Free Magic Bus by Rory Maclean Page B

along the same road as you are heading, as a matter of fact. Nothing was heard from him for years. Until last week. I received a call that he had come home.’
    The persecution of the Kurds shames Turkey’s recent history. The restoration of minority rights has begun to redress the balance, but many of the country’s 12 million Kurds – like some of Istanbul’s inward-looking
da ğ li
– remain embittered by both their exclusion from progress and by the frightening speed of it.
    Oscar polishes his fingernails. ‘In Kurdish, we say, “One hand clapping does not make a sound.” Kurds do all as family. When I say I love my brother, I mean I will do anything for him,’ he assures me in a flat tone. I notice that his pebble-smooth features are broken by the rough edges of three cracked teeth.
    Five hundred miles east of Ankara, Erzincan cowers in a narrow corridor flanked by the rumpled bodies of fallen giants. Nut-brownfields reach over their long, wrinkled limbs as if to tether them to the earth. In 1939, these giants stirred and the entire city was razed by an earthquake. The sense of loss still pervades the evening air.
    Oscar has a ride arranged to carry him across the mountains to Bingöl. He asks me to join him. ‘A favourable mention in your book will bring visitors and stimulate the local economy,’ he says.
    I turn down his invitation, even though my bus is going no further tonight.
    â€˜Another time then, my friend.’ He smiles but his eyes remain empty. Then he takes my hand and adds, ‘Remember, if you want to be sexy, you must drink Pepsi.’
    In my concrete-and-cockroach hotel room I turn the lock and jam a chair under the door handle.
    Along the hippie trail, beyond the ubiquitous crescent-and-star flags and assertions of ethnic integrity, Turkey unfolds as an elaborate, fluid mosaic; an Anatolian imbroglio of history and ideas over which great armies and ardent idealists have trampled and trespassed. In 334 BC, Alexander began his drive towards India from central Konya, the ancient city which the great Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah passed through on his
haj
to Mecca in 1331. St Paul was thirty-five years old when he walked this way. Crusaders and Islam’s horsemen galloped across this same lion-coloured plain, though heading in opposite directions. A thousand years later, the Intrepids were propelled east by their dream of a better world. In 1999, after the cessation of the insurgency, hundreds of radical Kurds chased in their footsteps, escaping over the border into Iran and northern Iraq.
    The next morning, my bus follows them too, squeezing out of the canyon, over the giants’ outstretched limbs, beside the fast, frothy Euphrates. Boulders roll down gravel arms. Meltwater churns wild and white over outsized fingers. I’m dwarfed by the pathos of human endeavour and the precipitous, primeval mountains shot through with bone and iron. At Tercan, the driver spills hot tea on his lap and almost crashes into a gorge.
    I spare only a day for grey, grim Erzurum. Women wash earthy wool in a public fountain, drawing veils across their faces as I pass. Policemen relax in the shade of the Citadel, singing soft songs to each other, gazing along the arrow-straight trading route as did Roman centurions, Danish freaks and all the travellers between them. In a broken backstreet a cracked old man seizes my hand and shakes it, crying out, ‘
Sie sind zurückgekommen
.’ You’ve come back. Since the Iranians closed the trail in 1979, few Westerners have had cause to visit the city. Istanbul feels a continent away.
    I push on across divided, diverse eastern Turkey, numbed by distance and busted springs, each bus slower, older and hotter than its predecessor. The Meteor Turizm coach has broken instruments and a cracked windscreen. The Do ğ ubeyazit Express, a fiery metal coffin on wheels, rides low on its tail and stops every hundred