by Matt Gross
Suddenly, I realized what was going on. To her, I was just another foreign john looking to sleep with her daughter, the daughter who, for one reason or another, had left again to work as a hooker. With every question I asked, with each insistence that she was a smart girl and just a friend, I was reminding her she’d raised a prostitute—just as, so many years ago, I’d unintentionally reminded Lina of the same thing. I wanted to help, but I couldn’t help hurting.
A week or two later, I was back in Phnom Penh, and I did what had to be done: I went to Martini’s. The place was bigger now, with a sprawling outdoor space that led to a small stage. Electronic music thundered in the night, and the crowd looked the same as ever: foreign guys drinking, local girls dancing. I ordered a Tiger beer and sipped it as I walked around, shaking my head sadly as girl after girl approached me with a slightly scared smile. I climbed the steps up onto the stage and looked out at the sea of prostitutes and their potential clients, but I saw no Lina—no Linas, either, no one who showed the slightest bit of individuality or energy or wit.
Or rather, they were all Linas, all wearing “sex girl” dresses, all equally trapped in a system that rewarded fuck-machine tactics and laughed at any expression of hope or determination. It was stupid of me to expect otherwise. I left my half-finished beer on a concrete ledge and went home to sleep.
The French millionaire was barefoot. It was a cool day in May 2008, and, like me, he’d just gotten off the ferry from Dover to Calais. From the ankles up, he looked the picture of the cosmopolitan Gaul: pressed pants, cashmere V-neck, clear blue eyes, close-cropped silver hair. An air of confidence and self-satisfaction emanated from him. He was returning to his home turf, happy.
But he wore no shoes. His feet were clean, but tough-looking, and I didn’t even catch a glimpse of his presumably leathery soles. On the taxi we shared from the port into town, he explained that he’d first gone barefoot sometime in the 1960s, and from that point on, he’d never reverted. Unless a social occasion or sport activity absolutely called for it, he was shoeless. In winter and summer, in first class and in restaurants. Sure, he sometimes got looks from people, but what did he care? He had money, he knew who he was, and he didn’t want to wear shoes. A few weird glances were worth the freedom.
The taxi dropped me off in the center of town, not far from Rodin’s famous Burghers of Calais statue, memorializing six prominent citizens who’d surrendered themselves to British forces to ward off a siege during the Hundred Years’ War. To my eyes, Calais looked as proper as the French millionaire. Its stately buildings, artsy atmosphere, and clean, slightly chilly air were what I thought a northern French town should be, and the local appetite for beer and pommes frites gave it a human aspect, too. As I checked into Le Cercle de Malines, a meticulously designed but still whimsical bed-and-breakfast—there was a taxidermic crocodile in the Indochine room, a huge claw-foot tub in the Rome room—I had the sense that Calais might be a place where I’d feel at home, on that fine line between highbrow and low.
I knew, however, that Calais had another side. In the past several years, it had become a magnet for refugees, who’d come from all over the world and hoped that here, where the English Channel was narrow and cargo trucks plied the tunnel beneath it, they’d manage, at last, to reach Great Britain. Until 2002, many of the refugees had stayed in a nearby camp called Sangatte, but Nicholas Sarkozy, then the interior minister, had closed it, and officials had declared the problem solved.
But that hadn’t stopped refugees from arriving. Hundreds of them, I’d heard, lived in hiding around Calais, and as the Frugal Traveler I felt it was my duty to learn what I could about these travelers who were frugal not by choice but out of necessity.
One day I walked over to an empty lot near one of Calais’s canals, where Anne-Sophie, the proprietress of Le Cercle de Malines, had told me the refugees gathered each day to receive free meals. Two hundred or so were milling around, waiting for La Belle Étoile, one of three aid organizations that feed the refugees, to open up its trailer. The majority—I learned through interviews—were Eritreans, Iraqis, Afghans, and Palestinians, many of whom had paid tens of thousands of dollars to escape their homes and would give what little they had left for illegal passage across the channel. Some had spent eighteen months getting to this point—others longer—and their voyages were never easy.
“You cannot imagine,” a young Eritrean man told me before turning away to join the lunch line.
