Nightingale

Writing to a friend of mine recently reminded me of one of the most extraordinary encounters I have ever had. In fact, the event was strange enough that I allowed it to go by unrecorded, almost believing it to be a dream; mistaking it for something that couldn’t have actually happened. For the last eight or nine years it has occasionally returned to me as exactly this, like something I have read, an outlined idea or a sketch and I have repeatedly dismissed it until it became distorted. A wave of fiction is now sweeping over the memory, glazing it with the sheen of imagination and drawing it out of my catalog of experience. Because I think there’s something instructive in the story, I have decided to write it down before nothing more than an outline and fabrication remains.

In 2009, I was on my way to Syria from Armenia. This was before the war and Syria was still considered safe enough that the US Government allowed someone under its protection to go there (I was a Peace Corps volunteer at the time and had to ask Uncle Sam’s permission to travel anywhere). In order to get to Syria, I had to pass through all of Georgia and down through eastern Turkey. While in Turkey, I was hoping to meet a friend. A man I’d met a year before, while he was walking from Iran to Turkey. He had stopped in the town where I had been living in southern Armenia and we had become friendly enough that when he left, continuing on his journey, I’d agreed to walk with him as far as the Armenian capital, as I had a meeting there in a few days. I neglected to bring a sleeping bag and nearly froze to death the first night as we slept in a road-side stall after we found the legendary hospitality of Armenians did not extend to offering lodging. The next day, we walked until evening together out of the mountains and down into the plains, but ultimately, I had to flag down a ride to be at my meeting by the next morning. We parted ways on the side of the road, not knowing if we’d meet again.

My traveling friend and I didn’t see each other again while he passed through Armenia, but I referred him to everyone I knew living along his route. He stayed with Reza in Yerevan and Davor in Vanadzor as he moved north. I continued to receive reports on his progress until he left the country. Even beyond Armenia, he kept in touch, sending me an email or two from the road in Georgia and Turkey and when, a year later, I prepared to head through eastern Turkey to get to Syria, I sent him a message, to see if he was still in the area. He was and we agreed to meet at the central mosque in Batumi on the Georgian/Turkish border.

I got into Batumi the evening before we’d agreed to meet. I had been traveling for over 16 hours and felt vertiginous and hypnotized. It was a rainy night and I was forced to take the first room I could find to keep myself dry. I only had one change of clothes and didn’t want to get wet. My room was in the top of an old house, not far from the Black Sea harbor. I had to cross a dark and empty room to get to it, with a dirty, but full fish tank in the corner, bubbling away. The algae was too thick to see through. The room itself was strange. The ceiling sloped toward the wall in a strange way, as if the builder hadn’t been sure how to bring the two together. The lumpy twin bed was pushed into a strange niche which resulted and I spent the evening under the blankets, still wearing all my clothes to fight the chill, listening to the rain lash the roof overhead and reading The Count of Monte Cristo, smoking cigarettes because I hadn’t brought enough food.

By morning, the storm had ended, but there was still a breeze and cold puddles filled every pothole on the way to the bus station—probably one of the only places left outside of his birthplace which still boasted a statue of Stalin, a bust on a column which stood up, scowling among the long-distance vans coming and going early in the morning to make their far-flung destinations at a reasonable hour. The drivers of these vans, rotund and smiling around their cigarettes, blowing coffee steam, looking nothing like their enshrined countryman.

My friend had sent me an email telling me he’d had problems leaving Turkey on his visa and hadn’t been able to get into Georgia. He was just across the border in Rize staying at a hotel he’d written of as being something of a brothel after an insistent prostitute had come to his door to proposition him multiple times the previous night.

I had no trouble crossing into Turkey, after paying the requisite 20 bucks, and found the hotel easily enough. During the day, there didn’t seem to be any prostitutes around and I made it to my friend’s door without encountering anyone other than the bored-looking guy at the front desk. My friend packed up his things and we went out for a tea before looking for a bus, which we found easily enough, an actual bus heading to Erzurum in the late afternoon. The bus marked a milestone. In Armenia and Georgia, at the time, there were no buses, only crammed vans called, collectively, marshrutki, which I was very tired of riding, considering the strain the lack of space put on one’s knees.

