He remembered his first visit to Istanbul. There had been many more visits after that, he said. One could not help falling in love with the city. He had the feeling of walking through history, through entire empires and civilizations. Several people in the audience nodded vigorously, eagerly affirming the impression of their own visits.
This was a time when Istanbul’s name was popular around the world. Much was made of its diversity, the so-called meeting point of two worlds. All of a sudden, there were books upon books about Istanbul, its sad and glorious past—in these books, it seemed, Istanbul was always sad and glorious, as if the city had done nothing but decay from an unseen splendor. Even Turkish writers had begun to discover their own city with fresh eyes. That period has mostly ended, by now. Those were better times.
“How about you?” the host finally asked M. “How do you step beyond the mythical to the real city? I guess my question is, do you ever manage to do so?”
M. was silent for a moment.
“I don’t want to be trite,” he said. “It can sound that way when I try to articulate it.”
“Alright,” the host said. “So, you don’t want to articulate your view of the city. What else can you tell us?”
There was laughter among the audience. M. smiled and turned to a page he had marked. He looked at it for a while.
“Actually,” he said, “I think I’ll read something else.”
He flipped through the novel back and forth and finally read a short scene set in Moda. I remembered this scene well, about the rocky beach, and the strange evening colors of the sky.
At the end of the talk, the famous author was flocked by the audience members.
I followed M. to the back of the shop where he was talking to two elderly men about the occupation years in Istanbul. In my bag, I had two of his novels and I was waiting for the right moment to approach him. But when his conversation eventually ended, I changed my mind and pretended to browse the shelves.
It must be an illusion common to all readers who’ve loved a book that they are destined to be good friends with its author; that they alone understand this person and share a special bond. I knew this and still, I did not want to have the short and disappointing conversation when M. would greet me cordially, thank me for coming, and sign my book. I would tell him my full name, so that he would notice it was Turkish, unlike the ambiguous Nunu. Perhaps he would ask me a question or two, before adding a warm greeting. To Nurunisa, with friendship.
That year in Istanbul, I had read passages from M.’s novels to my mother. One passage, I remember, was a description of cypresses. This was another one of M.’s indulgences in writing, when he looked away from his lonely character to describe trees, as if he were painting them one by one.
“All these foreigners think Istanbul is full of cypresses,” my mother said when I put the book down. “I wonder if this man ever set foot in the city.”
I told her he had lived in Istanbul while writing the novel.
“Then he must be blind,” she said.
I assumed my mother discredited the cypresses’ reputation simply because she did not like them. When we drove to visit my grandparents in Aldere, the cypress trees around the Edirnekapı Cemetery, where my father was buried, approached like dark clouds. My mother would drive without speaking until they disappeared behind us.
14.
After my father’s death, my mother sent me for a month to stay with my grandparents—her parents—in Aldere, a Thracian town some hours away from Istanbul. I was seven years old and I spent most of that time in the kitchen with my grandmother before going to school for a few hours in the afternoon. While my grandmother cooked, I lay on my back on the wooden divan, one leg crossed over the other, identifying the constellations of cracks on the ceiling. My grandmother sang along to the songs on the radio and I sang along in my head.
She asked me every day what I would like for lunch and I told her spinach pastries, baklava, toast with sour cherry jam, coffee with milk and honey. If she was making dumplings, she gave me dough to play with. If she was frying potatoes, she made stamps shaped like diamonds that I pressed into paint and printed on starched white cloths.
One evening after dinner, we sat in the garden with the town doctor and his wife, who arrived with a bag of toys that belonged to their grandchildren. That month, I was allowed to sit with the adults late into the night. I sorted through the bag, examining the neon-colored bears and kittens, and I was filled with loneliness looking at these animals that were another child’s friends. I thought they were looking at me with pity and that they wanted to be free of me, so they could go back to the other child.
“As surely as the seasons,” I heard one of the adults say. “He wasn’t the same. He changed as surely as the seasons.”
“Your heart breaks.”
“But there was nothing to do. He could hardly . . .”
“Like an infant.”
“It’s even a relief, God forgive me.”
“It wore her out, of course.”
I was listening to the conversation as if in a dream, drifting along with the words. From time to time one of the adults would look in my direction and they would all begin to whisper, but after some time their voices would rise again like a tide.
“Good for nothing,” my grandfather said suddenly, and he brought down his spoon on the table so loudly that we were all startled.
For many years, I pulled the words out and examined them, trying to focus very hard.
15.
These days, all anyone in Istanbul can talk about is the change. It’s happening at great speed. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a change, but an unraveling. Something we were blind to until now.
There are demolitions, demonstrations, marches. There are those who disappear; who don’t get to tell their story. And there is that constant, maddening hum of the city that drowns it all out, so that we lose track of all that’s twisting, turning, disappearing, and appearing anew under the title of a new villain.
