Magic Bus (2 page)

With wheeling gestures, she flings imaginary candles off the palace walls. The flames, fiery points of passion burnt in time, trace a line between the needle minarets and golden domes, over the plane trees and the fast-flowing sea, up the low stone hills of the Asian shore and away to the East.

‘Everywhere,' she says, excited by her memories, pulling off her feathered felt hat, embracing the vista in slender arms and pivoting on her toes.

‘We named our positions after the cities of Asia: riding the
Kabul, up the Khyber, doing the Bam-bam-bamiyan. Check it out, Jack; you have to figure out which one was which.'

I ask her, ‘When was this?'

‘My Summer of Love.'

And she starts to cry. Great, crystal raindrop tears glinting in the sun, collecting in little pools where her spectacles rest against her cheeks, ruining her mascara, hissing on the searing white marble. I look down at my notes to cover my surprise as much as her embarrassment. Then I smell smoke. I turn back to the woman. ‘My name isn't Jack,' I say.

But she's gone, leaving a single tea-light twinkling on the divan.

In the early sixties, the first Intrepids began arriving in Istanbul in small numbers, finding a sweet, melancholy city of ramshackle wooden houses and crumbling city walls, without tourists or touts. Old men in baggy trousers idled away afternoons in backstreet coffeehouses. Taxi drivers wore ill-cut Western suits, chewed gum and drank opiate wine. Fearsome razor-sellers worked the piers. Diesel smoke rose from weathered freighters. The oily air smelt of charcoal and mackerel. Along the cobblestone pavements, pedlars stirred steaming cauldrons of sweet corn cobs. Tailors slithered on the heels of their slippers, bent under the weight of dozens of leather jackets. The bazaar – where public letter-writers typed on Coronas – wasn't yet a gift-shop warehouse. Sultanahmet hadn't become a sightseers' ghetto. The neighbouring slopes and hills were still bare of buildings. With rainbow patches on their jeans or maple leaves on their backpacks, the travellers hung out at the first hostels, played guitars together on the steps of the Blue Mosque, smoked hubble-bubbles under the cypress trees before driving their battered VW Campers and Morris Minors on to the rusty Bosphorus ferry.

To catch a clearer glimpse of those years, I take a city bus along the Golden Horn, past shattered remnants of Byzantine sea palaces and fragments of
yali
boathouses. Ships' whistles and nasal love songs echo off the few remaining timber buildings, their blackened
‘gingerbread' lattices pressed and cracked between new concrete tenements.

Ersin Kalkan is a lean, fifty-five-year-old journalist with deep-set brown eyes, rough porous skin and fleshy boxer's lips. In the dusk, we sit in his compact walled garden of orange trees and damp old stones, drinking coffee beneath the darting swallows.

Istanbul, he tells me, marks the point where Asia and Europe both begin and end. The city was founded in 660
BC
by colonists from Megara and Athens, he says. In
AD
326 the Emperor Constantine shifted the capital of the Roman Empire here from Italy. In 1265, Princess Maria Palaeologina was sent from the church next door to Persia to wed the Great Khan of the Mongols, whom she converted to Christianity. In the 1920s, Atatürk founded the Republic out of the devastated Ottoman Empire and decreed that Turkish would henceforth be written in a modified Latin, not Arabic, script. He inaugurated an era of fervent nationalism which frustrated the cause of the caliphate until the close of the twentieth century.

In return, I tell Kalkan that the city's tangled marriage of East and West has already moved me: in Byzantium's ruins overlaid by Mehmet's serene mosques, along the narrow, cobbled streets where Janissaries once walked and now flashy European Union kiosks stand, in my fleeting, time-warp encounter on the Imperial Terrace.

‘Are you sure she wasn't a ghost?' he asks me with a sudden smile. ‘There are many ghosts in Istanbul: Trojans, Crusaders, Californians.'

I shake my head. ‘We didn't dwell on the spiritual. Her main interest seemed to be fornication.'

Kalkan tips back his head and stares for a long moment into the sky. Then, he says in a voice filled with feeling, ‘To us, hippies were the fireworks of freedom. They were… exotic.'

‘As you would have been to them.'

‘Every night I went to Sultanahmet to meet them.'

‘To practise your English?' I ask.

