Full Moon over Noah's Ark

by Rick Antonson

  “Please.”

  I sat with him, a few men his age, and the bearded man who was with us the night before. With the ferry still far away, I asked Muslim Giil, more casually than I felt, “Did the train passengers make it onto the ferry in Tatvan?”

  “No way to know,” he said. “Train to Iran leaves Van when train leaves.” It was that simple, but his next comment startled me. “If ferry left early out of Tatvan, and train passengers missed it, they take bus to Van. Only way for them to meet Iran train before it leaves.” He then asked what seemed to him an obvious question. “You waiting for someone on ferry?”

  “No, I’m waiting to catch the train to Iran at this station.”

  “This no train station. Van Gari is train station. Train station across city.”

  “There are two train stations?”

  “Just one.” The urgency dawned on him before it hit me. “What time goes your train?”

  “9:54.”

  He looked at his watch. “Is 9:44! You will not 9:54 be on train.”

  Alarmed, I said, “Is there a taxi?”

  “No, but I have a car!” The two men with us laughed, bolted up from their chairs, and whooshed us away with their hands. “Hurry. Hurry.”

  We ran over the open ground, my heavy pack flopping uncontrollably until the two of us lifted and carried it. Muslim Giil tossed my pack into the backseat, both of us puffing and laughing.

  Muslim Giil leaned in prayer before turning his key. It worked. He spurred the engine and we bolted across the lot and bounced onto the road. He sped away, turning on his lights when we approached a crowd of people milling about a corner store. He found an alley and we barreled along.

  “Maybe,” he said into the air.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Train to Iran. It is Iranian train. Maybe it waits for Turkey train passengers. If Turkey train missed ferry, then passengers may already be by bus at Van Gari. They may be boarding train as we drive.”

  “It is,” I said, resolved to accept whatever the outcome was.

  “It is.” He smiled philosophically. He looked at his watch. “It is 9:52.”

  The Mercedes shot over an embankment, landing hard alongside the main road of Van. Away we went, station bound.

  Muslim Giil braked directly in front of stairs leading into Van Gari. He was out of his car before I was and grabbed my bag. “Up the stairs.”

  Inside, people lounged about, slept on chairs, and ate food from shopping bags. No one looked to be in a hurry—a peaceful scene in railway stations everywhere, when the train is late.

  Muslim Giil hurried to a counter and approached a clerk on my behalf. I hoisted my bags to where he was. He turned to me.

  “You okay! Train delayed to Tatvan. Ferry waited. Passengers on ferry. Ferry late.”

  Outside the station doors, I saw a train, and the platform looked ready to accept passengers. Its whistle blew and shunted as the coaches picked up slack. Should I be rushing to get on this train? I wondered. No one else seemed to be in a rush to board. Were they even passengers?

  “Wait here with my bag?” I pleaded. He nodded.

  I ran. The train looked of a family with the Van Gölü Express’s livery, but this train’s signage instead read: Trans Asya Ekspresi. It was in motion, heading west. Wasn’t that the wrong direction? A man came over and said, in Spanish-accented English, “This train is one for Iran. For you?” I nodded. He said. “And for me too. But it goes first to Tatvan ferry. Pickup of passengers from Istanbul and Ankara. Then comes to here with them aboard. That when you and me get on. Later from now.”

  The train’s whistle blew again. With no passengers on board, it ventured away from the platform.

  I wanted to thank Muslim Giil for his kindness, but he would not accept money. We walked out the station doors into the cool air. Down the street were carts of food, and he offered to get me “toast.”

  “Sapas dicam,” I said, gratefully declining.

  He bent his head of flowing gray hair and air kissed my left cheek. I did so in return.

  “Sapas dicam,” he replied, gripping my hand without any movement. I realized he was thanking me for the unexpected escapades. I must admit I choked up a little.

  Then Muslim Giil drove away.

  * * *

  I took to the station’s mood. I still felt a bit antsy, with no train in sight, but the logic of it all settled in as I waited.

