Out of Istanbul

by Bernard Ollivier

  Since ancient times, war has been a permanent way of life on the Silk routes. It’s just as prevalent today, and the entire region of Central Asia is still in this day and age ravaged by local, violent conflicts. While I was preparing my journey, I had to bear this in mind in choosing my itinerary. I had the choice of several ancient routes. I would have liked to begin on the Mediterranean in the ancient city of Antioch and traverse Syria, Iraq, Iran, and then Afghanistan. They are magnificent countries; their peoples and lands are rich in history. But the dangers are all too apparent.

  I couldn’t take the route through the Steppes, either. The Turkish–Armenian border is closed. As for the Caucasus, the smoldering insurgency going on in Chechnya seemed as if it might flare up again at any moment . . . and it finally did. But the most unpleasant peril seemed to me to be the country’s new unofficial national sport: the kidnapping of foreign tourists, with ransom notes posted in Grozny Square. No, I have no interest in heading over there just to set myself up as bait . . .

  In the meantime, on the route that I did choose, I’m confronted with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s war against the State. My arrest yesterday suggests that things could heat up after Erzurum—on the edge of Turkish Kurdistan—especially since the trial of Öcalan that is taking place right now is making headlines in newspapers and on television, stirring people up.

  In the face of all these dangers, how did the caravanners get their information? They were better off than I, as I can’t understand what’s being said in the media. As for the English- or French-language press, the route I’m traveling is off the tourist track, where it is blatantly ignored. Merchants of the past had everything available in one place: the caravansary. Offering all necessary services, it was also a veritable word-of-mouth news outlet, where guests exchanged whatever information they had on a daily basis. One merchant might say to another: “I’m coming from the East and you’re coming from the West: tell me where you’ve seen epidemics, bandits, and wars, and I’ll tell you what I know on my end.”

  In my journey, does the village of Alihacı mark the border between a zone that’s not dangerous and another that is? In Çiftlik, two men tried, albeit halfheartedly, to take my watch and money. Yesterday, three men tried, more aggressively, to rob me. But the worst violence was that of the inhabitants of Alihacı, their collective madness, their greed (money, treasure . . .), and ignorance (wearing a backpack means I’m a terrorist). The army’s intervention probably saved me from their madness. But I would rather have dealt with soldiers who were a little more diplomatic. Like Mustafa, for example.

  On the morning of June 18, I ring Blue-Eyes back up and ask if, as promised, he would send someone to drive me back to the road where he picked me up. He sends a car and driver along with two soldiers armed with machine guns, with instructions to take me to Alihacı. I’m not so keen on that, and so I ask them to drive me to Yazıköy, thirty kilometers farther. The soldiers, who do things by the book, check with their commander. Blue-Eyes refuses. That’s not his turf. I can take the bus: the army will even pay for my ticket.

  He knows as well as I do that there’s no bus to Yazıköy. To hell with him. The man lied to me every time he opened his mouth.

  How am I going to get back on the route that I had mapped out? It would take me at least two days to hike there through a sector that is, beyond any doubt, dangerous. After pacing up and down the Sivas bus station for a while, I finally find a bus heading to Suşehri. One of the stops is Ekinözü, where I was planning to seek hospitality. I’ll have the driver drop me off there. The bus also heads up the mountain road and over the famous pass at Karabayır. It was so steep that caravanners gave it the nickname of “beguiendren,” which means, more or less, “where the lord must descend from his horse.”*

  Viewed from the bus, the landscape is superb. Along the road, a restaurant proudly proclaims “The Silk Road” in Turkish—which is normal—and in English—which is unexpected. To the north, tall peaks still covered in snow shine brightly in the sun. Instead of veering north toward Suşehri, the bus crosses an intersection and continues straight east. I scurry over to the driver. He tells me that a new road has opened that’s more direct and in good condition, and so the bus no longer travels the old route, which is too difficult and dangerous. Farewell Karabayır pass, farewell Ekinözü. This new setback means that I’ll miss a total of three stages between Alihacı and Suşehri. But in the end, are these places I should be sorry to miss? Mustafa Kaçar warned me I would have been endlessly bothered by army checkpoints, or worse, I might have been target practice for PKK sharpshooters. There are certainly times when I need to be careful. And I’m more careful now especially since the intense fear I experienced on June 16—my “day of disaster”—has not entirely faded.

