Smoke curled into the chamber, first slow, soon robust. Tendrils of white crawled across the ragged carpet, claiming more and more of the room. Behind the vanguard was a supporting wall of swirling grey, gradually thickening until I could no longer clearly see out into the hallway. The red remained, wavering, undefinable.
Only slowly did time tick, tick away. The simulated smoke became hard to breathe. Not only did the unceasing klaxon urge me to rush into the red, so, too, did instinct. The sensation was so powerful my legs twitched, itching for action, for escape. Yet I remained, having been charged with death. After twenty minutes came a flicker of a different color. A beam of yellow wandered across the reddishness of escape, then left. Eventually it returned with a companion. Then both vanished. Disappointment flashed through me. They had overlooked my room.
From the glow materialized two phantoms of black. Backlit by blazing red, each cut a dramatic figure in full-on fire gear, complete with oxygen tanks and face masks. Thickened by heavy layers of fire retardant gear, they seemed to move in slow motion. Beams from handheld searchlights roamed the smoke-dense room, lighting across old, clustered junk. Revealed in streaks were fallen stacks of chairs and tables upended upon each other, cobwebs flashing. I was living a movie thriller: the heroes had just discovered the killer's creepy lair.
A beam of light fell across my legs. Another zeroed in. Two bulky forms pushed through the thick directly towards me. Heavily gloved hands grabbed me by the shoulders to haul me bodily from the floor. I drooped and flopped as awkwardly as possible, feet dragging uselessly on the floor. Undeterred, they slung my arms over their shoulders and hauled me out. Between the deafening klaxons their respirators labored. Though much taller than my saviors, both men worked as a single unit to compensate. No words were exchanged. None were needed; both knew what the other was supposed to do.
It was a very interesting experience, this playing dead. I left with a much greater understanding and, thusly, a much greater appreciation for how well prepared the crew was to handle a variety of situations. Fires have always been a ship's greatest enemy, more so than rogue waves and certainly more so than pirates. These weren't waiters playing with fire hoses. The ordeal the fire team maintained as routine was most impressive. But then, to be honest, I always wanted to be a fireman. They're totally badass.
3
Tunis exceeded my expectations mightily. It was clean and organized, pretty and prosperous. Despite the local language being Arabic, many spoke English. Everybody spoke French. The tour guide had been given explicit instructions to knock our socks off, as this was Wind Surf's first visit and a return depended greatly upon the favorability of the tours. Thus Cosmina got the finest treatment. She strutted like a rooster until I thought she would crow.
The guide began by plying us with treats. We dined on a variety of dips, like hummus and baba ganoush, with huge mounds of brown, yellow, and even red dates. The reds were crisp and tart, like apples. Another local specialty was green tea with pignoli. I like pine nuts just fine, but in my tea? That seemed bizarre and was definitely not to my taste.
"I will show you everything!" the slender man in a dark, Western-style suit boasted.
"Any old rocks will do," Cosmina said sarcastically. "And Brian really gets off on limestone."
The driver's whirlwind tour was all but useless. A full catalogue of sites flashed by in moments, highlights blasted like bullet points, with no time to see if any of what was claimed was true, or even self evident. After hearing about twenty or more fascinating things—and seeing none of them—we arrived at our first destination. The first full stop was a village called Sidi Bou Said. Apparently it was famous for its art scene. I was mildly annoyed I hadn't heard of it, but readily admitted that my knowledge of African art—North or otherwise—was very poor.
Something about Sidi Bou Said struck me as off. The village was certainly picturesque enough, with a tight cluster of buildings perched atop buildings perched atop a cliff. The whole assemblage—maze-like layout, steep stairs for streets, vibrant bougainvillea—reared over the harbor for phenomenal views of the Mediterranean. The flagstones were swept clean and the walls whitewashed to such a degree that the city seemed somehow fake. Like Disneyland before the gates open, everything had been tidied and polished to a level unlikely had anybody actually lived there. And, indeed, we saw no people at all. No tourists, no locals. Baby blue and closed was every door and every shutter, like a paranoid Santorini. The mimicry would have been complete were it not for the geometric flourishes of an Arabic nation.
