Farewell

We parted from Boaz that afternoon in Arequipa. He was flying back to the US and his job in Washington, DC, and we were about to take the overnight bus to Cuzco. Being with Boaz was wonderful, and parting from him was sad.
While we were planning the trip, Judith was strongly opposed to doing any more than our business in the Colca Canyon area and returning from Peru. She had no interest in Peru and no desire to tour there. Ofer had been to Peru in the early 1990s and fallen in love with the country, so he naturally wanted to take advantage of his presence there to become reacquainted. Hannah had also been in Peru, but not the parts where we were, and she's an enthusiastic traveler, so she also wanted to stay on. I had mixed feelings. Like Judith, I had never had much interest in Latin America in general or in Peru - indeed I had been very apprehensive about the trip, imagining that people would be trying to rob us left and right. On the other hand, since we were laying out so much money to get there, and we had already committed so much of our time, why not do some ordinary tourism and get a little fun out of the trip?
We could always justify it, if there was any reason to justify it, by saying that we were going to see the places that Asher planned to see. We were completing his trip for him.
It's true that everywhere we subsequently went in Peru, Asher's shadow was with us - as his shadow is with me every time I dice an onion. And it's also true that we had a fascinating, enjoyable trip during the following ten days or so.
But I don't intend to write about those experiences here.
It's time to sum up and move on.
Planning and anticipating the trip to Peru was central in our lives during the months preceding the trip, especially in Judith's life, for she did most of the planning and arranging. We had a specific mission, and we completed it successfully - more than successfully. I'm proud of our family, proud of our friends who contributed so generously to our project, pleased to know that their contributions went to worthy people, glad that we were able to express personal gratitude to the people who did so much to help us. I'm also glad that I liked Peru and the Peruvians so much.
However, having completed the mission, I am left with emptiness: what is there to do next? What's worth doing?
Grief is lonely and individual.
Asher's death is many losses to many people, each of whom knew him in a different way, each of whom is in a different stage of life. We are all many things to many people, and when we die, each of the many people loses something different. We have lost a son, a brother, a friend, a student, a patient, a colleague.
"You can't take it with you," as the cliche tells us. But you leave a lot behind, assuming that "you" exist after you are dead, so that "you" are deprived of something or have lost something.
If we assume that "you" stops existing when "you" dies, then "you" leaves nothing behind. But it is we who are left behind, we who have lost, and we who imagine how "you" could have had a longer, fuller, more rewarding life.
Asher would have been twenty-nine last June. He might have gone on living for at least another fifty years, growing, developing, working, creating, gathering friends, lovers, a family, a career - living a full life and enriching the lives of others.
I've said it before. If Mephistopheles had appeared to me and offered me a deal: die instead of Asher, and he'll live for at least the number of years that you've lived so far, I would have taken it. Asher should have been speaking at my funeral a year ago, not I speaking at his.
I've had a decent shot at life. He only got a beginning.
Until Asher died, I was always optimistic, pretty much assuming that things would work out all right. I've lost that.

Winding Up

While Judith and I were at the lookout and then at Dante's school, and Ofer was trying to get to the place where Asher last was, Hannah and Boaz went where Asher planned to go: the bottom of Colca Canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world, an enormous ravine that widens out into a valley, whose walls, wherever they're not too steep, are terraced for agriculture.  

Tourists who have enough time hike down into the canyon, stay over night at the Oasis, a kind of resort, with hot springs, and then go on to visit some of the villages in the canyon, which are accessible only by foot or by mule.  You probably feel as if you're in a charmed zone, close to nature, far from noise and pollution, seeing people whose way of life is rooted deep in the past.

But Hannah and Boaz only had a day, so they left at dawn, hiked down, ate lunch at the Oasis, and then hiked up, reaching Cabanaconde again before dark.  

Hannah hired a mule to get back up, but Boaz took on the challenge of coming back on his own and met it with flying colors.  It's a stiff climb in any event, but at that altitude, it's especially hard.

The High Mountain Rescue Unit took us back to Arequipa the next morning.  We left early, so we could reach the condor lookout in time to have a chance of seeing some condors - but there weren't any that day, just about five hundred tourists.

All the way to Cabanaconde from Arequipa, I had been thinking to myself: these are the sights that Asher saw.  All the way back, all I could think was that Asher's body had made the same trip, in the same vehicle.

