In those days I had not discovered the consolations and demands of religion. For me my soul and my senses were the same and God’s work could only properly be accomplished by means of the investigations and applications of Science. Perhaps this was the form of hubris Prometheus suffered. Perhaps that was why I, too, came to be punished. I wished to enlighten a world I believed had a positive will towards peace and knowledge but, as a young man, I was also full of unexplored emotional and physical desires. I wanted to discover the limits of my appetites. In 1920 the political fate of Constantinople did not at all concern me. I naturally assumed the Turk was conquered forever; Britain or Greece would run the city until Russia was sane again and ready for the task. In the meantime, I hoped to taste as many of her pleasures as I could. I had been starved for too long. In Kiev, after the Revolution, I had frequently managed to entertain myself, but my enjoyment had been coloured by the pervading uncertainty of the times. This had also been true in Odessa just before I left. But in Constantinople there were no Bolsheviks or Anarchists threatening my peace of mind. I had never heard of the so-called Committee of Union and Progress. I knew certain Young Turk officers and soldiers had refused to lay down their arms and disappeared into the Anatolian hinterland, but I assumed they would soon be rounded up. My overriding thought was that I was free. I had been resurrected as a citizen of the world. Russia’s tragedy was no longer mine. I unclipped my plan-case to look afresh at my drawings and equations, my neatly written notes. Here was my fortune and my future. My nose would be against the grindstone soon enough. In the meanwhile I deserved a small vacation. Dressed and groomed to perfection, I locked my door behind me, took the lift to the ground floor, handed in my key, said I would be back before dinner, and joined the life of the city outside. I had no real fear that anyone I had known in Odessa might casually recognise me out of uniform (or, if they did, I knew they would be wary of me) and could not really believe there was any immediate chance of meeting enemies from my Kiev or Petersburg days; most of those, after all, must have been killed by now. In fact I was perhaps a shade over-confident, certain I could easily overcome any danger, drunk on the freedom of the captured Turkish capital. Yet I cannot say I was a fool. My eye, from habit, was forever cautious. In the steppe villages I had been afraid because I could not interpret most of the gestures, signals and subtleties of their environment; but here, though the place was new to me, I could read most signs very readily and those not immediately recognisable could be rapidly learned.
Instinctively I took a side street here, a main thoroughfare there. Crossing a little park I entered a shadowy café, ordering a cup of coffee while looking at everything and everyone, absorbing information swiftly and steadily: the little ways people had of using their hands, inflexions of speech, when they adopted passive mannerisms, when they felt able to seem aggressive. I knew I too was the object of their interest, because I was dressed so well, but I did not worry about that. Good spirits are one’s best protection anywhere. An open heart frequently saves you in the most appalling confrontations. In that sense it is always better for a city-dweller to be an innocent rather than to carry a gun. And one must be a good, natural actor: every day in a large metropolis we are called upon to play a variety of subtly different roles. It is nonsense, all this modern talk of what is a ‘real’ identity and what is not. We are the sum of our backgrounds, our experience and our environments; the self we present to the greengrocer is merely a different aspect of the self we present to the police inspector. The more conscious one is of this necessity of city life, the less one is confused, the easier it is to take action when action is called for.
