NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  In spite of my needling, the only criticism they offered was that it was said that Greeks and Armenians did not trust each other. “But we don’t know if this is true.”

  It was relaxing to travel among people with so few prejudices, who were so ready to laugh, who could let themselves be mercilessly interrogated by me. They had a rare quality for people so individualistic—politeness. I also believed Samih Pasha when he claimed that Turkish soldiers were brave. Many had been sent to Korea, to fight on the U.S. side in the Korean war. Some had been captured and, refusing to talk, had died under torture.

  I thought I might tap a vein of cruelty if I mentioned capital punishment. Mentioning the candidates in the U.S. elections who had campaigned advocating hanging-and-flogging policies, I asked how they would vote.

  “I am a military man—a general,” Samih Pasha said. “All my life my job was to kill people. But I am against all hanging.”

  “Because it is cruel?” I asked.

  “It is cruel, yes, but it is also unjust,” he said. “That is most important. How can you be so sure? And for people to be sentenced and then wait ten or fifteen years on appeal is horrible.”

  “In Iran they do it all the time,” Fikret said.

  I said, “We do, too.”

  “But not so much,” Onan said.

  “Clinton believes in it,” I said, and told him the Florida and Texas figures; that thirty-seven states had the death penalty; and that New York was probably going to get it, as their new governor had promised it.

  The Turks were silent. Samih Pasha said, “Terrible.”

  That night the storm grew worse, and Istanbul was still two days off. Fikret got seasick. “I don’t like this weather,” he said. “I think I should get off the ship in Izmir.” It was not only a rough sea, with a stiff wind, the air temperature had dropped. Just a few days ago we had been in the heat of Haifa, and now everyone was wearing heavy clothes and complaining.

  The Turkish songs in the lounge after dinner were tremulous and plangent and repetitive, and all of them in their lovelorn way reminded me (in Samih Pasha’s translations) of how long I had been away. The musicians played: a drum, a zither, a violin, a clarinet; and the sad woman sang,

  The months are passing—

  I am waiting.

  Why don’t you come?

  Don’t leave me alone …

  The Turks sat mournfully listening, eating ice cream, drinking coffee.

  Every night

  I want to stroke your hair

  Every night

  To touch it

  Your hair

  Every night

  At Izmir I hurried into town and called Honolulu and was reassured. I strolled to the bazaar and sat under a grape arbor and had lunch, a fish kebab and salad. I read an item in the Turkish Daily News that the government was thinking of doing away with “virginity tests on female students and the expulsion of ‘unchaste’ ones from school.” Virginity tests?

  In the afternoon the Akdeniz sailed into another storm, and Fikret hugged himself in misery on deck, regretting that he had not gotten off at Izmir and taken a train back to Ankara. With fewer people on board (half had disembarked at Izmir, including Samih Pasha and Onan) the ship had a somber air; and the cold weather made the mood bleak. The next day in the iron-colored Sea of Marmara under a gray sky it was even worse.

  I stood with Fikret at the rail. This sea air, however cold, was fresher than the foul air down below on this ship of chain-smokers. We passed Usküdar, where Florence Nightingale had tended the sick during the Crimean War; it was now a prison. That gave me an excuse to ask Fikret the ultimate Turkish question.

  “Do you think they torture people in Usküdar?”

  He shrugged. The movement of his shoulders meant “probably.”

  “How do you know?”

  “All countries torture,” he said.

  I let this pass. I asked, “What do they do in Turkey?”

  “Beating on the feet—bastinado,” he said. The word was precisely right, and I was amazed that he knew it. “Also electricity and hanging by arms.”

  “This would be, what? Crucifixion?” I said, as blandly as I could manage.

  “Whatever,” he said. “To get information.”

  I said, “But people lie under torture, so what good is it?”

  He got agitated, and his seasickness made him groggy. He repeated that everyone did it. He said, “The Germans executed the whole Baader-Meinhof gang in prison and then called it a mass suicide!”

  “I think it was suicide.”

  “The British government tortures Irish people!” he said.

  “They used to,” I said. “But it was sleep deprivation—keeping prisoners awake at night to question them. And I think they used noise, too.”

