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  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Islands

  A week after I was born, I was taken to Heybeliada; here I spent the summer of 1952. My grandmother had a large two-story house surrounded by a garden, in the middle of the forest and very near the sea. A year later I was photographed taking my first steps on the balcony of this house, which was as wide as a veranda. In 2002, the date of this essay, I rented a house in Heybeliada as I had before, not far from the one at which I stayed as a child. I have spent many of the fifty summers between then and now on the Princes Islands—in Burgaz, Büyükada, and Sedefada as well as Heybeliada—writing many novels. There is a corner on the wall of the balcony of that first house in Heybeliada on which my cousins and I would mark our heights every summer. Although it was sold after a string of family feuds, business failures, and inheritance disputes, I still go to see that house from time to time, to find the marks we made on that wall to see how much we’d grown.

  For me, the Istanbul summer begins with the departure for the islands. Before this can happen, school has to close and the sea has to be warm enough for swimming—and the price of cherries and strawberries has to have fallen substantially. In my childhood the preparations for going to the islands would take much longer than they do today. Because there was no refrigerator in the island house—for in those days a refrigerator was an expensive Western luxury—my grandmother would first defrost her Nişantaşi refrigerator and then porters would come to the house, wrap it up in sacking, and, with blocks and pulleys, lower it onto their shoulders; pots and pans would be wrapped in newspapers, carpets would be mothballed and rolled up, and over the continuous roars of the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, arguments, and repair work, the armchairs, wooden furniture, and curtains of the winter house would be covered with newspaper to protect them from the summer sun. When, after all this, we finally rushed onto one of those ferries whose particular shape we knew on sight, I would be unbearably agitated. That ninety-minute trip we took at the start of every summer felt endless. As we breathed in the cool sea air, the smell of moss and spring, my brother and I would walk the full length of the ferry once or twice, next we would beg my grandmother or my mother to buy us each a soda from one of the white-shirted vendors wandering about with their trays, and then we would go down below to chat with our cook—who would be waiting with our suitcases, trunks, and refrigerator, and when the ferry made its first stops at Kinali and Burgaz, we would watch the ropes being tied and the quayside goings-on, giving grave attention to every last detail.

  Every city has a sound that can be heard in no other, a sound that all those living in the city know well and share like a secret—the metro whistle in Paris, the buzz of motorcycles in Rome, and the strange whir of New York—and Istanbul too has a sound that all its residents know intimately; it is the metallic whine they have been hearing for sixty years whenever a ferry docks at any of the little wooden tire-ringed landing stations. When the ferry at last reached Heybeliada, my brother and I would rush across the quay to the island, paying no attention to our grandmother and our mother, calling from behind for us to take care not to trip and take a spill.

  It was in the middle of the nineteenth century that the Istanbul rich and the city’s upper middle classes began taking excursions to and building summer homes on the islands. Until the end of the eighteenth century, it was only large oared freight caïques that made the trip, which took half a day from the Tophane shore. In earlier days, the islands were places of exile for defeated Byzantine emperors and politicians; except for the prisons, monasteries, monks, vineyards, and small fishing villages, these were empty places. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the islands began to serve as summer resorts for Istanbul’s Christians and Levantines, as well as for those connected to various embassies. In 1894, after the English-made steam ferries were put into daily summertime service, the travel time between Istanbul and Büyükada went down to between an hour and a half and two hours. With the arrival of “express” service in the 1950s, the Istanbul rich were able to return to their islands every evening in forty-five minutes—a far cry from the half-day journey that Byzantine emperors, empresses, and princes would take by caïque perhaps once in a lifetime, not to mention would-be sovereigns whose eyes had been burnt out after a botched attempt to seize the throne. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the rich of Istanbul had yet to discover Antalya, Bodrum, or the southern coast, it was so difficult to find a place on the evening ferry leaving from Karaköy that men of importance would send along a manservant to hold a place, ceding it to his esteemed employer when he arrived. Whether they were Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, members of the city’s wealthy classes were unlikely to have been in the habit of reading; left to pass the time by smoking and gazing at the sea and one another, these naturally entrepreneurial commuters would also liven things up by organizing lotteries and raffles. The prizes were enormous pineapples or bottles of whiskey—both symbols of luxury as they were not generally available. I remember my uncle returning to the Heybeliada house one evening, smiling and holding the huge lobster he had won.

  From the beginning of the 1980s, when the Sea of Marmara became polluted, the largest of the islands, Büyükada, slowly ceased to be a place where the rich could stroll about in the evening, heedlessly flaunting the class credentials that were their European clothes. One afternoon in the summer of 1958, we were picked up in a flashy yacht and taken with our mother and father to a party on the shores of Büyükada. I remember seeing beautiful women stretched out along the shore in their bathing suits, rubbing oil on themselves, and rich men hailing one another and joking so confidently, and white-coated waiters offering them drinks and canapés on trays. Heybeliada was the home of the Naval Academy and favored by military families and bureaucrats, and perhaps this is why Büyükada always seemed richer to me; as I walked down its streets, looking at the cheese imported from Europe and the black-market whiskey, listening to the music and the happy chatter pouring out of the Anatolian Club, I sensed that this was the place where the “truly rich” spent their time. It was during my childhood, when shame and greed caused me to notice all degrees of difference, between the horsepower of one outboard motor and another, between the gentlemen who stepped into horse-drawn carriages after arriving and those who walked, between the women who went out to do the shopping and those fine ladies who had others to do this for them.

