The Wet and the Dry (21 page)

“You thought I was joking? Only in Lebanon. Only in Lebanon would an endurance soft drink be called Pussy. Only here. Imagine that in Egypt? Or in the Gulf? I am seeing signs for Pussy all over town. Everywhere I turn—Pussy. No? They think the locals won’t get it?”

“Yes,” one of the women cried, “I saw a truck today going up Mount Lebanon—it had the word ‘Pussy’ on its side. I was wondering—”

“You see? Only in Lebanon. What genius came up with that?”

They laughed till they cried.

“Pussy billboards everywhere.” The host sighed, leaning back and catching my eye. “You see what kind of people we are. Tremendous.”

The tone was therefore worldly and open. After the turkey and the apple pie, completely and authentically American, the bottles arrived. It is not uncommon here in Beirut to see bottles of Blue Label taken out from their special silk-lined cask and made available to guests. Two thousand dollars is a ferocious
price for a blended Scotch, but whisky here is a drink of display, a certificate of belonging to a global community of consumers, and its price is a necessary part of its appeal.

I went for arak myself, since I am a single-malt snob, but the aging businessmen around the table claimed that they had heard rumors of a new Johnnie Walker that was becoming available to the superrich, a blend even costlier than Blue Label.

Ah, Johnnie Walker, they muttered appreciatively. Mystery of mysteries, drink of drinks! Even the Muslims who do not drink have opinions about Johnnie Walker. Another guest, a man of about eighty who was also in construction, described the scene on the causeway that connects Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. There is, he said, a halfway house midway across where Saudi drivers returning to their border who are too drunk to drive are sheltered and monitored while they sober up. A remarkable thing, the Saudi appetite for booze, which is famous all over the Middle East. A vile thing, if you think about it. A dark and secretive passion that expressed itself not in gay conviviality and comradely exuberance but in trashed hotel rooms and surly scenes and the halfway house on the causeway, where the drunkards huddled like crack addicts after their debaucheries in Bahrain.

To Muslims living in more tolerant lands, however, the Saudi booze appetite is less shocking than a sign of character related to the overall condition of a people. Everyone knows the Saudis are pigs, the Lebanese often seem to be saying, and that is because they live there and not here. It is because they do not have Pussy in their corner stores, or Johnnie Walker Blue Label. It is because they have not learned how to regulate their desires.
Alcohol is desire, and especially whisky, that supreme but disreputable expression of it.

The host said, “Look at me. I am surrounded by bottles of Johnnie Walker. Am I tempted to join you in a glass? Not at all. I am perfectly happy that you are happy drinking my Johnnie Walker. I don’t have any emotions about it whatsoever. It is not about drinking what is forbidden. I have settled in to what I may and may not do. So the issue does not arise. I don’t hate Johnnie Walker because he is a symbol of Satan, or you, or the West. We’ve just eaten turkey with cranberry. Is that a symbol of America? We are not uncomfortable with anything and certainly not with alcohol. It is just not for us. We leave it quietly to one side. Enjoy your Scotch.”

East into West

                                  
After many years of contemplat
ing the move, and after my mother died, I finally got a little house in Istanbul. It sat on a hill between the northern suburb of Etiler and the old Armenian village of Arnavutköy, with the garish lights of the bridge at Ortaköy visible at night and seabirds wheeling above the cypresses and the stony minaret of the mosque on the side of the valley that swept down to the Bosphorus. My six-month travel turned into a year and then longer. I found myself living in the region I had originally intended merely to visit, and drinking there turned into an experiment of years.

Some places are intended as a withdrawal, a penance. Places where one is doomed to be alone with the self. I moved there during my mother’s death, and when I returned after the funeral in England, the
adhan
, the call to prayer, which woke me up every morning at five, did not infuriate me as it might have done otherwise. The enormity of the amplification created by that single speaker tied to the minaret’s shaft was enough to
penetrate all slumber, to crack all distraction. For a few minutes I was forced to concentrate on the call to prayer, a call to prayer of a religion to which I do not belong. The call would seem to stop on a high note, and I would drift back into grateful sleep; and then, almost enraged, it would recommence, and I would be forced to listen again to the rising and falling tones, the echo of an ancient desert, the hysteria. During those weeks of broken sleep and nightmares, I stopped drinking. It was a way of concentrating on death and its aftermath.

Etiler is one of the more international neighborhoods of Istanbul, affluent and residential, with a bar and restaurant scene stretched along Nispetiye Avenue as it rises toward the hideous Akmerkez Mall. It is not the Istanbul of Sultanahmet restaurant touts armed with battered English, and places where “tribal” women make bread in the window, and the
meyhanes
(or traditional taverns) of Istiklal where you down your raki with plates of
borek
and slowly realize that you are an alien. Etiler, like Levent to the south, is even more Westernized, but it is not a spectacle for Westerners: it’s a living facility.

This is what is most known about Turkey, that it is the only Muslim country that is secular, the only one where Muslims can drink legally, even if a mere six percent of Turkish households actually do so. It is famously “Westernized.” The founder of the nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatūrk, was himself a heavy drinker and was reputed to have died from a surfeit of raki, the Turkish version of arak. It is very likely that he did.

