Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘I didn’t have what to do,’ she said, wiping her forehead. ‘You are the newspaper man?’

  Rex confirmed that he was.

  ‘I recognise you from picture. Boss is told me not to come in, but I thought… I tried to think of something I can do, and he does never like cleaning those… grills, so…’

  Rex smiled. He hoped Keko would keep this girl on. ‘Where is the boss?’

  ‘At his house. Not house,’ she corrected herself. ‘Flat. Over his store. Same name, I think – Boszprusz.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  She shrugged, a very Eastern gesture, reminding him, with a sudden, unexpected shaft of pain, of an old girlfriend. ‘I only here couple weeks.’

  Rex wondered how many shops there were called ‘Bosphorus’ in the borough. A dozen? Probably hundreds.

  ‘Must be near,’ the girl added. ‘Because was walking back there, five, six, seven times in a day for check.’

  ‘To check what?’

  ‘If she was there. Mina. His girl.’ She lowered her voice and leant close, even though they were the only people there. Rex smelt chlorine and sweat. ‘For all the last week, they didn’t know where is she. Mina was missing.’

  * * *

  Bosphorus Continental Market was, as the girl said, close by: just east of the café on West Green Road, between another, identical-looking Turkish supermarket and a shuttered unit calling itself Alive & Descended Christ Fire Ministries. Rex couldn’t remember whether he’d ever bought anything from Bosphorus or not, but they stocked his favourite brand of Polish lager, Okocim, along with the Levantine staples of white peynir cheese in cans, strings of red sucuk sausage and yard upon yard of sticky biscuit.

  The sign outside was composed of red, green and yellow stripes, with the ‘o’ of Bosphorus formed by a little golden sun, and the same motif was visible throughout the interior. Over the tannoy, Rex heard the strains of Ibrahim Tatlises, bad boy of the Anatolian crooning scene. At the counter, surrounded by eye-talismans and other, less familiar dangling objects, sat a handsome, dreamy-looking young man in a denim shirt, flipping through a picture book.

  Rex’s phone rang then, and he ducked back out of the shop, under an awning fragrant with tomatoes and melons.

  ‘What is it, Rex?’

  En route, Rex had left a message for D.S. Brenard. To call this policeman a ‘contact’ would be an exaggeration. D.S. Brenard had arrested him on more than one occasion. But he also, grudgingly and irritably, traded the odd scrap of information.

  ‘Mina Küçüktürk,’ Rex said in a low voice. Two men passing by stared as they heard the name. ‘Were you looking for her?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Girl at her Dad’s café says she was missing for a week before she… I wondered if anyone had reported her missing?’

  ‘Definitely not. But she was a student, wasn’t she? My eldest is at Bangor now, we never hear from the little horror until he’s skint.’

  ‘This was a Kurdish girl who lived at home.’

  D.S. Brenard mulled it over. It was one of the reasons Rex liked D.S. Brenard. He always listened.

  ‘Look. Politically active Kurdish girl makes a YouTube thing talking about the need for protest, writes a blog called ‘Dying For Peace’ and then sets light to herself. You can’t be saying there’s some big mystery over this, Rex. Because there isn’t.’

  ‘There might be a story, though. And I’m a journalist.’

  A truck rumbled by, leaving in its wake a dirty smell, redolent of foreign cities. As the rumbling faded, Rex realised that cackling was coming from the other end of the phone. ‘’Ere, lads, Rex Tracey says he’s a journalist,’ Brenard said. Further, more distant laughs could be heard. ‘No one reported her missing,’ the detective said finally, and hung up. Putting his phone back in his pocket, Rex realised there was a ‘no magazines’ sign in the bottom left corner of the shop window. It looked forgotten, curling in the dirt and the ever-shifting temperatures. But what did it mean?

  Rex approached the till, realising the young man’s look wasn’t, as he’d first thought, dreamy. It was the numb, staring look of someone who hadn’t slept. He had thick, black, wavy hair, impeccably side-parted like some old matinee-idol. But he gave off an unwashed smell and his eyes were red. Rex introduced himself.

  ‘I was there when Mina… When she fell,’ Rex said. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  The young man gave a short, upward nod and murmured something indistinct. The picture book was all about birds. And it was birds, Rex realised, that hung all over the shop alongside the amulets: glass, metal, wood, paper, a whole handicraft aviary.

