NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  The worst turn of events was the recent rash of suicide bombers. Ironically, it was an Israeli, Baruch Goldstein, who initiated this new form of warfare, when he killed twenty-nine Muslims at prayer at a mosque in Hebron. He knew when he opened fire that he would never leave the mosque alive; he was beaten to death. Soon after him there were three Palestinian suicide bombers, in separate incidents, who managed to bring Israelis down with them, and this has become the principal tactic, and the most violent so far, in the war between the extreme Palestinian groups (Hamas and Hezbollah) and the Israelis. There are few defenses against the person who is willing to sacrifice his life to kill others.

  There was always a violent reply. The Israelis, obsessively retributive, had an absolutely unforgiving rule of retaliation, and always with greater force. It assured a continuing hopelessness and an impasse.

  A new development was that their dislike and fear of Palestinians had reached such a pitch that their answer now to Palestinian demands was the hiring of immigrant laborers and field hands from Thailand, the Philippines, and Poland—desperate so-called guest workers—to bring in the harvest. In the absence of Jews willing to perform the menial tasks that had been assigned to Palestinians, there were now seventy thousand such immigrants, a new element in the society, and a new underclass of non-Jews.

  In a crowded almost silent bus, jammed with passengers, I rode to Haifa. Only one person spoke, an old Ethiopian Jew—a patriarch, traveling with his large family. He carried a fly whisk and called out loudly in Amharic when he saw anything unusual. It was very easy to translate his exclamations. We passed the airport. Look at the planes! he cried. We passed the railway line. Look at the train! We were stuck in traffic. Look at all the cars! and nearer Haifa, traveling along the coast, the old man was delighted. The sea! The sea!

  The blue water lapped at the low shore of tumbled dunes.

  Intending to be early, in order to catch the Sea Harmony, I went directly from the station to the pier. In the event, I very nearly missed it.

  “Come with me,” an Israeli security officer said to me as he leafed through my passport.

  I was then subjected to the most intense and prolonged interrogation and suitcase search it has been my experience to receive in thirty-four years of traveling. This time I was not rescued by a helpful bookworm who knew my name. Instead, I was made to wait. And then I was questioned. Why had I gone to Turkey? Whom did I know there? Whom did I visit there? Where had I stayed? These specifics were noted. The same questions were asked of my time in Syria and Jordan. Then I was taken to a side room. My suitcase was gone through a third time, by a new official. He pointed to a plastic chair.

  “Sit down.”

  “If you say please.”

  “Sit down!”

  “I find this very unpleasant,” I said after two hours in the chair, when the man returned with my passport.

  Another man began trawling through my little bag. I stood up to stretch.

  “Sit down!”

  I was then summoned to receive my passport. I said, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t sink nossing.”

  “Know what I think?” I said. “I don’t like being treated like this.”

  “No one likes,” he said sourly. He hated me for my impertinence. He hated his job. He hated the Palestinians. He hated his life in a country where everyone is a possible terrorist and where life in this state of siege is a turbulent and terrifying nuisance.

  The disgust and pessimism is so palpable that after a dose of it, the Sea Harmony shipload of shouting boasting Greeks, swaggering on deck and plucking at their private parts and smoking and guzzling ouzo and snarling at each other, was peaceful by comparison.

  The Mediterranean War Report: Fighting in Turkey—Turks against Kurds; fighting in Bosnia—Serbs against Bosnian Muslims; fighting in Algeria—most recent death toll, forty thousand in the past three years, ten thousand of them since I had started my trip. The Israelis were shelling south Lebanon and continuing a blockade of south Lebanese ports and fishing grounds; the terrorists of Hamas were continuing their suicide missions against Israelis in Hebron and Gaza—and Israelis were answering each attack with one of their own. And a standoff between Greeks and Turks in Cyprus.

  The Sea Harmony was headed to Greek Cyprus, steaming out of Haifa and its hill of lights. I was sitting at the stern, with my feet jammed against the rail. A man approached and stood a bit too close to me.

