Full Tilt (4 page)

At first I was appalled by this catastrophe. It had taken me two hours to cycle the ten miles from Pirot and there was nothing I wanted to do less than return there. Then I saw the concrete and steel railway bridge on my left and waded towards it through a flooded field. First I made sure that there were no trains coming (a precaution easily taken, as Yugoslav trains emit volcanic clouds of smoke, and are constantly whistling excited variations on an unidentifiable theme) before climbing with Roz on to the line, and crossing the bridge, to join the road again through a field three feet deep in water. By this time worrying about pneumonia seemed futile; for days I had been living in a state of permanent saturation from the waist down, so that the only sensible reaction was lots of rum and no fuss.

While cycling the two miles from Dimitrovgrad to the Bulgarian frontier my attention was equally divided between the odd things that craters in the road can do to one’s lunch and the excitement of approaching for the first time the sinister Iron Curtain. At each bend I looked eagerly for tangled masses of barbed wire, watch-towers manned by vigilant soldiers armed with machine-guns and
binoculars
, and alert policemen keenly observing every movement for miles around. But not one of these thrilling phenomena appeared and it was only when I saw a locked, five-foot high gate across the road that I realised I had arrived at the significant point.

Looking around, I saw a neat little bungalow beside the road which, though it didn’t actually say so, was obviously the Police-cum-Customs post. I knocked loudly on the open hall-door, got no reply, entered and knocked on each of the doors leading out of the hall, with no more success, and finally opened one of them, yelling and whistling hopefully; stamps on my passport are the only souvenirs that I can afford to collect, and I didn’t want to be cheated of this one. Still nothing happened, and I stood in the doorway viewing the desk and
reflecting that if I wanted to enter the spy business here was my chance to make away with a fine collection of vitally important seals. Finally I left the building, to investigate the possibilities of getting into Bulgaria unaided.

If one looked hard enough, a half-hearted barbed-wire fence was visible stretching away from the road in either direction, marking the frontier. It was so like the kind of ineffectual barrier that some Irish farmers put up to prevent their sheep from straying that I felt quite home-sick. I had no difficulty in dragging Roz through one of the many gaps made by the local peasants and then, returning to the main road, I entered the insignificant little house which is Bulgaria’s Northern Frontier Fortress. Again my knock remained unanswered, but this time, when I opened a door leading out of the hall, I found a policeman happily dozing by the stove, with a cat and two kittens on his lap. I immediately diagnosed that he was a
nice
policeman, and when I had gently roused him, and he had recovered from the shock of being required to function officially, I had my diagnosis confirmed.

In December, the Bulgarian Embassy in London had issued me with a visa valid for only four days. Now this genial policeman, who spoke fluent English, took one look at the card, said that it was ridiculous, and issued me with a new visa entitling me to stay in Bulgaria as long as I wished! After which we sat by the stove and amiably discussed our two countries over glasses of brandy.

On leaving the Bulgarian frontier-post, I propped Roz against a tree and returned to Yugoslavia, in another attempt to obtain my souvenir passport-stamp. By now a pathetically bored-looking young man was sitting at the desk, listlessly attempting to solve a crossword puzzle. I explained how it was that my passport had received a Bulgarian entry stamp before it had had a Yugoslav exit one, and he said wearily that he had gone into Dimitrovgrad for a hot lunch. Obviously, at both frontier-posts, the attitude was that not even spies, much less tourists, would operate in the prevailing weather.

I had entered my first orthodox Communist country as a ‘neutral’
equally suspicious of both pro- and anti-Communist propaganda, but after a week in Bulgaria I left it as an admirer of the limited good that Communism can achieve within less than two decades.

Everywhere I was received with spontaneous friendliness and if any Secret Police had me under surveillance they were very discreet indeed. My movements remained completely unrestricted and I spent two nights as a guest in the households of a factory-worker and a collective farmer, where the standard of living was comparable with that of present-day Irish workers. On my last night I stayed at the home of a regional Party leader and was interested to observe that his standard of living was almost on a par with that of the ordinary workers. Nowhere did I see any evidence of extreme poverty and the average citizen – a cheerful, singularly unoppressed-looking individual – appeared to be adequately clothed, housed and fed.

