Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE FERRY TO BESIKTAS

ISTANBUL IS A WATER WORLD, and your first view of it, stepping out of Sirkeci Station, is the pin-cushion profile of minarets on domes seeming to rise from steep dark islands, turbulent ocean all around, the Sea of Marmara to the right, the Golden Horn to the left, the Bosporus straight ahead. Walk forward, walk anywhere, and you approach water splashing at the shores of the city, which is spread across three distinct promontories. Across the Sea of Marmara, dappled with raindrops this afternoon—past the ferries and cargo ships and fishing boats, those silhouettes of battlements and villas—is the shore of Asia, the twinkling edge of the Eastern Star.

To the southeast is Haydarpasa Station, looking like a dark waterside cathedral. Thirty-three years before, I had boarded an express to Ankara and Lake Van. Changing trains, taking buses, I had traveled overland to Iran and India and beyond. Things were different now: the Iranians had turned down my visa application, and war had brought anarchy to Afghanistan. I would take another route this time, head through Turkey and then hope to detour around Iran by changing trains in Georgia and rolling onward, through the Stans: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan—places that had been forbidden to me all those years ago—and into India.

After three night trains I needed a breather in Istanbul. A short walk from Sirkeci Station was the ferry terminal. I took the ferry to the landing stage at Besiktas and strolled to the Ciragan Palas. This hotel was part of an old and elegant Ottoman palace, and was as welcome a hotel as the Pera Palas had been in the past. It was expensive, but it was at the edge of the Bosporus and easy to get to, a 20-cent ride on the ferry.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Istanbul ferries "were such a part of everyday life that they assumed an almost totemic importance." The ferries dip and roll; the best way of admiring the vast, separated city is from the rail of a boat. "The ferries' great gift to the skyline is the smoke from their chimneys."

The words are those of Orhan Pamuk, the distinguished novelist and Istanbullu—he seldom left the city of his birth and said he had never been tempted to live elsewhere. Thirty-three years before, I had happened to meet Yashar Kemal, the novelist and political tub-thumper. He was still alive at the age of eighty-two, but was out of town. I decided to go in search of Pamuk and to see what the decades had done to Istanbul. For Pamuk, it is a city of joy and also of "overwhelming melancholy," and yet the Bosporus is "the font of our good health, the cure of our ills, the infinite source of our goodness and goodwill that sustains the city and all those who dwell in it."

In his unusual chronicle of his life in the city, Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk describes his childhood, his fractious family, his chronic ennui, his self-imposed solitude, his daydreams, his love of the side streets and the ships and the preoccupations that are peculiar to Istanbul. This is one of my favorite city books because it is written by a native son, a keen observer who knows all his city's faults as well as its virtues. It is right that it is also a family memoir, because his relationship with Istanbul is familial, the city like an uneasy relative, a funny uncle or an eccentric granny who provides him shelter. Such a book might be written by a New Yorker or a Parisian, but it would not be so persuasive, because New York is a modern city with a thin substratum and Paris is an artifact if not a confection. And a Turk is someone with deep roots, not a mere urbanite or transplant. For a Turk, Istanbul is an extension of Turkish culture and the Turkish personality, reflecting its conflicts, obsessions, and character traits. Its complex and glorious history is evident in many of its buildings, glimpses of Byzantium and Constantinople above the heavy traffic and the teenyboppers on cell phones.

Istanbul is ancient, and Istanbullus carry its old-fangledness in their heads—Pamuk is the proof of that. What do you think of us? the Turks often ask of strangers. New Yorkers and Parisians never ask such things, nor do Londoners, who take the view that strangers are the ones to be assessed or mocked, certainly not themselves. In most cities, the inhabitants are too busy and hard-pressed to care. But Turks are different, self-conscious of their longitude on the map, straddling Europe and Asia.

"To some degree, we all worry about what foreigners and strangers think of us," Pamuk says. "My interest in how my city looks to western eyes is—as for most Istanbullus—very troubled; like all other Istanbul writers with one eye on the West, I sometimes suffer in confusion."

