The guide assigned to us was named Jehuda Serbal. He dressed according to Arab custom, and he had the ugly habit of rubbing his own feet (which he usually kept bare).
“We haven’t had luck with our guide this time,” acknowledged Professor Pecha at one dinner.
In our presence, Jehuda Serbal usually offered up the mask of a smile; when he thought that no one was observing him, however, his face reflected repugnance or scorn. He was not a man to trust, I realized from the first time he was in front of me. Conscious of my contempt for him and my disaffection for his country, Jehuda stared at me every so often with his tiny eyes. Perhaps he expected me to spit my venom out at him—perhaps I even should have done it.
We traveled for hours—eight hours, nine, sixteen—to, once at our destination, the desert that they had talked to us so much about, stay only a few minutes. On the pre-Saharan mountain range of Jbel Saghro, for example, we didn’t even get to pause for fifteen minutes. I didn’t want to make any comment about it, as it was the first site where we stopped. I was surprised by how close those mountains were to the city and, later on, the general proximity of deserts to cities.
“How have I come all this way to stay here?” I exclaimed when we got off the bus. “Who has sent me to travel to this place, lost in the world?”
I was downhearted, weak.
Incredibly unusual shapes, never seen before, appeared infinite before my eyes: a nightmarish landscape where man had not yet been able to destroy anything.
At the peak of M’Goun in the high Atlas Mountains—the second stop on our route—we didn’t even stay ten minutes; I understood then that the trip would be this way: we would travel down precarious highways to arrive at places that Jehuda Serbal would pull us away from soon after we had arrived. The guide would present the most implausible excuses: not just that night would soon fall or that they were waiting for us at the hotel for lunch (a schedule that under no circumstances could be changed), but that another group of tourists was scheduled for the same time as us, for example (so that we had to give them their time, as if there weren’t enough space in the deserts of Morocco for everyone!), or that he had received an urgent call about a grave family matter.
“If you want to stay…” he said cynically on that occasion, knowing well the impossibility of such an option.
The members of the expedition were generally displeased with Jehuda’s attitude; in fact, there was no one who did not complain. Nonetheless, as disagreeable as his manner and disposition were to us, Jehuda was not, by a long way, the worst part of that disastrous trip. The worst part was the desert itself; yes, the desert. What immense disappointment when I saw it before my eyes! And that only for a few minutes, since they warned me again, as if they hadn’t already done so hundreds of times, how dangerous it could be to stray too far from the group. “Dangerous?” I wanted to ask at Erg Chebbi, a field of dunes some two hundred kilometers from north to south. According to what we had been told—we couldn’t verify it—exploring just a bit of the terrain was enough to discover hundreds of palm groves.
“Dangerous?” I finally retorted. “If I’ve only walked a few meters!”
“No, no!” exclaimed Jehuda when he saw me at the head of the expedition, trying to push forward a bit. And he smiled with his habitual sneer of cynicism and superiority.
Stubemann, who was close by, grabbed my arm. Perhaps he had noticed that I was about to disobey the instructions.
“It can be dangerous,” he said too and, as if that weren’t enough, he added, “Jehuda is right.”
We had gone by the Tinghir palm grove, which stretches out like a rippling river. Now, before the dunes of Merzouga, they warned me about the snakes and scorpions that I could encounter, if I were deaf to their recommendations and ventured out alone. To go four thousand kilometers for the purpose of seeing the desert to then, once there, not be able to go ten meters into it, seemed like an unacceptable and demented scam. If this hadn’t been enough to upset me, what really irritated me was that my companions on the expedition capitulated to these exaggerated warnings. Even so, that wasn’t the worst thing either. The worst—as I have already said—was the desert itself, which was little if anything like the photos that I had seen of that same desert in the Kroměříž Municipal Library. Unexpectedly, the reality of the desert in no way resembled my photographs. I tried to see something of the proud beauty of my images in reality, but there was nothing—absolutely nothing—that reminded me of them. Of course, it could be that they were deserts in other countries and even on other continents, I thought, or that they were these same deserts but seen from another perspective or time of day. What was certain was that the photos of the Sahara Desert that I had seen in my own country shared nothing in common with the little of the Sahara that we saw on those regrettable excursions. I concluded that the real desert never corresponds to the idea that we have of it, no matter how well informed.
