Tomy and the Planet of Lies (2 page)

 

Quetta, Pakistan. A city of 200,000 souls at the crossing point of the roads from Kandahar, in Afghanistan, Zaidan, in Iran, and Multan and Sukkur, in Pakistan—where we had just come from. This ancient Mogul city is now industrialized and relatively clean, and even has a halfway decent hotel, which—bizarrely enough—is called Lourdes after the city in France where the Virgin Mary appeared to a young girl.

Despite the hotel's Christian-sounding name, which seemed so out of place in a city of Moslems, I had seen no sign of God; otherwise I might have stayed a bit longer in Quetta. The blue plaster that covered the two-story hotel building was peeling off in several places, revealing an older clay wall strengthened with straw and, here and there, the odd stone. The room that Marc and I were sharing had a stuffy smell of old turpentine and insecticide. On the ceiling a decrepit fan turned lazily as if it had been slowly poisoned by years of exposure to so many pesticides.

We had arrived the previous afternoon, following a roundabout journey from Multan. It was a roundabout journey because the Indus had again broken free of its banks and all the usual routes to Quetta had either been blocked or simply washed away. Our next port of call was to be the Iranian border town of Zahedan, which was 721 kilometers distant from Quetta, across the Baluchistan desert.

Baluchistan, which contains the districts of Quetta and historic Kalat, covers an area of nearly 350,000 square kilometers and, at that time, was home to approximately 4 million people. Of these a considerable amount are nomads, who regularly wander across the borders to Iran and Afghanistan with their herds of sheep. There are strong political groups here who would like to see the region win its independence from Pakistan. These ambitions are given emphasis by the many bandits who break out from their mountain hideouts to attack military convoys or to rob travelers.

We had been warned not to travel across this part of Baluchistan without a military escort. The previous evening we had been told we should make contact with the brigadier of Quetta district responsible for such matters, and—after some telephoning around—we eventually organized a meeting with him before dinner in his office in the military headquarters.

“How many people are in your party? Which vehicle will you be using? What color is it? Have you got any weapons? Do you have a radio?”

He wanted to know the answers to these and many more questions. And early this morning he had called us at the Hotel Lourdes.

“You can travel without an escort!” he said. “We have the route under control. All of our posts have been informed about your beige Range Rover. Stay in your vehicle if people in plain clothes attempt to stop you. If worst comes to worst, just put your foot down and drive away as quickly as possible behind the nearest rock outcropping and then zigzag your way out of there. Make sure you raise plenty of dust: that'll mean they won't be able to see you. Your car is much quicker than the clapped- out old vehicles they'll be driving anyway. Good luck!”

The night before, Marc and I had been up till ten o'clock packing the car. Boxes filled with 2-liter bottles of mineral water, a spare jerry can of petrol, an additional 100 liters of water in four large canisters, and a plastic bottle of distilled water for the batteries in case they dried out. On top of this we placed the toolbox, spare wheels, maps, and compass, taking care not to forget the pistol and tear gas spray—hidden away but easy to get to. And, of course, we packed the camera cases and so on. After we'd finished our work, the hotel owner kindly let us use his kitchen to cook up some spaghetti and tomato sauce. We served it up with a bottle of red wine, which was light enough that we wouldn't have too much trouble getting up the next morning.

At six thirty a.m. we were ready to set off. The concierge of the Lourdes, a refined old Englishman who'd been in the country for years, slammed the rear doors of the car shut and then stood there and waved, shouting out: “Good luck!”

I started up the motor and scoffed: “Well, Marc, let's be going then! May Saint Christopher watch over us!”

“I don't know him. What does he do then?” asked Marc.

“Heavens above, lad! Where were you when you were supposed to be in religious instruction? Saint Christopher is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. He is the patron saint of sailors and waggoners…and, hopefully, of people crossing deserts.”

Marc crossed himself, rather clumsily, as he's not even catholic. “May Saint Christopher forgive me!” But the saint must have been put out by Marc's ignorance, as events were about to show.

