by Bill Bryson
It is hard to know what will become of Bulgaria. A couple of weeks after my visit, the people of the country, in a moment of madness, freely voted for a Communist regime, the only country in eastern Europe to voluntarily retain the old form of government.
This was 1990, the year that Communism died in Europe, and it seemed to me strange that in all the words that were written about the fall of the Iron Curtain nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know Communism never worked and I would have hated living under it myself, but it seems to me none the less that there is a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appears to work is one based on self-interest and greed.
Communism in Bulgaria won’t last. It can’t last. No people will retain a government that can’t feed them or let them provide toys for their children. I’m certain that if I come back to Sofia in five years it will be full of Pizza Huts and Laura Ashleys and the streets will be clogged with BMWs, and all the people will be much happier. I can’t blame them a bit, but I’m glad I saw it before it changed.
22. Istanbul
Katz and I went from Sofia to Istanbul on the Orient Express. I had thought that it would be full of romance – I rather imagined some turbanned servant coming round with cups of sweet coffee and complimentary hot towels – but in fact it was awful in every way: hot, foetid, airless, threadbare, crowded, old, slow. By 1973, the Orient Express was just a name on a rusty piece of metal on the side of any old train between Belgrade and Istanbul. A couple of years later it was discontinued altogether.
We had a compartment to ourselves as we left Sofia, but about two stops later the door slid brusquely open and an extended family of noisy fat people, looking like a walking testimonial to the inadvisability of chronic inbreeding, barged in laden with cardboard suitcases and string bags of evil-smelling food. They plonked themselves down, forcing me and Katz into opposite corners, and immediately began delving in the food bags, passing round handkerchiefs full of little dead fish, hunks of dry bread, runny boiled eggs and dripping slabs of pungent curdled cheese whose smell put me in mind of the time my family returned from summer vacation to discover that my mother had inadvertently locked the cat in the broom cupboard for the three hottest weeks of the year. They ate with smacking lips, wiping their stubby fingers on their shirts, before sinking one by one into deep and spluttering comas. By some quirk of Balkan digestion, they expanded as they slept, squeezing us further and further into our respective corners until we were pressed against the wall like lumps of Blu-Tack. We had twenty-two hours of this to get through.
By this point on our trip Katz and I had spent nearly four months together and were thoroughly sick of each other. We had long days in which we either bickered endlessly or didn’t speak. On this day, as I recall, we hadn’t been speaking, but late in the night, as the train trundled sluggishly across the scrubby void that is western Turkey, Katz disturbed me from a light but delirious slumber by tapping me on the shoulder and saying accusingly, ‘Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’
I sat up a fraction. ‘What?’
‘Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’
‘I don’t know, the lab report’s not back yet,’ I replied drily.
‘I’m serious, is that dog shit?’
‘How should I know?’
Katz leaned far enough forward to give it a good look and a cautious sniff. ‘It is dog shit,’ he announced with an odd tone of satisfaction.
‘Well, keep quiet about it or everybody’ll want some.’
‘Go and clean it off, will ya? It’s making me nauseous.’
And here the bickering started, in intense little whispers.
‘You go and clean it off.’
‘It’s your shoes.’
‘Well, I kind of like it. Besides, it kills the smell of this guy next to me.’
‘Well, it’s making me nauseous.’
‘Well, I don’t give a shit.’
‘Well, I think you’re a fuck-head.’
‘Oh, you do, do you?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact. You’ve been a fuck-head since Austria.’
‘Well, you’ve been a fuck-head since birth.’
‘Me?’ A wounded look. ‘That’s rich. You were a fuck-head in the womb, Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head.’
And so it went. Istanbul clearly was not destined to be a success for us. Katz hated it and he hated me. I mostly hated Katz, but I didn’t much care for Istanbul either. It was, like the train that took us there, hot, foetid, crowded and threadbare. The streets were full of urchins who snatched anything you didn’t cling to with both hands and the food was simply dreadful, all foul-smelling cheese and mysterious lumps of goo. One night Katz nearly got us killed when he enquired of a waiter, ‘Tell me, do you have cows shit straight onto the plate or do you scoop it on afterwards?’
One of the sustaining pleasures for Katz in the later stages of the trip was talking candidly in this way to people who could not understand him, making smiling enquiries of a policeman concerning the celebrated tininess of his penis or telling a surly waiter, ‘Can we have the bill, Boris? We’ve got to run because your wife’s promised to give us both blow jobs.’
But in this instance it turned out that the waiter had worked in a little place off the Tottenham Court Road for thirteen years and he understood Katz’s question only too well. He directed us to the door with the aid of a meat cleaver, making wholly justified remarks about the nobility of Turkish cuisine and the insolence of young tourists.