"To see Istanbul through the eyes of a foreigner always gives me pleasure," Pamuk goes on. Flaubert, Gide, Nerval, Knut Hamsun, and Hans Christian Andersen all visited Istanbul and recorded their impressions, and in most instances what they saw was a fading Orientalism that ceased to exist as soon as it was described—the harem, the grotesque and the picturesque, dervishes, hubble-bubble pipes, the slave market, Ottoman clothing, floppy sleeves, Arabic calligraphy, and, he says, the hamals, the porters, though such men can still be seen, heavily burdened with huge loads on wooden pack frames, trudging up and down the cobbled streets of the old city. Whenever I began to generalize about Istanbul's modernism, I encountered an exotic vignette—a shroud, a fez, a minaret, a veil, a donkey, or someone grilling fish over coals by the roadside.

But Pamuk's book, like all passionate books, is a bewitchment. Once you've read his Istanbul, you have been persuaded to see the city with his eyes—a gloomy, smoky warren of narrow lanes and conflicted families, serene, half fictional, like a city in a dream.

I find most cities nasty, but I can see that Istanbul is habitable, a city with the soul of a village. Unless there is a bomb in the bazaar, or a Kurd-related outrage, there is never news of Istanbul in the Western press. To say it is beautiful is so obvious as to be frivolous, yet the sight of its mosques and churches can be almost heart-stopping. I am impervious to its charm, even the word "charm," but I admire Istanbul for its look of everlastingness, as though it has always existed (it has been a noble city since its first incarnation as Byzantium 1,700 years ago, and looks it in part). Most of all I like the city for its completeness and its self-sufficiency: it is a finished work, distinctly itself. Of course, you can buy gold and carpets in the Grand Bazaar, or jewelry and leather goods in the Egyptian bazaar, but everything else is available throughout the city too, because Turkey makes everything—stationery, cheap clothes, computers, knives, cigarettes, refrigerators, furniture. Heavy industry flourishes. The newspaper business is lively and competitive, book publishing is energetic, Turkish literacy is high, and book sales are brisk.

Given the fact that Turkey shares borders with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Arme nia, and Georgia, as well as Greece and Bulgaria, it could be a cockpit, yet it is a generally calm and self-assured place.

Istanbul now was vastly more prosperous in the look of its spruced-up buildings and well-dressed inhabitants. The ferry to Besiktas was proof of that, with its Sunday-serene passengers: little families holding hands, groups of muttering boys, smiling girls with their eyes downcast for modesty's sake, elderly women in shawls, bearded mullahs, shrouded wives in black burqas, every gradation in the chairs and pews of the ferry, from defiant unbeliever to scrupulous Koran reader.

The city is dramatic in its vistas, its spaces, its mixed population, and for appearing to accommodate everyone, but it is too big and sprawling to be definable. Yet because it is whole and coherent, self-sufficient, with an impressive profile of domes and spires, it is an easy city to visit, allowing the traveler to be presumptuous. The formalities of Turkish life, the elaborate courtesies of the Turkish language, encourage politeness.

The massacre of Armenians a century ago, the later expulsion of Greeks, and the Kurdish outrages and Turkish reprisals are lamentable facts of Turkish history; still, no city in Asia is so self-consciously reform-minded. And it is lucky in its writers, who are public intellectuals in the European mode—Orhan Pamuk was one of many who denounced the downplaying of the Armenian slaughter. He represented a public conscience. Yashar Kemal had played that role, as had his near namesake Yaya Kemal. All such people—public speakers, makers of statements, sometime journalists, polemicists with their passion and daring—were almost unknown in the countries I'd just passed through: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. A young woman novelist, Elif Shafak, was also outspoken against excessive Turkification and in defense of Sufism. Many of the writers were in hot water when I arrived, but they seemed (as Turkish writers frequently do) to regard hot water as their natural element.

That it is one of the most easily negotiated and hospitable cities in the world makes me a mild Turkophile. Although it's a frustrating city to drive in (the traffic moves at a crawl), it is full of alternatives—a metro, commuter trains, buses, dolmuses (minivans)—and it is one of the great cities for walking or taking a ferry from embankment to embankment. I had been too young and hurried to appreciate its virtues on my first visit. For one thing, Istanbul is a well-used city: its marvels are not mere artifacts and museum pieces. They are part of everyday life. The ancient mosques and churches, the bazaars, the bridges, the gardens, the promenades, the fish markets, and the fruit stalls are busily patronized by Turks. Being a secular country, Turkey thrives on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer and rest, and the bazaars and shops are closed on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath.

