A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

  Nazmi the Laz would take his famous horse-drawn cart with rubber tires and do the rounds of Istanbul’s demolition crews, collecting wooden doors, newel posts, window frames, cracked bits of marble and paving, metal railings, and old roof tiles, which he displayed all around his shops and his teahouse. He would demand exorbitant prices for these rusty, rotten furnishings, just as he did for the cement and the bricks he sold in his shop. But if you were willing to pay and to hire Nazmi’s horse cart to deliver the materials to your construction site, you could count on Nazmi and his men to keep an eye on the land you’d seized and the house you were building on it.

  Those not prepared to pay Nazmi, or who thought it was shrewder to go elsewhere for the building materials—“I know where I can get it all a lot cheaper,” they’d say—were likely to see their ramshackle homes damaged overnight without a witness in sight, if not completely demolished, with the blessing of the Gaziosmanpaşa police. Once the demolition crews and the police were gone, Nazmi the Laz would pay a condolence call on those penny-wise fools weeping over the rubble of their ruined homes: he would say how he was friends with the captain at the Gaziosmanpaşa police station, they played cards together in the coffeehouse every evening, and had he only known this was going to happen, he could have done something.

  In fact, Nazmi the Laz had connections in the nationalist party then in power. From around 1978 onward, when those who’d built on government land using the materials bought from Nazmi started to fight over one another’s land, Nazmi the Laz set up his so-called office to keep a record of all these transactions, just like an official land registry. He also issued documents resembling proper title deeds to anyone who paid him for the right to claim a plot of empty land. To make these documents look as legitimate as he could, he followed the practice of the state’s official deeds by affixing a photograph of the owner (he’d recently installed a small coin-operated photo booth for his clients’ convenience) as well as including the name of the previous owner (he was always proud to name himself), and noting the precise location and dimensions of the plot, before finally sealing the whole thing with a red stamp he’d ordered from a stationery shop in Gaziosmanpaşa.

  “When the government’s giving out land here one day, they’re going to look at my records and the title deeds I’ve been handing out,” Nazmi would boast. Sometimes he would address the unemployed men playing rummikub in his teahouse with a little speech on how happy he was to serve his countrymen—who’d left the poorest villages of Sivas and come all the way to Istanbul without a single thing to call their own—by turning them into landowners overnight, and to those who asked, “When are we going to get electricity here, Nazmi?” he would say that they were working on it, hinting that in the event the Ghaazi Quarter was declared a municipality, he would stand for local elections under the banner of the ruling party.

  One day, a tall, pale man with a dreamy look in his eyes appeared on the empty hills behind the neighborhood, on land that Nazmi had yet to parcel out. His name was Ali. He never came down to Nazmi the Laz’s shop and teahouse; he kept to himself, avoiding neighborhood gossip, living alone on that isolated plot at the farthest edge of the city, where he settled down with his cheap bricks, pots and pans, gas lamps, and mattresses. Nazmi the Laz sent two of his truculent mustachioed henchmen to remind Ali that someone owned that land.

  “This land belongs neither to Nazmi the Laz, nor to Hamdi the Turk, nor Kadir the Kurd, nor the state,” Ali told them. “Everything—the whole universe and this nation, too—belongs to Allah. We are nothing more than His mortal subjects passing through this temporary existence!”

  One night, Nazmi the Laz’s men showed this reckless Ali just how right he was—with a bullet to his head. They buried him near the reservoir, keeping things neat and tidy so as not to give the city newspapers an excuse to write about their favorite topic: how the people who lived in the poor neighborhoods were polluting the beautiful green waters of the reservoir that served as Istanbul’s water supply. But the neighborhood dogs, who spent their winters warring with the wolves that came down looking for food, soon found the body. Instead of seizing Nazmi the Laz’s mustachioed men, the police arrested and tortured a family from Sivas who lived in the house closest to the lake. They ignored the many anonymous tips that Nazmi the Laz was behind it all and pressed on, applying their usual expert torture methods to the people from the lake, first whipping their feet and then setting up simple circuits to administer electric shocks.

