On Friday the 21st, we reached Trabzon and saw the mid 13th-century Byzantine church of Aya Sofya, whose frescos are shockingly lurid for the period – its Ascension has abstract geometrical patterns that look more out of the mid 20th century than the 13th. We went to the Atatürk Kö?kü, a Disney fairytale mansion in a perfectly-kept garden – Atatürk stayed there on three occasions, so it’s like a George Washington house. I paid admission and gave the guard a million ($4) and waited for change, which was not forthcoming, because, as the guard explained, this was the higher admission rate for foreigners. Even after Elif told him that we’re Turks, he insisted that although I had an extended stay visa that I, at least, should pay foreign rates. Dilek screamed at him, calling him all sorts of names. The guard finally capitulated, but this triggered a nasty fight between Co? and Dilek; Co? was embarrassed that Dilek would fight with a government official, and he pouted and refused to go to the upper floor of the mansion, sulking in the garden.
In the Rough Guide a site off the beaten path – the 15th-century former Armenian monastery of Kaymakl?, reachable only by a rough dirt road and a bit of hiking. I couldn’t believe how abandoned it was – it was in a tiny village of a few families and was actually being used by one of them as a hay-barn. As we walked up, a group of children let us inside, and we crawled on the bales to see the top frescoes inside – Jonah and the whale, Christ coming into Jerusalem, and several images of hell. I wonder: how does paint survive this long? It does seem interesting to me that the Armenian and Georgian churches (non-Muslim sites that are not obvious tourist attractions) have been left to be tended to by the locals. Perhaps the Turks don’t want to call attention to Armenian settlements lest Armenians claim land rights, but they’re too embarrassed to destroy the monuments, leaving it up to the local elders to be the ones to lose face if the monument goes to ruin. Elif says that the government even pays a small sum to some local to take care of it, and if that guy chooses to turn it into a hay-barn, so be it – but maybe the hay and its inaccessibility may preserve it even better than if it were a tourist attraction.
We then visited the famous (and thus preserved) 13th-century Greek Orthodox monastery of Sumela, clinging to the rock cliffs. We ate nearby some local food – a melted cheese and corn meal dish which tasted Mexican, as well as a crepe which would have had anchovies had they been in season. The drive up to the monastery was terrifying due to the steep, narrow road and to Co?’s driving. We walked back down the hill rather than to ride with him. The frescoes of the church were much-vandalized but still beautiful. The sign by the monks’ original toilets said “Original Bathrooms (Do Not Use).” Rule of thumb: if you see an enclosed area on a popular archeological site in Turkey, you can bank on there being a piss smell inside. Driving back from Sumela was like something out of an Indiana Jones film – we passed a rock quarry and then just as we turned the corner, we saw out the rear window huge boulders from it crashing onto the road right behind us.
Co? then had the bright idea of searching for local rice pudding for which the Laz are famous, except that we weren’t far enough east for there to be any Laz around, so we ended up driving two hours up mountain roads until we found a place that advertised “Famous Rice Pudding.” It was watery. Finally, we decided to go back to Trabzon to see the Russian Market. Unfortunately, Russian tourists have stopped coming to Turkey for many reasons (including the Russian economy crashing even faster than Turkey’s; the closing of the Turkish casinos by the Refah party; and the fact that Turkish men’s reputation for treating every Russian woman as if she were a natasha) – Elif says they’re now going to China instead. So, after eating at a Laz restaruant without Laz, we now were at a Russian Market without Russians. Co? bought binoculars, which took an hour until I told him how incredible the ones he was considering were, and I told the seller we’d buy them if he’d throw in a pair of AAA batteries for Elif’s mom.
We set out heading east from Istanbul along the Black Sea coast with Elif’s mom Dilek and her judge boyfriend Co?. Co? is married, but his wife is refusing the divorce out of spite, since Co? has been dating Dilek for two years. In Turkey, if the woman refuses the divorce, it won’t be granted until three years of separation – during which time adultery is an imprisonable offense. So the first few days, near Istanbul, we’re hiding from places where Co? might be recognized. After we get further east, we should be fine; our plan after that will be to head South along the Georgian, Armenian, and Iranian borders before heading back west.
After Lake Abant at Bolu, we reached the town of Old Safranbolu, a town whose houses date from Ottoman times and where it’s illegal to build new ones; some are wonderfully dilapidated, some such as the Kaymakamlar Evi (Governor’s house) have been restored. I loved the beautiful marble 17th century Cinci Hamam Ottoman baths and walked through all of its chambers on clogs as men were taking their baths, although it was too scalding for us to stay. We bought a tub of blackberries from some kids on the side of the road, and I ate the whole thing – spectacular, Edenic fruit. We stayed in Amasra, a town on two bays with a Byzantine-Genoese castle which had a huge neon Ataturk head that lit up at night.
The next day was a hard slog of driving, averaging about 40km/hour until Ayanc?k. We stayed at the Black Sea harbor town of Sinop, which had the typical scene of Turkish families with their kids walking on the strip, eating sticky gummy Mara? ice cream, with music blasting from the gazinos straight into our hotel rooms until midnight. On Thursday the 20th, we saw Sinop’s Alaeddin Camii, a mid-13th century Selçuk mosque that has a Spanish-Moorish-looking courtyard, as well as the Alaiye Medressi religious school. Heading east, the whole way we drove past hazelnuts which villagers were drying by the side of the road.