  ‘I said where were you?’ the young man asked softly. ‘When she fell?’ He had a local accent, like Mina.

  ‘At Shopping City. I was going round the precinct with Eve O’Reilly.’

  ‘Reilly,’ the man said.

  Ignoring this, Rex asked, ‘Was she related to you?’

  ‘Eve Reilly?’ the man asked, staring.

  This was getting weird now. ‘Mina.’

  ‘Brother,’ said the man, in an even quieter voice. ‘I’m Mina’s brother,’ he clarified. ‘Aran.’

  ’I didn’t know about you,’ Rex said, and then, recognising how odd that sounded, he added, ‘I go in the café a lot. I don’t think I saw you there.’

  ‘That’s because I was here,’ replied Aran blankly. ‘Working in this place.’ The way he said ‘this place’ didn’t sound too happy. But then he had plenty of reasons to sound unhappy right now.

  ‘I knew Mina,’ Rex began and then, catching a shocked, almost hostile look from Aran, added, ‘I mean, I talked to her in the café sometimes. To her and your father. We hadn’t spoken since she went to university. How was she getting on there?’

  Aran shrugged.

  ‘Was she happy?’

  ‘Sure,’ Aran said. ‘But that never stopped her being angry, too. You know. About lots of things. Prejudice. Things wrong in the world and that. You didn’t want to argue with her.’

  ‘Did you argue with her?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not, you know… I don’t follow news much and that.’

  ‘What do you follow?’ Rex asked. He glanced at the book. ‘Birds?’

  Aran nodded. ‘I like birds.’

  ‘What about your dad? Did Mina argue with him?’

  Aran frowned now, scratching his armpit. ‘Are you interviewing me?’

  ‘Sorry. I’m asking because I heard Mina went missing a week ago.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘The police,’ Rex said. He didn’t want the café girl to get into trouble.

  ‘The police didn’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Aran came from behind the counter with such sudden determination that Rex steeled himself, squaring his shoulders, thinking he was about to be thrown out. Instead, Aran bolted the main door, then grabbed a black baseball cap from a stool at the edge of the counter. He was a slight man, Rex realised. His sister had been quite tall.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, beckoning Rex towards the back, where the chillers full of cheese and sausage hummed.

  ‘Come where?’

  ‘My dad says no one wants to talk,’ Aran mumbled, not looking him in the eye, as he tugged the cap over his head. ‘No one will talk about Mina – so you talk to him.’

  Beyond the chillers was a double door. It led to a back yard with a metal staircase at the far end. They passed by a row of high metal cages, decked out with perches and tree branches and containing, as far as Rex could see, just one bird. He remembered Susan’s comments about people building birdhouses and saunas in their back yards. Was this part of the boom? The only resident, in this case, was a huge peacock. It uttered a lost whine and strutted to the edge of its cage as Aran walked by. He let it peck at his fingers, turning to see Rex’s reaction.

  ‘You should work for Eric Miles,’ Rex said.

  Aran’s face darkened. ‘This isn’t a zoo. He comes out,’ he went
on, poking a finger through the grille to stroke the peacock’s breast. ‘He’s free, like he’s meant to be.’

  ‘Why’s he in the cage, then?’

  ‘He’s been unwell.’ Aran said aggressively. Rex was silent. He spoke again, though, as the man led him up the metal stairs.

  ‘Mina had a peacock. I mean – a peacock brooch – didn’t she?’

  Aran looked at him in a more friendly way as he opened a white, plastic, panelled front door, complete with knocker and letter-flap and let him into a flat. ‘Yeah. From our mother. The police haven’t given it back yet.’ He took his cap off the second he entered. Rex wondered why he’d bothered to put it on, for such a short trip.

  ‘From your mother?’

  ‘That was Melek,’ Aran said, or at least, that was what Rex thought he’d said. He didn’t have a chance to ask any more, though, because Aran showed him through a dark, damp hall – decorated with what looked like a picture of the former Prime Minister, John Major, but couldn’t have been – into a stuffy, over-cushioned front room fronting the main road. In a brocaded, high-backed armchair, Keko was weeping. He was unshaven, and dressed in a white vest and dirty brown trousers. Another man was with him, standing up, smoking. Small like Aran, but somehow more dainty. He was dark-skinned, completely bald, in an elegant three-piece suit. Aran and the standing man exchanged words in Kurdish.

