The Turk Who Loved Apples (29 page)

Maybe you know even more than that. Maybe you're there because you understand that this place is thematically apt for getting lost. Like Tangier, a gray zone that lies at the northern tip of Morocco, a jumping-off point for both Arab invasions and European colonialism, and thus not really one or the other, instead a jumble of French and Spanish and Arab (and American) people and languages and ways of living. Or like Paris, whose nineteenth-century flâneurs redefined the aimless wander as a sophisticated modern pursuit. Or like Chongqing, the city of thirty-three million whose steroidal skyscrapers spread, uncontrolled, across a swathe of mountainous, river-cut southwestern China twice as big as Switzerland.

Venice? Not a bad idea, but maybe you've been there already, and realized how terribly small it is. In Venice, you can lose your way for five minutes, ten minutes, but then you'll intersect a horde of tourists, or stumble upon a vaporetto stop, and you'll instantly reorient. Ditto hundreds of other locales, both familiar and foreign, whose chaotic layouts seem to promise you'll lose yourself, but whose limits—size, variety, complexity—are all too obvious.

You consider the wilderness. The forests of Montana, the sands of the Sahara, the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans. Yes, getting
lost might be easy. But you want, eventually, to get un-lost, too, and emerge at the end of a week or two alive and intact. To want to get lost is not a death wish. Rather, it's the desire to block out the noise of expectation and structure, to experience surprise and the challenge of disorientation, to travel as if you'd never traveled before.

T
o pretend I'd never traveled before was impossible, of course, but it's what I attempted to do starting in the summer of 2010, after my stint as the Frugal Traveler came to an end. A new editor, Danielle, had recently taken over the Travel section, and over steak-frites and red wine in a diner near the
Times
building, she asked me to pitch her a new series of travel stories, one that was ambitious in scope but had no service element. These adventures did not need to be useful to or replicable by readers, she said; they only had to be great stories and well written.

So I began to talk to Danielle about what had happened at Tivoli Gardens and how, in the years since, it had never happened again. What I wanted to do, I told her, was to get lost, and to do so I needed to go to extremes: I would travel without a guidebook or a map, without contacts or a plan, without even booking a hotel to crash at upon arrival.

To her credit, Danielle saw this idea as more than one weird traveler's crazy mission. Getting lost—or, as the series would be called, “Getting Lost”—was a way of casting off the shackles of checklist tourism, GPS-based driving directions, and Internet advice forums, all in the hope of finding something more engaging, more true, more real. Which is, I think, what I was hoping for, too, even if I couldn't yet articulate it. All I wanted to do was go somewhere, blindly, and with these artificial constraints governing my behavior, I would see what happened.

What happened was this: Every day for a week in July, I stormed through the Tangier medina, a maze of ochre alleyways,
thick wooden doors, and shadows that provided fleeting protection from the Mediterranean sun. Trying urgently not to consider my route, I turned left and right and left again, marching up stairways and under archways and ignoring children who bobbled soccer balls and warned me certain pathways were
fermés
—closed. (They were always right, those routes always dead-ended, and I always had to backtrack.) I watched women carrying bundles of pungent mint to market and old men shuffling in loose, hooded djellabas, like retired Jedi.

And as I maintained my forward momentum, I realized: this was not working. As labyrinthine as the medina was, it lay on a hill that sloped down toward the sea—which meant I was, almost unconsciously, orienting myself. Every step uphill took me inland, every step down led to the shore. And as my paths crossed each other and repeated, I could tell that, even if my brain had not yet processed the exact route from one end of the medina to the other, my legs were figuring it out. Traitors!

Not exactly helping things were all the guides (licensed and ad hoc, old men and young boys), who cooed at me in English, French, and Spanish, “What are you looking for? Where are you going? You want the Casbah? Hashish?” I didn't want to ignore them—that seemed rude—but no answer, especially the truth, could satisfy them. Indeed, any answer only invited them closer. One, a tall, thin guy named Abdul whom I met outside the riad, or traditional house, where I'd decided to spend my first night, announced to me that he was not a guide, just a neighbor, that he'd grown up in the Casbah, the old walled citadel atop the medina, and that he wanted to accompany me as I walked around. He would, he promised, not ask me for money.

