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  Once Yalova was a small town whose shores were lined with trees and whose meadows provided Istanbul with its fruits and vegetables. Over the past thirty years, the greenery has given way to earth and concrete; the fruit trees have been chopped down, making way for thousands of apartment buildings; and the city’s summer population has swelled to almost half a million. The moment we set foot in the city, we saw that nine in ten of these concrete monoliths had either been reduced to rubble or were so badly damaged as to preclude entry. We were soon to see the hopelessness of the dream we had secretly nurtured—that we might be able to help someone, grab on to the corner of a piece of debris and help to lift it: After two days there were hardly any people still alive underneath the rubble. What few there were could be reached only by the German, French, and Japanese teams who’d come with the necessary expertise. More important still, the disaster’s effect had been so pervasive that unless someone took you by the arm and begged a particular service, it was impossible to see what you could do.

  There were many people like us, wandering in shock, up and down the street: With them we walked among the collapsed, overturned, and pulverized buildings; the cars crushed by rubble; the toppled walls, electric poles, and minarets; stepping over pieces of concrete, broken glass, and the telephone and electric wires that covered every street. In small parks, empty lots, and the gardens of lycées, we saw pitched tents. We saw soldiers, some blocking streets and some picking up rubble. We saw people wandering about bewildered, looking for now nonexistent addresses, people looking for lost loved ones, people parsing blame for this disaster, people fighting over a place to pitch a tent. Through the streets came a continuous stream of traffic: emergency vehicles with boxed milk and tinned food, trucks full of soldiers, cranes and bulldozers to remove the pulverized debris that had sunk into the cobblestones. Just as children immersed in a game will forget the rules of the real world, so strangers struck up conversations that broke all rules of etiquette. The disaster had made everyone feel they were living in an alien world. It was as if the most secret and cruel laws of life had been exposed like the furniture in those houses whose walls had been destroyed or toppled.

  I gazed for a long time into the buildings lying on their sides, buildings that had half disappeared or were leaning against those beside them as in a toy model of a city some child had mischievously arranged, buildings whose tops had crashed into buildings across the street and whose facades had fallen away. Machine-made carpets, hanging from their perches like flags on a windless day, broken tables, divans, chairs, and other sitting room furnishings, pillows faded with dust and smoke, overturned televisions, flowerpots and flowers sitting in perfect condition on the balconies of completely ruined houses, awnings that had buckled and bent like rubber, vacuum cleaners whose hoses stretched out into the void, bicycles crushed into corners, open wardrobes displaying dresses and shirts in brilliant colors, robes and jackets hanging on the backs of closed doors, tulle curtains, rustling in the breeze as if nothing had happened…. As we wandered from one house to the next, staring transfixed at the exposed interiors, the cross section exposed how fragile life is, how ill defended against the works of evil. We sensed how much our lives depended on the decisions of men whom we mostly despised. All those filthy contractors, those crooked bribe-taking councils and unregulated construction firms, those lying politicians we had been complaining about for so many years—they’d come from among us, from inside us, and our censure had not protected us from their evil.

  We walked for a long time from street to street, feeling that the disaster had changed history and our hearts in a way that could never be undone. Sometimes we would enter a small street whose houses were half standing—not yet totally collapsed but condemned all the same—or a back garden blanketed with fragments of glass, concrete, and crockery, where a pine tree had been pinned down but not snapped by a toppled building, a scene I would imagine the lady of the house beholding as she looked out at the garden through a back window while she worked in her kitchen. The familiar sights—the old lady at the kitchen window opposite; the old man watching television in the same corner every evening; the girl behind the half-open curtain—they were gone now, because the kitchen across the way, the corner, the tulle curtain, which we’d been watching from this angle for so many years, were themselves gone. Most probably, those who had once enjoyed these views were gone too.

  The survivors—those who had managed to hurl themselves out of these buildings without killing themselves—were now sitting on walls and street corners and chairs salvaged from who knows where, waiting for those still inside to be rescued. “My parents are over there,” said one young man, pointing at an indistinct pile among the slabs of collapsed concrete. “We’re waiting for them to be pulled out.” Another said that he had come from Kütahya to find his mother’s apartment house shattered; after pointing out where it had once stood, he said, “We’ll be going as soon as we have claimed the body!”

  Everyone who is walking the city streets—standing in front of the ruins; helplessly watching the emergency aid teams, the cranes, the soldiers; sitting dazed among the refrigerators, televisions, furniture, and boxes full of clothes recovered from their houses—everyone is waiting for something. Waiting for news of lost acquaintances, waiting to be sure their mother really is inside the building (perhaps she left the building in the middle of the night—before the earthquake—and went somewhere else, even though this would have been entirely out of character); waiting for the body of an uncle, a brother, a son, so they can put this place behind them; waiting to see whether, when the team gets here with digging equipment, they can extract some of their belongings, some of their valuables, from the heaps of dust and broken concrete; waiting for someone to find a pickup truck so they can cart off whatever they’ve been able to salvage; waiting for the aid workers to arrive and for the roads to open, so that some serious emergency teams can get through and rescue the wife or the brother who is still alive under that rubble. Though television and the press have done much to exaggerate such miracles, the truth is that by the end of the third day, there is little hope of rescuing anyone still alive. This despite the voices that can be heard, the noises by which those hanging on make their presence known.

