"The Lazy Cowboy" and Other Donkey Stories
Stubborn As an Ancient Rock, the Donkey Halts and Takes No Walk
Today’s postcard comes from “Writing Home from the Road: Out and About on Even-Toed, Odd-Toed Ungulates, As Well As On a Relaxed Oversized Sub-Ungulate” in “Other Eyes for Johnny Rocco.“
It is set in a deserted village of Malia (Μαλιά or Bağlarbaşı) in the mountains of Cyprus sometime in the late 1980s and features three poor Polish students on a working holiday, harvesting grapes with a stubborn donkey.
The music was produced by End of Code, the lazy cowboy on the stubborn donkey was drawn by Magda and I was the lazy cowboy.
Also, my “Bikebook: Anatomy of an Incurable Medical Condition Diagnosed as Bicyclitis” takes its readers to many donkey countries. Below, there is a story of Mahabat from Stenje in Macedonia and a single paragraph about a donkey-infested area between Goricë e Madhe and Goricë e Vogël in Albania:
The story from Stenje:
There is a battered wooden gate leading to what looks like a tiny, muddy farmyard. Peeking in, we spot a miniature house with two tiny windows barely 50 centimetres above the mud. A steaming pile of half-processed manure adds a rustic flavour to the space between the hut and a brushwood shed, while several broods of chickens peck and rake the worm-rich soil with gusto.
Soon, a petite lady approaches the gate with Mayka and her long-legged Mahabat in tow.
We have a soft spot for petite, elderly ladies—and an even softer spot for baby donkeys—so one of us makes a mistake of petting Mahabat’s back for a bit. This sends the good-natured Macedonian lady on her long-winded stand-up parade. Her rustic dialect must be generously peppered with Albanian from across the hill, making it impossible to fish out a single Slavic word—except for one: "Mayka."
Fresh from cycling through Macedonia’s famed Matka Canyon near Skopje, we know that “matka”* means “womb” and “mayka” means “mother” in Macedonian. Now, the wrinkled mouth of our miniature lady is on and on about Mayka and her Mahabat. Her right arm, as if swatting away flies, keeps telling us to take the baby donkey with us. She keeps stressing the last syllable in all of her messages and her catatonic folk incantation is accompanied by an enigmatic Mona-lisa smile, now and then broken by a merry one-tooth laughter.
We want to interact, but the rural stand-up comedian dismisses our probing interjections in Polish, Italian or Russian with her even more elongated final syllables of disbelief. She keeps tilting her head to one side and smiles like a gap-toothed Cheshire cat at us. It is hard not to notice that in her miniature muddy kingdom, the joy of life has very little to do with material status.
Everybody’s happy here. The worms have their dunghill, the chicks have their worms, Mayka has her Mahabat, the miniature lady has a foreign audience for her evening stand-up performance and we have our still standing adoption offer, as well as an excellent transcultural and trans-temporal photo and video opportunity.
Having just learnt that with the right attitude, life can be everybody’s oyster everywhere, we hesitantly splutter jo, faleminderit!** to the generous adoption offer, but our miniature lady keeps laughing. She just won’t take jo for an answer. We love her, but decide to head to a local bar in search of more reciprocal interactions with other residents of Stenje.
On our way back from the bar, we bumped into another old lady with a donkey in tow:
And the next day, sometime between Macedonian breakfast and Albanian lunch, I wrote this paragraph:
The story from between Goricë e Madhe and Goricë e Vogël in Albania:
If you cross the border with your eyes closed, walk about two kilometres, crouch on the roadside between Goricë e Madhe and Goricë e Vogël and listen to the sounds of the new country, you will immediately hear a change. The trills of birds will be similar because birds easily transcend barbed wire, the calls from the mosques will be similar because 27% of Macedonians bow to Allah and so do 59% of Albanians, but the intervals between hee-haws will be very much shortened. It’s because you have entered into the kingdom of the odd-hoofed beast Equus Asinus, locally referred to as gomar. Donkeys seem to stand all over the place on the other side of the border and quite hysterically carry their blunt sarcasm far and wide at all times.
* and matka means mother in Polish
** jo, faleminderit! means No, thank you in Albanian
Nine years after the adoption offer, whenever I think of Mahabat, I think of the tune of the chorus in Lau Ma Al Mahaba sung by Jewish girls from Yemen in Arabic. It translates into English like this:
I swear, if not for the rumors of the people
And the jealousy,
I would take my loved one* on my shoulders
And set out away.
(A-WA)
Not really, but just listen to A-WA (not) singing about my donkey for a bit, please:
*mahaba means love or loved one in Arabic
Finally, some photos of other donkeys:
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