Time and a Ticket

by Peter Benchley

  The people in the Middle and Far East are where we were a hundred and fifty years ago. Nothing is secure for them. They accept nothing and challenge everything. They are being wooed by democracy and by Communism, and they live in fear that one system or the other is going to be forced on them by America or by Russia. Everything that happens to their neighbors concerns them. A Pakistani student is concerned about the independence of India. If India goes communistic, his country has no bulwark against the Chinese. And he must know what is going on in America, for from America come all his arms and much of his food.

  So as paradoxical as it may be, perhaps America has been at a disadvantage in being the strongest, most secure country. We have never been challenged, and thus we have never been made to think. We could afford that lack of thought when the realities of the world permitted us to follow a policy of complete isolationism, but when the realities changed, when it became imperative for us to enter into competition with the rest of the world, it suddenly became very costly.

  The situation is changing for the better, though what is forcing the change is for the worse. As our beliefs, our way of life, even our lives, have been threatened more actively each year, as our security has slipped away, it has become apparent that we are affected by what happens in other countries, that we must be informed about what goes on in the world. A boy who has never known what his rights and aims and principles as an American are learns suddenly, when they are challenged by other principles and other aims, by Russians or Germans or Cubans. Everything he has blindly taken for granted abruptly takes on new meaning for him.

  Even since 1961 there has been a significant change among college students. There are far fewer now who disavow all responsibility and conscience by shouting, "Better Red than dead." The various college political clubs have made national news more than once by articulating their intelligent, well-founded views. Student newspapers and magazines that used to deal in their editorials with purely parochial matters have adopted a broader scope and are voicing thoughtful and informed opinions on world affairs. And perhaps most significant, every year fewer young people support the same political candidates their fathers support. They are learning, instead, to think for themselves.

  There is only one way for foreigners to go from Jerusalem, Jordan, to Jerusalem, Israel—on foot. Charlie and I were checked out on the Jordanian side of the Mandelbaum Gate, and carrying fifty to sixty pounds of luggage apiece, we trudged through the tortuous maze of sandbag barricades and concrete tank traps that divide the two countries. On the Israel side of the border, the customs official offered to give us special pieces of paper for the admission stamp so that we could return, if we wished, to an Arab country. No tourist can enter an Arab country if he has an Israeli stamp in his passport. Charlie accepted the special stamp, I did not, for no better reason than that I wanted an Israeli stamp in my passport and had no intention of returning to an Arab country. It began to snow as we waited for a taxi to take us to the Jerusalem YMCA.

  Israeli Jerusalem is a dull city. There is little to see—all the religious and historical sites are on the Jordanian side— and little to do. There were no live theaters, and no nightclubs, and we knew no one in the city. We had dinner at the only big hotel and then took a bus to a movie theater on the outskirts of town which was showing Please Don't Eat the Daisies with Hebrew subtitles. The impression we got was not of a city made drab by poverty—indeed, compared to Cairo and Jerusalem, Jordan, this Jerusalem was thriving. The main street was lined with shops selling European clothes, sporting goods, and furniture, the houses were clean and in good repair, and the people were well dressed and seemingly prosperous. Rather, it seemed to be a city populated by businessmen and students who had no interests outside their occupations, who cared little, if any, for entertainment, and who plodded along from day to day, traveling only from home to work and back again, asleep by ten-thirty and awake by seven. Jerusalem seemed to be a city in name only.

  Tel Aviv is a city. We took the train down through the hills to the sea. The land, though rocky and inhospitable, was all being worked—either for olive trees or, wherever possible, for crops. A few miles from the city, as the train started down from the crest of a long hill, we saw the icy blue of the winter Mediterranean curving along the shore below sparkling white buildings as high as ten stories.

