–Diane LeBow

Word count: 3844

“That’s the Hindu Kush Mountains, the killer of Hindus.” An Afghan man sitting next to me on the Ariana Afghan Airlines flight from Dubai to Kabul leaned over and explained. Outside the window, the flat desert lands of Iran and southern Afghanistan suddenly gave way to barren blue and gray ridgebacks, like waves of a stormy sea. I thought about the land I was visiting and wondered how stormy the political situation would be during my upcoming visit to this war weary land. As I was leaving for the San Francisco airport twenty-four plus hours ago, a friend called: “Have you been listening to the news? There’s just been another bombing in central Kabul, many people killed and injured, and an assassination attempt on President Karzai. Do you think you should delay your departure?”

Beneath us, small villages of stone and mud dwellings became visible as we angled in toward Kabul Airport. Voices and nervous laughter grew louder as excitement among the passengers mounted. Many on the crowded plane were Afghans returning after fifteen, even twenty years absence.

“I left when I was three,” one man said to me.

Another confided: “I’m afraid to get off. Everything will be so changed.”

The landing was a new experience for me: past bunkers and a graveyard of smashed up planes and cadavers of military aircraft, evidence of over two decades of war. I remembered I was entering a land of lawlessness, anarchy, warlords, and twenty-three years of conflict—actually a part of the world where civil war and foreign invasions are more the norm than peace.

Then we stepped off the plane into the “Country of Light,” as Afghanistan has been known. A young Afghan-American man who was traveling with us, said to me, “I thought I wouldn’t remember since I moved to the States when I was five but now that I feel the air and sniff familiar smells I know I am home.” The scene inside the terminal was bustling but well organized. Young men in ragged brown garments, looking like they had stepped out of the Middle Ages, pleaded to help me with my luggage in order to earn 10,000 Afghanis, about twenty-five cents.

Dust and people swirled all around me. The people were strikingly handsome—if dusty, like everything else there. Afghan eyes, dark and deep and very calm, really look into you and the look is not pained or demanding or threatening in any way: it is calm and clear. Perhaps the look is a result of millennia of survival and resignation to whatever the fates or world politics send their way.

Even though I travel extensively, I was never in a war zone before. There were a few things to get used to. As we left the Kabul Airport, my driver said, “Don’t worry that there is no seat belt,” as he saw me searching along the side of the seat. “I drive slowly.” With that, he floored it, and we raced up the wrong side of the divided street against the oncoming traffic. There are no traffic rules or stop lights in Afghanistan. Traffic when it moves, like spilled milk, goes anywhere there is a space. My driver Nabil’s technique suited the general sense of lawlessness in the air.

Through the open window of our car, I bought The Autumn 2002 Survival Guide to Kabul from a street child. It opened optimistically: “There’s a lot to see even if most of it is wrecked.” On the way to our guesthouse, all around us large areas of Kabul were bombed out wrecks of former homes, stores, and even palaces. Near the center of the city, burned skeletons of buses lie stacked one on top of another around the devastated former public transportation center. The ubiquitous blue burqaed women and street children begged at the windows of our van and later when I walked through the streets. Men with no legs, mine victims, negotiated along on a sort of skateboard amongst the traffic, pleading for “baksheesh,” some money.

As we drove up to the hotel I was to stay at, I noticed the top floor was missing and I joked to my driver that I hoped my room was on a lower floor.

There’s something about Afghanistan and the Afghan people that draws me back again and again. When I am there, I feel out of time, connected to all of humanity at all times. This land has been touched by so many—from Alexander the Great, the Egyptians, ancient Greeks, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Soviets, Taliban, to most recently, the USA–– and yet maintains a strong sense of identity.  There is approximately eighty percent illiteracy, few roads, little to no electricity, running water, phone service, postal or banking system. People live mainly on a subsistence level. Yet, to be with an Afghan is to be aware of a keen intelligence, often along with a sharp wit, a sense of irony and enjoyment of life, and a pervading kindness and hospitality.

How can this be when all around are bombed buildings, destroyed roads, adults and children with missing legs, piles of rusting tanks and crashed planes? I sought to learn more about this strong pulse of life that was throbbing here.

