…And a Kookaburra in a Gum Tree

The morning of 25^th September I’m at the gym, pushing my blushing jellyrolls against the cold indifferent weights. The sound system is tuned to JJJ FM to keep us pumping. Rapper Kanye West growls, “Get down, get down gurrrl…” Then there’s a commercial break. A deeply masculine yet hysterically happy voice cries out, “Tis once more the season! Why not put your new poolside furniture on lay-by for Christmas?” The selling frenzy is on: the first salvo in a three-month campaign to get our shopping hormones raging again.

I’ve got a week to come up with something about The Season. I dread the hollow of Christmas. I’m an Easter type. Specifically, a late night vigil lover, the between-time of not knowing, of darkness and candles and silence, the glorious exhaustion of being torn apart yet willing to hope, certain of it but not yet ready to know. Christmas should be such a time, but you have to retreat from the noise of the party to find it. Christmas celebrates the power of family ties, the gestures that we share to reinforce the social bond, with a bit of Christian storytelling thrown in for some. But many times, in truth, it cannot be those things.

How do you deal with it? Well, while you figure it out, you can think back on a few kiddie-Christmases and draw goodness from them.

***

Mansfield is your average little town in Victoria. It sits in a big yellow valley of hills and gullies ringed by smoky purple ranges. Sheep and cows and horses hide from the summer sun under big dry gum trees. The orange earth is cool and shadowy under the glare. The nude blue sky burns with heat. The long dry grass hisses with insects and snakes slithering across the cracks in the dirt. The sound on the land and in the sky is like a big brass bowl zinging after it has been struck with a nail.

The mountains to the east are forested, but with scuffed rocky knuckles above five thousand feet, covered in snow during winter. I got teased all through ‘68 at Mansfield Primary School after I’d piped up “we’re going skiing on Mount Buller during the Christmas holidays.” We’d come from Norway a few months earlier.

Mansfield (population 2,000, elevation 500 metres) is a square mile of a few dozen streets near a creek that’s too shrivelled up to swim in during summer. The town has mostly tin-roofed weatherboards with big back yards full of cars and horses and piles of firewood, or cream-brick bungalows with liquid ambers and japonicas and tightly clipped herbaceous borders. High Street, where the shops are, has a wide central plantation of oaks and elms running down the middle. At the crossing of High and Highett streets is the obelisk set up in the 1870s for the three local policemen killed by Ned Kelly (he’s our beloved outlaw now). There are big brick hotels on three corners, the Mansfield, the Delatite, and the Commercial.

I’ve spent the last four months of the school year at Mansfield Primary. On the last day before the two-month summer holidays I get permission to keep our class Christmas tree, and drag it half a mile down Hunter Street to our wreck of an old weatherboard rental. After a couple of weeks in the classroom it has started to dry and shed. The needles have lost their sheen but there’s enough magic left. My little brother and I decorate it with loops of coloured paper and a few strands of tinsel and a week later put our modest little pile of presents underneath, just like in the Christmas cards. We don’t think about Norway, and we speak English all the time now.

***

One hot Saturday night before Christmas our neighbours take us down to High Street for some fun. We walk down about nine o’clock. Strings of coloured lights stretch between the big trees on the nature strip. The men pour out of the bars and the women and kids out of the Ladies’ lounges. The kids are milling around going crazy with anticipation. The night air is brown with heat. Santa arrives on a tractor pulling a trailer full of toys. He’s big and tanned and sweaty under his stuffing. Mrs Hempenstall says that it’s Mr Nolan the butcher this year.

“Merry Christmurrrs” wheezes Santa, “Maaary Christmerrrs.” Santa has his helper perched on the back of the tractor seat, a big sexy girl with wide hips and long curly black hair. She’s done up in red and white too. It’s Mary Christmas of course. Mary Christmas wiggles around next to Santa in her tight red velvet mini dress with fake fur trim tickling her bursting boob-cups. A few of the rough kids, the ones with scuffed shoes and dark circles under their eyes, are getting very rowdy. Some wired-up dad spits out, “shuddup or yuzz’ll get a smack in the mouf, and yuz won’t gettny fucken toys from Santa.”

The crimson couple climb back onto the trailer and Mary Christmas pops herself down onto Santa’s lap for a moment. You can hear the men’s guts rumbling “hoor, hooor, hoooor…” Maybe she’s the same devil-may-care bird who ka-boom-boomed as “Vanessa the Undresser” in a sideshow tent at the Mansfield Agricultural Show a couple of months earlier. Some of the kids from school had snuck in under the canvas and hid behind the back row of chairs and they told us all about it, the wobbling tits and shimmying spangles, but I was too nice and too scared to do that.

Santa calls out “come on, who’s game for a toy or a smack on the bum, eh?” There’s a big scramble to get up onto the trailer, and Mary Christmas kisses the boys, and fends off a couple of tanned, drunk husbands, big veins running down their copper coloured arms. The wives are laughing, or pretending to. Santa kisses the little girls, who are being very good.  All the toys are gone before Norbert and I get anywhere close.

When it’s all over Mrs Hempenstall takes us across to the Delatite and we go into the Ladies Lounge where mum is having drinks with a few of her horsy friends. I’m allowed to have a shandy, and we eat bowls of spaghetti and meat sauce with Kraft Parmesan cheese. They cost fifty cents. I marvel at such sophistication. Real restaurant food at the pub! We get home by eleven and mum tucks us in. Min the bowlegged tomcat sits on the end of Norbert’s bed and Flickie the neurotic sheepdog climbs up on mine. All our pets were rescued from the road or from under a farmer’s gun.

We Coulehan-Lossiuses are “circumstantially” poor, not dirt-road poor, and this year we get the first of many festive hampers from my godmother down in Melbourne. There’s a Christmas cake, with rows of blanched almonds arranged around the top, a tinned ham—the biggest kind available, a boiled pudding, cans of fruit salad, bags of nuts and lots of chocolates. She’s sent us cards with a bright blue ten-dollar note in each one. Auntie Jean is our godmother, honorary grandmother and matron saint. Back in July when she came to meet us at the Melbourne docks I looked up at her thin, wrinkly smile and her cats-eye glasses and cried, “Ooh, you’re so old!” She laughs and reminds me about that every time I see her.

***

On Christmas Eve mum drives us over to Wangaratta in the old Hillman Hunter. We take the scenic route on the skinny gravel road across the hills. Every now and then mum stops to get us to look at a wombat crossing the road, or to admire the mountains in the distance. We stop to visit my godmother’s brother, “Uncle Geoff”, who is a bachelor dairy farmer on the Rose River. Mum plays baroque sonatas on the oboe that her father once played, and Geoff accompanies her on his old Bechstein. They drink homemade beer and local wine.  After dinner we drive further west, down onto the plain to Wangaratta, where there’ll be midnight mass in the big stone barn of a cathedral. It’s grand and solemn theatre, with robed choirboys and the organ. I will sing with them one day.

