Shooting Stars and Flying Fish: Swapping the boardroom for the seven seas

by Nancy Knudsen

  ‘And they believed you?’

  Osman looks stunned. ‘Of course I would speak to the president. Why would they not believe me?’

  I am still a long way from understanding the subtle measures of class and education that are at the root of Istanbul society.

  Osman disappears back to his working day, and we walk around the corner to find a row of small restaurants. Outside of each the host stands. ‘Hos Geldiniz’ – Welcome – they say as we pass, in a subtle appeal for custom. The tables are covered in thick woven fabric, and we dine on what we know – köfte and künüfe, delicious simple fare. The Turks take their cooking very seriously, and they beam at our enthusiasm. There’s no language in common, but it matters not. We’re back the next morning to the same restaurant for breakfast and are greeted like millionaires. Tasty cheese börek, fresh from the oven, is accompanied by a Turkish breakfast plate of olives, tomatoes, eggs, anchovies and fresh baguette. The food is so good I don’t care how long the kitchen equipment takes to arrive.

  Osman’s telephone call works – or maybe it was always meant to happen just as it does. Within twenty-four hours there is a knock at the door, and I find a line of delivery men with boxes on their shoulders. In and out they go for half an hour. The boxes contain everything from a full array of kitchen equipment to a twelve-piece dining set, from dishwasher to vacuum cleaner. By the time they are finished, we know that we had indeed needed to ‘bring nothing’.

  Meanwhile, Osman behaves as though he has adopted some stray, mentally retarded children. Without our English-speaking marina officers to assist, the simplest things become problematic. Without Turkish, we cannot even make a telephone call to find out what we need to know – that’s if we had a telephone, which we don’t know how to connect. He plunges in, thinking of everything before we do, smoothing away dealings with the university administrators, with electricians, with gas suppliers, telephone companies and cable TV providers. He tells us where to post a letter, where to buy bread. ‘Ask Osman’ becomes a mantra.

  As escape from this constant bewilderment, we set out to discover our suburb. In a city of between 15 and 20 million people (nobody has counted recently), Etiler is an inner-city suburb, although it is several kilometres and a half-hour drive to the centre at Taksim Square. At first sight it seems quite schizophrenic. Just a ten-minute walk in one direction is Istanbul’s most expensive shopping suburb, with coffee costing $9 a cup, and Gucci, Armani, Versace and Bruno Magli the most popular brands. Up the road in the other direction is one of the most prestigious universities in Istanbul, the Bog˘aziçi Üniversitesi, so we have languidly strolling fur coats on one side and hundreds of fast-moving bottoms in jeans on the other.

  The streets are lined with rambling mansions with guards at the gate and impressive views of the Bosphorus. The shaded windows of Mercedes, Bentleys, Alfa Romeos and the occasional Hummer sweep by silently, swooping through their electronically opened gates. No one else walks the streets. But down the far side of the same hill, we discover tiny wooden and corrugated-iron shanties tucked into crevices, clutching at the hills that wrap around them, and are puzzled.

  Then in yet another direction, just a block away behind a hill, we find steep narrow streets, where the never-ending traffic noise of Istanbul hardly reaches. Here there are creaking wooden blocks of flats reaching up the slopes towards the sun, eight or ten storeys high, without lifts. There’s life in these streets – old men here and there, smoking cigarettes while they watch the sloping road with a contented half-smile, young girls emerging crisp and smart and heading off to their workaday world. Under the blocks of flats are tiny shops in bad repair – hairdressers, food shops, electricians, a cafe or two. The windows are dusty, there’s rubbish along the side walls, the paintwork is covered in grime. Walking here, it’s hard to imagine that the houses of the rich are just a couple of blocks away; though there are trees – huge leafy trees and small flowering trees, winding and pushing their way onto the street clamouring for attention – and birds, chortling and hurtling through the dappled light above, singing invisibly, charming me and maybe the whole neighbourhood. We are all rich then and, like the old men watching their steep-sloping streets, glad to be alive.

