The Pillars of Hercules

That unmistakable vandalism was upsetting because it was violent and illogical. I had just come from Croatia and seen shellholes and shattered roofs. Those were the marks of war; but this was worse, more thorough, more absurd, nightmarish. And adding to the impression of derangement were the people, standing near these broken windows and upended culverts and burned-out factories, wearing rags.

This continued all the way to Tirana: vandalism and cement bunkers and people fumbling with hoes and pitchforks in the lumpy fields. Masses of bunkers lay outside Tirana and in places they were so densely situated that these areas had the look of an extensive necropolis, so similar were the bunkers to mausoleums.

“There are six hundred thousand of them,” a man told me in Tirana at the black market money-exchange. “One for each family—that is what we were taught. But what if we had used all that cement and iron and made houses with it? We would have had no housing shortage now.”

“Did anyone wonder why these bunkers were being built?”

“No. We were proud of them. We made them for a possible invasion—from our enemies.”

“Who were your enemies?”

“Everyone,” he said. “From every side. Revisionists from the east, imperialists from the west.”

It was later that I met him. At the moment, as the bus pulled into town, I was still wondering what to do, for as soon as I got off beggars lunged at me, and they followed me up the main street, whining and plucking at me.

My first problem was finding a place to stay. The only hotel I had found was full, and though at first I did not seriously mind being turned away, because it was so dirty, it seemed there was nowhere else. The Hotel Tirana was closed—for repairs, one person told me; for demolition, someone else said. The only other possibility was the grubby Hotel Dajti.

“All full,” the desk clerk told me. “Unless someone checks out.”

“Is that likely?”

“Don’t know. Please, I’m busy.”

I walked some more, back to the main square, past the statue of the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg with his horned helmet, past the mosque, into some backstreets, and spotted a hotel sign on another building. A man sitting on the stairs said he had space. It was the worst hotel I had seen on my whole trip. I was not a hotel snob—I liked a bargain. But it was that Albanian look again, not of neglect but of vandalism; the place looked unhealthy, even dangerous.

The Dajti had at first looked grubby to me. Now that I realized that it was really the only place to stay, it seemed desirable, even rather grand. The desk clerk told me to come back later in the day—he might have something for me. I couldn’t call him. “The phones are not working.” I left my name and considered offering him baksheesh; and then I perambulated again, thinking what a fix I would have been in traveling with someone else.

—Where are we going to stay?

—Something might turn up.

—What if it doesn’t? What will we do then?

—I don’t know.

—Why didn’t you think of this before?

—I don’t know.

—You could have made a phone call.

—The phones don’t work. You heard the guy.

—I’m scared, Paulie.

—Everything’s going to be all right.

I believed that. At the very worst, if there was nothing at the end of the day, there was the dump—the danger zone. There were also hotels in Durrës, awful place that it was; it was reachable by bus or taxi. There was also the last resort, asking someone on the street if they knew of a little old lady who took in boarders. In such a desperate city that was probably the way most accommodation was handled.

At the enormous fountain at the Palace of Congresses children were companionably taking baths—they had soap and towels. Nearby stood a marble cone as high as a six-story building. It was abandoned and partly wrecked (bricks missing, graffiti, kicked-over planters). A man saw me sitting and came over to talk. It had been a monument to Enver Hoxha, he said, and then: “Please give me money.” On most street corners, in gutters, next to buildings, there were heaps of garbage, and people picking through it and scattering it. Whenever I paused and looked at something—a hedge, a bush, a state building, a wall, the gunky river that ran through town, someone got in my face. “Please—food! Give me something to eat!” I bought a bottle of nameless fluid to drink, but before I could raise it to my lips, a woman had her hand on it. “Please—water!”

These were serious beggars, ragged and deserving, cowering near the puny trees and in the shade of the brick walls. Some wore traditional dress—skirts, leggings, black shawls, slippers, a cummerbund, veils, wide sleeves, all in tatters.

Towards late afternoon I went back to the Dajti. Yes, they had a room. I swapped my passport for a key. The room was dirty, it had a rank smell, it overlooked a field where boys were yelling and kicking a football. I slept like a log.

In the bar the next day I met an American in Tirana on business who said, “This is the worst hotel in the world. I mean, officially. It’s number one on a list of hotels that are, I guess, the best available in a given city.” He smiled. “The pits!”

The general in Ismaïl Kadaré’s novel stays in the Hotel Dajti. The Albanian novelist, who has been in exile in Paris for thirty years, makes it sound like the Ritz, a peaceful refuge, splendid among the pines of Tirana. He collected his mail at the desk … asked for a call to be put through to his family. In his otherwise macabre novel, even the Dajti’s phones work.

“But it costs forty dollars a night,” I said. “It’s not the worst forty-dollar hotel I’ve ever stayed in.”

It was relative, too. Right outside it, because there were policemen and security men and usually groups of people, beggars had taken up residence under the trees. There was a homeless beggar under most of the trees. There were others in doorways, in the manner of homeless people in New York, who prefer to sleep in the doorways of Madison Avenue and the safer and better-lighted parts of New York City. At night, at the base of almost every streetlamp on the main boulevard of Tirana, Shqiperia—“Land of the Eagle”—there was a ragged child sleeping.

After this strange introduction to Albania—the beggars, the bunkers, the dereliction of Durrës, the horror of Tirana, the dirt—I went underground. I happened to be riding a bus from the Tirana Railway Station (wrecked, inhabited by lurking quarreling Albanians) with no thought of where the bus was going—I was immersing myself in Tirana. I fell into conversation with a young man and his wife, who were just returning from Durrës. His spoken English was excellent. His nose was bright pink.

“We have been to the beach,” he explained.

Beach?

“Yes, it is a bit dirty. But we just sit. We do not know how to swim.”

We talked a bit more; their names were Djouvi and Ledia. I rode with them to the end of the line, some miles from the center of the city, where they lived in a large and ravaged-looking apartment house. When they asked me what I thought of Tirana I told them frankly what I felt.

“The Tirana that you see is much better than last year,” he said. “We have touched bottom—a year ago we had nothing at all. Now there is some activity. There are goods in some shops. Before there was no money, no goods, just desperation.”

“How was it worse last year?”

“It was anarchy,” he said. “There was no food, there was no government.”

I tried to imagine Tirana looking worse than it did today. “We had riots. Mobs of people roaming the city. Tirana was dangerous.”

We had been walking down the road and were now in a slum of tottering eight-story tenements, making our way—I guessed—to where Djouvi and Ledia lived. Djouvi told me he was twenty-four, Ledia was twenty. They had married a year ago, and yet both of them seemed older than their years. I remarked on that. Djouvi said, “I look older than twenty-four, yes, because so much happened to me. The hunger strike. The political troubles. We thought we might be shot. Also the fear of secret police.”

Now we were at the last grim tenement in the cluster. Djouvi asked me to look at the satellite dishes on the wall. There were five mounted on the wall of the building.

“Albanians are individualistic,” Djouvi said. “So each one gets his own satellite dish instead of one for the whole building, which would be cheaper. We get CNN, MTV. Italian channels are shown on Albanian TV, because it is cheap. I can speak Italian though I have never had a lesson. A quarter of the people in Tirana can speak Italian from watching TV.”

“How long have you lived in this building?” I asked him in Italian.

Without hesitating, he said in Italian, “I have lived here my whole life. I was born in it. Look at those buildings—they are ugly and dirty. But if you go inside you will see the apartments are very clean, because they are privately owned. Inside they are beautiful, outside not so nice.”

He invited me up the stairs to his fourth-floor apartment. It was spartan but clean—a bedroom, a kitchen, a sitting room with a bookcase: books by Mark Twain, plays by Ibsen and Aeschylus.

“My father helped build this building. We paid rent for thirty years. So when the government privatized it was sold to us for ninety-seven dollars. But we had paid for it many times over.”

“You seem very optimistic,” I said.

“I am optimistic—because I see changes for the better. Last year there was no one by the stadium selling soft drinks.”

He called it a stadium. It was a ruined football field, trampled grass surrounded by faltering walls, with some tables in front where people sold bottles of orange soda.

“Now there are four people there. Next year they will have shops in town and someone else will be there—people are moving on, little by little. Individual enterprise. That is what we want.”

But I said that I had not seen anything substantial for sale except pornographic newspapers—two-cent tabloids with large headlines over smudgy pictures of nude couples embracing or women on all fours. And Albanians did not seem to make anything except the rugs, copperware and knickknacks that were for sale in one shop in town. Even postage stamps were in short supply. At the main post office where one woman sat at one window stamps were rationed, three to a customer. There were only two sorts of stamps; neither was good for an airmail letter. The good for almost nothing two-lek “Posta Shqiptare” stamp bore the portrait of Mother Teresa, herself an ethnic Albanian from the province of Kosovo.

“Those sexy newspapers on the street have become very common in the past six months,” Djouvi said. “Before then we had many papers, political ones. But people now are sick of politics and sick of news. They want pornography.”

Ledia made tea. Her English was not good enough for her to be able to follow the conversation, but Djouvi translated for her. After a while I felt self-conscious, pestering Djouvi with questions—after all, I had just met him on the bus, and here I was in his apartment, drinking tea and asking him to explain Albania. I said that I really had to go but that I wanted to meet him and his wife again, to take them to dinner, and that they were free to bring any of their friends. I was ignorant of Albania: I wanted to know more.

After thinking this over, Djouvi said that it was not such a good idea to sit in a restaurant talking about the past of Albania, even worse to speculate on the future. But a walk in the park, meeting at one of the outdoor cafes first, might be better. He had a few friends who might like to come along to practice their English.

We agreed to meet the next day, around five, after work. Djouvi was a clerk in an office. His friends were teachers and civil servants. I met them not far from the cone-shaped Hoxha memorial, which was no longer the Hoxha memorial but simply an embarrassment. It had not been hard to tear down the dictator’s statue, but this enormous obelisk was another matter. They might have to learn to live with it, or else to rename it.

Late the next afternoon I sat on the bench that Djouvi had indicated on a neatly drafted map, and soon after five looked up and saw Djouvi and Ledia with three other Albanians about their own age. They were Nik, Ahmet and Alma. Djouvi explained that I had just arrived in Albania from Italy.

“There are many Albanians working in Italy,” Nik said. “We work hard and earn little money. Even in Germany and Switzerland you will find Albanians.”

“And Greece,” Alma said.

“The Greeks don’t like us,” Nik said.

“Italians smuggle Albanians into Italy,” Djouvi said. “They charge up to one thousand dollars. They pick them up on the beach south of Durrës. They use small fast boats and take the Albanians to the Italian coast and drop them.”

“Let’s get something to drink,” I said. We walked across the boulevard where, under the trees, various entrepreneurs had set up cafes. There was a friendly-looking place near the road, but they said no and chose one of the cafes at the very back, surrounded by bushes. We were hardly visible here at our table, drinking coffee, eating cookies. It was clearly their intention to remain hidden with this nosy American.

“For years nothing changed in Albania,” I said. “Then something happened, right?”

“After Ceausescu was shot,” Ahmet said, referring to the murder of Romania’s dictator around Christmas, 1989. “The next day things began to change here. The people were talking, first small groups of them, and after a few days there were larger groups, and we knew something was going to happen.”

“Was Hoxha in power then?”

“No, Hoxha died in 1985. His successor was Ramiz Alia. He is on trial now.”

“Hoxha was a dictator with Mehmet Shehu,” Ahmet said. “It is said that Hoxha shot Mehmet Shehu, though the official version is that Shehu committed suicide. I knew Shehu’s son,” Ahmet went on. “He told me his father was not suicidal. He went to school in the morning—his father was fine. When he came home from school his father had a bullet in his heart.”

“So you five are all friends, is that right?”

“We were students in 1990 and 1991. We helped form the Democratic Party as an underground movement. Alia was in power, but for some reason he was weak. Hoxha’s widow was working behind the scenes, filling the post with her relatives. We wanted to do something.”

“I am so happy to be talking to the Albanian underground,” I said. They laughed and instinctively looked around to see whether anyone had noticed them. “When I arrived I was really depressed, but it seems as though something promising is taking place.”

“This was a hard place before,” Nik said. “They would accuse us of being spies. People were afraid because of the police. The city was cleaner then. It was fear. It looked different. People are careless now because they know it is not their own property.”

Yes, even from where we sat at this cafe we were within sight of the heaps of garbage and the broken tree limbs and the squatting whining beggars.

“Tell me why it was a hard place. Was it just the police?”

“If Hoxha thought you were not on his side he imprisoned you,” Ahmet said. “He labeled you as a spy. I remember when I was at university we spent one month a year doing work for the state. We were sent to a labor camp—”

“A concentration camp,” Djouvi said.

“In the next room was the former minister of education, Todi Lubonja, and his family, doing forced labor. His crime was that when he was minister he allowed Western music to be played, decadent music, and Hoxha was furious. That was in 1974. Lubonja was finally released in 1989.”

“What other famous prisoners were there?”

“The present President of Parliament, Pjeter Arbnori, a writer, was put in prison in the Stalinist time,” Nik said. “He stayed there for almost thirty years. Longer than Mandela! He finally founded the Albanian Social Democratic Party. He was imprisoned in 1954, released in 1984.”

“Were ordinary people imprisoned for political crimes?”

“There was a strange law here under the Hoxha regime,” Djouvi said. “If a man was regarded as a spy or an enemy his whole immediate family went with him to the camp.”

“Not just them,” Ahmet said. “It did not stop there. Other more distant family members were barred from higher education or other things.”

“They were pariahs,” I said, and explained the word; yes, yes, that was the word—political pariahs.

“It was illegal to flee the country,” Alma said. “But let’s say you managed it. After the police discovered that you had gone they arrested your brother—they punished another family member for what you had done.”

“Beards were banned,” Ahmet said—he looked as though he had the beginning of a beard himself.

“Have you heard of Disneyland?” I said. Of course they all had. “Workers in Disneyland are forbidden to grow beards. And that’s probably not the only obsession that Disneyland executives have in common with Albanian dictators.”

Long hair was also banned, and Western music, and blue jeans, and pornography. Until 1990 no one in Albania was allowed to own a car. As soon as the government changed people started letting their hair grow, and playing rock music, and wearing blue jeans. Stolen cars were being imported from Italy or smuggled over the Greek border by the thousands. All over Tirana there were men sitting on stools near stacks of yellowing two-cent porno newspapers.

“So tell me,” I said. “How did this horrible man Hoxha manage to stay in power?”

Djouvi said, “Hoxha made us believe that we were the best people in the world. There was crime and violence and poverty in every country except ours. We believed everything we were told. We did not question anything. We did not ask why we had water shortages in summer and power cuts in the winter. We had no taxes. We believed that we were the greatest country in the world, better than China which we had rejected, better than the Soviet Union, much better than the West.”

“At school we sang songs, praising Hoxha. What a wise and great man he was,” Alma said. “We all did military service.”

“We all had a weapon—everyone in the country had a gun,” Ahmet said. “Each person had a personal weapon and a bunker. My weapon was a Kalashnikov, in the—what do you call it?—national arsenal? There were many weapons here.”

It was hard to imagine anything so efficient as an arms industry in this country that did not even have tractors or plows or sewing machines.

“Weapons is the one industry that has not stopped,” Djouvi said. “The factory is in Elbasan. We made weapons, we had a Chinese factory and Chinese training.”

Nik said, “All children love guns. We loved taking them apart and fixing them.”

We talked some more, and I was resisting writing anything down, because I did not want to make them self-conscious, but at last I suggested that we meet again tomorrow, at the same place. It was cheap enough—coffee twenty cents, sandwich fifty cents, mineral water eighty cents, a beer one dollar. The waiter presented me with a bill for less than five dollars.

“We will see you tomorrow, at the same time,” Djouvi said, shaking my hand.

“Come by the hotel,” I said.

“It’s better here,” he said.

“Okay, but if I’m a bit late wait for me,” I said. “I want to stop by the embassy.”

A querying expression came into his eyes.

“It’s a good idea for Americans to register their names in the U.S. Embassy in some countries,” I said, and thought: Especially in this country. “But I’ll try to be on time.”

Off they went. The next day I found the embassy, which was a lovely building in the style of a Mediterranean villa, creamy stucco with green and yellow trim, on a backstreet of Tirana. I spoke awhile with the Deputy Chief of Mission, Douglas Smith, who had been in the country a year or so and was fluent in Albanian. He told me about the tradition of bloodfeuds in the hinterland, wondering out loud whether they were somehow related to the concept of besa, which was a solemn Albanian oath. The feuds had been stopped by the old regime, but there was apparently a resurgence of them, with the democratic reforms.

I was at the cafe table early to meet the Albanian underground. Five o’clock came and went. I drank a beer. I had the dinner special, rice with a glop of tomato sauce on it and meatballs made out of a dead animal and french fries. The meatballs were quofta: a Turkish word for ground meat or meatballs; many food words in the eastern Mediterranean were Turkish, though kofta had gotten as far as India. I was reminded again of what truly disgusting food passed for Albanian cuisine.

There was no sign of the talkative youths of the previous afternoon. I should have known better than to say that I was planning to stop by the embassy. Paranoia is a hard habit to break. I never saw them again.

After three days and three nights in the stifling darkness of the fish’s belly, Jonah had an illumination. That is often the way with nightmares. After three days, Albania—which had started as a nightmare—took on the dimensions of a valuable experience. I had overcome my disgust and fear. Tirana was still as ratty, but I was calmer, fascinated rather than repelled, and so the city did not seem so bad. “It just looks dirty,” as Jonah might have said.

The beggars were now recognizable. They slept at night in the same places where they sat all day, with their hands out. There was a legless woman, an old blind man, and a hectoring man who shouted at passersby, demanding money; there were many children, scavenging in the day and curling up under the lights or in doorways at night. Two always slept together, one lying facedown and his younger brother—perhaps—using the small of his back as a pillow.

Instead of leaving I stayed a few days more. One of the reasons for this was that it was not easy to leave. I had arrived by ship and I wanted to leave by ship. Studying the map, I could see that in the deep south of the country a narrow channel separated Albania from the island of Corfu. It looked no greater than five miles: no distance at all.

“Yes, there are fishermen there, and they might take you across,” a man told me in Tirana.

He was from that area and seemed to have Hellenistic sympathies.

“My family name was Stavro,” he said. “We were orthodox. It means ‘cross’ in Greek. But the government made us change our name. So my grandfather took the name Çeliku—it means ‘steel,’ like Stalin.”

“How could you be orthodox? Didn’t Hoxha ban religion?” I asked.

“Yes. No churches. They were forbidden.”

God was illegal. Albania enjoyed the distinction of being the only officially atheistic country in the entire world. But instead of flocking to churches after the fall of the government they went haywire on porno, which had also been banned.

I was not convinced that I would be able to find a fisherman in southern Albania to take me to Corfu, but there was another way of getting to Greece. Greeks had a tendency to close the border out of spite, because they disliked Albanians and had poor diplomatic relations with the government. If the border was open, there was a bus from Gjirokastër to the Greek town of Ioánnina.

There was said to be a train to Vlorë in the south, but it was not running. Çeliku said there was a bus that went. I had not seen a bus that looked capable of going such a distance. I walked towards the southern edge of town, where I had been told the depot was located. There were no vehicles in sight, but there was the evidence of buses: great oil stains in the dust which spoke of big leaking gaskets.

I kept on walking, into a ruined park, past a stagnant reservoir where people were sunning themselves in their underwear. Their underwear had the same cast-off look as their clothes, just as ill-fitting and ragged and dated. Most of what Albanians wore these days had been supplied by Italian charitable agencies, and so it had come out of attics and closets in pious households up and down the Adriatic.

There were signs of vandalism even here—plaques torn off, signs defaced, dates obliterated, plinths cracked where they had held statues. About a mile beyond the reservoir there was a terrible smell, borne by a hot breeze. No sign indicated it, but it was clear that just ahead was the Tirana Zoo.

