Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  After twenty minutes he reappeared, apologetic. ‘Problems,’ he explained sorrowfully. ‘No bulbs in ship.’

  ‘No bulbs at all?’ It was difficult to believe.

  ‘No bulbs. Company has no money, so no buy.’

  A bed without a reading light is worse than fish without salt or lemon. I lowered my voice conspiratorially. ‘How about taking one from another cabin? Maybe a bunk with only a baby in it?’

  The steward looked at me with admiration, and wriggled his eyebrows furiously up and down like Groucho Marx. ‘Very, very gutt,’ he cried excitedly. In less than a minute he had returned triumphant and I had a reading light.

  It soon appeared likely that I was to share my cabin with only one old Turk. The suitcase and cardboard box belonged to him, the steward said. Soon the old man himself sidled into the cabin on bowlegs, like an ancient jockey. He wore a felt hat, a suit of heavy, rough material, a waistcoat and a thin black tie. Later I found him praying, kneeling on a small mat he had unrolled in the middle of the cabin. For his prayers he had replaced the hat with a white cotton skullcap, and removed his shoes and his coat, but not his waistcoat.

  I left him to finish his prayers in peace. When I came back he smiled warmly and toothlessly at me, and I smiled back; it was all we could do to communicate. His head looked like a ruddy wrinkled apple, set on broad rounded shoulders under a short white thatch of hair. He opened his cardboard box and, squatting on his bunk, began composedly to unpack it: apples, a loaf of bread, onions, a plastic container of what looked like string beans. He sat in his waistcoat cross-legged on one end of the bunk and spread his meal on the comic-strip pages of a ‘girlie’ magazine at the other end, his loaf of bread barely screening the naked midriff of a pin-up, although the rest of her was visible.

  The cabin was cool and conveyed nothing of old socks. A broken thermos hung from a metal holder over the washbasin, and beside it were two glasses of different sizes, one of them cracked. At a pinch, the four passengers could stand up in the cabin side by side. The old hajji, toothless in his bunk in blue striped pyjamas, didn’t even snore.

  In the showers facilities were not so ideal. The gents’ shower room was a plumber’s nightmare, and the ladies’ had odd grey foetus-like things sloshing about the floor in a lake of scummy water. When the old man had dressed, removed his dental plate from the washbasin and left the cabin, I made do with a thorough rub-down there.

  *

  I never saw the old man in the dining room. I had three table companions, all Turks, but he was not among them. One was a very old soldier with a fine strong-jawed face, snow-white hair and a silky white cavalry moustache; he wore a medal on his left lapel. When I sat down he raised his wineglass to me, and said, ‘Sherefe!’ – ‘Good health!’ Opposite him a small man with glasses and a diffident manner introduced himself in bad English as a financial inspector working for the government. He even rummaged about in his coat and showed me his credentials – a frayed document signed by Ismet Inonu, a famous colleague of Ataturk from the early days.

  A younger man, perhaps forty years old, sat opposite me; an architect, he said he was, from Istanbul. He looked more like an actor – easygoing, a bon vivant – and we shared a bottle of the Dikmen red, of which the old soldier accepted a glass.

  ‘Excuse,’ the government inspector said, ‘I am sick, yes, from here’ – he touched his head – ‘all down. Drink offends me.’ He only meant it didn’t agree with him. At every meal he took a vial from his pocket and poured a little yellow liquid from it into a glass of water. I sneaked a look at the label and saw that it was for epilepsy.

  ‘I speak English very bad,’ he said. ‘Can you speak French?’

  ‘Yes. We can speak French if you prefer.’

  ‘Oh, I prefer. Yes. I prefer very much.’ But his French was worse than his English and we were soon bogged down in incomprehension. It didn’t matter. The architect spoke fairly good English, although he said German, not English, was his second language; he translated when necessary.

  ‘The old gentleman is an old lieutenant.’ He translated, ‘He wants you to know he fought the Greeks at Smyrna and also at Istanbul. He is seventy-nine years.’

  ‘Did he meet Ataturk?’ I asked.

  ‘He says Ataturk gave him his medal. At Smyrna. He is very pleased to meet an Englishman.’

  The architect could hardly wait to tell me about Turkey’s catastrophic economic situation. It is a situation so dire that you can’t blame Turks for their obsession with it.

