‘Thank you, my friend’, said our host, looking at us out of the side of his eyes, and behaving much as I might at home if a credulous millionaire stopped by for tea. His extended hand was looking for something more than the moist feel of my own.
‘It’s okay’, Louis said, undeterred, as we went back to the Hotel Ghion, an improbably dark place that, by curious chance, reproduced the name of the festive geisha quarter in Kyoto – though the addition of an ‘h’ made all the difference between heaven and hell.
‘Mohammed Aidid is staying in the hotel.’
Strangely, this was true. Aidid, the Somali warlord who had mocked and savaged American soldiers only a few weeks before in Mogadishu, was, by most accounts, the most wanted man in the world right now. Unlike most fugitives from justice, however, he had decided not to hie himself to Paraguay. He was resident in room 211 of the Ghion, perhaps musing on the comfortable benefits of Ethiopian Airlines.
We went along to his room, but on the subject of visas to Eritrea, the beauty of the day or even the merits of the local coffee, he and his press spokesman were silent.
Louis – in his cream suit and with his reddened complexion resembling, as was his habit, James Bond on an off day – looked forward to the drive ahead of us that was guaranteed to make use of all the clenched teeth and stiff upper lip we had been taught in school, even if the driver couldn’t get us to Eritrea.
‘There are three laws in international business’, he said (as I remember it, perhaps fictitiously). ‘The first is, “Always rent a car from an Italian. Especially if he is a she, and is ready to be asked out to dinner.” The second is, “Come to a country where driving is an adventure, nothing like the eventless exercise it is at home”. The third is, “Don’t bother with discounts when you’re on holiday”.’
The fourth – it wasn’t spoken – is, ‘Don’t trust an investment banker on anything other than finance’.
Two days later, the blue having hardly risen into the sky, a trim, stiff-backed man with greying hair – Nelson Mandela during his prison years, perhaps – appeared at our door. Behind him was a Toyota Land Cruiser. He took time to show us its amenities. It had locks that didn’t engage, seatbelts that didn’t close. In the back were two cans of kerosene certain to suffocate us if the roads (or their absence) didn’t do the job first.
‘Can we play this?’ Louis asked, extending a prized copy of Live Dead to our new friend and guide.
‘Of course, sir’, said the driver, and within seconds the tape player had swallowed the cassette and was spitting out strangled sounds.
Hours later, we were on the road. Our driver possessed a military bearing that inspired confidence in his ability to fight, if not to drive. The car bore the scars of previous trips to remind us that driving in Ethiopia is about as safe as eating a pig on the streets of Kabul. Both car and driver handled with the jittery fitfulness of an automatic-trained novice attempting a stick shift.
‘Have you been on this road before?’ I asked our leader.
‘Yes, sir’, he called back, over the protesting noises of the car. ‘Once. Twenty-seven years ago.’
‘A long time’, I said.
‘Yes, sir. I was a boy then. Travelling by bus.’
Very soon the broken huts and dusty lanes of Addis fell away and we were in the emptiness that is the very soul of Ethiopia. Occasional figures proceeded in a distant line across the emptiness towards the mountains. Petitioners dressed in white walked along the road to far-off churches, to celebrate the season. The purity, the dignity of the place moved me to a deeper part of myself.
The people of Ethiopia have a serious look to them – sharp eyes and heavy beards – and it is easy to feel as if one is moving through the landscape of the Apocrypha in the Bible. People wear crosses and ceremonial scarves over their white clothes. Devotion is intense. The rusted tanks and signs of recent fighting along the road were less potent than the tall, thin figures walking, walking, walking, for weeks, or months, on end.
Our driver allowed us to savour these beauties by flinging the rickety car into top gear and accelerating towards the occasional car that appeared before us, preferably around blind turns.
‘What the hell are you up to?’ cried Louis.
‘Sorry, sir’, he said, and then passed another car to put us into the path of an approaching truck.
‘Bloody hell!’ said Louis, the counter-intuitive benefits of travelling by road forgotten. ‘Are you trying to get us killed?’
‘Of course not’, I mentioned to him under my breath. ‘If he did, payment would not be forthcoming.’
