Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  But I have some memories of Afghanistan.

  The Hotel in No-Man's Land

  "Customs over there," said the motioning Afghan. But the Customs Office was closed for the night. We could not go back to the Iranian frontier at Tayebad, we could not proceed into Herat. So we remained on a strip of earth, neither Afghanistan nor Iran. It was the sort of bedraggled oasis that features in Foreign Legion films: a few square stucco buildings, several parched trees, a dusty road. It was getting dark. I said, "What do we do now?"

  "There's the No-Man's Land Hotel," said the taller hippy, with the pajamas and bangles. His name was Lopez. "I stayed there once before. With a chick. The manager turned me on."

  In fact the hotel was nameless, nor did it deserve a name. It was the only hotel in the place. The manager saw us and screamed, "Restaurant!" He herded us into a candlelit room with a long table on which there was a small dish of salt and a fork with twisted tines. The manager's name was Abdul; he was clearly hysterical, suffering the effects of his Ramadhan fasting. He began to argue with Lopez, who called him "a scumbag".

  There was no electricity in this hotel; there was only enough water for one cup of tea apiece. There was no toilet, there was no place to wash—neither was there any water. There was no food, and there seemed to be a shortage of candles. Bobby and Lopez grumbled about this, but then became frightfully happy when Abdul told them their beds would cost thirty-five cents each.

  I had bought an egg in Tayebad, but it had smashed in my jacket pocket, leaked into the material and hardened in a stiff stain. I had drunk half my gin on the Night Mail to Meshed; I finished the bottle over a game of "Hearts" with Lopez, Bobby and a tribesman who was similarly stranded at the hotel.

  As we were playing cards (and the chiefs played in an unnecessarily cut-throat fashion), Abdul wandered in and said, "Nice, clean. But no light. No water for wash. No water for tea."

  "Turn us on then," said Lopez. "Hubble-bubble."

  "Hash," said Bobby.

  Abdul became friendly. He had eaten: his hysteria had passed. He got a piece of hashish like a small mudpie and presented it to Lopez, who burned a bit of it and sniffed the smoke.

  "This is shit," said Lopez. "Third quality." He prepared a cigarette. "In Europe, sure, this is good shit. But you don't come all the way to Afghanistan to smoke third-quality shit like this."

  "The first time I came here, in '68," said Bobby, "the passport officer said, 'You want nice hash?' I thought it was the biggest put-on I'd ever heard. I mean, a passport officer! I said, 'No, no—it gives me big headache.' 'You no want hash?' he says. I told him no. He looks at me and shakes his head: 'So why you come to Afghanistan?'"

  "Far out," said Lopez.

  "So I let him turn me on."

  "It's a groovy country," said Lopez. "They're all crazy here." He looked at me. "You digging it?"

  "Up to a point," I said.

  "You freaking out?" Bobby sucked on the hashish cigarette and passed it to me. I took a puff and gulped it and felt a light twanging on the nerves behind my eyes.

  "He is, look. I saw him on the train to Meshed," said Lopez. "His head was together, but I think he's loose now."

  Lopez laughed at the egg stain on my pocket. The jacket was dirty, my shirt was dirty, and so were my hands; there was a film of dust on my face.

  "He's loose," said Bobby.

  "He's liquefying," said Lopez. "It's a goofy place."

  "I could hang out here," said Bobby.

  "I could too, but they won't let me," said Lopez. "That scumbag passport shit only gave me eight days. He didn't like my passport—I admit it's shitty. I got olive oil on it in Greece. I know what I should do—really goop it up with more olive oil and get another one."

  "Yeah," said Bobby. He smoked the last of the joint and made another.

  With the third joint the conversation moved quickly to a discussion of time, reality and the spiritual refuge ashrams provided. Both Lopez and Bobby had spent long periods in ashrams; once, as long as six months.

  "Meditating?" I asked.

  "Well, yeah, meditating and also hanging out."

  "We were waiting for this chick to come back from the States."