  Above all, the vision of the man standing in front of the door to my room, gripping his rifle, still haunts me. In that moment, I thought they wanted to kill me. Rather strangely, however, although I’ll admit that I was frightened, I didn’t panic, nor was I really afraid of dying. In our hypersheltered societies, death draws near in clever disguise. We keep it secret, we bottle it up, we reject it. I’ve often thought about my death. There have even been times when I would have welcomed it. But I had never, in my experience as a man, seen it close up, face-to-face. And it’s true, “neither the sun, nor death can be looked at steadily.”† And then there it was, my death, dangling from the nervous index finger of an ignorant halfwit, scared stiff by my backpack!

  Since leaving Venice, I’ve often reflected on the risks I’m taking. Of course, I risk my life on this road. But no more, as I see it, than on the highway connecting Normandy with Paris, or than when walking across the Champs-Élysées, even keeping to crosswalks. But I’m not naive. When we choose to walk, we open ourselves up to relationships. Some are kind, and some are cruel. If I wanted to die in my bed, then I should’ve stayed home. But on that topic, I have strong views. Those who want to die in bed and never stray far from it are already dead.

  At the point where we’re about to head over a mountain pass at an altitude of 2,000 meters (6,560 feet), I ask the driver to let me off on the deserted road. Stunned, the passengers watch as I get off ten kilometers as the crow flies from the nearest inhabited village and twenty-five kilometers from Suşehri. The driver almost refused to leave me there. It’s too dangerous, he said. So I explained that I wanted to walk to the nearest village, Aksu, by trail. Truth is, I’m itching to get back on my feet. The weather’s far too nice to be sweating it out in this box on wheels. It moves too fast, and I want to contemplate this tormented landscape at my own speed. There is silence once more, broken only by the sound of my steps on the gravel and that of a truck, from time to time, roaring up the inclines of the new road. It follows the course of a rushing stream that, over several millennia, has cut through the mountain, leaving the rest of the job to bulldozers.

  Vast carpets of crocuses quiver and buzz: upon closer look, I see millions of bees, industrious, obstinate, and gorging themselves on pollen. In some regions of Turkey, crocuses are still grown for the production of saffron. One kilogram of saffron requires harvesting one hundred thousand crocuses. Saffron was once used as a form of currency. In the small city of Safranbolu, near Tosya, known for its lovely Ottoman houses, two families still produce “true” saffron, cultivating the crocus satilus.

  As I lose altitude, the air grows warmer. Clumps of trees between the stream and the road provide cool shelter from the sun. Under the branches of a poplar grove, I lunch on a bit of bread and cheese and take a short nap. Little by little, the stress of my “day of disaster” melts away. My sense of calm returns.

  Later on, as I cheerfully get back out on the road, a car stops and asks if I’d like a ride. I merrily decline the offer: if people are once again stopping for hitchhikers, then fear is no longer a factor. Finally, to top it all off, an ambulance screeches to a halt, asking if I’d like to hop in.

  “No thank you, not yet. Maybe later on . .
.”

  The driver and passenger laugh. They want to know all about me, so they park their vehicle and get me to tell them about my journey. Then they drive off, but not without first handing me a chocolate bar.

  Suşehri was a busy staging point along the Silk Road. J.-B. Tavernier recounts that when he stopped for the night in the city, there were so many caravans that no one paid the tax. The caravanners just kept going, brushing the tax collectors aside, as they were very poorly organized and overwhelmed by so many travelers. Today, it’s a small, provincial city of no touristic interest whatsoever. At the post office where I had told people they could write me, the employee tells me that there are indeed a few letters waiting for me. It’s so unusual that the envelopes were placed in the vault. But unfortunately, his colleague went on vacation and took the key with him. In the hope that there’s nothing urgent, I suggest he send the letters on to Erzurum, where I’ll be in about ten days.

