Istanbul

by Orhan Pamuk

  These families were locked into petty but intractable disputes that often landed them in court, and in this, I felt, they bore some resemblance to my own family. Some managed to live together in their great mansions for years and years and—even as they were bringing legal action against one another—still gathering together for family meals (as my father, aunts, and uncles did). Those who took their grievances too seriously and matched emotion with deed would suffer more, refusing to speak to one another for years on end, even though they continued to live in the same yali; some, who could not bear the sight of their loathsome relations, would partition their yali’s most beautiful room, disrupting the flow of its high ceilings and its sweeping view of the Bosphorus with ugly makeshift plaster walls so thin they were still forced to listen to their hated relatives’ coughs and footsteps all day long; if they divided up the rest of the yali (“you take the harem; I’ll keep the annex”) it was less for their own comfort than for the pleasure of knowing that they were causing discomfort to their unloved ones. I’ve even heard of some who used legal maneuvers to block their relatives’ access to the garden.

  As I watch a new wave of similar disputes raging in the same families a generation later, I’ve begun to wonder whether the rich of Istanbul have some special genius for blood feuds. In the early days of the Republic, when my grandfather was amassing his fortune, a wealthy family moved to Nişantaşı not far from where we lived on Teşvikiye Avenue; the children took a lot their father had bought from one of Abdülhamit’s pashas and divided it into two. The first brother built an apartment that was set back from the pavement in accordance with city regulations. A few years later, the other built an apartment on his half of the lot; and while still acting within city regulations, he deliberately set it ten feet closer to the pavement, just to block his brother’s view. Whereupon the first brother erected a wall five stories high, which—as everyone in Nişantaşı knew—served no purpose other than to obstruct the view from the side windows of his brother’s house.

  You rarely hear of such disputes in families that moved to Istanbul from the provinces: Their norm is mutual support, especially if they are not very rich. After the 1960s, when the city’s population was skyrocketing and, with it, the price of land, anyone whose family had been living in Istanbul for several generations and who had managed to acquire an amount of property enjoyed large windfalls. To prove that they belonged to “old Istanbul money,” the first thing they did, of course, was to enter into disputes over dividing the property. There were two brothers whose land in the barren hills behind Bakırköy made them a colossal fortune when the city expanded in that direction; this may explain why the younger brother picked up a gun in the early 1960s and shot the older brother dead. The newspapers, I recall, insinuated that the older brother was in love with the younger brother’s wife. As it happened, the murderer’s green-eyed son was a classmate of mine at Şişli Terakki, so I followed this scandal with great interest. For days, it was front-page news, and as the city immersed itself in the minutiae of this tale of greed and passion, the murderer’s fair-skinned redheaded son would arrive in class in his customary lederhosen, clutching a handkerchief, to spend the day in sobbing silence. In the forty years since, whenever I pass the part of the city—now home to 250,000—that bears my lederhosen-wearing classmate’s last name, or I hear the family mentioned (for in the end, Istanbul is one big village), I remember how red my red-haired friend’s eyes would become and how quiet his tears.

  The great shipbuilding families (all from the Black Sea coast) were disinclined to take their disputes to court, preferring the naked passion that only weapons can satisfy. They’d begun with fleets of small wooden boats, competing for government contracts, but this did not lead to free competition in the western sense; instead, each sent out bands of brigands to intimidate the others; from time to time, when they tired of killing one another, they would do as the princes of the Middle Ages had done and exchange their daughters in marriage, but the ensuing periods of peace would never last long, and soon they’d be shooting at one another again, much to the distress of the girls, who now belonged to both families. After they began to buy up barges and build fleets of small cargo ships, and one of their daughters had married the president’s son, they became regulars in “Have You Heard?”—whereupon my mother would carefully follow Rose Nymph’s descriptions of their “splendiferous caviar and champagne-drenched” parties.