My lifelong work for women’s rights and the horrors of the Taliban especially pulls me to this part of the world. Imagine being confined inside your house with the windows painted black, only being permitted outside when accompanied by a male relative, being beaten for even showing a bit of wrist, and even stoned to death at the whim of a perhaps disgruntled husband who wants to be rid of you?  Imagine not being permitted any education or access to earning a livelihood, receiving medical care, or even an occasional visit to the public bath as you have no running water in your simple house? I wanted to learn more and see what I could do to help.

PART 1 Beyond the Burning Burqas: My First Visit with Afghan Women

Two years earlier, June 2000, the Taliban were still in power in Afghanistan. Their treatment of women is the ultimate in man’s inhumanity to women. Could any of us do something to help? Living in France at the time, I met a group of exiled Afghan women. Along with some French women, we organized a conference near the Afghan border in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, as it was still impossible to have such a gathering inside Afghanistan. There we met with over 300 Afghan women who had escaped across the Afghan-Tajik border and were living at the time in this former Soviet republic.  Our goal was to help them write up “A Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women,” based on United Nations’ documents. Major elements of our work were eventually incorporated into the new Afghan Constitution.

“Please, speak out about these crimes. But tell not just about the suffering, but also about the successes, how we are resisting.” I met Halida, a math professor from Kabul, who ran secret schools for girls inside Afghanistan all during the Taliban repression. She was one of several hundred Afghan women at this conference. These women were the lucky ones, educated and middle class, having the means and know how, to escape from their country as the Taliban took over. The stories of these women professors, doctors, engineers and computer scientists revealed to me what the civil society of Afghanistan has been and can be once again.

Western news coverage of Afghanistan generally presents a picture of illiterate warlords and draped women. However, earlier, into the sixties, Afghanistan was a progressive society. Women’s equal rights were guaranteed by the Afghan Constitution.  In pre-Taliban Afghanistan, women, at least in the urban centers, were educated and active participants in the society. They comprised fifty percent of the civil administration, seventy percent of the teachers, forty percent of the physicians, and had fifteen percent representation in the highest legislative body in Afghanistan—a larger number than the United States.

“Persecution of women is a method to install terrorism in order to paralyze society, to create a submissive society,” Khalida Messaoudi, Deputy from the Algerian government opened the conference with these words.  She is a petite, auburn-haired powerhouse. Facing death threats everyday of her life and surrounded by security guards, she was a central force in uniting the Algerian women and ousting Algeria’s version of the Taliban and in establishing representative democracy in her country. “Imagine,” she said to me later in the lobby, “right wing Christian fanatics, armed with automatic weapons, taking over Washington, D.C., and the U.S. government. This is the situation in Afghanistan with the Taliban.”

During meals, the stories poured into my ears:

A young woman at our table told me she had three children and that her pilot husband was killed in an airplane crash. “I hated the burqa,” she said. “With the burqa, you always have eye ache and headache. It is especially difficult for women who wear eyeglasses.”

One woman, Masada, is a dentist with a computer engineer husband and two children. She is an exceptionally beautiful woman around thirty with symmetrical features, large eyes, and dark brown hair. Like many of the Afghan women, Masada eschewed traditional dress; in her case she wore an oversized tee shirt and jeans. She told her tale of escape, which was like many others. “The Taliban were entering our town that day. I couldn’t reach my husband. I quickly arranged visas and plane tickets to Iran for my children and myself. After eleven months in Iran, I was able to take a train with the children to Tajikistan. Finally, from here, through an international company, I got a message to my husband that we were alive.”

Another woman who had escaped from a Taliban controlled area told me: “The Taliban took seven hundred women hostage. More than 2000 people were killed when they took Kabul. They sold and raped many women, using them as sex slaves. Aged and disabled people, they left to suffocate in closed barracks in temperatures over 110 degrees.”

A young male Afghan journalist spoke to me as we were walking outside after one session. “The Taliban live in darkness, they follow ancient beliefs. It is not our culture to treat women this way. Women are human, not animals.”

Habeeba, an engineer, said: “When the Taliban leave, the women will burn their burqas, the men will shave their beards, and there will be music on every corner.”  The burning has begun but much remains to be done.

