The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  What exactly did he mean about the toilets? Yervant explained that certain rooms were always vacant, since their walls had been partially blown away, exposing the interior to sniper fire. But in the attached bathrooms, the toilets remained—unflushable, full, and stinking. “Find one and make it your own,” he advised.

  The window in my room had been destroyed by a rocket and replaced with plastic by the UN’s refugee agency. The shelling was continuous. I unpacked my gear, propped my flashlight against a cup, brushed my teeth with the mineral water I had brought from Zagreb, laid out the St. Jude medallion my mother had given me, and unrolled my sleeping bag on top of an orange polyester blanket left over from the glory days of 1984, when Sarajevo was an Olympic city and the gruesome Soviet-style structure of the Holiday Inn had been built.

  As I discovered the next day, the press corps consisted of a bunch of men with cameras or notebooks in a standard uniform: jeans, Timberland boots, and ugly zip-front fluorescent fleeces. The sole exception was a tall, thin Frenchman named Paul Marchand, a radio reporter, whose outfit consisted of a pressed white shirt, creased black trousers, and shiny dress shoes.

  There were, I was relieved to see, other women. I recognized Amanpour, young, glamorous, and more visible than ever after her coverage two years earlier of the Gulf War. I also encountered a few French female reporters, all of whom violated the masculine dress code: a reporter from Le Parisien who wore cashmere sweaters; the petite radio reporter Ariane Quentier, who favored a Russian fur hat; and Alexandra Boulat, a photographer with a mane of long blond hair (she died after suffering a brain aneurysm in Ramallah, in 2007, at the age of 45).

  I also met Kurt Schork, who had a room near mine on the fourth floor. He was a legendary Reuters correspondent who had become a war reporter at the age of 40 after working for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Schork brought me to the Reuters office and showed me how to file my copy on a satellite phone for $50 a minute. There was a generator in the next room, which reeked of gasoline, and if it was running, one dialed the London office, then read the copy to a distant, frenetic typist, spelling out all the Serbo-Croatian words. It was very World War II. Carrier pigeons would have been faster.

  Over the next few weeks, Schork patiently told me where and where not to go. He showed me how to rig up a hose as a kind of makeshift shower. On Christmas Eve, we went to midnight mass together at St. Josip’s Catholic church on Snipers’ Alley (though not at midnight, since that would have been an invitation to the Serbs to shell us); Christian soldiers, who made up perhaps a quarter of Bosnia’s largely Muslim defense force, came down from the frontline at the outskirts of the city to receive communion.

  Room 437 would be my home, on and off, for the next three years: the mangy orange blanket, the plywood desk with cigarette burns, the empty minibar, the telephone on the bedside table that never rang because the lines were cut. And through the plastic sheeting of my window, I had a view of the city, with its 35,000 destroyed buildings and its courageous populace that refused to bend to its oppressors.

  The 2012 reunion in Sarajevo was to take place over the first week of April, Holy Week. This had some resonance for me, since during the siege I often went to mass with other Catholic reporters in the battered Catholic church. It had given me solace, and seeing the old ladies bent over their rosary beads reassured me in some way that wherever I went in the world I could find a common community bound by religion.

  Shortly after I arrived for the reunion, I ran into Emma Daly, who had been a reporter for the British Independent during the war and now worked for Human Rights Watch. She had married the war photographer Santiago Lyon, now a senior AP boss, and was the mother of two children. In those days, I don’t think either one of us projected much into the future or could have imagined ourselves married, with children, living more or less normal lives.

  “Have you seen the chairs yet?” she asked.

  Emma explained that a kind of temporary memorial had been set up on Marshal Tito Street, in the center of the city: 11,541 empty red chairs, one for every resident killed during the siege. Walking downtown, we approached the Presidency Building, where we had risked sniper fire and stray mortar rounds during the war to interview President Alija Izetbegović or Vice President Ejup Ganić, who always let journalists into his office and sometimes offered us hot coffee. “If you’re brave enough to come to this building,” Ganić once told me, “then I am going to talk to you.”

