Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  Stalin beckoned, a ham-hock palm waving me toward him. He grabbed me by the arm, and in a swift movement removed my modest towel. Then he led me into a proper shower room, sat me in a wooden chair by the wall, and watched as I went through the motions of washing.

  I smiled at him once or twice, but he only grunted. When I finished my absurd pantomime, he moved toward me again, and in as neat a move as I’ve ever seen, folded a towel over my head and another around my midsection. They were neat folds, the kind a waiter in a fancy restaurant achieves with napkins. I felt like a walking piece of origami.

  He took me back to the room where my clothes were, and I sat in silence for a while, then dressed and strolled out. There was no one to see me out, and I wondered if this was the same treatment kings once received. Or what about Kaiser Wilhelm — surely, that brusque Teutonic emperor had required something more?

  Later I learned that Stalin would have given me a massage if I’d paid him more money. I talked with other travellers who had gone for this treatment and been soundly thrashed like a slab of meat in a packing plant. Perhaps I’d missed the richness of the cultural experience, but I was happy Stalin had kept his oven mitts off me.

  Turkish is a fascinating language. It’s an agglutinating tongue, which means it piles suffixes onto the ends of root words in an almost endless train of syllables. The verb to break is, for example, kirmak (the undotted i is a particular feature of Turkish, giving an i sound such as in the English word sir). From this root you can get agglutinized constructions like kirilmadilar mi, meaning “Were they not broken?”

  Turkish, moreover, is related to most of the languages of central Asia — to Uzbek and Azerbaijani, even to Mongolian. Recent scholarship has collected substantial evidence that Korean and even Japanese might also be members of this same wide-ranging family. There are even scholars who see a link between Turkish and the Uralic agglutinating languages — Hungarian and Finnish, for instance.

  So how was Turkish peppered across half the world? The answer lies in the fabled Silk Road.

  It was from the shores of Constantinople that Marco Polo began his journeys. He came up to Constantinople from Venice but didn’t bother to write about that part of the trip, since the route was well-known to European travellers. Constantinople, after all, was then the seat of the Byzantine Empire. There wasn’t much left of the Byzantines’ magnificence, but their territory had served as a base for the Crusades of the past few centuries and they were still Christian.

  From Constantinople, Polo crossed the Bosphorus and began his famous journals. He accompanied his father and uncle along the Silk Road, east across Afghanistan and into the western deserts of China. In time he came to the pleasure palaces at Ta-tu, court of the great and wise Kublai Khan.

  Ta-tu is now Beijing, and the pleasure palaces are buried directly beneath the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. In all probability Polo learned to speak the tongues of his day. There are many passages in his journal that indicate he spoke directly with the great Khan. What they spoke wasn’t Chinese. They conversed in a kind of Old Turkish.

  And that’s the clue. Turkish, on one side related to Hungarian and on the other to distant Korean, trailed along with the Mongol hordes. Kublai Khan’s grandfather was none other than Genghis Khan, who led his armies across Asia right to the gates of Vienna, leaving his language in his wake, the tongue that eventually became Turkish.

  I, too, set out across the Bosphorus, heading for the central plains of Turkey into a fairy-tale landscape known as Cappadocia. The name comes from an Old Persian word, katspatuka, which means “Land of the Beautiful Horses.”

  Here again was evidence of the old Silk Road, though for me the trek meant many more bloody hours on a Turkish bus. Right from the start the people at the otogar or bus station had booked too many people onto the vehicle. At first they wouldn’t even let me on. Then it was decided that some people would probably get off at the first few stops, so I was allowed to sit in the aisle. After twelve hours, however, no one got off. In the end I spread out a slab of foam in the aisle and slept comfortably.

  At seven in the morning, bleary-eyed, we got off the bus and found ourselves in the small town of Göreme, home to the famous rock churches. The place is crazy. Bizarre earthen cones rear out of the ground, huge and dotted with caves. This region is volcanic. Much of the original soil has eroded, and the cones and vents of lava are all that’s left. They’re called “fairy chimneys” and resemble giant stalagmites that soar fifteen to twenty metres into the air.

