My belated birthday present

Our conversation was short and sweet. It went something like this:

“I am NOT getting in a hang-glider and flying toward the sea to face CERTAIN DOOM.”

“Yes you are.”

“Why. WHY are you making me do this?”

“I’m not making you do anything. You want this. You just need to be encouraged.”

Above Koktebel, the sea air mixes with the steppe air and the mountain air. Kara Dag, a 350-million year old exploded volcano and nature reserve, darkens as the night approaches. Mountains that used to be coral reefs deep below the Black Sea rise up behind Kara Dag, conveniently forming the profile of Alexander Pushkin. On a nearby hill, Voloshin is buried next to a lonely olive tree. In south-eastern Crimea, the sun sets almost directly behind the peninsula, marking the way to the west – though we are never up early enough to see it rise above the water.

“I have a PHOBIA of HEIGHTS! And FLYING! And DEEP WATER! And OTHER FRIGHTENING THINGS!”

“You don’t have any phobias whatsoever. You just got into one particularly idiotic pattern of thinking and experiencing life, and you think you can’t get out, but that’s dumb. Anyway, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t do this.”

At the compound we’re at, dogs and children play in the grass, and flying enthusiasts are busy with a new motor for powered parachuting. The man I’m with buys me beer and sauteed eggplant at a small bar run entirely by the flying enthusiasts, and I down the beer in virtually one gulp. A startlingly blond little girl giggles when we kiss inside the doorway. The sound of an approaching engine means that I’m up.

“You’re up.”

“I am NOT.”

“Come on.”

He takes my hand and we walk across the grass toward the strip together, me muttering obscenities the whole way.

“I’m giving you my beloved girl,” he tells the pilot as I get strapped in and outfitted with helmet and goggles.

“She’ll be taken care of,” he replies. He has the looks of an aging accountant – except he’s very tan, and there’s a wildness in his clear blue eyes.

“I HATE you,” I tell the man I’m with.

“You don’t want to do this?” Asks the pilot.

“I do. I’m just scared.” It comes out before I know what it is I’m saying. It’s also the truth. We putter along to the far end of the strip. I’m barefoot, my flip-flops do not make for safe footwear. The sun is in my eyes. I watch the ground fly past, and then I watch it fall away.

The minute that I am up in the air, I know that this is exactly where I have wanted to be – for many years. Ever since beginning to wake up in nightmares and cold sweats before an impeding trip to Germany back in the States, convinced that I am too scared to fly. I don’t know where the fear came from, but once it came, it made a cosy little enclave inside my stomach and ribcage, and then it wouldn’t budge. Until this very precise moment. After nearly 8 years. I am in the air, and being in the air makes sense.

We fly toward the sea, over steep hills and country roads. People wave at us from below and we wave back. My white dress flaps in the wind. We fly out toward Chameleon Cape – named so because it changes colours drastically depending on the time of day and the weather. I see it rising out of the water like a thirsty prehistoric animal, as I see Kara Dag rising on the right, like a bigger prehistoric animal. Somewhere on Kara Dag’s eastern slope is a stone that reminds me of an angel who has turned his back on the sea. The group of stones next to it is commonly referred to as demons who are playing cards. I like to think of the angel watching them.

Looking down at the coastline, I can see the line where the shallow water grows deeper. I’m not afraid. Even as we hit another air current and bounce wildly above the water, I’m not afraid. As we turn back toward land and the pomegranate sunset, I am struck by the fact that in a way, I’m native to Crimea. I was conceived in Yalta, to the west of here – “out of a great love,” as my parents never cease to remind me when they stop squabbling long enough, just in case I have any doubts. But it’s now, up here, with nothing but the wind and the sun and the mountains and Sasha the pilot and the engine, that I know it clearly: I was made from love, which is a building material as solid as blood and tissue. I think I might have forgotten. But Crimea has remembered.

Sasha motions to me with his liver-spotted hand – he wants to have a little fun. I give him a thumbs-up. We drop and rise sharply through the air on our approach back to the hill. I stretch my arms out and imagine they’re wings – not the white fluffy kind, but solid wings of dark feather, as dark as the ones that belong to the angel who sits on top of Kara Dag, keeping his watchful eye on the demons. These are the wings I have. They’re no less pretty, I think.

