The Emigrants
introduced us in the English-speaking world to this new kind of travel writing, and as one proceeds through it—noting, very slowly, that its subject is all the things that are being forcibly left out or suppressed (the empty rooms and blank pages of the last days of the war)—one begins to see that the very title, so hopeful in another context, in this book has much more a sense of the fugitive (a sense that comes over more strongly in the German title of the work,
Die Ausgewanderten
). Its subject is really the people who are forced out of one world and yet never really arrive in another, and so pass all their days as specters of a kind, not really living and not truly dead.
Those who concluded from that book that Sebald was writing about the Holocaust had to revise their opinions with the translation of
The Rings of Saturn,
for that work suggests a much larger sense of desolation. As Sebald’s narrator wanders around the lonely empty spaces of England—always the last passenger on the bus, the only guest at the inn—all he sees are ruined castles, abandoned factories, cemeteries that are overgrown. And the pressing sense on every side of the end of Empire pushes him towards much larger thoughts of ruin and decline (to a Buddhist, he might be reminding us, every meeting ends in a departure). The book begins with its narrator in a hospital “in a state of almost total immobility.”
In
Vertigo,
the sense of exile becomes most apparent when the narrator returns to his hometown. His family home has been turned into a hotel, he finds, and, checking in, he can only identify himself as a “foreign correspondent” (even as, of course, living in East Anglia, he writes in a language that none of his neighbors can follow). Every afternoon he sits alone in the “empty bar room,” and in the evenings he watches the regulars from the corner, a kind of shellshocked Rip Van Winkle. Those who find this too metaphorical to be true might here recall that the opening movement of the book told us that everything that Stendhal remembered of the campaign in Italy was a fiction: what is important is not just what happened, but what our fevered minds imagine to have happened.
At one point, though—and just in time, perhaps—as he sits on a Tyrolean bus full of old crones complaining about the darkness and the rain, their blighted crops, suddenly the sun comes out and floods the green pastures with a kind of radiance (and, it must be said, angels are one of the presences that recur in
Vertigo
). Even the Italian titles he gives to two sections of his book seem, now, to be ways to try to alchemize his dark memories into something else, in a more sunlit, hopeful tongue; part of his lifelong flight from German. His theme, after all, is not the people destroyed by the war, but those only wounded, permanently incapacitated by it, the sound of knelling bells always in the distance.
Those who hear that Sebald’s books are part of a never-ending excavation of memory may wonder about his relation to the poet of the cork-lined room, likewise famous for his shortness of breath. Yet where memory in Proust seems to bring back lost loves and careless afternoons, in Sebald it can only conjure up the dead. The memories that await him in his hometown are all of hearses and sudden deaths; of unexplained departures, or people who live their lives mute and stunned in their own rooms. (The fact, only slipped in, that the narrator’s father served in the Reich becomes the least terrifying detail of all.)
A closer parallel is with that other maker of obsessive journeys, Melville, afflicted as he was with a sense of being caught in a tangle of the Fates, and yet committed to exploring deeps that were inseparable from the dark. Think of how Ishmael, a proto-Sebald, talks in the opening paragraph of
Moby-Dick
of how he goes off to sea whenever he feels “a damp drizzly November in my soul” and notices himself passing coffin warehouses. And yet the intensity, even the delirium, of Melville comes from our sense that his craziness is carrying him away, as strong waves might the sturdiest boat. What terrifies in Sebald is, if anything, the opposite: his almost posthumous calm, as of a frozen ship upon a frozen ocean.
“Nature is a Haunted House,” he might be saying, with Emily Dickinson, “Art—a House that tries to be haunted.”
2000
A NEW YEAR
On the minivan, driving through the deserted moonscape of the East, not far from Djibouti—it could be not far from almost anywhere—I found myself next to a man, a former journalist, who exulted in the chance to talk about his trip to London, and asked me how Broadway was doing (compared, he said, with those other centers of world culture, Frankfurt Airport and Heathrow). The man on the other side of me, an agricultural student, looked on with wonder at these signs of worldliness. It was coming on for New Year, and a new page in Ethiopian history. The country had held its first free elections in sixteen hundred years, and everyone now was waiting to see how the three-year-old government of Meles Zenawi would fare. After centuries of emperors, and seventeen years of Communist madness at the hands of Colonel Mengistu, Ethiopia was trying the new Western tool of democracy.