We then reached Samsun, a nightmarish, disgusting Black Sea city. Suddenly, Co?kun dumped us on a street corner and announced that he was going to stop by the army base there to visit his son who was serving his mandatory 18 months. Co?’s son hates him because he’s divorcing his mother, and Co? hoped he could affect a reconciliation. This proved to be a failure, for Co? reappeared at the corner and hour and a half later with the news that his son had refused to see him. The entire time Co? was gone, Dilek complained mightily about having been dumped at a street corner rather than at a museum or something, and we were sure that when Co? returned he’d get what he deserved, but Dilek proved to be a paper tiger. She told him that that the corner where we were dumped stank of petrol, and Co? merely replied, “You didn’t come from a village, you know what cities smell like.” But then Dilek felt sorry for him because his son wouldn’t see him, and she fed him cookies which were in the car.
Later that day at the town of Ünye, Elif announced she wanted to see her father’s uncle’s widow. The last time Dilek saw the woman, Dilek was pregnant carrying Elif. She was delighted by the surprise visit and was super-nice, stuffing us with food. That evening, we ate in an amazing lokanta in Vakf?kebir.
We stayed at the “Besst Hotel” in Be?ikdüzü outside of Trabzon. There we saw our first natasha – Russian whore. She was stunning – tall, thin, skimpily dressed with high heels and bright red makeup. I totally would’ve gone for her.
Apartment-hunting in Turkey remains a slow process, as is just about everything else – not because of bureaucracy or shortages, but because of their way of doing business. No matter what you do, it necessarily involves drinking tea and tons of chitchat. No matter how hot it is outside or how many appointments you have, it’s impossible to see an apartment which doesn’t include a tea tray. Yesterday I went into a store and asked the shopkeeper if he had 200-speed film. His answer: “Bir cay almaz miydiniz?” (“Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?”) The question was rhetorical – I found myself holding a glass of tea before I could even ask if it the tea was 200-speed.
We took a day off from the hunt and visited Istanbul’s “Prince’s Islands,” a small island chain in the Marmara Sea, southeast of the Bosphorus, a 20 minute boat ride to Istanbul’s Asian side. It was love at first sight, and we decided immediately to rent an apartment on Heybeliada, a small island which is a mere seven miles in circumference. It’s away from the smog and noise of the mainland, but close enough to it to go there should we want to attend any cultural events (next month they’re having a Georgian dance festival which should be fun). Some of the other islands have fallen prey to Turkey’s relentless modernism and development; Kinali’s television transmitters jut out from its hills like porcupine needles; Buyukada threatens to become Istanbul’s Key West, an overgrown souvenir stand which screams avowal of, and thereby disproves, its own authenticity as an idyll. But Heybeliada remains rooted in the past. It still functions as a naval base, just as it did when it was an Ottoman outpost. On it are several beaches (with lovely sunsets that are never quite the same from day to day), forests, graveyards (with a Moslem one right next to a Greek one), a small naval base, a few playgrounds, a mosque, a Greek Orthodox monestary and Jewish synagogue. Many historic buildings have been preserved and restored, and the most of the beaches and forests remain untouched. The only evidence of modern development are the few beach clubs and high-rises which are the summer playgrounds for Istanbul’s nouveaux riches.
Automobiles are forbidden on the island, and until you find yourself living without cars, it’s hard to realize how environmentally-intrusive they are. About two or three times a day, a police car or military truck will pass, and the effect is similar to being in a large room and suddenly realizing that someone, somewhere, has lit up a cigarette. Traveling by fayton (horse-and-carriage) is a great way to get around when it’s raining or if you’re feeling too lazy to hike up Refah Sehitleri, the island’s main drag. You can sit back in the carriage and smell the evergreens, occasionally punctuated with a whiff of the driver’s cigarette smoke, or of manure when the horse relieves itself into the basket behind its rear. You can rent a bicycle by the hour, but the small size of the island, as well as the terrain of the forests and beaches, make foot travel preferable. We walk every day at sunset through the forests, on the beaches, or down to the water to check out the fishermen’s catch and watch them feed the cats. At dusk, the waves splash against the shore as we watch the changing atmospherics over the Marmara.
The house we’re renting reminds us of a charming bed-and-breakfast, complete with antique furniture. It’s across the street from President Inonu’s mansion (the first President after Ataturk, in the 1930’s). We have two balconies, both shaded. It’s always cool no matter what the weather outside, because of the breeze and because of the shade of the garden trees (olive, cherry, and walnut). The cherries from the trees are delicious, the walnuts interesting (never had non-dried walnuts before) and the olives inedible (they need to be treated). The tangerines haven’t come out yet. There are also grapes, rose bushes, and lion’s head flowers.
The sounds of the island are much the same as they have been for hundreds of years. In the heat of the summer, street-sellers ply their wares, hiking up the island’s hills in the unforgiving sun, barking their services in Turkish shorthand. It would take years of training to decipher their cries, sometimes the last syllable of what they’re selling, sometimes a mere loud vowel, sometimes a guttural bleat. Islanders can distinguish them by tonal color and come to the window to buy what they’re carrying from sticks draped over their shoulders – buckets, sesame pretzels, fresh unpasteurized milk, bottled water, gas, broomheads, rags, cloths, bottles, even watermelons. One man walks around with a device that he uses to fluff your pillows for a few lira.
Even the sounds of the mosque are the same as they have been for centuries, except for an unwelcome “improvement”: they’ve installed wired, amplified loudspeakers on the minarets, one of which is opposite our house. Five times a day (or six times on Friday or if somebody dropped dead), the Ezan (call-to-prayer) is preceded by the sound of feedback, followed by throat-clearing, at which point our dishes begin to rattle like it’s another earthquake. The island’s three Imams are some of the worst singers of the call-to-prayer in all of Turkey. They take turns: one sounds quite inebriated, another has no conception of scale or pitch, and the third sounds like late-period Bob Dylan choking on a pear. The music is different than in Saudia Arabia (and changes throughout the day), but the message is the same: God is great, Mohammed is his only prophet, come to pray. The only call to prayer that really takes some getting used to is the first one of the morning, which during the summer months can happen at 4:30 AM. If there are street dogs around, they will all howl along with the Imam, and the faraway howls sound like weird wailing ghosts. At such times (especially if I’ve had too much raki the night before), the call to prayer becomes, for me, a call to peeing.