  There are two types of ruins. There are the ones that are lying on their sides like discarded boxes, that still recall their original form, though some of their floors have collapsed into one another like the folds of an accordion; in buildings like these, it is still possible to find survivors in the air pockets. In the other type of ruin, there are no layers, no blocks of concrete, and it is impossible to guess the shape of the building as it once was; it is just a heap of powder, iron, broken furniture, tiny scraps of concrete. It is impossible to believe there could be any still-living survivor inside it. One by one, they pluck out the bodies from these piles of rubble; it’s slow work, like digging a well with a needle. As the soldiers slowly lift up a slab of concrete with a crane, the building’s former inhabitants and those looking for the bodies of their loved ones look on with sleep-deprived eyes. When a body emerges, they say, “He was in there crying all day yesterday, but no one came!” Sometimes there is digging equipment, sometimes there are only car jacks, iron rods, or picks to probe the empty spaces. Before they find the body, they find the deceased’s personal effects: a framed wedding photograph, a box with a necklace inside, clothes, and the dense stink of a corpse. Whenever they open up a hole in the concrete, and an expert or a heroic volunteer goes in to search with a flashlight, a ripple goes through the crowd waiting around the ruin; everyone starts talking, and there are cries and shouts. The volunteer who has gone inside, who usually has no personal relation to the building but who just happened to hear a noise coming from somewhere inside it, now asks for help from the front-end loader or the men who are digging by hand, but because of all the noise it’s impossible to hear what he is asking for. All this takes such a long time, people soon realize that to lift each stone and each body
out of this rubble could take months. But with the corpses stinking so, and the fear of epidemic, this will be impossible. Most probably, there will come a moment when the remaining corpses will be shoveled up with the rest of the rubble—the broken concrete, the household goods, the stopped clocks, the bags, the shattered televisions, the pillows, curtains, and carpets—and carted off to some distant place for burial. Part of me wishes to act as if none of this is happening, to forget everything I have seen, while another part wants to witness everything I can and then tell others.

  We saw people walking down the street talking to themselves, people sleeping in cars they had moved to an empty lot, and people who had taken furniture and food out of half-wrecked houses and arranged it along the pavement. In the center of the stadium, which the helicopters we saw flying back and forth over our heads used for a landing field, we saw people lying in a makeshift hospital; just next to this hospital were row after row of buildings turned to dust. We ran into a friend who is a photographer and married to a writer; he was heading toward the home of his wife’s father, taking pictures as he went. That old house was safe and sound; the father-in-law told us about the noise he had heard coming from the dust and rubble in the middle of the night. We ran into other people we knew, and in the empty garden of a little half-wrecked house we plucked sweet dusty grapes and ate them.

  Seeing us, seeing the cameras, everyone cried, “Journalists, write this down!” and then they vented their complaints about the state, the councils, the thieving contractors; their voices were loudly echoed in the media but it was all too likely that the politicians, state officials, and bribe-taking mayors being railed against would again run for office and again find favor with these voters. It was also likely that these people complaining so bitterly had at some point in their lives paid bribes to the city council to circumvent the construction codes and would have considered it stupid not to do so. In a country where presidents speak well of bribes, calling them “practical,” in a culture that runs on informal arrangements and in which swindles are bemoaned but tolerated, one can hardly expect contractors to eschew substandard iron and concrete, stay within the law, and thereby sustain higher costs, all in the name of preparing for a hypothetical earthquake that might harm others in the future. According to one earthquake myth—disseminated widely by word of mouth and popular because it cast homeowners as innocent victims—all but one of the buildings put up by a certain contractor were destroyed, the sole surviving building being the one in which the contractor himself lived.

  Having taken no precautions whatsoever before the earthquake, and having failed to mobilize a proper rescue effort afterward, the state has lost a great deal of popular respect. But because so many have, in their helplessness, a deep commitment to the dream of a higher power that will look after them, as Allah does, we can expect the state to regain its standing without undue exertion to earn it. One might say the same of the army, which was late in bringing help and was not much in evidence in the beginning, partly because many of its own buildings were destroyed. The national pride, the country’s self-confidence—these too were badly shaken in the quake. In quite a few places, I heard people saying, “The Germans and the Japanese got help to us on time, but not our own state!” I read the same words in the press. What reasons were adduced? “We’re just not organized,” said one old man, for he knew resignation heals better than anger; when bread was going moldy in one part of the city, in another part there was a bread shortage. As people lay under concrete, crying for help and slipping away, rescue vehicles were stranded without fuel or stuck in faraway traffic jams.