We drive back the usual route on the potholed two-lane highway. Norbert and I doze in the back seat the first hour of Christmas morning, our heads squished up against a pillow. The warm grimy vinyl smells of dog and horse, leather and lucerne. The cold window glass rattles over the rumble of the back wheels a couple of feet below. You don’t really sleep but it’s a deep sleep anyway. The ghostly gums speed by above our heads in twos and threes. The shrubs and grasses glitter with small marsupial eyes and the glint of broken bottles and beer cans as the headlights sweep by. A big road rig full of sheep passes. The slipstream is almost strong enough to suck the little car under.

Mum carries Norbert in asleep, and I follow with a sleepy little whine. Later, I half wake to see her in her white bra and undies tip-toeing out of our room after putting things in the socks we tacked up on the wall.

Norbert and I are up at six jumping around. My sock bulges with a bag of liquorice all-sorts and a plastic car. Mum groans sleepily as we rush in and out of her room. We get sensible presents. Next year’s shirts and pants and a book each, and bright new beach towels for the swimming pool.

***

We drive out to the Reynolds’ farm for Christmas lunch. The day is grey and sullen. The cloud perspires and grumbles for a moment, but refuses to cry. The humidity itches like a red infection. If only it would erupt into a pimple and burst with relief.

Mrs Reynolds, one of mum’s old hunting friends from before she went overseas, ushers us in and we have a look at their Christmas tree. It’s a gnarled and lanky eucalyptus branch propped up by the fireplace. The twisted bough is decorated with plastic angels and silver balls. It shocks me and I am embarrassed. The silvery, knobbly kneed limb and its miserly scattering of long crescent leaves, like dried slices of smoky green skin bunched and strung on the ends of bones, is all wrong, all wrong.

We pass around the Aerogard and spray our limbs and necks and wipe our faces to keep insects off. Lunch is served on a trestle table in the yard. All the heavy English trimmings: a turkey stuffed with sausage meat and breadcrumbs, gravy, onions, pumpkin, potatoes and a bowl piled high with peas. For afters we have Christmas pudding, brandy butter and ice cream. In case enough might not be enough there’s a trifle in a big glass bowl, layers of cake soaked in sherry, canned fruit, custard, whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. The old bathtub is full of ice and cans of Carlton Draught and Victoria Bitter. There are a couple of bottles of Porphyry Pearl, Australia’s sweet sparkling special occasion wine, for any lady who might want it, and jugs of orange cordial for the kids. We eat and eat.

Someone says let’s sing an Aussie carol. Mum starts up, “The silver stars are in the sky . . . da, daa, de daah . . .” but no one knows any more of the words. Mrs Reynolds goes inside and puts Christmas music on the record player. Bing Crosby croons That Christmas Feeling.  Then someone else goes in and flicks through the record albums and puts on Songs Of Christmas, with a-cappella holiday chestnuts like I saw mother kissing Santa Claus.  Then everyone gets sick of Christmas music and Mr Reynolds puts on a Slim Dusty country album instead. “There was a redback on the toilet seat, when I was there last night, I didn’t see him in the dark, before I felt his bite…”

But then Mrs Reynolds finds the Australian Christmas album, and to the familiar tune we hear,

“On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me:
Twelve possums playing, eleven lizards leaping,
Ten wombats washing, nine crocs a-snoozing,
Eight dingos dancing, seven emus laying,
Six sharks a-surfing, five kangaroos,
Four lyrebirds, three wet galahs, two snakes on skis,
And a kookaburra in a gum tree.”

The Reynolds boys get a game of farmyard football going. I hang around inside making little trips to the kitchen where the sherry trifle speaks to me in tongues.

Towards dusk we lie around dozing. Frogs are snoring in the muddy cow pond, cicadas chafing in the poplars by the creek, and the flies buzz around us as we sleep off the festive heat.

2-Oct-2005

This essay first appeared in the monthly magazine Black Lamb, which can be seen at http://www.blacklamb.org.

The Valley of Love

Excerpt from Turkish Diary

Saturday 11^th August.

Above the valley, tourist Ground Zero, the meringue-like peaks are cut with chambers. Everything “oozes atmosphere” as a travel blurb might say, and I’m beginning to feel a tiny bit dismissive of this “enchanted” place. But the Mexican boys mentioned the lovely valley walks around the village, along the gorges that meander through the cliffs and pillars, and there’s a large open-air museum containing the best of the rock-cut churches. Göreme had been a contemplative retreat for Christian monks and hermits since the second and third centuries, and the hills and pillars are full of little churches and boltholes, most of the remains date from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, from before the Seljuks and Ottomans came.

Göreme village has become wildly popular, but I’m not prepared for the dozens of hostelries, dozens of carpet shops, bus companies, balloon tours, restaurants and motorbike rental outlets screaming for business. Tour groups scurry everywhere, pouring out of or into the buses that roar in and out of town every hour. There’s a big board by the bus station with information about accommodation and restaurants, and I chat with a departing Italian couple. The story is, competition for tourists was getting crazy. Maybe as crazy as the port of Tangier is when you get off the ferry from Spain. So the locals organized a cooperative to calm things down. All the prices in town are fixed. Accommodation is good value but the food is a bit steep for a man wandering indefinitely on a tight budget. There’s neither sight nor smell of any cheap and smoky little workmen’s kebab stands or fresh fruit barrows of the type you find in everyday Turkey. The Italians recommend the Star Cave as clean and charming. Breakfast comes with the bed, and they say it’s the best kahvalte in Turkey. When I find the place I know immediately I’ve done well. The rooms have been cut deep into the rock, the beds are hard but the chamber is dark and very cool.

Mid afternoon is too hot for hiking, so I wander around to check out the town. Yes, I grumble silently, everything is twice the price of Konya. There are hundreds of western backpackers, mostly young couples, wandering around too, with that big-city expression on their faces, “We’ll just have to pretend you’re all not here.”

Looking for something to supplement my reading I wander into the 1001 Nights bookstore, run by a big middle aged Englishwoman. She sits on her front step in a thin cotton dress, thumbing through a paperback, and ignores me as I step around her. The shop is full of airport novels and well-creased travel guides.

“Have you got anything on Islam?”
“Only a Koran,” she replies flatly, not looking up from her book.
I’m a bit tetchy by now. “So what brought you to Göreme?” I ask.
“The rocks,” she replies, still not looking up. She’s clearly sick of the travellers and the gawpers.
“And have the rocks been ruined yet?”
“Oh no,” she replies breezily, still with no glance in my direction.
I wander out with, “Enjoy your rocks, then.”
I’m already a bit pissed-off after having become used to the relative solitude of Konya, but aware enough that I don’t want to remain so. I mean, the place is what it is.