  ‘Do you know we have seventy-one per cent inflation? Seventy-one per cent!’ He said it almost proudly. ‘You ask why that is. Well, the government doesn’t seem to be very good at economics. Do you know that Turkey has now three million unemployed?’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’

  ‘Only one answer. Get out the leaders. New ones will come. Turkey was six hundred years under the sultans. Fifty years a republic, okay, but now Ataturk’s work is gone.’

  ‘Maybe you need a new Ataturk. A new sultan. A red sultan?’

  He laughed. ‘Ja, a red sultan! Maybe!’

  We ordered another Dikmen between us. The old soldier accepted another thimbleful and said, ‘Sherefe!’ again. When the ship began to roll very slightly, the government inspector excused himself and slipped away.

  The architect said, ‘The CIA run this country.’

  American capitalists – this was the opinion of Turks I had met in buses, hotels, coffee houses – wanted Turkey as a source of cheap labour and, to maintain this state of affairs, were deliberately holding back the country’s industrialization.

  The architect shook his head sadly. ‘You could five year ago – no, two year – buy a wunderbar meal with wein, meat, all for fifty Turkish lira. Now, four hundred, five hundred.’

  He sipped the Dikmen red. ‘I sold a building on the Bosporus two years ago for five hundred thousand Turkish lira. How much now, you think?’

  I made a wild guess. ‘One million five hundred thousand.’

  ‘Twe-e-nty million Turkish lira! Ja! Now you see how bad is situation?’ Twenty million Turkish lira is about £200,000.

  During the three-day trip to Mersin, the architect proved to be a useful informant. Most of the Turks on the Samsun, he said, were not on holiday; they used these coastal steamers as a means of transport to work. The government inspector, for example, was travelling to Antalya to investigate the ledgers of the local administration there. ‘Maybe some shifty business.’

  The architect’s father had lived in a big house on the Bosporus and had given his wife all she wanted: clothes, jewels, anything at all. But there was a drawback: she was not permitted to leave the house – not ever. So she was denied the thrill of showing off her finery or jewels in public. The day he died was the happiest of her life. She threw an abandoned party for a few close friends to celebrate her freedom, and since then had married twice.

  ‘Oh, old Istanbul!’ the architect said, holding up his glass to toast his birthplace. ‘Before the traffic came, you could smell the girls, smell them in the street! Now gas you smell.’ He pinched his nostrils together, frowning.

  ‘The old days – twenty, thirty years before! Big-big villas on Bosporus in big-big parks, you know. Parks full of fish trees. Not fish trees? Ah pines. Ja, pines trees.’

  He wanted to know if I had read the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. ‘Famous poet.’

  ‘No.’

  He recited two lines and gave me a stumbling translation. Later I found them in a published English translation as follows: ‘The life of a man is long, perhaps longer than necessary/ Or perhaps is it shorter than necessary?’ The poem, ‘The Prison Clerk’, goes on:

  Abdul Hamid drowned

  Medical students,

  Threw them into the water

  At Seraglio Point.

  The currents swept the sacks away

  They were never found.

  Many,

  Many were hanged

  In the days o
f the fight for freedom.

  In those days they hanged men

  At the head of the Bridge

  Now at Sultan Ahmed Square.

  One last drink, you and I.

  ‘Istanbul hath no equal anywhere,

  Her sparkling air, her limpid water give

  A new dimension to the sound.’

  So sang

  Master Nedim, the poet, so he sang.

  At Antalya the old soldier and the government inspector left Samsun. The inspector had his work to do; the old soldier had a brother living nearby and would stay with him for a few days. I took a photograph of them together, and then another of the old man and his medal. They took turns kissing me on both cheeks. The inspector said in his hesitant English, ‘I am-very-content-to-meet-you. Très content,’ and gave me his card. Shoulders back, the old soldier said, ‘Goodbye, Englishman,’ and raised his hat. Months later I received a Christmas card from Istanbul. In a firm and careful hand the old soldier had written, ‘As you remember, we have met each other during the trip to Mersin in the ship. You have taken the photographs of my medal.’ Touched, I sent him a card back.

  Deprived of our table companions, the architect and I took a taxi to a small beach covered with beautiful, smooth, egg-shaped stones. The sea was greenish and felt like warm consommé against the skin. Boys fished; fat Turkish ladies stumbled over the stones, groaning happily like water buffaloes as they reached the water. Strange jagged hills shot up a little way inland.

