The Pillars of Hercules

Three nights in a row I had the same dream. I was an actor in a Shakespearean play that might have been Hamlet. I was the main actor, probably Hamlet. This was unclear in the dream because although it was a large and elaborate production I did not know any of my lines—not even one. I did not know the names of the other characters. It was all a muddle and mystery, especially as I had never been in a play in my life. Perhaps it was an anxiety dream about being unprepared and having to improvise. My method of travel was all about improvisation.

Each time I had the dream I was arriving at the theater—a sort of open-air affair, with many people in the audience, and lots of actors and stagehands, most of them greeting me with high hopes. None of them had the slightest idea that I did not know my lines. I would covertly pick up a copy of the play and leaf through its several hundred pages and realize that there was no way that I could learn my part between now and ten minutes from now when the curtain was going up on the first act. I experienced a sense of absurd humiliation and panic, as people greeted me and congratulated me, telling me how they were looking forward to my performance.

Most dreams are merciful. Each night, just before the curtain rose, I awoke.

I continued to play games of “Crappy Joe” with Melva. She was feeling optimistic and fitter than she had in Egypt and Israel, though still on antibiotics. “I’m coming good!” she said. She wanted to be independent. “I’m not a bludger,” she said. “Don’t look back!”

When we arrived at Piraeus we announced where we were going and realized that we were all going to a different place—Melva was staying in Athens, hoping to meet some Australians; the Germans were going to Crete, Spillman to Brindisi, Yegor was vague, Pinsker was gone. The Israelis whose names I never learned were speeding away in their car, heading for Croatia, they would not say why. Spillman said he was depressed—it was cloudy, and cloudy days were awful for him. And then Yegor handed his dog’s rope leash to him. The Greeks laughed. Spillman grew furious as the dog, agitated and confused, nipped other passengers. Then “Johnny Halliday” bit Spillman on the groin. Spillman’s fly was usually open—it was open this morning. He clasped himself and sat down and began to cry, and at that moment someone turned up the bouzouki music.

I hurried to a train, and a bus and a ferry; to Bari, and more trains. All the while I heard Spillman’s shout of hurt and complaint, as Yegor’s dog yapped. But I had not hesitated on the quay. I had been there before.

17

The Ferry El Loud III to Kerkennah

            Tunisia is another Mediterranean island, surrounded on one side by water and on the other by pariah states: fanatic Libya on the southeast, blood-drenched Algeria on the west, and the blue Mediterranean on its long irregular coast, scalloped by gulfs and bays. Foreigners do not enter Tunisia by road. There are planes, of course, and there are ferries to France and Italy. I sailed into Tunis on a ferry from slap-happy Trapani in Sicily, entering the harbor at La Goulette in the late afternoon and passing Carthage, the little that remained of it, just a rubble pile of marble where the glorious city had once stood.

I had now been on enough Mediterranean islands to sense that Tunisia was deeply insular. People said that Turkey and Syria were isolated, but that was not strictly true—there were buses from Turkey to Egypt, and from Syria to Jordan and Lebanon. Even poor miserable Albania had road and ferry access to Greece and Macedonia. My road and rail trip from Istanbul to Haifa had been slow and fairly awful at times—six border crossings and lots of irritation, but I had been safe; no one attempted to cut my throat.

Islamic militants in Algeria had carried out their vow to kill foreigners. Their aim was to destabilize the country by frightening foreigners, who were Algeria’s mainstay in running their oil-based economy. Seven Italian sailors—the entire crew of the ship Lucina—had recently had their throats slit as they slept in their bunks in the Algerian port of Jijel, not far from the Tunisian frontier; and a few months before that, twelve Croats had been found dead on their ship, their throats cut. Visitors to Libya sometimes simply disappeared. Such stories were a strong inducement to treat Tunisia as an island, and even Tunisians treated it that way. They never suggested crossing one of these borders, they seldom did so themselves—when they left Tunisia it was to go to France or Italy, to work at menial jobs.