Bozuk Read online

  “Good girl,” Mr. Gudewill says.

  At night, lying on my defiled mattress, I’ve been reading Pamuk’s new novel, The Museum of Innocence, which is actually the story of this city. The narrator has been collecting memorabilia from his impossible love. In real life, Pamuk has been teasing his fans and detractors with an alleged museum of his own, also in Beyoğlu. Reportedly, he is filling it with ordinary things from his life and times. I imagine my stranger turning the pages for me, as if the book were music. Mr. Gudewill did that; anxious for me to read the passages he loved. “Ah, this is a good part.”

  My own personal tourist museum can’t be any less fascinating than Pamuk’s collection. My rooms at the Eysan Otel are littered with indiscreet evidence of quick carnal exchange between lonely men and women: empty condom wrappers and soiled underpants under the bed, stains on the mattress and post-coital cigarette burns on the blankets.

  “Interesting,” I said to my invisible bed partner last night, a new habit.

  “Maybe I should be saving all these things. I could take them to Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence and add them to his collection.”

  “We need artifacts,” Pamuk wrote in his novel, which I have dog-eared shamelessly, “to better understand the lives of others, and our own.”

  Mr. Gudewill did not approve of turning down pages or underlining favourite passages. He said it was a desecration. I wondered if he were thinking of re-sale, if there might be bookstores in heaven; or if heaven is just a big museum like the undressing rooms in death camps, a place for storing our phenomenal lives before our souls are released?

  I haven’t saved the cigarette butts or false teeth of people I have loved, but, thanks to my father, I do have their fugitive voices captured in bottles.

  “Here we are.” Güzel orders tea and adds two lumps of sugar as soon as it arrives.

  “Pamuk’s characters,” he interrupts my thoughts, “are like insects trapped in tree sap, the slow moving streets of this beautiful city. Our old sidewalks crowded with vendors of fresh fruit, vegetables and fish, Ottoman princes, the descendants of families that have forgotten how to be useful in the world, refugees from the impoverished east crowding to the Promised Land on the European boundary, and deranged soccer fans are a navigational nightmare.

  “Only monuments like the Galata Tower, Attester and Galata Bridges and the architectural wonders of Sultanahmet, the Aya Sophia, the Topkapı Palace and the Blue Mosque help us navigate. Only the feribots crossing the waters leave and arrive on time. No one seems to know whether they are coming or going and they don’t like our Nobel Prize-winning author drawing attention to this very fragile and deranged beehive.” He barely takes a breath.

  I wonder if I should kiss him.

  “This city is all contradictions,” he says. “If you’ve a date in Constantinople,” the song says, “she’l be waiting in Istanbul.”

  I remember something Vefa said about Ozymandian melancholy. That could apply just as well to Istanbul as it does to Rome: Osmanli melancholy, beautiful women aging in gilded mirrors, the march of time. My new friends all seem so sad.

  Güzel continues, “Young Turks, fearing jihad, erosion of democracy and the relentless grind of bottom feeding, confess they want to get out. Istanbul has changed. The exodus from the eastern provinces is choking our jewel of Byzantium. There are too many people and not enough room. No one can move. ‘Göte giren şemsiye açılmaz,’ they say. “How can you open an umbrella if it is up your ass?”

  He smiles and places his hands on the table. He is done.

  “That’s quite a speech. Are you a politician or a professor? Do you approach complete strangers in order to rehearse this lecture on Turkish culture?” I smile because I don’t want to frighten him. I don’t want his hand to move away from the table, where I can admire it. It is a small hand, smooth, beautifully made. He has not done manual work.

  “Every tourist who comes to Istanbul wants to discuss politics and or Pamuk. We all have our answers ready.” He laughs.

  “I’ll try to think of some new ones.”

  I get it. I ran into Doug, Sweet Papa Lowdown’s sax player, who’s been hanging out in the streets, reading comics and learning the language. He’s calling their random tour the Bozuk Iptal Umbrella Tour, iptal meaning cancelled. Is this the world of Orhan Pamuk, a phenomenal mystery set in ruin and beauty, the remains of occupation and imperial glory where East met West and everyone got lost?

