Istanbul Read online

  The melancholy I itched for—and would later claim—that mood that spoke to me of defeat, obliteration, and degradation, also allowed me a respite from all the rules that needed to be learned, all the mathematics problems that needed to be solved, all the sections of the Karlowitz Treaty that needed to be memorized. To have been beaten and humiliated was to feel free. There were times when, in spite of myself, I wanted to be beaten, as my brother sensed when he said I was itching for it. Sometimes it was because he sensed it, and because he was cleverer and stronger, that I’d want to fight him with all my strength and get my thrashing.

  After every beating, a dark feeling would catch up with me when I was alone in bed, as I berated myself for being so clumsy, guilty, and lazy. What’s up? a voice inside me would ask. I’m bad, I’d reply. In an instant, this answer would grant me a dizzying freedom; a bright new world would open up before me. If I was prepared to be as bad as I could be, I’d be able to paint whenever I liked, forget about my schoolwork, sleep in my clothes. At the same time, there was the strange comfort I took in the defeat, the damage, the bruises on my arms and legs, the split lips, the bloody noses: My battered body was proof that I could not fight a good enough fight, that I deserved to be defeated, degraded, crushed. Perhaps it was while I was entertaining such thoughts that bright daydreams began blowing through my head like summer breezes and I was entranced to think that one day I would do something great. These dreams had a potency that belied the violence and injured pride that had given rise to them. The second world now shimmering before me, promising a happy new life, was fed above all by the violence I had just endured, and that made my imaginings all the more vibrant and lifelike. As I’d feel the city’s melancholy-hüzün settling into me, I discovered by chance that when I put pencil to paper at times like this, I liked what I did much more; as I forgot the world and played about with my melancholy, its darkness would begin to fade away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  A Foreigner in a Foreign School

  If you include the year I spent learning English in preparatory school, I spent four years at Robert Academy. It was during this time that my childhood came to an end, and I discovered the world to be more confusing, inaccessible, and distressingly boundless than I had ever suspected. I’d spent my entire childhood inside my close-knit family in a house, a street, a neighborhood that for me was, for all I knew, the center of the world. Until I started at the lycée, my education had done nothing to disabuse me of the notion that the heart of my personal and geographical universe also set the standards for the rest of the world. Now, at lycée, I discovered that I did not, in fact, live in the center of the world, and the place where I lived was not—this was more painful—the world’s beacon. Having discovered the fragility of my place in the world, and at the same time the vastness of that world (I loved getting lost in the low-ceilinged labyrinths of the library built by the American secular Protestants who had founded the college, breathing in the pungency of old paper), I felt lonelier and weaker than ever before.

  For one thing, my brother was no longer there. When I was sixteen, he left for America, to study at Yale. We may have fought incessantly, but we’d also been soulmates—discussing the world around us, categorizing, placing things, passing judgment—and my bond with him was stronger even than my bonds with my mother and my father. Released from the never-ending contests, taunts, and thrashings that did so much to fire my imagination and promote my idleness, I hardly had much cause to complain. But especially when melancholy descended, I’d miss his company.

  It seemed that some core inside me had disintegrated, but my head could not quite fathom where this core was. This seemed to be the reason I could not give myself wholly to my lessons, my homework, or anything else. Sometimes it would break my heart that I could no longer be at the head of the class without a special effort, but it was as if I had lost the ability to be too upset or too pleased about anything. During my childhood, when I had thought myself happy, life was soft as velvet, diverting as a fairy tale. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, this fiction had fragmented. From time to time I would manage to believe in one of these fragments with all my heart; I would then resolve to devote myself to it utterly, only to find myself drifting again—just as, at the start of every school year, I would decide to be first in the class, only to fall short of the mark. Sometimes the world seemed to grow more distant, a sensation I felt most keenly when my skin, my mind, my antennae were most desirously alert to it.

