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 1
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KAROL NIELSEN 5
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Black
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Elephants
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a memoir 19
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University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London 31
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9 © 2011 by Karol Nielsen. Acknowledgments for the
10 use of copyrighted material appear on pages 218–19,
which constitute an extension of the copyright page.
11 All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United
12 States of America.
13
14 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
15 Nielsen, Karol.
Black elephants : a memoir / Karol Nielsen.
16
p. cm.
17 Includes bibliographical references.
18 isbn 978-0-8032-3537-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
19 1. Nielsen, Karol. 2. Man-woman relationships—
Israel. 3. Persian Gulf War, 1991—Israel. I. Title.
20 hq801.n54 2011
21 306.84'5092—dc22
22 [B] 2011011330
23
Set in Chaparal Pro by Shirley Thornton.
24 Designed by A. Shahan.
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For my father, 9
who taught me how 10
to run hills. 11
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For my mother, 13
who taught me how 14
to endure valleys. 15
For my nephew, 16
who taught me how 17
to love. 18
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Let everything happen 9
to you: beauty and terror. 10
Just keep going. 11
No feeling is final. 12
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r ani e r m a ri a ri lke
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Contents 9
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A Note on Names xi 14
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1 The New Zealand Sheep
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Farmer and the Recruit 1
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2 Machu Picchu 11
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3 Schlepper 25 19
4 Revital 35 20
5 Mexican Pyramids 40 21
6 Long Distance 43 22
7 Sabra 50 23
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8 Give Peace a Chance 65
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9 Black Elephants 81
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10 Not a Good Soldier 91 27
11 Nadav 95 28
12 Housebound 97 29
13 Cappuccino, Cheesecake, 30
and Gas Masks 100 31
1 14 Sitting Ducks 104
2 15 The Promise 109
3 16 Lucie 115
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17 A Lonely Trip 118
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18 Hebrew Lessons 120
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7 19 Scandinavian Worker 126
8 20 Pampered American 133
9 21 Smoker 139
10 22 Nine-Point-Two Miles 142
11 23 Litmus Test 151
12 24 Better to Smile 162
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25 Hermit Crab 171
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26 Shalom, Shalom 181
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16 27 Collateral Damage 188
17 28 Homecoming 208
18 Acknowledgments 217
19 Selected Bibliography 221
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A Note on Names 9
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I have changed some names to 14
protect the privacy of the people 15
in the memoir, including Aviv’s. I 16
chose that name because his mother 17
had wanted to name him Aviv, the 18
Hebrew word for “spring.” 19
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Elephants
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The New Zealand Sheep 8
Farmer and the Recruit 9
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The minivan bumped along hills that hugged Lake Titicaca. 14
Haze made the water look silver. I sat behind Dirk, a Ger- 15
man traveler with a ponytail. It hung to the middle of his 16
back, streaked bronze from the South American sun. He 17
wore dusty jeans and a tank top that skimmed his torso. 18
Dirk was one of those hard-core travelers, the kind I’d met 19
along the way, who took regular trips through Latin Amer- 20
ica, Africa, and the Far East. They seemed so worldly, and 21
despite the army tanks, tear gas, and guns I’d seen during 22
my year as a writer for an English-language newspaper in 23
Argentina, I still felt sheltered. I was only beginning to 24
understand the underbelly of the world, something the 25
serious travelers seemed to have understood from birth. 26
Growing up in Connecticut, I felt the pull of faraway 27
places my father and grandfather had been, places like 28
India, China, and Vietnam. My father fought in the cen- 29
tral highlands of Vietnam, as a commissioned officer with 30
the 101st Airborne Division—the Screaming Eagles. After 31

1
1 the war, he left the army and became a businessman in
2 New York City. He had a window office in the Chrysler
3 Building. He dressed in suits, ties, and wing-tipped shoes.
4 Secretly, I pictured him trekking through jungle, a Nebras-
5 ka boy, lean and tall and tan—a Viking in army fatigues.
6 My father never glamorized war, but my mother’s father
7 did. He made it sound like an exotic mission, flying over
8 the Himalayas—the camel’s hump—from India to China
9 during World War II. He was never Grandfather or Grand-
10 pa or anything that sounded old. He was Bobby, the hero
11 who flew the hump. He’d take us to Chinese restaurants
12 and try to impress us by speaking Chinese to the waiters.
13 It worked. I wanted big adventure like Bobby, action like
14 a new recruit.
15 I wanted to travel the world when I graduated from the
16 University of Pennsylvania, like Marcos, an Argentine
17 friend who’d finished a semester before me. He liked India
18 best. “So many religions!” But I didn’t have the money, and
19 my mother said I needed a job. I found one at the Buenos
20 Aires Herald, famous for its coverage of Argentina’s “dirty
21 war,” when thousands disappeared during the military dic-
22 tatorship. I ended up in Buenos Aires because, as a fresh-
23 man at Penn, an Argentine student walked up to me and
24 said, “I want to teach you the tango.” Jon never taught
25 me the tango, but I got to know most of the Argentines
26 at school. Marcos, his brother Nacho, their cousin Pablo,
27 and their friends, Jon and Martin—Yon and Mar-teen—
28 lived in an off-campus row house in West Philadelphia.
29 They called it the Argentine Embassy.
30 Martin had the classic good looks of an Argentine polo
31 player, and we dated my senior year, but he was two years

2
younger and so studious that he hardly had time for me. 1
A straight-a student at the Wharton School of Business, 2
Martin was in the library night after night until one, two, 3
three, or four in the morning. After we’d broken up, I ran 4
into him in the library and told him I needed an extra 5
semester to finish my thesis. 6
“Do you have a place to stay?” Martin asked. 7
“Not yet,” I said. 8
“We have a room.” 9
So during my last months of school, while writing my 10
thesis and an article for the Penn World Review on the debt 11
crisis in Brazil and Mexico, I lived in the new Argentine 12
Embassy, farther from campus, on a beaten-down block 13
by a crack house and a gas station. My housemate Patri- 14
cia was a graduate student who had written for La Nación, 15
Argentina’s paper of record. She knew that I wanted to 16
travel and write after college, so she said, “Come to Bue- 17
nos Aires. You can live with me.” I went, and for months 18
I lined up cushions from her two small couches and slept 19
on the floor beside her balcony, facing the Rio de la Pla- 20
ta, and then I found a place across the hall. My balcony 21
overlooked a military horse corral, and when my family 22
came for Christmas, my mother went to the balcony and 23
thought, That’s it. I’m not worrying about her anymore! 24
This was five years after the end of the military dicta- 25
torship, but the mothers of the disappeared still marched 26
in the Plaza de Mayo, holding posters of missing children 27
and grandchildren, stepping over bodies painted on the 28
courtyard like crime-scene markers. Argentina’s still-fragile 29
democracy was dealing with labor strikes, hyperinflation, 30
and power shortages that meant walking up and down the 31

