I strike up a conversation with a few of the faithful as they exit the mosque in the company of the imam. My presence is a source of concern to them: who can put me up? Once again, I feel like a hot potato. The imam suddenly spots someone and beckons to him. A small man comes over and plops himself down next to me on the bench where I’ve taken a seat. For a moment, Behçet (beh’-chet) says nothing, but then he turns to me and asks, in a thin, trembling voice:
“Do you speak English?”
Behçet Kumral is dressed in a plaid suit, artfully blending almost every possible shade of green. His gray mustache is thin; he is short in stature, frail, and his whole being seems like a fragile speck of dust in the universe. Piercing, black metal eyes bespeak a bright mind. As for many Turks, a two- or three-day-old beard gives him a slightly neglected appearance, despite an impeccable suit and shirt. Behçet is a retired farmer. A year ago, upon hearing that an Englishman was planning a visit, the friend of some friends, the seventy-seven-year-old decided to learn the language of Shakespeare. In the end, the Englishman never came, but this little man kept right on studying. We chat. My friend appears to savor the admiration he arouses in those around us, for, in the entire village, only he can speak a foreign language. A half hour or so later, he invites me to follow him, leading me up the main street with shuffling steps, stopping to pick up a few pieces of fruit for dinner.
Behçet never went to school; he learned to read all on his own, deciphering sentences in old newspapers. He’s a passionate book lover. He has a personal library, something I had yet not seen in any village household since leaving Istanbul. His favorite story: Don Quixote de la Mancha. I’m honored when my little friend shows me his books, one by one, especially those by French authors, translated into Turkish, for which he has a particular reverence: Voltaire, Descartes, Rousseau, Malebranche . . .
“Have you read Malebranche?”
I admit that no, I have not. We find some common ground while discussing Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. My little friend also has two encyclopedias in his collection, and finally he confesses that, although he has been studying English, he has almost never had the opportunity to use it, and so he asks me to speak slowly. He has some trouble handling abstract vocabulary, pausing to think a long while before articulating his thoughts. He’s elated, and his joy speaks volumes. He wants to do everything he can for me, thrilled as he is to have a guest from abroad in his home.
“Should we walk a bit while we wait for dinner? If that is your wish, of course . . .”
A little embarrassed, I judiciously reply that, if that is what he would like to do, then I would be very happy to accompany him, but that I have just traveled thirty-eight kilometers, so . . .
“You know, if you want to stay—a day, two days, a week—my house is yours.”
The door opens, revealing a group of four high-spirited, mischievous-looking kids. These are my host’s grandchildren, whose parents occupy the upper floors. It’s clear there’s a strong bond between these little ones and their grandfather. It strikes me that normally only boys are allowed to approach strangers like myself. Here, however, the two little girls and two little boys are treated as equals. The man who owns books has no interest in ostracizing women. Later on, back home in France, with thanks for having sent him their photograph, I receive a letter from Behçet written in a marvelous, grandiose style, and ending in the words: “My grandchildren kiss your hands.”
Although in every other village my presence occasions a parade of inquiring eyes, here in Behçet’s home, I am finally incognito, as it seems that no one would dare bother this patriarch. Early the next morning, I jot down a short thank you note for him, leaving a few small gifts for his grandkids, and I open the door as quietly as possible so as to slip away . . . “à l’anglaise.”* But then out he pops from the kitchen. He had been waiting for me. Breakfast is ready, he tells me, there’s no way he is going to let me leave on an empty stomach. Just like last night, he hardly touches anything but watches me eat with such delight that I’m not the least bit bashful about feasting on everything that his wife has prepared. He accompanies me all the way to the main road. His wife, from the balcony, bids me farewell, waving her arms in the air. What a refreshing thought that, here and there throughout the world, there are still human beings as so fundamentally unique as this little man.