Istanbul had an air of Sunday serenity and an off-season slackness. Worry beads were not in evidence. It was only the next day in the empty bazaars that the hawkers were frowning, but when I remarked on the lack of customers, they said, "The tourists will come next month, Inshallah"

I was aware of being a solitary traveler on a long journey. With no detailed onward plans, I was not looking much beyond Turkey at the moment. The newspaper headlines were all about the Iraq War—it was a one-day bus trip to the Iraq border. The war was clearly unpopular, but no one singled me out or harassed me. On the contrary, I was welcomed in restaurants, and I delighted in the food: stuffed grape leaves, bluefish, cheese dumplings, and an eggplant dish so delicious its name is a catchphrase, imam bayildi, "the imam fainted."

In the rain and the raw March wind off the Bosporus, the streets were uncrowded. I walked from mosque to mosque, then made some calls, agreeing to give a talk at a local college, as I had done on my first visit. I was invited to a dinner party and asked if there was anyone I wished to meet.

"What about Orhan Pamuk?"

"He usually says no."

The next day I gave my talk, at Bogazçi University, a former missionary college on the heights of Bebek, and this being hospitable Turkey, I was guest of honor at a lunch where all the other diners were women. One was an American who was writing a book on all the writers who had lived and written about Istanbul, among them Mark Twain, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles, and a man I bumped into after lunch, John Freely, a New Yorker who has lived and worked here for thirty-five years, the author of many books on Istanbul subjects.

Since working women in male-dominated societies are often more forthright and funnier than women in more liberated places, this campus lunch was lively and pleasant. Afterwards, I spoke to an English literature class on the subject of time and travel, alluding not just to my return journey but (because the class was studying the Romantic movement) also to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."

They were attentive students of the sort that used to exist on American campuses—modest, studious, intense, omnivorous readers, quoters of Byron, admirers of Shelley, note takers, listeners, not intimidated by esoteric Romanticism. They happened to be reading Northanger Abbey—a copy on each desk. They were aware that because they were Turks studying English classics they had to try harder; they had something to prove. And they easily understood what I was saying about my return trip to Turkey and my memories of my long-ago journey, because they got the drift of "Tintern Abbey," where it was and what it stood for:

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet...

Though they hadn't been born when I was last here, these students, because of their learning, could relate to my sentimental journey: we had Wordsworth in common.

From the class on Romanticism, I went to look at the hotel I'd stayed in my first time, the Pera Palas. The building that had once seemed glamorous to me now looked elderly and neglected, and after one drink in the bar I left it and walked along the drizzly boulevards towards Taksim Square.

One of the compelling features of Istanbul is that minutes from a palace or the holiest mosque or the most respectable neighborhood are their opposites—the dive, the hovel, the lower depths. The density of the city allows this proximity. The big-city conceit of the snob is the notion that sleaze is elsewhere, but it is usually only a few streets away.

So there I was, after leaving the Pera Palas, in the twinkling of an eye, in a dingy downstairs bar, the Club Saray, among mostly empty tables, greeting Marjana, who had just joined me.

"You buy me drink?"

"Of course."

She was thin, blond, starved-looking, and sullen. She might have been ill, but what struck me about her was that of all the girls in the bar, dimly lit though it was, she was reading a magazine. Though she had just folded it into her bag, I could see that it was not Turkish but Russian. She had been so engrossed in it, she was the one woman who had not looked up when I'd entered. What was a Russian woman doing here?

"What are you reading?"

That was when she'd put it away. She smiled, and after she'd sat down she said, "Pop stars. Music. Money."

"You're Russian?"

"I live Ukraine"—but it might have been "leave."

"Kiev?"

"No Kiev. Small village." She was sipping a glass of raki.

"Nice place?"

"Not nice. Small!" She shook her head, struggling for words. "No life. No money."

"Chickens?"

"Da. Chickens!"

"You come to Istanbul to make money?"

"You have money?" She was thin, with delicate hands and a hungry mouth, and she said "money" like a famished person using a word for food.

"Plenty," I said, and made the money sign with my fingers.

"So buy me another drink."

"You didn't finish this one."

I knew the routine. The conventional view is that these women are idle sauntering floozies, killing time over a drink, lollygagging the day away on a bar stool. No, they are strict and even terrifying timekeepers, especially when they have a pimp to answer to. And it's odd, because "Hurry up," which is their mantra, is not an aphrodisiac and hardly an endearment.

The meter was running. Time is everything to a prostitute. As clock watchers they are keener than lawyers, though the term "solicitor" applies to both, and they share the concept of billable hours, every minute needing to be accounted for in these foot-tapping, finger-drumming professions.