  Amid all the confusion were the never-ending sexual fantasies, reminders of the other world in which I could always take shelter. I knew sex not as something you shared with another person but as a dream you created by yourself. Like the machine that set itself up inside my head to sound out every letter for me, once I’d learned how to read, now there was a new machine that would extract a sexual dream or a passing pleasure from almost anything and portray the arousing spectacle in technicolor with shocking clarity. Nothing was sacred—the machine fed on everyone I knew and every picture I saw in newspapers and magazines, and when it had cut and pasted the required details into a sexual fantasy, I would shut myself up in my room.

  As I wallowed in guilt afterward, I would recall a conversation I’d had in my old middle school with two classmates. One was very fat and the other stuttered. Struggling to find his words, the stutterer asked me, “Do you ever do it?” Yes, I was already doing it in middle school, but my shame was so great it was all I could do to mutter an answer that might have been no and might have been yes. “Oh, but you shouldn’t, not ever!” the stutterer cried, his face reddening at the thought that someone as clever, quiet, and hardworking as I would fall so low. “Masturbating is a fearful habit; once you start you can never stop.” At this point, I recall my very fat friend gazing at me with pained and mournful eyes—although he too urged me in whispers to avoid masturbation (or thirty-one, as it was known among us)—for he too had discovered this habit-forming drug. He now believed himself damned, just as he knew himself doomed to be fat, and so he wore the expression of one bowing to God’s will.

  Mixed in with my memories of these years is something that caused me the same guilt and loneliness and that I continued to do when I went on to the Technical University to study architecture. But it was hardly a new habit: I’d been skipping class since primary school.

  At first it was a matter of boredom, or shame at some imagined shortcoming no one had noticed, or the simple knowledge that I’d have too much to do if I went in to school that day. The reasons might have had nothing to do with school: an argument between my parents, pure laziness or irresponsibility, an illness during which I’d been shamelessly babied. A poem I had to memorize, the prospect of being bullied by a classmate, and (at lycée and university) my deep boredom, my melancholy, my existentialist despair—these too served as excuses. Sometimes I skipped school because I was a house pet, because—when my brother went off to school alone—the things I did in the solitude of my own room were done better—and besides, I’d long known that I would never be as good a student as my brother. But there was also something deeper, and it came from the same source as my melancholy.

  Just as his inheritance from his father was about to run out, my father found a job in Geneva; that winter he went there with my mother, leaving us with our grandmother, and it was under her spineless governance that I started skipping school in earnest. I was eight years old; every morning, when İsmail Efendi rang the bell to take us to school, my brother would head out with his book bag while I would mumble some excuse for delay: I hadn’t packed my book bag yet, I’d just remembered something I’d forgotten (could my grandmother give me a lira?), and, by the way, my stomach ached, my shoes were wet, I needed to change my shirt. My brother, knowing full well what I was up to and not wanting to be late for school, would say, “Let’s just go, İsmail. You can come back for Orhan later.”

  Our school was a four-minute walk from home. By the time İsmail Efendi had dropped off my brother
and come back for me, class was about to start. I’d drag my feet a bit more, find someone else to blame for the thing missing or unready, pretend that my stomach was aching so badly I hadn’t noticed İsmail Efendi ringing the bell. By now, because of the strain of all these lies and tricks and thanks to the dreaded vile milk they made me drink every morning—boiling hot, its stink still in my nostrils—my stomach would in fact be aching a little. After a while my oatmeal-hearted grandmother would give in.

  “All right, İsmail, it’s awfully late, the bell must have rung by now; we’d better keep him at home.” Then, raising her eyebrows, she’d turn to me and say, “But listen, tomorrow you’re definitely going to school, do you understand? If you don’t, I’ll call the police. I’ll write a letter to your parents.”

