What I realise later is that Dad doesn’t talk about the green island when he’s happy. And that’s why I so rarely hear him talk about the desert.
Desert
As I hitched up to Tehran, my heart in my boots, I was overcome by an intense bout of self-consciousness. It was like reading a novel and suddenly being visited by a vision of the writer in his under-junders with a fag in his mouth and a bottle of cheap red wine close by. You see the writer picking his nose; you see his scrotum peeking out of his jocks; you see his crowing self-congratulation when he mints a fancy sentence. What I saw was the idiot I had mostly managed to keep concealed from myself. I saw the story of my quest as just plain nuts. I saw the anxious expressions of a host of people gazing at a gangly child who should have locked been up for his own protection, as Jo had suggested. I saw the soft, pleading look in my own eyes, the sort of look that appears on the face of a dog that has taught itself to make a living out of apology. Narrating my story as I went along, fashioning its scenes, I was all at once hobbled by an inability to suspend disbelief. How can a man with an exposed scrotum and a finger in his nostril expect me to take anything he writes seriously? Or the life I was narrating for myself—what confidence could I possibly have in a child who imagined the things that I had imagined?
The truck driver who had picked me up stopped for the night at an outdoor hotel, Garden of Heaven, just north of Isfahan. Hotels like this are found all over the Middle East. You pay for a small wooden bed, carry it out to a vast courtyard and set it up wherever you can find a space. In the Garden of Heaven that night, forty or fifty beds stood scattered across the courtyard. The juddering snores of a neighbour kept me awake. When he woke, he raised himself on his side and stared at me, at first with suspicion and then with smiling curiosity. ‘Chakar?’ he said, meaning ‘Explain this’. ‘Australia,’ I said, and he nodded without understanding and went back to sleep. I listened to an old man chanting prayers with such exaggerated gestures of piety that his neighbours giggled and winked at each other. A mother whispered to her children, huddled close to her beneath a snowy white sheet. Four men sat cross-legged on their beds, absorbed in a game of what appeared to be euchre, the dealer flighting the cards expertly through the air.
I stared at the stars and recited ‘The Man From Snowy River’ to keep my fear at bay. My father had encouraged me to learn the poem by heart when I was ten. I remembered tears running down through the stubble on his cheeks when he first read it to me. It was the triumph of the boy whom Old Harrison had doubted that moved him. He liked to believe, even as an adult, that he would one day confound the Old Harrisons of his own life, all of those who’d doubted him.
I never knew why he thought he was doubted. People admired him. They thought him a reliable worker, a good enough father, a wonderful fisherman, a decent bloke. Sometimes, though, when he was drunk or almost, he would whisper to me if we were alone that he had done things he was ashamed of. ‘Can’t pretend I haven’t, Bobby. Get dark on myself at times.’ I thought he’d maybe done some cruel things in the war, but looking at it that night under the stars, I concluded that he’d never done bad things, but wished he could hold it against himself that he’d been wicked. I wished for wickedness myself, but a stylish wickedness of the sort that didn’t make you feel awful. I might say to some woman, ‘My dear, I’m a bad lot.’
