Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

Once we’d finally got to the cattle-drive of taxis, I slumped on the seat, gave the driver the address, which he failed to understand though I pronounced it correctly, wrote it down on a piece of paper, to humour him, and slept again, almost at once.

VIRGINIA

‘So are all the taxis in the modern world yellow?’ They looked exactly like the ones in New York. ‘Angela? Did you hear me?’

The woman was actually asleep again! I hoped the driver had not noticed. Perhaps he would take advantage, and drive us by a roundabout route. I remembered the traders who robbed us in the market, though of course that was almost a century ago. Socks, shirts, curtain material, the Turks had got the better of us. It was half the price it would have been back home, but we expected it to be cheaper still …

Though it’s true the shirts were beautifully stitched. Maybe they didn’t rob us at all.

I sat and read my guidebook in the queer stormy sunlight, looking out of the window as the city unfolded. Strange red Germanic tower-blocks near the airport like Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis . I saw it with Leonard in — was it 1927? — The Spectator had just given me a positive review, we held hands in the dark, we were happy and excited … So Lang was right about the future. Or perhaps Turkish architects had seen his films — did dreams of the future have such power? Had today’s young women read A Room of One’s Own?

I stared through gaps in the dull buildings on the right at the dazzling dark of the Sea of Marmara, which I sailed across in glory as a very young woman, so long ago, on the winds of the morning, as dawn came up over Constantinople, but now I just glimpsed its beauty through traffic, dark, blue-dark, reflecting the sky as great tree roots of lightning plunged into it and vanished. Angela slept on, and I did not try to rouse her.

My darling Vanessa. If I could, would I wake her? No-one was dearer to me than my sister — we could be here together again, hand in hand — and yet I had learned from the Hades of the laptop that her life after I died had been long, and hard, that Duncan loved boys into his dotage, that her goddess good looks grew dry and worn and our family sadness fell upon her like hoar frost.

I should leave her, then, exhausted as she was, to sleep all the ages of the earth away.

Gently the waves would break (maybe Angela heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light, which was a deep golden storm-light, the apocalyptic beauty before the fall, would touch the blue skin of her closed eyelids.

And as I groped for the thought, ‘Why is everyone sleeping?’ — I shut my guidebook, and drifted away.

Nothing broke their sleep, not even the storm, until, as they drove along by the water where men still stood with fishing-lines, there was a burst of car-horns, and their eyes opened wide.

Four western eyes looked for eastern beauty.

Here we are again, Angela thought, sitting bolt upright in her seat. Awake.

And Virginia thought: Constantinople. And then, straight away, rethinking: Istanbul. For she was starting to see that the names mattered.

There’s thunder in Istanbul, and thunder in New York. Thunder from the trains underneath both cities and in Istanbul also from trams above the cobbles. Blank sheets of lightning banging like migraine.

Turkey is doing very nicely, thank you. Its economy is on fast forward. Once the Turks wanted to join Europe, and the euro: for years they struggled to meet impossible targets of fiscal well-being (though the countries demanding them were deep in debt) and human rights (which they did not agree with, but found they did not have the right to refuse). Despite all their efforts, they were never accepted. And now that Turkey’s economy is whizzing, while the euro limps from crisis to crisis, they are not so sure that they want to join Europe. They can trade with Russia, or the Gulf States, or China …

But the Europeans and Americans still come in their thousands to holiday here, they throng to the ‘exotic’ Old City or the ‘cool’ young streets around Istiklal, they queue in the heat to see what lies under the great red dome of the Aya Sophia or the blue-green citadel of the Blue Mosque with its pattern of domes like crusted shells and its tall, musical minarets, and they sigh at the skyline of the city at sunset, and exclaim for a day or two at the call to prayer, though after you have stayed in Istanbul for more than a few days you might start to hate it, the wailing at midnight and five in the morning. But if you stay longer, and begin to belong, you no longer hear it, unless you are the faithful, it’s just one of the five, six, seven dimensions of one of the thousands of worlds that meet here, a voice that has been calling for nine hundred years since Constantinople fell to Mehmet the Turk.

Though history here is much longer than that. Before the Turks there were the holy Roman emperors and the savage hegemony of the Christians, and before the Christians were the Pagans, and before the Pagans there were … What?

Goat-bells. Human animals crouched on the shore at the meeting of two seas and three waterways, collecting wood at nightfall to make a fire. At a time when in New York, Manhattan — ‘Manahatta’ — there were only bears, and mammoths, and trees, and Central Park was a granite wilderness, and the rain fell everywhere, all over the world, and there were no borders, or written names.

On Fifty-third Street, New York — where a bookseller, Evri, with the headache he always gets before storms (who just snapped at a journalist on the phone, ‘Of course people will go on buying physical books, why do you people?’) sits staring at the taxis out in the road, counting them like golden beads on a string, not seeing a red-headed child peering in — and on Divan Yolu Caddesi, Istanbul, where the tourists are panicked by the thought of getting wet — yellow taxis are filling up with people: Turks in New York, Americans in Turkey, Yanks and Turks a long way from home, and the blue-black sky far above them darkens one more shade and pours down.

(In New York, Gerda’s unhappy. She has saved half the chocolate bar she bought at the airport in case there is an Emergency, because Dad once said ‘Always save half your rations when you are on an Expedition’, but the uneaten chocolate in her pocket makes her hungry. And she’s asked the taxi to stop, on a whim, ‘I am going to buy my mother a present,’ because she saw the bookshop, and she suddenly couldn’t bear to reach the hotel, just in case — just in case Mum isn’t …

‘I can’t park here,’ the driver said. ‘You can walk from here, it’s only half a block,’ pointing up the street, in a would-be reassuring fashion. Gerda pays him the money, and gets out, very slowly, cautious as a snail.)

In both cities, poorer people run from the thunderheads above in a last-ditch attempt to escape the rain, It’s here — tangling up the runners as they put on a spurt, pitting the surface of the Hudson and Newark Bay and the swells of Bosphorus and Marmara the same — hissing past slates and bouncing back up again with terrible force from drains, turning streets dark, turning shoes, coats, gutters, bags, leaves, dust, stone — now everything’s black.

(Fifty-third Street quickly turns into a river, and Gerda makes up her mind and darts inside the bookshop.)

Just a few bright drops of time are left for a hundred silver sardines on Galata Bridge, Istanbul. Scooped out by the veil of lines that trail from the blue iron parapets, they swim on bravely in polystyrene boxes. In plastic beakers, smaller fry bunch like flowers: sprats lie head-down in a collar of blood.