The Pillars of Hercules

I could not deny that the setting mattered. The Rock of Gibraltar to me was a French tourist on a ledge at the top pinching an ape. I remembered Van Gogh’s Arles because I was almost run down by a high-speed train at Arles Station, while entranced by almond blossoms. In Olbia, Sardinia, a Senegalese scrounger told me in Italian how in Africa (which he visited regularly) he had two wives and six children: “Not many.” In Durrell’s Kyrenia, Fikret the Turk suffered over his bean soup and said, “I have been thinking about marriage … Please tell me what to do.” I could not now think of Jerusalem without seeing a Lubavitcher Jew in a black hat and coat hoisting his orange mountain bike into an angry Arab’s cabbages. My lasting impression of Dubrovnik was not its glorious city, but rather its bomb craters and broken roofs and the Croat Ivo saying, “I came home. Because home is home.”

Places had voices that were not their own; they were backdrops to a greater drama, or else to something astonishingly ordinary, like the ragged laundry hung from the nave of a plundered Crusader church in Tartus, on the Syrian coast. Most of the time, traveling, I had no idea where I was going. I was not even quite sure why. I was no historian. I was not a geographer. I hated politics. What I liked most was having space and time; getting up in the morning and setting off for a destination which, at any moment—if something better compelled my attention—I could abandon. I had no theme. I did not want one. I had set out to be on the Mediterranean, without a fixed program. I was not writing a book—I was living my life, and had found an agreeable way to do it.

In this way I was exactly like the others on the Sea Harmony. We only looked like lost souls, but we had our achievements. Spillman who had solved the problem of his depression, Melva who was free of her husband’s threats, the Bratislava pilgrims for whom prayer was a way of life, the German Heinz who traveled with his little family. And more.

Delayed in Rhodes, I ran into Yegor, the bald and toothless Israeli who was always boasting how he had fought in three wars. He wore old tattered clothes and his only luggage was a small canvas bag. He slept in the cheap seats, where Spillman played, and sometimes he spoke French to Spillman. On board the first day he had said to me, “You have a cabin? I want to sleep with you!” And he laughed a loud toothless laugh, his lips flapping at me. He was obviously excitable. So I had not encouraged conversation.

But he ambushed me. I left Spillman looking for his chicken restaurant and his fruit stand; I had headed out of the walled city to the windy bay on the fringes of which tourist-resort Rhodes lay as new and ugly as every other new Greek seaside town. The Greek genius for tacky construction surpassed anything I had seen—surprising in people who claimed the Parthenon as part of their heritage.

Even Yegor remarked on the flimsy construction. It was the strong wind, battering the hotel signs and tearing at the power lines. None of the hotels were open and, absent of people, they looked abandoned and vulnerable.

“I think the wind will make them crash down!” Yegor said. His whinnying laugh was bad, but the sight of his toothless mouth was worse. I also thought: Why do apparently weak-minded people take such delight in disasters?

His dog, young and strong, tugged him along on its rope leash.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“Johnny Halliday.”

Hearing his name, the dog hesitated and glanced back at his master. Then he trotted on.

“But I call him Johnny.”

Again the dog turned its soulful eyes on Yegor.

“I take it you’re a soldier, Yegor,” I said.

“Three wars,” he said. “In ’67, the Egyptians had swords and tried to cut us”—he flailed his arms—“like this, our heads off! But we beat them! I was given a free apartment. I pay only forty shekels for one month.”

“You’re lucky.”

“But I have a big problem,” Yegor said. “I drink.”

“You get drunk?”

“I get drunk. I go to jail.”

“What are Israeli jails like?”

“Jews in one room, Arabs in another room. In each room, twenty men,” Yegor said. “One toilet only.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Horrible. And they fight, the prisoners.”

“What do they fight about?”

“On your first day, they take your food, to make you frightened. So you have to fight. What else can you do?”

We were walking down Papanikolaou in the new part of Rhodes City, a block or so from where waves were being blown on to the bright deserted shore. We had passed the edge of Mandraki Harbor, where on one corner—so it was thought—the Colossus had stood. But speculating on this Wonder of the World meant a great deal less than the reality of Yegor’s saying, On your first day, they take your food, to make you frightened.

“The police arrested you because you were drunk?”

“Because I broke a table,” Yegor said.

“An expensive table?”

“Not expensive, and not big. Made out of glass.”

“How did you break it?”