  A few days after we arrive, I answer a knock at the door one morning to find an ample young woman with a mass of curly dark hair and an uncertain smile on her face holding a plate of small chocolate cakes. She talks in a gentle, animated way, smiling and nodding. Is she selling them? At my blank face there’s a pause, as she reconsiders, and resorts to sign language. She points to herself and then at the door to the other apartment on the floor.

  ‘Oh!’ I cry. ‘Hello! You live over there. I understand now. You are my neighbour. Please, come in, come in.’

  I stand back from the door, but she smiles and rattles further in Turkish, points to herself continually, saying something that sounds like ‘Gyool, Gyool’, then points at me with a question on her face.

  ‘Nancy, Nancy,’ I reply.

  She pushes the plate of cakes into my hand. I take it, grateful, mystified, and she retreats to her apartment, waving, and disappears. I am left standing at my open front door still holding the plate of cakes, and this begins one of the most pleasurable friendships I am to have with Turkish people in Istanbul.

  Gül (for that is her name, and it means ‘rose’) is back the next morning, with the kapıcı (pronounced, roughly, ‘kapaja’), which, I am to learn later, literally means, ‘doorman’. The two of them come into my vestibule, but won’t come further, no matter how much I invite them into the living room with suggestions of ‘cafe’. They shake my suggestion away with much hand waving and keep up a constant jabbering at me, perhaps on the basis that if I can’t understand one word, maybe a dozen will do the trick. (I don’t know it yet, but the kapıcı in a Turkish apartment building has a sort of general caretaker role. He lives on the premises, usually in the basement flat, takes care of the garden, shovels the snow, and calls for repairmen if he can’t repair something himself.)

  My new neighbour and the kapıcı, without a word of English, somehow explain to me with much pointing and gesticulating that if I get a basket – and Gül shows me her basket – and hang it on my front door, then the kapıcı will bring fresh bread (ekmek) every morning, and a newspaper (gazette). I am getting used to being treated as though I am somewhat slow. I am to pay once a week. When I mime that I cannot read Turkish, my new kapıcı friend mimes that I should not worry. Now they rub their fingers together in that universal symbol for money (para). I fetch my wallet and then stand humbly by while they dig out what I need to pay. I am quite entranced by the lack of reticence they have about searching through my wallet.

  ‘What did you arrange?’ asks Ted over dinner that evening.

  ‘I have no idea, except that some kind of bread and some kind of newspaper are going to arrive tomorrow morning, but we have to get a basket to hang on the front door very soon.’

  So we search the nearby shops and, after much persistence, find and buy the ‘proper’ hanging basket. From then on the English language newspaper, the Turkish Daily News, and a loaf of very light white bread are deposited in our basket every morning, seven days a week.

  In a couple of days, when the cakes have been eaten, I return the plate, shining clean. However, I am told by an English schoolteacher friend that I have already erred.

  ‘Oh dear, dear, Nancy – you were supposed to return the plate with your own gift of food. Never mind, they know how ignorant Westerners are. I’m sure she won’t take it the wrong way.’

  While Ted sets off to Bahçes¸ehir Üniversitesi for his first taste of being a university lecturer – Bahçes¸ehir is a short bus ride away – I sit down and scour the internet, hoping to find a job as a teacher of English. It turns out to be laughably easy. I send three CVs, and get a same-day telephone call, with a next-day appointment. Within three days I am undergoing a one-
week conversion course to become a language teacher at the local Berlitz Language School.

  The Berlitz School is in I.stiklal Caddesi, near Galatasaray – Galata Palace, now a secondary school. I.stiklal Caddesi is one of the most charming streets in Istanbul, maybe in the world. I can think of no other walking street with such grand old buildings, yet with such life and vitality at street level. It is about two kilometres long, a wide walkway with an ancient tram that runs, bell tolling, up the middle. Thousands of people can be seen promenading in this street at any time of day or night, and I am soon told that up to 2 million people may walk the street on a Sunday. Off to each side, there are tiny streets full of galleries, antique shops, restaurants, movie theatres and more restaurants. There are restaurants that serve only omelettes, restaurants that serve only mussels, restaurants that specialise in köfte, and others that specialise in eggplant. At some of these places you can eat a full meal, including drinks, for $3.50 a head, at others there is no main course below US $80. On my first visit, I decide that even if I hate the job, I will just love coming to work here.

