The TravelJen Blog

he Hungarian Anesthesiologist is having trouble focusing. His eyes strain to settle somewhere between my apparently impressive breasts and the Great Beyond.

But he’s focused, all right.

“I’d like to have sexual relations with you,” he slurs, eyelids bobbing up and down like a drowning man in rapids.

I raise my eyebrows. I haven’t been within 5,000 miles of my husband, Steve, in three months. The last three weeks in Turkey have been particularly rough, the sexual pressure increasingly, ahem, mounting. Despite my noncheating ways, or perhaps because of them, there is a supernova of TAKE ME NOW! radiating out between my thighs. I am confusing men (and some women) with it. Still, I’m not going to shtup this guy on the Istanbul-Budapest train clink-clunk-clinking through the foggy Bulgarian night.

But I wish this anesthesiologist would try a little harder. I’m worth it, even if I’m not going to put out. His come-on lacks all art. It’s comical and clinical—a fatal combo. Maybe this approach works with the unconscious. (“Don’t move if you want to have sexual relations. Okay, I will do as you ask.”)

We are six hours into a two-day train ride from Istanbul to Budapest and three hours into the screw-top red wine I brought with me. Earlier, the Hungarian Anesthesiologist—let’s call him HA—and his travelmate, the impressively overweight Trauma Bone Surgeon (never has there been a more grievous collision of three words), invited me to hang out in their compartment, which is right next to mine. We three are the only passengers in this car. TBS disappeared a while ago with beer and a CD player. I am sitting cross-legged across from HA. I took off my shoes hours ago, a pair of black mules I bought in Istanbul that are the first really feminine thing I’ve worn in months.

HA leans forward and puts his hands on my knees. I raise my eyebrows so high they’re climbing into my scalp, but I don’t remove his hands. Not just yet. It has been three months since I’ve had hands on my thighs that weren’t my own. I feel like one of those mangy guard dogs at Coney Island that used to be locked in all winter with the rides. They would lean into the fence when you passed by, staring at you with needy eyes, hoping you’d touch them just a little, just for a moment of warmth, just for a merciful reprieve from their soul-hollowing lack of pack.

HA is monumentally drunk, existentially drunk, in-outer-orbit drunk. He slides his paws up my thighs. His face attempts a wolfish leer, achieves sleepy puppy. He is quite cute. When he nears the fun zone, I shove them off.

Leaning back, he switches tactics. “I’d like to fuck you.”

Now that’s better! A little enthusiasm!

“No.”

“But you are so beautiful,” he protests.

“You’re so drunk,” I correct him. “And I told you. I’m married.”

“Yes,” he says with a charmingly insouciant shrug. “But your husband is very far away.”

“That is true,” I agree.

There is a silence as I realize this full weight of this. My husband is really very far away. So far away this one-night stand could happen and he would never, ever know. Hey! Maybe it would even be his fault that I cheated. Sex is a natural and healthy part of mental and physical hygiene. Where the hell is he when I need him? It’s not fair, dammit. So what if I’m the one traveling around the world for months and he’s the one holding down the fort back in Brooklyn? That’s just a technical difference. He’s not here, and I am so horny I might swoon.

Or maybe—and here comes the second realization—it’s the combination of Xanax and wine that’s making me all romance-novel-cover. Anticipating sleeping in a crowded couchette car for six, I had taken the anti-anxiety pill just before getting on the train. Turns out the car was mine alone. Now reality is coated with a thick gel. It’s like maneuvering through a languid underwater version of a classic scene. Woman Flees Overly Persistent Suitor in Slo-Mo.

“I think it’s time for me to go,” I say, twisting closed the cap on the bottle of wine.

And that’s when HA grabs my foot and shoves in his mouth.

As he moans around my toes, I start to laugh. It’s absurd and unreal. It’s like being attacked by an enthusiastic labrador. Woman Flees Foot Fetishist. But he is sincerely transported, groaning and whimpering at once, revealing such a deep need that even as I laugh at the bizarreness of the situation—is a Hungarian anesthesiologist really huffing my feet on a crappy train through Eastern Europe?—I feel a sort of tender pity. I don’t know if there’s anything in this world that makes me as ecstatic as my toes are making him. Kicking him off would be like kicking a puppy.

