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  That said, the main thing I learned at school was that it was not enough to accept the facts of life without question; you had to be dazzled by their beauty too. In the first years of school, teachers would seize on any excuse to interrupt class to teach us a song. While I mouthed the words to these French and English ditties, I didn’t understand them and I didn’t like them, though I did like watching my classmates. (We sang them in Turkish, and the words would be something like, “Father Watchman, Father Watchman, today’s a holiday, so blow your whistle.”) A short plump boy who only half an hour earlier had been in tears for having once again left his notebook at home would now be singing gleefully, his mouth open as wide as could be. The girl who was always pushing her long hair behind her ears would do it less anxiously in the middle of the song. The fat brute who beat me up at playtime, and even his sly evil mentor beside him, who knew all about the secret line and made sure to keep himself on the right side of it—even they would be beaming like angels as they lost themselves in the clouds of music. In the middle of the song, the neat girl would turn to check that her pencil boxes and notebooks were still in order. The clever hardworking girl who, if I asked her to be my partner when we lined up two by two at the end of recess to return to class, would silently give me her hand—even she was singing her heart out, and the fat, stingy boy who would always wrap his arm around his paper—as if he were nursing a baby so no one could see it—had spread his arms out wide. Even the hopeless halfwit who hardly ever made it through a day without a beating joined in the singing of his own free will. When I noticed that the redheaded girl with the ponytail had noticed this too, we’d look into each other’s eyes and smile as we sang. I didn’t know the song, but when we got to the la-la-la part, I would join in, singing my loudest, and as I looked out the window, I would conjure up the future. In just a little while, the bell would ring and the whole class would erupt; I would skip outside with my bag to find our janitor waiting; I would take his huge hand, and as he walked my brother and me home, I would think that when we got there I’d be too tired even to remember everyone in this classroom, but even so my pace would quicken when I remembered I’d soon be seeing my mother.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Esaelp Gnittips On

  From the moment I learned how to read, the imaginary world inside my head was adorned with constellations of letters. They did not convey meaning or even tell a story; they just made sounds. Every word I saw—whether the name of a company on an ashtray or a poster, a news headline, an advertisement, a sign over a shop or a restaurant or on the side of a truck—and no matter where the word was—on a piece of wrapping paper, a traffic sign, the packet of cinnamon on the supper table, the tin of oil in the kitchen, the bar of soap in the bathroom, my grandmother’s cigarettes, her medicine bottles—I read them automatically. Sometimes I repeated the words out loud; it didn’t matter that I had no idea what they meant. It was as if a machine had set itself up between the visual and cognitive parts of my brain to translate letters into syllables and sounds. Like a radio in a coffeehouse so noisy that no one can hear it, my machine sometimes operated without my even being aware of it.

  Walking home from school, even if I was very tired, my eyes would find words and the machine in my head would say, FOR THE SECURITY OF YOUR MONEY AND YOUR FUTURE. İETT REQUEST BUS STOP. APİKOĞLU’S REAL TURKISH SAUSAGES. PAMUK APT.

  Once at home, my eyes would go to the headlines on my grandmother s paper: DEATH OR PARTITION IN CYPRUS. FIRST BALLET SCHOOL IN TURKEY. AMERICAN NARROWLY ESCAPES LYNCHING AFTER KISSING TURKISH GIRL IN STREET. HULA HOOP BAN IN CITY STREETS.

  Sometimes the letters arranged themselves in such strange ways that I was taken back to the magical days when I was first learning the alphabet. The decree on some of the cement pavements around the Governor’s Mansion in Nişantaşı, three minutes away from our house, was one of them. When I was walking with my mother and my brother from Nişantaşı toward Taksim or Beyoğlu, we’d play a sort of hopscotch on the empty pavement squares between the letters and read them in the order we saw them:

  ESAELP GNITTIPS ON

  This mysterious decree would incite me to defy it and spit on the ground at once, but because the police were stationed two steps away in front of the Governor’s Mansion, I’d just stare at it uneasily instead. Now I began to fear that spit would suddenly climb out of my throat and land on the ground without my even willing it. But as I knew, spitting was mostly a habit of grown-ups of the same stock as those brainless, weak-willed, insolent children who were always being punished by my teacher. Yes, we would sometimes see people spitting on the streets, or hawking up phlegm because they had no tissues, but this didn’t happen often enough to merit a decree of this severity, even outside the Governor’s Mansion. Later on, when I read about the Chinese spitting pots and discovered how commonplace spitting was in other parts of the world, I asked myself why they’d gone to such lengths to discourage spitting in Istanbul, where it had never been popular. (Still, whenever anyone mentions the French writer Boris Vian, it’s not his best work that springs to mind but a terrible book he wrote called I Shall Spit on Your Graves.)

