Labels and Other Stories Page 16

  Mehmet had been correct in supposing that patriotic coachloads of school parties would be converging on the sites and monuments of the Gallipoli peninsula, and it was with satisfaction that he noted the swarms of teenagers clambering over the remains of the gun batteries, prodding the wild tortoises, posing on the battlements of the castle, and scattering Coca-Cola cans in the wake of their thirst. It was only May 19th, and the onset of summer’s implacable heat was yet a few days off, but it was hot enough nonetheless for the schoolchildren to be buying plenty of soft drinks. Mehmet set about his work.

  At about midday he felt there was not much more to be done for the time being, and he decided that he would try to cadge a lift to the great monument at Mount Hisarlik Tepe. Accordingly he set off along the sinuous coastal road, in the secure knowledge that before long someone would give him a lift. In a country where most people had no car, but everyone could still be trusted, it was accepted that one gave lifts as a matter of course. Before long, a white car passed him and he signalled frantically for it to stop. When it did, he picked up his white sack and sprinted.

  When he arrived at the passenger door, he bent down to look at the driver, and knew immediately that he had flagged down a foreigner. The fellow was wearing shorts, white socks and a straw hat. His face, forearms and legs were burned a painful brick red by the sun, and he had the strength and bulk of someone who had flourished in a land of plenty. Like many foreigners, he looked somewhat ridiculous, and Mehmet wondered whether he would be safe to drive with. Also, foreigners were usually quite rich, and this often seemed to bring with it some unpleasant and offensive attitudes.

  ‘Günaydin,’ said the foreigner, and Mehmet thought, ‘At least he speaks Turkish.’

  The driver was in fact a phrasebook foreigner. He had conscientiously learned all the phrases he needed to know for telling people that he did not understand and did not speak Turkish. He had been hoping that in this way he might avoid the embarrassment of having to listen intelligently and nod at appropriate moments whenever Turks engaged him in conversation. He had discovered, however, that Turks were like the English: they thought that if they talked loudly enough in their own language, and paraphrased and reparaphrased themselves often enough, then sooner or later a foreigner would grasp their point. This particular foreigner had also come up against the usual difficulty of the phrasebook user: it was all very well being able to ask things in Turkish, but one never understood what one’s interlocutor said in reply. He asked ‘Nerede?’, and immediately knew that he was not going to comprehend Mehmet’s response.

  ‘Well,’ said Mehmet, ‘I’m just going round and about, sort of following all of these school parties, so I’m not really fussy. If you’re going by any of the monuments, perhaps you could just drop me off.’

  The foreigner looked at him blankly, and said, ‘Anlamam. Turkçe bilmiyorum.’

  Mehmet furrowed his brow and looked at him through the window. ‘Well, that’s very odd, that you tell me in Turkish that you don’t understand Turkish and you don’t speak it. You must admit it’s a little peculiar.’

  The foreigner shrugged and raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Anlamam,’ he repeated, and again asked, ‘Nerede?’

  ‘I’ve already told you where I’m going,’ said Mehmet. He was beginning to wonder whether the foreigner might not be a little mad, and whether it might not be better to wait for another car. He waved his hand in the direction of Seddülbahir. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s only one road and only one direction, so that’s where I’m going.’

  ‘Anlamam. Turkçe bilmiyorum,’ repeated the foreigner, with the same dumb expression upon his face. Mehmet sighed, realising that he had let himself in for a difficult lift, but he opened the door anyway, dumped his plastic sack on the floor, and climbed in. If he was going to get this foreigner to understand anything, then he was going to have to repeat himself an awful lot.

  ‘No problem,’ said the foreigner, and Mehmet’s eyes lit up. This was universal language. ‘No problem,’ he repeated, nodding his head as the car pulled away.

  On their left the Marmara Sea glowed in the sun, lapping on the tiny beaches, and above them on their right rose the slopes of dense Mediterranean scrub. Mehmet began to relax; the foreigner might be strange, but he was a careful driver. He reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a crushed pack of cigarettes. He had already lit one when he remembered that some of the more outlandish foreigners go crazy if you smoke anywhere near them. He indicated the cigarette and raised anxious eyebrows. ‘OK?’ he asked.