The prostitute also shares the lawyer's fake sympathy, the apparent concern for your welfare, the initial buttonholing how-can-I-help-you? clucking, the pretense of help that is a way of ensnaring you and making you pay. In both cases, as long as you go on paying you have their full attention, but they are always in charge.

Marjana, I could tell by her sideways glances, was getting signals from a Turkish man, probably her pimp, his heels locked onto the rungs of a chair as he rocked back with a drink in his hand.

"So we go?"

"Where?"

"Not far. Near this place. I like you." The second drink was set down. "I think you are strong man. You are from what country?"

"America."

"Big country. Lots of money. I want to go to America."

"How did you get here, to Turkey?"

"My friend tell me I can make money here. She say, 'Work in café.' Good work." Marjana looked a bit rueful, pursing her lips as she sloshed the raki in her mouth, then swallowed.

"You came—how? Bus? Plane?"

"I fly in plane. Is little money."

"Who's your boss? Ukrainian man?"

"Turk man." She glanced to the side, where the man was still glowering, and she pressed her lips together. Then, with a toss of her head, "We go?"

"Let's talk."

"Talk, talk," she said, irritated and impatient. She leaned over and tapped my knee. "What about fuck?"

I palmed some Turkish lire and put the notes into her hand, a gesture that shut her up but did not calm her. She looked at me as though I might be weird, but the money was in the meter.

"You have family?" I asked. She nodded. "Husband?" She nodded, but more slowly. "Children?"

At first she simply stared; then she began to cry, pressing her knuckles against her eyes. She shook her head and looked miserable. I hung my head, and when I saw her shoes—high heels, scuffed and twisted and damp from the wet streets of Taksim—I felt miserable myself at the sight of her tormented toes.

A hard-faced woman loomed over her and began to mutter. She was plump, in a tight dress, and her potbelly was at the level of my eyes. I recognized the word prablyema. Marjana was still sniffling in sorrow.

"What you say to Marjana?" the woman demanded.

"Nothing," I said lamely.

"She cry," the woman said.

Marjana tried to wave the woman away.

"I didn't do anything," I said, and sounded like a ten-year-old. But I had made her remember her small children.

The woman muttered again to Marjana. Tears, recrimination, defiance, accusation, more tears—this was as far from sex as it was possible to be. And at the periphery was a suggestion of violence in the smoldering gaze and threatening posture of the Turkish man.

The woman flicked her fat hand at me, grazing my face with her big fingernails. Though they were plastic glue-ons, they were sharp and claw-like, and could have served as weapons.

"Maybe you go, eh?"

Gladly, I thought. I stood up and backed away, a bit too quickly, but happy to go, saying goodbye. I had guessed that Marjana was one of many women lured to Istanbul and kept against her will—with a family elsewhere, unable to help her. I had wanted to talk, but in such circumstances, in most circumstances, talk is trouble.

***

I GOT MORE NEWS of the dinner party: "Pamuk said he's coming." I was eager to meet him, not merely because of his well-made novels and his personal history in Istanbul, but because, as a passionate writer and self-described graphomaniac, he was probably eccentric, someone who lived at the edge of the world, the solitary soul that all writers must be in order to do their work and live their lives. Writers are always readers, and though they are usually unbalanced, they are always noticers of the world. From an early age I have not been able to rid myself of the notion that the best writers are deeply flawed heroes.

Among the Turkish guests at the party, some of whom were writers, all of whom were polite, patient, and deferential, Pamuk was restless. Rather gangly and bespectacled, he thrashed around as he spoke. He reminded me of someone I knew. He was a taunter, hunching his shoulders, throwing his head back to laugh—and he had a loud, appreciative guffaw. He pulled faces, often clownish ones that his scholar's eyeglasses exaggerated. He was both a mocker and a self-mocker, a buttonholer, a finger wagger, and his consistent mode of inquiry was teasing. He was a needler, a joker, not a speechifier but a maker of deflating remarks in a smiling and mildly prosecutorial way, like a courtroom wit.

I smiled when it dawned on me that he reminded me of myself—evasive, goofy, slightly moody, ill at ease in a crowd, uncomfortable at formal occasions. Latins look a lot like Turks: I felt he physically resembled me, and he had my oblique habit of affecting to be ignorant and a bit gauche in order to elicit information.

"What do you mean by that?" was his frequent question, demanding that you explain what you just said.

His mother loomed large in his life and in his Istanbul narrative. I asked him what she thought of the book.

