Self (19 page)

I grinned. “You liar! You thought I was American when we met.”

“Oh. Right.”

We laughed.

A pause. A search for fundamental differences.

“Do you think we can take our tops off?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied, looking around. “I don’t think we should.”

“I guess you’re right.” She looked out at the water. “Let’s go back to our room,” she said brightly, with that twinkle in her eye.

“Okay.”

As we walked back she said, “And of course you’re different. You can’t be American, you don’t have an American passport. And you speak French in Quebec.” Which, for as long as I knew her, she pronounced Kweebec.

They were the only Americans we met in Turkey.

We stayed in all kinds of cheap hotels and pensions during our stay in Turkey: some that were unique, like the troglodyte lodgings of Cappadocia; some rustic; some functional and forgettable; and some that were filthy, with dirty sheets and heavy smells. In this last category, I’ll never forget one that had a wall so mildewed and rotten that I could put my hand on it and push it in several inches, presumably startling our neighbours, if we had any. When I let go, the wall slowly sprang back. Would that Buster Keaton had been in the next room, we would’ve had a merry time. Ruth was the arbiter of hotel rooms, since I was game for anything. I was very much a student of the the-more-I-rough-it-the-more-I-am-alive school of travel. If a hotel room didn’t kill me, it made me better. Ruth walked out of many a room saying, “This one kills me.” But the woman was surprising and resilient, and she developed a tolerance for grunge that came to equal mine. By the end of our trip we would peek into rooms that were dungeons of degradation, sties that would have made swine blanch, and Ruth would emit a flat, unironic “Great” and drop her pack
on the bed. It helped that we were running low on money. Necessity is the mother of tolerance.

We bought double sheets in Kuşadasi. I carried one and Ruth the other. Every night we brought them together. This, and a shower with only a few degrees Celsius of warm water, made us happy.

We became minor experts in Turkish carpets, and damn good bargainers, able to ingest gallons of sweet tea and resist all kinds of smiles and ploys to make us buy what we didn’t want. One carpet that Ruth bought had an impossibly intricate gold and green pattern. When I saw it in Philadelphia, a tide rippled through my mind, a watery carpet of fleeting images and wordless feelings. I bought a kilim, the sole decoration in my bare student rooms, a magic carpet in the way it spoke to me of Ruth.

“The seeds of all things have a moist nature,” I said to Ruth, in Miletus.

She looked up from her bag and squinted. “What’s that?” she said. She was sitting on a great lion, at one time surely proud and menacing, but now old, worn and half-buried in sand.

“Greek philosophy started here. A guy named Thales. He said the source of everything was water.”

She looked around. “Well, he’s right.”

Miletus, once a port of such prosperity that it could afford philosophy, is now a desert, the river Meander having silted up and pushed back the sea. It’s a dry, dry place. Ruth brought out a Coke. She was incorrigibly American.

“He also said, ‘All things are full of gods.’ ” Just as I said this, Ruth pulled the tab on the can. There was an explosion of spray. “You see. Excess, compressed gods.”

She laughed. “Want some?”

As usual, I looked offended and then drank half of it.

We were alone; Ruth slipped her hand into mine. We walked about, pulling each other this way and that for no reason except the pleasure of knowing that the other was there. We kissed against a column. The seeds of all things.… I wished we’d been back in our room.

After Ephesus, on the Aegean coast, we made the decision to head east. We rested in Pamukkale’s white travertines, basins that thousands of years of flowing mineral water had created, all pure white in colour and overflowing with hot, calcium-rich water. Ruth piled mud onto her head.

The land pulled us along. Pamukkale wasn’t far from Cappadocia, wonder of wonders, refuge of the early Christians, who dug habitations into the friable rock, a lunar landscape like nowhere else on earth. And there was Konya in between, city of the whirling dervishes. And beyond, just beyond, was Nemrut Dagi, a sanctuary atop a mountain, with huge stone heads. From there it was an obvious step to Dogubayazit, site of the Kurdish castle of Ishak Pasa (and Little and Big Ararat besides).

