A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

Page 6


  The house had a dirt floor. Mevlut saw that, before leaving for the day, his father had laid out one of the straw mats they had carried from the village. His uncle and cousins must have taken the old one with them when they left last year.

  The rough old table on which his father had left a fresh loaf of bread that morning was of hardwood and plywood both. Mevlut would put empty matchboxes and wooden shims under its one short leg to keep it steady, but every now and then the table would wobble, spilling soup or tea over them and making his father angry. He got angry about lots of things. Many times during the years they would spend together in this house after 1969 his father vowed to “fix the table,” but he never did.

  Even when they were in a rush, sitting down and having dinner with his father in the evening made Mevlut happy, especially during his first few years in Istanbul. But because they soon had to go out to sell boza—either his father on his own or with Mevlut by his side—these dinners were nowhere near as fun as the lively, joyful meals they used to have back in the village, sitting on the floor, with his sisters and his mother. In his father’s gestures, Mevlut could always sense an eagerness to get to work as soon as possible. No sooner had he swallowed his last morsel than Mustafa Efendi would light up a cigarette, and before even half finishing it, he would say, “Let’s go.”

  When he got back from school and before setting out again to sell boza, Mevlut liked to make soup, either on the stove or, if it wasn’t lit, on their little butane cooktop. Into a pot of boiling water, he would throw a spoonful of margarine and whatever was left in the fridge, such as carrots, celery, and potatoes, as well as a handful of the chilies and bulgur they’d brought from the village, and then he would stand back and listen to the pot bubbling away as he watched the infernal tumult inside. The little bits of potato and carrot whirled around madly like creatures burning in the fires of hell—you could almost hear them wailing in agony from inside the pot—and then there would be sudden unexpected surges, as in volcanic craters, and the carrots and celery would rise up close to Mevlut’s nose. He loved watching the potatoes turn yellow as they cooked and the carrots give their color off to the soup, and listening to the changing sounds the soup made as it bubbled away. He likened the ceaseless motion in the pot to the orbits of the planets, which he had learned about in geography class at his new school, the Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, and this made him think that he, too, was spinning around in this universe, just like these little particles in the soup. The hot steam from the pot smelled good, and it was nice to warm himself over it.

  “The soup is delicious, my boy!” his father said every time. “I wonder if we should make you a cook’s apprentice?” On evenings when he didn’t go out to sell boza with his father but stayed at home to do his homework, as soon as his father had gone Mevlut would clear the table, take out his geography textbook, and start to memorize all of the city and country names, getting lost in sleepy daydreams as he looked at pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Buddhist temples in China. On days when he went to school in the morning and helped his father carry around the heavy yogurt trays in the afternoon, he collapsed on the bed and fell asleep as soon as they’d had their dinner. His father would wake him before going out again.

  “Put your pajamas on and get under the blanket before you go to sleep, son. Otherwise you’ll freeze when the stove goes off.”

  “Wait for me, Dad, I’m coming, too,” Mevlut would say without really waking up, as if talking in his sleep.

  When he was left alone in the house at night, and set his mind to his geography homework, try as he might Mevlut could never ignore altogether the noise of the wind howling through the window, the relentless scurrying about of mice and of imps, the sounds outside of footsteps and of wailing dogs. These city dogs were more restless, more desperate, than the dogs back in the village. There were frequent power cuts so Mevlut couldn’t even do his homework, and in the darkness the flames and the crackling from the stove seemed bigger and louder, and he became convinced that there was an eye watching him closely from the shadows in a corner of the room. If he took his eyes off his geography book, the owner of the eye would realize that Mevlut had seen it and would certainly pounce on him, so there were times when Mevlut couldn’t even bring himself to get up and go to bed, and slept with his head resting on his books.

  “Why didn’t you turn off the stove and get into bed, son?” his father would say when he came back in the middle of the night feeling tired and irritable.

  The streets were freezing cold, so his father didn’t mind that the house was warm, but at the same time he didn’t like to see so much wood used up in the stove. As he was reluctant to admit to this, he would say, at most, “Turn off the stove if you’re going to sleep.”