On my last afternoon in Tajikistan, a number of women friends from the conference arranged a country outing. We drove out in two vans and picnicked by a fast-moving river, surrounded by sunlit mountains which led on toward Afghanistan. A thin business woman in a tailored dress crouched down and drummed a Middle Eastern beat on an overturned rusty metal table. Soon one after another of the women began belly dancing. Small girls joined us. One woman drew me into the circle, the others clapping around us. Repeatedly, they said something to me that sounded like “Hurhun.” The word sounded uncomfortably close to a term I wouldn’t want to be called and wondered if somehow my behavior was unacceptable.

Back at the hotel, when we hugged goodbye, I took a deep breath and asked: “What does “hurhun” mean?

“Sister,” they replied. “Thank you, our sister, for being here.”

PART 2 Afghanistan: The Friendliest Country

After the fall of the Taliban the following year, I flew to Afghanistan as part of a human rights delegation sponsored by the San Francisco based organization Global Exchange. There were eleven of us, mainly young Afghan-Americans and me. Our mission was to assess the state of Afghan culture and the arts and set up projects to help both immediately and in the long-term. In addition, I planned to visit women’s projects and learn about specific ways I might be able to get involved..

The cover on an Afghan tourism brochure from the 1970’s that I found in a Kabul bookstore announced “Afghanistan, The Friendliest Country.” Believe it or not, that’s what I’ve found during my visits there and with the continuing friendships I have with Afghan people.

Driving through Kabul with my young Afghan friends even in the midst of the dusty chaos that is Kabul’s perpetual traffic gridlock, I never saw anyone yelling in anger. People laughed and joked. Kabul is a remarkably tight knit community. My driver used the traffic jams to shout messages to other drivers and passengers. “Tell my cousin to ask his friend Hamid about the tire he is fixing for me.” Since there were few functioning telephones in Afghanistan, I realized that the gridlock is a communication opportunity. Even when people run into each other, they don’t seem very upset. On one occasion, one of my drivers knocked a man off his bicycle. They both chatted for a few minutes, laughed about it, and drove on.

My friend, Tareq, a university student, said to me, “Why does everyone pick on Afghanistan? We are merchants and businesspeople. If they want something we have, all they have to do is talk with us and, we’ll do business with them. They don’t have to drop bombs on us.”

My new friends even made up jokes about the ubiquitous blue burqas. “Will the woman in the blue burqa please stand up?” they imagined someone announcing to a large crowd. Hoots of laughter on their part and mine followed. Wiping her eyes from laughing so hard, Shoukria said, “To the coat check girl: ‘Mine’s the blue one.’ More gales of laughter.

Not just high spirits but industriousness and ingenuity were apparent everywhere. In areas of Kabul, as well as in surrounding villages, piles of freshly cut poplar logs, a fast growing tree, were being used for rebuilding. During visits to Kabul Radio and Television, the staff showed us how they had concealed their precious archives of tapes and film inside panels of the ceilings or plastered up doors, so the Taliban couldn’t find them. Now everything was out in the open again and being broadcast. When the Director of the Kabul Museum showed me room after room of statues smashed by the Taliban, he and his staff assured us that, with international help, “We can reconstruct them.”

We purchased a few hundred dollars worth of electrical supplies and helped get the lights back on in the Kabul University library reading room where we saw students hunched over books in the darkened rooms. Every department at the University needed international assistance. The music department lack instruments. The Fine Arts department wrote out a prioritized list of supplies they needed. Before we left, we dropped off paper, paints, and clay.

At the National Archives, the director took me into a room where mounds of deliberately ripped canvases lay stacked. However, the establishment reopened and they were hanging a show of recent paintings while we were there. At the University as well as the National Library, we examined cases displaying books that the Taliban shot through or shredded with knives as all images are forbidden under their extreme rule.

I visited an orphanage that housed more than one thousand children but had no running water or functioning plumbing. Children made a game out of taking turns at a single hand pump in the schoolyard. A fifth grade class of orphaned girls sang for us: “Afghanistan, you are now my mother, and I must take care of you.”  Over the next days, we purchased pillows and wool mittens for the children.

