by Tahir Shah
Johan told me that happy cows made lots of delicious milk, that he thought hard before naming them, and that they were all his girls. ‘This one is Lisa,’ he whispered, cupping the head of one lovingly in his arms as she licked him, ‘and this here is Carmen. She can be quite naughty sometimes,’ he said.
After much talk of cows and after a taste of the local weissbier, Johan showed off his trophies and the wreathes he’d won for scything grass. It turned out he was a champion. When I praised this little appreciated Swiss skill, the farmer grinned until his cheeks dimpled. Then, as a way of changing the subject modestly, he showed me to my room.
In actual fact it wasn’t so much as a room, but a barn. Instead of beds there were stalls filled with fresh straw. I got a flashback of the travelling hardship I’m more used to, and sighed contently. Johan demonstrated how to fluff up the straw to make a pillow. Grinning, he went out to check on the girls once more before turning in himself.
Early next morning, after a breakfast of cured ham and tangy Appenzeller cheese, I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. The hillsides were glazed in dew, cool morning shadows streaming over them like giants’ cloaks. Johan had just finished milking the herd, and was cooing over them like a mother hen. He introduced me to another farmer, called Willi, whose ample white beard sprouted from a creased face, and whose hands were the roughest I can remember ever shaking. He spoke of the past, of his eighteen grandchildren and, then he told me about his own herd.
As I wondered how much more talk of cows and milk I could take, Johan took me along winding roads to the cable car. He pointed up to a distant crag and clicked his tongue. Squinting against the sunlight, I made out a straw-coloured building nestled there. Johan nodded, cackled with laugher, and hugged me goodbye.
Minutes later, I was floating up towards the mountains in the cable car, sailing high above a seamless mantle of bottle-green conifers. The gondola was packed with hikers, most of them locals, whose lives are nailed firmly to nature. There was an extraordinary sense of anticipation, as if being in the mountains was a love affair.
The gondola delivered us to sixteen hundred and forty-four metres and to Ebenalp, one of the highest points in all Alpstein. After watching a flock of paragliders arcing and pirouetting on the summer thermals, I toured caves where prehistoric bears once lived, and where their bones can still be found. Nearby, nuzzled into the rock, I saw a tiny chapel built by hermits, who for centuries sought sanctuary in the Alpine solitude.
The next day, the wheels beneath me were moving once again.
I had boarded the fabled Glacier Express at Chur, which bills itself as ‘the world’s slowest express train’. On the exterior, the sleek carriages were gleaming grey and fire engine red, while inside was washed in blinding light, streaming in through special side-lights.
Outside, an idyllic canvas of nature rolled by, peppered with picturesque little villages, silent beneath boiling cumulus clouds; rivers swollen from weeks of late spring rain, their waters the hue of aquamarines, sided by forests as thick as any.
A contrast to the cutting-edge carriages, the train’s dining car was a throwback to the 1930s when it was built. It was compact and wood panelled, with floral velvet seats, brass fittings, starched table cloths, and wild flower posies arranged at each place.
The waitress, whose name was Elvira, was energetically polishing the silver. She seemed a little flustered at seeing me arrive for a late lunch. ‘We have already catered for one hundred and twenty,’ she said apologetically, as she handed me the menu, adding, ‘the kitchen may be small but we prepare everything from scratch.’
Uncertain of what to order, I asked Elvira to do so for me, and was rewarded with one of the most memorable meals of my life. The dining car had the ambience of a well-loved gentlemen’s club, its cuisine – presented silver service – was worthy of any gastronomic pleasure dome. There was Salsiz sausage and veal paillard, bouillon aux crêpe en lamelles, platters of Alpine cheese, and a wine list that would make the most pedantic sommelier proud.
Leaving the Glacier Express at Brig, I had a lump in my throat.
All I could think of was about clawing my way back to the dining car, for another meal under Elvira’s conscientious watch.