On Sundays, around the time of the the day’s second call-to-prayer, people from all over Istanbul begin pouring onto the island. The shopkeepers welcome the weekly invasion, but the rest have nowhere to hide, as the island transforms itself into a local tourist-attraction-on-the-cheap. Our balcony is nicely situated about 40 feet back from the street, and we love to spend the day watching people make the pilgrimage up the main drag in the late-morning and then parade back down Refah ?ehitleri at dusk to catch the boat back to the city. This parade provides us much merriment. The women wear Moslem head-covering, but their faces have bright lipstick and heavy makeup – and they’re heading straight for the beach! The men walk down the street holding hands, or interlocking arms, or with their arms around each other’s backs. Perhaps it is of some significance that the Turkish word for friend is arkada?, which means “sharing the same back” – standing back-against-back, or guarding each other’s blind side. When they pass at 11AM and at 6PM, they carry boomboxes playing either the wimpiest Eurotrash dance music or lovelorn Turkish arabesque music. It makes for an awesome sight – these rugged-looking men, bragging about their girlfriends, holding hands and blasting love songs – as if they are but an instant either from starting a gang fight, or from doing the bump to the Village People’s song “YMCA.”
On Wednesdays, the island hosts a Çar?amba Pazari (Wednesday Bazaar), a large, bustling Farmer’s Market. Villagers, Easterners, and Kurds at tables hawk produce, addressing people by their estimation of your age (they call me “brother-in-law” or “older brother”; I’m supposed to worry when they address me as “uncle.”) Gypsies selling garlic or lemons weave through the crowd. The produce is as comes straight from Eden – each fruit is usually half the size of its American equivalent but about ten times as tasty. They sell by the kilogram and always try to sell you more. Greens are sold by the bunch, or even by the shopping bag; some of it requires careful handling, such as stinging nettles and poison ivy, both of which make delicious soups. Everything is labeled “Amazing Taste!” or “Super Fresh!” or “Shocking Price!” Yoghurt is sold with kaymak on the top, a delicious, hard, golden layer of cream. There is no fat phobia here, and the packages proudly announce the yoghurt as “Tam Ya?l?! Kaymakl?!” (“Full fat! With Kaymak!”) or even “Cift Kaymakli!” (“Double Kaymak!”)
I have to remember to be careful with green peppers, from which so many Turkish appetizers are made. When you buy them from the bazaar, you ask, are they hot?, and the guy always tells you the same thing: who knows? They all come mixed together in the same batch; some taste like American green peppers (better, of course: less watery, more taste), and some taste like jalapenos. For some strange reason I forgot all of this in Dilek’s house, and ate a whole pepper, which caused it to project like a missile out of my mouth, my eyes to rain tears, and for me to go into hiccupping spasms. I went to the bathroom and drooled snot for awhile and returned to my dinner, much to the family’s amusement.
If you miss the Wednesday Bazaar, you can buy produce in the little markets of Heybeliada, although it’s slightly more expensive. Bread is sold at the bakery by the docks for about 15 cents for a large baguette. I often splurge: an extra dime for a baguette covered with sesame seeds. The government fixes the price so everyone can afford it, but we got a real taste of enflasyon last week when bread prices skyrocketed overnight from 40,000 lira to 70,000 lira. Because it’s too expensive (and discouraging) to raise prices every day to keep pace with Turkey’s inflation, they just wait awhile and make a big jump. So right now the baguette costs a quarter, which is quite a bit of money for many of the locals. But in a few months, if the price holds, it’ll be back down to 15 cents again.
At the checkout counter of the Gul Market, they sell flavorless Turkish gum that has a faint rosewater odor. Its pieces are individually-wrapped, and the wrappers have sayings on them, which sometimes are terrible jokes, sometimes “words to live by,” and sometimes completely mysterious. Here’s what my wrapper says now; you decide which category it fits into:
The other people may come and go
But life is a pasta strainer
And you will settle down
With a Capricorn (a crab).
Too late. Elif’s a Sagittarius.
If you send a letter, be sure to put her name on the envelope as well, as my name seriously confuses the mailman. Our address:
We just returned from Edirne, a town bordering both Greece and Bulgaria, where we attended the 637th-annual Kirkpinar – the olive-oil-wrestling competition. People aged 5 to 50 had oil poured all over themselves in the 95-degree heat and wrestled with each other in a small stadium, two at a time, single-elimination, until one was left standing. (If nobody’s pinned to the grass after 40 minutes, they declare a victor on points). There are weight-divisions. It’s really fun when somebody sticks their hand down another guy’s pants (no grabbing by the balls) and picks him up and flips him. Lots of people being carried out on stretchers. People writhing around not because of broken bones but because having olive oil drip into your eyes burns so damn much. There were maybe ten thousand people inside the stadium; at least a dozen of them were women (that dozen included Elif). The mountainous gentleman occupying the seat next to me was a former wrestler. He demonstrated some holds on me. I can still feel them in my shoulders as I type this.
By far, the greatest attraction of Kirkpinar is the festivities outside of the stadium. Thousands of Gypsies were camping and dancing to the Zurna – which sounds like an oboe on steroids run though a megaphone and plugged into a Marshall amp. Drums beat constantly in the camp outside, which even could be heard inside of the stadium, providing a fearsome noise-backdrop to the whole event.
