A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

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  Süleyman. Actually, the village dogs never barked at me. We’ve moved to Istanbul now, and I’m sad that Mevlut had to stay behind in the village, I miss him…But the dogs in the village treated me the same way they treated Mevlut. I just thought I should make that clear.

  —

  Every now and then, Mevlut and his dog Kâmil climbed one of the hills, leaving the herd to graze down below. From his vantage point looking over the fields stretched out beneath him, Mevlut would yearn to live, to be happy, to be someone in the universe. There were times when he would dream of his father coming on a bus to take him away to Istanbul. The plains below, where the animals grazed, ended in a steep rock face at a bend in the stream. Sometimes you could spot the smoke from a fire at the opposite edge of the plain. Mevlut knew that the fire must have been lit by shepherd boys from the neighboring village of Gümüşdere, who, like him, hadn’t been able to go to Istanbul to continue their studies. From atop Mevlut and Kâmil’s hill you could see, when it was windy and the sky was clear, and especially in the mornings, the little houses of Gümüşdere and the sweet little white mosque with its slender minaret.

  —

  Abdurrahman Efendi. I will take the liberty to quickly interrupt here, as I actually live in the abovementioned village of Gümüşdere. In the 1950s, most of us who lived in Cennetpınar, Gümüşdere, and the three neighboring villages were all very poor. During winter, we would become indebted to the grocer and could just barely make it through to spring. Come springtime, some of the men would go to Istanbul to work on construction sites. Some of us couldn’t even afford the bus ticket to Istanbul, so the Blind Grocer would buy it for us and write it down at the very top of his account book. Back in 1954, a tall, wide-shouldered giant from our village of Gümüşdere, a man named Yusuf, went to Istanbul to work as a builder. Then he became, by pure coincidence, a yogurt seller and made a lot of money selling yogurt street by street. He first brought over his brothers and his cousins to help him in Istanbul, where they all lived in bachelors’ apartments. Until then, the people of Gümüşdere hadn’t known the first thing about yogurt. But soon, most of us were going to Istanbul to pursue this opportunity. I first went there when I was twenty-two, after completing my compulsory military service. (Owing to various disciplinary mishaps, this took me four years; I kept getting caught trying to run away, I got beaten up a lot and spent a great deal of time in jail, but let it be known that no one loves our army and our honorable officers more than I do!) At the time, our soldiers hadn’t yet decided to hang the prime minister Adnan Menderes; he was still driving around Istanbul in his Cadillac, and whenever he came across any remaining historic homes and mansions, he had them demolished to make way for wide avenues. Business was good for street vendors plying their trade among the rubble, but I just couldn’t manage that whole yogurt-selling thing. Our people here tend to be tough and strong, big boned and with wide shoulders. But me, I’m a bit on the skinny side, as you will see for yourself should we ever meet one day, God willing. I got crushed under that wooden pole all day, with a thirty-kilo tray of yogurt tied at each end. To top it all, like most yogurt sellers I also went out in the evenings to try to make a little more money by selling boza. You can try all you want to cushion the weight of the pole, but a novice yogurt seller will inevitably get calluses on his neck and shoulders. At the beginning, I was pleased to see that I wasn’t getting any, because my skin is as smooth as velvet, but then I realized that the damned stick was doing much worse; it was damaging my spine, so off I went to the hospital. I spent about a month in hospital queues before the doctor told me I had to stop shouldering loads immediately. But obviously I had to earn a living, so instead of giving up the stick, I gave up the doctor. And that’s how my neck began to get crooked, and I came to be known among friends no longer as Little Miss Abdy but as Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman, which was rather heartbreaking. In Istanbul I avoided those who came from my village, but I used to see this Mevlut’s hot-tempered dad, Mustafa, and his uncle Hasan all the time, selling yogurt on the streets. That was also when I got hooked on rakı, which helped me forget about my neck. After a while I gave up on my dreams of buying a house, a little place in some slum, some real-estate property. I stopped trying to save more money and just tried to enjoy myself instead. I bought some land in Gümüşdere with the money I’d made in Istanbul, and I married the poorest orphan girl in the village. The lesson I learned during my time in the city is that in order to make it there, you need to have at least three sons that you can bring over from the village to slave away for you. I thought I’d have three strapping boys before going back to Istanbul, and this time I’d be able to build myself a home on the first empty hill I came across and go on to conquer the city from there. But I ended up with no sons and three daughters. So two years ago I came back to the village for good, and I love my girls very much. Let me introduce them to you now:

