The Emigrants

After these nocturnal entries, the next of any length was written on the day they arrived in Constantinople. Yesterday morning left Piraeus, Ambros recorded on the 15th of September. Somewhat the worse for wear, he wrote, after the laborious overland journey. Calm voyage. Resting for hours under the awning on deck. Never seen water as blue. Truly ultramarine. This morning through the Dardanelles. Great flocks of cormorants. In the early afternoon, far ahead, the capital of the Orient appeared, like a mirage at first, then the green of trees and the colourful jostling houses gradually becoming more distinct. The masts of ships, crowding and swaying gently in a breeze, and the minarets, seeming to sway a little as well. - The Trieste captain paid, we take rooms at the Pera Palas for the time being. We enter the lobby as afternoon tea is being served. Cosmo writes in the register: Freres Solomon, New York, en route pour la Chine. Pera, the reception clerk tells me when I enquire, pera means beyond. Beyond Stamboul. Mellow orchestral music drifts through the foyer. Behind the drawn tulle curtains of the ballroom glide the shadows of dancing couples. Quand l'amour meurt, sings a woman, her voice meandering eerily. The stairs and rooms magnificent. Carpeted landscapes beneath high ceilings. Immense tubs in the bathrooms. From the balcony, a view across the Golden Horn. Evening falls. We watch the dark descending from the outlying hills upon the low roofs, rising from the depths of the city atop the lead-grey cupolas of the mosques till at length it reaches to the tips of the minarets, which gleam especially brightly one last time before the light goes. - At this point, Ambros's entries continue regardless of the dates in his diary. No one, he writes, could conceive of such a city. So many different kinds of buildings, so many different greens. The crowns of pines high aloft. Acacias, cork oaks, sycamores, eucalypts, junipers, laurels, a paradise of trees, shady slopes and groves with tumbling streams and springs. Every walk full of surprises, and indeed of alarm. The prospects change like the scenes in a play. One street lined with palatial buildings ends at a ravine. You go to a theatre and a door in the foyer opens into a copse; another time, you turn down a gloomy back street that narrows and narrows till you think you are trapped, whereupon you take one last desperate turn round a corner and find yourself suddenly gazing from a vantage point across the vastest of panoramas. You climb a bare hillside forever and find yourself once more in a shady valley, enter a house gate and are in the street, drift with the bustle in the bazaar and are suddenly amidst gravestones. For, like Death itself, the cemeteries of Constantinople are in the midst of life. For every one who departs this life, they say, a cypress is planted. In their dense branches the turtle doves nest. When night falls they stop cooing and partake of the silence of the dead. Once the silence descends, the bats come out and flit along their ways. Cosmo claims he can hear every one of their cries. - Whole districts of the city built entirely of wood. Houses of brown and grey weatherworn boards and planks, with flat-topped saddleback roofs and balconies. The Jewish quarter is built the same way. Walking through it today, we turn a corner and unexpectedly have a distant view of a blue line of mountains and the snowy summit of Olympus. For one awful heartbeat I imagine myself in Switzerland or at home again…

Have found a house out of the city, at Eyüp. It is next to the old village mosque, at the head of a square where three roads meet. In the middle of the paved square, with its pollard plane trees, the circular white marble basin of a fountain. Many people from the country pause here on their way to the city. Peasants with baskets of vegetables, charcoal burners, gypsies, tightrope walkers and bear trainers. I am surprised to see hardly a single wagon or any other vehicle. Everyone goes on