Walking to Samarkand by Bernard Ollivier

Author:Bernard Ollivier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510746916
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2020-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

TARYAK

Miyandahst Caravansary. Mile 754.

Stunned, bemused, I look up to discover Mehdi and Monir’s car parked only a short distance away. Eskandar, their son, climbs out of the back seat and runs toward me. What are they doing here? By what miracle? They laugh at my surprise and tell me that they stayed an extra day in Shahrud. At noon, they had lunch at Majid’s restaurant in Mayameh, who told them of the strange roumi he saved from starvation and let sleep on the tile floor. It wasn’t hard for them to deduce that I must be in Miyandasht. They just want to say hello. Monir takes some fruit from a cooler and I tell them all my troubles. Would they, by some strange coincidence, have an inner tube in their trunk? No, of course not. But they do have a car in working order, and they’re willing and generous souls. There’s no point in discussing it further: they’ll drive me to the next village so that I can purchase an inner tube and a tire.

Eskandar helps me remove the wheel, Mehdi goes over to negotiate with Ali, getting him to agree to keep an eye on my one-legged EVNI, and Monir makes room in the trunk in order to squeeze in my pack alongside the crippled wheel. And we’re off to Abbasabad, twenty-one miles distant. I send heartfelt a “thank you” to my guardian angel, who went above and beyond the call of duty getting me out of the jam I was in. But having accomplished that one act of brilliance, I guess he had better things to do than linger around just for me: there’s not a single garage in Abbasabad, and not a single bicycle dealer, let alone any bike tires. We’re told that we’ll have to go all the way to Davarzan, twenty-two miles down the road. There’s nothing there, either. We spot a kid on a bike with wheels about the same size as EVNI’s, but his tires are in even worse shape than mine. All we can do is keep on going until we reach Sabzevar, an important city nearly sixty miles away. By the time we arrive, darkness is already settling in. We finally find what I’m looking for and, in no time flat, the wheel is back together. Now for the return trip. I ask my friends to take me to the bus station so that I can catch a coach that will drop me off at Miyandasht. “Let’s have dinner first,” they reply. Then, after we’ve eaten our fill—Eskandar has a stunning appetite and gobbles down dish after dish—my friends decide to drive me back to where they picked me up themselves, my protests notwithstanding.

“But there’s no hotel. Where will you sleep?”

“We have what we need in the trunk.”

It’s quite late so we pitch camp in Abbasabad, out in front of a chai-khaneh. They have a huge canvas tent, and it comfortably sleeps all four of us. In the morning, the Dasht-e Kavir’s powdery, desolate vastness sprawling in every direction is a fabulous sight.

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