The New Zealand Sheep Farmer and the Recruit 3

1 sixteen flights to my apartment in semi-dark stairwells, lit
2 by tea lights on the landings. A few weeks before I’d come
3 to Argentina, a retired general had attempted a coup, and
4 my mother had warned, “This will be your Vietnam.” I
5 thought she was a killjoy, her worry a yoke I had to break.
6
7 Army tanks rolled past my neighborhood café—past bis-
8 tros, banks, currency exchanges, clothing boutiques, shoe
9 shops, stationery stores—toward La Tablada military gar-
10 rison, taken over by guerrillas. My roommate, Maria, and I
11 watched from a table by the window, sipping café con leche.
12 Maria sighed. “I want to go home. I’m too old for this.”
13 I’d met her when she stopped by the Herald, looking for
14 work. She had written for the arts section of the St. Peters-
15 burg Times, but the Herald had a small staff and wasn’t
16 hiring anymore. I’d slipped in because someone had just
17 left the paper when I showed up with a thick envelope of
18 work: my articles for the foreign affairs journal, my thesis
19 on the Latin American debt crisis, and my research paper
20 on the 1973 oil embargo—written as a summer intern for
21 a Washington dc think tank. “I’m not hiring any more
22 foreigners,” the editor had said. I left the envelope on his
23 desk. He called that afternoon. “Can you start tomorrow?”
24 I did. And later, when I’d run into experienced journalists
25 who’d been turned away by the Herald like Maria, they’d
26 always ask, “How did you get that job?”
27 Maria found work as an English teacher and freelance
28 writer for the Associated Press, doing features like her
29 piece on la mufa—the Argentine “blues.” She’d come to
30 Buenos Aires because she had family in Argentina, and
31 she wanted to travel and write, like me. But she was sev-

4
en years older than me, about to turn thirty, and she had 1
grown weary of the violence, remembering how her broth- 2
er swiftly left the country after the last military coup. She 3
wanted to go back to the United States to find a job, meet 4
a man, maybe have children. It seemed like a betrayal to 5
the free spirit in me, since Maria had given me her well- 6
worn copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography. But 7
the truth is that Argentina had become unmanageable for 8
me, too. Hyperinflation had shrunk the value of my sal- 9
ary from a livable $300 a month to only $30 in less than a 10
year. I couldn’t even cover my half of the rent with that, 11
and now that Maria was leaving, I’d have to pay the full 12
$160 a month. The rent didn’t fluctuate. My landlord set 13
it in dollars. 14
I took a sip of my café con leche. “I want to travel before 15
I go.” 16
It was the end of summer in Argentina, the seasons 17
reversing below the equator, when I bought an Aérolinas 18
Argentinas ticket with unlimited stops for a month and 19
left, seeing penguins in Tierra del Fuego, glaciers in Pata- 20
gonia, the Bambi forest in Bariloche, the wine country in 21
Mendoza, gauchos on horseback in Salta, sandhills striped 22
rose, lime, and bone in Jujuy. I crossed the Andes to Chile, 23
spending two nervous days in Santiago during Pinochet’s 24
military rule, and then took a plane to La Paz, where Boliv- 25
ian women wore English bowler hats and baby-doll skirts. 26
Now I was on my way to Machu Picchu, the Inca ruins in 27
the Peruvian Andes. 28
It was dusk when the minivan pulled into Puno, a mud- 29
dy border town on Titicaca’s shore. I couldn’t get over the 30
mud. It covered most of the cobblestone roads, except for 31

The New Zealand Sheep Farmer and the Recruit 5

1 patches of bone-colored rock that poked through now and
2 again. Chocolate-brown mud spread over everything, moist
3 and thick as manure. A Peruvian man walked toward Dirk
4 and me, stepping quickly through the mud without seem-
5 ing to get stuck. The man’s poncho bounced up and down
6 with each of his steps. His cheekbones protruded high,
7 and the cavity below sunk in deep. His skin resembled
8 redwood, a blend of rust and mustard and brown that I’d
9 seen in Bolivia, too. Argentina has so much European blood
10 that sometimes you’d think you were in France or Italy or
11 Spain instead. The man stared at Dirk and me.
12 “Viajeros?” He wondered if we were travelers.
13 “Llegamos.” I said the Spanish word for “arrived” the way
14 I’d learned to in Argentina.
15 “Argentina?”
16 “Sí.”
17 My instincts told me it was better to lie. The United
18 States didn’t have the best reputation in Latin America
19 because of the Central Intelligence Agency’s history of
20 backing coups, and the lie was easy to pull off with my
21 accent and long chestnut hair, a typical Argentine look. So
22 I let him think he’d guessed right, that I was an Argentine.
23 A neighbor, backpacking in the Andes.
24 The man smiled, his cheekbones rising into his dark,
25 deep-set eyes, as he bounded past us toward the docks.
26 The silver surface of Lake Titicaca rippled at the end of
27 that mud-caked road.
28
29 That night, after fish and fries, Dirk and I went to a pub. It
30 looked English. Bronze beer taps and a mahogany bar. Back-
31 packers in blue jeans and flannel shirts crowded the place.

6
 Dirk held up his beer and sipped. “There was a woman in 1
Brazil.” He grinned, taking a puff of his cigarette. I could 2
see the yellow tint of his teeth. “She wants me to stay.” 3
“Why didn’t you?” 4
Dirk laughed, a casual and carefree laugh that somehow 5
told me he only wanted pleasure out of life. “I don’t make 6
my life in Brazil, but it is beautiful. Have you been?” 7
“Just Rio,” I said. 8
“You don’t go north to Bahía?” 9
“I don’t think I’ll get up that far.” I shrugged. 10
He nodded and grinned as if listening to drums beat. 11
“The beaches and the people, so beautiful.” 12
“Someday,” I said. 13
The door to the pub swung open. A man walked in, and 14
I watched him, sucking in a deep breath, the way I do huff- 15
ing up a big hill on a run. I held the air inside, as if letting 16
it out would distract me from the backpacker. He smiled 17
and stared as he sauntered toward me, lean and tall. He’s 18
the one, ran through my mind. I had never felt that kind 19
of certainty. It was the way he looked at me—as if saying, 20
You bet I am—as he headed to the back of the pub and up 21
the stairs to the balcony. I turned and watched his plaid 22
flannel shirt flop against the back pockets of his Levi’s, 23
hanging low on his hips. 24
25
Dirk and I walked to the train station the next morning. 26
A ticket line overflowed into the street. Mostly men with 27
wool ponchos and long black hair. I waited in line, and 28
Dirk went on ahead. He asked a man up front to buy a 29
ticket for him in exchange for a few pesos. Dirk came back 30
with a ticket to Arequipa. He scribbled his address in my 31

