by Susan Duncan
'Tomorrow,' he says, still swinging my arm, 'Gallipoli!'
He skips a couple of steps, his face smooth and young in the stifled light. It is almost 25 April, Anzac Day, when Australians remember the dead at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. It was his only request when we began our holiday planning. Small enough, considering his interest in my weaver is minimal.
***
It's barely light and still very cold. Our bus to Gallipoli can't make it around the narrow Istanbul streets. The guide leads us three blocks to where it is parked. We carry our bags. Packed too much, but the seasons will change from late spring to summer while we are here, which means warm clothes as well as light ones. The bags get heavier with every block.
'The traffic will be bad,' the guide explains. 'We need to get out of the city before it reaches peak.'
On the bus we drift for five hours along the blue and gold shores of the Sea of Marmara. Houses, fields, trucks passing on the way to Greece. We doze, warm in the bus. Lunch is kebab and pide (grilled meat on a skewer and flat bread) and a glass of ayran – a thick, slightly sour yoghurt drink – in a seaside café at Eceabat. Here, the wind is so cold and fierce we sit inside, huddled in jackets and scarves.
'Thought the weather would be warmer,' we tell our guide, but not as a complaint.
'In Turkey, we say now is the time to dress like cabbages,' she tells us with a smile. 'Layer by layer. So you can peel each one off as the day grows warmer.' Her name is Yasmin and her hair is cropped into triangles so it looks like a black pixie hat. She smokes from the moment we step off the bus until we climb back on board. And she has a wicked hangover.
'Thought drinking was a no-no in your culture,' I remark, hoping I don't sound like a censorious old woman.
'It is,' she replies and laughs loudly. She is studying English at university, guiding and doing translations to pay her way. Drinking is a way of life, she tells us, for students. A way of rebelling against their parents, authority, politics, religion.
'My generation was no different,' I tell her, watching her eyes widen in disbelief. 'We burned our bras, marched for women's liberation. Every generation rebels. I think it's programmed into us biologically.' But she finds it hard to believe, looking at my whitening hair and sensible walking shoes.
At the Gallipoli Peninsula, the tweed hills are bleak and disturbing, the wind still ferocious. We tread the narrow, pebbly beach at Anzac Cove. So much death. So many cemeteries. The futility of it all. Who died in this trench, now crumbling and empty? Who played cricket on this beach while shrapnel and bullets whined overhead? Who stood where I am standing? What did he talk about? What were his hopes and dreams? Did he survive or is he lying under a simple white headstone with a wrenching epitaph. 'Rest, my son, rest', says one, as though a mother cannot bear the thought of death and chooses instead to believe her son is merely sleeping. For eternity. Whose sons, whose husbands, whose brothers? I knew none of them, but the ache of loss comes pounding back.
Only a few days earlier, though it already seems a lifetime ago, as we left Church Point for the airport, Marg from Little Lovett Bay rushed up and grabbed my arm: 'See if you can find a razor case I donated to the museum at Gallipoli, will you? I sent it to a lovely man a few years ago, who drove me there from Istanbul, in his taxi. He said he'd pass it on.'
I nodded. Not a chance in a million is what I thought, though. Then, suddenly, there it is in the small Kapatepe Museum, amongst the relics and the frail reminders of daily life in the trenches – rusted nail scissors, a battered Players cigarette tin, broken pieces of pipes: 'This razor case was made by Corporal Albert Bassnett in April 1915, doneted [sic] by the Molley family on behalf of Sergeant Tom Molley 1st AIF (Australia) who served with him on the Peninsula throughout the Gallipoli Campaign April–December 1915'. Only the name is spelled wrong. It should read 'Molloy'.
Tom was my neighbour's husband. How casually I'd fielded her request, not even bothering to ask why she would donate something to a faraway museum. Bob photographs the exhibit. 'She will be pleased,' I say. But I'm ashamed at my offhandedness with her.
After a few hours' rest in a hotel in a distant town we return to Gallipoli for the dawn service. Trudging for an hour and a half under a full moon along a dirt track, past silent, humble shacks with small flocks of sheep tucked into front yards. Every shadow feels like an echo of the past.