  When a Kurd from Bingöl died of a heart attack under questioning, the whole neighborhood rose up in protest and raided Nazmi the Laz’s teahouse. Nazmi was away, enjoying a wedding at his village near Rize. Taken by surprise, his armed men panicked and ran away, doing no more than firing a few futile shots in the air. Leftist, Marxist, and Maoist youths from various neighborhoods and universities around the city heard what was happening in the Ghaazi Quarter and came to lead this “spontaneous uprising of the people.”

  —

  Ferhat. Within two days, Nazmi the Laz’s offices were taken over and university students seized the land registry, and soon the news spread all over Turkey, especially among the Kurds and the Alevis, that anyone who came to the Ghaazi Quarter and announced that they were “poor and left wing” (or “godless,” according to the nationalist papers) would be given some land. That’s how, six years ago, I got my plot, which is still marked out with phosphorescent rocks. I didn’t settle there at the time, because, like everyone else, I believed that Nazmi the Laz would surely return one day to get his revenge and get his land back with the help of the state. Besides, Beyoğlu, where Mevlut and I were working as waiters, was so far from the Ghaazi Quarter that it took half the day just getting there and back by bus.

  We are still living in fear of Süleyman’s rage. Nobody wanted to get involved to help us make peace with the Aktaş family (I resented Mevlut, Rayiha, and Vediha for this). So Samiha and I ended up having a quiet, simple wedding in the Ghaazi Quarter. No one pinned any gold or hundred-dollar bills on us the way they did on Mevlut and Rayiha. I was sad not to have been able to invite Mevlut, to have had to get married without my best friend there, but at the same time it made me furious to see how close he was with the Aktaş bunch and how he was willing to mingle with fascists just because he imagined he could get something out of it.

  10

  * * *

  Getting Rid of City Dust

  My God, Where Is All This Filth Coming From?

  Samiha. Ferhat is so worried about what people will say that he’s skipping the best parts of our story, supposedly because they’re “private.” We did have a very small wedding, but it was wonderful. We borrowed a white dress for me from the Pure Princess Bridal Shop on the second floor of the blue building in Gaziosmanpaşa. I didn’t put a foot wrong all evening and refused to let anything bring me down—not the ugly, envious biddies around me saying “Poor dear, what a waste for such a pretty girl!” or those who kept their mouths shut but looked at me as if to say, You’re so beautiful, why marry some penniless waiter? I could never be anyone’s slave, harem girl, or prisoner…Look at me and you’ll know what freedom looks like. That night, Ferhat got so drunk on all the rakı he’d been sneaking under the table that I ended up having to get him home. But I held my head up and proudly faced the crowd of jealous women and admiring men (including the unemployed ones who’d only come for the free lemonade and tea biscuits).

  Two months later, Haydar and his wife, Zeliha, had talked me into working as a housemaid in Gaziosmanpaşa. Haydar would sometimes have a drink with Ferhat, and he and his wife had come to our wedding. So when they suggested that I start working, they meant well. Ferhat initially resisted the idea, not wanting to be the kind of man who sends the girl he’s just eloped with off to work as a maid only two months after marrying her. But one rainy morning, we all took the minibus to Gaziosmanpaşa together. Ferhat came along to meet the doorman at the Civan Apartment, the building where Zeliha and many of her relati
ves worked. We went down to the basement, where we sat—three women and three men—drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in the doorman’s quarters, which were smaller than the room we lived in, lacking even a window. Afterward, Zeliha took me to apartment number 5, where I was supposed to start work. As we walked up the stairs, I felt shy to be entering a stranger’s home and scared of being away from Ferhat. We’d been inseparable ever since we’d run off. At first, Ferhat would come with me every morning and spend afternoons smoking downstairs in the doorman’s place until I was done, and at four o’clock, when I emerged from apartment number 5 and found him downstairs in that stuffy basement, he would walk me right up to the minibus or else leave me with Zeliha to make sure I got on, before rushing off to make his shift at the Bounty Restaurant. But within three weeks, I had already started making my own way to work in the mornings, and by the time winter came around, I was coming back home alone in the evenings, too.