Admittedly, this spectacular improvement in Bulgaria’s standard of living has been gained at the cost of religious and intellectual freedom, though judging by some conversations I had with the younger
generation
it will not be long before the phoenix of the individual human spirit rises again from its ashes.

Personally I recoil at once from regimentation and I am far too reactionary to regard ‘backward peasants’ as being
ipso facto
in need of modernisation; yet in fairness I must give my personal impression of that side of the Communist coin which is not popular among Western propagandists.

I was able to cycle almost all the way from Cuprija to Istanbul, through Bulgaria and Turkey-in-Europe, but the Turkish highlands were still under snow so here again we became dependent on buses and trucks – when such vehicles could operate between blizzards. Mercifully the temperature was not quite as low as it had been in Europe, but the quantity of snow was far in excess of anything I had yet experienced; it was common to see fifty-foot high drifts, shaped so exquisitely by the wind that I still catch my breath at the memory.

En route to Erzurum our bus barely escaped being entombed in snow. We were stuck in a drift on a narrow mountain road and the
gallant snowplough which had come to rescue us skidded over a precipice, killing both men on board. Another snowplough then set out from the opposite direction but its progress was understandably slow and meanwhile the blizzard began again. As we waited the snow piled higher and higher around us, its silent softness contrasting eerily with the whine of the gale through the pass.

It is on occasions such as these that I thank God for my sanguine temperament, which refuses to allow me to believe in disaster until it is finally manifest, and I noticed that my comrades in distress were equally well fortified against panic by their fatalistic acceptance of Allah’s Will. Yet perhaps we were all more apprehensive than we had allowed ourselves to recognise, for we cheered very loudly when the second snowplough eventually appeared.

An ancient Jewish legend says that the Kurds are descended from four hundred virgins who were deflowered by devils while on their way to King Solomon’s court and my own experiences in both Turkish and Persian Azerbaijan prompt me to accept this genealogy as an historic fact.

At Dogubayzit, the last little town en route to the Persian
frontier-post
, I stayed in the local doss-house, where my bedroom was a tiny box leading off the wide loft which accommodated the majority of the ‘Otel’s’ patrons. This room had a flimsy door, without any fastening, and there was no movable piece of furniture which could have been placed against it as a security measure. The squalid bedding was inhabited by a host of energetic fleas, but their attentions were wasted on me and within minutes of retiring I was sound asleep.

Some hours later I awoke to find myself bereft of bedding and to see a six-foot, scantily-clad Kurd bending over me in the moonlight. My gun was beneath the pillow and one shot fired at the ceiling concluded the matter. I felt afterwards that my suitor had showed up rather badly; a more ardent admirer, of his physique, could probably have disarmed me without much difficulty.

As a result of the loud report and my visitor’s rapid retreat there was a stirring of many bodies on the floor outside my room and a few
sleepy mutterings – then quiet. Obviously gunshots in the small hours are not regarded locally as signs of an emergency.

By now I had finally escaped from snow and ice and on the following morning came one of the most glorious experiences of the entire journey – a fifteen-mile cycle-run in perfect weather around the base of Mount Ararat. This extraordinary mountain, which inspires the most complex emotions in the least imaginative traveller, affected me so deeply that I have thought of it ever since as a personality encountered, rather than a landscape observed.

Then came the Persian frontier – the most closely guarded we had yet crossed – and now Roz and I were really in our stride, cycling day after day beneath a sky of intense blue, through wild mountains whose solitude and beauty surpassed anything I had been able to imagine during my day-dreams about this journey. Particularly I remember the unique purity of the light, which gave to every variation of every colour an individual vitality and which lucidly emphasised every line, curve and angle. Here, for the first time, I became fully aware of light as something positive, rather than as a taken-for-granted aid to perceiving objects.

