Travelogue 683 – March 5
Dupont and Emerson

It’s been a blur of a week here in old Minnesota, devoted to work, and then to sleep. It’s one of those seasons in old Minnesota, longer than in other places, long weeks while the land lingers in between winter and spring, stepping carefully forward through slush. It’s a kind of twilight, a time of special light, a waiting.

I’m working, and I’m sleeping. When I work, the day starts before sunrise at Peace Coffee. I am watching sleepy people lining up for coffee from the vantage of my table at the back. The windows face east, and I am watching light creep into the Minnesota sky, making blue spaces between the branches of the bare trees. Espresso makes the computer screen flicker.

It’s midday in the office in Uptown, in the basement level one-room office with windows opening onto the asphalt of the parking lot in back of the building. The lights are fluorescent. We are solving puzzles. We are writing answers on chart paper. We are consulting computer screens. We are answering telephones. We make the hallway, dead carpet and windowless, resound with our voices.

Before the tired winter sun is done with the day, I’m already thinking about sleep. My body is still trying to shed my fever from last week, and it’s trying to shed the hours on the airplane, and the most mundane of daily tasks is feeling like a heavy weight.

I’m sleeping in Uptown, not so many blocks away from the office. I’m reliving my youth. AirBNB matched me with this house only half a block from an apartment from my past, where I spent three years sleeping on a futon in my tiny room in a shared two-bedroom place, a modest place stripped bare of adornment, furnished with necessity plus a TV. This was where I lived, writing my first play. This was where I lived when I started dating Leeza.

The house I’m staying in now is very characteristic of Uptown. As much as the district has changed along its main avenues, looking like a zoning attempt at carefree wealth, clean condos above bars that look like they were built to plans borrowed from South Beach, it all looks much the same on the side streets, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont. The clapboard houses are as humble as they ever were. Inside, students and artists camp in dim lighting. I’m housed in a room in the front of one of these houses. The floorboards creak. The false ceilings are stained. The paint is peeling. The upstairs neighbours are cheerful young guys who stomp and laugh in the evenings. The room is simple enough, bare but for the idiosyncratic tiled fireplace, and the ancient carpet laid over the floorboards. The bed is extraordinarily comfortable. I happily retreat into its warmth to read as long as I can, while upstairs the cheerful boys tell jokes.

I’m awake at three. The house is silent. I creep to the bathroom, trying without success to be quiet. The substance of the building responds to its occupants, murmuring when they move, groaning under their weight.

The frost of the season lies undisturbed outside, touching things with its lingering chill. It has hours before sunlight. Nothing moves once I have stopped. The house rests again. Sleep is slow as time. I’m abandoned to daydreams in the cold night.

Travelogue 682 – March 1
Craters

I’m looking out the window on the flight over the Atlantic. We’re midway to America. I’m curious as ever about the bizarre landscape of Greenland. It’s so hard to put any human scale to it. I see glaciers, blue at their wrinkled edges. I see formations of rock like craters, like round heads of volcanoes, but buried shoulder-high in snow. There are a number of them, and many of them are broken open on one side, as though to allow a doorway. They look like natural amphitheatres. I imagine myself standing in the circle of stone, with walls of rock rising round me. How many hours to walk side to side of the crater?

Bob Dylan is singing in my earphones. He assures me there will be shelter from the storm. It’s a world of steel-eyed death, etc. ‘Come in, she said, I’ll give ya,’ and I’m examining worlds of ice. They are strangely inviting from this height. When I imagine it, I don’t account for the cold. I don’t account for the anxiety of true solitude.

I’ll give you shelter from the storm, I’m hearing, and I’m very moved. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper, fogging up the airliner window.

There was a time when I was first introduced to Bob Dylan. That would have been when I visited my brother during his time at university. I was just a kid, raised on my father’s Tin Pan Alley. I wondered why this Dylan man would record an album when he clearly couldn’t sing. My brother laughed. He insisted I keep listening, and I did come to appreciate the songs.

Now the music is so much a part of me that I wonder how it could be otherwise. How could it be that this one song wouldn’t move everyone? I find it more challenging to imagine the person who isn’t moved by Dylan than it is to imagine crossing the crater in Greenland.

Maybe it’s the fever from the weekend doing my thinking. If they all could be me, at just this moment, they would feel it, too. If they could remember those days when I was ten, and remember the reverence for vinyl in those days. If they could have gone to the beach with my brother and walked the boardwalk.

It occurs to me that I’ve just drawn a circle around the story of the 60s. If only they understood. If only they heard our music, they would find shelter from the storm.

But it didn’t happen. The bold idealism should have been rewarded. With all that energy, they should have broken through, discovered peace and love. But it’s still a world of steel-eyed death.

For kids who grew up in the shadow of the 60s, it seemed the stuff of classical tragedy. In history, they were just one more wave of idealists who were broken under the wheel of human failings. But we don’t live in history. They were my brothers. They were my heroes. Their songs were plugged into our emotions.

Bob was in the news recently. At age 74, he’s sold six thousand items from his own history to the University of Tulsa, notes and lyrics and poems, artwork and photos. His archive will be neighbour to a museum dedicated to his own hero, Woodie Guthrie, also in Tulsa.

With Bowie’s passing, we awaken again to the passage of time. We’ve been watching the parents of the Boomers go for some time now, those tough veterans of the Depression and of world war. But now must we brace for this, the passing of the ‘kids’ of the 60s?

Bob Dylan sings at the close of the film, and the film is another brilliant production on the part of Danny Boyle This one is about a Baby Boomer named Steve Jobs. The film is structured like a play, a tragedy worthy of Greek stylings, a story revolving around the tragic flaw of the hero.

Much has been made of this man Jobs, the stark merging in his character of vision and implacable ambition. He has become myth, and it’s right that he is paired with Dylan here. It’s a pairing that captures much about the riddle of the Boomer generation. Dylan made his mark before Jobs was ten. There is a call and response to their dreams and achievements.

Will it be Jobs who is the final measure of the generation, when history has had its say? The song of the 60s led somehow inevitably to this, the vision epitomized by Jobs, the system that would link minds around the world, the system that would change everything. Steel-eyed death still stalks, but it advertises by phone to children in Osaka and Milwaukee and Addis Ababa.

My eyes are on Greenland. My eyes are on the foggy ocean. My eyes are now on the Hudson Bay. The ice on the bay is cracked in patterns that look like roads. The white ice goes on for miles and miles, and I still see no people. I stare so long the bright white colour of the ice loses its value. Without its colour, is ice still ice? I’m sleepy, and many miles of it are hypnotizing. I could once again be over Arabia, flat as broken ice, approaching Dubai. I have been this way before.

Travelogue 681 – February 25
The Queen’s Dog

I’m feverish and trying to sleep, despite the headache and the alternating sweats and chills. My back hurts from lying down for too many hours. When I do sleep, my dreams are horrible. I’m reliving nightmarish work scenarios over and over. I cannot rid myself of the dreams.

Outside, I hear a dog bark. It strikes me: as much as the Dutch like their dogs, it’s rare I hear them barking at night. It’s a sound I grew up with. There were the dogs next door. There were crickets. It always took me a long time to get to sleep. I seem to have followed a different line of sleep evolution to the majority. The middle-aged man to that sleepless child who listened to the dogs now generally drops off without effort. When there’s no fever.

There was a window above my bed, as I recall, and that was the direction of the dogs. The neighbours had a pack of German shepherds. They were unruly. We had a brick wall separating us, but that didn’t stop them from getting at one of our dogs and killing her.

My mother had a fondness for corgis. I was too young to enjoy the camp of it. My mother was an unashamed Anglophile. The queen’s breed is so silly looking, but so cute. These two dogs were very good-natured. I have an image surviving, my mother walking down the driveway weeping for the lost corgi. Either she or my father was carrying the bloodied body. I can’t remember which. Oddly enough, my mind can produce both images, my mother’s arms at her side, hanging empty in despair, and the dog’s body draped across her arms. For all I know now, I may have invented the memory entire.

There were also windows to the left of my bed, high ones, with a door in them. They led out onto a terrace overlooking a steep decline covered in ivy, divided by a staircase, and, at the bottom a stretch of brown grasses that we owned. The house was a patch of peace in the L.A. basin. The house was a temporary monument to the success of the family, lasting only five or six years, until the divorce. There were fruit trees on the grounds. There was a haystack with an archery target for my athletic older brother. There was a spot where my father set up a tent in a futile effort to cultivate an outdoorsy instinct in me, his youngest.

Just outside the window above my head was a sort of backyard that appealed more to my sensibilities. It was not a lawn. It was more like a sheltered little clearing in a wood, bare ground shaded by high trees, bordered on one side by the brick wall and on the other by the house. Here I whiled away a lot of lonely hours. My brothers had headed off to college. I was left to weather the tough seas of my parents’ final years together.

We were left with one little corgi, an affectionate little boy with red hair and no tail. He waddled around the house. He followed us and nipped at our heels. I would take him to the backyard and I would try to train him. He was very eager to please, and he licked my hand. When I wasn’t happy, he lowered his ears in shame.

I had a boy’s fascination for the circus. I read histories of the American circus I pictured the romance of the life on the road. I imagined the two of us could be an act together. We were friends and conspirators. He could sit and lie on command. He could sit up, and that’s a funny sight in a corgi. I tied a couple lengths of rope tight, parallel and about one meter above the ground, and I forced the poor pup to venture out on the ropes. He took it well. He had such a good disposition. He crossed the length of the ropes. We were ready for the circus.

But I never booked the audition. It was a dream. Instead I carried on with school in the day, and I listened to those dogs next door into the night, trying to interpret the message in their feverish barking. There was something I had to understand, a barren darkness over the wall. And I wasn’t going to be able to dream.

Among the streets of Rotterdam, the bark echoes, like an ink blot folded on itself and making a pretty aural design, and then it’s gone. That was it. There is no more to it. The fever twists the needle in my temple, and I roll over. I’m facing away from the window. I’ll slip into the foam of those dreams again, wondering while I do why the ones closest to the surface are the most troubled. I would drink from deeper in the well if I could. The darkest waters would be cool and refreshing.