As my friend and I continued to catch up, discussing books and walks, our bus climbed up into the hinterlands of Turkey, into an area the Armenians once inhabited and was, today, at the limits of Turkish Kurdistan. A place of contention. A place in the dry plateau where one scrambled to pull resources together and shunned neighbors as potential thieves. Our bus swung through the gloom of the desolate mountain passes and the subtle but continuous winds carrying tufts of snow from one side of the road to the other unarrested by trees of any kind. From the warm bus, it was a pleasant scene to observe without having to interact with; a cold, dark and isolated place without a single sign of human habitation. I sipped what remained of a complementary tea and listened to my friend talk about what he’d been reading. I tried to concentrate on his voice, but the lonely scene beyond the window absorbed my attention.

Until this point in my journey, I hadn’t seen any snow. Armenia had still been in the throes of autumn when I’d left and Georgia, despite being further north, enjoyed a mild climate thanks to the subtropical influence of the Black Sea. Crossing into Turkey, Rize was nearly on the Black Sea littoral but Erzurum, our destination, was back in the rolling landscape of eastern Anatolia where the weather was more somberly continental: hazy summers, crisp dusty autumns and dominated by the vast, silent winters of the high plains. As we climbed back towards the spreading shadow of Ararat, a heavy gray snow began to fall.

Despite the snow-obscured road, our bus arrived in Erzurum in the evening. We were planning to continue south. At the station, we asked about buses to Batman, but we were told that nothing would be leaving until the next day. There was only one bus left for the day and it was going to Ankara. On the trip down, my friend had told me how, being from Scotland, he was constantly equated with the Braveheart character, no matter which country he was in. At the bus station, he proved it to me. When we’d finished with our questions, the Turks asked where we were from. They’d grinned at my ‘America’ but seemed confused about what to say, but when they pointed to my friend and listened to his ‘Scotland’ or ‘Iscocia’ as it is in Turkish, they’d lit up. “Braveheart!” They’d yelled, offering hands to be shaken. One guy, presumably a bus driver by the width and humidity of his mustache, even threw up his hands, as if welcoming Mel Gibson himself. I wondered how many times my friend had heard this before. It must’ve been even worse in the Caucasus, among the mountaineers. I’d heard in Chechnya, it was the only Holloywood movie anyone watched.

Outside, we waded through a foot of snow looking for a hostel. The air was burning cold and belied the warm lights advertising kebabs and other, incomprehensible, Turkish fast food. I tried to smoke a cigarette, but it was so cold and windy, I had to give up. My fingers were going numb and the burning tobacco was continually being blown out.

We stayed in a hostel for the night and, in the morning, went off to the Ataturk University to scour the library for anything in English. We didn’t find much, but my friend was content to stay for a while and catch up on his Turkish studies. I went off to explore the town for any remaining vestiges of the Armenians.

Erzurum had a big center with plenty of impressive architecture, but I don’t remember much about it other than looking up into a big dome, open to the sky on one side, that looked like an apse over a massive door. I read carvings in the stone of old buildings, checked dates and, most of all, froze. It was such a cold day, that I continually had to duck into tea houses to warm up with one of the small tuliped glasses of tea which are so ubiquitous in Turkey you can order them in fast food places. Which is what I preferred to do because these places usually had their prices displayed somewhere, where the fancier places didn’t. Trying to save money and being leery of being ripped off kept me going in and out of the fast food places over by the bus station from which our bus south to Batman was scheduled to leave that evening.

The cold forced the sun to set early. It was scarcely 4 pm when it began to get dark. I’d just finished a tea, but I stopped at a place selling sesame rings to get another to keep the extra chill of impending night off. When I came out, I rounded a corner into a residential area and, under the warm glow of a streetlight, I found two boys sledding down the smallest hill you could imagine. It was no higher than the curb, but they continually pulled their sleds up, sat down, scooted over it and seemed to enjoy themselves. Having nothing better to do and a couple of hours before I was due at the bus station to meet my friend, I stood there and watched the boys (probably brothers, I reasoned) slide repeatedly down the bump. As I watched, I was approached by a man with a large, sad mustache (if a mustache can be thought of as sad, trailing down at the ends, looking like something hung on a peg and possibly forgotten) and a large overcoat. I couldn’t see much of his face under the streetlights, but his nose stuck straight out and his large, brown eyes sat humidly on either side of it like they were keeping it company.

