NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (63 page)

            
T
here was undoubtedly a more hallucinogenic experience available in poppy-growing Turkey than a long bus ride through Central Anatolia, though it was hard for me to imagine what this might be after a twenty-three-hour trip in the sulfurous interior of a bus of chain-smoking Turks, as day became twilight, turned to night, the moon passing from one side of the bus to the other, gleaming briefly in the snow of the Galatia highlands, fog settling and dispersing like phantasms, glimpses of dervishes, day dawning again, another stop, more yogurt, children crying in the backseats, full daylight in Iskenderun, rain in Antioch, all windows shut, the stale smoke condensing in brown bitter slime on the closed windows as fresh blue fumes rose from forty-nine burning cigarettes in this sleepless acid trip on the slipstream of secondhand smoke.

Being Turks, the smokers were courteous. I was repeatedly offered a cigarette.
Yes, plenty for you—please take two!

On a train I would have been scribbling. That is impossible on a bus, which is only good for reading. I was jammed in a seat, with a pain in my lower back that crept to my shoulder blades as we bumped from Ankara to Adana. I retreated into books. I reread the whole of
Hindoo Holiday.
I read Maugham’s short novel,
Up at the Villa.
I read
Myles Away from Dublin
, by Flann O’Brien. I read
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

In the blue haze of cigarette smoke I reflected on how I had been warned not to take this long route through Turkey.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I asked.

“That the bus will be stopped by Kurds and you’ll be dragged out and held hostage,” said my knowledgeable friend.

That happened frequently in southeastern Turkey, near enough to my route for me to be alarmed. Also, I was headed for Syria, a country very friendly towards the embattled Kurdish people.

“Gechmis olsen.
May it be behind you.”

But it had seemed a matter of urgency that I leave. Istanbul was also having its problems. In the previous few days in the Istanbul suburb of Gaziosmanpasha there had been a riot between Muslim fundamentalists and the somewhat schismatic and more liberal-minded Alevi sect. The matter had started with a drive-by shooting—fundamentalists plinking at Alevis at a cafe. Two Alevis dead. Then rival mobs gathered. Twenty-one people had been killed and many more wounded, mostly by the police and commandos who had intervened. Encircling the rioting mobs, the police began firing at each other, like Keystone Kops using live ammo.

The funerals that followed were massive parades of screeching mourners, and hundreds and police and soldiers. At the same time more riots broke out on the Asian side of the Bosporus, at Umranye. That resulted in eight dead, twenty-five wounded and “400 listed as missing”—so the local newspaper said. There was more rioting in Ankara: more funerals, much more disorder. Buses and ferries, bearing furious or sullen passengers, heading from the Asian side were halted and turned back. In other parts of Istanbul there was fighting between fundamentalists and Alevis.

“A foreign power is behind this,” said Mrs. Çiller, the Turkish prime minister. She meant Iran, but Greece was also blamed for “withholding information.”

“What next?” I asked my Turkish friends.

“After Friday prayers tomorrow there’s supposed to be trouble, when people come out of the mosques.”

I said, “Then I think I will leave on Friday, before prayers.”

The ticket from Istanbul to the Syrian border was $25. It seemed a
bargain until the bus filled with smoke. And because the weather was cold, the windows stayed shut.

“Ten years ago this was all open fields,” a Turk on the bus named Rashid said to me.

It was all high-rise housing now, and no trees, and in the bare stony fields tent camps had been put up by Gypsies—the tents made of blue plastic sheeting—and these urban poor, with their ponies and dogs, fought for space with the Turks in the tenements.

These were the Alevi neighborhoods. Rashid was a believer. Among his beliefs was metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. Rashid as a good Alawite might be reborn as a star in the Milky Way. A bad Alawite might end up back on earth as a Christian or a Jew. He worshiped sun and fire—a legacy of Zoroastrianism. Orthodox Islam was based on five pillars—prayers, the Hajj, the Ramadan fast, charity and the confession of faith. Rashid rejected these. It was only later, in Syria, that I was told that one of the more peculiar Alawite beliefs is that women do not possess souls. It seemed just as peculiar to me that Alawites believed that men, and especially Alawite men, had souls.

