Texts and Writings/Orhan Pamuk - Istanbul

Black and White(2)

그림자세상 2010. 3. 27. 00:35

  In the 1950s and 1960s, like everyone, I loved watching the film crews all over the city--the minibuses with the logos of film companies o their sides; the two huge generator-powered lights; the prompters, who preferred to be known s souffleurs and who had to shout mightily over the generator's roar at those moments when the heavily made-up actresses and romantic male leads forgot their lines; the workers who jostled children and curious onlookers off the set. Forty years later, the Turkish film industry no longer exists (mostly due to the inepititude of its directors, actors, and producers but also because it couldn't compere with Hollywood); they still show those old gardens, the Bosphorous views, the broken-down mansions and apartments in black and white, I sometimes forget I am watching a film; stupefied by melancholy, I felt as if I am watching my own past. 

 

 

 

  Between the ages of fifteen ans sixteenm when I imagined myself an impressionist artist of the Istanbul streets, it was my great joy to paint the cobblestones one by one. Before the zealous district councils began to cover them mercilessly with asphalt, the city's taxi drivers complained bitterly about the damage the stone pavements did to their vehicles. They also carped about the interminable excavations of roads for sewer works, electricity, or general repairs. When a street was dug up, the cobblestones had to be removed one at a time, and the work dragged on forever--particularly if they found a Byzantine corridor underneath. When the repairs were done, I loved watching the workmen replacing the cobblestones one by one, with a betwiching skill and rhythm.

  The wooden mansions of my childhood and the smaller, more modest wooden houses in the city's back streets were in a mesmerizing state of ruin. Poverty and neglect had ensured these houses were never painted, and the combination of age, dirt, and humidity slowly darkened the wood to give it that special color, that unique texture, so prevalent in the back neighborhoods that as a child I took the blackness to be original. Some houses had a brown undertone, and perhaps there were those in the poorest streets that had never known paint at all. But Western travelers in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries described the mansions of the rich as brightly painted, finding in them and the other faces of opulence a powerful and abundant beauty. As a child, I would sometimes imagine painting all these houses, but even then the loss of the city's black-and-white shroud was daunting. In summer, when these old wooden houses would dry out and turn a dark, chalky, tinderbox brown, you could imagine them catching fire at any mement; during the winter's long cold spells, the snow and the rain endowed these same houses with the mildewy hint of rotting wood. So it was too with the old wooden dervish lodges, forbidden by the Republic to be used as places of worship, now mostly abandoned and of interest only to street urchins, ghosts, and antiques hunters. They would awaken in me the same degrees of fear, worry, and curiosity; as I peered at them over half-broken walls, past the damp trees, and into the broken windows, a chill would pass through me.