Two years ago, on a tour described by the sponsoring (and financing) Gülen Movement as an encouragement to intercultural dialogue, as well as a way to save a lot of money, Nancy and I found ourselves traveling with a group of friends in Turkey. I had thought to finish a novel there. The novel, titled Santa Claus, concerned a failed cartoonist who, in middle age, begins to suffer nightmares of the sort he’d always had as a child at Christmas. But the story had curled in upon itself, self-meditated as it were, to the point where it needed to expand, to get this poor cartoonist out of the house, into the wide historical world—to Turkey, say, where the legends of Saint Nicholas originate. Let him seek the mystery there, I thought, right out in the open, out there by the Aegean in the glare of one of those Pasolini long shots, I imagined, like the ones in his Medea, where the narrative might withdraw in a way to leave him stricken, blinded by some awful realization I felt certain we’d discover on our tour.
But it would not work out that way. I’d get back home and write it up and it would hang there like some Lowell Thomas travelogue appended to the feature presentation. I would find I’d written past the proper claustrophobic ending, and I’d have this little journal full of wonders that no longer spoke to anyone but me. That left me out there in pursuit of an idea I’d sought to delegate. How strange to find yourself—to turn around in a way and find yourself in retrospect—exposed. It makes a difference taking all that in directly. Standing out there in the ruins getting sunburned on your own. No hat, no shades, no cover story. Noon at Ephesus is blinding, for example. All that marble like a mirror. Bleached-white history like a mirror to the blazing here and now. So here’s your long shot. There’s no Santa, you suspect. Yet here’s your notebook and you know where this is leading. You’re just not sure what it means.
TWO YEARS AGO—TO THE DAY almost; ten days from now it makes two years—we all checked in to a small hotel in Istanbul. Or maybe not so small; I’ve got a card here, pasted in: Grand Anka Hotel, it says. It didn’t seem so grand. A tiny lobby, shadowy hallways, rudimentary rooms. Compressed but nice enough. You felt inserted. And the windows opened. How about that. A sense, at last, of actual air, of openness of place after a fourteen-hour flight into the big end of the funnel of the ancient world then swirled past all that perfectly established ancient scenery that I remember rendering in black-construction-paper silhouette in third grade, down into the tributary avenues increasingly complex with life specific and approachable until, no room for gawking anymore, no distance from it, there you are, squeezed into the narrow end of things, straight through and up into your quarters with a view onto the alley. This is it, you think. A sigh. A pause. And then the windows open. It’s the alley, sure. But still. My journal entry:
ISTANBUL, HOTEL ANKA 7-12-10 7:15PM Room window opens onto orange wall across the alley. Clear, empty evening sky still bright. Sounds of conversation, sounds of birds echoing in the narrow two-story gap between the buildings—then crows or something angry-sounding. Terrible echoy [sic] racket from nowhere in particular, no visible source, for a couple of seconds. Then just faint, ambient sounds of the city. Nancy in the bathroom. It’s the Grand Anka Hotel, actually—Molla Gürani Caddesi No.: 46 Findikzade www.grandankahotel.com I’m drinking a Fanta orange soda as I write this.
Now, this really does feel odd to quote myself, to [sic] myself, but I think this is how you do it, looking back like this—two years seems long enough to keep its distance and allow enough uncertainty to fill the gap, to warrant reexamining the evidence as if there’s something there almost like history, by itself worth looking into. I have a photograph right here that Nancy took of me, emerging from the bathroom with her surreptitious camera. I’d not seen it till the other day. But there I am. Backlit and slightly blurred against the orange light through the window. Pen in hand. A can of Fanta on the little plastic table. You can see one of the blue-framed vertical window panels open just a little on the right. While on the left I block the view so you can’t see if that one’s open, but the gauzy drapes behind me seem to move. Look how I’m hunched above the table. Such a strange, sweet Fanta soda–colored light. Am I aware of that? I wonder. What a strange, sweet light that is? I probably need to go to bed. But there I am. Ten minutes more to jot this down, we’ll go to bed, awake refreshed more or less, and set out on this madly overscheduled tour our hosts with the mysterious Gülen Movement have arranged. Everything will open up again. We’ll all be out in the glare and squinting around at everything. But look how things have narrowed to this point—and what a strange, false light to sit and listen into. Sounds in alleys probably always tend to sound, in a way, historical, residual like the ocean in a shell. But here, my goodness, in this light like cartoon sunset, orange-construction-paper sunset to be placed behind the black-construction-paper silhouette of domes and minarets and all that blinded history going back as far as you like. Right back to the origins of windows onto alleys, I imagine. Clatter of dishes. Angry crows.
