Istanbul, Istanbul

by Burhan Sonmez

  The Doctor and Uncle Küheylan became engrossed in discussing soldiers, hunters, and sailors. They talked about the coastal road that had meant the end of the old fishing village in Kumkapı, about the ever-decreasing number of judas trees along the shoreline of the Bosphorus, about how the Architect Sinan’s four-hundred-year-old work, the Ilyaszade Mosque, was demolished so a petrol station could be built in its place, and about how an earthquake a thousand years ago had caused the nearest island to the shore to sink into a sea like Atlantis, and asked, “Is Istanbul an island too?”

  Istanbul was an island that was growing fat on the sins that would one day lead to her downfall, according to the Doctor. Sins here did not stay the same, but changed all the time. That’s why the city was not a known place, but somewhere people learned about day by day. Her mystery whipped her craving for change, fanned her yearning to attach herself to the future. When today grows vague, the truth grows vague too, ceding its place to symbols. Buildings replaced mountains, and balconies with flowers replaced the shore. And love too would turn into an insatiable, hairy, damp animal, constantly in search of new experiences.

  Uncle Küheylan protested, arguing with the Doctor that symbols were more real than truths. In this world, where they did not come of their own free will, people were not liable for discovering their own existence, but for bringing it into being. Mountains were mountains before we existed, just as trees were also trees before we came along. But was the city that way, were steel, electricity, and telephones thus? People who created music out of noise, and mathematics out of numbers, created a new universe along with the city. The more distant they grew from external nature, the closer they got to their own nature. Instead of mountain peaks, they believed in roofs sprouting up one beside the other, instead of rivers they believed in crowded streets, and instead of the stars, they believed in lights that shone everywhere.

  Which did I believe in, the stars or the city lights? I pondered that last month, while looking out of the window of the house in Hisarüstü where I was hiding, trying to work out where the stars ended and where the city lights began. When I took a break from reading I became lost in the Milky Way and my fantasies, then wondered whether the shimmering forms I was looking at really were the Milky Way.

  For the first few days I was not alone in the house in Hisarüstü, Yasemin Abla was there with me. I didn’t know her real name, and she too knew me by another name, Yusuf. We had met in Gezi Park in Taksim; because we had never met before, according to our brief, I had recognized her by the green scarf around her neck and she had recognized me by the sports magazine I was holding. She looked about five or six years older than me.

  “Yusuf,” she had said when we arrived at the house, “we’ll be staying here for a few days. The neighbors know me, if anyone asks we’ll say we’re brother and sister. But try not to let anyone see you.”

  It was a one room gecekondu. There was a small bathroom by the entrance. The kitchen consisted of a stove in the room we were in.

  When it was time for bed we took it in turns to get changed in the bathroom. We slept on two separate couches. When the smell of a burning match woke me up not long afterward, I half-opened my eyes. I saw Yasemin Abla sitting by the window, cigarette in hand, contemplating the view outside.

  “Couldn’t you sleep?” I said.

  “We can’t get in touch with one of our friends. He missed two appointments yesterday. I was thinking about him.”

  “Does he know this house?” The question was out of my mouth before I knew it.

  “There’s only one address he could give if he got caught and we evacuated it last night. He doesn’t know this house.”

  “I just asked.”

  “I don’t blame you for worrying, Yusuf.”

  I got out of bed and joined her, sitting down on the chair on the other side of the table. I also lit a cigarette.

  “Yasemin Abla,” I said, trying not to let my anxiety show, “have you ever been arrested?”

  “No, and you?”

  “No, me neither.”

  The house was on a slope. Rickety gecekondus sprawled all the way down the hill. The streetlights that stretched down to the sea mingled with the lights of the ships and the boats sailing on the Bosphorus. This was one of Istanbul’s most beautiful shorelines. Instead of the opulent villas and skyscrapers, she lavished her hospitality on the tiny gecekondus.

