Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
OtherRealms Issue 28 Part 09
Electronic OtherRealms #28
Fall, 1990
Part 9 of 18
Copyright 1990 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original
form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Romancing the Turquoise [Part 3 of 4]
The next morning brings warm sun and a trip to Kaymakli, a large
underground city. By this time, Matt is used to me, has the idea that
I've got a book idea, and helps me plan ways of defending it against
invaders. We drive over deserted roads -- and beneath two snow-capped
volcanoes, to the Ilhara Valley. It is a true canyon, bisected by the
fast Melendiz river, now in flood after some energetic rain. If you go
to the lip of the canyon and lie flat (safest way to take pictures), you
can see green poplars rising from the valley floor. The canyon walls
are honeycombed with hermitages and churches. Above the Valley is a
beautiful lodge and a series of staircases. I try not to think of how
much fun I'm going to have crawling back up those stairs. Compared to
this, high-impact aerobics is for sissies.
A guard at the valley floor warns us: the Melendiz has washed out all
approaches to the caves. If we want to see the Serpent Church, we'll
have to climb. There are already Germans on the rocks. We help them
with their cameras, are thanked in Oxford-accented English, and we start
clambering too. I have time to thank God that I'm wearing sturdy
clothes (unlike some of the women tourists who are wearing skirts and
high heels) and that I've done enough reading about rock climbing to
know that you always keep three points anchored. I am keeping up.
"Hey, Matt," I gasp between handholds. "You ever see Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade?"
"I hate snakes!" he shouts. We scramble over the rocks to what looks
like a two-story church, carved in the rocks. It looks like the place
in Indy where they kept the Grail. I take a few pictures to show people
back home what a couch potato is capable of...
...which reminds me of the way time is passing. I'm hungry, and I have
to get back to Ankara in time to change for that lecture and dinner
party. I explain this to Matt and receive an object lesson in the way a
culture that doesn't value hustle-and-hassle for their own sakes reacts
to a need to hurry up.
Given an American-style adrenaline hassle, we'd skip or skimp lunch, the
driver would have a fit, and we'd start back, me worrying and whimpering
all the way. Turkish-style travel consists of a leisurely and delicious
lunch while looking out over the spectacular drop into the valley,
followed by a drive with stops for pictures, tea, rest, and chats with
the other drivers. A German bus roars into the rest stop. Its
undercarriage holds a refrigerated compartment for beer and soda. A
Turkish tour bus pulls up. Its undercarriage holds pillows and quilts
so the driver can rest while his charges buy postcards. I sip tea out
of a tiny, tulip-shaped glass and wait for everyone to finish. Much to
my astonishment, I'm not even fidgety.
American-style traveling, and I'd probably be late. Traveling Turkish
style, I get back in plenty of time to say elaborate thanks and
farewells, wash every stitch I packed, and get changed for the lecture
on Hattusas. I even have time to walk down there and introduce myself to
Toni Cross and Peter Neve, the guest speaker. He's conspicuous not only
for having spent his entire professional life shuttling between Hittite
Turkey and Berlin, but for recovering from a broken back, helped by his
faithful kangal (yes, he's domesticated one of the creatures), who
refused to let people move him and lay by his side in the snow until
medical help came.
Toni introduces me to her friend Joy, who is hoping to write a
children's book set in Sardis. It sounds interesting, so I outline How
Books Are Published, give her my card, and suggest that we keep in
touch.
Not everyone at the dinner has an interest in archeology. These
meetings are a good way for the English-speaking community or Turkish
exchange students to meet each other. I speak to a woman working on a
dissertation on theatre and a British civil engineer.
After the lecture comes a dinner at the Kara Deniz, or Black Sea, in one
of the oldest parts of Ankara. For part of it, the entertainment seems
to be "let's watch the newcomer try to drink raki." Turkish raki, like
Greek ouzo, turns white on exposure to water and tastes like a collison
between grain alcohol and liquorice. The Turks call it "lion's milk."
Instead, I take my first cautious sip to laughter and applause when I
manage not to cough.
"You don't have to drink it," Sarge tells me. But Peter Neve
contradicts him. You will drink your raki...it occurs to me that if I
don't, he could sic that kangal of his -- elderly now, but with all his
teeth -- on me.
