Читать книгу Walking Backwards - Mark Frutkin - Страница 8

Istanbul,

1968

Istanbul, ancient Byzantium, fabled Constantinople, Gateway to the Orient. We have arrived at last in the city of multiple names. But why is it snowing?

I stand in line in the vast echoing space of the main train station of Istanbul with the two Michaels: one of Irish descent, the other Lebanese, and like me (at that time), both American citizens. It’s January and, outside, a wet, heavy snow settles on the city. All three of us wear backpacks in which we each carry, along with our own clothing, a bolt of new cloth — fine English wool — that a young, engaging Jordanian we met on the train has asked us to carry through Turkish customs for him.

“You are Americans; I am sure they will not bother to check you,” Ahmed had pointed out with confidence, soon after ingratiating himself with us by pulling out and passing around the train compartment an expensive bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch.

As soon as we had arrived and disembarked in the station, Ahmed had disappeared.

The slow stuttering line in which we stand consists of several thousand travellers, and extends for half a kilometre through the station. No sign now of our new Jordanian friend with his preternaturally wrinkled face and his wide, generous smile. His gentle charisma dovetailed perfectly with our trusting natures and, innocents that we were, it took little to convince us to carry his three bolts of cloth. Each bolt was about thirty inches long, twelve inches wide, two inches thick, and we had stuffed them into our packs without hesitation.

From my place in line, I figure that Ahmed has been swallowed by the crowd, a chaotic mix of poor families, old men and women, young children hanging off their mothers, soldiers, and gypsies. We are the only obvious North Americans in the station, surrounded by a sea of Turks, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Jordanians, Syrians, and other Middle Easterners. Few Western tourists come to Istanbul in January. As I wait, I begin to wonder where Ahmed has disappeared to. As an uneasy feeling uncoils in the pit of my stomach, I try to control my mounting panic.

The line inches forward, approaching half a dozen long wooden tables that stretch across the room. The customs officials stand behind these tables, appearing stern and serious in their too-tight uniforms. As we wait, we notice that they are scrupulously examining everything. They empty cheap suitcases and sacks, demanding to see the contents of every parcel and package. We notice that one customs official has uncapped a tube of toothpaste, which he is squeezing, scrutinizing the paste as it oozes out.

“What could they be looking for?” we ask each other. “No one smuggles drugs into Turkey. Jewels? Diamonds? Gold? What?” We give each other uncomprehending, worried looks.

The line lurches forward again in fits and starts and still there is no sign of Ahmed. Now we are swivelling our heads back and forth, looking for the Jordanian to come join us at the last minute. Why has he disappeared? I’m sure he’ll find us, I think, with an entirely unjustified faith. At the last minute, I’m sure he’ll come running up and go through customs with us. Where the hell is he?

The family of four in front of us is called to the customs table. The three of us wait, clutching our American passports like drowning men holding to bits of grey-green flotsam. We are next in line. There is no sign of Ahmed.

In 1968, the two Michaels and I were students at Loyola University in Chicago and had decided to take the third-year abroad program at the school’s overseas campus in Rome. We flew to Italy in September and settled in to learning Italian, how to drink wine, and how to roll spaghetti on a fork. Since we had a full month off over Christmas, we had decided to head to Istanbul by way of Vienna.

Since we were travelling to different destinations in the few days immediately after Christmas, we decided that we would meet together in Vienna after New Year’s and travel to Istanbul for the remainder of our generous month-long vacation. I had spent Christmas Day at the school in Rome, then headed to Munich with my friend, Albert, a tall, gangly Chicagoan with a mind for science and an eye for the ladies. We spent New Year’s Eve celebrating in the jazz clubs of Munich and got gustily drunk on German beer, finishing our late evening over a bowl of goulash suppe at a garishly lit restaurant crowded with bleary-eyed revellers like ourselves.

The next morning I awoke in our cheap hotel room with my skull feeling two feet thick. Hearing Albert stumbling about packing, I mumbled a farewell as he headed out to catch a train for Paris. Several hours later — my eyes still filled with sand and my mouth feeling like dry, crinkly, yellowed newspaper at the bottom of a bird cage — I had to force myself from bed in order to catch my own train for Salzburg. I would spend a day in Salzburg and then hitchhike to Vienna to meet the two Mikes.

