by A. W. Hill
Suddenly, the front wheels hit pavement, and two seconds later they were clear. Dante’s vehicle, however, had slipped into a rut carved by the bombs, and his rear wheels were stuck and spinning.
“Fuck. I’ll go back and give him a push,” Raszer said, opening his door.
“No,” Francesca said firmly. “No. He’ll get himself out. Stay where you are.”
He knew she was right, but he could see that her teeth were on edge. As a leader, she’d had to calculate the incalculable: the awful preferability of losing one, rather than two or more. “But if he keeps spinning his tires, he’ll dig up whatever’s down there.” “He’ll get himself out,” she said. “I know he will.”
Raszer watched the car through the dust-caked rear window and realized that his impulse had been partly penitential, and penitential heroism is usually suicide.
“Thatta boy,” he whispered, as Dante’s tires finally bit into earth.
“Easy, now,” Francesca urged.
“He’s out!” Ruthie cheered, as the Cruiser lurched forward.
“Now just follow my tracks, Dante,” said Francesca. “Follow my tracks.”
“Hoo-wah!” Ruthie shouted when Dante was safely across the shoulder.
And though the specter of bombs and blood hung in the air like smoke, the earlier fractiousness faded and they began, at last, to feel like one.
For the next forty minutes, they kept the speed moderate and traveled without incident, although the road was pocked with bomb craters every few miles, as well as with other evidence of the combat that had torn the mountains for nearly two decades. On the high, flinty ridges, Raszer glimpsed the remains of Nestorian churches; higher still were what appeared to be much older ruins, windswept citadels of the Assyrian culture that had once commanded all within reach of the Tigris. It was as rugged as the Hindu Kush and just as unconquerable. How the Turks thought they’d ever keep it from the indigenous Kurds was beyond his imagining, but they were still trying, almost a century after the meddlesome West had carelessly drawn its borders.
No one, he thought—not even the legions of an empire—keeps land like this from its tribal stewards. But nations and jealous husbands are forever trying to hold on to what can’t be kept, and now—against all logic—Turkey had the help of its NATO ally.
They entered the Zap Gorge in high afternoon, and the granite sepulchre of earth closed around them, leaving only a narrow river of sky eight thousand feet above to mirror the ancient current below. Dante informed Raszer that there was a village thirty miles away, near the Uludere junction, where they could rest and find food and provisions. They knew the Fedeli there, he said, as it had been a frequent base camp for their trekking forays into the local mountains. It would be a safe stop. “As long,” Dante added, “as it hasn’t been bombed.”
Just short of their destination, they came around a bend and encountered a fruit stand commandeered as a checkpoint by a detachment of the pesh merga, the provisional army of a nascent Kurdistan. With them were half a dozen Kurdish irregulars, the fierce hill fighters who were the guerilla vanguard in this oldest of wars. American involvement had accomplished what a half century of Turkish and Iraqi bullying had not: It had unified the squabbling factions of the independence movement, bringing the Marxist PKK into the same camp with the nationalist PDK and PUK. The hill fighters were turbaned and brown like old gold; but for their new Russian rifles, they might have stepped from the pages of Kipling. Several were in animated conversation with a formidable-looking young commander, who broke the huddle to step into the road and order Francesca to halt. A saber scar ran from his left ear to his upper lip, his thick hair was crow black, and his eyes were startlingly blue.
“Let me talk to them,” she said. “I think we’ll be all right.”
The commander fingered the white T-shirt dangling from the Land Cruiser’s antenna, while the other soldiers filed out from the fruit stand and surrounded the cars, rifles at the ready. As he watched Francesca’s approach, he seemed to Raszer to take the measure of her stride more than that of her gender, and in this there was a measure of respect not seen in the West. Raszer could hear only fragments of the exchange, but its tone was not as forbidding as the fighter’s appearance. Francesca displayed a series of documents, explaining them in language the soldier seemed to understand. Then she pointed back up the road, and Raszer knew she must be relating news of the bombing.
Through the windshield, Raszer saw Francesca step back. She indicated the road ahead and asked a question that caused all of the soldiers to prick up their ears and step away. A minute later, she was back in the driver’s seat and exhaled a sigh of relief.
“I’m impressed,” said Raszer. “What was the magic word?”
“Philby Greenstreet,” she answered. “And a 100-euro bill.”
“That name travels well.” Raszer said. “How did you explain us?”
“Pilgrims. Trekking to the old Chaldean monastery on Buzul Dagi. I said you and Ruthie were a French-Canadian priest and a fallen woman on a penitential trek.”
“Not that far from the truth,” said Raszer.
“Kiss my ass,” said Ruthie. “Can’t fall if you never stood up.”
And for the first time on the trip, they all shared a laugh.
