Into Thick Air (33 page)

“I like this,” said Jack, delivering bits of autobiography over the howl of music. “Merchant Marine. Was in Yuma not far from Tucson for nine years. Ex-wife still there.”

Sports Girl returned with the beer. She took a swallow with a needlessly complete lip lock around the neck of the bottle, then put one leg up on the pool table for the sole purpose of demonstrating her remarkable flexibility. I thought, She really
is
a Sports Girl.

Jack rambled, “I've gone back to Yuma, but prefer this.”

Sports Girl moved in. As if I were invisible, she kissed Jack and said, “
You
should come with me.”

“But what would all my wives say?”

Her sports tongue ran a nice 360 around her lips, leaving a faultlessly wet O in its wake. She then issued an oral invitation that, despite my present agnostic condition, reminded me that if I'd repeated her words during my Catholic childhood I'd have been socked with a penance of one hundred Hail Marys, minimum.

Jack said, “I've got to work tomorrow. You' ll keep me up all night.”

He was a playful devil. Sports Girl grabbed a cue and worked on the geometry of a shot. Jack turned to me and said, “Most Americans never heard of Djibouti. If they knew the girls looked like this. . . . Of course, most are from Ethiopia. And my favorite, the best in the world, are in Novorossiysk. Black Sea. Maybe it's the rebel spirit, the first taste of competition. They wear see-through blouses. Beautiful.”

Sports Girl didn't mind the competition. She turned to show us her rear, then bent over and backed slowly into Jack, like trains coupling.

Jack's eyes bulged, but he managed to hang onto his drink.

Sports Girl decoupled, turned, and admired her effect on Jack.

“Ha! You stand in attention for me!”

That was the last I saw of Jack.

 

THE NEXT MORNING I picked up the immense plastic telephone in room 9 and called a woman. I knew her only from a phone call months earlier.
While digging for information, I'd rung the only fancy hotel in Djibouti Town, the Sheraton, and asked if there was any tourist information they could send my way. A woman had said, no—but perhaps I would like some postcards from the hotel?

A month later I'd received an envelope with four picture postcards, each personally annotated by Roda Omar Hosh. One read, “There are two kinds of people in Djibouti, the Somalian and the Afar. The Afar are living in the north and the Somalian in the south, so the north is more beautiful.

“I hope you will appreciate all these pictures. I will tell you good-bye and see you soon.”

This morning I told Roda I'd arrived, with my bike, for the ride to Lac Assal. I took the silence that followed as an opportunity to further explain that I would leave Djibouti Town in two days or so, and because Assal was only a hundred miles away I would also take side trips to the French enclave of Arta and to one of the oldest seaports in East Africa, Tadjoura.

Roda was appalled.

“You will ride a bicycle? By yourself? I thought you were going on a bus with other tourists. Are you bringing a
pistola
with you?”

No
pistola
, I said, although suddenly I wished I had a grenade launcher. I asked Roda, Should I worry? Has something bad happened to a traveler in Djibouti?

“Who knows what these people are like? And what about wild animals? If you sleep in the desert alone, they can eat you.”

This calmed me: she had no idea. I promised to visit that evening at the Sheraton. Meanwhile, I packed a liter of Yemeni water and went for a walk. The fish at the Maskali was again superb, but when the
khat
arrived I headed to the Coiffure Vijay for a shave, thinking I'd better not show up at the Sheraton with a dribble of green on my chin. The dapper barber in a pearl-buttoned shirt was from Bombay. He unwrapped a fresh blade and assured me the razor was cleaned with alcohol. He said no more. There was no need to mention AIDS.

Only a block north of my earlier wanderings, I found the French Legionnaires, unsmiling men in silly white hats, in the Semiramis supermarket. Under vents blowing cool dry air was a faux country store, with wheels of
Roquefort and fruit bins made of rough-sawn wood, heaped with carrots and mangoes.

It all had come, as I had, on Air France. One of its thrice-weekly flights had arrived the evening I found Roda at the Sheraton. She was smart and trim in her uniform, retrieving a fax at the Business Center. The hotel was a tropical Arab fantasy of lattice ceilings and narcotic fans. In the casino, androgynous dealers flicked cards across green felt and sent roulette balls into orbit with a snap of their fingers. A gargantuan buffet was watched over by men dressed like jockeys in black-and-white checkered slacks and shirts.