As clearly and eloquently as possible, I explained to him that I had come to Tangier for no other reason than to get lost, that getting lost was something one could only do alone, and that while his offer was very generous, I had no choice but to refuse.

In that case, he countered, he would let me go, but would follow well behind me—several meters at least—available to explain whatever might need explaining. A fair compromise, I thought, and so off I walked—with him right at my side, explaining absolutely everything: Behind this wooden door was Mick Jagger's house; that minaret was the only octagonal one in Tangier; Kofi Annan once went to that café. I tried to argue, asked for space, turned on my heel, ducked around corners to hide when I thought he wasn't looking, but to no avail. Fine. If I couldn't lose him, I'd put my losing-myself plans on hold for the evening and take advantage of Abdul's expertise. I asked if he knew a leather worker who could fix the ancient canvas shoulder bag I was carrying; indeed, he did, and we spent a very long hour in front of a tiny storefront in a skinny passageway, watching a one-handed man with horrific scars across half his face mend and rebuild the bag. It was a frustrating interlude, and when it was over I wanted desperately to get away from Abdul and be on my own.

As we parted, he asked me for money. I gave him the coins in my pocket. And as I did so, I knew I was not about to get lost—not in Tangier.

But over the next week, I discovered other forms of lostness. Tangier's mix of languages—French, Spanish, English, and Arabic—was joyfully disorienting. I could begin a sentence in one, throw in a word or phrase from a second, and end in a third. Thirsty in the afternoon, I'd seek out a café, but since I couldn't remember the French word for watermelon, I'd order
un jus de sandia. Shukran!
And I'd be understood, as if this were an everyday request! Indeed, it was.

In Tangier, hearing, not seeing, was the key. At a nightclub, I drank too much with a group of German, French, American, and Korean expats and closed my eyes to focus on the babble of languages, and the live band's surprising segue from Miles Davis to salsa. Another day, my wanderings led me to a secluded hilltop spot where
the frenzied drumming of a wedding procession whirled up from the unseen lanes of a neighborhood below. As hard as I tried to pinpoint the party, I never caught sight of them, and the intensity of their rhythms wavered only with the strength and direction of the breeze.

These alternative losts may have made sense when I wrote about them in the
Times
(and now here), but on the ground in Tangier I still felt like a failure. There—and on subsequent “Getting Lost” treks to Ireland, Chongqing, Jerusalem, and Paris—it was impossible to step back, understand what was going on, and enjoy the myriad nongeographical ways I was losing myself. Instead, I was caught up with the concrete, step-by-step, practical process of getting lost. Do I turn right or left here? Have I seen this store, this intersection before? How can I shield my eyes from those maps on display at every bus stop?

Paris in particular presented a challenge, as I'd been there at least five times before, and had walked—and walked and walked—across it on each visit, from the hills of Montmartre to the Marais to the corner of the 15th Arrondissement where Jean had lived during her year abroad. I'd shopped at flea markets on the far edges of the city, and picnicked on pizza by the Canal St. Martin. I knew Paris, not perfectly but well, and I thought getting lost there would require an extra effort. So, before I arrived, I immersed myself in research: I read about the flâneur, the aimless urban wanderer who became an icon of nineteenth-century poets like Baudelaire, and about
le dérive
, literally “the drift,” a theory of “psychogeography” developed by the situationist Guy Debord in the 1950s that described how we move through urban spaces without hesitation. Or something. Frankly, I couldn't see much difference between
flânerie
and
le dérive
, but I did appreciate how very French it was to impose a highbrow intellectual framework upon something normal people already do all the time.

In fact, I probably got too “French” or Debordian in my own thinking, because immediately upon landing in Paris one rainy
September day I was consumed with imposing a theoretical framework on every single footstep. Any time I saw a landmark I recognized—the Carnavalet Museum, say, or the bar Prune—I'd turn around and walk the other way. Except that meant retracing my steps along the path I'd just come from, which also felt verboten. So . . . should I turn right or left? Push on through past the familiar into the unknown? And to what purpose? What was the point of this, except as an intellectual exercise? What would Baudelaire do?

