by Rory Maclean
‘Penny lived in Nepal for nine years,’ I say.
‘In a haze of beauty. India blew our minds but Nepal was flipping paradise on earth. Those days were the happiest, the most magical, of my life.’
Tree frogs croak in the breaks between songs. New kids join the party, returning hungry from a night trek to the Chimaera, the plume of natural gas flames on one of the foothills of nearby Mount Olympos. The smell of grilling meat and herbs melds with marijuana smoke. Beer bottles clink in a cooler. Two naked children doze on a raised, cushioned kösk under an orange tree.
‘Then Orrin snuffed it,’ says Penny.
We don’t respond, youth losing its voice at the mention of death.
‘And I ran away from Kathmandu. I became a nobody, needing a new hip, living with my souvenirs in sheltered housing in Battersea.’ She reaches into her rucksack, between the tissues, tarots and Tylenol, and extracts a crumpled paisley handkerchief. ‘Life became so… quiet. As quiet as the grave. And much too safe.’
Now I understand her tears, her protectiveness of the past. I try to ease her distress by saying, ‘After this holiday you’ll have new memories to take home.’
‘I don’t have a home any more.’
‘You moved out?’
‘As we grew older, things started to get tough for us in Nepal; aches and pains and disappointment. For the first time in his life Orrin got frightened. He started hoarding stuff. He lay down everything we owned: the LPs, the wine, even the ham in aspic. Lay them down for tomorrow, to be opened and rolled on the palate at some later date, to be put on the turntable in the future. The enjoyment was supposed to be heightened because of association and time. But then Orrin died and the point of saving was lost. I found myself back in England, in an old folks’ home, a tomb for ancient Britons.’ She stops, allows herself a little cry, then leans back with the end of the joint and gazes skywards, trying to make out stars. ‘So I let it all go.’
‘All go?’
‘Last week I packed this bag. Stacked all our crap in the middle of the room. Then I walked out, leaving the door wide open, and went straight to Heathrow; destination: Istanbul.’
We stare at her in disbelief, shocked and fascinated.
‘Who knows what happened to all that stuff. I hope someone made use of it. Someone who deserved it. I certainly wasn’t having any fun – stuck inside that place, surrounded by things. Maybe right now someone is listening to my autographed copy of the White Album.’
After her moment of exuberance Penny sighs. Her head falls to her chest. I see her old frame begin to shake as if by an earth tremor. In a moment she’s gasping for air, unable to fill her lungs. I put an arm around her shoulders and help her back into a sitting position. The tears flare like tiny jewels on her cheeks. She stares at the bonfire, tries to roll a cigarette, spills the tobacco on to the pebbles. She runs her fingers through her grey hair. Debbie takes Jeff’s hand.
‘I wasn’t on anything,’ Penny confesses to us when she catches her breath, reading my thoughts. ‘I just got depressed living alone in a box in London, living for stuff. That was never the dream.’
Beyond our circle, the incomers have turned up the volume. The night’s tempo lifts again as the revellers expand the dance, looping around our fire, drawing us unwittingly back into the deafening chaos. Sparks sail above the dark bay, into the high hills.
‘For love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave,’ whispers Penny. ‘Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.’
I can hardly hear her voice above the raw pulse of music. Her face is in shadow, as pale as chalk. Her hair has fallen out of its clips and over her neck.
‘Ginsberg?’ asks Mary.
‘Song of Solomon,’ says Terry in recognition.
Then Penny seizes my hand and pulls me to my feet. She staggers ahead and I let her guide me into the heart of the dance, into the whirlpool of writhing, leaping, living bodies.
7. Bend Me, Shape Me
We are up at dawn, driving into a white sunrise, tracing a crescent above a searing sea. The coast road curves high above the shore, dropping into fishing villages skimmed by a sheen of tourism like the blue chintz on old chairs at the Restaurant Paradise. In Kemer, a lone angler throws his line over the rocks, lemon-yellow beach apartments at his back. A proud young Turkish woman, skin dove-brown, long black hair uncovered, kicks into the sea in her apricot bikini. Behind her, broad grandmothers ride out to the fields sitting two abreast in tractor hoppers. Corner shops sell donkey yokes and Bain de soleil. Skeletons of new holiday homes climb the scrubby hill like en suite Lycian rock tombs.