  In the morning, when I leave the restaurant where I just had a hot, rich çorba mercinek, I bungle my second photo. The first one I botched was in Gerede. As I was walking down a side street, I saw, in a barber’s window, a venerable old man with a no less venerable white beard, who, in a tide of foam, was having his head shaved. It was a truly comical sight: imagine the hawk-like profile of a swarthy-skinned man elongated all the more and capped, with great symmetry, by a foamy tuft, white as snow. If I were at all good at drawing, I’d do a quick vignette sketch for you. Unfortunately, there was no film in my camera. In Suşehri, the must-have shot is that of a tractor carrying a load of joyful, laughing passengers. It has young people sticking out all over it quite literally. They’re clustered on the mudguards and on the hood, they’re crammed onto the seat and hanging onto the tilling mechanisms. By the time I get my camera out, they’ve all jumped off. I count them: seventeen young men, including the driver, perched on the machine. It’s confirmation of something I already knew: I’m no good as a photographer.

  I leave Suşehri without regrets and am heading down toward the artificial lake behind a dam at the edge of town when a man comes sprinting up. The post office employee sent him to tell me that, if I’m willing to wait until 4:00 p.m., he’ll have figured out how to get his hands on the key to the vault. I’m endlessly fascinated by the mysterious methods for communicating used by peoples who have not made communication itself the focus of their business. By what unfathomable means will the vacationing man manage to deliver THE key, and, furthermore, by what route has this stranger managed to catch up with me, though I’d already left the city? Therein lie all the mysteries of the Orient.

  But no, I’m not about to wait around. I have no desire to stick around forever in this charmless city. I follow the lakefront for some ten kilometers. The air is hot, but my gait and salt intake must be right since I’m barely perspiring. Should I stick with this rather heavily traveled road, or head back out to wander through the villages? Naturally, so long as I continue to avoid it, I’ll continue to harbor deep down the fear that took hold of me on June 16. And the longer I wait, the stronger its grip will be.

  So I dive right in and take the mountain road, which, south of the reservoir, leads into the deep countryside. It’s a steep climb. The scenery changes. To the right, the earth is sandy and crumbly, green in color, with vertiginous downslopes and, nearly directly below at the very bottom, a rushing stream whose rumble reaches my ears. On the other side, earth of dark ocher, the color of rust. There’s no vegetation other than a few clumps of shrubbery at the stream’s edge. Children are playing in the water, and the sound of their laughter brings a human touch to this cold and lunar landscape.

  In the small village of Akşar (ak’-shar), I chat for a moment with two men putting the finishing touches on a restaurant in preparation for its grand opening, scheduled for the day after tomorrow. A third companion is frying eggplant in a smoking pan of oil. He’s stripped to the waist but has a gun hooked on his belt. When I express my surprise, he tells me that he’s a cop and is cooking to help out his friends. After Akşar, the road vanishes, and I have to navigate by sticking to the path trodden by ranging herds. When I reach the top, I catch sight of Erence (ay-rahn’-djeh), the village where I’m going to spend the night. But before I get there and since my T-shirt is wet, I change clothes beside the mountain stream I wade across and seize the opportunity to rinse my shirt in the current and hang it on my pack to dry. Pinned to my back, one might easily mistake it for a white flag: a rather appropriate symbol in these regions.

  Thus attired, I step foot into the yard belonging to the muhtar of Erence, Arif Çelik. The man is surprised, uncommunicative, even hostile. He asks for my passport, jumps on his phone, and calls the jandarmas. Standing in the middle of his yard, pack still on my back, I think to myself that the troubles are about to begin. The telephone rings, Arif indicates that it’s for me. The jandarmas instruct me to proceed to their headquarters, eighteen kilometers away. I laugh out loud. Eighteen kilometers to show them my papers and as many for the return trip: that makes thirty-six kilometers. I’ve just traveled forty from Suşehri to here, and I have no intention of doing it all over again this evening. If they want to see my passport, let them come here.

  I camp out in the middle of the yard, next to my belongings. Arif tends to his business. He’s visibly disturbed by my presence and can’t figure out what attitude he should adopt. But I do: I have to wait. I’m seriously starting to wonder whether I’ll be spending another night at the base. The phone rings several times. The jandarmas insist. They want to speak to me again. I stand my ground and advise them to call Blue-Eyes or, even better, Mustafa Kaçar, if they want more information.

