by Adam Johnson
“Why are you doing this?” one of them asked. He rotated his palms skyward in query.
“Why do you sit here day after day playing okey?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said. And he nodded.
Loose Thread on the Silk Road
October 31, 2014
Sanliurfa, Turkey, 37°08’54” N 38°47’24” E
We parked the mule on the Euphrates and took a hire car to Edessa: a famous pilgrimage town in Mesopotamia. Founded by Assyrians. Traded at the point of a sword between the Greeks, Nabateans, Romans, Sassanids, Byzantines, Arabs, Armenians, Seljuks, Crusaders, and Seljuks again. About 4,000 years ago its cruel king, Nimrod, ordered Abraham burned alive for rejecting the Assyrian pantheon. Abraham’s God saved the prophet by turning the flames into water and the coals into fish. According to Muslim tradition, God then punished Nimrod by sending a mosquito up his nose to bite his brain. The deranged king ordered his men to knock his head with felt-wrapped mallets, then with wooden clubs. Nimrod died that way. A pool in the modern city, now called Sanliurfa, commemorates Abraham’s miracle. The pool is filled with sacred carp. People feed the fish with a lira’s worth of pellets. The fish are immortal and quite fat. Eat one and you go blind.
Next to Abraham’s pool is an old bazaar from the days of the Silk Road. The tailors there are Kurds. They sit in a shady courtyard where menders have patched holes for a thousand years. They sip tea. They ruin their eyesight spearing licked thread through needles.
The fates of mighty empires once rose and fell according to the flow of commodities across the worn plank shop counters of Sanliurfa. Maybe they still do. Today, the tailors hunch over antique American-made sewing machines that were sold a century ago by Sears, Roebuck & Company. The tailors pump the machines by foot. Sturdy artifacts from another time. From an age before the rise of disposable Chinese polyester. From a world where America exported more than its titanic debt.
“We’re the last generation,” tailor Muhammed Sadik Demir says with no self-pity. He shrugs. “People don’t repair clothes anymore. They throw them away.”
Actually, it is Deniz Kilic who says this.
Kilic, my Turkish guide, my interpreter, is going home.
He has suffered like no other walking partner on the long Out of Eden Walk trail out of Ethiopia. Shin splints. Sore feet. Blisters on top of blisters. He has endured, too, the torment of my lectures on walking landscapes—avoiding beelines, contouring hills. Yet Kilic never stopped. In the mornings, he pounded on his boots. He tottered on. He loved the slow journey. It allowed him to deploy his streetwise charm. Teasing, joking, he disarmed all we meet. He called the humblest farmer hoca—master, teacher. From Mersin to Sanliurfa, across more than 200 miles of mountains, roads, beaches, and fields, he was my wise-guy window to Anatolia. He forced me to watch my first 3-D movie—Dawn of the Planet of the Apes—claiming it was research. His parents had named him after the 1960s revolutionary Deniz Gez-mis, Turkey’s version of Che, and he was bracingly cynical about all politicians. He completed his thoughts with snatches of pop songs.
Crossing a creek with the mule: “ We all live in a yellow submarine . . .”
Frowning up at storm clouds: “Here comes the rain again, falling on my head like a memory . . .”
I will see you again, I tell him.
Like all of the walk’s guides, Kilic is invited to Beagle Channel between Argentina and Chile, to the finish line of the journey. This is the dream: Every walk partner who has helped shape the walk’s route will regroup in 2020. I see Mohamad Banounah; a son of Mecca, walking in Tierra del Fuego bundled against the Antarctic wind. I see Noa Burshtein, a young woman recently discharged from the Israeli army, walking the cobbled shores there. And Elema Hessan, the Afar fossil hunter from the bone-colored plains of the African Rift. And the Bedouin guide Hamoudi Alweijah al Bedul from Petra. And Bassam Almohor from Ramallah. There will be Russian guides. Chinese and Colombian guides. Twenty-one thousand miles worth of fellow voyagers. We will stride together, en masse, along the final mile of the human journey, to last beach of human imagining. Kilic will sing, “Baby, it’s cold outside . . .” This journey belongs to them. Warp and weft, they have sewed its story into existence.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W. S. Merwin
Mule-ology
December 11, 2014
Near Siverek, Turkey 37°46’32” N 39°16’22” E
First things first: A mule is not a donkey.