Travelogue 680 – February 18
Bedtime Stories
Part Two

The nights are long. We sit around the fire, and we call upon the poet to entertain us. The clan has its poet. Every age has its poet, the one who captures Truth with words.

‘If … I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o'clock,” I mean something like this: “The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.”’

And so begins one of the most memorable of modern bedtime stories. It was published in 1905. The story has an unlikely title. It’s called, ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.’ There is no smiting and there are no bloody executions. The enemies are a no-show, so there’s little need for puissance or valour.

Much of it is written in a language that isn’t accessible to the masses. I can’t read it. It looks like this:

It’s a kind of music. It’s lyre and pan pipes. One can only listen. This is the language of modern cosmology. When the ancient poets told us about Zeus and his escapades, we could picture them. But when these poets tell us stories we have a hard time visualizing. They see the universe as textiles woven of these threads of formulae, maybe like computer programmers stringing lines of obscure text together, knowing it results in the web pages we see on the screen.

It started with Newton. We could picture the apple. It led to Einstein, and now we have to picture curving space. No, you’re not seeing it.

Einstein was in the news recently. Scientists had confirmed another of his theories. They confirmed the existence of gravity waves. (The latter translates into another fun tongue-twister in Dutch, by the way: zwaartekrachtsgolven.) The Guardian, offered some interpretation, calling it a triumph of the local. Waves are subject to Einstein’s rule that nothing travels faster than light. Newton himself had been troubled by the implication in his theory that gravity was a force that would be felt instantaneously everywhere, even if in weakening proportion. Einstein added the speed bumps.

So, like all good story-telling, Einstein’s tales offer us explanations of the universe, creation stories, and even a kind of morality. The world coheres according to law. We are guided by the golden rule, c, the speed of light. And there is a good inside the search for universality. If stories require conflict, then maybe, lurking in the shadows, there is in fact a satyr, a trickster, in the guise of one Max Planck, Einstein’s mentor and father of quantum theory. It’s only there, among those quirky quanta, that the morals and the universals seem to break down.

Merrily our modernist poets wove their tales, reciting in their esoteric language, until their time began to wane. The modern world was passing, giving way to the medievalism of the post-modern era. Abstraction in art became suspect. Form returned to poetry. Religion surged. Evolution was under attack, a theory one had little problem visualizing. Those who were busy curving space and pursuing ghosts inside the atom found themselves isolated. The university was a fortress again. Outside, there were marauders.

Yes, the poets have rediscovered the power of waves. They obey the golden rule of c. They travel out; they come back. Their lives are waves. Their times are waves. They pick up old tools. It may be time to smite again.

Travelogue 679 – February 17
Bedtime Stories
Part One

The nights are long. Light the fires. Call upon the poet to entertain us. Every clan has one, the man or the woman with words. Tell us stories.

“Once upon a time,’ they say.

‘Andra moi ennepe, Mousa,’ they say. ‘Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways …’

‘In the beginning was the Word,’ they say because they’ve learned something of their power. The clans have built altars and pulpits.

‘Certainly Jesu Christ is only very God,’ was the story Valentinus told the Roman emperor. ‘And if thou believe in him, verily thy soul shall be saved, thy realm shall multiply, and he shall give to thee alway victory of thine enemies.’ That seems very persuasive. What emperor doesn’t want victory over his enemies? According to the Aurea Legenda, Claudius Gothicus was persuaded. He said, ‘Hear ye how wisely and reasonably this man speaketh?’ But his evil counsellors talked him down.

The saint should have just said, ‘Be my Valentine.’ But if he had, and if the emperor had chuckled and let Valentinus go, as too cute to have bludgeoned to death, there would have been no reason for the Archbishop of Genoa to have written about him a thousand years later.

The archbishop, one Jacobus de Voragine, has an interesting rhetorical technique. He interprets the names of the saints. ‘Valentine,’ he says, ‘is as much to say as containing valour that is perseverant in great holiness. Valentine is said also as a valiant knight, for he was a right noble knight of God, and the knight is said valiant that fleeth not, and smiteth and defendeth valiantly and overcometh much puissantly. And so Saint Valentine withdrew him not from his martyrdom in fleeing, he smote in destroying the idols, he defended the faith, he overcame in suffering.’

I’m not sure what or how Valentinus overcame in this story. Best to say the poet overcomes. His words survive. He himself becomes a word. ‘You are my Valentine.’

He chose his poetry, and the emperor wasn’t convinced. The poem was sedition. The voice had to be eradicated. The emperor has the poet beaten outside the city gates.

There’s something careless about Valentinus’s martyrdom, a kind of casual cruelty. The stories of martyrdom invite speculation. How serious was the old soldier Claudius Gothicus -- called Gothicus because of his slaughter of many Goths, -- how serious was he about this execution? It seems like an act of casual cruelty, a sort of theatre of flippant power.

Valentinus was no symbol of romantic love at that time. That came about more than a thousand years later, even later than Jacobus de Voragine. (Strange to contemplate that kind of time in the span of one’s reputation.) If he were the saint of chocolates and flowers, cupids and kisses, of fickle love, then the capriciousness and the cruelty might have been apt.

Instead, Valentinus just seems like an annoyingly earnest priest. Why not allow him a poetic exit, his walk up Calvary, his solemn moment before the axe or blade? But execution is theatre, and I suppose power is best demonstrated by contempt. I think of the violent dispatch of tourists and journalists and aid workers by warlords and jihadists around the world.

‘Certainly Jesu Christ is only very God,’ the poet says, and he describes the world. The jihadists perform their spoken word on video and they defy the world. They turn the technology on its head, reviling the science that made it. It’s funny to contemplate this assault on the children of the positivist, anti-clerical theologies that created the modern world, an attack clothed in the words of atavistic religionists. Funny.

They smiteth and defendeth valiantly and overcometh much puissantly. Their realm shall multiply, and Allah shall give to them alway victory of their enemies.

Travelogue 678 – February 16
The Day After

Romance looks a little different this year. For one thing, we’re a day late in celebrating Valentine’s Day. The weaker link in this marriage has left his planning for the last minute. He has asked for a delay.

And it’s been cold. Strange that lovers choose winter to celebrate themselves. Is it the cosy hearth, the warmth of the blankets, that make this date seem the natural day?

Did Saint Valentine remark upon the cold as he was led to execution? How cold was it in Rome that day? Was he thinking about love? One legend has it he married many Christian couples. Was the memory of their happiness warming him on his last walk?

Was he regretting his decision to preach to the emperor? They say Claudius Gothicus had taken a liking to the saint, until he had started trying to convert him. This emperor was a hard man, a soldier. He performed as a wrestler in his youth. This was a man rumoured to have taken out a horse’s teeth with one punch.

Saint Valentine was led outside the Flaminian Gate, and there he was beaten with clubs and stones. When that didn’t kill him, they took off his head. This was an ignominious end to the man. He leaves off as man; he becomes a martyr. And something survives in the violent end.

Interestingly, the Piazza del Popolo, just inside the Flaminian Gate survived as a spot for execution into the nineteenth century. There are always two sides to the survival.

Today, on the day after the day after, the cold is particularly acute. The sun is out, and usually that is enough to inspire me to cycle into town. But there is frost on the grass. There is ice in the street. I am convinced to walk up to the Metro Station. I contemplate the passing of Saint Valentine. He has died again, and the cold reminds us that winter still has power to overcome the warmth of red hearts and the shadow of groundhogs alike.

They buried Valentine hastily in a shallow grave outside the gates. The ground must have been hard. His followers dug up his remains, and returned them home to Terni.

I found a very nice selection of flowers available yesterday. That is one advantage to being tardy. I was eager to reward my patient wife. I presented flowers. I cooked. We lit candles, and the four of us shared a cosy moment of romance.

Baby stares at us when we kiss. My mother-in-law just looks the other way, usually finding some excuse to start shuffling noisily around the apartment again. She tidies. She wipes down counters. She piles dishes, and then she re-arranges them. She shuffles back to check on Baby. She tosses out a useless question. ‘Is she poopy?’ (And it doesn’t sound much better in Amharic.) She shuffles back with a sigh. My wife and I smile and we kiss again. Baby stares. She seems shocked. She considers crying, but we smile and we laugh and we gather her up in our arms. It’s Valentine’s Day, Baby.

And really it isn’t. Valentine’s ghost has flown, flown away to its home in heaven. It has flown like a turtle dove. In the Middle Ages, people believed that birds mated in February. That is such a lovely little caution of hope, a story like that. I will tell Baby that one day in February, when we are tired of winter. Listen to their songs, sweetheart.

Travelogue 677 – February 8
Expressions

Baby shivers with excitement. She sits in her high chair, her throne of white plastic and still regal, and she throws her arms wide. She holds her hands out, and she waves them with enthusiasm. She has these expressions of joy.

Each day seems like something different. She is growing so fast. She discovers new moods every day. There are days she devotes to whining. There are days she is content. She can sit on her mat in the living room, absorbed happily in the tag on one of her stuffed animals. She looks up. She bounces on her butt, and she talks. She looks for some new object to grab hold of. She reaches across the low coffee table. I’ve set a vitamin bottle there. It sounds like a rattle. She can shake it. She can scratch at the ridges along the cap’s edge.

There are days of joy. She claps, and she squeals. She coos and she waves. She gives Daddy a smile when he gets home that erases all troubles. She watches him take his coat off, drop his heavy backpack. She reaches up for him to pick her up. And with his help, she turns in the air.

Daddy’s coming and going. Lots of opportunities for homecoming, lots of flights around the living room.

It’s a season for starting projects. I’m launching into training for my spring race. I’m conducting auditions for my play. We have a lot of new recruits for the amateur theatre group. The actors are volunteers who speak English and enjoy theatre as a hobby. Many are teachers or students. We rehearse at the college. I’ve offered up one of my old one-acts for production, and I’ve written another one to accompany the first. The first is tragedy, the second a farce. They should make for an entertaining evening.

