Return to Istanbul or Shit, I Don’t Fit

I went on a student exchange by accident, which means I was literally able to go on one because of a horrible accident. My dad was injured in what is best described as a ludicrous amateur theatre mishap when he was working as a stagehand on a local production of Les Misérables. With the rebellion holding everyone’s full attention, the barricade was accidentally rolled over the back of his foot and almost sliced his heel right off. He recovered, but years later some compensation money came through from the local council, and that’s why, halfway through my final year of high school, after noticing I’d acquired some mild but potentially disturbing adolescent accoutrements (Tori Amos CDs and friends who fire-twirled), my parents were able to pack me up and send me away to Turkey for a year—the only one of four siblings who was offered such an opportunity.

My Les Mis–enabled flight to Istanbul in the summer of 1997 was maybe why, when I arrived, I was labouring with the delusion that my life was some sort of musical. Specifically, Annie. Because—and this was another inexplicable stroke of good fortune—I found that I would be living with one of Turkey’s richest families. Crystal chandelier rich. Swimming-pool-in-the-living-room rich. Eighteenth-century Ottoman-palace-on-the-Bosporus rich.

The night I got there the only thing I could compare it to was that scene from Annie where she arrives at Daddy Warbuck’s mansion and everyone runs delightedly after her while she grins and sings, ‘I think I’m gun-ner like it here!’ I was wonderstruck by the world I’d walked into. My host mum was twenty-nine, and on that first night she was wearing an expensive polo shirt and instructing the staff in such a commanding manner I became impatient to be twenty-nine too—to obtain her glamorous air of authority and confidence. Staff rushed about carrying out her orders, bringing me a plate piled with peaches and plums and apricots, making up my bed, carrying in a TV set. I had never had a TV in my bedroom! I had never had a double bed! I didn’t understand how I had become so lucky, but then, I didn’t understand a lot of things that happened to me in Turkey that year.

I started writing letters home almost immediately, describing breathlessly how Istanbul was like Salzburg and Siam. (My initial impression of myself as poor little orphan Annie was swiftly replaced with an amalgam of the kindly, beautiful, musical governesses Maria, from The Sound of Music and Anna, from The King and I, as soon as I realised I would be spending a lot of time with my two Turkish siblings under the age of six.) My first letter was sixty-four pages long—a page for every room in the house I occupied. Reading it now I want to throttle the cringe-inducing teenager who wrote it; though I can still see her point from time to time: the Muslim call to prayer really does resemble the breakdown section of ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ from Fiddler on the Roof, as well as certain less rock-opera moments in Jesus Christ Superstar, if you pay attention.

For the next year I continued to write letters home every single day, cataloguing events that stretched out across weeks, letters so long they bulged out of the envelopes I forced them into like the delicious stuffed peppers I had recently fallen in love with. When the letters arrived at their destination months later, they had been repackaged into larger brown envelopes—our secretary had transferred them over before she sent them for me so the pages wouldn’t fall out. Istanbul taught me to write. Not how to write, but simply to write. It was the only way I could cope with the homesickness, with the high walls around my bedroom, with wanting to explore the city even though intimidated by the stares I got from Turkish men every time I ventured into the street.

Back in south-east Queensland my mum, who worked at my school library, photocopied my letters and distributed them among my friends. I became a minor celebrity, the girl who lived in a palace, but when I returned to school a year later all my friends had graduated and moved to Brisbane for uni and I didn’t want to discuss Turkey. I just wanted a normal life again, to lose the weight I’d gained, to be allowed to stay out at night and not have the driver come and collect me early. I wanted to meet guys who didn’t follow me down the street for ten blocks, who didn’t try to feel me up while I was waiting in supermarket queues, who didn’t offer such ambiguous compliments as ‘Your hair is the colour of the rocks in hell’—words that made me lie awake at night in my huge double bed agonising over whether it meant my hair was interestingly dramatic or just sort of satanic.

I tell myself now that if I’d been a bit older I would have dealt with the attention and staring better, I would have handled it more maturely and just ignored it, deflected it. But I was the third daughter in a loud, theatrical family. I had fought my whole life for attention and suddenly now I was being looked at, now I was getting attention. It was everything I wanted, but it made me feel bewildered and ashamed.

Eventually I stopped going outside at all unless I was with my American friends or with my family. I holed myself up in the palace and kept writing.

Writing about Istanbul is a battle against cliché. It takes every effort not to fall back on descriptions such as ‘the crossroads between two continents’ and ‘a clash of cultures’. One should also stay away from any imagery involving women wearing headscarves striding arm-in-arm with their big-breasted, tight-T-shirt-wearing best friends. That, and romantic photos of workers in their shops, of kids on the street, of cats on the street­—of anything on the street. Most importantly, never use any kind of bridge metaphor: bridges between East and West, between continents, between Europe and Asia. Even though the eye is guaranteed to alight on at least two every time you look out your window, avoid all mention of bridges.