  Years later, when I was in lycée and there was no one to check up on me, skipping school was more fun. Because I paid for my guilt with every step I took in the city streets, I was better able to appreciate the experience and could see things only a truly aimless and idle idiot would notice: the broad-brimmed hat that woman over there was wearing, the burnt face of a beggar I’d missed despite passing him every day, the barbers and their apprentices reading the papers in their shops, the girl in the marmalade advertisement on the wall of the apartment building across the street, the workings of the clock in Taksim Square, which was shaped like a piggy bank (I would have missed this entirely if not for passing by just as they were repairing it). The empty hamburger shops, the locksmiths in the back streets of Cihangir, the junk dealers, the furniture repairmen, the grocery stores, stamp dealers, music shops, antiquarian booksellers, seal makers, and typewriter shops of Yüksekkaldırım—everything was as real and beautiful and irresistible as it had been when I was a child, wandering these same streets with my mother. The streets would be full of vendors selling simits, fried mussels, pilaf, chestnuts, grilled meatballs, fish bread, doughballs, ayran—a yogurt drink—and sherbets, and I would buy whatever struck my fancy. I’d stand on the corner, a bottle of soda in hand, watching a group of boys playing soccer (were they skipping school like me or did they not go to school at all?); I’d walk down an alley I’d never seen before and experience a moment of great happiness. There were other times when my eyes would be on my watch, and I’d think about what was going on at school right then, and my guilt would make my melancholy all the stronger.

  During my lycée years, I explored the back streets of Bebek and Ortaköy the hills around Rumelihisarı, and the landing stages of Rumelihisarı, Emirgân, and İstinye, which were still in use in those days, and the fishermen’s coffeehouses and rowboat mooring stations around them; I would take ferries to all the places that the ferries went then, enjoy all the pleasures a ferry could offer as I took in the other towns of the Bosphorus: the old ladies dozing at their windows, the happy cats, and the back streets where you could still find old Greek houses that didn’t lock their doors in the morning.

  Having committed my crimes, I would often resolve to return to the straight and narrow: become a better student, paint more regularly, go to America and study art, stop provoking my American teachers (who, despite the best intentions, had all turned themselves into caricatures), and stop trying to annoy my lethargic and malevolent Turkish teachers for annoying me so much. In a very short time, my guilt turned me into an ardent idealist. In those years the sins most common among the adults in my life—and these were the sins I could least excuse—were dishonesty and insincerity. From the way they asked after one another’s health to the way they threatened us students, from their shopping habits to their political pronouncements, it seemed to me that their every expression in life was two-faced, and that “experience in life”—the thing they were forever telling me I didn’t have—meant the ability, after a certain age, to be hypocritical and manipulative without trying and then to be able to sit back and pretend innocence. Let me not be misunderstood: I too played plenty of tricks, changed my story to suit the person, and told packs of lies, but afterward I would be plagued with such violent guilt, confusion, and fear of being found out that for a time I’d wonder if I’d ever again feel balanced and “normal”; this gave my own lies and dissimulations a certain consequence. I would then resolve to tell no more lies and to cease being a hypocrite—not because my conscience wouldn’t allow it or because I thought telling a lie and being two-faced were one and the same thing, but rather because the confusion that followed my transgressions exhausted me.

  These pangs, ever more intense, did not just come to me after I’d dissembled, they could hit me any time: while joking around with a friend, waiting alone in a cinema queue in Beyoğlu, holding the hand of a beautiful girl I’d just met. A great eye would swing out of nowhere to hang in the air before me—like some sort of security camera—and subject whatever I was doing (paying the woman in the booth, searching for something to say to the beautiful girl after I’d held her hand), and whatever banal, insincere idiocy I was uttering (“One please, in the middle section, for From Russia with Love”; “Is this the first time you’ve come to one of these parties?”) to merciless scrutiny. I’d be at once my film’s director and its star, in the thick of things but also watching from a mocking distance. Having caught myself in the act, I could maintain a “normal” demeanor for only a few seconds, after which I’d plunge into a deep and confused anguish—I’d feel ashamed, afraid, terrorized, and terrified of being marked as alien. It was as if someone were folding my soul over and over on itself like a piece of paper, and as my depression deepened, I could feel my insides beginning to sway.