I hate zoos generally but never have I felt more like opening cage doors and setting the animals free. If they ate a few Albanians then it was poetic justice for the torments these animals had endured, though I had yet to see an Albanian fit to eat.

The cages were very small—about the size that they would be for a wicked criminal in the prison of a brutish country. This was how the animals were seen—as savage beasts; and because they were beasts they were treated like convicted murderers. An example of this was the magnificent tiger, his fur gone grotty in his foul cage; he was fatigued and desperate in this eight-by-twelve-foot cage, which hardly contained him. An Albanian watering some plants tormented the tiger by squirting the hose into his face.

A wolf gnawed a bone in a small cell. Three eagles flopped in another cage, so small that it was impossible for them to spread their wings—one of them hobbled. A filthy crane, four sweating bear cubs, and worst of all a lioness, demented by captivity, pacing beside the bars, with still enough wit to flinch when an Albanian worker tossed twigs at her. Her mate, cowed by the twig-throwing, retreated to the back wall of the cage.

“Why are you doing that, you shithead?” I said to the Albanian, and made gestures.

He grinned at me and muttered in his own language. Throwing things at the animals was apparently one of the pastimes here. Among old bones and lion droppings and slime there was the other stuff that Albanians had flung through the bars—more twigs, balled-up paper, stones, a black cap.

But seeing this zoo was a way of understanding how the Albanians lived, in tiny apartments, eating bad food and not enough of it, putting up with water shortages and power cuts, tormenting each other, ignoring the filth in the streets. It was almost certainly the way their prisoners were treated, and these zoo animals were just another species of prisoner.

• • •

If I had abused that bullying man at the zoo in Italian he might have understood me. It was true that Italian was the second language here. I found an Italian-speaking taxi driver, Ali, bargained a little and went back to Durrës in his fairly new Lancia.

“Where did you buy this car?”

“Down the coast. The place has no name.”

“So was this car stolen?”

“Probably. But not here. Italy maybe.”

The bunkers by the roadside and on every hill did not look less strange, even days later. Ali said one of them was his—he had forgotten which one.

Past the ruined trees, the broken road, the cracked tenements, the locked railway station: I had fled from these on the old bus. The beach at Durrës was the nastiest I had seen in the Mediterranean. It was bouldery and black, littered with oily flotsam, broken glass and greasy plastic. This was the sort of beach that needed a great overwhelming tide to sweep it and scour its sand. Such a tide did not exist in this sea.

Its filth did not deter Albanians from swimming and sunning themselves there. Pale, in their underwear, they had the look of people who had been forced to strip and undergo a cruel initiation.

Ancient Roman columns stood on the beach—in ancient times this was where the Via Egnatia picked up after it left Bari, one of the great spokes of the Roman road system. It was the remains of a temple, left to decay. Farther on, a war memorial to the Albanian dead—a twenty-foot-high bronze soldier charging off his plinth and underneath it, spray-painted in red on the marble, Nirvana and Guns n Roses and Fuck You.

The construction of the memorial—the way the slabs were set up, the marble blocks a certain height and spaced just so—made it serve a dual function as war memorial and toilet. It had been fouled; it stank. This whole shore under the headland of the former palace of King Zog was a horror.

Ali said, “Want to see the amphitheater?”

We drove into a dead end, and there among the houses of the slum was a Roman ruin. The slum was part of it, though the houses looked much frailer than the Roman arches.

An Albanian watchman, angling for a tip, began chattering in Italian.

“This is where the rich people came in on their horses,” he said, showing me a cavernous entry way. “The poor people came in through that little door up there.”

The slum dwellers had simply encroached upon it in a distinctly Mediterranean manner, creeping up to it and snatching the marble slabs and the old Roman bricks and using these ancient building materials for their hovels.

“This was big enough for fifteen thousand people,” the watchman said. “They had shows—animals, lions, tigers and gladiators. Look, the original stone, these steps, this passageway went all the way around the perimeter, where you see these houses.”

“The people used the stone for their houses,” I said.

“But they didn’t break it. An earthquake did that,” he said. “There were two earthquakes. In the first one it was destroyed. People took the stone to put in their houses. Come, I will show you the chapels.”

There were two Byzantine chapels in the lower passageway. There had been catacombs, there were mosaics of broken but still-recognizable portraits of saints. The watchman knew them: St. Sofia, St. Irene, St. Stephen, some angels. “This was used for baptisms and funerals.”

“It’s too bad so much of it is buried,” I said.

“We only found it a little while ago.”

“This Roman amphitheater? You didn’t know it was here?”

“No. Like I said, it was buried in an earthquake. Then one day in 1966 a man’s fig tree died. He dug it up, to plant another, and in the hole he found this wall—these stairs.” He showed me the marble staircase. “He dug further and when he found more stairs he reported it to the archaeological department. And they saw that this whole slope was an amphitheater.”

At that point it began to be excavated, and bits of it started to vanish, only to appear as elements in the nearby houses. The Roman amphitheater was a mess, like everything else, and the underground passages that had been dug out were flooded.

“Pump’s broken!” the watchman said. Nevertheless, he had earned his five leks.

We went, Ali and I, to King Zog’s palace. Ali said that it was now a government guest house, like Hoxha’s mansion in Tirana. “Sometimes visitors stay here.” It was a squarish villa at the top of the hill, less impressive up close than it had seemed from the deck of the ferry Venezia.

Zog had a son, Ali said. He had been born in this palace, and the next day the infant had been spirited into exile with his father and mother.

“Do you want him to be your king?”

Ali laughed at the suggestion, and said, “He spent one day here. Then a few years ago he came back. Also for a day. So he’s—what?—fifty-five or fifty-six, and in his whole life he’s spent two days in Albania!”

I asked him whether it was true, as the youths in Tirana had told me, that all the borders of Albania had been closed, and that people were forbidden to leave.

Yes, Ali said, it was against the law—no one could leave.

“Why?”

“Why! Why!” He slapped his head to ridicule my pestering question. “You think it’s strange that we couldn’t leave this country. Look, when I was a little boy I couldn’t leave the house! Everyone stayed in. My parents kept the door locked. I couldn’t go out. You understand? No one went out of the house during Hoxha’s time.”

“They went to work, though?”

“Yes. Then straight home.”

On our way back to Tirana we passed the decrepit factories. The biggest was a rubber factory. “Is it working?”

“Destroyed,” Ali said. “All the factories are destroyed. Rubber factory. Plastics factory. Machinery. All broken.”

“Who did it?”

“Who! Who!” He smacked the side of his head again. “Who do you think did it?” He laughed but it was a shameful laugh. “I did it! In 1990 and again last year! We were excited. We broke everything!”

However poor Tirana seemed, life was harder in the countryside. About thirty miles south of Tirana many people had taken up residence in the larger bunkers and bomb shelters. They had extended them at the entrance with a framework of poles, covered with plastic or canvas sheets. It was bound to happen, with so many bunkers and such a serious housing shortage.

I had come here with Adrian Bebeti, a native of Tirana, in his late twenties, who also owned a stolen car, a BMW with a tape deck and leather seats. I had met him near the Dajti and he agreed to take me on a slow trip to southern Albania for a hundred dollars, stopping at Vlorë and anywhere else I wished, and dropping me at Sarandë, where (“Perhaps,” he said in Italian) I might find a boat to take me to Greek Corfu.

Himself, he hated Greeks, he said. They were scum who did little but persecute Albanians and lord over them the fact that they were members of the European Community. And look at them, the average Greek was just as pathetic as the average Albanian.

Adrian spoke Italian fluently. He had visited Italy twice. His brother worked there. He watched Italian television—he liked the game shows, the football, the music programs.

Driving south, we passed a burned-out factory.

“Did you do that?” I asked him.

“Not that one,” he said. “I burned another one!”

Traveling down the coast, about twenty miles south of Durrës, Adrian pulled off the road near a huge parking lot. But it was not a parking lot.

“All stolen,” Adrian said. Tutto rubato.

It was the thieves’ car market, all the cars lined up in an orderly way beside the shoreline. The Mediterranean had some odd beaches, but this one was by far the oddest. There were about five hundred cars and Albanians swarmed around them, kicking the tires, flashing money, making deals. Mr. Lombardi, are you looking for your Fiat that was stolen in Rome a few months ago? It was here. Mr. Schmidt, your Mercedes that was pinched in Munich, and Mr. Wilson’s Jeep Cherokee that was last seen in a hotel parking lot in Lausanne—these and many others were here under the scrubby pines by the Albanian shore. They were in good order, with new papers, and there were so many it was impossible for me to look at all of them. The prices were reasonable because, having been stolen, they had no book value, only what the market would bear. They were much cheaper, Adrian said, than what they would have cost in Italy or Germany. The number of them, and their excellent condition, and the remote spot on another grubby beach, nowhere near a town, all impressed me. It struck me that some of them might have come with me the week before on the ferry Venezia from Bari.

“Crooked lawyers in Italy fix them up with new papers, and off they go,” Adrian said.

“Ask them how much this Mercedes is.”

But he wouldn’t. He said, “It is not a good idea to ask questions here if you are not intending to buy a car. They will wonder why you ask so many questions.”

“I suppose that’s my problem—asking questions,” I said.

“In Albania we have learned not to talk too much,” Adrian said. And he suggested we get back on the road.

It was a poor road, lined with rows of tree stumps. The trees, Adrian explained, had been cut and used for fuel. There were few other cars on the road—some carts, some horses and dogs and chickens, and people had the habit of walking in the road. The houses were much poorer than ones I had seen in Durrës and Tirana. But they had the same doomsday look, as though at a certain point in the growth of these villages they had been stricken. The people were not ragged—no beggars here—but there was a definite look of deprivation: women carrying water in tin containers, families hoeing, groups of people selling small piles of vegetables or fruit by the side of the road. At the town of Fier we stopped and walked to the market, where Adrian bought a pound of cherries. They were in season. We sat and ate them, and then set off again.

Remembering what the American diplomat had said to me about the besa and the blood feud, I asked Adrian.

“You’re confusing two things,” he said. “First of all, besa means a promise that has to be kept, no matter what.”

“Give me an example,” I said.

“All right. Suppose you give me your telephone number in New York and I go there, because you invited me and you gave me your besa. In that case, you meet me, you take me to your house, you feed me—because your besa was given with your invitation. You would never leave me on the street. You would look after me no matter what. You cannot abandon me!”

He was driving in a swerving fast-slow sort of way. If private cars had been banned in Albania until 1990 that meant no Albanian had been driving for more than three years, and most of them much less, or not at all. The inexperience certainly showed.

“Revenge is another matter,” Adrian was saying—gabbling in Italian and swerving to avoid potholes in the rutted road. “We call it hakmari or jakmari. Hak means blood, mari means take.”

“Does it always involve killing?”

Adrian took both hands off the steering wheel and cupped them, a gesture that meant, “The answer to that question is so obvious I do not believe it is worthy of a verbal reply.”

I said, “Please give me an example of Albanian hakmari.”

“All right. Someone does something to your brother. So you do something to him. Or, you just killed someone in my family, you miserable Pig—”

Adrian became shrill and definite when he personalized these examples. I was uncomfortable again, as I had been when illustrating besa he had said, You cannot abandon me!

“In that case, I kill you,” he said, his jaw set. “Never mind how much time passes. It could be twenty years later. By then you are happy. You have forgotten what you did. But I have not forgotten. It is there, the pain in my heart. One day you leave your house—happy! It is a nice day! I go to you and”—he whipped his fingers against his throat—“I kill you.”

“Is it better if some time passes?” I said. “In English there is a proverb that goes, ‘Revenge is a dish that is best served cold.’ ”

Adrian smiled. He liked that. But he said, “Anytime is the right time for hakmari.”

I saw from the map that we were approaching Vlorë, where I had been intending to stop. I mentioned this to Adrian. He did not react. His mind was on other things.

“My grandfather was a victim of hakmari,” he said. “He had an enemy. One day the man killed him. It was my mother’s father, about 1952 or so.”

“Was his death avenged?”

“What could be done? Nothing. Because there were no men in the family. My grandfather had three sisters and his wife and only daughters. Women don’t kill.” He kept driving. He said, “That was in Scutari.”

“Why weren’t you told to kill the man?” I asked.

“I couldn’t kill him. I wasn’t born until 1966. By then it was too late. I was the wrong generation. The matter had been forgotten.”

“I see. So vengeance has to be carried out by someone in the same generation as the victim.”

“Exactly,” Adrian said.

“Was hakmari practiced during the Hoxha times?”

“No, not in the Hoxha communist times. But in the past few years I have heard stories. Not a lot but definitely there are families ‘taking blood.’ ”

We stopped for the night at Vlorë. We had gone more than half the distance to Sarandë, and it was now late in the day. It was not a good idea to be on the road after dark in a country so inadequately provided for. Anyway, Adrian had a friend here, he said. Remembering my liking for the cherries he had bought at Fier, Adrian asked several people in Vlorë where we could buy some. Thirty cents got us a pound of ripe cherries.

The hotel at Vlorë had no name, and many empty rooms. The only guests were two Albanian families. They had spent the day on the stony beach. Adrian said he would stay with his friend and pick me up at seven the next morning. He left me the cherries and a stern warning to be very careful. “Lock your door at night.” I took his advice.

At Vlorë there was a large villa on a headland which had belonged to Enver Hoxha. Before darkness fell I walked towards it, but saw that it was guarded by soldiers and thought better of rousing their suspicions. Though people stared; no one in Vlorë followed me; there was dire poverty here, but no beggars. The people on the beach, baring their bodies to the gray sky, risking death by poison in the water of Vlorë Bay, were bony and pale. It was so odd to see these skinny white people crouched on the sand, frail little families at play—and these were the well-off Albanians, at this seaside town.

Probably because Hoxha had come here often, there were slogans painted on the sides of buildings. They resembled the so-called “big character” Cultural Revolution slogans I had seen in China, and in some cases the words were identical. Glory to Marxism and Leninism had been painted carefully in red letters on a wall in Vlorë, and other walls extolled Hoxha—Glory to Enver Hoxha (Lavde Enver Hoxha) and ditto with revolution, work, and Albania. No one had bothered to paint over the now out-of-date slogans, but in some cases whole walls had been smashed. On a mountainside outside of Vlorë in stone letters forty feet high were the words PARTI ENVER.

I drank a beer, I ate bread and stew, and in my room I listened to an update from the BBC about the trial in Tirana of Ramiz Alia, who was being tried on charges of “abuse of power” and “misappropriation of state funds.”

There was no sound at night in Vlorë. No wind, no passing cars, no music, not even a voice. The sea was silent: not even the mushburger waves that slopped on the shore of other Mediterranean places.

“So what did you call him?” I asked Adrian the next morning, as we drove out of Vlorë past the slogans to Hoxha. “‘Great leader’? ‘Teacher’? ‘Father’? Something like that?”

“Shokut,” Adrian said. “Shokut Enver.”

“Meaning?”

“Friend.” Amico.

That was wonderful. The man who had put a wall around the country and starved them and turned off the lights and terrified them and imprisoned them and wouldn’t let them grow beards and lived in lovely villas while they stayed inside their huts eating sour bread or cleaning their personal weapon (“in the event of an attack by the imperialists”), this man was “Friend Enver.”

“These days we don’t use the word shokut at all,” Adrian said. “It is not a good word, because of the way we used it before.”

“Then if you don’t use the word friend, how do you say ‘Friend Adrian’?”

“We use the word zoti. Zoti Paul, I might say to you if I greet you,” he said. “It means ‘god.’ No more friends, we are now gods.”

Until Vlorë we had been traveling on a shore road that was fairly flat, but the next day I saw that the southern part of the Albanian coast was mountainous. The steep cliffs dropped straight into the sea, and the road climbed behind them, becoming corrugated and unsafe, as it shook our car sideways to the edge. Rising to over two and a half thousand feet, the road was also bleak and windy, in places precipitous, at the edge of rocky goat-haunted ravines, where the only settlements were clusters of stone huts, many of them ancient.

Above Vlorë there were only tree stumps—the trees had been recently cut down. In the desperate and anarchic days of the previous year, when there was no fuel, people had cleared the woods and cut even the cedars that had been planted beside the road.

“Perfume!” Adrian shouted as he bumped along the side of a ravine, and the heavy scent of rosemary from the mountainside entered the car.

Almost four hours of this narrow mountain road; Adrian had a tape machine in his car but only one tape, The Greatest Hits of Queen, a rock group. Adrian liked the group. “Freddie Mercury,” he said. “He died of AIDS.” Towards noon, passing a remote spot, we saw a policeman hitchhiking. At first I thought he was at a roadblock, and my heart sank. But Adrian explained that the man was hitching a ride and that we were under no obligation to pick him up. Thinking that it might be useful to have a policeman on board, I said, “Let’s take him.”

The policeman had two containers of olive oil. They were so heavy he could scarcely lift them. Adrian helped him hoist them into the trunk.

“Ramiz Alia!” the policeman said. “He’s on trial!”

Adrian said nothing. The policeman abandoned his attempt at conversation. Clearly, Adrian hated him. We drove about twenty miles. When the policeman got out at a crossroads Adrian discovered that some of the olive oil had leaked onto the carpet of his trunk, and he cursed and swore. It was obvious that the Albanians had few personal possessions, but they were maniacally fastidious about keeping them in good order.

The villages on the southern Albania coast looked Greek—blocky stucco huts in hillsides. We passed a ruined church.

“What religion are you?”

“None,” Adrian said.

“What about God?” I asked, sensing that I sounded like a character in a Graham Greene novel.

“I really don’t know—the whole thing confuses me,” Adrian said.

We soon were back above the coast again—great bluey-green bays and steep sluices of whitish rock. There was no one in the coves. No boats, no people, no villages. There was no litter. These were the emptiest and most beautiful beaches I had seen so far. Most of them were only accessible by sea, the cliff walls were too steep for any path. I was never to see such a coastline again in the Mediterranean. Nothing had happened here. Farther on there was a submarine base, with a large man-made cave cut into the mountainside at the shoreline for the sub to slide into. That was guarded, but that was the only man-made thing on this whole superb shore that still had the look of Illyria.

The Greek island of Ithaca, home to Ulysses, was only a hundred miles due south of here. Sailing back to Penelope, Ulysses would have seen these same cliffs and bays of this unspoiled coast.

We reached Sarandë in midafternoon. Adrian was edgy. He wanted to start back to Tirana immediately. I gave him the hundred dollars that we had agreed on and he dropped me at the Hotel Butrinti at the edge of town, just above the harbor.

“Is there a boat to Corfu?” I asked the desk clerk.

“Oh, yes. It will be here tomorrow at noon,” he said. “It is only one hour to Corfu Town.”

This was delightful news. The hotel was empty. I got a room and walked around the town, which was a strangely empty place, having been deserted by Albanians who had fled to Italy or Greece in search of work. There were a shirt factory and a carpet-weaving operation in Sarandë. There was a hospital. There were schools. What Sarandë lacked were people.

I met Fatmir, a friendly local man, whose parents had remained devoutly Muslim, he said, throughout the atheistic Hoxha years. He was fluent in English.

“I hope you will come back in ten years,” Fatmir said. “You will find that the houses are better, the town is better, the port is better, the food is better, and I am better.”

The strangest thing of all—stranger than the ruin of Albania, the bad roads, the skinny people, the rural poverty, the broken glass, the vandalism, the cruelty, the unexpected kindness—stranger than all of this was the sudden appearance the next day of a boatload of tourists sailing into Sarandë harbor on a day trip from Greece. I had not seen any tourists for such a long time—none in Albania, none in Croatia, none in Slovenia, not even Trieste had tourists. I felt I had been through a mild ordeal and that I had made a personal discovery. At that point I bumped into a busload of package tourists on their day out.

I waited for them to return from their little tour of the ruins at Roman Butrinti, and then I sneaked onto the bus which was taking them back to their boat. I would simply pretend that I had been on their day trip and, just like that, would find my way to Corfu with the tourists.