  In the meantime, Arif has struck up a conversation. He’s dumbfounded to learn that I walked all the way from Istanbul. In my notebook and on my maps, I show him the route I took. This settles him down, and we go on a tour of his small farm. I offer to take a picture of him on his tractor. In poor or remote areas, the tractor is such a vital piece of machinery that it’s often decorated with brightly colored fabric or carpets. His is adorned with a drugget sporting geometric designs dyed in hues of gray and green, reminiscent of army camouflage. It turns out that we’re exactly the same age. This strengthens our relationship. Now that he feels reassured, I believe he’s trying to calm down the jandarmas, since the phone calls become less and less frequent, and then finally stop.

  He invites me in for tea. Several of his friends come to join us, as well as the village’s young imam, and we have a rather pleasant conversation. A little later, while I’m getting ready for bed, my host goes to get a chair and sits down in front of me. He watches on in silent fascination as I brush my teeth. His own teeth are in rather poor condition—one in two are missing—but I love to watch him laugh in a show of his piano keyboard. I find it fascinating that, when he closes his mouth, the upper teeth fit perfectly into the gaps on the bottom, and vice versa. And so, with his mouth closed, Arif looks as though he has all his teeth. My laughter must be infectious because, by the time to go to bed, we’re the best of friends.

  He invites me to sleep in his own room; he and his wife squeeze into another room along with the rest of the family. By 5:00 a.m., I begin to hear noises. It’s Arif and his wife preparing breakfast so as not to hold me up, since I told them I wanted to leave early . . . without specifying that, for me, “early” means two hours later. Joined by the imam, just back from morning prayer, he walks with me for some distance. My heart is heavy when I take leave of this marvelously good man.

  Once again, I’ve changed my itinerary. The jandarmas affair yesterday turned out okay, but I suspect it’s going to happen again. I’m still too close to the turbulence zone to head out onto side roads. I need to get back on the highway. At 5:30 a.m., I cross back over the mountain stream and begin a long climb. When I reach the pass, at 1,800 meters (5,900 feet), Erence is no more than a tiny hamlet napping in the valley. On the other slope, the mountain’s northern side is still cloaked in snow.

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nbsp; In the first village I go through, a kind old man uses a stick and draws in the sand the path I need to take. But then a rascal appears, mistrustful and combative, and puts me through a veritable police interrogation. I’m sure the jandarmas will soon have more news about me. Once again, people in the fields and along the road stop greeting me. After a two-hour-long journey, I’m again overlooking Suşehri’s artificial lake. This immense reservoir along with the geometry of the fields create such a grandiose spectacle that I have to sit down and take it all in. The mountains to the north are mirrored in the water, hemmed in by yellow fields of ripened wheat and black squares of plowed soil. Abandoning the winding road, I run downhill and straight on into the low grasses where herds of cows are grazing. Beside a spring where I fill my water jug, a young shepherd comes over to ask for money. What does he want to buy?

  “Lots of cigarettes,” he says.

  On the paved road, I find myself once again barely five kilometers from the place where I left it yesterday. This was no useless detour—after all, aren’t detours also ways of going straight to something else?—for it allowed me to meet Arif and to explore landscapes whose memory has remained with me ever since. I’m walking at a good pace, despite the heat. After a good çorba in a cool, dark lokanta, I take a short, one-hour nap in the grass. My plan is to stop in the little burg of Çataklı (chah-tahk’-luh) and seek hospitality there. At 6:30 p.m., I realize that I left Erence over thirteen hours earlier and am now out of water. Without a single village in sight. A truck driver offers me some warm, questionable water kept in a dirty plastic jug under his seat. I do what I know one should never do: I greedily gulp down a good liter. Five hundred meters farther, just my luck, I come across a small mosque and a cool water spring.

  In Çataklı, a passerby assures me that the small city of Gölova, five kilometers off the highway, boasts a hotel. But a second passerby who has since arrived disagrees: he is certain that no such hotel exists. I am very tired, but the prospect—despite being merely hypothetical—of sleeping the whole night through and—who knows?—of taking a shower spurs me on. By the time I reach my destination, I’ve walked fifty-five kilometers over the course of the day, and I’m completely wiped out.