The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “I have a lot of property in the north, but I have no idea what happened to it,” a Greek woman told me. I had heard something similar from a Turkish woman, her exact counterpart, in the north, on a street in Lefkosa, who had fled from Limassol.

  And there was Mrs. Evzonas. Twenty years ago, in Famagusta (now Gazimagosa), she said to her husband, “Let’s get out of here.” There were Turkish planes flying overhead, and Turkish ships in the harbor. They took a two-hour drive to Limassol and hunkered down. “We’ll go back when it’s safer.”

  She told me, “We thought it would end soon. How did we know that it would last this long?”

  In two decades the Evzonases had not been back, nor had any of their friends. But this is a legitimate republic, recognized by other countries. I made phone calls to the United States from the public phone booths. And because of the brisk tourist trade it was possible to make a living here in a way that in Turkish Northern Cyprus was out of the question.

  “I would like to go back, but how can I?” Mrs. Evzonas said. “With my passport it is impossible.” She shrugged. “We are stuck here.”

  “This was once a small town,” a man named Giorgio said to me in Limassol. “In 1974 it was nothing. But so many refugees made businesses, so it began to get bigger.”

  I told him I had been to the town he knew as Famagusta.

  “They say it is a ghost town,” he said.

  He wanted me to agree, and he was right of course, but how could I tell him that in its ghostly way the town was more weirdly attractive than this?

  The Sea Harmony was not leaving until late that night. The driving rain had discouraged me from leaving town, and so I hung around, and when the rain slowed to a thin drizzle I walked east along the coast, working up an appetite, and then returned and had a traditional English beer in a traditional English pub and met Mr. Reg MacNicol from North London who was on a two-week holiday (“We come for the weather”) and when I asked too many questions he exploded and his florid face grew redder and he said, “You Yanks give me the pip! Life’s a compromise! Utopia doesn’t exist!”

  I took a bus back to the ship, where the Slovakians were kneeling in the midst of another solemn mass in the lounge bar.

  “I bought these for you,” Spillman said, handing me some Cyprus tangerines.

  A woman nearby said, “I know you. I saw them interrogating you in Haifa. They took you away.”

  “You’re very observant,” I said.

  “I was afraid for you,” she said. “Hi. I’m Melva. From Australia. I’ve lived a really cloistered life. All this is new to me.”

  She was another loner on this ship of loners, a solitary traveler, and she was as pleasant and as odd as the others. Tall, calm, observant, she shared a cabin with two other women, strangers to her. She had been cheated in Turkey and ill with suspected pneumonia in Egypt and spent two days in an Israeli hospital. “They threw me out. I had a temperature of a hundred and two and they said, ‘You must go now.’ I went to one of those grotty hotels and nearly died.” But she was game. I asked how she was now. “I’m coming good!”

  “Want to play cards?” she asked.

  She taught me an Australian card game called “Crappy Joe,” which was a version of two-handed whist that had interminable variations. Each successive game became more complicated in terms of the combinations needed to win. Her parents had played it almost every night for years in the western Sydney suburb of Emu Plains.

  “Aw, I was married for twenty-six years myself, but my husband and I just went in different directions. I had to get away.”

  She was dealing the cards for another hand of Crappy Joe.

  “You make it sound urgent,” I said.

  “He was stalking me,” she said. “At night I’d look out the window and there he’d be, staring in, his face so frightening. I’d be driving somewhere and look in the rearview mirror and he’d be behind me. I went out with a chap—a very nice man. My ex-husband went to his office and threatened him. ‘Don’t you dare go out with my wife.’ ”

  “He sounds dangerous,” I said.

  “That’s what I told the police. That he was obsessed. He’s got three rifles. But they said, ‘He hasn’t done anything, has he?’ ‘He keeps stalking me and staring at me through the window,’ I said. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t prove anything. He hadn’t done anything physical, see.”

  In the rain and wind the ship pulled out of Limassol harbor, and I was glad I was here and not there.

  “I got so worried I decided to leave,” she said. “I went to India, to Egypt, to Greece. Maybe he’ll leave me alone when I get back.”

  She won the hand, gathered the cards, let me cut them, shuffled them and leaned over.

  “Maybe I’ll never go back,” she said.

  The ship was rolling as it sailed around the coast of western Cyprus, past Aphrodite’s birthplace and Cape Drepanon and the last horned cape on this island of hornlike capes, Arnaoutis, and then into the darkness towards Rhodes.

  Rhodes—Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a giant bronze figure: was this my compelling interest on this island? No, it was not. How could it be? It was just an old story. The thing had been erected twenty-three hundred years ago, it had been knocked down sixty-five years later and sold off as scrap. So much for the Colossus of Rhodes.

  But not far from where this monstrous statue once stood, Spillman the Belgian was saying to me, “I will buy a chicken. I will drink some water. I will play music for the people in the town square. After one cup of tea I will return to the ship. At six o’clock I will take food. Some fruit. Some cheese.”

  “You are very well organized, Mr. Spillman.”

  “I do make planations of my daily life,” he said, his English faltering, “so I do not make a depression.”

  As he walked along, distracted—perhaps hungry—his English became a sort of homage to Hercule Poirot.

  “You can tell by my visage that I am a Jewish? Attention, I buy some parfum for my muzzah!”

  This and more was my experience of Rhodes. The old walled city of Rhodes was one of the most beautiful I had seen in the Mediterranean, the Palace and Hospital of the Crusader Knights were graceful as well as powerful. The water was brilliantly blue, and mainland Turkey was visible just across the channel. But all this was a backdrop for my walk with pigeon-toed Spillman. I admired him for having ingeniously compensated for his spells of depression. He liked his life, and providing he did not deviate from this route through the Mediterranean in which fruit markets and cheese stalls loomed larger than ruins, his life was happy. I began to reflect on how in the way I was traveling there was an unusual and apparently disjointed process at work. There was something immensely more interesting to me in hearing about Melva and Ted’s divorce, and the spooky behavior of her crazed ex-husband, than in hearing a story of—well, as we had just left Limassol, let us say the tale of Richard the Lionhearted’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre in 1191, at Limassol Castle, a building which had been practically demolished.

  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 o
rdinary, 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?”

  “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.

  Three nights in a row I had the same dream. I was an actor in a Shakespearean play that might have been Hamlet. I was the main actor, probably Hamlet. This was unclear in the dream because although it was a large and elaborate production I did not know any of my lines—not even one. I did not know the names of the other characters. It was all a muddle and mystery, especially as I had never been in a play in my life. Perhaps it was an anxiety dream about being unprepared and having to improvise. My method of travel was all about improvisation.

  Each time I had the dream I was arriving at the theater—a sort of open-air affair, with many people in the audience, and lots of actors and stagehands, most of them greeting me with high hopes. None of them had the slightest idea that I did not know my lines. I would covertly pick up a copy of the play and leaf through its several hundred pages and realize that there was no way that I could learn my part between now and ten minutes from now when the curtain was going up on the first act. I experienced a sense of absurd humiliation and panic, as people greeted me and congratulated me, telling me how they were looking forward to my performance.

  Most dreams are merciful. Each night, just before the curtain rose, I awoke.