In most other countries, changing trains tends to be a sordid ordeal of waiting and of discomfort. You hang around for hours, switching platforms at the last moment, charging up and down, overstuffed cases dragging clumsily behind. But in Switzerland, things are very different. It’s a land in which rail travel is still a genteel pursuit, one of enjoyment rather than of endurance. The station masters are well-dressed and courteous, the platforms clean, the efficiency of the system as reliable as an Oyster Perpetual. It explains why the Swiss one meets off the beaten track sometimes appear alarmed at how the rest of the world grinds on.
In the afternoon I reached the Alpine village of Kandersteg, a favourite with the British since Victorian times. Set in a monumental amphitheatre of peaks, ridges and jagged stone bluffs, it’s far more rugged than the sweeping farmlands I had encountered at Appenzell.
I took a cable car up to the magnificent Lake Oeschinensee, whose azure waters mirrored the sky. The setting was lovely, abundant with wild flowers and lizard-green ferns, with soft, moist moss, lichens, the air thick with bumble bees and marbled white butterflies.
At the water’s edge I met an American woman in a wide-brimmed hat. She was searching for tiny wild orchids, and had one of those smiles that sticks in your mind. She told me that she’d been coming to Kandersteg every year on the same day for four decades. ‘My fiancé proposed right where we are standing,’ she said. When I asked if he was with her, her smile faded. ‘He died in Vietnam,’ she said.
In the days I spent at Kandersteg, I found myself reflecting on the courtesy of almost everyone I encountered. However rushed or busy, there was always time for good manners. In Swiss villages, complete strangers greet each other as they walk past. Men still tip their hats, and people live in a well-honed system with do-as-you-would-be-doneby at its core. When taking a train, there’s none of the usual fear that your belongings will be pinched if you slip to the loo. And, when you get to the loo, you find it immaculate, because the last person left it how they would want to find it themselves.
The journey north-west to Lake Lucerne involved three trains and a paddle steamer in a single afternoon, each one running on a schedule as precise as Swiss clockwork. I found myself flinching at the thought of ever travelling in any other country again. More worryingly, it was beginning to seem as if an on-time world was quite a normal place to be.
Set on the western edge of the lake, the town of Lucerne is as placid as the waters in which its medieval buildings are reflected. Rust-brown tiled rooftops, church spires and onion domes, its skyline is a credit to Swiss style and to diehard values. Thankfully lacking are the rows of grotesque package hotels which tend to accommodate tourists on a grander scale elsewhere.
Like everything else in Switzerland, when it comes to tourism, the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity. As a visitor you feel fortunate at being allowed in at all. It’s rather like peeking under the curtain to see a play for which all the tickets were long since sold.
The lake and the town exist in harmony, each one respectful of the other. And, gliding across it like princesses dancing at a ball, are the steamers. Although built in 1901, the one I climbed aboard looked brand spanking new, and was christened Wilhelm Tell. One of five such vessels plying Lake Lucerne’s gleaming waters for more than a century, its mechanism was a marvel of the Victorian age. Pistons heaving up and down, it ushered me gracefully past swans and pedalos, around the zigzag margins of the lake. As we moved slowly forward, I glimpsed a handful of fabulous chateaux poking out from between the trees high above the waterline – homes of the super rich.
The steamer pulled up at Weggis, little more than a hamlet. Having been thanked politely for my custom, I clambered off. Then, as the sun set, long shadows waning i
nto night, I took a meal in the Weggiser Stübli.
A fragment of Swiss life from antiquity, the wood-panelled salon had escaped the ever-threatening need to renovate. With portraits of the hamlet’s leaders looming down, I dined on bratwurst and bauernrösti, washed down with a glass of crisp Les Murailles.
Seated at the next table was a wizened old man who looked as Swiss as Toblerone. I half thought he might break out yodeling any moment. Raising his glass of Riesling, he caught my eye.
‘We ought to keep it secret,’ he said with a smile.
‘Do you mean the food, or the wine… or the Stübli itself?’
The man sipped his drink, thought for a moment. He frowned.
‘All of it,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep it all to ourselves.’
