Heroes in My Head

by Judy Rebick

They didn’t laugh but looked at me with considerable hostility while they questioned me about my time in Jerusalem. They knew everywhere I had been. Phillip’s warnings about hanging out with Arabs came back to me, along with all the stories I had heard on my travels about body searches, long waits for trials, but most of all how they confiscated people’s passports. Even worse, I knew I’d have to call my parents if I was arrested. My father would come for sure. Jack was Israel’s top fundraiser in Toronto. He would try to use his influence and, failing that, try to bully someone into freeing me. That was a fate worse than going to jail.

  When they couldn’t find anything in the pack, a young woman came into the room.

  “Follow her,” the suit said to me.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “She is going to search your body,” he replied.

  “What? I am Jewish and a college graduate! I’ve travelled all over Europe and I’ve never had a body search. This is supposed to be my homeland! How can you treat me like this?” In an instant I turned from compliant, curious tourist into entitled potential immigrant.

  The woman asked me to undress. I slowly started undressing. The entire time I continued my rant — “I have never been humiliated like this!” — until I was down to my underwear and my bandaged foot. That morning, I had stepped on a piece of glass and the kibbutz doctor had treated the gash.

  “Take off the bandage,” she said.

  “You want me to take off this bandage? Then you get on the phone and call an ambulance! I am not risking an infection for this stupidity.”

  I figured I had nothing to lose, so I decided to make her life as difficult as possible. In addition, a trip in an ambulance might give me the opportunity to ditch the hash. It’s hard to believe that a twenty-four-year-old woman with little experience of border guards would consciously plan such a strategy, but I had learned a lot from my father about dealing with petty bureaucrats and border guards.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice slightly shaking. “Take off your pants.”

  I turned and looked her straight in the eye. “I’m on my period and I am not taking off my pants. I have been humiliated quite enough.” I made it clear that if my underwear was coming off, she would have to remove them.

  “Okay,” she said. “Get dressed.”

  I had to be sure not to show any relief so I kept yelling at her, at the guy in the suit, at the guys who searched my bags.

  “Are you sure?” her boss asked her. “Did you look everywhere?”

  “Yes,” she lied. They knew I had the hash. It was well known that the Arab dealers would sell to tourists, inform on them, then get the hash back as well as their money. I was lucky she was younger than I was and easily intimidated.

  Looking back, I realize this was the first time in my adult life that I had dissociated from any feelings of fear. This ability to exercise complete emotional detachment allowed me to quickly and coolly assess a tense and threatening situation, to stand up to authorities, and to keep going, which is what I did.

  * * *

  After Israel I decided to set out upon what is now called “the hippie trail.” Travelling alone from Turkey to Iran, Afghanistan, and India, I was confronted again and again with dangerous and hostile situations. Fellow travellers had warned me that it was too dangerous for a woman to do the trail by herself, but I didn’t listen.

  My first stop was Istanbul. Someone suggested that it would be easier, safer, and more scenic to take a boat along the south coast of the Black Sea rather than a bus across Turkey. The events of the days that followed wiped out the memory of what was likely a lovely boat trip.

  When we arrived at the port, I got on an old rickety bus that was supposed to drive through the mountains directly to Doğubayazıt, the last Turkish town on the highway to Iran. From there I could get a train that would go to Tehran. I wanted to arrive in India before the rainy season in the summer.

  Men and women sat separately on the bus, the women on one side and the men on the other. Since no one spoke English or seemed very friendly, all I could do was look out the window. I smiled at the woman next to me, but she didn’t return my smile, just looked down. The scenery was beautiful as we travelled through the mountains, but the villages we passed through were terribly poor, made up mostly of rundown shacks. The only toilet facilities were holes in the ground, covered in flies.

  I was dressed very modestly in loose Indian clothes. Nevertheless I was an object of curiosity, especially for the men. Most people in this part of the world had never seen a Western woman before.

