A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

  Nightclubs like these each have their own peculiar scent, a mixture of panfried meat, rakı, mildew, perfume, and stale breath, and over many years without a single window even cracked open, these elements ferment like wine and seep right into the carpets and the curtains. You get used to this smell eventually, until you miss it when it’s not there, and if you catch a whiff of it again one night after a long time absent, your heart speeds up and it’s like you’ve fallen in love. That night we listened dutifully to Lady Blue, the velvety voice of Turkish classical music. We watched the comedy duo Ali and Veli do impressions of the latest TV commercials and various politicians, and the belly dancer Mesrure, who is “famous in Europe, too.” There were many old songs that night, a melancholy atmosphere at the Sunshine Club, and behind every lyric and every note, there was Selvihan.

  I met Mevlut again somewhere in Beşiktaş two days later to continue his training. “Our first lesson today is highly theoretical,” I said. “See that restaurant over there? I’ve been there before; let’s go and have a look. Don’t worry, no rakı, we’re working after all. Nothing to upset your friends at the Righteous Path.”

  “I don’t read the Righteous Path,” said Mevlut once we’d sat down in the half-empty restaurant. “I just cut out that piece on Brothers-in-Law and that one picture.”

  “Now listen to me, Mevlut,” I said, getting annoyed at his innocence. “The key to this job is reading people…You’ve always got to be alert, so no one can pull the wool over your eyes. These people who start whimpering as soon as they see me, ‘Oh, it’s the inspector!’ It’s all an act, they’re testing me…You need to be able to spot that. You also need to know how to hold back and play the nice guy if that’s what’s called for. In other cases, if necessary, you need to get angry and be able cut some poor widow’s wires…You may have to behave as if you were one of the Turkish government’s proud civil servants, impossible to bribe. Though, of course, I’m not a civil servant, and you won’t be either. The money you collect isn’t a bribe, just what you and Seven Hills Electric have coming to you. I’m going to show you all the ins and outs. There are guys with millions in the bank earning interest and bundles of dollars under their mattresses, but the minute they see some poor inspector at the door, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Eventually, they start believing their own sob stories, and, believe me, they cry harder than you ever cried even for your wife. They end up convincing you, too; they wear you down. While you’re trying to read what’s in their eyes and searching for the truth on their children’s faces, they’re watching the way you walk and talk and looking into your soul trying to figure out whether to pay up and, if so, how much and, if not, what excuse will get rid of you. These two- and three-story buildings in the backstreets are now mostly occupied by petty clerks, street vendors, waiters, cashiers, and university students, and unlike the bigger buildings, they don’t have full-time doormen anymore. Usually, the owners and tenants of these places will have had serious disagreements about how to split the costs of diesel or coal and how high to turn the boiler, and because of that, their central heating tends to be turned off altogether. So they’re all trying to keep warm as best they can, and most of them will try to get an illegal connection to the grid so they can run an electric heater for free. You’ve got to size them up and not give anything away. If they see that boyish face and realize that you’re too compassionate to cut them off, they won’t give up a cent. Maybe they think with inflation so high, they’re better off holding out and keeping that money earning interest for a little longer. Be sure you don’t let them think you’re too proud to take a bit of change some old lady might offer you. On the other hand, you don’t want them thinking you’re so greedy you’ll swoop down on any pathetic sum they propose. You follow me? Now tell me, how does the heating work here in this restaurant?”

  “It works fine,” said Mevlut.

  “That’s not what I’m asking. How is the heating being provided? Is the restaurant using stoves or radiators?”

  “Radiators!”

  “Let’s check and see, shall we?” I said.

  Mevlut touched the radiator grille right next to him and realized that it wasn’t very warm. “So that means there must be a stove somewhere,” he said.

