A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  How many miles had we walked side by side before our paths diverged? My father, unable or unwilling to move from the place he’d taken up residence inside his head; me, to travel to far-flung places.

  Now I was edging towards Asia.

  At first, the changes between Bulgaria and Turkey were almost imperceptible. Topography and geology don’t always recognise borders: there was the same scrubbed, whitened land, the same rolling hills and fields of sun-dried crops. The colour would come later.

  We pushed up the wide four-lane carriageway away from the border and past a ribbon-town of articulated lorries parked up on the roadside. Despite the waves of land rolling across to Edirne, riding the rises along the D535 was easy in the partial cloud. For the first time since Karnobat, I was experiencing the joy of cycling again, and I felt physically strong and psychologically in the right headspace. I reflected back on my fears at the beginning of the journey: would I be fit enough? How would I cope with aching limbs? Now cycling had become such an established part of my everyday routine I hadn’t thought about the effect it was having on my body, but here on the D535 I realised there were no sore limbs, not even an aching bottom (as a friend had teased me about). Cycling, unlike walking, is kind to muscles and joints. I had lost weight, too, although I wasn’t sure if it was because of the exercise or because of the fierce heat that suppressed my appetite. Spending long days in the fresh air, strengthening muscles and breathing deeply on the inclines, had made me fit and healthy. And I was walnut-brown from spending so much time in the sun.

  As we turned a corner I saw two women on the bend of the road, dressed in niqabs and long black robes, dark among the pale fields of wheat: this was Turkey, not Bulgaria. But it was the colour of Edirne’s cityscape after the grey of Bulgaria that made me feel as if I was emerging from the shadows into bright sunlight. First the apartment blocks on the town’s skyline, followed by the shopping streets and the wares spilled out onto the pavements. And, finally, the people. All filled with colour.

  We dropped off the plateau, the hillside town tipping us down through chaotic streets towards the river valley. The smell of lemons filled the air, along with the aroma of koftas cooking and spicy aubergine. We sped past stores selling everything from shoes and fabric to magazines and tobacco, leather-faced, hawk-eyed owners eyeing the town from child-sized wooden seats on the pavement.

  We found our hostel down a quiet side street, the city noise reduced to a murmur, only interrupted by the cries of a fruit vendor as he wheeled his barrow past us, piled high with watermelons. We chained our bicycles up in the hostel’s little courtyard and went in search of food, finding a side street of restaurants that sold nothing but deep-fried battered liver and hot chillies and plates of beef tomatoes.

  Edirne was a messy, chaotic city. Hens negotiated tourists and townspeople in the pedestrianised thoroughfare, while skinny cats fought for scraps under tables and chairs so tiny they looked as if they came from a children’s nursery. Along the streets, the burble of street fountains mingled with the hum of human voices and meows of kittens. Shop fronts lining the cobbled precinct were topped with structures of wood – a strange muddle of steeply sloping, carved and balconied mountain huts in the sky. In amongst the jumble of streets, the needles of minarets punctured the burnt blue sky, the curve of mosque domes soft against the sharp elbows of buildings. We took refuge from the midday sun in the Selimiye Mosque, the swirling patterns of carpet and tile and painted ceiling in among the white stone reflecting the colour and chaos of the town.

  At dawn the next day we unchained our bikes in the courtyard and wheeled them out onto the empty side street, the town still asleep. With trepidation, I followed Jamie on to the wide carriageway of the D100. I’d read of the horrors of this main artery feeding into Istanbul – a monster of a road choked with aggressive traffic that smoked and fumed and spat at cyclists.

  *

  ‘Hang on. I’m coming over!’

  The Romanian had been cycling in the opposite direction, northwest from Istanbul. He’d stopped on the far side of the carriageway and shouted over the four lanes of traffic, his words almost swallowed up by the rumble of wheel and throb of engine. He stood on the hard shoulder, his thick neck protruding like a turtle as he scanned the road for a space in the steady stream of articulated lorries and vans speeding past. Then he ran, springing lightly over the central divide with thin, sinewy legs.

  ‘Where are you guys going? And where have you been?’

  He seemed as excited to see us as I was to see him – for we’d not encountered a single touring cyclist on the road since Constanța County in Romania.

