When Video Games Saved My Life

Hasankeyf Re-Redux

In the arid gorge there was such absolute silence I found myself thinking I was the only person alive in the world; diagonal cliffs and mountains slashed away from me in every direction, and so forceful was the heat and the light of the summer day that I could not hear the wind.

Tonight as I write these words in Korea, listening to Afrocubism in the cozy warmth of my one-room apartment, a Turkish rug on the floor, an electric guitar in the corner, a camera on the table, stacks of unread books on the fridge, with the pale green lights of forty-story high-rises flickering on and off like little televisions outside my window, and the dim roar of engines seeping in through the walls and the glass—as I sit here in the midst of my civilized life—the quiet and the stillness of that moment in Hasankeyf still overwhelms me.

Where I was alone.

The ancient city is built into and hollowed out of several massive soaring cliffs, which look like enormous beehives from a distance thanks to the thousands of caves that people made there over thousands of years—most of the last inhabitants moved out about five decades ago, but I still found a few places here and there that were locked from the inside, with beautiful red carpets hanging on the rock walls and lining the floor which I could see through a rounded window or two.

Then there were whole villages built on top of the cliffs, out of sight of the tourist town below, and all of them were built entirely out of the mountain rock—some of the richer manors had at least two stories and several large rooms, but all of them were deserted, so far as I could tell. At one point I was scared off by a ghost or a homeless person who, in the terrible silence, was making the sound of one stone grinding against another in the depths of an enormous stone palace, which indeed is quite terrifying when you are alone and imaginative in a strange ancient place. Many rooms and homes were still charred black from when the Mongols came and destroyed the city hundreds of years ago; on the other side of the planet, at around the same time, Korea was occupied by the same people, and Busan was probably used as a base for the Mongols’ failed attempts to conquer Japan.

The vast cliffsides on the river.

I had worked my way up to these abandoned clifftop villages, which even possessed a large ancient Seljuk-style mosque (its rectangular minaret differing significantly from the typical rounded Ottoman spears you see poking at the sky everywhere in Turkey) and a vast ruined graveyard with beautiful Arabic inscriptions on the smashed tombstones, by squeezing inside a little hole in the bottom of the cliff that I found just by wandering along the riverside; I climbed quite a long while up a long stone stairway and was periodically plunged into absolute blackness; all of the stone steps were solid and worn out of the rock, but in some places there were windows opening out onto a steep drop several hundred feet down to the hungry rocks and pebbles clacking about like fish in the rapids; sometimes the stairs were so close to these windows that I had to do some serious maneuvering to keep moving forward; these might be called ‘birdshit acrobatics’, as they involved scraping my bare hands in huge piles of stale, stinking, barnacle-y guano. I was able to wash my hands when I got back to the hotel, but my dignity remained tarnished forever. Still, to use the favored English phrase in Turkey, it was no problem.

The way to the top---and this is looking up.

Incidentally, at this hotel, which was the only hotel in Hasankeyf, I found myself arguing with a random Frenchman about who could have the only single room in the place to himself; he wanted it, I wanted it, but by some rare and very atypical luck, I had the key, and no force on Heaven or Earth, not even the three-pronged lightning bolt of God himself, was going to deprive me of it; the Frenchman’s really amazing English philippic was lost on the ears of my Turkish host, whose comprehension of the language was best illustrated after both of us simply walked away from the Frenchman in the middle of his endless and very intellectual exploration of why he deserved the room and not me—striding through the last sun of the evening, the Turk said of the Frenchman, “He is many problem”, sighing and shaking his head. That night, after so many vicissitudes, I slept alone.

Near where I got myself trapped with two pups.

Speaking of keys, the adventure with the dogs has already been enumerated, but I should say that, along with my two canine companions, I was locked inside the ancient city and really unable to escape; the vast half-medieval / half-steel gate was surrounded by scaffolding and steep death drops on all sides, and the lock seemed to require a key that I did not have; after much shouting toward the deserted road and town of stone beneath, and a brief encounter with a helpless but very pretty Istanbulite, I was resigned to spending the rest of the (still) very early morning locked in Hasankeyf, parched, dying of thirst, but I wasted much of my youth playing video games, and didn’t bore my way through countless Tomb Raider-style door puzzles for no reason; the time indeed came when video games saved my life; eventually I somehow figured out that there were some latches or levers you had to pull or push to open the door; I pulled them, or pushed them, I don’t remember; something clanked, screeched, rolled; the door swung open; the dogs rushed free without thanking me for anything—like most people—and I was able to run back to the hotel and the annoying Frenchman and guzzle down enough water for ten Ians and ten rabid dogs.

