Freewheeling: Derailed in North Africa: Book Ii

By Tom Foran Clark

The adventures of the two vagabonds on bikes, Pike and Emery, which had started in Italy, continue here as the two now enter North Africa on the ferry boat the Carducci.
Careening gulls followed the boat in to the port of la Goulette, where Arab dock workers in turbans and brown cossacks robes, (woolen djellabas), loaded cargo boats with carpets, iron, fruits, and olives with the help of huge, hulking, grimy, twisted, rusted cranes. In contrast to the slow moving turbaned stevedores, the two port officials who greeted Pike and Emery where the boats unloading platform met Tunisias soil were nattily dressed, speedily and efficiently checking and stamping their passports.
Then the two rolled out of La Goulette onto the Tunisian causeway over the Lake of Tunis where pink flamingos stood on high stilt legs in shallow waters. They went into the heart of the city, the souks of the medina. Souk or suuq was the Arab name for market. Medina was the Arab name for town. The Medina was a beguiling maze of winding, narrow lanes of shops and stalls souks displaying dazzling arrays of wares. There were weaver souks, and souks of rug-makers, potters, goldsmiths, silversmiths, coppersmiths, tinsmiths, sandal makers, trinket sellers, and on and on. Old men in red felt hats called chechias were bent over sewing machines in the souk of the clothiers. In the Souk de la Laine were weavers; in the Souk des Orfurs were goldsmiths; and so on.
It isnt long before the two encounter emptiness, vastness, and strange encounters, camping out in one or another lonely roadside field, the full moon beaming overhead in the night, outrageously luminous. It doesnt matter where we are, Pike whispers at one point, nervously, "so long as we dont wake up in the middle of the night, robbed of our papers and severed limb from limb."
They put in long days of churning, arriving at dusk one day at a small straw-and-mud hut that the two of them barely fit inside. They left their bikes and gear outside, leaning on the hut, and threw in their sleeping bags. Exhausted, they turned in for the night. The dawn came up yellow, like melting butter smooth. The sun, an amber globe as it rose from the horizon, soon paled, ascending into the silver cloud cover. While the two sentient early risers gazed on this scene, they were shocked by the sudden appearance of a sneering, frowning, angry human face. Behind that face there then appeared an even more startling, accusing visage, peering down on them. The two youths wore gray and brown hooded djellabas. They began talking both at once, yelling at the intruders, Pike and Emery. Pike looked white as a sheet, pulling on his jeans. He pulled his jacket over him as he went out. He had his hands thrust deep in his coat pockets. Emery felt sure all was lost. Pike was arguing with them.
Five minutes went by before Pike turned back into the hut to tell Emery what was happening. They want four dinar, Pike informed Emery, turning purple in the face. This is a hotel, they are telling me. We have stayed overnight in their hotel and now they request payment for their services. They just want blue jeans, Pike said, rolling his eyes. I told them we dont have any blue jeans. Pike and Emery paid their hotel bill with overalls. While Pike and Emery picked up the strewn litter of their remaining valuables and packed, the keepers tried on their new outfits. They were so happy with the overalls, they boldly invited Pike and Emery to stay longer at the hotel honored guests a second night. Smiling pleasantly, Pike declined, pushing off toward the road. Emery followed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503598492

Tom Foran Clark

Tom Foran Clark, a native Californian born in Burbank, went to public schools, completed his undergraduate studies in Logan, Utah, and graduate studies in Boston, Massachusetts. He has also lived in New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, France, and Germany. Beyond his writing and vagabonding, Clark has worked, variously over the years, as a graphic artist and copy editor in advertising firms, as a quality assurance engineer for assorted eBooks and marketing firms and, occasionally, off and on, as a public library director. Long a bookman, he has for many years been the proprietor of the online bookstore The Bungalow Shop. Clark is the author of The Significance of Being Frank, a biography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the 19th century Concord, Massachusetts schoolteacher, radical abolitionist, and chronicler and biographer of the lives and times of John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Clark is also the author of another collection of stories, The House of Great Spirit, and the novel Jacob’s Papers.

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Copyright © 2015 by Tom Foran Clark.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015913266

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-9851-5

   Softcover   978-1-5035-9850-8

   eBook   978-1-5035-9849-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

For Serge Castel

The stars, sun, moon, all shrink away

A desert vast without a bound

And nothing left to eat or drink

And a dark desert all around.

– William Blake

from The Mental Traveler

Chapter One

In the dim early morning light, aboard the Palermo-Tunis ferry, the Carducci, Pike was immersed in his book about the Mediterranean, Magna Graecia, Greater Greece, and the conquering Romans. His lips moved while he read. Every now and then he would pause, looking up to contemplate the sky, muttering words, talking to himself. Emery had to wonder if he was feeling any more at home in the world – he’d fallen so low – but he let it go.

