Exercise Day in Goma
The ruckus started far too early, particularly for a Sunday: shouting, pounding of feet, the four-in-the-morning din of remarkably motivated and cooperative (or conscripted) voices calling what sounded like military cadence. Such a Sunday morning racket on any military base in America, though unforgivable, would be no cause for alarm, but given Goma’s recent history of genocide, refugee thoroughfare, rebel hotbed, and volcanic eruption, it was moderately discomforting. The 12’ brick walls separating the street-facing rooms in the Hotel Ihusi from the road proved more echo chamber than noise buffer, so there was no avoiding it: there would be no more sleep this morning.
The Hotel Ihusi sits on the north shore of Lake Kivu; Rwanda to the east and the expanse of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the west; the idyllic, mountain range-surrounded lake to the south and smack in the middle of what has been, more than once over the last two decades, pure hell. The roads in Goma are shit. But with the sister-city of Gisenyi just a few hundred meters to the right, and with it an international border with Rwanda (currently passively patrolled by the Uruguayan army), the road in front of the hotel is paved from the border to the airport about fifteen kilometers to the north, and this morning it appears that every male in Goma is running on it. Or doing push-ups. Or knee bends, or arm swings in a circle or break dancing moves or those Russian dancer jumping squat kicks that I thought only my college roommate Dave was capable of mimicking (unimportantly, he did the break dancing as well, usually shirtless and sometimes with a red paisley bandana on his head. Such were the early 90’s). The parade that was exercise day in Goma continued until well after sunrise, and every conceivable getup strolled by, velour track suits and dirty jeans with thread-bare t-shirts and tight bicycle shorts and button down long sleeve shirts with khakis and Arsenal soccer jerseys and flip flops and a man in a toga, and all this is promising, because despite genocide, refugee highways, rebellions and volcanoes, who exercises? Those who believe they have a tomorrow.
A significant percentage of those who have entered Goma over the last twenty years have likely done so on foot, their possessions on their backs unless even that space was dispossessed by a child incapable of walking, what family they still had to their front and rear. A chartered UN flight, despite leg-numbing vibrations from the twin propellers and an approach that seemed dangerously, dangerously close to hitting the shacks lining both sides of the airport runway, is a bit more sedate means to enter the Congo. After a safe landing and a quick bag check, I’m picked up by our advance party, here to teach criminal law and the Law of Armed Conflict to the DRC Armed Forces, and we drive into town. A brief deviation: In 1862 the Nevada mountain town of Virginia City had fewer than 4,000 residents; a year later, as word spread of the legendarily bountiful Comstock Lode, the population nearly quadrupled to more than 15,000. Though the term was not yet in use (and anyway, may have originated with a river tool used for gathering timber rather than the more accepted population explosion), Virginia City was the quintessential boomtown – a community that experiences rapid growth, both economically and demographically.
The problem with the impressions of outsiders is that they’re almost always wrong. Or at least uneducated and tainted by our own histories, or confirmation bias, that thing we do when we bend what we see in front of us to fit what we expect to see in front of us, but Main Street Goma conjures pictures of 1860’s Virginia City, so familiar to all northern Nevadans, with a freshly paved road and clapboard storefronts and an infusion of cash, industriousness, and opportunity. The Goma on the drive from the airport – to be fair, just one main road in a city that covers 30 square miles – is pure energy. Everyone is moving: moto taxis saturate the city, all drivers male and passengers female, riding exclusively side-saddle; the store fronts open for business; every conceivable product hawked from head-top baskets (fish, live chickens, fabric, mattresses), sold from the back of a cart (steel rebar, engines, concrete, mattresses), or transported via the marvelous chikudu, a wooden kick scooter progenitor apparently hewn solely from industrial strength materials, a Minotaur incarnate.
Goma, like Virginia City, has experienced a population explosion. The comparison is a bit hollow; the population of Virginia City quadrupled in a year due to those seeking their fortune, while Goma gained nearly a million Rwandan refugees in four days. In three months in 1994, the Hutu majority in neighboring Rwanda killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus; in July, after Tutsi rebels organized, they chased the same amount of Hutus – many of them the very same people who had just committed the mass atrocities – across the border and into the DRC, bursting Goma at the seams. The reasons for the genocide are too complex for even Occam’s razor to dissect (one man’s refugee is another’s genocidaire), but the fallout, along with inflation, corruption, a never-ending war, and a 2002 volcanic eruption that decimated nearly half the town, is that Goma hasn’t experienced much peace and quiet in the last twenty years. But it’s trying.
