A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  I slumped over the handlebars of my bike as the dual carriageway swept a corner – and there in front of us was a ribbon of blue: the Sea of Marmara. The thin line of blue, buffered up against a paler sky, had the same impact as a shot of caffeine. My head cleared and I sat up straight on my bike and yelled, ‘Yahoo!’ The road curved around again to follow the line of the coast, the ribbon of blue fanning out like a celebratory flag in front of us.

  We left the D100 at the first opportunity and followed a narrow lane through coastal housing, white-washed villas jostling for a sea view between scrubland awaiting development. The way twisted left and right. Jamie stopped here and there to check his mobile until, at last, he made a sharp turn down a sandy track that led to Semizkum, by the ocean. We’d reached another long-awaited landmark.

  *

  The campsite manager shook his head, looking bemused. ‘Not possible. Our price is our price.’

  We still had our tents mouldering on the back of the bikes, not once removed since we had camped in a damp Tulln with Brian and Iris. But the hard earth and the lack of shade didn’t make it an attractive option. Plus the cabins – or cottages, as the campsite called them – didn’t cost much more. Still, I persisted, haggling him down a few lira. I thought I had the sharp edge of a businesswoman until I realised I’d save us pennies, not pounds.

  ‘Cottage’ was a glorified name for a garden shed: the interior of the hut was kitted out with beds, nothing more. Outside there was a veranda, an American-style fridge, a plastic garden table and two chairs. We had our little gas stove. Everything we needed. And the sea was just yards away.

  This is what we had dreamed of back in Romania: Nichtstun, as the Germans say – ‘doing nothing’, compressed into one sweet noun. In the morning we wouldn’t have to pedal anywhere, wouldn’t have to bear down on the D100. We wouldn’t have to rise at dawn to cheat the heat for a couple of hours.

  We changed into swimwear and headed down to the shore. The sea was warm and cooling at the same time. I found a sun lounger and settled down under a palm shade, wriggling myself into the role of holidaymaker. It felt strange, an indulgence. Children played in the sand, and a group of older women floated out from the sea edge, their brightly coloured beach hijabs billowing out in the water, looking strangely like jellyfish from a distance.

  But it wasn’t long before I began to feel restless. We wandered up to the campsite store and bought bread, beef tomatoes and olives. It was the food of the gods as we’d discovered back in Çorlu. The loaves were soft and light and doughy with a crisp crust, the olives salty and full of oily flavour and the tomatoes so sweet I could finally understand why they were categorised as fruit.

  In the evening, we wandered through the caravans that lined the seafront. These were no ordinary caravans, but miniature homes that spilled over onto sandy grass. There were carved tables and chairs, linen tablecloths and candelabras, Turkish carpets and tilly lamps, and the omnipresent çaydanlık – the two-tiered teapot that boils water from the bottom while the tea draws at the top. With Istanbul a mere fifty miles away, these caravans were homes from homes, an escape from the airless city heat. Entire families decamped to Semizkum for the summer season.

  By the second day, we were bored of sitting by the sea. It felt as if my legs were still rotating. It was as if I couldn’t stop spinning. This dream of Nichtstun didn’t match my physiology any more than my psychology.

  Restless, Jamie and I walked the beach to Altinorak Sitesei and found a small grocery store where we stocked up on the essential bread, tomatoes and olives as well as pasta and a tin of tuna for our one-pot evening meal over our camping stove. We asked the shop assistant for coffee and settled down on an outside seat with our bags of groceries, but when I went to pay, he shook his head. I asked him why and he typed the Turkish word into his mobile to show me the English translation: hospitality. It was an aspect of Balkan life that extended through Turkey and the Middle East, often forgotten in the west.

  By the fourth day, Jamie and I agreed we’d rather creep along the Marmara coastline than spend another day in Nichtstun with our overheated garden shed. We packed our panniers and wheeled our bikes up the sandy lane again.

  *

  ‘You crrrazy, you. Crrazy wo-man.’

