On the Shores of the Mediterranean (42 page)

We also waved goodbye to Mr Abouaza, who had not only got up early on what was for him a holiday to take us to the bus station an hour before the bus left but had also gallantly insisted on waiting until it left, presumably to make sure that we didn’t abscond from it, which was a great trial for all three of us for there is nothing worse in life than either being seen off or seeing someone off. And we had invited him to come and stay with us the next time he visited the family who had put him up while he was learning English in Bournemouth, which is where most Libyans appear to learn it.

Then, with a complement, but not a full complement, of twenty-two passengers, all of them Tunisian workers returning to their country, the bus lurched out of the enormous puddle in which all the buses were parked and trundled gently through the suburbs as though we had all the time in the world to get to Tunisia and Tunis. It was a fine sunny morning with a strong onshore wind blowing and the sea when it momentarily hove into view was navy blue with little white caps on it.

Altogether, apart from a ten-minute halt at a roadside café, we drove for about two and a half hours, past Berber villages, endless olive groves, little farms that had once been worked by Italian peasants who at weekends, when they went into Tripoli for the day in their best clothes with their wives, transformed its main square into a piazza in some Italian provincial town, past orange groves and long lines of stalls strung out along the roadside where there were so many oranges for sale that it seemed impossible
that they could all be disposed of before they went bad. Then the country became more arid. There were fewer trees, more prickly pears, more thorns, fewer houses, and there were scuts of sand blowing across the road from the dunes to the right and beyond them was the beautiful blue sea. To the left of the road an immense saline lake shimmered in the sun. The frontier was straight ahead, with the Libyan border post astride the road, an ugly modern building like border posts everywhere except that no one had apparently cleaned the plate glass windows of this particular one since they were put in. There was a queue of cars in front of us, but not more than half a dozen. It was a quarter to eleven.

‘It looks as if we’re going to be lucky,’ I said.

At five o’clock the following morning, twenty-one hours and some 480 miles outward bound from Tripoli, our bus entered the coach station at Tunis.

It was not a journey either of us would be anxious to repeat. It was certainly not one that we would ever forget. And sometimes since making it I have found myself wondering whether, if given the choice, taking into account my age and everything, I would choose to make it again or be guillotined. Obviously we had been spoilt. Travel under the auspices of the Leader, at the speed of light, had rendered the more lumbering methods of moving about under our own steam intolerable. I realized what Cinderella must have felt when deprived of her crystal coach.

The Libyan frontier when we reached it had proved to be in the hands of characters from Kafka, most of whom, most of the time, remained invisible behind the expanses of smeared frosted glass which enclosed them and prevented them from being reminded of the outside world, and in which they could be heard but not seen, except in the form of exaggerated and distorted shapes dimly perceived against the glass, like the shadows of reality
cast on the wall of Plato’s Cave. Invisible, that is, unless you bent double and peered into their office through what the French-speaking Tunisians on the other side of the frontier called a
guichet
, a small, oval hole in the glass, where they could be perceived for what they were, teenaged males with seven o’clock shadow and with hair that aped but failed to emulate the Leader’s inimitable coiffure, chatting animatedly with one another, greeting comrades coming on shift with a lot of back slapping and other forms of false bonhomie, smoking Marlboros, drinking the noxious cola or Chinese Gunpowder Tea made with leaves extracted from the ten-pound packages of the stuff seized from travellers en route for Tunisia by their comrades in the customs department, great mounds of which lay around in a special pen in the customs hall. Occasionally, apparently on impulse, one of them would rise to his feet, languidly select three or four passports from the large pile on the table before him (for by now an ever-lengthening queue of vehicles was building up behind our bus), rather as if he was taking cards from a conjuror doing a boring trick, before switching on his official, menacing scowl for the benefit of the customers and sallying forth to order the owners of the passports to present themselves, be identified by him as such, and begone to form another queue, this time for customs. Sitting on a packing case which some unfortunate was later ordered to prise open so that its contents could be examined, I had a fine view of these fiends and their goings-on through the
guichet
, until one of their number, unhappy that anyone not actually employed on the premises should be enjoying himself, shouted at me to go away.

