by Paul Theroux
That afternoon, anxious to have a look at the Asian side of Istanbul and prepared to buy my train ticket to Teheran, I took the ferry across the Bosporus to Haydarpasa. The sea was unexpectedly calm. I had thought, having read Don Juan, that it would be rough:
There’s not a sea the passenger e’er pukes in,
Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.
But that is farther up the Bosporus. Here the sea was mirror-smooth, and Haydarpasa Station, a heavy dark European building with a clock and two blunt spires, was reflected in it. The station is an incongruous gateway to Asia. It was built in 1909, from the designs of a German architect who apparently assumed that Turkey would soon be part of a German empire in which, in station like this, subject peoples would loyally be eating sausages. The intention seems to have been to put up a building in which the portrait of the Kaiser could be hung and not look out of place.
‘Teheran gitmek ichin bir bilet istiyorum,’ I said to the girl at the counter, glancing at my phrase book for courage.
‘We do not sell tickets on Sunday,’ she said in English. ‘Come tomorrow.’
Because I was on the right side of the Bosporus, I walked from the station to the Selimiye Barracks, where Florence Nightingale tended gangrenous soldiers during the Crimean War. I asked the sentry if I could go in. He said, ‘Nightingale?’ I nodded. He said her room was closed on Sunday and directed me to the cemetery at Üsküdar, Istanbul’s largest necropolis.
It was on the way to Üsküdar that I had an insight into what had, up to then, been bothering me about Turkey. The father of the Turks, which is what his surname means, was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and everywhere one goes in Turkey one sees photographs, portraits, and statues of him; he is on billboards, stamps, coins – always the same wincing banker’s profile. His name is given to streets and plazas and it enters nearly every conversation one has in the country. The face has become emblematic, the shape of a softening star, with the suggestions of a nose and chin, and is ubiquitous as the simplified character the Chinese use to frighten devils away. Atatürk came to power in 1923, declared Turkey a republic, and, by way of modernization, closed down all religious schools, dissolved dervish orders, and introduced the Latin alphabet and the Swiss civil code. He died in 1938, and that was my insight: modernization stopped in Turkey with the death of Atatürk, at five minutes past nine on 10 November 1938. As if to demonstrate this, the room in which he died is as he left it, and all the clocks in the palace show the time as 9.05. This seemed to explain why the Turks typically dress the way people did in 1938, in hairy brown sweaters and argyle socks, in baggy pinstriped pants and blue serge suits with padded shoulders, flapping winglike lapels and a three-pointed hanky in the breast pocket. Their hair is wavy with brilliantine and their moustaches are waxed. The hemlines on the brown gabardine skirts the women habitually wear are below the knees, about two inches. It is prewar modernity, and you don’t have to look far to see 1938 Packards, Dodges, and Pontiacs lumbering along streets that were last widened when those models appeared. The furniture stores of Istanbul show their latest designs in the window – boxy over-upholstered chairs and clawfoot sofas. All this leads one to the inescapable conclusion that, if the zenith of Ottoman elegance was the sixteenth-century reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the high-water mark of the modern was in 1938, when Atatürk was still modelling Turkish stylishness on the timid designs of the West.
‘Why, that’s awfully clever of you,’ said Molesworth, when I rang him up to explain this to him. Then he changed the subject. He was enjoying Tarabya; the weather was perfect. ‘Come up for lunch. The taxi will cost the earth but I can promise you a very good wine. It’s called either Cankia or Ankia. It’s dry, white, with a slight twinkle – a pinky colour, but definitely not a rosé, because I hate rosé and this was very drinkable indeed.’
I could not meet Molesworth for lunch. I had a previous engagement, my single duty in Istanbul, a luncheon lecture arranged by a helpful American embassy man. I couldn’t cancel it: I had a hotel bill to pay. So I went to the conference room where about twenty Turks were having a pre-lecture drink; I was told they were poets, playwrights, novelists, and academics. The first man I spoke to was the most pompous, the president of the Turkish Literary Union, a Mr Ercumena Behzat Lav, a name I found as hard to conjure with as to pronounce. He had a look of spurious eminence – white-haired, with tiny feet, and an unwilling gaze that was disdainful in an overpractised way. He smoked with the squinting disgust people affect when they are on the verge of giving up smoking. I asked him what he did.