I made the train, collapsed, and a few uneventful hours later, arrived in Salzburg, tumbling down the train car’s three metal steps into the almost empty station. Heading out into the Austrian night, I circled the small station several times and realized the city was nowhere nearby. Every other station I had visited in Europe had been at the centre of a city. This one was out in the suburbs. I could see no city lights in the distance, no tall buildings, and had no idea in which direction to walk to find the city centre. There were no taxis about (which I could not have afforded, anyway).

A few minutes later, my bumbling request in English at the wicket inside the station for directions to the heart of the city was answered in German, leaving me as lost as ever, since the only German I knew was, “Wo ist der hauptbahnhof?” (Where is the main train station?), a phrase that was distinctly useless to me in Salzburg since I was already apparently standing in the main train station and the main train station in this town was obviously nowhere. Eventually the ticket-seller convinced a helpful and kindly old man sitting in the station (his evening’s entertainment, I supposed) to walk me the considerable distance to an economy hotel in the heart of the city.

Being a poor student, I couldn’t even tip him when we arrived at the hotel, but he didn’t seem to expect anything and, in any case, one look at the old hotel told both of us that I had other problems awaiting me. My generous Virgil left and I entered the tall, narrow house where I would spend my one night in Salzburg.

When the stout landlady showed me to my room, she didn’t step into it. She couldn’t. There was a good reason why this was the cheapest room in Salzburg, the cheapest in Austria, perhaps the cheapest in Western Europe. She moved aside so I could see where I would sleep. I would have to roll into the bed and pull the door shut while ensconced. The bed was barely wide enough for one very small, skinny man (luckily, I was both small and skinny at the time). I would have to be careful lifting my head from the pillow. Too quickly and I would bang it on the porcelain sink, which was roughly the size of a man’s hat. The room must have been used for storing linen at one time, or perhaps brooms. What the room lacked in breadth, however, it made up for in height, the small space of the room stretching a good twenty-five feet up to a skylight that consisted of numerous panes of glass. Lots of vertical space. Useless vertical space.

Luckily, the bed came with a thick eiderdown blanket, since I was surprised to find, upon awaking in the middle of the night, that snow was falling on me. Apparently several of those panes of glass high above were missing. I tucked my head under the eiderdown and went back to sleep.

The next day — my twentieth birthday — I inspected the castle, thought darkly and momentarily of Kafka, and left Salzburg, walking out to the highway that led to Vienna, wearing my dark blue navy pea jacket and carrying my backpack. The air was thick and sticky with snow as I stood by the side of the highway, my thumb out for hours, looking like a travelling snowman or a ghost out of the Arctic. Finally, at last, a long, sleek, black car slid to a stop and I jumped into the empty back seat.

A Canadian! A low-level diplomat. And his blonde Austrian wife. He was friendly. She was icy. It was apparent she had had no interest in picking me up. All the way to Vienna, the Canadian and I talked with abandon (“My mother’s from Toronto,” I said. “No shit,” he commented.), ignoring the simmering Valkyrie in front.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

“I have no idea. I have to find someplace cheap.”

When we rolled into Vienna, he told me he knew of a good, economical place to eat — a student restaurant. He took me there, where he and I kept gabbing, drinking, and feasting. His wife ate in silence, refusing to look at either of us. After dinner, which he paid for, he offered to help me find a place to stay. Her jaw dropped.

He drove me from hotel to hotel and negotiated in German with the hotel-keepers on my behalf. All of the hotels were full. Something about the Christmas holidays. He insisted on continuing to help me find a cheap place. His wife was seething. More hotels and more hotels. He drove from one end of the city to the other. Finally, hours later, I found a room at a huge old establishment in the heart of the city. We parted and I thanked the good Canadian. As he and I exchanged farewells on the sidewalk, his wife didn’t even get out of the car.

That night I looked out from my room over a city of roofs softened with snow. Storybook Vienna. The radiator boomed and raised the temperature to a sauna-like level. I went to bed, slept, and awoke in the morning with a fever and spent the next day under the covers, only going out to grab a bowl of soup and a cup of tea at a local café.

