Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (2 page)

Almost everything was solely for local consumption: clothes, fabrics, jewelry, shoes, batteries and so on. One of the narrower streets was lined with almost medieval metal forges, where copper pots and crescent moons for the tops of minarets were banged into shape with hammers and tongs over fires.

I didn’t see theaters, clubs or any other places of diversion or entertainment. “Until two years ago,” Abdul said, “there was nothing to do in Libya but sleep. Things are better now.”

Things weren’t much better, though. Libya’s economy was still mostly socialist. There will be no fun without capitalism. Sorry. The state just isn’t gonna provide it, especially not a state that can’t even pick up the garbage.

“So, Abdul,” I said as we walked through the souk. “How many Libyans wear a Qaddafi watch?”

“Um,” he said and laughed grimly. “Not very many. There are, you know, enough pictures around.” He leaned in and whispered, “I don’t like him much, to be honest.”

I had imagined not.

“Look over there,” he said and pointed with his eyes. “You see those two?”

I saw a couple in their mid-20s chatting next to one of the gates to the old city. He wore a black leather jacket, she a long brown overcoat and a headscarf over her hair. They stood close together but didn’t touch. They looked soft, comfortable and content together as if they were married.

“Five, 10 years ago I never saw anything like that. It was absolutely forbidden.”

He told me to take off my shoes as he led me into a mosque. Seeing the handmade carpets, high ceilings, marbled walls, Roman columns, intricate tile work and soft lighting was like slipping into a warm bath for the soul. The heart-stopping beauty and serenity of the mosque in this harsh urban parking garage of a landscape was a strong incentive for piety, I suspected. I’m not religious, but I could see why some sought refuge from the modern in God. Modernity in this oppressive dystopian city was a spectacular galactic-size failure.

He dropped me off at my hotel before dark. Now that I knew the layout of the city, I decided to return to Green Square alone. I wanted to know what the real Tripoli, the not-touristed Tripoli, looked like.

It was worse on foot than by car and exactly what I expected: all right angles and concrete. Almost everyone in this part of town lived in a low barracks-like compound or a Stalinist tower. Landscaping didn’t exist. There were no smooth edges, no soft sights, nothing to sigh at. Tripoli’s aesthetic brutality hurt me.

I walked parts of the city that hardly any foreigners ever bothered to see. It looked postapocalyptic, as if it had been evacuated in war or hit with a neutron bomb. The sound of machine-gun fire off in the distance wouldn’t have seemed out of place.

Less than 1 percent of the people I saw were women. All those who did go outside wore headscarves. So much for Qaddafi’s being a “feminist,” as he claimed. Tripoli had as many women out and about as a dust-blown village in the boondocks of Afghanistan.

The few men I did see walked or huddled together. They looked sullen, heavy, severe. I felt raw and exposed, wondering what on earth they must have thought when they saw an obvious foreigner wandering around the desolate streets.

So I did what I could to find out. I smiled at everyone who walked past. You can learn a lot about a people and a place by trying this out. In New York City, people ignore you. In Guatemala City, people will stare. In Libya, they all smiled back, every last one of them, no matter how grumpy or self-absorbed they looked two seconds before.

I never detected even a whiff of hostility, not from a single person. Libyans seemed a decent, gentle, welcoming people with terrible luck. It wasn’t their fault the neighborhood stank of oppression.

Most apartment buildings were more or less equally dreary, but one did stand out. Architecturally it was just another modernist horror. But a 6-by-8-foot portrait of Qaddafi was bolted to the facade three stories up. It partially blocked the view from two of the balconies. The bastard couldn’t even leave people alone when they were home.

The posters weren’t funny anymore. There were too damn many of them, for one thing. And, besides, Qaddafi is ugly. He may earn a few charisma points for traveling to Brussels and pitching his Bedouin tent on the parliament lawn, but he’s no Che Guevara in the
guapo
department.

I felt ashamed that I first found his portraits even slightly amusing. The novelty wore off in less than a day, and he’d been in power longer than I’d been alive.

He was an abstraction when I first got there. But after walking around his outdoor laboratory and everywhere seeing his beady eyes and that arrogant jut of his mouth, it suddenly hit me. He isn’t merely Libya’s tyrant. He is a man who would be god.

