Self

by Yann Martel

  When it came time to go, after many emphatic thank-you-very-much's, Tesekkur ederim in Turkish, we got up, gingerly walked on what few inches were left of the street between the two women's carpets and proceeded.

  But again, only this time triple, quadruple, quintuple. To our left and right whenever we came to a cross street. Women, babies and carpets. Ruth and I looked at each other. "I feel like we're trespassing," she said. It was exactly that. We felt we had moved imperceptibly from the public sphere of the street to the private sphere of the house. In this feeling lay the genesis of my story.

  It was about a man walking along Ataturk Bulvari, Ankara's aorta, broad, tree-lined and busy. But our man is busy himself and has no time for its distractions. He is thinking about an important business deal. He turns off Ataturk Bulvari onto a quieter street; let us say it is an artery. Our man is thinking hard. He is not paying attention to his surroundings. What is important to him at that moment is what is inside his head. The honk of a car, the shout of a hawker, something disturbs him. Without a thought he turns off again, this time onto an arteriole. There are no distractions now. No cars, no people. He can walk in peace and concentrate fully. His eyes are open, but they see nothing. Only his feet are aware of the change in things. Our man has not yet come to a decision when he wakes up to the fact that he has stopped walking and is looking at a small table with a pair of glasses on it. What is this, he asks himself, still distracted. He would like to continue walking and thinking, but his feet no longer know where to turn. He realizes that next to the small table there is a large canopied bed, unmade. He notices drops of blood on the sheets. He looks at them, astounded. He spins around. He's in a bedroom. In a capillary, let us say. The room is described in detail for it is elaborately furnished. Our man is in a near-panic. "What am I doing here? How did I get here?" he asks himself. He quickly walks out of the room. He finds himself in a library, then a living-room. He continues on to a dining-room. Then into a kitchen. He opens a door and runs down a corridor. There are several doors; one leads to a bathroom, another to a bedroom, another to a closet. At the end of the corridor, a staircase. He bounds up it. But it continues: living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, pantries, libraries, dining-rooms, closets, corridors -- never a door that leads out, never a window through which he can climb out. An infinite domestic honeycomb. The story ends to the sound of the man's screams, his despair equal to that of a woman who goes shopping and then discovers that she cannot find her way home, but must roam the busy, noisy streets for ever.

  Where do men feel ill at ease? In airplane cockpits, bus depots, construction sites, dance halls, elevators, forest paths, gas stations, hotels, interesting little alleys, junkyards, kiosks, lexicographers' offices, mountain meadows, newspaper rooms, Oxford, parking lots, queer bars, restaurants, South America, taxis, underpasses, volleyball courts, waiting-rooms, xylophone schools, yak-petting zoos, zouave recruitment offices, auction halls, big stores, cockfight pits, deserted subway platforms, effigy burnings, Freemason halls, government offices, hospitals, intelligence bureaux, Jesuit seminaries, Knights of Malta meetings, lepers' colonies, movie-houses, necktie parties, opium dens, Plato's cave, quarantine stations, resplendent bordellos, sunny pink beaches, truckstop diners, utopian islands, villas, war zones, Xmas parties, youth hangouts, ziggurats, army headquarters, ballparks, churches, da Vinci's studio, essay-writing workshops, filibuster-planning sessions, generals' beds, hobbyists' conventions, International Socialists' collectives, junkies' flophouses, klezmer bands, libraries, the moon, night-time, oil rigs of the North Sea, penitentiaries, quiet places, rainbows' ends, slaughterhouses, theatres, un-American activities committees, voting booths, wreath-laying ceremonies, xenophobic demonstrations, yachts, or in zero-hour countdown rooms? No. In all these places, a man will never be told that he is not welcome because he is a man.

