Oh, bliss! Euphoria! Lisa and I climbing up an African mountain to reach a farming village, haul up a guitar and recorder, and then spend an evening by the fire, clustered in close with the entire village, teaching them Paul Robeson songs. Ecstasy! Socialist-summer-camp/Eastern-European-folkdancing/free-the-Rosenbergs/Passover-prayer-for-Palestinian-independence/don’t-eat-iceberg-lettuce-don’t-shave-your-legs-or-armpits heaven!! Sitting, watching the fireglow of excited faces, kids sleeping in their parents’ laps, people holding hands, leaning against each other, learning to sing “Go Down Moses,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Got no penny to my name, you hear the whistle blow one hundred miles.” Nobody here knows what pennies are, or miles for that matter, but who cares, I can’t understand the Kipsigi tribal songs that they are teaching us back, it doesn’t matter, everyone still sways and claps hands at the “Ain’t gonna study war no more” part. Oh, more pleasure than I can stand, dip me into agar right now, freeze this moment for the natural history museum, put me in the display case as the euphoric liberal.
Going for a visit to Richard and Samwelly’s home village. Hardly even the term for it. Drive through Masai country, empty flat grassland, and eventually, a hundred kilometers in, the hills start, the farms start, Kipsigi tribal country, until finally, endless rolls of gentle mountains, and every inch being farmed. Hard to tell what constitutes a village. In each valley, a trading post—a spring, a store with sugar, milk, and flour, a school, a dispensary manned once a week. And then, all over the mountain, a mud-thatched hut for every half dozen acres or so of maize. Can’t tell if, when they say “my village,” they mean each of their houses, the houses of their immediate family, or everyone on that mountain. Everyone related in complex near-incestuous ways, one village idiot per mountain, one wife beater, one young Turk building the first tinroofed house, one old shaman, everybody else just up to their ears with maize and chickens and nondescript dogs and cows wandering through the hut and donkeys hauling up water and endless kids and big excited hellos. Hours to get to the top of the mountain. Drive in from the last gravel road, five kilometers away, and then just bash through the cow path, people pouring out excited, never been a vehicle this far up before, certainly never a vehicle carrying whites intent on singing rounds and old union songs. Whooping, huzzahing, people running alongside the vehicle, kids in school shorts pouring out to clear the rocks out of the way, to help heave us over the tough spots, fight our way up the mountain over the old cornfields in four-wheel drive. Eventually, we give up, start hiking up with a caravan of people wanting to carry the sleeping bags, the guitar, the box of surprises. Excited marching line snaking up the mountain past the distant relatives hollering from the field to come have tea, Richard and Samwelly proudly leading the procession, prodigal sons returning with their pale friends. People start singing on the slopes, cows come up to nuzzle you. Heaven!
Up top. Maize and trees and views of everywhere and shade underneath Richard’s house. Lisa and I try surreptitiously to hug each other—“This is so wonderful it’s unbearable”—and the kids catch us, giggle, come and hug us too. People give you flowers, shaking hands with the parents and sisters and brothers’ wives and the folks just passing through. Tons and tons of roasted maize brought out to you to be eaten, and you haven’t even sat down yet. The sick kids are soon brought in, vitamins and antibiotics and ointments passed out, appropriate duckings and lectures about cleaning the kid’s eyes or making sure he gets milk each day. Balloons passed out. The kids run away in fright, and we have to teach them how to bounce them around and slap them, but not too hard. Universals, as based on observations of Kipsigi, Masai, and Brooklyn kids: all kids, within ten minutes of understanding the principle of blowing up balloons, will blow one up, untied, go over to their friend, and let the air expel by the friend’s rear end, making a fart noise. One kid discovers that you can blow up a balloon, let the air expel through my recorder, and make it play—reinventing the bagpipe. We tie a balloon to the roof with dental floss, and everyone plays tether ball with it. One kid, off on the side and moping after being yelled at by his parents. In a salute to his pre-agricultural ancestors, the kid had dug a hole in the path, covering it with fronds and leaves, and trapped the neighbor kid in his pit. No poison spikes, though, just some minor excitement and a good spanking. “You do that to elephants, not to Kimutai next door.” He still sniffles but eventually plays.
