Irish Michael has disappeared into one of the brothels and Ahmed is still at his trysting. Meanwhile, Lebanese Michael and I wander farther down the street, a little overwhelmed by the blatant display of flesh. At the bottom of the hill is a tearoom, packed with chattering Turkish men drinking sweet tea from tall glasses with bands of brass-coloured tin and tin handles. We stand in the doorway of the tearoom and realize there are no seats available. As we turn to leave, an old man stands up and offers us his seat, followed by another younger man. We demur. They insist. Everyone here is friendly and welcoming, unlike the hard-eyed men at the hotel. Somewhat embarrassed by the old man’s generosity and good manners, we sit and drink tea, awaiting the return of Irish Michael and Ahmed.
On arriving late back at the hotel, we go to our room and Ahmed retires to his. After the long day of travel, we are tired and ready for bed. I throw back my blanket and a mouse jumps out, seemingly as startled as I am. Landing on the floor, it disappears in a hole in the wall. But I am too tired to care. We fall into our three beds in our clothes — it’s too cold to even consider getting undressed and the presence of the little rodent is further proof that taking our clothes off would be foolish. We agree to sleep that night with the light on, a single bulb hanging on a long cord in the middle of the room.
After a refreshing and mouse-less sleep, our three heads crowd around the window the next morning as we watch Ahmed on the street below adding his bags, now containing the smuggled cloth, to the roof of a bus that is already piled high with baggage. The previous night, he had explained that he would leave early in the morning in order to bus the rest of the way to Jordan. We had said our farewells then. He waves up to our window and boards.
After he leaves, we check out of the hotel and go in search of other accommodations, farther from the train station, closer to the sights, and, hopefully, mouse-free. Several hours later, we find a cosy hotel in a quiet, crowded district of two- and three-storey buildings not far from the Blue Mosque. It will cost us the equivalent of thirty-two cents per night total for our three beds.
As we make our way to the stairs leading to our room on the second floor, Irish Michael turns to the hotel-keeper and asks in a loud whisper, “Hashish?” The hotel-keeper nods, signalling that he understands. But, with a gesture, he indicates that we will have to wait until later.
These events took place a few short years before young people from North America and Western Europe began making Turkey one of several preferred global destinations for the purchase and ingestion of drugs of various sorts. It was ten years before Alan Parker’s 1978 film, Midnight Express, about the Turks’ official reaction to this influx. Based on a true story, the film caused a stir in the way it depicted the brutalization of a young American drug smuggler in a Turkish prison. We were still innocents then — I had never smoked or ingested anything illegal — and, in their own way, so were the Turks, never having encountered droves of mad-eyed, fun loving druggies from the West with cash to burn.
We decide not to wait around for the hashish to arrive and head out to visit the fabled Covered, or Grand, Bazaar of Istanbul, the Kapali Carsi, a kind of Arabian souk gone mad, a huge market that covers acres and acres in the heart of the city, all under a roof, with its own streets and alleys. The chaotic maze of the Kapali Carsi includes more than fifty-eight streets and over six thousand shops that sell carpets, gold and silver jewellery, hammered silver and brass implements, clothing and food of all types, leather and suede goods, shoes, and every type of gewgaw, precious item, and detritus that has ever washed up from the factories of the world. For over eight hundred years, the rivers of the Silk Road have emptied into this sea of commerce.
The bazaar also has a Turk on every corner asking us, surreptitiously, if we want to change money. They offer a far better exchange rate than the banks so we change some of our Italian lira and U.S. dollars into Turkish lira. Luckily we do not change a significant amount of our stash, as we later learn that one must have proof of exchange from a bank in order to buy a return train ticket.
Lebanese Michael decides he wants to purchase a hookah in the bazaar. Both he and Irish Michael are heavy smokers, mostly of Camels when they can get them. When the merchant in the cramped stall realizes that we are serious buyers, he sits us down and calls for tea. A boy comes running with a tray of glasses from a nearby tea seller’s and we drink. The haggling begins. When the tea is finished, so is the dealing. In the end, we are not sure if we ended up paying more for the hookah than it was advertised for, but, in any case, Michael has his hookah in his pack and we return to the hotel.
As we enter the hotel lobby, we see the hotel-keeper is saying his prayers to Allah, having laid out his prayer rug in the hotel hallway more or less in the direction, we suppose, of Mecca. We can hear the muezzin calling from a minaret nearby. We step gingerly around the hotel-keeper and head up to our room where we set up the two-man hookah on a low table with its double tubes coming from a large glass bowl, which Lebanese Michael fills with water. The two Michaels tear open a couple of cigarettes and test it with tobacco. When they finish, we rest and wait.
After a short while, a sharp knock at the door startles us. We look at each other. I pull the door open and there stands a young Turkish punk in a black leather jacket, with a leather motorcycle cap on his head, its shallow brim shadowing his eyes. He looks like a short and swarthy version of James Dean. His hair is black and shiny as the wings of a beetle and his eyes appear sleepy, cautious and slightly dangerous. He peers into the room. “Hashish?”
We nod enthusiastically. Before entering, he performs a choreographed scene that could have come from a gangster film. Slipping his hand into his jacket and leaning back slightly from the waist, he looks down the hallway in both directions and back at us. He then pulls a large, nasty-looking pistol from his jacket and waves it in the air as he says, “Police come! Bang bang! Out window!” and points the barrel at the room’s single small aperture. Stepping inside our room, he shuts the door behind him and puts the gun away.
He smiles upon seeing the hookah. Pulling out a foil-wrapped hunk of hashish about the size of a plum, he breaks off a sizable chunk, places it on the burner of the hookah and sits down on the bed. We all settle around him as he lights the hash and starts smoking. We take our turns. Being the only non-smoker in the group, after drawing smoke from the hookah, I end up coughing for the next twenty minutes. When the hashish is done (he himself has smoked a good half of it), he collects payment from us and dissolves out the door. The two Michaels are totally whacked from the hashish, which must have contained a fair amount of opium, since all they want to do is sleep. I realize, with all my coughing, I probably actually drew little smoke into my lungs. Having no interest in sleeping, I decide to head out into the early evening for a walk.
Outside, I note that night in Istanbul has a distinct Alice in Wonderland quality — exotic and unreal. A few blocks away, I enter a vast teeming restaurant that posts its menu on chalkboards. Unable to read a word of Turkish, I simply point to my mystery meal and am soon served the strangest liquid concoction I have ever tasted. I now suspect it might have been a soup made from tripe or some other unmentionable part of the cow or sheep anatomy. The term “hardware” is used to refer to the reticulum part of a cow’s stomach, because if a cow ingests metal, a piece of iron fencing, for example, it will lodge there and cause no harm. The cow that ended up in that tripe soup must have subsisted on a steady diet of decayed sewer pipe.
We spend a week in Istanbul, catching the sights, crossing the Bosporus to set foot in Asia, and learning that old Turkish men can be surprisingly friendly and generous. One elderly gentleman walks us from our hotel to Hagia Sophia, which is surrounded by four minarets that bear an uncanny resemblance to intercontinental ballistic missiles. These minarets, I learn, are actually counterweights for the main structure, which would likely collapse without them. He insists on buying us breakfast on the way. This is good because our money is running seriously low.
The Hagia Sophia, it turns out, was the world’s largest cathedral for a thousand years.