  When this happened, there was no remedy but to go into a room and lock the door behind me. I would lie back and review my hypocrisy, repeat my shaming banal cant to myself, over and over. Only by gathering up pens and paper and writing or painting something could I exit the loop, and only if I painted or wrote something I liked could I return to “normal.”

  Sometimes, even when I hadn’t done anything false, I would suddenly see I was a fake. Catching a glimpse of myself in a shop-window or, in Beyoğlu, sitting in the corner in one of the city’s suddenly ubiquitous hamburger and sandwich shops, treating myself to a sausage sandwich after a film, I’d see myself in a mirror on the opposite wall and think my reflection too real, too crude to bear. These moments were so excruciating I’d want to die, but I’d continue eating my sandwich with ravenous anguish, noting how much I resembled Goya’s giant—the one who ate his son. The reflection was a memento of my crimes and sins, confirmation that I was a loathsome toad. It was not just because the reception rooms in the unlicensed brothels in the back streets of Beyoğlu had these same huge framed mirrors hanging on their walls: I disgusted myself because everything around me—the naked bulb above my head, the grimy walls, the counter at which I was sitting, the cafeteria’s sickly colors—spoke of such neglect, such ugliness. And I would know then that no happiness, love, or success awaited me: I was doomed to live a long, boring, utterly unremarkable life—a vast stretch of time that was already dying before my eyes even as I endured it.

  Happy people in Europe and America could lead lives as beautiful and as meaningful as the ones I’d just seen in a Hollywood film; as for the rest of the world, myself included, we were condemned to live out our time in places that were shabby, broken-down, featureless, badly painted, dilapidated, and cheap; we were doomed to unimportant, second-class, neglected existences, never to do anything that anyone in the outside world might think worthy of notice. This was the fate for which I was slowly and painfully preparing myself. Because only the very rich of Istanbul could live like Westerners, and this at the cost, it seemed, of unbearable soullessness and artificiality, I grew to love the melancholy of the back streets; I spent my Friday and Saturday evenings wandering them alone and going to the cinema.

  But at the same time that I was living in this world of my own—reading books I shared with no one, painting, acquainting myself with the back streets—I’d also made some evil friends. I joined a set of boys whose f
athers were in textiles, mining, or some other industry. These friends would drive to and from Robert Academy in their fathers’ Mercedes-Benzes, and as they drove through Bebek and Şişli, they’d slow down every time they saw a beautiful girl, to invite her into the car, and if they managed to “scoop her,” as they liked to put it, they’d immediately start dreaming of the great sexual adventures before them. They were older than I, these boys, but utterly brainless. They’d spend their weekends trawling Maçka, Harbiye, Nişantaşı, and Taksim for more girls to scoop into their cars; every winter, they’d spend ten days skiing on Uludağ with everyone else who went to the foreign private lycées, and in the summer they tried to meet the girls who summered in Suadiye and Erenköy. Sometimes I would go out hunting with them, and it would shock me how some girls could tell from one glance that we were innocuous children just like them and fearlessly step into the car. On one occasion, two girls got into a car I was in, acting as if it were the most normal thing in the world to get into some stranger’s luxury sedan that happened to be passing in the street. I engaged them in a random conversation, and after going together to a club where we drank lemonade and Coca-Cola, we all went our separate ways. Aside from these friends, who lived in Nişantaşı like me and with whom I regularly played poker, I had a few others with whom I occasionally played chess or Ping-Pong or met to discuss painting and art. But I never introduced them to one another or met them together.

  With each of these friends I was a different person, with a different sense of humor, a different voice, a different moral code. I had never set out to become a chameleon; there was no clever, cynical plan. Most of the time, these identities sprang up by themselves as I conversed with my friends and got excited about whatever they were saying. The ease with which I could be good with the good, bad with the bad, and strange with the strange did not produce in me the disaffection I observed in so many of my friends; by the time I was twenty, it had cured me of cynicism. Whenever something interested me, a part of me would embrace it absolutely.