Afterwards he walked me home, joking the whole time that he’d forgotten to hang up his apron at Café du Coin.
“Usually I can’t be bothered to walk beautiful women home,” he said. “But this time it’s an emergency, with my apron and everything.”
We were walking in the middle of an empty street when he reached for my hand and pulled me towards himself. I’d forgotten that things could happen like this—playfully, without solemnity.
When we went up to my room, he stood looking around him, his hands in his pockets.
“So, this is where you escape every time,” he said. “Did you bring the old man up here as well?”
He must have noticed the look on my face because he quickly added, “It’s really nice of you to be his friend.”
This, too, made me laugh.
* * *
—
Sometimes, I find a word that sums up a situation. It comes to me suddenly, often in the voice of the aunts. “She’s old-fashioned,” I heard them saying, as if there was nothing else to be made of the situation. I thought with relief that my friendship with M. was simply old-fashioned. It was this incongruity, I decided, that had drifted us apart.
A few days later at the café, Vincent asked my landlord, “Where did you find such a giggly tenant?
“At first we thought you were a bit strange,” he continued. “But now we find out you were laughing at us all along.”
When I was leaving Paris, Vincent said he would think of me in Istanbul.
“And you think of me at Café du Coin, making your coffee the wrong way,” he said.
68.
The last time I saw M. was at a discussion, at the same bookshop where I’d first met him a year before. Once again, there were signs announcing the event at the shop front, and I was a bit surprised that M. had not told me about it, even if we hadn’t spoken for some time.
I don’t know whether he saw me when I entered the room a few minutes after the discussion started. The bookshop was completely full, and I stood at the back, with a partial view of the row of speakers.
The writers were asked to talk about their routines, the ways they found inspiration, that sort of thing. The famous writer was there again, seated next to M. He had not published anything else since his book about Paris’s golden age.
He spoke at length about his rituals of writing. “I think of it as a rite of passage,” he said. “I enter a different world with different rules. But in order to enter that world, I must first be admitted.”
He had a particular notebook, a pencil, a time of the day. There were the poems that he read again and again.
“Basically,” he said, “I do everything I can to prepare myself before stepping into the unknown.”
When it was M.’s turn, he said that he admired his colleague’s conviction that the story was out there, just beyond his reach, if only he was determined enough to enter its world.
“For me,” M. said, “stories are fickle. I must often resign myself to the knowledge that they have their own logic. I am almost powerless in shaping a story because, like people, they do not submit to my expectations.
“The difficulty,” he continued, and I thought that he cast a glance towards the back of the room, “is to observe them from afar, in their own worlds. If I can manage to do this, without interfering in my clumsy ways, I am rewarded with sights of an extraordinary beauty. I think that these sights are certainly not the work of my hazy imagination, but things that the mind has noticed and stored away. With care and patience, they reemerge in writing. And sometimes, if I’m delicate enough, I may reach over to hold one and commit such a story to paper.
“But there are many which escape my grasp,” he said. “Perhaps it’s because I haven’t been gentle enough, and they shy back to their own worlds, like photographs of fairy sightings that used to be so popular at one time.
“And other times,” he continued, “I’m simply too deaf to hear them.”
I noticed, once again, how tall M. was. He was standing straight, without a hint of the stoop with which I have described him. And his voice, too, had nothing of a stammer. I could see that this was M. the writer. This gentle, generous stranger.
69.
I remember the sunlight filtering softly on the tables at our bistro. Au Petit Suisse, I mean, across from the Luxembourg Gardens. The light grew gradually, sweeping the tables inch by inch in dusty stripes. I think of this time as in a dream.
In Istanbul, rain comes pouring down, the sun appears without warning. It’s hard to remember the moment that came before. The city itself changes so rapidly—buildings sprout up like mushrooms, a new face emerges each day on television screens and newspapers. There is no telling which neighborhood will be demolished to be built anew, what small and unbeautiful park set up beside a looming tower while the ancient trees disappear.
There are the proposed changes, the proposed bills, constructions, state appointments. There are the tunnels, bridges, and metro systems connecting the city from one part to the other, to places I had never known about or been to. There are new rules every day, identity cards, social security systems, shortcuts to pay for entry and exit. A new routine invented daily. There are the faces of politicians about whom I know nothing, who are familiar only in their abundance. Their voices rise some pitches higher above the hum, trying to drown it out.
But I feel something for all these lonely people I see—so lonely amidst such crowds. I feel their dislike of the past, their wish to bury it and to look away. They seem so desperate in this clambering, rising city. In one stroke, they will get rid of anything that has aged. It’s a desire for all to be new. It isn’t unlike fear.
None of that has a place in the story I’m telling, this world that is changing, this country at the threshold. But it’s hard to remember the Istanbul of previous times. The Istanbul of Akif amca, of my mother, of M.’s novels.
