The Pillars of Hercules

Fikret shrugged. He did not complain. We went to a restaurant and had bean soup and salad and rice. The waiter was perspiring in the heat, his hair plastered to his head. A man carved slices from the upright log of grilled meat chunks called a doner kepab and mocked us for not trying some of the greasy scraps. A beggar woman crawled inside the door and sang pathetically, I am in trouble—Allah sent the trouble to me, until the man standing at the meat log threatened her with his meat fork.

“I want to ask you about marriage,” Fikret said.

Now I knew why he had seemed so preoccupied. I said, “What’s on your mind?”

“I have been thinking about marriage.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-six. But I have never been married,” he said. “How old should the woman be?”

“Have you had a woman friend?”

“A young one. She was twenty-eight, a nurse,” Fikret said. “She was too young for me. I told her to go back to her young man. But she was nice. And she was my height.”

The height issue was important to Fikret. He was rather short. I said, “Why do you want to get married?”

“I don’t like to be alone. I live with my brother,” he said. “He is not married. He is discreet. But—” He leaned closer. “Please tell me what to do.”

“Find a friend, not a wife,” I said. “Don’t think about her age. If you like her and she likes you, everything will be fine. Maybe you will marry her.”

This did not console him. He was still fretting.

“My life is not getting any better,” he said.

“Fikret, don’t look so desperate.”

“I think my life is getting worse.”

We went to a cafe down on the seafront for dessert and were served by a pretty waitress. Fikret smiled. I urged him to talk to her. She was a Turkish immigrant, having fled from “Bulgaristan”—Bulgaria was full of Turks, Fikret said. He named six former Soviet republics as Turkish, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang? “That’s Turkish, too.” He talked awhile with the waitress. But she was married. She had gotten married just a month ago. Fikret shrugged. Just his luck.

“This seems a sad place,” I said, as we walked along the shore afterwards. “Why is that?”

“It is isolated,” he said with such suddenness I realized that the word was in his mind. He felt isolated too, and sad.

On the way back to Gazimagosa, across the plains, Fikret said that one of the most famous Turkish fortune-tellers lived in that town. Her name was Elmas—the Turkish word for diamond—and she was noted for being so prescient that people came from all over to have her read their palms. Not just Turks, but people from many countries.

“They send her plane tickets and money, so that she can visit,” he said. “She knows everything.”

“Let’s find her,” I said. “We can ask her about your future.”

But, looking for her in Gazimagosa, we were told that we were too late.

“After five o’clock Elmas does not say anything,” a Turk in town told us. “You can find her, but she will not speak.”

We walked in the failing light through the town towards the port. When night fell, Turkish Cyprus was in darkness, because electricity was so scarce. Children chased each other in the dark, screeching miserably, the way children in the water howl and thrash, pretending to be drowning.

How strange that a place that had been so important, even illustrious in history, could be so decrepit. The north coast was associated with Richard the Lionhearted, who had led his Crusaders in a victory that gave them command of three castles at the edge of the Kyrenia Mountains, which they held. The Venetians had built the town’s fortifications. The original of Othello had done some of his soldiering here. More recently this eastern coast was noted for its beaches. Lawrence Durrell had written his book Bitter Lemons not far from the spot in Girne where Fikret said, “It is isolated.” Now it was a backwater, with U.N. soldiers guarding the Green Line and twenty-seven thousand Turkish troops hunkered down in the hinterland.

This was one of the few places the Akdeniz stopped, where the local food was worse than that on the ship. At dinner we saw Samih Pasha and Onan, who had just arrived back from Girne and the Turkish Officers’ Club.

Onan said, “I have been feeling bad because we left you.”

“You had to do your duty,” I said. “I had not realized that you were a gazi.”

“I am not a gazi,” Onan said. Samih Pasha had begun to laugh.

I said, “I know it must be important to you to discuss your battles with the other gazis in the Officers’ Club. And of course the Pasha had to do the same, reliving his famous window-breaking attack on Lefkosa.”

I kept it up, jeering at them for abandoning Fikret and me in Girne. Onan remained stern and apologetic. Fikret laughed—it was good to hear: he laughed so seldom.

Samih Pasha peered at me and said, “There is something about you.”