Istanbul Read online

  But it wasn’t just the unplayed pianos; in each apartment there was also a locked glass cabinet displaying Chinese porcelains, teacups, silver sets, sugar bowls, snuffboxes, crystal glasses, rosewater ewers, plates, and censers that no one ever touched, although among them I sometimes found hiding places for miniature cars. There were the unused desks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the turban shelves on which there were no turbans, and the Japanese and Art Nouveau screens behind which nothing was hidden. There, in the library, gathering dust behind the glass, were my doctor uncle’s medical books; in the twenty years since he’d emigrated to America, no human hand had touched them. To my childish mind, these rooms were furnished not for the living but for the dead. (Every once in a while a coffee table or a carved chest would disappear from one sitting room only to appear in another sitting room on another floor.)

  If she thought we weren’t sitting properly on her silver-threaded chairs, our grandmother would bring us to attention. “Sit up straight!” Sitting rooms were not meant to be places where you could lounge comfortably; they were little museums designed to demonstrate to a hypothetical visitor that the householders were westernized. A person who was not fasting during Ramadan would perhaps suffer fewer pangs of conscience among these glass cupboards and dead pianos than he might if he were still sitting cross-legged in a room full of cushions and divans. Although everyone knew it as freedom from the laws of Islam, no one was quite sure what else westernization was good for. So it was not just in the affluent homes of Istanbul that you saw sitting-room museums; over the next fifty years you could find these haphazard and gloomy (but sometimes also poetic) displays of western influence in sitting rooms all over Turkey; only with the arrival of television in the 1970s did they go out of fashion. Once people had discovered how pleasurable it was to sit together to watch the evening news, their sitting rooms changed from little museums to little cinemas—although you still hear of old families who put their televisions in their central hallways, locking up their museum sitting rooms and opening them only for holidays or special guests.

  Because the traffic between floors was incessant, as it had been in the Ottoman mansion, doors in our modern apartment building were usually left open. Once my brother had started school, my mother would let me go upstairs alone, or else we would walk up together to visit my paternal grandmother in her bed. The tulle curtains in her sitting room were always closed, but it made little difference; the building next door was so close as to make the room very dark anyway, especially in the morning, so I’d sit on the large heavy carpets and invent a game to play on my own. Arranging the miniature cars that someone had brought me from Europe into an obsessively neat line, I would admit them one by one into my garage. Then, pretending the carpets were seas and the chairs and tables islands, I would catapult myself from one to the other without ever touching water (much as Calvino’s Baron spent his life jumping from tree to tree without ever touching ground). When I was tired of this airborne adventure or of riding the arms of the sofas like horses (a game that may have been inspired by memories of the horse-drawn carriages of Heybeliada), I had another game that I would continue to play as an adult whenever I got bored: I’d imagine that the place in which I was sitting (this bedroom, this sitting room, this classroom, this barracks, this hospital room, this government office) was really somewhere else; when I had exhausted the energy to daydream, I would take refuge in the photographs that sat on every table, desk, and wall.

  Never having seen them put to any other use, I assumed pianos were stands for exhibiting photographs. There was not a single surface in my grandmother’s sitting room that wasn’t covered with frames of all sizes. The most imposing were two enormous portraits that hung over the never-used fireplace: One was a retouched photograph of my grandmother, the other of my grandfather, who died in 1934. From the way the pictures were positioned on the wall and the way my grandparents had been posed (turned slightly toward each other in the manner still favored by European kings and queens on stamps), anyone walking into this museum room to meet their haughty gaze would know at once that the story began with them.

  They were both from a town near Manisa called Gördes; their family was known as Pamuk (cotton) because of their pale skin and white hair. My paternal grandmother was Circassian (Circassian girls, famous for being tall and beautiful, were very popular in Ottoman harems). My grandmother’s father had immigrated to Anatolia during the Russian-Ottoman War (1877–78), settling first in Izmir (from time to time there was talk of an empty house there) and later in Istanbul, where my grandfather had studied civil engineering. Having made a great deal of money during the early 1930s, when the new Turkish Republic was investing heavily in railroad building, he built a large factory that made everything from rope to a sort of twine to dry tobacco; the factory was located on the banks of the Göksü, a stream that fed into the Bosphorus. When he died in 1934 at the age of fifty-two, he left a fortune so large that my father and my uncle never managed to find their way to the end of it, in spite of a long succession of failed business ventures.

  Moving on to the library, we find large portraits of the new generation arranged in careful symmetry along the walls; from their pastel coloring we can take them to be the work of the same photographer. On the far wall is my fat but robust Uncle Özhan, who went to America to study medicine without first doing his military service and so was never able to return to Turkey, thus paving the way for my grandmother to spend the rest of her life assuming mournful airs. There is his bespectacled younger brother Aydın, who lived on the ground floor. Like my father, he studied civil engineering and spent most of his life involved in big engineering projects that never quite got off the ground. On the fourth wall is my father’s sister, who spent time in Paris studying piano. Her husband was an assistant in the law faculty and they lived in the penthouse apartment, to which I would move many years later and where I am now writing this book.

