“Nous allons à Delhi,” Lissie answers in hesitant French.
“Eh bien, montez-vous et soyez à l’aise. Je peux vous conduire jusqu’à Teheran.”
The driver’s name is Jean-François Bertaut, and he is transporting a load of heavy farm machinery from Marseilles to Teheran. He tells them this, after realizing how sparse Lissie’s French is (three years of it at the Henderson School, another semester of it at Brenner), in a heavily accented English that could provoke laughter were he not their benefactor on an alien road that is already succumbing to the long shadows of night.
In the roadside gloom beyond the window, Lissie sees a baggy-pantsed woman drawing water from a well, sees an ox-cart loaded with earthen jugs and driven by a man wearing a fur hat and a long mustache, sees terraced cornfields, and sunflowers growing in wild profusion and then — she thinks surely it is a mirage — a camel caravan! The laden beasts plod along in the dusk, men in turbans and flowing robes walking beside them, the dust rising to cause a further diffusion of the rapidly waning light. “Look, Paul!” she says, and he turns from where he is sitting beside her as the truck rumbles past the caravan, a dozen camels in all, she guesses. “Yeah,” he says, “wow,” and she thinks, I’m in Asia.
The driver wants to know what is happening in the United States, particularly among the young people. He is himself in his fifties, Lissie guesses, a rotund little man wearing a peaked woolen cap, a gray jacket over a green V-necked sweater, and a tan shirt. His eyes are a pale, faded blue, his nose bulbous and interlaced with thin red veins, the mark of a heavy drinker. He has a thick, blondish mustache. When he takes off his cap to mop a red handkerchief over the top of his head, Lissie is surprised to discover that he is almost entirely bald.
His frame of reference as it pertains to the young people of France is what he calls the “minirevolution” that occurred in Paris during the spring of 1968, when students took over the Sorbonne, openly smoking marijuana in the courtyard and demanding constitutional reform, chanting “De Gaulle, adieu! De Gaulle, adieu!” and precipitating a pitched battle with the French riot police in the Latin Quarter. Jean-François was there at the time, visiting his sister; he saw the armored trucks and water cannons, he personally observed the police firing tear-gas grenades at the students and workers, who in retaliation hurled Molotov cocktails and cobblestones they had torn up from the streets. He can understand the attitude of the workers — eight million of them went on strike, demanding higher wages and shorter hours — but why the students? What was their complaint? Paul and Lissie (he pronounces her name in the French manner — “Leez”) are both young people, perhaps they can explain to him what is troubling today’s youth, including his own son who is somewhere in Holland right this moment, “Peut-être qu’il fume l’herbe ou pire, eh, as I have coming to expect.”
They would have sounded inarticulate at best even to Englishspeaking adults back home as they, or more accurately Paul — Lissie has already begun to doze as the blackness of night surrounds the lumbering truck — tries to tell about the war in Vietnam, and the way kids all over America are being dumped on, and about the stupid laws regarding something harmless like marijuana, and about the corruption of the American government, and the nine-to-five mentality of the American male, and the corporate structure that is stifling individuality, and the oppression of women back in the States, and the emphasis on materialism, and the—
“Ah, oui, oui,” Jean-François says, not understanding at all.
It is, perhaps, not the best of all possible ways to be seeing a foreign country, especially one as exotic as this one. The road is a route traveled by caravans centuries before Christ was born, skirting the Black Sea until it angles off toward Ankara, and then never veering more than a hundred miles inland as it skewers Yozgat, Sivas, Erzincan and Erzurum, coming within fifty miles of the Russian border as it swoops down toward Diyadin and then Gürbulak, the last town on the Turkish side before entering Iran. Lissie must content herself with only glimpses of the countryside as the truck rumbles along on the relatively good road at a steady fifty-mile-an-hour clip except where there are excavations or detours (and there are many), at which times Jean-François slows down to a snail’s pace that enables her to appreciate more fully the strangeness of the nation through which they are traveling.
Summer is full upon the land here in the north of Turkey. In the apricot and apple orchards, the trees are already bearing fruit. Oxen and mules, horses, and here and there a straining man, pull ancient plows as they furrow the earth. Behind them, swarthy women wrapped in long scarves knotted over the forehead, draped about the throat, hanging down the back, squat to pick their potatoes or onions. Everywhere, the voices of the muezzin summon the faithful to their prayers. She learns to tell time by the chanting voices that float mellifluously from the minarets at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and the beginning of night, a darkness that falls with a sudden hush as the voices echo and die.
The lilting voices of children rising and falling on a sloping green field as they herd cattle homeward at dusk. The Kurdish voices of the men in the coffee house at a truck stop outside Imranli, rumbling out through the open arched doorway, not a woman in the room, the men mustached and bearded, two of them smoking water pipes, their dark eyes studying blond Lissie as she pauses in the doorway, all conversation stopping; she quickly takes Paul’s arm and follows Jean-François to a stand selling hot sausages and a drink that tastes like warm lemonade. The voices of shepherds calling to each other, leather smocks over cotton trousers, skullcaps and beards, a single star gleaming in the summertime sky.
The sheep are wearing blue beads around their necks — what are they for, she wonders. They pass farmhouses without electricity, the feeble glow of candles shining behind paneless windows. They pass fields of plants Jean-François identifies as poppies — “Coquelicots, vous savez,” — and vineyards bursting with young grape. As they come closer to the Iranian border, she can see in the distance the snow-covered peak of Mount Ararat, and she wonders all at once if Noah’s Ark is really up there someplace, as promised by the guidebook she purchased in Ankara.
The distance from Istanbul to the border is some 1,200 kilometers, which she figures at six-tenths of a mile for an approximate distance of 720 miles. Jean-François picked them up outside Izmit on the evening of the fifth. By his reckoning, they will reach the border early on the morning of the eighth; he is averaging thirty-five, forty miles an hour, and sleeping only when he is utterly exhausted, pulling the huge truck over to the side of the road whenever his eyelids begin to droop, catching an hour’s sleep here, two hours there, pushing on again as soon as he is refreshed.
It is four-thirty in the morning when they pass through the sleeping Turkish town of Gürbulak. Turkish customs at the border gives them no trouble at all. Jean-François knows some of the men on duty, one of whom speaks a bastard French, and they pay scant attention to his passport, his visa and his various other papers. The one who speaks French glances cursorily at Lissie’s passport and visa, and then studies Paul’s. Nodding, he hands the papers back and says a few words to Jean-François in French Lissie cannot understand but which she takes to be a comment about herself since the words are accompanied by a leer and a laugh she thinks is lewd. Waving, the man passes them through.