Full Moon over Noah's Ark

by Rick Antonson

  I stayed with them until they were done playing, and then stumbled across a sign for an Internet café, so I walked up a set of narrow stairs that curved into a room with a few computers. I bought a Coke, paid for five minutes’ access, and signed on. I emailed home the reassuring news: “Back in Turkey. Am safe. Heading to Iran.”

  Down again on the street, I noticed an alleyway and a shed under a STAR taxi sign, which rang a bell from my previous visit. I asked about Naim, who had driven me from Tatvan to Van weeks earlier. Within a minute he appeared, recognizing me right away.

  “You are back? You want taxi to Van?”

  “I will take the ferry this time. It’s at 4:30. Will you show me your city?”

  “We can go to Nemrut Daği,” he said. “It is beautiful to view Lake Van from that high. Old volcano. There are two craters. One small, water is hot. One is big, water is cold water. Only ten kilometers from here to there. Six miles, that is.”

  “I would very much like to see that. And I wish to find a Turkey flag for my son Sean.”

  “Flag?”

  “Yes, a full size one from your country. Better if it has been used.”

  “Meet me here later. I will drive you way by craters and then to the ferry. You say it leaves at 4:30?”

  When I came back, it was 2:30. Naim handed me a Turkish flag that clearly had flown somewhere, its red faded. I didn’t ask where he’d gotten it. It was dirty but beautiful—at least it would be seen that way. “Sean will love it,” I said.

  “A gift,” said Naim. The ongoing and unsought generosity of people sat with me as a mark of their faith and self-confidence.

  We began a drive through the city’s streets, Naim telling me that I would love Nemrut. “I am proud to show you.” We were maybe ten minutes on the way to Nemrut Daği when it struck me that the ferry schedule was, in my admittedly limited experience, unreliable and worth checking. Naim agreed. He pulled to the side of the road to make a call on his cell phone. “My dispatcher says it is 4:30 today,” he reported. “Also that I should confirm with ferry company. Avoid ferry surprise.”

  He dialed the direct number of the ferry company, spoke in staccato Turkish, hung up, and roared the engine, tearing away from the roadside. “It leaving now. We go. Is only ferry today.”

  We raced across town and took shortcuts down side streets. Naim wove into the main thoroughfare, where there was no traffic light. I’m not sure why I feel that remote cities should somehow not have traffic jams, but some part of me feels they don’t deserve the insult that comes with too many cars driving on roads built a century ago for horse carriages. Here, it was as though the sprawl of the automobile culture collided with a lakeside town that didn’t want it. To honking disagreement, Naim nudged into the hectic flow of cars and through it. We burst onto the port lands and screeched to a halt in front of a building at the Tatvan İskelesi. “You’ll need ticket.”

  We were in and out of the building and back in the car in under a minute, my ticket in hand. Naim sped to where the dock ended and the ship began. The ferry was loaded with cargo containers, and a forklift was shifting the last pallet on deck. The ferry’s engines hummed. It was 3:00 p.m. I reached in my pocket to pay Naim for the ride.

  He brushed it away. “No matter, Rick. You go now. Maybe run.”

  I ran down the walkway and jumped onboard, just as the ferry propellers engaged and churned the waters. A deckhand hauled a chain-link rope aboard. By the time I’d made my way to the upper deck, we were under way, aboard the industrial ferry named Tatvan.

  Once we’d left port, and after my adrenaline subsided, the four-hour passage became a crossing of reflection, rather than the one of anticipation it would have been if I’d caught it two weeks earlier, when climbing Ararat was still in my future. I thought about my summit, and the improbability that I had managed to make it in and out of Iraq. The next night I would board the Trans-Asia Express from Van, Turkey, to Tehran, Iran. In this trip’s sense, I would soon become “homeward bound.”

  In my period of reflection, it actually took some time before I noticed that there were no other passengers on board. A crewmember walked to the back of the boat once, where I sat, but after looking me over and seeing that I posed no threat, left me alone with my thoughts.