  ‘Istanbul.’ With every month, week and day, the word sounded less ridiculous.

  ‘Istanbul … I’d think carefully about cycling into the city. It’s dangerous. A tourist cyclist was killed on the D100 close to the city centre just the other week. It’s better to take the bus.’

  I relayed the cyclist’s warning to Tom over the phone that evening.

  ‘Take the bus? You can’t do that! You can’t cycle all the way across Europe then take the bus into Istanbul. What an anticlimax that would be.’

  I listened, understanding the sense of his words, yet unbelieving that my cautious, risk-adverse husband was willing to throw us to the lions – or the infamous Istanbul traffic. I teased him that he was trying to get rid of Jamie and me.

  In truth, the D100 was not as horrific at this point as I’d imagined. The road was wide, the hard shoulder generous, the traffic still moderate and the articulated lorries slow enough that I didn’t have the sensation that I was going to be sucked under their wheels, unlike the road feeding into Drobeta-Turnu Severin. Perhaps the Romanian cyclist had been exaggerating the dangers.

  As we cycled on, the residue of night-time cooling quickly surrendered to the heat of the sun. The heat haze shimmered on the road ahead of us and the troughs and crests rose and fell with increasing frequency, the tidal wave of tarmac threatening to exhaust me. Outside Lüleburgaz, the D100 rose yet higher, the wall of road climbing to the sky. I slipped off my bike and pushed it up the hill – before remounting to tumble headfirst down into the city – and to our final CouchSurfing host, Ayhan, who was waiting for us.

  *

  2. The Turkish Twins

  I’d written to Ayhan way back in Constanța, Romania, asking him if he had a couch going at the beginning of August. Ayhan gave a tentative yes to my request so far ahead of our arrival date, and confirmed a spot on his sofas for Jamie and me when we were in Yambol. I was looking forward to experiencing a slice of real Turkish life beyond the hostels, hotels and campsites we’d booked along the D100.

  Ayhan’s instructions led us round the edge of the town, where the rectangular plots of new-builds bumped against the rectangular patches of field and farm. In this place, the traditional and modern came together – a suitable location for the farmer’s son turned agricultural salesman, who liked all the comforts of modern living.

  Our thoughtful Turk was waiting for us by the entrance of his apartment complex as we scrunched through the gravel of the newly created road towards him. He’d waited to make sure we didn’t get lost in the fresh mushrooming of apartment blocks in Lüleburgaz. Ayhan led us to the lift and up into his flat – a chic, contemporary bachelor apartment with black leather sofas and crate coffee tables. While I washed off the dust from the D100, Ayhan headed for the kitchen to make coffee.

  ‘How about a swim?’ he asked as we downed our drinks, and the three of us spent the late afternoon by one of the pools in the complex, Ayhan on his mobile phone most of the time, deciding whether to go self-employed or find another company now that he’d given up his old sales job.

  Ayhan was born in Bulgaria, but had left when he was just three, though his parents had held on to their land in the area, still returning on occasion to visit the family they’d left behind.

  ‘So, why did your family leave?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, the Turks were persecut
ed during the Cold War in Bulgaria. Any citizen found speaking Turkish in the street, for example, was heavily fined. A lot of Bulgarian Turks returned to Turkey during that time.’

  Ayhan had held on to his Bulgarian citizenship, his EU passport giving him visa-free access to much of Europe and with his dual citizenship, he’d travelled all over North America and much of Europe.

  At the poolside, I flicked through the newsfeed on my mobile and saw that Bulgaria, following in Hungary’s footsteps, was building a final section of razor-wire fencing that would completely seal their border off from Turkey. The Syrian refugees would now have to find another route through Europe: further north, colder, wetter. Time was not on their side as summer slipped away.

  When we returned to the flat, Ayhan’s twin, Nurhan, appeared. The two brothers had points of similarity, but in many ways, were as different as salt and pepper. While Ayhan spoke English fluently, Nurhan didn’t speak any. Ayhan was the more confident twin, secure in his pale good looks, his blond-brown hair and light green eyes. Nurhan had the same pale eyes, but with darker hair and ears that curled out. He was small and sinewy with a sweet smile and an easy, natural charm. Both brothers liked adventure, but while Ayhan sought out the bright spots of far-flung cities and exotic locations, Nurhan roamed his own country on his racing bicycle.