It rained overnight. The clouds rush toward the mountain peaks, which they soon swallow up. The Kızılırmak River churns its muddy waters and slams into the rocky massif, which it then hugs making a westward turn before heading due north, where, at last, it spills into the Black Sea. Motionless amid these moving elements, the rice paddies are visited by herons, which move across them taking cautious steps.
Yesterday, at my stopover point, one of my Achilles tendons started to bother me. It didn’t go away overnight; rather, this morning, both my tendons are reminding me that they exist. Did I not get enough rest? Fail to drink enough water? Were my bootlaces too loose? At noon, I take a nap, stretching and massaging my painful ligaments, and I drink much more than I feel like consuming.
I should be able to reach Osmancık without too much difficulty. The road is magnificent. I move from one plain to another through narrow ravines where, so as to widen the road for trucks, they dynamited the rock and sliced into the mountain. Here now is another plain, with rice and cereal crops as far as the eye can see. And over there, in a half circle, a high chain of tawny mountains. Washed by the rain overnight, the air is so clear that the mountains appear near. Yet I’d have to hike for an entire day if I wanted to reach them.
At Osmancık, after forty-six kilometers, I look, in vain, for the “two most comfortable caravansaries” described by my trusty Tavernier. The old, fifteen-arch bridge he visited four centuries ago is still there, closed to traffic. But to spruce it up a bit, it has been coated with cement from top to bottom. I feel for the poor old stones, which must be terribly bored in their dreary sarcophagus of gray. The Turks love cement. On the Samsun, a retiree even said to me: “I buy stock in cement companies, as they keep going up.” His stock is not all that goes up: so does the concrete.
The city is of no interest whatsoever. Neither of two hotels offers showers or hot water, and so it’s hard to choose, as the rooms in one are just like the rooms in the other: unbelievably filthy, noisy, cramped, and so ugly that I suddenly feel depressed. Commanding a view of the city is an enormous crag, at the top which a fortress is about to lose the very last stones of its very last wall. Cement couldn’t climb that high. Fatigue starts to get the best me. I am well aware that it’s important to fight back against these waves of melancholy that often grip the solitary foreigner, and I take heart by reciting the Arab proverb: “Esteem for those who travel, disdain for those who stay at home.”
* Michel Serres, Variations sur le corps, Paris: Le Pommier, 1999. Translation by Randolph Burks, in Serres, Michel, Variations on the Body, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2011, p. 23.
* TN: The Lydians.
* TN: Partir à l’anglaise = literally, “to leave like the English do,” meaning “to take French leave,” “to slip away unnoticed.”
CHAPTER VI
VENI, VIDI . . .
Between Osmancık (os-mahn’-djuk) and Gümüşhacıköy (gu-mu-shah’-djuh-kuh), the route heads into an imposing defile—or steep-sided narrow pass—a real danger zone. The confined roadway, near a roaring, turbulent river, slips between two smooth, sheer granite cliffs. Since the mountain stream must have once regularly flooded the roadway, a tunnel was dug just for it. The climb is steep. At the base, my altimeter reads 450 meters (1,480 feet); it will register 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) when I finally step out on the plateau.
Halfway up, the sweat pouring from my body by the liter, a car stops. The young driver offers to give me a ride. After I decline his invitation, he pulls off the road a little farther on, cuts the engine, and walks back to me with a bottle of cologne. It’s a custom here. In restaurants, diners are offered a splash a
s they get up to leave, rubbing their hands and sometimes their face with it. I’m not big on perfume, and so I refuse. Not a bit discouraged, Kamil Zeyrek returns to his car, and this time he offers me an armful of promotional giveaways: pens, calendars, maps . . . I tell him that my pack is already too heavy . . . He expresses such disappointment that I wind up accepting a pen and a map. I’ll offer them to one of my hosts. Seated in the shade of a broad stand of beech trees, we chat. Kamil, a traveling salesman, is passionate about walking and trekking and wants to know every last detail with respect to my hiking technique, what’s in my bag, how good my boots are, my sleeping gear.
