Travels with Herodotus Read online

  I rose early to go into the center of the city, which was a ways off. I was staying in a hotel in Zamalek, a rather wealthy residential neighborhood on an island in the Nile once largely the precinct of foreigners but by now also already inhabited by well-to-do Egyptians. Knowing that my suitcase would be searched as soon as I left the hotel, I thought it wise to remove an empty bottle of Czech pilsner beer I had stashed there and dispose of it along the way (in those days Nasser, a zealous Muslim, was conducting an anti-alcohol campaign). I concealed the bottle in a gray paper bag and walked out with it into the street. It was morning still, but already sultry and hot.

  I looked around for a garbage can. But as I was doing so, I encountered the gaze of a guard sitting on a stool in the entryway from which I had just emerged. He was observing me. Eh, I thought, I won’t throw out the bottle in front of him, because later he will rifle through the garbage can, find it, and report me to the hotel police. I walked on a bit and spotted an empty chest. I was on the verge of throwing in my bottle when I noticed two people in long white djellabas. They were standing and conversing, but at the same time watching me. No, I couldn’t dispose of the bottle here: they would surely see it, and, moreover, the chest was not meant for refuse. I kept walking until I noticed another garbage can—and sitting nearby, at the entrance of a building, an Arab gazing at me attentively. No, no, I said to myself, you cannot risk it, he is looking at you very suspiciously. So, bag and bottle firmly in my hand, I nonchalantly strolled on.

  Further on lay an intersection, in the middle of which stood a policeman with a club and a whistle—and on one of the corners sat a man on a stool, watching me. I noticed that he had only one eye, but this eye stared at me so insistently, so importunately, that I started to feel uncomfortable, even afraid that he would order me to show him what it was exactly that I was carrying. I quickened my pace to remove myself from his field of vision, and did so with all the more alacrity because I saw, flickering like a mirage in the distance ahead of me, a garbage can. Unfortunately, not far from it, in the shade of a small, scrawny tree, was an elderly man—seated and staring at me.

  The street now turned, but beyond the turn everything was exactly as before. I couldn’t throw the bottle out anywhere, because no matter where I tried, I encountered someone’s gaze turned in my direction. Cars drove along the streets, donkeys pulled carts loaded with goods, a small herd of camels passed by stiffly, as if on stilts, but all this seemed to be taking place in the background, on some plane other than the one on which I was walking, caught in the sightlines of perfect strangers, who stood, strolled, talked, most frequently sat, and all the while stared at what I was doing. I grew increasingly nervous, and as I started to sweat profusely, the paper bag in my hand was getting soggy. I was afraid that the bottle would slip out of it and shatter on the sidewalk, further arousing the street’s interest. I was truly at a loss as to what my next move should be, so I returned to the hotel and stuffed the bottle back into my suitcase.

  It wasn’t until nighttime that I walked out with it again. It was easier at night. I dropped the bottle into a garbage can, turned back, and with relief lay down to sleep.

  Now, walking around the city, I began surveying the streets more closely. They all had eyes and ears. Here a building janitor, there a guard, over there a motionless figure in a beach chair, a bit farther on someone standing idly, just looking. Many of these people were not doing anything in particular, yet taken together their multiple lines of vision created a crisscrossing, coherent, panoptic observation network, covering the entire space of the street, on which nothing could occur without it being noticed. Noticed and reported.

  It is an interesting subject: superfluous people in the service of brute power. A developed, stable, organized society is a community of clearly delineated and defined roles, something that cannot be said of the majority of Third World cities. Their neighborhoods are populated in large part by an unformed, fluid element, lacking precise classification, without position, place, or purpose. At any moment and for whatever reason, these people, to whom no one pays attention, whom no one needs, can form into a crowd, a throng, a mob, which has an opinion about everything, has time for everything, and would like to participate in something, mean something.

  All dictatorships take advantage of this idle magma. They don’t even need to maintain an expensive army of full-time policemen. It suffices to reach out to these people searching for some significance in life. Give them the sense that they can be of use, that someone is counting on them for something, that they have been noticed, that they have a purpose.

