Out of Istanbul

by Bernard Ollivier

  The city is surrounded by a wall of apartment towers and high-rise blocks into which commercial developers pack the common people. In a country with so much space and frequent earthquakes, what could possibly prompt architects to build housing projects skyward? Is it to draw a little closer to heaven?

  In Bolu, I wash off the day’s perspiration by sweating it out in the very beautiful Tarihi Orta Hammam, built in 1321. Natural daylight floods the bathhouse’s rooms, diffracted through blocks of glass set in the domes. As the sun’s rays pass through them, they become iridescent in the floating steam. I partake of this soothing, golden mist. I finally relax.

  And then I decide to go sightseeing and visit the caravansary. It’s a Taş-han (tash-han): the term han refering to a city caravansary, the word taş meaning “stone.” The construction is relatively recent, as it dates from 1804. This is not surprising, since previously the caravans followed a route that took them north of the present-day city. The han is very well preserved and the obligatory “tearoom” in its rectangular courtyard is a great place to unwind and share secrets in the cool shade of the arcades. The cells, formerly intended for travelers, are now occupied by artisans and small shops. In its inner recesses, there’s a bookstore run by a blond, curly-haired man with small, thick-lensed glasses and an athletic build: this is Mustafa Açıkyıldız. He and his wife Emine lived in France for twenty-one years. He was in the French Foreign Legion. He tells me that he rarely has the opportunity to speak French, except with an engineer from Lyon who works for a local company. I ask him a few questions about his life in France, and the kind of commitment he made with the Legion. He brings up something else, changing the subject. When I offer to take his picture, he flatly refuses. It’s an awkward moment, and we bid each other good-bye.

  I make use of my stopover in this city to reconnect with civilization—to send messages over the Internet, among other things, so as to catch up with my family and friends and reassure them that I’m doing okay. I’ve noticed that nearly every Turkish city, even medium-sized ones, have Internet cafés thronged with people passionate about communicating, both young and old.

  Is it the sweat bath or the healing powder that I purchased with Hikmet? The next morning, I notice that my wounds have begun to heal over. So as to further accelerate the healing process, I opt for a very short stage. But I remain cautious, having finally decided to nip in the bud my damned habit of always overshooting the reasonable decisions I already find so hard to make. I hold off until 3:00 p.m. to leave the city; that way, I won’t be able to walk more than three or four hours before the fateful onset of night and the risk of danger.

  The sun is shining brightly. A minibus packed with passengers comes to a stop, and the driver invites me to hop in. He’s disappointed when I tell him no. An hour later, as I’m walking by a courtyard that has been converted into a parking lot, he comes out running, beckoning me: “Gel, çay!”

  He and his friends make quite a fuss over me, consumed by curiosity, as they had all seen me, either earlier today or yesterday, along the road. Nationality? Where do I come from? Where am I going?

  I gladly answer the usual litany of questions as we sip cups of very sweet tea. It makes me laugh to see how these men—whose only physical activity is to downshift, brake, and accelerate—can be so fascinated by someone who walks; it’s as if I were a man from Mars. There is, in their eyes, a mix of admiration for what I’m accomplishing, a tinge of condescending irony, and a certain degree of disbelief. Why walk when you can go by car? Of course, once again, many of them ask whether they can drop me off a little farther on down the road. But this time, they’re not put off when I turn them down.

  Is it for lack of vocabulary or because I’m afraid of sounding pedantic? I give up trying to explain. But then, isn’t our leisurely conversation over a cup of tea the perfect answer to their incomprehension? If I were traveling by car, or had climbed up into their vehicles as a fare-paying rider, would this conversation have ever even taken place? No. Motor vehicles confiscate our words. They go too fast and make too much noise. Stops are predetermined; exchanges are strictly limited to payment of the fare. And if I get into a vehicle and find myself next to another passenger, there’s simply no guarantee that he’ll even want to talk, or that, since he’s getting off at the next stop, he’ll see the point of starting a conversation. Walking is freedom and exchange; vehicles are prisons of steel and noise, places of unsought intimacy. And how can I get across to these men, the descendants of nomads—whose virtues they love to extol—that they’ve become motorized, legless cripples, no longer capable of getting about on the strength of their own muscles, which are wasting away through lack of use?