  At parties, weddings, and balls of this sort—which my parents often attended, as well as my uncles and my grandmother—there were always plenty of photographers; my relatives would bring home any photographs in which they had appeared and display them for a few days on a buffet table. In them I recognized a few people who visited our house, plus a few celebrities I’d seen in the paper, along with a few of the politicians who had helped them on their way. When my mother compared notes on the phone with her sister, who attended such events more often, I would try to imagine what it had been like. Since the 1990s, society weddings have become grand affairs, attended by the press, television crews, and the country’s most famous models; they are advertised with skyrockets that can be seen throughout the city. But a generation ago, things were very different. The point was not ostentation but to allow the rich to gather together and forget, if only for an evening, their fears and worries about the meddlesome and rapacious state. When I attended such weddings and parties as a boy, I would, despite my confusion, feel pleasure at finding myself in such august company. I’d read this same pleasure in my mother’s eyes as she stepped out of the house to go to the party, having spent the whole day getting dressed. It was not so much the happy prospect of a fun night out; rather, it was the satisfaction of spending the evening with the rich—knowing that, for whatever reason, you belonged to their set.

  Upon entering the great, brilliantly lit reception hall, or (in summer) the sumptuous garden, while walking among the beautifully arranged tables, tents, flower beds, waiters, and manservants, I would notice that the rich, too, enjoyed one another’s company, even more so when celebrities were on hand as well. Surveying the crowd, as my mother did, to see “who else” was there, they were cheered to see “the right sort of people.” Most had not made their money by dint of hard work or ingenuity but through a stroke of luck or a swindle they now wished to forget, and their confidence rested in the knowledge that they had more money than they could ever hope to spend. They were, in other words, the sort of people who could only relax, only feel good about themselves, if they were in the same place with others like them.

  Once I’d taken my first stroll through the crowd, a strange wind would blow in out of nowhere and I’d begin to feel out of place. Either I’d see some extravagant piece of furniture or a luxury appliance (say, an electric carving knife) that we couldn’t afford, and my spirits would drop; seeing my parents on intimate terms with people who by their own smug account owed their fortunes to some disgrace, disaster, or swindle only added to my unease. Later I would discover that my mother, who was genuinely pleased to be in their company, and my father, who was probably flirting with one of his mistresses, had not exactly forgotten the sordid gossip they talked about at home but had put it aside, if only for the night. After all, didn’t all the rich do likewise? Perhaps, I thought, this was part of being rich: always acting “as if.” The rich spent these parties complaining at length about the food they’d been served on their last plane flight—as if this were a matter of great concern and grave importance and as if most of the food they ate were not of the same low quality. And then there was the way their money was deposited in (or, to use my parents’ word, siphoned into) accounts in Swiss banks. The knowledge that their money was in a faraway and hard-to-reach place endowed them with a lovely confidence that I envied.

  That the distance between us was not quite as great as I had thought was made clear to me once by an insinuation of my father’s. I was twenty years old and had just launched into a long diatribe against the stupidities of th
e soulless, brainless rich, who went to such pretentious lengths to show how “western” they were, who—instead of sharing their art collections with the public, endowing a museum, or following their passions—lived timid, mediocre lives; I singled out a number of family acquaintances, several of my parents’ childhood friends, and the parents of some of my own friends. My father interrupted me mid-rant and—perhaps because he feared I might be heading for a life of unhappiness or perhaps simply to warn me—he said that “actually” the lady I’d just mentioned (a very beautiful woman) was a good-hearted, well-meaning “girl,” and if I ever had a chance to know her intimately I’d have no trouble understanding why.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  On the Ships That Passed Through the Bosphorus, Famous Fires, Moving House, and Other Disasters

  My father and my uncle’s string of business failures, my parents’ arguments, the smoldering disputes between the various branches of the extended family over which my grandmother presided—these were some of the things that had prepared me for the knowledge that, despite everything the world had to offer (painting, sex, friendship, sleep, love, food, playing games, watching things), and although the opportunities for happiness were limitless and hardly a day passed without my discovering a new pleasure, life was also full of sudden, unexpected, fast-flaming disasters of every size and shade of importance. The randomness of these disasters reminded me of the radio maritime announcements, warning all shipping (and the rest of us too) about “free-floating mines” at the mouth of the Bosphorus and giving their precise location.