It’s impossible to tell at this moment how any of this will settle. For the time being, we’re waiting. Everyone has their opinion, of course, and each opinion is as fearful as the other.
But I want to record one thing, in the midst of everything: the old establishments—shops, restaurants, teahouses, and patisseries known to us by name, as the city’s landmarks—are closing one by one. Their buildings are torn down to be replaced with others; brand-new signs take the place of their worn-out names, which we never bothered to look at, as familiar they were to us as our own names.
And there are the cinemas, of course, and the theaters—Emek Sineması, Lale Sineması, Şan Tiyatrosu.
When my parents were at university, the aunts told me, my father would wait for my mother at the Kanlıca plaza to take her to the Emek Cinema. Those must have been the years of the Godfather movies, but that’s my own guess. I imagine they would arrive at the Kabataş port, and walk the back streets of Tarlabaşı, not minding the catcalls of cross-dressers lining the sidewalks, mustachioed men patrolling the steep streets, the neon light seeping out of brothels, coffeehouses bustling with neighborhood drama.
And who knows, the two of them might have bought chestnuts when they finally emerged onto İstiklal Street.
“He would drop from the sky,” the aunts said, telling the story of my father waiting at the plaza with his notebook until my mother came down.
“That’s how he did it. He just waited around until she gave in.”
It would snow and it would rain and my father continued to wait, bent over his notebook. This was a different story of my father’s strange ways, when they could still be contained in anecdotes.
“That poor boy,” Saniye sometimes said. And with those words, my father would change. His strange ways, once so innocent, would suddenly take on new meaning.
* * *
—
> Istanbul was once an innocent place, with all its trustworthy names. But those names are mostly gone.
There is a fear of time passing. And everywhere the signs of age are eradicated.
16.
Another one of Luke’s theories was that every relationship consisting of two people had a third leg. In the time that we lived together, his theories would sweep our life like a flood, washing everything in their colors.
Luke showed me, moving his fingers along invisible planes, how the unstable structure looked with two and three foundations. I thought that he was talking about the two of us (and that our third point of support was the stories we told each other about our families), but he continued with his theory: that my mother had recruited me as the third point of support in her relationship with my father.
We were sitting on our bed, covered with a paisley quilt. It was a dark place, that room, like a den, or the inside of someone’s head.
“Your mother needed you to be on her side,” he said. “She took you away from him because you were compassionate. But the moment you stopped participating . . . ,” he said.
He leaned over to hold my hand.
* * *
—
At the time, I didn’t know what sort of damage could be caused with words. I didn’t know, either, what would be lost.
17.
When my mother and I moved from Moda to the new apartment, we started playing the silence game. We started it right after I came back from my grandparents’ in Aldere.
I had imagined that when I was back and the two of us were finally alone, my mother would explain what had happened to us. I continued to wait for her explanation for years, even as I established the rules of our shared silence.
I would come home from school and slide the key into the lock, turning it with care. Inside, I unstrapped my shoes, slowly, like pulling at cloth stuck to a scar. I followed the trail of rugs to my room and changed out of my school clothes. I would either sit down to do my homework, or lie on my bed reading a book, listening to my mother’s sounds in the apartment.
My mother would be at her desk or in the kitchen making dinner. After I went to my room, I heard the sound of water from the shower, and I gave myself several points in the game. When there was no danger of my mother hearing me, I would take things out of my schoolbag, or go to the kitchen for a snack. There would always be something for me on the table—a plate of fruits, peeled and sliced, or a glass of milk and walnut cookies.
Once she was out of the shower, my mother called to me from her bedroom, asking why I hadn’t come in to say hello.
“Just a minute, Nejla,” I called back, to give her some more time alone.
After breakfast on Saturdays, if my mother brought her book to read at the table without clearing the dishes, I would say that I just needed to get something from my room and would slip out. The trick was to ease her into our routine, without her having to tell me. Otherwise the game would be over.
As far as I can remember, it had happened only once or twice that I lost so suddenly, when my mother asked me directly if I would please leave her alone.
On good days, when I collected points smoothly, the breakfast dishes remained on the table, and I left them there just as my mother had. If she saw or heard me around the house, she would come and talk to me, or ask if I was hungry. She asked kindly, like an apology. When this happened, I lost several points.
I told my mother I was working on something in my room and had to get back to it. In this game, I was the one who needed solitude.
“I hope you won’t want to be all by yourself tomorrow,” my mother said. “It’s the day for our walk.”
Such statements from my mother, when she played along, won me double points.
If we passed a whole day in silence in our separate rooms, I announced myself the winner and waited for my reward in the evenings, when my mother came to the doorway.
“Nunu, Nunito, Nukotiniko.”