  ‘No problem,’ said the foreigner, and Mehmet repeated the phrase happily. He offered his packet of cigarettes to the driver, who indicated ‘no’ by a small wave of his hand. Mehmet considerately held his cigarette out of the window so that its smoke would not offend. The foreigner noticed, and, having once been a smoker, became anxious that in the slipstream the cigarette would burn out too quickly. He pulled out the ashtray in the dashboard, and gestured towards it. ‘OK, no problem,’ he said.

  Mehmet smiled. He too had been anxious about the cigarette being largely wasted. ‘I suppose you’re a tourist,’ observed Mehmet. ‘I suppose you’re going around taking photos of everything. We get a lot of tourists here. Australians, New Zealanders, Germans. Where do you come from?’

  ‘Evet,’ replied the foreigner, who was tired of saying ‘I don’t understand. I don’t speak Turkish’ and thought that he might be able to get away with simply saying, ‘Yes.’ Mehmet looked at him askance; the foreigner’s brain must be a little disconnected. They passed an old peasant woman whose donkey was laden with firewood. ‘Fotograf?’ he suggested, assuming that the foreigner would like to take snaps of the peninsula’s more picturesque sights. He felt mildly insulted when the foreigner shook his head. ‘Well, I suppose you just want to take pictures of the monuments,’ said Mehmet. ‘Perhaps your grandfather is buried in one of the cemeteries.’

  The foreigner thought it safe to continue to reply in the affirmative, even though he did not understand at all. ‘Evet,’ he said, unwittingly assenting to the proposition that his grandfather lay thereabouts in a hero’s grave.

  ‘Well,’ said Mehmet, ‘my grandfather fought in that campaign as well. Obviously it was on the Turkish side. You should have heard his stories. They were amazing. He got shot three times on the same day, and then he was bitten by a snake. He lived through all that, and the war of national liberation (the one against the Greeks), and then he lived until he was ninety-seven years old.’ Mehmet grew serious. ‘You know, it’s true what Atatürk said, that the war we fought made us respect each other. The effect of all that blood was to make us brothers. English, Anzac, French, Turkish, all brothers.’ He looked very intently into the foreigner’s face, and asked, ‘Don’t you agree?’

  The foreigner resorted once again to ‘Anlamam. Turkçe bilmiyorum’, and Mehmet shook his head. This foreigner was undoubtedly a bit strange, agreeing with you part of the time, and then saying that he doesn’t understand. Perhaps there was some interesting psychological or intellectual condition whereby you momentarily forget your foreign languages, and then remembered them again a few minutes later.

  Mehmet made the foreigner drive to the huge monument and war cemetery at Hisarlik Tepe. It was forty-two metres high and was visible for miles around. Mehmet naturally assumed that the foreigner would want to photograph it, as well as all the heroic statues that surrounded it, and he elected himself to be the guide. In fact, it was really a stroke of luck that he had been given a lift by a tourist, since this would take him to all the sites where the parties of schoolchildren were.

  Mehmet left his white sack in the car, and the foreigner reluctantly took pictures of the monument, and the cemetery, and of Mehmet smiling in front of the statues. He had come to Turkey with only a limited amount of film, and did not know how to explain to Mehmet that he was a botanist who was visiting the peninsula to study the wildflowers, which at this time of year bloomed prolifically in all
the fields and grassy banks. The Turkish farmers did not use herbicides, and the wheat fields were swathed in scarlet poppies. The botanist found it depressing to think that once upon a time his own country had been as lovely as this, and he also found it frustrating that he was unable to explain to Mehmet that he was interested not in Turkey’s valiant past, but in its flowers. All the same, he was moved when he saw the tears in the corners of Mehmet’s eyes as he read the names of the soldiers on the gravestones. Two beautiful teenage girls were walking together, arm in arm, reverently placing bunches of marguerites on the graves. He found himself wishing that he was able to love his own country as much as the Turks loved theirs.

  Mehmet picked up an abandoned Coca-Cola can, and the botanist thought, ‘Ah, what a good man, he cares enough about this place to pick up other people’s rubbish.’ The botanist was very strong on the idea that each of us is responsible for the environment. In his own country he had often got into trouble with groups of youths, on account of confronting them and demanding that they pick up their sweet papers and cigarette packets. Mehmet crushed the tin can in his hands, and held on to it. The botanist was surprised that he did not put it in the bins that they passed. He was even more surprised when Mehmet signalled him to continue walking, and then rummaged in one of the bins.

