“We cannot allow the triumph of brutes,” one man said.
The Turk’s strength was called Herculean, but he was never the hero.
Not long after, in a rematch with a proper ring, the Turk lifted Roeber into the air and threw him first at one post then another until finally all four were broken, Roeber punched the Turk in the face, and the match was ended by the police. This time a draw.
YOU DON’T LIKE my asking you questions, do you?
You’re just doing your job.
Yes. But you don’t like it.
It’s not what I expected.
What did you expect?
Different kinds of questions.
What kind?
About my work. About where I’ll live. About, I don’t know, paying taxes, obeying the law.
We’ll get to those.
Do you tell everybody these stories?
I tell everybody stories.
But not these stories.
No, not these stories. Do you think Roeber could have beaten Yusuf Ismail in a fair fight?
I think it was a fair fight. Why are you telling me these stories?
Roeber bent the rules, you might say.
Why are you telling me these stories?
You really think Roeber fought fair?
—
Do you really think Roeber fought fair?
Fair enough.
Do you think that’s a particularly American way to win?
No.
Do you think Yusuf Ismail knew what was happening?
Yes.
So you think it was fixed? The Turk agreed to throw the fight? To throw Roeber off the mat? To put on a show?
I don’t know. You’re the one making this up, you tell me.
I’m not making it up.
Why did you tell me Roeber was a handsome man?
He was a handsome man. That’s what people say of him. I didn’t make that up.
But it’s subjective, don’t you think? How do you know what I find handsome?
Generally speaking, many people considered Roeber a handsome man.
But you told me that for a reason.
I’m telling you everything for a reason.
You’re trying to get me to reveal something. This is some kind of weird game. A psychological test. That’s it, isn’t it? You are evaluating me on some kind of psychological test.
This isn’t a test.
I’m going to call my lawyer. I don’t believe this is legal.
Of course it’s legal. I’m just doing my job, as you say.
Then ask me the proper questions.
The Fight at Cirque d’Hiver
Paris, 1894
Four years before he died
He was nervous with his hands all of the time. He opened and closed them, wiggled his fingers, he should have been a piano player with those fingers. All of the time, he moved his hands.
He spoke so frequently in pantomime that even when another Turkish fighter was on the bill, he often forgot to speak aloud. When he clapped his hands together it meant he was ready to fight. When he held his hands out in supplication it meant he did not understand. When he rubbed one hand on his stomach it meant either he was hungry or he was full. When he pointed his finger to his eye then stared hard at his manager it meant he didn’t trust him, and he better watch himself. When he pounded his hand on his heart it meant he was grateful.
It was said to be the most horrific, the bloodiest, the most savage bout ever wrestled on a mat. Brutal. Brutes. Turk versus Turk. Yusuf Ismail versus Ibrahim Mahmout. Yusuf was bigger but Ibrahim was stronger, just as tall, and more muscular.
It was said only another Turk could challenge Yusuf, who, by then, had won all of his European bouts in a matter of minutes, most often in a matter of seconds.
They were to fight Turkish-style, no holds barred.
They approached without speaking, their faces unemotional—trancelike, some would say later.
The first time blood streamed from Ibrahim’s nose, the referee stopped the fight to examine him. “It is nothing,” Ibrahim said.
In the end, Ibrahim’s nostrils were torn, his ribs broken, his arms turned in their sockets, and his clothes were streaked with his own blood. The Parisian women in the crowd wept at the sight of him. But he was the first wrestler in all of Europe to last longer than five minutes against the great Yusuf, the other, more terrible Turk.
Three times Tom Cannon, the referee, had tried to stop the fight, but neither man would release his hold, until finally Cannon, a fighter himself and no small man, beat at Yusuf with a stick. Yusuf paused long enough to glare at him, and Cannon retreated to a corner of the ring, as if he were the one conceding the match. A police inspector summoned six of the largest spectators he could see, and they approached Yusuf from two sides. Three to an arm they pulled at Yusuf, as if the only way to stop him wrestling was to split him in two. As they pulled, all six off-balance and leaning backward as if in a tug-of-war, the great fighter spun like an angry dervish so that all six men holding him lifted into the air. Ibrahim backed away suddenly, like a man just awakened. He stared down, confused, at the mat, which was covered in his blood.
“Would you like us to arrest him?” the police inspector asked Ibrahim. Ibrahim drew back, straightened, and with one hand resting on his damaged ribs, said, “But we were only wrestling.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?
I think it’s nonsense.
Why?
Because it is, it’s nonsense. The policemen, the great nobility of the savages, it’s all nonsense.
So you think it’s made up?
—
Do you think it’s made up?
—
You don’t want to answer?
Ask me the proper questions and I will answer.
