open, we’d start at the top, knock at each apartment, and pray for a sober person to emerge and say “Mormons?!? Of course I want to hear your message!” That or hot girls. In the absence of either, each slammed door widened the gulf between the Russians and me. My friends in America were partying, going to school, my family was sitting around the fire watching a movie, and here I was for two years, living a monastic life with an ironically bald cohort, walking around in a concrete-stained suit, and perfecting my pronunciation of nyet.
Missionary work was hard all throughout the former Soviet Union, but in the Siberian city of Omsk it was famously more so. I don’t know why. Our church was fairly new there, membership was sparse. But that was the case all over the country. Even in 2005 and in August, the land itself was cold, dark, and vast—a centuries-old natural prison. I hate to use the word bleak, which seems so obvious for Siberia, but Omsk was that more than anything else. It remains the unconscious standard by which I judge all usages of the word.
I never really felt at ease wandering around Omsk in a suit, since the
rebyata—literally “children” but in practice often something more like “hooligans”—were somehow worse there than in other cities. More outgoing, that is. “Ey, Amerika!” followed by some cursing in one of two languages, then a guiltless plea for money or a threat of some sort. Still, walking in twos helped, especially when your bald, broad-shouldered companion was scowling half the time. That actually was helpful. I had no idea how Bankston did it. He was another Omsk missionary, and he was always smiling, defenseless like a doe. And he was skinny, too, like me. The rebyata never actually did anything to me, luckily. In the summertime, the misty Siberian sun lingered well into the morning hours at such latitude, which helped. In the winter, of course, the opposite was true, and the sun started to set almost immediately after it made its appearance. But then, though, it was outrageously cold—too cold even for danger. So it all balanced out.
“The city was built almost entirely by prisoners,” I was told by a local soon after
arriving. “The name ‘Omsk’ is an acronym for Otdelyonnoye Myesto Ssylky
Katerzhnikh—Remote Place for the Exile of Convicts.”
Bad PR.
It was Wednesday, our day off, and on the last Wednesday of the month, about eight of us went to check e-mail at a new internet club. The city had a few such places, in random basements and back alleys. No matter how crazy things got in Russia, the general attitude was that it was always ok at home, and that’s what we got to remember on Wednesdays. I got to be consciously from there—the magical, stable, prosperous place that I wouldn’t have even believed existed if not for the weekly e-mails. On the way to this particular internet club on the last Wednesday of the month, which club was in both a basement and a back alley, Malcomb and I traversed the broad mud field separating it from the street by leaping between concrete slabs and other random debris. The place itself was inhabited by a dozen or so lanky teenage rebyata in black jackets and pointy shoes, scattered throughout the dimly-lit room playing war games and surfing the net. I always got the impression that much of the Siberian youth yearned, as I did, for personal connections to the stable world outside, even if they had never seen it. They saw us, and they liked that we were there, even if they’d never show it. So I assumed, anyway. We were palpable evidence of elsewhere. Malcomb and I sauntered past them to a room in the back.
I don’t remember who first logged onto CNN there in the back room, but within a minute or two, each of our eight monitors swung to the same story: a giant hurricane was tearing, at that very moment, through the southern United States. The honor system rule against outside websites went out the window as we collectively pored over hundreds of photos of people sitting on rooftops, trapped, floating face down through the muddy debris-filled streets. When one missionary came across new information, he’d yell it out to the group—this many dollars in damage, that many lives lost. I didn’t yell out so much. I was mostly just silently engrossed. It was incredible. A good chunk of New Orleans leveled. We knew New Orleans. A couple of us had been there.
One member of our suddenly animated group was noticeably less engulfed by the chaos occurring back home. It was Bankston, the smiler, who had only recently arrived in Omsk, though his reputation had preceded him. Elder Dustin Bankston was different from most of us in a lot of ways. First, there was the smiling, regardless of his audience, always, always smiling, but not like the one I’d put on at the end of a long day, timed just long enough to be seen through the peephole. Sometimes he even broke into song, though his voice was high and whiny—one of his honestly weaker attributes. He was a weird guy. For whatever reason, he was an extremely successful missionary, though. He was beloved by the Russians in a way I couldn’t comprehend, other than that he was maybe somewhat of a novelty. It was obvious even then that he was far less obsessed than the rest of us with preserving national bravado, at least in the traditional sense. Maybe it was because he had almost served his full two-year term and had learned from experience. I tend to wonder, though, if it had something to do with his origin.