“One is just the metaphor for another,” I commented to Professor Pecha.
“But it’s not easy to discern which of them is the metaphorical one,” he responded.
Our agitation with Jehuda Serbal reached the limit of what was tolerable when our vehicle broke down. Things began to go awry near the Bir Jdid spring, where we were headed to contemplate one of the most beautiful deserts on the planet and where it had been planned that we would spend the night. The old van—having taken more trips through the desert than it could withstand—broke down when we were just a few kilometers from our destination. All of the Friends remained silent while Jehuda and our driver Anyb got out to see. Anyb was a person who chewed gum. He always chewed gum, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like his gray, unshaven face either, and much less still that the corners of his mouth were always turned downward.
While they inspected the engine, some of my companions looked remorseful. From the beginning, I knew that a storm would be unleashed. But not a sandstorm—something else that I would have to endure, as I will recount in a moment. Feelings were running high for a good portion of the members of the expedition and, as I suspected, the rebellion did not take long to erupt.
When Jehuda and Anyb got back on the bus, we were informed that it had no gas and that, if that setback weren’t enough, the battery was flat. They said that nothing could be done but to wait for reinforcements to arrive, and they recommended that we get off the bus to avoid the heat. As they had done up till now, everyone reacted with humiliating submission. Some of us, however, could not overlook how Jehuda smiled maliciously at the driver just after informing us. The guide was happy because of the mishap; it was obvious that he was not displeased for us to arrive late in Bir Jdid and for our plans, once more, to be thrown awry. Who knows? Perhaps the heat was to blame for everything; it suffocated us on those buses without air conditioning. Or the tension that had built up over the course of the previous days, given that the trip was not going according to the organizing committee’s plans.
For one reason or another, at that moment Jan was overcome by anger and paná Benetková suffered a shocking crisis of shrieking. Incredibly indignant, Jan stood up and, with his legs wide open in an aisle he barely fit into, said in his shouting voice that trips to the desert were not undertaken without a jerrycan; of course, he was right. He also said that the least that could be expected with what had been paid was that the vehicle did not break down, stranding its passengers in the middle of the road; that was right too. Whether because of his nerves or because of the heat, he expressed himself with difficulty: stuttering and repeating everything several times. And he even managed to insult Jehuda, while Otla and some others tried to calm him down. While all of this happened, the professor, in one of the front seats, covered his face with his hands. I remember it perfectly clearly, as the image impressed me. Professor Ladislao Pecha appeared to be crying, but he wasn’t: that was just the gesture with which he expressed his desperation. Who did cry (and how!) was paná Benetková, whom no one could understand because of her powerful convulsions. She was paler than normal and blinked violently, the victim of an uncontrollable tic.
Everyone was very dismayed. Everyone? No, I confess that deep down inside it made me happy to see everything go wrong; it made me happy to see Jan out of control, stuttering and with his legs open even wider than normal, and no one being able to console poor Benetková, who was still whining in her corner. Only the professor’s face, covered by his large, wise hands, had disturbed the evil happiness that had taken me over, to the point that I felt ashamed. Nonetheless, as intense as those thoughts and feelings were then and as much as they make me feel ashamed now, all of that faded as quickly as it overcame me; it was too hot to think about anything but the heat itself.
Anyb and Jehuda reclined in the shade, almost beneath the van. I heard how they laughed and talked in Arabic. Several hours went by before reinforcements arrived. By then our trip to Bir Jdid was already ruined.
From the window of the broken-down van (only a few of us disregarded the advice to get off and remained inside) I saw how some of the Friends wandered on the close outskirts of the group. Some walked in pairs, most alone: they resembled islands in the middle of an inhospitable ocean of sand. From where I saw them, with the sunlight twinkling in the glass, they looked like the solitary inhabitants of an archipelago, one per island. They lived for the organization: it was their way—or that’s what they said—of giving themselves over to the desert (that’s how they said it: “to give oneself over to the desert”). Not me.