  “Good. Now, where’s the stove? Can you see it anywhere? You can’t. That’s because they’ve got electric stoves going. They keep them hidden because they’ve got them hooked up to the mains directly, bypassing the meter. They turn the radiator on a little, too, but only so no one will notice what’s going on. I had a look on the way in and saw that their meters are ticking very slowly. That means there must be other rooms, ovens, and fridges in this building, all using stolen electricity.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Mevlut like a wide-eyed child.

  I found the restaurant’s meter number in the purple logbook and showed it to Mevlut. “Read what it says in the comments.”

  “ ‘Meter next to the door…,’ ” read Mevlut. “ ‘Cable for ice-cream machine is—’ ”

  “Okay, so this place must sell ice cream in the summer. More than half the ice-cream machines in Istanbul during the summer aren’t connected to any meter. It seems the honest clerk who was here last time suspected something, but the technicians never found the illegal connection. Or maybe they did, but the giant at the cash desk gave them each a ten-thousand-lira bill to keep them sweet. Some places are so clever about where they tap the line that they think they’ll never get caught, so when you come in, they don’t even give you a little gift to say hello. Hey, waiter, over here, the radiator’s not working, and we’re a little cold.”

  “I’ll talk to my manager,” said the waiter.

  “He may or may not be in on it,” I told Mevlut. “Put yourself in the manager’s shoes. If his waiter knows they’re stealing electricity, he might report it. That makes it very hard to fire him, or even tell him off for slacking or hogging all the tips. That’s why the best thing to do is to call in an electrician who specializes in unmetered circuits and hand the whole place over to him one night when no one’s around. These guys can disguise an illegal line so beautifully that sometimes you just have to step back and admire the genius. In the end, our job is like a game of chess with these guys. They’re clever at hiding it; you have to be more clever and find it.”

  “I’ve had the heaters switched on, sorry for that,” said the manager, walking into the room behind his fat belly.

  “He didn’t even bother to say ‘radiator,’ ” Mevlut whispered. “What do we do now? Are we going to cut their power?”

  “No, my friend. Lesson number two: you figure out what the trick is and make a mental note of it. Then you wait for the right moment to come back and take their money. We’re in no rush today.”

  “You’re as sly as a fox, aren’t you, Ferhat?”

  “But I still need a lamb like you, I need your gentleness and your honesty,” I said to encourage Mevlut. “Your sincerity and your innocence are great assets to this company, to the world in fact.”

  “All right, but I don’t think I can deal with all these big managers and high-level crooks,” said Mevlut. “I better stick to the gecekondu homes, the poorer neighborhoods.”

  —

  Mevlut spent that winter and the spring of 1996 combing through logbooks and neighborhoods and learning at Ferhat’s side, but also venturing out on his own two or three times a week to poor quarters and backstreets in the city center, armed with only old meter readings to hunt for illegal hookups all by himself. The city center was falling apart: the broken and abandoned old buildings in which he’d lived as a waiter working in Beyoğlu nearly twenty years ago were now nests of electric thievery. Ferhat told Mevlut to stay away from that kind of place—both for his own safety and because he knew his friend would never be able to extract any money there. So Mevlut ended up in Kurtuluş, Feriköy, Beşiktaş, Şişli, Mecidiyeköy, and sometimes over on the other side of the Golden Horn, in Çarşamba, Karagümrük, and Edirnekapı—the Holy Guide’s streets and neighborhoods—collecting payments from families and housewives like one of those polite government clerks who once used to come calling.

  Working as a boza vendor, he’d become used to accepting little gifts on top of what he was owed—a pair of woolen socks, perhaps, or even some extra cash from people who told him “Keep the change!” and this had never troubled his conscience or wounded his pride. In a similar way, a tip for not cutting off someone’s power seemed a just reward for a service he was offering, and he had no qualms at all about pocketing the money. He knew these neighborhoods and their people well. (No one recognized Mevlut, though; they could never make the connection between the boza vendor who walked down the street once a week or once every other week in the winter and the inspector who came officially knocking on their door. Perhaps it was that the good people who bought boza at night were completely different from the bad people who stole electricity.) It seemed that the street dogs were always growling at Mevlut in these neighborhoods close to the city center. He began to keep his evening boza rounds brief.

