The Wedding of Hassan Fattah
Part Seven: The Finale
In which we spend a last day sightseeing, drink tea in the the upside down mirror image of Van Gogh’s Night Cafe, untie the ponytail, and bid farewell to a best friend
(previously in “The Wedding of Hassan Fattah”)
Across the street from the Hotel Richmond there is a tea house, a pastis
erie equal and opposite to Van Gogh’s Night Café. Looking into the window of this upscale room of tables on my first night, I recognized a timeless space, a space you could get lost in. It had green walls, a chandelier, and a mysterious waiter who stared you down. The clientele looked like Saint-Germain bohemians a little past their sell-by dates. Like the downtrodden in Van Gogh’s painting, they gave the room its air of intrigue. “Oh, there is this great pastry place across the street from that Hotel,” said Oz Number Two at the reception when I told her I’m at the Richmond. “I’m leaving Saturday and I have to get there.” Her hotel was far away—but she knew about the place and spoke of it as a must-see on her trip to Istanbul.
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I sat on Friday morning in the hotel breakfast room with my two guide books—the Knopf, which often proved the more useful and informative, and the Time Out, which often proved too hip for the kind of lighting strike sightseeing one has to do when time is running out. On one of the maps I located a mosque in a street just off the hill down to the Golden Horn, the hill along which the trades advance backward from Stratocasters to fishhooks. Now known as the Arap Mosque, it is the last standing Genoese church in Isatnbul, originally dedicated to Sts. Dominic and Paul, and built between 1323 and 1337. Sketchbook-in-backpack, I walked outside in brilliant morning sunshine, not the least hung-over or tired from the late night out, and stepped briskly in the direction of the shops selling air conditioners and electric fans.
Along the way I passed, or was passed by, men laboring under large boxes and packages tied to their backs, the traditional porters that have moved heavy goods up and down the Galata hill for centuries. Nowadays, the boxes say things like “Moog” and “Frigidaire.” There
was also a boy with a wet towel coiled on top of his head selling oysters to people in the passenger seats of cars. He perfectly embodied that balance of new and old, “European” and “Muslim World.” Dressed like your average Game Boy player in the back of a minivan in Columbus Ohio, he worked hard in the oyster trade in Beyoglu, a trade as old as the Galata hill. The towel turban didn’t come off as dress-up fun. It was a method of staying cool.
Moving along the busy downhill commercial street, I saw Europe poke its face in from time to time in interesting ways. Between two typically jumbled shops, for example, I’d see the Goethe Society, which was showing a Fritz Lang film that evening. Or a book shop with interesting art books in the window, all written in Turkish. Then, up a side street, rose the wide, tall, brick Galata Tower. I moved into into the tower’s neighboring shops and restaurants.
Circling the tower, I passing old two- and three story buildings—mostly, shops, and restaurants at street level. It was like moving through the moss and toadstools at the base of a petrified tree stump. I finally found a good angle from which to sketch, and basically sat working in the middle of the stone paved street. It was early, the restaurants were not open, and the shopmen milled about their business. I must have sat there for an hour doing a pencil sketch and getting sunburned.
I started heading downhill, past small stone buildings cluttered on top with antennae and satellite dishes. I was off the main hill road. As I moved along, the trades continued to evolve backward—electrical appliances gave way to hand tools. Then came brooms and
mops and such, then rope, and, finally, everything you need to go fishing. On the road along the banks of the Golden Horn, I did a sketch of the wide open shops with colorful buoys and floats hanging in rows. Fat men smoking pipes chatted. A little boy flitted about me, squirrel-like in his movement, very uncertain about what this strange pony-tailed man was doing with the book and pencil. I came up with one of my favorite sketches from the trip—I haven’t painted it, which often happens with a favorite sketch. I did another sketch–the Galata Bridge.
Heading back up, I checked the map for the Arap Mosque. The streets didn’t really have signs, so I went by the thickness of the lines on the map and the busyness of the cross streets heading up. I asked a blonde woman with iPod wires in her ears if she knew where the mosque was. She and I stood out as Euro-American (she was the Euro) tourists. She was in another world. I forget what she said, but it didn’t help. I finally asked directions of a tall thin young man in his twenties who came bounding down the hill. He sent me up another block and to the left. And there it was, the Arap Mosque, a black, calcified box with lots of ivy growing on it and no access inside. Nobody paid much attention to it. I was the only sightseer. A woman in a black robe and scarf washed her feet in the courtyard fountain at the side as I tried walking around the building. I was obstructed at one point by a chain link fence. It occurred to me that I was looking at maybe the oldest building that I’d ever seen. I make no sketch.
When I climbed back to the Gala
ta Tower I went in and found it packed with sightseers on their way to the restaurant and the observation level at the top.
If you have been following my accounts of the trip, you’ve noticed that there are lots of photos, none taken by me. Well, I took plenty of photos. Where the hell are they? That’s what I’d like to know. I’ll find them next week, of course, because it will be a week after I could have made a lot of use of them. That afternoon I photographed Sultanahmet, Beyoglu, and Asia from the observation deck—views of the city form the watchtower that defended Constantinople/Istanbul through the centuries. There were clouds buffeting the dun-colored
buildings and earth-orange mansard rooftops. There were freighters, cruise ships, and skiffs on the Bosphorous and Golden Horn and the little island with the lighthouse. Smoke and cranes. A rocket field of minarets, from which noon payers rose in cacophonous harmony. At a souvenir shop in the base of the tower, I bought a leather bracelet with a couple of maroon beads that took a year to fall off my wrist.