All morning Penny remains subdued, perhaps because of our early start, more probably because of her dramatic departure from England. She still believed that property is theft. We left the revellers asleep at Treehouses and set out eastwards on our own. I was anxious to get back on the trail. By sunset, we’ll reach her destination. Our last journey together in Turkey stirs my emotions, not least because I’m wary of her intentions in Cappadocia. I don’t offer to play her ‘Anarchy in the UK’.
More by luck than design – each shared taxi waiting to fill up before departing – a succession of dolmuş rides connects us with Antalya, the eastern Turkish heart of beach tourism. Here, Russian sun-seekers tan to leather around the pools at the vast Kremlin Palace, a confection of faux-Soviet holiday apartments with ersatz, onion-domed St Basil’s Cathedral. Syrians bake fully clothed by the water, their chadors caked with wet sand. Iranian girls belly-dance on public beaches while in the blocks behind them Iranian boys buy Ukrainian whores by the hour.
The Turks stare out of our Toyota’s tinted windows like foreigners moving through an unfamiliar landscape, most of them as detached from the new tourists as their parents were from the hippies. Then we swing inland, leaving behind immodesty and modernity. In only a few miles, unchanging upland villages rise out of dust. Children dig at patches of beans. Their back-bent mothers, in voluminous şalvars gathered at the ankles like baggy culottes, hoe yard-sized wheat fields. A farmer tips off his donkey, removes his knitted cap and unrolls his prayer mat. A man without a hand alights at a carpenter’s shop.
‘There!’ Penny shouts, standing up in her seat, pointing forward.
The flat steppe, which for hours has been bleak and mournful, crumbles away from the roadside. Our dolmuş hurtles down a steep, rippling precipice. I crane my neck upwards as the Toyota twists between extraordinary, mushroom-capped stone towers. The sun strobes between and through them, ushering us into one of the world’s strangest landscapes.
Cappadocia was once an essential stop-off on the overland trail to India, now it’s the most easterly point of the Turkish backpacking circuit. One-hundred-foot layers of volcanic ash, dust and ballast have been sculpted by the elements into a moonscape of honeycombed cliffs and Gaudiesque phalluses.
In Göreme, at the centre of a web of valleys, Penny doesn’t stop to find a hotel. Instead, she hobbles out of the bus station, calling back to me over her shoulder, ‘This way. Hurry up.’
I pay the driver and grab our bags, chasing after her past the ‘fairy chimneys’. Cobbled streets wind between the salt-white pinnacles. Ochre spires sprout breakfast balconies. Over thousands of years, people hollowed living spaces out of the soft stone, which can be carved with a spoon when first exposed to the air. At the edge of town, we turn down a dry river bed into deserted ‘Love’ Valley. Pigeons glide into fallow fields. Flocks of starlings rise up into yellow-flowered oleaster.
‘I remember that tower,’ Penny assures me, pushing into the outlandish wilderness, thrilled by the prospect of rediscovery. Around us, the canyon walls are riddled with the dark portals of hermit cells and cave churches. ‘We stayed down here to the right.’
We fork right and walk into a stone wall. A hot breeze exhales from the dead end. Undeterred, Penny retraces our tracks, laughing away my concerns about her age and the searing heat.
‘I’ll be dead for a very long time,’ she
shouts, doing little to ease my concern for her emotional state.
Until the 1950s, Cappadocia was unexplored and undocumented by the outside world, save for the accounts of a general secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and a Frenchman, Father Guillaume de Jerphanion. Then, British travel writers – including Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor – visited the region, and their evocative reports captured the imagination of the first sixties travellers. They pitched their tents and unrolled their sleeping bags in the sun-baked ravines, sitting up all night playing guitars and watching the sensuous colours of the rock surfaces change hue in the day’s shifting light. I’d read everything I could on the full-moon parties, the Malibu surfer who became a cavedwelling troglodyte and the former B-52 airman, whose job had been to obliterate life on Vietnam’s DMZ, planting a vegetable garden in the fertile Anatolian soil. I’d even heard of a Glaswegian who, driving his Messerschmidt bubble car to India, stopped here for a night and stayed for three years.
