Foreign Faces

by V. S. Pritchett

  From Ankara I flew to Antalya on the Mediterranean coast, south-west of Konya. It is a flight over the high peaks that shut off the tableland, a flight from sunny autumn to blue, blazing sea and torrid summer. The pine forests begin on the sandy lower slopes; and the sand turns to bright orange where it meets the emerald shallows of the sea. The plane bumps down in a cloud of dust. Antalya is locked into a deep gulf by immense mountains and a peak of snow. It is a fishing port mounted on high red cliffs that look like rotting cheese;you see the water frilling around the rocks below, but never hear it. Rich Turks keep villas in Antalya and leave their wives there with the children. It is a lazy, dusty little sub-tropical town, shaded by palms in the main streets, by fig trees in the gardens, refreshed by innumerable streams and waterfalls.

  The roads of Antalya, hedged by oleanders and tall cane, run out into a rich coastal plain of cotton fields,green rivers, and classical ruins. At Perga and Side,nearby, earthquakes have tumbled the enormous masonry of the Greek theatres and the Roman hippodromes, but at Aspendos I found the largest and most complete ancient theatre I have ever seen. Somehow it has escaped catastrophe. You stand inside it at noonday in the silence of eighteen centuries. Only a lizard or a snake slips across the stone seats where an audience once sat.

  All this coast is rich in relics of Greek and Roman colonisation. Where a civilisation once was, there are now thistles and tumbled columns, and the goatherd stands with his tinkling flock. You pass through the dusty villages. The brown pack camels slop along the roads,the donkeys trot, the lorries bulge with bales of cotton,the pickers are in the fields, the wagtails flicker in the roads, the snow-fed rivers run smoothly green. At Side you sit under the thatched awning of the rough tavern by the lapping sea, driving off the flies and the starving cats while you eat fish, and the eternal Turkish salad of cucumber, tomato, and peppers and drink your goat’s milk and water. Brown youths swim in the bay, and parties of Turkish schoolmasters and schoolmistresses come to the tavern and unpack their luncheons of cold chops, rice, and fried eggplant spread with yogurt.

  The sun has eaten into everything and everyone,fading the patched country clothes, so that poverty itself is simply an aspect of the heat. Although the place where you have eaten is neglected and dirty, you are glad to be out of the sun. You notice that the Turks, after they have eaten, go like all good Moslems to wash their faces and hands at the fountain nearby. Your driver, now that he is idle, has taken out his beads to play with—the “nervous beads” that you see in every man’s hands throughout Greece, Asia Minor, and India. This is one of the most sensible and simple forms of therapy, invented by peoples who have mastered the art of total relaxation of the body.They know how to sit and soothe the restlessness of the idle, itching hand.

  In its older parts, Antalya is a town where the side streets are as rough as headlong riverbeds. The lower parts of the houses are of stone, the upper parts of carved wood, overhanging. The women sit on cushions or pretty mattresses on the floor. At dusk the people leave the cottonfields; the camels are put out to graze. You see the mountains go red and then violet and finally to the bloom of blackness, as the sun goes down and the crowds are in the street. Mustapha, Ahmed, Suleiman—the women shout for their children.

  Anyone you pass in the street is certain to be quietly singing to himself one of those endless, ululating, wailing Turkish songs that sound like the choking tears and guttural cries of pleasure. One woman is murmuring these songs to another woman as they walk, and men to men, as if these pillow-sighings and erotic whimperings were all they thought of. A dozen businessmen at dinner, sitting under the thick trees and looking down at the moonstruck water of the gulf, stopped eating while each in turn sang one of these quivering, pleading Eastern songs which have hardly any words. All had this extraordinary art of using their vocal cords as if they were plucking at strings.

  The Turks are glad to chatter to the stranger in bits of French, English, and, occasionally, German. Whether they are college students, hotel servants, waiters, whether they are training for engineering, medicine, the civil service, or doing any job that comes along, these young men with the large girlish eyes are united in one thing: they want to be soldiers. “My father and my grandfather were killed in the Yemen. I want to die like them”, said a modest young boxer. The military life for them! They despise the occupations they will eventually have to take up. Among the young men of the world, they alone are eager for their military service.

