The Pillars of Hercules

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.

Given his overripe imagery and his feverish imagination, it is wrong to expect to find Durrell’s Alexandria. He says himself that his Alexandria, “half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.” That is true. And events have changed the cityscape. The Rue Nebi Daniel, where Darley, the narrator, lives and so much of the action takes place, is easy enough to find on the 1911 Baedeker map (running north-south, from the Jewish synagogue to the station) but nowadays is Horreya (Freedom) Street. In Durrell’s novels it is a dream-city, full of fantasies of food and sex, and even the descriptions are dreamlike, as an evocation of the body of water that lies just behind Alexandria, “the moonstone mirror of Mareotis, the salt-lake, and its further forevers of ragged desert, now dusted softly by the spring winds into satin dunes, patternless and beautiful as cloudscapes.” But that fictional city was gone, if indeed it had ever existed; and so was Flaubert’s Alexandria and E. M. Forster’s.

The great Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who lived most of his life in Alexandria (and worked for the Ministry of Irrigation), told a different story. In his poems he had celebrated the richness, the history, the squalor, the eroticism of the place as something human. His sense of reality caused him to be labeled decadent. In “The City” and “The God Abandons Antony” he had emphasized that the city was something within us, sometimes as “black ruins” and sometimes representing human hope or failure. “The city is a cage … and no ship exists / To take you from yourself.” The English poet D. J. Enright wisely wrote, “It is not that Cavafy reminds us that we are merely human. He reminds us that we are human.”

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

There were fleeting glimpses from certain books I had read, some aspects of dereliction, like a couple in tatters, and you think: That broken rag on her head was once a turban, and there were gaps on those shoes where there had once been jewels, and her shreds had once been silks. You could make out what it must have been from what it was, like the town auditorium in Crete that had once been a mosque, and the claustrophobic church in Siracusa that had been a Greek temple.

The hookahs, the so-called hubble bubbles, are still in Alexandria, and so are the cafes where the men sit sucking on these waterpipes, while cripples and flunkies fill them and keep them alight; the tottering buildings, the Cecil Hotel, the Corniche and its cooling breeze, and the children fishing from the edge, swallows crisscrossing the heaps of garbage, the jetty of the Corniche ending in the fort that was built with the rubble of the Pharos, the lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the “clang of the trams shuddering in their metal veins.” The stalls of watermelon, and fish, or almonds, the men with pushcarts doling out the mucky fava bean mixture they called foul. The air full of brick dust, “sweet smelling brick dust and the odor of hot pavements slaked with water.” The city was physically recognizable; the way life is lived outdoors on its streets and pavements makes the city visible and tantalizing, too, for what else remains indoors and hidden? At the very least, with the well-turned phrase, “a thousand dust-tormented streets,” Durrell could be assured that in this respect his description of Alexandria would never be out of date.

Alexandria was a broken old hag that had once (every other writer had said so) been a great beauty; she was not dead, but fallen.

It was not quite true that no one had described the Alexandria that I saw. There was one man, Naguib Mahfouz. He wrote in Cairo, but his inspiration came from Alexandria, where he spent the summer months of each year. “Only twice in his life has he been abroad,” one of his translators wrote, “and after his second trip he vowed never to travel again.” He had won the Nobel Prize in 1988, the Arab world’s only Nobel laureate in literature. At the moment Mahfouz was in trouble.

Two weeks before I arrived in Alexandria, while I was still on the Seabourne, visiting Taormina, Mahfouz had been stabbed by a Muslim fanatic in front of his apartment house on Sharia Nil in Cairo. He had been in intensive care since then. Mahfouz had been denounced by the blind cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and just as he had inspired the bombers who had tried to bring down the World Trade Center, he had filled another poisonous little apostle in Cairo with the resolve to murder Mahfouz.

It was a sudden stabbing on the street and had left a deep wound in Mahfouz’s neck. Mahfouz was an old man, eighty-three, a diabetic, and he had been seriously injured. Blood pouring from his wound, he had been taken to the hospital, which was fortunately only a block away. He was still in the intensive-care ward of the Cairo hospital.

I decided to take the train to Cairo to see whether I could talk to him. It was either that or a visit to the pyramids with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan.

Meanwhile, Alexandria was having an odd effect on me, plunging me into dream states, in which I was a sort of Prospero figure in a big rambling estate, among all sorts of Eskimos and Indians and old friends; and even odder unrepeatable sexual dreams. Was it the bright light of early dawn blazing through my porthole, the stillness of the ship at its berth in the Western Harbor, the mutters and bells and clangs? All that, and the city itself, everything I had read about Alexandria was feeding my imagination, provoking desires.

The news was bad. Tourists were being shot by fundamentalists in Luxor and Giza. Some had died of their wounds. The body count was fifteen this year, two last week. Some of the victims had been on tourist buses, others on trains.

“They shoot into First Class — they know where the tourists are on the trains,” Raymond Stock told me.

Raymond, an American poet, essayist and teacher, was Mahfouz’s biographer. He was fluent in Arabic and had lived in Cairo for four years, keeping in daily contact with his subject, whose apartment was not far away. I called Raymond from a pay phone at the port of Alexandria soon after I arrived on the Akdeniz. He said that even though Mahfouz was in the hospital he had still been seeing the wounded man almost every day and that he was slightly improved.

“Is there any chance of my seeing him?”

“I’m just going to the hospital now,” he said. “They might move him out of intensive care and if they do we could visit him this afternoon.”

On this very slender possibility I made plans to take the two-hour train trip from Alexandria to Cairo. But there was nothing else I wished to do; the pyramids, the Sphinx, the bazaar, the museums — they could wait. One of the aspects of the classical Grand Tour that I had always found attractive was the way the traveler sought the wisdom of great men. Naguib Mahfouz was certainly one of those.

“I have been driving a taxi for twelve years, and this is the first time I have ever taken a tourist to the main railway station,” the taxi driver told me.

“I’m not a tourist,” I said.

“Why you take the train?”

“So I can look out the window.”

And, I thought, so that I can verify something I had read: “Alexandria Main Station … the noise of wheels cracking the slime slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows … the long pull of the train into the silver light … the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound … a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.”

That was Justine, and the nice image of “the giant sniffing of the engine” had to mean a steam locomotive. That was the only difference. If I had known what the station was like I could have answered him: I want to go to the railway station because I want to enter a time warp.

But this was true of many railway stations. The two main stations in Istanbul had hardly changed at all. Haydarpasa was a hundred years old but the only difference was that diesels had now replaced steam. The same had been true in Trieste and Split, even in Tirana and Messina and Palermo, in Valencia and Alicante and Marseilles. Railway stations are not timeless, but — too well-built to modernize, too large and dirty to purify; often elderly, sometimes venerable — they retain a sense of the past.

The three classes of tickets, the confusion at the ticket windows, the pushing and shoving and the queue-jumping men cutting ahead, the texture of the cardboard tickets, the very smudges of the printing, made it seem an experience from a former time, from a paragraph in a book written long ago. The torn advertisements fraying from the wall, the “Women’s Waiting Room,” the filthy platforms, the beggars, the sweet-vendors and newsboys, and the shafts of dusty sunlight slanting onto the rails, the clopping of horses in the courtyard; these details, part of the present, might be found on the same old page.

Assuming that the Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist gunmen traveled Third, and their victims were in First, I decided to buy a Second Class ticket to Cairo on a later train. This presented a difficulty which illustrated one of the dilemmas of Alexandrian life. Outside the station I was ambushed by men screaming at me, hectoring me to buy melons, or nuts, crocodile-skin shoes. Inside, at the ticket window, I found myself begging a clerk to sell me a train ticket. It was perhaps an Egyptian paradox: The things you don’t want are pushed in your face; the thing you want seems unobtainable. After some perseverance, and luck, I found the right ticket window. It was outside the station — not many people knew where the First and Second Class ticket windows were, which was perhaps a comment on how hard-up Alexandria had become. I bought a round-trip ticket.

Then, to kill time, and see the city, I took a tramcar ten stops, west, into the old Arab Quarter. Here and there I spotted Turks from the Akdeniz haggling with Egyptians over figs, or fruit, or candy; or tourist junk — plaster sphinxes, beads, brass plates, leather purses, stuffed toy camels, crocodile-skin belts. Turk and Arab, with no language in common, screamed at each other in broken English.

“Fie dallah!” cried the Egyptian hawker.

“Free dallah!” the Turk yelled.

“Fuh dallah!”

“Duh wanna.”

“Meester — best prass for you.”

“Free dallah!”

On the way back to the railway station my returning tram became jammed in traffic so dense I had to walk or else risk missing my train.

The problem was a dead cart-horse on the tracks a quarter of a mile away at the center of Alexandria. I chanced upon it after passing through the stopped traffic of honking cars and taxis, the trams, buggies, trucks, buses and motorbikes. At the head of all this traffic was the dead horse, still in its traces, its wagon overturned on the tramlines. It had been killed on the spot by being struck by the tramcar. One of the tram’s front panels was dented and smeared with blood. The horse was a gray nag, very skinny, tortured-looking eyes and wrung withers, with a big red gash on its hipbone and another on its leg. The death of this one miserable creature had brought the city of Alexandria to a halt.

The train to Cairo passes through the heart of the Delta, through suburbs and Sidi Gaber, past the shantytown sprawl and the brick tenements hung with laundry, Arab boys kicking a football in a clearing between two vegetable patches, and then the railway line offers a panorama of the Delta’s agriculture — cotton fields, grape arbors, wheat fields, rice paddies, fields of leafy greens and bean stalks. Every foot of the Delta was cultivated, all the flatness demarcated into gardens and fields. The canals were so choked with hyacinths and papyrus that water traffic was unthinkable. Even in the heat of the day there were people in the cotton fields, picking the cotton, and hauling sacks. The animals sought shade, though. It was hot and dry, and goats were pressed against flat walls, their flanks against the brick, because that ribbon of shade offered the only relief against the sun overhead.

Only two branches of the Nile pass through the Delta. The Cairo train crosses both of them, the Rashid Branch at Kafr el Zaiyat, and nearer Cairo, at Benha, the Domyat Branch. I had never seen the Nile before, but here there was not much of it. There are so many dams upriver that a relatively small flow of the Nile penetrates this far. And the most recent one, the Aswan High Dam of 1970, so reduced the flow of alluvial soil that the northwest edges of the delta towns that had always been gaining land (because of the easterly flow of the Mediterranean current here) were now being eroded by the sea. The Nile Delta was shrinking.

Because they were so dusty and sunbaked and neglected, the towns of the Delta, even the larger ones like Tantra and Benha, were impossible to date. They seemed to exist in that Third World dimension of poverty and neglect that held them outside of time.

The mob at Cairo Station, people struggling to leave, people struggling to secure a taxi or board a bus, hustling, haggling, picking pockets, or simply standing and looking desperate, was the worst, most frenetic, I had seen anywhere in the Mediterranean. The taxi drivers were the most rapacious by far. It is no surprise to learn that a great proportion of New York’s taxi drivers began their careers here in Cairo, and many of these same men would soon be joining them. It was not that they were rapacious — rapacity becomes instinctual among the urban poor in the Third World, as a survival skill — but that the simplest transactions always turned into a tiresome bidding war, in which you were always cheated.

“Fifteen dollars,” a cabbie told me when I said where I wanted to go. This was nine times the normal fare. Just being quoted a fare in dollars in this far-off country irritated me.

But my efforts were rewarded. I met Raymond Stock at the Semiramis Hotel and he greeted me by saying “Mahfouz is expecting you.”

He explained the stabbing while we had coffee. Sheik Omar had issued the fatwa on Mahfouz in 1989 from his seedy little mosque in New Jersey. It resembled the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, and coming so soon after that well-publicized one, it seemed as though Sheik Omar was trying to upstage the Ayatollah Khomeini. Mahfouz, too, was being accused of writing a blasphemous book. Sheik Omar called him “an infidel.” The book was Children of the Alley (Aulad Haratina). In one reading it was just a neighborhood tale of life in Cairo, but it was poetic too, and much could be read into it. That was the problem — its allusiveness. It seemed to contain echoes of the Koran, and the Bible, too. This was not as strange as it seemed. Time had done very little to change the Arabic language or the structure of Egyptian life. The character Qasim was a familiar figure in Cairo, but he had certain qualities in common with the Prophet Mohammed (and his chapter abounded with Koranic parallels). Rifa’a somewhat resembled Jesus, as the character Gebel resembled Moses. It was the story of a delightful family, said its most recent translator (my brother, Peter Theroux), but within this was a deeper story, of the spiritual history of mankind. The novel has 114 chapters; the Koran has the same number. “It is not a history of God,” Mahfouz had said, “but rather a history of God the way Man has insisted on imagining Him.”

