The Pillars of Hercules

The Turkish songs in the lounge after dinner were tremulous and plangent and repetitive, and all of them in their lovelorn way reminded me (in Samih Pasha’s translations) of how long I had been away. The musicians played: a drum, a zither, a violin, a clarinet; and the sad woman sang,

The months are passing

—

I am waiting.

Why don’t you come?

Don’t leave me alone …

The Turks sat mournfully listening, eating ice cream, drinking coffee.

Every night

I want to stroke your hair

Every night

To touch it

Your hair

Every night

At Izmir I hurried into town and called Honolulu and was reassured. I strolled to the bazaar and sat under a grape arbor and had lunch, a fish kebab and salad. I read an item in the Turkish Daily News that the government was thinking of doing away with “virginity tests on female students and the expulsion of ‘unchaste’ ones from school.” Virginity tests?

In the afternoon the Akdeniz sailed into another storm, and Fikret hugged himself in misery on deck, regretting that he had not gotten off at Izmir and taken a train back to Ankara. With fewer people on board (half had disembarked at Izmir, including Samih Pasha and Onan) the ship had a somber air; and the cold weather made the mood bleak. The next day in the iron-colored Sea of Marmara under a gray sky it was even worse.

I stood with Fikret at the rail. This sea air, however cold, was fresher than the foul air down below on this ship of chain-smokers. We passed Usküdar, where Florence Nightingale had tended the sick during the Crimean War; it was now a prison. That gave me an excuse to ask Fikret the ultimate Turkish question.

“Do you think they torture people in Usküdar?”

He shrugged. The movement of his shoulders meant “probably.”

“How do you know?”

“All countries torture,” he said.

I let this pass. I asked, “What do they do in Turkey?”

“Beating on the feet—bastinado,” he said. The word was precisely right, and I was amazed that he knew it. “Also electricity and hanging by arms.”

“This would be, what? Crucifixion?” I said, as blandly as I could manage.

“Whatever,” he said. “To get information.”

I said, “But people lie under torture, so what good is it?”

He got agitated, and his seasickness made him groggy. He repeated that everyone did it. He said, “The Germans executed the whole Baader-Meinhof gang in prison and then called it a mass suicide!”

“I think it was suicide.”

“The British government tortures Irish people!” he said.

“They used to,” I said. “But it was sleep deprivation—keeping prisoners awake at night to question them. And I think they used noise, too.”

“That is worse than the bastinado!” Fikret cried. “That can make you lose your mind!”

He looked at me reproachfully. He was seasick and upset, and I had offended him by taking advantage of our friendship to ask him nosy questions. But that was the nature of my traveling: a quest for detail, conversation as a form of ambush, the traveler as an agent of provocation.

The mood passed as Istanbul came into view, a whole hill of exotic features—the palace, the minarets, the domes, the steeples, the tower; and below it the bridge, and the water traffic in the Golden Horn.

“I am going home,” Fikret said.

“I hope you find that woman you’re looking for.”

“Yes,” he said, and gulped as he tried to swallow his anxiety. “And where are you going?”

“Two weeks ago I was headed for Syria, when I saw this ship leaving and decided to join it,” I said. “Now I really am going to Syria.”

15

The 7:20 Express to Latakia

            There was undoubtedly a more hallucinogenic experience available in poppy-growing Turkey than a long bus ride through Central Anatolia, though it was hard for me to imagine what this might be after a twenty-three-hour trip in the sulfurous interior of a bus of chain-smoking Turks, as day became twilight, turned to night, the moon passing from one side of the bus to the other, gleaming briefly in the snow of the Galatia highlands, fog settling and dispersing like phantasms, glimpses of dervishes, day dawning again, another stop, more yogurt, children crying in the backseats, full daylight in Iskenderun, rain in Antioch, all windows shut, the stale smoke condensing in brown bitter slime on the closed windows as fresh blue fumes rose from forty-nine burning cigarettes in this sleepless acid trip on the slipstream of secondhand smoke.

Being Turks, the smokers were courteous. I was repeatedly offered a cigarette. Yes, plenty for you—please take two!