Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (11 page)

Afterwards I told them that I had been in Turkey thirty-three years ago, when the phones didn't work, and Turks in the hinterland had asked me to sell them my watch and my blue jeans. I could see from where I was standing that everyone had watches and wore blue jeans.

I asked how many of them had cell phones. They all did. And to my other questions: all used the Internet, all used e-mail.

"How many are going to the demonstration on Saturday?"

All.

***

"
MUHAMMAD WAS ILLITERATE
. He had twelve wives and, let us say, a vivid sexual history," another forthright Turkish professor was saying to me. I was in another part of Ankara, another campus, Bilkent University.

Muhammad the indefatigable womanizer: that is the way the Prophet is depicted by Neguib Mahfouz in his celebrated (but banned in every Arab country) novel
Children of the Alley.
So I wasn't shocked. But I said, "Do you say these things out loud in Turkey?"

"Everyone knows my views," he said and shrugged. "But these are facts. Ninety percent of what I say would be disputed by orthodox Muslims." He smiled. "Or would be considered heretical."

He was Professor Talât Halman. As a former minister of culture in the Turkish government, and a scholar, writer, and director of the Department of Turkish Literature at Bilkent, he had considerable authority. He had also taught a course at New York University on the history of Islam. He was in his late seventies, he was shrewd and funny, with the ironic and knowing manner of a confident scholar. Over lunch he told me much that I didn't know and had never, until now, inquired about.

"What do we know about Mecca at the time of Muhammad?" I asked.

"Mecca was mainly a pagan city, but with rabbis and priests here and there. The rabbis were suspicious of this new cult of Islam. They repressed it, or at least they tried to. That's why the Koran is full of battles—between Muslims and Jews."

"Are there any historical documents that describe this early friction between Muslims and Jews?"

Professor Halman shook his head. "Not many documents. That's the trouble."

"Why were the rabbis suspicious?"

"They were alarmed by the new ideas and the way they were mingled with the traditional stories." We were having big bowls of fragrant soup, but Professor Halman put his spoon down to explain. "There is always tension present at the origin of a new faith. This has been true through
out history. There was lots of friction in Mecca at the time of Muhammad."

"What is the significance of the Kaaba?" I asked, because the huge black cube of shining stone had always seemed to me an enigmatic symbol.

"The Kaaba in Mecca—it's a meteorite, of course."

I hadn't known that, and said so.

"It is obviously a miraculous force of nature," Professor Halman said. "The Jews hadn't claimed it. No one had claimed it—so Muhammad did."

I said, "I'm interested in Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, which is an American religion. Columbus and the American Revolution were foretold in
The Book of Mormon,
translated from golden plates by Smith in 1827, so he claimed. When he was alive there were apparently lots of other American prophets like him, preaching and professing that God was directing them. Jesus had predecessors too. So how did Muhammad arise as a prophet?"

"There were no proto-Muhammads, as with Jesus and Joseph Smith," the professor said. "From the age of forty, Muhammad had these new ideas. He spoke. People wrote down his words. There's lots of apocrypha, too, especially the Hadith—wise sayings of the Prophet. About a million of them exist, but"—the professor smiled—"who can establish their veracity? This number has been winnowed down to five thousand."

"Can you quote a Hadith?"

He did so, promptly, with an irresistible one: "The ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr."

I said, "Jews don't proselytize, but Muslims do, and they make a lot of converts. What's the attraction?"

"At the time of Muhammad the converts were oppressed peoples. Islam gave them something to fight for—a great sense of victory."

"But I'm thinking of now."

"Even now, the traumatic experiences of colonialism and occupation, the memory of the humiliation of the Crusades. To a great extent, Islam was shaped by conquerors and colonialism."

"So Americans fighting in Iraq will only make Islam stronger?"

"Yes, and bring about more suicide bombers," Professor Halman said. "Martyrdom is important in Islam. There are lots of mentions of martyrdom in the Hadith. There is quite a lot of militarism in the Koran."

"But martyrdom is important in Christianity," I said. "That's one way of becoming a saint."

"Yes. But unlike in Christianity, in Islam it is also good to aid and abet martyrdom," he said. "And giving away money is also a form of martyrdom."