When we land, I’m laughing, and it takes a while for me to stop. It’s not hysterical laughter – it rises like champagne bubbles inside of me and then it overflows. The man I’m with takes me out to the edge of the hill, and we look down at a dried-out lake like an eye milked over with a cataract, watching us from below, and make our beer bottles sing in the wind. Night is coming and there are crickets in the grass. I press my face against his shoulder.

“Still hate me?” He asks.

“Did I say that? Did you ever hear me say that? Because I don’t think that you did.”

So let me get this straight – you slept with this guy…

… And, as one of my friends just pointed out – “whoops, he wasn’t who you thought he was.”

So the logical thing is, of course, to accuse him of rape. And then have him convicted. Of rape. By deception.

What if he had lied about his salary? His level of education? What if he had told you that he’s a great lover and he turned out to be one of these guys who lasts half a minute…?

What if this had been a Jewish dude looking to get laid in Jerusalem, and he’d decided that the best way to score was to tell some Arab woman that he’s actually an Arab? Think we would have heard about this one then? (Well, maybe. I don’t know. This isn’t necessarily a rhetorical question.)

Yes, the guy absolutely sounds like a sleazebag. And I am 100% certain that being confronted with his lies was a violating experience. I feel violated every time some dude lies to me about some crap. I can’t imagine how violated I would feel if a dude wound up lying to me about his actual identity.

And yes, I absolutely understand, that due to the complicated socio-political situation in Israel, these cases are way more complicated than what they look like on the outside. For all we know, this was a deliberate attempt by this guy to, above all else, shame and humiliate this woman (the fact that he apparently walked out before she even had the chance to dress herself is probably telling). And the shame and humiliation is something that’s borne out of a number of issues – you can’t be categorical about it. And that cannot be ignored.

Still, she could have sued him for fraud. Or just thrown her drink in his face at a party (I find Bloody Marys work best, in situations like this) and moved on. A criminal case sets a dangerous precedent.

A friend of mine recently developed a big crush on a guy in the course of a work assignment. They wound up sleeping together. The next day, she found that he had lied to her about a bunch of crap – including his name and, guess what, his criminal history. And I don’t mean a criminal history as in he got busted for shoplifting as a screwed-up teen many years ago. It was pretty horrible for her, and she spent the next few days spontaneously bursting into tears. She even took up smoking for those few days (and this is someone who has lectured me on my Parliaments very extensively). But then she moved on. She warned all of her friends about the creep, but she moved on.

And talking to her about it today, we both agreed that a rape case against the guy would have been ridiculous.

Speaking of anecdotes – I spent 6 years of my life with an Arab man who made me very happy. I get pretty tired of the assumption that “zomg Arab men are all rapists and violent terrorist bastards.” It’s a blanket assumption that many people make when confronted with cases like this, and it sucks.

Bag spam: what’s in my bag? And what’s in yours?

I’ve got friends who keep sending me little memes that I have no intention to spam other people in my Gmail address book with. I can, however, spam the readers of this blog!

So for those of you who are, for some reason, dying to know what’s in my bag, here’s a rundown:

– Work pass & press card. V. important. We have a saying in Russian: “without paperwork, you’re a little bug. With paperwork, you’re a human being!”

– Wallet. This one was a present from my ex, from London. It’s huge, expensive and fabulously bourgeois – novacheck with a patent leather trim. I keep the usual wallet-y stuff in it, and I also keep more unusual stuff, such as two small, laminated icons of the Virgin & Jesus, a small cross threaded in gold on a tiny cloth pillow (of the sort one normally sews into one’s clothes, or a soldier’s uniform – a present from one of my aunts), and small amounts of currencies from all the countries I used to live in (Ukraine, U.S.A, United Arab Emirates & Jordan. Should probably stick a Soviet coin in there too.).

– Keys from two flats – one in Moscow, one in Kiev. A keychain of silver stars I bought in Alabama, and a keychain of a little red and gold bag that my ex brought me back from Dubai once. I feel a little wistful every time I see the little red and gold bag dangling. And so it goes.

