The Wet and the Dry (22 page)

Born in 1612 he ascended the throne in 1623 and died drunk at twenty-eight. During a revolt of the Janissaries in 1632, he purged the army and executed twenty thousand rebels in Anatolia. Then he successfully invaded Persia. He also banned coffee and alcohol throughout the empire. (The ban on coffee did not last, despite that substance’s obviously “intoxicating” effects.)

The man who banned alcohol, however, became its greatest addict. The historian of Istanbul, John Freely, says this about the affliction of Murad’s later years:

During the latter years of his reign Murad became addicted to drink, apparently under the influence of an alcoholic layabout known as Bekri (“the Drunkard”) Mustafa. The story of Murad’s meeting with Bekri Mustafa is told by the historian Demetrius Cantemir. It seems that Murad was walking through the market quarter in disguise one day when he came across Bekri Mustafa “wallowing in the dirt dead drunk.” Murad was intrigued by the drunkard and brought him back to the palace, where Mustafa introduced the sultan to the joys of wine, showing him that the best cure for a hangover is more of the same. Bekri Mustafa soon died of drink, leaving Murad bereft, as Cantemir writes:

At his death the emperor order’d the whole Court to go into mourning, but caus’d his body to be buried with great pomp in a tavern among the hogsheads. After his decease the emperor declar’d he never enjoy’d one merry day, and whenever Mustapha chanc’d to be mentioned, was often seen to burst out into tears, and to sigh from the bottom of his heart
.

This didn’t stop him from turning into a homicidal maniac. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in 1640, he was buried in the
turbe
of the Blue Mosque. His younger brother Ibrahim inherited the throne and became a sex maniac who, before being deposed by the Janissaries and then strangled, had become known to the populace as Ibrahim the Mad. Interestingly and perhaps unsurprisingly, he invaded, and subdued, Crete in order to finance his unaffordable debaucheries.

The sultans were not just the leaders of the Ottoman state.
They were also caliphs, Islam’s spiritual leaders, descended in one way or another from the Prophet. Murad IV was perhaps the first caliph to die of alcoholism, but he was certainly not the last.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the Ottomans became more exposed to Europeans and began to lose battles and wars to them, the sultans came more and more under the sway of alcoholic tastes, in much the same way that they came under the sway of rococo architecture. Murad V, for example, who ascended the throne in 1876, had accompanied his uncle Sultan Abdülaziz on a tour of Europe in 1867, where he had acquired a ferocious and, for his advisers, regrettable appetite for champagne and cognac. His alcoholism was so severe that he was unable to go through with the coronation ceremony, during which a new sultan was girded with the sword of the dynastic founder Osman.

Murad was deposed a few months later and died of diabetes in 1904, a caliph of Islam so habitually intoxicated that he could not function either in the service of the state or as the head of a religion that prohibits alcohol.

Thus I thought as I drank the Martian house cocktail at the Orient, a green mix of some kind that is offered free to clients who look as if they might spend a fair amount. An order of two aged Old Havana rums usually qualified me, and so I could sit at that long bar alone at 6:10 sharp with dark rums and imagine Efendim Christie seated at the far end with her toddy and notebook. On those days, however, when I could not face the long cab ride to a bar in the city, not even the Orient, I walked down from
my street on the edges of Etiler to Bebek, passing above the sweep of the Bosphorus close to the point where Xerxes threw over his pontoon bridge during the invasion of Hellas in 480
B.C
. The Valide Pasha Palace now sits on that waterfront, and north of it socialite fish restaurants and nightclubs, among which stands the Bebek Hotel with a bar facing out over the water to the gold-lit palaces and the baroque gardens on the far side.

To the Otel Bebek, as it is known in Turkish, I come at night, hesitant and alone but enjoying the walk down through wooded hills, along winding roads of cottages and pine trees where the stray dogs sometimes snarl and follow like hyenas. There are times when I have to save myself with stones. (And didn’t Byron also complain in his letters of the ravenous dog packs of Istanbul?) It is the preamble to a gin and tonic on the deck under the gas heaters. Yet at the same time, I notice a bottle of Famous Grouse standing on one of the glass shelves behind the bar, as it would never do in a bar of comparable stylishness in a Western country.

