The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Part 8

With the darkness comes ivko in his yellow van. He has been out buying a rakija still, he says, and I am unsettled by him from the beginning; perhaps it is his portly stature and red face, or the fact that he is not nearly as old as I expected, or the thick hoa.r.s.eness of his voice, which betrays his having just eaten a large meal, or the moonlit circ.u.mstances of his arrival.

He tells us about what people believe, about ghosts in a neighboring home, about the spells necessary to cast an evil spirit out of the house. He tells us about a scorned woman who would come to his bedside to throttle him in his sleep, and how he would awake to find his house empty, a cat staring at him from the open doorway. ivko's brother, an elderly man who has caned his way out of the house and is offering us grape juice, chuckles at this, and says something about how ivko's amorous attentions turn women into cats. Undeterred, ivko describes his ability to commune with the dead, a gift with which he was born but discovered only as the result of his uncanny experiences with a children's game; about the communications he has made on behalf of friends, of family, of the loved ones who tend to be far more restless than those who are already gone.

He tells us about the vile, Croatian mountain sirens, jealous spirit-women whose whims range from seducing men to fomenting war to playing girlish tricks on the villagers. "You come into the stable in the morning," says ivko, "and the horse's mane and tail have been braided tight, like the braid of a girl." He has seen it himself: no human hands can untangle a braid a vila has made, and cutting the hair will kill the horse.

Night has fallen, and the generator across the street has gone quiet. The village is empty, and there is barely enough light for me to see ivko's face. It takes me a while to realize it, but his arrival by night was carefully orchestrated to create the atmosphere for this interview. The moment this occurs to me, the goats in the stable let loose a chorus of shrill, vein-stiffening screams.

"UnG.o.dly, aren't they?" ivko says, laughing and patting my arm as he pulls me back down to my chair, from which I have leaped without realizing it. "No goats in the Nativity, you know. They are the Devil's beast."

The Balkan vampire consistently arises as a product of hard times. As so many people in Serbia and Croatia grumbled at me, the reign of Josip Broz t.i.to was a time in which the primitivism of ancient fears had no place. For a region as war-ravaged and unstable as the former Yugoslavia, it is no wonder that the devastation and disillusion of recent decades precipitated a return to the mainstays of tradition, and especially to supernatural stories in which evil, if indefatigable, is always easily identifiable. Villages overcome their vampire plagues as they would more secular hardships: the story becomes in its own way a narrative of hope, a throwback to the surety of old beliefs, old customs-to tiny, frightening truths that stabilize a community against the world. The vampire is an agent of chaos, a self-inflicted spiritual trauma, but nevertheless manifests the Devil in a form that society can, occasionally, defeat.

If we consider the vampire a cultural necessity, an adaptable product of a society's fears and obsessions, then his role in the Western world is not so different. Here, too, the story of the vampire offers hope. Refined and beautiful-and stapled into his obligatory leather pants-he is a far cry from that dirty, bloated wanderer of graveyards, that product of a people for whom the desolation of the dead cannot surpa.s.s the cruelty of the living. He is too well traveled now to linger at crossroads, too hygienically inclined to dig his way out of coffins; having spent eternity studying art, literature, philosophy, he is no longer confounded by a crucifix; as a lover, he has worked hard to overcome his cadaverous locomotion, his ungainly south Slavic diction, and his indirect Victorian fumbling, so that the mere sight of his fangs now inspires young maidens to bare their throats of their own accord. The Americanized vampire is the ultimate fantasy for a nation in decline: the person who has been able to take it all with him when he dies, who has outlived the vagaries of civilization itself.

Having abandoned the culture that forged him, moreover, he deceives us into thinking that he has moved beyond what he always has been-a disease. Now the plague he spreads is a therapeutic fantasy in which an embarra.s.sment of wealth and youth and hedonism is acceptable as long as its beneficiary is equipped with the right intentions. We have forgotten to be afraid because as long as he protects his loved ones, as long as he is conscious of his own dangerous nature, as long as he pits himself willingly against others who share his wrath but not his n.o.ble motivations, we are willing to believe that a weapon of evil, in the right hands, can be transformed into an instrument of good.

In the early fall, three months after my departure from Croatia, I receive a hesitant e-mail from Veljko. He writes with information he's restrained himself from sharing until my journey was over and I was safely home. The morning of my departure from Otri-Seoci, he says, he stood by and helped load my belongings into the bus having already learned, from village gossips, that ivko's brother-cheerful alcoholic, generous host, mocking unbeliever-had died suddenly the previous night, a few hours after we left ivko's house. In some ways, as Veljko sees it, the suddenness of the death is a good thing, because liver failure is a slow and excruciating process. But something about it still leaves him unsettled, and he has spent months wondering whether he should tell me about this, weighing anew the consequences of explicit communication. Is it possible that our conversation with ivko loosed some infernal force that night, upset the delicate balance of something unseen, and felled ivko's poor brother as a warning to the rest of us? Veljko isn't certain. But he is, he tells me, ent.i.tled to his superst.i.tions.

A Year of Birds.

Annie Proulx.

FROM Harper's Magazine.

ON MY FIRST DAY alone at Bird Cloud, my ranch near the Medicine Bow range in southern Wyoming, a bald eagle sat in a favorite perch tree across the river. It was December 30, 2006. The day before, two of them had sat side by side for hours, gazing down through the pale water sliding over the rocks, waiting for incautious fish. This was eagle-style fishing. Sometimes they stood in the shallows, cold water soaking their fancy leggings. Bald eagles are skillful at their trade, and I have seen them haul fish out of the freezing water onto the ice, or swoop down, sink their talons into a big trout, and rise up with the heavy fish twisting futilely. Bird Cloud's construction crew was lucky enough to see one of them dive onto a large fish, lock its talons, then struggle to get into the air with the heavy load, meanwhile riding the fish like a surfboard down the rushing river.

The house at Bird Cloud took two years to build. During that period I tried to identify the habits of the birds in the area and gradually recognized seasonal waves of avian inhabitants. Watching a large number of birds took concentration and time-there was nothing casual about it. The bald eagles were permanent residents. Some hawks stayed and some hawks went south. The great horned owls stayed. The ravens raised families every year and then went somewhere else for the summer to hunt once the young began flying. They came back in autumn to tidy up the nest and poke around, then departed again before the winter storms came. In early spring hundreds of red-winged blackbirds. .h.i.t the copper-stemmed willows on the island and the cliff echoed their yodeling aujourd 'hui! aujourd 'hui! I put out feeders to attract the smaller birds, but days, weeks, and months went by with no visitors. These wild birds were too naive to recognize feeders as a source of food.

