In Europe (72 page)

And Odessa? My old acquaintance Natalya exclaims that she soon hopes to take another holiday ‘in Europe’. Edvard, who is busy setting up a commercial radio station, complains all evening about the trouble he has getting into Europe, even for a brief business trip. ‘Waiting in consulates, waiting for permits, sometimes it takes months. I'm serious: it's almost as bad as back in the days of the Iron Curtain. Only now the barriers have been thrown up in the West, instead of here.’

There can be no mistake about it: here in Odessa, people think a great deal and often about Europe, more than the Europeans themselves. The next morning I have an appointment with Charel Krol-Dobrov, a professor of European Studies at the University of Odessa. ‘This is a country for advanced students only,’ he feels. ‘In Holland, the border of Europe is clear: it's the sea. But here? Where does it start? Where does it end? Looking at Europe from the East, you get a different perspective. Western Europe has always been content with itself, while people on the eastern borders have always been faced with the question: do we belong, or don't we? That's why there's so much talk in Eastern Europe about the nature of Europe, much more than in the West. What is Europe? What should Europe be? What should Europe become?’

He tells me about the old Russian dichotomy between Slavophiles and pro-Westerners, and about how the communists nurtured that dichotomy after their own fashion.‘Now that old debate seems to have become obsolete, because the communists have lost and, implicitly, so have the Slavophiles. But here in this city it remains a lively issue. Here people feel the Asian blood in them, but also the European blood, they must come to terms with both of them, and that has been going on for centuries.’

Outside, on the boulevard, we hear a woman singing. She is standing beneath a big black umbrella to protect herself from the sun, but it seems as though she is still on stage at the opera. In her old voice, she sings arias from
Carmen
,
Tosca
,
Aida
,
The Marriage of Figaro
and
Rigoletto
, an entirely European repertoire. Charel Krol-Dobrov cannot help but laugh: ‘Who is best able to judge movement? The person on the train? Or the person standing outside, watching?’

This time I have booked a berth on the
Passat
, for the same trip I once made on the
Briz
, but now in the opposite direction. The harbour, as we move out to sea, is lit by the evening sun. Lingering, melancholy notes – a tonality they're always very good at here – drift across the quay and the decks. The smoke from the ship's funnels leaves a thick stripe across the sky, and then the city glides away, the green boulevard, the opera house triumphant on the hill. A yellow pilot boat moves along with us; the pilot, an old man, is drinking coffee on the bridge. The
Passat
threads its way through the line of ships rusting along the coast. And then we head into the Black Sea, that strange, half-dead sea, that ‘wasteland of water’ as Paustovsky called her, that sea where the twins ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarity’ first met.

For a full day, there is no coastline in sight. The ship, riding high and empty, bobs across the waves like a beer can. In the restaurant, overgrown with plastic geraniums, meals are served in shifts and according to a strict timetable. Ukrainian girls in bikinis sun themselves on deck, the eyes of the Turkish traders seem about to pop out of their heads, tourists play cards and sleep. In and out of the restaurant three times a day, the rolling of the sea, dolphins before the bow, white foam behind, no-man's-land.

FROM ANCIENT TIMES CONSTANTINOPLE WAS THE HINGE BETWEEN
East and West, the final bulwark of the Roman Empire, the wealthiest metropolis between London and Peking, the terminus of the Chinese silk route, the advance beacon of Europe.

And today?

From the Black Sea, the first thing one sees are the green hills of Kilyos, behind them the elegant houses and gardens where Irfan Orga once spent the last, light summer of his childhood, and amid them the modern suburbs of Istanbul, lying in folds across the hillsides like cotton wool. We are sailing into the Bosphorus. The villas glide by left and right, one more extravagant than the other, with carved wooden balconies, stoops and terraces looking out on the water, brightly coloured gardens, trees, a village square, a minaret, a little wharf, a few cafés, a beach.

It is 7 a.m., but the sun is already hot. We pass a tiny fishing boat, the nets half spread in the water, three tanned and weathered men wave to the girls on the
Passat
. The great bridge between Europe and Asia lies in the distance, a flimsy thread being crossed by hundred of bugs and beetles.

