Istanbul Read online

  So for that entire night, every non-Muslim who dared walk the streets of the city risked being lynched; the next morning the shops of Beyoğlu stood in ruins, their windows smashed, their doors kicked in, their wares either plundered or gleefully destroyed. Strewn everywhere were clothes, carpets, bolts of cloth, overturned refrigerators, radios, and washing machines; the streets were piled high with broken porcelain sets, toys (the best toy stores were all in Beyoğlu), kitchenware, and fragments of the aquariums and chandeliers that were so fashionable at the time. Here and there, amid the bicycles, overturned and burned cars, hacked-up pianos, and broken mannequins gazing up at the sky from the cloth-covered streets, were the tanks that had come too late to quell the riots.

  Because my family told long stories about these riots for years afterward, the details are as vivid as if I had seen them with my own eyes. While the Christian families were cleaning up their shops and homes, mine was recalling how my uncle and my grandmother had raced from one window to the next, watching with rising panic as the angry mobs roamed up and down our streets, smashing shop windows and cursing the Greeks, the Christians, the rich. From time to time a group would gather outside our apartment, but it just so happened that my brother had developed a fancy for the little Turkish flags they’d just begun to sell at Alaaddin’s shop, perhaps in the hope of capitalizing on the heightened nationalist sentiment then sweeping the country; he’d hung one in my uncle’s Dodge, and that, we think, is why the angry mobs passed without overturning it and even spared the windows.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Religion

  Until I was ten, I had a very clear image of God; ravaged with age and draped in white scarves, God had the featureless guise of a highly respectable woman. Although She resembled a human being, She had more in common with the phantoms that populated my dreams: not at all like someone I might run into on the street. Because when She appeared before my eyes, She was upside down and turned slightly to one side. The phantoms of my imaginary world faded bashfully into the background as soon as I noticed them, but then so did She; after the sort of elegant rolling shot of the surrounding world that you see in some films and television commercials, Her image would sharpen and She would begin to ascend, fading as She rose to Her rightful place in the clouds. The folds of Her white head scarf were as sharp and elaborate as the ones I’d seen on statues and in the illustrations in history books, and they covered Her body entirely; I couldn’t even see Her arms or legs. Whenever this specter appeared before me, I felt a powerful, sublime, and exalted presence but surprisingly little fear. I don’t remember ever asking for Her help or guidance. I was only too aware that She was not interested in people like me: She cared only for the poor.

  Thus the people in my apartment building interested in this phantom were the maids and the cooks. Although I was faintly aware that, in theory at least, God’s love extended beyond them to everyone under our roof, I also knew that people like us were lucky enough not to need it. God was there for those in pain, to offer comfort to those who were so poor they could not educate their children, to care for the beggars in the street who were forever invoking Her name, and to aid pure-hearted innocents in times of trouble. This is why, if my mother heard of a blizzard that had closed the roads to remote villages or of an earthquake that had left the poor homeless, she would say, “May God help them!” It seemed not so much a petition as an expression of the fleeting guilt that well-to-do people like us felt at such times; it helped us get over the emptiness of knowing we were doing nothing about the situation.

  As creatures of logic, we were reasonably certain that the soft and elderly presence hiding its brilliance behind an abundance of white scarves would be disinclined to listen to us. After all, we did nothing for Her. Whereas the cooks and maids in our apartment, and all the other poor people around us, had to work very hard, seize every opportunity, to get in touch with Her; they even fasted for an entire month every year. Whenever she wasn’t serving us, our Esma Hanım rushed back to her tiny room to spread out her rug and pray; every time she felt happy, sad, glad, fearful, or angry, she’d remember God; whenever she opened or closed the door or did anything for the first time or the last time, she’d invoke Her name and then whisper a few other things under her breath.

