Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (8 page)

Istanbul had an air of Sunday serenity and an off-season slackness. Worry beads were not in evidence. It was only the next day in the empty bazaars that the hawkers were frowning, but when I remarked on the lack of customers, they said, "The tourists will come next month,
Inshallah
"

I was aware of being a solitary traveler on a long journey. With no detailed onward plans, I was not looking much beyond Turkey at the moment. The newspaper headlines were all about the Iraq War—it was a one-day bus trip to the Iraq border. The war was clearly unpopular, but no one singled me out or harassed me. On the contrary, I was welcomed in restaurants, and I delighted in the food: stuffed grape leaves, bluefish, cheese dumplings, and an eggplant dish so delicious its name is a catchphrase,
imam bayildi,
"the imam fainted."

In the rain and the raw March wind off the Bosporus, the streets were uncrowded. I walked from mosque to mosque, then made some calls, agreeing to give a talk at a local college, as I had done on my first visit. I was invited to a dinner party and asked if there was anyone I wished to meet.

"What about Orhan Pamuk?"

"He usually says no."

The next day I gave my talk, at Bogazçi University, a former missionary college on the heights of Bebek, and this being hospitable Turkey, I was guest of honor at a lunch where all the other diners were women. One was an American who was writing a book on all the writers who had lived and written about Istanbul, among them Mark Twain, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles, and a man I bumped into after lunch, John Freely, a New Yorker who has lived and worked here for thirty-five years, the author of many books on Istanbul subjects.

Since working women in male-dominated societies are often more forthright and funnier than women in more liberated places, this campus lunch was lively and pleasant. Afterwards, I spoke to an English literature class on the subject of time and travel, alluding not just to my
return journey but (because the class was studying the Romantic movement) also to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."

They were attentive students of the sort that used to exist on American campuses—modest, studious, intense, omnivorous readers, quoters of Byron, admirers of Shelley, note takers, listeners, not intimidated by esoteric Romanticism. They happened to be reading
Northanger Abbey
—a copy on each desk. They were aware that because they were Turks studying English classics they had to try harder; they had something to prove. And they easily understood what I was saying about my return trip to Turkey and my memories of my long-ago journey, because they got the drift of "Tintern Abbey," where it was and what it stood for:

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet...

Though they hadn't been born when I was last here, these students, because of their learning, could relate to my sentimental journey: we had Wordsworth in common.

From the class on Romanticism, I went to look at the hotel I'd stayed in my first time, the Pera Palas. The building that had once seemed glamorous to me now looked elderly and neglected, and after one drink in the bar I left it and walked along the drizzly boulevards towards Taksim Square.

One of the compelling features of Istanbul is that minutes from a palace or the holiest mosque or the most respectable neighborhood are their opposites—the dive, the hovel, the lower depths. The density of the city allows this proximity. The big-city conceit of the snob is the notion that sleaze is elsewhere, but it is usually only a few streets away.

So there I was, after leaving the Pera Palas, in the twinkling of an eye, in a dingy downstairs bar, the Club Saray, among mostly empty tables, greeting Marjana, who had just joined me.

"You buy me drink?"

"Of course."

She was thin, blond, starved-looking, and sullen. She might have been ill, but what struck me about her was that of all the girls in the bar, dimly lit though it was, she was reading a magazine. Though she had just folded it into her bag, I could see that it was not Turkish but Russian. She had been so engrossed in it, she was the one woman who had not looked up when I'd entered. What was a Russian woman doing here?

"What are you reading?"

That was when she'd put it away. She smiled, and after she'd sat down she said, "Pop stars. Music. Money."

"You're Russian?"

"I live Ukraine"—but it might have been "leave."

"Kiev?"

"No Kiev. Small village." She was sipping a glass of raki.

"Nice place?"

"Not nice. Small!" She shook her head, struggling for words. "No life. No money."

"Chickens?"

"
Da.
Chickens!"

"You come to Istanbul to make money?"

"You have money?" She was thin, with delicate hands and a hungry mouth, and she said "money" like a famished person using a word for food.

