NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (53 page)

As we talked, and drank coffee, I felt I was experiencing an aspect of culture on the Turkish Mediterranean that had not changed in five hundred years. This was the ultimate country house. It was hard to imagine a more peaceful setting, a greater harmony of both natural and architectural elements, or—in this waterside culture of caïques and yachts and ferries—an easier place to reach, from almost anywhere. I had fulfilled the old Turkish idea of fleeing the city of shadows and hawkers’ cries and music, and finding peace in its opposite, light and silence; sitting in comfort at the edge of Asia and contemplating Europe.

Frustrated that my Syrian visa was taking so long, I went back to the ship I had seen moored at Kadiköy, the
Akdeniz
, a Turkish cruise liner. Was it headed somewhere interesting? I found the agent in a nearby office.

“Where is this ship sailing to?” I asked.

The man’s English was inadequate to frame a reply, but he handed me the printed itinerary: Izmir, Alexandria, Haifa, Cyprus, and back to Istanbul. Perfect.

“What day is the ship leaving?”

“Today—now.”

“Now?”

He tapped his watch. He showed me three o’clock.

It was now noon. I explained that my passport was at the Syrian Consulate, three miles away. If I could get it back from the Syrians, and check out of my hotel (two miles away), was there room for me on board?

Plenty of empty cabins, he indicated. The price was thirty-four million Turkish liras—cash. This was $940, not bad for a twelve-day cruise. I wondered whether I could get aboard. I decided to try.

What followed was a bullying drama enacted by mustached men in
brown suits, chain-smoking and muttering in broken English. It was also manic pursuit through Istanbul traffic. The Syrians complained about my insisting on having my passport back prematurely. The hotel complained that I had not given them prior notice of checking out. The post-office money changers were on strike, and so I went to a usurer who laughed at my credit card and took nearly all my cash. Eventually I had my passport, my bag, and the money. I was panting from the effort, and I had less than an hour left to buy my ticket, buy an exit stamp from the police, get through customs and immigration, and board the ship. Then the police complained, the immigration officials complained, and so did the agent. The counting of the thirty-four million in torn and wrinkled bills of small denomination took quite a while.

Amazingly, just before the gangway was raised I was hurried aboard the
Akdeniz
and given my cabin key.

“My name Ali,” the steward said.

That was his entire fund of English words; but it was enough. He was a short bulgy man, forty or so, in baggy pants and stained white shirt. He seemed glad to see me, and I thought I knew why.

A large Turkish suitcase had been placed in my cabin. The suitcase alone filled the floor space, and bulked in my fears. I imagined my cabin-mate. He would be called Mustafa, he would snore, he would smoke, he would natter in his sleep, he would get up in the middle of the night so often I would nickname him “Mustafa pee,” and he would retch—or worse—in the tiny head. He would toss peanut shells onto the floor. He might be antagonistic; worse, he might be friendly. Indeed, he might not be Mustafa at all, but rather a big tattooed biker called Wolfie, with scars and a blue shaven skull; or a ferocious backpacker; or a demented priest, or a pilgrim, or a mullah with wild staring eyes. At these prices you got all kinds.

Ali was outside the cabin, waiting for me. He knew what I had seen. He knew what was in my mind. Ali may have had an infant’s grasp of English but he had intuition bordering on genius.

“Ali, you find me another cabin,” I said.

He understood this.

“One person—just me. This ship has plenty of empty cabins.”

Just to make sure there was no misunderstanding I whispered the password,
baksheesh.

He smiled and showed me his dusky paw: Welcome to the Eastern Mediterranean.

He narrowed his eyes and smiled and nodded to calm me, to reassure me that he was going to deal with this matter immediately. Give me a little time, he was suggesting.

I looked at the rest of the ship. It reeked of rotting carpets and sour grease and damp Turks and strange stews and old paint and tobacco smoke. There were about a hundred passengers, all of them Turkish. Not a single backpacker, or German tourist, nor any priests or pilgrims. The Turks on board, in thick shawls and brown suits, were drinking tea and smoking and fretting. And men and woman alike, all bespectacled, had that Turkish look of uniform disguise that resembles someone wearing fake glasses attached to a false nose-and-mustache.