* * *
—
I haven’t read M.’s new Thracian novel, and I haven’t made an effort to follow its reception by Turkish readers. The thought of reading it makes me sad. It would be like making a trip to Istanbul’s historic peninsula, to visit the palaces and cisterns, to look up at tiles and mosaics and see very little else. To see only that city which is oblivious to change.
But more than this, it seems pointless. There is the hum that deafens all other noise. I imagine that M. will have looked past this, back to another, lovelier time. What use is it to read that, now, when we are at the brink of something, waiting?
I understand the futility of my story at such a time. But then I imagine our bistro, that striped light, and I worry about everything that will disappear unless I record it.
* * *
—
Some weeks ago, on my way back from the magazine, I went into a bookshop before going home. I was the sole customer in the early evening. The bearded, spectacled owner and his cat were absorbed in their business, and I sat for a long time, going through a pile of books by my side. When I was paying for the ones I’d settled on, the owner asked whether I had read the Istanbul books of the English or Irish writer—“I can’t recall his name,” he said, “it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
He told me that my selection of books brought to mind this author, whose name he was trying to remember. He had just written a new book, the shopkeeper said, once again set in Turkey. He couldn’t remember the title of that one, either.
“Does this happen to you as well,” he asked, “when you forget the most obvious things?”
“I don’t think I know this author,” I told him, but of course I was tempted. I wanted to boast, to tell the shopkeeper that this author had once told me he would never get tired of my stories.
But I will say this. The book’s short title is M.’s special way of greeting me, raising his hand for just a moment before putting it back into the pocket of his green jac
ket. He wants me to understand, even if I don’t have the heart to read it, that this is his way of telling the story, his own invention of Midnight.
70.
In Paris, after I no longer saw M., I would go to the Gare du Nord and stand by groups of men smoking by the arched glass doors. I already knew then that I would be leaving soon. I had received a note from the program to inform me that my registration was annulled.
I watched the newcomers to the city—businessmen hailing taxis, older and impeccably groomed couples rolling expensive suitcases, lovers reuniting amidst crowds without a care. I didn’t have the chance to observe them for long enough to know whether they had arrived in the city in elated spirits or in mourning, just as the visitors themselves did not know whether great joy or misfortune awaited them.
I had always liked the feeling that I could board a train and leave the city whenever I wanted. I liked the idea of arriving at a new place, and the brief period of time when my foreignness would be legitimate.
Sometimes I walked to the slender Gare de l’Est, where trains to Istanbul once departed. Or I walked south, all the way down Sébastopol to the river, past the Luxembourg Gardens (the Judas trees, once again, were barren), the observatory, and then farther out, to the peripheries where the stately apartments of the past century gave way to concrete buildings, the tree-lined streets merged with bridges and highways. I walked to the ancient slaughterhouses at the city’s southern gate, whose grounds were converted to the modest Parc Georges-Brassens. It was the type of park one would find in less beautiful cities. There was an artificial pond and gazebo, a brightly colored play area, benches arranged around bronze statues. In those cities, such a park would be the crowning jewel. But in Paris, the Brassens park was almost always deserted.
Some days I traced the periphery of the inner city to the north, past the train station to Belleville, with its garish banquet halls, the alleys and passageways of a vanished working class, concrete buildings inhabited now by migrants. I walked up crowded boulevards, discount stores, electronics shops, hair salons, travel agencies. Beneath overpasses, groups of men sat in tents and on mattresses, surrounded by a clutter of makeshift tables and cardboard roofs. I felt as if I were looking through the invisible walls of a building, seeing into people’s homes—plastic bags, paper cups, toothbrushes, blankets, and pillows.
I think that Paris was also changing at that time. Fear and distrust seeped in from every corner. But I did not mind the change so much, or I ignored it. This wasn’t really my city, after all, and change does not pain strangers in the same way.
* * *
—
For a long time after the end of our friendship, I would still talk to M. as I walked. I did it unintentionally, and I would realize with surprise that I had crossed half the city telling him my observations. I still catch myself looking at something and putting it away—collecting it—with the feeling that I’m saving it to show someone later.
After M. and I stopped writing, I wouldn’t walk our usual path along the river. The parade of domes, statues, and bridges made me restless; I wanted to be in other streets, where life continued without ceremony.
One morning, I came across the abandoned train tracks that circumscribed the city. I followed three teenagers climbing a low wall, down to the tracks overrun with weeds and broken glass bottles. We walked together for a while, and then the teenagers put down their bags and took out spray paints. I continued past them, until I reached a tunnel. I decided to take a few steps inside, where it was still light. I heard the echoes of my footsteps on the gravel and I continued, soon swallowed by the darkness and the sound. I walked until the tunnel’s bright mouth diminished to a frowning pout and sat for a while in complete silence.
