The Devil Is a Black Dog (13 page)

“Did you bring me a gift?” the officer will ask, and you will put a hundred-dollar bill on the table. He smiles at you and signs your papers. “May the protector watch over you,” he says and walks you to the entrance.

Outside, the night covers you. You are freezing and you will be able to see your breath, so you stumble back to the hotel. Somebody on the street will put a candle in your hand so you don’t get lost.

You lie on the cot and listen to the roaches, how they appear when darkness descends on the room. You can’t see anything, just the dark, and something moving. Then you feel the khat in your head, releasing you from the darkness, from the company of roaches. It lulls you until you are far away, so far.

You will wake at the call to morning prayer. It is cold. You will pack up your stuff; all that is important to you fits in just a backpack. You go to the mosque. The Muslims won’t say anything, but whisper behind your back. The imam’s voice will shake with emotion at the discovery that an infidel can also understand God’s word.

When prayer is over you will ask directions to the bus station. Twenty men will escort you there. You ask why, and they say it is because you are all brothers.

You have difficulty extracting yourself from them, but eventually you are able to buy a ticket for Ta’izz. You begin to look for the bus and get lost among the vendors. From the hagglers you hear the daily news. Al Qaeda has announced that “they can no longer guarantee safety for foreigners in the country.” Everybody is fleeing. The government is allowing multiple flights to depart from the airport on behalf of the trapped foreigners.

You find your bus from among the dozen waiting. Cages of chickens, luggage, and people sit on the roof, as with every other bus at the station. When one of the buses departs, feathers drift down through the swirling air.

You try to board. The driver, a fiftyish man, gives a start when he sees you. He jumps from behind the wheel, grabs your shoulder, and begins to plead with you not to choose his bus. From his wallet, he shows you pictures of his children. He grovels, saying he doesn’t want you to travel with him, because anything could happen, and your protection would be his responsibility. If you get robbed or shot, if you were to disappear, he would be taken in front of the authorities; he would be sentenced to ten years’ hard labor for taking part in a terrorist act.

You have no cause to argue. You will just stand there, focused on the pleading driver, who goes on to explain how in your Western clothing you would stick out in the crowd like a bone in sand; only an idiot wouldn’t notice you. You could dress in a
jellabiya, and you can stick a
jambiya
in your belt, but it would be pointless because you can’t change your hair or eye color. You are about to give up when somebody from the mosque appears.

You realize that a heated argument has broken out over you. It is put to the driver that he should take you, lest he get struck down by the archangel Gabriel himself for not helping one of God’s pale but elected children. You never get involved in religious arguments. You just don’t speak, because you already know it would be pointless.

Since you set foot in the Middle East, you have been able to explain everything about yourself, outside of your relationship with God. You can say where you came from and what you are doing, you can buy chicken or rabbit, but not that you don’t believe in God. Everything but that.

You once tried to explain to a taxi driver in Cairo, when asked about your religion, that you are not Muslim, you are not Christian, you aren’t anything. “Bidun Allah,” you said by way of explanation. He looked at you, nodded, and said he had no problem with the Jews. This is how you came to understand that in the Middle East, atheism just doesn’t exist. If you say to an Arab that you are “without God,” it means you are a Jew.

The argument will result with you being let on the bus as a Muslim brother who has to be watched out for. You will find a spot between a woman who smells of sweat and a goatherd. In front of you sit some Palestinians. You will see their wounds and know that they are the fleeing opposition. Their wounds are material reminders of their resistance to political Islam.

The bus starts up, the driver looking worriedly into the rearview mirror. He’s keeping an eye on you. You leave the town behind and ride along a curvy, rocky road. You look out the window: the ground is red and the sky is near, as if you are traveling on Mars; patches of khat and shot-up armored vehicles are the only reminders that people live here.

Halfway to Ta’izz you will have to cross a military checkpoint. The bus will need to wait an hour while you are being interviewed. The soldier wants to make clear that you are crazy to travel at this time; but when he sees he can’t talk you out of it, that you are determined to see the end of the world, he tucks half a kilo of khat into your jacket pocket. “At least you will feel good. Just don’t get off the bus unless it’s necessary.”