At Anzac Cove, the chill ground is lumpy with bodies, sitting, lying, sleeping, dreaming. Spotlights scour the night sky like airraid lights from World War II. It looks more like the site for a rock concert than a memorial service. Giant television screens show old videos of the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John . . . There's scaffolding, cameras on cranes, long lines of Portaloos. But the atmosphere is strangely quiet, the crowd subdued and polite.
'Hard to find a spot to sit.'
Nearly everyone is so young. Why are they here? They have no experience of war, or even – hopefully – of loss. We throw down our plastic groundsheets bought in a nearby village, squeeze in between groups of prostrate bodies. Soon, we lie like everyone else. A young woman with flaming red hair sleeps with her head on my thigh.
Nearly five hours to dawn. When the redhead gets up and goes for a walk to get her blood circulating, a young Turkish woman and her husband mutely offer to share their blanket. We smile at each other and make room for them on our groundsheet. Within minutes we are all warmer.
As the light turns to a lemony blush, we struggle to our feet, stiff-limbed and numb, faces red raw with the cold. But it is not the finely honed words of the politicians that move, nor the prayers, although where there is death, ritual is always a comfort. Some inner core shifts when I see the Australian destroyer, HMAS Anzac, in the distance, a simple red kangaroo painted on its funnel. It triggers a yearning for a landscape of gum trees, for the peppery smell of scorched earth on a westerly wind, for a clean blue sky. An ache for everything deeply, intrinsically Australian. For Pittwater. For home. In the orange glow of sunrise, a lone bugler in a slouch hat with a scarlet band plays 'The Last Post', and I think of Lovett Bay and our simple service at Church Point.
'Feel like crying.'
'You are crying,' Bob replies. And his eyes, too, are filled with tears.
***
We cross the Dardanelles by ferry later in the day. My body is screaming with tiredness. Once I could go without sleep for forty-eight hours, adrenalin pumping, and still function. Now I feel the strobing threads of a migraine. I tell my body to behave but it refuses to listen. Does this mean that I have to shift the goalposts? Keep reducing the distances to the touchline? Is every year going to mean being less and less capable?
I glance at Bob, who looks like he's had a ten-hour sleep on a feather mattress, and wonder at the biology of men and women. I close my eyes. All I want to do is lie down. For a moment, I am filled with the same old regrets. Regrets that so many years slipped by without me taking note of the great moments. Regrets that I failed to understand the effortlessness of youth until it began to slip away from me. Regrets that I didn't cram in more. Regrets that I wasn't more useful when it would have cost so little. A ping of regret for the old times, because when you are past fifty, they truly are the old times.
Then I slam back the ball of self-pity. I force myself to remember, again, the day I sat on a cracked leather chair in a fluoro-lit office and had a weary but decent doctor tell me that I had cancer. After that kind of wake-up call, life in any form is a gift – young, old, ancient. My mother insists these are the most contented years of her life, perhaps because her countdown is speeding along and only a fool would squander what is left in a mire of bitter regret.
'Here,' says Bob. He holds a glass of hot tea and two painkillers. Thank you, I think, for not making me feel like a liability. But I know I have changed enormously from the woman of even five years ago.
When I was young and tired I could always find some inner reserve. Now when I am tired and I search for the spare tank, it isn't there. I get furiou
s, furious that my body makes decisions without consulting me. Furious that I cannot control the where or when of a migraine, a hot flush, fatigue. Furious that menopause has changed my entire bodily frame of reference.
'So what do you want to do?' Bob asks. 'Give up everything? Give up living? Just exist?'
'It's you I worry about. You just keep going and going. I'm always holding you back.'
He grins then, and his big capable hand reaches for mine. 'Don't worry about it. We're a team. I paddle hard too. I just hide it better.'
He leads me to a bench, makes me lie down with my head in his lap. How did I get so shockingly lucky?