Afghanistan is a teacher’s paradise. Eager learners, both girls and boys, pack schools, half of the students sitting on the floors, shared the scarce books and writing on tattered bits of chalk boards. “Please stay here and teach us. When are you coming back?” the students of Alfatha Girls School addressed me in excellent English. Their 37-year-old principal, Mahgul Nawabi, ran underground schools for girls during the Taliban years when all girls were forbidden education. In many classrooms during my visit, I saw older women attending classes with much younger pupils, hoping to catch up on the years the Taliban denied them education.

I also visited a well-run school for the deaf, the first and only one in Afghanistan. The director developed the first system for signing in Farsi. “I try to help those who have been forgotten,” he told me. Another unique school is for street children. There are five such centers in Kabul, serving over 38,000 homeless children or children without functioning families. At these centers, the children spend a few hours each day, are taught literacy and basic mathematics, have a meal and access to bathing facilities, and, perhaps most important, have friends they can count on.

One day, several of us hiked up on the side of a mountain near the ancient walls of Kabul. Throughout the town, most people headed toward the stadium where the commemoration in honor of Masood, would occur.  A national hero, Masood, the great Afghan freedom fighter, was assassinated on 9/9/01, as part of the 9/11 attack on the USA, This was the infamous stadium where the Taliban performed public executions and stonings every Friday.  Above us security helicopters whirled. Below women washed clothes in the tiny trickle of water which was all that was left of the Kabul River after five years of drought

As we clambered up the steep gravelly hillside, from the flat roof of a mud and stone dwelling, a man on crutches waved at me and, with a smile, beckoned me over. As I approached him, I could see he had those movie star good looks of many Afghan men: gorgeous symmetrical features, muscular build, dark hair and beard, and expressive dark eyes. “Come in, have tea with my family,” he said through the university student who was my translator. I was having trouble staying upright on the steep slope and wondered as we entered his tattered house how my new friend managed on his crutches.

He introduced himself as Ashref. “I’ve fought against the Soviets and the Taliban to protect my family and little community here. I’m the mayor,” he told me in a matter of fact way, a broad smile on his face. A mine had blown one of his legs off, he explained, and he showed me various holes in his chest and back from mortar fire. In spite of his personal history, he joked constantly and was one of the most jovial people I’ve ever known. His wife, a beautiful woman with those special golden green eyes seen on some Afghans, interrupted to tell me, “My husband is a very good man.”

I asked him, “Here you are after twenty plus years of war, you’ve lost a leg, your body has been shot at again and again, yet you are so cheerful. How is that?

“Now we have peace,” he said, “and peace is everything.”

PART 3  TWO YEARS LATER

When I entered the unheated old cinema building in central Kabul, where until recently the Taliban had banned all films, the electricity went out for several minutes and I stood in the pitch dark with about one thousand Afghan women. They had traveled from all corners of Afghanistan to be here, on planes, on donkeys, and on foot.

Two years had past since my last visit to this country. The specific occasion this time was a women’s conference to prepare materials for the new Constitution at their Loya Jirga, or Constitutional Convention. For three days we sat in a packed hall for about eight hours each day, witnessing what the American Institute for Democracy, which helped fund the conference, described as “true grass roots democracy at work.”

Like a dam had broken, these women demanded every possible right and a perfect society. “We want freedom to wear what we wish. We want to be free to marry whom we wish or not to marry. No more polygamy, no violence, free education, health care. We want the right to ride bicycles.”

A few days later, some of their proposals were in fact added to the new Constitution, including a twenty-five percent requirement of women in the Parliament. Of course, enforcement is another story.

One afternoon, my plan was to find Ashreef, my one legged Mujahadeen friend, again, to see how he and his family were doing, and bring them photos from my last visit as well as gifts. With a few friends, I drove to the place in Kabul where the hills rise up from the bed of the Kabul River and where I recalled meeting Ashreef two years earlier. Street names or numbers don’t exist here. When we showed my photos to some people, they recognized him immediately, as he is well respected in his community. “He’s at the mosque,” and they ran to get him. Within minutes, rushing down the street on crutches toward me, with a new artificial limb, was Ashreef. We were both very moved by our reunion, tears streaming down both our faces. Somehow this illiterate warrior and I have a close bond.

