Caner was Kurdish, as well as Alevi, a branch of Islam considered heretical by many members of the dominant Sunni sect in Turkey. It was great luck that he was the first person I met in Turkey, the prism through which I slowly tried to understand its politics, because as a member of two outcast minorities, he had no particular love for either the Islamists or secularists, this party or that party. He thought everyone was terrible. He was able to see things more clearly, without passion, without ideology, and consequently without much hope. And bleak as that was, he was a constant reminder to try to think that way, to avoid the traps of one’s own bias. I would find it very hard to do.
The following day, he took me to get a cheap secondhand cell phone and an illegitimate SIM card—to this day I am not sure why but the expedition added to my already exaggerated idea of Turkey as an early-stage capitalist country—and we walked across the Galata Bridge, the low-hanging expanse over the Golden Horn that connected European Beyo?lu, my neighborhood, to the old Ottoman city. I had heard that men fished off it—this being one of the most common romantic images of Istanbul—but that first day, it shocked me to see so many of them dangling rods and lethal hooks so close to what was a chaotic pedestrian walkway.
“Caner,” I said. “Do they need a permit to fish off the bridge?”
“Permit?” He again looked at me as if I were insane. “Do … the fish have permits to swim?”
His question delighted me out of all proportion to its content. To look at the world from a new perspective is to feel as if the ropes holding you to the earth have been cut. Caner was going on, laughing, remembering how once a friend of his asked why we called fish “seafood,” when that would make humans “landfood.” “Don’t confuse freedom with happiness,” someone said to me in those years. But inside my mind I was reconstituting meanings the way Caner did with words. No one with the same set of constructs I had was watching me, and I had the space to look at everything so differently that I actually felt as if my brain were breathing. In fact, I felt like a child.
*
ORHAN PAMUK MADE Istanbul’s hüzün famous—a fallen-empire melancholy and loss that suffused the city and its people—but Istanbul, at first, was far too beautiful for me to see evidence of rot. Those first days my leg muscles became sore from walking up and down Istanbul’s steep hills over and over, trying to memorize it all for an impossible mental map. I was in love, as if I had been living in an upside-down world and suddenly someone had turned everything right-side up. Unlike New York, where buildings blocked the sky, Istanbul from the grand wide lens of its hilltops made you feel bigger, undiminished and uplifted. Down on the narrow streets, close-up, everything seemed to happen in miniature, like on a movie set, and therefore appeared incomparably more human-size: the peasant woman emerged from her shop sweeping; a man pulled his cart of old broken things; a tiny boy trailed after his father; at night a man peed into the doorway; ladies hobbled slowly, one foot, then the other, side to side; men smoked on stools outside hardware stores; antique furniture piled up outside rickety houses; a peddler sold eggs as if from a concession stand. Head scarves bobbed through the crowds like buoys. Rather than some Islamic menace, they seemed like turn-of-the-century Edith Wharton characters in souped-up bonnets. Covered women looked perfectly normal, here, where they lived, carrying grocery bags, walking to work, far away from the theoretical world in which I had imagined them. The impact of merely seeing foreign things with my own eyes was the equivalent of reading a thousand history books. I found that I was watching life more carefully, that every nerve was alive to my environment.
I didn’t speak the language, so those first months I lived in a state of white noise and visual bliss. I was forced to look, and to see. In fact, the first time I would return to New York after a year in Istanbul, twelve months of gazing at the Bosphorus, I took a subway over the Manhattan Bridge and it was as if I saw the water in New York for the first time. It wasn’t that I noticed its relative homeliness compared to the Bosphorus; it was that I had never actually looked at it. In Istanbul, I ran down every evening to a dusty parking lot where the attendants sipped tea and watched the sun slip behind the minarets and into the Golden Horn: Topkap? Palace, the Blue Mosque, the Galata Tower, the mouth of the Bosphorus. You could see everything from there, but it was just a parking lot, whose inhabitants were three attendants, a cat lady and her ten cats, and three stray dogs. “Come, sit down,” the parking lot attendant would say, offering me tea. I stood and watched the sun disappear behind the old city, its red glare thrown across the Bosphorus, transforming the windows of the Asian side into a thousand copper fires. The stray dogs cuddled in the dirt together and howled when the mosque began its call to prayer. In New York such property would be worth millions of dollars and bought up for condos. I’d read somewhere that the Byzantines believed that everyone, rich and poor, deserved a home with a view of the Bosphorus, rather than that it was the exclusive property of a wealthy few. Everything in Turkey seemed antithetical to where I came from.