These were nicer than the sort that in Gibraltar I had had to distinguish from apes, but still the genuine sunburned beer-swigging article. They hated Albania. They were disgusted by Sarandë—after my experience of the rest of Albania, Sarandë seemed pleasant, if a bit spectral. The tourists were shocked by the Hotel Butrinti. They mocked the Roman ruins.

Most of them were hard-up Britons who had come to Corfu because it was, they said, cheaper than a holiday at home. Kathleen and Sally, two older Irish women who worked in the same clothing factory in Dublin, had paid a little over four hundred dollars (£267) for two weeks in Corfu. This included their round-trip airfare from Dublin, as well as bed and breakfast at the hotel in Corfu. (“We couldn’t go for even a few days in Cork for that money.”)

“I’m not impressed at all,” one woman said, glancing at the town as we lined up on the quay.

“The food were filthy,” a man said in a strong Lancashire accent.

“The tea, I couldn’t drink it,” his Lancastrian companion said. “They make it out of flour, you know.”

“The Russians had something to do with this, I understand.”

They were bored, scared, exhausted.

One man next to me looked very depressed.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Me wife died at Christmas,” he said. Four months ago. “It was quite a blow.”

“How long were you married?”

“Forty-two years,” he said. He was asthmatic with grief, struggling for breath, poor old guy, looking so lost here on this Albanian shore.

“Oh, God.”

“That lady over there is just a friend,” he said. “I went out with her long ago, before I met my wife. I don’t know what will happen now. I’ll sell my motor home soon.” He looked sadly at me. “I don’t expect you to understand. But you’re kind to listen.”

Fatmir had come to the quay to see the tourists leave.

“Come back to Albania, Mister Paul,” he said. “When you come back it will be better.”

The sad old man said, “That’s a shocking big bag you’ve got there.”

“I’m a stowaway,” I said. I explained how I had come from Tirana and was sneaking aboard, so that I could get to Greece.

“Good lad.”

My passport was examined and stamped. I found a seat on the upper deck, feeling pleased with myself. Kathleen and Sally waved to me from another seat. But on board, among the tourists, I got gloomy. Spring had arrived and so had the trippers and the holiday-makers, the Germans, the cut-price package people, in their annual combat with the hectoring locals. “I geeve you good price!” “You eat here!” “The food were filthy.” “Just ignore him, Jeremy.” All that.

As we left Sarandë on this boat to Corfu Town, fifteen or twenty boys leaped from the pier and began swimming in the roiling water of the stern, yelling, “Money!” and “Give me your hat!” and “Soldi!” as a smaller number of them had done at Durrës.

Some of the tourists taunted them, just as the tourists had taunted the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar. Others threw bits of paper or peanuts. Some coins were flung from the rail—small-denomination leks which, although made of some sort of metal, were so worthless they could float in water. The Albanians boys began to complain. The tourists laughed. The boat gathered speed.

“Fuck you!” one of the boys yelled. He made a finger sign. Then they all took up the cry. “Adio!” “Fuck you!” “Va fan cul’!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!”

“The universal language,” Kathleen said in her lilting Dublin accent.

13

The Seabourn Spirit to Istanbul

On our third day at sea we were all given a printed directory, a little four-page brochure, as elegant as a gourmet menu, of the passengers’ full names, and where they lived. I kept it, read it carefully, used it as a bookmark, and as it became rubbed and foxed with use I scribbled notes—question marks, quotations, warnings to myself—beside some of the names.

From Richmond Virginia, then, came Mr. William Cabell Garbee, Jr., and Mrs. Kent Darling Garbee, and from Southold, New York, the Joe Cornacchias, whose horse “Go for Gin” had just won the Kentucky Derby; from East Rockaway, the Manny Kleins, to whom on the quay at Giardini Naxos, near Taormina, I gave instructions in the use of an Italian public telephone. Mr. Pierre Des Marais II and Ms. Ghislaine LeFrancois had come from Ile Des Soeurs, Quebec; Ambassador Bienvenido A. Tan, Jr., and Mrs. Emma Tan, from Manila, Republic of the Philippines—the ambassador, retired, now did “charitable work,” in a public manner; and the Uffners, the Tribunos and the McAllisters from New York; all these joined the Seabourn Spirit that day on the quay at Nice.

The Mousers were from Boca Raton, and smoked heavily and invented fabulous new destinations with their malaprops, such as their cruise “to Rio J. DeNiro” and “Shiva, Fuji.” And from Honolulu there were the Bernsteins: Mark, who had once been obliged to destroy on behalf of a client twenty-two million Philippine pesos (one million U.S. dollars), a five-hour job on his office shredder; and his wife, Leah, who represented the popular Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiw’o’ole, whose current weight was over seven hundred pounds. Mrs. Sappho Drakos Petrowski from Simsbury, Connecticut (but formerly a dealer in fresh flowers in the Florida Keys), was traveling as a companion to Mrs. Mary P. Fuller, ninety-one years old, of Bloomfield, Connecticut, widow of brush tycoon Alfred Fuller, who sold brushes door-to-door and then founded the Fuller Brush Company.

There was Harry Jipping, a developer, from Reno, Nevada, who said, “Malta—is that an island, or a country? Isn’t it part of Italy? You mean it’s got its own money and all that?” and “That black stuff—what’s it called? Right, caviar—that Cornacchia guy’s always chomping on it.” Harry was traveling with his wife, Laverne, a Frisbie from Grand Junction. The Joneses from New York, the Smiths from Toronto, the Greens from Wooton Wauwen, England, Mrs. Doris Brown from Lauderdale, Florida, the Burton Sperbers from Malibu. And Jack Greenwald from Montreal, who wore a blazer with solid gold buttons, and his regimental tie of the Household Cavalry, and who addressed the waiters in French, usually to describe his personal recipes which he insisted on their delivering to the head chef, Jörg, and seldom spoke to another passenger on board except to say, “Can you tell me what a drongo is?” or “I’m down to two desserts.” Mr. Greenwald’s wife was the former actress Miss Constance Brown.

The Zivots from Calgary, the Alfred Nijkerks from Antwerp, Belgium, the Sonny Prices from Sylvania, Ohio, and the Rev. Deacon Albert J. Schwind from Beach Haven, New Jersey, Señor and Señora Pablo Brockmann from Mexico City, Mr. Ed and Mrs. Merrilee Turley from Tiburon, California. Mrs. Blanche Lasher from Los Angeles was on her twelfth cruise; so were the Ambushes and the Hardnetts.

And Mrs. Betty Levy of London and the Algarve was on her thirtieth cruise and had been up the Amazon. “I love your books, I’ve read every one of them,” Mrs. Levy said to me. “Are you writing one about this cruise?”

“No, unless anything interesting happens,” I said, so confused by her directness that I realized that I was telling her the truth.

The Fritzes, the Norton Freedmans, the Louie Padulas—all these people, and more, boarded the Seabourn Spirit that day in Nice.

• • •

The summer had passed. It was low season again. I needed an antidote to Albania and the shock I had gotten in Greek Corfu, an island leaping with chattering tourists that reminded me of the rock apes on the slopes of Gibraltar. I had gone home and tended my garden, and then in late September I went to Nice. I joined this cruise. I had never been on a cruise before, or seen people like this.

Many were limping, one had an aluminum walker, Mrs. Fuller was in a wheelchair, some of the wealthiest looked starved, a few were thunderously huge, morbidly obese. Like many moneyed Americans who travel they had a characteristic gait, a way of walking that was slow and assured. They sized up Greek ruins or colorful natives like heads of state reviewing a platoon of foreign soldiers, with a stately and skeptical squint, absolutely unhurried. That, and an entirely unembarrassed way of laughing in public that was like a goose honking ten tables away.

“You’ve got to be a mountain climber to get up these stairs!”

“Why don’t they turn the air conditioner on?”

“Who’s that supposed to be?”

It was the color portrait on B Deck of the Norwegian King and Queen—two of Scandinavia’s bicycle-riding monarchs, King Harald V and Queen Sonja. The ship was Norwegian, registered in Oslo.

Some were rather infirm or very elderly or simply not spry, with a scattering of middle-aged people and only one child (Miss Olivia Cockburn, ten, of Washington, D.C., traveling with her grandparents). The majority were “seniors,” as they called themselves, who had the money or time to embark on such a cruise. Hard of hearing, the passengers mostly shouted. Their eyesight was poor. Eavesdropping was a cinch for me, so was note-taking.

“This is our eighth cruise—”

“Did you do the Amazon—?”

“Vietnam was very unique—”

Most of them, on this luxury cruise through the Mediterranean, were sailing from Nice to Istanbul. Some were going on to Haifa. Betty Levy was headed into the Indian Ocean with the ship. The cost for this, excluding airfare, was one thousand dollars a day, per person.

I was a guest of the shipping company. There was no disgrace in that. It often happens that a writer is offered free hospitality, in a hotel or on a ship. Few newspapers or magazines actually pay a penny for the trips their writers make, and so travel journalism is the simple art of being slurpingly grateful. It posed no moral problem for me, but because my writing made me seem as though I was continually biting the hand that had fed me, my ironizing was nailed as “grumpy” and I was seldom invited back a second time. That was fine with me. In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.

In 1928, Evelyn Waugh was offered a free cruise of a similar sort, through the Mediterranean on a Norwegian ship, the Stella Polaris. Waugh’s agent got free tickets for Waugh and his wife on the understanding that Waugh “would write it up in a travel book.” The account of his cruise, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal, published in 1930, was one of the most celebrated travel books of the thirties, regarded by many people—though not by me—as the heyday of the travel narrative. (I think that travel books have had many heydays.)

Waugh “had no interest in foreign travel,” Humphrey Carpenter wrote in The Brideshead Generation. “He would have agreed with John Betjeman’s remark to Edward James: ‘Isn’t abroad awful?’ ” Yet Waugh gave the Mediterranean mixed reviews, and admitted to a frank infatuation with Corfu. Labels, the result of the free tickets, was full of snap judgments and obnoxious opinions that helped make his reputation, and because of its hearty snobberies the narrative became the model for a certain kind of travel book that was much boosted recently by a crowd of pedants who believed that there was a time in the past when the going was good. It is actually a strange book.

But then a travel book is a very strange thing, there are few good excuses for writing one—all of them personal—and, these days, there are as many different travel books as there are travelers. The fairest way of judging travel books is by their truth and their wit. You can have quite a good time reading a harrowing book like The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, without any further thought of traveling to Antarctica. It is less a matter of geography than of your own taste. And some of the best and most enjoyable travel books are studies in snap judgments. In the end, all that matters is that the facts are generally true, so that a historian, some Fernand Braudel of the future, will be able to use your book as a source for, say, the condition of Albania in 1994 (“… stolen cars … bad roads … poor diets … lived in bunkers … Hoxha graffiti still legible on some walls …”). Historians are on firm ground with primary sources, diaries and travelers’ tales.

The most tedious travel book, in my opinion, is the one in which the author is being vague about having a wonderful time. All that jauntiness seems like boasting to me, and dishonest boasting too, since the writers must be hiding so much misery. We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.

Labels was written by a twenty-six-year-old who had just published a successful novel, Decline and Fall (and was about to publish Vile Bodies); who had decided, like the character in Saki, that “the art of public life lies in knowing when to stop, and then going a bit further.”

Here is Waugh on the French: “As a race, it is true, the French tend to have strong heads, weak stomachs, and a rooted abhorrence of hospitality.” Germans are “ugly.” Paris is “bogus.” Monte Carlo is “supremely artificial.” Waugh even manages to be rude about the pyramids (“less impressive when seen close”) and the Sphinx is “an ill proportioned composition of inconsiderable esthetic appeal.” Mallorca, Gibraltar, and Algiers are no better, though Waugh’s way of dismissing them is highly amusing. Waugh is no kinder to what he calls—and this has a certain resonance today—“the mongrel kingdom of the Jugoslavs.”

It is all eccentric opinion—Waugh is the last person who would say that his book had the weight of scholarship as its justification, or even the quest for adventure. “There is no track quite so soundly beaten as the Mediterranean seaboard,” he says, admitting that this will be the opposite of adventure, as it is the opposite of scholarship. At one point he begins to discuss Arab architecture and then he apologizes and offers a whole paragraph of “silly old me.”

Labels is never predictable. When travel writers make cruises the subject of books the theme is often that of the Ship of Fools on yet another pointless voyage. (Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that writers tend to be solitary if not downright antisocial.) Waugh avoids that, and is impartial, as mocking towards the English as he is towards the Maltese and the Algerians. In the narrative he develops a line in wine snobbery, too: “the wine of Crete is lowly esteemed,” “I do not believe that Algerian wine is really very nice,” Málaga is “very nasty,” and as for Manzanilla—“the inferior brands taste like the smell of evening newspapers.”

And so it goes, this parody of the Grand Tour, from Monte Carlo to Naples, from Haifa to Cairo, from Malta to Gibraltar, by way of Venice and Athens and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and many other “labeled” cities that Waugh promptly relabels. The book has no more authority than the eccentricity of its author, who, on the verge of a divorce, was very unhappy at the time he wrote it. It is vindicated by its humor and its originality. Also, Waugh knew better than most people that there is a great deal of pleasure to be derived from a travel book in which the traveler is having a very bad time; even better if it is an ordeal.

I had not been lying to Mrs. Betty Levy. My idea was to find a way of going to Greece and Turkey, not to do a hatchet job on a shipload of cruise passengers, supine on the sundeck, reading Danielle Clancy and Clive Grisham, and their novels with alarming titles: A Clear and Present Client, Extreme Prejudice, Remorseful Storm Rising. They yawned and turned the pages. The big books were propped on their bellies. I was reading Gatsby, as you know.

The Seabourn Spirit was a moderate-sized ship of ten thousand tons. Its 180 passengers were accommodated not in cabins—the word was not used—but in two-room suites: double beds, bathtubs, a liquor cabinet, a television set, and not a porthole but a picture window through which you could see the Mediterranean. On various decks, there were a swimming pool, several Jacuzzis, an exercise room, a sauna room; a large marina unfolded from the stern, complete with two speedboats.

Tipping was forbidden on the Seabourn Spirit. You could eat whenever you liked, alone or with a group of people. You could host a dinner party at short notice and they would prepare a table for twelve. You could call room service and say, “Caviar for six and two bottles of champagne,” and it was there in your suite in ten minutes.

I had always thought you worked and saved to put your kids through college. I had now discovered that there were Americans who worked and saved to take vacation cruises on ships such as the Seabourn Spirit. A fourteen-day cruise for two in 1994 was about equal to what it cost the average student in the United States to attend a good private university for one academic year: that is, about $28,000.

As a train drudge and a ferry passenger, I had bumped and shuttled from Gibraltar to Albania, thinking of the coast of this sea as overdeveloped or sludgy or victimized by war or stupidity. As a cruise passenger I saw the Mediterranean as much bluer, the coast much tidier, and from the deck of the Seabourn Spirit, Nice had great charm and even its shingly beach looked peaceful. Nice was not the overcrowded seaside resort of retirees and dog merds that I had passed through on a jingling train so many months before. It was no longer the site of my one-star hotel and my long rained-upon walks. It was merely a backdrop, twinkling as I drank my complimentary glass of champagne. Night fell, the mist put the town out of focus and made it a Matisse, with yellow blobby lights reflected in the water. We glided out of the Old Port, south to Italy.

Down in my suite the phone was ringing.

“Ja, Mr. Theroux, this is Jörg the chef, calling from the kitchen.”

“Yes?”

“I hear you are a vegetarian,” Jorg said. “I can tell you that we just had some nice salmon flown in from Norway. Was there anything special you wanted me to make for you?”

It seemed an auspicious start, and the next day, gliding along a perfectly flat sea that was blue and unwrinkled under a blue and cloudless sky, a slight breeze, Italy showing as a low smoky shoreline to the east, we passed between Elba and Corsica. The captain made an announcement to this effect; some people looked up and squinted past the rail, then returned to their reading.

There was a lecture in the lounge given by the Seabourn Spirit’s own onboard academic. I went to the lecture that first day and, along with the rest of the listeners—about thirty of us—made notes. The subject was “Mediterranean Civilizations.”

—Greece was resource-poor, and overpopulated. They needed to colonize all over the Mediterranean to get resources.

—But there was never a place called Greece. Just city-states.

—The Minoans were peaceful and progressive.

—The Myceneans were mercenaries.

—Spartans sent their children to military school at the age of seven. They never came home after a defeat. Better to die.

—The Romans did not practice moderation.

—Cleopatra was not Egyptian. She was the daughter of a Macedonian general.

—The Athenians were gentle and democratic. They woke up. They had no breakfast. They ate one meal—porridge. They wore a sort of diaper, and a sheet. They went to the forum and talked. It was not a life of luxury.

At this mention of porridge, a huge man sitting behind me said to his wife, “Are you as hungry as I am?”

“The male passengers on this ship are so big,” a woman said to me that first lunchtime, “I thought they must all be members of a team of some kind.”

The white ship growled south bathed in full sunshine on the glittering sea, following the low shore of Italy that was never more than a long narrow stripe at the horizon, like the edge of a desert, a streak of glowing dust.

Our progress was following one of the oldest routes in the Mediterranean. “Coasting was the rule” in the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel wrote in The Structures of Everyday Life. It was rare for any ship to risk the open sea, even as late as the seventeenth century, because the fear of the unknown was so great. “The courage required for such an unwonted feat has been forgotten.” Mediterranean sailors usually went from one port to the next, along the coast, and it was a brave sailor of the high seas who ventured out of the sight of land, from Mallorca to Sicily, or Rhodes to Alexandria. “The procession of coasting vessels steered by the line of the shore, to which they were constantly drawn, as if by a magnet.”

But our ship steered parallel to the coast for the pleasure of seeing it, and hovering, as a reminder of where we were.

The clear day of unobstructed sun became a blazing late afternoon, the western sky and sea alight, and at last in a reddening amphitheater of light, a buttery sunset.

An invitation had been clipped to my door: Did I wish to join the First Officer and his guests for dinner?

There were ten people, and the subject at my end of the table was what we did for a living.

Millie Hardnett said that her husband had made his fortune in specialty foods—canned fruit, jars of peaches in wine, exotic syrups—and after selling his business to a food conglomerate they now spent their time cruising.

Twisting his dinner roll apart, Max Hardnett asked me, “Someone told me you were a writer, Paul. Have you published anything under your own name?”

“My husband sold his company to Sara Lee,” the woman to my left said.

This was Mary Fuller, whose husband had founded Fuller Brush. And another fact: Sara Lee was a real person, a middle-aged woman whose father had named the cheesecake, the company, and everything else after her. She had a last name, but no one could remember it.

Her companion, Sappho, said to me, “Alfred wrote a book, too. You say you’re a writer? You should read it.”

A Foot in the Door, by Alfred Fuller, described (according to his widow) how he had grown tired of being a poor farmer in Nova Scotia and took a hint from his brother, who worked for a brush company, and decided to sell brushes door-to-door. What’s that? You mean I don’t have the brush you require? Well, describe it to me and I will supply it to you. Alfred was open to customers’ suggestions and created brushes to fill their needs. Bottle brushes, wide brooms, whisks and dust mops. This was pioneering salesmanship and soon Alfred had teams of men out there, ringing doorbells and hustling for commissions.

“It was a real Horatio Alger story,” she said.

“What do you think about that?” Sappho asked me.

“I met Arthur Murray once in Honolulu,” I said. Why was I telling her this? He was another famous name on a business. “I even know someone who danced with him. Arthur Murray taught her to dance in a hurry.”

“Alfred thought up the idea of direct selling,” Mary Fuller said. “It’s not popular now because of crime.”

She was ninety-one and kept to her wheelchair but she was not at all frail, and she had a good appetite. At times, surveying the table, she looked like a sea lion, monumental and slow in the way she turned her head. She kept her good health, she said, by visiting mineral baths in places like Budapest and Baden-Baden. She mumbled but she was lucid. She spent each summer in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

“How did you meet Alfred?” I asked.

