Istanbulistan: An Istanbul Story
After a hiatus, the adventure continues..
My apartment is small, though arguably the largest I have had yet to live in. It sits in a quaint neighborhood that — according to the descendants of its ‘natives’ — was established by the British who came — along with the French — to the Ottoman Empire’s help against Russia over Crimea. The 1853 war is seared in the memory of every product out of Turkey’s nation-builder of an education system for being the first war in which the Ottomans sought foreign financing. (£200,000 taken from the British Empire worth about £25.5 billion today.) Beginning of the end, so it goes.
(Here, I could go on and on about my neighborhood’s tree-lined streets that not only relieve the burning pavement, but also mask the ugly architecture that surely wasn’t inherited from the British. It has none of the architectural charm of my beloved Beyoğlu, but has all the class that now castrated Istiklal once exuded. Its churches are varied in size and architecture; it even hosts a street that reminds me every time of San Francisco or Lisbon (which coincidentally, is consistent with my theory that San Francisco and Istanbul had a love child (wink! The Golden Horn connection!) and dubbed it Lisboa. It’s a narrow street bifurcated by tram tracks that emerge from the back of a grandiose church, flow downhill and disappear into billions of years of secrets that dye the Bosphorus blue.)
In early July, I decided to play hookey from work along with my neighbor to embark on mid-week/midday boozing on one of the Prince Islands. The ferry ride would take about an hour and spit us out at the end of a wormhole to an earlier time that surely looks better now than it actually was. Nostalgia has a way of filtering memories with lukewarm, sepia tones.
After a quick stroll under a lazy midday sun, we sat down in a randomly selected restaurant, one in a row of identical dominoes. Our only adult commitment was to our pooches. We would have to keep things civil and be home to walk our furry love plugs around 6pm. Five solid hours of drinking. Easily a half-liter of rakı kinda day. There are some lessons in life you learn, but not care to apply. And thirties are a great decade for those kinds of educated-errors. But not on that day. The heat was too excessive to leave room for any other excesses.
Over timidly consumed bites, we told bold tales. Some true as far as memory remains, some embellished only with a sparkle.
By the time the bottle was empty and it was tea o’clock, we hopped on the Kadıköy -bound ferry. It was as packed as the midday ride. Not caring much for standing for an hour with stomachs full of anise-kissed liquor, we parked our bums on seaweed-colored anchoring ropes coiled in one corner. As our conversation drifted back to boys (no, that’s not all we talk about!), the girl who had been perched up on the side of the ropes turned around and started talking to us. Came in mid-sentence, uninvited.
I was delightfully tipsy and welcomed her breach. She had a young face; no wrinkles. But, like me, she had freckles. The reddish dots had settled for a quiet life across her forehead. Unlike their cousins to the south, who were rambunctious, likely drunk from having conquered the highest, roundest, fleshiest cheeks on her otherwise chiseled face. She had an easy but shy smile. Her light-brown eyes flashed with streaks of blue, yellow, honey and green. She would look at us, then turn her head mid-sentence to gaze into the summer blue that could be the color of her headscarf; of secrets of the Bosphorus, of laborious distances that hum with cold blue winds, all the same. (Blue. Packed with meaning. So lonely, so true.)
Having picked up the name Ozan from our conversation, she confessed to having issues with a certain Ozan herself. Dove right into the story, as if she had been waiting for her turn all along.
Then, just as the plot was revealed, it thickened. Our ferry mate had not one, but two Ozans in her life. The leading Ozan is her husband of five years. Ozan doesn’t take her places. Ozan likes to color with pastels, never crosses the lines. But, she is wild. She can hardly contain that roaring, raw feminine energy with that aloof blue scarf.
Her other Ozan is a man she declared her love to. She said they had never been physically intimate, yet she felt love cascade right out of her. When she could no longer control her bustling kısrak power, she first told her husband, then his wife that it was him she loved, Ozan-2. Full stop. The platonic lover, Ozan-2’s wife, completely horrified and beside herself, told our ferry mate that she would harm her if she came anywhere near her husband. And what did our friend do? She took out a restraining order against her.
The craziest thing may have been the nonchalant way in which she told this story. I wondered if it was rehearsed, shaped with a thousand of her mind’s chisels. Carefully constructed with delicately placed words, accents, and staccato breaths in between well-manicured rests. No. That’s bullshit. She was sincere. She was naked underneath layers of manufactured skin.
Having consumed half a liter of rakı under the torturous midday sun, my friend and I were dumbfounded by the absurd reality in which we found ourselves. This unusual woman, who injected herself into our conversation, had suddenly shared intricate details of her mahrem with us. I wondered, could her detached, nonchalant manner ever be bestowed on a confidant the same way?
Anonymity is the ultimate invisibility cloak. A carte blanche for the self. Strangers merge paths, strangers swap the strangest of stories. Strangers dissolve into strangeness.
As the ferry glided across the Kadıköy harbor, she asked if she could take a selfie to remember the day by. We gladly agreed. After we put her in a cab and waved her good-bye, we stopped at the first bar on the way home to freshen up with a round of cold beer. While we were still trying to digest the day’s grand finale, my phone beeped. A picture downloaded. Our pale-faced, blue-headscarf-laden friend and her countless freckles in the foreground; our rakı and sun-kissed faces in the background with plenty of smiles to go all around. There we were. Three very different stories intertwined for a brief hour as we worm-holed our way back to Istanbul’s bustling rhythm from the lethargic sounds of the Island’s pedestrian and equine footsteps.
I thanked her for the picture. We wished each other well. Genuine nice-to-meet you’s were exchanged. In fact, it might have been one of my sincerest.
Half-an-hour and half-a-liter of beer later, another message. Then another:
- Just spoke to my mom. Says hello.
- Btw, a quick confession.
- I immediately noticed you when you got on the ferry with your friend.
- You then came and sat next to me.
- Then we talked. When I first heard your voice, I thought it was sweet.
No. This wasn’t a woman wild with unhinged sexual energy hitting on me.
This was a woman, who got to be herself, got to take all her layers off in public; layers of bullshit, layers of residue thick with judgment of ‘the other’, the villain. A woman just like me.
There was I, inebriated with the uniqueness of the experience, the richness of its texture.
We found a connection, acceptance and ‘one’ in the ‘other.’
It might have been that day that I came up with the idea of drawing a massive figure on the dark grey wall of my claustrophobic bedroom: A woman in her niqab with shades of brightest colors bursting out of the tiny slit left for a rectangular tunnel vision.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light — spelled out in every color.