Already Emery had moved past his resolution never to speak to Pike again. He approached Pike cautiously, asking if there was anything in Pike’s book about Carthage, which the two now approached. There was: The Romans brutally conquered the abundantly creative Phoenicians, Pike read aloud. "Adding insult to injury, they later left only their own Roman ruins behind them."

For conversation’s sake, remembering Pike’s awe at simultaneity in southern Italy – forever becoming and forever perishing – Emery asked him about this now, in terms of Carthage and Tunis, here in front of them, the historical past existing side by side with the present moment. Pike considered this, and answered carefully, I’ll tell you what, Emery. I’m not going to jump to any conclusions. Let’s just take this a day at a time.

Later, pushing their bikes through the pathless sands of the Sahara desert, they’d take this concept, simultaneity, for their definition of North Africa: the ancient past, the present moment, and all future time coexisting seamlessly. But then, on the Carducci, as they approached the Gulf of Tunis and Cape Bon, We’ll see, is all Pike would say about it.

Careening gulls followed the boat in to the port of la Goulette, where Arab dock workers in turbans and brown cossack’s robes, (woolen djellabas), loaded cargo boats with carpets, iron, fruits, and olives with the help of huge, hulking, grimy, twisted, rusted cranes.

In contrast to the slow moving turbaned stevedores, the two port officials who greeted Pike and Emery where the boat’s unloading platform met Tunisia’s soil were nattily dressed, speedily and efficiently checking and stamping their passports.

Pike, born in French-speaking Canadian territory and brought up in the Massachusetts Canuck mill town Lawrence, thanked them fluently and graciously. Then the two rolled out of La Goulette onto the Tunisian causeway over the Lake of Tunis – where pink flamingos stood on high stilt legs in shallow waters. They went in search of a bundock, a bank, and then on into the heart of the city, the souks of the medina.

Souk – or suuq – was the Arab name for market. Medina was the Arab name for town. At the time France had taken possession of Tunisia – since relinquished, of course – the Medina of Tunis was Tunis. Now it was a remnant, existing within the outer, teeming metropolis.

The Medina was a beguiling maze of winding, narrow lanes of shops and stalls – souks – displaying dazzling arrays of wares. There were weaver souks, and souks of rug-makers, potters, goldsmiths, silversmiths, coppersmiths, tinsmiths, sandal makers, trinket sellers, and on and on. Old men in red felt hats called chechias were bent over sewing machines in the souk of the clothiers. In the Souk de la Laine were weavers; in the Souk des Orféurs were goldsmiths; and so on.

Pike asked around and got a good lead on a hotel on the Rue de Kasbah in the heart of the Medina. A single bed, six feet by six feet, filled the tiny room. Its one window offered a view merely to the entry hallway. Pervading everything, as the two settled in, was chanting. It permeated all. Chanting diffused itself into every activity and setting. The chanting was the constant thing: the dominant, reverberating thing.

Over time, this omnipresent chant became intimately familiar, like conscience, the voice in the head, or your own blood coursing through your veins: la ilaha illa allah (There is no God but Allah). Allah akbar: God is great. In Arabia, this is the soul’s breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, dessert, and midnight snack.

The message of Allah’s greatness resounded in the Rue de Kasbah when Pike and Emery fell asleep; and the message of Allah’s greatness resounded through the souks when they awoke, dressed, and entered the labyrinth of souks, going in search of the central Mosque, the Zitouana. The founder of the Zitouana Mosque had originally taught the Koran under olive trees, and so the mosque had taken this name: the olive tree mosque. It had grown to be something of a university in its time: professors had gathered with their student clusters for Koran studies around particular mosque columns – one column per professor.

A later, nineteenth century addition, the exquisite minaret tower, reached high into the pure, austere, blazing blue sky. Not a cloud could be seen. The sun seemed to approach, to move closer – to better illuminate only sunstruck Tunisia upon the earth.

Needing shade, coolness, and refreshment, Pike and Emery retreated back into the narrow, clamorous lanes of the souks. There, a tiny brown-eyed girl ran hand-in-hand with a brown-djellaba’d boy who tripped, in the lane, on the hem of his bulky robe. Both fell forward, but it was the girl who took the fall. Emery could not even hear chanting, the silence of that moment was so cutting. Then the little girl began to cry. A piece-of-five coin had flown from her hands, and landed at his feet. Emery picked it up; then picked her up. He put the coin in her precious hand, and she ceased crying. She took the boy’s hand in hers again, and the two pressed on.