I was impressed that the bald eagles stuck around. The Stokes Field Guide stated: "Once a pair is established on a territory, they are very reluctant to move elsewhere to breed." That fit the case. Stokes also warned readers to stay at least a quarter of a mile away from the nest during the "egg-laying to early nesting" period, as alarmed parents might abandon their young. But these eagles hadn't read Stokes and tolerated all of us. The house itself was roughly a quarter of a mile from them and they warned us away only if we stood on the riverbank directly across from the nest or got over to the other side of the water and walked near their tree. The bald eagles have raised two chicks every year except one, when only a single chick survived. The books say one surviving chick is the norm, but these eagles have been calm and laid-back-wonderful parents with a high success rate. Whenever a stranger came to the house the bald eagles took turns flying over and scrutinizing them. Anything new-lawn chair, garden hose, shrubs-piqued their curiosity, and they flew over low and slow, examining the object. In fact, they were nosy. It was quite fair. I peered at them through binoculars, they peered back.

The North Platte River runs through the property, taking an east-west turn for a few miles in its course. Bird Cloud is 640 acres, a square mile of riparian shrubs and cottonwood, some wetland areas during June high water, sage flats, and a lot of weedy overgrazed pasture. On the lower portion, about 120 acres, Jack Creek, an important sp.a.w.ning site for trout, comes down from the Sierra Madre, thirty miles distant, and angles through the property to enter the North Platte. Jack Creek is big enough to need a bridge, and it has one, a st.u.r.dy structure made from the floor of a railroad freight car. Just below Jack Creek there is a handsome little island, a shady cottonwood bosque, in the North Platte. The bulk of the property, more than five hundred acres, lies at the top of a sandstone cliff, a sloping expanse of sedge and sage. The cliff is four hundred feet tall, the creamy cap rock a crust of ancient coral. This monolith has been tempered by thousands of years of polishing wind, blowtorch sun, flood and rattling hail, sluice of rain. After rain the cliff looks bruised, with dark splotches and vertical channels like old scars. Two miles west the cliff shrinks into ziggurat stairs of iron-colored stone. At the east end of the property the cliff shows a fault, a diagonal scar that a geologist friend says is likely related to the Rio Grande Rift, which is slowly tearing the North American continent apart.

On that first solitary day at Bird Cloud, I walked east to the Jack Creek bridge and looked up at a big empty nest high on the cliff across the river. It was clearly an eagle nest. Had the bald eagles used it before moving half a mile west to the cottonwoods? Had it belonged to another pair of eagles? The huge structure was heaped with snow. Somehow it had a fierce look, black and bristling with stick ends. At 4:30 the sun still plated the cliff with gold light. Ten minutes later it had faded to cardboard gray. I looked again at the distant big empty nest, then noticed that on the colluvium below and a little to the west of the nest there were two elk, likely refugees from a big herd that had moved through the property several weeks earlier when hunting season opened. Twenty or thirty geese flew upriver high enough to be out of gun range. Dusk thickened, and then, in the gloaming, I saw a large bird fly into a cranny directly above the elk. Roosting time for someone, but who?

The next day-the last day of the year-the sun cleared the Medicine Bows at 7:45. It was a beautiful, clear winter morning, the sun sparkling on the snow, no wind, two degrees below zero, and a setting moon that was almost full. As Richard La.s.sels, a seventeenth-century guide for the Grand Tour, said of fireflies, "Huge pretty, methought." By noon both bald eagles were in the trees above the river, watching for fish below. After half an hour they flew upriver to try their luck in another stretch of water.

In mid-morning out of the corner of my eye I saw a large bird flying upriver with steady, brisk flaps, and remembered the one I had seen the previous evening taking shelter near the big, empty nest. Was it the same bird? What was it? It was too large to be a hawk.

New Year's Day was warm and sunny, thirty-two degrees, encouraging a few foolish blades of gra.s.s to emerge from the snow. A flock of goldeneyes, diving underwater to forage, dominated a part of the river that stayed open all winter. I thought there might be a hot spring there that kept it clear of ice.

At the end of the daylight the bald eagles sat in trees three hundred yards apart, merging into the dusk but still staring into the river. Their low-light vision must be good. At 4:40 a dozen Canada geese flew upstream. An orange ribbon lay on the western horizon. I waited, binoculars in hand. Two minutes later the last sunlight licked the top of the cliff, then was gone. The sky turned purple to display a moon high and full. I did not see the large mystery bird. Perhaps it was an owl and had no problem flying after dark. But I doubted it. I had a strong suspicion that it was an eagle, the owner of the big, sinister nest.

For me the keeping of a list of birds sighted has neither value nor interest. I am more interested in birds of particular places, how they behave over longer periods and how they use their chosen habitats. What the birds did, ate, and raised attracted me. I suppose I could say I was drawn to their stories. But in thinking about all this the next morning I once again missed seeing the big mystery bird. In the fleeting seconds it was in view I saw that its coloring was uniformly dark. The rhythm of its wingbeats was similar to that of an eagle. Could it be a juvenile bald eagle from last year's hatch? Or was it a golden? Maybe.

Days of flailing west wind, strong enough to push its snout under the crust of the fallen snow wherever the hares or I had left footprints, strong enough to then flip up big pancakes of crust and send them cartwheeling east until they disintegrated in puffs. Eagles love strong wind. It is impossible to miss the joy they take in exhibition flying. The bald pair were out playing in the gusts, mounting higher and higher until they were specks, then splitting apart. After a few minutes of empty sky the unknown big dark bird flapped briefly into view before disappearing in a snow squall.

Late in the afternoon, as dusk crept up the eastern rim of the world, one of the bald eagles showed up with talons full of branches and dropped out of sight at the nest tree. Were they redecorating the nest on a cold winter day? The wind swelled and bl.u.s.tered. A solitary duck appeared, blown all over the place. White underside and black head and wings and was that a round white spot on its face?-probably a goldeneye, but for a second it resembled a penguin shot out of a cannon. Half an hour later two more eastbound ducks appeared, clocking along with the wind at about eighty miles per hour. The second bald eagle came into sight fighting the headwind, just hanging in the air and flapping vainly, until finally it turned and in seconds was miles away. The nest eagle rose up and followed.