  Keko gave Rex a nod, and waved him to the opposite armchair. As Rex sat, the old man nodded some more, as if to say he appreciated the visit, but then continued to weep to himself silently, twisting worry beads and a handkerchief round the fingers of his gnarled right hand. This was how they met death in some cultures: you sat with the bereaved. Simply sat with them, until the worst of the pain was over.

  Being from another culture altogether, Rex felt uncomfortable. He sat looking around the room as two men chatted, another one wept, and everyone ignored him. He felt his phone buzzing, but he let it go. There was another phone, the latest iPhone, in fact, on the table next to him: an odd note in this room of faded Arabesque. The room also partly served as an adjunct of the store downstairs, with drums of oil and a dozen multi-packs of pink toilet roll stacked in one corner, a shipping crate of Rize tea in another. In between, some trappings of a normal family life: photos on an ornate, darkwood dresser. Mina grinning in pigtails. Aran, solemn in a mortarboard, rolled diploma in his left hand. And everywhere, in mugs, in vases and jam-jars, on every surface, fresh flowers, slowly curling in the warmth. The heating was on full-blast and the smell – bodies, grief, tobacco, pollen – was cloying.

  ‘You’ve had lot of well-wishers,’ Rex said to Keko. He didn’t hear. He was leaking tears. Aran looked puzzled. Rex gestured towards the flowers.

  ‘They’re not to do with my sister,’ he said. ‘They were for Newroz. People bring them at New Year.’

  A glass of black tea had somehow appeared at Rex’s elbow, with a swollen cardamom bobbing on the surface. The man in the pretty suit held his own glass and raised it to Rex. Rex returned the gesture and sipped the tea.

  ‘You want to ask some things?’ Rex noted the man’s deep voice. Small men always had these big voices. Was that something natural, or something they worked at?

  ‘I wanted to tell Keko how sorry I was. But yes, I’m a reporter and I do have things to ask. People want to know how you all feel. Why you think she did it.’

  ‘Mina was with me,’ Keko interrupted, fixing a greasy, bulky pair of spectacles on, which magnified his sorrowful eyes to the size of eggs. His voice was hoarse. ‘With me too much. Keko is communist,’ he added, making a fist with the hand containing the handkerchief and the beads and thumping it against his heart. ‘I teach Mina, all day, BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, look, listen, politics. Mina makes Kurdistan politics because Mina…’

  He paused, to make a dry swallow. Rex noticed how many times the man said ‘Mina’. Not ‘her’. Not ‘she’, or, like Aran, ‘my sister’. He was keeping her alive. His loved girl. ‘Mina was with me. No mother. Mother should be teach girls: make sew, make cooking, make house. But no mother.’ He gave a dry heave. The other men watched calmly.

  ‘Why no mother?’

  ‘My sister died,’ said the bald man, dabbing at his forehead with a silk handkerchief. A gold ring glinted, on a hand that looked somehow not right. ‘In Germany.’

  ‘It’s where I come. First me,’ explained Keko slowly. ‘Turkey army make many bombings upon Kurdish peoples. Van. Diyarbakir. Move, move, many times. Come to Germany 1988. Many Kurdish peoples coming then, from Turkey, Iraq, Syria. Alevi, Yezidi peoples, to Germany, Sweden. After. Wife come 1991. Die 1997. 1997 coming to here.’

  Rex hadn’t understand all of what Keko told him – his English seemed to have deteriorated with his grief – but he concluded that Keko, like a lot of London’s Kurds, had left Turkey when the conflict between the government and the Kurdish rebels, the PKK, had been at its most savage. He’d come to the borough via Germany, where Mina had been born, and she must have lost her mother when she’d been only two or three.

  ‘So you all came to London then, in 1997?’ he asked, looking at the bald uncle.

  ‘I’m kind of all over,’ he said vaguely. ‘Germany, Sweden, here, North Kurdistan.’

  ‘I thought there was no Kurdistan… Sorry,’ Rex added. ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced.’

  The man smiled, as if Rex’s turn of phrase amused him. He put his glass down and tapped his breast. ‘I am Rostam. Rostam Sajadi.’ He looked like an ancient Egyptian. A neat, mannequin-sized ancestor-figure. And were his eyebrows pencilled in? ‘You thought wrong, Mr Tracey. About North Kurdistan.’

  ‘He means the south of Turkey,’ said Aran. ‘Where the Kurds live.’

