A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

Page 7


  —

  Six years ago and three years after the military coup of 27 May 1960, while Mevlut was back in the village learning how to read and write, his father and his uncle Hasan came to Istanbul to find a job and start earning some money, and they moved into a rented house in Duttepe. Mevlut’s father and uncle lived together there for two years, but when the landlord raised the rent, they left and went across to Kültepe (which was only just beginning to fill up), where they hauled hollow bricks, cement, and sheets of scrap metal to build the house where Mevlut and his father now lived. His father and Uncle Hasan got on very well in those early days in Istanbul. They learned the secrets of the yogurt trade together, and at the beginning—as they would later laughingly recall—these two towering men would go out together on their sales rounds. Eventually, they learned to split up to cover more ground, but in order to prevent either from getting jealous of how much the other brought in, they always pooled their daily earnings. Their natural closeness was also helped by the fact that their wives back in the village were sisters. Mevlut smiled when he recalled how happy his mother and his aunt were whenever they went to the village post office to pick up their money order. In those years, Mevlut’s father and Uncle Hasan used to spend Sundays idling in the parks and teahouses and on the beaches of Istanbul; they would shave twice a week sharing a shaver and razor; and when they came back to the village at the start of summer, they would bring their wives and kids the same presents.

  In 1965, the year they moved into the unregistered house they had built in Kültepe, the two brothers claimed two empty lots, one in Kültepe itself and the other in Duttepe, with the help of Uncle Hasan’s eldest son Korkut, who had just joined them from the village. The 1965 elections were approaching, and there was a sense of leniency in the air, with rumors that the Justice Party would declare an amnesty on unregistered property after the elections, and with this in mind they set out to build a new house on the land in Duttepe.

  In those days, no one in either Duttepe or Kültepe formally held title to their land. The enterprising individual who built a house on an empty lot would plant a few poplars and willow trees and lay the first few bricks of a wall to mark out his property, after which he would go to the neighborhood councilman and pay him something to draw up a document certifying that said individual had built the house in question and planted those trees himself. Just like the genuine title deeds issued by the State Land Registry, these documents included a crude plan of the house, which the councilman himself would draw with a pencil and ruler. He would jot down some additional notations in his childish scrawl—the adjacent plots belonging to this or that person, a nearby fountain, the location of the wall (which in fact might have consisted of no more than a rock or two here and there), and the poplar trees—and if you gave him some extra money, he would add a couple of words to widen the imaginary boundaries of the plot, before finally affixing his seal underneath it all.

  In reality, the land belonged to the national Treasury or to the forestry department, so the documents provided by the councilman did not guarantee ownership at all. A house built on unregistered land could be knocked down by the authorities at any moment. Sleeping for the first time in the homes they’d built with their own hands, people would often have nightmares about this potential disaster. But the value of the councilman’s document would prove itself when the government decided, as it tended to do every decade or so in election years, to issue title deeds for homes built overnight—for these deeds would be handed out in conformity with the documents drawn up by the local councilman. Furthermore, anyone who was able to procure a document from the councilman certifying ownership of a plot of land could then sell that plot to someone else. During periods when the flow of unemployed and homeless immigrants to the city was particularly heavy, the price of these documents would rise, with the increasingly valuable plots quickly split up and parceled out, and the political influence of the councilman, needless to say, also climbing in proportion to the influx of migrants.

  Through all this feverish activity, the authorities could still send the gendarmes to a hastily built home and knock it down whenever they felt like it or found it politically expedient to do so. The key was to finish building the house and start living in it as soon as possible. If a house had occupants, it could not be demolished without a warrant, and this could take a long time to obtain. As soon as they had the chance, anyone who claimed a plot of land on a hill would, provided they had any sense, recruit their friends and family to help them put up four walls overnight and then move in immediately so that the demolition crews couldn’t touch them the next day. Mevlut liked to hear the stories of mothers and their children who had their first night’s sleep in Istanbul with the stars as their blankets and the sky as their ceiling, in homes with no real roof yet, and with even the walls and the windows not yet finished. Legend has it that the term gecekondu—“placed overnight”—was coined by a mason from Erzincan who in one night built about a dozen homes ready for people to move into; when he died at a ripe old age, thousands paid their respects at his grave in Duttepe cemetery.

