A Belgian in Africa (story--exclusive preview)

It might have been around the time I quit my position at the organization--it seemed oddly pressing to focus on the accumulated loose ends of my life at the time, though now it's hard to say whether I made any headway along that path at all--but it could have been around that time that I started thinking about the Belgian again. The Belgian in Africa, I should say, since there are other Belgians that I think of from time to time, as one does.

He and I had met all of once. Not even properly at that. We were both camped at the Blue Nile Sailing Club in Khartoum, a best-of-the-worst kind of overlanders' haunt set on the eponymous river about a mile shy of the confluence. It was morning, he was doing maintenance on his engine. Absolved of my duties at the organization, free to cast my glance over any shade of my life's palette, I might have remembered him standing there. In the astonishing golden light of a sun hardly risen above the trees, yet whose heat was already accomplished, the sallow half-wasted figurine of his body winked with the waxen dullness of the unliving. His belly sagged, the fleshy folds of it washing off the trunk in glacially suspended lipid cascades, earthbound, as if there might be formations within him, tendencies, that were eager to enter that ground for whatever semipermanent dissolution, and get on with it. Someone said we all carry within us a body of death I think. And maybe so.

Stooped over his engine, he wore a pair of filthy shorts and nothing more, and would look up occasionally to snap a command at the grouping of inert Arabs congregated close by in spotless jellabiyyas. I watched him as he stood up to wipe his brow. He looked over at our vehicle, then approached. We were also traveling up through Africa, there were three of us. He wanted a wrench and my friend lent him one. And that constituted my meeting with him, such as it was.

I said nothing to him in hope that his eye would not drift across my face, that it would not occur to him to engage me in conversation. The eye, too, had that same inertness, as if the it marked a forbidden border, as if the external world could not enter and continue past that aperture. The wind was blowing, I remembered. I had trouble seeing across the river for the dust eddying up off the building sites that convulsed the city. The Belgian had fallen into brief conversation with my traveling companions. Road conditions, fuel prices, the petty dramas of our respective visa debacles. I might have indicated that I found his personage contemptible by the set of my chin, by addressing what little I could bring myself to say to my traveling companions only. I couldn't recall. The point, my dear friends, is that he was no more than a Belgian in Africa to me--with all the sordid things that entails.

Later, as we pulled out of the Sailing Club to head up the road, I saw a pastylooking woman emerge from the side of the camper unit mounted on the back of the Belgian's white Land Cruiser. She wore a floppy white hat and a sour expression.

We had made it about 100 miles up the road by nightfall. Carlos pulled the vehicle in off the road once we could see no vehicles in either direction. We camped on a boulder-pocked strip between the half-completed highway and a glistening fleet of transmission towers that marched up into the hazy distance where the horizon was awash in a confused palette of red and purple, evanescent inks congealing into a brevity of impossible cobalt. Soon it was black and starry. Having taken my meal with the others, I wandered off parallel to the road in the direction of a hazy string of lights. Walking, I found I was thinking about the Belgian. Annoyed, I tried concentrating on the journey ahead, but he had ingrained himself in my mind like some cognitive tick. And I had been thinking about him on the road, for almost the entire way since we'd left behind the dusty hue and cry of Khartoum.

The string of lights resolved into a roadbuilders' camp. There were several shipping container offices, and white tents for the mess and lounge. The men were mostly Sudanese. Among their number were some Chinese engineers, an Egyptian foreman. The engineers seemed happy enough to see me wandering in off the wadi, and motioned for me to join them in their canvas social tent. Making the rounds inside were a bottle of whiskey and a few issues of German smut.

The wind tore through the interstices of the boulders piled up next to the tent. I couldn't help listening to the sad dry sigh of it when one of the men leaned over with an issue to feature a glossy and stained picture of a man with a face like a block ejaculating onto a wincing girl's chest. Which is an act that I find sad to begin with, though sadder still when the girl in question cannot muster the flagellatory enthusiasm that sets the stars of porn apart from mere dayjobbers not meant for the dirty pictures they pose in. I played along with the manly session of show and sip and tell. The whiskey passed from mouth to mouth, and the smut from eye to eye in a frottage of arousal and degradation. They asked what I was doing. I said I was headed up the road to Egypt with friends. And they, I asked. What were they doing? We are building your road! said a Chinese engineer. To Egypt! At which we all laughed. I asked if they saw a lot of my kind come through. A few a week, said the Egyptian foreman, usually in the early part. He said they found that some of us passed us too quickly when they had men on the road, men pushing rubble, spraying tar, measuring geometries, painting stripes. I responded that surely many Sudanese drove by at speeds that would have to be considered too fast. To me a Sudanese man behind the wheel of a car was to be regarded as a kind of diabolical reaper.

The foreman considered my statement for a moment. Then he tipped the bottle back and allowed its amber contents to gurgle out the neck and down his throat. It is the look in their eyes, he declared. The statement admitted of no response. Outside the tent, the wind had picked up and begun to howl and hoot as it caught the rocks at the precise pitch and speed needed for that particular pitch of forlornness.

The men in the tent were watching a satellite channel with a program on African predators when at length I left them for my camp, and a sleep in which I would stalk visions of the women I had seen in their smut, dreaming of them in the attitudes of real desire. They seemed not to notice when I slipped off.

The next day my traveling companions and I drove on to the toppled remnants of the Nubian pyramids at Marawi. I told them about my evening with the men who were building the road we were driving on and occasionally alongside of. Carlos, the vehicle’s owner and driver, said that I was crazy to wander off in the night to pursue unknown lights on an unknown desert. I countered that we had to be crazy to be where we were in the first place. And had we not, I recall thinking to myself, in some sense lost the power to pronounce a verdict of insanity on other members of our generation and culture? We did not know what sanity was, so what prerogative to identify its opposite? We could point out what was wrong and corrupt--and with some assurance--but never what was true and whole. I think it goes without saying that you need both in order to arrive at a valid verdict of insanity. I will not be called crazy, and I told Carlos so.

~

After we left, the Belgian tinkered on with his truck. His wife had just flown into Khartoum from Brussels laden with spares for the vehicle, among them several bearings and cables, as well as a turbocharger to replace the one he had worn through while whirlwinding through East Africa. He finished at 3 in the afternoon, and when he revved the engine, its throaty whine was much to his satisfaction. If you had been watching him then, you could have seen him walk to the bathroom and wipe himself clean. But you would have struggled in vain to see him don a shirt over sagging torso; and if you had kept on and been very clever about it, you could have seen him sneaking a slug of whiskey through a windowcrack of his bedmounted camper at the sounding of the sunset prayer.

That evening he and his wife had a dinner of fish and steak at the Khartoum Hilton, a Sudanese surf and turf as you might have commented if you'd been watching. Again you would have struggled in vain, had your object been to hear the two of them conversing about anything beyond the quotidian things that might have been hard work to leave unsaid, the ‘how is your foods’ and ‘shall we get the checks’ and ‘I think this is a nice view of the Nile, don’t you’ of this life. The highlight of their conversation, such as it was, came when the Belgian started talking about how he imagined his next transafrica trip. Enough, he declared, with all the planes, trains and automobiles. That was no way to really see the continent, to encounter its people--to sniff its heady scents for God’s sake! His usual flintmade reserve, but of course not his superciliousness, had given way to gesticulations that his wife thought were slightly delirious. She found herself wondering if maybe he had caught some bug while driving around in Africa.

