In The Orbit Of A Star

Every great city has a unique quality of light, Istanbul was no exception.

On an afternoon in mid October more than a decade ago she stepped into it. Like all great meetings it occurred in passing, on the steps. She was returning and he leaving, and just having locked the door of the shabby rental behind him, he was somewhat startled to be confronted by someone coming up the steps. The sky above the Golden Horn, always glorious in late afternoon, suffused the hall in a rosy glow. He had not yet encountered anyone from the building though he had been in residence over a week.

Breathless and leaned against the wall, having ascended seven of the Bereket Apartmani’s eight flights, she considered him through opaque sunglasses.  Her hair was concealed in a scarf, though not of the uniform Turkish kind, which folds into a tightly pressed kind of visor with a military sense of containment.

—Merhaba, he ventured.

A long pause ensued.

—You’re the Canadian, she said, finally.

English. The language and the woman who spoke it. She’d annunciated his citizenship with a clarity that only those born to hers could summon.

—Yes, he, agreed. Though he’d never understood just how much until being in that country.

—Fiona. I live upstairs. Pop by for a drink one evening.

—Thanks, I will. My name’s Adam.

—These fucking stairs are killing me, Adam, she sighed before gathering herself for the final flight.

Fiona was not young. Yet she seemed nowhere in the vicinity of her calendar age either. She had been an actress in the West End, had co-starred with Ann Bancroft and other notables of a certain era. The light still clung to her, undimmed. She had played in a Agatha Christie production, and there was archival footage of her meeting the Queen. They watched it together, years later. She no longer acted in plays or did movies but earned money doing voiceovers and sometimes sang with a kind if hapless piano player, who had played one too many arpeggios. The gig— at a bar off Istiklal entered through one of the neighbourhood’s many passajlar, always dense with chattering tea drinkers and smokers— was more for their personal entertainment than money.

What began then was a relationship unlike any other he’d known. At the time she had a young lover, a Kurdish musician named Ozgur. Twenty-eight and furiously handsome he had long hair and the assured manner of all gifted musicians. Ozgur was not fazed in the slightest by Adam’s impromptu arrival on the doorstep later that week, bearing a bottle of red.

Later, when he commented that Ozgur seemed a likeable character, Fiona’s head rocked back.  Out sounded that signature throaty, head-turning laugh of hers.

—Darling, he’s hung like a horse!

From another it would have just sounded wrong, or attention-seeking. Yet these pronouncements of hers, which bordered the outrageous, never quite outraged. On another occasion when Adam spoke of visiting a friend in France her eyes widened.

—Brittany! My god, darling, don’t go there! Fucking awful place! I lost my black son in Brittany,  she said stubbing out her Marlboro, engulfed in backlit blue cloud.

Her opinions came out like the opening lines of great novels, drawing one into her anecdotes without fail.  They pierced the room with the tone of candour, the air of universal truth, between puffs of smoke.

They had both immediately, completely, fallen in love. Not with each other, and not with their respective bedmates either. The love they shared was for their adopted city, its plunging broken streets and its uplit monuments, and for the characters that peopled it. In Istanbul everyone seemed to fumble forward through life desperate as poets.

Galata, its tower, stood sentinel over them, no more than 50 feet from the doorstep of the Bereket Apartmani in the European quarter. Everyone an exile, Turk, Greek, Armenian, Kurd, all just as foreign to one another as the foreigners, liberated and hunted. Just like them. Perhaps that was why they were as complicit as thieves.

She would drop in on him at Gramofon with its deep velvet benches, the confluence of crowds streaming past in the slanted afternoon sunshine, half of the flow belched out of Tünel the old funicular which linked Karaköy, the other half surging round the bend on Istiklal away from Taksim. Gramofon’s food was unremarkable, the red wine often sour, but its unique vantage was like a refreshing draught provided by the constant river of humanity.

—Darling, she said one evening as she poured beer into a glass and handed him the remaining half bottle. I have a favour to ask. Will you keep your mobile open on Thursday?

She had met someone. He had cut her hair earlier in the week and they had tea together a few times outside his salon. He was coming to dinner at her flat and she felt uncertain. There was a charged heat between Fiona and this hairdresser— the touch of his hands on her scalp, washing her hair. It occurred the moment they’d met, that charge. That their communication was limited, broken into fragments both Turkish and English, made her somewhat nervous about comprehending and responding to his expectations.

