Istanbul Noir

by Mustafa Ziyalan

  And then …

  I won’t say what happened next. Not because I don’t know, but because I don’t want to bore you any further. Considering the intimate details I’ve already provided, I must have heard all about it from one of the parties involved, and since that obviously couldn’t be Cavidan Hanım (though who knows, right?), I must have heard it from Tolga. Perhaps I’m Tolga’s best friend, bearer of his secrets, his lawyer, or better yet, perhaps I’m Tolga himself. If I’m not making all this stuff up, that is. But what difference does it make anyway? Who says these were their real names? I probably changed them, right? Especially since the case still remains to be settled in court! Sharing these experiences with you—even if I don’t actually know you—has, it seems to me, forged a bond between us. And that bond forces me to confess: Yes, I changed the names, and I also changed the professions and the addresses. Unfortunately, these are not real people except for their genders and ages. The only real thing is that everything unfolded exactly as I have told you. Oh, and the wind! It was every bit as powerful as I have said. Really, what a lodos it was!

  THE STEPSON

  BY MEHMET BLL

  Sirkeci

  It was one of those winter evenings when the darkness descends early. His hands burned from the cold, his stomach from hunger, and his heart from longing for his mother. He looked at the kiosk in front of Sirkeci train station, at the spit of twirling meat, the döner, fat seeping out of it onto the fire below. He swallowed. He reached into his pocket. He had just enough money for one more night in a bachelors’ room—unless he took care of it tonight, then he wouldn’t need to pay for the room anymore. But what if his stepfather failed to show up again? It would mean another night of dining on simit, that’s what.

  When he had reached his home that frosty evening, the woman who opened the door was a complete stranger to him. It was from this sinister woman, with the gaping front teeth and foul look in her eyes, that he learned his mother had died. The woman was one of his stepfather’s wives, and she told him that she’d moved into the house after his mother’s death. She refused to explain any further. The woman started to shut the door, but he grabbed it, forcing it back open. How did his mother die? When? And where was his stepfather? The woman said nothing about his mother, only that she hadn’t seen her husband in a long time. He stopped by once in a blue moon to drop off some cash, but he never stuck around for long. That was all she could tell him. She shut the door.

  The roots of his hair were damp with sweat, there was a tingling in his knees, and the tips of his toes had gone numb. He sat down on the wet concrete step in front of the house. He was frozen in a state of shock and grief. His facial expression, the thoughts and questions running through his mind, the entire flow of life, all of it was frozen in a state of temporary coma. At every door he knocked on that night, he met the same response: “I don’t know anything about it!”

  Both he and his mother were outsiders in this place, his stepfather’s hometown. Something had happened, someone had done something to his mother, and now everyone was keeping it from him, as if they’d made some kind of pact of silence. There was a sternness in their answers, a chilliness in the voices, and an unbreachable distance in their faces. They didn’t want him, didn’t want him wandering the town’s muddy streets like some stray shadow, didn’t want him asking questions, didn’t want him knocking on their doors; they wanted him to evaporate, to get lost, and for good. It was as if his mother had been erased from their memories all together. So where was his stepfather?

  With no place to go, he spent his time behind the neighborhood coffeehouse, shivering and whimpering like a dog in a graveyard. At the end of the second day, he was getting a drink and washing his face at the fountain behind the mosque, when the sound of the imam’s frazzled voice sent a chill down his spine. Though only a few years older than him, the imam looked like a ghastly old man, what with his turban, robe, and beard, and squinty eyes behind dark glasses; in a voice that sounded like something out of the netherworld, the imam was saying something about his mother’s death. He approached the imam timidly so that he could hear better. It had been months since the young man’s mother had died, the imam explained. It was the young man’s stepfather who had informed the imam of the woman’s death one evening, asking that she be buried the next day following the morning call to prayer. It is only for Allah to judge, it is true, the imam said, and as a sinner the stepfather bore the weight of his own sins. But he had to admit that he did not like the look of the stepfather that night. Instead of sorrow for the departed, his eyes had shined with raw sparks of fear, sated flickers of rage. Of course, only the dearly departed, the man’s stepfather, and Allah knew what had happened that night, whether the woman had passed on naturally, or due to an accident, or whether she was the victim of a malicious deed.