She did not want to agitate him any further by disagreeing, so she said that yes, they were spending an awful lot of time shut up in the car the way they were going. Delicate diplomacy was her greatest skill. It was true of course--most of the Africa she was seeing was what happened to be on offer through the dusty and bugsplattered perspective of the windscreen. She got the feeling that their converted Land Cruiser had become a roving fortress from which they dared venture less and less. The turbocharger certainly had something military about it, which she suspected was the reason he chose it. Of course, they were in the Sudan, a godforsaken place best speeded through. And speed they did.

But to return to their conversation: The Belgian's point was that the next trans-Africa journey he took be by donkeycart. She threw up her hands, but he insisted he was serious. Fully. What better way to experience the melancholy of the continent's vast expanses? What could be more local and down to earth? More environmentally sound, socially just, spiritually rejuvenating? Best of all, it made economic sense--they would spend nothing but what was needed for the donkey, cart, and veterinary kit, and if their donkey died or was confiscated at a border crossing, they could bring bolts of cloth and bowls of metal to use as bargaining chips in bartering for a replacement ass. Just as they would burn no fuel, needing only what fodder they found by the side of the track, neither would they bring any currency, and would contribute the labor of their hands where what they had brought in the way of barter would not do. They would be the only whites on the continent other than the stray few who had gone native who weren’t perverting the local agrarian subsistence economies with cash. And as if all that weren't enough, my dear--that is what he said--the ass would assure their carbon neutrality. And meanwhile--the Belgian was beaming feverishly--their prudent investments at home would be prudently maturing, bearing prudent fruit. He could even write a book about it for the adventure-thirsty (anglophone) masses: Africa on Assback.

The wife took a long and bracing sip of wine, saying nothing. They were 55 years old. He was mostly gray, but the grizzled look of the African adventurer managed to highlight a certain youthfulness. She was having a harder time keeping up her end of the charade. Her clothes were never quite as clean as she wanted them to be, and each morning she found that more dust and grit had accumulated on her mirror and inside (somehow) her bottles and tubes of tinctures and lotions. And there was no covering, cream or unguent that could adequately shield her already battered northerner’s skin from the corrosive sun. Nor had her legs and midriff been spared by what foul and unseen small life flew and crawled at these intemperate latitudes. Why could she never be the one to pick where they would go next? Why not a string of restorative spas in the Swiss alps instead of the rigors of Patagonia, mention of which her husband seemed unable to omit from any conversation, be it about the weather, their money, or the chances that their daughter Annelie would finish university before she became ineligible for renewal of her study stipend. Which were slim. And now this business about a donkeycart. She wished she had the nerve to tell him that she could ride the cart with him pulling, ass that he was.

I personally have thought several times about making a significant journey by donkeycart. Las Vegas to Omaha, for one. Or Duluth to Dayton: From the San Francisco of the North to the site of the Great Accord--on a donkeycart. Of course, in these places I would probably soon be locked up by some hellbelt sheriff, so maybe the Belgian had the right idea pick Africa for his setting. Be it noted that I would not presume to ask a woman to accompany me on such a journey.

The Belgian couple left Khartoum the next morning, taking the road we had. The Belgian drove fast. I hope you will not mind if I just call the Belgian 'M.' from now on, to avoid bringing up the entire nation when I want to cite the man (though M. is not his real initial, not even close). Cars and trucks with their windows or roofs open heard a sound similar to that of a cruising jet engine as he passed them. M. said they needed to cross the country quickly, and every country afterwards for that matter, if they were to get home with enough time to source cart and draft animal, and then make it to at least the Mediterranean before the snows started falling. It was June. Their air conditioner had broken, and the heat was almost too much to bear. It was certainly not possible to talk and think and bear the heat all at once. She knew better than to ask if they could find some shade for the hottest hours.

M. slowed neither for the roadworks nor the frontage road diversions, and least of all for the roadworkers themselves. M.’s wife--let me refer to her as M.W. occasionally, in the name of simplicity--thought she could see the men glowering at them through the dustclotted glass. She had never known M. to drive like this in Belgium. She thought she could see the men shaking dim fists and hurling invisible objects into their billowing dust contrail in the side mirror. It occurred to me that one of these anonymous and embodied curses may have been hurled by the Egyptian foreman with whom I had tippled and gazed at semen-glossed breasts the evening before. If so, I wondered what look he might have discerned in M.’s eyes at that moment.

That day my traveling companions had wakened at 6 in the morning and begun to drive. Not quickly, but consistently. We also had a 100 mile headstart on M. I mention this merely as a benchmark when I mention that we were passed by M. on the road an hour before sunset. In the moment of overtaking I could see that he wore no shirt, and was allowing the desert sun to slow-roast his torso through the windscreen. He extended a large hand in greeting as he roared past. We pulled by to camp soon afterwards.

M. drove into the dark hours. At some point sealed road gave way to corrugated dust. M. drove on. To make sure he would be on the first pontoon to cross in the morning, M. wanted to camp just outside the town with the ferry that crossed this portion of the Nile. About two hours after full dark, as they jangled along the corrugations shaped by harmonics, but were themselves far from harmonious, there was a sign announcing their entry into the village of Karima. Not that there was any reason to pause for the sign at all, much less to puzzle over its script. In fact, for them the dirt track itself was no more than a convention, a formality, for their movements were guided and tracked by a handheld Global Positioning Satellite unit. This contraption not only heralded their arrival at Karima, but also told them exactly how many meters remained between them and the coordinates given for the ferry landing, well in advance and tocking down by 50 meter blocks. 500, 450, 400, 350...

M. had decided to go see the landing that evening before pulling back to the outskirts to camp. He wanted to make sure there was nothing hazardous about the configuration. But just as old Ahab’s sextant told him where he was, and not where he would be, so M.’s handheld GPS unit, which could tell him just how many meters remained between him and his target, gave no intelligence in the way of the things that could and would happen between where he was and where he wanted to be. Nor did it make any pronouncements on the sagacity of his chosen route. For instance, even if it had been one of those advanced models that provide topographical relief--and I had nothing to indicate that it was--it would hardly have been able to alert M., the operator dwelling in the security of his device, to the existence of a well in his path. And it could not possibly have forecast that, owing to the hallowed and healing nature of this well and its water, there would be dozens of suffering sleepers clustered around it in hope of a cure to what ailed them at that hour. Nor could the device conceivably provide any intelligence or forewarning regarding the camouflaging effect of windblown desert sand sweeping across a uniformly clad and dustcovered throng of recumbent humanity featuring in the headlights of an approaching vehicle by night.