  People were everywhere in the streets—gathered in groups on the steps of municipal buildings and museums, sitting at tables in porched-in cafes, hurrying to and fro along tree-lined avenues. There were ads for theaters, movies, and concerts on every street corner, newsstands selling everything from the New York Herald Tribune and the London Times to Paris Match, Life, and Whisper. The women were as well dressed as Parisiennes, clicking along the streets in pointed-toe shoes. They wore light spring dresses, either not knowing or not caring that the temperature was barely forty.

  We had planned to stay in Israel about a week, hoping to go to Haifa and the Sea of Galilee. But we found that we would have to leave in less than two days. Although our Jordanian guide had managed to arrange for an open ticket to New Delhi routed through Teheran and Karachi, so that theoretically we could go as we pleased, he hadn't been able to obtain a schedule of planes flying out of Israel, and it turned out that we had arrived at a spectacularly inopportune time. Either we left Israel the next day or we stayed for ten more, when the next plane stopped on its way to Teheran. By going to Cyprus and one or two other places, we could have routed ourselves through Baghdad on three different airlines, but we had already been informed that we couldn't go to Baghdad: first, we had no Iraqi visa and couldn't get one in Israel, and second, we would lose our typewriters at the border—the premier, Abdul Kassem, was having trouble with the Kurds, and he was not willing to allow any potentially useful items such as typewriters into Iraq and perhaps into the hands of reporters sympathetic to the rebels.

  So we spent only one night in Tel Aviv. A woman named Virginia Hall, a foreign service officer I had met in Rome, invited us to dinner, and we spent the evening steeped in Israeli culture—drinking scotch and listening to records of that famous Israeli cantor Ella Fitzgerald singing the plaintive oriental melodies of Cole Porter.

  10

  I had put out of my mind the trouble Bob Resky and I had had finding a hotel room on the Riviera, and I was developing a rather cavalier attitude toward the problem of finding a place to sleep. Charlie and I had reserved our room in Egypt more than a month in advance, and in Jordan and Israel we either met or already knew people who found us our "cheap, clean hotel." We were becoming spoiled, sure that in any city something would turn up. We were aware that the room would, on occasion, have to be in the best hotel in the city and therefore cost ten to twenty dollars a day, and would other times necessitate our walking the dark, unfamiliar streets at midnight and settling for a filthy, sometimes dangerous, fleabag lean-to for forty cents a day. In Europe or America such fleabags were relatively safe, and though we had heard that to stay in a twopenny-hapenny dump on the docks of Singapore was to invite disaster, we couldn't conceive of a disaster ever occurring.

  We had not reserved a room in Teheran. The girl at the BO AC office in Tel Aviv advised us to reserve through her, but we hoped to get a cheaper room by looking around ourselves. As the plane circled around Lebanon, sedulously avoiding Arab air space, and soared over the twinkling lights of Ankara into the night, I wondered if we had been wise in refusing to let BO AC reserve for us.

  At thirty-three thousand feet I have to talk. It is the only pastime that keeps my mind off the fact that through some insidious feat of legerdemain, I have been catapulted into the sky in the belly of a creature that has no right ever to leave the ground. If I'm forced to sit and contemplate this unpleasant fact, I can convince myself that within no more than thirty seconds the flying mass of metal will plummet back to the earth it never should have left in the first place.

  I had had two quick drinks as soon as the seat belt sign went off, and already the sweat th
at had soaked my palms during takeoff was drying and the lump that almost closed my windpipe when the engines changed pitch at crusing altitude had all but disappeared. I turned to Charlie to discuss the hotel situation, but he was dozing, infuriatingly unperturbed by being at the mercy- of this devil machine. The plane was not crowded, and so when the stewardess brought me a third drink, I asked if she knew of any hotel in Teheran that would fill our needs. She was almost six feet, slim, with a pleasant figure and a head of curly blond hair. She spoke with a clipped London accent.

  "I don't know if I can help you," she said. "There's always the place we stay, but the rooms are a little dear. Are you there on business?"

  "No," I said. "Just touring."

  'It's a terrible place, Teheran. You shan't want to stay long."