  “Pamuk is one of the privileged. He grew up in a house that bears the name of his ancestors. His is the legacy of Byzantine anachronism, which is as often as not the prerogative to be and do nothing, to wait like an old beauty for the elixir of love to revivify her moldering body.”

  Güzel carries on talking but my mind wanders to my other agenda, Iman, who was betrayed by strangers. I want to bring up her name but am afraid to interrupt. Would that insult Turkishness?

  When the world first saw Iman in the hotel in Tripoli, her headscarf had fallen off, her face was bruised, her eyes and lips swollen from crying. She showed us the rope burns on her wrists. There were other wounds but before we could see them a soldier disguised as a waitress had thrown her coat over her head. Then Iman was led out to a police car by Gaddafi goons and driven to God knows what horrible destination. What were her parents thinking as they watched helplessly on the other side of the revolutionary war? I can’t imagine.

  Will this stranger help? Dare I ask?

  Later might be better. The band is playing at the Jazz Company near Taksim Square this evening. After a few rakıs, who knows?

  “Would you like to hear my new friends play music tonight?”

  “I have to work, but perhaps later.”

  “Do you know the Jazz Company?”

  “Of course. I will try to be there.”

  I love the evening walks down Istiklal: the ice cream clowns, the cafés, the music, the fairy lights dancing over the street and, of course, the people. By the time I cross Taksim Square, it is dark and the political speakers of the day are gone, replaced by vendors selling stuffed mussels and corn and girls wearing light-up Minnie Mouse bows in their hair.

  The Jazz Company, a club in a Western-style hotel only a block from the square, is another world. It could be upscale anywhere. The band is just setting up and there are only a few businessmen and their girlfriends drinking at the chic bar. Güzel has not yet arrived. Not wanting to appear anxious, I was hoping to arrive after him. I do not like sitting in bars by myself, but here I am, trying not to stare at the demonstrably primed couple at the next table.

  Cagdas, the Sweet Papa Lowdown Turkish drummer, pulls up a chair and orders a rakı and mezzes for me. “I get it free with the gig.”

  “Aren’t you hungry? Aren’t you thirsty? “

  “I don’t drink and I won’t have time to eat, so enjoy it for me.”

  I wonder if he is telling me the truth. There is no end to the hospitality of Turks.

  “Check out our neighbours,” I say.

  The man is sipping champagne and passing it by mouth to his partner. They look European, possibly German, but speak Turkish. Everything is unpredictable in Turkey, except for the women in hajibs, but maybe not them either. I remember stories of Muslim women on wild shopping sprees in the lingerie department at Harrods in London. This woman could be in her underwear; she is that indiscreet. She puts her tongue in his ear.

  “That’s enough for me,” Cagdas says, “ I gotta play.”

  As the club fills up and the band starts playing, my neighbours turn up the volume. Having given up on Güzel, I pass the time by trying to understand their conversation, which is turning belligerent. Their exchange sounds as feral as the cats that fight and fuck in the street outside my hotel. His fingers circle her wrist like a handcuff. She spits in his face. This is the tipping point. He stands up.

  “Orospu!” he screams, ‘slut,’ picks up his chair and, barely missing her, smashes it down on the glass tabletop, and then stalks out of the cl
ub.

  The band carries on, perhaps a bit faster, “When the sun goes down in Harlem,” Jeff sings, and the woman stays seated, her face inscrutable.

  “Do you speak English?” I lean over and ask.

  She gets up, brushes away the slivers of glass as if they were pollen. “Yes, but I must leave.”

  “He might have killed you.” By now, several waiters are sweeping up the glass and removing the broken chair.

  “He is my husband,” she says, shrugging, as if this behaviour were marital foreplay.

  “Men like that don’t know when to stop,” I insist. “ One day he will kill you.”

  She says nothing but keeps looking at the door, as if he might come back. “Excuse me. I have to go to the washroom.”