  We’d cycled an absurd half-dozen miles from the campsite to the town of Silivri, finding the back roads off the D100, lingering over coffees in seaside town squares and on the shoreline. But we were moving again. We’d found a cheap hotel room with air-conditioning and I’d gone out to find a hairdresser – my hair as faded and dry as the sun-drenched Turkish fields.

  The hairdresser held the comb suspended in the air. Mamma manager, who’d been swishing around the room in her long skirt barking out orders from under her headscarf, stopped now to stare at me while her teenage assistants in their knee-slashed skinny jeans giggled into their hands.

  ‘You come all way from Eng-e-land?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To Istanbul?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On a bee-ce-clette?’

  ‘Yes.’ I reeled off the countries: ‘Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.’

  The hairdresser shook her head, uncomprehending. ‘When you start?’

  ‘On the first of May.’

  ‘How long you on bike?’

  ‘Almost four months.’

  ‘Four days in car!’

  ‘Plane, four hours,’ one of the assistants laughed.

  ‘Crrrazy.’

  ‘Crrrazy wo-man,’ another one said.

  That evening, we walked past fish restaurants to sit on the shoreline, watching dogs canter through the shallow waters as the sun spread gold across the bay. I wondered if our hairdressers saw what lay beyond the shop door. The foreignness of a place gives the unfamiliar a sharpness, like wiping condensation from a window. The world from my bicycle was a place of brilliant intensity and colour.

  *

  4. Into the Megalopolis

  We stood before an ancient crossing: the Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Bridge. It unfurled a stony streamer across the shallow waters of Büyükçekmece Bay, a remnant of the Ottoman Empire in among the highways and high-rises, the factories and refineries. Jamie had guided us here through the chaos of lanes spilling over with rubbish and tyres.

  ‘Let’s get away from the D100,’ he’d said to my relief, and we’d slammed down the narrows chutes of streets crowding the hillsides above the Sea of Marmara. Now and again, we caught glimpses of sky and sea between the gaps of buildings. In this industrial hinterland of Tepecik, the air was filled with fumes and the insect hum of traffic from the motorway was always in the background. As we twisted this way and that through the back streets of Istanbul’s suburbs, it was hard to believe these roads could lead to anywhere but a dead-end, and I grew less sure of Jamie’s rerouting.

  Then this.

  The buildings gave way to wasteland, and beyond that a pale sheet of water stretched out to the hills and an expansive sky. Our destination lay on the horizon, in among the skyscrapers and the satellite tower with its wraparound bubble building, like a spaceship that had collided with the construction and skewered itself onto its needle.

  Across the bay, Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Bridge rose and fell in waves of stone, echoing the topography of the land around it. No motorised vehicle had ever crossed this bridge, although this sixteenth-century construction was as broad as a highway. The roughly hewn stones were too uneven for any modern vehicle, even our bicycles. We dismounted and pushed them over to the other side.

  The bridge was built by Mimar Sinan between 1566 and 1567 and named after Suleiman the Magnificent, the longest reigning Ottoman sultan, who expanded the empire across Europe into Serbia, then Hungary, only to be halted at the gates of Vienna. It’s said the water in the shallows were pumped out to make way for the building of the three island supports for the bridge, and some 40,000 cubic metres of stone were
used in the construction – a magnificent feat of engineering for the magnificent Sultan.

  We set off across the bridge, with its twenty-eight arches, feeling the privilege of passing over this foot-worn crossing, footsteps on footsteps through the centuries. For a moment, the advance of civilisation was halted, and there was just us, the rolling Ottoman bridge and the cry of the gulls above our heads.