* * *
—
During those days when I collected points with each passing hour, I built my paper city. I had a stack of my mother’s newspapers—the small-print, leftist Cumhuriyet I used for building walls; the colorful Hürriyet, full of shocking stories about centenarians and talking animals, I used to construct telephone poles; and the thick black letters of Milliyet I used to pave my labyrinthine streets. The city twisted and turned around itself, with courtyards and dead ends that I alone could see from my godly vantage point but that were invisible to the people walking its streets.
My city did not resemble Istanbul, except that it had two shores, separated by bridges. The boardwalk was dotted with benches that I populated with my paper citizens, letting them watch the city of which they knew so little. Sometimes, feeling sorry for their pathetic vision, I granted them entry into a courtyard, or took them on a walk around my mazelike neighborhoods. Or I walked them along the train tracks I had built without destination.
My favorite citizens were the unfortunate clay and newspaper amputees whose arms and legs had come off, whose small heads and smudged newspaper faces saddened me. For them, I organized special walking tours—with red pieces of thread around their waists—when I gave them powers to walk vertically, defying gravity, while all the others watched, collected at the boardwalk. With my help, these quiet people, who had never complained to me of their amputated states, pattered up bridges and telephone poles, twirling with joy when they reached the highest points.
The headlines of my childhood were all folded inside the paper city. The northern side was built with the names of army generals, the IRA, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, PKK. To the south, my construction of an amusement park coincided with the building of the dam in Southeast Anatolia. The words that confused me, that seemed to have a life of their own—inflation, coalition, constitution—were neatly rolled up to serve as pipes and chimneys for buildings. I reconstructed the city frequently, rebuilding courtyards and opening up dead ends, adding current news on top of older news.
One afternoon, as I was laying down the foundations for a new district, I saw a story about a group of young girls in an eastern village who had committed suicide. At first, I did not read the entire headline, but saw only the word, as if it had reached out from the paper and struck me across the face. I was so startled that I turned the paper around. I had never seen this word in writing; I was only aware that it hovered above, its name barely uttered. Only one time in Aldere, and once when the aunts were talking to a neighbor woman. Spoken in a strange whisper that I wondered whether I had heard correctly.
I got up and closed the door to my room.
The newspaper wrote that this, this word, was the girls’ only relief in their oppressive lives. Still, I didn’t really understand the story. I couldn’t make sense of the threat that faced the girls, nor did I know why the newspaper wrote that they had escaped to their freedom, as if they had triumphed.
I folded up the page several times and used it to pave the narrow road that led from my city’s busiest neighborhood to the outskirts, where I built a walled-off garden. Over time, I decided to repave the road, and covered it with a densely scripted page from Cumhuriyet.
My own house was inside this garden, and the bright tubes of newspaper coupons were the trees I saw from my bedroom window. In the winter, I covered the trees with patches of cotton.
The newspaper house itself, where I lived with my mother, was wide and low, like my grandparents’ house in Aldere. I built houses for the aunts and for my grandparents as well. They all lived close to each other but at a distance from our house, so that my mother did not have to see them all the time.
There was also a path leading to an opening in the garden wall and past it, through the opening, to a small cabin.
On afternoons when I had collected enough points and was certain that my mother was immersed in her world, I would allow one of my favorite citi
zens to visit this cabin where, unknown to anyone but the two of us, my father continued to live.
18.
After the reading in the bookshop, several of the writers and some people from the audience gathered at the front of the shop, discussing the best of four restaurants in the neighborhood.
“Now that we’re out,” the famous author said, “we might as well go all out. I rarely do this type of thing.”
“Here’s a piece of advice,” he said to the young girl standing next to him. “Don’t become a writer if you want to live an interesting life.”
He asked M. whether he would join them. M. said he was too tired and that he hoped they would have a wonderful time.
“That’s what I mean,” the famous author said, and the girl laughed.
After they left, M. stayed at the shop for a few more minutes. I was browsing a shelf of poetry books and I heard him tell the shop owner that he was working on a new book. It was set in Turkey, once again, but this time in a small town close to Istanbul.
“We should schedule a reading to hear the work in progress,” the shopkeeper said.
“Well,” M. said, “no progress yet. I’m still nosing around.”
I left the shop after him, walking a few steps behind before I caught up to tell him that I had enjoyed the reading, especially his passage about Istanbul.
“My hometown,” I said. This sounded strange, as if Istanbul was a faraway place I could not return to.
“But you forgot one thing,” I added, and told him that Moda Street did not run down uninterrupted to the water as he had described in that scene. There was also the fish restaurant.
“I kept that one to myself,” M. said. “That’s my spot.”
Then he asked, “Have you ever had their sardines grilled in vine leaves?”
Walking on the Ceiling Page 3