‘He says he does not speak English,’ said Mrs Nur, my pretty translator. The president had spoken and looked away. ‘He prefers to speak in Turkish, though he will speak to you in German or Italian.’
‘Va bene,’ I said. ‘Allora, parliamo in Italiano. Ma dové imparava questa lingua?’
The president addressed Mrs Nur in Turkish.
‘He says, “Do you speak German?” ’
‘Not very well.’
The president said something more.
‘He will speak Turkish.’
‘Ask him what he does. Is he a writer?’
‘This,’ said the man through Mrs Nur, ‘is a completely meaningless question. One cannot say in a few words what one does or is. That takes months, sometimes years. I can tell you my name. Beyond that you have to find out for yourself.’
‘Tell him he’s too much work,’ I said, and walked away. I fell into conversation with the head of the English Department of Istanbul University, who introduced me to his colleague. Both wore tweeds and stood rocking on their heels, the way English academics size up new members of the Senior Common Room.
‘He’s another old Cantabrigian,’ said the head, slapping his colleague on the back. ‘Same college as me. Fitzbill.’
‘Fitzwilliam College?’
‘That’s right, though I haven’t been back there for donkey’s years.’
‘What do you teach?’ I asked.
‘Everything from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf!’
It seemed as if everyone had rehearsed his lines except me. As I was thinking of a reply, I was seized by the arm and dragged away in a very powerful grip. The man dragging me was tall and stoutly built, bull-necked, with a great jaw. His palely tinted glasses did not quite hide his right eye, which was dead and looked like a withered grape. He talked rapidly in Turkish as he hustled me into the corner of the room.
‘He says,’ Mrs Nur said, trying to keep up with us, ‘he always captures beautiful girls and good writers. He wants to talk to you.’
This was Yashar Kemal, the author of Mehmet My Hawk, the only Turkish novel I could ever remember having read. It is thought that before long he will be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He had, he said, just returned from a visit to the Soviet Union where he had been lecturing with his friend, Aziz Nesin. He had addressed audiences in Moscow, Leningrad, Baku, and Alma-Ata.
‘At my lectures I said many terrible things! They hated me and they were very upset. For example, I said that socialist realism was anti-Marxist. This I believe. I am a Marxist: I know. All the writers in the Soviet Union except Sholokhov are anti-Marxist. They did not want to hear this terrible thing. I told them, “Do you want to know the greatest Marxist writer?” Then I said, “William Faulkner!” They were very upset. Yes, Sholokhov is a great writer, but Faulkner was a much greater Marxist.’
I said I didn’t think Faulkner would have agreed with him. He ignored me and pressed on.
‘And the greatest comic writer, of course we all know – Mark Twain. But the next greatest is Aziz Nesin. And don’t think I’m saying that simply because we’re both Turkish or because he’s my best friend.’
Aziz Nesin, who was across the room mournfully nibbling an American embassy vol-au-vent, has written fifty-eight books. Most are collections of short stories. They are said to be hilarious, but none has been translated into English.
‘I have no doubt about it,’ Yashar
said. ‘Aziz Nesin is a greater comic writer than Anton Chekhov!’
Aziz Nesin, hearing his name, looked up and smiled sadly.
‘Come to my house,’ said Yashar. ‘We go swimming, eh? Eat some fish? I will tell you the whole story.’
‘How will I find your house?’ I had asked Yashar the previous day. He said, ‘Ask any child. The old people don’t know me, but all the little ones do. I make kites for them.’
I took him at his word, and when I arrived at the apartment block on a bluff above a Marmara fishing village called Menakse, I asked a fairly small child the way to Yashar’s house. The child pointed to the top floor.
The disorder in Yashar’s apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order – the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cosy solidity of a nest. On several of Yashar’s shelves were editions of his own books in thirty languages; the English ones had been translated by his wife, Thilda, whose narrow desk held an open Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
Yashar had just been interviewed by a Swedish newspaper. He showed me the article, and although I could not read it, the word Nobelpreiskandidate caught my eye. I commented on it.
