We stopped again after another twenty miles on a double-lane road, just outside of Cizre, as the Fonz darted into a roadside general store carting more cigarettes. He was gone twenty minutes.
With nothing to do but wait, I took out a guidebook and had enough time to realize that near here, and to the south of Sirnak, was Mount Cudi—or Cudi Dagh, or Mount Judi, or Qardu—which, based on the Qur’an, is thought to be Nûh’s “place of descent”: a third potential Mountain of the Ark location. Trying to put a positive spin on the last few hours of my life, I wondered how possible it would be to take this detour in the Noah story, since we were in the vicinity.
My revelry was short-lived.
Fonzie emerged from the store with bewilderment pasted on his face. He looked as though he’d gone inside to drop off the cigarettes and instead had sex with the merchant, but said nothing to us as he got back in the car.
After a few more deliveries, we found ourselves on the outskirts of Sirnak and dropped off one of the businessmen at a hotel. We were not much out of the main district of the town when the second man left us at an office building.
“Siirt, just you.” Fonzie, who had by now delivered two or three dozen cartons of cigarettes, was less superficially jovial and more at ease. “One more stop.” With that, we were at a roadside vendor. Cartons were removed from my door panel and taken inside the store for cash. Fonzie was back in a shot, counting the bills as he walked.
“You make much money at this?”
“Very profitable.”
“Dangerous,” I said.
“Oh yes. For you.” He laughed at this; I didn’t. “I drive border three days every week. It is my job. I don’t transport cigarettes every time. I am careful. Border guards are friends. Sometimes.”
“What if you are caught?”
“Yes. What if I am caught?” He thought a bit, with an unworried look. “I would no longer own taksi.”
Changing the subject and recalling an earlier conversation, he said: “I know agent in Siirt, before main city. You can buy bus ticket from him to Tatvan. It is easy.”
The day was warm as we entered Siirt, one hundred and twenty miles and a few hours after crossing the border. It was mid-afternoon under clear skies. The Fonz dropped me in front of a storefront jostling for the attention of sidewalk customers. He pointed to a sign that said “Ticket Agency” in Turkish and to the travel decals on the store’s window. I had paid Fonzie in advance, so there was no more negotiation. As I got out of the car, he leaned over to shake my hand, suddenly fond of our escapade. “Thanks for your cigarette help.” Then he flashed me a mouth-wide goodbye, honked, screeched his tires, and was gone.
The ticket agency was closed.
I knocked on the door several times, more loudly with each pounding. A woman came from the fruit stand next door, signaling she would phone someone.
Time passed, and two teenage boys appeared to assist me, looking as if they were on a school assignment for the absent owner. They did not speak English, and my Turkish was unhelpful. Unsure of what I wanted, they opened the agency. We consulted a map on their wall. Once “bus” and “Tatvan” were established, they conveyed “likely.” The Fonz had told me what a bus ticket might cost, and I held that amount in my hand. Without negotiation, one of the lads took my cash—which instantly made me think I was overpaying. The other boy issued a ticket, all written in Turkish. The only word recognizable to me was ‘Tatvan.’ The one who’d taken my cash looked to the clock and mimicked the arms, the paper bills pointing to the minute hand. I deduced that the bus to Tatvan would be arriving soon. They walked me to the other side of the street and waited with me.
When they saw the bus coming, they flagged it down. The driver spoke sharply to them as I stepped up onto the bus stairs. It did not move. The driver shook his head as I showed him my ticket. He nodded, and then he shook his jowls, saying, “Full. No room.” I again showed my ticket. He nodded. “Yes. Ticket. Full. No room.” And it was true; there was not a seat to be had. The driver’s comment was “Tomorrow.”
My bus pulled away, leaving me on the curb.
Four Mountains of the Ark (hypothetical) are shown here. Three are literary locations for the landing of an Ark after the Great Flood: Nisir (Mt. Nimush) is from the Epic of Gilgamesh; Ararat is from the Torah and the Bible; Judi (Cudi) is from the Qur’an. A fourth presumptuous location, also depicted, is Mount Sabalan.
