Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Read online

  His Mukhabarat, the secret police, are omniscient. His visage is omnipresent. His power is omnipotent.

  And he is deranged. He says he’s the sun of Africa. He threatens to ban money and schools. He vanquished beauty and art. He liquidates those who oppose him. He says he can’t help it if the people of Libya love him so much, they plaster his portrait up everywhere. Fuck him. I wanted to rip his face from the walls.

  * * *

  If you go to Libya, you simply must visit Ghadamis. Known by travelers as the jewel of the Sahara, it’s worth all the money and all the hassle you have to put up with to get there.

  In the early 1980s, Qaddafi’s regime emptied the ancient Berber Saharan city by decree. Everyone was shepherded into the modern concrete “new town,” which begins right outside the mysterious tomblike adobe gates of the old.

  The old city doesn’t look like a city when you’re inside. It looks like a vast underground system of tunnels and caves lit by skylights. It’s not underground; it was built with a roof over the top to keep the infernal summer heat out and the meager winter warmth in. Some of the streets (which really are more like passages) are pitch black even at noon. There was no need for light. The inhabitants had memorized the walls.

  It is not a small town. It’s an enormous weatherproofed adobe mini metropolis. There are seven quarters and seven gates, one for each resident tribe. Everything you’d expect in a city is there—streets, homes, offices, markets, public squares and mosques, all made of painted mud and sparkling gypsum. The only thing missing from the old city is people.

  If Libya were a normal country—and if Ghadamis were a normal city—the old city would be packed with hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, Internet cafés and desert-adventure tour offices. But Libya is not a normal country, and Ghadamis is an unwilling ghost town.

  My travel agency replaced Abdul with a second guide for the trip to Ghadamis and into the desert. “Yasir,” I said to him. “Why were the people of Ghadamis forced out of their homes?”

  I knew the answer already. It was part of Qaddafi’s plot to Arabize the Berbers and to construct the New Man, a ludicrous ideal hatched in the Soviet Union. (Berbers were also forbidden to write anything publicly in their own language.) But I wanted to see if a local was permitted to say it. He couldn’t—or at least didn’t—answer my question. He only shook his head and laughed nervously. There were others around who could hear.

  The old city was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. A few engineers were inside shoring up the foundations of an old mosque.

  “It’s astonishing,” one of them said when I chatted him up. He was an Arab who had studied engineering at a Western university and spoke masterful English in fully formed paragraphs. “The sophistication and aesthetic perfection in the old city contrasts markedly with the failures in the new.”

  No kidding. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world. Neither have you. Because there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. And there never will be.

  “We’re here to make this place livable again because someday, you know . . .” He trailed off, but I knew what he wished he could say. Someday Qaddafi would die. When his bones pushed up date palms, the people of Ghadamis could abandon their compounds of concrete and move back into the city that’s rightfully theirs.

  I returned to the old city at night by myself and saw a single square of light in an upstairs room of an ancient house. The owners were forbidden to stay there at night. But it was nice to know that some of them still left the lights on.

  * * *

  When you visit another country, it’s inevitable: you are going to meet other travelers. And you’ll almost certainly talk about other places you’ve been. Go to Costa Rica, and conversations will turn to Guatemala and Bolivia. If you hang out in Cancún, you’ll meet people who like the Virgin Islands and Hawaii. In Paris you’ll hear talk of London, Prague and Vienna.

  So what happens when you bump into others in Libya? In Tripoli, I met a photographer who spends every summer in Darfur. Out in the dunes, I met a long-haired, goofy, bespectacled English guy named Felix. This was the first time he had ever set eyes on a desert. (He really went for it.) He had a thing for totalitarian countries. “I like to visit places based on ideas,” he said. Then he checked himself. “That doesn’t mean I like the ideas.”

  “Where to next, Felix?” I said.

  “North Korea, if I can get in.”

  “I’d like to see North Korea,” I said. “But after that, what’s left?”

  “Only the moon,” he said and laughed. “This is great, meeting you here. It’s nice to know someone else who’s open to nuttiness.”

