Magic Bus (7 page)

‘The entrance is over here.'

Ten feet above the ground, hidden behind a fold of rock, a dim aperture opens into the stone. Under her guidance, I scramble on to a ledge and crawl lizard-like into its cool darkness, disturbing flights of moths. The passageway curves to the right, then up inside
the carved cliff. I unfold myself into a simple, cruciform cave church. On its threshold, a protective millstone stands ready – as it has done for a thousand years – to be rolled over the entrance. Penny puffs at my heels.

‘Man, this is it.'

Above our heads, a dome has been hewn out of the solid rock, an iron adze and chisel outlining door frames, marking false capitals and lattices. Two stone seats and a ledge of pews mark the perimeter, enhancing the illusion of a conventional church. Around a thick horseshoe arch, which opens on to the canyon, are painted umber flames symbolizing the descent of the Holy Ghost into the nave.

Penny spins on her toes, her arms wrapped around herself and tears forgotten, wailing, ‘Whooee.'

In caves such as this, unnumbered generations took sanctuary from wolves, Romans and the consumer society. Early Christians retreated up the steep cliffs to carve over the centuries as many as four hundred hideaways, chapels and basilicas. St Paul, born not many miles to the south, considered the environment suitable for inspiring and training missionaries. During medieval times, the valleys became one of the principal monastic centres of the Byzantine Empire. In the sixties, Cappadocia provided sanctuary for many Intrepids, also giving them a safe place to explore a utopian way of life.

‘After Istanbul, we stayed here for the summer. All summer. Just hanging out. Just being.'

Penny settles herself into the monk's seat, a look of deep contentment rising on her face. She gazes over the lip of the cave, down to a small spring and a clump of wild apple trees and starts talking about their stay, her loquacious self again.

‘That summer, people put up their tents and banners, which in this fantasyland was amazing. There were Japanese glass chimes, little Tibetan prayer flags, cats doing Zhao Zen meditation, couples promising to love each other under the stars and under heaven.' She takes a deep breath. ‘It was cosmic.'

At the end of another short tunnel is a second square chamber,
perhaps a funerary chapel, its ceiling darkened by centuries of cooking fires. A single pillar is smashed away at its base and dangling like a stalactite.

‘This was our bedroom. Lit a few candles here, I can tell you.'

I stare at the sooty, deconsecrated space, then out into the valley, at her demi-Eden, now abandoned and inhospitable. I feel an urge to protect her – and myself – from disappointment and say quickly, ‘We should head into Göreme to find a hotel.'

Penny ignores me, dropping to her hands and knees to scrabble in the dust, looking for something, for anything: a Levi's button, a Day-Glo hair pin, even a roach clip. I know she'll find no memento. Too many years have passed since her heady summer of love. Too many younger travellers have stopped by her cave.

‘Penny, let's go.'

But she's laughing, digging in the earth, scooping away the soil. She pulls up small stones. She breaks a purple nail-extension. I put my hand on her shoulder and, after a minute or two, help her on to her feet. I pick up our bags and turn towards the tunnel.

‘Stay with me, Jack,' she says.

‘Here? In the cave?'

She nods. I'm about to refuse her when I notice her hands trembling on her cane.

‘But… I don't have a guitar,' I say.

Later, I trek back into town to buy water and food. I borrow a frying pan and a couple of blankets from the Kö
ş
e pension. By the time I crawl back up the tunnel, it's late afternoon. Penny has swept out the church, arranged her candles by the stone altar and sits on a pew gazing at the distant, rippling cones.

‘I've been watching the light change with the day,' she says, nodding into the distance. ‘Brick red to rust, ochre to salt-white.'

I unpack the shopping, pass her a pack of cigarettes, uncork a bottle of wine for me. I cut up a cucumber, tomatoes and a shrub-sized bunch of coriander to make a salad, tossing it together with lemon and oil in a carrier bag. In the pan I fry a monster omelette with red peppers, olives and salty, dry
tulum peynir
goat's
cheese. I lay a couple of rolled
börek
pastry parcels around its rim. We balance on the rocky lip, eating from the pan in silence, breaking bread, watching our crumbs being carried away by bold sparrows and the evening's ants.