Of course at the first occasion you disobey the command and disembark with the rest of the passengers at a stop in front of a restaurant. There will be a well near the building, and you will watch the sheep take water while you eat. Lepers come to beg, but the restaurant owner chases them off with a stick. The cement is sprinkled with their blood.

Five men from the bus stay at your side so you don’t get into trouble. Volunteers. With Argos eyes they examine every approaching figure, their hands on their jambiyas, blades half drawn. In places like this the tribes frequently take high-value hostages. And with your white skin you are an obvious target.

Before the turnoff for Ta’izz, you tell the driver you want to get off. When you cut through the crowd of passengers, two suggest they accompany you to be on the safe side. You summon up your best Arabic to thank them. You do so in the Muslim fashion, so as to calm them. If you say it like this, they will believe that you are indeed blessed and angels sit on your shoulder, and that
peace will be with you.
They will believe, because unlike in your country, in this land spoken words have magic.

You get off and watch the huge dust cloud kicked up by the Ta’izz-bound bus. The passengers wave good-bye from the windows. When the bus finally disappears in the distance you look around. You will see a red rocky landscape and sparsely growing shrubbery; your shirt sticks to your skin. You are not in the hills anymore.

You wait for around twenty minutes, but no ride comes. Your mouth is dry. You curse yourself that you didn’t bring water.

An hour passes. Your limbs start to cramp from dehydration and you wonder how long you can last like this, here in the middle of nowhere. Just when you’ve accepted that you will be spending the night in the desert, a small goat appears.

At first the goatherd mistakes you for an evil spirit wandering among the rocks. In the ensuing conversation it is all you can do to convince him that you are not evil. He points his Kalashnikov at you (you recognize it as one made back home) and shouts at you until you say the Shahada. Once you have convinced him that you are a Muslim, he lowers the gun and offers you some goat milk. He asks where you are headed. You say the end of the world. He nods and informs you that the place is 150 kilometers from where you are standing. And beyond the end of the world begins darkness, the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

While you talk, you let him touch your skin. He has never seen such white skin up close, and he still suspects you are not a real person. You offer him khat in exchange for the goat milk. You both sit and chew. His tribe lives only six miles from here, and if you decide you want company, he can take you to the end of the world in their only car. You accept.

You and the goatherd walk the six miles through the darkening desert. After night has fallen and the giant swelling moon bathes everything in light, the huts appear.

Everybody comes out to stare at you until the men order the women and children back inside. A gray-haired elder, the
qadi
, steps up to you. When you say that you are Hungarian, he nods. There is such a country; you can see relief on his face.

The qadi invites you into his hut and offers you meat. He promises that tomorrow they will take you to Aden, if you really want to see the end of the world. He asks only that you eat with him now. The meal with the elder takes around two hours, after
which you lie down on a rug he lays out for you. There you will sleep while the qadi’s wives and children eat the leftovers.

Arthur Rimbaud wrote of Aden: “This is a stinking cesspool, the end of the world.” A plaque at your hotel commemorates the fact that the poet embarked upon his African career from here, though they spell his name wrong.

You bid the tribesmen good-bye and get a room at the hotel. You can barely breathe because the sea air is so heavy.

You do the work you have here, but all the while you are thinking of the end of the world, and wondering just what street it’s on. You rove about carelessly at night, and after somebody punches you out and takes your cell phone and two hundred dollars, your mouth will be salty with blood.

You can’t find the end of the world anywhere, just old colonialist buildings, heat, and the smell of disease. And right when you are about to give up, you find it.

The end of the world can indeed be found in Aden, in the brothel named The Sailor’s Club, the only place in the city where they serve alcohol. Built on a pier, practically sitting in the sea.

