Out of Istanbul

by Bernard Ollivier

  “Give.”

  “I’ll give it to the muhtar. You’re not the muhtar.”

  He’s furious but makes no attempt to take it by force. I breathe a sigh of relief, since, in a confrontation with an athlete like that, I stand no chance whatsoever. Now I need to get out of this trap. I go back to my pack, hoist it onto my shoulder, and head toward to the door.

  “I’ll be back this evening. If your brother’s looking for me, I’ll be with the beekeepers at the entrance to the village.

  “No, stay.”

  My departure throws him into a panic. He puts his hand in his pocket and takes out the lamp.

  “Here, I give it back to you, but stay. My brother won’t be long.”

  I give it some thought, for I have to be careful not to make a false move. Here, I feel threatened. But the risk is very different from what I went through in Alihacı. The Kurds won’t call in the army. The relationship between the army and the villages is too adversarial. At Yastıktepe, my first Kurdish village, and here too, there are no portraits of Atatürk, which were everywhere I went until I entered Erzurum. From now on, if I have any trouble, I’ll have to settle it with the villagers themselves. If I go now and hang out with the beekeepers, I’m going from the Kurdish camp to the Turkish camp. And, by refusing his hospitality, I’d be rubbing the muhtar the wrong way. He is, beyond any doubt, a respectable and respected man. I cannot hold him responsible for the odd behavior of his crazy brother. Ultimately, even if I were to seek hospitality from the beekeepers, I’d be safe for one night, but what about the next? I think back to what the Kurdish gentleman told me in Paris: from one hamlet to another, everyone knows everything. It would be impossible for me to get through the other villages if I lose face with the muhtar here.

  After all, the vital thing for me was getting back my passport. And as soon as the brother returns, everything will be fine. I must therefore be patient and wait. I set my bag back down. The rascal breathes a sigh of relief. But he’s clearly angry with me. But I think I can handle the situation: with the pocket lamp he gave back to me, I have something I can trade with, and I ought to be able to soften him up.

  In the hours that follow, the usual scenario unfolds. The village elders are first to come see the foreigner, since they have plenty of time. Then the community’s prominent figures. One of them is quite young, about thirty-five, clean-shaven and wearing a three-piece suit. He’s a bit fat, whereas all the others are lean country folk, their faces worn by the harsh weather. I have no trouble figuring out who he is: he’s the imam. The macaque plays the ringmaster, running about, disappearing, then coming back with more curious villagers. Every able-bodied person in the village has soon squeezed into the room. The memory of Alihacı haunts me. What are these men thinking? What do they want from me? They’re friendly to me and ask about my journey.

  Those sporting caps traditionally worn by devout men congregate about the imam, whom they treat with the utmost respect. After having said nothing for a long time, he asks me a hundred questions about my journey, religion, profession, and sources of income. As soon as he speaks, the faithful all nod their heads in agreement in a display of support. As if, after all, there were two camps: his and mine. I get the sense that I can’t expect anything from these people, although they don’t appear hostile. Our two worlds are too far apart from each other. It’s now dark out. Once again, worry has set in. The muhtar is still not here. In his absence, I’ll be all alone tonight with that horrible macaque, and I don’t have a very good feeling about that. Anytime I say something, he throws a greedy glance at my gear, sometimes brushing it with his hand as he walks by, as if wanting to reassure himself that it’s still there. The man is clearly mad with greed. And no doubt simply mad. When the villagers start singing the praises of my big boots, which, after one thousand five hundred kilometers, seem to have at least that many left to go, he says, with a big, worrisome smile: “They are mine.” Ill at ease, the men look away. I’ve been warned: he won’t stop at just the pocket lamp.

  At eleven o’clock, I’m quite certain that the muhtar will never come. The macaque brings in a carpet. The imam and four men recite prayers while the others, paying no attention to the ritual, continue their conversations. Now very dubious, I’m wondering why they didn’t go to the mosque to pray. And yet I realize that Islam is a very flexible religion: the temple can be wherever the faithful find themselves. Then, little by little, the men get up and leave. Around midnight, everyone has left except the imam. The madman goes to get yogurt, bread, and cheese, and we have dinner. He then sets some mattresses and blankets on the bunks. I glance over nervously at him. And with one pronouncement, the imam reassures me.

