The Consolations of Village Life

Early one Saturday morning I stood the balcony of my third-story apartment and glanced down at the street below.  At that hour there was no reason to expect any riveting sight, but to my surprise I saw a flock of sheep trooping up the street; filling it from curb to curb.  On the column’s left flank was one of the neighborhood’s stray dogs, surrendering to its herding instinct.  At its head was a real, live shepherd. 

I live in a village.  Its name, Görükle, has no meaning in Turkish, according to some because it represents a corruption of Kouvoukleia, the name it went by in Ottoman times, when the majority of its population spoke Greek.  By now, the Greeks are long repatriated and replaced by students from nearby Uludağ University, giving the place more in common with the Athens in Ohio or Georgia than the one facing the Aegean.

The University dates back to the 1970s; its current student body totals almost 45,000.  Görükle’s elevation from somnolent map-speck to country-fried college town must have been gradual, but it seems to have gained momentum over the past few years.   To a point, its town and gown portions are visibly demarcated.  The eastern end of town, the one closest to the campus, is filled with new five-story apartment buildings.  Farther west, the streets begin to narrow.  The houses, squatter and older, their doors and windows framed blockily in wood, sport front yards where chickens wander. 

But the two cultural strains have a way of intersecting.  Across the street from my student-swollen apartment building is a grazing commons – that's what the shepherd was leading his sheep home from.  With pricey cafes open till the very wee hours, Atatürk Cadde, or avenue, has the look of a student cruising drag.  But you’re almost as likely to see a tractor tooling along it as a Peugot or a motor scooter, even on a Saturday night.

Village life in a single word?  Convenient. If I need to restock on cigarettes, ekmek, or Diet Coke, there’s a tekel, or convenience store, within 100 yards of my front door – about half the distance between my Phoenix apartment and the nearest Circle K.  I pay my electric and water bills at an office only another couple of hundred yards up the hill and across Atatürk.  The expedition takes about as much time as paying by phone, when you count APS’ labyrinth of voice prompts.  Plus, right around the corner from the pay station, a guy named Ismail runs a combination tailor shop, dry cleaner, and laundry service.  A bit up the street from him, Şaypa, the chain supermarket, sells razors, shampoo, shower gel and – best of all, as I discovered last night – underwear. 

Village life, then, is a lot like life in a compressed urban area, only so much cheaper.

Surely yuppies have known this forever, which is why they’ve made a habit of squirreling themselves away in places like Tarrytown, New York, Newton, Massachusetts, and Hiawassee, Georgia.  For the first three months after my arrival here, I paid the price they typically pay: a daily commute to satellite branches of my school buried deep inside Bursa.  The round trip could take up two and a half hours.  The sheer routine of it all – on the minibus, off the minibus; on the Metro, off the Metro – made me feel more cramped and programmed than any cube farm ever had.   If I hadn’t been able to ease myself into each new day with a run through the breeze-kissed mountain greenery around campus, I’m  sure I’d have burned out. 

But at the beginning of July, through a series of lucky breaks and coincidences I can only describe as providential, I was offered a job at a better-run school whose headquarters stands within sleepwalking distance of my apartment.  (To be exact, it stands just across the street from Şaypa, the underwear store, and only a corner away from Ismail's shop and the bill-pay station.)  Since then, I've been living the life of a full-time villager, stretching my daily runs to nine miles, and saving close to 70 lira each week in Metro and minibus fare.

The new arrangement feels almost too good to be true.  To boot, it feels unearned -- in the eyes of a skeptic, providence, or grace, can look an awful lot like caprice.  Every hour I haven't spent on the Metro, I've reminded myself, "You'd better be making the most of this time, Buster Brown.  You could feel the crunch again any day now."  To nine of these warnings out of ten, my response has been to grunt and fart and sleep for another hour.  (The fact that I'm writing again might mean I'm all caught up.)  But, when awake, I make a point of soaking up as much ease and beauty as my senses will hold.

Also by way of keeping both feet on the ground, I catalogue all the demystifying details of the place.  It's hotter than hell, and my apartment has no air conditioning.  Morons roar up the hill on motorcycles and motor scooters till all hours of the night.  My run carries me over concrete and asphalt; my knees will take their revenge on me before long.  The other day I opened my door to find a grasshopper the size of my fist waiting for me on my doorstep, like he was collecting for Arthropod Relief Services.  My girlfriend's in Istanbul, a trip of at least five hours, door to door.  Except for working, sleeping, writing, and working out, there's fuck all to do.

No, this isn't a novel where an uptight bourgeois flees to some sunny wasteland in search of his missing mojo and either finds it (as in Zorba: The Greek) or loses his marbles (as in The Magus).  This is real life.  Providence has patted me on the head, but it's a pat of moderate force, nothing to freak out over.

A few nights ago, as I was walking home from class, I passed the grazing commons.  There was enough of a moon that I could make out the humped, wooly backs of the sheep, milling together silently.  As I came closer, one of them sprang over the curb and into the street.  Its lunge showed a power and grace I'd thought beyond the species.  After glancing around, it shuffled back to join its colleagues.  Then I noticed they were all clustered around the dumpsters, eating the leftovers from the previous night's Iftar.  Real life indeed. 

The Accidental Activist

By now the whole world knows that Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç doesn’t want women laughing out loud in public.  He said so last Monday, the first day of the Bayram, or national holiday, marking the end of Ramadan.  Right away, Turkish women voted Arınç down with their pearly whites, flashing them in hilarity for selfies which they’ve posted on Snapchat.

In my own way, I, too, stood at the barricades.  Only two days after Arınç’ speech, I made a Turkish woman laugh.  Where Turkish culture’s concerned, I’m a tenderfoot, functionally mute when the conversation drifts away from ekmek, or baguettes, and çay, or tea.  The woman was laughing at me, which I’ll admit she had every right to do.   

