Out of Istanbul

by Bernard Ollivier

  I’m still feeling the previous day’s fatigue and am not in the best of moods. Above all, I’m worried about my feet. It’s a contest, and either my boots are going to learn to get along with my feet, or my feet are going to have to get used to my boots. For the moment, the boots are winning. Whenever I can, I walk in water, hoping to soften up the leather. All of my agony is coming from the stitching on the lower part of the tongue, which is too low. The fold in it feels like a guillotine, slicing into my toes with every step.

  In the very deep, narrow valley that follows the course of a mountain stream, families have come out to enjoy a Sunday picnic. Children are barefoot in the water, catching crayfish with their hands. The adults are cooking them over fires on makeshift pits between two rocks. The sky has clouded over. I’m creeping along. The taxi drivers gave me good information regarding directions, but the distances are completely unrealistic. For the last leg that they said would be about three kilometers, or a forty-five-minute walk, I’ve been hiking for over an hour and a half, and the end is nowhere in sight. Suddenly, the road abuts the stream and turns right, heading steeply up between the hills. I follow it for about a half-hour before coming upon some woodsmen. They tell me that I should have forded the stream. My taxi drivers left that detail out. I turn around, take my shoes off, cross, dry my feet, reapply my bandages, and get back underway. I’m starting to regret not having stopped in Beyköy.

  What is it that constantly pushes me to keep going farther than planned? Common sense and caution told me I should stop. I’m angry with myself. But I can’t seem to help it. Just a little more effort, just a little farther, I don’t know how to hold myself back, as if the initial momentum were uncontrollable. I’m very critical of myself in this respect, as I’m always the first victim. What is this furious impulse to walk, and then keep on walking, that propels me onward? Is it vanity? Pride? The desire to test my limits? To break some record? I honestly have no satisfactory answer. But it’s a feeling I know well, ever since I took up walking; that is to say, some twenty years ago.

  Long-distance running is unlike most sports in that, aside from a few professionals, it isn’t about beating one’s competitors. When, after having run for thirty-five kilometers, the body screams for mercy and a complicated chemical process forces it to convert fat into a form of nutrition that starved and painful muscles can use, the runner has to dig deep into the mind and heart to muster new energy, replacing all that has been lost. It’s in that complex combination of the mental and the visceral, and in a burst of pride, that the runner is able to nibble away at those last few precious seconds. After kilometer forty-two, the finish line crossed, muscles cramping, the runner turns around to glance at the clock. And therein lies happiness: in those few instants that have been shaved off a previous time. The marathon runner has but one opponent worth competing against, and whom, one day, it will be impossible to catch: him- or herself.

  As for walking, the need to outdo myself cannot explain everything. Yes, of course, the grass is always greener a little farther on, behind the hill, just past this village, or over that mountain pass. But mixed in with this uncontrollable momentum pushing me forward is a fear I find hard to quell: that of not reaching my destination. So, like a miser stockpiling his coins, I hoard each and every kilometer, fearing that I might come up short. With such focus on my destination, I walk and I walk, for as long as I still have strength to put one foot in front of the other and carry my pack. It makes even less sense when you consider that my only imperatives are the ones I set myself. I have no deadlines to keep, no daily targets to meet, no minimum distance to travel. I must, of course, get to Xi’an in four stages, one per year. But if it were to take me an additional year, what difference would it make? For now, I have only one constraint: to reach the Iranian border before my entry visa expires. As it stands, I’m in step with the timetable I set for myself back in Paris. I’m even a little ahead. So relax, I tell myself. Just relax.

  After fording the river, on the forest road that climbs through the fir trees, for a good hour, I don’t see a living soul. Then a couple with a child—the child riding on a strange little cart built by his father—reassures me: I’m going the right way. Fifteen minutes later, I come to a fork in the road. To the right or to the left? Damn you, fork in the road! My map is of no help; the path isn’t even on it. My compass vaguely indicates that the east is to the right. So I go right. Night is quickly falling. Five hundred meters on, in front of a cabin next to a sawmill, a white dog is barking ferociously. There’s a light on inside. I call out. A man steps out: he’s albino. I have to admit that seeing the milky white dog alongside this opalescent man with night falling seems very surreal, and for a moment, my head starts to spin.