As I pass one of the motorbike rental places I get a friendly greeting from the vendor, so I stop and said hello back. The fellow is not a Turk, he’s much darker and sleeker.
“You don’t look Turkish, where are you from?”
“I’m from Iran. I’m a refugee from the regime, and I’m waiting for a chance to go to Europe.” He asks me my name and tells me his. “In Farsi it means culture,” he says. His name is beautiful and so complex and strange I cannot remember it.
“I might cross the border into Iran if I can get a visa in Erzurum. What do you think?”
“Oh we Iranians are very friendly, even if our government is not. Tabriz is cool now, but Isfahan, the most beautiful city in Iran, will still be hot.”
He drapes his arm around my back; it feels very warm and sweet. Maybe he is a gay refugee? Or maybe he is a relaxed and friendly Iranian. After we say goodbye I wonder if I should go back to ask him out for a cup of tea after I clean myself up. But as I walk and the moment passes the impulse fades, becoming more dreamy than real, and so I let it go.

I buy bread, cheese, juice and water from one of the mini markets. I have three hours until dark, enough time for a nice little hike into volcanic Cappadocia, carved from the layers of earth spewed out by Mt Erciyes ages ago, the soft muddy rock capped with harder material, sculpted in weird ways. It is still a scorcher on the road as I find the path out to the Zemi or Love Valley walk. It is called Love Valley because of the hard bulbous boulders, surmounting the uncannily phallic-looking towers of soft rock, which the wind and rain have carved beneath them. There’s a small church up the hill on the left, the Nazar Kilise or Evil Eye church, keeping the phallic symbolism at bay no doubt. The door is locked, but there’s a sign pointing to a ticket office. I don’t need a dose of evil eye right now, and I will save my church hopping for tomorrow.

Deeper into the valley I begin to feel better, the stress of jostling crowds leaves me. I pass a few local men, wiry and haggard, cutting brushwood and loading it onto a cart. I’m happy to see them. Then as the gorge becomes cooler and deeper I pull off my sandals to walk barefoot in the soft chalky gravel, and this induces a rapid mood shift, from shamefaced irritation to wrinkle-free serenity. Deeper into the scrubby valley I come across a copse of abandoned fruit trees. The pears and apples are far from ripe, but the yellow plums are sweet, and I eat handfuls of them, tartly sweet and juicy, but still not quite ripe either. I find some dusty purple plums as well but these are still hard and sour. It’s bliss to get my feet connected with the earth. It takes me a couple of hours to hike barefoot to the end of the valley, then up over the cliffs to the gravel road on top, where the land is cultivated in small plots; squash, melons, grapes. My feet have adjusted to the dust but the stones on the road mean sandals again.

I pass some farmers working the fields. A thin black-and-tan puppy gambols out to greet me and I stoop to give it a pat. It leaps and writhes with excitement and gets tangled up in my legs, and then lets out a piercing yelp as I trip and tread on its toe. The farmer and his wife give me stony looks as I walk on. But the pup follows me. I growl. I shoo. I wave my arms about but nothing will stop it. The little boy working with the farmers runs after me to drag it back. But the pup escapes, and comes bolting down towards me again, even further away from the farmers than before. The boy has to chase and catch him a second time. For a few minutes I feel like a stupid, interfering clod. But the vanity of shame dissipates quickly. Further along the road I come to a vineyard and choose a bunch of tiny purple grapes. They’re sweet, and I gobble up a second bunch.

After another half hour I arrive at the bluffs overlooking Göreme, with other villages in the valleys and crags nearby. The sun begins to set. The pink Erciyes volcano rears up to the east. There’s quite a crowd up there to see the sun go down. Just as it begins to sink over the lip of the horizon a roar arises as several young Turkish couples ride up the steep path on scooters and rented dune buggies to take each other’s pictures as the last sliver of red orb disappears into the earth.

I find an outlet selling beer and buy a can of Efes. Then I find a kebab stand and wait for my lamb in pide to be prepared and take my supper back to the Star Cave. I’m chatting about the possibility of hiking up Erciyes Dagi with Ramazan, the son of the owner. He’s keen to help me plan a trip up the mountain. He admits that he’s never been there, and wants very much to come with me, if he can get off work. By the sound of it I am not sure if he wants to accompany me as a buddy, or have me hire him as a “guide” to tag along and be paid for the privilege. I tell him I prefer to make my own adventures, but that I appreciate his conversation. I will plan carefully and discover as much as I can before attempting an exhausting hike up a mountain in a foreign country. I haven’t done such a climb since I went up Mt Shasta in 1999, and then, having been several years out of condition, I’d turned back a few hundred metres from the summit as the light began to wane, exhausted. Erciyes is not as high as Shasta. But I am nearly eight years older.

To bed, my book and my little Raki bottle tucked in a nook carved in the rock below the spluttering light bulb. I seem to be developing a cold, perhaps from the coughing baby in the seat behind me on the train to Konya. And my guts are gurgling with incipient diarrhoea. Was it the salad in Konya? Was it the holy water from the fountain? Or was it those recent fistfuls of delicious, unwashed fruit? There are plenty of toilets in Göreme, smelly but functional squatters with running water. It’s not going to be so bad.

Sunday 12^th

I wake up at seven with the light bulb in my stone niche sputtering away. There’s no switch and all the bulbs are connected. So I unscrew mine two turns to the left to switch it off, two turns to the right for light. If you want one light off, then you get all lights off, and vice versa. But the whole lot short circuit this morning, and as a result there’s no power at all.

The breakfast, thankfully already prepared, is substantial and excellent. Watermelon, honey melon, oranges, peaches, round crispy fried things, cheese, cold meat, hard boiled eggs, little black, dry olives, cream cheese on bread, fried eggplant and zucchini, butter, honey, strawberry jam, tea and coffee. A couple of Japanese and Italians look hesitantly at the flies swarming over the food, but I comment, manly and nonchalant, “oh, I’m Australian, we’re used to flies.” I grew up rural though, and most modern urban Aussies would be squirming and waving their arms about as well.

I’ve been told that the open-air museum remains crowded all day long but decide to go, and pay the extra to see the special dark church and deal with my feelings regarding the crowds. The museum is a kilometre out of town, and the closer I get the more tour buses appear. I’ve planned my little excursions up the winding paths to the various chapels cut into the cliffs, keeping close eye on the needs of my intestines and the location of facilities. The internal river of mud is in full flood today, as I suspected would happen. Yesterday afternoon I’d scoped out all the available toilets in town, and looked at the plan of the museum park. I get through today with eight or ten hurried trips to whatever squat hole is closest at hand. It’s very hot and I’m drinking a lot of water. There’s a constant stream of tours, and as soon as a Japanese tour leaves a chapel, an Italian or a Spanish tour enters. Then there’s an English tour with only a couple, middle-aged, bookishly quiet, so I wander in with them.