Of course that same day I think I left for Van, and, eventually, Kars, where I would make the acquaintance of my first Nazi.

Rabid Dogs And The Garden In The Desert

Remains of an Armenian village just outside Yuvacali, Southeastern Turkey.

The far southeast of Turkey largely consists of black rocks and endless plains of yellow scrub; it is so dry and dusty in the summer you cannot go more than thirty minutes without gorging yourself on a liter of water; thousands of years ago it was a garden, a paradise, soaking wet, lush, green, and populated with a veritable bestiary of exotic animals, but the coming of agriculture (which may have been invented here) hastened the destruction and exhaustion of the environment and reduced the place to a wasteland, which was nonetheless populated by plenty of human beings by the time I arrived—as our species’ tenaciousness is second only to that of the common cockroach.

My guide Mehmet and I drove back and forth through this place for a few days, visiting one amazing set of ruins after another, as well as a family of nomads and an enormous rabid dog—I swear this thing was the size of a lion—which attacked our car when we were driving very slowly over an unfinished road. Mehmet was pretty nonchalant about this and I had to shout like a fool for him to roll up his window, as the monster was trying to jump inside and tear his throat out—and when we met the nomads I kept my eye on this thing, as I could still make it out in the distance, a small vicious dot wandering around through the walls of rippling heat that were broiling up out of the earth like a furnace. The family wasn’t too concerned about the dog either.

Some of the nomads, who were very hospitable and perhaps unusually quiet, as I cannot remember any of them attempting to speak to me.

I encountered more than a few animals that seemed or actually were dangerous while I was out in eastern Turkey; once, while I was locked inside the ancient ruins of Hasankeyf, I almost had to do battle with what I thought was a rabid dog; to make a long story short, I climbed up a cliff to get inside these ruins, and didn’t want to climb back down again, as I nearly lost my life in the process (I’ll tell the whole story another time), and the only other way out was through a gate that seemed to be locked until the afternoon (this was early morning, thanks to my jetlag); there were two dogs who were also locked inside with me, waiting for the gate to open so they could go free; they started barking at me when they saw me, one started running over to me, and I had to pry up a heavy metal pipe lying on the ground, as I seriously thought it was going to attack; but both of them turned out to be very nice, and just desperate to leave; I probably got flees from petting them. Eventually we escaped—but again, another time.

Hasankeyf, slated to be inundated at some point in the future; here I almost lost my hotel room to a Frenchman, and almost caught rabies, and certainly got fleas.

As Mehmet and I wandered the wide plains and the half-desert we came to a manmade canal of rich blue water flowing like liquid crystal, like a stream of diaphanous ice, through the sand and the grass and the rocks; this was Turkey’s GAP Project, an effort on the government’s part to enrich the southeastern wastelands with water. And indeed in some places you could see farms of green towering corn extending over the hills and into the horizon, all from these cement canals of beautiful, magical water. Yet the people I saw still lived in the most abject poverty. Everyone was dusty and dressed in rags; in the cities it was a common site to see horsedrawn carriages, though the carriages had rubber wheels and all of the horses were thinner than fashion models; most of the people walking along the roads tried to hitch a ride with us, and in the small towns we passed through—most of which consisted of only a handful of houses—it truly did not seem as if anyone was doing, or had ever done, anything.

From The Garden In The Desert

There was absolute silence. At the historical sites there was invariably a pair of children asking for me to photograph them for money; they would pick up pieces of pottery, attempt to sell them to me, and then smash them on the ground in anger when I refused. Outside of Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district and perhaps the tomb of Ataturk, which I did not bother to visit, the government does not appear to care about its immense wealth of antiquities—something other nations would die to have, as my current home, Korea, has already lost almost everything that belonged to its past, and lives in a sort of cultural twilight or purgatory, where no one really knows or cares at all about the thousands and thousands of people who came before them. This is a common trait of most nations, but it’s easier to have an awareness of the past when the wrecks of time literally surround you wherever you go—as in Istanbul, as in Rome—and it’s possible that even the most ignorant inhabitants of these places have a stronger historical consciousness than their fellows living here in the vast cement octopus that is Busan. Plus, there’s all the money from tourism, obviously.

