Immigration's Story

Greetings,

If you land in J and don't have an onward ticket they, the blue uniformed ones, shake you down. You know the drill.

Extract a crisp green "C" note and slide it across the counter inside your documents. He smiles. His gold shoulder braid shudders. He gestures, "just a minute." You stand aside as Europeans and ill-informed immigrants stream past, pay, receive an entry stamp good for 30 days and head toward the next gold braided computer peering man.

Your man comes out and escorts you through the "Question?" line. 

He hands your paperwork over to another man and tells you to wait outside the "NO ENTRY" zone. You study lines of visitors; men, women, and families waiting in their lines for one last stamp, one final chance for freedom from the tyranny of travel-itis, a legendary disease with no antidote.

His friend nods, accepts the papers and does his thing. Open, remove cash, slide passport through a scanner, stamps it and hands it back. The man returns it to you and says, "Good-bye my little butterfly."

You grab your bag and hit the bricks. You are immediately surrounded by extended families desperately struggling to survive in a mean old world. On one side are 1,001 girls and women near a "Maid For Hire," sign. Some hold brooms, others caress irons, mops, wash rags and woks. The smell of burning cooking oil penetrates your consciousness. 

On the other side are 1,001 boys and men with a "I Will Do Anything," sign - the small print reads, "I can clean, drive, escort, bribe, talk, build, hammer, make bricks, sleep, eat and construction projects are my speciality." 

A single man singing a long song entitled, "If you want to play you have to pay," plays a mysterious six-string instrument in the shadows. You follow disappearing notes into the night. The dark night of the soul.

Peace. 

Gate 207

Greetings,

Behind plate glass windows, doubled reinforced near quiet conveyor belts and two standing security machines were people who stayed. Behind. 

The guards and the cleaners, the attractive blond clerk with thin legs who'd finished her morning shift now going home to change for her "exotic" nightly floor show; all these clowns and European travelers sat waiting for attendants to clean the toilets and load beverages and snacks onto flight 3343 as late afternoon Istanbul light slashed through the terminal dungeon zone of quiet escape.

This man lives in Bursa. He works metal for a living. He is an artist. 

I don't mean it was fun, no - it's a long adventure. However, after just over a year in this wet misty Turkish hammam, this abject rather polite and yet emotionally distracted future tense - a void-like dream substance where people sat around showing no incentives, no desire to be even slightly creative, as if their loss, their past was always now, this dream.

An example was the sullen, out of sorts security woman, girl actually, in her 20's, forced by economic realities to accept a job - a useless thankless job, so I've put my luggage on the conveyor where it is scanned; placed the laptop, pocket watch, and cell phone in a plastic tray and the stuff rolls through and she comes over, "Do you have any knives in your luggage?"

"Yes, in the checked bag. They are from Tibet. They are made of silver with tourquoise and coral stones. The handles are yak bone, streaked with bown earth colors," pointing them out to her masked face. All the security people wore masks. 

Her mask says, "I could care less, I'm so tired, so anxious, so bored about everything and nothing I could shit a Doner in a tomato based food culture with a kebab sausage shaped like a small powerful package of shit grilled to perfection and served on a platter with tomatoes, onions and wedges of lemon for the sour reality." 

Anyway she says, "Open your bags," with a sharp edgy tone in her, "where's your mama" voice.

So, I ask her, "Which bag would you like me to open, the big or small as they are joined," so she said, "the small one, and where's your passport?" (she will never have one in her long life) so I hand it to her and she really, really, wants to be important , self-sufficient, reliable, self-reliant, strong, courageous, adventureous, and other impossible to imagine nightmares in her sweet life; 

controlling the situation with this slightly momentarily limbo based foreigner who resembles a professor from a dig out on parole from his dusty archeology, caressing relics like Ottoman tiles, castles, mosques, tea cups, carpets from Ishfan and Kurdish villages under attack by unmanned Predator drones released by aggressive war loving - keeps the general populace guessing filled with patriots serving as an excuse to print money and purchase expensive war toys while the citizen's education and health care systems collapse under the weight of corruption and theft. 

Finally finished dusting off Turkish military fixed wing aircraft, Meerschaum pipes, ceramics, perfectly cleaned furniture and assorted Roman ruins I open the zipper on the small Eagle bag releasing an amazing beautiful Golden Eagle shocking her back to reality and she rummages through fast, finding a music system and she doesn't want or care

to see it or hear it. All the beautiful music gathered along the trail of tears from Armenia genocide realities into wild wolf Van mountains, down along the southern desert borders, past fields of women birthing songs, cultivating children like seeds after a quick rain. All their voices, singing. 

You see, she is merely going through the motions. That's it.

That's a short, clear, precise and brief sentence.

Peace.