Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (6 page)

I only came to realize how mean a place it was when Mohamad's brother-in-law took me to visit his father in the country. We rode off down the highway and up into some low hills, softly curved like the breasts of mother earth, nourishing big shade trees and peaceful olive groves. I saw a brown cow suckling its calf, and a compound of thorn and cactus, and we turned in there to a couple of huts set at right angles. They were made of mud plastered over wattle and you could see where the hands had shaped them at the corners. The door frames revealed how thick and satisfying the walls were, like gingerbread maybe, topped with thatch, and at their base sat two colour-matched orange marmalade cats.

Inside, the spaces were about the same size as the rooms at Kabaria, but this was
real
space, under the rafters, with room for the imagination to grow. The old man sat down opposite me across a rough coffee table while his wife busied herself behind me with a charcoal stove, always behind me so that I never really saw her. Behind her and filling the width of the hut was a wicker-work bed stretched on a wooden frame.

The old man talked crazy nonsense to me about the world beyond his cactus fence, and he had a perfect right because it was a crazy world. I ate his bread and honey - his own wheat, his own hives - and heard about the Jews.

'These Jews,' he said, 'they have a strong smell. I can smell one a mile away.' We were face to face, and half of me is Jewish. Maybe it's the rear half.

T have heard of a Jewish tribe,' he went on, 'which was conquered, and the invaders slew all the men, but the women allowed themselves to have children by their conquerors.
"Beshwaya, beshzvaya",
they murmured; "in time, in time". Secretly they taught the children to hate, and when they grew up they murdered their fathers.

'As long as there is one left alive they will never give up.'

He was a fine old man and his nonsense did not disturb me. Any Jew could come into his house and be as safe there as in his own home, as long as he came as a person and not a label. I watched him, listened to his voice rather than his words, and drank in the scene. Everything fitted, everything was right; shape, size, colour, texture, all the parts had grown together, into something that would shape the instincts of the people who made it and lived in it. Whatever messages of hate he picked up and repeated, his personal dealings guided by those instincts would surely be alright. But in Kabaria what was there to inspire the inhabitants of those shabby, cramped boxes, fighting for work on the edge of an overcrowded city? Perhaps the old man led a tougher life, perhaps at times he ate less or felt the cold. If so it had only done him good. But the
kids couldn't see it. How could they? They had to get into that mess on the edge of the city so that one day some of them might appreciate what they had left behind. Did they choose or were they driven? Either way, I thought, they were the stuff that wars are made of.

In Tunis I worked the embassies. The Libyans gave me my visa, and took out one heavy anxiety, which the Egyptians replaced with another. There would be no possibility, they said, of crossing the border from Libya into Egypt.

I stared at the map. There was
the
road, no other. North of the road was the sea. South of the road, the desert. Here and there tracks trailed into the desert. . . and disappeared, punctuated full stop by an oasis, or dwindling into nothing. There was no other way. A fourteen hundred mile cul-de-sac to Salloum on the Egyptian border. I had to go down it, just in case . . .

On the third morning I was ready. The bike was packed. Mohamad had his gang around him, and they were going to escort me to the highway, and take ritual pictures on my cameras. Each time the bike had gone out into the street more people had seen it. By the third day every kid in town knew about it. As I rolled it along in first gear, over-heated and dressed up to kill, the parade swelled to fantastic proportions. The Pied Piper or the Wizard of Oz could not have had a greater success, but I had nowhere to take this crusade and I began to get nervous wondering where it would take me. It was immodest, out of all proportion; I couldn't stop it, but I knew it had to go wrong.

As my army turned the last corner, in sight of the main road, the police came in and wound it up. They grabbed Mohamad, who was carrying my cameras, and told me to follow. The rest they sent scattering. There were only a couple of them, in dark and dingy suits, but they looked awkward and angry. When I got into their office on the highway one of them had already managed to find the release to open the camera, but didn't know what to do then, so I grabbed it, and closed it and rolled the film back into its cassette and then opened it for him.

