ISTANBUL
To fall in love with Istanbul is normal; to fall in love in Istanbul is heaven on earth....
I would go to the four corners of the world for this man, so what was three quarters of an hour by bus through the snarled-up streets of Istanbul? The traffic was so slow that my fellow passengers were slumped in various florid states of coma, like a bunch of people with sleeping sickness. One boy flopped right forward with his head in his lap; many sat absolutely still and unmoving under woolly hats. The hats were good. I came to this most exotic of cities expecting silks, Pictures by Alexis Krikorian spices, carpets, all the rubies and pearls of the Orient. Instead I bought woolly hats against the torrential rain. I made up my mind instantly about both the city and the man. Coming from the airport across the Galata bridge, with the lights of the mosques on either side and the hill climbing up into central Istanbul ahead, I knew I would love this place. It has always, throughout its long and sometimes bloody history, signified romance. This was Byzantium; it was Constantinople. It was the heart of the Holy Roman Empire; the sumptuous seat of the Ottoman sultans; the last stop on the Orient Express from Venice. It is a ravishing, turbulent, beautiful city where you are always aware of the Other - just across the dark waters of the Bosphorus, beyond the ancient wooden villas on the waterfront, dance the lights of Asia, as much an idea of mystery and decadence as a continent.
I met Daniel on my first night in Istanbul, in a fish restaurant in the Kumpkapi area, one of the oldest parts of the city. In the past this place teemed with sailors and women and drinking dens, but now it's full of restaurants with fairy lights round the windows and musicians playing romantic music. There was a group of us there together. We ate fresh fish - calamari, white anchovies and huge shrimps which were brought to the table for our inspection. The restaurant owner lifted a lobster's arms to show us it was alive, but I prefer not to be on speaking terms with my dinner.
A blonde diner in a tigerprint blouse and a scarf around her hips was sidling into her version of the belly dance when Daniel arrived. He had sharp cheekbones and a sharp mind and was treated with great affection by other people in the group; I thought he must be affectionate himself. He was beautiful and turned out to be gentle and funny and passionate about the things in life that matter. As our group idled over last drinks, the waiters formed a circle and started dancing themselves, moving perfectly in unison. Perhaps it was a traditional dance or perhaps they did it every night to show their visitors how spontaneous and joyful they were. No matter. It was fun.
The Turkish people are said in all the guide books to be extremely friendly, though in my experience that was limited to one half of the population. Turkish men are extremely friendly - Labrador friendly, bounding up to you at every opportunity to offer you tea or the guided tour of their carpet shops. I accepted the invitation only once, after visiting the Blue Mosque.
From the outside this is one of the most exquisite buildings I have ever seen anywhere. It does not strive upwards like the cathedrals of Europe, forcing their attentions on their God. Instead its multiplicity of white domes ripple onwards in waves of stone, as if to suggest expansiveness of experience and belief. It has six minarets, unheard of except in the Kaaba Mosque at Mecca, which hastily added another to retain its pre-eminence in the minaret department. Those at the Blue Mosque are slender, delicate, tracing faery fingers against the sky while seagulls from the Bosphorus wheel round and round them.Inside the mosque, which was designed in 1609 to reflect the azure blue of heaven, every surface is covered with pattern - flowers, leaves, swirls, a hallucinatory magic carpet of shifting shapes. High into the far reaches of the dome it stretches, this ceramic wallpaper, in a strange symbiosis of the domestic and the divine. So too do hundreds of wires supporting a circular wrought-iron chandelier. It is laden with hundreds of little lanterns but their light flickers too close to the ground to illuminate the vast space above. The effect of the wires is rather as if some giant hand has reached down and scored out all the beauty of the decoration with crude black strokes.
At the back of the mosque, these craftsmen who were capable of rendering stone into the finest filigree, erected wooden grilles where the women sat. The fretwork was heavy, ponderous, the work of artisans, not artists. From behind them, the women could have glimpsed only dimly the beauty of the interior, the presence of their god. What profligacy by the building's creators, to throw away the grace of their vision by excluding half the human race.
