Istanbul Read online

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  A Conversation with My Mother: Patience, Caution, and Art

  For many long years, my mother spent her evenings alone in the sitting room, waiting for my father. My father spent his evenings at his bridge club, and from there he would go on to other places, returning so late that my mother would have already tired of waiting and gone to bed. After my mother and I had sat across from each other to eat supper (my father would have rung by then: I’m very busy, he would have said, I’ll be home late; you go ahead and eat), my mother would spread her cards across the cream-colored tablecloth and read her future. As she turned over each card in each fifty-two-card deck—one at a time, trying to order them by value, with red following black—there was no great desire to search the cards for signs, nor did she take pleasure in fashioning the signs offered by the cards into a story that gave the future a pleasing shape. For her this was a game of patience. When I’d come into the sitting room and ask whether she’d read her fortune yet, she always gave me the same answer:

  “I’m not doing this to read my fortune, darling, I’m doing it to pass the time. What time is it? I’ll do one more and then I’m going to bed.”

  As she said this, she would glance over at the old film playing on our black-and-white television (a new thing in Turkey) or the discussion about the Ramadans of yesteryear (in those days, there was only one channel, expressing the state’s point of view), and she would say, “I’m not watching this; turn it off if you like.”

  I would spend some time watching whatever was on the screen; it could be a soccer match or the black-and-white streets of my childhood. I was less interested in the show than I was in a respite from my inner turmoil and my room, and while I was in the sitting room I did as I did every night and spent some time chatting with my mother.

  Some of these chats turned into bitter arguments. Afterward I would return to my room and shut my door, to read and wallow in guilt until morning. Sometimes, after arguing with my mother, I’d go out into the cold Istanbul night and wander around Taksim and Beyoğlu, chain-smoking through the dark and evil back streets until I could feel the chill in my bones, and after my mother and everyone else in the city had gone to sleep I would return home. I fell into the habit of going to bed at four in the morning and sleeping till noon; I would keep to this routine for the next twenty years.

  The thing my mother and I argued about in those days—sometimes overtly and sometimes without admitting it—was my uncertain future; for in the winter of 1972, in the middle of my second year studying architecture, I’d stopped attending classes almost entirely. Aside from the few I had to attend to avoid removal from the roll and expulsion, I was hardly ever seen at the Taşkışla architecture faculty.

  Sometimes I would tell myself, sheepishly, “Even if I never become an architect, I’ll still have a university diploma,” an observation much repeated by my father and my friends, who all had some influence on me, making my situation, at least in my mother’s eyes, only more precarious. I’d seen my love of painting die and felt the painful void it left behind, so I could tell in my heart of hearts that I would never make it as an architect. At the same time, I knew I could not go on forever reading books and novels until morning or spending my nights wandering the streets. I would sometimes panic and rise abruptly from the table, trying to get my mother to face facts. Because I didn’t know why I was doing this, much less quite what it was I was trying to get her to accept, it sometimes seemed as if we were fighting each other blindfolded.

  “I was like you when I was young,” my mother would say, just—I would later decide—to annoy me. “I’d run away from life, just like you. While your aunts were at university, living among intellectuals or having fun at parties and balls, I’d sit home like you and spend hours gazing stupidly at Illustration, that magazine your grandfather liked so much.” She’d pull on her cigarette and look at me to judge whether her words were having any effect. “I was shy, afraid of life.”

  When she said this, I knew she meant like you, and as anger boiled up inside me, I’d try to calm myself with the thought that she was saying these things “for my own good.” But my mother was expressing a deep and widely held view that it broke my heart to know she shared. As my eyes moved from the television to the ferry searchlights moving up and down the Bosphorus, I would repeat this orthodoxy to myself and think how much I hated it.

  I knew it not from my mother, who never expressed it openly, but from the lazy Istanbul bourgeoisie and like-thinking newspaper columnists who would conclude, in their moments of greatest and most insolent pessimism, “Nothing good can come out of a place like this.”

  This pessimism is fed by the melancholy that has for so long broken the city’s will. But if the melancholy flows from loss and poverty, why do the city’s rich embrace it too? Perhaps it is because they are rich by chance. It may also be because they have created nothing brilliant of their own to rival the western civilization they hope to imitate.

  There was in my mother’s case, however, some basis to this destructive, cautious, middle-class cant she had spoken all her life. Soon after they married, after my brother and I were born, my father mercilessly set out to break her heart. His absences, the family’s slow impoverishment—when she married she hadn’t the faintest idea that she’d have to grapple with such things, and I always felt that these misfortunes had forced her to mount a sustained defensive posture in the face of society. During our childhood years, whenever she took my brother and me shopping in Beyoğlu, to the cinema, or the park, and she noticed men were looking at her, her guarded expression told me of the extreme caution she exercised with anyone not a member of our family. If my brother and I began to argue in the street, I’d see, along with her anger and distress, a desire to protect us.

