A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

  Yet when any of the Greek families who’d fled or been banished came back to Istanbul and Tarlabaşı to check on the old houses of which they were still the registered owners, they weren’t exactly well received. People were reluctant to tell them the truth—“Your homes have been settled by Anatolian paupers from Bitlis and Adana!”—so even the neighborhood’s most good-natured residents often shied away from meeting their old acquaintances. There were those who resented the visitors and treated them with open hostility, convinced that the Greek landlords had only come back to claim their rent; and also those who would meet with their old friends in the coffeehouse and embrace them with tears in their eyes as they remembered the good old days. But these emotional moments never lasted long. Mevlut had watched as some of the Greeks come to see their old homes were heckled and stoned by bands of children recruited by one of the many criminal gangs who operated in the area, working with the government and the police to take over the Greeks’ empty homes and rent them out to the poor migrants coming in from Eastern Anatolia. On witnessing this kind of scene, Mevlut’s first instinct, like everyone else’s, would be to intervene: “Stop that, kids, it’s not fair.” But he’d start to have second thoughts immediately; the kids would never listen to him anyway, and besides, his own landlord was among the people putting them up to it, so in the end he’d just walk away without saying anything, half ashamed and half furious, thinking, Well, the Greeks seized Cyprus, anyway, or pondering some other injustice he wasn’t entirely sure about.

  The program of demolitions was announced as an effort to clean up and modernize the city, an approach that appealed to everyone. Criminals, Kurds, Gypsies, and thieves currently squatting in the neighborhood’s vacant buildings would get kicked out; drug dens, smugglers’ warehouses, brothels, bachelor dormitories, and ruined buildings that served as hubs of illegal activities would be demolished, and in their place would be a new six-lane highway taking you from Tepebaşı to Taksim in five minutes.

  There was some protest from the Greek landlords, whose lawyers took the government to court over the property seizures, and from the architects’ union and a handful of university students battling to save these historic buildings, but their voices went largely unheard. The mayor had the press on his side, and in one particular instance, when the court warrant for the demolition of one of these old buildings took too long to arrive, he sat at the steering wheel of a bulldozer draped with a Turkish flag and brought down the house himself, cheered on by bystanders. The dust generated by these demolitions would find its way even into Mevlut’s house five streets down, seeping in through the cracks in the closed windows. The bulldozers were always surrounded by curious crowds of the unemployed, shop clerks, passersby, and children, the street vendors plying them with ayran, sesame rolls, and corn on the cob.

  Mevlut was keen to keep his rice cart away from the dust. Throughout these demolition years, he never took his rice anywhere too noisy or crowded. What really struck him was the demolition of the big sixty- and seventy-year-old blocks at the Taksim end of the coming six-lane boulevard. When he’d first come to Istanbul, a light-skinned, fair-haired, kindhearted woman on an enormous billboard six or seven stories high had offered him Tamek tomato ketchup and Lux soap from one of these buildings facing Taksim Square. Mevlut had always liked the way she smiled at him—with silent yet insistent affection—and he made it a point to look up at her every time he came to Taksim Square.

  He was very sorry to learn that the famous sandwich shop Crystal Café, which used to be housed in the same building as the woman with the fair hair, had been demolished along with the building itself. No other place in Istanbul had ever sold as much ayran. Mevlut had tried its signature dish twice (once on the house)—a spicy hamburger dipped in tomato sauce—and he’d also had some of their ayran to go with it. The Crystal got the yogurt for their ayran from the enormous Concrete Brothers of Cennetpınar’s neighboring village of İmrenler. Concrete Abdullah and Concrete Nurullah didn’t furnish yogurt only to the Crystal Café; they also did regular business with a whole host of restaurants and cafés in Taksim, Osmanbey, and Beyoğlu, all of them buying in great quantity, and up until the mid-1970s, when the big yogurt companies started to distribute their product in glass bowls and wooden barrels, the brothers made a fortune, taking over territory in Kültepe, Duttepe, and the Asian side of the city, until they were swept away in the space of two years, along with all the other yogurt vendors. Mevlut realized how much he’d envied the rich and capable Concrete Brothers—so much cleverer than he was, they didn’t even need to sell boza in the evenings to make ends meet—when he realized he was interpreting the demolition of the Crystal Café as some sort of punishment of them.