If the GPS unit had nothing to say on this score, it was even less loquacious on the subject of how the sleeping gaggle of the suffering would react when, in the sudden space of a turbocharged second, their tribulations were multiplied unbearably on themselves. When the moment came, M. was holding the GPS unit, eyes flicking between screen, dials and windscreen. He was traveling at perhaps 45 mph when he had to swerve out of the way of a jellabiyyah-clad wanderer whose form flashed djinnlike in the dust. The swerve that M. executed to avoid an accident delivered him into the maw of calamity. When they hit the sleeping throng it was easy for a moment to think that they had run afoul of scattered sacks of grain, an impromptu depot awaiting transfer to the mill. Or perhaps a circle of sleeping animals. But screams and groans parted the illusion like a scythe. It was all very quick. After the rapid and violent thump-thump-thump, they found themselves stalled out in the center of a bloodbath. The wellhead had come off the sacred fount and the jet of holy water it splurted into the night flared prismatically in the harsh sodium headlight glare before raining down to mingle with the spilled crimson life of the maimed and dying. Those still able dragged themselves off with arms and legs broken, gargling blood and trailing phosphoric green spittle. Others lay in grotesque attitudes of agony, their sundered heads or ribbaskets or groincradles flattened or opened or simply spread along the sand in baleful red articulation. One man staggered around the hood and stood in the moteblown stream of the headlights, his jellabiyyah blooming with blood from where the shoulder had been staved. He raised his good arm as if to address a congregation, but the oration could not progress beyond a long and burbling sanguinary groan before he sank to his knees and toppled lifeless onto the sand.

The ablest of the survivors groped for stones and bottles, instinctively hurling them at their pale devastator. Side panels dented under fire. One hit the windscreen, its transparency exploding into a dazzling reticulum. M., who still wore no shirt and hadn't the faintest idea of what to do, yelled 'fuck' and ‘sorry’ a few times in English in an attempt to pacify the clawing crowd, but when a rock shattered the driver’s window and narrowly missed M.’s skull, the sorry gave way to Godverdomme as he opened the throttle and pulped whatever human forms still caught beneath the treads as they strove for purchase. The tires found their grip amid the screams and sent the vehicle headlong into the sandblasted night. The wail of the turbocharger was like a banshee trailing after them, thought M.W.

Struck dumb until then, she screamed, What in God's name has happened? What are we going to do? Then, her voice dropping as the broken screams and gurgles issuing from the medieval horror behind them abated into a vacant and accusatory silence of wind: What have you done? Oh God, what have you done?

M. had made his decision. To stop was to die. And they’d fare no better resorting to the police. They had to escape. He drove furiously for ten minutes or so, retracing the way they had come, headlights off. He was panting when he skidded to a halt to confer with his wife. They would have to flee the country, he began. By car. There was no way they could ditch it and fly out. The authorities would match the passports with the carnet and the customs declaration. And there was no telling what might happen to them if they were caught. Perhaps they discussed the possibility of somehow sinking the vehicle in the Nile. Or that could simply have been something I would consider as a way of getting the blood off. But if they did raise it as a possibility, they must have dismissed it just as quickly. One thing was in their favor: Being on the west side of the river opened up the entire desert continent beyond, and all its lonely avenues of escape. But they had to avoid towns and roads and being seen at all costs until they were deep in the desert, hopefully across one of Sudan's invisible borders. They had several jerrycans of diesel, and with luck they would be able to cross unseen into Libya or Chad within a week. M. also had his clutch of unexpired backup passports. M.'s wife considered asking at this point if she could just be dropped off--under the circumstances the authorities might have mercy on a foreign woman claiming abandonment by a husband recognized as a remorseless killer--but she knew too well that he would have little chance of making it through the desert without her. She stayed on.

They drove west through the night, picking a route over the pans and among the rubble and down the frosty needlepoints of the wheeling constellations of the zodiac. They were still driving when the sun rose behind them. She could see a gilded chevron of nameless foreign fowl flying north high above them. Did birds ever feel frightened flying so high above the ground? Could there have been some legend among them that they might be sucked into the blackness of space if they flew too high? Her teeth clenched, she thought that this was quite a way to experience the melancholy of the continent's vast expanses. What greater banishment than to be put to flight across these lunar scarps, into a desolation that grew always greater. They drove through the day, too, stopping only once to void bladders and to check the engine oil and tire pressure. Just like the night before, the GPS unit told them precisely where they were, and spread the world out before them on a grid of points where they might be--M. had picked an intersection of latitude and longitude in the southeastern Libyan desert--but it told them nothing of their pursuers, if there were any, and indicated neither what they'd been through nor what was to come. They simply drove, passing the device from hand to hand, bloodcracked eyes riveted to a blurred and vacant horizon.

Day ending, M. guided his tired vehicle along a low escarpment rising feebly through the haze. He tucked the vehicle in among a pair of columnar boulders with dimensions almost perfectly suited to the task to which they were now posted. The last of the light failed. M. cut the engine. Eyes were trained on the windshield, he continued to stare rigidly ahead, deep into an invisible void, as his wife considered him. The lost light brought out the essential contours and ridges: The chin was weak, the nose small and almost girlish. The eyes were a northern seaside teal in the light, but in the dark all she could see of them were their frames of dusty crows' feet beneath an anguished brow. The domelight came on and she saw the eyes, contracting pupils set within sclera bloodshot from that day and thousands of other earlier days spent hunched over figures and charts so that what balance they carried would throw off enough to let them pull up stakes and roam about the world at liberty. Like this.

That evening they resumed the regular rhythms of travel, heating tins of vegetables and spaghetti and meatballs. I believed they had about 50 liters of treated water in jugs left at that point. M. built a small fire with palm wood bought in Khartoum. As she wrote in her journal about what was happening to them, M. looked to the flames and lamented the lack of the most rudimentary public safety measures in countries like these. He muttered about guard rails and phosphorescent vests and luminescent road markings, the foolishness of sleeping so hard by the town's only thoroughfare.

She was quiet, but she was thinking about the flesh, its frailty, the illusion of it. How the only certain thing about it is its disintegration. She did not think the situation they were in had much to do with public safety measures. The last thing she saw out the window from her bunk before sleep was her husband through the tendrils of woodsmoke, raising a full bottle of amber whiskey to his lips. The T-shirt he wore had been a gift from their daughter after a trip to Mexico's Pacific coast. The emblazoning read: 'One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.'

They woke early and drove on without breakfast. There was no road now, no corrugated track or braid of furrows to follow. But the rocky pans and sandy gulches gave traction and were conducting them north toward Libya. The occasional long-abandoned hulk of a Bedford or a Leyland truck gave them the half-comfort of knowing that others had at least attempted the route. Early in the afternoon they came upon a newish Mitsubishi truck that had drifted into a deep rut and overturned, sentry to a senseless occurrence appointed to the distinction of permanence. Scattered amid the scree in the direction of the truck's tipping were dozens of smashed 19" television sets, a mortuary of black plastic panels and bunches of garishly colored wire and nests of jagged shards gleaming with malevolent spectra.

M. decided to stop for lunch. They ate bread, a tin of sunheated sauerkraut, another of hot corn, and half a crumbling block of Belgian cheese. Sweat furrowed their cheeks and bloomed on the fabrics they wore. She had heaved one of the 25 L water jugs down onto the shaded sand in the light-lee ahead of the rear left tire, where she tipped it with confidence to refill her 2 L bottle. Heat and distraction combined to put the jug out of her mind as they left. Nor had M. marked it, so that as they pulled away, the tire rose up onto the jug and burst it. The sand drank what spilled immediately. They could salvage no more than a liter or so from the tatters of PET that remained--their inventory had been reduced to something like 24 liters at a stroke. As they pulled away, deeper into the desert, the field of glass shards glinted with indifferently, adamantly. It looked like a signal, but she did not want to decipher it.