  The Spaniard stood beside me later. “To Tehran or to Iran?”

  “Tehran for two nights. Then to London.”

  “Me. I spend three weeks in Iran.”

  “Just to travel?”

  “Travel is everything. It is not ‘just’ anything.”

  He’d one-upped me in my own language.

  “Luis,” he said, tapping his chest.

  “Rick.”

  We talked of our travels and home countries. He shared his crackers and cheese with me. We stood as we ate and talked, my back to the open station.

  As we waited, I felt a movement behind me and turned to see two attractive Iranian women in their early twenties, both without head-scarves. They were watching us, listening in on our conversation. A man stood behind them.

  “You are from where?” the older one finally asked, smiling.

  The younger one said, “We are hungry for English. Will you speak with us?”

  “… Yes …” Who was I to decline this charming request?

  “We have never heard English-speaking original,” said the older.

  “I am named Mona,” came from the youngest.

  “I am named Rick.”

  “Will you meet my parents?”

  Of course.

  Mona said of the woman with her, “Kamelia. She is my sister.”

  “This is Mother. Father.” The introductions were done with pointing and the males shaking hands, and self-conscious giggles. “Hamid is Kamelia’s husband.”

  A young man came up to the group with soda drinks. “This is my brother Adel. He is going to university. We have short-term visas to Van to say goodbye to him. It will be two years before we see him again. He has study visa for USA.”

  The Spaniard stayed with us in the conversation.

  Then the boarding call blared. The twenty-two hour journey to Tehran was about to begin.

  Down the tracks came Trans Asya Ekspresi with narrow red and blue lines running the length of white-painted carriages.

  On the platform, I wished Adel well in the United States, and encouraged him. “It is good for students to travel to another country. Our world’s future depends on it.” I left Mona’s family to their goodbyes and tears of departure.

  On boarding my sleeping car, I could hear the revelry of the passengers travelling together through Tatvan-to-ferry-to-train—that cacophony of languages and anticipation that made this hour a pleasant time for them.

  I pushed my pack into compartment H, landing it on the floor in front of a man and woman.

  “You’ll want one of these,” the man offered up. It was a glass of white wine.

  The train jerked eastbound.

  “Anthony. Actually, just Tony.” We shook hands as his wife said, “Irene.”

  “Might that be an Aussie accent?”

  “Melbourne,” she said. “Retired and rambling.”

  Tony and Irene had sorted out their side of the room. I tossed my bag on a bed and accepted their wine. Next stops Kapıköy, Razi, Tabriz, and Tehran.

  It was well after midnight as we passed the Turkey–Iran border and neared passport control. My anticipation of dealing with the formalities at Kapıköy had made for a restless attempt at sleep. Irene and Tony stayed awake as well, but no one spoke. Better tired than groggy in front of the border patrol.

  At 3:00 a.m., the train pulled up short of any platform and stopped. Train officials walked down the corridors, ensuring that everyone was awake with passports open to Iranian visa permission. I’d gotten mine before leaving on the trip in anticipation of finding a way
in.

  We streamed off the train into a low-lit, dank room, square, its walls forty feet long. Two solitary windows were all we had to remind us of an outside world. The ninety or so train passengers formed two lines, one for men and one for women. A man told Tony there had been a third line five minutes ago, but the official manning it “broke fast for one hour.”

  There was no return route outside except through the customs turnstiles.

  “The train won’t leave without us,” I said to Tony.

  “You are saying we sit and get in line later?”

  The answer came from Irene. “May as well.”

  Within a minute the two young Iranian women were over to visit, each in a knee-length smock over black jeans. Kamelia’s husband was there with them. “We can explain what happens here,” said Mona. “They will take you only one at one time. But one of you can wait in line for both of you.” She said this to Tony and me. “You will need to wait on your own,” she said to Irene. “We are here two hours. More maybe.”

  We explained our strategy, and I repeated my flippant comment.

  “Do not think the train will not leave without you. It would,” Kamelia warned.