In Dogubayazit we took a taxi to the border. We peeped into the Islamic Republic of Iran. I would have gone if the border hadn’t been closed because of the Iran-Iraq war. Ruth looked at me. “Right,” she said. “Sure. We’ll go tomorrow. Just hop back into town to exchange our bikinis for one-pieces, and we’ll be all set to do Iran,” which she pronounced “I ran”, first person singular. In Dogubayazit at the same time as us, filling up the best hotel in town with his team, was James Irwin, an American astronaut who had walked on the
moon (and presumably found it full of God) and was now unsuccessfully looking for Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat. “Let’s find the crackpot,” said Ruth. But Mr. Irwin was hard at work on the mountain.

We returned westward along the Black Sea coast until Samsun, where we headed inland towards Ankara. I regretted that we had not seen Urfa and Harran, in ancient Mesopotamia, near the Syrian border, and that we would miss the entire Mediterranean coast, but it’s always like that with the two vectors that rule our lives: space is truly infinite, we have ample proof of that, but it flies in the face of all experience to say the same of time.

The only story I wrote in Turkey came to me in Ankara. Ankara is partly a planned city; Atatürk plucked it out of provincial obscurity in 1923 so that the capital of his European nation would be firmly in Asia. It is a modern, bustling city. But it does have its own memory, its own history. After visiting the ninth-century citadel, Ruth and I went walking in the old city, along the narrow, twisting, hilly streets with their low, sometimes vividly coloured houses. It had rained earlier, but the sun was out now. There was a refreshing coolness to the air. Puddles were mirrors. We walked with no destination in mind, for the simple pleasure of the activity, a voluntary lostness. We turned left or right beckoned by a potted plant or a shade of blue wall. Children played in the streets. Some who weren’t too frenzied over their fun stopped and looked at us in silence. Others, between the catch and throw of a ball, called at us in their shrill voices. “Hello to you too,” one of us would reply, which as often as not triggered a cacophonous chorus of shouting and giggling in return, one voice more high-pitched
than the next, a sound that is internationally familiar to the human species. One little girl, no more than three years old, got so caught up in the commotion that our appearance caused that she went gaga. She trembled, she stared, she dripped saliva — she looked as if she were about to explode. Instead, she arched back, closed her eyes and put out a shriek that was so loud and piercing it would have shattered crystal. “Aren’t you a little screamer?” said Ruth, bending down and making her eyes big. Momentarily I saw her in a different light. She knew children intimately, intimately three times over. I so rarely saw her in that way, even when she was talking of her Philadelphia brood. The screamer’s mother came out and swept the little diva into her arms. She and Ruth exchanged looks and smiles, women of different languages but mothers in common.

Others watched us too, but silently. Old, ill-shaven men who followed us with their eyes, perhaps nodding if theirs caught ours.

The street was too narrow for traffic. We came upon a woman sitting on a carpet beneath the open window of what was clearly her own dwelling. Beside her lay a sleeping baby. She was sewing. She took no more notice of us than a glance’s worth.

We walked past her.

At a turn we beheld the same thing, only double. Two old women on carpets opposite each other, one with a baby quietly prattling and playing with a piece of cloth. Old they were, these women, with bright, multilayered clothes and few teeth. They were in animated conversation. At the sight of us they waved and smiled and spoke to us. I smiled back and pointed ahead, meaning that we were on a walk and ahead was where
we were heading. At exactly the same time they both fell silent and looked where I was pointing, as if I were indicating something amiss, a cement truck coming their way, perhaps. They looked back at us, and both repeated my hand gesture, probably not knowing what they meant by it, only that it might please the foreigners. One held up an empty glass. An offer of tea. We sat down and had tea and another of those conversations we’d had with women throughout Turkey, where many words are spoken, none is understood and much is communicated. Ruth pointed at the baby and said, “Is this your grandson?” and instantly the baby was propelled onto her lap and then mine. “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” I said to the gurgling child.

When it came time to go, after many emphatic thank-you-very-much’s,
Teşekkür ederim
in Turkish, we got up, gingerly walked on what few inches were left of the street between the two women’s carpets and proceeded.

But again, only this time triple, quadruple, quintuple. To our left and right whenever we came to a cross street. Women, babies and carpets. Ruth and I looked at each other. “I feel like we’re
trespassing
,” she said. It was exactly that. We felt we had moved imperceptibly from the public sphere of the street to the private sphere of the house. In this feeling lay the genesis of my story.