  Once again, I went the wrong way.

  His hot-tempered white dog yapping away, the alabaster man tells me that I should have gone left at the fork in the road. Sazköy is indeed the next town, two or three kilometers distant.

  This time, I’m hobbling, making miserable headway. Night has fallen. It comes early, around 8:30 p.m., even though the summer solstice is not far off, and the air cools quickly. An hour later, still without any indication of a village, I unenthusiastically come to terms with the idea that I’m going to have to bivouac for the night. I’m a little uneasy about sleeping out in the cold without shelter in the middle of an unfriendly forest. I should probably have asked the albino man whether he could put me up for the night. This is what I get for being so stubborn. As luck would have it, I come to an opening, telling myself that, why yes, this would make a cozy spot to sleep in, when, all of a sudden, the electrified call to prayer of a muezzin blares off to my left. I’m saved! Fifteen minutes later, I’m walking past the first houses. It’s 9:30 p.m. I’ve been on the road for at least eleven hours.

  I find the largest and most beautiful house and knock at the door. The old man answering it looks me over with a wary eye. I try to explain who I am and where I’m going, but I must be too tired, and my Turkish vocabulary has flown the coop. In desperation, I take out my little “open-sesame” letter and hand it to him. He reads it, stares at me, taking his time, and then, with his index finger, he strikes his forehead several times: you’re nuts! His reaction is so unexpected, and I am so happy to have made it to where I wanted to go and freed from my fears, that I make no attempt at formality: instead, I burst out laughing. He smiles, steps back, and invites me in.

  Nevzat is a peasant farmer. He’s seventy years old and lives here with his sick wife and his daughter Şükran (shu’-kran). They are of Caucasian origin, as are all the inhabitants in this village, and they’ve maintained the language and culture of their forebears. The spacious, two-floor house is comfortable, and the shower that they suggest I take washes away some of my fatigue. But like I said, as a hoarder of kilometers, I want an accounting, a calculation of just how exhausted I am. Rich with Nevzat’s insights and my bad map, I can now estimate how far I’ve walked today: I must have covered between thirty-eight and forty kilometers (24 and 25 miles) . . . not counting the times when I went off course. It’s an impressive total.

  After dinner, the master of the house ushers me into a large room, which he methodically fills with smoke, puffing on one cigarette after another, and after that he finally focuses his attention on the mystery I represent for him and that he wants at all costs to make sense of. Why did I embark on such an adventure? No, as much as he tries to wrap his mind around it, it simply makes no sense. Then suddenly, in a triumphant moment, he smiles, rubbing his thumb and index finger together:

  “Para! (Money!) It’s for money, isn’t it? Çok para? (chok pah-rah) (A lot of money?)”

  “No, not at all!” I try highlighting some of the points of interest: The Silk Road’s HIS-TO-RI-CAL significance, the IN-COM-PAR-A-BLE joy of walking, and the MIR-A-CU-LOUS pleasure of meeting new people. My host doesn’t buy a word of it and sticks to his version. For him, I’m driven by money. I get tangled up in explanations that my limited Turkis
h vocabulary prevents me from making sound persuasive; I furiously page through my dictionary, but to no avail, his mind is made up. He asks me to step out of the room for his evening prayer, and then we call it a day.

  I have a hard time falling asleep as I grapple with serious doubts over just how my adventure is going. Am I going to be able to keep going? Are my injuries finally going to heal? Will I have to stop for a while to let the wounds heal over? How am I going to navigate across this country? I should have brought along a GPS unit, an instrument that would let me find my way based on a satellite positioning system. Should I change shoes? No, the cure would be worse than the malady. The infection that has already set in wouldn’t necessarily heal, and I would have to break in the new boots, in the hope of finding “a shoe that fits” (an appropriate expression), which is dependent moreover on whether I can even find any in this region—which, in fact, is highly improbable. Fatigue knocks me out cold.