  In the hours that follow, I continue to ponder the parallels between nomadism and the Silk Road. In Central Asia, this mythical road was created by Arabs and, later on, by Muslims. In Arab culture, travel and commerce are linked. Mohammed, a descendant of nomadic tribes, followed in the footsteps of merchants and, during his exile, journeyed extensively. His successors continued to do as he had. Nomadic Arabs conquered a large geographic area before they were finally halted—in France at Poitiers, and elsewhere. The Ottomans, themselves descendants of Mongol nomads, conquered present-day Turkey by force. Once the Muslim faith had unified the steppes of Central Asia, both groups capitalized on their dual heritage: commerce and travel. Through to the tenth century, Muslim trade flourished, merchants enjoyed considerable prestige and enormous wealth, until military forces portioned out fiefdoms for themselves at the merchants’ expense. Buying and selling continued on nevertheless for nine more centuries along the roadsides of Central Asia and China.

  The Arabs are indisputably the inventors of the literary travelogue. At the end of the ninth century, Abu Dulaf Mis’ar provides an account of his expedition to Central Asia, Malaysia, and India. Another great traveler, Abu Hamid al-Gharnati of Toledo, relates his exploration of the world in the twelfth century, one hundred years before Marco Polo. Whether they were traveling for business, out to discover the world, or simple pilgrims, by the time Europeans were only beginning to set out on their great journeys, Arabs and Muslims had already crisscrossed the globe. Three Arab travelers, the three Ibn, described the known world in great detail: in the tenth century, Ibn Fadlan visited Bulgaria and Russia nearly three hundred years before the first European, Jean du Plan Carpin, would head out on his diplomatic mission in 1245 to visit the great Khan. At the end of the twelfth century, leaving Arabized Spain on his pilgrimage to Mecca and back, Ibn Jubayr depicted the Mediterranean basin in what was extraordinary detail for those days. But it is Ibn Battuta of the fourteenth century who stands out, beyond any doubt, as the greatest Arab traveler. Thanks to him, Arabia, Asia Minor, Russia, India, China, Spain, and the Sahara—just a handful of places!—would no longer be, for the curious, terræ incognitæ.

  All these mental incursions back into the past have taken my mind far from the road before me: without thinking, I’ve just passed through the village of Çaydurt, fifteen kilometers from Bolu, and I unhappily note that State Road 100 and the Istanbul-Ankara Highway are drawing nearer to each other so as to make it over another gap, the Fakilar Pass. At the foot of the valley, in between these two roads barely one hundred meters apart, stands a dirty, gray, rectangular cement structure: an inn, used primarily by truck drivers. The dining room I enter is dimly lit, probably so people don’t notice that the floor hasn’t been swept since the place opened. One of the kitchen staff, shuffling his feet, shows me to my room one floor up: it’s a minuscule unit with a window looking straight out over the highway. Two one-person beds take up all the space. The sheets have probably never been washed since opening day, either; they’re stiff as cardboard from all the dirt. The boy goes out, leaving the door open behind him, letting me share in the blissful sleep of another hotel guest, snoring like a diesel engine in a room across the hallway.

  I have a bathroom, but it’s unfortunately rather dark. Someone unscrewed the only bulb intended
to brighten a place reserved for hygiene, light, and cleanliness. In the shadows, the first thing I hear is the sound of a waterfall. A pipe is broken in the ceiling, and water is loudly spilling down onto the tile floor. A noisy leak in the toilet’s flush mechanism is unsuccessfully trying to drown the other one out. The sink has no hot water, and the cold water tap that I finally manage to break free is already stuck such that I can no longer shut it back off. My pocket lamp, which is about to give up the ghost, throws enough light, however, for me to notice that no one would ever guess the shower basin’s original color, as it, too, is covered in a thick layer of slimy filth. A nauseating odor tops it all off. I walk back out, closing the door. There will be no shower tonight, not even a cold one: I’m too afraid of getting dirty.