“English?” The man asked in a slightly impatient manner. “DoyouspeakEnglish?” It was obvious from the way he ran his words together, it wasn’t his first language.

“I speak English,” I told him, wearily. He looked like someone who wanted money and I felt too cold and lazy to bother with giving him any, not that I had much to spare.

“I’m not Turkish,” the man exclaimed. “I’m from Iran.” He said this like it was natural that anyone visiting Turkey would have, by now, had their fill of Turks.

“Salaam,” I told him. “I have some good friends from your country. One is from Rasht. I’ve heard it’s a beautiful place. Do you know it?” But all this English was too much for him. He only shook his head confusedly.

“My English, not so good,” he told me, making a gesture that looked like he was driving away flies rather than illustrating language ability. “You know why I came Turkey?” The mustached man asked. I noticed his clothes, though clean, were cheap and didn’t look very warm. His jacket and hat looked like a costume for a play, rather than something you’d try to coax warmth from on a cold evening. His outer layers were floppy and uninsulated. If I’d been wearing what he was, I would’ve been freezing. The man, however, seemed too excited to be cold.

“Why’d you come to Turkey?” I asked parroting his question, seeing no reason why I shouldn’t humor him. I pulled out a cigarette, lit one and offered him the pack, from which he accepted two. I scowled a little.

“This is the only place Iran man goes without visa. Do you understand?” He accepted my light, but didn’t touch my hand with one finger to indicate his thanks afterward as my Iranian friends often did. He took a drag in between words and managed to exhale a massive smoke cloud which, in the cold air, hung around us before slowly breaking apart and drifting away.

“Only Turkey, I can go without visa. I want go anywhere else, I need visa. You,” he suddenly asked pointing at me. “Where are you from?” I told him. His eyes lit up. “Ahhh.” He exclaimed, grasping for my hand to shake. Which I offered, irritably; it seemed like a ploy. “You can go anywhere. No visa.” He was wearing thin leather gloves. Even through my own glove, I could feel how cold his hand was. I started to explain that I needed a visa to get into Turkey, but that I was able to buy it at the border and for Syria, where I was headed, I would definitely need a visa. He waved all this away. It was obvious he wasn’t interested in hearing what I had to say.

“You know why I am here?” His voice dropped a little and through the wind, I could barely hear him. The cold was biting into my cheeks and stinging the lobes of my ears which stuck out from under my hat. I wanted to go inside. It was obvious this man wanted to tell me something, but in the tradition of the area, he had to dance around the subject a while. There was something mournful about him. He looked like someone who’d once been well off who’d been forced into the kind of dignified destitution that is the hardest kind to maintain. It seemed possible he’d done something in Iran and had an interesting story of exile to tell. I shook my head and he continued talking.

“I came Turkey because I can only go here. I want to travel. I never traveled my whole life. So, I travel and when my money runs out, I kill myself.” He paused after this, as if seeing what I made of his statement. I waited him out to see if he was going to add anything, but he didn’t. In fact, he’d turned away as if he’d told me all he needed to. He watched the sledding boys without interest, smoking his cigarette in great gulps of smoke. I smoked too and considered what he’d said. I didn’t believe him. He was too proud of the idea to mean it. Having to unveil your suicide plan like that to a stranger, it wasn’t something anyone suicidal would do. But, I didn’t know very much about it. I waited for a story, the clincher. In just a moment, I was sure, he was going to tell me how I could save him by giving him money, but he just smoked and stared.

“You’re going to kill yourself?” I asked after a minute, feigning a more naive aspect than was probably necessary, like I wasn’t sure what the word ‘kill’ meant. The man continued to watch the boys. Either he didn’t hear me or he wasn’t going to acknowledge the question. I figured if he didn’t want money, he wanted me to talk him out of it. But I had no idea how to begin. The only thing I knew about him was that he was from Iran and was going to kill himself. Even those suicide prevention line operators need more information than that.

