Sand and Sea

I woke this morning to the sounds of the duomo's bells echoing across the ancient town of Amalfi, my chosen place of repose and escape for a couple days. The town was just coming to life, cafes being slowly set up for the day's business, some people wandering to mass. Church bells have replaced the muezzin's call. The owner of my residence brought me another cappuccino on my balcony and suggested routes I should take on the cliffs overlooking the teal ocean. I regretted not having packed any of my oil paints or charcoal. This is a town from another age, a town of seafarers and mariners. I always go to the sea for my moments of stillness and quiet. I am a connoisseur of seascapes. And I miss my endless expanses of oceans as I look out from a ship underway, but I know I will eventually return. Everything always looks different from the sea. I feel detached from the world, though this is probably more of an illusion than reality.

And yet, my thoughts still wander to Cairo and the rest of the world. Yesterday I took my friend and dog to the airport in Rome so that they could return to Egypt. I hope to follow soon. We were surprised to find so many in line for the flight to Cairo, and I again relearned that the world's borders are not set, but differ from one person to the next. A group of Palestinian men, including a university professor, had been waiting for three weeks to return to their families in Gaza. They had spent more than 4000 euro to make arrangements to get home. Egypt was opening the Rafah border crossing for 48 hours and they intended to get across in time. But the Egypt Air employees told them they could not go to Cairo, even though they had visas. As the men desperately pleaded to speak to a manager another senior employee came out to tell them they would not get on the flight. The younger of the group started screaming, "Our families are there! We have to get back to them! The border will only be open for two days! Don't you understand?" Then he turned to us, "I am so sorry for this. Excuse me. But I must get home." He was embarrassed and desperate, forced into this situation by a world of uncaring political borders and the indifference of airline employees. It was embarrassing that my dog could get into Cairo much easier than these men. I have yet to find out from my friend if they were ever able to make the flight and get back to their families...

Yesterday I finally cracked open one of the two works of fiction that accompanied the ten or so foreign policy and Middle East history books I took with me on my flight from Cairo. My copy of The English Patient is worn and battered. But its words and images are divine.  It is more like a collection of thoughts and sensations than a tightly woven plot-line. And how appropriate that my own journey has brought me from Egypt to Italy. 

By 1932, Bagnold was finished and Madox and the rest of us were everywhere. Looking for the lost army of Cambyses. Looking for Zerzura. 1932 and 1933 and 1934. Not seeing each other for months. Just the Bedouin and us, crisscrossing the Forty Days Road. There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I've met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African- all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations.

The desert could not be claimed or owned- it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis. The places where water came to and touched...Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn't want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.