  “So, you mean you have no idea why or how my mother died?” the young man suddenly asked.

  Unfazed by the interruption, the imam told him that other than the suspicious look in the stepfather’s eyes, there didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary. Maybe she really had died of natural causes; maybe she’d just run out of breath or her heart had just stopped beating.

  It was obvious, however, that the imam had not taken a liking to his stepfather, a man who in his entire lifetime had not once donated a dime to the mosque, attended anyone’s mevlit service, or gone to Friday prayer, or any of the bayram prayers for that matter. Or maybe the imam simply felt a twinge of pity for this desperate, suffering young man.

  There would be no peace for him, and he would not be able to mourn properly, until he knew the why and how of it, and the imam was aware of this. And so he told the young man that his stepfather had gone to Istanbul, that he was there in a neighborhood called Sirkeci, that there the young man would find a coffeehouse run by his relatives, and that he could ask his stepfather to tell him the truth of the matter himself once he found him. The young man felt an urge to hug the imam, to kiss his hand, to wipe his skirts on his face. But he was out the door before the imam could even finish saying, “May God pardon his faults.”

  There was no doubt in his mind: It was his stepfather who was responsible for his mother’s death. That tyrant, that drunkard, that asshole with the many wives had consumed his mother, whose very hand the young man held in such high esteem that it seemed too precious for his lips. He’d taken her life. Sent her to the grave much, much too early, without even going to the trouble to tell her son about it.

  He knew that if he did not get his revenge, he would be defiling the memory of his mother, damning her love for him, betraying the breast whose milk he had craved since his first breath of life.

  When he first disembarked, the crowd and noise that he found in Sirkeci had sent his head spinning. The tram siren, the honking cars, the people scurrying along the muddy sidewalks, all of it had unnerved him completely, and so he ran, straight to the sea with its billowing waves a few hundred meters in the distance, sprinting, as if toward some kind of miracle. While catching his breath he stood looking out at the ships rocking back and forth in the water, the greedy seagulls squawking in the air, the men fishing from the Galata Bridge, the larger bridge connecting the two sides of Istanbul, and the misty beauty of the opposite shore, which extended before him like a living, breathing postcard. He was hungry, as usual. It was then that he purchased his very first simit in Istanbul and quickly devoured it, right down to the last sesame seed.

  Finding the coffeehouse that the imam had told him about proved quite a task. In the narrow streets crammed full of jostling pedestrians, salesmen screaming out their pitches, store on top of store on top of store, heaps of merchandise piled high upon tables, and dark office buildings, he was looking for a coffeehouse with a certain name but an uncertain address. “Walk straight ahead, turn right, then go uphill …” “You’re at the wrong place, brother. You gotta go down this street until you see a kiosk on the corner, then you turn left there, and then …”

&nbs
p; The cigarette smoke stung his eyes and seared his nose the moment he stepped into the coffeehouse. He scanned the room, searching for his stepfather. There were men yelling, playing cards, rolling dice in a game of backgammon, watching television. He looked at each face. When the apprentice carrying tea on a suspended tray asked him who he was looking for, he told him. But why was he looking for him? “I know him from back home,” the young man said, and gave him the name of the town. That loosened the apprentice’s tongue up a bit. He told the young man that the latter’s stepfather wasn’t there at the moment, and that he only stopped by every once in a while. There was a hotel where he hung out sometimes though. He could tell him the name of the hotel, if the young man wanted to try there.

