The Pillars of Hercules

The Akdeniz had hired a bus for those Turks who wanted to go to Jerusalem. A number of people had signed up for the trip, but many—as in Egypt—were interested in looking at Ottoman sights, whatever Turkish castles and fortresses they could locate. The passengers on the Seabourne Spirit were offered a four-hour tour of the whole of Israel, called “The Holy Land by Helicopter.” It is a very small place, and so this was not as odd as it sounded, and the helicopter tour took in all the main cities, including Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Nazareth, and ended at the citadel of Masada—the scene of the famous massacre—with hampers of picnic food, and chilled champagne.

I had no particular plans in Israel, just a general desire to travel down the Mediterranean coast, to Tel Aviv and Gaza; to see Jerusalem; to pay a visit to a writer in Nazareth, who was Arab and Christian and an Israeli citizen. But this was all premature, because when I went into the Akdeniz’s lounge to collect my passport I found myself surrounded by armed men.

“Israeli security,” one man said. “Is this you?”

It was my passport, the page with my goofy picture on it.

“Yes.”

“Come with us.”

I was taken to a corner of the lounge, while the Turkish passengers looked at me with pity. They were the problem, not me. Every one of the other passengers, the whole crew, the officers—from the captain to the lowliest swabbie—every person on board the Akdeniz was a Turk.

“You speak Turkish?” one of the Israeli security men asked.

“No.”

“But everyone on this ship is Turkish.”

“Some of them speak English,” I said.

“Are you traveling with someone?”

“No.”

A man flicking through my passport said, “You have been to Syria.”

“No,” I said. “That visa’s been canceled. I had to pick up my passport early in order to catch this ship. Out of spite the Syrians wouldn’t give me a visa.”

“Why are you the only American on this ship?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What is your profession?”

I hesitated. I said, “I’m in publishing.”

These men wore pistols, two of them had machine guns. They did not wear uniforms, but they were soberly dressed and seemed very intent on discovering how an American could be traveling alone with so many Turks.

“And now I’m a tourist,” I said.

It hurt me to have to admit that, but I thought generally that tourists got away with murder and that being a tourist was an excuse for any sort of stupidity or clumsiness. You can’t do anything to me—I’m a tourist!

“What are you going to do in Israel?”

“Look around, then leave.”

“What do you have in your pockets?”

“You want to search me?”

A woman approached. She muttered impatiently in Hebrew, and it had to have been, “What’s going on here?” The men muttered back at her, and showed her my passport.

“Yes,” she said. “This ship is Turkish. The people are all Turkish. But you—why are you on board?”

“Because they sold me a ticket.”

“Where did you buy it?”

“Istanbul,” I said.

And at this point, faced by Israeli Security and having questions barked at me, I was on the verge of asking whether this was a traditional Israeli way of greeting strangers: sharp questions and even sharper gun-muzzles in my face.

“What are you doing here?” the woman was asking me, as she leafed through my passport, the sixty pages filled, as you know, with exotic stamps—China, India, Pakistan, Fiji, New Guinea, Rarotonga, Great Britain, Albania. She flipped to the first page.

“Are you the writer?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “I have read your books.” She said something in Hebrew to the security men. “Now I know why you are on that ship.”

“Thank you. Does that mean I can go?”

“Okay. No problem,” she said, and wished me well.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Akdeniz, the Cimonoglu family and others were being divested of their passports. “Because we are young—we have the whole family, even children, with us,” the mother, Aysegul, told me later. “They think we want to stay in Israel and take jobs! But we have jobs in Turkey! I will write an angry letter to the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul.”

What are you doing here? was a question I usually felt too ignorant to answer. My answer had to be: Just looking.

Curiosity was my primary impulse—sniffing around. But I also wanted to see things as they are, especially the aspects of any country that were likely to change. The look and the feel of a place, the people—what I could grasp of their lives. Politics seldom interested me, because there were too many sides, too many versions, too much concern with power and not enough with justice.

Most of the time I felt like a flea. I could not pretend that I was part of a place, that I had entered the life of it. I was a spectator, certainly, but an active one. I was also passing the time, and there was nothing unworthy about that. Most people like to think they are in search of wisdom. That was not my motive. Perhaps it was all very simple, even simpler than curiosity and that, in all senses of the phrase, I was making connections.