View of the Anatolian countryside from the train. Photo: Tressler.

Taking the train was my wife’s idea, but I’d quickly seconded the motion. Returning from visiting relatives in Karaman, taking the Konya-Istanbul train seemed a romantic idea. I pictured the two of us, ala Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in “North By Northwest,” having dinner, me lighting my wife’s cigarette, while a burnt-orange sunset lit the passing Anatolian countryside. I could even work on a story about our weekend in Karaman.

But once we boarded and set off, both of those romantic images were scuttled. We were tired, and anxious to get home. Forget “North By Northwest.” Besides, you can’t even smoke on the train nowadays. The ride was just bumpy enough that even if I had brought a notebook along, it would have been difficult to concentrate. (There was free Wi-Fi, so we could have watched a movie, but alas, we didn’t even think to check the connection until it was too late.)

So with little to do, we found ourselves with more than four hours to kill. Periodically, a robotic female voice could be heard, in Turkish and English:

“DEAR PASSENGERS, PLEASE SPEAK IN YOUR INSIDE VOICE OUT OF CONSIDERATION FOR THE OTHER PASSENGERS. THANK YOU.”

“Inside voice – what is that?” I asked. Of course, it was a mis-translation, had to be.

“Yeah, it sounds creepy, doesn’t it,” my wife said. “Like my serial killer voice or something.”

We looked at each other intensely, making a silent pantomime.

“We’re having a conversation between our inner demons,” she said.

“Yeah, my inner demon against your inner demon.”

We exchanged bored sighs, while the train rattled and roared over the landscape. Outside, we were passing the table lands, green and brown-layered, like one of those sediment jars you filled as a kid, and it was getting dark. Three hours to go.

“We should’ve flown back,” Özge said.

“We would’ve been home by now,” I agreed.

The other passengers, all returning home the same as us, were dozing, or else squinting over their iPads and smart phones. I calculated the rest of the journey. By the time we arrived in Istanbul, it would be after ten. With a taxi, we could be home before eleven. At any rate, it was the end of the weekend.

“Did we have a good time in Karaman?” I asked.

“We did,” Özge said. “Did we dance at the party?”

“We did,” I said. “We danced all night.” “Did Father dance?”

“Oh, yes. He doesn’t remember, but he danced, too. At breakfast we teased him, and he was like, “I don’t believe you. I never dance.’”

“He was drunk. We all were drunk. Remember Ceylan, the owner of the hotel? He kept insisting we go for soup at 2 in the morning? He was like, ‘in Karaman, we drink to the soup!’”

“Drink to the soup,” my wife said. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

We both wanted a cigarette badly. I decided to go to the toilet, just to have something to do.

The toilet was in the back of the car. It was occupied, so I stood in the lurching compartment, looking out the window, listening to the sound of the train. It was dark now outside and there was nothing to see. In the cars, people were sleeping, and all was quiet, except the constant rattle and hum of the train.

I thought about a story taking place on a train. Trains are a natural locale for stories.

Like all great train stories, mine would involve several different narratives involving several different passengers. There could be an old Turkish man and a young executive-type seated directly behind. They are fighting over who has greater right to the curtain. One wants the curtain open to see the countryside, and the other wants it closed so he can sleep. All through the story, one keeps pulling it open, and the other angrily snaps it back. They nearly come to blows, and the train stewardess has to come and break it up. Eventually, they arrive at a truce, with both sides getting half of the curtain until the sun goes down and the argument becomes moot.

That could be one story, I thought. Another subplot could revolve around the train’s no-smoking policy. Earlier I’d said to my wife that the train staff – there was a cafe in the back of the train – probably had a secret place where they leaned out the window and smoked. (“Of course,” my wife concurred). In the story, one passenger goes on this obsessive mission to “catch” the train staff smoking. He (or she) even goes so far as to snap a photo, then blackmails the staff into letting them share the secret smoking spot. “Come on,” the character says. “You either let me in on the smoking or I post this online! What’s it gonna be?”

