A patchwork of Mediterranean style, life and love

Julie had learned the skills necessary for this craft before coming to Turkey and had been really excited to find a patchwork class in her neighborhood in İstanbul. Stitching the materials and patterns that she loves in the company of a group of Turkish ladies has, she enthusiastically told me, been both a great language exercise as well as a way to make some firm friends.

Turks call patchwork “kırkyama” -- forty patches -- to express the way a myriad of pieces of material are joined together. Over the weekend I became fascinated by the way the scraps were being so expertly joined together. This was no random piecing together of bits of material -- each scrap had to be joined in the right order and with careful stitching so that each piece lines up exactly.

The choice of the material makes a huge difference: Shade, texture and pattern all play their part in making the resulting quilt unique. A seamstress can make up the same pattern a hundred times over, but by using different combinations of fabric the result is different every time. Do you choose light on dark, or dark on light? Should patterned pieces surround a plain one, or plain ones surround a patterned one? Do you prefer bold primary colors, or subtle pastels? Or even a modern combination of the two?

Despite her modesty, I got the feeling that Julie is one of the best students in her class. Over the year they have completed a wide range of projects using all sorts of patterns. The handwork she had brought with her wasn’t the simple hexagonal pattern I had done at school. No, Julie said her teacher had insisted she did an extremely difficult pattern over the summer.

The mathematician in me was amazed at the way the tessellations of squares, triangles and rhomboids were put together in this, the “pineapple” pattern. Basically twenty-five 10cm x 10cm squares were put together in a 5x5 arrangement, and then bordered with bands of plain material for the edging. This edging picked up the colors in the 25 squares, each called a block.

But each block was itself made up of many scraps -- I counted 45 in each one. The incrementally placed geometric shapes would not look impressive on their own, but placed in order by the skillful quilter, they formed a beautiful design, pleasing to the viewer’s eye. Look close up, the mix of light and dark colors, contrasting and complementing patterns led the eye in and out of the pattern. Step back and the overall effect was one of repeating squares and triangles, chevrons and diamonds. A triumph in beautiful tones!

I was reminded of the patchwork stitcher’s art when reading Michael Kuser’s novel “Three-Way Mirror.” Just as the needlewoman chooses her material and lays out the pattern so as to show off each piece to its best advantage, Kuser tells his three separate stories set in İstanbul, Athens and Rome in a way that places them alongside each other. The similarities form a pattern that takes the eye from one piece to the next; the contrasts bring out the overall pattern.

Kuser is no stranger to Today’s Zaman readers -- his columns are a popular feature in Sunday’s Zaman. Neither are the links between these three cities -- the mighty cities of Turkey, Greece and Italy -- strange to those who have seen the amazing exhibition currently running at the Sabancı Museum on the history of İstanbul. In the exhibition Byzantine artifacts from Greece and even the Vatican, which were spread there by trade and commerce, or the plundering of the Crusaders in 1201, have returned for a short time to İstanbul. Even four life-size bronze horses that adorned the Hippodrome in Constantinople were taken to Venice; for a few short months their replicas are now in İstanbul again.

Kuser’s tale is a complicated pattern, like Julie’s pineapple design. He has cut his fabric into tiny pieces, for each chapter is only a couple of pages long and each is a cameo of life in a big city. He moves swiftly from one city to another -- the chapter heading tells us the geography -- and swiftly from one character to another.

The common heritage of these three countries which have a Mediterranean coastline is depicted in their food, their architecture and their politics. Not content with just allowing your eye to travel aimlessly between neighboring pieces that have a harmonious hue, Kuser uses travel as a device to make this more intentional. For example, we first meet Costas from Athens when he is flying home from the İstanbul airport. His company is being besieged by a Turkish mogul who wants to purchase it. His own mother moved to Athens after her father lost property in the Turkish Wealth Tax of 1942.

Parts of the three independent stories echo each other, too. Under the office building owned by Betty in İstanbul, an old Ottoman hamam is discovered. In this basement cellar lies an old skeleton and a chest of old papers that the dead man appears to have stolen: They include a eulogy for Sultan Selim II. In Rome Rosa’s boyfriend Mino is exploring what lies beneath a hole under her house with a metal detector. He finds no treasure and no bones, but a long-since dead cat now petrified by the heat. The antiquarian papers theme is picked up by Stanley the book-lover who finds some old books by a dumpster, including one with an old leather binding that turns out to be building plans from 1729.

Kuser’s smart insights into İstanbul life show how well he understands the culture here. As he also lived in Athens and Rome in the mid-1990s I guess his expressions of Greek and Italian life are just as accurate. He calls İstanbul “a crime against humanity, the perfect sin, for all is forgiven, until a new crime is discovered … A child smiles. The sun shines. A fresh breeze blows in from the Black Sea, sweeping away the smoke and grit, and all is forgiven.”

Athens is “an actor of one thousand and one faces and famous for two. The laughing mask of comedy, the keening mask of tragedy … Athens is both actor and stage, producer and audience.”

Rome, on the other hand “is a pretend city. The city center with buildings designed and built to human scale, the parks and trees, the lack of heavy industry even outside the city -- that’s why everyone loves Rome.” City-living doesn’t stress the Romans, Kuser says, because “Romans of old welcomed spectacle, and do so today.”

“Three-Way Mirror” is full of beautiful descriptions, and Kuser’s excellent writing style carries the reader’s interest through the fact that in some places the story-line disappoints. Some characters are introduced and then just left hanging -- we never see them again. In a city where the dead are buried quickly in order that their souls may find rest, the artistic reveling around a skeleton, including its crashing end, is vaguely unbelievable.

About half-way through the book I began to expect the three separate tales to begin to wind themselves together into one. Moving on to more chapters, this task seemed more urgent, if they were to be woven together as one whole before the final pages. However, this is a patchwork, not a tapestry. Its art lies in the way each piece is distinct from its neighbor as much as it is eternally joined to it.