"She didn't like my Istanbul book. Then I got a divorce." He smiled. "She wasn't happy about that. But I put her in a book—My Name Is Red. Then she was happy."

"I put my mother in a book and she was very unhappy," I said. "She saw it as a betrayal. When my first book was published, almost forty years ago, she wrote me a long letter. I was in Africa at the time. She said the book was a piece of trash. That was her exact word. Trash! 'Thanks, Mom!'"

Pamuk became interested. "You must have been sad about that."

"Strangely, no. I was energized. I think I would have been disturbed if she'd praised the book—I would have suspected her of lying. I thought: I'm not writing to please her. By the way, I kept the letter. I still have it. It was a goad to me."

We were at the dinner table, being served a Turkish meal. While listening attentively to me, Pamuk was absorbing the reactions of the other people, his eyes darting.

"Why did you make a face?" he said to the woman next to me.

She denied she had made a face.

"Was it because we were talking about mothers, and you are a mother?"

"Of course not."

"You did this," Pamuk said, and squinted and showed his teeth and compressed his face into a comic mask.

He spoke about his years as a student, studying English, reading English books, and how as an anonymous Turk with a fluency in English he had taken Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter around Istanbul, pointing out the sights, explaining the history.

"I showed them the city. I was the translator. I was next to them, helping, listening. They had no idea who I was, but they were great writers to me."

Talk of Arthur Miller turned to talk of Marilyn Monroe. I said that I had written an essay about the Sotheby auction of Marilyn's personal effects.

"Expensive things?" Pamuk asked.

"Everything—dresses, books, shoes, broken mirrors, her capri pants, a copy of The Joy of Cooking with her scribbles in it, her wobbly dressing table, her junk jewelry. She had a yellow pad of paper and, in her writing, the words 'He doesn't love me.' A cigarette lighter that Frank Sinatra had given her. Also her 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' dress. And her toaster."

Pamuk was delighted by the inventory. He said, "I love catalogues of people's lives. Did you see the auction of Jackie Kennedy's possessions?"

"Yes, but no toasters in that one."

He said he loved minutiae, the revelation in everyday objects. Not the treasures but the yard-sale items, always more telling. It was a novelist's passion, a need to know secrets, to intrude—without seeming to—on other people's lives.

Still eating, he sized me up and said, "You went swimming with Yashar Kemal."

"That's right—thirty-three years ago."

"He is away, in south Anatolia," the host said, because I had also asked how I might get in touch with him. "He is sorry to miss you. He remembered you from that time long ago."

It seemed to me amazing that he was alive and writing, at the age of eighty-two, this man who'd boasted of his Gypsy blood and his upbringing in the wild hinterland of Turkey among bandits and peasants. He had been inspired by Faulkner, another writer who boasted of being a rustic. But Pamuk was a metropolitan, a man on the frontier as all writers are, but essentially a city dweller.

"I read your book about South America," Pamuk said. "I liked the part about Argentina, especially Borges."

Pamuk had much in common with Borges, not just his writing but his personality—an inwardness, a gift for the magical in his prose, wide and even arcane learning combined with a sense of comedy. Borges had been very funny in conversation, and often self-mocking, pretending to jeer at his own writing, insincerely remarking on how short his stories were—"and probably full of howlers!" as he said to me of "The Wall and the Books," his Chinese story.

The most endearing trait that Pamuk and Borges shared was a passion for the cities of their birth. Throughout Borges's writing is a nuanced history of Buenos Aires, and Borges would have nodded in agreement at Pamuk's judgment of a life in Istanbul, because it was so similar to that of a Buenos Aires person, a porteño: "When Istanbullus grow a bit older and feel their fates intertwining with that of the city, they come to welcome the cloak of melancholy that brings their lives a contentment, an emotional depth, that almost looks like happiness. Until then they rage against their fate."

In his writing, Borges extolled the violence, the music, the steamy secrets of Buenos Aires while at the same time bemoaning its philistinisms and pomposities and backward-looking conceits. Pamuk, it seemed to me, was no different.

"You read to him," Pamuk said. "That was nice."

"He enjoyed being read to. He had a little glimmer of eyesight—I mean, he signed a book for me—but he couldn't read."

"Did he do this?" Pamuk shut his eyes and threw his head back in an imitation of Stevie Wonder lost in a rapture of appreciation, grinning and shaking his head. It was a sudden and unexpected turn. Everyone laughed.

