Istanbul Read online

  Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, part of me longed, like a radical Westernizer, for the city to become entirely European. I held the same hope for myself. But another part of me yearned to belong to the Istanbul I had grown to love, by instinct, by habit, and by memory. When I was a child, I was able to keep these two wishes apart (a child has no qualms about dreaming in the same moment of becoming a vagabond and a great scientist), but, as time wore on, this ability faded. At the same time, the melancholy to which the city bows its head—and at the same time claims with pride—began to seep into my soul.

  But maybe its source was neither the poverty nor the destructive burden of hüzün. If from time to time I wanted to curl up in a corner alone like a dying animal, it was also to nurse an anguish that came from within. So what was this thing whose loss was causing me such misery?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  First Love

  Because this is a memoir, I must hide her name, and if in naming her I offer a clue in the style of the Divan poets, I must also hint that this clue, like the rest of my story, might be misleading. Her name meant Black Rose in Persian, but as far as I could ascertain, no one on the shores from which she jumped joyfully into the sea, and none of her classmates at the French lycée, were aware of this—because her long shiny hair was not black but chestnut and her brown eyes only one shade darker. When I cleverly told her this, she raised her eyebrows as she always did when she became suddenly serious, and, pushing out her lips just a little, she said that of course she knew what her name meant and that she’d been named after her Albanian grandmother.

  According to my mother, though, the girl’s mother (whom my mother referred to as “that woman”) must have married very young, because when my brother was five and I was three and my mother took us out on winter mornings to Maçka Park in Nişantaşı, she’d seen the child with her mother, who looked like a young girl herself, my mother said, pushing her around in an enormous pram and trying to get her to go to sleep. My mother once hinted that the Albanian grandmother had come out of the harem of a pasha who had either done something very bad during the armistice years or disgraced himself by opposing Atatürk, but I had no interest then either in the Ottoman mansions that were burning down all around us or in the families that had once lived in them, so I’ve forgotten the exact story. My father, meanwhile, told me that the little Black Rose’s father, with the help of a few intimates influential in government circles, had become the agent for a few American and Dutch companies and struck it rich overnight, but there was nothing in his tone to suggest he disapproved.

  Eight years after our meetings in the park, when my family bought a house in the Bayramoğlu neighborhood, a summer resort to the east of the city, very fashionable among the nouveau riche for a time during the 1960s and 1970s, I would see her riding her bicycle. During the town’s heyday, when it was still small and empty, I’d spend my time there swimming in the sea, going out in boats to trawl for fish, catching mackerel and scad, playing soccer, and, on summer evenings after I’d turned sixteen, dancing with girls. Later, however, after I had finished lycée and had begun to study architecture, I preferred to sit on the ground floor of our house, painting and reading. How much did this have to do with my rich-kid friends, who called anyone who read anything other than a textbook an intellectual or a shady character “riddled with complexes”? This last slur they applied indiscriminately—it could mean you had psychological problems, or it could mean you were worried about money. I was more worried about being labeled an intellectual, so, hoping to convince them I was not an effete snob, I began to say I read my books—my Woolf, Freud, Sartre, Mann, Faulkner—“just for fun,” though they’d ask why I underlined passages.

  It was my bad reputation that attracted the Black Rose’s attention late one summer—this despite the fact that all that season, and all the ones before when I’d spent more time with my friends, we’d hardly noticed each other. When my friends and I would go to discos in the middle of the night as one big happy group, racing (and sometimes crashing) someone’s Mercedes, Mustang, or BMW to Bağdat Avenue (then known as the Asian city’s Park Avenue and only half an hour away), or when we’d take their speedboats out to some desolate cliff, lining up empty soda and wine bottles to shoot at with their fathers’ chic hunting guns, scaring the girls (when they screamed, we boys hushed them); or when we were listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles while playing poker and Monopoly, the Black Rose and I took no interest in each other.

  This young and noisy crowd gradually dispersed as summer drew to a close, and then there were the lodos storms that lashed these shores every September, always shattering one or two row-boats and putting yachts and speedboats at peril. While the rain continued pelting down, the seventeen-year-old Black Rose began to pay visits to the room in which I painted and which, taking myself too seriously, I called my studio. All my friends dropped by from time to time, to try a hand with my paper and my brushes or to examine my books with the usual suspicion, so this was not particularly unusual. Like most people living in Turkey, rich or poor, male or female, she needed conversation to pass the time and fill her days.

  In the beginning, we shared the last of the summer’s gossip—who was in love with whom and who had made whom jealous—though that summer I hadn’t paid much attention. Because I had paint on my hands, she sometimes helped me make tea or open a tube of color before going back to her place in the corner, kicking off her shoes, and stretching out on the sofa, using one of her arms as a pillow. One day, without telling her, I did a sketch of her lying there. I saw this pleased her, so the next time she came I did another. The next time, when I said I was going to draw her, she asked, “How shall I sit?” like a starlet who’s never been in front of the camera before, thrilled and yet unsure of where to put her arms and her legs.

