The Pillars of Hercules

Every so often there is a bomb scare in Turkey, sometimes involving the American Embassy. A telephone threat is made, a location is described. A man describing himself as a bomber hangs up. Then the counterterrorists go into action. Sophisticated thermal imaging equipment is brought to bear on an ominous-looking parcel left in a doorway. As many as a hundred men might have surrounded the parcel, to provide cover for those disarming it. In many instances the bomb-disposal experts find a large ripe cucumber in the parcel, with a note saying, This is what you are!

A television set at the front of the bus began showing a violent video of a sub-Rambo sort, all explosions, gunfire, and mutilation. I read Hindoo Holiday. I gagged on the cigarette smoke. The smoke gave me a headache. If the bus were stopped by Kurds they would look for a foreigner (so I was told) and find only me. I would be held captive and used with the utmost brutality. I wondered whether the Kurds smoked. If not, being their prisoner did not seem so bad.

After dark, at a cold windy pit stop, I bought a glass of yogurt.

“What did you pay for that?” Rashid asked me.

“Twenty thousand,” I said. Fifty cents.

“Life is so expensive here,” he said. “In Antakya you could get that for eight thousand.” Twenty cents.

He was making a return trip. He had arrived in Istanbul the day before to receive an order for his metalworking shop in Antakya. To save money he slept at the bus station and came straight back. He hated Istanbul anyway.

“And these,” he said, waving a pack of cigarettes. “Fifty thousand! Go ahead, take one—”

I read Up at the Villa, in which a pretty widow gets a proposal of marriage from a distinguished man about to take an important post in India. She needs time to think about it. The man departs. That night the woman goes to a party, where a young rascal proposes marriage to her. She laughs at him, saying she does not believe in love, but would like to use her beauty and make an unfortunate man happy for just one night. That same night she picks up an impoverished man who had been a waiter at the party. She takes him to her villa, prepares a meal for him, makes love to him, and then tells him why. The young man is so insulted he shoots himself. She panics and calls the rascal, who helps her get rid of the body. The distinguished man is scandalized when he hears what has happened, and the pretty widow ends up with the rascal, who spirits her away before the body is found.

I liked the idea of a great scheme (marriage to an ambitious and successful man) being undone by a single unthought-out act, but this frantic night was unbelievable. And I objected to the book because it did not sufficiently remove me from the irritating reality of noxious smoke and bad air and coughing passengers in the lurching bus.

Into Ankara, out again, through mountain passes, under snowy cliffs, past cold fields where low fog had gathered in ghostly wisps, and onward between black crags, and above it all a huge ivory cue-ball moon.

“I worked in Saudi Arabia,” a man named Fatih told me at another pit stop in the darkness. “I went to Mecca and Medina.”

“So you made the Hajj?”

“No, no, no. If you do that, you can’t drink alcohol and whatnot afterwards.”

He would purify himself with a Hajj some other time, when he was older, and past any carnal desire.

We eventually came to the middle of Turkey, Tuz Golu, a great lake, with the moon gleaming upon it; and another stop at two in the morning in cold clammy Aksaray, an area well known for its desolation and monotony and mud houses. I stood and stamped my feet and took deep breaths, and then reboarded and read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of neurological case histories. It was a salutary book—Oliver Sacks is full of sympathy for afflicted strangers and he usually determines that these people have developed strengths and gifts as compensation for the supposed defects. Also: “There is often a struggle, and sometimes more interestingly a collusion between the power of pathology and creation.” That was certainly true. If you were happy and normal why would you ever want to write a book? Indeed, why would you be on this bus at all? There was an aspect of dementia to the act of writing as there was to a desire to travel, but as Sacks pointed out, dementia was nothing to be ashamed of, and indeed was often a useful spur to imaginative or creative acts.