Not Knowing

The path down to the lookout took us past the kindergarten and a second school building of some kind. As passed it, a woman saw us, rushed out from somewhere, and pounded on the door of the second school building. Out came Dante, our English round-faced speaker. He told us he was going to have some English classes in the adult education school that afternoon and asked us to come by at three. He told us he spent the morning in the school building, to make sure no one broke in and stole the computers. We wondered to ourselves what that meant about the population of the village.
In any event, we agreed readily, and that afternoon, we went back to what was now a very familiar corner of Cabanaconde. As usual, there was a misunderstanding. The English lessons didn't really begin at three, and the students who began learning at some vague time after three were not high school students but elementary school kids, and not many at that. Dante evidently expected us to stay all day, from three on, but we only planned to spend an hour there.
About eight kids gradually gathered, and Judith and I gave them a lively, improvised English lesson. Their performance was pretty impressive, seeing that Dante was hardly a fluent speaker of English himself. They knew a lot of vocabulary, and they were lively and intelligent. It was fun working with them.
I guess any kid who was willing to go back after school for voluntary English lessons either had very pushy parents or high personal motivation.
Dante told us that he had arrived in Cabanaconde a few years ago with some kind of a diploma and one English book, no building, no program, but with some kind of government backing. He gradually built a program, recruited students, obtained a building, and started teaching English as well as tourism, electronics, and computers. Does he really know very much about those four fields? Evidently enough to get people started. If you wait until you have fully qualified teachers in places like Cabanaconde, you'll never have any programs.
Dante needs textbooks, dictionaries, and atlases, as well as other equipment. So now he's on our "Help Cabanaconde" list, too. Dante was a little disappointed when we told him at four that we had to go, but we didn't have a lot of energy, between the high altitude and the high emotions we'd been experiencing.
Meeting his students took our mind off the reason we were in Cabanconde for a while, but when we got back to the hotel, we were reminded sharply. Ofer had returned to the hotel, and he was exhausted and distraught. Instead of coming back from seeing the place where Asher fell with a clear idea of how the accident happened, he came back with more questions than answers, as well as a badly injured knee.
All he could say to us was that if Asher had somehow gotten to the place from which he apparently fell, he must have been a champion mountain climber - which we know he wasn't.
Our only hope of finding anything definite out now lay in the memory chip of his camera. At the time we thought we had it, but when we got back to Israel, Ofer discovered that the chip we had was not the one upon which Asher had recorded his pictures from Peru, and that chip wasn't with the camera or his belongings. It's gone.
That afternoon, Judith and I didn't push Ofer to hear his theory about how Asher had fallen, and we have decided not to since then. If Ofer has worked out a theory by now, it's still only a theory, and even the fullest knowledge can't change the horrible fact that our son is dead.
Asher's death was shrouded in mystery from the start. For nearly two months, before his body was found, he was only "missing," and we hoped that somehow he was still alive. We will never know exactly what series of errors and miscalculations led to his fall. That's frustrating, but what good would fuller knowledge do?

Two Dreams

A few weeks ago, the body of an Israeli hiker who had fallen into rapids in Peru was discovered, wedged under a rock, not far from where he had fallen, months later, after the water in the river had receded.
The night after reading about that, I dreamed that Asher's body had been recovered similarly. In my dream he had long, black straight hair and a long beard, though in reality Asher had short, light, curly hair, and was clean shaven. The figure in the dream, who was definitely "Asher," looked like a figure of Christ after he has been taken down from the cross.
Even though he had been under water for a long time, we started resuscitation, and he responded. "A medical miracle," someone shouted.
I woke up in fear.

In a dream last night I saw a child of about five, a child of mine.
I had come home from somewhere and found him with a terrible bloody wound on his face, between his eyes. The blood on his face was very bright red.
I hugged him and wanted to rush to the hospital with him, but he spoke calmly and said it had happened earlier, and he had taken care of it.
The "child" was Asher, and when I realized it was he, again I woke up in fear.

How strange it is to see someone in a dream, who doesn't look at all like the person you're dreaming of, but you know it's the same person.

