I teach the truth to the youth. I say 'Hey youth! Here's the truth:PART ONE: Yojimbo
Better start wearin' bulletproof.' --Ol' Dirty Bastard (RIP)
Olympos is not a city, not a town, barely a speck on the map, just a bunch of Greek ruins on a pebbly beach. The bus stop is at the top of the mountain road seven clicks up from the valley floor, and you gotta wait for the shuttle van unless you want to hoof it all that way lugging your gear. Once the road flattens out at sea level you drive past dozens of treehouse compounds, guesthouses where the owners, once upon a time, exploited a loophole in the national parks laws that "allowed" them to build structures as long as they weren't anchored directly to terra firma. We piled out of the shuttle and into the closest and busiest of these establishments, already rocking on a Saturday afternoon with a truckload of university students augmenting the sparse traffic before the season here really gets underway. Scoring a room and a few drinks, we ate dinner and talked until late with a couple of professors from the fisheries department at a university in nearby Antalya and bedded down blessedly away from the noise still coming from the party out front.The next morning was an early rise, the ever-present call to prayer replaced by the cries of the camp's resident peacock and a dozen crowing roosters and barking dogs rolling their respective calls off the high granite canyon walls. We grabbed breakfast and then I lay down for some more shut-eye while D read on the balcony. I rolled over around eleven to shouting from the front and D telling me there was some kind of kerfuffle afoot, that the workmen from the rooming blocks under construction were heading out with 2x4's and lengths of chain, that she was going to check it out. I said "Great, let me know who wins," assuming the uni students were still pissed-up and brawling over who got who's girl the night before. I rolled back over and closed my eyes.
The first gunshot came two minutes later, as D's footsteps clanged back up the metal stairs leading to our room. She opened the door, said "I think somebody's shooting," and stood dumbfounded in the middle of the room, the door unlocked behind her. I finished throwing on my shorts, told her to sit behind the big wooden dresser, locked the door and ran to the window to see what was going on. By this point there had been perhaps four shots spaced irregularly, and with the rocks all around us it was impossible to tell where they were coming from. There were people milling along the walkway leading from the front bar/dining area directly to our building, one guy with a shirt tied around his upper arm, blood dripping from his fingers onto the flagstone path, one girl sobbing hysterically and being led by the shoulders toward the back of the compound. All at once everybody scattered and I could see a man across the rocky riverbed shoulder his weapon, look down the barrel, and fire right at me.
We both felt the concussion of the shot and couldn't tell if our building had been hit, couldn't tell who this guy was aiming for, didn't know what was happening and had no way of finding out. I joined D behind the dresser, crawling on my knees after making sure I had locked the door. At that point we were both in shock, possible scenarios running through our heads. Security footage from Columbine played back before my eyes, dark figures stalking hallways on grainy quarter-inch tape. D and I sat in silence, waiting for the flurry of shots from a different weapon to tell us this siege was over. It never came. The next several shots clarified our situation, that this guy was still working and we needed to get into a room with no windows. "Get in the fucking bathroom," I said to D, "and lock the door." She complied hesitantly, in shock same as myself, and I sat there for a moment, terrified, thinking the most American thought I've had in months:
Why doesn't anyone else here have a gun?
Time passed, don't know how much. About ten shots had been fired, and maybe a minute had passed since the last one before I thought it was safe to peek an eye around the drapes and scout the scene. There was no crazed gunman this time, only the first few people coming out of their hiding places and wandering slowly, cautiously toward the front of the complex. More time passed without a shot, and D came out of the bathroom to join me at the window, kneeling on the spare bed, with two inches or more of wooden paneling between us any any further volleys. The reception girls were running back and forth, with their identical black bobs and blue jeans, tears streaking their heavy makeup. After a moment's silent consensus, we opened the door to look over the balcony, both of us crouching and the door open behind us. As one of the reception girls ran past again, I asked her what was happening. "Nothing nothing--stay in your room," she replied, and then I knew I was going downstairs. I grabbed my camera and a shirt and we slowly marched down the stairs, looking around us for signs of trouble until we joined the pack in front of the main office off the dining area. We saw U, the German tour organizer we'd spoken with the previous afternoon, and she gave us the skinny:
PART TWO: Rashomon
Apparently the next treehouses down the way are owned by relatives of the family that owns the joint where we were staying, and every so often they make like Hatfields and McCoys. The McCoys next door were riled by the full house at our place and things got tetchy between sets of cousins. Punches were thrown, car windows were broken, and eventually some poor dumb crazy son of a bitch picked up his pappy's shotgun and came after Old Man Hatfield. Got him in the shoulder with a load of birdshot, then started working his way down the riverbed, indiscriminately shooting up the buildings, scattering the staff and patrons and generally scaring the piss out of all of us. The shot I saw him take put out the window at reception and lodged in the wooden door, which was open enough to block the direct line between the barrel of his shotgun and our room. He was arrested without incident by the Jandarma who arrived on the scene with bigger guns. Four people were wounded, none killed. Everybody got lucky.As the story was repeated five or six times for the benefit of late arrivals to the mayhem now coming back from the beach, a little Hatfield girl walked among us with a tray of tiny plastic cups full of cool water. I drank mine in a gulp and watched her ponytail bob through the gathering crowd, and I suddenly felt relief surge up from my feet like hot wind up a subway grate. We were safe, people were starting to crack jokes, and the line at check-out was getting longer. Reasoning that we were never safer than we would be that night, we stayed on and joked about a survivor's discount. Then we hit the beach, soaked up some sun, intermittently muttering "goddamn!" and rehashing the story for each other's benefit, the telling getting easier with each iteration but no less surreal.
That night at dinner we shared our table with P, an Englishman who had arrived in Turkey from Syria and Egypt. He was witness to the recent bread riots in the latter and figured Olympos would be the last place he'd be in danger, but he was standing up front when the gunman next door opened for business. Like D, he had gone out to check the initial fisticuffs, a very human reaction that D likened--only half-jokingly--to that of the dodo bird.* We talked for a while, comparing our versions of events and trying to synthesize a chronology and a coherent whole from all the stories we'd heard. The three of us agreed that the first shot takes you by surprise. You stand there thinking Nawwww... By the second you know it's gunfire and every moment really does stretch to an infinity, only to shrink in recollection as your reactions exist out of time, out of any sense of objective truth. What you're left with are pieces of a whole that, when played again before the mind's eye at 24 frames per second, tell an incomplete story and finish in five.
In the end nobody could agree on how many shots were fired: ten? twelve? twenty? By the time I went back for another bowl of salad the glazers were already at work repairing the hash made of the windows fronting the riverbed road. By morning you'd have to know where to look for the pockmarks in the wooden buildings to tell the place had been shot up. Even the blood on the stone path had dried to an unremarkable cinnamon brown as a new wave of tourists filed in from the shuttle we took back to the road, back to civilization, leaving the Wild West Show in the rising grey dust but taking its telling with us. One story, many versions, all of them true. Peace.
*: The dodo became extinct because of its misguided impulse to run toward the sound of another dodo in distress. Pin one down, let 'er howl, and the rest come running to be exterminated at your leisure. Delicious (while supplies last).
