The Black Book, which had the greatest impact on me, is set in Istanbul. It involves a quest, increasingly feverish, by a character to find his journalist cousin – an ‘other’ and yet an alter ego. He wishes to be independent like him, but finally to ‘become’ him. The novel uses Istanbul to play out this drama. The seeker takes haunted, hunting walks through twisting, deserted streets. He hopes to find some illumination and to penetrate his cousin’s hiding place, for the latter vanishes, leaving no fixed address, only tantalising traces of his whereabouts. (Pamuk spoke at an Adelaide Festival in 1992. Helen Garner recalls him talking about ‘“the engaged Turkish writer who bravely goes to jail – by comparison I seem to be a spoilt young bourgeois who has fun and writes a lot” ... a tight-lipped audience contemplated the young Turk’s playful cynicism, but I couldn’t help laughing ...’ Pamuk later refused a writers’ award in Turkey because of the state persecution of some writers).

My interest in Pamuk was rooted in a long-standing fascination with Istanbul. Some cities seem to await our arrival, but we are really waiting for them. Long before I saw Istanbul, I fell in love with it. It became a dream-place where unspecified discoveries awaited me. During my visits, some revelations of a modest kind did come, but not beams of illumination. I came to realise that I never could get to ‘know’ Istanbul, only some of its changing aspects I myself had helped to create.

When Alper suddenly said, ‘Why don’t you go and see him while you’re here?’ I thought to myself, don’t be silly, one doesn’t do that sort of thing. But Alper was not easily put off. ‘I know where he lives,’ he said confidently. A famous old apartment house in Beyoglu. ‘But how do you know he’s in Istanbul at the moment?’ I asked. ‘You know when he’s in because you can always see him writing at the window.’ Alper’s knowledge startled me. He also talked about the size of the apartment, which accommodated a huge library and looked out across the Bosphorus. Impulsively, I decided I would try to meet Pamuk, but to safeguard his sensitivities – and mine – by writing a letter I could leave for him, and dropping it at his apartment along with some Australian books and magazines.

I set off, not unconfidently, across Galata Bridge, catching the funicular up the hill. ‘Yes,’ said the first person I asked. The old German High School, my main pointer, was ‘just around the corner’. I soon came to the apartment block. There was no concierge but, in the friendly Turkish manner, a helpful crowd spontaneously gathered – nearby shop-keepers, passers-by and one or two tenants – as though setting up an informal counselling committee. They unanimously decided that Pamuk did not live there anymore. Beyond that, all was unclear, save for one suggestion that he now lived at Nisantasi and I had best proceed there. I was given the name of a long street but not a number, just the name of some apartments ‘so famous’ that anyone would be able to direct me. The goodwill made me credulous.

As I caught the tram to Taksim Square, a storm broke. The square was awash. Nevertheless, I thought I might as well continue my search. I caught a taxi and set off into the peak-hour traffic as night fell. I chatted to the driver in English mainly, using one or two words of Turkish and much gesticulation, as when I congratulated him and Turkey on the gold medal for weightlifting won at the Olympics in Australia. By the time we got to the busy street, we were on first-name terms. Peering through the rain, Bulent spotted the apartments. I raced across while he waited and held up traffic. ‘No Orhan Pamuk lives here,’ the doorman said. The valiant Bulent even raced across to confirm this, as horns sounded.

There was no parking and only a single lane of traffic each way as we drove up and down, searching in a hopeless way, until Bulent said good-naturedly: ‘Laurie, I’ll have to let you off here so that you can make enquiries at the shops.’ I felt I had come so far that this sounded feasible rather than hare-brained.

I started enquiring as I went along, with a growing feeling that this was a pretty wild thing to do. Then, suddenly, came the first clue. ‘Orhan Pamuk, the writer?’ exclaimed one man. He said the apartments – the ‘real’ ones, I hoped – were just down the road, on the other side of the street. It was hard to believe. I rang the bell and saw an old lady – the concierge? – peering out doubtfully. In the rain, I tried to look respectable, if bedraggled. She let me in and told me that Orhan Pamuk did not live there anymore. He seemed an ever-receding possibility, a case of endless deferral.

