Out of Istanbul

by Bernard Ollivier

  Mustafa tells me that Kızık has a caravansary that someone will show me the way to tomorrow morning. This route, he explains in a scholarly tone, was not along the Silk Road, but rather on the “Road of Osman, Imperator.” He can tell me no more. There were three Turkish sultans who went by the name of “Osman.” He has no idea which one of them goes by the name of “Imperator,” nor does he know the exact route taken by that particular road. It’s likely something he heard here or there and that he’s restating without any further knowledge. Incidentally, the next morning, when I mention that I’d like to see the caravansary he told me about, no one knows where exactly it is.

  I hit the road under a cool sun that feels more like spring. A dam being built near the village made it necessary to reroute the roads, and my map is useless. I manage to find the one I want, and, very abruptly, it heads uphill. With my altimeter reading 1,300 meters (4,265 feet), a car passes me up on the dirt road and comes to a stop one hundred meters farther on. Two fellows get out, position themselves next to the car, and wait for me. As I approach, I immediately put up my guard: their faces are grave and tense, even hostile. The taller one, who also seems the most malevolent, has one hand in his pocket. I have no doubt he’s clasping a pistol or a knife. I do my best to smile despite my apprehension, and, advancing with hand outstretched, I introduce myself: I am French and visiting Turkey. There’s a dramatic change in their attitude. The shorter one tells me that he is the muhtar of Kargıncık, two kilometers distant, and that his name is Nihaze. The other fellow removes his hand from his pocket and holds it out to clasp mine. Fear—which, on both sides, had raised its ugly head—suddenly scurries back into its lair.

  They offer to give me a ride to the village. I refuse, but at the first houses a half-hour later, Nihaze is waiting for me beside the road. He takes me to his house for tea. While the women get it ready, he tells me he has six children: five boys, all of whom are in France, near the city of Dreux. Instead of a simple tea service, the women have prepared a veritable meal. A delicious eggplant-and-onion dish that I devour. Nihaze takes only a few small bites. He tells me that he raises bees and sells the honey. It’s his main source of income. He’s the only mountain dweller I’ve encountered so far who keeps bees. A lot of honey is produced here, but it’s still the monopoly of beekeepers who come from the Black Sea coast in summertime.

  Nihaze walks with me to the edge of his village. The mountains rise before us, almost straight up. He points to a path: this is the “route suitable for vehicle traffic” shown on my map. Before long, it fades beneath the grasses, then disappears altogether, such that I have to follow my compass through the pastures. The landscape is so majestic, and my walk through the thick grass so pleasant, that I climb with glee, unmindful for the time being of any possible misadventures.

  After an hour-long workout, soaked in sweat, I reach a kind of small platform—its surface area is probably no larger than that of my little house in Normandy. My altimeter reads 1,700 meters (5,580 feet). The view is breathtaking. I set down my pack and lie on my stomach in the grass. One of my childhood pleasures comes back to me all of a sudden: the sense of being embraced by the Earth itself, like a protective mother. Before me, the immense Tokat plain stretches to the north, and the city is visible, nearly forty kilometers away. To the south, the Sahırsivis tepe, culminating at 2,100 meters (6,890 feet), blocks the view somewhat, but I have 340 degrees of fabulous scenery. I carefully examine the lower hills that rise in terraces both to the east and to the west. My T-shirt is soaked. I take it off and head over to a kind of trough built by shepherds. A spring there is gently burbling. I splash some of the water onto my face and then my chest. Finally, after checking not just once, but twice, that there’s nobody around, I take off my clothes and plunge into the improvised bathtub. The water is ice-cold. It’s a brutal shock, but once I’m numb, I manage to let go. There was no opportunity to wash up yesterday or this morning. The bath is pure bliss, especially since I must be in the highest bathtub anywhere in Turkey, and knowing I’m free to enjoy, even for a moment, being so near the Gods.

  Still, I avoid overdoing this invigorating, icy bath, lest the Gods take offense. I scrub myself down, dry myself off, and, to warm myself back up, I run through the soft grass down the other side of the pass, shamelessly crushing pretty bellflowers with my big boots. In the valley where I finally come to land, I notice that the houses have given up tile roofs in favor of sheet metal. At Çırçır (chur-chur), the collapsed minaret is being rebuilt. A village elder, Osman Chahine, tells me he has a brother who left for France twenty years ago and never once sent news. Does he think I know him?