I STILL DON’T QUITE KNOW what the Gülen Movement is. It’s either a broad and loosely structured organization that encourages education and intercultural understanding or a subtle plan to Islamize the world. And if the latter, all the more sinister as it looks just like the former. But if the former, how to explain the apparent fervor and devotion of its estimated millions of supporters—all these restaurateurs, hoteliers, private families, news and cultural organizations who’ll receive us, charge us nothing, give us fancy Turkish tea sets, Iznik plates in velvet boxes, paper-marbling demonstrations (three or four of these at least)? You’d think a program founded on goals so clearly laudable they might readily find expression in a Miss America pageant wouldn’t excite much more than general approbation. Much less fervor. Much less all expenses paid and all this loot. And, to be sure, there will be those among us not so easily charmed, who will regard their fancy tea sets with suspicion. But I’m easy. Easily charmed and lured from caution with a handshake and a box of Turkish delights. The rose-flavored kind. Besides, I like these guys. Our two main guys. Our guides. Our fervent guides with unpronounceable names, advanced degrees in science—yeah, there’s something going on here—and their steady, slightly frantic sense of humor.
I don’t even mind the forced march; we were warned about the schedule. It’s an inculcating schedule. Inculcation is the order of the day. And every day. For good or evil we’re to see the sights, by God, and meet the people. All the sights and very nearly all the people, it would seem. And every bit of it requires complete attention. Looking back to check the record, all the stuff I filtered out because it didn’t fit the story, I don’t want to miss a thing. There is no story. I will just shut up and read my notes and take my inculcation like a man. Just be a tourist. Just say thank you, do that little hand-to-the-heart thing and be grateful for the marbled-paper samples and the candy and the tea sets. So much kinder, after all, than the alternatives—the fearful things and hateful things like whipping sticks or underwear or coal.
RIGHT OFF THE BAT I think I spot a trace, a ghost, an afterimage almost. This is both too easy and too strange. It’s our first day. Our first full day and we’ve already been to breakfast at a famous old café above the Golden Horn. (Though not before a couple of us get lost in a nearby cemetery, wonderfully overgrown, haphazardly terraced into the cliff with leaning monuments of stone or cast concrete atop which turbans or other status-bearing headgear of various types are represented and that look like tailors’ forms to hang a coat or a cloak upon. Other vertical slabs of gentler and more undulating style, perhaps once floral in design, have worn away until they look like Halloween children wearing sheets—a pair of sad-eyed fenestrations at the top through which, it occurs to me now, I should have thought to look, like one of those children, like an imitation spirit. Bend and lean with the stone to gaze out over the Golden Horn through the eyes of the Ottoman dead.) Then after breakfast off to the gaudily modern offices of the daily, Gülen-sympathetic newspaper, Zaman, for a tour and a panel discussion of matters cultural and political and, to me at least, opaque. All this and before the day is over we shall have penetrated ancient Ottoman tunnels, paid a visit to the Jewish Museum, a former synagogue…
…whose entrance is achieved down such a narrow passage past such a clutter of shops and small concerns and up such an odd little twisting stair at the end, you wonder if it tells, still, of a protective obscurity.
And whose contents—photos, clothing, old religious items mostly—seem to preserve that small and precious vulnerability of objects just unwrapped, removed from a family trunk, and all beneath a pale blue ceiling painted, as if by a careful child, with uncertain ranks of gold stars. We shall have plied the Bosporus up and down in a passenger ferry and, finally, toured an art school in a gutted, hastily modernized former palace by the water where we all sit outside for a while and watch the shadows spread and find ourselves amused and maybe comforted a little by the attentions of a small orange cat. But right in the middle of this, our first full day, and right at noon and right in the center of the city as we’re all processing—more like being herded; we are thirteen—down the Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul’s great central avenue, I stop to look where Nancy’s pointing, up at a clear blue sky, to see a trace of Santa there, a cartoon scribble made of wire and neon tubing dangling way up there from a cable or a power line we see is part of an elevated grid of lines and cables running the whole length of the Istiklal Caddesi to provide, I guess, support for needs both practical and ritual. A dormant neon snowflake farther on, another Santa or a snowman—hard to tell. They are so faint here in the middle of July, these wintry images like dreams, like racial memory drifting down from who knows where into this vast protective net above the back-and-forth of ordinary life.
SO, HOW WOULD LOWELL THOMAS navigate all this? In an easy, jovial way, I’m sure. Don’t get too serious or you’re bound to run ’em off. But not so differently, I think, from Pasolini. Under all that joviality Thomas’s camera tends to start and gape as we would; in the early documentaries especially, they’ve not learned quite yet to separate the camera’s gaze from ours. It’s still a little like home movies. Mostly long shots. Our attention tends to wander from the narrative just as Pasolini seems to want it to—to sense the place where the story hovers like a mist or a cloud of dust kicked up, an accident, just barely there for a while, just sort of hanging in the ordinary air, odd bits detaching, drifting off.
