Slow Boats to China Read online

  An old Greek insisted on carrying my heavy metal suitcase up a steep side street to a house where, he conveyed with signs, there would be a room for the night. He tottered alarmingly but, when I tried to take the suitcase from him, he protested loudly, ‘Okhi! Okhi!’

  At last a woman appeared at the doorway. ‘English?’ she said from the rectangle of lamplight. ‘Want a house?’

  ‘Just one night.’

  She showed me a room the size of a large cupboard; no window, no water, just a hard-looking bed and stifling heat.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Six hundred drachma.’ When I laughed, she said, ‘Five hundred.’ I said goodbye, tipped the old man, picked up my suitcase and walked down to the harbour. At the ramp to the Samos Express, I found two of the crew and said I would be travelling with them to Turkey tomorrow morning; could I stay on board?

  ‘Okay. I’m the captain’s son. It’s okay.’

  ‘I’d like to leave my bags here now.’

  ‘Of course. No one steals in Greece.’

  I stowed the bags under a seat in the saloon, and went ashore.

  Several dozen yachts lay along the wharf, some pleasantly modest and workmanlike, some gleaming with chrome or aluminium and looking like kept women. A little way along I came to the king of them all; a red light glowed like the eye of a giant idol at the top of the mainmast, perhaps seventy feet high. It was a large sailing boat, a three-master, but it had engines, too; I could hear the purr of its generator. On board a muscular black member of the crew in impeccable whites lounged on guard, impassively watching the strollers who stopped to peer at this sailing palace. Who was it – Goldfinger or Dr No, holidaying in Samos this year?

  From a café table, near some island boats – the Aegean caïques, single-masted wooden boats with wide noses curved like drawn bows – I could see a sign that said, ‘Sail with Jiannis. Trips to have a nice time daily. Trips to the nice Island Samiopoula with a nice taverna and a sandy beach.’ And over a fish steak and a half-bottle of retsina – ‘Not too much sweet,’ said the waiter – I thought of my perfect landlady in Patmos and the greedy one in Samos asking an outrageous price for her stuffy little room. Greedy, yes; but warmed by the retsina, I looked at the animated quay and thought, What of it?

  A young Greek waiter was laughing with two Swedish girls at the next table, obviously making a rendezvous. I heard singing and the tinkle of a breaking glass coming from a back room. My waiter winked and put another half-bottle of the product of the Union des Coopératives Vinicoles de Samos on my table. As I drank it, I tried to imagine this quayside in winter, its café canopies furled, the tables stacked inside, windows and doors closed against wind and rain, and the chains of coloured lights switched off for another six months. Now, after all, it was the silly, sunny season when islands tried to forget the empty, lonely winter, when rain and winter gales have driven tourists and their money away and turned the islands’ spirit to sludge. So why should anyone begrudge the fishermen, boatmen and landladies their modest killing? What harm was there in saving something for the winter? No harm at all, the retsina said.

  Around midnight I went aboard the darkened and empty Express, felt my way into the saloon – a notice told me it was a ‘place touristique’ – and stretched out on a banquette against the bulkhead. The fleas attacked three or four hours later, although I slept through their first blitzkrieg and only woke up when their occupation was fully established.

  In the dark I could only turn, twist, curse and scratch and feel them running joyously all over my body. I had lived in the goat-filled tents of Bedouin tribesmen and the reed houses of Iraq’s Marsh Arabs, but as biters these fleas were Olympic champions.

  Where did they come from? From the cats of Samos? From the crew? Although the place touristique literally hopped with them, they only came out at night; luckily for the owners of the Samos Express, fleas are nocturnal creatures, because, if they had remained on the warpath the next day, the ship would have become a floating bedlam; passengers would have been leaping and twitching about the decks like victims of an advanced stage of St Vitus’s dance.

  From 4.30 a.m. I had to abandon the idea of sleep. My hands and ankles were covered with lumps that itched intensely; my waist seemed to be ringed by a nagging chain of fire. When daylight came I began a feverish search, but neither then nor later in the shower in a Turkish hotel did I glimpse an antenna of one of those seagoing fleas. They stayed with me just over a week.

