Mulberries and mosques: David and Ana walk through Fatih

Posted on by Justin

 
His boss was in the States, so he ditched out of work early and she skipped school. It was a resplendent, sunny day in early May, the trees fully green, the Halic holding the light like liquid silver.
They took the 87 bus out to Edirnekapi. It traced the ridge across the Halic from his flat, running parallel to the old Roman aqueduct.

“I love this,” she said as the bus passed beneath the aqueduct, its arches forming a row of tunnels that traffic diverted through.

They got off at the Theodosian walls, the boundary of Byzantine Constantinople. A stairway had been cut from the wall, wide enough for a small car. No rail guarded its precipice, and gypsy children ran up and down the stairs, oblivious to death.

They climbed, coming to a terrace wedged between two higher sections of wall. Another stair - steeper, narrower, more like a ladder in truth - climbed one of them, leading towards the massive gate where Mehmed the Conqueror had marched his army triumphantly into the city.

He waited and she climbed first, hand over foot. Ostensibly, he was supposed to break her fall, but mostly he watched her legs. She looked down at one point, clinging to the wall like a climber, the wind taking her hair, a flutter of black, and she smiled at him.

“Stop looking at my ass,” she called down.

“But it’s so nice,” he lamented, and he said it so sadly that it actually made her melancholy. As she got to the top, pulling herself over the threshold that had been rounded by centuries of hands and feet, she turned back to see the whole of the city suddenly revealed, the mostly red roofs tumbling in steppes down to the Halic, and then climbing on the opposite side, the mismatched apartment buildings like blocks placed by different children, or like puzzle pieces jammed together against their will. She stood in the wind, watching David begin his tentative ascent, and thought about their inevitable end, how things like this were cut like a small frieze (or bas relief) from the solid granite of life, little flourishes amidst the larger, more mundane surfaces, forever confined to their specific place. She would go back to Prague, he to the US or off into the desert to find his brother (though she doubted, though he‘d come this far, that he had the naivete or the courage for that last step), and they would send each other more and more infrequent emails, and then they would be little more than memory, flashes of lightning in the ever greater darkness, invisible to the external world. She often thought this way: her life as a great storm, or her life as a vast stone surface, both of them impenetrable and unknowable to anyone else, especially the minute details that moved her so much.

He hurled himself over the threshold, clinging to the solid rock, looking up and her and grinning. He stood and drank in the city, shielding his eyes with his left hand.

“Wow,” he said. “How did you find this?”

She shrugged. “I explore.” She started to walk toward the gate. “Come on,” she called. “It gets better.”

They climbed one last stair, which wound around a turret, finally reaching the wall’s apex. Istanbul was at their feet. They were alone, and moved slowly from arrow notch to arrow notch. In one direction, the sun-blanched tumbling roofs of Fatih, Suleymaniye, Aya Sofia small in the distance; in another, the Halic, its quicksilver eddied by ferries and struck by sun, the old naval shipyard going to rust, the terraces of Kasimpasa and Kurtulus, and very far off, the skyscrapers of Sisli, and even further the unfinished spires of Ayazaga; in another, the vast green and cluttered marble of a military cemetery, those dead and buried in the great city’s ancient conquest.

Grasping history, understanding its exact shape, is an impossible thing, he thought. All we have are these shadows, gouged by time and then grown over, built upon by future generations, until the past is only a faint scar on the world, crumbled rock or a slight rise in the earth.

She stopped and he put his hand on her waist. She tilted her had back to kiss him, rested her head on his shoulder. Across the street, on a rooftop overgrown with weeds, dandelions, a mother in a headscarf was hanging laundry, her son hiding behind the clothes as they fluttered in the wind. On the street, a man slowly pushed a cart piled high with scrap metal.

They climbed back down and she led him downhill, through crumbling Ottoman homes. Their windows were long shattered, door frames distended, wood warped and rotted. In the streets, Syrian children in rags ran barefoot from one home to another. Inside the gutted homes, there was evidence of families, laundry hanging between two rafters or a collection of canned foods buried beneath rubble, illegal wires bundled and spliced into buildings seemingly long abandoned.

It was her walk, and he followed. At the bottom of the hill, the water glittering down each side street, they came to Ahrida synagogue, the building itself blocked behind a high wall. Atop this wall, a massive stone slab had been inscribed with Hebrew, the letters smoothed by time.

They sat at a café across the street, a place that was strangely chic for its neighborhood, as if it had been lifted from Brooklyn and deposited here.

“How many years until the whole neighborhood is like this?” she asked after ordering a latte.

“Well, we are eating here.”

