Ghost Train to the Eastern Star Page 8

  "Nomadism," he said. "The storytelling tradition is strong in Turkey because of our seasonal migrations. Iran has been settled for twenty-five hundred years. Greece is sedentary. But Turkish society has a dynamic structure. Because of this constant movement we became storytellers."

  All that remained, before I took the night express to Ankara, was a visit to the dentist. I had a loose filling, and fearing that the discomfort would only get worse over the next weeks or months, I asked for a recommendation.

  That was how I came to be sitting, canted back in a chair, being examined by Dr. Isil Evcimik, who was a pleasant woman in her late forties with a reassuringly well-equipped office. Cuddly toys dangled nearby, to cheer up anxious children. They cheered me up too, and when Dr. Evcimik told me that her daughter was at Princeton, on a full scholarship, I felt I was in good hands.

  It seemed part of Dr. Evcimik's technique to murmur a running commentary on what she happened to be doing at any given time. With a hypodermic syringe in one hand and a swab in the other she said, "I will first swab"—and she swabbed my gums—"and then we wait a little." We waited a little. "Then I put the needle in very slowly. Please tell me if it hurts." It didn't. "Good. Now we wait a little more."

  Was the tooth cold- or heat-sensitive? she wondered.

  I didn't know, but it was sensitive.

  "Can be either. Can be both. But better if it's one or the other."

  She explained reversible sensitivity. That could happen to me. Or there was irreversible sensitivity. "In that case, you might need a root canal. Where are you going to next?"

  "Georgia. Azerbaijan."

  "A root canal in Azerbaijan? I don't think so." She selected a drill, saying, "Now I will drill amalgam." She drilled the loose cement out of the tooth and said, "This is amalgam." She sprayed the tooth, she drilled some more. She then mixed a substance on a dish. "This is composite. This will taste very bad. Please don't swallow any—it's not poison, though."

  I sat, mouth agape, listening.

  "Now I will fill." She tamped the composite into the hole. "This"—with a flourish of a tool—"is a bonding agent. We will apply. And then"—a flash of silver—"a collar. Like a belt around the tooth, so you can floss." More manipulation. "Not done yet. It's high. I will smooth it." She did so. "Please bite on this." I did so twice. "How is it?"

  "Better."

  "I don't like 'better.'"

  She buzzed it some more, she perfected it, she told me that she had always wanted to visit Hawaii, and to this end she gave me her bill, a bargain at the Turkish equivalent of $153.

  When I told Dr. Evcimik I was taking the train that night to Ankara, she said, "That's the best way to go. The plane is expensive and lots of trouble. The airport is far and there are always delays. When I go to Ankara myself I always take the train."

  It was still raining in Istanbul. The rain had followed me from Paris, and it had defined each city—making Paris glisten with scattered light; giving the Budapest streets a slop of snow and mud and darkening the mildew on its buildings; muddying Bucharest and filling its potholes with black puddles. But in Istanbul the rain gave the roads a somnolent nobility, because it was a city of waterways and domes and slender minarets and towers that glowed in the diffused light of the downpour. The buildings were masterpieces, but what I remembered was how, at a distance, they were transformed by the rain.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO ANKARA

  THE CENTURY-OLD STATION at Haydarpasa was floodlit and looked like an opera house on the night I crossed the Bosporus to take the night express to Ankara. "A railway here in Asia—in the dreamy realm of the Orient ... is a strange thing to think of," Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad, when he was in Turkey. "And yet they have one already, and are building another." My night train was leaving at ten-thirty, but I arrived an hour early, sliding to the pier on the ferry from the far bank. The whole station had been renovated. It was obviously regarded as a venerable building, worth preserving; the restoration had been extensive. Years ago, dark and decrepit, its days seemed to be numbered. Now that the train was the best way to go from Istanbul to Ankara, investment in the railways had increased.