Life was tough for them, sometimes in nonobvious ways. France would not give them asylum, nor would it deport them, nor would it allow them to stay and work temporarily. Worse, refugees and aid workers told me, the police would generally arrest them for walking in public during the day—simply for being in the country illegally. They’d be held twenty-four hours, then released, perhaps to be rearrested mere hours later.
For some, this was a minor inconvenience. Many were being trafficked in a semi-organized way, and would wait only a few days in Calais before getting word of a truck that would take them to the port, then—if they were lucky—to England.
In this respect, Roshan and Ahmed, a Sri Lankan and a Somali I was introduced to by aid workers, were atypical. Both had fled their war-torn homelands, but not with asylum in England as their goal—they’d simply fled for their lives. Roshan, a round-faced, kindly bus driver in his twenties, had run away after his conductor was murdered; he’d received word he himself was next. His seven-month boat journey brought him via India first to Italy, then to Paris as well. As for Ahmed—known to aid workers as Eddie Murphy for his good humor and Deliriously red jacket—when both his parents were killed in a single day (his father in the morning, his mother in the evening), he took a boat to Djibouti with four friends, who then locked themselves in a container on a cargo ship, and several days later found themselves in France.
Neither Ahmed nor Roshan had the aid of organized trafficking mafias, and neither had any money. They were trapped in Calais, and life in Calais was hell. They shared a donated tent in a wooded area known as “the jungle,” and survived on donated meals (two a day, if they were lucky) and donated clothes. Another aid organization handed out tickets for showers—but with hundreds of refugees needing to bathe, this was at best a once-a-week luxury.
“Dogs don’t live like this! Cats don’t live like this!” Ahmed told me. Then he laughed bitterly as he told me about his attempt to win asylum: He’d been rejected because, without access to an embassy, he was unable to prove his story—and yet France also refused to deport him, saying Somalia was too dangerous to go back to.
Despite their miserable circumstances, they had not lost their basic humanity. If anything, it appeared their deprivations had made them more human. When Roshan had arrived in Calais, he had no idea what to do, or even where to go to find food, but Ahmed took him under his wing and showed him how to survive. They were both the sole representatives of their countries, both calm and intelligent (each said he spoke at least six languages), and they’d bonded deeply.
Once, Ahmed said, he’d been invited to join several other refugees on a midnight truck to England, but when he’d asked if Roshan could come, too, the others said no. They were Muslim, as was Ahmed, but Roshan was not. And so, faced with the prospect of freedom in the U.K.—or at least slightly better living conditions and a community of Somali expatriates and refugees—Ahmed turned them down. He stuck by his friend, stuck in Calais. Could I have done that? I wondered. Would anyone have done that for me?
The second day I met with them, I brought sandwiches—chicken, tuna, cheese—and cans of Orangina. But when I arrived at the empty lot, I found Roshan and Ahmed already in line for their free meals and didn’t have a chance to remove what I’d brought from my bag. Nor did I want the other refugees to see me giving them anything, for fear it would upset the equilibrium of the larger group. So the three of us sat near the canal, under a warm, early-summer sun.
Ahmed and Roshan opened their lunches: platters of canned tuna, mini-bag
uettes, cheese, fruit, yogurt. And as they were getting ready to eat, they noticed that I had nothing. Immediately, they started dividing up what they had, handing me a can of tuna and half a baguette. I tried to refuse, insisting I wasn’t hungry and preparing for the waves of horrific guilt to wash over me. How could I take what they had when they had nothing? But they, too, insisted. If they were eating, I should as well.
So I accepted. I broke off pieces of bread and dug them into the shallow can of tuna salad, and I ate slabs of cheese that reminded me of what had been served on the flight over from New York. We shared our bottled water, and we ate, and we talked.
And the guilt that I’d imagined never quite materialized. I think I understood what was going on—that their instinct to share was so strong, so ingrained, that they would let nothing block it, not even the fact that they had next to nothing. Sharing food—with friends, with strangers, with the needy—was what they had done at home, was what had sustained them during the months of hard travel that had brought them to the jungle of Calais, and it was what they would continue doing in order to preserve what dignity remained. It was a way of asserting their equality—they didn’t have much, but they had enough to give away—and of reminding me that I was not so far removed from them. I, too, was hungry. I, too, felt gratitude in the depths of my soul for this act of kindness. For half an hour, we could simply be three people from different parts of the world, lunching as friends together in this place we’d never expected to wind up.