  At any moment, my parents could begin to argue about something utterly predictable, or else a property dispute could flare up with the relatives upstairs, or my brother would lose his temper and decide to teach me a lesson I’d never forget. Then again, my father might come home and mention in passing that he’d sold our house, or they’d slapped a restraining order on him, or we had to move, or he was going off on a trip.

  We moved a great deal in those days. Each time, the tension at home grew, but because my mother had to give so much attention to the wrapping of each pot and pan with old newspapers, as was then the custom, she had less time to keep watch over us, and this meant my brother and I could have the run of the house. As we watched the movers pick up the cabinets, cupboards, tables that we’d begun to see as the only constants in our lives and prepared to leave the apartment that had been our home, I’d begin to feel melancholy, the only consolation being that I might find a long-lost pencil, a marble, or a dear toy of great sentimental value that had gone missing under a piece of furniture. Our new homes may not have been as warm or as comfortable as the Pamuk Apartments in Nişantaşı, but the ones in Cihangir and Beşiktaş had beautiful views of the Bosphorus, so I never felt unhappy to be there, and as time passed I was less and less concerned about the decline in our fortunes.

  I had a number of strategies to keep these small disasters from unsettling me. I’d established strict regimes of superstition for myself (like not stepping on sidewalk cracks and never closing certain doors all the way); or I’d have myself a quick adventure (meet up with the other Orhan, escape to my second world, paint, fall into a disaster of my own by picking a fight with my brother); or I’d count the ships passing through the Bosphorus.

  In fact I’d been counting the ships going up and down the Bosphorus for some time. I’d been counting the Romanian tankers, the Soviet warships, the fishing boats coming in from Trabzon, the Bulgarian passenger ships, the Turkish Maritime passenger liners heading into the Black Sea, the Soviet meteorological vessels, the elegant Italian ocean liners, the coal boats, the frigates, the rusting neglected Varna-registered cargo ships, and the decaying vessels that kept their flags and countries of origin under cover of darkness. This is not to say I counted everything; like my father, I didn’t bother with the motor launches that crisscrossed the Bosphorus, taking businessmen to work and transporting women with fifty bags of shopping, nor did I count the city ferries that darted shore to shore from one end of Istanbul to the other, carrying gloomy passengers who spent the journey lost in thought, smoking and drinking tea; like the household furniture, these were already fixtures in my everyday life.

  As a child I counted these ships heedless of the disquiet, agitation, and mounting panic they induced in me. By counting I felt as if I was giving order to my life; at times of extreme rage or sadness, when I fled myself, my school, and my life to wander in the city streets, I stopped counting altogether. It was then I longed most keenly for disasters, fires, the other life, the other Orhan.

  Perhaps if I explain how I got into the habit of ship-counting, it might make more sense. At the time—we are talking about the early sixties—my mother, father, brother, and I were living in a small Bosphorus-facing apartment in my grandfather’s building in Cihangir. I was in the last year of primary school, so I was eleven years old. About once a month, I would set my alarm clock (with the image of a bell on it) for a few hours before dawn, waking up in the last hours of the night. The stove would have been put out before bedtime and I couldn’t light it on my own, so to keep myself warm on a winter’s night, I would go into the empty bed in the rarely used maid’s room, take out my Turkish textbooks, and begin to recite the poem I had to have memorized by the time I got to school.

  “O flag, O glorious flag,

  Waving in the sky!”

  As anyone who has had to memorize a prayer or a poem will know, if you’re trying to engrave words into your memory, it’s better not to pay much attention to what you see before your eyes. Once the words imprint themselves, your mind is free to go in search of images that can serve as aide-mémoires. Your eyes can be entirely disengaged from your thoughts and watch the world for their own amusement. On cold winter mornings, while I shivered under the covers and memorized my poem, I’d gaze through the window at the Bosphorus, shimmering in the darkness like a dream.