The evening start with warm-up exercises, led by one of the directors. He has them shake their feet, shake their hands. He has them make funny noises. I always sit these things out. I’m no actor, and I don’t have the stamina for this kind of fun-making. They are walking briskly around the classroom space, tracing random lines with their steps, turning around each other, stopping when the director claps, eyes closed and telling us what they have observed, or freezing in spontaneous poses at the director’s command. Show me revenge, he shouts. Show me grief. Show me love.

I’m struck by the poses for love. The contrast is startling. The men show us sad-eyed longing, even pining. The girls show joy and pleasure. It’s a young crowd, and so there’s something right about this pantomime. The picture is occasionally worth a thousand words.

The director claps and love is abandoned for the next drama. Walk. Shake the puzzle pieces and see where they land. Theatre is a beautiful vision, a state of nature.

Travelogue 676 – February 6
Winds in the Port City

Baby stayed up late last night. We were celebrating having her home. She started daycare this week, and we all suffered. We took her three mornings this week for ‘wenen’, which means getting used to it, to the place, the people, and the routine.

The first morning, she cried desperately when we placed her in the arms of the minder. I was rooted to the spot. I could not make myself walk away. This was heart break again. A feeling I didn’t expect on a day like this.

This is what days this week have looked like. Bike under clouds, the winds gathering under bridges and rushing between buildings downtown. Central Station stands as buttress against depression, steady and suggesting light in its silver panelling. While there isn’t much light to reflect this winter, the station glows with what it may.

People cross the open plein in front of the station. Their gait suggests hope, no matter what their individual moods might be. They assume a city pace reflexively, and the effect is contagious. We have places to go!

Baby will one day stride across some city square, absorbed in thought. Thoughts will churn through her young mind. She’ll be in a hurry, and she will understand urgency. There is only today’s clock. Someone watches her. Suddenly all is silent. There is only motion. The engine is sealed inside. One doesn’t hear the pistons of insistent thought.

From this distance, it appears she’s leaning to one side as she walks. She tilts into some wind. She makes her way across the square

I’m afraid it’s a moment I won’t forget, the first moment of abandonment. I can’t amend that. Even morally. This world requires the testing of innocence, the strain against trust. It’s an unexpected burden. I’m made to enforce the ways of a world that I don’t entirely believe in.

Bike under clouds, and the cold wind gathers under bridges. When it comes, it teases the nerves and awakens imminence. Depression pools in the high portals of the train station. The people lay down their footsteps, quick rhythms toward the turnstiles. There’s a massive screen above the terminal and it exhibits looping video of daily business in Europe’s biggest port.

I guess it’s all about the turnstiles.

Travelogue 675 – January 20
Land of Opportunity

He’s Afghani. He’s taking me to the airport. It’s 530am, and there are people strolling the streets like it’s an afternoon in spring. I remark to him, and he nods. This is a city that never sleeps, he says.

You like it here in Dubai, I say to him. Of course, I do. Everyone does. There is work. There is money. It’s safe. People have a nice time. They work hard and then they enjoy. He doesn’t come up with the words, ‘Land of Opportunity,’ but they hang there in the cab’s stale air. This is Dubai. People are flooding in from all over the world for a chance at Sheikh Mohammed’s dream.

And how do they get along, these people from all the hot-headed races of the planet? It’s safe, he insists. No one acts out because the rule of law is strong here. Do anything, you’re caught, and you’re fined. There are people from all nations here, but they never fight. Try to start a fight, he challenges, looking at me in the mirror. See what happens. No, no, I demur. I believe you.

Despite his call to arms, he’s a mild man. He’s polite. He’s bearded, well-groomed. He seems content. He drives like there might be a tomorrow, which is refreshing. We will arrive at the airport in peace.

And what about the heat? Oh, it’s not so bad. In summer, forty, forty-five. He shrugs. That sounds pretty bad to me. He smiles. You don’t feel it, he says.

It is an international city. You see that right away. If you squint and cover the Arab script with one hand, if you turn away from the flashy skyline, if you ignore the occasional Arab in full garb, strolling by like a happy overlord, if you judge only by the people on the street, you wouldn’t know quite where you were in the world. The residents are remarkably diverse.

People follow money, and there is plenty of money here. I’ve seen some of it during my sightseeing, seen the money congealing into high buildings around the Marina, buildings shaped by fun innovation and ambition. Two of them feature storeys-high portraits of Sheikh Mohammed and some other bearded luminary.

I’ve taken the ferry from Bur Dubai, spending an hour on the waters of the Gulf, peering out the shaded windows. We pass the artificial shores of the Sheikh’s islands, the World Islands, and then the Pearl. These latter lie just off the Marina, long and curved islands shaped like the fronds of a palm, and surrounded by a circular breakwater. We pass the spreads of several luxurious resorts and behind them rows of posh houses. At the furthest point from shore, you see the five-star Atlantis Hotel, a pink Aladdin’s dream, two wings separated by an enormous arch, a suggestion of unseemly wealth.

About sixty thousand people live on the Pearl Islands. It was projected to house double that number, but apparently the engineers have irritated Mother Nature by stirring the muddy depths of the gulf. The waters trapped among the islands have become fetid. Property values are sinking into the silt.

The ferry enters the tame waters of the Marina, and we are encircled by the clean buildings among their sunny walkways and fringes of grass. I’m thinking healthy lawns in this desert city are like Persian carpets, expensive and rare beauties. They are expertly manicured, lushly green.

I am happily quit of the ferry. I walk the streets of this Arabian Bel Air, back in the sunshine and the fresh air. I so enjoyed the morning’s tour of old Dubai that I am eager to see the new one. Ultimately I am disappointed. It seems as though I am often let down by the deployment of wealth. I expect something more. There is a surprising genericism to the sensibility of the rich. I expect more. Something more challenging than innovations on the skyscraper, more exciting than the many variations on lounge and finger food, something more than pretty women smirking at pretty men in pretty cars, everyone showcasing brands and tame body art as though they were born to advertise.

I make it to the beach. This one is behind the Hilton. It’s a narrow ribbon of sand, with a view of the gulf that is compromised by more construction on more islands and by the hazy prospect of the decadent Pearl Islands. The waves are small and lazy. There is a camel offered for rides. There are so many bodies, they seem like litter. A beautiful woman in a blue bikini turns in a slow circle, recording video with her phone. I’m in long sleeves and baggy pants. I turn away when the lens comes my way. I feel no interest in turning back. I stroll through the sensuous Hilton back to the street that parallels the shore. I’m looking for somewhere to eat. I seek out a patio above the street, within sight of the gulf, where whole families are indulging in shisha together. I eat humble humus. I look only at the water.

I go home by way of the Metro. It’s a long ride back to Deira on the east side of the city. Much of the way the Metro is on an elevated track, and I can watch the city roll by. Between the districts of the Marina and the Burj Khalifa lie miles of flat city blocks, something like the real city, developed but subdued. This probably represents the experience of most people here, the simple houses among the mundane round of errands. It’s a comfort to them that the rich are out there, like a promise, lacking all imagination but spending prolifically. They embody the opportunity.

Travelogue 674 – January 19
Tangent About Rome

People complain about the cold, and still there’s a skip to their step. Northerners like the cold. Batu doesn’t. She seems stunned and slow. We disembark from the tram at Central Station. She asks, ‘Is this it?’ in a small voice, though she’s been this way dozens of times. I’m concerned that she never seems to retain anything. Maybe it’s just a lack of confidence that makes her ask. We’re here to put her on a train. Twice now, she has missed her stop when travelling alone, on the same trip. Her station is the third stop. They announce the stations. She’s equipped with the time of arrival. Still she gets disoriented.

We walk from the tram stop to the train station. She shuffles slowly and unsteadily. Her eyes peer out from between coat collar, coat’s hood, and scarf. She follows me into the great hall of the station. I guide her through to her platform, and I wait with her. I remind her of her stop, her schedule. She listens vaguely, proudly. I watch her board and make her distracted way down the aisle until she finds her seat.

With the help of a friend of ours, she has been investigating affordable treatment options in Belgium. It’s a long shot. Is this the ‘medical tourism’ we hear about? If so, it’s rather more than a euphemism, really a romantic term for something degrading.

It would have been easier if she had been undocumented and seeking asylum. Medical care would not have been refused. As it is, they say she has to go home for treatment, forcing an honest family to break their rules. No one will send a family member home if treatment there is risky.

There is in this a sort of keynote to the refugee crisis in Europe. Problem-solving begins and ends with national citizenship. Citizenship becomes something like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. It occurs to me that the Roman Empire is still alive. Of course we all want to be Roman, I mean German. And how precisely did this become the solution to the long algebraic problem that starts in, say, the Arab Spring? If only you would become me …

But they don’t. Most sink under prejudice and dejection, and commit their families to several generations of marginalization. No one is shocked by this eventuality in 2016. And many think the refugees deserve it. It is an odd chain of logic.

The chain of events started in crisis. Do we have reason to think this will be the last crisis? Are war, famine, disease, and environmental crisis endangered species now? We don’t prepare for them. We just whip out the golden tickets once a generation and despise the recipients of the tickets. It is a bizarre response.

If we accepted crisis as part of the human condition, and if we believed in world citizenship, would we imagine different solutions? Would we properly fund world-wide response systems? Maybe refugees would not have to walk thousands of miles in pursuit of a chance to be gardeners for Roman patricians?

Some American politicians seem to have caught the Roman imperial fever, forgetting the roots of the country’s identity and vitality.

I have to travel to an unlikely harbour of hope to be reminded of that pioneer spirit. It’s a taxi driver in Dubai who voices the closest thing I’ve heard in years to the old spirit one might have expected in New York, (if not in Berlin).