I think that I wound up sleeping with my head propped against the glass. I was depleted, but not so much from the trip itself as from the simple act of being a man and being alive. I didn’t want to find myself there, in the middle of that nothingness; I didn’t want to be anywhere—if something like that were possible—not even in my comfortable apartment in Kroměříž which, despite how few days had passed since my departure, I had already begun to pine for. I noticed that my body wasn’t prepared for the climate and that, consequently, the expedition had been a mistake, that my entire life was a mistake. I thought—surely the victim of heat stroke—that I shouldn’t have been born, that I shouldn’t call myself Pavel, that I shouldn’t have thought or felt any bit of anything that I had ever come to think or to feel. And that is how I fell asleep: restless, with my mouth dry and with a strange beating in my temple, which woke me constantly with its violence.
Perhaps Jan would not have blown up and paná Beketková would not have started to cry if Jehuda Serbal hadn’t gotten lost in the volcanic mountain range of Sirwa the afternoon before, ruining that excursion too.
What kind of guide was this, I asked myself, who got lost and made us miss out on a territory that should be familiar to him? If I had been able to, I would have abandoned the group under these circumstances. Anyb and Jehuda, for their part, did not speak to each other. Nor did they laugh through their teeth as they would the next day; they limited themselves to sitting there and hiding beneath their tunics, awaiting who knows what? Finally, we had to return to the camp because Jehuda didn’t remember the way. He didn’t remember the way! Was that not enough to make one angry enough to demand some compensation? With the same arrogance that put me on a train home when we first met each other, Otla Plická answered me that the situation was not that dire and that, after all, I must be understanding.
“The wind can move the dunes in such a way,” he explained to me, “that even the most expert guides can be disoriented. In cases like this,” he continued, after adjusting his visor, “the wisest thing to do is not to move at all or, if it is still possible, to reverse the path one has walked to go back in one’s own footsteps.”
That was what we would wind up doing.
When the van started working again and we set back out on the path, some of the Friends talked about how Otla had not organized the expedition well. He hadn’t accounted for unforeseen events, for example, and lacked alternate plans. They said that someone named Vaclav, the previous president, had performed the functions of the role with greater care and, definitely, that the presidency was too big a job for Otla.
“How disgusting!” I heard.
Someone was complaining about the low quality of the hotel’s food.
“Did we leave our country to eat this?” replied his conversation partner.
I wanted to turn and see who it was. I didn’t dare. Something in my heart was pleased with my discomfort. I now also realize that I wanted to retaliate.
Before that venom poisoned me, however—who knows why?—I remembered the handsome face of Charles de Foucauld. Until I met the Friends, I had never heard anything about that distinguished Frenchman, anonymous in life and famous in death; I had not read any of his countless writings nor did I know that he had several thousand followers around the world. Nonetheless, in some way I intuited that Charles would not have approved of the thoughts ambushing me then and that, on learning them, he would have been saddened by the pettiness of my schadenfreude. The rumors and murmuring among the travelers, on the other hand, had begun much earlier: almost since we had arrived to the desert places that we had planned to visit. It was no wonder: the desert is the place of murmuring par excellence. So, it was the thought of Charles, his image, that sucked the poison of rage from my heart.
With two of the five planned excursions ruined, the next morning no one really remembered what had happened the previous afternoon. The old professor, whose silences were even more prolonged since we had landed in Morocco, assured us that memory faltered more easily in the desert than in any other place. Suddenly—although it might last only a few seconds—you might not know where you or your companions are; you can even forget what day and month it is, and even the reason why you undertook such an expedition. Anyb and Jehuda were not ignorant of this, certainly; they counted on everything happening as it always did the next day, with complete normality. What I didn’t count on, by contrast, was for Jehuda not to respond to the insult made by the raging Jan: immutable, the guide reacted as if he hadn’t even heard it or, rather, as if he had allowed those offensive words to bounce off his body and then hit Jan, who, in fact, would get even more angry as he heated up. Perhaps Jehuda was accustomed to the irritation and fits of Europeans; perhaps he knew that those who let off steam by shouting do not pose any real threat.
This day was the first that some of the Friends stayed back at the hotel, so the expedition party was incomplete. Otla justified it by arguing that many were tired. We all knew, nonetheless, that the group was wounded and that it would take very little to spark off new disagreements. During the journey, Otla explained to me that it wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened on one of the organization’s trips.