The New Zealand Sheep Farmer and the Recruit 7

1 journal and kissed my cheek. I might have gone with him
2 to the front of the line if we were going in the same direc-
3 tion. But he was heading south toward Chile, and I was
4 moving north to Cusco and Machu Picchu. Besides, if the
5 Peruvians had to wait, I’d wait, too.
6 “Why do you wait in such lines?” a baritone voice
7 breathed into my ear.
8 I turned to see the backpacker from the pub.
9 “I need a ticket for Cusco,” I said.
10 He smiled. “Come, I know a better way.”
11 “Okay.”
12 I followed him down the path, and we walked into a
13 travel agency near the main road, a one-room office with
14 a counter. Posters of Machu Picchu blown up on the walls.
15 “Necessitamos dos billetes a Cusco, por favor.” He spoke Span-
16 ish well, like me.
17 “Where do you stay?” he asked.
18 “The hostel next to the pub.” I pointed up the hill and
19 waved right. “That side of the square.”
20 “Tomorrow morning.” He nodded his head. “Seven o’clock.”
21 My backpack hung heavy on my shoulders as I trekked
22 down the hostel stairwell in the morning. It smelled
23 musky, like wet laundry gone sour. A yellow cab drove up
24 as I reached the front stoop on the cobblestone square.
25 “Here, give me your bag.” He opened the trunk and found
26 room for my big blue backpack among the others. The
27 trunk was stuffed full. “Come, get in,” he said.
28 I got into the car already filled with travelers. He slid in
29 next to me, closed the taxi door, and told the driver to get
30 us to the train station in the neighboring town. Our train
31 to Cusco departed from there.

8
 “What’s your name?” he asked, his nose nearly resting 1
on my cheek. 2
“Karol.” 3
“Aviv,” he said, pronouncing his name Ah-veev. He looked 4
like an American college student with his wire-rimmed 5
glasses, shaggy chestnut hair, plaid flannel shirt, and fad- 6
ed Levi’s. 7
Aviv looked at the backpacker beside me in the cab. “This 8
is Uri.” He had black curls and aquamarine eyes. 9
“Hi, Uri,” I said. 10
He gave me a groggy morning hello. 11
Aviv then pointed at the women in the front seat. “This 12
is Liat and Mihal.” Their names sounded like Lee-ot and 13
Mee-hal with a guttural h. 14
“You’re American?” Aviv studied me now, like I’d stud- 15
ied him in the pub. 16
“Yes, and you?” 17
“We are Israeli, all of us in this car but you and the driver. 18
We are traveling together for some days now. We meet in 19
Bolivia, and we stay together after that.” 20
I remembered the first Israeli I’d met on the road. I’d 21
taken him for an American soldier at first. Big blue eyes, 22
short-cropped, dusty blond hair and bodybuilder biceps. 23
He sat next to me on the plane out of El Calafate, an Argen- 24
tine village along the Andes, where the Perito Moreno 25
Glacier spawned blue-and-white icebergs. 26
“I met an Israeli in Patagonia,” I said. 27
“We’re all traveling after our military service. We call it 28
the tax for living in Israel,” Aviv chuckled. “Men go in the 29
army three years, the women two years, and then we go on 30
a big trip. Some are going to South America, and some are 31

The New Zealand Sheep Farmer and the Recruit 9

1 going to the Far East. We are going away from the fighting,
2 so much fighting. I am liking peace very much, peace like
3 you have on a sheep farm. Okay, maybe not a sheep farm
4 in Peru, where everything is looking so peaceful, but still
5 you have terrorists coming to make problems. Peace like
6 you have on a sheep farm in New Zealand.”
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Machu Picchu 9
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12
13
The train looked like a diner. Brown vinyl benches tucked 14
under beige Formica tabletops, all along the car on both 15
sides. The Israelis found a booth near the entrance. No 16
room for me. I scanned for an open seat, spotted one sev- 17
eral rows back, and hustled for it. Aviv came over to strap 18
my bag to the metal rack above. 19
“You have to tie the bags,” he said. “A lot of things get 20
stolen on the trains.” 21
“Thanks.” 22
Aviv went back to his seat. 23
A Peruvian man peeled oranges for his little boy and girl. 24
I tried not to stare at the oranges. I hadn’t had any break- 25
fast and didn’t have anything on me. One of the children 26
offered me a slice. I looked at the father before accepting 27
it. He smiled, and I slid the slice into my mouth. 28
With a jerk, the train rolled out of the station. I gazed 29
out of the window at flocks of sheep roaming green hills 30
under a gray sky. 31

11
1 “Do you want to play cards?” Aviv asked, sitting down
2 on the corner of the table in front of me.
3 “Sure.”
4 “I’ll teach you a game we play in the army.” He took out
5 a pack of cards and a bag of peanuts. I grabbed a handful.
6 As he flipped cards to demonstrate the game of Whist,
7 I could not concentrate on his words. All I noticed were
8 his hands. His fingers were as lean as the rest of him. His
9 knuckles protruded, like burls on a maple. The skin was
10 bronzed and cracked around the cuticles, like a working-
11 man’s. I liked his hands.
12 “Have you got it?”
“I think so. Let’s try a game.”
13
I soon caught on.
14
“Where do you live in Israel?”
15
“A small town, the north,” he said. “Are you from New
16
York?”
17
“Not far. Connecticut. Very boring.”
18
“Boring sounds good.” He beamed. “Do you have paper?”
19
“Sure.” I pulled out my journal and flipped to a blank page.
20 “I will draw a map.” He made a quick sketch of his coun-
21 try. “You see, there is Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. I’m
22 in Kiryat Bialik, right here.” He pointed to a dot just above
23 the northern port of Haifa.
24 “You’ve been traveling long?” I asked.
25 “I’ve been six months traveling. Argentina, Chile, Brazil,
26 Bolivia, Peru,” Aviv said, counting countries with his fin-
27 gers. “How long you have been in South America?”
28 “About a year.”
29 “You travel one year?”
30 “No, I spent most of that time working for a newspaper
31 in Buenos Aires.”

12
 He tapped my journal. “You are the journalist, and I am 1
the traveler.” 2
“I keep a journal because I don’t like to forget what I’ve 3
seen,” I said. 4
“Why do you go to Argentina?” 5
“I’d have traveled the world if I’d had the money, but I 6
didn’t, and my mother said I had to get a job. So I stayed 7
with an Argentine friend from school and got a job.” 8
“Tell me, have you been to Torres del Paine in the south 9
of Chile?” 10
“No, just Santiago.” 11
“Torres del Paine is such a beautiful place. I was hiking 12
in the mountains there. I want to go again.” He smiled.
13
“I only went to the south of Argentina. I loved Calafate,
14
the glaciers and icebergs. They were so blue,” I said, biting
15
my lower lip. “Did you go?”
16
“Yes, I was there, and Bariloche, too.”
17
“I didn’t like Bariloche, except for the hot cocoa served
18
with a stick of flaky chocolate that looked like a tree branch.”
19
“I know this drink,” Aviv said. “But why you don’t like
Bariloche?” 20
“It was so touristy.” 21
Aviv stopped to consider my criticism for a moment, 22
then continued. “I’ve liked it very much. We don’t have 23
such mountains and forests in Israel.” 24
“You went to Rio?” 25
“Yes, for Carnival. But the best of Brazil is the north.” 26
“I’ve heard.” 27
“You didn’t go?” 28
“Next time I’d go to the north of Brazil, Colombia, Ecua- 29
dor, Venezuela.” 30
“Me, too.” 31