***
We wind through an almost biblical countryside. Dry stone fences, fields spotted with red poppies, hills carpeted with chamomile, campanula and wild geranium. Women sell olives and wild pistachios along the roadside, men guide horse-drawn ploughs. Shepherds, cigarettes dripping from bottom lips, ride sturdy brown donkeys or trudge the tracks, crook in hand, with flocks of well-mannered fat-tailed sheep. Once or twice there is the tender sight of a young man gently nursing newborn lambs still slick with afterbirth.
About an hour inland from the icy Aegean Sea and not far from the ragged urban sprawl of a town called Ayvacik, we turn towards the red-tiled roofs of an untidy, ramshackle village perched on a rocky hillside, a town so high and quiet, the song of nightingales ripples clearly. Only the sound of our feet treading the rocky ground sounds discord.
As we walk towards the village square, where we will learn about vegetable dying and rug weaving, dirty white geese eye us suspiciously. Sharp-eyed chooks stab the dusty ground and cats, dozens of them, laze in thin sunlight, watchful and unmoving. The narrow streets are pungent with the smell of cow dung. Piles of compost, taller than a man, wait in lanes to be spread over freshly planted vegetable gardens.
In shaded corners women, their hair covered and wearing floral trousers, sit in doorways on the street, rolling creamy wool between tanned, callused fingers, or crocheting delicate white lace. They smile shyly as we pass, but do not speak. At the tea house, cloth-capped men with five o'clock shadows slouch under a fruiting mulberry tree, drinking weak black tea from tulip-shaped glasses, playing backgammon.
My weaver, when we meet her, is not the firebrand of my imagination. She is a short, plump, cheery-faced 45-year-old mother of two, with a couple of cows, forty sheep and a much treasured new calf. She also has the commercial instincts of a shark. Within five minutes of being invited into her home, she produces a few crocheted borders she wants to sell.
'How much?' I ask, expecting to pay about five dollars.
'Fifty lira [about $50],' she replies promptly, knowing she has me. And I laugh as I pay because I like her toughness, her instinctive ability to seize an opportunity. Doesn't matter if you can read or write, to survive is what it's all about.
'What are your dreams?' I ask when we are ready to leave. Because I am curious. Is acceptance of age-old tradition the key to happiness?
She thinks for a while, taking the question very seriously. Then she slides her arm around my waist as though we have always been friends. A new dress for her daughter, she says eventually, because there is a wedding soon. She is hoping her Emine will catch the eye of a suitable young man.
And that, it turns out, is the reason for the huge price for the crocheted borders. The money will buy fountains of fabulous fabric for Emine, a stocky, rosy-cheeked young girl with the light of desire in her eyes. Shades of my own mother, I think, who dressed me in frills and, once, a petticoat so rigidly hooped that when I sat down my skirt reared up in front of my face. It was at a kids' party and I can still hear the laugher. It's probably why I have always preferred wearing trousers.
Later, Bob and I walk into a forest of elegant pines. Rugs and more rugs, masses of them, are tossed casually on the ground. Cushions are scattered amongst beaten silver tables on wooden bases loaded with plates and glasses. We kick off our shoes and run like kids across the velvet softness of red, blue, gold and purple.
'Kings used to live like this,' says Bob, his face full of excitement. It is pure fantasy. Only the camels are missing.
'There's a tree over there,' Bob adds, pointing away from our carpeted picnic ground. 'I'm told it's called an erik tree. If you tie a ribbon on it, you can make a wish.'
'I can't think of anything to wish for.'
'That's good,' he says, his face serious.
We sleep that night on a homemade mattress filled with cotton in the garden of the village headman. A doona stuffed with wool, thick and toasty over us, we drift off. When it is late, a low whine creeps up the valley. Then the wind blows. Little green plums, hard as bullets, pelt our heads and caterpillars, squishy and sticky, fall on our faces. Dust gets into our ears and we snuggle deeper as the wind builds to a gale. Rugs set out for us to look at fly everywhere. Sleep is impossible.
'Do you think kings had to deal with weather?' I whisper.
'Everyone has to deal with weather.'
We wait for dawn and this is magic.
***
We continue our journey for another six weeks, riding local buses, getting stranded by roadsides, holding our breath around hairpin bends with sheer drops to the sea below. Then our credit card is stolen from us in a scam of breathtaking finesse. After dinner one night, we are mellow, not concentrating.