Roda excused herself; the Air France passengers needed attention. Tomorrow there would be a conference on antipersonnel mines. Tonight, a steady stream of women headed into a reception room. At one end stood a pair of well-stuffed armchairs upholstered in gold, atop a platform with a backdrop of red velour and white lace bunting. A woman invited me in. There were a hundred women seated in rows, all ages and all done up expensively in shimmering fabrics and head scarves. A few wore full veils, but far more displayed henna tattoos in red and blue on their hands and feet—the marks of marriage.

More women arrived. With some discomfort I wondered what would happen when the men arrived and found two hundred women and me. Fortunately, the men were musicians, carrying a synthesizer and all sorts of drums. On the first note the women let loose with a trilling howl like Indians in an old western.

In rushed four more men, with video cameras and floodlights. The music swelled, an electronic pounding, and about a dozen women began to dance. I was hoping it was a coronation, but then a seven-tiered wedding cake arrived and was placed on a long table laden with pizza squares. I slipped out and found Roda at the gift shop.

“This is an Arab marriage,” she said. “Afar and Somali marriages are similar—the differences are mostly the costumes. But always the woman has a party for all her friends. Not for the men.

“Usually we marry our cousin. My fiancé is the cousin of my mother's cousin. Often it is first cousin, and most always it is arranged. Mine was
arranged by my family when I was sixteen. I'm twenty-two now, waiting for him to finish his studies. Some women don't like these arranged weddings—they escape to Europe, or America.”

I asked, When is your wedding, Roda?

“In May.” She paused and smoothed her skirt. It was already smooth. “But I will not be there. He loves me, and his family paid for me, but I do not love him. I have known him since we were children; we're like brother and sister, not man and wife. I don't want to be his wife for the rest of my life. Marriage should be for life, yes?

“So I will escape, too. Maybe to America. United States, or Canada. Perhaps you can give me an invitation so I can get a visa?”

I'm not sure it's that simple.

“I think it is if I have the money for a one-month vacation—then I never come back. I have a brother in Quebec.”

An enormous hubbub erupted from the reception hall. Roda said, “Here comes the bride.”

Besieged by the twin video teams, the newlyweds entered. Her hair was a tower of ringlets held aloft by invisible adhesives and a tiara. Her white gown had enough sequins to make Liberace self-conscious. A Cleopatra bracelet clenched her bicep.

The terrified groom, his pupils reduced to pinpricks by the lights, shuffled like a robot past the throng of trilling women. Five minutes later the couple reached their thrones, sweating madly, and exchanged leis of white flowers. Each of the two hundred women insisted on photographing the lucky couple.

No wonder Roda wanted to escape. I took a taxi back to the Palace and turned on CNN to discover that in 1994 Oman became the first Arab nation to give women the right to vote.

 

THE SHERATON was not alone on the northern tip of Djibouti Town. Most of the embassies were clustered nearby, perched on land's end like first-class passengers on the bow of a ship.

A listing ship, it seemed, after I screwed together my bike and rolled it outside. I had an appointment at the American embassy for a “security
briefing.” The miserable refugees outside my hotel posed little danger. Too wasted to beg, they lay with stick limbs folded in whatever shade they could find. The more fortunate had a scrap of cardboard to lie on. I felt like a king and a pig.

Dark clouds massed in the north. It was easy to recognize the embassy behind its concentric rings of concrete blast barriers, rolls of barbed wire, and an inner wall with a bulletproof security station. I was relieved of my camera, then I passed through a metal detector and a gate into a waiting room. For a minute my only company was Mr. Osama bin Laden, staring with oddly serene eyes from a poster announcing a $5 million bounty on his head.

Lauren May stepped in, shook hands, and introduced me to the security officer. He looked like a man who had a
pistola
strapped to his ankle. With my fine French map unfolded, he swiftly indicated the locations of land mines.

