by Linda Rogers
“How un-Turkish.”
“Un-Turkish, anti-Turkish. You are starting to sound like the government.”
“Are you against the government?”
“I am for my people.”
“Who are your people?” I say, before I realize that direct questions will get indirect answers.
“One of my people, a journalist, was arrested recently for insulting Turkishness.”
“What does that mean?”
“I wish I knew.”
“But you didn’t mind when Pamuk was prosecuted for the same thing?”
“I always mind when freedom of expression is threatened. The president said, ‘It is crime to use a bomb, but it is also crime to use materials from which a bomb is made.’ I assume he meant words.” He indicates a cyclist pedalling by the café. “I believe words are the bicycles of peace.”
“So many contradictions.”
“Welcome to my country.” He laughs. “And you should know Turks dislike broken money.”
“What does that mean?”
“It is beneath us.”
We have been grazing the mezzes, yogurt, beans and lakerda, finely sliced smoked tuna. The waiter removes them as soon as he thinks we are not paying attention to our plates. I say that someone could make a fortune selling food and drink clamps to tourists. Last night, a hotel waiter confiscated a full rakı when I turned my back on it. And it had cost me ten lire. No more, because no one tips here.
“In Canada, most of the waitpersons are women, except in high-end restaurants.” Our waiter smiles, appearing to understand what I am saying even though he doesn’t respond to my request for water in English. I ask again for minerale su and still he doesn’t bring it.
“Would you please ask him to bring some mineral water?” I ask Güzel, as the levrek, a charbroiled sea bass, is served. “What is this?” I separate the cucumber and tomato salad from my fish because I don’t like food touching, isolating a mound of sliced onion with dark specks sprinkled on top.
“Onion with sumak. It is delicious.”
He is right. The onion cuts through the fish oil and my obsessive compulsive agenda. We agree to walk through the Kadıköy fish market after lunch in search of sumak, which is related to a poisonous plant that grows in Canada.
“How is Turkey like an onion?” he asks.
“You are going to tell me.”
“No, I am not going to tell you anything. You will learn by observation. We Turks are enigmatic for a reason. You never know who you are talking to.”
“When will I get to the very inside of this onion?”
“That is just air. It is journey that matters.”
The market smells about one hundred times as intense as natural food stores at home. I love the combination of spices, fish and fresh produce. When Güzel leans close to me, I can smell Europe and Asia mingling in the same kitchen. And orange groves. I breathe in and I think he notices.
“You see,” he says, indicating nuts in labelled baskets. “Every nut has its own name. We don’t say hazelnut, peanut, walnut, but we understand they are all related.”
“What about the nuts in headscarves and long coats? Is there a word for that?”
I know it is presumptuous of me to pass judgment on a culture I don’t understand. I sound like George Bush when he talked about freedom before bombing the bejesus out of Baghdad. What does he know about freedom? What right did he have to express indignation about weapons of mass destruction when his country dropped an atomic bomb on Japan? How many cultures will America destroy before their God gets their number and puts an end to their arrogant assumptions about good and evil? How can I even begin to know what it means to be a hidden woman, erased by my clothing? Is snow excreted by the devil to keep us quiet or, by god, to help us endure the darkness of winter?
What will I find in the market or anywhere else for that matter? Güzel tells me the nut vendors advertise Turkish delight as a male aphrodisiac. Will he be insulted if I offer him a piece?
My father taught me the difference between lookers and seekers. “Seekers,” he said, are restless, always looking for the next thing. “Lookers” are the patient ones who wait for mysteries to reveal themselves. I thought it was confusing because he also called beautiful women, especially supernatural women shimmering on the silver screen, “lookers,” but now I get it. The lookers wait like barnyard hens because they KNOW they will be found when the time is right.
This is what I am thinking while we stand in the Church of Holy Wisdom, built be the emperor Justinian and converted to a mosque by the invaders in 1453, while Europe took its eyes off the sacred dome of Christendom and focused its attention on discovering the New World. This huge room is the story of Byzantium with its layers of truth revealed and unrevealed, its deceptions and revelations all five hundred metres apart.