“All politics is prostitution,” the man (whose family name was Flahflah) pronounced, and the agricultural student nodded meaningfully. “Rome was not built in a day.” He talked of how the English had devastated India, how despots were as much a part of his history as of Europe’s, how all men were brothers.
“Americans say democracy, English say democracy,” he went on. “But this imported democracy is sometimes inapplicable. Look at me: I am a Moslem, I have four wives, seven children. In my home, I must make all the decisions. I do not allow the debate. I am in control. So how can I talk about democracy in the country when I do not allow it at home?”
He pulled up his monogrammed briefcase, and showed me a diploma from Egypt, from fourteen years before. He had dined with many famous men, he said. “We in Africa are very low. So our leaders are very low. But in Washington, a man from the international aid development office, a very high man, I talked to him, he took me to lunch, and he said, ‘Here in America also, it is corrupt. But here, the difference is, a man chooses his friends, and they are qualified. In Africa, a leader chooses his friends, and they are illiterate—and he does not choose the qualified man.’ But it is the same. Tribalism in both cases, but we call it something different.”
Zenawi was not perfect, he acknowledged, but nor was Bill Clinton. “What you say in office, and what you say out of office, they are never the same. Too many interests.”
The agricultural student nodded once more.
Back in Addis Ababa, the rich Indians were taking drinks on the veranda of Unity House, while local trendies revved up their Toyotas (with Harvard University stickers on them) and pale expats sweetened up their local girlfriends. Addis is almost like a rough draft of a capital, or an esprit d’escalier—a clever idea that came too late—with its buildings (OFFICE OF THE AD HOC COMMITTEE FOR PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT) set against outstretched beggars, and its signs (ADDIS ABABA SHERATON PROJECT) pointing to vacant lots. It is also, like many capitals in politically unstable countries (like Cairo, or Delhi, or Manila, say), a city of whispers. At the next table in the Beijing Restaurant, two Africans were thrashing out “Realpolitik” and “alternative programs,” while, outside, the Mercedes of the hotels and the purring BMWs of the Amhara elite carried their passengers to Christmas feasts, or to places like the Ghion Riviera, where a black-tie band was serenading the plump, and girls were crooning love songs in front of the sunlit swimming pool (“It is strictly forbidden to swim immediately after taking meals”).
“They are brutalizing the country,” said one of the men in the next booth, feelingly. “It is a revolution ten times more powerful than Mengistu’s revolution. Because that was based on— nothing. This is based on people’s deepest feelings.”
“Yah, man. It is like the prisoners in the Greek myth, who for thirty years took the shade as reality. They took the shade for reality!”
They talked about the BBC World Service, while outside the former officers of Mengistu’s army walked the streets, trying to hit up foreigners for money, and children banged on cars at stop-lights, crying, “Father, father! By Jesus Christ! Hungry people!”
The next day, a society matron slipped her jeep down Churchill Road, past the Kid’s Paradise school, towards a jeweler she knew. “For me, they are heroes, the guerrilla leaders,” she said, taking time off from her own jewelry business, and collecting her sons from school in Switzerland. “But they are kids. Sometimes they come to my house and say, ‘We do not have any more than a fifth-grade education. And now it is too late to go to school.’ And I tell them, ‘Why do you worry about education? You have been giving your lives to your country. That is more important.’ ”
That evening, a large man at the wheel of his small car, with a cauliflower ear, said, “Zenawi will kill democracy. But still, this is not Africa. I talk to the foreigners, and they tell me in Lagos, in Algiers, it is never safe. Ethiopia is not like that.” A little later he added, “I tried to go to the U.S. But the Embassy, they tell me no. Is too much of our people going to U.S. Now they say, no more.”
The notices outside the Hilton hotel—the only spot of glamour in the country—said, “The Hotel is not liable for any damage or threat occurring to or from vehicles parked in this courtyard.” The papers in the lobby were ten days old. In the coffee shop they were playing Muzaked versions of Christmas songs, culminating in “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”—the song recorded to provide food for the starving of Ethiopia.
The banners across the street said STREETCHILDREN WEEK, and the books in the window of the Ethiopian Book Centre were
World Blindness and Its Prevention, Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous
System,
and
America: Life and Institutions.
Boys sold candies (individually) on street corners, or put out scales so that people could weigh themselves (for a price). In the National Stadium, a soccer team with red shorts and white shirts was playing against a team with red shirts and white shorts.