Anyway, Istanbul isn’t a bridge: it’s a river, constantly moving, easy to drown in. But let’s stay away from metaphors in general, please, I quietly beg myself before embarking on my first trip back there in thirteen years. You don’t need them because everything in Istanbul is standing there before you. Just write what you see.

The drive into the city from the airport is filled with masses of tulips. They’re arranged in welcoming patterns on the sides of the street, but now, in early May, they’re starting to wilt into imprecise intestinal shapes. Bulldozers stand frozen in empty dirt plots like sculptures, reminding me of my very first impression of Istanbul as one enormous building site. It always seemed to be being built, or rebuilt, but I notice a difference this time: everything appears a lot cleaner, the city has started to look like someone cares about it. Even the aqueducts seem sort of new.

We turn a corner and there is the turquoise water, the sort of natural beauty that a writer who hasn’t banned herself from metaphors might liken to a long silk scarf, a glistening head of hair, a horse’s mane. The Turks call the Bosporus a throat.

The city feels like home as soon as I arrive. I head straight to Taksim, to Istiklal Caddesi, the kilometres-long shopping strip where I spent most of my days in Istanbul, watching movies at the dilapidated cinemas in the side streets instead of going to school. I recently read that almost three million people walk down this boulevard every day. I see two women marching in matching trench coats, both chatting distractedly on their phones, together though apart, one sipping a yoghurt drink, the other smoking a cigarette. I recall the Turkish verb for ‘smoke’ because it’s the same as the verb for ‘drink’. I tried drinking cigarettes here when I was seventeen and I didn’t like it, but the Turkish language I knew I could drink, smoke, forever. I haven’t spoken it in so long, but the sound of the words alone, devoid of any meaning, makes me indescribably happy.

I go back to the suburb I used to live in, way up at the northern end of the Bosporus. The smell of wisteria hits me straight away. ‘Purple drops’, my friend Zeynep says, translating the name of the flower from the Turkish. It’s early summer and giant bees weave in and out between us as we stroll. Life is quieter here, there’s more money. We stop outside the walls of my old house and it’s exactly as I remember it.

The pink stone walls are too tall, but I don’t need to see behind them to know what’s there: a manicured lawn the size of a small public park with a beautiful rose garden tripping its outside edges. A gazebo where I ate breakfast in summer overlooking the water. Inside, the swimming pool positioned next to a massive television that had MTV, and where I sat and watched the fates of Louise Woodward and Bill Clinton unravel live. A thick binder book in the sitting room, cataloguing all the antiques in there—I remember there was definitely something Ming and something else from a French Louis. I look up to my old bedroom window. I try to glean whether it still has the same heavy burgundy curtains, if there’s evidence of anyone else having stayed there since I did, if anyone replaced me.

Zeynep and I go to a nearby tea garden to work. We walk up stairs of slate, and under grape vines and cherry trees we sit with our computers for the day. Families arrive and order beautiful fresh plates of Turkish breakfast. Groups of friends set up games of backgammon and sit there for hours, drinking cherry juice and çay. Every glass of tea is placed in front of us with the blessing ‘May it contribute to your health’, and each slender-waisted glass is taken away empty with the same words. The tiny saucers always come with two sugar cubes staring up at us. Their shape and innocence remind me of the leaflet they gave us at orientation camp to describe the rollercoaster ride of cultural adaptation we would experience as exchange students.

The leaflet was titled ‘Shit, I Don’t Fit!’ and it was a single photocopied page with three hand-drawn diagrams on it. The first diagram explained that when you arrived in your host country you were going to feel like a cube in a country full of spheres. You would say to yourself, Shit, I Don’t Fit! Gradually, over the year you lived there, the corners of yourself would be worn down; you would gradually adapt to the new country, you would learn its customs and its language. Everyone in the second diagram is smiling happily because everyone, including the exchange student, is a sphere: everyone fits! But then it’s time to go home and when you arrive back in your native country a year later you realise that everyone there is still a cube and that you’re now a sphere—the only sphere. That’s when you’ll say to yourself once again, Shit, I Don’t Fit.

What the leaflet didn’t tell you was that you can never return to being a cube, that you’ll be saying, Shit, I Don’t Fit forever. It’s a weird concept to come to terms with, especially when you look at yourself and see you’re white and privileged and that the only characteristic that might make you a legitimate minority in your home town is that you’re a bigger fan of musical theatre than you are of cricket and football.