  The conductor in his new uniform was also an encouraging sign that Turkish railways were in good shape. He was standing by the stairs to the sleeping car. He greeted me, welcomed me aboard, and helped me locate my couchette. I saw that there was a dining car on this train. The carriages were new. All this was a kind of heaven—a private berth, a cozy cabin, a book to read (I was reading Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace), and twelve hours of comfort ahead of me. No border to cross, no interruptions. The other passengers were businessmen, wearing suits, carrying briefcases; a family with two children; and some shrouded women.

  Turkish manti (dumplings) were on the dining car menu: flour cubes, cheese, meat, and spices, served with lentil soup and a glass of wine. After eating I turned in, read a chapter of The Flea Palace, and, rocked gently by the movement of the train, hearing the rain lashing the windows, fell asleep.

  I awoke eight hours later in bright sunshine, the first rainless day since leaving London, in the dry rough hills and the gravesites and tumuli of Gordion, about sixty miles west of Ankara, where Alexander had slashed the hard-to-pick knot.

  Nearer Ankara were new houses, gated communities, college campuses, rows of tenements—the building boom that seemed to be general around the growing cities of Turkey. On my first trip I had summarized Turkey as a peasant economy with colorful ruins, but modernized, mechanized, it had undergone a transformation: it was an exporter of food, literacy was high, and the trains had improved, though most people took buses because the roads were so good.

  There was no train to Trabzon; I'd have to take a bus, I was told as soon as I arrived in Ankara and announced my intention of traveling northeast to Georgia and Azerbaijan. My plan was to circumvent Iran while staying on the ground.

  I'd been invited to give a talk in Ankara, and it was hinted to me that the setting would be formal. That meant I'd need a necktie, an article I did not possess. I bought one for a few dollars, and that night, to the invited guests, I enlarged on my theme of the return journey, how it reveals the way the world works, and makes fools of pundits and predictors. How it showed, too, the sort of traveler I had been, what I'd seen, what I'd missed the first time. I was not in search of news—had never been, I said. I wanted to know more about the world, about people's lives. I wasn't a hawk in my travels; more a butterfly. But revelation was granted to even the most aimless traveler, who was happier and more receptive to impressions.

  "An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats.

  And wisdom is a butterfly

  And not a gloomy bird of prey.

  Ankara, which had seemed to me long ago a dusty outpost at the edge of the known world, had become a thriving city, important for its manufacturing, bright, youthful, sprawling across the dusty hills and ravines, with three large universities at its periphery. Culturally it had reclaimed its past, the golden age of bull worshipers and philosophers who had flourished thousands of years before, to the west of Ankara at Hatusa.

  Mingling with the people who'd attended my talk, many of them academics or politicians, I was told in confidence by a whispering man that they were against the war in Iraq and wished the United States had never invaded.

  This mustached man tapped the air with his finger and said to me, "Not a single person in this room is in favor of what America is doing in Iraq." Perhaps self-conscious of his generalization, he turned to look at the hundred or so people in the room he had just characterized, and noticing some Americans, he added, "The Turkish ones, anyway. All of us are against it."

  "We were a Turkoman family in Iraq," a woman said to me, and introduced herself as Professor Emel Dogramaci of Çankaya University. "We were powerful in Kirkuk." By powerful, she meant wealthy. The family had become philanthropic in Ankara, having departed Kirkuk, a Kurdish area now. "We left because we were not happy with Saddam."

&nbs
p; "Were you glad to see him overthrown?"

  "Of course, but not at the cost of this war," she said. "This war is dreadful. It will not help. We don't see when or how it will end. The only certainty is civil war. Well, that is happening now, isn't it?"

  I said, "The depressing thing is that it could go on for years."

  "I dislike Bush. I prefer Clinton, for all his failings," she said. I admired her confidence, her fluency, her style. She was a woman of a certain age, well dressed, glittering with jewels, opinionated and forthright. "Bush doesn't know anything, but who are these people who are advising Bush? They gave him very bad advice. Did they know what they were doing?"

  "Rumsfeld was one of them."

  "We know Rumsfeld!" the woman said, snorting at the name. "He was supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. He was supporting Saddam! He was telling us to do the same!"

