I find it fascinating that many Brits (and Euros in general) criticize Americans for their brash and vulgar behavior while they themselves rampage across Europe as if nothing has changed in the last six hundred years. There is nothing to cause more fear in the mind of a restaurant or bar owner, and nothing more potentially devastating to a proprietor's business (while indeed also potentially profitable) than to spot a great hoard of Soccer Hooligans top the horizon heading in their direction, great clouds of dirt rising in their trampling wake, a clashing roar of voices floating on top like a thunderstorm, running of cattle, broken limbs, and beer--beer! The Brits do have the best music though (pretty much ever since the Beatles).
None of us can agree on the name of the hotel now. It seems appropriate that the site of a polder should be mysterious, even nameless, a place of crossing roads and clashing winds, where everyone might vanish while you and your company alone remains. We had spent the day searching futilely for "le Grand Place", reportedly the most frequently visited of Brussel's Grand Places, not to be missed etc, but no matter how we tilted the map, it could not guide us there. Rain drenched our clothes and glued our hair to our scalps as we hunted, shivering and disgruntled, through a confusing maze of streets, then stood frowning, rationalizing ourselves into giving up. The hotel bar seemed all the warmer after that.
The four of us sat around a table by a window looking out on a darkening public square, the noise and light of Brussels dampened by the overcast weather, drinking dark Belgian beer. It wasn't long before JD summoned--somehow, he won't explain it, an expression of latent metaphysical powers within him--two pixies from the Northern isles, English by accent but from much farther North by appearance, their bright blue eyes glinting in the dim light like the flash of distant ice floes under moonlight, their narrow faces sharpened from eons of frigid winds, and their manner delicate and precise: the bearing of elves or of animated bones.
They joined us and spread their tools on our table, a pouch of tobacco, a handful of dried leaves, and four stacks of tiny gold tablets, each bearing a rune that corresponded with a letter of our alphabet. And we were introduced to a game, the rules or any description of which now escape me utterly, such a whirlwind it led us on through its duration.
The male of the pair--let me call him Elric--led us in this game, which somehow manifested as a spotlight directed in turn upon each of us, and we were called upon to defend ourselves alone. While this was going on, someone, a short old Chinese man, arrived intermittently with a platter of drinks, thick dark beverages that I believe haven't existed on Earth for hundreds of years, and then promptly disappeared again, like a shadow or a ghost from some tavern in another time. We had disagreements that became arguments that grew into fights, punches thrown against bodies built only from shadows, shocking words spoken that disrupted entire lives and then were forgotten. There came a moment when the female of the pair--let me call her Galadriel--comforted me with the words, "it's all right, I'm your mother, this is your mother, it's all right...", and I was comforted. I cannot say why I needed it.
I realize now that time had vanished for us there. Or rather, time continued, but we were disjoined from it, the speed our lives so accelerated through the influence of the pixies that the entire encounter, while seeming to have taken place in real time, afterwards was clearly dilated into little more than a moment. Somehow incursive events elude context, or perhaps only strip the context away in retrospect, so glaring are their livid white points; there are no beginnings and no endings around them, but often just a welling of pressure, the needle drifting into its red zone, then stuck there forever in the moment before it must burst. I have some recollection of it bursting after the pixies departed, but I'd rather not speak of that.I've just returned from Belgium, and sit sadly staring at objects that will not move of their own accord--but enough of that! If Iceland was a bountiful smorgasbord of cute girls in love with American men and culture, Belgium was the counterpoint staff of servants who must work in the kitchen all day. They do not even slightly love American men and culture. They love--well, whatever. Maybe they just don't.
French Lessons
French people! All of them French people! This first place we go to eat--the very first place in Belgium--is all full of these French people, and they're all speaking French in there, like that's not weird. Crowds of them crowding around tables and into back rooms, all yammering at each other in French, wow. These French people, did you know, have this entire culture that they live and breathe and actually act in, a whole environment where things are centered around French. They've got French pastries, French wine, French, I don't know, adverbs, French television, even French children. And these people, these French people, have rules that we as stupid Americans know nothing about (not having had the benefit of a French influence or at least guide for most--well, all--of our lives. And these rules are important to the French people because they really have so little in the way of anything real that they have to make stuff up and pretend it's worth something. For instance rules.
So one of these French people parts herself from the crowd of hooting comrades and guides us to a wooden table with some breakfast condiments on it (it being around late breakfast time), some jelly and shit that I didn't recognize (being from Philadelphia and therefore stupid), and she's our waitress so we try to order from her: JL orders something, then I try to order something, but it turns out I ordered something that was apparently incompatible with what JL ordered, so one of us had better change our minds and quick. She's impatient with this apparently unprecedented conflict, this French person, this waitress, who, not expecting a tip from Americans (and therefore not getting one, ptew on you), just wants to leave our company pronto, and taps her foot, and shuffles menus around as if to inspire enough sense into them that even Americans could comprehend what they might order for breakfast. Um... yeah, rules--so a debate starts up between me (who speaks English and some German) and the waitress (who speaks some wack-ass language that I don't know), about whether or not I can actually order what's offered on the menu. She grows increasingly frustrated with the communication gap, and it's like watching some twisted circe d'soliel enacted by one loony girl; she's slapping down plates, then grabbing the plates and removing them, then slapping down a different kind of plates, then removing those, her face red, her hair a mess, her voice indecipherable even to a Frenchman--and all I could hear in it was "yammer yammer yammer"--and JR, who actually knows some French, doesn't think it would be funny enough if he were to help me out at all, but sits quietly with a slight grin on his face, waiting for the violence to begin.
