#42___Istanbul memories – 1960s
From a passage in my book that contrasts the “Inside” of the Covered Bazaar with the “Outside” of the rest of the city.
Outside the Bazaar was the daylight world, my everyday world: our house at the school overlooking the Bosphorus and its commanding view of the crenellated battlements of Rumeli Hisar and the (then) sparsely-populated hills of Asia beyond rolling down to the famous channel—the veritable soul of the city—as yet unshackled by bridges.
Outside were the squares in which Omar Khayyam’s Sultan had exchanged his noose of light for bouquets of pigeons—gathered expressly to be stampeded by boys—that exploded from the ends of my outstretched arms, rose and traced long ellipses around the symmetrical clusters of domes pushing up through the city’s ancient canopy.
Outside was the unique profile of that canopy, a skyline drawn and dominated not by the spirit of commerce, as in so many modern cities, but the commerce of spirit. I especially remember it from the vantage point of a hired fishing boat chugging down the Bosphorus on a bright day: the vista in which the eye’s brilliant flight broke against, and at once was healed by, the elegant stipplings of minarets and cypress in their dreaming transactions with the Invisible, suturing together earth and sky along the city’s crest.
Outside was the vast music of Istanbul whose soloists, in this child’s memory, were the muezzins and the hot corn, simit, paper halvah and water vendors, all singing out their respective nourishments. Backing them was a horn section led by the oil tankers whose stately passage through the Bosphorus was announced by an extended basso profundo blast that, like the channel itself, bridged the Black and Marmara seas, not with water but with a flash flood of sound, an oratorio condensed into pure fanfare that would have charmed the likes of Gabrieli or Handel. (Despite the exuberant gravitas of those calls, it was their aftermath I awaited, the brief and magical twilight reign of the echo. Magic is bred of night knowledge, a creature of a shadow land far from the C-major verities of day and, accordingly, it was the shadowy tail of the tanker’s bellow that fed my youthful wonderology. Held by the sustaining pedal in the Thracian hills, the echo held in turn the intimations of a wilder music; like a great work of art it granted the imagination a fleeting conjugal visit with the horizon. Quasi una fantasia. To paraphrase Eliot, I was the echo while the echo lasted.) Sounding at more regular intervals were the jubilant three-‘whoop’ calls of the car ferries shuttling their clutches of men and metal between the shores of Europe and Asia. And in the harbor of Bebek at the foot of our hill, the silent grace notes: the small brightly-painted fishing boats swaying from side to side and davening in their moorings beneath the cobbled embankment, rising and falling in the neverending ripple and chop like the flotsam of a shattered rainbow.
Excerpt from Ganesha’s Mouse, Book 1