Still feverish, I had walked down the street and entered the first place I could find — a gorgeous, turn-of-the-century Viennese café, its decor featuring high vertical panels of dark wood and mirror. I stood in the doorway and noted that each of the patrons in the room — they looked like students — was reading a newspaper. As I entered, they all turned to look at me, every single one wearing the circular granny glasses popular at the time. It was like staring at the faces of forty John Lennons.

On the third morning, January 5, I dragged myself out and went to meet the two Michaels, as we had planned, on the steps of the cathedral, Saint Stephanskirche, at 11:00 a.m.

The next day, in the early evening, we boarded a train bound for Istanbul. Near midnight it stopped at the border between Austria and what was then Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav border guards entered the cramped compartment, checked passports, and shrugged out, leaving behind a memory of grim faces, peaked caps, and ugly uniforms. We sat on our hard wooden seats, smoothed over the years by thousands of travellers like ourselves, and waited. We noticed it was growing colder inside the compartment. We speculated that they must have turned off the heat when we crossed the border, since there had been heat when the train was in Austria and now there was none.

After about an hour’s delay at the border, the train started moving. Five seconds later it stopped with a distant squeal and crash. After pausing for several minutes, it started up again, but going the other way. Again, after five seconds, it stopped with a similar squeal and crash. Several more minutes and it started up again, only to halt after the requisite five seconds. Back and forth the train went for most of the night. Each time it started up, our hopes leapt — Now we are going! We’re on our way to Istanbul! — only to come crashing down in disappointment mere seconds later.

Meanwhile, the cold was penetrating our compartment. We dug into our packs and put on extra shirts. We donned sweaters. We put our coats on. We could see our breath. Peering out into the darkness at the invisible borderlands, we glimpsed nothing but our own worried reflections gazing back.

“They must be changing cars,” said Lebanese Michael, his bulging black eyes looking blurred and tired behind his thick glasses.

Irish Michael ran his hands through his prematurely thinning hair. “We should have brought something to drink. Some whisky or something. Even wine.”

We nodded and waited, slept fitfully sitting up, and eventually the train started moving for good in the right direction. This time it didn’t stop until it reached Belgrade in the morning.

We had decided to stay over in Belgrade and catch the next train coming through to Istanbul twenty-four hours later. Belgrade in January was a revelation, a revelation of a dark, bleary, smudged sort. We exited the train into a decrepit downtown train station where a platoon of ancient women in babushkas swished brown sludge around the floor in a vain attempt to sweep clean the mud, snow, and sleet that was coming in on the badly made, worn-out boots of the workers.

Through a travel office in the station, we found a place to stay. Like something out of an animated cartoon or a modern version of an Eastern European folk tale, the old lady’s little house in which we were sequestered was the only residential structure in the sector and was surrounded by faceless grey towers where happiness could only be a faint memory and the future was already perfectly planned at least five years ahead. The old lady herself proved to be a spark of warmth in a cold land. She introduced us to her son, a medical doctor visiting for the holidays from Switzerland. Wanting nothing to do with us wild-looking and possibly dangerous students from America, he kept his distance. Our landlady pointed us in the direction of a café district to take our evening meal where we dined on ground horsemeat. If it wasn’t horsemeat (and I am no expert), it must have been beef from an extraordinarily lean and well-exercised cow.

When we returned, we were introduced to the delights of sleeping on a traditional oven-bed. Our sleeping quarters (quarters is hardly the right word, for the oven took up one entire side of the sitting room in her toy house) consisted of a bed laid out on top of a huge tiled oven over four feet high. It was cozy and warm. Unfortunately, there were three of us sharing it. It was another interesting night in a long series of interesting nights. With three grown men in one bed, all fully clothed, it was impossible to find a comfortable position. Sleep, when it arrived at all, came in fits and starts.

The next day, when we returned to the main station to catch our train, we learned that this day’s train to Istanbul would only be stopping at a station in the distant suburbs. The ticket-taker waved us out to a bus stop on the street and we waited in a panic, not wanting to spend another hour — let alone another excruciating day — in a bleak Belgrade that looked like a set for a badly made film noir.