THE POINT IS, FINALLY, to reach Demre, ancient Myra, on the southern coast of Turkey, where Saint Nicholas, to whatever extent, existed. Where his legends concentrate and his church still stands. But that’s a week or so away and there’s a lot of ground to cover, all these other points to touch upon. To try to keep in mind. I can remember having those terrible dreams myself on Christmas Eve when I was a kid. I think I probably always had them. It was part of the deal—you had to make it through. All night to wake again and again convinced that you’d misunderstood somehow. That you had got it wrong, completely wrong and in the morning you would find yourself unwrapping—such a precious, vulnerable thing to have to do in any case, to have to kneel beneath the tree, remove the ribbon and the paper—but you’d find yourself unwrapping nothing much. You’d find that there was really nothing much at all. How worse than nothing that can be. You can’t imagine. So, you’d shake it off and try to go back to sleep but it would be like that till morning. Nancy says she and her brothers never quite got what they wanted. Which is not the same at all. To be expecting the Lone Ranger and get Tonto, long for Barbie and get Midge (I never even heard of “Midge.” Who gives their daughter “Midge” for Christmas?), but that’s still okay. Midge represents, at least, the higher order. The transcendent possibility inheres. I had to wonder, though, if she had ever thought to be perverse and ask for Midge to see if, maybe, she’d get Barbie. No, she said. We never did. We didn’t want to not believe. Which is exactly what she said. She didn’t want to not believe.
THE FOUR GREAT HIGHER-ORDER ANGELS gazing down from under the dome of Hagia Sophia are of that complicated many-winged variety that has always seemed so strange to me—so tangled yet compelling, as the record of some garbled close encounter and the iconographic struggle to make sense of it. Like Antoine Sonrel’s amazing scientific illustration of the gazillion-tentacled jellyfish Cyanea arctica, less about what’s there than what’s required to make it graspable at all. These mosaic angels seem as freshly, forcibly drawn into reluctant comprehension as some creature never seen before hauled straight up from the depths, laid on the deck, exploded, wrecked and uninterpretable—each one a somewhat differently contorted blast of feathers as if captured in a net, pulled from the vacuum down, in this case, into regions so compressed and dense with longing there is little left to deal with but distortion, this implosion of desire to be addressed as best we can, with no less care than if it were a scientific illustration. Nancy thinks at first they’re “thrones,” among the most exalted angels. Later on deciding “seraphim,” the highest of them all. The ranks of angels seem as grand, obscure, and powerful as those of champagne bottle sizes. Potent with a certain risk, you sense from restorations under way on one of the angels, who’s been opened, as it were—his gold Islamic cover taken off to show the fourteenth-century Christian face, which looks not altogether pleased to be let out into the thin ambivalent air.
Then on to the Blue Mosque. No ambivalence here. Maintained in its original serenity. One’s presence does not echo. There is carpet and a single hushed uncomplicated thought to fill the complicated, ornamental space the way time occupies the clockwork. Curiosity seems, here, beside the point, and so do we. I don’t even think to look, as earlier, for ancient names in Greek or runes carved into the marble. Here we simply take our shoes off, stand around, and get absorbed. A little later, at Topkapi, I’m still wearing the little gold-embroidered Turkish cap I had bought from one of the vendors outside Hagia Sophia. I refuse to remove it though I know it’s silly. At some point, at a famous photographic prospect with the Bosporus far below, I strike a pose and announce that I am David Pasha and that everyone’s to call me David Pasha, and they do and I am gratified and inexplicably happy to be wearing my silly cap of orange-red velvet embroidered with gold and set with pearls and bits of mirror. I sense I’ve got myself caught up in something. In this silly tourist business—in the seriousness of it, thinking after all this is quite serious, this is how one goes about becoming Chatwin, Burton, Thesiger, whoever I imagine in exotic circumstances. This is what a silly hat is all about: you must give in to it, cast your dignity aside, allow yourself to be ridiculous and take your pose at the wall above the Bosporus, but a pose—one must be careful here—constrained to a degree of self-awareness, to so subtle an adjustment of the gesture, of the foolishness, the obviousness of posing in a fancy hat above the sweep of history, so receptive to the simple invitation of the moment that the faintest sense of truth, dare I suggest, creeps in, to everyone’s amusement and surprise. Which I receive as confirmation (as a child puts on his costume to become whatever he wants, become the pretense which at that age he can sense is only slightly less believable than being here at all) that I am truly David Pasha, have become him in some barely meaningful way; that one can do this, find one’s place, as it were, in history, all this ornamental history, through such ornament and foolishness—just step right into what, in fact, seems hardly less believable than being here at all. As we are gathering to leave, a young, attractive Turkish couple I’d not noticed on our tour but who, I have to think, had been observing us, nod, smile, and call me David Pasha as they pass and I am overcome with joy.
THE FOLLOWING DAY WE take a high-speed ferry across the Sea of Marmara to Bursa. I love that. It seems a marvelous thing to say. The Sea of Marmara. This gives me an hour or so to catch up on my journal. Nancy moves to the windows. Then outside to the rail, where she remains for the rest of our passage.