  His father either got their firewood from Uncle Hasan’s little shop or else chopped it himself with a neighbor’s ax. Before winter arrived, Mevlut’s father taught him how to light the stove using dry twigs and bits of newspaper, and where to find these sticks and scraps in the nearby hills.

  In the first months after they’d arrived in the city, on returning from his yogurt rounds, Mevlut’s father would take him farther up Kültepe, the hill on which they lived. Their house was at the edge of the city, on the lower part of a balding, muddy hill dotted with mulberry trees, and with a fig tree here and there. At the bottom, the hill was bound by traces of a narrow little creek, which wended its way around and through the other hills, from Ortaköy to the Bosphorus. The women of the families who had migrated here in the midfifties from impoverished villages around Ordu, Gümüşhane, Kastamonu, and Erzincan used to grow corn and wash their laundry all along the creek, just as they had done back home, and in summer their children would swim in its shallow waters. Back then, the creek was known by its old Ottoman name Buzludere, “Icy Creek,” but the waste generated over fifteen years by more than eighty thousand Anatolian migrant settlers on the surrounding hills, and by a multitude of factories, small and large, soon caused the river to be known as Bokludere, “Dung Creek.” By the time Mevlut arrived in Istanbul, neither name was used anymore, as the river had long been forgotten, absorbed by the growing city and mostly buried under layers of concrete from its source to its mouth.

  At the top of Kültepe, “Ash Hill,” Mevlut’s father showed him the remains of an old waste-incineration plant whose ashes had given the hill its name. From here, you could see the slums that were rapidly taking over the surrounding hills (Duttepe, Kuştepe, Esentepe, Gültepe, Harmantepe, Seyrantepe, Oktepe, et cetera), the city’s biggest cemetery (Zincirlikuyu), factories of all shapes and sizes, garages, workshops, depots, medicine and lightbulb manufacturers, and, in the distance, the ghostly silhouette of the city with its tall buildings and its minarets. The city itself and its neighborhoods—where Mevlut and his father sold yogurt in the mornings and boza in the evenings, and where Mevlut went to school—were only mysterious smudges on the horizon.

  Farther out still, you could see the blue hills on the Asian side of the city. The Bosphorus was nestled between these hills, and although invisible from Kültepe, whenever Mevlut climbed up the hill during his first months in the city, he always thought he could glimpse its blue waters between the mountains. Atop each hill that sloped down to the sea was one of those enormous transmission towers carrying a key power line into the city. The wind made strange noises when it blew against these gigantic steel constructions, and on humid days, the buzz of the cables scared Mevlut and his friends. On the barbed wire surrounding the tower was a picture of a skull warning DANGER OF DEATH, the sign pockmarked with bullet holes.

  When he first used to come up here to gather sticks and paper, Mevlut would look out at the view below and assume that the danger came not from the electricity but from the city itself. People said that it was forbidden and bad luck to get too close to the enormous towers, but most of the neighborhood got its electricity from illicit cables expertly hooked into this main line.

  —

  Mustaf
a Efendi. So that he would understand the hardship we’ve endured, I told my son how all the hills around here, except for ours and Duttepe, still lacked power. I told him that when his uncle and I first came here six years ago, there was no electricity anywhere, no water supply or any sewage drains either. I showed him those places on the other hills where Ottoman sultans used to hunt and where soldiers took their target practice, the greenhouses where the Albanians grew strawberries and flowers, the dairy farm run by those who lived in Kâğıthane, and the white graveyard, where the bodies of soldiers who died in the typhus epidemic during the Balkan War of 1912 were covered with lime; I told him just so he wouldn’t be fooled by the bright lights of Istanbul into thinking that life was somehow easy. I didn’t want to crush his spirit entirely, though, so I also showed him the Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, where we would soon have him enrolled, the dirt field laid out for the Duttepe football team, the Derya Cinema with its feeble projector, which had just opened this summer among the mulberry trees, and the site of the Duttepe Mosque, which had been under construction for four years now, sponsored by the baker and contractor Hadji Hamit Vural and his men, all from Rize, with their matching oversize chins to prove it. On the slopes to the right of the mosque, I pointed out the house his uncle Hasan had finished building last year on the plot we had marked out together four years ago with a wall of whitewashed stones. “When your uncle and I arrived here six years ago, all of these hills were empty!” I said. I explained that for the poor souls who’d come here from far away the priority was to find a job and settle down in the city, and in order to get to the city ahead of everyone else in the mornings, they all tried to build their homes as close as possible to the roads at the foot of the hills, so that you could almost see the neighborhoods growing from the bottom of each hill toward the top.