“He courted me in New York,” she said. “He was very determined. When he wanted something he got it. That’s why he was so successful in business, too. My mother called him ‘The Steam Roller.’ ”

She went on a cruise every year, she said. This simple assertion brought forth a torrent of cruise memories from the rest of the table.

“This is our sixth cruise in three years—”

“We were up the Amazon—”

“So were we. I wanted to go into the jungle in a canoe, but instead we shopped in Manaus—”

“I went to Antarctica. In the summer of course. Penguins—”

“We cruised China. That was special—”

“Down the Yangtze—”

“Vietnam on the Princess—”

In the morning we were anchored off Sorrento, high steep cliffs and pretty palms and dark junipers, the carved porches and stucco walls of hotels and villas. At the Hotel Vittoria Excelsior it was possible to see the suite where Caruso had stayed. Across the bay was Mount Vesuvius, Naples in its shadow, smothered in a cloud of dust.

This was a different Italy from the one I had seen in the winter. I had been traveling second-class on trains, among working people and students; in my Italy of cheap hotels and pizzas I often lingered to watch people arguing, or goosing each other, or making obscure gestures. I seldom saw a ruin or a museum. But this Seabourn Italy was the Grand Tour of the Italy of colorful boatmen and expensive taxis and day trips. It was the coast of castles and villas, but there was no need to go ashore: you could sit under the awnings and simply admire Italy, its glorious seaside. Just look at it, and then doze and let the ship sail you to a new coast. After all, the Mediterranean shore was much prettier viewed at a distance.

Some Seabourn passengers bought ceramics in Sorrento, and lace, and leather goods. Others, of whom I was one, went on the Pompeii tour.

Pompeii was a Roman seaside resort which was buried, along with Herculaneum, in A.D. 79, mummifying many of the inhabitants and wrapping in ashes of Vesuvius, and preserving for posterity, Roman frivolity and ingenuity, the passions as well as the day-to-day life of these people, some resident and some on holiday. Many of our images of Roman decadence, the salacious postcards of big penises and scenes of buggery that are sold in Naples, originate in Pompeii. An illustrated booklet, Forbidden Pompeii, in five languages, was stacked in every souvenir shop. The site itself, just a glorified ground plan, all that remained of Pompeii, was in an industrial area, full of garages and factories and auto repair shops, in a suburb of Naples.

It had been plundered long ago. Even its so-called excavation—which was recent: the mid-eighteenth century—had been just a form of looting and treasure seeking. It had no studious or archaeological intention. No one cared to investigate the Roman way of life or the organization of ancient households. Some bits of pottery that were unearthed influenced Josiah Wedgwood’s so-called “Etruscan” pottery designs as well as creating fashions in some English furniture designs. But that was all. Digging up Pompeii was a quest for trinkets and corpses.

Sometimes the digging was ritualized. General Grant stopped in Pompeii in 1877 on his triumphant trip around the world. To honor his visit, the Italian authorities dug up a ruined house for the general. This sort of excavation was “one of the special compliments paid to visitors of renown.” General Grant was given a chair and he sat and smoked a cigar while the workers began shoveling. A loaf of bread (baked in A.D. 79) was unearthed. Then some bronze ornaments. The Italians were disappointed and ashamed. They had hoped to find a human body. They eagerly offered to excavate another house in anticipation of perhaps finding a corpse or some old jewelry for General Grant. The general said he was hungry. A man in his party suggested going to a nearby restaurant, and he joked, “To excavate a beefsteak!”

Our guide was Riccardo. That was another aspect of this new cruiseship Italy. Instead of the buttonholed strangers I had depended on before, I now had a guide showing me around. They were just as friendly but oddly irrelevant. Riccardo was a good-humored Neapolitan who had recently moved to Sorrento.

“Eight meters of volcanic ashes,” Riccardo said. “Four square miles of city, where twenty-five thousand people—”

Like the history lecture yesterday, the tour was anecdotal, filled with meaningless numbers and generalizations, but from this bouncy little Figaro they were like a salesman’s obliging patter. “Big wine shop!” he said, as we walked down one of Pompeii’s paved streets. “See wagon ruts in the road? These are stepping-stones. See graffiti? Notice this is a bakery—just like the bakery oven we have today for pizza and bread.”

We went through the Forum, we saw a toilet. “They called it a Vespasian, because he was the emperor who taxed the people for each peepee.”

“I didn’t realize there’d be all this walking,” Mr. Mouser said.

Riccardo said, “I will show you a brothel. A real one!”

We hurried after him, turning corners. Then Riccardo paused and said, “You see that big phallus on the wall?”

It looked like a peg on a coatrack. To tease him I said, “You think that’s a big one?”

“I think maybe normal,” Riccardo said.

“In America we would call that a small dick.” Out of delicacy I said this in Italian, using the word cazzo, enunciating it—not grunting catz, the way I heard Italians doing in Boston when I was growing up.

“That word is a little vulgar,” Riccardo said in Italian.

“What word would you use?”

“‘Dick,” he said. Cazzo. “But I don’t raise my voice, eh?”

James Joyce believed that Italians were obsessed with their private parts. “When I walk into the bank in the morning,” he wrote, “I wait for someone to announce something about his cazzo, culo, or coglioni. This usually happens before quarter to nine.”

The Pompeii brothel—a so-called Lupenare, a house of the she-wolf—was filled with shuffling Japanese, young and old, men and women, giggling at the lurid frescoes depicting coitus, marveling at the pallets of stone—the shelves on which the act of love was performed; snapping pictures of the cubicles.

“Now I will show you the house of the bachelor brothers,” Riccardo said. “They lived a bisexual life. We know this from frescoes and statues.”

One of the statues of Priapus, a small figure clasping a torpedo between his thighs, was in a side room. Thirty Japanese filed past it. I waited at the exit listening to the flashbulbs and the shrieks and giggles of the women, who emerged with their hands over their mouths, because an open mouth is considered rude in Japan. The Japanese men were silent, and they looked rueful as they shuffled out of the room. Not very long ago, women tourists were forbidden to enter that room.

In an unvisited corner of the same house there was a fresco showing the infant Hercules strangling snakes, and I thought again of the Pillars of Hercules, and how this god, the patron of human toil, was a suitable model for me in my journey.

“What do you think?” Riccardo asked me as we strolled along.

“Very interesting.”

But I was being polite. I disliked it all for being a theme park devoted to Roman dissipation—just chat and speculation, a rather unsatisfying amusement, like Epcot’s preposterous Italy-by-the-Lagoon in Orlando, Florida. In the end, all that people will remember will be the statue and fresco of Priapus showing his torpedo.

We were soon on more fertile conversational ground when I saw a priest—an American, or at least non-Italian, priest was walking past us with another group.

“Riccardo, when you see that priest,” I said, “do you think he’s a jettatore who might give you the evil eye?”

“That is a superstition you find in Sicily and south of Naples,” Riccardo said, laughing insincerely. “Not here very much.”

“Don’t some people do something when they see a priest?”

“You scratch your—somethings—and you make a cornuto if you see someone with the evil eye. A priest, maybe.”

“What do you do?”

“I don’t worry much, except—”

He was hesitating. I said, “Yes?”

“Nuns,” he said with disgust. “I hate to look at them. Their faces can be frightening, especially the ones with a black cloth over their heads.”

“What do you do when you see them?”

“I have a special thing that I do,” he said. He winked at me, but he would not say what his precaution was against the evil eye of a black-shawled nun.

Whatever Riccardo devised in the way of counter-magic was something in the folklore of Italian superstition that had been proven effective against the evil eye. The belief was ancient and so were the remedies. Touching iron was recommended—keys, nails, a horseshoe, the hinge of a door—because iron was associated with magnetism, to absorb the malevolent power. If no iron was immediately available, a man secretively grasped his goolies. Garlic worked—some people carried a few cloves in their pocket. Some people wore garlic on a string, or a piece of onion, or a saint’s picture, or a necklace of pigs’ teeth. They might carry a goat’s horn, or a plastic imitation. Some colors repelled the evil eye: blue in the north of Italy, red in the south. Was there a jettatore standing on the road making a malocchio on your house? Sprinkling water sometimes helped. Even better, pissing on the spot where the evildoer stood, because urine also acts as counter-magic.

Thin people, priests, nuns, Gypsies were all potentially dangerous jettatori, suspected of possessing the evil eye. The jettatore was not to be confused with the Sicilian strega, a witch but a useful—probably indispensable—woman, who (observed by both Norman Lewis and the Sicilian reformer Danilo Dolci) “arranges marriages, concocts potions, dabbles a little in black magic, clears up skin conditions, and casts out devils.”

The evil eye is probably rooted in envy; such fears predominated in places where people were more or less equal in their misery, where resources were scarce and there was heavy competition for them. It was also related to the struggle in such places of getting ahead without looking superior or stronger, the paradoxes of power and difference, and the fear of the unknown.

The shores of the Mediterranean, so divided in certain matters, are united in their fear of the evil eye. Compliment a Frenchman and he blows lightly, to ward off the curse. If someone says, “What a lovely baby!” to almost any Italian parent in the presence of their child, the parent will immediately (and covertly) prong their fingers at the speaker, as a way of fending off evil spirits. Or they might spit three times at the suspected jettatore as soon as the person’s back is turned. In any case, the parent kisses the baby when he or she suspects it of an evil eye being projected on the child. Riccardo said that anyone who compliments a baby without adding “God bless you” (Dio ti benedica, or in dialect Di’ bendet) is probably wishing evil upon the child.

Some chants worked in Italy, I was told. Fearing the eye, you muttered the words for the three blackest things in the world: “Ink! Black mask! And the buttocks of a female slave!” (Inga! Mascaro!? natiche di schiava!) or simply, “Away! Tuna eggs in France! Let bad luck go to sea!”

Maltese fishing boats have the horned hands painted on the bow to deflect evil. Small replicas of finger horns were worn, or kept on key chains. Crusaders—the Knights of St. John—had sculpted eyes in the watchtowers in Valletta as part of the harbor defenses. In Greece, not priests but people with blue eyes are dangerous as bringers of the evil eye, and it is perhaps significant that Greeks think of Turks as being blue-eyed people, a whole nation of evil eyeballs ablaze. The remedy is a glass blue eye that Greeks use as a pendant. In Turkey (where this remedy originates) the glass blue eye can attain the size of a dinner plate, and the glass eye, along with other necessities such as matches and cooking oil, is sold in every kiosk and shop. It is really a fish eye, and plucking out a fish’s eye and stepping on it is efficacious counter-magic in the eastern Mediterranean.

But I should not think of Italians as people who walked around worrying about the evil eye, Riccardo said. Did I know what a gobbo was? Yes, I said, a hunchback.

A gobbo got his hump by having been the victim of the evil eye, in infancy. But it also meant that he was the repository of counter-magic.

“So it is good luck to touch the hump of a hunchbacked man,” he said. “And if the hump is on a dwarf, that’s even better. Some people go about with a hunchback all the time. Gamblers, for example.”

The modern version of Pompeii is probably the nearby town of Positano, a small harbor shared unequally by the idle rich and the landladies and the fishermen. If Positano were to be buried in volcanic ash today, future generations would understand as much about our wealth and our pleasures and the prosaic businesses such as bread-making and ironmongery as Pompeii taught us. They might not find a brothel, but they would find luxury hotels, the San Pietro and Le Sirenuse. The Roman author and admiral Pliny the Elder died in the Pompeii disaster; a Positano disaster could gobble up the film director Franco Zeffirelli, who lives in a villa there. It was perhaps this coast’s reputation for wickedness that induced Tennessee Williams to make his decadent Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer begin to go to pieces in Amalfi, before he was finally eaten by cannibalistic boys in another Mediterranean resort, the mythical Cabeza del Lobo.

The Seabourn was not leaving until late, and so I paid a Sorrentino driver eighty dollars to take me to Positano. This was my expansive Seabourn mood: I would never have paid that money when I was jogging along on trains and ferries.

Along the Amalfi drive, winding around the cliffs and slopes of this steep coast—much too steep for there to be a beach anywhere near here—I told the driver my fantasy of Positano being buried in ash. The driver’s name was Nello, and he was animated by the idea.

“It could happen,” Nello said, and began to reminisce about the last eruption.

It was in 1944, he was twelve. “My madda say, ‘Hashes!’ ”

Nello insisted on speaking English. He claimed he wanted practice. But that was another thing about travel in a luxurious way: the more money you had, the more regal your progress, the greater the effort local people made to ingratiate themselves and speak English. I had not known that money helped you off the linguistic hook.

“Vesuvio wassa making noise and zmoke. The hashes wassa flying. Not leetle hashes but ayvie, like theese,” and he weighed his hands to show me how heavy they were. “We has hambrella. Bat. The weend blows hashes on de roof and—piff—it barns.

“‘Clean de roofs!’ my madda say.”

“It sounds terrible,” I said.

“It wassa dark for two day. No san. Hashes!”

And it was certain to erupt any minute, Nello said. The volcano was long overdue.

We got to Positano. Isn’t it lovely? Nello said. Yes, it was, a steep funnel-shaped town tumbled down a mountainside into a tiny port. What could be more picturesque? But it was a hard place to get to—the narrow winding road. It was expensive. It was the sort of place, like Pompeii, that you took a picture of and showed your friends and said, “We went to Positano.” And they said, “Isn’t it darling? Those gorgeous colors.” It was the Mediterranean as a museum: you went up and down, gaping at certain scenes. But really I had learned more about Italy in the crumbling village of Aliano or the seedy backstreets of Rimini.

On the way back to Sorrento and the ship Nello said he was too tired to speak English, and so, in Italian, we talked about the war.

“The Germans had food when they occupied Naples,” he said. “We didn’t have anything to eat. They threw bread away—they didn’t give any to us. And we were hungry!”

“What happened after Liberation?”

“The Allies gave us food, of course. They handed out these little boxes with food in them. Delicious.”

“So the war was all about food, right?”

“You’re making a joke!”

But I was thinking that this precise situation was happening across the Adriatic: the Serbians had food, the Bosnians had none; the war was being fought as viciously as ever.

• • •

We sailed from Sorrento after dark, and sometime in the night we passed through the Straits of Messina. This time I did not think of Scylla and Charybdis. I was absorbed in my meal and probably being a buffoon, saying, “Yes, Marco, just a touch more of the Merlot with my carpaccio.” The ship was silent and still in the morning. I pressed the button on my automatic window shade and it lifted to show me the coast of Sicily. Craning my neck, I could see Etna, and on the heights of the cliffs on the nearby shore the bright villas and flowers of Taormina.

It was so beautiful from the deck of this ship anchored in the bay that it seemed a different town from the one I had trudged around some months ago. I had been a traveler then, looking for D. H. Lawrence’s house. This time I was a tourist. I bought some ceramic pots, then I walked to the quay and showed Manny Klein how to use the public telephone.

“You’re an old pro,” he said.

Later, in the lounge, the Seabourn Spirit passengers said they were a bit disappointed in Sicily. But it wasn’t really that. It was a growing love for the ship which eventually took the form of a general reluctance to leave it, to look at any ruins, to eat ashore, or even go for a walk on the pier when the Seabourn Spirit was in a port. The ship had become home—or more than home, a luxury residence, a movable feast.

“May I suggest the Two Salmon Terrine with caviar and tomato, followed by Essence of Pigeon with Pistachio Dumplings?” the waiter, Karl, asked. “And perhaps the Game Hen with Raisin Sauce to follow?”

Karl, of Italian, German and Ethiopian ancestry, was the spit and image of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, one of whose grandmothers was a black Abyssinian.

“As I mentioned the other day, I try not to eat anything with a face,” I said. “Which is why I had the asparagus and truffles last night, and the stir-fried vegetables.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nor anything with legs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nor anything with a mother.”

“No fish, then.”

“Fish is a sort of vegetable,” I said. “Not always, but this Gravlax with mustard sauce, and the Angler Fish with Lobster Hollandaise might fall into that category.”

“Soup, sir?”

I looked at the menu again.

“I’ll try the sun-dried blueberry and champagne soup.”

For dessert I had a banana sundae with roasted banana ice cream, caramel and chocolate sauce. The man at the next table, gold buttons flashing, had just finished a plate of Flamed Bananas Madagascar and was about to work his way through a raspberry soufflé with raspberry sauce.

After dinner I went on deck and strolled in the mild air for a while. The night was so clear that from the rail I could see the lights of Sicily slipping by; the places I had labored through on the coastal trains were now merely a glowworm of winding coast, Catania, Siracusa and, farther down, at the last of Sicily, the twinkling Gulf of Noto.

It is only sixty or seventy miles from the coast of Italy to Malta, but that night it was a rough crossing, and for the first time the Seabourn rolled in the westerly swell. Sometime in the early hours there was peace again, my bed was level, and by dawn we were anchored on the quay at the edge of Valletta, in Grand Harbor, walls and turrets and watchtowers on every side. I could see the staring eyes that had been sculpted into some towers by the Crusaders as a defense against the evil eye.

Malta has been identified as Calypso’s island in The Odyssey and was home to the Crusaders, the Knights of St. John, and is still an impressive fortress. It is also low, almost treeless, dusty, hot, and priest-ridden. There is so much Christianity in Malta, and of such a kneeling and statue-carrying and image-kissing variety, that there is an old Arab proverb that goes, “He’s calling to [Muslim] prayer in Malta!” (Wu’ezin fi Malta!)—in other words, asking for something utterly hopeless; trying to get blood from a stone, or as they said in Italy, “blood from a turnip.”

Most of the Seabourn passengers had already gone ashore, for the bus tour to Mdina. I decided to make my own walking tour of the town, though it would not have been difficult to include the whole island. It was about eight miles wide and eighteen miles long. If you could take the heat and dust, much of it was walkable in a day. Apart from the forts and citadels there were small square houses and dusty streets, not very different from the place that Edward Lear described to his sister Ann when he passed through in 1848: “There is hardly a bit of green in the whole island—a hot sand stone, walls, & bright white houses are all you can see from the highest places, excepting little stupid trees here and there like rubbishy tufts of black worsted.” The people were very kind, he added, “But I could not live at Malta.”

But who could? Anthony Burgess and various British tax exiles had tried it in the 1970s but they were undone by the Maltese government, which harassed them. Burgess, an ardent and prolific book reviewer, was accused of soliciting and receiving pornographic books—that is, review copies—and the books were frequently intercepted by Maltese customs. He eventually left and moved to Italy, though the government seized his house and confiscated his library. The Malta sections of Burgess’s autobiography are chapters of sorrowful accidents and misunderstandings and frustrations. It baffled me why writers chose the most irritating Mediterranean places in which to live and be creative—Maugham in Cap Ferrat, Greene in Antibes, Burgess in Malta. After writing his masterpiece His Monkey Wife (or Married to a Chimp) and a movie script for The African Queen, John Collier went to Cassis, near Marseilles, and wrote very little.

I walked down the gangway and up the cobbled street into Valletta, bought a map and some stamps and listened awhile to a small sweating woman in a damp t-shirt shrieking into a bullhorn.

“Most important thing! Beauty with a purpose! You see? She is lovely but she is holding hands with two Down’s syndrome sufferers!”

“What’s going on here?” I asked a Maltese man in a snap-brim hat.

“That’s Miss Malta,” he said.

The buxom young woman in the yellow ball-gown tugged the two shy, bewildered girls down the sidewalk, past an outdoor cafe of gaping Maltese.

“Beauty with a purpose!” the bullhorn woman yelled. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!”

She lowered the bullhorn to get her breath.

“Hello,” I said. “Is that Miss Malta?”

“Miss Republic of Malta, yes,” she gasped. “We are going to the Miss World Pageant in Johannesburg next month.”

The Maltese seemed approachable, friendly, rather lost, a bit homely, dreamy, decent and well-turned-out. The garrison atmosphere was much the same as I had found in Gibraltar. Even the Maltese who had never been in England had a sort of shy pride in their English connection and spoke the language well.

