Bruce Chatwin (28 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Bruce planned to meet Erskine in Cairo after first spending a week in Turkey. On 19 August 1963, he flew to Istanbul. “Sotheby’s sounded healthy on the telephone and mercifully far off,” he scribbled in his notebook. “I loathe jet aeroplanes.” Ten years later he would write in his Patagonia notebook, after a flight to Rio Gallegos: “Yesterday afternoon confirmed my opinion that air travel is often the longest method of travelling from A to B.”
In Istanbul, his hostess was a Sotheby’s contact: Guler Tunca, a beautiful and well-connected glass collector. Guler lived with her husband and son in a white timber house on the Bosphorus. “Bruce appeared very young and unable to fend for himself,” she says. “But don’t you believe it. He was as cunning as you could hold together.”
Guler introduced Bruce to her neighbours, a family of young Ottoman princes and princesses. “The mother is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, and radiated a sort of animal attraction,” Bruce wrote in his journal. As he lay stretched out in the sun beside the Bosphorus, a large erratic speedboat appeared, containing another prince, more girls. Bruce dived into the water. Untypically, he confided his insecurities. “In their company I felt sickly, weak, hideous and incompetent. They converse in five different languages at once and look healthy.”
He explored Istanbul’s museums and markets with Guler’s son Ahmed and her friend Ziah Sofu. “To the bazaar with its sweaty crowds to see Mustafa Kent, an antiques dealer in a courtyard . . . After an affable talk a hand twists a newspaper package through the window. Unwrapped, it contains a Roman bronze, some 18 in. high, genuine, rather hideous, the Farnese Hercules. Ziah remarks ‘Good musculature, isn’t it, Bruce, eh,’ and strokes its hard patina fondly.”
He visited a caravanserai with Ziah – “which is just as a palace ought to be, a series of places to picnic” – and Haghia Sophia. As it had Byron, the building overwhelmed Bruce. “The infinity of this creation transcends everything. It makes the cross beams and cornice of a Greek temple pedestrian and earthly, the dome of St Peter’s like a glorified soap bubble.”
The rest of his time was taken up by Guler’s friends. One evening he was invited to a diplomatic dinner where he sat next to an attractive girl.
“‘Do you live here all the year round?’ I asked.
‘No, I study in Grenoble and then we have houses in Lago de Maggiore, Beverly Hills and Japan’.”
Out of his depth, Bruce invoked the scandal in his family. “All were very intrigued to hear of my great-grandfather who died of a tumour on the brain in Ventnor jail in 1902.”
Reunited with Erskine in Cairo, his joy at meeting a kindred spirit was palpable. “What a relief to laugh again with Robert! whose arm is pale pink from his injections.” Avoiding dinner invitations with local dealers, Erskine and Bruce made two or three local trips, one in an ancient Chevrolet to the Maidan pyramid. Bruce’s contemplation of the monument was interrupted by a boy who extracted an English vocabulary from inside his underwear. “The most useless document I have ever seen. The first subject was the Army. The second Love. Under the section Love the 8-year-old would learn in English the following: ‘I love, you love, he loves, a bachelor, a prostitute, my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, a sailor, a virgin, Darling, A nice boy, etc., etc.’.”
Their departure from Cairo’s Shepherd’s Hotel two days later was a comic nightmare. While Erskine settled the bill, Bruce went to collect their luggage. “In half a minute the landing was filled with characters expecting to be tipped . . . they began to announce their tides like characters in a Medieval play. ‘I am the Washerwoman.’ ‘I am the Room Steward.’ ‘I am the Breakfast Steward.’ ‘I am the Chamber Maid.’ And so on. In a fury I screamed that no one would get one cent unless I was given some help with the luggage. Nobody moved. I picked up too many suitcases and fell over a slippery rug on my left rib. Smug smiles from the onlookers. Conspiracy to prevent me to take the luggage in the lift. Ten piastres to the lift boy succeeded. Hobbled out of the lift to find Robert fuming about the bill.”
“On to Beirut, that sluttish city, where the Middle East becomes too sharp by half without the charm,” Erskine wrote to his mother. “We were only there a day, to see a horrid old merchant who tried his best to peddle fakes at us.” In an apartment full of modern French furniture mauled by woodworm, the dealer Fouad Alouf produced a marble head of Alexander the Great, telling Bruce: “‘I have refused $20,000. All the archaeologists are agreed that mine is the only head of Alexander. It has his neck and ears.’ Perhaps, but the face was almost entirely missing.”