  As night fell, the driver made an unscheduled stop in a village to rest. After a couple of passengers got off the bus, the driver started packing up as if he intended to spend the night there. A group of men began gathering around the bus. When they saw me, they started tapping on the windows and knocking on the door. I went up to the driver to indicate that I was frightened. At first he just laughed. Then they started pounding on the windows, and I turned around and noticed the looks of concern on the faces of the women. An unaccustomed fear was growing in my belly.

  “Please, let’s go,” I said, pointing ahead. “No stop here.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  Pointing to the men now banging on the bus, I replied, “Big problem, big problem,” miming with my arms.

  I went back to my fellow travellers, asking one of them to intervene. A man went up to the driver and asked him to continue the journey, but the driver ignored him, too. Then the pounding got louder and more violent.

  Finally the driver realized we were in danger and managed to pull away.

  After about two weeks in Tehran, a modern city where lots of students I met spoke English, I took the train to Mashhad, where I was told I could get a ride to Herat, Afghanistan.

  Mashhad is a beautiful, ancient city. Today it is a big tourist town, but back then it was a sleepy village. After checking into a small hotel near the train station, I immediately went out for a walk. I saw a group of people in a nearby park and wandered over to see what they were doing. Before I got very close, someone threw a stone at me and then more people started throwing stones. At first I was stunned. It was the middle of the twentieth century and I was dressed modestly, yet I was being stoned like a harlot in ancient times. It didn’t take me long to start running, and run I did, as fast as I could to my hotel.

  I checked to make sure I wasn’t hurt and then tried to calm down and figure out how I was going to get out of there safely. About an hour later, there was a knock on my door. When I opened it a friendly man said in broken English, “So sorry, miss, so sorry.” He pointed to a badly beaten young man on the ground next to him. The young man was the one who had started throwing the stones. His face was black and blue, and from the way he was holding himself I assumed his body had taken an even worse beating. The beating was meant as an apology to me, but seeing the young man on the ground made me sick. I couldn’t wait to get out of the country.

  * * *

  The bus left Mashhad early in the morning and arrived in Herat, the second-biggest city in Afghanistan, in mid-­afternoon. Afghanistan was still a peaceful place in 1970. It was near the end of Mohammed Zahir Shah’s forty-year reign. During this time, Afghanistan was a relatively open society for travellers. Hash was legal and plentiful so lots of hippies stopped there. In fact the main role of Afghan border guards seemed to be to stop travellers from carrying Afghani hash into Iran where they would be arrested or worse. Drug laws were so lax in Kabul that there was a pharmacy known to many that sold heroin over the counter.

  Afghanistan had good relationships with Western countries through the United Nations but very little contact with Western tourists other than hippies. It was, however, quite religious. Unlike in Turkey and most of Iran, women there were often veiled. It was the first time I saw women wearing the burka. Women appeared very little in public and certainly never interacted wit
h travellers, but the Afghani men were polite, kind, and hospitable. Much less influenced by the West, they were obviously proud of their culture. They invited travellers to share their food and to talk in whatever way we could given the language differences, but they were neither solicitous nor aggressive. The country had a calm, quiet beauty. I loved it there and have felt heartsick about its tragic history ever since.

  I remember an evening in Herat, sitting around a fire with a few travellers and a group of Afghani men dressed in tribal clothes. They were cooking meat on an open fire. For the first time since I had arrived in Istanbul two months before, I felt safe. I stayed in Herat until I was able to get a ride to Kabul.

  Kabul is said to be more than 3,500 years old. Located in a narrow valley between the Hindu Kush mountains, it was a key location for trade along the Silk Road. Running short of money, I arranged through a wire to my mother to have some money transferred to a bank in Kabul. I had left some money in my account in Toronto with a letter allowing my mother access to it. It turned out that one of the ways the Afghan bank made money in those days was to hold transfers for a while, a week, two weeks, one never knew. I was stuck in Kabul with little or no money. Luckily the owner of the hotel agreed I could stay there and pay him once the funds came through. My situation was a common one.

