The Pillars of Hercules

16 The Ferry Sea Harmony to Greece

Down Moussallam Baroudy Road, past the blue To Beirut arrow and the lovely semi-derelict Hejaz Railway Station to Choukri Kouwatli Avenue and following the arrow To Jordan. Instead of the short trip to Lebanon I had to take a much longer one, around its back, south into Jordan and hang a right into Israel, and keep on going to the coast and the waiting Sea Harmony that was sailing in a few days. It sounds like an epic, but in fact if I had made an early start, I could have had breakfast in Damascus (Syria), lunch in Amman (Jordan), tea in Jerusalem (Palestine; disputed) and dinner in Haifa (Israel).

These countries were so small! One of the more marvelous atrocities of our time was the way in which the self-created problems of these countries, and their arrogant way of dealing with them, made them seem larger, like an angry child standing on its tiptoes. They were expensive to operate, too: they had vast armies; they indulged in loud and ridiculously long-winded denunciations of their neighbors. All this contributed to the illusion that they were massive. But, no, they were tiny, irritating, shameless and vindictive; and they occupied the world’s attention way out of proportion to their size or their importance. They had been magnified by lobbyists and busybody groups. Inflation was the theme here, and it was just another tactic for these quarrelsome people to avoid making peace.

Lovely roads, though. That was how I managed to cover so much ground. I was thinking: Why isn’t Route 6 as good as this — why can’t I get to Provincetown this fast? And then I reflected: We paid for those roads and bridges from Jordan to Jerusalem and on to Tel Aviv, and they are a hell of a lot better than ours!

After the last shrine to Basil, a triumphal arch at Der’a (where T. E. Lawrence was captured, fondled by a Turkish commander and then abused and whipped — one of the great chapters of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ending “in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost”), and Syrian customs, I was held up by a car of Arab smugglers. Cartons of Marlboros, about fifty of them, had been crammed into the car’s chassis, and they were being removed and stacked at Jordanian customs, under the eyes of the suspects. Then, the green hills of Jordan, the queer Taco Bell architecture of the repulsively spick-and-span city of Amman and — since Jordan does not have a Mediterranean coast — a ten-dollar taxi ride from there to the Jordanian-Israeli frontier at the Allenby Bridge (thirty feet from end to end, another bit of Middle Eastern magnification) into the West Bank, real desert under brooding mountains and Israeli fortresses and gun emplacements; a bus to the Israeli checkpoint, and another ten-dollar taxi to the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem.

All the way from Syria through Jordan and well into Israel, the truth of this expensive farce was evident in the sight of the tent camps of Palestinians — shepherds with their animals, displaced, hardly tolerated, snotty-nosed children and their ragged elders, despised by Jordanians and Israelis alike, who roar past them in Jeeps and buses, sending up clouds of dust, making a vivid frontispiece for the diabolical next edition of the Bad News Bible.

I stayed in Arab East Jerusalem and made a circuit of the old city again. It was another average day in Zion. Israeli police were in the process of arresting three Arabs near the entrance to the Damascus Gate, and a Jewish protester was being dragged away for holding a “pray-in” at the Temple Mount. At the sacred sites people assumed all the odd postures of piety, on their knees, in their stocking feet, bowing, sobbing, and — at the Western Wall — hundreds, carefully segregated by sex, men here, women there, separated by a steel crowd-barrier, gabbled over their paraphernalia of scrolls and books, men wearing shawls on their heads like the Haurani crones of south Syria, and others had paper yarmulkes, like squashed Chinese take-away cartons, on their heads.

On a blocked back lane an hysterical Lubavitcher in a black hat and black frock coat and billowing black pants hoisted his orange mountain bike in order to squeeze past a van and, struggling through the narrow gap, knocked over an Arab’s stack of cabbages. The men began a futile argument in different languages.

On the Via Dolorosa, near the Flagellation Chapel, I heard a man say to a woman, “So now we do everything you say and you make all the decisions!”

And around the Fifth Station, where the Via Dolorosa ascends steeply to Golgotha, a woman was saying to a man, “Are you sure it’s this way? You’re not sure, are you? You’re just too embarrassed to ask someone directions.”

And farther down the Via Dolorosa, a child screaming, “But you said I could have one!”

Near the Lion Gate there was some Intifada graffiti, which a young mujahideen helpfully translated: Long Live Fatah (Arafat’s Palestinian organization), This Land of Flowing Blood, and In Memory of the Hero and Martyr Amjad Shaheen! (shot by Israeli soldiers).

