The Three Names of a City

THE THREE NAMES OF THE CITY

25th May 2005: AC Milan – Liverpool. Istanbul.

[1.]
In a city like this it's easy to believe in the invisible world; I come to your door with pockets full of sweets, like a smuggler, a child-thief, like the villain of an ancient lullaby. They are tourist sweets. I am a tourist. You open the door like a border policeman would let a suspicious car go; there will be regrets, I'm sure.

But not just yet.

Before all that:

You catch me smoking outside the press conference.

The hotel with green wallpaper – the marble city – smoking on the balustrade – the sound of water never too far away. Postcard moments of me and you. A procession of yellow cabs and construction sites. Duman means smoke.

You don't smoke, you tell me. But thanks.

I came here to take pictures; I make a click gesture with my hands and you understand.
This is how it starts, if it could be said to have started at any fixed point: I came for the green of a football match; the chemistry of photographs is fragile like the bodies of the dead – everything might crumble at any time, the moment of revelation becomes a mark of too much light, too long in the water, somebody moving when they shouldn't, leaving a blurred star-wake. Not pictured.

[2.]
`Let's get out of here,´ is a line from a film we never saw. You grab my coat and kidnap me from myself, walking down the hotel stairs two steps at a time.

You tell me that your name is Acke, but that's a pet form – with you being so tall, I imagine your mother standing on tiptoes to kiss your forehead; that image stays with me, long after these two days, and I understand that there are materials, there are chemical products more lasting than celluloid. Image comes from imago, it doesn't have to be real.

`Will you tell me your name?´ You ask.

I point to the credential badge, still hanging from my breast pocket.

You frown.

`Yes, but will you say it to me?´

Maybe it's because you feel no more comfortable than I do in borrowed clothes and press passes, maybe it's because you don't understand my language and I can't speak yours, maybe it's that we are both strangers in a brief city, but the stones seem to smile a secret smile every corner that we turn.

[3.]
The old man from the tea house explains to us: this is a city so beautiful that they had to re-name it twice.

(I understand that; how can you let something you love go by without trying to unravel it with vowels, mouth, with hands? People will always write on white walls. Revolutions will come and they will change the name of the streets; you say your name is Acke but I don't believe you, because it wasn't me who chose it)

All the radio talks about is tonight's match, like a buzzing noise behind our ears reminding us that this story is not completely ours.

There is a stain, a red-wine-ring on the corner of the newspaper, the exact page I'm trying to read you from. I know Turkish, you don't. This team will win, it says. You try to convince me of the merits of a four-man midfield, you only partly succeed because I think wings are beautiful, the way they run so close to the line, ready to die for the cause.

Everything you know about game tactics, I know about bodies in motion. Light reflected. You shake your head, `there can be no light without words´.

We follow the inconsistencies of the city like a third character not invited to the play, detective story and we in its tails or it in ours, you with the whitest skin of the city, as easy to follow as a comet.

[4.]
When, later, trying to decipher the mysterious outcome of the game, you say `sometimes you just have to take an illogical risk, because all else is lost´, I think I like that, but it doesn't sound like football at all. It's more of a pop song, or a tense silence, or that moment when we are struggling through the Italian tourists on the covered market and I place my hand on the small of your back, meaning nothing, meaning only to guide you to the row with the tiles and ceramics painted in turquoise.

It starts like this: You tell me your name is Acke. I never learn to pronounce it properly.
We act like tourists, proper tourists, buying cheap jewellery or a red dress for imaginary girlfriends or dead grandmothers, we follow every tourist at the same time, often tripping in our own steps, speaking made-up languages, making a pocket-size map of everything we see.

After the game we look at the sky,
and the thin, tiny tv antennae on the tallest buildings, mistaking them for stars.

You grab my arm and save me from the cheering, red crowd. People walk, laugh past us, grazing me like bullets. Happiness, but not mine. The human epidermis is renewed completely every 10-60 days. Does that mean in two months time my elbow won't be the elbow you touch now?

The torches, we follow the torches out of the stadium, we get lost, we get drunk on a park bench, lost in streets as narrow as our waists, one might say everything is human-sized here, human-touched. Like the statues of saints worn featureless from so many hands. Love can erode. I think about the solvent products in my lab, about how they eat away the unexposed spots of celluloid to reveal the light. I think about how you eat away everything in me that's inconsequential, fear or lies.

To be naked and barefoot in Istanbul tonight.

The cafés and bars take all their tables outside. There you take a picture of a smiling face. There the wine is girl-sweet and we look at the bridge for a long, long time.

The sky in red, red, red. Caramelized, smoke and music from open windows, smoke in your hands.

[5.]
You sit up on the hotel bed, Indian-style, drunk and listening while I tell you of the city's other names, the secret ones, the catacombs, the hidden passages underwater. Follow me, I say. Dersaadet, Asitane, Pâyitaht, I say.

Dersaadet means “Gate of Felicity”. You like it. I handwrite it on your knee: در سعادت .
People singing in English outside. We leave the window open, just in case.

`I understand nothing of what happened tonight,´ I say with broken syntax.

(thinking of my hand on the small of your back, walking through the Grand Bazaar; thinking of women with golden earrings; thinking of the pitch minutes after the match, staring back at us like a spent lover, obscene)

Then you twist my wrist and hold me with one hand and pull me against the sheets. They smell of bleach. I will remember this long after I've forgotten your face, or how you tried to teach me to say Acke, or how many names Istanbul has had.
We hear fireworks above our heads, the festivities – they leave us alone. For a moment we disappear.

I draw my name on the palm of your hand, between the line of love and the line of fate: לִיאוֹר. Lior.

With fingertips I begin to rewrite myself on you.
I leave the characters unfinished, like a kiss, or a late piano piece.

[6.]
One of us sleeps in a bed that's not his, against a collarbone that's familiar and strange, not his, but like his – my lips recognize the shape of all things human, my mouth recognizes the structure of bones, even yours. Strange bones. Cell calling to cell. Genetics and love are only one step apart, no, half a step. We hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, even if it is written on a language that's neither mine nor yours. Everything – the night – written in undecipherable languages, in runes, in cuneiform, and us with no Rosetta stone.

I stay awake a long time listening to your breathing, your drunkenness, feeling my eyelids have disappeared. The meow of a cat you thought was beautiful and wanted to adopt.

I lied before: it is you who come to my door.

[7.]
A city so beautiful that they had to re-name it twice.
But the other, whispered names remain, liminal.
Maybe we remain too, like a simple story: a photographer, a journalist, an international football competition.

Everything else is the kind of secret these stones know how to keep, how to asphyxiate. You scribbled the number and time of your flight on the room-service menu.

Instead: I stay where I am. I visit yesterday's tea house to find the old man, his words, gone. I ask for a table outside. On the uneven surface, sloped – stones, stones – the table tilts and falters, waking up to soberness, just waking up.
I look at the sky, a plane crossing it.