We went back to their business and found a city map. One stabbed at a circle that was numbered to a coded list, indicating the Otobüs Terminali, and said, “Siirt Otogarı.” He pressed a finger gently to the jersey I wore, then onto the map. “Tatvan,” he emphasized. Clearly, I must get to this bus depot and from there to Tatvan.
“Taxi?”
“No,” he responded. It amused me that even those who didn’t speak English understood “no.”
“Where do I catch a bus to the bus station?” They did not understand my words but got the gist when I tried “Otobüs Terminali?” They walked me out of the shop, down the street a block to a bench with a bus stop sign. They indicated a bus should show … in a while. They went away, taking with them any hope I had of reimbursement. It is how it goes.
When a bus came, I called out “Otobüs Terminali?” The driver shook his head, closed the door, and drove off.
Fifteen minutes later, another bus came and this driver too shook his head, but before leaving he said something in rapid Turkish and gestured down the street.
I walked back to see if the teenagers were still in their shop. They were gone. Retracing my steps to a street corner, I saw a mother and little kids, one girl maybe ten, crossing toward me. Thinking the girl might learn English at school, I asked directions and they attempted answers. I got the gist that the bus connecting me with the Otobüs Terminali was at a different stop. I must go there—if only I could figure out which stop was the correct one.
In the middle of my exchange with the family, a growling motorcycle thundered up to us. A middle-aged man doffed his helmet, showing a hair crew-cut of military precision. He was astride a Harley Davidson that, at idle, was too loud to talk over, so he yelled.
“What do you want?”
I shouted. “The Otobüs Terminali, by bus. Or a taxi.”
“No taxi. Not reliable. You want bus. Also not reliable, but …”
The family moved on. The motorcyclist placed his helmet across the handlebars. He turned off his engine and it rumbled still. Now even the traffic felt quiet. The man pounced, his voice still vibrating: “Wha tha phuk are you doin here?”
“Well …” My mind raced to find calming words. It was tough to distinguish if he was crazy or just rough around the edges. He seemed upset and big, not in that order. Trouble was mine for the having.
“You must be politician.” He shook his head in disgust. “Don’t look it. Or you are religious. Don’t smell it. Or belong to an NGO. You here to change us?”
“Nope.”
“You here to marry one of our women?”
“Just passing through …”
“No one just passes through here. There is no reason for a foreigner to give a shit about this place.”
Since we seemed to be getting along, I asked about him.
“Air force pilot,” he replied. “Jet fighter.” He pointed away as though he’d parked one nearby. “You are from North America. I was in Labrador. Training for NATO flights.”
He burst into a monologue involving Turkish politics, within which his armed forces were a major player. “There will be a coup, it is said,” he began. “The Force, it has much political power. Forces are disgruntled.” He talked of the growing public distrust of government, and also of the recent distrust of the armed forces. At first I was intrigued—a poli-sci lecture on the street corner in Turkey. Then I wondered if it was safe to even be seen in the general vicinity of a wild man talking so negatively about the government. He rolled on about the country’s prime minister: “Erdoğan concentrates on winning Eur
opean friends. Needs cross-investment Euros. For European support, first he must better treat Kurds and Armenians.”
That would seem a good thing, I thought. The other side of that, the man said, was that “Erdoğan will make Turkey an Islamic state. Pious types restrict freedom of others.” He made a threat: “Government will be stopped.” In a country of coups, this seemed to me entirely plausible.18
Putting on his helmet, he did up the chinstrap. “If I had another helmet, I could take you to Otobüs Terminali. You would see why you shouldn’t spend time here. You are nowhere.”
Then came the simplest of explanations: “This bus stop is for neighborhood and you would need to make transfer. You would get lost. Actually, you are lost. You need cross-city bus. Walk down three blocks and stand at bus sign.”
His Harley roaring again, the military man saluted me and rode away.
I walked over a few blocks, and when a bus came to the stop where I waited, my mention of Otobüs Terminali was greeted with a nod. I added “Siirt Otogarı” for clarification and was welcomed up the steps. Moving to the back of the bus, I sat among four kids and three men sharing the bench on a little rise with two side seats. They were friendly right away, one man asking in English, “Where do you go?”