  The muhtar who takes me in, Talat Tekine, is kafka (Caucasian), as is the entire population here. He tells me that their ancestors arrived in 1874. There isn’t a single Turk in the entire village, and the inhabitants only speak Caucasian. But no one knows how to write in that language, since only Turkish is taught in school. The two other Caucasian villages that I later go through give me the same impression: there is a strong and self-sufficient sense of community, like little Anatolian kolkhozes.

  People are mentioning terrorists again. And although I take these warnings seriously, I can’t help but notice with a little amusement that the “terrorists” are always other people. At Tokat, where I’d been forewarned that they were everywhere, people said that there weren’t any. The imam at Çıftlik said they were somewhere around Kızık. In Kızık, they said I’d find them in the vicinity of Altınoluk and Çırçır. Now that I’m there, they tell me that they’re mostly near Tokat. We’ve come full circle. Still, it’s a warning not to be taken lightly. Garrisoned in this backwater village is a detachment of jandarmas, tasked with fighting terrorism, and their presence here is certainly no coincidence.

  My host, in his fifties and going gray at the temples, is strapped into an impeccable three-piece suit. He resides in a newly built home. But there’s nothing new about it. It’s based on the very same model as all the older homes, both in terms of layout and the materials used to build it. As in the old houses, there’s no special bathroom, just a washbasin next to the toilet. The furniture exudes a certain degree of comfort and aesthetics. The most striking example is in the opposition between a single chromo print on a wall and a bountiful bouquet of plastic flowers on a table. I sleep in the living room, on a mattress laid on the ground. Talat’s daughter, who just brought me a pillow for the night, has a stunningly beautiful face. When her father tells me her name, she says something to me, probably, “welcome to our home,” but I’m so taken by this vision of beauty that I mutter some endless compliment that begins in Turkish and ends in French. In brief, she sends my heart aflutter, and I show it.

  In this little village, just like in the village yesterday, the welcome isn’t as warm as it was during the first days of my journey. As good Muslims, my hosts take me in and satisfy their curiosity, but that’s where it ends.

  In the morning, Talat accompanies me out onto the road. He’s one of the rare peasants I’ve met who knows how to read a map, and he shows me clearly the path I should follow: “At the first intersection, go right, then at the intersection after a bridge go left.” He gives my hand a squeeze then heads home, never looking back. Thanks to him, I’m once again on friendly terms with forks in the road.

  This morning, June 16, regardless of all that, nothing can undermine my optimism. The sun, for its part, is celebrating with me. For deep inside, I’m celebrating: according to my punctilious calculations, having checked and rechecked my addition of kilometers traveled since leaving Istanbul, today I’ll be crossing the one-thousand-kilometer mark. I reckon that the event will take place around 11:00 a.m. It has been one month and two days since I left the Turkey’s largest city. Back then, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to adhere to the agreement I’d made with myself. Even though I’m not quite halfway through, I’m satisfied with the pace I’ve kept, since I’ve walked thirty-five kilometers a day. If I take into account the days off, m
y average is still thirty kilometers a day since May 14. I’ve overcome infected feet, I’ve survived Kangals, and I’ve made some progress, albeit modest, in learning Turkish. I’m also in very good physical condition, and the stages—thirty-five kilometers on the day before yesterday, and thirty kilometers yesterday, including a mountain climb—leave me feeling fresh as a daisy the next morning. The despair I felt upon leaving Tokat is already long gone and forgotten. Forgotten, too, my resolution to walk with my head in the clouds and nothing on my mind, paying no attention to reference points, benefits, and balance sheets. Wisdom, ’tis well known, is found at the end of the journey.

  The first village I have to traverse is called Akören. As I approach, I see a man step out of the first house. He spots me, goes back inside, and comes promptly back out with what, from a distance, looks like a stick. As I pass him by—he’s in a squatting position, ready to jump me—I notice that the stick is a rifle. The man looks at me with hostile, stern eyes. Panic paralyzes me, and, for a moment, I’m afraid that my knees might give out. Despite the fear gripping me, I muster the courage to hail him with a sonorous and affable “hello,” but unfazed and stubborn, he says nothing. I continue on at a pace that’s as neutral and light as possible, as if my inexistence might ward off the volley of lead the scoundrel intended for my backside.