The stabbing came about in this way. Mahfouz had an informal weekly meeting with his pals in Cairo. They were mainly old men and called themselves “the vagabonds” (harafish). But a few weeks before, there had been a quarrel — a trifling matter but it kept Mahfouz at home the following week. When the dispute was patched up, Mahfouz was with his pals again — and that was the night the assassin came for him. He said he was an admirer. He was a member of Sheik Omar’s Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya, the fundamentalist Islamic Group.

“If you come here tomorrow at five, you will find him,” Mrs. Mahfouz told them.

No one, not even she, suspected that someone would try to kill Mahfouz. In any case, Mahfouz made no concessions. He was fearless. He walked every day in the open air. Everyone who knew him, knew his movements. He was a familiar figure in Cairo, he walked all over the city, and he lived without a bodyguard. There was a feckless doorman at his apartment house but that man was half-asleep at the time of the attack.

The attacker approached Mahfouz the following day, just before five o’clock, as Mahfouz was getting into a car. Seeing him, Mahfouz in a reflex of courtesy turned to greet him. The man drew out a knife with a seven-inch blade and thrust down, stabbing Mahfouz at the base of his neck on the right side, cutting the carotid artery and slicing the radial nerve.

In his haste, the attacker forgot to cry out “Allah-u-akhbar!” and this omission (so he told police afterwards) explained why he had failed in his mission to murder Mahfouz. For this lapse, Allah delayed the death. He remembered to say it afterwards. “That is why I got away.” Other people said the man was simply unprofessional, since he had used a lowly kitchen knife for this important deed.

“I am being chased by a thief,” the man said to the taxi driver, who, unsuspecting, bore him away.

Meanwhile, Mahfouz had fallen and blood was pumping out of his severed artery and onto Sharia Nil. The man who had come to give Mahfouz a ride compressed the wound, stanching the flow, and the wounded man was hurried to the Military Hospital, just a few minutes away.

Bleeding profusely but still standing, Mahfouz said to the doctor, “There’s some blood here. I think you should look at it.”

He was immediately given two pints of blood, and during surgery another eight pints.

In another part of Cairo, the attacker was caught and held by some people whose suspicions were aroused by his strange behavior. The man did not deny what he had tried to do.

He said, “If I am released I will try again to kill him.”

In the newspaper Al-Ahram, Hasan Al-Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front, said, “The Egyptian fundamentalists’ use of force is a legal and honorable action, as were the attacks in Tel Aviv [the recent bus bomb] by Hamas.”

The most enlightened view — and it underlined the paradoxes of the issue — was that of Professor Edward Said, who wrote in Al-Ahram, “Mahfouz’s stabbing highlights the total bankruptcy of a movement that prefers killing to dialogue, intolerance to debate, and paranoia in favor of real politics.”

But the blame had to be shared: “It is hypocritical now to say to Mahfouz’s assailants only that they are crude fanatics who have no respect for intellectuals or artistic expression, without at the same time noting that some of Mahfouz’s work has already been officially banned in the Arab world. One cannot have it both ways. Either one is for real freedom of speech or against it. There is little basic distinction in the end between authorities who reserve the right for themselves to ban, imprison, or otherwise punish writers who speak their minds, and those fanatics who take to stabbing a famous author just because he seems to be an offense to their religion.”

Children of the Alley had the distinction of being banned in every Arab country, and many of those same countries included other Mahfouz novels in this ban. Small wonder, as Professor Said had suggested, that the fundamentalists seemed justified in their murderous intentions.

“He’s glad to see you,” Raymond said. “I told him you helped get him into the American Academy.”

“He got himself in,” I said.

The smiling man, supine in his bed, his neck bandaged, his hand in a splint, that greeted me in the intensive-care ward did not seem the dangerous man who had been vilified all over the Arab world. His expression was serene, his eyes clear. He was weary from what could have been a mortal wound, but he welcomed his visitors with animated conversation. He was modest, he teased, he even laughed and, soon after, this man who had been stabbed by a religious nut with a kitchen knife said, “It hurts when I laugh.”

Raymond introduced me. He said, “This is the man I told you about. He was one of the people who supported your application to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

Mahfouz began to laugh a little as Raymond repeated this in Arabic, as though a witticism had occurred to him that he was anxious to deliver.

“Raymond’s exaggerating,” I said.

Mahfouz said — his first words a joke—“I am the first person to be stabbed for being a member of the American Academy!”

He then uttered a dry chattering laugh that convulsed him and caused him pain. He was in a ward with about ten other men, all of them bandaged, with drip-feeds, and monitoring devices, and with plastic curtains around their beds. But Mahfouz’s intelligence, and his sweetness, shone in his face.

“How are you feeling?”

“I can’t write,” he said, and swung his splinted right hand on its sling. “That is bad.”

Dr. Yahyah el-Salameh said, “The hand problem was caused by nerve damage. The knife hit the radial nerve. So his hand is paralyzed.”

“My eyesight is bad, and I can’t hear,” he said. “That wasn’t the attack. That is because of my diabetes.”

Some of this was in English, some in Arabic. His accent could have been the accent of one of his characters that he had described: “like the smell of cooking that lingers in a badly washed pan.” Raymond stood behind me, translating. Mahfouz understood most of what I asked him, though from time to time he needed Raymond’s help.

“Tell the people at the American Academy that I am very grateful,” he said, clutching my hand. “Please thank them.”

“I know they’re worried about your health.”

“It was a shock, but—” He smiled, he laughed a little; he did not want to dwell on the attack.

“What do you think about those people?”

“I feel no hatred,” he said, slowly, in English. “But—”

He was gasping, having a hard time getting the words out. Dr. Yahyah looked anxious, but Mahfouz waved him away.

“—it is very bad to try to kill someone for a book you haven’t read.”

He was sniggering again, and seeing me laugh, he kept on talking, gesturing with his wounded hand.

“If you read the book and don’t like it,” he managed to say, stopping and starting, “then, okay, maybe you have a reason to stab the author. Eh? Eh?”

It was as though he was turning the whole attack into a violent absurdity. Something of the same kind occurs in his strange story “At the Bus Stop,” where the passive onlookers to a series of disconnected intrusions and sudden incidents all die in a senseless hail of bullets. That story and some others in the collection The Time and the Place have the logic and distortion of a nightmare, a blend of comedy and horror and the lack of logic that life confronts us with. He was saying: As a shy and peaceful man — elderly, deaf, half-blind, diabetic — wasn’t it ludicrous that he had been knifed? He was old and physically shrunken, like the character of whom he wrote: “There’s nothing left for death to devour — a wrinkled face, sunken eyes, and sharp bones.”

“But I am sad,” he said.

And he explained that the whole thing was pathetic. This was silly and futile. The fundamentalists were, most of all, ignorant.

“I thought they had learned something. I thought they were better than before. But they are as bad as always.”

“I think he is getting tired,” Dr. Yahyah said. “Maybe you—”

As though defying the doctor, Mahfouz said, “Fight thought with thought — not thought with violence.”

It was what he had said when defending Salman Rushdie against the supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The effort of his speaking, much of this in English, had wearied him. He saluted us. He said he would be better soon—“Come back to Egypt then — we’ll talk”—and he gripped my hand in his left hand and tugged it with affection.

Afterwards, I realized that I had been the one who had raised the religious issue and harped on the attack. But in retrospect I had the feeling that Mahfouz would have been much happier talking about something else — his work, perhaps, or Islamic aesthetics, or the weather, or Alexandria, or the French philosopher Bergson (who had worked on a theory of humor), or music, for which — before his deafness — Mahfouz had had a passion. He did not regard himself as a victim. His fatalism was part of his humor, and his modesty, and most of all it made him fearless.

My train back to Alexandria was El-Isbani, “The Spaniard,” though no one could explain why it was called that. It was an express, it rushed across the Delta, stopping two or three times, and Alexandria on the return seemed serene, as Mahfouz had described it: “Here is where love is. Education. Cleanliness. And hope.”

I had a drink at the Cecil and walked down the Corniche in the darkness, listening to the waves lap at the shore. “A great blue mass, heaving, locked in as far as the Fort of Sultan Qaitbay by the Corniche wall and the giant stone jetty arm thrusting into the sea.” This is Mahfouz, in his novel Miramar. “Frustrated. Caged. These waves slopping dully landwards have a sullen blue black look that continually promises fury. The sea. Its guts churn with flotsam and secret death.”

Alexandria made sense to me now. It was not a derelict or threatening place. It was an ancient city, founded by Alexander the Great around 332 B.C., and rising and falling with the fortunes of this end of the Mediterranean, it had been many different cities since then. Mahfouz had been born in 1911 and had witnessed the violent 1919 revolution, the various occupations — Greek, Turkish, British; the Second World War, the rise of Nasser, the fall of Nasser, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the humiliation of the Israeli Six Day War of 1967. He had seen E. M. Forster come and go; he had been in Alexandria in the late 1940s, when the action of Durrell’s novels had unfolded. He had watched these writers and their characters depart. And it was right that after the romantics and the fabulists had finished with the city, and the fantasies had ceased to be credible, the city had been reclaimed by a realist like Mahfouz, who possessed sympathy, and alarming humor.

I slept in my cabin on the Akdeniz, and woke exhausted and enervated by my dreams. Then I went into town again, bought the newspaper, and went to a cafe to read it. An Alexandrian joined me, Mr. Mohammed Ali.

“Cairo people are not like Alexandria people,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“We are Mediterranean people,” he said. “We are used to so many other nations, so many other different people.”

“But everyone in Alexandria is the same now. Isn’t that so?”

“We are people of the shoreline and the water,” he protested. “We have maybe three million people. Cairo has fifteen million!”

While I was in Alexandria, on the evening of my third day, the Arabic newspaper Al-Ahali (The People) published Naguib Mahfouz’s offending novel, Children of the Alley, in a special edition that sold out within a few hours of its hitting the street. “After 25 years of its absence from the Egyptian people!” the headline said. The whole book, in thirty broadsheet pages, had been printed without permission, infringing Mahfouz’s copyright. At first glance, it seemed a challenge to the hard-liners, but Raymond Stock had lived in Egypt long enough to find a sinister motive possible: Remember when Mao started the Hundred Flowers Campaign in order to get intellectuals and rebels out of the woodwork? he said. Well, this might be something similar, the publication of the blaspheming novel encouraged by the fundamentalist sheiks, to see who would applaud it. In this way, identifying the infidels, and rousing potential stabbers of Mahfouz. Whatever, it was an event, and it seemed to electrify the city. All at once, in the space of a few hours, everyone in Alexandria was reading Mahfouz’s novel.

“All gone,” the newsboys told me.

Looking for someone to help me buy a copy, I met a man who had bought five. They were at his house, he said, or he would have given me one.

“I spent forty pounds [about $14] on one copy last year!”

This man, Mohammed Okiel, asked one of the newsboys who had turned me away earlier, claiming he did not have a copy. Browbeaten by Mohammed Okiel, he found a copy of the special edition under some movie magazines. He had the decency to say “Sorry” to me in English.

“He is ashamed,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed was a lawyer. We found a quiet backstreet cafe, where young men were puffing on hookahs, and we drank a cup of coffee and talked about Mahfouz. I did not say that I had seen him in the hospital in Cairo — it was too improbable, and it was boasting. Besides, I wanted to know what other people thought.

“Naguib Mahfouz is a great man,” Mohammed said. “And he is a very great writer.”

“Have you read the novel?”

“Yes, Aulad Haratina is a great novel. I like it very much,” he said. “All the prophets are in it. Jesus, Moses, Mohammed. But it is also about us — we people.”

“Are you a religious person?”

“No. I have no religion,” he said. “Religion is false. Christian, Muslim, Jewish — all false.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because they cause trouble.”

“Don’t they bring peace and understanding, too?”