‘But his hardy mountain pony he could scarcely raise a trot,’ I whispered, with my hands over my ears to dull the warbling of the old man’s prayers, ‘He was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur …’ How could I make myself vivid? Break into life? I could hear Bertie summing me up when I returned to the butcher’s shop: ‘Had your fun? Want you to wake up a bit if you’re going to do this proper. Remember those fuckin’ sausages you used to make? Looked like bedsocks filled with rags …’
Around me, the settling sounds of the other guests were diminishing. The old man had rolled up his prayer rug. The gamblers had packed it in. I heard only the roar of the trucks on the highway, the clink of the tea glasses being washed, the crying of children cut off by the soft shushing of a mother. ‘So Clancy rode to wheel them—he was racing on the wing Where the best and boldest riders take their place, And he raced his stock-horse past them, and he made the ranges ring With the stockwhip as he met them face to face …’
Isfahan at five in the afternoon was dark and wet. A motionless grey sky stretched from horizon to horizon, and the rain fell soundlessly. I found a hotel in the centre of the city, then went in search of a second-hand bookshop I recalled from my first visit nine months earlier. Why it should be so I don’t know, but I could always find English-language bookshops in the Middle East. I had sought it out not because I was short of reading material, but for its comfort. I ignored the shelves at the front of the shop that were dedicated to travel guides and picture books, and settled out of sight amongst the novels. I was immediately at peace. Tears filled my eyes as I welcomed the relief. I came across a novel by Jon Cleary and turned it about in my hands, thinking that Cleary, a fellow Australian, may once have been as stupid as I was. I searched avidly for more Australians. I found They’re A Weird Mob, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a collection of Australian verse, The Tree of Man, Robbery Under Arms, and a book of cartoons with the famous ‘Stop laughing—this is serious’ drawing by Stan Cross on the cover. I sat with this small pile of books on my lap, trying to think of something that I would always remember—perhaps, ‘Oh yes, my great passion for Rolf Boldrewood began in Iran, strange as it may seem.’ But I didn’t feel attracted to Robbery Under Arms. In the end I purchased the book of cartoons (I still own it) and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
I finished reading The Spy Who Came In From the Cold early in the morning. I lay on my bed staring at the skylight with the book beside me. The big problem with learning anything about life from a book is that other people respond to you as if you were the same person as before you read the book. I wanted to announce that I now knew how deeply immoral were the intelligence services of countries all over the world. And how important love was. And loyalty. And what it means to stand up and say, ‘You cynical bastards—I’m no longer your patsy,’ as Leamas had. I felt tougher for having read the book. But the fact was that the manager was standing at the front door when I headed out for an early morning walk in the rain, obviously concerned that I would leave without paying my bill. And right there, I was up against it. I said I would pay when I left. He said, ‘You pay now.’ So I paid. If he’d known what had happened inside me, he might have thought that it was dangerous to insult me. But he didn’t know. Instead of being out in the rain looking at life through fresh eyes, I was out in the rain feeling hurt. And I remained hurt. Oh God, just to be commanding—even for an hour!
I walked for a long time, the rain too warm to create much discomfort. The sight of me wandering the narrow streets in my green suit and tie must have puzzled the Isfahanis, but they didn’t show it. I was in a maze of narrow lanes with broad gutters running down the centre. Doors opened onto courtyards, and here and there I glimpsed people, poor people rousing themselves for the day’s work, the men unshaven, the women seeming always alert and versatile in a homely way. I saw one mother managing to keep a black umbrella aloft while washing a child’s face at an ancient courtyard fountain, tending a naked baby in her lap and tickling the tummy of a blissed-out puppy with her toe. Groups of children with intent faces hurried down the lanes to school, books wrapped in plastic shopping bags to shield them from the rain. People shouted all the time, even if only a short distance apart, but it was not angry shouting. Carts and tiny three-wheeled vans bounced along the lanes, barely avoiding the centre gutter. One cart, pulled by what looked like a cross between a German Shepherd and a goat, displayed a picture of a huge white tooth, and I could only think the tiny, stooped man at the reins must be a roving dentist. Another man, a knife sharpener, carried a grindstone on his back; files of various grades hung on long cords from
his belt.
Amongst all these tradesman, mothers and hurrying schoolchildren, I felt the burden of my idleness and fretted for proper employment. It occurs to me now that both the burdens I carried around the world—the need to keep my little pink hands from staying too clean; the need to make it big with dusky women—were strapped across my shoulders by my father. He could have made things a lot easier for me if he’d just taken the time to say, ‘Best thing, have fun.’
I headed south-east from Isfahan on the long journey to the Pakistan border. The heat in the parched mountains and the desert forced me to surrender the advantage of hitching in my green suit. It was my belief that the truck drivers thought me too well got-up to be left on the roadside, but the real reason that I was offered rides so readily was, I am sure, the simple goodwill of the drivers. Refusing to give up the last vestiges of sophistication, I kept my tie on. When it became so hot that I couldn’t bear a tight collar, I at least tried to show by my demeanour that I was a person who would normally hitch across the desert in a suit and tie.
