Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (39 page)

“And what about when it’s not in use?”

Switters shrugged. He started to
suggest that the Vietnamese term was so long that simply speaking it might
constitute foreplay. However, he would have had to yell to make himself heard
above the roar of breakers, and as they were then less than thirty yards from
the beach, yelling was probably not a wise idea.

“I assume you got the Turkish in you
repertoire, ja?” he thought he heard Skeeter say right before they slipped
sideways again and a wave broke over them. (Good thing his computer and pistol were
in plastic bags.) If he remembered correctly, the Turkish term for the vagina
was
dölyolu
, but with the coast guard or a Jonah cult possibly nearby,
he wasn’t about to shout
that
into the gap-toothed chaw of the
rock-biting waves.

The oasis didn’t seem to be getting
any closer. For a moment, he seriously considered that it might be a mirage, a
faux tableau created by too much heat rising from too much sand into too much
sky. True, the nomads had seen it, as well, but to Bedouins a mirage would have
its own tangibility. Could it have been a shared hallucination, like the Virgin
Mary’s dancing fireball at Fatima? Well, whatever, it was all his now.

He was no longer singing. He still
had the urge to sing, he had the wahoo in him—the hint of anxiety only boosted
it, and its level had rarely been higher—but the exertion of propelling the
chair robbed him of the breath to sing. Surrounded on all sides by an immense
silence, the only sound he heard beyond his own shallow gasps was sand
crackling beneath his wheels and thorny weeds brushing against the spokes like
a tone-deaf witch trying to pluck a banjo.

That a person’s elation seemed to be
tightly bound to his or her unencumbrance was a detail generally overlooked by
psychologists (not surprisingly, since psychologists tended to skirt the
subject of elation altogether, except when describing symptomatic behavior at
the manic extreme of bipolar personality disorder), but Switters’s high spirits
could be primarily attributed to the fact that he was . . . well, the word
footloose
did not really apply, not literally, considering his perambulatory injunction,
but at large, certainly, at liberty, exempt, burdened neither with possessions
nor duties; free in a wild, wide-open land, where he was consciously going against
the flow (of reason, not of nature), deliberately choosing the short straw,
flaunting the rule of “safety first” (surely one of the most unromantic phrases
in the English language). However, it also had not failed to energize his
coconut that the operation in Iraq had gone so swimmingly.

The hardest part of the mission had
been the landing on Jonah’s riviera. Once Skeeter had succeeded in beaching the
rubber raft and helping him into his chair—a tricky, time-consuming task due to
the surf, the rocks, and Switters’s inability to disembark on his own or
otherwise assist—it had been a piece of cake. They had stowed the gas masks in
the ruins of an old stone net shed, where Skeeter rested while Switters got out
of his soaked yeast-colored linen suit and into a dry, navy blue, pin-striped,
double-breasted number of a sort that was not uncommon in Turkey. They talked
briefly, shook hands (Switters imagined he could feel a current of pent-up
music in Skeeter’s fingers), and parted, Skeeter to buck the waves back to the
yacht, Switters to trundle the four kilometers into the town of
Samanda(breve)gi, where, in a compound next to the marketplace, he had come
upon a small contingent of Kurds.

Kurds belonged in
The Guinness
Book of World Records
on at least two counts: they were the largest ethnic
minority on earth without an independent homeland, and they had been
double-crossed and betrayed by more foreign powers than any other people in
history. For this last reason alone, Switters had expected it would take days
if not weeks to win their confidence. The United States, after all, had been
among the nations to use them as pawns. After that one night, however, spent
smoking (cheap cigars provided by Switters), drinking (arrack, a date-based
liquor furnished by the Kurds), and discussing (poetry and philosophy, in
Arabic) around their headman’s hearth, he had felt comfortable enough to
confide in them, and they had agreed to participate, to the extent that they
could, in his humanitarian escapade.

Because Iraq’s border with Turkey was
deeply troubled where Kurds were concerned, and abristle with Turkish troops,
Switters thought it best to try to enter from Syria. His new friends agreed. If
he would buy the petrol, a couple of their restless young men would drive him and
his gas masks (they demanded thirty masks for themselves, though they resided
far from the threatened region) across southeastern Turkey in one of their
rickety old Mercedes trucks. Somewhere near Nusaybin, they would put him in
touch with Syrian Kurds who would help him cross over into Syria. And so it
came to pass.