Three days later in the little Cappadocian town of Göreme, as I find myself surrendered (as I’d promised not to do) to childhood-Christmas-style intensity of longing toward the gorgeous village weavings you see hanging everywhere, I allow myself (like some poor old conventioneer alone at night on Bourbon Street) to pass beyond the threshold into regions of desire, into the ancient Silk Road carpet shop of the world presided over by a figure straight from Bourbon Street, to start the ancient, wary conversation:
Any old ones? Sure. And quickly I can see that there are old ones, room after room. And this? This dandy little piece…draped over a chair? Nomadic. Gorgeous color. Bright surprizing [sic] pattern….300 dollars. Really? Okay, you have good eye—nice old piece 250. Shit. 250. Now I’m really lost and taken into back rooms. Holy moly. Some of these I’ve seen in books. This looks like Ghiordes. “Good”—he shakes my hand—“almost; it’s from that area.” Then a brilliant one way back there in the corner hanging up. A prayer rug…Beautiful red mihrab, green field, the borders clear, unfussy. “Good condition. From a mosque.” I catch his eye and smile; at this point I am reckless—“I suppose that’s what you say.” He lifts his head, goes stern—“I bought the mosque. Ten thousand for the mosque. This rug has never been on floor.”
So, as all this transpires, and I emerge with my purchase, Nancy sees and understands, from her watchful distance, how I do, how I can lose peripheral vision, eyes locked into goofy spirals. And that night presents an antidote, a vision like a Pasolini long shot. (How did she know to wait to save it?) She tells how, as we were coming across on the ferry, as she stood there at the rail gazing over the gentle azure surface, she observed, some distance away, a little carpet all spread out, just floating along on the Sea of Marmara. Inexplicable, beautiful, vanishing thing out there all by itself. A little dream of a little Oriental carpet.
We go shopping. We have lunch. We visit a mosque. Shoes off, shoes on. I get silly again at an ancient kebab house—the Bursakebapcisi—folding an airplane from a beautifully imprinted vellum place mat and releasing it from a second-story window into the courtyard among the diners. A satisfactory, slightly stalling, circling flight to the waiters’ great, and no doubt feigned, appreciation. There’s no story. There’s no novel. I can do whatever I want. I think the condition of the tourist must be pretty close to that of the hysteric. It’s the open-ended wideness of the world sensed as a fact unto itself that makes us crazy. Then more shopping. Then a rush of conversation between our guides, a couple of phone calls. We’re about to go off-schedule, slip beneath the subtle membrane that protects our presence here. Tonight, not far away although we’ll have to hurry, an unadvertised, unglamorized performance of the whirling Sufic ecstasies.
…at the tiny “House of Saint Karabash”—Dervishes. It would put us very late on our long bus ride to Izmir, but a rare opportunity to see a simple unspectacularized performance at an ordinary place enjoyed by ordinary people. So, after supper, after dark, we make our way up narrow rough-stone streets to the mosque-like House of Karabash and outside under little lights [strung] here and there in the trees were families, children, neighborhood people probably, settled gently into the evening at picnic tables, children running around and everything quite easy as we file into the house, remove our shoes and take our places—women upstairs with the better view I think…[men] on the carpeted floor behind a balustrade. And after fifteen minutes or so, the Sufis—maybe a dozen—[appear] in their black robes and their tall felt caps (and two of them, the leaders, wearing caps with rolls of green cloth at the bottom…) and after the placing of a red-stained sheepskin to one side of the performance space, the chanters along the wall begin to chant, the drummers drum their tambourines, the fluters flute and the whirlers (five, I think) take off their black to reveal their pure white whirling gowns and so, at the sad descending groan of the older of the leaders, start to turn, to the flute and the chant, like an orrery out on the floor—a young one, maybe 10 or 12 I’d guess, with the face of an Italian Renaissance angel, among the five, a minor planet but in perfect, measured orbit circulating at a steady but, one senses, potent rate as if, Boléro-like, it had the capability of frenzy. At some point it all jacks up, but just a bit, speeds up a third, and they’re all circulating out there, eyes closed, each rotating on his axis as all circle about the center into which the portly, bearded older leader has now placed himself, his eyes closed too and turning but in black still, an invisible attractor (you remember how, at the start, each whirler came to sort of lean into him gently for a moment as if taking on his gravity), now he’s there as if to hold them in as things speed up and somewhere—I can’t find the source—a punctuating cry, a deep expulsion of breath, to each phrase of the chant and you think we’re in for it now—we, gathered here so easily to watch, those looking in from the open door, the ones outside in the summer evening hanging out beneath the trees and the little lights, we’re really in for it now. But suddenly they stop. All five at once. The little one too. Just as we’re made to understand it can, in principle, go on and on and faster and faster forever, they all stop without a shudder or a stumble, even the little angel-faced one. They are able to seem to have come to a perfect stop because, in principle, they haven’t stopped at all. Then back in the bus and on to Izmir through the night. I think about something Nancy said regarding that gasping Sufic cry and how she thought such cries were the name of Allah reduced to the act of breathing, to the sound of breath released and that she’d read somewhere that Yahweh (Jaweh?) as the name of God had come from breath, from such a gasping cry. We get into Izmir and check into the Marlight Hotel at 4am. I think of poor Professor Miller on Mt. Wilson back in the 20s with his giant interferometer hoping to catch the breath of the luminiferous ether on his perfectly polished mirrors like the breath of God—if not the word then maybe just the breath.