I take to ordering it every night before the gin and tonic as a memory of some kind, though I have never drunk it before. With Mama’s tipple in hand, I walk out onto the deck alone. There is never anyone here in winter, understandably. I stand over the floodlit waters where hundred of seagulls sit above a glittering watery stratum of hovering jellyfish. In the pale green depths, swarms of silver fish can also be seen darting underneath the jellyfish, picked out by the lights. The lights of Asia rise up on
the far side, a huge Turkish flag illumined in the distance, and between us and them the silhouettes of great ships pass in the night on their way to Odessa.

It is here that I come face to face with the incompleteness of what I know about my mother. She returns to me with that cheap smoky whisky pooling on the tongue and the sight of the brilliantly lit gulls sitting in a silent swarm on the waters. During her last night, I sat with her at the Royal Sussex in Brighton during a sinister storm while my niece slept on the floor. By then she was already unconscious on morphine, and her hand pulsed with reactions arising in an unconscious mind that might well have known that it was dying. I had known very little about the circumstances of a suddenly lethal disease—doctors call pancreatic cancer “the silent killer”—which had only been diagnosed four days earlier. A death swift and merciful in some ways, but mysterious for that same reason. There had been no time for farewells, and there was a chance that she would not have wanted a farewell anyway. She had a brusque contempt for sentimentality, like all deeply sentimental people.

The shame of it was that I had not been able to share with her a last Famous Grouse, and instead, therefore, I have to drink it by myself in a bar in Istanbul, in the ghostly setting of the Otel Bebek, with its bow-tied barmen and chintz armchairs, with a curious glass bowl of limes on the bar.

The Bosphorus was a place she loved, probably because Lord Byron had swum across it and because Byron, too, loved it, as quite bad passages of
Don Juan
attest. It was my mother, in fact, who called my attention to the fact that these waters were “very
English” insofar as they had inspired many of our countrymen and countrywomen. It was their Hellenism, in one way; but it was also the Ottoman sense of ease and, perhaps, their fine-mannered late imperial sadness mitigated, in the Tulip Era, by full-moon parties lit by wandering tortoises bearing candles.

The Istanbul-loving wife of the British ambassador to the court of Ahmed III, Lady Mary Montagu, has left us superlative letters, which Byron did not hesitate to recall:

The European with the Asian shore,

Sprinkled with palaces, the ocean stream

Here and there studded with a seventy-four,

Sophia’s cupola with golden gleam;

The cypress groves; Olympus high and hoar;

The twelve isles, and the more than I could dream,

Far less describe, present the very view

Which charm’d the charming Mary Montagu.

My mother loved the city because the sea runs through it, and everywhere the seagulls turn in vast spirals. She lived, less spectacularly, in Hove for the same reason. Istanbul adopted her ghost, or it could have been the other way round, because one would never know. The Turks assure me this was normal. Dead mothers naturally look in to see if their children are all right.

There is a well-known place to drink raki by the Bosphorus underneath the castle built by Mehmed II when he cut off the
grain supply to Constantinople in 1453, the Rumeli Hisari. It’s called the Rumeli Balikcisi, and at night you can sit on a terrace overlooking the road and look up at the soaring bridge to Asia, lit up in charmingly absurd lollipop colors. It’s a place to explore the subtly different types of raki.

There is Yeni Raki—“new raki”—which unlike traditional raki, fermented from grape pomace, is derived from beets. Like all other aniseed-flavored drinks—ouzo, pastis, arak, and absinthe—it can then be drunk either neat (which the Turks, adopting the French word, call
sek
) or with chilled water added. The water, of course, induces spontaneous emulsification, the so-called “louche” effect: absinthe turns cloudy when water is dripped into it through a cube of sugar, thus obscuring its lovely green color.
La fée verte
, absinthe was always called—“the green fairy.”

When drinking raki, I cannot help but recall the admirable slotted spoons that are used for the preparation of absinthe, the sugar cube resting upon the holes through which ice-cold water will pass. Raki is not prepared this way, but it is also an aniseed fermentation that possesses a colossal alcohol content, and it enjoys in Turkey the same universality that absinthe enjoyed in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Curiously, raki only became popular at that very same time. It was a product of the liberalization of Ottoman society in a century dominated by a collective imitation of Europe. It is a sister drink to absinthe, a creation of the same period.