  You’ll find nuttiness in Libya even out in the boonies. On the treacherous so-called road from Ghadamis into the dunes, someone used an enormous piece of ordnance that looked like a mini-Scud missile to mark a 3-foot chassis-busting hole in the ground.

  Yasir couldn’t take me on that road in his van. So we hired Bashir to come with us. He was a burly man with a turban and a beard who taught philosophy in school. We didn’t hire him, though, for his brain. We wanted his Land Rover.

  The three of us left Ghadamis and headed straight toward the Algerian gate only a couple of miles away.

  Just beyond it, a 300-foot-tall mountain of sand was piled in layers.

  “You see that sand,” Bashir said and pointed. I could hardly take my eyes off it. “Two weeks ago I drove some Japanese tourists out here. The old guy asked me who built the dune.” He chuckled and shook his head. “I told him, well, my grandfather worked for a while on that project, but now he’s dead.”

  “We can’t go there,” Yasir said. “We must visit Libyan sand. Last month some German tourists were kidnapped right on the other side of the border.”

  More than 100,000 people were killed in Algeria during the 1990s and into the 2000s in a civil war between the military regime and Islamist fanatics.

  “Have you ever been to Algeria?” I asked.

  “No one here goes to Algeria,” he said.

  We drove over a hill and were surrounded on three sides by dizzying, towering, impossibly sized dunes. We slogged our way to the top, gasping, with calves and thighs burning, not daring to look down, to watch the sunset.

  The top was unreal. The desert floor was another world far below ours. If birds were in flight, I could have looked down on them. On the western horizon was the Grand Erg Oriental, a sea of dunes bigger than France that looked from the side like a distant Andes of sand. Bashir prepared bread and sticky mint tea.

  I watched the sun go down and the sky go out.

  By Libyan standards, this was radical freedom. Life goes on even in countries like this one. No government, no matter how oppressive, can control all the people all the time—especially not in the vast and empty Sahara.

  We ran down the sand and climbed back into the Land Rover. Bashir hit the gas. He zigged us and zagged us up, down and across the 300-foot-tall dunes along the border with Algeria. At one point—and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious—he said we had actually crossed into Algeria.

  The stars came out. A full moon rose, turning the sand into silver. We laughed like boys as we rode the dunes in the moonlight.

  * * *

  I didn’t go back to Tripoli to hang out in Tripoli. Tourists use the city as a base to visit the spectacular nearby Roman ruins of Sabratha and Leptis Magna. I’m not exactly a ruins buff, but trips to these places came with the package. So I went. And I saw. And I was nearly alone. I shared Leptis Magna with only my guide and some goats. Sabratha would have been empty if the vice president of the Philippines hadn’t dropped by at the same time.

  But I was glad to be back in Tripoli. This time my hotel was in the Italian Quarter, just two blocks from Green Square. Not again would I have to walk through a swath of Stalinist blocks to get to a proper neighborhood.

  My new hotel was more upscale than the first. The management (or was it the state?) pre
tended to have tighter security. The metal detector just inside the entrance wasn’t being watched by a college kid. It was staffed by the military.

  Okay, I thought. Now they’re gonna be serious. I stepped through and the metal detector screamed. The soldiers ignored me, joked with each other and never looked up. The same thing happened every time I walked through it.

  Libya was a totalitarian police state. But it was an awfully lethargic totalitarian police state. It’s been a while, I thought, since anyone there drank the Kool-Aid.

  The heater in my room sounded like a chopper over the jungles of ’Nam. It was broken and stuck forever on Cold, but the maid left it on anyway. So while it was 60 degrees and cloudy outside, it was a teeth-chattering 50 degrees in my room. I opened the window, and the cold wind off the Mediterranean actually warmed the place up.

  A bath could have made me feel better, but the hot-water knob came off in my hand. The hotel had the outward appearance of spiffiness, so I’m sure there was hot water somewhere in the building behind the hole where the knob had come off in my hand. I just couldn’t get to any of it.