On 3 September, they landed in Teheran. The tight-hipped uniforms of the policemen and the gesticulating copper statues of Reza Shah reminded Bruce of a Berlin suburb from the 1920s. “Considering the very great beauty of Islamic architecture in antiquity,” wrote Robert, “the Persians seem to have lost absolutely everything they had in the way of taste and refinement. They are rude to the point of nausea.” Mr Naj, a Pakistani from Manchester, bemoaned his fate to Bruce. “He cannot find English Baby Food and wonders that all Persians are corrupt and dishonest. ‘I tell you quite frankly, sir, I wish I had never left England’.” Next day they travelled to Meshed, close to the Afghan border; a pale, mud-coloured city with jade-painted doors and bricks arranged in tweed-like patterns. The superb mosque architecture included the Shrine of Meshed, covered in sheet gold. “It looks fantastic in the evening sunlight,” wrote Erskine, “glowing like the moon, with its two gold-covered minarets standing over it, side by side.” He described for his mother the figures they cut: “At the moment I’m dressed exactly like a Rider Haggard character – khaki drill shorts, Australian bush hat, water bottle at belt. Very outpost of Empire and a source of immense amusement to Persian population!” And so they prepared to enter Afghanistan.
It took several days to organise the journey from Meshed. They left in one of the oil tankers departing for Kabul. The driver arrived eleven hours late. “We drove with him for a 100 miles in acute discomfort and apprehension,” Bruce wrote to Margharita from Herat. After five hours of “cataclysmic jolting” the driver discovered he had lost his papers. At midnight in the middle of nowhere he let out a piercing scream: the receipt for his petrol load had blown away. He would have to return to Meshed. They passed an uncomfortable night in the lorry. At dawn, Bruce caught the driver escaping in a gale. “He meant to leave us in charge of the tanker until his return two days hence.”
They abandoned the tanker and got an immediate lift on an Afghan trading lorry of great character heading for Turbat-i-Sheikh Jam. The lorry delighted Bruce. It was constructed like a little cottage with drawers and cupboards and covered with painted decorations: windmills, stags at bay, robins in snow-landscape and other motifs “culled no doubt from Memsahib’s Christmas cards 30 years ago!” The cargo, wrote Erskine, appeared to be “crates of Japanese contraceptives. Symbol of progress!”
The first Afghans Bruce met responded warmly to him: “an Afghan truck driver greatly admired my ears.”
Deposited in a wayside café, they waited in the heat until, finally, a convoy of four brand-new Land Rovers “driven by dashing Afghans” agreed to take them across the border. Under the stare of wild-looking border guards with fixed bayonets – including one wearing a Southdown Bus Company overcoat – they were through. “Our arrival in Afghanistan was a moment of rare excitement,” Bruce wrote in his journal. “A moonless night and a howling gale blowing great clouds of sand across our path.”
Bruce strained in his journal for Byron’s sophistication, later dropping certain episodes into
The Songlines.
According to Erskine, the material Bruce left out is just as interesting. Erskine, for instance, remembered the “dashing Afghans” who carried them over the border as “a group of incredibly laid back, dark-glassed young men who were working every conceivable racket, including smuggling vodka. When we got to the Park Hotel in Herat at 2 a.m. we began to thank them profusely and they said: ‘Where’s the money?’ Things got nasty, Bruce emptied his pockets and I have a strong memory of it being very humiliating. We had got it wrong. The dashing Afghans had sold us a lift, but we didn’t realise it.”
The Songlines.
According to Erskine, the material Bruce left out is just as interesting. Erskine, for instance, remembered the “dashing Afghans” who carried them over the border as “a group of incredibly laid back, dark-glassed young men who were working every conceivable racket, including smuggling vodka. When we got to the Park Hotel in Herat at 2 a.m. we began to thank them profusely and they said: ‘Where’s the money?’ Things got nasty, Bruce emptied his pockets and I have a strong memory of it being very humiliating. We had got it wrong. The dashing Afghans had sold us a lift, but we didn’t realise it.”
Bruce saw what he expected to see from his Marlborough reading of Byron. “No sumptuary laws here,” he wrote of Herat, responding to the sight of silk cloaks worn jauntily off the shoulder and turbans of impossible proportions in yellow and blue. “Pompeii must have looked like this.” At first, his glances were rewarded. Herat was an entirely Eastern city, with no traffic lights or factories. “The bazaar is really Arabian nights! It’s marvellous here!” Erskine told his mother.
Bruce explored the city. An aged weaver wore a white sharkskin smoking-jacket decorated with Swastikas. In the fruit stall, a wrapping of pink silk gauze protected the peaches from flies. Under the peach trees, Bruce watched professional scribes write letters. “On the desk were the entire letters of Herat for one day (about 30). Stamps are kept in a rose-printed chintz bag.” Most incredible was the bazaar, which he visited in a curricle jingling with bells and hung with red pompons. “All women are in yashmaks. The men storm about with artificial ferocity, flashing dark and disdainful glances. In fact, their eyes are made up, but then the outward appearance is all important.”
