Magic Bus (12 page)

‘At least the air's cool,' says Rudy, thinking again of beer.

In the course of telling him about my journey, I say, ‘I've never been able to find a proper road map of the overland trail.'

‘Never was one.'

‘But didn't you get lost?'

‘Sometimes there weren't any roads. My first trip across Iran I saw only one paved highway in the whole country. But every few months I'd come back and see the change. One time a town would get its first street lamp. The next there would be a new stretch of tarmac. The third, a roundabout with a fountain and a road sign. Then everything started to look so
American
: police uniforms, Budweiser beer, the Peace Corps.'

As he talks, Rudy lights a cigarette and blows the smoke straight above us toward the trees.

‘Nothing changed in the desert, of course. The road was never paved and overtaking was nasty. You had to get a view several miles ahead to make absolutely sure there were no approaching sand clouds. Once you committed yourself, you couldn't see a thing. I tended to turn the music way up loud when overtaking.'

‘To the soundtrack of your lives?' I ask him.

‘The stereo system was the first thing every driver arranged,' he nods. ‘I played stuff with meaningful lyrics, the tapes getting stretchier and stretchier in the heat. Reeeeur reeeeur.'

Aboard the Silver Dart, Rudy also played the music of the country through which he was driving: marching tunes through Austria's mountain passes, Beethoven's Ninth in Germany,
bouzouki
tapes across Greece,
arabesk
songs in Turkey and
qawwali
chants in Pakistan.

‘As well as kids in Indian headbands, I carried dead-ass dentists, Essex shop-assistants, Welsh council-workers, people who'd spent all their lives in an office and had never left the UK. All of them were looking for an Adventure. I couldn't let the trip be just a bus ride. I had to knock them out with
foreign
vibes.'

With its patchwork radiator and without any windows (they had fallen out on his thirteenth run along the rutted Caspian road), Rudy finally sold the Bedford in Lahore.

‘I don't think there was one original part left in her,' he laughs. ‘Praise Allah for the mechanics outside the Amir Kabir.'

Pakistan International used the Bedford for another decade as an airport courtesy bus.

‘And that was the end of the Silver Dart?'

‘I'd always dreamed of owning a Mercedes,' he recalls, shaking his head. ‘Every trip I'd watched them sail past me, their engine brake going buurrrp burrrrp.'

In 1972, Rudy bought a Mercedes 321 with a 5.6 litre engine and a split windscreen. With its two supplementary 100-gallon fuel tanks, the Last Silver Dart (‘LSD') could cover the 7,250 miles from London to Kathmandu with only two fuel stops – in Greece and Iran.

‘On its first trip, six Italian lesbians got onboard. In the early seventies that was – bam! – in your face. They were proud, defiant and very hairy. They refused to shave any bodily parts.'

At the next table, a customer drinks his tea in the Iranian manner, from a saucer, with a lump of sugar between his teeth. As the waiter refills our glasses, Rudy goes on, ‘Somewhere between Kandahar and Kabul we stopped at a blissed-out hotel. My schedule was always flexible, to say the least, so in that beautiful place I decided to let a day or six slip away. But the lesbians were on a timetable. “Rudy,” said the pretty one, putting down her pipe, “we have to be in Kabul tomorrow. We leave now, yes?” They stood there with their hands on their knives, cutting no slack. When I didn't respond, they said, “Rudy, we don't want to kill
you…” In a flash, half a dozen other passengers jumped up and formed a human chain around me. We left the next day.'

Rudy flicks his ash on the ground. I watch him with close interest as his eyes take on a look of mystification, as he says, ‘Afghanistan, man, was another world. The gate opened and the light cleared. One minute, the world was dull and dusty. The next, the poppies were
luminous
red, the rivers
electric
white, the mountains balanced against the sky. The whole journey went from black-and-white to colour.'

‘Maybe it was the dope,' I say.

‘The border police practically gave the stuff away. They lay on string beds on the customs shed veranda, slicing melons, calling for green tea, saying to us, “This is for you. First quality. Welcome to Afghanistan.”' Rudy smiles, stirs his tea, doesn't drink, says, ‘Baggy Aladdin pants, flowery shawls as big as blankets, hubble-bubbles filled with humungous
chunks
of the finest Masr. My single best moment happened in Kabul. Someone at Friends' Hotel put on the new Steppenwolf album.' He leans forward, lifts his voice and his hands to the table, sings softly about flying free on a magic carpet ride. ‘It doesn't sound like much now but I was blown away.'

