Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (26 page)

The braying American was at it again, stopping me thinking about that clue. ‘It’s not their fault, they’re just, frankly, at an earlier stage of human civilisation. But at heart, they are warm, simple people.’

‘I wanna buy silver,’ his wife complained, in a grating, whining, little girl voice. ‘You gotta take me to the Bazaar, Howie. With you I know they won’t get away with anything. You can come with us, Miss – I don’t know your name.’

‘Thanks, I’ll be fine,’ said the student.

The American bored on regardless. ‘If you earn their respect, they’ll be friends for life …’

‘Do you have any Turkish friends?’ asked the student.

Then we all gasped in unison.

‘Catastrophe,’ I said to Angela.

‘What?’ she said, anxious.

‘Your crossword clue.’

We were going down, we were racketing down through
blinding yellow nets of lightning, bumping like a stone through black attics of cloud, floor after floor through a great broken building, electrics flashing to left and right.

‘Angela, are you all right?’

‘Tiny bit bumpy, isn’t it?’

‘The sea voyage was so much worse.’

I valued her hand. I didn’t want to lose it. In that moment, she mothered me.

Ten minutes of fear can be a very long time. I was almost glad when she started talking, until I heard what she had to say –

‘So what WILL happen at my conference? The conference, I mean. Not my conference.’

(There is a collective groan and laugh as the plane tips and swoops, spectacularly.)

‘Cabin crew to positions for landing.’

‘Virginia, I just want to get there.’

Now we plunged into another universe, a parallel universe of playful demons. Yes, I was ready, I felt excited –

It was the moment when darkness threatens, when if a feather alighted in the scale we would be cast down into the bottomless pit. One feather, and the plane, its back broken, would pitch us down into the depths – in the burning wreck, they might have found my bones, and who would they have thought I was?

I saw the body of the plane strewn over the city, perhaps in the wide green space in Pera, a broken, blackened insect of steel. They would remove our charred bodies. Later, picnickers might seek shelter there; lovers at night might lie on the gangways; a man with a goat might sleep in the galley, and a tramp creep up near them to ward off the cold. Then the roof would fall in; briars and hemlocks would blot out the seats, the lavatories, the eyes of windows. Grass and young plants would take root in blown sand, then brambles would flower and fruit above them, till some trespasser, losing his way in the park, could tell only by the fin of one wing, sticking up forlornly from a tangle of blackberries, that here once hundreds of people had flown, a plane full of people, their hopes, their plans, the families with babies, the couple holding hands, the young mother planning her next play for young people, ‘Follow the ways of our forefathers’ –

But a force was working that kept us flying. Angela shook her pen: the story went on.

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God
save
us – ’

(
They bump, hit, bump, bump-bump to a stop
.)

God. Thank God.

I am not religious, but at such moments, one calls on someone. A wash of relief left me exhausted. I loosened my seat belt and sank back to rest as the plane taxied towards its station.

We could have died. We were here, alive.

I thought of Gerda. And I thought of Edward.

What would they feel if I died in an air crash? Edward would suffer, and have regrets.

‘Please remain seated till the seat belt signs are turned off.’

No, he would never marry again. He might turn our house into a museum … Yes, the Angela Lamb Museum … Schools would bring parties to visit it …

It was summer, the lawn was mown and all the roses were in full bloom. Edward, wearing the chief steward’s uniform, was pushing a trolley of tea and coffee and selling duty-free copies of my books … he could barely cope with the numbers. They poured down the gangways, unstoppable, jostling, with bags and cases and people treading hard on my foot, and flight attendants who tapped me on the shoulder and said –

‘Excuse me, Miss, perhaps you are dozing. Time to disembark from the aircraft. I’ll get my colleague to help you, ladies.’

‘I’m not asleep.’

(
Takes stock of the half-empty plane
.)

‘Virginia, why didn’t you wake me? I must have been in everybody’s way.’

‘The Jews weren’t bothered, they simply pushed past. And I took the opportunity to look at your map. Our hotel is in the heart of the old city.’

‘Madam, please, let me carry your cases.’

‘Actually half her things are in
my
hand luggage. It’s very heavy. Can you help me?’

A minute later they were on their way. The two spoiled women – Americans, weren’t they? – were almost the last straw for the flight attendants, blood sugar low after the eleven-hour journey. The praying passengers, the nappy changes, the kosher meals, the extra hand-luggage … Now these American bitches couldn’t leave the plane.

They found one last smile: ‘Enjoy your holiday, Madam.’

‘It’s work, actually,’ Angela huffed.

And then they were gone, and the plane was their own. Littered with plastic, paper-bags, blankets, newspapers, tissues – but their own. The crew smiled and drew a deep breath. Amara said ‘I can’t stand Americans,’ and Süleyman said ‘And I can’t stand Jews.’

But the empty, disordered plane was in sunlight, the last strip of gold before the storm came, and Süleyman touched his friend on the arm and said ‘You know I don’t really mean it,’
and Amara nodded. ‘I didn’t mind the older one. She actually gave me a lovely smile.’

‘Which one was older?’ asked Süleyman. He was blind to the finer points of women, or maybe Angela was looking exhausted.

‘We have to look after them in any case,’ Amara said.

‘Not for a bit,’ said Süleyman. He was off until the flight back to New York tomorrow.

Time to go home, kick the nearest human and de-stress by stroking the cat.

Turkish people love cats: Americans, dogs.

56

I stood just inside the cabin door, dazzled by the light at the top of the steps, trembling before a new beginning. Through the open door the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said – but there were birds, who sounded like the same birds that sang in New York and in London, I didn’t know exactly what species they were, there was deep golden light as I walked forward and all I saw was their wing-tips scattering like little black letters on the clouds’ dark velvet – the storm through which we’d swooped was still alive above us, on the point of breaking. What did it matter if I didn’t know the names of the birds, if their meaning, which was life, which was beauty, was plain? Air on my face. Fresh living air.

Angela still lingered behind me somewhere.

I faltered at the point when I landed with Virginia. I was, after a fashion, at home in New York, but in Turkey I was still a newbie. Yes, I had been there several times before, but I didn’t have the skills to look after her. I had only brought her because she pleaded.

I trudged like a zombie through the queue for visas. The storm rumbled like a giant’s borborygms through the airport roof above us. I didn’t care, we were on the ground.

Virginia’s big shining eyes were darting about, up, down, everywhere. I envied her vivacity – no wonder she had bounced
back from the dead. The visa queues were even longer than usual. Virginia tried to chat to the official, who smiled tolerantly but stayed silent. She was interested by such irrelevant things – the baggage carousel, a good-looking policeman.

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.

‘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.

PART THREE

Virginia in Istanbul

57

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.