The second Kurdish group, as colorful
as carnival cavorters in their billowy trousers, embroidered blouses, and
tablecloth-sized head coverings, had taken him along Syria’s northeastern snout
on camelback. It was while swaying to and fro atop one of those spitting,
whining, kicking, loaf-lipped beasts that he had finally made contact with
Maestra. He’d been afraid to e-mail her since, as evidenced by the Joe who’d
seen him off in Seattle, the company was picnicking in his computer, and for
reasons he hoped were just her characteristic orneriness, she wasn’t answering
her phone. As much to take his mind off his uncomfortable ride as to ease his
worry about her, he’d punched her Magnolia number into the satellite phone one
more time—and was actually startled when the line was picked up and a gruff
voice bellowed, “This had better be good!”

“Did anyone ever tell you, Maestra,
that you have the disposition of a camel?”

“Damn straight I do, so don’t try to
milk me or pile a load on my hump. Where are you, boy?”

“Are you aware that a camel’s hump is
naught but a lump of fat?”

“Really? Then it’s the same as a
woman’s breast.”

“Oh no, you must be mistaken. A
woman’s breast . . . why, a woman’s breast is a miniature moon. It’s made out
of moon paste and warm snow and honey.”

“Heh! You romantic ninny. Where are
you?”

He dared not be specific, but she got
the idea that he was in camel country, and, more important, he got the idea
that she’d fully recovered from her stroke. She was, in fact, arranging to fly
to New York to be on hand for the auction of the Matisse in late June. “I’m
making sure those poufs at Sotheby’s don’t try to stiff me.”

Thus it was with much lightening of
heart that he slipped into Iraq, a country where it was as easy to get beheaded
as to get a bad meal. Fortunately, he endured the latter and avoided the
former. In a ruined mountain town southwest of Dahuk, he had bestowed the masks
(minus the hundred he’d given his latest escorts) on a tearfully grateful
mayor, whose constituents had been recently decimated with nerve gas dropped on
them by the very Baghdad authorities who had promised them self-government in
1970. The mayor hosted a celebration in his honor that evening, with lambs on
the spit, hookahs on the rug, and belly dancers on the balcony. Because these
Kurds were more strict in their adherence to Mohammed’s commandments than was
the isolated group in Samanda(breve)gi, it proved a nonalcoholic affair, a
condition that actually suited Switters since his digestive tract found arrack
as combustible as pisco and since sobriety could be a useful ally in a hasty
getaway.

Knowing full well that Baghdad would
have informants in the town (there would have been a minimum of two or three at
the party) who’d waste little time in reporting his presence to the nearest
military garrison, Switters excused himself early on in the festivities and,
instead of visiting the outhouse, as advertised, ducked into the small room
he’d been given and retrieved his belongings. He rolled out the rear entrance,
rattled across an adjacent courtyard dotted with stones and tethered donkeys
(belly dance music drowning out the clatter), and on through a gate onto a dark
side street. The neighborhood was as empty as a Transylvanian blood bank, most
of its inhabitants being at the party, but outside PUK headquarters a block
down the street, he found a battle-hardened old militiaman leaning against the
battered hood of a Czech-made version of the Jeep. The guard spoke little
Arabic, while Switters’s Turkish vocabulary was pretty much limited to
dölyolu
.
In Kurdish, even the word for that revered orifice was absent—temporarily, he
trusted—from the tip of his tongue; yet, somehow the message was conveyed that
Switters desired to be driven to the Syrian frontier, a hundred miles away. The
request had been stubbornly refused, even after Switters flashed the wad of
deutsche marks that Poe had provided to see him through (the rest of his pay,
about nine thousand dollars plus airfare, was being wired to his Seattle bank).
So, for the first and only time in the operation, he drew his pistol. He cocked
it with an ominous click and snuggled its barrel up under the guard’s floating
rib. “To the opera!” he called. “And five gold guineas if you catch the king’s
carriage.”