  On the other side, we stepped back into the twenty-first century with its colourful wall murals and quirky plastic statues dotting a leafy park. We climbed up to Büyükçekmece, the steepness of the streets forcing us off our bikes and onto our tiptoes, until at last we met the D100 again, now merged with the E5 motorway. The traffic was thickening, along with the fumes and smog. We cycled on into the heat of the day, our bodies sagging over our bikes in the endless rise of road, until, at last, we saw a restaurant, emerging like a mirage from the heat haze. We stopped to rehydrate and reboot our energy levels with chilled, sugar-loaded drinks. On the edge of the terraced garden, Istanbul’s suburbs fell away to the sea, with soil and grass giving way to concrete. It covered the hills along the coast as far as the eye could see in both directions, a mangle of chalky buildings that tottered drunkenly on the coastal hills.

  Here in the shaded garden, sounds were muted and the glare of sunlight dimmed by the shade of plane trees. As I closed my eyes in appreciation of the breeze and quietness, a burst of noise broke from a nearby minaret speaker: the call to prayer. Then wave upon wave of undulating voice echoed from mosques across the hillsides as if in discordant conversation until they found a fragile harmony.

  We continued up the hill, the satellite needle growing before us, until at last we reached the summit. The E5 at this point was a knot of roads curling under and over each other. Across the multiple lanes was our eleventh-floor refuge in the sky. Fortunately, there was a footbridge and a lift at either end of it, just big enough to take our bikes – if we took them one at a time. On the other side, in amongst the shops and skyscrapers, sat KAT11, our home for the night. We just didn’t know where. We skirted the block, looking for the name without success. We asked in stores, but the shopkeepers shook their heads. Then, a moment of enlightenment: KAT11 simply meant floor 11. The hotel was secreted away, high above Büyükçekmece in the skyscraper next to us.

  Ahmed, the hotel manager, was concerned that we had left our bicycles in the underfloor garage. He wrung his hands. ‘It’s not safe. They could be stolen. They should go in the underground office with the security men. Go down and ask them to keep them for you.’

  Jamie and I took the lift down to the garage, but the office was locked and there was no sign of the security men. We reported back to Ahmed, who nodded with worried eyes. Later, without telling us, Ahmed had gone down by himself and had somehow managed to manoeuvre the chained-together bikes into the office.

  In our nest in the heavens, we had a view of the metropolis that spread for miles, the concrete disappearing into a million lights when darkness fell. Neon lights flashed in jelly-pinks and electric-blues with the names of big brands: Nike, Mercedes-Benz, Shell. I edged to the window, unused to being so high and feeling dizzied by the drop beneath me.

  It was a world far removed from the rural Northern Ireland I had grown up in. Looking out of the window at the high-rises and lights stretching out towards the centre of Istanbul, my thoughts returned to that night at Wood Lane when my mother had cried out for help with a bottle of sleeping pills – threatening to sleep forever.

  I’d allowed my father‘s inability to seek forgiveness to destroy me too. I’d played this scene over and over in my mind over the years. A single event; a hardened heart. An abandonment. Now I realised I had a choice: I could give in to my bitterness and the sense of betrayal, or I could come to terms with the past and move on. I needed to accept it was a moment in time: a failing of character made manifest on that terrible night. This was not the sum total of my father, just a part of him.

  My father, now ninety-two, was a husk of his former self. His pride had long ebbed away. His thoughts and hopes and disappointments, unspoken. There was no outlet for his experiences during those war years – or for his past with his own father, who he’d revered, yet who had beaten my father into adulthood. Life was never simple. There were all those nuances of grey.

  As I gazed down at the ocean of Istanbul lights, I knew it was time to move on and put the past behind me. Tomorrow, we’d cycle into the urban concrete with courage. We’d not look back.

  *

  ‘Ride defensively.’

  ‘Ride decisively.’

  ‘Expect the unexpected.’

  Nurhan hadn’t been the only one to warn us about the highway from Büyükçekmece into Istanbul with a thumb turned down. One Turk told us it would be better not to take to the roads – even he found it stressful and he was used to the unpredictability of Turkish drivers: ‘They’re insane.’ And there was the Romanian cyclist south of Edirne who had begged us to take the bus. Good luck messages and words of advice came in from worried friends.

