Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (24 page)

It's hard to eat anything in Haiti without having a political epiphany. Sugar is the king of madeleinelike foods here, a politico-economic treatise in itself. A whole world bursts out of it. Columbus brought the first sugarcane plants to Haiti on his second voyage to the island. After that, the entire colony under the French was involved in sugar cultivation, but the plantation economy could not survive without a slave labor force, and the beginnings of Haiti's slave revolution in 1791 destroyed the economic underpinnings of the trade. By the time the slaves gained independence for Haiti in 1804, many of the French plantations had been burned to the ground and lay in ruins. Small cultivators grew sugar for market and for their own use, but there was no central refinery until the Haitian American Sugar Company was established in 1912. HASCO was one of Haiti's biggest employers, but it has been shuttered in recent decades because Haitian sugar, which is grown by smallholders, has been too expensive to compete with much cheaper Dominican sugar, which is plantation-grown and smuggled into Haiti in large quantities across the border. Even after the earthquake, the cheerful red-and-white HASCO smokestack still stands, smokeless, near the edge of Port-au-Prince. In the 1980s, Haiti exported sugar; now it imports sugar. And who cuts the sugar on the Dominican Republic's sugar plantations? Haitians, the world's best cane cutters, who live in slavelike conditions on huge state-run plantations.

And Haitians cannot stop eating the stuff, as if it were their patriotic duty. I believe that there's more sugar in a cup of Haitian coffee than there
is coffee. Their cakes are sweeter than ours. When they make a fruit drink, it's loaded up with sugar. Rum and
klerin
(a supercharged white rum) are favorite drinks, both made with distilled sugarcane. Sometimes the sugar is Haitian—especially the sugar used in
klerin
, which is often homegrown and home-brewed, to say nothing of hallucinogenic. Sugarcane for chewing is also a home-raised crop. It grows by the side of country roads in small patches.

I had a skinny little friend in Haiti who was dating a beautiful and ample woman, a generous, womanly woman. One day I was watching the two of them chat when another friend came up to me, nodded his head at the two, and said in an undertone,
Fòmi pa mouri anba sak sik
. This is one of many succinct Haitian proverbs that come right out of Haitian country life. Figuratively, it means that you can't get enough of a good thing. But literally translated, it means, The ant does not die under a sack of sugar.

There are many other foods redolent of history and politics. Take manioc, a root vegetable that's boiled and mashed and served with meats. It has a sweet, nutty taste. Manioc grows deep in the ground, and when you want to replant a field where it has grown, you have to pull up the whole plant to leave the earth ready for new sowing. This is called
dechoukaj
. When the Duvalier dynasty was overthrown in 1986 and Haitians in crowds went around the country forcing out Jean-Claude Duvalier's henchmen, the slang for the movement was
dechoukaj
. So now when people eat manioc in Haiti, they think about Duvalier.

When you eat conch (
lambi
in Creole), you think of the slaves blowing through the twisty pink shell, which makes a deep honking noise, to herald the beginning of the Haitian revolution and call its leaders together from the plantations. When you eat pumpkin soup, the traditional New Year's Day meal, you think of General Jean-Claude Paul, an alleged narcotrafficker who was killed in 1989 when his holiday soup was poisoned. Rice and beans is such a staple of Haitian cuisine that it is known as
riz national
, and it is as important a piece of the national fabric as the anthem or
the constitution.
Griot
, or deep-fried (I mean really deep) pork bits, is so tasty and delicious, so crunchy and amusing, that it has the same name as traditional storytellers, the griots who used to go from town to town, telling complicated stories full of wisdom and jokes from the old country, Africa—where storytellers and songwriters are still called by this name.

You can't
not
think about food when you're in Haiti, about what food is available, where it's available, and who gets to eat it and how often. At the restaurants in Pétionville, the nicer town up the hill from Port-au-Prince, you can get burgers or Bolognese sauce. You can get pâté de foie gras or grilled salmon or take-out spring rolls. You can find flank steak or skirt steak, roast chicken or
poulet Créole
. You can find the flesh that is not in the stew in the countryside.