  The benefits of this relationship are mutual. The man of the street, serving the dictatorship, starts to feel at one with the authorities, to feel important and meaningful, and furthermore, because he usually has some petty thefts, fights, and swindles on his conscience, he now acquires the comforting sense of immunity. The dictatorial powers, meantime, have in him an inexpensive—free, actually—yet zealous and omnipresent agent-tentacle. Sometimes it is difficult even to call this man an agent; he is merely someone who wants to be recognized, who strives to be visible, seeking to remind the authorities of his existence, who remains always eager to render a service.

  Once, as I was leaving the hotel, one of these people stopped me and asked that I follow him—he would show me an old mosque (I surmised that the man was one of them, as he always stood in the same spot, surveying what was probably his beat). I am by nature quite credulous, to the point even of regarding suspicion not as a manifestation of reason but as a character flaw; now the fact that an undercover agent proposed a visit to a mosque instead of ordering me to report to a police station brought me such relief—joy, even—that I agreed without a moment’s hesitation. He was polite, wore a tidy suit, and spoke passable English. He told me that his name was Ahmed. “And mine is Ryszard,” I replied, “but call me Richard, that will be easier for you.” First, we walk. Then we ride for a long time on a bus. We get off in an old neighborhood—narrow little streets, winding alleyways, cramped passages, small palaces, dead ends, crooked, grayish-brown clay walls, corrugated tin roofs. Whoever walks in here without a guide will not walk out. An occasional door here and there, but all of them shut, bolted fast. It’s deserted. Sometimes a woman hurries past like a shadow, sometimes a group of children appear, but the little ones quickly vanish again, frightened by Ahmed’s shouts.

  We arrive at a pair of massive metal doors, on which Ahmed taps out a code. There’s a shuffling of sandals within, then the loud scraping of a key in the lock. A guard of indeterminate age and appearance opens the door and exchanges a few words with Ahmed. He leads us across a small enclosed courtyard to the doors of the minaret, its threshold slightly sunken into the ground. The doors are open, and both men gesture to me that I should enter. A dense twilight prevails within, but I can just make out the outlines of a winding staircase running along the minaret’s interior wall, which in its shape resembles a large factory chimney. Somewhere way up high gleams a point of light, which from where we are standing looks like a pale and distant star—it is the sky.

  “We go!” declares Ahmed, in a half-cajoling, half-commanding voice, having earlier told me that from the minaret’s summit one can see all of Cairo. “Great view!” he assured me. We set off. From the start things don’t look good. The stairs are not only extremely narrow, but slippery, covered in sand and loose plaster. But the worst thing is that they have no handrail, no handles, no ropes—nothing to grab on to.

  Oh, well—we’re off. We climb and we climb.

  The most important thing is to not look down. Neither down nor up, but only at the closest point straight ahead, the steps directly in front at eye level. To turn off one’s imagination, because the imagination only frightens. Some sort of yoga would be useful, some sort of nirvana and tantra, karman or mokosh, something that would allow one not to think, not to feel, or be.

  Oh, well. Off again.

  It is dark and cramped. Steep and twisting. Fro
m up there, from the top of the minaret, if the mosque is in use, a muezzin calls the faithful to prayer five times a day. These are drawn-out calls, uttered in singsong, sometimes very beautiful—solemn, moving, romantic. But nothing about this minaret suggested that it had been used by anyone in years. It was an abandoned place, smelling of dankness and old dust.

  I don’t know if it was from the effort, or from a still vague yet growing anxiety, but I started to feel fatigued and must have slowed down noticeably, because Ahmed began urging me on.

  “Up! Up!” And because he walked behind me, he blocked all possibility of my turning around, retreating, escaping. I could not double back and pass him—the abyss was right there, to the side. Well, that’s that, I said to myself, there’s nothing to do but keep climbing.

  We climb and we climb.