“Watch out for terrorists around Tokat. Don’t walk too early in the morning or late in the evening,” he tells me, before heading off to meet with his clients.
The view from the top looks out onto emerald green glens. In front of them is a plateau, about ten kilometers wide, where, thanks to a nearby dam, farmers employ large-scale irrigation. I stop in a roadside bistro where I gulp a glass of fruit juice and dry my sweat. From here on out, I have a bird’s eye view of the Merzifon plain, several hundred meters below. This vast flatland, bulging here and there with several gentle hills and some sort of leaning sugarloaf formation, is atremble in the blistering heat and extends out all the way to the horizon.
In Gümüşhacıköy, the one and only hotel affords a minimum level of comfort. Once again, there’s no shower. And the toilets down the hall are perfectly disgusting.
Across from the hotel stands the Mehmet Paşa Caravansary. Or at least what remains of it, as its exterior walls have been destroyed. All that has survived are a few ground-level cells on each side of a central alleyway. Their attractive geometry was spoiled when a line of streetlamps was erected, an attempt at modernization. At each end, an arched doorway constructed of alternating white-and-black stones would have been delightful . . . had they not committed architectural abomination by erecting a cement clock tower atop one of them. The edifice was four hundred and seventy years old, a venerable old age, when it was disfigured by this off-white monstrosity, less than fifty years ago. To accomplish this massacre, the gateway arch was broken and then crowned with a support structure of gray cement. The inoperative clock is spewing long trails of rust down the fake stones etched in the concrete.
In the shadow of the clock tower, in the small square next door where a wheat market is held, the great hammam, as old as the caravansary, suffers somewhat from being right nearby but has thankfully managed so far to have dodged the mania for cement. The same for a mausoleum, which is more interesting for the fervor it generates than for its originality of its architecture, another of the city’s curiosities.
In early morning, while I was putting away a çorba (chor’-ba) (soup) in a small restaurant on the square before hitting the road, the owner calls over to me.
“In France, are you ruled by republican oligarchy, like we are?”
I’ve barely had time to understand what he said when the other patrons enthusiastically join in on the discussion. Some of them want me to comment. Eager to leave, I steer clear of a political discussion that my microscopic Turkish vocabulary would have made ludicrous anyway.
As I’m closing in on Merzifon, a police car stops, and the driver asks me to hop in.
“I want to converse with you, I need to practice my English.”
At least he stated things clearly.
I manage to convince him to meet up with me in town so that we might chat in a more relaxed environment over tea. The first house upon entering Merzifon is a mosque, which, interestingly, is in the process of being demolished. One of the workers comes over to me and questions me in French: he wants to know where I’m from and where I’m going: in short, always the same questions.
Setin Yusuf worked for seventeen years in France, most of the time undocumented. He lived in a neighborhood of Paris I know very well, Rue Myrha in the Goutte d’Or district, on the east side of the eighteenth arrondissement. On vacation there two years ago, he suffered a severe heart attack. He can no longer work, has no medical insurance and no pension. Setin has time on his hands and makes himself useful by preparing tea for his retired friends as they tear down the shrine in order to build a bigger one. Originally designed for one hundred and fifty people, the mosque is too small now that the neighborhood has grown, so it has to make way for an edifice that can accommodate at least five hundred worshippers. The men who are here, all retired construction workers, take great pleasure in this undertaking, as it allows them to express their faith while putting their know-how to good use.
Setin pointed me to a hotel that is a somewhat short on comfort. But probably since he was promised a baksheesh, the very reasonable room rate I was initially quoted is adjusted upward. Two hours later, the price we agreed upon to wash my shorts and two pairs of socks has also doubled. Unwilling to be taken for a sucker, I relocate to a more comfortable establishment . . . only to forget a travel wallet that I always carry on my person and that holds a thousand dollars, my reserve funds in case of an emergency. The next morning, when I realize that I forgot it, I sheepishly head back to see the manager, who, without a word, hands me my bag with everything in it, his eyes filled with reproach.