  Mehmet was ashamed of having been reduced to this, and he did not want the foreigner to see what he was doing. The foreigner, however, was perplexed; his immediate thought was that Mehmet must be an oddity, perhaps someone who was obsessed with rubbish. However, he saw Mehmet’s hurried shame very clearly, and pretended, when Mehmet caught him up, not to notice that he was carrying three or four cans behind his back. The foreigner let Mehmet back into the car, and affected not to notice that he was hurriedly stuffing them into his white sack.

  The foreigner spotted a can on his side of the car, thought about it, picked it up, and, when he got in, handed it to his passenger. Mehmet looked up at him, took the can eagerly, and then felt the blood rush to his face and ears. His expression became miserable; he had been detected so soon in his humiliating occupation. He tried to explain.

  ‘I do it for money,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a proper job, but it’s the inflation. They say it’s ninety per cent, but I think it’s more like three hundred. Everything’s getting more and more expensive, and life is harder and harder every day. I can’t afford anything any more. The prices go up and up, and my salary doesn’t.’ He reached into his back pocket and drew out his wallet. He showed the foreigner his small wad of lira. ‘Turkish lira,’ he said disgustedly, ‘they’re not worth anything. I don’t know whose fault it is, but they ought to be shot. How am I supposed to manage? Unlike some, I’ve got nobody sending me Deutschmarks. It’s a shitty life.’

  The foreigner nodded; he needed no Turkish to understand the gist of these gestures and complaints; there were so many zeros on a Turkish banknote that even a dog was a multimillionaire.

  Mehmet reached into his sack and showed the foreigner the bottom of a tin can. ‘I look at the serial numbers,’ he said, ‘and that way I know which ones I ought to collect. Some are made of good metal that’s worth recycling, and some of them aren’t. I only take the best.’

  The foreigner thought for a moment. He had two days left, which was probably enough time for the fieldwork that he had to do. It looked as though he would just have to give up the idea of spending the last day lounging on a beach. It was frustrating that Mehmet had somehow taken over his day, but on the other hand he was in a splendid position to help him, since he had the car and plenty of time. He criticised himself inwardly for being tempted to let Mehmet wander off somewhere, and then speed away in the car. He would have despised himself for doing it, and besides, how often does one get the chance to help someone else earn an honest living? He felt obscurely that his comfortable life on a comfortable income placed a special obligation upon him, and anyway, a few hours collecting cans was surely pleasant enough on a day as lovely and springlike as this. ‘Seddülbahir?’ he suggested, and Mehmet nodded. There would be lots of schoolchildren at the First Martyrs’ Memorial and at the Sergeant Yahya Memorial, all swigging soft drinks and throwing away the cans.

  As they drove around the coast the foreigner marvelled all over again that this idyllic place had been the scene of so many months of bloody battles. Mehmet waved a hand towards the fields and their swathes of flowers. ‘I love this place,’ he said. ‘I used to know it very intimately. I did my degree in agronomy, at the university in Istanbul, and I came out here to do my fieldwork. I know the names and habitats of all these flowers, but unfortunately no one in the real world is interested in such things. Nobody pays you for it, anyway. I’m like most of my friends: I’ve got qualifications I can’t use, and I scrape through life like a stray dog in the street. If you’ve got the time I’d like to go for a short stroll and have a look at the flowers, for old times’ sake. Some of them are very interesting. I was working on the use of selective herbicides to get rid of them, but you can’t get peasants to spend money on herbicides anyway, and now I’m quite glad that nothing came of my work.’ He turned and looked at the stranger. ‘I like the flowers now, even though they used to be the enemy.’

  ‘Anlamam,’ said the foreign botanist hopelessly, frustrated and irritated that Mehmet kept on talking without seeming to realise that no communication was occurring.

  Mehmet was also wearied by the lack of communication, however. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I suppose we’ll just have to go on looking at these monuments. I don’t really see the attraction of it myself, but there you are. At least there’ll be a lot of kids throwing away cans.’