The next morning the wind had calmed to thirty miles an hour with gusts. .h.i.tting fifty. It was a cold and sunny day, and the bald eagle team was out flying at 8:00. As I made coffee I saw the big mystery bird flapping out of sight toward the neighboring ranch. Why was it so elusive? I wanted badly to get a good look at it, but it seemed to fly past only when my head was turned. The two isolated elk stood on a knoll at the west end of the cliff; antlerless, dark brown necks, yellow rumps, and red-brown body color. At first sight I could imagine they were the mountain sheep that used to live on the cliff in Indian times. Their faces seemed rather dished, like sheep faces. Magpies were busy across the river, and one raven sat in a tree slightly to the west of its nest site in the cliff. Could the raven, like the eagle, be interested in fixing up its nest so early in the year?

By afternoon the wind was up again, and at the top of the sky were three eagle-shaped specks. Three eagles playing in the wind. Three? Was one of them a juvenile bald planning to nest here, or was it the big mystery bird? And just how many eagles called this cliff home?

That night the wind went berserk, terrific shrieking and battering. In the morning it was still intense and I could see the windows moving slightly in and out. The worst wind yet. I went out into the driveway to see how badly it was drifted. Huge impa.s.sable drifts. The wind almost knocked me over. A small bird shot past the kitchen window, but on the far side of the river the two bald eagles sat calmly in the trees near their nest.

During the nights of high-velocity wind I lay tense and awake in the dark listening to the bellowing and roar. In the daytime it was easier to ignore. The television would not work because the wind had wrenched the satellite dish out of alignment. After four or five days of relentless howling the wind fell into a temporary coma, turning everything over to a warm, sunny, and calm day. Temperatures climbed into the forties. But the weather report warned that another storm was approaching. A friend in town smashed a narrow alley through the drifts on the county road and cleared out the driveway. I was no longer s...o...b..und. The power company made it out and realigned the dish.

The daylight hours were lengthening by a few minutes each day. While it was calm I walked down to the east end of the property, and glancing up at the cliff I saw not one but two big dark birds. They were playing in the air, obviously delighted with the calm, with each other, with life in general. Then they both dove into their bedroom niche in the chimney west of the big, empty nest. I could not hear their voices, because a large flock of ducks, more than a hundred, flew over, twittering and whistling. The birds looked like eagles, they flew like eagles, but they were completely dark. They did not have the golden napes pictured in the bird books. Goldens soar with a slight dihedral; bald eagles soar with their wings almost flat. But I was now almost sure that a pair of golden eagles owned the big nest and were preparing to use it.

The next day started sunny but another three-day storm was on the way, and by late morning low, malignant clouds smothered the ranges in all directions. The weather people said it was going to turn very cold. I took advantage of the lull before the storm to get outdoors with the binoculars. A raven was fooling around the cliff face, trying out several niches. Then the big dark birds appeared above the cliff in a tumbling display. The binoculars showed that they did have lighter necks and heads. I had no doubt now. They were a pair of golden eagles and they were courting, planning to fix up the empty nest and raise a family only half a mile from the bald eagles. I felt fabulously wealthy with a bald eagle nest and a golden eagle nest both visible from my dining room window. I wanted to spend the day watching them, but the storm was due to hit during the night so I headed out to get supplies while the road was still open.

January wore on. It was cold, and day after day the snow fell as in Conrad Aiken's story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," which I read when I was eight years old, thinking it was a story about a profound snowfall. Later, when I learned it was an oblique study of intensifying juvenile madness, I was disappointed. On the frozen river four coyotes nosed around the north sh.o.r.e margins. Upstream the goldeneyes' strip of water was still open but shrinking daily.

On a Sunday morning of flat calm it was twenty-one degrees below zero. The air was stiff. Freezing mist had coated every tree and shrub. The river pinched in, making waists of black water in the ice. There were no birds in sight. The sun struggled up and the mist rose in great humps over the remaining ribbons of open water. The tops of the cottonwoods glittered like icy nosegays, stems wrapped in gauze. Spring seemed very far away, but the bald eagle pair sat side by side catching the first rays. They often sat this way, one great eagle-beast with two heads. As the sun gained height the eagles fluffed themselves out and began to preen. A lone magpie flew over the mist. In the afternoon I skied down to the east end and into the cottonwood bosque. A golden eagle and four magpies were eating the scanty remains of a snowshoe hare. The eagle fled as I came in sight, and the magpies followed reluctantly, sure I was after their feast. It was easy to see what had happened. The hare's tracks zigged and zagged through the brush, but one foot east of the corpse I saw the snow-angel wing prints of the attacking eagle.

Wyoming was once a haven for eagle killers. In the bad old days of the 1960s and 1970s in this valley many men who are now cattle ranchers raised sheep and firmly believed that bald and golden eagles carried off young lambs. If you raised sheep you killed eagles-bald or golden, but especially goldens, though both birds were protected by law-by poison (thallium sulfate was popular), or by shotgun from rented helicopters and small planes, or by rifle from an open pickup window. Eagles were killed in other states, especially in the West, but Wyoming became notorious to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to the Audubon Society, and to newspaper readers across the country as the home ground of the most ignorant and vicious eagle-killing ranchers. Chief among them was the wealthy and powerful sheep rancher Herman Werner, ex-president of the Wyoming Stock Growers a.s.sociation. He and his son-in-law were called "the Wyoming helicopter monsters" after they used a hired helicopter to "sluice" eagles.

Nathaniel P. Reed, an a.s.sistant secretary of the interior under Richard Nixon, made stopping the killings a primary goal. In 1971 the FBI set up a sting. An agent who had been raised in the West posed as a ranch hand and got a job on Werner's spread, where, in the bunkhouse, he heard about dozens of dead eagles. Because this was hearsay, a federal judge would not issue a search warrant. But two Audubon Society members who had been monitoring the eagle killings were out at the airfield one day and happened to notice someone working on a nearby helicopter. They could see a shotgun and empty sh.e.l.ls in the craft. They had a camera with them and they used it. The man working on the helicopter realized he had been photographed. Weeks later the anxiety-ridden helicopter pilot showed up at the Department of the Interior in Washington. He said that if he were granted immunity he'd tell about the eagle killings, and so he did, telling a Senate subcommittee that he had carried eagle-hunting shooters into the Wyoming skies, that Werner was one of the air service's best customers, and that the gunners had shot more than five hundred bald and golden eagles. Time reported that the Wyoming dead-eagle count was 770 birds. Despite "national outrage" the department was still not able to get a search warrant for Werner's land. But the U.S. Air Force flew a surveillance plane over the ranch, and an infrared camera picked up a pile of decomposing flesh. That finally got the search warrant and led to the discovery of a great number of eagle carca.s.ses. As Dennis Drabelle reported in Audubon magazine: There was still a hitch. The U.S. attorney for Wyoming balked at bringing a case against the rancher because he was sure that Herman Werner would never be convicted by a Wyoming jury. Werner ... made a surprise visit to [Nathaniel] Reed's office. "He simply bolted in," Reed remembers, "a wiry man wearing a Stetson hat. He said he was going to get me. I said quietly, 'Before you get me, please tell me who you are.' He said, 'I am Herman Werner, the man who protects his sheep by killing eagles. And you don't know anything about eagles.'"