More things we’ve introduced to the mountain, in addition to balloons and dental floss: rice, watermelon, eyeglasses, Band-Aids, soap bubbles. The possibilities are endless. By the afternoon, Lisa is helping one of the guys study for his high school exams. Basic geometry, English grammar, how to decide if a field should be planted in straight lines or contours. What do we know about that? I, meanwhile, am inundated by a kid who wants to quiz me on geography. “How many kilometers in your river, The Mississippi? How many cows in your province, The Minnesota? How many metric tons of maize in your district, The New Jersey?” I get irked, as I decide he’s just trying to show me how much more he knows about The New England and places like that than I do. As revenge, I have announced that I will teach him the important words in English that he must learn to get ahead, and I am soon drilling him on 1920s gangster slang. Fedora. Rubout. Gun moll. Running board. Bimbo. Speakeasy. B-girl. Richard catches on, lectures him solemnly on the need to learn the terms, teach them to the other kids on the mountain. Later in the day, as we describe how we dart baboons to the interested crowd, the kid says, “Oh, so you rub out on the baboons.” Yes, indeed; we congratulate him.
Late afternoon, picture time. Up and down the mountain, families pouring out as we take photos and promise copies next time we’re there. Pictures are still novel enough here that Kenyans are subject to the same photography heebiejeebies that Americans had in 1900—no photo is ever candid, no subject ever smiles, only the finest of clothing is worn. People have been changing clothes all afternoon, everyone in this dirt-poor village washing and sewing and patching. Group portraits, beloved babies held high, favorite cows at the centerpiece. Those who’ve been to school invariably insist on being photographed holding an open book, arm lifted in the air, orating at the mountain. All these vibrant multicolored crowds exploding with energy, reduced to deathly serious, near-poignant daguerreotypes.
Evening. Mounds of potatoes and cabbage; one child and one donkey have been dispatched down to the store to bring up the main treat, bottles of soda for everyone. A goat has been slaughtered, and various distressing and unidentifiable organs are passed to us first as honored guests; Lisa, who came to Kenya as doctrinaire a vegetarian as I had been years before, who had recognized that the juncture would come of having to choose between the morality of not eating meat and the morality of being a good guest in a place like this, plows into her goat innards with gusto and praise. Pleasure, intimacy, everyone leaning in and happy, eating like hogs. We start to sing, teaching the songs. Julius, cherubic teenager whom Lisa had been quizzing on geometry, leads the counter-singing, teaching us Kipsigi tunes, in a delicate near-whispered voice, face contorted with concentration. Three tough-demeanored, near-thuggish men, distant cousins, have sat silently at the back of the room throughout, not really participating. They suddenly fall into serious, whispered, sustained discussion of considerable intensity among themselves before announcing, with Richard as their messenger, that they have a song, a special song, that they would like to sing. This turns out to be “Three Blind Mice,” sung with near-religious fervor in astonishing falsettos. More singing; we are taught religious songs about Babylon and Zion and facing the Lord. It occurs to me that if you are the sort of missionary who, instead of trying to cure river blindness or build schools by hand or promulgate liberation theology in the face of right-wing death squads, merely sits around with some happy folks and sings songs, you have a fairly easy, pleasurable life.
Finally, a break in the singing, time for the main event of the evening. I hate magic tricks, always have, have no capacity to figure out what is going on, am irritated by the whole process. But I will admit it, I have a magic trick to do. The old “make a handkerchief disappear into your fist while you’ve actually stuffed it into a fake thumb that no one noticed.” These are people who have never seen a movie, a TV program, or a magazine, never heard a machine-derived sound except for a car and radio and some turbine that grinds maize at the village store. They are simply flabbergasted. In the paraffin lamplight, I stuff the handkerchief into my hand, while mesmerized faces watch closely. Clump my fist up, blow into it three times, and—hand opened—gone. Gasps. Over and over, people alarmed each time, backing away from me. Irresistibly, I have to begin hamming things up, pulling off cheap chintzy flourishes and low-rent carnival histrionics. I begin to moan and shake when the handkerchief disappears, make gargly sounds, act as if my hand is not my own, make horrible silly faces. People begin to clutch each other, a first child hides under the table. One time, instead of pulling the handkerchief out of my obviously empty fist, I slowly, laboriously, seem to pull it out of Richard’s ear (who knows the trick). He clutches his head, cries, “Empty, empty,” causing more panic. Next time, I get the shakes, point all over the room until I settle on the girl who’s been sassing us all evening. She trembles, cowers, but it’s no use, I come over and, moaning and yelping the whole time, pull the handkerchief out of her ear. She drops to the floor, clutching her head. Anguished requests that I do it again.