Machu Picchu 13
1 I made a wish, the kind I’d made blowing out candles on
2 a cake as a girl, that Aviv and I could someday tour those
3 countries together. Aviv was the first traveler who made
4 me feel this way. I liked traveling alone, always taking my
5 time to explore and observe and think, always meeting
6 someone along the way, but everyone else, including Dirk,
7 eventually seemed like an intrusion on my solitude, even if
8 slight. Aviv was the only one who made me feel as free as I
9 had been going alone. I felt a rush and put my hand on his.
10 “So, how do you know Spanish so well?”
11 “My family, we lived in Mexico.”
12 “When?”
“I was very young. My Spanish, it was very bad. I didn’t
13
speak for something like six months. Then one day I start
14
to speak, and I don’t shut up for nothing.” He laughed.
15
“The same thing happened to me. I’d had some classes
16
in college and lived with some Argentine students for a
17
while, but forget it, nothing would come out of my mouth.
18
I’d sit silently at dinner and try to understand until I got
19
too tired to listen anymore. Then all of a sudden, I don’t
20 know why, words came out of my mouth. I was chatting up
21 the ice cream man, the grocery store clerk, my doorman.”
22 Aviv grinned. “So why do you leave?”
23 “Hyperinflation. I couldn’t live off my salary anymore.”
24 Aviv nodded, a knowing nod, one that told me he knew
25 what was going on in places like Argentina. Places where
26 things got messy. Places like his homeland.
27 “You go home now?”
28 “Yes, after Machu Picchu.”
29 “Have you gone to Taquile?”
30 “The reed islands on Lake Titicaca?”
31 “No, not the reed islands. A real island on Lake Titicaca.

14
The people, they are so beautiful. I make a sign to help 1
them with their fight.” 2
“Their fight?” 3
“The island people, they don’t want boats from Puno 4
taking tourists to the island. They only want their own 5
boats to take all the tourists. The people, they don’t have 6
any other way to make money. They need the money to 7
buy coffee and sugar, all the things they don’t have on 8
the island. They share the money. It’s for all the people. 9
I make a sign with the other Israelis, Uri and Mihal and 10
Liat. The people, they are so happy we make this sign. We 11
play soccer to celebrate.” 12
I’d had friends from Penn who protested apartheid, join-
13
ing a sit-in to pressure the university to divest from South
14
Africa, but I always wondered who they would become after
15
school, when we no longer lived in the protective bubble of
16
a liberal arts college. But Aviv seemed like someone who’d
17
never sell out, who’d never lose his idealism, who’d never
18
let go of his dreams.
19
“I’ll go on my way back to Buenos Aires.” I wanted to see
the island and his sign. 20
We played cards and talked for hours, about everything— 21
our travels, Argentina, the army, the apples he had picked 22
to finance his trip. When he returned to his seat, I heard 23
laughter and guessed his friends were ribbing him about 24
his interest in the American. Me. 25
26
I felt a rumble and woke to nightfall. The train pulled into 27
the station in Cusco. Aviv was already untying my back- 28
pack. 29
“You slept,” he said, smiling. 30
“We’re here already?” 31

Machu Picchu 15
1 It was night, but I could see that Cusco looked medieval.
2 Cobblestone roads, stone facades, shingled roofs peak-
3 ing in triangles, one after another. Aviv hailed a cab and
4 directed the driver to a hostel he’d read about in his guide.
5 The car bumped up the jagged stone path and left us at the
6 hostel. It looked like a fortress, the kind that protected
7 Scottish kings.
8 Aviv nudged me in the morning. He already had on his
9 jeans and flannel shirt. “We go for breakfast.”
10 “Oh, okay, what time is it?”
11 “It’s almost nine o’clock. Usually, we’re going out much
12 earlier.”
13 “We go now,” Mihal said.
14 “We go later,” Aviv said, looking at me.
15 Uri followed Liat and Mihal out of the room.
16 I went into the bathroom to change, and when I came
17 out, Aviv was sitting on one of the single beds studying
18 the South American Traveler’s Handbook, the bible of seri-
19 ous backpackers. I had a guide that offered lengthy anthro-
20 pological insights along with the practical things, which I
21 mostly skipped over, preferring word-of-mouth tips from
22 South Americans and travelers like Aviv.
23 “I know a place to eat. I hear about it from other trav-
24 elers.”
25 “You know everything. Me, I hardly know anything
26 before I get where I’m going.”
27 “I like to research everything. Come, let’s go.”
28 I wanted him to reach out, take my hands, wrap me
29 around him, and kiss me. But he didn’t. I walked out of the
30 room behind him, watching his Levi’s pockets and the rim
31 of his flannel shirt. Outside, he walked next to me, keeping

16
a friendly distance, the kind I’d kept with Dirk. We stepped 1
over cobblestones that bumped along the road. Peruvians 2
in ponchos dipped in and out among the stones, scaling 3
hills and descending them without effort. But backpackers 4
crept over the rock road, as if climbing a mountain ravine. 5
Aviv pointed to a fortress like our hostel. “This is where 6
we eat. I have met a traveler in La Paz who said I must go 7
here.” 8
I followed Aviv up the stairs to the restaurant. Exposed 9
beams crisscrossed above oak booths along the wall. 10
“Here.” He pointed to a booth across from the bar. We 11
slid in. 12
“It looks like a pub,” I said. 13
“It’s a vegetarian place.” 14
A waiter came over to us. “Do you want the muesli?” 15
“What’s that?” 16
“Yogurt, fruit, granola, and honey.” 17
“Okay, I never tried it.” 18
Aviv asked the waiter for two mueslis. 19
“You never tried muesli?” 20
“No, I’m not a vegetarian, not by a long stretch. My par- 21
ents are from Nebraska, and everybody from Nebraska 22
eats meat.” 23
“I don’t like how it looks before it is cooked, so I tell my 24
mother I’m not eating meat anymore. I am only twelve 25
when I tell her this, and since then I don’t eat meat.” 26
“I’d never get away with that. My mother was tough.” 27
I used to argue with my mother mostly about clothes 28
and hair. The faded, ripped jeans I’d wear or the split ends 29
on my long swimmer’s hair I’d refuse to cut. She once sent 30
me to my father’s barber to get the ends trimmed, and I 31

