Imagine Istanbul

And on the third day,
I found him.

He sat across from me at the table, gazing into the lense of my camera and into me. The camera becomes an invasive tool. I feel guilty. But in his eyes, I see Truth and purity.

In the moments before I had found him, I had feelings of doubt, thinking that this was the most crazy thing to do. To travel all this way to a faraway country and hope to find someone in a city of fifteen million people when I did not even know his name, his language, his address.

I almost cried when I saw him. I was so happy to find him again. Mehmet, the one who translated everything, said that Yilmaz had known I was looking for him. He wondered what I wanted, I am sure. All the waiters stood around talking. I told him I wanted to take him for lunch in a nice restaurant but first I wanted to buy him some clothes and shoes. Yilmaz left the tools of his trade, a bench made from an old wooden box and his cloths and shoe polish with the waiters at the Café because, he said, he “trusted them”. As we left the café and walked down the path to the market, people smiled calling out to me and the boy; I think they were saying hello recognizing that, finally, the tourist woman had found the little child she was searching for.

The first place we went to was the shop of Mr. Blue Jeans who was helpful in finding Yilmaz some new black jeans and a sweatshirt in his shop. These were the things that Yilmaz chose. After we were finished there, I wanted to buy this little shoe shine boy some new shoes. Mr. Blue Jeans said he had a friend who owned a shoe store. Here, little Yilmaz chose his new shoes and we put his old worn out shoes and “work” clothes in a plastic bag.

With Yilmaz wearing his new clothes and shoes, off we went to a Turkish restaurant, the one on the second floor, close by the market with the large windows that look over the meeting point of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorous.

And the attention the people gave to Yilmaz in that restaurant was the attention that no doubt falls upon movie stars when they go out for lunch.

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