Finally, it is time for the ice. We’ve brought a Styrofoam box filled with dry ice from camp. I feel like a whimsical García Marquez character, or a Theroux obsessive—we have brought ice to the mountain. We hauled up the sealed box, shooed the curious kids away, and now it is time to reveal its contents. I place a piece of ice on the table. “Hot,” everyone agrees, looking at the smoke. Everyone reaches their hands close. “Hot … cold?” Confusion, edginess. It is passed around, people holding it contentedly for a second before it stings, then tossing it about in alarm. “Don’t kill my brother,” shouts Samwelly’s oldest kid as it is passed to the younger. Perplexity, people craning to see what’s next. I fill up a cup with water. I display it to everyone, pour half of it out on the floor. “Water.” Obviously. Place it in the dry ice, make everyone count to one hundred, then pull the cup out, turn it over—the water doesn’t run. Screams again, kids flee the room. Everyone passes it around. “It’s become a rock.” “It’s a cold rock.” “It’s ice,” pronounces Julius the student. “What is ice?” “I don’t know,” he admits.
Then the coup de grâce. I have snuck a pocketful of dry ice. Take a cup full of water. Everyone leans in. Once again, I begin to make horrible spastic tremors and babble in tongues. Throw in the handful of dry ice. Bubbling smoke, pouring all over the table, the miracle of dry ice mixing with water that makes the most sophisticated scientists I know stop in their tracks and play happily for minutes (while I hope that I won’t get asked the tough question that Julius has just boggled, since I haven’t the slightest idea what dry ice actually is, or why it causes the smoke). “It’s soup,” shouts Samwelly’s kid. Others are not so sure and are backing off again. Then I reach up my sleeve—god help me, I’ve actually done something so hokey as to hide something up my sleeve. It’s a plastic snake, about a foot long. I reach into the bubbling cup, tilt my head at an autistic angle, roll my eyes up into my head and drool a bit, and convulsively coax a snake out of the boiling froth. I hold it back as if I’m fighting it for my life, wail, bite into its head, and run from the house with it hanging from my mouth, amid wonderfully satisfying shrieks.
Inconceivable though it may seem, we get even more pleasure out of the dry ice at other times. We make ices. It’s my greatest concession in the face of this moronic rice and beans and mackerel asceticism. Early morning, clouds clearing. Lisa, Richard, and I confer. “Looks like its going to be hot today.” “Yeah, hot.” “Hot enough for ices.” “Could be.” We make a quick calculation, see if there’s enough dry ice until the next shipment to squander on the ices. Yeah. Dart the baboons, come barreling into camp, before anything else we run like drooly idiots, tongues hanging out—“Ices, ices.” Fill up cups with water, mix in the orange powdered drink, ever ever so gently place the cups into little concavities in the dry ice. And wait. Lifting the lid. “Ready?” “Almost.” “Soon.” “Ices.” “Yeah.” Finally, by midafternoon, when it’s roaring hot and there’s never enough shade, the ices are ready. We each get our cup, spoon, and begin to scrape at the solid block of flavored ice. My god my god my god it is so good you want to scream, to never finish. We scrape and nibble for hours, between blood samples and centrifuge spins.
We tried experiments; Richard led the way. “If we can make ices from the orange Frink, how about soda?” he wondered. We tried it, fabulous. “If soda, how about cocoa?” We made cocoa, cooled it off, froze it. It was so good, we all hugged each other. “If cocoa, why not tea?” Not bad, thought Richard, although no one else was too enthused. The next day, Richard suggested freezing onion and cabbage and goat stew—he was within a hair’s breadth of reinventing the TV dinner. Lisa convinced him we would just be disappointed.
Ices. We dream about them, we finish some and wonder if we can make more, we spend half the evening anticipating the next day’s. Not everyone is as enthused. Eh, too cold, says Samwelly, who, visiting in his off-hours from the tourist camp, lets his ices melt back to a lukewarm drink. Are you mad?! we yell, we’ll make you your own warm drink, don’t waste the ices next time, give them to us. Soirowa thinks it’s just plain weird, won’t have anything to do with it. Or so we think until one day we barrel into camp early. There is Soirowa, just fishing out his cup of ices made out of cow’s blood. Big hemolyzed block. Scrumptious, is his description, after translation.