Until the famous Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887, it was generally thought that the “vacuum” of space was filled with an unimaginably subtle fluid called the luminiferous ether, which provided both a means for the otherwise inexplicable propagation of light across the void and for a certain level of comfort with the emptiness. So deeply, amniotically sustaining was this notion, some refused to let it go, to accept the negative results from the beams of light bounced back and forth within an arrangement of little mirrors in a basement room in Cleveland.
Dayton Miller believed the experiment too earthbound. How could ether—were it present and of course it must be present—so imponderable, almost spiritual a substance, manage to penetrate that mundane situation, drift through dirt and brick to breathe upon the massive and, in any case, inconclusive apparatus? And though special relativity, in a few years, would reveal the ether itself to have been a mundane and unnecessary mechanism, Miller would pursue it into the twenties, finally assembling what was believed to be the most sensitive interferometer in the world atop Mount Wilson and installing it in an airy, tentlike structure way up there as near to heaven as he could get so that the ether might drift right through like a breeze or the Holy Spirit on a summer night at some old tent revival, and contriving, after something like five million separate measurements, to hear, to believe he heard, within the sighings and the creakings of it all, within the “noise” of human, thermal, and mechanical uncertainty, the reassuring whisper of earth’s passage through the dark. It was not audible to others, though. Experiments could not confirm his data, which, years later, were submitted to modern analytical methods and found to have been entirely consistent with a negative result—a kind of rigorous wishful thinking. Photographs show a strong, kind face. He was devoted to his family. Played the flute. And I imagine him up there with this great instrument physically, personally having to turn it through its stations all those months, like wetting a finger to find the wind but over and over through the seasons, turning and turning toward the longed-for absolute.
WE ARE AT EPHESUS AT NOON. It’s like I said. Like a mirror. It’s 100 degrees outside, someone will tell me later. Something’s happened to my camera; I’ve reset it accidentally or something, or it’s somehow overloaded. All the pictures overexposed, burned out—exactly how I feel. We’ve advanced beyond the black-construction-paper silhouette, beyond the Fanta-colored sunset into the light of history. Bleached-white, ruined-marble history, which is blinding. Look about you. All is glare. That tired old bleached-out dusty hound over there is fading as we watch. He’s part of history. Aren’t you, boy. He’s found a patch of shade among the scattered stones and fallen columns. He’s a sad old ruined marble dog. There’s hardly any shade. So history’s just a sort of overexposure, isn’t it, boy. He knows. He’s fine with that.
Then off to a rug shop where they teach young girls to weave and I escape without a purchase. Then, as evening falls, a Gülen-inspired high school, where we get a demonstration of the art of paper marbling. Most impressive are the ink-on-water tulips. Ink on water has a physics that’s agreeable to tulips. And to tourists, I surmise. We get more marbled-paper tulips the following day at a Gülen— What to say? Gülen-inspired? Encouraged? It’s all good. I am encouraged. I love tulips. Anyway, a somehow Gülen-affiliated hospital, where we all receive, as well, hand-painted porcelain plates in dark blue velvet boxes and our names, if we wish, in calligraphic felt-tip-marker Arabic. My goodness, is that me? My name as beautiful as that? As easy as that? We don’t deserve this. We’ll only take it home and put it away, years later come across it, take it out again and think, Well, look at that. That’s something, isn’t it. All that stuff. That’s really something, I suppose.
Did you know Gülen himself—Fethullah Gülen, the septuagenarian Muslim scholar and founder of the movement—lives in the Poconos? Pennsylvania. On a private estate in the Poconos. Well, he does. At such a strange remove, it seems, from his effect. Menachem Schneerson—known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe and, by many of his followers, believed to be the Messiah—lived in Brooklyn. Buried in Queens. The Messiah. All right here at home. So here again, you see, it’s the clear and empty wideness of the world that lets our longing fill it up, spread out to the edge like ink on water, makes us crazy.
It’s an hour’s flight to Kayseri, whose exuberantly futuristic City Museum suggests to me some sort of interstellar conveyance and, to Nancy, one of those Transformer toys about to unfold into a giant robot. Or the fanciest imaginable 1980s boom box. Or an attempt to schematize the unearthly erosional shapes of the Cappadocian landscape, toward which we, in fact, depart the following day on a lurching bus ride west to Göreme and the tufa “fairy chimneys” and the ancient human-excavated villages and monasteries. Nearly there we pass a small encampment by the road—a battered car beneath a tree, three improvised tents. I joke that they’re Gypsies. But they are. They come through here a lot, we’re told. How about that. Gypsies. Periodically, like swallows.
In this region frescoed angels tend to populate the caves instead of bats. There may be bats as well, and pigeons too, but mostly there are angels, saints, and Christs in full array. The whole developed kit of heaven has gone strangely underground. Between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, all that radiant iconography seems to have percolated right back into the rock like geode crystals. Whence it came, I guess, if you go back far enough. The excavations by the British archaeologist James Mellaart in the early sixties at Çatalhöyük, only a hundred miles from here, revealed an urbanizing, Neolithic culture dating back eight thousand years, complete with shrines, including sculptural and painted iconography, within which, here and there, were bits of evidence suggesting even older, deeper gropings toward the sacred in the natural shapes of pebbles and concretions, broken pieces of stalagmite that presented to the clear and credulous mind dark hints of power and fecundity—rude subterranean forms sometimes improved by a quick and, one imagines, trepidatious hand (an especially “fearful” and perfunctory human head pecked out atop a blackened “knobbly limestone” lump), touched up to keep the terrible potency in focus and, perhaps, in check.