  3

  * * *

  The Enterprising Individual Who Builds a House on Empty Land

  Oh, My Boy, Istanbul Is a Little Scary, Isn’t It?

  LYING IN BED at night during his first months in Istanbul, Mevlut would listen closely to the sounds of the city drifting in from afar. He would wake up with a start on some quiet nights to the faint sound of dogs barking in the distance, and when he realized that his father wasn’t back yet, he would bury his head under the blanket and try to go back to sleep. When it seemed that Mevlut’s nighttime fear of dogs was getting out of hand, his father took him to a holy man in a wooden house in Kasımpaşa who said a few prayers and breathed a blessing over Mevlut. Mevlut would remember it all many years later.

  He discovered in a dream one night that the vice principal of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, the so-called Skeleton, looked just like the skull on the DANGER OF DEATH sign on the electric transmission tower. (Mevlut and his father had met Skeleton when they had gone to present Mevlut’s primary-school certificate from the village so that they could enroll him.) Mevlut didn’t dare look up from his math homework lest he should come face-to-face with the demon that he believed was always watching him from the darkness outside the window. That was why sometimes, when he wanted to go to sleep, he couldn’t even work up the courage to get up and go to bed.

  Mevlut got to know Kültepe, Duttepe, and the neighborhoods of the surrounding hills through Süleyman, who had become very famil iar with the whole area in the year he’d already spent there. Mevlut saw many gecekondu homes, some of whose foundations had only just been laid, some with the walls only half built, and others awaiting the finishing touches. Most of them were occupied by men only. The majority of those who had come to Kültepe and Duttepe from Konya, Kastamonu, and Gümüşhane these past five years had either left their wives and children behind, as Mevlut’s father had done, or were single men with no prospects for marriage, no gainful employment, or any property whatsoever back in their village. They left their doors open sometimes, and Mevlut would see as many as six or seven single men in one room, all sleeping like logs, and in those moments he could really feel the sullen presence of the dogs that lurked about. The dogs must have been able to detect the thick smell of stale breath, sweat, and sleeping bodies. Unmarried men were aggressive, unfriendly, and always scowling, so Mevlut was mostly afraid of them.

  On the main road in the center of Duttepe down below, where bus routes would one day terminate, there was a grocer whom Mevlut’s father called a swindler; a shop that sold sacks of cement, used car doors, old tiles, stovepipes, scraps of tin, and plastic tarpaulins; and a coffeehouse where unemployed men loitered all day. Uncle Hasan also had a little shop in the middle of the road that led up the hill. In his free time, Mevlut used to go there and make paper bags out of old newspapers with his cousins Korkut and Süleyman.

  —

  Süleyman. Mevlut wasted a year back in the village because of my uncle Mustafa’s temper, so he ended up in the year behind me at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School. When he first arrived in Istanbul my cousin was a fish out of water, and whenever I saw him standing all alone in the school yard during recess, I made sure to keep him company. We are all very fond of Mevlut and don’t let his father’s behavior affect how we treat him. One night before the start of the school year they came to our house in Duttepe. As soon as he saw my mother, Mevlut gave her a hug that showed how much he missed his own mother and his sisters.

  “Oh, my boy, Istanbul is a little scary, isn’t it?” said my mom, hug ging him back. “But don’t be afraid, we’re always here for you, see?” She kissed his hair as his own mother used to do. “Now tell me, am I going to be your Safiye Yenge here in Istanbul, or will it be Safiye Teyze?”

  My mom was both Mevlut’s uncle’s wife—his yenge—and his mother’s older sister, his teyze. During the summer, when Mevlut was likely to be influenced by our fathers’ constant bickering, he tended to call her Yenge, but during winter, when Uncle Mustafa was in Istanbul, Mevlut called my mom Teyze with all the sweetness and charm he had in common with his mother and sisters.

