Along the Bosphorus (A Vintage Short) by Orhan Pamuk

Author:Orhan Pamuk [Pamuk, Orhan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400033881
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

In the days before television, this was a pleasant way to pass the time. But my ship-counting habit, this habit I share with so many others, is essentially fed by fear, one that eats away at many others in the city too. After seeing all the wealth of the Middle East seep out of their city, after witnessing the slow decline that began with the Ottoman defeats at the hands of Russia and the West and ended with their city falling into poverty, melancholy, and ruin, İstanbullus became an inward-looking nationalist people; we are therefore suspicious of anything new and most especially of anything that smacks of foreignness (even if we also covet it). For the past 150 years, we have lived in timorous anticipation of catastrophes that will bring us fresh defeats and new ruins. It’s still important to do something to fight off the dread and the melancholy, and that is why the idle contemplation of the Bosphorus can seem like a duty.

The types of disasters that the city remembers best and awaits with greatest trepidation are, of course, the accidents involving ships in the Bosphorus. These bring the city together and make it feel like a large village. Because these disasters suspend the rules of everyday life and because, in the end, they spare “people like us,” I secretly (if also guiltily) enjoy them.

—

I was only eight on the night I deduced—from the noise and the fires piercing the starry night—that two tankers laden with petroleum had collided in the middle of the Bosphorus and had, after a huge explosion, burst into flames; but I was more thrilled than terrified. It was only much later that we found out by phone that the burning ships had set off explosions in neighboring petroleum depots, and there was a danger that the fire might spread and consume the entire city. As with all spectacular fires of that era, there was a preordained order: First we saw a few flames and a bit of smoke, then rumors circulated, most of them false, and then, in spite of the pleas of mothers and aunts, we were gripped by an undeniable desire to see the fire for ourselves.

That night it was my uncle who awakened us, piled us into the car, and took us to Tarabya via the hills behind the Bosphorus. Just in front of the big hotel (still under construction), the road had been blocked off; that saddened and elated me as much as the fire itself. Later, I was very jealous to hear a swaggering school friend of mine claim that he had been able to pass through the cordon after his father had flashed a card and cried “Press!” And so it was that in the year 1960, just before dawn on an autumn night, I ended up watching the Bosphorus burn with a curious, even joyous, crowd of people in pajamas, hastily fastened trousers, and slippers, holding babies on their laps and bags in their hands. As

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