Istanbul Noir
Page 1
This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2008 Akashic Books
Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple
Istanbul map by Ayegül zer
eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75006-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-62-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008925932
All rights reserved
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
info@akashicbooks.com
www.akashicbooks.com
ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:
Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman
Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan
Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin
Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin
Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth,
edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock
Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack
D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos
D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos
Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking
Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen
Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas
Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce
London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth
Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton
Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block
Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block
Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford
New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith
Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly
San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis
Toronto Noir, edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore
Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason
Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz
Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman
FORTHCOMING:
Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana Lopez & Carmen Ospina
Copenhagen Noir (Denmark), edited by Bo Tao Michaelis
Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney
Indian Country Noir, edited by Liz Martínez & Sarah Cortez
Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani
Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II
Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen
Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson
Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin
Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell
Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom,
Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven
Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski
San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis
Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert
Acknowledgments
Mustafa thanks Pınar Yeilolu for giving him such a good reason to live, and for not so simply bearing with him through those Istanbul Noir times; Cem Mumcu for encouraging him to plunge into the project; Murat Eyübolu for making him look good in his photographs; his aunt Nil Taneri for inspiring him with her street map of Istanbul which she autographed for him in 1967; and Re-fike Türker, his aunt from Kumkapı, whose death was the death of Istanbul a little bit.
Amy thanks Dilek Akdemir for, well, everything. She also thanks Tansel Demirel for being a translator’s best friend; Irene Gates for valuable feedback; dil Aydoan for blatant honesty, bold encouragement, and Foça; participants of the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature for input and motivation; Tülin Er for constant reassurance; and her mother for reading to her while she was still in the womb.
Both Mustafa and Amy would also like to thank the tough-lovin’ (but not necessarily tough to love) folks at Akashic; Ayegül zer for the killer map; Deniz Ourlu for the stark and striking cover photo (and Murat Ourlu and Deniz Akkol for helping us find it); and Mel Kenne for making connections.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
PART I: LUST & VENGEANCE
SMAL GÜZELSOY
The Tongue of the Flames
Büyükada
FERYAL TLMAÇ
Hitching in the Lodos
Bebek
MEHMET BLL
The Stepson
Sirkeci
BARI MÜSTECAPLIOLU
An Extra Body
Altunizade
PART II: PUSHING LIMITS, CROSSING LINES
HKMET HÜKÜMENOLU
The Smell of Fish
Rumelihisarı
JESSICA LUTZ
All Quiet
Fatih
ALGAN SEZGNTÜRED
Around Here, Somewhere
akınbakkal
LYDIA LUNCH
The Spirit of Philosophical Vitriol
Tepebaı
PART III: IN THE DARK RECESSES
YASEMN AYDINOLU
One Among Us
Samalcılar
MUSTAFA ZYALAN
Black Palace
Aksaray
BEHÇET ÇELK
So Very Familiar
Fikirtepe
NAN ÇETN
The Bloody Horn
Fener
TARKAN BARLAS
A Woman, Any Woman
Yenikapı
PART IV: GRIEF & GRIEVANCES
RIZA KIRAÇ
Ordinary Facts
4th Levent
SADIK YEMN
Burn and Go
Kurtulu
MÜGE PLKÇ
The Hand
Moda
Turkish Pronunciaton Guide & Glossary
About the Contributors
INTRODUCTION
TRANSGRESSION AND THE STRAIT: POLITICS, PASSION, AND PAIN
Istanbul is the place where East meets West, literally. It is, as convention would have it, a meeting point, a crossroads. At the same time, it marks the spot where geography is irreparably rent in two; it is a fissure in the continuum, a seething rupture, so to speak. The only city in the world to lie smack dab at the junction of two continents, Europe and Asia, Istanbul is split down the middle by the Bosphorus Strait, pierced by the Golden Horn, and caressed by the Black and Marmara seas. In short, with her “tough love,” Mother Nature has pummeled and groomed this place into one of the most stunning geographical locations on earth.
Indeed, Istanbul has been the site of the collision and collusion, of the fracturing and the fusion of cultures, for millennia. Capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) and Ottoman empires, the city formerly known as Byzantium and then Constantinople became Istanbul (incidentally, a word derived from the Greek term for “in the city”) after being conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. Many Christian Greeks remained and even flourished in Istanbul following Byzantium’s defeat at the hands of the Muslim Ottomans. Under Ottoman rule, Istanbul became known as alem-penah—“refuge of the universe,” a haven for myriad religious and ethnic groups. When the Jews were expelled during the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 by the Spanish king, the Ottoman Sultan welcomed them with open arms. As the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul attracted hundreds of thousands of people for centuries from within the empire’s vast territories and beyond. In the wake of the empire’s demise, the Turkish Republic (founded in 1923) has served this legacy well. Waves of immigration, espec
ially since the 1950s, have increased the city’s population by more than tenfold: Turks, Kurds, Laz, Alevis, Circassians, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, etc. You get the picture. A mosaic, a melting pot, a vat of oil and water—call it what you will, there is no denying that Istanbul has always been ethnically, socially, and religiously cosmopolitan to the core.