  A little farther along, on the village square, two old men who had seen me coming look away as I draw near. The young whippersnapper washing up at the fountain points the road to the next village when I ask him about it, without even turning around. Once again, I’m stricken with fear. A diffuse sense of fear that makes my heart beat faster. I’ve heard about “terrorists” for a long time; perhaps now I’m in their midst? The day before yesterday, Mustafa, Kızık’s mayor, told me, “There are some in Altınoluk.” That’s one of my next destinations. The three men, like the man wielding a “stick” a short while ago, are uneasy. They’re not hostile; they’re simply paralyzed by fear. It’s not the same fear that seized me when I saw the rifle and that, in a flash, drained me of my energy. No, the fear they feel is permanent, it’s something they live with. It dictates their every move. I also noticed that not one of the few vehicles that passed me on the road, cars or tractors, stopped to offer a ride. Fear trumps curiosity. And workers in the fields no longer wave to invite me over for tea, as they often did before Tokat. I’ve entered the land of fear.

  The man driving three young calves out of a pasture has a friendly face. He has a slight build, a dark complexion, a short mustache, and a three-day-old beard. He chuckles and says, raising his hand in friendship:

  “And just where are you headed?”

  He smiles and so do I.

  I string together, in Turkish, something that I intend to mean:

  “To Erzurum. Don’t tell me it’s far, I know that. I’ve come from Istanbul on foot, and that’s even farther, right?”

  My vocabulary and grammar didn’t betray me: he bursts out laughing. He’s exuberant, he pokes at me as if we were two partners in crime and drags me into his house. The calves go back in their stable, which occupies the ground floor. Fazil Önel, which is his name, protects me as I head up the stairs to the second floor, because lurking just under the steps is a Kangal as big as one of the calves, ready to swallow both me and my bag in two gulps. The first question I ask, of course, is whether there are any terrorists in the area. Again, he laughs. He has a hearty laugh and an open, trustworthy face.

  I will indeed encounter terrorists, he tells me, if I continue heading east. In his opinion, there are three Shiite villages where I really ought not wander, and he advises me to make a detour around them. I draw a circle around the three names on my map, a precaution that, no sooner having done it, I regret. Yes, the names of these little villages are impossible, and I mix them all up. But if I’m stopped, I’ll look pretty slick with these rebel areas underlined and gear that everyone thinks mistakes for a portable arsenal!

  I had indeed planned to go through one of them, Ovatabök. Fazil’s daughter, a pretty fifteen-year-old brunette, gestures desperately to her father. She clearly wants to talk to him. He gets me settled out on the patio, then goes to see her. He comes back laughing harder than before:

  “She’s afraid you are a terrorist!”

  One Turk thought that I had a motor hidden in my bag. Does his daughter think it conceals a bazooka?

  The girl and her sister prepare the tea. In the meantime, Fazil and I chat, along with Ali, an elderly neighbor who bears the title of “haj” ever since he made his pilgrimage to Mecca. This evening, I’m planning on seeking hospitality in a village that has the same name as he does, “Alihacı” (ah-lee-hah’-djuh) (Ali the Haj). The prestige of those who, in olden days, went on foot or by horse all the way to Mecca was such that the entire village shared in it. And the inhabitants sometimes even renamed their town with the name of their hero.

  Fazil tells me that he has seven children: four boys and three girls. The boys aren’t here, they’re all in college.

  “And the girls, they’re not in college?”

  He has trouble understanding my question.

  “But the girls work on the farm!”

  “And they’ve never gone to school?”

  “Yes of course, but only the usual studies, age seven to eleven.”

  When, before leaving them, I take a snapshot of Fazil and Ali, the teen girls run off to hide in the house, as though the devil himself had appeared to them.

  The weather’s spectacular. The sun’s playing hide-and-seek in a fluffy sky, and the air’s cool, ideal for walking. I’m in my element. A light breeze sweeps over the grasses, I feel free, relieved, full of joy. Three kilometers after having said good-bye to Fazil, I stop. The road is a wide track of hard-packed dirt and white gravel that gently undulates from one hill to the next. In the distance, I can see how it winds its way over the prairie, disappearing for a while, and then reappearing; it lingers a little to the left, and then, like a prankster, it vanishes once again behind a green hedge. I soak up this peaceful scene. The road is bordered by flowering pastures and plowed fields. The mountain range I crossed yesterday appears less formidable, perhaps because, at the moment, it’s bathed in blue light.