Between Tabriz and the Caspian coast the terrain becomes fiercely wild and the few inhabitants match it. One midday when I was sitting eating my lunch at the edge of the track, near a hairpin bend
overlooking
a deep valley, three elderly men came round the bend, carrying spades on their shoulders. As a little farming village lay some two miles back this seemed to me a most natural sight, but then, as I was about to salute the group, two of them seized Roz, who was leaning against the cliff a few yards away, and made off down the track with her, while the third advanced towards me, his spade raised threateningly. I fired over his head and quickly backed along the edge of the track, ready to fire again, but the amateur bandits had had enough and bolted like rabbits, mercifully abandoning Roz.

Many experienced travellers have since advised me that it is wiser to go unarmed in such areas, where a gun can provoke more trouble than it averts. Obviously, this would be true if one became involved with genuine armed bandits – yet a ·25 does have its uses.

However, my next misadventure was such that I judged it best not to produce the pistol. Passing through Adabile at lunchtime on a cold day (we had now risen to a considerable altitude) I paused to treat myself to a hot meal in an eating-house. As usual Roz and I attracted a curious crowd and soon a young police officer, gorgeously uniformed and braided, approached me to say that as this was a Restricted Area, because of Russia’s proximity, I must accompany him to the
police-barracks
to fill in some forms. My inbred trust in police had not yet been undermined so, having finished my lunch, I innocently followed him through a maze of alleyways between mud houses. At last he turned into a little compound with a well in the centre, ushered me through a doorway, locked the door and put the key in his trouser pocket. Only then did I realise that we were alone in an obviously empty private house.

At first my captor was ingratiatingly amiable. But soon, having discovered that European women are not as obliging as he had supposed them to be, he lost all control, and the ensuing scene was too sordid for repetition. As my adversary was armed with a revolver I kept my gun in my pocket and used unprintable tactics to reduce him to a state of temporary agony. During this respite I grabbed his trousers, which by then were lying on the floor, fled to the hallway, found the key, unlocked the door just as my victim appeared behind me, and raced back through the alleyways to the centre of the town.

It is perhaps understandable that, of all the regions I travelled through, Azerbaijan is the only one I would not wish to revisit alone.

Roz and I arrived in Teheran on 20 March, the eve of the Shiah Muslims’ New Year of 1342, and the Now Ruz Festival involved me in a delay of five days. Before continuing my journey I had to get a visa for Afghanistan, collect a spare tyre from the Customs and change a travellers’ cheque into Afghan currency – none of which transactions would be possible until the conclusion of the Now Ruz celebrations.

Today a deep depression has moved over Dervla; I presented myself to the Afghan Embassy at 9 a.m. this morning, only to be told that under no circumstances whatever would they grant a visa to a woman who intended cycling alone through Afghanistan. But if this is true, why wasn’t I told of the ruling at the Afghan Embassy in London? Apparently about six years ago a lone Swedish woman motorist was carved up into small pieces, since when solitary female travellers have been banned – or so they say here. Probably I could easily get a visa in New Delhi, as official decisions rarely confirm each other in this part of the world: but that’s not much consolation at the moment. Of course everyone at the Embassy was very sorry to frustrate me thus and they offered to provide free transport from here to Kabul and looked bewildered when I patiently pointed out that I wanted to cycle because I liked cycling, not because of economic distress. I also pointed out that women get murdered in Europe with monotonous regularity and that the hazards of travelling alone through their country were probably no greater than the hazards of doing likewise in Britain or France. But they refused to be swayed by my eloquence, so this evening it looks as though I’m beaten. However, since leaving the Embassy I’ve incubated a few nefarious schemes to be tried out tomorrow.

This afternoon, having expensively cut through interminable lengths of red tape, I extricated my tyre from the Customs. Those who know assure me that I’m very lucky to have received a parcel posted from Dublin on only 8 January. Yesterday one of my hosts received a letter
sent from Brussels by airmail on 18 November, and letters posted in Teheran to Teheran addresses often spend a week en route.

The temperature has been around 72° F. for the past few days but this evening a cool wind rose suddenly and we’ve had a heavy, homelike shower.

