The Way of the World

In the summer of 1953, Nicolas Bouvier, a young Swiss writer in his early twenties, left Geneva to embark on an overland journey eastward. He had an old Fiat, money for about four months, and two years of open road ahead. At a post office in Zagreb, he found a letter from his friend Thierry Vernet, a painter, describing the vivid market life of Travnik in Bosnia. The letter confirmed their plan: Bouvier would join Thierry in Belgrade, and from there they would drive through Turkey, Iran, and onward toward India. Bouvier reflects that his wanderlust took root in childhood, lying on the carpet and gazing at an atlas.

Bouvier arrived in Belgrade at midnight and found Thierry at the Café Majestic. The Association of Serbian Painters (ULUS) had invited Thierry to exhibit, and the two settled into a dilapidated studio in Saïmichte, a suburb built on the remains of a former Nazi concentration camp and roughly converted into ateliers for state-supported artists. Their neighbors were generous despite extreme poverty. Thierry's exhibition drew a cross-section of Belgrade, from bewildered Communist journalists to wistful former bourgeois who had returned under an amnesty to live in the smallest rooms of their old residences. Bouvier wrote short pieces for local newspapers and reflects on how Serbian artists and peasants treat culture as vital, unlike in Switzerland, where art serves merely decorative functions. With their friend Mileta, a young ULUS painter, they traveled north to the Hungarian border region of Bačka to record rare Romany songs performed by gypsy musicians in the village of Bogojevo.

They drove south through Šumadija, where their friend Kosta, an accordionist, and his family hosted an enormous feast with music and dancing. Bouvier savored the slow pace of the road, discovering that the journey itself "flows through you and clears your head" (47). They settled for several weeks in Prilep, a small Macedonian town perfumed with drying tobacco and encircled by wild mountains. Bouvier describes its complex ethnic tapestry: Turks settled since Suleiman's time, Bulgarians, Albanian refugees, Greek exiles, Communist Party functionaries, and dour Macedonian peasants. They befriended Ayub, the Turkish barber, who introduced them to the town's Turkish community. Bouvier encountered a Jewish Macedonian hotel maid who survived three years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp and spoke of her deportation as a kind of voyage. They recorded an elderly bagpiper named Lefteria who had roamed Macedonia for 30 years.

Crossing into Greece, Bouvier notes the shift from Balkan night-blue to an intense sea-blue. In Constantinople, they lodged at the Moda-Palas, a deserted pension run by Madame Wanda, a Polish proprietress who warned them they would have no luck in Istanbul. She was right: The bourgeoisie wanted nickel-plated furniture, not modern painting, and Thierry was humiliated going door-to-door with his drawings. They departed at two a.m. and drove across the vast Anatolian plateau, encountering ox-carts unchanged since Babylonian times and enormous painted trucks. At the Ordu Pass, villagers dancing in the rain exuded such menace that Bouvier did not dare use his tape recorder. They pushed the car uphill at nearly 10,000 feet to cross the Cop Pass, where an eagle struck a bell on a gibbet, sending a resonance across the unnamed mountains.

At the Iranian border, they drove past Ararat into warmer air and reached Tabriz as the first snow fell, blocking the roads. They spent six months there, renting two whitewashed rooms in the Armenian quarter. Bouvier describes a city in decline: Once the largest in Iran, Tabriz lost its merchant class after the Bolshevik revolution closed the Russian border, and the 1941–1945 Soviet occupation drained it further. During Muharram, the annual Shi'ite mourning commemoration, penitents beat their breasts, flailed their backs with iron chains, and sliced their shaven heads with cutlasses. Paulus, a Baltic émigré doctor, became their closest friend, a massive storyteller who arrived with smoked sturgeon and vodka and responded to every misfortune with irrepressible laughter. Bouvier took on French pupils to earn a living and struggled to write, tearing up the same page 20 times. The decision to separate came over kebabs at the Djahan Noma restaurant: Thierry's relationship with Flo had matured, and she would meet him in India for their wedding. Bouvier would continue alone.