We did not spend much time in Sidi Bou Said, however. The guide had been tasked to show Cosmina everything there was to offer, and by God he was going to do so in record time. We flashed past the luxurious Presidential palace—assuming you could really call the Tunisian autocrat a president—the nicely rebuilt Roman theatre, and the only moderately impressive Carthage Museum. Finally we stopped at a roadside curiosity instead of zooming on by. That's when things went bad. The driver pulled over to a curb along a busy street to show us something not everybody has to offer: a graveyard for sacrificed babies. A big graveyard for sacrificed babies. Perhaps the driver should have stuck to his previous method of all talk and no see.
"Are you kidding me?" Cosmina exclaimed, having unconsciously adopted the expression that so annoyed her in Malta. She ogled down at the excavation. Buried and forgotten for millennia were crumbling stones indicating entire crowds of the unfairly slain. Though shadowed from the Saharan sun by gently swaying palm trees, there was little sense of peace when contemplating row upon row of innocence lost, or, rather, taken. The far side was bounded by a wall that held an even larger cemetery.
"It is very sad," the guide agreed solemnly. "This was during Phoenician times, long ago. Barbaric, but a piece of history that must not be forgotten."
"No history should be forgotten," I said. "Barring my first marriage. Oh! Who's killin' it with the ex-wife jokes? I am, I am!"
Strangely, nobody was laughing. I was tempted to add that dead babies always ruin a good joke, but sensed—finally—that would be in bad taste.
"Filthy Muslims love killing," Cosmina muttered, dripping vitriol. Hard eyes locked on the ancient forest of headstones, she cocked her head to light a cigarette. The end flared red hot. After a long drag she finally looked at my surprised expression and said, "What? You like Arabs? I thought you were American."
"I think you're taking it too seriously," I said. "This happened probably close to three thousand years ago."
"So that makes killing babies okay? It's not like they've improved since then."
"Who's 'they'?" I said with as much patience as I could muster. "'They' have been gone for thousands of years. The Carthaginians were not Muslims. They weren't even Arabs."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Cosmina exploded. "We're in North Africa, aren't we? I'm talking about people killing babies and you're talking about... I don't even know what! Fine, they weren't Arabs. Africans. Happy?"
She ground out her cigarette with a sharp twist of her foot. "Thank God the Romans won."
The guide wisely slipped back to the car. We followed, still locked in combat—er, conversation.
"Don't go lying to yourself that Romans didn't kill babies by the boatload," I pointed out. "We're talking about the Bronze Age, here. It was fairly common. And, I might add, these people weren't Africans. The Phoenicians were Semites."
"Semites," she said flatly, slamming the door. "As in Jews."
She obviously wasn't interested in anything I had to say. I had encountered this before. The truth was that few people were capable of talking about religious human history without getting emotional. They get suspicious of those who do. But even though guilty of making a crude joke at a bad time, I was still right. I said as much. "Yes, they were Semitic."
"How the hell would you know that?" she challenged.
"I have a university degree in history," I explained in a not particularly gentle manner.
"Art history is not about painters as much as their influences," I retorted. "Roman art, culture, and ideas came from Phoenicia centuries before they started emulating the Greeks. That's because Phoenicians were in Italy before the Romans were. Nobody pops up in a vacuum. And this land is also very, very old. Successive waves of people came and went. So don't think for a minute any of these groups are the same as today just because they live in the same place... or have the same label."
Now it was Cosmina's turn to stare at me, open-mouthed. Her emotions were running high, very high, probably brought on by visiting such grisly ruins. As usual when anger takes over, strikes have little to do with the subject at hand.
"I brought you here because I thought you liked ruins, and instead you preach to me over a goddamn Phoenix graveyard full of dead African Jew babies and tell me Christians did it. I'm talking about dead babies and you're talking about the influence of pots and shit! Don't you get emotional over anything?"
To concede to her last point, I shrugged. That was definitely the wrong mannerism.
