AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  We climb higher through spaghetti-western countryside: arid hills, scrub. Dead cacti turn brown then black, charred in the sun. We stop to pick up school kids, drop others off, see them run away amid a flurry of chickens and dogs. People waving from their shiny swept porches. The bus windows don’t open, or at least no one else wants to open them on account of the dust. I don’t know if my full bladder is taking my attention away from the road, or if it causes me to be more petrified than I’d otherwise be. Then suddenly the trees fall away and we find ourselves high up on a sheer cliff face, hairpin turns. Tiny mountain villages with pigs running through yards, and cattle on the already treacherous road. Every once in a while I can catch a peek of Cristo Rey rising above the mountains, and I swear it’s getting farther away. Crosses loom amid cacti at each and every turn.

  “Vaya con Dios.”

  My life flashes, a ribbon of flawed dreams, before my eyes, all its sins and small humiliations. Starting with kindergarten, when I stole Martin Price’s toy van, and my teacher asked me to help him look for it, and reeling toward the present. But it’s Mexico that has burned itself into my immediate memory: The baby sleeping among the mangoes in an Old Mazatlán market stall. The groups of people that congregated when my companion and I had problems with the language. A wasteland of volcanic rock fifty miles or so outside Zacatecas. Seeing a small child attacked by a dog, in the neck or ear, and then the mother and child screaming, the street frozen, only to watch the dog scamper away down an alley. An army checkpoint with small fires in the middle of the road. A flatbed truck full of young policía waving rifles in the air like tennis racquets. Hundreds and hundreds of poor families lined up alongside the highway into Guadalajara, camped outside the many maquiladoras, (foreign-owned manufacturing plants). Mobil, Kenwood, IBM. A huge stone carving of an angel being hoisted, unsuccessfully, onto a truck.

  A tight spiral of cobbled road corkscrews up to the summit. There are radio transmitters everywhere. Garbage strewn over the ground. Stalls of poor families selling tortillas, candy, corn slathered with coconut and mayo. An old man, one eye blasted white, gets on the bus, leaning on a gnarled walking stick. He looks back, studying us, then exchanges quiet words with the driver. I’m sure I hear the word “chinita.” I say nothing. If I talk, release my muscles even for a second, that’s all she wrote.

  At the top, Jesus has to wait. I run up the last stretch of cobblestone, wheezing at the first person I see: “Donde está el baño?” The washroom attendant is absent, just ranchero music crackling from a radio, so I don’t bother paying the two pesos. (Meanwhile my companion has to put up with a little girl pulling her eyes chinita tight while her mother laughs, looking on. A guy decides he wants to record her on his video camera, follows her around for a while until his friends tell him to stop. “How does it feel to be travelling your first time in Mexico with a freak?” she will ask me and laugh, frustrated and a little shaken.)

  Checking my fly twice, I step back out into the thin and perfect air. Everything is unreal here, exaggerated. People walk about, empty vessels infused with light. The land around us is hazed by height and distance, the vegetation up here so green it seems as if each leaf has been painted. And looming above us stands the resurrected Christ. Some forty feet high, though He seems much taller, and fashioned from black polished stone. A solitary white cloud in the blue above His head. Two stone cherubs play at His feet, one holding aloft a crown of thorns, the other a crown of gold. The folds of His robe cascade down from His outstretched arms, as if He embraces all Mexico.

  We stand there, for what seems like forever, at the threshold of the round chapel beneath Cristo Rey. Holding our breath, we will step inside, and above us we’ll behold a magnificent, palpable crown of thorns that circles the entire ceiling. Two hours from now we will see the Americans again on the bus, and they will show the semi-precious stones they bought from the Valenciana mines. “They’ve only got these little trinkets left,” Sally will smirk, “for us travellers.” Nick’s will-to-happiness will still be going strong. “See the intricacy, the veins?” he will say, twirling a pendant in his hand. “See how it catches the light?”

  And we will nod politely and say yes, but my companion will be self-conscious on account of a new, staring batch of passengers, and I will be thinking already of going back into town and searching for an icon of the Virgin. I will imagine returning to Vancouver and perhaps going to church for the first time in almost twenty years, which I won’t do, and I will later begin to wonder if the illusions and expectations I’ve brought home are just the oxidized flip side of the coin I took to this country. An unreal movie spinning in tandem with the unfathomable day-to-day. I will see how, like a holy image crudely painted on tin, everything is an illusion once you try to make sense of it. But now, here in the centre of Mexico, we walk inside the suffering head of Christ and look above.