  At times it was difficult travelling in Turkey. There were hassles. Because they took place under the sun of an exotic climate they often became adventures, something not only easier to take, but even sought after. By that bizarre paradox of travel, the worst journey -- the endless bus trip, the mattress with the million creepy-crawlies, the hotel with the soft, rotten walls -- becomes the best, most fondly remembered one. But when I look back now, some of these hassles were unacceptable. They had one common link: men. Men who openly stared up and down at us. Men who cracked smiles at the sight of us and turned to their friends, pointing us out with a nod of the head. Men who brushed themselves against us to pass us in streets that were not busy. Men who brushed themselves against us to pass us in streets that were not busy and who ran their hands over our breasts. The young man who ran up to me from behind in a dark street of Ankara, pinched my ass and vanished just as quickly. The one in Istanbul, too. Men who clicked at us. Boys who clicked at us. Men who felt they had the right to ooze their unctuous, unwanted attentions upon us regardless of our words, opinions or indifference. Men who decided they knew what we wanted, what destination, what product, what service, what price, before we had even opened our mouths. The bus driver who, seeing that I was asleep on the last row of seats, stopped his bus on the side of the highway, came back and kissed me, so that I woke up to this stranger looming over me and pushed him away angrily, calling out to Ruth, while he walked back smiling and laughing, proud of himself. The man who exposed himself to me at a roadside stop, grinning and playing with himself.

  We brushed it all off. We were tough, we became tough. By the time we caught the train from Istanbul to Athens, we were veterans of combat travel. Though we washed every day, we felt as though we hadn't bathed in months. We were not tanned -- we were weathered. Our lungs, our minds, had that weary ache of time spent in the great outdoors. We were wary, cunning, skeptical, argumentative, dismissive. No Johnnie Turk was going to fuck around with us. If we'd stayed longer, we would have developed plate armour that clanked as we walked.

  But we were not Sherman tanks. We were two women wearing conservative cotton clothes travelling in a big, male country. It wore us down. More than we realized. Some doors became very important to us in Turkey: the doors to our hotel rooms. When we closed and locked them, it was not to secure Ruth's camera, but to secure our shelter. Shelter meant a place to be together -- and away.

  Which is not to say that we didn't meet Turkish men who were nice. We did. Lots. Who were nice; proper; civil; friendly. But this approach -- some good Turks, some bad Turks -- is all wrong. My point is neither demographic nor democratic because it was not primarily individuals that struck me, so much as an attitude. And an attitude can slosh around like the sea, rising in one man, ebbing in another, surging forth anew in a third -- all beyond the accounting of numbers.

  I'd say the seas were high and rough in Turkey. Ruth and I sailed through without a problem, but I wonder about my Turkish sisters. Moving through the public spheres of Turkey as we did, we met Turkish women not a tenth as often as we met men, and nearly always when they were without men -- at the market or on buses or on carpets in small streets in Ankara. They spoke to us, they smiled, they sat beside us, they touched us, we spoke in sign language and nodded heads; with them we could relax, let our guard down. They were happy, I guess -- happiness is such an incredibly hardy plant -- but I believe it was happiness within strict confines, like plants that grow in pots.

  We met a woman who worked at a bank in Ankara, not as a clerk but a little higher up, and we had supper with her. Meral told us that she would never become a manager at her bank, never, because she was a woman. "Things were better sixty years ago, under Ataturk," she said. "He gave us the right to vote. He believed in women."

  This is what I was approaching, trying to digest, in my story about a man caught in a honeycomb house.

  I showed it to Ruth.

  "I loved being a housewife," she said. "I hate working. Who needs it? My husbands were the only problem I had when I was a housewife. You should have seen Tuesday when she was a little girl. She was such a clowny goof. Danny's best fri
ends are Hispanics and they're teaching him Spanish. He spices up his English with it. It's the funniest thing. My son gets excited about something and suddenly he bursts out, 'Yo soy Pancho Villa!' and he's swaggering up and down the room with an imaginary sombrero and pistols. It cracks me up. With Jerry, we had a nice house with a garden and I had my own car. God, I'd be a housewife anytime. Just give me a good man."

  She meant her words to do no more than describe her own experience. It's just my opinion, just mine -- that's what her tone of voice said.

