A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

  There were other places like Fidan dotting the city where his father made regular deliveries two or three times a week. Occasionally he would fall out with the proprietors, who were always trying to push his prices down, causing him to drop one restaurant and pick up another instead. Delivering to these places was a lot of hard work for not much profit, but his father couldn’t give them up entirely because he depended on their kitchens, their massive fridges, and their terraces or back gardens as storage spaces for his trays of yogurt and jugs of boza. These were alcohol-free restaurants that catered to local shopkeepers, serving home-cooked food, döner kebabs, and fruit stews, the owners and headwaiters all on good terms with Mevlut’s father. Sometimes, they would show father and son to a table at the back, give them a helping of meat and vegetable stew or rice with chickpeas, a bit of bread, and some yogurt, and sit down with them to chat. Mevlut was fascinated by these conversations: a man who sold raffle tickets and Marlboros, a retired policeman who knew everything that went on in Beyoğlu, and the apprentice at the photography studio next door might also join them at the table, and they would talk about the rising prices, sports betting, how the police were cracking down on those who sold cigarettes and foreign liquor on the black market, the latest political intrigues in Ankara, and the inspections being carried out by the municipal police on the streets of Istanbul. Listening to the stories of these mustachioed chain-smokers, Mevlut felt as if he were entering the secret world of the city. He heard how a carpenters’ neighborhood on the back edge of Tarlabaşı was gradually being settled by a branch of a Kurdish clan from Ağrı; how the authorities wanted to clear out the bookstalls that had taken over Taksim Square because of their links with left-wing organizations; how the gang that controlled the car-parking racket on the lower streets had entered into a full-blown turf war, complete with clubs and chains, against the gang of Black Sea coast immigrants that operated in Tarlabaşı.

  Whenever they came across street fights, car crashes, pickpockets, or incidents of sexual harassment, people shouted, threats were made, curses were flung and knives pulled, and Mevlut’s father left the scene as fast as possible.

  —

  Mustafa Efendi. Watch out or they’ll call you in as a witness, I’d tell Mevlut. Once you’re in their books, you’re done for. Even worse: if you give them your address, they’ll send you a court summons. If you don’t show up, the police will come knocking at your door. They won’t just ask you why you didn’t appear in court, they’ll ask you what you do, how much tax you pay, where you’re registered, how much you make, and are you left wing or right wing.

  —

  Mevlut did not always understand why his father would suddenly turn into a side street and sink into a long silence only moments after having shouted “Yogurt seller” with all his might; why he pretended not to hear a customer who stood at a window calling out “Yogurt seller, yogurt seller, hey, I’m talking to you”; why he greeted and embraced the Erzurum lot so warmly but then called them bastards behind their backs; or why he might give a customer two kilos of yogurt for half the usual price. There were times, too, when with many customers still left to visit, many more homes waiting for them to pass by, his father would walk into a coffeehouse, leaving his pole and his precious cargo of yogurt outside the door, and slump into a chair with a cup of tea, just sitting there without moving a muscle. This, Mevlut could understand.

  —

  Mustafa Efendi. The yogurt seller spends his day walking. Neither the city buses nor those run by private companies will pick up a passenger carrying yogurt trays, and the yogurt seller can’t afford a taxi either. So you walk thirty kilometers every day carrying thirty, maybe forty kilos on your back. Our job is mostly heavy lifting.

  —

  Two or three times a week, Mevlut’s father would walk from Duttepe to Eminönü. This took two hours. A truckload of yogurt from a Thracian dairy farm was delivered to an empty lot near Sirkeci train station in Eminönü. The unloading of the truck, the pushing and shoving among the yogurt sellers and restaurant managers waiting to pick up their supply, the sorting out of payments and returns of the empty aluminum trays to the warehouse among the buckets of olives and cheese (Mevlut loved the smell of this place), the settling of accounts—it would all be over in a flurry, just like the recurring commotions on Galata Bridge, the whistling of ferries and trains and the grunting of buses. As this organized chaos unfolded, Mevlut’s father asked him to keep track of their transactions. It was such a simple job that Mevlut suspected his illiterate father of bringing him along only to introduce him to the business and make sure the people there knew who he was.

  As soon as they were done stocking up, his father would shoulder just under sixty kilos of yogurt with determination, walking nonstop for forty minutes before, dripping with sweat, he would drop off a portion of his cargo at a restaurant at the back of Beyoğlu and the rest at a different one in Pangaltı, then return to Sirkeci to collect the second load, dropping it off either at one of those two places or at a third, these spots serving as bases from which he would “distribute” his yogurt to various neighborhoods, to streets and homes that he knew like the back of his hand. In early October, once the temperature dropped, Mustafa Efendi would start going through the same steps twice a week with the boza. To his pole he would tie the jugs of raw boza filled at the Vefa Boza Shop, dropping them off at one of the restaurants where he had friendly relations, and later taking them home to be sweetened with sugar and flavored with spices, ready for him to sell out on the streets from seven o’clock every evening. To save time, sometimes Mevlut and his father would mix the sugar and spices into the raw boza in the kitchens and back gardens of these restaurants. Mevlut was in awe of the way his father was always able to keep track of where exactly he had left the empty, half-empty, and full yogurt trays and boza jugs and how he could always work out which route would allow them to make the most sales while walking the shortest distance.