Politicians tended to simplify the sides into Jews and Arabs, but such designations were totally misleading. A Jew might be a Moroccan, fluent in Arabic and Hebrew and French, raised in Marrakech and educated in Tel Aviv; or a Russian from Odessa now living in a settler village in Gaza, or a monoglot girl in pigtails from south Florida. An Arab might be as complex and interesting as the man I met over coffee in east Jerusalem — a Christian named Michel, born in Jaffa in 1933, his father Palestinian, his mother Italian. “Many Italians used to come and stay here, because it was a holy land for them, too.” He said that since 1948 there had been nothing but trouble. The influx of militant Jews had made it impossible for him to go on living in Jaffa, so he had had to come here to Jerusalem, where there was safety in numbers. He had been married in the Church of St. Anne in the Old City and believed (as I did) that Jerusalem should be an open city, internationalized, and not an Israeli stronghold. The Israelis had knocked down walls and put up offices and rearranged and rebuilt Jerusalem to suit their political ends.

His twenty-year-old son was in Iraq, studying engineering.

“Because I have no money,” he said. “And Saddam Hussein gives scholarships to Palestinians.”

There were some Palestinians at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and there was a Palestinian university at Beir Zeit in Nablus. But in general Israel took no responsibility for educating the underclass of Palestinians any more than they saw the Palestinians as having a right to their own portion of the country. Not much was being asked — at most about twenty percent of what was rightfully theirs. Without partition there will be no peace, but in the present atmosphere peace was a long way off.

It was an atmosphere of conflict, a joyless unrestful place in which from the simplest transactions like being ripped off for a taxi fare, to the highest levels of government, there was no finesse. It was all sour looks, the suspicion, the sharp elbows, the silences, the soldiers, and fundamentalists of all descriptions. Both sides were fearful, racialistic, intolerant and paranoid. Israelis ignored the fact that they snatched and settled land that was not theirs. Their usual reply to any complaints was: You hate Jews.

The worst turn of events was the recent rash of suicide bombers. Ironically, it was an Israeli, Baruch Goldstein, who initiated this new form of warfare, when he killed twenty-nine Muslims at prayer at a mosque in Hebron. He knew when he opened fire that he would never leave the mosque alive; he was beaten to death. Soon after him there were three Palestinian suicide bombers, in separate incidents, who managed to bring Israelis down with them, and this has become the principal tactic, and the most violent so far, in the war between the extreme Palestinian groups (Hamas and Hezbollah) and the Israelis. There are few defenses against the person who is willing to sacrifice his life to kill others.

There was always a violent reply. The Israelis, obsessively retributive, had an absolutely unforgiving rule of retaliation, and always with greater force. It assured a continuing hopelessness and an impasse.

A new development was that their dislike and fear of Palestinians had reached such a pitch that their answer now to Palestinian demands was the hiring of immigrant laborers and field hands from Thailand, the Philippines, and Poland — desperate so-called guest workers — to bring in the harvest. In the absence of Jews willing to perform the menial tasks that had been assigned to Palestinians, there were now seventy thousand such immigrants, a new element in the society, and a new underclass of non-Jews.

In a crowded almost silent bus, jammed with passengers, I rode to Haifa. Only one person spoke, an old Ethiopian Jew — a patriarch, traveling with his large family. He carried a fly whisk and called out loudly in Amharic when he saw anything unusual. It was very easy to translate his exclamations. We passed the airport. Look at the planes! he cried. We passed the railway line. Look at the train! We were stuck in traffic. Look at all the cars! and nearer Haifa, traveling along the coast, the old man was delighted. The sea! The sea!

The blue water lapped at the low shore of tumbled dunes.

Intending to be early, in order to catch the Sea Harmony, I went directly from the station to the pier. In the event, I very nearly missed it.

“Come with me,” an Israeli security officer said to me as he leafed through my passport.

I was then subjected to the most intense and prolonged interrogation and suitcase search it has been my experience to receive in thirty-four years of traveling. This time I was not rescued by a helpful bookworm who knew my name. Instead, I was made to wait. And then I was questioned. Why had I gone to Turkey? Whom did I know there? Whom did I visit there? Where had I stayed? These specifics were noted. The same questions were asked of my time in Syria and Jordan. Then I was taken to a side room. My suitcase was gone through a third time, by a new official. He pointed to a plastic chair.

“Sit down.”

“If you say please.”

“Sit down!”

“I find this very unpleasant,” I said after two hours in the chair, when the man returned with my passport.

Another man began trawling through my little bag. I stood up to stretch.

“Sit down!”

I was then summoned to receive my passport. I said, “What do you think?”

“I don’t sink nossing.”

“Know what I think?” I said. “I don’t like being treated like this.”

“No one likes,” he said sourly. He hated me for my impertinence. He hated his job. He hated the Palestinians. He hated his life in a country where everyone is a possible terrorist and where life in this state of siege is a turbulent and terrifying nuisance.

The disgust and pessimism is so palpable that after a dose of it, the Sea Harmony shipload of shouting boasting Greeks, swaggering on deck and plucking at their private parts and smoking and guzzling ouzo and snarling at each other, was peaceful by comparison.