  I watch her speak to a waiter and hand him money. Then she leaves. I follow as far as the door. Her husband is waiting on the street and they walk off toward the crowds in Taksim Square, arm in arm, vanishing in the night to an ending I don’t want to imagine.

  Is this secularism for Turkish women, who can show their faces and drink and still be abused?

  “Is there something I don’t understand?” I ask the waiter. “What just happened?”

  “She paid for the drinks and she paid for the damage, fifteen hundred lira.” He shrugs.

  “Not a good one,” Güzel says later, when I tell him the story.

  “What did you say?”

  CHRISTMAS

  At night, festive strings of lights illuminate the Istaklal Cadessi. Even in May, it feels like Christmas. I close my eyes and smell snow, remembering a moment with my parents. Was it an acrobatic trick or grace, the two of them balanced on the curb waiting for a light to change the day of the Santa Claus parade? They were not touching, each of them together, each of them alone, outlined in light, with the pale winter sun in front of them. The day was cold. I watched our breath condense. I was four years old, standing in their shadows.

  My mother and father, I thought, were unassailable, divine. I could not see my father’s imperfect heart beneath his impeccably tailored overcoat. He kept at a safe distance from my mother and her insatiable hunger for love. I could see the cold space between them.

  Years later, waiting for a stoplight to turn green at an intersection in the Kootenay Mountains, I looked up and saw a thunderhead shaped like an angel. The big black cloud was etched in light the colour of precious metal, the gilded surrounds of medieval religious paintings. By then, both my parents had gone to Heaven or whatever follows this sprint over broken glass.

  My memories of those moments are soundless. Is unheard music the necessary matrix of human relationships? Have I been creating a jigsaw of human shapes circumscribed by blinding light? A holy family, is that the incandescence Pamuk sensed when he said he heard God in the silence of snow? I have felt this; but I need a guide to lead me to an understanding of my own feelings.

  After the Christmas I witnessed the miracle of the curb, my father took me to visit the parents of friends who had been killed in the last war. I was the future, what their boys had died for. Was I a compensatory angel there to remind them that their sons had not been sacrificed in vain? Now this notion disturbs me, but at the time I understood his need to spoon my future into their hungry void. I could see the bereaved parents turning from my father’s anxious offertory.

  Feeling their exacerbated unhappiness, my father began singing desperately, the way his own father had on one famous truce in the trenches of World War One – “Silent Night,” the words heavy with meaning. That silence was death. The guns began firing immediately afterward. My grandfather was gassed. His friend lost an eye.

  Grief, the loneliness of the survivor, slowly killed my father. I am sure that every sip of forgetfulness was self-medication for the sickness of knowing that his young friends had died for no reason. How many Jews did they save? How many gypsies? What sort of peace did the U.N. peacemakers leave in Korea? How many child soldiers have been brought to redemption by “peaceful” intervention in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Darfur, Rwanda, or Angola? How many Palestinian or Afghani infants will have milk and medicine because other children have been convinced to blow themselves up in public places? Not enough. Never enough.

  My father and the men and women who have followed him into subsequent battlefields appear to have saved the world for condos, cappuccinos, and jets that tear much larger holes in the ozone than the needle-eyed cracks angels pass through. They are all damaged. When my mother took me to visit him in the hospital, I saw in his eyes, as large and innocent as at the moment of his birth, the knowledge of finite space. That knowledge could not be drowned in whiskey or the hunger of women who may have picked his pocket while they pleasured him. It can only be redeemed by love as brilliant as miracles.

  I became a creator of miracles as soon as I could speak. Even today I cannot tell the difference between my real memory and magical thinking. Did I imagine all the good news to comfort myself, or the people who live without hope? My mother used to say she knew when I was telling a lie, because I blinked. It is impossible to stare directly at the sun or at a lie. Was I lying to myself when I saw my parents standing at the light, waiting to go forward? They were not angels. I wonder how hard it is going to be for me to become one.

  Is my stranger, Güzel, the perfect companion, the perfect angel who will understand whatever it is I am trying to find out?