But in recent years the Justice and Development Party, the AKP, of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—a man who
prays devoutly five times a day—has begun to curb its nation’s exceptional liberalism in the matter of alcohol. Images of alcohol have been more or less banned from the media, and taxes on it have been raised, so that whereas before a bottle of raki once cost about eight Turkish lira, about five dollars, it now costs thirty-five dollars. The government protests that it is doing nothing to curb Turkish freedoms. It points out that European governments tax alcohol as well, that everywhere it exists governments try to regulate its consumption, its representation. But Erdoğan himself has said that he does not understand why anyone would drink wine with dinner. Why would they drink wine, he has said, “when they can eat the grapes instead?”

In the center of the country, in the conservative heartland, the bars in entire towns are closing down, their licenses discreetly unrenewed. It was difficult to prove empirically, but unlike Beirut, where wine is cosmopolitan and cheap, drinking in Istanbul is expensive and unrefined: French wine, even, is not easy to come by. At even a chic fish place in Bebek, it is going to be Buzbağ, Kavaklidere, a Narince from Central Anatolia, an Öküzgözü, and little else.

Defenders of the government, who probably comprised the majority of the population, argued that there was justification for taxes on alcohol and restrictions on advertising. (Alcohol could no longer be shown in ads for cheese or meze side dishes, foods with which it is traditionally associated.) In the first place, it was popular, and the government would not suffer for being Islamic. Second, alcohol was harmful. Third, it was fun, and the Turkish relationship to fun is complicated.

•  •  •

Walking through the darkly somber streets of Karaköy or Galata under the song of seagulls, I consider the Brumelia celebrated sixteen hundred years ago under those same seabirds. It was Christianity, not Islam, that banned it, but the present religion in any case would not have suffered it for a moment. Constantinople was made orderly, as befitted a metropolis that first made monotheism a state religion. When you walk up toward Cihangir from Selim III’s brick armory, the Tophane, and look back over the city, what you see is a skyline of monotheistic certainty, its minarets once compared by a visiting Herman Melville to the slim, funereal forms of graveyard cypresses.

There would be no global Christianity without this city, which later, under the Ottomans, came to be known as the Abode of Happiness. Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise. Its stony melancholy is imperial, austere, and attuned to the one god, whether that of Justinian or that of Mehmet the Conqueror. “Gong-tormented” and vaporous, as Patrick Leigh Fermor famously described it in
Mani
, that exquisite meditation on, among many other things, the long-drawn-out and misunderstood genius of Byzantium.

It is not only the stones that make the city feel so weighted; there is also a folk memory so deep that it will never emerge again into consciousness. The celebrants of Brumelia, the Greeks, did not disappear. They merged into the city’s bloodstream.

To those who live here, Istanbul’s slightly overheated trendiness does not obscure this essential fact. It’s an intricate city,
difficult to know, labyrinthine and secretive and withdrawn. Its rarefied sadness is what is charismatic about it. Accordingly, the heavy drinking of raki is not joyous; it is brooding, internalized. But raki also heals.

When looking for a bar, I bear in mind Buñuel’s injunctions, even in Istanbul. But here one is thrown back eventually on the Pera Palace Hotel, whose famous bar has undergone a revolting and purposeless renovation. No matter. It is still Agatha Christie’s bar, and one cannot ask for much more than that.

It was here in the Pera, as every tourist knows, that she wrote
Murder on the Orient Express
. Istanbul was where she liked to work, where she perhaps liked to escape her philandering husband. On this occasion a chocolate model of the Eiffel Tower stands in the salon that separates the lobby from the ballroom. Here all is Ottoman-style domes and columns and carpets, a perfect fabricated Eastern set piece. A great mother-of-pearl cabinet dominates the far end, inside which vellum books lie on their sides. (Has someone just been reading them?) The Orient Bar, newly tarted up, adjoins these orientalist rooms and, with its framed oils of tenebrous sultans, partakes of their mood and invites one to sit at the heavy counter and drink a house cocktail, the Martian.

I like to walk around the Pera anyway, a tomb of nineteenth-century hotel technology and traveler frivolity. On the walls by the elevator, I love the paintings by minor Frenchmen showing girls in European parks covered with doves and pigeons, or views of the Asian Bosphorus when it was still an idyllic and somewhat medieval place, with kiosks and bearded men in turbans
lounging under mulberry trees. The old Istanbul that was expeditiously buried under freeway cement around the year 1960.

The iron scrollwork of the 1890 elevator soars up to unknown pleasures of upper floors, and the stairs are soundless with the pile carpet. But this is just, for me, the appendix to the Orient Bar, which in winter is empty but that beckons night after night, and not only because of its sureness of touch with staple mixes. It’s a bar that meets all the Buñuelian requirements: no music, no youth, no men in beards, no strange lighting. Though I might add that it seems a shame that one of the wall-mounted sultans is not the infamous IV, who died of alcohol poisoning after countless drinking parties. During which, chroniclers assure us, he would shoot arrows at passersby from a window of the Topkapi Palace, or run disguised into the streets and kill random individuals with a sword, by way of inebriated amusement. The Dionysian folly of alcohol was running rampant, to point out an obvious paradox, in the veins of the Islamic world’s most powerful leader.

Indeed, I thought quite often of Murad IV as I sat alone at the Orient Bar that winter, for he was without question one of the most amazing of Ottoman personalities. Drinking here, how could one not?