Istanbul Read online

  We began with Beyazıt Square, where the Çınaraltı Café had retained its old look (even after political skirmishes around the front gates of Istanbul University had become commonplace, the boy waiters never lost their composure); pointing at the Beyazıt National Library, I boasted that it contained “one copy of every book ever published in Turkey”; I took her to the Sahaflar Secondhand Book Market, where on colder days the old booksellers crouched around the gas and electric stoves in their little stores; I showed her the unpainted wooden houses of Vezneciler, the Byzantine ruins, and the streets lined with fig trees; and I took her to the Vefa Boza Shop, where my uncle had sometimes taken us on winter evenings to sample this famous fermented millet drink, and where I pointed out to her Atatürk’s personal boza glass, now inside a frame on the wall. That a rich “Europeanized” girl from Nişantaşı who knew all the fashionable shops and restaurants of Bebek and Taksim should, of all the things I had shown her in poor old melancholy back-street Istanbul beyond the Golden Horn, pay the most attention to a boza glass that had not been washed for thirty-five years didn’t bother me. I was pleased with my companion, who put her hands in her coat pockets just like I did and liked to walk very fast, like me, and looked at things as carefully as I had done two or three years earlier when first exploring these neighborhoods on my own. I felt myself closer to her than ever, and my stomach began to ache in a way I had not yet discovered was another symptom of love.

  Like me, at first she was perturbed by the centuries-old wooden houses of the poverty-stricken back streets of Süleymaniye and Zeyrek, which looked as if the tiniest tremor would cause them to collapse. She was bewitched by the emptiness of the Museum of Painting and Sculpture, a mere five minutes from the doltnuş stop right across from her school. The disused fountains of the poor neighborhoods; the white-bearded skull-capped old men who sat in the cafés watching the streets; the old aunties at their windows, staring at passing strangers as if they might be slave merchants; the neighborhood people who would try and guess who we were in voices loud enough for us to hear (What do you think about these two, big brother? They’re brother and sister, can’t you see? Look, they’ve taken the wrong turn)—all this awakened in her the very shame and melancholy it awakened in me. We’d be chased by children trying to sell us trinkets or simply to talk (Tourist, tourist, what is your name?), but she didn’t get upset, as I did, or ask, Why do they think we’re foreigners? Even so, we stayed away from the Covered Bazaar and the markets of Nuruosmaniye. When the sexual tension became too much to bear—she still didn’t want us to go back to paint in Cihangir—we’d return to Beşiktaş, which we visited all the time because of the Museum of Painting and Sculpture, and get on the first ferry (54 İnşirah), going as far down the Bosphorus as time allowed, to watch the leafless groves, the sea that trembled before the yalıs when the north wind blew, the fast-running waters that changed color as the wind pushed the clouds across the sky, and the surrounding gardens full of pine trees. Years later, I asked myself why it was that we never held hands, during these walks and sea trips, and came up with many reasons: (1) We were two timid children who took to the streets of Istanbul not to feel our love but to hide it; (2) lovers who hold hands in public are happy and want everyone to see they are happy, whereas I, though I was willing to accept that we were happy, was afraid of appearing superficial; (3) this sort of happy gesture would turn us into tourists who had come to these poor ruined conservative districts for “careless pleasure”; and (4) the melancholy of the poor neighborhoods, of ruined, ravaged Istanbul, had long since engulfed us.

  When this melancholy sat heavily on me, I would want to rush back to Cihangir to do a painting that somehow paralleled these Istanbul views, though I had no idea how such a painting would look. I soon discovered that my beautiful model sought a very different cure for her melancholy, and this was my first disillusionment.

  “I’m feeling very low today,” she said, when we met in Taksim. “Would you mind if we went to the Hilton Hotel to drink some tea? If we go to any of those poor neighborhoods today, I’m only going to feel worse. Anyway, we don’t have enough time.”

