Tragicocomedia

“Otogar, Otogar,” the man insisted. He seemed almost desperate, as though my life depended on it. If I wasn’t somewhat sympathetic to his situation I would have laughed at this exaggeration. Either way, I knew how to get to the bus station and wasn’t about to pay someone to show me.

The tram platform was raised above the street; the main drag of the Sultanahmet district, Istanbul. The man walked up and down, nose to the opportunity. All about were tourists, travellers, pilgrims; some were bound to be clueless.

The day was still crisp with breakfast; fine air ticklish with desiccated leaf. The order hereabouts – neatness, monumentality, soaring, ancient stone – was an island. Outside Sultanahmet the tides of Istanbul pulsed and surged; everywhere a little busier, a little dirtier. I was still in two minds about the place, though I was reluctant to leave. Love took a little longer these days, but I figured it would eventually arrive. It wasn’t, after all, my first time there. That had been five years before; tired after five months on the road; a sad, reluctant coda, oddly non-plussed.

The tram filled up quickly. The carriage was full of other travellers; pilgrims I suppose, come to pay a sort of homage. The purpose was still indistinct to me and the rationale unclear. It was homesickness, adventurousness, a good excuse to go back to Turkey and see more ruins. Anzac Day at Gallipoli.

I stood by the doors at the carriage’s end. Before me were a group of Kiwis and a tanned and freckled, blonde, weathered Australian. He can’t have been a day over thirty, but his face was lined from squinting against the antipodean glare. I hadn’t seen anyone who looked so Australian in a long time. He was accompanied by a young black man. I told myself he was Kenyan, a refugee, on no good grounds whatsoever. Another guess, but one far less informed. He smiled at the blonde Australian and smiled at me as well. I thought he looked nervous, something was in the balance.

“Are you from Australia?” the blonde man asked me.

“Yes. But I live in England.”

“Right. I’m an Aussie too. From W.A. Name’s Scott.”

He sounded very Australian indeed, dry and broad. There was distance in his eyes. Open space or tiredness? I couldn’t tell.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Gallipoli?”

“Yeah, mate, s’right.”

“Me too. Headed for the bus station?”

“Yep. That’s the one. This bloke’s takin’ me there.”

“Aha,” I said, unsure how to follow it up. “So, you know where to go then?”

“Yeah, well this bloke does. No worries.”

Scott had a tired and guarded look about him. The way he stood with his back against the wall spoke both of practical common sense, but also a certain deficit of trust. The “Kenyan” standing next to him kept smiling at both of us, almost sycophantically. I figured he must have latched onto Scott in the hope of getting a tip. Scott pointed a thumb at him and said:

“I gave him twenty US bucks. He’s helping me out.”

“Okay, nice.”

Twenty bucks. US. Phew. It struck me that here was a bloke who was really going to get taken for a ride in Turkey if he wasn’t more careful. Then again, Scott looked like he could afford it and no doubt the Kenyan needed the money more than him. I thought about saying something, but didn’t want to patronise him or insult the other chap. My mind wandered back to a scene from the film Gallipoli, in which gullible Australian soldiers get ripped off in the bazaars of Cairo. It was at this point that a thought first occurred to me that would stay with me over the next twenty-four hours – Scott was just like one of those original Anzacs.

I thought I ought to make small talk and asked Scott what he did. He told me he was an electrician who worked in rural Western Australia. He’d just arrived that morning at the end of a horrifically long journey. He’d flown back to Perth from the States where he’d been on holiday, met his brother at the airport who had packed his gear for him for his three-month trip to Europe, and three hours later he set off on the twenty-hour flight between Australia and Turkey. No wonder he looked tired.

Scott struck me as an old-fashioned Australian; quietly spoken and with a country formality about him. He was curiously, almost stiffly polite, saying “thanking you, thanking you,” to even the smallest offer of help or advice. He seemed to be utterly genuine in what he said and did – devoid of pretence and incapable of telling a lie. He didn’t exactly volunteer information, but was willing to talk once he got started.