But whereas absinthe was banned in the West by 1915, condemned as a psychoactive drug containing the supposedly
dangerous chemical thujone, raki became the national drink of the first secular Islamic nation. The differences between them, as regards addiction, psychoactive properties, and potency, are pretty much nil.

Absinthe gained popularity first in the French Army, where it was used—much like tonic water and its quinine—as an antimalarial. Its demonic reputation at the end of the century is hard to explain. But a drink that has an alcohol level of anywhere between 50 and 75 percent cannot fail to disequilibrize the drinker. Raki usually comes in at a slightly lower 45 percent, but that is enough to expose the galloping imbiber to a bout of what will feel like dementia.

Public displays of drunkenness are unusual in Turkey. Sometimes, as you are walking nocturnally along a street near a commercial area like Taksim, or a tougher joint like Tarlabaşi, a man in the grip of that madness will brush against you. But in the majority of cases you will be struck by how tragic, by how isolated and silent he will seem, how frozen by social restriction, how inoffensive in his lack of freedom. He is not the wild drunk on a street in London who will happily take a swing at you. The violence is there, but it seems more contained, more frigid. In any case, the terrace of the Balikçisi will never offer such an experience because here the drinking of fine raki is studious and contemplative, attuned at all times to the demands of a mild connoisseurship.

Here I add the water because I prefer it to the
sek
style. I relish the way that, as soon as the water has been added, the waiter will come up with a pair of tongs and delicately drop a single
cube of ice into my glass. Thus chilled and clouded, my Yeni is ready for daydreaming.

I wonder, as I drop in the ice cubes myself, at the rakis mentioned around 1630 by Evliya Çelebi, the Ottoman travel writer who left a great and beautifully irrational book called the
Seyahatname
, which describes both the Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire and, in rather more detail, the city of Constantinople itself, of which he was a native—and one often forgets that under the Ottomans the city was never officially called Istanbul.

Çelebi, who was an indignant and overprotesting teetotaler, enumerated banana rakis, the cinnamon and clove rakis sold all over Istanbul in defiance of the Islamic assumption that even one drop of it (as Çelebi himself put it) was sinful. At that time, there were a hundred distilleries in the city, a fantastical production implying an equally fantastical consumption.

Here is an aghast Çelebi on the alcoholism of Galata, the European quarter on the far side of the Golden Horn, largely inhabited by Italians:

In Galata there are two hundred taverns and wine-shops where the Infidels divert themselves with music and drinking. The taverns are celebrated for the wines of Ancona, Mudanya, Smyrna and Tenedos. The word
gunaha
(temptation) is most particularly to be applied to the taverns of Galata because there all kinds of playing and dancing boys, mimics and fools flock together and delight themselves, day and night. When I passed through this district I saw many bareheaded and bare-footed lying drunk in the street; some confessed aloud the state they were in by singing such couplets as these: “I drank the ruby wine, how drunk, how drunk am I! / A
prisoner of the locks, how mad, how mad am I!” Another sang, “My foot goes to the tavern, nowhere else. / My hand grasps tight the cup and nothing else. Cut short your sermon for no ears have I / But for the bottle’s murmur, nothing else.”

Çelebi protests many times that he is merely recording these strange phenomena for the benefit of his friends. But it should be remembered that he was a page and a favorite of Murad IV, hired by the sultan because he was reportedly able to recite the entirety of the Koran in seven hours. His acquaintance with alcohol might not have been what he pretended. The visions and flights of fancy that punctuate his book suggest some kind of intoxication was at work—in one famous passage he recalls seeing the Prophet in a dream, and duly records that his hands were “boneless” and smelled of roses. It could have been a night’s dabbling with cinnamon raki.

By now I could faintly distinguish between the different styles of raki, but not to a degree that would ever constitute discernment. It felt more melancholic, more grave, than arak—who knows why? More like absinthe, lacking only the more elaborate ritual of the “green fairy.”