Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (48 page)

A large and grizzled taxi driver sauntered up to me and spoke in Russian. ‘Feodosia …?’ I inquired, tremulously. He smiled, and beckoned. A replay of scenes during my last days in Turkey flashed through my mind: faces aghast at the mention of the Crimea, fingers drawn across throats, a warning heard in Kastamonu – ‘Never, never go out at night in Kırım. They eat people.’ The afternoon was waning. I followed the taxi driver, wondering whether I would end up dyghted with dung somewhere out in the huge silence of the steppe.

Vitaly was, of course, charming. We were soon discussing – God knows how – the merits of various bars in Aden, which he had visited as a sailor in 1972. The Crescent, I agreed, was decidedly
horrorshow
– my Burgessian approximation to the Russian for ‘good’. We recalled too the Rock, and the Sailor’s Club; but conversation – like the bars of old Aden – soon ran dry. Vitaly put on a cassette of bitter-sweet Slavic disco music.

The road was fast but potholed. We headed east through colourless steppe under a vast sky, smooth and grey as a flat-iron. At first it looked as if it would never quite meet the earth; but soon a horizon appeared to the south – a line of mountains behind which, Vitaly said, lay the sea. The Crimea took on shape: that of a prodigious pasty, rolled flat in the middle, crimped at the edge.

There were occasional villages of small cement-block houses, and people with vegetables in buckets by the side of the road. Some sold honey, one of the Crimea’s medieval exports. Amid the strangeness of arrival, it was something to latch on to. Then, abruptly, we entered a region of deciduous forest. In Turkey, autumn had been at its melancholy outset; here it was crimson and yellow, fierce and fiery. I had crossed from the land of a mousy Pan to the realm of red-headed and more primitive gods. As we drove past Stary Krim, IB’s city of al-Qiram, I noticed a brand-new mosque near the road. Further into the town rose another minaret. Its profile took me back across the sea, across Anatolia, and I realized that it must belong to the mosque built by Özbeg in 1314 – within a year or two of the one put up by Sultan Muhammad ibn Aydın of Birgi. Something else to latch on to. ‘
Allah! Allah!
’ Vitaly wailed. ‘
Krimsky Tatar … mullah!
’

It was still not dark when we reached Feodosia. I had forgotten how far north we were – as far north as Bordeaux. I shivered; but boys and girls wandered about in the endless twilight in shorts, displaying endless, non-Tatar legs. For the next half-hour we cruised the town, asking in vain for my hotel. This was not a simple matter. When I had booked the room (a requirement for getting a visa) through an agent in Manchester, it had been called the Torgtehbiznes; I had recently telephoned the agent from Turkey to change my dates, and learned that it was now called the Fiord. When, finally, we found it, there was no indication on the blank frontage that it was a hotel at all, and certainly no name. Even the staff didn’t seem to know what it was called. Incredibly, though, they were expecting me.

I behaved like a newly arrived Martian. They had to show me how to use the room-key, double-headed like Zeus’s axe, and how to switch on the light. I then locked myself in the loo and had to be rescued. As I was searching for an appropriate form of thanks in the phrasebook, one of the other guests gently closed it, said, ‘No!
This
…’ and flourished a bottle of vodka.

He was right. Vodka – and Crimean
champanskaya
, and
konyak
, and scotch from me – were great facilitators of communication. An impromptu party began. We ate curds with sour cream and sugar, and the little dumplings called
pelmeni
, and oily
shprotti
– which my new vodka-based fluency told me were Slavonic ‘sprats’. Despite these stomach-lining snacks, the drink took me by stealth. Sprats, shprats, shprotts: it seemed eminently reasonable.

And then it happened, quite unexpectedly: I was dancing. My
partner
was a plump platinum blonde, comfortably into her fifties, less so into a lamé sheath dress. As we swayed in a tight clinch – an unusual tactile experience, both metallic and pneumatic – she ruffled my hair, pointed to herself and cooed,
‘Babushka!’
Then, pointing to me she added, throatily, ‘I
loahv
you!’

