Another Imaginary City!

At the exact spot where Asia kisses Europe there's a heavy cloud of fried mackerel from the fish sandwich stands near the docks: you can smell it even from the ferry or from the windows of the New Mosque across the street. Ah Istanbul! At breakfast the hotel puts out a giant tray of dripping honeycomb to eat with bread. The afternoon sunlight comes through the grating of the mosque windows and four women in brilliant headscarves bow their prayers quietly while outside the women's section a little girl twirls a dance all across the soft carpets. It seems impossible not to romanticize our cousin city where East and West meet just like here, but better: less violently, at least to the naked eye.

In my imaginary city of Istanbul, we walk through the colored lights of the Grand Bazaar and rest our feet on the carpets of the Blue Mosque. The call to prayer across the bridges of the Bosphorus is wrenching and melancholy because of the distance between us and God, and not because of the invisible boundaries which it demarcates: the battle and fear lines.

On the plane from Tel Aviv to Istanbul I run into Yaqub (I'd call him Y. too but there are all too many Y.'s running through this narrative...) the Jewish-American-Israeli-Muslim-Sufi owner of Olam Qatan bookstore in Jerusalem, on his seasonal run to Turkey for Sufi music. He's travelling with an Arab-Israeli poet friend and his son, and for a few moments it seems that in our Istanbuli imagination we can all go on a wild goose chase for live Sufi music together: an American bookstore owner with a hippy beard and cap, a Tel-Avivi hipster, an Arab-Israeli poet, a sulky Arab-Israeli teenager with a muscle T-shirt, gold necklace, and me.

A half a kilo of cherries and a few hours later of eating, walking, googling in Turkish, etc. the Sufis did not reveal themselves and we had to conclude that if the Sufis do not want to be found, you will not find them.

Two nights later in the New City, away from the Disneyland version of Istanbul for tourists, a man twirled in a blue skirt and white crescents painted on his face like clown makeup. Is it just the tourists that are Sufi crazy, or is is the Istanbulis too? Yaqub says that the American obsession with Rumi is what is stopping Iran from attacking the US. Y. says you can love one part of the culture, even fetishize it, and still be enemies. Look at how we Israelis adore our humus, esp. Arab humus.

O for a teaching gig in Istanbul! O ferry rides to mysterious destinations! Oh Haman - you epitome of human civilization! O water borekas! At the airport, the escalator leads us to a special closed of gate where we undergo security twice. Back to Tel Aviv. The plane ride is filled with Palestinian tourists; they've also gone to the mirror land for a vacation.