by Jim Malusa
“This is an Arab marriage,” she said. “Afar and Somali marriages are similar—the differences are mostly the costumes. But always the woman has a party for all her friends. Not for the men.
“Usually we marry our cousin. My fiancé is the cousin of my mother’s cousin. Often it is first cousin, and most always it is arranged. Mine was arranged by my family when I was sixteen. I’m twenty-two now, waiting for him to finish his studies. Some women don’t like these arranged weddings—they escape to Europe, or America.”
I asked, When is your wedding, Roda?
“In May.” She paused and smoothed her skirt. It was already smooth. “But I will not be there. He loves me, and his family paid for me, but I do not love him. I have known him since we were children; we’re like brother and sister, not man and wife. I don’t want to be his wife for the rest of my life. Marriage should be for life, yes?
“So I will escape, too. Maybe to America. United States, or Canada. Perhaps you can give me an invitation so I can get a visa?”
I’m not sure it’s that simple.
“I think it is if I have the money for a one-month vacation—then I never come back. I have a brother in Quebec.”
An enormous hubbub erupted from the reception hall. Roda said, “Here comes the bride.”
Besieged by the twin video teams, the newlyweds entered. Her hair was a tower of ringlets held aloft by invisible adhesives and a tiara. Her white gown had enough sequins to make Liberace self-conscious. A Cleopatra bracelet clenched her bicep.
The terrified groom, his pupils reduced to pinpricks by the lights, shuffled like a robot past the throng of trilling women. Five minutes later the couple reached their thrones, sweating madly, and exchanged leis of white flowers. Each of the two hundred women insisted on photographing the lucky couple.
No wonder Roda wanted to escape. I took a taxi back to the Palace and turned on CNN to discover that in 1994 Oman became the first Arab nation to give women the right to vote.
THE SHERATON was not alone on the northern tip of Djibouti Town. Most of the embassies were clustered nearby, perched on land’s end like first-class passengers on the bow of a ship.
A listing ship, it seemed, after I screwed together my bike and rolled it outside. I had an appointment at the American embassy for a “security briefing.” The miserable refugees outside my hotel posed little danger. Too wasted to beg, they lay with stick limbs folded in whatever shade they could find. The more fortunate had a scrap of cardboard to lie on. I felt like a king and a pig.
Dark clouds massed in the north. It was easy to recognize the embassy behind its concentric rings of concrete blast barriers, rolls of barbed wire, and an inner wall with a bulletproof security station. I was relieved of my camera, then I passed through a metal detector and a gate into a waiting room. For a minute my only company was Mr. Osama bin Laden, staring with oddly serene eyes from a poster announcing a $5 million bounty on his head.
Lauren May stepped in, shook hands, and introduced me to the security officer. He looked like a man who had a pistola strapped to his ankle. With my fine French map unfolded, he swiftly indicated the locations of land mines.
“Be on the lookout,” he summarized in a square-chinned way, “anywhere north of Lac Assal and Tadjoura.”
I mentioned that this would make camping tough.
Ms. May said, “There is nothing to do in any case in or around Tadjoura.”
I said that the Djiboutians had been pretty nice.
“That’s because you’re not French.”
Pedaling back, I realized that now I truly looked French, for they were the only ones with bicycles. The machines were locked outside the Semiramis market, where I picked up crepes, Laughing Cow cheese, and Madeleine rolls for the ride into the desert. Later, I stopped at the Three Stars café for a fruit drink. Distracted by Mariah Carey on French MTV, I neglected my usual practice of supplying my own bottled water. The drink arrived in an enormous sherbet glass, beaded with condensation, and after one sip my taste buds said, Why not?
Twelve hours later, in the predawn, I woke with a twisted gut that said, How could you be so stupid? I was packed and ready to roll, yet the only departure that morning would be the contents of my stomach and intestines, from both ends.
I slept fitfully until 2 PM. The spasms of fluid loss would not stop. I ended up in the office of Dr. Bruno dell’Aquila. The stacks of magazines and odor of alcohol were exactly like Dr. Pellerito’s in Tucson, but this office had a poster proclaiming: Don’t Mutilate Women. It was a simple gruesome cartoon of blood dripping from a blade and a girl’s crotch, part of a government effort to curtail the Horn of Africa custom of female circumcision.
