The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  One week on from Istanbul I reached the Domaniç Dağları, a low mountain range marking the northern edge of the Kütahya Plain. My route climbed a thousand metres into forests of chestnut, beech and fir, and then roamed over rolling cropland.

  It was harvest time. Families were out in the fields, raking the corn and feeding it into threshing machines. Wheat stalks lay on the ground, along with mounds of chaff and straw, while the air was thick with fines. They poured from the machines in pillar-shaped clouds, flashing whenever they caught the light. I watched them stream across the sky like sparks from a forge, watched the horizon glitter and char.

  Where the wheat had been cut, only stubble remained, and the earth showed through in crushed seams of red soil.

  Heading south over the plain, my evenings were always the same. The villages were modest places, with houses built from concrete and wood. Some boasted a ruined kervansaray or the tomb of a Sufi saint, but otherwise there was little to see. Arriving before sunset, I would find a group of men waiting outside the teahouse, the kahve. They might motion me to put down my rucksack, but otherwise remained still, until the ezan sounded from the mosque and they hurried off to pray. Returning twenty minutes later, they would sit down with great groans of relief and order glass after glass of tea. Now they were welcoming: unfolding my map, opening my notebooks, testing the weight of my kit and grinning to show sugar-stained teeth.

  Soon I would be taken to a sparsely furnished room next door to the mosque. A metal tray would be lying on the floor, covered with bowls of dolma and pilav, cacık and köpoğlu, goat’s cheese, olives and a flatbread the size of a punctured football.

  ‘Yemek, yemek!’ my hosts repeated. Eat, eat!

  If there was no teahouse, the men would gather in the office of the village headman, the muhtar. Most evenings it was a mixed bunch: an elderly figure with grey hair and grey skin; an overweight chap with sweat showing on his forehead, his cheeks, his chin; a boy aged eleven or twelve who stuttered as he served the tea; and the muhtar in a tweed-type jacket, gripping every new arrival by the jaw or clutching the crown of their head.

  The men would talk all evening, the room filling with the smell of cigarettes and the tannin taste of tea left brewing too long. They laughed at the Gezi Park protests, laughed at the idea of Turkey joining the EU, and grimaced at the name of Assad. Otherwise I could translate no single word they said, but sat dulled with boredom, gazing at the moths that pattered against the overhead lights, their grey wings trembling like smoke from snuffed candles.

  Around midnight the muhtar would clear everyone out and insist I sleep on the divan. Alone again, I felt a sudden rush of gratitude. For bottles of water and bags of fruit. For a meal on a metal tray and a bed in an empty office. Thank you.

  As I lay on the divan, I would count how many days I had been hiking – was it two hundred since Canterbury? I could still remember the attic dormitory in Orsières and the pilgrim refuge in Radicofani, remember Giulia and Max and the convent of Sveta Bogorodica. What linked these memories was the same sense of gratitude that I felt for the villagers in Turkey. Then, as I drifted into that fluid space before dreaming, I remembered another refuge, one that I visited many years earlier. When the thoughts of suicide were only starting. When I first began to lose my way.

  One February afternoon, in my second year at university, a friend took me to a part of town that I had never seen, where each house looked the same, each street like the last. Eventually we stopped at a house where the door was not shut but simply pulled to, the light from inside forming a halo round the doorframe.

  My friend went through without knocking, leading me downstairs to a basement with thick carpets and soft-shaded lamps. In one corner of the room there was a box of craft materials, in another corner a plastic kettle, a bowl of clementines and an open tin of Earl Grey tea. The walls were papered with drawings and paintings, the ceiling covered in angels. Their bodies were made from card, their wings from tissue paper and gauze. They had cartoon eyes and smiles wide as clowns, and were tacked up among stars of silver foil – too many to count.

  As my friend made tea she explained that this place was a sanctuary. When I asked why we had come, she said that she wanted to heal me.

  We had met one another the previous year, when I first arrived at university. At the time she did not believe, but something about faith troubled her, would not leave her be. Then she had an epiphany and afterwards nothing was the same, not the sky, nor the seasons, nor the people she saw in the street. Now her belief was deep, yet impulsive too. Sometimes she fasted, or passed all night in prayer. Sometimes she asked God to make decisions for her and searched Acts to learn His will. But she laughed when she told me these stories, and puzzled over her prophecies when they made no sense.

