Better Than Fiction 2 (10 page)

It was dark by the time the tour ended, and Sam led us to a table and some chairs that had been set up on a lawn just outside the fort. We sat, about seven of us, and hot tea was brought out. About thirty feet away was the entrance to the dungeon where Salman Taseer had been locked up for opposing Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator who ruled the country from 1977 to 1987. By 2010, Zia was long dead in a suspicious plane crash and Taseer was governor of Punjab Province. In January 2011, Taseer would be assassinated by his own bodyguard.

Sam mercifully sat at the opposite end of the table, and a friend of his took the seat across from me. He owned a business that he claimed could deliver seeds anywhere in the country in forty-eight hours. The day before, as we were barreling down a
main thoroughfare just outside city limits, the van I was riding in had to swerve around a dead horse in the road. Its cart had been pulled to the curb so as not to completely obstruct traffic. I had the feeling that if this businessman could deliver
anything
in this country in two days, he was destined to become very rich. He was wearing a suit and tie, and gave considered answers to my elementary questions about agriculture in Pakistan. He asked about my family, told me about his, and explained thoroughly but without drifting into dullness, the nuances of his business. And then he began to talk to me about American foreign policy and what the US owed Pakistan for its help fighting terrorism.

‘You cannot expect us to fight the war by ourselves’, he said. ‘And you cannot simply send aid money. It vanishes. It all goes to Dubai.’

‘What’s in Dubai?’

‘The politicians’ bank accounts’, he said.

‘Ok,’ I said.

‘You should write about this for your magazine’, he said.

‘I’m more of an editor’, I said.

‘America must send tangible things’, he said. ‘Weapons, food, tanks, planes. This business of sending money is a guaranteed failure.’

‘I see’, I said.

‘Look at the British. Look at what they left behind! A railway system. An education system. Tangible good deeds. Why does America believe it can solve all its problems with money?’

If he’d been less gentlemanly, I might have asked if the legacy of British colonization, partition, and the subsequent sixty years of political strife, had been an even trade for trains that run on time. But he was right, of course, to put these questions to me. In 1982, Zia-ul-Haq took a break from tossing political
opponents in the dungeon to fly to Washington, where he met with President Reagan in the Oval Office. The US had been elbows-deep in Pakistan’s governance, going back to the 1960s. The country was a protectorate of the United States, first as an outpost against communism, more recently against Islamic fundamentalism. As a citizen of the United States, I was therefore worthy of blame.

‘I see’, I said again.

And then he began to talk about India.

Earlier in the week I’d gone to Wahga, a border outpost along the Grand Trunk Road, an artery that ran from Afghanistan, through Pakistan and India, to Bangladesh. At sundown, Pakistan and India’s respective armies performed a military ceremony culminating in the slamming shut of a massive gate, severing the connection between the two countries for the night. It was a bit like the flag ceremony at a NASCAR event: bombastic, militaristic, an orgy of patriotism performed before scores of screaming fans.

When we arrived at Wahga, our driver pulled into a shady lot next to a guesthouse. I slid open the door and was hit with a powerful smell. It was unquestionably organic, decomposition of some kind. Rotting flesh, I’d thought. It was the scent of dead deer I’d found in the woods when I was a boy, a smell that set off alarms in the central nervous system.

The driver was unfazed, and I didn’t want to cause offense, but after we’d walked a little ways toward the border, I had to ask: ‘What was that smell?’

‘India’, he said.

‘I see, I see’, I said. I mulled this while we walked some more.

‘India’, I said.

‘Yes, India, this smell’, he said, as if conveying tragic knowledge. He went on: ‘They drive their cotton across the border but because it is Indian, it must be quarantined at customs, and then it rains, and the cotton becomes wet, and then you have this smell.’

‘Ah, okay’, I said.

In my brief time in Pakistan, I’d heard India blamed for everything from droughts to floods to electrical load shedding. Blaming India for its smelly cotton was the most logical defamation yet.

Now the seed-dealer across from me had invoked the name of the great scapegoat.

‘India’, he said, ‘is funding most of the terrorism within Pakistan. It’s a known fact.’

‘Is that right?’ I said.

‘Tehrik-i-Taliban is
directly
funded by the Indian government. India wants to see us wiped from the map’, he said.