With this final pleasure denied him on the grounds of prudence and a sincere threat from me that I would kill him myself if an English-speaking Turk didn’t do it first, Katz spent the remainder of our time in Istanbul in a moody silence, except for growling at touts in the Grand Bazaar to fuck off and leave him alone, but this I excused on the basis of justified provocation. We had reached the end of the road in every sense. It was a long week.
I wondered now, as I rode a taxi in from the airport through the hot, airless, teeming streets of Istanbul, whether my attitude would be more receptive this time.
Things did not start well. I had made a reservation at the Sheraton through the company’s internal reservation system in Sofia, but the hotel turned out to be miles away from the Golden Horn and old town. The room was clean and passably swank, but the television didn’t work, and when I went to the bathroom to wash my hands and face, the pipes juddered and banged like something from a poltergeist movie and then, with a series of gasps, issued a steady brown soup. I let the water run for ten minutes, but it never cleared or even thinned. For this I was paying $150 a night.
I sat on the toilet, watching the water run, thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts that you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.
Sighing, I smeared a little of the brown water around my face, then went out to see Istanbul. It is the noisiest, dirtiest, busiest city I’ve ever seen. Everywhere there is noise – car horns tooting, sirens shrilling, people shouting, muezzins wailing, ferries on the Bosphorus sounding their booming horns. Everywhere, too, there is ceaseless activity – people pushing carts, carrying trays of food or coffee, humping huge and ungainly loads (I saw one guy with a sofa on his back), people every five feet selling something: lottery tickets, wristwatches, cigarettes, replica perfumes.
Every few paces people come up to you wanting to shine your shoes, sell you postcards or guidebooks, lead you to their brother’s carpet shop or otherwise induce you to part with some trifling sum of money. Along the Galata Bridge, swarming with pedestrians, beggars and load bearers, amateur fishermen stood pulling the most poisoned-looking fish I ever hope to see from the oily waters below. At the end of the bridge two guys were crossing the street to Sirkeci Station, threadi
ng their way through the traffic leading brown bears on leashes. No one gave them a second glance. Istanbul is, in short, one of those great and exhilarating cities where almost anything seems possible.
The one truly unbearable thing in the city is the Turkish pop music. It is inescapable. It assaults you from every restaurant doorway, from every lemonade stand, from every passing cab. If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anaesthetic to a background accompaniment of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
I wandered around for a couple of hours, impressed by the tumult, amazed that in one place there could be so much activity. I walked past the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia, peeling postcard salesmen from my sleeve as I went, and tried to go to Topkapi, but it was closed. I headed instead for what I thought was the national archaeological museum, but I somehow missed it and found myself presently at the entrance to a large, inviting and miraculously tranquil park, the Gülhane. It was full of cool shade and happy families. There was a free zoo, evidently much loved by children, and somewhere a café playing Turkish torture music, but softly enough to be tolerable.
At the bottom of a gently sloping central avenue, the park ended in a sudden and stunning view of the Bosphorus, glittery and blue. I took a seat at an open-air taverna, ordered a Coke and gazed across the water to the white houses gleaming on the brown hillside of Üsküdar two miles across the strait. Distant cars glinted in the hot sunshine and ferries plied doggedly back and forth across the Bosphorus and on out to the distant Princes’ Islands, adrift in a bluish haze. It was beautiful and a perfect place to stop.
I had clearly come to the end of my own road. That was Asia over there; this was as far as I could go in Europe. It was time to go home. My long-suffering wife was pregnant with her semi-annual baby. The younger children, she had told me on the phone, were beginning to call any grown man ‘Daddy’. The grass was waist-high. One of the field walls was tumbling down. The sheep were in the meadow. The cows were in the corn. There was a lot for me to do.
And I was, I admit, ready to go. I missed my family and the comfortable familiarities of home. I was tired of the daily drudgery of keeping myself fed and bedded, tired of trains and buses, tired of existing in a world of strangers, tired of being forever perplexed and lost, tired above all of my own dull company. How many times in recent days had I sat trapped on buses or trains listening to my idly prattling mind and wished that I could just get up and walk out on myself?
At the same time, I had a quite irrational urge to keep going. There is something about the momentum of travelling that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop. That was Asia over there, after all – right there in my view. Asia. The thought of it seemed incredible. I could be there in minutes. I still had money left. An untouched continent lay before me.
But I didn’t go. Instead I ordered another Coke and watched the ferries. In other circumstances I think I might have gone. But that of course is neither here nor there.
Bill Bryson’s opening lines were:
‘I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.’
This is what followed:
The Lost Continent
A road trip around the puzzle that is small-town America introduces the world to the adjective ‘Brysonesque’.
‘A very funny performance, littered with wonderful lines and memorable images’ LITERARY REVIEW
Neither Here Nor There
Europe never seemed funny until Bill Bryson looked at it.
