* * *
I like hardware stores. They have the remedy for every predicament you can think of. Manning the counter was some boy still wet behind the ears. He did his best to help me out. He found a wire for me, the closest thing he could find to a piano string. I bought some duct tape and a stout hammer handle. A small saw, some sandpaper. I thought of the headline: Scalpel. I didn’t know the first thing about scalpels. What I did know was that long gone were the days when punks who thought they were hot shit packed straight razors in their shirt pockets. I bought a sturdy box cutter; it fit my hand perfectly. I almost bought a blowtorch too, but then I changed my mind. Truth be told, I’d never really liked the smell of burnt flesh.
Pubs crowded the edges of the neighborhood. I thought I saw the blondie again. But I didn’t pay him any mind this time. I went to a pastry shop that had a broken marble counter. I had börek. I went to a greasy spoon restaurant. I had vegetable casserole with meat, rice, and cacık. Then I ducked into a workers’ coffeehouse and ordered rosehip tea. I opened the paper. Let’s see what happened when I wasn’t looking. The headline said, The Scalpel Slays Again! For real. Somebody out there was on a killing spree, knocking off retired civil servants. Nobody had seen or heard a thing. It was almost like some practical joke—saving the retired from their misery! Except it wasn’t a joke. And whoever did this was treating the victims like lambs marked for slaughter during the Feast of the Sacrifice. The person, or persons, might very well be in the business of butchering or medicine, the paper said. Well, there is little difference between a butcher and a medical professional, if you ask me. For lack of visual material, they had printed a huge picture of the scalpel; one had been found with each victim. It was a fancy piece of work: handmade, with some floral ornaments connecting the handle to the blade. Holy shit, look at that! I recall thinking, Are we seeing the beginning of a serial killer fad in Turkey? Of all things …
Days passed. I was getting used to the neighborhood. The neighborhood was getting used to me. I visited the stationery store every once in a while. I was getting fat on kebabs and lahmacun. I recalled the once numerous vendors of firewood, the yorgan makers, and such. If only I could find a yorgan maker, I’d stop to watch the cotton spinner. That would help me focus. But where to find one these days? I went to the barbershop instead and got an old-school haircut and a very close shave with a straight razor. That’s how I regained my focus. The razor, glinting like a river snake, reminded me of all the things I still had to do.
I wandered about with purpose, before, finally, I dared to enter Çıngıraklı Bostan Street. It all felt like a dream. Yet I found the chief’s house just like that, as if I’d put it there myself. There it was, still standing after so many years.
I did my best to ignore him, but I couldn’t help being painfully aware of the blondie. To the hilt. He was in the neighborhood, around me, after me. I was curious as to whether he was following me or not. Maybe he had a number going on in the neighborhood and he was concerned that I would lay claim to his stakes, try to scare up a partnership, or wreck his game somehow. I was picking up a bad vibe from blondie, but whatever his beef, there was no way I’d let him stand in my way. He had to be handled before I could get down to business.
There was a snack shop selling dried fruits and nuts at the mouth of Horhor Avenue. One day I was buying dried oleaster berries there. The blondie walked by and continued up Horhor. I grabbed the paper bag and paused to put some distance between us. Now I was after him. The box cutter was in my pocket. I was about to do some close-range work; it was giving me a serious buzz.
I don’t know if I actually caught up with him or if he just let me catch up. We were in front of a building; its door was ajar. I tossed the bag, reached with my left. He turned then, and I saw his hands were empty. Perhaps foolishly, I let the box cutter go and pushed the guy, charging into him. We burst through the door, crashing against its wings. I was surprised we were still standing. I tried to land a hook on his face; he moved his head ever so slightly and evaded the blow. Nice. Very, very nice. There was no one to break up the fight. My blood was boiling. I saw red the shade of a sizzling iron. I dove into the atrium of the building and pounced on him. By that point, he was no different to me than a rabid dog, and I was a butcher, barging through the gates of the slaughterhouse, eager to do the deed.
We were sitting on the stairs leading up from the atrium of the building. We were breathing heavily, good and cranked up. My knuckles hurt. It felt like I had a few broken ribs. My nose was swollen. Something warm was dripping down my face. My vision was off on the left. My brow was beating like a punctured heart.
As far as I could tell, he wasn’t in any better shape. He turned to me and said, just like that, “We are each worse than the other, you know.” He had a slight accent, like I did. He was right. We were each worse than the other, in ways both material and not so material. But I didn’t know the half of it yet.
We stepped out, leaning on each other. We ducked into a nearby pharmacy. The pharmacist lady had to hold a scream in when she saw us. Fortunately, the blondie knew what he was doing. We left without having to explain anything to anybody.
We went to a kebab house that I was familiar with, one of several strung from the mouth of Horhor toward the police station. I never figured out the man tending it; I didn’t even know his name. He was dark and always wore a black suit. He knew me from back when my mother was sick.
“My oh my!” he said when he saw us. “Did they try to remodel you guys or what?” I would have laughed out loud, if only I’d had the strength. He took us to the back of the store and let us sit at a secluded table. He brought us towels, water, and bags of ice.