Outside one of the subterranean churches filled with angels, in the lime-white glare of the afternoon, you can barely see, in the rock, outlines of hands. At first just two or three—left hands—scored into the tufa with a knife or a nail like a child might do with a crayon using his own hand, fingers spread into a template. Then you start to see them everywhere—all over the clear pale rock with the sun just bright enough to wash the natural texture out yet show the marks, the fainter and fainter outlines, older and older, even overlapping, merging into one another until the pressure of the hands against the rock becomes the texture and you can’t not see them—as if they were wanting to get into the church, wanting something, frantic almost, marking not so much where hands were placed as where they lost their grip and slipped away.
I’m out of Band-Aids, having used them all to mask the inexplicably bright blue light that seems, in every hotel room so far, to call our attention, through closed eyelids all night long, to the fact that the TV is still powered up and waiting to be turned on. Perhaps it’s meant to reassure—a sort of penetrating night-light meant to tell us not to worry about bad dreams and let us know that there is always a means at hand to take our minds off things like that. But here at last in our little cave hotel in Göreme—it’s okay. The light is red. No need for a Band-Aid. Red is fine here in our humid semisubterranean room carved out of rock. It’s like an eye. A tiny, ancient, red interrogating eye. Is Santa here? Nearby somewhere? ’Tis said he knows when we are sleeping or awake. It’s back to Istanbul tomorrow, where we’ll catch a flight to Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast. At which point Nancy and I part company with the others for the day and take a hired car south along the coast to Demre.
We are told it’s best to hire a car. It is a coastal road but the mountains come right down to the ragged edge of the Mediterranean. There are tunnels, lots of turns and switchbacks, places where the eye will leave the road. Where all of a sudden there’s the water. There’s the blue you get in children’s paintings. Blue as that primordial blue you’ve had in mind since childhood.
You approach the travel office from the sidewalk; there’s a little sliding window like a snow-cone stand. We wait as our guide for the day, who neither drives nor speaks much English, seeks to establish our requirements, general worthiness, or something. This takes time. We’re finally beckoned to a side door, down some stairs into a semibasement room, and given tea. A heavy man in a crisp white short-sleeved shirt sits at his desk and speaks for a moment with our guide, who also wears a crisp white short-sleeved shirt. He turns to us and tells us it will be three hundred lira. Or about two hundred dollars, which is fine. I place the cash in American dollars on the desk. The heavy man leans back. We’re waiting. For our driver, I presume—who must be summoned or retrieved. It takes a while. We have our tea. The oscillating fan across the room lifts Nancy’s hair. At last a clatter from the stairwell and a third white short-sleeved figure peeks in, smiles, holds open the door to admit another, smaller, darker, whose white short-sleeved shirt seems placed a little hastily upon him like a coat of fresh white paint to cover up some old graffito that persists in bleeding through. His eyes are bright. His ears are large. His skull is shallow as a begging bowl. Great scrawl of a nose to compensate, to keep him pointed straight into the wind across the steppe, across the ages. Now we’re set. The fan whirs back and forth. The heavy man can’t seem to find the keys.
On the mountainous road to Demre…there are pine trees. “Look,” says Nancy, “Christmas trees.” The road climbs up and in and out among the rocky Colorado-looking hills. We lose the shore for a while, then gradually after an hour or so dip down and back to find the complex edge of the deep blue Mediterranean, swerving around the inlets, some of which have cliffs and shallow caves and bathers. Here and there are gauzy quonset huts. Then acres of them—thin white fabric greenhouses. We pass by a giant tomato held aloft in a giant hand—a public monument. The quonset huts are empty though. The ground inside is covered in the same white gauzy cloth. “The earth is sleeping,” says our guide for the day who most call Sam although his name is Ufuk. “That’s poetic,” Nancy says. “Did I say wrong?” asks Ufuk. “No,” says Nancy. “No. It is poetic.”
It’s an active blue somehow. It’s almost noon, and the light comes straight down into the water so you get the depth of blue against the limestone white of the shore, which you imagine should dissolve like Alka-Seltzer. Fizz away like history. How can it still be blue like that? How can it not have gotten all used up by now—after thousands of years of myth and history, not been neutralized, gone empty bathwater gray like the Gulf of Mexico, say, where myth has long departed and there’s nothing left but fishing trawlers, drillers, and sometimes way out there a tanker, simply going about their business on the gray depleted water. How can it stay that way, you wonder. Blue that holds us in suspension. Wine-dark blue that stands for black. Do you suppose there might be different grades of emptiness? As Cantor claimed for infinities? At about the same time Michelson and Morley sought the ether, Cantor showed, in a very precise sort of way, how there could be greater and lesser infinite sets. How the infinite might, depending on what kind of numbers you used to think about it, have higher or lower “cardinality.” Might we not, then, point the arrow the other way, turn all this inside out to imagine something similar for emptiness? A scale of potentiality? Of blueness, as it were? The variable likelihood that, out of nothing, myth will simply happen.