  The architect eyed the fat women, who giggled and groaned, trying to wriggle out of their bathing costumes under their towels.

  ‘I very much like womans,’ he said. ‘Sixteen years, sixty years! Sixty years can be very good. London womans sixty years old very, very good.’

  In London, he told me, he favoured the Cumberland Hotel. ‘Plenty of womans there.’

  ‘Expensive?’

  He looked shocked. ‘Never I pay!’

  In the evenings the second-class passengers gathered in the saloon and young Turks leaped and reeled about in traditional dances. Much vodka and beer were drunk. The ship’s officers came down to dance with the prettiest girls. In the afternoons there was a film show; one day I saw Laurel and Hardy.

  *

  The Samsun passed Ephesus, Bodrum (Halicarnassus), Cnidus. Also Marmaris, Finike and Myra, where St Nicholas (Santa Claus) came from.

  Ε. Μ. Forster once landed in Cnidus in darkness, mud and pouring rain, and was obliged to stumble upward over vast blocks of dislodged stone ‘amid the rapture of competent observers, who had discovered that the iron clamps were those used in classical times, and that we were straining our ankles over masonry of the best period’. In the darkness of a temple Forster fell off the stage into the orchestra, which, luckily, was planted with Jerusalem artichokes set in glutinous mud.

  Marmaris stretched along an unexpected bay, ringed with hills like a Scottish loch. I saw a rocky island streaked with rust, and four levels of mountain, in varying shades of purple and blue. Along this coast you can swim among submerged temples, theatres and libraries. There are valleys full of poplars, weeping willows and cypresses alive with larks and goldfinches. Among groves of olive trees whose bushy tops turn to silver as the sun dips into the Aegean, it is possible to believe that the great god Pan still lives. After all, who was the willowy flute-player of Ephesus?

  *

  It wasn’t the fault of the radio officer of the Samsun, Haluk Bilgi, that he couldn’t help much when I asked him how best to negotiate the Suez Canal.

  We met one evening in the second-class saloon. Next midday I had a drink with him in a small cabin bare except for two pin-ups and a bottle of wine. ‘I’m sorry, no gin. I drank it,’ he said apologetically.

  He considered my problem with frowning concentration. ‘Now, to get through Suez to the Red Sea. Try take ship from Mersin to Haifa. Then from Haifa some ship to Elat – not difficult. Elat is in the Gulf of Aqaba, you know. Unfortunately, it is still Israel.’

  ‘Yes, from Elat it will be difficult to find a ship to Jedda or Dubai – in fact, to any Arab port.’

  ‘Yah, maybe.’ He thought for a while. ‘Also avoid Djibouti. Ships I’ve been on down the Red Sea never want to take passengers from Djibouti. Political problem.’

  That was that. I felt no further forward.

  Haluk Bilgi was only thirty, he told me, but he had sailed nearly around the world. He showed me photographs of his wife and two children. He was happily married now, though he had once fallen briefly in love with a girl in Iloilo City in the Philippines.

  ‘In Sulu Sea, Philippines, there are many pirates who followed us in speedboats with heavy machine-guns. Sometimes they destroy the lighthouses, and then, when a ship is grounded, they kill the personnel on the ship. Many people killed there.

  ‘In Singapore, prostitutes are coming to the boat to offer their body for two Singapore dollars, maybe same as one US dollar. They say, “Hello, how are you?” We say, “Very fine.” After intercourse we pay two Singapore dollars. Man prostitutes, same like girl, are five Singapore dollars. Yah! Females cost less. Our astonishment was very much.’ He roared with laughter, spreading out his hands in disbelief.

  Bilgi said, ‘I like Turkish ship. I have the company social-service help. Maybe my wife one year must be stay in hospital, I don’t pay for nothing. In this company, if I have son and I die, he will be given education by government, to be pilot or engineer, go to university – everything.’ He passed the bottle. He was a happy man.

  *

  Mersin. Modern jerry-building. Cranes. Neon lights. I had no time to drive out to see Tarsus, where St Paul was born, and where Antony first met Cleopatra. Instead, I walked to the shipping office pointed out to me by Bilgi, presented the letter given me by the helpful Turkish Maritime Lines lady in Smyrna, and was given a ticket for the night ferry to Famagusta or Magusa, as the Turks called it.

