Black and White(3)

  Having always apprehended the city's soul in black and white, I am captivated by the line drawings of more discerning western travelers like Le Corbusier and by any book set in Istanbul with black-and-white illustrations. (My entire childhood, I waited in vain for

 

 

 

the cartoonist Herge to set a Tin-Tin adventure in Istanbul; when the first Tin-Tin film was made here, a pirate publishing outfit issued a black-and-white comic book called Tin-Tin in Istanbul, the creation of a local cartoonist who mixed his own renderings of various frames from the film with frames from various other Tin-Tin adventures.) I am likewise fascinated by old newspapers; whenever I come across an account a murder, a suicide, or a robbery gone wrong, I catch the whiff of a long-repressed childhood fear. 

  There are places--in Tepebasi, Galata, Faith, and Zeyrek, a few of the villages along the Bosphorus, the back streets of Uskudar--where the black-and-white haze I've been trying to describe is still in evidence. on misty smoky mornings, on rainy windy nights, you can see it on the domes of mosques on which flocks of gulls make their homes; you can see it, too, in the clouds of exhaust, in the wreaths of soot rising from the stovepipes, in the rusting trash cans, the parks and gardens lefr empty and untended on winter days, and the crowds scurrying home through the mud and the snow on winter evenings. These are the sad joys of black-and-white Istanbul: the crumbling fountains that haven't worked for centuries; the poor quarters with their forgotten mosques; the sudden crowds of schoolchildren in white-collared black smocks; the old and tired mud-covered trucks; the little grocery stores darkened by age, dust, and lack of custom; the dilapidated little neighborhood shops packed with despondent unemployed men; the crumbling city walls like so many upended cobblestone streets; the entrances to cinemas that begin, after a while, to look identical; the pudding shops; the newspaper hawkers on the pavement; the drunks that roam in the middle of the night; the pale streetlamps; the ferries going up and down the Bosphorus and the smoke rising from their chimneys; the city blanketed in snow.

  It is impossible for me to remember my childhood without this blanket of snow. Some children can't wait for their summer holiday to begin, but I couldn't wait for it to snow--not because I would be going outside to play in it but because it made the city look new, not only by producing in every street and every view an element of surprise, a delicious air of impending disaster. It snowed on average between three and five days a year, but Istanbul was always caught unawares, greeting each snowfall as if it were the first: The back streets would close and then the main roads; queues would form outside the bakeries, just as they had in times of war and national diaster. What I loved most about the snow was its power to force people out of themselves to act as one; cut off from the world, we were stranded together. on snowy days, Istanbul felt like an outpost, but the contemplation of our common fate drew us closer to our fabulous past.