  Despite the long wait, customs was actually no hassle, and we crossed the border without incident. We were all remarkably fresh later that morning as the train slowed for a high trestle. A better view of this scene would have been from a hiker’s trail below, looking up, yet from our train window it was still an impressive drop, one of the highest trestles in the world.

  Mona and Kamelia, Iranian sisters and the author’s fellow travellers, posing in front of the Trans Asya Ekspresi at Tabriz station, en route to Tehran.

  I had taken lunch alone and later lounged in the roomette, reading with Irene and Tony. We’d passed through Tabriz, where we’ d been able to disembark, walk about, and take photographs. Now, in front of us was five hundred miles of track without interruption. I snoozed. There was a soft tap at the door. Tony flung it open with his foot.

  Mona stood in the doorway looking at me. “My father would like you to join us for dinner.”

  In the dining car, Father and Mother were waiting on one side of a table when we arrived. Mona slipped in to the window seat, and I sat beside her. Hamid and Kamelia were seated on the other side of the aisle, facing each other.

  Our sextet silently concentrated on our menus to sort out dinner. I looked over at Hamid and Kamelia and my gaze went to a space outside the window, where the Caspian Sea lay one hundred miles away and out of sight.

  This is a propitious spot, I thought, remembering something I’d thought about while resting earlier in the afternoon. The train’s proximity at that moment was as close as I’d get to a contending (only remotely in contention) fourth Mountain of the Ark. We were in a distant region of the ancient land of Urartu. An old map I’d come across showed Lake Van at Urartu’s center, with territory north into present-day Armenia and almost this far into Iran’s northwest. The region was then known as the Kingdom of Van, sometimes interpreted as the Kingdom of Ararat.

  In my pre-trip research, I had frequently been taken aback by how much work “Arkeologists” invested when attempting to prove their speculations. One impressive work-up was that of Robert Cornuke, who posited that the Ark’s landing occurred far away from the region’s namesake Mount Ararat, though still within Urartu. It fascinated me how ably individuals align rumors with desktop research and exaggerated claims of fact. Cornuke’s quest caught my attention in part because one of his partners in the escapade was astronaut James Irwin’s widow, who came to the conclusion that her husband had been searching on the wrong mountain—Ararat.

  Cornuke’s first choice for his mountain of the Ark was Mount Sabalan, sixty miles from where our train traveled. At 15,816 feet, Mount Sabalan is the third-highest mountain in Iran. In Cornuke’s book, The Lost Mountains of Noah, based on reworking terminology, he postulated that Mount Sabalan was “the most compelling candidate for the final resting place of Noah’s Ark.” His back up choice was Iran’s Mount Suleiman, where after a 2006 expedition he claimed to have the Ark within sight, an assertion that garnered Cornuke interviews on Good Morning America and CNN, along with Fox News. To make these claims feasible, he took the liberty of stretching both the known borders of ancient Urartu and the phrase “the mountains of Ararat” beyond their historical parameters to include his propounded mountains of the ark.

  Though the case in support of Cornuke has been called “weak and unconvincing” and “misleading,” I could not let go of the idea that, in addition to the three credible “Mountains of the Ark,” there were modern storytellers who freely bent history and legend anew. It is highly debatable that Mount Sabalan (let alone Suleiman) would have been in the ancient land of Urartu, so what captured my interest, let alone Cornuke’s? Perhaps it was the enduring ability of farfetched concoctions to draw us in, to remind us that, odd as some claims are, we can’t look away.

  The train jolted and brought me back from my window gazing. Mona said, “Rick. You daydream?”

  Father spoke to me in Iranian, and I nodded to make him feel I understood. Hamid razzed, “You are being polite, Rick. He just told you he would order a nice Iranian shaam for you. That is dinner.”

  The meal was varied and delicious, and Father described the servings as Hamid and Mona took turns with the English renditions. It was lamb stew over rice with vegetables. They insisted I try the Iranian drink of runny yogurt called doogh.

  Mona told me of her university studies. “It is now not easy for a woman to be in school like me, and I must have good grades. I wish to teach languages.”

