A Problem on the Border

     When I first traveled abroad, I thought I was a bit more clever than others. Forty years ago many people used cash or traveler’s checks (or “cheques” as American Express would have it). In those distant days, even credit cards were uncommon, and I certainly had none. I obtained a letter of credit from the Northern Trust Company, my bank in Chicago, a document usually used by businessmen. In this way I would risk carrying no money and my savings could continue to bear interest in my absence. I then plagued banks throughout Europe and North Africa by showing up and requesting twenty or twenty-five dollars in the local currency. This worked well, we found, even in out of the way places.
     We were proceeding across North Africa mostly by train. At that time, the Moroccan trains had four classes. The last of these was our inevitable choice and we rumbled across country in cars with backless wooden benches that reminded me of trains in old Western movies. Oujda was our last Moroccan town – we bought some Algerian money from a street hustler before boarding the train. The black market existed because the Algerian government currency was controlled; that is, it did not trade freely but was maintained at an artificial level by the government.
     We had had some difficulty entering Algeria. My profession was listed as “editor” on the visa form, and the USA was uneasy with the Algerian National Liberation Front which had clear alliances to the Vietnamese one. After all, under Boumédienne, members of the Black Panther “international section” were guests there and, in a few months, Tim Leary would arrive to join them. I convinced the immigration people that I was harmless, and I was admitted to the land by someone who presumably understood that I would receive money through the banks’ approved pipelines.
     In fact, I had no difficulty using the letter of credit in Algeria, and I retained all the documents and receipts accompanying the transactions. In Annaba we sought to buy tickets through to Tunis, but the clerk insisted that we have a bon de passage, while the issuing official, unfamiliar with letters of credit, wanted to see the more conventional document recording currency imported, changed, and carried out. Having imported no money – well, we had, in fact, but that was illicit unreported cash – we had never received this form.
     We were stalemated. It did no good to point out that the immigration man’s principle would mean that we could never leave his country, a result desired by no party. He simply turned up the palms of his hands in impotence. He had the bureaucrat’s taste for asserting power when possible as well as the typical minor functionary’s fear of doing anything outside of standard operating procedure. He surely toadied to his superiors and thus had a reasonable expectation that his inferiors would do him the same courtesy.
     We decided to head toward the border anyway. Early in the morning we took the train to Souk Ahras, built on the ruins of Tagaste, Augustine’s birthplace and a Roman municipium. There, in an office at the train station, we encountered the same obdurate official refusal to allow us to leave. The immigration officer had returned to his heaps of paperwork, and we were quietly discussing what might happen if we simply walked to the border when the chef de gare strolled by, resplendent in his perfectly pressed uniform. He wore decorations like a soldier’s and walked with military bearing.
     Pleased to observe that something out of the ordinary was transpiring in his domain, he took an interest and summoned us into his office. He offered tea and we could see things were looking up. We passed a few pleasantries back and forth in our imperfect French and exchanged opinions on world events. We discussed the glories of Algeria and the virtues of the current regime. When I ventured to ask about our immediate circumstance, he sighed, as though such trivial matters were very nearly beneath his level of perception, signed the necessary paper, and pushed it toward us. Beyond the stage of relishing manipulation, he knew the meaning of noblesse oblige. As a big man, he demonstrated his power by patronage. Fortunately, that day, he chose to patronize us.

Hitchhiking in Algeria

     Algeria had enjoyed at the time of my visit less than a decade of independence. People pointed to bullet-scarred walls with pride. The government was the secular National Liberation Front – the Islamic fundamentalists were studying scripture instead of seeking to take power. In several ways, the revolution was evident even to the casual traveler; the contrast with Morocco was inescapable. Instead of cramped rooms where boys crowded on benches and chanted Koranic verses all day, there were many small, modern schools. Health clinics, though decidedly modest, operated even in small towns. When a beggar approached the tourist seeking a handout, a practice approved by Islam, others sometimes stepped up to say that no one needed to beg, that the NLF provided for all.
     We set out eastward from Oran, taking a bus to the edge of town and then seeking to hitchhike the coastal road to Roman ruins in Cherchell and on to Algiers. The fact that we caught a few rides only took us into the deep countryside where we became stranded. In the U.S.A. hitchhiking, now all but extinguished, was fairly efficient back then, but along this particular route we saw only a horsecart every twenty minutes or so, a car or truck once or twice an hour. We were in a rural spot, well out of any town, yet somehow a crowd of children gathered from here and there once they had heard about the novel attraction. They hunkered down just across from us and gazed with satisfaction, thinking perhaps of how their friends would be impressed by their encounter with such exotic characters. When we opened a backpack to get a drink of water, the crowd stirred in excited interest; boys craned their necks to learn as many of our secrets as they might.
     Patricia felt a desire to pee. There was no cover for a considerable distance, and the children would never have let one of us out of sight in any event. We waited. In the distance a man on a donkey appeared, not a promising figure from our point of view. He approached and trundled by with hardly a glance our way.
     After several hours, a pickup truck pulled over, the window rolled down, “Est-ce que vous êtes americaines?” “Oui, oui.” The window rolled back up and the care accelerated. Wondering if the driver was a critic of American foreign policy, we waited on. After ten minutes the car reappeared, the window opened, and through came a hand with an old oversize American banknote, what proved to be a 1907 five dollar bill. “An American army soldier gave this to my grandfather. Take it, you can use it perhaps, but you must write me a postcard from America.” And off he sped.
     We were beginning to consider the possibility of sleeping rough by the roadside, and by now we both wanted to pee. Suddenly, of all things, an empty taxi appeared, though heading in the wrong direction. We remembered a village named Khadra only a few miles back, so we hailed the cab and asked to be taken there, figuring we could catch some sort of bus. The town was small, lacking a hotel or a real restaurant, but there was a small café which, we thought, meant a likely w.c. We went in and inquired and the man behind the counter gestured toward a door. A so-called “Arab toilet” would have been welcome indeed, but, when the door was opened, it revealed only the small back yard of the café which people clearly used as a latrine.
     Thrown into the street, we had by now gathered a crowd of followers even larger than that out in the countryside. A local madman wandered by and they tried to set him on us, and might have enjoyed a more amusing spectacle than the lot out on the highway, but we had by that time found an informant who told us that no bus would leave until five the next morning. We were kindly offered the option of sleeping on board the bus. This seemed satisfactory, though the urination problem was becoming urgent.
     Just then, a car drove up. The local schoolteacher had heard of our arrival and had come to offer us immediate relief and hospitality. Though we were backpackers, we were foreigners who knew something of the world, and he considered himself unfairly stranded in this village, cut off from the modern culture his education had led him to prize, even while he remained rooted in certain traditional Maghrebi values. To us he meant relief (he had running water, even), as well as dinner, and a bed.
     Later that evening, as his wife brought steaming tajines from the kitchen and he urged us to eat more and more, we tried to be civil by exchanging a few words with her. “No,” he said, “Don’t bother with her, she is ignorant. She doesn’t know French, she can’t read at all. Forget her.” We imagined that she and the children would share whatever we failed to consume and found the thought no spur to appetite.
     The following morning, the night watchman in a ragged djellaba, who carried a rusty old blunderbuss older even than himself, tapped on the window to awaken us, and we caught the five o’clock bus for Mohammedia from which one might board the main line of the train system to Algiers. It was most unlikely we would have another opportunity to see the mosaics at Cherchell.