"You're wicked," I said.

"What do you mean by that?"

I said, "He didn't wag his head. He sat there and often finished the sentences in the stories. He seemed to know most of them by heart."

"Which stories? What did you read?"

"Kipling. He liked Plain Tales from the Hills. 'The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows'—about opium smoking. 'Beyond the Pale'—a doomed love affair. Borges was a connoisseur of unrequited love."

"What else?"

"Parts of the Arabian Nights in the Burton translation. He owned a first edition, about twenty volumes."

"Some of it is sexy. You read him those parts too, eh?"

Querying, mocking, needling, teasing, then all at once attentive. Pamuk approached a subject like a city dweller, darting up this alley and down that street, and then he was at an upstairs window calling down, raising a laugh, before his confrontation with a direct question. He also had a writer's gift for risking the sort of overfrank childish questions that can be disarming.

Talk of Borges and love led him to speak candidly about his father's mysterious other life and the loud battles between his father and mother: the turbulent household—evasive husband, agitated wife.

A woman sitting next to Pamuk said, "My mother once bumped into my father when he was with his mistress."

"That's a nightmare," I said.

"Good answer!" Pamuk said, smirking at me.

His indirection, the manner of his teasing, his posturing and prodding, finishing with a trenchant remark, was proof of Pamuk's seriousness. I thought of how all writers, when they are alone, talk to themselves. "When the inner history of any writer's mind is written," V. S. Pritchett once said, "we find (I believe) that there is a break at some point in his life. At some point he splits off from the people who surround him and he discovers the necessity of talking to himself and not to them."

In Istanbul it is possible to observe this process taking place in Pamuk's restless mind, his discovering that his inner life is unknown to his family, his relief in talking to himself. He finds solace away from his family, in solitary walks and mumbling meditation, because, among others things—as a portrait of a city, about growing up in a conflicted family, the joy of reading, famous visitors, a love of solitude, the melancholy of an ancient place—the book is about how he abandoned all other ambitions to become a writer, or more than a writer.

He was in the news. This reclusive man seemed an unlikely hero, but a few months earlier he had been in court as the defendant in one of those national trials that is like a morality play, a lion being judged by donkeys. Around that time he wrote in The New Yorker, "Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, its saints, and policemen at every opportunity, but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and prisons, I cannot say that I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last 'a real Turkish writer.' "

Outsiders complain that Turkey is repressive. Turks complain too. Every shade of Islamic opinion is present in Turkish society, ranging from the most benign to the most fanatical, and every shade of secular opin ion as well. This, I think, is the reason every visitor to Turkey finds something to like in the country and always finds a Turk to agree with.

The odd but probably provable fact is that repression often has a salutary effect on writers, strengthening them by challenging them, making them resist, making their voices important, for at their best, writers are rebellious, and repression is the whetstone that keeps them sharp, even if the repression makes their lives miserable. A free country cannot guarantee great writing, and a public intellectual (albeit a reluctant one) like Pamuk hardly exists in Britain and the United States.

Pamuk's crime was his mentioning to a Swiss journalist that "a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds were killed in this country and I'm the only one who dares to talk about it." This remark resulted in death threats, newspaper attacks, vilification, and a criminal charge of insulting the state. At his trial Pamuk faced a possible three-year sentence if he was found guilty, but the case was dropped. He was set free. He'd made his bones as a Turkish writer and he disappeared—Istanbul has that big-city quality of being a place in which you can vanish without a trace.

Pamuk does agree to be interviewed now and then. His voice is distinctive, his manner inimitable. Here is his response to a woman from a British paper badgering him on the subject of free speech in Turkey: "Look," he said to her, "I never had any trouble writing novels. I talked about this with my publisher when we were publishing Snow, which was my own explicitly political novel—but then nothing happened to it. The only time I had trouble, I had trouble because of interviews, madam." Then he waggled his finger at the woman and laughed.

He was waggling his finger now, at this dinner party, indicating one person, then another. "What do you mean by that?" "Why are you smiling?" "I find that ridiculous"

"How did you get to Turkey?" he asked me. "Someone said, what, you took a train?"

"Train from London. Well, four of them. Via Romania."

When Pamuk made a face he looked years younger, indeed like a disgusted child, his glasses shifting on his wrinkled nose.

"I was in Romania," he said. "A writers' conference, but on a boat—a sort of cruise. A whole week just sailing around with other writers."

"It sounds awful."

"Good answer!"