After a journey of a half-hour on a packed city bus, we approached the small train station. Somehow the two Michaels were able to elbow their way to the exit, but I was unable to push through the crowd before the bus pulled away. What the hell! I glanced out the window at snow-covered fields as I struggled to exit. I had to wait for the next stop, at least a couple kilometres away. The train was coming in ten minutes. I couldn’t make it by running. Fortunately, a taxi stood waiting nearby. I got across to the driver — I didn’t know a word of Serbian — that I needed to get to that train station, vite! He sped away with me panting in the back and when we pulled up, I tossed a handful of coins at him and fled. I rushed into the station, joined the two Michaels, and we boarded the train for Istanbul.

The fields of Bulgaria in January were no more intriguing than the grey streets of midwinter Belgrade. Even the newly fallen snow in the countryside looked dirty. We came through Sophia, noted a few huge renditions of social realist art hanging on the sides of buildings (happy red-cheeked steelworkers forty feet high), and soon bid farewell to Bulgaria. It was Istanbul or bust for us. That was when we met Ahmed.

He wasn’t much older than we were, but definitely wiser in the ways of the world, a charming Arab with a ready smile and perfect teeth. He explained that he was working in England (we didn’t catch his occupation or he didn’t say) and was heading home to Jordan for the holidays. He was affable, courteous, and generous, as we soon learned when he pulled the unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker out of his suitcase and began passing it around. It wasn’t enough to get the four of us seriously drunk, but we did enter a pleasantly mellow phase of the journey. It was then he asked us to stick the bolts of cloth in our packs and take them through customs for him. He asked in such a friendly way — no pressure, no panic, almost as if it were an afterthought — that it seemed only natural to agree. In late afternoon, the engine hooted one last time and the long train guttered and shivered into the Istanbul train station.

The two Michaels and I stand in line in the station, awaiting our turn to approach the customs table, still wondering what has happened to Ahmed. The customs inspector is motioning us forward. Irish Michael and Lebanese Michael somehow decide without consulting me, or each other for that matter, that I should lead this little parade of three. With an unerring instinct for survival, their hands push me, the one with the honest-looking face, into the front. Hitching my pack higher on my shoulder, I walk forward, trying to look nonchalant yet sufficiently respectful of authority, trying not to look guilty and yet attempting to reveal the appropriate amount of uncertainty and fear. I ask myself how I can be both invisible and yet appear as a dutiful, law-abiding crosser-of-borders. I grip my American passport. As I near the table, I hold it forth for the customs inspector to take. His face, with thick, grown-together eyebrows and a moustache to rival Stalin’s, is not unfriendly nor is it genial. His large, brown, sleepy eyes look into mine, judging in a moment whether I look like the smuggling type or not, deciding in a fleeting instant what my future will hold.

His eyes slide from mine as he leans forward to take the passport hovering in my hand before him. But before he grasps it, he notices the cover, which I have turned so he can read it. PASSPORT — United States of America, with its rampant eagle crest, all printed in gold. Behind me, the two Michaels proffer their own documents like supplicants, one on each side of me, but slightly behind, our three passports resembling a meagre flock of three eagles flying in formation. On seeing that we are Americans, instantly, without a moment’s hesitation, he waves us on, not even taking my passport to check it. Not believing our good luck, but trying not to look overly elated, we three scurry to the next official who sits at his wicket automatically and mindlessly stamping all passports presented to him, including ours.

And with that, we tumble out of the train station into the raw January dusk, snow still falling heavily. Instantly, a jinn arising out of a smoking lamp, Ahmed appears at our sides. “Come. Follow me,” he says.

He leads us to a nearby hotel in a decrepit-looking two-storey building. We follow. The snow is floating down in fat flakes. I stare at it. This is Istanbul; it’s supposed to be warm. Why is it snowing? As we enter the hotel lobby, we see about twenty Turkish and Arab men — rough-looking characters with facial scars and heavy-lidded eyes — sitting around a tiny round stove that is gasping out a nimbus of feeble heat at one end of the room. As we wait for Ahmed to make arrangements at the counter, the men stare at us with hard looks as if we are one of those slabs of lamb hanging on a spit on a street-side stall. We stare back wide-eyed.