He stretches his arms out along the bench, looks up into the trees. I watch his face. He says, ‘I wanted to go back there this trip but the wife wouldn't wear it. All the news about the Taliban and American bombing had scared her. I told her, “Janie, don't get your balls in an uproar. I'm a survivor.” She said to me, “Rudy, honey, you're not immortal any longer.”'

The waiter stands by our lounger, breaking Rudy's concentration, catching my eye. Perhaps he doesn't like hard rock. Or maybe he just wants us to pay the bill.

Rudy's face is flushed, almost as if a discharge of psychic heat is racing through his veins. ‘We were kids, turning nineteen or twenty, questioning and rebelling just like the world itself,' he says as I find my wallet. ‘That synchronicity gave us such a sense of sharing, of possibility.'

‘Can you still smell the patchouli?' I ask.

‘Yeah, I can,' he says without a hint of cynicism. ‘Like it was yesterday.'

As I pay for the tea I think of Laleh again and ask him if, after all his journeys, he feels attached to any single place. He shakes his head. ‘I felt the world was mine and that I belonged to the whole world.' He takes a long, deep breath. ‘I found my little piece of heaven on the road itself.'

The evening light is golden, the shadows now soft. Above our heads a gentle breeze rouses the woodpeckers, stirring beating wings and rustling whispers from the interlocking branches of the poplars and plane trees.

Rudy adds, ‘But I lost it after the Iranian Revolution.'

‘Not just you,' I say.

‘All the guys stopped driving then: Rob and Keith with their Setra, George on Budget Bus, ugly Bob from Chattanooga who had the Volvo. It broke my heart having to stop.'

We're standing now, descending towards the city. I ask, ‘Was driving always a big thing for you?'

‘Since reading travel stories as a boy,' he says.

At the age of eight, Rudy's imagination had been captured by an anthology of automobile journeys in the
Second Motor Book
. In its pages, an army Major FAC Forbes-Leith set out in 1924 in a 14 h.p. Wolseley Felix, intent on being the first man to drive from England to India.

‘I carried the book on both the Bedford and the Merc, along with Heyerdahl and Vonnegut. I suppose Forbes-Leith was my inspiration. He and an amazing pedal car.'

‘What pedal car?'

‘When I was growing up, my uncle had a toy shop in St Austell. One Christmas he gave me a pedal car. It was made by Liberty Brothers – registration LIB 1212, I remember – and had a long bonnet, pneumatic tyres, spoked wheels and little doors with knobs which opened out like this. It was painted buttercup-yellow with dark-green upholstery and silver headlights. When I was very small – about five – I could just squeeze a little girl into the seat next to me,' he says.

‘For a magic carpet ride?'

‘It was such an item in my life. One day I came home from school and my dad had given it away.
My
bloody pedal car.' He's quiet for a moment. Then he says, ‘Hey, did I tell you that I drove the first double-decker bus into Kathmandu?'

Rudy is determined to track down a pre-dinner drink. We agree to meet later and I leave him at the edge of the park. I'm heading back to my hotel and to reach the Metro station must cross a main road. Iranian drivers ignore traffic lights so, to survive, I've learnt to tuck myself in behind groups of pedestrians. As a body, we leave the relative safety of the pavement, striking out into the organized chaos of fast, filthy vehicles, looking straight ahead, not stopping. Horns blare, a bus hurtles down a contraflow lane piping its piercing whistle, a green and white BMW police car slices by my tail.

I duck into the station.

In the ticket hall, every sign is written in Farsi, except for an arrow on a city map reading ‘You Are Here'. On the platform, the first two carriages are reserved for women. I am packed into the male section of the train, pushed up against a middle-aged man with rough, fawn-coloured skin. He starts to talk, says, ‘I have been to the cemetery.'

He extracts from his breast pocket a photograph of a young man, maybe twenty-one years old. In the prime of life. ‘My youth,' he says.

‘Your son,' I say, attempting to correct him.

‘He died 3,212 years ago.'

