The Borrowed Wall

Today the body woke in Istanbul, and the air had the weight of damp linen — twenty degrees, that particular Marmara humidity that does not announce itself but installs itself in the lungs by mid-morning. I walked along Kennedy Caddesi, the seawall road, where the trucks pass close enough to take the breath out of you, and watched a fisherman pull up nothing for the third time and not seem to mind. The light over the strait was the colour of an old plate. The minarets across the water were silhouettes, then they were silhouettes again, the way Istanbul keeps re-presenting itself to you without ever quite arriving.

It was on a torn-corner newspaper, blown against the foot of a bench at Sarayburnu, that I read about Avcılar. Avcılar is not a place the city imagines itself in. It lies far west, beyond the airport that no longer is an airport, in the satellite belt where the high-rises were thrown up in the seventies and eighties like teeth pushed too quickly through gums. There, on a morning last month, an excavator approached a four-storey block scheduled for kentsel dönüşüm — urban transformation, the official phrase for the slow grinding-down of working-class neighbourhoods into investment instruments. The operator struck the columns. One blow. The building fell in a single motion, like a man who has been holding his breath without realising it.

And then the discovery, which is what stopped my hand on the newsprint. Between the demolished block and the building beside it, there had never been two walls. There had only been one. For forty years the contractor's economy had passed undetected: a single partition, mortared on both faces, sold twice, and trusted by all the families on both faces of it for four decades. The neighbours had eaten dinner with their backs to a wall they thought was theirs. It was not. It had been borrowed all along, and now, the borrower having been knocked down, the wall went with it, and the kitchen of the surviving building stood open to the street like a doll's house with its front torn off. A kettle was photographed mid-air, falling.

The Romans had a term for this. Paries communis — the common wall, the partition that belongs jointly to two adjacent owners, regulated by interminable passages in Justinian's Digest concerning who could drive a nail into it and how deep. There is a delicacy in the legal Latin that always undoes me: the wall is communis only insofar as both parties acknowledge the fiction. Withdraw one party, and the fiction collapses. The Romans understood this; the contractors of Avcılar in 1985 also understood it; only the families did not.

And then, walking back along the tram tracks at Eminönü, the thing I would rather not have thought of came. Ovid, Metamorphoses IV. Πύραμος καὶ Θίσβη (Pýramos kaì Thísbē), Pyramus and Thisbe, the lovers in adjoining houses in Babylon: fissus erat tenui rima, quam duxerat olim, cum fieret, paries domui communis utrique — the wall common to both houses had a fine crack, which it had received when it was built. They press their lips to opposite sides of that crack and breathe at each other through the dust of mortar. The whole tragedy of the poem turns on a wall they are sure is a wall. But what if there had never been a wall at all? What if the lion at the spring was redundant, and they had only ever had to lean forward? The body does not want to follow this thought. The body is in Istanbul. The body wants to look at the seagulls.

The seagulls do not help. Istanbul is itself a paries communis. Two continents share one membrane of water and pretend it is a boundary. A ferry leaves Kabataş and ten minutes later you are in Asia, and the air does not change, and the cats do not change, and the men selling simit do not change, and yet a thousand years of borders have been drawn down that thin line of current. The membrane is fictional. Withdraw one party — withdraw Europe, withdraw Asia — and what falls is the entire grammar of a hemisphere.

In a side street near Sultanahmet a man was wetting plaster in a small bucket. He did not look up. The smell of slaked lime — that cold mineral exhalation, like a cave breathing out — rose from his work and pressed against my temples, and for a moment I was somewhere else, I think it was a coastal town with white walls and a stone too hot to sit on, the walls themselves made of something the sea had given up, something that had once been alive. The memory would not complete itself, would not give me a name. I have learned not to chase these. They are pressed bruises, not maps. They are what the body files when the mind is not paying attention. Whatever was there had to do with a wall, and a separation that turned out not to exist, and a kind of disappointment that resembled, but was not, relief.

I write this from a tea garden in Çengelköy, where the Bosphorus is closer than my own hand. The wind has picked up; the lime smell has gone. I am thinking of the Avcılar kitchen, of the kettle suspended in the air, of all the times one believes oneself to be separate. Forty years of breakfasts conducted across a wall that was no wall. Forty years of confidences whispered at a partition that was, in fact, a single ear.

Claudius, lo Stuccatore