  The construction project undertaken by Mevlut’s father and uncle had also been inspired by the preelectoral mood of permissiveness, but it was abandoned when that same mood caused a sharp increase in the price of construction materials and scrap metal. Rumors of a coming amnesty on unregistered property had sparked a frenzy of unlicensed building on state-owned land and forests. Even those who’d never before thought about building an illegal home went off to a hill somewhere at the edge of the city and, with the help of the local councilman, bought some land from whatever organization controlled the area (gangs, really, some of which carried sticks, others armed with pistols, and others still with political affiliations) and built homes in the most isolated and absurdly remote locations. As for buildings in the city center, many had floors added on to them around this time without permits. The wide expanses of empty land on which Istanbul was spread quickly turned into one vast construction site. The newspapers of the homeowning bourgeoisie decried the unplanned urban sprawl, while the rest of the city basked in the joy of home building. The small factories that produced the substandard hollow bricks used to build the gecekondu homes, and the shops that sold other construction materials, were all working overtime, and you could see horse carts, vans, and minibuses carrying bricks, cement, sand, timber, metal, and glass around the dusty neighborhood roads and up the hill paths at all hours of the day, gleefully ringing their bells and blowing their horns. “I hammered away for days to build your uncle Hasan’s house,” Mevlut’s father would say to him whenever there was a religious holiday and father and son went to Duttepe to visit their relatives. “I just want to be sure you remember that. Not that I would want you to make enemies of your uncle and your cousins.”

  —

  Süleyman. That’s not true: Mevlut knows that the real reason why construction on the Kültepe house had to stop was that Uncle Mustafa kept sending all the money he made in Istanbul back to the village. As for what happened last year, my brother and I really wanted to work with Uncle Mustafa on the house, but my father understandably had had enough of my uncle’s mood swings, of his constantly picking fights and treating his own nephews so badly.

  —

  Mevlut would become very upset whenever his father told him that his cousins Korkut and Süleyman “would stab him in the back one day.” He couldn’t even enjoy going to see the Aktaş family for holidays and other special occasions, like the day the Duttepe football team made its debut or when the Vural family invited everyone to celebrate the construction of the mosque. He’d always relished those visits because he knew his aunt Safiye would feed him pastries, that he would get to see Süleyman and catch a glimpse of Korkut, and of course he’d enjoy the comforts of a clean and tidy home. At the same time he dreaded those barbed exchanges between his father and his uncle Hasan, which always filled him with a sense of impending doom.

  The first few tim
es they went to visit the Aktaş family, Mevlut’s father would take a good long look at the windows of the three-room house, and declare “this bit should have been painted green, the wall on that side needs replastering,” to remind Mevlut of the injustice they’d suffered and to ensure that everyone knew of the claim that Mustafa Efendi and his son Mevlut had on this house.

  Later, Mevlut would overhear his father telling Uncle Hasan: “As soon as you get hold of some money, you’ll sink it all into some swamp or something!” “What, like this one?” his uncle Hasan would reply. “They’re already offering me one and a half times the initial value, but I won’t sell.” Instead of gently fizzling out, these arguments would typically escalate. Before Mevlut even got a chance to eat his stewed fruit and orange after dinner, his father would rise from the table and take hold of his hand, saying: “Come on, son, we’re leaving!” Once they were out in the dark night, he would add: “Didn’t I say that we shouldn’t have come at all? That’s it, we’re never coming again.”