I want to weep. Güzel intuits my feelings and is quiet. I think this is what he requires me to feel in the temple of cosmic desire, where God is so close and still inscrutable.
I am waiting to be filled with the wisdom of the mother church, even though I have no idea what is hiding under the layers of Constantinople and Istanbul.
The dome of the Aya Sophia, which has survived earthquake and political turmoil, is covered in scaffolding. The Muslims plastered over the pendentives supporting the dome and now the government is having them uncovered. One excavation has uncovered an angel.
I want to ask Güzel what further glory they will find under the plaster, but I know he won’t answer. I close my eyes and taste the fig pudding at Ciya, remembering that Musa told me food should hold onto the taste of the earth it grew in. Truth is the flavour in figs from the Garden of Eden, not far from here.
I hear the percussion of a thousand wings, as the temple doves all rise at once to circle the dome at prayer time. Then I see her, or him, the seraphim from the Book of Isaiah, a moonfaced angel with six wings.
I am astonished by the revealed seraphim in the Aya Sophia. Even before I looked up and witnessed the unveiled face in its labial nest of wings, I knew I would be surprised. It is an image of Iman. Does Güzel also see it? Should I wait for him to read its significance, or will he think I am out of my mind? “Hello,” I say, echoing the Turkish schoolchildren who spoke their only words of English to the yabanc ı lady in the church of many incarnations,
“Hello. What is your name?”
She does not answer.
Her face, peeking out of a feathery surround, looked like a head about to be born. Is this the way angels enter cracks in the firmament, through a process like birth? Is it painful entering Earth’s atmosphere? I have seen the same expression on the red and wrinkled faces of newborn babies. They seem to be saying, “Have I come to the right place?”
On the hill that leads from the Eminönü feribot station to the Church of Holy Wisdom, I saw a simit seller wearing a T-shirt that said in English, How can I be lost if there is no place to go? Where is no place, I wonder? Did the seraph also read it from her lofty vantage point? Did this statement of despair or resignation disturb her?
This angel means business. She has survived every indignity. There is no hope without moving forward, wherever that may be. If Iman, or Faith, has not yet found her freedom, I know now that she will. I am sure angels go back and forth for celestial rest and recuperation. The seraph, suffering the indignity of a Muslim cover-up, has worn a plaster veil for hundreds of years.
Did she just sit there listening, or did she go to a heavenly place to get over the man-created concept of exclusivity, so she could return for the Arab Spring of social revolution and the assassination of Osama bin Laden in his safe house filled with marching orders disguised as pornography and Coca-Cola cans?
Iman’s mother said in an interview, “She is not only my daughter now. She is the daughter of the revolution.”
“Bozuk,” I say, and Güzel smiles. I think he sees what I see, an angel made from broken pieces of stone and glass, covered by men who believe the human fac
e is a violation of holy intention.
“ I knew you’d understand.”
“Why?” I ask, forgetting everything I have learned about patience.
TUGRUL
Sweet Papa Lowdown is having a dinner and house concert at Tugrul’s home before embarking on their tour. In addition to playing piano, sax, flute, clarinet, and risking extreme sports, Tugrul is a chef, a great one, Vefa says. Apparently, he has been offered a television show where he will ride his motorcycle to remote villages, cook the regional food and stay to play music.
I am intrigued when Vefa passes on an invitation to the party. Berk and Vefa will take us to Tugrul’s house, which is on the European side of the Bosphorus.
“Can I bring my new friend?” I ask. “Is there room in the car?”
They are punctual. Berk is driving with Vefa beside him. “We could have offered one or two of the others a ride,” he says when we get in the back of the Mercedes. I don’t see a space.
“They’re taking a dolmuş,” Vefa says, and turns on the radio, which Berk aborts with an irritable snap.
“I need to concentrate.”
He is right. There are no street signs and Berk says, since he has been studying in Sweden, he hasn’t yet visited Tugrul in his new suburban aerie, if there can be such a thing in an ancient city. I am a bit disappointed because I’ve been hoping Tugrul would be living in an old family house, one of the wooden Ottoman mansions along the water.