“People should be friends. I think it is easier to be friends without religion,” he said. “You can have peace without religion. Peace is easier, too, without religion.”

The texture of Alexandria, all the metaphors, and the romance and the layers of history were irrelevant to that simple reflection. It seemed a salutary and humane thought, too, because in a matter of hours the ship’s lines were loosed from the quayside, and we sailed out of this sea-level city, passed the lovely palace of Ras el Tin, and the old yacht club, and the lighthouses, and the ships at anchor. As the sun set directly behind our stern, we plowed east along the crescent of the Delta, towards Israel.

On deck after dinner, watching the Rosetta lighthouse winking from the Egyptian shore, at the narrow mouth of the Rashid Nile, Onan said — speaking as though I were not present—“Paul ran away from Alexandria. Where did he go?”

“There is something about this man,” Samih Pasha said, and his mustache lifted as he smiled at me. He then tapped the side of his nose in a gesture of suspicion. “Something — I don’t know what.”

“I had business to attend to,” I said.

“We saw the pyramids,” Fikret said. “But for just a little while. Fifteen minutes at the museum. Then the shopping. Women shopping.”

“I was very angry,” Onan said.

I said, “You can’t leave Egypt unless you have a small stuffed camel toy and plaster model of the Sphinx.”

“You see? He is making a joke,” Samih Pasha said. He tapped his nose again, once again drawing attention to its enormous size. “Something, eh?”

Fikret said, “I think Mr. Paul is right. He does his business. He doesn’t waste time.”

“You are going to Jerusalem?” Onan asked me sternly.

“If I have time. Are you?”

Onan sucked his teeth in contempt, to demonstrate the absurdity of my question, and then he said, “The only reason I am on this ship is to go to Jerusalem. Not the pyramids, not the Sphinx. I don’t care about the Nile. But Jerusalem. It is a holy place!”

His tone was just a trifle shrill, combining something military with something obsessional, a touch of the ghazi—the warrior for God Almighty.

“Relax, Onan, of course I’m going to Jerusalem,” I said. “I have the feeling you are making a pilgrimage.”

“It is your feeling,” he said. “I must find a concordance in Israel — for the Bible. I read Hebrew. I am interested in the Bible.”

“Yet I feel that you are a devout Muslim.”

“Once again, it is your feeling,” Onan said. “I believe in the words of the holy Koran. I believe in Heaven and Hell.”

This statement had an effect in the darkness of the Levantine night. We had passed beyond the sea-level lights of the shore and were traveling surrounded by dark water and dark sky, a cosmic journey on a rusty ship.

Fikret was muttering to Samih Pasha. He said, “General Samih knows a joke about hell.”

“Thank you very much,” Onan said tersely.

“A man dies and doesn’t know whether to go to heaven or to Gehenna, as we call it,” Samih Pasha said, smiling broadly. “So an angel comes and shows him two breeches.”

He paused and smacked his lips, to make sure we had taken this in. I thought: breeches? Then I thought: Yes, bridges.

“First breech is Heaven. Very nice. Clean. Peaceful. Seenging,” Samih Pasha said. “Second breech. Man looks. Is Gehenna. Music! Fun! People dancing! Boys! Gorl!”

“‘Weech breech?’ the angel asks him. Man says, ‘Second breech! Thank you very much!’ He find gorl right away. Nice! He begin to make love to her. Nice! But! Something is wrong. He cannot make love. He look — no holes!”

Onan frowned, Fikret squinted. I said, “No holes,” and was interested that this Turkish man should use the plural.

“The man says, ‘Now I see why this is Gehenna!’ ”

I laughed, but no one else did, except the General, at his own joke. Onan continued to glare at him. Fikret said with his usual solemnity, “I understand.”

That night, lying in my cabin, I thought of poor diminished Alexandria, and it seemed logical that it should look that way, after so much of it — streets and buildings and monuments — had been ransacked by writers.

Offshore, twiddling my radio, I got classical music — Beethoven’s violin concerto from the Israeli shore — and remembered that the last time I had heard such music was in Mediterranean Europe. That was not so odd, for after all, Israel is an outpost of Europe. The moral high ground as a refuge and a garrison.

And because of the ethical commitment and the financial burden required by Israel of all Americans it is impossible for Americans to go to Israel and not feel they have a personal stake in it — or more, that Israel owes them something — perhaps an hospitable attitude? Reflecting on the twelve-figure sum of approximately one hundred billion dollars that America has given Israel since 1967, that was my feeling. It was not a number I ever dangled in front of an Israeli, though on deck at the port of Haifa, I said to Samih Pasha, “As an American taxpayer, I think I own that building.” He laughed and later in Turkish Cyprus, a place that is a drain on Turkey’s budget, Samih Pasha said, “That building! I paid for it! It’s mine!”

“Now Paul is going to disappear,” Fikret said.

“Bye-bye,” the General said.

Onan was busying himself with his maps and scriptures, in preparation for his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He looked more intense than ever, and even somewhat feverish, his eyes bright with belief.

The Akdeniz had hired a bus for those Turks who wanted to go to Jerusalem. A number of people had signed up for the trip, but many — as in Egypt — were interested in looking at Ottoman sights, whatever Turkish castles and fortresses they could locate. The passengers on the Seabourne Spirit were offered a four-hour tour of the whole of Israel, called “The Holy Land by Helicopter.” It is a very small place, and so this was not as odd as it sounded, and the helicopter tour took in all the main cities, including Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Nazareth, and ended at the citadel of Masada — the scene of the famous massacre — with hampers of picnic food, and chilled champagne.

I had no particular plans in Israel, just a general desire to travel down the Mediterranean coast, to Tel Aviv and Gaza; to see Jerusalem; to pay a visit to a writer in Nazareth, who was Arab and Christian and an Israeli citizen. But this was all premature, because when I went into the Akdeniz’s lounge to collect my passport I found myself surrounded by armed men.

“Israeli security,” one man said. “Is this you?”

It was my passport, the page with my goofy picture on it.

“Yes.”

“Come with us.”

I was taken to a corner of the lounge, while the Turkish passengers looked at me with pity. They were the problem, not me. Every one of the other passengers, the whole crew, the officers — from the captain to the lowliest swabbie — every person on board the Akdeniz was a Turk.

“You speak Turkish?” one of the Israeli security men asked.

“No.”

“But everyone on this ship is Turkish.”

“Some of them speak English,” I said.

“Are you traveling with someone?”

“No.”

A man flicking through my passport said, “You have been to Syria.”

“No,” I said. “That visa’s been canceled. I had to pick up my passport early in order to catch this ship. Out of spite the Syrians wouldn’t give me a visa.”

“Why are you the only American on this ship?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What is your profession?”

I hesitated. I said, “I’m in publishing.”

These men wore pistols, two of them had machine guns. They did not wear uniforms, but they were soberly dressed and seemed very intent on discovering how an American could be traveling alone with so many Turks.

“And now I’m a tourist,” I said.

It hurt me to have to admit that, but I thought generally that tourists got away with murder and that being a tourist was an excuse for any sort of stupidity or clumsiness. You can’t do anything to me — I’m a tourist!

“What are you going to do in Israel?”

“Look around, then leave.”

“What do you have in your pockets?”

“You want to search me?”

A woman approached. She muttered impatiently in Hebrew, and it had to have been, “What’s going on here?” The men muttered back at her, and showed her my passport.

“Yes,” she said. “This ship is Turkish. The people are all Turkish. But you — why are you on board?”

“Because they sold me a ticket.”

“Where did you buy it?”

“Istanbul,” I said.

And at this point, faced by Israeli Security and having questions barked at me, I was on the verge of asking whether this was a traditional Israeli way of greeting strangers: sharp questions and even sharper gun-muzzles in my face.

“What are you doing here?” the woman was asking me, as she leafed through my passport, the sixty pages filled, as you know, with exotic stamps — China, India, Pakistan, Fiji, New Guinea, Rarotonga, Great Britain, Albania. She flipped to the first page.

“Are you the writer?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “I have read your books.” She said something in Hebrew to the security men. “Now I know why you are on that ship.”

“Thank you. Does that mean I can go?”

“Okay. No problem,” she said, and wished me well.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Akdeniz, the Cimonoglu family and others were being divested of their passports. “Because we are young — we have the whole family, even children, with us,” the mother, Aysegul, told me later. “They think we want to stay in Israel and take jobs! But we have jobs in Turkey! I will write an angry letter to the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul.”

What are you doing here? was a question I usually felt too ignorant to answer. My answer had to be: Just looking.

Curiosity was my primary impulse — sniffing around. But I also wanted to see things as they are, especially the aspects of any country that were likely to change. The look and the feel of a place, the people — what I could grasp of their lives. Politics seldom interested me, because there were too many sides, too many versions, too much concern with power and not enough with justice.

Most of the time I felt like a flea. I could not pretend that I was part of a place, that I had entered the life of it. I was a spectator, certainly, but an active one. I was also passing the time, and there was nothing unworthy about that. Most people like to think they are in search of wisdom. That was not my motive. Perhaps it was all very simple, even simpler than curiosity and that, in all senses of the phrase, I was making connections.

I walked off the ship and around the harbor and looked for the Seabourne Spirit. It was due in Haifa the following week, I was told. That was a pity. I had thought I might see Jack Greenwald again. I continued walking into town to buy some envelopes so that I could send some accumulated books and maps back to myself.

Walking along, I kept seeing the same series of books, the repeated title, The Land of Jesus, Das Land Jesu, La Tierra de Jesus, La Terra di Gesù, La Terre de Jésus.

The woman at the stationery store said, “Nine shekels.”

It was a word I never got tired of. I found it a slushy and comical word, filled with meaning. Shekels was like a euphemism for money, but it had other similar-sounding words in it — shackles and sickles and Dr. Jekyll, all money-lenders’ meanings. It was impossible for me to hear the word and not think of someone demanding money. At this point, I had no shekels.

“You can change dollars into shekels at the bank, or on the street — the black market,” she said. “The rate is three shekels and twenty agorot.”

But when I asked on the street, fierce men — Russians, Moroccans, Poles — said, “Two shekels, ninety agorot! Take it! That is the best price!”

“I want three shekels,” I said, though I did not care. I liked saying the word shekels.

A man selling hard-core porno videos from a pushcart on the street shouted, “No one will give you three shekels! You change money with me!”

The way these Israelis spoke to me had more significance than what they were saying. It was as though they were always giving orders, never inquiring or being circumspect. Other Israelis I dealt with that first day in Haifa were the same, and I noted the tone of voice and the attitudes, because they did not change in the succeeding days.

They were gruff, on the defensive, rather bullying, graceless and aggrieved, with a kind of sour and gloating humor. They were sullen, somewhat covert, and laconic. They seemed assertive, watchful and yet incurious; alert to all my movements, and yet utterly uninterested in who I was. I did not take it personally, because from what I could see they treated each other no better.

This abrupt and truculent behavior surprised me, especially as I had become accustomed in my week on the Akdeniz to elaborate Turkish courtesy, the greetings, the gratitude, the rituals of politeness. Turks almost never raised their voices in polite company, and they had a number of expressions for taking the blame for a mistake rather than risk causing offense. Dealing with other people, Turks tended to seek permission. Casually bumping into someone they said, Kasura bakmayan, “Please don’t notice my mistake.”

Some Israelis were as elaborate and Semitic in these courtesies as Turks and Egyptians had been, but there were few of these. They were silent or else muttering Sephardis, Moroccans, Algerians, Spaniards, with dark expressive eyes, and these people could be very polite. The rest were familiar in a Western way — European, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian; urbanized, exasperated. They sweated, they complained, they peered with goose-eyes and raised their voices. They looked uncomfortable and overdressed; they looked hot.

An address I had to find in Haifa was on Tzionut Street — Zionism Street. About ten years ago it had been called United Nations Street, because at the time Israel had been befriended by the U.N. and this was one of the ways they showed their thanks, crowning a city street with the name of the helpful organization. But in 1981 a resolution was passed by some countries in the General Assembly, equating Zionism with racism. The Israelis were so annoyed, they changed the name of Haifa’s United Nations Street to the hated word Zionism.

I was looking for the writer Emile Habiby, but he was not in his studio in Tzionut Street. He might be out of the country, a neighbor told me. Or perhaps I should try his home in Nazareth.

