This story is included in the award-winning The Kindness of Strangers (Lonely Planet), edited by Don George and with a preface by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The book includes original stories by Jan Morris, Tim Cahill, Simon Winchester, Pico Iyer, and Dave Eggers, and won both a Lowell Thomas award and an Independent Publishers award.
I didn’t know whether I was being kidnapped or rescued—that was what made my one big decision so difficult. That and the fact that I was young and foolish, and more than a little anxious about being stranded in the North African desert.
It all began quite innocently. Our bus had deposited Alan, my affable traveling companion, and myself at the door of a small, clean hotel in a dusty Tunisian village …
The buildings were two stories high at most, covered with plaster, and whitewashed against the powdery red dust that enveloped the town and seemed to stretch forever. In the desperate heat of late afternoon, the place appeared to be completely deserted. Not a single shop was open and the dirt streets were empty: no vehicles, no pedestrians, not even a stray dog.
Inside, the 1940s-era hotel was as empty as the street. There were no brochures advertising nearby attractions (I suspected there were no nearby attractions); there was no “We accept VISA, MasterCard, and American Express” sign. That was okay; I had travelers’ checks. There was no bouquet of silk flowers, no table, no couch on which weary travelers could rest. A lone white straight-backed chair stood sentry on the floor of exquisitely patterned blue and red ceramic tiles. The reception desk held a silver tray filled with Christmas mints—the round kind with a green Christmas tree in the middle—like my grandmother used to put out every year. It was August, and they looked old.
I had only just met Alan, a wandering college student like myself, that morning. But I quickly decided he’d be great to travel with: he seemed friendly, calm and reasonable—not the type to freak out if a bus schedule changed or a train was delayed. Plus he spoke a little French, which I did not. Alan had a quick, cryptic conversation with the hotel clerk, and then translated for me. The clerk had suggested that he hitch a ride to the local bar/restaurant—six miles out of town—for a beer and a bite to eat. It didn’t occur to either of us that a woman shouldn’t also venture out, and I was eager to see some sights, meet the locals, and have dinner. Of course I went along.
In retrospect, I realize I should have known better. We were in Tunisia, a country where women stay indoors and cover up like caterpillars in cocoons. The guidebooks had warned me to cover my shoulders and legs, and I felt quite modest and accommodating in a button-up shirt and baggy jeans.
When we arrived, I found that the place was more bar than restaurant, and that I was the only female present. Even the waiters were all men. But these details didn’t seem important. After all, I had dressed conservatively, and decided to take the precaution—again, recommended by my guidebook—of avoiding direct eye contact with men. What could possibly go wrong?
Since I spoke neither French nor Arabic—and was assiduously avoiding eye contact—it was quite impossible for me to converse with anyone but Alan, who was busy putting his first-year college language skills to dubious use. I was bored. This was a plain-as-bread sort of establishment; there was no big screen TV soccer game, no video arcade, not even a friendly game of cards or a bar fight for me to watch. Just a lot of dark men in white robes, sitting in mismatched wooden chairs, speaking softly in a language I could not understand and drinking tiny cups of strong coffee. The bitter, familiar aroma was a meager comfort.
Then the music began; it sounded off-key and was startlingly loud and foreign—a little frightening, even. Next the belly dancers appeared: twelve gorgeous women, one after another, with long, dark hair, burnished skin, flowing diaphanous skirts in brilliant vermilion and aqua and emerald, gold necklaces, belts, bracelets, anklets. Gold everywhere: tangled cords jangling against long brown necks; fine, weightless strands decorating the swirling fabrics; heavy gold chains slapping in a satisfying way against ample abdominal flesh. They were a remarkable contrast to the stark room and simple furnishings, and I began to realize that things in Tunisia were not entirely as they first appeared.
The music quickened, and the dancers floated across the bar—which had somehow been converted into a stage—and around the room, weaving in and out among tables, lingering occasionally for a long glance at a pleased patron. Soon they were at our table, looking not at Alan but at me, urging me, with their universal body language, to join them.
Did I dare? My stomach clenched momentarily. I knew my dancing would be clumsy and ugly next to theirs, my short-cropped hair and lack of makeup unattractively boyish, my clothing shapeless and without style or significant color. I wore no jewelry, as the guidebook suggested—just my glasses, which were not particularly flattering.
Of course I was relatively unattractive and clumsy in this foreign environment, I thought, but there was no need to be priggish as well. And the women were by now insistent, actually taking me by both hands and pulling me up to dance with them. Flushed with embarrassment, I did my best to follow their swaying hips and graceful arm movements as we made our way around the room once again. Even with the aid of the two beers, I was not foolish enough to attempt to duplicate their astonishing abdominal undulations.
As soon as I thought these exotic, insistent beauties would allow it, I broke the line and resumed my place—plain, awkward, very white, and completely out of my element—next to Alan. Thereafter, it was excruciatingly embarrassing for me to watch the dancers, and Alan agreed to accompany me back to the hotel. He, too, had had enough excitement for the evening and was ready to retire, so he asked the bartender to call us a cab. A fellow bar patron overheard the conversation and was kind enough to offer us a lift. The man wore Western-style clothing, understood Alan’s French, and seemed safe enough; we felt fortunate to have arranged the ride in spite of our limited linguistic abilities and the fact that the night was still young.
But that’s when the evening turned ugly. Two well-dressed, middle-aged men left the bar immediately after we did. We saw them get into a black Mercedes, and we watched in the rear-view mirror as they trailed us, just our car and theirs, bumping along a sandy road in the empty desert. There were no buildings, streetlights or pedestrians, and we saw no other vehicles.
I looked out the window, enjoying the vast, black night sky and trying to ignore my growing sense of anxiety. When we came to an unmarked Y intersection, our driver, in a bizarrely ineffective attempt at deception, headed steadily towards the road on the right, then veered off at the last second to take the road on the left. Neither Alan nor I could remember which direction we’d come from hours earlier, when it was still light out and we were not under the spell of Tunisian music and belly dancers and beer. The strange feigning and last-second careening alarmed us both.
And it got worse. Immediately after the incident at the intersection, the men in the car behind us revved the engine, chased us down and ran us off the road and into a ditch. They stood in the road, shouting and gesticulating wildly outside our car. My hands went icy in the warm night air. Despite—or perhaps because of—an imposing language barrier, we had the impression that the men who ran our car off the road were attempting to rescue us.
But what, exactly, were they rescuing us from? Was our driver a sociopathic kidnapper bent on selling us into slavery? A rapist? A murderer? And why were our “rescuers” so insistent? Was it out of the goodness of their hearts, or did they, too, have some sinister motive? We had to make a choice. One car would probably take us safely to our hotel; the other might lead to a terrifying fate. But we had no idea which was which.
In this moment of crisis, we clenched hands and Alan looked at me—somewhat desperately, I thought—for a decision. I tried to assess his strength, and wondered whether he was a good fighter. (Probably not—he was a Yale man.) My stomach churned, but I forced myself to concentrate. We had only two options: We could remain in the long black limo, hope it could be extricated from the ditch, and hope our volunteer driver really was the kind and innocuous man he had appeared to be.
Or we could bolt from the car, scramble out of the ditch, and as quickly as possible, put our rescuers and their car between ourselves and the man who had so generously offered us a ride…
Read the rest of this story in Lonely Planet’s The Kindness of Strangers:
