Out of Istanbul

by Bernard Ollivier

  And then walking, marvelous walking, performs its usual miracle. As my muscles begin to warm up, my flow of bile dries up, and my anger subsides. After two hours on the road, I turn around and see Ağrı’s rooftops shining beneath the rising sun. To my right, five or six kilometers as the crow flies, I catch sight of the village of Bezirhane, where I had such a tough time yesterday, flanked by my two bandits. From here, it doesn’t look all that terrifying. Looking at it on the brighter side, the results of my outing, after all, are not so dark. I was the target of three attempted robberies, but in each case, my lucky stars allowed me to escape unharmed. I lost a full day in Payveren and another in Bezirhane. And so what? I’m not in that much of a hurry. I have all the time in the world, because, on top of it, I’m two weeks ahead of the travel schedule I’d set for myself. I’m in top physical shape, and the pain that popped up this morning in my left leg vanished after the my first few steps. Yes, I came close to being robbed yesterday, but I also had the distinct privilege of spending several hours chatting with Kurdish women who kindly treated me with motherly love. How many people can say that? Bezirhane and Payveren hardly represent all the other villages in Kurdistan.

  As for whether my presence here is appropriate and how likely it is that I’ll reach my destination, I think back to the answer Monique gave me, on the Way of Saint James. Unlike me, she had embarked on the pilgrimage for religious reasons. “You have better reasons to walk than I do,” I told her, “since to touch the tomb of Saint James is for you a meaningful objective. As I am not a believer, for me the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is not a goal.” “But the goal of reaching Compostela is not so important to me, hardly any more than for you,” she answered. “For all of us, it’s not the goal that matters, but the Way.”

  The Way . . . Is there one more fabulous, more legendary than the very one I am traveling? Where else in the world could I be as much at one with all those who, for over two millennia, walked before me on these rugged pathways across Anatolia? Their route is my route; the risks they faced, I face, too.

  Little by little, good spirits return, and, when a truck and then a car stop to offer me a ride, I turn down their invitations as lightheartedly as I did before. Little by little, too, my eyes have risen from the asphalt to gaze out over the short grass, which, like a soft, silky carpet of long wool, hugs the hills and glows tender green in the sunlight for as far as the eye can see. The dream is back.

  I think about all the Turks and all the Kurds who offered me their soup and sometimes their bed, let alone their time. The memory of these fraternal gestures makes my heart beat just a little faster, and not because I’m walking. Yes, I’ve been through some dark days since setting out, but so very few compared to all the bright, beautiful times spent here in Turkey, this country that I’ll soon be leaving. Selim, the philosopher; Mustafa, the bakkal; Hikmet, the student; Şükran, the hostess; Behçet, the old intellectual; Arif, the peasant; and all the others: you are my friends. Extraordinary friends. Friendships for a day, and yet strong and solid as though tempered by time. I’d never experienced that before: that friendship and love are not the work of time, but the result of a secret alchemy; and that eternity has nothing to do with how long something lasts, either. Every pilgrim, it is said, returns home transformed. My Kurdish and Turkish friends: as a pilgrim of fraternity, I will return home holding your smiles and farewell embraces close to my heart.

  Walking along, I lunch on some bread and cheese while over the billowing hills float the faces of these fortuitous friends. As I cross over a low mountain pass, I’m awakened from my dream by a sonorous hello. A cyclist has snuck up on me and comes to a stop. His bicycle is barely visible under the saddlebags, and the cargo rack is bedecked with a floppy sausage and a spare tire. The man, not much older than twenty, looks at me with a smile. He’s blond, tall, and athletic. He’s wearing round glasses that give his laughing eyes an intellectual look, eyes protected from the sun by a golfer’s cap. His face and arms, those of an adventure traveler, as well as his legs protruding from his cycling shorts, are the color of burnt bread. His loud laugh resounds in the narrow ravine of the mountain pass. I walk over to him while he laboriously gets off his bike, stiff from the position that he has apparently held for several hours.

  His name is Toralf Benz. He’s a young German who set out from Berlin in the hopes of reaching Sydney to attend the Olympics. A death in his family forced him to make a week-long round trip back to Germany. All the way to Erzurum, he traveled with a friend, the one I spotted while I was on the Köprüköy Bridge. They will meet back up in Iran, in Isfahan, a city known for its carpets and its one hundred and thirty palaces. He speaks excellent English. We walk side by side, letting loose a flood of words, all that we’ve been holding back for a very long time no doubt. Toralf will return to Europe, completing his round-the-world journey, but he’s unsure yet whether he’ll travel across North or South America. He has plenty of time to think about it before reaching the shores of the Pacific. Aside from English, he doesn’t speak any of the languages of the countries he’s crossing, and the vocabulary he knows is generally limited to a handful of words. From time to time, he’s lucky enough to run into a Turk or Kurd who used to work in Germany, with whom he can converse.