  “You’re always Teyze to me,” said Mevlut now, with feeling.

  “Your father won’t like that!” said my mom.

  “Safiye, please look after him as much as you can,” said Uncle Mustafa. “He’s like an orphan here, he cries every night.”

  Mevlut was embarrassed.

  “We’re sending him to school,” Uncle Mustafa went on. “But it’s a bit pricey, what with all the textbooks and exercise books and so on. And he needs a blazer.”

  “What’s your school number?” asked my brother Korkut.

  “Ten nineteen.”

  My brother went to the next room to rummage in the trunk and brought back the old school blazer we had both used in the past. He beat the dust off and smoothed down the creases and helped Mevlut into it like a tailor waiting on a customer.

  “It really suits you, ten nineteen,” said Korkut.

  “I’ll say! No need at all for a new blazer, I think,” said Uncle Mustafa.

  “It’s a bit big for you, but it’s better that way,” said Korkut. “A tight blazer can give you trouble during a fight.”

  “Mevlut isn’t going to school to get into fights,” said Uncle Mustafa.

  “If he can help it,” said Korkut. “Sometimes you get these donkey-faced monsters for teachers who pick on you so much that it’s hard to stop yourself.”

  —

  Korkut. I didn’t like the way Uncle Mustafa said “Mevlut doesn’t get into fights”; I could tell he was patronizing me. I stopped going to school three years ago, back when Uncle Mustafa and my father were still living in the house they built together in Kültepe. On one of my last days of school, to make sure I would never be tempted to go back, I gave that donkey-faced show-off of a chemistry teacher Fevzi the lesson he deserved: two slaps and three punches in front of the entire class. He had it coming ever since the year before when he asked me what Pb2(SO4) was, and I said, “Pebbles,” and he started mocking me, as if he could bring me down in front of everyone; he also made me fail the year for no reason. It may well have “Ata
türk” in the name, but I have no respect for a school where you can go to class and beat your teacher up at will.

  —

  Süleyman. “The blazer’s got a hole in the lining of the left pocket, but don’t get it sewn up,” I told a bewildered Mevlut. “You can hide cheat notes in there,” I said. “This blazer wasn’t of much benefit in school, but it really comes in handy when you’re out selling boza in the evenings. No one can resist a boy out on the cold streets at night in his school uniform. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still a schoolboy, son?’ they say, and then they start stuffing your pockets with chocolates, woolen socks, and money. When you get home, all you have to do is turn your pockets inside out, and it’s all yours. Whatever you do, make sure you don’t tell them you’ve left school. Tell them you want to be a doctor.”

  “Mevlut isn’t going to leave school anyway!” said his father. “He really is going to be a doctor. Aren’t you?”

  —

  Mevlut realized that their kindness was tinged with pity, and he couldn’t fully enjoy its fruits. The house in Duttepe, into which his uncle’s family had moved last year, having built it with the help of his father, was a lot cleaner and brighter than the gecekondu Mevlut and his father occupied in Kültepe. His aunt and uncle, who used to eat on the floor back in the village, now sat at a table covered with a flowery plastic tablecloth. Their floor was not of dirt; it was of cement. The house smelled of cologne, and the clean, ironed curtains made Mevlut wish he belonged there. They already had three rooms, and Mevlut could tell that the Aktaş family, who had sold everything they had in the village—including their cattle, their house, and their garden—would live a happy life here, an outcome, Mevlut felt ashamed and resentful to admit, his father hadn’t yet managed, nor even seemed inclined to try for.

  —

  Mustafa Efendi. I know you go to see your uncle’s family in secret, I would tell Mevlut, you go to your uncle Hasan’s shop to fold up newspapers, you sit and eat at their table, you play with Süleyman, but don’t forget that they cheated us, I would warn him. It is a terrible feeling for a man to know that his son would rather be in the company of the crooks who tried to trick his father and take what was rightfully his! And don’t get so agitated about that blazer. It’s yours by rights! Don’t you ever forget that if you stay close to the same people who so shamelessly grabbed the land your father helped them claim, they will lose all respect for you, do you understand, Mevlut?