The Big Read: This cat walks up to my wife...

02 June 2017 - 08:19 By darrel bristow-bovey
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A sculpture of ‘Tombili’, one of the more famous cats of Istanbul’s Ziverbey neighbourhood.
A sculpture of ‘Tombili’, one of the more famous cats of Istanbul’s Ziverbey neighbourhood.
Image: OZAN KOSE/AFP

I spent a night this week in the wine-dark streets of Istanbul, looking for a cat. Not just any cat, and they aren't all the same colour in the dark.

It's a particular cat, glossy black with white paws and a white nose and a white patch on his chest like a corner of a handkerchief protruding from a top pocket.

There are lots of cats in Istanbul, belonging to no one and to everyone. When people ask me why I like Turks so much, I often think of the cats, how they are welcomed and fed and stroked and loved but not fussed over or sentimentalised, how they take over shops and bars and neighbourhoods and how people treat them with a casual generosity and detached good nature and no one thinks to boast about the fact that they like cats. It's hard to see something as intangible as community but you can see it in the neighbourhood cats.

A little over a year ago my wife and I were staying in an apartment in Cukurcuma, a block up from Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence, and one night in our local bar the black and white cat walked over and settled on her lap and went to sleep. For the next week or so we came back every night and stood outside on the sidewalk and he would detach himself from the shadows and come padding over to be lifted and stroked and murmured to.

When it was time to leave, my wife spent time crying and I spent time persuading her that she couldn't scoop him up and carry him home in her luggage like some crazed Angelina Jolie. On the way to the airport she saw him from the window of the cab and I had to sit watching the meter tick over while she huddled with him on the sidewalk whispering into each other's ears like Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson at the end of Lost in Translation.

This week, on our way to somewhere else entirely, we stopped in Istanbul for a day just so that we could go back and see the cat. Would he still be there? Of course he would. Cats live in Istanbul neighbourhoods all their lives, and we'd only been away for a year.

A lot has happened to Istanbul in a year. There have been bombs and terrorist attacks and an attempted coup, and like just about everywhere else right now, they have a villain in charge of the country, and these things take time but they start to make a difference, and then that difference speeds up. There are fewer folk strolling on the Istiklal Caddesi in the evenings, and on the concourse outside the Blue Mosque there are more police than people. The nationalists and the populists say this doesn't matter, that they don't need foreign money and foreign opinions, that Turkey can solve Turkey's problems, and they say that because that is what nationalists and populists say. But there are more people sleeping in doorways now, more shops that are dark. It's the only time I have ever won while haggling with someone in the Grand Bazaar, and I felt so bad about it that I ended up giving him more than we finally settled on.

We went to the bar and had a drink and waited for the cat to arrive. We walked around outside, and down the alleyway. We stood under the lamppost with hands on hips. Where was he?

Outside the doner shop I saw the man from the shop that sells vinyl records and second-hand paperbacks and suitcases filled with old black-and-white family photographs from Turkish families for a lira each. He was drinking tea with the doner guy and he told me that he might be closing his shop. I was sorry about that, but I wanted to know if he'd seen the cat. He told me that the bar across the road had closed down, and that his sister's sons had both left to go to Germany to find work and raise their families. He told me I had to have tea with him.

After a certain point you can't keep asking about a cat while a fellow offers you tea so we sat and sipped from tulip-shaped glasses and he said he didn't know the particular cat I meant, but there are fewer cats around in the neighbourhood these days and no one knows why. There is no reason for it. He sighed. "When bad things happen, they bring companions with them," he said, shrugging.

I looked up the dark cobbled street running uphill toward Istiklal Caddesi and I nodded. I said I knew what he meant.

"But we still have tea," he said. "And we still have friends."

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