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 to sustain its own virtues.
Kolya came to fetch me from my post in the ship’s bow, motioning for me to follow him as if he had something urgent to show me. Downstairs in our cabin he produced a bottle of champagne and four plastic cups. Then he disappeared and returned a moment later with two women.
Anna and Olga were the occupants of the neighbouring cabin. They were a dramatic illustration of the way that Slavic women seem unable to find any middle ground between slim grace and stout coarseness. Anna was a striking figure in tight jeans and a short sleeveless top. Olga, in cardigan and heavy shoes, wouldn’t have stood out among a party of dockers. Kolya, already a slave to female beauty, had only invited her to make up the numbers.
He was an energetic host, a fifteen-year-old playing at cocktail party. He poured the champagne, produced packets of American cigarettes and a bag of pistachio nuts, and chatted to everyone, the life of the party. I felt like a debutante being launched into the ship’s society. When the women asked about me Kolya explained I was going to visit the Tartars, and that I was a good friend of a priest called William who had been to visit them already.
Olga was silent and morose while Anna did all the talking. She had spent three weeks in Istanbul and was now travelling home to Sevastopol. The purpose of her visit was unclear. She tried to make it sound like a holiday but her cabin, like all the cabins on this boat, was so crowded with canvas sacks and cardboard boxes tied with string she could barely get the door open. The collapse of Communism had made everyone a salesman. But Anna, I suspected, had been trading more than tinned sardines. The Black Sea routes carried a heavy traffic of young women bound for the red-light districts of Istanbul. Many were part-timers making three or four trips a year to boost the family income.
We drank the champagne and when it was finished Kolya fetched another bottle, which I tried in vain to pay for. The boy was our host, magnanimous and expansive. He made toasts, he told dirty jokes that made the girls laugh, he kept his jacket on, buttoned up to conceal the gun. Olga soon drifted away to shift some crates and Anna now basked alone in our attention. She had become flirtatious. With the boy she already enjoyed a maternal familiarity, alternately hugging him and slapping him in mock remonstration, and now she extended the same attentions to me, pinching my shoulder and propping her elbows on my knees.
Kolya was showing off his collection of T-shirts adorned with American slogans. ‘California is a State of Mind’, one announced. ‘Better Dead than in Philadelphia’, another said. When he presented one to Anna, she leapt up to try it on. Standing with her back to us in the cramped cabin she removed her top. The boy gazed at her naked back and her bare breasts swelling into view as she stooped to pick up the T-shirt, then he shot a hot questioning glance at me. She swung round to model the gift. It seemed a trifle small. Her nipples pressed through the thin fabric just below a caption that read ‘Flying Fuck: the Mile High Club’.
When we had finished the second bottle Kolya took us off to the nightclub. I had not suspected the Lomonosov of harbouring a nightclub but Kolya was obviously a veteran clubber on the Black Sea routes. We descended a narrow stairway to a windowless dungeon in the bowels of the ship. Coloured lights in putrid hues of pink and blue glazed the shabby velvet sofas and plastic tables gathered round a small dance floor. The room smelt of stale beer and bilge water. Disco Muzak was leaking out of tinny speakers. Kolya ordered and paid for a round of drinks with umbrellas in them. I had given up trying to restrain him.
Throwing back her cocktails, Anna was now in full party mode. A tall bearded Russian, billed as Rasputin, had taken to the tiny stage with a synthesizer that replicated every instrument known to lounge lizards. She insisted I dance with her, tugging me by the arm out onto the empty dance floor. She had two basic steps, neither related to the music. The first was licentious: she ground her hips provocatively against me, insinuating one of her legs between mine. The other was a cross between the Moulin Rouge chorus line and a kung-fu exercise with a series of high kicks and spectacular twirls. It was a nerve-wracking business. The transition from simulated sex to the martial arts was so drunkenly abrupt that I was in real danger of having my head kicked in between romantic clinches.
All the following day at sea, Kolya followed me around the ship like a pint-sized bodyguard, his jacket bulging. Below in the cabin he spent most of his time loading and unloading the pistol. I tried to keep myself out of the line of fire.
In the dining hall Kolya, Anna and I ate together at a corner table. Meals on the Mikhail Lomonosov were dour occasions. Breakfast was an ancient sausage and a sweet cake. Lunch and dinner were indistinguishable – borscht, grey meat, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs. The passengers ate in