The tough alternative newspaper High Country News took up the cause and public opinion began to quiver and shift. The U.S. attorney general pressed for prosecution. But Werner never came to trial. A few months before the court date, he was killed in a car wreck. In Wyoming, as the wool market declined and sheep men turned to cattle, as the fine for killing eagles greatly increased, as ranchers began to learn that the Department of the Interior had sharp teeth and that bald eagles were interested in carrion and fish, not lambs, the killings mostly stopped.

A very Wyoming touch to the whole affair is in the Werner Wildlife Museum at Casper College. The museum includes "an extensive bird collection."

Finally, after weeks of swinging in the wind, the bird feeder attracted a clientele-around fifty gray-crowned rosy finches. Rosies started coming in from everywhere. Chris Fisher in Birds of the Rocky Mountains put it well: "During the winter, Gray-crowned Rosy Finches spill out of the attics of the Rockies to flock together at lower elevations." So they were likely coming into this valley from both the Sierra Madre and the Medicine Bows. They rose into the sky for no reason I could ascertain, paused, and then returned to the feeder. There were no birds of prey in sight, no humans, no dogs or cows or snares, the wind was calm and the day sunny. Did they all fly up to spy out the land for distant threats? Or to rea.s.sert a (to me, invisible) hierarchy? Sometimes they flew to the trees near the river for a few minutes, then back to the feeder. I had to refill the thing several times a day.

The beautiful days had grown longer. One morning I watched one of the bald eagles dive toward an open stretch of water off the island, and I ran madly upstairs with the binoculars just in time to see it heave a fish onto the ice. It ate part of the fish and then flew to the nest. At ten past five the sun still gilded the top fifty feet of the cliff. One bald eagle was in the nest tree, the other flying downriver. The cliff turned the color of a russet apple, and I enjoyed the rare deep orange sunset smoldering under the edge of a dark dirty-sock cloud.

I bought a telescope and set it up in my bedroom, which has a grand view of the river and the cliff. The eagles weren't in sight but one of the elk was. Oddly, it seemed to be wearing a canvas jacket, different and lighter in color than its neck and haunches. Was it a trick of the light? It looked like a boulder in the middle. After an hour the elk stood up and disclosed the second elk lying close behind it. With the telescope, details leaped into prominence. The first elk pulled some tufts of hair from its back, then nibbled on sage or rabbit brush. The second elk became invisible again. There looked to be well over a hundred rosy finches at the feeder. I tried to walk along the river but the golden eagles became so agitated that I turned back. One golden angrily escorted me all the way to the house. I had once thought of inviting bird-watchers onto the property but I knew then that was impossible. The goldens had to have privacy.

A few days later I went for an evening walk on the old property-line road, keeping a quarter-mile distance between myself and the goldens. They came out but did not call, just flew along the cliff, watching me. Near the end of the property another pair of goldens appeared, silent and flying rather low as though also checking me out. Suddenly the nest pair came roaring east along the cliff and drove the strange pair away. I could see the new goldens settling in a tree to the east. Perhaps they were nesting there. Six eagles in three pairs in the s.p.a.ce of a mile.

The next morning one of the bald eagles and a prairie falcon had a sky-filling quarrel, the falcon darting, the eagle swooping. The falcon disappeared suddenly. At noon the wind began to rise and in an hour it was lashing the cottonwoods. One of the bald eagles sat on a branch above the river watching for fish. The branch moved vigorously to and fro. With each lurch the eagle braced its tail against the branch like a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, and for some reason I found this endearing. Sometimes I thought of these birds as Evan Connell's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. The falcon flew around near the goldens' part of the cliff. The big birds were not in sight. Something about the falcon's busybody day bothered me. Was it looking for a nest site? In previous years they had nested at the far eastern end of the cliff near another pair of prairie falcons. Every bird the falcon came near seemed agitated.

Chickadees were rare at Bird Cloud. At my first Wyoming home, in Centennial, dozens of mountain chickadees came to the feeder on the lee side of the house every day, but I almost never saw them at Bird Cloud. Of course, Centennial was close to the forest and Bird Cloud was surrounded by open grazing land. The prevailing weather at Bird Cloud had, as its basic ingredient, a "whistling mane" of wind from the northwest. It built concrete snowdrifts in winter. In summer it desiccated plants, hurled sand and gravel, and dried clothes in ten minutes. The eagles, falcons, and pelicans loved windy days and threw themselves into the sky, catching updrafts that took them to mad, tilting heights. Why was it so windy at Bird Cloud? With the top of the cliff checking in at a little more than seven thousand feet above sea level the wind was almost never flat calm, and often like a collapsing mountain of air. The cliff directed the wind along its stony plane face as boaters coming down the river knew only too well. And because vast tracts of land to the west were heavily grazed cow pastures unbroken by trees or shrubs, the wind could rush east unimpeded. And this, I found, rereading Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, was deadly for chickadees.

I know several wind-swept woodlots that are chickless all winter, but are freely used at all other seasons. They are wind-swept because cows have browsed out the undergrowth. To the steam-heated banker who mortgages the farmer who needs more cows who need more pasture, wind is a minor nuisance ... To the chickadee, winter wind is the boundary of the habitable world.

He adds "books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves."

Fresh snow fell overnight and the rosy finches were fighting over the woodp.e.c.k.e.r picnic mix as rich suet held the seeds together. I wondered if something was dead at the top of the cliff. The goldens were up there, rising and falling, and the balds were there as well. I remembered several years earlier in Centennial when a deer got into our small herb garden, got panicked by something, tried to squeeze through a six-inch s.p.a.ce between fence slats and got its broad chest wedged in, and was unable to escape. Whatever had frightened it tore out its heart, leaving the body still jammed in the fence. We dragged the carca.s.s down into the willows. A pair of goldens found it within hours and in three days had eaten the entire deer. Now I hoped that whatever attracted the eagles was not one of the elk. I had not seen either for about a week. A little later one of the balds was back in its fishing tree and half a dozen whistler ducks flew over the house with one of the goldens right above them, maybe trying for a feathered jackpot.