Machu Picchu 17
1 ended up with a Dorothy Hamill. “That’s not fair,” I’d say.
2 “I don’t care if it’s fair. I’m your mother, and I make the
3 rules,” she’d say. I tried to run away once but only made
4 it to the hemlocks in the front yard.
5 “I tell you a story. When I am a little boy and we live
6 in Mexico, my mother and father take me to the United
7 States for a vacation. We drive through the Mojave Des-
8 ert, and I want grapes. I tell my mother, ‘Ima’—that is the
9 Hebrew word for ‘mother’—‘Ima, I want grapes.’ So my
10 mother says to me, ‘Aviv, we are in the desert, we can’t
11 find grapes here. You have to wait.’ And I say to her, ‘No,
12 Ima, I want grapes.’ So she finds me strawberries, and I say,
13 ‘No, Ima, I want grapes.’ Then she says to me, ‘But Aviv,
14 we are lucky to find strawberries in the desert. We can’t
15 find the grapes. You have to wait.’ But I tell her again, ‘No,
16 Ima, I want grapes.’ I don’t eat the strawberries. My father
17 keeps driving. Then my mother finds another place, and
18 she comes to me with grapes.”
19 The waiter set down gray ceramic bowls full of yogurt,
20 granola, cantaloupe, blueberries, strawberries, and red-
21 wine grapes. I tried a spoonful.
22 “This is really good. Still, I don’t think I’ll become a veg-
23 etarian.”
24 “This is what I’m eating, besides cottage cheese, rice,
25 eggs, and fish. Sandwiches of avocados, tomatoes, and
26 olives on a pita. And apples. Apples every day. Apples are
27 the best for me. I am eating them always. Sometimes I am
28 buying a big bag of apples and eating them all in one day.
29 Maybe one dozen, even more. When I’m picking apples to
30 save money for this trip, I am picking one and eating one,
31 picking one and eating one.”

18
 “I like peanut butter best. I used to eat it right out of 1
the jar.” 2
Aviv spooned some yogurt, grapes, and honey into his 3
mouth. 4
“Peanut butter is okay. But not like apples. Nothing is 5
like apples, for me.” 6
7
Aviv and I sat in a chapel, quietly looking at the golden 8
trunk by the pulpit and the stained glass windows that 9
wrapped around the chapel, full of Bible stories I’d learned 10
in Sunday school. We’d been together for several days, 11
since he pulled me out of the train line in Puno, but this 12
was our first day alone, and I had decided if he didn’t kiss 13
me soon, I was going to move on. Then I felt his lips on 14
mine, our first kiss, inside that tiny chapel, a warm spring 15
flowing inside of me. We left the chapel, holding hands. 16
Cusco had seemed medieval and gray until then. Now 17
I noticed the Gothic church spire pointing toward the 18
baby-blue sky and evergreen Andes peeking over stone 19
forts, guarding the cobblestone square. A Peruvian woman 20
leaned against a column with her loom. She stretched one 21
leg out on the stone path and tucked the other one under 22
her navy skirt. She flipped back her long black braid as she 23
pulled threads with her butternut hands. She jerked the 24
threads into place, one after another. Threads of rose and 25
violet and blue, weaving them into diamonds on a belt. 26
She had already made half of the belt, the kind children 27
carried in bundles as they worked the cobblestone plaza 28
in bare feet. 29
Aviv and I sat down on a wooden bench in the center of 30
the square. Children pranced over the cool stones toward 31

Machu Picchu 19
1 us and made a semicircle around us. They stretched out
2 their suntanned arms, clutching handmade belts and
3 ceramic jars painted with falcons and warriors.
4 “Where are you from?” asked the tallest, a girl.
5 “I’m American, and he’s Israeli.”
6 “Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. Paris, the capital of
7 France. Mitterand, the president of France,” she said.
8 “How did you learn English and all of those facts? Amaz-
9 ing,” I said.
10 “From the tourists,” she said, sounding so matter-of-fact.
11 “My name is Betty. I need shoes and a notebook for school.”
12 The other children grabbed onto her skirt hem and
13 elbows and shoulders, waiting to see what we would
14 do. Would we buy her a pair of shoes and a notebook
15 for school? They looked up at Betty, scanning her black
16 ponytail and ebony stare, and then they looked back at us,
17 mouths agape, waiting to see what would happen.
18 “You don’t have a notebook for school?” I asked. They
19 all looked at Betty again.
20 “No. I need a notebook—and shoes,” she said, pointing
21 to her black cotton Mary Janes. She wore no socks, and
22 her chopstick legs seemed almost green from the cold. It
23 was early April, and the Andean foothills were cool.
24 “Here,” Aviv said. He handed her a few bills. “I’ll take
25 a jar.”
26 Betty snatched the cash and plunked a jar into his palm
27 and dashed off over the cobblestones to the other side of the
28 courtyard, her entourage following, a goose and her gaggle.
29
30 Aviv and I sat on the roadside waiting for the bus to Machu
31 Picchu. A dirt path cut through the green foothills, so green

20
they looked like a fertilized lawn. We squatted outside a 1
restaurant shack. Weathered gray like Cape Cod homes 2
I’d seen on family vacations as a child. Sun and rain beat 3
hard on the wood, bleaching it from brown to driftwood 4
gray. Buttercups dimpled the valley across the road, the 5
hillside sloping down into a valley that stretched out flat 6
like a Nebraska cornfield. Beyond the valley, green moun- 7
tains rolled up and up and up, forming an Andean ridge 8
that ran as far as I could see along the horizon. 9
Inside the shack, a woman with molasses skin and black- 10
bean eyes leaned into the counter. 11
“When does the bus come?” Aviv asked in Spanish. 12
Her raven hair, pulled back off her face, hung in a braid 13
down her back. 14
“Look, don’t know, could be hours,” she told us. 15
“Sit, sit.” She pointed toward a picnic table near the door- 16
way. We could watch for the bus from inside, she said. We 17
ordered potato and leek soup, the only item on the menu, 18
spelled out in Spanish on a blackboard behind the counter. 19
20
An hour later, the bus had not come. We walked out to the 21
roadside again and crouched. 22
“Hey, there’s a car.” I pointed down the road. “Let’s go 23
for it. We’ll never get out of here unless we hitch a ride.” 24
We waved our hands as if making snow angels and tried 25
to catch the attention of the silver car driving toward us 26
along the hillside road. A cloud of dirt kicked up in our 27
faces. The car screeched to a stop just ahead of us, and we 28
trotted for it. The driver rolled down his window. He wore 29
slacks, a button-down shirt, and penny loafers. His black 30
hair was cropped short like a fifties preppy. 31

Machu Picchu 21
1 “Going to Machu Picchu,” Aviv said in Spanish.
2 “Get in,” the driver said.
3 The driver sped up around the bend, along the edge of
4 the green slopes that dipped down into the valley. Aviv
5 nudged me in the shoulder and pointed to the gun under
6 the driver’s side seat. My grandfather, a Nebraska rancher
7 on the sheriff’s posse, used to carry a loaded pistol under
8 his car seat for protection from people like Charlie Stark-
9 weather, who’d gone on a killing spree. Peru had a different
10 kind of violence. Shining Path guerrillas were kidnapping,
11 torturing, and killing Peruvians and some foreigners. The
12 car jerked to a stop. A mound of red-brown dirt blocked
13 our path.
14 “Workers are protesting,” the driver said. He darted a
15 glance down the valley and back to the dirt blockade. “I
16 have a gun for such problems,” he said. He had the men-
17 acing look of a paramilitary man.
18 “We can’t pass?” Aviv asked.
19 “No,” the driver said. “But if you walk down there, down
20 into the farms, you can pass to another village, and there
21 you can find a bus.”
22 Aviv led the way into the valley and through a corn-
23 field. Corn silk puffing out of pale green husks brushed
24 my shoulders. On the other side of the field, we found a
25 paved road. It looked like it would take us to Machu Pic-
26 chu, if we walked and walked and walked.
27 “We can’t walk all the way,” Aviv said. “This is too much
28 walking.”
29 I pointed. “There, that’s our ride. Come on.”
30 Aviv and I hailed a truck. The driver stopped and told us
31 to climb up. I grabbed the ladder on the side of the truck