The chambers are small, simple, dusty, with early Christian symbols and crucifixes from the iconoclast period of the eighth century in some, and others — after the period of iconic austerity has ended — plastered over in the eleventh to twelfth centuries and covered in chalky polychrome murals in red, brown, black and white tints. The most significant parts of the scriptures were laid out in paintings, along with the lives of the saints and the doings of the emperors.

After a quick plumbing run, making sure I’m good for an hour or so, I climb up to the main attraction, the Dark Church, so called because only a small window lets in light, and therefore the frescoes are as vivid and fresh as when they were painted a thousand years before. The full panoply of colour is not visible in the gloom, but some of the less responsible tourists take pictures with flash cameras. The vivid blues and reds leap off the walls for a millisecond before they return to the shadows, a tiny bit less vivid than before. Pouting angels adorn the walls, and in several of the domes, the same sternly unreadable Christ Pantocrator I had seen in the Chore Church in Istanbul. Christ’s face, pale from a life protected from the daily burn of the sun, fully adult, with none of the suppleness of youth, is none other than the heavy, hairy, jowly face of a well-fed, thirty-something Byzantine-Greek aristocrat. Oh, how we project ourselves onto the unknown!

One Italian woman poses in front of every significant scene while her husband or lover takes her photo. Only one couple walks in through the doorway to spend a quiet minute, and they make the sign of the cross as they leave. All I need is five minutes of quiet to spend with these darkly glowing walls. It is valuable to see my irritation and high-mindedness clearly. It’s August, the last month of the summer holidays. What else can I expect?

I wander off the main track and come across a shady little chapel to sit in and sip my water. The simple interior exudes an odd damp smell, salty and sour. The smell becomes stronger and clearer, and as I look about I can see wet patches trailing down the corners of the room. It finally hits me. This plain little church off the main path is used for pissing in. I’m reminded ruefully of the biblical quote “the stone that was rejected shall be the cornerstone.” Perhaps one might add, “The chamber that was pissed in shall provide the wine of life,” or something quirkily Gospel-like. I find myself another shady nook outside to get a bit of peace before I head back to the main gate, to relax with a beer in the dappled, vine clad terrace cafe down by the buses, carpet sellers and ice cream vendors. It’s good to see that there are as many Turkish families visiting here as there are foreigners, keen to see this part of their country’s history.

The lights are back on when I get back to the Star Cave but now the water is off. Ahmed the owner dips a metal basin into the fountain and hands me a plastic pot, so I get a quick soapy wash and a rinse off, and then a rest until the burn of the day had passed.

As I did yesterday, I wait for the shadows to lengthen before a hike up the Pigeon Valley. The sunshine remains ferocious on the village road, but once under the dappled shade of the cliffs it becomes pleasant, cool and breezy between the pinnacles, pigeons cooing in the dovecotes, with fruit trees, daisies and other yellow and magenta flowers, tall shaggy stands of grey-flowered mint releasing their fragrance as my bare calves brush past them. Moist tunnels dug into the soft rock make the path easier to negotiate, small brown butterflies flit by, a straggly hive of bees swarm around wet piles of stones under one of the tunnels, and water trickles along the rutted grassy path. I pass under a stone wall half-hidden by foliage. Above I can see plots of well-tended apricot bushes, tiny patches of cultivated earth under the cliffs.

The path ascends and becomes wild and overgrown with brambles and purple plums. It’s a dead end. I backtrack and brush up against a patch of stinging nettles. The sting does not last long. Above me I make out a couple of voices speaking French. I’ve missed a turn in the path. I let them pass, wait awhile, find the path and continue on and up toward the village of Uchişar. The village surrounds a pinnacle full of holes and crannies, once used as a fortress.

Uchişar is also terribly touristy, and geared toward the French, with a higher level of comfort, one might say ostentation. I pass an expansive stone restaurant, Le Jardin des 1001 Nuits, and a hotel, La Maison du Reve, and then a cluster of new and very splashy-looking manoirs. One has an ostentatious, three-metre-high bronze empire-style candelabra flanking the entrance, and another has an enormous and ferociously Napoleonic bronze equestrian statue on its flag-stoned terrace. The view is spectacular though, of the volcano and the huddle of Göreme in the middle distance. I get a glass of tea from a modest little café before heading back down to the valley and doff my sandals to walk the Pigeon trail in bare feet. Once again, having my soft feet hit the bare earth induces serenity. I must strap my sandals back on when I land on the hot village streets an hour later. New white stone palazzos are being raised in Göreme too, with stonecutters at work shaping and carving ornaments in the lintels. These tourist mansions will be clean and beautiful when they are built, and the stone will age well.

Monday. 13^th

Poor sleep. The bed is hard. I wake out of a dream: A slow funeral march of trombones and trumpets passes by outside, down in the Cappadocian valley. Then the players enter slowly in twos, dressed in red musician’s costumes. The melody rises from the bass instruments to the trumpets, and the song rises in slow, sombre arpeggios. As I wake from this dream I can hear the town muezzin winding down the dawn call to prayer.

At five-thirty I’m ready to head out for a walk before breakfast. I have a little juice left, but no water, and nothing is open at this hour. So I walk the cool empty streets to the main square and the public toilets, which have soap and cold water, faucets and basins. I run the water for a minute then take a sip. It tastes quite OK, and is probably the same mains water used in the cafes. I fill my small water bottle and prepare to trust my guts. I want to head out to the Red Valley, regarded as the most spectacular of the walks, but it may be a bit too much of a rush to try and do it in three hours, so instead I amble up the rise towards the open-air museum. And as I often remind myself, not having seen the main attraction means a reason to return.

In a valley below the hot-air-balloon rides strain to get off the ground. I count twenty-six balloons slowly fattening and rising, with about twenty people crammed into each gondola, as crowded as a rush-hour subway car. These people have paid two hundred Euros to see the sun rise from a balloon! Passing the museum compound, a couple of guard dogs bark savagely and run towards me, hackles up. But they’re not that good at their jobs because as soon as I stop still and utter soft little noises, they wiggle over and lick my legs. One is a fully-grown female mongrel and the other a six-month-old pup. They’re clearly mother and daughter, judging by the playfulness of the pup toward the older dog. They follow me all the way to the top of the ridge above the monastery chapels. Together we sit up there and watch the sun rise over the hills, the cliff-top village of Uchişar glowing pink, and the twenty-six balloons trying to raise their payloads into the sky, most of them too late to see the sun climb over the horizon from any elevation. A couple of the balloons float high over the valleys and manage a big tour up and back. The lucky few! Most of the balloons hover motionless for half an hour, barely a few hundred metres up before they sink again.

