Turkish Holiday: Part I

My slim knowledge of Turkey at that time was limited specifically to one man, whom we referred to as Monsieur Kebab. We happened haphazardly across a small kebab restaurant early in our stay in France. The fall days had just been receiving the surplus of a lengthy summer, and we were able to eat outside late into the evening. Monsieur Kebab sweated profusely behind the small counter that was his workspace, and, after taking our orders, quickly prepared huge, foot-long kebabs that dared us to finish them in one sitting. Back then we were able to do so because 1. we were younger, and could digest such a massive quantity of food while still remaining skinny and 2. we had little idea of how unhealthy the food we were eating was, even the vegetarians among us, it being so foreign and new to us, and 3. France, with no concept of a "to-go box," commanded us to finish the meals we had ordered.

It was the second day in a row that we went to eat chez Monsieur Kebab (I never bothered to learn the name of his kebab café, for though there were many in the city of Bordeaux, Kebaberies they all were) and perhaps for this reason, he sent his wife to pour us tea after we had finished our meals. The tea was served in small glasses, hot, just poured from the boiling samovar and it was saturated with sugar. Up until then I had naively believed sugary tea to be my own guilty pleasure. I had thought all tea by tradition was meant to be served plain and had expected that later in my adult life I would grow accustom to its natural taste. Never did I imagine that a whole country preferred its tea likewise.

We drank the tea thankfully--considering the donation of this tea an attempt at friendship--and from then on nurtured the limited kind of relationship that one can have with a foreign restaurant owner, being ourselves foreign. The conversations we had were short, and mostly practical in nature: sauce blanche, avec frites, et une tasse du thé. And Monsieur Kebab always remained distantly stoic. The one time I asked him about Turkey, from which I eventually learned he had emigrated, he demurred any sort of emotional response and replied simply that it was a big country, and strife with misfortune. He had aged photos of Turkey's best sites all over his small restaurant.

In that time I was surrounded by foreign countries and immersed in one, so my journeys would naturally be a matter of luck or chance: any country I visited would be as foreign and new to me as any other. I had a friend, Reid, who was studying in Cairo and, looking at a map, we decided that if we were to travel together over spring break, the best place to meet up was Turkey. We corresponded by various means of internet and eventually planned to meet on April 20, 2005 in a small square in Turkey. There was a new internet site called Couch Surfing which allowed people to find others who were willing to host them as they traveled for no amount of money. I myself was a bit hesitant about that, but Reid did all the legwork and arranged that we would stay in an apartment with some engineering students in a district of Istanbul called Beşiktaş.

A few nights before I left for Istanbul I went to see Interpol outside of Bordeaux in a small suburb called Gradignan. The big concert halls there were always on the fringe of the city. I went alone but knew I'd see friends once I arrived. On the bus ride there I noticed two girls drinking out of a bottle of Schwepp's tonic. I knew they couldn't be French, drinking so overtly. I approached them and found out that they were from Manchester. They let me drink their gin and tonic with an apology of appearing so bluntly English. The blonde of the two and I stayed outside the venue and subsequently missed seeing British Sea Power. We chatted about our lives and, then, I was just so fascinated by someone who fit this stereotype I had formed in my adolescent life about girls overseas. This one liked Manchester City and hated Manchester U. This one, back home, worked at a record store outside of Manchester. She liked the Smiths growing up, liked Blur over Oasis. She had seen them all in concert. It seems cliché to me now, but at the time I was thrilled to meet a girl like that. I had a mind to take her away from the concert, dispense of our 19 euro tickets and have her fill me in on every detail of her childhood and adolescent life. Instead, I never saw her even during or after the concert, just told her I would see her later and headed into the crowd and was lost.

Years later I would take up the oeuvre of Orhan Pamuk. In its totality, it is clear that Pamuk's plots are really background to the setting, a reversal of the rules of literature in order to play out his relationship with Turkey. Writing in New York, the idea of "exile" blossoms in his depictions of Istanbul, a city that has been ingrained so intensely into his memory that his relationship with it is borderline obsessive. In this sense, Pamuk is allowed to never resolve his murder mysteries, for the act of chasing a character who actually never appears in a novel is actually an excuse for wandering the city, searching its darkest alleys and most rundown cafés. Similarly, a lifelong love affair can be loosely referred to in a short story, since it is less about the love affair than the woman's boutique in Nişantaşı, where he grew up, and the lineage of the girl he meets there, how she is connected to him through family. Resolution and character development are cast aside; Pamuk's writing is more like a crazy old man who takes you by the hand in order to tell you truncated stories and conspiracy theories, then leaves you suddenly stranded in a street you have never been down before, and suddenly you realize the old man's intention was never to fill you in on his thoughts, but rather take you on the most in depth tour of the city you could have hoped for.

Having lived in one place for decades, a city takes on a new, fictive role once you cast yourself away from it, or are exiled. All of Pamuk's work resembles serial fiction, not in the sense that characters reappear and plot lines are picked up and end with "to be continued," but in the sense that throughout his books and stories, elements and themes of Turkey appear again and again: the Milliyet newspaper; the overprotective and controlling Turkish family; incest in Turkish genealogy and relationships; the umbrage of Atatürk, Father of Turkey, and how the Turkish people seem unable to tear themselves away from it; the lines for dolmas; and the "New Life" caramels, cigarettes, tabacs. As he says often, memory is a garden, and if anything, for Pamuk, the act of writing is his way of walking down the streets of his childhood, reliving the quotidian activities in Turkey that, as a child, he took for granted.

But for me, there has always been a second kind of exile. This type of exile happens before birth, and in a way it is just as tragic, if not more so. A new, fresh city can only be digested once you have left it and it has always struck me how, even a place I have only visited for one week can stay with me more indelibly than any memory I have of the town I grew up in. When you feel strangely at home in a setting that you never knew existed until you got off the plane, when you can almost see your younger self playing in the cobblestoned streets with the other boys of that region, when you feel as though a pastry endemic of the nation you are in has been the pastry you have breakfasted on every day of your life, just out of habit, then when you have to leave and return home, you truly experience a sense of exile. The most tragic part of this exile is that even if you decide to make that place your home by learning its language, taking up a job there and living your whole life there, even fully immersed in that place, you will never truly be a part of it, only the outsider looking in. While, like Napoleon, exiles can be pardoned and welcomed back, the second type of exile is eternally banned.

When the concert was over, it was raining. Outside the venue some of my friends were drinking whiskey and I drank with them. Then, soaking wet, I had to run as fast as I could to catch the last bus home, thinking how if I didn't catch it in time I would be stuck forever in the rain. I reached my stop and decided that I should call Reid in Cairo before he left for Istanbul, so I walked to a payphone nearby. The rain had stopped now and the soft ground beneath my feet felt content after being freshly watered.

As I dialed the numbers--which were strange series of country and area codes, and led to a strange dial tone--I thought of the girl from Manchester. I imagined briefly what it would have been like if I asked her to marry me, if I moved with her back to Manchester and how as a couple we would be City fans and share our hatred for Man U. I wondered if I would ever see her again, and if, years later, I wrote about her, then whether she was also thinking of me. Then Reid's voice came on the line in a manner that suggested he was picking up the phone in a vastly different setting than I was.

We talked briefly about our plans to meet. He told me to meet him in Beşiktaş in front of a grocery store called Tanşas. He said it was the only one in that district and that the taxi driver would know where to go. When I went home that night, I felt a kind of vertigo, as though I had momentarily touched upon multiple parts of the globe all at once allowing me to, in an infinitesimal amount of time, realize the vastness of the world.