  An hour later, another man came in my direction. He looked at me with officialdom’s concern.

  “I am captain.” He took me to the bridge, picked up a pair of binoculars and pointed to the distance, knowing daylight would soon be gone. “Akdamar Island,” he announced.

  The crewmember brought me a glass of water, a treat he could not share, which he conveyed by zipping a thumb and finger across his lips to indicate daytime abstinence for Ramadan. I drank and passed it back, and glimpsed him, just before he cornered out of my sight, taking a sip of what was left.

  Back outside on the deck, I felt the cold and wrapped a jacket around my shoulders. It was early evening and I thought about the Şahmaran Hotel in Van, grilled chicken and red wine mere hours away. I was hungry. The captain reappeared as if on cue and signaled me to follow him. I obeyed. He led me down an iron stairway of peeling paint, into an empty public seating area where purple chairs were welded to the deck.

  There, on a white table, sat a bowl of rice with what looked to be yam, and chunks of what might be beef. He motioned that I should sit down and tapped the fork with his knuckle, indicating it was mine. I sat, picked up the fork, and looked up to see him leave. It was food shared from his dinner, hot and good. I ate it all.

  Back on deck, it was as though the land lights around the lake were coming on in concert with the stars in the sky. The crewmember that had earlier brought me water came by to ask what I did in my home country.

  I can’t remember, or don’t want to, is what I thought to myself, which was egotistical, bred from the feeling I had nothing to add to his life by sharing what interested him about mine. My life was as foreign to him as his was to me, and why should my line of curiosity overshadow his? It shouldn’t have, but it did. We talked about him some more instead, and I learned he’d always lived in Tatvan; a man of thirty who had been a child soccer star, now with a boy of his own, who didn’t like soccer.

  Despite my having no nautical trade to offer or discuss, he took me back to the bridge. We were nearing the dockyards of Van. The captain told me what he was doing as though I’d become fluent in technical Turkish. He leaned out a window as he guided his massive craft against the sturdy timbers of the dock. With me leaning out the window at his left elbow, it felt as though he and I parked the boat together at Van İskelesi. Upon completion, he spat out the window, so I spat too. He smiled. Then we spat again, together this time, commemorating the docking ceremony. The things you learn.

  Being the only foot passenger to walk off the ferry, I did so after watching the trucks shunt from shore to the boat as they prepared to haul the cargo trailers off the ship. They grunted up the drawbridge and away. There was no taxi stand in sight, and the captain, watching from the bridge, signaled that I should walk further down the carriageway.

  A hundred feet from where I stood, over on the other side of two sets of railway tracks, a dozen people sat around tables, drinking what looked to be coffee. Over and away, beside them, a few cars were parked in the darkness. On the distant southeastern shore, I spotted the hotel where I would be staying. I hoped for a taxi at the coffee spot, which from all appearances looked to be a station of sorts.

  Climbing down to the tracks, I made my way across them, tripping on a rail in the process. I threw my pack up on the other platform and climbed out of the rail bed, scrambling onto the concrete terrace near the coffee place. A sizeable and jovial man at a table clapped in applause and signaled me over. “You have earned tea. Sit with us.”

  I was nobody to him and his companions, yet freshly grilled köfte was brought to our table right away and placed near me. The meat sizzled and my stomach whined in response.

  “Eat. They are good,” the burly man
said. Before I could reach over, two of his friends helped themselves. He swatted their hands away, and they tittered in delight.

  “I am looking for a taxi,” I said.

  “Sometimes this is a good place to look. Tonight, I am not sure.”

  “I need to get to a hotel.”

  “Where have you traveled from?” The question came from the table next to ours. I turned to see a bearded, aged man, his face half caught in the lamp’s glare. I told him my story, beginning in Tatvan earlier that day.

