Fly-Fishing the 41st (14 page)

“There must be trout in it,” Johannes said.

But he did not stop to fish it, he drove all the way to the village of Çatak to ask the native Kurdish people where the trout were, using the Kurdish word for trout,
massi alé.
When we got there, though, Çatak was not a friendly scene. The streets were deserted and an armed soldier stood on every street corner. Johannes turned around and we headed back north of town.

Johannes pulled off the road near a lovely stretch of river. I was stringing up my fly rod when a red van pulled off the road beside us. Out of it poured a dozen Turkish police in plain clothes.

“Alabalik?”
Johannes asked them.

“
Evet,
” they said, “passports?”

“You must leave,” another said.

“Why?” asked Johannes.

“There is terror here, it is not safe,” he said matter-of-factly, pointing up in the dry craggy hills overhead. “Thousands of people die fighting here.”

I couldn't associate any permutation of the word “terror” with this scene. We were in a canyon of sorts and along the stream grew willows and poplar, their gentle leaves sensitive to the slightest breeze. The water was very cold, the sun burned my neck. I was fly-fishing.

“Okay then,” the policeman said “you have ten minutes to fish, then you must leave.” A colleague of his took a fishing rod out of the van on which was tied a large copper spoon. Another held a revolver, and I pretended not to notice. I was very thirsty and walked down near the stream to drink where a spring cascaded out of the rock on the bank. I drank until my mouth was numb from the cold water. I closed my eyes, then looked into the sun, thankful for such a beautiful day, then closed my eyes again and felt the sun burn from above the cliffs.

I was crouched down, balanced on my toes, when the ground began to shake and a raucous sound drowned out the gurgling of the small spring and the river. A tank was passing on the road.

One of the men approached and tapped me on the shoulder. “You must leave,” he said. I had not made even one cast.

I counted ninety-three tanks passing on the road as we left the area, each with a soldier standing upright and armed in the open hatch. Kurdish children along the side of the road waved to the Turkish soldiers and some soldiers waved back. We followed the road back to the checkpoint and spent the night by turquoise-blue Lake Van under a large apricot tree.

R
ETURNING TO
A
USTRIA

T
he next morning was the twenty-sixth of July. During nervous fits in my tent the night previous, I dreamt that I was back together with my high school girlfriend, Whitney. I would not have recognized her were it not for the freckles and her blue eyes and the way she wore her straight brown hair. With the dream came old anxieties. I could smell the cool melancholy air of the New England autumn when school began and the dreaded end of summer with it. An apricot leaf, turned yellow, had fallen into my lap as I read in the vestibule of my tent that morning.

Meanwhile, Johannes was having his own anxieties. He realized he was not going to catch his Tigris trout on this trip. I was picking apricots from the tree pretending not to hear the jokes he cracked about trading me to terrorists for a specimen of the Tigris trout.

During the course of the day's driving we came to more military checkpoints. The inspections were overwhelming, invasive, and taxing. For the first time Johannes had truly given up on his mission and we were headed west.

I pitched my tent that night on a rocky surface in the parking lot of a small restaurant in Malatya. I had bad stomach pains, perhaps from eating too many apricots, and the air was stifling hot.

The next day I lost my appetite, acquired severe nausea, and purged my intestines. I had two bites of bread for breakfast with my morning tea but could eat no more. My mind could concentrate on little else but the pain I was feeling. I suddenly felt dirty and couldn't remember the last time I had showered. Had it been eight days? I noticed for the first time that my arms were caked with dust. The thought of being clean again began to obsess me. I dreamed of
having a shower and cold clean tap water to drink. What thoughts filled my head; perfect images of the pink faucet in the bathroom at home and how in the summer it beaded with condensation when cold water coursed through it.

