Bliss: A Novel

by O. Z. Livaneli

  Cemal tried to stifle the feeling of being without a point of reference, which caused him as much panic as it did Meryem, before turning his thoughts to his older brother, Yakup, about whom he felt both jealousy and apprehension. So this was the beautiful city he lived in. Yakup had not visited the village once since moving to Istanbul with his family. Perhaps he had even forgotten the name of his hometown. It was as if he were living in Istanbul like one of the sultans, and those left behind were his slaves, unworthy to be noticed. While Cemal had been fighting with death, enduring the freezing rain on the mountaintops for days on end, and pissing blood, his brother had been lording it here. The letters he wrote to his father, and the news he sent to the soldier on leave were boastful in tone, belittling his hometown, as though he thought himself superior because he lived in a new environment. His attitude made the people in the village curious and also aroused both their envy and their admiration.

  Meryem was overcome with fatigue and excitement. The ferry she and Cemal had taken had crossed from one continent to another, from Asia into Europe. From time to time, she remembered how she had thought that Istanbul was just behind the hill near her village. How ignorant she had been. It was true no one had taught her anything. Being a child of misfortune, she had been shunned. Her head had been filled with old wives’ tales and superstitions. But in the short time since leaving the village, she had already learned many new things.

  The bus passed through traffic-choked thoroughfares, changed direction at streets leading off from squares, stopped many times, and finally entered a main road leading away from the city center. Only a few passengers remained, and Meryem and Cemal were able to sit down. Already exhausted, the motion of the bus made Meryem drowsy, her head fell forward, and she slept.

  When she woke up, she noticed that the bus had stopped at a bus station. This was a very different Istanbul. Gloomy houses in a dilapidated condition surrounded the terminal. Here they were to board another bus, and when they had disembarked, Cemal asked the driver for directions.

  The bus they boarded this time carried them farther away from the brilliant city, through dark fields flanked by decrepit houses. At each stop, as the magical city became more distant, Meryem’s hopes and dreams faded a little more. She felt as if she was returning to the east of Anatolia. It was as if they had traveled two long days for nothing and had never left their town. The bus stopped in the darkness in the middle of a dreary field. The driver turned to Cemal, and said, “The directions you showed me told me to put you down in Rahmanlı. This is the bus stop for there.”

  They got off the bus, which soon disappeared down the road, exhaling oily smoke, leaving them alone in the dark night. The air smelled of crops, manure, and burning wood. After the first initial disorientation, the commando in Cemal took over. “That’s where we must go,” he said. “Come on.”

  They began to walk across the field along a muddy path. Meryem’s plastic shoes sank into the sticky clay, reminding her of the walk through the village marketplace. She could hear the voices of the villagers. “Well, my girl, congratulations, you’re off to Istanbul,” they had said. “Good luck to you. Istanbul is a big city, not like this place.”

  “The villagers should come to Istanbul and see for themselves what it is like, especially this place where Yakup lives,” Meryem thought. Compared to where they were, her home was like a palace. She had no idea where they would end up.

  After walking for a time, Cemal noticed two men standing a short distance away in the dark. A familiar sense of danger overcame him. “Hey,” he called out in warning, fearing that if they were soldiers, they might fire on them. He heard the familiar sound of guns being primed.

  “Halt!” they shouted. “Who goes there?”

  “I’m a soldier, too!” Cemal shouted back.

  “Don’t move!”

  Turning on a flashlight, the two figures began to approach Cemal and Meryem.

  Cemal could hardly believe what was happening. He felt as if he were approaching sentries in the Gabar Mountains. They would now ask for the password and shoot if he did not answer correctly.

  As the men came nearer, Cemal realized that they were gendarmes. This meant that Cemal and Meryem were out of the zone of police jurisdiction, in other words, outside of Istanbul.

  Without lowering their guns or flashlight, the gendarmes demanded their identity cards. Cemal tried to soften them down by a few joking remarks in his native dialect, but they remained unsmiling. When Cemal handed them his discharge certificate and ID card, the situation was strange. “So you were a commando,” they said, in the tone of respect due to a senior combatant. What was a former commando doing in the middle of a field with luggage and a little girl at this time of night?

  Cemal told them that they were going to visit his brother in Rahmanlı.

  “Okay,” said the gendarmes, “Rahmanlı is at the top of the hill, but you’ve come at a bad time.”

  That morning, the gendarmes had conducted an operation in Rahmanlı and discovered a Hizbullah “grave house.” The neighborhood was under curfew now.

  Cemal did not understand what the gendarmes meant by a “grave house,” but he asked no further questions. Since the quarter was surrounded by soldiers and especially dangerous in the dark, the gendarmes decided to accompany Cemal and Meryem to Yakup’s home. The smell and the rustle of their khaki uniforms made Cemal uneasy. He felt naked and useless as he had on the day he was discharged. His comrades, the fighting, the canteen food, the stacking of weapons, the ambushes, the cigarettes smoked under cover, and even the rain running down their necks into their uniforms, all suddenly rushed back into his mind. He felt nostalgic for his former life, even a kind of envy.