A note for tourists: The streets of Istanbul are full of feral cats. Sometimes they
meet each other under the outdoor café table where you’re having lunch. It’s best if you see them coming so that by the time they explode into claw-drawn combat, you will have already retracted your legs. As for the likelihood of sustaining permanent hearing loss from the shrieking cat yowls, you really just have to take that as it comes… The waiter apologized–I think that’s what the shurg meant–but the situation was completely beyond his control. I only had tea there, and moved along to lunch at a place that looked like a German meat restaurant, except for the fact that beer was served in the kind of murky plastic tumblers that they served juice and milk in at summer camp. They had those tumblers for beer in a lot of bars.
I headed back to the Istiklal, having purchased a financial times and Herald Tribune. I just roamed the side streets. I bought a Provence-style flower pot and a shell-beaded necklace that did not take a year to come off my neck–more like a few hours. I went to the bookstore called Robinson Crusoe. I had tea here, a beer there. I watched the crowd and moved as part of it, reading and enjoying the afternoon with no sightseeing destination on the agenda. I came to the tea shop across from the hotel, went in and took a table next to the big window with its complex web of lace curtains.
I ordered key lime pie, no doubt a choice make under the influence of the lime gr
een walls and dazzling chandelier. I ordered a pot of tea, and I took out the sketch pad. The people I sketched, starting with the waiter, were the people I saw in the café.
There was nothing particularly Turkish about the place. The mural to the left was, in fact, somewhat suggestive of arch-rival Greece. The room stopped short of a Casablanca cliché, but there was certainly a North African feel—having never been to Morocco, I do really have to use the Casablanca yardstick. The chandelier, a vortex of shiny things, lit the room, enforcing its own kind of orbital gravity. This was yet another world inside Istanbul, a world in which I lost track of time completely.
When I left, I brought my flowerpot and newspapers back to my room, and went out again for the evening with only Anna Karenina. I was aware there would be a party at a nightclub that evening hosted by one of Layla’s cousins, but the crowds teeming into Istiklal Cadessi were more s
eductive than a night at a Bosphorus nightclub. This was my last night in the city, and I wanted something a little less structured. I wanted an adventure. A new gravity was pulling me into the side streets and alleys, each its own construct of glamour and excitement, custom-designed for the solitary traveler. I walked through the open fish market and the flower market, moving to the beat of Iraqi folk music—I think I started hearing those drums just before I left the teahouse. Passing through the markets, I bought my daughter a beautiful purse I knew she’d like, and began wishing that I’d taken advantage of the price of leather. Then I stopped buying things and loosened by hair, thus producing a scraggly gray mane.
At dinnertime, I moved into a new side alley, stopping at a very wonderful outdoor teahouse. I sat on the squat bench and ordered tea from a tall, scraggly-haired waiter. The street, partly lit by votive candles on the teahouse tables, filled with an orange light–my variety of orange. Check out the range in the ceiling of the teahouse painting. I get there by mixing alizarin and cadmium
yellow hue, controling the tone with cobalt blue hue. Blue is the most important part of my favorite orange. Just a little bit of blue.
Anna’s world was becoming more complex by the minute. The two blonde women at the table next to me left, and two Turkish men took their place. They started playing Mancala, an African board game. I put down the book and sat looking at the café across the street. There were real Iraqi drums playing at this point. I was totally relaxed, and I stayed that way long enough to enjoy it. Then, I thought, “that’s it!” That’s it.
Club M is one of the hottest nightspots in Istanbul, teetering on a high bank over the Bosphorus. The taxi cab ride there was tough—we very nearly ran over a boy on the Street of Carpenters. The men were sitting in twilight on the piles of tires, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea at the bottom of the street. Lots of traffic in town. Then things spread out—the neighborhoods were very affluent a mile or so past the Sissotel.
I told the woman at the door of the club that I was with the Fattah party. Two men led me to the back half of the club, which had a 
terrace over the cliff. My evening was spent mostly on the terrace. I watched the sunset with Hassan’s cousin from Salt Lake City and his partner. And I finally met the short bald man—Laurent from Paris. We eyed each other apprehensively the previous night at the reception. We decided Istanbul was big enough for the two of us and had a nice chat. Omar, in a lime green Nehru jacket, danced exotically with the ladies lined up for the honor as “Lauren Bacall” smoked on the sidelines. I sat down with Hassan’s cousin from Baghdad, whom I’d met at the baths. “I will miss you very much,” he said. His grasp 
of English caused him to exaggerate. “You are my best friend.”
One of the stores near the hotel was open when I got back. I bought a box of Turkish delight. A bar around the corner was open as well, and I crossed over to it and ordered coffee. A local artist’s paintings were on exhibit, and I asked the waiter about them. He told me, in something like perfect American English, that there would be a reception for the artist on the following Tuesday. I told him I’d be gone by then. I opened the wooden cigar box that the Turkish delight came in—the box had a picture of the little lighthouse at the mouth of the Bosphorus on its lid. I tried one.
Photo of Porter by Dick Osseman
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At the café, July 2005
Hassan and Lara Barbara Fattah, 2006 .
Layla and Hassan, NYC, March 2004
Thanks for reading!–Vanx
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