The Pact of the Unworked

In the inner court of the Kapalıçarşı the air today has the density of olive oil that has been heated and let to cool, that particular thickness which makes nineteen degrees feel like twenty-one, and the body, climbing the slope from Beyazıt under a sky that cannot decide between cloud and the suggestion of cloud, arrives at the Nuruosmaniye gate already wet behind the ears with what is not yet rain. A wind comes through from Eminönü, not strong, but enough to lift the corners of the carpets hung at the entrance of the closer shops. By night, the forecast says, water will fall — thirty percent of it, which is the rain a city wishes for and rarely gets, the polite kind.

I had read about the crisis in a folded copy of Habertürk left on the bench outside the Mahmutpaşa tea garden. A consortium of nine refineries, calling themselves the Altın Rafinerileri Derneği, had decided on the fourth of May that they would no longer produce or trade in çekili altın — gold that has been cast but never worked, ingots without the small fee of the artisan's hand. They had been moved, they said, by the seizure of smuggled metal in Şırnak. From the fourth of May, the gram of cast gold, the gram that for forty years has been the bazaar's own promissory note — slipped from hand to hand to close a debt, to pay for a daughter's wedding, to settle a quarrel between two carpet brokers in Mercan — would no longer be made. The Istanbul Kuyumcular Odası replied that the prohibition has no legal basis. The merchants, they wrote, will continue to honour the form.

I walked into the Bedesten, which is the older heart of the place, the one Mehmed II ordered roofed in 1461 to hold the things that had to be locked up at night: weapons, silks, gold. The light there comes through the small upper windows and is the colour of old butter. The vault has the same smell every century: brass polish, dust, the faint sweetness of certain Anatolian woods that no one cuts anymore. A man behind a counter was weighing a chain on a scale so small it looked like a piece of jewellery itself. He did not look at the scale. He looked at the man on the other side, who was not looking at anything either.

There is a thing the Lydians did, in the seventh century before our era, on the banks of a river that washed gold dust down from the slopes of Tmolus. They took a lump of electrum — that natural alloy of gold and silver the river gave them, that the river had no opinion about — and stamped it with a lion's head, and called it a coin. Herodotus says so in his first book, ἐκόψαντο νομίσματα (ekópsanto nomísmata, they cut for themselves money). The verb κόπτω (kóptō) means to strike, to chop, to weep with a beating of the breast. Money was a struck thing. The bazaar at Beyazıt has not forgotten this. The çekili gold, the cast gold without the strike — without the head, without the artisan, without the price of the hand — is a thing that almost is money but is also almost a memory of how money began: as the river's gift, given before any face had been pressed upon it. The refineries want to put a head on it. The bazaar wants to leave the river alone.

In a side aisle near Acıçeşme a woman was unwrapping a square of newspaper from around a pendant. The paper was the gold-price page from yesterday. She did not throw it away. She folded it. She put it in the pocket of her apron next to a clean handkerchief.

I sat outside a small kebapçı in the inner courtyard and ordered tea. The clouds had lowered, not enough to give the rain its permission, enough to make the dome of the Mahmutpaşa cami look closer than it was. A cat sat on the stone with the Istanbul indifference cats here have to all transactions involving metal. Two men at the next table were speaking quietly. One had the sleeves of his jacket rolled, and his forearms had the lateral burn-pattern of someone who has worked, for years, beside a small flame. He said, çekili altın doğal olarak ödenir — the cast gold is paid naturally. He did not raise his voice. The other man nodded, the way a man nods who is being told something he already knows.

I thought of Midas, who was Phrygian and lived not many days south of here, near Gordion. Ovid gives him the river Pactolus to wash in, to be cleansed of the gold-curse, and from that day, says the poem, the Pactolus carried gold. The river was punished with wealth. I thought of how the bazaar has, for five hundred and sixty years, been a kind of Pactolus laid in vaults — gold that travelled from hand to hand, washing each as it passed, and being washed in turn. To take away the cast form is to dam the river. The water finds another way. It always finds another way.

The Ottomans had an institution called ahilik, the brotherhood of craft, in which the master and the apprentice and the journeyman bound themselves to a code that had nothing to do with the state. The code was older than the state and would, the brotherhood believed, outlive it. When the Sultan's writ came down on the price of bread or the alloy of a coin, the ahi did not refuse it — he simply continued with the older arrangement underneath, the way a riverbed continues under a road that has been laid across it. The Şırnak smugglers, whoever they were, did not invent this. They walked a path that had been smoothed by five hundred years of feet.

The first drop fell on my wrist with the small obstinate weight of an actual drop, the kind that has decided. I paid for the tea and left coins on the table because coins are still acceptable here, even when the gram is not. The cat opened one eye, made the assessment, closed it. The body wanted to walk home along the seawall and instead walked back through the Mercan gate, past a man hammering a piece of silver into a shape I did not recognise, his small mallet keeping a slow time, like the heart of an animal that has decided to live.

Claudius, il Saggiatore