Why Do You Write Books?!

Writer’s Block. So what do you do when you get stuck? When the phrases dry up, the words go away, the pixels get the pox?

In my case, I look at the Etruscan Babe-a-licious hanging on my wall and implore her help. But it’s not working, it’s too hot in here, and too hot outside.

So, for no one’s sake but my own, I might as well tell another story, this one tying together Baudelaire’s contribution to this blog, that girl glimpsed on the Paris metro twenty-five years ago, and my current predicament.

About six years ago, while researching for Sea of Faith, I traveled to easternmost Turkey to survey the battlefield of Manzikert, where a decisive clash occurred in 1071 between Byzantine and Seljuk armies. I walked a hilltop overlooking the vast plain, trying to imagine the scene. At the foot of the hill stood a Kurdish village where cinderblock dwellings were interspersed with tall mounds of dung drying for use as winter fuel. The plain, even in the warm weather, looked cold and forbidding.

That evening, while poking around the ruined fortress of Manzikert (now called Malazgirt), my companions and I were approached by two plainclothes policemen: one an avuncular fellow with the requisite Turkish moustache; the other, younger, tall and trim, clean-shaven, silent, with silver eyes and a smile of pure malice. Clearly, he had just walked out of Midnight Express. After an extended conversation, they left us alone, disappearing back in the dusk toward their car.

Dung, battle, winter phantoms, intimations of nastiness – not a banner day.

One of my companions was Turkey’s most prominent woman archeologist, who had kindly agreed to fly me with me from Istanbul to be my guide in this remote region. The other was our driver, a young Arab man from Antakya (history’s Antioch), that sliver of the Arab Middle East that belongs, absurdly, to Turkey rather than to Syria.

Sensing my down mood, the next morning the archeologist suggested we travel to the shores of Lake Van, about twenty miles away and check out a medieval Seljuk graveyard she knew of. Smart cookie: the place was, indeed, magical, its hundreds and hundreds of eight- and nine-foot-tall gravestones covered in elaborate calligraphy, hewn from purple volcanic rock and now standing like forgotten sentinels in a grassy, untended downland. A snow-capped mountain range to the north closed off the perspective; Mount Ararat loomed just over the horizon.

Moods much restored, we pulled away from the graveyard and bumped along the road to the east and the Iranian border. Within a few miles, there was a handmade sign pointing right, to a dirt road leading down to the shore of Lake Van. The sign read, in Turkish, Ottoman Fortress.

My archeologist friend furrowed her brow. She and her colleagues had done an extensive cataloguing of Anatolia’s archeological sites and she was unaware of this castle.

So we took the bait.

Down and down we went, soon confronting a massive wall of fortifications through which an opening had been punched. Then an opening of another wall, of different dimensions and material, and then another. There was stone and rubble littering the ground. “This is not just Ottoman,” said the archeologist with a tremor of excitement. “A lot of people have been this way.”

The road ended at a lakeside village that consisted of four cube-like stone houses that had been constructed from spolia, that is, from the surrounding archeological debris: mismatched blocks of stone from the different fortifications, fragments of pediments, even what looked like a stone arm bent at the elbow, doubtless once part of some classical statuary.

Alongside this wonderful stone hamlet rose a very old mosque, looking quite dilapidated and neglected. “Now this might be Ottoman!” she said.

We peered through the latticework of a locked wooden door into the murky interior, speculating on whether the sanctuary was still in use. Suddenly, from behind us, came the sound of shouting.

We wheeled around to see an imam approaching. He was old and infirm and, of course, blind. I reflexively assumed he was expressing his outrage that an infidel – ie., me – was sullying the precincts of this holy place. But then both my companions burst out laughing.

As the driver chatted amiably with the imam, the archeologist explained: “He said: ‘Why are you looking at this dusty old ruin when the mulberries are ripe? Go up on the roof and get me some!’”

We clambered atop the old dome and from a retaining wall on a slope alongside the structure there grew a profusion of mulberry bushes. We set about harvesting them, feasting on them, their dark juice covering our hands and chins. We laughed a lot.

When we had descended and given the imam his share, we asked him if he had water for us to wash off the juice. He nodded toward the village.

Through the hanging beads in the doorway of the first house, we spied a group of perhaps five or six women, all clad in brilliantly colorful robes, sitting on the floor.

From a discreet distance, my companions asked if there was a well nearby.

Almost immediately, a slender young woman emerged through the beads shouldering an earthenware jug. She was dressed in green and orange robes, her face veiled. She motioned for us to stand to one side.

We watched her as she set off swaying along a pathway to the lake. There was a slight breeze whispering, the sunlight was wan and pleasant, and on a far-off island in the pale lake we could make out the tawny ruins of a medieval Armenian monastery.

The three of us smiled at each other, contented in the moment.

The girl returned with the water, motioned for us to squat so that she could pour it out directly from the jug.

We obeyed and she lowered the earthenware vessel from her shoulder and tipped it. As she did this, her veil slipped.

Now you know what I’m going to say next, right? Baudelaire, the metro… but there is something more here.

She was absolutely exquisite. Sixteen or seventeen, going on eternity. We’ve all seen The Afghan Girl, but this Kurdish girl almost defies description. Just her eyes… they seemed as dark and purple as the Seljuk stone. Only they flashed.

The water splashed on our hands and the three of us looked up at her, transfixed. When she had finished and had one hand free, she gave a hint of smile, modestly acknowledging the consternation she had caused, then readjusted the veil over her face and slipped back through the beaded curtain.

We were shell-shocked. Silent, still squatting, frozen in place.

It was the woman, of course, who first found her voice. The two men had been turned to stone.

“Why do I give lectures in Istanbul?!” the archeologist said heatedly. “Why?! We should all just move here!”

I could say nothing.

She turned to me.

“Why do you write books?!”