  From their home in Kirkuk her family had observed Donald Rumsfeld paddling palms and pinching fingers with Saddam, and selling him weapons, among them land mines. The Iranian response was to send small children—because children are numerous, portable, and expendable—running, tripping into the minefields to detonate the bombs with their tiny feet, to be blown to pieces.

  "This is not political. It is not about oppression. It is a religious war—Sunnis against Shiites," Professor Dogramaci said.

  "Which one are you?" I asked.

  "I am a cultural Muslim," she said. "I don't go to mosque. But Islam is in my past and my personal history."

  "Maybe Iraq will just break up into separate states—Kurdish, Shiite, Sunni," I said.

  "That could happen—a sort of federation. But I tell you this," she said, and she faced me full-on, looking darkly at me, and her dress of watered silk, her lovely necklace, and her glittering rings only made her more menacing. "The oil does not belong to the Kurds alone. It belongs to the people of Iraq. If there is a Kurdish state and they claim the oil, and the others are left behind"—she raised her hand, her sparkling fingers—"then I tell you there will be trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?" I asked.

  "I cannot be specific," she said, and looked like a fierce grandma. "But we will not stand aside and watch it happen."

  Inclining her head, listening to this conversation, was Mrs. Zeynep Karahan Uslu, a member of parliament for the ruling AKP, the Justice and Development Party. She was attractive, in her mid-thirties, and had the same independent air as the professor.

  Noticing her, the professor's mood lightened. She said, "You see? This woman is a parliamentarian. She has a child. She is from Istanbul. That is her husband, Ibrahim." Ibrahim, watching us, began to smile. "He follows her here to Ankara and looks after the child. Zeynep is a modern Turkish woman. I knew her father, a great scholar. I am so happy to see her!"

  "Yes, it's not easy," Zeynep said. "Sometimes we sit in parliament until two or three in the morning. I leave and the police stop me. They see a woman alone in a car. They say, 'What are you doing?' I have to say, 'I have parliamentary business!' This would never happen in Istanbul, where people are up all night. But Ankara is a big, dull city."

  Not dull at Hacettepe University, though, where I was to speak the next day. Big posters greeted me: "ABD! EVINE DÖN!"

  "'USA—Go Back Home!'" my translator said.

  "Is that meant for me?"

  "No, no—it's for the demonstration on Saturday," he said, intending to reassure me. "The AKP is organizing it."

  Zeynep's party—and she had intimated that the city was dull?

  The foyer of the building where I was to speak was hung with posters of Fidel, Che Guevara, and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. It was all like the sixties in the United States: inflammatory posters, yet the students were militant in a Turkish way, polite but firm.

  Gory photographs along one wall showed Israeli atrocities in Palestine and massacres in Iraq—bombing victims, mass graves, blown-up houses, shrieking women, mourning families, children with arms and legs blown off, bloody bandages. And in large letters a declaration.

  "What does that say?"

  "'It is in our hands to stop all this!'"

  At one table a pretty girl and a well-dressed boy, obviously students, were selling paper badges, disks trimmed in black ribbon, with a motto in the center.

  Before I could ask, my translator said, "'We support Iraq resistance.'"

  It was an amazing display, even daunting: flags, bunting, denunciatory posters, angry images, and now that I understood the Turkish words for "USA—Go Back Home!" I saw the demand all over—it followed me down the hallway to the university auditorium.

  "Not a single person in this university believes the U.S. is right in the war," one of the teachers told me. "Not one."

  Four hundred people were already in their seats. They were literature students. I told them that I was the same age as our bellicose vice president, but that was where our resemblance ended. After Dick Cheney graduated from college, he went to Washington to seek political power, and he never left. I joined the Peace Corps, to teach school in Africa. I distrusted politicians, and I avoided making friends with politically powerful people, because (I said) the nearer you are to such people, the more morally blind you become.

  Then I talked about literature. "People will tell you, 'What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?' They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized."