She laughed.

“I like to think Istanbul has too much history to fully be taken. It will resist. These places will come, but the neighborhood around it will not change. That is my great hope. The construction all over the city is so sad. So thoughtless. They just come in and destroy beautiful buildings. And for what? For shit.”

He smiled at her anger. “Can we get inside the synagogue?”

She shook her head, lit a cigarette.

“No. You have to call in advance and go through a background check.”

“Why?”

“Do you know nothing about Turkish history?”

“Of course I do. The Wealth Tax of 1946, okay? I get it. But that’s history.”

She shrugged. “Not so much as we think, I bet.”

“Have you been inside?”

“I have.”

“How is it?”

“Not so special.”

He laughed.

“My father is Jewish, you know,” she said, ashing the cigarette and catching his eyes.

“Really?”

She nodded.

“Originally from Czechoslovakia?”

Again, she nodded.

“That means …”

“That my grandparents survived the Holocaust? Yes, it means that.”

He took a cigarette of his own.

“It’s funny. Or, not funny, but I don’t like to tell the story. It feels … what’s the word? That mean very wrong and disgusting?” she asked.

“Obscene?”

“Yes. Obscene. People only want to know the story because it’s obscene and because they get a kick out of being so close to something so horrible. Or, I used to feel like that. But now I do think it’s something that is a part of me, maybe that gives my life importance. Like a weight on me, but in a good way.”

He looked at her evenly.

“You want to hear the story?”

“Of course I do.”

She smirked, as if to say, you’re no different, and it made him laugh.

“They lived in a small city a few hours from Prague. They had grown up there. My grandfather was the oldest son. He was very loyal. Like my father. Men in my family are loyal, even my brother, in his way,” she looked past him. Again, there was the stillness in her body, the tautness.

“They could have left. He had a brother in New York, another brother here, in Istanbul. There were cousins in London, I think.”

She immediately lit another cigarette and glanced across the street. She could be inscrutable, which was something he liked. These stories felt hard-won. They felt new, as if she was trying them on the world for the first time, as if they were a part of herself she’d never thought to share.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she said. “It’s not my story. I’m not even sure how I’m supposed to tell it. I remember pieces of it. They didn’t know it was going to be that bad, he said. I remember that, but that’s it. I don’t remember the buildup. I just remember the ending, and then my part of the story.”

She’d been thirteen when he told her, after she’d decided not to get bat mitvah’ed. He was a widower then, living in a nursing home in the middle of fallow fields, his room looking out onto a barren copse of trees. It put an enormous financial strain on her parents, but her mother refused to have him in the house - had never liked him, in fact, namely because he’d never liked her, and thought his son should’ve married a Jew. He made no secret of his disdain for her mother, even when Ana was around.

“Your father has made many mistakes,” he once said. “Your mother is the biggest.”

It was one of the few things that made her feel any connection with her mother, in fact.

As he told her the story - and he told it with steely equanimity, barely flinching - she wondered why, why in God’s name was she with him alone, why was she being told this story, why was she being forced, against her will, to carry this burden of his? Why not her brother? Why wasn’t he being told?

“I don’t remember how it happened but they were lined up along the river. There was a river through the city. All the Jews in the town were lined up. My grandfather and grandmother, and both of their parents. My grandparents had been separated from their parents in the chaos. Then an officer started going down the line shooting everyone in the back of the head. He would put the gun to the back of their head and without waiting pull the trigger. Then there would be a splash, a second later.

“I remember more from this part of the story.”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean?”

“We always remember the horror.”

She smiled at that. It’s terrifying when it's laid out for you, the size of things. That’s what she felt at thirteen. She felt like the world was opened and like it couldn’t be made small again.

“He said the river turned bright red, a color he had never seen and never saw again. He said he saw his father’s body float past. He recognized the coat. He said the silence between rounds, when the officer reloaded, were strange and beautiful. You could hear the water and the birds in the trees.”

She smoked in stillness. He could hear vendors calling out at the end of the street, the insistent thrush of people bartering and buying. Life mid-stream. Like the susurrus of the blood in his ears on a quiet night, the kind of quiet one never got in Istanbul.

“But he survived?” David asked, bringing them back to one another, out of the flow.

“Something happened seven people before the officer got to my grandparents. A car pulled up and another officer got out and talked to the officer doing the shooting. And then they rounded the rest of them up into trucks and took them to rail cars and they went to the camps from there. Most of them died anyway. It was just more suffering. But they lived.”

He told her the story and then he sat silently glaring at her - not with anger, not with love, but with indifference. He’d survived and his life had come to this. His son had married a woman he hated. His granddaughter had not been brought up in the faith. His own suffering had been prolonged sixty years.