  I could see the Bosphorus through the gaps between the four- and five-story apartment buildings below us, above the roofs and chimneys of the rickety wooden houses that would burn down over the next ten years, and between the minarets of Cihangir Mosque; no ferries ran at this hour, and the sea was so dark that no searchlight or lamp could pierce it. Over on the Asian side, I could see the old cranes of Haydarpaşa and the lights of a silently passing cargo ship; with the help of faint moonlight or the lamp of a lonely motorboat, I could sometimes see huge, rusty, mussel-encrusted barges, a solitary fisherman in a rowboat, the ghostly white contours of Kızkulesi. But mostly the sea would be engulfed in darkness. Even when—long before sunrise—the apartment buildings and cypress-filled cemeteries on the Asian side began to grow light, the Bosphorus would remain pitch-black—it looked to me as if it would stay that way forever.

  As I continued memorizing my poem in the dark, as my mind occupied itself with recitation and strange memory games, my eyes would fix on something moving very slowly through the currents of the Bosphorus—a strange-looking ship, a fishing boat setting out early. Although I paid this object no mind, my eyes did not refrain from their usual habits; they’d spend a moment studying this thing passing before them and only when they’d established what it was would they acknowledge it. Yes, that’s a cargo ship, I’d say to myself; yes, this is a fishing boat that has not lit its only light; yes, this is a motor launch taking the day’s first passengers from Asia to Europe; yes, that is an old frigate from a remote Soviet port.…

  On one such morning, when I was shivering and memorizing poetry under the blanket as usual, my eyes lit on an amazing sight, the likes of which I’d never seen. I remember well how I just sat there, frozen, my forgotten book in hand. A great hulk, growing larger and larger as it rose from the pitch-dark sea and approached the closest hill—the hill from which I was watching—this was a colossus, a leviathan, in shape and size a specter from my worst nightmares, a Soviet warship!—rising out of the night and the mist as if in a fairy tale, a vast floating fortress. Its engine was running low, the warship p
assing silently, sluggishly, but so powerfully that it shook the windowpanes, the woodwork, and our furniture; the tongs that someone had hung wrongly next to the stove, the pots and saucepans lined up in the dark kitchen, the windows in the bedrooms where my mother, my father, and my brother were sleeping were all trembling too, and so was the cobblestoned alley that went down to the sea; even the garbage cans in front of the houses were making such a clatter you might have thought this peaceful neighborhood was suffering a minor earthquake. It meant that what İstanbullus had been discussing in whispers since the Cold War began was actually true: The biggest Russian warships passed through the Bosphorus after midnight, under cover of darkness.

  For a moment I panicked, thinking I should do something. The rest of the city was asleep and I was the only one to have seen this Soviet vessel heading who knew where to commit who knew what terrible act. I had to spring into action, to warn Istanbul, to warn the whole world. This was the sort of thing I’d seen so many brave child heroes do in magazines—stir cities from their sleep to save them from floods, fires, and invading armies. But I could not find the will to leave my warm bed.

  As anxiety overtook me, I hit on a frantic stopgap measure that would become a habit: I applied my full mind, sharpened as it was by memorization, to the Sovet ship, committed it to memory, and counted it. What do I mean to say? I did the same as those legendary American spies rumored to live on hilltops overlooking the Bosphorus, who photographed every passing Communist ship (and this is probably another Istanbul myth that had some basis in reality, at least during the Cold War): I mentally cataloged all the salient features of the vessel in question. In my imagination, I collated my new data with existing data about other ships, the Bosphorus currents, and perhaps even the rate at which the world was turning; I counted it and in so doing turned the giant hulk into something ordinary. And not just the Soviet ship: By counting all ships “of note” I could reassert my picture of the world and my own place within it. So it was true, what they taught us in school: The Bosphorus was the key, the heart of the geopolitical world, and this was why all the nations of the world and all their armies and most especially the Russians wanted to take possession of our beautiful Bosphorus.