– A bottle of mineral water facial spray. Because it’s Freaking. Hot. In Moscow. Sometimes, when I catch random people looking at me when I spray myself with it, I’ll offer to spray them too. They tend to say yes.

– My metro pass. Speaking of the metro, just look at what I had to put with this morning. Hades. This is Hades.

– Cosmetics, to keep myself pretty. There’s a mirror and eyeshadow compact in there, that my badass teenage BROTHER, of all people, bought for me. I told him I wanted eyeshadow for Christmas (as a way of getting him to not buy me anything – I didn’t want him to spend his money), he went into a make-up store with one of his equally badass friends, described my facial features and colouring to the saleslady, and picked out a compact. And it was perfect.

– Deodorant. Because it is Freaking. Hot. In Moscow. I really need to switch to some of that more natural crap, that won’t make my lymph nodes develop tumours. I really need to.

– My big fat Nokia phone. It belonged to my ex. I stole it in a fit of pique, after I discovered that it had a 5 megapixel camera. My ex had broken my camera a few months prior. I am still avoiding the iPhone. I think this is an issue of sentimentality.

– A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. I avoided reading Byatt for years, on account of her dissing and dismissing J. R. Rowling in the NYT. No, really, I actually did this. Looking back on it, it might have been a tad silly. A tad.

– A pack of Parliaments and blue lighter to match. I don’t really smoke, of course.

– A long, silver scarf. When I lived in Jordan, I wore it as a hijab for a while. Nowadays, I take it with me when I plan to visit a church, like I did this morning. (There was absolutely no one there, it was just after a service but before they closed their doors. A few women were singing psalms in a corner by the iconostasis. One came out eventually and accepted the little paper on which I had written the names of people who needed prayers – prayers for health and wellbeing, prayers for souls who had passed on, and a special prayer to the Virgin, for two individuals who need extra help. One of those individuals being me.)

– Oversized purple  sunglasses. I bought them in London, after losing my other ones in a pub in Devon. As I recall, I got a huge lecture about switching from Vivienne Westwood to Ralph Lauren – from a person who is actually fashionable.

– A green little iPod Shuffle. My actual iPod recently fell in battle. The Shuffle was kindly donated by a famous philanthropist, i.e. my brother.

– A small bottle of perfume – the grassy, summery kind. “It reminds me of my youth,” someone told me recently. “But you are still young,” I said. “Not in that way,” he replied.

– The bag itself is a black patent leather tote, fabulously expensive, bought on fabulous sale as, to quote Disney’s Emperor Kuzco, “my birthday gift to me! I’m SO happy!” I’m not really happy, but stalking around Moscow with a great bag makes me feel imposing – which is good enough, I suppose. Our head news correspondent recently told me that one of these days, I’ll come back from the bathroom and both she and my bag will be halfway to the border with Belarus. I eagerly await further developments.

Dear Roman Polanski, we have presents for you

Right through here.

Seriously  – this entire Polanski thing has once again reminded me that I am in the wrong line of work. The news is an unnecessarily depressing business. I’d like to go back to my earlier childhood dream of being an orientologist in Australia. Or Brazil. Or Argentina. I’m pretty sure that not many species of birds have rape – except for ducks, but who needs ducks? I could have been studying the tinamou. It’s a terrific bird, when you think about it, really. Nearly 50 species. An ancient lineage. They make beautiful calls, very shyly, from behind bushes, rocks and trees. They lay attractively coloured eggs. These are creatures that are worth the development of patient observation techniques.

This is all just a polite way of saying FUCK THIS POLANSKI NONSENSE WITH A GARDEN RAKE, of course. But then again, I don’t know. I hear that rural Argentina’s nice.

They way journalism should always be*

Here we have Spain’s captain, Iker Casillas, kissing his reporter girlfriend. You know, when Spain was stunned by Switzerland, a bunch of fans tried to blame HER for the loss, because she was in South Africa, reporting on the World Cup, and apparently her feminine wiles “distracted” Casillas into letting Spain score, right right right. Well, you know how I feel about BS like that. “Never mind what haters say, ignore ’em till they fade away” – as the immortal genius of T.I. would have us know.

Love is beautiful. I love love. I love love even more when it has football stirred in.

* – OK, I exaggerate. But not by much. Not really.