  I was wearing one of those army coats that leftist students wore in those days; I hadn’t shaved, and even if they did let me into the Hilton Hotel, did I have enough money to pay for tea? I dragged my feet for a while, and then we went to the hotel. In the lobby, we were recognized by a childhood friend of my father’s who came every afternoon to drink tea and pretend he was in Europe, and after shaking my melancholy love’s hand in a most pretentious way, he whispered into my ear that my young lady friend was very lovely. We were both too preoccupied to pay him much attention.

  “My father wants to take me out of school here and send me to Switzerland,” my beloved told me, as a tear rolled from one of her enormous eyes and dropped into the teacup in her hand.

  “Why?”

  They’d found out about us. Did I ask who they meant by us? Had the boys she’d loved before me aroused such anger and jealousy in her father? Why was I so much more important? I can’t remember whether I asked these questions. Fear and self-interest had blinded my heart, and I was too worried about protecting myself. I dreaded losing her—while still without an inkling of the great pain that awaited me—but I was also angry that she now refused to stretch out on my divan and pose for me and let me make love to her.

  “We can speak more easily in Cihangir on Wednesday,” I said. “Nuri’s left. The place is empty again.”

  But the next time we met, we went to the Museum of Painting and Sculpture. We’d made this a habit because it was easy to get there quickly from her school and easy also to find an empty gallery where we could kiss. Above all, it saved us from the city’s cold gloom. But after a while the empty museum and its mostly abominable paintings delivered us to a melancholy even stronger than the city’s. By now the watchmen knew us and had begun to follow us from room to room, and because this exacerbated the tensions between us, we stopped kissing at the museum too.

  But we quickly fell into a routine that stayed with us throughout the joyless days that followed. We would show our student cards to the two old watchmen, who, like all watchmen in Istanbul’s museums, would give us sour looks, as if to ask, What could you possibly want to see in this place? With false cheer, we would ask them how they were, before going straight to see the museum’s little Bonnard and tiny Matisse. Reverently whispering their names, we’d move quickly past the anguished but uninspired paintings of Turkish academicians, reciting the names of the European masters they imitated: Cézanne, Léger, Picasso. What we found disillusioning was not that these artists, most of whom came from military schools and had studied in Europe, had allowed themselves to be influenced by western artists, but that they captured so little of the feel, touch, and soul of the city about which we had wandered, so in love and so cold.

  But still, the main reason we came to this building, originally built for Dolmabahçe Palace’s crown prince and only a few paces from the room in which Atatürk died—the very thought that we had kissed so close to this spot made our skin crawl—was not that the galleries were empty or convenient, and not that the late Ottoman splendor of the high ceilings and wonderful wrought-iron balconies was refreshing after the tiring poverty of Istanbul, and not that the Bosphorus views from its large windows were much more beautiful than most of the paintings on the walls; what kept us coming back was our favorite painting.

  This was Halil Pasha’s Reclining Woman. On our first meeting after our visit to the Hilton lobby, we bypassed the rest of the museum, heading straight to this painting; its model was a young woman who had, as I noticed with surprise on first inspection, kicked off her shoes to stretch out on a blue divan and stare sadly at the painter (her husband?), using one of her arms as a pillow, just as my model had done so many times. It was not only this strange resemblance that drew me to this painting; during our first visits to the little side gallery where it hung, she had watched us kiss. Whenever we heard one of
the suspicious old watchmen creaking his way across the parquet floors, we’d stop, sit up straight, and launch into a serious conversation about her, so we knew every detail of the painting well. To this we’d add whatever we’d found on Halil Pasha in the encyclopedia.

  “The girl’s feet must have grown cold after sundown,” I said.

  “I have more bad news,” said my love; every time I looked at this painting, she looked more like Halil Pasha’s model. “My mother’s asked a matchmaker over, and she wants me to meet her.”

  “So will you?”

