NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  But I was grateful to them for making room for me, for allowing me aboard, for being hospitable. Turks made a point of greeting strangers in the common areas of the ship. I learned the greetings, I felt lucky.

  And it gave the Mediterranean its true size. It was not the trip I had planned—five days through Turkey to the middle of Syria overland, with all the roadblocks and holdups. Instead, it was a couple of days from Turkey to Egypt: overnight to Izmir, and then a day and a half to Alexandria; and a day from there to Haifa. The Eastern Basin contained many cultures, with sharp elbows, but in fact the area was rather small. It was just that the people on these shores were so combative that made this end of the Mediterranean seem large.

  From Bursa, then, came Mehmet Saffiyettin Erhan, an architect and historian of old wooden buildings, traveling with his shawled and aged mother, Atifet. And the Sags (Sevim and Bahattin), and General Mehmet Samih, three-star general and ace fighter pilot, known to all as Samih Pasha, who boasted of the windows he had broken with the boom of his jet engines over Nicosia, just before the partition of Cyprus. And Mehmet Cinquillioglu and his wife, Fatma, the four Barrutcuoglu, including little Lamia, the three Demirels, and the Edip Kendirs. And there were some Kurds, too, ones I thought of as concupiscent Kurds, and …

  Oh, give it up. But studying the names outside the Purser’s Office on the Akdeniz passed the time. We had traversed the Dardanelles during the night, and now, in sunshine, I was standing at the rail with Mehmet Erhan, the architect.

  “If architecture is frozen music, that looks like a minaret in D.”

  “Pardon?”

  We were sailing past a mosque, into the port of Izmir. The ship was three hours late, Mehmet said, not that it mattered. Mehmet was a fund of information. Canakkale—the Dardanelles—meant “cup” in Turkish. The Turks were rather proud of having slaughtered so many foreign troops at Gallipoli. Under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk, the Turks had driven the Greeks out of Smyrna (Izmir) in a decisive battle in 1923, and founded the Turkish Republic. Ataturk’s house was in Izmir, if I wanted to see it.

  “What dots Akdeniz mean?” I asked.

  “White Sea,” he said. “It is the old Turkish name for the Mediterranean.”

  The Black Sea was Kara Deniz, the Red Sea Kizil Deniz, and beyond that headland was the Greek island of Chios, where Homer was born.

  “If there was a Homer,” I said. There seemed to be some doubt whether Homer ever existed—that the poetry just accumulated over the years, with recitation, and that the idea that Homer was blind came from the description of Demódokos, the blind minstrel in The Odyssey.

  … that man of song

  whom the Muse cherished; by her gift he knew

  the good of life, and evil—

  for she who lent him sweetness made him blind.

  —The Odyssey, Book VIII, II. 67–70 (translation by Robert Fitzgerald)

  Mehmet, who had read The Odyssey in Greek, said he had also heard of that possibility.

  The Akdeniz docked and we were told that it would not leave until late afternoon. I had time to take a taxi down the coast to Ephesus, the great Graeco-Roman harbor city, where St. Paul had preached and was buried, and where the Virgin Mary spent her old age. Mary was not buried there; there was no body. At death she had been levitated from the planet Earth in a cosmic transportation known as the Assumption, an article of faith among Catholics. It is an incident the New Testament neglects to mention—that Mary “was assumed body and soul into Heavenly glory” like Enoch and Elijah was made official by Pope Pius XII in 1950—though you would have thought someone would have noticed it at the time. The idea of a little Jewish woman, known variously as the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven, being propelled by divine force bodily into outer space (“angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!”) cannot be called unmemorable.

  The Panayia Kapili, or House of the Virgin, five miles down the road from Ephesus, had been spruced up and was no more than a novelty, but it had a lovely view, which was all that mattered.

  There were brothels in Ephesus, as there had been at Pompeii, and graffiti, too, but this was altogether a greater city, and more of it remained from antiquity. My problem was that the whole time I was in Ephesus I worried about the ship leaving Izmir without me, so I hurried back. At the gangway, a crew member said there had been a new change of plan—the ship would not be leaving until nine.