  We had already ascended so far along this dangerous stairway with no railing or handholds that any sudden motion either of us might make would cause us both to tumble down several stories. We were united by a paradoxical embrace of untouchability—whoever would so much as touch the other would surely fall after him.

  That symmetry would soon change to my disadvantage. At the end of the stairs, at the very top, was a small, narrow exterior terrace that encircled the minaret—the muezzin’s perch. Normally, it would be surrounded by a brick or metal barrier. Here it appeared that the barrier had been metal, but after many centuries it had rusted and fallen away; the outcropping in the wall had no protection. Ahmed gently pushed me outside and, still standing on the stairs himself, leaning safely against the opening in the wall, said:

  “Give me your money.”

  I had my money in my pants pocket, and was afraid that even as insignificant a gesture as reaching into it would cause me to plunge to the ground. Ahmed noticed my hesitation and repeated, this time in a sharper tone of voice:

  “Give me your money!”

  Looking up into the sky, anything just to not look down, carefully, cautiously, I slid my hand inside my pocket, and then just as slowly, very slowly, pulled out my wallet. He took it without a word, turned around, and started climbing down.

  Now the most difficult thing was the route back from the exposed terrace to the first step of the stairs—a distance of less than one meter, which I crossed centimeter by painful centimeter. And then the torment of the descent, which I managed seemingly not on my own legs, but on oddly heavy, almost paralytic limbs that felt as though they had been nailed to the wall.

  The guard opened the gates for me, and some children—the best guides in such back alleys—led me to a taxi.

  I lived for several more days in Zamalek. I walked to downtown Cairo along the same street as before. I encountered Ahmed every day. He always stood in the same spot, covering his beat.

  He looked at me with no expression on his face, as if we had never met.

  And I looked at him, I believe, also without expression, as if we had never met.

  ARMSTRONG’S CONCERT

  Khartoum, Aba, 1960

  Emerging from the airport in Khartoum, I told the taxi driver: Hotel Victoria. But without a word, with no explanation or justification, he took me to the Grand.

  “It’s always like this,” explained a Libyan I met here later. “If a white man arrives in the Sudan, they think he must be an Englishman, and if he is an Englishman, then naturally he must be staying at the Grand. It’s a good meeting place. Everybody comes here in the evening.”

  The driver, lifting my suitcase out of the trunk with one hand, inscribed a semicircle in the air with the other, indicating the kind of view I would have, and said with pride: “Blue Nile!” I looked at the river flowing below us—it had a grayish-emerald hue, was very wide, and flowed swiftly. The terrace of the hotel, long and shady, gave onto the river and was separated from it by a wide boulevard lined with old, branching fig trees.

  A ceiling fan whirred in the room to which the porter led me, but its blades did not cool, merely churned the hot air about. It’s a furnace in here, I thought, and decided to go into town. I had no idea what I was doing: I had walked barely several hundred meters when I realized that I had fallen into a trap. The heat emanating from the sky above ground me against the asphalt. My head was pounding and I was short of breath. I felt unable to walk further, yet I also realized that I lacked the strength to turn back. I started to panic: if I didn’t find some shade soon, the sun, I was certain, would kill me. I began to look about frantically, but saw that in the entire neighborhood I was the only moving thing. Everything around me was lifeless, shuttered, still. No people, not a single animal. My god, what was I to do? The sun was beating like a blacksmith’s hammer on my head; I could feel its blows. It was too far to the hotel, and there was no building nearby, no entryway, no awning—no shelter. Finally, I spotted a mango tree. It was the closest thing in sight, and I dragged myself to it.

  I reached the trunk and slid onto the ground, into the shade. Shade in such moments is something utterly tangible, and the body receives it as greedily as parched lips imbibe water.

  In the afternoon the shadows lengthen, start to overlap, then darken and finally turn to black—it is evening. People come alive then, their will to live returns; they greet one another, converse, clearly happy that they have somehow managed to endure the quotidian cataclysm, to survive yet another day from hell. The city starts to bustle, cars appear in the streets, shops and bars fill with people.