I would jump into the next river that Johannes had in mind to search for trout. That happened to be the Karagöz River, a tributary of the Zamante, near the village of Pinarbaşi in south central Turkey. We had long left the basin of the Tigris River; the Karagöz flowed from its source to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Karagöz was Edenic; an even-flowing stream that wound lazily through cow pastures and meadows of tall grass where boys slept on golden mounds of hay. We stood beside the banks and watched the smooth clear river glide by and the tall green grasses show their silver undersides to the wind. It was a strong antidote for sickness and the anxiety the military presence had caused. I jumped into the water and scrubbed myself, then I lay down near the bank and fell asleep.

While I rested, Johannes dove in the water with his mask and snorkel. He explained when I woke that this stream held a very special kind of trout, a subgenus of the brown trout called
Platysalmo platycephalus.

“Six years ago I fished here and caught many,” Johannes said, “today I have not seen a single one. The water is not as clear as I remembered it and algae is growing on the bottom.” We drove upstream to see if the water was clearer near its source and there we witnessed the problem. They had mined something from the hillside, and silt from the operation had flowed into the stream. The gravel necessary for the trouts' spawning had been covered with a fine gray mud.

“It is possible that this unique trout is now extinct,” Johannes said as he stared in the water. “War may be the only hope for them.”

 

Visibility decreased toward twilight as we drove through sheets of dust, backlit by a warm orange sunlight.

Late the next morning we were already on the west coast of Turkey, driving through a dense hardwood forest at the foot of Mount Uludåğ (Olympus). We stopped for a cucumber salad and yogurt with a bottle of Coke near the town of Bursa on the Marmara Sea.

As we approached the town of Edremit on the Mediterranean coast that evening I wrote in my journal of my surprise at the diverse nature of the trout we had encountered on the trip. Every population we had seen looked slightly different, and I imagined the differences were not only physical but genetic.

 

Johannes and Ida had arranged for us to stay with an Austrian friend named Ekhart who lived with his Turkish wife in Akçay, a clean white-plaster town with palm trees on the Mediterranean. We found their apartment building on a quiet street. Ekhart greeted us at the door and gave both Ida and Johannes a full embrace before leading us up the stairs to his apartment. As he spoke in German, I could understand only a little of what he said. He was concerned about Johannes's plan to return to Austria through former Yugoslavia, nations that had found recent peace after eight years of war. Ekhart sat us down in the kitchen.

“I read in the paper, Hannes,” Ekhart warned, “that it is dangerous to pass through Serbia. The country is in chaos. Highways and borders are closed, bridges across major rivers are blown out. Corrupt policemen are stealing from travelers. The war is over, everyone is an opportunist.”

Johannes listened. “It is a crowded ferry ride from Greece to Trieste,” he responded. “I would rather drive and take the risk. Besides, there are many interesting trouts there.”

Ekhart took Ida's hand in sympathy and kissed it. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“It's okay,” Ida said, “I'm used to it.”

Shortly, Ekhart's wife appeared and greeted us, a lovely Turkish
woman who spoke perfect German. She poured us each a glass of sweet wine like a muscat. It was cool and foreign, and seemed to plane the dust off the inside of my mouth.

Ekhart talked for some time as we sat around the kitchen table. I just kept filling my glass with muscat and watching Johannes, who seemed to be as indifferent to what Ekhart had to say as I was. Ida told them about our trip so far, which she described as a “horror trip.” Johannes smiled occasionally and lit a cigarette, which appeared to shield him as he smoked it. His eyes were focused on something beyond the table where we sat. Ekhart and his lovely wife held hands as they spoke.

That night the five of us ate dinner at a restaurant near the beach. A truck drove around spraying insecticides, the mist settling in my drink and on my food. In an uncharacteristically autobiographical moment (he was drunk), Johannes told stories of his carefree twenties and how he first came to dive for trout. I smelled a warm salt breeze and heard the crashing waves.

“I used to drive from Austria to the Croatian coast and go skin diving. I became interested in the sea fish and began catching them for my tank at home in a small net I had made, not much different from the net I use now. On the return from one trip I passed by a river with very clear water and I saw fish in it so I decided to dive. It was the Krka River, and I didn't know how cold the water would be, or why it was so cold, that it came from big springs underground. I also didn't know the fish were trout, but when I dove I caught one and guessed that's what it was.”

