by Ben Okri
The woman was silent beside him. She stared out of the window as if she were a part of what she saw. Maybe it was her way of being comfortable everywhere. Her gaze was detached and yet warm. Her detachment made her beauty more striking. But her face changed when she became aware that he was studying her. He could feel the invisible shield she was putting up against his scrutiny.
Outside, the mood of the sky doubled. He had been conscious of the silver mood of the sea without noticing it.
‘The city is shaped by its rivers and its hills,’ said the guide. ‘I have brought you to the Marmara. Through these waters come the ships of the world. Do you see them? Then they have to go through the Bosphorus, that narrow stretch of water, one of the most important gateways in the world.’
He stared at the ships as the guide spoke.
‘The ships go through it slowly. The ships you are seeing now are waiting their turn.’
The car glided alongside the Bosphorus.
‘Beyond the Bosphorus is the Golden Horn. The river divides the city. I will not give you its history or I will be talking for several weeks. The names alone are sometimes their own history.’
He had stopped listening. The names had sent him off in a dream. He was no longer himself. He had gone off on the first of his slippages. He was now the Sultan’s palace with its centuries of Ottoman rule, its gold-leaf ceiling, its crystal and mahogany staircase, its magnificent carpets, and the room in which time is frozen, where Ataturk died. He felt the palace as a home of sighs and splendour. The gardens were full of whispers and the mirrors were full of songs. Its harems troubled his dreams. Its armed soldiers stood in constant vigilance. Its gate contemplated the Bosphorus.
He would have continued in this dream but for his wife gently shaking his shoulder.
‘Do you see the different heights of the wall?’ said the guide. ‘That’s because the Sultan did not want the world to have a glimpse into his harem. So he built the wall higher here.’
‘How many wives did the Sultan have?’ asked the woman.
It was the first time she had spoken on the drive round the city.
‘Sometimes they can have more than two hundred concubines.’
Beyond the window the streets were throbbing. There seemed to him a strange contrast between the magnificence of the city, its domes, its palaces, its thousand spires, its beautiful mosques, and the crowds of people climbing the hills or hurrying along the streets.
Looking out of the window, on the Galata Bridge, it occurred to him that the city was a vast open museum, surrounded by a blue sea. They were in a traffic jam. The slowness of their crawl made him aware of a close line of men leaning over the bridge. They were looking earnestly over the waters.
‘What are they doing?’
‘They are fishing.’
‘What are they fishing?’
‘Black Sea mackerel.’
Then he saw the dark curves of their fishing rods.
‘I don’t have a rod,’ he said wistfully, ‘or I’d join them.’
‘You can still join them.’
‘How?’
The guide asked the driver to stop.
They got out of the car. There was a chill wind blowing over the river.
They went among the men fishing. The men were solemn and silent and did not resent the intrusion.
‘We keep a rod in the trunk of the car,’ the guide said. ‘Do you really want to fish? You could be here all day.’
‘Maybe another time,’ said Oraza.
They stood there and watched the swirl and flow of the water. The skyline was a music of mosques on the hills. While he stood there he heard the pern of a fishing rod spinning. None of the men caught any fish. They stood there patiently, as though fishing were an excuse for something more mysterious. He stood there with them and breathed in the essence of the Golden Horn.
After much driving around, after listening to the history of the city and the description of its famous sites, they were taken to a street of spices. There were small pyramids of yellow and red and gold beneath the wooden eaves of the market. The blended odour of peppers and turmeric was strong in their nostrils. The guide took them to a café and left them to themselves for a while. Oraza had red tea and the woman had black tea and baklava.
‘I’ve wanted baklava all day,’ she said.
He noticed that her face had changed. Her features were purer and whiter, her hair still red, her eyes still tiger-green. She was different but the same.
‘Who are you really?’ he said after a while. ‘I didn’t want to ask in front of the guide.’
‘I am a dream that you had once and will have again.’
‘A dream I had once?’
‘Before your obsession with Byzantium.’
A smile trembled on her lips.
‘If you like, I am the dream of Byzantium itself.’
‘How?’
‘In the world in which you dwell, a castle can become a bird, a palace can become a song. This city is full of dreams and here dreams can become things. But things also can become dreams.’
‘I half understand you.’
‘There are many realities in this place. In which reality do you want to live?’
‘Can I choose?’
‘Of course.’
He pondered this, his mind gently whirling.
‘Those red and yellow spices, what do you think they might be?’
He looked at the mounds of spices and the men seated in the recesses of their shops.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That is because you are looking.’
‘What should I do then?’
‘Do what you do best.’
‘What is that?’
‘Dream.’
He let his mind drift and suddenly from the spices he was overwhelmed with the plangent sound of an old Turkish lute. He had heard it once before in his quest for Byzantium. The sound, like the sigh of abandoned lovers, brought a throb of tears to his heart. He gripped the table.
‘Are you all right?’
He had no time to reply. The guide had returned and was urging them to continue the tour. Oraza discreetly wiped the tears from his face, and rose. The woman looked at him compassionately.