  Along the Russian frontier, they like to boast, it is usually the Turkish peasant who provokes the incidents.Their favourite sport along the north-eastern frontier is to step over into Russia and chop down a tree. The peasants are terrible destroyers of trees, and the state has a hard time stopping them. There are notices in the forests saying: “Do not kill these trees. They are your life”, and in theory the death penalty exists for the axe-happy. (The urban Turk delights in trees, as one can see in the oasis he has planted in Ankara.)

  The young Turk not only admires the military tradition but also argues back hard if you criticise it. They admire their left-wing army. In Antalya, people were preparing to celebrate the founding of the republic, and I saw the actual celebration far up on the Aegean coast, in Izmir (Smyrna). The high-school girls in their black smocks and black stockings, the youths, and the crack regiments made a fine sight on the march, not at all Germanic, not at all machine-like in the Iron Curtain way, but with a natural grace. And they carried a huge picture of Atatürk. He was a soldier, and he liberated them,

  There are countries that are all over in a flash from the traveller’s point of view, Turkey is one that can become an addiction, especially for those who are excited by noble landscapes. The coasts are as stupendous here as in Greece, and the traveller who goes by steamer from Antalya or Izmir around to Istanbul will have something that complements his Greek experience. Izmir was, of course, a Greek city until 1922, and the dramatic ancient sites of Ephesus and Bergama—the new name for Persamum—are nearby. Although a great part of Izmir was destroyed in the Greco-Turkish war, and although the majority of its Greek population has gone, it is still a lively port. The ships come to the quays in the heart of the city; the heavy, curving, green-red-and-blue hulls of the sailing luggers rock against the harbour walls. All day the cranes rattle outside your hotel, loading the bales of cotton and the cases of currants. Hundreds of men and boys are fishing off the splendid water-front.

  Turkey is a masculine country, and it is no paradox to add that, although the men seem to be out on the streets all day and half the night, the intense life of the people takes place in the home. Whatever is said about the emancipation of Turkish women, the Moslem tradition goes deep and crumbles slowly and with difficulty. The only public displays of affection are between men: a characteristic sight at evening is the men walking arm in arm in silence and the women together in the same way, with little public interest between the sexes. That is kept severely private.

  The cafés are filled with men; women never enter them.There the men sit playing backgammon or talking; more often they sit silently before a glass of water or smoking their hubble-bubble pipes. Occasionally a waiter comes out and places a new piece of charcoal in the little tray at the top of the apparatus; occasionally the smoker,gripping the red or green plush holder of the tube, raises the tip to his mouth like someone playing a note or two on silent bagpipes. In the glass jar at his feet, the water bubbles and the blue smoke clouds. It is all a long,contented protest against time.

  At night they will leave and walk up and down in threes and fours, groups of men passing groups of men.Only once did I hear loud talk; a dignified drunk was reciting poetry. At the end he was ironically but decorously applauded by a group of students who paused to listen and then strolled on. Soon the streets were empty. All had gone home, for that is where Turks like to be. They are said to be uxorious husbands. After all,their courtships have been prolonged and strictly controlled, with a severe eye to the proprieties. They are family men. />
  And if one asks what is going on in the minds of these family men who are living in a poor, anxious, puritan country that is being violently wrenched by the strong arm of the modern world, the answer perhaps lies in one of the tales of Nasreddin Hodja, the ancient homespun philosopher and Sancho Panza of Turkish folklore. Everyman, woman and child in Turkey loves to quote his droll sayings.

  Once (the tale goes) the Hodja dreamed that he was eating a plate of delicious soup, when a neighbour woke him up, saying, “My mother is ill and she asks whether you could give her some soup—if you have cooked any today.”

  “What fine noses people have,” the Hodja said. “Theycan even smell my dreams.”

