Originally written 3 November 2007
It is my favourite way home, and it is so convenient, though rather slow: to take the boat from Eminönü to Üsküdar and change there back across to Besiktas. It spares the long dull walk, and the ghastly crowding of the tram and the unspeakable traffic snarls. Instead there is the deck, spacious even when full, a glass of sweet tea and the rocking brought on by waves, who knows what waves and where they are from. Still there is a sense of relief, coming home, to be back on the European side at Besiktaş or Kabataş. Though not wide - perhaps half a mile at this point - the Bosphorus is a chasm, uncrossable without help. It is deep, full of strong currents, and a totally uninhabitable place for man. It runs through a city - or, rather, a city has formed on its banks, enriched through it, taken to the world by it - but it is as remote from the city as any ocean. What if there were to be no more boats across? For sure, there is today a bridge; isolation is no longer absolute. Yet the bridge is distant and in its own way impassable except to machines. One might take a taxi from Üsküdar to Besiktaş but the fare would be astronomical. (One might add that this channel of water is a trite, symbolic division of the continents - after all, one could walk up the western shore, turn left and follow the Black Sea coast round until eventually returning to a point a few hundred yards from the start, on the opposite side. But even then there would have been a transition spelled out in the countries passed through - from Thrace and Bulgaria, definitely south-eastern Europe, Ukraine, geographically European and with culturally European claims, to the disquiet of its big brother; Russia, definable precisely by its schizophrenia as to whether it is fundamentally European or Asian; then Georgia, Christian but definitely Asian, along with Azerbaijan and Armenia, and at last Anatolia, the ancient Asia Minor.) Such abstrusions aside, if there were no boat there would be no option but to remain on the other shore, as though one had crossed a sea. And though in one sense Üsküdar is just another group of suburbs, in another equal sense it lies on a different continent, and this has a resonance. Just as one can feel wonder at having travelled from home to the city via Asia, in the course of an ordinary day. Just as one wonders at these boats, how everyday it all is, how cheap it is, how many competing lines there are, what a web of routes exists, these boats turning and approaching under each other’s bows, a relentless stream of commuters passing in each direction.
On the southern shore of the Golden Horn, just inside the Galata Bridge, lit up against the smoky night by rows of bare bulbs, two boats serve fried fish from large hobs. They rock from side to side so sharply - like a child’s round-bottomed toy that cannot be knocked over - one of the cooks practices keeping upright while the deck twists thirty degrees either way beneath him, but the fish don’t quite slide off the stove, nor the stove off the deck. Still, the man serving the fish to customers on the quay has to hold it out, waiting for his side of the boat to drop and bring him close enough to reach shore. I never do see what caused all this rocking, the inner Horn appearing seeming calm to the eye.
Drawing away, churning and scrabbling, from the lit-up shore, into the dark channel. The black waves seem bigger now, the Asian shore further away. We move out from the ancient city, its hills crowned by imperial mosques floodlit, but its bazaar streets now dark and empty but for wind. Odd lights move on the water, but don’t inform what they are. The colossal container vessels have but a headlight and a tail light, without much on board to indicate life; they pass through like dark bodies in deep space. It is astonishing a combination at any time, the historical city and its watery determinant, still today full of big ships - ships bigger than ever before. The Pera hill stands to port, the Galata Tower floodlit and, by the water, the Istanbul Modern gallery behind the cruise ships. Men on the upper deck sip tea and look out, never quite tired of the passage. It is like a licence to look to the horizons, as well as a forced removal from work or domesticity. Wordless, familiar, unacknowledged, it releases man to dreaming. To standing silently among strangers as this ritual of passage familiarly passes. By the Seraglio Point a thousand white lights pick out the traffic entering the city, lights that move closer and condense into a single line-mass as the road turns perpendicular to us. Beside them, the unearthly white of the lighthouse beam, rising and falling. Green buoys wink a sea lane to the world’s unseen ships past rocks and unlit offshore platforms. And seaward - black beyond blackness. Only last week, before the clocks changed, I had come this way in an autumnal afternoon, the water luminescent one way and jewel blue the other, so light that it seemed to have no weight. Meanwhile the great channel, the dark deep flow through the brilliant city, between the streets, under the land, that was there before the city and will be there after it has been. Ships steer across the void, their lights nodding; man cannot survive here, he must be carried in a vessel. They shift like stars, passing worlds on a black oscillating carrier.