  What’s more, the material the cones are made of is known as tufa. It has the peculiar property of turning rock-hard when it’s exposed to air and moisture, though it’s as soft as Styrofoam inside. Over several millennia people living here have tunnelled into these formations and built dwellings.

  In this town Fred Flintstone’s Bedrock, albeit inhabited with strict Muslims, comes to life. The women are wrapped up modestly, and the men sport pajama pants and long, swarthy moustaches. There are goats, donkeys, and chickens, not to mention the region’s fabulous ruined church caves. They are called kilise in Turkish, and I set off immediately to see them.

  Thinking myself wise and adventurous, I rented a mountain bike from a pajama-clad entrepreneur. The landscape was dazzling, and I imagined myself scooting between the hoodoos and finding dinosaur bones and ancient pottery shards. The land was dotted with cacti, though, and my tires soon bled away their air. I fixed three flats before I gave up and threw the bike into the back of a passing truck for a lift to town. Then I set off again on foot.

  At first everything was absolutely magical. A valley near the town contains the Open Air Museum. Numerous caves are found among the conical formations, but the ones here are special. They’re the ancient churches that date from the eighth century at a time when Christianity was desperately clinging on in the face of Muslim armies from the east. In some of the caves there are still the remains of frescoes. In the Karanlik Kilise, or Dark Church, they’re well preserved because there were no windows. In the Yilanli Kilise, or Church of the Dragon, there are murals of St. George spearing a serpent.

  Walking back to town, I got lost as usual. I followed a little stream that wasn’t much more than a path. Up ahead, I encountered an old man tending his fields. I had already read in my guidebook that tourists were welcome to see the churches, but they better stay off the farmers’ lands. It was a something of a sore point. I debated strategically turning around, since he hadn’t seen me yet, then changed my mind and called out to him. I figured it would be better to announce my presence and apologize rather than risk being sprayed in the backside with buckshot.

  The farmer turned and grinned toothlessly and warmheartedly, waving for me to join him. The old man didn’t speak a word of English. He motioned for me to wait and then got his jacket, which was hanging in a nearby tree. The trees were thick with nectarines. The volcanic soil there, though it looks dry and chalky, is actually quite fertile. He returned, snatched down a nectarine, and handed it to me, then fumbled in the pocket of his jacket to withdraw a little book.

  The old man had withered hands, the nails caked in the dirt of toil, but he opened the book reverentially and flipped to the first pages. There on the paper were the names and addresses of all those travellers who, like me, had stumbled across his fields. The entries went back almost twenty-five years. He handed me the stump of a pencil and turned to a bright new page. With a nod he indicated I should add my name to the list, which I did. I also took a picture of him, promising to send it to him later.

  Then the farmer took me around his lands. I remember there were butterflies everywhere and strange fruit that resembled kiwis. The ones on the tree were sweet, but those that had dropped to the ground were like big raisins. As we strode down a narrow valley, he made drinking motions with his hand, intoning over and over the word sodah. I already knew from buying bottled water in Istanbul that the Turkish word for water was su, but when we came to a small pool squirting out of
the ground, he bent to drink from it, cupping his hands. Then he pointed to me. I thought of E.coli and giardia and all the terrible fevers one can get from contaminated water. At first I shook my head, but he insisted. When I finally dipped my hands into the water, raising it to my lips, I was surprised. It was bubbly, like champagne, and fizzed across my lips. It was indeed natural soda water.

  After apple tea at the farmer’s house, we said goodbye. In Turkish goodbye is güle güle. It’s only said by the one left behind, not the one leaving, and it means, charmingly enough, “Go smiling.”

  I hiked back to the main road with the farmer’s wife, who was carting a load of apples on a donkey. She didn’t say a word to me, but when we reached the road, she pointed me in the direction of Göreme while she continued on without a backward glance the other way.

  I did send the photographs to the farmer when I finally arrived home. He had scribbled down his own address, which I still have, smudged by his earth-worn hands. I picture him now smiling at the photo, thinking of the far-off travellers who had stumbled onto his lands.