  Around 3:00 p.m., we’re in the little town of Taşlıçay. This is where I stop, while Toralf continues on. Since we still have a lot we’d like to share, I invite him to lunch. The city center is situated off the highway. There, a restaurant owner treats us to a most welcome tas kebab, and we swap travel stories. This young athlete’s goal seems most of all to achieve the feat of strength of traveling around the world. These young people, in my view, are quite audacious. But aren’t I, too?

  Time catches up to us, and Toralf has to get going. He wants to make it to Doğubeyazıt, or at least somewhere as near to the city as possible by tonight. I take his address because I want to know how his trip “round the Big Blue Marble” turns out, and I promise to send his parents the photo I take of him standing, smug and with a handsome smile, beside his bike.

  We part and bid each other happy trails in front of a young Turkish man who teamed up with us because he wants to practice his English. There’s no hotel in Taşlıçay. Once again, I’m going to have to go begging for hospitality. The young Anglophile has an idea. He asks me to follow him and leads me . . . to the jandarmas. The officer he introduces me to tells him in Kurdish how one should proceed. And that’s how I wind up in the office of the regional officer, the equivalent of the préfet (prefect) in France.

  İsmail is a brilliant and overworked young man who takes the time to listen to my story. His coworkers clearly admire and respect him. He also enjoys the authority that all government employees in this country enjoy. Especially since managing a region in Kurdistan for Turkey’s central government is a highly political—and risky—position. Considering that the PKK will target anything representing the government in Ankara, including schoolteachers who come to teach Turkish in Kurdish villages, it’s no secret that revolutionary militants would love to target this building.

  As elsewhere, I said that I was a retired schoolteacher. İsmail issues orders, and without any fuss, they move me into a kind of very clean and newly built hotel for teachers. The jandarmas, İsmail’s offices, and the teachers’ residence are all in close proximity to one another. It’s no coincidence: safety is a constant concern, and the fear of attacks is ever-present. It’s the weekend, so only a few teachers are in residence. I’m given a brightly lit room and access to the showers. In the evening, I go for dinner in the restaurant located on the building’s ground floor, and İsmail, who’s meeting a few of his coworkers there, greets me and asks whether everything’s working out. Once again, he must have issued orders, because the server refuses to let me pay. I spend a pleasant evening in the lobby. People are either playing chess, stira, or cards. Most of them, though, engage in the nation’s favorite activity: conversation.

  One of İsmail’s cowork
ers, who has a good command of English, corroborates the claim that there’s gold in Kurdish soil, but that, inexplicably, the central government refuses to mine it. He also confirms what I already know: PKK hardliners would prefer that their leader be executed. For when he called for his troops to lay down their arms, the organization split into two factions: the doves and the hawks. The hawks refuse to give up the fight. We agree on the idea that Öcalan’s execution would be a political error, for the immediate result would be to pull the rug out from under the supporters of a negotiated solution and once again rally the revolutionaries—the hard-liners as well as the moderates.

  It’s the first time I’m able to have a dispassionate conversation with a Turk on the issue of the Kurds without the inevitable finger across the throat to end the debate. On several occasions over the past few days, I spoke about the Öcalan affair with Kurds and have been surprised by their answers. Young and old, men and women all agree on one thing: they don’t approve of the PKK’s violence. I’m not naive: if they were members, they wouldn’t have said so anyway, but they wouldn’t have criticized its politics. On the other hand, all of them, without exception, expressed their support for Öcalan. “He is our president” was the phrase employed most often.

  The Öcalan affair continues to be a source of embarrassment in the country’s political arena. The army and along with the vast majority of Turkish citizens are demanding his death. But the Kurds are united in having self-identified with Apo. What’s more, European countries are asking the Turkish authorities to show leniency in their conflict with the Kurds, especially since several atrocities carried out by the army and the jandarmas in mountain villages have scandalized Western opinion. To execute Öcalan would, therefore, satisfy the Turks and the army but would stir things up in Kurdistan and prevent Turkey from entering Europe. There must be days when politicians in Ankara regret ever having captured him.

  The conversation with İsmail’s colleague focuses for a long time on the obvious urgency of stimulating the local economy. He explains that some programs are already underway, such as trout farming. Trout farming is great. But, as I see it, the focus should first be on modernizing agriculture. A difficult task, especially since the army is doing everything in its power to empty out villages in the mountains so as to gain greater control of the territory where the terrorists are reported to be, as the saying goes, “like fish in the sea.” Which brings us back to trout . . .

  One anecdote underscores for me that, even for enlightened minds like those I’m rubbing shoulders with here, age-old traditions carry a lot of weight. The opportunity arises for me to tell how, at the start of my journey, I tried to pay for my stay at Nevzat’s house, and how his daughter Şükran walked in on us while we were talking. Catching me with some banknotes in my hand, she turned red with anger and questioned her father: “You didn’t take any money, did you?” They all burst out laughing. They laugh so hard that it’s obvious I’m missing something. I ask what they find so funny about the story. “Because the man listened to something a woman had to say” is the unanimous response.

