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Prologue: The Mirror 1 Prologue: The Mirror I am standing in a hotel room in Mus, looking at the mirror. I have just come in the door, K eeing the downpour, and the mirror has stopped me in my tracks. It is chipped and smudged and the view it affords, of a man frozen somewhere between youth and middle age, his hair matted into sodden arabesques over a gleaming forehead, is not a pretty one. Tears of spring rain run disconsolately off my nose; my red embarrassed face, steaming industriously, anoints the scene with a grey aureole. What unsettles me is not the effect of an utter drenching, or the weariness in my eyes, which can be remedied with a towel, a change of clothes and a good night’s sleep, but the fact that the image in front of me is so different from the image I have of myself. A mere six years divide me from the last time I stood before this mirror, in the same dingy room in this same stale hotel, but into those six years I have crammed what now seems like an impossible number of those rites, of passage and defeat, that mark the advent of maturity. Peering through the nimbus at my K ushed, puffed up, rain-spattered features, I see with shock the degeneration that the people outside, out there in the streets of Mus, must also see. Last time I was here in Room 205, the room they give to foreigners, I was a precocious young man. I was a foreign correspondent, which is different from being a journalist, implying curiosity rather than prurience, and a certain mildly debauched romanticism. I was in Turkey on a glamorous assignment for the Economist, arbiter of Anglo-Saxon liberal opinion; I shrugged off all weight of expectation from my pedestal of self-reliance and painless expatriate poverty. Now, my reK ection tells me, I am a husband, a father, a mortgagee. But what strikes me hardest – here, of all places – is that I am no longer a Turk. I am drying my hair now. There is a knock at the door, small enough to make my heart leap. Who could it be? ‘Your tea,’ says the room boy, From Rebel Land by Christopher de Bellaigue. Reprinted by arrangement of Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) 2010 by Christopher de Bellaigue. 163g.indd 1 30/01/2009 11:21:43 2 Rebel Land a surly, emaciated fellow. He has been watching me since I arrived this morning, asking questions someone else has told him to ask. ‘I will show you how your TV works,’ he mumbles, entering unbidden. Our eyes fall on the objects strewn across the desk: a camera, my notebooks and some pens; a mobile; the outline of a laptop. He leaves the TV on, tuned gratuitously to CNN, then goes into the bathroom, where he informs me that red is cold and blue is hot. Then he stands at the door, with placid, bovine insistence. ‘Nothing else, Sir?’ I turn off the TV, rummage through my bag and give him some lira with ill grace. A black mark from his shoes remains on the bathroom K oor, but the tea he has brought is good and hot. A love affair brought me to Turkey in 1995, from India, where I had started my career as a staff reporter on a local magazine; the love affair ended but Turkey captivated me. In Turkey, Muslim, modern and almost democratic, it would be possible to test the axiom of ineluctable conK ict between Muslim countries and the West. Turkey staggered from one crisis to another: the generals, defenders of the secular order, toppled an Islamist government; the lira hit the ground with a smack; the south-east was rocked by separatist > ghting; Turkey thought it was European. These were big issues, as big as any around, and there weren’t enough correspondents to do justice to the story. I was proud to be the youngest member of the foreign press corps, proud to talk to the foreign minister on equal terms. From my base in the dull, well-scrubbed capital, Ankara, I sought excuses to visit Istanbul: louche, suggestive, and dazzling when the evening sun struck the Bosporus, gilding the helmet domes of Sinan’s mosques while the gulls panted against the wind and whorls of detritus whipped down Istiklal Street. Here was a city of old men leaning on cigarettes and slamming down backgammon pieces, and of nubile young women, affectionate and cheaply dressed – relief from the white-knuckled achievers back in London. On the overnight train from Ankara, overdoing it with the arrack in a smoke-clogged dining car, I congratulated myself on inhabiting a rough, unruly, endlessly fascinating world, a battered oriental shield of Achilles to which I, more than most, had been granted privileged access. I had a priceless key, other than the native friendliness and hospitality of the Turks. I had learned the Turkish language > rst from love, and then economy, preferring not to employ an interpreter like From Rebel Land by Christopher de Bellaigue. Reprinted by arrangement of Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) 2010 by Christopher de Bellaigue. 