The Pillars of Hercules

The weather turned windy after we left Cyprus, but there were fierce storms elsewhere in the Levant, the captain told me. Storms could be terrible here. “The waves breaking across the ship, so it is like a submarine.” Alexandria was a difficult harbor to enter in a storm. “One time I spent five days going back and forth, one hundred miles east, one hundred miles west, before we could go in.”

The Akdeniz became for me like a seedy hotel in which I was an old-time resident. A Turkish hotel: the food, the music, the greetings, the courtesies, the wives in their old-fashioned frocks and shawls, the old soldiers, the young boy who spoke English well and was funny, the old woman—possibly crazy—who ranted at me in Turkish, “My name Ali” doing my laundry and overcharging me, then pretending to be surprised when I tipped him, the waiter who looked like Tom Selleck, the barman who said, “The usual?” The round of odd meals, cucumbers for breakfast, big meaty lunches, obscure stews at night.

The General, Samih Pasha, was always at the head of the table. I encouraged him to tell us war stories, and he obliged. His stories usually emphasized the courage of Turkish fighter pilots in NATO exercises. Where accuracy was concerned, the crucial factor in fighter bombing was nerve.

“You have to be brave,” Samih Pasha said. “Going maybe five hundred miles per hour. If you are not brave, you release the bombs too soon. The brave ones release bombs at the last minute for a hit, then count one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, and pull the stick.” He grinned, the tips of his mustache rising. “The G-force take you. Maybe you black out. But you are climbing.”

The Italian pilots were appalling, the Greeks even worse. The Turks on the other hand were so deadly that in a bombing raid of four planes the first two planes obliterated the target, leaving nothing for the last planes to bomb.

Samih Pasha’s high military status as a three-star general had gotten him a special passport. He did not need a visa to enter Germany. He had a multiple-entry visa for the USA. He showed me his military passport.

“Good passport,” he said.

“That’s not just a special passaport,” I said. “That’s a Pasha-port.”

He thought this was screamingly funny, though neither of the other Turks laughed.

At another meal I began baiting them about the Greeks. We had just been to Cyprus and seen the misery of the Turks on this divided island. And what about the Armenians?

“Ignorant people in Turkey might say things,” Fikret said. “But if you live with Greeks and Armenians you see they are good people. You understand them. Prejudice is ignorance.”

“I agree,” Onan said.

“And people who live far away from them have images of them that are untrue. But we like them.”

“But what about their Turko-phobia?” I said.

“That is understandable,” Fikret said. “Why should we blame them? Armenians too—we should understand, though I am sorry to say they believe that part of Anatolia belongs to them.”

In spite of my needling, the only criticism they offered was that it was said that Greeks and Armenians did not trust each other. “But we don’t know if this is true.”

It was relaxing to travel among people with so few prejudices, who were so ready to laugh, who could let themselves be mercilessly interrogated by me. They had a rare quality for people so individualistic—politeness. I also believed Samih Pasha when he claimed that Turkish soldiers were brave. Many had been sent to Korea, to fight on the U.S. side in the Korean war. Some had been captured and, refusing to talk, had died under torture.

I thought I might tap a vein of cruelty if I mentioned capital punishment. Mentioning the candidates in the U.S. elections who had campaigned advocating hanging-and-flogging policies, I asked how they would vote.

“I am a military man—a general,” Samih Pasha said. “All my life my job was to kill people. But I am against all hanging.”

“Because it is cruel?” I asked.

“It is cruel, yes, but it is also unjust,” he said. “That is most important. How can you be so sure? And for people to be sentenced and then wait ten or fifteen years on appeal is horrible.”

“In Iran they do it all the time,” Fikret said.

I said, “We do, too.”

“But not so much,” Onan said.

“Clinton believes in it,” I said, and told him the Florida and Texas figures; that thirty-seven states had the death penalty; and that New York was probably going to get it, as their new governor had promised it.

The Turks were silent. Samih Pasha said, “Terrible.”

That night the storm grew worse, and Istanbul was still two days off. Fikret got seasick. “I don’t like this weather,” he said. “I think I should get off the ship in Izmir.” It was not only a rough sea, with a stiff wind, the air temperature had dropped. Just a few days ago we had been in the heat of Haifa, and now everyone was wearing heavy clothes and complaining.