  We brewed tea and sat up until dawn. We didn’t talk about politics, but about books and our dreams. I was envious of Yasemin Abla’s repertoire of poems, of her ability to recite a couplet containing any word I said. When I said “sea,” she murmured the couplet, “O free man! Thou shalt always cherish the sea.” When I said “clock,” she replied, “Clock! Menacing, horrific, stone faced god!” She laughed like a grade A student. We had turned off the light and her face shone radiant in the light of the streetlamp. At the end of the night, when mist was draping itself over the red of dawn, we got back into our beds. We slept, heedless of the cries of the seagulls and sparrows.

  At around midday Yasemin Abla went out. After it had grown dark she returned, carrying a bag full of food.

  “There’s still no word from our missing friend, Yusuf. I’m traveling out of the city tomorrow, I’ll be back in three days at the latest.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I’ve brought you food. If I’m not back by the evening of the third night, empty the house. Don’t leave anything here that might give a clue to your identity.”

  Yasemin Abla heated water on the stove, she went into the bathroom and washed. When she came out she was wearing her pajamas.

  When she saw me sitting at the table trying to sew the tear in my jacket she asked, “Can you sew?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Give it to me then, I’ll sew it for you. The hook has come off my earring, you can put it back on for me.”

  I took the amber earrings from her and compared them, to work out how to repair the one without its hook. I moved my pocket knife slowly, so as not to damage the amber.

  As Yasemin Abla was sewing the tear on the shoulder of my jacket, she raised her head. “Do you like handicrafts?” she asked.

  “Not really. How about you?”

  “I used to be a seamstress. I love touching fabric, and cutting it. I made my pajamas and my dress myself.”

  I looked at her dress hanging on the wall. It was low cut, knee-length, with a belt. The flowers on the print of the dress matched her earrings.

  “Stand up and try your jacket on,” she said.

  I put on the jacket and moved my arms forward and sideways.

  “You’ve done a great job,” I said.

  Yasemin Abla came closer and straightened the jacket’s creased collar.

  “Well, you’ll have plenty of time on your hands. Iron your jacket before I get back.”

  “At your command,” I said, smiling.

  “It’s not a command, it’s a wish.”

  Her hair was wet, she smelled of roses. She had the freshness of someone recently bathed. She stepped back slowly. She picked up the teapot from the stove and filled the tea glasses.

  She liked talking. She told me about the impoverished house where she had grown up, and the world she had looked out on from the small window of that house. Once again, she recited couplets containing each word I spoke. She watered the geraniums on the windowsill. The geraniums in one of the two pots were blossoming, while the flowers in the other were withering. She said that when she returned she would water the flowers in the garden too. There were four-o’clock flowers, oleanders, and roses in the garden. As we talked, the night nestling between our words and the flowers seeped out and flowed away, like water from a cracked bottle. We did not notice that the sky had grown light and that the stars had retired.

  When I awoke not long afterward to the sound of rain, she was not in her bed. She had crept out silently.

  I sat by the window and lit a cigarette.

  A storm was
brewing outside. An unruly wind was howling. The Istanbul Sea was uncanny. It had raged suddenly, turning day into night. The clouds had grown black, like in oil paintings. In the Bosphorus the waves were tossing a ship about, flinging it toward the shore. The ship, flailing in all directions, had sounded its SOS siren. It might sink and be engulfed by the waters at any moment. The siren’s piercing shriek mingled with the sounds of the rain, the wind, and the waves. As the ship’s entire crew looked up at the sky and supplicated God, perhaps the drunks, beggars, and those on the brink of suicide on the shore begged for the ship to come and pick them up from the rocks first, and then sink, if that was its intention. Sinking with a ship was the best way to go. The sea cracked its whip again and again, foaming with wrath. The waves reared like untamable wild horses. Yasemin Abla had picked the perfect weather to go out in. Either that, or the storm had waited for her to go out and for the ship below to arrive at the Bosphorus. As the wind scattered the last petals of the four-o’clock flowers, the oleanders, and the roses in the garden, the streets were empty. Dogs and the homeless were sheltering in the ruins of crumbling buildings. Istanbul, dizzy with destitution and extravagance, waited with her arms spread wide, while the ship’s crew, alternately begging and cursing the storm god, could not envisage any grave other than the sea. When every avenue was closed, was it better to accept one’s fate, or to curse? The storm inspired such debates. And yet one fuchsia geranium on the windowsill faded, whilst another bloomed, in the same air, and with the same water.