Blondie wiped my face with peroxide, then stuffed gauze in my nostrils. “It’s not broken,” he said. Not that it mattered, really. He fixed my cut eyebrow with some strips. He gave me pills for pain and infection. Then he examined and treated himself in front of a mirror. We grabbed the bags of ice and sat, facing each other, like two geese that had escaped a very close shave by some demented barber.
His name was Pandeli. He lived in Vienna. He was a doctor. Single. He had done his residency training in surgery in Istanbul. Not so luckily for me, he had trained as a kickboxer several years before.
I told him about myself. I lived in New York. I had a car repair shop there. I was single. I had dabbled in tae kwon do in the past. I had come to Istanbul because my mother was sick. I didn’t yet explain why I had stayed on, though.
“All right,” I said, finally giving in, “so what brought you here, man?”
There was a silence.
“Look, bro,” he replied, “to make a long story short—” He took a photograph out of his pocket. It was like stained glass. But black-and-white. A clutch of guys, young and old, looking all pumped up, like they were celebrating something. One of them stared straight out of the photograph, straight at me, smiling brightly. I was reminded of photographs of a lynching I once saw on a Harlem wall; photographs of people smiling as if they had just accomplished some major shit. The guy in the photo had a mustache and a gold tooth in the lower right side of his mouth. He was holding a bottle; I recognized it as olive oil. There was an improvised fuse sticking out of it. There seemed to be a demolished store in the background. I examined the proud crowd in the front. The guy holding the bottle could be seen most clearly. He was young. The photo preserved him, it seemed, best of all. The more I looked at him, the more I examined his features, the more amazed I was. My eyes narrowed to blades. My amazement turned into other things. Into rage. Into disgust. My eyes were like a welding machine gradually finding its focus.
I’ll never forget. Never. Damn it. My world went topsy-turvy. Like that. I forgot about my bruised ribs.
I couldn’t wait any longer. One evening a few days later, I was on Çıngıraklı Bostan Street again. I knew that the door of the building always stood open, that the superintendent was rarely around.
I ran up those three floors and f
ound the door, easy as cake. I knocked. I knew his wife had died a few years ago. And that he hadn’t married again.
He opened the door himself. He looked me over. I imagined pushing my way in, the door smashing his face flat like a tomato.
“I grew up in this neighborhood, amca,” I said. “I heard that Müzeyyen Teyze passed away, so I thought I’d drop by and give my condolences.”
“It’s been quite awhile since the lady died, son. Where did you hear about it?” Coming from this guy, the word “son” made me sick to my stomach. How? Why? What son?
“I was abroad.”
“So our news makes it all the way over there, huh?” He smiled. A hushed, stolen smile, like that of a hyena. Then he relaxed. “Come in,” he said finally. “Come on in and sit down.” He opened the door for me and stood aside.
It reeked of mold, moisture, perhaps urine inside. It was a crowded condo. There was a chestnut showcase by the entrance full of never-used fine china. The door to the guest room was open; the furniture was carefully covered. He invited me to the living room, where he spent his time when he wasn’t in the coffeehouse. He had set up a little corner for himself. It seemed he’d laid the paper he’d been reading on the coffee table before he got up to get the door. His glasses were on top of the folded paper. A pitcher of water, a glass, what appeared to be a saccharine box, his cigarette box, and his lighter were also on the table. Now, where did he keep his service gun, I wondered. Next to the chair hung a calendar and framed newspaper clippings about the chief’s exploits, photos of him when he was younger. One of the headlines read: Anarchist Hunter! Another: Peace and Quiet Reign in His Neighborhood! I didn’t recall having any peace and quiet in this neighborhood, but never mind.
He took off his leather slippers and made himself comfortable in that corner of his. Aa to us all. The chief, even if retired. I perched on one of the couches.
“I went to Oruçgazi School back in the day,” I said.
“Whereabouts did you live, son?” he asked. That corner, that aa performance, deserved a proper nightshirt, of the long, flowing, imposing variety. But he was wearing a pressed shirt and pants. Old habits, I thought.
“We lived on Oruçgazi Street.”
“Really, in what building?”
“Oruçgazi Building. I’m the son of Asaf Bey.”
“I don’t think I know him.”
My father’s name was not Asaf; I hadn’t seen my old man in twenty-five years. I decided not to beat around the bush any longer.
“You must know my mother, though.”
“What’s her name?”
“She passed away.”
“I’m sorry. May the remaining live long.”
“May everybody … She had an injured back. She had to take an early retirement for medical reasons, got to the point that she couldn’t even leave the house anymore.”
“We should all be blessed with good health. But that’s just life, I guess. Things happen.”
“Yeah, they happen to some, but not to others. I’ve always been curious. I mean, I’ve always wondered exactly how it was she injured her back.”
He was becoming visibly uncomfortable. He looked tense.
“Back then, they said she’d injured her foot jumping rope with her students. And then one thing just led to another.” He’d swallowed the bait. “Isn’t that right?”
“You have such a great memory, amca! How on earth do you even know that, let alone remember it? And why?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?”