Altogether it was not surprising, perhaps, that the fundamentalists, who had contrived to follow an equally bizarre but different set of beliefs and symbols, had declared war on them.

Speaking of symbols, the bus passed a market where a man was selling cucumbers. The cucumber is a potent symbol in Turkey.
Hiyar
—cucumber—is a synonym for penis. One of my Turkish friends had said to me, “No one uses the word cucumber in Turkish, because of the vulgar associations.” It was a bit like an English speaker being very careful to give a context when using the loaded word “balls.” But in Turkish a whole set of euphemisms was substituted for cucumber. Most people called them “salad things”
(salatalik)
so as not to offend polite taste.

Every so often there is a bomb scare in Turkey, sometimes involving the American Embassy. A telephone threat is made, a location is described. A man describing himself as a bomber hangs up. Then the counterterrorists go into action. Sophisticated thermal imaging equipment is brought to bear on an ominous-looking parcel left in a doorway. As many as a hundred men might have surrounded the parcel, to provide cover for those disarming
it. In many instances the bomb-disposal experts find a large ripe cucumber in the parcel, with a note saying,
This is what you are!

A television set at the front of the bus began showing a violent video of a sub-Rambo sort, all explosions, gunfire, and mutilation. I read
Hindoo Holiday.
I gagged on the cigarette smoke. The smoke gave me a headache. If the bus were stopped by Kurds they would look for a foreigner (so I was told) and find only me. I would be held captive and used with the utmost brutality. I wondered whether the Kurds smoked. If not, being their prisoner did not seem so bad.

After dark, at a cold windy pit stop, I bought a glass of yogurt.

“What did you pay for that?” Rashid asked me.

“Twenty thousand,” I said. Fifty cents.

“Life is so expensive here,” he said. “In Antakya you could get that for eight thousand.” Twenty cents.

He was making a return trip. He had arrived in Istanbul the day before to receive an order for his metalworking shop in Antakya. To save money he slept at the bus station and came straight back. He hated Istanbul anyway.

“And these,” he said, waving a pack of cigarettes. “Fifty thousand! Go ahead, take one—”

I read
Up at the Villa
, in which a pretty widow gets a proposal of marriage from a distinguished man about to take an important post in India. She needs time to think about it. The man departs. That night the woman goes to a party, where a young rascal proposes marriage to her. She laughs at him, saying she does not believe in love, but would like to use her beauty and make an unfortunate man happy for just one night. That same night she picks up an impoverished man who had been a waiter at the party. She takes him to her villa, prepares a meal for him, makes love to him, and then tells him why. The young man is so insulted he shoots himself. She panics and calls the rascal, who helps her get rid of the body. The distinguished man is scandalized when he hears what has happened, and the pretty widow ends up with the rascal, who spirits her away before the body is found.

I liked the idea of a great scheme (marriage to an ambitious and successful man) being undone by a single unthought-out act, but this frantic
night was unbelievable. And I objected to the book because it did not sufficiently remove me from the irritating reality of noxious smoke and bad air and coughing passengers in the lurching bus.

Into Ankara, out again, through mountain passes, under snowy cliffs, past cold fields where low fog had gathered in ghostly wisps, and onward between black crags, and above it all a huge ivory cue-ball moon.

“I worked in Saudi Arabia,” a man named Fatih told me at another pit stop in the darkness. “I went to Mecca and Medina.”

“So you made the Hajj?”

“No, no, no. If you do that, you can’t drink alcohol and whatnot afterwards.”

He would purify himself with a Hajj some other time, when he was older, and past any carnal desire.