  Vediha. I wanted my first strapping boy to be serious and hardworking and had decided to call him Vedii. Unfortunately, I had a daughter. So I called her Vediha, the female version of Vedii.

  Rayiha. She loves to sit on her father’s lap and has a lovely smell, too, as her name suggests.

  Samiha. She’s a clever little thing, always crying and complaining; she’s not even three yet and already thundering about the house.

  —

  Mevlut would sit down in Cennetpınar in the evenings with his mother, Atiye, and his two older sisters, who both doted on him, to write to their father, Mustafa Efendi, in Istanbul, asking for shoes, batteries, plastic clothes pegs, and soap, among other things. Their father was illiterate, so he rarely replied, ignoring most of their requests or else claiming, “You could buy those things cheaper from the blind village grocer.” Mevlut’s mother could sometimes be heard complaining in response: “We didn’t ask you to bring these things because the Blind Grocer doesn’t have them, Mustafa, but because we haven’t got them at home!” The letters Mevlut wrote to his father ended up instilling in the boy a particular understanding of what it meant to ask for something in writing. There were three elements to consider when WRITING A LETTER TO ASK SOMETHING OF SOMEONE WHO IS FAR AWAY:

  1. What you truly want, which you can never really know anyway

  2. What you are prepared to say openly, which usually helps you gain a slightly better understanding of what you truly want

  3. The letter itself, which though imbued with the essence of items 1 and 2 is really an enchanted text with a much-greater significance

  —

  Mustafa Efendi. When I came back from Istanbul at the end of May, I brought the girls their flowery purple and green dress fabrics; for their mother, a pair of closed slippers and the Pe-Re-Ja–brand cologne Mevlut had written down in his letter; and for Mevlut, the toy he’d asked for. I was a bit hurt by his halfhearted thanks for the present. “He wanted a water pistol like the village headman’s son…,” said his mother while his sisters smirked. The next day, I went to the Blind Grocer with Mevlut, and we went through each item on our account. Every now and then I lost my temper: “What the hell is this Çamlıca gum?” I’d bellow, but Mevlut kept his eyes down, as he was the one who had been buying it. “No more gum for this one!” I told the Blind Grocer. “Mevlut should go to school in Istanbul next winter anyway!” said the Blind Grocer, that know-it-all. “He’s got a good head for num bers and sums. Maybe he’ll be the one to finally go to college from our village.”

  —

  The news that Mevlut’s father had fallen out with Uncle Hasan in Istanbul over the past winter quickly reached the village…Last December, during the coldest days of the month, Uncle Hasan and his two sons, Korkut and Süleyman, had left the house they lived in with Mevlut’s father in Kültepe and moved into a new one they had all built together on Duttepe, the hill opposite Kültepe, leaving Mevlut’s father behind. Uncle Hasan’s wife, Safiye, who was both Mevlut’s maternal aunt and his paternal uncle’s wife, had quickly followed, coming from the
village into this new home in Istanbul to look after her husband and sons. These developments meant that Mevlut could now join his father in the autumn so that Mustafa Efendi would not be left alone in Istanbul.