It happened at Yenikapı, in front of the ticket window for the Istanbul Deniz Otobüs, or ferryboat.  I had spent three days in the city, visiting my girlfriend, Gülçin. Now I was preparing to re-cross the Sea of Marmara, back to Bursa, where I teach English.  In truth, it hadn’t been much of a vacation.  Instead of visiting the Hagia Sophia or the Galata Tower, or sampling the hip charms of Kadıköy, Gülçin and I had mostly hung around her air-unconditioned apartment, doing our best not to melt.  Money, as we’ll see presently, was tight.

 The ancient capital, seat of caesars and sultans, sprawls across 2,000 square miles like a concrete Maja Desnuda.  This makes it a cab driver’s paradise.  Back in March, on my first trip to my Gülçin’s house – located, as far as I can tell, halfway between the ferryboat landing and the Bulgarian border – my fare had come to a reasonable 90 Turkish lira, or $41.  This time, however, my driver soaked me 239 lira – an increase of nearly 300%.  The black shock of seeing those numbers blinking back from the meter made me forget my duffel.  The driver drove off with it, leaving me to blow another 500 lira at the Marmara Park shopping mall, replacing jeans, t-shirts, and socks.  (I never did figure out where to buy boxer briefs.) 

 Gülçin and her relatives agreed the man had probably jacked up the fare on purpose and, on finding unexpected plunder in his trunk, invoked the law of finders-keepers.  As any traveler knows, this is standard operating procedure.  But Turkey is a country where wild rumors – grim or hopeful, depending on your party preference – are shared like Willy Wonka memes.  If the reigning government’s not about to turn the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, it’s getting ready to abrogate the Lausanne Agreement.  I’d lived in the country only four months, but on this point cultural osmosis had had its way with me.  I found it impossible to smother the suspicion the driver had acted from some political motive.

As we sped away from the dock along Kennedy Cadde, I had noted hundreds of billboards touting Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for president.  Erdoğan is already prime minister and chairman of the Justice and Development Party – under either hat, he is Bülent Arınç’s boss.  Erdoğan's opponents fear that adding the presidency to his portfolio will complete his transformation from politician into strongman.  They may have a point.  Citywide Pop Art project seems pretty far down the road to equestrian statue.

Pointing to a bank of posters, I observed to the driver: “Tayyip – everywhere!”  Calling the PM by his middle name is a habit I picked up from Gülçin, a member of the opposition center-left Republican Party. I hadn’t worked out whether this kind of familiarity normally conveys affection, as in “Dubya,” or contempt, as in “Slick Willie” or “Barry Hussein.”  But I thought it sounded jaunty and knowing. At the beginning of the ride, the driver had bummed me a Parliament, which seemed like permission to show off.

Now he retorted: “Erdoğan!  President!”  Reverent and approving, the two words sounded like a parry in pidgin and made me shut my trap for the rest of the drive.  Ever after, I wondered whether inflating my fare and impounding my luggage could have been an Erdoğan loyalist’s act of sabotage against a cheeky Westerner.

Three days later, the return trip to Yenikapı came to an all-time low 73 lira.  I should have been overjoyed, but I wasn’t.  The bargain only confirmed my suspicion that on my earlier trip I’d been taken, literally, for a ride, and the confirmation put me in a poisonous mood.  All budget expats knows this mood well.  It dawns with the realization that the hardiness and adaptability we’ve claimed for ourselves is an alibi; that in our heart of hearts we’d rather be at Club Med, having our boots expertly licked.  The mood transcends politics, but politics, being one more source of strangeness, can feed it.  Worst of all, this mood has a way of demanding expression.   

The waiting room at the ferryboat landing wasn’t especially crowded.  The lines at the ticket windows were only a few people deep.  Most of the travelers seemed to be Turkish – sedate mothers and fathers with bouncing children in tow.  Together they made a low, contented hum.  Under other circumstances, it might have soothed me.  In my present state, the mellow domesticity reminded me that I was a foreigner, awkwardly transplanted into someone else’s incomprehensible normal.

The ticket agent was a woman in her early 20s, wearing hijab.  Briskly, she printed out my ticket and demanded: “Yirmi dokuz lira.”  Twenty-nine lira, or $13.58, is no great imposition by any standards.  But it also happened to be nearly twice what I’d paid to ride the same ferry in the opposite direction.  That was the match to the powder.  I went Five Easy Pieces, lashing the agent with the umbrage earned by the crooked driver and – now that I think about it – by the sales clerk at Mavi Jeans.

She opened her mouth and blinked when I called the price a travesty.  When I called it exploitative, she cocked her head like a curious beagle.  This is not what communications experts call mirroring, so I groped for the words in Turkish.  How “korsan,” or “pirate,” made its way into my working vocabulary, I had no idea.  But surely it had to express the thought “This is highway robbery” better than “ekmek.”

Pointing fiercely through the glass, I snapped, “Korsan!”  The agent’s eyes narrowed with delight and a laugh escaped her.  It was a most unpirate-like laugh – practically a titter – and she quickly covered her mouth and tried to look serious.  All of it, her laugh and her determined reversion to gravity, so charmed me that I took my ticket and stomped off to the büfe, where I picked a fight over marked-up Biskrem cookies.

Maybe by now, in the best Turkish tradition, the agent’s told all her friends that the foreigner she served last Wednesday was acting from his own political motive, making her laugh on purpose in the hope of subverting her religious observance or her party’s social agenda.  For the record, I wasn’t – I was melting down like a Snickers bar.  But where’s the glory in that?