by Paul Theroux
After three night trains I needed a breather in Istanbul. A short walk from Sirkeci Station was the ferry terminal. I took the ferry to the landing stage at Besiktas and strolled to the Ciragan Palas. This hotel was part of an old and elegant Ottoman palace, and was as welcome a hotel as the Pera Palas had been in the past. It was expensive, but it was at the edge of the Bosporus and easy to get to, a 20-cent ride on the ferry.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Istanbul ferries "were such a part of everyday life that they assumed an almost totemic importance." The ferries dip and roll; the best way of admiring the vast, separated city is from the rail of a boat. "The ferries' great gift to the skyline is the smoke from their chimneys."
The words are those of Orhan Pamuk, the distinguished novelist and Istanbullu—he seldom left the city of his birth and said he had never been tempted to live elsewhere. Thirty-three years before, I had happened to meet Yashar Kemal, the novelist and political tub-thumper. He was still alive at the age of eighty-two, but was out of town. I decided to go in search of Pamuk and to see what the decades had done to Istanbul. For Pamuk, it is a city of joy and also of "overwhelming melancholy," and yet the Bosporus is "the font of our good health, the cure of our ills, the infinite source of our goodness and goodwill that sustains the city and all those who dwell in it."
In his unusual chronicle of his life in the city, Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk describes his childhood, his fractious family, his chronic ennui, his self-imposed solitude, his daydreams, his love of the side streets and the ships and the preoccupations that are peculiar to Istanbul. This is one of my favorite city books because it is written by a native son, a keen observer who knows all his city's faults as well as its virtues. It is right that it is also a family memoir, because his relationship with Istanbul is familial, the city like an uneasy relative, a funny uncle or an eccentric granny who provides him shelter. Such a book might be written by a New Yorker or a Parisian, but it would not be so persuasive, because New York is a modern city with a thin substratum and Paris is an artifact if not a confection. And a Turk is someone with deep roots, not a mere urbanite or transplant. For a Turk, Istanbul is an extension of Turkish culture and the Turkish personality, reflecting its conflicts, obsessions, and character traits. Its complex and glorious history is evident in many of its buildings, glimpses of Byzantium and Constantinople above the heavy traffic and the teenyboppers on cell phones.
Istanbul is ancient, and Istanbullus carry its old-fangledness in their heads—Pamuk is the proof of that. What do you think of us? the Turks often ask of strangers. New Yorkers and Parisians never ask such things, nor do Londoners, who take the view that strangers are the ones to be assessed or mocked, certainly not themselves. In most cities, the inhabitants are too busy and hard-pressed to care. But Turks are different, self-conscious of their longitude on the map, straddling Europe and Asia.
"To some degree, we all worry about what foreigners and strangers think of us," Pamuk says. "My interest in how my city looks to western eyes is—as for most Istanbullus—very troubled; like all other Istanbul writers with one eye on the West, I sometimes suffer in confusion."
"To see Istanbul through the eyes of a foreigner always gives me pleasure," Pamuk goes on. Flaubert, Gide, Nerval, Knut Hamsun, and Hans Christian Andersen all visited Istanbul and recorded their impressions, and in most instances what they saw was a fading Orientalism that ceased to exist as soon as it was described—the harem, the grotesque and the picturesque, dervishes, hubble-bubble pipes, the slave market, Ottoman clothing, floppy sleeves, Arabic calligraphy, and, he says, the hamals, the porters, though such men can still be seen, heavily burdened with huge loads on wooden pack frames, trudging up and down the cobbled streets of the old city. Whenever I began to generalize about Istanbul's modernism, I encountered an exotic vignette—a shroud, a fez, a minaret, a veil, a donkey, or someone grilling fish over coals by the roadside.
But Pamuk's book, like all passionate books, is a bewitchment. Once you've read his Istanbul, you have been persuaded to see the city with his eyes—a gloomy, smoky warren of narrow lanes and conflicted families, serene, half fictional, like a city in a dream.