“We kept looking for the boats,” he told her after a long silence, when she finally met his eyes again.

“Boats?” she asked.

“The boats that would take us to the other side of the river. We thought there would be boats. We kept waiting for the boats. Until the very end.”

She looked at David, studied him, thought about his own story, the one about his missing brother. What would he get by finding out the truth? He struck her as the kind of man who liked neat truths, who believed that there was such a thing as good and evil, and that more often than not, good would usually win. Despite all evidence to the contrary. He was naïve in that way, and sweet because of it. He didn’t believe in God, but he believed we could achieve universal moral truths, and wasn’t that the same thing? He still believed there was good to be salvaged from his brother’s absence. He was fighting, desperately, to make that so. It moved her. His earnestness moved her, even if she pitied it, too.

He thought it was the end of the story, that they had survived, and that here she was, the evidence of that survival - grace incarnate.

“I went to their old city last year, before I came here,” she said as he was about to change the subject, to bring it back to his own life.

“Really?” he said, leaning back.

She nodded. She had no idea why she went, even at the time. It was spring, and she had a week at home, trapped with her mother and her father’s best friend. The two of them acted like a couple and expected her to accept as much. Her father would come down and finding them kissing at the kitchen stove, making his breakfast. And then he would excuse himself, interrupting in his own house. Her brother was harassing her, too, about how much weight she’d gained, about how pointless architecture was, how no matter what she studied she’d just end up back in town, married to some village loser, popping out her own hopeless children. It was like they all wanted her to fail just so they could be less pathetic, so that through her misery, they could be justified.

“I woke up one morning and took a train there. It was a beautiful ride. Lots of flowers and farmhouses out in the flowers. It was like they had been taken over by the flowers.” She smiled, and could tell that he liked it when she talked about architecture. “It is a funny, ugly city now. Like most cities, with their ring of shit around them. Communist buildings and now modern buildings, which look the same. Ugly. The inside city is very nice, but normal. Like any old Czech city, with lots of romantic looking homes that are probably home to miserable people like my family, people trapped in their smallness.”

He smiled.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Keep going.”

“There’s not much to tell. I walked through the town. If I had thought about it, I would have looked up their address, but I didn’t plan ahead. I guess I didn’t care that much. I got a cappuccino. I eventually found the river, which was smaller than I had imagined. It was a pretty day and people were out on their bikes and roller skates with their dogs. Teenagers were walking around holding hands. I looked for a monument but didn’t find any. Later I found out it was at the cemetery, outside of town.

“I guess I just sat there and thought about then and now. The people enjoying the sun. I thought about all the people who could have been sitting there instead of me, but they weren’t, and I was. I thought they probably would have appreciated it more than I did. That it was probably wasted on me. I also thought that no one there had any idea about me or about what had happened then or about what color the river had been.”

She shook her head. She’d never felt close to any of that, never felt like it affected her in any real way, even though it did, at the most base level - the very fact of her existence. But she couldn’t feel close to it, even if she tried, couldn’t feel like it had anything to do with her. The size of it was simply too big and her own life too small. She felt closer to it now, actually, in Istanbul, than she ever had before. It was the first time she felt like her family had done anything to warrant the size of it.

They sat in a long silence that wasn’t actually silent - the city alive around them, beneath them, above them. He went into the toilet and splashed water on his face and when he came out, she had paid and was on her feet, looking at the letters above the synagogue’s gate. He watched her for a moment and had a thought: if his brother hadn’t vanished, he wouldn’t be here with this woman.

She recalled a line she’d stumbled upon by accident, a book she’d picked up at a market somewhere in a town she couldn’t remember.

No matter the art, no matter the love, no matter the money, ‘whoever is born arrives at death through time’s swift passage; and the sun leaves nothing alive … our ancient lineages are as shadows to the sun…

She could feel him come up behind her and waited for him to touch her. He waited for her to turn, and then put his hand on the small of her back and moved her hair aside and kissed the nape of her neck. She closed her eyes and fell back slightly, thinking for a half second that she would collapse into him before composing herself and walking away.

It was market day in Balat. The road began to wend its way uphill, and it was covered by great wings of canvas, and beneath their shade, mountains of produce glistened brightly, damply. Other trinkets - toys and kitchen ware, polished and new - shone despite the heavy tarpaulins, which shivered and shook in the afternoon’s wind.

The vendors sang songs, deep tenor odes to the beauty of their produce, the prices coming out as arias.