  *

  At eight o’clock the Samos Express was ready to leave for Kusadasi. At the last moment a busload of Austrian tourists pulled up and came aboard, their bus driver handing over a plastic bag full of passports to the barman. We cast off. For a time crew ran back and forth to the accompaniment of a mechanical squawking from the engine room as a caïque’s anchor rope was disentangled from the Express’s screws, and then we moved toward the Turkish coast.

  The Turkish mainland is startlingly close to Samos. Soon we passed the red Turkish flag that flies from a small lighthouse on an islet to starboard, while the coast of Samos is still what looks like touching distance away to port. The Greeks have soldiers on Samos, which indicates an underlying tension here that is absent on Patmos.

  Why shouldn’t there be drama in this mere streak of water between Greek and Turk, whose enmity is so deeply rooted in so many massacres along these coasts, capes and islands that both races might be said to enjoy hostility as some elderly people are said to enjoy ill health? (The next day in Kusadasi, as throughout Turkey, the Turks would celebrate Victory Day – the military victory over the Greeks in 1921 and the violent expulsion of all Greeks from Anatolia by Kemal Ataturk – with goose-stepping military parades.)

  There was drama, too, in the way Greece lay in sunshine, its rose rocks warmed in the sun while, ahead, the Turkish coastline could only be glimpsed dimly through thunderclouds that merged with a rising sea mist.

  Someone on Patmos had praised a Hotel Imbat in Kusadasi, and I took him at his word. But by noon I was already leaving the Imbat. A haughty young man at the reception desk, who had taken a long time to appear, said, ‘I can give you another room.’

  But it had been a mistake to go there in the first place. I ought to have taken warning from the tourist-club insignia that bespattered the modern entrance hall. The room I had already been shown to was far too expensive to include a toilet that had no water, a telephone that didn’t work even to the reception desk, and walls and doors that seemed to be a hundredth of an inch thick.

  I pointed all this out to the cool, young receptionist, who said, ‘That’s only your opinion.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  Back in the town – the Imbat is quite a long way outside it – I found the Akman Hotel. It was near the sea, and also near where buses left several times a day for Smyrna, the port in which I counted on finding my next steamer – the one to take me the length of the south Turkish coast to Mersin. I registered at the Akman and walked to the shipping agent’s office, but it was closed. The office was near the jetty where I had disembarked from Samos, and I was surprised to see the Samos Express still at her moorings. She had been due to sail some time earlier. I walked up to the jetty gate. The passengers for Samos, including those who had come across with me that morning on a day trip, were piled up there, sitting or lying disconsolately on the ground, or shifting from one aching foot to another. The Samos Express reared and plunged in wild and swelling water and, leaning his arms on the bridge and gazing sadly at his passengers, her captain rocked with her. The Express was delayed because of the sudden winds and high seas, but no passenger was allowed to go near it or even onto the jetty. The locked and guarded gate illuminated the contrast between a Greek harbour and a Turkish one, even the difference in the Greek and Turkish attitudes to life. In Greece anyone can wander down to the quayside; it is impossible to imagine anyone in seafaring Greece being arrested for wanting to look at the sea or at ships. Kusadasi is small and of no military importance, yet a
cloud of police surrounded the gate, and big-chested loiterers in jeans and T-shirts, obviously plain-clothes men, stroked their waterfall moustaches.

  ‘Don’t get locked up here,’ a youngish man with a Canadian passport in his hand was saying to a despondent British girl who, I had overheard her saying, had run out of money. ‘They take away your belt and shoelaces. They don’t give you hygienic conditions. They’re really rough on drugs here. Once you’re in jail don’t expect no hygienic conditions.’

  By temperament, Turks are lockers-up and lockers-out. They have prison on the brain, and a belief that bars are all you need to make the world a safe place, if not a happy one. Few Turks seem to think the world is a happy place.

  Mr Akman of the Akman Hotel doesn’t believe in prisons, thank heavens. About happiness, he is sceptical too. He believes in fishing.