  Another stroke of luck was that Karen, a Canadian woman I had travelled with from Spain to Greece, showed up in Kabul with her boyfriend about a week after I got there. After all I had gone through, it was so good to see friends and a huge relief to be with a woman.

  One day Karen and I were taking a walk in downtown Kabul. I had a feeling that something was wrong. Suddenly a man came up to us and quietly said, “Walk quickly, there is danger. The mullahs have come down from the mountains. It is dangerous. Leave!”

  As we made our way back to the hotel, we saw a group of robed holy men chanting and marching toward us. The mullahs were conservative Muslim scholars who did not think women should appear in public without the burka. Perhaps these men were organizing for the Islamic revolution that would follow in the coming years.

  Despite that incident the relative safety of Kabul allowed me to relax and I realized I was quite depressed. My energy had flagged. I had diarrhea off and on. I figured it was the upset stomach that made me so tired, but I hadn’t had sex or even desired sex since I had left Israel.

  I thought a night of passion would do me good, so when a tall, handsome, blond American man flirted with me in the hotel restaurant I responded even though I didn’t feel attracted to him. His name was Paul and he was from Seattle. He was travelling from India.

  “I was busted for dope there,” he said. “Now I just want to get home as soon as I can. I’m waiting for some money from home and staying with friends here.”

  There were a lot of Westerners living in Kabul, most of them junkies who could access heroin from the drugstore and live a decent lifestyle. He was staying with them on the outskirts of the city.

  He had a small pickup truck that he had borrowed from one of his friends. I got in the cab of the truck and we went back to his place where we had sex. I felt nothing, no pleasure, no fear, no sadness, nothing. I pretended to enjoy myself but he knew what was happening. He wouldn’t talk to me on the drive back to the hotel but said he would pick me up later for a lamb roast that evening.

  When he came back, he seemed really angry.

  “Let’s talk about it,” I offered.

  “No sweat,” Paul responded but I could see that wasn’t true.

  When we got to the campsite, he went to his room while I sat around the fire and partook in the copious amounts of hash being circulated. At some point he came out and sat on the opposite side of the large circle around the fire. I was very stoned and not sure what to do about him. The scene was already surreal. About fifty hippies surrounded a giant fire with a full lamb roasting over the flames. The crackle of the fire and the small explosions when the fat hit the flames, combined with the delicious smell of roasting lamb, triggered all kinds of contradictory senses. Most if not all of us were stoned on hash or heroin. The group’s intense drugged state hovered over the circle.

  Should I get up and join him? I thought, trying unsuccessfully to make eye contact. Maybe I should explain what bad shape I’m in so he doesn’t take it personally, but I don’t even know this guy and right now he seems kind of hostile. But he’s a nice person; he wouldn’t hurt me. You’re being paranoid, for Christ’s sake. Get up and talk to him.

  Before I could move, he got up, uncurled to his full six feet, and started to stride toward me. I hesitated, not sure what to do. I got up but still didn’t move from my spot — something was holding me there. If I had been more myself, I probably would have started walking toward him, but instead I just stood up and kept looking at the fire, catching him in the corner of my eye.

  Then, I felt a wind at my back.

  I turned around and looked behind me.

  A knife in that tree. A hunting knife. It wasn’t there before, was it? I thought. I looked again and then walked over to the tree and put my hand on the knife handle. It was vibrating. Oh my god, he must have thrown that knife. Was he throwing it at me, or thinking about throwing it at me? I gotta get outta here.

  If I had taken a few steps toward him, I might have been dead or certainly severely injured.

  I went to the street and got a pedicab back to the hotel. I was shaken, more shaken than I had been on the entire trip. I guess the fear of what could have happened was great enough to break through the depression.

