the world or what there was to see, but I was open to what there was to eat. Camembert in France, ham sandwiches with butter (butter? hmmm), pork-liver pâté. In Italy, puntarella and buffalo mozzarella, sautéed rabbit, fresh figs. Yogurt and honey in Greece and feta with tomatoes and cucumbers; profiteroles, zaatar bread, King of Persia pistachios, roasted corn, duck eggs swallowed raw in a tea glass on the road overland to India.
A gong sounded. People started to stir, then slowly stampede. A line formed that snaked the length of the ship. I didn’t see any food. I didn’t smell any food, but a gong and what could pass as a queue facing in one direction was enough for me. I imagined rice and vegetables with a fried egg on top, soup with scallions and cabbage and pillows of tofu, maybe a shred of pork or chicken. I hadn’t eaten since early morning. The line moved but I was too far away to see anything. I smiled at the babies; pushed with the best of them. I was very hungry and nearing my turn.
And soon, there in front of me were the servers, ladling food onto tin plates from two huge oil drums. I was pushed from behind, handed a tin plate, and pushed again.
I looked down. A ball of rice and two silvery fish heads. Maybe there were three. Fish heads? I liked the look of a whole fish on a plate as well as anyone: braised with ginger, or roasted with fennel. I even liked the way a whole fish looked after it was eaten. A charming head and tail and a beautiful skeleton of bones.
The rice was gummy, the fish heads were small, stuck in the rice, eyes staring. I didn’t know what to do with them except look for a cat! My companions, English and Australian, gave back their plates and left the line empty-handed. They hadn’t liked the Christmas turtle soup or the lacquered goose poised in flight. They pooled their money with a plan to bribe the crew. I decided not to give up. I was very hungry. I took my tin plate and went back to my place on the deck. I formed some rice into a ball with my fingers and shoveled it into my mouth with my thumb. The fish heads looked at me. I picked one up and studied it. I poked at it with my fingers and found a small round of sweet white flesh at the cheek. And more to eat in the furrow at the top of the head, and above the eyes, at the forehead (if fish have a forehead). I broke it apart and sucked the bones. I ignored the eyes and gelatinous bits (personally, aspic gives me shivers) and I started on the second head. I finished the rice. I rinsed my fingers and my plate. My travel friends, meanwhile, had managed to score a pineapple and a bag of mandarins for a small fortune. They set about rationing like shipwrecked sailors. I accepted a mandarin section. I have always liked fruit after a meal. I unzipped my sleeping bag and lay down on the deck. I dreamt of fish heads.
The next day lunch was fish heads and rice and dinner was fish heads and rice. Twice a day, every day, for seven days, I ate fish heads. I found more tasty bits. I found the joy in fish heads. I smiled at the babies. I breathed in the sea air.
The ship ultimately left us, not in Singapore, but on a tiny island off Malaysia that had never seen a tourist, where the police were kind enough to put us up in a jail cell for the night, and for another small fortune, we hired a boat to take us to Singapore. We went straight to Maxwell Road to eat amazing dishes at the open-air market: Hokkein mee (fried prawn noodles), Hainanese chicken rice, chili crab. I didn’t miss the fish heads. But I’ve never forgotten them.
There was an old Italian man in my neighborhood who had served time in Alcatraz. In “the hole,” he said, they fed him bread and water. “I’d put the bread aside,” he told me, “and after two days it tasted like cake . . .” In Indonesia, I learned what he meant.
MARGUERITE
“You’ll be cut to pieces before you’re fifty miles across the Border,” I said. “You have to travel through Afghanistan to get to that country. It’s one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no Englishman has been through it.”
—Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King
The first time I met Marguerite she was wearing bedsheets. She had dyed them colors, pinks and purples, and sewn them into pajamas. She wore many sets, one on top of the other, and told me she would shed them, one by one, as the weather got warmer, until in Goa she would be naked. Her hair was orange from henna and her eyes half shut from opium but I didn’t understand that then.
We were in Istanbul, sleeping at the Gülhane, drinking tea at the Pudding Shop in Sultanahmet. Marguerite was alone but I was with Oliver who, as I saw it, had rescued me from a life measured in church bells and cheap cigarettes. I had seduced him on the floor of the dining room where we had set our sleeping bags side by side in the home of mutual friends when I heard he was on his way to India. I had been calculating. Men were easy to seduce, unless you loved them. It was always easier not to love them. God knows, they could be cruel.
Even Oliver, fragile as a flower, would in the end be heartless. Oliver, brilliant and beautiful, with his clipped overwrought language ripened at Cambridge, The Golden Bough in his rucksack. Where I come from, a man is said to be beautiful when he looks like a girl. Handsome was something else. Handsome made the heart beat. Beauty made you sigh. You wanted to reach out and touch its cheek.
Oliver was beautiful, with the perfect face of a fairy-tale prince. He wore his hair in a pageboy and I called him Prince Valiant but not to his beautiful face. I was living an interior life. Where I come from, men have rough ways and big noses and are always touching their crotches.
I was smug when we left the next morning, hand in hand. We took the train to Istanbul. Even Oliver, who counted the pennies in his palm, had to let go of hitchhiking somewhere in the south of Yugoslavia.
THE ISTANBUL TRAIN STATION
NOVEMBER 15, 1969
5:00 A.M.
When the train pulled into the station I saw him standing there and at that moment I remembered the warnings I had been given as a girl about the colpo di fulmine, when your heart is split open as though by lightning. A dangerous event. How can you protect yourself when your heart is split in two?
He was all I could see. Black curls, black eyes, hands in pockets, alone, grinning. A mythological creature, a satyr.
I think of him standing on the tracks in front of the train. How could he have been? I was delusional, too long alone on the road with the beautiful, brilliant, parsimonious Oliver. I closed my eyes. The train moved further into the station and he was gone.
Oliver went to rent us dormitory beds and I made my way down to the Pudding Shop. The Pudding Shop. Germans, Dutch, French, English back from the East, draped in satin and silk and beads, languorous, with kohled eyes, and, yes, beautiful.
And there was Marguerite, in her bedsheets, carefully rolling an English joint. “I’m Dutch,” she said, between licking the many papers it took to make a real English joint. She had a chipped front tooth and slurred the words, her accent heavy. “My English is not so good.”
“Your English is great,” I said.
“I go to India,” she said.
“Me, too,” I told her.
“We go together. Ja, why not?” she said. She ran her tongue the length of the joint to seal it and tore a piece of cardboard from a package of Murad cigarettes to make a filter. The joint was conical and when she lit it, the tip burned red in a circle the size of a nickel. “Ja, you come with us. We go tomorrow. We take the train.” She handed me the joint.
“I’m with someone,” I said. “An Englishman.”
“You bring him. Good. He comes too.” She closed