“Bitlis. There to Baykan. Then Tatvan. By bus.”
“Ah, fifteen minutes to Otobüs Terminali. Stay on this bus, even when I get off it.”
It was the validation I needed. Dusk was approaching when he got off the bus. I looked to others who had overheard our exchange and one said, “Five minutes.”
Otobüs Terminali, while airy and open, revolved around a darkened central corridor, wide and under a high roof. Merchants’ stalls straddled both sides of the station. Under a sign that said Otobüs, I asked a woman for a ticket to Tatvan, showing the one I’d bought earlier that had been declined. “It is not me,” she said. “Maybe them.”
“Them” were three young men in a stall bearing the sign “Vangölü Bus.” I soon learned that Vedat, Dmar, and Hamra were a team: one acknowledged my existing ticket, another refused to give me a refund, and a third explained, “That bus has left: We have our bus in one hour. You need new ticket.”
I bought one and waited. The hour came and went, and Vedat, tilting back in his chair, advised, “Maybe one more hour. It is big bus. Comfortable. Air conditioned.”
Dmar asked about my travels, and when Hamra came by with tea, he brought four cups. “Sit down,” he said. “Your ticket name is Rick.” Then with an unexplained linguistic twist of his tongue he said, “Hi, Berk.” And so it was that I joined them behind the counter.
Dmar stood and announced, “I’m getting dinner for us. And also for you, Berk.”
Vedat’s square eyes belied the truth behind this. “Big bus is not coming. Mechanical. But little bus, it will come. Just not now. We’ll have meal.”
“Not now?”
“Not now. Not soon. But tonight. Is good.”
They spread a large towel over the concrete floor. Dmar returned with a paper box loaded with food. The four of us sat on the floor behind their sales counter.
“Is all delicious. Is all Turkish,” said Dmar. As he handed me each serving he explained its name: haşlama, and karurma, a soup he called mercimek, and salad (gorbasi) and rice (pirma). Feeling I should have this information, he wrote the names down on a sheet of paper and gave it to me. We ate the hearty meal while sipping sweet tea. I learned they’d all been born in this town. None had traveled, despite working for a transportation company. All three were unmarried.
I went to use the bathroom and when I returned ten minutes later, I realized how dark and late it was.
“Bus is ready,” said Vedat loudly to a group of nine passengers standing together in the wide aisle. Beside them was a traveler wearing a slouchy hat. I could not see his face. Vedat continued with “It is …” and his explanation spilled into the air. The locals nodded. Off they went, led by the man with the slouchy hat. I followed.
“Tesseku aderim.” I waved.
We walked to a concrete platform where one might presume the bus to Tatvan would have arrived and been prepared for departure. But that platform ended without any sign of a bus. We all looked around and realized we were in an acre-size lot with only a few buses, all parked for the night and shuttered. There were no overhead lights. The floppy hatted man walked on. We passed the empty buses and the yard opened wide. Not a running bus in sight. I kept close to the group. We left the station lot and moved onto a dark street. There were no lights to guide us, so I turned on my flashlight. “Tesseku aderim,” I heard.
All of us night travelers moved along a back street, sheep-like, following our slouchy-hatted leader, someone no one appeared to know. Halfway down that dirt street was an idling minibus with its parking lights on. The floppy hat man stood by the doorway, checking our tickets. I boarded last in the line, asking a hopeful, “Tatvan?”
The driver nodded and I made my way on board. All seats on the bus were taken. Only one option was left to me. I became the fourth person in the minibus’s last row, with its three seats. Squishing onto the bench, I hugged my pack against my chest.
“It’s midnight,” a man said.
“Yes, it’s midnight,” said the slouchy hatted clerk as he closed the bus door and left us.
There was an argument between the driver and the man seated beside him, possibly about why a big bus scheduled to leave at 7 p.m. had become a minibus leaving at midnight. Whatever the particulars, it was carried out entirely in Turkish and appeared to be resolved, or at least temporarily put on hold, by the time we departed.