  I am given two classes, one a level two class, where they can hardly carry on a conversation; the other a ‘Doing business in English’ class, which is much more interesting. I travel to the Nike Company on the outskirts of Istanbul by taxi to teach this class twice a week – we use one of the Nike boardrooms. The four students are around thirty years old, and their English is fluent but not grammatically correct. They need to learn colloquialisms and expand their vocabularies. This makes for interesting conversations because a subject that moves them to passion will reliably get their English flowing. So we discuss anything from football to politics, their love lives, social customs, and the possible entry of Turkey into the European Union. These conversations are increasingly intriguing for me as they grow more and more controversial. By keeping a sense of humour within the class, but discussing subjects that they rarely discuss in their daily life, it seems they are loving their lessons and I am gaining more and more insight into the thinking of the young urban Turk.

  It is they, for instance, who explain the existence of the shanties among the suburbs of the rich. They are gece kondu which means ‘night landing’. Turkey’s people, along with the Hungarians and the Finns, migrated from the lands east of the Ural mountains, and some of their traditions come from this nomadic past. The age-old unwritten law is this: if you can find a group of friends who will bring a few bricks or stones each, and you can build a house on public land overnight, so that it is finished by daybreak, you own both the house and the land it is on, from that moment.

  These entrepreneurial house builders then turn their attention to the services that they will need – power, water and telephone etc. Having already demonstrated their adeptness at night-time labour, they proceed to attach secreted electric cables to the next house or the one over the street or up the gully. For water they attach their own pipes to the mains by stealth, and with almost miraculous cunning and some ‘help’ from the local telephone officer, organise a telephone connection. Rumours have it that richer Turks sometimes pay for the electricity and water for their neighbouring gece kondu for thirty years without knowing it.

  When I, with some convict blood no doubt coursing through my veins, laugh at the ingenuity of the villains, my students are incensed. The reason is this: When we arrived in Turkey, as we drove through the countryside we were amazed at the number of half-built houses in every village. Many built-up areas resemble a bombed city, they are so full of half-built houses. Now I learn the reason from my students. There are no mortgages – young people without family to give them money have hardly any chance to ever own a house. The solution is to build your house, a room at a time, as you can afford it. (Note: This has since been corrected by the current AKP government, and mortgages are now available.)

  What incenses my students is that while they struggle for half their lives to save to own a house, the government, trying to eliminate the thousands of people living in straggly huts with the poorest of sanitation, are hastily erecting hundreds of apartment blocks, and giving them to the gece kondu dwellers so that they can demolish the slums.

  Ted and I lead a kind of double life. Inside our flat on a hill high above the Bosphorus we are like any Australian family: cereal for breakfast, a roast about once a week, vegemite on our toast. Outside our flat there is a fine, strange world to discover, and there’s much gladness when daughter Kassandra arrives to visit and share our expeditions together.

  We gradually learn more about the local customs and traditions. For example, pet ownership is not a Turkish tradition, so what appear to be very tame stray dogs on the streets are actually fed and enjoyed by everyone. The local belediye, or council, collects them, gives them their injections, and drops them back off on the street where they found them.

  The food is a delight. Slowly growing braver, we experiment with every kind of food. As a seaside-living nation, the fish is always fresh, coming straight from the sea to the table. The köfte have such an exciting taste compared to my mother’s meatballs. I am glad that the first time we try the kokorec we don’t know that this delicacy is actually offal stuffed into intestines – luscious. We begin to love the cheeses – so different, with delicate flavours, and often various combinations of goat, sheep and cow’s cheese. Then there’s the sizmak – natural olive oil fresh from the farmer’s stone presser, brought to the weekly market in Coca-Cola bottles.

  Kassandra, also entranced by the romance of Istanbul, falls in love with a fellow sculptor, Cemil, and we consider what it will be like to have a Turkish son-in-law.

