Hold the Enlightenment Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. “The PKK or the military. Whoever: let Allah strike them blind.”
    And then we were in Uludere proper. Homes on the outskirts were made of river rock and looked almost medieval, but the downtown was filled with newer, poured-concrete shops, and the streets were crowded with unemployed men. They were mostly Kurds: tall, generally slender people with imposing, hawklike faces.
    We stepped out of the car and were immediately surrounded by dozens of people, mostly men, all of them answering our questions at full volume and at the same time. No one knew the man who had shot the tiger in 1970, but there was a fellow who shot one in the sixties. He was dead. Forty years ago, the paved road we’d driven had been a mule trail. Uludere was now a big town. No one had heard anything about tigers for years.
    An old man said there had been lots of tigers about in the early sixties. He heard them at night, while he tended his sheep. They made a sound a little like the whinny of a horse, like the bray of a donkey. Not the hee-haw sound: the “ahhhh” sound they make. Someone else said the animal was so heavy it took three men to carry a dead one; that its track looked like that of a domestic cat, but bigger, with the talons as long as a man’s index finger. The big cat, he said, seemed to “seize” the snow: when the pads of its paws flexed, it left a little snowball in the middle of the track.
    We had been talking with the men for about ten minutes when the subgovernor of the province arrived along with several cops. This self-inflated little turd threatened to confiscate our film and “detain” us until he could ascertain for sure the nature of our business in Uludere. Saim, the Duck, and I retreated to the truck behinda solid wall of Tommy talk while Mr. Security fired up the engine. A cop put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder, but he shook it off, jumped into the truck, and said, “Go, go, go.”
    Back in Van, we were out of ideas. But it was a nice, sunny day and we drove to a dock about twenty-five miles outside of Van and hired a boat to take us to the old Armenian church of Akdamar Island.
    We’d heard rumors of a Loch Ness–type monster in the lake and asked the boatman, Recp Avci, about it. “There are no monsters,” he said, “but there are some very large snakes.” I assume he meant eels. “I have never seen one. My father did: he said it was as big around as a fifty-five-gallon oil drum and as long as this boat.” The boat appeared to be forty-five feet long.
    “But,” Saim said, “you are describing a monster.”
    The island was rugged and rocky and it rose out of the clear blue waters of Lake Van like a shattered sculpture. The church, built in 915 by the Armenian king I. Gagig, was surrounded by almond trees, the branches bare and gnarled in the winter sun, and looked like a combination cathedral and mosque, a central dome set on four axes in the Byzantine style. The lower walls were covered over in bas-relief. There were depictions of a naked man and woman in a garden, and another of the same man and woman eating something that looked like an apple. There was a knight on horseback spearing something that looked very much like the Lake Van monster. Another sculpture showed a man being tossed from an open boat into the mouth of what could, once again, only be the Lake Van monster.
    More to the point, there were tigers all over the walls. After the Armenians were driven from the church by the Turks, the place had become a mosque. The Muslims had painted animals around the upper dome: goats and wolves and, once again, tigers. Lots of tigers.
    I sat in the sun, looking out across the lake at the shining, snow-clad mountains and thought: “At least, in historical times, there were tigers here.” Also apparently present were Saint George, Adam and Eve, along with Jonah and the Lake Van monster.
    That night, we walked through the maze of cobblestone alleyways off the main street of Van and finally found a