  When I studied her long thin nose so that I could draw it right, the hint of a smile would form on her little mouth; she had a broad forehead, she was tall, with long suntanned legs, but when she came to see me she wore a chic long closed skirt handed down to her by her grandmother, so I could see only her small straight feet. When while sketching I studied the contours of her small breasts and the extraordinarily white skin of her long neck, a shadow of shame would flit across her face.

  During her first visits, we spoke a lot, and she did most of the talking. Because I’d pointed out a cloud I’d seen in her eyes and lips and said, “Don’t look so miserable!” she told me, with a directness I hadn’t expected, about her parents’ quarrels and the endless fights among her four younger brothers; she told me how the family sometimes got around her father’s punishments—house arrest, a speedboat ban, a few slaps—and how sad her mother was that her father chased other women; she also told me that because our mothers were bridge partners and had confided in each other, she knew my father did likewise—and as she told me all this, she looked straight into my eyes.

  Slowly we sank into silence. She would walk in and go to her usual place, or she would pose for the painting (heavily influenced by Bonnard), or she would open one of the books that happened to be lying around and stay on the same divan reading, in various positions. Later, whether or not I was drawing her, we fell into a routine: She’d knock on the door, come in without saying much, stretch out on the divan in the corner, pose as she read her book, or sometimes, out of the corner of her eyes, she would watch me sketching her. Every morning, after I’d been working for a while, I remember I’d start to wonder when she’d come, and I remember that she never kept me waiting long but would wear that same shy smile as she made her way almost apologetically to stretch out in her usual place.

  One subject of our ever-less-frequent conversations was the future. In her view I was very talented and hardworking and so destined to become a world-famous painter—or did she say a famous Turkish painter?—and she would come to my crowded opening in Paris with her French pals and proudly tell everyone she was a “childhood friend.”

  One evening, with th
e excuse of looking at the clear sky and a rainbow that had appeared over the other side of the peninsula following a rainstorm, we left my dark studio to walk together through the town for the first time; we walked for a very long while. I remember that we said nothing. We were worried about being seen by the few acquaintances who remained in the now half-empty resort and about the possibility of running into our mothers. But the thing that made this walk wholly “unsuccessful” was not that the rainbow disappeared before we had a chance to see it but the unacknowledged tension between us. It was while we were on this walk that I noticed for the first time just how long her neck was and what a pleasing way she had of walking.

  On our last Saturday evening, we decided to go out together, and we met without telling any of the handful of curious and unimportant friends still at the resort. I’d borrowed my father’s car, and I was tense. She’d put on makeup and a very short skirt, and a lovely perfume that stayed in the car for some time afterward. But before we even got to the amusing place we were headed for, I could already sense the ghost that had made our first walk unsuccessful. It was at the half-empty but still much too noisy discotheque, while we were trying to recapture the effect of the long and peaceful silences we’d enjoyed in my studio—it was only now I realized how deep they’d been—that we recovered our composure.

  But still we danced, to slow music. Because I’d seen others doing it, I put my arms around her, and then I pulled her closer as if by instinct, and noticed that her hair smelled of almonds. I loved the little movements of her lips when she ate and how she looked like a squirrel when she was worried.

  As I was about to take her home, I broke the silence in the car by saying, “Are you in the mood for a painting?” Without showing much enthusiasm, she agreed, but when we walked hand in hand into our dark garden and saw that the studio lights were on—was there someone inside?—she changed her mind.

  She visited me every afternoon over the next three days: stretching out on the sofa—gazing at my painting, at the pages of her book, at the little curled waves in the sea outside—and then leaving as unobtrusively as she had come.

  It did not cross my mind to get in touch with her in Istanbul that October. The books I was reading so passionately, the paintings I did in such haste, my radical leftist friends, the Marxists who were killing one another in the corridors of the university, the nationalists, and the police—they all made me ashamed of my summer friends and their rich resort with its barricaded entrance and its watchmen.

  But one evening in November, after the central heating was on, I phoned her house. When her mother picked up the phone, I hung up without speaking. The next day I asked myself why I had made that ridiculous phone call. I did not realize I had fallen in love, and I had not yet discovered what I would have to learn again and again every time this happened: I was possessed.

  A week later, on another cold dark evening, I phoned again. This time she answered. In words I had prepared in advance in some corner of my mind, without the rest of my mind knowing it, I spoke with rehearsed spontaneity: That painting I’d begun at the very end of the summer, did she remember? Well, I was hoping to finish it now, so could she come and pose for me one afternoon?

  “Should I wear the same clothes?” she asked.

  I hadn’t thought of this. “Yes, wear the same clothes,” I said.

  So the following Wednesday I went to the gates of Dame de Sion, where my mother had once been a pupil, to pick her up; I kept my distance from the crowd of mothers, fathers, cooks, and servants waiting near the door, preferring, like a number of other young men, to hide behind the trees to the side. Hundreds of girls were pouring past the threshold, all wearing this French Catholic school’s uniform—a navy blue skirt with a white shirt—and when she emerged from the crowd, she looked as if she’d shrunk; her hair was tied back, in her arms were her schoolbooks, and in a plastic bag she was carrying the clothes she would be posing in.