‘Yes,’ said Thilda, who interpreted my questions and Yashar’s replies, ‘it’s possible. But they feel it’s Graham Greene’s turn now.’
‘My frint,’ said Yashar, hearing Greene’s name. He placed his hairy hand on his heart when he said it.
Graham Greene seemed to have a lot of friends on this route. But Yashar knew many other writers and he slapped his heart as he listed them. William Saroyan was his friend, and so were Erskine Caldwell, Angus Wilson, Robert Graves, and James Baldwin, whom he called ‘Jimmy’ – he reminded me that Another Country had been written in a luxurious Istanbul villa.
‘I can’t face going swimming,’ said Thilda. She was a patient, intelligent woman who spoke English so well I didn’t dare to compliment her on it for fear she might say, as Thurber did on a similar occasion, ‘I ought to – I spent forty years in Columbus, Ohio, working on it like a dog.’ Thilda sees to the practical side of his affairs, negotiating contracts, answering letters, explaining Yashar’s harangues about the socialist paradise he envisions, that Soviet pastoral where the workers own the means of production and complete sets of Faulkner.
It was unfortunate that Thilda didin’t come swimming with us because it meant three hours of talking pidgin English, an activity that Yashar must have found as fatiguing as I did. Carrying our bathing trunks, we walked down the dusty hill to the beach. Yashar pointed out the fishing village and said he was planning a series of stories based on the life there. On the way, we met a small quivering man with a shaven head and the regulation rumpled thirties suit. Yashar shouted a greeting at him. The man crept over and grabbed Yashar’s hand and tried to kiss it, but Yashar, by jerking his own hand, turned this servility into a handshake. They spoke together for a while, then Yashar slapped the man on the back and sent him tottering away.
‘His name Ahmet,’ said Yashar. He put his thumb to his mouth and tilted his hand. ‘He drunk.’
We changed at a swimming club where some men were sunning themselves. In the water I challenged him to a race. He won it easily and splashed water at me as I struggled in his wake. The previous day he had looked like a bull; but now, swimming, his bulk making the water foam at his arms, he had the movement of a mature sea monster, with hairy shoulders and a thick neck, and he surfaced roaring as his vast head dripped. The champion swimmers – he claimed to be one – all came, he said, from Adana, his birthplace in South Anatolia.
‘I love my country,’ he said, meaning Anatolia. ‘I love it. Taurus Mountains. Plains. Old villages. Cotton. Eagles. Oranges. The best horses – very long horses.’ He put his hand on his heart: ‘I love.’
We talked about writers. He loved Chekhov; Whitman was a good man; Poe was also great. Melville was good: every year Yashar read Moby Dick, and Don Quixote, ‘and Homerus’. We were pacing up and down in the hot sun on the beach front, and Yashar cast a giant shadow over me that eliminated any danger of my getting sunburned. He didn’t like Joyce, he said. ‘Ulysses – too simple. Joyce is a very simple man, not like Faulkner. Listen. I am interested in form. New form. I hate traditional form. Novelist who use traditional form is’ – he fumbled for a word – ‘is dirt.’
‘I don’t speak English,’ he said after a moment. ‘Kurdish I speak, and Turkish, and gypsy language. But I don’t speak barbarian languages.’
‘Barbarian languages?’
‘English! German! Ya! French! All the barbarian –’ As he spoke, there was a shout. One of the men sunning himself in a beach chair called Yashar over and showed him an item in a newspaper.
Returning, he said, ‘Pablo Neruda is dead.’
Yashar insisted on stopping at the fishing village on the way back. About fifteen men sat outside a café. Seeing Yashar, they leaped to their feet and Yashar greeted each one with a bear hug. One was a man of eighty; he wore a ragged shirt and his trousers were tied with a piece of rope. He was deeply tanned, barefoot, and toothless. Yashar said he had no home. The man slept in his caïque every night, whatever the weather, and he had done so for forty years. ‘So he has his caïque and sleeps in it too.’ These men, and one we met later on the steep path (Yashar kissed him carefully on each cheek before introducing him to me), obviously looked upon Yashar as a celebrity and regarded him with some awe.
