City Of Dreams I

Thursday – Gürel and Cemberlitas

Having breakfast in one of the roof restaurants opens up your eyes to the immensity of this city. The undulating landscape of weathered pastel buildings, satellite dishes, aerials, domes and minarets covering the hills pauses, letting the blue of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn outline its vastness.

The blue sky is cloudless, nowhere for the sun to hide and the heat is already unbearable.

I walk to the language school where I will be attempting to learn some Turkish. I walk in and Gürel is waiting for me. He’s short, wears his black, long curly hair in a ponytail and has a friendly round face decorated with a fine moustache, a perfectly trimmed goatie and the longest of eyelashes. We get through the alphabet and begin to practice phonetics. Gürel teaches me the correct pronunciation of the Turkish dotted vowels ö and ü– his lips locked around imaginary smoke rings. He’s ever so effeminate. He moves around the table and white board with such finesse, fluttering like a butterfly. He makes a point somewhere in the middle of the class of mentioning that he is married. He repeats it towards the end.

I leave at two in the afternoon and walk to Karakoy’s tram stop. I get off at Cemberlitas and go to the Hamam just across the tramline. Walking in the pristine changing room, I undress and put all my stuff in the locker. A pair of loud Spanish women walk in, invading the otherwise quiet space with a running commentary of their just finished Hamam experience. I walk past avoiding them. I get to the bowels of the building, a milky light pervades the space, a dozen star-shaped holes cover the dome. The light travels down towards the central marble slab, funnelling outwards and highlighting it. I slide towards one of the running taps and sit next to it, I fill the metal bowl with hot and cold water and empty it slowly over my head. The heat in the room is bearable.

A large woman gestures for me to come over. We communicate with gestures. I lie facing down on the warm marble. She covers my entire body in a cloud of soap- I disappear- it makes me smile. I wipe my face and look to the right- a young woman, clearly Nordic, is lying on the opposite side, she smiles back. I must look like a cloud with an amused silly face. I look further down and see another cloud, this time I laugh.

The large woman bathing me throws a big bowl of water on top of me and I re-appear, smelling of cheap hand made soap. She begins scrubbing my back and moves onto my limbs. When she's done with that she washes my hair vigorously. I’m sent to an adjacent room and a friendly masseuse tells me to lie down in Spanish. I picture the two loud Spaniards, torturing her with their chatter into memorising the sentence.

Outside, the afternoon is glorious and I feel as sunny.

Friday – Towards Sultanhamet

The pavements in Istanbul have been designed to be avoided. I'm walking down to Galata Bridge. The road follows a steep incline but it’s smooth and hazard free. The pavement, on the other hand, is uneven and has unmanageably deep steps cut onto it, a high raised stone border is set between it and the road and every so often a black rectangular manmade hole interrupts the fragile solidity of the ground- in it, a few cement steps serve as entrances to basement flats; devoid of any safety or warning features, it is up to you to watch out for these. Years of training prevent me from walking on the road and I stumble, climb, jump and trip along the pavement, forcefully facing down. I want to see Istanbul so, I give up and join everybody else on the road.

Aggressive cars drive within touching distance, demanding and menacing. An old man, twisted under a large sack trails uphill, I want to help. Men of all ages walk up and downhill. It smells of rancid sweat and gusts of misir filled air mix with the heavy scent of kebaps. It’s hot and humid and sweat runs down my back and below my breasts. Shops, glued to one another, cover both sides of the street. Same-trade stores stick together- first, someone must have thought of opening a bicycle shop, for the next fifty metres, this is bicycle street- then, a satellite dish eats up the useless pavement, advertising a new theme; now, satellite dishes of all sizes stick out from the facades of the stores, no more bicycles dangling overhead.

Shopkeepers sit outside sipping tea from tulip glasses, young boys hurry across the street delivering tea on hanging trays.

I turn right towards Galata bridge and the Golden Horn. The bridge is teeming with men fishing- below it and running along both sides of the bridge, fish restaurants pave its underbelly.

I reach Sultanhamet at noon.

Saturday – Balat

I run across the road avoiding the menacing traffic and reach the Byzantine wall. Octagonal towers stand at regular intervals, some have lost their tooth-like crowning stones; they seem filled with soil and a mass of vegetation pours over their edges, making the once mighty Constantinople walls look like a sequence of untidy plant pots. I follow the cobble-stone path towards one of the doors; either side tombstones frame the approach. I notice some are in the shape of elongated tablets, inscribed with Arabic writing and topped by a turban; the majority are turbanless though and I wonder if this is a sign of lack of wealth or importance.

I walk through the stone opening and into the neighbourhood of Balat. The call to prayer’s invasive moan begins. I stop. Behind me- the dead- outside the walls of their once home- banished- but close enough and not forgotten; the main road and miles of expanded city, modern Istanbul. Ahead of me, a labyrinth, foreign and intimate, suggestive of dark deeds and dangerous people; for a moment I feel I shouldn’t enter.