Today the Ihusi is just one of two hotels in a city of more than a million people where “westerners” ostensibly feel safe (as of this writing, the U.S. State Department “strongly recommends you avoid all travel to the city of Goma. . .”), and they can charge $70 to $200 – cash only, please – for one night’s stay in a country where the average annual income is $120. And people pay it. Pilots on a layover, American military, French NGOs. The Congolese are here too; a provincial governor for whom a line quickly forms to pay respect, women in bright Liputa prints, the non-hotel staff Congolese separated from everyone else not only by our obvious whiteness but by the relative grating of English or German or even French when it’s compared to the melodic lilt of Lingala. Like a musical could break out at any moment. Also, the Congolese consider fashion a national pastime. They have contests. And a club, the sapeurs, that has spawned a lexicon and a cultural phenomenon, and they dress like every day is go-to-Church Sunday. No cargo pockets here, thank you, and shorts are for little boys. The poverty of Africans juxtaposed with the care in which they take in dress is alarming, and the Congolese are downright rakish. To be fair, the Ihusi is fantastic. There’s a lakeside breakfast and a crystal clear swimming pool, clipped-wing, crazy-eyed Grey Crested cranes prowling the grounds, and decent beer and red clay tennis courts with an instructor, if you wish, and a wood-paneled room the hotel passes off as a gym where I met an Indian Special Forces officer who, despite a grin and his head wobbling culturally in agreement, seemed awfully pissed off that I stood him up at happy hour at le Chateau. But it’s a mirage, this Ihusi, and who knows what it portends for Goma. The city is still broke, aid money still runs the show (in 2014, only Afghanistan and Israel received more foreign aid than the DRC), corruption is still rampant, and the country’s borders were still set by King Leopold.
Outside the lobby of the Hotel Ihusi there’s this statue, a wood carving about four feet high of a tribal woman with bulging, blood shot eyes and protruding ribs and ears and a receding hair line and sharpened teeth bared in joy or wickedness. My initial instinct is that, though I find it captivating, it is what Congolese know tourists will buy, a caricature of the savage myth cultivated by Leopold and H.M. Stanley and every other colonialist, old school and neo alike, who have used Africa as a till. Racist. Like a Nazi propaganda poster or a black lawn jockey, things that never had a time or a place but rather needed human beingness to catch up to them. But then I think that even though exercise day in Goma means something, it is also worth noting that the foundation of just about every building and road in the city is volcanic rock, forged by violence.
Photos: Bujumbura, Jerusalem, Washington, D.C.
Assateague Island National Seashore
Guatemala
The Preakness
Day Tripper
Provincial Police Headquarters, Kandahar City
Got a good reason/For taking the easy way out/Got a good reason/For taking the easy way out now
I stare up at a late-model Toyota Hilux, white with red racing trim down the side, sitting parked, incongruously, ten feet above the ground and atop a faded-maroon rusted steel shipping container, a dirty twin mattress balanced on its roof like a hat. It is an odd place to put a mattress, I think, on top of a truck on top of a shipping container. A wood and concrete water tower, ancient looking but likely built by the Russians, partially obscures my view, as does a tree of undetermined type. I know it is brown. Everything here is brown. There are varying shades, but far and away the most abundant is a sandy, tannish-brown, the color of the earth here in Kandahar Province, pervasive in the brick used to make the buildings, or in the mud and straw mix used to cover those bricks, or in the dust that covers everything from brick to tree to child to perched Toyota Hilux. Even the one frog and one lizard I see – the sum total of non-avian wildlife I spy in a thirty-day period – have adapted to a gritty light brown the exact same color as the ground upon which they walk; I would have stepped on them but for their movement. The houses and villages here, too, would be unintentionally crushed were a giant to walk among them, they rise up from the earth seamlessly, giving the effect they have either been molded out of the ground below or the earth scraped away from around them.
I turn from the truck and water tower and walk back towards Police Headquarters (PHQ), a two-story building on one end of a small dirt and gravel courtyard surrounded by other nondescript two-story buildings, stepping over a rivulet of sewer water and then around a line of men of varying ages waiting to do business at PHQ. There is activity here, the ubiquitous goings-on of daily life at a bureaucratic center, noteworthy only because of the loaded pistol on my hip and the stark absence of women. I see only one, though she sees me first, furiously waving her hand at me, an exaggerated version of the hand-and-arm signal my grandmother, in her rare moments of impatience, would use to hush me up. The woman is in full burqa, squatting in the courtyard against the passenger side door of a truck, no skin visible but for her left hand and wrist, and that only because of her extended-arm wave, violent, not to say hello or to beckon but clearly to indicate that I should, immediately, cease looking at her. I suspect she cares not that I was not, in fact, looking at her until her waving caught my attention, first causing in me curiosity that quickly shifted to bewilderment and then to something just short of alarm as I suspected this hand-wave was the functional equivalent of her running her hand across her throat.
This is very much Kandahar. The American footprint here is small, the few tents and plywood buildings housing Security Force Assistance Team-10 (SFAT-10) so jammed together into a space about as big as a basketball court I turn sideways to walk between them. SFAT-10 is on an open base, meaning the Americans walk around freely between their own small area and the police headquarters next to it, walking past a mosque in between; and though there has been a glut of “blue on green” (the board game-simplistic name given to the event when Afghan Soldiers shoot coalition forces) attacks in Afghanistan, this is PHQ, a relative zone of safety run by a Chief of Police one American calls a “god-king.” The Chief is a young man, somewhere in his early thirties – Afghans tend to give their birth date in brackets, like [in the winter, before the Russians came]; he’s also a Brigadier General and Chief of Police with neither military nor policing experience who rose to power the old-fashioned way, by being a complete but discriminate ass-kicker. Another American tells me he enjoys power and popularity because he is the epitome of what a Pashtun man should be, which I take to mean that in conjunction with valuing honor and respect, he has no problem sending you on your way, metaphorically speaking.