  Fearing that the one in charge of housekeeping might also be the cook, I make do with a cup of yogurt for dinner. In my room, I lay out my sleeping bag on one of the beds, but so much intimacy with all the dirt is overpowering, and so it will be a short night. What’s more, a truck-hating dog howls every time a motor roars by on the highway; that is to say, whenever the old dog feels like it. When, exhausted and voiceless, he finally quiets down, an army of toads, probably inspired by the sound of water coming from my “bathroom,” begins to serenade me with a chorus of a thousand dreary voices. Howling trucks, a barking dog, the stench of filth, mourning toads, and the splash of water pouring from gargoyles: I stare out at the highway swept back and forth by the bright beams of the passing vehicles, sleep drags its feet, and anxiety disrupts the shadows.

  As on the Samsun two weeks ago, or two days ago at Nevzat’s house, the questions once again raise their ugly head. Will I make it through to the end? This evening, I have my doubts. The pain on the top of my toes has, little by little, eroded my optimism. To this has been added an enemy that I had completely underestimated: linguistic isolation. While walking alone, I don’t suffer from the solitude. The images I amass, the dialogue I have with myself are enough. It’s during the stopovers, in restaurants, and with the people I meet that I feel stranded on my linguistic desert island. The vocabulary I learned before my departure and what I pick up here and there along the way are simply not enough. This insurmountable barrier—this prison cell of words—is unbearable, and I can think of no solution to the problem. And what will it be like when I’m in Iran, since I haven’t learned a single word of Farsi?

  The Turks, devilishly chatty, sometimes speak to me at length, and I can’t understand a thing. On television, omnipresent in restaurants, teahouses, and peoples’ homes, faces flash by, and out of the mouths pour sounds that, for me, are entirely incompehensible. I wasn’t very pleased to find out, several days after my departure, that the trial of Öcalan (Oh’-djah-lan), the Kurdish leader of the PKK, had begun. Television networks are broadcasting special coverage. People are riled up and there is a lot of debate, but I understand nothing. What worse form of torture can there be for a journalist? A manager of one establishment, in response to my question—“How long is the trial going to last?”—replied with a satisfied smile by simply sliding his index finger under his throat. That language, sad to say, is universal.

  Late that clamorous night, in a hotel room reeking of goats and grime, I make a cursory assessment of my journey. It has been twelve days since I left Istanbul, and I’ve walked three hundred and sixty kilometers (220 miles). But there are still over two thousand five hundred (1,550 miles) to go before I reach Tehran. From here to there, will I be able to hang on, both mentally and physically? Am I going to solve the difficult problem of finding my way? And will I be able to brave the many calamities that people here and there have warned me about: Kangal dogs, PKK gunmen, highway bandits, and of course some nasty hole in the ground that will cause me to stumble and break a leg (or two)? In the wee hours of the morning, overcome by fatigue, I finally drift off to sleep for a few minutes, unable to answer the one question that encompasses all the others: will I see this journey through to the end? If I had the choice right now, I wouldn’t stake my money on it.

  When I wake up, I’m happy to note that my feet feel better. And, for one who walks, when the feet feel fine, everything’s fine. Yesterday’s shortened stretch and the healing powder have worked wonders. And so, with a lilt in my step, I head over the Fakilar Pass, which rises to an altitude of twelve hundred meters (3,900 feet). To improve my vocabulary as I walk along, I make a game of translating superlative-packed billboard advertisements, cleverly positioned in between these two heavily traveled roads. And every day, I make myself review what I’ve already learned, while adding five new words. I’m a tenacious walker and a conscientious traveler. But still, my main difficulty is understanding. Turks speak very quickly, and the structure of their sentences is far removed from ours. Even words I know are camouflaged under a profusion of prefixes and suffixes, making them seem unfamiliar. When I don’t quite catch a sentence and ask for it to be repeated, my interlocutors, mostly simple folk, think I’m hard of hearing. So they repeat the same thing at the same speed, only shout.