  Except for those moments when we were made to remember Her mysterious bond with the poor, God did not trouble us unduly. You could almost say it was a relief to know they depended on someone else to save them, that there was another power that could help bear their burdens. But the comfort of this thought was sometimes dissolved by the fear that one day the poor might use their special relationship with God against us.

  I remember the disquiet I felt on the few occasions when—more out of curiosity than boredom—I’d watch our elderly maid praying. Seen through the half-open door, our Esma Hanım looked a lot like the God of my imagination. Turned slightly sideways on her prayer rug, she would slowly bend over to press her forehead against it; she would rise only to bend over again, and now, as she prostrated herself, she looked as if she were begging, accepting her lowly place in the world; without quite knowing why, I’d feel anxious and vaguely angry. She only prayed when she had no pressing duties and no one else was at home, and the silence, broken intermittently by whispered prayers, made me nervous. My eyes would light on a fly crawling up the windowpane. The fly would fall on its back, and the buzzing of its half-transparent wings as it struggled to right itself would mix with Esma Hanım’s prayers and whispers, and suddenly, when I could bear this no longer, I would tug at the poor woman’s scarf.

  That it would upset her when I interfered was something I knew from experience. As the old woman used all her willpower to ignore my intrusion and finish her prayers, it seemed that what she was doing was somehow false, nothing more than a game (because now she was only pretending to pray). But still I was impressed by her determination to immerse herself in prayer and took it as a challenge. When God came between me and this woman—who was always so loving to me, taking me on her lap and telling people who stopped in the street to admire me that I was her “grandson”—I felt as uneasy as anyone else in the family about the devotion of deeply religious people. My fear, which I shared with everyone in the Turkish secular bourgeoisie, was not of God but of the fury of those who believed in Her too much.

  Sometimes, when Esma Hanım was praying, the phone would ring or my mother, suddenly needing her for something, would call out for her. It then fell to me to run straight to my mother to tell her our maid was praying. Sometimes I did this out of the goodness of my heart, and sometimes I was driven more by that strange disquiet, that envy, and a desire to make trouble just to see what would happen. There was a certain desire to know which was stronger, this maid’s loyalty to us or her loyalty to God; part of me was keen to wage war with this other world into which she escaped, sometimes returning with angry threats.

  “If you tug at my scarf when I’m praying, your hands will turn to stone!” I still kept tugging her scarf, and nothing happened. But like my elders, who, while claiming not to believe in any of this nonsense, still watched their step—just in case time proved them wrong—I knew there was a point beyond which I dared not tease her. While I hadn’t turned to stone this time, like everyone else in my prudent family I learned that it was always wise, if you’d just derided religion or expressed your lack of interest in it, to change the subject right away; we equated piety with poverty but never in too loud a voice.

  To me, it seemed as if it was because they were poor that God’s name was always on their lips. It’s entirely possible that I reached this false conclusion by watching the disbelief and mockery with which my family viewed anyone religious enough to pray five times a day.

  If God gradually ceased to manifest Herself as a white-scarved worthy, if my bond with Her was a subject that aroused a fleeting fear and caution, it was partly because no one in my family saw fit to give me any religious instruction. Perhaps they had nothing to teach me: I never sa
w anyone in my family bowing down on prayer rugs or fasting or whispering prayers. In this sense, you could say that families like mine were like those godless bourgeois families of Europe who lack the courage to make the final break.

  This might seem unprincipled cynicism, but in the secular fury of Atatürk’s new Republic, to move away from religion was to be modern and western; it was a smugness in which there flickered from time to time the flame of idealism. But that was in public. In private life, nothing came to fill the spiritual void. Cleansed of religion, home became as empty as the city’s ruined yalis and as gloomy as the fern-darkened gardens surrounding them.