The English had found these people, used them to service their fleet and dance for their soldiers, educated them, made them into barbers and brass-polishers, turned over to them London lower-middle-class culture and the sailor values of folk dances, fish-and-chips, BBC sitcoms and reverence for the Royal Family, and given them a medal. Every schoolboy—Maltese as well as British—knew that Malta had been awarded the George Cross for bravery in the last war.

But the British soldiers had left, the brothels and most of the bars were closed, business was awful here too, and at a time when most British war heroes were auctioning off their medals at Sotheby’s—a Victoria Cross was worth about $200,000—Malta’s medal was hardly valuable enough to keep the economy going. The neighbor island of Gozo was the haunt of retirees living off small pensions. The only hope was in Malta’s joining the European Community, to make the islands viable.

I never saw Lear’s “stupid trees.” Presumably they had all died in the severe drought that was still going on—there had been no rain for six months. The earth was so parched that the plowed fields had the same look as the nearby stone quarries, for the fields were also littered with chunks and blocks of hardened clay. The fields were bounded by stone walls, cactuses, and spiky yuccalike plants. It was a fearfully rocky place, and still so dry that the island’s five desalination plants were going at full bore.

After the Carmelite church and St. Paul’s Shipwreck Church and the crusader fortress, I went to St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral. In this island of 360,000 people, all were Catholics, except for the 180 paid-up Protestants at St. Paul’s Anglican. Today the church was being prepared for the harvest festival: English ladies with the pallor and fretfulness of exiles polishing brasses, arranging flowers and piling fruit.

“I’ll put this bougainvillea on this wire frame and if it dies, there it is.”

“Quite.”

“And your maize cobs, Joan?”

“Trying to get them to spill out of this bally little basket.”

Fussy, helpful, panting church helpers, brass polish in one hand, cut stems in the other, and surveying their labors the keen eye of a vicar, hoping to impress a bishop. With so many dead heroes and clerics and crusaders and expired retirees in Malta the church was thick with brass plaques all in need of a good polishing.

“This plaque is coming up a treat, Gina.”

“I could do with a nice cup of tea.”

We then learned the island was called Malta and the natives showed us unusual kindness, is written in Acts 28:1–2. In the King James translation the name is given as “Melita,” the Greek name (derived from meli, the Greek word for honey, for which Malta was renowned). The rest of the biblical chapter is a good traveler’s tale about shipwrecked Paul. Gathering some sticks for a fire, Saint Paul is bitten by a snake. Seeing this bad omen the “barbarous” Maltese take the stranger to be a murderer. But Paul plops the snake into the fire and shrugs, and “they changed their minds and said he was a god.” After some effective faith healing, Paul is feted by the Maltese and given all the provisions he needs to take him onward to Sicily and onward to Rome.

The cheeriest man I met in Malta was Mr. Agius, “coffin-maker and undertaker,” busy in his shop near the church. He had been taught the coffin trade by his father and grandfather and he told me that a good mahogany coffin with silver handles went for a thousand dollars while the cheapest one, of plain pine, cost $165.

“This is for poor people,” he said, showing me the cheap one. “There are many poor people in Malta. They choose this one.”

He disposed of three or four coffins a week. He nipped from one coffin to the next, pointing out its virtues, the flourishes, the angels, the crosses, the handles, the gilt, the panels.

All the while I talked to him his son sat with his face in a radio that was blaring old rock and roll songs—“Peggy Sue” and “Rock and Roll Music (Any old time you use it).”

Malta had the culture of South London in a landscape like Lebanon—news agents selling The Express and The Daily Telegraph, video rental agencies, pinball parlors, pizza joints, and a large Marks and Spencer. All those, as well as fortresses and churches and many shops that sold brass door-knockers. But chip-shops and cannons predominated.

“I want to see the sights,” I said to a man at a bus stop in Valletta in desperation.

“What about the salt pans of Buggiba?” he said.

It was early afternoon. On the afterdeck of the Seabourn Spirit, pecan pie was being served with vanilla bavarols with coffee and armagnac.

I boarded the goddamned bus and rattled down the narrow road to Rabat and Mdina, across the island. The names were Arabic, like many others in Malta, and for all its Italian loan words Maltese was a Semitic language. Even the people had a Arab cast to their features, though they sneered at such comparisons, for the English had taught them to despise Gippos.

More fortifications and cannon emplacements at Mdina, a walled town on a hill, looked over dusty fields and complaining donkeys; and seeing this landscape of powder and dead trees I began to understand Malta’s serious water shortage. The brackish water from the faucets had forced nearly everyone to drink imported bottled water. Mdina and Rabat were parched, and were lifeless, like Valletta. It was as though only war, or talk of it—memories of plucky heroics—animated the Maltese. The war was advertised all over Malta in exhibits and museums and memorials; it was all that anyone talked about. But the war stories ranged from the earliest Crusades to World War Two. The reason for this was obvious enough. The Maltese had only been useful during military campaigns, but in times of peace they had been ignored. This was a garrison.

Wandering down the street of Mdina, I saw some people from the ship.

“I don’t think much of this place—”

“A little disappointing, like Pompeii—”

“I could use a drink—”

They were headed back to the ship, so I joined them on the bus, just got on after my ten-cent ride on an old British bus to Mdina.

The Maltese guide, haranguing on a microphone for the ship’s passengers, was determined to make a case for Malta.

“This has become a very very fashionable part of Malta,” she said. We passed a low hill of square houses. And at a small row of shops: “This is a very trendy discotheque—all the young people in Valletta go here,” and “Major shops. Your Bata Shoes, your Marks and Spencer, your Benetton.”

After that she uttered the sort of sightseeing sound bite I had started to collect.

“The Germans dropped a two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-kilo bomb on that church, while five hundred people prayed. It did not go off. People said it was a miracle of the Virgin Mary.”

At Valletta, the busload was offered a choice of visiting another church or going back to the ship.

“Ship” was unanimous. The feeling was that Malta—magnificent from the ship, with a drink in your hand—was rather disappointing up close. Afterwards, no one had a good word for Malta, even after having given it a good five hours of thorough scrutiny.

That night, as the Seabourn Spirit crossed the Ionian Sea at twelve knots, I dawdled over my note-taking and went to the dining room late. On this ship, everyone had a right to eat alone, but the maître d’ said that if I wished he would seat me with some other people—providing they did not object.

That was how I met the Greenwalds, who were from Montreal. Constance was demure, Jack more expansive—the previous night I had seen him polish off two desserts.

“What did you think of Malta?” I asked.

“If you wanted to buy a brass door-knocker,” he said, “I guess you’d come to Malta. There are thousands of them for sale there, right? Apart from the door-knockers, it wasn’t much.”

“Did you buy one?”

He was a bit taken aback by my question, but finally admitted yes, he had bought a brass door-knocker. “I thought it was an eagle. But it’s not. I don’t know what it is.”

“Isn’t that a regimental tie you’re wearing?” I asked.

“Yes, it is,” he said, and fingered it. “The Royal Household Cavalry.”

“They let Canadians join?”

“We are members of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth,” he said. “Though as you probably know, there’s a secessionist movement in Quebec.”

“What sort of work do you do?”

He semaphored with his eyebrows in disgust and said, “Scaffolding.”

“Really?”

He smiled at me and said, “See, that’s a conversation stopper.”

“Mohawks in New York City are capable of climbing to the top of the highest scaffolds,” I said, to prove it was not a conversation stopper.

“I’m not in scaffolding, I was just saying that,” he said. “‘What do you do?’ is the first question Americans ask. But it’s meaningless. ‘I’m Smith. I’m in steel manufacturing.’ ”

He was a big bluff man, and his habit of wearing a blazer or a peaked cap gave him a nautical air, as though he might be the captain of the Seabourn if not the owner of the shipping line. He seldom raised his voice, and he took his time when he spoke, and so it was sometimes hard to tell when he had finished speaking.

The waiter was at his elbow, hovering with a tureen of soup.

“Oh, good,” Jack Greenwald said. “Now I’m going to show you the correct way of serving this.”

After we began eating the conversation turned to the cruise. Most people on the cruise talked about other cruises they had taken, other itineraries and shipping lines and ports of call. They never mentioned the cost. They said they took ships because they hated packing and unpacking when they traveled, and a ship was the answer to this. It was undemanding, the simplest sort of travel imaginable, and this sunny itinerary was like a rest-cure. The ship plowed along in sunshine at twelve knots through a glassy sea by day, and the nights were filled with food and wine. Between the meals, the coffee, the tea, the drinks, in the serene silences of shipboard, young men appeared with pitchers of ice water or fruit punch, and cold towels. And there was always someone to ask whether everything was all right, and was there anything they could do for you.

“I was on a Saga ship, cruising to Bali,” Jack Greenwald said. “Forty-one passengers and a hundred and eighty crew members. Can you imagine the number of times I was asked, ‘Is everything all right?’ ”

Over dessert—again Jack was having two, and being very careful not to spill any on his regimental tie—and perhaps because I had not asked, he volunteered that he had been the producer of a number of plays and revues. The names he mentioned meant nothing to me. Up Tempo was one. It rang no bells. The Long, the Short and the Tall? Nope. Titles of plays or musicals, because they were usually reworded clichés, sounded familiar but inspired no memories.

“Suddenly This Summer?”

“Rings a bell.”

“Parody of Tennessee Williams,” Jack said. “Did very well.”

“Before my time, I think.”

“I sometimes have problems with writers,” he said. “There was one that made problems. I had to pay him two-fifty a night for one joke he had written. Just one line.”

“What was the line?”

“Someone in the cast says, ‘Will the real Toulouse-Lautrec please stand up?’ ”

“That’s not very funny,” I said.

“No. And the writer complained that he was not being paid on time. His lawyer sent me a big long lawyer letter. I said to myself, ‘Hell with it,’ and took the line out. Writers.”

“That’s what I do for a living.”

“Know the story about the writer?” he said. “Writer makes it big in Hollywood and wants to impress his mother. So he invites her out to visit him. She takes the train and he goes to the station with flowers, but he doesn’t see her anywhere. Finally he goes to the police station to see whether they know anything, and he spots her there. ‘Ma, why didn’t you have me paged at the station?’ She says, ‘I forgot your name.’ ”

“That’s not funny either,” I said, but I was laughing.

“It’s odd, isn’t it, Brownie?” he said to his wife. “We’ve broken our rule. We’ve actually had dinner with another passenger.”

“I hope that wasn’t too painful for you,” Constance said to me.

“Tomorrow I’ll tell you how I made some lucky investments in the Arctic,” Jack said. “Frobisher Bay. Making a deal with some Eskimos while they ate a raw seal on the floor. I’m not joking.”

• • •

After a man has made a large amount of money he usually becomes a bad listener. Jack Greenwald was not a man in that mold, he was not in a hurry, and he was a tease, but with an air of mystery. “I happen to be something of an authority on Persian carpets,” he would say. Or it might be Kashmiri sapphires, or gold alloys, or oil embargoes. If I challenged him I was usually proven wrong.

These deals in the Canadian Arctic, this talk of “my carver,” “my goldsmith,” and the billiard room he was planning to build, with a blue felt on the billiard table, made him seem like the strange tycoon Harry Oakes, whom he somewhat resembled physically; but there was an impish side to him too, a love of wearing Mephisto sneakers with his dinner jacket, and a compulsion to buy hats, and wear them, and a tendency to interrupt a boring story with a joke.

“Hear the one about the eighty-year-old with the young wife?” Jack said, when the subject of Galaxídhion, our next port, was raised in the smoking room, where he had just set a Cuban cigar aflame. “His friend says, ‘Isn’t that bad for the heart?’ The old man says, ‘If she dies, she dies.’ ”

I had fled from Corfu after arriving on the boat from Albania. I had tried and failed to get to Ulysses’ home island of Ithaca. But there was only one ferry a week. The Seabourn passed south of it in the night and I felt I had returned to roughly where I had left off and was continuing my Mediterranean progress. I had felt a deep aversion to Corfu which even in the low season was a tourist island. The whole of Greece seemed to me a cut-price theme park of broken marble, a place where you were harangued in a high-minded way about Ancient Greek culture while some swarthy little person picked your pocket. That, and unlimited Turkophobia.

We had sailed south of the large island of Cephalonia, and passed Missolonghi, where Lord Byron had died, into the Gulf of Corinth, anchoring off the small Greek village of Galaxídhion, on a bay just below Delphi. Indeed, beneath the glittering slopes of Mount Parnassus.

Tenders took us ashore, where we were greeted by the guides.

“My name is Clea. The driver’s name is Panayotis. His name means ‘The Most Holy.’ He has been named after the Blessed Virgin.”

The driver smiled at us and puffed his cigarette and waved.

“Apollo came here,” Clea said.

Near this bauxite mine? Great red piles of earth containing bauxite, used to make aluminum, had been quarried from depths of Itea under Delphi to await transshipment to Russia, which has a monopoly on Greek bauxite. In return, Russia swaps natural gas with Greece. Such a simple arrangement: we give you red dirt, you give us gas. Apollo came here?

“He strangled the python to prove his strength as a god,” Clea went on, and without missing a beat, “The yacht Christina came here as well, after Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy, for their honeymoon cruise.”

Through an olive grove that covered a great green plain with thousands of olive trees, not looking at all well after a three-month drought, we climbed the cliff to Delphi, the center of the world. The navel itself, a little stone toadstool omphalos, is there on the slope for all to see.

“I must say several things to you about how to act,” Clea began.

There followed some nannyish instructions about showing decorum near the artifacts. This seemed very odd piety. It was also a recent fetish. After almost two thousand years of neglect, during which Greek temples and ruins had been pissed on and ransacked—the ones that had not been hauled away (indeed, rescued for posterity) by people like Lord Elgin had been used to make the walls of peasant huts—places like Delphi were discovered by intrepid Germans and Frenchmen and dug up.

Delphi had not been operational since the time of Christ. In the reign of Claudius (A.D. 51), “the site was impoverished and half-deserted,” Michael Grant writes in his Guide to the Ancient World, “and Nero was said to have carried 500 statues away.” Delphi was officially shut down and cleared by the Emperor Theodosius (379–95), who was an active campaigner for Christianity. It is no wonder that what remains of Delphi are some stumpy columns and the vague foundations of the temples—hardly anything in fact except a stony hillside and a guide’s Hellenistic sales pitch. Anyone inspired to visit Delphi on the basis of Henry Miller’s manic and stuttering flapdoodle in The Colossus of Maroussi would be in for a disappointment.

The Greeks had not taken very much interest in their past until Europeans became enthusiastic discoverers and diggers of their ruins. And why should they have cared? The Greeks were not Greek, but rather the illiterate descendants of Slavs and Albanian fishermen, who spoke a debased Greek dialect and had little interest in the broken columns and temples except as places to graze their sheep. The true philhellenists were the English—of whom Byron was the epitome—and the French, who were passionate to link themselves with the Greek ideal. This rampant and irrational phili-Hellenism, which amounted almost to a religion, was also a reaction to the confident dominance of the Ottoman Turks, who were widely regarded as savages and heathens. The Turks had brought their whole culture, their language, the Muslim religion, and their distinctive cuisine not only here but throughout the Middle East and into Europe, as far as Budapest. The contradiction persists, even today: Greek food is actually Turkish food, and many words we think of as distinctively Greek, are in reality Turkish—kebab, doner, kofta, meze, taramasalata, dolma, yogurt, moussaka, and so forth; all Turkish.

Signs at the entrance to Delphi said, Show proper respect and It is forbidden to sing or make loud noises and Do not pose in front of ancient stones.

I saw a pair of rambunctious Greek youths being reprimanded by an officious little man, for flinging their arms out and posing for pictures. The man twitched a stick at them and sent them away.

Why was this? It was just what you would expect to happen if you put a pack of ignoramuses in charge of a jumble of marble artifacts they had no way of comprehending. They would in their impressionable stupidity begin to venerate the mute stones and make up a lot of silly rules. This Show proper respect business and No posing was an absurd and desperate transfer of the orthodoxies of the Greeks’ tenacious Christianity, as they applied the severe prohibitions of their church to the ruins. Understanding little of the meaning of the stones, they could only see them in terms of their present religious belief; and so they imposed a sort of sanctity on the ruins. This ludicrous solemnity was universal in Greece. Women whose shorts were too tight and men wearing bathing suits were not allowed to enter the stadium above Delphi, where the ancients had run races stark ballocky naked. In some Greek places photography of ruins was banned as sacrilegious.

In spite of this irrationality, the place was magical, because of its natural setting, the valley below Delphi, the edge of a steep slope, the pines, the shimmering hills of brilliant rock, the glimpse of Mount Parnassus. Delphi was magnificent for the view it commanded, for the way it looked outward on the world. The site had also been chosen for the smoking crack in the earth that it straddled, that made the Oracle, a crone balancing on her tripod, choke and gasp and deliver riddles.

“‘What kind of child will I give birth to?’ someone would ask the Oracle,” Clea said. “And the Oracle was clever. She would say, ‘Boy not girl,’ and that could mean boy or girl, because of the inflection.”

“I don’t get it,” someone said. “If the Oracle could see the future, why did she bother to speak in riddles?”

“To make the people wonder.”

“But if she really was an Oracle, huh, why didn’t she just tell the truth?”

“It was the way that oracles spoke in those days,” Clea said feebly.

“Doesn’t that mean she really didn’t know the answer?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t that mean she was just making the whole thing up?”

This made Clea cross. But the scholar Michael Grant describes how the prophecies were conservative and adaptable to circumstances, and he writes of the Oracle, “Some have … preferred to ascribe the entire phenomenon to clever stage management, aided by an effective information system.”

Clea took us to the museum, where one magnificent statue, a life-sized bronze of a charioteer, was worth the entire climb up the hill. As for the rest I had some good historical sound bites for my growing collection.

—The Oracle sat on this special kettle and said her prophecies.

—Pericles had very big ears, which is why he is always shown wearing a helmet.

On the way back to the ship, while the guide was telling the story of Oedipus—how he got his name, and killed his father, and married his mother, while frowning and somewhat shocked Seabourn passengers listened—I began to talk to the Cornacchias, Joe and Eileen, who told me about their recent win at the Kentucky Derby. It was the second time a horse of theirs had been triumphant—“Strike the Gold” had won in 1991, and “Go for Gin” this year.

“What’s your secret?” I asked.

“I have a very good trainer who knows horses. He feels their muscles. I also have a geneticist, who checks them out. It’s a science, you know.”

The Cornacchias lived on the north shore of Long Island, some miles east of Gatsby country. Eileen was an admiring and pleasant person and Joe an unassuming man, who did not boast. He was also very big. “I tell the horses, ‘If you don’t win, I’m going to ride you.’ ”

“What was the purse this year?”

“I won eight-point-one million bucks. Broke even.”

“Where’s the profit, then?”

“ ‘Go for Gin’ is starting to make money as a stud.”

Back on the ship, we resumed our voyage, and as the sun set behind Corinth we slid through the narrow Corinth Canal, with just a few feet to spare on either side. Jack Greenwald stood on deck in his blazer, smoking a thick Monte Cristo, waving to the Corinthians on shore.

At the Seabourn dinners when black tie was requested, two or three a week, it was impossible to tell the waiters from the passengers. The night before we arrived in the port of Piraeus, a variety of caviar was served that reminded Jack Greenwald of something he had once eaten in the Arctic. This became a long story about narwhal tusks, “an area in which I am one of the few living specialists.”

“I have two very important things to do in Athens,” Jack said to me on deck after dinner. “Make a phone call, and buy a captain’s hat. I want one of those real hats—not one with braid. And the phone call is about my cat.”

“Yes?”

“My cat is a diabetic,” he said. “We must have a medical update. Isn’t that right, Constance?”

On the quay the next day I said that we would save money and time if we took the train the twenty miles or so from Piraeus to Athens. Good idea, he said, and waved away the taxi driver he had been speaking to. But on the way to the train station Jack became bored, and he turned around to see the taxi driver dogging our heels, still whining.

“Please don’t say another word,” Jack said. “I will give you a hundred dollars if you stick with us all day.”

