There is not a soul about. Sounion is a fishing village with a couple of modern hotels now, and lies far below. There, on the crest of the dark cliff, the shrine looks from a distance as if it had been gently lowered from heaven rather than been erected on earth. Marble has more in common with the clouds than with the ground.
Fifteen white columns connected by a white marble base stand evenly spaced. Between them and the earth, between them and the sea, between them and the blue sky of Hellas, there is no one and nothing.
As practically everywhere else in Europe, here, too, Byron incised his name on the base of one of the columns. In his footsteps, the bus brings tourists; later it takes them away. The erosion that is clearly affecting the surface of the columns has nothing to do with weathering. It is a pox of stares, lenses, flashes.
Then twilight descends, and it gets darker. Fifteen columns, fifteen vertical white bodies evenly spaced at the top of the cliff, meet the night under the open skies.
If they counted days, there would have been a million such days. From a distance, in the evening haze, their white vertical bodies resemble an ornament, thanks to the equal intervals between them.
An idea of order? The principle of symmetry? Sense of rhythm? Idolatry?
43
Presumably, it would have been wiser to take letters of recommendation, to jot down two or three telephone numbers at least, before going to Istanbul. I didn't do that. Presumably, it would have made sense to make friends with someone, get into contact, look at the life of the place from the inside, instead of dismissing the local population as an alien crowd, instead of regarding people as so much psychological dust in one's eyes.
Who knows? Perhaps my attitude toward people has in its own right a whiff of the East about it, too. When it comes down to it, where am I from? Still, at a certain age a man gets tired of his own kind, weary of cluttering up his conscious and subconscious. One more, or ten more, tales of cruelty? Another ten, or hundred, examples of human baseness, stupidity, valor? Misanthropy, after all, should also have its limits.
It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (Russian for nowhere).
4 4
I'm not a historian, or a journalist, or an ethnographer. At best, I'm a traveler, a victim of geography. Not of history, be it noted, but of geography. This is what still links me with the country where it was my fate to be born, with our famed Third Rome. So I'm not particularly interested in the politics of present-day Turkey, or in what happened to Atatiirk, whose portrait adorns the greasy walls of every last coffeehouse as well as the Turkish lira, unconvertible and representing an unreal form of payment for real labor.
I came to Istanbul to look at the past, not at the future— since the latter doesn't exist here: whatever there was of it has gone north as well. Here there is only an unenviable, third-rate present of the people, industrious yet plundered by the intensity of the local history. Nothing will happen here anymore, apart perhaps from street disorders or an earthquake. Or perhaps they'll discover oiclass="underline" there's a fearful stench of sulfureted hydrogen in the Golden Horn, crossing whose oily surface you get a splendid panorama of the city. Still, it's unlikely. The stench comes from oil seeping out of rusty, leaking, nearly hole-ridden tankers passing through the Strait. One might squeeze out a living from refining that alone.
A project like that, though, would probably strike a local as altogether too enterprising. The locals are rather conservative by nature, even if they are businessmen or dealers; as for the working class, it is locked, reluctantly but firmly, in a traditional, conservative mentality by the beggarly rates of pay. In his own element, a native finds himself only within the infinitely intertwining—in patterns akin to the carpet's or the mosque walls'—web-like, vaulted galleries of the local bazaar, which is the heart, mind, and soul of Istanbul. This is a city within a city; it, too, is built for the ages. It cannot be transported west, north, or even south. GUM, Bon Marche, Macy's, Harrods taken together and raised to the cube are but child's babble compared with these catacombs. In an odd way, thanks to the garlands of yellow hundred-watt bulbs and the endless wash of bronze, beads, bracelets, silver, and gold under glass, not to mention the very carpets and the icons, samovars, crucifixes, and so on, this bazaar in Istanbul produces the impression of—of all things—an Orthodox church, though convoluted and branching like a quotation from the Prophet. A laid-out version of the Hagia Sophia.
45
Civilizations move along meridians; nomads (including our modem warriors, since war is an echo of the nomadic instinct ) along latitudes. This seems to be yet another version of the cross that Constantine saw. Both movements possess a natural (vegetable or animal) logic, considering which one easily finds oneself in the position of not being able to reproach anyone for anything. In the state known as melancholy—or, more exactly, fatalism. It can be blamed on age, or on the influence of the East, or, with an effort of the imagination, on Christian humility.
The advantages of this condition are obvious, since they are selfish ones. For it is, like all forms of humility, always achieved at the expense of the mute helplessness of the victims of history, past, present, and future; it is an echo of the helplessness of millions. And if you are not at an age when you can draw a sword from a scabbard or clamber up to a platform to roar to a sea of heads about your detestation of the past, the present, and what is to come; if there is no such platform or the sea has dried up, there still remain the face and the lips, which can accommodate your slight— provoked by the vista opening to both your inner and your naked eye—smile of contempt.
46
With it, with that smile on the lips, one may board the ferry and set off for a cup of tea in Asia. Twenty minutes later, one can disembark in <;engelkoy, find a cafe on the very shore of the Bosporus, sit down and order tea, and, inhaling the smell of rotting seaweed, observe without changing the aforesaid facial expression the aircraft carriers of the Third Rome sailing slowly through the gates of the Second on their way to the First.
(Translated by Alan Myers and the author)
1985
In a Room and a Half
To L.K.
1
The room and a half (if such a space unit makes any sense in English) in which the three of us lived had a parquet floor, and my mother strongly objected to the men in her family, me in particular, walking around with our socks on. She insisted on us wearing shoes or slippers at all times. Admonishing me about this matter, she would evoke an old Russian superstition; it is an ill omen, she would say, it may bode a death in the family.
Of coUise, it might be that she simply regarded this habit as uncivilized, as plain bad manners. Men's feet smell, and that was the pre-deodorant era. Yet I thought that, indeed, one could easily slip and fall on a polished parquet, especially if one wore woolen socks. And that if one were old and frail, the consequences could be disastrous. The parquet's affinity with wood, earth, etc., thus extended in my mind to any ground under the feet of our close and distant relatives who lived in the same town. No matter what the distance, it was the same ground. Even living on the other side of the river, where I would subsequently rent an apartment ora room of my own, didn't constitute an excuse, for there were too many rivers and canals in that town. And although some of them were deep enough for the passage of seagoing ships, death, I thought, would find them shallow, or else, in its standard underground fashion, it could creep across under their bottoms.