Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

The naturalization papers validated my claim to be a world citizen. Though I would doubtless have continued to travel, I now felt doubly justified in exploring far and wide. Days at home often blur into one another; days in strange surroundings intensify life. Tennyson’s Ulysses said, “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees.” I cherished travel for the ways it stopped time, forcing me to inhabit the present tense. Augustine of Hippo legendarily said, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page,” and I wanted to go cover to cover. I set out to see the change I wanted to be in the world.

  * * *

  My friend Christian Caryl, a distinguished political journalist and essayist, moved to Kazakhstan in 1992 to head the country’s institute of economics; I went off to visit him there a year later. When I said I wanted to go out to the steppes and meet nomads, he laughed and asked what I planned to say when I met them. While hiking up a mountain at the edge of Alma-Ata (which has since been renamed Almaty), we were caught in a blizzard. After an hour of huddling against the storm, we heard a vehicle approaching and waved it down frantically. The driver took us in; he was drinking regularly from a flask, but we were hardly in a position to complain. When he passed his tipple over to me, I took a swig of what I assumed would be vodka, but it was spirt—pure grain alcohol. That single swallow made me temporarily blind and dizzy. Then I passed it over to Christian. Drinking and singing, we made our way down the mountain. When our rescuer asked me what I was doing in his part of the world, I blurted out my line about meeting nomads on the steppes, and he offered to take us to the steppes the following morning. We volunteered to buy the next day’s spirt.

  The nomads (who had become somewhat less than nomadic since Stalin’s forced collectivization) could not have been more welcoming. We sat in their yurt and peppered them with questions. One mentioned that his perceptions of Iran were based on that country’s provision of roads and hospitals in the area, while his impressions of the United States were drawn largely from episodes of Baywatch, the foreign program most often broadcast there. He had decided on this basis that Iran was good and America was decadent and evil. Since Kazakhstan is a large and oil-rich country and was then newly independent, I thought this was momentous information. When I got home, I wrote it up and submitted the piece to an editor I knew at the New Republic. He called me back almost immediately and said, “Oddly enough, this is the second proposal I’ve had this week about Kazakhstan’s prejudice in favor of Iran. Something must really be going on there.” I sheepishly called Christian, who acknowledged that he, too, had submitted the story of our day out.

  Traveling with my parents when I was younger, I had absorbed the touristic notion that a visitor should come to observe a society, not to engage with it. As a journalist, I quickly became aware of the narrowness of that precept. When I visited a new place, I was usually on the receiving end of enormous generosity from the people I met there, and I didn’t see how I could fail to reciprocate. In 1992, a friend and I were in a car crash in Zimbabwe. Our front tire had blown out on a dirt road, and our car had landed upside down in a thick jungle. We had to get our jalopy back to South Africa. We had been camping and had with us ten days’ worth of food as well as many bags of mealie meal, a corn-derived staple of the local diet that we had planned to share with locals if we needed to stay with them. There was no point taking it all back with us. So just after sunrise, we pulled off the road near a collection of particularly shoddy rondavels, and I climbed a steep bank. Several people were rubbing their hands for warmth around a thin fire, and I handed them ten bags of groceries and basked for a moment in their astonishment. Travel entails help both to and from strangers.

  I became increasingly concerned with this question of engagement and reciprocity. Any new relationship is disruptive on both sides. Rather than avoiding and minimizing this disruption, I began trying to open myself to it. Sometimes the engagement was profound; often, it was happenstance. While I was good at fitting in under anomalous circumstances, I had to acknowledge my differences and accept that others noticed them, too. You can’t fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.