  The rows of red chairs, some of them scaled down to represent children, stretched far into the distance. Later there would be some grumbling over the fact that the chairs had been made in a Serbian factory. Yet the amount of destruction they represented was overwhelming—every one of these people might still be alive if a sniper had failed to pull the trigger, if a mortar shell had landed 20 feet to the east or west.

  That night, at the refurbished Holiday Inn, we all got horribly drunk. Then we started taking group pictures. All of us were a little rounder in the face, the men with less hair and bigger bellies. The women, though, looked remarkably good.

  The Holiday Inn now offers Wi-Fi, working toilets, a few restaurants (the food still bad), and clean sheets. We gathered in the bar, a group of veteran reporters and photographers who hadn’t seen one another in 20 years. There was Morten Hvaal, a Norwegian photographer who once had driven me around the city in the AP’s armored car, pointing out landmarks; Shane (“Shaney”) McDonald, an Australian cameraman who had sat in my room one night with Keith “Chuck” Tayman and Robbie Wright, watching falling stars from an open window; and there, in a corner, Jon Jones, the photographer who had scared me so on my first ride from the airport. Now he was nice. We had all grown up.

  But some people were missing from the Holiday Inn lounge where we had spent years living on whiskey, cigarettes, and chocolate bars. Shouldn’t Kurt Schork have been sitting on a barstool, drinking a cranberry juice? Kurt was killed by rebel soldiers in Sierra Leone in May 2000, the morning after we ate dinner together in a restaurant overlooking the sea. And where was Paul Marchand, with his black shoes and white shirt? (He had once called me in the middle of the night to shout, “The water is running and she is hot!”) After the war he wrote novels, started drinking, and, one night in 2009, hanged himself. Juan Carlos Gumucio was gone, too. A bear of a man—and the second husband of Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, also gone, killed in Homs, Syria, in February 2012—he had introduced himself to me in central Bosnia by exclaiming, “Call me JC! Like Jesus Christ. Or like King Juan Carlos.” We used to go to Sunday mass together in Sarajevo—and in London, too, but then out afterward for bloody marys. In 2002 he shot himself in the heart after, in Colvin’s words, “seeing too much war.” I was in Somalia at the time, on a hotel rooftop, and someone phoned to tell me. There were gunshots all around me, and over that din I began to cry for my friend.

  The morning after our reunion, we all had hangovers. Gradually, we pulled ourselves together, and shortly after noon, we went to a vineyard owned by a local former employee of the AP. There we spent the afternoon drinking wine and looking out over the hills at Sarajevo. It was almost unthinkable, but we were sipping wine and eating slow-cooked lamb in the exact spot where snipers had set up 20 years before.

  Our return to our homes in Auckland, Beirut, Boston, London, Milan, New York, Nicosia, Paris, and Vienna was followed by a flurry of comradely e-mails and pictures posted on Facebook. There was much talk of getting together again, which we all knew would never happen. Then we all plunged into depression. A few days later I received a letter from Edward Serotta, who had gone to Sarajevo to document its Jewish population during the Bosnian war and now works in Vienna reconstructing family histories that were lost during the Holocaust. Serotta said that he remembered coming back to his Berlin apartment after weeks in Sarajevo and putting on a pair of trousers that slid off him. At first he thought they belonged to someone else. Then he realized that they were his—and that he was still himself—but phys
ically and emotionally, he was not the same person who first went to Sarajevo.

  Serotta told me he remembered a night he walked through the city, in November 1993, thinking, “If mankind is going to destroy itself, I feel honored and privileged to be here to see how it is done.”

  After I put his letter away, I gathered up all my Sarajevo mementos—the tiny bits of shrapnel, a photograph of me and Ariane in helmets on the frontline, a copper coffeepot, a love note that Bruno, my husband, had left me in Room 437 after our first meeting, his English then imperfect: “I won’t loose you.”