  So in our house, it was left to the maids to fill in the void (and satisfy my curiosity—if God didn’t matter, why did they build so many mosques?). It wasn’t difficult to see the foolishness of superstition. (“Touch this and you’ll turn to stone,” our maid would say. “His tongue’s been tied.” “An angel came and took him up to heaven.” “Never put your left foot first.”) All those pieces of cloth people tied to the sheikhs’ türbes—tombs—the candles they lit for Sofu Baba in Cihangir, the old wives’ remedies the maids concocted because no one would send them to the doctor, and the legacy of centuries of dervish orders that found its way into our republican, European household in the form of proverbs, sayings, threats, and suggestions: They might all be nonsense, but they had left their imprint on everyday life all the same. Even now, when in a large square or walking down a corridor or pavement, I’ll suddenly remember not to step on the cracks between the paving stones or on the black squares, and find myself hopping rather than walking.

  Many of these religious injunctions became confused in my mind with my mother’s rules (like “Don’t point”). Or, when she told me not to open a window or the door because it would cause a draft, I imagined that a draft was a saint like Sofu Baba, whose soul was not to be disturbed.

  So rather than see it as a system by which God spoke to us through prophets, books, and laws, we reduced religion to a strange and sometimes amusing set of rules on which the lower classes depended; having stripped religion of its power, we were able to accept it into our home as a strange sort of background music to accompany our oscillations between East and West. My grandmother, my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles—none of them ever fasted for a single day, but at Ramadan they awaited sunset with as much hunger as those keeping the fast. On winter days, when night fell early and my grandmother was playing bezique or poker with her friends, the breaking of the fast would be an excuse for a feast, which meant more treats from the oven. Still, there were concessions. On any other month of the year, these gregarious old women would nibble continuously as they played, but during Ramadan, as sunset approached, they’d stop gorging themselves and stare longingly at a nearby table laden with all sorts of jams, cheeses, olives, flaky böreks, and garlic sausages; when the flute music on the radio indicated that the time for breaking the fast was near, they would eye the table as hungrily as if they, like the ordinary Muslims who made up 95 percent of the country, had gone without food since dawn. They’d ask one another, “How much more is there?” When they heard the cannon fire, they waited for Bekir the cook to eat something in the kitchen, before they too set upon the food. Even today, whenever I hear a flute, my mouth waters.

  My first trip to a mosque helped confirm my prejudices about religion in general and Islam in particular. It was almost by chance: One afternoon when there was no one home, Esma Hanım took me off to the mosque without asking anyone’s permission; she was not so much burning with a need to worship as tired of being inside. At Teşvikiye Mosque we found a crowd of twenty or thirty people—mostly owners of the small shops in the back streets or maids, cooks, and janitors who worked for the rich families of Nişantaşı; as they gathered on the carpets, they looked less like a congregation of worshipers than a group of friends who had gathered to exchange notes. As they waited for the prayer time, they gossiped with one another in whispers. As I wandered among them during prayers, running off to the far corners of the mosque to play my games, none of them stopped to scold; instead, they smiled at me in the same sweet way most adults smiled at me when I was a young child. Religion may have been the province of the poor, but now I saw that—contrary to the caricatures in newspapers and my republican household—religious people were harmless.

  Nevertheless, I was given to understand by the high-handed ridicule directed at them in the Pamuk Apartments that their good-hearted purity carried a price. It was making the dream of a modern, prosperous, westernized Turkey more difficult to achieve. As westernized, positivist property owners, we had the right to govern over these semiliterates, and we had an interest in preventing their getting too attached to their supersititions—not just because it suited us privately but because our country’s future depended on it. If my grandmother discovered that an electrician had gone off to pray, even I could tell that her sharp comment had less to do with the small repair job he had left unfinished than with the “traditions and practices” that were impeding “our national progress.”