I had often imagined a character such as him sending a postcard home with a touchingly simple message on it – his first communication in months. It would read something like this:

Dear Mum,

I’m in Turkey and I’m alright. Don’t forget to feed the chooks. Hope the tractor hasn’t broken down again, love to Gran,

Scott.

When we finally arrived at the bus station some fifteen minutes later, I gestured and offered Scott the door.

“After you,” I said.

He smiled and replied in his dry accent.

“Thanking you, thanking you.”

At the bus station we fare-welled Scott’s helper who had long ago realised he was redundant, but showed impressive loyalty for sticking it out. The main bus station, or Otogar, in Istanbul is a massive hexagonal affair of tall, brutalist concrete bays, accessed by spiralling overpasses. Like a temple complex for machines, the scale of it would be dehumanising were it not for the buzz of human chaos that fills it.

Scott and I followed the New Zealanders who had stood near us on the tram and bought tickets for the next bus down the coast. Having flown in first thing that morning and had next to no sleep, I really hoped I might be able to doze on the bus. Once aboard, however, I was too restless. The Kiwis from the tram ended up sitting opposite us and we all swapped stories along the way, taking in the dry landscape with its concrete communities that looked like so much scattered lego.

When we finally pulled into Eceabat, I was instantly struck by its scrappiness. The roads were full of holes, many of the pavements were dirt and rubble, and a considerable number of the houses and shops were half-derelict. Turkey is no stranger to that peculiar Mediterranean phenomenon of the concrete skeleton. Everywhere there are unfinished developments, many standing alone in the middle of nowhere – usually three to four storey apartment buildings, with the walls yet to fill the framework of concrete pylons and floors. Eceabat had a number of these skeletons on the outskirts of the town, and it was here that we headed after alighting from the bus, for at the southern edge of the town lay the famous “Vegemite Disco Bar.”

The Vegemite Disco Bar was ramshackle to say the least. Thrown up without symmetry or polish, the brick and breezeblock structure was a glorified shed, though in no way glorious. It was patched here and there with corrugated iron, fishing nets and pieces of board and was ennobled by a sloppy yet commercially accurate mural of the Victoria Bitter logo. The place had the feel of a post-apocalyptic survivors’ refuge; a last chance saloon of sorts. And so it was.

They did of course, sell dirt cheap beer – a snip at five hundred thousand lirasi – and it was cold. Just before embarking on this trip, the Turkish Lira had taken a nose-dive and was once again spiralling out of control. It lost half its value against the pound in little over a month and one pound now bought around two million lira. As a consequence of the insane level of devaluation and inflation that has plagued Turkey over the last few decades, they now have a ten-million lira note, which is truly spectacular to behold. The most alarming thing about the banknote, however, was that even for the seemingly impossible number of zeroes on it, it was still only the equivalent of a fiver.

Scott had worn a strained expression on his face for the last few hours, which I hoped was due to his epic trek across the world and not my conversation, but once he got a can of Troy Lager in his hand, he looked decidedly more relaxed. We were instantly accosted by a garrulous Kiwi who asked if we had anything to smoke. Sadly no, but he seemed an amusing bloke, so we walked outside and pulled in along the stretch of concrete beside the water, now crawling with southern hemisphericals. Some smiling Turks had a barbecue going and the smell of kebabs grilling over the coals filled the air.

We sat on a small, rickety wharf leaning out from the broken concrete, so rickety that we soon moved off it onto the concrete. Simon, our new-found Kiwi friend, proved a real barrel of laughs. He can’t have been more than about twenty-five years old, but he claimed to have just sold his house, left his girlfriend behind and left New Zealand “for as long as it takes.” I soon enough gleaned that the house had come into his hands as a consequence of some apparently very profitable drug-dealing. We chatted for a couple of hours, sinking cans of Troy in the warm afternoon sun. Clearly satisfied with the size of the crowd, the guys running the bar put on a cassette recorded off Triple J radio station in Australia. It must have been quite an old one, because after about half an hour the music was interrupted by a news flash in which there was mention of Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who hadn’t been prime minister since 1992.