Haifa had the look of a colony, which is also the look of a garrison. Its new buildings looked out of place — imported, like foreign artifacts — on the heights of the hills, among them Mount Carmel, that bordered its harbor and its sea-level town of merchants. There were of course soldiers everywhere, and many people — not just the obvious soldiers — carried sidearms. The city did not have an obvious religious atmosphere either, and its secularism was jarring after all the expressive pieties of the Islamic world I had recently seen. The most conspicuous place of worship in Haifa was the enormous Baha’i temple — jeered at by Onan as “a ridiculous religion — not even a religion.” (He had the same disdain for Sufism: “They take the Koran and just fly away with it!”)

Just as I was surprised by the offhandedness and the truculence, I was pleased by many other aspects in Haifa that I had not expected. The food, for example. It was the cleanest, the freshest, the most delicious I had found since Italy — but it was less meaty than Italian food, and lighter. It was salads and fish and fresh bread, hummus and ripe fruit, just-squeezed juice and pure olive oil. It was not expensive. Everyone ate well.

The public transport was another pleasant surprise. There was a train to Tel Aviv. There were buses. From the bus terminal in Haifa you could go anywhere, every half hour, and because this was Israel there was not a town or village in Israel that was not reachable in a few hours. Jerusalem was an hour and three quarters. The Dead Sea was two hours. Nazareth was an hour. Tel Aviv about an hour. A bus to Cairo took half a day, which was nothing. President Clinton had just visited the previous week to be present at the signing of the Israel-Jordan Peace Accord. So there were buses to Amman, too.

The intellectual life of Israel was visible in terms of public lectures and bookstores — I had not seen such well-stocked bookstores since leaving Italy. Croatia’s were pathetic, Greece’s stocked school textbooks and women’s magazines, Turkey’s were no use to me, nor were Egypt’s. Israelis sold every sort of book and magazine, in all the languages that Jews spoke, which was almost all the languages of the world. There were museums with rich collections, classical music on the radio and symphony concerts. I like going to concerts, listening to live music; I went to two good ones in Israel. I could have gone to many more if I had stayed longer. Israelis complained of the high cost of living, and the high inflation, but nothing in Israel struck me as being very expensive.

And there was a suburban atmosphere which also made it seem peaceable if not downright homely and dreary. This first impression was borne out by my travels to other towns and cities, for so much of Israel had the texture and pace of a retirement community, and — alone among Mediterranean countries I saw — the whole land was noisy with the persistent whine of air conditioners.

Strangest of all, I felt a sense of safety. Perhaps it arose from the colonial look of the city, and the orderliness of the stores and streets. I never felt at risk — or rather I felt that I was among millions of people who were taking the same risk.

But of course you only feel very safe in Israel if you are ignorant. I did not know it then — I learned it by degrees — but Israel was in a terrible period, one of its worst cycles of murder and retribution. What I took to be somnolence was suspense.

Another thing I learned about Israel: never question a date, because everyone took liberties. A person might allude in one sentence to something that happened last week, and in the next breath he would be in the Bronze Age, quoting the Torah and mentioning Egyptians at the time of Moses, making it all seem like it was yesterday. It was poetic license, but it was often the basis of Israeli political or military decisions. Egyptians claimed that on the walls of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was written “Greater Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile!” It was not merely a misquotation, but a misrepresentation of Genesis 15:18 in which God promises Abram and descendants all land, from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt, which is not the Nile but the Sea of Reeds. On the other hand, “God gave it to us” is not usually the equivalent of a Purchase and Sale Agreement.

The same doubtful history and wobbly logic made it normal for Israeli immigrant citizens from Morocco and New York City and Kiev to think of themselves as Israelites, and Israeli life today as a rehash of the Torah, in which the chosen people were taunted and held captive and laid siege to by idol-worshiping pagans. They never used the word “Palestinians”—always saying “Arab” instead, because it depicted an upstart horde and served to make Israelis seem the underdogs (there were so many more Arabs in the Middle East than there were Palestinians). Egyptians avoided the word Arab too. They were part of the same theater of self-dramatization. This was the land of the Pharaohs, they said; they were pharaonic. “We built the pyramids!”

So the Israelis were not alone in taking liberties, but it made life rather confusing for a traveler when Mediterranean peoples were so busy misrepresenting themselves. Most inhabitants of its shores took the most fanciful liberties with their ancestry. In fact, though no one ever said so, the Mediterranean was almost devoid of aborigines.

Anyway, I took the train down the coast from Haifa to Tel Aviv. Israeli Railways was celebrating its centenary. A hundred years ago Israeli Railways did not exist, of course; but who had built this line? Probably the British.

Something that bothered me greatly were the numerous people traveling armed with rifles, usually large and very lethal-looking ones, and pistols. Most of those people were soldiers and one of the characteristics of Israeli soldiers on trains and buses was their fatigue. They always looked sleepy, overworked, and no sooner were they on a seat than they were asleep, and I often found that their weapons bobbled in their arms were pointed directly at me.

This happened on my very first ride, as a soldier in the seat opposite made himself comfortable to sleep, put his feet up and propped his Uzi automatic rifle, so that it was horizontal in his lap, and it slipped as he dozed, and was soon pointing into my face.

I said, “Excuse me,” because I was afraid to tap his arm and risk startling him and the weapon discharging.

He did not wake, but after a while I raised my voice, and asked him to take his rifle out of my face.

Grumbling, without apology, he shifted in his seat and moved his rifle so that it was pointing at the woman across the aisle, who was so engrossed in reading a medical textbook, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease, that she did not notice the man’s weapon.

“Now it’s pointing at her,” I said.

He slapped and pushed the rifle, and though it was still not upright as it should have been, he grunted and went back to sleep.

Walking up and down the crowded coach, I counted the weapons: two in the next row, a frenzied man in a white shirt with a nickel-plated revolver, a soldier two rows back with a pistol and a rifle, ditto the soldier next to him, a woman in uniform lying across two seats with her big khaki buttocks in the air and a pistol on her belt, seven more armed passengers farther down. My feeling is that all weapons are magnetic — they exert a distinct and polarizing power, and nearly all attract violence. The gun carrier’s creed is: Never display a weapon unless you plan to use it; never use it unless you shoot to kill.

For the first time on my trip I suspected I was traveling in a danger zone. I had never seen so many weapons. And yet, as I said, I did not feel that I was personally threatened. That was one of the many paradoxes of Israel: it was a war zone and yet it was one of the most monotonous places imaginable.

We passed Carmel Beach, some condos going up, and a sign, “The Riviera of Israel.” It was rubble and rocks and, farther on, dunes. The coast had the look of a shoreline that had been leveled so that it could be defended. There were no obstructions, it was all visible, nowhere for a landing party to hide. In military jargon such a landing was called “an insertion”—a rapid on-shore penetration by stealth under the cover of darkness, men leaping out of small boats and hitting the beach. Many had been attempted, but few had succeeded. The very idea, though, that such military actions were contemplated here made this section of coast south of Haifa unlike its Riviera namesake.

At Binyamina and beyond was the reality of the country — that it was really very empty and underpopulated, that the garrison mentality is strong (people living in places they can defend) and that it was agricultural, intensively cultivated in many places, banana groves set out with precision and order, grape and vegetable fields beneath the green and rocky hills of Har Horshan.

The orchards and citrus groves I had expected to see in Israel were there on the coast near Netanya, with rows of eucalyptus, the gum trees that were used everywhere as giant quick-growing fences and windbreaks. Plenty of fruit trees, and canals, and craters and scrubby ditches; but where were the people? This coast was one of its most populous regions and yet it was thinly settled.

The settlement of Hertzliyya was celebrating fifty years of prosperity, and agriculture flourished there, too. But with such subsidies, so it should have. It seemed to me much more extraordinary that Mediterranean countries that did not receive three billion dollars a year in foreign aid were growing fruit and running schools and defending themselves.

Approaching Tel Aviv, I saw for the first (and last) time on the shore of the Mediterranean a drive-in theater. It was beside the tracks, and also beside the sea. It was advertising a double feature in Hebrew on the marquee.

That was appropriate enough, for no city in the entire Mediterranean looks more like an American concoction than Tel Aviv. It was wrong to compare it (as many people did) to Miami and its tangle of suburbs. Tel Aviv was both more sterile and less interesting, and it was strangely introverted; its streets were lifeless, its different cultures, and its tensions, masked.

So what was it? Tel Aviv had no Mediterranean look, nor anything of the Levant in its design; it was Israeli in the sense that Israeli architecture and city planning is an American derivative. Somewhere on the east coast of Florida there must be a city that Tel Aviv resembles, a medium-sized seaside settlement of ugly high-rise buildings and hotels, a shopping district, a promenade by the sea, not many trees; a white population watching gray flopping waves under a blue sky.

Did the appearance of it mean anything? I spoke to some people in Tel Aviv. I began to think that what was visible in Israel was less important than what was felt.

“You know about the bombing?” a man named Levescu said to me, utterly dismissing a question I had asked him about the look and the texture of Tel Aviv. He waved away what I had said with an irritable gesture. “Twenty-five people! On a bus! An Arab!”

“Yes, I read about it,” I said. “Terrible.”

“Terrible!”

This tragedy had put Tel Aviv in the news for having had one of the worst massacres in recent Israeli history: twenty-five dead, forty-eight people wounded. That had happened only a week before.

“It was revenge, wasn’t it?”

“Revenge — for what? It was murder!”

Some months before, in Hebron, a man named Baruch Goldstein had entered the Shrine of the Patriarchs (a mosque, but also a synagogue, where Abraham, Rebecca, Leah, Isaac and Jacob are entombed) during prayers, perhaps with the connivance of Israeli soldiers — after all, Goldstein was heavily armed — and howled, “No Arab should live in the biblical land of Israel!” He machine-gunned twenty-nine men to death, severely wounded over a hundred men, and was himself beaten to death.

The members of the Palestinian group Hamas (an Arabic acronym but also meaning enthusiasm or ardor or zeal) had vowed revenge. The Tel Aviv suicide bomb was their reply.

“There will be no dialogue with Hamas,” Prime Minister Rabin had said on Israeli television. “We will fight to the death!”

I mentioned to Mr. Levescu that it seemed there would be more violence.

“You didn’t hear the news?” Then he told me.

Three Palestinians had just been killed that morning at a checkpoint in Hebron.

That night watching television in Tel Aviv I saw another killing, and it had taken place either that day or some few days earlier. A videotape taken by a freelance journalist showed an Israeli soldier giving the coup de grace to an injured and unarmed Palestinian. The tape showed the soldier sighting down his rifle and firing a bullet at the struggling man’s head and blasting the skull to pieces. It was explained that the man, Nidal Tamiari, had had a fistfight with the soldier. The military denied that the soldier had shot the man in cold blood. The spokesman said, “He was verifying the kill.”

It was too late to ask Mr. Levescu what he thought, but in any case I had a feeling I knew what he would say. This is war! He had said it often enough in our conversation at the cafe by the sea in Tel Aviv. His sentiments were predictable, and his story was fairly typical.

“We left Romania in 1946,” he said. “Father, mother, brother and me, and sister.”

They crossed the border into Hungary, made their way by train to Budapest, where they hid. They were smuggled to Vienna, then into Germany. They stayed awhile, they received some help, they headed south to France, moving slowly, and once on the coast traveled east, entered Italy and got a train to Bari. A ferry took them to Cyprus. They were among many Jews there, awaiting transfer to Israel. At last they arrived in Haifa. The trip from Romania had taken a year.

“My father joined the Haganah [“Defense,” the Jewish guerrilla army prior to independence] and we were given a house,” he said. “The house is still there in Haifa. Arabs were our neighbors. We visited them. They came to our house. We liked their food better than they liked ours. We ate with Arabs!”

That reminiscence, like the Pilgrim Fathers befriending the Red Indians, and being helped by them, was a frequent detail in stories of Israeli pioneers in Palestine.

“Weren’t you fighting the Arabs?” I asked.

“Other Arabs,” he said. “And British.”

“Which other Jews were here when you arrived in 1947?”

“The first wave had been Russians. Then Poles. Then Bulgarians and Romanians,” he said. “In the 1950s we got Moroccans and North African Jews — Algeria, Tunisia. And others.”

