“I don’t know.” Val was scared, I could tell. “Maybe. Probably not.”
The clouds looked low enough to touch. It grew dark. The darkness no longer made me feel wrapped up and safe. I could imagine a precipitous drop on one side of the narrow road and a looming mountain about to crash down on us on the other. I drove for another hour, barely able to see the road ahead through the thick snow and the cracked windscreen, relying on Val to guide me.
“I can’t go any further. I’m too tired.”
It was hard to see if there was anywhere to stop, but eventually Val steered me to a place where the narrow ridge we were following widened out a little. He got out and checked that it was safe to pull over. It was freezing cold. We unzipped the sleeping bags and piled them on top of each other. I didn’t sleep head to tail. I lay in the middle close to Val. He put his arm around me. I was so tired even thoughts of being attacked by Turkish bandits or rolling off the mountain couldn’t keep me awake. That night, I had endless dreams of driving—not over Turkish mountains, but across the Nullarbor. There was no snow, it was unbearably hot, but Dad wouldn’t stop and he’d locked the doors so that we couldn’t get out of the car.
Eighteen
Hassles
“Can you see to drive?” Val asked.
I was peering through the crazy-paving windscreen the next morning.
“I can see through the cracks, but you’ll have to keep your eyes on the road all the time, in case I miss something.” At least it wasn’t snowing.
I’d straightened out the bent windscreen wiper, reconnected a wire and got it working again. We drove under a heavy sky, but there was only a little flurry of snow first thing. It was the most unfriendly landscape I’d ever seen—sharp and hard and colourless, not a tree or bush anywhere. No one spoke. Our surroundings seemed to suck up cheerfulness.
The road improved a little as the morning progressed, but I’d had enough of mountains. I was praying for a flat straight road to appear around the next bend.
Dolf was still working on his song for Ulla. I’d heard the same sequence of eight notes about five hundred times.
“Dolf, can you give it a rest. I can’t concentrate with that noise.”
I glimpsed him in the rear-view mirror. He looked wounded and I felt bad.
“Where’s your flute, Val? Can’t you two play something together?”
“It’s not a flute, it’s a tin whistle.”
“I don’t care what it’s called,” I hissed. “Just stop him playing that tune.”
He pulled it out of his rucksack. “What do you want us to play?”
“Anything as long as it’s not by the Rolling Stones.”
He played classical pieces and more modern bits, all wound together. Dolf strummed along, almost always managing to keep in key. The only part I recognised was the flute bit from the end of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”.
I’m not musical at all. I tried to learn recorder at school, but I could never get the hang of scales. I’m always impressed by people who can pick up an instrument and play without sheet music.
“That was beautiful, Val. How come you can play so well?”
“I had music lessons from the age of six and I played the flute in the school orchestra.” He polished the whistle on his jeans. “My family wanted me to become a professional musician.”
The closest I’d ever come to being a musician was when I sang backing vocals on a Movers and Shakers demo record.
“That’s five things,” I said.
“What?”
“I told you five things about me ten minutes after we met. It must have taken me ten days to get five things out of you.”
“I didn’t realise it was so important.”
At last we started to descend. We were still high up, but there were villages again, squashed into little valleys. The houses were mud-brick cubes, some with grass growing on their roofs. Apart from an electricity wire strung between leaning posts, I don’t think those places would have changed much in hundreds of years.
There were other groups of low square buildings with flat roofs, made of cement blocks instead of mud. They were military camps. I knew that because of the tanks parked outside.
“You see that mountain?” Val said
“I’m not blind. Of course I can see the mountains.”
“That one in particular.”
He was pointing to the highest peak, which had a crown of snow and a halo of cloud. “That’s Mount Ararat.”
“How do you know that?”
He shrugged. “We flew over it once. It’s where Noah’s Ark is supposed to have landed.”
“There’s a town in Victoria called Ararat.” We’d driven through it when we went to Melbourne one year.
“Is there a mountain there?”
I laughed.
“From memory it’s near a range of low, drab green hills which are nothing like that.”
“It must have been an early settler’s idea of a joke.”
And then the mountains came to an end. The clouds stopped as if someone had drawn a line that they weren’t allowed to cross. There was blue sky. The sharp rocks softened, tufts of whatever it is that grows there in next-to-no soil appeared. I pulled down the window to let in the warm air. A few scattered fields appeared with sparse but green crops growing in the sunlight. Then there was a town visible on the plain beneath us—a big town, a flat sprawl of square brown buildings with the occasional dome and minaret breaking the monotony.
“I’m starving,” I said.
My last meal had been a few snacks that had passed for lunch the day before.
“We’ve only just got going,” Val said. “We can’t stop yet, we’ve already lost too much time.”
In all the drama, I’d almost forgotten about Alun. But Val hadn’t.
“We have to eat.”
A rusty sign written in Arabic and English and riddled with bullet holes told us the town was called Dogubayazit. We needed fuel, so Val grudgingly allowed me to stop. I drove around for half an hour looking for somewhere that sold diesel. Eventually, I found a leaking antique pump behind a car repair yard. I pleaded with Val and he said we could have breakfast and even sit down to eat it.