  —

  Ferhat. I’m just going to interrupt for one minute because I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression: I’m a hardworking man of honor who knows his responsibilities, and if it were up to me, I would never allow my wife to work. But Samiha kept saying how bored she was at home and how much she wanted to work. She cried a lot, too, though she won’t tell you that. Besides, Haydar and Zeliha are like family now, and the people at the Civan Apartment are like brothers and sisters to them. When Samiha told me, “I can get there by myself, you stay at home and keep up with your college courses on TV!” I decided to let her. But then I felt even worse every time I couldn’t understand the accounting lessons or couldn’t post my homework assignments to Ankara on time. There’s this mathematics professor on right now who’s got so many white hairs sprouting out of his enormous nose and ears that you can make them out on TV. I can barely follow what he’s doing with all those numbers he’s writing on the blackboard. The only reason I put up with this torture is because Samiha believes—more than I do—that everything will be different once I manage to earn a degree and find a job as a government clerk.

  —

  Samiha. My first “employer,” the lady in apartment number 5, was a troubled, short-tempered type. “You look nothing alike,” she said, eyeing us suspiciously. We’d agreed that I would gain her trust by saying I was a relative of Zeliha’s on her father’s side. Mrs. Nalan did believe that I meant well, but at first she couldn’t quite trust me to get rid of all the dust properly. Until four years ago, she’d done the cleaning herself, as she didn’t really have that much money to spare. But then her firstborn son died of cancer while still in middle school, and Mrs. Nalan had been waging a ruthless war on dust and germs ever since.

  “Did you wipe under the fridge and inside the white lamp?” she would ask, even when she had just seen me doing exactly that. She worried that the dust would infect her second son with cancer, too, and as it came time for him to get home from school, I would become increasingly agitated, dusting with more determination and running back and forth to the window to shake out the duster, furious as a pilgrim stoning the devil. “Well done, Samiha, well done!” Mrs. Nalan would say to spur me on. She would stand there talking on the phone while pointing out some speck I’d missed. “My God, where is all this filth coming from!” she’d complain. She’d wag her finger at me, and I’d feel as guilty as if I’d brought it all with me from the poor neighborhood I lived in, but even so, I loved her.

  Within two months, Mrs. Nalan trusted me to come in three times a week. By now she had started leaving me home alone, armed with soaps, buckets, and rags, while she went out to do her shopping or to play rummy with the same friends she was always on the phone with. Sometimes she’d sneak back in without warning, pretending to have forgotten something, and when she saw me still hard at work cleaning, she’d be pleased and say, “Well done, God bless you!” Sometimes, she would pick up the photo of her dead son that stood on top of the TV next to the china dog and cry as she wiped the silver frame over and over again, so I would set down my dusting cloth and try to console her.

  Zeliha came to visit me one day just after Mrs. Nalan had gone out. “Have you gone crazy?” she said when she saw me working as hard as ever; she sat down to watch TV while I worked. From then on, Zeliha started coming over whenever the lady she worked for wasn’t home (sometimes Zeliha’s lady and Mrs. Nalan would leave together). While I dusted, she would talk about what was happening on TV and rummage through the fridge for a snack, telling me that the spinach wasn’t bad, but the yogurt had gone sour (it was the kind that you bought from the grocery store in a glass bowl). When she started looking through Mrs. Nalan’s drawers, commenting on her underwear, her bras, her handkerchiefs, as well as other things we weren’t even sure what to call, I couldn’t resist joining in for a laugh. Among the silk headscarves and foulards right at the back of one drawer, there was a triangular amulet charmed to bring wealth and good fortune. Tucked away in another corner, among old identity cards, tax returns, and photographs, we found a carved wooden box that smelled wonderful, though we had no idea what it was for. Hidden among the medicine bottles and cough syrups in the drawer on Mrs. Nalan’s husband’s side of the bed, Zeliha found a strange bottle with a liquid the color of tobacco. The bottle was pink, with a picture of an Arab lady with big lips on the label, and our favorite thing about it was the smell (perhaps it was some sort of medicine, or perhaps Zeliha was right that it was poison), but we were too scared to ever pour any of its contents out. A month later, while exploring the secrets of the house on my own (I liked finding pictures of Mrs. Nalan’s dead son and his old homework assignments), I noticed that the bottle had disappeared from its usual place.

