Natasha from Kiev

At the beginning of September 2001, passengers at the Amsterdam airport waited for their flight to Casablanca. There was Youseif, a Moroccan man from Fez living in San Francisco going home to see his family after many years. He would stay three months.

There was a woman from Kiev with her 5 year old son. Her name was Natasha and she was tall, slim and beautiful. She was married to a Moroccan man. They’d met at the university in Kiev and he lived in Amsterdam. She had not seen him for three years and he didn’t know his son.

He did not come to the airport to see her because he didn’t have the correct papers nor was she able to leave the airport and see him because she lacked the correct papers so she waited for her flight to her new home.

Natasha had heard about her new home but had never seen it. She was taking her son to Morocco where they would meet her husband’s family for the first time and live their life.

She did not speak Arabic. Her cheap red, white and blue Russian plastic baggage was falling apart at the seams. Her son was a terror and pissed his pants leaving a trail of urine in the departure lounge. Natasha was beside herself.

With them was an American writer going to Morocco for six months. He had finished a book in the summer about a woman who spoke every language and he was jumping through a window into new adventures.

We all spoke the same language as night fell around the roar of planes leaving gravity taking people somewhere.

We were buried at gate 54D, miles from bright gleaming duty free shops full of perfume, electronics, banks, casinos, toy stores, restaurants, gleaming diamond rings and watches, customs, clothing stores and business.

Passengers carried plastic bags saying, “Buy and Fly.”

It was midnight when we landed in Casablanca and walked through a towering hall full of intricate inlaid mosaic tiles and a waterfall. Framed images of smiling kings watched us. Customs was a formality and the baggage conveyer belt broke down as frustrated passengers waited.

Small wheels on useless baggage trolleys were bent and stuck. They careened left and right as people wrestled impossible loads through green ‘nothing to declare’ zones toward friends and relatives.

I helped Natasha load her life on a cart and she disappeared into the throng with her son. I watched her husband’s family approach her. It was his father, mother, brother-in-law and an older woman dressed in traditional jellabas. They welcomed her with a hug, speaking words Natasha did not understand. They scooped up the boy.

I focused on the old couple as they slowly walked away and imagined they would take him forever, this progeny of theirs, their connection to their son.

Natasha, an alien in their world, an aberration, would be relegated to a new life. She moved into their world with a Ukranian passport, speaking unknown languages where she would be welcomed on one hand and relegated to a life in a new reality serving her new family.

She was going to be many things to them and they would manifest their loss on her. She would carry the water and gather wood. She would carry their fading light, hopes, dreams and connections. Their grandson would realize everything. They disappeared into a polluted city of 5 million.

They were descended from Berbers. Their culture had a passion to touch a world outside their ability to perceive the reality.

Their son in Holland relied on his mobile. He could do no wrong. He was a grand man in their eyes and hearts. Many women came and went in his life. It was his dark eyed nomadic destiny.

While his wife was trapped in the airport he was with his girlfriend and he didn’t have the correct papers anyway. He wasn’t lying when he said his family would take care of her.

I whispered this story to Natasha but she found it hard to believe.

Leaving Casablanca

Slanting light wrapped its arms around someone gathering raw unfiltered and uncensored material on their journey.

Light cut the sky, severing the white village, stone paths, Moorish brown doors, idle men, shifty eyed one armed merchants, unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

As a Wandering Ghost he traversed light, space, and time near vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on both sides of their extended faces while shaking hands with everyone confirming his flight. Your exile dream vision.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with this hesitancy, this delay, this boarding card question.

Their visa stamp bled through their indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses and delicate woven craft work designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa. They craved freshly cut sweet smelling green boiling tea to mix their life’s colors with dust.

They taxied down the runway as rainbows illuminated western clouds. The moon danced in cobalt blue sky. Above clouds thunderheads formed a white billowing future, all air and water,
an infinite dream machine.

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward Seattle and heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis he wrote to Imane in Marrakech, the Red City.

“Dear Imane, - Faith in Arabic - my dearest friend in another earth orbit time zone, a Heart Space. Imagine meeting you on a train just by chance. We trust our instincts to experience the truth.

“I am flying over ice fields, Canadian white with blue water cracks, down below stretching to the northern horizon. We are above the clouds whispering winter’s knowing. Spring will find white ice melting.

“We are above frozen rivers looking for strength inside it all to flow.

“Orange and jasmine fragrances in a Marrakech courtyard welcome your eyes surrounding you with sensual delight. I am trapped inside a metal container above frozen white water. I need to jump into the cold water and scrub off old airport noise, dust, sound, people pushing their lives toward inarguable conclusions.

“Yes, I will jump down onto white ice floating to meet you on the other side of a reality where sand lies shimmering beneath the blue sky and a warrior’s life is strong.

“Spring is coming, you see small tight winter trees waiting to explode in Holland, such a pity, such a tragedy waiting to happen, this season shift as if someone put 2 and 2 together in some grand equation.

“Billy in the Spanish Sierras is 3 weeks older than before he was born which doesn’t have anything to do with this memory yet contains everything because he is a lovely boy and calm. He saved their relationship you know; Mo, the desperate English woman who cheated on her English husband after producing two lovely daughters in Graz, an old Roman village in Andalusia. She took up with Pedro, and yes, Billy’s conception and birth saved them forever.

“I will always remember watching Pedro, an old hippie turned anarchist turned leather worker, one morning when we shared breakfast. We were in his old white stone home along the back ridge of narrow tight Roman cobblestone streets below Penon Grande mountains.

“We enjoyed toast, cheese, olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. Pedro gently sliced red skin and spread each tomato seed on his brown bread.”

A defining moment. Each seed itself a small world of life and future. So small yet so significant. We never wasted anything. We weren’t poor mind you just paying attention to the details.

“Back to us. Our Marrakech train conversations were the magic of being still, hurtling past abandoned mud homes, villages where women ride donkeys miles to wells looking for blue water, children without education tend flocks, men hammer their sharp knives through mint tea while laughing with the sky.

“As we sat in Jemma space watching black hooded cobras dance you were beautiful with a fine laughter and our time together was sweeter than the smell of jasmine in the afternoon and now I see ice cracking into blue water falling from the blue sky and winter sleeps below us.

“Just as the Sahara sand blows south for the winter, ice retreats north to it’s spring and it’s austere, nothing at all, a blank white, perhaps like a huge, gigantic white blank page in an old black sketch book with a broken spine spilling watercolors, stories, poems, releasing old visions of butterflies in micro fauna extremes.

“I survived these adventures and I ramble onward and tell you now when I am in the air it’s good to be moving like standing still in the frozen river of dreams. We are a cloud of blue water dancing with white ice seeing this amazing world of ours. Specific images from these moments.

“To be precise when I grow a little weary of all the moving, all the standing silent inside the language of silence white clear and slow the smell of jasmine in the garden penetrates my heart.

“I would like to rest my head and heart there just now, just for the smell of knowing red dust, water bells, chimes, singing birds, oranges, lemons, your laughing eyes again and this is enough.”