At the end of the next day they were down to 15 liters of water and two 20 liter jerrycans of diesel. Around sunset they saw a splotch of what might have been greenery on a flaming horizon. Its location corresponded pretty well to an oasis marked by a palm tree on the map. A watering holes discovered by the old slave caravans. The green was still there in the morning, equal parts opportunity and threat. M. said they had to avoid it. They were still in the Sudan.

~
***
I'd be lying if I failed to admit that M. became much more to me than just another Belgian in Africa. I guess you could say I took an interest in him. We were still in the Sudan when we heard about his terrible accident and subsequent flight from a French couple traveling up the same road. I somehow knew it had been M. before they said that the authorities were searching for a Belgian. The survivors must have had the wherewithal to pick out the EU "B" on his plate. We met the couple at the Dongola ferry crossing a few days after setting out from Khartoum. The first thing I noticed as we started talking was their tired eyes. But they were plainly relieved to be talking to us, and their animation grew as they told their story. They were driving in a white Land Cruiser that bore some resemblance to the Belgian's, and the authorities had pulled them over for a protracted and unpleasant interrogation.

***
As the questioning began, they admitted to having met the Belgian on the road in Ethiopia. But their repeated assertions that M.'s vehicle differed from theirs in that it had a camper mounted on the back were unhelpful. In fact, they were nearly disastrous, since their prior acquaintance with M. raised suspicions that they might have been accomplices to the road killings, which the authorities were now treating as a case of mass murder. The police had threatened them with all kinds of odious treatment in a clumsy attempt to extract a confession, but the lack of any blood or gristle on their vehicle was enough to convince them in the end.

Some of the officers, they said, had wanted to confiscate their truck for forensic analysis, but a frantic call to the French embassy in Khartoum had brought about a chain of events that resulted in the police chief's decision being overruled from Khartoum. So the vehicle was swabbed, and the couple was released with the understanding that they would be detained at the border if the results indicated that they should.
***
We decided to travel with the French couple as far as the ferry across Lake Nasser. It was obvious they could benefit from the moral support, and if the police decided to question us as well, their contacts and testimony might be of use. We were right: When we were detained at the next roadblock and questioned about 12 Sudanese men murdered in their sleep, the French couple speeded things considerably by demanding that the station lieutenant put a call in to the officer who had been in charge of their questioning. As we left, the lieutenant apologized to us with offers of tea and hospitality.

That evening around an acacia fire, the couple told us what they knew about the Belgian. Within five minutes of their meeting, they said, he had begun boasting about his clever system for cheating on his wife with "women of quality" while away in Africa. It was done using Internet dating forums. Whenever he emerged from the bush into a town with a connection, he would log on and invite francophone or Dutchspeaking women to fly down and share the romance of an African road journey with him. By his own admission, he had so far been able to lure down 5 women for an average stay of 2 weeks. Evidently the average stay was a statistic worthy of mention. He had told the couple that his wife would be flying to meet him in Khartoum on the very day he would bid adieu to his fling du jour--a matronly specimen, in the couple's phrase. But the pasty woman I'd seen emerging from his camper in Khartoum must have been his wife.

We were all able to exit the Sudan without too much hassle about a week later. By 'without too much hassle,' I mean that when we were detained by the Wadi Halfa border police, it had nothing to do with the fugitive Belgian. Some tourists had been reported pilfering pieces of pyramids and other antiquities, and now the border posts were under orders to search the vehicles of transiting tourists. It shames me to admit that I had in fact snatched a piece of a Nubian pyramid for myself and secreted it in a niche along the bottom of our chassis. But it pleases me to report that they did not find it. The search was over in a little over twenty minutes, and was followed by the usual apologies and offers of tea and comradery. The only juncture that actually worried me was when the captain was flipping through my journal, which contained, in addition to the extensive notes I had by then compiled on the facts and legends surrounding the Belgian, the outline of a satirical piece on my experience of the Sudan modeled on a CIA field report. But the captain was unable to read the Latin script, and had just been making the show of things that officers' decorum demanded.

We exited, as I said above. In the weeks that followed, my traveling companions and I saw the Valley of the Kings, the great pyramidal deathchambers, scattered relics of lapsed civilizations. But I was finding it difficult to focus on the sights. It seemed like so much rubble, and all I could think about was the Belgian. I kept reviewing what little I had seen of him, of his vehicle, the man and the machine behind the infamous, inadvertent deed, and how they had fused into that fatal and sandblown moment in which the white Land Cruiser ended 12 lives in the dark. But none of the overland tourists I met could tell me anything about him that I hadn't been first in hearing. When we reached Cairo I lit out on my own for a few days to forget the Belgian. The idea was to lose myself in the city. On my second day I wandered all afternoon through neighborhoods sublime one moment and squalid the next. I walked, my shadow contracting and reforming to mark the sun's passage. I saw the great and recently restored Hakim mosque and the spectral and sordid everydayness of the City of the Dead. The gray onset of the hour of Solomon saw me strolling under the fragrant awnings of the Khan-el-Khalili market. There I tried my hand at a few robust rounds of haggling, though none of it was any use. All I could think about was the Belgian. I took a taxi downtown and stopped at the Hurriyyah bar for a few rounds of an Egyptian lager. Anything but robust. Ceiling fans buzzed. Depending on the fluctuations of my Weltschmerz, patrons' cries could seem jovial or desperate. Before long I fell to talking with a hardened group of German travelers who had just washed up in Cairo from an epic, dangerous journey through the center of the Sahara.

They talked about where they had been, what they had been through. We drank, told some jokes, eyed some women. But inevitably, I brought up the only subject I was fit to discuss. I talked about what the Belgian had done, how he had disappeared, what he looked like, what route I imagined he might have taken through the desert. That there had been no news of him since his disappearance. I mentioned that the French had made the divergence of M.'s white camper-converted mid-90's Land Cruiser from their own truck the basis of their defense. One of the Germans asked me to repeat my description of the Belgian's truck. I did. He tipped his beer, regarding me down the barrel of the bottle with eyes that were drunk, slightly wild. They had seen a vehicle parked on a dune in southeast Libya about a week earlier, he said, which fit my description exactly. There couldn't have been another vehicle matching that description within a thousand miles in any direction, I thought. I asked what they had done. Nothing much, the German replied blankly. The vehicle had been parked. Their guide had a nervous feeling, and he warned them off. They had idled for a few minutes about a kilometer away. When after ten minutes there had been no signal for help, or to get lost, they had driven on, and hadn't really thought about the incident again until now.

My mind flew off in a frenzy of speculation. Why had they not investigated further? Or had the slightly reeling German been lying to me? But what possible reason could he have for deceiving me, given that he had been the one to bring up seeing the vehicle in the first place? Maybe he had had a closer look and had seen something he'd rather not remember. But really, even if they had looted the vehicle, they had almost certainly left the things I was after untouched. Someone, I believe, has said that no one is as stupid about the essentials as a German, nor as astute about inessentials.