‘Come on!’ Penny shouts.
There is no shade along the winding footpath. The midday sun glares off the ashen sand, dazzling my eyes and softening my brain.
‘It’s got to be here somewhere.’
We press along an even narrower ravine, deserted and silent but for the cries of birds.
‘There,’ she rushes, like a lame horse on the home stretch. ‘There it is.’
The cave – her cave – is perched thirty feet up a sheer face, overhung with a mushroom-cap awning. I see no ladder.
‘The entrance is over here.’
Ten feet above the ground, hidden behind a fold of rock, a dim aperture opens into the stone. Under her guidance, I scramble on to a ledge and crawl lizard-like into its cool darkness, disturbing flights of moths. The passageway curves to the right, then up inside the carved cliff. I unfold myself into a simple, cruciform cave church. On its threshold, a protective millstone stands ready – as it has done for a thousand years – to be rolled over the entrance. Penny puffs at my heels.
‘Man, this is it.’
Above our heads, a dome has been hewn out of the solid rock, an iron adze and chisel outlining door frames, marking false capitals and lattices. Two stone seats and a ledge of pews mark the perimeter, enhancing the illusion of a conventional church. Around a thick horseshoe arch, which opens on to the canyon, are painted umber flames symbolizing the descent of the Holy Ghost into the nave.
Penny spins on her toes, her arms wrapped around herself and tears forgotten, wailing, ‘Whooee.’
In caves such as this, unnumbered generations took sanctuary from wolves, Romans and the consumer society. Early Christians retreated up the steep cliffs to carve over the centuries as many as four hundred hideaways, chapels and basilicas. St Paul, born not many miles to the south, considered the environment suitable for inspiring and training missionaries. During medieval times, the valleys became one of the principal monastic centres of the Byzantine Empire. In the sixties, Cappadocia provided sanctuary for many Intrepids, also giving them a safe place to explore a utopian way of life.
‘After Istanbul, we stayed here for the summer. All summer. Just hanging out. Just being.’
Penny settles herself into the monk’s seat, a look of deep contentment rising on her face. She gazes over the lip of the cave, down to a small spring and a clump of wild apple trees and starts talking about their stay, her loquacious self again.
‘That summer, people put up their tents and banners, which in this fantasyland was amazing. There were Japanese glass chimes, little Tibetan prayer flags, cats doing Zhao Zen meditation, couples promising to love each other under the stars and under heaven.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘It was cosmic.’
At the end of another short tunnel is a second square chamber, perhaps a funerary chapel, its ceiling darkened by centuries of cooking fires. A single pillar is smashed away at its base and dangling like a stalactite.
‘This was our bedroom. Lit a few candles here, I can tell you.’
I stare at the sooty, deconsecrated space, then out into the valley, at her demi-Eden, now abandoned and inhospitable. I feel an urge to protect her – and myself – from disappointment and say quickly, ‘We should head into Göreme to find a hotel.’
Penny ignores me, dropping to her hands and knees to scrabble in the dust, looking for something, for anything: a Levi’s button, a Day-Glo hair pin, even a roach clip. I know she’ll find no memento. Too many years have passed since her heady summer of love. Too many younger travellers have stopped by her cave.
‘Penny, let’s go.’
But she’s laughing, digging in the earth, scooping away the soil. She pulls up small stones. She breaks a purple nail-extension. I put my hand on her shoulder and, after a minute or two, help her on to her feet. I pick up our bags and turn towards the tunnel.
‘Stay with me, Jack,’ she says.
‘Here? In the cave?’
She nods. I’m about to refuse her when I notice her hands trembling on her cane.
‘But… I don’t have a guitar,’ I say.
Later, I trek back into town to buy water and food. I borrow a frying pan and a couple of blankets from the Köşe pension. By the time I crawl back up the tunnel, it’s late afternoon. Penny has swept out the church, arranged her candles by the stone altar and sits on a pew gazing at the distant, rippling cones.
‘I’ve been watching the light change with the day,’ she says, nodding into the distance. ‘Brick red to rust, ochre to salt-white.’