I was completely unqualified to judge the veracity of this claim. If he was after an intelligent response to his statement, he’d have been better off addressing his cup of tea.

‘I see’, I said, which meant, of course, that I didn’t.

He talked some more and I pretended to understand, and then Sam ushered us back into our cars. The police escort was long gone, and after dinner I was dropped at my hotel. It was nearly midnight, and I was in my room flipping through TV stations and eating crackers on the bed when I heard the bomb blasts. They were unmistakable, a pair of sharp, percussive booms. I turned off the desk lamp so I could see out the window, but there was nothing out of the ordinary: manicured lawn, flowers, the trees and barbed wire, a few motorcycles on Mall Road. I had a
pre-dawn flight, and stayed up until it was time to leave for the airport, but there was nothing about the blasts on television. Reading a paper on the plane, I learned that a police station a few kilometers from the hotel had been bombed, and when the policemen came running out of the building, the assailants had opened fire on them. The story was deep inside the paper, and didn’t warrant a photo, as I recall.

My plane was heading southwest toward Abu Dhabi, not too long after leaving Lahore, when we passed over the Sulaiman Mountains, a rumpled range at the southern end of the Hindu Kush. It was dark out, and I wouldn’t have seen the mountains except that, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a bright flash of light, then another, popping across the wrinkled spines and valleys of the range. I turned off my reading light and peered out the window. The flashes kept coming. I was sure I was seeing shelling.

In the UAE I’d change planes for another business class seat on a flight to the US. There was a glass of juice on my armrest, a newspaper on my lap, and I could play Battleship on my viewscreen, unless I wanted to recline my seat into a bed and catch a nap. I watched the lightshow until we were out of range. Stripped of the volcanic rumble and the earth-trembling shock that accompanies heavy ordinance, it was as if the explosions had not quite enough meaning, and I tried to impose a sense of reverence on my voyeurism. I conjured up a heavy, solemn emotion and tried to hold onto it, the way one might at the funeral of a head of state. It faded quickly.

The pilot came on over the intercom to give us the details of our cruising altitude, speed, intended arrival time, and at the end of his speech, he said, ‘You might have seen some heat lightning over the mountains a few minutes ago. It’s nothing to worry about.’

W
e are flying down an empty six-lane highway, on our way from Jeddah to Riyadh, a seven-hour drive, and I’m thinking of possible routes of escape. I’m in the passenger seat of a new Toyota sedan travelling at 140 km/h through the Saudi Arabian desert and I’m racing through the implications of opening my door and leaping free.

The driver is a stranger to me. He is young, no more than twenty-five, with a smooth face and a tentative moustache. His name is Shadad, but he is not a taxi driver, and this is not a taxi. This car and this driver were arranged hastily by my guide and friend, Majed, who helped me around Jeddah the previous week. Before this drive began, Majed and I considered it a decent, if necessary, idea to employ such a driver for this trip, but now I am pondering how I could leave this car. If I open the door and roll out, would I survive? And if I did survive, where would I go?
There’s nothing but rocks and sand for miles in any direction.

But still. Vacating this car might be necessary, because though I want to trust this young driver, he is not really a professional driver, and he has no taxi licence, and most of all, moments ago, while he was talking to a friend on his cellphone, he looked over to me with a mischievous smile and said to his friend, ‘Yeah, American, boom boom.’ Then he laughed. He did everything but point his finger at me and pull the trigger. I’m not sure how many ways there are to interpret this.

It did not have to be this way. I woke up this morning ready to spend the day in Jeddah, having lunch with new Saudi friends, dinner with new Saudi friends, and then fly out of Jeddah in the late evening, heading back to the US on a red-eye through London. But it was soon after waking up that I looked closely at my itinerary to find that the flight I am booked on is not leaving from Jeddah at 10pm tonight; it’s leaving from Riyadh at 8pm – five hundred and twenty-five miles away.

So I made a flurry of frantic calls back home, to airlines and travel agents, confirming that this was indeed the itinerary, and learning that there were no available flights that would get me from Jeddah to Riyadh in time. There are various reasons I need to get out of Saudi Arabia and back to the US this day, so I had no choice but to look into driving across the country, to Riyadh, to make the flight.

And I had to tell all this to Majed.

‘How could this happen?’ he asked. I told him I had no idea, that I was very sorry.