  Leaving the library to return to the main room of the museum, stopping briefly by the crystal lamps that only add to the gloom, we find a crowd of untouched black-and-white photographs that tell us life is gaining momentum. Here we see all the children posing at their betrothals, their weddings, and the other great moments of their lives. Next to the first color photographs that my uncle sent from America are snapshots of the extended family enjoying holiday meals in various city parks, in Taksim Square, and on the shores of the Bosphorus; next to a picture of me and my brother with our parents at a wedding is one of my grandfather, posing with his new car in the garden of the old house, and another of my uncle, posing with his new car outside the entrance to the Pamuk Apartments. Except for extraordinary events like the day my grandmother removed the picture of my American uncle’s first wife and replaced it with a picture of his second, the old protocols prevailed: Once assigned its place in the museum, a photograph was never moved; although I had looked at each one hundreds of times, I could never go into that cluttered room without examining all of them again.

  My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving certain moments for posterity, and in time I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives. To watch my uncle pose my brother a math problem, and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying, with a half smile, to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room, and at that very same moment to see a picture of him at five years old—my age—with hair as long as a girl’s, it seemed plain to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so we could weave them into the present. When, in the tones ordinarily reserved for discussing the founding of a nation, my grandmother spoke of my grandfather, who had died so young, and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls, it seemed that she—like me—was pulled in two directions, wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection, savoring the ordinary but
still honoring the ideal. But even as I pondered these dilemmas—if you pluck a special moment from life and frame it, are you defying death, decay, and the passage of time or are you submitting to it?—I grew very bored with them.

  In time I would come to dread those long festive lunches, those endless evening celebrations, those New Year’s feasts when the whole family would linger after the meal to play lotto; every year, I would swear it was the last time I’d go, but somehow I never managed to break the habit. When I was little, though, I loved these meals. As I watched the jokes travel around the crowded table, my uncles laughing (under the influence of vodka or rakı) and my grandmother smiling (under the influence of the tiny glass of beer she allowed herself), I could not help but notice how much more fun life was outside the picture frame. I felt the security of belonging to a large and happy family and could bask in the illusion that we were put on earth to take pleasure in it. Not that I was unaware that these relatives of mine who could laugh, dine, and joke together on holidays were also merciless and unforgiving in quarrels over money and property. By ourselves, in the privacy of our own apartment, my mother was always complaining to my brother and me about the cruelties of “your aunt,” “your uncle,” “your grandmother.” In the event of a disagreement over who owned what, or how to divide the shares of the rope factory, or who would live on which floor of the apartment house, the only certainty was that there would never be a resolution. These rifts may have faded for holiday meals, but from an early age I knew that behind the gaiety there was a mounting pile of unsettled scores and a sea of recriminations.

  Each branch of our large family had its own maid, and each maid considered it her duty to take sides in the wars. Esma Hanım, who worked for my mother, would pay a visit to İkbal, who worked for my aunt. Later, at breakfast, my mother would say, “Did you hear what Aydın’s saying?”

  My father would be curious to know, but when the story was over he’d say only, “For God’s sake, just stop worrying about it,” and return to his newspaper.

  If I was too young to understand the underlying cause of these disputes—that my family, still living as it had done in the days of the Ottoman mansion, was slowly falling apart—I could not fail to notice my father’s bankruptcies and his ever-more-frequent absences. I could hear in more detail how bad things were whenever my mother took my brother and me to visit our other grandmother in her ghost-ridden house in Şişli. While my brother and I played, my mother would complain and my grandmother would counsel patience. Worried, perhaps, that my mother would want to return to this dusty three-story house, my grandmother, who now lived all alone, would again draw our attention to its many defects.

  Apart from the occasional show of temper, my father found little to complain about; he took a childish delight in his good looks, his brains, and the good fortune he never tried to hide. Inside, he was always whistling, inspecting his reflection in the mirror, rubbing a wedge of lemon like brilliantine on his hair. He loved jokes, word games, surprises, reciting poetry, showing off his cleverness, taking planes to faraway places. He was never a father to scold, forbid, or punish. When he took us out, we would wander all over the city, making friends wherever we went; it was during these excursions that I came to think of the world as a place made for taking pleasure.

  If evil ever encroached, if boredom loomed, my father’s response was to turn his back on it and remain silent. My mother, who set the rules, was the one to raise her eyebrows and instruct us in life’s darker side. If she was less fun to be with, I was still very dependent on her love and attention, for she gave us far more time than did our father, who seized every opportunity to escape from the apartment. My harshest lesson in life was to learn I was in competition with my brother for my mother’s affections.