  When she found out that I was not taking her home so my mother would offer her tea and cake, but to the apartment in Cihangir that my mother was letting me use as my studio, she grew anxious. But after I had lit the stove there and pulled out a divan like the one in the summerhouse and she saw that I was “serious” about the painting, she relaxed, changed modestly into her long summer dress, and stretched out on the divan.

  It was in this way, and without announcing itself as a love affair, that the relationship between a nineteen-year-old artist and his even younger model began to dance in harmony with a strange music whose notes we did not even understand. In the beginning she came to the Cihangir studio once a fortnight, later it was once a week. I started doing other paintings in the same mode (a young girl reclining on a sofa). By now we were speaking even less than we had during the last days of the summer. My real life was very crowded, what with my studies at the architecture faculty, my books, and my plans to become a painter; I was afraid some intrusion into the purity of this second world would ruin it, so I didn’t discuss my everyday troubles with my sad, beautiful model. It wasn’t because I thought she wouldn’t understand, I just wanted to keep my two worlds separate. I had lost interest in my summer friends and my lycée classmates who were preparing to take over their fathers’ factories, but—by now I could no longer hide it from myself—seeing the Black Rose once a week made me very happy.

  On rainy days, just as when I’d been staying in this same Cihangir apartment as my aunt’s guest, the pickup trucks and American cars struggling up Chicken Can’t Fly Alley would skid on the wet cobblestones and we would hear them. During the ever longer but not at all unpleasant silences between us while I painted, we would sometimes come eye to eye. In the beginning, because she was still enough of a child to be happy about such a thing, she would smile, and then, fearing that she had ruined the pose, she would immediately return her lips to their former shape and her dark brown eyes would stare into mine with the same silence for a very long while. Toward the end of these strange silences, as I studied her face, she could see from my expression the effect she had had on me, and as I continued to look straight into her eyes without breaking the stare, I understood from the curve that began to appear at the corners of her lips—which she could not keep from turning into a smile—that my long stare had pleased her. Once, as she smiled in this half-happy, half-sullen way, bringing a smile to my lips too (my brush now floating aimlessly across the canvas), my beautiful model was overcome by the urge to let me know why she had smiled—and broke her pose.

  “I like it when you look at me like that.”

  Actually, this explained not just why she’d smiled but why she’d been coming to this dusty Cihangir apartment once a week. A few weeks later, when I saw the same smile forming on her lips, I put down my brush and went over to sit next to her on the sofa, and as I’d been dreaming of doing for several weeks, I dared to kiss her.

  Because the sky was black and the dark room had made us more comfortable, this late-breaking storm swept us up and carried us along without impediment. From the divan on which we were lying, we could see the searchlights of the Bosphorus boats traveling stealthily across the dark waters to the walls of the apartment.

  We continued meeting, without breaking our ritual. By now I was very happy with my model, but why did I hold back all the impulses I would display so lavishly in the future in situations like this: the sweet nothings, the attacks of jealousy, the panics, the bungling, and other emotional reactions and excesses? Because I didn’t feel them. Perhaps this was because our artist-model relationship—the thing that had made us notice each other and that still bound us together—required silence. Or perhaps it was because—and I had thought about this with a childish shame in the most obscure corner of my mind—I knew that if I ever married her, I would have to become a factory owner, not an artist.

  After nine Wednesdays of silent painting and silent lovemaking, a much simpler worry came between the happy painter and his model. My mother, who could not go for long without checking on he
r son, went to the studio apartment in Cihangir that she also used for storing old furniture; as she looked over my paintings, Bonnard’s influence did not prevent her from recognizing my beautiful model. Each time I’d finish a painting, my chestnut-haired love would break my heart by asking, “Is that supposed to look like me?” (not important, the wise guy would tell her), so while we were probably both pleased that my mother had recognized her—it answered her question once and for all—at the same time we were worried that my mother would ring hers and prattle happily about how close we’d become. (For her part, the Black Rose’s mother thought her daughter was spending her Wednesdays in a drama class at the French consulate.) As for the temperamental father, let’s not mention him at all.

  We ended our Wednesday meetings at once. A short while afterward, we began to meet on other days, on afternoons when she got out of school early or on some mornings when I skipped class. Because my mother’s raids continued, because we no longer had enough time to paint and enjoy our long silences, and because I let a classmate who was being hunted down by the police—for, it was insisted, a political crime—hide out there, we stopped going to the Cihangir apartment altogether. Instead, we walked the streets of Istanbul, staying away from Nişantaşı, Beyoğlu, Taksim, and all the other places we were likely to run into the acquaintances we called “everyone”; instead, we’d meet at Taksim—a four-minute walk from the Dame de Sion in Harbiye and also from my university in Taşkışla—and board a bus that took us farther afield.