by Pico Iyer
In chapel we sang, “There is a green hill far away,” and I thought, inevitably, of our house, now painted yellow, on the ridge in California, on the far side of the world; on the last day of every term, just as my mother and her friends had done at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, we all but shouted out William Blake’s lines about building a new Jerusalem in “England’s green and pleasant land.” When I was allowed “out of bounds,” occasionally, to buy sweets from the shop round the corner from where I’d grown up, it was to think of the dentist down the road, in the same street where Graham Greene’s wife and children lived. The name of our school magazine was The Draconian.
Once a year, perhaps, through an elaborate lottery system, each of us had a chance to win the ultimate prize: freedom from school lunch. If a letter was chosen close enough to the “I” in “Iyer”—I can remember even now the sensation of crowding around the magic box in the room lined with lockers—I was given a small paper bag and told, at 10:40 on a Sunday morning, that I didn’t have to show up again till dinner at 6:15. Inside the bag was a small packet of potato chips, a Penguin chocolate bar, an apple and a 6½-ounce bottle of Coke. Fully aware of how special a luxury this was, I ran upstairs to my room, searched around for the compass in my pencil box, jabbed a few holes in the rusty bottle top and proceeded to sip the elixir through the pinpricks for the next four hundred and fifty-four minutes.
Outsiders would seldom understand why we would later, with complete sincerity, call our years at school the best days of our lives. But we were situated within a very clearly ordered universe, in which an omnipotent authority determined everything. Every tiny pleasure felt earned, legitimate, and we always knew exactly where we stood. We were learning how to live with other boys, how to work with them and give them space, how to gauge their secrets as spies (and novelists and priests) do; our regimental comrades, as they quickly came to seem, would remain our closest friends through life, even if we couldn’t always tell how much we knew them (or they us).
The second biggest dorm in the school was called “Gunga Din,” in honor of the native water bearer in Kipling who dies to save a British officer’s life; on Sunday mornings, we assembled again in our classrooms and wrote twice-folded blue Air Letters to our parents. “Dear Mummy and Daddy,” we wrote, “this week Cherwell beat Linton 3–1. You can imagine how excited we all were! Reader-Harris’s parents are taking him out for tea next month—and he’s invited me to come! In Divinity we’re doing the Pharisees and the Gallic Wars are really galling! The School Play this term is Oliver!, about the boy who asked for more. But Podge asked for less last week, and he got six of the best with a tennis shoe.”
In English class, they taught us about a whisky priest, who drank and fathered a baby and forgot his prayers; when he offered Mass, the only bread he had to offer was from his mistress’s oven. His parishioners were the other unwashed sinners in his prison cell. Perhaps we understood this somewhat, by intuition, as we headed back to our own cells: simple broken humanity was the sacrament, and even a holy man was “just one criminal among a herd of criminals.” The rest of the world—the places of need and desperation that we were being trained to go out and administer—lived in a realm as barren and magical as that of the Gospels.
And then, overnight, as it seemed, the eighty-four days were up and I was walking down the steps of TWA 761 into the born-again sunshine of California once more, and the relieved indulgence of my parents. My father was explaining the symbolism of Sgt. Pepper, his eyes bright with mischief, to his students, and serious young philosophers, prom queens from the beach towns to the south—now called “Radha” and “Parvati”—were asking him earnest questions about Walden and “Kubla Khan.”
Mountain lions could sometimes be seen in the dry hills through the window in my father’s study; a mother bear had been spotted with her cub up the road. We might have been in one of the cowboy-and-Indian movies we’d so excitedly devoured on TV in Oxford (though now the Indians were of a somewhat different kind and the cowboys were mostly shy men from the south, speaking Spanish). Sometimes fires broke out on the ridges up the road—humans were surely never meant to live in wilds like these—and those who had taken my father’s course on anarchist thought might note that you had to get rid of the old if a new order were ever to come into being.
No,” I said, one day, many years later, in another small room in an old island empire, when Hiroko asked; it wasn’t really the fact that I’d instinctively given the name “Mr. Brown” to the little sketch I’d written, imagining seeing Greene in Havana (or the fact that “Brown” was the name of his protagonist in Brighton Rock and The Comedians, his recurrent nom de guerre); it wasn’t the fact that he traveled—all of us had been taught to take off across the world, and for me as for him, travel was mostly a way to see more clearly the questions and shadows it was easy to look past at home. It was that he was always on the move in some deeper sense, never ready to assume he had the last word, reflexively able to see around the corner of his beliefs and to recall how he and his world looked to the person on the far side of the street.
Always there was a dance in him between evasion and an almost ruthless candor, his instinct for privacy and his need to purge himself of his secrets on the page; he was one of those men who would often tell more to his unmet readers than to his oldest friends. He almost had to guard his public life, in fact, in order to have more to offer, less compromised, in his private; the less you let out freely to every stranger—California had taught me this, along with many of the other laws of restraint—the more and deeper the material you had to share when it most mattered.