  Because Castro had for many years insisted that Cuba was atheist, then allowed his country to be more moderately secular, and finally met with the Pope in 1996, the celebration of Christmas was still tentative when I visited Havana in 1997. Over the preceding decades, New Year’s Eve had become something of a family-centered celebration to make up for Christmas; now, people were just beginning to ponder the notion of more ebullient festivity, and I decided to act on that emergent vigor. Friends and I found an apartment in Old Havana, in a pretty rough area but with twenty-foot ceilings, decorative columns, detailed cornice moldings, and a balcony looking out over the ancient buildings across the street. If you want to get to know a strange country quickly and deeply, there’s nothing like organizing a party. At Cuban parties, the dancing starts when the party starts. A gorgeous black lesbian ballerina named Marleni led me to the center of the room. “Music is the most important thing there is for me,” she confided. “It makes me feel things.” We were feeling things anyway: six Brits, two Americans, and thirty or so Cubans (diplomats, doctors, artists, television personalities, foundation directors, musicians, hustlers, students), all gathered to celebrate our various ideas of a new beginning. We soon lost our self-consciousness—the mojitos were very helpful—and at midnight, we leaned over the balcony and poured buckets of water into the street to wash away the old year and welcome in the new. Everyone in the nearby houses was doing the same thing, though some people had only sherry glasses and others had barrels of rainwater; someone even poured out a mojito. We loaded a heaping plate of food and a drink to leave outside for the Santeria gods. Then we ate again, and then we danced until dawn, as everyone in the streets seemed to be dancing when we stumbled back home at sunrise. The Cubans loved our party because it was so American, and we loved it because it was so Cuban.

  In 1993 I went to South Africa to report on its burgeoning art scene. Before my trip, I had arranged a rental car and bought a road atlas. My plane arrived late, and the airport was all but closed when we taxied to the gate. I was the only person from the flight hiring a car, and I reminded the sleepy man at the desk that I’d arranged ahead of time for one with an automatic transmission. I’m no good with a stick shift under the best of circumstances; South Africa has left-side driving, and I’m none too good at that, either. I was going to be thumbing through maps as I went, and it was an era of carjackings, when you had to be vigilant every time you stopped the car, ready to speed away through a red light in a threatening situation. The rental guy disappeared for twenty minutes, then came back and said, “Okay, boss, we have one automatic car.” I signed the paperwork and we stepped outside, where I beheld the largest white Mercedes I had ever laid eyes on. So much for fitting in.

  It was still illegal for white people to enter the black townships, and when they did so nonetheless, they were usually accompanied by a black person who knew the way around, since there were no maps of these districts. One day I went to Soweto to interview a painter. He met me at the township entry and guided me to his studio; when we finished, he said that the way back out was so simple I could drive by myself. I headed off according to his directions and was getting along rather well until I heard a siren behind me and saw a policeman signaling me to pull over. He came up to my window and announced, “You were speeding.” I apologized and mentioned that I’d seen no posted speed limit. White South Africans had a reputation for being condescending to black policemen, but I was respectful and apologetic. The policeman said, “Wait here. I’m getting my supervisor.”

  Ten minutes later, another police car pulled up and the supervisor got out and approached my window. “You were speeding,” he said. I apologized again. “You’re not from here, are you?” he s
aid. “I’ll get my commander.”

  After another ten minutes, a third police vehicle drove up. “You were speeding,” the commander said.

  I apologized for the third time.

  “Why were you speeding?”

  “I didn’t know there was a speed limit; it doesn’t seem to be posted; and I am a white foreigner in a gigantic white Mercedes driving by myself in Soweto, which is inherently nerve-racking.”

  At that, the commander burst out laughing. “Don’t worry about it, man. We’ll escort you out.”

  I left in a motorcade, with two police cars in front of me and one behind.

  Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits. Travel distills you to a decontextualized essence. You never see yourself more clearly than when immersed in an entirely foreign place. In part, that is because people make different assumptions about you: often, expectations relate to your nationality rather than to the nuances of your manner of speech, the cut of your clothing, or the indicators of your politics. Equally, travel disguises you; one can feel oddly camouflaged and anonymous wrapped in the sketchy preconceptions of others. I enjoy being lonely so long as I am lonely by choice; I can enjoy some place far away and difficult so long as I am missed back home. I dislike social constraints, and traveling has helped me to be free of them.