Johannes poured me a glass of raki from a carafe. He spoke about his apprenticeship as a young baker in Colombia, and about the two years he spent in South Africa. He suggested that I should enjoy being young and free. I added some water to my glass of raki, drank a bit, and yawned.

“
Estas cansado?
” Johannes asked me, are you tired? And then he looked at Ida. “
Es mejor estar cansado que casado,
” he whispered,
which in Spanish was clever and funny because the words for tired and married were the same but for one letter. It is better to be tired than married, he had said.

We paid the bill and walked back to Ekhart's.

 

The next morning Johannes and I drove inland, up the valleys between the coastal hills, through winding roads in olive groves, along rows of tall cypress. We passed a young boy shouldering a shotgun, a pair of songbirds tied by the feet to the end of the barrel.

We fished high above the coastal towns, and could often glimpse the sea. The trunks of the olive trees were black, almost charred looking, and their leaves were thin and powdery green. The oldest olives had been cut back many times, their hollow and ghoulish trunks sending out new and fertile shoots. They flailed their entwined limbs, dancing in a wild ecstasy, it seemed, to some music in the wind.

 

The next morning we departed Ekhart's on a ferry from the Turkish coast to Greece. Camped beside the sea that night, I had a distinct and memorable dream involving Johannes.

In my dream Johannes and I had hiked up a mountain and stopped to eat our lunch at the summit, seated on the edge of a cliff. We were calm and civil and not afraid of being so close to the edge until we had a look beyond it, and saw that below us was a deep abyss. After I had looked over the edge I could not get off my hands and knees for fear I might fall. And then, watching from my position, I saw Johannes walk to the edge, spread his arms as if he were stretching, and then leap.

His action to do so was intentional; he even had a slight smirk on his face. And as he flew in the wind and my view followed his calm descent, I yelled, “Help me, help me.”

I hiked down the mountain to look for a ranger's office and as I
did I tried to decide whether I should call Ida and if I did what I should say. I thought it would be just as well for anyone else to tell her what happened. Maybe I'd write a detailed message of the event and deliver it to her.

As I was drafting the letter in my mind, I was thinking that Ida would surely give me Johannes's books, research materials, and photos on trout. Of course, it was the first thing she would want to get rid of, remnants of the obsession that consumed him and had diverted his cares and attentions from her. I wouldn't ask, but knew she would give the collection to me. I would tell Ida that Johannes's death had been an accident.

Then I walked to a bar and had a drink. I was seated beside a man, and then recognized that it was Johannes's ghost, standing, with one arm on the bar, as he always did. I didn't act surprised to see him, I only asked him why he had jumped. “When did you decide to do this?”

“Monday, while I was driving,” he replied. I tried to think back to Monday and where we had been, but I could not remember the days and places.

 

That day we had passed all of Greece in a rainstorm and now were traveling west through dark tunnels to the border with Macedonia. The border station looked abandoned but an agent emerged as we approached, checked our passports, issued us transit visas, and let us through. After some driving through a green and mountainous country, we crossed another border into Serbia.

Some kilometers down the road we were halted by police at a barricade.

“Passports,” one said. Another looked at our plates.

“Fucking Austrian!” he yelled in English and waved us on.

 

The countryside was beautiful and the new corn in the fields held no ancient hatreds, as some of the people did. We soon found our
currencies were not accepted, our dollars, shillings, and lira not exchangeable.

In the late afternoon we began to look for a hotel where we could stay the night. The proprietors told us that the only valid currency was deutschmarks and we had none. A thunderstorm blew over the road on our way to Priština. As our money was no good we could not even buy gas, though the tank was still half-full. Toward twilight, rain still falling, we pulled off the road where we would not be seen and camped in a farmer's field.