FORTY-FIVE
Tetouan
THE CHESSBOARD WAS SO OLD and battered that you had to guess which squares were white and which were black.
The pieces were worn too, hand-carved from driftwood by my opponent, an old sailor named Abdel-Latif. He was wizened and frail, and had one of those blinding white denture grins that gives nothing away. Especially when he was lining up an attack.
We both opened with our pawns, breaking only to sip our café noir. I felt confident and somehow powerful, certain of early victory. But then, just five moves in, the old seaman’s queen swooped down, and knocked my king on his side. The dentures parted no more than a crack.
‘Checkmate.’
Abdel-Latif tapped a fingernail to the tabletop, indicating that his winnings were due. Like everyone else who frequented the hole in the wall café, in a lane off Tetouan’s souq, I knew the rules.
Once the makeshift capital of Spanish Morocco, the sleepy town of Tetouan, a stone’s throw from Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, is one of café culture, long siestas, and Andalucian charm. It’s a place forgotten by tourists, who make a beeline for Tangier, or the Imperial cities of the Moroccan hinterland. Inexplicably, they have always bypassed Tetouan, a whitewashed treasure trove of history, one that nestles between the Mediterranean and the Rif.
For me, it’s the ultimate de-stress destination. There’s nothing quite so wonderful as wasting long afternoons there. Bathed with Lotus Eater listlessness, I like to amble from café to café playing chess, a rough straw hat shading the blinding summer light. Tetouan is the kind of place that seeps into your bones, gently coaxing you to forget what you imagine to be reality.
But it wasn’t a desire to relax, or even my love of chess, that lured me to Tetouan last week. It was a quest. I wanted to track down the military barracks outside town where Franco had rallied his troops before the Spanish Civil War. I had seen a picture – faded sepia – Franco standing on a mound, haranguing the Guardia Mora, his personal cavalry regiment, the Moroccan bodyguards. They were dressed in fabulous Moorish costumes, capes slung over their backs, turbans crowning their heads, rifles tight across their chests.
It took me no more than an hour to locate the barracks. Abdel-Latif the chess player had whispered the way. He said he could remember as a child seeing the fascist dictator himself parading through the town, his horsemen charging before him like harbingers from Hell. I’d told him about the sepia photograph. His acrylic teeth had grinned.
‘There has been change,’ he said.
And there certainly had. The long barrack buildings were derelict and black with grime, their roofs caved in, the doors torn away. The parade ground was overgrown and forlorn, waist-high with tinder-dry grass, through which wild peacocks roamed.
At the far end of the quadrangle I made out the mound where Franco had stood almost eight decades before. Abdel-Latif was quite right, there had indeed been change.
Later, in the afternoon, dazzled by blinding pink bougainvillea against stark whitewashed walls, I bumped into the chess player again in the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter. He was staggering home, tracing a line through the shade, one that he made twice daily, back and forth from the café in the souq.
‘To know Tetouan, you must know Spain,’ he said slowly, clicking the tip of his cane down on the flagstones, ‘and to know Spain you must know Tetouan.’ I asked if the Andalucian motherland could still be found there. Again, he grinned. ‘You will find it hiding in the details,’ he said.
And Tetouan is all about detail. It’s bewitching and ubiquitous. You see it in the glorious tiled façades of the Hispano-Moorish architecture, and in the wrought iron arabesques, in the contraband from Andalucia that fills the shops, and in the way the young women tie their hair.
What I like best about Tetouan is the small-town feel, the sense that life carries on and no one’s looking, a life conjured by ideal simplicity. There’s none of the hustle and bustle of city life but, instead, a serenity, one that almost touches melancholy.
On a corner, just off the main square, Place Hassan II, a farmer was selling three goats and a sickly-looking lamb. Across from him, I found a boy standing with gleaming chips of painted amethyst cupped in his hands. And, next to him, a cluster of old men. They were touting moist cream cheese and parasols, cigarettes, and Spanish postcards from before the War.