Our driver saw another madman approaching on the mountain road and went into the wrong lane again, accelerating around the curve.
‘I don’t believe this!’ Louis exclaimed, and then an exchange of words followed that were not diplomatic. We stopped for a little while to catch our breath, and our driver confided, ‘Your friend, sir, is very strict. More strict than military.’
‘He is’, I conceded. We had already come across travellers who had decided to take the Ethiopian Airlines circuit, looking as if they had enjoyed the holiday of their lives.
The days went on, and often we were caked in dust so as to resemble brown snowmen in the back. To keep the windows closed meant certain death from the cans of kerosene. To open them was to admit all the accumulated sand and grit of centuries. Jerry Garcia would have sweetened the trip considerably, but he was now a pinched squeal of swallowed tape in the Land Cruiser’s once state-of-the-art sound system.
‘Let’s just get to the nearest town and bail out’, said Louis, who looked very close to accepting that there was a benefit in paying less and enjoying more. For a dangerous moment I felt that English masochism was going to accept defeat in the wilds of Ethiopia.
Fortunately, our driver protected us from this. ‘No lunch’, he began to wail piteously, when informed of the new hurry-up plan. ‘No breakfast, no lunch, no rest.’
‘No end’, said Louis bitterly, and with that, communications between the two broke down for good. From then on, for day after day on unpaved roads, the Land Cruiser sending us jolting against its uneven roof, the kerosene directing the perfumes of Araby into our nostrils, the new jolts shaking the dust from us, the sand getting inside our eyes and ears, as if we were crossing the Sahara on camel, both my companions chose to speak only through an intermediary.
‘Tell him to slow down’, said Louis, as we hurtled around a truck, and then swerved back towards a precipice and the comforting depths of the Ethiopian plateau.
‘Please, sir’, said the driver. ‘No lunch, no rest, no dinner.’
I could only imagine he was driving fast to get to the nearest meal. Louis was telling him to go slow and speed up simultaneously, and I happily translated as we lurched over small streams and the car coughed and collapsed by the side of the road.
We started up again and then, at one traumatic moment, another Land Cruiser zipped past us on the unsurfaced road, at a clip that would have qualified it for attention in a NASCAR rally. Minutes later we met it again, in a ditch, its passengers sitting dazed in the front seat.
‘No lunch’, cried the driver. ‘No breakfast, no lunch, no rest.’
‘No hope’, said Louis, and I translated this into warm pleasantries to our guide.
Occasionally, in the midst of emptiness, our leader would see a man he had served with in the military. The car would stop, and pregnant reminiscences would be exchanged. Louis had taken to closing his eyes, as if to make it all go away, and burying his head in Richard Price’s novel of gangland violence, Clockers. The driver spoke of his war experiences with a nostalgia growing by the minute.
In time, near-dead, we approached a hotel where Louis and the driver with whom he had long since stopped speaking were able to go their separate ways: the driver back to his much-missed home, Louis to the horror of spending less to enjoy more comfort, with Ethiopian Airlines. I, now permanently brown – a human sand dune with a simultaneo
us translation machine inside (which could only offer translations from English into English) – was moved to reflect on the beauty of travel.
We travel, I thought – looking fondly at my heroic old friend – for adventure and fun, to get away from the drudgery of our lives at home. We travel to court hardship and face the dangers and excitements that are themselves a kind of vacation and challenge for us. We meet people for whom our presence is nothing but opportunity, to take them out of the sadness and difficulty of their lives. The smiles exchanged on both sides have something of a nervous edge.
I looked again at my friend, the best travelling companion I knew, collapsed in an exhausted heap in one corner of the car, too tired even to argue the ‘no breakfast, no lunch’ conundrum, and thought how the more horrifying the trip, the more amusing it is in retrospect. But humour, everything, encountered on the road, is just a gateway. It only really moves us if it comes very close indeed to something that looks exactly like its opposite.