After the stamping of the twenty-two passports, which took until some time after midday, came the customs examination, carried out under a canopy by one customs official, all the others having gone off to eat their dinners.

I must say it was a new experience, at least in a Mediterranean
country, to pass through a customs in which every traveller, in this case including a one-legged Tunisian lady on crutches who was travelling with her husband in an old car loaded inside and out with all their household possessions in cardboard boxes, was required not only to remove everything they had with them from whatever vehicle they happened to be travelling in, but were then required to lay their luggage out open on the road under the canopy outside the customs house, where eventually the one official on duty inspected the contents simply by placing his hands beneath them inside the bag, lifting them up, then turning them upside down and allowing them to run through his fingers, an operation which took, even with the help of those full of fight who had come back to help him after eating their midday meal, another two and a quarter hours, by which time it was quarter past two in the afternoon.

After which we were free. Free to drive in the bus another hundred yards or so across a bare expanse to the Tunisians and their border post; there once more to remove everything we possessed from the bus, wait another hour and a half to have our passports stamped, and another three-quarters of an hour to have our possessions made to loop the loop once more, but this time in the middle of an enormous, sand-swept open space, and to watch the one-legged lady as she hopped about, opening cardboard boxes, stoically supporting these fresh indignities. By the time we left it was four o’clock. Altogether we had been on the frontier for more than five hours.

I asked the conductor, who made the same journey twice a week in both directions, whether he thought we had been unlucky, but he said it had been comparatively quick.

‘I wonder what it would be like,’ Wanda said, ‘if they were going slow.’

Then, after trundling through a succession of check-points at each of which a policeman boarded the bus and inspected all twenty-two of our passports, the driver put his foot down and we zoomed away down a dead straight road, with drifts of sand across it in places, straight into the eye of the setting sun. We were travelling through the Gefrara Plain, an almost treeless steppe desert with the great saline lake, the Sebkhet el Adibate, which forms part of the northern frontier between Libya and Tunisia, to the left, seeing no one along the way except a few ragged herdsmen tending their goats and camels, until we reached what seemed like an oasis in which there were small villages with box-like white houses with little beehive huts of reeds built on to them standing beneath the trees. Women wrapped up to the eyes were drawing water from the wells and carrying it away in earthenware pots balanced on their heads. Then, just as we were congratulating one another on the good progress we were making, the bus came to rest in Ben Gardane, a small town in which the houses were painted in shades of blue and ochre where the bus conductor announced to our dismay that there would be a half-hour lunch break.

After this enforced rest once again onwards into the wilderness, after the first bottle of wine for what seemed weeks and some delicious lamb chops. Occasionally we passed the empty shell of a building at the roadside and sometimes a well, with what my map said were the jagged peaks of the Jebel Dahar range looming up on the port bow, running away southwards, the sun going down behind them in a cloudless sky over the Grand Erg Oriental, a part of the Sahara, silhouetting them so that they looked like the temperature chart of someone suffering from undulant fever. After this we entered a more fertile country that until recently had also been part of the wilderness, but was now covered with immense olive groves which stretched away as far as the eye could see. Here and there among them little rectangular whitewashed
barns or farmhouses with barrel-topped roofs gleamed in the last of the light. Along the roadside, women were going home dragging bundles of olive twigs for their cooking fires, raising the dust. How beautiful the world could be, at least to look at, I thought.
‘Com’è bello il mondo!’
I would like to have shouted out, but didn’t for fear that my fellow passengers might think I’d been driven round the bend by the events of the day and might start clamouring for me to be dropped off at the next convenient
hôpital psychiatrique
.