  It was only then that I noticed the amber earring. It was sitting between two plant pots, untouched by the rain and wind outside. It was the earring I had repaired the previous night. Where was the other? I searched everywhere, on the couch, by the front door. I glanced in front of the mirror in the bathroom. Had Yasemin Abla forgotten the other earring there as she was packing her things? Had she left in that much of a hurry?

  I sat on the couch and, holding the earring with my fingertips, raised it in the air. It was a golden translucent grape, swinging from a silver hook. Lights and curls swirled inside its ancient depths. Orange and brown waves undulated gently inside it. I stared at this amber earring that had hung from women’s ears, and been displayed in shop windows, for so many years, as though I had never seen one before. How did the selection process of our minds work? When did someone become aware of an object’s existence?

  Just like the earrings I hadn’t noticed before, perhaps I had walked in the same street as Yasemin Abla without noticing her either. Maybe it had been another rainy day. People huddled under umbrellas, scuttling alongside the magnificent tall buildings, brushed past young girls busking in passage entrances. Some reminisced about the lover who had abandoned them, while others despaired over their unruly children. Everyone spoke the same language, but no one understood one other. Each mind had other minds living inside it. When it rained, Istanbul became a forest densely populated with bare trees. Everyone grew flustered, and every house, every street, and every face looked the same. I was walking past Yasemin Abla, rushing to get to her appointment on time, her hair wet. Pulling the hood of my duffle coat down over my forehead, I hurried on. If she had dropped one of her earrings and carried on walking without realizing, if I had picked up the amber earring at my feet out of the puddle, if I had stopped for an instant and examined my wet hand and the gray crowd that had swallowed Yasemin Abla, would Istanbul have changed for me? Would that earring have filled my heart with a joy I had never known before?

  The odd thing about Istanbul was the way she preferred questions to answers. She could turn happiness into a nightmare, or the other way round, make a joyous morning dawn after a night devoid of all hope. She gained strength from uncertainty. They called this the city’s destiny. The heaven in one street and the hell in another could suddenly change places. Just as in the tale of the king and the pauper: A king desired a bit of entertainment. He ordered a pauper dozing in the street to be brought to the palace. When the pauper woke up, everyone revered him as a king and served him. Once the pauper had got over his amazement he believed he genuinely was the king. He thought his other life of penury had been a dream. At the end of the day, when night descended and he fell into a happy sleep, they carried him outside again. When he opened his eyes he found himself back in the street, amongst the rubbish. He couldn’t work out what was real and what had been a dream. For several nights they played the same game. When the pauper first woke up he was in the palace, and when he next woke up he was in the street. Each time he believed his other life had been a dream. Who could say that stories were growing stale and weren’t allowed into the city? Weren’t that king and that pauper both from Istanbul? One got pleasure from toying with people’s destiny, while the other tried to live by swinging between one end of the scale of truth and the other. Did the people hurrying in the rain now know in what state they would wake up tomorrow morning?

  In the same way that Istanbul was not Istanbul, neither was the amber earring an amber earring. It had its history. Yasemin Abla had bought that earring because she liked it and thought it suited her. Then she had given it to me to repair, and added me to its history. Inside this amber earring with its yellowish tinges was a story and a beautiful person’s dream.