That was fine with the taxi driver, whose name was Leonides. He took us to a jewelry shop. Jack: “Is that your cousin?” Leonides took us to a restaurant. Jack: “You have relatives everywhere.” Leonides had a blue eye on his key chain, a talisman against the evil eye. Jack: “You actually believe that stuff?”

“I’m going to tell Leonides I’m in love with him,” Jack said. “Just see what he says.”

In a wintry voice, Constance said, “Behave yourself.”

“Tell me about your king,” Jack said.

“King Constantine,” Leonides said. “Since one year he come to the Greek.”

“Were you happy?”

“Some not happy. Some people say, ‘Go!’ ”

“Did you say ‘Go’?”

“No. That is not good, sir.”

“You know Jackie Kennedy?”

“Mrs. Kennedy, sir. She married Mr. Onassis for the name, sir. For the name!”

Jack turned to me and said, “When Kennedy died I had to take two numbers out of my revue Up Tempo. They mentioned him. They weren’t funny anymore.”

We went to the Acropolis, but it was shut because of a strike by the municipal workers who staffed it. Still, it was possible to see the Parthenon, as white as though it had been carved from salt, glittering and elegant, and towering over the dismal city of congested traffic and badly made tenements. Apart from what remained of its ancient ruins, and the treasures in its museums, Athens had to be one of the ugliest cities on earth, indeed ugly and deranged enough to be used as the setting for yet another variation of the Heart of Darkness theme, perhaps to be called Acropolis Now.

The Seabourn passengers we happened upon in the city were unanimous in sharing this view.

“Athens is a four-hour city,” one man said, meaning that was all the time you needed to see it in its entirety. That hourly rate seemed to me a helpful index for judging cities.

“I think Athens is a toilet,” a blunter man said.

“There’s nothing to buy in Greece,” a woman said.

While I bought lurid postcards of ancient pottery depicting bizarre sexual acts, Jack went to another jewelry store with Leonides. I found them later, being pursued by the owner.

Hurrying into the taxi, Jack said, “When a jeweler tells you a stone costs a hundred and forty thousand dollars and then after some haggling says that he’ll give it to you for eighty thousand dollars—a discount of sixty grand—does that inspire confidence?”

This brought forth a lesson in the form of a story from him in buying anything in the Middle East. This applied to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Israel, wherever one was possessed of a desire to spend.

“What I am about to tell you is very valuable,” he said. But the story was complicated. It concerned his friend Ali who had sold him a carpet, then bought it back, and resold it, all at different prices.

“What’s the point of the story?” he asked in a rhetorical way. It was this: Nothing in the Middle East has an absolute value. What a cousin is charged is different from what a stranger will be charged, and an old customer is told an altogether different price. There is no way of assigning a price to anything except by sizing up the buyer.

New passengers had arrived on board and were audible as they got acquainted with the old ones.

“—and then I’d be facing a two-hundred-thousand-dollar medical procedure.”

“—so big it wouldn’t fit in the safe in the house, so we had to take out a separate policy.”

“—on a scale of one to ten my brother-in-law is a minus four.”

“—our tenth cruise in two years.”

“—up the Amazon.”

“—Antarctica.”

“—Galapagos.”

The ship sailed south to the Peloponnesian port of Nafplion, gateway to Mycenae. I had seen the Mycenaean gold masks and bracelets in the museum in Athens, and felt in need of a little exercise, so I stayed in Nafplion and climbed the thousand steps on the hill behind the town to visit the Fortress Palamidi. This brooding structure of eight bastions that dominates the skyline was pronounced impregnable by its Venetian architect Agostino Sagredo. But he had tempted fate, because a year after it was finished, 1715, the Turks landed in the Peloponnese and immediately captured it. About a hundred years later in 1822, the year of Lord Byron’s death, during the Greek struggle for independence, the Greeks wrested it from the Turks.

At the top, a sign: Visitors are prayed to enter the site decently dressed. I knew this was another example of Greek puritanism and misplaced veneration. I asked the young man at the entrance to explain to me what it meant. He was unshaven, in a grubby shirt. He was playing cards with his much grubbier friend.

“People come with bikinis and shorts. They don’t look nice,” he said.

Oh, sure, Demetrios, and you look like Fred Astaire.

Hiking farther on, outside town, I met a woman on the footpath and asked her whether there was a village that lay at the end of it. I apologized for not speaking Greek.

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “I am Italian.”

So we spoke Italian. Her name was Estella.

“What part of Italy are you from?”

“I am from Uruguay,” she said, and added, “Let me tell you Uruguay is much cleaner and more orderly than Greece. Do you notice that Greeks throw paper and bottles all over the place?”

The litter in Greece was remarkable—the roadsides, the beaches, even the ruins were scattered with plastic bottles and candy wrappers and rags and tin cans. I wondered why.

“Because they are barbarians,” Estella said. “They are different from every other European.”

“You don’t think Greece is modern?”

“I have lived in Nafplion for three years. I can tell you it’s not pleasant. Greece is decades behind in every way. Twenty or thirty years behind the rest of Europe.”

“I am just visiting. I saw the fort.”

“The fort is like everything else here. Interesting, but dirty.” From a nearby hill I had a good view of Nafplion, the small old Venetian quarter, which was now just souvenir shops; the commercial part of the city, which had gone to seed; and the rest of it, ugly and recent and jerry-built and sprawling.

More than any other place I had seen so far on the Mediterranean, Greece was purely a tourist destination, a theme park of shattered marble and broken statues, and garbled history. But tourists did not really go to Greece for the history; they went for the sunshine, and these cautioning signs were in many cases meant to restrain north Europeans who in the Greek warmth became militant nudists—Germans, especially. The Greeks struck me as being more xenophobic than the French, and more ill-tempered and irrational, in a country more backward than Croatia. They sneered at the Albanians and deported them. They loudly cursed the Turks. They boasted of their glorious past, but were selective, for it was only yesterday in the 1960s that these passionate democrats had welcomed a military coup, and supported them for creating one of the most right-wing governments in the hemisphere, the seven-year dictatorship of the Greek Colonels.

Greece manufactured nothing except tourist souvenirs. It did not even clean its beaches of litter. It was famous for its pollution and its foul drinking water. Even its politics had become ridiculous, as its aging prime minister, famous for his moralistic rants, chucked his wife and ran off with an air hostess. But Greece had been redeemed. By being accepted as a member of the European Community, Greece had become respectable, even viable as a sort of welfare case. Membership meant free money, handouts, every commercial boondoggle imaginable; and the sort of pork that Italians had made into prosciutto the Greeks simply gobbled up, all the while keeping their Mediterranean enemies out of the European Community.

As I walked over the hills above Nafplion the sky lowered and it began to rain, and the complaints of the grazing sheep grew louder. In sunshine, at a little distance, Greece could look delightful, because the arid glaring rock was so bright and backlit, the trash and garbage camouflaged, and even the most polluted parts of the Aegean had sparkle. The rain made it truly gloomy. In bad weather Greece was an awful place, of glum gray tenements and wrecked cars and rough treeless hills of solemn stone. Cloudy skies seemed also to throw the Greek dereliction into sharper relief—and so, to make matters worse, the sensational litter of Greece became visible in the rain.

Given these tetchy people and this insubstantial landscape and the theme park culture, it was odd that Greece was thought of as a country of romance and robust passion and diaphanous rain. In a land of preposterous myths, the myth of Greece as a paradise of joy and abundance was surely the most preposterous. How had that come about?

“The sea,” wrote Kazantzakis, rhapsodizing in Zorba the Greek, “autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece.” Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea.

“Many are the joys of this world—women, fruit, ideas. But to cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise. Nowhere else can one pass so easily and serenely from reality into dream. The frontiers dwindle, and from the masts of the most ancient ships spring branches and fruits. It is as if here in Greece necessity is the mother of miracles.”

Dreamy, sentimental, passionate Kazantzakis, of the purple prose and the purple nose! His Greece, especially his native Crete, is mostly gone now and the paradox is that (if I may borrow an empurpled leaf from one of the master’s own books) it seems that Kazantzakis’s Oedipal feeling for his motherland produced the inevitable Greek tragedy. Tourists came in droves to verify Kazantzakis’s sensuous praise of the Greek sluttishness, and rumbunctiousness, and goodheartedness, the cheap food and the sunshine.

The early visitors were not disappointed, but in the end Greece—so fragile, so infertile, so ill-prepared for another invasion—became blighted with, among nightmares of tourism, thousands of Zorba Discos, Zorba Tavernas, Zorba Cafes and the Zorba the Greek bouzouki music from the movie soundtrack played much too loudly in so many souvenir shops. All the curious, the fake icons, the glass beads, the t-shirts and carvings and plates (Souvenir of Mycenae); and regiments of marching Germans, resolutely looking for fun. Greece had needed a few metaphors. Kazantzakis provided the highbrow, or at least literary, metaphors; movies and television provided the rest.

The Seabourn lay at anchor at the Greek port of Ágios Nikólaos (“Ag Nik” to its habitués). There were many Zorba businesses here, and the sign As seen on the BBC was displayed at various parts of town, for this place, specifically the nearby leper island of Spinalonga, was the setting for a popular and long-running series entitled “Who Pays the Ferryman.”

“You didn’t see it?” a German said to me at a cafe in town. He was incredulous, and he mocked my ignorance. I was not offended. Since I spent many days mocking other people’s ignorance, this was fine with me. “When this show was on television in Germany, the streets were empty. Everyone was at home watching it. Me, too. That’s why I came here.”

The port and the town and everything visible had been given over to tourists; there was not a shop nor any sign of human activity, nor any structure, that was not in some way related to the business of tourism. All the signs were repeated in four languages, German taking precedence.

Writing about tourists—whether it is a harangue or an epitaph—is just pissing against the wind. There is a certain fun to be had from snapping the odd picture, or cherishing the random observation. But I had vowed at the beginning of my trip to avoid tourists and, whenever possible, not to notice them. Haven’t we read all that elsewhere? I went ashore, bumped into the Greenwalds (Jack: “I’ve just been offered a genuine Greek icon for fifty dollars. Think I should buy it?”), walked around a little, and finding the crowds of milling tourists much too dense, I rented a motorcycle and left Ágios Nikólaos at sixty kilometers an hour. I rode east, down the coast, then southward over the mountains to the opposite side of Crete, to the town of Ierápetra. This place looked very much like Ágios Nikólaos, which I had fled from: curio shops, tavernas, postcard shops, unreliable-looking restaurants, Rooms for Rent! Bikes for Hire!

There were plenty of Zorba enterprises here, too. And bullying restaurateurs and their touts brayed at passersby at Ierápetra.

“Meester—you come! You eat here! Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Best food in Griss! Where you go? Not some other place—you eat here!”

Every five feet there was an insistent tout, hustling people off the pavement and seating them, before any competitor could snag them. There was probably a more unpleasant figure one could be assaulted by than an unshaven Greek howling commands at me in ungrammatical German, but if so I could not think of one at the moment. They were seriously browbeating the perambulating tourists—just the mood to whet your appetite; and when the people kept walking they were insulted and abused by the touts they had passed.

All that and a foul beach, but the muddiest beach at Ierápetra was called Waikiki, a misnomer that was merely a harmless desecration compared to the violence of calling a boardinghouse outside town The Ritz. Elsewhere in Ierápetra the eighteenth-century mosque in a quaint part of town had been wrecked and partly rebuilt. The minaret was still standing. The Arabic calligraphy remained. But the interior was defiled, having been turned into a tiny auditorium. Chairs had been set up, facing music stands, and the bass drum was propped against the wall.

Was this worse than the Turks in Istanbul revamping the Byzantine magnificence of Santa Sophia’s and making it a mosque, along with any number of Christian churches? Probably not. But there were still Christians functioning in Turkey and there were no Muslims in Greece. Apart from the tourists and some retirees, there were no foreigners in Greece. There were Arabs in Spain, Albanians and Africans in Italy, Moroccans in Sardinia, Algerians in France; but there were no immigrants of any kind in Greece. The Albanians that came had been sent back. Whether it was Greece’s feeble economy that kept everyone except Albanians (whose economy was abysmal) from wishing to settle there, or Greek intolerance, was something I did not know. Perhaps it was both—or neither, since the Greeks were themselves migrants, leaving in great numbers for America and Australia.

Was Crete the ancient homeland of the Jews? Tacitus thought so. His theory was inspired by the name of Crete’s highest mountain, in the central part of the island: “At the time when Saturn was driven from his throne by the violence of Jupiter, they abandoned their habitation and gained a settlement at the extremity of Libya. In support of this tradition, the etymology of the name is adduced as a proof. Mt. Ida, well known to fame, stands on the isle of Crete: the inhabitants are called Ideans; and the word by a barbarous corruption was changed afterwards to that of Judeans.”

A Dutchman, Janwillem from Rotterdam, whom I met in Ierápetra, told me that he was here to look at buying a place for his retirement.

“I retire in a few years,” he said. “I would like to overwinter here, or in Benidorm.”

“What’s the attraction here?”

Janwillem countered with a question of his own. “You’ve been to Holland?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Very flat. Very expensive,” he said. “But here”—and he gestured—“is cheap! You can eat at one of those places with wobbly tables, very old and nice, dinner for two, with wine—twenty guilders!”

“So you’re moving here?”

“Maybe if I find a flat on the top of a house, with balcony, nice view of the sea.”

Still, Janwillem seemed doubtful. Was he?

“I think it is very isolated in the winter,” he said. “There is a Dutch group of people in Benidorm, in Spain. You have been there?”

“Yes,” and I wanted to add I hated it, but why demoralize this Flying Dutchman in his hopes for a happy retirement?

“If you are bored in Benidorm, it is so easy to get the bus back to Holland,” he said. “Here is harder. A ferry to Piraeus, then the train or the bus to Patras. Ferry to Italy. Another train to Rome. Train to Paris. What? Two or three days—maybe four!”

I had met Janwillem by chance, walking the backstreets of Ierápetra, as he was looking for a likely dwelling in which to spend his retirement. By the end of this conversation he had convinced himself that retirement in Greece would be an enormous mistake.

Mounting my motorcycle, I rode back to Ágios Nikólaos, admiring the mountains and the blue bays, sideswiped by cars and trucks, as I made my way through the goat-chewed, sheep-nibbled landscape of sharp rocks and olive trees and cracked white houses, all of it screamingly signposted: For Rent! For Sale! Buy Me! Try Me! Rent Me! Eat Me! Drink Me!

Mike the Greek was still sitting at his motorbike rental agency, still reading the porno magazine he had been leafing through that morning.

“How do you say porno in Greek?”

“Porno!” he cried. “Same!”

Back on the Seabourn, I met Jack Greenwald, who said that he had spent the afternoon in the Jacuzzi on the upper deck with Ambassador Tan.

“We talked about what stressful lives we had led,” he said. “I was lying but I think he was telling the truth. We were drinking and sitting there in the Jacuzzi in the sunshine. It was very pleasant. He tells me he’s on his way to Bangladesh, to help poor people.”

“Was Reggie in the tub?” I asked, using the name we had assigned to one of the British passengers.

Jack wagged his finger at me and said, “No, no. Never trust an Englishman who doesn’t shine his shoes.”

After Warm Purple Cauliflower with Olives in White Truffle Vinaigrette, Chilled Plum Bisque, and Marinated Breast of Guinea Fowl with Juniper Gravy—or did I salve my conscience with the Vegetable Gratin?—I bumped into Mrs. Betty Levy and asked why she had been missing at dinner.

“I’m feeling a bit precious today,” Mrs. Levy said. “I had some consommé in my suite. I don’t want to get anything. They’ve all got something.”

Now, well into our second week of this Mediterranean cruise on this glittering ship, we had learned a little about history (toilets were called Vespasians in ancient Rome, Pericles had enormous ears, Athenians ate porridge for breakfast), and found out a lot about each other. In many ways it was like being an old-time resident of an exclusive hotel. Passengers knew each other, and their families, and their ailments, and were confident and hearty.

“How’s that lovely wife of yours, Buddy?”

“Say, is your mother any better?”

“Lovely day. How’s the leg?”

The only stress was occasioned by the visits ashore—not that it was unpleasant being reverentially led through the ground plans of ancient sites, and down the forking paths of incomprehensible ruins, many of them no larger than a man’s hand (“Try to imagine that in its day, this structure was actually larger than the Parthenon”). It was rather that every daily disembarkation for a tour was like a rehearsal for the final disembarkation, the day when we would leave the comfort of the Seabourn, and that was too awful to contemplate.

This ship was now more than home—it had become the apotheosis of the Mediterranean, a magnificent vantage point in the sea which allowed us to view the great harbors and mountains and cliffs and forts in luxury. At sundown we were always back on board, away from the uncertainty and the stinks of the port cities, and the predatory souvenir-sellers. We were on our floating villa which, in its way, contained the best of the Mediterranean. We drank the wines of the Midi and the Mezzogiorno, our dishes were better than anything we saw in the harborside restaurants, and rather than risk the detritus of the beaches, we had our own marina on the stern. Even with his billions, Aristotle Onassis had felt there was no greater joy on earth than cruising these sunny islands, and his honeymoon trip with his new wife, Jacqueline, was the very journey we were embarked on, sailing—it must be said—in our vastly superior ship.

From Crete, we sailed through the islands called the Sporadhes, living up to their name as sporadic—isolated and scattered—and onward past the Greek island of Kos, to the coast to Turkey, the port of Bodrum, with its crusader castle and its crumbling city wall and its market, which contained both treasures and tourist junk.

It was immediately apparent, even in the swift one-day passage from Greece to Turkey, that we were in a different country. I compared them, because as old enemies they were constantly comparing each other. Turkey was both more ramshackle and more real. Travelers tended to avoid Turkey, which was not a member of the European Community (thanks in part to Greece’s opposition), so Turkey had not depended on tourists for its income and had had to become self-sufficient, with the steel industry and the manufacturing that Greece lacked. Turks were calmer, more polite, less passionate, somewhat dour—even lugubrious; less in awe of tourists, and so they were more hospitable and helpful. Greeks were antagonistic towards each other, which made them hard for foreigners to rub along with; Turks, more formal, had rules of engagement, and also seemed to like each other better. Turkey had a bigger hinterland and shared a border with seven countries, yet Turks were less paranoid and certainly less xenophobic, less vocal, less blaming, perhaps more fatalistic.

We had crossed from Europe to Asia. Turkey is the superficially westernized edge of the Orient, Greece is the degraded fringe of Europe, basically a peasant society, fortunate in its ruins and (with most of the Mediterranean) its selective memory. But it was wrong to compare Greece with Turkey, since their geography and their size were so different. Greece’s landscape was more similar to Albania, and if Greece was a successful version of Albania, Turkey was a happier version of Iran—perhaps the only moderate Muslim country in the world.

After the assault by touts at Greek ports it was restful to walk down the quay in Bodrum and not have Turks flying at us. That restraint was an Asiatic virtue. Turks also had Asian contempt, and were famously cruel, both knowing they were so and believing that most people in the world were just the same. If you abused Turkish hospitality (as I did frequently) and asked Turks whether they tortured their prisoners, they spat and said, “Everyone tortures their prisoners!”

It was raining in Bodrum. Half the Seabourn passengers did not bother to go ashore. But even in the rain the harbor looked alive, an effect perhaps of being full of beautiful wooden sailboats in port for a regatta. The crusader castle was intact, except for the occasional mark of an infidel’s aggression. There were pious Latin inscriptions over the battlements and gateways (“No victory is possible without your help, O Lord”), a nice reminder that Christianity had kept its faith robust with its own jihads—holy wars that had lasted for centuries.

Walking past a carpet shop—an unmistakable sign that we were in Asia—I saw Jack Greenwald being harangued by the carpet dealer.

“This is not a carpet! This is a piece of art!” he cried. “I am selling art!”

Jack beckoned me in, introduced me to the dealer, Mr. Arcyet, as “my millionaire friend,” and soon carpets were being unrolled and were flopping one on another. It was another Greenwald tease to abandon me to the hysteria of a Turkish carpet dealer who believed he had an American tycoon captive in his shop, on a rainy day in Bodrum.