  Mevlut had been in Istanbul for twenty years. It was sad to see the old face of the city as he had come to know it disappear before his eyes, erased by new roads, demolitions, buildings, billboards, shops, tunnels, and flyovers, but it was also gratifying to feel that someone out there was working to improve the city for his benefit. He didn’t see it as a place that had existed before his arrival and to which he’d come as an outsider. Instead, he liked to imagine that Istanbul was being built while he lived in it and to dream of how much cleaner, more beautiful, and more modern it would be in the future. He was fond of the people who lived in its historic buildings with fifty-year-old elevators, central heating, and high ceilings, built while he was still back in the village or before he’d even been born, and he never forgot that these were the people who had always treated him more kindly than anyone else. But these buildings inevitably reminded him that he was still a stranger here. Their doormen were condescending even if they didn’t mean to be, which always left him scared of making a mistake. But he liked old things: the feeling of walking into one of those cemeteries he discovered while selling boza in distant neighborhoods, the sight of a mosque wall covered in moss, and the unintelligible Ottoman writing on a broken fountain with its brass taps long dried up.

  Sometimes he thought of how he broke his back every day even now just to scrape by with a rice business that wasn’t really profitable, while all around him everyone who’d come from somewhere else was getting rich, buying property, and building his own home on his own land, but in those moments he told himself that it would be ungrateful to want more than the happiness God had already given him. And once in a great while, he noticed the storks flying overhead and realized that the seasons were passing, another winter was over, and he was slowly getting older.

  13

  * * *

  Süleyman Stirs Up Trouble

  Isn’t That What Happened?

  Rayiha. I used to take Fatma and Fevziye to Duttepe (just one ticket between them) so they could spend time with their aunt Vediha and have a place where they could run around and pick mulberries, but I can’t do that anymore. The last time I went, two months ago, I got cornered by Süleyman, who started asking me about Mevlut. I told him he was fine. But then, in that typical wisecracking way of his, he brought up Ferhat and Samiha.

  “We haven’t seen them since they ran away, Süleyman, really,” I said, telling him the same old lie.

  “You know, I think I believe you,” said Süleyman. “I doubt Mevlut would want anything to do with Ferhat and Samiha anymore. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Surely you must know, Rayiha. All those letters Mevlut wrote when he was in the military were meant for Samiha.”

  “What?”

  “I read some of them before I passed them on to Vediha to give to you. Those eyes Mevlut wrote about were not your eyes, Rayiha.”

  He said it all with a smirk, as if this were all in good fun. So I played along, smiling back. Thank God I then had the presence of mind to say, “If Mevlut meant the letters for Samiha, why did you bring them to me?”

  —

  Süleyman. I had no intention of upsetting poor Rayiha. But in the end, isn’t the truth what matters most? She didn’t say another word to me, she just said good
-bye to Vediha, took her girls, and left. Occasionally, when it was time for them to go, I’d put them all in my van and drive them up to the Mecidiyeköy bus stop myself, just to make sure they got back on time and Mevlut didn’t get annoyed because no one was there when he got home in the evening. The girls love the van. But that day, Rayiha didn’t even bother to say good-bye to me. When Mevlut gets home, I doubt she’ll ask him “Did you write those letters to Samiha?” She’ll cry about it for sure. But once she’s thought it over, she’ll realize that everything I told her is true.

  —

  Rayiha. I sat with Fevziye on my lap and Fatma beside me on the bus ride from Mecidiyeköy to Taksim. My daughters can always tell when their mother is sad or upset, even when I don’t say anything. As we walked home, I said with a frown, “Don’t tell your father we went to see your aunt Vediha, okay?” It came to me that maybe the reason that Mevlut doesn’t want me going to Duttepe is to keep me as far as possible from Süleyman’s insinuations. As soon as I saw Mevlut’s sweet, boyish face that evening, I knew Süleyman was lying. But the next morning, while the girls were out playing in the garden, I remembered the way Mevlut had looked at me in Akşehir train station the night we eloped, and I became uneasy again…Süleyman had been the one driving the van that day.

