NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (71 page)

Places had voices that were not their own; they were backdrops to a greater drama, or else to something astonishingly ordinary, like the ragged laundry hung from the nave of a plundered Crusader church in Tartus, on the Syrian coast. Most of the time, traveling, I had no idea where I was going. I was not even quite sure why. I was no historian. I was not a geographer. I hated politics. What I liked most was having space and time;
getting up in the morning and setting off for a destination which, at any moment—if something better compelled my attention—I could abandon. I had no theme. I did not want one. I had set out to be on the Mediterranean, without a fixed program. I was not writing a book—I was living my life, and had found an agreeable way to do it.

In this way I was exactly like the others on the
Sea Harmony.
We only looked like lost souls, but we had our achievements. Spillman who had solved the problem of his depression, Melva who was free of her husband’s threats, the Bratislava pilgrims for whom prayer was a way of life, the German Heinz who traveled with his little family. And more.

Delayed in Rhodes, I ran into Yegor, the bald and toothless Israeli who was always boasting how he had fought in three wars. He wore old tattered clothes and his only luggage was a small canvas bag. He slept in the cheap seats, where Spillman played, and sometimes he spoke French to Spillman. On board the first day he had said to me, “You have a cabin? I want to sleep with you!” And he laughed a loud toothless laugh, his lips flapping at me. He was obviously excitable. So I had not encouraged conversation.

But he ambushed me. I left Spillman looking for his chicken restaurant and his fruit stand; I had headed out of the walled city to the windy bay on the fringes of which tourist-resort Rhodes lay as new and ugly as every other new Greek seaside town. The Greek genius for tacky construction surpassed anything I had seen—surprising in people who claimed the Parthenon as part of their heritage.

Even Yegor remarked on the flimsy construction. It was the strong wind, battering the hotel signs and tearing at the power lines. None of the hotels were open and, absent of people, they looked abandoned and vulnerable.

“I think the wind will make them crash down!” Yegor said. His whinnying laugh was bad, but the sight of his toothless mouth was worse. I also thought: Why do apparently weak-minded people take such delight in disasters?

His dog, young and strong, tugged him along on its rope leash.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“Johnny Halliday.”

Hearing his name, the dog hesitated and glanced back at his master. Then he trotted on.

“But I call him Johnny.”

Again the dog turned its soulful eyes on Yegor.

“I take it you’re a soldier, Yegor,” I said.

“Three wars,” he said. “In ’67, the Egyptians had swords and tried to cut us”—he flailed his arms—“like this, our heads off! But we beat them! I was given a free apartment. I pay only forty shekels for one month.”

“You’re lucky.”

“But I have a big problem,” Yegor said. “I drink.”

“You get drunk?”

“I get drunk. I go to jail.”

“What are Israeli jails like?”

“Jews in one room, Arabs in another room. In each room, twenty men,” Yegor said. “One toilet only.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Horrible. And they fight, the prisoners.”

“What do they fight about?”

“On your first day, they take your food, to make you frightened. So you have to fight. What else can you do?”

We were walking down Papanikolaou in the new part of Rhodes City, a block or so from where waves were being blown on to the bright deserted shore. We had passed the edge of Mandraki Harbor, where on one corner—so it was thought—the Colossus had stood. But speculating on this Wonder of the World meant a great deal less than the reality of Yegor’s saying,
On your first day, they take your food, to make you frightened.

“The police arrested you because you were drunk?”

“Because I broke a table,” Yegor said.

“An expensive table?”

“Not expensive, and not big. Made out of glass.”

“How did you break it?”

“I used a man to break it,” Yegor said.

“You used a man?”

“I took him and crashed him down, so I broke the man, too. Ha! Ha!
Ha!” That laugh again, those gums, those lips. “I was drunk, so they arrested me.”

“Were you in prison long?”

“Some months,” Yegor said. “But I have been seventeen times in prison. I can’t help it—I drink too much!”

He jerked his dog’s leash, the dog made a strangled noise, and they walked on, the dog yapping in a sharp imitation of his master’s laugh.

Later that day, back inside the old castellated city, I was admiring the medieval walls and the carved escutcheons, when Yegor accosted me.

“I told you lies,” he said. “Ha!”

“About going to prison?”

“If you go to prison in Israel they take your passport, and I have a passport, so how could I go to prison? Ha! You believed me!”

The problem with a liar is not his frank admission of lying but rather when he robustly asserts that he is telling the truth.

Another of the loners was leaving the ship in Rhodes. This was a young fellow named Pinky, who congregated with the Germans and Spillman and Melva and others in the cheap seats. The name Pinky was short for Pinsker. He made a living in Canada working as a teacher in settlements of the Ojibway and Ojib-Cree people. The villages were in remote parts of Canada. The job was well-paid but stressful. Burned-out, was the way he put it.

“For example, the kids are real delinquents sometimes.”

“How does an Ojibway teenager express his delinquency?”

“You wake up in the morning and you see that they’ve covered your house in graffiti—names and swear words and everything. And they go nuts with snowmobiles. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

I smiled at him in what I hoped was an enigmatic way.

“I can tell by the way you’re always asking questions. And you’re the only one who listens to Spillman.”

Pinsker told me he was rather lonely. It was about time he found someone to share his life. He had not found much romance in the Ojibway settlements of northern Canada, and so he had set out on an extended trip, hoping to meet someone. His month working on a kibbutz had not improved his situation, and it had surprised him in other ways. As a Jew he had been shocked by some of what he had seen.

“The kids knew nothing about Judaism. Can you imagine that in Israel?” he said. “A lot of them had never been to a synagogue. They were pre-Bar Mitzvah age, but they didn’t study. I’ve never seen Jews like that—I was surprised by their ignorance.”