I have come here to speak with the Chief via the good graces of both the Chief and SFAT-10, who picked me up from my own home at Kandahar Airfield in a three-vehicle convoy of giant, armored vehicles having a passing similarity to a semi truck with a gun turret. Kandahar Airfield (KAF) itself is as a big a base as any in Afghanistan, essentially the acreage of any one-runway international airport, plus outbuildings, and a deployment experience here is a world away from the smaller, spartaned existences of the FOBs and COPs and VSPs spread throughout the villages south and west of here. At one of these male-only outposts, you might walk past a Soldier nonchalantly pissing, openly, into a steel pipe sticking out of the ground specifically for this purpose, and time is passed by patrols and camp improvements during the day and video games and muted masturbatory sessions by night, but KAF has indoor showers, and a KFC, and a T.G.I. Friday’s, and its own currency and at least six different dining facilities and The Boardwalk, an oval, wood-planked, covered walkway with shops and restaurants and barber shops on the outside and a turf football field, basketball court, and hockey rink, courtesy of the Canadian forces, on the in. I spend less than thirty days here, but the surreality of the multitude of nations and uniforms and civilian contractors and armored vehicles and budding Boardwalk romances and sheer bizarreness of the post-apocalyptic Mad Maxness of it all never lessens. Rocket attacks are spare but marked by their own oddity, precursed with a siren and a disarmingly calm human-imposter female voice. The siren wails and then, over a camp-wide P.A. system, the Rocket Attack lady warns: ROCKET. ATTACK. ROCKET, ATTACK. Her digitized accent is slighted to the British just enough to share their air of understatement and calm, yet still conspiratorial and a bit creepy and certainly not human enough to assuage my suspicions she’s in on it, like she knows the rockets are coming and waits until the last minute simply to continue to exert her dominance over us. There are just one or two sirens in a matter of weeks, but then there is a night with five in a matter of a few hours, two of which are followed by audibly impacting rockets, and she has us scrambling from vehicle or office to bunker and then back again, multiple times, like cockroaches when the lights are turned on.
SFAT-10 picks me up in their M-ATVs, huge, rubber wheeled vehicles one driver tells me handles “like an F-150”; we wind our way past the NATO barracks, and the infamous “poo-pond,” indisputably Kandahar Airfield’s signature landmark, a Walden Pond of treated human shit. We exit KAF through one of the several Entry Control Points and onto the highway towards the city. The forty-five minute drive from KAF to PHQ in Kandahar City is smooth and uneventful; I pass it largely by staring out the thick, quadrilateral slit of window to my left, looking forward only when I feel the beginnings of backseat-nausea. Each vehicle is manned by four personnel: a driver, a TC (truck commander), a security man, and a turret-gunner; their radio chatter is brilliant in its mundanity. They discuss the vast array of dirt available at KAF; their live-burial preferences, were their choices limited to concrete, gravel, or sand; how much it would hurt to get run over by one of their own vehicles (clarifying question: “are we talking head to feet, or feet to head?”); how many pounds in a ton; the cultural and religious transcendentalism of Hacky Sack; how KAF, due to the excess of sports injuries, is the most dangerous place in Afghanistan; the delicious irony in the name of the gypsy people of Afghanistan, the Kuchis. A female soldier in another vehicle delivers, spoken word and over the radio, the first forty-five seconds of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s magnum opus, “Baby Got Back.”
My vision of Afghanistan is asterisked: I have a uniform, and a gun, and I travel via helicopter or armored vehicle and see the world through bullet-proof glass. I have no beard. I speak with the locals exclusively through a translator, outside of my disastrously pronounced “asalaam alaikum,” “sangyee,” and “manana,” and I speak with them only because of the tragedy imposed upon them by an American soldier who murdered their children and wives and fathers. I am neither a Muslim nor one of the People of the Book. I am an intruder, I reside here only for an eye-blink, and, being Western and specifically American, my worldview is based selfishly upon me and how I fit into it, not upon my father’s history, or my tribe’s, or my people’s. Yet, also being Western and specifically American and perhaps a bit introspective, I have opinions, and difficulty squaring them, or posing them for that matter, and am perplexed by much that is Afghanistan. I, perhaps unfairly, also determine that I could be here one hundred years more and my perplexity would not be much diminished.