  I needed money. The banks were closed, and so were the money changers. But on a back street of Izmir I saw embedded in an old wall something that looked like a cash machine. I stuck in my ATM card, issued by Fleet Bank in East Sandwich, Massachusetts, punched in some numbers, and out came ten million Turkish liras ($280), just like that.

  Some screeching schoolchildren were leaving a large building on the seafront. A sign on the front door said that it was Ataturk’s seaside house, the one that he had used in the 1920s, when he was leading the war against the occupying Greeks. I went inside and recognized my dinner companions from the previous night on the ship, and their children and grandchildren. One of the ten-year-olds spoke English. They were all from Ankara, he explained. They had taken the train to Istanbul to catch the ship. He said that his parents and grandparents were impressed that I had chosen to visit the house of their famous Ataturk.

  The great man’s old telephone stood on his desk. One of the children giggled into the receiver until he was reprimanded by a caretaker. Ataturk’s bathtub, his washstand, his sofa, his tables, his chairs. Some objects retain the aura—the personal magic—of the owner; others do not. Wood does, big fuzzy chairs don’t; a bathtub does, a bed does not; a desk does, and a telephone, but not curtains, nor framed pictures.

  A wooden, clinker-built rowboat was dry-docked in the reception room, and it was so well made it did not look out of place. Ataturk had rowed it in Izmir Bay, using those same oars that were counterbalanced with heavy upper shafts.

  I left the house and walked down the promenade where, at the German Consulate, there was a long line of Turks, old and young, waiting for German visas. In spite of the dire news from Germany that Turks were being assaulted and their houses burned, that they were the target of both skinheads and opportunistic politicians, still there were plenty of potential migrants in Izmir.

  As the sun exploded in its descent at the edge of the distant Aegean and became a slowly evolving incident, vast and fiery and incarnadine, I boarded the Akdeniz in time to eat a dinner that was like the parody of a heavy meal: cold meat, beans, fish, more meat, more beans. Never mind. I had gorged on caviar on the Seabourne. This was a different experience.

  Then I sat under the lights of the deck, in the mild evening, and read the Turkish Daily News, an item about the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mr. Mümtaz Soysal. It was another act in the endless drama between Greece and Turkey, but it was timeless, too, and this episode could have occurred at any time over the past century, the same phrasing.

  “If Greece extends its territorial waters from six miles to twelve miles, we will go to war with them”—and Mr. Soysal had actually used the word.

  Mr. Soysal had made himself popular in Turkey because of his pugnacity. But the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr. Kaolos Papoulias, met Mr. Soysal in Jordan and they agreed in the future not to use the word war.

  After that the Greek Defense Minister, Mr. Arsenis, accused the Turkish minister of “raving.”

  It was like old times, and old times here could mean anything from the Trojan War to the partition of Cyprus. The newspaper said that Greeks and Turks were holding talks on the future of Cyprus. To aid their cause the Greeks had sent to Cyprus a specially sanctified holy icon from a monastery on Mount Athos. The Greeks seemed confident that this icon would do the trick, but the Turks were not so sure.

  As I read, the anchor was hauled up and we were tugged to sea and away from the twinkling lights of Izmir.

  At dawn we passed the island of Patmos, where an angel appeared to John and the result was the Book of Revelation. Patmos was
Greek. All the islands were Greek, in fact, even the ones that were only a mile or two from the Turkish mainland. Turkey, to its irritation, possesses only a handful of offshore islands, which is why any mention of Greece extending its territorial waters sounds provocative and maddens the Turks. We passed Kos, then quickly Níssyros, Tilos and Rhodes. Turkey was a persistent shadow behind—always a low layer of dirty air behind the islands.

  “The islands are so empty,” Mehmet said. He was again standing at the rail, with his mother. “Nothing on them. One town, or less.”

  He grinned at me.

  “Because there are nine million Greeks,” he said. “Maybe ten. Not many.”

  I asked Mehmet about the Kurds. On the BBC morning news on shortwave I had heard that thirty villages had so far been emptied of Kurds and fifteen more had been burned, with crops and animals, the goats suffocated in their pens.