Heading upstairs to our room, we pass by a young woman with sores on her lips. “Probably from syphilis,” whispers Irish Michael as we open the door on a spacious room with three single beds in it. Ahmed’s own room is elsewhere in the hotel. After collecting his three bolts of cloth from us, he hurries down the hall.

We drop off our packs in our room and head out to have dinner with Ahmed who has decided to treat us to a meal for taking part in his little smuggling scheme.

After dinner at a tiny, nearly empty restaurant, Ahmed offers to take us to a special place on the far side of town. We nod our heads. Sure. Fine. Sounds good.

We start walking down the street and hop a taxi, which drops us off in a run-down residential area that is darker than the inside of a stone at the bottom of the sea. The air contains a slight tang of salt. In the mess that has turned from snow to sleet and rain, we start following a muddy street that climbs a long hill. Through the blackness we notice there are a lot of people around, all men it seems, walking up and down the hill. But there are no lights ahead to announce where we are going. At the top of the hill, we come to a high, wooden fence on our left, and, following Ahmed, we step through a narrow gate. Just inside the gate is a police sentry box with a lone policeman sitting in it, and beyond that, we are shocked by the sight of a garishly lit street that runs down another side of the same hill. This street is lined with what we quickly come to realize are brothels.

Ahmed leads us along to window-shop. Hundreds of Turkish men are running about, checking out the merchandise in the large picture windows. Each of the eighty or so storefronts offers a view into a sitting room where half a dozen women and girls sit or walk about. The preferred uniform consists of panties, high heels, and sweat socks — and nothing else. I stand staring, watching my boyhood ebb away, while a little Turkish man next to me is feeling the ample breast of a woman who has squeezed it out an open vent below the window. Men are going in and out of the buildings, heading upstairs with their choices and coming downstairs alone, satisfied smiles on their faces.

Ahmed soon disappears. The three of us continue wandering down the street, stopping to gaze in at each window. I find most of the women unattractive — the furthest thing possible from the Playboy foldouts of my youth or even the pretty girls I knew back home. Many of the women are thick with rolls of fat and feel no need to hide this fact. I had always heard that Turkish men enjoyed their women on the plump side and here is living, breathing, rippling, quivering proof. A few are thinner; some, it seems, dangerously so.

As I stand looking in a window next to a doorway, a girl reaches out and grabs my hat, which is like a seaman’s cap, but black instead of dark blue and with a short brim. As I am particularly fond of this hat, I step into the hallway to retrieve it. She says something to me in Turkish, laughing. The other girls and women behind her are giggling. She’s the only pretty prostitute I’ve seen in all the storefronts, but she’s missing a tooth in front. Small and perky, she’s obviously inviting me in for a little playtime. But I am poor and young and innocent and, at the moment, a little shame-faced, awaiting the return of my cap, trying not to stare directly at her breasts. Taking pity on me, she smiles and hands back the cap, releasing me into the night.

Irish Michael has disappeared into one of the brothels and Ahmed is still at his trysting. Meanwhile, Lebanese Michael and I wander farther down the street, a little overwhelmed by the blatant display of flesh. At the bottom of the hill is a tearoom, packed with chattering Turkish men drinking sweet tea from tall glasses with bands of brass-coloured tin and tin handles. We stand in the doorway of the tearoom and realize there are no seats available. As we turn to leave, an old man stands up and offers us his seat, followed by another younger man. We demur. They insist. Everyone here is friendly and welcoming, unlike the hard-eyed men at the hotel. Somewhat embarrassed by the old man’s generosity and good manners, we sit and drink tea, awaiting the return of Irish Michael and Ahmed.

On arriving late back at the hotel, we go to our room and Ahmed retires to his. After the long day of travel, we are tired and ready for bed. I throw back my blanket and a mouse jumps out, seemingly as startled as I am. Landing on the floor, it disappears in a hole in the wall. But I am too tired to care. We fall into our three beds in our clothes — it’s too cold to even consider getting undressed and the presence of the little rodent is further proof that taking our clothes off would be foolish. We agree to sleep that night with the light on, a single bulb hanging on a long cord in the middle of the room.