Travelogue 673 – January 18
Persia’s Out There

Finally we have some ice on the ground. It’s refreshing to see. And at first, the sub-zero C temperatures are refreshing. Batu’s train leaves early. We’re starting hours before the sun rises. I’m used to that. Batu reels when the cold wind hits her. She pulls the kerchief tightly over her mouth and nose. We walk to the tram station. I tell her I like the cold. The air is crisp. The night is clear; we can see stars. She isn’t convinced. I’m not sure I am, either. Secretly, I’m relieved that this mission, delivering my mother-in-law to the train station, saves me the early morning trial of cycling into town. This morning’s ride would have been painful. I wouldn’t have thought to bring a scarf. I put too much faith in first impressions. When I first leave the flat, I quite enjoy the brisk air of winter. But after twenty minutes in it, battling North Sea winds in my thin windbreaker and fingerless gloves, I come to my weary senses. And then I resolve to be smart. The next day I forget, and I resolve again. It doesn’t seem like I get to decide to be smart.

Batu is on her way to Antwerp. Our very good friend Chuchu lives there. He is helping Batu navigate the strangely obscure medical systems of the Benelux. She has been circling around hospitals and aid agencies, trying to finish her treatments. It would have all been so much easier if she were an asylum-seeker. There are no rewards for honesty in this milieu. So be it. We work harder.

I’ve been back in winter for a week. It wasn’t so long ago I was tasting of the resort life in Dubai, strolling beachside in the bright sun. I’ve been travelling too much; there’s nothing jarring or unnatural about beach sands one day and ice the next.

The beach sands come at the end of my free day in Dubai. In the morning, I have toured the Bur Dubal Market. I have broken the heart of an innocent young cashmere salesman. I have seen something of old Arabia. Deira and Bur Dubai are what is left of historical Dubai, straddling the Creek, as the sniggering Brits have called it, the River Zara as the Greeks once called it. This area now comprises the north-eastern extremity of the city. Growth has extended miles west along the Gulf. And near the westernmost extremity is the posh Marina area.

I have left the market, and I have ventured farther north along the Creek. There’s a Metro station, and there’s another dock for tourist boats. There’s a big one anchored there. It is seaworthy. This one will travel down the coast and take me to the Marina. The ferry will chug up to the mouth of the creek and out into the Persian Gulf. (My hosts in Dubai would rather I call it the Arabian Gulf.)

We navigate up the winding Creek. passing the long breakwaters made of piled rocks and concrete blocks shaped like cones and anchors. On the right we’re passing the huge plot of new land being developed for city expansion. It feels like Holland here, with chunks of land being reclaimed all the time.

Once we make it to the Gulf – arriving into the big waters with a rocking motion that makes many of us find our seats, -- we will pass by several of these ambitious polders. First there are the ‘World’ islands, islands dredged up out of the sands below, buttressed by rock, arranged in a rough shape of the world map. Of course, from water level it only looks like another shore to starboard. On the port side we have been passing by the glamourous city proper. The majority of the passengers have piled out of the cabin to take pictures of the Burj Khalifa, spire dedicated to Arabia’s new ascendance.

I don’t blame them for wanting to get out of the cabin. The seats are comfortable, but the windows are polka dotted with a sort of protection from the sun, making it hard to see out. Strange dilemma on a tour boat, wishing for an unobstructed view. The open deck aft is tiny. People are forced to crowd together for a breath of fresh air to calm their tummies.

More than the sights of the city I’m enjoying the view of the water. This is why I paid the ticket price, to see the Gulf. I love bodies of water. I enjoy the open space, the simplicity of only air and water.

I’ve seen the Gulf years ago from the northern shore, in Kuwait. I’m not so disingenuous as to say I can tell one body of water from another. Maybe a sailor could. So why does it matter which one I visit? Maybe it’s enough to believe that places do have unique qualities. Maybe it’s my ongoing naïve belief in history. This water washes up on the shore of Persia. Alexander marched alongside it. (Or was that the Gulf of Oman?) Maybe I enjoy playing with subtle impressions I know better than to trust. I say, the Gulf is gentler than the Mediterranean. The colours are lighter. Maybe I say, the Persian Gulf is big brother to the others in the region. Maybe I say, the Red Sea is darker, leaves an impression of wine, has a primitive taste.

Travelogue 672 – January 11
Cashmere and Abras

‘Come see, come see,’ they call as you pass. You stroll the length of the narrow, shaded concourse, the market, lined with nearly identical shops the entire length, and the whole way you are accosted by salesmen. They hold out scarves and drape them over your shoulder or over your head as you pass. If you pause, they count you as sold, and there will be a struggle to disentangle yourself. ‘I have something to show you,’

I remember this pleasure from days in Istanbul many years ago. Westerners always walk briskly, aggressively through, with sour expressions. They hate this sort of assertiveness. I find it entertaining. I find a kind of honesty in the brazenness, even as the sale is a gambit and a lie at heart.

While I was in Istanbul. I devoted a day or two to the carpet shops, spending hours haggling over cups of tea. It was enjoyable, the cycles of hospitality and chit-chat, punctuated by vigorous argument over the value of pieces of great craft. He’s angry; he’s insulted. I am unmoved. We settle into more mild conversation. It’s a relationship.

I don’t have the time on this trip, though I stop to haggle over some cashmere pieces, anyway. In half an hour I talk the salesman down more than half. Judging by how readily he gives in, I see that I could have gone farther. It just isn’t worth it unless you have the time to discover rock bottom, and properly that should be an investment of hours.

I tell him I have to go. He begs. He wheedles. He seems genuinely broken-hearted that I would leave. He has told me how he loves America, offered it without hesitation or blush, though I know it for double speak. He means it; he lies. For my sake, he loves America. I apologize. I walk away. He’s watching me and pining.

This is the Bur Dubai Souk in Dubai, set right on the Creek. It’s worth the visit, picturesque in its several hundred metres of historical architectural styling, the narrow alleys among squat buildings of stone, alleys trellised above and fluid with crowds below. You can bargain for cashmere or traditional lamps. You can stroll the quaint little alleyways in meditation over what old Arabia might have been like.

You even have an opportunity to daydream about old India, pushing through the impossibly constricted alleyways of the Hindu Market, where people pass singles file and sideways between the severe walls of buildings, and where shops are sudden doorways leading into crowded warrens lined with the bright colours of Indian foods and Indian brands, rammed into displays, hanging from the walls.

You can sit creekside at the outdoor tables of the sunny café. You watch the abras and the dhows drift by. The Creek is crowded with traffic. There is every manner of trading vessel navigating the Creek, and every one of them unique, all of them wooden and all outfitted with eccentric cabins on deck. The abra is the tiny passenger craft with peaked awning. People cram in side by side, sitting around the edge of a central platform, and everyone pays one dirham. When the boat is full it departs, motoring across the Creek from Deira side to Bur Dubai. This was the highlight of my day, riding out on the water. No doubt it was the Brits, so fond of the slighting misnomer, who dubbed this the Creek. Where the abras cross, it’s nearly as wide as the Maas in Rotterdam.

I make an industrious day of it, walking and walking around this city on the Persian Gulf. Maybe I want to work out the grief at disappointing the cashmere salesman. I’m haunted by the look in his eye when I told him I had to leave. Even tourism is tragic.

Travelogue 671 – January 10
When Christmas Never Passes

Temporarily the sky is clear. I ready myself quickly, and run out to the bicycle. It’s a perfect Sunday morning for a ride. The ground is wet, like it will never dry, but up above behind the clearing clouds is an early dawn sky glowing with a dark and hospitable blue. It’s already past 7:30am, but the day is only now dawning.

It’s not even a full twenty-four hours that I’m back in Rotterdam, and I can’t resist getting out to pedal the bike paths, where the remnants of rain glistens ahead of me. I remember I must switch on my little white headlamp. It’s the law here. I see no police out. Only a few cars, slow and tentative as though they are lost.

In Ethiopia the sun is full and blazing by now. In Ethiopia, it’s the Sunday after Christmas. I realize that I’m allowing a Christmas song to roll through my head. I’ve had to endure two Christmas seasons this year, one in Europe and one in Ethiopia. That meant a second round of Christmas music everywhere I went. Even Shimeles had them looping in his taxi.

My experience of Christmas Day in Ethiopia itself is detached. I’m travelling that day. I’m hoping for a good night’s rest before travel, but holidays in Ethiopia start early. My first impression is actually of the dogs whining. It’s 6:30am and the dogs are making those high-pitched sounds that are impossible to sleep through. Those are the sounds they make when there is someone friendly in the yard. It’s a steady appeal for food and attention. I’m awake.

When I look out into the yard, I see that indeed members of the landlord’s family have begun the preparation for the holiday. Surprisingly, the sheep that spent the night tied to s stake in the garden, plaintively bleating has already seen its violent end. Its rumpled brown hide has been tossed aside in one corner of the yard. A selection of its guts are piled beside the dogs’ cages, along with its bloody lower jaw. No wonder the dogs are whimpering hungrily. Whole berbere peppers have been spread on a tarp in the yard to dry in the sun. Fortunately, that is the aroma that predominates, rather than the sheep blood. I could wish I had time to stay and enjoy the holiday. I have invitations to several houses for Christmas dinner.

Instead, I finish my packing and I’m riding in Shimeles’s taxi toward the airport, listening to the Christmas sound track. In the streets, people are walking leisurely toward families’ and friends’ houses, walking hand in hand and smiling, many dressed in traditional gear. I’m suddenly envious and wishing for another Christmas, after all. What has happened to me?

I’ve arrived at Central Station, where I park the bicycle downstairs among the thousands of others in the cavernous hall. I turn off the little headlamp. I turn the key in the bike lock and very carefully withdraw it again. It’s the last key for this lock, I remember. One day too cavalierly I unlocked it, left the key in the lock while swinging the chain around and into position, and sent the key flying across the hall. Lose another key and I forfeit the bike, I think. The fastidious attendants would ask for proof of ownership before cutting the chain. I haven’t licensed or registered the bike. I always manage to be an outlaw here.