His hysteria was short-lived, interrupted by a more dramatic event. Outside the shop, a huge Turkish woman had collapsed on the street, and she lay in the rain, her skirt hiked up, while a Turkish man slapped her face in a violent attempt to revive her, and other Turks sauntered by to stare. Soon there was a crowd of murmuring Turks, watching the supine woman, and when a taxi came to take her away, it required four of them to haul her into the backseat.

That unscheduled event was the only drama in Bodrum that day. It was too rainy to go anywhere. The phones would not work without a Turkish phone card, and there were no cards for sale anywhere in the town (“You come back next week”). I looked at the old mausoleum and the new casino and the suburbs of bungalows and condominiums of the sort that were being retailed elsewhere in the Mediterranean as holiday homes for Europeans in less congenial climates. The prices of this Turkish real estate ranged from $30,000 to $60,000—cheaper than, but just as hideous as, the ones in Spain, Malta and Greece.

Resolute about staying ashore, I had a Turkish lunch of eggplant, fava beans, stuffed peppers and a gooey dessert, and afterwards, back on the ship, realized that the people who had stayed on board had had a better lunch, a drier time of it, and still enjoyed the thrill of seeing the castle and the sailboats and the shapely Turkish mountains.

At dinner, the Seabourn was sailing north to Lesbos, and Jack Greenwald was in unusually high spirits in anticipation of dessert—one of his own recipes, Fraises au poivre, Strawberries with Black Pepper. Greenwald’s high spirits took the form of teasing, and as we were at a larger than usual table, he was able to range over it, poking fun. To the Panamanian, he said: “Noriega was a very patriotic man, above all, don’t you think?” To a woman wrinkling her nose: “That is how Eskimos say no. They say yes by lifting their eyebrows—here, do you think you can manage that, too?” To a rationalist at the head of the table: “Of course I believe in ghosts, and our prime minister, Mackenzie King, believed in ghosts, too.”

This chatter was no more absurd than that of the other passengers.

“—Harry and I were at the Barbara Sinatra benefit for abused children,” a woman was saying. “Tom Arnold was one of the speakers. He talked about the man who had abused him—”

“—figured, if you’re in Turkey you’ve got to get a Turkish carpet. I measured the spot in the house and I’ve got the measurements with me. We’re looking for something floral—my wife loves flowers. We don’t want anything geometric—”

“—a couple of icons. They swore they were genuine—”

“—stayed for a whole week in the Sea Shells—they’re islands in the Indian Ocean.”

“—next time up the Amazon.”

“—get to Rio J. DeNiro, during Carnaval.”

At last, the waiter rolled a trolley towards Jack Greenwald with several bowls, and the strawberries, and in bottles and saucers various other ingredients for his dessert. Jack supervised and narrated the preparation.

“Nine plump fresh strawberries—good,” he said. “Now, take that pepper mill and grind twelve twists of pepper,” and he counted as the black pepper fell upon the crimson strawberries. “Take a tablespoon of Pernod and macerate them, yes, like that. And a tablespoon of Cointreau. Macerate. Lift them, let it reach all the berries. Now a tablespoon of Armagnac. Macerate, macerate.”

“Yes?” The waiter showed Jack the bowl of slick speckled berries.

“A few pinches of sugar and three-quarters of a tablespoon of fresh crème,” Jack said. “Mix carefully, just coat them with the crème. You notice how I pronounce that word ‘clem’—that’s because I’m from Montreal.”

There was a bit more business with the Fraises au poivre. The plates were wrong. No, not soup bowls—but flat plates were needed for the serving, and the sauce had to be dripped just so.

“What do you think?” he asked, after I had sampled some.

It was hard to describe the taste, which was both a slow sweet burn, and peppery and syrupy and alcoholic and fruity; and I did not want to tell him that no taste could compete with the pleasure of watching this dessert being concocted by him and the deferential waiter.

To add to my pleasure, Jack immediately ordered a helping of Cherries Jubilee, another Greenwald variation, flambéed, with ice cream, and tucking in, he said, “Doesn’t this go down nicely after the strawberries?”

Afterwards, he said that he had joined the cruise—he was going on to Haifa after Istanbul—in order to lose forty pounds, “but I’m having my doubts.”

• • •

Morning in Lesbos, dreary in a drizzling rain, but there were floods elsewhere. FLOODS! CATASTROPHE! the Lesbian headlines cried. DEATH IN CRETE! Torrential rains were general all over the Peloponnese: cars washed into the sea, stranded tourists, cliffs broken by erosion, roofs collapsed.

Because so little vegetation existed in Greece, whether mainland or islands, the soil did not hold the rain. Lesbos was a study in erosion, the gravelly hills sluicing down their own gullies and washing into the street; dirt, mud, stones, silt, sand traveling fast in streams and pouring into the sea, reducing the island, making it starker and stonier.

Had Greece always looked like this? I began to think that there had to have been a time when it was forested, and that the loss of trees had given it this crumbly and lined appearance. It had perhaps been quite a different landscape in ancient times, not the white wasteland of hot pockmarked stone and blazing sand, but a cooler place of shade trees and forests.

I traipsed through the town of Mitilini, bought a newspaper, made a telephone call, visited a church, and watched a fisherman plucking tiny fish from the thick folds of his net. It continued to rain. Few places are gloomier than a tourist town in a rainstorm. The weather seemed to make the Greeks crabbier, too; the frowning chain-smoking men in the damp tavernas they had turned into men’s clubs.

If I had arrived in Lesbos on my own, in a boat from Turkish Izmir, or on a Greek island-hopping ferry, with days on the island, I would have tried to make it work for me. I would have buttonholed a Lesbian, needled a landlady, glad-handed a Greek, and tried to create some rapport. But this was a one-day visit. I jumped puddles all morning, had lunch on the Seabourn and made another foray in the afternoon, all the time watching the clock. The food on board was excellent; there was friendship and good cheer and comfort. It was so easy for me to turn my back on the island and wait for the ship’s whistle to blow and for Lesbos to vanish astern.

Most of the passengers were getting off the ship in Istanbul. A few were going on to Haifa. Mrs. Betty Levy was threatening to stay aboard for another month or more. Her dream, she told me, was to be at sea for weeks—no ports, no tours.

This impending sense of departure gave our progress up the Dardanelles the following morning a gloomy air of abandonment, and the funereal pall was not lightened by the knowledge that we were passing Gallipoli, and the two hundred thousand graves of fallen soldiers. The Dardanelles is like a canal, no more than a mile wide in some places, linking the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to the Sea of Marmara, where another canal—the Bosporus—divides Istanbul, and so on, to the Black Sea.

The Dardanelles is also the Hellespont of Leander, who swam back and forth to be with Hero; and of Lord Byron, in homage and in imitation. I had thought of swimming it myself—a mile was swimmable—but it looked uninviting in late October, with four- to five-foot breaking waves, and a heavy chop, with a cold wind blowing from Thrace on the north side.

“Freeze the vodka,” Jack Greenwald was saying to the waiter in French, preparing him for the caviar course at tonight’s dinner. “Wrap the bottle in a wet towel, put an apple in it for taste and keep it so cold it gets syrupy. Do you follow me?”

The bloody battlefield of Gallipoli was now the little Turkish village of Gelibolu, mainly fisherfolk, and where Xerxes and Alexander had marched their armies across on pontoon bridges, where Jason had sailed with his Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, there were rusty freighters, and more villages, and a town, Canakkale—some mosques and minarets visible, along with the factories and the clusters of houses. But it was wrong to expect anything dramatic. It was an old sea, of myths and half-truths and sound bites of history; its periods of prosperity and peace had been interrupted by even longer periods of disruption and pillaging. It was the center of many civilizations, but there had always been barbarians at the gates—and inside the gates.

Yet so little was left of the Mediterranean past that it was possible to travel the sea, from port to port, and never be reminded of the ancients. Even the recent brutality of Gallipoli was buried on the featureless shore—just another cemetery. There were so many graves on the shores of this sea.

Fog rolled in, dusk fell, blurred lights shone from the shore, some indicating the crests of hills. And then in this mist, a nocturne of misty light, there emerged and remained printed on the night a vision from the past, of a skyline that was purely minarets and towers, and mosque domes and bridges and obelisks, like a promise made in Byzantium that was being honored in the present. We had crossed the Golden Horn.

Closer to the European shore, which is the site of the old city, their features were more distinct, first the squarer lines of the Topkapi Palace, then Agya Irene, and the fifteen-hundred-year-old Agya Sophia, every brick intact; and behind its minarets, the six minarets of the Blue Mosque, and on the crest of the hill Nur Osmanye—the Light of God—the thick Byzantine fire tower, Yeni Mosque beneath it, at the end of the Galata Bridge, and beyond the vast almost unearthly masterpiece of Sinan, the Süleyman Mosque, pale and glittering even in this shifting fog.

Ferries were crossing the Bosporus, passing the Seabourn, hooting, their lights illuminating the sea and giving the scraps of hanging fog the shimmering and golden texture of an antique veil, a little tattered and brittle, perhaps, but still usable for conveying mystery.

Just before I left the Seabourn Spirit, Jack Greenwald took me aside and gave me a gaily wrapped present. Inside was a Turkish lapel pin and his Household Cavalry tie.

“Wear them both,” he said. “The pin will be useful here in Turkey. The tie is helpful everywhere.”

“I’ll feel like an imposter wearing this tie.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“And isn’t it an insult to your regiment?”

“Not at all,” he said. “My regiment wasn’t half as impressive as that one.”

“Jack, do you mean you weren’t a member of the Household Cavalry?”

“Oh, no, I was in another regiment—you wouldn’t be impressed by that one,” he said. “I only wear ties from fancy regiments. I get good results too. I’m always being saluted when I’m in London.”

14

The M.V. Akdeniz: Through the Levant

Leaving the comfort of the Seabourne Spirit was so much like a secular version of the Expulsion from Paradise that I thought I would brood less if I moved straight on to Syria. It seemed a prudent move, too. For all its physical beauty, Istanbul was passing through a turbulent phase. A recent bomb in the Covered Bazaar had killed many people, including three tourists. That at once caused an immediate eight-thousand-visitor cancellation to Turkey. The Bazaar bomb might have been the work of Kurds of the Kurdish People’s Party (PKK). But there were other bombers, fundamentalist ones, from the Great Raiders of the Islamic East and the Devrimçi Sol—the Revolutionary Left. Liquor stores were a frequent target; so were banks, because they charged interest on loans, and it is written in the Koran that “Allah hath blighted usury” (11:276).

There had been a rocket attack on the residence of the United States Consul General. It missed, but if it had hit its target the building would have been demolished. Ten armed men guarded the house now, and the Consul General, and most foreign diplomats in Turkey, did not stir outside without a bodyguard.

Istanbul, even under siege, was still magnificent. Never mind that W. B. Yeats had not actually seen the city—it was everything magical that he had written about it in his two greatest poems. It had known three incarnations, as Byzantium for a thousand years, then Christian Constantinople, and finally Istanbul of the Ottomans. It was a labyrinth, ringing with the voices of hawkers, of ferry horns, of muezzins and of the plonking music that was called “Arabesque.” As Yeats implied. It was a place where there was no real distinction between life and art, it lay on both banks of the Bosporus, one continent nestling next to another—just a stretch of water, a ferry ride from Europe to Asia.

And though Turks moaned about the dangers in Istanbul, they were warier of the Turkish hinterland. My plan was to get a Syrian visa here, take the train to the south coast city of Adana and then trains and buses to Iskanderun, Hatay, Antakya (Antioch) and into Syria and down the Syrian coast.

“That is a bad area,” I was told.

“Which area?”

“Every place you mentioned.”

“But that’s my route,” I said.

“May it be behind you!” It was a Turkish expression: Gechmis olsen.

Soon after arriving in Istanbul, I checked into a third-rate hotel and applied for a Syrian visa. Feeling sentimental, I walked down to the Asian side of the Galata Bridge and looked for the Seabourne Spirit on the quay at Kadiköy. But it had sailed away. Another ship was in its place—Turkish, rusty, slightly larger, no one on board.

I seriously considered swimming the Hellespont.

Ömer Koç had swum the Hellespont, though he, of all people, could have found an easier way of crossing that stretch of water. His was the wealthiest family in Turkey. I looked him up, because I had an introduction and because my Syrian visa was taking a while to come through.

“I’ve also swum across the Bosporus, to Europe, and back,” Ömer said. The Hellespont swim was in homage to Byron. “It can be a long swim—three miles or more, because the current takes you.”

“I was thinking of trying it.”

“This isn’t the month to do it,” he said.

A handsome young man in his late twenties, Ömer spoke with an English accent acquired as a student in England. He helped run the family business, Koç Holdings. The walled compound of Koç Holdings was something of a landmark, in that its grounds had been scattered with Greek pillars and marble ornaments and statues. They had been gathered by his father, Rahmi, from sites all over Anatolia, to make it look like an ancient site.

“He had a wonderful sarcophagus, but in the end decided not to put it on the lawn,” Ömer said. “He decided that it would be frightfully morbid.”

Ömer lived on the Asian side of the Bosporus in a palatial Turkish house known as a yali, a summer house. It was the narrowest point on the Bosporus, where Darius had built a pontoon bridge and marched his army across in the fifth century B.C. On its carefully chosen embankment, the yali epitomized the great absorbing tendencies of Turkish culture—an appreciation of light and land and water, and a blend of East and West; the Ottoman house in its maturity.

Ömer’s yali, built a hundred years ago, had been occupied by a princely son of a khedive, one of the Turkish viceroys of Egypt. When Ömer’s father, Rahmi, bought it in 1966, it had fallen into disrepair. Rahmi Koç totally revitalized it.

“I was very small when we moved in,” Ömer said. “I spent my childhood here, and I still live in it most of the time.”

I wondered whether Ömer had been intimidated by having been brought up in this pristine house with its delicate furnishings.

“My brothers and I realized that it was ornate, but my father didn’t worry about us making a mess,” Ömer said. “He’s not bothered by that sort of thing.”

He and his brothers, Mustafa and Ali, romped in the basoda—the formal living room, where guests were received—and climbed all over the banquettes, called sedirs. They especially loved being so close to the water, Ömer said. They dived off the landing stage, where their boat was moored, and this proximity to the Bosporus turned them into great swimmers.

Like his father, Ömer was a collector, a passionate bibliophile. His library was stocked exclusively with books on Turkish subjects. Evelyn Waugh used to joke that his relative Sir Telford Waugh’s book, Turkey—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, “sounded like Boxing Day.” Ömer owned that book, and a thousand more rare volumes, along with old maps, weapons, incunabula, and treasures, such as Sultan Abdul Hamid’s personal letter opener, a simple dagger.

“This is interesting,” Ömer said to me, and showed me a copy of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur inscribed to Sultan Abdul Hamid (1876–1909). And he explained that Lew Wallace had been the American Cultural Attaché from 1881 to 1885.

Ömer’s grandfather, Vehbi Koç, now in his eighties, was the patriarch of the family and a noted philanthropist. He had been called “the father of Turkish private enterprise.” His name was as familiar to the average Turk as Henry Ford’s was in America, and significantly Henry Ford II wrote a foreword to Vehbi Koç’s autobiography. Ömer gave me a copy. The book was not a rags-to-riches story, because the Koc family was not indigent. It was a modest Ankara family which, like most others in Anatolia, had no lights or running water. A real bath was “a public bath. This was a monthly expedition.”

In accordance with Turkish tradition, family members found Vehbi Koç one of his own cousins for him to marry. This arrangement was intended “to preserve the family fortunes, and with the hope that they would get along together.” He saw his wife for the first time at the end of the marriage week when, on the seventh day, his bride, Sadberk, raised her veil.

As a youth, Vehbi went to Istanbul and served an apprenticeship. “I noticed that the minorities”—the Greeks, the Jews, the Armenians—“led a better life. Their standard of living was much higher than the Turks’, so I decided to go into business.” He progressed from being a contractor, to manufacturing, to the production of foodstuffs and steel, to the making of cars (Fords and Fiats) and railways. He became by his own report a frugal billionaire and his book contained, among other things, advice on how to stay healthy. For example, “Find the right weight, and stick to it for life.”

“The best entertainments” from his youth, Vehbi Koç wrote, “were marriage and circumcision ceremonies.”

“Oh, yes, circumcisions are great occasions in Turkey,” Ömer told me. And it did not take place immediately after the boy’s birth. His own sunnet, or circumcision party, occurred when he was two and a half—and was a joint one, shared by his brothers Mustafa (nine) and Ali (seven)—and was celebrated at the yali on the Bosporus. It was an enormous party—four hundred guests—and his parents indulged their sons.

“Normally the party is held the same day as the ceremony—to ease the pain, as it were,” Ömer said. “But my parents wanted us to enjoy it, so it was held fifteen days later.”

As we talked, and drank coffee, I felt I was experiencing an aspect of culture on the Turkish Mediterranean that had not changed in five hundred years. This was the ultimate country house. It was hard to imagine a more peaceful setting, a greater harmony of both natural and architectural elements, or—in this waterside culture of caïques and yachts and ferries—an easier place to reach, from almost anywhere. I had fulfilled the old Turkish idea of fleeing the city of shadows and hawkers’ cries and music, and finding peace in its opposite, light and silence; sitting in comfort at the edge of Asia and contemplating Europe.

Frustrated that my Syrian visa was taking so long, I went back to the ship I had seen moored at Kadiköy, the Akdeniz, a Turkish cruise liner. Was it headed somewhere interesting? I found the agent in a nearby office.

“Where is this ship sailing to?” I asked.

The man’s English was inadequate to frame a reply, but he handed me the printed itinerary: Izmir, Alexandria, Haifa, Cyprus, and back to Istanbul. Perfect.

“What day is the ship leaving?”

“Today—now.”

“Now?”

He tapped his watch. He showed me three o’clock.

It was now noon. I explained that my passport was at the Syrian Consulate, three miles away. If I could get it back from the Syrians, and check out of my hotel (two miles away), was there room for me on board?

Plenty of empty cabins, he indicated. The price was thirty-four million Turkish liras—cash. This was $940, not bad for a twelve-day cruise. I wondered whether I could get aboard. I decided to try.

What followed was a bullying drama enacted by mustached men in brown suits, chain-smoking and muttering in broken English. It was also manic pursuit through Istanbul traffic. The Syrians complained about my insisting on having my passport back prematurely. The hotel complained that I had not given them prior notice of checking out. The post-office money changers were on strike, and so I went to a usurer who laughed at my credit card and took nearly all my cash. Eventually I had my passport, my bag, and the money. I was panting from the effort, and I had less than an hour left to buy my ticket, buy an exit stamp from the police, get through customs and immigration, and board the ship. Then the police complained, the immigration officials complained, and so did the agent. The counting of the thirty-four million in torn and wrinkled bills of small denomination took quite a while.

Amazingly, just before the gangway was raised I was hurried aboard the Akdeniz and given my cabin key.

“My name Ali,” the steward said.

That was his entire fund of English words; but it was enough. He was a short bulgy man, forty or so, in baggy pants and stained white shirt. He seemed glad to see me, and I thought I knew why.

A large Turkish suitcase had been placed in my cabin. The suitcase alone filled the floor space, and bulked in my fears. I imagined my cabin-mate. He would be called Mustafa, he would snore, he would smoke, he would natter in his sleep, he would get up in the middle of the night so often I would nickname him “Mustafa pee,” and he would retch—or worse—in the tiny head. He would toss peanut shells onto the floor. He might be antagonistic; worse, he might be friendly. Indeed, he might not be Mustafa at all, but rather a big tattooed biker called Wolfie, with scars and a blue shaven skull; or a ferocious backpacker; or a demented priest, or a pilgrim, or a mullah with wild staring eyes. At these prices you got all kinds.

Ali was outside the cabin, waiting for me. He knew what I had seen. He knew what was in my mind. Ali may have had an infant’s grasp of English but he had intuition bordering on genius.