  “That is worse than the bastinado!” Fikret cried. “That can make you lose your mind!”

  He looked at me reproachfully. He was seasick and upset, and I had offended him by taking advantage of our friendship to ask him nosy questions. But that was the nature of my traveling: a quest for detail, conversation as a form of ambush, the traveler as an agent of provocation.

  The mood passed as Istanbul came into view, a whole hill of exotic features—the palace, the minarets, the domes, the steeples, the tower; and below it the bridge, and the water traffic in the Golden Horn.

  “I am going home,” Fikret said.

  “I hope you find that woman you’re looking for.”

  “Yes,” he said, and gulped as he tried to swallow his anxiety. “And where are you going?”

  “Two weeks ago I was headed for Syria, when I saw this ship leaving and decided to join it,” I said. “Now I really am going to Syria.”

  15

  The 7:20 Express to Latakia

  There was undoubtedly a more hallucinogenic experience available in poppy-growing Turkey than a long bus ride through Central Anatolia, though it was hard for me to imagine what this might be after a twenty-three-hour trip in the sulfurous interior of a bus of chain-smoking Turks, as day became twilight, turned to night, the moon passing from one side of the bus to the other, gleaming briefly in the snow of the Galatia highlands, fog settling and dispersing like phantasms, glimpses of dervishes, day dawning again, another stop, more yogurt, children crying in the backseats, full daylight in Iskenderun, rain in Antioch, all windows shut, the stale smoke condensing in brown bitter slime on the closed windows as fresh blue fumes rose from forty-nine burning cigarettes in this sleepless acid trip on the slipstream of secondhand smoke.

  Being Turks, the smokers were courteous. I was repeatedly offered a cigarette. Yes, plenty for you—please take two!

  On a train I would have been scribbling. That is impossible on a bus, which is only good for reading. I was jammed in a seat, with a pain in my lower back that crept to my shoulder blades as we bumped from Ankara to Adana. I retreated into books. I reread the whole of Hindoo Holiday. I read Maugham’s short novel, Up at the Villa. I read Myles Away from Dublin, by Flann O’Brien. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

  In the blue haze of cigarette smoke I reflected on how I had been warned not to take this long route through Turkey.

  “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I asked.

  “That the bus will be stopped by Kurds and you’ll be dragged out and held hostage,” said my knowledgeable friend.

  That happened frequently in southeastern Turkey, near enough to my route for me to be alarmed. Also, I was headed for Syria, a country very friendly towards the embattled Kurdish people.

  “Gechmis olsen. May it be behind you.”

  But it had seemed a matter of urgency that I leave. Istanbul was also having its problems. In the previous few days in the Istanbul suburb of Gaziosmanpasha there had been a riot between Muslim fundamentalists and the somewhat schismatic and more liberal-minded Alevi sect. The matter had started with a drive-by shooting—fundamentalists plinking at Alevis at a cafe. Two Alevis dead. Then rival mobs gathered.
Twenty-one people had been killed and many more wounded, mostly by the police and commandos who had intervened. Encircling the rioting mobs, the police began firing at each other, like Keystone Kops using live ammo.

  The funerals that followed were massive parades of screeching mourners, and hundreds and police and soldiers. At the same time more riots broke out on the Asian side of the Bosporus, at Umranye. That resulted in eight dead, twenty-five wounded and “400 listed as missing”—so the local newspaper said. There was more rioting in Ankara: more funerals, much more disorder. Buses and ferries, bearing furious or sullen passengers, heading from the Asian side were halted and turned back. In other parts of Istanbul there was fighting between fundamentalists and Alevis.

  “A foreign power is behind this,” said Mrs. Çiller, the Turkish prime minister. She meant Iran, but Greece was also blamed for “withholding information.”

  “What next?” I asked my Turkish friends.

  “After Friday prayers tomorrow there’s supposed to be trouble, when people come out of the mosques.”

  I said, “Then I think I will leave on Friday, before prayers.”

  The ticket from Istanbul to the Syrian border was $25. It seemed a bargain until the bus filled with smoke. And because the weather was cold, the windows stayed shut.