  On the way back from Uncle Hasan’s in Duttepe to their own place in Kültepe, Mevlut would see the city lights sparkling from afar, the velvety night, and the neon lamps of Istanbul. Sometimes, as he walked with his little hand in his father’s bigger one, a single star in the starry dark blue sky would catch Mevlut’s eye, and even as his father kept grumbling and muttering to himself, Mevlut imagined that they were walking toward it. Sometimes, you couldn’t see the city at all, but the pale orange-hued lights from the tens of thousands of tiny homes in the surrounding hills made the now-familiar landscape more resplendent than it really was. And sometimes, the lights from the nearby hills would disappear in the mist, and from within the thickening fog, Mevlut would hear the sound of dogs barking.

  4

  * * *

  Mevlut Begins to Work as a Street Vendor

  It’s Not Your Job to Act Superior

  I’M SHAVING in honor of your first day of work, my boy,” his father said one morning just as Mevlut was waking up. “Lesson one: if you’re selling yogurt, and especially if you’re selling boza, you need to look neat. Some customers will look at your hands and your fingernails. Some of them will look at your shoes, trousers, and shirt. If you’re going inside a house, take your shoes off immediately, and make sure your socks don’t have holes in them and your feet don’t smell. But you’re a good lad, you’ve got a kind heart, and you always smell all nice and clean, don’t you?”

  By clumsily imitating his father, Mevlut soon worked out how to hang yogurt trays on opposite ends of his pole so that the two sides balanced, how to slide slats between the trays to keep them separate, and how to cover each stack with a wooden lid.

  The yogurt did not seem so heavy at first, because his father had taken some of his load, but as they advanced on the dirt road linking Kültepe to the city, Mevlut realized that a yogurt seller was essentially a porter. They would walk for half an hour along the dusty way full of trucks, horse carts, and buses. When they reached the paved road, he would concentrate on reading billboards, the headlines on newspapers displayed in grocery stores, and signs affixed to utility poles advertising circumcision services and cram schools. As they advanced farther into the city, they would see old wooden mansions that hadn’t yet burned down, military barracks dating back to the Ottoman era, dented shared taxis decorated with checkered livery, minivans blowing their musical horns and raising a cloud of dust in their wake, columns of soldiers marching by, kids playing football on the cobblestones, mothers pushing baby carriages, shopwindows teeming with shoes and boots in all colors, and policemen angrily blowing their whistles as they directed the traffic with their oversize white gloves.

  Some cars, like the 1956 Dodge with its enormous and perfectly circular headlights, looked like old men staring with their eyes wide open; the radiator grille on the 1957 Plymouth suggested a man with his thick upper lip topped by a handlebar mustache; other cars (the 1961 Opel Rekord, for instance) looked like spiteful women whose mouths had turned to stone in the middle of an evil cackle, so that now you could see their countless tiny teeth. Mevlut likened the long-nosed trucks to big wolf dogs, and the Skoda-model public-transport buses, which huffed and puffed as they went, to bears walking on all fours.

  There were enormous billboards that took up one whole side of a six- or seven-story building with images of beautiful women using Tamek tomato ketchup or Lux soap; the women, like those in European movies or in Mevlut’s schoolbooks, did not wear headscarves, and they would smile down at him until his father turned away from the square and into a shaded lane on the right, calling, “Yogurt sellerrr.” In the narrow street, Mevlut felt as if everyone was watching them. His father would call out again without ever slowing his pace, swinging his bell along the way (and though he never turned to look at his son, Mevlut could tell from his father’s determined expression that he was nonetheless thinking of him), and soon a window would open somewhere on an upper story. “Over here, yogurt seller, come on upstairs,” a man or a middle-aged lady in a headscarf would call out. Father and son would go inside and make their way up the stairs, through the vapors of frying oil, until they reached the door.