I asked them if tourists ever strayed to their town. Two of the men shook their heads. But the last, a hunched figure in a thick camel-wool jelaba robe, cocked his head towards the square.
I looked round, and spied an Englishman standing there. I knew he was English because he was wearing those dull red trousers that the English wear on their holidays. He had horn-rims, a pallid, almost fearful expression, and a brow streaming with sweat. With nothing else to do, I went over and struck up conversation.
The Englishman said his name was George, explained that he lived in Guildford, and that his wife had got them the deal of a lifetime on a holiday home, bought online. I congratulated him on discovering Tetouan.
He tapped a finger to his nose.
‘Better keep this one to ourselves old boy,’ he said.
I’m not quite sure why, but George seemed unwilling to melt away into the shadows after our brief conversation. I turned towards the souq, and he followed. Down through narrow telescoping lanes, packed with wares – yellow baboush slippers and wool jelabas, golden kaftans and silk brocade, fresh meat, powdered henna, rose water, and savon noir for the hammam. And, like all the truest medinas anywhere, there were underpants and fake Reebok running shoes, wooden spoons, pots and pans, and wooden sieves dyed pink.
With every stride, I could feel George behind me, plodding forward in my footsteps. Just as I wondered how I might slip away, he sponged a giant polka-dot handkerchief over his cherry-red brow, and invited to see the villa he had bought. I accepted, and we drove south for twenty minutes, the slim ribbon of potholed tarmac shaded by olive trees.
The sun was low and the shadows long by the time we arrived. George pointed to an expansive clutch of villas and apartments, all of them whiter than white. He said you could get a villa there for next to nothing. We trooped out of the car and, a minute later, were in his sitting room, his wife was fussing around us. She took out a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and poured three enormous drinks. We clinked glasses. George from Guildford then made me swear a solemn oath not to publicize Tetouan in any way.
‘The last thing we want,’ he said, draining his gin, ‘is this little scrap of paradise going to the dogs!’
FORTY-SIX
The Afghan Notebook
ON THE MORNING OF HIS DEATH, my grandfather placed a tattered notebook in a brown manila envelope, sealed it with packing tape, and mailed it from his home in Tangier, to my father in Tunbridge Wells.
He must have stopped at the post office on his way up the hill to Gran Café de Paris, where he took tea late each morning, and where he was regarded as an eccentric by the other clientele.
An hour later my grandfather was dead, knocked down outside his house by a reversing Coca-Cola truck.
It almost seems like too much of a coincidence that the old man would have passed the notebook on to his oldest son on that of all mor
nings. After all, he had guarded the journal’s contents his entire adult life, updating it meticulously over the years, and had kept it secret from even his own family. Perhaps he had had a premonition of some kind, or had foreseen that his skull was about to be split open outside his small villa on Rue de la Plage.
Whatever the sequence of events that caused him to mail the slim package to England that morning, the important thing was that the notebook got away. As for my grandfather’s other possessions, most of them were stolen by his treacherous maid, Zohra, who had waited years for her master’s death. She ran off to the mountains laden with all she could carry, and was never seen again.
The death that morning closed a life wildly rich in diversity, the kind that is almost impossible to summarize in a line of words.
My grandfather’s name was Ikbal Ali Shah. An Afghan by ancestry, he had been born in northern India, the son of a Nawab, the Muslim equivalent of a Maharajah. His father presided over a Princely State named Sardhana, presented to our family by the British Raj a century and a half ago.
Unwilling to spend his life ruling ancestral lands in India or others in Afghanistan, my grandfather set sail for Scotland to study medicine. He arrived to find Edinburgh gripped by the Great War. While helping the War effort he met Morag Murray, known within the family as ‘Bobo’, the daughter of a well-known member of Edinburgh society.
They fell instantly in love and eloped to the Hindu Kush.
My grandfather was a polymath. He was the author of more than seventy books, a diplomat and scholar, an adviser to half a dozen heads of state. But far more important to him than any of these things was the prospect of pursuing a quest, and the overwhelming desire to have what he always referred to as ‘an interesting life’.