But there was something subtler going on beyond all this: he knew what it was to animate a dialogue, quivering and uncertain, connecting the two worlds he moved between, each not knowing how much to distrust or be fascinated by the other. He knew how to keep alive the demands and intensity of faith, by not really being part of any congregation, yet refusing to stake out the easy ground of a nonbeliever. He saw that he was in part the schoolmaster whose face he surely recognized whenever he caught his blurred features in a train window—and a boy committed to forging his own way in opposition to that schoolmaster, his father. Life would and could be spent in movement, in process, not settling to any fixity or doctrine, but sensing that the human challenge was something much more profound and unassimilable. So much so, in fact, that even saints might despair of figuring out the riddle and the ache.
CHAPTER 6
We were driving—well, to make a critical distinction, “being driven”—down unpaved roads across the highlands of Ethiopia, and we were being told that the eleven rock-cut churches of Lalibela were not far away, just an hour or a day or two. We had come here, Louis and I, to experience Christmas in the ancient country and we wanted to get to Lalibela on New Year’s Eve, six days before the Orthodox Christmas was observed, on Epiphany. Along the road there were rusted tanks and all the debris of a recently concluded civil war; when we arrived at a village just before night fell, we were told that bandits were all around and sure to attack if we continued. Behind us in the aging white Toyota were two cans of kerosene, guaranteed to asphyxiate us if somehow we survived the road itself.
After another long day of driving, we slipped into tiny rooms in the pitch dark and fell into a deep sleep. When I walked out next morning at dawn, it was to see dozens, hundreds of believing souls, all in white, gathered on a hilltop, while below them thickly bearded priests, in purple raiment, carrying leathery Bibles the size of a human hand, moaned and chanted from their holy books. The bright winter sun rose from behind the faraway mountains; light began to stream through the cross-shaped openings in the churches; grave, piercing faces from the Book of Kings held our own, impossible to ignore. Hundreds of pilgrims looked back at them, burning-eyed, no sign of fatigue or weakness after walking three weeks or more to be in the holy site.
“This is Golgotha,” a deacon said, walking us round the site as the morning freshened.
“This is Nazareth. We call this the River Jordan.” The New Jerusalem had been built here, in the stronghold of Ethiopia’s high mountains, to give sustenance to those who could not hope to get to the Old Jerusalem after it had been taken over by invaders.
We walked and walked and I, who had suffered through years of having to read the Gospel of Matthew in Greek and writing essays about the trial of Jesus, felt, almost for the first time, what lay behind all the symbols and the pitiful reductions; faith itself could be a solace, an exaltation, regardless of the everyday terms and icons with which we tried to encourage (or ensnare) it. This country was as bare as any I had seen, beyond the point of poverty, trying to surface again after seventeen years of dictatorship, and all it seemed to have was the hope in the priests’ intense chanting, the light in the eyes of the people who had come here, as to Heaven. To stand on the hillside in the dawn and join in the thronged prayers was to step out of the moment, for a second, and disappear inside what the poets we had read at school had taught us to call “Eternity.”
My upbringing had left me at a little distance from both the wisdom of the East, as I heard it in my parents’ home, and from the secret black book that Louis pulled out every morning and evening; like most little boys, I loved to define myself by everything I thought I could see through. Yet it was impossible not to be moved by everything the cross had brought into being here, in the eyes of people who held to their traditions as to hope itself, and the feeling that they passed on like a holy contagion.
If anything, in fact, the power of worship and the sense of purpose it created were more visible in this emptiness. There were no lights in the little settlement where we’d slept and, in the dining room, on New Year’s Eve, only three other travelers, from Switzerland, had joined us for a meager dinner. But now, as we began to drive away from the chants and Bibles, back into the world, we were surrounded by hundreds of worshippers, rail thin and fragile, walking, walking, in straight lines, while dressed in flimsy, almost transparent robes, towards the churches for Epiphany.
Our driver had never been on the road before; he seemed, in truth, barely to have been behind the wheel of a car before. Three weeks earlier he had been in the army. Now he sat, with great erectness and pride—he might have been an Ethiopian Mandela, with his cropped grey hair and ancient face—and gunned the Land Cruiser at hostile speeds around blind turns.
“Slower! What are you doing—trying to kill us?” Louis shouted, a little like the London merchant I remembered from Greene’s Stamboul Train.
The driver caught my eyes in his rearview mirror. “Sir, your friend is very strict. More strict than military.”
“He is,” I acknowledged. “He just came from Kenya. Some of his friends were killed there. In an accident. He’s jumpy.”
I hoped the mention of his country’s neighbor might be enough; with its sixteen hundred years of unbroken tradition, and almost complete freedom from European control, Ethiopia was always keen to assert its distance from the rest of Africa. But I couldn’t tell what, if anything, it meant to our driver; he stared with new intensity at the road and pushed his foot down, roaring around an army truck and swerving desperately back as we rounded a turn and found another truck barreling at high speed towards us.
“Cool it!” cried Louis, and the driver registered a mild complaint with me and then began to speed up again; diplomatic relations between the two had broken down days before.
All of us were wordless, though, when, out of nowhere, another white Toyota loomed behind us—and then, zigzagging wildly across the potholed road, roared straight ahead and disappeared, thick clouds of dust coming up to block our way as it accelerated off.