  “I know many Kurds,” he said. “We have Kurds on this ship—some passengers. They look like us. Same face. They speak Turkish. We are friends.”

  After the Gulf War the Kurds, who had been fighting for forty years or more, had become hopeful again of establishing a homeland. They fought with greater conviction, believing that the United States would take up their case. It did not happen. It only made the Turkish troops angry. They evicted Kurds from their villages in the southeast, and sent them into the mountains, and when some Kurds straggled back the Turks burned their villages to the ground. The radio program contained the voices of Kurds: We were given twenty minutes to leave by the soldiers. But some people were too old to gather their belongings, and they lost everything—all they owned was destroyed.

  I reported this to Mehmet.

  “But some Kurds are not troublesome,” he said. And then he raised his eyes and said, “That is Karpathos, also in Homer.”

  We were alone on the deck. The Turkish passengers tended to be heliophobic. They sat under the awnings, in the smoky lounges, along the sheltered passageways. There were always six or eight of them in a lounge watching videos, one of their favorites a cowboy film starring Charlton Heston. They gathered for the meaty meals, which were usually mutton stews and thick bean soups and mounds of rice and followed by fruit in iced syrup. Breakfast was just olives and yogurt and cucumber slices. Even in this sunny weather they remained heavily dressed, the men in ties, the women in drab frocks and shawls.

  “Put on your pantaloons,” a waiter in an ugly black uniform said to me when I entered the dining room one hot day in shorts.

  On the third night out there was a cocktail party, with nonalcoholic punch, and the officers were introduced, just as on the Seabourne, but these were solemn, rather robotic-looking men in white uniforms, like ice-cream sellers being awarded prizes for good sales. It was also a Turkish Holiday—Republic Day—so we got a special meal of shish kebab, stuffed eggplant and a special dessert, and as usual the fat man at my table ate his wife’s main course and dessert. For most meals this woman sat toying with her food, and when her husband finished his meal he swapped plates and got hers.

  No one read anything on the ship—not a book or a newspaper, nothing. Only Mr. Fehmi and I touched alcohol. The rest bought cups of coffee, they talked. They were the most sedate, as well as the politest people I had ever traveled with.

  How polite would they be in an emergency? I pondered the question because we were so ill-prepared. A fire was always a possibility—everyone smoked. The ship was old, and poorly cared for. But there was no lifeboat drill at all; no suggestion of where the mustering stations were located; no mention of where the life jackets were stowed. I found mine in a tangle at the bottom of my closet. It probably did not matter. In the event of a sinking I felt sure that “My name Ali” would lead the stewards to their lifeboat and while he was stamping on the rest of the passengers’ fingers and pushing them away he would signal to me and let me aboard. Watch Ali, I thought: he knows the drill. He was usually to be found hiding on the lower stern deck, scowling with hatred at the sea.

  The night before we landed at Alexandria I was invited to another dinner table. Three men beckoned, then stood and welcomed me.

  “I am Samih—people call me Samih Pasha,” an older man said to me, and shook my hand. “I think I recognize that tie.”

  “Household Cavalry,” I said.

  “I am Fikret,” the second man said. He looked haunted and shy. He was attempting to smile. He was a radiologist and his evasiveness suggested he was having a bad time on board.

  “I am Onan,” the third man said. He was young, soldierly, with an odd blaze in his eyes.

  “There is another Onan in the Bible,” I said.

  He ignored this. “I am making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.”

  The soldier, the medical man, the religious nut; and me. We became friends. After that, I ate almost every meal with them. At that first meal, Samih Pasha said, “I have been everywhere. Even Santa Barbara and Nevada and Singapore. Singapore is the cleanest city in the world, but it is not interesting. I am a military man. I should have liked that. But, ha! I wanted to leave Singapore after one day!”

  “Tomorrow we will be in Egypt,” Onan said.

  Almost all my life, I had dreamed of Alexandria. Most of life’s disappointments begin in dreams; even so, in the morning when the Akdeniz lay at anchor there, and I stepped ashore for the first time, I was horrified by the city—but wait.