I drink the raki. Toni's husband Ihsan mercifully shows me how to
dilute it with ice water. I find myself getting used to it, or maybe
it's simply burned out my taste buds. When Ihsan hears my story of the
drive from Cappadocia, he agrees: "There is balance to all things," he
intones. "There are two groups of people -- people who like to work and
people who enjoy life...like the Turks. I think things should stay this
way."
Is it too late, I ask, to change sides?
The second part of the evening is enlivened by the arrival of a very
heavy hitter from New York who is reporting on human rights. She's
classing Turkey with North Korea, El Salvador, and several other
countries known for human rights abuses. She is hard-hitting to the
point of being abrasive. I make myself scarce and silent. Sarge goes
even more silent, then zings her with one well-chosen question. She is
reasonably pleasant thereafter. When she finds out I'm a novelist, doing
research in Turkey, she offers to nominate me for PEN.
Wait till she finds out what I write.
Friday (May 18) is my last day in Ankara. I revisit the Museum of
Anatolian civilizations, join Sarge, Toni, and Joy for lunch, then find
myself back at ARIT (American Research In Turkey) which Toni manages in
Ankara, happily sitting at a long table and researching what could be
the start of a historical novel set in Cappadocia.
I end my stay in Ankara at a party for a South American diplomat who is
being transferred to Iran and is candidly happy at the idea of seeing
Isfahan and Persepolis. No accounting for tastes. The party, about
equally divided between foreigners and Turks, is a notable one; the
hostess, an American musician and artist married to a lawyer, has
brought in a Turkish musician who sings and plays the flute and what
looks like an autoharp but is called a kanun. At one point, several of
the Turkish women and some of the teenaged girls get up and dance.
Exaggerated and with beads added, this is the belly dance of nightclubs.
In a private home and in the presence of friends, it is decorous and
charming.
To my horror, I find myself in a discussion of the American and Turkish
stock markets with an American lawyer, who visited Turkey for three
weeks and promptly left a job in one of the most prestigious Wall Street
firms so he could join a firm that would station him in Ankara, and a
Turkish banker, engaged to another American. To the lawyer's shock, I
not only read Harry Harrison, I know him and his wife. His girlfriend,
a British engineer, is delighted.
A music tape interrupts; it's Ladino chants -- and Sephardic music
(Spanish, Hebrew, with a lot of Arabic influence) always makes me cry.
It occurs to me that I am going to miss Ankara and the friends I've made
here.
Kutahya and Culture Shock
Success this weekend! Even though Sarge's car is still in the shop,
awaiting parts from Germany, he has rented the Mercedes Jeep from the
Embassy motor pool. No fears that I'll break a door handle or that an
axle will snap on a back road with this thing, which could moonlight as
a tank.
We take off for Gordion, where Alexander cut the knot. It wasn't a new
place then; one of the largest hoyuks in Anatolia marks the tomb of a
king popularly supposed to be King Midas. There are some fine pebble
mosaics and a good local museum; once again, we can thank Ataturk for
the wise policy of allowing regions to keep some of their antiquities
rather than shipping them all off to Ankara.
"Midas's Tomb" is a huge barrow, as barrows go; and it is centered in an
area full of such mounds, tombs of lesser nobles. The archeologists got
lucky on this one. They entered the tomb from above, and almost the
first thing they heard was the sound of wood decomposing as air touched
it for the first time in 2,000 years. Fortunately, they had chemical
preservatives on-site; the tomb -- which you reach via a long, cold
underground passage, is in a fine state of preservation.
We climb to the top of the hoyuk, and I pick up some pyrite. Fool's
gold from Midas's Tomb -- an object lesson for a person whose day job is
on Wall Street. We climb another hoyuk from which the antiquities were
scooped. Two barrows in an hour, and the blood-caffeine level is down.
By the time I get over the ensuing nap attack, it's time for lunch.
Unfortunately, it's also May 19, Youth and Sports Day (mandated by
Ataturk), and what seems like half the Turkish Army and Air Force is out
on the road in buses on the way to three-day furloughs. The roadside
place where we stop is crowded with armed people, all of whom are
considerably less rowdy than American soldiers might be and who politely
ignore me. Unfortunately, we miss the restaurant that sells live trout
in a pool outside the eating area. At least, Sarge thinks it's
unfortunate; the last one of those I saw in Cappadocia had a kangal
sleeping outside it. No doubt, he was guarding the fish.
