NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (57 page)

On deck after dinner, watching the Rosetta lighthouse winking from the Egyptian shore, at the narrow mouth of the Rashid Nile, Onan said—speaking as though I were not present—“Paul ran away from Alexandria. Where did he go?”

“There is something about this man,” Samih Pasha said, and his mustache
lifted as he smiled at me. He then tapped the side of his nose in a gesture of suspicion. “Something—I don’t know what.”

“I had business to attend to,” I said.

“We saw the pyramids,” Fikret said. “But for just a little while. Fifteen minutes at the museum. Then the shopping. Women shopping.”

“I was very angry,” Onan said.

I said, “You can’t leave Egypt unless you have a small stuffed camel toy and plaster model of the Sphinx.”

“You see? He is making a joke,” Samih Pasha said. He tapped his nose again, once again drawing attention to its enormous size. “Something, eh?”

Fikret said, “I think Mr. Paul is right. He does his business. He doesn’t waste time.”

“You are going to Jerusalem?” Onan asked me sternly.

“If I have time. Are you?”

Onan sucked his teeth in contempt, to demonstrate the absurdity of my question, and then he said, “The only reason I am on this ship is to go to Jerusalem. Not the pyramids, not the Sphinx. I don’t care about the Nile. But Jerusalem. It is a holy place!”

His tone was just a trifle shrill, combining something military with something obsessional, a touch of the
ghazi
—the warrior for God Almighty.

“Relax, Onan, of course I’m going to Jerusalem,” I said. “I have the feeling you are making a pilgrimage.”

“It is your feeling,” he said. “I must find a concordance in Israel—for the Bible. I read Hebrew. I am interested in the Bible.”

“Yet I feel that you are a devout Muslim.”

“Once again, it is your feeling,” Onan said. “I believe in the words of the holy Koran. I believe in Heaven and Hell.”

This statement had an effect in the darkness of the Levantine night. We had passed beyond the sea-level lights of the shore and were traveling surrounded by dark water and dark sky, a cosmic journey on a rusty ship.

Fikret was muttering to Samih Pasha. He said, “General Samih knows a joke about hell.”

“Thank you very much,” Onan said tersely.

“A man dies and doesn’t know whether to go to heaven or to Gehenna, as we call it,” Samih Pasha said, smiling broadly. “So an angel comes and shows him two breeches.”

He paused and smacked his lips, to make sure we had taken this in. I thought: breeches? Then I thought: Yes, bridges.

“First breech is Heaven. Very nice. Clean. Peaceful. Seenging,” Samih Pasha said. “Second breech. Man looks. Is Gehenna. Music! Fun! People dancing! Boys! Gorl!”

“‘Weech breech?’ the angel asks him. Man says, ‘Second breech! Thank you very much!’ He find gorl right away. Nice! He begin to make love to her. Nice! But! Something is wrong. He cannot make love. He look—no holes!”

Onan frowned, Fikret squinted. I said, “No holes,” and was interested that this Turkish man should use the plural.

“The man says, ‘Now I see why this is Gehenna!’ ”

I laughed, but no one else did, except the General, at his own joke. Onan continued to glare at him. Fikret said with his usual solemnity, “I understand.”

That night, lying in my cabin, I thought of poor diminished Alexandria, and it seemed logical that it should look that way, after so much of it—streets and buildings and monuments—had been ransacked by writers.

Offshore, twiddling my radio, I got classical music—Beethoven’s violin concerto from the Israeli shore—and remembered that the last time I had heard such music was in Mediterranean Europe. That was not so odd, for after all, Israel is an outpost of Europe. The moral high ground as a refuge and a garrison.

And because of the ethical commitment and the financial burden required by Israel of all Americans it is impossible for Americans to go to Israel and not feel they have a personal stake in it—or more, that Israel owes them something—perhaps an hospitable attitude? Reflecting on the twelve-figure sum of approximately one hundred billion dollars that America has given Israel since 1967, that was my feeling. It was not a number I ever dangled in front of an Israeli, though on deck at the port of Haifa, I said to Samih Pasha, “As an American taxpayer, I think I own that building.” He laughed and later in Turkish Cyprus, a place that is a drain on
Turkey’s budget, Samih Pasha said, “That building! I paid for it! It’s mine!”

