The city was just as I remembered. It was steep, so steep, the street we were in, and the hotels were dark, wooden-fronted. Narrow passageways, roughly cobbled, plunged down, down to where the water must be. So many things were almost familiar.
The tremendous change was the great snake of traffic that bumped its way down the centre of the highway, where once we saw carts, donkeys, dragomen. But the same array of physiognomies that I remembered from before, streaming down the pavements on both sides of the street, pale European (though perhaps they were Circassian, the sultans had chosen Circassian wives for their beautiful white skin and red Russian lips, I had read in Melek-Hanum’s autobiography), Mongol, with those high cheekbones and strange, slanted, intelligent eyes (when I made simple observations of this sort to Angela, she contradicted, or disapproved, but honestly, how can one make sense of the world if one never hazards a generalisation? It is part of the work of ordering particulars; otherwise one’s totally at sea. But my thoughts weren’t allowed in the twenty-first century). Strong thickset men with short beards or dark jowls who could have been Turkish, Greek or Italian, talking loudly as they strolled in pairs; a few with jutting beards and downcast eyes which flicked up, momentarily, at my yellow coat; women with luxuriant blue-black hair that fell like blackbird’s wings down their backs; others in every form of veil, some thick and padded out behind like an eccentric kind of back-to-front nosebag, long, tight overcoats in pastel shades, the belt pulled draw-string tight at their waist, plus high-heeled shoes and heavy eye make-up – after a bit I saw it was a uniform for grouplets of young women clinging together, I supposed they were religious, but why the heavy eye makeup? – then other girls in the lightest of head-scarves, and some with curled yellow-blonde hair and dark roots; and women who must be from Arab countries, black from head to foot, only the eyes showing, which made them look curiously guilty as I caught little flashes of hidden life. A pale hand came out of one shroud, suddenly, and cuffed a small boy on the head, a little modern boy in shorts and a T-shirt which I saw, as I bent closer, read SPIDERMAN; he had a red plastic gun in his hand with which he was prodding his small, veiled sister. There were men who were clones of those I’d seen in New York, in crumpled business suits, with bulging briefcases, watching passing women with abstracted eyes; other men in calf-length tunics, pyjama trousers, and small round hats: and as I gazed at all the faces, skin-colours, sizes, I thought ‘This country could rise again, maybe there will be a new Ottoman Empire, for after all, it sits at the isthmus of the world, it looks east and west, it is Asia and Europe. With the power of contradictions, it can rule us all. Look how vigorously people stream down the street, they have finished a day’s work but they are not tired.’ I could hardly wait for supper, so I could tell Angela!
Surely there was more vitality here than in the richer parts of Manhattan, where frail young men walked their waisted poodles and the fashionable women went out without trousers, and when you looked closely they were thirty years older than their long thin legs and blonded hair. Two decades might have been scraped off their faces but it just made them fainter, they were being erased, and I thought of Manhattan with the exits blocked, crashes in the tunnels, traffic-choked bridges, and I wondered, would New York sink under the sea while the Turks leaped up like a school of dolphins?
(Then I remembered Central Park. The fresh green leaves, the springy joggers, the Spartan glamour of some of the people, elegant, polished, unstoppable as robots, fit as greyhounds, determined to win. And the mesmerising power of the big corporations, the black buildings blocking the sun … No, Americans and Turks might be evenly matched.)
I was walking downhill into the end of the afternoon. My yellow coat danced beside me in shop windows. Surprise! A young man outside a barber’s with the same striped pole we used to have in London – maybe we borrowed them from Turkey? – suddenly stretched out his arm and said ‘Hallo, lady. How are you today?’ He had thick black hair and his eyes were slightly crossed, there was a cushion of flesh around his waist – but I saw his muscles underneath his red shirt, and the teeth in his smile were young and white, I evaded his arm and slipped past him, gasping – I had left him behind, he was in the past, or was he shouting after me? – I found I was patting & stroking my hair – I hurried on, dazed by the light, past the random poems of strange hotels – The Coliseum, The Rose Bouquets – & their charming amateur attempts at decoration: asymmetrical trees hung with orange lanterns, a wooden hotel with baroque Spanish casements, a tree-trunk snaked around with fairy-lights. Anything could happen on this winding, plunging street, whereas in New York, there was no room for error, the roads ran straight to the neat horizon –
– but none of that mattered, I was here on this planet –
– the yellow-pink evening illuminated the wide washed blankness above the city, sunlight glinted on the radial cobbles, the broken kerb-stones, a plastic chair; a brown hound sneaked the eyed beak of a fish; the mosque began its call to prayer and the birds circled the chasm in the buildings through which the road ran down towards the sea – & all this had always existed in me, and I in it, and it would last forever – just round the corner it would soon appear, the vision of water I was longing for, the Sea of Marmara, so blue, it would be, now the storm had passed and the sun was out, and there would be fishermen, broad backs bent, their corded arms against the brightness –
But I looked at my watch, and it was half-past six. I would have to turn back, to meet Angela, and in any case, I saw Leonard frowning, ‘Virginia, you are too excited.’
Walking back uphill – it was harder going up, and I was perspiring in my yellow coat – I found myself thinking of the cross-eyed barber. Yes, I would have to pass him again. And I felt – what was that strange feeling? But the red-and-white pole stuck up unattended, there were just two black tom-cats outside it, bristling, padding around one another like boxers –
Presents, I remembered, and dived into a shop with a little flotilla of red Turkish flags and something very blue in the window – but ah, it was all modernity – shimmering cases for telephones, fluorescent cigarette lighters. But there against the glass, a waterfall of light! Rows of small round white and turquoise eyes on blazing glass disks of cobalt blue. Yes, they were instantly familiar, they were charms against the evil eye, Nessa was pulling me by the hand through the hectic theatre of the Grand Bazaar, plunging through stalactites of gilt and bead-work –
(we had walk-on parts the brief play was over)
Then I saw the hat, on a pile in the corner. It was casual, youthful, nothing like the navy-blue swan of a hat I’d been forced to leave behind in New York; this was a happy, summery, cream straw boater. I put it on, and in that dim corner, in that dirty mirror, I was twenty-four years old again! ‘I’ll take it, please.’ A rush of pleasure. ‘And two of the charms.’ (They would bring good fortune. Writer’s luck – one needed it.) An immensely old woman with a scored brown face took my money, wreathed in smiles.
So much to tell Angela! So much to see!
– But I could guess what she had been doing. The thing these modern people always did, switch on their machines and fret at them. If it didn’t work she would be losing her temper, as she did in front of me in New York, in the restaurant of the Empire State Building. ‘This fucking, fucking thing,’ she said loudly, but she was annoyed when I started laughing. ‘Virginia, you’re embarrassing.’ I was embarrassing! She was embarrassing!
While I was breathing in the evening air, Angela was tethered to her London friends, or worrying about her editors – (she had so many editors, her agent, first, then her publisher, then her American editor – did these modern writers not edit themselves?). She was a chained monkey, night and day, dancing to the tune of her accordion.
The laptop thing came with her everywhere, on her knee, like another baby, her real baby, now Gerda had flown. Perhaps it had always been her real baby. Had Gerda always felt alone?