“Oh my God.”
At the Erzurum airport, we ate at the Snow City Airport Restaurant, which had broad windows and resembled a steel version of a ski lodge, with its high triangular ceiling and view of the mountains, its bad hot sandwiches and impatient children. The wireless connection worked upon our arrival and a week later did not. A large flat-screen TV was hooked up to the video game Tetris. A family of six watched a plane rev up on the runway, the tears steadily gathering in the women’s eyes as the plane prepared for takeoff. They finally let themselves cry once the plane sped away, as if they hadn’t believed that their relative would actually be leaving them until they saw the evidence themselves.
It was a spotless, proud airport complex, built to usher in more skiing-related tourism, aspiring to be a holiday destination, except that there were women moving slowly in black chadors and lots of tesettür, the belted, long coats and tightly drawn head scarves of current Turkish fashion. The women didn’t look like skiers. There were mescit areas, tiny warrens for praying, and walls of windows facing the thick, jade-colored grasslands, and the gleaming, blinding, silver snowy peaks that cast their glare on us like the tips of light swords. The landscape looked as if it had been swept clean of unnecessary objects. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe the emptiness made the land seem vulnerable: to ugly condos, ski lodges, more Snow City Airport Restaurants, English-language signs stabbed into ancient grounds. The Euphrates begins there.
In his memoir Blood-Dark Track, the novelist Joseph O’Neill, who is of Turkish and Irish descent, writes of nothingness in a country that ought to be full of something. Everywhere you are conscious of the great absence discovered beyond yet another hill, mountain, ancient river, or contemporary man-made lake. The emptiness is a mirror. He writes:
What I was really feeling, during these journeys, was the solipsistic anxiety that can result from being plunged among people with whom I stood in a relation of near-total mutual ignorance. To be among such strangers was a form of eradication; for which of them could bear witness to who I was? And the converse was also true: unable meaningfully to incorporate these Anatolians into my construction of the world, I lacked the ability to do them justice.
O’Neill’s passage resonated with me because driving around eastern Turkey—my first time east—felt like confronting an enormous void. Although the landscape was beautiful, I often felt completely terrible, beset by a sense of menace that I couldn’t shake for the rest of the trip.
I began to realize why I felt this way when we reached Kemah. The roads had been slow that day and it had gotten dark before we made it to a decent-size city. Kemah was a creepy place, I knew that before I even saw it. One hundred years ago, in June of 1915, the Turks had sent thousands of Armenians on a forced march and then shoved them off the cliffs overlooking the town. This, I found, was what happened so often to me in Turkey: You’re learning about a country, you have read books, and so you know what bad things have happened, and where, and then you go to those places, and you can’t help but feel haunted by your knowledge of the invisible past. You keep wanting to see it, though; to see those bad things playing out on the land before your eyes, to imagine that that big old tree was once watered with blood, to feel certain that the people who inhabited the town also carried with them if not the motives, then the memory of the crimes committed before their own births. Would the people of Kemah always bear a kinship to those thousands of Armenians pushed from the Kemah cliffs, or to the people who pushed them?
I kept seeing these connections—the dead Armenians, the Kurds, the ubiquitous Martyrs’ Parks—connections I had never felt the moral compulsion to look for while traveling in, say, the Native American blood lands of Colorado or the old plantation fields of the American South. Suddenly, though, it was all I could think about—that I never made the same inquiries into my own country as I did here in Turkey. I judged the Turks; every time I read of another massacre, another disgrace, I somehow brought it to bear on the collective character of the people I was meeting, as if that history had formed them. But then what of mine, and what of me?
We drove into the village of Kemah along a river and across a bridge. On the right, there was a famous Sel?uk türbe, or tomb, and then the road wound to the left and up a hill to the town. The mosque and teahouse sat at the center of the place and about ten men were sitting outside, drinking their tea. Most of the buildings seemed run-down, tables in front of restaurants turned over, unwelcoming. Two guys hung out of what passed for a sports car, their terrible techno music rattling the windows. There was a small hospital and one bank and three restaurants. The ever-faithful jandarma, or military police, stood guard at the bottom of the hill, right where the road began, as if it were a gate. At one point, I saw trucks of soldiers pass on the main road—a parade of camouflage unfolding forever, one after another, men’s legs jangling together in the open-air back.
Turks in this part of the country often didn’t allow women to stay in hotels alone, and in any case there wouldn’t be any hotels in Kemah. We knew to ask for the o?retmen evi, or teachers’ house, which was where civil servants stayed while traveling. It looked a bit like a high school, as if they wouldn’t want their retired teachers or guests to ever feel displaced, and had the cold, tinny feeling of a psychiatric ward: no carpets, no cloth, no comfort, no niceties. In Turkey, I thought this was the aesthetic of an aggressive modernity: like the cold busts of Atatürk, his austere face and translucent eyes reminding his people of a vision of modernity now being wiped away by time.
Three little girls called to us soon after that: “Abla! Abla!” (Sister! Sister!) The three girls looked not at all like they might be from the same country. One, with fair, peachy skin and freckles and light brown hair, had nondescript features and a rangy athleticism. The second child looked drawn from an old Eastern European postcard: her face narrow, her nose large, her eyes the saddest and most stunning blue, her eyebrows thick as a brush, but her hair plain and straight brown. And the third girl didn’t really look as if she were from Turkey at all. I assumed she was Kurdish, but even then she looked more like she was from Central Asia. Enormous almond eyes wrapped around the width of her head like sunglasses, her face tapered into a heart shape; her skin a perfect bronze, her hair stick-straight and black. My Turkish friend Asl? later told me that the reason all the girls looked different might have been because at least one of them was Armenian.
“Do you think you will ever leave here?” I asked one girl.