Thursday, 20 September
The next morning when I woke up, I went back out onto the square and found Eren and Özgür at the büfe. They invited me to join them for breakfast.
I learned a little bit more about them then. I learned that they were very close friends and figured they had been passing private jokes between themselves the night before and nothing more. Also, I learned that Eren owned the bakkal across the street in addition to the büfe. I realized that his darting eyes the night before had probably just been him watching his store, which had been open but unstaffed. There was nothing to worry about, these guys were fine. After breakfast, I went back to the hotel to take a nap.
I emerged from the hotel early in the afternoon, strolling out onto the center square and into the barbershop. It had been over a month since my last haircut, so it was past time for another one.
When the barber finished my haircut, I switched chairs and joined the other patrons for a cup of tea. As we talked over our tea, a man walked into the shop. He took a chair to wait for his haircut, spotted me, and asked if I was aware of the Greater Middle East Project.
The Project was a popular conspiracy theory to the effect that Western Europe and the United States wanted to redraw national borders in the Middle East. Erdoğan, the prime minister of Turkey, supposedly would be the emperor running an assortment of redrawn national entities which would include a smaller, carved up Turkey, a new state called Kurdistan, and other national entities, some of them loosely based on existing nations. Basically, the project would reformat a large part of the world.
“Is this true or not?” he asked me. His was a simple question, but my answer would not be. So I needed a few seconds to see if I could piece together a nuanced response in my Tarzan Turkish. I stalled for time.
“I don’t know. You tell me. What do you think?”
“I asked you first. Is it true or not?”
Man, I thought, I just wanted to come in here for a haircut, and then go back and take a nap. I didn’t come in here to talk about politics. I usually tried to steer clear of political conversations anyway, especially when I was alone in Turkey.
He pressed, “Is it true or not?”
In my very bad Turkish, I replied, “I understand what you are asking and I’m knowledgeable about the topic, but I can’t have the conversation you would like to have because my Turkish isn’t good enough.”
Usually, that’s enough to end a conversation and for people to say Well, we would love to talk about this topic with this foreigner but since his Turkish isn’t good enough we will just have to stick with small talk. And then the political conversation would end and we would talk about the weather.
But this guy would not back off. He was determined to talk about the Greater Middle East Project come hell or high water.
Finally, he asked me impatiently, “Does the Greater Middle East Project exist? Yes or no?” I repeated, “My Turkish is not good enough for this conversation.”
But the more I said it the harder he pressed me for answers, even on other points that I cared even less about.
I swallowed my last drop of tea, then stood up and started walking toward the door, shaking hands and saying goodbye to everybody, including the hostile questioner. I was so flustered, though, that I almost walked out without paying. But I remembered and stopped just as I began to step out the door. I looked over at the barber, tongue-tied. Now I couldn’t even remember the Turkish for “How much?” a term I said dozens of times each day.
The barber looked at me and shrugged apologetically. He seemed to understand my frustration and how obnoxious his other customer was being. He said, “Don’t worry about it, it’s on the house.” So I left and went back out on the square.
I crossed the square to say hi to Özgür and Eren. I was moving quickly from suspecting them to befriending both of them and their buddies too. They were a good group to know because they had stores at the center of the village and they knew everyone. When Eren saw me he put down a plastic bin filled with bags of chips, smiled at me, and said, “Nice haircut.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I am going back to the hotel to take a nap now.” Özgür spoke up, “Come back this evening. We want you to meet The Mayor.”
“The Mayor?”
“Well, actually, he’s not the real mayor. We just call him that. His nickname is Şef. He used to run the local bank branch, but now he’s retired.”
“Okay, sounds good to me. I’ll see you later this evening,” I said as I turned towards the hotel.
Toward the end of the afternoon, when I woke up from my nap, I went back out onto the square and found Eren and Özgür sitting out on the curb in front of one of their stores eating sandwiches with a couple of their friends.
They offered me a sandwich. I thanked them and took the sandwich and started eating it, letting the breadcrumbs spill on the ground around me. Özgür got a broom and swept up the crumbs, telling me that spilling breadcrumbs was a sin. “Don’t do it,” he warned.
I noticed that they were not spilling their breadcrumbs, and I could not figure out how anyone could be so tidy when eating a sandwich made of crumbly bread. I certainly didn’t have those kinds of eating habits, so apparently, I was going through life offending God by spilling my breadcrumbs.
As we stood on the curb eating our sandwiches, Özgür piously sweeping up after me, Şef came by. As it turned out, Şef was the village drunk. In his retirement, he had taken to booze. Not just any booze, but a particular brand of rotgut.
Şef motioned at me to follow him. We walked into one of Eren’s stores, where Şef bought a bottle of rotgut and picked up a couple of plastic cups. Then we crossed the street and carried a couple of chairs up a set of stairs onto a balcony overlooking the square.
We sat down and Şef poured a round of rotgut into our two plastic cups. I’m not much of a drinker, and it was a horrible tasting rotgut. I took only enough of a sip to taste it on my lips. Şef, however, tipped his cup and slammed the rotgut back in two gulps. Then he set his cup on the ledge of the balcony and poured another. I realized I would never keep up with Şef. He got drunker and drunker.
A group of pre-teen girls approached below the balcony, chatting and laughing together. Şef began making lewd gestures at them. I cringed as I sat in my chair not drinking the rotgut. Şef slammed back yet another cup and made more lewd gestures as the girls continued across the square. Then another group of pre-teen girls walked into the square and Şef made more incredibly lewd comments and gestures at them, too, while slamming back more and more rotgut. I got a bad taste in my mouth, and it wasn’t due to the rotgut.
I got up to leave. This was not a good person to be with. I didn’t want to be associated with this guy at all. Then I began to realize I’d been had. Eren and Özgür were playing a joke on me. I sat back down.
A group of also-drunk teenage boys strolled by. There is nothing more dangerous than a group of drunk teenage boys trying to prove to each other how tough they are. I must have been the greatest story in Çardak by then because they, like the man in the barbershop, started asking me about the Greater Middle East Project. They began speculating rowdily back and forth amongst themselves.
“He’s probably a CIA operative!”
“No, he’s a KGB officer!”
“No, Mossad!”
They agreed on Mossad, and from there on they referred to me as Mossad. In the spectrum of intelligence agencies, as I had been finding out in the past couple weeks, you start out as a CIA agent. Then, if you are a bad-ass you get promoted to KGB. If you are a real bad-ass you get promoted to being Mossad. When they began calling me Mossad I knew that even though they were drunk they were showing me respect and would not be throwing me off the balcony. Getting thrown off balconies is for mere CIA officers.
They soon left to do whatever else drunken teenagers do. Şef finished the rotgut, walked me back to Eren and Özgür, and went home to sleep it off. By that time it was 10:30 PM, so I said a quick goodbye to Eren and Özgür and went back to my hotel to wash off the dirty feeling of Şef in the shower’s lukewarm water.
—
In 2012, Matt sold off or gave away almost everything he owned. He strapped whatever was left to his back, flew to Turkey, and walked across it. Every foot, from one end of the country to the other. Along the way, he slept in mosque gardens, dined with strangers, and stumbled into refugee camps.
This is the story of that journey. We’ll be publishing one chapter each week from his book. If you would like to read the whole thing at once, you can purchase his book titled Heathen Pilgrim: Walk Across Turkey on Amazon.
