Monday, October 24, 2005

International Molloy

International Molloy

Molloy can’t help but take a moment to reflect on the larger questions, after being asked whether, as an American, he was welcomed in Greece.

By and large, yes.  The Greek people we met were very friendly, our nationality notwithstanding.  The following incidents, not limited to Greece but part of Molloy’s (admittedly limited) international personal experience, come to mind as representative of “the larger questions”:

  1. Our cab driver coming into Athens from the airport made it clear that the Greek people had nothing against the American people, but the American government had made many, many mistakes.  He was very friendly to us, complaining as much about the influx of Albanians into Greece, and the fact that these immigrants were taking away jobs from the natives.  Athens also had to worry at times about anarchists making raids on police stations, thus the police presence fairly late at night when we arrived at our hotel.

  1. On our second night in Athens, we were sound asleep at 2am when gunfire—a lot of it—broke out nearby and lasted for some 5-10 minutes.  Molloy did not go to the window to see what was up, but he did busily and anxiously imagine that terrorists were storming the hotel to kidnap and behead the hated American tourists (himself and Mrs. Molloy, a shadowy figure in these memoirs and not to be confused with Men Tal, who disappears when trouble appears, as Molloy wished he himself could).  As suddenly as the gunfire started, it stopped, and Molloy, eyes staring wide into the ceiling’s dark abyss, eventually fell asleep.  The next morning, when he asked the desk clerk whether this had been a case of the anarchists storming a nearby police station (the cab driver had mentioned this upon dropping us off), sidestepped the question and merely said things were fine, and did we feel safe in Athens?  Since no one seemed to have fired directly into our room or at our persons, Molloy gulped and said, oh yes.

The car rental man informed Molloy the next day, though, that the hotel was in a good neighborhood but close to a rather bad neighborhood, and what we heard was no doubt the police shooting it out with criminals of the night.  Gulp.  We resolved to be in early.

Leaving at 5am for the airport on the last day in Athens, police seemed to be arrayed on the street next to the hotel.  No incident was in progress, as far as we could see, other than trash collection.  So we rather hastened along empty sidewalks, in the darkness, accompanied only by the early morning disruptions of traffic.  Hit and run artists had left grafitti on every metal storefront.

  1. From another era entirely, approximately 1973/74, Molloy was traveling from Rome to Madrid, having spent ten days in Rome with a friend teaching on a Fulbright Fellowship.  Getting to the Rome airport late, he rushed through check-in and down to the departure gate, and onto the plane with minutes to spare, breathing hard.  This was an Iberian airlines flight from Rome to Madrid.  As he got settled, the pilot’s voice exploded over the intercom (in Spanish):  “Hurry!  Hurry!  Everyone off the plane!  Take nothing with you!  Leave immediately!”  (Or, words to that effect.)  People jumped up, several women screamed.  Molloy looked about, saw nothing out of the ordinary except the alarmed hyperactivity of other passengers, and proceeded to pull his carry-on out of the overhead.  He joined the crowds in the aisle exiting the plane and was hustled to the other side of the airport, by foot, to an empty hangar where he spent the next eight hours.

What he couldn’t see as he exited his Iberian Airlines plane was that the Pan Am plane on the other side of him had been attacked by terrorists.  They  had rushed through the same terminal Molloy had just rushed through, only they had machine guns and killed several security police on their way to the departure gate.  Once at the plane, they tossed in hand grenades, killing many passengers, and then hijacked a full Lufthansa plane on the opposite side of the Pan Am flight—if the Iberian flight had been full, it might have been the target for hijacking.

During the eight-hour wait on the opposite side of the airport, Molloy watched the unloading of the dead through a long camera lens.

  1. In Tel Aviv, in the late 1990s, on a sunny day, Molloy choose one of two directions for walking.  It took him to an art fair crowded with people.  He enjoyed the art, like that of any other art fair—pleasant paintings, jewelry, ceramics, potted plants—and watched people sitting in the sun at picnic tables, eating the food from any of a number of food booths.

Not much later, walking back along a city street, he paused to look at the television in an appliance store window.  There he heard the word “bomba.”  In the direction he had not chosen, a suicide bomber had blown himself up in a popular outdoor restaurant, killing 14 people.

Two days previous, in Jerusalem, Molloy had come to the western wall and found it blocked and empty of people.  Small crowds and television cameras were poised around the perimeter.  After some 45 minutes, there was a loud “Pop!”  He learned from some English speakers that the security squad had detonated a small bomb placed in the square.  The barriers were removed, and life went on as usual.

Many more such sad incidents are offered in the daily news.


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