‘Hugely funny (not snigger-snigger funny but great-big-belly-laugh-till-you-cry funny)’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
Made in America
A compelling ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture gets beneath the skin of the country.
‘A tremendous sassy work, full of zip, pizzazz and all those other great American qualities’ INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
Notes from a Small Island
A eulogy to Bryson’s beloved Britain captures the very essence of the original ‘green and pleasant land’.
‘Not a book that should be read in public, for fear of emitting loud snorts’ THE TIMES
A Walk in the Woods
Bryson’s punishing (by his standards) hike across the celebrated Appalachian Trail, the longest footpath in the world.
‘This is a seriously funny book’ SUNDAY TIMES
Notes from a Big Country
Bryson brings his inimitable wit to bear on that strangest of phenomena – the American way of life.
‘Not only hilarious but also insightful and informative’ INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
Down Under
An extraordinary journey to the heart of another big country – Australia.
‘Bryson is the perfect travelling companion ... When it comes to travel’s peculiars the man still has no peers’ THE TIMES
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Travels through time and space to explain the world, the universe and everything.
‘Truly impressive ... It’s hard to imagine a better rough guide to science’ GUARDIAN
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Quintessential Bryson – a funny, moving and perceptive journey through his childhood.
‘He can capture the flavour of the past with the lightest of touches’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Also by
Bill Bryson
The Lost Continent
Mother Tongue
Made in America
Notes from a Small Island
A Walk in the Woods
Notes from a Big Country
Down Under
African Diary
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Chapter 1
HOMETOWN
SPRINGFIELD, ILL. (AP) – The State Senate of Illinois yesterday disbanded its Committee on Efficiency and Economy ‘for reasons of efficiency and economy’.
– Des Moines Tribune, 6 February 1955
I
N THE LATE 1950s, the Royal Canadian Air Force produced a booklet on isometrics, a form of exercise that enjoyed a short but devoted vogue with my father. The idea of isometrics was that you used any unyielding object, like a tree or wall, and pressed against it with all your might from various positions to tone and strengthen different groups of muscles. Since everybody already has access to trees and walls, you didn’t need to invest in a lot of costly equipment, which I expect was what attracted my dad.
What made it unfortunate in my father’s case was that he would do his isometrics on aeroplanes. At some point in every flight, he would stroll back to the galley area or the space by the emergency exit and, taking up the posture of someone trying to budge a very heavy piece of machinery, he would begin to push with his back or shoulder against the outer wall of the plane, pausing occasionally to take deep breaths before returning with quiet, determined grunts to the task.
Since it looked uncannily, if unfathomably, as if he were trying to force a hole in the side of the plane, this naturally drew attention. Businessmen in nearby seats would stare over the tops of their glasses. A stewardess would pop her head out of the galley and likewise stare, but with a certain hard caution, as if remembering some aspect of her training that she had not previously been called upon to implement.
Seeing that he had observers, my father would straighten up, smile genially and begin to outline the engaging principles behind isometrics. Then he would give a demonstration to an audience that swiftly consisted of no one. He seemed curiously incapable of feeling embarrassment in such situations, but that was all right because I felt enough for both of us – indeed, enough for us and all the other passengers, the airline and its employees, and the whole of whatever state we were flying over.
Two things made these undertakings tolerable. The first was that back on solid ground my dad wasn’t half as foolish most of the time. The second was that the purpose of these trips was always to go to a big
city like Detroit or St Louis, stay in a large hotel and attend ballgames, and that excused a great deal – well, everything, in fact. My dad was a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register, which in those days was one of the country’s best papers, and often took me along on trips through the Midwest. Sometimes these were car trips to smaller places like Sioux City or Burlington, but at least once a summer we boarded a silvery plane – a huge event in those days – and lumbered through the summery skies, up among the fleecy clouds, to a proper metropolis to watch Major League baseball, the pinnacle of the sport.
Like everything else in those days, baseball was part of a simpler world, and I was allowed to go with him into the changing rooms and dugout and on to the field before games. I have had my hair tousled by Stan Musial. I have handed Willie Mays a ball that had skittered past him as he played catch. I have lent my binoculars to Harvey Kuenn (or possibly it was Billy Hoeft) so that he could scope some busty blonde in the upper deck. Once on a hot July afternoon I sat in a nearly airless clubhouse under the left field grandstand at Wrigley Field in Chicago beside Ernie Banks, the Cubs’ great shortstop, as he autographed boxes of new white baseballs (which are, incidentally, the most pleasurably aromatic things on earth, and worth spending time around anyway). Unbidden, I took it upon myself to sit beside him and pass him each new ball. This slowed the process considerably, but he gave a little smile each time and said thank you as if I had done him quite a favour. He was the nicest human being I have ever met. It was like being friends with God.