As submissions for Istanbul Noir started to come in, it became increasingly clear to us that what was taking shape was not just some collection of dark stories set in old Stamboul, but a rich portrait of the city itself—or, at the very least, a particularly revealing series of snapshots. Mind you, it is a city shaped largely by the often vicious ebb and tide of the nation’s politics. Although Ankara may be the capital of the Republic of Turkey, the truth of the matter is, with a good twelve million people and thus a fifth of its population, Istanbul is the throbbing, often bleeding, heart of the country’s politics. And it shows.
In a tumultuous and notoriously unreliable city where the only constant is instability, one often seeks solace in humor. You will get a dose of that in at least a couple of the stories in this collection. The humor is, we hope, appropriately dark. Rather (but not entirely) antithetical to this humor is a mood that also predominates in several of the pieces: hüzün. Like many of the terms you’ll find in the glossary at the end of this book, hüzün is one of those difficult-to-translate concepts integral to the culture of Turkey and the Turkish language, and as a characteristic mood of the inhabitants of this city, several of the stories in this collection are imbued with it. Hüzün is a kind of melancholy, a heaviness or a sadness of heart. It is a world pervaded by gray, a state of weariness and hopelessness and lethargy. It is a word for which, arguably, there is no equivalent in English. It is an indescribable mood that you can describe for hours. And in that respect, it is a lot like Istanbul.
A sadomasochistic metropolis in equal measures self-important and self-loathing, Istanbul is rife with contradiction. It is a living conundrum: impossible to pin down and moody as hell. It is raw and human, vibrant and pulsating. It is a city of blood and concrete, a palimpsest of memorials and scars that will not be erased.
Istanbul’s history has been marked by the clashing of wills, battling sometimes for life, sometimes for power, often, ultimately, for both. The last several violence-riddled decades in particular have left an indelible mark on the contemporary fabric of the city, not to mention on the minds, bodies, and souls of its people. The knife has cut deep, and the wounds may never completely heal.
This holds true especially for the coup of 1980, which marked a violent and painful rupture in the history of the Turkish Republic. In its efforts to squelch the political left, the state effectively crushed the spirit of an entire generation, extinguishing hope and erecting on its ashes an apolitical society, shaped to the mold of consumerism. An inexhaustible source of heartache and melancholy, bitterness and rage, the involuntary transition from a society fermenting with dissidence to one numbed to the point of docility has had a pervasive impact upon the Turkish people, palpable in many of the stories in this volume.
The political vacuum created by the subjugation of the left was soon filled by the emergence of new forms of nationalism and Islamism. While the history of the Republic is fraught with efforts to galvanize Turkish identity at the expense of others—such as the incitement of the “Riots of September 6–7” in 1955, during which Greeks and other non-Muslims and their property in Istanbul suffered widespread attacks, the banning of the Kurdish language, and myriad other discriminatory practices and policies targeting “non-Turks”—in its most recent guise, hysterical ultra-nationalism has become normalized. The Turkish state continues to wage a nearly twenty-five-year war against Kurdish rebels in the southeast, and a psychological war throughout the nation. With displaced Kurds heading west, Istanbul has become rife with ethnic tensions—the perfect breeding ground for paranoia. In a state that propagates its own exaltation by means of a ban on “insulting Turkishness” (Law 301), self-esteem is a shaky business, and targets for venting your own insecurity are easy to come by. Hence the assassination of Hrant Dink, an intrepid Armenian journalist convicted of 301, just two years ago—in broad daylight on a lazy day in the heart of Istanbul, nonetheless.
Together with ultra-nationalism, the post-1980 era has also seen the rise of Islamic movements, ranging from the most radical marginal groups, like Hezbollah, to the current ruling party, the “moderate conservative” Justice and Development Party (AKP). The party of a marginalized majority oppressed by the militantly secular elite cultivated by founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the early years of the Republic, AKP is a nightmare-come-true for many, who believe that they will not stay “moderate” for long.
Lying at the crossroads of East and West, Istanbul belongs to neither and to both, and it is precisely this elusive in-betweenness upon which the city thrives. No matter how much blood is spilled trying to conform to Western standards, they just don’t stick in this slippery city. Here, you don’t break the rules, you forge a loophole through them. It is no coincidence that transvestites are generally banished to the gritty back streets of Istanbul, while one of Turkey’s most popular icons is an outrageous and outspoken transsexual, cherished by families throughout the nation.