I don’t know where Ahmed and Roshan are now. In 2011, a representative of La Belle Étoile confirmed for me they were in England—“but we don’t have anything more precise,” she wrote—and my further attempts to locate them failed. Instead, I have to make the assumptions one makes about refugees in the abstract: that they survived the journey; that they found asylum, or government aid, or community support; that they continue to live and try to maintain some semblance of dignity, despite the hardships. Or: La Belle Étoile was wrong; they died en route; they were discovered and deported—to another limbo, to a newly pacified home, to certain death.
But the truth is I hate to have to think this way, to lump them in as mere members of the group of refugees, with typical histories and typical destinies. As with Lina, I want to imagine them as individuals, as unique human beings with personalities and families and quirks—with stories that separate them from the mass of stereotypes and statistics, that prove they were alive and that for a few minutes or hours we shared a can of a beer or a can of tuna, the same slab of concrete or mosquito-buzzed balcony. And while I wish we could have shared more (and, yes, that I could have honored Lina’s humanity by accepting her offer), I also know that I don’t know where we’ll all be tomorrow. Our paths might cross, our situations reverse. I’ve wandered enough, and worried at the future, and sketched out in my head what I’d do if it all went to shit, and I hope that when it comes time to split my last soggy baguette with a stranger, I’ll act as they did—without hesitation, as an equal, as if I had all the bread in the world.
________
*The rumors were not entirely well-founded, it turns out. While many Thais believe Cambodian mafias run the child-beggar racket, a UNICEF study in 2007 showed that most beggars were independent operators who’d come to Bangkok with their mothers.
Chapter 6
The Orient
On Learning, and Unlearning, How to Navigate a Messy World
The first Émile Zola book I read was The Beast Within, a novel of lust and murder on the railroad line between Paris and Le Havre. I’d found the book during my research stint in Phnom Penh—it was lying around the house I was staying in, and, having nothing else to read, I picked it up and was immediately absorbed into its twisted, violent world. The story concerns a railroad station manager, Roubaud, who discovers that his wife, Severine, had as a child been sexually abused by the president of the railroad, whose house she’d grown up in. In a fury, Roubaud forces Severine to help him kill the president, and then, believing their crime has been witnessed by Jacques, a railway engineer, cajoles his wife into romancing Jacques so he won’t turn them in. Only Jacques, too, has a secret: Any time he’s sexually attracted to a woman, he gets an uncontrollable urge to kill her, savagely, and drag her naked corpse through the streets. Now that’s what you call dramatic irony!
I loved the darkness of the novel, as well as its suspenseful plotting, but perhaps more than anything I loved its setting, which turned out to be the setting of all Zola’s dozens of books: France in the late nineteenth century, a time of not just social mobility but literal mobility as well. Railroads had tied the country together as never before, and now people from Provence were moving north to rebuild Baron Haussmann’s Paris, while folks in Le Havre could take day trips to the capital and come home in time for dinner. Travel was remaking people’s lives, challenging the traditions of the past, and inviting the ambitious to start anew wherever they could imagine.
Over the course of my own travels, I read many more of Zola’s novels: Nana, about a hustling concubine in nouveau riche Paris; L’Assommoir, about Nana’s mother, an aspiring laundress tempted by booze; The Belly of Paris, about the intersection of politics and gourmet cuisine at the city’s famous food market, Les Halles. I read these books at home, sometimes, but mostly I read them while traveling. They attuned me, I felt, to the way travel changes the world, and the hyper-precise language allowed me to fantasize that I, too, might one day be able to describe my own adventures in such crystalline detail. The stories took me out of myself, into a strange and fascinating and startlingly complete universe—a place so distant from my own life that I wished I could stay there forever.
Which is why it should have been no surprise that one evening in the spring of 2007, as I was reading Zola in bed, I looked up from my book and realized I didn’t know where I was. Not the city, not the country—I was nowhere at all. Terror hit me like a locomotive. My heart slammed in my panicky chest, and I was seized by the fantastical fear that at any moment a government official would storm into the room and demand I reveal our location. What would I say?