I wait until HA pauses to breathe and gently extract my foot from his grasp. I slide it, damp, into my shoe. His shoulders sag. He seems vulnerable and defeated, and suddenly far more sober.

“Well, good night,” I say lightly.

“Yes, good night.”

The next day at 4 pm, we pull into Videle, Romania, to wait for our car to get hitched to a train to Budapest, where HA and TBS are returning after three weeks backpacking in eastern Turkey (they smell like it), and I have to catch yet another train to Warsaw. It’s roughly 18 hours after we left Istanbul, and Videle is, honestly, nofuckingwhere. It’s so quiet that it takes me an hour to realize we’ve even stopped. Even my book, which is pretty lousy read, is more engaging. We have three hours to wait for the Budapest train.

There is no food or water for sale on the train, and the only amenities are sheets and a pillow, which are surprisingly clean, and a bathroom, which is unsurprisingly not. In Videle, you can restock for the overnight trip to Budapest if you have Romanian currency, known as lei. I do not. Coming back from the station shop, HA loans me some. I promise to pay him back when we arrive in Budapest the next morning. “Oh no no, this is no problem,” he says, avoiding my eyes to take in the stray dogs lounging between the train tracks. He looks queasy and embarrassed.

I buy sausage and feta cheese and some deep-fried snack that is the unholy union of a potato chip and a peanut. I’m almost out of wine, so I also buy beer.

According to TBS, who has periodically joined me in the hall of the car to lean his forearms on the open windows and breathe in the sometimes green, sometimes mechanical air of the relentlessly November-gray Romanian countryside, HA has spent the day yakking out the window and sleeping it off. When HA loans me money, it’s the first time I’ve see him since the border crossing the night before. Border police had banged on our compartment doors at 4:30 am. For 30 minutes or eternity, dozens of people zombified by interrupted sleep had wandered around on the tracks as if waiting for a cue from George Romero. As we looked out the train window, HA pleaded with me not to leave the train with my passport, as if the undead really were out there waiting to eat our brains.

“You cannot go,” he said, nearly in tears, weakly holding my arm. “You cannot. You must not. No. You are too beautiful—”

“I’m too beautiful to get my passport stamped?” I snarled, yanking my arm out of his grasp. I do not wake from a wine-Xanax coma in a good mood. I promptly went outside and did my own undead shuffle until herded into a cruelly bright office where after filling out a tourism questionnaire about my visit to Turkey (why? at 4:30 am? on the Bulgaria-Romania border? is this a dream?) my passport was stamped. Eventually we got back on the train. I slept well. I had a pleasant day in my compartment listening to music, writing, and watching the green fields flutter by.

Now, as nightfall nominally darkens the already bleak landscape, we pull out of Videle. The train chugs along. I read. The window is open to the cool and damp air. I am cocooned in the warmth of my sleeping bag. It’s a delicious combination.

A couple of hours later, HA and TBS invite me next door. HA seems to want to pretend nothing happened as much as I do. I bring the rest of the wine, as well as the feta cheese and sausage and beer from Videle.

We talk about Hungarian music for a while, about which I know exactly nothing, and then about Goethe and Kerouac, about whom I know only a bit more, having never read Goethe (one of those Somedays) and having hated On the Road. (As far as I’m concerned, the Beats can suck it.) TBS stays long enough to bum a Xanax and then disappears, as he had the night before, into an empty car with beer and his CD player. I wonder if he thinks HA is going to get into my pants. I get the feeling this isn’t the first time this has happened. TBS has the long-practiced resignation of the sidekick who gets out of the way while his good-looking friend gets the girl.

And the fact is: HA is awfully attractive. He is lean and fit with pale blue eyes. He is unassuming. He’s intelligent, well traveled, and well read.

