Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

old Mercedes trucks. Somewhere near Nusaybin, they would put him in touch with Syrian Kurds who would help him cross over into Syria. And so it came to pass.

The second Kurdish group, as colorful as carnival cavorters in their billowy trousers, embroidered blouses, and tablecloth-sized head coverings, had taken him along Syria’s northeastern snout on camelback. It was while swaying to and fro atop one of those spitting, whining, kicking, loaf-lipped beasts that he had finally made contact with Maestra. He’d been afraid to e-mail her since, as evidenced by the Joe who’d seen him off in Seattle, the company was picnicking in his computer, and for reasons he hoped were just her characteristic orneriness, she wasn’t answering her phone. As much to take his mind off his uncomfortable ride as to ease his worry about her, he’d punched her Magnolia number into the satellite phone one more time—and was actually startled when the line was picked up and a gruff voice bellowed, “This had better be good!”

“Did anyone ever tell you, Maestra, that you have the disposition of a camel?”

“Damn straight I do, so don’t try to milk me or pile a load on my hump. Where are you, boy?”

“Are you aware that a camel’s hump is naught but a lump of fat?”

“Really? Then it’s the same as a woman’s breast.”

“Oh no, you must be mistaken. A woman’s breast . . . why, a woman’s breast is a miniature moon. It’s made out of moon paste and warm snow and honey.”

“Heh! You romantic ninny. Where are you?”

He dared not be specific, but she got the idea that he was in camel country, and, more important, he got the idea that she’d fully recovered from her stroke. She was, in fact, arranging to fly to New York to be on hand for the auction of the Matisse in late June. “I’m making sure those poufs at Sotheby’s don’t try to stiff me.”

Thus it was with much lightening of heart that he slipped into Iraq, a country where it was as easy to get beheaded as to get a bad meal. Fortunately, he endured the latter and avoided the former. In a ruined mountain town southwest of Dahuk, he had bestowed the masks (minus the hundred he’d given his latest escorts) on a tearfully grateful mayor, whose constituents had been recently decimated with nerve gas dropped on them by the very Baghdad authorities who had promised them self-government in 1970. The mayor hosted a celebration in his honor that evening, with lambs on the spit, hookahs on the rug, and belly dancers on the balcony. Because these Kurds were more strict in their adherence to Mohammed’s commandments than was the isolated group in Samanda(breve)gi, it proved a nonalcoholic affair, a condition that actually suited Switters since his digestive tract found arrack as combustible as pisco and since sobriety could be a useful ally in a hasty getaway.

Knowing full well that Baghdad would have informants in the town (there would have been a minimum of two or three at the party) who’d waste little time in reporting his presence to the nearest military garrison, Switters excused himself early on in the festivities and, instead of visiting the outhouse, as advertised, ducked into the small room he’d been given and retrieved his belongings. He rolled out the rear entrance, rattled across an adjacent courtyard dotted with stones and tethered donkeys (belly dance music drowning out the clatter), and on through a gate onto a dark side street. The neighborhood was as empty as a Transylvanian blood bank, most of its inhabitants being at the party, but outside PUK headquarters a block down the street, he found a battle-hardened old militiaman leaning against the battered hood of a Czech-made version of the Jeep. The guard spoke little Arabic, while Switters’s Turkish vocabulary was pretty much limited to dolyolu. In Kurdish, even the word for that revered orifice was absent—temporarily, he trusted—from the tip of his tongue; yet, somehow the message was conveyed that Switters desired to be driven to the Syrian frontier, a hundred miles away. The request had been stubbornly refused, even after Switters flashed the wad of deutsche marks that Poe had provided to see him through (the rest of his pay, about nine thousand dollars plus airfare, was being wired to his Seattle bank). So, for the first and only time in the operation, he drew his pistol. He cocked it with an ominous click and snuggled its barrel up under the guard’s floating rib. “To the opera!” he called. “And five gold guineas if you catch the king’s carriage.”