  I took the letters out from where I kept them, and when I read through them again, I felt relieved: they sounded exactly the way Mevlut talks to me when we’re alone together. I felt guilty for having paid any mind to Süleyman’s lies. But then I remembered that Süleyman himself had brought me the letters, and that he’d used Vediha to convince me to run away with Mevlut, and I felt unsure. That was when I vowed never to go to Duttepe again.

  —

  Vediha. One afternoon, just after Mevlut would have left to sell his rice, I snuck out of the house and got on a bus to Tarlabaşı to see Rayiha. My little sister greeted me with tears of joy in her eyes. She was busy frying chicken with her hair pulled back like a chef’s, a huge fork in her hand and a cloud of smoke with the scent of cooking swirling around her as she yelled at the kids to stop making a mess. I gave the girls a hug and kiss before she sent them out to play in the garden. “They’ve both been sick, or else we would have been by,” she said. “Mevlut doesn’t even know about my visits.”

  “But Rayiha, Korkut never lets me out of the house, and certainly nowhere near Beyoğlu. How are we ever going to see each other?”

  “The girls are scared of your boys, now. Do you remember what Bozkurt and Turan did that time, when they tied poor Fatma to a tree and started shooting arrows at her? They split her eyebrow wide open.”

  “Don’t you worry, Rayiha; I gave them quite a beating over it and made them swear they’ll never hurt the girls again. Anyway, Bozkurt and Turan aren’t back from school until after four. Tell me the truth, Rayiha, is that really why you haven’t been coming, or is it Mevlut who’s told you not to?”

  “Actually, if you want to know, it’s not Mevlut’s fault. It’s Süleyman who’s to blame; he’s trying to cause trouble. He was saying that the letters Mevlut wrote me when he was in the army were really meant for Samiha.”

  “Oh, Rayiha, you can’t let Süleyman get to you…”

  Rayiha pulled out a bundle of letters from the bottom of her wicker sewing box and opened one of the yellowing envelopes at random. “ ‘My life, my soul, my one and only doe-eyed Miss Rayiha,’ ” she read, and she burst into tears.

  —

  Süleyman. I really can’t stand Mahinur when she starts mocking my family and saying we still belong in the village. As if she were a general’s daughter or a doctor’s wife or something, and not a government clerk’s nightclub-hostess daughter. Give her two glasses of rakı, and she’ll get going: “Were you some sort of shepherd, back home?” she’ll say, raising her eyebrows gravely as if it were a serious question.

  “You’ve had too much to drink again,” I’ll tell her.

  “Who, me? You drink plenty more than I do, and then you lose control. Hit me again and I’ll give you a taste of the fire iron.”

  I went home. My mother and Vediha were watching Gorbachev and Bush kissing each other on TV. Korkut was out, and I was just thinking I might have another drink when Vediha ambushed me in the kitchen.

  “Now listen to me, Süleyman,” she said. “If you cause Rayiha to stop coming to this house, I will never forgive you. She truly believes these lies and stupid jokes of yours, you’ve got the poor girl in tears.”

  “Oh, fine, Vediha, I won’t say anything more to her. But why don’t we get our facts straight first, if we’re going to keep telling lies to spare people’s feelings.”

  “Süleyman, let’s imagine for a minute that Mevlut really did see Samiha and fell in love with her, but then wrote his letters to Rayiha because he thought that was her name.”

  “Well, that is exactly what happened…”

  “No, what’s likelier is that you tricked him on purpose…”

  “I just helped Mevlut get married.”

  “Have it your way, but what good does it do to dredge it all up now? Apart from causing poor Rayiha a lot of pain?”

  “Vediha, you’ve done your best to find me a wife. Now you have to face the truth.”

  “None of the things you said actually happened,” said Vediha in a steely tone. “I will tell your brother, too. I’ll have no more of this. Understood?”