We had been wanting to live in Turkey ever since we sold our business, the Philadelphia Music Conference, in February of 1997, but moving there was not an option until Elif had her U.S. Green Card. And then one day in 1998, about nine months before the INS said it would come, it arrived in the mail. We opened the envelope and looked at it for a good long time. We immediately put our belongings into storage, and within two weeks, we were gone.
***
Much can change in Istanbul in just one year. Suddenly, everybody has cell phones. The dolmu?’es, which just last year were old 1950’s American Packards, now are almost all minivans. The lira, which three years ago was worth 46,000 to the dollar, is now 270,000 to the dollar; my leftover 10-and 20- thousand lira bills from last year are now no longer accepted. On the mainland, you now see teenagers wearing T-shirts with English writing on them. Mercifully, none of the street signs, storefronts, or restaurant menus are in English; whereas I used to think the Quebecois were snooty for banning non-French languages from Montreal storefronts, I now agree with them.
Our first task was to get me an extended-stay visa in Turkey. Before we had left New York, I had mailed $40 along with several photographs, forms and tax returns, and Elif’s mom called to tell me that the government had informed her that my application had been approved. But once we arrived in Turkey, their entire file on me had disappeared.
Thus began the ordeal. We went to the Immigration office in some remote part of Istanbul to procure forms, waited two hours and paid the equivalent of ten dollars to have a typist fill them out in quadruplicate (using carbon paper!) and to have eleven pictures taken of myself. I then waited on another line to get a form signed. Then I had to go into another line, which was considerably less pleasant: in a small hallway which was way over 100 degrees, we were smashed against a wall in a crush of Armenians, Georgians, Bulgarians, and Azerbaijanis, unable to breathe; even the venerated Turkish police unable to keep the peace in the moshpit. There were no exits, just a bunch of elbows and armpits, and nobody there was glad they used Dial. At some point, we literally fell out of the line, and that was it; we went home, defeated.
Back at Elif’s mother’s house, we learned that even if we had made it to the front of the line, we still would have have needed additional documentation, as well as $120 for the extended-stay visa (the same one for which I had mailed away $40 dollars from the US). We had had enough. Elif told her mother Dilek that we weren’t going back, and we gave Dilek my photos and told her to take care of it herself or to have one of her attorney friends do so. A week later, she handed me the visa.
As Dilek tells it, how it happened was quite simple. The Turkish immigration officers informed Dilek’s attorney friend that it was absolutely necessary for me be there in person, and that there was simply no way they around that regulation. If I didn’t like the rules, I could go home after three months. And then, one of the officers noticed the lovely little piece of paper that the attorney had accidentally left on his desk. Another officer in the room walked over and also admired its rectangular dimensions and its delightful yellow hue, as well as the picture of Ataturk on it. He was obviously in a patriotic mood, as he simply had to have one too – and as coincidence would have it, she had another one for him right in her purse!
Elif and I went to visit her father Kadri, her stepmother Isik (who is twenty years younger than Kadri and looks startlingly like Elif), and her 6-year-old half-sister Eylul. They’re in the last few weeks of staying at their summer house in Tuzla. It’s one of a few small houses congregated around a common pool, neither well-made nor particularly luxurious, and they go to escape the heat and to gather with their summer friends. They rely on well-water, and Tuzla seems more hard-hit than any other area in Istanbul with water shortages. It seems silly that you’d spend a good part of your summer swimming at a second home when you often can’t use the toilet there.
We arrived in the late afternoon and were immediately greeted with a power outage. While Turkey’s infrastructure is faulty and aging, I’ve never been able to figure out what triggers outages in Istanbul at any given time; they happen on mild days as often as they do on days with extreme temperatures. You’ll be downloading a video email attachment of a guy hitting another guy over the head with a computer keyboard, or clearing pornography files off your father-in-law’s computer, and click! – the power’s out. Most Turkish homes are equipped with fluorescent lamps with rechargeable batteries that plug into the wall and automatically turn on when the power goes out (a couple of times a week).
We went swimming, towelled off, and began our dinner. Kadri loves to grill fish whenever we come, delighting in “forgetting” that we’re vegetarians. Elif’s stepmother Isik cuts the onions, which are served on the side and are crucial to the meal, so much so that once Isik walked out on a restaurant with us because they didn’t serve lemon and onion on the side of her grilled fish. We had arugula salad, and raki of course, and night rolled in. I was getting worried that we might be staying too late there, as Elif’s mother, who’s been divorced from him for a decade, still becomes quite jealous when we do.
The power still hadn’t resumed, so we lit candles and talked and drank. And the evening’s libations came to engender a certain sharpness in Kadri’s tongue, which proved an ill combination with Isik’s sensitivity to perceived slights. While her faculties and demeanor generally make Isik, to Kadri, a welcome relief from the whip-like firestorm of will that is Elif’s mother, tonight he was mocking Isik while looking at Elif and I in a conspiratorial way, which led to Isik crying and exiting the room. Kadri’s response: “Women, they come, they go; I’ve had two wives and I’ll have a third if necessary.”
When Isik returned, there was still no electricity, but hurt feelings were in abundance, so Kadri’s sister Nebahat decided to call the ghosts. Nebahat had polio as a youth, so one of her legs is shorter than the other, and she serves as the family’s conduit to the spirit world. She communicates with the beyond and will tell you all about death, ghosts, reincarnation, and telepathy if given the slightest provocation. (She levitates, too.)