“But better behaved than the Ojibway kids?”

“Not really. Some of them were really obnoxious—always fooling,” he said. “What do you think of Israel?”

“The land of contradictions,” I said. I mentioned some of what I had seen. Small land, big contradictions.

“When I was on the kibbutz someone told me a really interesting theory,” Pinsker said. “It’s like this. In the Diaspora, Jews realize that non-Jews are always looking at them and so they strive to be religious. They work, they study difficult subjects, they try to get ahead in the community—they want to excel, and they usually succeed. They know they are seen as Jews and that it’s important that they succeed. Don’t you think that part of it is true?”

“If you say so.”

Pinsker said, “But when they get to Israel they consider that they’ve arrived. They don’t have to prove anything to anyone. They sit around and complain—there’s no need to do anything. Who’s looking? Who cares? They abandon their ambitions and get lazy. That’s why Israel is the way it is, and why it doesn’t seem Jewish.”

Pinsker was staying in Rhodes, hoping to catch a ferry to the Turkish town of Marmaris in the morning. He said good-bye and wandered away to look for a hotel, while I went back to the ship, thinking how little I had learned of the island. But it had been importantly a backdrop for the lives of these travelers, and as a gorgeous location it gave their stories an exoticism that made them memorable. There was, as always, a poignant interplay between the melancholy banalities of the travelers’ tales and the locale of this lovely island.

We were at sea, making for Piraeus all the next day, through the Cyclades—never out of sight of an island, and usually within sight of a half a dozen. On the bridge the captain dreamed of invading Turkey and reclaiming land that he felt was rightly Greece’s. There was bouzouki music inside and cold raw weather outside. There was nowhere to sit on deck. The twenty-eight Slovakians from Bratislava were on their knees in one
lounge, praying. The Greeks in another, smoking. The squalor in the cheap seats became remarkable, a piling-up of bags and garbage and supine bodies.

Three nights in a row I had the same dream. I was an actor in a Shakespearean play that might have been
Hamlet.
I was the main actor, probably Hamlet. This was unclear in the dream because although it was a large and elaborate production I did not know any of my lines—not even one. I did not know the names of the other characters. It was all a muddle and mystery, especially as I had never been in a play in my life. Perhaps it was an anxiety dream about being unprepared and having to improvise. My method of travel was all about improvisation.

Each time I had the dream I was arriving at the theater—a sort of open-air affair, with many people in the audience, and lots of actors and stagehands, most of them greeting me with high hopes. None of them had the slightest idea that I did not know my lines. I would covertly pick up a copy of the play and leaf through its several hundred pages and realize that there was no way that I could learn my part between now and ten minutes from now when the curtain was going up on the first act. I experienced a sense of absurd humiliation and panic, as people greeted me and congratulated me, telling me how they were looking forward to my performance.

Most dreams are merciful. Each night, just before the curtain rose, I awoke.

I continued to play games of “Crappy Joe” with Melva. She was feeling optimistic and fitter than she had in Egypt and Israel, though still on antibiotics. “I’m coming good!” she said. She wanted to be independent. “I’m not a bludger,” she said. “Don’t look back!”

When we arrived at Piraeus we announced where we were going and realized that we were all going to a different place—Melva was staying in Athens, hoping to meet some Australians; the Germans were going to Crete, Spillman to Brindisi, Yegor was vague, Pinsker was gone. The Israelis whose names I never learned were speeding away in their car, heading for Croatia, they would not say why. Spillman said he was depressed—it was cloudy, and cloudy days were awful for him. And then Yegor handed his dog’s rope leash to him. The Greeks laughed. Spillman grew furious as the dog, agitated and confused, nipped other passengers. Then “Johnny Halliday” bit Spillman on the groin. Spillman’s fly was usually open—it
was open this morning. He clasped himself and sat down and began to cry, and at that moment someone turned up the bouzouki music.

I hurried to a train, and a bus and a ferry; to Bari, and more trains. All the while I heard Spillman’s shout of hurt and complaint, as Yegor’s dog yapped. But I had not hesitated on the quay. I had been there before.

            
T
unisia is another Mediterranean island, surrounded on one side by water and on the other by pariah states: fanatic Libya on the southeast, blood-drenched Algeria on the west, and the blue Mediterranean on its long irregular coast, scalloped by gulfs and bays. Foreigners do not enter Tunisia by road. There are planes, of course, and there are ferries to France and Italy. I sailed into Tunis on a ferry from slap-happy Trapani in Sicily, entering the harbor at La Goulette in the late afternoon and passing Carthage, the little that remained of it, just a rubble pile of marble where the glorious city had once stood.

I had now been on enough Mediterranean islands to sense that Tunisia was deeply insular. People said that Turkey and Syria were isolated, but that was not strictly true—there were buses from Turkey to Egypt, and from Syria to Jordan and Lebanon. Even poor miserable Albania had road and ferry access to Greece and Macedonia. My road and rail trip from Istanbul to Haifa had been slow and fairly awful at times—six border crossings and lots of irritation, but I had been safe; no one attempted to cut my throat.

Islamic militants in Algeria had carried out their vow to kill foreigners. Their aim was to destabilize the country by frightening foreigners, who were Algeria’s mainstay in running their oil-based economy. Seven Italian sailors—the entire crew of the ship
Lucina
—had recently had their
throats slit as they slept in their bunks in the Algerian port of Jijel, not far from the Tunisian frontier; and a few months before that, twelve Croats had been found dead on their ship, their throats cut. Visitors to Libya sometimes simply disappeared. Such stories were a strong inducement to treat Tunisia as an island, and even Tunisians treated it that way. They never suggested crossing one of these borders, they seldom did so themselves—when they left Tunisia it was to go to France or Italy, to work at menial jobs.