22
and scaled up to a bed of dusty brown potatoes heaped a 1
story high. I crawled on top of the potatoes and clutched 2
onto the wood railing that hemmed in the potatoes. 3
“Sort of like a hayride,” I said. 4
Aviv laughed. 5
The truck bumped along the road, potatoes popping up 6
and down, though none flipped out of the truck. I gripped 7
onto the railing the way I held onto the safety bars of a 8
roller coaster. 9
The potato truck pulled into a cobblestone courtyard at 10
dusk. When we climbed down, the driver pointed to the 11
train tracks. “There, that is where you will find the train 12
to Machu Picchu, but it won’t leave until the morning.” 13
“Come, this way,” Aviv said. He pointed to a hostel next 14
to the train station. 15
Aviv lay on the bed, one leg on the wide-plank pine floor 16
and the other stretched along the mattress, his Levi’s coat- 17
ed in potato dust. His flannel shirt flipped up over his 18
stomach. His skin was honey-colored from the Brazilian 19
sun. He stared at me with easy eyes, smiling. I pulled the 20
curtains off their hooks and went to him. 21
22
In the morning, we took a train to Machu Picchu. The Inca 23
ruins were nestled on an Andean ridge. The mountains 24
were green, a muted green, unlike the bright lime of the 25
foothills below. A gray river snaked through the valley. A 26
staircase scaled a jutting peak. Llamas bobbed their swan- 27
like necks and bleated as they pranced about the ruins. A 28
Peruvian man in a red poncho whistled folk tunes into 29
his reed flute. 30
“Look, over there,” Aviv pointed to a stone slab at the 31

Machu Picchu 23
1 far edge of the ruins. “That is where they are sacrificing
2 virgins to their gods.”
3 Aviv and I walked over to the block, big and rectangular
4 like a coffin. I studied the granite slab, searching the worn
5 surface, as if I might see some lingering evidence of blood.
6 “Do you think it’s true?”
7 “Of course,” Aviv said. “People do anything in the name
8 of God.”
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31

24
 1
2
3
4
5

3
6
7
8
Schlepper 9
10
11
12
13
Back at home in Connecticut, I sat at the kitchen table 14
with my mother, looking out the picture window while 15
she read my article. It was May, and the white dogwood 16
and the hot-pink azaleas were in bloom. 17
“Why don’t you start here,” she said. 18
“With the cartoon?” I said. 19
Somewhere in the middle of the story, I’d described a 20
Buenos Aires newspaper sketch that lampooned how cool 21
Argentines stay during national crises—still packing their 22
bags for the beach, even though the country seemed poised 23
for another coup before the first presidential transition 24
since the military left power. 25
“It’s a whole lot catchier.” She still had a midwestern 26
twang, after nearly twenty years in Connecticut. 27
“Nobody will get it,” I said. 28
“Sure they will. Why don’t you start like this: The scene 29
is a beach.” 30
I scribbled lines onto paper. “How about this? The scene 31

25
1 is a beach with an Argentine couple basking in the sun,
2 sipping drinks. One says casually to the other, ‘How close
3 we came to losing democracy.’”
4 “That’s the way to start, something catchy, hook people
5 in,” she said.
6 The telephone rang. My mother reached for the phone.
7 “It’s Aviv.” She raised her eyebrows as she handed me
8 the phone. I had not told her about him.
9 “Aviv?”
10 “That’s me.”
11 “Where are you?”
12 “Brooklyn.”
13 “Brooklyn?”
14 “I stay one week with friends of my parents. Then I say,
15 why don’t I find work and stay. So now I’m with Schleppers.
16 They’re Israeli. They give me work as a mover. My tired
17 muscles will be happy to tell you all about it.” He chuckled.
18 “I’m moving to the city soon,” I said.
19 “When?”
20 “When I find an apartment.”
21 “I think you should live with me.”
22 “I couldn’t do that. What would I do when you leave?”
23 “You would miss me?”
24 “Yes.”
25 “Can I see you?”
26 “Soon.”
27 “You promise?”
28 “I promise.”
29 “Now I have to go. Do you remember Rosanna, the wom-
30 an I met in Brazil. She is here working as a nanny. We go
31 to the movies now,” Aviv said.

26
 “Oh, yes, okay,” I said. 1
He’d met Rosanna in the north of Brazil, before he met 2
me. Now she was in New York? How could he ask me to 3
live with him and then run off to see Rosanna? 4
After I got off the phone, my mother asked, “Who’s 5
Aviv?” 6
“I met him in Peru,” I said. 7
“You didn’t mention him.” 8
“I didn’t think I’d ever see him again, but he’s here, and 9
he wants to live with me. Then he says he’s got to go, he’s 10
meeting Rosanna.” 11
“Who’s Rosanna?” 12
“Some woman he met in Brazil.” 13
“Well is he worth getting so upset over?” 14
“I don’t know. Yes, yes, he is.” 15
16
Aviv and I explored Inca ruins in the Peruvian Andes for 17
two weeks before taking the train back to Puno, the Boliv- 18
ian border town on Lake Titicaca. I stopped there and took 19
a boat to the reed islands and then Taquile. As my boat 20
approached, islanders hurried down the steep steps of the 21
moon-shaped island, hurling stones at nearby boats com- 22
ing from the mainland. I could see Aviv’s protest sign, still 23
on the docks. Aviv had gone ahead to Bolivia, and I met 24
up with him in La Paz. 25
It was crisp in the Altiplano as Aviv and I hiked up and 26
down the streets of La Paz, steep as San Francisco’s. Boliv- 27
ian men in colorful stocking caps and women in English 28
bowler hats and baby-doll skirts crowded the streets, sell- 29
ing supplies like batteries, razors, and aftershave along with 30
alpaca sweaters, coca tea leaves, and dried llama fetuses, 31