Before he left it behind to come to Siberia, Bankston lived with his mom and younger sister in a 19th century mansion right on the coast in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. To the rest of us mostly-sheltered Northerners and Westerners, he was the South. He always said “no, sir” and “yes, ma’am,” and he even sang in a gospel choir, which is odd for a Mormon. He was full of stories about crocodiles and trailer homes. His best story, though, was about how his mom, a respected nurse, had recently bared all for the MTV cameras at Mardi Gras. This sort of behavior is also uncharacteristic of Mormons. No, Bankston and his family weren’t shy, per se. But on the last Wednesday in August, when the flashing dot on the CNN map was directly over his hometown, he didn’t have much to say. And he didn’t get any e-mail.
The next day was the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Siberia.
“Congratulations,” said our American mission president on speakerphone the next morning. Malcomb and I called to inform him of the situation with Bankston, of which he was already aware. We mentioned that our compatriot didn’t seem overly disturbed by the whole ordeal. He was quiet at the internet club, and later that day still seemed indifferent about the questionable existence of his house. Malcomb said he was in denial.
“It’s antebellum!” Bankston’s reedy voice sang when he told us. “It survived Hurricane Camille. It can withstand anything!” Had Bankston known that his entire hometown had been leveled, he may have felt differently. He had to know, though, and his outward confidence baffled me. The president assigned Malcomb and me to watch out for Bankston and prepare him for the possibility that everything was gone—basically, to let him down gently, assuming the worst. Later that day, Malcomb and I spent an hour trapped standing in a hot, crowded trolley bus experiencing electrical problems. In my journal that night, I lamented the inefficiency of such Russian “conveniences” for an entire page. I said “it’s a good thing that the majority of Americans are nice enough to lie when Russians ask questions comparing our two nations… Nobody that has lived in both societies can even approach a comprehension of how much better things are in America.” I also stated simply, “God bless America.” I don’t recall the tone of voice that hovered above the metallic ink that day, but I hope it was grateful. In context, it doesn’t seem likely, though.
At our missionary meeting the following day, I knew Malcomb would be insensitive toward Bankston, and he was. “It’s all gone, man!” Bankston took it with the same smile as always. I tried to be the bigger man and comfort my senior elder, telling him that while the Lord does indeed watch out for His servants, it’d be wise to mentally prepare for the possibility that he no longer had a home. But while Bankston remained more or less unfazed, I could feel my own steel door faltering. Here he was, a prisoner in Omsk, and while he’s away doing good, his home is attacked. It wasn’t fair. We were all prisoners, but most of us probably deserved to be there for one reason or another. Malcomb and I certainly did. Bankston was the best man among us, and yet it was his home, his point of reference destroyed, his neighbors floating face down on CNN. It didn’t bother me theologically. Every day, I fielded the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” That was easy: good people are tested, just never above that which they are able to bear. Bankston had been so tested, and he appeared to be passing. I would have failed pitifully.
As I sat in silence, a younger missionary spoke. “Hey Bankston, if you need a place to stay for a while, you can live with my family in Utah.” Another concurred, offering his own house, and then another followed. Even frigid Malcomb offered lodgings with his family in Buffalo. I don’t think Bankston seriously considered any of the offers, though. He smiled as he sang to us about Dixie, unprovoked. I wish I was in de land of cotton—old times dar am not forgotten. I’m sure a big part of him did wish he was there, but I also realized that Bankston was Bankston, even in exile. He didn’t need to validate himself by consciously remembering where he was from. He just plain was from there, and even if he never saw home again, he had gleaned the best things from it. He had lost it because he was the only one of us who didn’t need it.
