NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (62 page)

Samih Pasha and Onan and Fikret commiserated with the woman, saying it wasn’t fair. Yet it interested me that this portion of island in the Mediterranean was regarded as such a pariah that it had no contact with any country beyond its borders; and its greatest enemy was on the other side of the Green Line.

Suddenly Onan said, “We have to go. We will see you later.”

Watching him hurry away with Samih Pasha, Fikret said, “They will go to the Officers’ Club to eat.”

“Onan’s a soldier?”

“I think, yes. Bible Man was in the army before.”

“What about us? Bean soup at some awful place, eh?”

Fikret shrugged. He did not complain. We went to a restaurant and had bean soup and salad and rice. The waiter was perspiring in the heat, his hair plastered to his head. A man carved slices from the upright log of grilled meat chunks called a
doner kepab
and mocked us for not trying some of the greasy scraps. A beggar woman crawled inside the door and sang pathetically,
I am in trouble—Allah sent the trouble to me
, until the man standing at the meat log threatened her with his meat fork.

“I want to ask you about marriage,” Fikret said.

Now I knew why he had seemed so preoccupied. I said, “What’s on your mind?”

“I have been thinking about marriage.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-six. But I have never been married,” he said. “How old should the woman be?”

“Have you had a woman friend?”

“A young one. She was twenty-eight, a nurse,” Fikret said. “She was too young for me. I told her to go back to her young man. But she was nice. And she was my height.”

The height issue was important to Fikret. He was rather short. I said, “Why do you want to get married?”

“I don’t like to be alone. I live with my brother,” he said. “He is not married. He is discreet. But—” He leaned closer. “Please tell me what to do.”

“Find a friend, not a wife,” I said. “Don’t think about her age. If you like her and she likes you, everything will be fine. Maybe you will marry her.”

This did not console him. He was still fretting.

“My life is not getting any better,” he said.

“Fikret, don’t look so desperate.”

“I think my life is getting worse.”

We went to a cafe down on the seafront for dessert and were served by a pretty waitress. Fikret smiled. I urged him to talk to her. She was a Turkish immigrant, having fled from “Bulgaristan”—Bulgaria was full of Turks, Fikret said. He named six former Soviet republics as Turkish, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang? “That’s Turkish, too.” He talked awhile with the waitress. But she was married. She had gotten married just a month ago. Fikret shrugged. Just his luck.

“This seems a sad place,” I said, as we walked along the shore afterwards. “Why is that?”

“It is isolated,” he said with such suddenness I realized that the word was in his mind. He felt isolated too, and sad.

On the way back to Gazimagosa, across the plains, Fikret said that one of the most famous Turkish fortune-tellers lived in that town. Her
name was Elmas—the Turkish word for diamond—and she was noted for being so prescient that people came from all over to have her read their palms. Not just Turks, but people from many countries.

“They send her plane tickets and money, so that she can visit,” he said. “She knows everything.”

“Let’s find her,” I said. “We can ask her about your future.”

But, looking for her in Gazimagosa, we were told that we were too late.

“After five o’clock Elmas does not say anything,” a Turk in town told us. “You can find her, but she will not speak.”

We walked in the failing light through the town towards the port. When night fell, Turkish Cyprus was in darkness, because electricity was so scarce. Children chased each other in the dark, screeching miserably, the way children in the water howl and thrash, pretending to be drowning.

How strange that a place that had been so important, even illustrious in history, could be so decrepit. The north coast was associated with Richard the Lionhearted, who had led his Crusaders in a victory that gave them command of three castles at the edge of the Kyrenia Mountains, which they held. The Venetians had built the town’s fortifications. The original of Othello had done some of his soldiering here. More recently this eastern coast was noted for its beaches. Lawrence Durrell had written his book
Bitter Lemons
not far from the spot in Girne where Fikret said, “It is isolated.” Now it was a backwater, with U.N. soldiers guarding the Green Line and twenty-seven thousand Turkish troops hunkered down in the hinterland.