He smiled at the news that I had glided in from Bulgaria, through the boondocks of Turkey, habituating myself, and was planning to glide east again in a few days, to Ankara and Trabzon and Hopa to Georgia.

He said, "I have read your book about Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow"

"What do you think?"

"A very affectionate book."

"That's true, but not many people saw it."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. Maybe quarrels are more interesting. People said it was cruel. I'd say unsparing. The quarrelsome part of it was played up as a writers' feud. But Naipaul was an important figure in my writing life."

"How can we know what he thought of the book."

"No way of telling. He's not talking."

"I can't believe he didn't read it."

"I don't think he did. His wife did, though, I'm sure of that."

"The wife was part of your problem," Pamuk said. "Second wife, yes?"

"Right"

Pamuk leaned over and looked across the top of his glasses and said, "Am I a good reader of Paul Theroux?"

"Very astute."

"And wasn't there another woman?"

"Naipaul's mistress of twenty-three years. He ditched her after his wife died and married a woman he had just met in Pakistan. It's a strange tale."

"Maybe not so strange," Pamuk said.

We talked about writers' lovers and pieced together the odd love life of Graham Greene, who remained married to a woman he had not cohabited with for sixty years or more, while chasing women and suffering through three or four grand passions, all of them with married women. His last affair was like a marriage. The woman visited him at his apartment every noontime and prepared his lunch, after which they made love. Then they had a drink, and at nightfall the woman returned home to her husband. This went on for years. The husband knew about it, but his wife said something like "Don't make me choose."

Pamuk said, "It sounds perfect."

"After Greene died, the woman divorced her husband."

"Ah." Pamuk looked happy, contemplating the complexity of this.

Over dessert, the other guests who were writers talked about the bur den of being a Turkish writer abroad. Westerners whose knowledge of Turkey was limited to Midnight Express and döner kebabs would challenge them, saying, What about the Armenians? What about the Kurds? How come you torture people?

A writer named Yusof said that he had been an admirer of the Anglophile critic George Steiner.

"I was in London," Yusof said. "I had five books I wanted George Steiner to sign. I went to one of his lectures, and afterwards he took a seat at a table to sign people's books. He signed two of mine and said, 'Where do you come from?' I told him Turkey. He pushed the rest of my books away—he wouldn't sign them. He said, 'Go home and take care of your people.' He meant the Kurds."

On my way back to the hotel, it occurred to me that though the United States had supported the Kurds, tolerating Kurdish terrorism in both Turkey and Iraq, and were still fighting a war in Iraq, no Turk had blamed me for this slaughter, or even raised the matter with me.

***

THE OTHER WRITER I HAD wished to meet in Istanbul was Elif Shafak. We met at the Ciragan Palas, on another rainy day. She was so beautiful I forgot her books, writing seemed irrelevant, I was bewitched. I was reminded of the Kipling line "Much that is written about Oriental passion and impulsiveness is exaggerated and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true," and Elif Shafak seemed the embodiment of it. She was about thirty, with gray-blue eyes and the face of a brilliant child, which is also the pedomorphic face of a Renaissance Madonna, framed by wisps of light hair. All over her hands and fingers were thin silver chains, looped and dangling, attached to a mass of silver rings, as though she'd just escaped from a harem.

I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying, so distracted was I by her loveliness. But her passion and impulsiveness were unmistakable, and I reminded myself that she had written five highly praised novels.

Unlike most other Turkish writers, she was cosmopolitan. She had either taught or studied, or both, in universities in Michigan and Arizona and at Mount Holyoke. Her mother had been a Turkish diplomat, so she had lived in many capital cities. Her father had vanished from her life; she was aware of his being present in Istanbul but never saw him. This absent father was the subject of her new novel, Baba and the Bastard, which was kept hidden in many Istanbul bookstores because of its racy title.

"Shafak" was an invented surname, the word meaning aurora or dawn in Turkish. The name suited her, since she glowed with life, and dawn in Asia does not come by degrees, the sky slowly lightening, but is like something switched on, filling the new day with a sudden brightness that seems complete. Elif Shafak had that radiance.

She was also unexpectedly combative—you don't expect such fight in a beauty, but it was attractive as, jingling the chains and silver filigree on her hands, she denounced various Turkish attitudes.

"Turkey has amnesia," she said. "Turks are indifferent to the past, to old words, to old customs."

"I thought that Turkish reformers were generally a good thing."