A sign by the road we stop to photograph: a Coca-Cola Santa, old style, sad eyes gazing up as saints’ will do, and beckoning us to a local restaurant.
It’s the fat, red-suited Santa we all love. The Coca-Cola Santa Claus whose mission and refreshment are the world’s. And yet how strange his eyes are here. Their heavenward gaze so sad and saintly, a platter of seafood held before him like the emblem of his martyrdom.
In Demre he is everywhere. Cartoony ones on signs. Greek/Russian icons. Keychains. Postcards. [Everywhere you look are] motor scooters. A gaggle of Russian tourists. Little tractors pulling wagonloads of melons—some adorned with carefully handmade canvas covers—tractor cozies—over the engine cowl and headlights. One, of faded blue, has decorative scarlet zig-zag appliqué around the edges. Then the owner, at my interest, comes to stand beside it, lets me take his picture.
Where’s the church? Where is the seat of Holy Nicholas? Our driver spots a sign. Just down the street. It’s hot. Cicadas chatter everywhere. Not quite a Texas chatter. Slightly deeper, lower frequency. Once noticed, it’s oppressive. All the motor scooters too—in such an ancient holy place they seem like temple monkeys. We decide it’s lunchtime. Here’s the Noel Baba Restaurant. Seafood platters, if you please. We sit outside. The garish signage features cartoon Santas. One of whom is listening to something, a wide-eyed Santa with a mitten to his ear. To what, I wonder, is he listening? To the motor scooters maybe? The cicadas? I think maybe the cicadas.
There’s no church. I see no church. Its iterations—sixth to eighth to eleventh to nineteenth centuries—ought to be piled up right here one on top of another. A great conspicuous, reverential heap. The hopes and fears of all the years. The alternating levels. Midge and Barbie. Love. Despair. The Russian tourists seem to know where they are going. Sure enough, there is an entrance to the grounds. And here’s a company of stray dogs to admit us. All these holy sites have complements of animals, it seems. I love the wonderfully important-looking tickets you’re issued at these places by the Ministry of Culture. I collect them for my journal. I imagine they’re expensive to produce, each with its site-specific photograph and shimmery silver seal and whatever that is—that black magnetic strip, I guess—there at the bottom. Every photograph of every site—full color, at the left below the ministry name and logo—has been taken in the clear, bright afternoon. Blue sky, a wisp of cloud. The past, once clearly identified in ordinary light, seems easy as anyplace to get to. Here we are, then. There’s a gift shop. Benches set about. A great bronze statue of a European “Father Christmas” Santa with the children of the world around his feet. I’ve got a picture of our driver on a bench—he and our guide prefer to wait outside the church, which by the way seems more like a working excavation, down a ramp and partially covered by a huge protective awning; I am told the sea was nearer then, the land much lower; now it looks subsided, unprepared for this attention, just dug up; who would have thought, look what we’ve found—but anyway, I’ve got this photograph of Dogan (from his name tag, I’m not sure how it’s pronounced) in his crisp white shirt, his loosened tie, black trousers, water bottle dangling from his hands between his knees. (I ought to tell you, very quickly, about the bottled water here. I’ve saved a label Nancy peeled; the brand is “Sandras.” Sandras water. Did you know as late as Hellenistic times they minted silver coins with the image of an ancient deity worshipped here and hereabouts called Santa, Sandan, or Sandas? And that on these coins he’s shown atop a pyre where he was burned at annual festivals. And afterward his resurrection and ascension celebrated. How about that. Right up the chimney as it were. You see how complicated all this starts to be.) So anyway, as I keep saying—anyway, I’ve got this photograph of Dogan, our driver, sitting on a bench outside the church near the top of the ramp. He smiles straight back into the camera. We’re about to go inside, walk down the ramp at last—I wish the church were more; it looks much nicer in the photo on our tickets, with grass and flowers, clear of scaffolding and awnings—and I turn to take his picture. He can’t help but look eternal—ears of Buddha, face of Pan. A reassuring smile, I think, is what’s intended. He’ll be here when we come out. But it’s the smile of the guy who runs the scary carnival ride. As complex and ambivalent as that.
Inside, the church is clear of all except the deepest ambiguities—going to rubble at the edges but within all dark and open with the fading light of frescoes Nancy says are by a provincial hand (11th century mostly, I think—my little guide book’s with my baggage)…but a much less polished hand in any case, observant of the protocols, the chant of it all I guess—it feels like that. The matter-of-factness of the miracle. And St. Nicholas matter-of-factly here as well, at least in principle—his marble tomb apparently borrowed from another [worthy somewhere]. He is everywhere—we know that. The cicadas sound like sleighbells.
