The Pillars of Hercules

Tunis was busy with two important events—the Carthage Film Festival and a decisive soccer match, Tunisia against Togo, to determine which country would qualify to play in the Africa Cup. I watched the match on television at the cafe in a backstreet, with about two hundred people, men and boys. They were attentive, there were no outbursts, only murmurs. Tunisia was ahead, one to nothing for most of the match, and towards the end, when Togo kicked the equalizer, not a word was spoken. The only interruption came when the strangled cry of a muezzin gave his call to prayers. A number of people got down, faced east, and prayed—five minutes of this—then back to the match, which ended in a draw.

The Carthage Film Festival was promoted under the slogan “A Hundred Years of Tunisian Cinema!” This seemed to me as unlikely a claim as the centenary of Israeli railways that was being celebrated when I was in Haifa. Never mind. I pretended to be a movie critic and went to two of the movies. In spite of the name of the festival, the movies were shown in Tunis. Most had been made in the Mediterranean; France, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Egypt and Palestine were represented. There were ten films from Turkey. The rest were from places as distant as Brazil and China.

My interest was the Mediterranean. I chose two films about places I had been. But I had not been able to penetrate the countries to this extent. Couvre Feu (Curfew), directed by a Palestinian, Raschid Masharaoui, was an insider’s account of simple bravery and defiance against great odds, the stone throwers of the Intifada facing machine guns of the Israeli soldiers.

Throughout the Mediterranean, the most-quoted atrocity of Bosnia was not a list of the number dead but rather the deliberate shelling by the Serbs of the ancient bridge over the river at Mostar. The destruction of the bridge symbolized everything that was wicked about the war—the stupidity and meanness in the conflict, and all the atavistic cruelty that was still present in the Mediterranean. In Bosna (Bosnia) directed by Bernard Henry I saw the bridge destroyed—and much else. This documentary showed the carnage of the war, the pitiful merciless slaughter, the inert corpses by the roadside, the blood and broken glass and decapitations; the mass graves, weeping children, terrified adults and brutalized soldiers—snow, rain and ruin. But no atrocity in the film stirred the audience more than the shells—about a dozen of them altogether—falling on the bridge itself, which had stood for five hundred years, finally falling to pieces into the river. The people in the theater gasped, there were pitiful groans, and when the lights came up there were tears in their eyes.

I went back to my hotel after the film about Bosnia and listened to the news on my shortwave radio. “Serbian forces are advancing on Bihac to reclaim territory they lost to the Bosnians in the past two weeks,” I heard. The casualty figures for the dead and wounded and missing were given, and the news that Sarajevo (which I had seen shelled in the year-old documentary Bosna just an hour ago) was being shelled again.

The weather was rainy and cold. I was eager to move on. I returned to Mr. Habib, the agent for the shipping lines.

“We are waiting for notification,” the agent said. He was friendly. He spoke English well. He said that it would be an interesting voyage.

I said, “As it’s a Libyan ship I think I should tell you that I am an American.”

“No problem. I’ll talk to the captain, just in case anyone thinks of doing something stupid to you.”

I kept trying. But three days later Mr. Habib was still waiting for notification, and there was no word about the Garyounis.

18

To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz

            This lakelike sea with such a tame coast had so habituated me to sunshine and mediocre weather that it did not occur to me to stick my face into the wind today and fathom its force. Surely the whole point about picturesque landscapes was that they were not dangerous? But if I had simply wetted my finger and held it up I would have known a great deal. As the rain and wind increased, I waited for the Garyounis to take me to Morocco. I saw only that the wind was lifting the flags higher and straighter than normal. A seasoned Mediterranean sailor would have seen more muscle in that wind than I had, sensed something darker and chillier, a turbulence from the Levant, a dolphin-torn and gong-tormented sea. It was the weather we had been having for a week. Mediterranean weather usually came and went. But this did not go.

One day, Mr. Habib said, “The Garyounis was put into dry dock. The Libyans are sending a different ship. It does not take passengers. Therefore, you will have to go some other time.”