“My journey will only truly begin when I have nothing,” she said.
We reached the Greek border that afternoon, and of course we couldn’t just drop Ulla off there, Dolf insisted on taking her to Thessalonica, which was another two hundred and fifty miles away. By the time we got there, everyone was ready for a proper bed, especially Dolf, though not because he was sleepy. We needed to find a cheap place to stay the night.
“Drive to the railway station,” Ulla said. “There will be cheap hotels near there.”
I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to find the railway station seeing as I couldn’t read Greek, but I drove around the town and eventually found a bus station. When I stopped the car, we were surrounded by large women who were all talking at once. The women were miming sleeping, so we worked out that they were offering us accommodation. It had been a week since I’d slept in a proper bed. (I didn’t count the hostel bunk.) A women dressed in black, with a black headscarf tied under her chin, pushed aside the others and wrenched open the passenger door. The Citroën bounced like a trampoline as she lowered herself into the front seat.
“Railway room,” the woman said. “Railway room, railway room.”
That seemed to be all the English she knew. She wrote one hundred and twenty on a scrap of paper and we guessed that was how many drachmas the railway room was going to cost. Dolf was nodding enthusiastically, the woman was shouting directions in Greek, and so I followed her waving arm.
I had no idea what a railway room was, but it sounded noisy and uncomfortable. I thought it might be on the edge of a train line or in a converted railway station, but the woman directed us to a whitewashed house with a tiled roof. It was her own house, which had a view across the town all the way down to the sea. And there wasn’t a train in sight.
It was a warm evening and we all sat in the backyard under a grapevine listening to the sound of cicadas. There were tomatoes, cucumbers and capsicums growing in the garden and an olive tree. It reminded me of our Greek neighbours’ garden in Semaphore. The woman couldn’t speak any English, but she seemed to know exactly what we wanted without us having to ask. She brought out lamb on skewers, salad and olives. There was wine and fresh fruit.
The woman had two rooms that she let out to tourists. The rooms were connected and to get to my room, I had to walk through the room that Dolf and Ulla were going to share. That was what a railway room was.
The bed was clean, if a little lumpy, and the night was still and quiet ... for a while. The sound of a squeaking bed broke the silence. The walls were thin and the darkness seemed to magnify the sound. I could hear someone panting. There was a sudden strangled cry, I couldn’t tell if it was Dolf or Ulla, and then it was quiet again. It seemed that every time I had a bed to sleep in, I had to listen to the sounds of people having sex.
In the morning, I was hoping for a shower, but there was only a lukewarm bath, which the woman filled for me to make sure I didn’t use too much hot water. I washed my hair, which was still stiff with salt. I plugged in my hair dryer, and it blew a fuse. The woman complained, muttering things in Greek. For breakfast there was bread and yoghurt and some sort of yellow porridge. The woman kept jerking her head towards the bedroom door. I could hear the bed squeaking again.
Eventually Dolf and Ulla came out, Dolf looking pleased with himself, while Ulla was as impassive as ever. I was annoyed with her for sleeping with Dolf. I could tell she didn’t care about him, but poor Dolf was in love. He was only going to get hurt. I don’t understand how some girls can have sex with someone they don’t love.
They drank coffee, but didn’t eat anything. The woman charged us almost double what she’d said the night before (apparently food wasn’t included in the original price), but Dolf didn’t argue. He put his wallet in his back pocket. At least he tried to. It fell to the floor. He tried again, but the same thing happened. The woman pointed to his rear and said something.
“You haven’t got a pocket on that side, Dolf,” I said. “It’s on the other side.”
I didn’t know that sex made you stupid.
Eleven
Edge of Europe
“What’s that up ahead?”
A black cloud hung huge and low over the horizon. It looked like smoke from a factory fire.
As we got closer I realised it wasn’t smoke but a cloud of pollution over a city. I’d never seen anything like it. That was my first glimpse of Istanbul.
We hadn’t left Ulla in Thessalonica. We didn’t drop her at the Turkish border. In the end, Dolf had decided he had to take her all the way to Istanbul. I could have complained, but there was no point. He’d made up his mind.
I’d crossed several national borders, but I’d been a bit nervous about going into Turkey. I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and we entered it on a minor road where one friendly guard stamped our passports and let us through without any questions. People working in wheat fields waved at us. There were tortoises in the grass by the roadside and storks nesting on top of buildings. We didn’t have any Turkish money, but in the next village a teacher bought us coffee. A woman gave me two white roses and some lemon cologne to cool my face. It was like we’d driven into a fairytale.
Istanbul was different. It looked so foreign. All over the city minarets pierced the sky. The people were dark-skinned and unsmiling and mostly men. And it was hot, so we had to have the windows open. The pollution wasn’t just fumes, it was in particles big enough to see. Bits of it settled on my skin and got into my eyes. I’d thought the pollution was bad in London, where the water ran grey when I washed my hair and my ankles were permanently grimy, but this was a whole lot worse. It was like breathing in smoke from a steam train.
I drove around in circles for about half an hour. It was scary. Other drivers were beeping at me for being slow and not knowing which way to turn and going the wrong way down a one-way street. The traffic noise was drowned out by someone wailing in Arabic over a loud speaker. I’d never heard anything like it.