  At the airport, a group of us had gathered for coffee: Serotta; the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Roy Gutman; Ariane; Peter Kessler (a UN refugee worker) and his wife, Lisa; and Anna Cataldi, an Italian writer and UN ambassador. Ariane and I soon boarded the plane to Paris, and she—always the astute little reporter in the fur hat—caught my mood.

  “Don’t be sad,” she said. “There are many places to go.” She fiddled with her handbag and read Paris Match.

  But I was sad. My experience in Sarajevo was the last time I thought I could change something. The city was passing below my eyes from the plane window, forever broken, resting on a long flowing river.

  A. A. GILL

  America the Marvelous

  FROM Vanity Fair

  “STUPID, STUPID. Americans are stupid. America is stupid. A stupid, stupid country made stupid by stupid, stupid people.” I particularly remember that because of the nine stupids. It was said over a dinner table by a professional woman, a clever, clever, clever woman. Hardback educated, bespokely traveled, liberally humane, worked in the arts. I can’t remember specifically why she said it, what evidence of New World idiocy triggered the trope. Nor do I remember what the reaction was, but I don’t need to remember. It would have been a nodded and muttered agreement. Even from me. I’ve heard this cock crow so often I don’t even feel guilt for not wringing its neck.

  Among the educated, enlightened, expensive middle classes of Europe, this is a received wisdom. A given. Stronger in some countries, like France, less so somewhere like Germany, but overall the Old World patronizes America for being a big, dumb, fat, belligerent child. The intellectuals, the movers and the makers and the creators, the dinner-party establishments of people who count, are united in the belief—no, the knowledge—that Americans are stupid, crass, ignorant, soulless, naive oafs without attention, irony, or intellect. These same people will use every comforting, clever, and ingenious American invention, will demand America’s medicine, wear its clothes, eat its food, drink its drink, go to its cinema, love its music, thank God for its expertise in a hundred disciplines, and will all adore New York. More than that, more shaming and hypocritical than that, these are people who collectively owe their nations’ and their personal freedom to American intervention and protection in wars, both hot and cold. Who, whether they credit it or not, also owe their concepts of freedom, equality, and civil rights in no small part to America. Of course, they will also sign collective letters accusing America of being a fascist, totalitarian, racist state.

  Enough. Enough, enough, enough of this convivial rant, this collectively confirming bigotry. The nasty laugh of little togetherness, or Euro-liberal insecurity. It’s embarrassing, infectious, and belittling. Look at that European snapshot of America. It is so unlike the country I have known for 30 years. Not just a caricature but a travesty, an invention. Even on the most cursory observation, the intellectual European view of the New World is a homemade, Old World effigy that suits some internal purpose. The belittling, the discounting, the mocking of Americans is not about them at all. It’s about us, back here on the ancient, classical, civilized Continent. Well, how stupid can America actually be? On the international list of the world’s best universities, 14 of the top 20 are American. Four are British. Of the top 100, only 4 are French, and Heidelberg is one of 4 that creeps in for the Germans. America has won 338 Nobel Prizes. The UK, 119. France, 59. America has more Nobel Prizes than Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia combined. Of course, Nobel Prizes aren’t everything, and America’s aren’t all for inventing Prozac or refining oil. It has 22 Peace Prizes, 12 for literature. (T. S. Eliot is shared with the Brits.)

  And are Americans emotionally dim, naive, irony-free? Do you imagine the society that produced Dorothy Parker and Lenny Bruce doesn’t understand irony? It was an American who said that political satire died when they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. It’s not irony that America lacks; it’s cynicism. In Europe, that arid sneer out of which nothing is grown or made is often mistaken for the creative scalpel of irony. And what about vulgarity? Americans are innately, sniggeringly vulgar. What, vulgar like Henry James or Eleanor Roosevelt or Cole Porter, or the Mormons? Again, it’s a question of definitions. What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie. The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance. It was Camus who sniffily said that only in America could you be a novelist without being an intellectual. There is a belief that America has no cultural depth or critical seriousness. Well, you only have to walk into an American bookshop to realize that is wildly wrong and willfully blind. What about Mark Twain, or jazz, or abstract expressionism?