The Mediterranean War Report: Fighting in Turkey — Turks against Kurds; fighting in Bosnia — Serbs against Bosnian Muslims; fighting in Algeria — most recent death toll, forty thousand in the past three years, ten thousand of them since I had started my trip. The Israelis were shelling south Lebanon and continuing a blockade of south Lebanese ports and fishing grounds; the terrorists of Hamas were continuing their suicide missions against Israelis in Hebron and Gaza — and Israelis were answering each attack with one of their own. And a standoff between Greeks and Turks in Cyprus.

The Sea Harmony was headed to Greek Cyprus, steaming out of Haifa and its hill of lights. I was sitting at the stern, with my feet jammed against the rail. A man approached and stood a bit too close to me.

“Excuse me,” the man inquired. “Are you Guy Lupowsky?”

He had a plump pink face and a potbelly, and he stood awkwardly, his short arms hanging. He wore a gray suit, but it was rumpled; and a shirt and tie, but they were soup-stained. He said “Lupowsky” in a slurping and delicious lisp, all spittle and slush.

I said no, I was not Guy Lupowsky.

“I am sorry. I see you and I fink you is him. Classical guitarist from Belgium. I am a musician. I play Jewish.” He said the words “musician” and “Jewish” as though he were masticating the wet pulpy segment of a juicy orange.

After every few words he swallowed. His English reflected the way he was dressed. It was well intentioned and almost formal in many respects, like his suit and tie, but also like his suit and tie it was mangled and at times comic.

He introduced himself as Sam — that is, Shmuel — Spillman. He said he divided his time equally between Belgium and Israel, going back and forth, nearly always on the Sea Harmony on this leg, and the rest by Italian ferries and trains. He did not have a home in either country, nor even an apartment. “I get a room, just a small one. A big one confuses me. I rent a room by the week in Tel Aviv, and another one in Brussels. I cannot own a place. That would confuse me.”

In a sense he was the ultimate voyager, shuttling across the Mediterranean from Brussels to Tel Aviv and back. He had no permanent home — he did not want one. He had few possessions, he said; they rattled him. What to do with them? He had his music and his mother. That was enough, said Spillman.

“I cannot stay with my mother, or there will be trouble. She is very rich but we quarrel. She makes problems. Is better that I get a room and visit her. I have some presents for her.” He thought a moment. And he slurped and lisped the spattering word, “Chocolates.”

“How do you decide when to stay and when to go?” I asked.

“It is the sunshine,” he said.

“You like sunny weather?”

“I need sunshine,” he said, and the word on his tongue was like a gum-drop. “For my depression.”

“I see.”

“I need to come here.”

But “here” was far astern to the east, for we had plunged seaward, and the lights of Haifa were just a little row of lighted dots that made a yellow horizontal line across the night. Israel was that perforation in the darkness.

“For my depression I need the sunshine, and I need the Jews,” Spillman said. “I am very Jewish.” He swallowed and went on, “I am very, very Jewish.”

“So you visit Israel when you get depressed in Brussels?” I said. “But when do you visit Brussels?”

“When I get depression in Israel,” he said. “When it feels dark to me. I take medication but the real medication is to leave. Every six months or less I feel it, and it gets bad, and I see my doctor. He prescribes medication and I come.”

“Isn’t it sunny most of the time in Israel?”

“Sometimes it is dark,” he said. “I am not speaking of the sunshine. I wanted to settle in Israel but I did not want to give up my Belgian residency. It was such a big decision and it was giving me depression. My psychiatrist said to me, ‘Don’t decide, go back and forth, as you wish. It is better.’ So I do that.”

“That’s a wise doctor,” I said.

“He is my friend.”

He hesitated.

“He knows I am a gay people,” Spillman said. He looked at me sadly. “But I have no more desires. I had a friend but now I have no friend. Are you going to eat?”

“Is it time?”

“From six-thirty to seven-thirty they serve dinner. Then it is closed. You can buy coffee or biscuits or sweets but not foods. In the morning at seven—”

After so many voyages, Spillman knew the whole routine of the ship. He knew some of the crew, and they knew him. He knew every feature of the ship, that they did not do laundry, that the coffee was good, that the food was expensive, that the deck chairs were always dirty, that the crew smoked too much. He knew the arrival and departure times. More than that, he knew the high points of each port of call — the fruit market in Limassol, specific hotels where you could get an inexpensive shower (Spillman had a seat, not a cabin, on the ship and had nowhere on board to have a bath), the best eating places en route, a particular cafe in Rhodes that sold roast chicken. Spillman said the word “chicken” with a gasping and slushy hunger.

All this I learned over dinner, spaghetti and cabbage salad, glopped onto plates by the five Burmese who served in the cafeteria. It was prison food.

