Sometimes we joked that our institute was the hanged garden of Leningrad. Unlike the famed gardens of Babylon, ours was not planted. We were mere and wonderful potential.
Eleven thousand starved in November. More than fifty thousand died in December, when wood for coffins was long gone. Daily I heard the dynamite crack, loosening the terrible frozen earth to sneak in the sheet-wrapped corpses, tall and short but almost all bone thin, pulled in on sleds, abandoned at the cemeteries for group burial. Too many to name or count or care about. But I would not come to such an anonymous end, I told myself, even then as though looking back from a great distance of years.
In a small town near the Pacific Coast, Alena and I had walked the square, taken in a colonial church with an unusually fine and simple wooden altar, and purchased a fabulous melon from a stall on the street.
The melon was unlike any I had previously encountered, and I have seen only one since, on another trip to Central America. It was large and oblong like a watermelon but with a pale, ridged, almost-white rind that made it look more like a winter squash than a summer fruit.
It grew heavy in my arms as we waited for the boat that would ferry us across half of Lake Nicaragua, to the island of Ometepe. There, a small band of us planned to collect what we could of the coffee, sesame, and strange fruits that grew in its fertile volcanic soil. We would also take notes on an unusual breed of cattle for colleagues in Tbilisi and photograph some pre-Columbian petroglyphs by request of the culture ministry. Alena and I hoped to photograph some howler monkeys.
Heat was coming in with the day, and a pack of dirty boys pestered us for coins. The great director stood at the launch, looking out toward the two volcanoes that rose from the lake to form the largest freshwater island in the world. It struck me that he was seeking to put maximum physical distance — indeed all forms of distance — between himself and the little beggars.
I watched a woman just down the shore, washing clothes on the rock. Unlike cheap travel paintings of boisterous women working and gossiping and splashing together, she was straight-faced and alone. She washed her family’s clothes not as a social event but because they needed to be cleaned.
Sergei, loaded with bananas, distributed them to the beggars, and with the eating they again became boys, joking and playing hopping games with Sergei until the boat pulled close.
On the boat’s deck, moving slowly toward the clouds and volcanoes of Ometepe, we cut into the melon.
I was surprised at Alena’s appetite, which, four months into her first pregnancy, had been weak for some time. And the large lake’s water was chopped by the strong, warm wind, making the boat jerk up and down. Yet Alena devoured slice after slice of the melon’s rich orange flesh. Over and over, she said, “I’ve never eaten anything so good” and “Absolute ambrosia.” And I thought: I do not know this woman at all.
I had such high hopes for us at that moment. I had already lied to her, of course, but I thought that along with the baby we would be delivered a new beginning.
Alena spit a melon seed into the sublime lake, warmth bathed us, and we were deeply happy for the last time.
What I realized only later, after seeing it again more than once, was that the return of Alena’s appetite was caused by the plummeting of her hormones. She was no longer sick from pregnancy.
Alena miscarried the baby in a not entirely uncomfortable inn, in the middle of medical nowhere. She rested on the clean sheets that the innkeeper had insisted we accept while we waited for a boat to return us to real land. I sat at a table outside and watched our friends swim foolishly among the small but still dangerous freshwater sharks. I drank a sweet, purple drink made from pitaya fruit, and then beer after beer, and ate, grilled, three of the small fish that live nowhere in the world but Lake Nicaragua.
A local man used only a small stick to move a herd of a dozen or so cattle down the beach. I imagined him returning to a simple meal, a thick-waisted wife, and a vague number of small children. I would have traded places with him, at least at that moment. But of course he would not have agreed.
The great director sat with me, our bare feet in the sand that felt like dirt but fell away clean. “This island was once used for sacred burials. We are lucky that we do not have to bury Alena here.”
He sat with me on the boat as I held Alena, and together we watched the volcanoes recede. I had planned to hike up into the cloud forest of the dormant Madera to see the lagoon in its crater. But now I focused on the perfect cone of the taller, still-active volcano, Concepción, and tried hard to feel worse for Alena than for myself.
The director personally arranged for the several forms of transportation we required, and Alena lived enough to arrive, unconscious and two days later, at the hospital in Managua. During some of the hours of waiting, I tried to picture what our lives would be and failed.
On the way home, there were other hospital layovers, in Atlanta and London. Alena would never again agree to travel pregnant, but, of course, the damage was already done.
Late, late, and I was alone, walking the corridor outside of the grain collections, my turn to guard.
I placed my feet slowly, heel rolling to toe, heel rolling to toe, making no sound myself, only remembering the sound of the great director’s gait. Click, click, an even rhythm covering an uneven stride, longer on the right but faster on that side too, creating a symmetrical sound but a biased walk that had to be corrected by a step to the right about halfway down the corridor, where I now stood, shifting left so I could step right, imitating.
What I had thought of doing many times over the past weeks, I did now without thinking much about it.
Just a few kernels of a few kinds, taking nothing too rare, taking the last of no variety, rearranging the remainder to hide my weakness. My sore teeth, barely able to split raw rice, faired better with the soft pop of millet, the clean chew of teff.
Perhaps I had no right to the rice, no claim on the millet, but the teff was my find, mine to take back. I had collected it with my own hands on one of the first of my many trips with the great director. “Abyssinia,” I said aloud, my mouth full. “Abyssinia.”
Our steamer harbored in Djibouti the last week of 1926. The great director spent his night alone. Mine, I spent with a wide-eyed, French-speaking Somali girl with a smooth back and beautiful ankles. The next day we proceeded overland, by train, to Addis Ababa.
We were received by Emperor Menelik, who, it turned out, shared an interest in agriculture, wheat in particular.
He granted permission for our expedition as we ate our way through a procession of dishes, increasingly hot with spice: orange squash in coconut milk, mashed eggplant, raw marinated beef, lentils, mixed simmered greens, chicken-and-egg stew. We scooped mouthfuls of each with the thin stratum of fermented bread on which it was served. This injera grew like a sponge in my stomach, filling me far beyond comfort and pushing the meats and vegetables into my intestines too soon.
The flesh of my mouth — the insides of my cheeks, the softness under my tongue, and my palate more than my tongue itself — burned, pasted with powdered red pepper. My breath stung my eyes. I interrupted the great director, the emperor, his entourage, to retire.
The next morning, the great director woke me early to accompany him to the market to procure sandals for the fourteen men who would guide and serve us on our journey.