  Afterwards I returned to the Samsun and said goodbye to the architect. ‘We had nice talks,’ he said.

  With Bilgi, I took my luggage ashore. On a nearby wharf the night ferry, the Yesilada, had lowered her ramp to load cars and trucks. ‘Green Island,’ Bilgi translated. Sweating workmen were trying to push a truckload of tomatoes up the ramp. The truck was too old or too heavy, or the ramp too steep; it kept rolling back again onto the wharf.

  ‘Fockin’ vegetables,’ muttered Bilgi with contempt.

  I said goodbye to him and, when he’d gone, I stood alone watching the cursing men wrestling with the truck. With her ramp yawning open, the Yesilada looked like a hippopotamus refusing a pill.

  Five

  I carried my metal suitcase up the ramp after the recalcitrant truck had at last been manhandled into the Yesilada’s hold, but saw no sign of a companionway leading up to a deck. A group of men in uniform stood there and must have seen that I was a passenger in need of direction but none of them made a move.

  ‘Where do I go from here?’ I called out to them, putting the suitcase down with a bump. They looked blank, and a full minute went by before a small man detached himself from the group. ‘What want?’ he said.

  I showed him my ticket with the cabin number on it. He nodded, picked up my small bag and said, ‘Come.’ We found a stairway behind a battered Ford. One deck up was a corridor and a single-berth cabin. When I thanked my guide he said, ‘Okay.’

  I soon discovered that, if I lay on the bunk, the suitcase neatly filled the rest of the cabin. There was a porthole that didn’t open. At 2.00 a.m. I woke up feeling like a character in the Edgar Allan Poe story who wakes up thinking he is in his coffin buried alive, although he is actually in a small cabin in a ship at sea.

  The Yesilada was carrying a large number of poor Turkish Cypriot families returning from visits to relatives in Turkey, or poor mainland Turkish families being moved to Cyprus to be resettled in areas formerly Greek but taken over by the Turkish army when it invaded the island in 1974 and occupied its northern sector.

  The divisi
on of an independent island nation, inhabited mostly by Greeks, partly by Turks, is a modern tragedy awaiting a solution that may never come. Under President Makarios, the Greek Orthodox archbishop and politician, the two peoples of Cyprus had lived in peace – uneasily, it is true (the Greeks certainly had a tendency to bully the Turkish minority), but with no mutual problem that could not have been resolved by honest if dour negotiation. Yet folie des grandeurs drove political leaders in Athens and Ankara chose to use the Greek and Turkish Cypriots as proxies in a civil war.

  The colonels who had controlled Greece since their coup in 1967 organized a second coup in Cyprus in 1974, which, for a time, put Makarios temporarily to flight and replaced him with a Greek Cypriot bent on achieving by force the extreme Greek nationalist dream: enosis, or the union of Cyprus with Greece, the unwilling Turkish minority included. This gave the Turkish generals in Ankara the excuse to fulfil their dream: the invasion and annexation of northern, mainly Turkish, Cyprus. The invasion was easily carried out: Cyprus is far nearer the Turkish mainland than it is to Greece, and the Turkish army is far stronger than the Greek army. Soon the Turkish soldiers gleefully bombed and bayoneted Cypriot Greeks out of the formerly mixed northern region, which they made exclusively Turkish. Turkish Cypriot peasants dragged themselves from farms they had worked for decades, if not centuries, among Greek neighbours in the southern zone, to the newly occupied Turkish zone. Turkish peasants who come over from the mainland – like those on the Yesilada – do so as part of their government’s policy of increasing the proportion of Turks to Greeks on the island. The Greek colonels and their protégés in Cyprus have long since fallen from power; the world’s statesmen regularly urge the Turks to permit a reunited Cyprus; the Turks as regularly refuse to budge.

  Every bench, chair and corner of deck space on the Yesilada was occupied by Turks and their roped suitcases, bundles and boxes of food. Many of them had put down mattresses so close together that it was almost impossible to move about between them. On the mattresses squatted or lay soldiers with shaven skulls and in shapeless, rough, threadbare uniforms, as well as elderly men in baggy peasant trousers and women in coloured petticoats. The area around the ‘Snac’ Bar smelled heavily of raki and tobacco.