  Mustafa Efendi was on first-name terms with many of his customers; he could remember their yogurt preferences (with cream or without) and how they liked their boza (sour or fresh). When, one day, they got caught in the rain and took shelter in a musty teahouse along the way, Mevlut was amazed that his father knew both the owner and the owner’s son; just as he was when they were walking down the street one day, lost in thought, and they crossed paths with a junk dealer on a horse cart who embraced his father like a long-lost friend; or when his father showed himself so hand in glove with the local constable only later to call him “a piece of shit.” Considering all the streets, buildings, and apartments they saw—so many doors, doorbells, garden gates, staircases, and elevators—how could his father possibly remember how everything worked, how to open and close things, which buttons to push, how each gate bolted shut? Mustafa Efendi was always giving his son tips: “This is the Jewish cemetery. You walk by quietly.” “Someone from Gümüşdere village works as a janitor in this bank; he’s a good man, just something to bear in mind.” “Don’t cross here, try farther up where the metal guardrails stop; the traffic’s less dangerous, and you won’t have to wait as long!”

  “Let me show you something,” his father would say as they groped their way around a dark, dank stairwell in a block of apartments. “Ah, there it is! Go on, open it.” In the semidarkness, Mevlut would find a little compartment beside the door to an apartment and open it carefully, as if lifting the lid off Aladdin’s magic lamp. In the shadows inside there would be a bowl with a sheet of paper ripped from a school notebook. “Read what it says!” Mevlut would hold the note under the pale light of the stairwell lamp, handling it delicately, like some sort of treasure map, and he would read out in a whisper: “Half a kilo, with cream.”

  Seeing how his son looked up to him as a man of wisdom who could speak the special language of the city, and how the boy couldn’t wait to learn the secrets of the city himself, was enough to put a proud spring in Mevlut’s father’s step. “You’ll learn it all soon enough…You will see everything without being seen. You will hear everything but pretend that you haven’t…You will walk for ten hours a day but feel like you haven’t walked at all. Are you tired, son, shall we sit down for a bit?”

  “Yes, let’s sit down.”

  They hadn’t been in the city even two months before it got cold enough to start selling boza in the evenings, and Mevlut began to feel the strain. After going to school in the mornings and walking fifteen kilometers in four hours to sell yogurt with his father in the afternoons, he would fall asleep as soon as they got home. Sometimes, when they stopped to rest in diners and teahouses, he would put his head down on the table for a quick nap, but his father would tell him to wake up, as this was the kind of thing you would expect to see in one of those disreputable twenty-four-hour coffeehouses, and it might not go down so well with the manager.

  Mevlut’s father would wake him in the evenings, too, before he left to sell boza. (“Dad, I have a history test tomorrow, I have to study,” Mevlut might say.) Once or twice when he couldn’t get up in the morning, Mevlut told his father, “There’s no school today,” and his father was happy that they could go out together to sell yogurt that day and make a little more money. Some evenings, his father couldn’t bear to wake him, and he would pick up the jugs of boza himself and walk out pulling the door softly shut in his wake. Later, when Mevlut woke up all alone in the house, he would hear the familiar strange noises coming from outside, and he would feel remorseful, not just because he was afraid, but also because he missed his father’s companionship and the feeling of his hand inside his father’s. With all these thoughts weighing on his mind, he couldn’t even study, which only made him feel guiltier.

  5

  * * *

  Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School

  A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor

  PERCHING ON a low, flat expanse at one end of the road linking Duttepe and the hills behind it to Istanbul, Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was situated in such a way that mothers hanging laundry up in their gardens, old ladies rolling out dough with their rolling pins, and unemployed men sitting in teahouses playing rummikub and card games in the neighborhoods along Dung Creek and in the profusion of gecekondu homes on the surrounding hills could all see the school’s orange building, its bust of Atatürk, and its students doing endless gym exercises (in their trousers, long-sleeved shirts, and rubber-soled shoes) in the big school yard, like so many colorful flecks in the distance, under the supervision of Blind Kerim, teacher of religion as well as gym. Every forty-five minutes, hundreds of students would pour out into the yard, released by a bell that wasn’t heard in the faraway hills, until another silent signal caused them all to disappear just as quickly. But every Monday morning, all twelve hundred students, both the middle school and the high school, would gather around the bust of Atatürk, their collective interpretation of the national anthem echoing mightily off the hills and heard in thousands of nearby homes.

  The national anthem (“The Independence March”) was always preceded by an address from the principal, Mr. Fazıl, who would climb to the top of the stairs at the entrance of the school building to give a lecture on Atatürk, love of country, the nation, and the unforgettable military victories of the past (he was partial to engagements of bloody conquest, like the Battle of Mohács) and to encourage the students to follow Atatürk’s example. From the crowd, the school’s older, more rebellious elements called out derisive comments, which Mevlut initially struggled to understand, while other miscreants interrupted with strange if not downright rude heckles, so the vice principal, Skeleton, stood careful watch beside Mr. Fazıl, like a policeman. This strict surveillance meant that it would not be until a year and a half later, when he was fourteen and had begun to question the protocols of the school, that Mevlut finally got to know those serial dissenters, who farted impertinently even when surrounded by a large group and who were respected and admired by both the religious, right-wing students and the nationalist, left-wing students (the right-wing students being invariably religious, and the left-wing students invariably nationalist).