  He couldn’t have gone to Kültepe or Duttepe to collect money where everyone knew him, but he did take his logbooks and head over to those other hills that had followed the same course from destitution to development: Kuştepe, Harmantepe, Gültepe, and Oktepe. They could hardly be termed “poor neighborhoods” anymore. The single-story hollow-brick buildings that had once covered these hills had all been knocked down in the past twenty-five years, and now these places were all considered part of the city itself, like Zeytinburnu, Gaziosmanpaşa, and Ümraniye. Each neighborhood had its own center—usually the bus stop where one had caught the first regular service to the city some twenty-five years ago, and which would now
be flanked by a mosque, a new statue of Atatürk, and a muddy little park. This would also be the spot where the neighborhood’s main street began, a long road that seemed to stretch all the way to the end of the world, with five- and six-story concrete blocks on either side. The buildings brought an assortment of kebab shops, grocery stores, and banks, all on street level. Here, too, there were families, mothers, children, grandfathers, and grocers who’d set their sights on free electricity (though in fact Mevlut couldn’t find that many), and their manner was no different from what you might find in any ordinary neighborhood in the center of Istanbul: the same tricks, the same lies, the same basic innocence…They may have been more apprehensive of Mevlut in these places, but they also showed him a lot more warmth than anywhere else.

  The ancient cemeteries that would pop up in the older parts of the city, filled with strange and mysterious crumbling gravestones topped with all sorts of emblems and sculpted turbans, didn’t exist in these new neighborhoods. The newer and more modern cemeteries, devoid of cypress trees or any other vegetation, were usually situated well out side the new quarters and surrounded by tall concrete walls, just like factories, military bases, and hospitals. In the absence of graveyards, the stray dogs who stalked Mevlut on his morning inspections would spend the night sleeping in the dirty little park across from the statue of Atatürk.

  Mevlut always approached the city’s newest and poorest neighborhoods with the best of intentions, yet he found that the most belligerent dogs of all lived here. He spent many miserable hours in these areas, most of which had only recently been assigned their own meters and logbooks. Often he hadn’t even heard their names before, and getting there could involve a two-hour bus ride below the city center and away from the main highways. Once off the bus, Mevlut would exercise all of his “good intentions” to ignore the wires that people had hooked up—not even bothering to hide them—to the big cables that carried electricity between cities, and he would turn a blind eye to the clumsy circuits powering the kebab stall across from the bus stop. He could sense that each of these neighborhoods had its own leaders and chiefs, and that he was being watched. My job is just to look at the official meters, he wanted to say in his most determined, proper, and righteous tone. You have nothing to fear from me. But the dogs attacked him, and Mevlut got scared.

  These new homes and gardens on the edge of the city had been built with newer and better materials than the poor neighborhoods of Mevlut’s childhood. Hollow bricks had been replaced by alternatives of higher quality, plastic had been used instead of scrap metal, and gutters and pipes had all been made out of PVC. The houses were constantly growing with the addition of new rooms, just as gecekondu homes always had done, and this meant that the electricity meter would get swallowed up inside a room somewhere, so that if you wanted to take a reading or cut the power, you had no choice but to knock on the door. That would be the cue for the local strays to begin circling the inspector. In some new neighborhoods, a power line might have been brought in and affixed to a pole, a chunk of concrete, a wall, or even a grand old plane tree in the little local square, and sometimes this was where you found people’s meters, not inside their homes. These electri cal hubs, which weren’t so different from those Ottoman-era fountains that used to supply a neighborhood with water, would also be under the constant supervision of small packs of two or three stray dogs.