  A short distance after cresting the hill, the Ankara Highway turns southeast. State Road 100 also splits in two. The section heading east, emptied now of a good deal of the traffic, becomes bearable once again. In order to discourage vehicles from trying to pick me up, I walk on the left side of the road. There must not be many walkers in Turkey, and the thought bolsters my ego: I’m seen as a veritable curiosity, a rarity, a national phenomenon. However fleeting our encounters, the road hogs and I communicate through sign language. Our dialogue consists of a succession of sound and light signals, gestures, and facial expressions that in and of themselves express the different reactions I give rise to. They can be classified as follows, from hostility to enthusiasm:

  – A honk of the horn accompanied by a hand gesture brushing me away: “Get outta my way!”

  – A simple honk of the horn: “Let me get a look at that face.” This happens most often when I’m heading up a steep incline, looking down at the pavement. It’s also the way trucks call out to me when they’re coming up from behind. They spot a pair of legs over which there is a rucksack, in turn topped with a hat, and, quite understandably, they want to see whether or not there’s a head.

  – A honk of the horn with a hand in the air, palm turned up toward the sky an an inquisitive facial expression: “What the hell is this? Nationality? How’d you get here? Where are you going?”

  – A honk of the horn, hand in the air, palm turned out in my direction as Romans would do: “Hello, friend!”

  – A honk of the horn and a military salute: “Nice job, buddy!”

  The most demonstrative are those who, headed in either direction, have passed me previously and who greet me as they would an old acquaintance. From a distance, they flash their headlights and then honk as they pass me by, with wild gestures and an open smile. When there are several people up front, the passenger closest to me leans out the door and shouts a word of encouragement. Later on, toward the end of my journey, I come to find that, in cafés along the highway, many drivers have already heard of me and come over to tell me so, wanting confirmation of the incredible story: A MAN TRAVELING FROM ISTANBUL TO TEHRAN ON FOOT. They know better than anyone that, depending on their load and the engine’s horsepower, it would take them an exhausting two- to four-day journey to cover that same distance.

  The bus drivers who’ve already seen me, or who’ve caught wind of the crazy Frenchman, are especially friendly and make an announcement to their passengers. Then all the passengers spur me on. I always respond. To the most aggressive ones, I raise my middle finger to the sky. The others receive a Roman salute and a smile. For the nicest ones, those who flash their headlights from a distance, I metamorphose into a kind of windmill, waving my arms and walking stick to the extent that my load allows. But sometimes, after fatigue has set in, I put on much less of a show.

  Around noon, a van coming toward me zooms past, does a one-eighty, passes me in the other direction, and then c
omes to a stop a hundred meters on. The driver gets out, walks over to me, and starts asking questions.

  “Nationality?” “Where are you from?” and so on.

  He looks at his watch.

  “I’ve got two hours. Hop in, I’ll take you a hundred kilometers or so.”

  In the face of my amused rejection, he scratches his head, assuring me that he would love to help me out. He’s truly disheartened that I’ve turned him down, and I feel awful. How hard it is to be free!

  High atop Fakilar, my altimeter reads 1,200 meters (3,940 feet). The landscape looks rather swampy in spots. At Yeniçağa (Yeh-nee’-chah-ah), they are mining the peatlands. The deciduous trees have disappeared, but on the summits of some hills, fir trees have been planted. Everywhere else, plowed fields and meadowlands blanket the gentle slopes, warmed by a spring sun. The road continues to gradually climb: 1,360 meters (4,460 feet). Herds of russett cattle watched over by young shepherds pepper a prairie landscape painted in every possible shade of green. There are no walls, no fences, no ditches; the plain would be endless were it not for the ever-present chain of mountains obstructing the horizon. Although it’s nearly the end of the month of May, the altitude here has slowed the walnut trees’ progress, such that their first leaves are only beginning to open out. Out on the plain in advance of the Bolu Pass, not even fifty kilometers away, the leaves were fully open and nuts had already formed. At the edge of a pond, children are fishing with makeshift poles while keeping an eye on their animals. These young people seem to be from another era! And yet these are scenes from the world I knew as a child. Could I possibly be that old?