The silhouette of a girl walking in the shadows of the street lights,
the homes falling apart around her, the dinners shambling along
inside of shanties and shacks, the illegally wired televisions squawking
while men in tattered wife beaters bray in the dark, watching football,
and their wives, heads covered loosely in finely crocheted scarves -
finely curled strands of hair peeking out the sides - reel in the laundry lines
and their children huddle in packs with the stray dogs and the stray cats.

~

Down the road from my apartment building
is one of the hulking new developments
that pockmark this city like craters
or like the defensive embankments of an army losing a war.
A sparkling new bus depot; sweeping plazas of exposed concrete,
storefronts - their windows still dusty - occupied by McDonald’s and
Burger King and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Young Turks in oversized
paper hats asking if you want the “buyuk” Big Mac or the “orta.”

A stairway connects it to the neighborhood below.
I take this stairway some mornings, on my way to the ferry
that will take me from Europe to Asia for my job.
(which is editing the English translations of a Muslim
scholar who, people on the street tell me, is trying to
overthrow the government; is trying to institute sha’ria;
is trying to turn Turkey into Iran or Saudi Arabia).

At the base of this hill I once saw a man and his brother
hacking apart the carcass of a bull, its bloody haunches
and bones scattered about a patch of bare dusty earth,
itself nestled between gecekondus whose disjointed floors
hang precariously over one another like mismatched  Lego pieces.
Walls of brick and wood and shingle, their facades crumbling
like dead skin.
           My first week here I was walking down this street
and stumbled upon a cockfight. A circle of old men in
home-sewn sweaters and boys with dirty faces
surrounding two strutting roosters - I sometimes hear their
brothers or sons announcing dawn when I return
from my late night runs - who were prancing, feathers erect,
and slowly picking one another apart.

~

Last week I went to the opening of an exhibition.
These openings are usually like openings in New York or London
or San Francisco or Tokyo: free wine, young artists
with thick framed glasses and pristinely rumpled clothes
- disaffection, you must remember, is essential for any artist worth his salt -
that were assembled by the fine, brilliant hands
of women crammed like hens into a smoggy, smoky, sweaty
factory in southeast China. You want art? Check the inseam
of your pants.
          But this opening - crammed into a small, dirty room on the third floor
of a building slated for demolition this winter (to make room for a new
shopping mall, the third mall on this two mile stretch of street) -
is not serving wine, and it’s not populated by the usual disaffected
artists in their immaculately tailored jeans.
           Instead, there is seftali and portakal suyu. And the artists are
children, who scamper about the gallery, their shoes squeaking on the tile
floor in a way that reminds me of my elementary school gymnasium.
Nine and ten year old kids, with dark hair and vibrant eyes,
proudly showing off the photographs they’ve taken. Their neighborhood
through their eyes. It’s the neighborhood at the bottom of the hill;
in English, its name means ‘house of light.’ The photos are striking.
They show the children's friends hanging out of windows and
laughing. An old woman in hijab lugging jugs of water
up a hill. An old man sitting in the heat of summer and wiping
his brow. There is grace and there is joy.
           The kids pull their mothers - about half of them covered
- around the room by the hand, like tugboats leading tankers
down the Bosphorous. They want to speak English with me,
to show off their skills. They hug everyone. They pose
for a group photograph, smiling like angels.

~

There was a stray cat in my old neighborhood. The locals called her melek,
which means ‘angel’ in Turkish. She’d lost a leg to a motorcycle, and she
roamed the street - hobbling - as if she owned it. The other cats made way.
She slept on motorbikes, atop cars. Families brought her in for dinner.
She sauntered freely into the cafes and shops on the street.