We eventually came to the middle of Turkey, Tuz Golu, a great lake, with the moon gleaming upon it; and another stop at two in the morning in cold clammy Aksaray, an area well known for its desolation and monotony and mud houses. I stood and stamped my feet and took deep breaths, and then reboarded and read
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
, a collection of neurological case histories. It was a salutary book—Oliver Sacks is full of sympathy for afflicted strangers and he usually determines that these people have developed strengths and gifts as compensation for the supposed defects. Also: “There is often a struggle, and sometimes more interestingly a collusion between the power of pathology and creation.” That was certainly true. If you were happy and normal why would you ever want to write a book? Indeed, why would you be on this bus at all? There was an aspect of dementia to the act of writing as there was to a desire to travel, but as Sacks pointed out, dementia was nothing to be ashamed of, and indeed was often a useful spur to imaginative or creative acts.

As I read this book, dayspring in the shape of a rising tide of pinkness gathered in the sky over the low hills of Anatolia, and the moon still showed in the clear sky. Then, towards Adana, bright daylight heated the bus, and field-workers and vegetable pickers traipsed down the road all bundled up, carrying hoes. Farther on, people bent double were already working in the fields. This green and fertile part of Turkey was chilly and sunny and flat, in the delta of the Seyhan River, the tucked-in corner of the Mediterranean, next to the Bay of Iskenderun.

Iskenderun itself, its puddled streets lined with thick palm trees, lay at the foot of a range of the dark Amanus Mountains, and beyond its small houses, and its onion fields, was the sea again, small waves slapping, the surface hardly disturbed, like the shore of a lake. It was the old sloppy Mediterranean Sea, not a body of water with many moods, but looking shallow and tame and almost exhausted. There was no fishing here, not even any swimming. And this place which Alexander the Great had founded after a great battle—until fairly recently it had been known as Alexandretta—was just a little tiled-roof town. Its beach, littered with windblown trash and dumped junk, was also reputedly the place which, when “the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomitted Jonah upon the dry land,” the land that was this very beach. But here, as elsewhere, the sea is now no more than a backdrop to olive groves and fruit trees.

This province, Hatay, is disputed. The Syrians claim it as rightfully theirs, but the Turks control it. The people themselves speak a heavily guttural Arabized Turkish, and the markets both in Iskenderun and in Antakya—where I gave up and got off the bus and staggered, followed by hawkers and small boys, through the market to a hotel—seemed as Middle Eastern as it was possible to be, without many veils.

Recovering from the bus ride to this town on the border of Syria, I stayed here in Antioch (Antakya) for a night, and the next day hiked from monument to monument—the Roman bridge, the mosque and aqueduct, the Church of Saint Peter. There were ruined fortresses outside of the town, and one of them, the Castle of Cursat, had been built by crusaders.

More impressive to me than anything else was the market at Antakya, which was almost medieval in its bustle and its mud, small boys quarreling and fooling among the fruit stalls and meat markets, and the full floppy costumes of the country people, the women in pantaloons and shawls, the men in beards and gowns. The commerce was brisk—the selling of fruit and fish, the retailing of tonics and potions—and it was also a meeting place of people from the mountains and the seashore, from Turkey and Syria and Lebanon. It was not a covered bazaar but rather a large area of rough ground, where people were yakking and striking deals and watching staticky television and talking over bundles and sacks of lemons and heaped-up blankets, as boys rushed around selling glasses of tea on trays, or barrows of dried fruits and nuts. Cripples, beggars, beards, deformed people with
boils and knobs on their faces, all the sects of Islam, and mud puddles and flaming braziers and the sizzle of meat, and a great sense of filth and life.

In this remote place people came up to me, and it was either a shaven-headed boy or else a hobbling old man, and they greeted me in Turkish, asking
“Saat kach?”
—What time is it?—because I was wearing a wrist-watch. I was perversely gratified because they had asked in Turkish, which proved that my long bus trip had had the effect of making me seem somewhat Turquoise, as rumpled and muddy as the rest of them. So I went about feeling anonymous and happy. The disciples of Jesus spent a year in Antioch preaching and it was in Antioch (Acts 11: 26) that, perhaps in answer to a puzzled question, “What sort of Jews are you?” they first began to call themselves “Christians.”