After only half an hour on the road, we were already in the mountains. Not mountains like I know them from Switzerland, however. Here there were no plants or snow, no green blades of grass or mountain streams—only the railway track which runs from Sukkur to Zahedan. We saw three stations, but not a single train.

Every half hour we were stopped by military patrols. Officers checked our passports and after a few minutes' palaver allowed us to continue on our way with an ironic “Good luck!” For about 60 kilometers, our route was accompanied by a telephone cable running along at ground level next to the road. It was comforting to know that we were somehow still connected to civilization. We were making good progress and by midday we had already covered a third of our journey when we were suddenly confronted by a roadblock constructed from large blocks of stone, which had been laid haphazardly across the road. Behind them stood one man in uniform accompanied by four others in civilian clothing, their machine pistols casually pointed at the floor.

The uniformed man ordered me to get out of the car, which was exactly what the brigadier had warned me not to do. Why were the other men not in uniforms? Were they no longer part of the Pakistani Army? The uniformed man pointed at the metal cases on the rear seat of the car. I knew that there were ignorant people around who liked opening up technical equipment, or pulling out the contents of exposed film rolls only then to exclaim that the films have nothing on them. My aluminum cases housed metal detectors, which were sensitive instruments, easily damaged by careless handling.

Suddenly, I had a bright idea. I smiled my best smile and reached deliberately with my right hand for the console in the middle of the car. My Polaroid camera was lying there. I slowly pointed it at Marc and pressed the button; then I aimed the lens at the uniformed man and smiled even more sweetly than before. Right after I pressed the button, the Polaroid picture whirred out of the camera's slit. Still smiling in an affable manner, I tore off the protective strip from the picture and waved it around, fanning myself in the process. When the uniformed man saw his own likeness appearing in full color about a minute later, he must have thought I was some kind of magician.

The turban-wearing civilians laid their machine pistols on the floor and gawped over their boss's shoulder. Then they all wanted just such a picture for themselves and then finally a group picture with me. Marc shot the ‘family portrait' from the car window and passed me the camera. I asked him to hand me a new packet of film—it was the last Polaroid film we had. Laughing I asked the five men to sit on the stones blocking the road and took two more pictures.

After this display of magic, I began to heave one of the stones off the road and gestured to the men to help me with the others. After I gave the camera to the officer and showed him how to press the button, the others joined in with my stone-clearing activities. I got back behind the wheel and we waved and laughed, and then I put my foot down. It was the last checkpoint we came across and to this day, I don't know whether it was a genuine one or not, or how long it had taken those road-blockers to realize that after the film had run out there would be no more magic pictures sliding out of the camera slit.

The mountains lay behind us, and ahead of us stretched the endless desert, initially flanked on the right by the foothills, which gradually faded away as we drove on. The road became more of a dirt track, the surface transforming into a kind of corrugated strip with furrows spaced around 15 to 20 centimeters apart.

Initially, I tried driving slowly over them but the Range Rover clattered, shook, and vibrated unbearably. Finally, I figured out that a driving speed of about 60 to 70 kilometers per hour was ideal. The only danger at that speed was where sudden sand drifts covered the bumpy road. If the wheels were caught at an angle in the sand the car would skid around in an instant—like on black ice, but without ice's advantages: that you could see it and that it stopped at the edge of the road. Here, on the other hand, lurked quicksand where the whole vehicle could sink into the sand without leaving a trace.

Sitting behind the wheel, I felt like one of those bulky men operating a jackhammer. Every bump was transmitted along my arms to my elbows. How long would the car hold out? The grey-beige color of the Range Rover was slowly being completely blanked out by white sand dust. How long would the air filter cope with that? When would the spark plugs and the distributor give up the ghost? Please, holy Saint Christopher, anything but a breakdown in this awful heat. The external temperature was now at about 50 degrees Celsius; I couldn't lean my elbows out of the open window anymore because the metal of the doors was now hot enough to fry bacon.

At around four in the afternoon, we saw a few houses in the middle of this forsaken desert. I drove up towards them until we could see a signboard bearing the legend: Customs. What was all that about? A customs post here in the middle of the desert? A lonely, old soldier in a dark brown t-shirt explained that this was the last Pakistani settlement, 200 kilometers before the Iranian border. He demanded twenty dollars in small bills, which I paid and then asked what the people here actually did. “Nothing,” he said. “We're just here to keep an eye on the boarder.” The name of this desert backwater was Nok Kundi.

