Amelie and the Turks
Amelie and the Turks
In August Istanbul is heavy with heat, the humidity soars, the traffic and crowds can be unbearable during the week. On the weekends though those who can leave the city, head south to the beaches of Bodrum, Marmaris and Anatolia. This year Ramadan falls in August and during the long days of fasting those who observe the fast are lethargic, or irritable (although in cosmopolitan Istanbul not so many people fast).
If you’re stuck in the city, the best thing to do is catch a ferry out onto the Bosphorous, where the waves throw up fresh, cool breezes, and the feeling of being out on the water, of going somewhere, brings release. Out on the Bosphorous, you escape the congested streets, the heat, the routines, and can just look out at the sea. You can summon lyrics from favorite songs, and sing quietly to yourself beneath the roar of the ferry engines and crashing waves, and fall into easy daydreams …
… Amelie is with me now, that intriguing, impish angel of the misfortunate, friend of the lonely, caretaker of lost treasures. Amelie, with secret pain, looking for love, veiled behind a curtain, rattling a pair of skeleton keys. On other days, other daydreams, it is someone else (Fitzgerald, or Hemingway, or Kundera, writers usually, but sometimes a beautiful girl from university days, or a passing face picked out from the crowd). But it is Amelie today (yes, she’s speaking French; because it is a daydream, of course I understand perfectly).
The ferry is moving very quickly over the water now, most people have gone up to the top for the best view and to feel the wind in their faces. Amelie and I settle for a spot on the side of the ferry, near the waterline, because Amelie says she wants to feel the salt-spray of the waves as they crash against the side of the boat. We watch as another ferry races past, skewing off at an angle out toward the Sea of Marmara.
I point out the domes and minarets of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, rapidly approaching, but these we’ve seen a thousand times, Amelie says. “I like to pick out the things nobody else notices,” she reminds me. She turns and watches as a fat gypsy woman jiggles by. The gypsy woman is wearing a crimson-colored headscarf. Amelie likes to watch the woman’s fat waistline jiggling beneath a cream-colored dress.
We disembark at Karakoy and cross under the Galata Bridge; the restaurants are mostly empty, even though it’s nearly lunchtime. We go up onto the top deck, past rows of fishermen fishing for sardines. Soon we arrive at the train station; following Amelie, I went inside. The station was deserted, except for one old man sitting on a circular bench. In the dead heat, the stone walls, with their rich, Ottoman patterns, are cool and tantalizing: there is a feeling of departure, of transience, that all stations have, even though today it’s mostly empty.
We wander over to the international desk. Neither of us has enough money, but we eye wistfully the departures: Belgrade, Sofia, Python, Thessaloniki – where shall we go, Amelie? But she’s already wandered off, snapping a photo of the Ataturk bust, running her hand along its bronze relief.
Outside we pass another gypsy woman, this one much older and she asks for change through a brittle, toothless mouth. Amelie hands her one lira. We pass more restaurants, the waiters calling out in English “Welcome!” and “Mademoiselle!” to Amelie, but we continue out onto a broad avenue where the trams race by. After some twenty minutes we are up the hill and near the walls of the palace, where more Kurdish and gypsy men and women sell souvenirs, wallets, watches, scarves. Then we enter the park of the palace grounds. Immediately, behind those fortified walls, we are in a quieter, cooler world. The park is completely shaded beneath a canopy of cyprus and pine trees, and high up there is a hushed breeze in the leaves that drifts for a moment with bird-song, with secret whispers, then descends down into the grass, through our hair and past our faces. Couples, young and old, sit on the benches, or lay in the grass. Amelie selects a bench near an isolated, abandoned section of the palace, and we sit and look out at people as they pass. Though it’s only mid-August the path is already crowded with leaves, shriveled, copper-toned leaves (“How long have they been there?” Amelie asks, with a giggle. “Perhaps they are from last fall, or the fall before?” ) Nearby the breeze picks up a newspaper, and it glides like a ghost – or perhaps deceased sultan – trying trying on a shirt before dropping to the grass again.
Amelie gets up and we walk some more. The bark is peeling off the trees (Amelie takes a strip of it, then puts it in her bag and wipes her hands); we’re near the end of the park, high on a hill, and up here it’s really windy. We pass a sculpture, sort of obelisk. Some has sprayed “Fatmam” on it. Far below the ships and ferries pass on the Bosphorous. There’s an open-air café here and we go and sit at one of the small, wooden tables. A waiter comes and we ask about tea, but it’s too expensive, so the waiter brings us water.
The breeze gets stronger; Amelie gets up and wanders over to the edge and looks down on the Bosphorous, she picks up a stone (“It’s too high to skip from here.”) and puts it in her pocket. Turkish pop music is playing. I try to think of something Ottoman … Suleyman the Magnificent, Fati Sultan Mehmet, all the dead sultans. A lot of them were kept up at the mosque, their tombs with all their family in boxes around them.