  I am in Khartoum awaiting two Czech journalists, with whom I am to travel to the Congo. The country is ablaze, consumed by the fires of civil war. I am growing agitated, because there is still no sign of my companions, who were supposed to fly in from Cairo. It is impossible to walk around the city by day, but it’s also too hot in the room. And I can’t stand it any longer on the terrace, because every few moments someone walks up to me and asks, Who are you? Where are you from? What is your name? Why did you come here? Do you want to start a business? Buy a plantation? If not, then where will you go next? Are you alone? Do you have a family? How many children do you have? What do you do? Have you been in the Sudan before? How do you like Khartoum? And the Nile? And your hotel? And your room?

  The questions have no end. For the first few days I politely answer them. For what if they’re being asked out of friendly curiosity, in accordance with local custom? On the other hand, it could be that those who are asking are from the police—better not to irritate them.

  The questioners usually appear just once, replaced the following day by a fresh contingent; I am being passed along like a baton in a relay race, it seems.

  Then two of them—always together—started to appear more repeatedly. They were extremely friendly. Students, I guess, with a lot of time on their hands these days, since the chief of the ruling junta, General Abboud, had shut down the university, as a breeding ground of discontent and rebellion.

  One day, looking warily around them, they ask sotto voce if I would give them several pounds—they will buy some hashish, we will go out of the city, into the desert. What to do in the face of such an offer? I have never smoked hashish and am curious about how it makes one feel. On the other hand, what if these two are from the police, and trying to set me up, perhaps to extort money from me or else have me deported? And this at the very start of a journey that is promising to be so fascinating. I’m nervous, but choose the hashish and give them the money.

  They pull up in the early evening in a beat-up, open Land Rover. It has only one headlight, but it is as strong as an antiaircraft reflector. Its beam parts the tropical darkness, a seemingly impenetrable black wall, opening it for a moment to allow the car through before it immediately closes in again. So dense is the dark that one would have the impression—were it not for the brutal potholes—that the vehicle is actually standing still.

  We drive for maybe an hour, at first on blacktop, thin and crumbling along the edges, which soon peters out into a desert road along which lie occasional immense boulders, as if cast in bronze. At one of them we m
ake a sharp turn and drive on for a moment longer, then come to a sudden halt. We are at the top of an escarpment, and the Nile glimmers silver below, illuminated by the moon. The landscape is reduced to a minimalist ideal—desert, river, moon—which at this moment is world enough.

  One of the Sudanese removes from his bag a small and already opened bottle of White Horse, enough for a couple of swallows for each of us. Then he carefully twists together two thick joints, handing one to his friend and one to me. In the light of the match I suddenly see, emerging from the night, his dark face and shining eyes, with which he looks at me as if he is considering something. Perhaps he has given me poison, I think, but I don’t know if I actually thought that, or if I thought about anything at all because I am already in another world, one in which I have become weightless, in which everything is incorporeal and everything is in motion. This movement is gentle, soft, wavy. It is a tender swaying. Nothing barrels ahead, nothing explodes. All is calm and quiet. A pleasant touch. A dream.

  But the most extraordinary thing is the state of weightlessness. Not that awkward, ungainly weightlessness we have seen with astronauts, but a nimble, adroit, controlled one.

  I do not remember how precisely I rose up off the ground, but I do distinctly remember floating through the skies, which were dark but of a darkness that was bright, even luminous, soaring amidst multicolored circles which parted, revolved, filled the space all around, and which resembled the light twirling of hula hoops.

  Sailing along this way, I feel immense joy at being liberated from the burden of my own body, from the resistance it presents at every step, from its stubborn, relentless opposition. Who would have thought, but it turns out that your body need not be your enemy but rather can, if only for a moment, if only under such extraordinary circumstances, be your friend.

  I can see in front of me the hood of the Land Rover, and out of the corner of my eye the shattered side-view mirror. The horizon is intensely pink, and the sand of the desert a graphite gray. The Nile in this predawn moment is a light navy. I am sitting in the open car and trembling from the cold. At this time of day the desert is as cold as Siberia; the chill pierces you to the bone.