One day I’m walking up Istiklal Caddesi and I see the author Elif Batuman coming in the other direction. Before I arrived in Istanbul I read all her New Yorker pieces about the city—she did a feature about a marvellous restaurant over on the Asian side, and another one about Istanbul soccer teams. She’s wearing dark sunglasses and is walking side-by-side with a companion, deep in conversation. Without questioning my impulse, I call out ‘Elif!’ She turns around and I explain in panting racehorse prose that See! Here’s the book you wrote which you signed for me at the Melbourne Writers Festival last year, and which I’m showing to you to prove that obviously I’m not crazy, because how can anyone who is waving a signed copy of your book in your face after recognising you in dark sunglasses on a street that three million people walk down every day be anything other than totally sane. And guess what? I live in Istanbul now too! She lifts her sunglasses up and squinting, says politely, ‘Oh, okay, yeah, you do look familiar.’ I know that I don’t. There’s nothing more for either of us to say so I put her book back in my bag and say thanks and goodbye.

In that split second I thought that maybe I needed a Rosetta Stone, that Elif could help me decode this city. That maybe if I talked to her, she could explain my own confusion about this place and maybe then I could finally pin it down. But I forgot that everyone is on their own here; everyone has to work it out for themselves; everyone has to make sense of their own version of Istanbul, for themselves.

Every day, the square below the Galata Tower is packed with tourists. I’ve been up there once, but I prefer the square underneath. The cucumber seller calls out, peeling crisp cucumbers and sprinkling them with salt, and he’s wearing the same T-shirt as yesterday and the day before. It has a large stain on it, and from this distance it looks like a bridge spreading out across his bulbous tummy from east to west. It’s not a bridge, I scold myself. It’s just cucumber juice.

Today I’m having a tourist day. I’m wearing tall boots and culottes with thick stockings underneath, but at the Blue Mosque the security guy deems it too revealing anyway and wraps a long, sapphire blue skirt around my waist. He presses the Velcro of the skirt firmly together and, with his hands around my hips, I look up into his eyes, boldly, bravely comfortable looking these men in the eye now I’m older, feeling ready to challenge them, to dare them. But he’s gazing off distractedly into the distance at some Germans who are sitting on stairs that people are forbidden to sit on, so I place a scarf on top of my head and wander off into the mosque. The pong of a thousand bare tourist feet is overwhelming and I only stay long enough to take a photo of a guy vacuuming the enormous, sprawling carpet with a dustbuster.

The election is in two weeks. The current government is ahead in the opinion polls and is predicted to win its third term, but it owns most of the newspapers as well as the TV stations so you don’t know whether to believe those figures or not. Every day, minivans plastered with photos of candidates drive around the city streets, blaring their party theme tune through distorted loudspeakers. ‘Don’t think! Just vote for us!’ the lyrics of the current government’s theme song say. Zeynep often refers to the dramatic changes the city has undergone in the past decade, saying that most people have stopped caring about everything. I tell her I got the opposite impression the first day I drove in from the airport, that to me Istanbul seemed looked after, and she points to the rubbish thrown around in ancient fountains and the cars parked thoughtlessly on footpaths. They’re small things but they would never have happened ten years ago, she says.

I ask her if she’s ever thought of moving to New York, because she’s smart and creative and fed up with the politics in Turkey and it’s so difficult to be an artist here. She sighs, a little wearily, as if I’m not the first person to ask her that. ‘Why would I want to live in New York? It’s just a small Istanbul.’

I’m no closer to figuring out Istanbul than when I was seventeen, when I likened the place to a musical, an entertaining fantasy. The call to prayer starts up. It’s broadcast from all the nearby mosques and they’re out of sync with each other like they’re caught in crossfire. Six or seven versions mingle together and create the singular, pleasantly discordant tune I love. If there’s anything about Istanbul I can pin down it’s that mess, jumble and confusion are interesting and beautiful.

I’m sitting up on the terrace of my apartment in the late afternoon when the sky starts turning a marbly pink. I love how Istanbul drags out its dusk, like a child not wanting to go to bed. In a few hours, when everything has finally turned to grisaille, the seagulls will station themselves like gargoyles or satellite dishes on the rooftops and guard the city as though they own it. Together with the stray cats and dogs, they probably are the closest to belonging here. I can’t shake the idea that the people who live here are thinking Shit, I Don’t Fit, just like me. The pink turns to mauve and hangs there for a long time—one big purple drop of wisteria. The sky pulls the seagulls in close to it then lets them go, and entire flocks pulse up and down together in kaleidoscopic choreography like Busby Berkeley dancers.

Copyright Lorelei Vasthi 2011