“It’s the call to prayer,” Ulla said. “Muslims pray five times a day.”
Dolf sat in the back looking dazed. I think it was just starting to dawn on him how far he was from home. It had dawned on me a while back.
Ulla wanted to find out about the next leg of her journey east. She had a few Gestetnered sheets of advice for travellers, published by a hippy organisation in London called BIT. They mentioned a place called the Pudding Shop. We asked directions from a couple of long-haired Americans, who directed us to the Blue Mosque.
The huge, domed mosque soared into the grimy sky like a massive layer cake. It was built of grey stone and spiked with six slender minarets, which were beautiful but menacing, like rockets ready to ward off an attack from above. The Pudding Shop was a dingy little café in the shadow of the mosque which sold coffee and desserts. For some reason it had become the place where people travelling to India met to exchange information. And eat sweet things. The place was crowded with travellers, hippies, whatever you want to call them—young people from Britain and America, and all over Europe too. Istanbul was the last stop in Europe, or the first depending on which way you were going. Those who were on their way to the East looked fresh and wore bright T-shirts and jeans that were still blue. Those who were returning looked weary; their hair was longer and they wore beads. The girls had nose studs and faded Indian skirts.
I didn’t care whether Dolf was going home or not; I knew what I was going to do. As soon as possible, I was turning round and going back to London. There was one boy with faded clothes and red hair in a ponytail who was on his way back from India. I asked him how he was getting home.
“I’m hitching,” he said, “but if you want to cop out and take the easy way there’s a bus that goes all the way to Amsterdam.”
He told me that the bus would cost about twelve pounds. I’d spent over eight pounds, so I had just enough cash to pay for that, plus the channel ferry with a little left over for food.
While Ulla was read
ing the notice board, I was reading the menu. There was an English version tacked up on the wall. It seemed like a long, long time since I’d had dessert. I thought I’d earned it. The red-haired guy recommended the Turkish rice pudding. That sounded good to me, so I ordered some. It was good—thick and creamy, served cold and sprinkled with cinnamon. Dolf was comparing the cheap hotels on the notice board to the list on Ulla’s pages. It was confusing; some of the places that the BIT notes said should be avoided got rave reviews on the notice board.
“We could go to de camping,” Dolf suggested.
He was pointing at a faded flyer for a camping ground.
“That’s a good idea, Dolf,” I said. I had to conserve my money.
We didn’t have a map of Istanbul, so I memorised the vague instructions on the notice board—near the airport, past a ruined church, turn off at the Shell station. I got lost and Ulla was giving me a hard time as I drove along the same stretch of road for the fifth time. I’d had enough of her icy Scandinavian attitude, her down-turned mouth, her impossibly straight hair.
“Do you want to drive?” I said.
I was looking at her in the rear-view mirror. She just gazed out of the window and ignored me.
“You’re such a bitch!” I shouted.
I was ready for a ding-dong argument, but she wouldn’t take the bait. I kept driving, getting faster and faster.
“You think you know everything!”
Dolf suddenly shouted something in Dutch in his high-pitched panic voice. I looked back at the road. I was on the wrong side. A truck was heading straight for us. I yanked the steering wheel. The Citroën ran off the road, ploughed through some long grass and narrowly missed a tree.
“Sugar!”
I was so busy steering I forgot to brake. The Citroën kept going through the grass and then miraculously we were on a dirt road. The car finally rolled to a halt and stalled. My arms were shaking, my heart was thumping, sweat was running down my back.
I could see camper vans and tents through the trees.
“There is the camping,” Ulla said, as cool as ever.
The camping ground was a fenced patch of dusty dirt with three straggly trees and an ancient concrete building without a roof that contained the toilets and showers. There were three types of accommodation—a few caravans equipped with fridges and televisions belonging to stray European holiday makers who had wandered off the beaten track; the grubby tents and multicoloured kombi vans of young travellers; and then those who didn’t have vehicles or tents had erected a jumble of sad and sorry makeshift dwellings, made from blankets and groundsheets propped up with sticks.
Ulla watched Dolf put up the tent.
I belonged with the motley group that didn’t have tents.
I apologised to Ulla for yelling at her.
“You are too uptight,” she said.
Dolf and I shared the last tin of beans, and then Dolf followed Ulla into the tent. I did some long-overdue hand washing. I went to the toilet. It wasn’t a sit-down toilet, it was the type that you squat over, made of cracked, grey porcelain with foot-shaped indents either side of a hole. There was no chain to pull, no button to press to flush it, and no toilet paper, just a bucket of water to sluice your business away. It smelt awful. By that time it was dark and there were no lights in the shower block, and I didn’t want to shower in the dark.
With my last ounce of energy, I constructed a miserable shelter for myself with the quilt and a sheet of plastic and crawled into Thomas’s sleeping bag.
We drove back into the centre of Istanbul the next morning and had a late breakfast at the Pudding Shop—fresh bread, yoghurt and thick, sweet black coffee. Turkish bread comes in flat oval slabs sprinkled with sesame seeds. After the bread in Yugoslavia and Greece—which was tasteless, like unsweetened, white fairy floss—Turkish bread was delicious. I learned the word for bread which is ekmek.