His Mukhabarat
,
the secret police, are omniscient. His visage is omnipresent. His power is omnipotent.

And he is deranged. He says he’s the sun of Africa. He threatens to ban money and schools. He vanquished beauty and art. He liquidates those who oppose him. He says he can’t help it if the people of Libya love him so much, they plaster his portrait up everywhere. Fuck him. I wanted to rip his face from the walls.

*  *  *

If you go to Libya, you simply must visit Ghadamis. Known by travelers as the jewel of the Sahara, it’s worth all the money and all the hassle you have to put up with to get there.

In the early 1980s, Qaddafi’s regime emptied the ancient Berber Saharan city by decree. Everyone was shepherded into the modern concrete “new town,” which begins right outside the mysterious tomblike adobe gates of the old.

The old city doesn’t look like a city when you’re inside. It looks like a vast underground system of tunnels and caves lit by skylights. It’s not underground; it was built with a roof over the top to keep the infernal summer heat out and the meager winter warmth in. Some of the streets (which really are more like passages) are pitch black even at noon. There was no need for light. The inhabitants had memorized the walls.

It is not a small town. It’s an enormous weatherproofed adobe mini metropolis. There are seven quarters and seven gates, one for each resident tribe. Everything you’d expect in a city is there—streets, homes, offices, markets, public squares and mosques, all made of painted mud and sparkling gypsum. The only thing missing from the old city is people.

If Libya were a normal country—and if Ghadamis were a normal city—the old city would be packed with hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, Internet cafés and desert-adventure tour offices. But Libya is not a normal country, and Ghadamis is an unwilling ghost town.

My travel agency replaced Abdul with a second guide for the trip to Ghadamis and into the desert. “Yasir,” I said to him. “Why were the people of Ghadamis forced out of their homes?”

I knew the answer already. It was part of Qaddafi’s plot to Arabize the Berbers and to construct the New Man, a ludicrous ideal hatched in the Soviet Union. (Berbers were also forbidden to write anything publicly in their own language.) But I wanted to see if a local was permitted to say it. He couldn’t—or at least didn’t—answer my question. He only shook his head and laughed nervously. There were others around who could hear.

The old city was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. A few engineers were inside shoring up the foundations of an old mosque.

“It’s astonishing,” one of them said when I chatted him up. He was an Arab who had studied engineering at a Western university and spoke masterful English in fully formed paragraphs. “The sophistication and aesthetic perfection in the old city contrasts markedly with the failures in the new.”

No kidding. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world. Neither have you. Because there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. And there never will be.

“We’re here to make this place livable again because someday, you know . . .” He trailed off, but I knew what he wished he could say. Someday Qaddafi would die. When his bones pushed up date palms, the people of Ghadamis could abandon their compounds of concrete and move back into the city that’s rightfully theirs.

I returned to the old city at night by myself and saw a single square of light in an upstairs room of an ancient house. The owners were forbidden to stay there at night. But it was nice to know that some of them still left the lights on.

*  *  *

When you visit another country, it’s inevitable: you are going to meet other travelers. And you’ll almost certainly talk about other places you’ve been. Go to Costa Rica, and conversations will turn to Guatemala and Bolivia. If you hang out in Cancún, you’ll meet people who like the Virgin Islands and Hawaii. In Paris you’ll hear talk of London, Prague and Vienna.

So what happens when you bump into others in Libya? In Tripoli, I met a photographer who spends every summer in Darfur. Out in the dunes, I met a long-haired, goofy, bespectacled English guy named Felix. This was the first time he had ever set eyes on a desert. (He really went for it.) He had a thing for totalitarian countries. “I like to visit places based on ideas,” he said. Then he checked himself. “That doesn’t mean I like the ideas.”

“Where to next, Felix?” I said.

“North Korea, if I can get in.”

“I’d like to see North Korea,” I said. “But after that, what’s left?”

“Only the moon,” he said and laughed. “This is great, meeting you here. It’s nice to know someone else who’s open to nuttiness.”

You’ll find nuttiness in Libya even out in the boonies. On the treacherous so-called road from Ghadamis into the dunes, someone used an enormous piece of ordnance that looked like a mini-Scud missile to mark a 3-foot chassis-busting hole in the ground.