The Fight at Kirkpinar
Turkey, 1887
Eleven years before he died
It was nothing but an enormous empty field, really. No arena, no grandstands, no statues or plaques to memorialize the hundreds of years of tournaments that had been held there already. But even empty, when the grass was no longer matted down in a hundred makeshift rings and the oil and sweat of the fighters had been absorbed into the earth, it had the feel of a battlefield. Men had wrestled there, the summer hunting grounds of the sultan, since 1690. Back then it was the sultan’s renowned guard, the Janissaries, who had stripped down, greased each other with oil, fought for days, then celebrated for days more.
By the 1800s, the wrestlers wore ox-hide shorts down past their knees, and it was those that provided most of the holds. The only rule was that one man could not invade another’s rectum with his fingers. They all kept their hair short so that it could not provide a hold. There was no cover from the sun, and the matches took place only feet apart, so that sometimes one pair of men tumbled into another pair’s fight. In that case, all four would separate, step back, then begin again without argument or complaint. If one man got grass in his eye, it was his opponent who ran for water and a rag and then wiped at the afflicted area until it was clear.
Hundreds of men came to compete, and thousands more, men and women, came to watch. The field was surrounded by tents for sleeping, for eating, for drinking, for dancing. Before each fight, each pair of combatants would pray and then loosen their arms and then help oil each other—including their ox-hide shorts—a ritual as old as the tournament.
Yusuf did not look ahead to the end, when a champion would be named, nor did he watch any of the matches, some happening just a few feet from his own, nor did he participate in any of the surrounding festivities. He wrestled one match and then another and when he wasn’t wrestling he entered a timeless state in which all he did was wait for his next match.
He was noticeable because of his size, and there was always a moment as he approached each new opponent when the opponent took him in all at once and then tried not to react. By the second day many of them knew Yusuf’s name, though he was young and had never wr
estled at Kirkpinar before. By the time he reached the championship match, everyone knew him by name. His opponent would be the most popular wrestler the empire had ever had, a wrestler who had won the tournament for each of the past twenty-six years, a record unmatchable now or then. Kel Aliço.
As Yusuf poured oil onto his hands to rub onto Kel Aliço’s back, he noticed his hands trembling, and he clapped them together as if to wake them up. Kel Aliço smiled.
They wrestled five hours with only one fall.
At the end of the fifth hour, Kel Aliço leaned toward Yusuf and said, “I cannot beat you.”
He stepped back and made a half bow to Yusuf, then a half bow to the spectators, who were first silent and then in an uproar. The renowned champion had named his successor. Yusuf was instantly beloved.
DO YOU THINK, in choosing to immigrate, the Turk made a mistake?
—
Do you think in choosing to immigrate he made a mistake?
He didn’t immigrate, he went on tour.
Do you think in choosing to go on tour he made a mistake?
—
He could have remained the Ottoman champion.
Yes, I get it.
A hero like Kel Aliço.
—
He could have spent his whole life in Turkey, never gotten on a boat.
I get it.
Do you think in choosing to go on tour he made a mistake?
He could have died anyway.
True.
I mean, he would have. Eventually. He would have died anyway. Just differently.
So do you think he made a mistake?
—
He was already a champion.
—
Do you think that should have been enough for him?
—
WHEN THE TWO SHIPS HIT, there was a sound like the clash of swords.
When two men hit, there is the slap of skin, the slide of hands trying to find purchase on greased and sweaty skin, a reverberation of force that ripples first through their outer layers of flesh and then through their organs. Their collision displaces energy into their two bodies, and each tries to use that against the other. It becomes an energy they share.
There was a tremor through the two ships as well, but each passenger had to bear it on their own.
I imagine that before the collision, on the boat, Yusuf must have thought often of reaching home. He was ready to retire. But I imagine, too, that he was afraid. He had some money, he had a family to return to, but it was all unknown; he had spent his life wrestling, traveling. He was famous, of course, but he had daughters he barely knew and a wife who had grown accustomed to living without a husband. He had things to be ashamed of. He had never had much of a life outside of wrestling, so what would it be like to no longer have wrestling?
It would be nice to imagine that in the water he did not think of his fights with men but, rather, of how he used to train against nature, and how though he never defeated it, nature always made him stronger. How beautiful if he was able to remember his home with the cypress trees, the wind from the east, and the fields full of filberts and pistachios and chestnuts, later to be roasted in a fire.
As a boy Yusuf often flew into rages, but he burst into tears nearly as often.
As a boy he was terrified of quicksand, and in the end, the water held him, pulled him down, just as he had long ago imagined the earth could do.
It is said his bloated body washed up on a shore of the Azore Islands where it was found by a Catholic priest, who had him buried in the church garden.
His belt of gold was never found.
His family received nothing when he died.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?
Nothing.
It doesn’t make you sad?
No.
I think you’re lying to me.
Ask me the proper questions.
I just want you to reconsider. I don’t think you should make any decisions now. Stay where you are. You don’t have to decide now. We’ll just hold off on the paperwork. You might be better off where you are, don’t you think?
I want to speak to your supervisor.
I won’t approve you, not yet. Not until you’ve thought about what we’ve talked about.