  “I’m sleeping here.”

  Everything is becoming clear. Although the imam told me that he lives next door with his wife and children, if he plans to sleep here, it’s to protect me in the absence of the muhtar. It’s proof that I am indeed dealing with a man suffering from mental illness. Fear prevents me from falling asleep. I occasionally drift off for a few moments, but then I wake back up in a start. The madman, rolled up in a blanket on the carpet, is fast asleep. The imam is snoring.

  At 5:00 a.m., I’m woken by the first ray of light, since I’m already on the qui vive anyway, and all I can think of is freeing myself from the macaque’s clutches. But I cannot violate the sacrosanct laws of hospitality, so I have to wait for breakfast. While the madman gets it ready along with the women, the imam questions me for a long while on Catholicism and Christian rites. I answer as best I can, nimbly thumbing through my pocket dictionary in search of the religious terms that—a true curse—are words I haven’t learned. Breakfast resembles dinner: bread and cheese, washed down with tea. Coarse food and exhausting work: it’s no surprise that no one is overweight here, as in Turkey’s west.

  I’m about to leave when the imam stops me:

  “Don’t go: the dogs have not yet left with the flocks. You’ll be ripped to pieces.”

  I’m chomping at the bit. We sit in total silence. I feel despondent, as I’m in a hurry to get a move on. The macaque is going around in circles. He can no longer bear it, he asks me to give him back the lamp. I hand it over to him with as friendly a smile as I can muster. I hope that that will calm him down for good, but I doubt it.

  Finally, around seven o’clock, I have permission to leave. The shepherds and their flocks have headed off for mountain pastures. The village is deserted. I wasn’t able to fill my water bottle last night as I typically do and let the purification tablets take effect through the night. I therefore head to the spring. Meanwhile, the imam seizes this opportunity to ask me more questions about my religion. I have no trouble pretending not to understand what he’s saying, for my mind is elsewhere. What awaits me in the next village? I sense some imminent threat. If he only knew just how little I really care about all his questions on the comparative virtues of the world’s different religions! I’m eager to get away from the fear that has gripped me since last evening when I knocked on the madman’s door.

  When that macaque of misfortune who’d gone off into a barn a little while ago comes back to join us, a wave of fear paralyzes me. As if I weren’t terrorized enough already, he tells me he’s going to walk with me.

  And in his hand, he’s holding an ax, as sharp as the one that I saw in the skilled hands of Hüseyin while he carved his pitchforks, or Mustafa the carpenter, as he sharpened his ax with love. I throw the imam a frantic glance. But there’s no help coming from that quarter. He holds out his hand, saying that he’s delighted to have met me, then quietly walks away, his hands in his pockets. He likely stayed with me last night to protect me, because no one wanted a foreigner to be robbed or harassed in the village. But were that to happen outside his fiefdom, he could care less. The madman is beaming. He knows that, as soon as no one can see us, he’ll be able to steal whatever he wants from me.

  I try not to panic. With the weapon he keeps waving in front of me and his obvious strength, I wouldn�
��t stand a chance. In the face of irrepressible desire, what’s one man’s life? For this fellow, nothing.

  If I acted on impulse, I’d drop my backpack and take to my heels. But where would I go? There’s a tractor in front of the muhtar’s house. With a spin of the wheels, the madman would catch up to me. Eager to make his move, he invites me to get going. While stowing my brimming water jug, I try to come up with a plan. How can I gain time, get out ahead of him, and away from danger? Suddenly, I have an idea. Last night, when I told him I was headed back to see the beekeepers, he went to pieces. Why not try that again?

  “I promised to say good-bye to my friends the beekeepers,” I tell him. “I’m headed there first, and when I come back through town, you can join me.”

  Frustrated like a little kid, he nevertheless seems to buy into my crazy idea. I immediately put on my pack and start going. My beekeepers have already been out working for a long time. I give them a nutshell version of last night’s ordeal and ask them to confirm what I’d already guessed:

  “Is it true that the muhtar’s brother isn’t quite right?”