A man, who said he was from Pakistan, struck up a conversation with Dolf and Ulla, and they went off with him to look around. They didn’t ask me if I wanted to go with them. I felt a bit panicky as I ventured out onto the street. I was alone in Istanbul. The mosque towered above me. There were crowds of people—boys selling cigarettes from trays around their necks, European tourists groups, women with covered heads. This was one place where I really didn’t want to be by myself. Everyone was staring at me. I was conscious of my uncovered flesh. I was wearing clothes I’d worn around London without even thinking, but I’d suddenly become indecent.
A man with a thick black moustache with the ends curled thrust a postcard in my face.
“One lira,” he said and he wouldn’t let me pass.
Through the crowd I thought I saw a tiny red dragon. I pushed the postcard man aside. I tried to move forward. I thought I must have imagined the dragon, but then, in among the shouting, beeping and the midday call to prayer, I could hear someone whinging in a Welsh-accented voice about the lack of proper food. I elbowed my way through the crush of people and glimpsed the dragon again.
“Alun!”
I pushed aside a tour guide with a megaphone and some bare-foot boys begging for money. I saw green trousers.
“ALUN!”
He turned round. I waved both hands in the air as if I were drowning and he was a lifesaver. He waved back and came over to me.
“So are you following us now, Adelaide?” he said with his hands on his hips.
“No, I think it’s you who’s stalking me.”
I don’t know why I was so pleased to see him. It’s not like he could solve my problems, but his smiling face made me feel like things weren’t so bad.
“Hello, Jackie,” Val said. He’d stopped shaving and the beginnings of a beard suited him.
Alun’s facial hair was less successful.
They’d only just arrived in Istanbul.
“Do you know where Ulla is?” Val asked.
I felt a pang. At the time I wasn’t willing to admit to myself that it was jealousy. I couldn’t understand why males found Ulla so attractive.
“She went with Dolf to the bazaar.” I was sure she’d forgotten all about her vague promise to meet them there.
Alun was looking at the food for sale on a stall.
“I need potatoes,” he said miserably.
There was a potato dish, but it was cold with chunks of boiled potato swimming in a watery tomato sauce. I thought it looked pretty good. Even though I’d not long had breakfast, I was ready for lunch, but Alun didn’t like the look of it.
“I don’t want to eat anything ... you know ... foreign.”
“That could be difficult,” I said, “seeing as we’re in Turkey.”
“I know, but I don’t want to get the runs.”
“He’s trying to avoid going to the bog,” Val said. He gave me one of his half smiles.
“I know a place to eat,” I said and led them back through the crowd to the Pudding Shop.
Alun wasn’t impressed.
“Try the bread,” I said. “It’s lovely. I don’t know how white bread can taste so good.”
“It’s baked in a stone oven heated by a wood fire,” Val said.
Alun rolled his eyes. “I suppose you’ve been to Turkey before.”
“We came here on holiday when I was a child.”
“His dad is a diplomat,” Alun explained. “Val’s been everywhere at least once.”
Alun didn’t like the look of the Turkish bread.
I recommended the rice pudding and Alun ordered two serves, but it reminded him of his mother’s cooking and made him homesick again.
“I’m glad we ran into you again, Adelaide,” Alun said. “I don’t suppose I could swap the book you gave me for the other one?”
“Didn’t you like it?”
“Well, I did sort of like it.” He looked embarrassed. “But I’ve finished it, see. And now I need something else to read.”
“I haven’t got it with me, it’s back at the camping ground.”
Alun looked
at Val. “I don’t suppose we could...”
“No.”
Val wanted go to the bazaar to buy things he could sell for a profit back in London, but Alun put his foot down.
“I’m not going to the Bazaar. If I’ve come this far, I’m at least going to look at the ancient buildings and Alexander’s tomb!”
I’d travelled hundreds of miles and seen no historical buildings. I’d been to Paris and barely glimpsed the Eiffel Tower. I’d driven through Greece without visiting a single ruin. I’d reached the end of a crazy journey and accidentally ended up in Istanbul, so I thought I might as well spend one afternoon seeing some of the sights.
“I’ll come with you,” I said. “If you don’t mind. I was a bit nervous on my own.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Your sense of direction is terrible,” Val said. “I’ll only have to come looking for you if you go off on your own.” I didn’t know whether he meant Alun, me, or both of us.
We went into Saint Sophia, another huge mosque that had been turned into a museum. We left our shoes at the door and entered the cool and uncrowded space, staring up at the massive dome, high above us. It was decorated with swirling gold Arabic writing. There were mosaics of Christian saints, which seemed strange in a mosque. Alun wanted a brochure, but the only one they had for sale was in German. Val translated it for us.
“It’s the oldest mosque in Istanbul, built fifteen hundred years ago,” he said, “but it started off as a cathedral. Later it was converted to a mosque and the minarets were added.”
We walked barefoot over beautiful carpets spread all over the floor, breathing in a sharp fragrance which Val said was frankincense.