163g.indd 2 30/01/2009 11:21:43 Prologue: The Mirror 3 other correspondents, and > nally, from frank and guileless affection for my adoptive country. After a year my Turkish was better than good; after three, it was assumed I was Turkish until some idiomatic infelicity, corroborated by my fair hair and blue eyes, led to the question, ‘Are you only half-Turkish, or are you a Turk who grew up abroad?’ Neither was true. I was good at languages, and good at mimicking accents, and single-minded in my pursuit of both. I was proud of being unlike the other correspondents, chaperoned everywhere by drivers and interpreters. It was through my enthusiasm for this rumbustuous, sociable tongue that I achieved assimilation. Back then the image staring at me was bright and sharp, the image of a man who loved where he lived and what he did. I lived in a small section of Turkey, the western part of the rectangular landmass that our grandparents called Asia Minor and we call Anatolia. So did my Turkish friends. They, participants in the nation’s march towards modern civilisation, were not content to live solely in this western section. They holidayed on its westernmost extremity, the Aegean coast, or took K ights to points west: Rome, Paris, New York. We reporters were exceptional in that we made trips in the opposite direction, to the interior and the south-east, where the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, shot up conscripts and agitated for independence; but it was understood that these were work trips. Few of my Turkish friends would consider going as far as central Turkey. Why languish in steerage on the great liner heading west, when the sun-kissed bridge was open to all? Take a comfortable overnight bus from Ankara and awake the following morning on the coast, sucking clotted cream for breakfast, picking over the Hellenic remains, K oating towards Greece. Where, among your fellow sunbathers, was the PKK or the black-clad Islamist women – ‘two-legged cockroaches’ in the secularists’ wicked vernacular? In another country, was the not entirely glib answer, a country so far removed from the hors d’oeuvres and the nights under jasmine as to be perfectly, sublimely irrelevant. The Turkey I inhabited was unmistakably the Turkey of Kemal Ataturk. He founded the republic in 1923, from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire, and died > fteen years later. He remained, sixty years after his death, the country’s most inK uential politician. He was everywhere: in massive photographs digitally reproduced on the wall of a department store; in the corner of a TV screen, his silhouette From Rebel Land by Christopher de Bellaigue. Reprinted by arrangement of Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) 2010 by Christopher de Bellaigue. 163g.indd 3 30/01/2009 11:21:43 4 Rebel Land rippling over a Turkish K ag; in the endless hypothetical consultations (‘What would Ataturk have done?’) and the lachrymose, uncritical veneration that my friends offered him. I regarded the Ataturk cult with indulgence, partly to avoid offending my friends, and partly because his values, of rationalism and agnosticism, seemed to be mine. Ataturk and his legacy, my friends told me, was all that stood between Turkey and the sort of Islamic Revolution that had turned neighbouring Iran into one of the most benighted countries on earth. The Turkish identity he had promoted had prevented malcontents such as the Kurds from splitting off and setting up states of their own. God forbid that Turkey should become another Iran, or another Yugoslavia! Back in Ankara, at a loose end, I would perform solitary pilgrimages to the great man’s mausoleum, lingering in a gallery of his personal effects, enjoying the crispness of his dress shirts and handkerchiefs, his surprisingly dainty shoes, his studs and pins and the signed photographs that testi> ed to his standing among the kings and dictators of the world. He had been a bucolic authoritarian, but for an English public schoolboy bucolic authoritarianism was cool. Eventually I moved to Istanbul. I spent years wandering the European quarter with my head thrown back, looking for my sea view top K oor, and eventually I found it. It was a chambre de bonne, up > ve exceptionally steep K ights of a nineteenth-century block of K ats, right there on the second bend heading down Faik Pasha Street, perhaps Istanbul’s most picturesque.

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