9
Outside, the guide said:
‘I want to take you to my favourite mosque.’
They could see spires through stone arches. There was a clothes shop below. The guide led them up grey stone steps. When they entered the mosque, with their shoes off and the woman’s head covered with an orange scarf, Oraza immediately felt the abundant peace of the place. The guide drew his attention to the Iznik faiences, with their intricate patterns of blue and yellow and brown on the walls and pillars. Light from the high-arched windows flooded the orange carpet. They stood beneath the circular low-hanging chandeliers and marvelled.
‘This is the Rustem Pasha Mosque and it was built by the great Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan in 1561,’ said the guide.
‘I can see why it’s your favourite mosque,’ said Oraza.
The dome with its patterns reminded him of peacock feathers.
‘Come, let me show you something.’
The guide led them out. They put their shoes back on and went down the stairs and out the back of the building. He showed them a stump of stone.
‘That’s where they chopped off the hands of women who committed adultery,’ the guide said dramatically. Then he added, ‘Or any other crimes in the old days.’
The woman went over and, bending low, put her wrists on the stone, just to see what it felt like. They laughed nervously.
At a herbal shop, on Asmaalti Caddesi, they were served a red and refreshing tea. While they were drinking, the owner came in. He was a short thickset man with a dense beard. When he saw Oraza, he said:
‘Have you found Byzantium yet?’
Oraza made no reply but studied the snake oil bottles and the Argan cream and the leaves and the bars of Turkish delight patterned about
the shop. The owner began telling them about the work he was doing with the distilled essence of herbs from all over the world.
‘I have herbs here that cure cancer,’ he said energetically.
But Oraza was not listening because he was thinking of the Byzantium he had not yet found. Then he had one of those moments of slippages. He found himself in a bazaar. Then he was in a shop looking at scarves and wraps. Then he was in a restaurant, drinking ayran. Then he had a vision of domes and spires against a deep blue sky. Birds were circling the spires. All the while the guide was talking about the city.
When the slippage settled he was kneeling near a pillar in the Blue Mosque. It was crowded and there were shoes in wooden cabinets behind him. The woman was kneeling next to him and the Japanese visitors who went past took pictures of the two of them. The Iznik tiles gleamed in the muted luminous light from the Venetian windows. A moment later he put his palms to one of the four massive pillars called Elephant Feet. When he touched the pillar, he felt the charge of a dark tranquil light populated with forms and ghosts across the centuries who had made their pilgrimages to this place.
Outside, in the snow-covered park, they sat on a bench between the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, while the guide told them of the misunderstanding that led to the creation of the eight domes on the great mosque.
The day went fast but he tried to live it slow. The woman with him glowed in the sun. Sometimes she appeared small, other times she appeared tall. Sometimes her hair was blonde, other times red. She too was a slippage, but she was always the same beneath her changing forms.
Later, when they were walking down the street, he saw an old wooden house with a black cat sitting on a windowsill. He felt again the instability of the world. All through a lunch of blue fish and salads the sense of unreality persisted. He was sitting across from the woman in the Balıkçı Sabahattin fish restaurant and she was telling him about her life in a narrative of spices and blue cloths. Her words turned into yellow birds in his mind. They were like the lost fragrance of golden incense.
They went across the Hippodrome and gazed at the Egyptian obelisk and the Delphic stone. Then they went down into the underworld and wandered among the columns and looked down into the dark waters. They encountered the two faces of Medusa. It was cold down there and in the water there were swarms of big dark fish. He felt, on touching a pillar, that he had seen an image of his future. But before he could grasp it they were above ground again and walking along the grey stones of the city walls.
Time kept breaking up for him. Some moments were long and sun-filled. Others were short and magical. There was a brief dream of the Jewish cemetery and a tramp sleeping on a bench and then wandering around in the splendours of the Grand Bazaar. He was next aware of trams grinding past them in the darkening street and then of their journey back to the hotel up in Zincirlikuyu, from where the city glimmered at night.
In the hotel lobby their butler hurried towards them. She was compact and neat. She wanted to find out if there was anything they needed. All he wanted was a moment’s rest before dinner. The butler had tea sent up to their room in an elegant tea service.
At dinner they listened to the gentle touch of the pianist performing Turkish songs.
‘I can only be here when you dream me,’ the woman with him said, after they had ordered.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘If you forget to dream me I won’t be here.’
‘Why not?’
‘It is the law of the world in which we meet.’
‘What are the other laws?’
‘They are many, but really only a few.’
‘Give me one or two.’
She thought a moment. They were sitting in a corner of the hotel restaurant, under a dim light.
‘We are how we are because of how others are,’ she said quietly.
‘That’s hard to understand.’
‘It’s very simple. I am how I am because of how you are. Mutually, we create our reality.’
‘I still need to think about it. Give me another.’
‘Each person, even those we love, suppresses some aspect of ourselves.’
‘Is that a law or an observation?’
‘You will find that it is true here.’
‘Where is here?’