Mother dog rests herself in the crook of my leg, and her pup romps around me licking and biting. They follow me all the way back until frantic barking heralds another guard dog’s territory. A bit later another dog, a big, very skinny mongrel-hound, melancholy and starving, follows me up to the Star Cave, but the resident poodle-terrier races out with yelps and barks and tells him to piss off, the poor sad thing.

 

Lorentz Lossius

Giving gifts

After days of traveling south, planning, list making, and the one-day stopover in Jerusalem to visit the money lenders, go shopping, then get down to Bethlehem in time to find a place to stay, Christmas night finally arrived. When the three wise men got to the cave and found Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus they gave them gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Mary and Joseph sighed huge sighs of relief. They had shopped well. They both gave the three wise men each a jewel-studded ivory casket full of locally produced organic delicacies: nuts, preserved fruits and stuffed olives. Joseph gave Mary a blue Persian silk evening robe, and Mary gave Joseph a fine set of Roman state-of-the-art carpentry tools and Jesus, being divine, lifted his chubby little hand and gave them all youthful looks for the rest of their lives (you can see it in all the paintings). Then Joseph realized, with the baby on the way and everything, that they’d forgotten all about the relatives back in Nazareth. How could they possibly face them next Christmas…….

What is a gift? An exchange of goods with those you know, who have? Or something offered to a stranger, who does not have.

Samadhi Coming Down

when I’m done attending
the universe’s birth
after having navigated
all the seas of time

peanut butter sandwiches
bring me down to earth
and then I dive into a glass
of deep red wine

Van Diemen’s Land

After four months in Sydney, back from three years in London and fifteen in New York, it’s time to get out the city for a while, maybe even piss off for good. I have a friend way down south in Tasmania whom I have not seen since the sixth grade. Cate and I have talked on the phone for hours. She lives in the bush near Hobart and works for Qantas, even knows of a job lead there. So I lend my flat to my brother, and head south to the Melbourne-Devonport ferry in my little Ford.

The ten-hour drive is another story. Sydney’s homely but better educated sister is laid out on a great flat plain north of the bay, glittering impressively at dusk, with towers and spires at her centre.

I lose my way trying to avoid the expensive toll roads, but have to pay to get to the South Melbourne docks in time. The Spirit of Tasmania is as big as a cruise ship and I arrive near the tail end of a long line of cars. The inspectors are making a fuss about my jerry can of petrol and bottles stove fuel, and they walkie-talkie up front, describing my red hatchback. When I get around to the ramp I’ll be asked to halt and told to empty them and fill them with water. I grumble at the waste, shaking the fine print permission on my ticket at them, but they have updated rules to follow. When I finally get around to the open jaws of the ship, the lads wave me through and up onto the ramp. They’re too busy to worry about a bit of extra fuel.

Several decks up the restaurant, bar and gaming areas are teeming with folks, mostly old couples, youths hanging on to their girlfriends, and a few lone males like myself slumped on benches with pints of beer. The ship is an hour late getting started. The engines rumble sub-sonically underfoot as I wander up and down the white steel stairs, finding the open decks at the stern where the smokers and lovers go.

Everyone on the ship is white. That old fashioned angular, beaky, or slack-mouthed Aussie whiteness of untempered English, Scot and Irish stock, reddened in many of the men by sun and drink. The disorienting shock is similar to that experienced after leaving spice-bowl New York City and going into a supermarket in buttermilk biscuit Pennsylvania.

So I settle in, find a cruise chair, quite the same as an economy seat on a plane, and line up for dinner at the budget buffet. A couple of fellows slouch in front of me on the line, they’re really piling the food on, so I’m not ashamed to do the same. The lad next to me is tall and broad with a beet red face and straw-coloured stubble. He has a battered, barnyard-stained felt hat pushed down over his carroty bristle. He pours a couple of ladles of gravy over his pyramid of food. It wells and dribbles over the side of his plate. The other fellow laughs, turns to me and chuckles “look mite, ‘ee’s spillin’ ‘is fuckin’ grivy all iver the plice.” I grin back; how refreshingly friendly. But I rein in the twinkle after a second, because I am a foreign stranger, after all.

I sit alone and tuck in to a big plate of roast lamb, mint sauce, potatoes and a couple glasses of wine. Then I head outside with the others as the ship swings around creating a stiff breeze. It noses down the narrow flagged channel in muddy Port Phillip Bay. The suburbs twinkle around us in the black distance. At about midnight the ship rolls blindly through the churning rip tide at the heads and out onto the open sea. I’m hoping to catch the eye of one or other of the lone fellows leaning out and smoking, but they’re not interested in any conversation, so it’s off to the chair for a bit of sleep. I find a better spot, triangulated as far away from two old snoring men as I can, and get about five hours worth. Up at dawn, and out on deck; a brisk spray in the breeze and a slight roll underfoot. Gulls on either side rise and fall and keep pace, as though bearing the ship’s enormous foam wedding train. Ahead lies the coast of Tasmania cutting an ominous line under the dreary scudding sky. Further inland, a great granite wall glows between grey layers of cloud in the horizontal sunlight.

Tasmania is a temperate paradise, a much more compact array of terrain than the mainland, with rugged coasts and mountains, a broad farmed valley down the middle and tall rainforests in the south west. The climate is mild, though winters are long by Australian standards. The air is clean. The Westerly winds blow across the southern ocean with no continents to pollute them. It’s exhilarating, with a visceral hint of homecoming.

The ferry spews us out at Devonport. I want to head south immediately to catch the last of the cold spring weather. It’s only a three hour drive down to Hobart on the narrow Midland Highway. The Great Western Tiers rise like a wall from the plains, still flecked with snow in late October. Then the Ben Lomond Plateau rears up to the east. The Midlands Valley is broad and dry and dull, like much Australian farmland, but this section of the drive lasts less than an hour. The land is bedizened with willow groves along the creeks, rows of poplars, and little stone houses and churches with beautiful spires. The dusty green Australian bush has been pushed back only as far as the hills. Through Perth, Campbell Town, Ross and Oatlands, then over a crumpled scarf of green ridges to Hobart on the Derwent River, under the rocky dome of Mt Wellington and the surrounding ranges.

Hobart is a pretty little city with many colonial remnants: Georgian symmetry and Victorian wedding cake in honey coloured stone around the waterfront. Battery Point, up the hill, is the next oldest settlement. There’s a small oval village green, Arthur’s Circus, and there’s St. Georges Church on Cromwell Street, built in 1838 in the Greek style, with a tower like the lighthouse of Alexandria might have looked. The church is surrounded, as though in a medieval village, by streets of imposing houses and workmen’s cottages. Trellises, roses, clean tan stone and peeling green paint on the veranda posts. Antiques, tea with scones, jam and clotted cream; so motherly and English. South along Sandy Bay there’s Wrest Point Casino, a glass and concrete cylinder built in the early seventies to attract mainland money, now looking as sophisticated as a stack of ashtrays. The suburbs sprawl along the Derwent as far as steep slopes and water will let them.

