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.

Art of the Knives

September 1, 2001. Before sleeping dragons woke up in Truth Or Consequences to have a little fun at the poor human’s expense.

One thing he witnessed with clarity on the transatlantic flight was how a Spanish woman sitting across and up a row manipulated her knife to carve an apple. She used her thumb to measure thin red skin and gently worked the blade down the fruit near her thumb while maintaining slight pressure.

She was delicate and firm with the sharp tool. He’d observe many people using knives and he always remembered the Spanish woman’s fingers and blade.

On warm afternoons as winter sun sang past the Grand Penon dolomite mountains in the Sierras an old Spanish man labored up the hill on his cane with his brown and white terrier toward the gazebo. The gazebo overlooked Lacilbula.

“Ola,” exchanging pleasantries. The man pulled a folding blade and a pear wrapped in a white paper napkin from his brown sweater pocket.

He had the same precision as the woman on the plane. When he finished slicing a piece he kept it on the edge and ate off steel. Slice by slice. Done, he tossed the core to his barking mongrel, wiped off the blade, folded it, returned it to his pocket, took his cane, walked over to the potable water stone fountain, removed his upper teeth, washed them and put them back in his mouth.

The village butcher named Garcia had the art. Grazalema families butchering a pig on a plywood slab in their garage had it. A cafe barman displayed it with his long thin blade slicing thin strips of ham off a pig’s bone wedged between wood supports.

Friends had it butchering rams in Casablanca for Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice. The feast, a major Muslim holiday, commemorated the Qur’an’s account of God allowing the patriarch Ibraham to sacrifice a ram instead of his son Ishmael. It was sacrifice with a capital S. Ibraham dreamed he wanted to kill his son and God said, “No. I will send you a ram,” and this was their tradition.

Three rams were slaughtered, one for each married man in the family. The rams spent their last night in the wood factory attached to the warren of rooms constituting the family home in an industrial section of town.

They started at nine a.m., after a breakfast of crepes and tea. Ahmed, Tofer, Saad and their father secured wooden beams and ropes above the red and gray tiled floor.

They held the ram down and sliced it’s throat. Breath and blood flowed across checkerboard tile. It fought for it’s life, kicking and screaming. The head was severed and thrown to the side. They cut a hole in a back leg near a tendon and bone, ran a rope through it and hoisted the carcass into the air.

The wool coat was sliced off and thrown on a ladder where it dried in the sun. It’d be collected by a man pushing his rolling cart through the neighborhood and made into a prayer rug. The body was inflated with an air compressor to make skinning easier. Blood flowed over tiles.

Rex, the German shepherd drank his fill.

Sharp knives. They re-sharpened blades in the shop and worked fat off the skin of the poorest animal. Internal organs tumbled into plastic tubs. A wife carried them upstairs to the team of women preparing meals. Men washed the interior cavity with hot water.

Liver skewered with fat was grilled over red hot coals and served with tea, hot bread and olives at noon. Everyone gathered at a long shaded table under pink and red boginvillas flowers and clear blue sky.

At 3 p.m. they ate the stomach with lemon, olives and fresh hot bread. Fruit and water. Larger sections of the ram were dismembered with a band saw, placed in plastic bags and frozen. A third would be given to the poor.

Across the street itinerant men cooked rams heads on a makeshift grill and hacked off the horns.

Rare people say they experienced two sensations simultaneously: they saw colors when they heard sounds, or they heard sounds when they ate something. The condition is called synaesthesia.

The sound you hear is the smell of a ram’s head crying. The music of embers, wool and glazed eye calm. The edge you touch is the blade releasing blood, the feeling you see is the poorest skin, white intestines, black liver on red coals. A single piece of charcoal welcomes the skull, horns curve from blue sky into dark eyed knife slashing flesh.

All families made the sacrifice. Sacrifice, community, family energies within the spirit world and human hospitality. The feast lasted three days.

The art of the knives.