  “Hamid, what of your plans?” He and Kamelia had been married for two years, with no children.

  “I would like to study engineering. And to go to school in London. It is expensive and I have applied. It is my hope.”

  Tea arrived. The train swayed, making all of us rock sideways too. Mother, who did not seem near fifty years old, kept up the swaying motion, letting it evolve into a seated dance. She spoke and Mona turned to me. “Mother asks if you like Iranian music. Do you know it?”

  “I imagine I would like it.”

  When the translations were complete, Mona said, “You will come to our train compartment. We have Iranian music there. Mother will teach you Iranian dance.”

  * * *

  The top bunks were up in their couchette when we all arrived. I sat down with the three women while Hamid and Father took to the compartment across the aisle, door open; Mona sat next to me. Mother took out her cell phone and scrolled through her music files.

  Over the phone’s speaker came a folk song with a bite. Mother turned it louder, then rose, without a hint of self-consciousness, and began to dance. The floor space between the couchette’s two bench seats was six feet by two, and we lifted our feet onto our respective seats to make more room, sitting cross-legged. Mother took the floor. She swayed gracefully, swirled slowly. Her face gleamed with Persian pride for the music, lifting her arms one at a time, curving them in and around one another as the song progressed.

  Kamelia joined in as the music’s tempo increased. Her dancing, in comparison, was rapid and felt more modern, even though it was clearly steeped in tradition and respectful to the folk story unfolding through the singer’s voice.

  Mona wove herself into a sway beside me. I picked up on her movements in our seated dance, trying to mimic her sense of rhythm.

  There was a knock on the open door, and Hamid stood with his computer. “Rick, we have more choice. You will hear today’s Iranian music.”

  Mother motioned for me to rise. Kamelia sat down, and Hamid lifted his feet so that the dance floor was open for Mother and me. There was enough room for me to follow her lead without touching, mindful of the cultural differences. I animated an air-twirl of her as one would in a jive or country and western dance. Mona rose, in what I took to be the Iranian equivalent of, “May I cut in?” We danced on the train to Tehran.

 
Hamid’s computer continued to play modern songs and samples of older Iranian music. “Long ago, this was important,” he said. Switch. “Now, this is.” Switch. “But younger, like Mona, would listen to this.” Switch. “Or this.” Switch. “This is mine.” Switch.

  Hamid let the last song play with all the trappings of tradition, music I’d never heard before. I felt at once enchanted and culturally ignorant.

  Hamid reset a song to play again. Mother sat, dancing, moving beautifully back and forth on the bench. She captivated me with her grace and drama. Mona sang along and Kamelia hummed, while Hamid snapped his fingers in time with the song, in an unusual way I’d never seen before. Two of his right-hand fingers at a time collided with two other fingers of the same hand, against his thigh. Then his left hand did a toss-up version of that with three fingers into the palm of the right hand. It was like an ancient instrument, basic yet mesmerizing.

  I tried it myself, and my fumbling made them all poke fun at me. I reverted to the finger snapping I knew, the thumb and middle finger variety from common jazz, both hands on the go. It would not suffice. I had to learn to do it their way. Mona separated my fingers into pairs, the lower two against my knee. She forced their collision. It worked. Hamid’s hands became a metronome. The four of us followed him in a band of hands, playing along with the Iranian song.

  After I’d captured a video of this on my camera, I fell back into the rhythm. I sensed the elusive future of this country in its night train dancers—free-moving, inspired, independent.

  We arrived at Tehran’s Rah Ahan Railway station at three o’clock in the morning. The terminal was wide open for our late arrival, and we clambered out. I said my goodbyes to Tony and Irene as we shunted our bags off the train onto the concrete, and I scanned the next two cars, hoping to see Mona and her family. Hamid was on the platform, passing luggage off the train to the ground. Seven of their extended family had shown up. I joined the group, seeking out Mona. “I have come to say goodbye and to thank you.”

  “Oh, Rick, we were looking to find you. Our friends are here. Now a busy hello and busier farewell.”