Some time later I prised myself free, but she carried on dancing with increased vigour. I had several stiff shots of vodka to recover. The room began performing elaborate double
entrechats
. I excused myself for the night. But she was still up there strutting her stuff, pogoing alone to the bitter-sweet Slavic disco beat. Some
babushka
.

I awoke early to the sound of leaves being swept on the street. My head, too, was littered with dead matter. I went for a walk to clear it. In the middle of town I found a market, already busy with headscarved women selling fruit and vegetables, almonds and walnuts, berries and dried camomile. Seeing this, I could understand the appeal of the Crimea for the Tatars. It had everything – bountiful forests and mountains and, inland, broad flat grazing for the herds. For a nomad people who were getting a taste for the fruits of settled life, it was perfection in miniature.

The market was a thoroughly peasant place, but nearby was a different Feodosia, of low stuccoed villas with classical pediments, peeling madder washes and cats in windows. I stopped and listened: someone was playing the ‘Minute Waltz’ on a slightly out-of-tune piano, beautifully,
rubato
. It ended with a whirl of
accelerando
, then a silence broken only by the spin of falling leaves.

I wandered down to the docks, IB’s ‘wonderful harbour where some two hundred ships lay, both ships of war and merchantmen’ – now silent too, home to a bare half-dozen small vessels. It was going to be hard to find out where hushed, provincial Feodosia and noisy, cosmopolitan Kaffa intersected, if indeed they still did.

Back in the hotel a woman was waiting for me. She was in chic early middle age and wore a frock with red polka dots. She extended her hand. ‘My name is Nina Suvorova. The proprietress of this hotel summoned me.’ Her English was carefully poised. ‘She thought that you were perhaps a little … lost, and that you might welcome some guidance.’ She looked at me quizzically and pursed her lips, which matched the polka dots.

‘Well, I must say I’m a bit perplexed on the language front,’ I admitted. ‘By the way, your English is excellent.’

‘That is because I am a teacher of the English language,’ she explained.

I told her that I too had been one, years ago. ‘Ah, then perhaps you know Bonk? But no, of course not. His grammar is for the Russian-speaking learner. It is indispensable. I always say to my students, “Let us begin with Bonk!”’ She smiled so radiantly that I could imagine no more delightful guide.

We set out immediately. Nina hadn’t heard of IB; but I soon realized that, as far as more recent history went, I had no need of a guidebook. ‘This’, she said, pointing to a seafront façade covered with gambolling cherubs, ‘is the Astoria Hotel. It was constructed in 1914. You may wish to note that seven years later it was the scene of the conference that ended the Civil War. The last of the White Russians departed from here, from Feodosia.’ A statue of Pushkin, freshly decorated with flowers, inspired her to recite a verse; Lenin we passed by without comment. We strolled along the harbour, further than I had been on my earlier sortie, until we came to a tapering tower. ‘And this is the Tower of St Constantine. The noted nineteenth-century marine painter Aivazovsky, who was a great benefactor to Feodosia, recalled very scenically the arrival of Catherine the Great at this tower, after the capture of the Crimea by Potemkin from the hand of the last Tatar khan. The date of the khan’s surrender, if you would like to note it, was 8 April 1783. It was Catherine who restored to our city its original Greek name of Feodosia …’

I was staring up at the building, following its cornicing of brick merlons, only half listening. Nina paused. ‘And the date of the tower?’

‘It was constructed by the Genoese in the fourteenth century …’ I felt a tingle of excitement ‘… The tower – I think one says more precisely “bastion” – was part of the city wall. Here the wall turned inland from the sea, protecting the Genoese from attackers from the steppe to the east.’ So this was the intersection, where Feodosia met Kaffa.

We sat on a bench in a park behind the bastion. Nina was back to Aivazovsky; but my mind was elsewhere, trying to reconstruct the dreadful event which had taken place – right here – a decade and a half after IB’s visit.