  “It seems ridiculous. The man she’s suggesting is someone or another’s son and he’s studied in America.” In a mocking whisper, she told me his rich family’s name.

  “Your father’s ten times richer than they are.”

  “Don’t you understand? They’re doing this to get me away from you.”

  “So are you going to meet the matchmaker when she comes for coffee?”

  “That’s not important. I don’t want trouble at home.”

  “Let’s go to Cihangir,” I said. “I want to do another painting of you, another Reclining Woman. I want to kiss you and kiss you.”

  My love, slowly discovering my obsessions and beginning to fear them, tried to address the question that was gnawing at both of us. “My father’s in a bad way because you want to be an artist,” she said. “You’ll become a poor drunken painter, and I’ll be your nude model.… That’s what he’s afraid of.”

  She tried to smile but couldn’t. Hearing our watchman creak slowly but powerfully across the parquet floor, we turned, by habit, even though we’d not been kissing, to the subject of the Reclining Woman. But what I really wanted to ask was, Why does your father have to know what sort of career awaits every boy his daughter “goes out with” (the expression was just coming into use in Turkish around this time) and when he plans to marry her? I also wanted to say, Tell your father I’m studying to be an architect! But even as I struggled to answer her father’s fears, I knew that doing so would be condemning myself to become a weekend artist from this moment on. Every time I asked her to come back with me to Cihangir and she refused—this went on for weeks—my head, fast losing its capacity for cold-blooded reason, would urge me to shout, And what’s so wrong about being an artist? But the empty rooms of these ostentatious apartments—built for the heir apparent and now housing Turkey’s first museum of painting and sculpture—like the wretched paintings on its walls, were answer enough. Having just read a book about Halil Pasha, I knew that he was a soldier who had not been able to sell any paintings at all as he advanced in years, so he and his sad wife, also his model, had lived in army quarters and eaten frugal meals in their canteens.

  When we met after that, I would try very hard to amuse her, showing her Prince Abdülmecit’s solemn paintings (Goethe in the Harem, Beethoven in the Harem) to make her smile. Then I would ask, “Shall we go to Cihangir?” despite having promised myself not to. We would hold hands and fall silent. “Am I going to have to kidnap you?” I asked, assuming an air borrowed from some film I’d just seen.

  During a later meeting, which had been very difficult to arrange because it was so hard for us to speak on the phone, when we were sitting in the museum in front of the Reclining Woman, my sad and beautiful model told me, with tears flowing down her cheeks, that her father, who regularly thrashed her brothers badly, also loved his daughter to a degree that could be said to be pathological; he was insanely jealous, and she was afraid of him; at the same time, she loved him dearly. But now she had realized that she loved me even more, and in the seven seconds it took the old museum watchman to creak his way down the corridor, we kissed with an intensity and abandon that I had never before known. As we kissed, we held each other’s faces in our hands as if they were as fragile as porcelain.

  Halil Pasha’s wife stared sadly down at us from her magnificent frame. When the watchman appeared at the door, my lovely said, “You can kidnap me.”

  “Then I will.”

  I had a bank account I’d opened up years earlier to save an allowance I had from my grandmother; I also owned a quarter of a shop on Rumeli Avenue—this had been settled on me after one of my parents’ fights—and I also had a number of securities, although I had no idea where they were. If I could manage to translate an old novel by Graham Greene in a fortnight, I could take it to a publisher friend of my friend Nuri (no longer wanted by the police); according to my calculations, I could, with the money I earned from the translation, put down two months’ rent on a small apartment like my studio in Cihangir and live there with my beautiful model. Or perhaps, after I’d kidnapped her, my mother (who’d been asking me why I seemed so troubled lately) would take pity on us and give us the Cihangir apartment.