She knocked at an apartment door and introduced me to Pamuk’s uncle and aunt, a kindly couple who invited me in but corroborated what the concierge said. I asked if I could leave the letter and the books. They readily agreed but asked why I didn’t phone Pamuk. They gave me his number. Being committed, I did so, to be told by his wife that he was out but would be back in half an hour. She invited me to phone then. I decided to retreat to my safe house on the other side of the Golden Horn to collect myself before I did so.

Still full of qualms, I phoned and the man himself answered. He said in a forthright voice that he would see me, but later in the month before I returned home. He was amused at my near-misses – or were they as good as a mile off? – and my comparison with a similar unsuccessful search in The Black Book. ‘An interesting experience, eh!’ he chortled. A mixed one, I thought, looking back on it then.

A couple of days before I left Istanbul, I rang Pamuk. He said, regretfully, that he wasn’t able to meet me after all, but he gave me an address to write to. Well, that’s the end of that, I thought disappointedly – but it wasn’t quite. In The Black Book, in which the narrator takes long night-time walks, among his preferred districts are Cihangir and Kurtulus on the Beyoglu side of the Horn. I’d never heard of them and thought they might be interesting to explore.

On my last afternoon, I set out for Cihangir. I visited the Armenian church in Kemerhalti Street, Beyoglu, stopping for a beer at the ‘Street of the moat’ marked by Genoese stone remnants. At Tophane Park, I cut uphill and followed a slanting road. Suddenly, I found myself in the street of the address where Pamuk had asked me to write to him. Was this another of those beguiling ‘signs’? I faced two choices: I could either pass by, so as not to interrupt the writer at work, or ring and risk finding him absent again. Passing by seemed best. But it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. I realised I had not brought the street or apartment numbers with me. Well, that’s decided, I thought.

Pamuk’s The White Castle, an earlier novel I read while in Istanbul, contains a tongue-in-cheek preface, slippery with ambiguities, in which everything can mean something else, even the opposite. ‘I suppose that to see everything connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. It is because I too have succumbed to the disease that I publish the tale,’ comments the fictional ‘editor’. (The novel also has an epigraph, ‘a mistranslation from Proust’).

Looking back at my own little story about meeting Pamuk, I had assumed that there was a connection waiting to be made, but instead it was deferred and aborted, and my fascination was sustained by near misses. Perhaps something else was going on, too: a stepping ‘outside’, an unfamiliar openness to experience that was spontaneous, and an acceptance of the incomplete. This was released by some felt affinity with Istanbul along with my conception of it as the ‘other’. Yet life is full of disconnections or apparent ones. Sometimes we encounter connections only glancingly, like a floating web that brushes our faces. If we were hypersensitive and could, say, hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, we would go mad, said George Eliot. But, she reassured readers, we all go around well wadded with stupidity.

I finished my Cihanghir wanderings by visiting the mosque. It has no ‘architectural interest whatsoever’, my reliable guidebook informed me. But it had its own grisly tale. It was built for a hunchback prince who died of grief; his beloved half-brother, the heir, was strangled by mutes, while Suleiman, the father of both, and namesake of Istanbul’s greatest mosque, looked on from behind a screen. Not far away, in the present, Kosovo was burning.

Inside the mosque were two large windows, panelled half-wheels, overlooking the Bosphorus. At the bottom, some tiny ships, diminished by distance, slid in slow motion from one small rectangle of glass to another, like fish swimming through the walls of bowls.

I lingered in the tiny courtyard that clung to a steep hill, insulated from the noisy city. Then I walked through some straggly cypress trees, past a clump of graves, gazed in the blue afternoon across the busy Bosphorus, and felt immeasurably at peace.