  My appetite for new landscapes is inexhaustible. I’m like an unfaithful lover: each new beauty draws me in, effacing the one before. Hardly have I had my fill of one dreamlike vision, when the next one—and that one alone—grabs my attention. For me, happiness is always hiding, just past the next plain, behind that rocky outcrop; it’s hiding in a fold in the terrain, around the bend of a river, at the far end of this narrow pass. Driven by a desire to hold it in my hands, I lose all sense of time.

  When I take my watch from my pocket, it’s 11:30 a.m. I look around to be sure that I’m alone. I take a running start, laughing like a madman on this deserted road, and, as far as the weight of my pack will allow, I take a giant leap.

  I just crossed over the one-thousand-kilometer mark.

  CHAPTER VIII

  JANDARMAS . . .

  Shortly before noon, some peasants invite me to join them for their snack, and then to hop on their tractor for a ride back to their village, two kilometers away. I accept the galettes, tomatoes, and onions, but I want to walk. The patriarch appoints his youngest brother, Yusuf, to keep me company and show me the way. When we get to the first houses, a stout man with a distrustful look on his face is waiting for me next to my host. He says that he’s the village muhtar and wants to see my passport. The document appears to do the job as the man relaxes, and in no time the joking begins. My host family is exultant; the neighbors parade by. In the room where people greet me, the mattresses are stowed, raised to lean against the walls next to piles of neatly folded blankets. At night, this must be a large dormitory. But I have no desire to test it out. I’d rather get to Kuzören, on the other side of the hill, overlooking a field of grain, busy with farmworkers. The red, clayey soil is as hard as concrete. The first drops of rain turn it i
nto glue that sticks to your shoes. Behind me, Mount Yıldız (2,550 meters/8,370 feet) has its nose in the clouds. From a vantage point on the hill, looking east, I can make out the peaks that I won’t get to for two more days.

  The temperature is up. My walking stick sinks into the hot tar, and around 4:00 p.m., my jug is empty. I knock on the door of a solitary house, a short distance from a village, to ask for water. The man answering the door invites me into a room where three of his partners are busy at work, bent over computer screens. I’m flabbergasted by such modernity so deep in the countryside. I learn that these natives are land surveyors, and that they’re working on the country’s first land registry. It’s a long-term, complex, and monumental task, requiring careful attention to detail. Until recently, property rights were transmitted orally, which often resulted in arguments between neighbors and made it all but impossible to set up and administer a system of property tax. They explain that in Turkey, when a man dies, his wife inherits one quarter of his belongings and his children receive three-fourths. They are taken aback when I tell them that French Napoleonic code gives everything to the children and nothing to the wife. As I head back out, my thirst quenched, they weigh me down with a good pound of cookies.

  Two kilometers farther on, a tractor stops, and its passengers invite me to hop on board. There are three of them, all in their thirties. When I turn them down, they head off, and—in the now-classic scenario—they stop two hundred meters on. The driver, a sturdy, bearded fellow, remains seated on the vehicle; the other two get down and pretend to be washing their hands at a spring. They’re clearly waiting for me, and, in fact, as soon as I’m near, they come over to me. A small fellow in a light-blue suit, greedily sucking on his cigarette, is all smiles with his questions, showing off all thirty-two of his yellowy teeth. While he asks me the usual questions, I lose track of the other one, who has come over to stand off to my right. Suddenly, I realize that he has ever so gently zipped open one of the pockets of my pack and that he’s in the process of removing my camera. I pounce on him, rip it from his hands with a booming “No!” and take off running, camera in hand. With the weight I’m carrying, I have a hard time running quickly. I’m in the middle of the countryside, far from civilization, at their mercy. Maybe it would have been wiser for me to head in the other direction, toward the village . . . The two men have climbed back aboard the tractor, and it quickly catches up to me. It forces me onto the left side of the road. It’s impossible to get away, since the road follows a cliff. To my left, a ravine opens below me, two or three meters deep. If I jump, I may very well break a leg. There’s no escape route to my right, either: vertical as a wall, it’s the mountainside.