The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross Read Free Book Online Page A

humid.
    As the day wore on, I was growing thirsty, and we’d still not found any water. Worse, we’d left behind the grassy areas and moved into a zone of rough red cliffs, like something out of an old Western. This, Bakut decided, was where we would descend, and as the narrow non-path grew slippery with sand, we dismounted and led the horses by the reins. But even then, the horses balked, and we found ourselves perched precariously, a sheer drop below, an unclimbable hill above, and the horses refusing to negotiate the way down.
    â€œChut!” Bakut yelled as he yanked the first horse’s bridle. “Chut!” he yelled, leaning back with all his weight over the edge of the cliff. “Chut!” he yelled, then paused and, chuckling, turned to me and said, knowingly, “Extreme.”
    Meanwhile, I sat on the hill with my head in my hands, trying to envision a way this could end happily. It was difficult. I was on the verge of freaking out, as one might expect. But with nothing to do but watch Bakut teeter on the precipice, my imagination took hold. With the hot afternoon sun blazing, I saw the horse slip, taking Bakut with him over the cliff edge, one last “Chut!” echoing through the canyons as they fell. And what then? It almost seemed like this would make things easier for me—I’d just tie up my horse, descend on foot, locate Bakut’s mangled body, and return to the yurt camp for help. It was horrible to envision, but at least it would let me do something, move forward, instead of just waiting here, puzzling out horrible eventualities precisely because I knew I would soon have towrite about this very adventure for the Times and needed to make it sound dramatic.
    Which it was. Tired, thirsty, ill-equipped to handle the situation, I was worried. But not so worried that I would do something rash, like try to help Bakut pull the horses down or storm off on my own. Instead, I remembered Siddhartha’s proclamation—“I can think, I can wait, I can fast”—and did likewise here, in the foothills of the Tian Shan, a mere thousand miles north of the Buddha’s birthplace. Honestly, I’d always liked waiting and watching and thinking, maybe even more than I liked doing and moving and talking. Waiting and watching and thinking was how I’d not only survived innumerable intercontinental flights and interminable bus rides but come to enjoy them, look forward to them. Those interstitial moments allowed me a rare freedom—freedom from the need to act and interact, as I’d had to at home and would have to once I arrived, as well as freedom to imagine the future, to revel in its glorious potential: Who knew what would happen on the far side of Customs? In the raki bars of Istanbul? On the slopes of Cerro Catedral? Around the hot pots of Chongqing? Not I—but I could let my mind run wild, unconstrained by reality. None of these fantasies—in equal parts tragic and heroic—would likely come true, but in contemplating the extremes I’d prepare myself for the easier to cope with realities, like being stuck with stubborn horses and no water on a sandstone mountain far from home.
    If there was a difference between my blind adventure in Vietnam and my blind adventure in Kyrgyzstan, it was this: in neither case did I know what I was getting into, but my absolute innocence in the first had in the latter been tempered into mere ignorance. The distinction between the two actually came into my mind in my first months in Vietnam. Among the many books I’d lugged with me was The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, which follows the late-seventeenth-century adventures of a poet, Ebenezer Cooke, as he travels around colonial Maryland, guarding both his innocence and his virginity (the same thing, kind of). The novel continually returnsto the problem of innocence and ignorance, as in this exchange between Ebenezer and his former tutor, Sir Henry