  “Ten years ago this was all open fields,” a Turk on the bus named Rashid said to me.

  It was all high-rise housing now, and no trees, and in the bare stony fields tent camps had been put up by Gypsies—the tents made of blue plastic sheeting—and these urban poor, with their ponies and dogs, fought for space with the Turks in the tenements.

  These were the Alevi neighborhoods. Rashid was a believer. Among his beliefs was metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. Rashid as a good Alawite might be reborn as a star in the Milky Way. A bad Alawite might end up back on earth as a Christian or a Jew. He worshiped sun and fire—a legacy of Zoroastrianism. Orthodox Islam was based on five pillars—prayers, the Hajj, the Ramadan fast, charity and the confession of faith. Rashid rejected these. It was only later, in Syria, that I was told that one of the more peculiar Alawite beliefs is that women do not possess souls. It seemed just as peculiar to me that Alawites believed that men, and especially Alawite men, had souls.

  Altogether it was not surprising, perhaps, that the fundamentalists, who had contrived to follow an equally bizarre but different set of beliefs and symbols, had declared war on them.

  Speaking of symbols, the bus passed a market where a man was selling cucumbers. The cucumber is a potent symbol in Turkey. Hiyar—cucumber—is a synonym for penis. One of my Turkish friends had said to me, “No one uses the word cucumber in Turkish, because of the vulgar associations.” It was a bit like an English speaker being very careful to give a context when using the loaded word “balls.” But in Turkish a whole set of euphemisms was substituted for cucumber. Most people called them “salad things” (salatalik) so as not to offend polite taste.

  Every so often there is a bomb scare in Turkey, sometimes involving the American Embassy. A telephone threat is made, a location is described. A man describing himself as a bomber hangs up. Then the counterterrorists go into action. Sophisticated thermal imaging equipment is brought to bear on an ominous-looking parcel left in a doorway. As many as a hundred men might have surrounded the parcel, to provide cover for those disarming it. In many instances the bomb-disposal experts find a large ripe cucumber in the parcel, with a note saying, This is what you are!

  A television set at the front of the bus began showing a violent video of a sub-Rambo sort, all explosions, gunfire, and mutilation. I read Hindoo Holiday. I gagged on the cigarette smoke. The smoke gave me a headache. If the bus were stopped by Kurds they would look for a foreigner (so I was told) and find only me. I would be held captive and used with the utmost brutality. I wondered whether the Kurds smoked. If not, being their prisoner did not seem so bad.

  After dark, at a cold windy pit stop, I bought a glass of yogurt.

  “What did you pay for that?” Rashid asked me.

  “Twenty thousand,” I said. Fifty cents.

  “Life is so expensive here,” he said. “In Antakya you could get that for eight thousand.” Twenty cents.

  He was making a return trip. He had arrived in Istanbul the day before to receive an order for his metalworking shop in Antakya. To save money he slept at the bus station and came straight back. He hated Istanbul anyway.

  “And these,” he said, waving a pack of cigarettes. “Fifty thousand! Go ahead, take one—”

  I read Up at the Villa, in which a pretty widow gets a proposal of marriage from a distinguished man about to take an important post in India. She needs time to think about it. The man departs. That night the woman goes to a party, where a young rascal proposes marriage to her. She laughs at him, saying she does not believe in love, but would like to use her beauty and make an unfortunate man happy for just one night. That same night she picks up an impoverished man who had been a waiter at the party. She takes him to her villa, prepares a meal for him, makes love to him, and then tells him why. The young man is so insulted he shoots himself. She panics and calls the rascal, who helps her get rid of the body. The distinguished man is scandalized when he hears what has happened, and the pretty widow ends up with the rascal, who spirits her away before the body is found.

  I liked the idea of a great scheme (marriage to an ambitious and successful man) being undone by a single unthought-out act, but this frantic night was unbelievable. And I objected to the book because it did not sufficiently remove me from the irritating reality of noxious smoke and bad air and coughing passengers in the lurching bus.