Ghost-calling is the perfect activity for an evening with a Turkish family without electricity. Creating the Ouija board is a low-tech endeavor – tearing pieces of paper – but a very serious one. Isik is most serious of all. She believes, as do all except Elif, Kadri, and I. Nebahat will actually push the cup, Elif explains; although everyone present including Nebahat knows that she will actually push the cup, they remain firmly convinced not that she’s a prophet, but that the ghost indeed is guiding her hand. While I may be a poor medium, I’m a game audience, and I can take minutes. I find the idea of meaning appearing letter by letter and changing midstream lovely. And I love to watch the women’s efforts at solidifying the family bond while the men couldn’t care less. Kadri is “rahat” (comfortable) but useless in this interaction, as no money is involved.
The ghost is giving information about Isik’s mother’s husband, who just separated from her. Nebahat takes dictation from the ghost; Isik’s mother mother weeps at the information. The ghost addresses others and can slap and then forgive and be forgiven.
THE GHOST (to Isik): “You are meaning well, but it’s not showing…”
At this point, it’s hard to tell the believers from the nonbelievers; simple people are receiving koans and hard truths alike. Isik is angry at the ghost, who has now likened her to a machine. Nebahat, the medium, is untouchable. They’re casual but not skeptical, easily slipping into the beneficent fiction. Elif’s half-sister Eylul, who’s 7 years old, is bored; the ghost had better say something to her quick – but placation is not the ghost’s purpose; maybe the girl is better off asleep, and Nebahat and Eylul don’t seem to like each other much.
THE GHOST: “…But don’t worry about that, because your future is completely clean.”
THE GHOST then addresses me. He does not know me but says I am happy. I am grateful that he will speak to us at all, however briefly, many years from now, one thousand and ten years ago. The ghost now spells I-B-S-E-N. He spells it repeatedly, and then says, “Don’t start your job without reading Ibsen.” And then: “Have hope.” And then: “You have to check [not read] the newspapers with a big hope. CHECK the newspapers all the time, without sleep, without getting tired. You’re very smart; the job will find you.” (Oh shit, is this a money thing again?) And finally: “But run after it so much and take it seriously.”
THE GHOST, to Elif: “If you know the technique, you will be successful. Your spirit is clean, but you can’t forget the technique.”
Nebahat: “I want a 5-minute break for a cigarette.”
Ertugrul, Nebahat’s asinine brother-in-law: “How can you take a break without consulting the ghost? You’re not taking it seriously.”
Nebahat then consults with THE GHOST, who then proceeds to spell out: “Don’t listen to your brother-in-law who doesn’t take it seriously himself.”
THE GHOST was right: I am happy.
The power comes on.
Isik says, maybe the ghost is tired. Kadri laughs at her that the ghost doesn’t have a body and can never be tired. This makes Isik nervous, and she tells him to be serious. Ertugrul The Redneck sits on the couch away from us and says ssh. Kadri now makes fun of him, saying he’s the ghost’s lawyer. Elif translates this for me, and I laugh with Elif and try to share the laugh with Kadri, but the way knowledge traded is crucial: Kadri looks at me with a half-smile and quickly glances away, not knowing if I know the story of how Ertugrul had screwed him really maliciously in a business deal fifteen years ago.
Nebahat said to THE GHOST, “We will pray for your soul. We are going to sleep. Please go,” and she turned the cup over.
***
I woke up the next morning at Elif’s mother’s house, brushed my teeth, and had a vague feeling that the voice of Nebahat was inside my toothbrush, talking to me. I thought I had gone crazy from last night’s proceedings, as well as from reading James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a 500-page Ouija poem. She asked me through my toothbrush, “Can I talk to you?” I said, “Well, what’s up?” And she answered: “Can you understand my Turkish? Elif doesn’t believe in this stuff, she’s very strong, she doesn’t believe in anything.” I told her spirit that I wasn’t sure that her atheism in and of itself meant strength, but that in any case, I was due back on planet Earth, and that the next time we’d talk to each other would be in person. She thanked me and I rinsed out my mouth.
An hour later, Elif’s mother’s sisters came over for breakfast, and I made the mistake of casually mentioning in conversation that Nebahat had just that morning spoken to me telepathically as I brushed my teeth. Boy, were they pissed!
“Of course she spoke to you – it’s just like her to do a thing like that,” said one aunt. Her husband: “Psychic powers exist, and if she has them, which I’m not sure she does, she should use them properly.” The aunt: “She hypnotizes you, puts you in a trance with her slow, steady, sweet voice, and sucks you into the whole thing, whether you like it or not.” Another aunt: “She only uses these powers to feel special.”
In the morning of our second-to-last day in Istanbul, we take the boat in the morning and walk to the Egyptian Spice Bazaar. An 8-year-old is marching in a white hat and white cape and white shoes, surrounded by his adoring family. I discover that he is going to get circumcised. Men and boys are fishing in the Bosphorus by dropping string off the bridge. People surround us, trying to sell us things. One guy asks: “Where a you from?” Elif cooly answers, “Konya,” the name of one of Turkey’s more conservative towns. She is positively enchanting; I eye her posterior as she is dancing around in her skirt, carrying her pocketbook.
Inside the Grand Bazaar, sellers stand at the edge of their stalls among walls of ceramics saying “Yes, please,” or “Speak English? Speak German? Speak Swahili?” One sign read: “Let me help you spend your money.” In the old section, we find a store with a lovely late-Ottoman ring of pink gold and a rather scuffed diamond. It’s about $150, which is more than my frugal girlfriend likes to spend. I think that it’s lovely and buy it with the last of my money.
We head home, and on the boat, on the Bosphorus dividing two continents, with an antique ring and an ideal setting, without knee-bending or prepared speeches, without my having planned any of it, it just seems the perfect moment to affirm what the fortune-teller Firdevs and the spent coffee grounds revealed would be the case. We are engaged to be married.