  Even though I’d studied the maps with Jamie again and again, there was no real alternative to the D100/E5 around Büyükçekmece. We had, however, noticed there was a service road on either side of the motorway. A quieter option, surely. But, if anything, the service road proved to be even more dangerous, with parked vans pulling out unexpectedly and cars driving at speed on and off the many slip lanes. Their drivers seemed to suffer from bicycle blindness – or perhaps it was ‘kill a cyclist day’.

  Jamie rode in front, with me following closely behind. We hadn’t been on the road long when a driver pulled out directly into Jamie’s path from one of the slip roads. There was no time to brake. Jamie swerved violently, all too aware of the stream of traffic on his left side.

  Time slowed down. I watched Jamie move out into the speeding traffic, while the car from the slip lane careered blindly towards him, his wheels now inches from the thin frame of Jamie’s bike. I watched Jamie caught in the squeeze of traffic, his lean body no match for the speeding cars. If he is killed now, it will be my fault and all because of my hare-brained scheme to cycle a continent.

  Jamie – this child I had waited an agonising five months for, whose life was announced by a thin line of blue on a pregnancy stick – was now dicing with death. Tom and I had watched him grow from the size of a pomegranate seed to a cherry, then from a lime to a butternut squash and watermelon. We’d laughed at the pregnancy book comparisons to fruit, but I’d watched my stomach swell with pride and anticipation. I waited with increasing impatience as his due date came and went – first by one week, then by two, and finally three.

  Now, on this Istanbul highway, the moment that could have been Jamie’s end had passed. Somehow, he’d slipped between the cars and carried on. I breathed out and the world began to spin again. But minutes later, a second car drove out from another slip road straight into Jamie’s path. Jamie slammed on his brakes this time, wobbling briefly before coming to a halt.

  While he’d been reluctant to enter the world, he was not ready to leave either. All those years ago, when I was finally taken into hospital to be induced, Jamie was still loath to make an appearance. My labour lasted a day and night and by the next morning there was still no sign of my child. Tom watched the anxious faces of the midwives as they gathered around the monitor showing Jamie’s dipping heartbeat, while I lay there exhausted, unaware of what was happening. There was nothing for it, but the operating table, and so Jamie was pulled into the world on someone else’s time, not his.

  Friends had told me how incredible birth would be: the deep, unconditional love a mother feels as soon as their child is placed in their arms, but I’d felt empty inside that day, with no emotion for this long, bloodied baby. My love would come slowly over the months and years, but it would come. But the guilt at my lack of connection for my longed-for baby stayed with me for a long time. No one had spotted I was suffering from postnatal depression, least of all me.

&nbs
p; I dragged my bicycle onto the pavement, thinking I’d rather walk the rest of the way to Istanbul than kill my son. Mothers were supposed to protect their children, not put their lives on the line. Jamie followed.

  *

  After Avcilar, we found a route through a series of waterside parks that greened the edges of the Sea of Marmara. The parks should have been a pleasant diversion, but the paths were littered with broken glass and the lawns lined with rubbish and the sleeping bodies of the homeless. Still, it was infinitely better than the suicidal service road.

  Where the E5 curved north away from the coast, we continued south and east along the shore and on to Çekmece Istanbul Road. The road was pleasant and cool, shaded by the spruces that lined the pavements. Then to my delight, Jamie found a cycle path that ran alongside the seafront. We skirted the airport, the planes flying low, their wheels almost touching our heads, or so it seemed. My sister Maggie and husband Andy were possibly nearby, having spent the night in an airport hotel, and Tom and Patrick would be arriving soon.

  All those weeks and months I had been cycling away from them, riding thousands of miles across a continent, and now they were tantalisingly close. But it still felt unreal. I couldn’t imagine the end-point, when my wheels would stop turning. For good. Now cycling along the Sea of Marmara, the grimness of the D100 behind us, my head felt fuzzy. There was a strange numbness, and for once I felt strangely removed from my surroundings. But it was a pleasant feeling, like the sensation of floating after coming around from a general anaesthetic.