When I visited in August 2010 I went out in my poncho into one of the refugee camps in the middle of Port-au-Prince's central square during a torrential tropical storm. Like hundreds of others, this camp was slapped up by Haitians made homeless by the earthquake in January 2010. The tarps covering the tin and cardboard shacks were flapping in the wind, and all the adults were inside, taking what shelter they could. Outside, children in skimpy shorts and T-shirts were frolicking. They kicked a soccer ball and made it skip over the water; they rode pieces of cardboard in the streams that were coursing down the camp's narrow alleyways; and they did cartwheels through puddles that were more like little lakes. They splashed in the base of a decorative fountain that is no longer in service. The grown-ups were grimmer.

I was running down the corridors at sunset, looking for some people I'd met a few days earlier, but I was disoriented in the rain and couldn't find their tent. There was thunder and lightning, very loud, very close. A woman sitting and looking out from a shanty beckoned me in, and I took shelter in her shack. Inside the darkness was slightly relieved by a small flashlight hanging from a piece of earthquake-salvaged rebar. The one-room lean-to
was the size of a closet. A narrow, less-than-twin mattress sat on two boxes at the back. This was the house of Jésula Bellevue, who was trying to cook dinner in the rain. (Jésula means “There's Jesus.”) Jésula's two little battered aluminum pots sat on top of a small bright red charcoal fire just outside the shack's opening, protected from the rain by a slight extension of the roof that Jésula's boyfriend, Wilner Dorasmé, had somehow fashioned. Wilner was sitting on the bed inside the smoky shack, with a baby on his lap. The baby had a fever. The fire outside cast an orange glow over the interior. Jésula and Wilner's three-year-old son, Walness, laid his head on the side of the mattress and stared at the pot in which his mother was cooking dinner. Behind the pots on the fire, a recent river, created by the storm, was gushing by. Roselaure, Jésula's eight-year-old daughter, anxiously watched the pot. Roselaure was skinny as a rake in her red skirt and a T-shirt that advertised the country's largest cell-phone company, Digicel. Her hair was done in a dozen tiny pigtails, each ending with a red rubber band. This was to be the family's first meal of the day, and Roselaure was very hungry, she told me. She was bouncing with excitement, and smiled shyly at me every chance she got.

The smell coming from the pot was good, deep and savory. I asked Jésula what she was making. She was making a fish sauce for rice. The rice was already ready, and into the other pot went tomato paste, some mayonnaise, a pat of butter, a stalk of thyme, a can of what Jésula and all Haitians call “salmon” but which, unlike the salmon up the hill, is actually sardines (the can was opened with the family's one knife), and a half cup of rainwater they'd just gathered, plus the rain that was coming down out of the sky into the pot as the sauce cooked. To this Jésula added toward the end one hot red pepper, and an onion (“You want it to stay crunchy,” she told me). It was crowded and damp and smoky and dark inside the shack, but with the food coming, it was cozy, too. When dinner was served, the family ate from one plate with one spoon, taking turns.

JAMES MEEK

AT A DINNER IN KIEV I HEARD THERE WERE PAGANS IN EUROPEAN
Russia. The Soviet Union had just died. After four score years and ten it had gone suddenly, like an old man with heart failure. Without realizing it I was imbibing the nostalgia of the people around me for the safe old broken-down Soviet world, the nostalgia that choked the Russian-speaking lands in the years I lived there. Now I'm nostalgic. I was younger then, but my nostalgia is also nostalgia for nostalgia itself.
Ranshe bylo luchshe
was the refrain in those days: “it used to be better.” Though I doubt it did, I miss the regrets of others for the loss of a past I didn't experience, as if fragments of their rosy Soviet memories crept into me and now pretend to be my own.

The host and guests were fastidious intellectuals—academics, I think, or doctors, or engineers, people who drank but abhorred drunkenness, although they might find it amusing in a foreign visitor. There were jackets but no ties. Smart dresses. The women cooked and served. The most farsighted of them would already have spent every ruble they had on goods and property. The others would lose their savings in the great inflation that was about to hit Kiev like war, like a plague. Hyperinflation and disillusionment would later crush the sort of hospitality I was used to, but then, Westerners
were still honored curiosities. We had the aura of little Marco Polos, and nothing was our fault, and we took advantage.