  “Excuse me,” the man inquired. “Are you Guy Lupowsky?”

  He had a plump pink face and a potbelly, and he stood awkwardly, his short arms hanging. He wore a gray suit, but it was rumpled; and a shirt and tie, but they were soup-stained. He said “Lupowsky” in a slurping and delicious lisp, all spittle and slush.

  I said no, I was not Guy Lupowsky.

  “I am sorry. I see you and I fink you is him. Classical guitarist from Belgium. I am a musician. I play Jewish.” He said the words “musician” and “Jewish” as though he were masticating the wet pulpy segment of a juicy orange.

  After every few words he swallowed. His English reflected the way he was dressed. It was well intentioned and almost formal in many respects, like his suit and tie, but also like his suit and tie it was mangled and at times comic.

  He introduced himself as Sam—that is, Shmuel—Spillman. He said he divided his time equally between Belgium and Israel, going back and forth, nearly always on the Sea Harmony on this leg, and the rest by Italian ferries and trains. He did not have a home in either country, nor even an apartment. “I get a room, just a small one. A big one confuses me. I rent a room by the week in Tel Aviv, and another one in Brussels. I cannot own a place. That would confuse me.”

  In a sense he was the ultimate voyager, shuttling across the Mediterranean from Brussels to Tel Aviv and back. He had no permanent home—he did not want one. He had few possessions, he said; they rattled him. What to do with them? He had his music and his mother. That was enough, said Spillman.

  “I cannot stay with my mother, or there will be trouble. She is very rich but we quarrel. She makes problems. Is better that I get a room and visit her. I have some presents for her.” He thought a moment. And he slurped and lisped the spattering word, “Chocolates.”

  “How do you decide when to stay and when to go?” I asked.

  “It is the sunshine,” he said.

  “You like sunny weather?”

  “I need sunshine,” he said, and the word on his tongue was like a gum-drop. “For my depression.”

  “I see.”

  “I need to come here.”

  But “here” was far astern to the east, for we had plunged seaward, and the lights of Haifa were just a little row of lighted dots that made a yellow horizontal line across the night. Israel was that perforation in the darkness.

  “For my depression I need the sunshine, and I need the Jews,” Spillman said. “I am very Jewish.” He swallowed and went on, “I am very, very Jewish.”

  “So you visit Israel when you get depressed in Brussels?” I said. “But when do you visit Brussels?”

  “When I get depression in Israel,” he said. “When it feels dark to me. I take medication but the real medication is to leave. Every six months or less I feel it, and it gets bad, and I see my doctor. He prescribes medication and I come.”

  “Isn’t it sunny most of the time in Israel?”

  “Sometimes it is dark,” he said. “I am not speaking of the sunshine. I wanted to settle in Israel but I did not want to give up my Belgian residency. It was such a big decision and it was giving me depression. My psychiatrist said to me, ‘Don’t decide, go back and forth, as you wish. It is better.’ So I do that.”

  “That’s a wise doctor,” I said.

  “He is my friend.”

  He hesitated.

  “He knows I am a gay people,” Spillman said. He looked at me sadly. “But I have no more desires. I had a friend but now I have no friend. Are you going to eat?”

  “Is it
time?”

  “From six-thirty to seven-thirty they serve dinner. Then it is closed. You can buy coffee or biscuits or sweets but not foods. In the morning at seven—”

  After so many voyages, Spillman knew the whole routine of the ship. He knew some of the crew, and they knew him. He knew every feature of the ship, that they did not do laundry, that the coffee was good, that the food was expensive, that the deck chairs were always dirty, that the crew smoked too much. He knew the arrival and departure times. More than that, he knew the high points of each port of call—the fruit market in Limassol, specific hotels where you could get an inexpensive shower (Spillman had a seat, not a cabin, on the ship and had nowhere on board to have a bath), the best eating places en route, a particular cafe in Rhodes that sold roast chicken. Spillman said the word “chicken” with a gasping and slushy hunger.