I find most cities nasty, but I can see that Istanbul is habitable, a city with the soul of a village. Unless there is a bomb in the bazaar, or a Kurd-related outrage, there is never news of Istanbul in the Western press. To say it is beautiful is so obvious as to be frivolous, yet the sight of its mosques and churches can be almost heart-stopping. I am impervious to its charm, even the word "charm," but I admire Istanbul for its look of everlastingness, as though it has always existed (it has been a noble city since its first incarnation as Byzantium 1,700 years ago, and looks it in part). Most of all I like the city for its completeness and its self-sufficiency: it is a finished work, distinctly itself. Of course, you can buy gold and carpets in the Grand Bazaar, or jewelry and leather goods in the Egyptian bazaar, but everything else is available throughout the city too, because Turkey makes everything—stationery, cheap clothes, computers, knives, cigarettes, refrigerators, furniture. Heavy industry flourishes. The newspaper business is lively and competitive, book publishing is energetic, Turkish literacy is high, and book sales are brisk.
Given the fact that Turkey shares borders with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Arme nia, and Georgia, as well as Greece and Bulgaria, it could be a cockpit, yet it is a generally calm and self-assured place.
Istanbul now was vastly more prosperous in the look of its spruced-up buildings and well-dressed inhabitants. The ferry to Besiktas was proof of that, with its Sunday-serene passengers: little families holding hands, groups of muttering boys, smiling girls with their eyes downcast for modesty's sake, elderly women in shawls, bearded mullahs, shrouded wives in black burqas, every gradation in the chairs and pews of the ferry, from defiant unbeliever to scrupulous Koran reader.
The city is dramatic in its vistas, its spaces, its mixed population, and for appearing to accommodate everyone, but it is too big and sprawling to be definable. Yet because it is whole and coherent, self-sufficient, with an impressive profile of domes and spires, it is an easy city to visit, allowing the traveler to be presumptuous. The formalities of Turkish life, the elaborate courtesies of the Turkish language, encourage politeness.
The massacre of Armenians a century ago, the later expulsion of Greeks, and the Kurdish outrages and Turkish reprisals are lamentable facts of Turkish history; still, no city in Asia is so self-consciously reform-minded. And it is lucky in its writers, who are public intellectuals in the European mode—Orhan Pamuk was one of many who denounced the downplaying of the Armenian slaughter. He represented a public conscience. Yashar Kemal had played that role, as had his near namesake Yaya Kemal. All such people—public speakers, makers of statements, sometime journalists, polemicists with their passion and daring—were almost unknown in the countries I'd just passed through: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. A young woman novelist, Elif Shafak, was also outspoken against excessive Turkification and in defense of Sufism. Many of the writers were in hot water when I arrived, but they seemed (as Turkish writers frequently do) to regard hot water as their natural element.
That it is one of the most easily negotiated and hospitable cities in the world makes me a mild Turkophile. Although it's a frustrating city to drive in (the traffic moves at a crawl), it is full of alternatives—a metro, commuter trains, buses, dolmuses (minivans)—and it is one of the great cities for walking or taking a ferry from embankment to embankment. I had been too young and hurried to appreciate its virtues on my first visit. For one thing, Istanbul is a well-used city: its marvels are not mere artifacts and museum pieces. They are part of everyday life. The ancient mosques and churches, the bazaars, the bridges, the gardens, the promenades, the fish markets, and the fruit stalls are busily patronized by Turks. Being a secular country, Turkey thrives on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer and rest, and the bazaars and shops are closed on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath.
Istanbul had an air
of Sunday serenity and an off-season slackness. Worry beads were not in evidence. It was only the next day in the empty bazaars that the hawkers were frowning, but when I remarked on the lack of customers, they said, "The tourists will come next month, Inshallah"
I was aware of being a solitary traveler on a long journey. With no detailed onward plans, I was not looking much beyond Turkey at the moment. The newspaper headlines were all about the Iraq War—it was a one-day bus trip to the Iraq border. The war was clearly unpopular, but no one singled me out or harassed me. On the contrary, I was welcomed in restaurants, and I delighted in the food: stuffed grape leaves, bluefish, cheese dumplings, and an eggplant dish so delicious its name is a catchphrase, imam bayildi, "the imam fainted."