In my own hotel, the Ghion, an infamous Somali warlord was staying in the Riviera wing (taking note, no doubt, of the stern rules outside the swimming pool: “If you feel tired while swimming, inform immediately”). I stood on the lawn outside his room, under a huge full moon, while his fluent and charismatic private secretary, until recently an M.B.A. student, told me that they were trying only to get “democracy and justice for our country,” a “Somalia ruled by Somalis.” They had come here to broker peace. “When the Americans came,” the young man went on, “we greeted them with green leaves, green flowers. But now the Western propaganda has distorted all that. We are not afraid to die.”
I turned to my local guidebook. “The first thing that strikes you about Addis Ababa,” it informed me, as guidebooks do, “is the champagne atmosphere.”
1993
FLIGHTS
The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death.
—CAMUS
THE KHAREEF
When the southwestern monsoon, or khareef, passes through the southern tip of Arabia, a heavy chill mist falls over the province of Dhofar, in southern Oman, and the temperatures fall twenty or thirty degrees below those of the rest of the Arabian peninsula. In the thick fog you can hear almost nothing but the ocean sighing in the distance, and when you travel up into the mountains it’s hard to see anything but women veiled in black from head to toe, only their mascara’ed eyes looking out, and locals seated on patches of green beside the road, delightedly picnicking in the rain.
The
khareef
is an eerie, somewhat magical time in southern Oman, and its heavy fogs and rain allow the frankincense trees to grow along the foothills that run beside the sea. Drizzle is imminent nearly always, and the mist envelops everything, so that when you look down the long empty roads you see camels, and sand, and nothingness. Along one side of the road sits a Hilton hotel, but the palm trees beside it are worn, and the gusty ocean is almost entirely without color. The world has sloughed off proportion and dimension.
The smell of frankincense on the back streets, the Indian shopkeepers outside their little stalls as if they were still in Cochin—“Foodstuff and Luxuries,” “Watch Repair,” “Coconut Sale,” “Auto Cushion”—suggest somewhere entirely forgotten by the world. Everything shuts down in the middle of the day, though not for prayer; the sovereign spirits here are trade and sleep. Once the richest area in the world, Dhofar now nestles behind the mountains, unvisited, much like the last sultan, who took to his palace here for twelve years, and banned bicycles, radios, even sunglasses for locals.
I sat in my room in the deserted hotel sometimes, and watched a few American soldiers, on their Friday off, wrestle on the lawn below. The sound of Arabic curses came from the next terrace; in the lobby there were always barrel-chested Englishmen, here to train the local army, with tattoos across their forearms, pounding one fist into another, again and again and again.
The Indians sat at their desks looking wistful, sometimes wry. What had brought them here, I asked. Not adventure or dreams or anything; a shrug, an uncle now gone. They’d come to Muscat, the fairy-tale sand-city in the north, and somehow ended up here. What was there to do? A defeated smile.
In the bar, a tiny Filipina served drinks to tired blond Germans with leathery tans, who shook their bangles and tossed their heads impatiently, as they waited for the grand tours they’d been promised, and groups of men from Atlanta in shorts—who knew on what mission?—cracked jokes as they sat in the thick armchairs huddled together in clusters in the lobby. “The plural of ‘fish’ is ‘fishes’?” “A dollar for anyone in the room who can tell us what the plural of ‘fish’ is.”
The Omanis in their long white robes sat in the vast space talking softly, their women dressed in black, so intense that they seemed apparitions of suggestiveness. A curling hand, decorated with some kind of design; a kohl-lined eye. So little could be seen of them, walking straight and regal in their black, handbags swinging from their shoulders, white clogs emerging occasionally under their robes, that their eyes carried everything. A spark, a light of mischief.
Outside my window there was dust and fog; out on the road, spotless tarmac stretching in every direction without cease. Camels by the sand, and in the distance the new port, to receive container ships. The mountains were close, but nothing but clouds now; figures appeared around curves like creatures from myth, and then disappeared again into the mist.
I arrived here after a thirty-three-hour flight from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles to London, then Abu Dhabi, to Muscat, and then Salalah; I got out at the long dusty road and walked into a room with a terrace, a view of the sea without color. In the morning, when I went out, there was rain all over the chairs; a lone figure was somewhere behind the palm trees, walking towards the lights.
One day I hired a car and driver—a homesick man from Kerala, on his way to marry a woman he’d never met (he kept up with home at night through his FM radio)—and we drove into the hills. As we went up the mountains from the plain, the mist, already thick, began to envelop us, so we were part of it, and it of us, and the rain began to fall. Cars inched their way around turns, and at the tomb of Job, at the top, I stepped out into the lightly falling rain and followed a group of shadows, all in black, disappearing between the trees.