AN IDYLL IN IBIZA
KARL TARO GREENFELD
Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of three books on Asia, most recently Plague: The Inside Story of the Killer Virus that Nearly Crashed the World, about the SARS virus. A former staff writer and editor for Time and correspondent for the Nation, he is currently Editor-at-Large for Sports Illustrated. Karl has lived in Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and now resides in New York City with his wife and two daughters.
Anya had warned me. Yet I had discounted her descriptions of her wealthy German family as exaggerated. Who wasn’t a little embarrassed by their parents? But now, as I sat at the breakfast table with the Becker family and watched them spoon huge quantities of yogurt and muesli into their mouths, pile blutwurst, cheese and ham onto thickly buttered black bread and fit entire open-faced sandwiches between their lips, gulp carafes of orange juice and pots of coffee and then light and smoke Fortuna cigarettes before commencing another round of breakfast, I felt I had landed among some race of aliens who had an entirely different notion of what should constitute the first meal of the day. I sipped coffee and had some toast. Including Anya and myself, there were nine of us around the marble-topped table on the veranda overlooking the Mediterranean. The Balearic sun was already blazing; within an hour it would be so hot that you would feel too fatigued to do the folding and refolding required to read a newspaper and would instead place the paper on your face to shield you as you slept.
Anya and I had met six months earlier in Tokyo, where she was a model and I was a magazine editor. She was tall and blonde with grey-green eyes and a huge appetite which she struggled to curb for professional reasons. We were a good match in our similar fecklessness in our respective fields. She landed second-rate jobs – handing out winners’ trophies at motorcycle races, doing fittings for obscure designers – while I worked at a magazine where the stories, even after several passes through the editorial process, would still fall short of professional standards. At some point as our careers were careening into prolonged skids, Anya mentioned that her family had a house in Ibiza. I immediately conceived the idea of fleeing there as an ideal escape from Tokyo. By the time we left for the Mediterranean, Anya’s contract was about to be dropped by her agency and I had either quit or been fired from the magazine, depending on who you asked.
We arrived late at night, having taken off from Tokyo twenty hours earlier and touching down in London and Madrid along the way. We were greeted at the airport by Anya’s mother, Baumy. She was a handsome woman in her early fifties, and her six-foot frame allowed her to carry the additional weight of middle age without appearing fat. She was bronzed and toned from hours of golf and boating, and though she was crow-footed around the eyes, from the nose down she still had Anya’s complexion. In fact, as I looked from Anya to Baumy, I realised that I had just seen Anya’s future. One could do worse.
Her family loved exotic cars, Anya had told me, and I had imagined fine Italian and English sports roadsters. My own family had been maddeningly prosaic when it came to automobiles, my father returning home every few years with a practical new station wagon manufactured in Sweden or Japan. I don’t believe he even knew the names of European sports cars. But the car Baumy led us to in the airport parking lot was not what I would call exotic – it was idiotic. It resembled the car the Munsters drove: a dark brown jalopy with huge fenders and headlights mounted on struts. The roof pitched forward at a jaunty angle, and there were no windows or doors. Nor was there a trunk.
‘The buggy’, Anya explained, using the family nickname for the vehicle.
We had to slide our bags through the open side of the buggy onto the back seat, and then I climbed in and tried to wedge myself in among the bags. Anya sat in front next to her mother. The car started with a noisy rattle like an old biplane and then Baumy backed out. Someone honked. She stopped.
I realised the car had no rear-view mirror.
Despite our burden and the car’s poor visibility, Baumy passed aggressively, honked if drivers paused for a moment at traffic circles and generally threw the buggy into curves and roared down the straight with surprising confidence in the creaky suspension system. Crouched atop a duffel bag, I flinched as Baumy steered the buggy into passing lanes and then swerved back into line just before the headlights of oncoming traffic. Around hairpin turns, I noticed, like cautionary talismans, there were burned-out carcasses of other cars that had apparently taken these turns too fast. Anya’s family, I would discover, seldom heeded warnings.
When we finally arrived at the family’s house, I gaped at the view and my own good fortune at having washed up here. We had just passed through a dreary winter and damp spring in oriental Tokyo and had now landed in sunny, occidental Ibiza. I had somehow escaped from a crumbling life in Japan and landed in a place that seemed like paradise. The house was built into the side of a rocky spit of land and comprised a series of decks and balconies and stairwells from which spoked bedroom suites. On three sides of the house there was nothing but clear blue sea.