  The modern Turk is caught between delightful dreams of steel mills, sugar refineries and the seductions of the Common Market—and the soldier’s rough awakening.

  10

  Iran

  At night, when the plane jumps eastward out of Beirut or Istanbul and sets its nose on to Asia, something more than the usual airplane loneliness settles in the mind of the traveller. He feels his Western roots have been torn up. He is heading for emptier spaces, looking down on invisible tribes and turbans, on dust and rock, and on towns half concrete, half mud. If he sees Baghdad lying like a bracelet below or catches sight of the Tigris worming its way painfully toward the yellow flares of the oil wells, the loneliness deepens. Europe is concentrated and intense. Its civilisation, ever since the Greeks, has rejected the word “relax”. But now the traveller is moving into the world of wide-open areas and thin populations, where despotism is second nature, where the two extremes of violence and passivity are as natural as rock and plain, where freedom is a foreign word. And then he comes down in Tehran and finds he is only half right, and that Iran is strange to him, but not totally strange. He has really come down on an island. Iran may be rather Russian; it may be Asiatic; in fact it is an island in the land ocean of Asia.

  I am not talking about the brash pride that a city like Tehran takes in its modernity. The airport is just about the finest I have ever seen. It has cost somebody millions; the place is splendid without being splendacious. The drive into the city, down a fine avenue, named Elizabeth II in a fit of enthusiasm, is a floodlit rat-race of pelting, swerving, interweaving foreign cars, French, American, British, Russian, and German. The red double-decker buses have been imported from London. The neon signs signal the soft-drink war between Pepsi- Cola, Alpine, and Canada Dry. The traffic in Tehran is mad but inspired; the city looks as if one half is being put up and the other being pulled down, and that it will all be twice as modern by the end of the month. You feel you will be lucky not to be in the hospital by then, after going through a windshield or breaking your leg in some hole in the pavement.

  It is not the modernity of Tehran or of any other place in Iran that calms the traveller; it is something else, which the Persians exaggerate but which has an element of truth. They are to some extent a racial island. The old name they have revived indicates it: Iran means “land of the Aryans”. Their language is Indo-European like our own. Often one hears the echo of a European word. And, although Arab, Mongol, Slavonic, and Turkish blood is in them, they are linked with us through the ancient Greeks. They look at their neighbours, the Iraqis and the Turks, and feel they have more in common with us but have been cut off in the course of the great migrations and invasions of history. This is not altogether an illusion. For three thousand years the Persians have been, before anything else, a cultivated race. They are conscious of being the heirs of a world empire, and of the grace, distinction, and tolerance of old cultures.

  Still, even as one feels the undercurrent of a natural affinity in Iran—an affinity one does not feel in the Arab countries—one senses the bewilderment of a double life, Western one moment, Oriental the next. “I wanna tell you,” says the elegant young Persian businessman who has spent a year in the United States, “i‘m gonna make a million dollars and I’m gonna spend it. I’ll give it away.” He drives suicidally in his Cadillac. One minute he is telling you how he bribes the Iranian customs to let his machinery in or about the gang war his truck drivers are engaged in; the next he is reciting verses from the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz. Pretty well all Persians can recite Hafiz.

  The businessman’s father and his family had been merchants who sat cross-legged on their carpets in the bazaar. A brash fellow? Hardly. He is a dandy, speaks three European languages, and in spite of the showing off, is touching in his serious desire to find a friend. His excitability may be due to the altitude: most of Persia is set up on a high tableland, four to five thousand feet up. But there is something besides dizziness in him. In the immediacy of Persian friendship there is something searching, a quest for something indefinable; at heart, every Persian is a mystic. He seeks some absolute Friend. This young money-hunter was, in fact—as I discovered from many intimate conversations with him—in a state of emotion about the meaning of life, the fascination and uselessness of Fortune. I would not be surprised to hear one day that he had renounced the world and gone into a retreat with the dervishes.