  I awake to a mouthwatering scent. In the kitchen, Şükran is making fritters: lovely, triangle-shaped börek (buh’-rek). She tells me that she was a designer for a firm in Germany. She returned home to take care of her mother. She gives me a crunchy fritter and encourages me to go take a look at the garden, of which she is very proud. There, seated on a bench, my bare feet in the morning sun, I contemplate the dawn of the world. The rose bushes that she planted are flowering, and their sweet smell fills the air. Did Beauty chase the Beast from the kitchen so that she could work in peace, or because she didn’t want to give rise to any rumors? In these little villages, in light of religious and social rules, is it possible for a man and a woman not joined in holy matrimony to simply spend a little time alone in a room together without people talking?

  Her friend, a correspondence school professor, joins us. She stuffs a bag of carefully stacked fritters that she made for me into my pack. When I’m ready to leave, alone with Nevzat, I try to express my gratitude by offering him a little money. Of course he refuses. But then Şükran, coming out of nowhere and catching me with banknotes in hand, purple with rage, turns to her father and doesn’t hold back: “I hope you didn’t take his money!”

  Of course not, dear lady, fear not: even though your father cannot grasp who I am, he would never think to profit from the situation and transgress the sacrosanct tenets of Turkish hospitality.

  Sazköy, like Polonez, the village where I stopped at the end of the first day, are non-Turkish enclaves in the country’s interior. As I walk, I ponder how, in the countries of Central Europe and Russia, minority groups tend to maintain their distinctiveness. This is quite different from France, where immigration policy seeks to integrate the many waves of foreigners who’ve come to live there. A few years ago in Romania, I was able to visit villages where some Germans had successfully maintained their language and culture for centuries. Nevzat and Şükran are proud of their ancestry. And in Hendek, Dr. Kirval readily shared with me, and not without some pride, that his father was Georgian and his mother Laz, which is a small tribe native to the shores of the Black Sea.

  I head back out onto the trail at a snail’s pace, the pain in my feet requiring a determination and acceptance of suffering typically associated only with the saints. More than an hour goes by before I can press on without moaning. I’ve promised myself not to exceed twenty kilometers today. At the foot of the mountains I glimpsed while leaving Sakarya, I have no choice: to get past them, I’ll have to abandon the small roads and take State Road 100. Turkey is a stairway that climbs out of Istanbul, which is at sea level, and culminates at Erzurum, at an elevation of more than two thousand meters (6,500 feet). The Bolu dağı (boh-loo dah’-uh) (or Mount Bolu) that I have to climb today is the first step up, and it’s dreadfully steep. Here at the base, my altimeter reads three hundred meters. It will read one thousand meters (3,280 feet) at the summit, barely seven kilometers (4 miles) away.

  There are hundreds of them, bumper to bumper, two lanes across in both directions. These legions of trucks, make no mistake, are the harbingers of hell. Their engines whine, spewing thick, oily black smoke. Their motors wail as they head downhill in second gear. Their brakes chirp and their engines sputter from the release of compressed air, piercing my ears. Swirls of partially burned diesel oil foul the air, no doubt rising so high as to pollute the mesosphere, as well. A minuscule pedestrian amid these belching steel monsters, battered by the blazing sun, I begin the climb under the truck drivers’ disapproving—or perhaps perplexed—eyes. I feel small, fragile, threatened. I walk on the left side of the road, so I can see trucks coming toward me. The space between the guardrail and the cliff is so tight that I cannot safely walk there. So I have to squeeze my way between the steel retaining wall that forms a barrier and the trucks that brush past me, some so bold that they graze my backpack as they go by. I’m seriously starting to shake in my boots. After all, whether I get crushed against the railing or my body free falls to the bottom of the ravine, who would care? One truck driver, furious to see part of his territory encroached upon by some cockroach, delivers a burst of compressed air that explodes in my ear as he drives past.