The woman I was seeing for my first months here - maybe seeing
is the wrong term; we were friends, friends who sometimes went to bed
together. But sometimes we read books together. Sometimes we got coffee
together and talked about traveling. Sometimes we made dinner and laughed.
Sometimes we showered together and she looked at me as if I were a lost
child. Which, maybe, I am.
               This woman - she’s beautiful, which I never told
her; I learned how to say it in Turkish, ‘güzelsin,’ but then forgot to use it,
and then things had shifted, as they do sometimes in life - would take Melek,
who was spotted like a Holstein cow (and here I remember the dairy farms in
northern Wisconsin, their halogen lights blaring into the clear autumn night,
hunrdreds of cows herded into neat rows), like a baby in her arms. She'd carry
Melek to her apartment and feed the cat raw beef. Melek would wander the house
uncomfortably, a street cat through and through, and then plop down
anxiously by the front door while me and the woman drank wine
and rubbed each other’s feet in the garden, her neighbors watching us
surreptitiously while hanging their laundry.

This woman bought the meat just for Melek, and this tenderness moved me.
It made me understand how some man - not me, I knew - would eventually
fall terribly in love with her. I wanted, often, for that man to be me. I sat in
bed and tried to envision a life together. But it required effort. She wasn't
there in those blank moments, those moments when love consumes you. I
thought of something an old lover told me: These things aren't equations,
chico. They aren't like math. There's magic to them, and sometimes that
magic isn't there, or sometimes it disappears.
         The last time I saw this woman, she was wearing a necklace I brought her
from a trip I took this summer, to an island in the Aegean sea. I spent a week
riding my bike and talking to strangers, and one of them, an artist, took me
by the hand and placed a ceramic fish, painted the color of the sea, into it
and curled my fingers closed. “Hediye,” she said, a woman in her late-forties,
who’d quit her job as an accountant and moved to this island to make ceramic
jewelry. A gift.
               I returned the favor, and gave it to this woman, who wore it
while the two of us got dinner. I was back from a difficult trip to the US.
Feeling like I was in free fall. And then she showed up at my door in a
dress like white gauze, that necklace bouncing softly on her sharp collar bones,
and I felt at home.
               She’d moved by then, to a different neighborhood. We went to her new
place and smoked skinny cigarettes on her balcony which overlooked Aya Sofia.
I remember feeling something then, something wordless and impossible to
articulate: that we were at the end of things. That summer was over. That
whatever fragile hollow we’d stitched from the world was about to close.
We sense such things sometimes, and then when they come true, we wonder
if they would have come to pass had we not imagined them happening.

We both had work the next morning, but we stayed up until five.
Talking, and then making love. The kind of love that obliterates the rest
of the world, so the whole contents of human history are whittled
down to the form of your bodies, the sweat holding you together. It
sounds horribly trite to put it into words, but that’s what it is. That’s
its truth. We made love like that for two hours and afterwards, lying
there on her sheets ruined by sweat and blood, we tried to speak
and found that we’d forgotten our respective languages. I’m serious
about this. I couldn’t remember English. She couldn’t remember Turkish.
I made a brief, primal sound - some primitive vowel - and she responded
with an ancient consonant, and then we burst into laughter. We existed
like this - without language - for maybe ten minutes. When my words
came back to me, I thought: if there is a God, that was it.

I might see her once or twice more in my life, which isn’t a tragedy, but
the sadness of that catches me in moments. We can experience transcendence
with those we barely know. We can betray those we love most. So let me say
one last thing:

N-----, güzelsin.

~

On Sunday, the market opens shortly after dawn.
Every neighborhood in Istanbul has its weekly market
where the farmers and vendors from the surrounding countryside
drive rickety, belching trucks across the bridge and into the city
in the hours before dawn. Trucks overflowing with tomatoes or
melons, apples or cucumbers.

The market in my neighborhood is set on the wall of a valley.
It’s long and labyrinthine, snaking its way down to the valley floor.
Beneath vast wings of canvas, and hanging lights that sway in the
autumn wind, men smoke cigarettes and drink tea and barter with
students, with women in burqas, with one another.
Imagine heaps of color - orange and green and yellow and red. The smell
of meat smoke, of gozleme frying on an open griddle. Of saffron and
chili and cinnamon being funneled into little plastic bags. Of fresh simit
that mangy toothed children push through the throngs of people
on broken-down carts.