  Into Ankara, out again, through mountain passes, under snowy cliffs, past cold fields where low fog had gathered in ghostly wisps, and onward between black crags, and above it all a huge ivory cue-ball moon.

  “I worked in Saudi Arabia,” a man named Fatih told me at another pit stop in the darkness. “I went to Mecca and Medina.”

  “So you made the Hajj?”

  “No, no, no. If you do that, you can’t drink alcohol and whatnot afterwards.”

  He would purify himself with a Hajj some other time, when he was older, and past any carnal desire.

  We eventually came to the middle of Turkey, Tuz Golu, a great lake, with the moon gleaming upon it; and another stop at two in the morning in cold clammy Aksaray, an area well known for its desolation and monotony and mud houses. I stood and stamped my feet and took deep breaths, and then reboarded and read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of neurological case histories. It was a salutary book—Oliver Sacks is full of sympathy for afflicted strangers and he usually determines that these people have developed strengths and gifts as compensation for the supposed defects. Also: “There is often a struggle, and sometimes more interestingly a collusion between the power of pathology and creation.” That was certainly true. If you were happy and normal why would you ever want to write a book? Indeed, why would you be on this bus at all? There was an aspect of dementia to the act of writing as there was to a desire to travel, but as Sacks pointed out, dementia was nothing to be ashamed of, and indeed was often a useful spur to imaginative or creative acts.

  As I read this book, dayspring in the shape of a rising tide of pinkness gathered in the sky over the low hills of Anatolia, and the moon still showed in the clear sky. Then, towards Adana, bright daylight heated the bus, and field-workers and vegetable pickers traipsed down the road all bundled up, carrying hoes. Farther on, people bent double were already working in the fields. This green and fertile part of Turkey was chilly and sunny and flat, in the delta of the Seyhan River, the tucked-in corner of the Mediterranean, next to the Bay of Iskenderun.

  Iskenderun itself, its puddled streets lined with thick palm trees, lay at the foot of a range of the dark Amanus Mountains, and beyond its small houses, and its onion fields, was the sea again, small waves slapping, the surface hardly disturbed, like the shore of a lake. It was the
old sloppy Mediterranean Sea, not a body of water with many moods, but looking shallow and tame and almost exhausted. There was no fishing here, not even any swimming. And this place which Alexander the Great had founded after a great battle—until fairly recently it had been known as Alexandretta—was just a little tiled-roof town. Its beach, littered with windblown trash and dumped junk, was also reputedly the place which, when “the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomitted Jonah upon the dry land,” the land that was this very beach. But here, as elsewhere, the sea is now no more than a backdrop to olive groves and fruit trees.

  This province, Hatay, is disputed. The Syrians claim it as rightfully theirs, but the Turks control it. The people themselves speak a heavily guttural Arabized Turkish, and the markets both in Iskenderun and in Antakya—where I gave up and got off the bus and staggered, followed by hawkers and small boys, through the market to a hotel—seemed as Middle Eastern as it was possible to be, without many veils.

  Recovering from the bus ride to this town on the border of Syria, I stayed here in Antioch (Antakya) for a night, and the next day hiked from monument to monument—the Roman bridge, the mosque and aqueduct, the Church of Saint Peter. There were ruined fortresses outside of the town, and one of them, the Castle of Cursat, had been built by crusaders.

  More impressive to me than anything else was the market at Antakya, which was almost medieval in its bustle and its mud, small boys quarreling and fooling among the fruit stalls and meat markets, and the full floppy costumes of the country people, the women in pantaloons and shawls, the men in beards and gowns. The commerce was brisk—the selling of fruit and fish, the retailing of tonics and potions—and it was also a meeting place of people from the mountains and the seashore, from Turkey and Syria and Lebanon. It was not a covered bazaar but rather a large area of rough ground, where people were yakking and striking deals and watching staticky television and talking over bundles and sacks of lemons and heaped-up blankets, as boys rushed around selling glasses of tea on trays, or barrows of dried fruits and nuts. Cripples, beggars, beards, deformed people with boils and knobs on their faces, all the sects of Islam, and mud puddles and flaming braziers and the sizzle of meat, and a great sense of filth and life.