I unpack the shopping, pass her a pack of cigarettes, uncork a bottle of wine for me. I cut up a cucumber, tomatoes and a shrub-sized bunch of coriander to make a salad, tossing it together with lemon and oil in a carrier bag. In the pan I fry a monster omelette with red peppers, olives and salty, dry tulum peynir goat’s cheese. I lay a couple of rolled börek pastry parcels around its rim. We balance on the rocky lip, eating from the pan in silence, breaking bread, watching our crumbs being carried away by bold sparrows and the evening’s ants.
‘We travelled throughout the world. We conquered the warshattered world by our faith and transformed it into paradise,’ she says after supper. The words are familiar. ‘Hermann Hesse.’
‘You say faith? What do you – did Hesse – mean by faith?’
‘The belief in something better,’ she answers me. ‘The search for enlightenment.’
To Buddhists, enlightenment means the passing into nirvana, the release from the cycles of death and rebirth. In the sixties, the word became generalized to describe an enlightened awareness of self.
Bands of golden sunlight gild the high branches of the pines. Its radiance filters through the veins of the olive leaves. The shadows of black crows fleet across stony cliffs. As the sun sets, we sit together in silence; Penny still studying our surroundings, me writing.
Last night, the candles burnt out before I could finish my notes. This morning, I left the cave and set about exploring Göreme, the isolated farming village transformed by tourism. I’m curious how the town looked in Penny’s day.
Rock churches rise beyond the coach park. Veiled women buy vegetables alongside backpackers in shorts. Across from the Bedrock Travel Agency, down the hill from the Troglodyte Hotel, I find Flintstone’s Bar. Its Turkish owner, ‘Fred, a local caveman’, tells me how he settled on its name.
‘A couple of years ago, two Australian girls were sleeping in one of my caves,’ he says, filling the quiet afternoon with conversation. ‘I gave them a morning call by shouting, “Wilma, wake up!” We’d been watching The Flintstones on TV. The girls shouted back, “Coming, Fred.” Dino,’ he yells at the dog licking my hand, ‘leave the customer alone.’
To help me to revive the sixties, Fred invites over Abdullah Güney, owner of Zemi Tours, and Bayram Maden, a tall and flamboyant restaurateur.
‘I remember the parties most of all,’ grins Abdullah, shaking my hand, settling himself on to a low cushion, eager to talk, ‘drinking wine, playing guitars, sitting together in the Turkish
way.’
‘At first, the hippies camped in the valleys,’ recollects Bayram, one of the initial villagers to welcome the Intrepids to Göreme.
‘Our mothers told us, “Don’t go near the giaours.” The infidels.’
‘My father ran the only café in the village,’ Bayram goes on. ‘One night after he had gone to bed, I invited some of them to sleep on the tables and floor. Next morning, when it was still dark, my father walked in and tripped over the sleeping bodies. He took his stick and beat them out into the street.’
‘Like wild dogs,’ laughs Abdullah recalling the old, insular days.
‘I convinced my father to let our guests stay but he insisted on hanging a curtain across the middle of the café: locals on one side, giaours on the other.’
‘We called him “Christian Bayram”,’ Abdullah tells me, laying his arm across his friend’s shoulders. ‘He grew long sideburns, which wasn’t allowed, and fell in love with a South African girl. His mother wailed, “What has happened to our boy?”’
‘In Turkish, we say European girls are washing the eyes of the men: uncovering their legs, showing their arms, putting on lipstick.’
‘But the visitors’ liberalism must have upset the older villagers,’ I say, as Fred slips off his stool to serve a customer, pulling a pint of Carlsberg by hand. ‘They covered traditional foods in ketchup. They insisted on you learning English. What did you think of that… disrespect?’
‘Nothing,’ shrugs Bayram, pragmatic and dismissive. ‘They were – you are – tourists. You could be from the moon.’
In 1983, three German travellers helped to pour the concrete foundation of the first cafeteria. The following summer, it was joined by the first cave-house pension. Over the coming decades, the area was transformed from a derelict backwater into a labyrinth for tourists’ consumption. Now a bustling town in Cappadocia, Göreme’s two thousand residents run sixty hotels, fifteen tour agencies, eighteen restaurants and a bus-station shopping-complex.