After a refreshing and mouse-less sleep, our three heads crowd around the window the next morning as we watch Ahmed on the street below adding his bags, now containing the smuggled cloth, to the roof of a bus that is already piled high with baggage. The previous night, he had explained that he would leave early in the morning in order to bus the rest of the way to Jordan. We had said our farewells then. He waves up to our window and boards.

After he leaves, we check out of the hotel and go in search of other accommodations, farther from the train station, closer to the sights, and, hopefully, mouse-free. Several hours later, we find a cosy hotel in a quiet, crowded district of two- and three-storey buildings not far from the Blue Mosque. It will cost us the equivalent of thirty-two cents per night total for our three beds.

As we make our way to the stairs leading to our room on the second floor, Irish Michael turns to the hotel-keeper and asks in a loud whisper, “Hashish?” The hotel-keeper nods, signalling that he understands. But, with a gesture, he indicates that we will have to wait until later.

These events took place a few short years before young people from North America and Western Europe began making Turkey one of several preferred global destinations for the purchase and ingestion of drugs of various sorts. It was ten years before Alan Parker’s 1978 film, Midnight Express, about the Turks’ official reaction to this influx. Based on a true story, the film caused a stir in the way it depicted the brutalization of a young American drug smuggler in a Turkish prison. We were still innocents then — I had never smoked or ingested anything illegal — and, in their own way, so were the Turks, never having encountered droves of mad-eyed, fun loving druggies from the West with cash to burn.

We decide not to wait around for the hashish to arrive and head out to visit the fabled Covered, or Grand, Bazaar of Istanbul, the Kapali Carsi, a kind of Arabian souk gone mad, a huge market that covers acres and acres in the heart of the city, all under a roof, with its own streets and alleys. The chaotic maze of the Kapali Carsi includes more than fifty-eight streets and over six thousand shops that sell carpets, gold and silver jewellery, hammered silver and brass implements, clothing and food of all types, leather and suede goods, shoes, and every type of gewgaw, precious item, and detritus that has ever washed up from the factories of the world. For over eight hundred years, the rivers of the Silk Road have emptied into this sea of commerce.

The bazaar also has a Turk on every corner asking us, surreptitiously, if we want to change money. They offer a far better exchange rate than the banks so we change some of our Italian lira and U.S. dollars into Turkish lira. Luckily we do not change a significant amount of our stash, as we later learn that one must have proof of exchange from a bank in order to buy a return train ticket.

Lebanese Michael decides he wants to purchase a hookah in the bazaar. Both he and Irish Michael are heavy smokers, mostly of Camels when they can get them. When the merchant in the cramped stall realizes that we are serious buyers, he sits us down and calls for tea. A boy comes running with a tray of glasses from a nearby tea seller’s and we drink. The haggling begins. When the tea is finished, so is the dealing. In the end, we are not sure if we ended up paying more for the hookah than it was advertised for, but, in any case, Michael has his hookah in his pack and we return to the hotel.

As we enter the hotel lobby, we see the hotel-keeper is saying his prayers to Allah, having laid out his prayer rug in the hotel hallway more or less in the direction, we suppose, of Mecca. We can hear the muezzin calling from a minaret nearby. We step gingerly around the hotel-keeper and head up to our room where we set up the two-man hookah on a low table with its double tubes coming from a large glass bowl, which Lebanese Michael fills with water. The two Michaels tear open a couple of cigarettes and test it with tobacco. When they finish, we rest and wait.

After a short while, a sharp knock at the door startles us. We look at each other. I pull the door open and there stands a young Turkish punk in a black leather jacket, with a leather motorcycle cap on his head, its shallow brim shadowing his eyes. He looks like a short and swarthy version of James Dean. His hair is black and shiny as the wings of a beetle and his eyes appear sleepy, cautious and slightly dangerous. He peers into the room. “Hashish?”