  Meryem was overcome with surprise as she followed the gendarmes over the muddy field that sucked and dragged at her feet. What kind of a place was this city? Had they by any chance mistaken their directions?

  They passed a sentry post, climbed the hill, and came to a place that looked like a large village full of gendarmes standing guard. Meryem thought that it was too wretched and dilapidated. All the houses were single-storied and poorly built. Rather than being plastered, some of the walls had tin plates nailed to them, and most had a chicken coop at the side. Television antennas sprouted from windows and roofs. Masses of raveled wires and cables hung between the houses. The whole miserable area was illuminated by streetlights. Filthy stray dogs were running all around, but there was nothing resembling a village square. The open space they were walking across was a sea of mud.

  “This can’t be Istanbul, it can’t,” Meryem thought glumly. She felt deceived. Clearly, God had not forgiven her. He did not love her. Furthermore, He was punishing her again. First, He had shown her the miraculous city of Istanbul, to stir up her excited hopes, then came the painful disappointment of this dark, muddy, filthy place.

  When Yakup opened the door and saw Cemal and Meryem standing there beside the gendarme, he was speechless. His face changed color as if he had received a sudden blow. His wife, Nazik, soon appeared to prevent the soldiers from wondering if Yakup did, in fact, know the two strangers.

  Yakup’s house could hardly be called a home. It consisted of one tiny room in which thin mattresses were heaped in a corner, and a metal bedstead hung from the ceiling, through which snaked the cable for one naked electric lightbulb. Yakup’s three children were sitting on the floor, eyes fixed on the television, the only thing that made the room look like any other home. They were too engrossed to rise to greet their uncle Cemal. The announcer was talking at the top of his voice. Even the barn at home was preferable to this hole, Meryem thought to herself, as well as being far cleaner.

  Yakup was overcome with embarrassment. He asked halfheartedly after the health of his brother and of his relatives in the village.

  Meryem followed Nazik to the back of the room, which served as a kitchen. Nazik was making soup, and Meryem immediately began to help by cutting the bread. Colored plastic buckets and basins were ly
ing on the earthen floor. The plastic jerry cans lining one of the walls indicated that the house lacked running water.

  “My, how you’ve grown.… You’re ready for marriage,” exclaimed Nazik. “But why in the world have you come here?”

  “Nazik, is this Istanbul?” Meryem questioned instead of making a reply.

  “To hell with Istanbul,” Nazik exclaimed angrily.

  “But is this place really Istanbul?” Meryem repeated.

  “We’re on the outskirts of the city. Istanbul is so big, it’s difficult to say where it begins or ends. This is what is called a shantytown. The rich people live in the center of the city, but where would we get the money to live there? We can hardly even keep a foothold in this place.”

  Nazik began asking about her relatives and friends in the village as well as the latest gossip. She was homesick, but her husband, who had bragged so much about living in Istanbul, was reluctant to return home with his tail between his legs.

  The house reverberated with the noise of the television. Cemal’s nephew İsmet and niece Zeliha, whom he had known in the village, and a third child, who had been born in Istanbul, answered their uncle’s questions with their eyes fixed on the television. They told him that yes, they went to school, but it took them more than half an hour, rain, sunshine, or snow, to walk there. Whether one called this place a village, a township, or part of the city, there was no school of any kind in Rahmanlı.

  As Yakup was telling his brother about his life in this area, he mentioned in passing that gendarmes had raided a nearby house that day.

  “Look!” İsmet suddenly burst out. “They’re showing our neighborhood on the TV!”

  All the mud and squalor of Rahmanlı was passing across the screen as the television cameraman panned the area, dogs snapping at people’s heels as they contorted their faces and bodies to get themselves on camera. İsmet and Zeliha scanned the images excitedly, hoping to see themselves.

  The television announcer stated several times that the operation in Rahmanlı had led to the discovery of a house belonging to Hizbullah, an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization, which rented houses and buried the corpses of their victims in the basements. That morning, authorities from the municipality had come to Rahmanlı to demolish an illegal building. In fact, all of the houses in the district were illegally constructed. Whoever wanted to put up a house would reach an agreement with the local mafia and build wherever they wished. Every now and then, the municipality would decide to get rid of a few of these shacks, leaving the majority untouched. Cemal learned later that 75 percent of the buildings in Istanbul, which had a population of almost 14 million people, were illegal.

  When the authorities came to demolish a home, the owners would resist. Shrieking women would attack the officers with pots, pans, and sticks. Often, in a last reckless attempt to save their dwelling, a desperate father would catch up one of his children and climb up onto the roof, and, after dousing himself and the child with gasoline, threaten to set fire to himself and the child with the cigarette lighter in his hand if anyone came any nearer. While the authorities tried to persuade him to desist, the television cameras kept rolling, not missing a second of the tragic drama.

  That morning, the residents of the house scheduled for demolition had exhibited a strange response. When the authorities informed the owner, a bearded man in baggy pants, that his building was about to be knocked down, he replied quite calmly, “Okay, but there are still people asleep here. Just give us half an hour so that we can gather up our things.”