In Merzifon, not far from the mosque, a once-beautiful stone caravansary is now in shambles. In keeping with a common practice, the revenue it generated served to maintain the religious building. The mosque is in excellent condition, while the caravanners’ inn is in ruins. Both were constructed in 1666. One enters through a paved courtyard—an area of about twenty square meters (215 square feet)—through a monumental portal, the only opening to the outside. Two fountains provided water, one for the animals, the other for the men. Around the shaded courtyard were situated a dozen or so large rooms equipped with bunk beds. The storerooms and stables can be reached by a ramp a half-story high, above which still exist six corbelled rooms, for use by the stable boys. On the second floor, a circular gallery provides access to forty or so individual rooms. Each dwelling is equipped with a fireplace. Unfortunately, the roof is failing, and the entire building looks like it will soon collapse.
Across from the entrance to the caravansary is another ancient monument, a covered market called a bedesten, and it, too, is in very poor condition. It’s a vast space comprising nine domes. Despite several attempts, I’m unable to get past the padlocked oak doors covered in rusty iron sheets designed to keep people out.
The following day, I decide to put the highway behind me, along with its many trucks and loud noise. My feet have finally fully triumphed over my hiking boots. The day off in Tosya reinvigorated me. I can therefore go wandering off once more into meadows, orchards, and hazelnut-tree Edens, which are so abundant in this region. I head down a small road that skirts the Ortaova military aviation camp for a long while, spiked with miradors in which the figures of heavily armed soldiers can be seen moving about.
A young boy, about twelve, rides past me on his bike. Intrigued by the unusual appearance of this strange pedestrian, he does an acrobatic U-turn, greets me, and then subjects me to an impressive interrogation. When I’ve satisfied his curiosity, he gives me his verdict: “Your performance,” he says, “isn’t bad . . . for an old man.” I like his candor, and I continue by his side until we reach his village. Out on the village square, twenty buyers or so are huddled around a van packed with fruits and vegetables. They desert the merchant and form around us a kind of a silent guard of honor, simmering as they are with unasked questions. Workmen on the roof of a mosque under construction stop what they are doing and shout:
“Gel, çay!”
As he begins to realize the effect that my presence is having and wanting to get the most out of it, the kid, whose name is Ender Saka, yells back in a voice loud enough to be heard by the men on the roof:
“He is sixty-one and has walked all the way from Istanbul.”
Then, satisfied with the results and like an actor who wants to keep the suspense building, he pedals back over
to me. A swarm of kids swoops in, but Ender has my best interest in mind and turns out to be a first-rate guard. He allows them to follow us for one kilometer, then finally chases them away. He has thus preserved all his inside information. He once again fires several volleys of questions at me and then abandons me after informing me that I’ll find a village and a restaurant three kilometers on.
There is neither a village nor a restaurant. After walking for two full hours, on the shores of a man-made lake, some country folk getting ready to eat invite me to partake in their meal. The sun is beating down hard and there isn’t even the tiniest grove in sight, so we eat in the shade of the tractor’s trailer. My hosts are the descendants of Azerbaijanis who came to the region in 1914. They’d like me to stay for supper and to spend the night, but their village is too far off my route. Their daughter, Fatime, has never had her picture taken, and so she begs me to take her portrait. I take a snapshot of their twins as well, a boy and a girl, black as pitch, filthy, snotty-nosed and endlessly babbling.
The earthen berm holding back the lake dominates the plain. From here, I see five villages and can identify three of them on my map. I have no trouble finding my bearings, and so I head off cross-country. In Sahigili, the muhtar, Mustafa Müjde, offers to put me up for the night. It’s a pleasant evening. Every one of the small village’s able-bodied residents comes parading out to see the curious traveler. Two young people who speak English fairly well serve as interpreters. In the morning, they’re nowhere to be found, and the master of the house and of the village, convinced that I don’t speak a word of Turkish, avoids speaking to me. The situation makes us both uncomfortable, and I head off posthaste.
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