When they were alive, most sultans were kept secluded, in the harem, waiting to garrott their brothers or to be garroted themselves. “It’s no fun to be sultan,” I mused.
“Let’s go back,” Amelie says.
The temperature is 35 degrees C, humidity 80 percent. In Kadikoy, a student named Nizam is waking up, getting into the shower and realizing that he’s forgotten to pay the hot water bill again. In Uskudar, a student named Engin is packing for his trip to England and realizing that he’s really going; in Taksim, at a café a girl named Ceren is looking at her boyfriend Can and deciding that she wants to become an EU volunteer next year and live abroad. In Levent, the traffic is so heavy, the busses have stopped and people are getting off in huge droves and just walking along the highway, past the cars, and feeling really good about themselves as they reach the metro.
Amelie decides to go to the Museum of Islamic Technology and Science. The tickets are five lira apiece. They check our bags and then we go inside. The dark interior is cool. Upstairs Amelie likes to look at the astrolabes and meteorscopes. She also looks at the 14th Century hand grenades and she is drawn to a large, triple crossbow, “popular in the 12th and 13th Centuries in the Islamic-Arabic era,” the card reads in Turkish, English, French, Chinese, Russian.
In the medicine room, we look at a row of surgicial instruments sitting in neat, numbered rows.
Amelie likes no. 220: “Cauter: for cauterizing the places of superfluous eyelashes after the same have been pulled out.”
She also likes no. 204: “Cauter: for the tear gland fistula. With this the entire corner of the eye is cleaned for those who do not like cauterization near the fistula.”
We are both strangely excited and assured that neither of us are entirely sure exactly what “cauterization” means.
In the mineral room, I am suddenly reminded of an incident in the 7th grade. At our school, there was a geology display, and one of the pieces was obsidian, the black shiny volcanic rock that is shiny because it cools really quickly. One afternoon, when no one was looking, I stole the obsidian, put it in my pocket and took it home and put it on display in my bedroom.
“Did they catch you?” Amelie asks.
“No.”
“Do you still have the rock?”
“No.”
We wandered over to the physics room, which was disappointing because we expected to see gadgets moving, whirling, like abacus, but it was completely still and dead, and the architecture room was just OK, with the miniatures of the mosques in Spain. We read of Tabit, who, “without being aware of the results of Archimedes in this area, made use of infinitesimal calculus in his two treatises on the quadrature of the parabola and on the cubature of the paraboloid.”
Amelie wrote this sentence in her notebook word for word. The security guard, eying us, mistakes us for students and beams with approval at our keen interest in Islamic mathmatics.
Outside it is 3:04 p.m. We pass a miniature of the Galata Tower; two young men are taking a picture of it. We’re hungry, but first we wander over to the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosques. A man is selling watermelon but it is too expensive. Further on, we hear a trumpet. A man is playing, "Let it Be," by the Beatles and we recognize it. You play trumpet, Amelie says. Yes, I say. But not for a long time. My first year in Prague I needed money so I pawned it.
We walk back down toward the waterfront, we are tired and do not say much. We see the ferry to Kadikoy at the pier and run and get tokens and just make it. We go back to the side where we were coming over. It’s much more crowded than it was earlier, but an old Turkish couple squeezes over and makes a spot. Amelie smiles and thanks them and they smile back, curious, charmed. Amelie likes old people, and they can see that. I see a couple of good-looking young women, and hear them speak English and realize they are American and wonder if they are students or on holiday. Then I remember Amelie, my afternoon companion. We get up and go to the other side; there are only a couple people here. Amelie takes out the stones she collected earlier and skips them over the waves, but the water is too choppy.
“Are you happy?” she suddenly asks me. The question confuses me. “Yes,” I say.
Then we look out at the sea; it’s late in the afternoon, and the waves pound against the side of the boat, the spray coming up into our faces. Amelie says she has to go. She is beginning to become blurry and indeterminate in the wind.
Somewhere in the city, a gypsy woman selling flowers is being photographed by a tourist, and asking for 2 liras, instead of 1. In Suadiye, a man named Fetih is fasting when suddenly he decides that for the sake of health he will take a break today and goes out to have a cigarette and tea. Far away, in the Ayazaga the stray dogs laying in the streets suddenly get up and begin barking for seemingly no reason at all. And even further away, in the city of Bursa a young woman named Ozlem is thinking about her ex-boyfriend and wondering if he is OK, wherever he may be.
Meanwhile, Amelie is fading, as daydreams do. She is saying something, I try to catch it but it’s hard to hear over the motors and choppy waves. She is holding something, one of the stones she collected during our walk. She gives it to me, and talks about a trumpet.
What was it, she said?