But, as I dutifully recall, I’m married, and there’s only wine in me tonight, so I’m horny but not swooning. I relax into our conversation. We are on the not-so-cheery topic of anti-Semitism in Hungary when I stretch my feet across the aisle, cramped from sitting cross-legged for so long. They are perhaps 24 inches from him. My toenails are painted a slutty purple exactly the color of my mom’s favorite boots in 1981, which was applied six weeks ago during a friendly but half-assed pedicure in Kerala, India. My feet also have a less appealing film of sleeping-bag sweat and Istanbul street dust.

As we talk, HA keeps glancing down at my feet. Just to see what will happen, I begin to use my right foot as a tool of emphasis, pointing it around the car as I describe how when I was 13, my best friend, who was Hungarian, was suddenly not allowed to be friends with me anymore. “Her father told my father that he didn’t want his daughter to be friends with a Polish Jew,” I say, aiming my foot toward the compartment door. His head swoops to the left. “My father only told me this about five years ago.” My foot wags from side to side, and his eyes follow it as if watching a tennis match. “I don’t know what my dad was more stunned by: the guy’s anti-Semitism,” I continue, my foot briefly alighting on my opposite knee, “or that the guy thought he was Jewish,” I finish, bringing my foot to rest on the red velour next to him. I casually cross my ankles.

“But what about your feet?” he abruptly asks.

“My feet?” I say innocently.

“Yes, how are they feeling? Would you like a foot massage?”

I’d take a free foot massage from a crackhead outside the Port Authority. I promptly rest my heels on his kneecaps. He begins to rub the ball of my foot. His neck is tense; his mouth wants to strain toward them, but he resists.

“So you like feet, doncha?” I say conversationally.

“Yes, very much,” he says, not meeting my eyes. We’re silent as he rubs my feet, roaming from the heel to the pad, rolling the knuckles between his fingers like money, squeezing and kneading as if working bread dough. He tries to keep his mouth away.

The thing is, he isn’t very good at massage. Perhaps this foot fetish is new territory for him, an urge he’s only beginning to explore. Perhaps this train ride through interchangeable countryside—connected to nothing in his real life, where he puts people to sleep for a living, where perhaps his girlfriend (does he have one? I don’t even know) freaked out when he rolled his tongue around her pinky toe one brave night—has opened up to him the possibility of doing something he has long desired, something he may have been told isn’t right but feels oh so right, something that only he and I would ever know about.

Suddenly I am cringing with guilt. I had thought this was an equal exchange. He gets to touch my grubby feet, and I get a free foot massage. But it seems clear that I’m taking advantage of him. What would my husband say about abusing this guy’s kink just to get a foot rub? Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. That’s what. I try not to think about what he would say about letting HA touch me at all.

I lift my feet out of HA’s palms.

“Thank you very much,” I say lightly.

“You’re welcome.”

There is a silence.

“I should probably go.”

“Yes, good night.”

“Good night.”

We pull into the Budapest central station about 8 am. HA and TBS figure out their respective trains, say goodbye, and then HA helps me to find the line to Warsaw. With a wave, he quickly takes off.

It’s only a week later as I am boarding a flight from Warsaw to London that I realize I never repaid him for the lei.

Hidirellez is an annual Spring holiday celebrated on May 5. In Istanbul, it’s a five-day street festival that rocks Ahirkapi, an area near Sultanahmet, where several of the city’s most famous sites cluster, including Topkapi Palace, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Archaeological Museum (including the Museum of the Ancient Orient), and the Main Bazaar. Dogan invited me to join him and his friends to check out half-dozen many bands, and in particular Buzuki Orhan Osman, a German-born Greek musician who leads an amazing orchestra through Roma, Greek, and Balkan tunes. We were supposed to hook up with Sercin and Cem—I considered calling her from my mobile, as I had a shiny new TurkCell phone number—but somehow we never got in touch. It’s a shame, too, because she would tell me later they didn’t have a very good time, whereas we had what can be officially categorized as a Blast.

This is what some of it looked like, and how some of it sounded.

****

The streets were sardined with enterprising kebab makers, cheery Efes pourers, and hawkers of those quintessentially Turkish blue-glass amulets that offer protection against the evil eye.

Smoke, kebabs, and Efes, the Budweiser of Turkey.