I waited twenty minutes. Dr. dell’Aquila wore very small black wire-rimmed glasses that would have been a mistake on me but looked suave on an Italian. After a brief exam he said, “This is very common this week—there is something going around Djibouti Town. It is likely bacteria, like Salmonella. You will get better in two to three days.”
He prescribed four drugs for my relief. The Horn of Africa Pharmacy was across the street in a concrete cube. It could have been a brothel, but inside its electric doors the staff swiftly filled my prescriptions, and minutes later I stood speechless by the optical checkout scanner. Everything, from doctor to druggist, had taken less than $50 and one hour, without an appointment.
Recovery took somewhat longer, but at least I had a chance to visit the “Cultural Center” and discover another Djiboutian surprise.
“The Center has moved,” said the woman behind a desk holding volumes of the French Civil Code and papers weighted by a stout shell shaped like a turban. A black robe hung from a peg. A Djiboutian lawyer, her name was Hasna Barkat.
What, may I ask, is your specialty?
She smiled at my naiveté and said, “Commercial. Civil. Criminal. Everything. A lawyer does not specialize in Djibouti.”
How many lawyers are there?
“Twelve.”
Twelve! In all of Djibouti?
“Djibouti is a small country. And it is not, as in some other countries, the first reflex of the people to seek a lawyer. If there is a dispute, it is brought to the elders.”
These words made Djibouti seem so . . . civilized.
Yet that night my sleep was uneasy. It was thirty miles and a climb of 2,500 feet to the first town en route to Lac Assal—a long way for a leaky man. And although everyone from whores to lawyers had treated me well, I’d not ventured out of a tourist preserve of maybe three square miles. Like a deer in a national park without hunters, I was a coddled curiosity. Look, honey, it’s an American—and he’s tame!
The sunrise colored the bottoms of untroubled clouds. They were moving inland. I got on my bike and pedaled out of town.
CHAPTER 10
Djibouti Town to Lac Assal
Nobody Has Come
on a Bicycle
THE FIRST REFUGEE CAMP is strewn across a plain of fist-sized stones outside of Djibouti Town. It’s hundreds of shelters built of any scrap of plastic, palm leaf, metal, or cardboard big enough to make shade, and held in place with cord and rocks. The French map calls this a “Spontaneous Habitation.”
In occasional clearings by the road, kids chase cans or balls. I expect them to yell and wave when I pass. Instead they sprint for me. Out of the swarm of a hundred, one rushes up and grabs my brake lever and nearly topples me. Most of the kids scream and laugh and back off, but the bolder ones snatch up rocks, and in an instant I’m more target than tourist.
At the moment there is no time for fear, only self-preservation. I jump on the pedals. The bike is light—I’ve no computer, no telephone, no pistola—and the wind’s up and at my back. One rock smacks my leg, and then I’m gone.
At a gas station I stop and, panting now with panic, tell my story to an Ethiopian truck driver. He shrugs. “There’s nothing you can do. In Djibouti Town the people are good. These are animals.”
He’s going the wrong way. Ther
e are no taxis. On my own, I’m flying by the time the children in the next camp see me. Still, they try. Their best shot ricochets off the spokes. The next time I see a crowd of children ahead, on the right side of the road, I look back over my shoulder and see a truck coming. When it passes I duck behind it, picking up speed in its slipstream until a surge of adrenaline allows me to overtake the truck on its left, using it for cover as we pass the children. By the time they spot me and give chase, I’m out of range and only a few rocks skip past.
I’m too shaken to celebrate. I’m thinking of the parentless children in Lord of the Flies—but what were the refugee children thinking? Probably not much besides the thrill of hunting. A new animal. Don’t let it get away! If they’d knocked me out, they might have gathered round in awe and poked at my sweating body with a stick. The very bravest might have touched my strange moon-colored skin.
