05 January 2006
ISTANBUL: "I will see you in Sisli tomorrow," said Ebru Bozacioglu. I was calling late on Friday night from the Moonlight Pansiyon in Sultanahmet. Ebru, a Turkish friend from graduate school, had promised to help track down the famous novelist Orhan Pamuk. It was 2 degrees and snowing in Istanbul. The dark cobblestone streets behind the Blue Mosque were reminiscent of the impending violence Pamuk pairs with melancholy to evoke his city.
It is true that the sodium lighting is sparse at night. It is also true that shadows can be cast very long and belong mainly to lonely men wearing dark clothes.
"This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying. This is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for 150 years," Pamuk writes in his latest book, "Istanbul: Memories of a City."
The next day I met Ebru in front of the Marmara Hotel in Taksim Square. The wet snow was still falling and my pants were splattered with mud. After warming up, we headed to Sisli.
The taxi dropped us off on a steep hill off Tesvikiye Street, where Pamuk occupies a penthouse apartment. He has lived all his 53 years in this building, formerly the site of an Ottoman pasha's garden.
In broad daylight, the neighborhood of Nisantasi could be anywhere in Paris' 16th arrondissement. It is very far from the melancholic city on the Bosphorus where gentle crimes are committed by turbaned fishermen, something straight out of a Pamuk fantasy.
Instead, a Zara megastore has claimed a block east of his building, joining forces with Emporio Armani and Guess. Teenagers in blue neckties swarm out of lycees and cause commotion on redbrick sidewalks. This is serious shopping territory for women in fur coats. When bored, they seek novelty at the Starbucks on Vali Konagi Street.
The only vestiges of Old Istanbul are inside the antique shops of the Pasaj Tuhafiye. There you can buy faded photographs of grand viziers for $30 or an Ottoman treasury bill from 1903 at 4-percent interest.
Pamuk says he likes to watch re-runs of 1950s Turkish films because they transport him back to the city of old gardens, Bosphorus views and broken-down mansions.
"I sometimes forget I am watching a film; stupefied by melancholy, I feel as if I am watching my own past," he writes in "Istanbul."
A high-profile trial on December 16 jarred Pamuk back to the contentious politics of modern Turkey, however.
It is at moments like these that the idea of taking pleasure in the world, a childhood tenet, finds its death by poisoning.
The best-selling novelist appeared in a courthouse opposite the apartment where his grandmother had lived for 40 years. As is now well known, Pamuk stands accused of denigrating Turkish identity for comments made to a Zurich daily a year ago. According to Article 301 of the new Turkish penal code, he could face up to three years in jail.
It is no surprise that Pamuk's trial, postponed on a technicality, has become a media circus. After all, here is the intellectual Republican with an expensive address descending from his ivory tower to engage monsters shored up by a tide of uncertainty.
At a bookstore on Tesvikiye Street, where you can find English-language versions of Pamuk's "The Black Book," the vendor says his novels are selling like hotcakes. Some people shrug with indifference when asked about the Turkish bestseller, however, arguing that his vision of life in contemporary Turkey is long on artifice and short on plot.
In "Snow," from 2002, the main character is a failed poet who travels to Kars, a dusty city on the Armenian border. There he investigates a suicide epidemic among "headscarf girls," while municipal elections are about to swerve toward an Islamist party.
In a surrealist chain of events, Kars is paralyzed by a blizzard that magnifies its social ills. The usual silence, broken only by barking dogs, makes place for political intrigues, random violence and impossible love. Characters live in inner exile, or else they die.
Pamuk enjoys the silence of his penthouse apartment in Nisantasi. But it is different when right-wing columnists (and some Islamists) force him into silence with embedded threats.
In a December 19 commentary for The New Yorker, Pamuk reiterated his belief that the black spots in Turkish history need public airing. The taboo surrounding Ottoman events and the treatment of Armenians in eastern Anatolia at the beginning of the 20th century is very much alive. Open any Turkish history text for a sampling.
At first, Pamuk was quiet when he found his books to be the object of controversy. Then a provincial governor ordered the burning of "Snow" last summer. What stains Turkey's history, Pamuk argued in his commentary, is the impossibility to speak freely.
"I believe that in today's Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians [is] a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters [are] inextricably linked," he wrote.
Historical truth is elusive and the best substitute is probably a constant competition of ideas. As long as scholars engage in research and Ottoman records remain accessible, it should be no recipe for media circuses or fatwas. And yet, timed as it is with heated debates about Turkey's EU candidacy, the Pamuk trial is one more in a long list of political scandals.
"I hate him," says an upper-crust matron at the Cafe Wien. The wife of a retired diplomat who lived for many years in California, she regards Pamuk as the ultimate traitor.
"I am also hating him," echoes her companion, an art historian of about 70. Our conversation in the mirrored cafe has drawn attention, with some of the posh customers concerned about the vehemence. They switch from English to Turkish and my friend-turned-translator Ebru paraphrases their words.
While it is understandable that less-educated people are willing to berate a "white Turk" like Pamuk for flouting tradition, the kind of virulent chauvinism exuded by these women of privilege comes as a surprise.
Is Pamuk not a product of Turkey's Westernizing elite? Did he not grow up in a building on which there was a piano on each floor? Wasn't his family also claimed by the downfall of the Ottoman Empire?
After the storm and in the middle of the holiday lull, Turkey is still festering in debate. A column by Gunduz Aktan in the daily Radikal on Saturday charged against liberal intellectuals who want the authorities to recognize the "genocide" (the word is heavily guarded by quotation marks). As in the Russia of Vladimir Putin, the very label of "liberal intellectual" can imply a measure of disloyalty to the state.
Basak, a 35-year-old banker, tells me at a party in Erenkoy that Turks have always felt alone. "We are surrounded by three-fourths of water and four-fourths of enemies. What do you expect?" he asks.
Pamuk's neighborhood of Nisantasi is worlds apart from Sultanahmet where I am staying. But I am sure the Tesvikiye Mosque (built by Sultan Abdulnecid Han in 1853) is never far from his thoughts.
The courthouse in Sisli will reconvene on February 7 to hear his case. Ali Babacan, Turkey's economy minister and chief EU negotiator, told a private television channel two weeks ago the Pamuk trial was a blow to the country's image. A December headline in The Economist also addressed Turkey's image problem.
It did not improve when Dennis MacShane, a British member of Parliament for the Labor Party, was punched in the face and kicked in the shins for attending Pamuk's trial. In statements to the press, MacShane said Turkey would never join the EU if the trial proceeded.
"If the trial resumes in February, the presiding judge will be pressured to drop the case. But then the average Turk will think the Europeans are tampering with our justice system. We are caught between the sword and the wall," says Basak.
"Speaking about walls, the Americans made a huge media circus lately about a 200-year-old wall they found in Manhattan. It's funny for us in Istanbul because wherever you dig you're bound to hit a 2,000-year-old wall," says Taylan, 37, also at the party in Erenkoy. And history can sometimes prove to be a curse, he might have added.
As I write, the muezzins have begun to cry into the night of Sultanahmet. It starts at the mosque next to my hotel on Orhaniye Street. Then it extends to Yeni Camii, the new mosque built 400 years ago and now facing the Galata Bridge.
I imagine the chants spreading from there to the giant Suleymaniye Mosque overlooking the Golden Horn, built in the 16th century by Suleyman the Magnificent. The calls to prayer are not recordings, but real voices comfortable with their quivering and imperfection. And at night, they penetrate into your black-and-white dreams.
