Young Master I. "Paddy Fermor" Ludders at an interfarc station in Stamboul, long ago

Δευ, Μάιος 10, 2004 12:21 pm
High spirits and a feeling of being out of touch with many people lead me to attempt a Marek/Jason-style "Dear Boxholder" narrative communication. You should read it as if I'd been sending such things all along, but you weren't ever getting them on account of some technical problem. Nor should you be alarmed if such technical problems recur in future.
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       The express bus from Alexandroupoli came to a final stop in the late afternoon drizzle of a huge dystopic bus-station complex outside of Istanbul and the charming community of its passengers immediately dissolved: the two Thracian Turks and the Iraqi Kurd and the Greek language that had afforded us our sweet temporary friendship – all vanished; to be replaced, quite unsatisfactorily, by a nightmare of tangled transportation networks and an incomprehensible mediating language. The two beautiful young Japanese women also vanished, but not till after one of them had turned herself into a rockstar by suddenly producing a guitar-case as she disembarked; the old expatriate Korean man who had accompanied the other – and whom I had imagined to be her father? teacher? lover? – I saw wandering away into the crowds without her, breaking my illusions: their relationship had apparently been as fleeting as mine with the Kurd.
       This interesting old Korean man had lived in Istanbul for some years and had periodically turned in his seat throughout the course of the bus ride to give me advice, in his thin English, on my visit to The City; so I caught up to him in the confusion of the station to ask how I should get downtown and where would I find a cheap hotel. He turned his tired eyes and, recognizing me, began to speak, gesticulating vaguely this way and that: but I could pick out only a very few words – "pension," "bazaar," "ichiban" – for he spoke not in English but in Japanese, the language of his many hours' commerce with the young woman. Not wanting to embarrass him by pointing out his mistake, I listened for some thirty seconds, nodding politely; when he'd finished I said thank you and goodbye and we parted. I found my way to an ATM machine and withdrew 450 million Turkish Lira from my Bank of New Hampshire account and bought a map of Istanbul (1 million). I then approached a man and had an unexpectedly difficult time, without "language", formulating the question "Where on this map are we?" When he finally came to understand the puzzling charade, my interlocutor responded by indicating, quickly and gracefully, that we were in fact outside of the bounds of the map; so I bought a subway token (1 million), determined cartographically which track to take, and in subterranean blindness passed under the ancient crumbling span of battlemented Byzantine walls and into The City they compassed.
       There followed two weeks of happy ambulatory investigation