"What I don't understand," I said, "is why Muslims leave Islamic communities and emigrate to places like Germany and Britain, basically Christian countries. To live among Christians and Jews. And Muslims get fractious when they're told not to wear headscarves and so forth. Why bother to emigrate if it makes them so unhappy?"

"They emigrate because their countries are backward," the professor said with superb good sense. "Better to emigrate than to starve to death."

"Muslim boys were burning cars in Paris a few months ago."

He said, "A North African has limited choices. He can only go to a Francophone country. He ends up in France and sees it is secular, and he objects. But you see Muslims are also reacting against political oppression."

"Tell me how this applies to Iraq now."

"American experts are the problem," Professor Halman said. "They were wrong about the Soviet Union and wrong about Iraq. They are academics and bureaucrats with vested interests."

"Sinister forces?"

"Not sinister but obtuse. The ones who said the Soviet Union was strong were politically motivated, perhaps. They didn't know how weak the Soviets were."

"So the U.S. government gets the wrong advice?"

"Yes, and mainly from scholars. Scholars need to validate the status quo, or they will lose their funding."

"The last time I took this trip," I said, "the shah was in power. Everyone said he was strong and progressive, though it was clear to me that the countryside was reactionary and orthodox Muslim."

"That's a point. Advice-givers don't travel enough," he said. "Where are you going next?"

"Up to Trabzon, then Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and—" I stopped; it seemed unlucky to mention more countries.

"That's good," he said. "Ankara is a dreary place."

"But I've had an interesting time here."

"It's a wasteland," he said. "And Turks are a melancholy people." He pressed his fingers to his temples as though to accelerate his memory. "I think there's been trouble in Trabzon. I can't remember what."

So I headed out of Ankara intending to leave Turkey. Long ago, Turkey had seemed a distant and exotic country of frowning men and enigmatic women, with unreliable telephones and simple roads and a dramatic, confrontational culture. Now it had everything, it was part of the visitable world, but it was no longer the way to Iran and Afghanistan, so I headed north.

T
HE TROUBLE IN TRABZON
, on the Black Sea, where I found filthy weather, ugly rumors, and ill tidings, was the incident that had slipped Professor Halman's mind: the murder a month before of an unbeliever in a fit of sentimental fury. This singular outrage—singular because such things seldom happened in Turkey—was the shooting of an Italian priest, Father Andrea Santoro, by an overexcited Islamist named Oguz intending to avenge the honor of Muhammad in a controversy over mocking cartoons of the Prophet that had appeared in various European newspapers. Oguz, who was sixteen, was caught the day after the murder, and Father Santoro's corpse was given a solemn sendoff, attended by the highest Muslim clergy in Turkey, the muftis.

Symbolism is everything in religious strife, which is why it looks so logical, while being so stupid and brutal. The Catholic was singled out and shot for symbolizing the enemy, as any outsider might be, including me. The poor man had been praying in a back pew of the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon, where, on an average Sunday, there were no more than a dozen communicants. Rare as this murder was, it was so recent it concentrated my mind on leaving Trabzon. On arriving I'd asked, "What are the sights?" and been told the ancient mosque was a must-see. It was a Friday, a day of prayer in this (so I was also told) pious city. I should add that not once in Turkey was I hassled for being an unbeliever, nor was the subject ever mentioned. But the rain got me down, so I began to look for ways to escape it.

Because there was no train, I had arrived on the night bus from Ankara, the Ulusoy coach—Greyhound standard—with frequent pit stops on the twelve-hour ride to the northeast, allowing passengers to get out and smoke, since smoking had been banned on Turkish buses.
The exception was the bus driver, who could light up as much as he wished. These were also eating stops, at rest-area cafeterias, where the food was not bad: thick soup, trays of reddish beans, sinister slabs of meat drifting in black gravy, scorched kebabs, and bread in round loaves the diameter of a steering wheel.

Over the mountains in darkness from Ankara, and still in darkness to Samsun and the edge of the Black Sea, we followed the coast road serenely until the day lifted. In the dreary, sunless dawn the towns on the shore, Ordu, Giresun, Tirebolu, and nameless little settlements, looked ugly and lifeless, with hideous new buildings and ramshackle older ones on the barren coast. Yet the steep escarpment just behind the coast was beautiful, dark with wooded hills, and farther back the mountains loomed in a tangle of rain clouds.