A light breeze blew over the water and I took great pleasure in watching the glittering ripples across the bay. It was joy enough to be beside the sea once again and the scene was almost picturesque. By around five in the afternoon it started to get a little chilly, and I realised that the clothing I had  was not going to be warm enough to get through a night sitting on a windswept beach. What had I been thinking in bringing so little – and no sleeping bag? Scott looked ready to move. I think he was feeling sleepy after four beers and a kebab or two, so we fare-welled our new friend and set off along the main drag towards the bus-station.

I wandered into the first clothing shop I saw and bought a discount jumper that didn’t fit me in the slightest, but had potential life-saving qualities. We grabbed a couple of bottles of water, some snacks, hot and cold, fruit, and a large bottle of raki for emergencies, before grabbing one of the many taxis buzzing around. Our driver was an affable bloke who told us this was his fifteenth run out to the beach that day. During the course of the conversation, Scott somehow found ample opportunities to roll out his charming mantra of “thanking you, thanking you”.

On the drive out of Eceabat, we passed lines of people walking to the beaches and a number of flat-bed, horse-drawn carts topped by beer-swilling antipodeans. We drove through darkening fields and copses of pines glowing a pale magenta in the westering light. As we reached the other side of the neck of land and saw the horizon again, the richly coloured sunset had such an impact on me that I asked the driver if he would stop a moment so that I might take a photograph. I caught the sun as it was halfway towards night; radiating echoes of burnt orange past distant hills. In the foreground, a sea of purple shadows was topped by dulled silver. It vanished quickly and the oranges darkened; the sky’s reflection faded into the blackening waves. We climbed back into the taxi.

North Beach, where the ceremonies would take place at dawn, was a well-landscaped site with neatly cut lawns and three flagpoles bearing the Turkish, Australian and New Zealand flags. A large crowd had already gathered, spread out along the lawns and the beach itself. Stepping out onto the newly bitumened surface, we spotted a bunch of blokes playing two-up down beneath the flags.

“Okey dokes, ladies and gentlemen, place ya bets!”

Having been away from Australia for a couple of years, I felt a mix of nostalgia and self-conscious embarrassment. It was, however, something of a relief that people had not come here to sit about in mournful silence. This more spirited, larrikin attitude to the occasion struck me not only as appropriate, but as being what the original diggers would have wanted. Scott and I had hardly dumped our stuff and taken a slug of raki before a game of Australian Rules football started up. We shifted our gear and joined in the game.

It was now about seven thirty in the evening and there were probably only a few hundred people about, spread over a rather broad area. Once the game had broken up, we sat down and had another hit of raki, but neither of us were in the mood for drinking. Scott seemed to be fading fast after so long without sleep.

“Mate, I’m butchered. I think I’m going to crash for a while.”

“No worries. I’ll take first watch.”

“Wake me up if anything happens.”

“Will do.”

Scott climbed into his sleeping bag and curled up on the grass. In a moment, he was fast asleep, like a cocooned insect.

Now a game of rugby league sprang up in the middle of the “field”. Being a New South Welshman, this was more to my taste and I volunteered my services. Two teams were immediately formed and, what started as a game of touch footy soon upped a gear into full tackle rugby league. A bunch of Turks who were sitting alongside the road watching the activities decided to join us, getting right into the spirit of it. Fast asleep in his sleeping bag, Scott was chosen as one of the corner posts. It was little short of miraculous that during the next hour of noise, mayhem and vigorous tackling, he not only avoided being stepped on, but did not even bat an eyelid.

When the game was over, things slowed down a little and everyone sat down in groups, drinking and talking. People continued to arrive in a steady trickle until all the grass we’d been playing on was covered. Some of the new arrivals couldn’t resist planting the Australian flag, which struck me as both unnecessary and discourteous. After all, the Turks had been kind enough to fly the Australian flag over this hallowed ground, and to want to claim it all over again seemed not merely arrogant and thoughtlessly nationalistic, but also naively disrespectful of the Turkish victory.