Each band was surrounded by a twisting throng of dancing Istanbulites spilling their beers all over each other and not minding a bit. We headed for the deepest section of the festival, a large arena surrounded by Byzantine walls.

The mildly demonic-appearing Osman (right) and his orchestra jack up the already boisterous thousands into a shimmying frenzy (Listen).

Everyone dances. EVERYONE.

When they’re not dancing, they’re singing along, as Dogan and Ismail do here.

My dancing was considered insultingly tame. I learned that the shoulders must shake, and the arms must fly overhead. The hips must whip back and forth, and sometimes you do the bump.

Osman is known as a bouzouki master. He was remarkable. He even played the instrument backwards over his head. Here he leads a call-and-response scattin’ extravaganza (listen).

It’s traditional to welcome Spring with a leap over a fire. We came across this one in the street a few blocks away from the festival, just past a police station.

Jump your way into noncorporeality!

Thanks to a flash, I maintained my solid state.

And that’s goodbye to Turkey.

Ludingirra’s time is up. And he’s not happy about it.

His friends think it’s funny, though. They laugh at him, snorting over their beers. He shakes his shaggy head regretfully and drags deeply on his cigarette. There’s no way around it: Every Turk is a Soldier.

It’s my last night in Turkey. I’m drinking Efes beer with Dogan and three of his friends on the roof of a club in the Tunel area of Taksim, the hippest part of Istanbul. The first three floors are filled with the young, writhing, and beautiful, who dance and drink and drink and—in the women’s bathroom, at least—puke; the rooftop bar has simple wood tables and a quieter, older crowd. Mind you, it is Friday night, and people are clearly drinking their faces off, but they’re having (perhaps increasingly incoherent) conversations while they’re doing it. Downstairs you can only shout in each other’s ears and then nod as if you actually heard what was said.

Dogan is a computer programmer for a tobacco company who has put me up for a week and seems to know pretty much everybody in Taksim. Ismail is a petroleum engineer and recently diagnosed diabetic. (He pulls out a needle halfway through the night, and as he lifts his shirt, I have to look away.) There’s also old friend of theirs whose name I can’t remember but who has appealingly Mod sideburns and a week ago at the annual Roma music festival kept yelling at me to “be more Turkish”—in other words, to shake my ass; and, of course, Ludingirra, the soon-to-be soldier, who in daily life is a 33-year-old editor of a music magazine. His name isn’t really Ludingirra, but that’s what I’m calling him, for reasons that will become clear later.

This is why Ludingirra’s time is up. If a guy studies for a master’s degree, as this moppet-headed sloucher did, he can delay mandatory service in the Turkish military until he’s 33. (He gets another four years if he’s aiming at a Ph.D.) And then, come hell or highwater, he must serve for up to 15 months. Of the four, Ludingirra is the only one who hasn’t served his required time. (Women can join the army, but they don’t have to.) Many stints aren’t exactly taxing; Ismail, for instance, patrolled Ephesus, a Greek-Roman city that is one of the most popular archaeological sites in Turkey. In Turkey, it’s known as Efes—and thus the inspiration for the beer we’re on round four, or maybe five, of.

There are two places it would suck most to be stationed, and both involve Kurds, the minority population in both Turkey and neighboring Iraq, who have been fighting both governments for decades. The first would be the Turkey-Iraq border, which Turkey wants to cross to follow Kurdish separatists known as the PKK into the historically Kurdish area of Iraq. The other would be Diyarbakir, a mostly Kurdish city in southeast Turkey where separatists and Turkish soldiers have been routinely killing each other—and civilians—and more civilians—since 1984. Tens of thousands have died.

The only pro-Bush person I met anywhere in the world—think about that for a moment—was a Kurd from Diyarbakir. A taxi driver in Istanbul, he was happy Saddam Hussein got his, and everything else be damned.

We had a robust political debate about Bush, language barrier be damned.

Kurdish taxi driver: “George Bush very good! Number one! HA HA HA!”

Me: “No no no! George Bush no good! Hayir [no] George Bush! Hayir!”

Taxi driver: “HA HA HA! Evet [yes] George Bush! Evet! Number one!”