‘These my friends,’ said Yashar. ‘I hate writers; I love fishermen.’ But there was a distance. Yashar had attempted to overcome it with clowning intimacy, yet the distance remained. In the atmosphere of the café one would never take Yashar – twice as big as any of the others and dressed like a golf pro – for a fisherman; neither would one take him for a writer on the prowl. There, he looked like a local character, part of the scenery and yet in contrast to it.
It seemed to me that his restless generosity led him into contradictions. My conclusion did not make my understanding any easier. Over lunch of fried red mullet and white wine Yashar talked about prison, Turkey, his books, his plans. He had been to jail; Thilda had served an even longer jail sentence; their daughter-in-law was in jail at the moment. This girl’s crime, according to Thilda, was that she had been found making soup in the house of a man who had once been wanted for questioning in connection with a political offence. It was no good expressing disbelief at the muddled story. Turkey, the Turks say, is not like other places, though, after describing in the dour Turkish way the most incredible horrors of torture and cruelty, they invite you to come and spend a year there, assuring you the whole time that you’ll love the place.
Yashar’s own characteristics were even stranger. A Kurd, he is devoted to Turkey and will not hear of secession; he is an ardent supporter of both the Soviet government and Solzhenitsyn, which is something like rooting for the devil as well as Daniel Webster; he is a Muslim Marxist, his wife is a Jew, and the only foreign country he likes better than Russia is Israel, ‘my garden’. With the physique of a bull and the gentleness of a child, he maintains in the same breath that Yoknapatawpha County has an eternal glory and that the Kremlin’s commissars are visionary archangels. His convictions defy reason, and at times they are as weirdly unexpected as the blond hair and freckles you see in Asia Minor. But Yashar’s complexity is the Turkish character on a large scale.
I told Molesworth this at our farewell lunch. He was sceptical. ‘I’m sure he’s a marvellous chap,’ he said. ‘But you want to be careful with the Turks. They were neutral during the war, you know, and if they’d had any backbone at all they would have been on our side.’
3. The Van Gölü (‘Lake Van’) Express
‘I BEG you to look at this scroll and look at me,’ said the antique dealer in Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar. He flapped the decaying silk scroll at his ears. ‘You say the scroll is stained and dirty! Yes! It is stained and dirty! I am forty-two years old an
d bald on my head and many wrinkles. This scroll is not forty-two years old – it is two hundred years old, and you won’t buy it because you say it is stained! What do you expect? Brand shiny new one? You are cheating me!’
He rolled it up and stuck it under my arm, and stepping behind the counter he sighed. ‘Okay, cheat me. It is early in the morning. Take it for four hundred liras.’
‘Olmaz,’ I said, and handed it back. I had expressed only a polite curiosity in the scroll, but he had taken this for canny interest, and each time I tried to walk away he reduced his price by half, believing my lack of enthusiasm to be a wily bargaining ploy.
Finally I broke away. I had overslept. I was hungry, and I had provisions to buy for my trip on the Lake Van Express, which had a reputation for running out of food and arriving at the Iranian border as much as ten days late. Food was on my mind for another reason. I had intended to sample some dishes mentioned in Nagel. The names tempted me, and, as I would be leaving on the afternoon train, this was my last chance to try them. I had drawn up a menu for myself. This included ‘The Imam Fainted’ (Imam Bayildi, a kind of ratatouille), ‘Vizier’s Finger’ (Vezir Parmagi), ‘His Majesty Liked It’ (Hunkar Begendi), and two irresistible ones, ‘Lady’s Thigh’ (Kadin Badu) and ‘Lady’s Navel’ (Kadin Bobegi).
There wasn’t enough time for me to try more than the last two. I stopped at a coffee shop on my way to the ferry and wondered if the Turks’ taste in anatomy was revealed in their choice of names: the thigh was meaty, the navel sweet. At twenty cents each they were a good deal cheaper and probably a lot safer than their namesakes arrayed after midnight in the alleys off Istiklal Caddesi. To the braying of saxophones in the dimly lit taverns, these alley cats pluck at your sleeve as you pick your way along the steep cobbled footpath. But I was resolute. I never got closer to a lady’s thigh in Istanbul than the pastry with the euphemistic name. Besides, I had been warned that most of the alley cats were transvestites who, during the day, worked as crew members on the Bosporus ferries.