We approach the heart of the city. I have said so before: here, time obviously stopped in 1948. The dozens of ferries full of fathers with briefcases and mothers with shopping, the rusty, worldly-wise freighters from Sebastopol, Odessa and Piraeus, the bright-red tugs, the oil fumes, the glistening water: everything exudes the spirit of work and trade, no frills.

The European part of the city resembles old Barcelona, except for the occasional, echoing call to prayer. The markets are full of shouts and aromas, the stalls overflowing with milk and honey, bulging with herbs,
chicken and fish, with cherries the size of plums, plums the size of apples, with vegetables of a thousand varieties. On Istiklal Caddesi, boys surf on the bumper of an old tram, their feet sliding over the rails. In the middle of the day, loudspeakers everywhere issue the call to prayer. This is Muslim country, yes, but the baroque shopping gallery where I have lunch could just as easily be Brussels, or Milan. Istanbul, like Odessa, is an amalgamated city, a city that must come to terms with all these different identities, without choosing one or the other.

I stay at the Pera Palas, an antique hotel built in 1892 as an extension of the Orient Express, a cool resting place after the exhausting train trip through the Balkans. The building breathes a nostalgic chic, an ancient lift creaks up and down all day, right through the middle of the stairwell. Gold and marble glisten in the immense halls. In the big, flaking bathrooms you can sit on the same toilet as Greta Garbo, stare out of the same window as Empress Sissi of Austria, and lie in the same bed as King Zog of Albania. The TV is turned up loudly in the room where Trotsky slept: 204.

The loveliest suite here is held eternally for Mustafa Kemal Paşsa – known from 1934 as Kemal Atatürk, the ‘father of all Turks’. A porter takes me by the hand, lets me peek around the door. It is a small, silent sanctuary: a bed, a bathroom, two easy chairs, a desk with a couple of photographs and some papers. So this was the Istanbul pied-à-terre of the military dictator, this hero of the First World War who reined in the chaos of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, drove out the foreign occupiers and led the country powerfully and energetically into the modern age.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Atatürk was able to impose secularisation simply by decree, an unparalleled revolution in the Islamic world: women were no longer allowed to wear veils, men no longer the fez, polygamy was banned, women were given the vote, the Islamic lunar calendar was replaced with the Gregorian, the Arabic script with the Roman alphabet. Instead of Islamic law, Swiss law was adopted, almost word for word, Sunday became the official day of rest, all Koran schools were closed and Islam was to respect all secular legislation.

In recent decades the father of the fatherland has been honoured more than ever, despite – or perhaps because of – the country's new Islamisation.
One statue after another was raised, his portrait hung in every café and classroom. He was seen as the symbol of the great leap forward, the containment of the power of the believers, the definitive break with the ‘sick man of Europe’, as the Ottoman Empire was once called. Still, Atatürk was himself the product of that very same empire, an empire that was in reality less feeble than was often supposed. Like France, for example, Turkey had started a programme of modernisation as early as the mid-nineteenth century. All manner of reforms later ascribed to Atatürk actually began under the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II: the reform of the educational system, the modernisation of the army, the reorganisation of the legislative system and government finances, the pushing back of the influence of the Muslim elite, the westernisation of clothing, the building of roads and railways.

It was under Abdülhamid that a direct overland connection was established with Western Europe: the first Orient Express steamed into the city on 12 August, 1888. The Pera Palas became the outpost for the Western elite. During those same years, eighteen new technical schools were established, as well as a university and a school of medicine. Atatürk's own youth is a shining example of the possibilities offered by modernised Ottoman education around 1900.

Atatürk's separation of church and state – Islam was to be practised only as a private faith, without legal or political influence – was also, in fact, an enactment of existing opinion. In the nineteenth century in particular, many Islamic thinkers became inspired by the modernisation of the West. They arrived at standpoints, based on the Koran, that were in many ways comparable to modern Western thought. They entertained a great many ideas about intellectual freedom, about the role of the individual and about the separation of church and state.