"Don't you blow me off," she screeched. "You preach all high and mighty to your girlfriend, too? I'm sorry, ex-girlfriend? No wonder she left you. Jesus!"
"Moving along!" the guide finally said, gunning the engine and screeching away from the curb.
While Cosmina fumed in the backseat beside me, I tried to just let it all go. Visiting foreign cultures brings us face to face with our own lack of knowledge. That makes many people feel vulnerable, and a cornered animal lashes out. Unfortunately travel also brings us face to face with the closeted ethnocentrism we all have to some degree or other. Cosmina saw something abhorrent in a land of different people and lashed out at a target that fit modern stereotypes: Muslims killing innocents. The fact that Muslims weren't to blame didn't matter much.
The simple truth is that most people don't like something different. Most people eat the same thing for breakfast every day for years on end. When you suddenly pluck them out of entrenched routines and drop them into something different, most scramble for what they know. Sometimes it means jumping on McDonald's, sometimes it means jumping on stereotypes. And most stereotypes—especially about 'others'—are shallow, ignorant, and frequently third-hand labels. This particularly applies to the dinner table taboos of religion and politics. Such inaccuracies weren't just in foreign lands, but also close to home. Case in point: Abraham Lincoln stood for a further reaching central government—the very antithesis of his modern-day Republican party. Labels are best left to canned goods, not people. Unfortunately canned goods have just as little chance of shaking off their labels.
Since Cosmina was already demonstrating a remarkable ability to offend people, I chose not to react to her antagonism. I also chose not to educate her about her comment regarding how 'the Romans won'. The truth was that while the Romans did eventually win their struggle against the Carthaginians, it was only after they lost and were shown mercy. Yes, mercy out of North Africa. The Europeans repaid it by utterly massacring almost everybody in sight. Ah, the good old days. It was a bizarre piece of history that few knew, yet had a direct impact on the entire world as we know it.
The Romans and the Carthaginians fought many battles with many armies over many countries. There were heroes on both sides, but perhaps none more interesting than the Carthaginian general Hannibal. He famously led a force over the Alps towards Rome—a feat in itself that none thought possible. Hannibal cleverly used elephants in the front ranks, which scared the bejesus out of the Romans who'd never before seen their like. He attacked the army of Rome and won. He could have, and probably should have, invaded the panic-filled and generally defenseless city. But Hannibal didn't sack Rome: he chose mercy. If he had finished with the kill, the entire Western world—and thusly the entire modern world—would not be as we know it. It's staggering to imagine how world history would have played without Rome.
Whereas Hannibal hesitated to strike an endgame, the Romans did not. They regrouped and eventually conquered Carthage. This, the Second Punic War, should have been the end of it. But the rhetoric was so intense in the Roman senate—"Carthage Must Be Destroyed!" being a battle cry uttered ad nauseum—that a third and final conflict occurred even after Carthage surrendered. This time Carthage was utterly razed to the ground and the Romans slaughtered eighty percent of the men, women, and children who lived there. To make sure resurrection would not happen, they plowed vast quantities of salt into the earth to prevent agriculture. Salt from Venice, maybe? Wrong millennium. Anyway, the Romans took over the land and called it Africa. Yes, that's where the name came from. Eventually the Romans rebuilt the area to their taste. And tasteful they were: they constructed bathhouses sky high.
Soon we were walking the fabled streets of once mighty Carthage. Cosmina took pains to avoid me, which suited me fine. Alone I strode through the thick walls of the great public baths complex. Many walls were still intact as bricked mounds capped in wild flowers. The complex was huge in scope and scale, including a wondrous frigidarium—cold chamber—with columns reconstructed to their original sixty foot height. The vaulted ceiling once reared one hundred feet above the tiled floor. Modern man may be used to air conditioned auditoriums, but the Romans were doing it in 150 A.D.! Who says engineering isn't awesome?
Despite being the gateway to the Sahara, Carthage was built overlooking the sea and, thusly, subject to its weather. The sky was locked in drab grey, with several militant thunderheads circling around to systematically strike every inch of ground. Their fuzzy purple bottoms dropped sheet after sheet of rain, polishing everything like the Cleaning Bubbles.