They seemed content to dismiss the sighting as an interesting coincidence. Naturally, I would not let it go. I wanted their exact itinerary. I wanted GPS points, landscape pictures, and anything else they could remember. I wanted to find that fucking Belgian. I confessed my fixation: I asked them to pity me. They were clearly put off by my oddly allocated singlemindednes, but they had no cause to deny me the help due to a fellow traveler. Slightly drunk myself, I accompanied them back to their Cairene fleapit--though to be fair these were fleas who recognized that there was no God by God, and that Muhammed was his prophet. There I was free to copy down the GPS points that I hoped would let me draw a bead on where they had sighted the vehicle. I also downloaded some of their pictures onto my memory stick. As I ducked into the fervid night, I could hear them discussing my case. One of the words I could make out was "verwirrt," meaning confused, tangled.

I'll allow that what I did next must seem an extravagance undertaken without hope of reward. And it might well have been. But at the time it was terribly important to me. Everything depended on it, I felt. Even now I feel strongly that I could not have allowed the tale of the Belgian to fade into sandy irresolution. My traveling companions thought me crazy when I told them I would be interrupting my journey with them so to outfit and undertake an expedition into the Libyan desert to search for the missing Belgian. They tried to dissuade me, and I broke off contact with them. I will not tolerate being called crazy, as I have said.

It took only a few days to get organized, and by week's end I was in Tripoli with all the permits I needed, a rented Land Cruiser and the guide required by the Libyan authorities. One morning we set out. The journey was long and hard. 1,200 miles of sand and rock, of which I will spare you the tedium of a description. We got there, we began the search, and we continued the search. After a bleared string of nearly identical days spent driving in circles around the GPS points the Germans had given me, I began to despair. My guide, besides being an utter cretin, was costing me 100 Euros a day, and I was ready to give up. No amount of patient explication could convince him as to the purpose of my journey. He was a tediously and self-righteously practical man. After a week, it was tacitly apparent that he took me for a madman. After two his demeanor lapsed into open contempt. In the evenings I could hear him laughing on the satellite phone.

It was on the very morning I had resolved to leave and get shut of the whole sad affair that I saw it, first as a vague blotch through my binoculars, then distinctly. It was the Belgian's vehicle, parked on a dune as the Germans had said. I drove up to it at full speed. Everything had prepared me for what I saw when I opened the side door to the camper. There they lay, desiccated and half gone to dust. The Belgian's mouth was opened into a brittle and agonized rictus. His wife's face in death wore no expression. Her hand was resting on his, though, in token that their pact would somehow continue. The cabin, though musty, did not smell of rot. I surveyed their repose for only a moment. Then I started poking around the cabin, emptying cabinets and overturning boxes. At first it seemed I would find no record of their flight apart from the grim screed written on the lifeless bodies themselves. The digital camera contained no pictures taken after Khartoum. Perhaps they had viewed later pictures as evidence and destroyed them. On the floor I found a sheet of paper with some numbers on it, distances I thought, but they did not tell a story. I was preparing to leave their deathchamber when it occurred to me to check the bodies themselves. I put out a reluctant foot to prod at them with my boot. They yielded like pinata dummies. There was nothing on M.'s sere person. Beneath one of his wife's legs, though, was a book bound in black leather. It was a detailed log of their entire journey.

All of it was there. The misgivings she felt as she stepped aboard the plane in Brussels; her anger when he begrudged her a visit to the mahdi's tomb in Omdurman; the horror of the bloodsoaked moment when their lives were shunted onto the fatal trajectory into the desert; the delirious enlightenments that poured forth from her pen as on the final waterless days. The journal was unlined, a simple number bound in quality leather, its sheets filled edge to edge with handwriting as regular as a typeface. Her sentences were complete, considered, the product of an ordered mind that I could almost feel straining against the bars clapped around it by her marriage as I turned the pages. Her thoughts did not trail into the gibberish you'd expect from the end of terminal thirst. Or if there was gibberish, it was set against the foil of a disturbing lucidity. Very interesting stuff, I thought. I was just getting to the good stuff when my guide started pestering me to leave. I told him to go fuck himself.

Here is what happened to them in their final week: Once they'd lost the water jug to the Land Cruiser's unsparing tread, their path was indiscernible from the trajectory of those errant European wanderers who have been vanishing in the desert since the fabled search for the fabled Timbuktu. They drove until their progress was halted by a sandstorm lasting three days and three nights. On the morning after it cleared, M. staggered from the camper to take a GPS reading. The batteries had failed. They had no compass, no knowledge of how to navigate by the firmament. They had achieved their goal of making it across the border into Libya. Rather, they had escaped the Sudan into a place from which there was no escape. Any trace of their passage had been obliterated by the storm, and by M.'s reckoning they were over 500 crowsflight miles away from any marked road. Or, in her phrase, as the vulture flies. They were down to 4 liters of water and a half tank of diesel. As they set off on their doomed final drive across the hot gray rocks toward the ever-receding band of shimmer on the north horizon, M. noted quietly that the truck could benefit from a smaller, less thirsty engine. M.W. said nothing.

They had made perhaps 200 miles by nightfall and had seen no tracks, no vehicles, no relief. It was as empty as the brown of the map. Just as an orange and predatory crescent moon loomed up to their right, the engine gave a sickly burble and died. M. put on his headlamp and poured a bottle of vodka into the tank. Afterwards, the engine would not start.

They remained in that spot, sand on a slight rise, otherwise without feature. In such heat and without water, the span between full vitality and death was, by my calculation, somewhere between five and seven days. At some point on the second day of the wait, M. burst out of the camper and tried with scrabbling heaves to force the vehicle back to life. It was the hottest part of the day, and it did not take long for him to collapse. It took a considerable volume of her spousal oratory to coax him back into the camper. He took up his spot on the bed, and did not move for several hours. Around nightfall he remembered the store of wine he had laid up, two full cases. She noted that he could have boiled the spirit off to make it slaking, but did not, and used it to ease his transition into the inevitable instead. The final days passed in a logorrhetic rant, drunk and desiccated, against the backwardness of Africans and Muslims. At the bottom of a particularly adamant bottle, he claim that he would grind them all into the sand if he could. 'The sand,' he groaned as he smashed the bottle against the sink. 'Into the sand!'

I've been relying on M.W.'s written testimony almost from the beginning, so what could be more appropriate than to close with a few selections from her journal? They are very interesting, but because they raise many more questions than they answer, I should preface the selections by writing that, just as Ahab's sextant could not tell him where he would be, and just as M.'s GPS unit could not predict his perdition, the journal she left behind told me nothing about the fathomless infinity that awaited her after the last word was written.


To begin:

_________ (M. ) passed out drunk last night when I tried kissing him for what I thought might be the last time. May I be forgiven for suggesting that he was faking it. In his sleep he twittered forth the names of women unknown to me. I nipped on some of the wine myself as he dozed. Out the window I thought I could see two sets of twinned and hovering amber orbs. How many lost wayfarers like us must it take to sustain these jackals?

To continue:

This act of writing. Usually it comes in an idle moment with nothing happening but the writing. The words are the moment's attraction. But they bend on something outside of the moment. Something past or future, something in the world of spirits. On things that do not exist. Now everything has contracted into this moment. This is all that exists. The writing is the same as the thirst, the thirst one with the writing. The words bleed off like life's vital vapor. What are past and future when I can no longer see the words for the thirst shrouding everything in mists of pulsing black? I don't wish it on you. He didn't mean to run those people over. He couldn't slow down, never could. To drink wine when you are thirsting to death is excruciating, your skin burns with every sip. Better by far to feel it dry and let it run to sand.