And why hadn’t this happened more often? At the time, I was on the road months out of every year, visiting a dozen or more countries, and yet never in one longer than two weeks. Veni, vidi, fugi. Just a couple of months before, I’d spent seven days flying from Geneva to Prague to Copenhagen to London (via Berlin) to Fez to Paris to Budapest to Geneva, and moving so speedily that in London I didn’t bother to get a hotel room—I just walked the rainy streets all night. My personal velocity was accelerating every day, and I half-expected to get confused, to mistake Budapest for Prague or forget what had come after Copenhagen.
But that didn’t happen. I’d always known where I was, where I’d been, where I was going. Not that I’d ever felt stable, as if I truly inhabited any of the places I happened to be passing through. I’d speed-walked through Kafka’s Prague, tipsy on nettle beer, and I’d spun unthinkingly through the alleyways of the Fez, and I’d never come close to losing my way. Movement was my natural state. My orientation was forward. I was in the zone. I could go on like this forever.
So why had I come unsprung only now, while reading in bed? And why was I so terrified at the prospect? And most important of all, where the hell was I?
I tried to think. I scanned the room, hoping I’d find in its décor the hint I needed. Wooden four-poster bed. Antique desk sticky with air-conditioning. Sponge-washed peach walls. Framed prints of blue gods with many arms. I knew this, I knew this!
India! I was in India, and, and . . . in the former French colony of Pondicherry! I’d arrived a few hours ago, and I’d leave in five days. Next up: Darjeeling, then Mumbai, then Brooklyn.
Relief welled up inside me. I read my book and fell asleep. And when I woke up the next morning, I was still in Pondicherry.
In the weeks and years that followed, however, I began to regret my quick thinking in that Pondicherry four-poster. Why couldn’t I have held on to t
hat feeling of lostness that had invaded my body? Why couldn’t I have savored it, rolled it around my mind, tried to enjoy for a few more minutes the sensation of utter disconnection? It was there, I’d had it in my psychic grasp. For the first time since I was seven years old, I’d been lost! And yet it had slipped away so quickly I was left with nothing, only puzzlement and a lingering aftertaste of fear.
Fine, then, I’d have to rely on what had happened in Denmark, twenty-five years before.
After the adult bookstore, after the bad hamburger, after the restorative french fries, there was at last Tivoli Gardens, the amusement park. Rides and shows, lights and the legs of towering Danes. My father had learned a fireworks display was imminent, and we hustled through the crowd. I remember a metal fence as high as my own not quite four-foot head, and I remember being unable to see as well as I wanted to. I scooted this way and that, darted around bodies, squeezed through gaps, and caught only glimpses of sparking pinwheels and cannons of flame—earthbound pyrotechnics, not the Fourth of July skyrockets my family would watch, unblocked, on the UMass campus.
When the fires were finally doused and the audience dispersed, I found myself alone. Dad was gone, and I couldn’t recognize my surroundings. Where was the hamburger stand? Where had we come in? Where was I? I was nearly eight years old, with dirty blond hair and blue eyes, and I must have looked like any other Danish child. Maybe I cried. Maybe people came to help me, speaking a language I couldn’t understand. How long did this go on for? How long until some mother brought me to a security guard, who brought me to an office, where my father was waiting to take me home—or did I arrive first?
I can’t remember. I can’t remember, either, what it actually felt like to be lost. Did I panic? Did I try to reason my way back to my father? Did I notice landmarks, or follow that metal fence back to where I’d been before? By that age, I must have seen the classic Sesame Street cartoon in which a young boy gets lost in a psychedelic landscape where women have butterfly heads, a plastic house pulsates like a Wurlitzer jukebox, and a green-clad pimplike figure steps out of a yo-yo string to inform the poor confused kid, “Well, you should figure it out for yourself, little guy. But I’ll give you a hint: Try to remember everything you passed, but when you go back, make the first thing the last. Ha ha! Yeah!” At which the kid simply retraces his steps—past the animal fountain, past the hippo eating chocolate—to his home, into whose entryway (framed in Corinthian columns) he runs, yelling, “Hi, Mom! Boy, was I lost!”