It was about a man walking along Atatürk Bulvari, Ankara’s aorta, broad, tree-lined and busy. But our man is busy himself and has no time for its distractions. He is thinking about an important business deal. He turns off Atatürk Bulvari onto a quieter street; let us say it is an artery. Our man is thinking hard. He is not paying attention to his surroundings. What is important to him at that moment is what is inside his head.
The honk of a car, the shout of a hawker, something disturbs him. Without a thought he turns off again, this time onto an arteriole. There are no distractions now. No cars, no people. He can walk in peace and concentrate fully. His eyes are open, but they see nothing. Only his feet are aware of the change in things. Our man has not yet come to a decision when he wakes up to the fact that he has stopped walking and is looking at a small table with a pair of glasses on it. What is this, he asks himself, still distracted. He would like to continue walking and thinking, but his feet no longer know where to turn. He realizes that next to the small table there is a large canopied bed, unmade. He notices drops of blood on the sheets. He looks at them, astounded. He spins around. He’s in a bedroom. In a capillary, let us say. The room is described in detail for it is elaborately furnished. Our man is in a near-panic. “What am I doing here? How did I get here?” he asks himself. He quickly walks out of the room. He finds himself in a library, then a living-room. He continues on to a dining-room. Then into a kitchen. He opens a door and runs down a corridor. There are several doors; one leads to a bathroom, another to a bedroom, another to a closet. At the end of the corridor, a staircase. He bounds up it. But it continues: living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, pantries, libraries, dining-rooms, closets, corridors — never a door that leads out, never a window through which he can climb out. An infinite domestic honeycomb. The story ends to the sound of the man’s screams, his despair equal to that of a woman who goes shopping and then discovers that she cannot find her way home, but must roam the busy, noisy streets for ever.

Where do men feel ill at ease? In airplane cockpits, bus depots, construction sites, dance halls, elevators, forest paths, gas
stations, hotels, interesting little alleys, junkyards, kiosks, lexicographers’ offices, mountain meadows, newspaper rooms, Oxford, parking lots, queer bars, restaurants, South America, taxis, underpasses, volleyball courts, waiting-rooms, xylophone schools, yak-petting zoos, zouave recruitment offices, auction halls, big stores, cockfight pits, deserted subway platforms, effigy burnings, Freemason halls, government offices, hospitals, intelligence bureaux, Jesuit seminaries, Knights of Malta meetings, lepers’ colonies, movie-houses, necktie parties, opium dens, Plato’s cave, quarantine stations, resplendent bordellos, sunny pink beaches, truckstop diners, utopian islands, villas, war zones, Xmas parties, youth hangouts, ziggurats, army headquarters, ballparks, churches, da Vinci’s studio, essay-writing workshops, filibuster-planning sessions, generals’ beds, hobbyists’ conventions, International Socialists’ collectives, junkies’ flophouses, klezmer bands, libraries, the moon, night-time, oil rigs of the North Sea, penitentiaries, quiet places, rainbows’ ends, slaughterhouses, theatres, un-American activities committees, voting booths, wreath-laying ceremonies, xenophobic demonstrations, yachts, or in zero-hour countdown rooms? No. In all these places, a man will never be told that he is not welcome because he is a man.

At times it was difficult travelling in Turkey. There were hassles. Because they took place under the sun of an exotic climate they often became
adventures
, something not only easier to take, but even sought after. By that bizarre paradox of travel, the worst journey — the endless bus trip, the mattress with the million creepy-crawlies, the hotel with the soft, rotten walls — becomes the best, most fondly remembered one. But when I look back now, some of these hassles were unacceptable. They had one common link: men. Men who openly
stared up and down at us. Men who cracked smiles at the sight of us and turned to their friends, pointing us out with a nod of the head. Men who brushed themselves against us to pass us in streets that were not busy. Men who brushed themselves against us to pass us in streets that were not busy
and
who ran their hands over our breasts. The young man who ran up to me from behind in a dark street of Ankara, pinched my ass and vanished just as quickly. The one in Istanbul, too. Men who clicked at us. Boys who clicked at us. Men who felt they had the right to ooze their unctuous, unwanted attentions upon us regardless of our words, opinions or indifference. Men who decided they knew what we wanted, what destination, what product, what service, what price, before we had even opened our mouths. The bus driver who, seeing that I was asleep on the last row of seats, stopped his bus on the side of the highway, came back and kissed me, so that I woke up to this stranger looming over me and pushed him away angrily, calling out to Ruth, while he walked back smiling and laughing, proud of himself. The man who exposed himself to me at a roadside stop, grinning and playing with himself.