  I sensed this caution most keenly in my mother’s constant entreaties to “be normal, ordinary, like other people.” This plea carried a great deal of traditional morality—the importance of being humble, of accepting what little you had and making the most of it, practicing the Sufi asceticism that had left its mark on the entire culture—but this outlook hardly helped her understand why anyone might suddenly leave school. In her view, I was wrong to exaggerate my importance, to take my moral and intellectual obsessions so seriously; such passionate concern was better reserved for cultivating honesty, virtue, diligence, and being like everyone else. Art, painting, creativity—these were things only Europeans had the right to take seriously, my mother seemed to be saying, not we who lived in Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century, in a culture that has fallen into poverty, thereby losing its strength, its will, and its appetite. If I was forever mindful that “nothing good can come out of a place like this,” I wouldn’t live to regret it.

  At other times, to dignify her position, my mother would tell me that she’d named me Orhan because, of all the Ottoman sultans, it was Sultan Orhan she had loved most. Sultan Orhan had not pursued grand projects and had never drawn attention to himself; instead, he had lived an ordinary life without excess, which was why the history books spoke so respectfully and so sparingly about this second Ottoman sultan. Although my mother smiled as she told me this, it was clear that she wanted me to understand why she thought these to be important virtues.

  On those evenings when my mother waited for my father and I came from my room to argue with her, I knew my part would be to resist the broken-down, humble, melancholy life that Istanbul was offering and with it the comforting ordinariness my mother wanted for me. Sometimes I would ask myself, Why am I going out there to have this argument again? and in failing to find a convincing answer, I sensed an inner turmoil I could not begin to understand.

  “You used to skip class in the old days too,” my mother would say, turning her cards over faster and faster. “You’d say, ‘I’m ill, I have a stomachache, I have a fever.’ When we were in Cihangir, you made quite a habit of this. So one morning, when you said, ‘I’m ill, I’m not going to school,’ I s
houted at you, do you remember? I said, ‘Whether you’re ill or not, you are leaving right now and going straight to school. I don’t want you at home!’ ”

  At this point in the story, which she told me as often as she could, my mother would pause and—perhaps knowing it infuriated me—she would smile; there would follow a pause as she took a drag from her cigarette, and then, without looking me in the eye but always with a lilt in her voice, she would add, “After that morning, I never again heard you say, ‘I’m ill; I’m not going to school.’ ”

  “Then I’m saying it now!” I said rashly. “I’m never setting foot in the architecture faculty again.”

  “So what are you going to do then? Are you just going to sit at home like me?”

  Slowly there rose up the urge to push this argument to the limit and then slam the door and go off for a long, lonely walk in the back streets of Beyoğlu, half drunk, half mad, smoking cigarettes and hating everyone and everything. The walks I took in those years sometimes lasted hours, and sometimes, if I had wandered long enough—gazing at shopwindows, restaurants, half-lit coffeehouses, bridges, fronts of cinemas, advertisements, letters, filth, mud, raindrops falling into the dark puddles on the pavement, neon lights, car lights, and packs of dogs overturning the rubbish bins—sometimes another urge would come to me: to go home and put these images into written words, find the language to express this dark spirit, this tired and mysterious confusion. This was an urge as irrepressible as that happy old yearning to paint, but I was not sure what to make of it.

  “Is that the lift?” my mother asked.

  We both stopped to listen, but we couldn’t hear anything to suggest a lift. My father was not on his way up. As my mother again concentrated on her cards, turning them over with a renewed energy, I watched her in astonishment. She had a certain way of moving that was very soothing to me as a child, though when she’d withdrawn her affections, watching her move this way had caused me pain. Now I was no longer sure how to read her. I felt myself caught between unbounded love and anger. Four months earlier, after a long investigation, my mother had tracked down the place in Mecidiyeköy where my father met with his mistress; skillfully extracting the key from the janitor, she’d gone into the empty apartment to meet with a scene that she would later cold-bloodedly describe to me. A pair of pajamas that my father wore at home was sitting on the pillow in this other bedroom, and on the bedside table stood a tower of bridge books, just like the one he’d built on his side of the bed at home.

  For a long time, my mother had told no one what she’d seen; it was only months later, on one of those evenings of playing patience, smoking, and watching television out of the corner of her eye, that I had come out of my room to talk to her and she had suddenly blurted out the story. Seeing my distress, she cut her tale short. Still, every time I thought about it later, the notion of another house my father visited every day could not help but make me shudder; it was as if he had done what I had never managed—he’d found his double, his twin, and it was this creature, not his lover, he went to this other house every day to be with; the illusion only reminded me that something in my life, in my very soul, was wanting.

  “In the end, you’re going to have to find a way to finish university,” my mother would say, as she dealt herself a new hand. “You can’t support yourself painting; you’ll have to get a job. After all, we’re not rich like we used to be.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, having long ago worked out that even if I did nothing in life my parents could still support me.

  “Are you trying to tell me you can support yourself painting?”