I studied the traffic. I stood in the cemetery of the Petit Champs, beneath poplars and plantains, and looked across the glinting Golden Horn at old Stamboul on her seven, misty hills. I turned to my left and saw the Bosphorus lying between me and Asian Scutari. I marvelled at the volume of shipping. It crowded the waters as densely as any city-street. Yet it was nothing compared to the unguessable vastness of the ancient city. I had never realised any metropolis could sprawl so far in so many directions and in this case on three distinct shores. Russian cities, even St Petersburg, were tiny in comparison, virtually embryonic. Constantinople had no visible limits. She seemed spaceless as well as timeless, inhabiting a universe of her own devising: an infinite island existing outside the planet’s ordinary dimensions, where all races, all ages coincided at once. So strong was this impression that I found myself trembling with pleasure at the notion and became reluctant to leave the gardens until, somewhere beyond a wall, a donkey (or perhaps an imam) began to bray, destroying my mood. I continued up a narrow, shady street cleaner than most, its terraces of apartments apparently occupied entirely by European families. At the end of this street was a parade of shops selling stationery, books, perfume, flowers, sweets and tobacco, reminding me of any decent middle-class part of Kiev. The titles of the books were in every European language, including Russian. I bought a packet of papyrussa and thus changed one of my Imperial roubles, knowing I was cheated on the rate but not caring. I turned back, eventually, into the Grande Rue. From a little boy who squeaked at me in an unidentifiable language I purchased a button-hole; he made strange smacking sounds with his lips. I bought Russian-language newspapers at a kiosk. Sitting at an outside table of a coffee-shop, I drank sherbert and read the papers, amused by their grandiloquent Tsarisms and empty pomposities. I smiled at girls with heavily painted faces and cheap finery who winked at me as they passed by. Every other woman appeared to be a whore and every whore looked beautiful to me. There were also dozens of upper-class ladies in expensively cut Parisian clothes and elaborate hats and even some of these spared me a glance. I loved such an ambience. It is gone completely from modern life.
Tolerantly I waved away street-sellers offering me everything from their brothers’ buttocks to their sisters’ second-hand dolls. I bought some candy for a few kuruş, tried a little and handed it to the first child who begged a coin from me. Soon I had a reasonable sense of my location. The high part of town, Pera, was predominantly European, full of embassies and the mansions of the rich, offices of banking houses and shipping companies, better-quality shops. Sprawled below this, its border marked by the Galata Tower built by the original Genoese traders, were the mean, twisting alleys and jerry-built warrens of the poor. Further up the hill, beyond Pera, were suburban villas in spacious gardens, a predominance of lawns and parks. From the waterfront Galata Bridge led across the Horn to Stamboul, dominated here by Yeni Cami, the so-called New Mosque, with its unbelievably slender towers and clustered domes of different sizes. Stamboul was the Turkish city, though it also possessed a Greek quarter whose occupants traced their ancestors to before the time of Christ. Here were most of the older Orthodox Churches; the ancient, vaulted cisterns which were still in use, and the original walls of Byzantium, all productions of a superior culture the Turks might frequently imitate but never better. The most magnificent building of Stamboul remained Hagia Sophia, visible from Pera and distinguished easily by her bright yellow dome. This most beautiful of Christian churches the Ottomans continued to use as a model for their mosques. Although the majority of famous monuments were in Stamboul, making her the true site of Byzantium, perhaps Pera was the real Constantinople. Pera was where the Byzantines had buried their dead (it was still full of vast cemeteries for most races and religions), where the Osmanlis had hidden foreigners necessary to their trade; a city which flourished between dusk and dawn, given over to subtle diplomacy, exotic pleasures, obscure crimes and even more obscure vices, yet during the day the outward appearance of dignity and moral respectability, one of the marks of a typical European capital, was preserved. I was curious, of course, to visit Stamboul, but the pleasures of Pera took priority. I made no effort to restrain myself. I was a child given limitless credit in a sweetshop. I considered some sort of programme. It would not be wise to break immediately with the Baroness, unless her clinging proved inconvenient, neither must I lost contact with Mrs Cornelius. However, there would be no harm in my making fresh acquaintances. The more people I knew the more possibilities for self-improvement could present themselves. I reminded myself of every habit I had developed during the War and the Revolution. I remained wary of acquaintances from my former life, whether they displayed friendship or not. So many refugees filled up Pera I must inevitably run into some who might embarrass me. They would know me under a former name or might have met me when I posed as a Red or a Green. People were untrusting and might easily refuse to believe I had been forced from necessity to play these roles. It did not suit me to become again an object of suspicion. Thus I gave particular attention to Russians, surreptitiously inspecting every face. It would have been difficult if I had bumped into the young women I had known in Petersburg, for instance, or some radical bohemian who believed me a Bolshevik pederast because I had kept company with my dear friend Kolya. I could still see Brodmann, pointing his finger at me, screaming ‘Traitor’. This had been the direct cause of my precipitous flight from Odessa. Nevertheless, I remained confident that in most cases I could bluff out any such confrontation.