At the door, they look askew at your bloody shirt, but you are white, so they let you in. You will tap your ring against your beer to signal to the girls: yes to another drink, but nothing more. But of course you don’t run away when one of the black girls sits next to you. “Special prices,” she will say, and you will refer to her as “Jasmine” later, because you are too ashamed to ask her name.

You ask her where she comes from to steer the conversation away from business. “From there,” she says and points toward the sea into the darkness.

“This here is the end of the world. Here the rules no longer apply. In this place, in this bar,” you put to her when she stands up from the table.

“My home fell from the earth long ago,” she says, and moves to the table of another man.

You will sit alone in the bar for a long time, staring into the darkness. Rifle fire flashes in the distance, beyond where the waters of Somalia begin.

W
e snaked our way through the hills. The grass sprouted in clumps along the slopes, the sand revealing itself in patches; only from a distance did it all seem to blend together. It was eight in the morning, and a cool breeze blew off the desert, the juniper bushes shining with dew. Sheep grazed in the distance, and we could hear the sound of the bells that the rams wore from their necks. After driving past abandoned, shot-up tanks and the desert itself, Libya’s green hills were a welcome sight.

“Do you think they will attack today?” I asked Hamid. He blinked as the sun hit his eyes. I rolled the window down and took two cigarettes from the pack. The air was already tepid, promising a sweltering noon. I lit both cigarettes and handed one to him.

“
Inshallah,
” he said, and took a long drag. “If NATO gives the green light, then we commence.”

“It’s already been a week with no action. They’re just taking potshots at each other.”

“True. You see, Gaddafi’s men have learned to be sneaky. They fly the same flags as us on their cars, so NATO can’t tell the difference. But we will attack when NATO gives the word that they have taken out their rocket launchers.”

The mere mention of the rocket launchers was enough for me to hear the scream of the Grad rockets in my head and the thundering noise of exploding shells. For two weeks now I had been listening for their sound on the Ajdabiya front. The advancing Gaddafi soldiers always attacked the lines of the rebels early in the morning, during prayer. They weren’t able to aim the rockets precisely, and whenever they managed to hit, the destruction was massive.

“Nobody knows when the blitz will be?”

“Allah Karim, Abu Abdel Hafiz! Only the Transitional Council knows. At least I hope somebody knows when this wretched offensive will be!”

I knew Hamid’s outburst wasn’t directed at me. His boy was stationed at Ajdabiya with a group of insurgents, and he would take part in the fight for Brega once the offensive began. Brega was a meat grinder. In a civil war with no end in sight, it had already changed hands four times.

We puffed our cigarettes in silence. I fixed my gaze on Hamid’s face. It was wrinkled with worry. He was just fifty, but he appeared much older when the thought of his son crossed his mind. Then the wrinkles creased deeper across his face: out of worry for their boys, fathers all over Libya were aging like this. Before the uprising, Hamid had been a doctor, but with his good English, he became a driver to foreign journalists during the conflict, along with serving on the Transitional Council. We had met in Benghazi, quite by accident, after the rocket bombardments.

“I apologize that I can’t take you directly to Tobruk, Abu Abdel Hafiz,” he said, regaining his composure. He had been calling me Abu Abdel Hafiz since I told him that I had named my
son Hafiz. We had been sitting in his car when Gaddafi’s sharpshooters began to fire on us in Ajdabiya, and it was then that we became friends. People bond easier in war. Nobody wants to die next to a stranger.

“As long as you take me, no problem. I’m not rushing anywhere. And don’t worry about your boy. It will be alright.”

“Inshallah. But if he dies, it will be for a just cause. God loves his martyrs.”

“But you don’t want him to die, do you?”

“Of course not. I am his father. But God’s ways are unfathomable. If God wills it, he will die as a martyr, and of course I also fear this.”

We turned off the paved road. The earth was red and damp, and the sun was so blindingly bright we could hardly see the ruins of Cyrene. The sunshine spilled from the hills and onto the ancient statues, columns, and ruined stone houses.

“We are going to Shahat, it’s close now,” said Hamid. “You can see a shahid burial.”