  What happened was this. They had gone to Mykonos that summer. Mykonos had its attractions: it was frequented by very wealthy people who enjoyed rubbing shoulders with hippies. There was no class barrier because on Mykonos both the wealthy people and the hippies went around in the nude. "Rich straights and scrounging freaks," Lopez said, "and all of them bare-ass." Lopez and Bobby sold silver Indian jewelry and hashish and salted away $2,000. They took the money to India and bought silk scarves and shirts. These they sent, with a reliable girl, to the States; then they went into an ashram. The girl sold the Indian silks in Chicago and returned with $7,000. They divided the money and then went to Katmandu to live the life of simple mountain folk.

  Lopez was thirty-one. After graduation from a Brooklyn high school, he got a job as a salesman in a plastics firm. "Not really a salesman, I mean, I was the boss's right-hand man. I pick up a phone and say 'Danny's out of town,' I pick up another one and say, 'Danny'll meet you at three thirty.' That kind of job, you know?" He was earning a good salary; he had his own apartment, he was engaged to be married. Then one day he had a revelation: "I'm on my way to work. I get off the bus and I'm standing in front of the office. I get these flashes, a real anxiety trip: doing a job I hate, engaged to a plastic chick, all the traffic's pounding. Jesus. So I go to Hollywood. It was okay. Then I went to Mexico. Five years I was in Mexico. That's where I got the name Lopez. My name ain't Lopez, it's Morris. Mexico was good, then it turned me off. I went to Florida, Portugal, Morocco. One day I'm in Morocco. I meet a guy. He says, 'Katmandu is where it's happening.' So I take my things, my chick, and we start going. There was no train in those days. Twelve days it took me to get to Erzurum. I was sick. It was muddy and cold, and snow—snow in Turkey! I nearly died in Erzurum, and then again in Teheran. But I knew a guy. Anyway, I made it."

  I asked him to try and imagine what he would be doing at the age of sixty.

  "So I'm sixty, so what? I see myself, sure, I'm sitting right here—right here—and probably rolling a joint." Which seemed a rash prophecy, since we were in the no-man's land hotel, in a candle-lit room, without either food or water.

  Somewhere at the front of the hotel a telephone rang.

  "If it's for me," Lopez shouted, but he had already begun to cackle, "if it's for me, I'm not here!"

  The Bus With A Hole in It

  Lopez sat beside me. He said he liked me, "because freaks are so fucking boring and straights are sometimes a groove."

  I dreaded the journey, not merely because we were traveling across a patch of stifling desert to the blighted town of Herat, but because I loathe buses. Most buses remind me of church summer-school outings to Nantasket Beach. This bus was on its last legs; it was filled with dust and gasoline fumes. We started out with eighteen people and picked up seven more along the way: a blind child, a very old woman, a man with a rifle, a family of four and their five chickens. No one got off. The men's turbans were loosely tied; one man hung out the window, and as he gawked at the desert his turban began to unravel, making a long flapping rag which reached nearly to the back of the bus. It was only when another man called his attention to it that he gathered it in.

  We passed more of those sand castles, and after a while the black tents of nomads. Lopez called them "Coochies" (perhaps Kutchis) and said he had seen them all over India and Pakistan as well. He said they were fierce and unfriendly, but that he had always wanted to join them. The large black tents, ominously pitched in the Afghan desert, reminded me of that speech in Tamburlaine where one of the characters describes how Tamburlaine always pitches black tents when he is about to go to war. The historical Tamerlane actually traveled this same desert and captured the town of Herat.

  We stopped again and again. The little bus was hot and crowded; all the windows, except the broken side
one where the man had almost lost his turban, were closed and sealed, and a woman near me, who looked very ill, began quietly to puke. The children were crying, and the blind boy, squatting on the floor near the driver, was singing—that high, tuneless Muslim whining. Two hours passed in this way. Lopez said, "You digging it?"

  Suddenly—I cannot describe my surprise at the speed of this occurrence—there was the loudest bang I've ever heard; I could not imagine what caused it. The whole interior filled up with the blue smoke reeking of cordite. There was a moment of shock and confusion, total deafness—the driver swerved, nearly overturning the bus, and brought us to a halt.

