A traveler in search of fresh experiences goes to one place, then another and another, and each landscape they see and each person they meet shows only one face. The traveler makes memories and photographs, and that one face is frozen in time as if it had always been that way, as if someday they could return and see that very same smile. But a face is like an ancient city built on mounds of shattered walls, shards of pottery, and wind-blown soil, with the centuries of history constantly underfoot but only to be seen here and there in the stones pockmarked by cannonballs or worn smooth by sandstorms. If the traveler returns, they will begin to see into the past. Having visited all the famous sights, they might wander slowly through the marketplace and notice a narrow alleyway, so easily missed by anyone in a hurry, a rusted door half buried in the street, a shop full of dusty old things that have fallen out of fashion. If the traveler returns, they will begin to see into the future. Buildings will have been hollowed out by earthquakes or bankruptcy, inhabitants will have arrived and departed, trees will have been struck by lightning, children will have new ideas and old folks will have new wrinkles, towers of concrete and glass will have sprouted from empty lots. To travel in a line is to learn the vastness of space; to travel in a circle is to learn the vastness of time.
I returned to Dersim. Fall had come, and the mountain winds blew cold into the shadows while the warm sun shone out of clear blue skies. When I got off the bus, I bought some bread, butter, cheese, and apples and decided to see some of the countryside on foot. I slept that night by the water under the rustling willows and poplars, and then walked for half a day up the Pülümür Stream. A huge sheepdog with vicious looking spikes on his collar approached me, wiggled his butt, got some pets, and then followed me for nine miles, waiting patiently whenever locals invited me to stop and drink tea. The dog abandoned me for some soldiers and I rode the last few miles with a couple of off-duty military policemen in civilian clothes. I reunited with my friends and settled back into their household, making up my bed on their couch every night. I was no longer considered a guest but a member of the family, so I learned to make tea in the Turkish way and to lay out breakfast properly. When visitors stopped by, I joined in welcoming them to the house. Everyone’s time was stretched thin between caring for Mother and going to work, so there weren’t many special activities, and for the most part it was just ordinary life. But there were a few trips away from the house when time allowed. On two occasions I saw beautiful goats with long silky hair being sacrificed, the blood pouring from their throats and then their bodies hung from a beam, skinned, cut into portions, and divided among everyone present. One day, walking along the road for some exercise and a change of scenery, I met four young men on a tractor, and they took me down through the pastures, deep into the valley, where we loaded up a trailer with freshly cut oak branches and sped down treacherous roads to a remote farmstead where we left the branches for animals to eat in winter. The garden at the family’s mountain house produced piles of tomatoes, peppers, green beans, arugula, mint, hawthorn fruits, and rose hips. Walnuts were in season, leaving telltale yellow stains on people’s fingers, and one day we harvested wild pears from the roadside between squalls of rain. On the breakfast table there was always a dish of freshly made rose hip preserves and a dish of raw honeycomb from the family’s hives.
But amidst all the beauty of the season, Mother seemed to be clinging to this world by a thread. She had trouble swallowing food and water, she was frail, and she struggled to draw breath through a rattling flood of mucus. She spent more and more time sleeping, and when she was awake her one eye rarely had much of a spark in it. I imagined that she was suffering, and I knew her children and grandchildren were suffering, as they did everything they could to keep her alive and yet still lost ground day by day. I was touched by the way they treated her, so different from everything I’ve seen in America. It was not just her health they looked after but her dignity as a full human being; they dressed her not in pajamas or a hospital gown but in her own clothes, they tied her headscarf around her hair, wheeled her to the breakfast table, lifted her onto the sofa in the living room to spend time with the family and guests, kissed her cheeks, and talked to her even though she could no longer reply. As I held her hand, her wrinkled skin dry and delicate, her milky eye looking into my face, I wanted so much to understand the world she came from, but she couldn’t tell me her story; I could only see it reflected in the hearts of the family she’d raised. I told her that her children were very beautiful people.
Hazelnut couldn’t speak either but she told me with gestures that Mother had lost one eye chopping firewood, that in the old house she had baked her own bread, that this stuff bought from the bakery was nothing to that bread. Her brother Resolve still lived in the old house and I went to visit him there. The place was no more than a hundred yards away, but up the stone stairs and through the stand of plum trees and tall dry weeds was another world. The house was built in the 1950s to a traditional design, with walls of earth and stone, crossed by beams made from tree trunks with the bark removed, the floorboards creaking and the ceiling boards buckling and rotting out in places. The roof was flat, made from some 16 inches of packed dirt piled onto the ceiling boards. In old times, it would have been carefully graded with a big cylindrical stone roller, the edges beaten flat with a special wooden mallet so that the water would run down to a long spout in one corner before it could soak in. But now the beams were settling and the roof was no longer flat; there were dips and treacherous places, cracks, weeds pushing their roots in. It only kept the water out with sheets of plastic buried under the dirt, plastic that was crumbling, the leaks slowly rotting the wood underneath. I spent a day helping Resolve make repairs, filling buckets with dirt, hauling them up the wooden ladder, spreading the dirt over patches made from scraps of roofing tin, sprinkling water to keep the fine dust from washing away with the first rain. Resolve took care of that old house like his sisters took care of the old woman who once kept it: gently, lovingly, desperately, hopeful but sad for the coming loss. Under that leaking roof was a lifetime of family memories: an old wooden clock, piles of dusty knickknacks, broken things that might come in handy someday, framed photos of people who’d died or moved far away.