Descending through an arch, Bruce found himself in a vast caravanserai, with two layers of arches, built in the time when Herat was one of the great trading posts in Asia. “Alas, the trans-Asiatic camel trains don’t come there any more, but this arcaded enclosure has another use. It has become a clothes market largely for women.” From every arch, multicoloured gowns flapped in the wind. They were not ordinary clothes. “A genius has bought up a gigantic horde of American ladies dresses.” Sitting under a peach tree and a blue sky of wheeling kites, he itemised the cuts to Margharita:
“From Maine to Texas, from Chicago to Hollywood the wardrobes of thousands of American ladies over 40 years are hanging into the breeze. Gowns that could have been worn by Mary Pickford, shiny black velvet with no back, or by Clara Bow, red lace and bead fringes, Jean Harlow, flamingo-pink crêpe off the shoulder with sequin butterflies on the hips, Shirley Temple, bows and pink lace, the folk-weave skirts they square-danced in, the crinolines they waltzed in, fiery sheaths they tangoed in, utility frocks they won the War in, the New Look, the A line, the H line, the X line, all are there, just waiting for some Afghan lady to descend from her mud-built mountain village and choose the dress of her dreams all to be closely concealed under her yashmak. I am sure she will get far more pleasure from it than its original owner.”
The Afghanistan Bruce encountered had changed since Byron’s visit in 1933. A zealous restoration programme had ruined many of the minarets and domes in
The Road to Oxiana.
In Herat, Bruce visited the Mausoleum of Gohar Shad. Set up for it by Byron’s description, his heart sank as they drove up to the newly constructed walls. “Furiously impatient to see the buildings for which I had travelled so far, I ran the length of the wall, found an open gate and bounded up an orderly garden planted with rows of pines and mulberry trees, artificially contrived beds of geraniums and petunias . . . My hopes are raised at the sight of the dome of the Mausoleum rising above the pines, to be dashed as I approached. Since Robert Byron wrote, the whole thing has been ham-fistedly restored and restored to look like a pump station in buff brick.”
The Road to Oxiana.
In Herat, Bruce visited the Mausoleum of Gohar Shad. Set up for it by Byron’s description, his heart sank as they drove up to the newly constructed walls. “Furiously impatient to see the buildings for which I had travelled so far, I ran the length of the wall, found an open gate and bounded up an orderly garden planted with rows of pines and mulberry trees, artificially contrived beds of geraniums and petunias . . . My hopes are raised at the sight of the dome of the Mausoleum rising above the pines, to be dashed as I approached. Since Robert Byron wrote, the whole thing has been ham-fistedly restored and restored to look like a pump station in buff brick.”
They were also on a buying trip. After they let it be known that they were fully prepared to buy ancient things someone came up and whispered “I have golden helmet”. Imagining some splendid Achaemenid object, they agreed with much shushing to be led down a tiny street. Under a bed was a bundle – and out it came: a Prince of Wales Dragoon Guard’s helmet, left over from one of the Afghan wars.
A little apprehensive at having to take an Afghanistan internal flight, they pressed on to the capital. Kabul had a welcome freshness after the heat of Herat, but architecturally it resembled a Balkan town, with ugly modern bungalows sprawling into the suburbs. Outside Kabul, they traced Byron’s steps to Babur’s tomb, one of the architectural marvels of the Mughal Empire, where they experienced another letdown. Shah Jahan’s white marble pavilion, built in the 1640s and resembling a blown-up ivory casket, was in ruins. At dinner with the British Council representative, they met the Afghan official in charge of cultural affairs. Bruce laid into him. “‘Why,’ we asked, ‘should a beautiful little building that is irreplaceable be allowed to disappear at the expense of the hideous concrete fountain that plays outside the Kyhber Restaurant?’” The effect was instantaneous. His interest aroused, Mr Manash asked: “How much would it cost to mend the pavilion?” Erskine guessed: “Oh, $10,000.” Manash thought for a moment, nodded and said, “Yes, good!” Erskine realised that Manash thought he was offering to buy the pavilion. “I whispered to Bruce, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to sell it to us!’ We fled.”
At the pool of the International Club they swam with the Duke Ellington band, but Kabul held few other attractions. “Robert is sick and tired of the place. ‘It isn’t a city, it’s a concrete camp where nothing works.’ He has become very morose.” Whenever Bruce asked what he wanted, Erskine replied, “Cambridge College Ale.”
On 24 September, after exploring the Ghorbend valley and making a dash over the Khyber into Peshawar, they returned to the Afghan capital. They had spent £1,050 on antiquities in Afghanistan, bringing the total cost of the expedition to £4,451. “We pray that the aeroplane will leave,” wrote Bruce.
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