Me: “Hayir George Bush! Very bad!”

Taxi driver: “America best country! HA HA HA!”

Discussing the Kurdish situation brings out, at best, uncomfortable cringing from Istanbul sophisticates, and might get your teeth knocked in (from either pro or anti Kurds) in other parts of the country. Talking about the treatment of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey in the early 20th century is even worse. It’s against the law, in fact.

Turkey is bidding for European Union membership, and two of the major sticking points for some EU member states are Turkey’s record on human rights and freedom of speech. For many writers, these two have neatly—and unfortunately— converged. There are a lot of things you can’t say in Turkey. For instance, it’s illegal to call the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 “genocide”; the controversy about whether it was continues today. Nor can you pen something that is “insulting Turkishness.” What is “insulting Turkishness,” exactly? It seems to be defined much as obscenity famously was in 1964 by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: hard to define, but “I know it when I see it.”

Turkish prosecutors saw it in a Swiss newspaper article in which 2006 Nobel Prize–winning novelist Orhan Pamuk was quoted as saying, “30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares talk about it.” The charges against Pamuk were dropped in early 2006.

But he’s not the only one to dare to talk about it. The Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, given a six-month suspended sentence in 2005 for openly writing about the Armenian controversy, was gunned down outside of his newspaper’s office in Istanbul a year later. Thousands protested. Then novelist Elif Shafak was charged for writing about the same subject. The judge threw her case out in less than an hour. She didn’t testify, as she was busy giving birth at the time the case was heard.

But you don’t have to write about Armenians to be prosecuted for your words. You could try “insulting Muslim women and inciting religious hatred,” as Sumerian archaeologist Muazzez Ilmiye Cig was accused—and promptly cleared—of doing in 2006 when she wrote in a scholarly work that head scarves predate Islam, and were in fact worn by Mesopotamian priestesses who carried on the sacred sexual rites I mentioned in an earlier post. (Incidentally, the 90-something Cig, like a lot of Turks, considered Pamuk’s accusations of Armenian genocide to be untrue. On her website is this obliquely menacing message: “She is a true daughter of Ataturk. She conforms to reforms without concession.”)

Nor must you have a connection to Turkey at all. The only time I saw Dogan—super mellow, incredibly generous, and widely traveled Dogan—look alarmed was when it came to a book, and it wasn’t about Turkey. I was rereading Shalimar the Clown by the recently knighted Salman Rushdie. Much as Midnight’s Children is about the founding of India, Shame the history of Pakistan, and The Moor’s Last Sigh the colonization of India, Shalimar is Rushdie’s take on the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. I was revisiting it because I had now actually been to Kashmir.

Dogan and his girlfriend Anna-Marie were heading out of his apartment to have dinner with friends when he stopped short. He pointed at the book, which was sitting, I thought very innocently, on the coffee table in his living room, where I was cross-legged on the couch with a glass of wine.

“Don’t let anyone see you reading Salman Rushdie,” he said with a small smile. “Satanic Verses is illegal in Turkey. You can’t sell it here.”

I was surprised. I would have thought that in Turkey, where secular humanists and nationalist reactionaries can at least bond on their mutual distaste for religion, watching Rushdie thumb his nose at Mohammed might have been at least diverting. But instead it had been frightening. I’ve haven’t been able to verify that the book is banned in Turkey, but certainly there is precedent for Dogan’s anxiety. Consider what happened in July 1993, in Sivas, a city in central Turkey. Pro-sharia radicals protesting Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator of Satanic Verses, set fire to the hotel hosting the Pir Sultan Abdal Literary Festival Nesin was attending. They blocked firefighters from dousing the flames. Thirty-seven died. Nesin himself made it out alive.

But I didn’t know about Sivas then. “Wow,” I said. “I had no idea. I have a copy back home. I can send it to you if you want.”

Dogan was nearly tasered by this suggestion. “Oh! No! Oh, no!” He furiously waved his hands, warding off the very idea, as if the novel would be a literary bomb exploding his mailbox and his life. “Oh no, don’t do that. Please, really. You can’t. That is a very bad idea.”