Tasmanians are friendly and down to earth, but quite conservative and leery of mainland ways and mores as they see them. It’s a very comfortable place to exist in, but whether they think about it or not, they carry tragedy and terror in their bones.

The aboriginals of Tasmania were descended from the earliest wave of humans in Australia, pushed south by successive migrations over tens of thousands of years, becoming isolated on the island when the seas rose 12,000 years ago. Soon after colonisation the British proconsul had them concentrated in reservations, for their spiritual and corporeal good, where of course, they died. Decades later, impatient for more land, killing parties set out to pick off the hold-outs. The last full blood aboriginal man, William Lanne, passed away in 1869 and his wife Trucanini survived until 1876 as a revered curiosity. Only a diluted strain of native blood survives in a fraction of the population.

The island had been touched-on in the 1640’s by the Dutch sailor Abel Tasman, who came ashore briefly and named it Van Diemen’s Land in honour of his patron. In 1772 a French ship under the command of Capt. Marion Du Fresne stayed a week. After Port Jackson was settled in 1788 by the British an expedition was sent south to consolidate the claim, and to discover that this part of the territory, long thought to be the southern tip of Terra Australis Incognita was separated from the mainland by a broad strait. Australia’s second penal colony was founded on the Derwent River in 1803.

Van Diemen’s Land would become hell on earth for the convicts who were sent here, and Macquarie Harbour on the rugged south west coast, with cold rain and wind squalling down the mountain slopes, was its black hole. Intractables were kept chained together at night on a wet rock ledge, up to seventy bodies at a time. The Irish convict Alexander Pierce escaped with a party of five from here. Seven weeks later, having crossed the mountains and reached settled land, he was caught eating a sheep, raw, alone. One, then another of the weaker members of his party had been isolated, axed and eaten. Pierce survived at the top of that ragged food chain of men. The authorities could not believe his exploits, assuming he was covering for the other escapees. He kept his mouth shut after being sent back to Macquarie. Incredibly he escaped again with an unsuspecting sap who came along to be used for food. Pierce was again captured, found chewing on the remains of his companion, and promptly hanged in 1823. His skull, boiled and picked clean, was eventually sold to an American collector. It sits in a glass case at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Port Arthur was the great Victorian experiment, erected on the south-eastern Tasman Peninsula. It served as a model of scientific penal thoroughness, with a separate gaol for the moral protection of child convicts. Its impressive barracks and church now sit roofless in lawns of green, tranquil and monastic in the afternoon sun, the stones scrubbed clean of blood and pain, a major tourist attraction. A troubled local lad massacred thirty-five visitors there in 1996, most of them in the cafeteria, others he hunted down one-by-one as they fled.

I spend two weeks here. Wandering the pretty streets of Hobart, listening to music at the cathedral on Sunday nights, eating hot chips with tomato sauce, hiking up Mt Wellington, heaving and sweating, humming along with the birds under the snow gum saplings up to the cold brackeny heights. When there seems less chance of rain, I drive further into the western and northern wilderness and sleep in the car, to clamber higher and further up Cradle Mountain, The Walls of Jerusalem, and Legges Tor. I spend bad weather at Cate’s house in the bush on the south slopes of Mt Wellington. She works evening shift in town and sleeps much of the day. So I go out in the mornings, and then drive back up the rough muddy track to be alone with Gismo the cat afternoons and evenings. Huddled by the whistling smoky stove as the cold rain pours outside, with cups of tea and Arnotts Teddybear biscuits. Wonderful, and oh, so depressing.

I am just not ready for this. Didn’t Pascal write something in his musings about man’s misery? About not being able to sit quietly in a room alone? Perhaps it is easier to shut a noisy world out with a grumble, than to draw it in to one’s solitude; easier, when we are weak, to have a giant to battle on the outside, rather than face the whining beast inside.

So I dither about the job possibility and head back north, to Devonport and the ferry, avoiding the toll roads of Melbourne, on to the thousand kilometres of road and the anaesthetic allurements, stress and family obligations of Sydney. Better to cast my pearly daydreams before swine than toss them back into the deep, forgetting sea. I’m going to learn to love to hate that city, just as I learned to love to hate other bigger cities in the past.

But I will return to Tassie often; maybe one day for good, to hike the rugged outcrops, to sit in a silent mountainside room, wind and rain raging through the gum trees, fire in the hearth, cat under the sofa, alone with my Goliath.

November 1^st 2004

This essay first appeared in the monthly magazine Black Lamb, which can be seen at http://www.blacklamb.org.

North Africa

 

sleep, sweet lover, forget me for a while,
let a ship of cedar bear you down the river Nile,

we couldn’t decide on a place to eat
we fought about it silently in the street,
we shared a bed in a ten dollar room,
hidden from the noisy afternoon,
we both clung hard, we both began to weep.

now I look upon your face as you sleep,
you have become the beauty of this earth,
as I know nothing, just as everything is true,
the sight of your beauty is my rebirth,
oh God, such a feeling arises with you.

your eyelids are the curtains of your eyes,
behind them the holy of holies resides,

let a ship of cedar bear you down the river Nile,
sleep, sweet lover, and forget me for a while.

 

June 1999

Konya

Excerpt from Turkish Diary

Thursday August 9th

It’s ten a.m. and not hot as I’d feared it might be, though the direct sun burns my face and neck. It’s a couple of kilometres’ walk north and east along wide but busy streets, past shops and apartment blocks, to the old part of the city. I am comfortable stopping people and gesturing a request for directions. An older fellow helps me out. He worked and travelled all around Europe in a trailer, he says in German. I understand enough to respond. We wish each other a good day and to his delight I manage to say, “teşekkür ederim, hoşçakal,” many thanks, and goodbye in Turkish.

The guidebook recommends a cheap and friendly place. After a couple of inquiries, I plunge into the side streets, past an old yellow-plastered mosque and a row of public telephones, looking for Çıkrıkcılar Cadessi in the knot of streets south of the main boulevard. I’m almost there when a tubby, jolly fellow trots around a corner and hails me crying, “Yes yes yes, Hotel Ulusan, I will be back in a minute.” It’s the place I have been looking for. It’s clean and newly refurbished, with grey tiles and chrome stair rails, but retaining the creaky old nineteen forties’ rococo furniture from its previous incarnation. He shows me a single, for 25TL a night. It’s more than I had planned to pay but I am exhausted and I take the room, have a long hot shower, neaten up my stubble and rest for a while.

Konya is a mellow place, with few of the insinuating touts or imploring street salesmen of the type trawling the tourist-choked laneways of Istanbul. I seemed to be the only traveller with a pack on my back. Walking down Mevlana Cadessi, on my way to finding the hotel, a fellow approaches me and asks where I’m from, and to direct met to his carpet shop. We chat for a bit. He stayed on Enmore Road in Sydney for a while. He looks disappointed when I tell him I am travelling and studying but not purchasing stuff this time, but he asks me to come up for tea sometime, so I just might.