“Whether because of the climate or because of the intensity of the sunshine, much brighter in the Sahara than anywhere else on the globe, it takes very little here for someone to get mad at the others.”
In effect, all of us were very susceptible: what permitted us to live through those days of such intensity was the same thing that made us suffer.
Since the third night of that first trip to the Sahara I counted the days left until my return: five, four, three. The wait was very hard, since my desire to board the plane that would take us back home was as ardent as the fear that something would ultimately go wrong, and we would have to stay in Africa for longer than foreseen. What do I know? That we would go to the wrong airport and lose our ticket, for example; or that we would have an accident on one of those long, boring trips in the van; or that a civil war would break out between some of the countless African tribes and they would take us hostage. As absurd as all of this seems, I was almost sure that something like this would end up happening.
The hotel where we lodged that night was uncomfortable and dirty. Or perhaps it wasn’t and just seemed so because of the poverty that everyone who wandered through its neighborhood lived in. I wasn’t used to seeing people like this, so deprived, so naked. If the lodging had not been so foul, I would have gladly stayed there, sheltered and hidden, for the days that remained until our return to Europe. I would have given anything for the sake of saving myself from those highways with their potholes a half meter deep. But even that and any other hardship was I willing to endure—anything except Jehuda Serbal’s face, smiling with cynicism.
Paná Benetková, recovered from her crisis, pulled up alongside me at the bar.
“You are calculating the days left until we return home. Or am I mistaken?” she said without looking at me.
No, she was not mistaken. She had guessed it correctly.
“I noticed,” she added, and left with a glass of wine in her hand.
Weeks later, at one of the meetings at Hoggar, I knew that all who travel to the desert always go through a moment when they wish they had not done so. So, I was not at all unique in that either. Like so many before me, and like so many who will surely come after me, I wanted to go back. But back where? I ask myself now. To Kroměříž, perhaps? To the time before I knew of the organization? I wanted to go back because, at the heart of everything, what I wanted was not to have departed. I wanted to go back because until then I had never experienced the greatest thing that a trip can give the traveler: the desire to stay, the need not to return, the irresistible impulse of being born again.
The sixth day of my stay in Morocco, when there were just two days left before my departure, I began to count the hours remaining until the return flight. It was a real torture that I couldn’t even avoid once I was seated on the plane, awaiting takeoff: a mishap or misfortune…could still come about!
Stubemann, with his thick glasses, was beside me again; I appreciated that neither he nor anyone else asked me for my impressions of the expedition. What could I have said? That I would never again travel with the Friends? That the organization should forget about me forever? That the desert had disappointed me?
At the door to my house in Kroměříž, with my keys still in my hand, I knew that I would never again return to Hoggar, that I would no longer participate in any meetings; I knew, ultimately, that my friendship with the desert, if it had ever existed, had come to an end.
Soon after taking my suitcases to my bedroom, I noticed the photographs that I had framed and hung weeks ago. I contemplated that desert landscape for several moments with my hands on my hips and, contrary to what I had expected, I had to recognize that I wasn’t satisfied with myself nor particularly satisfied to be back in my own country. Rather the opposite: a sensation of helplessness and uneasiness, very similar to what I had experienced in the airport in Tangiers, came over me then, rising from my feet to my head, until I was exhausted. I had to sit down.
It was on returning to Kroměříž that I realized how unhappy I was there; surrounded by mediocrity, I hadn’t perceived that my existence was mundane and dull. Dispirited by that idea, I decided that the next morning I would take down my photos; but the truth is that the next morning—and not because I forgot—I didn’t take them down. I believe I can say that it was exactly those three photos, more than any other thing, that determined everything that would happen to me later. I contemplated those images for a long time during the weeks that followed my first trip to the Sahara. Of my adventure in the desert, of my fascination with this concept and with this reality, those photographs seemed to be the only thing destined to endure. Well, perhaps Petruchová’s cold hand on my back (something that, occasionally, I still recalled, and not without excitement).
When it was time to say goodbye, now back in Prague, Stubemann gave me a much more affectionate hug than I would have expected. Perhaps he intuited that we would not see each other again; or maybe he suspected that my friendship with the desert had reached its end. But he was mistaken. We were both mistaken.