We nod enthusiastically. Before entering, he performs a choreographed scene that could have come from a gangster film. Slipping his hand into his jacket and leaning back slightly from the waist, he looks down the hallway in both directions and back at us. He then pulls a large, nasty-looking pistol from his jacket and waves it in the air as he says, “Police come! Bang bang! Out window!” and points the barrel at the room’s single small aperture. Stepping inside our room, he shuts the door behind him and puts the gun away.

He smiles upon seeing the hookah. Pulling out a foil-wrapped hunk of hashish about the size of a plum, he breaks off a sizable chunk, places it on the burner of the hookah and sits down on the bed. We all settle around him as he lights the hash and starts smoking. We take our turns. Being the only non-smoker in the group, after drawing smoke from the hookah, I end up coughing for the next twenty minutes. When the hashish is done (he himself has smoked a good half of it), he collects payment from us and dissolves out the door. The two Michaels are totally whacked from the hashish, which must have contained a fair amount of opium, since all they want to do is sleep. I realize, with all my coughing, I probably actually drew little smoke into my lungs. Having no interest in sleeping, I decide to head out into the early evening for a walk.

Outside, I note that night in Istanbul has a distinct Alice in Wonderland quality — exotic and unreal. A few blocks away, I enter a vast teeming restaurant that posts its menu on chalkboards. Unable to read a word of Turkish, I simply point to my mystery meal and am soon served the strangest liquid concoction I have ever tasted. I now suspect it might have been a soup made from tripe or some other unmentionable part of the cow or sheep anatomy. The term “hardware” is used to refer to the reticulum part of a cow’s stomach, because if a cow ingests metal, a piece of iron fencing, for example, it will lodge there and cause no harm. The cow that ended up in that tripe soup must have subsisted on a steady diet of decayed sewer pipe.

We spend a week in Istanbul, catching the sights, crossing the Bosporus to set foot in Asia, and learning that old Turkish men can be surprisingly friendly and generous. One elderly gentleman walks us from our hotel to Hagia Sophia, which is surrounded by four minarets that bear an uncanny resemblance to intercontinental ballistic missiles. These minarets, I learn, are actually counterweights for the main structure, which would likely collapse without them. He insists on buying us breakfast on the way. This is good because our money is running seriously low.

The Hagia Sophia, it turns out, was the world’s largest cathedral for a thousand years. The Ottoman Turks transformed it into a mosque in 1453, plastering over the Christian mosaics covering the walls. Today, there is a continuing controversy concerning revealing the ancient mosaics: to do so would entail the destruction of historic Islamic calligraphies that cover the surface of the walls.

Since its construction, the building and/or the great dome have been destroyed or damaged almost once a century by fires, earthquakes, or riots. When it was rebuilt in 562, Paul the Silentiary composed an epic poem in which he described the church as a meadow of marble. Paul the Silentiary, by the way, was responsible for maintaining the silence in the palace of Emperor Justinian. (“I hate a babbling tongue,” he wrote in an amatory verse from the Greek Anthology.)

Enrico Dandolo, one of the doges of Venice, is buried in Hagia Sophia. In 1204, he led the Fourth Crusade, which defeated Constantinople and sacked the city. At the time he led the knights to victory, he was blind and believed to be ninety-seven years of age!

Following the Fourth Crusade, numerous important relics and art were removed from Hagia Sophia and other sites in Constantinople. These included the shroud of Jesus and a stone from his tomb, the Virgin Mary’s breast milk, the statues that would become the four horses of Saint Mark in Venice, a trace of the blood of Christ, a piece of the true cross, the arm of St. James the Apostle, and “a not inconsiderable piece of St. John.”

The day before we leave, we begin to hunger for some “real” North American food and hike up to the Hilton Hotel on a high hill for a splurge on hamburgers and a wash in the clean bathrooms with hot running water. In the end, we will pay dearly for this last-minute indulgence.

The next day we go to the bank, change our money, receive our official declaration of exchange and buy our last-class train tickets to Venice, where we will have to leave the Orient Express and switch to the Italian train line. We have a minimal amount of money left between the three of us and we know we will still need to buy tickets from Venice to Rome.