"Plenty," I said, and made the money sign with my fingers.

"So buy me another drink."

"You didn't finish this one."

I knew the routine. The conventional view is that these women are idle sauntering floozies, killing time over a drink, lollygagging the day away on a bar stool. No, they are strict and even terrifying timekeepers, especially when they have a pimp to answer to. And it's odd, because "Hurry up," which is their mantra, is not an aphrodisiac and hardly an endearment.

The meter was running. Time is everything to a prostitute. As clock watchers they are keener than lawyers, though the term "solicitor" applies to both, and they share the concept of billable hours, every minute needing to be accounted for in these foot-tapping, finger-drumming professions.

The prostitute also shares the lawyer's fake sympathy, the apparent concern for your welfare, the initial buttonholing how-can-I-help-you?
clucking, the pretense of help that is a way of ensnaring you and making you pay. In both cases, as long as you go on paying you have their full attention, but they are always in charge.

Marjana, I could tell by her sideways glances, was getting signals from a Turkish man, probably her pimp, his heels locked onto the rungs of a chair as he rocked back with a drink in his hand.

"So we go?"

"Where?"

"Not far. Near this place. I like you." The second drink was set down. "I think you are strong man. You are from what country?"

"America."

"Big country. Lots of money. I want to go to America."

"How did you get here, to Turkey?"

"My friend tell me I can make money here. She say, 'Work in café.' Good work." Marjana looked a bit rueful, pursing her lips as she sloshed the raki in her mouth, then swallowed.

"You came—how? Bus? Plane?"

"I fly in plane. Is little money."

"Who's your boss? Ukrainian man?"

"Turk man." She glanced to the side, where the man was still glowering, and she pressed her lips together. Then, with a toss of her head, "We go?"

"Let's talk."

"Talk, talk," she said, irritated and impatient. She leaned over and tapped my knee. "What about fuck?"

I palmed some Turkish lire and put the notes into her hand, a gesture that shut her up but did not calm her. She looked at me as though I might be weird, but the money was in the meter.

"You have family?" I asked. She nodded. "Husband?" She nodded, but more slowly. "Children?"

At first she simply stared; then she began to cry, pressing her knuckles against her eyes. She shook her head and looked miserable. I hung my head, and when I saw her shoes—high heels, scuffed and twisted and damp from the wet streets of Taksim—I felt miserable myself at the sight of her tormented toes.

A hard-faced woman loomed over her and began to mutter. She was plump, in a tight dress, and her potbelly was at the level of my eyes. I recognized the word
prablyema.
Marjana was still sniffling in sorrow.

"What you say to Marjana?" the woman demanded.

"Nothing," I said lamely.

"She cry," the woman said.

Marjana tried to wave the woman away.

"I didn't do anything," I said, and sounded like a ten-year-old. But I had made her remember her small children.

The woman muttered again to Marjana. Tears, recrimination, defiance, accusation, more tears—this was as far from sex as it was possible to be. And at the periphery was a suggestion of violence in the smoldering gaze and threatening posture of the Turkish man.

The woman flicked her fat hand at me, grazing my face with her big fingernails. Though they were plastic glue-ons, they were sharp and claw-like, and could have served as weapons.

"Maybe you go, eh?"

Gladly, I thought. I stood up and backed away, a bit too quickly, but happy to go, saying goodbye. I had guessed that Marjana was one of many women lured to Istanbul and kept against her will—with a family elsewhere, unable to help her. I had wanted to talk, but in such circumstances, in most circumstances, talk is trouble.

***

I GOT MORE NEWS
of the dinner party: "Pamuk said he's coming." I was eager to meet him, not merely because of his well-made novels and his personal history in
Istanbul,
but because, as a passionate writer and self-described graphomaniac, he was probably eccentric, someone who lived at the edge of the world, the solitary soul that all writers must be in order to do their work and live their lives. Writers are always readers, and though they are usually unbalanced, they are always noticers of the world. From an early age I have not been able to rid myself of the notion that the best writers are deeply flawed heroes.