Pike and Emery wove their way further toward the Medina’s core of souks, in search of water or soda. Mint tea was far more available – at every corner café – but they wanted ice-cold drinks. In Araby, if one didn’t drink tea, one drank soda pop. The best soda pop, if one really wanted to slake one’s thirst, was lemon soda – on this point, Pike and Emery agreed.

At noon they ate Chorba, a spicy soup with pasta; baklava, a pastry soaked in honey topped with almonds; asssida, custard with hazelnuts; and mint tea. They then left the Medina and rolled across the nouveau ville to the Bardo Palace, the former home of the Regent, or Bey, of Tunisia, open to the public as a museum. Here they viewed countless works of breathtaking filigree, hundreds of delicate and stunning mosaics and tiles before venturing into the gardens, filled lavishly with flowers, fountains, lawns, and palms, where Emery lay down and, while Pike went out on a photo shooting expedition, he passed a good portion of the afternoon reading in a French phrase book.

When they left the Bardo, they got back on the road to the Medina, weaving their way amid Peugots, Citroens, and camels, by the busy fish and meat market on the Rue Sidi Abd Esselem (got cous-cous, a tomato and semolina stew, and a big Salade Tunisienne to share), returning to their Rue de Kasbah hotel room. They shared their meal with an adopted gray, sleek, and exotic cat they dubbed Sadie de la Kasbah – Sadie afterwards laying on the bowed-out bed purring and stretching regally.

In the morning, Sadie struck out with them when they checked out – until somebody tossed chicken bones out an upper window in the Rue de Kasbah. At this, Sadie leapt – and half a dozen other cats.

The two riders wove their way through the slow electric current of the souks amid the rough, elemental, elbowing throngs to the outlying avenues and boulevards of modern Tunis. They went in search of the offices of Tunis Tour Buses, on the Avenue Habib Bourgiba, which reputedly also housed the American Express office. Indeed, there was a window, and a sign, and an American Express clerk.

Back in Rome, Emery had sent off a letter, special delivery, to his folks, begging them to sell all the books and bike and musical instruments and coins and stamps and all he had left behind with them and take whatever money these might bring and send half of it to him care of the American Express office on the Avenue Habib Bourgiba, and the other half care of the American Express office on the Rue Mauritania in Marrakech, Morocco. Happily, the Tunisian apportionment awaited him – traveler’s checks – saving grace. Emery no longer felt completely, totally, wholly, altogether out of luck.

Outside the Tunis Tour Buses company, old men in striped djellabas carried live turkeys by their ankles, upside-down. The turkeys looked bewildered, their eyes perplexed but not pleading. Emery remembered what Pike said when he first saw this. He whispered it in French: "Bon courage."

The two rolled out of Tunis onto flatlands holding decrepit white and blue cubicles, poorhouse huts huddling together in clusters, neighborhoods. Lambs hopped playfully about. Heavily burdened old women hauled bundles of sticks on their backs. Old men stood in horse-drawn carts, calling out "Whoop-pah! Heyp! Yoh!"

Clouds now came in flotillas. Amid dry, cool winds they rolled by orange groves, Eucalyptus trees, and cactus serving as bounding walls around neighborhoods and between cubicles, into a long, low gully. Pike loped over a barren field to check out a half-roofed shack, a potential shelter for the night. He was approached, on a path that had formerly been invisible to them, by two figures in flowing robes. The two girls told Pike they lived further up the path, behind obscuring orange and Eucalyptus trees. Pike whistled out and called Emery’s name, motioning for him to come over to where he and the two girls stood.

More than sufficing, Pike’s French was a boon. One of the girls told Pike they would be pleased if he and his friend could come stay at their home – a spare room was available and it would be a privilege, they insisted, for their family to be a host to the two visitors.

Pike and Emery went along the path with them. Soon two shacks emerged into view. Coming closer, they could see the two huts formed two sides of an inner square bounded on its other two sides by bamboo-like stalks, or rush, fences. Straw-topped lean-tos were attached to each house. In the square, an old woman, elaborately tattooed with henna on her arms and legs and face, greeted the visitors heartily. Raza, grandmother of Fatma and Nouri, was dressed in swirls of dark blue burlap or thickly woven wool.

The two girls put the bikes in a different room than the one the guests would be staying in. To this spare, long, narrow room Raza now led them. In the corner of the room was a rolled-up straw mat. Smiling, her deep brown eyes twinkling, Raza gestured to the mat, then to the floor, clearly indicating Make yourselves at home.

The two guests laid out the straw mat, then sat down on it, crosslegged, beaming with peace and calm. Outside their door, in one of the two lean-tos, Raza fed a fire in a pit, stirring up a crackling blaze. She then placed burning coals into a brazier, then brought this into