‘We travelled throughout the world. We conquered the warshattered world by our faith and transformed it into paradise,' she says after supper. The words are familiar. ‘Hermann Hesse.'

‘You say faith? What do you – did Hesse – mean by faith?'

‘The belief in something better,' she answers me. ‘The search for enlightenment.'

To Buddhists, enlightenment means the passing into nirvana, the release from the cycles of death and rebirth. In the sixties, the word became generalized to describe an enlightened awareness of self.

Bands of golden sunlight gild the high branches of the pines. Its radiance filters through the veins of the olive leaves. The shadows of black crows fleet across stony cliffs. As the sun sets, we sit together in silence; Penny still studying our surroundings, me writing.

Last night, the candles burnt out before I could finish my notes. This morning, I left the cave and set about exploring Göreme, the isolated farming village transformed by tourism. I'm curious how the town looked in Penny's day.

Rock churches rise beyond the coach park. Veiled women buy vegetables alongside backpackers in shorts. Across from the Bedrock Travel Agency, down the hill from the Troglodyte Hotel, I find Flintstone's Bar. Its Turkish owner, ‘Fred, a local caveman', tells me how he settled on its name.

‘A couple of years ago, two Australian girls were sleeping in one of my caves,' he says, filling the quiet afternoon with conversation. ‘I gave them a morning call by shouting, “Wilma, wake up!” We'd been watching
The Flintstones
on TV. The girls shouted back, “Coming, Fred.” Dino,' he yells at the dog licking my hand, ‘leave the customer alone.'

To help me to revive the sixties, Fred invites over Abdullah
Güney, owner of Zemi Tours, and Bayram Maden, a tall and flamboyant restaurateur.

‘I remember the parties most of all,' grins Abdullah, shaking my hand, settling himself on to a low cushion, eager to talk, ‘drinking wine, playing guitars, sitting together in the Turkish way.'

‘At first, the hippies camped in the valleys,' recollects Bayram, one of the initial villagers to welcome the Intrepids to Göreme.

‘Our mothers told us, “Don't go near the
giaours
.” The infidels.'

‘My father ran the only café in the village,' Bayram goes on. ‘One night after he had gone to bed, I invited some of them to sleep on the tables and floor. Next morning, when it was still dark, my father walked in and tripped over the sleeping bodies. He took his stick and beat them out into the street.'

‘Like wild dogs,' laughs Abdullah recalling the old, insular days.

‘I convinced my father to let our guests stay but he insisted on hanging a curtain across the middle of the café: locals on one side,
giaours
on the other.'

‘We called him “
Christian
Bayram”,' Abdullah tells me, laying his arm across his friend's shoulders. ‘He grew long sideburns, which wasn't allowed, and fell in love with a South African girl. His mother wailed, “What has happened to our boy?”'

‘In Turkish, we say European girls are washing the eyes of the men: uncovering their legs, showing their arms, putting on lipstick.'

‘But the visitors' liberalism must have upset the older villagers,' I say, as Fred slips off his stool to serve a customer, pulling a pint of Carlsberg by hand. ‘They covered traditional foods in ketchup. They insisted on you learning English. What did you think of that… disrespect?'

‘Nothing,' shrugs Bayram, pragmatic and dismissive. ‘They were – you are – tourists. You could be from the moon.'

In 1983, three German travellers helped to pour the concrete foundation of the first cafeteria. The following summer, it was joined by the first cave-house pension. Over the coming decades, the area was transformed from a derelict backwater into a labyrinth for tourists' consumption. Now a bustling town in
Cappadocia, Göreme's two thousand residents run sixty hotels, fifteen tour agencies, eighteen restaurants and a bus-station shopping-complex.

‘When I was growing up, I slept with my shoes under my pillow,' says Abdullah. ‘Today, all my children drive cars. My daughter was the first village woman to go to university. Our prosperity started with the arrival of the hippies.'

It's late when I hump the week's supplies back to ‘Love' Valley. The torchlight plays on stone walls so smooth, so eroded, that every sharp edge seems to have melted away in the day's heat.

I'm not worried that Penny might have done herself an injury. Or abandoned the cave during my absence. I'm no longer wary of her intentions. She may remember Cappadocia as both a paradise and a good place to die but I don't suspect suicide is part of her life plan.