  ‘It will give us a reason to return,’ decides Ted. Now we are sometimes four, exploring Istanbul together.

  While we relish the various flavours of the food in the local restaurants and markets, and every new flavour is a joyous taste discovery, at home I have a dilemma. Some of my most-used ingredients are simply missing from Turkey. In the local shops there’s no bacon, no soy sauce, no wasabi, no cheese that I recognise, no oyster sauce, fish sauce or ginger, and I can neither read the labels on the herbs nor find them in our Turkish–English dictionary. The butcher shops have strange unrecognisable cuts of meat and I have no idea what to do with the unusual fish species. Some of my experimentation has us laughing and, after throwing it out, running to the nearest restaurant for dinner. The solution is, of course, obvious. I buy an English-language Turkish cookbook, delete all the files in the recipe corner of my brain and begin cooking Turkish.

  This makes an adventure of every meal as I try a new recipe every day, and Ted Nobbs keeps reassuring me that he didn’t marry me for my culinary skills. Eventually it works, and we adjust very nicely to eating as our neighbours do.

  As we melt, stumblingly, into the lifestyle of modern Turkey, the season moves on and the mornings become misty and grey, giving way to the sun only reluctantly. A pigeon makes its second home on my third-storey windowsill, and outside, in the early mornings, black silhouettes bend in their leather coats against the wind. Inside, the maze of gentle central heating pipes keeps us snug, and the sunshine streams in on one side of the flat or the other, morning and afternoon.

  Far below our apartment, down an impossibly steep hill, the Bosphorus flows by, with great ships that constantly file past, like armies, to the Black Sea, and a network of busy ferries that threads through the waterways. On the shore, thousands of rod fishermen crowd the banks, and behind them there’s a chaos of new buildings jammed against the ancient grey stone walls. Among the glass and steel structures, old palaces sit serenely, and between all of these are hilly winding lanes and back streets, crammed with unexpected tiny treasure shops.

  The assumption of honesty and generosity to each other within the community is the same in Istanbul as in the countryside, and hard to grasp for this urban Australian: The habit of passing your 10 million lire ($10) bill through a dozen other hands to reach the bus driver and c
onfidently waiting for the change; the bazaar vendor who always seems to throw in a tomato when one buys beans, or put an apple in with the spinach; the taxi driver who nonchalantly gives me back the 10-million-lire note that I mistook for a 1-million-lire note.

  Clouds of yellow leaves flutter over the wet streets as autumn approaches, and one morning they are covered with the first brushing of snow. It warms again, but the leaves fall, the frosts come, winter gales begin to pass through regularly, and the seagulls take cover on the grass in front of our apartment.

  From October, Christmas decorations start appearing in the streets – no Nativity scenes, but reindeer, Santa Clauses, sleighs, toys, stars and snowflakes. The shopping centres are ablaze with colour, with gnomes hammering and sawing, and traffic roundabouts are full of decorated Christmas trees.

  We are invited to a New Year’s party in a Chinese restaurant by our dear new friends Osman and Diane Taneri. Diane is a warm pretty Englishwoman who has lived in Istanbul for thirty-five years. They have two gorgeous daughters, vivacious and typically feminine Turkish girls, who speak English with a pronounced English accent that betrays no sign of their Turkish origins. Our relationship with the Taneris has become a pleasurable social one, now that we are no longer dependent on Osman to solve our daily catastrophes.

  New Year’s Eve is a lively evening, the women showing off their designer best, with midriffs fashionably bared and lots of brightly coloured floating feather stoles. The music is up-tempo, the dance floor never empty and one might be at a similar party in Sydney except for a few weird things. Every now and then the band breaks into ‘Jingle Bells’ or ‘Silent Night’ and other Christmas carols. Being a predominantly Muslim culture, they seem to have no idea that it just isn’t done to sing Christmas carols after Christmas. Also, I’m a little puzzled that so many people seem to be celebrating birthdays, with waiters bearing cakes overhead flaming with candles and much drunken singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ first in Turkish, then in English (same tune). Eventually, Osman explains that they are wishing the year a happy birthday!