We had just driven across purgatory and now we were driving directly into hell itself. The desert track became even more irregular, the gaps between the furrows in the road were randomly spaced, and the sudden sand drifts more frequent. There may have been no water here as far as the eye could see, but at least once a year it must rain cats and dogs because every once in a while the track simply disappeared, as if washed away. It wasn't possible to manage much more than jogging tempo, no more than 20 kilometers per hour. In the rearview mirror I could see our endless dust trail rising up into the twilight, fanning out behind us like a pale gray veil.

Seven p.m. The heat was still oppressive. Position: still 126 kilometers to the Iranian border in the desert of Baluchistan. Throughout the whole day, we had not seen a single vehicle apart from ourselves on the road.

Marc's face was swollen, his eyes rimmed with red. Sweat was pouring out of every pore, but despite the heat, he was shivering. It was clear that he had some kind of fever: he coughed and wheezed like someone with some kind of lung disease. I vaguely recalled something about dust allergies so I moistened a cloth with mineral water and wrapped it around his mouth and nose. I drove on with Marc sitting next to me wrapped up like a mummy, occasionally gasping and coughing, but it was hard work. One kilometer after the next. The massive, blazing gold disc of the sun sank slowly down behind a massive sand dune and suddenly the heat relented. Our position was now 98 kilometers from the Iranian border. Marc's condition still had me worried, however. We decided to call it a day. We would spend the night here and give Marc's immune system a bit of a chance to regenerate. It would have been foolish to try to carry on anyway. The sand drifts don't show up well in the headlights.

This was the incredible night when Tomy came into being. Marc and I will never be able to forget the events of that night. It all began with Marc's chattering teeth and from a fever. He got himself some medication to reduce fever and some antihistamines from our onboard first aid kit and washed them down with generous amounts of mineral water. To give him enough room to lie down properly across the front seats of the car, I made myself a bed on the roof, the rear seats being packed full with our equipment.

Occasionally a cool desert breeze wafted through the night, blowing fine dust into my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, penetrating the warmth of my woolen blanket. I looked up at the starry skies above me, the way they only appear in the middle of a desert. Clearer and brighter than any planetarium, those strange, heavenly bodies seemed so close that I could simply reach out and grab them. Despite being numb with fatigue, I stayed awake. Below me, Marc still coughed. Every movement he made was amplified by the car's suspension across the chassis. Sometime after midnight, I finally dozed off, but woke again around an hour later shivering with the cold.

I stared at the glittering jewels of the night sky and began to daydream. Somewhere out there, in the endless expanse of space, spaceships would be zooming around from planet to planet, bringing post and strange wares from bizarre worlds to distant outposts of the Milky Way, perhaps there would even be wars between planets or solar systems. Maybe even now information was flashing between the constellation of Pleiades and the planets of Polaris, our North Star. We human beings, we microscopic mites down below, don't have the slightest inkling of it all. Never had I seen the constellation of Lyra so clearly as in this night. I knew that its main star, Vega, was fifty times brighter than our sun, but on this night, for the very first time, I could clearly make out its blue coloration with the naked eye.

I wondered how many planets might be in orbit around Vega. I recalled that Lyra was famous for its double-double star, an absolute rarity in our galaxy. Astronomers believe that the possibility of life in a double star system is very slight, if not non-existent, as the constant radiation from the binary suns would make the emergence of life impossible. But what makes them so sure about it? Maybe life forms have evolved under quite conditions than we can imagine. Maybe… maybe… maybe there are solar systems with binary stars populated by gaseous intelligent beings, maybe they don't even need space ships to travel the unimaginable distances between the stars. Maybe there is so much that is so completely different to what we assume. I would give my life to be able to fly out into the universe, past the glowing suns, violet planets and—why not?—life forms that look like giant spiders. Although I cannot, for the life of me, stand the creatures normally.