In the café, there is a selection of Elvis playing. A few days ago, I was overlooking the Persian Gulf and sitting among whole families smoking shisha together. Now I’m listening to Elvis Presley in a Dutch café. But I’ve transcended culture shock, or maybe sunk beneath it, like a seedling under a tractor tire. Maybe it’s more like that. In either case, I’m not feeling much. I’ve been back and forth to Africa three times in the last three months. One music, two suns, three seas, four planes, five fingers counting one sun, two seas, three planes, four singers …

Travelogue 670 – January 6
Above the Stadium

There is that striking view of Addis from the road that passes below the Prime Minister’s compound. The compound occupies the top of a hill, separated from the city by a stone and iron fence dating back to the Emperor’s day. Through the fence one sees nothing through the trees. But the road sweeps along beside the fence, turning as though to circle the hill, and the view out the other car window takes in much of the centre of town, from the high mountains behind us to the near, irregular summit of Piassa and down through the shantytown of Irib’kuntu then to the high buildings around the train station and the stadium. and the ancient Ambassador Hotel.

It’s down there in the district called Stadium where they built a new office building that houses, among other happy government offices, the Charities and Societies Agency (CSA) that regulates all NGOs in Ethiopia.

The air is so clear this morning. It’s chilly. Shimeles the taxi driver has donned his heavy leather jacket and scarf. Often, the view over the city is obscured by morning mists or by a brown fug of morning fires. Today the view there is refreshing, lending everything a tint of morning blue or pink. There’s a brand new building going up with an arch in the highest roofline of metallic tiles that reflect golden in the morning sunlight.

It happens that the CSA’s building is almost next door to the high, arched one. They occupy a building that is also new, but that is more prosaic. The first floors are dedicated to a shopping mall. Because Ethiopian Christmas approaches, they’ve hauled some man-sized speakers out front and are blasting Ethio pop that doesn’t strike me as particularly seasonal. Vendors have lined up in the entryway to sell jewellery and kitchenware and shoes from their tables. Once you’ve cleared the guards, you have to squeeze through all the product and the customers to reach the elevators. Back here you feel the truer nature of the building, new, cold concrete rising in harsh angles. Once you’ve reached the seventh floor, the building becomes colder yet. It’s been furnished with rickety wooden partitions that look like they were moved from their last residence, and moved with special care unless they disintegrate from age in their hands. The chairs and desks are definitely vintage. They have made the new building look already beat.

Once past the Prime Minister’s estate, you turn right and cruise down the long hill toward Meskel Square on a wide street divided in the middle by attractive parkland, fenced off with gates locked most of the time. This is some of the most pleasant real estate in Addis, the big tree-lined boulevard, passing the staid Foreign Ministry, the stately old Hilton, Selasse’s palace with stone gate pillars carved with representations of his warriors and of noble lions.

Halfway down this long slope, a busy road crosses. Turning right, you will pass alongside the palace and roll downhill toward the historic hot springs. There you’ll find that sweet old bar and restaurant, the Finfine Adarash, where so many memories from the Tesfa Foundation era have been absorbed into the abundant woodwork, absorbed like the pungent odours of fine cigars shared in imagined triumph. On the weekend, I treated a few staff members to kitfo and tibs in gratitude for work well done. A few had never been inside, and marvelled at the preserved atmosphere of old Ethiopia.

Walk past the Finfine and past the stadium, and you will also arrive at the CSA Office. Today, Yenebeb and I will have to revisit the CSA offices. Stopping by this office has been a daily task. We sit at the desk of our team leader, and he scowls at us. He sits in the corner of an office with four others. The others are looking on with some sympathy. Yesterday, the team leader was in meetings and while we waited, the others in the office commiserated with us. ‘I admire you,’ one of them says. We are persistent.

I stand at the window of the miserable office. They have a nice view of the stadium. You can see half the pitch. I can see players in red practicing down there. I have tried to engage our team leader with talk about football. I say we’ll watch a game up here some time. He is able to smile, but he does seem to derive more pleasure from his esoteric interpretations of the NGO Proclamation and the rules of NGO law. Who am I to begrudge him this satisfaction? He was meant for theology. His recitations have the air of improvisation, and there’s a perverse beauty to them. I wouldn’t have the heart to interrupt. There is too much soul in his persecution of us.

And so we continue to compile documents. We will send staff hither and yon on senseless missions, delivering documents and inspecting library furniture for the proper seal. We will torment the U.S. board for more and more paperwork that requires the stamp of state officials and ambassadors and John Kerry himself. And our team leader will weigh each sheet of paper against the feather of his logic, and he will pronounce learned judgements. We are his captives, his acolytes.

Travelogue 669 – January 4
Dry Solidarity

I slept through the change of years. I was in my bed in Addis Ababa. My compound was quiet. Menna has reported to me about the horrors of New Year’s in Rotterdam, where the youth take their celebratory duties very seriously. They ignite explosives in the streets all night. Baby jumps at noise, and I can imagine how scary it might have been. I feel for her.

Baby’s daddy slept soundly, meanwhile, so soundly that when he awoke he didn’t know where he was. It’s winter. Opening one’s eyes on the persistent darkness has become routine. I glance around among the shadows of the tiny bedroom and try to place myself. I can just about hear the clicking of the mind’s computer as it processes. Maybe a more appropriate metaphor would be the sound of a lonely night clerk in the mind shuffling through files, trying to find a match. The file containing rooms where I’ve slept is extensive. It takes the poor clerk a while to find a match. ‘I’m in Addis!’

Why is morning starting so late here, I wonder? I was, after all, looking forward to full days again, sunlight for the right amount of hours. I glance at the phone’s clock. It’s after six, and it’s still dark. Not night time dark, but the gloomy blue of sunlight’s very slow advance. The sun hasn’t risen yet over the ridge of mountains to the east.

I know I should get up and check the water. I need to take any opportunity for a shower. But I know the odds are slim that there is water, and I don’t want to face the chilly morning air.

I think about the dry sink in my bathroom. I think about the whining hiss my tap makes as it reaches for water, unsuccessfully, the violent clunking in the pipes. I sigh, and I stay where I am.

I think about the millions of Ethiopians suffering the effects of drought even now. There are communities in the north of the country where all the animals have died, and even children have succumbed. There is no water. Without water, there is little food. Government and aid agencies are scrambling to help. We have been contacted by concerned donors. They can’t be sure that communities they care about are being reached by the broad federal and international efforts.

I have discussed with staff what we can do. The advantage we small agencies have is that we can focus on specific communities. We can help with immediate relief, while also trying to create capacity that will alleviate future crisis, making sure schools have tanks for water, for example. I need to make clear this only supplements the large-scale efforts by the experts. I may enjoy bashing the ‘big boys’ in international aid from time to time, but we could not do without them.

And so I master the morning’s trivial struggle. I force myself out of bed. I check the tap. With a terrific clank, it does deliver water. The stream is weak. I quickly fill my little, blue plastic pour-jug. I flush the toilet with the first of the precious water. I fill the jug again and leave it by the sink for washing hands, and then I try the shower. As I suspected, water power is too weak for a comfortable shower. The stream is just strong enough to trigger the water heater, but ironically, it’s by varying the flow that one adjusts the temperature. With only enough to start the heat, it comes out too hot. I’m left with too cold or too hot. As I deliberate, the stream slows and dies. The decision is made for me. I’ll be dry and dirty today. My consolation is a few more minutes under the covers.

Travelogue 668 – December 21
Another Monday

Christmas is forever approaching, never arriving. The cafes have already abandoned the Christmas music, so faithfully presented every morning last week, two weeks ago.

I imagine future historians evaluating the evidence, what we broadcast and what we print, and determining we were gluttons for holidays. We couldn’t get enough. I feel helpless in being judged this way. No one consulted me. I am targeted rather than consulted. In the public sphere, holidays are a strategy of assault. I am forced into compromises with the insistent sentiment and ritual. How will the historian evaluate the private experience of holidays? I have none. If it weren’t for the jarring shift in music and the sudden closure of my cafes, I might coast safely through these ceremonies, barely registering them.

I’m thinking this will change once Baby gets older. And she is growing alarmingly quickly. She has personality. She knows what she likes. She likes grabbing things, and usually the things you would rather she didn’t grab, the TV remote, the salt shaker, the full glass, the phone you’re speaking into. She rolls forward reaching for one thing or another. You set her right, and she starts reaching again. I’m distressed. I thought these stages came later. Maybe when she was sixteen?

Baby enjoys jumping up and down. Daddy holds her upright, and she starts jumping up and down and laughing until Daddy’s arms are sore. And then she wants more, crying if she doesn’t get to jump. Daddy calls for Mommy.

Baby enjoys jabbering. She has something in her hands. She is kneading it, pulling at it, scratching it, and then she looks up and she starts telling you about it. ‘Da-da-da,’ she says, looking you right in the eye. ‘Yes, Baby.’ The she starts a long series of raspberries.

Just around the corner is a petting zoo. We walk there on the weekend with Baby on my back, set snugly into the contraption we inherited from Jan. The straps dig into my clavicle. Baby seems to enjoy it. She laughs. She stares at cars. She sleeps.

It’s Baby’s first time to see animals. There’s a cow in the barn, chewing on hay. There’s an alarmingly big pig in the yard. Menna doesn’t believe that it’s a pig. ‘Are you sure that’s not a cow?’ There are a few smaller pigs, but ugly ones, with hair on their snouts. There are cute goats and round sheep. There are chickens and turkeys. The animals are taciturn today, so we make their sounds for them. Baby doesn’t listen. She just quietly stares.

I never quite know what Baby is going to do. Tease her one minute, and she laughs. The next time she just stares back. She plays quietly, and then suddenly she shouts. She cries with no warning and no build-up. Then she smiles. The animals were fascinating at some level for her. They held her attention. But I can’t say what she took away from the encounter. It all goes somewhere in the new brain. God knows where.

And today, it’s just another Monday. The baristas have given up on Christmas. I was done with it before I started. I’m working. I’m coughing up green spittle. I’ve been sick since the last trip. Next week, I head off again. I’ll spend New Year’s in Addis Ababa, where it is celebrated as a faranji holiday, a luxury, a frivolity. The Ethiopians celebrated their New Year’s more than three months ago. That sort of ambiguity I appreciate. Any holy day should have only the most tenuous grip on the soul. Shall I treat it as something special? Is it fireworks or is it prayer? Is it quiet? Shall I laugh, or shall I stare?