  Aside from their sumptuous mansions, their beautiful gardens, and their palm and lemon trees, the thing that lends these resort islands an atmosphere altogether different from the rest of Istanbul is their horse-drawn carriages. When I was a child, I’d rejoice whenever I was allowed to sit next to the driver; as I played in our garden, I would imitate the bells on the reins, the clop of horseshoes, and the driver’s gestures. Forty years later, I would play the same games with my daughter on these same islands. The horse-drawn carriages are the same today as they were then, cheap, quiet, and practical, and to love them you must learn to accept the strong smell of horse manure in the markets, the crowded streets, and the depots—learn, even, to love it enough to seek it out, so that when, in the course of a journey, the tired (and sometimes cruelly whipped) horse elegantly raises his tail to drop a steaming hot load on the avenue, you are happily childish enough to smile.

  Until the start of the nineteenth century, the islands were mainly where Greek priests, seminarians, and fishermen wintered. When, after the 1917 revolution, White Russians started settling on some of the islands, the villages began to grow, filling up with flashy restaurants and nightclubs. The Heybeliada Naval Academy was founded, as were several TB clinics; the city’s Jewish community moved en masse to Büyükada and the Armenian community to Kinali. There followed another influx of people to serve the tourists, and though the islands grew more crowded, their essential character did not change.

  Since the powerful İzmit earthquake of 1999 made itself felt on the islands, and it became widely known that the next great one would very likely strike even cl
oser, the islands have progressively emptied out. I love imagining them in the autumn, when the primary and middle schools reopen and the high season comes to an end, allowing me to enjoy the sadness of the empty gardens; I love imagining the early evenings and the winters.

  Last year, on one of those very autumn days, I was wandering among the empty gardens and verandas of Heybeliada when I remembered how, as a child, I would gobble up the figs and the grapes that families had not managed to pick before returning to Istanbul. It was a sad joy to enter the empty gardens of families we had known from afar, never having had the opportunity to become acquainted—to climb their stairs, swing on their swings, and view the world from their balconies. After this walk last year, so much like the ones I had taken as a child, jumping from wall to wall, I went into İsmet Pasha’s house, which I had visited only once before—a vague memory of having come with my father forty-five years earlier and of the former president taking me on his lap to kiss me. The walls of this house were now adorned with photographs from the pasha’s days as a politician and statesman, alongside holiday photographs of him jumping into the sea from a caïque in his black swimsuit with its single suspender. What unnerved me was the silence and the emptiness, so much like the end of summer on Heybeliada, surrounding the house. Its bathtubs, sinks, and kitchen fittings, its well, its cistern, its floor coverings, its old cupboards, its window moldings, and so many other details, amid the faint smell of mold, dust, and pine—everything reminded me of the family home that was no longer ours.

  Each summer, at the end of August and the beginning of September, the flocks of storks flying south from the Balkans go straight over the islands. Now, as in my childhood, I go out to the garden to admire the mysterious fortitude in the unheard flapping of these pilgrims’ wings. When I was a child it would be two weeks after the passing of the last flock when we would make our forlorn return to Istanbul. Once we reached home, I would pick the sun-bleached newspapers from the windowpanes, and as I read the news now three months old, I would fall into a trance and think how very slowly time passed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Earthquake

  I was awoken between midnight and dawn—at 3 a.m., as I was later to discover—by the first jolts. It was August 17, 1999, I was in my study in our stone house on Sedef, the little island just next to Büyükada, and my bed, which was three yards from my desk, was swaying violently like a rowboat caught in a storm at sea. A terrifying groan came from underground, from what seemed to be right under my bed. Without pausing to find my glasses, following instinct more than reason, I rushed outdoors and began to run.

  Outside, behind the cypress and pine trees just before me, among the lights of the distant city, and on the surface of the sea, the night was juddering. It was as if everything was happening at once. While one part of my mind was registering the earthquake in all its violence and listening to the noise coming from the earth, another confused part was asking, Why has everyone started shooting at this time of night? (The bombs, assassinations, and nighttime raids of the 1970s may have caused me to associate gunfire with disaster.) Afterward I thought a great deal but without success about what could have sounded so much like automatic weapons fire.