  The elite were downstairs in the lobby. Slick men in suits, mostly from Arab countries, all but ignored the French delegation that was in town while Jacques Chirac cut new oil deals with Qaddafi. There were no Americans, no tourists and no women. I felt underdressed and out of place in my khakis and sandals, but what could I do? I was in a hard-line, oily-sheened Arab police state. I couldn’t have blended in if I tried—except, perhaps, in one little corner of the Italian Quarter.

  If you were dropped from the sky onto the main street that ran through that district, you could be forgiven if you thought you were somewhere in the West. It was strung from one end to the other with hip, cutting-edge perfume and clothing stores. These places had bright lights, colored walls and fancy displays. They piped in Western music through sophisticated sound systems. The salespeople wore snappy, stylish clothes. The customers were young and cool. There were, amazingly, hardly any portraits of Qaddafi in this part of town. (Perhaps the warehouse was out of stock and the new stores had them on back order.)

  There was far less commerce in Libya than in most countries, but this little micro-corner was bustling. I found French cheese (but not prohibited wine), Japanese DVD players, Belgian chocolate and Swiss instant coffee.

  At first I thought the only coffee shops in the city could be found along a single block on one of the back streets. Old men sat out front in cheap plastic chairs and grumpily smoked hookahs. That didn’t look like very much fun.

  But then I found an Italian-style café fronting Green Square. I ordered a double macchiato and a cheese pastry and actually found a nice dainty table. I looked around and thought, Heck, this could be Italy or even Los Angeles if it weren’t for the total lack of women around. Globalization penetrates even Arab socialist rogue states these days. And what a relief, really. You’d never know you were in the beating heart of a brutal dictatorship while sitting in that little place.

  Both my guides, Abdul and Yasir, took me to dinner. We could have eaten in the Italian Quarter. But no. They had to take me out to the Parking Garage Quarter, which is to say, anywhere else but the old city.

  I groaned silently to myself. I liked these guys—if not their taste in dining establishments—but I hated being schlepped around all the time and never being asked when or where I wanted to eat.

  The only time I truly needed a guide was on the road between Tripoli and Ghadamis.

  I couldn’t read the Arabic road signs. Armed soldiers demanded papers at checkpoints. I was grateful my guides had the stacks of papers prepared. But in the city, I was perfectly capable of finding a place to eat on my own. It wasn’t easy, but it could be done with effort and patience.

  I appreciated the hospitality, even though it was bought and paid for. Abdul and Yasir seemed to enjoy “buying” my dinner, but I felt micromanaged and babysat. Come here, look at that, sit there, eat this. They were great guys. But I lusted for solitude. If I said so, they would have been offended.

  They took me to a restaurant in a neighborhood that was downright North Korean, it was so chock-full of concrete.

  “We really hope you like this place,” Yasir said.

  It wasn’t quite as bad as a parking garage, but it was a near miss. The main floor was reserved for a wedding, so we were shepherded upstairs to a huge, dimly lit room mostly empty of tables. The wedding party hadn’t arrived yet. There was no one else in the building.

  I didn’t know what to say in this gloomy warehouse of a restaurant. I felt like we were the only people out for dinner that night in all of Libya. Abdul and Yasir hoped I would like this place? Oh, the poor dears. I was embarrassed for them and wondered what tourist in his right mind would come to Libya when he could go to Tunisia, Morocco or Turkey instead.

  * * *

  Worlds can’t meet worlds. But people can meet people. I forget who said that, but I like it, and I thought about it as I walked around inside Libya, hanging out and talking to regular folks.

  In a nation where so many reported to the secret police, where a sideways word could get you imprisoned or killed, walking around blue-eyed and pale-faced with an American accent had its advantages. I met one shopkeeper who opened right up when he and I found ourselves alone in his store.

  “Do Americans know much about Libya?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  He wanted to teach me something about his country, but he didn’t know where to start. So he recited encyclopedia factoids.

