Better Than Fiction 2 (16 page)

Guido and his partner, Enrique, took us through the jungle, informing us of the medicinal value of every plant and tree, and of the poison in certain ants, snakes, and spiders. They led us on a paddle down the river in dugout canoes to a tiny village on stilts. It was the dry season so their houses were two stories high
until the rain came and the river rose. A few women were out in their yards combing the dirt with homemade brooms. There was a volleyball net in the center of town and Guido arranged a bet between us and some of the village women. Marcy was an excellent player. Tyler and Leo were strong, too, and they poached every ball that came in my direction, but we still lost.

Guido took us the next day to a larger village, with an infirmary and a school. We looked up at the school from the ground. Long blackboards hung on one wall and wooden desk-chair units stood in rows. Maybe I could teach here. I wanted to climb up and see what was written on the board, on scraps of paper, but we moved on.

The next night we went back to Puerto Miguel for their Saturday night dance. It was in the bodega, the only hut with a generator. They had cold beer and a disco ball. They were playing Latin pop music. We bought beers and sat at a long table. Marcy and I made friends with the teenage girls sitting on a bench nearby. With them were a few younger girls. The tiniest of them was bawling. When I asked why she was crying, a girl told me that she was scared. Scared of what? I asked. Scared of you all. I told them not to be scared of us, and two of them asked Tyler to dance. The three took to the dance floor, smiling madly the whole time. An eleven-year-old boy named Johnny asked me to dance and, after a while, even the way cool older boys, in their button-down shirts and high tops in the corner, shuffled out onto the floor under the disco ball.

On the way back, Guido drove the boat full throttle. The only light was a flashlight Enrique held, indicating with quick jerks the place Guido should go, making sure the path was free of caimans, then shutting it off so we could see by natural light. The stars exploded above us, every inch of sky lit.

On our last morning on the Amazon, alone in my little tent, I wrote in my journal. I wrote about how much I missed writing. I made pledges to send out parts of the novel to literary magazines, to start volunteering, to start saving for more travel. ‘It has been a good trip,’ I concluded, ‘if only for making me want what I already have.’

We packed up and got back in Guido’s motorboat. We would fly to Lima the next day. But in a basement hotel room in Iquitos that afternoon, alone with Tyler for the first time in six days, I broke down sobbing as hard as the little girl at the bodega, and we finally said so many of the things we’d been feeling but not saying for so long. It was an imperfect conversation, unskilled as we both were at really expressing our emotions. But it was a beginning.

From Lima, Tyler and I continued on to Boston, where the condor took us up in his talons and carried us swiftly into our future.

‘A
man is hiding out at the Swiss Embassy at the moment. He was tipped off that he is “next for assassination”, so if you see men in black coats eating sunflower seeds they are security police waiting in case he runs for it.’

My friend Alice speaks in her soft English voice as she pours Azerbaijani tea. It is minty, medicinal, delicious.

‘Okay,’ I say, as if this is perfectly normal.

Our maps are spread across the table in Alice’s flat in old town Baku. The minaret outside the window is a thousand years old and beyond it fog folds over the Caspian Sea. Steamboats from Turkmenistan come in and out of sight. I run my finger along the blue thread of road we are about to drive along, officially the M4, known locally as Sheki Road. It runs from Baku to Mingacevir, following the course of the Southern Caucasus Mountains. We are leaving in ten minutes, but I am
having an internal crisis: I am not sure I want to go, but I don’t know how to confess this to Alice.

My visit to Azerbaijan has coincided with Novruz, the celebration of New Year and spring. Outside, flutes play and children run around in traditional hats, but I am far from festive as I do my final bag check: phone, iPad, charger, camera. What is it I am feeling? I know: fear.

Everything in Alice’s flat is beautiful. The carpets are antiques from Kashgar and Kazakhstan. The books on the shelves are in seven different languages and yet, despite this luxurious comfort, there is an odd atmosphere. The Azerbaijanis like to know what she is doing. Her phone is tapped, emails read, surveillance maintained. I keep checking corners of her rooms for cameras.

‘Are you ready?’

I zip up my rucksack. It’s now or never: tell her that I don’t feel safe. But she is at the door, patting her pockets, checking that she has keys, ready to go.

Alice
, I say. Although I don’t; I pick up my bag, walk behind her.

It was a confusion of geography. I thought I knew where Azerbaijan was, but I only looked it up on Google Maps the day before flying and it showed me something different. It wasn’t nestled against Kazakhstan as I’d thought, but instead was
this
side of the Caspian. It had a border with Russia and a contested war zone with Armenia, both of which I knew about, but also two other significant borders: Iran and Iraq. As if telepathic, my dad texted at that exact moment.

Do you realise where you are going a few hours drive miles from Mosul in Iraq?

I examined the distances; he was right. I was heading straight towards the strip of the globe regularly shown in the media as full of lootings, war, fighting, kidnaps, beheadings, uprisings, jihadi brides, and death cults. In short: terror. On the other hand, I was thinking, Azerbaijan: isn’t this the land of glamour, oil, songs, and Eurovision? My head awash with stereotypes and nerves, I looked again at those borders. Close to Kirkuk. To Baghdad.

I considered pulling out, but as is the way with trips, the momentum was stronger than me. To bail on Alice the day before would be mortifying, but more than that, what I couldn’t shake was the feeling that
forces
told me I should not go to this part of the world, and the question was: did I believe them? Before I knew it, I was buying supplies of water from a tiny shop and walking down the cobbled steps of Baku’s old town towards Alice’s dust-covered 4X4.