One of the boys who volunteered to join us as we wandered a monastery that may have been visited by Jesus.

Despite all the complaints and criticisms, adventures in eastern Turkey were a dime a dozen; almost everything else I did on that trip could have been accomplished by a band of little old ladies, but upon venturing into the parched landscape surrounding the apartment complexes of Urfa—after an eighteen hour bus ride from Antalya!—I truly came to a place that had not yet been entirely consumed and themeparkified by tourism, perhaps the sole self-centered benefit of Turkey’s disdain for its own riches.

The Way To Hasankeyf

The last seat in the dolmuş.

It was a packed dolmuş ride to Batman, and the unlucky barrage of disasters I experienced along the way seemed to indicate that I would never make alive it to that fabled place with a superhero’s name. In the hot rickety minivan I sat next to a young family of affable Turks or Kurds (whose eastern accents made it sound as if each was constantly hawking up phlegm) and helped them to pacify their baby in the bright, burning afternoon heat, earning their favor in the process. The father gave me his infant child and asked me to hold him up to the dry wind rushing in from the yellow open window, and I realized quite abruptly that this was the first time I had ever held a baby before, and that despite my disgust with this particularly ugly child and my nonstop efforts to keep it from shrieking in my ears at all costs, there was something elemental and primordial about holding someone so young, small, and helpless—someone largely unknown to the world and to himself, with infinite potential, the capability to do anything, despite the unluckiness of his fate to be born to a family of sheepherders near the besieged Kurdish stronghold of Diyarbakır.

The father interrogated me in bemused Turkish for maybe an hour, and the entire minivan looked on without shame at us for the entirety of the trip, with one maiden aunt glaring at me with the usual Eastern mixture of terror, boredom, and curiosity stretching out her pale rubbery face, every single time I moved—and I may exaggerate sometimes but I do not exaggerate here. Two younger school teachers, each of whom possessed a smattering of English, attempted to converse with me, and asked me to tell the world that the people there are not terrorists. They gave me what seems to be a collection of bookmarks that quote the Koran in Arabic and Turkish, and said that to read it, even if I didn’t understand it, would bring me luck—proving to me that there is little ultimate difference to the superstitious folk religions scattered across the world, and that most are primarily concerned with simple rituals that bring the believer fortune, as if the creator of the universe cares about such things. I can remember the scam in Luang Prabang, in Laos on the other side of the planet, at the foot of the beautiful green mountain called Phu Si, where tourists are asked to pay money to free baskets of sparrows—”it will be lucky for you!”—which are probably either caught again or simply trained to come back to roost as soon as the tourist skidaddles up to the top to see a giant Buddha footprint.

Near where the young family got out of the dolmuş---note the ubiquitous trash.

Let’s also just say a little about the mutual media manipulation going on in our two cultures, made obvious by the conversation with the two kindergarten teachers—everyone in the West thinks all Muslims are terrorists, everyone in the East thinks all Westerners think all Muslims are terrorists. Oh television! If only you didn’t keep people so scared and divided! If only these people didn’t elect politicians who freely dole out blank checks to the military! This is obviously unfortunate for everyone since I think most people could be friends regardless of the various ridiculous species of kookiness bouncing around in their heads.

I stuffed two cold water bottles in the baby’s shirt and was kissed on my forehead by the father after I told him that I would not be drinking any water in front of them since everyone in the minivan was observing Ramadan. They were all undoubtedly parched, exhausted, and irritable by midafternoon from drinking no water and eating no food in a vast, arid furnace, and for me to drink even a single drop would surely have infuriated them (though I think it would take a bit more to break their facade of hospitality). To be without water in such a place for even half an hour is intensely uncomfortable. Children are supposed to be exempt from taking part in the challenges of Ramadan, and the baby in the dolmuş certainly was, but on a different trip I later saw a young boy, maybe only six years old, sucking a few drops of water through the cap of a full bottle that his father—the driver, a suicidal asshole—refused to allow him to open.