"No, they erased a lot that we need to know," she said. "The Kemalists and the reformers changed the culture. They threw away old words, they got rid of foreign words. But these words are part of who we are. We need to know them."

I was transfixed by her eyes, by her slender fingers, a silver chain swinging from a ring on each finger.

"We need to know about the Armenians," she said.

"You say these things in public?" I asked.

"Yes, though it's hard, especially for a woman here."

"I'm interested that you have public intellectuals, speaking their mind. Most countries don't have them."

"We have many. We fight and disagree all the time."

"How do you get on in the United States?"

"I like it, but I had to start all over there. I am someone here. There, I am no one."

She talked about her studies in Sufi literature and culture, not the dervishes of Istanbul but the cults and practitioners in remotest Turkey. I offered her my memory of Sufis dancing at sunset at a mosque in Omdurman, in Sudan, one of the most dramatic encounters I'd had on my Dark Star Safari through Africa. Mine had been a happy accident, hers were both vivid and cerebral; Sufism was a study for her. I was nonetheless distracted—her beauty was like a curse that prevented me from understanding the nuances of what she was saying. Still, I felt that meeting Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, I was looking at the future of Turkish literature.*

* Later that year, Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in literature.

In a casual conversation with a Turkish scholar I mentioned how impressed I was with the work of writers like Pamuk and Shafak. And there were many others who'd not been translated. How to explain this literary excellence?

"Nomadism," he said. "The storytelling tradition is strong in Turkey because of our seasonal migrations. Iran has been settled for twenty-five hundred years. Greece is sedentary. But Turkish society has a dynamic structure. Because of this constant movement we became storytellers."

All that remained, before I took the night express to Ankara, was a visit to the dentist. I had a loose filling, and fearing that the discomfort would only get worse over the next weeks or months, I asked for a recommendation.

That was how I came to be sitting, canted back in a chair, being examined by Dr. Isil Evcimik, who was a pleasant woman in her late forties with a reassuringly well-equipped office. Cuddly toys dangled nearby, to cheer up anxious children. They cheered me up too, and when Dr. Evcimik told me that her daughter was at Princeton, on a full scholarship, I felt I was in good hands.

It seemed part of Dr. Evcimik's technique to murmur a running commentary on what she happened to be doing at any given time. With a hypodermic syringe in one hand and a swab in the other she said, "I will first swab"—and she swabbed my gums—"and then we wait a little." We waited a little. "Then I put the needle in very slowly. Please tell me if it hurts." It didn't. "Good. Now we wait a little more."

Was the tooth cold- or heat-sensitive? she wondered.

I didn't know, but it was sensitive.

"Can be either. Can be both. But better if it's one or the other."

She explained reversible sensitivity. That could happen to me. Or there was irreversible sensitivity. "In that case, you might need a root canal. Where are you going to next?"

"Georgia. Azerbaijan."

"A root canal in Azerbaijan? I don't think so." She selected a drill, saying, "Now I will drill amalgam." She drilled the loose cement out of the tooth and said, "This is amalgam." She sprayed the tooth, she drilled some more. She then mixed a substance on a dish. "This is composite. This will taste very bad. Please don't swallow any—it's not poison, though."

I sat, mouth agape, listening.

"Now I will fill." She tamped the composite into the hole. "This"—with a flourish of a tool—"is a bonding agent. We will apply. And then"—a flash of silver—"a collar. Like a belt around the tooth, so you can floss." More manipulation. "Not done yet. It's high. I will smooth it." She did so. "Please bite on this." I did so twice. "How is it?"

"Better."

"I don't like 'better.'"

She buzzed it some more, she perfected it, she told me that she had always wanted to visit Hawaii, and to this end she gave me her bill, a bargain at the Turkish equivalent of $153.

When I told Dr. Evcimik I was taking the train that night to Ankara, she said, "That's the best way to go. The plane is expensive and lots of trouble. The airport is far and there are always delays. When I go to Ankara myself I always take the train."

It was still raining in Istanbul. The rain had followed me from Paris, and it had defined each city—making Paris glisten with scattered light; giving the Budapest streets a slop of snow and mud and darkening the mildew on its buildings; muddying Bucharest and filling its potholes with black puddles. But in Istanbul the rain gave the roads a somnolent nobility, because it was a city of waterways and domes and slender minarets and towers that glowed in the diffused light of the downpour. The buildings were masterpieces, but what I remembered was how, at a distance, they were transformed by the rain.