  When the smoke cleared, we saw a hole in the green formica ceiling; it was oval, about an inch and a half wide and edged with soot. Beneath this hole a trembling Afghan held a smoking shotgun. The gun belonged to another man who, wedged at the front of the bus, had no room for the gun. He had passed it to the man to hold, but had not warned him that it was loaded. The man might have pulled the trigger, or else the bumpy road might have set it off. There was a brief argument and then we went on our way.

  "Didn't I tell you this was a goofy country?" said Lopez. "Ever see anything like that before?"

  The frightening part came an hour later, when the man with the gun got out. There was a fierce argument between the driver and the man with the gun, and then the male passengers leaped out and they all stood in the desert beside the bus, shouting in the sunlight. It was complicated: the man who owned the gun hadn't been holding it when it went off; the man who was holding it hadn't known it was loaded. But there was a hole in the bus to pay for, and as everyone's belongings were tied to the top of the bus, the slug had penetrated suitcases and bundles. The argument became a fight, and three men rolled in the sand, shouting and kicking, as the shotgun changed hands.

  Lopez said, "It's getting hairy."

  The owner of the shotgun held the muzzle and swung it at his attackers, who dodged it and got him to the ground. They punched him; he shrieked and tried to get free. The other passengers hooted at him and kicked him when he rolled near.

  "I think we should get out," I said. I was for leaving the bus and hitching a ride. My fear was that someone would reload the shotgun and start shooting, and when that happened I wanted to be able to flatten myself against the ground.

  "No, no, no," said Lopez. "You don't understand these goofs. They're not going to kill the guy. They just want to get some money out of him to fix the roof. He doesn't want to pay, see, because he wasn't holding the gun. But he'll pay—he's outnumbered."

  "Meanwhile, we sit here—"

  "Look, take it easy. In five minutes they'll all be back in here and we'll be going down the line. It'll be like nothing happened."

  It took ten minutes, but Lopez was right: we were on our way. It was another hour to Herat. I spent it tremulously vowing that this would be my last bus ride.

  It is hard to decide where Asia begins. The Russians say at the Urals, the Turks at Haydarpasa, but these are the kind of meaningless cultural perspectives of geography that produce such judgements as the one frequently heard in English pubs, "The wogs begin at Calais." Surprisingly, many faces one sees in eastern Turkey, in Iran and Afghanistan have a European cast, but they are darker and more deeply wrinkled. Perhaps Asia begins when the first dusky hand reaches out with obsequious arrogance for baksheesh. That's what I thought in Turkey. But now I knew. I had crossed the imaginary line between Europe and Asia. When that gun went off with such a crack, blasting a hole in the desert bus, Asia began.

  A Bazaar, A Band, The Exchange Rate

  To be in Herat, in the western corner of Afghanistan, is to be nowhere; and Herat is so far from Kabul there are still people in it who refuse to believe the king has been dethroned. News travels slowly; there are no newspapers in Herat. On the other hand, the bazaar is unexpectedly crammed with merchandise, dirt-cheap in all senses. Herat is a town of clumsy craftsmen, who have forgotten the fine points of their trade. They squat, biting on their tongues, making dangerously sharp jewelry and wooden objects, hacking at leather with dull scissors and making wolfpelts into valises much as one would make a sow's ear out of two or three silk purses. Between the shops—the tiny closets and cupboards where these crude results are displayed—are antique stalls, some selling genuine treasures, ancient Afghan flintlocks with mother-of-pearl inlay, braces of pistols, chunks of carvings pilfered from temples, old silver, carpets smuggled from Russia, brass samovars and rare coins. And further along, where the sidewalk ends, and bridging the open drain which is dammed to overflowing with the green excrement of donkeys, are the fruit stalls: grapes, figs and pomegranates, winged and humming because of the clusters of wasps on them. The stallholders do not shoo them away. They laze and watch the passers-by, mainly women, who in spooky pleated shrouds really do look ghostly as they peer through the thick lace at their eyes. These small draped figures move swiftly among the stalls, putting the wasps to flight when they unveil their skinny hands to choose their fruit.

