Istanbul
13 October 1995
Another Venice. How could I not love
it? The Bosphorus and its boats. I rest my case. I could happily stay here for
months.
On the other hand, the main problem
is in leaving. My friend at the bookshop tells me that I'm not the only one
with this problem. Ten million Istanbuliots are also trying to leave, and they
don't succeed either.
Having finally got my bearings as
between the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, I reached the Sirkeci railway
station with something of a sigh of relief. I'd found my bearings by the usual
hard method of deliberately losing myself and then walking for hours,
criss-crossing terrain, to establish a kind of psychic grid into which I can
then slot new elements. However my relief was short-lived. So far from being
able to book a train ticket for Izmir tomorrow, I was met by a large sign
saying "Grev". Turkish railways have been on strike for 22 days a
huge public sector strike, and apparently the biggest strike in the history of
Turkey.
In the street outside the British
Consulate, a moment of poetry. The broken pavement has been repaired with sand
and cement. The sand is full of fragments of sea shell. The sea in the city, in
the very ground on which we walk I find this poetic. Not so the man to whom I
spoke. He cursed the feckless builders. They are supposed, by law, to bring
sand from rivers from freshwater beds not from the sea. Sea sand contains
salt. When used for housing, it attracts damp. This is one reason why so many
people suffer from rheumatism. But the sea is so close to hand in this city, so
the temptation to use sea sand is great.
Another small moment of poetry. In a
secondhand bookshop near the Tόnel I found Petropoulos's book Rebetika
Tragoudhia, No way I can afford it. Price 125 dollars. But what a thing of
beauty. On page 206, the dying man's last song "I am dying, mother...
bury me deep... and when I am buried, bring my two brothers to my graveside...
and let them, then, kill the one who killed me...
In the heat of conversation with a
Turk recently arrived from Berlin, a man much like myself, I was complaining of
how nobody sings any more... I mentioned the book. "Ha! I saw that book
too! Wonderful book!" A moment of communion with a total stranger, over
deep things of the heart. My faith in books, and in the preservation of memory,
renewed.
And then a small corner, a
home-from-home, the kind of place where I am truly happy. The small alleys of
chandlers shops just upstream of the Galata Bridge. All huddled together, a
last remnant of the old Galata as was, caught between the thundering roadway
and the quayside of the Bosphorus.
Here are the sellers of ship things.
Each with their own detail specialisation. Each with their own acute knowledge.
Each able to supply or make the smallest part for the innermost workings of
the engines buried in the bowels of the smokiest old ferryboat. Shops that
display their wares on the sidewalk of the narrow streets. Pulleys. Cleats.
Stays. Chain in every dimension. Steel cable on large wooden drums. Steel wire
and plate. Bronze and brass in sheet or rod sectioned square, round or
hexagonal. Paints. Varnishes. Old rags. Ropes. Valves. Taps. Nails. Screws.
Buoys. Life jackets. Sou'westers.
At the heart of the huddle is a
small, dilapidated mosque. Next to it, an ablution area. The men of this
enclave are observing Muslims. Nearby, a tea stall and a seller of grilled lamb.
What is extraordinary is to watch
the men at work.
On a patch of black, oil-stained
earth, with wooden cable drums all around, a small thickset man with a green
skullcap is wrestling with a multi-core steel cable almost the thickness of a
man's wrist. He is splicing an eye into the end of it. Hard, brute steel being
bent to the will of man. He has a four-foot metal marlin spike which he uses to
part the strands of cable. He hammers the cable onto the spike, and then takes
a strand in both hands and forces it down through the opened hole. The beauty
is in the neat lie of the cable as it follows the twist of the cable and snugs
down against it. That is splicing an act of forcing, running seemingly
counter to nature, but resulting in a harmonious consonance.
At a small workshop, housing two
lathes and a vertical drill, a small queue of men is gathered at the door. Some
hold pieces of paper, with design specifications of a component part. The
others hold items of metalwork that they want drilled, finished, or created
wholly anew as a copy of what they already have. The lathe-turner is a master
of his craft. You come to him, you tell him what you want, and he makes it for
you, out of metal, on the spot. Carefully measuring calipers, vernier guage.
Filing rough edges, lovingly running a blackened thumb over the finished
product to ensure its smoothness. And at the door the men stand and watch, or
sit on low chairs on the pavement, fingering beads and talking of this and that.
I walk to the quayside. In
higgledy-piggledy array, a cluster of medium-sized freight lorries, tarpaulins
roped down behind. Drivers snooze in the afternoon sun. A seller of nicknacks,
even poorer than the drivers themselves, tries to interest them in his small
wares. From the opposite shore of the Horn tug boats arrive and moor alongside.
They are then loaded with goods from the lorries human chains of men tossing
boxes to each other across the gap. Seems to be boxes of toiletries. And carton
drinks. Nearby, waiting to be trans-shipped, large drums of Shell oil.
Quadruple-size sacks of potatoes. Ditto onions. A group of men are sprawled on
the onion sacks, chaffing and chatting and whiling the time away. Their leader
calls me over, as I pass. While I try to ascertain the purpose and the
destination of all this freight (I imagine that is it for the big liners moored
downstream of the Galata Bridge), he musters up a sufficiency of English to
tell me the following: "I have friend in London. Look his address. Jon.
In Chelsea. My friend gay. He likes to fuck. You like to fuck? Fuck good,
eh?" The rest of the company concurred that fuck was indeed good, and fell
into a contented musing as I went on my way.
A man tells me that this is the very
spot where Lord Byron, freshly arrived from England, stepped ashore in the
uniform of an admiral borrowed from his uncle in order to impress the
locals. Possibly so.