‘The world in which we meet.’
‘Are there other worlds?’
‘There are worlds in which we meet but don’t know it.’
After that they ate in thoughtful silence, nourished by a fine blend of Turkish red wine.
10
As his head touched the pillow, he went off into another slippage. The woman was no longer there. In her place was Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played upon an invisible piano. Suddenly he was not himself any longer. He was a young English dancer who loved maps and was lost in the charms of the spice market. He was an Italian lecturer of semiotics sitting in a Bebek bar, staring at the Bosphorus. He was a tour guide with a bad cold, conducting these demanding tourists through the labyrinths of the city. He was a fountain, lit at night, whose uprush of water failed to reach the night sky. He was an artist in Üsküdar, painting the same abstract canvas over and over again. He was the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great concealing a timeless secret. As if he were experiencing what the Gnostics called the multiplicity and oneness of being, he was always something different and yet the same. But when he became the spice market, with its little pyramids of paprika and hibiscus, he fell into a long dreamless sleep.
11
He woke to find himself in the Hagia Sophia. He had no idea how he got there. The guide was not with them. He felt in the cathedral a great sense of spaciousness. A big section of it was closed off for repairs. He felt the woman with him, but he could not see her. She was with him in fragments of the Goldberg variation that was floating about him in the air. A sense of tranquillity came over him. He wandered around on the ground floor. He gazed at the chandeliers. High above he saw the blue and gold mosaic of the Christ Pantocrator raise his right hand in gentle benediction, left hand bearing a golden book. On both sides of him, in roundels, were the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel. There were verses from the Koran high up there too. The central dome had been taken over by Arabic calligraphy.
His guide suddenly appeared and told him, with the brevity of dreams, the legends of the Hagia Sophia. Here was the centre of Byzantium. Here was once the centre of the world.
12
He was wandering past a pillar when he saw the woman. She was on her knees, playing with the two black cats of the cathedral. As he approached, she looked up at him and smiled. She left off playing with the cats and joined him on his tour. They went upstairs and looked down over the nave. They were closer to the plaques with inscriptions. They lingered at the blue and gold mosaics. They were in the Hagia Sophia a long time and were the last to leave. There was a mirror over the main door which reflected a fresco behind them. Each time he passed through a door in the cathedral he felt clearer.
It was sunny outside. They bought roasted corn from a vendor. The four minarets of the Hagia Sophia were like slender spacecrafts about to launch into the cloudy sky. In Gülhane Park he saw water washing over the sculpture of a pink open book. Statues sat among the trees. Children were blowing bubbles next to a man who sold plastic pistols. There was snow on the grass.
13
He was getting used to being there. As they walked along the city wall, the woman changed again. She was now slim and tall. She was in an evil mood. She did not want to speak and she walked on ahead of him. When he caught her eye, the woman turned cold again.
They were looking for Hoca Paşa Sokak and they got lost. They went down streets with tramlines, past shops and cafés. They were misdirected several times. They found where they were looking for at the end of a street of restaurants. They stopped to have a bite in a small establishment. They had Kalamata olives, grilled red peppers, and Manti. Then they went to the Hodjapasha for the Mevlevi Sema
ceremony.
Inside, the circular hall was crowded. The musicians came in with long white hats. He listened to the plucking of the yayli tambur and the beating of the kudum. When the dancers came into the centre of the stage and took off their black cloaks, revealing the pure white coats and gowns underneath, he felt himself slipping. As they whirled to the rhythm of the ney and the kanun, and the mesmeric beat of the kudum, he felt himself swaying and then rising. Soon he was lost in the immensity of Divine Love.
14
At dinner he was alone again. He was alone because of where the Whirling Dervishes had taken him. The waiter, solicitous and charming, was once a famous footballer. Oraza had a salad and minced lamb and a little red wine and went up to bed. He tried to sleep but he kept slipping off again. He was a Sufi dervish whirling through the universe and dreaming about a girl he once saw in a crowd. He was a waiter in Arnavutköy whose wife had left him after thirteen years because they could not have children. He was a film director in Tarlabaşı, a black and Gypsy neighbourhood, looking for a long-lost friend. He was the Grand Bazaar with its shops of cloths and panoply of lights. He was the Hagia Sophia at night.
In the morning it was drizzling. The aria from the Goldberg Variations was in the air again. He listened to it while he looked at the sprawl of houses across the city. The city had become the music. He stared at the bridge outside his hotel window. Beyond the Bosphorus white houses with ochre tiles ranged along the rhythm of the hills.
Downstairs in the lobby, the doorman got him a taxi to take him to the Eminönü pier. He wanted to visit the Asian side of the city. There was mostly a dark-haired crowd in the ferry waiting hall. The men were bearded. After a while he began to recognise the Turkish configuration of face. How do people acquire that characteristic stamp of national features on their faces, he was thinking. Then among the faces he saw one that was different. She was singing softly to herself by the window. When she looked up, he saw that it was the woman who claimed to be his wife. He went over to her.