Bankston’s last three months in Siberia were harder than most. A couple weeks after the hurricane, his mom got a hold of him. As a nurse, she had been working night and day in a care center, with no way to call out. Some things were salvaged from their antebellum house, but most things were gone. Work in Omsk continued much as it had been before. Though it was only mid-September, winter had already made noticeable advances. Wind pushed through the crooked avenues, forcing us into heavier coats and hats as we scoured the bleak town for open doors. A punk on a crowded trolleybus unzipped the front pocket of my bag and almost had his hands on my wallet when I noticed him. I told him “nice try,” then elbowed him in the stomach, not nearly as hard enough, on my way off of the bus. I needed to be better.
It was only years later that I made the connection between the Russians and their steel doors, exhibiting stone-faced severity only on the outside. It seems so obvious now. The thing is, it was a front, yes, but a front understood and agreed upon by the whole community. Bankston figured that out, and responded to it as one probably should respond to someone who takes themselves too seriously—with a smile. His may not have been the Russian way, but it was real, and was received warmly. The front of mirrored toughness I had built up to that point was, conversely, entirely artificial, and the locals could see right through it. With time, I started to figure it out, and things got better.
“A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, following his
four-year exile in Omsk, Siberia
Siberia is complicated—-difficult to describe, strangely enough. It seems like it should be easy. Each of the initial stereotypes that come to mind are true, after all, both about the land and the people. When you really get down to it, though, comparing whole societies is, as it should be, problematic. I recall, however, that people never spat on me in America—-not even during my stint as a door-to-door salesman. In hindsight, I think it’s the spit versus lack of spit that entrenched my initial bias in place. Note to self: Russians are mean—-I have proof. I brushed it from my coat.
Six days a week and well into night, we were asking to get spat on, wandering the crooked, grayscale streets searching for podyezd doors left carelessly open. The thick steel doors and their steel locks were put in place specifically to keep people like us out, and though the foot-thick concrete walls around them eroded right onto my jacket sleeve—another stain—when I brushed by too closely, the doors themselves received regular upgrades and often boasted sophisticated key technology. A bare-minimum cost for intimidation. The Russians themselves, by the way, were similarly steel-faced, unsmiling, and I didn’t smile at them either. But this is about the buildings. The Stalin-era apartment buildings that house nine-tenths of the Russian populace are built vertically, and almost without exception, they’re either five or nine stories tall. The nines have elevators. In neither type are there hallways—only entryway-stairways, called podyezdy, with four or six apartments on each floor. A five-story podyezd took about 20 minutes to knock through, assuming nobody expressed any interest. Nine floors took 45. People at home in Idaho Falls or suburban Buffalo, where Malcomb was from, lived in houses. Homes. I beat Malcomb in chess five times in a row last week. When the two of us would find a door open, we’d start at the top, knock at each apartment, and pray for a sober person to emerge and say “Mormons?!? Of course I want to hear your message!” That or hot girls. In the absence of either, each slammed door widened the gulf between the Russians and me. My friends in America were partying, going to school, my family was sitting around the fire watching a movie, and here I was for two years, living a monastic life with an ironically bald cohort, walking around in a concrete-stained suit, and perfecting my pronunciation of nyet.
Missionary work was hard all throughout the former Soviet Union, but in the Siberian city of Omsk it was famously more so. I don’t know why. Our church was fairly new there, membership was sparse. But that was the case all over the country. Even in 2005 and in August, the land itself was cold, dark, and vast—a centuries-old natural prison. I hate to use the word bleak, which seems so obvious for Siberia, but Omsk was that more than anything else. It remains the unconscious standard by which I judge all usages of the word.
I never really felt at ease wandering around Omsk in a suit, since the
rebyata—literally “children” but in practice often something more like “hooligans”—were somehow worse there than in other cities. More outgoing, that is. “Ey, Amerika!” followed by some cursing in one of two languages, then a guiltless plea for money or a threat of some sort. Still, walking in twos helped, especially when your bald, broad-shouldered companion was scowling half the time. That actually was helpful. I had no idea how Bankston did it. He was another Omsk missionary, and he was always smiling, defenseless like a doe. And he was skinny, too, like me. The rebyata never actually did anything to me, luckily. In the summertime, the misty Siberian sun lingered well into the morning hours at such latitude, which helped. In the winter, of course, the opposite was true, and the sun started to set almost immediately after it made its appearance. But then, though, it was outrageously cold—too cold even for danger. So it all balanced out.