I’m here with a tall, gorgeous woman. She’s taller than me by a foot,
and has skin whose textures reminds me of polished sandstone.
You find this here - people so beautiful they almost defy logic. Men
with impossible coiffures, just sitting next to you on the bus. Women
in turquoise headscarves whose eyes are like pure onyx. One thing I love
about Istanbul is that people acknowledge such perfection here. They
stop and look. They stare. They relish such beauty.
        This woman tells me about her former life. About the summer
she spent working in a factory that took apart the corpses of chickens.
About the stench that clung to her that summer - of dry blood, and wet
decay. The stench of rot. It was under her nails, in her hair. It was
impossible to scrub away. “That was a lonely summer,” she says,
Matter of factly.

We buy tomatoes and apples, cucumbers and pomegranates. We fill
dented aluminum buckets to the brim while old women with grizzled fingers
cradle pieces of fruit beside us, looking for the right one.

Later in the week we make chili and salad. In our small kitchen, the women
dice vegetables and talk about work. The men sit on the balcony,
and across the halic, where ferries glide like ghosts in the night,
Suleymaniye and the old aqueduct glitter against the night.
Way out in the distance, a line of planes descending into Ataturk
dot the black sky like falling meteors. Men and women coming back to earth.

The fireworks start around nine. We pile onto the balcony, wine glasses
in hand, and turn off the lights. Out over the Bosphorous: light and color.
We watch in transfixed silence. An Australian, two Germans, two
Belgians, a Turk, an American.

~

My roommates and I have taken in a kitten. A little ball of charcoal
with green eyes. With eyes like the woman who still sometimes haunts
my dreams
         (last night we were walking through a Japanese forest. A low,
wide stream of clear water, beneath which were smooth stones. Tall
gnarled trees grew out of the water, their shade dappling the surface. We
walked down the stream, the water cold on our ankles, and I
wanted so badly to tell her something but couldn’t find the words.
Couldn’t even decide what I wanted to tell her. Maybe that I am here,
so far away, watching fireworks with people I could not have
imagined meeting, people I have come to love, and that she and I no longer
Know a thing of each other’s lives, and that this doesn't exactly make me sad,
not anymore at least, but that it fills me with something that almost resembles
wonder, wonder that two people can love so fiercely that maybe, in the end,
there can only be silence.
                           That sometimes I think about her and it makes me
laugh, or smile. That I’ve begun to tell my friends here
stories about her - and that the stories we tell about people, I think, are a
measure of the love we feel for them).

The other day I was bringing our kitten home from the vet,
carrying him through the subway station in his carrier. Inside,
he cried and wailed, confused and scared. There are times I feel
like him in this city. Surrounded and lost. In need of someplace
safe.
        In the long hall that connects one train to another, there was
a young woman playing the prelude to Bach’s cello concerto. Thousands
of people rushed by her at a time, ignoring the music. I remembered a
story I once heard, about a concert violinist playing anonymously, for
hours, on the subway in Berlin. I stopped and listened. My kitten stopped
crying. After the prelude, the woman smiled. Dreadlocks and a peacoat,
eyes like burnt chestnuts. She knelt over, opened the carrier, and lifted
the kitten out, whispering to him in a language I couldn't understand.

~

A group of us go out for dinner. Beer and Chinese food in a basement dive.
We talk, and we laugh. We tell stories about people we have lost. Friends
and lovers. It is one of our friend’s last night here. “I don’t want a big
evening,” she says. “What I’m going to miss are the ordinary days. The
nights like this.” So we eat Chinese. And then we part into the night.