  —

  Süleyman. My father and Uncle Mustafa are brothers, but our surnames are different. When Atatürk decreed that everyone should take a surname, the census officer from Beyşehir came to our village on the back of a donkey, toting his reams of records, to write down the surnames everyone had chosen for themselves. On the last day of the whole operation, it was our grandfather’s turn. He was a very devout and pious man who had never gone anywhere farther than Beyşehir. He took his time thinking and finally went for “Aktaş.” His two sons were arguing in their father’s presence as usual. “Put me down as Karataş,” demanded Uncle Mustafa, who was a little boy at the time, but neither my grandfather nor the census officer paid him any heed. Still, my uncle Mustafa is very stubborn and prickly, and many years later, before Mevlut was enrolled in middle school, he went down to the judge to have his surname changed, and from then on they became Karataş, “Blackstone,” while we remained Aktaş, “Whitestone.” My cousin Mevlut Karataş is really looking forward to starting school in Istanbul this autumn. But of the kids from around our village who have been sent to Istanbul on this pretext, not a single one has graduated from high school yet. There are almost a hundred villages and towns around where we come from, and so far only one boy has ever made it to college. That bespectacled mousy creature eventually went off to America, and no one has ever heard from him again. Many years later, someone saw his picture in the newspapers, but because he had changed his name, no one was even sure whether this was our bespectacled rodent or not. If you ask me, that bastard must have converted to Christianity by now.

  —

  One evening toward the end of that summer, Mevlut’s father brought out a rusty saw Mevlut remembered from his childhood. He led his son to the old oak tree. Slowly and deliberately, they sawed off a branch that was about as thick as an arm. It was a long and slightly curved branch. Using a bread knife and then a pocketknife, Mevlut’s father trimmed the twigs off one by one.

  “This will be the pole you use when you work as a street vendor!” he said. He took some matches from the kitchen and asked Mevlut to light a fire. He charred and blackened the knots on the rod, turning it slowly over the fire until it had dried up. “It’s not enough to do it once. You have to leave it out in the sunshine all through the summer and dry it over the fire again. Eventually, it will become as hard as stone and as smooth as silk. Go on, have a look and see if it sits well on your shoulders.”

  Mevlut placed the stick across his shoulders. He felt its toughness and warmth with a shiver.

  At the end of summer, they went to Istanbul, taking a small sack of homemade soup powder, some dried red chilies, bags of bulgur and flatbread, and baskets of walnuts. His father would give the bulgur and walnuts as gifts to the doormen in some of the more prestigious buildings so that they would treat him well and let him take the elevator. They also took a broken flashlight that was to be fixed in Istanbul, a kettle that his father particularly liked and would bring back with him to the village, some straw mats for the dirt floor at home, and other paraphernalia. Plastic bags and baskets bursting with their belongings kept popping out of the corners into which they’d stuffed them during their one-and-a-half-day train ride. Mevlut immersed himself in the world he could see beyond the carriage window, even as he thought of the mother and the sisters he was already missing, and had to jump up every so often to chase after the hard-boiled eggs that kept falling out of their bags and rolling into the middle of the carriage.

  The world beyond the train window contained more people, wheat fields, poplars, oxen, bridges, donkeys, houses, mosques, tractors, signs, letters, stars, and transmission towers than Mevlut had seen in the first twelve years of his life. The transmission towers looked as if they were coming straight at him, which sometimes made his head spin until he fell asleep with his head on his father’s shoulder, and woke up to find that the yellow fields and the sunny abundance of wheat had been replaced by purplish rocks all around, so that later, in his dreams, he would see Istanbul as a city built out of these purple rocks.

  Then his eyes would fall upon a green river and green trees, and he would feel his soul changing color. If this world could speak, what would it say? Sometimes, it seemed to Mevlut that the train wasn’t moving at all but that an entire universe was filing past the window. Each time they passed a station, he would get excited and shout the name out to his father—“Hamam…İhsaniye…Döğer…”—and when the thick blue cigarette smoke in the compartment made his eyes water, he went outside to the toilet, stumbling like a drunk before he could force the door open with some difficulty, and watched the railroad tracks and the gravel go by under the toilet hole. The clacking of the train’s wheels could scarcely be heard through the hole. On the way back to his seat, Mevlut would first walk through to the very end of the train, looking into each compartment to observe the traveling multitudes, the women sleeping, the children crying, the people playing cards, eating spiced sausages that made entire compartments smell of garlic, and performing their daily prayers.