Schlepper 27
1 cradled in small baskets as fertility amulets. I bought a
2 stocking cap, knit in bands of electric pinks, blues, yel-
3 lows, and greens that I hung on my wall after I moved to
4 New York, and Aviv bought a fleece coat that he wrapped
5 around me as we waited for my bus to Buenos Aires.
6 I had to go back to Argentina and pack a year-and-a-
7 half’s worth of belongings into my backpack and suitcases
8 and cardboard boxes before flying home, while Aviv had a
9 ticket from La Paz to San Francisco to see Dov, his father’s
10 son from his first marriage to a woman who lived on a kib-
11 butz near the Golan Heights. Dov planned to return to the
12 kibbutz with his wife and daughters once he finished his
13 PhD. Aviv’s eyes began to tear up, the way mine did after
14 my bus began to pull away.
15
16 The city felt like a sauna and smelled of garbage, piled up
17 on the sidewalks because of the sanitation strike, as I went
18 for a run along Central Park, carefully avoiding the inside
19 of the park, where a jogger had been raped and bashed in
20 the head by teenagers only weeks before I moved to the
21 city that summer. The unidentified woman would become
22 famously known as the “Central Park jogger,” and my street
23 smarts kept me out of the park until it had become a much,
24 much tamer place.
25 As I ran along Central Park South, I noticed Aviv ahead
26 of me, walking toward the Salute to Israel Parade on Fifth
27 Avenue. I’d been in the city for several weeks, sharing a
28 small place near the park with Jeanne, a friend from col-
29 lege who introduced me to Gabriel García Márquez’s One
30 Hundred Years of Solitude, inspiring my passion for Latin
31 American literature: Isabel Allende’s The Stories of Eva Luna,

28
Jorge Amado’s Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands, Jorge 1
Luis Borges’s Labyrinths, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Car- 2
los Fuentes’s The Old Gringo, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Real 3
Life of Alejandro Mayta, and much, much later Guillermo 4
Rosales’s The Halfway House, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666— 5
authors from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, 6
Mexico, Peru. 7
I hadn’t called Aviv, like I’d promised. I worried some 8
about Rosanna, though Aviv spoke about her casually, like 9
a friend instead of a lover. She was almost ten years older 10
than Aviv, and he said she was “sometimes beautiful, some- 11
times not, like Sônia Braga,” the sensual Brazilian actress 12
in Kiss of the Spiderwoman. Only a tough critic like Aviv 13
would see her that way, so I knew that Rosanna was prob- 14
ably a striking brunette, too, but the truth is the thought 15
of Aviv leaving worried me more. 16
I called anyway, and we met at a diner that night. 17
“I saw you today, near the park.” 18
“You should have come to me.” 19
“I was going jogging, and I don’t know, I felt nervous.” 20
“Nervous, but why?” 21
“To see you in New York. Maybe it would be different.” 22
“But there is no difference for me.” 23
“I’m glad.” I paused. “But what about Rosanna?” 24
“Rosanna, she’s working as a nanny.” 25
“I know she’s working as a nanny, but what about her?” 26
“I understand you. We are just friends. That is all.” 27
“Just friends? But you went to the movies together.” 28
“Rosanna is only a friend, nothing more.” 29
I still felt raw about it, but I let it go. “So, you had no 30
trouble finding a place to live?” 31

Schlepper 29
1 “No trouble. I took the first place I’ve seen. You should
2 see the floor. It’s painted the color of a mango. And there
3 are plants everywhere.”
4 “So have you seen much of New York?”
5 “I’ve been working all over. The Village, Brooklyn,
6 Queens, New Jersey. New Jersey looks like such a nice
7 place. I tell myself I would like to live in a place like New
8 Jersey.”
9 “New Jersey? That’s boring. Manhattan is so much bet-
10 ter.”
11 “It has so much energy, I can’t sleep. I always feel I am
12 missing something.”
13 “That’s what I like, knowing there’s always something
14 new, and if you miss it today, something else will come
15 along.”
16
Aviv sighed. “Maybe if I knew I could live here always, I
17
would feel different. But I’m only here for a few months.”
18
“When will you go?”
19
“Maybe September. I have only done the army. Now I
20
must go and study at the university.”
21
“What will you study?”
22
“Computers at the Technion. You have this school, mit—
23
they say in Israel that the Technion is like this school.”
24
“It must be the best.”
25
“It’s the best.”
26
27 “I’m starting to think about graduate school.”
28 “What do you study?”
29 “Latin America, maybe get a job with a big newspaper
30 so I can earn a living.”
31 Aviv smiled. “I can help you become an Israeli expert.”

30
 We began to see each other almost every night after 1
work, spending the entire weekend together, exploring 2
the city’s contours when it was still an intensely bohe- 3
mian and dangerous place, going to diners for simple 4
meals—scrambled eggs and home fries, soup and grilled 5
cheese sandwiches—and small cafés for cappuccino and 6
cheesecake and long soulful talks, following live music or 7
a movie, usually independent or foreign. Aviv’s favorite 8
was Betty Blue, a French film about a passionate, but tor- 9
tured, romance between an aspiring writer who works as 10
a handyman and his obsessive girlfriend that begins with 11
a long scene of lovemaking. 12
I’d gone to the Christian Science Sunday school, like 13
my mother and her mother—the daughter of a Nebraska 14
dentist who read Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook, Science and 15
Health with Key to the Scriptures, and adopted the religion 16
that relied on healing through prayer and forbid drinking, 17
smoking, or sex outside of marriage. Alcohol, cigarettes, 18
and drugs didn’t interest me, but abstention was an impos- 19
sible standard for a young woman who studied the world 20
map on her shower curtain instead of wedding magazines. 21
Aviv’s taste in films seemed radically defiant and sophis- 22
ticated. He was a scathing critic of “typical American 23
movies”—a category that seemed to cover almost anything 24
that wasn’t made by Woody Allen or Spike Lee. Our first 25
argument was over Dead Poet’s Society. It didn’t matter 26
that the film was directed by Peter Weir, an Australian; it 27
was still a “typical American movie.” Aviv was irritated by 28
the fragile young man in the film, an aspiring actor who 29
commits suicide after his father crushes his dreams by 30
transferring him from an American prep school, where 31

Schlepper 31
1 he’s inspired by theater, poetry, and his brilliant teacher
2 who urges his students to carpe diem—“seize the day”—
3 to the stale future of a military academy. “I don’t want to
4 see this guy in Israel,” Aviv said.
5 I understood Aviv, the idealist who’d had no choice but
6 to serve in the military, like every other Israeli boy and
7 girl. It didn’t matter that he’d served in a noncombat role,
8 working with computers instead of guns, during his man-
9 datory military service. He’d lost precious years in the
10 army when typical Americans were in college, like me. But
11 I understood the sensitive boy in the film, too. After my
12 first year of college, inspired by my Shakespeare professor
13 on loan from Princeton, I told my mother that I wanted
14 to study English and become a writer. My mother shot
15 back with her usual fierceness—the cowgirl confidence of
16
a cattle rancher’s daughter that I feared until I was old
17
enough to admire it—“I won’t have you lollygag around
18
reading books, you hear me, Karol Lynn.”
19
It was an especially egregious plan because of the twen-
20
ty-five thousand dollars my father was spending on tuition,
21
room, and board to send me to Penn. My mother wanted
22
me to study something professional, something that would
23
help me get a job when I graduated. “A woman needs to be
24
able to support herself in this world. Besides, if you want
25
to become a writer you have to have something to write
26
27 about.” I’d never won an argument with my mother, hard
28 as I’d tried—always getting into trouble over my lip, too
29 much lip—but for the first time I didn’t fight her.
30 And to be fair, this news was probably coming as a sur-
31 prise to my mother, and in some ways to me, too, having