I had no money. My strategy for survival was barter. The rides were free, but the food was not. In scores of tiny eateries along the dirt highway to Yazd, to Rafsanjan, to Kerman, I gave up items of clothing in exchange for a bowl of beans and a plate of watery yoghurt. The less-fancy shirts went first, then my Speedos, my T-shirts, a pair of Dunlop runners, my spare belt, two of my three ties. My primitive method of payment didn’t seem to raise any eyebrows. It was the desert; trucks, glass windows and bottles were about the only things that hadn’t been around when Mohammed was a boy. Occasionally I flourished. I had a coup in Kerman, when from the lucky-dip of my suitcase I pulled out a box of condoms purchased twelve months earlier from a pharmacy in Little Collins Street. I’d bought them on the advice of old Vince in the ladies’ shoe department at the Myer Emporium. ‘You’ll want some frangers,’ he’d told me. ‘And first couple of times you go out with a sheila, pay for her tucker.’ The Kermanis knew immediately what the condoms were, and cackled with delight as if news of them would bring the desert girls bounding down from the hills. I ate royally and was allowed to sleep on the restaurant floor for the night.
Finding a bed on other occasions was difficult. The outdoor hotel people were a little less patient with barter. Perhaps the lack of a concrete exchange bothered them. A bowl of beans for a shirt was obviously a deal, but what value did you put on sleep? I slept on roadsides, in cemeteries (a popular kipping place for the homeless of south-eastern Iran), in trucks, under trucks and sometimes, gratefully, on the beds of pitying samaritans.
In Iran, the deeper you travel into the sticks, the more familiar you become with donkeys. (I wonder if the donkey’s role in the development of human community has ever been thoroughly investigated.) In the tiny, arid towns of the Kerman Desert, often the only thing getting along under its own steam is a donkey, with a boy and a haystack swaying on its back. I saw one poor beast barely able to put hoof before hoof under the burden of an automobile engine carried on a platform strapped to its shoulders and rump. I thought of the little haulier I’d seen die in Istanbul, who must have lived his life as a donkey. I pitied the poor beasts, but slung myself and my bulky suitcase on to their backs whenever a ride was offered.
Plodding along with a grinning boy holding the rope bridle of the donkey, the desert like rusted iron running away to hills baked black and red, I never for a second felt that I was anything other than a tourist. My thoughts penetrated far enough into the lives of the people around me to register if they were rich or poor or very poor, and no further. I was an Australian on an adventure—ill-conceived though it was. The world and all its landscapes existed for me to dawdle through. The people of the world existed to play implausible roles in one-dimensional dramas of my own concoction. Extraordinary that the ego of even a very dim child should function as such a tough carapace!
And yet, perhaps my limitations made me a more honest tourist. At least I wasn’t scurrying from site to site collecting insights. And I wasn’t searching for a culture to adopt. Some of the great travellers—both D. H. and T. E. Lawrence, for example—were searching for a hidey-hole in cultures they had no part in creating, prepared to daub their white skins with colours that would blend in. For all the ludicrousness of my quest, it did maintain a Lord Jim, nut-case candour. I was a simple white boy craving escape and glory. It never occurred to me, or to Jim, to give up our green suits and adopt the gorgeous garb of the natives.
It was cold at night in the desert; I had to suit-up before settling down. The jacket of the green suit began to look shabby so, rather than watch it lose all its allure, I swapped it in Kerman for a bowl of bean paste. The paste was certainly food, but it didn’t taste like food and I bitterly regretted making the deal. It was now impossible for me to let the natives know how sophisticated I could look if I wanted to.
It was probably to compensate for my outward appearance that I started reading some of the non-fiction works I’d picked up in the hostel in Athens. I lurched through Eros and Civilization without making the slightest sense of it. In any case, there was nobody to impress with my choice of literature. A truck driver noticed the naked woman on the cover and took it for a dirty book; when I showed him that there were no other pictures, he lost interest. Equally unlikely to impress was a dictionary of literary terms that I peered into. I made it my task to memorise terms that I thought might come in handy one day, such as ipse dixit and leitmotiv. I was also taken with the illustration of meiosis from a Houseman poem, and quoted it aloud for weeks: ‘Long for me the rick will wait, And long will wait the fold, And long will stand the empty plate, And dinner will be cold.’ The lines kept company in my head with ‘The Man From Snowy River’, my other memorised piece. Fowler’s Modern English Usage was impossible then to enjoy. But I laboured to grasp the distinction in the use of ‘will’ and ‘shall’, and more or less mastered it. The knowledge allowed me to so contrive a letter to my father and sister that every ‘will’ became a ‘shall’. Fortunately, I had no money to post it.
