In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads. Stanley Stewart
his mother who was working in Istanbul. He was a thin boy with a mutinous complexion and an agitated manner. His gangly limbs jerked and rattled with adolescent impatience.
Kolya and I conversed in a bizarre amalgam of English, Turkish and Russian, prompted by various phrase books and a vocabulary of gestures and mime. It made for surprisingly lucid conversation. At first I tried to chat to him about kid’s stuff – his age, his school, his mother, ice-hockey – but he brushed these dull enquiries aside. He was keen to know the legal age limit for smoking and drinking in England, what kind of guns the police carried in London, and if the Queen was still in the business of beheading. His Istanbul had been somewhat different from mine. He had never heard of Haghia Sophia but he knew where to buy imitation Rolex watches and could quote the prices in three currencies. Like everyone else on this ship, he was a small trader, bringing home goods to sell in Sevastopol. He showed me his wares, – T-shirts, switchblades, pornographic magazines.
He sat on the edge of his bunk, drumming his legs in a nervous rhythm, blowing smoke rings towards the porthole. Kolya was in a hurry to grow up, to find the fast-track to the adult world of hard currency, illegal trading, and women. I was more than he could have hoped for as a cabin-mate, a representative of the glamorous and decadent West, that happy land of rap stars and Playstations. Hoping to cement our relationship, he looked for a way to make himself useful to me. I was a lone foreigner on a ship of Ukrainians and Russians, and he began to cast himself as my protector.
His mother appeared at the door of the cabin to say goodbye. A tall blonde Venus in a fur-collared coat, she was an exotic dancer making a Ukrainian fortune in one of Istanbul’s nightclubs. In the narrow passage Kolya was momentarily tearful – a boy like any other saying goodbye to his mother – but once she was gone he was quick to shake off this unwelcome vulnerability. He began to count the fistful of dollars that she had tucked into his pocket. Then he bolted out the door as if he had another ship to catch. Fifteen minutes later he was back, carrying a shopping bag from the free-port facilities on the quayside. Inside was a hard plastic case. Opening it, he lifted out an automatic pistol.
‘A hundred dollars,’ he said, breaking the seal on the box of ammunition.
‘What is it for?’ I asked, ducking as he swung the gun round the cabin.
‘Protection,’ the boy said. His eyes shone.
He had bought a shoulder-holster as well, and sought my help in buckling it round his thin shoulders. Then he slipped the gun into the new leather, and put on his jacket to hide the weapon. Smiling, the child stood before me, armed and dangerous, ready for the voyage home.
We sailed at nine. Below in the cabin, I felt a series of shudders run through the ship, and went out on deck to find us slipping away from our berth. Swinging about in the entrance to the Golden Horn, where a stream of cars was crossing the Galata Bridge, we turned up the Bosphorus away from the old city. The world’s most splendid skyline, that exquisite silhouette of minarets and domes, was darkening on a lemon-coloured sky. Haghia Sophia, round-shouldered above the trees of Gülhane, was the colour of a shell, a delicate shading of pinks and greys. Swaying in the wash of currents, ferries pushed out from the docks at Eminönü, bound for Üsküdar where the lights were coming on along the Asian shore. On the foredeck, I made my way through the cables and the piled crates to stand in the prow of the ship as we slipped northward through the heart of the city.
The austere face of the Dolmabahçe Palace, the nineteenth-century successor to the Topkapi, rose on our left. Its restrained façade belies a kitsch interior, a confection of operatic furnishings too ghastly to detail. It was here that the last Sultans watched their enfeebled empire slither to an ignominious end in the early years of the twentieth century. Much of the palace was given over to the harem, whose membership seemed to grow as the number of imperial provinces declined. Sex, presumably, was some consolation for political impotency.