My friend and I walk home together. She’s German, my height,
beautiful in a quiet way - the kind of beauty that doesn’t stop you on the
street, doesn’t make you stare, but that emerges after careful study.
Emerges like the finer techniques of a master painter - all the more lovely
for their subtleness.

“You know,” she says, “I’m not sad. I don’t feel like I’m leaving.
Or, I do and I don’t. This week has been so strange. Nothing in
me has shifted. I feel like tomorrow, I’ll wake up, go to work,
and life won’t change. I can’t make myself believe that I’m
leaving. That all of us might never be together like this again.”

We stop at the edge of the new bus depot. It overlooks the hills
of Kasimpasa and Balat, Fatih and Eyup. I think about the
millions of lives out there, in the streets and the gecekondus.
Each life with its stories of loss and regret. Each life with its
own secrets and desires. Each life its own novel.

I think back to the night before I left Philadelphia. The girl with eyes
like our kitten and I sat in her room with the lights turned off and we cried,
cried so hard that our bodies shook. Cried ourselves into a
kind of void, where language was of no use. Sometimes,
there aren’t words.
             “You could write a novel about us,” she told me once.
“We already have written a novel about us.”

I think that out there in this city there are people experiencing
grief I don’t ever want to feel again. There are people holding
lovers for the last time. There are people watching their fathers
die. There are people committing unspeakable violence. There
are people making love so good that they forget how to speak.
There are people having dinners with their families, dinners that
I sometimes look in upon on my lonely walks, when I miss my
own family. There are people being kind even though there is no
reward for such kindness. Even though kindness is so often
repaid with pain, with cruelty.

“You know, this city has taught me how to let go,” my friend says,
rolling a cigarette. “When I was younger, I held onto things so
tightly. I always focused on the end of things. I would get so
sad because everyone I loved would eventually leave, or die.
And it felt like I was losing them. But living here, you learn to
lose people with grace. You learn to be grateful. You learn that
they aren’t lost to you. They’re still there. You’re still carrying them.
You still have the stories. And if you’d never met them, sure, you
wouldn’t feel this pain, this pain of leaving, but you also wouldn’t
have those stories. Istanbul taught me that. Istanbul taught me to let go.”

~

My job hosts a conference. It’s a conference about faith, and about violence.
Scholars come from the US and Pakistan, from England and Turkey.
We sit in rooms overlooking the sea and we talk, and we talk: about faith
and about dialogue; about the environment and about identity. We grow
to like one another. We become friends. Maybe nothing is solved -
how could anything be solved, especially by twenty people talking
philosophy in a room? - but we will all go back to our lives feeling a little
bit better about the world. Feeling like there are good people fighting
good fights.

The last presenter is a man from Pakistan who now lives in Los
Angeles. For three days, he’s been slightly removed from the rest of us.
He asks questions that are incisive, even aggressive. But during the breaks,
he does not sit with the rest of us. He doesn’t make small talk. He doesn’t
share his story. He’s in his middle-fifties and he wears the round
collared shirt favored by devout Islamic. His hair is black, immaculate.
I’m sitting next to him, so I’m the only one who can see that, as he begins
his talk, he scans over his words, and then closes the document. He
opens a poem instead. It’s about his wife.
         “She died 71 days ago,” he tells us at the end. The rest of us,
who minutes ago were fidgeting with tiredness, stretching and drinking
coffee, have been pulled back to attention, to silence. “This conversation
we’ve been having for the last three days has been beautiful. But I’m
not sure it’s changed anything. I’m not sure we can change anything.
We’ve talked a lot about evil. And the truth is this - there is evil in this
world. It’s in you, and it’s in me. We commit acts of evil every day. We
walk past deeply poor, deeply lonely people on the street. We don’t talk
to them. We don’t help them. We ignore them. We buy clothes from
companies that exploit women in Bangladesh and China. We buy food
that is taken from animals who have spent their lives living in misery.
Every single one of us. There is an evil in this world that is so pervasive
it encapsulates all of us. It’s a system that is bigger than us. It’s comfort.
it’s greed. It’s the belief that these things are the most important pursuits
of our lives. I’m not here to lecture you - all of you know this. We’re all
trapped by it. We commit acts of evil every day and we don’t even realize
it. We make decisions that result in the deaths of three hundred workers
in Bangladesh. In the deaths of five boys in Somalia. In the deaths of a family
in the hills of Afghanistan. These are the facts. And what can we do in the face
of that? How can we keep living our lives? I ask myself this sometimes.
and I don’t know.”