  Everyone who came to the sanctuary had to draw a picture. Soon the floor around us was littered with maps of imaginary landscapes (mine), or verses copied from the Psalms (hers), or a pair of miniature portraits (also mine), or a soppy sketch of a sunrise (whoever was here before us). The whole time I felt uneasy, convinced the house belonged to a cult. I kept expecting someone in a dressing gown and sandals to rush downstairs and barge through the door, babbling about the End of Days. I waited for that moment, but it never came. There was nobody hanging back to speak to me with a photocopied leaflet and a fixed grin. No one asked me to hold hands with them, or pray with them, or offered to baptize me in the bath. I couldn’t understand: if this was a cult, why weren’t they trying to convert me?

  I did not ask my friend because I did not trust her answer. Over the last year, as she grew certain of her belief, my own apathy about religion hardened into contempt. I surrounded myself with the loud voices of atheism – read the books, watched the debates, and became convinced that faith was a child of fear. What I wanted was the bleak landscape of certainty, a disenchanted world which I could control. So I decided that I did not believe, that sin carried no cost, that all things were allowed.

  At the same time, my life was coming unmoored. From a distance it was no more chaotic than any other student’s, but up close the warnings were there. Night after night I drank until I passed out. When drunk my mind fixated on a single thought: of damaging myself beyond repair. Sometimes I climbed onto the roof of my college and walked unsteady laps of the courtyards – tiles loose beneath me, stars reeling above. I was not unwell, but I wished to be, for the idea of suffering gave depth to empty days.

  Where did it come from? This melancholy? This loathing? This hunger for hurt? Was it a flaw buried deep in my childhood, or an adolescent longing after tragedy? For I was too young to understand how fragile this existence, how precious. Instead, when I imagined wrecking my life, it brought a sudden thrill of power. But, as my mind lost balance, that attraction became a compulsion, until I could think of no future except self-destruction.

  My friend did not know what was wrong, yet she wanted to help. She took me to the sanctuary because she believed it was a place of healing. In truth, I was put off by the room’s snug, smug atmosphere. I never asked who owned the house, or how she learnt about it. I never found out who drew the pictures, or whether she was the one who filled the sky with angels. We left after two hours, and I never returned. But a few weeks later, senseless with drink, I ran the tracks at Baker Street Station as a train screamed in to the platform.

  Since then, that afternoon has seemed fated to me – a last chance to change course. However, crossing the Kütahya Plain, my perspective began to alter. Stopping each night at a different refuge, I was reminded of the visit, but it was not the boredom I remembered, nor the sense of unease, nor the crisis gathering outside. Instead, it was the smell of clementines. And a stillness which was not broken by the movements we made, which seemed to belong to the room. And the realization that a sanctuary might be hidden beneath the streets. This was no church or chapel, yet here was charity that gave before anything was asked and gave without hope of return. Charity that was patient, that was kind, that
kept no account of wrongs. That bore all things. Believed all things. Hoped all things. Endured all things. That never failed, though prophecies fail, and tongues cease, and knowledge shall vanish away.

  Midway through the summer of 1097 the armies of the First Crusade stopped at Antioch in Pisidia. This was the Roman city where the Apostle Paul founded a church in the decades after Christ’s death. Then they went east, marching towards the other, more famous, Antioch. My own passage through Turkey did not stay with the crusaders but turned in the direction of Antalya, a Mediterranean port two hundred and fifty kilometres to the south. This would track, in reverse, Paul’s missionary journey into Asia Minor.

  The saint’s itinerary was never recorded, but hikers have waymarked a modern approximation. That route began in Yalvaç, a modern town at the foot of the Sultan Mountains, which I reached in the last week of July. It contained a museum, a mosque, a market and a sun-baked square filled with cafes – all closed in the afternoon heat. The ruins of Antioch in Pisidia occupied its north-east corner: a pitch of yellow earth embedded with paving stones, pillars and eroded foundations.