In spring, they obtained travel permits and drove south into Kurdistan. In Mahabad, a Kurdish town under heavy military presence, a police captain convinced they were spies installed them in the local prison. Life in the gaol was comic and absurd: The captain lectured on the digestive benefits of fennel while petitioners and smugglers filed through. Bouvier met Hassan Mermokri, a young Kurdish arbab, or village-owning landlord, serving a hundred-year sentence for stabbing an uncle at 16. Back in Tabriz, Roberts, an engineer with the American Point IV technical assistance program, had lost his optimism: His school-building project failed because villagers sabotaged materials, the local mullah opposed literacy, and the peasants saw no point in education without first addressing hunger and injustice.

In Tehran, they struggled to earn money until a fit of laughter during a meeting with the director of the Franco-Iranian Institute changed everything: Thierry received an exhibition, Bouvier a lecture. They earned enough for six months and departed south. At Isfahan, Bouvier marveled at the Safavid monuments, legacies of the dynasty that made the city its capital in the 16th and 17th centuries, but was seized by a powerful premonition of death while walking by the river. At Persepolis, the car broke down; 30 hours of labor in blazing sun followed. On the road to Shiraz, the brakes of a truck towing their car failed on a mountain descent, and they crashed through a migrating tribe of Kaoli, Persian nomads akin to gypsies, miraculously without killing anyone. The desert crossing intensified: The heat forced them to drive only at night, they lost liters of water daily, and they crossed the Lut, Iran's most punishing desert. At the Mirjaveh customs post on the Pakistani border, they set off alone into the Baluchi desert at night.

They arrived in Quetta, Pakistan, their combined weight down to 220 pounds. They took work as musicians at the Saki Bar, run by Terence, a former British Guards officer turned restaurateur who cooked chocolate soufflés, read Proust, and listened to Gluck's Orphée in his cubbyhole. Then disaster struck: Bouvier's entire winter manuscript, all his writing from Tabriz, was accidentally swept up by the hotel boy and hauled away by the refuse truck. Bouvier and Thierry spent a day digging through the town dump amid vultures, recovering only four scorched scraps. On their last night, a Kuchi musician, an Afghan gypsy, played a tiny harmonium and sang in a voice reminiscent of the Bosnian sevda, or love songs, they had heard near the start of their journey. The voyage spiraled back on itself.

They crossed into Afghanistan through the Khojak Pass. In Kabul, both men fell ill; a Swiss UN doctor named Claude nursed them back to health. Thierry exhibited and sold paintings, then contracted jaundice. In mid-November, he flew to Ceylon, where Flo awaited. They split their money at the airport. Bouvier remained alone. He hitched north on a truck across the Hindu Kush via the Shibar Pass, enduring breakdowns and brutal cold, and arrived at a French archaeological dig at Kafir Khale, where a fire temple from the ancient Kushan empire was being excavated on a hilltop overlooking the Bactrian plain of northern Afghanistan. In a passage written six years later, Bouvier reflects on the difficulty of completing the book, describing the corrosive silence of memory and his fear of not recovering the vitality of that time.

On December 3rd, Bouvier departed the dig alone and drove south toward India. On the Afghan side of the Khyber Pass, the mountain corridor connecting Afghanistan and Pakistan, the customs officer was asleep behind a bottle of purple ink. Bouvier left his passport and went to lunch, savoring his last hours in the country. He sat for an hour before the mountain, smoking a hookah, experiencing a transcendent moment of clarity. He reflects that he believed he had grasped something that would change his life forever, but concedes that such insights cannot be held: "Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself" (317). He picked up his stamped passport, left Afghanistan, and drove toward the top of the pass, where on days when the wind blows from the east, the traveler meets gusts of the ripe, fiery scent of the Indian subcontinent.