  Perhaps the real reason the cautions on the pavements of Nişantaşı are engraved in my memory is that the automatic reading machine had installed itself in my head at about the same time that my mother had begun, with renewed energy, to instruct us in the do’s and don’t’s of life outside; in other words, when we were among strangers. She would advise us, for example, not to buy food from the dirty vendors on quiet streets, and never to order köftes in restaurants because they always used the worst, oiliest, toughest meat. Such warnings got mixed up with various announcements that my reading machine had imprinted in my head: WE KEEP ALL OUR MEAT IN THE REFRIGERATOR. Another day, my mother cautioned us yet again to keep our distance from strangers in the street. The machine in my head said UNDER EIGHTEENS NOT ADMITTED. On the backs of trams, there was a sign that said HANGING FROM THE RAILS IS DANGEROUS AND FORBIDDEN, which was exactly what my mother thought too; seeing her words in an official announcement did not confuse me, because she’d also explained that people like us would never even think of hanging on the back of a tram just to travel for nothing. The same applied to the sign on the back of the city ferries: IT IS DANGEROUS AND FORBIDDEN TO APPROACH THE PROPELLERS. When my mother’s admonitions about littering took on an official voice, an unofficial graffiti written in uneven letters about THE MOTHER OF THE LITTERER caused me some confusion. When I was told to kiss my mother’s and my grandmother’s hands but never anyone else’s, I would remember the words on anchovytins: PREPARED WITHOUT BEING TOUCHED BY A SINGLE HAND. DON’T PICK THE FLOWERS OR DON’T TOUCH—both these signs echoed my mother’s own commands instilled in the streets, and there may have been a connection between these injunctions and her prohibition against pointing. But how was I to understand signs that said DON’T DRINK WATER FROM THE POOL when I’d never seen a drop of water in said pool or DON’T WALK ON THE GRASS in parks that were nothing but mud and dirt?

  To understand the “civilizing mission” that these signs embodied and that turned the city into a jungle of announcements, threats, and reproaches, we must take a look at the city’s newspaper columnists and the “city correspondents” who were their forefathers.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Ahmet Rasim and Other City Columnists

  Early one morning in the late 1880s—not long after Abdülhamıt II began his thirty years of Absolute Rule—a twenty-five-year-old journalist was sitting at his desk in the offices of Happiness, a small newspaper in Babıali, when “all of a sudden” the door flew open and a tall man in a red fez wearing “some sort of military jacket” with sleeves made from red broadcloth marched into the room. Spotting the young journalist, he shouted, “Come here!” The young journalist rose fearfully to his feet. “Put on your fez! Get moving!”

  The journalist followed the man in the military jacket into the horse-drawn carriage waiting at the door, and off they went. T
hey crossed the Galata Bridge in silence. It was only halfway through the journey that the sweet-faced young journalist found the courage to ask where they were going.

  “To the sultan’s chief secretary! They told me to fetch you at once!”

  After he had been waiting at the palace for some time, an irate gray-bearded man beckoned the young journalist to his table. “Come here!” this man cried. He had a copy of Happiness open before him. Pointing at it furiously, he asked, “What is this supposed to mean?”

  When the young journalist did not grasp what the problem was, the man began to shout.

  “Traitor! Ingrate! We should throw your head into a mortar and pummel it into paste!”

  Although cowering in fear, the journalist noticed that the offending piece was a poem by a dead poet; its refrain was “Will spring never come, will spring never come?” Hoping to explain, he said, “Sir—”

  “He still won’t shut up! … Go stand outside!” said the sultan’s chief secretary. After he had stood trembling outside for fifteen minutes, he was ushered inside again. But every time the young man tried to open his mouth to explain that he was not the author of the poem, he met with a new tirade.

  “Impertinents! Dogs! Bastards! Shameless wretches! Damn them! They’ll hang!”

  When the young journalist understood that he wouldn’t be allowed to speak, he gathered up all his courage, took his seal out of his pocket, and placed it on the table. When the sultan’s chief secretary read the name on the seal, he immediately saw there’d been a mistake.

  “What is your name?”

  “Ahmet Rasim.”

  Relating this incident forty years later in a memoir entitled “Author, Poet, Writer,” Ahmet Rasim recalled that when the sultan’s chief secretary realized his officer had brought him the wrong man, he changed his tune. “Why don’t you sit down, my son,” he said. “You don’t mind my calling you that, do you?” Pulling open a drawer, he beckoned for young Ahmet to approach and, handing him five liras, he said, “Let’s leave it at that. Don’t mention this to anyone.” With that, he sent him off.

  Rasim told of this encounter with his usual exuberance and good humor, adorning his story with the everyday details that became his hallmark.

  His love of life, his wit, and the joy he took in his craft—these things made Ahmet Rasim one of Istanbul’s great writers. He was able to balance the postimperial melancholy that engulfed Tanpınar the novelist, Yahya Kemal the poet, and Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar the memoirist with his limitless energy, optimism, and high spirits. Like all writers who love Istanbul, he was interested in its history and wrote books about it too, but because he was careful to keep his melancholy in check, he never yearned for a “lost golden age.” Rather than see Istanbul’s past as a sacred treasure chest, rather than dredge history for the authentic voice that might allow him to produce a western-style masterpiece, he preferred, like most others in the city, to confine himself to the present: Istanbul was an amusing place to live, and that was all there was to it.