“Diane,” he said, “we spoke of you often throughout the year. I looked at the little blue card you left with us, especially when I was sick or felt sad, and the thought of you always raised my spirits and made me feel happy again. Last evening I had a dream you were coming back and my wife and I spoke of you.” We spent a couple of hours talking over tea, nuts, and raisins in his modest but well kept tiny mud brick house.

He says he is an Islamist: women should have full rights to have careers, to go to the university, but still he believes they should wear the hijab. “We are Moslems, we want to respect our women wearing the cover. It is not the burqa which is the point but the freedom to move about in their lives, to live full lives, that is important. However, after conversing for over 1 1/2 hours, Ashreef said to me, “I’ve been at war for over 15 years, that’s all I know. I am thinking that maybe my mind and ideas haven’t developed as they should be. Maybe I need to rethink some of these new ideas especially regarding women and expand my mind and thoughts.”

Then he turned to the two young Swedish women journalists who were with me, “You are my guests, but Diane is no longer a guest.” My heart stopped for a moment. Had I offended him in some way?

“Diane is now part of our family.”

When William Faulkner accepted the Noble Prize for Literature in 1950, he talked about the human ability to endure and prevail: “When the last ding dong of doom has clanged and faded in the last dying evening… there will be one more sound, that of the puny human voice saying ‘I refuse to accept this.” That’s the voice I hear in Afghanistan.

Growing up in the fifties, I was well indoctrinated to believe that one was a very odd number and that I would never be o.k. until I met my better half, as they used to say. Everyone said traveling on your own as a woman was too difficult, scary, lonely, even dangerous. You would have no one to share your happy times with. You would feel like a stray bird on Noah’s Ark.

For some years I stayed home. Finally, I tried out my single flight wings at a Club Med in Mexico and on an organized rafting trip on the Colorado River. Once I went to Guatemala with a friend of a friend that I met at a party. She was the director of a major travel company, had lots of information on Guatemala, and made all our basic arrangements: flights, routing, hotels. She was another single woman with wanderlust. She had time and money. She was bright and seemed pleasant enough–i.e. not overtly prone to crying jags or screaming. We hated each other. Like a military commander, she would make a list each morning of exactly where we would go and what we would be doing each moment of the coming hours. At meals, she ordered always the least expensive items, although she actually earned a good deal more money than I did, and not only would not split the check but, using a calculator, she would divide tax and tip proportionately to her lesser bill. She hated that I spoke with strangers, making new friends easily. Perhaps worst of all, she was an early to bed early to rise type. I, on the other hand, love the music of the night and can do very nicely, thank you, without roosters and early bird tweets. In fact, I wear earplugs and a black face mask to protect me from such dawnlike hazards.

When I travel, I like to have some idea of itinerary and a program. But I open each day like a Christmas morning gift. Even though I know it is going to be a book or a bicycle or something to wear, I don’t know exactly which book or what kind of bike or how the sweater will feel and look on me. I may meet someone who says: “Hey, come home to my pueblo and have lunch with my 109 year old grandmother and me.” And I’ll cancel my plane or train reservation and go. Maybe a handsome Pakistani actor and I bump into each other underwater in a hotel swimming pool in Tel Aviv and end up making love intermittently for days, with breaks for his shoots and my writing and sightseeing. So I leave for Jericho a few days later; no walls come tumbling down. I can do whatever I want because I am traveling alone.

Alone: that has such a fallacious ring to it. Such a negative connotation. Like the “childless” versus “childfree” of the feminist seventies. If you are a traveler (not a tourist, but a traveler: that is, to experience as much of the world as possible in your four score years and ten or whatever is not a choice but a necessity like oxygen) and you are sufficiently blessed to have a soul mate, who is compatible in interests, personality, and resources, you are extremely fortunate.

But even then, you will probably not meet that fascinating gay Scottish retired millionaire farmer who invites you to sail with him from Cannes to Porto Fino for a month. Why not? Because you will be otherwise occupied, no doubt happily, with your soulmate. You will not be sitting alone in an off season St. Tropez restaurant on the harbor, enjoying a bucket of mussels in wine and garlic sauce accompanied by a nicely chilled Sancerre which the above mentioned retired farmer sends to your table because he also is eating alone that evening. So you end up learning about fox hunting in Scotland and the extreme joys of sailing the French and Italian Mediterranean in a yacht.