When we arrived at Dilek’s apartment, we told her the news, showing her the ring as she was washing dishes. It took her a few minutes for her to understand what we were saying. I then called my parents on the phone, who responded by promptly accusing me of lying to them: for no particular reason, they had it in their mind that we’d eloped and were already married. Firdevs must have been right about their worrying. I assured my mother that the wedding would be held near our home in New York, that we were coming home soon, and that I still loved them even though they were completely insane.
We went out that night with Elif’s whole family, to a restaurant owned by Dursun, a friend of Dilek’s who had a career singing Turkish classical music in the 1970’s but whose star had long since faded. Now he was singing in his own restaurant, with rotted teeth and the worst toupee to ever sit on a human head. He started with a song whose lyrics were apropos to him – “Strangers took her away, my life’s spring turned into winter and ended.” He then went into a typically cheerful little Turkish number called “What a Love This Is, What a Pain.” Another song had lyrics like “Open your arms, hug me, I am cold, I am cold, I can’t cover myself,” which everyone sang and my new fiancé enacted with body movements, hugging herself, rubbing her arms as if cold.
Whenever a song got over forty beats per minute, I was forced to “shikidi shikidi,” or bellydance – or at least, at the table, to snap my fingers with my arms out, shaking my chest, wiggling, and grinning like an idiot for hours on end, while her aunts clapped rhythmically, perfectly vacant. My role is to entertain and to show that I am entertained, or at least to prove that I’m willing to show that I am entertained when I am not entertained, that I am the American grooving on their vibe, that I’m not an uptight American, but I want it to be over. All night I keep hearing people say that I’m so relaxed for an American, how they expected me to be much taller and blonder, how they expected me to be condescending to them and, above all, how happy they were that I wasn’t Christian, because while I, as a Jew, hadn’t yet accepted the idea of Mohammed as a prophet, at least I didn’t have these weird ideas of God as a trinity.
I know by now that the dessert, the cheese-filled “shredded wheat” of Kadayif, is not the end of the meal. I want Dursun to die. We’re practically the only people at his restaurant, he has a whole band behind him, waiters walk around nervously trying to serve us and the two other tables of people there, but this guy in the 70’s jacket with bad teeth and a worse rug is performing as if onstage at Madison Square Garden, and he will not stop. And until he does, I will be forced to snap my fingers and wiggle my arms, knowing I look spastic, as if I had epilepsy, wiggling there in my green Philadelphia Orchestra T-shirt. As he goes into Arabesque, I am reflected in the windows outside, thinking, you look like an idiot, Brian.
But then I catch a glimpse of Elif next to me, and turn and see that she too is forced to endure this ordeal, and she translates the new song’s lyrics as “May a drop of wine be in my future that I will drink from my lover’s hand,” and I know that we will have a great and long life together, away from bad music, away from the convergence of the centuries and the cacophonous noise and the chaos, and hopefully, in Firdevs’ land, in a wooded place where birds would be dropping money on our heads.
Although I’d driven a manual transmission across America, Elif’s family was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of operating a stick shift in Turkey. Our plan was to drive south with Elif’s mother in Elif’s uncle’s car, a very old model which always stalled going into first gear. They decided to test my skill at driving by starting me along the minibus route in Istanbul. During rush hour. With all of Elif’s family in the back seat. While stalling a dozen times, I found myself narrowly skirting minibuses changing lanes, and taxis, dolmuses, buses, and pushcarts, and UFO’s coming down from the sky and landing in the middle of the road.
I abandoned the car and was curled up in a fetal position, sucking my thumb and crying, and they called a cab driver to take us all home. It took the cab driver twenty minutes to get our car into gear without stalling. I was mortified, upset, and obsessively thinking about all of the places we’d be missing out on seeing – as when would I ever return to Turkey? We called several car rental companies, but none had automatics. Back at the apartment, Dilek cooked for me to comfort me like a mother. She broke out a Ouija board to call the ghosts to cheer me up, but she was a hapless medium.
So we took the bus south the next day, seeing the usual things on the Aegean and western Mediterranean coasts that a tourist would see. The view from Tilos, where we bought oregano from an old beggar woman. Walking on a suspension bridge at Saklikent, and then crossing between the gorges in the water by holding onto a rope; the air is hot but the water so cold it hurts. The underwater ruins at Letoon, with Elif picking olives and eating them raw to show off, even though they’re disgusting unless you prepare them. Ancient cities on the Turquoise coast in which visitors had mistaken the world’s largest open-air archeological museum for the world’s largest open-air public toilet: every cave stank, and people were literally peeing on the country’s amazing historic legacy. Swimming in the lake at Oludeniz while our camera’s on the beach, constantly checking it to see if anyone would steal it, although Elif said that it was an impossibility there, for some reason.
I got food poisoning and threw up all night in Bodrum, while Dilek fed me chicken soup and had me drink sahlep, an orchid root powder drink that tastes like hot white chocolate. The next afternoon, we paid a man a few thousand lira so he could put food in Dilek’s hair while birds landed all over her body. We saw the dungeon at the castle, “Where God does not exist.” We took a boat to Kekova, with old tombs in the water surrounding the islands, the only thing louder than the jackhammer sound of the motor was the boat’s radio blasting Tarkan’s “Hepsi Senin Mi.” Elif bellydanced to that song wearing a semitransparent one-piece green bathing suit, which caused me to delay for a few minutes my standing up in front of everyone to dive into the water. And finally, I dived and dived, and Dilek shouting out, Brian, say “Guzel yuzuyorum,” which means “I am swimming well,” and Elif tells her that I’ll choke on it if I yell that out while swimming. And, of course, we saw Efes, the great ancient lost city of Disneyland. We tried to make a call back to Istanbul in a public Turk Telekom phone which of course ate our money without making a connection. And at Pergamom, I ran up and down the aisles at the amphitheater yelling, “Peanuts, get your peanuts here!” – while Elif, il miglior fabbro, pretended she was Athena.