  The staunch disciples of Atatürk who dominated the press, their caricatures of black-scarved women and bearded reactionaries fingering prayer beads, the school ceremonies in honor of the Martyrs of the Republican Revolution—all reminded me that the nation-state belonged more to us than to the religious poor, whose devotion was dragging the rest of us down with them. But feeling at one with the mathematics and engineering fanatics in our own household, I would tell myself that our mastery did not depend on our wealth but on our modern western outlook. And so I looked down on families that were as rich as we were but not as western. Such distinctions became less tenable later on, when Turkey’s democracy had matured somewhat and rich provincials began flocking to Istanbul to present themselves to “society”; by then my father’s and my uncle’s business failures had taken their toll, subjecting us to the indignity of being outclassed by people who had no taste for secularism and no understanding of western culture. If enlightenment entitled us to riches and privilege, how were we to explain these pious parvenus? (At the time I knew nothing about the refinements of Sufism or the Mevlana or the great Persian heritage.) For all I knew, the new class denounced as “rich peasants” by the political left held views no different from those of our chauffeurs and cooks. If Istanbul’s westernized bourgeoisie gave support to the military interventions of the past forty years, never strenuously objecting to military interference in politics, it was not because it feared a leftist uprising (the Turkish left in this country has never been strong enough to achieve such a feat); rather, the elite’s tolerance of the military was rooted in the fear that one day the lower classes would combine forces with the new rich pouring in from the provinces to abolish the westernized bourgeois way of life under the banner of religion. But if I dwell any longer on military coups and political Islam (which has much less to do with Islam than is commonly thought), I risk destroying the hidden symmetry of this book.

  I find the essence of religion to be guilt. As a child I felt guilty—about not being fearful enough of the honorable white-scarved woman who entered my daydreams from time to time and about not believing in Her enough. There was also the guilt of keeping myself apart from those who did believe in Her. But just as I embraced the imaginary world into which I so often slipped, I welcomed that guilt with all my childish might, certain my disquiet would deepen my soul, sharpen my wits, and bring color to my life. As for the other, happier Orhan in that other house in Istanbul—in my daydreams, religion caused him no disquiet whatsoever. Whenever I grew tired of religious guilt, I’d want to seek out this Orhan, knowing he would not waste time on such thoughts and would sooner head for the movies.

  Still, my childhood was not without capitulations to the dictates of religion. In the last year of primary school, there was a teacher I now remember as disagreeable and authoritarian, though at the time it made me happy just to see her; if she smiled at me I was ecstatic, and if she so much as raised an
eyebrow I was crushed. When describing to us “the beauties of religion,” this elderly white-haired sullen woman overlooked the vexing questions of faith, fear, and humility, choosing instead to see religion as rationalist utilitarianism. According to her, the Prophet Muhammad had thought fasting was important not just to strengthen one’s will but also to improve one’s health. Centuries later, western women inimical to the other beauties of religion nevertheless availed themselves of the healthy joys of fasting. Praying raised your pulse; like gymnastics, it kept you alert. In our own time, in countless Japanese offices and factories, the blow of a whistle signals the stop of work when everyone does five minutes of exercise, rather as Muslims take five-minute breaks for prayers.

  My teacher’s rationalist Islam confirmed the secret longing for faith and self-denial that the little positivist inside me was nurturing, so one day during Ramadan, I decided I would fast too. Although I was doing this under the teacher’s influence, I didn’t inform her. When I told my mother, I saw she was surprised but glad, as well as a little worried. She was the sort of person who believed in God “just in case”; even so, fasting was in her view something only backward people did. I did not raise the subject with my father or my brother. Even before I made my first fast, my hunger for belief had metamorphosed into a shame best kept secret. I was well acquainted with my family’s touchy, suspicious, and mocking class attitudes, and I knew what they were likely to say. So I did my fast without anyone noticing or patting me on the back and saying, “Well done.” Perhaps my mother should have told me that an eleven-year-old was under no obligation to fast at all. Instead, she had all my favorite things waiting for me—braided cakes and anchovy toasts—when my fast was over. Part of her was glad to see the fear of God in such a young boy, but I could see in her eyes that she already worried whether this was evidence of a self-destructive streak liable to condemn me to a life of spiritual suffering.