32
shown my creativity through painting and drawing until 1
now, even winning a citywide prize for a piece in the eighth 2
grade, though it was always a slightly dubious award to 3
me because I’d copied the image of the sphinx, the way I 4
copied faces in fashion magazines, not knowing that my 5
teacher would submit it for competition. But when it came 6
to books and writing, something I considered to be the 7
domain of Ivy League intellectuals, and while, technically, 8
I would become one of them, I had come from the down- 9
to-earth pioneers of Nebraska and Iowa and Wyoming. 10
Farmers, ranchers, blacksmiths, dentists, pilots, soldiers, 11
engineers, small-business owners, a railroad clerk, a coal- 12
car worker, a secretary, and a dancer. My mother’s mother, 13
Lulalee, toured the country with the Chester Hale Girls 14
and then joined the Radio City Rockettes before marry- 15
ing my grandfather, the hump pilot. He first saw her in a 16
photograph on his sister’s piano. “I’m going to marry that 17
woman,” he said to his sister. She had married my grand- 18
mother’s brother—a bomber pilot who’d get shot down 19
and killed in action on a mission to Münster, Germany, 20
during World War II, winning a posthumous Purple Heart. 21
My grandfather, a voracious speed reader who disdained 22
the eastern establishment, would write a fantastical short 23
story collection called “The Purple World.” It was never 24
published. 25
While I had the drive to tell stories, I had no proof of its 26
possibility as a profession and couldn’t match my mother’s 27
conviction about the best way to proceed, couldn’t come 28
to the defense of my plan when it still seemed too uncer- 29
tain and far off, so I sheepishly got off the phone, settling 30
on international relations, so I could write about other 31

Schlepper 33
1 countries, and economics, to convince my mother I’d find
2 a job, while slowly sinking into a foggy malaise that lasted
3 through college, lifting sometime in South America, where
4 I’d wake up in the mornings after my 3 p.m.–through–mid-
5 night shift at the newspaper and write. Every day.
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31

34
 1
2
3
4
5

4
6
7
8
Revital 9
10
11
12
13
Aviv sat next to me on the couch of his roomy, two-bed- 14
room apartment in Harlem that he shared with a Califor- 15
nian. He’d painted the floor mango, like Aviv had said, 16
and filled the place with plants. It had a relaxed, tropi- 17
cal feel that suited Aviv. He had just finished a pickup 18
basketball game on the West 104th Street court, a few 19
blocks away. 20
“You know, I wanted to be in the nba,” Aviv said. 21
“A basketball star?” 22
“Too late for such dreams.” 23
“Never too late.” 24
Aviv shook his head. 25
“My sister Revital, she is coming to New York. She wants 26
to see the Amish.” 27
“I went with my family as a girl. We stayed on a Men- 28
nonite farm and milked the cows.” 29
“My sister, she likes traveling, too. After she finishes 30
with the army, she travels in South America like me. Then 31

35
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Ship sail, game of, 186.

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 Table of Contents

PREFACE.
CORNISH FEASTS AND “FEASTEN” CUSTOMS. 1
LEGENDS OF PARISHES, ETC. 56
Cornwall Stone. 93
FAIRIES. 120
SUPERSTITIONS: Miners’, Sailors’, Farmers’. 130
CHARMS, Etc. 143
For Tetters. 149
Toothache. 149
For a Strain. 150
For Ague. 150
For Wildfire (Erysipelas). 150
CORNISH GAMES. 172
Pray, pretty Miss. 174
“Friskee, friskee, I was, and I was.” 175
“Fool, fool, come to School.” 176
“Scat” (Cornish for “slap”). 177
Hole in the Wall. 177
Malaga, Malaga Raisins (a forfeit game). 177
She Said, and She Said. 178
Drop the Handkerchief. 178
How Many Miles to Babylon? 179
Rules of Contrary. 179
 Lady Queen Anne. 179
Old Witch. 180
Ghost at the Well. 182
Mother, Mother, may I go out to Play? 182
Here I sit on a cold green Bank. 183
Joggle along. 184
The Jolly Miller, 184
Bobby Bingo. 185
Weigh the Butter, weigh the Cheese, 185
Libbety, libbety, libbety-lat. 186
Ship Sail 186
Buck shee, buck, 186
Accroshay. 187
Buckey-how. 187
Cutters and Trucklers (Smugglers). 187
Marble Playing 187
Cock-haw. 188
Winky-eye. 188
Uppa, Uppa Holye (pronounced oopa, oopa holly). 188
Tom Toddy, 189
BALLADS, Etc. 190
John Dory. 191
An Old Ballad On a Duke of Cornwall’s Daughter 192
Ye Sexes give ear. 195
A Fox went forth. 196
Tweedily, Tweedily, Twee (North Cornwall). 197
When shall we be Married? 198
Sweet Nightingale. 199
The Stout Cripple of Cornwall. 200
The Baarley Mow (a harvest song). 203
 The Long Hundred. 205
Elicompane. 205
Uncle Jan Dory. 205
ADDENDA. 207
INDEX. v
 Colophon
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Metadata

Title: Cornish Feasts and Folk-lore

Author: Margaret Ann Courtney (1834– Info
1920)
Language: English
Original publication 1890
date:
Keywords: Cornwall
England
Fasts and feasts
Folklore
Legends
Social life and customs

Catalog entries
 Related Library of Congress catalog page: 28031161
Related WorldCat catalog page: 702566
Related Open Library catalog page (for source): OL6723199M
Related Open Library catalog page (for work): OL6665109W

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distance
14 [Not in source] ’ 1
24, 24,
141,
208 ” [Deleted] 1
25, 147 [Not in source] “ 1
28 bedroom bed-room 1
72 ther their 1
76 ’ ” 1
105,
144,
173 “ ‘ 1
105, ” ’ 1
144,
 173
113 it its 1
120 elfiish elfish 1
128 possiby possibly 1
129 [Not in source] . 1
130 ,’ ’, 2
130 .’ ’. 2
170 [Not in source] , 1
180,
180 courtesy curtsey 3
184 midle middle 1
207 semed seemed 1
208 ancles ankles 1
vi , . 1

Abbreviations

Overview of abbreviations used.

Abbreviation Expansion
4s. 6d. 4 shilling 6 pence
6s. 8d. 6 shilling 8 pence
999l. 19s. 11¾d. 999 pounds 19 shilling 11¾ pence
A.D. [Expansion not available]
B.B. [Expansion not available]
F.L.S. The Folklore Society
F.M. [Expansion not available]
F.R.S. Fellow of the Royal Society
H. G. T. [Expansion not available]
H.R.C. [Expansion not available]
J. H. C. [Expansion not available]
M.A. Master of Arts
M.B. Bachelor of Medicine
Rev. Reverend
St. Saint
T.S.B. [Expansion not available]
W. A. B. C. [Expansion not available]
W. Antiquary Western Antiquary
W. B. [Expansion not available]
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CORNISH FEASTS
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