“Americans?”

“Not many from America,” he said. He laughed — not mirth: it was a nervous expression of the Israeli ambivalence towards America. “Americans come here. They look. They smile. They know they have something better.”

“What do you think of America?”

“America is the grandfather of Israel,” he said. Or it might have been “godfather.”

The following day, in Gaza, at the Palestinian settlement of Khan Yunis, a Palestinian journalist, Hani Abed, was blown up by a sophisticated bomb that had detonated under his car when he turned the ignition key. Such a bomb could only have been placed there by the Israeli secret service members, Mossad. It seemed as though what Rabin had said just the other day about fighting to the death was being proven.

This was not denied; on the contrary, it was heavily hinted that this was so by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz (The Land): “Hani Abed … got the punishment coming to him, ‘for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind,’ ” including Hamas in the denunciation.

Wiping someone out and then quoting a bit of blood-spattered scripture (this text from Hosea 8:7 was an old standby) seemed fairly routine. But of course that was not the end of it, for several days later a boy on a bike pedaled past an Israeli checkpoint into Gaza City and blew himself up, along with two soldiers, and he was instantly proclaimed a martyr for the Palestinian cause.

That was an about average week. I happened to be there, writing it down. It went some way towards explaining why the Israeli soldiers were anxious and fatigued, why strangers never chatted in trains or buses, and why the atmosphere was so sullen.

There had been no public expression of bereavement in Tel Aviv over the bus bombing. No flags at half-mast, no wreaths, no ribbons. There were angry letters to the Jerusalem Post in this regard: “What is wrong with us that we cannot express our own grief.”

That did not mean that no one grieved; there had to be great sorrow. But the silence meant there also had to be tremendous resentment, anger and frustration. Out of this bitterness came feelings of revenge, and support for any politician who vowed it (as most did, ad nauseam) to the death. This and the unforgiving attitude seemed an Israeli rather than a Jewish reaction.

There was not much public expression of joy either — not much laughter, no talking on buses and trains, no sense of animation; more a sort of sick-of-it-all, seen-it-all attitude that was laced with suspicion. After dark the Tel Aviv streets emptied, and the same was true of Haifa — almost no nighttime pedestrians. That was a clear sign of high anxiety.

Even Tel Aviv, in spite of its long beach and leafy suburbs, had the look of a fortress, for its militarism gave it the same colonial garrison look that Haifa had. It looked out of place, built on sand, artificial and incongruous. It was both too big and not big enough, and only its traffic and loud music and air conditioners gave it a Miami sound.

I went to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, about a twenty-minute walk from my hotel. It contained a number of works which I had seen elsewhere — rusty shovels (“Untitled #34”), flashing lights (“Neon Fragment”), rags on hooks (“Work in Progress”), and the last resort of the artist barren of imagination, broken crockery glued to plywood (“Spatial Relationships”) — perhaps the splinters and shards of the very plates the artist’s spouse had flung in frustration, crying, “Why don’t you get a job!”

This frivolity did not speak of Israel, but obviously someone — a wealthy person in Tel Aviv — had put up the money for this. One exhibit showed photographs of small naked girls, six- and eight-year-olds, smiling, with trusting faces, sitting with their legs apart. The expression “kiddie porn” did not describe such pathetic trust and violation.

We have all been in such art museums and said, “It makes me mad.” And been told by the ludicrous supporters of such junk, “That’s good. It’s supposed to make you mad.”

But the museum was not a total waste. There was also a one-person show by an Israeli artist named Pamela Levy — photographic paintings, all of them arresting, many of them upsetting. Some were scenes of battlefields, showing dead and dismembered soldiers, and the horror of war. Many were depictions of biblical characters, or Old Testament re-creations of Israeli life, hairy men and chubby women in classic poses. Many of the naked men were shown hooded. “Lot and His Daughters” had a sinister carnality — naked girls and a supine old man, and the painting entitled “Rape” was disturbing most of all because it looked like a form of fooling that was about to turn violent.

The artist Pamela Levy had been born in Iowa in 1949 and had come to Israel in 1976. She was as much of an Israeli as anyone else here, but I felt that her painting said a great deal about the state of mind here: the repression, the aggression, the fantasies, the nakedness, the sexual ambiguity, the terror. Those paintings seemed to offer an insight to the turmoil in the country, and so her art was true.

Later, I had lunch with the Cohens from London. I bumped into them in a restaurant and we talked. They were an elderly middle-class couple, very polite to each other and pleased to be in Israel. It was their annual holiday.

“Every year we come, just about this time,” Mrs. Cohen said. “We’ve seen so many changes.”

“Has Tel Aviv grown very much?”

“I can remember when none of this was here,” Mr. Cohen said. “Are you from London?”

“I used to live in south London,” I said. “Clapham — Wandsworth way.”

“Are there many Jews there?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

And as I was muttering to myself, “How should I know how many Jews there are in Clapham?” it occurred to me that perhaps I had been privy to a secret exchange. When Jews met in safe places each asked where the other was from and said, Are there many there?

“I think there’s a synagogue in Putney,” I said.

“Hammersmith,” old Mr. Cohen said.

Changing the subject, I mentioned that it was my first time in Israel and that I liked the food.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Cohen said. She mentioned several restaurants for me to try. “They’re not very nice but at least they’re kosher.”

The streets were empty at nine o’clock, and Tel Aviv, which advertises itself as “The City That Never Takes a Break,” is not much after dark. It was just a wall of unforgiving concrete; not pretty, not even very interesting, but like the rest of Israel in being clean and orderly and full of public buses. No graffiti, no apparent disorder, and so naive people who were unaware of what was going on were reassured by this appalling ordinariness.

The beach at Tel Aviv continued south to Jaffa where, within a few feet, it turned into an Arab town. But it was not a popular destination. Most people stayed right here at the center of town, and it made me think that this was perhaps more an Eastern European dream of the seaside than an American one, illustrating the Shakespearean solecism, the stage direction in The Winter’s Tale: “the coast of Bohemia.”

I woke early, and called Emile Habiby. He was still out of the country, so I checked out of my hotel and got a ten-shekel bus ticket to Jerusalem. In this week of revenge killings I expected the bus to be filled with soldiers, and it was; but they were asleep, hugging their rifles, and when they woke up they looked cranky. The rest of the bus passengers were the assorted citizens of Israel — Moroccans in track suits, Hasidim in black hats, followers of the Lubavitcher sect whose messiah, recently deceased, was the Rebbe Schneerson. (An exact duplicate of the messiah’s Brooklyn brownstone, down to the iron rails and the aged brickwork, had been built in Jerusalem, so that he would feel at home in the event that he should visit Israel.) There was a woman with a violin and another with a viola, students with textbooks, people with groceries, and pilgrims — but a pilgrim is just another sort of tourist.

Down the highway, into the semidesert and Route One through the rocky hills. But it was all more familiar than it should have been. The guardrails were American-style, and so were the signs and barriers and arrows and signal lights, and all this hardware gave a distinct sense of being in the United States.

The four-lane road passed ravines and steep slopes, some wooded summits. Old-fashioned armored cars and rusty trucks had been left by the roadside as memorials to the men who had died in what the Israelis call the War of Liberation. The vehicles, so old, so clumsy, roused pity. It was rough country, and even with the stands of slender cypresses it looked bereft, as the buildings did by the side of the road, plain, unornamented, with that same garrison look, the flat military facade which was Israeli architecture. Most buildings in Israel seemed as though they had been designed to withstand an attack.

Jerusalem is a city in the hills. The outskirts were steep and suburban, and the higher the bus climbed the denser the buildings. The bus station was like any old bus station, crowded, chaotic, with an added element of anxiety, for violence was an outdoor activity in Israel. Because Jerusalem’s terrain is irregular the streets are twisty and steep. This makes it hard for someone on foot to get a good clear sight of the city — or rather the two cities. The Old City is the Jerusalem of postcards. But West Jerusalem is the city of politics and commerce; it is still being built and settled as the Israeli capital, as though a deliberate challenge to anyone who harbors the idea of internationalizing it.

Asking the way to the Old City, I met an Ethiopian Jew, Negu. The colloquial term for such people was Falasha (“stranger” in Amharic), but it was rejected by them, as obviously contemptuous. He said he would show me the way. He had little else to do. He was not working.

“You could join the army, couldn’t you?”

“I am too old for the army.”

But he was hardly thirty, and as Israel was a country where, of necessity, soldiers were all ages and sizes, I could not understand why this was so.

“Would you be a soldier if they let you?”

Negu shrugged. He did not want to pursue this. He was thin and tall and quite black, with piercing eyes and an odd sloping walk, with a twitch of alertness in it, always seeming to be aware of what was happening around him.

“When did you come here?” I asked.

“Six years ago.”

“From Addis Ababa?”

“My village is eight hundred kilometers from Addis Ababa.”

“This must be quite a change from that.” Eight hundred kilometers had to be the remote bush, the very edge of the country, on one of the scrubby borders — of the Sudan, or Kenya, or Somalia.

We were walking through the busy precincts of West Jerusalem, where there were offices and agencies and shopping districts and hotels. Ahead I could see the domes of the Old City, an ancient skyline, but here it was all bustle — people, traffic, the same hectic anxiety that I had felt in the bus station, an air of apprehension; each person walked just a beat faster, and voices were more insistent and a few octaves shriller.

“In some ways, Israel is better.”

But he was doubtful.

“Better than your village in Ethiopia?”

“In some ways only. In other ways, no. Ethiopia is good.”

“You’re a Jew, though?”

“Yes. I am a Jew. We do not use these things on our head,” he said. He pointed to a passerby wearing a yarmulke.

“You have a family?”

“Yes. Wife. Children,” he said. “We are Jews.”

“Will you stay here?” I asked. “Do you like it?”

He shrugged, the same shrug, irked by my curiosity, wondering who I was and why I was asking.

“That is the gate you are searching for,” he said, and left me.

It was the Jaffa Gate, which took me through the Armenian Quarter to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I went inside, jostled by hurrying visitors, and then walked to the real treasure of the city, Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock and, a little farther on, the Al Aqsa Mosque. There I met Fikret, from the Akdeniz, who had lost the others.

“I was at the Crying Wall,” he said. “I cried!”

“Where is Bible Man?” That was our nickname for Onan.

“He is looking for Hebrew books,” Fikret said. “He has already bought one for sixty dollars.”

We walked together through the Lion’s Gate, to the edge of the Mount of Olives. Fikret reminded me that this was a city that was sacred to Muslims, which all believers tried to visit.

Jerusalem was a little jewel in the hills, a lovely city, certainly one of the most beautiful I had seen on my trip. But as a place of pilgrimage, inspiring a sort of breathless pilgrim, eager to possess it, with that special intensity, Jerusalem merely glittered for me. I found myself resisting its power to cast enchantment. Praying there seemed like theater, requiring a suspension of disbelief or a self-conscious fakery. And the city was a symbol. In Israel symbols were always useful shorthand, and so they were chosen as targets — they were exaggerated, or destroyed; either way, they lost their reality.

Fikret stayed, saying he was going to look at the mosque again. I decided to return to Haifa. Back at the bus station I tried to buy a ticket to Gaza.

“No, no, no,” the ticket seller said, and waved me away.

I asked a policeman. He shook his head. He said that, because of the recent shootings and bombings, the territories were closed. I would not be able to get through a checkpoint at the border.

“That’s too bad.”

“That is not bad,” he said. “You are lucky you can’t go to Gaza. It is dangerous.”

At the bus station, asking directions, a man heard me speaking English and took me aside. He was thinking of emigrating to the United States. Did I know anything about Orlando? He wanted to become a driver there — not necessarily a taxi driver, but something a little more colorful, perhaps a limo driver.

“I think I could be a success there, with my English accent,” he said.

It was true, he had the ghost of an accent, but though his reasoning seemed preposterous, I said, “Sure, they’re bound to think you’re David Niven, but how is Israel going to manage without you?”

“There’s no money here,” he murmured, and slipped away.

To reassure myself that the Akdeniz would not leave Israel without me I talked to the purser. No, the day after tomorrow, he said; and so I was free to go to a concert, the Haifa Symphony Orchestra: Elgar’s “Introduction and Allegro for Strings,” Tippett’s “A Midsummer Marriage,” Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini,” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony in C.”