A wind spouted down from the mosque roof we were standing near, spraying the cold, dry snow that had recently been shoveled from the walk. The boys crouched behind their sled and laughed. The man made no effort to protect himself. The wind and snow fluttered his useless clothes like a scarecrow. With his jacket shaking in the wind, I could see his back was hunched over. His head was too far down between his shoulders, like a vulture. It gave me the chills. He saw me looking and tried to straighten up, but his head wouldn’t lift all the way. I don’t know what it meant, but it reminded me of all the illnesses that can beset someone and twist up their guts or squeeze their bones without anyone knowing why. So many cancers could have been eating this man from the inside. He could have been in so much pain I couldn’t see. With this possibility, it was just as unlikely that he wouldn’t kill himself. Why shouldn’t I believe him? The wind died down; I tried to think of something comforting or at least meaningful to say. I wanted to tell him he wasn’t alone, but, he was. He’d finished his cigarette and I offered my pack again. This time, he only took one.

The kids had started sledding again and their shouts drifted over to us, muffled by the wind. I only knew a handful of words in Turkish, but somehow I’d picked up the word for ‘nightingale’. Since the kids weren’t yelling ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’ or any of the other words I knew, they were yelling ‘nightingale’. Every word they yelled, sledding down that bump and climbing up it again. ‘Nightingale, nightingale—nightingale.’

The man puffed his cigarette and watched the boys. He seemed to be hearing the same translation of their shouts I was, but I couldn’t tell what he thought about it. I started talking, knowing he wouldn’t understand, but wanting to be alive and to add something to the windy silence. Another boy came running from across the street to join the sledding. He jumped on the sled and the other two tackled him. The three of them rolled around in the snow a little before fitting themselves onto the sled, each one holding onto the legs of the boy behind him.

“You should go to Istanbul, at least,” I said. “If you want to travel. You might see something different there.” It felt stupid to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

“I started there.” He said. His voice nearly startling me, coming out of the wind, between the shouting boys. “It was the first place after I leave Iran.”

I started asking him traveler’s questions. ‘Hagia Sofia? Bosporus? Lokum?’ He waved them all away. ‘No,’ he told me and explained that Iranian money didn’t have a very good exchange rate. He said he’d just wandered around. I told him I’d done the same when I’d been there, not having much money either. He nodded at this, confirming the wisdom of my activity. I wondered if we’d been there at the same time, but I didn’t say anything else. There was no point to the conversation.

I finished smoking. I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t offer anything, but I figured as long as I stood there, he wouldn’t be alone. Gradually, I convinced myself to ask the man about himself. I asked about his family and his life back in Iran. He answered my questions in his weary, wind-flapped voice and, despite my attention, I immediately forget everything he said. After his statement, his words seemed to blow away before they made any sense. 

One of the boys was trying the bump while standing on the sled, but the position proved too much temptation for the other two and he was tackled before he could make any progress. I wondered what the kids looked like to the man. From the end of life, what did the beginning look like? Was it absurd or enviable? The man’s expression gave no indication. He continued to smoke. His expression was so blank, I wondered if he saw the boys at all. It seemed he didn’t after one of them grabbed the sled and ran off, the others following down the street until they were gone. The man kept his eyes on the bump, like there was still something to see there.

After the sledders left, I couldn’t stand on that street alone with the man. I can give no explanation why. I gave him the rest of my cigarettes and told him, before I left, that things could always get better. He didn’t say anything in response but said goodbye after I did. I shook his cold hand again and hurried to the bus station, past the cold lights of the kebab stands. The overnight bus to Batman was already at the station, half-full of tired Kurdish passengers and their bundles. Over the two front windows, there was an enormous MASHALLAH decal. I found my friend and we got on the bus together. We were both tired after the cold day. We talked for a bit after the bus pulled out of the station and climbed back up into the snow-covered hills. I told him what I could about the Iranian man, but there wasn’t much to say and gradually we began to fall asleep, like kids at a sleepover, our words becoming further and further spaced until there was no reply. I stayed awake a little while and drowsily watched the headlights plow through the falling snow. The bus was warm and snoring. Everyone must’ve been asleep. The snow came at the windshield, like long-winged moths, flapping against the letters HALLAHSAM at the top of the glass and pushed away by the long wiperblades. In the dim light, I could make out my reflection, and gradually, the reflections of the other passengers. Everyone’s features were only half completed. The eyes and cheek hollows were pocketed by snowy darkness and, gradually, as my eyes relaxed, the snow replaced everything.