  Translated into plain French, they tell me that this man is a “couille molle” (limp-dick). So for them, a man can do whatever he wants, even if that means violating the taboo against accepting money from a guest. His wife and his daughter must accept his actions without saying a word, even if they are forbidden. That’s how it is: women are not to judge men. On the other hand, men have the right to dominate, contradict, and judge women.

  Here, as elsewhere, I’m received with great generosity, the kind reserved back home for distinguished guests. Turkey, a place I will soon be leaving, has taught me the meaning of one of its language’s most beautiful words: “misafir.” In French, too, I like the French word “hôte” and the halo of mystery surrounding it: does it refer to the one whose honor it is to receive (the host), or whose pleasure it is to be received (the guest)? What better way to show that the success of one’s welcome depends on both parties? But in my many travels, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered as much warmth, as much naturalness about opening one’s house to others as I have in Turkey. In the villages, I was always struck that host’s pride was something all the villagers shared in. In our “civilized” countries, this way of welcoming a guest has little by little been forgotten or perverted. We still welcome our family members and a close circle of friends. As for anyone else, there are houses for that purpose called hotels, all the more impersonal in that they are international. The Texan, French, or Japanese traveler wants to feel “at home” whether in New York, Buenos Aires, or Bangkok. As for those we actually welcome into our homes, if they are in our close network, then it’s most often within the framework of a “quid pro quo” (hosting you is something I “owe” you) or for some well-defined purpose: “come on over for the weekend, we’ll discuss the matter.” An open door, without any expectation of reciprocation, or a reward, without any preconditions, is now just a rare holdover from the days when the country wasn’t so prosperous. Is it still possible in our societies back home to welcome others to our table for the simple pleasure of discovery, exchange, and conversation? I would have my doubts had I not experienced firsthand such warmth in French and Spanish homes while hiking the lengthy Road to Santiago. While for us back home that remains the exception, here in Turkey, it’s a way of life.

  This is why the Kurdish activist whom I met in Paris recommended that I seek hospitality in the house of the master of each village, as he remains the guarantor of time-honored traditions. To betray tradition would have terrible consequences for his public image.

  When I wake up, day is breaking. The road is long to Doğubeyazıt, the last city before the Iranian border. It’s over sixty kilometers (37 miles) away, and I have no desire to do another take of my previous long-­distance feat. I’d like to try to cover as much ground as possible even if it means, as has now happened twice, having to hitch a ride in a car or truck in one direction and then in the other the following day. So I quickly get up and cinch up my pack . . . but I cannot leave. For security, all the exits are locked. I silently search the entire building up and down, looking for a way out, but it’s no good. The rooms are located on the second floor. A first door blocks access to the staircase. And I would bet that the door opening out onto the street is also locked. I bide my time for a while, but no one gets up. After searching for over an hour, I finally discover an emergency stairway in back of the building. It’s accessible through a small window. It’s hard getting my backpack through, and I have to really struggle. Just as I’m almost through, the man who helped me get settled yesterday opens the door for me. We go for breakfast. We chat. When I depart, it’s already 8:30, and my plan to cover a lot of ground falls through, having lost three precious hours, the very ones when the temperature favors fast, comfortable walking. So I proceed unhurriedly, part of my energy having been sapped by my forced captivity. One of the teachers told me yesterday that in the small spa city of Diyadin there’s a hotel, so that’s where I’ll plan on stopping. The landscape varies little. This is still the steppe, a place of far-off vistas on which the clouds cast fast-moving shadows that climb to the mountaintops. From time to time, a few houses are a reminder that people live here. A farmer working in a field with his son tells me that in the village I see off in the distance there’s a church, because it was once inhabited by Armenians. After they left, the building fell into ruin. Such churches were sometimes converted into mosques, as was the case of the Hagia Sophia during the Ottoman conquest of fifteenth-century Istanbul.

  The exterior architecture of Kurdish houses is very different from that of Turkish houses, but both bear witness to the same history. These populations have preserved in their culture the legacy of their nomadic ancestors. Everything is reminiscent of a tent. First and foremost, the single main room that serves as the greeting room, the dining room, and the bedroom. The other rooms are secondary and soulless. In this room, unusual because of its furniture, the carpets and pillows
on the floor and on the bunks, the custom is to eat while seated on the floor . . . nothing has changed, except that stone walls have replaced canvas or felt. In most houses, there’s no more furniture than there would have been in their ancestors’ tents. The Turks do not see anything sacrosanct about the family home. When a house falls into ruin, they get a new one, as though they were abandoning one pasture and extinguishing the campfire before folding up the tent so as to set it up farther away. And the housing complexes, the towers, and high-rise blocks that I saw as I left Istanbul have the same fascination for the masses as they once did for our rural populations who left their old village farmhouses for the concrete housing projects of Paris’s suburbs and their oak beds for Formica sideboards, without a tinge of regret.