As March came in the river deepened and widened. I could hear the water gurgling under the ice from the house. As I knew they would, red-winged blackbirds took over the bird feeder. Their main meeting place was the willow thicket on the west end of the island where hundreds jammed into the same clump of trees, sang and sang, flashed their epaulets, then all flew away only to return and sing and flash again. The prairie falcon cruised back and forth in front of the cliff, its color so like that of the pale rock it was virtually invisible. A marmot showed up from somewhere-a leftover pile of lumber-and took up a station beneath the bird feeder, happy with the seed that the redwings dropped. Walking down at the east end of the property in a light rain I saw a large marmot on the top of the cliff, peering down. A few hundred yards east I caught a glimpse of a large coyote as it ducked out of view. Both were oversized. With hindsight I later thought the marmot was really a mountain lion cub and the large coyote probably its mother, as I saw both cats at close range later in the spring.

One lovely warm afternoon the goldens were sunning themselves on the cliff top above their nest site. They flew outward, wheeled, and returned to a proj ecting rock they favored. When they flew, their shadows also flew along the cliff and it was not easy to sort out the birds from their shadows. The larger golden sat on the rock while the smaller, darker eagle did some fancy wingwork, glided down to his lover, presented her with something to eat, then mounted her. I had never seen a pair of eagles mate before.

Every day Bird Cloud showed remarkable changes. The dull mud was inescapable. A few pale green rushes sprouted at the end of the island. The river grew larger and faster. One of the elk reappeared after a two-week absence. It, or they, may have been feeding on the back slope, which could not be seen from the house. In mid-month a little burst of warm days cleared most of the ice out of the river. Falcons, ducks, geese, hawks, and eagles sped in all directions, coming and going. I counted twenty mountain bluebirds and knew there was a housing shortage. But the ravens, hara.s.sed mercilessly by the prairie falcons, abandoned their old nest site. I was left with only the memory of the previous year when four young ravens teetered, flapped, and finally pushed off from the home nest late one afternoon to try their wings. It had been Memorial Day weekend and one of the season's first thunderstorms was moving in. The young ravens fluttered and hopped, clung and dropped, flew short distances, always close to the cliff face with its thousand crannies. We watched them with pleasure, but their hopping and unpracticed flying also attracted the attention of every other bird in the vicinity. The bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, and falcons circled or chose high perches suitable for diving attacks. The great horned owls hooted from the island. The storm arrived, dropping first a few splattering drops, then sheets of cold rain that drowned our campfire. I was sure the young ravens were done for. They could not seem to get back to the nest ledge and huddled on narrow shelves or exposed k.n.o.bs of rock. With sadness we went inside, dreading what the morning would bring. Would any of them survive the waiting predators? Would the storm batter them?

The dawn showed off one of those fragrant, polished days so rare in Wyoming, windless and fresh-washed. We all rushed to the cliff with binoculars wondering whether any of the young birds had survived. "I see one!" someone called and then another came into the sunlight from its hiding hole, rather damp and bedraggled. The last two joined them from some cranny, and there they all were, preening in the sun, smart and sa.s.sy and very much alive. They spent the day practicing evasive flying and I didn't worry about them any longer.

An early-morning walk on the island brought me face to face with a great horned owl in a willow thicket. So strange. The left eye was brilliant yellow, the right one a rusty brown, very likely from an injury. It fled into a cottonwood and stayed there all day. Now migrating birds flew over constantly, following the river. One afternoon there were six golden eagles on their way somewhere else but unable to resist playing in the air currents above the cliff. Mallards, mergansers, and dippers arrived, then black scoters, a pair of northern flickers, a northern harrier, and a single western meadowlark. The river, fed by rapid snowmelt, continued to rise, and on March 19 it was high enough to lift the bridge and swing it onto the island sh.o.r.e, cutting it off from the mainland. The warm days continued, worrisome because everything was drought dry. A forecast for rain brought nothing. When it finally did fall it made the roads into an icy, slippery mush.

One of the Canada geese, no doubt thinking itself clever, built a nest high up on the east end of the cliff, not far from a peregrine falcon nest. I wondered if this was the same foolish goose that had built a nest the year before in the top of a tall tree and open to the sky between the golden eagle nest and the prairie falcons. She and her mate lost all their chicks to predators and had to try again, this time with a nest on the ground beneath the tree and the male standing guard.

In late March a winter storm moved in for a day and a night. Despite the snow and wind a flock of horned larks gleaned seed among the sage and rabbit brush. The prairie falcon roared down out of nowhere and the larks exploded into fleeing rockets. Other carnivorous birds, especially the bluebirds, sat dejectedly on the fences waiting for spring. When the storm sailed away it left a foot of fresh snow. At the cold sunrise there was a heavy fog over the river that expanded and blotted out the sun. Beneath the snow the ground was wet, half-frozen mud. Just to have somewhere to walk I drove the truck back and forth in the driveway, flattening the snow. The snow turned the black metal ravens on the gateposts into magpies.

April came in windy and warm. On a walk to the east end I found a dead osprey on the ground, its gray feet curled in an empty grasp. There was no way to tell what had brought it to its death. There were so many jealous and territorial birds around that any one of them might have seen the osprey as an interloper-within half a mile two pairs of goldens, red-tailed hawks, and a pair of peregrine falcons, and a little farther west the raven family and the prairie falcons. Spring is the time for death. A calf carca.s.s washed up on the island to the delight of the magpies and perhaps the eagles.

I was not sure of the timing of the bald eagles' family life. They had started fixing up their huge nest in December, a task that can go on for several months. It looked to be more than six feet across. But I suspected there were young in the nest the first week in April, mostly because I saw one of the bald eagles determinedly chasing a red-tailed hawk near the nest. The hawk had been patrolling the western section of the cliff for several days. That would put the eagles' egg-laying in the last week of February or the first week of March. The female lays two or three eggs over a period of about a week. Both eagles take turns brooding the eggs. Though the females do more of this duty than the males, both have a brood patch on their bellies: bare, hot skin that rests directly on the eggs. Whoever is not on the eggs rustles food. On a warm, sunny day both parents can have a little break. Incubation takes thirty-five days, more or less. Once the eaglets have hatched, exhausting work begins. If the weather is still cold one of the parents stays with the babies and keeps them warm. When the spring sun beats down hot and fierce the parent eagles transform themselves into wide-wing umbrella shades. In the early days the male was kept busy finding and bringing food to the nest, four to eight times a day. After the first few weeks the female hunted as well, and in the late stages of rearing a nestling the mother did most of the hunting.