  Afterwards I told them that I had been in Turkey thirty-three years ago, when the phones didn't work, and Turks in the hinterland had asked me to sell them my watch and my blue jeans. I could see from where I was standing that everyone had watches and wore blue jeans.

  I asked how many of them had cell phones. They all did. And to my other questions: all used the Internet, all used e-mail.

  "How many are going to the demonstration on Saturday?"

  All.

  ***

  "MUHAMMAD WAS ILLITERATE. He had twelve wives and, let us say, a vivid sexual history," another forthright Turkish professor was saying to me. I was in another part of Ankara, another campus, Bilkent University.

  Muhammad the indefatigable womanizer: that is the way the Prophet is depicted by Neguib Mahfouz in his celebrated (but banned in every Arab country) novel Children of the Alley. So I wasn't shocked. But I said, "Do you say these things out loud in Turkey?"

  "Everyone knows my views," he said and shrugged. "But these are facts. Ninety percent of what I say would be disputed by orthodox Muslims." He smiled. "Or would be considered heretical."

  He was Professor Talât Halman. As a former minister of culture in the Turkish government, and a scholar, writer, and director of the Department of Turkish Literature at Bilkent, he had considerable authority. He had also taught a course at New York University on the history of Islam. He was in his late seventies, he was shrewd and funny, with the ironic and knowing manner of a confident scholar. Over lunch he told me much that I didn't know and had never, until now, inquired about.

  "What do we know about Mecca at the time of Muhammad?" I asked.

  "Mecca was mainly a pagan city, but with rabbis and priests here and there. The rabbis were suspicious of this new cult of Islam. They repressed it, or at least they tried to. That's why the Koran is full of battles—between Muslims and Jews."

  "Are there any historical documents that describe this early friction between Muslims and Jews?"

  Professor Halman shook his head. "Not many documents. That's the trouble."

  "Why were the rabbis suspicious?"

  "They were alarmed by the new ideas and the way they were mingled with the traditional stories." We were having big bowls of fragrant soup, but Professor Halman put his spoon down to explain. "There is always tension present at the origin of a new faith. This has been true through out history. There was lots of friction in Mecca at the time of Muhammad."

&nb
sp; "What is the significance of the Kaaba?" I asked, because the huge black cube of shining stone had always seemed to me an enigmatic symbol.

  "The Kaaba in Mecca—it's a meteorite, of course."

  I hadn't known that, and said so.

  "It is obviously a miraculous force of nature," Professor Halman said. "The Jews hadn't claimed it. No one had claimed it—so Muhammad did."

  I said, "I'm interested in Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, which is an American religion. Columbus and the American Revolution were foretold in The Book of Mormon, translated from golden plates by Smith in 1827, so he claimed. When he was alive there were apparently lots of other American prophets like him, preaching and professing that God was directing them. Jesus had predecessors too. So how did Muhammad arise as a prophet?"

  "There were no proto-Muhammads, as with Jesus and Joseph Smith," the professor said. "From the age of forty, Muhammad had these new ideas. He spoke. People wrote down his words. There's lots of apocrypha, too, especially the Hadith—wise sayings of the Prophet. About a million of them exist, but"—the professor smiled—"who can establish their veracity? This number has been winnowed down to five thousand."

  "Can you quote a Hadith?"

  He did so, promptly, with an irresistible one: "The ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr."

  I said, "Jews don't proselytize, but Muslims do, and they make a lot of converts. What's the attraction?"

  "At the time of Muhammad the converts were oppressed peoples. Islam gave them something to fight for—a great sense of victory."

  "But I'm thinking of now."

  "Even now, the traumatic experiences of colonialism and occupation, the memory of the humiliation of the Crusades. To a great extent, Islam was shaped by conquerors and colonialism."

  "So Americans fighting in Iraq will only make Islam stronger?"

  "Yes, and bring about more suicide bombers," Professor Halman said. "Martyrdom is important in Islam. There are lots of mentions of martyrdom in the Hadith. There is quite a lot of militarism in the Koran."