“Did you ever see her around back then? In the street? Here and there? You ever look her in the face?”
That tensed the guy up even more.
“What do you mean, son? Why would we look at a woman like that? Of course we wouldn’t, she was a sister to us, here and in the afterlife.”
“Right,” I said, leaning in toward him. “So would you look her in the face like this?” We were eye to eye. “Like this?” He opened his mouth. But he couldn’t make a sound. I let my own voice rip. “Is that the way you treat your sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters? Huh? You two-bit punks?” It was as if a festering boil had burst within me, like the pus was bubbling up, spewing out of my mouth, out of my nose. “Pieces of shit!” My jaws were almost locked with disgust. “Beatings! Thrashings! Honor killings!” I was on him in two steps, an unstoppable surge of words gushing through my mind. A refrain: “Dungeons, tortures, executions …”
I strapped him firmly to the chair with duct tape, taking care not to rough him up too much. I gagged him. He was old, too old. I remembered my grandmother. Look at him, look at my grandmother. My mother wasn’t religious at all, but my grandmother prayed five times a day and fasted during Ramadan. She was opposed to the death penalty, just like my mother. Back during the coup, during that era known as “September 12,” when these guys were stringing people up, my grandmother, may she rest in peace, would say, “They’re human beings too, my son; they’re our children too, all subjects of Allah.” She’d cry silently. A kind of dry, tear-free weeping. Perhaps, being a woman, there were no tears left in her at that age.
The guy stirred as he slowly came to. Once he understood that there was no way he was getting free, he surrendered to the chair.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll remove the tape, but if you raise your voice, it’ll be real ugly for you, believe me.” He nodded. I took off the duct tape. He coughed.
“Listen, son, you’re making a big mistake. I’m an old, very sick man …”
“You are very sick, true, but yours is a different kind of sickness,” I said. “And you know what? You’ve made everybody else sick too. You made the whole damn country sick …”
“Look, son, the apple of my eye, I’m a retired civil servant of this country.”
“I’m not your son, not the apple of your eye, not your anything. And I am nothing to that state of yours. And it’s nothing to me.”
“Who are you people? Anarchists? Communists? Separatists?”
“What’s that? You mean you don’t even recognize this little neighborhood bastard? One of many, right? You’ve fucked yourself up in the head, old man, all hung up like that about those ‘illegal organizations’! If you’re law and order, then hell yes, I am an anarchist!”
“Son, I’m telling you, I’m sick, I’m alone, I don’t have anybody. Don’t you have a conscience?”
“And who do I have? Who did my mother have? Huh? Tell me! I have every bit as much a conscience as you do, no more, no less …”
“Don’t you have any fear of Allah?”
“Yeah, right. You picked the wrong guy to ask that question to.”
“I’m sick, I …” He was babbling.
“Wait,” I said, “I got just what you need. This’ll heal you up for sure.” I took out the knife. “Or how about I just carve your prescription into your skin here, how’s that sound? That’d make a snazzy tattoo, huh?”
He fell silent. Then he started moaning and praying, murmuring the Kelime-i ahadet. I was sure there must be a prayer book in a bag somewhere, and some holy Zamzam water in the fridge.
I grabbed his face with my left hand, then I took his left, which was strapped to the chair, with my right. Almost like I was going to kiss it and put it to my forehead. Right.
“What did you do to my mother? Tell me, blow by blow.”
“Who fed you such nonsense, son? There is no such thing! I swear—”
I squeezed his hand. His bones gently cracked in my hand. Like pretzels.
“Look,” I said, “no bullshit. Why did you take her in?”
He pulled himself together. Then, with some defiance, he said: “She was muckraking at her school. We heard about it.” My mother had been a member of the teachers’ union. She was a first-rate union organizer.
“What else? Is that all?”
“And a retired colonel from your building came to see me.”
“No kidding? So?”
“They were trying to put together a petiti
on to kick a whore out of that building. But your mother, she said, ‘Everybody has the right to a private life, we have no business butting in,’ and sent the petitioners away.”
“How many times I’ve heard that story. It must’ve been sooo fuckin’ hard to swallow for you macho assholes, huh? So what else?”
“She had to be cut down to size. That’s just the way things were back then.”
“Back when?”
“Before 1980 … Times of anarchy … chaos …”
“But it’s still like that now, isn’t it? How was it back then? Tell me, how?”
“She was a divorced woman, she had to be reined in.”
“Is that so? ‘She was a divorced woman.’ Why don’t you come straight out and say it: She was a bitch. A cunt. You never had the guts, though, and you still don’t, do you?”
“God forbid! I could never say such a thing! No! Never!”
“Well then?”
“I sent my guys for her, and we took her in.”
“And?”
“We were just going to give her a good tongue-lashing and let her go.” Then he let it slip: “But she was one of those … those women. Long on hair …”
I knew the saying: “And short on reason? Watch your mouth, asshole!”
“Sorry, I mean, your mother, she started mouthing off about rights, justice, constitution, schmonstitution …”
“Ha! You and your schmonstitution. You assholes turned it into a schmonstitution, right? But go on. What then?”
Istanbul Noir Page 15