Among the Turkish guests at the party, some of whom were writers, all of whom were polite, patient, and deferential, Pamuk was restless. Rather gangly and bespectacled, he thrashed around as he spoke. He reminded me of someone I knew. He was a taunter, hunching his shoulders, throwing his head back to laugh—and he had a loud, appreciative guffaw. He pulled faces, often clownish ones that his scholar's eyeglasses exaggerated. He was both a mocker and a self-mocker, a buttonholer, a finger wagger, and his consistent mode of inquiry was teasing. He was a
needler, a joker, not a speechifier but a maker of deflating remarks in a smiling and mildly prosecutorial way, like a courtroom wit.

I smiled when it dawned on me that he reminded me of myself—evasive, goofy, slightly moody, ill at ease in a crowd, uncomfortable at formal occasions. Latins look a lot like Turks: I felt he physically resembled me, and he had my oblique habit of affecting to be ignorant and a bit gauche in order to elicit information.

"What do you mean by that?" was his frequent question, demanding that you explain what you just said.

His mother loomed large in his life and in his Istanbul narrative. I asked him what she thought of the book.

"She didn't like my Istanbul book. Then I got a divorce." He smiled. "She wasn't happy about that. But I put her in a book—
My Name Is Red.
Then she was happy."

"I put my mother in a book and she was very unhappy," I said. "She saw it as a betrayal. When my first book was published, almost forty years ago, she wrote me a long letter. I was in Africa at the time. She said the book was a piece of trash. That was her exact word. Trash! 'Thanks, Mom!'"

Pamuk became interested. "You must have been sad about that."

"Strangely, no. I was energized. I think I would have been disturbed if she'd praised the book—I would have suspected her of lying. I thought: I'm not writing to please her. By the way, I kept the letter. I still have it. It was a goad to me."

We were at the dinner table, being served a Turkish meal. While listening attentively to me, Pamuk was absorbing the reactions of the other people, his eyes darting.

"Why did you make a face?" he said to the woman next to me.

She denied she had made a face.

"Was it because we were talking about mothers, and you are a mother?"

"Of course not."

"You did this," Pamuk said, and squinted and showed his teeth and compressed his face into a comic mask.

He spoke about his years as a student, studying English, reading English books, and how as an anonymous Turk with a fluency in English he had taken Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter around Istanbul, pointing out the sights, explaining the history.

"I showed them the city. I was the translator. I was next to them, helping, listening. They had no idea who I was, but they were great writers to me."

Talk of Arthur Miller turned to talk of Marilyn Monroe. I said that I had written an essay about the Sotheby auction of Marilyn's personal effects.

"Expensive things?" Pamuk asked.

"Everything—dresses, books, shoes, broken mirrors, her capri pants, a copy of
The Joy of Cooking
with her scribbles in it, her wobbly dressing table, her junk jewelry. She had a yellow pad of paper and, in her writing, the words 'He doesn't love me.' A cigarette lighter that Frank Sinatra had given her. Also her 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' dress. And her toaster."

Pamuk was delighted by the inventory. He said, "I love catalogues of people's lives. Did you see the auction of Jackie Kennedy's possessions?"

"Yes, but no toasters in that one."

He said he loved minutiae, the revelation in everyday objects. Not the treasures but the yard-sale items, always more telling. It was a novelist's passion, a need to know secrets, to intrude—without seeming to—on other people's lives.

Still eating, he sized me up and said, "You went swimming with Yashar Kemal."

"That's right—thirty-three years ago."

"He is away, in south Anatolia," the host said, because I had also asked how I might get in touch with him. "He is sorry to miss you. He remembered you from that time long ago."

It seemed to me amazing that he was alive and writing, at the age of eighty-two, this man who'd boasted of his Gypsy blood and his upbringing in the wild hinterland of Turkey among bandits and peasants. He had been inspired by Faulkner, another writer who boasted of being a rustic. But Pamuk was a metropolitan, a man on the frontier as all writers are, but essentially a city dweller.