The year was 1346. Özbeg Khan had been dead five years; the new
ruler
of the Golden Horde was his son Janibeg, whom IB had met on his trip to the Caucasus foothills. The uneasy co-existence of Tatars and European traders had broken down. Janibeg’s forces first attacked the Genoese colony of Azov, on the mainland 250 miles to the north-east; now they were besieging Kaffa, and making little impression on it. Then disaster struck: the attackers were themselves attacked – by the Black Death. The siege collapsed, the European colony was safe. As a parting shot, Janibeg ordered his catapulteers to lob the bodies of the plague victims over the walls.

Walls which had withstood live Tatars were no defence against dead ones. A city under siege, enclosed, tightly packed, is the human equivalent of a Petri dish: even before the Tatars had left, the plague was galloping through Kaffa. Fearing another siege, many of the surviving Italian merchants sailed for home. With them went
Pasteurella pestis
, released from the thinly populated steppe into the crowded Mediterranean basin, to gorge itself on Europe, North Africa and the Levant.

Some commentators have branded the account, written by a contemporary Italian chronicler, a legend; others have pointed out that the epidemic would have spread in any case. The pest investigators Dols and Ziegler, however, do not doubt that the siege of Kaffa was a factor in the westward journey of the Black Death. And if the account is true in detail, then Janibeg was by no means the first commander to use biological weapons. In medieval Europe, besieged towns were regularly bombarded with dead cows, the victims of rinderpest. The idea is much older: according to Arab geographers the notorious scorpions of Nusaybin, now on the Turkish-Syrian border, are said to be descended from ancestors which the Sassanian army shot over the battlements in earthen pots in
AD
363.

As Nina dilated on painters and poets, my thoughts flicked between the procession to the Mosque of the Footprints in Damascus, plague pits in Bristol, and the sickening
whump
of corpses landing here, where we sat on a bench in a tree-lined avenue.

‘… And now we shall visit the burial place of Aivazovsky. I hope you are not tiring.’

‘No, no. I was just thinking of IB.’

‘Ah, Battutah. I believe you are thinking often about your Battutah.’ She made him sound like a rival for her affection.

Unexpectedly, the burial place of Aivazovsky also rang Battutian
bells
– loud ones, and not only metaphorical. It was in a fourteenth-century Armenian church, approached through an arched structure like a
porte-cochère
. Nina explained that this was a bell-chamber. I immediately pulled out the
Travels
and read: ‘When we alighted at the mosque of Kaffa we heard the sounds of bells on every side. Never having heard them before, I was alarmed and bade my companions ascend the minaret and chant the Qur’an, litanies, and the call to prayer.’ The judge of the Muslims appeared, equally alarmed. ‘“I heard the chanting and the call to prayer, and feared for your safety,” he said. Then he went away, but no evil befell us.’

‘Your Battutah was correct when he said that the bells were all around him,’ Nina said, impressed. ‘There were approximately forty churches in medieval Kaffa.’

As we wandered around the old part of the town we found more of them. One had a small tree growing out of its roof. Another lay in waste ground littered with human turds. Now they were silent; but it needed little imagination to picture the arrival of IB and his friends in what, to them, was a hell of bells. The sound is anathema to pious Muslims for, as the
hadith
says, ‘The angels will not enter any house in which bells are rung.’ In towns with mixed Muslim and Christian populations there could be long-running rivalries, Minarets v. Steeples. The eleventh-century poet al-Ma’arri described one such local derby:

In Ladhiqiyyah it’s all go

For Jesus and the Prophet:

Priest’s bell clangs out
fortissimo
,

Shaykh
shrieks and strains to top it.

There was one mosque in Feodosia, and it turned out to be no distance from the first church. As we entered the gate – Nina, I noticed, hesitantly – I wondered if this could have been the very place where IB staged his minaret protest, and where he and his companions stayed during their visit. The building, however, was hard to date, for it was a confused jumble of ragged masonry and brickwork, much patched and altered. The confusion was increasing as we watched: a man was mixing cement for a half-built arcade along the front of the prayer-hall. Hearing our footsteps, he turned around.