“The city was built almost entirely by prisoners,” I was told by a local soon after
arriving. “The name ‘Omsk’ is an acronym for Otdelyonnoye Myesto Ssylky
Katerzhnikh—Remote Place for the Exile of Convicts.”
Bad PR.
It was Wednesday, our day off, and on the last Wednesday of the month, about eight of us went to check e-mail at a new internet club. The city had a few such places, in random basements and back alleys. No matter how crazy things got in Russia, the general attitude was that it was always ok at home, and that’s what we got to remember on Wednesdays. I got to be consciously from there—the magical, stable, prosperous place that I wouldn’t have even believed existed if not for the weekly e-mails. On the way to this particular internet club on the last Wednesday of the month, which club was in both a basement and a back alley, Malcomb and I traversed the broad mud field separating it from the street by leaping between concrete slabs and other random debris. The place itself was inhabited by a dozen or so lanky teenage rebyata in black jackets and pointy shoes, scattered throughout the dimly-lit room playing war games and surfing the net. I always got the impression that much of the Siberian youth yearned, as I did, for personal connections to the stable world outside, even if they had never seen it. They saw us, and they liked that we were there, even if they’d never show it. So I assumed, anyway. We were palpable evidence of elsewhere. Malcomb and I sauntered past them to a room in the back.
I don’t remember who first logged onto CNN there in the back room, but within a minute or two, each of our eight monitors swung to the same story: a giant hurricane was tearing, at that very moment, through the southern United States. The honor system rule against outside websites went out the window as we collectively pored over hundreds of photos of people sitting on rooftops, trapped, floating face down through the muddy debris-filled streets. When one missionary came across new information, he’d yell it out to the group—this many dollars in damage, that many lives lost. I didn’t yell out so much. I was mostly just silently engrossed. It was incredible. A good chunk of New Orleans leveled. We knew New Orleans. A couple of us had been there.
One member of our suddenly animated group was noticeably less engulfed by the chaos occurring back home. It was Bankston, the smiler, who had only recently arrived in Omsk, though his reputation had preceded him. Elder Dustin Bankston was different from most of us in a lot of ways. First, there was the smiling, regardless of his audience, always, always smiling, but not like the one I’d put on at the end of a long day, timed just long enough to be seen through the peephole. Sometimes he even broke into song, though his voice was high and whiny—one of his honestly weaker attributes. He was a weird guy. For whatever reason, he was an extremely successful missionary, though. He was beloved by the Russians in a way I couldn’t comprehend, other than that he was maybe somewhat of a novelty. It was obvious even then that he was far less obsessed than the rest of us with preserving national bravado, at least in the traditional sense. Maybe it was because he had almost served his full two-year term and had learned from experience. I tend to wonder, though, if it had something to do with his origin.
Before he left it behind to come to Siberia, Bankston lived with his mom and younger sister in a 19th century mansion right on the coast in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. To the rest of us mostly-sheltered Northerners and Westerners, he was the South. He always said “no, sir” and “yes, ma’am,” and he even sang in a gospel choir, which is odd for a Mormon. He was full of stories about crocodiles and trailer homes. His best story, though, was about how his mom, a respected nurse, had recently bared all for the MTV cameras at Mardi Gras. This sort of behavior is also uncharacteristic of Mormons. No, Bankston and his family weren’t shy, per se. But on the last Wednesday in August, when the flashing dot on the CNN map was directly over his hometown, he didn’t have much to say. And he didn’t get any e-mail.
The next day was the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Siberia.
“Congratulations,” said our American mission president on speakerphone the next morning. Malcomb and I called to inform him of the situation with Bankston, of which he was already aware. We mentioned that our compatriot didn’t seem overly disturbed by the whole ordeal. He was quiet at the internet club, and later that day still seemed indifferent about the questionable existence of his house. Malcomb said he was in denial.
