ON & OFF THE ROAD #6

Memory.

A man in Queens, New York--a pharmacist--gets written up in The New Yorker because he is a Hafiz. Someone who can recite the Koran from memory. I don't remember a lot of the movies I see, many of the books I read and a number of the people I met last month, but I do remember meeting a Hafiz-in-training some 24 years ago in Mauritania. Like so much else that has disappeared over the decades, the name of of the boy I met in 1986 escapes me, but the name of the man profiled in the magazine that follows me across the Atlantic every week is Mohammad Tayyab. His 15 minutes come courtesy of the Ramadan fast, occasioning his nightly recitations at the local mosque. 

Depending on how you look at it, my route to Mauritania was interrupted or enabled by Ramadan. Walking south from Layoun, past the unfinished stadium and the Blue Men, (without a group), the ride I'd hoped to catch through Spanish Sahara turned out to be a lonely Morrocan cop with an ulcer. We pulled a U in the dusty road and headed back to Morroco's southern outpost. German tourists murdered; Canadians robbed; Algerian backed guerillas looking for trouble. No way would I be allowed to hitch a ride through the Sahara, I was told. 

My savior, holed up at home and exempt from fasting due to his medical condition, was gorging himself on all the food nobody else could eat. Fundamentally, he was sick of eating alone. I eventually managed to find a flight to Nouadhibou via Grand Canary, which is sort of like lunching at the Tour d'Argent as a last meal before the guillotine's descent. 

The airport in Nouadhibou, at least in those days, was a cinderblock garage serviced by camel taxis. Here, a 3 kilometer long phosphate train would take me to the middle of the country where I hoped to catch a truck to Nouakchott, the capital. Scores of cars, piled high with cargo and higher still with people too poor to pay the fare, made up the bulk of the train, while in the rear a single passenger car--missing doors and windows, but featuring seats, provided transportation for the employed and the curious. Mauritania is a country twice the size of France with about 4 million inhabitants. the 3,000 Belgian and French in the country earn 97% of the wages. But in my cabin on that train so long ago was a young native, not more than 18 or 20, wearing a white shirt and black pants and very happy to be riding below rather than above the roof of our train. We spoke in French. My travel companion asked if I knew the Koran, I said I didn't, to which he responded with a long, rhythmic incantation in a tone of Arabic I certainly had never heard before. I asked him what it meant and he said he didn't know. The meaning would perhaps come later, but for now he was just concentrating on memorizing it. His goal was to have the whole thing committed to memory. Like the man from Queens a quarter century later, he would be a vessel for the word of God, meaning be damned. 

Here in Germany I'm working at the theater. Over the course of the last few weeks, we've been rehearsing Woyzeck and I watch, from my perch at the piano in the back of the stage, (where I've been outfitted to look like a cross between Elton John circa 1978, and a polar bear), as the actors go from barely knowing every 10th line, to so utterly internalizing the entire play that whatever they say, whether in the book or not, seems to come from the soul of the characters they're playing. The meaning of every single word; the intention behind every scrap of punctuation, has been hoed and mulched during hundreds of hours of rehearsal. The premiere is beautiful. After so much thought and practice, every performer erupts with the extremity of communicating what we've learned to the packed house. 

Two days before the Woyzeck premiere, we go see Leonard Cohen in concert. 76 years old and he plays for 4 hours. He has the posture of a man half his age and gets down on his knees in every other song. The concert is nothing short of a religious experience. Stories of love and war and a lifetime in every note and every word. I'm an atheist and such experiences are what I thought would supplant the church, the synagogue, the mosque, as our species evolves. The transcendence of art, so full of the meaning behind the word, the image, the sound--rather than just the word itself--revealed, we've been told--in all the "great" religions. 

Cohen remembered every word of the 30 songs he sung. But he ended the show with the words "God bless."