Travelogue 667 – December 13
Puddles

My favour with the sun gods was short-lived. I have little time for the attentions that gods require. I’ve spent too many years watching the rain come and go. Stubborn caprice is the way of things, whether ruled by gods or by physics.

The rain has returned. The days are short and they lack light. Grey streets reflect grey skies. Puddles reappear and spread. Grass soaks in the waters, turns a somber dark green, squishes underfoot, often hiding marshy pools just below the level of their blade tips. Where the water has topped the grass, its black surface lies quietly, disturbed only by the fussy birds, disturbed only by the reflections, bright despite the dim winter light, reflections of what passes in the world above, cars and drifting apartment buildings, and incidental skies. The bricks in the parks take on a sheen of mossy green. Carpets of leaves lay at the margins of things, blown there weeks ago, and now congealed into brown layers of slime.

The texture of all things outside is cold and wet, their colours darkened by the damp. You expect your fingers to come away wet from any surface. You keep your hands in your pockets. People duck instinctively, heads down, shoulders hunched. They hurry toward shelter. The Dutch bred of generations of Dutch take on an aspect of grim and pleased determination, knowing this was what has defined their race. They lean into it; setting shoulders against it. They make a point to mount their bicycles and pedal across town against the wind, a trip they might breezily have made by car or tram in the summer.

My Dutch teacher launches into a mini-lecture about Dutch emigration, how they left by the thousands in the previous century, looking for better weather. We enjoy these lectures because we enjoy Job. He’s a cheerful and also caring sort. He has the booming voice and clear elocution of a long-time teacher. He likes to pause and tell his stories. His command of history is approximate but I appreciate the spirit.

We meet at the small Volks Universiteit on the Heemraadsingel, the canal in western Rotterdam that was once centrepiece of a cosy neighbourhood for the well-to-do. Alongside this canal run strips of green park, and then rows of pretty houses built by the prospering classes before the Great War. The school occupies two of these beauties. Our teacher points out vestiges of Jugendstil ornamentation, in the windows, in the doors and frames. It doesn’t seem like many individual or families are left to inhabit these houses. The houses have been taken over by law firms and design firms. Have the captains of industry all moved to Arizona?

Is there a note of disdain perhaps, when the Dutchman remembers the ones who have left? He can commemorate and admit the complaints in such a way as suggests that endurance is the nobler path. It’s a venerable European trope, suffering reified, made abstract and virtuous.

I insist on getting around on my bicycle. I am not necessarily bred for it, but I must imitate my mentors. I’m Dutch by choice, and so it’s incumbent on me to imitate their virtues. The old bike has seen a few years of service in all weather. The back tire is worn; it slips on the wet brick. I’ve had to replace the lock. The links in the chain were rusted. The lock mechanism was getting cranky. The seat is leather. In this kind of weather, it is more or less permanently soaked through. I have to carry a plastic bag with me to slip over the seat. I take the bag indoors and where possible, slip it behind the radiator to dry.

I sit by tall windows to watch the tides of weather as I work. The day of Sol Invictus approaches, the day that daylight begins its long resurgence. I’ll stand in the rain watching for signs of it dawning.

Travelogue 666 – December 8
Sun’s Out, Let’s Go to the Mall

The mention of the sun gods in my last essay has bought me some favourable attention. The shy solar disc has shown his face more than usual in Holland. True he sleeps in, painting the never absent northern clouds with pink tints of promise no earlier than 8:30, or half nine, to calculate time the way the Dutch do. But he shows his face. I feel his warm hand on my shoulder as I cycle across town.

For this, I owe one of the sun gods an offering. I’m squeamish about sacrifices. Maybe just a prayer, or a thumbs-up. My favourites among solar deities are Helios and Shamash, Greek and Sumerian. I like the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli for his fun name, but he seems too violent to be a peaceful sun god.

I won’t go as far as renouncing any of the storm gods so popular in the last few millennia, particularly Yahweh and Allah. Their followers are too volatile. As followers of a storm god should be. Moreover, in solar systems of divinity, there’s need for exclusivity. Storm gods are welcome at the Olympian feast.

Only a week ago I’m in sunny Dubai. I’m daring an excursion on my sick day. I’m emerging from the metro among crowds of tourists and shoppers heading in the same direction as I am. There is an air-conditioned, elevated walkway from the metro station to the massive mall that adjoins the Burj Khalifa, gleaming spire in central Dubai, the tallest building in the world. I elect to rediscover the sun and avoid the crowds, so, rather than follow the crowd into the tunnel of windows, I take a right turn out of the metro station

I emerge into the humid heat and stare about in a confused manner, like a sick person. I identify the magic spire, and I start walking toward it. I am nearly alone on the street. I pass a few construction workers looking to go indoors for snacks and air-conditioning. I pass a few tourists as misguided as I am. One intrepid soul passes on a bicycle.

It turns out there is more purpose than only comfort for the elevated walkway. Much of the distance to the tower is dedicated to construction of one sort or another. Dubai is reminding me of Addis Ababa, with its forests of cranes, its taste of cement dust. I cross new streets where there is no sidewalk left for pedestrians, only dividers with shrubbery and the high placards that wall off construction sites.

Eventually, I emerge into the sweeping plaza that describes a luxurious arc underneath the Burj Khalifa and, at its farther end, deposits the enterprising tourist at the base of the ambitious mall. Along the way, that tourist will follow the course of an artificial waterway that has the colour and purity of a Bel Air swimming pool. It trips along underneath palm trees, over a few gentle falls and into a neat little lake surrounded by new developments. Individuals scream as they glide by overhead, riding a wire strung between high-rises on either side of the lake. Families stop to take photos with the skyscraper behind them.

I’m sweaty. My lungs are burning. I haven’t eaten. Reluctantly I resign myself to the stream of humanity indoors. Inside the mall, I’m treated to another bizarre dislocation. There is something so alienating to walking the length of a mall in another country. Alienating in its sudden familiarity, invigorating and depressing in the same moment. One recognizes humanity in its universal attitude of comfort, families in slow procession, babies crying, dad in sneakers, hair down. Yes, some hair down even in this Muslim country.

I choose the French bistro at the food court. It’s quieter than the other fast food places. There are salads. Aside from the predictable images of the Eiffel Tower, the décor isn’t busy signing, signing, signing in the glib manner of Dubai. British women come in together, carrying bags, spirits buoyed by the shopping experience. They signal wealth with brand names and manicures and jewellery. There’s a studied ease to them, a demanding self-consciousness that I sense like an aura.

The food hasn’t revived me. I feel overwhelmingly sleepy. I pay and I leave, and I wander lost through the mall in a daze. I end up in a massive book store built in a circling space, turning around some secret, maybe an elevator shaft leading to the top of the magical spire. The shelves curve, and I seem lost in the self-help and business sections, that seem to have merged. The titles tell me I can be richer, I can be smarter, I can be effective, I can be wise, I can be good, I can find myself.

Travelogue 665 – December 4
The Women’s Car

The sun is a revelation. I understand clearly why many of our earliest cultures worshipped the sun.

The sun has risen over Holland, unimpeded by winter clouds, for the first time in weeks. There’s a glory to the sight of blue skies, even chilled as they are. I am moved to ride my bicycle into the center, a morning exercise I haven’t had the heart for in a long time. On the way, I pass among a group of young children being led by their teachers upon some expedition or another. They part for the cyclists, and I pick my way carefully through their ranks as they smile and joke and chatter.

I’m coughing as I go. My nose is running, stimulated by the exercise and the chill, and I’m spitting up horrible substances. It’s rush hour, and busy commuters are vigorously pedalling past me. I’m happy to extend my time under the sky, rather than speed it up, and so I turn the wheels in leisurely rhythm.

Was it only days ago I was sweating under the Arabian sun? Sick then, too, and coughing, but recovering something in the sun, like my solar battery had been run low. I am dazed from lack of sleep. I drift down the street, regretting the long sleeves. It’s humid. There is a sweet scent to the air. It’s shisha. The streets are a jumble, broken frequently by driveways leading into alleys and leading into parking lots. The storefronts are a relentless miscellany. Arab cities are like extended shopping malls, open air markets brought indoors, into concrete stalls. The streets chatter and bark with prolific, unsentimental commerce. One sees it in the Arab quarters in Europe, the hard rows of shops packed to the rafters with randomized goods.

I’ve decided to be adventurous. I’m going to take the subway. The boys at reception have offered me the vaguest directions to the nearest station, clothed in many words and gestures. Outside the hotel there is a white pedestrian bridge over the busy road. There are no steps. You walk three levels up a zig-zagging ramp and three levels down on the other side. Then you wander along narrow streets broken repeatedly by driveways and ramps, with all space between occupied by tiny ‘supermarkets’, tiny appliance shops, tiny outlets to serve all smart and mobile phone needs, tiny shisha cafes. And there are tiny hotels. It could be my imagination, compromised by illness, but it seems like everyone coming out of these ad hoc hotels is Russian. They are burly Russian men travelling in threes cackling like they have mischief in mind.

I finally find the metro station on the next busy avenue, the entrance hidden in a shining conch-like metal shell. At the bottom of a long escalator is a spacious, modern and gleaming new metro station. I buy the day’s ticket and I pass through the turnstile. I descend to the platform for the Red Line toward Jebel Ali. Everything still feels new. Dubai opened its first metro line in 2009. The cars are automated, driverless. There is air-conditioning. There are doors on the platform, like I’ve seen only in a few stations in London. One doesn’t stand exposed on the platform edge as the train approaches.

I rush onto the train with the crowd. I find I’m in a first class car, plush seats and room to slouch. I make my way back to the next car. We are underground. I stand and watch the tunnel shadows fly by, spacing out, surrendering to the sway of the underground train. But some thought is nagging, trying to break through. I awaken, and I begin to scan the faces of my companions in the metro car. Lots are Asian. Lots are women. Aha! The alarm breaks through into consciousness. Women in Arab countries -- danger. I look around with closer attention. There are no men. The alarm grows. I see the sign on the panels above the doors, ‘women and children only’. There is a fine for being male here, one hundred dirhams. And that is actually calming. One hundred dirhams is not exactly Sharia law. I was momentarily picturing something much messier.

