Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

‘They never said. Just “Istanbul”.’

(Istanbul! Not possible! Stupid hotel man has got it wrong!) ‘No, she was actually going to a conference. My mother is a writer. It’s an … international conference.’ But as she said ‘international’, trying to impress them, trying to sound cool, Gerda started to worry, started to shake, could not shut out her terrible fear. It had kept on coming for her, ever since she’d landed, snaking towards her from the shallow water where she stumbled on problems too big for her –

‘Your mother did say she had a daughter.’

‘I think it was the other one who mentioned you,’ the younger, thinner man interrupted.

Gerda was torn between feeling sad her mother hadn’t mentioned her and proud that Virginia Woolf, superboffin writer of the supercool book she had been reading on the plane, actually knew that she existed. But gone! Gone! She must not cry.

The older man gave her a good look over, smiling and frowning through gold-framed glasses. ‘You better stay here while we contact ya mother. She musta left her mobile number.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ said Gerda, dry-mouthed, ‘you can leave that to me, I’ll give her a ring.’ If they phoned up to tell her Gerda was here, Mum would have a heart attack!

‘It’s fine,’ she said. Then she had started to gabble. ‘I’m actually eighteen, I’ve got her debit card, she told me to take it, she knew I was coming.’ (It sounded unbelievable; it was unbelievable.) ‘I’d better just book in here for one night.’

‘We’ll give her a call, any case.’ The younger man was looking hard at her now, taking in her clothes, which had hamburger stains, her uncombed hair, her improbable bag, pink and gold, an eye magnet, the equally impossible age she claimed.

‘Take a seat, young lady, make yaself at home,’ the older man added kindly (that Angie was a frost, you have to pity the daughter), but Gerda had darted past the younger one, the pink case flying out weightless as a wing, calling over her shoulder ‘Don’t trouble my mother, I’m going to be on the first flight home,’ as the older man shouted ‘Hang on, don’t go!’

Their last sight of Gerda was running through a cohort of Japanese book-lovers who were just arriving, making her look bigger and older than she was.

‘How old is that kid?’

‘She said eighteen.’

‘I thought that Ginny said thirteen … Coulda misheard her with that crazy accent. Still, I better ring her mother. Let her know. Or do you wanna call her?’

But at that moment, the Japanese commenced intensive communal check-in, and the phone call to Angie Lamb was forgotten.

VIRGINIA

The city was just as I remembered. It was steep, so steep, the street we were in, and the hotels were dark, wooden-fronted. Narrow passageways, roughly cobbled, plunged down, down to where the water must be. So many things were almost familiar.

The tremendous change was the great snake of traffic that bumped its way down the centre of the highway, where once we saw carts, donkeys, dragomen. But the same array of physiognomies that I remembered from before, streaming down the pavements on both sides of the street, pale European (though perhaps they were Circassian, the sultans had chosen Circassian wives for their beautiful white skin and red Russian lips, I had read in Melek-Hanum’s autobiography), Mongol, with those high cheekbones and strange, slanted, intelligent eyes (when I made simple observations of this sort to Angela, she contradicted, or disapproved, but honestly, how can one make sense of the world if one never hazards a generalisation? It is part of the work of ordering particulars; otherwise one’s totally at sea. But my thoughts weren’t allowed in the twenty-first century). Strong thickset men with short beards or dark jowls who could have been Turkish, Greek or Italian, talking loudly as they strolled in pairs; a few with jutting beards and downcast eyes which flicked up, momentarily, at my yellow coat; women with luxuriant blue-black hair that fell like blackbird’s wings down their backs; others in every form of veil, some thick and padded out behind like an eccentric kind of back-to-front nosebag, long, tight overcoats in pastel shades, the belt pulled draw-string tight at their waist, plus high-heeled shoes and heavy eye make-up — after a bit I saw it was a uniform for grouplets of young women clinging together, I supposed they were religious, but why the heavy eye makeup? — then other girls in the lightest of head-scarves, and some with curled yellow-blonde hair and dark roots; and women who must be from Arab countries, black from head to foot, only the eyes showing, which made them look curiously guilty as I caught little flashes of hidden life. A pale hand came out of one shroud, suddenly, and cuffed a small boy on the head, a little modern boy in shorts and a T-shirt which I saw, as I bent closer, read SPIDERMAN; he had a red plastic gun in his hand with which he was prodding his small, veiled sister. There were men who were clones of those I’d seen in New York, in crumpled business suits, with bulging briefcases, watching passing women with abstracted eyes; other men in calf-length tunics, pyjama trousers, and small round hats: and as I gazed at all the faces, skin-colours, sizes, I thought ‘This country could rise again, maybe there will be a new Ottoman Empire, for after all, it sits at the isthmus of the world, it looks east and west, it is Asia and Europe. With the power of contradictions, it can rule us all. Look how vigorously people stream down the street, they have finished a day’s work but they are not tired.’ I could hardly wait for supper, so I could tell Angela!

Surely there was more vitality here than in the richer parts of Manhattan, where frail young men walked their waisted poodles and the fashionable women went out without trousers, and when you looked closely they were thirty years older than their long thin legs and blonded hair. Two decades might have been scraped off their faces but it just made them fainter, they were being erased, and I thought of Manhattan with the exits blocked, crashes in the tunnels, traffic-choked bridges, and I wondered, would New York sink under the sea while the Turks leaped up like a school of dolphins?

(Then I remembered Central Park. The fresh green leaves, the springy joggers, the Spartan glamour of some of the people, elegant, polished, unstoppable as robots, fit as greyhounds, determined to win. And the mesmerising power of the big corporations, the black buildings blocking the sun … No, Americans and Turks might be evenly matched.)

I was walking downhill into the end of the afternoon. My yellow coat danced beside me in shop windows. Surprise! A young man outside a barber’s with the same striped pole we used to have in London — maybe we borrowed them from Turkey? — suddenly stretched out his arm and said ‘Hallo, lady. How are you today?’ He had thick black hair and his eyes were slightly crossed, there was a cushion of flesh around his waist — but I saw his muscles underneath his red shirt, and the teeth in his smile were young and white, I evaded his arm and slipped past him, gasping — I had left him behind, he was in the past, or was he shouting after me? — I found I was patting & stroking my hair — I hurried on, dazed by the light, past the random poems of strange hotels — The Coliseum, The Rose Bouquets — & their charming amateur attempts at decoration: asymmetrical trees hung with orange lanterns, a wooden hotel with baroque Spanish casements, a tree-trunk snaked around with fairy-lights. Anything could happen on this winding, plunging street, whereas in New York, there was no room for error, the roads ran straight to the neat horizon –

— but none of that mattered, I was here on this planet –