The dolmuş broke down twice in the middle of the road, there were all kinds of other vicissitudes, but everything was worth Hasankeyf, where I soon, somehow, arrived…

Story Of The Real Live Nazi

At the Archeological Museum in Van, a day before I met the Nazi

It was in the slightly Russian-esque city of Kars, located at the heart of a beautiful rainy pseudo-steppe in northeast Turkey, close to the Georgian border and even closer to the magnificence of Ani, that I was compelled to make the acquaintance of a certain friendly taxi driver for the express purpose of getting back and forth to that ancient Armenian city. In general the Turks despise the Armenians—every ethnic group seems to hate every other ethnic group in that area of the world—and don’t care for monuments to the glorious past of that foreign culture. The Romans, the Byzantines, the Sumerians, were all bred out of existence, but the Armenians are still right on the Turks’ doorstep and a constant reminder that despite what Ataturk says, Turkey is not the homeland of the Turks anymore than America is the homeland of the majority of the population that currently resides there.

So this results in Ani (and other beautiful non-Turkish historical sites) being in a state of neglect and disrepair. In this form the Armenian genocide continues. Likewise, the government cannot admit to the presence of an amazing, foreign, and enemy civilization inside their borders, so they deny it. The few poorly-translated information signs at Ani all claim that the place was built by Seljuqs when, in fact, it was destroyed by the Seljuqs (and almost destroyed again by the Turks in 1921); the population was so thoroughly massacred that you could not walk the streets without tripping over piles of corpses. Today this means there is no public transportation, so you have hire a taxi driver to get you there and back for a rather decent chunk of change. A regular dolmus might set you back a few dollars but I may have blown as much as fifty on this peculiarly Nazified excursion.

My taxi driver was an everyday Turk: friendly, gregarious, talkative, hospitable, and very eager to get to know me as best as he could with the limited High School English he possessed. Our enthusiasm for conversation was really unlimited during the long trip outside of the city of Kars. Barış, a mustachioed, pudgy, but handsome bright-eyed 34 year-old man revealed to me that he was not observing Ramadan because of a sore throat and proceeded to gobble down a number of individually-wrapped chocolates, tossing the wrappers out the window one-by-one with a nonchalance that set my leftwing hackles on edge; nonetheless the entire country is something of a giant garbage dump and I had been there for two weeks so I was used to such rampant idiocy. He showed me a picture of his baby son on his cell phone and was fond of discussing the benefits and drawbacks of various foreign cars. Later in the day he helped get me some tasty köfte and practically organized my entire trip to Ardahan, the leaping-off point for those crazy enough to get to Georgia overland from Turkey. He invited me to tea several times.

Kars, photographed while in the Nazi's company

The revelation that an otherwise normal-seeming person is, in fact, a bloodthirsty Nazi is really no different to discovering that a good old friend was really a reptilian shapeshifter, a vampire, or an admirer of Glenn Beck all along—it often comes as a complete surprise. During a lull in the conversation he suddenly asked me: “You know who is Number One?” I said no. I didn’t know who Number One was. “Adolph Hitler!” he replied.

Now I had been warned about this by my Turkish friends in Busan—don’t tell anyone in Turkey that you’re Jewish. I’m helped by the fact people generally don’t know who I “really” am unless I say so—while Jews are often depicted by their detractors as befitting a certain monstrous style, most of us really look like anyone so it’s easy enough to blend in with the rest of you meshugganas as long as we keep the money and the sacrificed catholic babies stuffed in our pockets and out of sight. I also noticed, during my travels around the country (Istanbul-> Cannakale-> Selcuk-> Antalya-> Urfa-> Van-> Kars), that at about three different bus stops there were small bookshops with at least one Turkish volume about Adolph Hitler, complete with the usual charming portrait of the man at full scowl, prominently displayed. Nevermind that the archetypal fucking Nazi would have exterminated every last person in Turkey if he had been given the chance. The obvious is not always so obvious to everyone.