The Afghans have the most kindly way of trying to thwart one. On arrival at the Embassy this morning, I was received like an old friend and informed that all arrangements had been made for my safe transport to Kabul. Two German motorists – a writer and a painter – were enlisted for the purpose and had very kindly agreed to take on Roz and myself, without even seeing how presentable or otherwise either of us might be. The idea was that I’d be entered like a camera or a radio on their passports, so that they’d have to produce me to the police in Kabul and I couldn’t get away on Roz once we’re over the frontier without
them
being involved in trouble. Being thus reduced to the status of a piece of luggage naturally did no good to my
amour propre,
but with everyone being so pleasantly insistent on my reaching India alive I couldn’t decently lose my temper. This lightning move – as it was by local standards – kiboshed one of my nefarious schemes, so having profusely thanked all concerned, I said that I had an important appointment in half an hour and that I would be back later to fill in and sign the countless relevant documents. Then I sped off by taxi to the Embassy of a ‘Friendly Power’ where I set about implementing the second nefarious scheme.

Having pleaded my way into the office of a sufficiently senior man, I outlined my miserable predicament and begged for a letter written on his government’s behalf requesting the Afghan Government to grant bearer a visa for a month’s travelling by cycle through Afghanistan at her own risk. I added that no one need worry about the consequences if I vanished, as none of my relatives are close enough to ‘create’. Fortunately, the victim of my machinations was an upholder of Free Enterprise and the Liberty of the Individual. He looked at me in silence for a moment, then said, ‘Well, I suppose if visas had been required in
1492, the New World would not have been discovered. All right – I’ll play ball. But remember that all this is very unofficial and unbecoming to my position and I’m depending on you to come out alive at the other end, for my sake – which I somehow think you will do.’ Then he proceeded to devise a most impressive document, all red ribbons and massive seals and flourishing signatures, in which concoction he took a fatherly pride. So now I simply
cannot
allow myself to be murdered in Afghanistan!

Half an hour later I was back in the Afghan Embassy, waving the Ruritanian-looking scroll with ill-concealed triumph. Not surprisingly, it worked. No one was happy at the thought of me being granted a visa, but since another state had nobly elected to hold the baby they gloomily agreed – against their better judgement, underlined – to give the lunatic her head. However, Kabul has to be contacted so I won’t have everything signed, sealed and delivered until the 30th; but I’m too elated tonight to fuss about another few days’ delay.

At a party yesterday evening I met three Pakistani officers – a general, a brigadier and a colonel – who are here on a three-months’ military mission and who immediately took me under their collective wing. They are all Pathans and are the first people I’ve met who do
not
expect me to be murdered in Afghanistan. For this, among other reasons, I find their company singularly congenial; being generally regarded as something next door to a corpse becomes tedious after a while. Acting on their cheerfully original assumption that I will eventually cross the Khyber Pass in one piece, they have advised me on which parts of Pakistan are most worth seeing and have given me a list of addresses of their friends and relatives all along my route. Colonel Jahan Zeb went to enormous trouble to plan an itinerary for me, which included a detour to the Tribal Territory of Gilgit, so now all is set fair for Pakistan and I’m assured I’ll have the Army behind me there – which is quite something in a country now run by the Army!

On leaving Constantinople, where one spends a small fortune on beggars, I had resolved to give nothing to anyone during the rest of the journey lest I end up with a begging-bowl myself. But of course Persia has undermined that resolution: the pathetic wretches seen here simply can’t be ignored. (Many of them in the towns and villages are lepers diagnosed too late for treatment – even if treatment were available in their area, which it often isn’t – and left to die slowly at home.) So now I’ve got the problem worked out systematically. I reckon that by being a guest at my friend’s house I’m saving £1 a day, which I distribute as baksheesh. This obviously is an oblique form of selfishness; one couldn’t come home after a walk through Teheran and settle down to enjoy the luxuries of Capitalism if one hadn’t done something, however trivial, to alleviate the surrounding misery. Yet it’s well to remember that this misery is not as total or as neglected as it appears to be. One of the religious duties of Muslims – as of Christians – is to give alms to the needy and the vast majority of Muslims of every sect regularly fulfil this duty in proportion to their means. In effect the citizens of these countries provide for their deprived brothers as generously as do the tax-paying citizens of a Welfare State and the disparity between the circumstances of the disabled of Persia and the disabled of Britain is no greater than that between the circumstances of the working men of the two countries: in fact it may well be less, though the distribution of funds is more haphazard. Also the Muslim method of providing ‘Social Services’ has the important virtue of maintaining a natural and humane link between individuals. It is obviously more desirable to have citizens giving to beggars voluntarily, out of compassion, rather than to have them grumblingly paying taxes to an impersonal government which dispenses what is left, after its civil servants have been paid, to unknown sufferers who are mere names in a filing cabinet.