  It was nearby. It wasn’t nearly as difficult to find as the coffeehouse had been. He passed through a number of dark, narrow, muddy, potholed, lookalike streets before arriving at the hotel. It had single and double rooms, as well as twelve-person rooms with bunk beds, what the receptionist referred to as “bachelors’ rooms.” He asked about his stepfather. Perhaps he was staying there? “What you want with him, huh, boy?” the receptionist snarled in response. He repeated what he had said to the coffeehouse apprentice. He wasn’t up to no good; he was just hoping to find his friend from back home. The receptionist told him that his stepfather did stay there, but that he didn’t show up every night. Now, did he want a room or not? He whipped out the money for a bed in one of the bachelors’ rooms.

  Toward morning the door opened, startling him so much that he nearly bumped his head on the iron bars of the bed above. It took him a few moments to recall where he was. He wasn’t in the army ward, or in the infirmary at the barracks—then he finally remembered. He had to keep watch. Shivering, he got out of bed and with slow, silent steps made his way to the toilet. The odor was suffocating, and so he held his breath as he peed, for what seemed an interminably long time. He washed his hands and face; there was no soap; he took a piece of tissue paper from the nail in the wall and dried his hands. Quietly, he descended the stairs.

  He exited the hotel and walked across the street; there, he knelt behind a large garbage can. His empty stomach was raising hell and his eyes burned, desperate for sleep. He saw a crumpled newspaper on the ground and reached out and opened it. Maybe some reading would wake him up; besides, it was a decent way to pass the time.

  RUMORS END IN MURDER

  A woman in Bayrampaa shot and killed a man whom she claimed had spread rumors about her … Another transvestite murdered. The transvestite, who was staying at a hotel in zmir’s Konak district, was found dead, having been stabbed in the heart with a knife … When his neighbor started making passes at his daughter, the man chopped him up with a meat cleaver …

  It was a rude awakening: Who sought revenge empty-handed? Well, he did, apparently. How was he going to take out his stepfather? He didn’t have anything, not a knife, not even a shiv. He heard foot-steps and sat up. A tall, bald, potbellied man with a mustache and a long beard was approaching the hotel. He tottered drunkenly. That was him; that was his stepfather, his mother’s murderer. The young man’s heart began racing, beating like a machine gun. He was glad to have found this man, but he was suddenly furious at himself for having shown up empty-handed. Still, he stood up and ran across the street, stopping his stepfather in his tracks.

  “What did you do to my mother?”

  His stepfather was startled at first. But then he looked closely at the face of the pathetic figure standing across from him, and scowled. Try as he might, the young man didn’t know how to interpret the expression oscillating across his stepfather’s face. Was he an innocent man who had been wronged? Or a sinner whose sin had been uncovered, a petulant drunkard, his mouth and nose twitching unconsciously? Though he reeked of alcohol and was shrouded in a mist of sleeplessness, the man quickly snapped to. He was looking down, in both senses of the term, upon the scrawny body before him, his snot-nosed stepson, who stood screaming at him in that puny voice of his.

  “What the hell are you talking about, snot-face?”

  In a reflex he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He felt weak and helpless, like a peeled onion, like he’d been ground to a pulp. With all his weakness, he grabbed his stepfather’s collar.

  “Did you kill my mother?”

  His stepfather swayed slightly before grabbing him by his wrists and throwing him to the ground and kicking him over and over again. The more the young man struggled to get up, the harder the kicks became.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? Huh? You little fucker and your fucking mother. Too bad you couldn’t be a man and stand up for her, huh? Fucking faggot!”

  As he lay on the ground being kicked, he recalled the house where his mother and stepfather had lived. A house that he could never, not even for a second, call home. He was the last to bed and the first to rise. He recalled his sofa bed, which he couldn’t unfold until his mother and, especially, his stepfather had left the living room for the night. Drunken hands some nights, under a shield of darkness, would touch his shoulders, his chest, his cock, pretending to tuck him in.

  He was making his way down Mercan Hill, from the Covered Bazaar to Sirkeci, filled with shame. He had lost his past, his present, his entire life. Because he had lost his mother. He was incapable of taking his revenge. And even at this moment, feeling so useless, he imagined himself embracing his mother, weeping and sobbing, and telling her all about what his stepfather had done.