By the third week in April the American pelicans had arrived, big k.n.o.bs on their beaks showing it was breeding time in their world. The pelicans were fabulous fliers and on windy days put on astonishing exhibitions of soaring and diving. Fishermen in Wyoming shoot pelicans because they believe the birds eat all the fish, leaving nothing for them. That first spring at Bird Cloud I was appalled by all the big, fluffy white carca.s.ses that floated down the river.

In May the weeds came and I spent hours pulling evil h.o.a.ry cress and trying to claw out the prolific white roots. The air was st.i.tched with hundreds and hundreds of swallows. Several persistent rough-winged swallows tried to build nests in the house eaves. To reduce the number of possible spots for porcupine dens I started piling up dead wood and fallen branches on the island, planning to have a bonfire on a rainy day. There was plenty of undisturbed room for them on the other side of the river. A tiny, dark house wren had found the wren-sized birdhouse on the island and was moving in, carrying wisps of dead gra.s.s and minuscule twigs not much larger than toothpicks.

It was a big thrill when I saw a white-faced ibis near the front gate where there was irrigation overflow. The ibis stayed around for weeks. A few days after this sighting I was sitting near the river and saw two herons fly to the bald eagles' fishing tree. They were too small to be great blue herons and did not really look like little blues. A few minutes with the heron book cleared up the mystery; they were tricolor herons, the first I had ever seen. By the end of the month American canaries were shooting around like tossed gold pieces despite another cold spell.

Suddenly it was mid-June and noxious weeds grew everywhere-leafy spurge, cheatgra.s.s, Canada thistle, and more h.o.a.ry cress. Nests were full of young birds, and the predator birds, who had hatched their young earlier, had rich pickings. Even a raiding great blue heron flew over pursued by smaller birds. I hadn't dared go near the fence across from the big nest for fear of forcing the goldens to abandon, but I could see now that they had two big chicks in the nest. And June marked the appearance of an insect I had never seen before- Eremobates pallipes, a.k.a. wind scorpion, a resident of deserts and the Great Basin. It is straw-colored, about three quarters of an inch long, and very much resembles a scorpion although it is not poisonous. It will bite if disturbed. It feeds on smaller insects, so I caught it and put it outside, hoping it could catch mosquitoes. More likely it made a snack for the myriad hungry birds rushing around outside.

On a hot, dusty Fourth of July, I walked down the road to the east end, pleased not to be cursed by the parent goldens. One of their chicks had found a narrow shelf with an overhanging ceiling not far from the nest, and there it sat, hara.s.sed by-who else?-the prairie falcon. But even young goldens are tough, and the falcon departed. When I got back from my walk I found some bird had dropped the corpse of a large nestling on the deck, white downy feathers, wings not fully fledged, the head gone. I thought it might have been the chick of a great blue heron or sandhill crane. The drought was bad, very hot and dry day after day and no rain for a long time. The gra.s.s cracked and broke when stepped on and it was too hot to sleep at night. Wind scorpion weather.

A hard, hot wind blew incessantly, drying out the lettuces in the garden, tearing petals off any flowers not made of steel. But the young eagles, both bald and golden, loved this hot wind. They and their parents were all soaring and zooming, trick flying, mounting high and then rolling down the air currents. At one point I could see seven eagles flying above the cliff at various alt.i.tudes, some so high they resembled broken paperclips.

A few mornings later a bird with an ineffably beautiful song woke me. I had no idea what it was and it was not visible from the high bedroom windows. I tried to identify it from birdsong CDs without success. It was the harbinger of a nasty little frost, a complete surprise that killed the tops of my tomato plants and beans, scorched the zucchini and cuc.u.mbers. I didn't realize it but the surprise mid-August frost would be an annual event at Bird Cloud, striking just when the garden was approaching high ripeness.

On the first of September, making coffee in the kitchen, I glanced up at the cliff and saw the big tawny-red mountain lion walking along the top. It descended to an area of outcrop above and to the right of two huge square stones balanced almost on the edge. Three weeks later, just before dark, I gla.s.sed the cliff and the colluvia below and noticed a large round rock on the debris pile that I couldn't remember having seen before. The telescope revealed it as a dead deer that had apparently fallen from the top of the cliff. Falling off a cliff was not something even the most addlepated deer would do. I surmised the lion had chased the panicked deer over the edge, and until dark I kept peering through the telescope, looking for the lion come to claim its kill. But the lion did not come. The next morning two ravens were on the carca.s.s. As I made coffee I noticed that the ravens were gone, replaced by thirty magpies and two coyotes. It took the coyotes half an hour to break through the hide. The bald eagles perched nearby, waiting for their chance, and several ravens also waited. One of the coyotes departed. There was no sign of the lion. By mid-morning the remaining coyote, b.l.o.o.d.y-muzzled and gorged, waddled away. The magpies moved in. The most cautious diners were the eagles and ravens, who waited until after eleven for a turn at the deer. The first coyote returned with two friends and all three began to tug the carca.s.s toward the edge of the colluvium, a drop-off of about ten feet. By afternoon the carca.s.s was no longer in sight, now fallen into the brush below where perhaps the lion would claim it. The renegade thought occurred to me that perhaps the neighbor's cow that had fallen off the cliff the year before had been chased to its death by the lion.

The prairie falcons left, and the next week the ravens were back. A lesser goldfinch flew into a window. I left it on the deck and in the morning it was gone-I hope because it revived. Many birds knock themselves out and then come back from apparent death rather groggy and confused, but alive. The big, handsome northern flicker is an aggressive bird that often hurls itself at its reflection, falls like a stone, lies on its back with its feet curled up for a while, opens one eye, gets shakily up, and staggers through the air to a nearby branch, where it spends an hour or two thinking black thoughts-and then flies into the window again.

By the end of the month most of the migratory birds were gone. I remembered an earlier September when some friends and I had camped at the top of Green Mountain where we could look down at the Red Desert and make out the old stagecoach road and a few bunches of wild horses. We hiked around, noticed quite a few hawks, and by mid-morning realized that the hawk migration was in full spate. Hundreds of hawks flew over us that day, swiftly, seriously intent on getting away. Also intent, not on getting away but on filling up great pantries with pine seeds, were gray jays. They would cram seed after seed into their pouches and then take them to their secret caches. One smart gray jay, trying to pack in more than his crop could hold, hopped (heavily) to a little pool of water in the top of a boulder, took a few sips to wet down the seeds, and resumed gathering.