‘The thing about a road trip,’ Alice says, as she swerves to avoid an oncoming Mercedes on the wrong side of the road, ‘is that we are free. We can do what we like.’

‘That’s true,’ I say without conviction. Alice’s car has diplomatic plates so she can park anywhere. This is handy, but it also means people peer in to see who we are. Alice insists on smiling and speaking to everyone, whereas my instinct is to shuffle down in the seat and be as invisible as possible.

I take out my camera and video the passing blurred world to calm my tension. The oil-slicked glitz of Baku city quickly transforms into ramshackle bungalows squatting at the feet of electricity pylons. The sky clears, the sun is with us. We turn on some music. Soon there are no more houses, no trees, instead a
moonscape, desert swells of land with speckles of green.

‘In a few months, it’ll be parched and barren,’ Alice says.

I write down the names of the places we drive through: Mushvugabad, Gobustan, Jangi, Sabir. We cross the river Agsu, a trickle in the middle of a dry bed of stones. Along the roadside people wave, trying to get us to pull up and purchase things. Sheep are penned in cages with carcasses hanging next to them. There are violets for sale, spring hyacinths. We stop and buy a bunch and the powerful hyacinth smell overpowers the car. I smile at one teenage boy holding up a bag of anonymous green herbs but, as we drive on, he throws a stone and it hits the rear of the car.

In the dip of a valley, a deserted amusement park sprawls along the edge of the road. The unmoving Ferris wheel and shuttered-down cafes remind me of my home and I have a pang, missing my kids, who might be walking along the seafront now.

‘So is it very Islamic where we are going? Should I have brought an abaya?’

‘It’s practising Muslim, of course. In Baku it’s a fairly relaxed version; in the mountains, it’s more Caucasian.’

I have no idea what this means. Alice looks at the clock. We are meeting one of her friends for lunch in the town of Shamakhi, which is, I am told, famous for divine carpets and tin roofs and carpentry.

‘Perfect timing,’ she says as we roll into the car park of an unassuming cafe that has the pit-stop look shared by roadside diners the world over: dodgy toilets, tired-looking families, adequate food, smokers smoking.

Alice’s friend is a writer named Ayten Caravanshaz and we three chat about books, life, travel. We eat eggs scrambled with tomatoes and drink chai. We are the only women in the cafe
aside from a couple of babushkas with tiny children on their knees opposite. Men sit in small groups talking quietly. Our conversation turns to Iraq, Syria.

‘You realise,’ Ayten says, lighting a cigarette, ‘that many here think that Isis and terrorism are created by the British to make trouble.’

‘Really?’ I say. ‘Is that how you see it?’

She nods. ‘How do you see it?’

Alice looks carefully at me.

‘Somehow the world feels hysterical. More unstable than ever.’ I want to articulate how strange it is to be overwhelmed with fear like this. I’ve crossed borders between the Palestinian Territories and Israel, I’ve travelled through Mongolia and Northwest China, across the whole Middle East. I don’t know why I am nervous here. Is the world more hostile than it previously was? Or have I changed, become fearful?

‘If I listened to the UK Foreign Office advice, I wouldn’t go anywhere now. I ignore it because I want to travel, but I’m not a brave foreign correspondent or one of those camera guys taking pictures with bombs flying around their heads.’

Alice scoffs. ‘You certainly are not.’

‘What am I, then?’

‘You are a writer,’ Ayten says. ‘You travel in a different way.’

In my head I picture a real travel writer, not an imposter like me: a person endlessly drawing maps on napkins, catching buses instead of taxis, hitchhiking, speaking obscure languages, unaffected by borders or politics. Not sliding down the seat of the car to avoid eye contact with men on the streets. Alice and Aytan begin to discuss a trip they are planning in the summer to cross the Iranian border.

‘Really?’ I say. ‘Iran?’

Alice looks at me with surprise. ‘Yes. I believe that people are friendly, if you just speak to them. It helps if you have the language of course and my Farsi isn’t great, but you do your best. Doors open. They really do.’

I listen to their plan to visit Lankaran, the Azerbaijani region that borders Iran and the excursions they will make across what sounds like a final frontier, the very definition of inaccessible other-land. I excuse myself and go in search of toilets. As I navigate my way through a scrub-land behind the cafe occupied by chickens, I try to work out my anxiety: it is true that the logistics I need to put into place before I go anywhere these days are complicated, with kids and the pausing of life. Neither Alice nor Aytan has children, does that give them additional courage? I’m not sure. I can imagine both of them packing a child into a rucksack and heading off into remote hills.

When I emerge from the toilets it is as if a switch has been flipped. The weather has changed into sleeting rain, the sky a despondent grey, a low cloud trying to snow.

Aytan bangs her fist on the bonnet of the car and then waves.

‘Enjoy
Mabrouk Novruz
! Jump over the fires!’

‘Are you really going into Iran?’ I say as we trundle along the road towards worsening weather.

‘Definitely.’

I can’t decide if she is the sane one or me.

I have brought only one book with me on this trip: Knut Hamsun’s
In Wonderland
, a description of a journey he took through Russia and the Caucasus. I read passages out
to Alice as we drive.
An almost sleepless night on account of the Caucasian fever and Caucasian bedbugs…
I like the way he writes about travel. He describes a powerful need to be in fantastical strange places but, once there, he is full of an unwanted homesickness and the journey itself triggers memories of the past. When in Baku he yearns to reach Iran, Persia generally, but he never gets there.