A Message from the Condors

The next morning, Hannah and Boaz walked down into the canyon, accompanied by one of the mountain rescue men, and Ofer went with Diego and Benito, another mountain rescue man, to see the place where Asher's body was found and the place from which he fell. Judith and I decided to spend a quiet day in Cabanaconde.
The Kunturwassi hotel is on a low hill a short distance away from the main square, which, as usual in Peru, has a church on one side and stores and restaurants on the other three sides. The hotel is a rambling assemblage of bungalows adjacent to the main building, which houses the reception desk and a restaurant on the upper floor, with a view down into the village and out to the mountains on the horizon. A little brook flows out of the rocks under the restaurant past the outdoor stairway leading from the reception desk down to the rooms. You can also climb up a flight of stairs from the restaurant to an observation tower on top of the hotel.
When Judith and I sat down to eat breakfast, the waitress, a motherly woman in her forties, spoke softly to us in simple Spanish that we could understand. Were we Asher's mama and papa? The whole village was worried about him and looking for him. She expressed deep sympathy and suggested that we should have a mass said in Asher's honor, but we explained that we weren't Catholics.
She accepted that news with no comment.
The day before, on our way to the kindergarten, we saw a sign that read "Mirador Achachihua, 500 m," and we decided to see what that was. The path continued onward past the kindergarten, as the village houses thinned out. We reached what looked like a half-constructed, reinforced concrete bull ring. At that point it wasn't clear where the path led, but we clambered over a low stone wall and continued in the direction of the canyon, finally reaching a promontory from which you could see all the way down to the Colca River in the bottom or the canyon, and at the peaks and cliffs in three directions. We were in sight of the place to which Robert had taken us the night before.
A local guide was there with a small group of young tourists, but they left after a while, and Judith and I decided to stay there. We could see down to the place Asher had presumably meant to reach and the general area where he fell. It was a good place to collect our thoughts and be alone with our feelings.
I sat down on a rock to write in my notebook.
The silence was nearly absolute. The sound of the rushing water of the river, more than a kilometer below us, came up to us faintly. Otherwise there were no sounds - no engines running, no human voices, no horns or sirens.
Soon afterward, we began to see large birds flying in the canyon below us: eagles. Then condors appeared, five of them, first soaring and wheeling at eye level over the canyon, then rising higher and circling in the air over our heads. They came so close to us that we could hear the wind rushing through their feathers. We could see their eyes, their beaks, the hugeness of their black, extended wings. They circled and circled, as if inspecting us. We moved so they wouldn't mistake us for carrion. We knew that condors don't attack live animals or people, but we couldn't help be frightened, they were so large and majestic.
I tried to take pictures of them with my point and shoot camera, totally unsuited to that. I only managed to capture a few blurry images.
I don't know how long the condors stayed in the air above us, circling, swooping, disappearing and returning, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone.
Earlier I had thought - against every skeptical principle in my mind - that our mission in Peru was to free Asher's soul from the Colca Canyon. His body had been brought back and buried, but until people who loved him came to see the place where he fell, his sould would be stuck there.
The visit from the condors had a mystical quality to it, as if they were helping us free Asher's soul from that place. As if they knew why we were there.
As we left, heading back to the village, I began sobbing uncontrollably.

The Official Version

That evening Robert led us to the point at which, in his opinion, Asher went astray.
We started in daylight along a trail leading from a corner of the main square of Cabanaconde, not the trail that hikers ordinarily take on their way down into the Colca Canyon - but there is no sign in the square, and it would be easy to start off at the wrong corner, in the right general direction, but on the wrong path.
Ever since we found out what happened to Asher, I have been imagining that wrong path, picturing it to myself, running after Asher and telling him he'd made a mistake.
For quite a while the trail was wide and nothing would indicate that it was the wrong one. It wound between low stone walls through small fields newly plowed and planted with corn. A few minutes along that path, we came to a junction, where you could turn off to the right and get onto the correct path down to the canyon. Again there was no clearly visible sign, but on a rock, where no one would notice it, on the near edge of the path, low toward the ground, someone had written "Oasis" - the name of the resort inside the canyon. When we saw that sign, we thought to ourselves: If only someone had written "Oasis" in large letters, with an arrow pointing to the right, on the wall facing the direction of the village, so that someone coming from there would have seen it, Asher might be alive now.
Robert led us past that point, along a path that was still well trodden. Farmers use it to get to their plots of land. We were five members of our family: Judith, Hannah, Boaz, Ofer, and I, accompanied by Robert and Cabezon. We reached the end of that path and walked across a small plot, and, as we looked out over the canyon, Robert presented his conclusions to us - an official police report.
In his opinion, Asher reached that point and then took a steep animal trail downward around prickly bushes that had since been burned off. He came to a series of two waterfalls and managed to negotiate the first. When he got to the foot of that waterfall, instead of continuing to the left, where the trail continued, he stepped back on the narrow ledge to take a picture of the waterfall and then fell backward, plunging about a hundred meters to his death.
The place from which he fell and the place where his body was found were more or less inaccessible from the point to which we'd been taken, and the following morning Ofer was planning to go there by a different, somewhat easier route with Diego and Benito, a member of the rescue unit. Robert strongly discouraged Hannah and Boaz from even considering going there, because the hike would be so demanding and dangerous.
After presenting his theory of how Asher had happened to fall, Robert described how they had recovered his body. The operation was extremely difficult, because the terrain was so steep. They wrapped the body and loaded it onto a kind of sled and pulled it up the cliffs with ropes. All the while rain was threatening, and if it had started to rain, they wouldn't have been able to continue. Robert said they were "praying to Asher" all the time, to keep it from raining, and the rain did hold off until the body was stowed safely on the rescue unit's white pickup truck - the vehicle we'd been riding around on since we'd reached Arequipa.
As I write these words, my eyes well up with tears.
After all the explanations, and after seeing the place, the story still made no sense. True, Asher was not an experienced hiker, but even an inexperienced hiker - or especially an inexperienced hiker - should have known that the path Robert showed us was not a well-worn path taken by hundreds of hikers down to a popular resort. It's hard to imagine that Asher wouldn't have reached that place, taken a look, and said to himself: I must have taken a wrong turn. I'll go back.
On our way back, darkness fell, and we all withdrew into ourselves and thought about what we'd seen.