“They still call the prices in millions,” Ana told him. “For the old women, who remember before the currency changed.”

The narrow street was crowded with other shoppers, women and children mostly, a few older men accompanying them. The few young men there were Syrian, and they moved in packs, less well dressed than the vendors, their pants stained, their sweaters ratty and faded with wear. They smoked and sauntered, speaking Arabic, while the vendors eyes them wearily, occasionally spitting after the groups passed.

She shook her head.

“I don’t know why they get so angry. It’s good for business.”

She picked up a few oranges, almost as a reflex, bringing them to her nose, so that her skin touched the peels. She closed her eyes and breathed heavily, smiled to herself. Then she set them back down. The vendor spoke to her in Turkish, clutching his heart, breaking into song. She demurred, laughing.

“Actually, I know what it is,” she said as they kept walking.

“What?” he asked, perplexed.

“Why they don’t like the Syrians. Why they didn’t like the Iraqis before them.”

“Why?”

They passed an older woman, covered, who dragged her son behind him. He seemed ageless - he could be twenty or forty - his face distorted by illness, his feet clubbed and back hunched. He clenched her hand desperately, and she guided him patiently through the crowd. David tried to imagine what that would be like - the patience, your life given away. The truth was he couldn’t.

“It all comes back to the end of the Ottoman Empire. That wound is still fresh. A lot of Turks feel like the Arabs sold them out during World War I. Like the Ottoman Empire would have survived and won if the traitorous Arabs hadn’t stabbed them in the back.” She smiled, shook her head again. “They also hate how the west lumps them together with Arabs and them to be ‘just one of the Muslims’. That’s a real sore point.”

“How do you know so much about Turkey?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I listen. I keep myself open to conversation. People will tell you their whole life story if you just listen.” She smiled self consciously, taking his hand surreptitiously beneath the crowd. “Kind of like what I’ve been doing with you.”

One of the vendors near the end of the market was selling mulberries. They caught David’s eye; he hadn’t seen them at any other stall. They were piled in a small mound next to a higher mound of strawberries. It was early in the season for them, but they looked mostly ripe. Winter had been warmer than usual.

She’d walked ahead without him and it took her a moment to realize she’d lost him. He was standing awkwardly, trying to talk with the vendor. She waited for a moment, to see how he would manage. The two of them pantomimed until David tried one of the berries. He smiled, touched his heart, and motioned for a small container of them.

The vendor was middle aged, short, with a moustache and a cigarette - both were pretty much obligatory for the vendors. He shoveled the berries carelessly into the container, not concerned about smashing them or sprinkling them with ash. David took another berry and bit into it.

There had been a mulberry bush at their grandparent’s farm. It grew along the crumbling stone fence, on the trail down to the Brandywine, where David and Andrew would swim in summer. It was too cold for swimming during the spring, but they would trek out to the tree, carrying a step ladder. They would climb into its branches, carrying old snicker doodle tins, filling them to overflowing with berries, the juices flooding the crevices of their hands, coursing down their wrists, the fruit working its way under their fingernails. The juice would be worked so deeply into their skin that it would take almost a week for the purple hue to vanish completely. They would spend the month of May marked like old-time convicts, brothers in transgression.

He had already dug into them by the time he caught up with her, his index finger and thumb a vibrant, melancholy mauve. He teasingly touched her on the cheek, staining her, too, and she laughed.

“You turn into a kid sometimes,” she said.

He shrugged and offered her the berries, which she took. They were delicious, sweet and cool, the riper ones almost too ripe, so that they tasted earthen, on the verge of molding.

They climbed away from the market, the hill growing steeper and steeper, the street eventually emptying out so they were the only two people walking. The teahouses were half empty, only the oldest men and the unemployed stragglers taking seats, smoking and playing tabela.

“I like to make this walk every month. I have to keep revisiting places because my memory is not normal, I don’t think,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it doesn’t hold images like most people’s memories. Things become blurs very quickly, leaving only a vague impression of a time. I think I am like a goldfish or something, constantly living in the present, constantly having to experience the world in a new way.”

“But you remember plenty.”

“I have my stories. But they’re empty stories. I can’t remember the pictures. Sometimes I think I keep telling stories because if not, I’ll be totally broken from my past.”

“Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

“You think?” she took another berry from him. Its taste reminded her of something she shouldn’t place; for him, its scent carried a flash of open field, too vague to place.

“Sure. I think my life would be better if I remembered less.” He stopped to catch his breath. The hill was steep. A middle aged man in a winter coat, despite the spring sunshine, pushed a cart of scrap metal downhill, a bell on it tolling like the bell of a medieval undertaker. “I can’t let go of things. Or at least not well. Andrew was good at this. He could just shed people, places, as if the season were changing and he were changing clothes.