  We saw one man driving his dusty old car very slowly through the back streets; upon approaching a ruin that had caught his eye, he stopped and shouted at the crowd through his window. “How many times did I tell you that Allah’s wrath was upon you, that you should renounce sin?” Some people in the crowd gave him a lecture fierce enough to send him on his way, and off he went in angry triumph to the next ruin. I read an article by a like-minded analyst who held that the army and the state were being punished for interfering too much in religious matters, and I heard others ask why, if that was the case, had so many mosques and minarets had been destroyed?

  Amid all this devastation—these ruins and corpses—there were of course moments of elation. To see a survivor step out of the rubble, even after so much time had passed! To see help coming from all over the country, and help also coming from countries that the state had always tarred as enemies! But the main and unspoken source of joy: to have somehow survived. There were those who by the end of the third day had come to terms with the disaster and begun to think of the future; despite all warnings and prohibitions, they were neatly and cautiously removing their belongings from their former homes. We watched two young men walk into a ground-floor apartment that was lurching 45 degrees to one side and remove a chandelier from the ceiling.

  At the quayside, the coffeehouse beneath the big chestnut tree was full to bursting. There, despite all the dead and missing, people allowed themselves the exultation of having survived a disaster. The manager had found a generator and managed to chill refreshments in his refrigerator. The young men who came to our table did not want to talk about the earthquake but about literature and political memories.

  On our return, we again saw the retired postmaster who had gone back to check on his property. “I went into our street and looked down it; our house is gone,” he said quietly. “There was a twelve-year-old girl beneath the rubble, apparently.” He spoke softly, as if this were somehow his fault, and he complained very little.

  Later, my friend remarked that an Englishman would complain if it rained during his annual holiday, while a man whose house had disappeared made no complaint at all. We went on to conjecture that it was perhaps because people didn’t complain at all that earthquakes in Turkey took so many lives, but we didn’t like where our thoughts were taking us. That evening, fearing (along with the entire nation) that there might be another earthquake, we slept outside in our gardens.

  When our ferry was in the middle of the crescent-shaped gulf, I noticed how many new inhabitants these shores had accumulated since my childhood, and how, with their identical concrete apartments, the towns had merged to become one continuous city. The entire area now lived in fear of what the scientists assured us would be an even deadlier earthquake, whose epicenter would be even closer to Istanbul. It was not clear when this earthquake would strike, but according to the maps in the papers, the all-destroying fault line ran directly underneath the little island we were now approaching.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Earthquake Angst in Istanbul

  In the old days, I never stopped to wonder whether the towering minaret I can see from my desk might fall on me. The mosque was built in memory of Süleyman the Magnificent’s son, Prince Cihangir, who died at a young age; since 1559 it has stood with its two high minarets at the top of a steep slope overlooking the Bosphorus, serving as a symbol of continuity.

  It was my upstairs neighbor who first broached the subject when he came to share his earthquake angst with me. Half in panic and half in jest, we went out to the balcony to estimate the distance. In the space of four months, there had been two major earthquakes in Istanbul and countless aftershocks; these and the death toll of thirty thousand were still very much on our minds. What’s more (and I could read this in the eyes of my engineer neighbor), we both believed what the scientists were telling us: that in the near future, somewhere in the Sea of Marmara and closer to Istanbul, another major earthquake would kill 100,000 people instantaneously.

  The crude measurements of the minarets we made with the naked eye did not reassure us. After perusing a few books and encyclopedias, we were reminded that over the past 450 years, the Cihangir Mosque (that “symbol of continuity”) had twice been destroyed by earthquakes and fires, and there was no trace of the original mosque in the dome or the minarets standing across from us. A bit more research, and we discovered
that most of Istanbul’s historic mosques and monuments had been destroyed at least once by earthquakes (including Hagia Sophia, whose dome collapsed in an earthquake that struck the city twenty years after it was built) and that quite a few of them had been destroyed more than once and later rebuilt “to withstand more pressure.”

  As for minarets, the story was much worse. In all of the worst earthquakes that had struck the city in the past five hundred years—including the “little day of judgement” that hit the city in 1509 and the great earthquakes of 1766 and 1894—fallen minarets greatly outnumbered collapsed domes. After the two recent quakes, my friend and I had seen countless fallen minarets, not just on television and in the newspaper but during our visits to the earthquake zone. In most cases, they’d fallen onto neighboring buildings: student hostels where sleepy watchmen were playing backgammon late into the night, houses where mothers had risen from their beds to feed their babies, or (in the case of the second big earthquake in Bolu) families that had gathered around a television to watch on the evening news a discussion of the likelihood of another earthquake, only for a minaret to come down like a cake knife, slicing the room in two.

  Of the minarets that had not fallen, most were damaged. Those that were beyond repair were lifted with chains and cranes and destroyed. Because we had watched many minarets fall in slow motion on television, both my neighbor and I knew how minarets fell. The tremors from the next earthquake were expected to come from the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, as I’ve said. So my neighbor and I set out to calculate the angle at which our minaret would fall, trying to factor in past mishaps: The section just above the balcony had buckled slightly during the August earthquake; an earlier bolt of lightning had struck the stone just beneath the star and crescent, sending it flying into the courtyard below.