After I’ve passed the last sorrowful shelter built of palm mats and the burnt flatbed of a long-dead truck, my fear deflates—after all, they were only forty-pound children with stones. Yet as I ride into the black rock desert I can’t help but think that pedaling a bike through Djibouti is a ridiculous way to suffer voluntarily, as absurd as peeing into a water bottle at 20,000 feet because you’ ll freeze if you leave your tent.
At least the local herders should be in good cheer. Recent rains have persuaded the leguminous trees and bushes to let loose an extravagance of green, vivid against the volcanic clinkers. The sandy dirt is the red of Persian rugs. Lofty camels sway over the brush and strip the leaflets, while goats attack from beneath. The dry watercourses are trimmed with milkweed eight feet tall, with huge leathery leaves like oven mitts and big wrinkled seed pods constricted round the middle into a pair of hemispheres.
A cloud slides over the sun, and the gift of shade softens my temper. It can’t be much over 90 degrees. It’s Friday, the Muslim day of rest, with so little traffic that the policeman at the sole checkpoint is snoozing peacefully in his shack. The bike lets me slip past without a sound.
As I ride west, a steady climb brings into view the narrow Gulf of Tadjoura to the north, the milky blue light blending sea and sky. The blacktop is smooth and bordered with the toxic purple blooms of nightshade and the brain-twisting white flowers of sacred Datura. Some forward-thinking soul has created a rest stop of a few shade trees by surrounding them with an anti-goat wall of fifty-five-gallon drums. Atop a power line is a long-legged buzzard with orange and white feathers and a slaughterhouse beak, hooked and tipped with black. It turns and casts a baleful eye, and just like that I’m glad to be cycling through Djibouti.
As the road climbs, the bike slows, but a downshift keeps the pedals spinning at the same clip. A truck labors past, also downshifting, rattling with racks of returnable pop bottles and emblazoned with This is the Fanta Moment! I make do with Yemeni yogurt and oranges when I stop for lunch under a thorn tree. By habit I begin to clean up the orange peels before realizing that they’ll be more appreciated on the ground. Pedaling off, I turn to see This is the Orange Peel Moment! The goats vacuum up the peels in ten seconds.
Ahead is a junction with a five-mile spur road to Arta, a summer retreat for those with the means to escape the heat of Djibouti Town. It’s goat land all the way to the summit. The white flocks move lightly over the dark mountain, like sliding cloud shadows that expand and contract as they pass over ridge and canyon. At the mountaintop village of Arta, the homes are behind walls topped with broken glass embedded in the cement, or impenetrable hedges of red and white oleander, or an inspired trellis of bougainvillea and barbed wire. I push on toward a forest of antennae and spinning radar parabola, past a pair of massive gates with lion’s-head knockers. The sign says, Ambassador of France.
I head to the Centre d’Estivage, a little hotel and a big white stucco bar and restaurant with a veranda onto a spotless playground and groomed volleyball court. The supervisor is welcoming.
“Nobody has come on a bicycle! Would you like to have lunch?” (Yes.) “And the evening meal?” (Yes.) “You can dream outside if you like, or you can dream inside, with bath.”
I choose inside. This may be my last chance for a shower, for there will be no more French oases after Arta. Lunch costs the same as the room, but someone must pay for the signature white china, rimmed in blue. The hushed music I identify as a Rhinelander waltz without ever having heard such a thing. Likewise, the fixed menu is unrecognizable, but once the food appears I guess it’s Petit Snippets Verdure and Jus L’Oink. With my diet of anti-Salmonella drugs, I don’t chance the alcohol kindly offered by the couple with an infant at the next table.
“Bordeaux Saint-Emilion,” she says. “Good with savage animals.” Her name is Corinne. She’s dark and lovely and the owner of some nose. The baby is enormously attractive to me in my child-deprived state.
“His name is Morvan. It is name from Brittany. ‘Son of the Sea.’ ”
Son of the Sea is landlocked in a Chicco car seat. His crew-cut father wears an orange T-shirt, Camel Adventure shorts, and what is either a faint birthmark or a black eye. His improbable name is Claude Target and he is a Legionnaire, which means that his name might not be Claude Target. Anyone who joins this secretive arm of the French military may assume a new identity, to leave behind their possibly unpleasant past.