The Bosphorus is a pilot’s nightmare. In the twisting straits ships veer back and forth between the two continents, dodging the powerful currents and each other. We passed so close to the mosque at Ortaköy on the European side that I was able to look down through grilled windows to see a row of neatly synchronized bottoms, upturned in prayer. Half a mile on I could see what was on television in the stylish rooms of the old renovated Ottoman houses on the Asian shore. Accidents are not uncommon, and people tell amusing anecdotes about residents of the waterside villas being awoken in the middle of a foggy winter night to find a Russian freighter parked in the living room. Since the late seventies no less than twelve listed yalis or Ottoman houses have been run down by ships, invariably captained by tipsy Russians.
A spring wind had blown up, the Kozkavuran Firtinasi, the Wind of the Roasting Walnuts, which comes down to the Bosphorus from the hills of Anatolia. On the Asian shore we passed the twin-spired façade of the Ottoman cavalry school where cadets were taught some shadow of the horsemanship that had brought their ancestors from Central Asia. Beyond I could make out the ragged outline of Rumeli Hisari, its crenellated walls breasting the European hills. On the slopes below is the oldest Turkish cemetery in Istanbul. Both here and at the cemetery at Eyüp, there is a marvellous literature of death, ironic and light-hearted. I had been reading translations of them at breakfast. They are a fine lesson in how to say farewell.
‘A pity to good-hearted Ismail Efendi,’ reads one epitaph, ‘whose death caused great sadness among his friends. Having caught the illness of love at the age of seventy, he took the bit between his teeth and dashed full gallop to paradise.’ On another tombstone a relief shows three trees, an almond, a cypress, and a peach; peaches are a Turkish metaphor for a woman’s breasts. ‘I’ve planted these trees so that people may know my fate. I loved an almond-eyed, cypress-tall maiden, and bade farewell to this world without savouring her peaches.’ As we passed, the cemetery showed only as an area of darkness.
Soon the city was slipping astern. The tiered lights fell away on both shores and Europe and Asia drifted apart as the straits widened. I stood in the bow until we passed Rumeli Feneri and Anadolu Feneri, the lighthouses on the two continents flanking the northern entrance to the Bosphorus, blinking with different rhythms.
In antiquity the Black Sea was a watery frontier. When the Ionian Greeks crossed its wind-driven reaches in search of fish and wheat, they came upon a people on the far shores who might have stepped from one of their own mythologies. The Scythians were a diverse collection of nomadic tribes with a passion for gold and horses. To the Greeks they were barbarians, the repository of their anxieties and their prejudice.
Herodotus gives us a compelling account of them. His descriptions show remarkable similarities with Friar William’s account of the Mongols two thousand years later, a reminder if one was needed of the static nature of nomadic society and the pervading anxieties they aroused in settled populations. They were a people without towns or crops, Herodotus tells us, clearly unnerved. They lived on the produce of their herds of cattle and sheep and horses, migrating seasonally in search of fresh pasture. They slaughtered their sheep without spilling blood, drank fermented mare’s milk and smoked hemp which made them howl with pleasure. They were shamans who worshipped the elements and the graves of their ancestors. In battle they formed battalions of mounted archers. Their equestrian skills were unrivalled, and they sought the trophies of their enemies’ skulls for drinking-cups.
The ship lifted on the sea’s swell, its bow rising to the dark void ahead. A new wind was blowing, the Meltemi. It was a north-easterly blowing from the Pontic steppe across 500 miles of sea. In Istanbul they say the Meltemi is a cleansing wind, dispelling foul airs and bad feelings.
Historically, the people of cities have had an ambivalent response to the unsettled landscapes of the steppe which seem to harbour ideas both of Arcadia and of chaos. Settled peoples were forever torn between the notions that nomads were barbarian monsters who threatened civilized order, and intuitive innocents who retained some elemental virtue that had been lost to them. ‘Nomads are closer to the created world of God,’ wrote the fourteenth-century Arab historian and philosopher, Ibn Khaldun, ‘and removed from the blameworthy customs that have infected the hearts of settlers.’ He believed that they alone could escape the cycles of decadence that infected all civilization. Only regular blasts of their cleansing winds allowed civilization