So far, so good. Jasmin got married too. My urge to steal paper faded and my contract at the school drew to an end. I had to look for another job. And so, I set out for another town.
Tripoli was big. Very Big. In the beginning, I often got lost in the old parts of town, the bazaars and pedestrian zones. The atmosphere wasn’t bad, though. You could move about freely, even talk to the women. What’s more, the streets were full of foreign women. Any number of whores in the hotels, clubs and other city-centre locations. Usually foreigners, like the underlings of the local pimps.
It took me a while to find work in this big city. First, at a pizza place, then at a beach cafe where I could also sleep at night. From morning till evening, I had to serve the customers with tea or juices and run one film after another on the video recorder. The cafe closed in the evening but a few men would still be sitting, waiting for me to pop in a porno. That was my job, and the men were dealers, junkies, thieves, fences, gays, foreigners and men who had nothing to do all day but watch films at the cafe. Indian films by day. Porn by night.
Things weren’t going especially well for me at the time. I desperately wanted a new job but it wasn’t easy. The country was full of foreigners who were ready to do anything and that too for hardly any pay. Then, one day, the cafe owner said I could stay in an apartment in a newly constructed building in the centre of town. I was relieved to not have to spend another night at the cafe. There, I couldn’t sleep until very late but I still had to wake up early. And it was never really quiet. Often, I couldn’t sleep a wink because of the cries and groans of the gay men, trying — at night and very close by — to satisfy their urges. The poor gays — often, they allowed the worst sort to mount them and were then surprised when the same ones beat them up or did who-knows-what to them. Each morning at eight, I had to open the cafe and help my gay Egyptian colleague Jamal to tend his wounds from the night before. And so the apartment in the newly constructed building was my saviour though it was only a tiny room, lit by only a bulb in the ceiling. In it lived four other foreign workers — one from Chad, one from Tunisia, one from Egypt and one from Syria.
Sadly, I was there for only two days before I had to flee. But not because there was only one toilet for twenty people or because the apartment was crawling with lice. No, no, it was because my Syrian flatmate had fucked up. The very first night we’d all been sitting together, he’d boasted, his chest swelling with pride, ‘We have a world-class porno here!’
‘Oh no — I’m sick of stupid porn flicks!’
‘I’m talking of a real one — a real porno!’
‘What?’
‘First, you have to promise you won’t breathe a word about this. Not a word outisde these four walls!’
‘I promise.’
‘Good! Now we just have to wait until midnight!’
At midnight, the Syrian removed a brick from the wall. ‘Let the show begin!’
One after the other, we peeped through the hole in the wall. On the other side were the landlord’s daughters in their bedroom. By the time it was my turn, they were lying on the bed, right in front of the hole, and pleasuring each other in the most exhilarating way. The Egyptian explained that they’d removed a brick too and were equally pleasured in sharing with us the mysterious things they got up to at night. Things continued like this for another half hour before one of them got up and put their brick back. My flatmates did the same. Lights out. Show over.
The next day, at work, I could feel the urge to write rising in me again and my heart beginning to beat faster. I sat at a table, grabbed a bunch of receipts from the cafe and began to write, feverishly. That day, I wrote a lot.
In the evening, when I got home, exhausted, an unpleasant surprise awaited me. A crowd of people were standing with the police outside the building. ‘Are you the new guy here?’ a resident from the first floor asked me softly.
‘Yes, what’s happened?’
‘Piss off quick! They’ve discovered it!’
‘Discovered what?’
‘The hole!’
Thereafter I lived as if on a ghost ship. I drifted aimlessly from one job to another, from one town to another, from one country to another, from one escape to another. Women came and went, even writing abandoned me for a long time. It’s true that I tried from time to time to commit a few lines to paper but what was missing was the passion. Nor did I feel the urge to steal paper — there was no need for it now. After the peephole incident, my temple dream had suddenly faded away. Only a considerable time later, in Achaea in Greece, did it surface again.
Achaea, about an hour from the town of Patras, was a tiny village. I’d never wanted to go there, nor live and work there. I’d been camping in Patras when I had the thought of going to Achaea. After several failed attempts to reach Italy illegally from Patras, and after spending all my money, I began to look for a job in this part of the world. One day, I heard from a refugee that there were a lot of gypsy traders in Achaea and they were looking for men to help carry their carpets. Without a moment’s thought, I headed in their direction.
I lived with six other men in a flat in an old building at the edge of the village. Two rooms. No electricity, no water, no toilet. We fetched water from a next door, we used candles. For our toilet — we went beneath the sky, outside the village. But at least I was earning, and that would keep me going for a while.
My job was to stand in the village square from morning till evening, waiting for someone to ask for a carrier to load his lorry with carpets. I transported carpets produced in a variety of countries: India, Persia, Arabia — wherever carpets are still produced. I needed neither language skills nor any special training to know what I had to do. And the people explained with whatever gestures it took what I needed to understand.
You couldn’t miss the gypsy presence in this village — strings of garlic on the doors and the cautious, if not wary, behaviour round strangers, especially of the gypsy women with their brightly coloured dresses and lots of jewellery. When it came to the women, a stranger could very quickly be in serious trouble. You weren’t permitted to speak to them under any circumstances. They liked to go for an afternoon walk along the village streets but always under the beady eyes of the gypsy men. Any approach by a stranger was made utterly impossible. The menacing muscles and big strong hands of their escorts stifled any hint of a wish on my part to approach those pretty women.
I did manage to meet one of them, though. This is how. If there were no carpets that needed to be carried, I carried all kinds of other things. And so, one day, an old lady came up to me and gestured to me to accompany her home. There, a young girl was waiting, wearing a bright house frock. The old lady left me with the girl in the yard and sat down on a chair at the front door. I looked at the girl curiously. She was about twenty, well built and with the kind of flaming beauty you find only in gypsy women. With a few words and many gestures, she tried to explain what I had to do. I was to help her rearrange the furniture in the bedroom — the bed was to go in the corner, the wardrobe beside the window. . But I could hardly concentrate on the job. With every move, I could peep into her coffee-coloured cleavage. Spotting my nervousness, she began to play a dangerous game — she raised her house frock and tied it round her hips in such a way that I could see more than half of her muscled legs. The colour of chocolate, they were. A wild, highly erotic vision. We worked very slowly and without a word. Sometimes, we touched when we both reached for the same piece of furniture. Each time it happened I felt my heart beat faster, a mad horse galloping away. The job could have been done in fifteen minutes. But we took almost an hour. The old lady noticed. She said something to the girl and then the girl began to work faster. The old lady turned round her chair so that she could watch us. Which is why my job, sadly, was soon done.