We drove down again, and south, and found ourselves in a paradise of sorts, a clear river running along the base of the hills, where happy shirtless boys were splashing and jumping around as if they’d found their way back to the beginning of the world. Families were gathered on carpets under the trees, one man serenading his party—a wedding party—with a set of bagpipes.
Near the Holiday Inn, a crumbling ruin not far away, archaeologists had found the remains of the place acclaimed by Marco Polo as a “fine and great and noble city.” The Queen of Sheba had sent her dhows from here, my guide said, to Egypt and Jerusalem and Rome, bearing frankincense at a time when it was worth more than gold. Her castle was now remembered by a pile of stones.
In the lobby a Canadian engineer sat alone, looking out into the mist where the GIs organized games of touch football without a ball.
Four days later, following the so-called Incense Coast, I came to Aden, the largest port of southern Yemen, which once had seemed a center of the world, the place where every ship from Britain to India stopped for refueling. The last time I had been here, at the age of two, in 1959—my mother was taking me back from the Oxford where I was born to the Bombay that was her hometown—Aden had buzzed with the slightly illicit excitement that attends a port, groups of touts out to meet the tourist ships and promise everything that is possible when West first touches East. Aden, Victoria’s first imperial acquisition, was the largest harbor in the world then, outside Manhattan.
Now, in the summer of 2001, the town was a biblical wasteland. Goats foraged outside the broken shops and old women, at occasional red lights, came and hammered on the windows of passing cars, skinny arms extended. I saw no shops or restaurants or anythings in Aden; the children played in the street because there was nowhere else for them to play. It seemed as if the whole city was sitting on debris, waiting to see what the next wind would blow into town.
I took myself to the Crescent Hotel, near Steamer Point, where a replica of Big Ben tolled the passing hours. But when I walked into the old British haunt—a black-and-white portrait of Queen Elizabeth, when young, peering out through the unlit lobby—I quickly realized this was no place to stay. “We have a new Crescent Hotel down the street,” the young boy at the desk offered, and I followed him to a marginally less dusty place where an aged retainer offered me a crisp military salute.
The new hotel on the beach seemed more promising, though just to walk into the lobby I had to walk through a security machine of the kind you see at airports. Going out onto the sand—pristine, and opening onto a silent, lovely bay—I noticed that I was the only person there. Then I looked more closely and saw armed soldiers on both sides of me, standing against the wall, protecting me, I could only imagine, from Aden.
When I walked out of the hotel, a sad-eyed man, apparently Indian, slouched up to me. He said hello in a fluent, almost swallowed English, and I learned that his father had been an Englishman, though born here. The man before me had applied for a passport, and the chance to live in England, but Her Majesty’s Government had refused him because his father, though entirely English, was born in Aden. “Do you want to see the cemetery?” he said.
We drove a few hundred yards to where a clump of head-stones sat in the wasting heat. Their inscriptions were in German, Greek, Russian, or Chinese; Aden had once been known as the “entrance-hall of China and the warehouse of the West.” Most of the inscriptions, though, were in English, recalling forgotten Gwendolenes and Despinas, flying officers and telegraphists. OH FOR A TOUCH OF THAT VANISHED HAND. AVE ATQUE VALE.
“We used to see them every time we went to church,” my new friend said. “Getting buried. One or two a week.” Now St. Mary’s was shuttered, and Christians such as he could worship only in secret if at all. The English had left, quite literally overnight, in 1967, the Russians had come in, and then they too had given up on Aden, leaving it to a civil war. Though technically reunited with the northern parts of the country in 1991, it had been through a two-month siege in 1994. The Frontier Hotel, burned out, had become the Mövenpick. The Mövenpick, destroyed in the next period of fighting, was now the Aden Hotel.
In the small part of town where the English had been, the signs still said, WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOUR STAY. PLEASE COME AGAIN at the Prince of Wales pier. A bookshop in the customs shed sold black-and-white postcards of the once bustling port, and paperbacks, forty years old, in which someone had laboriously inscribed, Miss Sirihin Abdullah Murji, P.O. Box 1959,
Mombasa.
I thought of a grandfather, difficult and vainglorious in his youth, who now has been softened by incapacity, and can almost be regarded with affection.