  His uncle flashed him a look. Rex wondered what it meant.

  ‘Mina could have explained all the geography and the history to you,’ Sajadi added.

  ‘Because she was… very passionate about Kurdistan?’

  Keko rose abruptly and left the room. At first it seemed as if he objected to the conversation, but seconds later Rex heard a bathroom lock being slid across. Sajadi took the old man’s place in the armchair. He looked almost child-like in it. A boy, with a three-grand suit and a three-thousand-yearold face.

  ‘Listen, my friend, I’ll tell you – Keko blames himself, of course, but he didn’t have any influence on her, not since she was a teenager. It’s the university. Full of trouble-makers. They got to Mina.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Brainwashed her.’

  ‘I didn’t know her well,’ Rex said. ‘But she didn’t seem like a girl who could be easily led. Who would be leading her, anyway?’

  Keko called out something hoarse and indistinct from the bathroom. Aran caught a sigh in his throat, tore open a pack of toilet paper and headed out onto the landing with a roll. A quietly angry man.

  Once his nephew was out of the room, Rostam lowered his voice and leaned closer, rotating the ring on his little finger. ‘You don’t know how they work. PKK, I mean. You know who I mean?’

  ‘The Kurdish Workers’ Party, right? Fighting Turkey for independence?’

  Sajadi snorted. ‘Workers’ Party! Gangsters and terrorists. And they use children like her so people like you take notice.’ He screwed up one hand tightly to underline his point.

  ‘Mina was nineteen.’

  ‘Exactly. A child. Not even married. This is who they use.’

  ‘But what was she protesting about?’ Rex asked, realising that this had been bothering him all weekend. ‘No one knows who made the bomb in Trabzon. The ceasefire hasn’t ended. So what point was she making?’

  Rostam gazed at him coolly. ‘Because I’m Kurdish I must know? I must be involved? I’m a businessman.’

  ‘I thought you might understand more than me.’

  Sajadi winced, as if he’d caught a bad smell on a breeze. ‘That horse shit is for old men and teenagers. No one cares about that political horse shit any more. It’s the same as religio
n…’ Here, the man cast a hand towards the sky, dismissing the gods. ‘It just makes everything difficult, gets in the way.’ He fell silent, taking a lot of care to nip the glowing end of his cigarette off, and tamp it down in the ashtray. The atmosphere seemed to have soured quickly.

  But two decades of interviewing had taught Rex a thing or two. When people were angry, when you’d annoyed them – then was the time to ask the awkward questions. Why not? They were already annoyed. And their guard was down.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the police Mina was missing?’

  There was a pause, then Sajadi held a palm out. Now Rex realised what it was. His right index finger ended below the knuckle. ‘What do police mean to a man like Keko? Do you know how the Turks treat the Kurdish people? The police are the ones who come for you at night.’ He grabbed the lapel of his jacket. ‘Police beat you on the soles of your feet,’ he added, now making a beating gesture. ‘You don’t ask police for help. You ask them to stop killing you.’ He’d spoken calmly, but his eyes flashed like searchlights as he acted everything out, made vivid every point with a gesture.

  As Aran re-emerged onto the landing, Sajadi spoke more urgently, more or less in Rex’s ear. ‘Listen. It’s like this. Mina was with a guy. There were texts. Gifts. In our community, that would be a massive dishonour.’ The hand went over the face – a mask of shame. ‘We were looking for her ourselves. Trying to sort it out quietly.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Aran and myself. It would kill Keko if he knew. So if you care about him, you won’t print that. Okay?’

  ‘Okay. But why tell me?’

  ‘Because I want you to understand why she did it.’ The ring went round the little finger again, a compensation, perhaps, for that missing digit. ‘It always happens like that. You know all those pictures of the peshmerga girls? Your newspapers love them, don’t they? Our pretty girls who joined the guerrillas, with their pigtails and their AK’s.’ Tits were mimed now, and pigtails, and then guns. Was this what you did when you’d spent a life in exile, never being understood? ‘That is horse shit. All those girls your newspapers printed – they were just following their boyfriends. They had to run away to the mountains with their boyfriends because if the boys had fucked them, if the boys had even kissed them, you see, then they were ruined.’ One, jabbing, phallic finger made the point here. ‘Ruined in Kurdish culture. They didn’t shoot AK’s, those girls. Not peshmerga – not soldiers – just cooked rice. See? They were used.’