I have always thought that someone thirsting to death in the desert should be keen to dignify her lot by leaving some trace of her suffering behind, some sublime nugget of insight snatched from death's maw as she--to borrow a phrase from Poe--approached the unknown slopes of the night. She snatched the nugget; the Belgian did not.

To conclude:

She sees the earth begin to fragment before her, crust, mantle and core sloughing off into thousands of sundered planetoids, and as she sees the blue of the sky vanish traceless into the black void of the world-naught--the woman puts on her jacket.

What is to be said of that sentence? I do not think that a writer who spent his entire lifetime crafting a single sentence could ever come close. There were a few more half-entries. Disjointed prophesies, streams of names and places and smells that were the framework for a lifetime of experience, but which meant nothing to me.

An Epicurean Walk

Last night I brushed up on the tenets of Epicureanism. I knew that according to the popular understanding—misinformed by an ancient Christian smear campaign—Epicurianism amounted to little more than pleasure-seeking. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Epicurus did indeed advocate the seeking of modest pleasures as the highest good in life. But these pleasures did not involve partying or having sex. Instead of beer-chugging and hip-thrusting, they were more on the order of friendship and the attainment of enough knowledge to overcome superstition—though not more than was necessary to that end. In fact, Epicurus himself remained celibate, believing that marriage would overcomplicate things for him. So to understand Epicurianism as a philosophy of pleasure is half-baked at best. Just as important was the achievement of apenia—the absence of pain. Which according to old Epicurus was best guaranteed by avoiding excess and overstimulation.

The thought system seems to have been informed by a fundamentally conservative pessimism: Seek not too much pleasure in the moment, lest you be bitterly disappointed in the future. Epicurus and his followers espoused an ethics of convenience (treat others well because what goes around comes around), without positing an absolute morality. They also seem to have been of sound mind when it came to epistemological principles: Trust the senses only, and neither your prejudices nor your emotions will fool you--a kind of proto-empiricism. Three additional tidbits stuck with me from my brief reading: 1) Epicurus is said to have referred to life as a "bitter gift”; 2) A later Epicurean formulated a little mantra called the Tetrapharmakos, or four-fold cure, viz.:

Do not fear god
Do not worry about death
What is good is easy to get
What is terrible is easy to endure;

3) The Epicureans were effectively atheists. Meaning that although they avoided outright denial that gods existed (and thus also the fate that befell Socrates), they held that these gods disported themselves far from earth, somewhere out in the interplanetary void, and that they did not give a damn about human affairs, and were totally unable to interfere in them. If I remember correctly though, one daredevil Epicurean did go so far as to formulate a denial of God, saying that if God was willing yet unable to stop evil, then He was not omnipotent, that if He was able but unwilling to stop evil, then He was malevolent, and that if He was neither able nor willing—why call Him God?

This morning I set out on my “Epicurean walk” along the Bosporus. The water and the hills that flanked it were covered in a thoroughly philosophical mist. It seemed like the morning had been shaped this way—into a sort of interior to help contain and focus my thoughts—just for me. I reflected that the creed of modesty seemed very appropriate to the Epicureans' status as political outsiders. "Do not expect too much," the core of their thinking seems to say, "and you will not be disappointed." Or: Set the bar low enough and you'll sail over it every time. The thinking also seems similar to Buddhism in its focus on eliminating desire and selfishness as the source of unhappiness. Which is quite sensible, if ultimately defeating. As I walked I also remembered that while I was studying in Berlin I had met a kid who identified himself as an Epicurean, in the strict sense. I remember him as indeed having been somewhat restrained in his habits, entirely unlike myself, and that I found his company boring. Surely it is sad for someone to have resigned himself to the modesty and low expectations of Epicureanism (ultimately a kind of cynicism) at age 20? Or was it a token of wisdom beyond his years? The other thing I remember about this chap—he was a Canadian—was that his father was an arms dealer, which he thought was pretty cool.

There is more to be said about Epicureanism, obviously. It may be wrong to see it is fundamentally pessimistic, for instance. Maybe what I interpret as pessimism is in fact no more than a hard-baked realism. It would also be worth looking into the unconscious cultural pockets where Epicureanism survives today. As a philosophical system it does not seem to be a very good fit for America for instance: If "what is good is easy to get," why stake out the moon?

Ayvazovsky

Here is a painting by Ayvazovsky

Turtles for Lanterns

The other day I went with a friend to the Istanbul Modern Art Museum. Setting and view masterful, glorious, as always in Istanbul. Architecture commensurate with the usual idea of a modern art museum without being too noticeable. The special exhibit was dedicated to the work of Cihed (Jihad!) Burak, who seems to be very much loved in Turkey, and who did indeed produce some beautiful but above all funny paintings, but whom I appreciated far less than I would have if we'd seen his stuff first, instead of after touring through the permanent exhibits. There always seems to be a saturation point with museums—if I am paying attention, I can only soak up so much before succumbing to an abstracted fatigue. In any case I liked Burak’s work less than Abidin Dino's work as featured at the Sakip Sabanci (a Turkish bigshot) Museum, seen before my holiday travels. Go ahead and do an image search for Dino’s stuff—it’s really good.
Two things I wanted to note about the permanent exhibits: An amazing painting of the Ottoman fleet at anchor as the sun sets over the city, done in the late 1800's by a Russian named Ayvazovski (from the Caucasus, maybe?). Quite simply better than the real thing, with light that seemed to emanate from some source behind the canvas. The second was a wonderful anecdote my friend told me apropos of an old court painter about how the sultans liked to place candles on the backs of turtles and set them loose to wander about the imperial tulip garden to provide atmospheric effect as they amused themselves with their courtesans at night. What a lovely picture—I am very sold on the old Ottomans. What amazing aesthetes.

A Point on Stoicism

A point on Stoicism. Like some Eastern religions, Stoicism advocated a form of meditation training the mind to remain in the moment, to avoid brushing up against the dead ends of the loss both constituted by the past and inherent in the future. I went on a walk this morning with the express intention of so remaining “in the moment." It felt exciting to be undertaking an excursion in the great occidental tradition of walking and thinking, here on the very brink of the orient. Multicultural peripateticism. Aside from the chaff of cross-cultural frottage, I found that vision interfered with my efforts to remain in the present. There was nothing I could see that did not instantly relate to something unseen. Nothing was visible without also suggesting that it was merely the shadow of something invisible, usually of past processes. Mountains are the shadows of mighty geological clashes in the remote past. The built city is the shadow of millions of mighty struggles against indifferent time and entropy. The day itself seems to "recede into shadow" when I start thinking about all the days that have come before it, and how my understanding of this day is a function of lessons learned on all the days that have been.
My thoughts themselves are the shadows of some ur-thoughts knocking around my brain precipitated by current stimuli. And yet the effort to pare away the shadows, to get to the bottom of things, is always a vain one. To “live in the moment,” then, I must shut my eyes. And when using my sight I must be content to walk about in a world of shadows and reflections, to spar with them if need be, but know know that I will never vanquish them. Maybe there is comfort in knowing that the surface of things screens more than it shows. Maybe such an understanding can be donned as a vest against ugliness itself and the pratfalls of superficiality. Maybe tomorrow I will take an Epicurean walk and see what happens.