  I returned to the window and took another look outside. The sea had settled and the waves were now calm. Where was the ship struggling against the storm a moment before, sounding its SOS? Had it continued on its way, or was it buried at the bottom of the sea? It had stopped raining. The dogs had gone out into the street. A man was strolling absently along the rows of houses. He wasn’t wearing a coat or carrying an umbrella. He took no notice of the puddles he stepped into. He paused for a moment and turned his head toward the house. I couldn’t make out his face in the darkness, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine that he was weary and hungry. He decided against continuing on, and turned around. He quickened his pace, as though he had forgotten something and was hurrying to retrieve it.

  I brewed a pot of tea. I had breakfast, although it was late. I looked at the row of books lined up on the only shelf on the wall. I chose two books. One was An Anthology of World Poetry, the other was the novel Memed, My Hawk, by Yaşar Kemal. I lay down on the couch. After reading several poems I started on the novel.

  The clamor of the children and the street vendors resonated in the sunshine after the rain. How vigorous and cheerful the sun was; just as it withdrew into itself during the storm, its presence pervaded everything afterward. I wanted to open the window, but knew that I mustn’t let anyone see that the house was occupied. I peered out into the street from behind the curtain. I opened the window a tiny crack, imperceptible from outside. I inhaled the cool, fresh air.

  I passed the days reading, lying on the couch, and sleeping a lot. At night I contemplated the lights in the neighborhood and the boats sailing on the Bosphorus. The sky changed every night. The colors flowed in turn from one end of the sky to the other, the wind scattered the lights in the distance in all different directions. I waited until the evening of the third day with a calm heart and my fingers entwined around the amber earring. I finished the novel and read certain poems over and over again.

  Yasemin Abla had said “the evening of the third day.” I started to think of the worst case scenario, I imagined she had been caught. I got ready as the sun was setting. I tidied up. I packed my toothbrush and my razor. As I was tying the dustbin liner containing our cigarette butts I heard footsteps outside the door.

  There was a knock at the door, but it wasn’t the agreed-upon knock.

  I waited.

  A child’s voice said, “Is nobody in?”

  It must be the child of one of the neighbors. I didn’t budge.

  The same voice came in a whisper this time, “Ağbi, will you open the door?” Ağbi? How did she know me? If they had seen me arrive with Yasemin Abla, why was she calling me and not Yasemin? I didn’t get it. I went to the door without switching on the light and slowly opened the door a tiny cr
ack. A little girl was staring at me, wide-eyed.

  “Ağbi, I have homework to do for tomorrow, will you help me? My grandmother told me to call you.”

  “Your grandmother? Who is your grandmother?”

  “We live in the house behind yours. Yasemin Abla helps me with my homework too.”

  “Yasemin Abla’s out. I’ll tell her you dropped by when she gets back, and she’ll come and see you.”

  “My grandmother asked for you. She said go and call you, Yusuf Ağbi.”

  A hundred questions flashed through my mind in an instant. How did she know that Yasemin Abla wasn’t back? How did she find out my name? My curiosity wouldn’t allow me not to go. And waiting at the neighbor’s house was a better option than staying at home.

  “I’ll just get my jacket,” I said.

  I picked up my rucksack on the way out. I wouldn’t be coming back here. I threw the bin liner onto the pile of rubbish behind the low garden wall.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Serpil.”

  Serpil walked up the narrow alleyway beside the house. She knew her way around in the dark. I followed her in silence. Once at the back we climbed over broken fences. We walked through another alleyway I would never have found by myself, and climbed up a dilapidated stone stairway. When we were in front of the houses I stopped and looked. We were above the gecekondu where I had been staying.

  Serpil walked through the open door first.

  “Come inside, Ağbi,” she said.

  It was a one-room house, just like ours. A woman sat on the couch by the window. She was knitting.

  “Are you here, Yusuf?” said the woman.

  “Good evening,” I said.

  “Come and sit next to me, my boy.”

  It was only then that I noticed the woman was blind. I sat opposite her and looked not at her face but at her fingers busily knitting. Knit two, purl two she counted, as her knitting grew longer. She stopped, as if she were aware that I was looking at her fingers.

  “Come closer,” she said, putting down her needles.