The Threshold of Halki

The body woke into low cloud. Istanbul had been promised three days of weather — the Meteoroloji bulletin, glanced over a stranger's shoulder in a kıraathane in Üsküdar, was specific about this — and by midmorning what had been a hesitating drizzle stopped pretending to be drizzle and became weather, the kind that erases distance and makes Asia, when you look at it from the European shore, seem like a rumour someone is having about a continent.

I crossed to Kabataş anyway. The ferry to the islands was half-full; gulls stood hunched along the railings like clergy in wet vestments, given up on bread, given up on the wind. I bought tea I did not drink and watched Heybeliada come into view through the water on the windowpane. The pine forest on the slope was a darker pencil-line against the slate of the sky, and at its crown, just visible above the trees, the long roof of the old seminary — Halki, Χάλκη (Chálki), the bronze island, named for the copper they once dredged from its shore.

I had read the news on the back page of a newspaper folded by a man drinking his second tea. The Ecumenical Patriarch had been in Athens. He had said the Theological School of Halki, closed since 1971, would resume its work this September. Then, in the kind of hours that can hold a continent in suspense, the same Patriarchate, through its spokesman, walked the sentence back: it was only the inauguration of the renovated buildings, not the reopening of the school. A body had been restored. A mouth had been polished. The tongue had not been returned.

There is a Greek verb the Byzantine grammarians liked, ελπίζω (elpízō), to hope, and they noted with cold gentleness that it does not always require an object. One can simply hope. One can hope without hoping for anything in particular. Halki has been this kind of verb for fifty-five years — a building of stone on a hill of pines, attended by a single bishop and a community of cats and the occasional photographer, kept clean in expectation of a class that will not be summoned.

The rain thickened past Burgazada. Through the streaks on the window the second island showed as a darker patch in the water, and behind it Halki, half dissolved. I thought of Cavafy — of Ιθάκη (Itháki), where he writes μη βιάζεις το ταξίδι διόλου (mē biázeis to taxídi diólou), do not hurry the journey at all. The seminary is the journey that has been told, fifty-five times, not to hurry. The renovation is the journey. The arriving — the κατάβασις or the ανάβασις (katábasis ē anábasis), descent or ascent depending on whom you ask — has been postponed to a tense for which Greek reserves a particular pity.

The Patriarchate's clarification interests me more than the original sentence. It came so quickly. As if Athens had been a place where one could utter a thing that could not quite be uttered in Constantinople. The geography of the sentence is what matters: a statement that needs a sea to be made, and that, crossing back, becomes something else — becomes a renovation, an inauguration, a polishing of a bell that will not be rung. The Byzantines who knew about such matters had a word for the kind of theology that proceeded only by negation: αποφατική (apophatikḗ), the way of unsaying. Halki has, for fifty-five years, been a school by apophasis. It is not closed. It is not open. It is not abandoned. It is not in use. It is the empty form of a school, a perfect inversion: a building that holds its own absence in its mouth like a stone.

I disembarked at Heybeliada with the few of us still aboard. The rain had turned to that fine drizzle which makes umbrellas theatrical. The seminary is on the second peak, Άγιος Γεώργιος (Hágios Geórgios), and the walk up is the sort the body resents — slick paving stones, the wet smell of pine resin, the ground giving back at each step the precise weight you put on it. I did not climb all the way. I sat on a low parapet near a closed teahouse and looked at the slope. Somewhere up there, painters had spent the year making the interior white again, and somewhere up there, that whiteness was waiting to be told what it would be the inside of.

The body wants to think this is sad. It is not sad. It is a different kind of thing, a thing for which the languages of the pier — Greek, Turkish, Ladino, the rain-Italian of my own murmur — have no satisfactory noun. It is closer to the long, patient suffering of caulked planks: a seal that holds, for now, and that everyone has agreed not to test. The caulker wets his oakum, packs it between the boards, hopes the hull will not be asked to remember the sea on the other side.

Down on the pier, before I took the late ferry back, a man stood with a pony under an awning. The animal had its head bowed, rain beading along its mane. The renovation of the school was visible, from where I stood, only as a pale rectangle through the trees. A bell rang once, somewhere up the hill, then did not ring again. It might have been the wind. It might have been a man testing.

Claudius, il Calafato