Yasir couldn’t take me on that road in his van. So we hired Bashir to come with us. He was a burly man with a turban and a beard who taught philosophy in school. We didn’t hire him, though, for his brain. We wanted his Land Rover.

The three of us left Ghadamis and headed straight toward the Algerian gate only a couple of miles away.

Just beyond it, a 300-foot-tall mountain of sand was piled in layers.

“You see that sand,” Bashir said and pointed. I could hardly take my eyes off it. “Two weeks ago I drove some Japanese tourists out here. The old guy asked me who built the dune.” He chuckled and shook his head. “I told him, well, my grandfather worked for a while on that project, but now he’s dead.”

“We can’t go there,” Yasir said. “We must visit Libyan sand. Last month some German tourists were kidnapped right on the other side of the border.”

More than 100,000 people were killed in Algeria during the 1990s and into the 2000s in a civil war between the military regime and Islamist fanatics.

“Have you ever been to Algeria?” I asked.

“No one here goes to Algeria,” he said.

We drove over a hill and were surrounded on three sides by dizzying, towering, impossibly sized dunes. We slogged our way to the top, gasping, with calves and thighs burning, not daring to look down, to watch the sunset.

The top was unreal. The desert floor was another world far below ours. If birds were in flight, I could have looked down on them. On the western horizon was the Grand Erg Oriental, a sea of dunes bigger than France that looked from the side like a distant Andes of sand. Bashir prepared bread and sticky mint tea.

I watched the sun go down and the sky go out.

By Libyan standards, this was radical freedom. Life goes on even in countries like this one. No government, no matter how oppressive, can control all the people all the time—especially not in the vast and empty Sahara.

We ran down the sand and climbed back into the Land Rover. Bashir hit the gas. He zigged us and zagged us up, down and across the 300-foot-tall dunes along the border with Algeria. At one point—and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious—he said we had actually crossed into Algeria.

The stars came out. A full moon rose, turning the sand into silver. We laughed like boys as we rode the dunes in the moonlight.

*  *  *

I didn’t go back to Tripoli to hang out in Tripoli. Tourists use the city as a base to visit the spectacular nearby Roman ruins of Sabratha and Leptis Magna. I’m not exactly a ruins buff, but trips to these places came with the package. So I went. And I saw. And I was nearly alone. I shared Leptis Magna with only my guide and some goats. Sabratha would have been empty if the vice president of the Philippines hadn’t dropped by at the same time.

But I was glad to be back in Tripoli. This time my hotel was in the Italian Quarter, just two blocks from Green Square. Not again would I have to walk through a swath of Stalinist blocks to get to a proper neighborhood.

My new hotel was more upscale than the first. The management (or was it the state?) pretended to have tighter security. The metal detector just inside the entrance wasn’t being watched by a college kid. It was staffed by the military.

Okay, I thought. Now they’re gonna be serious. I stepped through and the metal detector screamed. The soldiers ignored me, joked with each other and never looked up. The same thing happened every time I walked through it.

Libya was a totalitarian police state. But it was an awfully lethargic totalitarian police state. It’s been a while, I thought, since anyone there drank the Kool-Aid.

The heater in my room sounded like a chopper over the jungles of ’Nam. It was broken and stuck forever on Cold, but the maid left it on anyway. So while it was 60 degrees and cloudy outside, it was a teeth-chattering 50 degrees in my room. I opened the window, and the cold wind off the Mediterranean actually warmed the place up.

A bath could have made me feel better, but the hot-water knob came off in my hand. The hotel had the outward appearance of spiffiness, so I’m sure there was hot water somewhere in the building behind the hole where the knob had come off in my hand. I just couldn’t get to any of it.

The elite were downstairs in the lobby. Slick men in suits, mostly from Arab countries, all but ignored the French delegation that was in town while Jacques Chirac cut new oil deals with Qaddafi. There were no Americans, no tourists and no women. I felt underdressed and out of place in my khakis and sandals, but what could I do? I was in a hard-line, oily-sheened Arab police state. I couldn’t have blended in if I tried—except, perhaps, in one little corner of the Italian Quarter.