  From the very first kilometer of the climb, I start sweating like a rookie sherpa. Once my T-shirt is soaked, the sweat starts dripping down my back, is channeled by my buttocks, trickles down my legs, and pours into my shoes, giving an unforgettable acid bath to . . . my feet, which can bear no more. To my left, the view is magnificent. A dizzying drop-off draws the eyes down, planted here and there with unexpected flowering rhododendrons in a landscape of scrap metal, smog, and rock. Adorning the downslope, I notice the rusted remains of trucks that really did take the plunge. I notice, moreover, that in several spots the guardrail is twisted or flattened by vehicles whose drivers must have had the fright of their life. The place is gigantic, dizzying, inhuman. Below, at the very bottom of the valley, just under my feet, bulldozers, angledozers, and other machines are on the move. They’ve been working—for the past five years now—on the last leg of the highway linking Ankara and Istanbul. This is a gargantuan undertaking: they have to cut through the mountain and build colossal bridges to span the ravines.

  A song would seem to evoke some of the difficulties facing the traveler on this road, this “Bolu” road, as it is so deservedly called in this famous old Turkish folk song:*

  The island road leads straight ahead, Oh! A graceful young girl is heading out:

  That girl is on the wrong road—By the grace of God—I hope she’ll come this way.

  The Bolu island road is formidable, Mount Bolu is clouded in mist, Play your Saz, my friends, Oh! ’Tis a time to celebrate!

  There are chestnuts all along the island road, Oh! They fall one by one, The girls are all in a row along the road, Oh! Let there be one for each of us.

  When, at long last, I reach the summit, my T-shirt has become see-through from the sweat and sticks to my skin, and my shorts are dripping wet. In the lavatory of a restaurant set on a rocky outcrop, I don a new shirt, but everything else will have to dry while I wear it. I find a table out on the terrace overlooking the valley and have lunch. Beyond the reach of the traffic’s roar, heartened by a copious serving of mercimek çorbası (mehr’-djuh-mek chor’-bah-suh)—the name of that invigorating red lentil soup has finally come back to me—I dream of the caravans that, long ago, must have climbed the mountain in silence, the animals advancing in single file through the clumps of tall grasses. In those days, before the existence of bulldozers, certain paths were so narrow that the animals could only get through one at a time. These were the places that local lords, the paşas (pah’-shah), chose for their customs offices, and where they set up their tax collectors to levy a duty on the merchants’ camelids loaded with packages. In the seventeenth century, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier tells us the price of passage: a half Reichsthaler for camels, a quarter Reichsthaler for packhorses. Riding animals passed duty-free. Each caravan driver could have up to three. I’ve tried in vain to superpose those centuries on my own, telling myself that a truck is w
ell worth a dromedary, and a Reichsthaler one hundred million liras, but I can’t keep track of it all; the lenses through which we interpret the world have changed, the musical notes have been altered along with the key.

  From my bird’s-eye view high above the valley, I can more easily understand why Turkey chose to build roads rather than rails. Historically, ever since the invention of the harness, nations have had to decide whether to transport merchandise by pulling it or by carrying it. It could be pulled by cart, chariot or wagon; and today by train. It could be carried by Bactrian camel, dromedary, or horse; and today by truck. In the United States, the train won out. Given its topography, Turkey hardly had a choice. Trains have a hard time rolling through lands that rise like a stairway! Rail transportation requires huge capital investments. On the few rail lines that have been constructed, most of which are single-track, Turkish trains travel at a snail’s pace, whereas on every road, ultramodern motorcoaches whiz by at full tilt. Whichever urban center they come streaming out of, these large, comfortable buses slip silently over the roads, crisscrossing the entire country. As for trucks, there are thousands upon thousands of them, transporting anything and everything on each and every road, fully loaded with all the utensils, food products, odds and ends, tools, and paraphenalia that every nation regards as its pride and glory.

  I had promised myself not to walk more than twenty kilometers today. But the thought of sleeping in this hotel atop the Bolu pass—that is to say, at the gates of Hell—amid a Dantean din of trucks, buses, and screeching loudspeakers with messages for those stepping out of them is hardly enticing. My feet seem to be sufficiently content in their sweaty sauna, and I’ve stopped thinking about them. So it’s settled: I’ll push on. After the pass, a short descent brings me back to an elevation of nine hundred meters (2,950 feet). The plain, extending out as far as the eye can see, has supplanted forest. Far off, tens of kilometers distant, the horizon is obstructed by a mountain chain painted in a surprising medley of blues. I find no other hotel along the way, and so I finally wind up in Bolu, having walked thirty-five kilometers since morning.