The stewards, the waiters, the menials, nearly all the underlings on this Greek ship were either Burmese or Indian. They spoke no Greek. Orders were always given in English and carried out by their efficient, muttering flunkies. They swept, they painted, they mopped, they cooked and served. A Burmese made the moussaka, another Burmese shoveled it onto plates, an Indian handed it over, a Burmese rang the cash register. It was not their fault that the ship served prison food. And none of them had been on the ship long — a year at most. The Burmese were from Rangoon, the Indians from Bombay. They were desperate for employment. They were also loners on the ship, men without women.

Greece, like Israel and Italy, had high unemployment, around ten percent. It interested me that Burmese were making moussaka on this Greek ship, and Filipinos were picking oranges outside Tel Aviv, and West Africans were harvesting tomatoes near Salerno, in Italy. It was the Third World in the Mediterranean, proving that there were even poorer and needier countries than Tunisia and Egypt and Morocco. These people and others had come from halfway around the world to help these developed countries, members of the European Union, to scrub its floors and harvest its crops. The Burmese and Indians lent the ship a melancholy air and made the Greek crewmen seem like overlords, as they loudly issued orders in badly pronounced English. They made the class system explicit by giving it a color. The Mediterranean had always had an underclass of remote or provincial people, but they had never come from so far away.

“Maybe you’ll meet someone,” I said to Spillman over lunch the next day. Speaking of his marriage, he had begun to slip into another depression.

“Yes?”

He stopped eating. The thought of meeting someone seemed not to have occurred to him. He became reflective, a problem clouding his face, taking some of the pinkness from it.

“Perhaps.”

“What’s the problem with your mother?”

“My marriage, also. I made such a great scandal with my marriage. It was a big catastrophe, mamma mia. You know Jewish women? No sex before marriage! Don’t touch me!” He dabbed a balled-up hanky at the spaghetti sauce on his lips. “On our wedding night it was such a disaster.” He was silent for quite a long time. Months, perhaps years, were passing in his mind. Events, too. He was nodding, reviewing these events as great and small they passed before him. At last he winced and said, “We got a divorce.”

He followed me on deck afterwards. Having just left Israel for his health, he was in a particular mood, one of rejection, as he headed to his other home.

“Israel is no more a Jewish country,” Spillman said disgustedly. “It was special before, but now it is like all other countries. Just wanting money. Everyone talks about money.”

He was speaking into the darkness. Israel was somewhere in that darkness.

“I think there will be civil war,” he said. “Jews against Jews, the orthodox ones against the others, the settlers against the others. The Arabs will just watch us fighting.”

Spillman was in the cheap seats in the big smoky lounge at the center of C Deck, surrounded by his heap of bags — shopping bags mostly, in which he carried all his possessions. One of them was an instrument he called a “melodeon”—a fat flute with a keyboard which made a kazoolike sound. Goodhearted man that he was, he spent part of the day serenading the others in the cheap seats. Jewish songs, Gypsy songs, and old favorites such as “Blue Moon” and “O Solo Mio.”

There was a bald toothless Israeli with a dog on his lap in the cheap seats, and a German family with a small baby, and some backpackers, and some Greek Cypriots, and part of a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land, and a Dutch couple which had just been on a kibbutz. There were some Arabs, too. The Israeli with the dog said that he had been a soldier his whole life. “I have fought in three wars!” The German family had set up a field kitchen in some spare seats and were forever dishing up food for their baby and themselves. The Slovakian pilgrims traveled with a small bearded friar who said mass in one of the lounges every day. The prettiest pilgrim was a girl in her twenties who carried a wooden cross as tall as she was. Tacked to it was a holy card, the size of a baseball card, with a saint’s picture on it. She heaved the cross in a slightly defiant way, the winsome Slovak, smiling, carrying this enormous cross among the querulous passengers.

There were other passengers, too, in the cabins. Some of them had strange stories to tell, but I met them later. The Sea Harmony was an unusual ship for the way people were thrown together. The bad weather did not help either — it was cold and windy, the sea unsettled. It was not a cruise, but rather a way for these people to get from one side of the Mediterranean to the other, or to stop along the way.

I had paid a little extra to have my own cabin. That was my only luxury. The food was awful. The weather was grim. The Greek crew was truculent and unhelpful, and the Greek passengers even worse — two of them sat in the lounge shouting into cellular phones, making interminable calls. They smoked. They demanded that the Burmese play tapes of Greek music very loudly. Because the decks were cold and windswept, there was no refuge anywhere. But I had my cabin.

The wind was blowing the rain sideways on our approach to Limassol, and the weather continued cold and rainy, such a novelty, after the parched landscapes of Syria and Israel, all these muddy sidewalks and puddled streets and weeping trees. I had been eager to see the Republic of Cyprus, after having traversed Turkish Cyprus. It had been impossible for me to go directly from one to the other, and so this thousand-mile detour had been necessary. But had it been worth it? Yes, I thought so, because I had seen how Turkish Cyprus had been lifeless and deprived; and now I saw that it hardly mattered, for Limassol, with its tourists and its Royal Air Force base at nearby Akrotiri and its embittered Greeks, was unattractive and seedy. Turkish Cyprus was like a Third World island of soldiers and self-help; Greek Cyprus was a rather ugly and bungaloid coastline, the most distant outpost of the European Community, another welfare case.