Barış explained to me very casually that he loved Adolph Hitler specifically because he had killed so many Jews. He mimed a machine gun during this lecture, perhaps because he was unaware of the real way most Jews met their end during the Holocaust, while I was forced to contain my profound hatred for him as we were driving alone in the middle of nowhere; I hid my self beneath my smile as he continued and declared that all Jews deserved to die thanks to their treatment of Palestinian children. I laughed and agreed with every further point he espoused. My interactions with him were polite and totally devoid of all true emotion but I am fairly certain he had no idea of the truth of how I felt. His ease and candor suggested to me that his opinions were shared by many of his fellows.

Ani's modern inhabitants

The visit to Ani belongs in another post, but I will say that after everything Barış and I parted amicably. His aleikum salaam was extraordinarily warm; mine was pretense. I debated whether I should reveal my sick, true nature to the man, as a means of perhaps letting him know that for all their money-grubbing world-dominating follies Jews are actually relatively normal—even dashingly handsome and charming—human beings, but I held off. How do you tell someone that you are a member of an ethnic group whose extermination he gleefully, even boyishly, advocates? What do you expect? Could such an ignoramus ever achieve the sort of paradigm-shift a revelation like that ought to cause? Would he simply treat me coldly? Or try to murder me? The risk was too great. I was tempted to say, by the way, I’m a Jew and I’m damn proud of it (you fucking Nazi), but I let it go. The man is doubtlessly still there and easy to find as the city is small and taxi drivers are few.

Afterward I was afraid that every friendly person I encountered would randomly reveal to me, in a moment of friendly candor, their adoration of Joseph Goebbels—I prayed to my inward household gods that they would think once or twice before doing so. Barış remains the only actual Nazi, to my knowledge, I have ever met.

Driving To Tbilisi

(Bad) Picture of a statue of King David the Builder on the way in to Tbilisi

The ride to the capital of Georgia achieved heights of discomfort and terror that I never before thought possible. We did not drive so much as plummet down the curving roads, passing every car we encountered regardless of whether we could see who was coming in the opposite direction, and doing so at breakneck speed. The turns were so sharp I thought the packed van would topple over onto its side multiple times. The two-way road was really a two-lane highway. I remember looking out the front windshield and seeing a column of cars side-by-side, each on the left passing his neighbor on the right. There were no seatbelts. People in that part of the world look on them as an insult: if you wear a seatbelt, the driver thinks you don’t trust him (which made perfect sense as almost every driver I met operated his vehicle as if it were an airplane and not a car). Apparently they are also somewhat fatalistic, thinking (like King Gorboduc) that what will be, will be, and no seatbelt will save one whose fate has already been written down by god.

The driver and one passenger behind me were a pair of chainsmokers who complemented one another on this voyage in the following way: when the driver lit up, the passenger would catch a whiff of the smoke and then proceed to oblige herself; when she lit up, the driver, who had by then finished his cigarette, would smell her smoke and then cave in to his cravings only moments after having satisfied them. So the entire van chainsmoked for several hours. There were some very young children aboard who took part in this silent and involuntary collective socializing; one of them was as pale as the moon and had the huge, unearthly blue eyes of a true Georgian. Some of them are the only people I know of who actually resemble the figures we see in Byzantine mosaics. I have never seen so many beautiful people concentrated in such a small place as the old city of Tbilisi. One of them, a muscular young man who spoke good English (the Georgians find English easy since their own language is so fantastically complex), later rode the old Soviet subway with me and helped me find a hotel. Their hospitality is not just a legend and I’m sure I would have found further examples if I had stayed longer than just two days.

But the driver himself was a man whose personality was so crowded with idiosyncrasies that I think his entire psyche was ready to burst at the seams. He had a Russian, and not a Georgian, appearance; bloodshot eyes from a lifetime of smoking like a dragon, and a healthy barrel-like potbelly from drinking like a Russian; and he had the oddest way of sitting in his seat I think I have ever seen. He did not sit still. He revolved. He rotated. He swung his head in circles like a planet around a star. He bobbed back and forth like a bobble-head. And he did all of this for three hours, stopping only to let someone get on the van or to cross himself on catching sight of a Georgian cathedral perched high-up on a mountain, out of reach of all the countless marauders this country has been subjected to through its long history. I don’t know how long he has been driving for money, but I think it was a miracle that he survived even a single one of his own voyages.