  They mime an answer that is unambiguous. So I tell them about the ax, and how he wants to come along with me.

  “Head back the other way. If he comes by here, we’ll try to stop him.”

  No sooner said than done, and I hustle. I don’t think I’ve ever walked so fast. From time to time, I stop and listen, ready to hide should I hear the sound of an engine. In the hamlet I traversed last night, I hand out some candy to the children. A tall man who says he’s the muhtar wants to see my passport. Are my problems going to continue? Full of apprehension, I hand it to him. He fingers through it, then hands it back to me, satisfied. That reassures me, as I’d begun to think that courtesy might be a thing of the past. A half-hour later, I’m back on the paved road, and I stop a truck headed to Pasinler. Only when we drive off do I feel I’m finally out of harm’s way.

  I ask the driver to drop me off near the banks of the Aras River that, further on, serves as the borderline between Iran and Turkey and then between Muslim Turkey and Christian Armenia. In the seventeenth century, Muslims feared that their Christian enemies might sully the river’s water. For that reason, they drank from their cisterns only. On the other side of the river, the Christians feared the same thing and only drew water from their wells. Today, terrifyingly polluted, the Aras would poison everyone irrespective of their religion and would populate both Heavens and both Hells in short order.

  On the other side of the river, I’m back on State Road 100. We’re fifteen kilometers from Pasinler, the city I left yesterday morning. The forty kilometers I covered yesterday and the ten kilometers this morning have therefore come to naught since I’m now practically back at my point of departure. But it’s a privilege to still be alive and in good health. Why should I complain?

  Farewell Kurdish villages. If one day I return, I’ll try not to come alone, and I’ll try to avoid picking the week your idol is condemned to death. I decide to stick to the main road while cursing myself: in Yastıktepe, people warned me—either miming a rifle or a finger across the throat—that I was headed straight toward the terrorists. And the first beekeeper I met, the one who offered me a glass of ayran yesterday morning, was concerned whether I was armed. So I was perfectly well aware. But no, I had to press my luck, invoking my guardian angel, naive as I am. One of these days, if I keep demanding the impossible, my little angel’s gonna leave me high and dry. Whatever happens, as a big fan of westerns, I tell myself that the next time I watch one in which a gunfighter kills a cowboy just to steal his boots, I’ll be reminded of the scoundrel I met in Payveren.

  The spot where the truck dropped me off along State Road 100 is called Köprüköy (the bridge village). And a bridge there is indeed: an old, very beautiful stone bridge with eight arches. No longer open to traffic, it once linked the two halves of a village straddling the two banks of the Aras. Then, for a reason no one can quite explain, the villagers relocated three kilometers away. Today, the structure now only connects one field to another. As I’m looking it over, a man rides by on a bike. He’s a tourist, and he’s laden like a Silk Road camel. He yells something to me that I can’t make out and just keeps on going. Solid proof that he’s a foreigner. Farther along, a family is seated on the grass for a picnic lunch. The couple and their two children are in European dress. The man tells me that he’s a jandarma. His wife is stunningly beautiful. They invite me to partake in some vegetable-and-meat börek. The whole event feels so pleasantly rural and amicable that it makes me forget my awful night. In the river, wet up to their midriffs, women and children are dunking large carpets that they then vigorously shake out or scrub and then spread flat out on the stones along the bank for them to dry in the sun. The children horse around, splashing one another; their mothers scold them. These rustic, peaceful scenes are comforting: come now—yes, I had the misfortune of falling upon a half-wit, but that’s no reason for me to lose my sunny disposition! But no sooner am I back on the road than dark thoughts begin once again running through my mind. What rotten luck! One of the most interesting regions I’m traveling through is Kurdistan. And here I am, like a common tourist, forced to walk along a road that is as impersonal as it is international.

  I don’t recall the scenery between Köprüköy and Horasan that day. Anger drives me forward, each step of the way. And I travel the twenty-seven kilometers lumbering gloomily, my shoulders hunched, looking at my feet.