In the rain and the raw March wind off the Bosporus, the streets were uncrowded. I walked from mosque to mosque, then made some calls, agreeing to give a talk at a local college, as I had done on my first visit. I was invited to a dinner party and asked if there was anyone I wished to meet.
"What about Orhan Pamuk?"
"He usually says no."
The next day I gave my talk, at Bogazçi University, a former missionary college on the heights of Bebek, and this being hospitable Turkey, I was guest of honor at a lunch where all the other diners were women. One was an American who was writing a book on all the writers who had lived and written about Istanbul, among them Mark Twain, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles, and a man I bumped into after lunch, John Freely, a New Yorker who has lived and worked here for thirty-five years, the author of many books on Istanbul subjects.
Since working women in male-dominated societies are often more forthright and funnier than women in more liberated places, this campus lunch was lively and pleasant. Afterwards, I spoke to an English literature class on the subject of time and travel, alluding not just to my return journey but (because the class was studying the Romantic movement) also to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."
They were attentive students of the sort that used to exist on American campuses—modest, studious, intense, omnivorous readers, quoters of Byron, admirers of Shelley, note takers, listeners, not intimidated by esoteric Romanticism. They happened to be reading Northanger Abbey—a copy on each desk. They were aware that because they were Turks studying English classics they had to try harder; they had something to prove. And they easily understood what I was saying about my return trip to Turkey and my memories of my long-ago journey, because they got the drift of "Tintern Abbey," where it was and what it stood for:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet...
Though they hadn't been born when I was last here, these students, because of their learning, could relate to my sentimental journey: we had Wordsworth in common.
From the class on Romanticism, I went to look at the hotel I'd stayed in my first time, the Pera Palas. The building that had once seemed glamorous to me now looked elderly and neglected, and after one drink in the bar I left it and walked along the drizzly boulevards towards Taksim Square.
One of the compelling features of Istanbul is that minutes from a palace or the holiest mosque or the most respectable neighborhood are their opposites—the dive, the hovel, the lower depths. The density of the city allows this proximity. The big-city conceit of the snob is the notion that sleaze is elsewhere, but it is usually only a few streets away.
So there I was, after leaving the Pera Palas, in the twinkling of an eye, in a dingy downstairs bar, the Club Saray, among mostly empty tables, greeting Marjana, who had just joined me.
"You buy me drink?"
"Of course."
She was thin, blond, starved-looking, and sullen. She might have been ill, but what struck me about her was that of all the girls in the bar, dimly lit though it was, she was reading a magazine. Though she had just folded it into her bag, I could see that it was not Turkish but Russian. She had been so engrossed in it, she was the one woman who had not looked up when I'd entered. What was a Russian woman doing here?
"What are you reading?"
That was when she'd put it away. She smiled, and after she'd sat down she said, "Pop stars. Music. Money."
"You're Russian?"
"I live Ukraine"—but it might have been "leave."
"Kiev?"
"No Kiev. Small village." She was sipping a glass of raki.
"Nice place?"
"Not nice. Small!" She shook her head, struggling for words. "No life. No money."
"Chickens?"
"Da. Chickens!"
"You come to Istanbul to make money?"
"You have money?" She was thin, with delicate hands and a hungry mouth, and she said "money" like a famished person using a word for food.
"Plenty," I said, and made the money sign with my fingers.
"So buy me another drink."
"You didn't finish this one."
I knew the routine. The conventional view is that these women are idle sauntering floozies, killing time over a drink, lollygagging the day away on a bar stool. No, they are strict and even terrifying timekeepers, especially when they have a pimp to answer to. And it's odd, because "Hurry up," which is their mantra, is not an aphrodisiac and hardly an endearment.
The meter was running. Time is everything to a prostitute. As clock watchers they are keener than lawyers, though the term "solicitor" applies to both, and they share the concept of billable hours, every minute needing to be accounted for in these foot-tapping, finger-drumming professions.