It would have been truly sublime, however, if Baumy had been restrained from decorating. As it was, she had managed to install the widest array of duck paintings and sculptures I had ever seen. Duck pastels lined one wall. On another were water-colours and oils of various forms of aquatic bird. There were even wooden ducks – they might have been hunting decoys – nailed to the ceiling. The spacious living room was diminished by all this avian decor, so that you had to turn sideways to get past the porcelain mallards.
But once you were clear of them, and out onto the veranda, there was the swimming pool and beyond that, of course, the Mediterranean. I stowed our bags in one of the bedrooms. I was looking forward to sleep and then a lazy day by the pool.
Instead, I found Anya undressing and sliding a black dress over herself.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘We’re going out to dinner’, she explained.
‘We’ve been on airplanes for two days’, I pleaded. ‘We haven’t slept.’
She shrugged. ‘My mother wants to take us to dinner, the whole family.’
Anyway, she pointed out, in Spain, one eats dinner very late.
I had no choice but to join them. I didn’t want to appear ungrateful or, even worse, a weakling. I was beginning to sense, from Baumy and even from how Anya behaved around her mother, that this was a family that seldom second-guessed their impulses.
At dinner, I was introduced to an array of Beckers, all of them healthy and blond with strikingly defined cheekbones. There was the father, Lothar, a tall, skinny man with a face like James Coburn who didn’t really seem to speak German, English or, actually, any language at all. He communicated with furrowed brows and stern nods. There were Anya’s brothers, Wolfram and Gunther, Teutonic giants who had joined the father’s business – an industrial concern that had something to do with ceramic pellets – and had similarly low golf handicaps. Much of the conversation among the Becker men revolved around golf, eating and ceramic pellets. There
were the girlfriends, both blonde with strikingly perfect skin. I don’t believe I ever saw either of them smile. And there was the younger sister, Emi, who wore her hair short and was even taller than Baumy and Anya. Even through my fatigue, I detected an attitude of dismissiveness directed towards me from the various women attached to the Becker clan. The men seemed happy enough to have me along, although I imagined they already knew I would never fit into their lives of golf and ceramic pellets.
That night, when I lay down on the platform bed, for an instant the pounding and sloshing of the nearby sea made me imagine I was adrift. Yet just as I was falling asleep with Anya’s head in my arms, I was jolted awake by the scurrying sound of a small mammal, the dry clicking of tiny feet on the tile floor. I slipped away from Anya, lifted the mosquito net and, in the dark, made my way across the room to the light switch. We had kept the door propped open to catch a breeze and now, as I switched on the light, I saw, for a moment, an undulating brown and black pelt dart around a corner and out the door.
I tried to wake Anya to tell her that I believed I had seen a rat. She wouldn’t be roused.
By the time we gathered for breakfast the next morning, I had concluded the Beckers were different from any family I had ever known. My parents had been writers. My brother had been autistic. We lived in a Los Angeles suburb and while we had been well off financially, my parents, both Depression-era children, had remained parsimonious and resourceful. My Japanese mother, for example, still hung clothes out to dry in the sun. My Jewish American father would sometimes wear my old suit jackets once I had decided they were passé. The Beckers, on the other hand, as I watched them inhale a round of soft-boiled eggs and guzzle glasses of milk, consumed a disproportionate amount of all kinds of resources. The lights in the living room had stayed on all night. There were pumps going in the swimming pool. Showers left running in bathrooms. Air-conditioners blasting in rooms with open windows. The women wore immense diamond earrings. Baumy had a diamond ring the size of a small walnut. The men all wore Rolexes. I had nothing against their gaudy excess – in fact, in some ways I aspired to it – but up close, it came across as joyless. I had never thought of myself as particularly bohemian, yet compared to these industrialists, that’s what I was. Still, these were not the kind of people to question or wonder how we would get along; there were meals to be eaten, rounds to be played and internal combustion engines to be operated.
By the Seat of My Pants Page 11