Still, for now, these writers’ works are intact. But for the long haul, for real persistence through time, they may want to consider writing on clay tablets like Ludingirra. I’m not talking about the music magazine editor, at least not specifically. Maybe I’m talking about all writers, including myself; considering how intangible a medium the Internet is, clay seems preferably substantial.

Instead, I’m referring to the 18th century b.c. Sumerian I had dismissed as a Momma’s Boy a week back. Turns out that perhaps I had jumped the gun in that appraisal. He did note for a courier who was sent to Nippur to fetch his mother that the courier would be able to recognize her by her singular qualities:

My mother is like a bright light on the horizon/active in the mountains./A morning star (shining even) at noon/A precious carnelian-stone, a topaz from Marhasi/A treasure from the brother of the king, full of charm…

—and I mean, c’mon. We all love our mothers—I particularly like drinking wine with mine while storm watching from a good porch—but really. What a suck up. Trying to secure our place in the will, are we?

I had floated this theory by Dogan earlier in the week. He enthusiastically informed me I had no clue what I was talking about: “Oh no, Ludingirra is very famous!”

It turns out that Ludingirra wrote an autobiography, a highly unusual thing for 18th century b.c., in which he detailed how the Akkadians, the new sheriffs in town—”town” being Nippur, in what is now southern Iraq—were suppressing Sumerian culture. And we know this because the clay tablets on which he had written his autobiography were translated into Turkish by Cig, the Sumerian archaeologist whose long-view take on the hijab landed her in court.

We’ve had enough beers that when I privately, slowly, and not very logically connect Ludingirra’s inevitable military stint with Sumerian Ludingirra’s complaints about Akkadian oppression, I find myself depressed as hell. Many people like to think of the past—any period, anywhere on this planet—as some sort of Golden Age when the Ancestors Got It Right, and if we could only recapture the Wisdom of the Ancients, then we too could create A Better World. These people are bullshitting themselves so completely that it makes me sad for and angry at every last damned one of us. Sumerian Ludingirra and Turkish Ludingrra can tell you about how the majority routinely crack the skulls of the minority. It’s happened everywhere, in all cultures, at all times. Akkadians and Sumerians. Turks and Kurds. Iraqis and Kurds. The whole damned planet. Its utter predictability in the archaeological record, the present day, and the forseeable future is seriously depressing.

Shit. Maybe I’ve had too much to drink. I’m a lightweight now. I keep these thoughts to myself as we talk about the Pixies; Ludingirra does write about music, after all. I wax rhapsodic about seeing the very last show in the Pixies 2005 reunion tour, at Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC, which is much more fun than dwelling on the Dark Side of Man.

First Dogan decides to leave, and then Mod Sideburns does; Ismail agrees to drive me back to Dogan’s later. Later comes sooner rather than, er, later, and soon enough Ludingirra and I are exchanging contact info. Mine’s easy: I hand him a business card. Ludingirra writes down his name, email address, and magazine’s website on a torn slip of paper. I stash it somewhere.

If he had written it on clay tablet, I might be able to say what his real name was instead of coining with the moniker of a man who’s been dead for 4,000 years. Because that slip of paper disappeared. It won’t turn up, either—not as a crumpled-up bit in my purse, nor a fluttering-to-the-ground scrap from my notebook, nor a drunken scrawl that I won’t be able to decipher months later as Steve looks at me questioningly over my shoulder. (“Picking up men in foreign countries, are we?”) It will just do a vanishing act. Whoosh. Gone. The whole damned night might have never have happened, save for writing it here, in this painfully ephemeral medium.

Because I’d like to know: Will Ludingirra wind up serving at some place like Ephesus or somewhere more like Diyarbakir? Will he be able to bore himself to tears watching fat, sunburned Germans on package tours pose before the rising columns of the library at Ephesus, or will he be forced to help crack heads—or get his own cracked—at the border?

On the drive to Dogan’s, Ismail and I have this exchange:

Me: You work for a petroleum company? Really?

Ismail: Yes, really.

Me: And you’re okay with that?

Ismail: They will get the oil whether I am okay with it or not.

Me: That is true.