I was in Turkey, for various reasons. I was staying on Büyükada (the Big Island) in the Sea of Marmara, about twenty miles from Istanbul and the shining dome of Hagia Sophia. Once a place of exile for unruly princes, Büyükada later became a weekend retreat for Levantines, Europeans and the Ottoman upper classes. Remnants of this epoch are scattered all over the island, including a beautiful, decaying hotel called the Splendid Palace. No cars are allowed. People travel on foot, by bike or by phaeton – traditional horse-drawn carriages, driven by wild-eyed locals.
It's always been a good place to write crazy works of fiction. George Gurdjieff lived by the harbour for a while. Leon Trotsky also lived on Büyükada after he was exiled by Stalin. He spent his days fishing and writing his self-aggrandising history of the Russian Revolution – as fictional as many novels. There's a black-and-white photograph of him in his study reading The Militant, the newspaper of the Communist League of America. After a few years, Trotsky was on the move again: to France, Norway and finally Mexico.
One morning I asked around the neighbourhood and was shown to Trotsky's house, a ruined mansion by the sea, its walls buried in bougainvillea. It is now the subject of a dispute and languishes in its post-revolutionary state. There is a high brick wall around the garden, but I scrambled over it and landed in a wild herbaceous border. Stepping over piles of rubble, I approached the house and pressed my face against a windowpane. Gloomy, abandoned rooms. Not the slightest trace of a samovar. Creeping away, I found an old iron frying pan in a bush. I took it home and cooked some eggs.
The following day I caught the ferry back to the city. The boat was quite empty, apart from a few elderly men drinking gallons of strong, sugary tea. I walked from the port towards BeyoÄ?lu, passing the oldest hammam in the city (established in 1454, its slogan the ominous ‘We offer history not luxury'). Eventually I paused at a tall, narrow building on Cukurcuma Caddesi, painted the colour of a fine Merlot. This is Masumiyet Müzesi, or the Museum of Innocence, established by Orhan Pamuk in 2012. It contains an array of objects that Pamuk collected while writing his 2008 novel, also called The Museum of Innocence. The place resembles a Wunderkammer, though the true origins of the objects have been erased and we are told instead that the collection belongs to Kemal, the protagonist of Pamuk's novel.
There are glass cases filled with lamps, books, clothing, thimbles, photographs of people in boats, shoes, earrings, ice cream cones, watches, newspaper articles, olive stones, bottles of cologne and shaving brushes, not to mention an annotated display of cigarette butts. From the top of the museum you look down on the entrance hall, where the floor is decorated with a spiral. An inscription reads, ‘If we can learn to stop thinking of life as a line corresponding to Aristotle's Time, treasuring our time instead for its deepest moments, then lingering eight years at our beloved's dinner table no longer seems strange and laughable.' If time consists of moments, which shall we commemorate? The grand events, imbued with formal significance, or the quieter moments of love and surrender? In the novel, as in the museum, Kemal wants to ‘let everyone know, I lived a very happy life'. Except Kemal never really lived, so the museum also presents one more version of an old philosophical question: ‘What is reality anyway?'
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