  Mr Akman is tall, middle-aged and could be a distinguished professor of mathematics. He comes from Erzurum in the remote north-east of Turkey near the Soviet border, and until recently he was a consulting engineer, somehow connected with the building of the Hilton Hotel in Istanbul. He studied in Germany and he speaks good German, but his English, through lack of practice, is weak. He abandoned his job a few years ago to build and manage his own hotel in Kusadasi.

  The first evening, when I came down to his simple bar, he asked me to have a vodka. Over it, I said how much I liked the hotel.

  ‘Sank you,’ he said with a gentle smile, as though he really was grateful. When I asked him if he enjoyed running his own place instead of building hotels for other people, he said, ‘N-no, I want to retire.’

  ‘What would you do then?’

  ‘Fishing.’ His smile broadened, and he cast an imaginary fly across the room. ‘Here,’ he went on, ‘too many problems. Staff come and go. Now we have room, breakfast, dinner. No lunch. Lunch too difficult. Maybe next year no dinner, only breakfast and room.’

  ‘The year after that no breakfast?’

  He laughed. ‘Ja, ja. Then no room. Then I go fishing in Erzurum.’

  Mr Akman had a visitor from Ankara, an English-speaking friend, a doctor from the university, who said in a wise tone of voice, ‘I know England. I like it. But you have so many problems with race there. I saw those notices in your restaurants: “No black men served here”. Oh, yes, I saw them.’ I wasn’t going to let the doctor and politics get between me and Mr Akman by driving me to mention Armenia or the Turkish occupation of Cyprus.

  The more I saw of Akman the more I liked him. He was shy, and had the lugubrious look of A. A. Milne’s Eeyore – a look that I soon saw hid a heart of gold and a hefty degree of fatalism.

  The first evening Mr Akman invited me to join his friend the doctor and himself for dinner: soup, kofte kebab, salad, then grapes. We shared a bottle of red wine: Dikmen, ‘Turkey’s best,’ said Mr Akman, raising his glass. ‘Chin-chin,’ said the doctor, who, despite his feelings on English racism, was friendly. He was bursting with stories of the appalling political savagery at Ankara University that was disrupting any serious study there. ‘The disease of Turkey,’ he said.

  After dinner every light went out in Kusadasi. ‘They are always fusing,’ the doctor muttered in the blackness. The hotel’s television was cut-off; its screen had been giving us ill-coordinated views of Turkish soldiers goose-stepping in the Victory Parade in Ankara and the sound of British military marches; I thought I recognized ‘Garb of Old Gaul’. In the darkness beside me Akman’s wan voice murmured, ‘Problems … problems.’ Waiters brought candles, and I saw Akman walking up and down in the shadowy bar, muttering to himself. He looked upset, and I postponed asking him about a phone call I needed to make to Smyrna; I would have to reserve a room there for a day or two before I sailed. But in a moment he came up to me, reached over the bar and filled my glass to the brim with brandy. ‘From me,’ he said.

  Mr Akman’s friendliness set the style for the whole hotel. It was a very ordinary place: not particularly well built, austere and certainly not beautiful or luxurious. I think Akman depended on groups of none-too-well-off Dutch and German families. Under a different owner it would have been a good hotel to avoid; adequate, dull and nondescript. But without playing a jovial extrovert ‘mine host’ role – quite the reverse – Akman somehow pervaded it with a life-enhancing property.

  Sometimes his friend the doctor helped behind the bar. At other times the son of one of his Turkish lawyer friends from Kusadasi poured drinks or manned the reception desk. Having just left Istanbul University, this young man was waiting for the call to do his compulsory military service with the Turkish army – twenty rigorous months in uniform. He had shaggy hair and tugged at a stiff moustache with bristles an inch long, saying gloomily to me, ‘In the army, all hair will go.’ Turkish military barbers shave the skulls of draftees with a savage glee, he explained. In that case, several of Mr Akman’s young waiters would be as bald as footballs within a year or two. Until that dreaded day they darted cheerfully about the hotel in well-coiffed hairdos, and spent a good deal of their time writing notes to pen pals in Europe, mainly to the German girls who came to Kusadasi for the summer holidays. Most Turkish boys, particularly those working in hotels, yearned for jobs in Germany. They said they wouldn’t hesitate to marry any Germany girl – ‘She could look like a sausage’ – if it helped them to get work permits there. Many did marry for work permits, and were the envy of their friends, who had to stay behind in Turkey to go through their military service.