Alongside all this there is also Atatürk the despot, and he too, more than sixty years after his death, exerts at least equal influence on Turkish society. The country's secular character, so hated by the religious and the fundamentalist, was jealously guarded by the army. In 1961 the military did not bat an eyelid when it hanged the democratically elected prime minister, Adnan Menderes, for ‘corruption’ and for ‘conspiring with the Islamic parties’. During a military coup in 1980, thousands of opponents were detained without due process. As late as 1998, the generals, acting
‘in the name of Atatürk’, brusquely shoved aside the first democratically elected Islamic government. The Turks even have their own jargon for this: the ‘deep state’ as opposed to the ‘official-but-superficial state’, a ‘soft coup’, ‘pasha coups’ or ‘media coups’.

It is 7 p.m. on Friday, rush hour for the ferries. People come pouring up the gangplanks carrying bags, toolboxes, baskets full of chickens, fishing gear, bicycles, even tables and chairs. Vendors of roasted ears of corn, sunflower seeds, peeled cucumbers and fresh fish jostle each other on the quayside. There are people hawking dancing puppets, breathtakingly pink children's petticoats, light-blue plastic birds with purple feathers. A blind man plays the violin, his friend sings a sorrowful song into a badly distorting microphone.

The toy vendors have two new dolls: an electric blonde doll that rocks a baby, and a green commando that crawls along with his rifle, producing regular flashes of light and deadly sounds. A little further along a man is sitting beside old bathroom scales: for five cents you can weigh yourself. The little fishing boats moored along the quay bob on the waves, the crew are roasting fish on grills set up in the middle of the deck, hopping like acrobats with every wave that washes in. The beggars are out in full force. Within a minute I am accosted by an old man, a woman with one leg and a pitiful young girl with a baby. The fishmongers shout, the electronic dolls quack and rattle, the ships’ horns blast, the blind man sings through it all: this is the quay by the bridge across the Golden Horn at 7 p.m. on a Friday.

The ferry to Büyükada, one of the islands in the Sea of Marmara, is a rusty tub full of people excited to be escaping the city, even if only for a bit. I start talking to a young student. She tells me the same stories about newcomers that one hears often in Amsterdam, only these immigrants are from her own country. She is frightened by the advancing countryside, she sees tens of thousands of young people moving to the city each year, full of illusions, only to become hopelessly bogged down after a time, without work, without a family. Fundamentalist groups are popping up all over. ‘Istanbul is losing itself,’ she says. ‘There is no more movement, no more change. Everything has become frozen by the polarisation in the city between rich and poor, and between modern
thinking and fundamentalism. The situation is becoming more tense every day.’

Soon afterwards the city would literally quake and tear, thousands of people would die, but that was all still to come and we were able to enjoy the evening without a real care. A cheerful man is trying to sell knives, he demonstrates the quality of the blades by artfully cutting strips from a plastic bottle. Tea and fruit juice are served in huge quantities. A few boys on the afterdeck raise their voices in song. The air is balmy, the sea is dazzling. And meanwhile Istanbul runs on along the Asiatic shore, the city rolling on between the coast and the hills like a broad, greyish-white band, dozens of kilometres, hundreds of thousands of apartment blocks, ten, twelve million people who dream and want to do something with their lives, crowded together at the brim of the Asian continent.

One Sunday I wander a bit aimlessly through Fener, the old Greek neigh-bourhood. Some of the houses here are still wooden. In a square there is a tiny carousel, pushed by its owner. A group of children waits excitedly, a few coins clenched in their fists. According to my city guide, the names of these little streets are actually of an unparalleled poetry: Street of the Thousand Earthquakes, the Lane of the Bristly Beard, the Alley of the Chicken Which Cannot Fly, Plato's Cul-de-Sac, the Street of Nafie with the Golden Hair, the Street of Ibrahim of the Black Hell. Tantalising aromas waft over from an antique bakery. When I stop for a moment, the baker comes outside and hands me a sweet pretzel. He will not accept my money: ‘This is how we make them, stranger. Taste it!’

Istanbul is still the centre of the Orthodox Church. Strictly speaking, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople holds the same position as the Pope, but it takes me a long time to find the Orthodox Vatican tucked away in a corner of this working-class neighbourhood. The complex is surrounded by thick walls. In the church a priest is being ordained, the pews are full and in the courtyard families are standing around talking. The atmosphere is festive. The priests are all elderly men, the seminary was closed thirty years ago by the Turks, but it seems as though there's a revival in progress. The patriarchate still looks like a fort, though its perimeter walls have been daubed with graffiti: ‘Long live our Islamic struggle!’