Vefa laughs, and we cross the Ataturk Bridge in silence.
“I can’t stand it,” Berk says.
“Can’t stand what?” Vefa asks.
“Who’s chewing gum?”
“Not me,” Vefa says.
“Not me,” and I turn to Güzel, who says nothing.
“Berk has misophonia.” Vefa laughs again and Berk joins him.
“It drives me crazy,” he says.
“What?” I ask, as we drive over thousands of years of craziness: wars, occupations, misogyny and, currently, the sex trafficking of Russian children.
“He hates certain noises,” Vefa says.
“So I became a musician.” Now I am afraid. He is laughing so hard I think he is going to drive straight off the bridge.
“You won’t be the first woman sacrificed in the Golden Horn,” Vefa observes. Misogyny is becoming a theme with him.
This, I understand, is Turkish humour. Berk has an umbrella up his ass and so he prays for rain. Vefa, the philosopher, is distraught, so he plays the fool.
When Tugrul opens his front door, we are assaulted by beautiful smells. Rita, Cagdas’s bride, on a break from interning in Berlin, is in the kitchen making a Portuguese bacalhau dish, and Tugrul’s wife is nowhere to be seen. “She went to Rome on business.” I wonder if she approves of this motley crew of blues men resting their rakı glasses on her grand piano.
“Cat’s away,” I say, eyeing the beautiful assortment of mezzes and bottles on the coffee table, and Tugrul winks.
“She’ll be back,” he says. “Who can resist handsome, talented and rich?”
“Me,” says Vefa.
Dinner will go on all night, so they play first. Jeff sings “Doin’ a Stretch” and then Sarp, the angel-voiced tartar, follows with “The KC Moan,” so I think I’m in heaven; but then it gets better. When Rick starts to sing “Black-eyed Susie,” the ubiquitous evil eye dangling from the neck on his mandolin, keeping time, Tugrul plays a sultry clarinet intro and then puts down his instrument. He doesn’t ask. He just picks me up in his arms and floats me away. I close my eyes and pretend he’s my dad. No wonder my mum couldn’t let go. How many men make you feel like you’re wearing wings, as if you are the lightest most acrobatic bird in the sky? We fly, and I don’t want the music to stop.
But, after a few more songs, it does, and we sit down to dinner.
Güzel takes the chair beside me at the long table, which Tugrul tells us has been in his family for many generations and, when he was a bored six-year-old, he even carved his name in the wood during one interminable meal. No one speaks to my friend. Perhaps they disapprove of tourists picking up men in the market and the sort of man who will be picked up. Maybe they thought he should have owned up to chewing gum in Berk’s car. The boys in the band and their assortment of wives, girlfriends and daughters are absorbed in their food and they talk about the tour.
Güzel doesn’t seem to mind. I think he enjoyed watching me dance.
“How many people here believe in God?” Am I really saying this?
“I do,” Hanna and Naomi, daughters of an apostate New Jersey Jew and granddaughters of a Baptist lay preacher, chime in unison.
“We are Turks,” Vefa says after a pause, his answer, I am discovering, for everything, at once enigmatic and to the point.
“What do you mean,” I ask, “this time?”
“I mean we are tolerant. We mind our own business.”
“Since Ataturk,” I say, and tactfully refrain from mentioning the Armenians.
“No, always,” he replies, and turns to compliment Rita on her fish soup as Naomi tears a piece of flatbread and shares it with her sister.
The Ottomen, I am learning, are invisible and enigmatic, especially when it comes to religion. I wonder if this helps or hurts them when the earth moves. They have survived, so far.
The evening goes on and Güzel only speaks to me, explaining the conversation bouncing around us, and the food we are eating.
“That’s pureed broccoli and pomegranate seeds with dana bonfile. Dana is beef. We eat cow, but not pig. The green bits are sautéed bay leaves.”
“It looks like Christmas.”