I make my way further back in the train. I stop at the edges of the crowd that includes males of the species. There isn’t much space left. My destination is farther than I expected. There are half a dozen more stops.

The train runs on an elevated track. I watch the white and yellow sun-splashed neighbourhoods go by, fortunes locked up in thousands of tons of cement – I think of the proliferation of cement factories in the countryside of Ethiopia. Red roads and grey roads cross underneath the train tracks, and run the other direction toward the gulf, a blue line in the distance. It’s a big city.

Travelogue 664 – December 1
Night Cough

I’m home now in Rotterdam, home a day already and still coughing. I’ve returned to my family. I’ve returned to the same clouds I left. The same rain come and goes, and everything is always damp. When I leave the house in the morning, it is night. I’ve come from light, from desert light, to darkness.

This was my experiment, flying Emirates to Addis Ababa, taking long layovers in Dubai. I have to be at the Dubai airport at 5am. It’s 3am, and I haven’t slept because of a persistent cough. I picked this up in Addis. My throat is raw; my chest hurts. I haven’t slept in days. One ear is still plugged from the last flight.

If I were flying home, I could rest. But I’m flying to London, arriving midday, and I’m scheduled for meetings into the evening. I can’t do it.

At 3am, I go down to the lobby. The elevator is glass and faces out into the open interior of the hotel, and so I can turn and count the elliptical balconies as I descend, watching the carpeted lobby rise. The lobby is still alive at 3am. There are hotel guests returning from their revels, but there are also people strolling through the lobby and its little mall, window-shopping as though it were a Saturday morning. At 3am, I’m asking the young men at reception to help me change my reservation.

The boys at the desk are busy tonight. There are three of them even this late, behind the black marble desk in their tidy uniforms. They seem to be south Asian. I start with one whose accent is so heavy, I’m struggling. He is helping me while he has a phone receiver pressed against one ear. He earnestly stares at me through thick glasses, and asks me questions I don’t understand. He pulls up my reservation at the hotel. No, please don’t mess with that, I say. I need help with an airline reservation. A colleague comes to help. He dials a number on speaker phone, and we navigate the automated menu together until I’m put on hold. He clicks off the speaker phone and hands me the receiver. I stare back at the first young man, mirror image frowning with the phone receiver pasted to my head.

I’m done. I’m back in my room and still I can’t sleep. The cough comes back to me in timed charges, going off whenever I might be dozing. I get up, and I pace. I run in place to move the blood, move the mucus. I setup the computer again, and I work.

I crack the composition book I bought in Minnesota. Inside is page after page of lists. I find the latest, and I start tapping wrathfully on the laptop keyboard, tapping out the words required, the words like Dutch rain, pooling into lines and paragraphs, feeding the greedy soil of perennial work. The screen light burns me. I glare at my hateful work. When the cough starts, I stand and I pace and I run in angry exorcism, summoning all the disease to show itself. I spit.

Exhaustion eventually beats even pain. It falls like night, falls late but inexorably, falling over me like suffocating wool, falling even as the first hints of light are rising in the warm air outside, rising like clouds of sparks from a new fire. Even the cough can’t resist it, steadily robbed of its vitality until it’s only a spike of pain remaining like a pulse inside a restless dream.

It’s midday. I’m moving. It’s not like being awake. There’s an unreal quality to the sunshine. Outside my window, I can see the city’s famous skyline, dominated by the Burj Khalifa, the once (and still?) tallest building on the world, where once Tom Cruise hung his crafted body out the window like a handkerchief to wave for the fans. I must go down there, I’m thinking.

The sun seems almost to stand between us.

Travelogue 663 – November 24
By the Gulf

I’ve been called back to Addis suddenly. Impatient government officials are asserting their prerogatives. I’ve decided to try a new airline.

I laugh to write here about airlines. I’ve observed how much expats love to talk about airlines, at least in Ethiopia. The travel choice is an interesting calculation, balancing price with comfort with timing. One rarely gets everything. Some time ago, KLM cancelled their direct flights to Addis, and I’ve never quite settled back into any happy routine. My default choice has been Lufthansa. But it’s an uncomfortable compromise. I could recite a few complaints, but the biggest one is that I’m stuck with overnight flights. My body can’t take it.

Bole Airport in Addis late at night is bleak. It has become Purgatory. It is crowded. Hundreds of Chinese men spill out of the smoking area. The hallway smells. The lights are dim and sickly yellow. I will wear mourning the next time.

I’ve decided to try Emirates. I’ve heard goods things. If I spend the night in Dubai, I can fly in daylight.

I’m standing at the window just as the sun rises over the buildings in the east. The sky is yellow. Behind me in the room, the décor is simple, everything yellow and brown, like the painting above the bed, a brilliant piece of Arab kitsch, in which elders sit around the ancient divan in the days before oil, old fishermen and traders in long gowns and high turbans singing along as one of them plays a lyre-like instrument.

The scene out the window is instantly familiar. Years ago I worked in Kuwait. The buildings seem the same, the close clusters of stacked concrete, flat roofs to the sky. It’s the same Gulf sun, seeming to rise at full power. I can see the street below. There aren’t too many people out, a few men walking to work.

The Dubai airport is like a cavernous temple to celebrate the city as a kind of miracle state, to celebrate commerce, and of course to celebrate the Sheikh Mohammed, Emir of Dubai, the author of all this success. The lobby is a good half kilometre of slick open tile under high pillars covered with reflecting silver. Once you pass through passport control, a surprisingly relaxed procedure, you enter the real palace, multiple high-ceilinged storeys accessed by an open escalator surrounded by glass and light, revealing all storeys at once. On the third floor, there is a long gallery of duty free shops. I stop at a Costa Coffee, a chain I associate with London, and I watch the waves of people.

I’m reminded how truly diverse the populations are in the Gulf. Their terms of engagement are complex, of course. I doubt the U.A.E. is paradise for the workers from south Asia or Africa. But I’m a visitor. The world walks the gaudy halls of the airport in sunlight. I’m escaping the grim paranoia in Europe, experiencing peace and diversity in the Middle East.

I’ve missed the cultures that believe in courtesy. It’s refreshing. My cultures seem allergic to anything that might be taken as corny or sentimental. To this sort of adolescent mind set, the courtesies of older cultures seem naïve. But they are ancient and have evolved for a purpose, even if only aesthetic. I’m sure it’s more.

Travelogue 662 – November 16
Lacking Enemies

On Monday morning the wind is blowing. Our clothes on the line outside are in disarray. My running shirt has fallen to the ground. The wind screeches suddenly as it finds a crack in window or door.

It’s dark when I get up now. I leave the house while the wind is blowing, while the clouds in the night sky pick up the lights of the waking city and reflect them back in colours like war.

The bad boys from Brussels have done their work. There are calls for war now. France is closing their borders. One questions in both cases, ‘against whom?’ My job has made a project manager out of me, and I can’t help asking for detail.

It was easier for the boys from Brussels. Their objectives were very concrete. We will kill and cause mayhem, they said over their martyr’s whisky. That was a manageable project. It had become somewhat divorced from its originating principle. Just as France’s principle has the most tenuous connection to task.

It seems to me that history has become like an untethered balloon in the winds above my city, buffeted wildly among the clouds. The dark winter sky obscures.

There is plenty of war in our world, and yet it’s a beast without purpose. Since World War II, it’s awfully hard to craft rational narratives for our myriad wars. They surge and they halt, and they run rampant, and the witnesses wonder at the psychology of the beast. Was it religion? Then why is it so bloodthirsty? Was it a political program, a ‘freedom’, a ‘democracy’? Then why the strange gleam in the eye, the relish, and the lapse into chaos when the wall is down?

Dare we say that the terrorist program is already bankrupt? Was it conceived to scare the governments of the West into withdrawing from the Middle East? Are the terrorists encouraged by some sign that the rest of us have missed? They terrorize the people but can they terrorize the governments? In fear, the people support government’s security measures and the calls for war. Just as the people were tired of the expense and the cynical grind of foreign wars, the terrorists show up to provide new fuel.

Little wonder that conspiracy theorists think the terrorists are inventions of the victim governments. Unwitting tools, maybe. I’ve always been sceptical about the drunken shouts of ‘genius’ when talking about boys with box-cutters or about the desperate boys with clogged arteries in Washington.

And so the animal with horns reels this way and that, yielding to the martyr’s whisky and the seduction of wild action. It feels so much like purpose.

Pity the rest of us, whose lives are so much less romantic. Lacking enemies we have only families. Lacking glory we have only the ride into work of a morning. I read the stories about boys and their glory while I read the Metro into town. I have the bilingual dictionary in my lap. I do this every morning. I read and I study. It’s something to do when you have no one to kill.

Travelogue 661 – November 5
Style

I pull the car door shut behind me. ‘Shimeles! Indemen adark? Good morning.’ The day starts. Shimeles pulls away from the kerb and into the wide sweep of asphalt that, at this hour, serves almost exclusively the taxi vans roaring downhill from the communities on the Entoto Road. Shimeles doesn’t need to ask where I’m going. I’ve been following the same routine every morning, a routine dictated by dependence on reliable internet. I have to put in a few hours of work on the computer before I show up at the office in the Kebena district. I’m going to the Radisson in Kasanchis.

The Radisson is located on one of those streets in Addis blessed by a sudden chic, where the hotels and the construction cranes suddenly soar, where traffic suddenly clogs, where money seems to pool and eddy in its wild course across the city. Shimeles curses as he maneuvers among the slow streams of traffic. He pulls over and glances back with an anxious look. The traffic is stopped behind him, and one of the hotel guards is already on his way over. I know to get out as fast as I can. Shimeles is moving as the door shuts behind me.