  After a week of deliberations only slightly more realistic than those of a child who plans to grow up to be a fireman, we arranged to meet in Taksim, but for the first time she failed to turn up, though I waited for an hour and a half. That evening, knowing I would lose my mind if I didn’t talk to someone, I called up my friends from Robert Academy, whom I had not seen in a very long time. Happy to see me in love, in agony, and beyond help, they smiled to see me drunk out of my mind in a Beyoğlu meyhane, where they reminded me that even if I didn’t marry the underage girl without her father’s consent, even if I just lived in the same house with her, I’d still be thrown into prison; then, upon hearing me spout more nonsense, they asked me how I expected to become an artist if I had to abandon my studies and work to support her—it didn’t upset me when they said this—and finally, in a spirit of friendship, one of them offered me the key to an apartment where I could lie with my “reclining woman” whenever I wished.

  After waiting twice outside the crowded gates of Dame de Sion, hiding in a distant corner, I was able to kidnap my lycée student lover. I promised her that if she came back with me to my friend’s apartment (which I had already visited and tried to tidy), no one would disturb us. Finally I managed to persuade her. As I was later to discover, it wasn’t just my thoughtful Robert Academy friend who used this garçonnière but also his father, and it was such a dreadful place I sensed at once that my Black Rose would never want to strike a pose there to suggest a painting, if only to make us feel better. On the great bed in this apartment, whose only other furnishings were a bank calendar hanging on the wall and a shelf, where, between two bottles of Johnnie Walker, sat all fifty-two volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, we thrice made sad and angry love. When I saw that she loved me more than I had thought, when I saw how she shook when we made love, when I saw how easily and often she burst into tears, the pain in my stomach grew more severe, but when I tried to fend it off I felt even more helpless than before. Because every time we met, she told me about her father’s plans to take her to Switzerland during the February vacation for a supposed ski trip and then enroll her in a fancy school full of rich Arabs and cracked Americans. The panic in her voice made me believe her, but when I tried to cheer her up by imitating a tough guy from a Turkish film and vowing to kidnap her, seeing the happy look on my love’s face, I would believe myself too.

  At the beginning of February, at our last meeting before the school holiday, to put the looming disaster out of our minds and also to thank him for giving us the key to his house, we met with my good-hearted friend. Some other classmates joined us, and that evening was the first time any of them had seen my love; as each friend tugged at a different part of me, I had cause to remember why I had so instinctively chosen never to mix my various circles of friends. Things went wrong between my Black Rose and my college friends from the moment they met. Trying to establish a rapport with her, they made gentle fun of me, but she wouldn’t play along; later, to appease them, she joined in on jokes that might have been fine at another time but now sounded impossibly silly. Upon being asked about her mother and her father, what they did and where they lived, and all the other questions about wealth and property, she cut the conversation short to show she despised su
ch talk, and for the rest of the evening, aside from looking at the Bosphorus from the Bebek restaurant and talking about soccer or some consumer brand or other, the only moment in which she took any evident pleasure was when we stopped at the narrowest point of the Bosphorus, the Aşiyan, to watch yet another wooden mansion burning on the opposite shore.

  It was one of the most beautiful Bosphorus yalis, in Kandilli, very close to the point, and to see it better I got out of the car. My lovely had tired of watching my friends enjoying the fire so she came to stand beside me, her hand in mine. To get away from the cars and the crowds that had gathered to sip tea and to get a better view of this, one of the last remaining Ottoman mansions, as it went up in flames, we walked to the other end of Rumelihisarı. I told her how when I was in lycée and skipped classes, I had often taken a ferry to the other side and explored those streets too.

  Standing in front of the little cemetery in the dark cold night, feeling the tumultuous strength of the Bosphorus currents in our very bones, my love whispered that she loved me very much and I said I would do anything for her and then I embraced her with all my might. We kissed; whenever I paused to open my eyes, I’d see the orange light of the fire on the other side playing on her soft skin.

  On the way home, we held hands in the back of the car, saying nothing. When we got to her apartment, she rushed to the door like a child. It was the last I would see of her. She didn’t show up for our next assignation.