Me: "Look, fine, and whatever--just give me coffee."
Waitress: "Yammer yammer."
Me: "Coffee. Yes? No? Coffee?"
Waitress: "Yammer yammer coffee yammer just coffee yammer?"
Me: "Yes, just coffee."
Waitress: "Yammer yammer..."
And then of course one needs to get guffawed from the Js for it. "I'm protesting," I said. "I'm not going to eat in Belgium. Screw the French!"
At the end of the meal, one of us has to go up to the counter and pay for the bill. The bill, ripped angrily from a tablet, is more like a scrap of diagnostic doodle one might find in a psychiatrist's office, with arcane symbols scrawled illegibly in the margins, and quasi-Arabic numerals somewhat lined up for an unknowable total. Pay for the bill. Pay for this bill that is impossible to interpret with money that has no meaning to any of us. I swear I was annoyed enough to go up and do it if I'd been paying attention, but JD bravely grabbed the thing and, looking much like a green corporal sent to accept the surrender of a mighty general (albeit a French one), set off past the tables of yammering Gauls toward the vaguely indicated front register.
About an hour later we had forgotten about him, chatting as we were about the ongoing crisis facing travelers in countries with inadequate standards of language, and then, looking pale and shaken, he returned to his chair, obviously exhausted, and counting the colorful monopoly money that remained in hand.
JR: "Did you pay?"JD: "I think I got hustled."
Me: "Did you get the slow count?" (We had been warned by some travel book to be wary of "the slow count", which is when a cabbie or register clerk returns change to a tourist counted out slowly in the hope the recipient will just grab the first bill and consider himself square. By extension, any misdeed done by a native to a tourist might be called "the slow count", for instance blatantly wrong directions, or the Eifel Tower.)
JR: "What was the bill?"
JD: "I don't know! What's the conversion?"
JL: "Take the amount in Francs, double it, then move the decimal two places to the left."
JD: "..."
JR: "..."
Me: "..."
JL: "Or no... Yeah, that's right."
JD: "I think I just left one and a half cents for a tip...."
I thought that sounded perfect, but it was a somewhat awkward journey back through the French maze to the startlingly attractive door. (Within this maze still lurked the minotaur who didn't want me to have coffee just coffee.) I noticed several startlingly attractive girls on the way, but I thought, "Shit, what's the point? They all speak that horrible language that I'll never know (mainly out of principle)."
Amsterdam is a city of many surfaces, each pressing out aggressively, like the panels in a funhouse hall of mirrors, like the gleaming teeth of the fabled Great Wombat, but never offering portal to the dark, real city that lurks hungrily beneath. There is a reason for this--and its name is Tourism.
The Masters of Amsterdam, stern ancient descendents of the old City Guild Masters who have ruled the place as long as harlots have populated it, were long ago made aware of the darkness at its center, and worked actively to paint it over, as a brothel whore will cover a genital sore with a smear of rouge, a draped red light, a brown paper bag. The names of these Masters are public but their appearances are false, so that no seeker after the truth of Amsterdam might accost one and forcibly demand escort to the truth, though he knows of the legends, and lacks only the key borne by every Guild Master.
The strategy of subterfuge is a simple yet brilliant one, for spots of the dark underneath show through in places, and lure the tourists in for the irresistible sake of spectacle, never suspecting that they are witness to just the hint of the real. But there are pathways inside, some of them long forgotten, a few well travelled even today.Pakistan has--alas--finally closed down the Taliban embassy and kicked poor Ambassador Zaeef out. What will become of the poor lad? I hate to admit it, but I'm gonna miss that guy, as well as his buddy Shaheen. They were about the funniest two dudes from about the funniest crowd I can remember, two loonies sitting together on their comfy blue chairs on the Embassy veranda, answering reporters' questions with straight faces, making stuff up as they went along. A shy and quiet man, trained in fighting rather than diplomacy (surprising, I know), Zaeef was assigned to the post of ambassador to Pakistan (inarguably the most important international position available to a young Talib on his way up the Holy Ladder) due to his language skills (he knows a few words in English). But where Zaeef really shined was in his improvisational talents (he's appeared several times on "Who's Line is it Anyway?"), never stammering or deflecting when asked difficult or surprising questions, but always quick with a challenging retort or a clever joke. On one occasion, he quipped: "We know this is going to be a long war." On another: "If we are able to attack America we should do that, but at the moment we don't know what we will do." Taliban press conferences were well known for the good laughs. Ah well, maybe he's back to hosting Death to America parties in Kabul.
Update! Looks like Zaeef is requesting asylum from Pakistan, fearing perhaps that his old buddies might blame him for not threatening the Americans well enough to scare them off. So far, Pakistan hasn't returned his calls....
The Taliban have become historical punch-lines now, their new-emperor's clothing (shown above in the classic Han Solo style) has been revealed, and now they will be remembered mainly for their stunning barbarity crossed with a truly inspired gift for rhetorical comedy. According to liberated Afghanis--who now feel so free they are even going to the movies--the Taliban would cruise about town with their long beating-sticks, measuring beards and trying to see under burkhas, lording over their cities like kennel-masters in Disney cartoons. Their mission was to enforce the various edicts given them by their mad boss Mullah Mohammed Omar, who was prone to receiving new rules inside of dreams. Omar, a visionary, invented (and filed a patent for) the administrative process of banning everything then making allowances (in contrast to the complicated and cumbersome systems most other governments employ).So what were the Taliban? Nazis on dope? The Stooges on PCP? Or just some twisted zealots who won the Afghan lottery and got to be the bosses for five years?