There are dogs here, too. Two dogs asleep right here in the very center of the nave. Is this the nave? Of course it is. There’s someone kneeling at the altar at the far end where the afternoon glares in through arched stone windows. And these dogs, big dogs, a red one and a white one, simply laid out on the cool stone floor. Right out there in the middle. In the novel Santa Claus, the one all this does not belong to, wherefrom I have been released to seek the truth on my own account, there is a kid based on a kid I actually knew when I was one. An easily frightened little chubby kid who lived just down the street and whom we’d torment by pretending we could hear, somewhere in the distance, monstrous noises, sounds of Giant Killer Shrews (a recent locally filmed production featuring dogs made up like monsters who produced a terrible, cicada-like chittery cry). And when we did this, he’d run home. He’d drop whatever he was doing and just bolt. I think sometimes he was thrilled. Exhilarated. At those moments when the always-fearful world revealed itself to him so clearly and he knew exactly what was what and what he had to do. One of the dogs is up. The white one. Trotting over now to Nancy. We were told we shouldn’t pet them. There’s a danger of disease. But she extends her hand. It sniffs and wags and seems to want a pat. Here comes the other one. My goodness, they like Nancy. They’re like beggars importuning. Jumping up and interfering with each other. Now there’s trouble. Now we’re in for it. Now the Russians turn to look. The red and white are going at it. Just like that. They’re at that frenzy, at that sudden full ferocity that takes your breath away. Where’s Nancy? Over against the wall. It sucks the air right out. The kneeling lady stands and turns with both hands to her mouth. How cool and dark and clear it is, right here at the heart of things. How clearly things reveal themselves. Who knew? The shady afternoon. The fragmentary frescoes like lace curtains. Everything reducing here into this blur, this swirl, the awful, almost vocalizing roar of it replacing, for a moment, all the space. Replacing everything—the miracle, the saints and the apostles and the angels with their sharp red wings. So terrible, the way it happens just like that, so naturally and easily. And just like that it’s over. Dogs withdraw, resume their former life. The light comes in. Cicada sounds. The Russians drift away into their chatter.
At the gift shop I decide to buy a T-shirt—simple dark blue, almost black, with an image of Nicholas’s hand in blessing. What comes next sort of fades on out. Three miles away are the ruins of Myra—not the town itself exactly, where Saint Nicholas was bishop, but the older parts, the Roman-era theater and the ancient Lycian necropolis. And the residue, more residue than anything else, I think—assorted capitals and column sections, blocks of stone with carvings and inscriptions—like the items in a junkyard stacked and waiting for a better day. And everywhere on every other stone it seems are carved these gaping archaistic masks. Theatrical masks, their empty eyes and mouths wide open—comic, tragic, worn away to something like astonished. Like bewildered. I suppose they once belonged to a great theatrical facade. But now—as it seems to me, and as I say it seems to fade away—so close beneath the rock-cut tombs on the cliff above they seem like faces of the dead. A few have pebbles in their mouths. I’ll ask a member of our company, John Lunsford—my old teacher, former director of the Meadows Museum in Dallas, famous polymath and specialist in everything—about that. If he knows of some tradition that involves the placing of pebbles in the ancient open mouths like that. You think of pebbles left on Jewish graves of course. But he does not. I’ll bet it’s children. That’s exactly what a kid would do. The obvious thing to do. You place a pebble in its mouth. And then what, I would ask the child. Do you stick around? Do you want to hear what he has to say, I’d ask the child who placed the smooth, flat, tongue-shaped pebble there. Would you care to put your ear up close and listen? I’ll bet not. You placed the pebble there and ran. A thousand years ago I’ll bet that’s what you did. I know I would. I’d run straight home. It’s getting late. We need to head back pretty soon and Nancy wants to see the beach. We pass a number of the empty, gauzy Quonset huts on the road back into town, but now they’re brilliant, incandescent in the angling-reddening sunlight. They all glow. Yes, we have nothing. No tomatoes. No bananas. Yet how radiantly, warmly empty. Back through Demre, past another of those signs with the saintly seafood-laden Santa. The shore arcs way around to the east and out to a postcard point of land. There are no cicadas here, just surf. Ufuk and Dogan stand by the car and have a smoke. Did Lowell Thomas ever just shut up, do you think? Just sort of let the camera run? Nancy has kicked her sandals off. She’s wading. We can’t stay here long. We’ve got a schedule for the evening. Now she’s standing in the surf and bent a little with her head turned. Beckoning. “Listen.” There’s the sound of surf but, underneath, something else—a different, deeper, dragging and abrasive sound. The rocks. The pebbles. Here’s where all the pebbles come from. The shore is made of differently colored pebbles and the surf is doing its work. Well, here you go. Here are the voices of the dead. Here’s what the cartoon Santa listens for. Of course. So, what do they want? I can’t imagine. Nothing much. “Look.” Nancy holds some up. They’re processed, sorted—all are smooth and flat but with the larger ones on top and smaller and smaller underneath. There is a system here. She scoops a little deeper, brings up smaller ones—all shades of white and gray and brown and black and even red, with different geological histories, I suppose, but processed here into these simple, pretty things that come so easily into the hand. She chooses a few to keep. To take home as mementos. Just to have. Right at the edge of dissolution, beauty comes into the hand. We can’t let go.