  At my hotel, I snap out of my anger only to wade right into a dreary bout of depression. The strain was too much. Suddenly, finding myself alone is a crushing burden. I’m only two hundred kilometers from the border that I was really looking forward to crossing. And now, doubt and fear have clouded everything. Fear. Unreasonable fear. I’m not afraid of the PKK. I know that its political activists can be brutal, even murderous. But their actions are predictable. The PKK could, strictly speaking, lock me up and use me as a bargaining chip. That’s a risk I’m willing to take. But I refuse to bear the risk of a crazy man who wants to kill me just to steal my shoes. Of course, I’m aware that these poor people, lacking everything, are mesmerized by the more or less glitzy wealth, the moneyed splendor that the West flaunts all over TV. It makes these poor people dream and leads the weak-minded to give in to impulses of unfettered greed.

  And yet, like them, my skin has been baked by the sun; like them, I wear clothes with a few holes in them; and all day long, I struggle under the weight of my load as they struggle under that of their bales of hay. But whether I like it or not, we are from two different worlds. I represent Europe and its riches, its cars and its jewels, its McDonald’s, and its movie stars. In my backpack, which I’d prefer were transparent, they imagine a thousand treasures. Not one day goes by without someone asking me how many cars I have, what my salary is, or without someone guessing how much money they think I have, since I can travel, whereas they . . . For millennia, they have seen wealth parade by in big bundles on the backs of camels. On my back, although it’s small and modest, there’s also a bundle. But it’s another thing to imagine it might be full of gold. And in these regions, far from everything, the sometimes-murderous game of cops and robbers is still going on. Here, or in Iran, am I going to run into other madmen? With the spell of bad luck that seems, of late, to be right on my heels, it’s quite possible. For the first time since my departure, I regret having gone it alone. In spite of my fatigue and yesterday’s sleepless night, it’s late into the night when I finally fall asleep, and I wake up after only four hours of fitful sleep.

  From Horasan to Eleşkirt, there are seventy kilometers and not a single hotel. I get going without really knowing where or when I’m going to stop. Around noon, while I was resting by the roadside having just come over a small mountain pass, a cyclist appears, looking to me like the twin of the one yesterday, but this one stops. He’s English and hails from Liverpool. A little later, a couple of other riders catch up to him. These three young men, whose co
mbined age is probably just a little more than mine alone, are on their way to New Zealand, where they hope to arrive for Christmas. They camp, which explains why they have so much gear. The bikes disappear quite literally beneath the saddlebags and bundles. There’s a certain family resemblance with our tanned skin, sun-chapped lips, and the quiet jubilation that springs from well-tuned bodies. Each morning, they tell me, they ride anywhere from sixty to eighty kilometers, then rest in the afternoon when it’s hottest out. I take their picture, they take mine and then get back underway, carried off at top speed by the downslope. Exchanging a few words with these kind, jolly fellows has pulled me from my unhappy thoughts. Just now, I regretted traveling alone. But after they leave, I reconsider. Yes, they’re on one hell of a trip, making one-of-a-kind memories. But that’s where the me-and-them parallel ends. On their bikes, in their tents, they see only part of the country they’re visiting, mostly its scenery. Trapped within the language they share, lying in their tent, they are less exposed than I am to the danger of being robbed, but they interact very little with locals. They’re discovering the world, whereas I’m confronting it through my own experiences.

  Today, all the car and truck drivers want to give me a ride. It’s as if word had gotten out. One bus driver stops, yelling, “para yok” (it’s free). A father and his two sons who drove past me back up in their van. They offer me snacks while getting me to tell them about my voyage. The father recites a long speech to his sons that I interpret as the defense and illustration of the virtues of hard work. He points several times at me, and his sons gaze at me as though I were in the process of being canonized. Then, when they finally give up trying to get me to accept a ride, they head off, waving at me as they do.

  It’s very hot out. One T-shirt dries on my pack while the other gets wet on my back. Out on the steppe, dozens of flocks graze under the shepherds’ watchful eye. When I’m close enough, one of them runs up to me to ask a few questions, then goes back to the others to fill them in. I wish I were a dragonfly so that I could drop in and hear his version, the questions that are sure to be asked, and the answers that the little shepherd, building on his interview, must be tempted to invent.