Another subplot could involve a married couple, much like Özge and I. The husband would be working on a novel or something – that’s why they’d taken the train, so he could work. Only the train is too bumpy, too crowded, too restless-feeling to concentrate on work. Instead, the husband resorts to using the voice recorder on his phone, and communicates his ideas that way, speaking directly into the phone so that he’ll be sure to have something to work on later. But what happens is that, while the husband retires to compartment outside the car to whisper his ideas into the phone, he unwittingly arouses suspicion from some of the passengers. Seeing that he is obviously a yabanci, the other passengers fear that he is a spy, or else linked to a terrorist group. He could even be setting up an attack – an explosion, a hostage-taking event – right before their eyes! These fears are passed on to the stewardess, and at the next stop the husband is detained by police for questioning … 

The toilet was still occupied. I didn’t need to go anyway, so I just went back inside the car.

“You were gone a long time,” Özge said.

“There was a long line,” I said.

She looked back.

“There isn’t a line now,” she said. “So if you need to go —”

“No, it’s alright.”

“What were you doing back there?”

“Thinking of a story.”

“You’re funny.”

The train started slowing down just then. We were arriving in the town of Eskişehir. Many people got up, grabbed their overhead luggage and got ready to disembark. When the train finally stopped, we rushed out onto the platform and lit cigarettes. Lots of people were boarding the train for Istanbul, too, so there was time. A few other passengers smoked, too, and kept alert eyes on the train.

“Now that we’ve stopped,” I said aloud. “Can we turn off our ‘inside voices?’”

“Are you talking to yourself again?” Özge laughed. “Eskişehir by the way is a nice city.”

“Is it? How far are we from Istanbul?”

“Still three more hours, maybe two.”

When we boarded the train again, an infant was wailing loudly. Great, a screaming baby. But it quieted down after a minute or two, after the train set off. We continued our journey, and the voice on the intercom gently reminded us all to speak in our inside voices.

I thought of a rhyme, delivered in a Vincent Price voice:

“Once the journey starts,
and the bags are put away,
The Inside Voices will come out
to Play.”

“They keep showing the same video over and over again,” Özge said.

She was referring to the TV monitor overhead. The video was entitled, “THE MONSTER EATS,” and showed this junk-yard compactor with huge metal teeth. A full-size white van was shown being devoured, chomped up tires and all, by the machine. At the other end, strips of shredded metal were all that remained. Other items were tossed in as well, including a sofa. For some reason, I imagined people being thrown in en masse. People by the thousands, the millions, all of them fed to the machine, and all of them emerging as just bits of shredded metal on the other side.

I wondered – are those our ‘inside voices’ speaking? This grisly montage, accompanied by the sounds of the train? Were they Özge’s? Mine?

“What are you talking about?” my wife asked. She’d been dozing a little.

“I said, ‘Are those the sound of our inside voices?” I pointed to the TV screen.

“Inside voices,” she murmured.

Ten o’clock. We were on the outskirts of Istanbul. The black, sightless night gave way to the bright lights of the emerging city.

There had been no new announcements from the intercom for some time.

“Now that we’re almost there, can we speak in our normal voices now?” I asked. Özge was awake again. I got up and reached for the overhead to get our bags. We wanted to be ready to get off the train as soon as it pulled into the platform.

“What?”

“There haven’t been any reminders,” I said. “Maybe the ‘inside voices’ policy was  only for the zone directly ouside of Konya. You know – the ‘holy city’ of Rumi.”

“You should have asked this question to Galip.”

“You’re right. I should’ve asked Galip.”

Galip was the name I’d given to this wax figure of a poet-musician we’d encountered while touring an historic house in Karaman. The house was spacious, with many low sofas and pillows and divans, and there were these costumed wax figures here and there, to give a sense of atmosphere. I’d sat next to the poet-musician, and dubbed him “Galip,” for he looked a little like this guy Galip I used to know in Istanbul. Just for fun, I’d carried on this pantomimed conversation with Galip, while my wife took photos … It was quiet, meanwhile, on the train. Everyone was presumably still speaking and listening with their inside voices – on their headphones, on their iPads, in their jumbled, displaced dreams.

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James Tressler, a former Lost Coast resident, is a writer and teacher living in Istanbul.