  While Ayhan put together a makeshift meal, Nurhan showed me pictures of himself cycling through a winter Turkey of moss-covered canyons, snow-covered mountain passes, plunging waterfalls and dripping pine forests. It was a far cry from the dusty D100. Despite Nurhan’s lack of English, we managed to communicate. I asked him about the dangers of the D100, Ayhan shouting a translation from the kitchen. Nurhan found Google Maps on his mobile and traced the route with his finger from Lüleburgaz to Beylikdüzü followed by a thumb’s up. Then he traced the road from Beylikdüzü to Istanbul and gave a thumb’s down.

  ‘Bad.’

  Ayhan returned from the kitchen with a small plate of stuffed vines and egg and urged us to eat up as he’d arranged for us to meet his friends in town. In the café, we sat surrounded by agricultural graduates as they talked tractors and farm machinery, or so I imagined. As I listened to their gravelly Turkish, I felt bemused to find myself, a middle-aged British woman, surrounded by muscly, moustachioed and bearded Turks who politely answered my questions while daintily drinking tea from tall thin glasses on saucers. I tried to imagine agricultural students at home spending a night on the town, soberly drinking tea, and the thought made me smile to myself.

  ‘So, did you all grow up in farming families?’ I said as we stood up to leave. The men grinned a yes then held out strong farming hands to wish us all the best for the remainder of our journey.

  I thought of my mother’s farming family, out in the fields that lay in the drumlins of County Down. We’d spent Saturday evenings visiting my mother’s birthplace, her parent’s farm at Ballycross. I’d fed my grandmother’s orphaned lambs with bottled milk (kept warm in the plate-warming cupboard of her Aga). I’d climbed onto the shed roof in the corner of the front field to gather conkers and grazed my grandmother’s kitchen garden for bitter gooseberries and plums. My mother’s brothers were tough men who spent long days in the fields and Sundays in the meeting house. They were teetotal too.

  At first, my father had loved Ballycross, envying the days his brothers-in-laws spent in the open. But his feelings towards them slowly soured after he married. His tongue grew sharper with the years and my mother had taken his criticisms of her family badly. In bed, I listened to my parents argue, my mother’s voice raised in hurt; my father’s cold and angry as he tore into her family, kestrel-vicious with his harsh words. My heart hammered in fear and helplessness, wishing they would stop. The idyllic world of my childhood was falling apart and the harshness of real life was a shock.

  Back at Ayhan’s flat, we said our goodnights to Ayhan and Nurhan and slunk off to our sofas, exhausted from the fifty-mile dual carriageway cycle in the heat, while Ayhan went off to party with neighbours by the pool, no doubt with a cup of tea in his hand.

  *

  3. The Sea of Marmara

  Leaving Ayhan and Nurhan, our journey ahead to Çorlu was only thirty-three miles, and we were glad of it: by 10am, the heat was already fierce. The D100 was still quiet and its hard shoulder continued to provide a reassuring amount of space between our bikes and the lorries. It had a now familiar smell of diesel, oil and exhaust fumes, dust, dry earth and stagnating vegetation. We cycled in silence, concentrating on each rise and enjoying the freewheels to the next dip. The fields of crops stretched out on either side of the road, interspersed with petrol stations and glassy salesrooms. I’d asked Ayhan about the new roads and buildings we’d seen everywhere in Turkey and he’d rolled his eyes: ‘Built with borrowed money.’ As for us, we were glad of the shiny new garages that served up free tea in little side-rooms. One petrol pump attendant had laughed at Jamie’s height, and indicated with his hands that he thought him too skinny. After the sobriety of the Bulgarians, I was enjoying the gregariousness of the Turks and their banter.

  We were now seeing road signs for Istanbul with increasing frequency. I longed to see Tom and Patrick. August was marching on. We’d last seen them in June and they were fading from memory like the sun-washed landscape that surrounded me. But the Sea of Marmara was only fifty-odd miles away, and the stretch to Istanbul beyond that along the coast, even less. In theory, we could be there in two or three days, but Tom and Patrick were not arriving for another ten days and we had no choice but to dawdle.