Several desserts follow this: baklava, pastries and puddings. Desserts are Tugrul’s specialty.
“Try the tavuk gogsu.”
“What is it?”
“Caramelized creamy chicken breast. Delicious.”
I am skeptical, but he is right, if anyone can be right or wrong in this country of contradictions. It is amazing custard.
“I love it, and I’ll bet it ranks with chicken soup as invalid food.”
“Turks never get sick.” Vefa seems to enjoy my reaction to his little ironies. His friends are apparently immune. I must practice my non-reactive face.
There is lots of teasing and joking about the frustrations of life in a constantly re-invented nation, but no more talk of God or Erdog˘an’s gradual erosion of the rights and freedoms the secular Turks are no longer taking for granted. We leave after dinner, which has, as Berk promised, stretched to midnight.
When he walks me to the car, Tugrul kisses me on both cheeks and whispers, “What happened to your friend?”
I don’t have time to answer. Berk has his earplugs in and he has started the engine.
“What did he mean by that?” I ask.
“We are all mad here,” Vefa quotes the Cheshire Cat with a smile as wide as the Ataturk Bridge.
IN THE HOUSE OF GOD
I asked Güzel if the dervishes live like monks – some of whom, tormented by sexual deprivation, are my clients. Do they find sexual fulfillment in dizziness? He laughed. Actually, I was hoping to flush him out. Since I have had my bottom pinched by a spice merchant and, more recently, on Moda Caddesi, by a dress salesman who looked like Omar Sharif, I wanted him to tell me why he hasn’t at least brushed against me when the feribots lurch as they make their imperfect berthings.
I went by myself to see the dervish ceremony at the Hodjapasa Hamam on my last night in Istanbul. I can understand why a Turk wouldn’t want to witness such a touristic performance. Besides, Güzel says he’s not a Muslim. Perhaps he is trying to maintain an ecumenical distance from the Sufis, who might be the Unitarians of the Middle East. In any case, I was glad to be alone. I didn’t want this ecstatic experience explained to me.
The Mevlevi Sema Ceremony started late. I had time to examine the old stones in the hamam and the dome punctuated by stars. The front row of chairs sat empty until a tour of Baptist-Americans came in and took their s
eats. I couldn’t see past the wall of plus-sized ladies with enigmatic expressions, many wearing hats, from my back row position; so I stood up.
I wondered if Mohammad and Jesus were duking it out behind the impenetrable Baptist façades as they wondered if they were in the temple of God or the Axis of Evil. Despite the fact that we had been asked not to speak or clap during the ceremony, I laughed out loud during the reading from the Qur’an when I realized that the tourists, used to clapping during religious music, had been respectfully sitting on their hands.
I watched the dervishes, dressed in white shrouds with felt tombstone-shaped headdresses, circling their holy man, raising their right hands to Allah and pointing their left to the ground in a gesture of receiving and dispatching his blessing.
As the holy men turned to their sacred songs, I felt the message in their momentum. Let the music decide. If I had red shoes, I would spin to the answer. I’m remembering what Freya Stark, the poet of travel, wrote in her memoir Ionia, “Nothing short of the universal – the kingdom of heaven or the heart of man – can build the unfenced peace.”
It is very discreet, nothing obviously out of place, no papers flung about or missing, or cosmetics spilled; but someone has been in my room. I am precise with my things, especially when I am away from home. They are not exactly where I left them. It wasn’t the maid. She was here with clean towels before I left the hotel.
I smell orange blossoms.
When I check out of my hotel, praising the food prepared by Ahmet the owner, he frames his face with his hands and dances around the lobby. Ahmet, who has the countenance of a cherub, has exceeded himself with every meal. I decide not to tell him about my visitor.
“Someone was in my room last night,” I tell Güzel, as I drive the Opel we rented in Izmir down the coast to Cesme. With its rolling hills and lush vegetation, the Aegean region could be Northern California with Roman and Greek ruins painted in the foreground.
He taps his shaved head with his fingertips, which I now know is his think gesture, but doesn’t say, “Are you sure?” because I can see that he knows it is true.