“Now Paul is going to disappear,” Fikret said.

“Bye-bye,” the General said.

Onan was busying himself with his maps and scriptures, in preparation for his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He looked more intense than ever, and even somewhat feverish, his eyes bright with belief.

The
Akdeniz
had hired a bus for those Turks who wanted to go to Jerusalem. A number of people had signed up for the trip, but many—as in Egypt—were interested in looking at Ottoman sights, whatever Turkish castles and fortresses they could locate. The passengers on the
Seabourne Spirit
were offered a four-hour tour of the whole of Israel, called “The Holy Land by Helicopter.” It is a very small place, and so this was not as odd as it sounded, and the helicopter tour took in all the main cities, including Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Nazareth, and ended at the citadel of Masada—the scene of the famous massacre—with hampers of picnic food, and chilled champagne.

I had no particular plans in Israel, just a general desire to travel down the Mediterranean coast, to Tel Aviv and Gaza; to see Jerusalem; to pay a visit to a writer in Nazareth, who was Arab and Christian and an Israeli citizen. But this was all premature, because when I went into the
Akdeniz
’s lounge to collect my passport I found myself surrounded by armed men.

“Israeli security,” one man said. “Is this you?”

It was my passport, the page with my goofy picture on it.

“Yes.”

“Come with us.”

I was taken to a corner of the lounge, while the Turkish passengers looked at me with pity. They were the problem, not me. Every one of the other passengers, the whole crew, the officers—from the captain to the lowliest swabbie—every person on board the
Akdeniz
was a Turk.

“You speak Turkish?” one of the Israeli security men asked.

“No.”

“But everyone on this ship is Turkish.”

“Some of them speak English,” I said.

“Are you traveling with someone?”

“No.”

A man flicking through my passport said, “You have been to Syria.”

“No,” I said. “That visa’s been canceled. I had to pick up my passport early in order to catch this ship. Out of spite the Syrians wouldn’t give me a visa.”

“Why are you the only American on this ship?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What is your profession?”

I hesitated. I said, “I’m in publishing.”

These men wore pistols, two of them had machine guns. They did not wear uniforms, but they were soberly dressed and seemed very intent on discovering how an American could be traveling alone with so many Turks.

“And now I’m a tourist,” I said.

It hurt me to have to admit that, but I thought generally that tourists got away with murder and that being a tourist was an excuse for any sort of stupidity or clumsiness. You can’t do anything to me—I’m a tourist!

“What are you going to do in Israel?”

“Look around, then leave.”

“What do you have in your pockets?”

“You want to search me?”

A woman approached. She muttered impatiently in Hebrew, and it had to have been, “What’s going on here?” The men muttered back at her, and showed her my passport.

“Yes,” she said. “This ship is Turkish. The people are all Turkish. But you—why are you on board?”

“Because they sold me a ticket.”

“Where did you buy it?”

“Istanbul,” I said.

And at this point, faced by Israeli Security and having questions barked at me, I was on the verge of asking whether this was a traditional Israeli way of greeting strangers: sharp questions and even sharper gun-muzzles in my face.

“What are you doing here?” the woman was asking me, as she leafed through my passport, the sixty pages filled, as you know, with exotic stamps—China, India, Pakistan, Fiji, New Guinea, Rarotonga, Great Britain, Albania. She flipped to the first page.

“Are you the writer?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “I have read your books.” She said something in Hebrew to the security men. “Now I know why you are on that ship.”

“Thank you. Does that mean I can go?”

“Okay. No problem,” she said, and wished me well.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the
Akdeniz
, the Cimonoglu family and others were being divested of their passports. “Because we are young—we have the whole family, even children, with us,” the mother, Aysegul, told me later. “They think we want to stay in Israel and take jobs! But we have jobs in Turkey! I will write an angry letter to the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul.”

What are you doing here?
was a question I usually felt too ignorant to answer. My answer had to be:
Just looking.

Curiosity was my primary impulse—sniffing around. But I also wanted to see things as they are, especially the aspects of any country that were likely to change. The look and the feel of a place, the people—what I could grasp of their lives. Politics seldom interested me, because there were too many sides, too many versions, too much concern with power and not enough with justice.