Loose ends all tied up

Following is the very last installment of the post about the Sudan trip that is starting to feel like it happened a long time ago. Enjoy:

Saturday: We have reached Wadi Halfa. We are camped on the desert under a sky bright with stars leaking light from some other world. The wind is gusting hard and kicking up dust between the fly and the tent whence which purgatory it then sifts down through the skylight and the windows and covers every surface in an accreting tide. I have dust in my hair, on my tongue, in my teeth. I wonder about all the things this dust has been before it became a part of me. It catches the light like millions of motes or flies when I turn on my torch and cleave the night's fabric. Today at sunset Ian and I climbed a scree mountain and heaved rocks down onto the pan below, seabed to our island. Inselberg. With the dust-saturated hues of dust for water. We pulled into Wadi Halfa at midmorning after an easy drive, mostly along graded roadbed being prepared for asphaltization, then around the very edge of Lake Nasser, which at the neck I went to examine it was reeking and otherworldly. In town we were quickly located by a fellow named Midhan Mahir, who is a fixer for the ferry and other things khawajaat (Arabic for whitey) might want to undertake but lack the bureaucratic savvy to pull off without assistance. At first we were wary of his smoothness--Ian would not let him handle any of our documents--but it did not take long for him to win us over and convince us that he was the right man to get us and the vehicle onto the ferry. When we asked about Internet, he said that while Wadi Halfa had no Internet facilities as such, we were welcome to come over to his place and surf the web using his mobile phone as a modem. When I asked how we would know his house, he fiddled for a minute with his phone and pointed to two sets of numbers on the display: These were the GPS coordinates to his house. After lunch we actually used the GPS device to navigate through Wadi Halfa's sandy streets to his family's compound to take him up on his offer. The mudplaster house centered around a sandy courtyard shaded by a tamarind. Midhan entertained us with stories and pictures of past clients (including one really inspired John Bull who paddled a kayak up Lake Nasser until he was hauled in by the Egyptian army), served us tea, and patiently reestablished the Internet connection several times when it blanked out. He was gracious and earnest. We did not yet know that he would prove very ineffective when it came to more difficult tasks like getting the Land Rover on the ferry. For the present I will spare myself the unpleasant taste of that memory.

We left his place toward sunset to seek out a bushcamp. Which was easy, since a few minutes in any direction but toward the unnatural lake puts you in the middle of the desert. Given all the sand sifting into my tent, I think we would have done better to select a site in the lee of something--but then again, why worry about something that will only multiply the purgative effect of tomorrow's shower, the first in six days? Tomorrow will be nice--besides sleeping in and spending a lot of time in the shade, I plan on finishing this trip log and making some headway on the Belgian in Africa story. I might also take a late afternoon hike to one of the crumbling mountains surrounding us that appear to have erupted out of the sand--fossils of heaven-tending aspirations that are slowly crumbling and returning to earth.

We will be boarding an Aswan-bound ferry four days from today, and will arrive in five and a half. At which point I think I will get straight on a train to Cairo. Maybe a month there? Where will I be when the new year begins? I wish to return to Istanbul, visiting the Levant thitherbound. I wish to cross Libya and then enter Algeria, then travel south through the wasteland proper to Niger. I wish to return to Zambia to pick up what waits for me there. I wish to hunker down and have time to work. And yet I wish to forever clutch at the feeling of journeying, of being hurried along while I gaze at the entirety of my life through the prism of the landscape into which I am venturing. How did Whitman put it? To be still, and yet be hurried? Perhaps that is best. I want to leave it all behind me, but there are people I want to get in touch with from my past. All I ask for is an ornateness that is simple, and for the new year a profound truth that I will glean by skimming, a revelation from God channeled through the embrace of someone unclean, and a recognition that is totally abstracted and anonymous. Ha!

But there are days I haven't written about somewhere back there, three of them, and let's see if I can't fish them up: On the first of these neglected days we were up at first light. A frenetic and oath-peppered sequence of me collapsing the tent, rolling it up, putting my things away, brushing my teeth, doing my sit-ups and push-ups, putting in my contacts, making my coffee, everything all at once and within the space of 20 minutes so that we could roll over the pan and ease onto the tarmac road just as the sun's first flames licked the low hills in the east. Macadam eventually yielded to graded preliminary roadbed and rubble and frontage roads for graders and dumptrucks and all manner of earthmoving machines, thousands of them to wreak the first work of modernity on the desert. Some of the crews waved happily at us as we passed them on the graded road. Others gestured angrily as if to challenge our use of it while it was still under construction. Parts of it were unpassable due to piled rubble that would eventually be spread out and tarred, forcing us onto the frontage.

At length we arrived at Karima, site of another ferry across the Nile. To locate it I had to ask only once: Wain il bontoon 'abr in-nahr? There it was, another two-hour exercise in frustration waning into restive forced patience. The precise modality of the incompetence bears no mention. Suffice it that we were cheated out of a spot once and had to wait for a long time once aboard the pontoon for the pilot to dislodge from the bank. Why bother to build a landing when you can stand around yelling and puffing yourself up with mock importance all day instead? Again, there was a nearly completed bridge just downstream, so we were among the last to have to deal with that farce. To what poorly executed labor will Sudan's ferry captains turn their hands once the bridges are built?

High fives all around once we were off and lumbering through the sleepy town toward the road on the other side. As we drove I took pictures of industrial and communications installations--noting their GPS coordinates as I did--preliminary to a mock espionage report I will be composing in Cairo. I hope no Sudanese official happens to rest his eyes on that last sentence, and then misunderstands it! A some point we got to Dongola. Fuel, cold water, a bit of rest. Then a couple of hours up a sandy track along the Nile through the agricultural heartland of the Nubians. Nubia had a look of long agricultural prosperity, in sharp contrast to the philistine oil prosperity of Khartoum and the tentacular roads that snake away from it. That night we camped out under an acacia in a farmer's field. I saw some children out in it tending goats and asked them where their father was, so I could ask permission to stay there, which he readily gave when I found him, a large, proud-looking Nubian man in spotless gellabiyyah and fez. We ate that night a curry with Lake Tana fish that we'd had in the freezer from Bahir Dar. I read late into the night and listened as the insects dumbly beat their wings against my nylon walls.

The next day the road north would pass through farming villages and then strike out into a desert almost martian in appearance--or at least like the Mars seen in Total Recall. I asked Ian what place might come to mind if he were shown a picture of the landscape we were passing through and not told what it was. He said Afghanistan. I said the Gobi. We pulled by in a wadi somewhere out in the desert to sit out the hot hours and have some lunch. There I started writing the story about the Belgian in Africa, and found myself inadvertently borrowing from Bolano's method of using absurd nonsequitur and undermining of narrative authority. We ate a delicious chicken Teriyaki prepared by Ian. At some point later that day, we heard the tell-tale flapping of a blown tire. It was the left rear. A quick change and we were on our way again. That night we camped hard by the Nile. The truck was nestled in among some date palms, and I pitched my tent right on the fissured earth of the riverbank. I slept early to give my road-jangled bones a rest. Before sleeping I put up my hammock, lashing it to the car at one end and around a palm trunk at the other. I lay in it briefly, but then discovered that I was more content to let it flap about in the strong wind. To cut the whiplash, I cinched the hammock around the midsection, then stepped back to behold a giant bikini top filled by a voluptuous wind.