  After Rick Maddocks wrote his first book, Sputnik Diner, he went AWOL in Thailand, where he saw an elephant with a tail light playing the harmonica. He didn’t see as many foreign-owned assembly plants there as in Mexico.

  009Destination: India

  EXIT PERMIT

  Grant Buday

  Her name was Sheila, and she was home from nursing school in Delhi. She was nineteen, had black hair loose to her hips, and an accent so elegant it made me whimper. I thought: Marry her. Live here amid the tea plantations, with Kanchenjunga—third highest peak on earth—right there on the horizon. Life could only be good.

  We met in Darjeeling’s central market.

  “You’re bumming about?”

  I corrected her. “Travelling.”

  She elevated her chin and considered this distinction as if not quite convinced. But there was a smile at the corners of her mouth. We wandered past silver jewellery, bricks of tea, orchids, ginger, and coriander from Kalimpong. We sipped tea and watched a man pass, carrying a bundle of goat legs under his arm.

  Sheila was a Christian. “RC,” she said.

  When I told her I was raised a Catholic, she appeared skeptical. She frowned at my beard and faded jeans and road-worn runners. I didn’t look like an altar boy any more. Fortunately I hadn’t worn my Frank Zappa T-shirt featuring him seated on the toilet.

  Sheila switched the subject. With splendid composure she asked me about North American culture. “Of course I have seen the idiot box,” she said, meaning television, rare in India in 1979. “But it’s all such bunk, don’t you think?”

  I thought: She’s your ticket to a superior life. Win her. Do anything, say anything, but win her.

  We agreed to meet the next day at noon in the botanical gardens. I was too busy fantasizing to sleep that night. Our children would be striking. My friends back home would envy me. Life in Darjeeling would be healthy. At seven thousand feet, breathing that alpine air, I’d have the lungs of a twenty-year-old when I was eighty. My fantasies did not include what I’d do for work, though I felt certain my prospects would be better than they were back home in Vancouver, where construction jobs and factory labour awaited me, or if I returned to school, discussions about whether the table in the middle of the room really existed—objectively speaking, that is.

  I arrived early. While I waited I looked at the orchids, roses and rhododendrons. By one, Sheila hadn’t arrived. By two, she still hadn’t shown.

  I tried to read my copy of Joyce’s Ulysses but couldn’t concentrate. At three o’clock I left, bewildered, recalling our parting handshake. When she’d disappeared into the crowd, with her went another life I might have lived. I now realize she was not all that exotic or mysterious; she was pragmatic and maybe even dull. But that didn’t matter. I saw only what I wanted.

  My plans were to see Kathmandu and find a Buddhist monastery where I’d learn to meditate. After that I’d be so calm, so centred, so glowingly enlightened that work and money wouldn’t matter and the women would flock to me.

  I was seeking alternatives and falling in love. In Thailand with an elementary school teacher nam
ed Willawan. In Hong Kong with a woman who waitressed in a won ton house. And in Calcutta with Mrs. Sydhwa. Her house had twenty-foot ceilings, old copies of Punch and novels by Marie Corelli. I guiltlessly dozed away entire afternoons there. She was seventy and had cataracts but she was beautiful, and I was never happier than when sipping afternoon tea with her and spreading her guava jam on toast, listening to her talk of old Calcutta.

  In Burma there was the girl in the Maymyo market with white patterns decorating her lovely face.

  “What are they for?”

  “For the skin.”

  She sold herbs. I fancied a life there in the market, sitting amid the incense and cool fruit, smoking cheroots and idling my afternoons away, bantering with the man to the left selling canaries and with the lady to the right selling sugar cane drinks.

  Everywhere I went, from Tokyo to Darjeeling, Kathmandu to Colombo, I was smitten with a woman and by the life she represented, the identity I could occupy, the culture I imagined I could join.

  “That’s wonderful. That’s marvellous.” The Reverend Raymond Butcher had just learned that our taxi driver was not a Buddhist or Hindu or a Muslim, but a Protestant studying for the ministry. The driver was a Gurkha named Deobahadur Rawat, Deo for short.