  The bearded man shifted in his seat, slowly, and rose to join our table. Reaching for the köfte with slender fingers, he chose a smaller one, leaving the last and largest for me. He shakily poured me some tea and said, “You must have longer story. How did you come to us in Van?”

  I backed up, starting with the Van Gölü Express. When I got to the part about missing the ferry weeks ago, they all laughed. “It is!” one of the men exclaimed and another chorused him. “It is.” The singularity of that expression summed it up.

  “Well, certainly, ‘It was,’” I echoed.

  They were pleased to hear that I’d climbed Mount Ararat and then come back to Van, because, as the bearded man said, “Few people from West travel to Van. Fewer come back.”

  It went quiet. The ferry sat motionless. Inside, someone turned a light out. The burly man reached over to shake my hand. “My name is Muslim Giil. I will drive you to your hotel.”

  “You have a taxi?”

  “No. But I have a car.”

  We trudged away, Muslim Giil and I, followed by the old man, back to his car, a Mercedes that looked as old as the man with us, and in a similar state of disrepair.

  It would not start.

  “It is,” said Muslim Giil.

  I took stock of my situation. I was sitting in a car that wouldn’t start, with two men I’d known for under twenty minutes. We were at the far end of a lake port, where a ferry now sat empty and dark. All I could see of these men was by starlight.

  Another turn of the key and all the Mercedes did was cough.

  “It is,” I said.

  “It is,” said the old man from behind me.

  The Mercedes lurched forward on the third try. Muslim Giil fed it gas, and the tires suddenly caught dirt. We flew out of our parking pit and hurled down a lane. The driver did not want to ease up on the gas in case we stalled, and the muffler rattled when he double-clutched into third gear. He took his hand off the shift and pushed his flop of gray hair out of his eyes and back over his head. The man in the back seat snickered, “Again, it works.”

  Muslim Giil laughed.

  I did not remember this area of Van from my previous visit and had no idea where we might be going. No one had asked where I might be staying, so I said, “Merit Şahmaran.”

  “Nice,” said the old man.

  But we were heading down dark back lanes.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Merit Şahmaran,” Muslim Giil replied, as we suddenly sprang onto a highway I recognized as Van’s main road.

  “Sapas dicam,” I said, expressing my appreciation and not a little relief.

  They both replied, “Sapas dicam.” The bearded man said, “Sapas Dicam is Kurdish for ‘thank you.’ We are Kurdish. Turkish is for thank you Tesseku aderim. You used Kurdish words for us. We like that.”

  Muslim Giil kept driving through increasingly familiar surroundings. Shifting into a lower gear, he stopped under the portico of the Şahmaran to let me out, leaving his car idling, just in case. We shook hands.

  “Sapas dicam,” I repeated.

  “It is,” he said.

  Aysenur and Emre were on duty in the lobby. Emre said, “Welcome back. Dinner service is about to close. I will tell them to save you food.”

  “I’m starved!” I said. “I certainly can eat.”

  “You eat, Richard. Then tell us about Iraq.”

  17 Wargehe Delal would, within a few years, become a name associated with a refugee camp providing housing for thousands of Yezidis who sought refuge from Islamic State jihadists, fleeing demands that they convert to extreme Islam and jettison their own faith.

  18 In 2011, 250 military officers were detained. Charges against them included conspiring against the government. The four highest-ranking officers resigned over an alleged plot and to protest the treatment of the armed forces command. Cowed, the once-dominant military authorities would no more hold sway. Half of Turkey’s admirals went to prison, a contingent within the jailhouse population of four hundred retired or serving officers.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE TRANS-ASIA EXPRESS

  “You could almost say that the Cyrus Cylinder is a history of the Middle East in one object and it is a link to a past which we all share and to a key moment in history that has shaped the world around us.”

  —Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, media comment

  The morning light came late to my hotel room but stayed there. Despite that, I slept in, for the first time in what seemed like a while. Finally, I got up for coffee, honeycomb, and note-making before heading out to run errands.