  Mevlut became attuned to the lives in the thousands of kitchens he would see during his career as a street vendor, of the countless housewives, middle-aged women, children, little old ladies, grandpas, pensioners, housekeepers, the adopted and the orphaned that he would meet:

  “Welcome, Mustafa Efendi, half a kilo right here, please.” “Ah, Mustafa Efendi! We’ve missed you! What have you been up to in that village all summer?” “Your yogurt better not be sour, yogurt seller. Go on then, put some in here. Your scales are honest, aren’t they?” “Who’s this beautiful boy, Mustafa Efendi, is it your son? God bless him!” “Oh dear, yogurt seller, I think they must have called you upstairs by mistake, we’ve got some yogurt from the shop already, there’s a huge bowl of it in the fridge.” “No one’s home, please make a note and we’ll pay you next time.” “No cream, Mustafa Efendi, the kids don’t like it.” “Mustafa, once my youngest daughter is all grown up, shall we marry her off to your boy here?” “What’s the holdup, yogurt seller? It’s taken you all day to climb two flights of stairs.” “Are you going to put it in the bowl, yogurt seller, or shall I give you this plate?” “It was cheaper the other day, yogurt seller…” “The building manager says street vendors aren’t allowed on the elevator, yogurt seller. Got it?” “Where do you get your yogurt from?” “Mustafa Efendi, make sure you pull the door shut behind you as you leave the building, our doorman’s run off.” “Mustafa Efendi, you will not drag this boy around on the streets with you like a porter, you will send him to school, okay? Otherwise I’m not buying your yogurt anymore.” “Yogurt seller, please drop off half a kilo every two days. Just send the boy upstairs.” “Don’t be scared, son, the dog doesn’t bite. All he wants is to have a sniff, see, he likes you.” “Have a seat, Mustafa, the wife and kids are out, no one’s home, there’s some rice with tomato sauce, I’ll heat it up for you if you’d like?” “Yogurt seller, we could barely hear you over the radio, shout a little louder next time when you go past, okay?” “These shoes don’t fit my boy anymore. Try them on, son.” “Mustafa Efendi, don’t let this boy grow up like an orphan. Bring his mother over from the village to look after you both.”

  —

  Mustafa Efendi. “God bless you, ma’am,” I’d say on my way out of the house, bowing all the way to the floor. “May God bless all that you touch, sister,” I would say so that Mevlut would learn that if you want to survive in this jungle, you have to make certain compromises, so that he would understand that if you want to be rich, you must be prepared to grovel. “Thank you, sir,” I would say with an elaborate show of obeisance. “Mevlut will wear these gloves all through winter. May God bless you. Go on, son, kiss the man’s hand…” But Mevlut wouldn’t kiss it; he would just stare straight ahead. Once we were back out in the street, I’d tell him “Look, son, you mustn’t be proud, you mustn
’t turn your nose up at a bowl of soup or a pair of socks. This is our reward for the service we provide. We bring the world’s best yogurt all the way to their doorstep. And they give us something in return. That’s all it is.” A month would pass, and this time he might start sulking because a nice lady tried to give him a woolen skullcap, until, fearing my reaction, he would make as if to kiss her hand, only to be unable at the last moment to make himself do it. “Now listen here, it’s not your job to act superior,” I’d say. “When I tell you to kiss the customer’s hand, you have to kiss the customer’s hand. This one’s not just any old customer, she’s a kindly old lady. Not everyone is as nice as she is. There’s scum in this city who will buy yogurt on credit, then move houses without warning and just disappear without paying up. If you act all haughty when a good person tries to show you some kindness, you will never be rich. You should see how your uncle sucks up to Hadji Hamit Vural. Don’t let rich people make you feel ashamed. The only difference between us and them is that they got to Istanbul first and started making money before we did.”

  —

  Every weekday between five past eight in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon, Mevlut was at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School. When the last bell rang, he’d run off to join his father on the yogurt rounds, emerging through the crowd of street vendors amassed outside the school gates and the boys who’d been unable to settle their scores inside the classrooms and were now taking their blazers off for a fistfight. Mevlut would drop off his schoolbag full of books and notebooks at Fidan Restaurant, where his father was waiting for him, and the two would head out to sell yogurt side by side until dusk.