Afterwards I saw six decorous prostitutes crouched at the corner of Sederot Ha’atzma’ut and little Lifshitz Street, and they were laughing and making kissing noises at me. I attempted to talk to them — they were bound to be fluent in English — but realizing that I was not interested in anything else they turned away. Besides, they saw some potential customers hurrying along, two young Hasidic Jews with big black hats and black frock coats, velvet yarmulkes, side-curls and black pants tucked into black socks. They walked in a flapping flat-footed way, and quickened their pace when they saw the prostitutes, who just laughed.

I followed the Hasidic boys for a while, just to see where they were going — up to Mount Carmel or over to the crumbling buildings of Wadi Salib. Seeing them in the bus or the train, in the desert heat, these black-suited and bearded Hasidim always made me perspire. Dressed for chilly nineteenth-century Poland, they made no allowance for being in the desert of the Middle East. They also seemed out of place because Israel was so secular — Christian or Orthodox churches were more numerous in Haifa than synagogues. People were polite but pieties were rare, courtesy scarce. It was not rudeness; it was more a sort of truce. Everything was practical and measured. What was the fear? Was it that generosity, which is also goodwill, exposed you to strangers and thereby put you at risk?

Back at the Akdeniz all the Turks were on board. They were relaxing. After the tension and the seriousness of Israel, these Turks seemed the soul of jollity. The food was Turkish, the music was “Arabesque” syncopation and Turkish movie themes. It was at a distant pier, a twenty-minute walk from Gate Five, Port of Haifa, the turnstile where we had to show our passports. For the passengers, the ship was Turkey.

I was still reading the Trollope novel, Dr. Wortle’s School, about the fuss in an English village over an apparent impropriety. Tonight the embattled doctor was reflecting, “It is often a question to me whether the religion of the world is not more odious than its want of religion.”

Emile Habiby had arrived back in Israel. When I telephoned him he said that he would get into his car and meet me in Haifa. I protested — no, he had jet lag. I would come to Nazareth. On my map, Nazareth was about halfway to the Sea of Galilee — about thirty-five miles, less than an hour.

“But how will I find you?”

“Everyone knows me. Just ask anyone, for Habiby sofer.” Sofer is writer in Hebrew.

I found a taxi driver, Yossi Marsiano (“Like Rocky Marciano”). He was a Moroccan Jew, from the north Moroccan town of Ouezzane. He was edgy and impatient. He had a way of grinning that showed no pleasure at all, only pure hysteria. I told him Habiby’s name.

“He’s an Arab?”

“He’s an Israeli.”

This was true, and more than that he was a Christian and a Palestinian as well. Yossi was confused, and for a moment it looked as though he regretted having agreed to take me. Then he told me to get into the car, and to hurry.

“How much?”

We agreed on one hundred and sixty shekels.

“Get in. We go,” he said. “In, in.”

Leaving Haifa and passing the populous bluff of Mount Carmel that dominates the city, it was impossible not to think of Habiby. He had written about those specific heights a number of times in his novel Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter (translated by Peter Theroux, 1995). One of the glimpses is fanciful, Mount Carmel as “a bull with its snout turned up, ready to lunge at a matador come to him from the land of Andalusia. He disregards him in anticipation of matadorial carelessness; if he ignores him, thebull will not give him a moment’s respite…. [But] he is as patient as the Arabs.”

In another part of the novel, Mount Carmel is remembered by the narrator as the wilderness of his childhood, “still a virgin forest, except for its lighthouse, which was, in our eyes, closer to the stars in the heavens than to the houses of Wadi al-Nisnas…. The wild melancholy of al-Carmel took our breath away.” Returning hopefully, he sees it as it is today, a promontory covered with apartment houses and condominiums, and fenced-in mansions. It is now denuded of trees; gone are the flowering plants, the terebinth, hawthorn, fennel and paradise apple that had protected it. The old spring has dried up, and the narrator reflects on “how mountains die — how Mount Carmel is dying!”

It is an oblique reference to the way that modern Israel has spread its new buildings over an ancient landscape, turning familiar contours into unrecognizable (and unmemorable) urban sprawl. The growth was still in progress. No sooner had Yossi and I reached the north end of Haifa than we were in a traffic jam.

“Road fixing,” Yossi said.

While he reassured me that this was nothing, a matter of minutes, he continued to fret. That was an Israeli paradox, a person obviously troubled and anxious saying, “No problem!” Yossi was fretful. We inched along. He banged the steering wheel in anger and became self-conscious and said in his unconvincing way, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

I was not worried. Nazareth was not far. But to take Yossi’s mind off the traffic jam I asked him how he had come to Israel. Every Israeli had a migration story. In the 1950s, Yossi’s parents had not seen any future for themselves as a minority in the remote Moroccan town of Ouezzane, surrounded by Arabs, and so they had decided to take their small children and settle in Israel.

On the surface, it was a back-to-the-homeland story, but where was the work? Where was the money? It was all right for Yossi’s father, who was a bank clerk, but Yossi and his brother did not discern any bright new Israeli dawn. The brother moved to Los Angeles and prospered. So much for the homeland as a refuge.

“I went to Los Angeles to visit him,” Yossi said. “In California you can’t walk on the street. Just Mexicans walk. Everyone else drives.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Yes! I was there! No one walks!”

“But your brother is happy there, right?”

“Right. And I want to live there. I want to work, get a Green Card. But how can I, if I can’t walk on the street?”

Impatient in the stalled traffic, he had become shrill. I decided to agree with everything he said about the United States, no matter how offensive or inaccurate it was.

“Manhattan is better. You know that.”

“It sure is,” I said.

“Too many Jews in Manhattan,” Yossi said, his grammar slipping. “That is good. I talk to the Jews, they talk to me. I think, maybe I go there and get some money. Here is no money.”

“But this is the Jewish homeland, isn’t it?”

“No money here,” he said, smacking the steering wheel. And he started to grumble. “America is dangerous. Guns. Trouble. Why I want to go there?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Because here is bureaucracy,” Yossi snapped back. “Office. Papers. Application. Permission. ‘Hello — No, sorry, is closing, come back in two hours.’ ‘Come back tomorrow.’ ‘Come back next week.’ ‘Sorry I cannot help you.’ ‘You pay one hundred shekels.’ ‘Officer is not here now.’ ‘Where is your papers — you have no proper papers.’ This is shit!”

It was quite a performance, and it certainly convinced me. I shut my mouth and let him fume until the traffic eased. But he was soon chattering again.

“This Habiby sofer—he is an Arab, you say?”

“He’s an Israeli — Christian. Born in Haifa,” I said, and resisted adding, Unlike you, Yossi.

“More road fixing!” Yossi said.

More traffic, a bottleneck; an hour went past, and then we were on our way, in a road that skirted a large village.

“That is an Arab city,” Yossi said.

“What is its name?”

“I don’t know.”

I saw from my map that it was Shefar’am — small houses on a hillside, sprawling further, some animals grazing in the foreground; not much else.

“No streets, no numbers, no names — like this Habiby. ‘Ask for me — ask for sofer.’ No number, no street. In Haifa you can go anywhere — too easy. Jews have numbers!”

“I’ll try to remember that, Yossi.”

As the obstacles increased, Yossi became shriller and in his shrillness more anti-Arab.

“Look at the houses — not clean! The streets this way and that! No numbers!”

The road to Nazareth became narrower, the line of traffic slower, and Nazareth itself across the desert and occupying a high hill was like a distant vision, almost a mirage. It was physically different from any other of the places I had seen in Israel, not just the style of house, but the way they were piled up, some of them leaning, the look of accumulation over the years, added rooms and windows, wall upon wall, the layers of tiled roofs. The foundations were ancient, but higher up, the third or fourth story was more recent. It was the sort of growth that was characteristic of wonderful old trees — fragile shoots on young branches that crowned a thick immovable trunk. Nazareth had that same grip on its hill — it was something venerable, with deep roots, still growing.

People worked outside in Nazareth, too — some of them were the sort of occupations that were usually pursued in the open air in the Middle East — carpentry, wood carving, car repair; but there were men fixing televisions and painting signs, too. They were banging dents out of car fenders, and selling fruit, and stacking bricks. Unlike the indoor existence that people lived in Jewish Tel Aviv or Haifa, life in Muslim Nazareth spilled into its streets.

That was another difference between Jews and Palestinians. It annoyed Yossi.

“You see? Just people everywhere, and not clean, and what are they doing?”

They were working, they were sitting, they were dandling babies, they were exuding an air of possession and belonging.

“Look over there,” Yossi said, and pointed to the east, another settlement, an extension of Nazareth, but newer, with whiter buildings and tidier roofs and emptier streets, the Jewish settlement of Natseret Illit.

“Jews! Jews! Jews! Jews!” Yossi said.

We started up a hill (“Too many cars! All these Arabs have cars!”), entered an area of twisty streets (“So dirty!”), continued to climb (“Houses have no name, no number — like Morocco Arabs”) and yelled at passersby, “Habiby—sofer!”

The name did not ring any bells with the passersby.

We kept going. Sunshine turned to twilight. Dusk gathered. The dust of Nazareth was reflected in car headlights and people and animals wandered in the road (“Arabs!”). The lights did not help; their glare made it harder for us to see, and finally in the interior of the upper town, instead of illuminating the road the lights blinded us.

“Haifa is not like this! Look at Arab streets!”

He was ranting and it seemed we were truly lost when he asked a man and woman where Habiby lived and they said in a Scottish accent that they had only been in Nazareth for two days and had no idea.

“Forget it. Let’s go back to Haifa. We’ll never find the house.”

“You must find your friend!” Yossi screamed, making a U-turn in the dark. “And I must smoke a cigarette!” He was very upset. He screamed again incoherently. He was saying, “Don’t worry!”

The only lighted doorway on this street was a bakery. A man in flour-dusted overalls stood holding a squeeze bag of frosting and was using its nozzle to decorate some jam tarts. He had not heard of Habiby, but he said in Arabic, “Why don’t we call him and ask him directions?” He did so. The street was not far, he explained. He sat down and smacked some flour out of a shallow cardboard box and turned it over. Very slowly, he sketched a map on the bottom of the box. Then he handed this box to Yossi, and off we went, higher, almost to the top of the hill of old Nazareth.

Emile Habiby’s house was large and rambling, set among others on a steep hillside, filled with people, mostly women and children, all of them Habiby. The author had three daughters and ten grandchildren; his first great-grandchild had just arrived.

He sat, the patriarch, surrounded by this energetic family. He was seventy-three, stocky, even bull-like, with a heavy sculptured head and a raspy voice and a booming laugh. He had the build of a Mediterranean fisherman — he had worked on a fishing boat out of Haifa for many years; but he was also one of Israel’s intellectuals. He had published a number of novels, among them The Secret Life of Saeed and Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter, and he had won several literary prizes, the Order of Palestine in 1991 and the year before that the Jerusalem Medal. Two previous recipients of the Jerusalem Medal were so outraged at the fact that the prize had been awarded to an Arab that these thinkers (who had been singled out for their contribution to humanity) returned their medals in disgust. The absurdity was much enjoyed by Habiby, whose novels are excursions into the fantastic.

I had encouraged Yossi to come in with me and, welcomed, given a cigarette, he sat calming himself in this Palestinian household, a great nest of Habibys. Cups of coffee appeared and pastries and small children. In the kitchen other children were being fed, and the Habiby women were talking and laughing. I was moved as much by the size and complexity of the family as by its harmony.

And at last Yossi was smiling a real smile. In spite of all of his abuse and his shrieking, we had arrived, and he was happily smoking and we were receiving the best welcome imaginable, with food and compliments and solicitous questions.

There were pictures of Jesus on the wall, and portraits of the Madonna and Child. It was a reminder that this was a Christian family, and such pictures could not have been more appropriate since Nazareth was the home of Mary and Joseph. The Basilica of the Annunciation had been built over the house of St. Anne, and even Joseph’s workshop had been discovered and excavated in Nazareth, and there it was for all the world to see, the workshop of the best-known carpenter in Christendom.

“It’s good of you to come all this way,” Habiby said. “Though you know I would have come to Haifa to see you.”