The larger islands in the Mediterranean are miniature continents, the French historian Fernand Braudel said. He cited Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Cyprus as good examples of this. I could see how this might be so. A single island might have many microclimates, and regions and dialects if not separate languages; and a mountain range that was like a continental divide, and a wild or sparsely settled interior. They were so complex they seemed vast, and each section of coast was different. But the partition of Cyprus made it smaller. It had broken into two mean fragments, a pair of true islands, each with its own culture and language. The large complex island of Cyprus had become two simpler and much less interesting places, in the twenty years since the Turks had asserted themselves in the north and the Greeks in the south.

I walked from the port to the town, buying my breakfast on the way, fruit here, juice there, and at last bought a copy of the day-before-yesterday’s Daily Telegraph and read it over a cup of coffee in a cafe across from Limassol’s front, while the wind whipped the waves onto the promenade.

Limassol was as unlike a town in Turkish Cyprus as it was possible to be, and yet if anything it seemed more hollow and dreary. It was, I suppose, the cheesy fun-fair atmosphere that tourism had forced upon it, and the weird jauntiness, the forced high spirits and fake geniality that can make a visitor lonely to the point of depression. Spillman had told me he was going fruit shopping at his favorite market and then straight back to the ship. There was nothing else to buy, only horrendous souvenirs, unpainted plaster statues, mostly nude women, but also animals, busts of anonymous Greeks; paperweights made of varnished stones, copper saltcellars, toy windmills, dishcloths depicting Cypriot costumes and maps, dolls in traditional dress, doilies, tablecloths, egg timers, letter openers, ashtrays labeled Limassol, and every souvenir plate imaginable. There were many images, in plaster, on dishes, modeled in plastic, of the goddess Aphrodite. Legend had it that Aphrodite had risen from the waves off the west coast of Cyprus. The Golden Bough: “The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos was one of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world.” The images on sale depicted a sulky and misshapen Barbie doll rather than the goddess of love.

The day before yesterday’s Mirror, the Sun, the Daily Mail and other British papers were available. Bus tours were advertised to various parts of the island. Signs said “Traditional English Pub,” and “Full English Breakfast,” “Fish and Chips,” and “Afternoon Tea.” There were bleak hotels on the promenade and some derelict mosques on the backstreets. There was something old-fashioned and fifties-ish about Limassol, as though like the newspapers the town too had an air of the day before yesterday.

The Greek Cypriots I spoke to were friendly and forthcoming, and as angry with the Turks as the Turks I had met on the north side of the island had been with them. Each side expressed its anger in the same words.

“I have a lot of property in the north, but I have no idea what happened to it,” a Greek woman told me. I had heard something similar from a Turkish woman, her exact counterpart, in the north, on a street in Lefkosa, who had fled from Limassol.

And there was Mrs. Evzonas. Twenty years ago, in Famagusta (now Gazimagosa), she said to her husband, “Let’s get out of here.” There were Turkish planes flying overhead, and Turkish ships in the harbor. They took a two-hour drive to Limassol and hunkered down. “We’ll go back when it’s safer.”

She told me, “We thought it would end soon. How did we know that it would last this long?”

In two decades the Evzonases had not been back, nor had any of their friends. But this is a legitimate republic, recognized by other countries. I made phone calls to the United States from the public phone booths. And because of the brisk tourist trade it was possible to make a living here in a way that in Turkish Northern Cyprus was out of the question.

“I would like to go back, but how can I?” Mrs. Evzonas said. “With my passport it is impossible.” She shrugged. “We are stuck here.”

“This was once a small town,” a man named Giorgio said to me in Limassol. “In 1974 it was nothing. But so many refugees made businesses, so it began to get bigger.”

I told him I had been to the town he knew as Famagusta.

“They say it is a ghost town,” he said.

He wanted me to agree, and he was right of course, but how could I tell him that in its ghostly way the town was more weirdly attractive than this?

The Sea Harmony was not leaving until late that night. The driving rain had discouraged me from leaving town, and so I hung around, and when the rain slowed to a thin drizzle I walked east along the coast, working up an appetite, and then returned and had a traditional English beer in a traditional English pub and met Mr. Reg MacNicol from North London who was on a two-week holiday (“We come for the weather”) and when I asked too many questions he exploded and his florid face grew redder and he said, “You Yanks give me the pip! Life’s a compromise! Utopia doesn’t exist!”

I took a bus back to the ship, where the Slovakians were kneeling in the midst of another solemn mass in the lounge bar.

“I bought these for you,” Spillman said, handing me some Cyprus tangerines.

A woman nearby said, “I know you. I saw them interrogating you in Haifa. They took you away.”