I was not alarmed by any of it until the Turks themselves began to complain about the ship.

“I was not expecting this,” Mr. Fehmi said. He had worked at a NATO base for sixteen years and spoke English fairly well. “This is a great disappointment.”

We were among the few drinkers on the ship. We were soon joined by a ship’s officer who explained that the
Akdeniz
was experiencing difficulty leaving the quayside. It was a forty-year-old ship, with no bow thrusters, so a tug had to snag a stern line and spin the ship one hundred and eighty degrees to the edge of the Golden Horn, and only then could we get away.

But in this slow turning the whole skyline of Istanbul revolved, gray and golden in the late-afternoon light, the sun setting behind the mosques and the domes and the minarets. I counted thirty minarets and a dozen domes, and with the ferries hooting, and the fishing boats and the caïques and the freighters dodging us, everything at the confluence of these great waters—the Bosporus, the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara—sparkled and rang with life. And then we were truly under way, passing Topkapi Palace and the city wall that still showed breaches where it had been blasted open by the Ottomans in 1453.

In a stiff wind, we passed Haydarpasa Railway Station, where I had planned to take my train to Ankara and Syria. But that was yesterday’s plan. I had changed my mind, and I was glad of it, for wasn’t the whole point of
a Mediterranean grand tour voyaging among the great cities—from here to Izmir to Alexandria and onward? And I liked being the only
yabançi
—foreigner—on board. It was as though, among all these Turks, on this Turkish ship, crossing the Eastern Mediterranean, I had penetrated to the heart of Turkey.

I went back on deck to look at the last of Istanbul—“Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour”—and saw Ali creeping towards me. He signaled with his eyebrows, he pursed his lips, he dangled a key. That meant he had a cabin. He beckoned, and I followed him to a new cabin.

This is all yours, his hand gestures said. And when I passed him his
baksheesh
, he touched it to his forehead in a stagey show of thanks, and then slapped his heart, and I knew that as long as my money held out he was mine.

Then I was drinking fifty-cent beers in the smoky lounge and congratulating myself. It had been a frantic but worthy impulse, like leaping aboard a departing train for an unknown destination. Never mind the cigarette smoke and the filthy carpets and the Turkish muzak and the TV going at the same time. I found a corner to make notes in and read a few chapters of Dr.
Wortle’s School
by Anthony Trollope (scandal and hypocrisy in an English village), and then just as night fell I went on deck and watched the Sea of Marmara widen into an immense sea that might have been the Mediterranean.

Having my own cabin meant that I had a refuge. And because it was on B-Deck I was entitled to eat in the Upper Class restaurant, The Kappadokya, where the captain and other officers dined. The captain was a pinkish Turk with confident jowls in a tight white shirt and white bum-bursting trousers, who looked like a village cricketer whose uniform had shrunk. He sat with six Turkish spivs and their preening wives. It was Upper Class but like the Lower Class dining room on the next deck down it was the same men in brown suits and old veiled women and frowning matrons in fifties frocks. Some of the older women looked like Jack Greenwald in a shawl, and their big benign faces made me miss him.

I was seated with an older Turkish couple. We had no language in common, but the man tapped his finger on Greenwald’s Turkish pin that I had in my lapel, and he smiled.

“Afyet olsen.”
That was from my small supply of Turkish phrases. “Good eating.”

But the phrase was misplaced. The meal was not good, and a palpable air of disappointment hung in the room—silence, and then muttered remarks. It was generally a hard-up country, and these people were spending a large amount for this trip. We had that first meal: salad, pea soup, fatty meat and vegetables, and a third course of a great mass of boiled spinach; then fruit and cream for dessert. It was Turkish food but it also somewhat resembled an old-fashioned school meal.

The shawls, the brown suits, the felt hats, the clunky shoes and dowdy dresses and cigarettes were all part of the Turkish time-warp in which the Turkish middle class was still finding clothes of the 1950s stylish. Even the shipboard dishes of pickles and potato salad and lunch meat and bowls of deviled eggs were from that era, and appropriate to the old Packards and Caddies and Dodges that plied up and down Istanbul. (In a week in Turkey the average middle-aged American sees every car his father or grandfather ever owned.) It was a sedate cruise so far, the nondrinking Turks all well-behaved, very placid, and so Turkish that it seemed like mimicry, a big smoky lounge of dour Turks in heavy clothes, heading for Egypt.