  What is so contrary about Europe’s liberal antipathy to America is that any visiting Venusian anthropologist would see with the merest cursory glance that America and Europe are far more similar than they are different. The threads of the Old World are woven into the New. America is Europe’s greatest invention. That’s not to exclude the contribution to America that has come from around the globe, but it is built out of Europe’s ideas, Europe’s understanding, aesthetic, morality, assumptions, and laws. From the way it sets a table to the chairs it sits on, to the rhythms of its poetry and the scales of its music, the meter of its aspirations and its laws, its markets, its prejudices and neuroses. The conventions and the breadth of America’s reason are European.

  This isn’t a claim for ownership, or for credit. But America didn’t arrive by chance. It wasn’t a ship that lost its way. It wasn’t coincidence or happenstance. America grew tall out of the cramping ache of old Europe.

  When I was a child, there was a lot of talk of a “brain drain”—commentators, professors, directors, politicians would worry at the seeping of gray matter across the Atlantic. Brains were being lured to California by mere money. Mere money and space, and sun, and steak, and Hollywood, and more money and opportunity and optimism and openness. People who took the dollar in exchange for their brains were unpatriotic in much the same way that tax exiles were. The unfair luring of indigenous British thought would, it was darkly said, lead to Britain falling behind, ceasing to be the preeminently brilliant and inventive nation that had produced the Morris Minor and the hovercraft. You may have little idea how lauded and revered Sir Christopher Cockerell, the inventor of the hovercraft, was, and you may well not be aware of what a noisy, unstable waste of effort the hovercraft turned out to be, but we were very proud of it for a moment.

  The underlying motif of the brain drain was that for real cleverness you needed years of careful breeding. Cold bedrooms, tinned tomatoes on toast, a temperament and a heritage that led to invention and discovery. And that was really available only in Europe and, to the greatest extent, in Britain. The brain drain was symbolic of a postwar self-pity. The handing back of Empire, the slow, Kiplingesque watch as the things you gave your life to are broken, and you have to stoop to build them up with worn-out tools. There was resentment and envy—whereas in the first half of the 20th century Britain had spent the last of Grandfather’s inherited capital, leaving it exhausted and depressed, for America the war had been the engine that geared up industry and pulled it out of the Depression, capitalizing it for a half century of plenty. It seemed so unfair.

  The real brain drain w
as already 300 years old. The idea of America attracted the brightest and most idealistic, and the best from all over Europe. European civilization had reached a stasis. By its own accounting, it had grown from classical Greece to become an identifiable, homogeneous place, thanks to the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Following the Dark Ages, there was the Renaissance and the Reformation, and then the Age of Reason, from which grew a series of ideas and discoveries, philosophies and visions, that became preeminent. But at the moment of their creation here comes the United States—just as Europe was reaching a point where the ideas that moved it were outgrowing the conventions and the hierarchies that governed it. Democracy, free economy, free trade, free speech, and social mobility were stifled by the vested interests and competing stresses of a crowded and class-bound continent. Migration to America may have been primarily economic, but it also created the space where the ideas that in Europe had grown too root-bound to flourish might be transplanted. Over 200 years the flame that had been lit in Athens and fanned in Rome, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Stockholm, Prague, and Vienna was passed, a spark at a time, to the New World.

  In 1776 the white and indentured population of America was 2.5 million. A hundred years later it was nearly 50 million. In 1890, America overtook Britain in manufacturing output to become the biggest industrial economy in the world. No economy in the history of commerce has grown that precipitously, and this was 25 years after the most murderous, expensive, and desperate civil war. Indeed, America may have reached parity with Britain as early as 1830. Right from its inception it had faster growth than old Europe. It now accounts for a quarter of the world’s economy. It wasn’t individual brains that made this happen. It wasn’t a man with a better mousetrap. It was a million families who wanted a better mousetrap and were willing to work making mousetraps. It was banks that would finance the manufacture of better mousetraps, and it was a big nation with lots of mice.