  But it was a voice that carried weight with me. The inexperience of my fiction seemed to dash itself against the finality of her experience. My story felt stiff and simplistic, the baroque element terribly arty, the whole thing a flimsy nothing. The one conclusion I drew was that I was young. I had fuelled my story with an indignation that was swaggering, like Danny's Pancho Villa. In areas where I had not yet felt my way -- men, motherhood, work -- I had projected a great scaffolding of ideas.

  I kept my sense of wonder at these women in Ankara who domesticated the streets, I kept my indignation at the status of men in Turkey, but I threw out the story. I was hurt and frustrated. Not at Ruth. In a general way. I remember that as I methodically tore my story into square shreds I wondered why things had to be both so simple and so complicated. I vowed that I would never have children. Not me, no sirree. And no man would ever have control over me.

  Ruth said, "Let's go for rice pudding," and that was the end of it. They make excellent rice pudding in Turkey, creamy and with lots of cinnamon. That was always the exit from our problems: the senses. Rice pudding or a caress of her hands on my breasts, an aubergine dish or me pushing Ruth onto a bed.

  We met him on one of those endless bus trips Ruth and I endured. Perhaps it was between Kayseri and Malatya. A gleaming black snake of a road that meandered across the undulating green and treeless plains of Eastern Anatolia. One bus, no traffic. A farmer, I guess he was. A man of the land, wed to the black earth. He got on seemingly from nowhere and got off in a place not much different. In between the two, we met, our parallel lives touched. He looked to be in his late twenties and he had the rugged, very masculine good looks characteristic of handsome Turkish men: clean, classical features, perfect white teeth, clear eyes, a thick black moustache and a body packed with muscles and hair. His arms and torso strained at the clothes he wore and his forearms were so hairy I could barely see his skin. Hair burst out from the top of his shirt like flames from the window of a burning house.

  I don't remember how the three of us got to speaking. I suppose the usual: eyes becoming aware of each other because of his looking, nods and smiles, his first tentative word. He had fewer English words at his disposal than he had fingers, words that he must have learned in schooldays long past. Yet he was so eager and determined to communicate with us that it was nearly a miracle of Jesus: he transformed his drops of English into decanters of rich meaning. He pronounced my country's name with such solemn, serious emphasis -- Kah-nah-dah -- that I did what I hadn't done in a long time: I considered it from the outside, as if for the first time. What a curious name it is, sounding so much like a nonsense word, the babble of a child, with the giant C and the three syllables like three dance steps.

  We communicated in broad emotions, something like waving at someone from a distance. He smiled and tilted his head a lot. When he was touched, which was often, he slapped both his hands against his chest, which made a booming sound. He was a sweet man, as decent as a nineteenth-century novel. We lavishly praised his country. This nearly brought tears to his eyes. I said, "Ataturk!" and shook my fist, signifying "Great leader!" He slap-boomed his chest and exclaimed, "Ataturk!", signifying I'm not sure what, but it was positive. In fact, "Ataturk!" "Ataturk!" were the last words we exchanged as we shook hands before he got off, as if we were members of an Ataturk revivalist society.

  When he was no more than a dot on the horizon and we could no longer see his waving, we sat back.

  "Wasn't he a nice man," said Ruth.

  "Yes," I replied dreamily. I dwelt on his niceness, his integrity. It took some long minutes before my ambiguous thoughts resolved themselves into focus. He was a sweet man -- and one I lusted after. This thought, the popping of the word "lust" into my head, shocked me. A man! Him! To sleep with him! What a thought! I closed the curtains of my eyes and approached my object of desire. Everything that had never turned me on before did so now. Weight, hair, smell. I took his shirt off and imagined his hairy, muscular chest. Imagined running my hands over it. Pressing my naked chest against it, so slight and hairless in comparison. It was this, his warm, hairy bulk, that excited me. His head so massive and hirsute, so deep brown and rugged, as he took one of my breasts in his mouth. His hands, powerful, rough and gentle, grazing over my body, lingering over my clitoris. He stood fully naked in front of me, his erection standing out. I couldn't imagine him penetrating me, not in reality or in fantasy. But my hands ran over his thighs. I could see holding it. Sucking it.