  Two weeks later, Mrs. Nalan said she needed to talk to me. She told me that Zeliha had been fired in deference to her husband’s wishes (though I wasn’t entirely sure whose husband she was referring to), and regrettably, although she was absolutely sure that I was innocent, this meant I couldn’t work there anymore either. I hadn’t fully grasped what was going on yet, but when I saw that she was crying, I started crying, too.

  “Don’t cry, my dear, we’ve arranged something wonderful for you!” she said with the upbeat tone of a fortune-telling Gypsy saying, Your future looks very bright! A wealthy, distinguished family in Şişli was looking for a hardworking, honest, and trustworthy maid like me. Mrs. Nalan was going to send me there, and I was to go straightaway without making a fuss.

  I didn’t mind, but Ferhat wasn’t happy with this new job because the house was so far away. I had to wake up even earlier now to catch the first minibus to Gaziosmanpaşa while it was still dark outside. In Gaziosmanpaşa, I had to wait another half hour for the bus to Taksim. This leg of the trip took well over an hour, and the bus was usually so full that everyone waiting to board would elbow one another out of the way to get on first and grab an empty seat. Looking out of the window of the bus, I’d watch the people going to work, the street vendors pushing their carts to their chosen neighborhoods, the boats on the Golden Horn, and—my favorites—all the children going to school. As we drove past I would try to make out the big newspaper headlines in shopwindows, the posters on the walls, and the enormous billboards. I would absentmindedly read the rhyming couplets of wisdom people had stuck on the back of their cars and their trucks, and I would start to feel as if the city were talking to me. It was nice to think that Ferhat had spent his childhood in Karaköy, right in the middle of the city, and when I got home I would ask him to tell me about those days. But he got back late in the evenings, and we saw less and less of each other.

  In Taksim, where I had to change buses again, I would buy a sesame roll from one of the men in front of the post office and either eat it on the bus as I looked out the window or put it in my plastic handbag and have it later at the house where I worked, with a cup of tea. Sometimes the lady I worked for would tell me, “Have some breakfast if you haven’t eaten already.” So I would help myself to cheese and olives from the fridge. But sometimes she wouldn’t
say anything at all. Around noon, I would start making grilled meatballs for her lunch, and she would tell me, “Throw in three more for you, Samiha.” She would take five meatballs on her plate but only eat four; I’d eat her leftover meatball in the kitchen, and so we’d end up having four each.

  But Madam (that’s what I used to call her—I never used her name) would not sit at the table with me, and I wasn’t allowed to eat when she did. She wanted me near enough to hear her when she said, “Where’s the salt?” or “Clear this away now,” so I would stand in the doorway to the dining room watching her eat, but she wouldn’t talk to me. She kept asking me the same question and always forgot the answer: “Where are you from?” When I told her Beyşehir, she would say, “Where’s that? I’ve never been,” so eventually I started saying I was from Konya. “Ah, yes, Konya! I’m going to go one day and visit Rumi’s grave,” she’d reply. When I went to work in two other homes, one in Şişli and the other in Nişantaşı, I said I was from Konya again, and though the people there also immediately mentioned Rumi, they didn’t want me performing any daily prayer rituals. Anyway, Zeliha had already taught me to say no if ever anyone asked, “Do you pray?”

  I’d started going to these other houses on Madam’s recommendation, and the families there didn’t like me using the same bathroom as they did. These were old houses with small servants’ bathrooms that I would sometimes have to share with a cat or a dog and where I’d also leave my handbag and my coat. Madam had a cat who stole food from the kitchen and never left her lap, and sometimes, when the cat and I were home alone, I’d give it a swipe and confess to Ferhat when I got home in the evening.