  We arrived in Çorlu in the early afternoon, weaving through a maze of narrow streets and blocks of peeling apartments. Our flat overlooked a large square dotted with plane trees that were circled by old men in shirts and nylon trousers, squeezed together on wraparound benches, leaf-deep in gossip. The women, in contrast, hurried by, swinging bags of shopping. Children ran up and down the steps of the plaza or played hide-and-seek behind the trees and the little clock tower. We booked the apartment for a second night and spent our rest day wandering through the shopping streets and spreading out in the coolness of the flat. I watched the pigeons waddle across the square before flapping noisily up into the branches of the plane trees. Cats threaded themselves through the plane trees, rubbing skinny bodies against trunks and human legs.

  Strings of cats had threaded themselves through my childhood too: black and white cats, striped tabbies, the gingers belonging to my grandmother. With more than idle interest our cats watched the homing pigeon hut that backed on to our garden. One evening, we heard the crack of a shotgun. The sound ricocheted around the garden, the sudden explosion making my heart pound. Our cat was not seen again after that day. My father marched round to the neighbour, accusing him of killing the cat.

  ‘I didn’t kill your cat, but if I find it after my pigeons again, I will shoot it.’

  My father contained his anger, but his ice-cold voice sliced the air like the cheese cutter in his shop.

  My father, loving, caring and sometimes warm as a summer breeze, also had a heart that blew as cold as a blast of winter Arctic. The nights spent tearing into my mother’s family, with the viciousness of our cat torturing a trapped bird, continued through summer and on into winter. I buried my head under the blankets of my bed and held my ears, but I could still hear their voices, filled with anger and hurt, ricocheting around the room like our neighbour’s bullet. One night, my mother came down the stairs and started to pour painkillers down her throat. I sat in my nightie in the cold kitchen, hugging my knees. My father’s shoulders stiffened in mental lockdown, his eyes hardened, his jaw set.

  ‘Just say sorry,’ my eldest sister pleaded with my father, but he stood there silently, then turned and went back to bed, leaving my sister to fish the pills from my mother’s mouth.

  The warmth of my childhood home had become an uninhabitable place of winter.

  *

  On the morning of 6 August, we carried our bikes down the stairs, ready t
o face the D100 for one last time before the Sea of Marmara.

  We stopped at a ramshackle building on the side of the road, half-obscured by rows of football-sized melons, and climbed the steps in search of coffee.

  ‘Deutsch? Ja, ja, Ich spreche Deutsch!’ the farmer and café owner said. ‘Willkommen bei mein Café.’

  German was becoming extremely useful in this country, for Turks were the biggest non-German ethnic group residing in Germany. Some Turks returned home in retirement. Others divided their time between the two countries. Many German-Turks had businesses or second homes in the old homeland. Now I was finding that if someone didn’t speak English, there was a good chance we could communicate in German.

  The proprietor led us into a small courtyard behind the shop, where a group of burly Turkish men bent over dainty glasses of tea with gold handles served on patterned saucers of dusty pinks, blues and greens.

  ‘I lived in Germany for years. Managed businesses there. Did really well. There was good money to be made then. Now it’s not so easy, so I came back.’

  ‘You can make good money from the shop and café here on the D100?’

  ‘Well, yes, but I also grow melons. All those fields behind are mine. Yes, it was a good move coming back.’

  Our friendly melon grower offered us tea on the house, but much as we wanted to linger under the shade of the fig trees, we sensed the Sea of Marmara was not far off.

  After more than 100 miles of the D100, I yearned to leave it behind for a while – the boredom on the dual carriageway was hard to bear. I longed for the back roads of Romania with their friendly cart drivers and settlements of waving villagers. I thought back to the spring in Germany and Austria and the near-empty bike paths along the Rhine and Danube, the woodlands filled with birdsong. It seemed so long ago now, setting out on the journey with a sense of nervousness, excitement and adventure. Everything was new: the cycling, the fresh green of leaf, the call of recently arrived birds in search of a mate, the bud of spring flower. Here, the land stretched out treeless and bird-less and yellowed with sun-dried crops and stubble: it was the dustiness and exhaustion of late summer. And I realised I felt weary.