Adam agreed to keep his phone open and be not too far from the Bereket Apartmani that evening.

Half a year later and Adam had sold everything he owned in Canada and returned to Istanbul in late May. The Bereket apartment was no longer available. However In the months that followed the city embraced his return like a mother whose son had been thought lost at sea. It seemed to him that life was somehow just beginning. His one disappointment was that Gramofon had remodelled and, like a Hollywood idol having undergone the knife, lost the charisma. A year later it morphed again into a charmless but highly profitable outpost of a simit chain, churning out the sesame-encrusted loops of bread and thousands of glasses of tea daily.

They met now at Leyla in Cihangir, their backs to the wall, seated on the port side of its long central bar which jutted like a ship’s prow into the high-ceilinged room full of literary players, intellectuals, actors and directors, all huddled like conspirators at the tables arrayed between the bar and the door.

Fiona was still deeply in love with her hairdresser, though somewhat less enamoured with his skills with the scissors.

—My hair is getting so limp, and he fried it with that last dye. Of course I can’t go anywhere else now. It would destroy him. She paused, and dropped her chin. My god, darling! What is he doing?

A regular, an unusuallylarge man with an irregularly large head, seated opposite at the bar had changed seats for the second time. He favoured sand coloured suits a few shades lighter than his hair and smoked fat cigars, the putrid smoke of which reached them in bursts.

—He’s moving closer. He keeps watching us!

Her tea glass clattered against the spoon and saucer. She dug in her purse while she spoke.

The man was not exactly ugly, yet there was unnerving manner about him, the angle at which he cocked his head, the uneven clench of his bearded jaw. Each time a space opened around the bar, cigar man would relocate, edging closer. After ten tulip-shaped glasses of tea, their nerves were easily jangled. But it was true.

—You’re right. I’m ordering a beer. What do you think he wants?

—It’s a bit early, don’t you think? That neck of his. My god. Maybe we should leave.

She finally dug out her cigarettes.

—Nonsense. He can’t murder us at the bar. Besides I need to counter all the caffeine coursing through me.

—You spend too much time here. People will be getting ideas about you.

It was true. Ayse, a television actor with curling golden brown hair and red lips had said that she thought him a spy because he always sat perched at the bar with his laptop, his face washed in the glow of the screen. Another regular, Selahattin, had introduced them. Always scribbling lines in a notebook and smoking, puffing cigarettes to the filter, Selahattin’s steely grey hair and glinting bespectacled eyes, gave him a wizardly air.

In any case Ayse didn’t seem too perturbed and invited him to go for walks down the uneven pavements past gypsy flower vendors and hole-in-the wall hardware shops. Adam wasn’t certain if her interest was genuine or not, or rather a ploy to wake up her boyfriend, Emre, also an actor. Emre would get calls on the set of his TV dramedy to inform him that she was walking through Cihangir again with that tall foreigner. The outcome seemed to amuse her when he rang her several times find out was going on. Ayse liked the fact that neither he nor Fiona budged or reacted when a famous person entered Leyla.

Cigar man eventually found a seat next to them, puffing heavily, engulfing them in smoke, clearly listening but never uttereing a word. Finally they escaped into the rising evening wind.

Weeks later they were all huddled outside on the street outside Smyrna, a favoured haunt of actors just across the street from Leyla. Ayse, Fiona and Adam had been invited to dinner by Selahattin. Emre wrapping late, joined them. The two women actors became fast friends, and Fiona began flirting overtly with Emre, offering to take on Emre if Ayse had had enough.

Later in the evening Fiona leaned over to Adam and said in a low tone:

—Darling, I need your help Thursday.

—With what?

—It’s those fucking Russians again.

—What?

Fiona suspected her lover, the hairdresser, was about to cheat. He had regulars,  Russian and Ukranian women who entertained lonely men. They were always in the salon. Of course he flirted with them while his assistant, Ramazan, looked on with a slackened jaw. Normally on Thursdays he stayed at Fiona’s. But that Tuesday he’d abruptly cancelled. She wanted to spy on the salon from across Istiklal on Thursday, but couldn’t risk sitting alone at a table until 10 at night, and wanted Adam to keep her company to see if he would be leaving with someone.

There is no script for an original life. But in the orbit of a true actress, in a city unlike any other, there is always drama.