A donkey is a member of the equine family burdened by low selfesteem: a small, modest, long-eared creature from which mules are bred when mated with a horse. In other words, a donkey is the crude base metal from which a superior alloy—the mule—is forged. To call a mule a donkey, then, is at best a beginner’s mistake that will earn the squinting contempt of veteran muleskinners. At worst, they are fighting words.
There are jack mules (male) and jenny or molly mules (female). There are blue mules, cotton mules, sugar mules, and mining mules. There is a mammoth mule that weighs a thousand pounds. George Washington was a mule breeder. But all mules are immune to politics. There is no idealistic mule.
Being hybrids, mules are biologically sterile, which helps explain their dispositions: angry at the world.
The Mexicans have a saying: Una mula piensa por lo menos siete veces al día como matar el amo. “A mule thinks at least seven times a day how to kill is master.” This is doubtless an exaggeration. Nobody, however, disagrees with the drift of this aphorism.
Mules do not tolerate names.
This fact might surprise the lay public. True, one can call a mule anything one wishes. Our white jenny, for example, has been baptized differently by each of my walking partners across Turkey. Deniz Kilic called her Barbara for reasons only he can explain. Mustafa Filiz dubbed her Sunshine. Murat Yazar calls her Sweetie. John Stanmeyer, my photographer colleague, refers to her as Snowflake. My preference is Kirkatir, a Turkish name meaning “grey mule.” It is the original moniker bestowed by her previous owner, an Alevi woodcutter from the forested hills above Mersin. The truth is that, like all mules, she answers to no label meted out by mere humans. Kirkatir does not come when called, or when whistled to. She comes when she feels like it. This is not very often.
Kirkatir is twenty-two years old.
How old is this in mule years? About five millennia. Walking along a trail with Kirkatir is like trekking with the oldest living being on the planet Earth: It is like taking a Sunday stroll while tethered to a redwood, or a bristlecone pine tree. When I first took her for a test walk, back in July, I noticed that her hide was wrinkled around the edges of the packsaddle. “How old is she?” I asked the owner. The owner, Ahmed, looked heavenward. He held up his palms. He shrugged his shoulders. Ahmed was a passable thespian. Her documents, procured after the sale, spelled out the truth.
“She’s not that old,” sniffed Deniz Kilic, who had agreed to her purchase before I arrived in Turkey, and who now felt responsible. Deniz spent the first afternoon of the walk in Turkey peering grimly down into his smart phone. He was looking hard for a Web site that would attest that mules could live for fifty years, or perhaps even a century.
Mules eat everything.
On a cross-country foot journey, this tolerant belly is a useful quality. Horses are much too finicky. That said, the mulish appetite does have its disadvantages. In Jordan, where I traveled with cargo mules, one of the animals, Selwa, ate my Bedouin guide Hamoudi Enwaje’ al Bedul’s walking stick. Walking sticks are very hard to come by in empty deserts. Hamoudi cursed Selwa. Days later, after much intense searching, he at last found another stick. Selwa ate that one, too.
Mules are smarter than horses.
This is a well-known fact about the mule race. Mules, for instance, take no unnecessary chances. Look into a mule’s dark, benthic eyeballs: Yo
u will detect quadratic equations cascading down like plankton behind their depthless retinas. Mules are forever calculating their odds. Kirkatir is a careful mule. She observes all posted traffic laws. She stops at all speed bumps installed on roads to slow automobiles. She does this for a very long time.
One afternoon, Deniz and I walked into a veterinarian’s office outside of the Turkish city of Gaziantep. We needed an expert opinion.
“We have a problem with our mule,” we informed the animal doctor, a thin, appraising young man who stood behind the counter in a white medical smock. “Our mule does this strange thing all night long. Whenever we tie her to a tree at a camp, she paces back and forth—yes, back and forth—constantly. She does this odd dance.”