When we go shopping for food to take on the train, we decide we can only afford a couple loaves of bread and a two-pound hunk of white cheese, semi-soft, that we later discover stinks worse than Limburger. The powerful, rank smell means we will be assured of having few travellers with the gumption to share our accommodations on the long train journey home. We hop the train, find a compartment, and bid farewell to fabled Istanbul, gateway to the Orient. Little do we realize we have a fifty-three-hour train trip ahead of us to reach Venice. Our compartment is fitted with wooden benches only, and we are carrying enough food to last three grown men about half a day.

Fifty-three hours. As the crow flies, Istanbul to Venice is about nine hundred miles. Of course, a train isn’t a crow, but if it flew as straight as one, this train would have kept up a blistering pace of seventeen miles per hour for the entire journey. As it was, it could not have travelled much faster than that. By the second day, we are delirious with hunger and the slowly passing view of snow-covered Bulgarian and Yugoslavian fields out the window.

About forty hours into the journey, we three starving students stare at a massive, well-fed Austrian who sits across from us. We’re not sure if he is a well-off tourist or a businessman. He is in his late thirties or early forties, is tall, broadly built, and has a slightly prissy air about him. When he boarded in Sophia he carried, in addition to his suitcase, a lidded wicker basket stuffed with food. For the past forty minutes we have watched him munch on black bread, yellow cheese, sausage, pickles, smoked fish, and chocolates, and have seen him guzzle several bottles of Fanta orange pop. He avoids our gaze, glancing out the window every few moments at the blank fields.

Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he belches. We can smell his sausage-scented burp from across the compartment. It’s torture. He rises, places the basket on the open overhead rack, and exits the compartment to visit the toilet at the end of the car.

As soon as the Austrian is out of sight, Irish Michael hauls his basket down and is brazenly distributing food. We are like destitute urchins from the back streets of a third-world slum, snatching bits of cheese and sausage. We don’t steal all of it, just a little, just enough to allay the hunger for a few moments. We hope he won’t notice. When he returns from the washroom, he immediately checks his basket (which Michael has reinstalled overhead) and notices the missing comestibles. He gives us a disgusted look and haughtily moves to another compartment, taking his basket with him.

It’s a gruelling trip. Two nights sleeping sitting up on a hard wooden bench, three days with little to do and even less to eat. At last, in early evening, we glimpse the lights on the hills around Trieste and feel an extraordinary elation. We are back in Italy. Back in the West. Back home, more or less.

In Venice, we descend from the train and can think only of food. We find the closest restaurant and gorge ourselves on a feast of pasta and wine, blowing much of our remaining money. But the food! To taste such food! A plain Italian meal, but nectar of the gods to us. Almost four decades later, I can still smell it, taste it, feel the fullness of it, the sweetness and the salt, the garlic and tomato, the rich red wine.

When we return to the station, we realize we only have enough money to buy three tickets to Florence and will have to hitchhike back to Rome from there. We don’t care. Our stomachs are full and we are content as we sit on the train. We arrive in Florence late at night, and by this time the fatigue is overwhelming. The plastic chair in the train station, with all its curves in the wrong places, is a machine built for torture, not sitting or sleep, but I must stay in it until the first light of morning when we will walk to the highway and stick our thumbs out.

At dawn, we are so stunned with fatigue, we misread the map meant to guide us out of the city and get lost trying to find the highway. Eventually, we stumble upon the entrance ramp to the autoroute to Rome and nearly weep with frustration at the sight. At least one hundred other students and young people are already hitchhiking in the morning’s angled sunlight.

We sit down on the ground and bow our heads. When we raise them again, we are cheered, because every truck climbing onto the expressway is stopping for people to board. Either the Italians are the world’s most generous drivers or they are incapable of living for more than an hour without company and conversation. In fifteen minutes, the crowd has cleared and we too are sitting in the cab of a truck on our way back to Rome, the driver babbling on and on about almost nothing, his hands flying off the wheel at regular intervals to gesticulate and give his words life.

Back at the school, I strip off the clothes I’ve been wearing night and day against the cold for a week as I prepare for the delights of my first shower in far too long. (We had no access to a shower or bath while in Istanbul.) I peel off my socks and throw them directly into the garbage. Something in the air smells like that reeking Turkish Limburger we gobbled on the train.