“I went through one really terrible breakup. God, it was like seven years ago now. Which is hard to believe.” He smiled at her; his teeth were slightly purple. “Andrew and I were both home for Thanksgiving, and Maleka was supposed to be there with me. I was in bad shape. I drank a lot. I was angry, but I also cried a lot. One night Andrew and I just got hammered together, really drunk, and we were sitting there playing guitar and sharing a bottle of whiskey, and I started talking about Mal. He interrupted me - I remember he was sitting there with the guitar and the whiskey in his hand - and he said, ‘Life comes in seasons, Dave. Maleka was a season. Now you’re in this season, and soon you’ll be in another season. You don’t know how many seasons you get.’ And then he started playing ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ which made me laugh and cry, because it’s not the kind of song I’d ever heard him play.”

They were standing in the middle of the empty street, the shadows just creeping over them. He turned, and for the first time realized how far they’d climbed, a sunny sliver of city now revealed below them, the canvas of the market at its bottom, then the sinewy wrinkle of the Halic. No city has so many hidden vistas, she thought, turning with him.

“Hey,” she said, and then kissed him when he looked at her.

“I guess what I was trying to get at is maybe it’s not so bad you forget easily. It means you won’t chase your brother half way around the world.”

“I wouldn’t chase my brother halfway across our village,” she said, which made him laugh.

“Come on,” she said, pulling him by the hand. “I want to show you my favorite mosque in the city.”

It was a former Byzantine church, hidden down a tiny side street which was, itself, already nestled amongst a web of side streets. It was tucked between two gecekondus, its small brick dome dwarfed by their shambolic balconies, most of them strung with laundry.
 

They stepped in quietly. She slipped her shoes off with ease, pulling a scarf from her purse and tying it over her hair, and he hobbled behind her. It smelled like the bottom of a well, wet and fecund. There had been the ruins of an old mill along the Brandywine, also on his grandparent’s farm, and the smell reminded him of those ruins, where he and Andrew would play fort, the two of them defending it against imaginary invaders.

They ducked beneath a low stone door into what had once been the church’s nave. The ancient mosaics had been covered by Arabic script or simply pulled out, piece by meticulous piece, leaving behind the hollow shadows of Christ and Mary, the disciples listening.

A group of a half dozen old men were clustered by the mihrab, sitting cross-legged on the floor, their heads covered with off-white taqiyahs. In front of each of them was a Qur’an. They talked quietly, and only one of them noticed the visitors. He smiled at them, wondering how two foreigners had found the place, impressed they had wandered so far off course.

Ana and David sat against one of the walls. He looked at the painted over dome, the scrawling Arabic figures that were so foreign to him, that intimated something closed and mysterious, a circuitry that he did not have access to, would never understand. She closed her eyes and listened to the men, catching bits and pieces of their Turkish.

“Do you know what they’re saying?” David whispered to her, very softly. His voice felt enormous, like it filled the entire small sanctuary.

“They’re talking about humility,” she whispered back.

The man who had acknowledged them, Mustafa, was worried about his only son, Bilal. Bilal had always worked very diligently, and he’d become successful making commercials for politicians. He only worked with politicians whose views he respected, but he had made a lot of money. Though he paid more than what was required in zakkat, Mustafa worried because he lived in a big new apartment overlooking the sea and furnished it with things that, Mustafa thought, were frivolous and ostentatious. Part of him was very proud of his son, and he wanted to brag every time he saw one of his commercials on television, to call up all his friends and to tell them to put on the channel. But he worried about his ostentation. He worried that he was becoming attached to ease and earthy pleasure. And he worried that his own pride was his own form of attachment.

“And the servants of the Merciful are those who walk on the earth in humility,” imam Rabbani read. “This we must always remember.”

“Yes, but doesn’t the Messenger, peace be upon him, also command that we must be grateful for the blessings given to us? Mustn’t we also enjoy what God has provided for us, as long as we give what is required of us?”

“Yes, we must. But that enjoyment must be temperate, too. It must not tie us to things. Let me ask: would your son be able to give up his lifestyle if God commanded him to, in His name?”

Mustafa mulled over the question.

“Come on,” Ana whispered to David, rising to her feet. No one noticed as they slipped quietly out, emerging from the quiet cocoon of the mosque, the street, hidden as it was, surprising them with its noise and color, with its deep odor of petrol and smoke. The city, he was learning, was inescapable, its verve and current coursing through even the most overlooked, narrowed vein.