My guesthouse in Urfa was a newly opened konak evi, and I awoke on my last morning to a quiet mansion. The caretaker/night guard Musfta slowly made me breakfast after I sat down at the long table in the courtyard. First bringing bread, then a plate, then tea. Only then, the rounding-outs of the guest-house Turkish breakfast. The owner of the guesthouse runs "the" LP-approved local travel agency, and I'm glad he's not around for morning chit-chat. Then again, I'm just glad to be alone.
I gathered my things and asked directions to the otogar, with the intention of finding it myself. Yet as I asked the question, I could see immediately that I was about to find myself in one of the sweetest bits of hospitality I constantly find myself caught up in, which I will call the soft-boiled egg treatment, where I am carefully passed from one local to another in my travels like a very precious and delicate soft-boiled egg until I finally arrive wherever it is I first inquired after.
Mustafa locked the guesthouse, lead me through Urfa’s walled maze, through the courtyard of Ulu cami and to the bus stop, where I was carefully handed off to a driver. He was fully informed of my origin, destination, and soft-boiledness, setting off a chain of handoffs until I found myself at the otogar. Before I knew it, I had landed softly in a seat near the bus’s middle door, and the clean-cut attendant scowled at a man who tried to sit next to me, moving him to the back.
Eyeing my warm bottle of water, the attendant snatched it, tossed it, and replaced it with a cold cup of water, which was tehn replaced, without a word, and without a glance at the other (possibly also thirsty) passengers, with a paper cup of hot Nescafe.
After all passengers had settled down and we pulled away from the station, a shy young girl was patte3d off of her mother’s lap and slid onto the seat beside me. The concerned attendant offered me a seat at the front “with a better view,” but as you can’t hope for better in the bus seat neighbor lottery than a shy young girl, I stayed put.
Looking out over the window revealed only lazy sloping hills of dry grass, burnt yellow by the inescapable summer heat. Sloping up and down and up and down, offering no more aesthetic diversity than the occasional brindled cliff, and no more movement than the occasional flick of a gray horse’s tail, or the slight sway of a lone tree.
Between hills we would sometimes pass a small irrigated oasis, surrounded by a bundle of houses and a quiet roadside market, men relaxing in the shade of the awning with the ubiquitous glass of strong tea. Around the houses were fences made of stone, and families worked in the field.
The bus clock is wrong, so incorrect as to not make even the slightest statement as to the current hour. The shy girl is caught between sleep and wakedness, long eyelashs lifting on every rough bump to check our progress through the scratchy countryside. Her parents have purchased a touristic wooden-crafted model ship as an Urfa souvenir, and every time the bus stops her father carefully pulls the ship out of its overheard compartment, examines it, and slides it carefully back inside.
I just go on sitting in the cool AC, taking what comes to me in space and time, with the thin red numbers shining into the daylight that it is 22:35, and the yellow and the green, and the gray horses and the stone fences. I only just learned it was Sunday when I bought a newspaper for the bus ride.
But as we ride towards Mardin, many of the other passengers staring at the same yellow hills know exactly where we stand in space and time; outside our air-conditioned capsule the beginning of Ramadan is approaching . Now it is only a few days away, and for the first time in years during the long days of summer. But on my loose trip itinerary, it starts “in Hasankeyf.”
As we move east, the landscape seems a relief of the previous fields – wide patches of green with the occasional barren strip. The water rerouted from the nearby Euphrates is sprayed in neat squares and rectangles, with very few drops straying from the careful, but fuzzy, border as the green rows fly by and the high cliffs in the distance creepy by almost imperceptibly.