“You’re very observant,” I said.

“I was afraid for you,” she said. “Hi. I’m Melva. From Australia. I’ve lived a really cloistered life. All this is new to me.”

She was another loner on this ship of loners, a solitary traveler, and she was as pleasant and as odd as the others. Tall, calm, observant, she shared a cabin with two other women, strangers to her. She had been cheated in Turkey and ill with suspected pneumonia in Egypt and spent two days in an Israeli hospital. “They threw me out. I had a temperature of a hundred and two and they said, ‘You must go now.’ I went to one of those grotty hotels and nearly died.” But she was game. I asked how she was now. “I’m coming good!”

“Want to play cards?” she asked.

She taught me an Australian card game called “Crappy Joe,” which was a version of two-handed whist that had interminable variations. Each successive game became more complicated in terms of the combinations needed to win. Her parents had played it almost every night for years in the western Sydney suburb of Emu Plains.

“Aw, I was married for twenty-six years myself, but my husband and I just went in different directions. I had to get away.”

She was dealing the cards for another hand of Crappy Joe.

“You make it sound urgent,” I said.

“He was stalking me,” she said. “At night I’d look out the window and there he’d be, staring in, his face so frightening. I’d be driving somewhere and look in the rearview mirror and he’d be behind me. I went out with a chap — a very nice man. My ex-husband went to his office and threatened him. ‘Don’t you dare go out with my wife.’ ”

“He sounds dangerous,” I said.

“That’s what I told the police. That he was obsessed. He’s got three rifles. But they said, ‘He hasn’t done anything, has he?’ ‘He keeps stalking me and staring at me through the window,’ I said. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t prove anything. He hadn’t done anything physical, see.”

In the rain and wind the ship pulled out of Limassol harbor, and I was glad I was here and not there.

“I got so worried I decided to leave,” she said. “I went to India, to Egypt, to Greece. Maybe he’ll leave me alone when I get back.”

She won the hand, gathered the cards, let me cut them, shuffled them and leaned over.

“Maybe I’ll never go back,” she said.

The ship was rolling as it sailed around the coast of western Cyprus, past Aphrodite’s birthplace and Cape Drepanon and the last horned cape on this island of hornlike capes, Arnaoutis, and then into the darkness towards Rhodes.

Rhodes — Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a giant bronze figure: was this my compelling interest on this island? No, it was not. How could it be? It was just an old story. The thing had been erected twenty-three hundred years ago, it had been knocked down sixty-five years later and sold off as scrap. So much for the Colossus of Rhodes.

But not far from where this monstrous statue once stood, Spillman the Belgian was saying to me, “I will buy a chicken. I will drink some water. I will play music for the people in the town square. After one cup of tea I will return to the ship. At six o’clock I will take food. Some fruit. Some cheese.”

“You are very well organized, Mr. Spillman.”

“I do make planations of my daily life,” he said, his English faltering, “so I do not make a depression.”

As he walked along, distracted — perhaps hungry — his English became a sort of homage to Hercule Poirot.

“You can tell by my visage that I am a Jewish? Attention, I buy some parfum for my muzzah!”

This and more was my experience of Rhodes. The old walled city of Rhodes was one of the most beautiful I had seen in the Mediterranean, the Palace and Hospital of the Crusader Knights were graceful as well as powerful. The water was brilliantly blue, and mainland Turkey was visible just across the channel. But all this was a backdrop for my walk with pigeon-toed Spillman. I admired him for having ingeniously compensated for his spells of depression. He liked his life, and providing he did not deviate from this route through the Mediterranean in which fruit markets and cheese stalls loomed larger than ruins, his life was happy. I began to reflect on how in the way I was traveling there was an unusual and apparently disjointed process at work. There was something immensely more interesting to me in hearing about Melva and Ted’s divorce, and the spooky behavior of her crazed ex-husband, than in hearing a story of — well, as we had just left Limassol, let us say the tale of Richard the Lionhearted’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre in 1191, at Limassol Castle, a building which had been practically demolished.

I could not deny that the setting mattered. The Rock of Gibraltar to me was a French tourist on a ledge at the top pinching an ape. I remembered Van Gogh’s Arles because I was almost run down by a high-speed train at Arles Station, while entranced by almond blossoms. In Olbia, Sardinia, a Senegalese scrounger told me in Italian how in Africa (which he visited regularly) he had two wives and six children: “Not many.” In Durrell’s Kyrenia, Fikret the Turk suffered over his bean soup and said, “I have been thinking about marriage … Please tell me what to do.” I could not now think of Jerusalem without seeing a Lubavitcher Jew in a black hat and coat hoisting his orange mountain bike into an angry Arab’s cabbages. My lasting impression of Dubrovnik was not its glorious city, but rather its bomb craters and broken roofs and the Croat Ivo saying, “I came home. Because home is home.”