He chose a little cafe with wooden benches beneath a rickety verandah from where we could keep an eye on the taxi. I made a pig of myself, ignoring the small crowd that was gathering to watch the spectacle of a foreign woman eating. My concentration on the food was broken when I heard a voice call out in English.
“Hey, you cats!” It was the Danish guy. He greeted us like old friends, even though I still didn’t know his name.
“I saw this crazy taxi,” he said, patting Gertrude’s bonnet. “I thought it was the American girls.”
“No, it’s us,” I said through a mouthful of rice.
“It looks not so good,” he said when he saw the windscreen. “You have some problems, I think.”
“One or two.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen the two Mercedes, have you?” Val asked.
“We’re trying to find Alun and Ulla,” I explained.
“No. I didn’t see them.”
He sat down at the table. I offered him my last kebab, and I wasn’t sorry he refused.
“Where’s ... your friend?” I didn’t know her name either.
His smile disappeared.
“Kirsten? She has gone.”
“Gone where?”
“To Afghanistan.”
“You didn’t want to go?”
He sighed. What was it about the East that lured girls away, leaving lovesick boys behind?
“We met this guy in Ankara. An English cat. He was into eastern religion, but modified for westerners. He said people from Europe need training to let go of their bad habits, their selfish ways. We are taught to be greedy capitalist pigs from a baby, and have no idea how to be spiritual. Not like people from the East.”
I’d come across quite a few eastern types who’d tak
en to capitalism like ducks to water, but I kept that to myself.
“He will start an ashram in Nepal. For westerners.”
Suddenly he had my attention. I’d heard that story before.
“At first I thought he was a really together guy. He had good stories about travelling in Africa, meeting the Blue Men of the Sahara, taking penicillin to small villages. Then we saw him again, hitching outside Kirrikale. He was looking for a ride to Erzurum. He says, our meeting is meant to happen, no coincidence. He rode with us for two days. But then I realised he was trying to ... I do not know the English word. Like when the government wants to get men to join the army.”
“Recruit?”
He nodded. “He said he wanted assistants, lieutenants he called them, to help him organise his ashram. I said no we are doing our own thing. But Kirsten she wanted to join him. He said they would go to Nepal. They took the car. It is hers.”
“What was his name, this guy?”
“Billy.”
“Are you going after her?” Val asked.
“I thought I would, but Afghanistan is a bad trip, that’s what I’ve heard. Now I am thinking I would like to hitch to Israel. Some Israelis we met in Greece told me about life on a kibbutz. It sounds like a place where I could get my head together. Simple. Growing vegetables. I think I would like that.”
Val was anxious to get back on the road. We were just getting up to go.
“Hey, I have something to show you.” The Danish guy dug into his shoulder bag. “Photographs. I got them developed in Ankara.”
He spread a pile of black and white photos on the table. There were lots of shots of Kirsten, in various poses, in various places—outside a Swiss chalet, on a gondola, next to some Greek ruins. He sorted through them and pulled a few out.
“These I took in Istanbul, that night. You know, the acid trip?”
Those photos were completely different to the sharp, well-framed photos he’d just shown us. They were out of focus, people’s heads were cut off, some were just unidentifiable blurs.
“That night. Wow. It was a real head-trip for me. I think that was when the break between me and Kirsten began.”
I don’t remember seeing him with a camera, but there was the proof. Val, Dolf and I looked through the photos in silence. There was the night that had changed everything, frozen in shades of grey. There were more photos of Kirsten; one of Ulla stirring her pot; another of Dolf, Ulla and Val by the fire. Dolf looked ill. Ulla was sitting in the lotus position smiling a mean, satisfied smile, like a cat with a mouse under its paw. Val was looking in the other direction away from them. There was another photo. Val and I went to pick it up at the same time. I just beat him to it. It was of us when he was fastening the bracelet around my ankle. He was concentrating hard and I looked like a child getting the Christmas present she hadn’t dared to imagine she’d get, still expecting that someone was going to snatch it away and say they were only kidding. There was also a photo of Alun and Wasim. Wasim was talking. His hands were blurs in front of him as he made his point. Alun was staring at him, hanging onto his every word; there was a faint smile on his face and firelight in his eyes.
“Take whichever you want,” the Danish guy said.
Dolf picked up the photo of Ulla cooking. “I take dis one.”
I took four photos. I wanted that time back, not when we were under the influence of LSD, but when we were all together. I missed Alun.
“Thanks,” I said. “I hope things work out for you.”
“I hope you find your friend,” he said.
We reached the Iranian border mid-afternoon. It looked like a military roadblock. There was the usual collection of unattractive buildings made of cement blocks and three or four bored-looking men in uniforms just like in Yugoslavia and Turkey, but their uniforms were smarter and better fitting; their guns looked like they would actually work, and there were tanks.
There was a long queue of cars. While we were waiting, Val struck up a conversation with an Australian who was crossing into Iran on a bus. He was the first Australian I’d met since I’d left London. I thought he might have news from home, but he was from Sydney and he’d been living in Europe for three years.
