The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘At daybreak the smell of baking bread from the ovens drifted across the snow’
Michael Kerr revels in a powerful piece of vintage travel writing – from Nicolas Bouvier’s ‘The Way of the World’
Nicolas Bouvier (19291998) grew up in a Protestant, bourgeois household in Geneva, and was itching to look beyond it. “At eight years old,” he once recalled, “I traced the course of the Yukon with my thumbnail in the butter on my toast.”
In 1953, aged 24, he drove from home to Belgrade to meet his friend Thierry Vernet, an artist. Then off they went, in Bouvier’s tiny Fiat Topolino – across Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan into Pakistan. It was a trip that took 18 months on the road, and then until 1963 to make it into print. The result, The Way of the World, a dazzling celebration of the joys of travel, was introduced to British readers in 2007 by Eland.
In this extract, Nicolas Bouvier reports from Tabriz, in Iran, where he and Vernet – having driven 900 miles through Anatolia in two weeks – ended up staying for six months. a sum, and Armenistan rumour never lied where figures were involved.
The town still had a few rich people, well concealed, but it no longer saw the colour of their money. For the most part they were great landowners like old M—, hiding the extent of their fortune under a ragged exterior. Fearing betrayal if they invested it locally, they hoarded their money, sending their excess income to foreign banks, or playing behind closed doors for fantastic stakes. Sat— the tanner, who had brazened out his loss, owned at least a hundred villages between Khvoy and Mianeh. A medium-sized village brought in around 20,000 tomans; thus he could count on an annual rent of two million tomans and his loss was insignificant.
When the bazaar got hold of the story, what on earth did they make of it – the destitute majority who were the town’s real face? Not much. They knew that Sat— had a full stomach three times a day, that he slept as the fancy took him with one – or two – women under enough blankets, and drove around in a black car. Beyond that, their imagination ran out; luxury belonged to a world they had no idea of, either from books – since they couldn’t read – or from the cinema, which disseminated a foreign mythology.
When they penetrated the houses of the rich it was through the servants’ quarters, which were scarcely better equipped than their own hovels. They were as unable to grasp the idea of 30,000 tomans as we are to grasp the idea of a thousand
Mark Twain, ‘The Innocents Abroad’
(1869) million dollars. Those who have nothing envy nothing beyond what touches the skin and the stomach: to be clothed and fed leaves nothing to envy. But they weren’t fed, and hurried barefoot through the snow, and the cold got worse and worse.
Because of this fantastic divide, the rich had lost their place even in the popular imagination. They were so rare or distant that they no longer counted. Even in its dreams the town remained faithful to its privation: everywhere else, fortune-tellers promise love or travelling; in Tabriz, their predictions are more modest, again involving a fine poem (instead of picking a card, the customer pricks with a pin a quatrain in a collection by Hafiz, which the fortune-teller interprets): three pots of rice with mutton, and one night in white sheets.
In a town so well acquainted with hunger, the stomach never forgets its rights and food is a fête. On feast days, the housewives in the neighbourhood rise early to peel, crush, bone, stir, chop, knead, and blow on the coals, and the fine vapour floating from the courtyards betrays the presence of steamed sturgeon, chicken in lemon juice grilled over charcoal, or one of those large balls of mince stuffed with nuts and chopped herbs, bound with egg-yolk and cooked in saffron, which they call keufteh.
Turkish cuisine is the heartiest in the world; Iranian has a refined simplicity; Armenistan is unequalled for pickles and sweet-and-sour; for ourselves, we ate a great deal of bread – it was marvellous bread. At daybreak the smell from
the ovens drifted across the snow to delight our noses; the smell of the round, red-hot Armenian loaves with sesame seeds; the heady smell of sandjak bread; the smell of avash bread in fine wafers dotted with scorch-marks.
Only a really old country rises to luxury in such ordinary things; you feel 30 generations and several dynasties lined up behind such bread. With bread, tea, onions, ewe’s cheese, a handful of Iranian cigarettes and the leisurely pace of winter, we were set for a good life: life at 300 tomans a month.
From by Nicolas Bouvier (Eland). Eland (travelbooks. co.uk), the largest independent publisher of travel classics, also publishes
Bouvier’s
and a book of shorter pieces. It is still fulfilling orders, and most titles can be downloaded.