‘To see what they were reading,' he says, surprising me, lighting another Marlboro. ‘Ginsberg, for example, who had the courage to put up his head and insult the American system, a system which to us was Protestantism and God.'

Allen Ginsberg was the bearded Beat poet whose enduring anti-authoritarianism made him a spokesman for the generation. His prophetic work – like the hippie trail itself – would come to link the Beats to the Beatles,
On the Road
to ‘The Long and Winding Road', karma to Coca-Cola, transcendence to terrorism.

‘“America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,”' Kalkan quotes from memory, nodding with new enthusiasm.

‘I didn't know young Turks had even heard of the Beats,' I say with sharp delight.

‘Come on. Ginsberg's poetry emboldened dozens of our best writers: Can Yücel, Ece Ayhan, Cemal Süreyya. Dylan inspired Erkin Koray, the father of Turkish protest music. Joan Baez played a concert here. Their example gave us courage to voice our dissent,' he insists, thinking of Turkey's decade of rapacious military dictatorship. ‘In those hard years, words and lyrics were a vital social and intellectual resource.'

‘As they were in the West,' I say, leaning forward and shifting my chair on the stones, indulging our shared passion. ‘People really believed that music could change the world.'

‘At times, dreams are as important as bread.'

Over salted slivers of anchovy flecked with garlic and thyme, I tell Kalkan about the Grand Tourists, precursors of the Intrepids. After the Napoleonic Wars, young Englishmen, for the most part wealthy Romantics, travelled in their numbers to Rome and Greece, then the crossroads of classical and contemporary culture. On horseback, by bone-rattling carriage and in the shadow of the Pantheon, their formative experiences established the concept of travel as an adventure of the self as well as a means of gathering knowledge. Like the hippies who followed them a century and a half later, the Grand Tourists looked abroad for models for political reform and a free-love alternative to Christianity. Both groups
aimed to learn and extract pleasure from ‘the foreign'. Most of all, they travelled to be transformed.

‘The Grand Tourists changed Regency society like the sixties changed the West,' I tell him. ‘The counterculture searched for a meaning of life outside the old institutions. Are you saying the travellers changed Turkey too?'

This is my first chance to examine the effect of the Intrepids on the peoples along the trail.

‘We saw hippies as revolutionaries,' replies Kalkan. ‘They travelled without money, rejected materialism, cut their relationship with career and government. Their objective was to know themselves.'

‘But most critics think they were naive and cultish,' I say, at once envious and wary of their search for themselves. ‘Flower Power can be seen as sentimental Romanticism.'

‘Their liberal values were innocent,' he tells me, ‘and they spread in a soft way throughout Turkish society. Our women began to feel they had the freedom to act as they wished. Young villagers re-evaluated their culture because of hippies' love of native clothing. They showed that there was a way of finding peaceful solutions to problems. They helped us to see that the world belongs to the people: wherever you put your feet is home.'

‘Many of them were stoned out of their heads.'

‘But all of them had flowers in their hair. Philosophical flowers,' he nods, lifting his hands as he talks, as if balancing ideas. ‘And their greatest effect was
after
their journey.'

‘On America and Europe?'

‘Europe used to be just one colour: white. It used to have one religion: Christianity. The West believed that world history began with Greece and Rome. As you say, the hippies were curious for different cultures. From us, they learnt that Mesopotamia – here in Turkey and the Middle East – was the mother of all civilization. They carried home with them a
kilim
woven from different beliefs: threads of Islam, sky-blue of Buddhist prayer flags, silver from Hindu temple bells.'

‘Like the Romantics and neo-classicism,' I point out. ‘The
frontier of the exotic was simply pushed further east, the imaginative potency of Italy replaced by India. Asia was the new touchstone of the ancient.'

‘Their travels made Europe aware of colour, of our common heritage. In a way, humanity was reborn.'

Kalkan laughs once more, perhaps at himself, perhaps at adolescent ideals, and runs his hands over his close-cropped, ink-black hair.

‘For me, it was because of the hippies – not Silk Road traders or colonists – that most Westerners discovered the East.'