On the way home to America I stop, again, at Ali al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, for years now a stopover for service members on their way forward, or home; once a thriving metropolis and now a bit of a ghost town as one war ends and another, presumably, winds down. The USO is still open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and always populated by Soldiers and Marines and Airmen in uniform, asleep on couches or armchairs or on the phone to family at home or, most likely, either playing or watching first-person shooter video games. For some, just like real life. There are six televisions and 360 degree viewing of, I assume, some version of Call of Duty, the sights and sounds of death and destruction and carnage piped in for your viewing and listening pleasure, be it four a.m. or in the heat of the late afternoon. Like the Afghans I see, I know not how to square what I see with what I think, and with my own asterisked experiences, and I think instead of Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote, to paraphrase, that words are simply abbreviations anyway, perpetually inadequate to properly express what you see and feel, which I take to mean you have to be there to know it, and even then it’s probably not enough.
Episode I: The 141 to Union Station
For most Americans living outside the east coast’s metropolitan areas, riding a train is an event. It is a luxury for those in surfeit of both time and money, and its inefficiency, especially in the vastness that is America left of the Mississippi, further relegates it to “vacation” status. There is a reason Disney’s monorail – an absolute bore of epic proportions – remains one of the most traveled rail systems in the world. If you are an American and you are on a train, then chances are you’re on vacation.
Mine, then, officially begins as I’m sitting on my backpack, fleece zipped up against the Baltimore chill on a Thursday morning, waiting for the 141 regional from BWI to DC’s Union Station while sizing up the Asian fellow next to me. He sits down on the bench, two shopping bags, a shoulder bag and wheeled overnighter beside him, and strokes a few black, wispy hairs hanging from his chin. Alan – his American name – is a Chinese MBA student in his first year at Penn State, and he’s returning from a Spring Break trip west where he visited LA, Disneyland, Universal Studios, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas, where he scored a pair of Timberlands at an outlet mall.
“How much do you think these cost,” he asks me. I offer up $60 and he responds by raising his eyebrows and gently fingering a small “Gore Tex” tag sewed into one of the seams. I do not bite, and stick with $60. “Eighty dollars” he says, and though I feign surprise, lips pushed out and mouth corners turned down, he has a bigger point to make.
“Do you know how much these cost in China?” I do not. “Two hundred dollars.” He then exposes the tag on the tongue’s interior, revealing the words “Made in China.” Alan laughs like this might be the funniest, most outrageous thing he’s ever heard.
A north-bound train approaches, interrupting Alan’s laughter, and he excuses himself as he stands up to take a picture of the oncoming engine. “My first American train,” he says, quickly snapping photos. He asks me to guess how many pictures he’s taken on his 5 day trip – Alan likes to make me guess things – and I err on what I think is the highside: “twelve hundred.” Alan pauses, then says “five thousand.” He follows with more raised eyebrows, sucking his tongue against his teeth in that Asian conversation filler that can indicate emphasis, assent, or the Chinese version of an American “um.”
After finding out I’m in the Army, Alan says he too was a Soldier, for ten years. He also says he was in “IT,” and I immediately peg Alan for a spy. I’ve been reading too much of The Atlantic lately, and am seeking adventure, so it is not a difficult leap for me to make. Alan doesn’t help matters when he opens his laptop to show me his vacation photos, his screensaver an SR-71 Blackbird flying over the Sierra Nevada’s. As any halfway decent spy, Alan must sense my shift in mood, and he explains away the rookie spy move with an “I like airplanes.” He asks me what he should do in DC, and I start into a list of museums and monuments he can see for free and over a short time period. The Smithsonian – there are eighteen, not counting the zoo – plus the Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson memorials, the Viet Nam vets memorial, the Korean, one of my favorites. Alan listens politely and then asks “how can I get into the Pentagon?” I quickly tell him he’s not allowed, but my Walter Mitty imagination subsides as he begins cranking through his vacation photos. The incredible tediousness of other people’s pictures spans cultural divides, I conclude, and I think that if Alan is a spy, he is either awful or exceptionally good. He realizes the pictures are boring as well (“these are kind of boring”), and I think that if Alan wasn’t trying to hack into my computer, we might just be friends. May we achieve peace by boring the snot out of each other with left clicks and mouse pads.
I leave Alan at Union Station, after first taking a few pictures of him with his camera, and exit out the west side of the building to DC Metro’s new bike station, a small but beautiful glass building that looks like the breaching back of the Loch Ness. I go inside to take a look, and am greeted by a guy sporting a shaved head and a ridiculously good Mark Twain mustache that parts to reveal less than perfect teeth but a great grin when I mention the sifaka Lemurs, two-pound circus freaks that run in loping strides, arms longer than their legs and held erect above their heads whenever they’re on the move. They leap between razor-edged spires in the Tsinghy de Bamarah nature reserve in northern Madagascar, where the bike worker has told me he just returned from two years in the Peace Corps doing “environmental stuff” – compost, gardening, water recycling – and he’s staying in DC to continue his efforts. I wonder how hard it is to get to Madagascar, but then he’s pulled away by customers, and I suspect our conversation is as good as it’s going to get anyway. Besides, I can see the Irish Times directly over his left shoulder, and with a day to kill, it is calling to me.