  The taxi was an old ’65 Mercedes with burnt-out dashboard lights and collapsed seat springs. It smelled of hair oil and bodies and the portly Reverend’s aftershave.

  He, his wife, April, and I were en route to the India-Nepal border to catch a bus to Kathmandu. It was four in the morning, and the gears of the Mercedes groaned as we descended from Darjeeling’s heights.

  Deo concentrated on the road. The quarter moon was just bright enough to reveal plunging valleys.

  Raymond told me, “Our son is here with the Peace Corps.”

  “He loves it here,” said April proudly.

  I nodded to her in the dark. Had their son found a girl? Three days had passed since Sheila had failed to meet me. I’d walked from one end of Darjeeling to the other but never caught a glimpse of her, though I did see a lot of entrancing girls.

  When I’d given up and gone to the bus station, the ticket seller told me of an American couple going to the Nepali border by taxi. They’d leave early enough to meet the bus to Kathmandu, and we’d make the two-day trip in one for the same cost.

  “He’s a civil engineer,” said Raymond. “Pretty much writes his own ticket. What did you study?”

  That was an awkward question. I’d dropped out of university after a year of C minuses. “I was working,” I said.

  He nodded deeply as if to say work was a good thing. “What field?”

  That was another awkward question. I was in the field of working in sawmills and on construction sites, never longer than three weeks before I quit or was fired. “Construction.”

  “John’s constructing irrigation systems,” said Raymond.

  “He has all kinds of people under him,” said April.

  “Great.” I began to wish I’d taken the bus.

  Raymond shifted so he could get a good look at me. “So what are you doing way over here in this neck of the woods?”

  The car continued its descent as I sought an appropriate response.

  “Tourist.”

  “Uh-huh.” He waited for me to go on, but I didn’t. “And what will you do when you go home?”

  Trapped and exposed, I heard myself say, “Go to university. Philosophy.”

  “Philosophy. Well, I’m a bit of a philosopher too.”

  Seated in that car, fearful of hearing the Reverend Butcher’s undoubtedly elevating philosophy, I decided I’d do anything to avoid becoming like the Butchers. I was not a Christian but a Buddhist. And I didn’t want all kinds of people under me—I wanted to be one with the people. I’d much rather be the Darjeeling night watchman, for example.

  I’d met him earlier that morning while waiting for the taxi. He was about fifty, gaunt-faced, dark-skinned, wrapped in scarves and sweaters, and sat cross-legged before a fire of oil-soaked rags, smoking a bidi. I squatted there too, despite the ache in my knees, wearing all my clothes—faded blue jeans, the Frank Zappa T-shirt, the “Relax for Survival” T-shirt, the grey pullover—my bath towel wrapped around my shoulders. The cold hurt like a needle injecting my bones with ice. The watchman’s bidi stood upright between his fingers while he sucked the smoke through his fist. I was tempted to take up smoking myself to have some hot air heating my chest. The burning rags hissed and whispered in the mountain silence. And what a silence. No dogs, radios or traffic, just the fire, and beyond that an immense black sky. When I closed my eyes, the fire remained visible. Flames were probably burned permanently into the watchman’s retinas. I imagined him here each night and decided he must dream of fire: bonfires, forest fires, cities ablaze. I imagined that everything he looked at would be fringed in flame …

  The landscape changed as the taxi descended, cedars and firs giving way to palms and bamboo.

  By half past seven that morning we were rattling along at a fair clip between rice paddies. I watched a man work a post-and-beam water pump, irrigating a field. A man passed with a hoe over his shoulder, his hands three sizes too big for him. A boy passed, prodding a bullock in the anus with a bamboo stick. Three women in saris balanced brass jugs on their heads. Their bare feet were large and their splayed toes gripped the ground. I caught the scent of their coconut-oiled hair and heard the tinkle of their anklets. Of course I married one of them on the spot, and in my mind I unwound the endless length of her sari while cicadas hissed through the night. At dawn she heated milk for chai over a dung fire while the smoky sunlight stirred the mist …

  THE COLD HURT LIKE A NEEDLE INJECTING MY BONES WITH ICE. THE WATCHMAN’S BIDI STOOD UPRIGHT BETWEEN HIS FINGERS WHILE HE SUCKED THE SMOKE THROUGH HIS FIST.