But I was grateful to them for making room for me, for allowing me aboard, for being hospitable. Turks made a point of greeting strangers in the common areas of the ship. I learned the greetings, I felt lucky.

And it gave the Mediterranean its true size. It was not the trip I had planned—five days through Turkey to the middle of Syria overland, with all the roadblocks and holdups. Instead, it was a couple of days from Turkey to Egypt: overnight to Izmir, and then a day and a half to Alexandria; and a day from there to Haifa. The Eastern Basin contained many cultures, with sharp elbows, but in fact the area was rather small. It was just that the people on these shores were so combative that made this end of the Mediterranean seem large.

From Bursa, then, came Mehmet Saffiyettin Erhan, an architect and historian of old wooden buildings, traveling with his shawled and aged
mother, Atifet. And the Sags (Sevim and Bahattin), and General Mehmet Samih, three-star general and ace fighter pilot, known to all as Samih Pasha, who boasted of the windows he had broken with the boom of his jet engines over Nicosia, just before the partition of Cyprus. And Mehmet Cinquillioglu and his wife, Fatma, the four Barrutcuoglu, including little Lamia, the three Demirels, and the Edip Kendirs. And there were some Kurds, too, ones I thought of as concupiscent Kurds, and …

Oh, give it up. But studying the names outside the Purser’s Office on the
Akdeniz
passed the time. We had traversed the Dardanelles during the night, and now, in sunshine, I was standing at the rail with Mehmet Erhan, the architect.

“If architecture is frozen music, that looks like a minaret in D.”

“Pardon?”

We were sailing past a mosque, into the port of Izmir. The ship was three hours late, Mehmet said, not that it mattered. Mehmet was a fund of information. Canakkale—the Dardanelles—meant “cup” in Turkish. The Turks were rather proud of having slaughtered so many foreign troops at Gallipoli. Under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk, the Turks had driven the Greeks out of Smyrna (Izmir) in a decisive battle in 1923, and founded the Turkish Republic. Ataturk’s house was in Izmir, if I wanted to see it.

“What
dots Akdeniz
mean?” I asked.

“White Sea,” he said. “It is the old Turkish name for the Mediterranean.”

The Black Sea was
Kara Deniz
, the Red Sea
Kizil Deniz
, and beyond that headland was the Greek island of Chios, where Homer was born.

“If there was a Homer,” I said. There seemed to be some doubt whether Homer ever existed—that the poetry just accumulated over the years, with recitation, and that the idea that Homer was blind came from the description of Demódokos, the blind minstrel in
The Odyssey.

Mehmet, who had read
The Odyssey
in Greek, said he had also heard of that possibility.

The
Akdeniz
docked and we were told that it would not leave until late afternoon. I had time to take a taxi down the coast to Ephesus, the great Graeco-Roman harbor city, where St. Paul had preached and was buried, and where the Virgin Mary spent her old age. Mary was not buried there; there was no body. At death she had been levitated from the planet Earth in a cosmic transportation known as the Assumption, an article of faith among Catholics. It is an incident the New Testament neglects to mention—that Mary “was assumed body and soul into Heavenly glory” like Enoch and Elijah was made official by Pope Pius XII in 1950—though you would have thought someone would have noticed it at the time. The idea of a little Jewish woman, known variously as the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven, being propelled by divine force bodily into outer space (“angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!”) cannot be called unmemorable.

The Panayia Kapili, or House of the Virgin, five miles down the road from Ephesus, had been spruced up and was no more than a novelty, but it had a lovely view, which was all that mattered.

There were brothels in Ephesus, as there had been at Pompeii, and graffiti, too, but this was altogether a greater city, and more of it remained from antiquity. My problem was that the whole time I was in Ephesus I worried about the ship leaving Izmir without me, so I hurried back. At the gangway, a crew member said there had been a new change of plan—the ship would not be leaving until nine.