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "Not a bl... not a thing to do, is all."

  "And what do you do there?"

  "We get the whole crew together and have our own parties. We stocked up on gin in Jerusalem. You certainly can't go out anywhere. The only thing worth seeing is the market, unless you like belly dancers and that rot." She sat on the arm of the seat across from me. "Of course, sometimes we get that at our own parties, if the crew's lively enough. This is a good crew."

  I said, "Do you think there'd be any rooms in that hotel for us?"

  She laughed. "I'll ask about. Meet me in the terminal when we land, and I'll tell you then." She walked down the aisle to answer a call from a woman who wanted an extra pillow.

  The hotel was named the New Naderi, and it was, as the stewardess had said, expensive. But we arrived late at night, and we were unwilling to walk the streets with no idea of where we were going and no recommended hotels to look for. The desk clerk called two slightly cheaper hotels, but both were full. Besides, by now we had met the whole crew, and they had invited us to a party as soon as we unpacked. We resigned ourselves to the expense and, after throwing our bags in our room, rushed downstairs and drank warm gin-and-limes with the crew until 2 a.m.

  First thing in the morning, Charlie called a man on his list of Eisenhower Fellows from Teheran. The man was out of town, skiing. The second man on the list was out of town, too, as were the third, the fourth, and the fifth. Charlie contacted the sixth man, who had a position in Iranian industry, and he asked us to lunch that day.

  Our first stop was the American Embassy. We talked to one of the political officers, and he asked us what we knew about the country. Charlie said that all we knew was what we had read in the papers, and that the papers had led us to believe that things weren't as rosy as they might be. We gathered that the Iranian government was not riding the crest of success just then. The senate and parliament had not met for weeks, having been adjourned indefinitely by order of Prime Minister Amini. And the university had recently been closed because of violent student riots. The riots were over a minor matter of personnel changes and had nothing to do with complaints against basic governmental policies or procedures, but many people feared that Communists would infiltrate the rioting mobs and fire them up to overthrow the shah. For all we knew, we had arrived just in time to see a leftist revolt.

  The man pooh-poohed our alarm. He told us that the government was running very smoothly. Indeed, he said, it was running better than normal, because the shah's recent redistribution of land had been very popular, and he was going to continue to give land to the peasants for years to come. The political situation, in other words, was stable. True, there were problems, like foreign exchange deficits, student riots, lack of education among the people, but Amini was a strong man and was handling the government well, and there was no reason to fear for the shah or the shah's regime. We were given some booklets on the agricultural and industrial situations in Iran and we went on our way, assured that everything was normal and that the country would prove to be of no interest to us if we were hoping to see an Eastern state in turmoil.

  But before Charlie had left America, he had been told again and again to search for facts not through an embassy staff but through the people of the country. Diplomats, after all, do not live the life of the natives. They are governed by different laws, they see different people, and many of them almost never see the natives. So when we lunched with the Iranian businessman, Charlie skipped the routine questions about ways of life, standards of living, and the national growth, and asked the man bluntly what he thought of the shah and the shah's reforms, of the student riots, of the closing of both government bodies, and of the whole political situation in Iran. Had the man not chosen to trust us, the rest of the lunch might have been spent in uneasy silence. But he recognized our lack of authority with the government and our honest curiosity, and spoke freely. Charlie told him what the man at the embassy had said, and he laughed.

  "I wonder where he gets his information," he replied. He added that he wanted to make it clear, first of all, that he was living in a tightly run police state. Second, it was obviously to the government's advantage to have people think everything was stable, and therefore anything the government said about its stability was to be regarded with suspicion. He pointed out that things could not have been just fine if Amini had found it necessary to suspend all parliamentary activities and all higher education. The very existence of a police state showed a basic instability. It was all very well, he said, to claim that the police state was necessary, but its necessity derived from the strength, or the potential strength, of the opposition. Why bother to stamp out public opinions if there are no opinions that can hurt you?