  The official in charge had been so astonished by this unusual and unexpected reply that he immediately became suspicious and informed his superiors. His report was passed on to the gendarmerie, who were always on the alert whenever houses were torn down in this way. A short while later, a sergeant with two gendarmes came to the house to check the residents’ IDs. He pounded on the door and shouted to those within to open up on the count of three or he would break the door down. At first there was no response. Then all of a sudden, gunfire erupted from inside the house, wounding the sergeant at the door. Everyone scattered in panic, and after taking cover, the two gendarmes returned fire. From inside the house came strange cries and a unified chorus of “Allahuekber!” Among the hubbub, the voice of a woman could be distinguished.

  Reinforcements quickly arrived, and at the end of an hour-long battle, during which there were several casualties among the gendarmes, three men and an injured woman were dragged out of the house. Later, when it was discovered that the people in the house were Hizbullah militants, the basement was dug up, as the Hizbullah were known to use the ground floors of houses as graveyards for their victims.

  In the basement, three corpses were found, one belonging to a middle-aged woman. Like other victims of the Hizbullah, they had probably been kidnapped, locked in a closet or chest for a while, interrogated and tortured, and finally strangled with steel wire in front of cameras. The bodies were found tied up in the manner known as “hog-tied” and buried on top of each other to conserve space.

  The media reported that the Hizbullah had initially been organized as an Islamic/Kurdish alternative to the PKK, and in its first years had been under state protection. Eventually, the state either lost control of the group or no longer needed its help, so Hizbullah members were often raided in this way and their militants killed.

  Suddenly, Zeliha saw herself on television and began to flap her arms and chirp like a little bird. She had been visible for only a few seconds, but that was enough to arouse İsmet’s jealousy, especially as his friends from the area were now seen on the screen, excitedly explaining what had happened.

  “If you hadn’t been a soldier, they would never have let you come,” Yakup said. “The district’s blocked off. We ourselves, even, have trouble going in and out.” It was obvious from his body language that he wished they had been stopped.

  That night, the women and children slept in one corner of the room and the two brothers in the other. The folded piles of mattresses were spread out on the floor, quilts were placed over them, and Meryem soon fell into a deep sleep.

  Yakup and Cemal smoked and chatted for a while before going to bed.

  “Newcomers to Istanbul live in Rahmanlı,” Yakup related. “Immigrants from different Anatolian cities live here side by side.”

  After a pause, he blurted out, “So now you’ve seen what a lousy life we lead.”

  “Brother,” Cemal replied, “why do you stay? You were better off in the village. You had your own house, land, work … your kids didn’t suffer. Why did you ever come here?”

  “I was after a better life—a dream. ‘The streets of Istanbul are paved with gold,’ you know the saying, but it’s not like that, of course. For one thing, the people here in the city despise us as newcomers and do their best to put us down.”

  “Why don’t you return to the village?”

  “I can’t. There’s no going back. I won’t let anyone make fun of me for not doing what I set out to do. And don’t look at the state we’re in now. In a few years, things may be completely different. At least, it will be better for the kids.”

  Yakup took a long drag on his cigarette and began to tell Cemal his dreams of how to get on in the big city. New immigrants could not find the means to live in the city at first, so they would choose a place outside the city limits, however far, so long as it was near a bus route. Even though the land belonged to the state, a local mafia controlled it and sold lots. It had taken Yakup’s entire savings to buy a piece of property and build this small house, with the help of other immigrants from the same area of eastern Turkey. In order to get electricity, he had hooked up an illegal line to a nearby power cable. This was connected to the bed frame hanging from the ceiling. When the metal glowed red-hot from the current, the house warmed up like a Turkish bath.

  All he needed to become the legal owner of the property was a little patience. Before each election, the government in power generally issued an amn
esty for the residents of slums like Rahmanlı and sold them the official title deeds. One or two years after receiving the title deed, the owners often sold the property to a building contractor for several apartments in the new building to be constructed. Eventually, they would live in a beautiful apartment of their own, as well as receive rent from tenants. Once their capital had grown, they might open a kebab shop or a pizza place, or buy a taxi. Once the housing problem was solved, the rest was easy.

  A few years ago, the district where Yakup’s children went to school had been a slum. Now it had big modern buildings and shopping centers, traffic lights, and a flood of cars. Its residents had become wealthy after receiving the title deeds to their property. Undoubtedly, the same would happen to Rahmanlı in the future, and newcomers to Istanbul would have to go farther beyond Istanbul’s limits to build their shanties. If Yakup persevered, İsmet, Zeliha, and their little sister, Sevinç, would lead a good life as citizens of Istanbul. That was why they put up with the miserable life they led at present.

  Yakup could not explain all this to those in the village. Their thick heads would be unable to comprehend this kind of plan. In fact, he had promised himself that he would never go back to live among those ignorant people. They had no idea of life outside of their small town.

  Cemal was confused. How could Yakup speak so bitterly and demeaningly of their village? “Brother,” he said, “I’m sure you don’t mean that, especially as our father may get to hear of this. You should be more careful.”