It was pouring when I left the Blue Mosque, and I was glad to ditch the coldness of religious certainty for the flawed warmth of humanity. I accepted an invitation from Arjan, swarthy and with a particularly Turkish moustache, to visit his carpet shop, the Phoenix. Little glasses of apple tea were brought, a deliciously tart drink that may have been what people drank in old Istanbul's sherbert shops; it certainly has little connection with tea. I told Arjan I couldn't afford to buy, but he spread carpet after carpet on the floor, with that dazzling disregard for effort that is the mark of eastern salesmen. There were silk carpets, wool and cotton carpets, kilims, sumacs from Mount Ararat, adorned with embroidered birds and animals because Noah's Ark is supposed to be stranded there. Many carpets, he said, were made for girls' dowry chests, though for some reason they had to be changed every two years, which seemed an ominous portent for the men they might be involved with.
In between talking about the traditions embodied in the carpets, he took over my mobile phone and showed me how it worked, something I hadn't grasped in ten months of ownership. 'There are naughty people out there who will send you a virus,' he warned, about the Bluetooth feature I didn't know the phone possessed. After many glasses of apple tea he finally offered to cook me a traditional Turkish dinner, but I suspected I might be the dessert and finally extricated myself.
Later, another kind Turkish man - a writer and publisher who had fallen foul of the country's Mikadoish laws - showed me an Istanbul I couldn't have seen from the guide books. 'In this place,' he said, pointing to a sunken bath from Roman times that sits in the middle of the historic Sultanahmet district, 'protestors went on hunger strike for three days.' At the bottom of the Hippodrome, where athletics and chariot races were held in Roman times, he talked about the revolt which happened here in 532 - the Nike Revolt, though nothing to do with running shoes. A staid fountain bestowed by the German people stands there now.
This city, now beautiful, now brutal, has a way of cloaking the barbarities of its past in the glamour of the Orient. We went to the Four Seasons, a five star hotel just round the corner from the Topkapi Palace. As you walked in the entrance you were assailed by the heavy scent of roses; massive globes of flowers stood in tall vases and the atmosphere hummed with the hushed tones of luxury.
Yet this was once the Sultanahmet prison and the writer had come here to visit friends of his imprisoned during the 1968 student riots. It was dark and dingy and shrieking with noise. No-one could tell who was there in the gloom, so people were constantly shouting to be heard. It was hard to believe it, looking at the red and gold silk hangings, the sumptuous gold and glass fittings. Later I had coffee in the garden room overlooking the former exercise yard. It came with a jug of hot milk, a tray of dainty shortbreads and perhaps an added edge from the knowledge of what this used to be.
On my last night in Istanbul I met Daniel in a bar we'd been in earlier in the week. I had moved to a little backstreet hotel behind the Blue Mosque by then. My room had a four poster bed with Turkish carpet round the top and the sound of Turkish pop from moving vehicles pounded in at all hours of the night. In the morning you saw women in headscarves hanging out the windows, beating their carpets.
The bar where we met was in a trendy little alley at the bottom of the main street in Taxim, Istanbul's modern city centre. It had ornate chairs with red flock velvet and carved wooden tops and Daniel leaned back in his as he told me he was gay. So we were to be friends, then, 'passionate friends,' I hoped. This term is mostly used for same sex relationships where there is a profound and often spiritual bond. It lasts longer and runs deeper than romantic love and feminist writers refuse to believe there is no sex involved, though those of us brought up in Catholic cultures have little difficulty grasping the concept.
After that we went clubbing, into little gay bars which Daniel said were in a timewarp because I was the only woman in a throbbing sea of Turkish men. He said he didn't dance so I danced with a friendly man standing beside us and Daniel said this was beautiful. Then he danced with me and I was happy and maybe he was too. I asked him why he didn't go with one of the men in the club, but he said, 'No. Tonight I am with you,' which may be the nicest thing a man has ever said to me.In the taxi back I was distraught. I had been with someone I adored and now it was over. The taxi driver looked sympathetic and handed me a couple of tissues. I asked him to let me off at the Blue Mosque and I sat there alone for a long time. It was still dark and the lights shining on the building made the stone look almost translucent. A couple of birds soared in and out of the minarets and I thought about freedom and I thought about friendship and here in this city where East meets West and Christianity meets Islam, where continent meets continent and sea calls to sea across the Bosphorus, anything seemed possible.