Outside of Elif’s grandmother’s apartment, we run into a woman named Firdevs, who looks like she is 140 years old but is really only about 95. She wants to make us Turkish coffee, and to read our coffee grounds and tell our futures. Elif’s grandmother makes fun of her, calling her “Falci Firdevs” (“Fortuneteller Firdevs”), but soon we’re up in the apartment drinking coffee.
***
FIRDEVS
A man, a woman and a sister are thinking about you. After doing business, you and Elif will move away to another house. You will put both of your belongings together. You’re going to make lots of money. Your two fortunes are intertwined. Money is on the way. You’re going to do some business, and there is some money waiting for you. It’s like a good-luck bird, getting higher and higher. There’s a bird on the high place with money. There’s also a horse. That means that you’re going to get money from two places.
ELIF’S GRANDMOTHER
That’s a very financially-minded spirit!
FIRDEVS
In your home you are dominant. Your in-laws will put you on their head like a crown. You’re going to a crowded place and will carry Elif on your shoulders. You love her so much. The future is saying it, I’m not saying it. If God has written it, nobody can stick their noses into it. It’s in the coffee grounds. There’s news from a man on the phone. Someone is curious. You’re going to very crowded places. Your father said some things to you, to go to the crowded place. You’re going to get some money from your family – no, maybe not, but from a man. You’re receiving three pieces of money, big money, not small money.
ELIF’S GRANDMOTHER
Enough!
FIRDEVS
I’m not saying it. It’s right here. You have enemies as crowded as dogs. If they could, they would eat you. A man would help you. Your biggest enemy is a big man with a big head. There are two different houses, but your enemy is right in your own house. Somebody cried when you were coming to Turkey. Your mother is very worried about you. She’s trying to help you. You’re thinking of your mother and family, what should I do, and your work. Do you know how to burn a candle? You are going to burn a candle for a wish in a church.
ELIF’S GRANDMOTHER
Check his plate too!
FIRDEVS
They love each other so much. Whatever you’re wishing for will come true. You two are getting married. Is your house crowded? Your family loves you so much. Your mother and father are talking to each other. Their insides are churning with nervousness. Did you call them and tell them that you are fine? There’s a bird, good luck. There is a very big building with lots of people in it. You are starting a new business again. You are a very smart boy. You’re not stupid. But there is a big bright thing waiting for you. There is a moon on your head. There is money money on top of your head. You’ll be very very wealthy. Money money. You are going to get very happy news from somebody. You are very lucky because whatever you wish for will happen. If you put it into your mind you do it. You’re going to get three pieces of good news. Happy happy money money. You’re worried about something, your heart is full. Very rich, very rich. Boats, or factory – you have something happening. You’ll have four big businesses. That’s it.
ALL
Health to your mouth!
FIRDEVS (reading Elif’s future)
You are worried about something. Don’t worry. You’re going to get some happy news. This all sounds like a lie to you, but if God wrote it there, it’s going to happen. Whatever you have a wish for in your stomach will come true. You two are going to get married, and you’ll be very happy. One place is very wooded. You’re going and coming back and forth. Your heart is clean. There is a bird. You are going to sit on big richness. Your business will go well. Maybe you’ll bring stuff back to America from here, but you are sitting on many belongings. There’s a bird, it’s very clear. You have enemies giving you filthy looks but they are powerless. You’re going to learn things from four places. You’re getting money. It’s a house like a kiosk, having a roof. You’re going to live in a gorgeous place. You’re living there together, though you’re not together now – it’s in the cup, I’m not going to lie! Are you sometimes a little worried or upset? Do you ever cry? You’ll get rid of that hard upsetness. You were very, very upset. Sometimes you say I’ll pack and go back home. But then you got used to it. Your future is bright and beautiful and clean. You’re going to laugh at me, you won’t believe me, but you’re getting married by a man with a hat. Have you been in his church? You two are going to crowded places. Beautiful places. You’re going to have money. He will have money and you will live in beautiful wooded places. You have a car. Your future is beautiful. You’ll be so happy. There’s a big door opening. You’ll go somewhere, but not immediately, later. Your fortune is beautiful. I don’t know how but your lap will be full of money.
ELIF’S GRANDMOTHER
Enough already! Saying the same things over and over again!
Breakfast is cheese and jams and fresh bread and eggs and pastirma – pepperoni so spicy, its stink comes out in your sweat. We board a government boat to take the half-hour trip to the European side of the city. I am among cleanshaven men, unshaven men with sunglasses, ponytailed women, women in headscarves, villagers shaped like fireplugs. A mustachioed man looks at me over his multicolored newspaper. Another man opens his bag and gives a presentation about the knives he is selling. We pass under the third bridge,
Image via Wikipedia
ducking as the boat goes under it, and disembark in front of the “New Mosque,” which is called “new” because it’s merely 400 years old.
Elif shows me around Istanbul with unbridled pride. This is my conservatory. Don’t take a picture of that, you’re going to see far more interesting things there. That’s Aya Sofia in the background. There’s Uskudar, where I was born. We were in Asia. Now we’re in Europe. Soon we’ll be in Asia. And again, Europe. This is Topkapi palace, my palace. This is the Golden Horn, once home to Venetians and pirates, this is the Galata Tower, from I think the 14th century. Here’s a cistern from Byzantium times, then Ottoman, then forgotten for a hundred years.