  All this I learned over dinner, spaghetti and cabbage salad, glopped onto plates by the five Burmese who served in the cafeteria. It was prison food.

  The stewards, the waiters, the menials, nearly all the underlings on this Greek ship were either Burmese or Indian. They spoke no Greek. Orders were always given in English and carried out by their efficient, muttering flunkies. They swept, they painted, they mopped, they cooked and served. A Burmese made the moussaka, another Burmese shoveled it onto plates, an Indian handed it over, a Burmese rang the cash register. It was not their fault that the ship served prison food. And none of them had been on the ship long—a year at most. The Burmese were from Rangoon, the Indians from Bombay. They were desperate for employment. They were also loners on the ship, men without women.

  Greece, like Israel and Italy, had high unemployment, around ten percent. It interested me that Burmese were making moussaka on this Greek ship, and Filipinos were picking oranges outside Tel Aviv, and West Africans were harvesting tomatoes near Salerno, in Italy. It was the Third World in the Mediterranean, proving that there were even poorer and needier countries than Tunisia and Egypt and Morocco. These people and others had come from halfway around the world to help these developed countries, members of the European Union, to scrub its floors and harvest its crops. The Burmese and Indians lent the ship a melancholy air and made the Greek crewmen seem like overlords, as they loudly issued orders in badly pronounced English. They made the class system explicit by giving it a color. The Mediterranean had always had an underclass of remote or provincial people, but they had never come from so far away.

  “Maybe you’ll meet someone,” I said to Spillman over lunch the next day. Speaking of his marriage, he had begun to slip into another depression.

  “Yes?”

  He stopped eating. The thought of meeting someone seemed not to have occurred to him. He became reflective, a problem clouding his face, taking some of the pinkness from it.

  “Perhaps.”

  “What’s the problem with your mother?”

  “My marriage, also. I made such a great scandal with my marriage. It was a big catastrophe, mamma mia. You know Jewish women? No sex before marriage! Don’t touch me!” He dabbed a balled-up hanky at the spaghetti sauce on his lips. “On our wedding night it was such a disaster.” He was silent for quite a long time. Months, perhaps years, were passing in his mind. Events, too. He was nodding, reviewing these events as great and small they passed before him. At last he winced and said, “We got a divorce.”

  He followed me on deck afterwards. Having just left Israel for his health, he was in a particular mood, one of rejection, as he headed to his other home.

  “Israel is no more a Jewish country,” Spillman said disgustedly. “It was special before, but now it is like all other countries. Just wanting money. Everyone talks about money.”

  He was speaking into the darkness. Israel was somewhere in that darkness.

  “I think there will be civil war,” he said. “Jews against Jews, the orthodox ones against the others, the settlers against the others. The Arabs will just watch us fighting.”

  Spillman was in the cheap seats in the big smoky lounge at the center of C Deck, surrounded by his heap of bags—shopping bags mostly, in which he carried all his possessions. One of them was an instrument he called a “melodeon”—a fat flute with a keyboard which made a kazoolike sound. Goodhearted man that he was, he spent part of the day serenading the others in the cheap seats. Jewish songs, Gypsy songs, and old favorites such as “Blue Moon” and “O Solo Mio.”

  There was a bald toothless Israeli with a dog on his lap in the cheap seats, and a German family with a small baby, and some backpackers, and some Greek Cypriots, and part of a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land, and a Dutch couple which had just been on a kibbutz. There were some Arabs, too. The Israeli with the dog said that he had been a soldier his whole life. “I have fought in three wars!” The German family had set up a field kitchen in some spare seats and were forever dishing up food for their baby and themselves. The Slovakian pilgrims traveled with a small bearded friar who said mass in one of the lounges every day. The prettiest pilgrim was a girl in her twenties who carried a wooden cross as tall as she was. Tacked to it was a holy card, the size of a baseball card, with a saint’s picture on it. She heaved the cross in a slightly defiant way, the winsome Slovak, smiling, carrying this enormous cross among the querulous passengers.

