Ghost Town

So, tell me: Where were you, and what were you doing, at 9.00 this morning? That's an easy one to answer, yes? In my case, I was in college, lugging my bag up to my staffroom and thinking about the day ahead.
OK, so what about the same time yesterday? Yes, still easy. Last week? Can you remember what you were wearing? Is it getting tricky now? What about a month ago, or a year? Or how about, ooh, let's say, the last week of May, 1994? That's an impossible one, right?
Well, during that week, I was apparently loafing round my flat in Izmir: It was the time of Kurban Bayram, I'd been reading and talking, apparently, and I was scrabbling round for something to write down.....
I've been amusing myself for the last few weeks by reading my old diaries - the ones covering my first teaching job in Izmir, from October 1993 to August 1994. It has been an odd experience, as I find myself occasionally wondering who this idiot is who has written it. Every few lines record the fact that I have been reading something, or wandering round somewhere, or chatting to somebody about something, or sitting somewhere, or eating some meal or other, and I'm staring at this drivel, silently shouting 'Yes, but WHAT? What did you eat, what did you talk about, what did you read?'

It's really rather frustrating.

At other times, I wander at my 26-year-old self, seemingly drifting through the pages, uncertain, worried about writing, fretting about life, and then with a jolt I come across a line that could have been written by me now about things I still fret about.

Of course, the really jaw-dropping thing is the eye-watering amount of booze and fags we consumed back then - reading it, I'm slightly amazed that I still have a liver or functioning lungs. I also seem to have gone to bed at about 1.30 a.m. at the earliest as well. If I do that before a working day nowadays, I can barely function...

However, reading it, frustrating though it is, forces me to recall things as they were, and in so doing, brings up the fact that what I recorded is a ghost of things that were. Not only have all those people moved on, but the Izmir I wrote down, however fleetingly, is not the Izmir that exists today. My diaries record a phantom town, a place moving from being one thing towards being another,  and were I to return there (which I hope I do one day), I wouldn't find it as I recall. The Kordon has been expanded from just a strip of bars and restaurants with a busy road next to the waterfront, to an extended park made from reclaimed land and a wider boulevard. The waters of Izmir bay, which used to glisten with petrochemical sheens and effluent gunk, where children cast fishing lines into the sewage to catch fish for dinner, has been cleaned up beyond recognition. The air, which was heavy with pollution and, in winter, the acrid tang of thousands of coal-fired central heating systems, has also become more beneficent, and the city that was once called The Pearl of The Mediterranean is reclaiming that title for real, despite having a population that has exploded in the past twenty years.
As I read, memory forced itself into shape, and I began to reconstruct that phantom place, with images and odours, the odd remembered word - odd that, that it is words, the things I work with every day, that I have most difficulty in resurrecting from the cemetery of the mind.
Let's take one place from this ghostly, now unreal, place as an example - the Quartz Bar. I mention it several times, but I hardly ever actually describe it - here's a typical bit:

...we two caught a Dolmus to this bar, which was a darkened place, full of cigarette smoke + Turkish men. There was a small microphone + stand on a performance area, if anyone felt like doing a stint - sort of the equivalent of Karaoke Night, I guess.

That really is typical. Where is the rain-flecked cold night Guy, Luciano and me caught a taxi up there, where the driver didn't know where the bar was, and Guy directed him, arriving after a few minutes, and he indicated the Quartz with what seemed to me at the time a very Turkish gesture of the arm and said, 'Su bar, Abi'? What about the place itself, somewhere I am sure does not exist any longer? It was the end building of a little island of flats, with the doorway facing westwards. The road forked around it, the left side leading towards Bornova, the other towards the university. While there was a bar area downstairs, it was almost always deserted, with the real action going on on the first floor. It was, as I have said, dark: In fact, it was painted black, with glossy black and red furniture that had been very much fashionable in the 1980's but was already looking faded and chipped. The window blinds were red too, but covered in ash and dust. The seats were largely banquettes, with the odd bistro-type chair. As you came in the door, the toilets were immediately to your right, then there was a large seating area after that, just above the entrance, and another space, almost as large to its left as you looked. turning to your left, you next saw the tiny stage, where I saw some fantastic folk music being played on several occasions, including Grup Lacin, then further seating, which narrowed into odd angles. On the wall were some rather tacky Athena-type photos and cheesy landscapes - one that remains memorable to me is of a volcano erupting, while a woman's face weeps over it.

The place, to put not too fine a point on it, stank: cigarettes, spilt beer, stale raki, rancid oil, fried things, and a dodgy plumbing system, all vied with each other to produce the worst odour. But none of this mattered to us - we just wanted somewhere relatively local, relatively cheap and relatively friendly that stayed open until Stupid O'clock. It's where I had Turkish beer for the first time, and tried my first raki, where I sampled different mezes of various or dubious quality, listened to a whole new experience in music and saw that there was a different way to interact with music and food and booze from the tried and tested UK formula of just cranking up the volume and getting lashed.