  According to our new friend, Amini's position was not at all safe, for the leftist groups were gaining strength by settling their differences. But as happens when people fight against an absolute rule, their policies were negative rather than positive, bent upon ousting the shah and not supported by constructive plans for a government thereafter. So if they did manage to join forces and take over, there would first be chaos because of the lack of any clear policy, then another tight rule when and if order came. The man was not certain that there would be any government whatsoever by May. As it turned out, the shah survived and Amini did not. He resigned, a frustrated and disappointed man.

  But even though he did survive, the shah's position was not comfortably secure, and to this day there are many people disenchanted with him. The landowners, who are among the few educated, capable people in the country, are naturally unhappy seeing their land turned over to the peasants. The leftists remain equally discontent.

  We are still wondering about what we heard from the man in the American Embassy. The easiest explanation, and the one that is probably true, is that he saw no reason to talk to us about the weakness of the shah's government. He had no way of knowing that we wouldn't go shouting it about. He didn't know that with our connections and authority, we could have shouted it from the rooftops of Teheran, Moscow and Washington and no one would have listened to a word.

  But perhaps that wasn't the case. Suppose he had been telling us what he really thought about the situation. He talked to us for almost an hour, and he didn't hesitate to tell us the problems Iran was having with border defenses or with Russian threats, or with farming or bad bureaucracy or American aid. I would far rather believe that he was simply unwilling to talk freely to us, that he was holding out.

  We did not see the Iranian businessman again. The day after we had lunch with him, he went south to Shiraz on business. And since we had exhausted our "educational" contacts, we spent the next three days with the BOAC crew. We toured the covered bazaar with our blond stewardess, who drew a crowd like one Jayne Mansfield would draw in Times Square. Well over six feet in heels, her blond hair shining in the sun, to Iranians she was a strange and wonderful sight, a golden goddess of love walking in their midst.

  The crew warned us against Karachi. "A pesthole," they said. "Not a bloody nightclub in the whole place. And hot! The only thing to do is stay at the airline resthouse and live in the swimming pool. That way, you'll meet some people, and you'll have a par
ty or two. Otherwise, you might as well skip through to Hong Kong. You won't find any laughs in this part of the world."

  When we left Teheran late one evening, the temperature was forty-five, so we were pleased when the stewardess on the PIA jet announced that in Karachi it was eighty-eight. It didn't occur to us that at one o'clock in the morning, a temperature of eighty-eight degrees did not indicate a very temperate climate. And as we descended the ramp from the air-conditioned plane, all our joy at being warm once again quickly disappeared. Karachi's eighty-eight was like no eighty-eight I had ever experienced. The Egyptian climate had been hot, but it was dry, and after the initial cascade of sweat as our pores opened, we had gotten used to it. In Karachi it was like being in a bathtub. A breeze from the sea nearby did not waft across the land; it flowed. Everything was wet—the runways, the walls of the buildings, the metal railings in the customs office. I asked a customs official when the rain had stopped.

  "Six months ago, sahib," he said. "It will begin again in twelve or fourteen weeks. But is it not lovely, sahib? When the moon is out, everything glistens in the wet air."

  By the time we were through customs, our coats, jackets, and ties were draped over our suitcases. My pants stuck to my legs and made my underwear ride up my thighs.

  At the airline terminal in downtown Karachi, we were told that there was a hotel only three blocks down the road, and since there were no cabs, we would have to walk. We gathered our clothes and our suitcases and struggled down the unlighted road. It was a wide road, bordered on one side by flat land leading to the sea, on the other by dense tropical growth—banyan trees, heavy, rubbery plants ten feet tall, and gnarled, sinuous vines that wound their way between the huge leaves of the plants and trees. And the growth was alive. Birds and monkeys cheeped and cawed and barked among the trees. They were like city noises—traffic that honks and beeps endlessly, eventually becoming a soothing undertone. Silence along that road would have been terrifying.