  Near Göreme is a caravanserai, an ancient stopover on the Silk Road. I took a bus to it one day and was surprised at how big it was. There were places to water camels and a cavernous area of shade where merchants whiled away the time playing simple board games and speaking about the road ahead.

  Marco Polo almost certainly would have stopped there. It was only a week’s journey out of Istanbul and the last vestiges of civilization. Polo was travelling into the truly unknown, just like me, and I wondered if he had sat by the fountain in the courtyard and watched the crescent moon rise in the east.

  The Silk Road was actually a whole thread of trails, but they did lead all the way to ancient Beijing. What we label Turkey is properly called Türkiye by its inhabitants. The name is actually believed to derive from an old Chinese word, Tu-küe, meaning simply “People of the Earth” or “People of the Soil.” Almost certainly the term was first used to describe the Mongols who rode west along the trails with the armies of Genghis Khan.

  Languages can reveal their scatterings. We can track them back to their sources, their very beginnings. What we’re really tracing, however, are semiotic systems, ways of being, and that’s not so easy. Meaning is often wrapped in metaphors and layers of connotation. It expresses relationships and traditions in ways that might be unique to that people, that place in the world. And those meanings, those ways of being, are born, flourish, and die just as we do.

  I was attacked again by dogs in Turkey. This time I was really scared. Never had I been so heart-thumpingly sure I was in the presence of Death surrounding me, eyeing me, waiting for its chance. I kept walking, trying to make my movements seem nonchalant, but I knew that one wrong step would cause Death to hurtle toward me in a single terrible last moment.

  The dogs were German shepherds, and they were all around me, growling, snarling, and snapping at the air. And there I stood, fifteen thousand kilometres from home, alone and defenceless, waiting for them to rip into me.

  I’ve had animals attack me before. A shark came after me in the crystal-clear waters off Belize, but it was blind, old, or something, and more or less bumped into me, then continued on its way. In Spain, as mentioned earlier, a German shepherd also assaulted me.

  This time, though, the threat was far more unnerving. Cappadocia is a spooky place, a backwater in time where villagers tend orchards in tiny plots of land between eerie hoodoos. They scrape the soil with wooden hoes and pile their produce into carts drawn by donkeys. Outside the hostel where I stayed just such a donkey stood in the shade, so I took a photo of the poor beast and thought it quintessential Turkey, something not seen in staged and artificial tourist postcards. And that’s where the problem with the German shepherds began.

  On my third day in Göreme, having explored the magnificent Open Air Museum and Underground City, I entered a winding alleyway where a donkey was being hitched to a wagon. An old woman sat up front, and two young boys were in the back.

  One of the boys waved to me and called out a greeting in English. He looked about nine, though he later told me he was twelve. Small and impish, he gestured me over. “You see kiliselar?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’ve seen them all. They’re beautiful.”

  “No, no … you come … you see.”

  There were ruins all over the Göreme region, and evidently Mehmet, as he introduced himself, had some on his family’s land. He told me to hop into the cart with him and his little brother. The woman driving, their mother likely, whipped a stick across the donkey’s back and set the cart in motion with hardly a glance at the stranger sitting with her children.

  Here was an adventure, I thought, a story I could write about. The cart lurched forward. A cloudless sky arched above us. I chatted with Mehmet behind the clip-clopping donkey. The boy’s English was broken and garbled, but he asked eagerly after my age, my nationality, and why I didn’t have a wife.

  We trundled across the rutted paths, out of the village, and into the weird valleys. The landscape was magical, and the boys chattered like happy squirrels. Finally, we pulled up at a little triangle of land, and the mother, still without a word to me, pulled a hoe from the cart and set off into a melon patch.

  Mehmet took his little brother by the hand and told me to follow. We strode down a dusty trail that led into the volcanic spires. This was the path that would bring me to the first kernel of fright. It was a small thing in retrospect and nothing certainly that warranted fear, but it threw me off, disturbing me perhaps more than it should have.