  One Friday—the Moslem Sunday—I was taken to a family party at the country house of some rich people. They lived in the hills above Tehran, where the mountains suddenly start up. These bare, snow-covered ranges dominate the city; on the shady side of the streets you feel the whisper of snow on your neck in the spring. The house stood on a little gorge behind a veil of poplars, and from it one looked across a wide, austere panorama of rock and almost treeless wilderness. I was accompanied by the mother and pretty daughter of the Persian family with whom I was living in Tehran, and I was the only man in the party. We went upstairs to the sitting-room, taking our shoes off before we went in, for Persians value their carpets highly. I was astonished to see several ladies and their children lying in what appeared to be an enormous bed at one end of the room. I thought at first they were ill.

  “Come on,” they cried. “Get into bed”, and into “bed” we got.

  It was not a bed, of course. It turned out to be a large low table, and under it was a charcoal brazier. The table was concealed first by a quilt ; on top of that was a large, crisp white sheet; over that was a large carpet. Around the table were bolsters and cushions. We tucked ourselves in, drew sheet and carpet to our waists, and passed the rest of the day lolling in the warmth while the servants brought us sweetmeats, fruits, glasses of tea, and cigarettes.

  This was a rich family who preferred to live in the traditional Persian manner. Yet they were Europeanised and “advanced”; all except one had been educated in France or England. They did not wear the chadar or cotton gown that serves also as a half-veil.

  “What have you noticed in Persia?” they asked.

  “You all have beautiful eyes,” I said.

  “Oh yes, we all have large, gazelle-like eyes,” they said. “Everyone in Persia has. And long noses,” they added. “One of our friends has gone to London to have her nose altered. Her English is not very good. She wants what she calls a ‘snob nose’.”

  “I am told by a French biochemist at the University that he finds Persian students more intelligent than those he has taught in any other country,” I said.

  “Yes,” they said. “It is not boasting. We have beautiful eyes and we are exceptionally intelligent, indeed too intelligent. Each of us is on his own and cannot co-operate with the others—you see that in the state of the country. Everyone is mad for himself.”

  Intelligence, intense curiosity, hospitality, courtesy, eager friendship, great tolerance—these indeed are the virtues of the country. But (these ladies said) these qualities had grown out of a long history of foreign conquest. The conquered Persians had developed all the arts that would seduce the conqueror; the passion for foreign things, for assimilating foreign ideas has enriched the Persian, but has perhaps made him too serviable, a smatterer, his whole intelligence bent on absorbing, not creating. His intelligence has enabled him to be showy and idle; his tolerance has made him passive; his
talent for friendship makes him put his obligations to his friends before his obligations to the community.

  If the Persian sees himself as an islander in a land ocean, he knows also that Iran is and always has been something else—an open road, and a very wide one. Iran is about the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. It hangs from the Caucasus and the green, forested mountains of the long Russian frontier that runs, interrupted by the Caspian Sea, for much more than a thousand miles across the north. The Caspian is the largest inland water in the world, and four-fifths of it is a Russian sea. The narrow green coastal strip is a warm, moist region of orange groves and olives, tea gardens, and the flooded rice fields that turn blood-red at sunset and have the effect of stained glass. High snow peaks, rising to 18,000 feet, cut this region off from the interior and south, where the tableland begins, stretching for hundreds of miles to Russia and Afghanistan on the east and on the west to the short frontier with Turkey and the fertile plains of Iraq. But the plateau is not flat. Again tremendous mountains break it up as one travels south to the sands of the Persian Gulf and the oil country, and east to the Himalayas in Pakistan and the true tropic of the Arabian Sea. Saudi Arabia is across the Gulf.

  Such is the Iranian road—rough and torrid in summer, freezing in winter, a road throughout history and still a road in the present, wide open to invasion. By this road the Allies forced the Iranians to let the supplies pass through to Russia during the last war. By this road the Russians infiltrated their agents of revolution after the war and the British pressed up from the south, as they had always done, to defend first India and then their oil interests. Iran is not, for the moment, a military road. In the background, it is controlled by the money of the World Bank, American dollars, the international—and also Iranian—oil interests.