  If I could have masturbated at that moment, I would have. But I had to contain myself and make do with fantasy as the bus drove onwards across Anatolia.

  We made the decision to catch the Istanbul--Athens train when we were in Ankara. From that moment on we were conscious that our trip, our odyssey, was coming to an end. Each practicality made this clear -- the train reservations, the plane reservations, the thrift so that we wouldn't have to cash another travellers' cheque in Turkey.

  We visited Istanbul distractedly. After a two-week trip that had lasted nearly three months, having resolved to close her open ticket at last, Ruth was now dying to see her children. We spent hours in the Great Bazaar, where she bought all kinds of gifts big and small, some for her friends, but most for Tuesday, Graham, Sandra and Danny -- one gift for every day she was away, it seemed. I bought Ruth a beautiful silver brooch with an amber inlay. She was chipper, having suddenly realized how much she missed home and how soon she would be there. While I wasn't averse to returning to Roetown, it would hardly be a homecoming.

  At my initiative, we went on long walks through Istanbul. I wanted to get as much travel out of our time together as possible. But in many ways Ruth had already left. In bed we were more bed-mates than lovers. She was not deliberately pulling away -- she emphatically invited me to Philadelphia for Christmas -- but it was becoming increasingly clear, though not openly, that we were from vastly different worlds and that only the suspension of travel, that abnormal fold of time and space, had permitted the romance to bloom. It was a romance that could not travel beyond travel. The change, that inner change that alters the way reality is perceived, was mutual; it was only that I lagged a little behind Ruth. I don't mean it to sound so dramatic, but beyond her I had no one. The whole trip had been one breathless rapture, every minute a pleasure and an adventure. Now I had to catch my breath.

  The train ride to Athens was long, sunny and melancholy. I was thankful the Greek landscape was so beautiful. Every mile absorbed a tear, so that I was able to smile at the airport.

  We spent our last day together wandering in the Plaka. In a deliberate last moment of romance, in the shelter of a doorway in the shadow of the Parthenon, we kissed the way lovers do. At the airport it was sad but sober. Ruth wavered between elation and memory, between I'll see my children soon and Oh! the times we had. I nodded. I had achieved a balance. The mind shushing the heart.

  The greenness of her eyes struck me for some reason at that moment. She turned, found her American passport and presented it with a smile to the man in uniform; she hauled her heavy carry-on pack onto her shoulder; she walked a few paces into the duty-free zone; turned; we waved to each other, eye to eye; she walked off.

  I took a single room that night. Alone in bed I burst into tears.

  It was near the end of August. I spent a few days in Greece, such easy travelling after Turkey. I slept in dorms, I walked around Athens, I returned to the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, and then I flew back to Kah-nah
-dah.

  It was surprisingly pleasant to be back in Roetown. School had not yet started and there were few students around. I had several days of peace. I had expected to be quite depressed, but to a new scenery, a new mood. I would see Ruth at Christmas, and I had her phone number, could always call her if I felt low -- so why feel low? This, and solitary walks in warm, sunny Roetown, and thoughts of the coming year's courses, and Elena's absence, all kept my spirits up. She wasn't returning to Ellis. There was a letter for me at Strathcona-Milne from her. She said that she didn't know why she was studying what she was studying so she had decided to stop. She would work for a while and then see what she wanted to do.

  Before the summer, a group of friends and I had arranged to rent a house in downtown Roetown. It was the last house on its street, tucked away just beyond the top of a hill. The street, after a sharp turn, ended in a parking lot. It served a factory which was next to us, quite a bit lower down, where the land levelled out. It was a cookie, breakfast cereal and porridge factory. I seem to recall that sometimes in the fall and spring the air carried the fragrance of roasted oats, but I believe that's a fabricated, wishful souvenir.

  In front of the house was the municipal jail, complete with barbed wire atop the walls and a whirling camera. From my desk I would spend the year glancing at that wall, wondering whether I might see a criminal suddenly pop up, ease his way beneath the wires, fall to the ground and break for freedom. But there was never such a break -- or it took place while I had my head down, trapped in the prison of the inept novel I had started.