Hold the Enlightenment Read Online Free PDF Page B

him.”
    I was, I think, wildly excited as I wrote place names in my notebook—Yaylapinar, Ormancik, Otakar. At precisely that moment, of course, we were arrested by the police.
    Tommy the Turk refused to get in the cop car because he wanted to begin this whole interrogation process by exerting some measure of control. “We’ll walk, thanks,” he said, as if the cop was a pal who’d just offered him a ride. The crowd had melted away, and we trudged slowly behind the police car as it moved past a green army tank and down a steep hill toward a two-story cement bunker that was the police station.
    Inside the gray unpainted cement building was a maze of corridors, with cops coming and going every which way, but down the largest and longest hallway, there was a central office where a man in a stylish suit sat behind an imposing wooden desk. This had to be the chief, and Tommy bulled past the cop who had detained us, rapped once on the open door, and strode into the chief’s office. “Please tell me exactly what is going on here,” he said in Turkish. Better to be the complaining party than a meek detainee.
    “We need to know,” the chief said in near perfect English, “what you are doing in our town.” The name plaque on his desk read: Mustafa Sahin.
    The chief was a sucker for Tommy talk, and we left with his own personal phone number in case there was any more trouble. He had also called the commanding military officer of the province, Colonel Eshrem.
    There was, it seemed, a military checkpoint at the gravel road on the edge of town, the road that led to Yaylapinar and Otakar and Ormancik: tiger country, or so we had been led to believe. We needed to talk to the colonel to pass, and were escorted to the army post and then through a leather-padded wooden door studded with brass tacks, and then a second padded door, like a kind of air lock.
    Certain military and police officials we had met regarded our mission as a highly laughable cover story for some nefarious activity or another, but the colonel not only believed us, he thought the search for the Caspian tiger was a worthy goal. He was a man given to folksy aphorisms: “You search for the tiger,” he said. “We say time spent searching for treasures lost is never time wasted.”
    Unfortunately, the colonel could not allow us to travel down the gravel road to Yaylapinar and especially not to Ormancik. That was where the two PKK insurgents had been shot a week ago. The PKK was all over the area, and there would be a military strike against them within a week.
    Still, the colonel thought it would be a grand thing if tigers still existed, here, in the midst of war. There was, he said, thinking aloud, a military exercise the next day. Several village guards, armed Kurds loyal to the government, would be meeting in Yaylapinar. “So, you could get to Yaylapinar,” the colonel said. He didn’t think we’d be in much danger.
    “And tonight,” the colonel said, “you will please be my guests. Sleep here, in the barracks.”
    And so I spent a night in a Turkish military barracks, which, I know, sounds like a fantasy out of a John Rechy book. In fact, we were given private rooms set aside for visiting officers and they were better than those in any hotel we’d seen: two beds to a room, clean sheets, a hot shower, and a sit-down toilet that actually flushed.
    The next morning, we were finally on our way, searching for the tiger … with a military escort. There were two trucks, one of them full of uniformed soldiers, and the other inexplicably empty. An armored personnel carrier brought up the rear. We rode in a Jeep Cherokee with a Captain Milbray as the convoy made its way along a road cut into the side of a ridiculously steep slope. There was a river far below, and burned-out military vehicles littered the banks.
    In these mountains, or so the colonel had said, some trails are so narrow, the slopes so steep, that a mule cannot turn and back up. People embarking