Majed couldn’t do the drive himself, so he and I searched around Jeddah, looking for someone who could. We made our way to the outskirts of the city and through a brief labyrinth of small alleys. Finally we reached a dead-end, where about a half-dozen
men sat outside on folding chairs. It was not a taxi stand or anything like it.

‘This place?’ I asked. ‘Who are these guys?’

‘Our only option,’ Majed said, and got out.

I sat in Majed’s car, thinking about what had transpired the previous day. Majed and I, who had enjoyed a fluid and friendly rapport for a week, had a strange exchange, which put in question if or why he should trust me. I made a joke about American-Saudi relations, and our military, their oil, various complicities and maybe even the CIA, and from then on, things went cold. It was as if he suddenly realised I was an American, and presumably participating in my country’s various crimes, real or imagined. Since then, he had been visibly anxious to be done with me; we barely spoke, and he seemed to be counting the hours till he could be rid of me.

So I was in Majed’s car, in this alley, watching him negotiate with the group, wondering if this could possibly be a good idea, getting into a car, for a six-hour drive across the Saudi desert, with a man we met in an alley.

Majed soon returned to tell me the price they’d arrived at. Because I trusted Majed’s judgement, and because the price was far less than what one would pay for a six-hour drive in the United States, I agreed. He and the men and Shadad chose the car we would take, among a few of them parked outside, and I took my suitcase from Majed’s trunk and put it in the trunk of this new car.

Majed and I said our goodbyes–which were far more perfunctory than I’d expected earlier in the week, when we were close – and Shadad and I took off.

And because I always trust people until I’m given a reason not to trust them, I was content. It was noon, and we had enough
time to make it to Riyadh. And because I was sure we would make it in time, I relaxed and planned to watch the passing scenery and possibly take a nap. But then, ten minutes into the drive, Shadad was on his phone, talking to his friend, and while on the phone he looked askance at me, a bloated grin fattening his cheeks, and delivered the ‘Yeah, American, boom boom’ line into his silver cellphone.

Now I’m very much awake. And I’m contemplating my options. I want to roll out of the car, but the car is now doing 160 km/h. We pass a tanker truck as if it’s not moving. At this speed I have no options. I’m going wherever this man wants me to go.

I want to make clear that I’ve rarely if ever felt in actual danger while travelling anywhere in the world. This could be dumb luck. It could be a combination of dumb luck, common sense, and the benefits of reciprocal trust: trust and you will be trusted. Give respect and you’ll get it.

In any case, it’s a result of a gradual evolution. When I first traveled, I was naive, sloppy, wide-eyed, and nothing happened to me. That’s probably where the dumb luck came in. Then I began to read the guidebooks, the State Department warnings, the endless elucidation of national norms, cultural cues and insults and regional dangers, and I became wary, careful, savvy. I kept my money taped inside my shoe, or strapped to my stomach. I took any kind of precaution, believing that the people of this area did this, and the people of that province did that. But then, finally, I realised no one of any region did anything I have ever expected them to do, much less anything the guidebooks said they would. Instead, they behaved as everyone behaves, which is to say they behave as individuals of damnably infinite possibility. Anyone could do anything, in theory, but most of the time everyone everywhere acts with plain bedrock decency,
helping where help is needed, guiding where guidance is necessary. It’s almost weird.

But every so often I have the feeling that a certain guide or driver or boat captain or acquaintance has a powerful kind of leverage, and could kill me if they wished, and no-one would know, no-one could trace where or at whose hands I disappeared. This is one of those situations. Only Majed knows or cares that I’m in this man’s Toyota sedan, and I am therefore at this man’s mercy. But again, I was absolutely content with and trusting of this man before he made the ‘Boom Boom’ comment. And normally I would have shaken it off, giving him the benefit of the doubt. I would normally think, He’s a young man, and he made a joke to another young man on the phone, and it has nothing to do with me.

But lately things have changed. There is new information. There are the State Department warnings in 2010, which say that Saudi Arabia is not so safe for Americans, and there are the many warnings made by hotel personnel not to get into random cars or taxis. And worst of all there is the fact that I have a friend who shared, I assume, my presumption of the goodwill of all those one might meet, and this acquaintance is currently in an Iranian prison. His name is Shane Bauer.