  It was, perhaps, because my father exerted so little authority that relations with my brother took on the significance they did: He was the rival for my mother’s love. As we of course knew nothing of psychology, the war was initially dressed up as a game, and in the game we would both pretend to be other people. It was not Orhan and Şevket locked in deadly combat but my own favorite hero or soccer player versus my brother’s. Convinced that we had become our heroes, we gave the game all we had; and when it ended in blood and tears, the anger and jealousy would make us forget we were brothers.

  Whenever my mood dipped, whenever I became unhappy or bored, I’d leave our apartment without a word to anyone and go either to play with my aunt’s son downstairs or, more often, upstairs to my grandmother’s. Although all the apartments looked very much alike, with chairs and dining sets, sugar bowls and ashtrays all bought from the same stores, every apartment seemed like a different country, a separate universe. And in the cluttered gloom of my grandmother’s sitting room, particularly in the shadow of its coffee tables and glass cabinets, its vases and framed photographs, I could dream I was somewhere else.

  In the evenings when we gathered in this room as a family, I often played a game wherein my grandmother’s apartment became the bridge of a large ship. This fantasy owed much to the traffic passing through the Bosphorus, those mournful horns making their way into my dreams as I lay in bed. As I steered my imaginary craft through the storm, my crew and passengers ever more troubled by the rising waves, I took a captain’s pride in knowing that our ship, our family—our fate—was in my hands.

  Although my brother’s adventure comics may have inspired this dream, so too did my thoughts about God. God had chosen not to bind us to the city’s fate, I thought, simply because we were rich. But as my father and my uncle stumbled from one bankruptcy to the next, as our fortune dwindled and our family distintegrated and the quarrels over money grew more intense, every visit to my grandmother’s apartment became a sorrow and took me a step closer to a realization: It was a long time coming, arriving by a circuitous route, but the cloud of gloom and loss spread over Istanbul by the fall of the Ottoman Empire had finally claimed my family too.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Me”

  When I was four, my brother, then six, started school, and over the next two years the intense ambivalent companionship that had built up between us began to fade. I was free of our rivalry and of the oppression of his superior strength; now that I had the Pamuk Apartments and my mother’s undivided attention for the entire day, I grew happier, discovering the joys of solitude.

  While my brother was at school I’d take his adventure comics and, guided by my recollections of what he’d read to me, “read” them to myself. One warm and pleasant afternoon, I’d been put to bed for my daily nap but finding myself too animated for sleep, I turned to an issue of Tom Mix, and soon I felt the thing my mother called my “bibi” going hard. I was looking at a picture of a half-naked redskin with the thinnest of strings around his waist and, draped over his groin like a flag, a piece of straight white cloth with a circle drawn at its center.

  Another afternoon, as I was lying under the covers in my pajamas talking to a bear I’d owned for some time, I felt the same hardening. Curiously, this strange and magical event—which, though pleasurable, I felt compelled to conceal—occurred just after I told my bear, “I’m going to eat you!” But it wasn’t owing to any great attachment to this bear: I was able to produce the same effect almost at will, just by repeating the same threat. It happens that these were the words that made the greatest impression on me in the stories my mother told me—“I am going to eat you!”—which I understood to mean not merely to devour but to annihilate. As I was later to discover, the daevas of classical Persian literature—those terrifying tailed monsters who were related to devils and jinns and frequently painted by miniaturists—became giants when they found their way into tales told in Istanbul Turkish. I got my image of a giant from the cover of an abridged version of the classic Turkish epic Dede Korkut. Like the redskin, this particular giant was half naked, and to me he looked as if he ruled the world.

  My uncle, who around this same time had purchased a small film projector, would
go during the holidays to the local photography shop, where he rented film shorts: Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Laurel and Hardy. After ceremoniously removing my grandparents’ portraits, he would screen the films on the white wall above the fireplace. In my uncle’s permanent film collection there was a Disney film he showed only twice; this short run was on account of me. The film featured a primitive, heavy, retarded giant who was as big as an apartment; when he chased Mickey Mouse into the bottom of a well, the monster tore the well from the ground with one sweep of his hand and drank from it like a cup; just as Mickey fell into his mouth, I would cry with all my might. There’s a painting by Goya in the Prado called Saturn Devouring His Son in which a giant thrusts a little man he has scooped from the ground into his mouth, and it terrifies me to this day.

  One afternoon, as I was threatening my bear in the usual way but also feeding him with a strange compassion, the door opened, and my father caught me with my underpants down. He closed the door just a bit more softly than he had opened it, and (even I could tell) with some respect. Until then, when he came home for lunch and a brief rest, he had been in the habit of coming in to give me a kiss before returning to work. I worried that I had done something wrong or, even worse, that I had done so for pleasure: It was then that the very idea of pleasure became poisoned.

  This sense was confirmed just after one of my parents’ more prolonged quarrels, when my mother had left the house and the nanny who had come to look after us was giving me a bath. In a voice devoid of compassion, she scolded me for being “like a dog.”

  I could not control my body’s responses; to make things worse, it was fully six or seven years, when I found myself in an all-boys junior school, until I discovered they were not unique.