  At the same time, as I learned in the Soviet Union, I was also intensely unsettled by such social anonymity. This anxiety reflects both the difficulty of reading people in other cultures and my illegibility to them. If I cannot figure them out, they probably can’t figure me out, either. When you must learn the unfamiliar rules of a new place, you become suddenly callow again. Travel makes you modest; what is prestigious at home can seem irrelevant or ludicrous abroad. You cannot rely on the veracity of your opinions in a country where standards are different. You often cannot understand why something is funny there; you sometimes cannot understand why something is somber. You question your own standards of humor, solemnity, even morality. Familiar landscapes cushion you from self-knowledge because the border between who you are and where you are is porous. But in a strange place, you become more fully evident: who you truly are is what persists at home and abroad.

  * * *

  Cultural dissonance often provides linguistic hilarity. At a hotel in the Norwegian fjordland, I found a menu that announced, “Breakfast is available daily from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m. Lunch is available daily from 12:00 to 12:30 p.m. Dinner is available daily from 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. Midnight snacks are available until 10:00 p.m.” One has to admire that thrifty spirit. I was very taken with the room service menu in French West Africa that offered for appetizers either “Rolled crepes with smoked salmon and egg of lump” or “Small bags of eggplant tomato-mozzarella”; for main course, the “Gratin of Molds, breadcrumbs with parmesan” or the “Roasted Captain, Olive Oil Sauce” or the vegetarian option, “Indian Jumps of Lentils.” For something sweet to end the meal, the only thing to be considered was the “Dessert Opera on custard.” In Xi’an, we were introduced to a pianist who explained over lunch that he gave few concerts and supported himself by performing at night in a bar. We decided to go to the bar to hear him despite his efforts to dissuade us. With the Chinese gift for lyrical euphemism, a sign outside identified the establishment in English as the SUNSHINE-AFTER-EIGHT FRIEND-CHANGING CLUB. It was a brothel. Whenever a friend has since needed changing, I fantasize a trip back to northwest China, and I remember the young women from the provinces, some defiant and many sad in their flimsy negligees.

  Even when one is paying attention, it is easy to become confused in alien surroundings for lack of reference points. In Prague in 1985, my friend Cornelia Pearsall and I studied the only available tourist map and decided that we ought to visit the Jewish ghetto, number sixteen on the map. Expecting squalor, we were pleasantly surprised to find a complex of beautiful apartments, many with spectacular views. Since all the signage was in Czech, we had to work out the narrative for ourselves. Cornelia noted the large number of pianos about, and I explained that the Jewish community in Prague had been highly cultured and artistically accomplished. Only two days later did we discover that the Jewish ghetto was actually number seventeen on our map, and that we had spent the afternoon at Mozart’s villa.

  Sometimes one simply doesn’t understand what one is looking at. I got to know former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara when he was in his eighties. The man behind the draft that had so terrified me in childhood had destroyed a country, occasioned a million needless deaths, and accomplished nothing. He was now a congenial senior citizen, regretful of the gruesome crossroads of history that he had traversed. He described returning to Vietnam and meeting some of his military counterparts there. The conversation, as he described it, consisted of the Vietnamese asking, “Why did you do X?” Then McNamara said, “Well, because you did Y, which meant such and such.” Then the Vietnamese would counter, “No, no, no, it meant the exact opposite of that! But then you did this thing that was clearly an attempt to escalate!” To which McNamara would comment, “No, we did that to try to quiet things down, because we thought you . . . ,” and so on and on and on. McNamara’s errors proceeded from his ignorance about his opponents—a problem much exacerbated by the dismissal of Asia experts from the US government and universities during the purges of McCarthyism. Like Cornelia and me in Mozart’s villa, McNamara was applying off-base assumptions to a place he had completely misunderstood. Had more than a million deaths not occurred in the Vietnam War, his encounter with his former foes could have been something out of a French farce. To learn a place is like getting to know a person: it is an exercise in depth psychology. You must understand those with whom you communicate to understand the content of their communication. It takes modesty to recognize that your coherence is someone else’s incoherence and vice versa. “We argued in the language of war,” McNamara said to me, “which I wrongly thought was a universal language.”