  Like most of his readers, he had no great interest in the East-West question or the “Drive to change our civilization.” For him, westernization was something that had created a slew of new poseurs with new affectations he was happy to ridicule. His own youthful literary affectations—he’d written novels and poems but failed in each endeavor—had made him both suspicious and bitingly funny about anything that hinted at artifice or pretense. When he mocked the various ways in which Istanbul poets with pretensions read their poems—imitating the Parnassians and the Decadents and going so far as to stop people in the street for impromptu performances—and also mocked the genius of his fellow literati in directing any conversation straight to the matter of their own careers, you can feel at once the distance he put between himself and the westernizing elite, most of whom were, like him, based in the publishing district of Babıali.

  But it was as a newspaper columnist—or, to use the French word in currency at the time, a feuilletoniste—that Ahmet Rasim found his own voice. Except for the odd fit of pique and the occasional affectation it inspired, politics did not interest him; after all, state oppression and state censorship made politics a tricky and sometimes impossible subject. (He loved explaining how the censoring of his own columns was sometimes so severe that there was nothing left to publish but a blank space.) Instead, he made the city his subject. (“If political prohibitions and narrowness mean you can’t find anything to talk about, talk instead about the city council and city life, because people always love to read about it!” This advice from our Istanbul columnist is more than a hundred years old.)

  So it is that Ahmet Rasim spent fifty years writing about the goings-on in Istanbul, from the various species of drunks to the street vendors in the city’s poor neighborhoods, from grocers to jugglers, from the beauties of the towns along the Bosphorus to its rowdy taverns and meyhanes, from daily news to trading news, from amusement parks to meadows and public gardens, the market days and the particular charms of each season, including, in winter, the joys of snowball fights and sledding, as well as developments in publishing, local gossip, and restaurant menus. He had a penchant for lists and classification systems and a good eye for people’s habits and idiosyncrasies. The elation that a botanist might feel at the variety of plants in a forest, Rasim felt about the many and varied manifestations of the westernizing impulse, immigration, and historical coincidence, all of which gave him something compellingly new and strange to write about every day. He advised young writers to “always take a notebook” when wandering around the city.

  The best of the columns that Ahmet Rasim dashed off between 1895 and 1903 are collected in a volume entitled City Correspondence. He never referred to himself as a city correspondent except derisively; in complaining about the city council, making observations about daily life, and taking the city’s pulse, he was borrowing a practice developed in the 1860s in France. In 1867, Namık Kemal, whose name would become one of the most important in the modern Turkish canon and who admired Victor Hugo not only for his drama and poetry but also for his romantic combativeness, wrote a series of letters in the newspaper Tasvir-i Efkar about everyday life in Istanbul during Ramadan. His letters, or “city columns” as they were called, set the tone for those who would follow by taking on the confidential, intimate, complicit tone of an ordinary letter. And so, by addressing, all İstanbullus as relations, friends, and lovers, they succeeded in turning the city from a string of villages into an imagined whole.

  One such journalist was Insightful Ali Efendi, so known for being the publisher of a newspaper called Insight (he published the paper under the auspices of the palace, so when the paper was shut down for carelessly publishing a piece later deemed undesirable, he was known for a while as Insightless Ali Efendi). He made determined and relentless forays into everyday life, as often to advise his readers as to scold them, and though quite humorless, he is rightly remembered as one of the most meticulous Istanbul letter writers of his day, if not the wittiest.

  As the first chroniclers of the city’s daily life, these columnists captured Istanbul’s colors, smells, and sounds in amusing anecdotes and humorous reflections, and they also helped establish the ettiquette for Istanbul’s streets, parks, gardens, shops, ships, bridges, squares, and tramways. Because it was imprudent to criticize the sultan, the state, the police, the military, the religious leaders, or even the more powerful councillors, the literary elite had only one possible target for their scorn, and that was the helpless, faceless crowds, the little people who went about the streets minding their own business and struggling to make ends meet. Everything we know about those unfortunate İstanbullus not quite so educated as columnists and newspaper readers—what they’ve done in the streets for the past 130 years, what they’ve eaten and said, what noises they’ve made—we know thanks to the often irate, sometimes compassionate, ever censorious columnists who made it their business to write about them.

  Forty-five years after having learned to re
ad, I find that whenever my eyes light on a newspaper column, whether it hectors me to return to tradition or to redouble my efforts to be western, I immediately think of my mother, saying, “Don’t point.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Don’t Walk down the Street with Your Mouth Open

  I now present a random sampling of some of the most amusing pieces of advice, warnings, pearls of wisdom, and invective I’ve culled from the hundreds of thousands of pages written by Istanbul columnists of various persuasions over the past 130 years.