And so, from the tiresomely incomplete sketches of things I wrote eighteen or nineteen years ago, I can conjure phantom memories of a now-phantom place and once again begin to cloak them in flesh. This is why a diary can be so important - maybe I can't recall with absolute clarity every last detail, nuance or word, but I can recall for another person's ear and eye the phantom place I once haunted.

dust.

Finally, the bus arrived, its wheels banging against potholes and through ruts, even though the road had only recently been upgraded. Once thing I'd learned in my few months in Turkey was that roads and pavements tended to get repaired and almost immediately ripped up again, as some new pipeline or cable was installed. The weather, which had suddenly switched from 'freezing' to 'bloody hot' one day in April, had been steadily getting hotter and drier, and now it was only possible to stay outdoors if one stood in the shade.
 We got on the Izmir-bound bus. I'd been spending a couple of days away from work in a cheap pansiyon in Cesme, but now it was time to get back to the chalkface.I joined the scrum of people and found a seat at the back, wedged between people politely perspiring. I was in a foul mood, partly because I was going back to work, partly because of the heat, but largely because I had a raki hangover, something I certainly do not recommend. Raki is a wonderful drink, but too much really leaves you feeling grim. The coach was absolutely full and almost immediately became stiflingly hot, even with the windows open. It started off, bumping and trundling along the road, and the ticket guy came round, taking our fares and handing out little paper tickets. Behind him, a kid, about thirteen or fourteen I guessed, was splashing lemon cologne into the travellers' hands, holding a paper napkin underneath to catch splashes. He doused my hands and I rubbed them together, then rubbed my facewith them, allowing the rapid-evaporating alcohol to briefly cool me.
Shortly out of Cesme, the coach suddenly slowed down. From my seat, I could just see that someone was standing in the road, waving it down with both hands. It came to a halt, and the rear door opened. The ticket guy leaned out and I heard a few words of Turkish. At that time, I didn't understand the language that well, especially when it was spoken quickly, but I managed to get the gist. A voice outside was asking to get on, and the ticket guy replied that there were no seats. The other voice said it only wanted go somewhere a few kilometres down the road, and it would pay. The ticket guy hesitated, then looked, then hesitated again, then said, 'come on'.
I wondered to myself where the voice would sit. The voice clambered on board, attached to a person I can only describe as being the closest to a chimpanzee I have ever seen a human be. And not just a chimp: A full-scale PG tips chimp. He was wearing a greasy red baseball cap, advertising Marshall Paints; His thick black hair poked this way and that from underneath, and a pair of dark, small eyes stared brightly out of a scruffily-bearded, corrugated face; his shirt was stained with oil, and his trousers were baggy and far too big for him, held in place with an old leather belt. He clambered in on bow legs, and holding his hand was a young boy of about four, who was looking around with wide, limpid eyes and had an uncertain smile flickering first on, then off. The man looked at me, and smiled with a lot of gum and very little tooth, and what tooth there was was stained and carious.
Ticket Guy produced a small plastic stool from an overhead locker and an I got the answer to my question about the seating arrangements. They would sit at my feet, or rather, just to the side of them, after Ticket Guy asked me to shift over a bit. I found myself cramped up with this bizarre-looking chap on the stool with this boy on his lap. You can probably imagine how much more irritated I felt - my space was being taken up by someone, who, it now transpired, wasn't paying! He offered a tattered note to Ticket Guy, but it was waved down.
The bus set off again, and I tried to take my mind off my annoyance by listening to some music on my Walkman. A Madness song, 'The Prince', started playing, but after about a minute it came to a sudden, strangulated halt. I opened the player to find th beginnings of a manic bird's nest of stretched and broken tape. Now  I had nothing to do except feel grumpy and resentful. I thought I'd take it out by looking sullenly at the man and boy sat on the stool.
They weren't aware of me. The boy was talking rapidly in the high-pitched fluting way many Turkish children do, and I couldn't really catch much of what was being said, apart from 'Baba' (Father). I was a bit surprised: The man easily looked old enough to be the child's grandfather. He was smiling and laughing, and stroking the ragged beard. However, it was the man who held my attention. I saw that there were whole stories of pain and worry etched into that face. His skin had been darkened by dust and dirt and sun, it had been beaten and wrinkled by work and poverty; He was hunched and aged before his time, clearly unhealthy, someone who would sooner rather than later return to the dust. And yet his dark glassy bullets of eyes blazed and his whole face was creased with pleasure - at what? The boy on his lap, his son. He murmured words of love; He said 'my son. my son' almost constantly; every single thing the child said seemed to make him smile or laugh, and he held him with such care, such love, as though the little boy were the most precious and fragile thing of all; He stroked his hair and his face, and the child in his arms was clearly a new and astonishing and wonderful discovery, a piece of pure joy.
I went from irritation to my own wonderment, watching this interaction between father and son. There was so much love between the pair, such a tangible sense of the simple joy each took from the other that it was impossible to stay annoyed. It was an important lesson for me at that time - that one should never be fooled by appearance, nor should you let your mood determine how to judge someone or something.
Then, a couple of kilometres later, the man called to the driver, the coach stopped, and they got off. As they did, a sudden hot gust of wind kicked up the thick, chalky dust at the roadside, and man and boy disappeared into it, the door closed, and both were lost to sight.