  Alexandria seemed filthy and flyblown until I had seen Cairo, which was in many respects nightmarish; yet after a while the Cairene nightmare wore off, the frenzy in the foreground (Meester!) diminished, and my returning to Alexandria was like being received into bliss. Thus, some dreams can be reclaimed, and most culture shock is probably curable.

  “But sometimes,” a Turkish crewman said to me, “you have to do this,” and he held his nose.

  Drawing towards it on the Akdeniz, Alexandria seemed to me the ultimate sea-level city, at the very lip of the Nile Delta, the flattest city imaginable, in a flat landscape, flatter than Holland, with no high ground behind it for two thousand miles to the Mountains of the Moon. Alexandria’s flatness and its elongated shape had compressed it, forced it to become mazelike, a city of secrets, and its harbor and position on the Mediterranean had made it one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean.

  Like the greatest cities in the world, Alexandria belonged to everyone who lived in it; shared by “five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes.” That is Durrell writing in Justine, the first novel in The Alexandria Quartet, a sequence about love, sensuality, intrigue, deception. And so purple, with Nubian slaves, child brothels, and cabals and nearly always someone in the Casbah wailing with meningitis. But this cosmopolitan aspect of the city is persistent. Everyone belongs. In the second novel, Balthazar, the narrator amplifies this theme, speaking of how “the communities still live and communicate—Turks with Jews, Arabs and Copts and Syrians with Armenians and Italians and Greeks … ceremonies, marriages and pacts join and divide them.” And more: “its contemporary faiths and races; the hundred little spheres which religion or lore creates and which cohere softly together like cells to form the great sprawling jellyfish which is Alexandria today.”

  Or rather, yesterday; for today, Alexandria is a monoglot city of one race, Arabic-speaking Arabs; and one creed, Islam; and no sex. The foreigners had gone—the last had been expelled by General Nasser in 1960—and the money was gone, too; there was certainly a connection. And another sign of the times was the large number of Egyptians who had migrated to New Jersey. This militant tribalism seemed to be the way of the world, and certainly the story in much of the Mediterranean. It was perhaps a depressing discovery, but it was news to me, and the desire for enlightenment seems one of the nobler justifications for travel. That was good. I was seldom prepared for anything I found on these shores.

  The great multiracial stewpot of the Mediterranean had been replace
d by cities that were physically larger but smaller-minded. The ethnic differences had never been overwhelming—after all, these were simply people working out their destinies, often in the same place. But in this century they had begun to behave like scorpions—big scorpions, small scorpions, greenish, russet, black; and now the scorpions had sorted themselves out, and retreated to live among their own kind. I had yet to find a Mediterranean city that was polyglot and cosmopolitan.

  Even under the Ottomans, Smyrna had been full of Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Circassians, Kurds, Arabs, Gypsies, whatever, and now it was just Turks; Istanbul was the same, and so were the once-important cities of the Adriatic—Trieste was just gloomy Italians who advocated secession from the south; Dubrovnik was Croatians on their knees, praying for the death of the Serbs and the Bosnians. Greece seemed a stronghold of ethnic monomania, without immigrants. Durrës in Albania was a hellhole of pathetic Shqiperians, and if the Corsican clans had their way there would not be a French person from Bastia to Bonifacio. It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now, though there were any number of Senegalese peddlers hawking trinkets there.

  Given his overripe imagery and his feverish imagination, it is wrong to expect to find Durrell’s Alexandria. He says himself that his Alexandria, “half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.” That is true. And events have changed the cityscape. The Rue Nebi Daniel, where Darley, the narrator, lives and so much of the action takes place, is easy enough to find on the 1911 Baedeker map (running north-south, from the Jewish synagogue to the station) but nowadays is Horreya (Freedom) Street. In Durrell’s novels it is a dream-city, full of fantasies of food and sex, and even the descriptions are dreamlike, as an evocation of the body of water that lies just behind Alexandria, “the moonstone mirror of Mareotis, the salt-lake, and its further forevers of ragged desert, now dusted softly by the spring winds into satin dunes, patternless and beautiful as cloudscapes.” But that fictional city was gone, if indeed it had ever existed; and so was Flaubert’s Alexandria and E. M. Forster’s.