This I learned long ago from the World Book Encyclopedia. Its entry for the Foreign Legion began with a yawn (“one of the world’s most colorful and gallant fighting forces”) but led to an eye-opener: “Some of its members join to escape political imprisonment, others to avoid punishment, and still others to seek adventure.”
This was a revelation no boy would forget: no matter how bad you were, there was a place you could go and be paid to shoot guns in the desert.
So Mr. Target has a perfectly good reason for being here. I’m more of a mystery, and he wants to know, “Why have you come to Djibouti?”
Tourist, I say—just to see Djibouti. Mr. Target honks an incredulous laugh and asks again, “Why?”
Why not? Except for the refugee children outside Djibouti Town, the people are very nice.
“Because you are not French! Where are you from?”
America. Arizona. I like deserts, and I want to see Lac Assal.
“Ahh! Now this is very nice. Spectacular. And very hot. It is one of the hottest places in the world. But not so far away is the Forêt du Day. C’est fantastique. Clouds and trees and animals.” He growls. “Tiger.”
It sounds as if you like Djibouti.
“What? I did not ask to go to Djibouti. Nobody asks for Djibouti.”
But this is where many Legionnaires are posted. Why did you join?
“Adventure! Sensation! We just come back from desert school. Six days. Eighteen camels. We eat only banana and . . . baaahhh. . . .”
Goat.
“The goat. I have twelve years in the Legion. Many places I go. Bosnia, Desert Storm, Cambodia, Sarajevo, Chad, Congo, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Tunisia.”
Mr. Target lights a Camel, tickles Son of the Sea, and pours both of us a glass of wine. This time I accept.
Mr. Target is too kind. The Legion is not known for kindness. Their training includes not flinching as a tank passes over you, a churning steel track on either side. They worship a wooden hand, kept in a glass box in France, that once resided on the arm of a Legionnaire captain who was killed in a 1863 battle in Mexico. The clumsy prosthetic was all that remained of a brave platoon that was hopelessly outnumbered yet refused to surrender. That they were duly slaughtered only enhanced the Legionnaire’s reputation as men who fear nothing.
Mr. Target burnishes the tough-guy status by spearing and eating a wedge of extraordinarily stinky cheese. It’s veined with busy mold and likely capable of crawling off the dessert tray. Its odor attracts two more Legionnaires and a bottle of cognac to our table. The man with a tattoo of a human skull with a goat horn for a nose notices my bike by the door.
“Why do you ride the bike?”
; For pleasure, I say.
“I do not ride for pleasure. If I get the order to ride a bicycle, I ride.”
And what do you do for pleasure?
“Fighting.”
Son of the Sea begins to wail. Corrine says he needs to sleep. Let me try, I say—putting babies to sleep is something I also do for pleasure.
The mini-legionnaire is passed to me, and at once I’m happy and teary-eyed. I hum and pat Morvan to sleep in five minutes. I might have dozed off too if not for the entry of a man who satisfies all my preconceptions of a Legionnaire, tattooed to the last knuckle. He takes a look at the sleeping infant in my arms, backs off like it’s a land mine, and says, “Baby. Mom.”
I slip Son of the Sea back to Corrine.
Mike is, or at least was, an American. His wife, a round and red-faced Frenchwoman, joins us and helps herself to the cognac. Mike and Claude chat amiably—“Ha! Fuck you!”—before Mike turns to say, “Claude says you are a writer and something else? I’m looking for a writer. When I’m out of here I want to tell my story. Ten years in the Legion. French Guinea. Yugoslavia. Djibouti. All over the place. I got a story but I need someone to tell it.”
Well, I’m not really that kind of writer. But I may meet one someday.
“Here’s my address. Yours?”
We swap addresses, and he says, “I know Arizona. Yeah. Pen.”
He takes my pen and scrawls a map on a napkin stained with cognac and coffee.
“Look. California. Arizona. Right. Yeah. Listen. Here. Marines—I was in the Marines. Here.”
In Yuma?
“That’s right. Yuma.”
It’s a lot like Djibouti.
“It’s not Djibouti. Don’t tell me Yuma is Djibouti.”
I mean the desert.
“Desert. Listen. You’re riding that bike through Djibouti?”
I am.