This was one of the few places the
Akdeniz
stopped, where the local food was worse than that on the ship. At dinner we saw Samih Pasha and Onan, who had just arrived back from Girne and the Turkish Officers’ Club.

Onan said, “I have been feeling bad because we left you.”

“You had to do your duty,” I said. “I had not realized that you were a
gazi.”

“I am not a
gazi,”
Onan said. Samih Pasha had begun to laugh.

I said, “I know it must be important to you to discuss your battles with the other
gazis
in the Officers’ Club. And of course the Pasha had to do the same, reliving his famous window-breaking attack on Lefkosa.”

I kept it up, jeering at them for abandoning Fikret and me in Girne.
Onan remained stern and apologetic. Fikret laughed—it was good to hear: he laughed so seldom.

Samih Pasha peered at me and said, “There is something about you.”

The weather turned windy after we left Cyprus, but there were fierce storms elsewhere in the Levant, the captain told me. Storms could be terrible here. “The waves breaking across the ship, so it is like a submarine.” Alexandria was a difficult harbor to enter in a storm. “One time I spent five days going back and forth, one hundred miles east, one hundred miles west, before we could go in.”

The
Akdeniz
became for me like a seedy hotel in which I was an old-time resident. A Turkish hotel: the food, the music, the greetings, the courtesies, the wives in their old-fashioned frocks and shawls, the old soldiers, the young boy who spoke English well and was funny, the old woman—possibly crazy—who ranted at me in Turkish, “My name Ali” doing my laundry and overcharging me, then pretending to be surprised when I tipped him, the waiter who looked like Tom Selleck, the barman who said, “The usual?” The round of odd meals, cucumbers for breakfast, big meaty lunches, obscure stews at night.

The General, Samih Pasha, was always at the head of the table. I encouraged him to tell us war stories, and he obliged. His stories usually emphasized the courage of Turkish fighter pilots in NATO exercises. Where accuracy was concerned, the crucial factor in fighter bombing was nerve.

“You have to be brave,” Samih Pasha said. “Going maybe five hundred miles per hour. If you are not brave, you release the bombs too soon. The brave ones release bombs at the last minute for a hit, then count one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, and pull the stick.” He grinned, the tips of his mustache rising. “The G-force take you. Maybe you black out. But you are climbing.”

The Italian pilots were appalling, the Greeks even worse. The Turks on the other hand were so deadly that in a bombing raid of four planes the first two planes obliterated the target, leaving nothing for the last planes to bomb.

Samih Pasha’s high military status as a three-star general had gotten
him a special passport. He did not need a visa to enter Germany. He had a multiple-entry visa for the USA. He showed me his military passport.

“Good passport,” he said.

“That’s not just a special passaport,” I said. “That’s a Pasha-port.”

He thought this was screamingly funny, though neither of the other Turks laughed.

At another meal I began baiting them about the Greeks. We had just been to Cyprus and seen the misery of the Turks on this divided island. And what about the Armenians?

“Ignorant people in Turkey might say things,” Fikret said. “But if you live with Greeks and Armenians you see they are good people. You understand them. Prejudice is ignorance.”

“I agree,” Onan said.

“And people who live far away from them have images of them that are untrue. But we like them.”

“But what about their Turko-phobia?” I said.

“That is understandable,” Fikret said. “Why should we blame them? Armenians too—we should understand, though I am sorry to say they believe that part of Anatolia belongs to them.”

In spite of my needling, the only criticism they offered was that it was said that Greeks and Armenians did not trust each other. “But we don’t know if this is true.”

It was relaxing to travel among people with so few prejudices, who were so ready to laugh, who could let themselves be mercilessly interrogated by me. They had a rare quality for people so individualistic—politeness. I also believed Samih Pasha when he claimed that Turkish soldiers were brave. Many had been sent to Korea, to fight on the U.S. side in the Korean war. Some had been captured and, refusing to talk, had died under torture.

I thought I might tap a vein of cruelty if I mentioned capital punishment. Mentioning the candidates in the U.S. elections who had campaigned advocating hanging-and-flogging policies, I asked how they would vote.