  SEVMEK

  E-mail to the motherboard

  In Turkish, my name is Güzel, which means “beautiful” or “lovely.” We are all the mutable Sevmek, which is the verb “to love,” perhaps a little too, as we say in English, “close” for my companion?

  Like the first people from Madeleine’s country, Turks choose real names for their children. A child born in the morning might be called Sunrise. A child born without pain might be called Grace. A child conceived in a farmer’s field might be called Harvest. I have picked an active verb, the one that obsesses Madeleine, who has given and never received the love she needs and deserves. That, to my thinking, is most appropriate, as is the name of Iman, the young woman she wants to save through her caring.

  Getting close is my vocation. For now, I am close to Mad. Proximity is my gift to her. She seems quite determined to find love in Turkey (is this an Iman projection?), and I am here to make sure she doesn’t lose herself in the process.

  She was named after the little French orphan in the storybook, the girl who had difficulty marching in two straight rows with her convent companions and ended up falling into the Seine. The shit disturber. I call her independent, resilient. Then she became Mother. How absurd is this reversal of roles? What an obscenity.

  I will call Madeleine Mad in this diary because this is her season of madness, sa saison enfer, and that is a good thing. Madeleine, Mother, Mad is transposing herself. That in itself is a separate reality, her existential time.

  For your information, I speak fluent Turkish. The truth is, I can love in any language. The short answer is, I do not intrude. I respond to invitation.

  Madeleine sent a note, which incidentally, she signed “Mad,” to Postsecrets, a website where people reveal their innermost thoughts on postcards. Some of the letters are comical and some profoundly touching. The site receives confessions to terrible crimes and perversions, but most messages admit to the pain of loneliness. Mad sent in a card on which she had drawn a big magnifying glass focused on a tiny red heart. Beside it she had written in a cartoon bubble, “Please find me.” That was no problem. She was postmarked, “Istanbul.” She has always been hungry but now she is ready; and so I found her crossing the Bosphorus to Ciya.

  My tentative position requires browsing in places like Postsecrets to find clients. When I see that someone needs a friend, I will become that friend. The client may or may not be aware of my presence. Mad is a very intuitive person. I think she is responding to my energy. She’s beginning to extrapolate my intervention into a presence in the phenomenal world, a real companion.

&nbs
p; Let me introduce myself properly. I am a virtual companion, or at least I am apprenticing for that profession. Just as lawyers, doctors, goldsmiths, leather-smiths, printers and architects used to apprentice to masters, I am attached to a master, Sevmek. We are, in a sense, the long arms of Sevmek. Hopefully, before long, virtual companionship will be a reality and no one will need to be alone.

  For now, I travel with the pioneer of fifth-dimensional friendship, both of us navigating on faith. We are in new territory, our old calling now assisted by social media. My master has been around since the first creature with a designed intelligence crawled out of the sea. My colleagues and I have been called angels, chimera, doppelgangers, what have you. We have hovered over mosques and churches and synagogues, listening to the troubled, healing the sick, protecting the besieged or careless and carrying off the dead.

  I knew Mad when she was a kid. She had a little Electrolux vacuum cleaner savings bank. The bank held quarters. When it was full it popped open and the money came out. Mad would take her quarters to a payphone and call the North Pole. I visited her then. Spending a summer with her was my first job after rapturing. I loved it, and Madeleine was one of my favourite clients. When she turned up on Postsecrets decades later, I remembered her right away; and that is how I came to be in Turkey, one of the reasons.

  This is a different world. Now our clients type and scroll, make commands instead of praying. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this generation inspired but I would say they still deserve redemption. You may or may not realize that redemption happens one unit at a time. Because we have free will, it is not a sweeping universal thing. We have chosen to be alienated, to converse through machines, to think with machines, and to destroy with machines. This may not be a good thing, but we do have the opportunity to use the new mind control to our advantage. We can teach people to love and be loved. That is my job description in the social media.

  My boss is no Luddite when it comes to technology. You might argue that science is the devil’s work, a potential weapon of mass destruction, and I am tempted to agree. But don’t forget the devil is a fallen angel, a very important angel, the angel of light.