The driver, having let out a harangue that I took to mean he was innocent and full of testosterone, found the gas pedal. We shot our way along and up a hill and within fifteen minutes were driving through some kind of construction zone. There were detours and disruptions. A passenger smoked: the windows were closed.
The man beside me laid his head against the van’s window wall, but when he fell asleep his head flipped to the side, flopped a bit forward and onto my shoulder, where it remained.
Our dolmuş veered around corners, the driver hell-bent on either picking up time or careening over the cliff. With only our headlights to guide us through the miles of dark dirt road, we sped ahead. I could see through clouds of cigarette smoke that the driver was engaged in animated conversation with both the man seated next to him and the man behind him on the same side. The driver’s eyes, and his general sense of attention, were often elsewhere than the road, which resulted in corrective cornering that made the bus lurch in a worrying way.
If we went over the cliff, I thought as I looked around at my fellow travelers, I would be the last one out.
Streetlights appeared ahead and we stopped. Everyone disembarked from the bus. Although it was well after one in the morning, the place was waiting for us. There were stores selling clothing and food, as well as a mechanics shop. This transportation hub springing up out of nowhere was only a surprise to me. After all, thirsty and hungry passengers on a well-traveled road were not taken for granted, no matter what time of day it was. I returned from the toilets to find our minibus empty. A waving hand caught my attention and I went over to a low table where my fellow passengers sat on chairs, socializing, cups of hot tea in their hands.
I found a white plastic stool and sat among them, sipping tea from a half-filled cup offered to me. I thought, no one I know has any idea where I am. Next I thought, I don’t have any idea where I am.
* * *
By the time our bus neared Tatvan, it was still pitch black outside, and only three passengers remained aboard. I had moved to sit behind the driver, who knew I was looking for a hotel, any hotel, in Tatvan. I had dozed off when the dolmuş came to a stop. Twice someone said “Tatvan hotel,” but in my dream it was a spirit voice. One of the passengers shook me awake. I gathered my thoughts, and as I stepped down from the van, the driver pointed down a road that ended in darkness. “Hotel.”
“Hotel?”
“Hotel. Walk. Two, maybe three blocks. It is there.”
I had little choice but to hoist my pack and set off into the darkness.
A dimly lit old building emerged, as promised, and I walked up a wide stairway into a lobby. The foyer was broad, high ceilinged with fans swinging above an expanse likely furnished a hundred years ago. I could enjoy a day or three here. I imagined, in my sleep-addled daze, sitting in one of the high-backed wicker chairs playing backgammon. I knocked gently on the check-in counter. A man yawned his way from behind a wall, scrunching his eyes to clear them.
“Room?”
“Room.”
He wanted cash, but not much, and handed me a key for a room on the second floor. The counter clock’s display said 3:15 a.m.
At 6:30 a.m., I woke. The room around me was spacious, with two comfortable sitting chairs against a wall under slatted window blinds that protected me from whatever shone outside. There was enough light to reveal I’d fallen asleep lying on top of the bedspread, the blankets tucked in. I was up and in the shower, and not long after desperately seeking a coffee. I found the early fixings for a breakfast buffet on the lowest level, but nothing looked appealing. I returned to the lobby to check out, and asked about the ferry.
“Ferry,” the clerk responded, writing down an evening departure of 4:30 p.m.
I walked the streets of Tatvan, finding a bakery where a man was just then pulling bread from ovens. He wore white clothing slathered in dough and crumbs. His hands looked toasted. I eyed a loaf so big it could feed a family. I felt a family’s worth of hunger and bought it. Walking along the street, I tore off chunks of bread to eat until a woman whispered, “Tsk” in displeasure at my eating. In my hunger, I’d forgotten to respect Ramadan.
As I passed along the sidewalk where five men sat on tipped-over cargo boxes, I noticed they were playing a game using small tiles with numbers on their surfaces. Many tiles were face down, and others were held so that only each player could see his own numbers. One man motioned for me to join. I was eating and felt inappropriate, but he insisted and tipped over a wooden crate for me. So I sat down, and, realizing how distracting my bread’s aroma must be, rolled the bag tight, tucking it behind my ankles. “It is for you. You only,” the man who had bid me sit down said, and they went about their game.
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