The emaciated PUK grenadier wept
openly when Switters flung his rifle out of the moving Jeep, and Switters,
tears gathering in his own eyes, felt such shame that he had the warrior turn
the vehicle around, and they went back and picked it up. “Jesus, pal! Your
attachment to your symbolic manhood could get me killed.” The teeth the Kurd
showed when he smiled made his abductor’s seem a textbook example of the
rewards of dental scrupulosity. They clasped hands in the Islamic manner. And—

Wham, bam, thank you, Saddam! Nigh
him wigworms and nigh him cheekadeekchimple! They were out of there.

The distance between Switters and
the oasis at last began to shrink. Quite suddenly, in fact, the compound seemed
to enlarge, as if, cued by a director and strictly timed (ta da!), it had burst
out on stage. It was no mirage. But what was it? It had better be good because
all around it, in every direction, as far as his eyes could see, the world was
as empty and dry as a mummy’s condom.

He was wondering if he shouldn’t have
remained with the Bedouins. They were a marvelous people to whom travel was a
gift and hospitality a law. The Kurds had been gracious enough, but he
preferred the Bedouins, for they were less religious and thus more lively and
free. Kurds were essentially settlers who roamed only when forced from their
villages by strife. Bedouins were nomadic to the bone. Whereas Kurds were in a
constant state of bitter agitation over their lack of an autonomous homeland,
Bedouins had no use for such paralyzing concepts. Their homeland was the circle
of light around their campfire, their autonomy was in the raw sparkle of the
stars.

In almost every nation in the Middle
East, Near East, and Africa, nomads were under strong governmental pressure to
plant themselves in established settlements. Whatever the socio-political,
economic reasons given, underlying it all was that great pathetic lunatic
insecurity that drove men to cling to various illusions of certainty and
permanence. The supreme irony, of course, was that they clung to those ideals
because they were scared witless by the certainty and permanence of death. To
the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed,
liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.

The fires of this particular band of
wandering herdsmen had been noticed by Switters only a few kilometers inside
Syria, along the isolated, seasonally fertile wadi down which he’d been driven,
headlamps off, to avoid both Iraqi and Syrian border patrols. Knowing that they
would be honor bound to receive him hospitably, he ordered the commandeered
Jeep stopped about three hundred yards from their encampment, gave the driver a
fistful of deutsche marks, and sent him back to his Kurds and fray. “Thanks for
the lift, pal. Good luck to you and your homeboys. And if you don’t mind me
saying so, you ought to switch brands of toothpaste. Give Atomic Flash or Great
White Shark a try.”

Initially, he’d planned to make his
way back into Turkey, where an American with a properly stamped passport and no
gunnysacks of gas masks in his possession would have aroused not the slightest
suspicion. He might expect to reach the Istanbul airport within the week. But
he was full of himself after his little caper, and soon he was full of the
Bedouins, as well.

Despite the fleas that prickled him
nightly the way stars prickled the desert sky, he loved sleeping on their musky
carpets inside their big black tents. (
The universe is organized anarchy,
he thought,
and I’m lying in the folds of its flag.
) He loved their
syrupy coffee, earthenware jars, silver ornaments, tilted eyebrows, and the way
they danced the
dobqi
, their bare feet as expressive as a ham actor’s
face. Yes, and he loved it that they were as wild as bears and yet impeccably
neat and polite. Their good manners would put a Newport socialite to shame.
Every country had a soul if one knew where to look for it, but for the
stateless Bedouins, their soul
was
their country. It was vast, and they
occupied it fully. It was also portable, and he felt compelled to follow it
awhile.

Should he not have stayed with them
indefinitely, devoting his skills and energies to preserving their way of life?
The khan, after all, had offered him one of his daughters. “Take your pick
among the five,” the khan had said, ever the perfect host, and Switters could
sense them blushing behind their thin white veils, while the gold coins they
wore strung around their heads jingled slightly, as if vibrated by hidden
shudders of nuptial anticipation. Their chins were tattooed up to the base of
their noses, and at mealtime each would squirt milk from a ewe’s teat directly
into her teacup. He tried to imagine marriage to such a girl. His hypothetical
adulthood-prevention serum would be superfluous, for they already had been
inoculated with an ancient genetic Euro-Asian plasma that kept them soft and
fiery and curious and frisky to the grave. Imagine romping with a two-legged
patchouli-oiled bear cub every moonlit evening on the carpets she would have
woven for his own black tent! How primal, how lurid, how timeless and funky and
mysterious and frank!