The Istanbul airport was modern and efficient, European, and what struck me first was how foreign it did not feel, at least not in the way I expected, which was to somehow be older looking than the decrepit airport in New York I had just left. The metal walls gleamed, porters stood at the ready, there was a Starbucks. Sliding doors beyond the luggage carousels opened like a curtain to a stage where an audience of expectant faces, mostly men with dark facial hair, lunged forward, eager to snatch their waddling grandmothers and lead them safely from the crowds. The room felt almost hushed, an obedience to order that I didn’t yet understand. It was the airport of a stable country.
My sleek taxi swept past buildings whose architectural style resembled some strange combination of Florida housing developments and European suburbs, shopping malls as familiar as those I frequented in New Jersey. I never had fantasies about an exotic Orient, but I had not expected globalization to have seeped like heavy liquid into every corner of the earth. The roads were immaculate, tulips lined the drive, and everywhere billboards proclaimed hopeful new construction as if in some 1950s American film reel: the next promised land! As the car merged off the highway, I glimpsed the Sea of Marmara, glinting around those huge shipping tankers. The road then curved around the edge of the old city peninsula, ahead of which I finally saw the miraculous geography of greater Istanbul—three separate pieces of multicolored cityscape emerging from the middle of a bright blue sea. A storybook stone tower stood above a huddle of buildings cascading down a hill to the Bosphorus, which had a delicately webbed bridge spun over it, leading to—Asia? The closeness of the two continents seemed improbable, hopeful, as if the world was not so big and estranged after all; old white ferries scuttled back and forth like beetles dutifully carrying messages between the two lands. Seagulls cawed overhead—to me, the soundtrack of my Atlantic Ocean imposed on an Asian metropolis—and swooped down on tiny rowboats pegged to the shore. I could not believe how beautiful it all was, how it was exactly what I had wished for.
The apartment I eventually moved into was more than a hundred years old and had no heat and broken windows, but it was located in what I had imagined an Istanbul neighborhood would be: decaying but beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings and narrow planked stone streets, men loitering in doorways and smoking. Galata was on the European side of the city, once populated by Jews and Armenians and Greeks and now home to squatting Kurdish families and foreigners, its grandeur corroded and gritty. In my apartment, the shower sprayed straight into the bathroom, the kitchen was covered in dust, and the lobby was terrifyingly dark, but from the small balcony I could see the Hagia Sophia framed perfectly between two buildings, so I thought I was the luckiest person in the world. My new home was called the ?ükran Apartman?, or the Gratitude Apartments.
I knew only one person in the city, an American woman who was writing a book about Armenian-Turkish relations. After I unloaded my luggage, I dazedly followed her to meet a Kurdish PhD student named Caner so we could eat künefe in a shop that sold only künefe. Istanbul, in some heavenly seeming economic phase between the old world and early capitalism, still had shops that only did one thing: sell eggs, bake simit (the Turkish bagel), or make künefe, a syrupy dessert Turks felt no guilt making with both melted butter and cheese. Sometimes these shops were nothing but an oven and a couple of tables on a concrete floor, but their employees stood around staring at their customers vigilantly, delivered their desserts with the pride and confidence of an artist. Turkish hospitality was not obsequious; to the contrary, they were the ones in control. It had the curious effect of making you feel beholden to them even as they catered to you, the illusion of a relationship formed. These daily interactions went a long way, and for a long time, toward allowing me to pretend I was not lonely.
Caner and my American friend were continuing some conversation they had begun days before, and I watched Caner with the carefulness of a scientist. He was soft-spoken and serious, and he could roll his cigarettes gracefully without his eyes leaving your face. Earlier that day, the military had raided a “liberal” magazine called Nokta, which he told us about in a solemn tone, because it published some classified documents concerning the possible plotting of a military coup. A military coup was too fantastical a concept for me to take seriously; instead, I wondered when he said the magazine was “liberal” whether he had actually meant “radical.” I still had the reflex that the police only went after bad people. Caner said that the military wasn’t able to finish photocopying everything in one day, so they decided to complete their raid later. He seemed angry. I realized, with no small measure of surprise, that if you were a leftist in Turkey, your enemy was the military, not Islam.
After a while, I drew up the courage to try to impress Caner with my scattered knowledge of Turkey’s political situation. I asked him about the outgoing president’s assertion, in so many words, that Turkey was dangerously close to falling into the hands of radical Islam, which was the parlance of the time. The Turkish president was your standard secular Middle Eastern politician, the kind constantly warning about Islam, it seemed, in order to scare people. The only thing that stood a chance against the ideological purposefulness of Islamic political parties was the ideological purposefulness of being anti-Islam. The secularists talked about Islam more than anyone else.
“Do you think he actually believes that Turkey will fall into the hands of radical Islam?” I said, spitting out clichés with confidence. “Or is he just saying that to win votes for his party?”
Caner was looking at me as if I were insane. “Belief?” he said. “Belief is not about facts. Belief is about a political position.” This seemed to both answer and not answer the question. Was he on to me? Could he tell what I was really asking was: Is Turkey falling into the hands of radical Islam? At the time, in 2007, this was all anyone wanted to know. Caner looked as if “radical Islam” was the last thing on his mind. I longed for him to say more, but I was quiet.