“Anyway,” Francesca picked up, “we’re clear as far as Ispiria and the pack-in point. Once we’re on foot, it’ll be riskier. There are Turkish commando units in these mountains, and mercenaries. He told me the Americans can’t have a ground presence yet because they’re still officially neutral, so they contract the dirty work out to mercenaries. That way, they can claim they’re still supporting the Iraqi Kurds while opposing the Turkish Kurds in the name of NATO. Even though it’s the same army. What a shitty business . . . and all over an area the size of Belgium.”
Raszer looked around. “And about as developed as the moon. No farming, no cities, and, from what I’ve heard, not much oil either . . . except down Kirkuk way.”
“No,” said Francesca, starting off. “It’s mostly unarable, extreme . . . but it’s also one of the world’s great land bridges. This was once the kingdom of Urartu. The prophets walked down into Mesopotamia from these mountains. Noah’s flood covered these peaks all the way to Ararat. In so many ways, this is where it began. Worth holding on to, don’t you think?”
“A sacred well is worth more than the water that’s in it,” said Raszer. “People always spill blood and treasure over land like this. Bet the Old Man understands that.”
“You can be sure he does,” Francesca replied. “If this place becomes the prize in a full-out war involving Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and the Kurds, with the U.S. playing arbitrageur, who do you think will collect the fee?”
“How much land does he control?”
“It’s not insubstantial, but it’s not about size. He controls four key passes and has some of the Iranian Kurdish warlords—wild, renegade bastards—in a kind of thrall.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“But it’s more than that,” said Francesca. “It’s influence. He’s like a tumor with tentacles reaching into Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Riyadh. He’s got something on all of them, because they’ve all used him to do things they couldn’t admit to.”
Ruthie was staring out the window, uncharacteristically silent. “What do you say, Ruthie?” Raszer asked her. “Does all this square with what Henry told you about the Old Man?”
“Henry didn’t tell me all that much,” she answered. “Except that the most powerful people in the world don’t have titles or wear crowns, ’n that he was one of ’em.”
Raszer turned back to watch the gorge narrow into midafternoon blackness, the vaulting rock above having caused its own total eclipse. He heard his stomach growl. “I suppose I should’ve asked before,” he said. “Why aren’t you armed, Francesca?”
“There’s a long tradition in this region of giving protection to pilgrims. If you carry arms, you forgo protection.” She acknowledged his rum
bling belly. “Forty miles the other side of this gorge,” she said, “is Ispiria. That’s where we’ll leave the cars and gather the rest of our provisions. And sleep. And eat. I can hear that you’re hungry.”
Ispiria was at the eastern mouth of the gorge, on a summit reached after a long climb out of darkness into the burnt-gold and diminishing sunlight. It was not a village, as such, but a reconstituted Assyrian Christian abbey, now used as a combination outpost and field hospital for the Kurdish fighters and their families. In the court surrounding its ancient fountain, a Kurdish wedding was in progress. The sudden explosion of raucous sound and color was an elixir after the starkness of the road.
Francesca and Shaykh Adi hopped out and were greeted warmly by a man who was possibly the oldest living creature Raszer had ever laid eyes on. His kaffiyeh was crimson, his jellaba was white silk, and his eyes—like the young Kurdish commander’s—were the color of the pigment ground from lapis lazuli. After all of them had been introduced and toasted by the wedding party, they were shown to a colonnaded quadrangle of patchy grass in the shadow of the church’s domed roof, where they could lay their bedrolls and recuperate before what Raszer was told would be a full meal.
Dante pulled the Land Cruisers into the side-by-side stalls of an unused stable annex and barred the doors. The keys were entrusted to a young monk.
Behind the main structure, the abbey’s property extended to the mountainside and was bordered by the colonnade. Their billet was just to the near side of this. Ruthie collapsed almost immediately, while Francesca and Dante retired to a shaded corner for what appeared to be their afternoon devotions. Raszer dropped his gear and headed immediately back to the wedding, the holy dog at his heels. He was intrigued by the old villager, captivated by the backhills twang of the music—a kind of Anatolian hillbilly sound—and at this moment felt the need for a crowd, even if he was a stranger in the midst of it.
He found a vacant place on the fountain’s rim that the late-afternoon sun still warmed. Within twenty minutes, he guessed, the last of the light would be swallowed up by the gorge they’d just emerged from. He picked out the bride, a lovely copper-skinned girl of probably not more than sixteen, in a blossoming green skirt with a white underdress. Like all the women and most of the men, she took delight in dancing. The smiles were unforced, the sensuality unabashed.
Someone shouted behind him, and Raszer reflexively turned his head. The low-angle sunlight had swathed the white peaks to the northeast, painting the rock like gold leaf. What impressed him—made him shield his eyes, in fact—was the mirrorlike intensity with which the mountain reflected the light. Its crown suddenly burst into refracted flame, as if concealing a supernova. There were more cries, and a disparate chorus of ahhhs, as the wedding party stopped to observe the spectacle. Raszer stood, turned, and followed the villagers to a rise in the street. The old man in the crimson headdress came to his side, holding the hands of two children. He offered both Raszer and Shaykh Adi a nod. “English?” he asked, with a heavy accent.
“Français,” Raszer replied.
