Yashar had just been interviewed by a Swedish newspaper. He showed me the article, and although I could not read it, the word Nobelpreiskandidate caught my eye. I commented on it.
'Yes,' said Thilda, who interpreted my questions and Yashar's replies, 'it's possible. But they feel it's Graham Greene's turn now.'
'My frint,' said Yashar, hearing Greene's name. He placed his hairy hand on his heart when he said it.
Graham Greene seemed to have a lot of friends on this route. But Yashar knew many other writers and he slapped his heart as he listed them. William Saroyan was his friend, and so were Erskine Caldwell, Angus Wilson, Robert Graves, and James Baldwin, whom he called 'Jimmy' – he reminded me that Another Country had been written in a luxurious Istanbul villa.
'I can't face going swimming,' said Thilda. She was a patient, intelligent woman who spoke English so well I didn't dare to compliment her on it for fear she might say, as Thurber did on a similar occasion, 'I ought to – I spent forty years in Columbus, Ohio, working on it like a dog.' Thilda sees to the practical side of his affairs, negotiating contracts, answering letters, explaining Yash-ar's harangues about the socialist paradise he envisions, that Soviet pastoral where the workers own the means of production and complete sets of Faulkner.
It was unfortunate that Thilda didn't come swimming with us because it meant three hours of talking pidgin English, an activity that Yashar must have found as fatiguing as I did. Carrying our bathing trunks, we walked down the dusty hill to the beach. Yashar pointed out the fishing village and said he was planning a series of stories based on the life there. On the way, we met a small quivering man with a shaven head and the regulation rumpled thirties suit. Yashar shouted a greeting at him. The man crept over and grabbed Yashar's hand and tried to kiss it, but Yashar, by jerking his own hand, turned this servility into a handshake. They spoke together for a while, then Yashar slapped the man on the back and sent him tottering away.
'His name Ahmet,' said Yashar. He put his thumb to his mouth and tilted his hand. 'He drunk.'
We changed at a swimming club where some men were sunning themselves. In the water I challenged him to a race. He won it easily and splashed water at me as I struggled in his wake. The previous day he had looked like a bull; but now, swimming, his bulk making the water foam at his arms, he had the movement of a mature sea monster, with hairy shoulders and a thick neck, and he surfaced roaring as his vast head dripped. The champion swimmers – he claimed to be one – all came, he said, from Adana, his birthplace in South Anatolia.
'I love my country,' he said, meaning Anatolia. 'I love it. Taurus Mountains. Plains. Old villages. Cotton. Eagles. Oranges. The best horses – very long horses.' He put his hand on his heart: 'I love.'
We talked about writers. He loved Chekhov; Whitman was a good man; Poe was also great. Melville was good: every year Yashar read Moby Dick, and Don Quixote, 'and Homerus'. We were pacing up and down in the hot sun on the beach front, and Yashar cast a giant shadow over me that eliminated any danger of my getting sunburned. He didn't like Joyce, he said. 'Ulysses - too simple. Joyce is a very simple man, not like Faulkner. Listen. I am interested in form. New form. I hate traditional form. Novelist who use traditional form is' – he fumbled for a word – 'is dirt.'
'I don't speak English,' he said after a moment. 'Kurdish I speak, and Turkish, and gypsy language. But I don't speak barbarian languages.'
'Barbarian languages?'
'English! German! Ya! French! All the barbarian – ' As he spoke, there was a shout. One of the men sunning himself in a beach chair called Yashar over and showed him an item in a newspaper.
Returning, he said, 'Pablo Neruda is dead.'
Yashar insisted on stopping at the fishing village on the way back. About fifteen men sat outside a cafe. Seeing Yashar, they leaped to their feet and Yashar greeted each one with a bear hug. One was a man of eighty; he wore a ragged shirt and his trousers were tied with a piece of rope. He was deeply tanned, barefoot, and toothless. Yashar said he had no home. The man slept in his caique every night, whatever the weather, and he had done so for forty years. 'So he has his caique and sleeps in it too.' These men, and one we met later on the steep path (Yashar kissed him carefully on each cheek before introducing him to me), obviously looked upon Yashar as a celebrity and regarded him with some awe.
'These my friends,' said Yashar. 'I hate writers; I love fishermen.' But there was a distance. Yashar had attempted to overcome it with clowning intimacy, yet the distance remained. In the atmosphere of the cafe one would never take Yashar – twice as big as any of the others and dressed like a golf pro – for a fisherman; neither would one take him for a writer on the prowl. There, he looked like a local character, part of the scenery and yet in contrast to it.
It seemed to me that his restless generosity led him into contradictions. My conclusion did not make my understanding any easier. Over lunch of fried red mullet and white wine Yashar talked about prison, Turkey, his books, his plans. He had been to jail; Thilda had served an even longer jail sentence; their daughter-in-law was in jail at the moment. This girl's crime, according to Thilda, was that she had been found making soup in the house of a man who had once been wanted for questioning in connection with a political offence. It was no good expressing disbelief at the muddled story. Turkey, the Turks say, is not like other places, though, after describing in the dour Turkish way the most incredible horrors of torture and cruelty, they invite you to come and spend a year there, assuring you the whole time that you'll love the place.
Yashar's own characteristics were even stranger. A Kurd, he is devoted to Turkey and will not hear of secession; he is an ardent supporter of both the Soviet government and Solzhenitsyn, which is something like rooting for the devil as well as Daniel Webster; he is a Muslim Marxist, his wife is a Jew, and the only foreign country he likes better than Russia is Israel, 'my garden'. With the physique of a bull and the gentleness of a child, he maintains in the same breath that Yoknapatawpha County has an eternal glory and that the Kremlin's commissars are visionary archangels. His convictions defy reason, and at times they are as weirdly unexpected as the blond hair and freckles you see in Asia Minor. But Yashar's complexity is the Turkish character on a large scale.
I told Moles worth this at our farewell lunch. He was sceptical. 'I'm sure he's a marvellous chap,' he said. 'But you want to be careful with the Turks. They were neutral during the war, you know, and if they'd had any backbone at all they would have been on our side.'
Chapter Three
'T beg you to look at this scroll and look at me,' said JL the antique dealer in Istanbul's Covered Bazaar. He flapped the decaying silk scroll at his ears. 'You say the scroll is stained and dirty! Yes! It is stained and dirty! I am forty-two years old and bald on my head and many wrinkles. This scroll is not forty-two years old – it is two hundred years old, and you won't buy it because you say it is stained! What do you expect? Brand shiny new one? You are cheating me!'
He rolled it up and stuck it under my arm, and stepping behind the counter he sighed. 'Okay, cheat me. It is early in the morning. Take it for four hundred liras.'
'Olmaz,' I said, and handed it back. I had expressed only a polite curiosity in the scroll, but he had taken this for canny interest, and each time I tried to walk away he reduced his price by half, believing my lack of enthusiasm to be a wily bargaining ploy.