I am also not guaranteeing you may not be at risk or sometimes feel a bit odd and alone. When I was chloroformed and robbed on a midnight train in Ferrara, Italy, maybe it would have been easier to have been traveling with someone. But actually my wonderful and hospitable friends in southern Italy, my next port in the storm, soothed away most of my cares with some good pasta and wine, as well as loaning me some cash and helping me get replacement credit cards. Once at New Year’s in Guatemala City, an obnoxious small hotel owner gave away my room–in which I was already living–to a drunken, nasty friend of hers when there was not another hotel room to be found in the whole city, so I had to swallow my rage and pride and share my room with this chain-smoking harridan. Possibly if I had been with a man there in macho-land this experience would not have befallen me. On the other hand, maybe it would have and on top of finding ourselves homeless–because we wouldn’t have been able to share the room with another woman–I would possibly have had an enraged or whining male person on my hands.

What am I saying here? I’m not knocking the joys and security of home and hearth. My own nest in San Francisco is very important to me and I cocoon away a good part of every year there. Family, friends, true–even semi-true love–yes, wonderful. But we all pays our money and takes our choice. I’ll pay my single supplement, anytime.
© Diane LeBow

Published in Skirt Magazine, May 2005

I was not disappointed. First of all, in spite of what you might read in the American press, Libya is one of the safest countries to visit. Khadafi is eager to develop a vigorous tourist trade and urges his citizens to welcome all visitors, especially Americans. One of the benefits of a rigorous central authority is that streets are usually much safer than back home in the good old USA. There is very little crime and no visible poverty. Because of Libya’s oil wealth, the government gives each citizen a monthly stipend, as well as universal health care and free education through university for qualified students”including the opportunity to study abroad. Khadafi has actually been described as a feminist and, unlike most other Moslem leaders, maintains a society in which women share almost equal rights with men. They work, drive cars, walk around freely, attend schools and universities, and have protection under the law. Although most do wear scarves on their heads, they are not required to remain covered.

Before joining my group tour, I spent several days on my own in Tripoli and found the Libyans among the friendliest and most helpful people of anywhere I’ve visited. Individuals offered to guide me”not for any payment, but simply as my hosts”through the intricacies of the Old City. Men were polite everywhere I went, eager to meet an American and to show off their few English phrases.

There was so much to see”from Leptis Magna, one of the best-preserved Roman cities in the world, to Apollonia and Cyrene, which rivaled Athens in size and importance during the height of the Ancient Greece’s splendor. Sophocles and Aristotle visited frequently and spent time there.

As I wandered through Greek theatres and Roman baths, I was alone. Often there were barely a dozen other visitors as I walked through the Calderium, sat on Roman toilets for a photo op, and marveled at the sea coast locations of temples to Zeus and Athena. Walking along at Leptis Magna, I noticed a coin lying in the dust. When I picked it up and showed it to my guide, he said, “Oh, Roman coins are all over the place here. They don’t have much value.” I tossed it back into the soft dust, hoping other tourists would leave it for future visitors to enjoy.

A long day’s drive south took us to the ancient trading town of Ghadarmis, with its mysterious granaries carved into the rocky hillsides. Off we went then, with our four-wheel-drive vehicles out into the desert for several days, accompanied by Tuareg guides”gentle and hospitable nomads sometimes known as the Blue Men. They became my special friends who prepared meals and taught me how to wrap a turban properly. (Not just a fashion statement, that turban protected my entire face when the sand and locusts blew.) When my cranky camel objected to my leaning over to take a photo, he bucked me off and two of the camel drivers caught me in mid-air. I got my shot and didn’t drop my camera.

I am happy to report that the Libyan desert is perfect if you suffer, as I do, from arthritis. I rode my camel and hiked in the sand for hours with few or no aches. I was also delighted that our Libyan security guard, a handsome 30-year-old man, mooned over me during the entire trip. Nice to know some of my old stuff is still intact.

When it came time to leave, our Tuareg friends loaded us up with gifts”including the best gift of all, their email addresses! I am still in touch with them and look forward to a return visit.

Diane LeBow is San Francisco-based travel writer who has published stories in Salon.com, Via Magazine, numerous national newspapers, and several anthologies. A pioneer of college women’s studies programs, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California and is currently working on a book. Diane was not traveling with High Country Passage when she visited Libya.