‘
Days
ago. I am sorry.'

‘He was an artist. A poet. A scholar. A helicopter pilot. I am unfortunate.'

I repeat my regret.

‘He flew for
Ghalicheye Parandeh
. Air Squadron – how you say? – Magic Carpet.' He takes back the photograph as the carriage flickers into darkness. Under the flashing tunnel lights he stares at the black-and-white image of his lost boy. ‘I used to work in the
south with the Americans on oil wells. That is where I learn my English thirty years ago. Now I forget my English. But never I forget my youth.'

‘If you do not allow me to drive you I will eat sorrow,' said Sahar, my lean, persuasive taxi-driver.

Ten minutes ago, he spotted me outside my hotel, advised me to avoid the central bus station, offered instead to drive me the 250 miles south to Isfahan. The price, even before negotiation, was not expensive. Now, we're barrelling out of Tehran in his shattered Paykan as I tell him about the hippie trail. He says, ‘I've been on it. I've been on it.'

But when? Why? He's too young. He must have been born years after the Beatles broke up. Then I notice his eyes.

In the early 1990s, when he was sixteen years old, Sahar's family – itinerant fruit-farmers in the Zagros mountains – decided to send him and his younger brother to England to give them the chance of a better life. Visas were not available for unskilled Qashqa'i boys so their father, a hard-working
khan
who only wanted the best for his family, decided to pay to smuggle them to Britain. The family had contacts – a cousin in the police, relatives on the Turkish border – plus the example of a friend whose own sons had made it to London.

‘His boys have good slippers and their own television,' said the
khan
. ‘My boys have none of these things.'

The fee was exorbitant, almost two years' income, but the boys' earnings would in time pay off the debt and enable the family to plant an acre of orchard.

Only half of Iranians are Persians, descendants of the Elamite and Aryan tribes who first settled the central plateau. Azaris and Kurds make up the largest minorities, followed by a sprinkling of Lors, Arabs and Turkmen. The smallest ethnic groups are proud, independent nomads: Bakhtiaris, Baluchis – whose name means
‘Wanderers' – and Qashqa'is. Since displaced by a grandson of Genghis Khan in 1256, the Qashqa'is have roamed the wilds of Iran, driving vast flocks of sheep from winter pastures on the southern plains to grassy summer highlands in the Zagros.

Sahar was born in a black kilim tent, nursed on horseback, swayed and pitched up into the hills at a few weeks old. During his first, month-long, 400-mile spring migration, his father walked beside son and wife, wearing his cylindrical camel-hair cap, sweeping aside the new grass which grew to the height of a horse's girth. At night, when a hundred tents were pitched along a barren hillside, Sahar was a warm bundle dozing on thick Persian carpets. Around him, his family shared plates of rice, tore off thin leaves of flat bread, talked of the next water hole, a lame camel, the death of a lamb. By lamplight, his mother, unveiled, wearing a bright saffron and green dress with the coins of her necklaces gently ringing, sang old lullabies to him.

His people's high pastures lay to the east of the Karun river, in the shadow of a hill named Sartog, or ‘roof of the world'. The broad, weatherbeaten plateau, 2,600 metres above sea level, was treeless, fertile and fed by springs frothing from its embrace of dusty mountains. Here, Sahar spent his summers, from the age of three collecting dung for the fire, at five minding the goats, by seven drawing water for the compact green oasis of apricots and cherries at the base of the hill. His mother produced for him a baby sister who died and a brother who lived. Sahar promised to look after the boy and taught him to watch the flocks, to twine goat-hair rope, to whistle lambs down from the hill. When he did things wrong, Sahar called him useless, saying he didn't do enough to support the family, but they were really better than the best of friends. On clear dark nights when dogs barked and voices whispered in nearby tents, Sahar and Ali lay on their backs reaching for the stars. Before sunrise, they watched for the rise of the new moon, seeing it only by the dark disc of absent stars.

In the low-lying winter lands the brothers were taught arithmetic and Islamic history in a tent schoolhouse. Their father wanted his boys to learn English, to use a pen and paper, to be respected.
‘I want to see them become something, to look after us when we grow old.' Sahar had a good eye and hands and he excelled at drawing, skills that would later serve him well. Ali preferred playing football.