  I told Karen what happened and she said that I should stick with them for the rest of my time in Kabul. I didn’t want to go to the police. Travellers never knew what would happen if they went to the police.

  Paul never showed his face again in the cafés or hotels. Karen’s boyfriend said a lot of people, by whom he meant men, travelling east to west were pretty fucked up and that I should keep a distance. I was traumatized by the experience and wanted to get out of Kabul as soon as possible. I went back to the bank, this time promising myself I wouldn’t leave until they handed me the money. They did.

  * * *

  Two days after the knife attack, I set out for India. I was no longer having fun. This was a perilous journey where every decision could mean life or death. There were no more philosophical discussions, no more drug-induced mind wanderings. When I met a Westerner, the discussion was strictly limited to obtaining information: a safe place to stay, to eat, to sleep. I had started writing in a journal in Turkey, something I hadn’t really done since childhood. I remember writing, “A climb to every summit is rewarded with a better view of dawn.”

  It was in India that I finally saw the dawn.

  What seemed to me to be the silence and submission of the women in Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan gave way to the animated women in India dressed in their colourful saris, chatting, laughing, and curious about me. Men treated me with respect, telling me how much courage it must take for a woman to travel alone. It was almost as if I were watching a movie that suddenly changed from black and white to colour, like that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy leaves Kansas and arrives in Oz.

  After a couple of weeks in the mountains, feeling somewhat recovered from fatigue and depression, I headed south to Amritsar and from there I travelled to Delhi. On the way to Amritsar, the bus I was on made an unscheduled stop. Everyone got out and the women invited me to sit with them. None of them spoke English, but somehow I managed to communicate that I was from Canada and travelling alone. They showed me their jewellery and offered me food. I was falling in love with India.

  When I arrived in Delhi, the crowds and the summer heat were overwhelming. Here, for the first time, there were real tourists and fancy hotels. I was ready for a little bit of luxury even if I couldn’t afford it. Arriving at a hotel recommended by other travellers, I discovered that I had to share a room with a man. His
name was Alan, and luckily he was from Ottawa. Given my recent experiences I was worried I’d have to fight off his advances, but he was polite and kind. What’s more, he had been in India for a while, so he knew the ropes. In the end, he helped save my life.

  Alan suggested that I go to Calcutta, which was even more crowded and impoverished than Delhi. But then I got really sick. It started with a fever and diarrhea. At first it didn’t seem that different from the stomach flu, but it got worse — much worse. In the forty-degree heat I felt as if I was burning up, and then I started shitting water. Dysentery was my roommate’s diagnosis. He also told me that cholera starts the same way, and the disease can be fatal. I asked him how you knew the difference.

  “Cholera doesn’t stop,” he said.

  I had never been so sick. There was a moment when I thought I might die. And in that moment I made a promise. Maybe it was a prayer. Later in my life, when I embraced Marxism and rejected all religion, I thought of it as an epiphany, a realization of how I would spend the rest of my life.

  If I live through this, I promised myself, I will devote my life to changing the world.

  The poverty I’d seen on the trip had so deeply disturbed me that I was already thinking about getting active politically and fighting U.S. imperialism, which I saw as the source of most of the misery in these countries. The terrible oppression I had felt as a woman was also a factor. I had come to realize that the oppression of women was a social and cultural issue, not just an individual problem.

  These experiences would guide the rest of my life.

  III

  Down But Not Out

  1970–1985

  Nine

  The Revolutionary Seventies

  I arrived back in Canada on July 21, a few hours before I left Tokyo, in that weird way of crossing the international date line. Somehow the topsy-turvy time was a metaphor for my travels. Too sick to stay in India much longer, I had called my parents, asking if they would pay for an airline ticket home. My illness overcame my pride. Much to my amazement, my mother suggested a ticket to Japan, which I had always wanted to visit, and then Vancouver where my brother Leonard, who was now living in BC, could pick me up.