We drove around to see the small museum and the Rambow Tourist Restaurant and Cafeteria, where Rimbaud once had lived. And when I walked into the hotel, that evening, the man who had offered to reconfirm my ticket, to Jeddah next day, came up with a smile. “Your flight is canceled,” he said (and having seen Aden, I was surprised they even made the pretense of flights). “But there’s another one in four days’ time.”
Four days, I thought, could be forty in this wilderness, so I went outside, found an old African man with a battered car, and we drove into the deserted downtown area known as Crater. In the Yemenia office a woman in a black veil looked out at me, preparing for hostilities, and then turned away to a friend.
“It’s important that I get to Jeddah tomorrow. I’ll take any flight that’s available.”
“One moment,” she said, and then turned to the little girl who had appeared by her desk and joked about their friends, a birthday party coming up, perhaps. Then, turning to the computer, she slowly tapped on a few keys and then, looking at her watch, said, “There’s a flight to the capital, but it leaves ten minutes from now.”
“I have to be out of Aden,” I said. “There must be something leaving.” She stirred, and yawned, and went over to talk to another friend. There seemed no point in hurrying; no one was going anywhere in Aden.
Then, coming back and tapping away at her computer again, she said, “There is a flight leaving in the morning. But from Sana’a, across the mountains. A six-hour drive away.” It left at 6:00 a.m., which meant that check-in was seven hours from now.
“I’ll take it.”
“I can’t help you with this. You must go to the other Yemenia office.”
I went out into the dark—the main street was like the cemetery—and roused the driver from his sleep; we rattled off to another Yemenia office, a few hundred yards away, where another woman in a black veil looked up at me.
This new adversary clicked away on her keyboard—computers are slow in Aden, and linked to a world no one really believes in—and then, after many blocked paths and wrong turns, she announced that a plane was leaving in the morning, from Sana’a, the capital, long enemy territory to Aden, six hours away across the mountains. Check-in was six hours from now, she said; I couldn’t make it.
Time slips away in a place like Aden; space itself dissolves, as if the whole city is drifting away on the narcotic
qat
that everyone chews. The clock at the top of the Crescent Hotel clearly hadn’t moved for years.
I bought a ticket from her—no price was too high—and went out to summon my driver again, to drive back to the hotel. I called the hotel in advance, from the Yemenia office, to fix up a taxi to drive to the capital, and we made our way back, at a donkey’s pace, through the broken center of the city, past roadblocks and detours, the large ditches Chinese laborers were digging on behalf of the Aden Sewage Company. The city is stretched out along the coast like a piece of gum that someone has been chewing for a very long time.
At the hotel, racing to collect my things and check out, I was told that the taxi had been called for, but showed no signs of arriving; it was better to go to the taxi stand at the bus station. A young employee in a suit pushed me into a minivan, and we drove, tires squealing, across town, skidding in the dust, to a bus station that was a dingy emptiness. In front of what was optimistically called the “taxi stand” there was darkness and silence.
At last a man appeared, smiling, in an old Peugeot, and I recognized a man who had taken me all around town two days before in search of a cemetery we never found. “Wait over there,” he said, pointing to an even darker corner of the empty lot, and we went and sat in the silence, the night. The young man in his suit drummed his fingers on the dashboard; he looked at his watch, looked back nervously at me. Finally, the man who had cheated me before appeared, at the wheel of a very old car.
He had no interest in driving himself, he explained, through the man in the suit—the main source of income in the mountains was the kidnapping of foreigners. But he had found someone else who knew so little, or needed so much, that he had volunteered for the job: a very old man in a dirty turban loomed out of the dark. As he took his place behind the wheel, eyes closed, and visibly shaking, friends came up and patted him on the back, wished him luck, said prayers for his safe return.
He, too, before moving, closed his eyes and muttered a quick prayer, and then we were off, in the dark, the old man hardly able to see over the wheel, peering out into the night. Occasional trucks came barreling towards us on the narrow road, their headlights blinding.
The night that followed never happened, I tell myself now; it belongs to some place in the imagination. Very soon we were on a mountain road, pitch black, and though I could see nothing around us, I could tell there was a sheer drop on one side. Above us, as we climbed, there were occasional towers, medieval fortresses, set across the hillside. We turned a mountain corner, and suddenly there was noise: men with guns, turbaned boys, a clamor of faces in the dark motioning for us to stop. A flashlight in my eyes, my passport taken away, a whispered confabulation. The driver, trembling, was asked to get out and open up the back.