It was a dinner in a Soviet flat, the living room made into a dining room, sofa on one side of the table, chairs on the other, the table covered in cold dishes—a plate of smoked meat; a plate of smoked fish; a salad of diced potato, diced carrot, tinned peas, and mayonnaise; a salad of grated beetroot; a salad of diced vegetables covering an almost raw herring; slippery marinated mushrooms; white bread and butter dotted with orange pearls of salmon roe; pickled cucumbers; pickled wild garlic stalks. There would have been a bottle of vodka, a bottle of sweet red wine, and a bottle of cognac, to be drunk out of dainty cut-glass goblets from the glass-doored cupboard, the
stenka
, that covered one wall. When I was stuffed like a goose the second course would have been brought, pork cutlets or fried chicken with potatoes. Then cake. In Britain and America at this time, the newspapers, one of which I wrote for, were warning of famine in Russia and Ukraine. So were the Russian and Ukrainian papers. The famine was always somewhere the reporter wasn't.

One of the guests began talking about a place in the south, Ossetia, where the people were nominally Christian and actually pagan. They worshipped multiple deities in mountain ceremonies. It was in the Caucasus Mountains. I wanted to go. The mystery of a secret space on the map drew me into the Soviet Union just before it ceased to exist, but Kiev and Ukraine were only partly hidden. I'd had an idea of them before I went. The real lure was the mysteries that didn't advertise themselves until you entered the first mystery, the hidden within the hidden.

I visited North Ossetia, the part of Ossetia that's in Russia, several times after that. It wasn't until my third trip, one and a half years later, that I took part in a pagan rite.

I drove out of Vladikavkaz, capital of North Ossetia, toward the mountains on a bright, hot midsummer's day. Vladikavkaz isn't an Ossetian word. It's Russian, a garrison coinage from the eighteenth century meaning “Rule the
Caucasus,” and now it's an industrial city with some pretty czarist quarters, pleasant parks, and swaths of Soviet modernity, a modernity that looks botched and worn-out from the day it is built, yet lasts forever. It seems a regular south Russian or Ukrainian city, that sort of communist-Christian Europeanness, but it isn't. It was the day of the feast of Watsilla, the Ossetian god of the harvest, and the streets were full of portly men in short-sleeved shirts butchering sheep.

The road heads for Kazbek, the dormant volcano that looms over Vladikavkaz. After hundreds of miles of flat Russian steppe the blue rock wall and white peaks of the mountains leap out of the plain with great suddenness. Kazbek is more than fifteen thousand feet high. After an hour of twisting roads we were three thousand feet up, in the steep green alpine meadows of the Karmadon valley. We drove on to Dargavs, location of the holiest shrine to Watsilla, on Mount Tbau. I was to be a guest at the ceremony of the Three Holy Pies, which to the uninitiated would look like a group of men getting drunk and maudlin, making extravagant toasts, and overeating. As for the women, their job was to bake the pies. According to tradition, on this holiday the women had to bake in complete silence. They were supposed to veil their mouths and noses with towels, too, so that even their breath wouldn't hex the pastry; or perhaps it was to stop them spitting in our pies.

Before there could be pies, there had to be a sacrifice. Igor, a vet, took me to a small field around the back of his family's country house. In the pen at the bottom of the field, I saw the holy portion, or rather I saw him seeing us. His eyes reflected a moment beyond fear. Fear implies hope. Here was no hope; here was certainty that the bipeds wanted to kill him. He tried to bolt. Igor seized him by the horns and dragged him up the field to where a table and a basin were set up. The sheep had a brown fleece and a fat tail. Igor threw him on his side on the ground and bound three of his legs with white tape. He hoisted him onto the table with his head hanging over the end, over the basin, and pinned the animal with his right leg, clenching his
knee over the sacrifice's stomach. He held the head by the horns, lifted his eyes to heaven, uttered a short prayer, and cut the sheep's throat. Two pints of crimson blood fell into the basin.

Igor let him bleed dry. It took three or four minutes, the sheep twitching all the while. Toward the end he twitched more violently, his legs kicking out.

“If he takes a long time to die, it means the slaughterer has a light hand, and the meat will taste good,” said Igor. “If the slaughterer is clumsy, he'll die straight away and the blood won't come out.”