Istanbul Read online

  Why this fixation with the thoughts of western travelers, what they did on visits to the city, what they wrote to their mothers? It’s partly that many times I’ve identified with a number of them (Nerval, Flaubert, de Amicis) and—just as I once had to identify myself with Utrillo in order to paint Istanbul—it was by falling under their influence and contesting with them by turns that I forged my own identity. It’s also because so few of Istanbul’s own writers have paid their city any attention whatsoever.

  Whatever we call it—false consciousness, fantasy, or old-style ideology—there is, in each of our heads, a half-legible, half-secret text that makes sense of what we’ve done in life. And for each of us in Istanbul, a large section of this text is given over to what western observers have said about us. For people like me, İstanbullus with one foot in each culture, the “western traveler” is often not a real person; he can be my own creation, my fantasy, even my own reflection. But being unable to depend on tradition alone as my text, I am grateful to the outsider who can offer me a complementary version—whether a piece of writing, a painting, or a film. So whenever I sense the absence of western eyes, I become my own Westerner.

  Istanbul has never been the colony of the Westerners who wrote about it, drew it, or filmed it, and that is why I am not so perturbed by the use western travelers have made of my past and my history in their construction of the exotic. Indeed, I find their fears and dreams beguiling—as exotic to me as ours are to them—and I don’t just look to them for entertainment or see the city through their eyes but also to enter into the full-formed world they’ve conjured up. Especially when reading the western travelers of the nineteenth century—perhaps because they wrote about familiar things in words I could easily understand—I realize “my” city is not really mine. Just as it is when I am contemplating the skyline and the angles most familiar to me—from Galata and Cihangir, where I am writing these lines—so it is, too, when I see the city through the words and images of Westerners who saw it before me; at times like these I must face my own uncertainties about the city and my tenuous place in it. I will often feel as if I’ve become one with that western traveler, plunging with him into the thick of life, counting, weighing, categorizing, judging, and in so doing often usurping his dreams, to become at once the object and subject of the western gaze. As I waver back and forth, sometimes seeing the city from within and sometimes from without, I feel as I do when I am wandering the streets, caught in a stream of slippery contradictory thoughts, not quite belonging to this place and not quite a stranger. This is how the people of Istanbul have felt for the last 150 years.

  Allow me to illustrate this with a story about Flaubert’s penis, a matter of some concern to him during his stay in Istanbul. In a letter to Louis Bouilhet on the second day of his visit, our troubled author confessed that the seven chancres that had appeared on his penis after he caught syphilis in Beirut had now merged into one. “Every night and morning I dressed my wretched prick!” he wrote. First he thinks he might have caught it from a Maronite, or “perhaps it was a little Turkish lady. The Turk or the Christian?” he asks, and in the same mocking tone goes on to observe, “Problème! Food for thought! That’s an aspect of the ‘Eastern Question’ the Revue des Deux Mondes doesn’t dream of!” Around this time, he was also writing to his mother that he would never marry, but this wasn’t owing to his illness.

  Even though grappling with the syphilis that would result in such a sudden hair loss that even his own mother would not recognize him on his return, Flaubert managed to visit Istanbul’s brothels. But when one of the dragomen [guide translators] who always took western travelers to the same places showed Flaubert a place in Galata that was “filthy” and the women were “ugly,” Flaubert expressed a wish to leave at once. By his account, the madam, by way of appeasement, offered him her own daughter, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Flaubert found very attractive. But the daughter refused to go with him. The residents of the house had to force her—the reader is left to wonder how they managed this feat—and when the two were finally alone, the girl asked Flaubert in Italian if he could show her his organ so she might be sure he was not sick. “Since on the lower part of my glans I still have an induration and was afraid she would see it, I acted the monsieur and jumped down from the bed, saying loudly that she was insulting me, that such behavior was revolting to a gentleman; and I left,” Flaubert writes.

  When, at the beginning of his journey, a doctor in a Cairo hospital had demonstrated with one gesture how he ordered patients to pull down their trousers and display their chancres for the benefit of visiting western physicians, Flaubert had studied them all meticulously and made careful notes about them in his notebook, remarking with satisfaction—as he would when describing the height, stance, and dress of a dwarf in the courtyard of Topkapı Palace—that he had seen yet another eastern oddity, another filthy eastern custom. If he had come to the East to see beautiful unforgettable spectacles, Flaubert’s desire to survey its diseases and odd medical practices was no less intense. Still, he had no intention of exposing his own lesions or his own odd habits. In his brilliant Orientalism, Edward Said makes much of the opening scene in the Cairo hospital when analyzing Nerval and Flaubert, but he fails to mention the Istanbul brothel where the drama ends; had he done so, he might have prevented many Istanbul readers from using his work to justify nationalist sentiment or to imply that, if it weren’t for the West, the East would be a wonderful place. Perhaps Said chose to omit it because Istanbul was never a colony of the West and therefore not central to his concerns. (Although nationalist Turks would later claim the disease to have spread throughout the world from America, western travelers of the nineteenth centuries called syphilis “frengi,” or “French,” knowing it was the French who carried the infection to other world civilizations. Fifty years after Flaubert’s visit to Istanbul, Şemsettin Sami, the Albanian who brought out the first Turkish dictionary, would simply write that “frengi came to us from Europe.” But in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, Flaubert would still take the view he had when first asking himself how he’d caught this disease; without succumbing to another East-West joke, he concludes that it had caught more or less everyone.)