“Be on the lookout,” he summarized in a square-chinned way, “anywhere north of Lac Assal and Tadjoura.”

I mentioned that this would make camping tough.

Ms. May said, “There is nothing to do in any case in or around Tadjoura.”

I said that the Djiboutians had been pretty nice.

“That's because you're not French.”

Pedaling back, I realized that now I truly looked French, for they were the only ones with bicycles. The machines were locked outside the Semiramis market, where I picked up crepes, Laughing Cow cheese, and Madeleine rolls for the ride into the desert. Later, I stopped at the Three Stars café for a fruit drink. Distracted by Mariah Carey on French MTV, I neglected my usual practice of supplying my own bottled water. The drink arrived in an enormous sherbet glass, beaded with condensation, and after one sip my taste buds said,
Why not?

Twelve hours later, in the predawn, I woke with a twisted gut that said,
How could you be so stupid?
I was packed and ready to roll, yet the only departure that morning would be the contents of my stomach and intestines, from both ends.

I slept fitfully until 2 PM. The spasms of fluid loss would not stop. I ended up in the office of Dr. Bruno dell'Aquila. The stacks of magazines and odor of alcohol were exactly like Dr. Pellerito's in Tucson, but this office had a poster proclaiming:
Don't Mutilate Women
. It was a simple gruesome cartoon of blood dripping from a blade and a girl's crotch, part of a government effort to curtail the Horn of Africa custom of female circumcision.

I waited twenty minutes. Dr. dell'Aquila wore very small black wire-rimmed glasses that would have been a mistake on me but looked suave on an Italian. After a brief exam he said, “This is very common this week—there is something going around Djibouti Town. It is likely bacteria, like
Salmonella.
You will get better in two to three days.”

He prescribed four drugs for my relief. The Horn of Africa Pharmacy was across the street in a concrete cube. It could have been a brothel, but inside its electric doors the staff swiftly filled my prescriptions, and minutes later I stood speechless by the optical checkout scanner. Everything, from doctor to druggist, had taken less than $50 and one hour, without an appointment.

Recovery took somewhat longer, but at least I had a chance to visit the “Cultural Center” and discover another Djiboutian surprise.

“The Center has moved,” said the woman behind a desk holding volumes of the French Civil Code and papers weighted by a stout shell shaped like a turban. A black robe hung from a peg. A Djiboutian lawyer, her name was Hasna Barkat.

What, may I ask, is your specialty?

She smiled at my naiveté and said, “Commercial. Civil. Criminal. Everything. A lawyer does not specialize in Djibouti.”

How many lawyers are there?

“Twelve.”

Twelve! In all of Djibouti?

“Djibouti is a small country. And it is not, as in some other countries, the first reflex of the people to seek a lawyer. If there is a dispute, it is brought to the elders.”

These words made Djibouti seem so . . . civilized.

Yet that night my sleep was uneasy. It was thirty miles and a climb of 2,500 feet to the first town en route to Lac Assal—a long way for a leaky man. And although everyone from whores to lawyers had treated me well, I'd not ventured out of a tourist preserve of maybe three square miles. Like a deer in a national park without hunters, I was a coddled curiosity.
Look, honey, it's an American—and he's tame!

The sunrise colored the bottoms of untroubled clouds. They were moving inland. I got on my bike and pedaled out of town.

 

THE FIRST REFUGEE CAMP is strewn across a plain of fist-sized stones outside of Djibouti Town. It's hundreds of shelters built of any scrap of plastic, palm leaf, metal, or cardboard big enough to make shade, and held in place with cord and rocks. The French map calls this a “Spontaneous Habitation.”

In occasional clearings by the road, kids chase cans or balls. I expect them to yell and wave when I pass. Instead they sprint for me. Out of the swarm of a hundred, one rushes up and grabs my brake lever and nearly topples me. Most of the kids scream and laugh and back off, but the bolder ones snatch up rocks, and in an instant I'm more target than tourist.

At the moment there is no time for fear, only self-preservation. I jump on the pedals. The bike is light—I've no computer, no telephone, no
pistola
—and the wind's up and at my back. One rock smacks my leg, and then I'm gone.