There are a few Seljuk monuments around town. Over the trolley tracks, I climb past several flag-festooned tea garden grottoes and enter a low, rambling mosque on the top of Alaaddin’s Hill, Alaeddin Tepesi. It is a wide grey stone prayer hall with a timber roof held aloft with Roman and Byzantine columns, not like the later basilica-like Ottoman structures. A class of boys are chanting text in a side room. I sit there for a bit letting the cool breeze and the soft chant waft the sweat away. I will go to the Mevlana mosque and museum tomorrow, and pay my respects at the tombs of both Rumi and Shems. I can’t do much this afternoon except walk around, sip a lemon drink, eat a banana, and rest.

There are few other travellers here. A group of young French friends sitting in the internet room at the hotel do not return my greeting. They are happy in their own company. Exhausted, I go to bed early after drinking a shot of raki in half a glass of water to help me sleep.

*****

Sounds curl their tendrils in through my ear, deep into the well of sleep. An arabesque of light catches flecks of consciousness caught in the curve of the wall, and makes them shine enough to wake me. The sound is a white blast, streaming through the half closed window, shivering across the sheet in which I lie tangled. It’s a rage of bright noise, until I am fully awake and hear a melody soaring high in an imploring supplication. My fingers reach for the watch on the side table. It’s nine-thirty; I must’ve been a sleep for a couple of hours.

At ten p.m. the muezzin wakes me again. It is not the call to prayer, the opening phrases of which are becoming familiar to me, but a prelude, a holy verse from the Koran. Pouring off the minaret by the plain brick mosque I’d passed on my way to the back streets of the bazaar, it echoes around the hills, and the echoes bounce back and linger as though from very far away, perhaps even as far away as the granite outcrops outside the city. His recitation is brilliant and intense, not just a rising and falling scale, but a line leaping up and down, and trembling passionately on certain tones. He pours forth a sound which flies in through the window and drapes itself around my shoulders like a banner of green lace, and then a shimmering rope snakes over the wooden window sill, a cord of silk to bind me slowly. His muscular voice is as glossy as a leather bullwhip. The muscle in his voice raises the leather whip until it arcs, suspended above the pull of gravity, before he takes another breath and swings the leather thong forward, flaying the skin off my sweating temples. The sound becomes gravelly, like oil mixed with rocks pouring into a channel. Then he whispers, steam hissing from a vent, each smoky, shivering ornament is like a splay of bullets. His voice rises and becomes a ladder of milk to climb and drink from. It is an intensely male song, as is the Koran itself. I am ravished of course.

Some time later a more familiar cry begins, “Allahu Ekber.” From another more distant minaret, perhaps the large, baroque edifice on the other side of Mevlana Cadessi, the call rings out as well. This muezzin’s voice is harsh and frail, an old man’s voice, more nasal and less in tune than the master from the minaret close by. The master takes his time, long pauses between phrases, and his call continues long after the older muezzin’s call has expired.

*****

Friday August 10th

At five o’clock the call to prayer rouses me from the warm emptiness of perfect sleep. A couple of hours later the hotel porter brings me breakfast, a pot of fruit yoghurt, a toasted sandwich and cup of strong coffee. Today I want to visit the shrines, rest a while and think about where to go tomorrow.

The shrine to Mevlana is in the old convent, or lodge of the original Sufi order here. It is a small stone complex of rooms, with a mosque and a beautiful tower, a fluted cone gilded and veneered with turquoise tiles. There are very few western visitors among the large crush of pilgrims at nine a.m. when the shrine opens. A couple of older women, teachers, organize several groups of small school children into rows. They are mostly little girls of about seven, simmering with pious, barely suppressed excitement, each with a pink or orange flowery headscarf. As well as headscarves, many of the older women wear long tailored coats, like fully buttoned-up pinstriped suit jackets that reach the ground. There is a kiosk with a scalloped marble fountain, and around it, spigots for washing face, hands and feet. There is another small fountain, at which people line up fill cups and plastic bottles with holy water. I step up as well, wash my hands and take a drink from the spigot.

The lodge exhibit consists of mannequins in dervish dress: black-robed dervishes sitting at a low dining table, the cook in the kitchen, the novice in his corner, the master at his book, a diorama of monastery life. Then the river of people prepares to enter the tomb complex. No one takes their shoes off — there are so many people it would be impossible to organise retrieval of your shoes — but instead everyone pulls flimsy plastic sanitary slippers over their footwear and we all shuffle in through the modest little door.

Stone caskets of generations of Mevlevi leaders, each labelled, line the raised enclosure along which we all pass. Many pilgrims raise their hands to them in prayer. The high point, the main shrine, lies under a dome in the corner, the dome and walls and pillars covered in brown and black designs, with arabesques and calligraphy laid over the colours in gold. It looks like a room lined with embossed leather. The two largest tombs, that of Rumi and his son Sultan Veled, sit side by side under huge canopies of filigreed silver brocade, each with a tall felt cone wrapped in a green silk turban. Penitents approach and crowd around, hands raised to faces in prayer and supplication. A big middle-aged man turns, wiping tears from his eyes. It is hushed and moving, and exactly like being in a Roman Catholic shrine in a Latin country. Over all of us floats the haunting wail of the ney flute.

With the many hanging lamps of bronze and coloured glass, the gilded and shaded arches, the soft wail of the ney, the river of people moving slowly forward and praying softly, there is nothing but language and doctrine to separate this piety, this devotion, from any other.

To the left of the tombs is a room full of objects connected with the lodge. Copper utensils, several fine glass hanging lamps from Egypt, rosaries containing 900 walnut sized beads, Koran stands of carved wood, even one carved from a single block of jade. There are glass cases containing stiff, courtly robes of blue and green taffeta silk reputed to have been worn by Mevlana. They seem too grand, too priestly to have been worn by Rumi, especially after he had encountered Shems of Tabriz, renounced his official duties and gone quite mad with divine love. In another case lie robes associated with his son Sultan Veled, a red damask coat and a shirt covered in diamond patterns of calligraphy in red and black ink. There is also a thirteenth-century Seljuk silk prayer rug connected with Rumi, and a couple of blue and white, finely striped cotton quilted coats. They are in excellent shape for being 750 years old. There are incense cups, a braid of pearls, and several small clocks. I do not understand the significance of the clocks.

I see a couple of young men in wheel chairs, an elderly man in a fine black suit bent double with age being led by the hand by a museum guard. There are some old ladies in black with swollen bandaged legs walking slowly through the shrine on crutches. Most people are young though, families with children.

