Every Stone

Morning finds me at Ataturk International Airport, international departures terminal, at 7 am, sipping bitter, grainy Turkish coffee while waiting for Olympic Airlines to open and start admitting travelers. I have an hour and so take my time watching the people here. The security is intense — screening of person and baggage at the entrance — and the airport is sleek and modern. There’s a Burger King, but no Starbucks, although I spotted my third in Istanbul yesterday in Beskitas.

Today I will finish “Istanbul,” which I picked up in Ortakoy yesterday. Reading the book in a tiny cafe in Sultanahmat summoned to mind a neglected word, “elegiac.” Pamuk refers again and again to certain symbols of decline, coming back seamlessly, for instance, to the great wooden mansions of viziers and advisors surrounding his home, formerly occupying the lot his home was built on, that burned down one by one.

Pamuk perfectly captures the melancholy — in Turkish, explained at great length, it is “huzun” — felt by Istanbullus living in the ruins of a great empire. The sense of presentation, pressures of Westernization and its effects. Not having read “The Black Book,” I do not know how his tone compares, but here it is blindingly direct, vibrant, and vital. Each word strikes with the same or greater intensity and each contributes to a more complete sense of his identity and that of the city.

It’s clear, too, why Pamuk’s book stirred resentment in Turkey. The pages are filled with images of decline, among them descriptions of the packs of wild dogs that roamed the city. Although he wrote only two years ago, the dogs he refers to are gone. The desire to prove Westernization is shared –Ataturk is a hero still nearly everywhere you go in Istanbul — and so the outrage must have spread through the city in rings after Pamuk published his memoir. Some official pored over Pamuk’s books, I imagine, in a cooled study in a government building, and euthanasia efforts were born of his labors.

Pamuk writes also of sights I have seen, things like the three young boys playing soccer in the break-neck traffic of a hilly highway leading into Taksim Square on a portion just beyond a curve, making their game more dangerous than almost any developed world child’s entertainment. The next day when I passed the same curve earlier in the morning, the same boys were selling water. Only when they have finished their day’s work, selling water bottles for .50 lira to occasional passersby, do they play this perilous game.

Other startling anachronisms continue, like other young boys selling packets of tissues outside gleaming modern edifices or a sidewalk stand that consists only of a scale — something I saw also in Kyev. There, too, is the glut of young boys playing older, smoking cigarettes and scuffing their feet in the street, staring with a mixture of curiosity and anger at the American woman walking past alone. As in the rest of the city, dropping my eyes is the best means of continuing, whether because it allows me to retain the courage to walk by and creates for me the soothing illusion of solitude or because it is deferential and thus appeases these boy-men. These observations and memories will stay with me.

Altogether the morning passed somewhat uneventfully. (Or perhaps I’m trying to revise it for easy digest as I stare at the battery on my laptop, reading 47 and then suddenly 44 minutes in the space of thirty seconds.) Olympic Airlines was smooth and efficient, although Ataturk and Athens are supposedly two of the worst airports for travel and luggage. Security was reassuringly tight. I went through three stations and had to open my laptop and turn it on — its lack of juice a momentary problem before I pro-actively began to stare helplessly at the attendant and won his supervisor’s help.

Just as before, the flight was easy and without significant delay, the airport was chic and clean, if without outlets for my laptop, and passport control went very quickly. I picked up my luggage at the baggage claim, where it was the second bag off the line. There were six separate lines, carefully labeled and kept separate, for Greek, EU, and non-EU passport holders, all of which were being ignored, ironically, by a man smiling indiscriminately at all who filed through.

I taxied to my hotel, a cute historical little place with a cage elevator tucked away on Athinas street in Plaka, and got settled on the third floor. (Two women chain-smoked in the café. I think they worked there. The attending guy asked, “Would you rather have the 1st floor, with the bigger television, or the third floor?” Not a hard decision.)

Braided my hair, so as to appear more intrepid, or perhaps just less American, a high priority as I travel, and set out to find the Acropolis. Thankfully, given my limited navigational abilities, it was a straight shot down Athinas. I walked by the sites I will visit properly with Ashlie tomorrow, who has valiantly offered to be my guide around Athens, and wandered aimlessly in the direction of the National Garden, becoming unforgivably lost and exhausted before reaching it and eventually seeking out one of the various gyro places recommended in Lonely Planet. The guidebook failed me yet again, underpricing the food by a factor of five, but I was too hungry to quibble, and every restaurant and taverna here has similar prices. I settled for a sausage dish. The waiter warned me emphatically — “You know what is this?” I looked at him. Of course I didn’t. But it looked fine, going by the table next to me. He shook his head. “It spicy!” I nodded to affirm my decision. He shook his head again.

More on the Acropolis and history tomorrow, since today was just a preliminary assessment to pave the way for more efficient tourism tomorrow. I hope to make it to the National Archaeological Museum in the morning and the Acropolis in the afternoon, maybe the Garden in the evening.

Athens is fine by day, but it is remarkable by night. I walked to the Acropolis again tonight after a nap. Fresh feta cheese and tomatoes for dinner in its shadow, thinking of the Temple of Athena Parthenos and the Theatre of Dionysus. On Paros there is the Panagia Ekatontapyliani to visit and a spectacular cave on Antiparos, easily reached by ferry. And, of course, there are beaches. Walks in the sun in Istanbul and now Athens have left new constellations of freckles on my shoulders and, problematically, a tan that stops at the tops of my arms and in two curves across my chest and back criss-crossed with the vee of another top. My neck is still a decidedly different shade from my back, embarrassingly. Paros should cure it. If not Paros, then maybe Crete, which is less than four hours from Paros by ferry.

Now “Unbelievable” is playing in the background as I sit here sifting and sorting the day’s impressions into a dozen emails. At least it’s not Cher. There must be some international protocol on music selection for the cafes and shops of all major cities’ main drags, or perhaps it’s just that they switch the discs to Cher or late Madonna when an American passport crosses the threshold as a means of torment.

Relief! Billy Joel and now U2. What a selection.