From Goksun

I stay for two more days in Aleppo waiting for my chest to clear. I am still wheezing, and I cough through the night, but my visa is expiring, and I must ride north in the morning. I go slowly, through the flat scrubland, to the Turkish border. Before long I am riding through the quiet streets of Kilis. The young women are bare-headed here, and wear tight jeans and low tops and walk with head-phones in. The shopkeepers are well turned out, and stand in their doorways, arms folded behind their backs, watching the passers-by. There are old Ottoman mosques and hamams, made from alternating cream and black bricks, and old men walk by arm-in-arm. I am drowsy and decide to spend night and ride the sixty kilometers to Gaziantep in the morning.

It feels good to be back on an open road. The highway in Syria was noisy and clogged with traffic. Here three broad lanes of clear tar stretch out between chocolate-coloured fields, and rise slowly, and disappear between round hills far ahead. The fields are separated into long, thin lanes by lines of boulders, and farmers in rusty tractors plough the dark soil. Where the land is drier, orchards of bare silver trees stand deserted in the light earth. A man in muddy blue overalls flags me down from the roadside and I slow. He takes an apple from his pocket and hands it to me. He talks in Turkish and I smile and eat the apple and he nods. A man shouts from a tractor in the field behind and he runs off. I wave as I ride on and feel sad about all the times I don’t stop and leave those I pass waving sadly behind.

The road passes hills covered with deep green trees, and then the city appears, and the hills are full of buildings. There are rows of brightly coloured apartment blocks, surrounded by green lawns and well-kept playgrounds. I watch all the children getting off the turquoise buses and think it looks like a model. I wonder if Clichy-sous-Bois looked this way once.

In the city I walk by an old fortress and through covered markets where the metal workers are bashing pots. Later I go to a tea-house to watch a football game. The room is full of smoke and fifty old men look up from the backgammon boards and stare. I see a team of red shirts on the screen at the end of the room, and gaze around for a chair. There are big signs announcing the smoking ban on each of the walls and I smile. A young guy with a shaved head, and a metal bolt through his eyebrow, gestures for me to pull up a chair. He is with two friends and receipts are strewn across the felt table. Scores flash across the bottom of the screen and they all rustle through the papers and scribble numbers down. We drink tea and smoke and each time a new score appears Dogan pats me on the shoulder and says ‘Is goal. Is one-zero. I know. Is happy’ and he lifts his bet-slip up like a champion, and then the scores update and he puts his head in his hands and says ‘is life, is life. Robert, is life. I know. No problem. Is smile.’

I meet Dogan at the bakery the next morning, and the baker flattens the dough and sprinkles sesame seeds on top, and gives us tea while the bread is in the oven. On the steps to Dogan’s block of flats a little boy is tying his laces and Dogan ruffles his hair as we walk past and the boy runs off looking happy. His mum is making breakfast and we sit down at a little table. His brother comes in and then his brother’s friend ands his sister and her baby, and we eat omelet and cucumbers and grape syrup with the bread.

In the evening we go to see Gaziantep play Besiktas, and sit on concrete steps in the cold with all the shouting fans. There are policeman with long shields guarding the corner-flags and a man in a leather jacket taking photographs of the crowd.

I wake in the night coughing, and then I’m sick, and I go to the hospital in the morning. The receptionist smiles helplessly at me and I follow a nurse around wards and surgeries looking for a doctor who speaks English. After a while we give up and a doctor listens to my chest and then gives me an injection and puts me on a ventilator. The receptionist won’t take any money and I go back to the hotel and lie down.

I am short of breath as I ride out of Gaziantep, but as I get into the hills the cool air is soothing. I am on a narrow road winding around hillsides dotted with deep green pines, heading north onto the Anatolian Plateau. Long sections of the road are being re-surfaced and I rattle across the bare stone slowly, sending clouds of fine cream dust into the air around the tyres. I stop in Maras and find a hotel and buy some antibiotics for my chest.

The road north climbs steeply into the mountains. In the sunshine I sweat while I climb and when the road runs beneath the shade of a hillside the air feels cold on my wet shirt. I am high up now and I look back at the thin band of tar snaking through the pine forests to the south, and then the mountains behind, which are shrouded in a wintry haze. For miles I freewheel down, through deep bowls full of silver trees, sending crinkled orange leaves down onto the road. It is Bayram and families sit out on the porches eating barbecued mutton. They wave and some hand me charred sides of meat with thick crusts of white bread.

The road climbs again and I am tiring. The sun is low behind the mountains and it is cold. I am still far from Goksun and I wonder if I’ll make it by dark. It is too cold to camp and I try to pedal hard, but my legs are weary. I turn a steep bend and a broad valley of flat brown and green fields opens up before me. The road winds down and down, around the hillside, and at the far end of the valley I see the town. On three sides it is encircled by hills, dim in the fading light. Hills for the morning.