The city continued its course above me, inhaling and exhaling, uniting and dispersing, and I felt that I, too, was a small part of it. It was a feeling I had in my childhood, when I found a way to walk on the ceiling.
* * *
—
It must have been in the last year of my father’s life that I began my walks on the ceiling and discovered the white city. I didn’t tell anyone of its existence and visited it sparingly on the days when my father did not get up from the armchair and my mother would tell him to stop his games. It was a place I went to when Istanbul was heavy and dark, pressing in against the walls of our apartment.
On those days, I would find the square mirror in my parents’ bedroom and take it out of its cloth bag. I put on my mother’s wide summer hat, which swallowed my head and restricted my vision. I held the mirror to the ceiling and looked inside, making sure that no part of myself appeared in the reflection.
When I finally saw the white city on the ceiling, I stood still for a while, getting my bearings. I circled the mirror around, observing the stone desert I had landed in. When I was oriented, I tilted the guiding compass of my mirror and started my walk on the ceiling.
First, I traced the undemanding edges of the room. After a while, when I grew accustomed to the landscape, I ventured towards the chandelier growing like a tree in the hallway. To get there, I had to climb the tall ledge between the bedroom and the hallway, raising my legs high so I wouldn’t trip. Even though my feet didn’t feel the obstacle in front of them, I knew that the invisible rules of the city had to be respected. I had never tried touching the trunk of the chandelier, either, because my searching feet would merely be met with air. And I knew, when my legs hit upon objects I couldn’t see in the mirror, that the city was revealing its mysterious sights.
The white city required patience. It had to be walked slowly. Otherwise, the traveler would stumble and fall, or would see nothing but her own reflection. If the expedition was carried out in haste, if a weightless ledge was not carefully stepped over or a sightless and heavy mountain not avoided (in the real world this would be an ordinary table or chair), the city would disintegrate. The white city had to be walked blind but with open eyes.
If I heard anyone approaching, I quickly turned the mirror down and brought myself back. Sometimes I felt guilty that I hid this place from my parents. But I was the only one who understood its laws and I did not want to bruise it with clumsy footsteps.
Besides, I knew that my parents had their own invisible places where they did not take me. Their cities were also entered on faith. You had to be certain of their existence, that they were waiting for you even when you couldn’t see them day to day.
Just as my father had been on that night he walked all the letters of my name, past my mother in the bedroom to the balcony, and then stepped off, leaving us behind.
71.
Despite everything I’ve said about Istanbul, its new and maddening hum, there is also everything that remains. We don’t talk about this, out of fear. To keep envious eyes at bay. But then a ruin sticks out its head from some street. A modest church that has witnessed every civilization; a humble bathhouse; the rose-colored veins of a marble fountain. A street seller looks on idly. A waiter ushers you in, past the heads of smiling fish.
Then the city opens its arms, its blue-green waters.
72.
Akif amca writes of a walk in Paris that he took shortly before he returned to Turkey. This is the last record, if such things can be determined with precision, of a time before he knew my mother.
On this afternoon years ago, Akif amca walks along the river and stops to look at the cathedral from Pont de la Tournelle, before crossing to the Left Bank.
It’s a gray afternoon in April. Akif amca writes that even after he leaves the city, nothing will change of the sellers chatting at the Saint-Médard market, the cafés filling up and emptying along the boulevard, the narrow street that is always in shadow, descending to the river. This must be the same street M. and I walked that first night.
People will come together and they will separate, but the city, Akif amca writes, will remain. I don’t know whether the thought fills him with hope
or sadness.
* * *
—
I had told M. about this last walk in Paris recorded in Akif amca’s journal. One time, when we stopped on the bridge to look across the water at the cathedral, M. asked if this might be the very spot where our poet stood.
“Which poet?” I asked.
“The great inventor,” he said.
That’s how I remember our friendship. We passed our stories back and forth until they merged. And with each pass, we lightened our own burden. At that time, brief though it was, we shared a single imagination.
We may even have exaggerated our enthusiasm for the stories we told, for the sake of going on another walk and extending our frail acquaintance a bit further. But in the best moments our friendship was weightless—a pure, untainted invention.
What mattered most was that memory was stripped of bitterness and retold with joy. And once it took root, it grew bigger, this story of how things had been. It was a voice speaking through us, inexhaustible, it seemed, past resentment and sorrow. Past all that could not be resurrected.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Sarah Bowlin, for reading this book by the ocean. To my editor, Laura Perciasepe, for hearing Nunu’s voice when it was faint, and for all your suggestions.
Thank you, Lavina Lee, for your thorough reading. To Claire McGinnis, Calvert Morgan, and everyone at Riverhead for their enthusiasm and for bringing this book to life.
For your ideas, intuitions, encouragement, and reading, thank you, Fuat, Vera, Marie, Zsófi, Liz, Gigi, Yuri, Éva, Eda, Nicholas, Katia. I’m so lucky to have you as my friends and readers.
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