Mohamad was looking quite defeated, and they were shouting at him. Then one of them turned on me, and accused me of being a sensation-mongering journalist trying to get pictures of Arabs stabbing each other in drunken brawls, exploiting their poverty and ignorance to sell my dirty rag. It was a good story. Maybe it fitted somebody else. Then they turned to accusing Mohamad of being out to rob me, and said I had been taking my life in my hands, and I said all the best things I could as convincingly as possible and tried to get the temperature down. So they took us out in the street and told Mohamad to go home and told me to piss off.

I tried to make it alright with Mohamad before I went, but he was very chastened and didn't want to talk. I didn
't like to go but I was a provo
cation just being there, and so I said a sad goodbye and rode off into my cul-de-sac.

Tunisia rolls by. The first marvel comes in right after Kabaria, a huge Roman aqueduct swings alongside me for a few miles, crumbling but unconquered like a monster from the depths of time. The rains are early and I see the water hanging in the sky ready to fall on me. The land needs it but I don't, and I hurry past wheat fields and over hills to beat it. Halfway to Sousse I know it's going to get me (it's a personal thing between the rain and me) and I stop to pull on the waterproofs. The land is very quiet, just a bunch of horses about a mile away. I wish I shared that calm.

As I ride along I'm thinking about Kabaria. Why did it end like that? It would have been prudent to leave the day before.

Yes, well it would have been prudent to stay at home. You have to let things go their own way, or why be here at all.

Still, I am uneasy. I have to find a way to be with people in a less spectacular fashion. I didn't see why Mohamad thirsted for prestige. He got drunk on it, and how can I blame him? It's all very well for me to go around feeling humble, but I must also be aware of the effect I am having on others. It could be potent.

Sousse is a big town of eighty-four thousand people. Hassan the engine driver lives here, but his directions are hopelessly inadequate. Maybe he never meant me to find him. Anyway, I have spent too long now looking for him, and it's too late to ride on. I come across a beautiful old part of town, and a hotel of mosaic, tiles, lofty arches and cool interiors. A room for a dinar. Behind the hotel is a tiny lean-to shelter crammed with rags and boxes where I can put the bike. A man in a torn and dirty kaftan watches me struggle to manoeuvre the bike in through a narrow gate, ten minutes of hard work, and then says: 'One dinar.'

I am furious at him. 'You should have told me before,' I yelp.

That's right, you tell him. Let's have some English justice and fair play around here. God, Simon, you are a prick.

I argue the price down to something reasonable. In the morning, where I thought there was only room for the bike, I see there are people sleeping too. The information hits me like a custard pie in the face.

There's a lot of water everywhere. The roads near the sea front are under two feet of it. Do they mention this in the brochures? I see a package of Nordic tourists washed up in a hotel lobby. The hotel looks as though it has absorbed its own weight of water.

Crossing overland to Sfax I see another antediluvian wonder rear up ahead of me, a vast wall shot through with rows of ragged windows bars my way like a small mountain range. At the last minute it veers off sharply to the right and becomes the remains of a colosseum.

El Djem is flooded. Sfax also. The watery greyness keeps me going. Along the coast now, more life, more traffic, mud-brick houses, market gardens, date palms, donkeys, camels, all the things you read about, see in pictures. When you get there you know none of it was right.

Riding cautiously in the wet I have only gone one hundred and sixty-five miles by mid-afternoon. I decide to stop at Gabes, very aware of the Libyan frontier coming close. I want to prepare for it somehow. Tunisia is not part of the war. It is a Western-orientated, tourist-conscious, bilingual country. Libya is belligerent, fanatical, oil-rich and runs according to the laws of the Prophet Mohammed, or so I am told. I decide to post all my exposed film off now, and at the last minute remember a document I'm carrying that has an Israeli stamp on it and send that away as well. Images of search and interrogation flash across my mind. They make me both shiver and laugh at myself. Extreme situations always seem absurd until they happen.