  The border consisted of a man in a crate-wood booth. He wore a deep-blue uniform and a David Niven moustache, and he tapped his silver pen ominously. Judging by his expression, he’d recently been demoted. On the boards of his booth were the stencilled letters of shipping labels.

  The customs official’s frown deepened as he paged back and forth through Raymond’s and April’s passports. “Eggzit parmit?” He turned his hand palm upward in an accusing gesture. “Where is?”

  Though it was only eight a.m., discs of sweat darkened the Reverend’s underarms. He brought his formidable focus to bear on the issue. “Exit permit? I don’t, they didn’t …” He looked to Deo, who took a step back. “They never said anything in Calcutta about an exit permit.”

  The customs official slapped their passports down and dismissed them. “Go back.”

  “Back?”

  The man signalled me forward, found my exit permit, stamped it and waved me on.

  “Look here, we were not told—”

  Voice sharp as a split stick, he said, “Eggzit parmit!”

  Deo regained his fortitude and negotiated with the man while Raymond paced.

  “I fought in the war for you people. I stayed with the American ambassador in Delhi.”

  The official pursed his lips as if enjoying the sweet scent of his own moustache and the even sweeter taste of power. I imagined that later, over a glass of cashew fenni—the local firewater—he’d tell his friends how he’d dealt with those who think themselves above rules and regulations.

  April hurled herself onto the hood of the car in despair. “No wonder our son hates this country!”

  At Nepali customs a smiling man ambled out from a card game in a shed, stamped my passport and ambled back in. Across a field stood the bus, exhaust rolling from the tailpipe as the driver gunned the motor.

  The bus smelled alternately of dust, coconut oil, and betel nut. At times the mountain slopes were forested with immense rhododendrons thirty metres high, and at others with fir and cedar. We passed stone mounds flying flags of bright paper. The higher we climbed, the more the sky took on a blue-black colour. We passed a family hiking a steep stretch of road. They leaned hard
into the hill, father, mother, three kids, all barefoot and carrying conical baskets held to their backs by woven straps that looped across their foreheads. There I was with them, basket on my back, feet calloused, thighs mighty.

  The trip to Kathmandu took fourteen hours, plenty of time to feel bad for Raymond and April Butcher. And I did. They were admirably intrepid in their way. But now I was free of them and the reminder of the arid culture I was so desperate to escape. And anyway there was Adhe in the next seat, whom I promptly fell in love with. She had been visiting the Tibetan refugee camp in Darjeeling. Her red T-shirt and black suit coat gave her a curiously urbane look that contrasted with the copper mask of her face, her Buddha eyes, her brilliant teeth. We shared oranges and admired the mountains. As the bus bumped and turned, our bodies swayed and knees touched. She said in her slow but solid English, “I was born in Kathmandu …”

  Grant Buday’s fiction includes the novel White Lung, shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award and co-winner of the British Columbia 2000 Millennium Book Award. A chapter from the novel won the fiction category of the 1997 Western Magazine Awards. White Lung has also been optioned for a feature film. His travel writing includes a memoir of India called Golden Goa and his latest novel, A Sack Of Teeth, was published in 2002.

  Let’s blame Hemingway.

  010Destination: Western Europe

  PENETRATING EUROPE-LAND

  Mark Anthony Jarman

  1981—the year of the coup in Madrid. The Irish virgin and I are under a foreign mountain, we’re retreating. What drives us from Spain? Nothing really. De nada. The Moorish man flicks his lighter in the long dark railroad tunnel. Molly, the Irish woman, has it out. The Moor’s smile wilts. What are these infidels doing? Goats and monkeys! It’s not what it looks like. Well, maybe it is.

  What draws me to Spain? Let’s blame Hemingway. The bull and the running of the bulls, anarchists, Orwell, Koestler, John Dos Passos at the Hotel Florida, trout streams falling down the hills, toreador pants on a certain someone, Guernica’s Heinkel bombers, a bull’s horn pushed in the horse’s stomach, Franco and the gory civil war, the Russians executing Dos Passos’s translator, the Russians executing everyone, men falling in Canada’s MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion, the fifth column, fascist shells smashing the roof tiles, a siege, oh Madrid, my Madrid, la movida, the action, the all-night clubs, wild dancers, wild nights now that Franco is dead, the witch is dead.