  “What are you up to, why are you always going to the toilet?” his father asked. “Is the water running?”

  “It isn’t.”

  Children selling snacks would board the train at some stations, and while eating the wrap his mother had dutifully packed for him, Mevlut would examine the raisins, roasted chickpeas, biscuits, bread, cheese, almonds, and chewing gum these children sold before the train pulled into the next town. Sometimes shepherds would spot the train from afar and run down after it with their dogs, and as the train sped past, these boys would yell for “newspaprrrrsss” with which to roll cigarettes filled with smuggled tobacco, and hearing this Mevlut would feel a strange sense of superiority. When the Istanbul train stopped in the middle of the grasslands, Mevlut would remember just how quiet a place the world really was. In that quiet time, during those waits that felt like they might never end, Mevlut would look out the window to see women picking tomatoes from a small garden of a village house, hens walking along the train tracks, two donkeys scratching each other next to an electric water pump, and, just a bit farther, a bearded man dozing on the heath.

  “When are we going to move?” he asked during one of these interminable stops.

  “Be patient, son, Istanbul isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Oooh, look, we’re moving again!”

  “It’s not us, it’s just the train next to us,” said his father, laughing.

  In the village school that Mevlut had attended for five years, a map of Turkey, with a flag on it and a portrait of Atatürk, used to hang right behind where the teacher stood, and throughout the journey, Mevlut tried to keep track of where they might be on that map. He fell asleep before the train entered Izmit and didn’t wake up again until they arrived in Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa station.

  The many bundles, bags, and baskets they were carrying were so heavy that it took them a full hour to make their way down the stairs of Haydarpaşa train station and catch a ferry to Karaköy. That was the first time Mevlut saw the sea, in the evening twilight. The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep. There was a sweet smell of seaweed in the cool breeze. The European side of the city was sparkling with lights. It wasn’t his first sight of the sea but of these lights that Mevlut would never forget for the rest of his life. Once they got to the other side, the local buses wouldn’t let them on with all their luggage, so they walked for four hours all the way home to the edge of Zincirlikuyu.

  2

  * * *

  Home

  The Hills at the End of the City

  HOME WAS a gecekondu, a slum house. This was the word Mevlut’s father used to refer to this place whenever he got angry about its crudeness and poverty, but on those rare occasions when he wasn’t angry, he preferred to use the word “home
,” with a tenderness akin to what Mevlut felt toward the house. This tenderness fostered the illusion that the place might hold traces of the eternal home that would one day be theirs in this world, but it was difficult to truly believe this. The gecekondu consisted of a single fairly large room. There was also a toilet next to it, which was a hole in the ground. At night, the sound of dogs fighting and howling in distant neighborhoods could be heard through the small unglazed window in the toilet.

  When they arrived that first night, a man and a woman were already in the house, and Mevlut thought for a moment that they’d walked into the wrong building. Eventually it became clear that they were the lodgers Mevlut’s father had taken in for the summer. Mevlut’s father started arguing with them, but then he gave up and made a bed in another dark corner of the room, where father and son ended up sleeping side by side.

  When Mevlut woke up toward noon the next day, there was no one home. He thought of how his father, his uncle, and eventually his cousins, too, had all lived in this house together only recently. Thinking back on the stories Korkut and Süleyman had told him over the summer, Mevlut tried to picture them in this room, but the place felt eerily abandoned. There was an old table, four chairs, two beds (one with bedsprings and one without), two cupboards, two windows, and a stove. After six winters working in this city, this was the extent of his father’s possessions. After arguing with his father last year, Mevlut’s uncle and cousins had moved out to a different house, taking their beds, their furniture, and the rest of their belongings. Mevlut couldn’t find a single thing that had been theirs. Looking inside a cupboard, he was pleased to see one or two things his father had brought over from the village, the woolen socks his mother had knit for him, his long johns, and a pair of scissors—now rusty—that Mevlut had once seen his sisters using back home.