Given the capabilities of Mercedes Jeep, why stick to the highway? (Why
stick to the highway in any case?) The mud road we find climbs rapidly
into an area of ground scrub, stunted pine, and pure chalk; though it's
easily 80 degrees out, it looks as if we're driving through snow, broken
occasionally by the rush of swollen streams. The road specializes in
hairpin turns and switchbacks; frequent checks of a German survey map
mean that I lean over and take the wheel, except when I see trucks, farm
equipment, or kangal.
But the view on the occasional straightaways is breathtaking. Less
mountainous and dramatic than Switzerland, less raw than the American
West, but far tougher, in a way, than either. This whole area is
seabed, raised millions of years ago. It is rounded off, ancient; and I
definitely do have the sense that all Asia lies before me. No wonder
Alexander wanted to journey to World's End.
Just at the point I decide for the thousandth time that Alexander had a
good idea and I'm already considerably older than he at the time of his
death so I'd better get a move on it, Sarge resumes control of the
steering wheel. Damn!
I will never know the name of the village at which we arrived in
mid-afternoon. One moment, we are dodging the usual children, roosters,
sheep, and cats. The next moment, "Look at that inscription on that
stone!" he exclaims and we stop right after a bridge. Sure enough, just
as in Surusulay, the stone has been cannibalized from an earlier
building, Roman at a guess.
The men leave off lounging in the middle of the road to talk to Sarge.
To their surprise, he is not German, but American: they get few tourists
and fewer Americans there. I get out my camera, a procedure that draws
the village's children. To my surprise, many of them are girls. Living
as far from a major town as they do, they are shy, but fearless. The
women leave off doing laundry in the clean, fast river and approach
speculatively. We stare, then look down quickly and decorously. A young
girl runs up to me. I'd have thought her a child, but she apparently
feels very mature; she is in charge of the other children and wears a
headscarf like a grown lady. What's more, she has painted her palms, as
grown women do (Benazir Bhutto did so before her wedding) with henna,
which is used in the Middle East as a cosmetic as well as hair coloring.
Proudly she shows them to me. After all, doesn't every adult woman
understand about these things?
"Henna!" I say, so she'll know she's gotten her message across. "What a
pretty girl you are. You're all grown up!"
She understands my voice, if nothing else. As if some signal is given,
the children swarm after me.
Shortly afterward, Sarge introduces me to a village elder, who will be
our guide for some Byzantine ruins and Pontic hill tombs. We start to
climb into the Jeep; but not yet. The eldest girl runs forward with a
loaf of bread, hot from the oven.
"You have to break bread first and offer it about," Sarge warns me.
"Use your right hand." The elder shakes his head yok (no) proudly: this
is a gift and there's far more at home.
Turkish bread is great, and this is the best I've had. We much on it
all day and share it with unwary tourists we meet.
The plan is to reach Kutahya, where potters and artists have revived the
art of making fine pottery from both Turkish and Persian designs, by
nightfall. Traveling Turkish-style, with pauses for pictures, scenery,
and some monumental rock carvings of arslans and serpents, we go slowly.
Near sundown we pass through a town with the wonderful name of
Cavdarhisar. I don't see the hill-fort, but ..."My God, there's a
temple on the roadside!" We've reached Aizanos, where the Temple of
Jupiter forms part of one of the largest and best-preserved Roman
complexes in Anatolia. Some boys are playing soccer nearby. We prowl
the ruins of temple, bath, and amphitheatre till the sun dies and the
cats come out.
Then, on to Kutahya. The manager clearly decides that we are people of
the highest possible respectability...for Americans. I am escorted to a
room on an aile (aile means suitable for women and families) floor where
there isn't just an outer locked door but an inner one.
From my honorable and ladylike seclusion, I lean out the window to watch
the Youth and Sports Day parade, an affair of drums, guns, and torches
with decidedly Hittite overtones.