I’ve known Shane professionally for about three years, primarily as a translator. Back in 2008, I had just gotten back from what is now South Sudan, interviewing women who had been enslaved during the civil war, and I needed help transcribing both my interviews and some other interviews, many of which were in Arabic. So I was connected to Shane, a young man living in Oakland who spoke Arabic. He translated many of the tapes from South Sudan, and I later helped facilitate a trip he took to Darfur to make a documentary about the
rebel movement there. Then, six months later, I learned that he had been imprisoned in an Iranian prison on dubious charges of espionage. And while I’m riding in this Toyota sedan, Shane is still in the Iranian prison, fate unknown.

This is all to say that something I would have previously deemed beyond the realm of possibility – that I would personally know someone being held captive in Iran as part of an internationally denounced power play on the part of the semi-sane government of Iran – has made me more realistic about the possibility that this young Saudi driver might try to do something nefarious to me today. And then there is Majed, who was my friend, but who now might think I’m some kind of enemy. My mind, alone in this featureless desert highway, creates grotesque possibilities. Could Majed have set me up? Because he came to believe I was some intelligence agent, could he have handed me to someone who would profit from my kidnapping? These thoughts are shameful, embarrassing. But if Shane Bauer can be jailed for hiking near the Iranian border, is it so improbable that I could be disposed of in some way here in the Saudi desert?

I look at the car’s gas gauge. I have the thought that if the driver is running low, and needs to refill, I’ll be able to escape. I assume there’s no way he could stop me. I have half a foot of height and thirty pounds on him. Then again, there could be a secret rendezvous point where he’ll fill up his tank and hand me to someone who will pay some bounty…

The gas tank is full. At the very least, it will be a while before we stop for that particular reason. Looking around the dashboard, I notice that the car’s interior is still covered in plastic. This is a different way of going about things, and I’ve seen it before in other parts of the world – the reluctance to take the
plastic off new cars, new furniture, and bicycles. I notice that though the car seems new, there is a cassette player, and that the driver has many cassettes; I haven’t seen this many cassettes in one place in a decade or two. On the mirror itself is a simple sticker that says SAUDI ARABIA, lest he or any other driver of this car forget where they are. I notice, most of all, a blue sign hanging from the rear-view mirror that says HELP. Below it is an arrow pointing to an ISBN code, as if that help might come via checkout scanner.

We continue to pass other cars and trucks so fast that they seem stationary. Could he be in a hurry to bring me to his receivers, those he’s sold me to? Now he’s smoking. I try to roll down my window but it’s locked. The driver sees me trying and unlocks it. I lower the window an inch. He looks at the window disapprovingly, and I realise the effect is the opposite as desired: the smoke is crossing the car to exit above my ear. I close the window. He opens his and looks to me.

‘Smoke no good?’ he asks.

‘Smoke no good,’ I say.

‘Smoke good!’ he says, and smiles. He’s making a joke. This is promising, I think.

Sensing the beginnings of a human connection, I open my backpack. He seems unconcerned that I might be taking out something dangerous – another good sign. I take out a folder, where I have my itinerary and tickets and other documents, including a photo of my wife and two kids, which I had printed on an ink-jet printer before I left. In what now seems like prescience, I figured I might need such a photo, to show to a man like this, if such a man had ill intentions toward me and might be dissuaded by seeing me as a human, as a father; who might even find my children cute and want these children to grow up with
two parents and not one.

So I take the photo out and lay it facedown on my lap. And then I ask him if he has kids. He doesn’t understand, so I mime the cradling of a baby, then point to him.

He scoffs and says, ‘No. No baby. I am the baby!’

It’s a good joke, and we both laugh. This is good.

I turn the photo to face up, and point to it and to myself. He looks at my two children, both very young, two and five years old, and he looks at my wife, and then he sees me in the picture, and he puts it all together. He smiles, nods, and I feel like showing the photo has come off as natural, as a logical enough thing to do during a long drive. And maybe I’ve put a thought in his mind: that I am a father, that my children are young, that I seem like a regular person, probably not a spy or Halliburton contractor or collaborator with the network of government officials and oil and defence contractors who might be the target of his opprobrium.

I leave the photo on my lap for a few miles as we continue driving. He asks no questions about my family – not that he could, with the language barrier, but still, something, I hope, has changed between us. I very well could be imagining it all, but I have no choice but to hope. He flips the cassette in the tape player and lights another cigarette.