The next day I had an incomparable feeling of abandon and freedom as we drove over the desert with me perched atop the spare tire mounted on the Land Rover's rear door. It reminded me of being on a boat, with a feeling of movement that rocked and swayed rather than jangled. The deck of a ship is high above the keel. Up there among the wind and photons, the engine noise was also more of a distant gurgle, as on a ship. We passed through several villages with me perched on the back like that, raising many an eyebrow. A green Narrenschiff shipping white apparitions through the desert and signaling some dissolute purpose that could only have meaning in the glutted and voluptuous lands of whose mysterious existence we were a sign. I held out like that for about an hour, but it was difficult going, like sitting an unruly horse, and finally I thought it best to dismount before my grip gave out and I was flung off with possibly nasty consequences.

Another wadi during the hot hours for lunch, and then off again. The day's other highlight came toward the end of the afternoon drive, when we chanced on a tiny village straddling the desert road after a good hour of nothing. I stepped out and was greeted by a portly Nubian man fumbling with a cigarette. I asked if we could have some wellwater, and he beckoned me in under an awning. As I laved water into our jug from his barrel, I noticed that he had a generator-powered refrigerator in a corner. He invited me to look inside. I cracked the door and felt an access of cool air wash over my legs and feet. Inside were dozens of ice-cold 7-Ups and Pepsis. I bought us each a can and ran back to the car with the loot. The Pepsi was delicious. I drank it in 3 gulps and flung the can out onto the scarp. That was the day's second highlight. Don't start.

That night we camped up a dry gulley ringed by good-sized peaks. I found wood for a fire--I had to dig up roots--but it was meager and did not last long. Once I ran out of the thicker stuff I grew disgusted with the endeavor and tossed the rest of it on in a single bunch. The flames surged and nearly licked the car, but soon expired. The fire then subsided into a tangle of skinny orange worms that periodically gave up sparks to the wind coursing down the wadi. At length I pissed the embers to sleep and went to bed.

There was one more thing I wanted to mention: Yesterday at sunset and with a wind scouring the desert, the sky was full of cirrus clouds that appeared to be hurtling toward the western horizon, as if they were draining into the hole burned by the setting sun.

And so ends the Sudan narrative.

An obscure note

The confusion of the caduceus with the rod of Asclepius as the symbolic representative of medicine, as is the case in America, is very appropriate to the state of American health care. The caduceus, you see, is an ancient symbol of commerce, not of medicine. How appropriate that it should be the symbol of commerce that gets conflated with the medical profession's standard!

A Place of my Own

Hi there readers, if readers there be.

With the holidays over and yours truly back in Istanbul, an update is in order. Christmas in Sweden was nice. Lots of stories told by my grandmothers about the way things were, about the men in their lives who have gone on. At one point over a delicious Christmas dinner at my grandmother's house with everything in it just the way it had been 25 years ago, I looked at her aged face and realized with wonder that the tale she was just then telling about her father had played out well over a hundred years ago. It was about how his mother on her deathbed had implored her adoptive son, the one sired by a snake-charmer, to take care of my great-grandfather Hjalmar once she had passed on, to take him under his wing. And how Hjalmar, distressed at being seen as defenseless, had carried this formative slight with him forever after as it spurred him from strength to strength, from one achievement to the next as he tried to show his mother's ghost that he was indeed someone to be reckoned with. I also liked the story about the portrait of himself he had commissioned many years later as a gift to his wife during the halcyon days when he ran a steel mill, which story had it that he would always have to rouse the painter out of his drunken slumber when he came by on his lunch breaks to sit for the portrait, and that he had been scowling at the painter in a hot fury on the day of the portrait's finishing touches, producing an effect on the canvas that delighted Hjalmar: "Now that is what a boss is supposed to look like!" That portrait has been sternly presiding over my grandmother's living room since before I was born. Another story has it that a Polish handyman who was helping her around the house quit on the job one day because he could no longer endure Hjalmar's ceaseless scowl.

I realized something about my family's history I should have known before: Both sides have been involved with metals and mining at some time. It would seem that my own fascination has something congenital about it, no? There was even an African connection--circumstance took my grandfather Gunnar to Ghanaian mines on a business trip in the 1950's.

On my first day in Sweden I got an e-mail from my cousin Sebastian to let me know that he would be getting married a week from then in Bonn, Germany. I managed to find a flight and be at the wedding, which was very pleasant and dignified. Sebastian and I reconnected after 12 years or so of not seeing each other this summer, when he and his then-fiancee Veronique visited New York for a few days. Sebastian, who is a painter, was telling me how much the portrait of Hjalmar had also terrified him on his childhood visits to our grandparents in Sweden. The wedding was held at City Hall in Bonn, and was really very nice. The chambers where they exchanged vows before the state were high-ceilinged, wood-paneled and decked out with somber portraits of somber statesmen who have been dead for two hundred years. And I thought the officiant, who must wed dozens of couples a week, discharged the duties of her office with admirable seriousness.

I also generally enjoyed connecting with this German branch of my family. Both my Aunt Katarina and Uncle Bertil have roots in Sweden, so the family speaks Swedish at home. Actually it's a curious mixture of Swedish and German that I dubbed Sveutsch, and which they call Svyska. There is even some of that playful linguistic invention that results out of all human intimacy: The word for bed in their family, for instance, is örk, with heavy emphasis on the throaty German 'r'. Veronique, who is Quebecoise, speaks neither of those languages, so it was a polyglot affair, full of translations and twisted tongues. Late on the night of the wedding celebration, Katarina brought out an old photo album with pictures from the time she flew to visit her brother (my father) and my mother during their early years in Canada. I noticed with some astonishment that my father looked slim and dashing in these images, in which he was younger than I am now.

After that I went to Geneva to ring in the new year with an old friend. We went to church on the eve of the new year, something I haven't done in nearly a decade. It was in the Cathedral of St. Pierre, where Calvin preached (my friend disputes this, but she is wrong) his hard message nearly 500 years ago, but the message this time was more in line with the warm and fuzzy and marketable new-age Christianity, and for at least that evening, I sensed a diffuse sort of spirituality stirring within me. My flirtation with the numinous may also have had something to do with my reading of Crime and Punishment (no Zosimov in that book, but it beckons the reader back into the congregation's fold all the same), so you see, I was being subjected to very strong influences. I think I may have struck an atheistic pose in the past, but I think I may be too humble to dare state categorically that God does not exist. Uncertainty is the natural state of man--read the brilliant section about the dream of the disease of strong convictions at the end of Crime and Punishment for reinforcing effect at the hands of a hoary master. Other than the exalted setting and the festive air, the service appealed because of its multilingualism. Various men and women bestrode the pulpit to spread the word in something like 8 languages. I liked it, though Swedish was not one of them, which in its turn stirred a diffuse feeling of national offense. After the service ended, we stepped out of the cathedral right into the countdown on the public square. Dix, neuf, huit...it was a very elegant end to the year.

Now I am back in Istanbul. I took over the apartment from a departing Darren yesterday, and am planning to be here for two months for the time being. It is a good arrangement, and one which I hope will promote good work. The spirit of Calvin lives on.

I might also note, for any of you who are interested, that I won my fantasy football league in convincing fashion.