The Pillars of Hercules

On a train I would have been scribbling. That is impossible on a bus, which is only good for reading. I was jammed in a seat, with a pain in my lower back that crept to my shoulder blades as we bumped from Ankara to Adana. I retreated into books. I reread the whole of Hindoo Holiday. I read Maugham’s short novel, Up at the Villa. I read Myles Away from Dublin, by Flann O’Brien. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

In the blue haze of cigarette smoke I reflected on how I had been warned not to take this long route through Turkey.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I asked.

“That the bus will be stopped by Kurds and you’ll be dragged out and held hostage,” said my knowledgeable friend.

That happened frequently in southeastern Turkey, near enough to my route for me to be alarmed. Also, I was headed for Syria, a country very friendly towards the embattled Kurdish people.

“Gechmis olsen. May it be behind you.”

But it had seemed a matter of urgency that I leave. Istanbul was also having its problems. In the previous few days in the Istanbul suburb of Gaziosmanpasha there had been a riot between Muslim fundamentalists and the somewhat schismatic and more liberal-minded Alevi sect. The matter had started with a drive-by shooting—fundamentalists plinking at Alevis at a cafe. Two Alevis dead. Then rival mobs gathered. Twenty-one people had been killed and many more wounded, mostly by the police and commandos who had intervened. Encircling the rioting mobs, the police began firing at each other, like Keystone Kops using live ammo.

The funerals that followed were massive parades of screeching mourners, and hundreds and police and soldiers. At the same time more riots broke out on the Asian side of the Bosporus, at Umranye. That resulted in eight dead, twenty-five wounded and “400 listed as missing”—so the local newspaper said. There was more rioting in Ankara: more funerals, much more disorder. Buses and ferries, bearing furious or sullen passengers, heading from the Asian side were halted and turned back. In other parts of Istanbul there was fighting between fundamentalists and Alevis.

“A foreign power is behind this,” said Mrs. Çiller, the Turkish prime minister. She meant Iran, but Greece was also blamed for “withholding information.”

“What next?” I asked my Turkish friends.

“After Friday prayers tomorrow there’s supposed to be trouble, when people come out of the mosques.”

I said, “Then I think I will leave on Friday, before prayers.”

The ticket from Istanbul to the Syrian border was $25. It seemed a bargain until the bus filled with smoke. And because the weather was cold, the windows stayed shut.

“Ten years ago this was all open fields,” a Turk on the bus named Rashid said to me.

It was all high-rise housing now, and no trees, and in the bare stony fields tent camps had been put up by Gypsies—the tents made of blue plastic sheeting—and these urban poor, with their ponies and dogs, fought for space with the Turks in the tenements.

These were the Alevi neighborhoods. Rashid was a believer. Among his beliefs was metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. Rashid as a good Alawite might be reborn as a star in the Milky Way. A bad Alawite might end up back on earth as a Christian or a Jew. He worshiped sun and fire—a legacy of Zoroastrianism. Orthodox Islam was based on five pillars—prayers, the Hajj, the Ramadan fast, charity and the confession of faith. Rashid rejected these. It was only later, in Syria, that I was told that one of the more peculiar Alawite beliefs is that women do not possess souls. It seemed just as peculiar to me that Alawites believed that men, and especially Alawite men, had souls.

Altogether it was not surprising, perhaps, that the fundamentalists, who had contrived to follow an equally bizarre but different set of beliefs and symbols, had declared war on them.

Speaking of symbols, the bus passed a market where a man was selling cucumbers. The cucumber is a potent symbol in Turkey. Hiyar—cucumber—is a synonym for penis. One of my Turkish friends had said to me, “No one uses the word cucumber in Turkish, because of the vulgar associations.” It was a bit like an English speaker being very careful to give a context when using the loaded word “balls.” But in Turkish a whole set of euphemisms was substituted for cucumber. Most people called them “salad things” (salatalik) so as not to offend polite taste.