~

These are the facts: I have failed everyone I’ve ever loved, and so have you.
I’ve walked past people sobbing on the street - put on my headphones
and looked the other way. I’ve lied to my parents. I’ve cheated on lovers.
I’ve used women for their bodies. I’ve convinced myself that I deserve a
hamburger from McDonald’s or a pair of jeans from Gap because I
am the exception to the expectations I have for everyone else. I’ve
done these things because they are easy for me. Because I am lazy
and, more often than not, choose the easiest path. I have moved three
hours closer to my death by spending those hours on Buzzfeed. I’ve
looked at a woman crying across the table from me, confessing her
love to me, and felt nothing. And I’ve had the gall to claim myself
a victim when someone else does the same to me. I’ve abandoned
my friends to get laid. I’ve tried to fuck my friend’s girls. I turned
my back on my brother when he needed me most. I was willing
to let him die because it was easier for me. These are the facts.
This is life. 

~

But I’ve been thinking about faith and I’ve been thinking about hope.
I’ve been thinking about evil. I’ve been thinking that maybe life is
just a series of choices, and nothing more, and each one is a test.
To choose faith or despair. Despair is easy. Cruelty is easy. It’s
easy to walk past that person on the street. It’s easy to choose
your own comfort over easing the pain of another. It's easy because
the truth is that we aren't rewarded for kindness. We don't get anything
for our decency. And maybe this is why we've invented religions.
Because otherwise, it's too easy to be cruel.
               It’s easy to say this world is fucked. That we’ve ruined it. That
all we’re capable of is evil and destruction. These things are easy, and
maybe they’re true, too.

It’s difficult to still have faith in people or in goodness.
But then, isn’t this what faith is? It’s a leap. It’s a choice to believe
despite the evidence. It isn't an equation, after all. There's a magic to it.
              And maybe that’s all we have in this life.
The choice: to stay open and to be kind despite every opportunity
to be cruel. Maybe life is nothing more than this: to choose, again
and again, to be decent. And it’s hard. It’s harder work than
any of us can fathom. We all fail at it, every day. But we always
have the choice. I think sometimes that maybe that’s all we have.
But it’s a lot, isn’t it?

~

At the base of the hill, beneath the new bus station, are gardens.
Overgrown plots where women in headscarves work in the dirt,
planting tomatoes and onions, potatoes and strawberries. There are
flowers, too - mums and hyacinths and hibiscuses.

I’m walking down the dark street, carrying my kitten.
The gypsy family is laughing raucously in their makeshift dining
room. A woman hangs out her window, smoking, while downstairs
her husband watches Galatasary. In five years, this house will be gone
obliterated by the forces that make clothing factories in China, dairy
farms in Wisconsin, chicken slaughterhouses in Germany. These
lives will be ruptured and people with more money will move into
the new apartment buildings and drink wine and eat chili
while watching fireworks over the Bosphorous.
         Ahead of me on the street is a girl, six or seven
years old, dancing in the shadows of the street lights. Dancing to
music that no one can hear, but that she hears.

When I reach her, she stops and looks at me. Sweat on her brow.
She kneels down and reaches out to my crying kitten, taking him by the
paw. Then she stands up and we stare at one another for a time.
              She speaks in Turkish and I speak in English. It
doesn’t work - the words don’t match. So she takes my hand instead
and walks me down the street.
              Walks me home.