The permanently sticky table-topped Irish Times is what an American dive bar should be: sedate, local, cheap and decidedly irreverent. Tacked up around the bar are what must be over a thousand patches from fire and police departments around the country, and though there is Guinness on tap, the only top-shelf liquor I spy is a dust-covered bottle of Tanqueray. The chalkboard specials are Meatloaf, $10.95; Cold Meatloaf, $8.95. I wonder if it will be free if I wait around until Monday. An oil painting of John Wayne in an Indian chief’s headdress and a Warhol knockoff of Margaret Thatcher acknowledging a crowd, Crime Wave scrawled above the painting, frame a television, where Georgetown is about to beat Syracuse in the Big East tournament, and the heated rivalry explains the gathered Thursday afternoon crowd. It is equal parts older drunk white guy and late-twenty yuppie black guys (Georgetown University: 6% black; Georgetown Hoyas basketball team: 82% black), but Syracuse is Syracuse and beating them brings many a DC foe together.
A DC dive bar is as good a start to a trip as anywhere else, but the next 72 hours do their best to dampen my spirit. I am flying on the cheap – free military rotators to Germany, and maybe Kosovo if I am lucky enough to time them right – and I am getting what I pay for. An eight and a half hour flight on a C-17, sitting upright on cargo-strap jump seats and facing south the entire time while my plane flies east; seven hours of German rigidity while I unsuccessfully attempt to get a cash advance on my credit card, sans a pin number; connecting commercial flights in Frankfurt and Zürich, where my lack of sleep and irritability get the best of me and I quickly tire of the uniformly cheap leather-jacketed, hair-metal band coiffured European youth. My imagination, too, kicks in, and I suspect they are all heavies for second-rate Russian mobsters. I don’t fear pleather-wearing western european youth, but I do Russian mobsters, second-rate or otherwise, and I put my nose back into my book.
Finally: a two am arrival in Thessolinki, Greece. The town was named for Alexander’s half-sister, and he himself was born near here, prior to making almost all the known world his own. Here too, I start my own adventure, mine north and west for ten days rather than east for ten years. There are still arguments as to what incessant need drove Alexander to leave his home in Macedon, where he stood to inherit a kingdom and a lifetime of luxury. Perhaps it was a determination to prove himself worthy to his father, King Phillip II; perhaps a need to justify his mother’s explanation of his birth as the product of the midnight visit of a God serpent. Regardless, I find common ground in the need to explore, the need to experience life in order to justify it, the need for anonymity in an effort to somehow improve upon the familiar.
Episode II: Tasos the Buffalo
Thessaloniki, Greece
Fickle are the emotional meanderings of solo travel, and touching down in Greece after almost two days of frustration elevated my spirits substantially. I had only to get to the station to catch the next train to Skopje, and after talking to a security guard, had only to find a bus to take me there. Outside, a double-length city bus is waiting, and as I get on as the only occupant, I ask the driver if this goes to the train station. He smiles and gives half a head nod. I am not confident.
“Train station?,” I ask again. He downgrades the smile to a befuddled grin, adds a shoulder shrug and does away with the half head nod. I try my limited German: “Bahnhoff?” Again, same response. Eff it; it’s late and I am tired. I open my hand to reveal a stack of change, the first of many times I entrust my money to the honesty of strangers, and he gives the universal hand-and-arm signal, that touching of pockets usually reserved for able-bodied beggars and methadone addled youth that says “sorry, no change.” It is my turn to shrug and half-smile, and I take my seat for my own private ride to the I’ll know it when I see it Thessaloniki train station.
For the first ten minutes, I am alone. But the airport is on one side of the second biggest city in Greece, the train station on the other, and two a.m. on a Sunday morning in any big city can quickly turn into a side-show. There are the typical black leggings and mini skirts, plus face piercings and fake leather jackets, faux-hawks and vodka residue emanating from twenty-something pores. Admittedly, this is just a single, long stretch of road in a big city, but she is not pretty. Graffiti is the theme of choice, and it blankets the square, angry stanchions holding up building after building of six- to eight-storey cut-out structures on either side of this main drag. It is a bit shabby, I suppose, to personify a stanchion, but if you saw them you would think that building is mad at something. Through the windows and opened doors of the bus I see a man driving his moped the wrong way down the narrow sidewalk; a giant dog lays sprawled in front of a store entryway, guarding it through intimidation more than skill; a young man and woman, she a midget and arguably a cross dressing one at that, board the bus at one stop and get off at the very next. The city outside the window goes by in stops and starts; nothing on this road seems to be built outside of the 1970’s and they are a blur of geometrical, unspirited grayness. Even the dilapidated government buildings look more Disney Land Haunted Mansion than Foundation of Democracy.
It turns out I do not, in fact, know the train station when I see it, and the bus driver unhappily stops a block and a half past my stop after I muscle my way to the front of the bus to tap him on the shoulder. It is nearly 3 a.m., and the train station, battered and dirty, is not open. Dated font Greek block letters above the entrance doors foreboding, a few homeless men and apparently at least one other early traveler, she with an old hardside suitcase, gather under the overhang and out of the wind and chill. In front there is a plastic-blanketed shop selling snacks and porn, the man behind the narrow sliding plexiglass window confirms for me that this is the train station. I ask if I can catch a train to Macedonia from here.
