The Pillars of Hercules

“I used a man to break it,” Yegor said.

“You used a man?”

“I took him and crashed him down, so I broke the man, too. Ha! Ha! Ha!” That laugh again, those gums, those lips. “I was drunk, so they arrested me.”

“Were you in prison long?”

“Some months,” Yegor said. “But I have been seventeen times in prison. I can’t help it—I drink too much!”

He jerked his dog’s leash, the dog made a strangled noise, and they walked on, the dog yapping in a sharp imitation of his master’s laugh.

Later that day, back inside the old castellated city, I was admiring the medieval walls and the carved escutcheons, when Yegor accosted me.

“I told you lies,” he said. “Ha!”

“About going to prison?”

“If you go to prison in Israel they take your passport, and I have a passport, so how could I go to prison? Ha! You believed me!”

The problem with a liar is not his frank admission of lying but rather when he robustly asserts that he is telling the truth.

Another of the loners was leaving the ship in Rhodes. This was a young fellow named Pinky, who congregated with the Germans and Spillman and Melva and others in the cheap seats. The name Pinky was short for Pinsker. He made a living in Canada working as a teacher in settlements of the Ojibway and Ojib-Cree people. The villages were in remote parts of Canada. The job was well-paid but stressful. Burned-out, was the way he put it.

“For example, the kids are real delinquents sometimes.”

“How does an Ojibway teenager express his delinquency?”

“You wake up in the morning and you see that they’ve covered your house in graffiti—names and swear words and everything. And they go nuts with snowmobiles. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

I smiled at him in what I hoped was an enigmatic way.

“I can tell by the way you’re always asking questions. And you’re the only one who listens to Spillman.”

Pinsker told me he was rather lonely. It was about time he found someone to share his life. He had not found much romance in the Ojibway settlements of northern Canada, and so he had set out on an extended trip, hoping to meet someone. His month working on a kibbutz had not improved his situation, and it had surprised him in other ways. As a Jew he had been shocked by some of what he had seen.

“The kids knew nothing about Judaism. Can you imagine that in Israel?” he said. “A lot of them had never been to a synagogue. They were pre-Bar Mitzvah age, but they didn’t study. I’ve never seen Jews like that—I was surprised by their ignorance.”

“But better behaved than the Ojibway kids?”

“Not really. Some of them were really obnoxious—always fooling,” he said. “What do you think of Israel?”

“The land of contradictions,” I said. I mentioned some of what I had seen. Small land, big contradictions.

“When I was on the kibbutz someone told me a really interesting theory,” Pinsker said. “It’s like this. In the Diaspora, Jews realize that non-Jews are always looking at them and so they strive to be religious. They work, they study difficult subjects, they try to get ahead in the community—they want to excel, and they usually succeed. They know they are seen as Jews and that it’s important that they succeed. Don’t you think that part of it is true?”

“If you say so.”

Pinsker said, “But when they get to Israel they consider that they’ve arrived. They don’t have to prove anything to anyone. They sit around and complain—there’s no need to do anything. Who’s looking? Who cares? They abandon their ambitions and get lazy. That’s why Israel is the way it is, and why it doesn’t seem Jewish.”

Pinsker was staying in Rhodes, hoping to catch a ferry to the Turkish town of Marmaris in the morning. He said good-bye and wandered away to look for a hotel, while I went back to the ship, thinking how little I had learned of the island. But it had been importantly a backdrop for the lives of these travelers, and as a gorgeous location it gave their stories an exoticism that made them memorable. There was, as always, a poignant interplay between the melancholy banalities of the travelers’ tales and the locale of this lovely island.

We were at sea, making for Piraeus all the next day, through the Cyclades—never out of sight of an island, and usually within sight of a half a dozen. On the bridge the captain dreamed of invading Turkey and reclaiming land that he felt was rightly Greece’s. There was bouzouki music inside and cold raw weather outside. There was nowhere to sit on deck. The twenty-eight Slovakians from Bratislava were on their knees in one lounge, praying. The Greeks in another, smoking. The squalor in the cheap seats became remarkable, a piling-up of bags and garbage and supine bodies.