I escaped the rain courtesy of an archway of stone still strong. I was not alone, but kept company by a stray kitten. He peeked out from behind two Corinthian capitals—the caps above pillars—which rested on the ground. Seeing me seeing him, he rubbed his forehead on their elaborate floral edges, smoothed by passing millennia and, apparently, amorous felines.
Surrounded by the ashes of Eden, it was an appropriate time for reflection. Yet I didn't reflect upon what I came here to, what I wanted to. Those colossal hunks of stone wrestled by earlier men into luxurious function reminded me strongly of the first time I had visited North Africa. Three years ago I had spent a heady week in Egypt with Bianca. Since then we had chased each other over half the world, enacting strategies that would have made Hannibal green with envy. In the end Bianca even allowed herself to be caught. That was right about when I told her to stay away. I stewed yet over that turn of events. A reckoning would come soon, I knew.
Ah, but Bianca would have loved this place. She, too, got off on limestone. She should have been with me. Then again, even had she joined me on the Surf, she would not have seen Carthage. Her presence would have precluded Cosmina's favors. No, I was here for one reason and one reason alone: Cosmina wanted a Green Card, and this lonely American was her best shot. The fact that we didn't particularly like each other didn't faze her in the slightest.
I looked past the rain-spattered bougainvillea and saw Bianca's smile in an empty niche. No, I saw the echo of her smile. What I actually saw was the irascible Cosmina glaring at me over heavy puffs of cigarette smoke.
Chapter 8. Hvar, Croatia
1
The next time I saw Cosmina she was all smiles. Her ability to smoothly move on after throttling someone's day was a marvel. This had much to do with her ability to take credit for everything good that happened around her, whether she was responsible or not. While all of us have mastered self justification for our indulgences, Cosmina took such rationalization to an entirely new level. But she did not just settle for manipulating her own conscience, oh no....
We were once again in Corfu, Greece. Unlike the previous time in port, I had not assisted Cosmina in organizing her unwieldy groups of touring passengers. When I arrived to the crowded main lounge in the morning to do so, she had casually informed me I wouldn't be needed. I t
hought nothing of it. After all, we had not parted particularly well the night before. She probably still hated me for my role in slaying babies three thousand years ago. Yet when we crossed paths that afternoon she invited me to her cabin for a drink. I accepted.
Thus that evening I strode down to deck one from my cabin on deck two. In fact, I was the only staff not assigned an interior cabin on deck one. As a reluctant add on, the auctioneer had been given a modified storage closet that happened to be on deck two. Cosmina answered the door in her turquoise Surf polo and decidedly non-corporate short shorts. Her skin was a naturally dark caucasian, making her look tan. She had attractive legs, if growing a bit thicker as they went up, due to her abhorrence of exercise.
"You're welcome," she said, motioning me in.
"Welcome, or you're welcome?" I asked, mildly confused.
"You're welcome," she clarified. "For everything I've done for you."
"You invited me here," I said, now thoroughly confused.
Cosmina shook her head almost sadly, bobbed hair bouncing, as if this poor child before her was too obtuse to understand adult matters. She strode to a table cluttered with pamphlets, brochures, guidebooks, and bottles of perfume. Dominating the top of the mess was a huge block of rough white cheese. Referring to it with a flourish worthy of Vanna White, she said, "See this? This is two kilos of fresh goat cheese. Just a perk from the grateful tour company yesterday. One of many."
I said nothing, sensing an agenda. I was unsure how to proceed.
"I get a lot of perks," Cosmina continued meaningfully. "People do a lot for me because I do a lot for them."
"Of course," I said carefully.
"Did I mention how Ardin once worked for me?" she said casually, sitting upon the bed with affected nonchalance. By folding her legs beneath her, she revealed a lot of intimate skin. She patted the covers for me to sit next to her. This was not the come-hither one would expect living on land because the bed was the only place to sit. Further, she soon hugged a pillow over her lap. No, this was not leading to the über-common cruise ship 'land a first-world fish' conversation.
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