I did find myself enjoying E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, however. I hadn’t expected to. But it was thrilling, and just as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold ensured that I understood everything about international politics, so The Making of the English Working Class convinced me that I understood everything about everything.
The derelict look crept up on me. It wasn’t just the dirty clothes; it was the broken fingernails and the zip of my fly held shut with a safety pin. By the time I reached Bam, west of the Pakistan border, I was filthy. I sold my typewriter, and with the loot gave myself a wash, had the zip on the trousers of my green suit replaced, fed myself, and rented a bed in an outdoor hotel in the shadow of a mosque. I enjoyed feeling clean for a time, but remorse overwhelmed me. After a poor night’s sleep I hurried back to the tinsmith who’d bought my Olivetti, prepared to offer the remainder of my wardrobe in exchange for it. The Latin alphabet was of no use to him, after all.
He had the typewriter displayed amongst his traditional stuff—trays, dishes, bowls, ewers. I suppose it was meant to attract the curious. He declined my wardrobe with an expression of sorrow, a hand on his heart, head bowed. Merchants and shoppers gathered around, some seeming to take my side in the dispute. In my desperation I’d arranged all my clothes in a row—spare trousers, two shirts, green cardigan, last tie, spare belt, socks, singlets, underpants. I added half of my books, a used tube of toothpaste, a pair of thongs and two biros. Nothing doing.
My chief advocate, a greengrocer who’d wandered over from his stall, cast his hand along the row of garments, calling passionately for the tinsmith to get sane (as I guessed). He held up a book in each hand, shaking them at the heavens, as if he were asking God himself to witness the perversity of a tinsmith who would not yield up an Olivetti he couldn’t use in exchange for a full Western wardrobe with a veritable library thrown in. Nothing doing, still. My advocate
gave up the case with a shrug that said ‘Tinsmiths, waste of space’, gave me a hug of commiseration and went back to his vegies. I packed everything back into my suitcase and slouched away. I felt sick. Without my Olivetti, I was just a kid wandering around the Middle East. A true writer or journalist or reporter would not have sold his typewriter, no matter how filthy he was.
Too upset to battle my way across the desert on donkeys and trucks, I spent the last of the Olivetti money on a bus fare to Zahedan, right on the Pakistan border. The bus set off in the cool of the evening, feeling its way over the rough surface of the desert road and leaving the road behind altogether whenever a slightly less dangerous route offered itself. I had a seat at the back of the bus. For the first quarter-hour of the journey, all the children sat turned around in their seats, facing me. Craving a little endorsement, I tried to look as interesting as their curiosity suggested I might be. I smiled, wiggled my eyebrows up and down, made funny faces. The kids gave me up as a dead loss. When night fell, I settled sulkily back in my seat and thought of Miss Ashadi, and of how little allowance the Iranians made for romance and of how happy I might have been with Miss Ashadi if only vile religion hadn’t played havoc with our stars.
On the broad back seat of the bus, two men cleared a little space and played chess, skilfully replacing the pieces whenever the lurching bus threw the board about. The bus was unlit, so the game was played by the flame of a cigarette lighter. One player seemed anxious, and kept peering out into the blackness. For what? I wondered. What did he expect to see? Iran seemed to me more than ever a truly joyless, wowser-ish country where people nursed their sorrows. The tiny specks of light that showed out in the desert night I took to be the fires of people futilely clinging to a life of sinew and bone in the arid wastes. What was the point of Iran? People didn’t even read books, except for prayer books. The children only had to glance at their parents and their whole lives were revealed to them: a burka and babies for the girls; poverty and endless prayer for the boys, with maybe a game of chess to relieve the monotony.
The Boy in the Green Suit Page 16