“It’s antebellum!” Bankston’s reedy voice sang when he told us. “It survived Hurricane Camille. It can withstand anything!” Had Bankston known that his entire hometown had been leveled, he may have felt differently. He had to know, though, and his outward confidence baffled me. The president assigned Malcomb and me to watch out for Bankston and prepare him for the possibility that everything was gone—basically, to let him down gently, assuming the worst. Later that day, Malcomb and I spent an hour trapped standing in a hot, crowded trolley bus experiencing electrical problems. In my journal that night, I lamented the inefficiency of such Russian “conveniences” for an entire page. I said “it’s a good thing that the majority of Americans are nice enough to lie when Russians ask questions comparing our two nations… Nobody that has lived in both societies can even approach a comprehension of how much better things are in America.” I also stated simply, “God bless America.” I don’t recall the tone of voice that hovered above the metallic ink that day, but I hope it was grateful. In context, it doesn’t seem likely, though.
At our missionary meeting the following day, I knew Malcomb would be insensitive toward Bankston, and he was. “It’s all gone, man!” Bankston took it with the same smile as always. I tried to be the bigger man and comfort my senior elder, telling him that while the Lord does indeed watch out for His servants, it’d be wise to mentally prepare for the possibility that he no longer had a home. But while Bankston remained more or less unfazed, I could feel my own steel door faltering. Here he was, a prisoner in Omsk, and while he’s away doing good, his home is attacked. It wasn’t fair. We were all prisoners, but most of us probably deserved to be there for one reason or another. Malcomb and I certainly did. Bankston was the best man among us, and yet it was his home, his point of reference destroyed, his neighbors floating face down on CNN. It didn’t bother me theologically. Every day, I fielded the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” That was easy: good people are tested, just never above that which they are able to bear. Bankston had been so tested, and he appeared to be passing. I would have failed pitifully.
As I sat in silence, a younger missionary spoke. “Hey Bankston, if you need a place to stay for a while, you can live with my family in Utah.” Another concurred, offering his own house, and then another followed. Even frigid Malcomb offered lodgings with his family in Buffalo. I don’t think Bankston seriously considered any of the offers, though. He smiled as he sang to us about Dixie, unprovoked. I wish I was in de land of cotton—old times dar am not forgotten. I’m sure a big part of him did wish he was there, but I also realized that Bankston was Bankston, even in exile. He didn’t need to validate himself by consciously remembering where he was from. He just plain was from there, and even if he never saw home again, he had gleaned the best things from it. He had lost it because he was the only one of us who didn’t need it.
Bankston’s last three months in Siberia were harder than most. A couple weeks after the hurricane, his mom got a hold of him. As a nurse, she had been working night and day in a care center, with no way to call out. Some things were salvaged from their antebellum house, but most things were gone. Work in Omsk continued much as it had been before. Though it was only mid-September, winter had already made noticeable advances. Wind pushed through the crooked avenues, forcing us into heavier coats and hats as we scoured the bleak town for open doors. A punk on a crowded trolleybus unzipped the front pocket of my bag and almost had his hands on my wallet when I noticed him. I told him “nice try,” then elbowed him in the stomach, not nearly as hard enough, on my way off of the bus. I needed to be better.
It was only years later that I made the connection between the Russians and their steel doors, exhibiting stone-faced severity only on the outside. It seems so obvious now. The thing is, it was a front, yes, but a front understood and agreed upon by the whole community. Bankston figured that out, and responded to it as one probably should respond to someone who takes themselves too seriously—with a smile. His may not have been the Russian way, but it was real, and was received warmly. The front of mirrored toughness I had built up to that point was, conversely, entirely artificial, and the locals could see right through it. With time, I started to figure it out, and things got better.
Superior (fiction)
Author's note: This is the story that won the USU (Scribendi) fiction contest for 2008, the Dylan Days fiction contest in Hibbing, MN, and got me a place in the finals of Hollins University's annual short fiction contest. That's perhaps the best writing school in the country, and I was the only finalist (there were 9) west of Arkansas, so I don't feel too bad about not winning that. This was my first attempt at unreliable narration, but I think with time it turned out all right. Enjoy it here courtesy the Scribendi website.
http://www.scribendi.usu.edu/fiction_ugrad_1st.html
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