Then, after passing through the fifth road block, suddenly it was quite dark and there was nothing more to be seen except the headlights of the bus tunnelling through the darkness ahead between the eucalyptus trees, occasionally illuminating signposts. Some of them indicated places that had once been world famous as the scenes of battles – Mareth, Gabes, Wadi Zigzaou, the Wadi Akharit in the Plain of Arad where the Italians and the Afrika Korps had made a stand between the sea and the marshes of the Chott el Fejj – places on a map, places on signposts, places now largely forgotten, that having come to them with not inconsiderable difficulty even now we couldn’t see.

On 6 April 1943, it had taken two British and one Indian division to force the Wadi Akharit, a narrow river bed nowhere more than fifty yards wide. The following day, a patrol of the 4th Indian Division met up with one from the US 2nd Corps advancing from the west, who greeted the Indians with the words ‘Hello, Limey’, a greeting which they appreciated although they did not understand it. This was the historic moment at which the two armies, which had started nearly two thousand miles apart, were united. Just over a month later the Axis armies laid down their arms.

At nine o’clock that night we arrived at Sfax.

One of the other passengers on the bus, who was an inhabitant of Sfax, had told us that if we got down there we were still in time
to catch the last train to Tunis. Knowing that we had missed the 19.27 from Sousse, not having a timetable and not really believing this kindly disposed man, I arranged with the bus conductor that he would halt the bus at the station at Sfax, where it stopped anyway, long enough for me to find out if there really was a train. If there was not we would stay on the bus and try and get a shared taxi from Sousse to Tunis.

Now, while Wanda waited on the bus with our luggage, ready to disembark, I raced into the station. The
guichet
was open.

‘Quand part le prochain train pour Tunis?’
I asked the man behind it.

‘At half past ten,’ he said in near perfect English.

‘It’s OK,’ I said to Wanda, back at the bus, where the other passengers were becoming slightly restive at this sixty-second delay after thirteen hours on the road. ‘We’re in luck, there’s a train at half past ten.’

Both the conductor and the driver waved to us as the bus drew away, leaving us on the pavement. By this time I felt as if I had known them all my life. We had been through a lot together in the last twelve hours or so. How they both managed to endure the Libyan/Tunisian customs torture twice a week, each way between Tripoli and Sousse, without going bananas was a mystery, especially as the conductor told me that very often an entire day was consumed crossing from one country to the other.

‘Let’s get the tickets first, then we can eat at that place round the corner the driver recommended,’ I said, as soon as the bus had disappeared from sight.

Inside the station the man in the ticket office was just closing his
guichet
, apparently preparatory to going home.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘I say. What’s going on? We want two tickets to Tunis, for the half past ten train. The one you told me about.’

‘You don’t need them now,’ he said, closing the
guichet
and
switching out the light, thereby rendering himself invisible, no doubt relishing the effect. ‘You can get them tomorrow. It’s at half past ten tomorrow morning.’

‘We seem to be a bit stuck now,’ I said to Wanda, out in the yard into which we had been hurried by a soldier whose job it was to guard the station and who wanted to lock up. It was a bitter night. According to the radio in the restaurant at Ben Gardane where we had eaten five o’clock lunch, snow had fallen at Nabbeul on the shores of the Gulf of Hammamet.

‘Yes, we are a bit stuck, my husband,’ she said. ‘You certainly are some famous traveller. Even I know that anywhere you want to catch a train at 10.30 at night it leaves at 22.30.’

‘Perhaps there’s a bus,’ I said, but I didn’t really believe there would be.

The restaurant round the corner was a very jolly place, although it had an awfully sinister proprietor, like someone invented by Genet. It was full of French-speaking Muslims, all of whom were drunk and getting drunker every minute on what appeared to be the good red Tunisian wine with which they were washing down prodigious quantities of what also looked to be excellent
agneau en brochette
. The only table left was one in the direct line of a terrible draught of cold air that was entering through a gap in the swing doors, which nevertheless, not feeling particularly choosy at this moment, we decided to occupy.