The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015 by Adam Johnson

Author:Adam Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Loose Thread on the Silk Road

October 31, 2014

Sanliurfa, Turkey, 37°08’54” N 38°47’24” E

We parked the mule on the Euphrates and took a hire car to Edessa: a famous pilgrimage town in Mesopotamia. Founded by Assyrians. Traded at the point of a sword between the Greeks, Nabateans, Romans, Sassanids, Byzantines, Arabs, Armenians, Seljuks, Crusaders, and Seljuks again. About 4,000 years ago its cruel king, Nimrod, ordered Abraham burned alive for rejecting the Assyrian pantheon. Abraham’s God saved the prophet by turning the flames into water and the coals into fish. According to Muslim tradition, God then punished Nimrod by sending a mosquito up his nose to bite his brain. The deranged king ordered his men to knock his head with felt-wrapped mallets, then with wooden clubs. Nimrod died that way. A pool in the modern city, now called Sanliurfa, commemorates Abraham’s miracle. The pool is filled with sacred carp. People feed the fish with a lira’s worth of pellets. The fish are immortal and quite fat. Eat one and you go blind.

Next to Abraham’s pool is an old bazaar from the days of the Silk Road. The tailors there are Kurds. They sit in a shady courtyard where menders have patched holes for a thousand years. They sip tea. They ruin their eyesight spearing licked thread through needles.

The fates of mighty empires once rose and fell according to the flow of commodities across the worn plank shop counters of Sanliurfa. Maybe they still do. Today, the tailors hunch over antique American-made sewing machines that were sold a century ago by Sears, Roebuck & Company. The tailors pump the machines by foot. Sturdy artifacts from another time. From an age before the rise of disposable Chinese polyester. From a world where America exported more than its titanic debt.

“We’re the last generation,” tailor Muhammed Sadik Demir says with no self-pity. He shrugs. “People don’t repair clothes anymore. They throw them away.”

Actually, it is Deniz Kilic who says this.

Kilic, my Turkish guide, my interpreter, is going home.

He has suffered like no other walking partner on the long Out of Eden Walk trail out of Ethiopia. Shin splints. Sore feet. Blisters on top of blisters. He has endured, too, the torment of my lectures on walking landscapes—avoiding beelines, contouring hills. Yet Kilic never stopped. In the mornings, he pounded on his boots. He tottered on. He loved the slow journey. It allowed him to deploy his streetwise charm. Teasing, joking, he disarmed all we meet. He called the humblest farmer hoca—master, teacher. From Mersin to Sanliurfa, across more than 200 miles of mountains, roads, beaches, and fields, he was my wise-guy window to Anatolia. He forced me to watch my first 3-D movie—Dawn of the Planet of the Apes—claiming it was research. His parents had named him after the 1960s revolutionary Deniz Gez-mis, Turkey’s version of Che, and he was bracingly cynical about all politicians. He completed his thoughts with snatches of pop songs.

Crossing a creek with the mule: “ We all live in a yellow submarine .

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