I want to speak to your supervisor. Or you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.
Just go home and reconsider. Then, if you want to, you can try again.
This isn’t right. It’s not for you to decide.
But it is, isn’t it?
Either you ask me the proper questions or I speak to your supervisor or I speak to a lawyer.
—
—
All right. If you insist. Though I think you are making a mistake.
—
—
—
All right then. Here we go. I’ll stamp it. But you’ll see.
—
You’ll remember my words. I assure you, you will.
ICONOGRAPHY
Soon there will be a girl who will not eat. Some will call her the Turkish Girl; others, the Starving Girl.
Like most, I will read about her, then track her day to day in the news. I, like many, will find her beautiful, though I won’t know why.
IT WILL HAPPEN, simply, like this:
One day she wakes feeling full, and so she skips breakfast, then lunch, then dinner, and she wakes the next day so hungry she still doesn’t eat, the pain so exquisite that it feels true. It feels exactly like her.
But that truth is little known.
Most think she got the idea from the news, from the hundred and one Turks, including teenage girls, who died protesting the government’s treatment of those imprisoned for their politics. Others think it was Gandhi. Or Thoreau, who she read for her freshman seminar at her American university, or Kafka in European Lit the next semester. Some blame websites, call it an eating disorder. Some call it misguided idealism, student politics overrunning common sense, the fault of a twenty-four-hour fast sponsored by the Students for a Sustainable Society (which she joined on her way to the dining hall one night). Actually, there is no evidence she participated in the fast, as it was an honor system kind of thing, and, in fact, she forgot to starve that day, which was weeks before her own fast, and that day, in fact, she ate not only three meals but shared a sausage pizza with her roommates around nine p.m., three hours before the fast, which she forgot to begin, was to end.
BEFORE SHE WILL BE the Starving Girl, she is not even the girl but merely a girl, an international student at an expensive American university, not terribly political, not terribly religious. Not even terribly Turkish.
FIRST SHE FASTS IN SILENCE. Nobody notices. Then they ask if she is losing weight. You look great, they say. And then, You look thin. And then, Do you want my ice cream, pasta, cereal bar, bagel, Diet Coke? And finally they call university administrators, who call her parents, who fly in, as soon as they can, from Ankara, where they run a hotel near the Atatürk mausoleum, which they are forced to leave in the hands of their assistant manager, who takes the opportunity to allow all of his distant relatives from the east to visit for free, with the result that one impressionable cousin removes her head scarf at the foot of Atatürk’s statue, refuses to replace it despite the quiet insistence of her parents, and ends up leaving her family for good. The Starving Girl’s parents would be affected by this story, by their implicit participation in the splitting of a family, but they, due to their own troubles, never hear it.
NEVER DOES THE STARVING GIRL think of herself as anything but hungry. It is the others who give her act drama, and meaning, which, in the end, she is happy to accept.
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY moves her to the student health center while they wait for her parents. Nobody, even she, is sure exactly how long it has been since she has eaten. At the health center, her professors, her roommates, her friends, and a number of strangers are brought in one at a time and then in groups. They ask her to eat. The president of the American university asks her to eat.
Her roommates ask her to eat. The nurses ask her to eat. The president, the roommates, and the nurses together ask her to eat. What do we need to do to make you eat? they ask.
Change everything, she says.
It is the first thought that comes to her mind.
The next day the president of the American university brings in a boy who lived in a tree for nearly two years and who is also an alumnus, and he asks her to eat. You need to live so you can spread your message, the tree boy says. My death is my message, the Starving Girl says. My hunger is my message. She smiles a little smile as she says it. At least, so the alumnus tree boy will write in his memoir years later.
Can you be more specific? the president of the American university asks. About the message?
It is a very political university. They do not mind political actions as long as they have meaning and nobody is seriously hurt.
I hunger, the Starving Girl says.
For what?
For everything to be different.
The tree boy gets angry. Not everything should be different. Some things are really great. Some things need to stay exactly the same, he says.
The Starving Girl looks at him and again she smiles. It may be that she is too weak to speak; it may be that she has nothing to say. Or maybe she finds him funny. I wouldn’t like to say.
BECAUSE OF THE VISITORS—the friends and strangers—most of campus hears about the Starving Girl, and so a reporter, who is also in the Starving Girl’s European Lit class, in which they read Kafka, and who is from the university newspaper, comes to interview her.
What is it that you are trying to say? he asks.
She leans in closer to him, sliding along her bed, and looks into his face, but she does not answer.
Do you resent the contribution that food growers are making to global warming? he continues. Is it the pesticides? The cattle farts? The trucks and planes that move food millions of miles every day? The people’s need to eat tomatoes all year long, as if summer is eternal?
Could you repeat the question? she says, and they both laugh.
But really, he says. Doesn’t that stuff bother you?
Of course, she says, just above a whisper. Everything bothers me.
The Trojan War Museum Page 3