  He listed the principal resources while counting his fingers. I stifled a smirk when he named the border states. (I hardly needed a sixth-grade geography lesson.) When he told me Arabic was the official language, I wondered if he thought I was stupid or deaf.

  “And Qaddafi is our president,” he said. “About him, no comment.” He laughed, but I don’t think he thought it was funny.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Comment away. I don’t live here.”

  He thought about that. For a long drawn-out moment, he calculated the odds and weighed the consequences. Then the dam burst.

  “We hate that fucking bastard—we have nothing to do with him. Nothing. We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We do our jobs, we go home. If I talk, they will take me out of my house in the night and put me in prison.

  “Qaddafi steals,” he told me. “He steals from us.” He spoke rapidly now, twice as fast as before, as though he had been holding back all his life. He wiped sweat off his forehead with trembling hands. “The oil money goes to his friends. Tunisians next door are richer and they don’t even have any oil.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “We get three or four hundred dinars each month to live on. Our families are huge, we have five or six children. It is a really big problem. We don’t make enough to take care of them. I want to live in Lebanon. Beirut is the second Paris. It is civilized! Women and men mix freely in Lebanon.”

  * * *

  Almost everybody I know thought I was crazy to travel to Libya. The unspoken fear was that someone might kill me.

  Well, no. Nobody killed me. Nobody even looked at me funny. I knew that’s how it would be before I set out. Still, it’s nice to have the old adage that “people are people” proved through experience.

  Libyans were fed a steady diet of anti-Americanism, but it came from a man who kicked them in the stomach and stomped on their face for more than a third of a century. If they bought it, they sure didn’t act like it.

  I crossed paths with a middle-aged Englishman in the hallway.

  “Is this a good hotel?” he asked.

  It sure beat my last place in town. At least I wasn’t stranded out by the towers.

  “It’s a good hotel,” I said, not really believing it but grateful for what I had.

  “I think it’s bloody awful,” he said.

  I laughed. “Well, yes,” I said. “I was just trying to be nice. You s
hould see the place where I stayed when I first got here.”

  I heard footsteps behind me, turned around and faced two Arab men wearing coats and ties and carrying briefcases. One wore glasses. The other was bald.

  “It has been a long time since I heard that accent,” said the man with the glasses.

  I smiled. “It’s been a long time since this accent was here,” I said. Until just a few months earlier, any American standing on Libyan soil was committing a felony.

  “We went to college together,” he said, and jerked his thumb toward his friend. “In Lawrence, Kansas, during the ’70s.”

  “Yes,” his friend said as he rubbed the bald spot on his head. The two were all smiles now as they remembered. “We took a long road trip up to Seattle.”

  “We stayed there for two weeks!” said the first. He sighed like a man recalling his first long-lost love. I watched both their faces soften as they recalled the memories of their youth and adventures abroad in America.

  “What a wonderful time we had there,” said the second.

  They invited me out to dinner, but I was getting ready to leave. I didn’t want to say no. They looked like they wanted to hug me.

  We shook hands as we departed. And as I stepped into the elevator, the first man put his hand on his heart. “Give two big kisses to Americans when you get home,” he said. “From two people in Libya who miss you so much.”

  Chapter Two

  The Slow Rot of Hosni Mubarak

  Egypt, 2005

  There’s no way around it: your first impression of a new city and country will be powerfully influenced by whatever you see in your first 15 minutes of walking around. It’s important, then, that you choose the location of your hotel very carefully.

  My starting place in Egypt was the Hotel President on the island of Zamalek in the Nile River, supposedly Cairo’s Beverly Hills. The place looks nothing like Beverly Hills. It’s packed from one end to the other with medium-rise apartment towers, most of them knockoffs of the concrete soul-crushers that ring cities in the old Soviet bloc. I found shops, cafés and restaurants on the ground floor, but most were quiet, simple places, dimly lit on the inside, and they were spaced far apart as though Zamalek, despite its packed urban density and higher concentration of wealth per capita, could only support a thin spread of modest establishments.