“I am a military man—a general,” Samih Pasha said. “All my life my job was to kill people. But I am against all hanging.”

“Because it is cruel?” I asked.

“It is cruel, yes, but it is also unjust,” he said. “That is most important. How can you be so sure? And for people to be sentenced and then wait ten or fifteen years on appeal is horrible.”

“In Iran they do it all the time,” Fikret said.

I said, “We do, too.”

“But not so much,” Onan said.

“Clinton believes in it,” I said, and told him the Florida and Texas figures; that thirty-seven states had the death penalty; and that New York was probably going to get it, as their new governor had promised it.

The Turks were silent. Samih Pasha said, “Terrible.”

That night the storm grew worse, and Istanbul was still two days off. Fikret got seasick. “I don’t like this weather,” he said. “I think I should get off the ship in Izmir.” It was not only a rough sea, with a stiff wind, the air temperature had dropped. Just a few days ago we had been in the heat of Haifa, and now everyone was wearing heavy clothes and complaining.

The Turkish songs in the lounge after dinner were tremulous and plangent and repetitive, and all of them in their lovelorn way reminded me (in Samih Pasha’s translations) of how long I had been away. The musicians played: a drum, a zither, a violin, a clarinet; and the sad woman sang,

The Turks sat mournfully listening, eating ice cream, drinking coffee.

At Izmir I hurried into town and called Honolulu and was reassured. I strolled to the bazaar and sat under a grape arbor and had lunch, a fish kebab and salad. I read an item in the
Turkish Daily News
that the government was thinking of doing away with “virginity tests on female students and the expulsion of ‘unchaste’ ones from school.” Virginity tests?

In the afternoon the
Akdeniz
sailed into another storm, and Fikret hugged himself in misery on deck, regretting that he had not gotten off at Izmir and taken a train back to Ankara. With fewer people on board (half had disembarked at Izmir, including Samih Pasha and Onan) the ship had a somber air; and the cold weather made the mood bleak. The next day in the iron-colored Sea of Marmara under a gray sky it was even worse.

I stood with Fikret at the rail. This sea air, however cold, was fresher than the foul air down below on this ship of chain-smokers. We passed Usküdar, where Florence Nightingale had tended the sick during the Crimean War; it was now a prison. That gave me an excuse to ask Fikret the ultimate Turkish question.

“Do you think they torture people in Usküdar?”

He shrugged. The movement of his shoulders meant “probably.”

“How do you know?”

“All countries torture,” he said.

I let this pass. I asked, “What do they do in Turkey?”

“Beating on the feet—bastinado,” he said. The word was precisely right, and I was amazed that he knew it. “Also electricity and hanging by arms.”

“This would be, what? Crucifixion?” I said, as blandly as I could manage.

“Whatever,” he said. “To get information.”

I said, “But people lie under torture, so what good is it?”

He got agitated, and his seasickness made him groggy. He repeated that everyone did it. He said, “The Germans executed the whole Baader-Meinhof gang in prison and then called it a mass suicide!”

“I think it was suicide.”

“The British government tortures Irish people!” he said.

“They used to,” I said. “But it was sleep deprivation—keeping prisoners awake at night to question them. And I think they used noise, too.”

“That is worse than the bastinado!” Fikret cried. “That can make you lose your mind!”

He looked at me reproachfully. He was seasick and upset, and I had offended him by taking advantage of our friendship to ask him nosy questions. But that was the nature of my traveling: a quest for detail, conversation as a form of ambush, the traveler as an agent of provocation.

The mood passed as Istanbul came into view, a whole hill of exotic features—the palace, the minarets, the domes, the steeples, the tower; and below it the bridge, and the water traffic in the Golden Horn.

“I am going home,” Fikret said.

“I hope you find that woman you’re looking for.”

“Yes,” he said, and gulped as he tried to swallow his anxiety. “And where are you going?”

“Two weeks ago I was headed for Syria, when I saw this ship leaving and decided to join it,” I said. “Now I really am going to Syria.”