  Beneath drops that resembled neither rain nor snow, he dove into the streets he had wandered through when searching for the coffeehouse. He was looking for the display tables with the knives which had caught his eye earlier. Most stores were closed at that hour and the streets were largely deserted. The peddlers with their socks, lemons, chestnuts, “whorehouse sweets,” smuggled cigarettes, alcohol, mobile telephones, fake perfume, fake Viagra, lighter fluid, pirated CDs, videotapes, and DVDs seemed to all be in a silent daze, moving about like a slow-motion film. Finally he saw a stand with meat and bread knives and cleavers. But the goods on display weren’t what he was looking for; sure, they’d do the job, but they were too difficult to carry. As he looked blankly upon the wares, the peddler asked him knowingly: “So whatcha need, brother? A jackknife, a dagger, a switchblade?”

  He felt much stronger after pocketing a switchblade, one that opened just like that—chaak—with the press of a button. He was no longer afraid. He wasn’t thinking of the hunger he felt, or his yearning for the warm embrace and sweet milk-scented breast of his mother; he was thinking about vengeance, and hate.

  He’d taken up position behind the trash can again, in that same sheath of darkness across from the hotel. He put his numb hands to his mouth and blew warm air into them. Then he slipped his hands back in his pockets and ran his fingers over the switchblade. It was even colder than his fingers.

  He came to when he heard a woman scream: “Give me my money, damn it!” His hand went to the switchblade in his pocket and he pressed his back against the wall to conceal himself further.

  “Where you goin’, you bastard!”

  He stuck his head out a little, still shielded by the trash can, and saw a tall, young woman with golden-blond hair thrashing about on the ground at the corner opposite the hotel. Then he saw the man who was kicking her. He took out his switchblade and darted toward the woman.

  “What money, cunt? What fucking money?” the man screamed back at the woman.

  “You think you get to fuck for free, bastard? Go fuck your wife for free, asshole.”

  The woman was dressed much too lightly for this cold weather; it was beyond the young man’s comprehension. Her long, thin legs gleamed from the ground where she lay, and her black panties and ass were visible beneath her skirt, which was now up around her waist. He was shocked at the woman’s determination, as she fought the man’s legs by kicking right back at him. As if she were asking to be killed.

  “You asshole, leave her alone!” he screamed.


  Both the woman and the man looked over at him, stunned. The man turned away from the woman and furiously stomped toward him.

  “What, you her fucking pimp or something? What’s it to you anyway, fucking scumbag!”

  With a showy press of the button the switchblade opened—chaak. He liked that sound. The sparkle of the blade, there beneath the streetlamps as he moved it around in his hand, dazzled even him. By the time the man had begun to make his silent escape, the young woman was already on her feet.

  “Thank you sooo much. You came just in time.”

  The young man looked at the woman with a stunned expression as she said these words. She had a very deep voice. In fact, it wasn’t like a woman’s voice at all. Moreover, she was at least half a foot taller than he was. She put on quite the show as she coyly straightened out her skirt and hair. There was almost nothing left of the woman who’d just had her ass kicked moments before.

  “Allah must have sent you to me. My hero. So tell me, where are you from?”

  Now he was sure. The protrusion on her throat, her Adam’s apple, moved up and down as she talked.

  “Goddamn you!”

  His eyes were wide with disgust and he was looking for a hole, any hole, to crawl into. As he ran back toward the hotel, he saw his stepfather walk out and step into a taxi, which then disappeared down the street.

  “Hey, where you goin’? Wait a minute!”

  The woman man, the woman-like man, that blond-haired faggot in the miniskirt, just wouldn’t shut up. He, or she, chased after him, adjusting her clothing along the way. The young man ran after the taxi, cursing his bad luck, cursing his fate. He’d missed his prey. He had hoped that he wouldn’t have to wait another day, that he wouldn’t have to spend another night out on the cold stone pavement, that he would take care of this matter that evening, but now, because of some faggot’s ass-fucking money, his prey had gotten away.