Everything is exotic, and everything is vertigo – it feels as if we are constantly darting and weaving. The city is dusty and cacophonous; people scurry about carrying tea trays and refrigerators, selling things; cars and bikes and pedestrians and buildings are from every century, in every architectural style. The geography of the place makes no sense. The streets are a maze. I don’t know how anyone crosses them, or knows where to cross them, or how to stay alive doing so. It feels as if you’re in a mosh pit, defending yourself from the pigeons, from the glare of the sun, from the blaring speakers of the minarets, from the postcard-sellers.
We enter the Blue Mosque. I am carrying my shoes, and I’ve been given baggy pants to wear over my shorts. I feel silly wearing a purple shirt and my gym socks and sneakers under the baggy pants. The mosque is gold beyond gold: mosaic in red, blue, gold, calligraphy on top of windows, arches and domes. The narrow focus of my perception and memory can’t absorb it, can’t hold it, as my eyes saccade from one marvel to the other. Aya Sophia, more somber and mysterious, a church from Justinian times until the Moslems took it over and yanked the crosses right off. Great halls of arches; Islamic calligraphy in domes’ mosaics everywhere; birds flying inside. Topkapi Palace, with Chinese gifts brought to the Sultan; a letter from Mohammed; a hair from the prophet’s beard; the English-language tour of the harem given in some unknown dialect I couldn’t understand. Suleymaniye. The Archeological Museum, with the Hitite laws, the sculptures, the walls of Babylon, the remnants of every world civilization under one roof. Kariye Kilisesi, from the 11th-13th centuries, with unbelievable mosaics showing Christ doing unbelievable things. We pass the Last Train Station in Europe. At Dolmabahce Palace, I admire the building across the street, and start to take a picture of it. Elif warns me, Don’t film the building on the right because you’ll be arrested. No, really don’t take it. I turn back to Dolmabahce and the guards there still haven’t moved. Elif tells me that I can film those ones.
From the courtyard of the Green Kiosk, we hear another call-to-prayer going off, with the loudspeakers on the minarets blaring the news that Allah is God, and that Mohammed is his prophet. While this is happening, a child is sitting eating and drinking tea under the canopy, playing with a noisemaker toy gun that lights up making electronic noises. I have my first Ayran, a salty yogurt drink which is shocking the first time you drink it (especially if you’re used to fruit-at-the-bottom yoghurt), but it has incredible powers to bring you back to life after a day under the sun’s wilting heat.
We enter an old Chrysler – or is it a Packard? – and I’m munching of kokorec, a spicy fried intestine sandwich, waiting for more people to enter so the driver can take off. It turns out it’s a dolmus – which sits there until full, and you pay the driver based on how far you’re going (unless you’re crossing from Asia to Europe, in which case it’s a fixed rate). There are two rows of seats: four sit in the back, three in the middle (it’s supposed to be two by law, but the driver always tries to squeeze in a third, though if he’s caught he’ll get a ticket), and one sits in the passenger’s seat next to the driver. How it works is, if you’re in the back row, you say, how much is Bostanci, the driver says it’s 35 (thousand lira). You tap the shoulder of someone in the front seat, handing him, say, a million-lira bill. The driver, while operating the sick shift in frenetic Istanbul traffic, tosses the money on the dashboard as it comes forward from all of the passengers.
Although the driver seems like some redneck from the east of the country, smoking, weaving in and out of lanes, and cursing out anyone else on the road in his way, he’s a brilliant mathematician and phenomenal multitasker. He begins passing back all eight people’s money, one at a time, saying, here’s change for the 5 million; here’s change for the 1 million to Suadiye for the two people. No one stiffs the driver or pockets anyone else’s money. And as soon as someone gets off, he begins trawling for more passengers, honking at pedestrians and flashing his lights. I ask Elif to ask someone to open the window, and she informs me that it will not be possible; Turks are afraid of the wind, which is blamed for making you sick. It is 95 degrees outside and possibly double that inside; the driver is smoking, and I suspect that no one else has showered in weeks. The window stays closed.
We arrive at the boats at Kadikoy, where we encounter an open-air pet store; you can buy squirrels in cages, or Indian nightingales, fed with food coloring to make their feathers every color of the rainbow. This time, instead of the government boats, we take a Norwegian “sea bus” to Bakirkoy. An ice-cream seller sees me coming and puts on a fez and uses his stick to make balls of ice cream do acrobatics. It’s far too early in the morning to be eating ice cream, but Elif asks for a cone. He holds it out to me with his long stick, but every time I reach for it, he makes it fly away, or spin around, and he finally lets me have some. It is sticky and tastes like cotton candy.
We end up at Elif’s mother Dilek’s law office and enter a sketchy-looking elevator. Elif reassures me: it’s only plunged three stories to the ground once with her mother in it. No, really. Inside the office, Dilek tells me that she is the queen here, and the chair is her throne. The decorations provide me with much amusement: it’s another Elif museum! There are also pictures everywhere of Ataturk, founder of the Turkish republic and apparently the “Where’s Waldo” of her office – here’s another Ataturk, and there he is again, whoo! I go to the bathroom, and it’s a hole, next to which is a red bucket with a cup in it.
I had thought that the purpose of our office visit was to meet her mother Dilek for lunch, but I come to realize that the real purpose is for Dilek to show me off to her friends in the court. I’m whisked from one office to another. Merhaba! How are you? Heh heh heh. Everyone giggles and grins. Many are in need of serious dental work. Everyone smokes. Everyone offers me tea. Not Turkish coffee or touristy apple tea, but the dark, musky red Turkish tea. If you ever refuse a beverage, it will only confuse or upset them, and they’ll start to look desperate, running around, begging you to take their water, anything. After the fourth office visit of the day, I come to realize that the best strategy is to accept the tea but only drink a sip, and hope to be able to leave without anyone noticing.