  The first tremors lasted forty-five seconds, claiming thirty thousand lives; before they were over, I had climbed the side steps to the upper floor where my wife and daughter were sleeping. They were awake and waiting in the darkness, afraid and not knowing what to do. The electricity had failed. Together we went out into the garden and the enveloping silence of the night. The awful roar had stopped, and it was as if everything around us were likewise waiting in fear. The garden, the trees, this little island surrounded by high rocks—silence in the dead of night, but for the light rustling of the leaves and my pounding heart, which spoke of something terrifying. In the dark under the tress, we whispered with a strange hesitance—fearful, perhaps, of provoking another earthquake. There followed a few gentle tremors; these did not scare us. Later, lying in the hammock with my seven-year-old daughter sleeping in my lap, I heard the sirens of ambulances coming from the Kartal shore.

  In the days that followed, through the endless succession of aftershocks, I listened to many others recounting their movements during those lethal first forty-five seconds. Twenty million had felt the first quake and heard that roar from underground, and later, when they got in touch with one another, it wasn’t the astonishing casualty figures they discussed but those forty-five seconds. Most of them said, “You can’t understand it unless you’ve lived through it.”

  A pharmacist emerged untouched from an apartment building that had been reduced to rubble, and what he said was consistent with the testimony of two others who also emerged unharmed from the same building; he hadn’t hallucinated. His five-story building had jumped into the air—he had felt this very distinctly—and then it had fallen back in place and crumbled. Some had awoken to find themselves and their houses lurching surreally from side to side; as the structures began to topple the inhabitants prepared to die, but when the building next door broke its neighbor’s fall these people found themselves clinging to a corner of something. In relief they threw their arms around one another; some corpses later recovered from the rubble would attest to this too. Everything—pots, televisions, cupboards, bookcases, ornaments, wall hangings—was wrenched from its moorings, so the mothers, sons, uncles, and grandmothers who went frantically searching for one another were hit by they knew not which of their own belongings and were bumping into new walls they did not recognize. These walls, which had changed shape in an instant, shedding all their objects; the overturned furniture; the clouds of dust and the darkness—all this turned the houses into very different places, causing many to lose their bearings, though within the space of forty-five seconds some did manage to race down several flights and escape to the street before the building collapsed.

  I heard stories about a grandfather and a grandmother lying in bed awaiting death, of people who walked out onto what they thought was a fourth-floor balcony only to find themselves on a ground-floor terrace, of people who were opening their refrigerators just as the first tremors began and wound up spitting out whatever they had put into their mouths before they even had the chance to chew it. A surprising number reported being awake and standing somewhere inside their houses just before the first tremor hit. Others reported struggling though the darkness until fear at the violent shuddering got the better of them and they fell to the floor, not daring to move a muscle. Quite a few people claimed not even to have risen from their beds; with peaceful smiles, they told me they had put the sheets over their heads and left it to Allah—and many of the dead were found in this position.

  All these stories came to me by word of mouth, via Istanbul’s rapid gossip networks; people talked of nothing but the earthquake all day long. The morning after the fact, all the leading private television stations had helicoptered camera teams into the stricken areas; they ran the footage continuously. On my little island, and on the larger and more populated ones around us, there were very few casualties, but the epicenter was only twenty-five miles away as the crow flies. On the shore just across from us, many badly constructed buildings had collapsed and many people had died. All day, in the Büyükada market, a fearful, guilty silence reigned. I could not take in the fact that the earthquake had been so close and taken so many lives, that it had struck places where I had spent large parts of my childhood, and my disbelief frightened me all the more.

  Most of the damage occurred in the Gulf of İzmit. It is crescent-shaped, and if we were to imagine it as the crescent on the Turkish flag, the group of islands to which my little one belongs would be located where the star sits. I was brought to one of these islands a week after I was born, and over the next forty-five years have visited and stayed on several of them and at many varied places along the gulf. The city of Yalova, much loved by Atatürk for its thermal springs and famous during my childhood for its ersatz Western hotel, was now in ruins.
The petrochemical plant where my father had once been the director—I could remember when it was just a field and how the empty plot sprouted refineries—was in flames. The little towns along the crescent-shaped gulf, the villages we’d visit, on car trips or in a motorboat, to do our shopping, the entire shoreline would go on to be filled with huge apartment houses, while the districts I described with sad affection in The Silent House were later turned into huge summer resorts. Now many of these buildings had been razed or rendered uninhabitable. If, for two days, my mind refused to take all this in, struggling to deny the enormity of the catastrophe, perhaps the novel I was working on at that time was to blame. For its sake I did not wish to leave my little island, where life carried on as silently as before.

  On the second day, I could not hold myself back any longer. First we crossed over to Büyükada in a little motorboat, and then we made the hour-long crossing on a scheduled ferry to Yalova, on the opposite shore. No one had asked me or the friend accompanying me, the author of a book entitled In Praise of Hell, to make this trip; neither of us intended to write about what we saw or even tell anyone about it. We were moved only by the desire to draw near to the dead and dying, to leave our happy little island and observe, perhaps mitigate, the horror. On the ferry, as everywhere else, people were reading the papers and talking in hushed tones about the earthquake. The retired postmaster sitting next to us said he had a little shop on Büyükada that sold dairy products from Yalova, where he lived. Now, two days after the earthquake, he was returning home to see whether there were any cupboards or other furnishings that had collapsed in a dangerous way.