The Pillars of Hercules

In a stiff wind, we passed Haydarpasa Railway Station, where I had planned to take my train to Ankara and Syria. But that was yesterday’s plan. I had changed my mind, and I was glad of it, for wasn’t the whole point of a Mediterranean grand tour voyaging among the great cities—from here to Izmir to Alexandria and onward? And I liked being the only yabançi—foreigner—on board. It was as though, among all these Turks, on this Turkish ship, crossing the Eastern Mediterranean, I had penetrated to the heart of Turkey.

I went back on deck to look at the last of Istanbul—“Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour”—and saw Ali creeping towards me. He signaled with his eyebrows, he pursed his lips, he dangled a key. That meant he had a cabin. He beckoned, and I followed him to a new cabin.

This is all yours, his hand gestures said. And when I passed him his baksheesh, he touched it to his forehead in a stagey show of thanks, and then slapped his heart, and I knew that as long as my money held out he was mine.

Then I was drinking fifty-cent beers in the smoky lounge and congratulating myself. It had been a frantic but worthy impulse, like leaping aboard a departing train for an unknown destination. Never mind the cigarette smoke and the filthy carpets and the Turkish muzak and the TV going at the same time. I found a corner to make notes in and read a few chapters of Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope (scandal and hypocrisy in an English village), and then just as night fell I went on deck and watched the Sea of Marmara widen into an immense sea that might have been the Mediterranean.

Having my own cabin meant that I had a refuge. And because it was on B-Deck I was entitled to eat in the Upper Class restaurant, The Kappadokya, where the captain and other officers dined. The captain was a pinkish Turk with confident jowls in a tight white shirt and white bum-bursting trousers, who looked like a village cricketer whose uniform had shrunk. He sat with six Turkish spivs and their preening wives. It was Upper Class but like the Lower Class dining room on the next deck down it was the same men in brown suits and old veiled women and frowning matrons in fifties frocks. Some of the older women looked like Jack Greenwald in a shawl, and their big benign faces made me miss him.

I was seated with an older Turkish couple. We had no language in common, but the man tapped his finger on Greenwald’s Turkish pin that I had in my lapel, and he smiled.

“Afyet olsen.” That was from my small supply of Turkish phrases. “Good eating.”

But the phrase was misplaced. The meal was not good, and a palpable air of disappointment hung in the room—silence, and then muttered remarks. It was generally a hard-up country, and these people were spending a large amount for this trip. We had that first meal: salad, pea soup, fatty meat and vegetables, and a third course of a great mass of boiled spinach; then fruit and cream for dessert. It was Turkish food but it also somewhat resembled an old-fashioned school meal.

The shawls, the brown suits, the felt hats, the clunky shoes and dowdy dresses and cigarettes were all part of the Turkish time-warp in which the Turkish middle class was still finding clothes of the 1950s stylish. Even the shipboard dishes of pickles and potato salad and lunch meat and bowls of deviled eggs were from that era, and appropriate to the old Packards and Caddies and Dodges that plied up and down Istanbul. (In a week in Turkey the average middle-aged American sees every car his father or grandfather ever owned.) It was a sedate cruise so far, the nondrinking Turks all well-behaved, very placid, and so Turkish that it seemed like mimicry, a big smoky lounge of dour Turks in heavy clothes, heading for Egypt.

But I was grateful to them for making room for me, for allowing me aboard, for being hospitable. Turks made a point of greeting strangers in the common areas of the ship. I learned the greetings, I felt lucky.

And it gave the Mediterranean its true size. It was not the trip I had planned—five days through Turkey to the middle of Syria overland, with all the roadblocks and holdups. Instead, it was a couple of days from Turkey to Egypt: overnight to Izmir, and then a day and a half to Alexandria; and a day from there to Haifa. The Eastern Basin contained many cultures, with sharp elbows, but in fact the area was rather small. It was just that the people on these shores were so combative that made this end of the Mediterranean seem large.