  As you see, whenever she wants to intimidate me, Vediha refers to her husband as “your brother” instead of “Korkut.”

  —

  Rayiha. I can be making a warm compress to soothe Fatma’s earache, when I’ll drop what I’m doing and go pick out a letter from one of the bundles I keep in my sewing box and skim to find the part where Mevlut compares my eyes to “the melancholy mountains of Kars.” In the evening, while I’m listening to Reyhan’s chatter and to the girls wheezing and coughing in their sleep while I’m waiting for Mevlut to come home, I’ll get up as if in a dream and go back to where Mevlut wrote “I need no other gaze, no other sun in my life.” In the mornings, when I’m at the fish market with Fatma and Fevziye in Balıkpazarı, standing in that stench and watching Hamdi the poultry dealer plucking a chicken before he hacks it to pieces and smokes the skin, I’ll remember how Mevlut once called me his “darling who smells of roses and of heaven, true to her name,” and instantly feel better. When the south wind makes the city reek of sewage and seaweed, the sky looks the color of a rotten egg, and I feel a weight on my soul, I’ll go back to the letter in which he told me my eyes were “as dark as fathomless night and as clear as fresh spring water.”

  —

  Abdurrahman Efendi. There’s no pleasure in village life anymore, now that I’ve married my girls off, so I go to Istanbul whenever I get the chance. As the buses rattle along and I fall in and out of sleep, I always find myself wondering bitterly if I’m even wanted there at all. In Istanbul, I stay at Vediha’s and try my best to avoid grumpy Korkut and his grocer father, Hasan, who looks more like a ghost with every passing year. I’m a tired old man without a penny to my name, and I’ve never stayed in a hotel in my life. I think there’s something undignified about having to pay for a place to sleep at night.

  It is not true that I took gifts and money from Süleyman and Korkut in exchange for letting Süleyman marry my daughter Samiha, nor does the fact that Samiha eloped mean that I must have been tricking them all along. Korkut did pay for my teeth, but I saw this generosity as a gift from Vediha’s husband, not as the bride price for my youngest daughter. Not to mention how insulting it is to suggest that a beauty like Samiha should be worth no more than a set of dentures.

  Süleyman still won’t let it go, so I always try to stay away from him whenever I’m at the Aktaş home, but one night he caught me having a bite to eat in the kitchen. We hugged like father and son, which was unusual for us. His father had already gone to sleep, so we turned with great relish to the half a bottle of rakı Süleyman had hidden behind the potato basket. I’m n
ot entirely sure what happened next, but just before the call to prayer at dawn, I heard Süleyman saying the same thing over and over again. “Father, you’re a straight-talking kind of man, so be honest with me now, isn’t that what happened?” he repeated. “Mevlut wrote those love letters for Samiha.”

  “Süleyman, my son, it doesn’t really matter who was in love with whom when it all began. What matters is being happy after the wedding. That’s why when a girl and boy are engaged to be married, our Prophet says they shouldn’t be allowed to meet before the wedding and waste all the excitement of lovemaking beforehand, and it’s also why the Koran forbids women from going around with their heads uncovered…”

  “Very true,” said Süleyman. Though I don’t think he really agreed with me; he just didn’t dare argue against anything that had to do with the Holy Prophet or the Koran.

  “In our realm,” I continued, “girls and boys who are engaged don’t get to know each other at all until they’re married, so it doesn’t matter who was meant to receive their love letters. The letter is just a token; what really counts is what is in your heart.”

  “So what you’re saying is that it doesn’t matter that Mevlut wrote letters meant for Samiha when his fate was to be with Rayiha?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Süleyman frowned. “God takes note of His creatures’ true intentions. The Lord favors a man who intends to fast during Ramadan over a man who fasts because he can’t find food to eat anyway. Because one of them means it, while the other one doesn’t.”

  “Mevlut and Rayiha are good people in the eyes of Allah the Merciful. Don’t worry about them,” I said. “They will have God’s blessing. God loves happy people, who know how to make the best of the little they have. Would Mevlut and Rayiha be happy if He didn’t love them? And if they’re happy, then it’s not our place to say any more, is it, son?”