Indeed, I was struck by the ridiculous amount of Australian flags on shirts, singlets, bags, towels, you name it. One woman was completely decked out in the bloody thing. She wore a flag tracksuit, the top of which was undone to reveal a Tee-shirt with the Australian flag on it  – it was all over her socks and beanie, and just in case you hadn’t got the message, she had a flag draped over her shoulders. I have never ever been able to understand this expression of nationalist fervour and find flags horribly offensive and aggressive. Maybe it’s just me, but is it really necessary to shove your nationality down someone’s throat in a foreign country? Who gives a rat’s arse where you come from? A lot of people seem to think that the only level on which they can communicate with foreigners is to discuss their foreignness, rather than just assuming that they too are human beings and can be engaged on all manner of other subjects. They say travel broadens the mind, but for a lot of people it makes them increasingly militant about their own identity, which seems to be reduced to a bunch of symbols and clichés.

I sat there listening to people talking around me, bemused by the snippets of conversation I heard.

“Gee, it really makes you think, dunnit?”

“Musta been tough for those blokes on that first night.”

“Yeah, you can really feel the history, eh?”

I passed the time writing in my diary, listening to my walkman and occasionally taking swigs of Raki. I thought about going and making friends with some random people, but it just seemed like too much hard work, and from what I was hearing, I felt as though the conversation might be lacking something. I turned to look at the cliffs behind me, visibly outlined against the stars, and spent a good hour with my eyes fixed on a neck of land that looked like the head of the Sphinx. It might have even been called the Sphinx, I can’t remember. It had been beautiful just after sunset when the sky was still a darkening blue, and it was still beautiful now in the moon and starlight.

More and more people continued to arrive, and by around eleven-thirty at night, things had become a little ridiculous. Coach-load after coach-load was turning up, until the road behind was completely filled with huge tour buses and every inch of ground for a considerable distance was covered with people in various states of repair. As the evening wore on, so the sea-breeze wore on in, and gradually, it wore me down. I’d started out feeling vaguely warm, but by around midnight, I was freezing cold. I had no jacket with me, and so my only option was extra layers. I put on another tee-shirt, which got me through until around one. I then had to put on another and that got me through until about two. By three, I had no choice but to wrap my last tee-shirt around my head and put on a collared shirt under my jumper. By then it had become quite ludicrously cold and I was exhausted.

All this while, Scott had not moved at all, but had remained fast asleep. He was now surrounded on all sides by the crowd, and I lay down beside him in the small space that remained, head on my bag. I tried to sleep, but was far too cold and damp and lay there shivering miserably. It was so cold my entire body started aching, my head most of all. I cursed stupidity and bitterly passed two of the most miserable hours of my life. Why had I not brought a sleeping bag, or at least a coat? Hadn’t it occurred to me that Turkey in April was cold at night? Obviously not, and admitting my folly was no consolation. All I could think of was dawn. The sun would rise and so would the temperature. I would survive to see this great event, and gradually my body would thaw!

When things began stirring for the dawn service, shortly before dawn, I dragged myself from a despairing huddle and stood to attention. Imagine my displeasure when it was announced that the Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, was going to address us. I was certainly no fan of the man or the government of which he was a part, and was not pleased to be reminded of why I’d been so glad to leave Australia.

I woke up Scott and we both stood like zombies, watching the service. I tried hard not to laugh at Downer’s teddy-bear intonation, but could not take the man seriously. The New Zealand foreign minister was a little more inspiring, despite equally dealing in platitudinous clichés. One line stood out, however, and I got over myself and remembered the individuals who had come here in the first place.

“When they first got to the beach, there was no battle plan, no orders, just sheer heroism”

Sheer heroism indeed. And standing there, cold, exhausted, surrounded by a bunch of jingoistic antipodeans and having survived a speech by Alexander Downer, I felt like a bloody hero as well.