A nightingale sings in the cedars and the evening's mist rises from the strait. Waves of cool air flow around us heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and judas blossoms. Green leaves rustle behind a wooden railing. A sleek, stray cat slips behind the pots and across the top of a wall. In the old Greek house, Kalkan's mother serves us yoghurt soup with mint. Afterwards, we return to the garden for tea and more conversation by the pale light of stars.

Some time after midnight I complete my first notebook and thank Kalkan for his time. He dips his boxer's head and thanks me for indulging his memories of flowers and fireworks. He jots down the names of friends in Ankara and Cappadocia who might be willing to help me. We shake hands at the door. I hesitate before turning away.

‘How did other Turks – apart from young liberals like yourself – take to the first travellers?' I ask him. I knew that many single hitchhikers were raped and at least one German couple murdered along the road. I think of the bombs which have rocked Mediterranean resorts in recent months.

‘For twenty-seven centuries, Istanbul hungered for new ideas,' he answers me.

In the year Ginsberg published
Howl
, cosmopolitan Istanbul had a population of one million: Armenians, Greeks, Jews, the sons of old Byzantine families and daughters of Ottoman households.

‘But today the
da
ğ
li
– the villagers from the mountains – do not welcome change.'

Turkey's years of political turmoil ended in 1983 when prime minister Turgut Özal, a former World Bank economist, liberalized the economy and stimulated a business and tourism boom. The city's population grew tenfold, the vast majority of new residents migrants from rural Anatolia. But many of the incomers – despite the influence of travellers, television and work in Germany – remained rooted in an earlier century. An angry minority grew embittered by their country's race to become Western.

‘The
da
ğ
li
are scared, by the size of the city, by liberal society, by America's ways. They retreat into insular communities. They don't want reform. Kalkan fixes his eyes on me. ‘They fight to survive.'

I walk down the uneven streets. A line of late-night washing drifts in a roofless ruin. I cross the Golden Horn at Galata Bridge, still bristling with fishing rods despite the hour, and climb into a hilly neighbourhood of stepped streets and Maritime pines cradled in the Bosphorus's arms. As I walk, I think of the Grand Tourists and the first Intrepids, about the sixties impulse to reinvent the world and today's anxious acceptance of one's place in it. Law students play backgammon under the vines. A yawning, veiled woman pushes a wakeful child on a swing. A sleepless mussel-seller mops his neck with a cloth.

Istanbul touches me in the fluid Arabic script of its Iznik tiles, in its expressways built over Roman roads, in a lamb feeding on the grass precincts of a mosque. Yet for all its richness, I'm pursued by a gnawing hollowness of heart. Part of my attraction to the sixties is that era's reverence for immediacy, for self-surprise, for the imperative to Be Here Now. Most of the time, I find it hard to seize the moment, to live every act as if it were my last. I reflect on the day, simplifying and eliminating experiences to understand exactly what stirred me, and recognize how shaken I am by the chance meeting with the dippy, weeping hippie. I worry that I lost an opportunity by letting her go.

At that moment, a flash of light catches my eye. I look up, realizing in an instant that I want to see her line of candle flames
sweep across the inky sky. Instead I watch the landing lights of a descending aircraft.

I buy a kebab and crash out in my room.

The beginnings are easy to trace.

First,
On the Road
with Jack Kerouac, his soul stripped naked, his body hungry for release, his heart ‘mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time'.

Next, in New York on Bleeker Street at the Mills Hotel, where Allen Ginsberg, aged twenty-four, is ‘blowing Jack', coming out of the conformist 1950s and into the rebellious, hopeful decade.

Then, on MacDougal at the Rienzi and the Gaslight with bongo-beaters and wide-eyed runaways in turtlenecks reading frayed copies of Kierkegaard and asking, ‘Like, where do we go from here?' Their parents survived the Depression, came home from Normandy and Guam, took shelter in materialism and suburbia.

Now, poets like Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti reject the spiritual emptiness of their unexamined lives, plead for the resurrection of America's soul, rail against the ‘concrete continent, spaced with bland billboards, illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness'.

‘Beyond all laws, it is our stunted consciousness that imprisons us, and we suffer from a consequent hunger of the spirit,' writes novelist John Clellon Holmes, friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg. ‘How are we to break out of this prison? How do we let the spirit prosper so that the blistered desert we are making of the world can flower again?'