©Diane LeBow, published in High Country Passage Travel

June 18, 1999 | I travel a lot and mostly I travel alone. When I enter a public phone booth to check in with friends back home, sometimes I feel like I’m opening a mystery novel. I never know what news awaits me, and more than once, love has rung its way into my life — or disconnected from it — in these places.

“I hate to tell you this way, but your visit to stay with me in Hawaii just won’t work out now,” his voice said on my answering machine. It was at least 100 degrees. Familiar symptoms followed: crazy heart rate, a wash of sweat over my body. I did a quick survey of my life, past, present and future, and found it sadly wanting.

I was high in the Corsican mountains exploring the 1400 B.C. Bronze Age archaeological site of Pianu di Levie and had decided to stop in the sole phone booth to access my messages back in California. After two months in France and Corsica, I was to be heading home in five days, and then on to a remote area in Hawaii to spend a few weeks with my lover of the last six months, a man I had known for the past three years. I’d been looking forward to this visit, to the love and coziness, to being cared for, after what had been a rigorous and lonely two months. I stood in the phone booth with my tickets, reservations and dreams and wondered what to do.

My booth was in the sun, surrounded by the village’s barren and dusty tiny plaza. In order not to suffocate, I held the folding door of the booth open with one hip. I called my 88-year-old writer friend, Dorothy Carrington. These days, I seem to be collecting a certain kind of role model: older women writers all over the world, living well and creatively on their own. Dorothy tops my list.

During the next few days, I had been planning to visit her at her home in Ajaccio, Corsica’s largest town and Napoleon’s birthplace. Without pausing for a breath after hearing my romantic woes, she said: “That’s not at all surprising. Men are hunters. Only one in four is at all capable of making any kind of emotional commitment. And in any case, you wouldn’t want a man around all the time anyway.”

“What about sex?”

“Ah, well, yes. That is a problem. When I turned 70, my desire for sex just walked out the door, and I’ve been much more at peace ever since. So, are we going to get together?”

“What about lunch?”

“That’s too much. What I really want is a banana split.” This stated with an English aristocratic “baanahna.” I was already beginning to cheer up.

The next day I found myself on the white sand beach near the fishing village of Campomoro, looking out at southwest Corsica’s translucent turquoise sea. The blank sentinel eyes of a 14th century Genoese watch tower oversee this area of the Gulf of Valinco. A voice interrupted my solitude: “You seem to be quite triste; perhaps I can cheer you up.” I looked up. The voice was attached to a tall, olive-skinned, hazel-eyed young Corsican. “My name is Christian. May I bring my towel over here?”

As I explained my situation to him, he came to a rapid conclusion. “You must stay on here for two more weeks. There’s a phone booth just above by the cafe. I’ll help you call the airlines and we’ll change your flights. In fact, I’m not even using my apartment these weeks; please feel free to stay there.”

I awoke the next day to birds’ songs. Below me the sea was blue and calm. The nightmare had passed. The wrenching of flesh from flesh. On another isle 10,000 miles to the west, 12 hours earlier in time, the volcanoes still bubbled and smoked and exploded. He slept, perhaps dreaming guilty dreams of me. Here the volcanoes were calm, mature, covered with green maquis, smoothed by the centuries. But still the form of the volcano remained. The potential was there, of passion, eruption. The bells of Propriano sounded in the distance, below in the town. My new lover arrived, bearing fresh warm croissants.

“How many lovers have you had?” he asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“More than me, I’ll bet.”

Little does he know, I thought.

“Maybe finally you are meeting the right one.” He was charming and convincing and a wonderful antidote. My injection theory of recovering from a broken heart worked once again: Make love with another man, and like swallowing an antihistamine pill, you begin to recover. Replacement juices and hormones do their job.

My Corsican adventure was not the first time a rendezvous in a phone booth had sent me reeling. My attraction to and fear of phone booths began years ago. In 1961, I was a senior at a women’s college on the East Coast and living in dormitory housing. There was a single phone booth for about 30 women. When a call came in from a man, whoever answered the phone would shout up to your room, “A phone call.” If it was a woman’s voice on the line, they would say, “A call.”