“Ah, comment allez-vous?” the man asked. “You are a long way from home.”
“Très bien, merci.” Raszer pointed to the mountaintop. “C’est sublime.”
The sense of the miraculous was redoubled by what happened next. The sun dropped a notch farther and the beam directed at the summit was suddenly as focused as that of a laser. By his own poor scientific reckoning, some kind of interference pattern was being created by the cross-hatching of direct and reflected light, and in the heart of the blaze there appeared the form of a city unlike any he’d ever seen or imagined. Like a dreamer’s Constantinople formed of white gold and sheathed in ice, it shot spire upon spire into the darkening sky, fingers reaching for the face of God.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Raszer asked the patriarch. The dog whined softly.
“Na-Koja-Abad,” the man answered. “Home.”
“How many days’ journey?” Raszer asked, for he was still—despite his heart’s own semaphore—trying to fix the place in the coordinates of a measurable world.
“A life’s journey,” answered the man with a chuckle. “For some, more.”
He asked if Raszer knew Arabic, and Raszer nodded.
“This then you must remember: Wahdat-ul-wujood. All in God and God in all.” The elder rubbed his chin. “You are a man of light seeking the light,” he added, studying Raszer’s face. “Carry what you have seen here. It is the only truth. There is no death where this vision lives. Allah be praised.”
“Yes,” said Raszer. “Allah be praised.” He paused. “This vision . . . this place-- does it have anything to do with El Mirai, the citadel of the one they call the Old Man?”
The man put his finger to his lips and shook his head. “One mimics the other, and for some, that is enough. But they are as far apart as diamond and glass.” As an afterthought, he whispered, “Old Man—ha! I am the only old man here!”
When Raszer looked up again at the mountain, the city was gone.
THIRTY-ONE
A mile on foot into the Baskale valley, they came across a vast field of yellow tulips, their stems bent so that the cups were overturned and facing the earth.
“Ters lale,” said Francesca. “Crying tulips. The Bektashi say that they bow in submission to Allah. And weep for the children of Ali.”
“They grow in this bowl because it collects the rain and the warmth of the sun,” said Dante. “But once we climb out of this valley, you won’t see anything but the toughest wildflowers. And on the far side of Güzeldere Pass, it’s a desert.”
Their provisions had been supplemented by stock from a storage locker the Fedeli kept in Ispiria for the treks they led in late spring and early fall. They now had nylon rope and climbing hardware and supplies for sudden mountain storms, though Francesca’s forecast was that the weather would remain dry and might even turn hot. If they sustained a brisk pace, Raszer estimated they’d make their destination by the morning of the third day. The plan was to then make a base camp at the foot of the citadel, and for Raszer to ascend to el Mirai alone the next morning.
For the first part of the journey, they were on paths well worn by trekkers before them. The grades were steep, the stones sharp underfoot, and though the air remained dry and relatively cool, the sun was merciless. A layer of sweat formed every few minutes, then was blown dry by the next ferocious updraft. Dehydration was a real risk, and so—Raszer was told—were human and animal predators.
All through the nineteenth century, intrepid Englishmen had risked these mountains for the archeological treasures of ancient Urartu and Assyria, and many had had their throats slit by nomadic brigands. The treaties of spirit and flesh the Fedeli had made over seven years of leading trekking parties through the highlands of the Kurdish homeland offered some degree of protection, but only where the thieves were bound by tribe. Danger might come from renegades and mercenaries of any stripe. The greatest measure of safety came not from their alliances or from any makeshift diplomatic immunity, but from the inhospitality of the land itself. It seemed empty of life.
They made camp on a butte that rose like a river lock from the valley floor and overlooked the next day’s stark journey into nothingness. They broke a full two hours before sunset because they’d made excellent time, because Francesca was concerned about dehydration, and because travel late in the day invited thieves. They pitched two tents, bootleg versions of Red Cross originals, which offered some degree of inoculation—one for the men, and one for the women. Between them, they dug a fire pit and channels to drain any sudden mountain cloudbursts. Then they scrambled down the runneled sides of the butte to collect fuel from the dry brush and fallen walnut trees that clung improbably to the loose rock. By five o’clock they had a good fire, and by six thirty, Francesca had stuffed five eggplants with walnuts and dried chilies for roasting, and, with grudging assistance from Ruthie, had ma
de flatbread from flour and water.
They ate only what they could consume entirely. Their only intoxicants were fear and the hyperawareness it induced, a kind of feral vision. All sensation was enhanced because all the usual insulation was gone. The partial antidote for this animal edginess was—as it had always been—to huddle close and swap stories. And so it was that Raszer persuaded his two guides to tell him how the Fedeli had come to be.
Francesca had been on The Gauntlet for a little better than a year, after having abandoned her graduate studies at the University of Bologna. Her thesis work on semiotics, never completed, had dealt with sexual signifiers in the visions of the saints. She was one of few women who’d embraced the game’s gamble, and it had finally led her to the international resort areas of southwestern Turkey.