  Men stand idly in Herat's main street. You think they are jay-walkers until a horse cart approaches; then several men wave their arms—they are traffic policemen in Afghan robes and turbans; and several more scurry around with twig brooms and squares of cardboard—they are the Department of Sanitation. The driver reins his horse, obeying the frantic signals of the man with flapping robes, and the red pompoms and bells on the decorated cart sway as the vehicle proceeds. But the horse has been startled; he raises his tail and as he does so the men with brooms rush to the steaming pile, sweeping and scooping, and this they deposit at the side of the road, in the drains under the fruitstalls.

  The bells of the horse carts tinkle throughout the night. It is a pleasing sound, but I got no sleep in Herat. Twice, once at midnight and once at about three in the morning, I was awakened by music—not eastern music, no stringed instruments or screeching voices, but trumpets, farting cornets and snare drums and the gulping sound of tambourines. It might have been a school band parading to a football game, except that this was the dead of night. I heard them coming when they were several streets away; it went on, distantly, for twenty minutes and then was raucous under my window. It was a band, men with lamps preceded it, their lights swinging, and I could hear but not see what I took to be children running in the street: their laughing voices and animated feet. The music was brassy, the drumming loud, though the tune was unfamiliar. It was the sort of bizarre nightmare old men have in German novels, and I watched with some apprehension the glint of the instruments, the nodding turbans and dancing lights.

  It was typical of my baffling Afghanistan interlude that not only did I never discover who the musicians were, I also could not find a single person who had heard them playing. In such an atmosphere one could become paranoid in the twinkling of an eye, but the travelers had other things on their minds. They were certainly exercised about the exchange rate, and most of the conversations I overheard sounded like financiers' anxiety turned into slang.

  The news was bad: the dollar was quoted at fifty Afghanis, but the first shock the hippies got was from a sleek robed man who beckoned to a chief and offered him forty-five Afghanis.

  "So the black market rate is lower than the bank's. Right? Beautiful."

  "I remember when you could get seventy to the dollar."

  "Seventy! I remember when it was around ninety—and a bed was fifteen. You figure it out."

  They stood in groups, cawing like brokers faced with a plunging market, the worst in years. And the amazing thing was that these youths, whose own description of themselves was "freaks"—the girl in the torn blouse, the bearded one with the cracked guitar, the boy who walked around in his bare feet during that very cold night in no-man's land, the ones in pajamas, pantaloons, dhotis; the men with ponytails, skullcaps, and sombreros, the girls with crew cuts and copies of Idries Shah, all of them fatigued after their flight across Turkey and Iran—the amazing thing, as I say, was that they talked with impressive caution ab
out money. They were carrying French and Swiss francs, German marks, sterling and dollars; their money was in greasy canvas pouches and gaily colored purses and sequined bags with drawstrings.

  At times, when the topic was drugs or religion, they were impossible to talk to. They struggled with the debased language of drug psychosis to express abstract concepts they had got third-hand from drop-out philosophy majors. But when the subject was money they never mocked: they were serious, cunning and shrewd by turns, because they knew—even better than their detractors—how much their life, so seemingly frivolous, was underpinned by cash.

  "Listen, Bugsy got fifty at the bank."

  "That's his fault for going to the bank."

  "Yeah, fifty's not the official rate. Maybe here, but not in Kabul. I'm sure we can get fifty-eight."

  "Fifty-eight is peanuts!"

  "Anyway, we can't afford to get to Kabul at this rate."

  "Bad scene, man," says a boy wandering over to the group. "I just changed some money."

  Several eagerly importune him: "What'd you get?"

  "Fifty-one."

  "Hear that? So there's hope," says another. "I'm not changing mine for less than fifty-five."

  The difference between fifty-one and fifty-five Afghanis is about seven cents.

  "We've got English pounds," says a girl in a long grey skirt who has been listening with some intensity.

  "You're fucked, baby."

  A very thin boy with a scraggly beard considers this obscenity for a few moments, then says, "Yeah, you are. See, they're only buying dollars because the rate is low. They won't buy pounds but they'll sell you dollars for them—probably about two bucks for a pound. Then they'll buy the dollars from you. So you get ripped off twice."

  The girl was dejected. She said, "I don't know what to do."

  "Hang out. We don't know what the official rate is."

  "Can't someone make a phone call?"

  "This used to be a groovy place. What happened?"