“Yes. But I found the trip out here interesting,” I said. Especially when Yossi had pointed to the Jewish settlement of Natseret Illit and howled, “Jews! Jews! Jews! Jews!”

We talked about the tension since the massacre in Hebron. Habiby had written an article in The New York Times about it in which he had said, “One cannot go on pretending that nothing has changed,” and that the error many Israeli leaders and politicians had made was in refusing “to tell their people that they must reach out to the Palestinians; they have nobody else to rely on in the long run.” He was encouraged by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’s condemnation of the assassin Goldstein.

What had happened afterwards had been inevitable, since both sides vowed retribution. But his view was that both Palestinians and Israelis had a duty “to stand up to our own extremists.”

“There is an old Arab saying,” Habiby said, “that the Jews celebrate their feasts around gardens, the Christians around kitchens, and the Muslims around graveyards.”

A peace conference was going on at that moment in Casablanca, to which Yitzhak Rabin had been invited. I asked Habiby what he thought of the Israeli prime minister’s contribution.

“He talked too much. He should have proceeded slowly,” he said.

“You mean he was demanding too much?”

“No. He didn’t realize where he was,” Habiby said, throwing up his hands. “He was in Morocco, not Israel. He was among Arabs. But he talks to these Arabs as though he is talking to his own people.”

He was referring to Rabin’s manners, his characteristic bluster. “Being tough and businesslike, giving orders.”

“That’s it. But a little politeness would have been helpful.”

“I suppose he is feeling confident now that he has made a peace agreement with Jordan.”

“It should still be possible for him to show some politeness,” Habiby said. “Now they are committed. But instead of all this public boasting and all the urgency, why not use a little tact?”

Tact was a scarce commodity in Israel. Suspicion was so ingrained, and fear so common, that every sphere of life was affected, and the absence of faith and goodwill made people brusque. Israelis had struggled to arrive at this point, but life was still a struggle, and they perhaps saw, as Habiby had said, that they had no one else to rely on; the only allies Israelis would ever really have would be the Palestinians.

“Charmless,” I said. It was a word that summed up the atmosphere of Israel for me.

“Yes,” Habiby said, and gestured with his cigarette. “As for the peace agreement, I am not hopeful. I have doubts. But there is no going back.”

He had written, “We, Israelis and Palestinians, are already fated to be born again as Siamese twins … true solidarity with one is contingent on true solidarity with the other. There is no alternative.”

“What brings you to Israel?” he asked.

“I’m just traveling around the Mediterranean. At the moment, I’m on a Turkish ship,” I said. “It’s in Haifa — leaving tomorrow.”

“I have been traveling myself,” he said. “I must stop traveling or I’ll never write anything.”

“I know the feeling. Monotony is the friend of the writer.”

Yossi joined the conversation, first in English, then in Hebrew. Several times I interrupted to say that we ought to be leaving — after all, I had visited on such short notice. More food was brought. We ate. Habiby roared, describing the pompous attitude of Israeli politicians. Yossi nodded — yes, he agreed, it was awful.

Later than I intended, Yossi and I left, the whole Habiby family turned out to see us off and make us promise that we would come back again.

“You see, Arabs? The door is always open,” Yossi said in an admiring way. “We come there, the door is open. Cigarettes for me. Some food, thank you. Coffee, yes. Some more. Please, thank you. Take some extra.”

“You like that?”

“Oh, yes. Is good,” Yossi said. “The Arab door is always open.”

We got lost again, but Yossi was calmer. He stopped and instead of shouting out the window he got out of the car and asked directions. A man said that he would show us the way, if we followed him. We were taken down a dark narrow road through the Balfour Forest, and then on a different route to Haifa.

At Haifa, Yossi was reminded again of the hospitality at Nazareth.

“We lock our doors,” he said. “Jews don’t have open doors. No pastry. No food. No coffee.”

“What do Jews have instead of open doors?”

“Just hello. A little talk. Then good-bye.”

He kept driving, and he had second thoughts. He suspected that he had given me the wrong idea.

“But sometimes an open door is bad,” he said. “You want to talk to your wife, eh? People doing — what is Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“Laughing.”

“Yes. Laughing. It is bad. Open door can be bad. And look,” he said, and nodded at the heights of Haifa just ahead of us, Mount Carmel, the populous cliffs. “Those streets have names. Those Jews have numbers.”

He drove me to the port. He became sentimental again. “It was nice how they served us. Food. Coffee. That was nice,” he said. “You know that man was talking politics to me?”

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him, don’t ask me. I don’t know about politics.”

Instead of eating on the ship I found a restaurant and spent the last of my shekels on a meal. Every meal I ate in Israel was delicious, and I had found the Israeli countryside an unexpected pleasure. The restaurant was almost empty, like the streets; like everything else in after-dark Haifa. Everyone was home, watching TV, doing schoolwork, worrying.

All the Turks were on board the Akdeniz, so eager to leave, and in such a mood of celebration that even from my cabin I could hear them singing, their voices and their plonking instruments vibrating in the ship’s steel hull, making the thing throb with music of the Arabesque.

Sometime in the night I heard the sounds of departure — clanking chains, the lines slipping and straining in the winches, barks in bad English from ship to shore and back again, and then the reassuring drone of the engines and the ship rocking slowly in the deep sea. Then uninterrupted sleep was possible.

Dawn was bright, the glare of a dusty shoreline and a fortress, a Gothic church in the distance among rooftops, Northern Cyprus. It was not a province of Turkey — silly me for thinking so — but a sovereign state, the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, bankrolled and backed and guarded by Turkey, the only country in the world which recognizes it. It was about a third of Cyprus. The southern part was Greek, and the Green Line, guarded by United Nations soldiers, divided the two. Ever since this partition there had been peace on Cyprus.

Famagusta had been renamed by the Turks Gazimagosa — the Gazi an honorific term for a warrior, since the town had come through the war with valor. It was a small town, and its port was located in the old part, surrounded by a Venetian wall. It was very ruinous, all of it, and my impression was that Turkish North Cyprus was having a very bad time. Walking slowly with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan, it took us thirty-five minutes to see the whole of Gazimagosa, including the church, which was no longer a church: the Gothic cathedral of St. Nicholas had been turned into the Lala Pasha mosque by the grafting of a minaret onto one of the spires.

“This is it,” Samih Pasha said, tweaking his mustache. “So we go to Girne.”

“You come with us, effendi,” Onan said. “We worried about you in Israel when we didn’t see you.”

Greek Kyrenia was now Turkish Girne. It was about sixty miles away. The four of us found a taxi, and I let the Turks haggle with the driver. They came away saying, “No, no. Ridiculous!”

The driver had said that he could not take us for less than eight hundred thousand Turkish liras. This was $25—an outrageous amount to the Turks. I did not say that it seemed reasonable, because I was curious to know what their solution would be. It was a seventy-five-cent ride in an old bus to Lefkosa (Nicosia), a city that had been bisected by the Green Line. From there we would have to catch another bus to Girne.

On a bus that swayed down an empty road, past unplowed fields in the November heat of Cyprus, the wobbly wheels raising dust, the passengers dozing, the landscape looking deserted and arid — water was scarce, the last harvest had been terrible, the little nation was ignored by everyone — I was thinking how odd it was to be here, traveling across this bogus republic. The bus was uncomfortable, the road was bad, the food was awful, the weather was corrosive. But I had never been here before, which was justification enough; and I felt a grim satisfaction in being with a little Turkish team of men who kept telling me they worried about me when I was out of sight.

It was only an hour and a half to Lefkosa. The onward bus was not leaving for another two hours. In spite of his age, Samih Pasha walked quickly into town. He said he was eager to see the Green Line.

“Have you been here before?”

“Yes, but not on the ground,” he said, smiling. When he smiled his big mustache lifted in a big semaphore of happiness. “I was flying.”

In the ethnic fighting of 1964 and again at partition in 1974, it had been Samih Pasha’s task to fly his F-100 fighter plane from one end of Cyprus to the other, from his air base in Turkey. The object was not to engage Greek planes — the Turkish air force dominated the skies — but to break windows.

“I am flying at ten meters,” Samih Pasha said, “and when I get over Lefkosa I let out the afterburner and make a big noise — an explosion, you can say — and all the windows break!”

“Greek or Turkish windows?” I asked.

“Both! Impossible just to break Greek windows!”

And he described with pleasure the way his fighter jet streaked low across Cypriot airspace, scaring the bejesus out of the Greeks, and reassuring the Turks, who (so it was said on this side of the Green Line) had been systematically oppressed by them.

We walked down one rubbly street and up another, past some shops just closing for the lunch time siesta, to the United Nations checkpoint: a sentry post, a shed, a barrier, and a bilingual English-Turkish sign, STOP/DUR.

“I’d like to pass through,” I said to the soldier in the blue beret who stood holding an automatic rifle.

“No.”

“I just want to see Greek Cyprus and come straight back.”

“It is impossible.”

“You see?” Onan said. The others had watched me. They were much too polite to ask the soldier.

A woman came out of her house nearby and said hello in English. Her house had a colonnade in the front, and a pretty porch. I asked her whether she had crossed the Green Line, which was fifty feet away. No, she said, not for twenty years.

“This house was given to me by my father,” she said when I complimented her on it. “That was in 1930. Over there”—she pointed across the street to some abandoned houses—“was an Armenian family, and some Greeks. But they left.”

“Were they forced out of their houses?” I asked.

She got my point, and without replying directly to the question, she said, “My house in Limassol [in Greek Cyprus] is wrecked. They took my antiques. They took my Mercedes car.”

I was sorry that I had gotten her onto the subject, because the others left me listening to her litany of complaints. I sympathized. This had been a prosperous capital and now it was a wreck of a place, and we stood on a blocked road, among deserted houses, and the old woman was saying, “They won’t find a solution — not soon—”

A wall of atrocity photos was on display, under glass, on the Turkish side of the Green Line. They were blurred and smudged, some of them hard to make out. But the captions told the whole story, sometimes with sarcasm:

— A Greek Cypriot priest who forgot his religious duties and joined in the hunting and killing of Turks

— A Mother and Her Three Children Murdered by Greek Cypriots in the bath of their house in Nicosia

— Mass Grave

— Refugees

— Burned Village

— Frenzied Greek Cypriot Armed Bandit

— Dead bullet-riddled baby — Life was hell for us in 1963–74. We cannot return to those days.

“That is true,” Fikret said. “It was really bad. They tortured people. The Greeks burned Turkish villages. They made us suffer.”

“Aren’t you glad you had General Samih, three-star window-breaker, to help you?”

“This man,” Samih Pasha said, tapping his head and squinting at me, “he is always writing things down. I ask why?”

He had seen me scribbling atrocity captions. I said, “Because I have a bad memory.”

We walked to a restaurant, Sinan Cafe, farther down the Green Line. It was half a cafe, for it had been split in two by a wall that blocked the street; this main north-south road was now a dead end. On the wall a sign said, 1st Restricted Military Area — No Photographs! with a skull and crossbones.

Fikret and I drank a coffee. The owner said, “Want to look over the wall. There’s a good view from upstairs.”

We went to the second floor of his house and peered over the Green Line into Greek Cyprus. I could see ruined rooftops, broken tiles, no people; but in the distance was a tall pole flying the Greek flag, in defiance. As though in reply, from the Turkish side there was a Muslim call to prayers, the long groaning praise of Allah.

“Fikret, what do you think of Greeks?”

“Greeks in Turkey were prosperous, because they were good businessmen,” he said. “We do not hate each other.”

“But Greece is in the EC.”

“They don’t belong there, but neither does Turkey,” he said. “We are still a backward country. Does the EC want another headache?”

The four of us bought fifty-cent bus tickets at the Lefkosa bus shed and went another twenty miles over a mountain range towards Girne, on the north coast. The shoreline was rocky, and the land rose to black and rugged cliffs. Samih Pasha described how Turkish troops had landed just west of here in 1974. He pointed out the caves in the cliffs where they had hidden themselves and ambushed the Greeks, driving them south. We stopped at Bellapais.

“The quietness, the sense of green beatitude which fills this village,” Lawrence Durrell wrote of Bellapais, high above Girne, not far from the Crusader castle St. Hilarion, where Richard the Lionhearted spent his honeymoon. In his house there, described in Bitter Lemons, Durrell began writing his Alexandria Quartet. Nowadays Bellapais is perhaps more remote and dustier than it has ever been, but it is still very pretty. Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.