Inside, the guards salute and smile. Two of them stand inside the sentry post set in the barrier separating the hotel from the street. They run my backpack through the x-ray machine, and one sweeps my body with his little beeper. This is standard in the new Addis. The hostesses in the lounge greet me. They know to place my order for English cake and espresso, for the largest bottle of water they have and the limes to go with it. The lobby is something modern. We’ve emerged from a quick succession of styles signifying luxury, from the Hilton era, luxury as inherited from the late Selasse era, 70s California, through the flashy Arab period, and through the explosion of Ethiopian kitsch, to this, the understated and anonymous. I might be in Europe. The floors are marble tiling and brown carpet. The arm chairs are solid and comfortable. The tasteful black-and-white photography on the wall is Ethiopian in theme, but only if you look closely. The big screen placed at one end of the room is pointedly not tuned to Ethiopian TV, but instead to an international swim meet in Qatar.

My seat is closest to one corner, furthest from the TV, closest to an electrical plug. The waitress brings me the day’s internet code, and I am ready to go.

In Hawassa my destination is the Haile Resort by the lake, and my ride is the three-legged bajaj. From my new hotel, the place of echoes, I have to walk half a kilometre down one of those extravagant new city roads one sees all around Ethiopia these days, wide enough for three lanes each way and divided by a high-kerbed meridian, where often there are only bajaj drivers and horse carts to sparsely populate the macadam.

It seems as though there has been some unionization among the bajaj drivers. They don’t want to negotiate anymore, and the prices are relatively uniform. I try to haggle, just for nostalgia’s sake, but I pay the driver’s first price, and I swing myself into the back seat. He revs the buzzing little engine, and away we go, cruising at bajaj speed (something less than lightning) across town.

I’m not always so lucky with internet at the Haile. But I can’t imagine it’s better elsewhere in town. When the connection is working, it’s quick, and I can catch up on a lot of work. When it’s not, I fiddle with some documents, and I look around the vast lobby. The ceilings and the windows look to soar some twenty meters above us. It’s sparsely furnished to emphasize this feeling of space. Outside is a garden and the lake. You can see the whole lake. The opposite shore is indistinct in the morning mist.

It’s Yenebeb who says it best. The place seems to reflect Haile’s character, or what we think we know of it, the perfectionism, the dedication to excellence. So many luxury hotels have been built in recent years, one might think the craze accounts for all the new construction in Ethiopia, every crane in downtown Addis lifting new shower stalls to the sixth storey. But the standards are questionable. The fashionable hotels one year are very often the fading beauties the very next year, dirty, chipped and peeling, those beautiful showers malfunctioning. But there seems to be a pride in the workmanship here at the Haile, some substance and durability. Even the garden is still neat and ordered. There is sculpture. There is an interesting variety to the plants and trees.

I step outside, and I descend the garden steps toward the lakeside. There are fishermen among the reeds just off shore. They are standing, and it appears for the moment as though there must be a shoal underneath the reeds, but the fishermen are standing on small bamboo rafts.

There are still morning colours in the water. There are boys swimming in the water, off the plot of land next to the resort’s. They are shouting and splashing. Some are washing. At this hour, the outdoor tables are deserted. I sit and watch the waters. A Chinese man appears and slowly crosses my field of vision. He is stalking a heron. He’s holding forward an expensive camera.

A young couple arrives, clearly Diaspora, both in sporty hats, his a fedora and hers a huge sun hat. They are laughing and leaning into each other. They pause at lakeside for some posed, pouting pictures. Tourist photos are supposed to look like sly jokes these days. They stroll off, back toward the hotel, holding hands and still giggling, while I check my watch. It’s nearly time to go.

Travelogue 660 – November 4
Under Construction

The sun is up in Addis Ababa. Shimeles and I are travelling down the hill into town. Even this early, the lines have started for taxis in Arat Kilo. It’s only in the past few years you see these lines. There are too many people, too few taxis. They stand patiently beside the side of the busy road, thirty or more people deep. Even as there are more cars in Ethiopia, travel around town becomes more difficult. Even as the city launches the babur, the light rail, transport in the city is stalled. If anything the light rail did more to stop the town during its construction than to get people moving.

The light rail project has changed the landscape of Addis. Mexico Square has disappeared down a circular well of dirt among remodelled roads and the elevated railway. An elevated line bursts even into the solemn space of Meskel Square at the center of town. This particular line isn’t running yet, so the pillars of this strange viaduct stand silently, casting shadows over sections of town, feeling like an accusation. You make us do this to you.

Change is the norm in Addis now. There are streets wholly dedicated to progress, districts ordained a fashion by new asphalt, where rows of hulking buildings stand unfinished, fitted with eucalyptus scaffolding and covered with torn shrouds of grey tarp that make them look like creatures from Harry Potter.

One day I’m lost among a legion of these monsters searching for an old haunt, the quiet café called Kabu. It has vanished, and vanished so completely that I have to pace back and forth along the whole stretch of road to find clues to where it had once stood. Eventually I do identify the monster that swallowed my café. I survey the row of them, effectively just slabs of concrete stacked on bare supports like toothpicks.

Hawassa in southern Ethiopia is another city under construction, suffering the shocks of hasty development. I’m staying at a hotel that used to be a standard of class in the parochial old town. Even at this late date, Masresha, Hawassa native and man about town, suggests meeting in the restaurant of my hotel, which at one time was clearly the best. After only a few minutes, just as we’re getting comfortable at our table, the lights go out. They are gone for the rest of the evening. The waiters express surprise, assure us the lights will be back. But their movement in the dark is rote. Candles are brought to select tables, where somber men in suits are being served, and the waiters are suspiciously adept at serving while holding their mobile phones in their mouths, flashlights forward.

The food arrives. We enjoy the evening, even with the lights out, sitting outside in the balmy air of Hawassa, air aromatic with the flowers below in the terrace, humid from the nearby lake, and full of the chatter from the street.

The next morning I awake to an alarming racket. It sounds like glass being ground under foot and raked across concrete, screeching with bell-like tones. At the end of the hall, they’re renovating a room, tearing up the tile and sweeping it together.

At the end of the day I return, and my room door is open. They’ve ripped the room apart. The concrete floor is bare. The floor tile has been removed and the pieces gathered in one corner. In another corner, the furniture is piled in a mass, partially covered by a tarp. Everything is abandoned to dust and dejected silence. No one is around. No other room has been touched, though I don’t remember seeing any other guests.

It takes us an hour to locate my things and to negotiate a refund. And then we are forced to search town for another room. We settle on the Enjory, which at least has the benefit of electricity through the evening. But it’s a hotel cast in the usual mould, concrete chambers set around a square courtyard in an architecture that an acoustical engineer could do well studying, inside which the most trivial sound is preserved and amplified to all corners.

The hotel guards and the cleaners have a nice relationship. They chat until midnight, clinking and thumping through their final duties. All the room doors are closed, they reason, so the place is deserted. They are free. Finally, they carry their laughter to the street, where they join the rest of the celebrants. We are in Hawassa, they say. We are the lucky ones.

Travelogue 659 – November 3
She’s in Russia Now

Maybe it’s my night time reading. Maybe it’s Le Carré and his 60s narratives triggering memories. I awake in the morning from a dream about my mother. She’s in some foreign place. She’s unrecognizable, and apparently I am as well. It has been so long. Still, we do see each other, and we talk.

I’m awake at five. I realize this is my best chance at a shower, so I drag myself out of bed. It’s chilly, and it’s pitch black in my little flat. Outside the churches have begun their songs. I turn on the light in the bathroom, interrupting the night-long party of the roaches and spiders. ‘Sorry, boys. Morning always comes too soon.’

I’m more than a week into my Ethiopia trip. I feel the fatigue throughout. I’ve just returned from a four-day trip to the south of Ethiopia, to Hawassa. The ache of van travel on rough roads lingers. Hawassa is about five hours from Addis. Some will say less, but they haven’t ridden with trusty Tamrat. I encourage his relaxed style and pace. Even if he is tempted to speed, his vehicle won’t allow it. The old 4x4 will start shuddering sickeningly.

Road time is helped enormously by the new expressway from Addis to Mojo (and beyond). It’s a toll road bypassing the horrible old Debre Zeit road, and the asphalt is new and smooth and wide, and we drift along it in a kind of dream. Could this be Ethiopia? After lunch in Mojo at the old Daema Hotel -- unexpectedly the best fish of the trip, even though we spend four days by Hawassa’s lake, -- we rediscover the familiar Ethiopia, the road south broken and pitted. One really benefits from the seasoned driver who knows the road intimately. He swerves with an uncanny prescience around chains of nasty potholes, predicting the behaviour of erratic drivers oncoming, the rash youngsters ferrying travellers in battered vans, the screaming Isuzu flatbeds, the middle class frivolous on holiday. The high-speed daydream of American road trips is not the norm here. Very rare is the stretch of uniform speed. One brakes for crossing herds of cattle. One slows to pass horse carts using the highway.

The last span of road into Hawassa we undertake at night. I’ve done this before, so I know what to expect but it’s still unnerving, the sudden silhouettes of families on their horse carts in the headlights, the boy standing with the reins in his hands, the family serenely occupying their portion of the narrow road, even while cars converge from both directions. It pays to have the calm hand of Tamrat on the wheel.

It’s 5am in Addis Ababa. There is water. I submit to the warmth of it. I stand without moving, hoping for some renewal, hoping to coax the fatigue out of me, into the streams going down the drain. It’s unwise to wait too long; the water may waver.

I wonder what my mother and I had to say to each other. I don’t remember much. The encounter had the feel of a chance meeting of old barflies in an obscure watering hole overseas. I dream often of Russia, a country I’ve never seen, a landscape drawn for me by Dostoevsky, I suppose, in ethereal code for depression. I carry a fantastical miniature of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg with me, a geography of abandonment. Mom slouches at the bar, her head shaved in gulag style. She has a companion, a kind of Nick Nolte dishevelment with no real definition. They cackle in the way of drunks, needing no humour. When I talk to her, she is sober and someone else, a third, not my mother nor the barfly, and we talk about books.

Shimeles, my regular taxi man, will be at the top of the hill at seven. I was up before dawn to catch the water. Now I lie back again on the bed. I won’t sleep, but I can rest, watching the colour in the curtains slowly change, glow with new born daylight.