By mid-October most of the birds had gone south. The meadowlarks were the last to leave. The golden eagles were somewhere else, though probably in the area. The bald eagles were involved in a major undertaking-the building of a new nest in a cottonwood closer to the river and closer to our house. One eagle flew in with a double-talon bunch of cut hay, likely swiped from a cattle ranch's bales. This new nest, unlike the old one, was highly visible. I worried about people who floated the river in summer. Of course, this eagle pair had shown that they were more interested in river traffic and what we are doing around the house than in privacy and isolation. As with humans, in the bird world it takes all kinds. For weeks they hauled materials in, mostly sticks and a dangerous length of orange binder twine that could tangle young birds tramping around in the nest. They took breaks from the construction and went fishing at the east end of the cliff, something they would not do when the goldens were in residence. But were the goldens really gone? There were a few days of rain and wet snow that made the county road a slithery ma.s.s of greasy mud.

On the first of November I walked along the river fence line in the evening, and as I came abreast of the big nest, the scolding "GET AWAY, FOOL!" call came from the cliff. The goldens were in their bedroom niche.

Colder and colder the days, clear and windless, the kind of days I have loved since my New Engiand childhood. A rough-legged hawk, a stranger in these parts, came hunting over the fields. The bald eagles did something unusual-they chased it furiously, a.s.serting their territorial rights. The hawk fled. The new nest looked large and commodious. The day after Thanksgiving a Clark's nutcracker appeared briefly. It looked a little like a gray jay but had dark markings on its face like a small black mask, and the body and wings were utterly Clark's. I saw it for only a few seconds before it sprang away, but it seemed that very often I saw birds that were subtly at variance with Sibley's ill.u.s.trations.

Near the end of the month a little warm wind pushed in a bank of cloud. A northern harrier coursed over the bull pasture, just barely skimming the gra.s.s, floating on and on in lowest gear, then landing in the distance, hidden from me. It rose again, higher, using the wind. One morning one of the bald eagles brought a hefty stick to the new nest. It was long and awkward, and to get it in place the bird had to circle behind the nest and trample it in from the back with the help of its mate. It was a really big nest. A few hours later a bold raven came and sat on the west branch of the bald eagle's fishing tree, about twenty feet away from the male eagle. They both seemed uneasy. The raven pretended unconcern and stretched his wings. The eagle shifted from one foot to another as if muttering, "What is this clown doing in my tree?" The big female eagle came in for a landing and sat beside her mate, and as she put down her landing gear the raven took off.

In the afternoon the wind strengthened after four days of calm and the goldens enjoyed it, rising into the empyrean until they seemed to dissolve in blue. It was like one of the Arabian Nights tales in reverse, the tale in which someone fleeing looked back and saw something the size of a grain of sand pursuing, and a little later looked again and saw something the size of a lentil. Later still the pursuer resembled a beetle, then a rabbit, and finally a slavering, demonic form on a maddened camel. But to my eyes the goldens shrank first to robins, then to wrens, then hummingbirds, and finally gnats or motes of dust high in the tremulous ether. Just before gray twilight the northern harrier returned but strayed into enemy airs.p.a.ce above the cliff, and suddenly there were four ravens chasing and nipping. The extra pair of ravens came from nowhere, like black origami conjured from expert fingers. As darkness swelled up from the east a full moon rose and illuminated great sheets of thin cloud like wadded fabric drawn across its pockmarked white face.

November fell through the floor and December began with the tingling, fresh scent of snow. Seven or eight inches fell. I had hoped this month would be snow-free, but that hope was dashed. Getting the mail or supplies was chancy. Usually I could put the old Land Cruiser in low and smash through the snow, but in places the wind had packed the snow into unsmashable drifts and I got well and truly stuck on the county road. I tried to barrel through a five-foot drift that looked fluffy, small in comparison with the big piles that would come later in the winter, and ended up high-centered on a solid pedestal of snow, all four wheels off the ground. It snowed again just before Christmas, deep and beautiful snow that lay quiet in a rare calm. The hero sun came out for a quarter hour, then fell as though wounded. Eagles and goldeneyes were the only birds around. At dusk I skied down to the Jack Creek bridge. Mist rose from the river and the cliff seemed to be melting, the top floating on quivering froth.

I made it down to the last days of December. It was fifteen below zero and the snow squealed when I walked on it. Late in the morning I saw the pair of golden eagles flying high over the cliff, playing in the frigid air. It began snowing again and I decided I would try to get out the next day. The lane was half choked with snow. If I didn't go the next day I knew I could be isolated for a long time, jailed at the end of the impa.s.sable road. I packed the old Land Cruiser and fled to New Mexico.

Moscow on the Med.

Gary Shteyngart.

FROM Travel + Leisure.

"MY HANDS ARE COLD, but my heart is warm," a tanned young Israeli girl coos to me in broken Russian at a Tel Aviv nightclub as we nod along to an incomprehensible ska beat. "Do you think I'm pretty? Are you a Russian billionaire? I only want to marry an oligarch. Like Gaydamak."

That would be Arkady Gaydamak, the Israeli Russian billionaire, aspiring politician, owner of the right-wing Beitar Jerusalem soccer squad (its fans famously refused to heed a moment of silence in honor of slain former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin), noted philanthropist, and fugitive from French justice for alleged illegal arms trading to Angola and the less glamorous crime of tax evasion. No book or screenplay has yet been written about Gaydamak's fantastical life, an omission that may soon have to be corrected. "I am the most popular man in Israel," Gaydamak once proclaimed (at least one opinion poll said as much), marking him as the most stunning representative of an immigrant group that has peppered the omelette of Israel's politics, society, and culture since the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and more than a million Russian speakers showed up in the Holy Land.

In Tel Aviv, Israel's Mediterranean business and cultural capital, I meet the young, freckled, redheaded Masha Zur-Glozman, a freelance writer and Israeli-born daughter of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. "The Russians are now perceived to be cooler, more cosmopolitan," Zur-Glozman tells me. "They have connections to places like Moscow and Berlin [a city also home to a large Russian community] that the native-born Israelis do not."

Zur-Glozman has written about the ten stereotypes of Russian Israelis. Among her menagerie: the bad-tempered veteran who puts on his World War II medals on Victory Day, can't let go of his memories, and constantly toasts "Death to our enemies!"; the quiet, intelligent one with very specific interests like Greek pottery or Napoleonic campaigns who speaks shyly with a heavy Russian accent; the very bitter former-Soviet-bureaucrat-c.u.m-third-grade-sports-teacher who drinks too much, terrorizes his family, and is forever torn between over-patriotism and hating Israel; and the s.e.xy math teacher with a white-collared blouse, spectacular cleavage, and leather skirt who abuses her students, ignores the girls, humiliates the physically weak, and openly cheats on her poor schmo of a husband.