It was clear that it was only a matter of time before his repairs could no longer hold. Standing on the roof and looking around, I could see where things were headed, because nearly every other flat earthen roof had either been replaced with a peaked roof of corrugated metal or had a blue plastic tarp spread over it. These mountains were still very much alive, and earthquakes were not unknown—even in my brief time there I had slept through a small one. One day either the weight of winter snows would crumble this roof or workmen would tear it down to put up something new. And as I spent more time in Dersim, and as my improving Turkish allowed conversations to go deeper, I began to notice that the family had its own cracks and fault lines. Some people no longer talked to each other, some people still talked but didn’t really care for each other’s company, some people didn’t think all that much of each other, some people argued fiercely. At first I’d seen them as some kind of ideal family; I’d been overwhelmed by the way they welcomed me, I could barely understand what they said, that verbal world of cold thoughts and opinions, but I could easily see their warmth, the ways they expressed love for each other. And then as I gradually came to understand that they were ordinary people after all, the dazzling shine of newness wore off and was replaced by the rich patina of use and care. And I loved them all the more for being real and complicated and human.
The day before I left, I came home from the bakery to see an ambulance parked outside the apartment, lights flashing. My heart sank, and I knew what was going on even before I saw the medics loading a stretcher into the back. They drove off to the hospital, leaving the apartment empty except for me and Hazelnut. As darkness fell she wouldn’t turn on the lights, telling me with gestures that electricity was expensive, so we sat in the gloom of the living room with the television down low, waiting. I wondered if anyone had let Resolve know that his mother had been taken to the hospital. I told Hazelnut I was going over to the old house, and I found Resolve there, sitting in a small room with a glowing wood stove. Nobody else had thought to tell him, and he was angry. Soon after I arrived, a friend of the family called him to say that Mother had been moved to the ICU, which was news that should have come from his sisters. But there was nothing to be done about any of it. We sat on the bed as the kitten he’d recently adopted rubbed against our legs and jumped into my lap. Resolve invited me to spend the night in the old house and I did, bathed in the comforting smell of wood and dust and old books. In the morning he went to work, and I said a silent goodbye to Hazelnut. She hugged me with tears in her eyes, and I tried to explain with gestures that when the flowers were blooming in the spring, I would return. As my bus turned the corner toward the provincial capital, I caught a last glimpse of her looking down from the balcony, watching and waiting. I waved goodbye. That evening, on a bigger bus bound for Konya, I got the news that Mother had passed away. For her children and grandchildren I knew it was a bitter loss, but perhaps for her it was the end of a long and painful ordeal. She had suffered bravely and now she was free.
In Konya I drank tea with my friend Yunus again, and he and his colleagues at the museum introduced me to a soup called arabaşı and took me to a picnic on a perfect fall afternoon. I hung out again with my friend Ali in another carpet shop, and got to see the end of a carpet auction in a modern caravansary with a large walnut tree growing through the middle of the clear plastic roof. Its leaves were turning yellow, and every now and then one of the nuts would drop with a resounding thump. Men drank tea and smoked by colorful piles of rugs, occasionally bargaining for a piece that had slipped through their hands. I walked alone through the cemetery again, down a brick path lined with hanging vines, their leaves glowing translucent and scarlet like blood dripping from the arbors. I was no longer observing a single place and time, I was getting involved in people’s lives. And they were becoming precious to me, not precious like silver and gold but precious like a limb: irreplaceable, at once tough and fragile, extended out into a world that might bring pleasure or pain, healing or affliction. As little control as I had over the course of my own life, I had even less control over the course of theirs. And I think this is as it should be. Before I was born, all the substance of my body was common property, passing from soil to root and from root to leaf and flower, circulating through clouds and rivers, filling the lungs of the running deer, vibrating with the songs of frogs and crickets. For a brief interval this substance appears to be mine alone, and I can feel the thrill of freedom mingled with the loneliness of being separated from the rest of creation, but at the end of this journey I can only return to where I started, my body’s substance scattered to the wind and water, common property once again. When I reach out and entwine my life with others, I remember that no matter how far I travel, I’ve never really left that eternal home.
Gurbette benim geldi ecel başıma nâgâh
Hasretle olur ehl-i beytim giryân ve agâh
Çare yoktur gelen gider bu musafir hanede
Vatana ruhûmı isâl eder elbette Allah
In a foreign land death came suddenly to my head
Back home they will cry with longing when they hear
In this guesthouse we come and go, there is no cure
Surely Allah will send my soul to its homeland
—from a 1917 tombstone in Üçler Cemetery, Konya
Wow this was exquisite. Thank you.