  With no qualms about admitting to an interest in the strange, the frightening, the filthy, and the queer, Flaubert writes at length in his letters about the “cemetery whores” (who serviced soldiers at night), about the empty stork nests, the cold, the Siberian winds whipping down from the Black Sea, and the city’s great crowds. Like so many other visitors, he was specially fascinated by its cemeteries: He was the first to note that the gravestones one saw all over the city were, like the memories of the dead themselves, slowly sinking into the earth as they aged, soon to vanish without a trace.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Fights with My Older Brother

  Between the ages of six and ten, I fought with my older brother incessantly, and as time went on the beatings to which he subjected me grew more and more violent. There were only eighteen months between us, but he was considerably bigger and stronger, and because it was (and perhaps still is) considered normal, even healthy, for two brothers to fight and come to blows, no one saw the need to stop us. I saw the beatings as personal failures and blamed them on my weakness and lack of coordination; during the first few years, when my brother angered or belittled me, I was often the first to strike, and half believing that I deserved the beatings, of course I wasn’t going to challenge violence in principle. If one of our fights ended with broken glass and windowpanes and me bruised and bleeding, my mother’s complaint when she finally intervened was not that we had hit each other and not that I’d been beaten up, but that we’d messed up the house—and that because we’d been unable to settle our differences peaceably, the neighbors would complain yet again about the noise.

  Later, when reminded of those brawls, my mother and my brother claimed no recollection of them, saying that, as always, I’d invented them just for the sake of something to writ
e about, just to give myself a colorful and melodramatic past. They were so sincere that I was finally forced to agree, concluding that, as always, I’d been swayed more by my imagination than by real life. So anyone reading these pages should bear in mind that I am prone to exaggeration. But what is important for a painter is not a thing’s reality but its shape, and what is important for a novelist is not the course of events but their ordering, and what is important for a memoirist is not the factual accuracy of the account but its symmetry.

  So the reader who has noted how I have described Istanbul when describing myself, and described myself when describing Istanbul, will have already figured out that I am mentioning these childish but merciless fights to prepare the scene for something else. After all, children have a “natural” inclination to express themselves with violence; boys will be boys. There were games we’d invented for ourselves, common games with specially adapted rules. In our dark and shadowy house, we played Hide and Seek, Catch the Handkerchief, Snake, Sea Captain, Hopscotch, The Admiral Has Sunk, Name the City, Ninestone, Scare, checkers, chess, table ball (on a table made for children), and Ping-Pong (on our collapsible dining table), to name only a few. When my mother was out, we’d scrunch up newspaper and play soccer all over the house until we were worked up into a sweaty frenzy, and often these games would turn into fights.

  Whole years of our lives were devoted to “marble matches” that echoed the tactics and legends from the male world of soccer. Using backgammon pieces as our players, placing them on the field following the rules of soccer, we would imitate defensive and offensive strategies we’d observed, and as we grew more dexterous, these games grew more animated. We’d arrange our two teams of backgammon pieces (or marbles) in formation on the carpet that served as our playing field, and then, following the fine and varied rules we had established after hundreds of fights, we’d shoot for the goalposts a carpenter had made for us. Sometimes the marbles were named after the great soccer players of the day, and like people who have no trouble telling their beloved striped kittens apart, we could distinguish our marbles with a single glance. We’d comment on the match to an imaginary crowd in the manner of Halit Kıvanç, the greatest sportscaster of the day, and when we scored we’d shout “go-o-o-oal” as people in the stands do at a real match, and then we’d imitate the rumblings in the crowds. We included comments from the soccer federation, the players, the press, and even the fans (but never the referee); eventually, we would forget that it was just a game of a game and enter into vicious and deadly combat. Most of the time I’d crumble under the first blows.

  These early fights were sparked by defeat, excessive teasing, and cheating, but it was rivalry that fueled them. They were fought not to establish who was in the right but which of us was stronger, more skillful, more knowledgeable, more clever. And they expressed an anxiety we felt about having to learn the rules of the game—and indirectly the rules of the world—where in an instant we would be called upon to prove our agility and our mental prowess. In these rivalries were the shadows of the culture that drove my uncle to assault us with crosswords and mathematics problems whenever we entered his apartment, the same culture that brought us that half-serious jockeying between the different floors of the building—each of which supported a different soccer team—and that we found in those textbooks of ours that exaggerated the victories of the Ottoman Turks and books we received as gifts, like the Encyclopedia of Discoveries and Inventions.