The walking was wearing me out, too. The first night, exhausted, I'd crashed in a small, nondescript hotel near Place de la République (though I was no longer officially Frugal, the
Times
hadn't bumped up my budgets), and as I set off the next morning, a heavy pack on my shoulders, I knew I wouldn't be able to go another day like this. Up in Montmartre, I happened upon a short-term apartment rental agency, and arranged to stay in a renovated seventh-floor garret for the rest of the week. The apartment—the Eagle's Nest, they called it—was tiny, clean, and spectacular, with a jaw-dropping view of the city from Montreuil to the Bois de Boulogne. Every evening I'd sit at that window, drinking Sancerre and eating warm, prize-winning baguettes and imagining what might be going on beneath that sea of mansard rooftops.

And that was the problem: my imagination. I had set off for Paris with a too-fixed idea of what I might find if I got lost—eccentric museums hidden in fourth-story apartments, lively cafés in little-touristed quartiers, Parisians who would, unlike every other Parisian in Paris, greet the arrival of a moderately Francophone American with surprise and glee. (Or whatever passes for glee among Parisians.) But I didn't really know if such things existed, and I'd denied myself Internet access to find out. Instead, I relied on advertisements in the Métro, and I fixated on strategy: How could I get to the areas I hadn't yet seen? This was a vexing question—I was staying in Montmartre, from which walking to far-flung parts of Paris would not only take hours but also drag me through those familiar areas again and again.
There was the Métro, of course, but if I rode it blindly, I still might resurface somewhere I knew. Unless . . .

Unless I looked at the subway map.

So I looked at the subway map.

In full contravention of my own “Getting Lost” rules, I picked out corners of Paris, plotted my Métro connections, and emerged in Passy, at Tolbiac, at Bel-Air, at Pré-Saint-Gervais, fully prepared to discover what no other travel writer had yet discovered. Which was that my longed-for eccentric museums did not really exist. Instead, I walked past beautiful buildings and saw on their brass nameplates that all those mysterious third-floor suites and garden studios were the offices of gynecologists and physiotherapists. I sat in those side-street cafés and ate duck confit and braised lamb shanks that were, as far as I could tell, awfully similar to the duck and lamb I'd eaten at cafés in other neighborhoods. Innumerable little roads leading up to Père Lachaise, through forgotten swathes of the Marais, or toward the Bourse were lined not with underground boutiques but with wholesalers of crappy Chinese-made clothing.

It wasn't that every neighborhood in Paris was the same. Not at all. Passy was crammed with teenagers and bourgeois families browsing international chain stores, while couples in their twenties lounged in the sunny, quiet public parks of the 15th. The primly designed region around the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand had pockets of color—an artists' collective housed in an old cold-storage warehouse, a shop devoted to Japanese manga, anime, and video games—and La Butte aux Cailles, in the 13th, was precisely what I'd been looking for: the kind of tight-knit, old-school village no one believes still exists in Paris. (It's not like it's unknown, but somehow I'd never heard of it.) And yet, when I reported back this discovery to my Parisian friends, they dismissed it. La Butte aux Cailles, they said, was too far from anything to bother visiting—never mind that it's about five hundred feet from three different Métro stops.

What I began to understand was that the parts of Paris I already knew—the Marais, the Bastille, the cheap, creative restaurants of the 10th and 11th, Montmartre, and so on—were the parts of Paris that were, to me at least, the parts worth knowing. And instead of recognizing that, instead of trying to enjoy them purely, as if this were my first time in Paris, I was pointlessly pursuing an impossible goal, and filling myself with an angst that masked a weird truth: I was having a great time. Down the rue Catherine in St. Germain, I'd found a postage-stamp cinema showing Humphrey Bogart movies, and (thanks to a subway ad!) I'd discovered an exhibition of body-part-themed art at the Espace Fondation EDF, and I'd been plowing through a new Haruki Murakami novel at cafés across the city. And then there were the baguettes and cold wine at sunset . . .