The emaciated PUK grenadier wept openly when Switters flung his rifle out of the moving Jeep, and Switters, tears gathering in his own eyes, felt such shame that he had the warrior turn the vehicle around, and they went back and picked it up. “Jesus, pal! Your attachment to your symbolic manhood could get me killed.” The teeth the Kurd showed when he smiled made his abductor’s seem a textbook example of the rewards of dental scrupulosity. They clasped hands in the Islamic manner. And—

Wham, bam, thank you, Saddam! Nigh him wigworms and nigh him cheekadeekchimple! They were out of there.

The distance between Switters and the oasis at last began to shrink. Quite suddenly, in fact, the compound seemed to enlarge, as if, cued by a director and strictly timed (ta da!), it had burst out on stage. It was no mirage. But what was it? It had better be good because all around it, in every direction, as far as his eyes could see, the world was as empty and dry as a mummy’s condom.

He was wondering if he shouldn’t have remained with the Bedouins. They were a marvelous people to whom travel was a gift and hospitality a law. The Kurds had been gracious enough, but he preferred the Bedouins, for they were less religious and thus more lively and free. Kurds were essentially settlers who roamed only when forced from their villages by strife. Bedouins were nomadic to the bone. Whereas Kurds were in a constant state of bitter agitation over their lack of an autonomous homeland, Bedouins had no use for such paralyzing concepts. Their homeland was the circle of light around their campfire, their autonomy was in the raw sparkle of the stars.

In almost every nation in the Middle East, Near East, and Africa, nomads were under strong governmental pressure to plant themselves in established settlements. Whatever the socio-political, economic reasons given, underlying it all was that great pathetic lunatic insecurity that drove men to cling to various illusions of certainty and permanence. The supreme irony, of course, was that they clung to those ideals because they were scared witless by the certainty and permanence of death. To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.

The fires of this particular band of wandering herdsmen had been noticed by Switters only a few kilometers inside Syria, along the isolated, seasonally fertile wadi down which he’d been driven, headlamps off, to avoid both Iraqi and Syrian border patrols. Knowing that they would be honor bound to receive him hospitably, he ordered the commandeered Jeep stopped about three hundred yards from their encampment, gave the driver a fistful of deutsche marks, and sent him back to his Kurds and fray. “Thanks for the lift, pal. Good luck to you and your homeboys. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you ought to switch brands of toothpaste. Give Atomic Flash or Great White Shark a try.”

Initially, he’d planned to make his way back into Turkey, where an American with a properly stamped passport and no gunnysacks of gas masks in his possession would have aroused not the slightest suspicion. He might expect to reach the Istanbul airport within the week. But he was full of himself after his little caper, and soon he was full of the Bedouins, as well.

Despite the fleas that prickled him nightly the way stars prickled the desert sky, he loved sleeping on their musky carpets inside their big black tents. (The universe is organized anarchy, he thought, and I’m lying in the folds of its flag.) He loved their syrupy coffee, earthenware jars, silver ornaments, tilted eyebrows, and the way they danced the dobqi, their bare feet as expressive as a ham actor’s face. Yes, and he loved it that they were as wild as bears and yet impeccably neat and polite. Their good manners would put a Newport socialite to shame. Every country had a soul if one knew where to look for it, but for the stateless Bedouins, their soul was their country. It was vast, and they occupied it fully. It was also portable, and he felt compelled to follow it awhile.

Should he not have stayed with them indefinitely, devoting his skills and energies to preserving their way of life? The khan, after all, had offered him one of his daughters. “Take your pick among the five,” the khan had said, ever the perfect host, and Switters could sense them blushing behind their thin white veils, while the gold coins they wore strung around their heads jingled slightly, as if vibrated by hidden shudders of nuptial anticipation. Their chins were tattooed up to the base of their noses, and at mealtime each would squirt milk from a ewe’s teat directly into her teacup. He tried to imagine marriage to such a girl. His hypothetical adulthood-prevention serum would be superfluous, for they already had been inoculated with an ancient genetic Euro-Asian plasma that kept them soft and fiery and curious and frisky to the grave. Imagine romping with a two-legged patchouli-oiled bear cub every moonlit evening on the carpets she would have woven for his own black tent! How primal, how lurid, how timeless and funky and mysterious and frank!

Yet . . .

She would never serve anything but yogurt for breakfast, beer and biscuits and red-eye gravy stricken from