We kept on driving—what we had seen in Lalibela had shaken us out of easy words—and then, as we bumped over another pothole and came to the top of a small rise in the path, gears protesting, we saw a sight that rendered words irrelevant: the Toyota that had sped ahead of us twenty minutes before now sat motionless in a ditch. Its doors had been thrown open; two figures were slumped on its front seats.
“Stop!” cried Louis. “Stop the car!” I had no time to think, or fiddle around in my usual ineffectual way; already he was out, racing to the passenger side, where a foreign woman, older than we were, had been forced back against her seat by the collision.
He talked to her softly, asked her where it hurt, held her hand and told her it would be all right. Then he went round and attended to the driver, too.
“We’ve got to get them to a hospital,” he shouted. This seemed a senseless wish: we were surrounded by hours of emptiness and those warnings about bandits were not far away. But Louis was as decisive as before he had been full of quips and neglected orders to the driver.
Very tenderly, he held the injured local man and helped him over to our vehicle, setting him up in the front seat, next to our driver, as if he were a precious statue. Then he brought the woman over—a motherly travel agent from Brooklyn, we learned, as humbled and out of it in this world of famine and rock churches as we were. He made room for her on one side of our seat, and he and I squeezed into the other.
We drove, slowly now, so as not to throw their bodies around and after a long, long while found the main road. Our driver stopped at a little line of shops and asked after a clinic and then—though the minutes were ticking by and our cargo was faltering—we found a hospital in the middle of the nowhereness. A gurney came out, another, and the two casualties disappeared from view, while we settled into chairs in a corridor and tried to distract ourselves.
Louis pulled out his backgammon set, but it didn’t divert us as it had among the hill tribes of Chiang Mai. Great cries of pain emerged from the wards down the corridor, and then there was a silence that was no comfort at all. A bright-eyed young nurse walked past. “It’s okay,” she assured us. “Most of them are victims of gunshots. There is nothing to be done.” The green walls were blotched with puddles of reddish brown, and there were bloodstains on the floor.
We sat and threw the dice; more howling came from the rooms. It might have been something from the book Louis read each day: the worship and prayer in the morning, the real life and suffering right now. They belonged together—neither had full meaning without the other—and I thought of all the stories that Louis had read, as the people around me had, about pain and what eases it in the long term.
Then a young doctor came out; remarkably, he spoke a little English. “Your friend,” he said, “she’s okay. She needs to rest, but she’s been lucky.”
“The driver?”
“Only bruises. They were fortunate.”
They came out now—the American woman was smiling—and our driver asked directions to the nearest hotel. It was next to empty when we arrived, so we took over rooms, our plans forgotten, and, as we checked in, heard the woman ask if we would join her for dinner: she wanted to thank us for our help.
Two hours later, all three of us staggered down to a huge and almost empty lobby. At one table sat a glamorous young Indian woman with her boyfriend—both from London, we guessed from their voices in the near-silence. Otherwise, there was nothing.
We sat down, and our new friend began to talk about what she’d seen in Jerusalem, and her trip to Peru. The son et lumière in Egypt recently, and why she’d decided to come to Ethiopia to see if it might be a good spot for her clients. I noticed Louis looking around and realized he was restless and on his way to join the young couple at the next table; his Christian duty had been fulfilled, and now he was eager for adventure.
A few days later, we were back in Addis, and the Christmas celebrations were coming to their peak. The next day Louis was due to fly back to London while I was on my way towards the Somali border, where there had been unrest, and then heading down to South Africa to witness the unraveling of apartheid. On his last night there, the whole broken city of creaking aid projects and shacks and hand-painted signs leading to dead-end roads or hotels that would perhaps never get built was filled with petitioners, all in
white, streaming through the streets again, to chapels and churches and graveyards. Night fell, and they lit tiny candles by which to guide themselves. We walked into a church and found it so full we could hardly move. People were chanting, their faces aglow, and boys were pounding on ox-skin drums. Bearded deacons and priests were reciting from illuminated books, and when we stepped out into the graveyard behind the church, there were bright faces lit by candles in every corner, then dozens more above what looked to be a manger, in new clusters coming in from the streets, soft high voices singing songs we didn’t need Amharic to understand.
We walked around in a bit of a daze through much of the night; I don’t think anything separated Louis the Christian from me the fascinated outsider. Everyone was brought into a circle of candles, and somehow the prayers and hymns made more sense in the light not only of the forlorn metropolis that otherwise was so dark after nightfall, but in the light of our long journey, and the caves in the high plateau and then the long afternoon in the hospital with the bloodstains.
I took Louis to the airport the next morning and returned to my little room in the Hotel Ghion, the voices of the night before, the shining, excited faces lit up by the candles, the accumulated sensations of the past few days, complex and contradictory, building and building inside me, when suddenly the phone began to shudder. “Iyer!” my friend was shouting over the scratchy line (last names were how we’d been taught to show closeness at school). “You’ll never believe it! They took my cross away. The one I bought in Gondar. They say it has to be collected from some warehouse at the airport. Is there any way, do you think, you could …”
Go and collect it and give it to Giovanna, the stylish Italian travel agent who had set us up with our military driver.