“Ali, you find me another cabin,” I said.

He understood this.

“One person—just me. This ship has plenty of empty cabins.”

Just to make sure there was no misunderstanding I whispered the password, baksheesh.

He smiled and showed me his dusky paw: Welcome to the Eastern Mediterranean.

He narrowed his eyes and smiled and nodded to calm me, to reassure me that he was going to deal with this matter immediately. Give me a little time, he was suggesting.

I looked at the rest of the ship. It reeked of rotting carpets and sour grease and damp Turks and strange stews and old paint and tobacco smoke. There were about a hundred passengers, all of them Turkish. Not a single backpacker, or German tourist, nor any priests or pilgrims. The Turks on board, in thick shawls and brown suits, were drinking tea and smoking and fretting. And men and woman alike, all bespectacled, had that Turkish look of uniform disguise that resembles someone wearing fake glasses attached to a false nose-and-mustache.

I was not alarmed by any of it until the Turks themselves began to complain about the ship.

“I was not expecting this,” Mr. Fehmi said. He had worked at a NATO base for sixteen years and spoke English fairly well. “This is a great disappointment.”

We were among the few drinkers on the ship. We were soon joined by a ship’s officer who explained that the Akdeniz was experiencing difficulty leaving the quayside. It was a forty-year-old ship, with no bow thrusters, so a tug had to snag a stern line and spin the ship one hundred and eighty degrees to the edge of the Golden Horn, and only then could we get away.

But in this slow turning the whole skyline of Istanbul revolved, gray and golden in the late-afternoon light, the sun setting behind the mosques and the domes and the minarets. I counted thirty minarets and a dozen domes, and with the ferries hooting, and the fishing boats and the caïques and the freighters dodging us, everything at the confluence of these great waters—the Bosporus, the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara—sparkled and rang with life. And then we were truly under way, passing Topkapi Palace and the city wall that still showed breaches where it had been blasted open by the Ottomans in 1453.

In a stiff wind, we passed Haydarpasa Railway Station, where I had planned to take my train to Ankara and Syria. But that was yesterday’s plan. I had changed my mind, and I was glad of it, for wasn’t the whole point of a Mediterranean grand tour voyaging among the great cities—from here to Izmir to Alexandria and onward? And I liked being the only yabançi—foreigner—on board. It was as though, among all these Turks, on this Turkish ship, crossing the Eastern Mediterranean, I had penetrated to the heart of Turkey.

I went back on deck to look at the last of Istanbul—“Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour”—and saw Ali creeping towards me. He signaled with his eyebrows, he pursed his lips, he dangled a key. That meant he had a cabin. He beckoned, and I followed him to a new cabin.

This is all yours, his hand gestures said. And when I passed him his baksheesh, he touched it to his forehead in a stagey show of thanks, and then slapped his heart, and I knew that as long as my money held out he was mine.

Then I was drinking fifty-cent beers in the smoky lounge and congratulating myself. It had been a frantic but worthy impulse, like leaping aboard a departing train for an unknown destination. Never mind the cigarette smoke and the filthy carpets and the Turkish muzak and the TV going at the same time. I found a corner to make notes in and read a few chapters of Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope (scandal and hypocrisy in an English village), and then just as night fell I went on deck and watched the Sea of Marmara widen into an immense sea that might have been the Mediterranean.

Having my own cabin meant that I had a refuge. And because it was on B-Deck I was entitled to eat in the Upper Class restaurant, The Kappadokya, where the captain and other officers dined. The captain was a pinkish Turk with confident jowls in a tight white shirt and white bum-bursting trousers, who looked like a village cricketer whose uniform had shrunk. He sat with six Turkish spivs and their preening wives. It was Upper Class but like the Lower Class dining room on the next deck down it was the same men in brown suits and old veiled women and frowning matrons in fifties frocks. Some of the older women looked like Jack Greenwald in a shawl, and their big benign faces made me miss him.

I was seated with an older Turkish couple. We had no language in common, but the man tapped his finger on Greenwald’s Turkish pin that I had in my lapel, and he smiled.

“Afyet olsen.” That was from my small supply of Turkish phrases. “Good eating.”

But the phrase was misplaced. The meal was not good, and a palpable air of disappointment hung in the room—silence, and then muttered remarks. It was generally a hard-up country, and these people were spending a large amount for this trip. We had that first meal: salad, pea soup, fatty meat and vegetables, and a third course of a great mass of boiled spinach; then fruit and cream for dessert. It was Turkish food but it also somewhat resembled an old-fashioned school meal.

The shawls, the brown suits, the felt hats, the clunky shoes and dowdy dresses and cigarettes were all part of the Turkish time-warp in which the Turkish middle class was still finding clothes of the 1950s stylish. Even the shipboard dishes of pickles and potato salad and lunch meat and bowls of deviled eggs were from that era, and appropriate to the old Packards and Caddies and Dodges that plied up and down Istanbul. (In a week in Turkey the average middle-aged American sees every car his father or grandfather ever owned.) It was a sedate cruise so far, the nondrinking Turks all well-behaved, very placid, and so Turkish that it seemed like mimicry, a big smoky lounge of dour Turks in heavy clothes, heading for Egypt.

But I was grateful to them for making room for me, for allowing me aboard, for being hospitable. Turks made a point of greeting strangers in the common areas of the ship. I learned the greetings, I felt lucky.

And it gave the Mediterranean its true size. It was not the trip I had planned—five days through Turkey to the middle of Syria overland, with all the roadblocks and holdups. Instead, it was a couple of days from Turkey to Egypt: overnight to Izmir, and then a day and a half to Alexandria; and a day from there to Haifa. The Eastern Basin contained many cultures, with sharp elbows, but in fact the area was rather small. It was just that the people on these shores were so combative that made this end of the Mediterranean seem large.

From Bursa, then, came Mehmet Saffiyettin Erhan, an architect and historian of old wooden buildings, traveling with his shawled and aged mother, Atifet. And the Sags (Sevim and Bahattin), and General Mehmet Samih, three-star general and ace fighter pilot, known to all as Samih Pasha, who boasted of the windows he had broken with the boom of his jet engines over Nicosia, just before the partition of Cyprus. And Mehmet Cinquillioglu and his wife, Fatma, the four Barrutcuoglu, including little Lamia, the three Demirels, and the Edip Kendirs. And there were some Kurds, too, ones I thought of as concupiscent Kurds, and …

Oh, give it up. But studying the names outside the Purser’s Office on the Akdeniz passed the time. We had traversed the Dardanelles during the night, and now, in sunshine, I was standing at the rail with Mehmet Erhan, the architect.

“If architecture is frozen music, that looks like a minaret in D.”

“Pardon?”

We were sailing past a mosque, into the port of Izmir. The ship was three hours late, Mehmet said, not that it mattered. Mehmet was a fund of information. Canakkale—the Dardanelles—meant “cup” in Turkish. The Turks were rather proud of having slaughtered so many foreign troops at Gallipoli. Under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk, the Turks had driven the Greeks out of Smyrna (Izmir) in a decisive battle in 1923, and founded the Turkish Republic. Ataturk’s house was in Izmir, if I wanted to see it.

“What dots Akdeniz mean?” I asked.

“White Sea,” he said. “It is the old Turkish name for the Mediterranean.”

The Black Sea was Kara Deniz, the Red Sea Kizil Deniz, and beyond that headland was the Greek island of Chios, where Homer was born.

“If there was a Homer,” I said. There seemed to be some doubt whether Homer ever existed—that the poetry just accumulated over the years, with recitation, and that the idea that Homer was blind came from the description of Demódokos, the blind minstrel in The Odyssey.

… that man of song

whom the Muse cherished; by her gift he knew

the good of life, and evil

—

for she who lent him sweetness made him blind.

—The Odyssey,

Book VIII, II. 67–70 (translation by Robert Fitzgerald)

Mehmet, who had read The Odyssey in Greek, said he had also heard of that possibility.

The Akdeniz docked and we were told that it would not leave until late afternoon. I had time to take a taxi down the coast to Ephesus, the great Graeco-Roman harbor city, where St. Paul had preached and was buried, and where the Virgin Mary spent her old age. Mary was not buried there; there was no body. At death she had been levitated from the planet Earth in a cosmic transportation known as the Assumption, an article of faith among Catholics. It is an incident the New Testament neglects to mention—that Mary “was assumed body and soul into Heavenly glory” like Enoch and Elijah was made official by Pope Pius XII in 1950—though you would have thought someone would have noticed it at the time. The idea of a little Jewish woman, known variously as the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven, being propelled by divine force bodily into outer space (“angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!”) cannot be called unmemorable.

The Panayia Kapili, or House of the Virgin, five miles down the road from Ephesus, had been spruced up and was no more than a novelty, but it had a lovely view, which was all that mattered.

There were brothels in Ephesus, as there had been at Pompeii, and graffiti, too, but this was altogether a greater city, and more of it remained from antiquity. My problem was that the whole time I was in Ephesus I worried about the ship leaving Izmir without me, so I hurried back. At the gangway, a crew member said there had been a new change of plan—the ship would not be leaving until nine.

I needed money. The banks were closed, and so were the money changers. But on a back street of Izmir I saw embedded in an old wall something that looked like a cash machine. I stuck in my ATM card, issued by Fleet Bank in East Sandwich, Massachusetts, punched in some numbers, and out came ten million Turkish liras ($280), just like that.

Some screeching schoolchildren were leaving a large building on the seafront. A sign on the front door said that it was Ataturk’s seaside house, the one that he had used in the 1920s, when he was leading the war against the occupying Greeks. I went inside and recognized my dinner companions from the previous night on the ship, and their children and grandchildren. One of the ten-year-olds spoke English. They were all from Ankara, he explained. They had taken the train to Istanbul to catch the ship. He said that his parents and grandparents were impressed that I had chosen to visit the house of their famous Ataturk.

The great man’s old telephone stood on his desk. One of the children giggled into the receiver until he was reprimanded by a caretaker. Ataturk’s bathtub, his washstand, his sofa, his tables, his chairs. Some objects retain the aura—the personal magic—of the owner; others do not. Wood does, big fuzzy chairs don’t; a bathtub does, a bed does not; a desk does, and a telephone, but not curtains, nor framed pictures.

A wooden, clinker-built rowboat was dry-docked in the reception room, and it was so well made it did not look out of place. Ataturk had rowed it in Izmir Bay, using those same oars that were counterbalanced with heavy upper shafts.

I left the house and walked down the promenade where, at the German Consulate, there was a long line of Turks, old and young, waiting for German visas. In spite of the dire news from Germany that Turks were being assaulted and their houses burned, that they were the target of both skinheads and opportunistic politicians, still there were plenty of potential migrants in Izmir.

As the sun exploded in its descent at the edge of the distant Aegean and became a slowly evolving incident, vast and fiery and incarnadine, I boarded the Akdeniz in time to eat a dinner that was like the parody of a heavy meal: cold meat, beans, fish, more meat, more beans. Never mind. I had gorged on caviar on the Seabourne. This was a different experience.

Then I sat under the lights of the deck, in the mild evening, and read the Turkish Daily News, an item about the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mr. Mümtaz Soysal. It was another act in the endless drama between Greece and Turkey, but it was timeless, too, and this episode could have occurred at any time over the past century, the same phrasing.

“If Greece extends its territorial waters from six miles to twelve miles, we will go to war with them”—and Mr. Soysal had actually used the word.

Mr. Soysal had made himself popular in Turkey because of his pugnacity. But the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr. Kaolos Papoulias, met Mr. Soysal in Jordan and they agreed in the future not to use the word war.

After that the Greek Defense Minister, Mr. Arsenis, accused the Turkish minister of “raving.”

It was like old times, and old times here could mean anything from the Trojan War to the partition of Cyprus. The newspaper said that Greeks and Turks were holding talks on the future of Cyprus. To aid their cause the Greeks had sent to Cyprus a specially sanctified holy icon from a monastery on Mount Athos. The Greeks seemed confident that this icon would do the trick, but the Turks were not so sure.

As I read, the anchor was hauled up and we were tugged to sea and away from the twinkling lights of Izmir.

At dawn we passed the island of Patmos, where an angel appeared to John and the result was the Book of Revelation. Patmos was Greek. All the islands were Greek, in fact, even the ones that were only a mile or two from the Turkish mainland. Turkey, to its irritation, possesses only a handful of offshore islands, which is why any mention of Greece extending its territorial waters sounds provocative and maddens the Turks. We passed Kos, then quickly Níssyros, Tilos and Rhodes. Turkey was a persistent shadow behind—always a low layer of dirty air behind the islands.

“The islands are so empty,” Mehmet said. He was again standing at the rail, with his mother. “Nothing on them. One town, or less.”

He grinned at me.

“Because there are nine million Greeks,” he said. “Maybe ten. Not many.”

I asked Mehmet about the Kurds. On the BBC morning news on shortwave I had heard that thirty villages had so far been emptied of Kurds and fifteen more had been burned, with crops and animals, the goats suffocated in their pens.

“I know many Kurds,” he said. “We have Kurds on this ship—some passengers. They look like us. Same face. They speak Turkish. We are friends.”

After the Gulf War the Kurds, who had been fighting for forty years or more, had become hopeful again of establishing a homeland. They fought with greater conviction, believing that the United States would take up their case. It did not happen. It only made the Turkish troops angry. They evicted Kurds from their villages in the southeast, and sent them into the mountains, and when some Kurds straggled back the Turks burned their villages to the ground. The radio program contained the voices of Kurds: We were given twenty minutes to leave by the soldiers. But some people were too old to gather their belongings, and they lost everything—all they owned was destroyed.

I reported this to Mehmet.

“But some Kurds are not troublesome,” he said. And then he raised his eyes and said, “That is Karpathos, also in Homer.”

We were alone on the deck. The Turkish passengers tended to be heliophobic. They sat under the awnings, in the smoky lounges, along the sheltered passageways. There were always six or eight of them in a lounge watching videos, one of their favorites a cowboy film starring Charlton Heston. They gathered for the meaty meals, which were usually mutton stews and thick bean soups and mounds of rice and followed by fruit in iced syrup. Breakfast was just olives and yogurt and cucumber slices. Even in this sunny weather they remained heavily dressed, the men in ties, the women in drab frocks and shawls.

“Put on your pantaloons,” a waiter in an ugly black uniform said to me when I entered the dining room one hot day in shorts.

On the third night out there was a cocktail party, with nonalcoholic punch, and the officers were introduced, just as on the Seabourne, but these were solemn, rather robotic-looking men in white uniforms, like ice-cream sellers being awarded prizes for good sales. It was also a Turkish Holiday—Republic Day—so we got a special meal of shish kebab, stuffed eggplant and a special dessert, and as usual the fat man at my table ate his wife’s main course and dessert. For most meals this woman sat toying with her food, and when her husband finished his meal he swapped plates and got hers.

No one read anything on the ship—not a book or a newspaper, nothing. Only Mr. Fehmi and I touched alcohol. The rest bought cups of coffee, they talked. They were the most sedate, as well as the politest people I had ever traveled with.

How polite would they be in an emergency? I pondered the question because we were so ill-prepared. A fire was always a possibility—everyone smoked. The ship was old, and poorly cared for. But there was no lifeboat drill at all; no suggestion of where the mustering stations were located; no mention of where the life jackets were stowed. I found mine in a tangle at the bottom of my closet. It probably did not matter. In the event of a sinking I felt sure that “My name Ali” would lead the stewards to their lifeboat and while he was stamping on the rest of the passengers’ fingers and pushing them away he would signal to me and let me aboard. Watch Ali, I thought: he knows the drill. He was usually to be found hiding on the lower stern deck, scowling with hatred at the sea.

The night before we landed at Alexandria I was invited to another dinner table. Three men beckoned, then stood and welcomed me.

“I am Samih—people call me Samih Pasha,” an older man said to me, and shook my hand. “I think I recognize that tie.”

“Household Cavalry,” I said.

“I am Fikret,” the second man said. He looked haunted and shy. He was attempting to smile. He was a radiologist and his evasiveness suggested he was having a bad time on board.

“I am Onan,” the third man said. He was young, soldierly, with an odd blaze in his eyes.

“There is another Onan in the Bible,” I said.

He ignored this. “I am making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.”

The soldier, the medical man, the religious nut; and me. We became friends. After that, I ate almost every meal with them. At that first meal, Samih Pasha said, “I have been everywhere. Even Santa Barbara and Nevada and Singapore. Singapore is the cleanest city in the world, but it is not interesting. I am a military man. I should have liked that. But, ha! I wanted to leave Singapore after one day!”

“Tomorrow we will be in Egypt,” Onan said.

Almost all my life, I had dreamed of Alexandria. Most of life’s disappointments begin in dreams; even so, in the morning when the Akdeniz lay at anchor there, and I stepped ashore for the first time, I was horrified by the city—but wait.

Alexandria seemed filthy and flyblown until I had seen Cairo, which was in many respects nightmarish; yet after a while the Cairene nightmare wore off, the frenzy in the foreground (Meester!) diminished, and my returning to Alexandria was like being received into bliss. Thus, some dreams can be reclaimed, and most culture shock is probably curable.

“But sometimes,” a Turkish crewman said to me, “you have to do this,” and he held his nose.

Drawing towards it on the Akdeniz, Alexandria seemed to me the ultimate sea-level city, at the very lip of the Nile Delta, the flattest city imaginable, in a flat landscape, flatter than Holland, with no high ground behind it for two thousand miles to the Mountains of the Moon. Alexandria’s flatness and its elongated shape had compressed it, forced it to become mazelike, a city of secrets, and its harbor and position on the Mediterranean had made it one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean.

Like the greatest cities in the world, Alexandria belonged to everyone who lived in it; shared by “five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes.” That is Durrell writing in Justine, the first novel in The Alexandria Quartet, a sequence about love, sensuality, intrigue, deception. And so purple, with Nubian slaves, child brothels, and cabals and nearly always someone in the Casbah wailing with meningitis. But this cosmopolitan aspect of the city is persistent. Everyone belongs. In the second novel, Balthazar, the narrator amplifies this theme, speaking of how “the communities still live and communicate—Turks with Jews, Arabs and Copts and Syrians with Armenians and Italians and Greeks … ceremonies, marriages and pacts join and divide them.” And more: “its contemporary faiths and races; the hundred little spheres which religion or lore creates and which cohere softly together like cells to form the great sprawling jellyfish which is Alexandria today.”

Or rather, yesterday; for today, Alexandria is a monoglot city of one race, Arabic-speaking Arabs; and one creed, Islam; and no sex. The foreigners had gone—the last had been expelled by General Nasser in 1960—and the money was gone, too; there was certainly a connection. And another sign of the times was the large number of Egyptians who had migrated to New Jersey. This militant tribalism seemed to be the way of the world, and certainly the story in much of the Mediterranean. It was perhaps a depressing discovery, but it was news to me, and the desire for enlightenment seems one of the nobler justifications for travel. That was good. I was seldom prepared for anything I found on these shores.

The great multiracial stewpot of the Mediterranean had been replaced by cities that were physically larger but smaller-minded. The ethnic differences had never been overwhelming—after all, these were simply people working out their destinies, often in the same place. But in this century they had begun to behave like scorpions—big scorpions, small scorpions, greenish, russet, black; and now the scorpions had sorted themselves out, and retreated to live among their own kind. I had yet to find a Mediterranean city that was polyglot and cosmopolitan.

Even under the Ottomans, Smyrna had been full of Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Circassians, Kurds, Arabs, Gypsies, whatever, and now it was just Turks; Istanbul was the same, and so were the once-important cities of the Adriatic—Trieste was just gloomy Italians who advocated secession from the south; Dubrovnik was Croatians on their knees, praying for the death of the Serbs and the Bosnians. Greece seemed a stronghold of ethnic monomania, without immigrants. Durrës in Albania was a hellhole of pathetic Shqiperians, and if the Corsican clans had their way there would not be a French person from Bastia to Bonifacio. It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now, though there were any number of Senegalese peddlers hawking trinkets there.