  One of the Akman waiters, a wild-looking youth from Smyrna called Sukru, brought me a present of a cup of tea one morning as I sat writing in the empty dining room. When I thanked him, he said, ‘It’s nothing, amga [uncle].’ Half an hour of writing then vanished while he took out his wallet and showed me, like a bridge champion slowly laying down a winning hand, a fistful of colour photographs of a number of German ladies of various sizes smiling in bikinis from an almost identical spot on the beach near Akman’s Hotel – naturally, at different times, probably only days apart. ‘Very beauty,’ said Sukru, pushing the pictures back into his wallet.

  Next evening, in the grip of some disorderly Anatolian zeal, Sukru rushed through the crowded dining room bearing a two-foot-high pile of plates, tripped, fell prone across a table and threw the plates among the diners like a Scottish athlete tossing the caber. There was the noise of an exploding china shop. Like Highland cattle disturbed by thunder, shaggy German men and women lumbered wide-eyed to their feet dabbing with napkins and crunching about in the debris of broken plates. Sukru lay across the table as if stunned. Then, still prone, he twisted his head anxiously toward Akman.

  ‘Sukru, Sukru,’ murmured Mr Akman, sadly shaking his head. Without anger, he lifted a large splinter of crockery from his lamb stew, smiled his resigned smile, and went on eating his meal.

  I was grateful to Mr Akman because, while the police and the locked gates at Kusadasi harbour had reminded me of one side of Turkey, he showed me quite another.

  I went back to the office of Turkish Maritime Lines near the harbour. The door was open, so I went in. A man came in from the back of the office, which was empty.

  ‘Closed,’ he said. ‘After two thirty, closed.’

  ‘But it’s not two yet.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I have a ticket to sail on the Samsun, Izmir to Mersin, on 7 September.’ It wasn’t far from Kusadasi to Izmir, but I already knew it was not easy to find a boat and it didn’t seem worthwhile wasting time looking for one. Also, the grand ruin of Ephesus lay beside the road to Izmir and I wanted very much to see it, so I would tackle that stage by road. I said, ‘I want to confirm –’

  ‘No tickets sold here.’

  ‘I have the ticket and the reservation. I just want to con–’

  ‘No tickets here. Izmir only.’

  Another man, flushed with drink, came through the front door. ‘No ticket here,’ he said. So I left. I would go to Izmir (Smyrna, I preferred to call it, at least to myself) in a day or two
. I had six days to play before the Samsun was due to sail, and it was cheaper to stay at Akman’s than in a hotel in Smyrna.

  Kusadasi (pronounced Kooshadasi, with the accent on the second syllable) has a population of farmers, fishermen and people intent on attracting tourists. It is popular because it is near Ephesus. It is not a big town; its population is about fifteen thousand, according to a guidebook. It clusters around the harbour and a seventeenth-century caravanserai with immense walls that once housed the Club Méditerranée and is now a luxury hotel.

  Between the Caravanserai Hotel and the sea are many stalls and small restaurants, most of them selling fish; Kusadasi is famous for this. There is also a steak house, much grander than the other restaurants, where you are supposed to sit on a stool at a bar, push coins into a jukebox to keep the music pumping and roll your eyes around posters of pop stars on the walls. Blonde German girls sat there for hours on end, chewing gum, thighs spread, eyed by Turks of all ages, who watched the girls intently, as a boxer will study an opponent on film to decide whether to take it slow and tricky or go for a kayo in the first round.

  Near an open-air waterfront bar, I saw a man with his trousers rolled up washing two large sheep in the sea. After a while a young Turk, with a handsome raddled face, who was drinking beer at the bar, said to me, ‘Hello. You’ll never guess where I come from. Uganda.’