A den of sin and a bastion of virtue, Istanbul is a fog-covered playground of power and resistance, denial and repression, and if you don’t know the tricks of the game, you’ll likely feel the urge to abandon your marbles and go.
Some people here say that you’re a true Istanbulite when you start insisting that you’re leaving, but you never do. Others insist that there’s no such thing as a true Istanbulite—everyone comes from somewhere, but that somewhere is never Istanbul. These clichés are perhaps testimony to this city’s simultaneous push and pull, its allure—whether aesthetic, economic, mystical, inexplicable, or otherwise—and its tendency to either eradicate or repulse its own. It is a city of love and of hate, where passions ride high and often come crashing down with a vengeance.
Welcome to Istanbul Noir: Leave your shoes, and expectations, at the door.
Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler
Istanbul, Turkey
August 2008
PART I
LUST & VENGEANCE
THE TONGUE OF THE FLAMES
BY SMAL GÜZELSOY
Büyükada
How big a mistake can one possibly make? How much ruin can we possibly bring upon ourselves, our loved ones, or even strangers? Such questions would have sounded ridiculous to me when I was in my twenties. Back then, at most, you’d take a gun and empty two clips into people you didn’t know from a hole in the wall. Okay, let’s make that three clips. How many people can you kill at once? Or, for example, how deadly a bomb can you build on your own? That should be the true yardstick of how unhinged one is: How much havoc can you, as an individual, wreak upon the world? That was how I thought, and that was the reason, I imagine, why I was a guy who simply didn’t give a damn. I was so damn sure that the highest price I’d pay for any mistake couldn’t be more than my own life.
Now, as I do some soul-searching before boarding the ferry to the Princes’ Islands from Sirkeci, I see how much I’ve changed over the last twelve years. Without understanding, or even realizing it, I have become another person all together.
I was calm and certain, as if going through the motions I went through countless times every day. As if every day I’d put in a token and pass through the turnstiles, checking over and over again whether the safety was off on the .45 caliber Beretta in my coat pocket, caressing the bag containing the painful last moments of the twelve loved ones I had lost.
I had tweaked my plans to avenge those twelve as soon as I was released from prison in my mind so many times, that by now I wasn’t sure if I was living in reality, or only dreaming in the ward about the moment I’d confront the maniac responsible for their slaughter. But then, what did it matter! The truth is, there was only one clue to help me discern fantasy
from reality: The setting for that scene of revenge in my dreams was a dark alley full of crime and vice, where thugs settled scores. I would imagine how he, with his graying hair, dreamy eyes, and the self-confidence of a comic book hero, would collapse at long last, his back against a wall, full of fear, finally aware that there was no escape from my wrath. The location would be a street of transvestites and pimps who knew well and good when to look the other way; when cornered in that street, Nigel’s faint smirk and wistful expression would transform into a look of utter horror. Clearly understanding the end I had planned for him, he’d be able to remain standing only as long as he was leaning firmly against a wall of obscene graffiti. Finally, he would concede defeat, falling to his knees in a dirty puddle of rain.
I had been fantasizing about dozens of variations of this scenario every night, like a child who never gets tired of listening to the same fairy tale over and over. I had no choice. Then I’d plan how and where to look for him. This part worried me most of all. It was possible that Nigel, knowing my release date, had already made his escape. Yet the note he’d attached to the Polaroid that he sent with the last book (which I now kept next to the Beretta) made me think that he was as prepared and eager for the second round as I was: Büyükada. I’m waiting for you.
So there I was, gliding through the Sea of Marmara on a ship rocked by a rough and humid breeze. I could see the Princes’ Islands lined up in a row on the horizon, rising like the décor of a dream emerging from the fog. I thought that as I drew closer, certainly the spell would come to an end and I would be confronted with the cold reality of the island’s earth. Spread over the hilly terrain of Büyükada, a dark forest shivered in the blast of harsh wind, allowing a glimpse of magnificent mansions before quickly concealing them once again. This shiny paradise that I used to visit as a child during summer vacations now stood before me in a diabolic visage, surrounded by fog and dark clouds heavy with rain. The closer I got, the better I understood why Nigel had chosen this place for our final showdown. He didn’t want anyone else involved in this final reckoning. Nobody else would see us there in that little world of forests and isolated houses. We were now in the heart of nothingness. This is where we were to settle accounts. Ours was to be the confrontation of two ferocious, raging animals. Far from everyone and everything … But why was he dragging me all the way out here, when in his own twisted mind he’d already gotten his revenge for Xenia’s death?