When
does
the 'B' movie become a documentary? Back at the factory in Meriden we laughed about my untried, unprepared motorcycle. 'Chances are,' said one mechanic, 'if you don't worry about it, it'll go all the way with no bother.' I chose to worry. I took all the tools and spare parts I could carry, and half an hour later the oil fell out. Because I was prepared?

Does it rain because you carry your umbrella, or because you don't? It's a personal matter depending on how you remember it. The way I write my own history it's low on winning streaks. I never could gamble. I like to work things out in advance, but it bothers me to think of what I might have been missing. I've done too much hacking away against the grain of life. Without all that solemn effort, maybe, I could have gone further, faster, easier.

Remember what my headmaster said thirty years ago, that tar-stained old walrus. 'Simon, you think too much.'

Thinking's like a black tunnel. Once you're in it you have to think your way through to the other end. At least I think so.

The Libyan immigration man, if that's who he is, has a limp shot gun folded over his arm and hunting boots laced up round his trouser cuffs. He appears happy. He has several duplicated forms in Arabic, and points to where I should sign. I am being processed into Libya like a monkey, by sign language. I put my name to everything without question.

He takes my passport. 'Helf, he says. Helt? Oh, health. His first and only English word. I produce my vaccination certificates, grinning (like a monkey) and pass on. There's a lot of hanging about. Nobody will speak to me in a language I understand. The customs chief is in a shiny silver Italian suit, with a carton of Marlboros under his arm. He touches a few of my dusty things fastidiously.

'Visky?' he says. And that's his English word for the day. The Infidel Monkey shakes his head and enters Libya. It is not that they cannot speak anything but Arabic. They will not. It is part of the Libyan crusade for Islam. We are not always kind to our foreigners and it is a sobering experience to have the tables turned. In the good old days, I suppose, one would have spoken English at the top of one's voice until the natives just naturally gave way, but then we had Queen Victoria to fall back on.

On my left, a few miles of sand dunes and then the sea, blue fading to grey. On my right, desert, and nothing but desert. The map says there are fifteen hundred miles of it to Nigeria as the crow flies, if a crow could. Above, the sky is clear in all directions. Ahead the road is an impeccable two-lane tarmac. A mild wind raises a curtain of dust over the desert, nothing awkward, just enough to blurr the outlines of a few camels. There is no trace of a human presence anywhere. I stop to taste the emptiness, listen to the silence, like the hiss of a blank
tape playing. It's a bit awesome. Although I could easily do the hundred miles to Tripoli before nightfall, I know that I must sleep out in a real desert tonight.

The city-bred boy in me is frightened, and all the usual alarm signals go off in my head. Can I ride on this stuff? What will happen if I sink into it? Is it safe? Who might come by in the night? A tingling mixture of fear and anticipation, waiting to combine into something like joy. Once the decision is made it's easy. I choose a spot among some dunes on the seaward side and prop up the bike thanks to a metal disc welded on to the end of the swing stand, one good idea that
did
get carried out. Then the tent. Where? Which way? How anchored? Every action is part of a routine to be studied and perfected. How many times will I be doing this? Hundreds? It is worth getting it right. I use the bike to anchor one side of the tent, and find a boulder for the other side. What about the fly sheet? Will it rain? It seems impossible. The sky is clear from horizon to horizon, but still, just in case . . . Then in goes the bedding: The flying jacket folded inside out makes a great pillow. So it goes on. As I move round the bike I try to notice everything about it, chain tension, tyre tread, anything coming loose, falling off, trying to build up a picture of it as it should be so that any change rings a warning bell. . . and sure enough there's a rocker box cap loose. I can see the thread.

Those bloody things. What a fucking awful design.
Fifteen seconds of profanity to make their ears burn in Meriden. Must remember to tighten it, with jointing compound.
No! Do it now. You'll forget. And while you're about it check the battery level.