Diego

We got to know Diego a little better in the restaurant. Ofer had given him the promised reward of $1500 last January, and now he asked Diego what he had done with the money.
The police had taken $200 from him - not the mountain police, but the regular criminal police. We were outraged, but Diego smiled sweetly and said he'd given it to them willingly.
He'd spent another $500 to send his oldest child, a boy in his late teens, to study cooking in Arequipa. We were very gratified to hear that, because that had been Asher's profession, something Diego couldn't have known. He had spent the remaining $800 on a private operation for his wife, who had a tumor, because if they had waited for an operation through the national health services, it might have been too late to operate at all. She was still sick, he said, and there were going to be more expenses.
Then and there we decided to give him another $500 from the funds that our friends and relatives had contributed in Asher's memory.
Diego, who is in his mid-forties, makes a living, if you could call it that, by gathering cochineal, a red dye made from insects that live on cactuses. He roams through the Colca Canyon looking for cactuses infested with the insects and gathers as many as theee kilograms of the stuff every day - weather permitting.
Diego found Asher because he had been looking for cochineal in an area of the canyon where he usually doesn't go, it was starting to rain, so he took a shortcut home, and on the way caught sight of Asher's hat and backpack.
Ofer asked him how much he's paid for the cochineal (which was selling for between $50 and $80 per kilogram in 2005, according to some Web sites I have recently seen). Diego gets $5 per kilogram for what he gathers. So on a really good day, he makes $15. When it rains, and he can't go out looking, he obviously doesn't earn a penny, and if he's not lucky, he gathers a lot less than three kilograms. The material that he gathers looks like a greyish powder on the surface of the cactus. Gathering three kilograms of it would take a very long time, even if you found it quickly and easily.
Diego's seven-year old daughter, Miriam, was a bright, delightful child, with a charming smile and lots of energy. She had a great time in the restaurant, enjoying her food and the Inca Cola she'd ordered. But she was too bashful to repeat the poem she'd recited at the ceremony in the school yard. Her older brother, who was also with us, was a quiet, twelve-year old, with his father's shyness.
What will happen to them? Their mother's health is poor, and how long can Diego keep roaming up and down the canyon looking for cochineal? The older son, who's learning to be a cook, is the family's main hope.
We were lucky that Diego found Asher at all. The rains started soon after the body was discovered, and if his remains hadn't been found then, they might never have been found. Diego was lucky that he found Asher. The prize money saved his wife's life and gave the family hope for the future.
We were glad that the man who benefitted was such a deserving person.