  I hitchhiked into Van and lunched in a corner café after an hour’s walk up and down the city’s high-step sidewalks. Van is a city of incessant activity, and after eating I sought out the slower pace of back streets and alleyways.

  Mid-afternoon, back at the Şahmaran, I retrieved my stowed orange case, repacked, slept a bit, had a relaxed dinner, and checked out, all the time excited about the train journey to Iran that evening.

  “Richard, it is good that you stay here three times in these weeks.” Emre was making it easy to say goodbye. “Most people never visit Van even once. When will be next? One week?”

  “I leave for Iran tonight,” I replied. “You have made my stays relaxed.”

  “Van is relaxed for everyone. Unless you live here.”

  When Aysenur appeared, it was with quick steps and a sheaf of papers in hand, the manager’s ensemble. “You have train tonight. Do not expect it to be on time. But plan that it might be. It does happen.”

  “Can you check?”

  “No.”

  The Trans-Asia Express, a.k.a. the Trans Asya Ekspresi, begins in Ankara and makes its way to the Tatvan ferry, where its cargo of passengers disembarks and is ferried across Lake Van, where they board the Iranian-operated, Tehran-bound extension of this train. This is dicey. The Trans-Asia Express to Tehran departs Van only once a week.

  Onboard the Iranian train, passengers cross the Turkey–Iran border and, after passport checks, on to Tehran. When all goes according to plan, this journey of 1,800 miles, from Istanbul to Tehran, takes two and a half days. But flexibility is an asset when making such plans.

  “Richard, the Trans Asya Ekspresi to Iran, normally it is at 9:54 that it intends to leave,” Aysenur reminded me. “You should be at Van Garı by 9:30 o’clock, but I would say 9:15. The train is never early, but you should be.” He looked at the wall clock, indicating that it was time for me to get going.

  Emre and Aysenur walked me out of the Merit Şahmaran and hailed a taxi for me. It was then that I should have asked him to tell the driver about my destination. I did not. I took that modest task upon myself when I settled in the back seat and we drove away.

  “To the train station,” I said.

  I was heartened by his simple, taxi-driver-confident tone: “Yes. Train station.” It was his city, after all.

  When we pulled out of the hotel compound onto İpek Yolu, the traffic was light, but nearing the city proper, it became busy, and all of a sudden the driver took a side road. We plunged into low-lit neighborhoods and local roads, eventually emerging into the dock lands I’d arrived at the night before. We were back at Van İskelesi, where a fair number of people seemed to be waiting for the ferry to arrive. They were having barbecues with their families. Friday night was picnic night.

  “Train station here?” I asked.

  “Yes. Ferry comes here. Train comes her
e. Ferry meets train meets ferry. You get on.” The taxi driver’s encouragement continued. “It is where I think train station is. Am certain. I will carry your bag.”

  I recognized the lengthy concrete platform along both sides of the railway tracks, the tracks I’d crossed over upon my own arrival by ferry the previous evening. People milled about and kids played, everyone convivial. As the taxi driver pulled my pack, I asked again, “Train station? For sure?”

  He nodded. “For sure.” He even stopped and asked a man and woman, or at least his Turkish seemed to convey, and got affirmative nods. I asked in English, “Train?” They kept nodding.

  The taxi driver drove away, leaving me looking out into the expanse of Lake Van, with the bow lights of the arriving Tatvan ferry two hours offshore.

  In the next half hour, people left. They weren’t waiting for anything. They were using the open space to cook and hang out with friends. I realized that once the ferry arrived this would be a truck traffic zone, and they were leaving before that happened.

  Across the way from where I was standing was the only building big enough to function as a station; my happenstance rendezvous point the night before. It figured I was on the wrong side. I once more worked down to the tracks, this time hauling Big Bertha and myself over the rails, and climbed up onto the other platform.

  “Rick!”

  There sat Muslim Giil. It had been less than twenty-four hours since he’d taken me from here to my hotel.

  “Tea?”