palaces and azure mosques at its center and, radiating outward,
Murat’s patience, Cemal’s sad kindness, and the gentle wisecracks of
the student chemists.
We’re all silent, as if these Italian curses have cast a spell on us.
Renato breaks the silence to ask whether anyone has heard of
“Turk’s head” contests, but no one has.
A week later, back in Princeton, I found an article from the May
9, 1854, New-York Daily Times. A gossipy dispatch from Paris by one
“Dick Tinto,” it described a peculiar diversion:
In all the public dancing gardens at Paris, is a contrivance
to test strength of arm. It consists of a wooden head of a
man, covered with thick cloth and mounted upon a spring;
upon being struck by the fist, it descends to a point
proportionate to the force employed, and a finger moving
along a graduated scale, marks the degree attained. This
head has represented of late years, and perhaps from time
immemorial, the head of a Turk, and the number of blows
the Mussulmans have received in his person is quite
incredible.
* * *
President Obama, fresh from the G20 summit, has followed me to
Turkey. He’s overshot the mark by three hundred kilometers,
standing erect before the Turkish Parliament in Ankara. On the ferry
back to Istanbul, on a big-screen TV, Obama mouths words while a
female voice utters them in Turkish and Cemal loosely renders them
in Esperanto. “He’s talking,” Cemal begins, “about lots of Turkish
issues—normalizing relations between Turkey and Armenia,
reopening the Eastern Orthodox Halki Seminary, the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party, lifting the ban on Kurdish broadcasting.…”
No, not just about Turkey; Obama’s talking about everything,
everything we haven’t been discussing the past three days: Iran’s
nuclear potential, America’s role in Iraq, Al Qaeda, the reunification
of Cyprus, a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This is my
president, I think, as people all over the boat glance up from their
tiny glasses of tea to watch and listen. “The work is never over,”
Obama concludes, and the Esperantists exchange a knowing glance:
We could have told you that. Tadeusz observes wryly, “He was getting
more applause at the beginning.” When we disembark, saying ĝis la
revido (till next time), Cemal warns me that by ten the next
morning, when Obama is to land in Istanbul, all roads to the airport
will be closed.
At 6:30 a.m., standing with my bags at the elevator of the Seven
Hills Hotel, I step aside for the snipers in blotted camouflage who
file up a spiral staircase to the rooftop garden. They’re dragging
rifles, ammo, and iron stanchions to give Obama cover for his visit
to the Blue Mosque. All day they’ll aim between the minarets, where
just last night, gulls looped through rays of floodlight, patches of
moonlight, and the darkness in between.
BIAŁYSTOK
4. Bridge of Words
Four months later, after sprinting through the Warsaw airport with
my luggage, I barely make the bus to Białystok. I’m taking the
Podlasie-Express to Zamenhof’s native city, which is celebrating the
150th anniversary of his birth by throwing him a congress. Poland
has often been the site of jubilees—the Warsaw Congress of 1987
drew nearly six thousand—but the Cold War is over, and during the
grim post-1989 years, membership rolls declined all over Eastern
Europe. Here in Białystok, fewer than two thousand have registered.
Still, the assembly is large enough to fill a huge makeshift hall
erected on the grounds of the Białystok Polytechnic, and avid
enough to populate the endless round of ceremonies, meetings,
gatherings, concerts, and lectures for six days. The congress has a
cumbersome title—“‘To Build a Bridge of Peace Among Peoples’:
Zamenhof Today.”
Even in Zamenhof’s era, Białystok was a city of yesterdays,
scarred by the paths of emperors and kings, tribes and armies.
Today Białystok, minus its Jews, Russians, and Germans, watches
the children of Zamenhof fill its hotels and several dormitories of the
Polytechnic. The green conference logo with Zamenhof’s profile is
emblazoned on buses and bus shelters. Shopkeepers have been given
Esperanto glossaries; restaurants offer menus in Esperanto. An
Esperanto-language city map tracks a walking tour of Zamenhof
sites: his birthplace, the gymnasium where he studied, the monument
to the Great Synagogue (a grim reconstruction of its mangled
cupola), and the Zamenhof Center, which has a small exhibition
about Białystok in Zamenhof’s day. The Rynek—the large square at
the city center, once the marketplace—has been entirely given over
to an international arts festival. The city’s arts venues all seem to
have thrown open their doors; an Israeli friend, thumbing through
the program, counted thirty performances, about twice as many as
usual. In this city of three hundred thousand, unaccustomed to large
groups of tourists, I can’t walk a block without seeing two or three
Esperantists sporting conference badges, in animated conversation.
At the fair traditionally held the night before the official opening,
representatives from dozens of Esperantist organizations set up card
tables and distribute pamphlets. Some of the groups have had a
presence for nearly a century. The UEA website recognizes, rather
quaintly, associations of “doctors, writers, railway workers,
scientists, musicians,” “Scouts and Guides, the blind, chess, and Go
players,” “Buddhists, Shintoists, Catholics, Quakers, Protestants,
Mormons and Bahá’ís.” There is no Jewish group per se, nor has
there been for many decades; in 1914 Zamenhof worried that a
proposed Hebrea Esperanto-Asocio would represent Jews as a nation,
which he was convinced they were not.
Among the “activist groups” are LSG, the Ligo de Samseksamoj
Geesperantistoj (League of Gay Esperantists); VERDVERD, the green
Esperantists; TEVA, the Worldwide Esperantist Vegetarians
Association; and the pacifist Homaranisma Komunlingva Movado
Kontraǔ Novliberalismo, or HKMKN (pronounced “HoKoMoKoNo”):
the Humanitarian, Common-Language Movement Against the New
Liberalism, who’ve spent much of the past decade protesting the war
in Iraq. The railway workers are not in evidence, but most of the
other groups are represented, along with the famous Rondo Kato
(cat lovers’ circle). Also on hand are a clutch of Esperanto
publishers; the fine-arts journal Beletra Almanako; TEJO, the youth
wing of the UEA; and SAT (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, or World
Anational Association), headquartered in France, an umbrella group
for socialists, anarchists, and “anationalists” who since 1921 have
used Esperanto as tool for promoting any number of left-wing
agendas. Behind another table, a friendly young Cuban dispenses
leaflets with the logo of a lighthouse advertising next year’s
Universal Congress, to be held in Havana. It’s hard to imagine
getting myself to Havana, though I pocket the leaflet.