“There’s been a cholera outbreak,” he said. “The border’s been open for less than a week. You guys are lucky. Some of the people on the bus had to wait for nearly a month in that town back there. What’s it called? Doggy Biscuit?”
There were ten or more hippies on the bus, as well as a well-dressed American woman who was looking for her brother.
“He left home five years ago to get out of the draft,” she said. “Last we heard of him was from India about two years ago.”
She gave us a photo of him and a phone number to ring reverse charges if we came across him.
“In Ankara, they told us the bus went all the way to Tehran,” the Australian was complaining. “And that’s what we paid for, but when we got here, they said it was the end of the line.”
He shook his head, looking embarrassed at being taken in. “I’m not sorry to be leaving this country.”
After an hour we reached the head of the queue. While one of the guards poked through our luggage with the muzzle of his gun, another peered in the window and said something in a foreign language. It was a process I was getting used to. I opened my passport at the page with the Iranian visa I’d got back in Ankara and handed it over to the unsmiling guard.
“Why do they have to be so unfriendly?” I said.
Val was leaning across me to hand over his passport.
“Wouldn’t you be pissed off if you were stuck here with no chance of leaving, and you had to watch all these people with the freedom to go somewhere else?”
The guard gestured with his fingers, like an underhand wave, and said something else. I could smell his aftershave.
“What does he want?”
The man poked his finger into his arm.
“Vaccination certificates,” Val said.
We all got out of the taxi. I searched through my bag and found the yellow booklet that the travel agent had given me back in Adelaide. It was a miracle I’d brought it, since I hadn’t needed it to go to Paris. I’d had all the compulsory injections before I left Adelaide plus the optional ones—just to be on the safe side. I had stamps on the smallpox, cholera and yellow fever pages. The guard grunted as if disappointed and stamped my passport. It made a smudged mark on top of my nice Iranian visa.
The guard opened Val’s passport. His vaccination booklet was stuck in the back; it was worn and grubby around the edges. The guard grunted again.
I could see Val’s name on his passport.
“Valentine Charles Edward de Lacey. That’s quite a name.”
The guard took Dolf’s passport and then held out his hand again. Dolf shook his head.
“I have no certificate for vaccinations,” he said, pronouncing the word the French way. He probably didn’t know it was the same word in English. I guess the Rolling Stones hadn’t really prepared him for that sort of situation.
A smile blossomed on the border guard’s face.
“Cholera,” he said and pointed to a building.
Dolf blinked.
“You have to have a cholera injection, man,” Val said. “They won’t let you in if you don’t.”
Dolf blinked again and scratched his mozzie bites.
“You can still go home,” I said. “Your family must be worried about you, Dolf.”
I wasn’t in a position to be critical. My parents thought I was in London, flatting with my best friend, selling clothes and watching the cricket.
“You can hitch with someone going the other way.”
The border guard hadn’t finished with us though. He was gesturing to Val for more documents.
“Carnet,” he said, pointing to Gertrude. “Carnet de passage.”
“Why is he speaking French?”
This time Val didn’t know what he was talking about. The border guard pointed at
one of the concrete buildings and waved us away impatiently. I did a U-turn and parked the car near the money exchange place.
A very old, very dirty Bedford bus with England to India painted on the side was parked there. The passengers were coming out of the money exchange building. They were all English and very amused to find a London taxi so far from home. The girls hadn’t got the message about travelling in Muslim countries yet and were wearing shorts and miniskirts, oblivious to the stares of every man that passed.
“You need a permit to take a motor into Iran,” the driver said cheerfully. “You have to pay for the privilege.”
“Shit,” said Val.
“It’s like a bond, so you don’t sell your vehicle in Iran. You get most of it back if you take the car out again. I hope you’ve got plenty of bread, man,” the Englishman said. “A carnet doesn’t come cheap.”
Dolf went into one concrete building to get his vaccination. Val went into another to find out about carnets. I visited the toilets, which were squat toilets of course, but relatively clean and they actually flushed.
Dolf was the first to emerge. He had one sleeve rolled up, a protective hand over his upper arm and a look of mild terror on his face. Val looked just as stunned when he came back to the taxi.
“The carnet costs 26,785 rials,” he said.
“Wow, that sounds like a lot. How much is that in real money?”
“About a hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Sugar. I don’t suppose you’ve got that much?”
He shook his head. Dolf nursed his arm and tears welled in his eyes. He had the photo of Ulla in his hand.
The passengers were getting back on the Bedford bus, the driver came over to us with a tanned young man with short cropped blond hair.
“This is Gerry,” the driver said. “He might be able to help you out.”
“Hey,” the young man said. He sounded American. He was wearing crisp new jeans and a checked sports shirt. “I believe you’re having some hassles getting across the border. Carnet trouble.”
All three of us looked at him dubiously.
“My wife and I are working here in Iran. We’re archeology students with the Peace Corps on an excavation. We want to sell our car in Iran,” the man said. “We have a carnet that we won’t be cashing in. We are looking for someone who might be interested in buying it.”