  According to the principal, it was a depressing sign of the school’s and the nation’s prospects that twelve hundred students were unable to sing the national anthem together and in unison. The sight of them all singing to their own beat and, worse, of a number of “hopeless degenerates” who didn’t bother to sing at all drove Mr. Fazıl insane. Sometimes, by the time one side of the school yard had finished singing, the other side wouldn’t even be halfway through, so the principal, who yearned for them all to work together “like the fingers of a closed fist,” made the twelve hundred students sing the anthem over and over again, come rain or shine, until they got it right, while some of the boys, stubborn and determined to make mischief, flubbed the rhythm on purpose, causing fits of laughter and fights between the patriotic kids suffering the cold and the sneering, cynical defeatists.

  Mevlut watched these fights from a distance, laughing at the boys’ insolent jokes while biting the insides of his plump cheeks to avoid detection by Skeleton. But then, slowly, the national flag would be raised, with its star and crescent moon, and Mevlut’s eyes would fill with guilty tears as he sang the anthem with genuine emotion. For the rest of his life, the sight of a Turkish flag being raised—even in movies—was enough to leave him misty eyed.

  As the principal demanded, Mevlut wanted very much “to think of nothing else but his country, like Atatürk.” But in order to do this, he’d have to get through three years of middle school and three years of high school. No one from Mevlut’s family or from his entire village had ever performed such a feat, so this idea became ingrained in Mevlut’s mind from the very first days of school, assuming the same mythical contours as the flag, the country, and Atatürk—beautiful to imagine but difficult to reach. Most of the boys who came to the school from the new poor neighborhoods also helped their fathers in their work as street vendors or worked with local shopkeepers or were perhaps waiting in line to start an apprenticeship with a baker, an auto mechanic, a welder—knowing all along that they would drop out of school as soon as they got a little older.

  Principal Fazıl was chiefly concerned with maintaining discipline, which required a proper harmony and order between, on the one hand, the children of respectable families, who in class always sat in the front rows, and, on the other hand, the throngs of poorer boys. He had developed his own brand of thinking on this subject and shared it every Monday during the flag-raising ceremony, distilled as a slogan: “A good education removes the barriers between rich and poor!” Mevlut wasn’t quite sure whether Principal Fazıl meant to say to his poorer students, “If you study hard and finish school, you, too, will be rich,” or whether he meant, “If you study hard and finish school, no one will notice how poor you are.”

  In order to show the rest of the country what Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School had to offer, the principal wanted the school’s team to make a good showing at Istanbul Radio’s Quiz Competition for Secondary Schools. So he fielded a team of middle-class children from the better neighborhoods (the lazy and the resentful called them nerds) and spent most of his time having them memorize the birth and death dates of Ottoman sultans. At the flag-raising ceremonies, with the whole student body there, the principal bad-mouthed those who’d dropped out to work as repairmen and welders’ apprentices, cursing them as weak and worthless traitors to the cause of enlightenment and science; he also told off those like Mevlut, who went to school in the morning and sold yogurt in the afternoon; and he tried to lead those who’d become more concerned with getting ahead than with school back onto the right path, shouting: “Turkey will not be saved by cooked rice peddlers, hawkers, and kebab vendors, but by science!” Einstein, too, had grown up poor, and he’d even failed physics once, but he had never thought of giving up school to make a living—to his own benefit and that of his nation.

  —

  Skeleton. In truth, our Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was originally founded to serve the neighborhoods on the hills in and around Mecidiyeköy, to make sure that the children of civil servants, lawyers, and doctors, who lived there in modern and European-looking cooperative housing, received a proper state education. Sadly, over the past ten years the school has been overrun by hordes of Anatolian children, who live in the new neighborhoods that have sprung up illegally on the once-empty hills, making it almost impossible to run this lovely school properly. Even though many skip class to work as street vendors, or take a job and drop out, and a significant number of boys are expelled for stealing, battery, or threatening teachers, our classrooms remain overcrowded. There can be, I regret to say, as many as fifty-five students taking lessons in one of our modern classrooms built with thirty students in mind, three students may have to squeeze onto desks designed for two, and during recess, the boys cannot run or walk or play without crashing into one another like bumper cars. Every time the bell rings or a fight breaks out or there is any kind of sudden rush, there follows a stampede in which some students get crushed and the weaker ones faint, and there is nothing we can do but take them to the staff room, where we try to revive them with cologne. With all the overcrowding, it is of course more effective to have students learn by rote rather than try to explain things to them. Rote learning doesn’t just develop children’s memory, it teaches them to respect their elders. This is also the reasoning behind the education ministry’s textbooks. There are five regions in Turkey. A cow’s stomach has four parts. There were five reasons that the Ottoman State entered a period of decline.