Walking down Tel Aviv's Allenby Street I seem to run into all of the above and more, the Russian language muscling in on the spitfire Hebrew and the occasional drop of English. "Worlds colliiiiiiding!" Zur-Glozman does her best Seinfeld imitation with a comic flourish of the arms. Allenby, like many streets leading in the direction of a munic.i.p.al bus station, has something not quite right about it. The street exudes its own humid breath, its faded buildings sweating like pledges at a Southern fraternity. When the sun goes down, darkened nightclubs with names like Temptation and Epiphany entice the pa.s.sersby. Russian pensioners, some sporting the beguilingly popular "purple perm," sing and play the accordion for shekels. Hasids try to snare male Jews with the promise of phylacteries.

At 106 Allenby the Mal'enkaya Rossiya (Little Russia) delicatessen has everything you need to re-create a serious Russian table in the Middle East. There's vacuum-packed vobla, dried fish from the Astrakhan region, which is perfectly matched with beer; marinated mushrooms in an enormous jar; creamy, b.u.t.tery Eskimo ice cream-a Leningrad childhood favorite of mine; tangy eggplant salad; chocolate nut candy; glistening tubs of herring fillet; and a beautiful pair of pig legs. "Israelis love these stores now," Zur-Glozman tells me, and the pig legs may be just one of the reasons. Russian speakers, Jewish or not, have an abiding love affair with the piggy, and it was the influx of former Soviet immigrants that brought a taste for the cloven-hoofed animal to Israel, much to the dismay of the country's religious conservatives. The wildly successful and ham-friendly Tiv Taam chain of luxe food stores came along with the Russian immigration; the aforementioned Gaydamak tried to purchase the chain and turn it kosher, but even his billions couldn't temper the newfound Israeli enthusiasm for the call of the forbidden oinker.

Farther down on Allenby, the Russian-language Don Quixote bookstore-the Russian nerve center of Allenby Street-is full of curious pensioners and boulevard intellectuals feasting on a lifetime's worth of Isaac Asimov's science fiction, Russian translations of the kabbalah, and an ill.u.s.trated Hebrew-Russian version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is presented like a Talmudic text with sweeping commentaries crowding the words. "To Nineteen-Year-Old Gaga-so that he won't be stupid," an old tome is helpfully inscribed.

A few blocks down the street, the Little Prague restaurant is full of Russian boys. .h.i.tting on Israeli waitresses, and young Russian women pretending to eat. Little Prague exults in a wonderful version of the Czech cla.s.sic veprove koleno-a marinated and slow-roasted pork knuckle with a hint of rye, which in the hands of the chef is flaky and light. There is also a heroic schnitzel and excellent Staropramen and dark Kozel beer on tap. The interior is gloomy Mitteleuropean, but outside a nice garden deck beckons, fully populated by drunk, hungry people as late as 3 A.M. and at times bathed in the familiar sounds of the theme song to The Sopranos.

Allenby saunters into the sea, where pale ex-Soviets take to the beach like it's their native Odessa and florally dressed babushkas offer me advice: "Young man, take your sneakers off, let your feet breathe." A right turn at Ben Yehuda Street leads to the Viking, a languorous, partly outdoor restaurant that joylessly specializes in dishes like golubets, a stuffed cabbage peppery and garlicky enough to register on the taste buds. As I tear my way though the golubets and lubricate with a shot of afternoon vodka, a mother in one corner softly beats her son, who is wearing a T-shirt that says READY WHEN YOU READY. Crying, beaten children, along with sea breezes and heavy ravioli-style pelmeni swimming in ground pepper, complete the familiar picture, which could have been broadcast live from Sochi, Yalta, or some other formerly Soviet seaside town.

Off the Allenby drag, Nanuchka is what Zur-Glozman calls a neo-Georgian supper club, a place where one can order a cool pomegranate vodka drink, featuring grenadine juice from Russia and crushed ice, or a frozen margarita made with native arak liquor, almonds, and rose juice. The decor is mellow and cozy like a shabby house in Havana, complete with gilt-edged mirrors, portraits of feisty, long-living Georgian grandmas, and many charming rooms stuffed with sumptuous divans and banquettes in full Technicolor. The highlight of the crowded and raucous bar is a photograph of the former prime minister Ariel "The Bulldozer" Sharon staring with great unease at a raft of Pica.s.sos. At its more authentic, the Georgian food can really shine. Try the tender chakapulu lamb stew with white plums and tarragon, or setsivi-a cool chicken breast in walnut sauce, bursting with sweetness and garlic. Pinch the crust of the cheburek meat pie and watch the steam escape into the noisy air.

On the same street as Nanuchka, the club Lima Lima hosts a popular Sunday night showcase for Russian bands called "Stakanchik," or "little drinking gla.s.s." Amid luxuriant George of the Jungle decor, young, hip, and sometimes pregnant people in ironic CCCP and Jesus T-shirts shimmy and sway by the stage. A young singer wearing an ethnic hat begins a song with the words "Now it has come, my long-awaited old age," a sentiment somehow both Jewish and Russian.

I end my tour of Russian Tel Aviv at a much stranger place, the cavernous Mevdevev nightclub, located a stone's throw from the American emba.s.sy but occupying, until its recent closing, a s.p.a.ce-time continuum all its own. As the evening begins, a birthday boy in his forties, dressed in a plaid shirt and sensible slacks, is paraded onstage by the MC and forced to sing seventies and eighties Russian disco hits.

A young woman in a skimpy plaid schoolgirl outfit dances around a SpongeBob birthday balloon as the nostalgic Russian music, along with a detour into the early Pet Shop Boys, bellows and hurts. My friend Zur-Glozman meets an armed, cigar-chain-smoking Ukrainian, a graduate student of the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University who now lives in the occupied territories, as do many ex-Soviet immigrants. He invites Zur-Glozman and some of our friends for a ride in his car, which is the size of a school bus. We negotiate the gleaming white curves of Bauhaus Tel Aviv, looking for a nightcap. Over at Little Prague, the inevitable Israeli political argument breaks out between the right-wing Russian-speaking settler and some of my liberal Israeli friends. "You probably think our houses are built of Palestinian babies," the settler huffs.

"Well, you're the one with the gun," an Israeli woman tells him.

I worry for the sanct.i.ty of the evening, torn between geographical kinship with the formerly Soviet settler and political kinship with the progressive Tel Avivians, but as mugs of Kozel beer are pa.s.sed around and the nighttime temperature falls to bearable levels, the pa.s.sions cool. "As you can see," an Israeli friend tells me, "we aren't killing each other."

A Head for the Emir.

William T. Vollmann.