The old mosque room holds a collection of several hundred years of illuminated books, carpets and carved wooden doors. One of the carpets is ancient and fine, with a panel depicting the Ka’aba. The leaves of the books are dense with patterns and calligraphy, ink and gold. There are Korans, Divans, or discourses of Rumi, and copies of the Mathnavi, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth. In most of the books the colour blue dominates, along with red and gold. There is very little green. Some of the later, Ottoman books have imagery, depictions of Mecca and the Ka’aba. The work approaches perfection in line and proportion. Tall, clean shaven young men in pastel-coloured shirts lean over the glass cases and lift their hands to their faces, praying silently over the holy books.

_*****

On my way back from the shrine, I pass a man sitting on a straw mat by a shoe shop on the shady side of Mevlana Cadessi, with his bald head down and his hand held out. He is stocky and hairy, about fifty, sitting cross-legged on a mat with his wide and dirty trouser cuffs rolled up to his thighs. His thick, legs are burnt red and shiny with dirt. In both calves run winding canyons as big as a hand, gouged deep into his flesh. The jagged rims of these canyons are crumbly with dried skin, the upper layers fatty and yellow, and the lower depths courses of mottled red meat. I haven’t seen a leper in twenty-eight years, not since my encounter with the leper in Northern India. In a moment of shock I reach down and press some coins into his cupped hand. As I walk away I become fearful of the hand-to-hand contact. I wish I’d had a bottle of holy water from the shrine to give him. Maybe I ought to have gone the whole way and pressed my fists into his wounds.

Back at the hotel, I scrub my hands with soap and scalding water, and then head back out into the hot sun to find some lunch.

As I do so, the lunchtime call to prayer erupts from the loudspeakers above, and half the shops shut. Shutters are rolled down noisily. Windows are latched. Canvas sheets and cotton cloths are flung over stands of oranges, shelves of bread, racks of shoes, piles of children’s clothes. I will have to wait for an hour to get my chicken pide and cold drink.

In the afternoon I visit the archaeological museum, with finds from nearby Catal Huyuk, the first Neolithic urban settlement, and then from the Assyrian, Phrygian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine eras. In the front garden lie several enormous Roman marble sarcophagi, of warriors, naked wrestlers, angels, foliage, which look as though they were carved yesterday. It’s getting very hot and I have to buy another one-and-a-half litre bottle of water to get me through the afternoon.

To the north of Mevlana Cadessi is the tomb of Shems of Tabriz, Rumi’s guide and passionate companion. It sits in a small old stone mosque. Inside is a simple and beautifully proportioned arch separating the prayer space and the mihrab from the raised platform containing the casket. The ceiling is of glossy wood, carved in checkers and squares. The casket is covered in green cloth, crowned with a felt cone and turban denoting his spiritual rank. I stand silently, not thinking anything, just to pay my respects. All the devotees and suppliants around the tomb are women, both old and young. A couple of men entered later. They halt at the main prayer hall, turn left and begin their prostration toward Mecca. Near the tomb, a couple of young girls, twelve and fourteen, perhaps sisters, squat on the carpet and gaze up at me with unflinching curiosity. They’re not veiled, though their mother, kneeling beside them praying, is. After a minute or so, an ancient custodian appears from a small side room. He clicks and clucks, approaches the girls with words, and hands them each a veil with which they unhurriedly cover their heads.

A young and very pious looking man, dressed in flowing tan cotton and wearing a skullcap, finishes his prayers towards Mecca, and approaches the tomb. He kneels there immobile, his hands raised, silent. The old custodian appears again with a plate of large white sweets, and offers them around. He offers me one, too. It is very sweet and a bit fizzy as I crack it with my teeth; powdered sugar and baking soda sherbet, a hint or rose, a hint of mint, crumbling in my mouth and melting over my tongue.

The pious young man rises from his prayer to Shems, turns to leave and hurries out of the shrine. His shoulders are hunched, aching in humility, perhaps aching with the burden of the gift he is carrying with him. His face is scrunched up and cast down, as though he had been standing too close to a fiercely burning fire. It is the way some people look when they leave the communion rail in church after having received the bread and the wine.

*****

Friday evening in Konya

Feeling a bit lonely after the intensity of the day. But kept the thought in my head, to feel the company of everyone around me. I wandered up to one of the pleasure gardens which flank Allaeddin’s Hill, found a small table under a tree decked with coloured bulbs, ordered a glass of tea and a pile of sugar lumps and sat, absorbed in Yashar Kemal’s novel. Half a chapter later, a small boy trotted up and hovered beside me hoping to get my attention. He held a piece of paper and as I looked up, began reciting questions from it, pausing for my answers.

“Hello, what is your name, where are you from, how do you like Konya, have you been to the shrine?”

I could sense his mother and several other women sitting with her at a table in the grotto behind me all beaming at him as he spoke. As our brief formal conversation ended I turned to them, smiling as well. “Ah, he speaks such good English.”

“Yes, yes he speaks a little English,” replied his mother, decorously shading her smile. But of course he spoke no English; the ladies were curious to know something about me and had devised a little scheme to find out.

Earlier, while I was eating lunch in the shady part of the main square, another little lad of about eight, who was selling bottles of water kept cool in a metal pan full of water, ran over to me. He had two small bottles left and really needed to offload them. But I already had a coke and a big bottle of water, which I showed him. He was very persistent sitting by me on the bench arguing his case in Turkish. I wondered if this was a school holiday job, or if he would ever go to school. I gave him a piece of cherry cake instead, and he trotted away contentedly.

I wanted a beer to drink with my evening kebab, but none was available. The day before, I had asked in a mini market for Efes beer, and the shop owner had directed me around the corner to another place, which was hidden in a small arcade off the street. The man there had beers stacked out of sight in a large fridge covered in a big cloth. He wrapped the can in newspaper and put it in a plastic bag for me. Konya is more of a religious town than Istanbul.

So I had a tasty meal and a cola and went for a walk up to the main Ottoman mosque, next to the Mevlana shrine. The place crowded with Friday night relaxation. Families sitting in the square and on the terrace of the mosque drinking tea, eating nuts, cotton candy, ice cream.

Later I spoke to a couple of Mexican students at the hotel. They have been studying film. Very nice and informative guys, and had just come from Cappadocia. Göreme was not as full of touts and tourists as I had read, and there were some great day hikes around the area. Most people only went on the first bit of a hike, to see a church or a monument, but if you pressed on, you could enjoy serenity. We spoke about Mexico (they are from Mexico City and miss home cooking), and Norway (one of them had had a girlfriend from Bergen). They were such nice intelligent dudes. Went to bed and had a shot of the raki in a glass of water to help me sleep. Awoke at four a.m., the monk’s hour, and did not sleep until the call to prayer rang out around the town at five.

This excerpt first appeared in the monthly magazine Black Lamb, which can be seen at http://www.blacklamb.org.