The sight of the Black Sea made the passengers happy. They were all Turks, clearly glad to be away from Ankara, which was overbuilt and modern, set in the dry hills; this was the drizzly shore of an inland sea.

"Karadeniz," the old man next to me said when he woke and saw the water. I had once sailed on a Turkish ship called the
Akdeniz
—meaning the White Sea, which is what the Turks call the Mediterranean—so I understood this as the Black Sea. He marveled, smiled, elbowed his wife in the ribs. Like the other men on the bus he wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. In the course of the twelve-hour ride through the night, these men loosened their ties a little.

Judging from what I'd seen from Istanbul to Ankara to Trabzon, a building boom had overwhelmed Turkey, new houses everywhere, and the newer ones were dreadful, lopsided, misshapen, thrown together, and looked dangerously combustible; they were famous for falling down at the slightest earth tremor, of which seismic-prone Turkey had plenty.

But once I stowed my bag in a bus station locker and hiked to the foot of Trabzon's hill and up the steep winding streets to the middle of town, I changed my mind about the ugly houses. Trabzon was a pleasant place, even in the rain: a compact town center, the usual Turkish shops selling food and clothes and sweets, but also something I hadn't expected:
banyos,
bathhouses. And I had the sense they were traditional baths and that this was not a euphemism for knocking shops.

I saw a man being luxuriously shaved in a barbershop, so I went in and, using grunts and signs, asked for the same. The whole process, with a haircut, took forty-five minutes; after the long bus ride I was restored.

Near the barbershop was a hotel that was undistinguished but clean. The room rate was $350 a night—who would pay that in Trabzon? Instead of checking in, I used the breakfast buffet in the restaurant, telling the clerk that I would pay for it. He said okay, so I idled over breakfast and tried to make a plan for my onward journey. I had seriously pondered my options: after weeks of travel I was still facing terrible weather, wet and cold, the north wind blowing off the Black Sea from Odessa; the recent murder of the Italian priest, for being Christian, was not encouraging; and the main point of interest in Trabzon was a mosque.

When I finished, deciding that I would head east, out of town, and took out my money, the clerk waved me away. I repeated that I was not a guest of the hotel. The clerk just smiled and said, "No problem," indicated that it was a slow day in Trabzon, and added, "
Beer-shay de-eel
"—You're welcome.

I walked back to where I had stowed my bag and on the way saw a sign advertising buses to the Georgia border and beyond: Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, and other distant places. I went into a bus agency, and the door chime went
ding-dong.
Some women in black gowns were watching the Iraqi war news—scenes of American tanks—on a black-and-white television. They were eating pink popcorn out of a bag.

"Ticket, please?"

But the man at the desk scarcely looked up from his newspaper.

"Bus is fool."

"Just one seat," I said.

"Is fool"

"Excuse me, effendi." This politeness seized his attention. "I have serious business in Teeflees," I said, using the Turkish pronunciation. "Very serious."

He looked up at me and licked his thumb, manipulated a printed pad, and clicking his pen wrote me a ticket.

"Leaving at thirteen o'clock," he said and went back to his newspaper. The shrouded women had kept their attention on the war news.

But in the event, the bus left at noon—good thing I was early, drinking a coffee next door to the stop. The bus was more than full: many people were sitting on the floor, on each other's laps, or straphanging. I could see no space at all. The driver poked my arm and said gruffly, "You sit here," and indicated a cushion next to him, on the step. "In Hopa,
many seats." Hopa was near the Turkish border; the border post was a place called Sarp.

So I sat on a cushion on the floor of this crowded, beat-up bus, pleased with myself for being an older man, thus invisible, ghostly, grubbier than most of the bus passengers, some of them Turks going to Hopa, and the rest Georgians on their way over the border to Batumi. The Georgians were the ones with big black plastic sacks, bulging with Turkish goods that were apparently unobtainable in Georgia—children's clothes, toys, toasters, telephones, microwave ovens, and boxes of cookies. All this luggage boded ill for the upcoming customs inspection.