  There were other passengers, too, in the cabins. Some of them had strange stories to tell, but I met them later. The Sea Harmony was an unusual ship for the way people were thrown together. The bad weather did not help either—it was cold and windy, the sea unsettled. It was not a cruise, but rather a way for these people to get from one side of the Mediterranean to the other, or to stop along the way.

  I had paid a little extra to have my own cabin. That was my only luxury. The food was awful. The weather was grim. The Greek crew was truculent and unhelpful, and the Greek passengers even worse—two of them sat in the lounge shouting into cellular phones, making interminable calls. They smoked. They demanded that the Burmese play tapes of Greek music very loudly. Because the decks were cold and windswept, there was no refuge anywhere. But I had my cabin.

  The wind was blowing the rain sideways on our approach to Limassol, and the weather continued cold and rainy, such a novelty, after the parched landscapes of Syria and Israel, all these muddy sidewalks and puddled streets and weeping trees. I had been eager to see the Republic of Cyprus, after having traversed Turkish Cyprus. It had been impossible for me to go directly from one to the other, and so this thousand-mile detour had been necessary. But had it been worth it? Yes, I thought so, because I had seen how Turkish Cyprus had been lifeless and deprived; and now I saw that it hardly mattered, for Limassol, with its tourists and its Royal Air Force base at nearby Akrotiri and its embittered Greeks, was unattractive and seedy. Turkish Cyprus was like a Third World island of soldiers and self-help; Greek Cyprus was a rather ugly and bungaloid coastline, the most distant outpost of the European Community, another welfare case.

  The larger islands in the Mediterranean are miniature continents, the French historian Fernand Braudel said. He cited Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Cyprus as good examples of this. I could see how this might be so. A single island might have many microclimates, and regions and dialects if not separate languages; and a mountain range that was like a continental divide, and a wild or sparsely settled interior. They were so complex they seemed vast, and each section of coast was different. But the partition of Cyprus made it smaller. It had broken into two mean fragments, a pair of true islands, each with its own culture and language. The large complex island of Cyprus had become two simpler and much less interesting places, in the twenty years since the Turks had asserted themselves in the north and the Greeks in the south.

  I walked from the port to the town, buying my breakfast on the way, fruit here, juice there, and at last bought a copy of the day-before-yesterday’s Daily Telegraph and read it over a cup of coffee in a cafe across from Limassol’s front, while the wind whipped the waves onto the promenade.

  Limass
ol was as unlike a town in Turkish Cyprus as it was possible to be, and yet if anything it seemed more hollow and dreary. It was, I suppose, the cheesy fun-fair atmosphere that tourism had forced upon it, and the weird jauntiness, the forced high spirits and fake geniality that can make a visitor lonely to the point of depression. Spillman had told me he was going fruit shopping at his favorite market and then straight back to the ship. There was nothing else to buy, only horrendous souvenirs, unpainted plaster statues, mostly nude women, but also animals, busts of anonymous Greeks; paperweights made of varnished stones, copper saltcellars, toy windmills, dishcloths depicting Cypriot costumes and maps, dolls in traditional dress, doilies, tablecloths, egg timers, letter openers, ashtrays labeled Limassol, and every souvenir plate imaginable. There were many images, in plaster, on dishes, modeled in plastic, of the goddess Aphrodite. Legend had it that Aphrodite had risen from the waves off the west coast of Cyprus. The Golden Bough: “The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos was one of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world.” The images on sale depicted a sulky and misshapen Barbie doll rather than the goddess of love.

  The day before yesterday’s Mirror, the Sun, the Daily Mail and other British papers were available. Bus tours were advertised to various parts of the island. Signs said “Traditional English Pub,” and “Full English Breakfast,” “Fish and Chips,” and “Afternoon Tea.” There were bleak hotels on the promenade and some derelict mosques on the backstreets. There was something old-fashioned and fifties-ish about Limassol, as though like the newspapers the town too had an air of the day before yesterday.