'There's an ATM. Should we get some cash?'
We are in a tourist area, which means there's a chance the ATM directions will come up in English. Bob puts his card in the machine. A young man hovers behind us. He's scruffy, in dirty clothes and when he smiles, his teeth are black with decay. I smile back but inch closer to Bob, uneasy. The directions on the ATM come up in Turkish.
'Let's wait till the morning,' I say.
Suddenly, the man behind us snatches the card from Bob as he's putting it in his wallet.
'Hey!' Bob shouts, grabbing him. The man smiles again and slips the card into the machine and brings up the directions in English. Ah, we think, Turkish kindness.
'Thank you,' we say, smiling. He shrugs as if it is nothing and walks away.
Bob punches the keys. Nothing happens.
'Bugger it,' he says, slipping the card into his wallet, 'let's do this tomorrow.'
But he's puzzled. Something makes him pull out his card again. For a moment, he looks confused. The card is a Japanese credit card. Then we realise what's happened. Our hotel is just a few doors away so we run in and call up our account on the internet. The hotel staff try to phone MasterCard to cancel our account. While the phone number remains engaged, we watch the purchases made by our thief tally up on the screen.
'Let's go home,' I mutter to Bob as we lie in bed later that night. I feel violated, betrayed.
'Don't be so silly,' he says. 'It's only money. No-one got hurt.'
He's right but it takes me days to let it go. I have seen a million scams in decades of travelling. I should have twigged.
'So should I!' Bob says when I chastise myself once again. 'It's not just you, you know,' he adds. 'I wasn't concentrating.'
We travel on, stumbling over the remains of long-dead civilisations: sarcophagi in main streets, Roman columns used as bases for café tables, tombs cut into hillsides that cast the uneasy shadow of our own mortality.
I get mean with money and insist we stay in cheaper and cheaper accommodation until Bob complains: 'The noise is terrible, the bathroom is dirty, there's no hot water. Why do you want to punish yourself like this?'
Because I was stupid, I want to scream. Because I am frightened I am getting old and silly and that the next time I fail to be vigilant something bad might happen. What I really mean, though, is that my confidence is shattered.
In Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, Bob chooses a bed-and-breakfast in the crammed and crumbling old part of the city, away from concrete footpaths and office buildings. Our cab driver gets lost amongst narrow, nameless streets. I feel the anger of fear and a tingle of shame when I s
uggest heading downtown where the hotel staff will certainly speak English. I am not so intrepid anymore. I have stepped over the line separating traveller from tourist. I want each day to be easy. Challenges are wearing me down.
'Let's give it five more minutes,' Bob says.
The driver calls to a bunch of black-eyed kids playing soccer in the street. They point to a high wall about fifty yards away in a lane too skinny for even one car to pass through. The driver gets out. He disappears inside a door. A few minutes later, he returns with the hotel-keeper.
'Come,' says our host in perfect English. 'You need tea. And maybe a little pastry.'
Yes, I think with relief. That's exactly what we need. He shouts to the kids, who run over and grab our bags. He leads the way into a richly coloured haven where the floors are covered with dozens of quite small but utterly exquisite old carpets and every bedroom is a sumptuous suite.
'It's glorious, Bob. Quite glorious.'
'Are we done, then, with doing it rough?'
'Yes. Oh yes.'
***
'How was it, mate?' asks Toby when we return to Pittwater. There's a mug of coffee in his hand. It's the beginning of winter but he's still in shorts, with a blue flannel shirt. Heavy socks, too, under his dusty work boots. His partner Dave is already sitting at one of the picnic tables at The Point, coffee steaming in front of him, newspaper opened to the sports pages. The voluptuous Laurel Mae is tied up at the end of the ferry wharf.
Dave smiles his angelic smile. He's a hellraiser, though, if he's in the mood. Toby, too. But they never lose their manners, no matter how late it gets.
'Welcome home,' Dave says. 'Have a good time?'
'It was fantastic!' we reply. 'But it's good to be home.'