CHAPTER ONE

Another Orhan

From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see:
Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another
Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double. I can’t remember
where I got this idea or how it came to me. It must have emerged from a web of rumors,
misunderstandings, illusions, and fears. But in one of my earliest memories, it is already
clear how I’ve come to feel about my ghostly other.

When I was ve I was sent to live for a short time in another house. After one of their
many stormy separations, my parents arranged to meet in Paris, and it was decided that
my older brother and I should remain in Istanbul, though in separate places. My brother
would stay in the heart of the family with our grandmother in the Pamuk Apartments, in
Nişantaşı, but I would be sent to stay with my aunt in Cihangir. Hanging on the wall in this
house—where I was treated with the utmost kindness—was a picture of a small child, and
every once in a while my aunt or uncle would point up at him and say with a smile, “Look!
That’s you!”
The sweet doe-eyed boy inside the small white frame did look a bit like me, it’s true. He
was even wearing the cap I sometimes wore. I knew I was not that boy in the picture (a
kitsch representation of a “cute child” that someone had brought back from Europe). And
yet I kept asking myself, Is this the Orhan who lives in that other house?
 Of course, now I too was living in another house. It was as if I’d had to move here before
I could meet my twin, but as I wanted only to return to my real home, I took no pleasure in
making his acquaintance. My aunt and uncle’s jovial little game of saying I was the boy in
the picture became an unintended taunt, and each time I’d feel my mind unraveling: my
ideas about myself and the boy who looked like me, my picture and the picture I resembled,
my home and the other house—all would slide about in a confusion that made me long all
the more to be at home again, surrounded by my family.
Soon my wish came true. But the ghost of the other Orhan in another house somewhere
in Istanbul never left me. Throughout my childhood and well into adolescence, he haunted
my thoughts. On winter evenings, walking through the streets of the city, I would gaze into
other people’s houses through the pale orange light of home and dream of happy, peaceful
families living comfortable lives. Then I would shudder to think that the other Orhan might
be living in one of these houses. As I grew older, the ghost became a fantasy and the
fantasy a recurrent nightmare. In some dreams I would greet this Orhan—always in
another house—with shrieks of horror; in others the two of us would stare each other down
in eerie merciless silence. Afterward, wafting in and out of sleep, I would cling ever more
ercely to my pillow, my house, my street, my place in the world. Whenever I was
unhappy, I imagined going to the other house, the other life, the place where the other
Orhan lived, and in spite of everything I’d half convince myself that I was he and took
pleasure in imagining how happy he was, such pleasure that, for a time, I felt no need to
go to seek out the other house in that other imagined part of the city.
Here we come to the heart of the matter: I’ve never left Istanbul, never left the houses,
streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. Although I’ve lived in di erent districts from
time to time, fty years on I nd myself back in the Pamuk Apartments, where my rst
photographs were taken and where my mother rst held me in her arms to show me the
world. I know this persistence owes something to my imaginary friend, the other Orhan,
and to the solace I took from the bond between us. But we live in an age de ned by mass
migration and creative immigrants, so I am sometimes hard-pressed to explain why I’ve
stayed, not only in the same place but in the same building. My mother’s sorrowful voice
comes back to me: “Why don’t you go outside for a while? Why don’t you try a change of
scene, do some traveling …?”
 Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul—these are writers known for having managed to migrate
between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations
were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My
imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same
house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because
it has made me who I am.
Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the
variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century’s
time it would be the capital of the world. The reverse came true: After the Ottoman Empire
collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was
poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year
history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve
spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all İstanbullus) making it my own.
At least once in a lifetime, self-re ection leads us to examine the circumstances of our
birth. Why were we born in this particular corner of the world, on this particular date?
These families into which we were born, these countries and cities to which the lottery of
life has assigned us—they expect love from us, and in the end we do love them from the
bottom of our hearts; but did we perhaps deserve better? I sometimes think myself unlucky
to have been born in an aging and impoverished city buried under the ashes of a ruined
empire. But a voice inside me always insists this was really a piece of luck. If it is a matter
of wealth, I can certainly count myself fortunate to have been born into an a uent family
at a time when the city was at its lowest ebb (though some have ably argued the contrary).
Mostly, I am disinclined to complain; I’ve accepted the city into which I was born in the
same way that I’ve accepted my body (much as I would have preferred to be more
handsome and better built) and my gender (even though I still ask myself, naïvely, whether
I might have been better o had I been born a woman). This is my fate, and there’s no
sense arguing with it. This book is concerned with fate.
I was born in the middle of the night on June 7, 1952, in a small private hospital in
Moda. Its corridors, I’m told, were peaceful that night, and so was the world. Aside from the
Strambolini volcano’s having suddenly begun to spew ames and ash two days earlier,
relatively little seems to have been happening on our planet. The newspapers were full of
small news: a few stories about the Turkish troops ghting in Korea; a few rumors spread
by Americans stoking fears that the North Koreans might be preparing to use biological
weapons. In the hours before I was born, my mother had been avidly following a local
story: Two days earlier, the caretakers and “heroic” residents of the Konya Student Center
had seen a man in a terrifying mask trying to enter a house in Langa through the bathroom
window; they’d chased him through the streets to a lumberyard, where, after cursing the
police, the hardened criminal had committed suicide; a seller of dry goods identi ed the
corpse as a gangster who the year before had entered his shop in broad daylight and
robbed him at gunpoint.
When she was reading the latest on this drama, my mother was alone in her room, or so
she told me with a mixture of regret and annoyance many years later. After taking her to
the hospital, my father had grown restless and, when my mother’s labor failed to progress,
he’d gone out to meet with friends. The only person with her in the delivery room was my
aunt, who’d managed to climb over the hospital’s garden wall in the middle of the night.
When my mother rst set eyes on me, she found me thinner and more fragile than my
brother had been.
I feel compelled to add or so I’ve been told. In Turkish we have a special tense that allows
us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating
dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a
useful distinction to make as we “remember” our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our
baby carriages, our rst steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen
with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale of some other person. It’s a
sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams, but we pay a heavy price for it. Once
imprinted in our minds, other people’s reports of what we’ve done end up mattering more
than what we ourselves remember. And just as we learn about our lives from others, so too
do we let others shape our understanding of the city in which we live.
At times when I accept as my own the stories I’ve heard about my city and myself, I’m
tempted to say, “Once upon a time I used to paint. I hear I was born in Istanbul, and I
understand that I was a somewhat curious child. Then, when I was twenty-two, I seem to
have begun writing novels without knowing why.” I’d have liked to write my entire story
this way—as if my life were something that happened to someone else, as if it were a
dream in which I felt my voice fading and my will succumbing to enchantment. Beautiful
though it is, I nd the language of epic unconvincing, for I cannot accept that the myths
we tell about our rst lives prepare us for the brighter, more authentic second lives that are
meant to begin when we awake. Because—for people like me, at least—that second life is
none other than the book in your hand. So pay close attention, dear reader. Let me be
straight with you, and in return let me ask for your compassion.