But the town of Girne had the same look of desolation as the larger settlements I had seen in this embattled corner of the island. Empty streets, scruffy shops, empty hotels. I went to the largest hotel, on the seafront, just to see whether I could make a telephone call. The woman at the switchboard said it was impossible.

“You can’t call outside of here,” she said. “No one recognizes us!”

Samih Pasha and Onan and Fikret commiserated with the woman, saying it wasn’t fair. Yet it interested me that this portion of island in the Mediterranean was regarded as such a pariah that it had no contact with any country beyond its borders; and its greatest enemy was on the other side of the Green Line.

Suddenly Onan said, “We have to go. We will see you later.”

Watching him hurry away with Samih Pasha, Fikret said, “They will go to the Officers’ Club to eat.”

“Onan’s a soldier?”

“I think, yes. Bible Man was in the army before.”

“What about us? Bean soup at some awful place, eh?”

Fikret shrugged. He did not complain. We went to a restaurant and had bean soup and salad and rice. The waiter was perspiring in the heat, his hair plastered to his head. A man carved slices from the upright log of grilled meat chunks called a doner kepab and mocked us for not trying some of the greasy scraps. A beggar woman crawled inside the door and sang pathetically, I am in trouble — Allah sent the trouble to me, until the man standing at the meat log threatened her with his meat fork.

“I want to ask you about marriage,” Fikret said.

Now I knew why he had seemed so preoccupied. I said, “What’s on your mind?”

“I have been thinking about marriage.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-six. But I have never been married,” he said. “How old should the woman be?”

“Have you had a woman friend?”

“A young one. She was twenty-eight, a nurse,” Fikret said. “She was too young for me. I told her to go back to her young man. But she was nice. And she was my height.”

The height issue was important to Fikret. He was rather short. I said, “Why do you want to get married?”

“I don’t like to be alone. I live with my brother,” he said. “He is not married. He is discreet. But—” He leaned closer. “Please tell me what to do.”

“Find a friend, not a wife,” I said. “Don’t think about her age. If you like her and she likes you, everything will be fine. Maybe you will marry her.”

This did not console him. He was still fretting.

“My life is not getting any better,” he said.

“Fikret, don’t look so desperate.”

“I think my life is getting worse.”

We went to a cafe down on the seafront for dessert and were served by a pretty waitress. Fikret smiled. I urged him to talk to her. She was a Turkish immigrant, having fled from “Bulgaristan”—Bulgaria was full of Turks, Fikret said. He named six former Soviet republics as Turkish, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang? “That’s Turkish, too.” He talked awhile with the waitress. But she was married. She had gotten married just a month ago. Fikret shrugged. Just his luck.

“This seems a sad place,” I said, as we walked along the shore afterwards. “Why is that?”

“It is isolated,” he said with such suddenness I realized that the word was in his mind. He felt isolated too, and sad.

On the way back to Gazimagosa, across the plains, Fikret said that one of the most famous Turkish fortune-tellers lived in that town. Her name was Elmas — the Turkish word for diamond — and she was noted for being so prescient that people came from all over to have her read their palms. Not just Turks, but people from many countries.

“They send her plane tickets and money, so that she can visit,” he said. “She knows everything.”

“Let’s find her,” I said. “We can ask her about your future.”

But, looking for her in Gazimagosa, we were told that we were too late.

“After five o’clock Elmas does not say anything,” a Turk in town told us. “You can find her, but she will not speak.”

We walked in the failing light through the town towards the port. When night fell, Turkish Cyprus was in darkness, because electricity was so scarce. Children chased each other in the dark, screeching miserably, the way children in the water howl and thrash, pretending to be drowning.

How strange that a place that had been so important, even illustrious in history, could be so decrepit. The north coast was associated with Richard the Lionhearted, who had led his Crusaders in a victory that gave them command of three castles at the edge of the Kyrenia Mountains, which they held. The Venetians had built the town’s fortifications. The original of Othello had done some of his soldiering here. More recently this eastern coast was noted for its beaches. Lawrence Durrell had written his book Bitter Lemons not far from the spot in Girne where Fikret said, “It is isolated.” Now it was a backwater, with U.N. soldiers guarding the Green Line and twenty-seven thousand Turkish troops hunkered down in the hinterland.

This was one of the few places the Akdeniz stopped, where the local food was worse than that on the ship. At dinner we saw Samih Pasha and Onan, who had just arrived back from Girne and the Turkish Officers’ Club.

Onan said, “I have been feeling bad because we left you.”

“You had to do your duty,” I said. “I had not realized that you were a gazi.”

“I am not a gazi,” Onan said. Samih Pasha had begun to laugh.

I said, “I know it must be important to you to discuss your battles with the other gazis in the Officers’ Club. And of course the Pasha had to do the same, reliving his famous window-breaking attack on Lefkosa.”

I kept it up, jeering at them for abandoning Fikret and me in Girne. Onan remained stern and apologetic. Fikret laughed — it was good to hear: he laughed so seldom.

Samih Pasha peered at me and said, “There is something about you.”

The weather turned windy after we left Cyprus, but there were fierce storms elsewhere in the Levant, the captain told me. Storms could be terrible here. “The waves breaking across the ship, so it is like a submarine.” Alexandria was a difficult harbor to enter in a storm. “One time I spent five days going back and forth, one hundred miles east, one hundred miles west, before we could go in.”

The Akdeniz became for me like a seedy hotel in which I was an old-time resident. A Turkish hotel: the food, the music, the greetings, the courtesies, the wives in their old-fashioned frocks and shawls, the old soldiers, the young boy who spoke English well and was funny, the old woman — possibly crazy — who ranted at me in Turkish, “My name Ali” doing my laundry and overcharging me, then pretending to be surprised when I tipped him, the waiter who looked like Tom Selleck, the barman who said, “The usual?” The round of odd meals, cucumbers for breakfast, big meaty lunches, obscure stews at night.

The General, Samih Pasha, was always at the head of the table. I encouraged him to tell us war stories, and he obliged. His stories usually emphasized the courage of Turkish fighter pilots in NATO exercises. Where accuracy was concerned, the crucial factor in fighter bombing was nerve.

“You have to be brave,” Samih Pasha said. “Going maybe five hundred miles per hour. If you are not brave, you release the bombs too soon. The brave ones release bombs at the last minute for a hit, then count one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, and pull the stick.” He grinned, the tips of his mustache rising. “The G-force take you. Maybe you black out. But you are climbing.”

The Italian pilots were appalling, the Greeks even worse. The Turks on the other hand were so deadly that in a bombing raid of four planes the first two planes obliterated the target, leaving nothing for the last planes to bomb.

Samih Pasha’s high military status as a three-star general had gotten him a special passport. He did not need a visa to enter Germany. He had a multiple-entry visa for the USA. He showed me his military passport.

“Good passport,” he said.

“That’s not just a special passaport,” I said. “That’s a Pasha-port.”

He thought this was screamingly funny, though neither of the other Turks laughed.

At another meal I began baiting them about the Greeks. We had just been to Cyprus and seen the misery of the Turks on this divided island. And what about the Armenians?

“Ignorant people in Turkey might say things,” Fikret said. “But if you live with Greeks and Armenians you see they are good people. You understand them. Prejudice is ignorance.”

“I agree,” Onan said.

“And people who live far away from them have images of them that are untrue. But we like them.”

“But what about their Turko-phobia?” I said.

“That is understandable,” Fikret said. “Why should we blame them? Armenians too — we should understand, though I am sorry to say they believe that part of Anatolia belongs to them.”

In spite of my needling, the only criticism they offered was that it was said that Greeks and Armenians did not trust each other. “But we don’t know if this is true.”

It was relaxing to travel among people with so few prejudices, who were so ready to laugh, who could let themselves be mercilessly interrogated by me. They had a rare quality for people so individualistic — politeness. I also believed Samih Pasha when he claimed that Turkish soldiers were brave. Many had been sent to Korea, to fight on the U.S. side in the Korean war. Some had been captured and, refusing to talk, had died under torture.

I thought I might tap a vein of cruelty if I mentioned capital punishment. Mentioning the candidates in the U.S. elections who had campaigned advocating hanging-and-flogging policies, I asked how they would vote.

“I am a military man — a general,” Samih Pasha said. “All my life my job was to kill people. But I am against all hanging.”

“Because it is cruel?” I asked.

“It is cruel, yes, but it is also unjust,” he said. “That is most important. How can you be so sure? And for people to be sentenced and then wait ten or fifteen years on appeal is horrible.”

“In Iran they do it all the time,” Fikret said.

I said, “We do, too.”

“But not so much,” Onan said.

“Clinton believes in it,” I said, and told him the Florida and Texas figures; that thirty-seven states had the death penalty; and that New York was probably going to get it, as their new governor had promised it.

The Turks were silent. Samih Pasha said, “Terrible.”

That night the storm grew worse, and Istanbul was still two days off. Fikret got seasick. “I don’t like this weather,” he said. “I think I should get off the ship in Izmir.” It was not only a rough sea, with a stiff wind, the air temperature had dropped. Just a few days ago we had been in the heat of Haifa, and now everyone was wearing heavy clothes and complaining.

The Turkish songs in the lounge after dinner were tremulous and plangent and repetitive, and all of them in their lovelorn way reminded me (in Samih Pasha’s translations) of how long I had been away. The musicians played: a drum, a zither, a violin, a clarinet; and the sad woman sang,

The months are passing—

I am waiting.

Why don’t you come?

Don’t leave me alone …

The Turks sat mournfully listening, eating ice cream, drinking coffee.

Every night

I want to stroke your hair

Every night

To touch it

Your hair

Every night

At Izmir I hurried into town and called Honolulu and was reassured. I strolled to the bazaar and sat under a grape arbor and had lunch, a fish kebab and salad. I read an item in the Turkish Daily News that the government was thinking of doing away with “virginity tests on female students and the expulsion of ‘unchaste’ ones from school.” Virginity tests?

In the afternoon the Akdeniz sailed into another storm, and Fikret hugged himself in misery on deck, regretting that he had not gotten off at Izmir and taken a train back to Ankara. With fewer people on board (half had disembarked at Izmir, including Samih Pasha and Onan) the ship had a somber air; and the cold weather made the mood bleak. The next day in the iron-colored Sea of Marmara under a gray sky it was even worse.

I stood with Fikret at the rail. This sea air, however cold, was fresher than the foul air down below on this ship of chain-smokers. We passed Usküdar, where Florence Nightingale had tended the sick during the Crimean War; it was now a prison. That gave me an excuse to ask Fikret the ultimate Turkish question.

“Do you think they torture people in Usküdar?”

He shrugged. The movement of his shoulders meant “probably.”

“How do you know?”

“All countries torture,” he said.

I let this pass. I asked, “What do they do in Turkey?”

“Beating on the feet — bastinado,” he said. The word was precisely right, and I was amazed that he knew it. “Also electricity and hanging by arms.”

“This would be, what? Crucifixion?” I said, as blandly as I could manage.

“Whatever,” he said. “To get information.”

I said, “But people lie under torture, so what good is it?”

He got agitated, and his seasickness made him groggy. He repeated that everyone did it. He said, “The Germans executed the whole Baader-Meinhof gang in prison and then called it a mass suicide!”

“I think it was suicide.”

“The British government tortures Irish people!” he said.

“They used to,” I said. “But it was sleep deprivation — keeping prisoners awake at night to question them. And I think they used noise, too.”

“That is worse than the bastinado!” Fikret cried. “That can make you lose your mind!”

He looked at me reproachfully. He was seasick and upset, and I had offended him by taking advantage of our friendship to ask him nosy questions. But that was the nature of my traveling: a quest for detail, conversation as a form of ambush, the traveler as an agent of provocation.

The mood passed as Istanbul came into view, a whole hill of exotic features — the palace, the minarets, the domes, the steeples, the tower; and below it the bridge, and the water traffic in the Golden Horn.

“I am going home,” Fikret said.

“I hope you find that woman you’re looking for.”

“Yes,” he said, and gulped as he tried to swallow his anxiety. “And where are you going?”

“Two weeks ago I was headed for Syria, when I saw this ship leaving and decided to join it,” I said. “Now I really am going to Syria.”