Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [90]
My parents went on to give many legendary parties of their own during our first years in Istanbul. People still tell stories about them, but these rarely capture what they were really like. What I remember best is the rollercoaster laughter. It was as if they had just been released from tiny boxes and still couldn’t quite believe they could put one foot in front of the other without bumping into a wall. Everyone was welcome at my parents’ parties so long as they were “fun.” You could never predict the mix. Most were “people like us,” but there were also students and ex-students, expatriates-without-jobs and “un-expatriates” from the consulates, and artists and writers and actors, both Turkish and foreign. There was always music and singing, and usually an indoor bicycle race. After midnight there was feverish Greek dancing. Once it was so feverish that the floor fell through.
No matter how late the parties lasted, and even when they ended with a swim in the Bosphorus, my father was always up before me the next morning. I’d hear him sitting at his desk, clearing his throat in that precise, contented way that meant he was about to throw away a page with one mistake on it, to write it all out again, this time perfectly. No matter where he was in the house, he always had his writing pad with him, and a daunting pile of books.
He began his own book on Istanbul in 1966. Not long after he finished it, he happened to run into Bill Edmonds of Red-house Press. He suggested my father combine forces with Hillary Sumner-Boyd, who had also been writing a book on the antiquities of the city for many years. They did, and the result was Strolling Through Istanbul. By the time it came out, though, the Istanbul of our original strolls was disappearing. Many close friends had died of heart attacks and cancer. Politics had arrived on campus. Most of my father’s colleagues decided that the party was over and left. I left, too, although I never stopped thinking of Istanbul as home.
My parents stayed on until 1976, but then they moved away, too. They went on to make a nice new life for themselves in a nice house in a nice suburb of Boston. They had lots of friends, many of them from the old days in Istanbul. They had interesting jobs and my father was still writing more books than I could count. But then one day my mother came home with an elegant new coat. My father complimented her on it and she began to cry. “I asked her why. And she said, ‘Because I’ll never be able to wear it in a great capital.’ ” My father made her another promise, and they began to pack.
That was in 1987. Their first stop was London, then they returned to Istanbul to teach at the Koç Lyclée. In 1991 my father retired and they moved to Venice—not because they knew anyone there, but because it was “so beautiful.” Seven years ago, the chairman of the physics department at Boğaziçi University, as Robert College has become, asked my father if he would join them again. And so he did. The house in which he and my mother now live is only a few paces away from where the bus dropped us off on our very first day.
My father turned seventy-five last June. He has just finished his thirty-ninth book, but he cannot bear to use the word retire, unless it is preceded by the word “never.” “It’s still so wonderful here. I’m surrounded by interesting people and there are always more coming through. There are so many places still to see. Two years ago we finally got to Albania. Last year we got back to China. This year we’re going to Rome and, if we can manage it, St. Petersburg, Kraków and Prague. Next year? Maybe South America. We’ll