The manager is appalled at Sarge's choice of restaurant and runs out
into the street to warn him: it's been turned into a beer garden. The
restaurant he considers suitable is charming. All I can say is that the
honor of his hotel is safe with him.
I find some wonderful pottery in Kutahya, including a plate designed by
one artist who shows me an English-language clipping of him receiving an
award in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a site of pottery-making that the Kutahya
masters greatly respect.
We visit a mosque that looks more like an eighteenth-century building
than the medieval one it actually is and the house of a Hungarian
freedom fighter, whose revolutions failed and who took refuge in
Anatolia. It's a fine house, but seeing it makes me melancholy. No
doubt he was contented, with his European-style study, his money chest,
his letters, his books, his plans, and visitors from, no doubt, every
activist in Europe. But what of his wife, son, and daughter? Stubbornly
French-style clothes and a little inlaid spinet remind me of them.
Though the gardens here are beautiful, I wonder what that family found
when it ventured outside them.
Sailing to Byzantium
And, then, suddenly it is time to get me to Eskesehir to catch the train
to Istanbul! No one's going to believe that I've got dust in my contact
lenses, are they? Didn't think so.
Part of my shakiness is pure fear. For the first time, I'll be facing
Turkey without benefit of friends, guides, or tour bus. And the Mavi
Tren, the deluxe Blue Train I'd hoped to take to the City, is sold out.
"I've got half a mind to drive you back to Ankara and put you on a plane
tomorrow," Sarge mutters. I promise him I've got more guts than I'm now
displaying. I've also got his phone number, the Embassy's phone number,
and the names and phone numbers of three people in Istanbul who have
said it's okay for me to get in touch.
Hell, teenagers have backpacked all over the world with less concern;
what's the problem? Analyzing the problem from the standpoint of a
science fiction writer produces the answer: like Magdalen Lorne in the
Darkover stories, I have adopted enough local customs to have
assimilated some of them. The conservative, properly-brought-up woman
I've been "playing" would feel some distress at traveling to Istanbul
alone. Accordingly, I'm nervous. Get out of character, I order myself.
I am put into the charge of an official who makes sure that the mad
American doesn't stand on the platform for everyone to stare at, but
sits inside like a proper lady (he motions two other tourists to move
down and leave me room) and that I get into the right car and seat.
The seat is occupied. I present my ticket to a middle-aged man and his
head-shawled wife, and look very embarrassed. Half the Third World
seems to be staring at me. The other half is holding veils over its
mouth. No harm, of course; just curiosity. This has ceased being
Romancing the Stone and become Kim. The literary reference consoles me.
I sink into the seat and try not to disgrace myself further. Some
helpful men show me by gestures how to take care of my ticket. Ignoring
my efforts, they lift my suitcase into the luggage rack.
If this is an Express Train, I'm Rudyard Kipling. It occurs to me that,
for the time being, I am.
A line from Left Hand of Darkness also occurs to me: "When action grows
unprofitable, gather information. When gathering information becomes
unprofitable, sleep." I sleep. By the time I wake, we are passing
through mountains -- sometimes with only about three feet separating the
train from the rock face.
By midnight, we have reached Haydarpasa Station, outside Istanbul. From
here, I must catch the ferry. Not to Kadikoy, but to Karakoy; and God
help me if I screw up. Fortunately, I fall in with a Turkish lady from
Adona. Waving aside my baby-talk Turkish, she guides me in English; and
I wonder if she doesn't work at the Joint Forces base (NATO) in the
south.
The ferry begins its chug across the Bosphorus.
For a moment, things seem familiar. There's a train station, a ferry,
and a city ahead: how's this any different from Staten Island, with the
Statue of Liberty coming up?
Then I glance across the black water. Spotlighted on the far bank are
clusters of minarets and the great sullen bulks of domes. A middle-aged
Turkish lady is watching me, and I appeal to her. "Is that Ayasofya?"
(Hagia Sophia) I ask in my few words of Turkish.
When she smiles, nods, and says "Evet" (yes), I lose it. Completely. I
have dreamt of this moment all my life. I've written four books set
here. What I've come halfway round the world to see is shining out
there in front of me.
"It's so beautiful," I whisper, wiping my face. "It's just so
beautiful. I've wanted to be here all my life."
[continued]
------ End ------