One evening the promising words “phone call” summoned me to the phone. I had been dating an Irish Catholic man, Kerry Keegan, who attended an Ivy League men’s college in New England. I was in love with Kerry — and I was going through a pregnancy scare. A few days earlier I had called him to tell him that my period was late. My hope was that he was calling me. Instead a strange male voice identified itself: “This is Father Fitzpatrick. Kerry has shared your news with me. I am sure a smart college girl like yourself will know how to take care of this problem and not upset a fine family like the Keegans.” Clearly my Jewishness had placed me somewhere in the category of an untouchable in those intense anti-Semitic days. The phone booth was suddenly stifling as I hung up and dragged myself back to my room.

Other times phone booths yield happy surprises. When Abdallah Sidi called me in Paris from Tunis to say “Je t’aime,” I had expected neither his call nor the message but was very pleased. We had met just a few weeks before when I had spent 10 days at a Tunisian coastal resort. During gray rainy Parisian winters when sun becomes an atavistic memory, Tunisia is an inexpensive and sunny getaway for the French.

There in Tunisia, at a Club Med-style resort near Hammamet, a creative maitre d’ had seated me at the same table with probably the only single man in the dining room. Abdallah, an economist with the Tunisian government, was staying at the hotel while conducting government business in the nearby villages. He spoke French well but with a Tunisian accent. His English was another story. He used wonderful literal translations from Tunisian like “I have the nose” to explain that he was getting a cold and had congested sinuses. We talked during meals, met for after-dinner coffee, became friends and finally something more.

Americans take phone booths for granted. In Tunis, the only public phones are in the crowded post office. Waiting in line to call can sometimes take an hour. Then, at least in the days when I knew Abdallah Sidi, you were limited to three minutes per call. So when he phoned me in Paris, recalling the crowds and the heat in that area of Tunis, I appreciated what he was going through. I pictured the old souk, the market place, just behind the post office, the same souk where French friends and I had gotten trapped during a flash flood and had to pay a local boy to lead us out, flood water up to my knees, clutching over my head the maroon and gold woven dress I had just purchased.

“I want you to come spend the summer with me in Tunis,” he said. “Friends have made an apartment available. There won’t be any furniture but that’s not a big problem.” I thought about sleeping on the floor in a non-air-conditioned apartment in summertime Tunis. Abdallah was a very nice man, intelligent, handsome, divorced and intense. He had introduced me to what seemed a rather kinky aspect of Muslim lovemaking: silence. “You must make no sound because Allah can hear. When you are satisfied, you may say, ‘OK.’ But only that.” Back in Paris, I had been thinking about him a lot and missing him.

“I want us to be married. We have to speak quickly because my three minutes are almost up.” My mind whirled. “Click, click, buzz,” went the dial tone as we were cut off. As I hung up, I sighed a small thank you to the Tunisian phone system and began planning my letter of adieu.

Sometimes phone booths aren’t for phone calls. I discovered this while taking a cruise with my mother. She was a traveler; in her last years and failing health, she found cruises a means to keep up her wanderings. As claustrophobic and sedate as I found them, I accompanied her on several. One was unmercifully long: three weeks from the Caribbean through the Panama Canal and up to San Francisco. A man who sat at the next table from us and I eyed each other, spoke, danced and finally tried to find a private place. He was sharing his cabin with his young son and I was sharing mine with my mother. After midnight, wandering around the ship, we discovered an odd room off the gambling casino that, strangely enough, had a phone booth in it. The room appeared to be deserted so we started to hug and kiss. Eventually I ended up on the little seat in the phone booth. Enjoying ourselves immensely, we burst out laughing when a member of the crew started to enter the room, saw us and grew wide-eyed. “Is everything all right here?” he asked.

And now I sat by the Gulf of Valinco, thinking about loves that ended and began in public phone booths. I’m all right now, I thought after reflecting on my current situation. Laurel blossoms fell on me from the surrounding trees. My head had cleared; Corsican seas are soothing, blue and full of wonder. I was on Prospero’s island — and there wasn’t a phone booth around for miles.

salon.com | June 18, 1999

About the writer

Diane LeBow is a freelance writer and community college professor who divides her time between San Francisco, Paris and Corsica — when not on the road.