“Yugoslavia?,” he bellows. He is portly and bearded; an unkempt but kind face. “No,” I answer, clearly missing my cue, “Skopje.”
“Skopje is in Yugoslavia,” he says sternly, though I have no doubt he understands my intent. He is giving me a lesson. “This is Macedonia.”
Though we stand (he sits) in current day Greece, this was once Macedon, home of Alexander the Great and the kingdom of one of the greatest empires to ever govern the earth. Greeks are justifiably proud of their history – Herodotus, perhaps the father of history, was from here – and so me calling Macedonia “Macedonia” has touched a nerve. The new Macedonia, or the more geeky “FYROM” (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been a country only since 1991, and the Greeks, or more specifically the Macedonian Greeks, are not happy about it. I buy a beer, an Amstel Light tallboy, exchange introductions, and then ask Tasos about Kosovo.
“Yugoslavia?,” I ask. He answers yes.
And Bosnia? “Yugoslavia.”
“Montenegro?” He looks at me over the top of his glasses. “Yugoslavia.”
I ask where Alexander the Great was from, and he answers “that goes without saying.”
I laugh, crack open my beer, dig my fleece cap and gloves out of my backpack, pull them on tight, and look over the newspapers. I have noticed, in the short time I’ve been in Greece, that all the anglicized versions of Greek words look to me like some variant of “Vasili Tasikos,” prior to five minutes ago the only Greek guy I knew. I drink my beer quickly and buy another, again holding out a palm of coins to Tasos and letting him take what he needs. I stand next to the ice cream refrigerator, cold but out of the wind so warmer than anywhere else. A homeless guy and I share a 10 meter cheers over our Amstel Lights. There is warmth in unity. I pepper Tasos with questions until he finally, during a pause, says “Jack, come inside and get warm.”
Tasos Vouvolis – he says his last name means buffalo – has been working here at his uncle’s shop for almost ten years. He is also a plumber, but says business is not always good, so works here on weekends. His English is good, his voice the temper of an ascetic rather than a non-native speaker reaching for words. Tasos talks about the Greek economy; his concerns that because Macedonia has unfairly taken the name Macedonia (Tasos prefers they left it to history), who knows what else they will take; about Gypsies; about America and our wars. A man buys a porno mag, Tasos first puts it in a clear bag but then switches to a non-transparent black bag because the man “is shy.” He comments softly on each customer: he is a country boy, he is a methadone addict, he is a taxi driver, he doesn’t know what he is. I count the different number of cigarettes Tasos has for sale, and come up with 267. He teaches me “neasa kala” as a farewell – be good, be well – I teach him “keep it real.” It matters not that I never talk like this; “keep it real” will leave Tasos in good stead whether he travels to America or sits here for the next ten years and talks with the occasional American. I run across the street to buy Tasos and I a snack. I do not know how Europeans continue to get away with putting a fleshy pink hot dog in a croissant and calling it a breakfast pastry. Tasos serves me Russian tea, and then it is 5:30 a.m. and the train station doors open and though I am already feeling only goodness, the opening of doors has lifted me. I am on my way.
**************
I count six people waiting for the Thessaloniki to Belgrade train, though I will get off in Skopje, Macedonia. The train waits for us, so covered in graffiti I mistake it for scrap, cars waiting to be cannibalized for other, functioning trains. An official looking man directs me to stop taking pictures and then tells me this is the train to Skopje. It is a rolling museum, urban modern art on the outside and communist bloc remnant in. But it is clean, and empty, and I can sprawl out in the darkness facing forward, my shoeless feet resting on the seats in front of me, marking the beginning of the rows of seats facing towards me, ambidexterity on rails.
I drift in and out of sleep, I am a moderate insomniac despite, or because of, two bedless days on my feet and closing my eyes only on airport and airplane seats. I wake to slivers of sunlight coming in through the right hand windows, cypress trees outlined against a rising sun. A man comes through the train to ask us for our papers, and as I begin to shuffle through my back pack he lazily throws his left hand at me, letting me know not to worry about it. He is a universal bureaucrat, not a greenhorn looking to make his name but a man beaten down by years of repetition and nepotist supervision, he is a casual participant in the process. He does not need my ticket; he practically regrets his authority. I am clearly a foreigner and a paying customer, and there is no reason I would be sneaking into his country when his experience says I should be sneaking out. At the lonely Macedonia border I spy a Nirvana poster and hope it is both the literal and the figurative.
Two hours later I deboard in Skopje, and a man immediately accosts me and offers a taxi. He says he was a translator for the Americans and KFOR for ten years. I tell him I would rather walk, that I like the feeling of a pack on my back in an unfamiliar city. He asks if I need a hotel, I tell him eventually, and he says he is not familiar with the Hotel Eventually. This is, I think, a good beginning.