And then, Deniz and I reenacted, to the best of our ability, the rumba of Kirkatir: Standing elbow to elbow, we took three steps forward, tossed our heads dramatically—in a wide, clockwise circle—and then took three steps back. Perhaps, we asked the vet, our mule suffered an obscure mule neuroses? Was she a mule insomniac? Was our mule insane?
We repeated these steps three or four times. For clarity’s sake. For an accurate diagnosis.
The vet’s eyes zigzagged between us and a crowd of people growing at the open clinic door. No, the vet said at last. Our mule, he assured us, was perfectly normal.
JOAN WICKERSHAM
An Inventory
FROM One Story
BOY 1 WAS SMALL AND SOFT. He seemed breakable. Serious, soft brown eyes. He built careful buildings in the block corner—this was in kindergarten—a tower on one side and a tower on the other side, an arch in the middle. He didn’t say much. Over spring vacation, he went to visit his grandparents in Texas. You had heard that there were rattlesnakes in Texas, and you worried all week. You kept thinking of him walking around in Texas, his small, unguarded ankles.
Boy 2 rescued you on the playground. There was a kid who always showed up dressed like a cowboy, who one day climbed the ladder just behind you, put his lasso around your neck, and pushed you down the slide. Boy 2 ran over to see if you were hurt—you weren’t, just shocked by the sudden viciousness of it—and to shout at the other boy, “Leave her alone!” He stood over you while you loosened the rope and helped you pull the noose off over your head. After that day neither of them paid much attention to you, though you taunted the kid in the cowboy suit and looked behind you whenever you climbed the ladder to the slide.
Boys 3–5 were the boys of elementary school, interchangeable: bright, sturdy, clean looking. You and a lot of other girls liked them; they liked you and a lot of other girls. You ate lunch together in the cafeteria and played at one another’s houses. You knew their mothers and what their bedspreads looked like and what books they read. You talked with them about the things that happened to other people—the operation one kid had to have to, well, no one knew exactly what, but to widen the, you know, hole; the girl suddenly sent to live with an aunt after her father stabbed her mother—but nothing like that ever happened to any of you.1
Boy 6 was the one you loved, the one who kept asking you to be his partner for science and social-studies projects. He was your introduction to the conundrum that would occupy you for the next decade: the boy who liked you but didn’t like you. (Which brings up the concurrent but barely noticed Boy 6b, who liked and liked you, and whom you liked but didn’t like.) These italics made sense to every girl you knew, and were for a long time the currency of every female friendship, nearly every female conversation. Its coins were gossip, speculation, exhilarating confidences, assurances that somehow provoked more anxiety than they allayed, and devastating revelation, as in the time someone told you that Boy 6 not only liked another girl, but also had taken her to a party and felt her up (and you said, “But there’s nothing there to feel").
Boy 7 was the first boy who kissed you, and the last for several years. Which surprised you: you had assumed that this door, once open, would stay ajar. Boy 7 himself turned out to be bafflingly forgettable even though, for the three months or so when he was kissing you and the six months before that when you had wanted him to, thoughts of him had consumed you. Eighth grade ended and Boy 7 disappeared, along with Boy 7b, who had annoyed you all year by pulling your chair out from under you in morning assembly just as you were sitting down, but then sent you letters from summer camp on bright green stationery (you still didn’t like him, but you found the stationery—his mother must have bought it for him—endearingly at odds with his bratty attempts to be cool), which he signed “Love.”