I stand beneath the thick horseshoe arch. Above me, a single candle flickers in the darkness. I'm about to call out when I hear Penny's voice. I listen for a moment. She's moving around the cave, organizing her few possessions, singing as softly as the evening breeze. A Joan Baez lament. I don't join in because I don't want to break the spell. Her voice – as rusty as a temple bell – echoes off the darkening stones.

We eat a Flintstone pizza that evening, aubergines stuffed with lamb the next. We talk into the small hours. During the following days, I meet with Fred and the other men. I'm struck by the irony of the hippies' rejection of acquisitive selfishness stimulating their hosts' material prosperity. We also discuss the social cost of economic success. Fred remembers that, once, everyone in Cappadocia was family. ‘Every boy was my brother, every girl my sister' is how he expressed it. ‘Now, neighbours own competing restaurants and cut each other's throats.' But when I voice a pang of regret for the lost communal life, he wags his index finger.

‘Turks don't want to stay poor farmers in pretty villages, no matter how much some Westerners would wish our lives unchanged,' he says. ‘We want schools and doctors. We want to buy
toys for our grandchildren. We are a living part of this Flintstone world.'

Penny seems content to stay in the cave, watching the changing light. She leaves me to make my own decisions, to find my own road. She certainly has no wish to travel on with me.

‘There are a thousand paths to nirvana,' she tells me. ‘Mine is not by way of Iran.'

On our last night together, I tell Penny that Fred will check in on her every couple of days to restock her food and water. I make sure she has enough money. I offer her my email address. She puts her hand to my lips and tells me to shut up.

Nightbirds and bats drop out of their shelters, flying by the edge of our vision. A bulbul warbles in the branches. An owl hoots at the twilight. As the valley slips into darkness, the candles warm the old cave with their intimate light. In their shadow Penny's hair looks midnight-black not seal-grey. A full moon rises above the cones. The ancient horseshoe arch frames the stars.

I wake before dawn and, as she snores softly in her cocoon of borrowed bedding, I gather my bits and backpack and slip out of the cave. My bus is due to leave just after six.

In the valley, I pause to check for my passport. A thin, yellowed volume has been slipped between my notebooks. I pull out Penny's copy of
Siddhartha
. The edge of a page has been turned down. As I step along the path, I read Hesse's words on the shudder of awakening.

‘He began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.'

I turn the corner and walk away, leaving behind a lone voice singing to the morning.

Beyond the fly-flecked windscreen spread gaunt plains, barren flat-top mountains and asphalt ribbons quivering in the hot sun. In every direction the prairie unrolls a hundred miles wide, broken only by tufts of white flowers marking family plots. Distant figures scythe with short, crescent sickles. Summer breezes push and pool wheat and barley, weaving waves of pattern across the steppe. Space stretches out, as well as time, dwarfing electricity pylons and a thread-like rail line, as if the earth itself is expanding in the heat.

I changed buses in Kayseri, my spirit lifting with the road ahead. A rose blooms beside a caged, blue-stone ossuary. On a blind corner we overtake an overloaded truck, its green chillies quivering free of their sacks like miniature elvers. I drop my pen.

‘Excuse me,' I apologize to the passenger sitting beside me, taking off my earphones, ‘I don't speak Turkish.'
Türkçe bilmiyorum
. ‘Could you…?' I gesture at the pen rolling under his feet.

‘No panic on the
Titanic
,' says the stranger, brushing away my apology, offering me a delicate white hand. ‘You shouldn't bother to learn Turkish; it's an underdeveloped language.'

‘What do you mean, underdeveloped?'

‘In French movies, a man need say only three words for a woman to kiss him. In Turkish, a man must talk to a woman all day just so she will touch the back of his hand.'

I laugh, offer my hand, introduce myself.

‘Call me Oscar,' he says. ‘Everyone does.'

Oscar, whose real name is Özcan, would never stand out in a crowd. His clean-shaven face is as smooth and ageless as a sea pebble. I write him off as a salesman or a crooked, small-town accountant with fastidious hygiene habits. Until I look into his eyes. They are colourless.