Most of the time I felt like a flea. I could not pretend that I was part of a place, that I had entered the life of it. I was a spectator, certainly, but an active one. I was also passing the time, and there was nothing unworthy about that. Most people like to think they are in search of wisdom. That was not my motive. Perhaps it was all very simple, even simpler than curiosity and that, in all senses of the phrase, I was making connections.

I walked off the ship and around the harbor and looked for the
Seabourne Spirit.
It was due in Haifa the following week, I was told. That was a pity. I had thought I might see Jack Greenwald again. I continued walking into town to buy some envelopes so that I could send some accumulated books and maps back to myself.

Walking along, I kept seeing the same series of books, the repeated title,
The Land of Jesus, Das Land Jesu, La Tierra de Jesus, La Terra di Gesù, La Terre de Jésus.

The woman at the stationery store said, “Nine shekels.”

It was a word I never got tired of. I found it a slushy and comical word, filled with meaning. Shekels was like a euphemism for money, but it had
other similar-sounding words in it—shackles and sickles and Dr. Jekyll, all money-lenders’ meanings. It was impossible for me to hear the word and not think of someone demanding money. At this point, I had no shekels.

“You can change dollars into shekels at the bank, or on the street—the black market,” she said. “The rate is three shekels and twenty agorot.”

But when I asked on the street, fierce men—Russians, Moroccans, Poles—said, “Two shekels, ninety agorot! Take it! That is the best price!”

“I want three shekels,” I said, though I did not care. I liked saying the word shekels.

A man selling hard-core porno videos from a pushcart on the street shouted, “No one will give you three shekels! You change money with me!”

The way these Israelis spoke to me had more significance than what they were saying. It was as though they were always giving orders, never inquiring or being circumspect. Other Israelis I dealt with that first day in Haifa were the same, and I noted the tone of voice and the attitudes, because they did not change in the succeeding days.

They were gruff, on the defensive, rather bullying, graceless and aggrieved, with a kind of sour and gloating humor. They were sullen, somewhat covert, and laconic. They seemed assertive, watchful and yet incurious; alert to all my movements, and yet utterly uninterested in who I was. I did not take it personally, because from what I could see they treated each other no better.

This abrupt and truculent behavior surprised me, especially as I had become accustomed in my week on the
Akdeniz
to elaborate Turkish courtesy, the greetings, the gratitude, the rituals of politeness. Turks almost never raised their voices in polite company, and they had a number of expressions for taking the blame for a mistake rather than risk causing offense. Dealing with other people, Turks tended to seek permission. Casually bumping into someone they said,
Kasura bakmayan
, “Please don’t notice my mistake.”

Some Israelis were as elaborate and Semitic in these courtesies as Turks and Egyptians had been, but there were few of these. They were silent or else muttering Sephardis, Moroccans, Algerians, Spaniards, with dark expressive eyes, and these people could be very polite. The rest were familiar in a Western way—European, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian; urbanized, exasperated. They sweated, they complained, they peered with
goose-eyes and raised their voices. They looked uncomfortable and overdressed; they looked hot.

An address I had to find in Haifa was on Tzionut Street—Zionism Street. About ten years ago it had been called United Nations Street, because at the time Israel had been befriended by the U.N. and this was one of the ways they showed their thanks, crowning a city street with the name of the helpful organization. But in 1981 a resolution was passed by some countries in the General Assembly, equating Zionism with racism. The Israelis were so annoyed, they changed the name of Haifa’s United Nations Street to the hated word Zionism.

I was looking for the writer Emile Habiby, but he was not in his studio in Tzionut Street. He might be out of the country, a neighbor told me. Or perhaps I should try his home in Nazareth.

Haifa had the look of a colony, which is also the look of a garrison. Its new buildings looked out of place—imported, like foreign artifacts—on the heights of the hills, among them Mount Carmel, that bordered its harbor and its sea-level town of merchants. There were of course soldiers everywhere, and many people—not just the obvious soldiers—carried sidearms. The city did not have an obvious religious atmosphere either, and its secularism was jarring after all the expressive pieties of the Islamic world I had recently seen. The most conspicuous place of worship in Haifa was the enormous Baha’i temple—jeered at by Onan as “a ridiculous religion—not even a religion.” (He had the same disdain for Sufism: “They take the Koran and just fly away with it!”)