  * * *

  Much is made of the difference between tourism and travel. Tourists are said to move about in clusters and to reassure themselves with unflattering comparisons between wherever they are visiting and their homeland. Travelers venture forth because they want to experience a place, not just see it. When Flemming Nicolaisen, a Greenlandic Inuit friend, visited me in New York on his first foreign trip, he seemed uninterested in the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum, Broadway shows. He preferred taking my dog for long walks all over town. “When you came to Greenland,” he said, “did you want to see the war memorial? Or the museum in Nuuk?” I had to admit that I mostly wanted to be surrounded by the prismatic landscape of ice. He pointed out that the entire population of Greenland would have fit in one of the Twin Towers (then still standing) and said he just wanted to feel what it was like to be in a place with so many people. He was a traveler, and my agenda for him had been touristic.

  Authenticity is a traveler’s grail. It can be sought, but not planned. When I was twenty-eight, I drove across Botswana with my friend Talcott Camp on the country’s one major road; we’d periodically have to stop for a crossing herd of cows. Once, we saw a herd far, far ahead, but no evidence of a cowherd. As we got nearer, we realized that they were elephants. We had already seen elephants in enormous reserves, in their “natural habitat.” But the legal demarcation of national parks where paying tourists came to observe wildlife introduced a whiff of artifice to our encounters. Chancing on these creatures outside official boundaries was infinitely more transfixing. One was blocking the road, so we had to stop the car. We sat there for nearly an hour. The sun was low and washed the pachyderms in pink light. I’ve seen elephants in a dozen African and Asian countries, but nowhere else have I experienced such a feeling of revelation.

  Two years later, I traveled to the Baltics with my father. In Lithuania, we visited a tiny museum devoted to Vilnius’s vanished Jewish population. We were alone in its four rooms except for a couple of babushkas, half-asleep on plasti
c chairs, who we assumed were either guards or cleaners. Nazi propaganda had blamed the Soviet annexation of Lithuania on Jews, 90 percent of whom had been slaughtered with the enthusiastic collaboration of local authorities. Lithuanians who tried to help their Jewish neighbors were killed as well. Relatively few Lithuanian Jews ended up in labor camps, but one of the display panels at the museum described the conditions in such a camp and referred to a song the emaciated workers had sung to cheer themselves. My father, a great enthusiast for music, commented on it, and I wondered aloud what the tune had been. From the corner, a thin, reedy voice piped up. It had not occurred to us that the woman in the corner could understand English, nor that she might be Jewish; but now she sang that song of the camp, and we understood that she was not only this room’s guard but also its subject. When she fell silent, we tried to talk to her, but she withdrew back into apparent unilingualism and seemed unable to understand what we were asking her. She was one of those who had had nowhere to go, yet had survived.

  It is easy to be primitive without being authentic, but nearly impossible to be authentic if you are afraid of the rustic. John Ruskin, the great Victorian essayist, complained that the efficiencies of train travel eliminated the joys of voyaging. “It is merely being ‘sent’ to a place,” he wrote, “and very little different from becoming a parcel.” It took me some time to acquire a taste for discomfort. At first, I liked having had adventures better than I liked having them, but bit by bit, I realized that either you have a good time or you have a story to tell, and I ended up being open to either result. As a child, I experienced fairly luxurious travel; as I grew older, I learned to travel with fewer material expectations and discovered that luxury is a mutable concept. When I went to Guatemala City to write about gang life, I found myself one day in the poor neighborhood of La Limonada. An old man with a herd of goats approached us. “You thirsty?” asked the teenage felon who was showing me around. When I said I was, the goatherd milked one of the goats directly into a large paper cup, then handed it to me. I have never enjoyed a beverage more.