Places had voices that were not their own; they were backdrops to a greater drama, or else to something astonishingly ordinary, like the ragged laundry hung from the nave of a plundered Crusader church in Tartus, on the Syrian coast. Most of the time, traveling, I had no idea where I was going. I was not even quite sure why. I was no historian. I was not a geographer. I hated politics. What I liked most was having space and time; getting up in the morning and setting off for a destination which, at any moment — if something better compelled my attention — I could abandon. I had no theme. I did not want one. I had set out to be on the Mediterranean, without a fixed program. I was not writing a book — I was living my life, and had found an agreeable way to do it.

In this way I was exactly like the others on the Sea Harmony. We only looked like lost souls, but we had our achievements. Spillman who had solved the problem of his depression, Melva who was free of her husband’s threats, the Bratislava pilgrims for whom prayer was a way of life, the German Heinz who traveled with his little family. And more.

Delayed in Rhodes, I ran into Yegor, the bald and toothless Israeli who was always boasting how he had fought in three wars. He wore old tattered clothes and his only luggage was a small canvas bag. He slept in the cheap seats, where Spillman played, and sometimes he spoke French to Spillman. On board the first day he had said to me, “You have a cabin? I want to sleep with you!” And he laughed a loud toothless laugh, his lips flapping at me. He was obviously excitable. So I had not encouraged conversation.

But he ambushed me. I left Spillman looking for his chicken restaurant and his fruit stand; I had headed out of the walled city to the windy bay on the fringes of which tourist-resort Rhodes lay as new and ugly as every other new Greek seaside town. The Greek genius for tacky construction surpassed anything I had seen — surprising in people who claimed the Parthenon as part of their heritage.

Even Yegor remarked on the flimsy construction. It was the strong wind, battering the hotel signs and tearing at the power lines. None of the hotels were open and, absent of people, they looked abandoned and vulnerable.

“I think the wind will make them crash down!” Yegor said. His whinnying laugh was bad, but the sight of his toothless mouth was worse. I also thought: Why do apparently weak-minded people take such delight in disasters?

His dog, young and strong, tugged him along on its rope leash.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“Johnny Halliday.”

Hearing his name, the dog hesitated and glanced back at his master. Then he trotted on.

“But I call him Johnny.”

Again the dog turned its soulful eyes on Yegor.

“I take it you’re a soldier, Yegor,” I said.

“Three wars,” he said. “In ’67, the Egyptians had swords and tried to cut us”—he flailed his arms—“like this, our heads off! But we beat them! I was given a free apartment. I pay only forty shekels for one month.”

“You’re lucky.”

“But I have a big problem,” Yegor said. “I drink.”

“You get drunk?”

“I get drunk. I go to jail.”

“What are Israeli jails like?”

“Jews in one room, Arabs in another room. In each room, twenty men,” Yegor said. “One toilet only.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Horrible. And they fight, the prisoners.”

“What do they fight about?”

“On your first day, they take your food, to make you frightened. So you have to fight. What else can you do?”

We were walking down Papanikolaou in the new part of Rhodes City, a block or so from where waves were being blown on to the bright deserted shore. We had passed the edge of Mandraki Harbor, where on one corner — so it was thought — the Colossus had stood. But speculating on this Wonder of the World meant a great deal less than the reality of Yegor’s saying, On your first day, they take your food, to make you frightened.

“The police arrested you because you were drunk?”

“Because I broke a table,” Yegor said.

“An expensive table?”

“Not expensive, and not big. Made out of glass.”

“How did you break it?”

“I used a man to break it,” Yegor said.

“You used a man?”

“I took him and crashed him down, so I broke the man, too. Ha! Ha! Ha!” That laugh again, those gums, those lips. “I was drunk, so they arrested me.”

“Were you in prison long?”

“Some months,” Yegor said. “But I have been seventeen times in prison. I can’t help it — I drink too much!”

He jerked his dog’s leash, the dog made a strangled noise, and they walked on, the dog yapping in a sharp imitation of his master’s laugh.

Later that day, back inside the old castellated city, I was admiring the medieval walls and the carved escutcheons, when Yegor accosted me.

“I told you lies,” he said. “Ha!”

“About going to prison?”

“If you go to prison in Israel they take your passport, and I have a passport, so how could I go to prison? Ha! You believed me!”

The problem with a liar is not his frank admission of lying but rather when he robustly asserts that he is telling the truth.

Another of the loners was leaving the ship in Rhodes. This was a young fellow named Pinky, who congregated with the Germans and Spillman and Melva and others in the cheap seats. The name Pinky was short for Pinsker. He made a living in Canada working as a teacher in settlements of the Ojibway and Ojib-Cree people. The villages were in remote parts of Canada. The job was well-paid but stressful. Burned-out, was the way he put it.

“For example, the kids are real delinquents sometimes.”

“How does an Ojibway teenager express his delinquency?”