  Mevlut was standing on the porch of a house with a garden one day when he was attacked by a black dog. He checked the notes of his predecessor in the logbook and called out the dog’s name, but Blackie paid him no heed. He barked at Mevlut and forced him to retreat. A month later, Mevlut only managed to get away from a raging guard dog because the dog’s chain wasn’t long enough. Whenever he came under attack like this, he always thought of Rayiha. These things were happening only because she wasn’t there anymore.

  Mevlut was in the same neighborhood again one day, looking for a spot in the park to sit down with his bag on his lap while he waited for the bus, when—woof woof woof—a dog approached him. A second and third dog came up behind the first. They were the color of mud. Mevlut saw a black dog in the distance, as indistinct as a distant memory. They all started barking at the same time. Would he be able to ward them off with his inspector’s briefcase? He had never been so afraid of dogs in his life.

  One Tuesday evening, he went to the Holy Guide’s lodge in Çarşamba. He left some boza in the kitchen. The Holy Guide was much livelier than usual and free of the usual crowd of hangers-on. When he realized that he had the Guide’s attention, Mevlut quickly explained how he’d first begun to fear dogs twenty-seven years ago. In 1969, around the time Mevlut had first begun to work as a street vendor, his father had taken him to see a holy man in a wooden house in the backstreets of Kasımpaşa in order to address this fear. That holy man had had a white beard and an enormous belly, and, compared with the Guide, he was old-fashioned and unsophisticated. He had given Mevlut some rock candy and told him that dogs were deaf, dumb, and blind creatures. Then he’d opened his palms up as if to pray, instructing Mevlut to do the same, and in his small stove-heated room, he had made Mevlut repeat the following words nine times: “SUMMOON, BUKMOON, OOMYOON FE HOOM LAH YARJOON.”

  The next time he was attacked by strays, Mevlut had to put his fear to one side and repeat that verse three times. That was the first thing that people had to do when they became afraid of dogs, demons, and the devil: they had to banish the thought from their minds. “Don’t be scared, just pretend you haven’t seen them,” his father would say when he saw Mevlut getting agitated by the shadowy dogs on the dark streets where they sold boza together at night. “Say the verse quick, son!” he would whisper. But even when he concentrated as hard as he could, Mevlut would never remember the verse. His father would lose his temper and tell him off.

  When he finished recounting these episodes from his past, Mevlut cautiously asked the Holy Guide: Can a person really banish a fear or a thought from his mind by the force of his own will alone? By now, Mevlut’s experience was that trying to forget about something only made him think about it more. (In his youth, for example, the more he’d tried to get Neriman off his mind, the more he’d wanted to stalk her—but of course he didn’t mention this to the Holy Guide.) Wanting to forget something, having THE INTENTION TO FORGET something, was clearly not an efficient way of forgetting at all. In fact what you intended to forget tended to stick even more firmly in your mind. These were the questions he’d never had the chance to ask the holy man in Kasımpaşa, and now, twenty-seven years later, he was pleased to find that he had the courage to put them to the Holy Guide of the spiritual retreat in Çarşamba, who was a much more modern holy man anyway.

  “The ability to forget depends on the PURITY of the believer’s HEART, the SINCERITY of his INTENTIONS, and the STRENGTH of his WILL,” said the Holy Guide. He’d liked Mevlut’s question and had graced it with a weighty response worthy of the “conversations.”

  Feeling encouraged, Mevlut guiltily told the story of how as a little boy, on a snowy, moonlit night when the streets shone pure and white like a cinema screen, he’d watched a pack of dogs move in a flash to trap a cat under a car. He and his late father had walked past in silence, acting as if they hadn’t seen anything, pretending not to hear the cat’s dying wails either. In the time that had since gone by, the city had grown perhaps tenfold. Even though he’d forgotten all the prayers and verses he was supposed to say, Mevlut hadn’t been scared of dogs at all for twenty-five years. But in the last two years, he’d begun to fear them again. The dogs could tell, and that was why they barked at him and tried to corner him. What should he do?