  At the Cape Helles monument Mehmet became excited by the thought that perhaps the dead grandfather of the stranger was mentioned on the walls or the obelisk, but the latter did not seem to want to go and look. In fact, he had already set about picking up tin cans. Mehmet approached the owner of the refreshments stall, stood with as much dignity as he could, and said to its proprietor, ‘I am recycling cans as a sideline, and I am wondering if you might give me your permission to sift through your rubbish bins. I will leave no mess, I promise.’

  The proprietor considered him, and nodded his head with resignation. It was hard to have to maintain oneself in any profession these days. ‘Who’s the foreigner?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Mehmet. ‘He’s a mystery. He picked me up when I was hitching, and now he’s just driving me about whilst I pick up cans. I don’t know what he’s up to or where he’s really going.’

  ‘Not all foreigners are shits,’ observed the proprietor, a middle-aged man with a comfortable paunch. ‘Maybe you’ve struck it lucky.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Mehmet, ‘it’s a bit strange, driving me about and collecting cans when he doesn’t have to.’

  ‘Don’t question God’s plans,’ said the proprietor, pleased with his little flash of pious wisdom, ‘maybe he’s your angel for the day.’

  ‘That’s a pretty thought,’ said Mehmet, and the stallholder nodded knowingly, saying, ‘God’s the boss.’

  ‘Perhaps you could lend me a plastic bag?’ suggested Mehmet. ‘My sack is getting heavy.’

  Mehmet rifled through the rubbish bins, and then he and the foreigner trailed in the wake of the schoolchildren, who were photographing each other in the gun emplacements, and by the Sergeant Yahya Memorial. The foreigner was a little disappointed when he saw that Mehmet was simply discarding cans that he did not deem to be worth recycling; he had still not quite disabused himself of his first faulty notion that Mehmet was an environmentalist. ‘All the same,’ he thought, ‘this fellow is certainly a good rather than a bad thing. At least half of the cans get collected that wouldn’t otherwise.’

  Mehmet had not eaten since breakfast, and had not really eaten properly for several days. His stomach was starting to rumble, and he was feeling somewhat weak and dizzy. It was by now late afternoon, the heat of the late spring was beginning to oppress the brain, and he
was longing for a beer. The trouble was, that if he invited the stranger to a pastahane, then it would be up to him to pay for the drinks and a snack. The thought made him panic a little; he was a generous and honourable man, but money was the one thing with which he could not possibly afford to be generous. Nonetheless, he asked, ‘Hungry?’ in a tentative and non-committal tone of voice.

  The word ‘acikmak’ was one that the foreigner knew from his phrasebook, and he shook his head. He had been trying to lose weight, and had deliberately been missing out lunch, which in general was quite easy to do when you were tramping about in the wilderness, looking for flowers. Additionally, the equable climate made him feel less greedy than usual, and it was actually quite nice just to drink a litre of water at midday. He was puzzled by Mehmet’s response to his denial of hunger, however; he seemed both relieved and disappointed. It occurred to him that perhaps the Turk was angling for a free meal, and this thought at once annoyed him and made him feel sorry.

  Mehmet glanced at his watch, and realised that before long he would have to return to the ferry port in order to catch the boat, reluctant as he was to leave behind so many collectible cans, and therefore he suggested, ‘Kilitbahir?’

  ‘OK,’ said the foreigner, both amused and bemused by the manner in which he had lost a complete day going in a big circle with a perfect stranger.

  On the way through the dense pine forest that had been the site of the second battle of Krithia, they both simultaneously spotted a heap of rubbish that had been jettisoned by the roadside. They exchanged glances, and the foreigner stopped the car and reversed. ‘At least we now understand each other a little,’ they both thought. They found seven cans. ‘Seven,’ said Mehmet, pleased, and ‘yedi’ repeated the foreigner, also pleased.

  The foreign botanist stopped the car at an open-air café on the side of the road by the Havuzlar cemetery, intending to buy Mehmet food and drink, but was beaten to it by Mehmet, who ordered a beer for himself and an orange juice for the driver. ‘Would you permit me to take away your used tin cans?’ Mehmet asked the patron. ‘I recycle them, you see. It’s a little extra money for the family. I promise I won’t make a mess.’