Then came a frantic clot of boys with whom nothing happened, who each seemed to make brief sense of why nothing had happened with the one before. You were dazzled by a gentle voice and a kind smile; no, a cold stare and an air of having been mysteriously hurt; no, expertise, a violinist; no, pragmatism, altruism, a sweet head bent over a microscope; no, nervous brilliance and a kind of crooked offcenteredness, Mercutio, not Romeo, in the drama club production where you were playing the nurse. The boys talked to you or didn’t, were aware of you or weren’t. For one of them—Boy 10—you baked a birthday cake, and so did the other girl who had her eye on him; there was a terrible moment on a staircase, when you were running down from the second floor with your cake and she came charging up from the lobby with hers, both of you racing to be the first to reach and surprise Boy 10, who stood bewildered on the landing. With Boy 13 (a poet’s chiseled nostrils), things actually progressed to the point where you were sitting on his lap one afternoon in the library, tucked behind the stacks in his carrel which you had been haunting for several weeks. Then—he must have looked down at your bunchy peasant blouse—he said, “My God, you have copious boobs,” and you didn’t know what was more chilling, his use of the word “boobs” or his misuse of the word “copious,” and you slid off his knee and never spoke to him again.2
There was a devoted couple at your high school—she was a sophomore and he a senior, she was Juliet and Rosalind and Lydia Languish and he was the director. They were always together; they talked solemnly of a certain book, important to them both, a novel called Islandia, which you got from the library and were bored by—it seemed at once arid and overwrought. You returned it. In some confused irritated way you felt your failure to have penetrated it also barred you from love: there was something to get and you just didn’t get it. The couple in your school, with their relentless soulful glued-togetherness, appalled you, but you knew you would never rest until you had what they had.
You wondered if they were sleeping together, supposed they might be, though you couldn’t really imagine it, for them or for anyone, the mechanics of it, the geometry and the angles, the feelings. The nameless shattering thing you did alone in your room most afternoons had nothing to do with what you thought of as sex. Sex, as you understood it, was about being naked with another person and engaging in insertions that made sense in diagrams, but seemed too awkward and terrifying to actually do, or want to do, or let someone do to you, in real life.
One afternoon a boy—older, someone who sang in the school choir with you—asked if you wanted to go for a walk. Boy X.3 You said sure. You were not feeling any particular interest or dread, just: Why not? Later you’d wonder how you could have been so stupid. Did you think he wanted to talk about Benjamin Britten, or Mozart’s Regina Coeli? Well, yes, you sort of did. You’d thought he had wanted to talk about something, anyway, even if it was only going to be the stilted exchange of facts and preferences that constituted getting to know another person. That’s what you said, after you’d walked into the woods with him and the two of you were sitting side by side with your backs against a fallen tree and he made his laconic suggestion. “But we don’t even know each other!”
He looked at you. “What better way is there to get to know somebody?” His eyes were half-closed, he was drawling. You stood up and ran. Your disgust verged on terror and was almost indescribable—at least, you had trouble describing it to Boy 12, whose kindness had elated you and made you wistful at the begin
ning of freshman year, and who had since evolved into a friend. “But what’s the big deal?” he said now. “Nothing happened.”
You couldn’t explain. The fakeness of it, the vacancy.
“Isn’t it supposed to mean something?” you asked, and Boy 12 laughed and reminded you again that nothing had happened and you were okay, and you left him, uneasily. Maybe he was right and it really hadn’t been so bad? So why were you feeling nearly destroyed?
Part of it, you thought, was that nothing about you had mattered to Boy X except your gender. You could have been any girl. But no—bad as that was, there was something else, something you couldn’t have admitted to Boy 12 and couldn’t even clearly articulate to yourself. In fact there was something special about you that had drawn Boy X to invite you into the woods: you were not pretty. Boy X had been gauging the odds when he looked at you with those half-closed eyes. He’d been aiming low, and he’d felt he had nothing to lose if he missed. Your lack of beauty not only made him think he might succeed, it somehow gave him the right to try.4
You knew that there were things a boy would have to see past in order to fall in love with you—your weight, your skin, a general too-muchness (too many words, too many fierce opinions, too big, too loud, too voluble) that you could not seem to damp down. You thought—or tried to think—of these things as a thicket, the brambles a prince would one day hack through to get to you. You had wise consoling words for friends of yours who also worried about being too much, too intense: “That is the very thing that someone will one day love about you.” But what the hell did you know? You would have liked to be a tragic pale girl on the moors, or some other kind of mysterious sufferer, a poet, a muse, a wayfarer; but you knew—your mother told you—that you mostly came across as sullen. You were waiting for the boy who would—would what? Not just kiss or flatter you, but recognize you, and whom you would recognize.