  From the way my mother angrily stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, from her half-mocking, half-condescending tone and the way she could continue playing cards even while talking about a matter so important, I sensed where we were heading.

  “This isn’t Paris, you know, it’s Istanbul,” my mother said, sounding almost happy about it. “Even if you were the best artist in the world, no one would pay you the slightest attention. You’d spend your life alone. No one would understand why you’d given up a brilliant future to paint. If we were a rich society that respected art and painting, then—well, why not? But even in Europe, everyone knows that Van Gogh and Gauguin were cracked.”

  Certainly she’d heard all my father’s stories about the existentialist literature he’d loved so dearly during the fifties. There was a encyclopedic dictionary—its pages now yellowed, its cover tattered—to which my mother had referred a great deal to check facts, a custom that now furnished me with a sarcastic retort.

  “So does your Petit Larousse say that all artists are crazy?”

  “I have no idea, my son. If a person is very talented and hardworking, and if he’s lucky, perhaps he can become famous in Europe. But in Turkey you’d just go crazy. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m saying all this to you now so you won’t be sorry later.”

  But I was sorry now, and all the more so to think she could say such hurtful things while continuing to play patience and read her fortune.

  “What exactly is supposed to have offended me?” I asked, possibly hoping that she’d say something to wound me further.

  “I don’t want anyone to think you’re having pyschological difficulties,” my mother said. “That’s why I won’t tell my friends that you’re not attending classes. They’re not the sort of people who would understand why someone like you would decide to leave university to become a painter. They’d think you’d taken leave of your senses; they’d gossip behind your back.”

  “You can tell them whatever you like,” I said. “I’d give up anything not to be imbeciles like them.”

  “You will do no such thing,” my mother said. “In the end you’ll do the same thing you did when you were little: pick up your bag and patter off to school.”

  “I don’t want to be an architect, I know this for sure.”

  “Study for two more years, my son, get yourself a university diploma, and after that you can decide if you want to be an architect or a painter.”

  “No.”

  “Shall I tell you what Nurcihan says about your giving up on architecture?” my mother said, and I knew that in ushering in the opinion of one of her worthless friends she was trying to hurt me. “You’re troubled and confused because of these fights between me and your father, because he’s always running around with other women—that’s what Nurcihan thinks.”

  “I don’t care what your bird-brained society friends think about me!” I cried. Even knowing she was trying to provoke me, I still walked into her trap, willing myself to slip from playacting into a real rage.

  “You’re very proud, my son,” my mother said. “But I like that about you. Because the important thing in life is not this art nonsense but pride. There are a lot of people in Europe who become artists because they’re proud and honorable. In Europe they don’t think of an artist as a tradesman or a pickpocket, they treat artists as if they’re special. But do you really think you can be an artist in a country like this and still keep your pride? To be accepted by people here, who understand nothing of art, to get these people to buy your work, you’d have to toady to the state, to the rich, and, worst of all, to semiliterate journalists. Do you think you’re up to this?”

  My fury gave me a dizzying vitality that pushed me out of myself; I felt a wondrous ambition—so vast it surprised even me—to leave the house and run out into the street. But I resisted, knowing that if I held on here awhile longer to continue this war of words, destroying as much as I could, rebelling with all my might, giving pain and accepting pain in return, then, after we had each uttered our worst, I could still burst out the door into the dark dirty evening and run out into the back streets. My legs would take me up and down the uneven pavements, past streetlamps with pale lights or none at all, to the melancholy of the narrow cobblestone alleys, and there I would enjoy a perverted happiness at belonging to such a sorrowful, dirty, and impoverished place. Walking without end
, fired by rage, ideas and images filing past me like figures in a play, dreaming of the great things I would do someday.

  “Look at Flaubert, he lived in the same house as his mother his entire life!” my mother continued in her half-compassionate, half-condescending manner, carefully examining her new cards. “But I don’t want you to spend your whole life lounging around the same house with me. That was France. When they say someone is a great artist, even the water stops running. Here, on the other hand, a painter who leaves school and spends his life at his mother’s side ends up either drunk or in the nuthouse.” And then, another tack: “If you had a profession, believe me, you’d get a lot more pleasure out of painting.”

  Why was it that in such moments of unhappiness, anger, and misery, I could find pleasure in nocturnal walks through the desolate streets with only my dreams to keep me company? Why, instead of the sun-drenched postcard views of Istanbul that tourists so loved, did I prefer the semidarkness of the back streets, the evenings and cold winter nights, the ghost people passing through the light of the pale streetlamps, the cobblestone views, their loneliness?

  “If you don’t become an architect or find some other way to make a living, you’ll become one of those poor neurotic Turkish artists who have no choice but to depend on the mercy of the rich and the powerful—do you understand that? You do, of course—no one in this country can get by just by painting. You’ll be miserable, people will look down on you, you’ll be plagued by complexes, anxieties, and resentments till the day you die. Is that the sort of thing someone like you—as clever, as lovable, as full of life as you—really wants to do?”