  From Yalvaç I walked fifteen kilometres to a hillside village called Eyüpler, arriving a little before seven. The village was made up of mud-brick houses with stone bases and timber roofs. I was taken to the oda, a guestroom off the main street. Inside, the air smelt dank, as if the room were buried below ground. One wall was decorated with maps of Turkey, showing the eastern provinces of Kars and Muş, and the mountain region of Hakkâri. Another wall had posters of Islamic pilgrimage sites: white-robed crowds circling the Kaaba in Mecca, or the green dome of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.

  In the centre of the room was a sofa with clammy cushions and a musty cover. The cover was patterned, as were the cushions, but in the evening light these blended into brown.

  A framed picture of Atatürk frowned from above the door.

  After dark I left the room and crossed the street to the kahve, where a group of teenagers were drinking tea. One of the boys, İsmail, lived eleven months of the year in a Bordeaux suburb. Speaking fluent French, he told me that, although he was marrying a girl from Eyüpler, France was his home now. The jobs were better, the lifestyle too, and dual citizenship meant he could skip national service. This was important because five others in the group – Ahmed, Ozan, Kerim, Samir and one more whose name I did not catch – were about to spend a year in the army. None of them was yet twenty, and none of them had been outside Turkey; however, school was finished and they were restless to start. I presumed they would envy İsmail his escape, but instead they teased him for missing out.

  When I asked where they would be posted, İsmail replied that it was a secret. ‘Maybe the border. Where the Kurds are. Where NATO are.’

  ‘The Iraqi border?’

  His face became tense, the brow folding forwards. ‘Iraq. Yes. Samir will keep it safe.’

  The friends were puzzled by my journey. A plane, a car, even a bike they could understand, but travelling on foot was too much. My efforts to explain only added to their confusion. While I made halting comparisons with the hajj to Mecca, they listed family members who could drive me to the coast, no problem, no problem.

  Eyüpler had a tradition. Every year, a few nights before leaving, the new recruits lapped round the village in a farewell procession. Ozan claimed it was to say goodbye to their girlfriends. Ahmed suggested it was in case they died. Whatever the reason, tonight was the night.

  At nine o’clock the recruits linked arms and set off. As they walked they chanted – a loud and lurching folk song. İsmail stayed a few paces behind, trying to give me a tour. I could see only the dim outlines of houses, yet he described each building in detail. Here was an Ottoman fountain carved from stone, and there was some Roman masonry lodged into a wall. Here was the primary school, the secondary school, the muhtar’s office and the mosque. And look! There was the imam, approaching through the darkness.

  Once the imam was gone, Ahmed stamped the ground with a stick – one, two, three, four – and the recruits began to march – bir, iki, üç, dört. As the stamping grew louder, the rest of the group joined in, until we were all marching. Shoulders back, spine straight, chin up, one, two, bir, iki, three, four, üç, dört, in, out, swing your arms, turn your head – Salute! – two, three, four – Selâm verin! – iki, üç, dört. We so resembled a mob that I expected angry shouts from the locals, but I heard only the excited voices of children watching from bedroom windows. Meanwhile, İsmail remained at the back, hands in pockets.

  Eventually we stopped at a house, trooping upstairs to the room above the garage. Farm tools hung from the walls and a collapsed television occupied one corner. Everybody sat on the floor, spreading a rug over the carpet and emptying peanuts into the centre. There was no noise now but the splitting of shells and the snapping of husks. Then spitting, gulping, yelling, farting and another burst of song.

  The rest of the evening we played a game. A mobile phone was put on speaker and placed in the middle of the room. Each boy took a turn as caller, while the others listened in silence. The number dialled redirected the caller to a second number, this one random, and, whoever answered, the aim was to keep them talking. If the stranger hung up, the group would howl with disappointment, but occasionally they stayed on the line. Sometimes they were baffled, sometimes angry, sometimes bored. Sometimes it was a woman. Sometimes she would play along. İsmail was embarrassed by the game, refusing to take part and getting cross when Kerim suggested I have a go. But I did not mind, because the evening was familiar enough from my own adolescence. Everyone sitting too close and shouting. Shouting lazy jokes and crude stories and their laughter like shouting too. I recognized the bragging, the taunting, the games of knuckles and slaps, the sudden bouts of wrestling. And I recognized the feeling of futility, for there were no girls here to impress or appal, and when the laughter went quiet a look of boredom haunted each face.