The prostitute also shares the lawyer's fake sympathy, the apparent concern for your welfare, the initial buttonholing how-can-I-help-you? clucking, the pretense of help that is a way of ensnaring you and making you pay. In both cases, as long as you go on paying you have their full attention, but they are always in charge.
Marjana, I could tell by her sideways glances, was getting signals from a Turkish man, probably her pimp, his heels locked onto the rungs of a chair as he rocked back with a drink in his hand.
"So we go?"
"Where?"
"Not far. Near this place. I like you." The second drink was set down. "I think you are strong man. You are from what country?"
"America."
"Big country. Lots of money. I want to go to America."
"How did you get here, to Turkey?"
"My friend tell me I can make money here. She say, 'Work in café.' Good work." Marjana looked a bit rueful, pursing her lips as she sloshed the raki in her mouth, then swallowed.
"You came—how? Bus? Plane?"
"I fly in plane. Is little money."
"Who's your boss? Ukrainian man?"
"Turk man." She glanced to the side, where the man was still glowering, and she pressed her lips together. Then, with a toss of her head, "We go?"
"Let's talk."
"Talk, talk," she said, irritated and impatient. She leaned over and tapped my knee. "What about fuck?"
I palmed some Turkish lire and put the notes into her hand, a gesture that shut her up but did not calm her. She looked at me as though I might be weird, but the money was in the meter.
"You have family?" I asked. She nodded. "Husband?" She nodded, but more slowly. "Children?"
At first she simply stared; then she began to cry, pressing her knuckles against her eyes. She shook her head and looked miserable. I hung my head, and when I saw her shoes—high heels, scuffed and twisted and damp from the wet streets of Taksim—I felt miserable myself at the sight of her tormented toes.
A hard-faced woman loomed over her and began to mutter. She was plump, in a tight dress, and her potbelly was at the level of my eyes. I recognized the word prablyema. Marjana was still sniffling in sorrow.
"What you say to Marjana?" the woman demanded.
"Nothing," I said lamely.
Marjana tried to wave the woman away.
"I didn't do anything," I said, and sounded like a ten-year-old. But I had made her remember her small children.
The woman muttered again to Marjana. Tears, recrimination, defiance, accusation, more tears—this was as far from sex as it was possible to be. And at the periphery was a suggestion of violence in the smoldering gaze and threatening posture of the Turkish man.
The woman flicked her fat hand at me, grazing my face with her big fingernails. Though they were plastic glue-ons, they were sharp and claw-like, and could have served as weapons.
"Maybe you go, eh?"
Gladly, I thought. I stood up and backed away, a bit too quickly, but happy to go, saying goodbye. I had guessed that Marjana was one of many women lured to Istanbul and kept against her will—with a family elsewhere, unable to help her. I had wanted to talk, but in such circumstances, in most circumstances, talk is trouble.
***
I GOT MORE NEWS of the dinner party: "Pamuk said he's coming." I was eager to meet him, not merely because of his well-made novels and his personal history in Istanbul, but because, as a passionate writer and self-described graphomaniac, he was probably eccentric, someone who lived at the edge of the world, the solitary soul that all writers must be in order to do their work and live their lives. Writers are always readers, and though they are usually unbalanced, they are always noticers of the world. From an early age I have not been able to rid myself of the notion that the best writers are deeply flawed heroes.
Among the Turkish guests at the party, some of whom were writers, all of whom were polite, patient, and deferential, Pamuk was restless. Rather gangly and bespectacled, he thrashed around as he spoke. He reminded me of someone I knew. He was a taunter, hunching his shoulders, throwing his head back to laugh—and he had a loud, appreciative guffaw. He pulled faces, often clownish ones that his scholar's eyeglasses exaggerated. He was both a mocker and a self-mocker, a buttonholer, a finger wagger, and his consistent mode of inquiry was teasing. He was a needler, a joker, not a speechifier but a maker of deflating remarks in a smiling and mildly prosecutorial way, like a courtroom wit.