“You wake up in the morning and you see that they’ve covered your house in graffiti — names and swear words and everything. And they go nuts with snowmobiles. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

I smiled at him in what I hoped was an enigmatic way.

“I can tell by the way you’re always asking questions. And you’re the only one who listens to Spillman.”

Pinsker told me he was rather lonely. It was about time he found someone to share his life. He had not found much romance in the Ojibway settlements of northern Canada, and so he had set out on an extended trip, hoping to meet someone. His month working on a kibbutz had not improved his situation, and it had surprised him in other ways. As a Jew he had been shocked by some of what he had seen.

“The kids knew nothing about Judaism. Can you imagine that in Israel?” he said. “A lot of them had never been to a synagogue. They were pre-Bar Mitzvah age, but they didn’t study. I’ve never seen Jews like that — I was surprised by their ignorance.”

“But better behaved than the Ojibway kids?”

“Not really. Some of them were really obnoxious — always fooling,” he said. “What do you think of Israel?”

“The land of contradictions,” I said. I mentioned some of what I had seen. Small land, big contradictions.

“When I was on the kibbutz someone told me a really interesting theory,” Pinsker said. “It’s like this. In the Diaspora, Jews realize that non-Jews are always looking at them and so they strive to be religious. They work, they study difficult subjects, they try to get ahead in the community — they want to excel, and they usually succeed. They know they are seen as Jews and that it’s important that they succeed. Don’t you think that part of it is true?”

“If you say so.”

Pinsker said, “But when they get to Israel they consider that they’ve arrived. They don’t have to prove anything to anyone. They sit around and complain — there’s no need to do anything. Who’s looking? Who cares? They abandon their ambitions and get lazy. That’s why Israel is the way it is, and why it doesn’t seem Jewish.”

Pinsker was staying in Rhodes, hoping to catch a ferry to the Turkish town of Marmaris in the morning. He said good-bye and wandered away to look for a hotel, while I went back to the ship, thinking how little I had learned of the island. But it had been importantly a backdrop for the lives of these travelers, and as a gorgeous location it gave their stories an exoticism that made them memorable. There was, as always, a poignant interplay between the melancholy banalities of the travelers’ tales and the locale of this lovely island.

We were at sea, making for Piraeus all the next day, through the Cyclades — never out of sight of an island, and usually within sight of a half a dozen. On the bridge the captain dreamed of invading Turkey and reclaiming land that he felt was rightly Greece’s. There was bouzouki music inside and cold raw weather outside. There was nowhere to sit on deck. The twenty-eight Slovakians from Bratislava were on their knees in one lounge, praying. The Greeks in another, smoking. The squalor in the cheap seats became remarkable, a piling-up of bags and garbage and supine bodies.

Three nights in a row I had the same dream. I was an actor in a Shakespearean play that might have been Hamlet. I was the main actor, probably Hamlet. This was unclear in the dream because although it was a large and elaborate production I did not know any of my lines — not even one. I did not know the names of the other characters. It was all a muddle and mystery, especially as I had never been in a play in my life. Perhaps it was an anxiety dream about being unprepared and having to improvise. My method of travel was all about improvisation.

Each time I had the dream I was arriving at the theater — a sort of open-air affair, with many people in the audience, and lots of actors and stagehands, most of them greeting me with high hopes. None of them had the slightest idea that I did not know my lines. I would covertly pick up a copy of the play and leaf through its several hundred pages and realize that there was no way that I could learn my part between now and ten minutes from now when the curtain was going up on the first act. I experienced a sense of absurd humiliation and panic, as people greeted me and congratulated me, telling me how they were looking forward to my performance.

Most dreams are merciful. Each night, just before the curtain rose, I awoke.

I continued to play games of “Crappy Joe” with Melva. She was feeling optimistic and fitter than she had in Egypt and Israel, though still on antibiotics. “I’m coming good!” she said. She wanted to be independent. “I’m not a bludger,” she said. “Don’t look back!”

When we arrived at Piraeus we announced where we were going and realized that we were all going to a different place — Melva was staying in Athens, hoping to meet some Australians; the Germans were going to Crete, Spillman to Brindisi, Yegor was vague, Pinsker was gone. The Israelis whose names I never learned were speeding away in their car, heading for Croatia, they would not say why. Spillman said he was depressed — it was cloudy, and cloudy days were awful for him. And then Yegor handed his dog’s rope leash to him. The Greeks laughed. Spillman grew furious as the dog, agitated and confused, nipped other passengers. Then “Johnny Halliday” bit Spillman on the groin. Spillman’s fly was usually open — it was open this morning. He clasped himself and sat down and began to cry, and at that moment someone turned up the bouzouki music.

I hurried to a train, and a bus and a ferry; to Bari, and more trains. All the while I heard Spillman’s shout of hurt and complaint, as Yegor’s dog yapped. But I had not hesitated on the quay. I had been there before.