  After an hour the peanuts were finished. After two hours the conversation was dragging. This whole time we sat cross-legged, until I worried my kneecaps would crack. When I could not face another round of telephone roulette, I asked İsmail the way back to the oda.

  He offered to take me and once outside he announced: ‘They will miss their friends when they leave. The village also – they will miss when they are soldiers.’

  ‘You miss it?’ I asked.

  ‘All the time,’ he said. ‘But I had no choice. I had to go.’

  In the darkness I could not tell whether İsmail’s face showed shame or pride. Perhaps he wanted to cut loose from his past, but was struggling to leave himself behind. Or perhaps this village haunted his thoughts, no matter how far he travelled.

  On reaching the oda İsmail cleared the cushions from the sofa, while I unrolled my sleeping bag. Maybe this reminded him of something, because he started talking about the camp occupying Gezi Park. He explained that he did not support the protesters: he thought they were troublemakers. When I told him I was in Istanbul during the police crackdown, he explained that he did not support Erdoğan either. İsmail wanted balance: ‘I know it is not healthy to smoke, but I like cigarettes. So I smoke in the evening, but never during the daytime. Also, I know Islam forbids alcohol, but I like beer. So I drink with my friends, but never with my family. That is how Turkey should be. Not Europe. Not the Gulf.’

  The oda was lit by a single bulb, the corners of the room lapsing into shadow. I could no longer make out the posters of pilgrims, or the maps of ancient Assyria, and Atatürk’s frown was lost to the night.

  ‘Not Europe?’ I repeated.

  ‘Europe is Christian. In France I have friends from Morocco, from Algeria, Africa, the Middle East – but the society is Christian. They dress how they like, drink how they like. In winter everywhere is decorated for Christmas. That is history. France cannot pretend there is no history.’

  İsmail’s brow folded again. His forehead had been knitted the whole evening, which made him look much ol
der than his friends, or troubled by some unspoken loss. ‘Turkey is a Muslim country,’ he went on. ‘When tourists visit Istanbul, when they visit Antalya, it is a secular country, but outside the cities we are not secular. Now it is Ramadan and everyone fasts. That is the culture. I love Turkey, it’s true, but we are not Europe.’

  Though İsmail’s lips were still moving, no sound came out. It seemed there was something else he wanted to tell me, but he could not find the words. Perhaps he wanted to say that he knew how it felt to be a stranger. That he was a stranger too.

  Five hundred kilometres from Istanbul lay Göller Yöresi, a region of inland lakes formed in the high valleys of the Taurus Mountains. The largest, Lake Eğirdir, stretched fifty kilometres north to south. Its western side was covered in orchards, apple and peach trees blushing with fruit. Its eastern side was flanked by limestone cliffs.

  I spent the last weekend of July pacing round the lake. On Saturday morning the air was hazy and the water looked papery, while the cliffs were crumpled pieces of card. Approaching midday the air cleared and the water became a jewelled green. By teatime it was a fat blue, glinting as if smeared with grease, but in the late afternoon it changed again, filling with sunlight and turning bright white. Then the coastal road lifted and I could see the full length of the lake: folded spurs of land closing like curtains on a shining stage of water. I watched without tiredness, without delight, but with a steady sort of calm. Istanbul was far from here, Jerusalem too. Thessaloniki, Rome, they were far away now.

  That evening the road dropped back to the shore and the brightness gave way to a polished grey. Fishing boats left tracks on the laketop like scratches on stone. Then the sun went down and the waves were still.

  It was eight o’clock when I pitched my tent on a pebble beach by the lake’s edge. After dark I stripped and waded into the water, scrubbing the sweat from my arms and face. The shore was webbed with reedbeds, but I kept swimming until I could see the sky. Stars filled the night like metal filings: nickel and iron, platinum and zinc, tin and chrome and copper and gold – red gold, yellow gold, white gold too, flakes and flecks and specks of golden dust.