Episode III: Climbing Jacob’s Ladder
I exit Skopje’s train station, ignoring all calls of you need a taxi but still curious about the professional courtesies of underemployed taxi drivers. They stand close together, smoking cigarettes and talking until someone walks by, disengaging from each other long enough to shout out four or five you need a taxis. Some are more aggressive than others and will crowd you for a few steps, quietly pointing out the folly of you walking somewhere when you could oh so easily get in my taxi. Very cheap. But I continue on, doing my best to discreetly carry my two-inch thick guide book, as if the back pack and tan cargo pants somehow aren’t enough to give me away.
After ten minutes walking the wrong way and one solicitation for directions to the city center, I arrive in downtown Skopje to see a city under construction. Skopje has a walled Old Town, but the new town has fences as well, seemingly around everything. At my hotel (the Hotel Square, a “Unique Solution”) I ask the young man at the desk about the all the work going on. Alexander tells me it is new government and international money, and they are not only restoring infrastructure, but building monuments as well, “to Alexander and King Phillip II.” Perhaps Tasos’s fears weren’t misplaced.
I check in, drop my bags, and ask Alexander for dinner recommendations. He tells me only to “watch out for small gypsies,” saying “watch” with that throaty “hwa” sound for which no character exists in the English alphabet. I go out, promising to keep my eyes peeled for small gypsies, and find a city all to myself. It is a Sunday in the tourist off-season, but I am exhausted so it is just as well. I eat, read about Alexander, and drink several of the local beers before dragging myself to bed. Skopje TV, after hours, turns into a soft-core pornography telethon, and there on my television screen are several not-small ladies in varying stages of undress and all wearing hands-free headsets. They are apparently answering caller requests, unimaginative ones at that, though clearly talking far more to one another than to lonely men on the telephone. It is sad and a bit pathetic, on many counts, and though I am exhausted, I watch it until I see one of them turn around on the couch she’s sitting on, placing both hands on the back of the couch and causing it to break, her and the girl next to her tumbling over the collapsed couch and away from the camera and into a girl standing upright behind them, frilled buttocks and camisoled shoulders everywhere. Perhaps the callers aren’t so unimaginative after all.
I wake, early and refreshed, and cross the Vardar River over the six-hundred year old Stone Bridge and into the Carsija, Skopje’s old town. People are up and about and moving with a purpose, everyone bypassing a red-panted yellow-jacketed older man with darker skin and shoulder length oily black hair. He stands erect, looking straight ahead but at nothing, hand extended and palm up, distinguished all the more so for his colorful clothing in a black denim city, stark; a cigar store Indian on a centuries old Balkan bridge. The Carsija is centuries old as well, left over from the Ottoman Empire, and has been the cultural center of the city since around the year 1400. It is alive this morning, children and adults alike passing through on their way to tend to Monday’s activities, though the lack of tourists allow the adults time more social than business. I pass by idle shoe-shine men, unambitious watch and trinket stands on the cobble-stoned streets, groups of men gathered for coffee. I spend the day in the Carsija, drinking coffees, eating stewed lamb and kebabs, baffled at the dizzying number of jewelry shops, and envying the camaraderie of the Pit Bazar, the farmer’s market.
In the afternoon, on my way back across the now packed Stone Bridge, I am accosted by three or four adolescent, slightly soiled children. A boy stands in front of me, blocking my way, one hand holding his stomach, the other alternating between touching his lips and holding his cupped palm out to me. He feigns mute; his face is dirty, hair matted down and clothes shabby, face distorted to indicate his near-tears hunger. I am not sympathetic, I saw this kid in the Carsija, early morning, his frosted-tip hair massaged into a faux-hawk, running and laughing with his friends, I had made a mental note that here was a trouble-free kid, trendily dressed, who I could place in just about any city in the world and he would not look particularly out of place. But now here he stands before me, tragically without voice, nutrition or hair product. I tell him I am on to him, that I saw him earlier, and that he should ply his wares elsewhere. No matter his English skills, the tone is clear and he immediately gets the gist of what I am saying. He quickly switches tactics to flattery, smiling and grabbing my chest, one hand on each pec, telling me how strong I am. He follows with a bodybuilding pose down, and though I laugh, I am not moved and I tell him to “beat it.”
And then he turns on me. Sliding one step to his right to let me by, he relieves me of a banana, jammed into my backpack, quicker than alligator jaws. I am alerted only by his laughing friends, and I turn to see him just out of reach, cradling my banana like a baby, cooing to it, rocking it, letting the banana know everything will be OK despite its switch of parent. I want to grab him by his Adidas jacket and dangle him over the bridge. He is not intimidated, and now he holds the banana seductively, kissing it lightly, provocatively, eyeing me the entire time. His handling of the banana, a sick pederast version of licking the last piece of candy so your friends won’t eat it, gives him the win: the banana is his. I turn and continue across the bridge for home.
I return to the Hotel Square and tell Alexander about my interaction with the locals. “I told you,” he says, “to hwatch out for small gypsies.” Alexander then tells me that if I see a gypsy man I should punch him. I start to laugh, but Alexander is serious. “If you are walking and you see a gypsy man, and he is maybe one or two man away from you, you should go to him and punch him. In the face. It is okay.” I am not entirely confident in my gypsy-identification skills – in my mind they all look like Little Steven – and though I’m not sure how the justice system works here in Macedonia, I am not comfortable using “I thought he was a gypsy” to vindicate a hate crime.