I go in and decide to walk ahead, downhill.
Squat, precarious houses with Ottoman style balconies , chipped coloured plaster, weathered pink , ochre, emerald facades, a crumbling fountain, old beyond recognition, women wearing head-scarves sitting outside, some on chairs , some on the floor, happy children playing in the street, men sitting outside run-down cafes and workshops, they do so in pairs whilst the women gather in larger groups. I feel I’m invading their privacy as I walk along their streets, peeping. They look sombre and inscrutable. A cat is lying stretched on a miniature Turkish carpet. I turn around a corner, the setting sun vanishing fast. A crimson veil of light covers the top of the facades, below, the street is becoming ashen. The street contorts to the left , the ground levels up. I look up and a dazzling display of whites, bathed by the last blazing light of the day, hang motionless on a line across the street; a second line cuts across diagonally, travelling back to the left house; coloured clothes hang limply. A few metres down the street, a third line and a fourth- clothes dangling like flags on the line of a boat , speaking an insider’s language that I cannot decipher. Like in a dream, I’m in this place here and now, but I don’t know it, I don’t know its meaning; it’s foreign and unreal but for now, it exists. Is this how we enter dreams? Are they always there, waiting for us to come in? Do they continue to exist once we leave? I hope I can enter this one again.

Sunday – Cihangir and the Ney

‘ Cihangir is the rundown version of Le Marais in Paris’ – I heard someone saying. Cihangir has a language of its own, a soft, caressing murmur behind the impatient car horns, the strident chanson of hundreds of indolent street cats on heat and the trumpeting of street vendors. An eczane sits in one of the corners of antique shop street, the old man running the pharmacy sits always inside, by the door. The small shop window is a treasure chest. I read ‘ human body, just one lira’ written in English on a small piece of orange paper. A sun-bleached poster reading in Turkish ‘the human body is like a factory’ shows a drawing of a head and thorax cut in a frontal section- inside, a series of random chambers hold heavy machinery; minute men work in the chambers, there are tubes, passage ways, metallic cauldrons, the whole thing failing to depict any resemblance of body functioning. Elsewhere within the display, boxes of aspirin, vitamins, sanitary pads, condoms, contact lenses solutions, cockroach poison, fly spray, deodorants, fight for prominence on the wonky free-standing shelf system. Outside, the lower panels of the wooden shop window frame serve as auxiliary display space- here, two yellow fishnet bags filled with boxes hang from nails; an orange publicity cardboad sign with some Turkish writing and a drawing of an open match book , all the matches but one are lying in place, unused; a lonely match stands up, alight, its yellow flame rising. I’m trying to work out what the product is about; below it, fake oversized marketing boxes of Levitra are sitting on the ledge- I follow the boxes, bigger ones announce Viagra, suddenly I make the connection with the standing, flaming match. A pair of scruffy shoes stand to the right, I look up. The old man leans against the doorway, smiling amused. I smile back and move on.

I meet Hilal and Pinar. We are going to their boss’s house after dinner for a drink, he’s a thirty four year old hippie that has spent many months on board big ships, travelling across the world, trying to fight the big companies polluting earth for a profit.

From the restaurant, I see the domes of Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and Suleymaniye glowing across the Golden Horn; a crescent moon touches the right minaret of Yeni Mosque turning into a silver earring dangling seductively. The honey light of strategically placed beams displays the beauty spots of Istanbul, lighting up my imagination. I’m transported to a far away place, a semi-concocted world of alleys and eunuchs , harems and caravans , traders and viziers- I see the tips of the minarets alight like giant matches and Levitra pops up in my mind. ‘ Groove Armada’ is playing and I join in the conversation.

We sit on Erkan’s roof terrace, he’s warm and welcoming. Fairy candles light the terrace; mellow music fills the air . He talks about his trips around the world. He goes inside the house and comes back with a handmade flute , it has been his companion on lonely nights at sea. He plays a few deep, longing notes and he offers me to try it, he explains how to place your lips and at which angle you have to blow to hit the inside of the tube on the right spot and make it sound. I take it and blow down the tube, the air comes out the other end and I fail to understand how can anyone make this thing sound, it’s just an open tube with seven holes drilled on it. Erkan invites me to try again. The girls, reassuring me, tell me that it is very difficult, that you need months of practice, that they cannot play it. I try again. I remember Gürel’s phonetic lesson and I ease up some air out of my rounded lips. A faint, far away sound , like wind blowing through distant cliffs comes out the other end , I inhale and try a second time- it’s happening again and I release one of my fingers, the sound becomes deeper- they look surprised. I put the ney down. The girls express their amazement. This instrument, revered by Turkish people, is played by the sufis and its music sends the whirling dervishes spiralling upwards towards God. I clearly cannot do that. Erkan takes the ney and congratulates me soberly, looking like a child striped of attention.

©M.E. Romero