  I had known from the beginning that I would have to give the boy bahşiş, a tip for his services, and I didn’t begrudge him that. We climbed into a cave church, literally spelunking through a series of tunnels that led into the tufa. The church itself was unremarkable. No murals remained, and only the vague outline of benches stuck out around the sides of the cross-shaped room. Still, it was something not seen by many eyes, and I owed Mehmet that much.

  When we exited, the imp straightened pugnaciously and insisted on a completely exorbitant sum, equalling about $50. I think I laughed and offered him the equivalent of $3 in Turkish lira. I was prepared to haggle, but I was met with an odd defiance.

  Mehmet restated his original price and placed his hands on his hips, eyeing me with a face that was suddenly combative. His lips tightened in anger, and I could see he was serious.

  “Okay, here.” I withdrew another bill and dangled it in front of him. I was growing impatient. It had taken me a while to learn how to haggle. I’d been taken in by quite a few shopkeepers before I learned to do the haggle dance properly. I would cut a shopkeeper’s price by half, then he would try to edge me back up. Finally, I’d walk right out of the store, and inevitably he’d cheerfully chase me down the street, fully accepting my last offer.

  Now such is the power of words that what happened next truly shocked me. Little Mehmet glared at me with utter hatred and pronounced the words no one ever wants to hear. “Fuck off!” He spat out the words with such vehemence that I took a step backward as if he’d physically hit me.

  At most his stance should have irritated me — he was, after all, only a boy — but his words caught me so completely by surprise that I dropped the lira bills at his feet, threw my hands up in disgust, and turned to leave. It was the first sign that things were going terribly wrong.

  Now swearing is a strange concept in any language. I remember Chantal from Quebec saying “Sacrement!” all the time. Swearing consists of the words that hit the hardest and the deepest. For the French they’re religious terms. Most of the world, though, seems to swear in reference to bodily parts and functions.

  Swear words also need to be filled with hard consonants — something that will crack off the tongue. Fuck in Turkish, for example, is sik. In the case of fuck we seem to have lost the original meaning (I’ve heard it said that it’s based on an Old Germanic word applying to the act of a farmer planting a seed). But that doesn’t re
ally matter. Fuck is now used with relative ease as a noun, a verb, or an adjective pretty much anywhere.

  I once thought about writing an article on swearing but didn’t get very far. However, I did come across the interesting fact that a true curse, such as when you hit your thumb with a hammer, doesn’t come from the language centre of the brain. That’s strange because all language is thought to emerge from this little language centre, a marble-size pinch of brain cells behind our left ear — all our poetry, essays, and conversation, all the brilliant repartee that makes us human. Only our harshest curses actually emanate from elsewhere. They come from what is sometimes called the reptilian brain way below the cortex, a lump of basic tissue at the stem of the spinal cord. Wordless yells of pain also originate there.

  Anyway, young Mehmet told me to fuck off quite convincingly. I thought he might heave a rock at me, such was his inexplicable hatred, but I turned my back and hustled off quickly into the hills.

  The problem was that I really had no idea where I was going. The bizarre pinnacles towered around me, and the valleys and crevices between them revealed no trails. I circled one and then another, conscious of keeping my direction constant. I scrambled for fifteen minutes or so, then stopped, knowing the whole situation had become ridiculous. I felt a little embarrassed that I was fleeing from the wrath of a twelve-year-old boy. Maybe I should have swatted him. Perhaps he would have happily accepted a much larger amount, something plainly out of line with what anything else was costing me in this area of Turkey. But there was nothing I could do at that point to amend the matter. The road lay somewhere south, and I was certain that if I maintained my general movement in that direction, I’d eventually arrive at the road and be able to follow it back to the village.

  I walked a bit farther and then, to be careful, decided to climb to the top of one of the volcanic spires. Here they were fat cones, maybe three storeys tall, and from the crown of one I thought I might be able to spy a road. I was calming down now and began to think that the boy had had no idea of the power of the word he’d uttered. For him it might have been something meaningless to toss out when impatient. For a native speaker of English, though, it forms the most powerful of our curses, a cracking of ugly consonants thrown up from the most primordial part of the brain.