****************
The next morning I plan to rent a car and drive to Ohrid, a mountain lake town in southwestern Macedonia two and half hours from Skopje. At the rental car agency, a Donald Sutherland look-alike takes my credit card and driver’s license; he wears a thick brown rolled-neck cardigan, rectangular tortoise shell glasses hang from a chain around his neck. His beard and hair are the yellow-gray of a chronic smoker, he gives the passive air of intelligence of a liberal arts college professor. I ask for a map and he gives me a cartoonish, 3D folded version of just Skopje, and in Cyrillic at that. I ask for one in English, but he only says it is no problem, Ohrid is “that way.” Ohrid, in Cyrillic, looks enough like “Oxpna” that I am willing to take my chances, so I get into a car so small I am sure I can lift it in any emergency situation, turn on the radio to hear the tail end of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” followed by an accentless American voice proclaim that I am listening to “MACEDONIA’S NUMBER ONE RADIO STATION” and make a left turn onto the busy streets of Skopje.
There is something to city driving, particularly when you are accustomed to a short, relatively traffic-less commute, and city driving in a foreign county is especially exhilarating. I dodge pedestrians, speed past Yugos and dive in and out of lanes, here letting a faster car pass me, here moving out of the way of an oncoming bus in the suicide lane, here deftly avoiding the cars parked half on the sidewalk, half in the right-hand lane: I am dialed in. And the car man is right, Ohrid (Oxpna) is, in fact, that way, and soon I am on to the empty, melting-snow wet E-65 highway first to Tetovo and then Ohrid. The sparsely-treed mountains, early spring snow and village towns look enough like my own Sierra Nevada’s that I wonder if they are close in latitude (I find out later they are less than 100 miles apart), and I immediately feel at home.
The city of Ohrid is on a lake of the same name (again, Nevada: Lake Ohrid is a visual twin of Lake Tahoe, or Tahoe of it, and they both sit half in one state and half in another), and people have been living here continuously since 400 years before Jesus was born, his influence to spread here to Ohrid some 900 years later. The city has been ruled by Greeks and Macedons, Bulgarians and Romans, Seljuks and Normans, Ottomans and Serbians, and most recently Yugoslavs under Josep Broz Tito, but it is, at its innermost, ecumenical – a 5th Century Ottoman traveler noted 365 chapels within its walled Old Town. There are several still standing today, and I have my choice as I again have a centuries-old city to myself. I walk into the curtilage of the Sveta Bogorodica Perivlepta, an Orthodox church constructed in the late 1200’s. There are cats – Ohrid is, as many of the cities I visited, overrun with cats – but no other humans as I walk once around the outside before entering the church itself. I pay, and the woman behind the plexiglass – Jana Popaska, Doctor of History – asks me if I’d like a guided tour. I accept, and watch as Jana clips on a laminated badge, presenting her as a “UNESCO Tour Guide.” She steps outside the booth and shows me the badge, as if to eliminate any confusion as to who is guiding and who is being guided. She wears a white and black leather jacket, too much make-up, long black hair braided in two strands down to her waist, and her enthusiasm is infectious. The interior of the church is covered with frescos painted in 1295, Jana tells me, by the painters Mikhail, Carlos and Nikolai, and for the next thirty minutes Jana holds my rapt attention as she covers the frescos, the church, Jesus, love, politics, Bulgarian tourists, God, and the state of the economy in general. We stand in the center of the church, and rotate slowly in a clockwise direction as Jana first whispers the titles of each of the frescos and then follows with a description. The Birth of Jesus, she whispers, then practically shouts EXPLANATION!
I gather my thoughts, but it is not a request, it is a declaration, and Jana explains to me The Birth of Jesus (EXPLANATION!), doing the same with The Burning Bush, The Death of Jesus, Jacob’s Ladder, The Death of Mary and several others, following each whispered title with an emotive explanation. Her emotion would shame any other tour guide, her idolation of Joseph evident as she tells me he was 87 years old when he married the fourteen year old Mary, treating the child as a daughter and not a wife; her sadness clear as she, near tears, recounts the distraught Mary upon learning of the death of her only son. She whispers Jacob’s Ladder, then explains that though there are many explanations, her favorite is that of Saint Gregory, who described each rung as a year in life, ascension from earth to heaven possible only by living a life of virtue, by striving to love my fellow man and to worship a loving God. There is no Serb she tells me, no Croat no Muslim no Christian no American no Ohrid and no anything except for the love of life, and a loving heart and a loving God.
She ends abruptly, as if someone else had been giving me the tour, and apologizes for her voice which she says “sounds like a musician.” She tells me she had taken a pill a little earlier to make her happy but she fears it has only made her crazy, and I tell her no, your voice is just like music. We part, Jana telling me she will pray for me and will ask God to protect me wherever I go in the world. I tell her thank you, and that I think, after today, I need it a little bit less.