  My mother may have had her hand in it too, because, perhaps to make her daily life easier, she turned everything she could into a contest. “Whoever puts on his pajamas and goes to bed first gets a kiss,” my mother would say. “Whoever gets through the whole winter without catching a cold or falling ill, I’ll buy him a present.” “Whoever can finish his supper first without spilling anything onto his shirt, I’ll love him most.” These motherly provocations were designed to make her two sons more “virtuous,” quiet, and cooperative.

  But behind my hopeless fights with my brother was the insistent competitiveness of my heroes, all of whom were committed to winning, coming out on top, however improbable the result. So—just as we would raise our hands in class, to prove we were not like all those dunces—my brother and I would give our all to vanquishing and crushing each other to fend off the fear we kept hidden in the darkest corner of our hearts: the melancholy and desolation of sharing Istanbul’s shameful fate. When İstanbullus grow a bit older and feel their fates intertwining with that of the city, they come to welcome the cloak of melancholy that brings their lives a contentment, an emotional depth, that almost looks like happiness. Until then they rage against their fate.

  My older brother was always better at school than I was. He knew everyone’s address and could hold figures, telephone numbers, and mathematical formulas in his head like a secret melody (whenever we went out together, I would spend my time looking at the shopwindows, at the sky, at whatever struck my fancy, and he would look at the street numbers and the names of the apartments); he loved reciting soccer regulations, match results, the capitals of the world, and sports statistics, just as, forty years later, he enjoys rattling off the deficiencies of his academic rivals and how little space they take up in the Citation Index. Although my interest in painting came partly from my desire to spend time alone with my pencils and my paper, it also had something to do with my brother’s total lack of interest in it.

  But after hours of painting, if I had not found the happiness I’d been seeking, and when the darkness of the heavily curtained and overfurnished house began to seep into my soul, I would, like all İstanbullus, long for a quick route to victory and enter into a contest that might make one possible; whatever game it was that we were interested in at that moment—a marbles match, chess, a game of wits—I’d try to talk my brother into playing it again.

  He would raise his head from his book and say, “So you’re itching for it, are you?”—referring to the game I lost most times we played, not the brawling that came after. “The defeated wrestler never tires of a fight!” he’d say, thinking back on my most recent loss. “I’m doing another hour of work, and then we’ll play.” He’d return to his book.

  His desk was as neat and organized as mine was messy, like the scene of an earthquake.

  If our early fights helped us master the ways of the world, our later quarrels were more sinister. Once we’d been two brothers growing up together under the worried eyes and the constant shower of admonitions of a mother trying to fill the void left by an often absent father, hoping that if she denied this void she could somehow keep the melancholy of the city from seeping into the house. But now we began to act like two bachelors, each determined to carve out his separate domain. Such rules and regulations as we had established over the years to keep the peace—which parts of the cupboards were whose, what books belonged to whom, who got to sit next to our father in the car and for how long, who was to close our bedroom door at bedtime, who would turn off the light in the kitchen, and, when the latest issue of History magazine arrived, who got to read it first—even these settled protocols became sources of argument, insults, taunts, and threats. A single intemperate remark—“That’s mine, don’t touch it!” or “Watch out or you’ll be sorry!”—would lead to a skirmish, a twisting of arms, punching, beating, violence. To protect myself, I’d grab wooden hangers, fire tongs, a broomstick, anything I could use as a sword.

  Formerly, we’d used a game we had seen in real life (like a soccer match) and imitated it with marbles; if questions of pride and honor arose, we would settle them with a fight, but it was the game we cared about; now we had thrown aside that pretext and were fighting to settle questions of pride and honor drawn directly from life. We knew each other’s weaknesses intimately, and we began to exploit them. Above all, our fights were no longer angry outbursts that descended into violence; they were mercilessly planned acts of aggression.

  Once, when I’d managed to hurt him, my brother said, “Tonight, when our parent
s go to the cinema, I’m going to beat you to a pulp!” At the supper table that night, I implored my parents not to go, repeating my brother’s threats, but they still left me, as blindly confident as a peacekeeping force that thinks it has resolved a dispute between warring parties.

  Sometimes, when we were alone in the house—giving everything we had to one of our intense battles and dripping with sweat—the bell would ring and, like a husband and wife who’d been caught fighting by neighbors, we’d cut our fevered amusement short and politely usher the neighbor, the unnecessary guest, into the house with all the appropriate pleasantries—“Please come in, sir,” we’d say, “please sit down”—gleefully winking at each other, we’d explain that our mother would be back soon. But later, when we were alone again, we’d never rush back into our fight as a bickering couple might; instead, we’d act as if nothing had happened and return to our happy, idle pursuits. Sometimes, if I’d been roughed up very badly, I would lie down on the carpet and cry like a child imagining his own funeral, before falling fast asleep. My brother, no less humane or good-hearted than I, would, after working for a while at his desk, begin to feel sorry for me; he’d rouse me and tell me to get changed and go to bed, but when he’d gone back to work, I’d go to bed still dressed to wallow in dark self-pity.