Similarly, the bribery which is so rife here, is another, though much less desirable form of indirect taxation; everyone is paid so inadequately that they simply augment their official income as best they can from
day to day – a situation accepted by all with much the same brand of resentful resignation as we show towards tax-paying. House-owners pay the local police a regular monthly sum to ensure that their homes and cars will be properly guarded – and if some newcomer refuses to pay on principle his home will be the inevitable target for the next burglary. I’ve asked several responsible Persians why an orthodox tax isn’t imposed and their answer was that you can’t do that sort of thing with a mainly illiterate population and that the people who can afford property which needs protection can also afford to subsidise the police. But of course this is only one example and bribery is the determining factor in every sphere of activity from the university professor’s correction of exam papers down to the dustman’s collection of garbage. I must admit that it’s difficult to get adjusted to such a fetid atmosphere, in which one is always conscious of the power of money over integrity.

Today I’ve been receiving Good Advice in bulk from various Responsible Persons. H.I.M. the Shah was to have gone to Meshed this morning but the papers announced that his trip has been cancelled because of ‘bad weather’; as the weather at the moment is perfection (74°F. and cloudless sky) everyone thinks the government a bit dim for not inventing a better excuse. The fact is that the Mullahs are now stirring up serious trouble there about Land Redistribution and Women’s Emancipation and as they still have a very strong grip in that area, and are capable of working certain sections of the people into an anti-Shah frenzy, it was judged wiser for H.I.M. to avoid the Holy City just now. (Since I left Tabriz, two women have been killed there in Mullah-provoked anti-Women’s Emancipation riots.) As Meshed is the next – and last – Persian city on my route I am being warned repeatedly that I must do my best to look like a man in that area. Also I’m to be very careful about using my camera between here and there as, if I were accidentally to include even a distant mosque in a picture and the crowd happened to be in the mood, I could be stoned and possibly seriously injured, as recently happened to two over-keen French photographers.

I’ve also been advised that hotel bedrooms without locks call for empty bottles balanced on top of the door to ensure that one is not taken altogether by surprise should wandering lechers have designs on one’s virtue. (As creating empty bottles is one of the few things I’m good at, this is an appropriate suggestion.) However, I intend staying as often as possible in gendarmerie barracks between here and
Afghanistan,
as the Persian gendarmerie is a force existing primarily to protect travellers and is reputedly more dependable than other branches of the national police – how much more dependable remains to be seen.

Tonight I enjoyed a farewell hooley with my Pakistani friends – though hooley is hardly the
mot juste
as they drink only water. I suppose, if one will mix with good Muslims, it’s only to be expected that they’ll open for themselves another bottle of Pure Water (guaranteed) every time they refill your glass. And certainly Colonel Zeb needs no alcohol to stimulate his brain or improve his masterly skill in the use of the English language: quite apart from the
considerable
interest of what he has to say on an incredibly wide variety of topics, it’s a joy to merely hear him
saying
it. I haven’t enjoyed such a good evening’s discussion for a long time: the five of us started talking at 6 p.m. and got so involved on so many fascinating points that no one wanted to break it up and we didn’t have dinner till 10.40 p.m.! It’s now 2.10 a.m. so, as I’m planning an early start, some sleep might not be a bad idea.