The Second Ceremony in Cabanaconde

On the way from the kindergarten to the elementary school, we had to climb over ditches and piles of rubble. They were gradually paving the streets of Cabanaconde.
"When we were looking for Asher," Ofer told me, "the whole town was dug up like this. He could have been buried anywhere."
That's what we had been afraid of. Maybe Asher had made the wrong man angry at him, gotten into a fight, and been murdered. The killer could have thrown him over the edge of the canyon or buried him under the rubble in the village streets. No one would have known.
In the two or three weeks between the time that Boaz and Ofer came back empty-handed from Peru to the time when the body was found, we were preparing to hire a team of Israeli specialists to go and look for him. One of the men who would have been on the team said that among the first things they would do would be to check for new and unmarked graves in the cemeteries.
The school building was a simple concrete structure, but large, airy, and attractive. The kids, dressed in uniforms, had gathered in a big courtyard behind the school, and tables had been set up, laden with the books, materials, and equipment we had bought. I was pleased to see piles of world classics in simplified school editions: Cervantes, Moliere, even Moby Dick.
The ceremony at the elementary school was longer and more formal. I spoke in Hebrew, and Ofer translated into Spanish for me. The mayor spoke, saying that Asher wasn't the first person who died accidentally in the Colca Canyon, but we were the first family who ever thought of doing something for the people of Cabanaconde. The Governor spoke, and with my meager Spanish I heard him mention Israel, which was one of the things we had in mind. Then the kids sang a few songs and a five or six of them came up by turns and recited poems in Spanish, with sweeping theatrical movements of their arms and deep bows. One was a patriotic poem about Peru, how they would defend it against all enemies.
Then we gave a notebook, a pencil, and a ballpoint pen to each of the students.
Then, before we left, they gave us presents - Peruvian handicrafts.
Diego, the man who found Asher's body, showed up. His eight-year-old daughter attended the school, and she had been one of the kids who recited poems.
It was two-thirty or so by then. We were all hungry. Ofer invited Diego and his family to meet us in the square, so we could take them out for lunch.
He came with his daughter and his twelve-year old son, but without his wife, who wasn't feeling well, he said.
We headed for a place down the street from the corner of the square, but before we got there we passed a little hotel, which had a restaurant, but whose shutters were drawn. Diego's daughter insisted that she wanted to eat there, saying (I think) that it was her aunt's place. So we knocked, someone rolled up the shutters, and we went in.
Communication with Diego was awkward, since it all went through Ofer, but we could tell he was a kind, very modest person, shy and self-effacing.

The First Ceremony in Cabanaconde

Before leaving the lookout at Cruz del Condor we ate avocado sandwiches in the triangular rolls typical of this part of Peru, and that was our last food for quite a while that day. We checked into our rather whimsical hotel, the Kunturwassi (which we later learned meant, "Home of the Condor"), without any baggage, at 12:30. We were due to meet the school principals in half an hour. There was no time to eat, so I rested.
At one o'clock we walked down the narrow street from out hotel to the main square of Cabanaconde, past a little house with a Jehova's Witnesses sign on it, and there Mario and Norma were waiting for us.
We were concerned. A ceremony was planned at the two schools, at which we'd display the gifts and distribute things to the children, but the truck was stranded. How could we hold the ceremony?
Just as we reached the square and greeted Mario and Norma, the truck rolled in. The situation was saved.
We followed the truck down a narrow, unpaved road and began to get an impression of Cabanaconde: a grid of narrow unpaved roads lined with adobe houses, mainly roofed with galvanized steel sheets. There were animals in almost all the courtyards. A few hundred yards down the street, the truck stopped in front of a low, white building, identified as "INSTITUCION EDUCATIONAL INICIAL CABANACONDE," and the mountain rescue men started unloading the truck.
Norma ushered us into her kindergarten. About forty little kids were sitting against the walls of the large courtyard, beneath a large brownish yellow mural, with Peace written on it in Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic. An Israeli, who had signed his name as Lior, had preceded us in Cabanaconde!
While they were unpacking the things we had bought, I went over and sat with the children. Once had I taken a couple of pictures of them and showed them the pictures on the display of my digital camera, I was mobbed - what a pleasure!
Then the ceremony began. Cabezon, the driver, organized the pupils into lines, and they sang some songs for us. The teacher who led them in singing clearly enjoyed what she was doing. The children were all clean and well-behaved. They stood quietly in their lines while we gave each of them a notebook and a couple of pencils.
The mayor of the village and the governor of the district (a man appointed by the central government) were in attendance. In the end, as we were leaving, Norma draped necklaces of dried corncobs around our necks. Then we headed for the elementary school for a more elaborate ceremony.
At the kindergarten we also met Dante, a young man with a smooth, brown face who spoke pretty good English. In fact he told us that he taught it in an adult education program that he had set up. His son was one of the kids in the kindergarten, and he'd been invited to attend the ceremony.