“Then … it was a police station, son, every place has its rules.”
“Cut the crap! What happened next?”
“The one not helped by berating deserves—”
I knew that saying too: “A beating?”
“Yes. We roughed her up a bit.”
“Did you put her on falaka?”
“No, I swear to God, we didn’t have any such thing at our station.”
“Well, where were all those people wrung through falaka then?”
“They’d be picked up and taken away, we sent them away …”
“To where?”
“How should I know? I was only a civil servant of the state. How should we know what the state was up to?”
Ah yes, how could they know? So many of my friends were wrecked on falaka, endured suspension, were electrocuted through their genitals, even eyeballs. I’m sure some were sodomized with truncheons or Coke bottles. I was never arrested, never tortured. I was more into mischief and thuggery than all that education, reading, writing, and oration. I never finished high school. I got my college education in coffeehouses and movie theaters. My hangout was a body shop in Dolapdere. I didn’t mean shit to the state and its crews. Yet I always heard things from my friends at the coffeehouse in the neighborhood. As much as they could tell, anyway. After all, how could someone talk about such things? I mean, who could you tell? And who would believe you anyway? No way, no human being could possibly do such things to another. I’d always feel guilty when talking to people who had been tortured. I still do.
“Where did you hear these things, son?”
“It’s fresh news to me. I just found out … Okay, so did you electrocute her?”
“I’m telling you, we didn’t have those kinds of things at our station. We didn’t know anything about them.”
“Did you …” His eyes widened. “Stick … anything up her?”
“Have mercy! God forbid!”
“Okay, how did she break her foot and her back?”
He was silent again. Then: “She tried to run, fell down the stairs.” A pause. “Down two flights.”
“And you mean to tell me you guys did not throw her down?”
“No, no, I swear.”
“And then?”
“We took her back to the neighborhood.”
He was silent again. They left the woman on the street. Her legs, her back broken. Up until then, I thought that she’d been taken to the hospital directly from school. At the hospital, those butchers, so-called doctors, somehow failed to see the damage to her back.
“Son,” he said, “you’re young and still naïve. You don’t understand. A divorced woman, her mind up in the air, misguided.”
Okay. Either a poor, wretched woman, or a witch. The same old story. Then on with the patronizing, on with the witch hunt. I kept quiet this time.
“Look,” he said, “I have money, take it, let me go, I beg you …”
I put on my gloves. I went through the apartment. I didn’t have to dig around for long before I turned up his service gun, in a closet in the bedroom. A .45 caliber Kırıkkale. And next to it, bullets wrapped in cloth. His truncheon made of black rubber. I pocketed the gun and the bullets. In the same closet I found three bundles of American dollars.
“There must be some fifty, sixty thousand dollars there,” he said.
There’s a retired civil servant of the state for you! Ha! I didn’t bother asking him where he got that kind of money.
“Take it all, just leave me alone now. Go.”
That’s when I moved behind his chair. I took out the garrote I’d made in my hotel room. I swung it before his eyes. He let out a low-pitched scream. I held the wire by the handles and in a single, swift motion had it firmly around his neck. I leaned in and, my lips nearly touching his earlobe, asked: “How’s that? Does it hurt? Here’s your chance to see for yourself which is more effective: Palestinian suspension, rope, an oiled noose, or”—I tugged at the wire—“this. You came into this world without a prayer, punk, and now that’s how you’re gonna go.”
I heard the liquid dripping from the chair. He was soiling himself. I remembered my grandmother again. Those times when she was incontinent. I stopped. I thought. They say one nail drives out another, but does it really? Fuck it! Is that the way you’re going to deal with this goddamn monster?
I met Pandeli in one of those workers’ coffeehouses. I put the photograph on the table and took a good look. Yep, that was him. The police chief. The young hero of those infamous “incidents” of September 6 and 7. As they say, You can tell the make of a man from his baby shit. And there he was in his baby-shit days. He must have lost the mustache later. The gold tooth too. He didn’t need to be showy. Judging from those piles of bills he’d secretly stashed away, he’d been a virtuoso of the fine art of skimming.
Finally, Pandeli laid it all out there for me, unloading himself like a dump truck. His father’s store had been raided during those “incidents.” I’d heard a lot about those lootings, which went on for several days, from my mother and grandmother; the excuse was that Atatürk’s home in Saloniki had been bombed. They said that you couldn’t walk on Istiklal Avenue without stepping on goods from the gutted stores.
Pandeli’s father was never able to recoup his business. Nor his head. The family emigrated to Greece. The poor guy killed himself when Pandeli was still young. Pandeli found this photograph among his father’s belongings. He recognized their store. Then he read the articles about the chief and saw the photos of him. He recognized the guy and put two and two together. Then, on the fiftieth anniversary of the events, he thought of returning to Istanbul to look into things. It was his first visit back since he’d finished his residency.
We were silent for a spell. Then I told my story. A weird kind of confusion had overcome me when my mother was sick and dying. I don’t recall exactly, but I think I believed I was the Grim Reaper or something. I was in a hospital for a while. I heard about the things done to my mother from a friend of hers who visited me there. From Leyla Teyze. The poor woman didn’t really have any desire to talk about such things at a time like that, but she was sick and, I think, afraid of dying before she’d had the chance to tell me.
“Okay, look,” said Pandeli, “the Spaniards are after Pinochet. But that sort of thing will be a long time coming in these parts.”
What could I say? I smiled bitterly.
“So are we just going to let this guy off the hook?”
Good question. We paused and thought for a moment.
“Is there anybody you can think of who knows the city well enough and could find the people we’re looking for?” Pandeli asked.
“Yes,” I said, “there is, there sure as hell is …”
He was right: We were each worse than the other.
I found Pamuk in his coffeehouse in Tophane and convinced him to take a break and come back to Aksaray with me.
“Look,” he said, “I’m doing this for your mother’s sake, not yours!” Fair enough. We both were Aksaray kids, we went way back; he knew my mother, and he knew other people who had been tortured too.
The three of us gathered at a table back in the workers’ coffeehouse. Pamuk looked at me. “So what’s your beef this time?” he said.
I was sitting on one side, and on the other Pandeli was leaning toward Pamuk and rattling on in his ear. Pamuk, all serious, was giving him his full attention. Pandeli turned to me. “Let’s give him something, at least for his expenses,” he said. I gave Pamuk an envelope containing five thousand dollars.
“Finish the job and you’ll get another five grand,” I said.
“You got it!” he replied. He finished his tea. “Enjoy your teas, fellas. I’ll excuse myself now, if I may.” In fact, Pamuk was not the kind of guy who asked for permission for anything. He stepped out of the coffeehouse, fading like a huge shadow into the Aksaray evening.
“All right,” I said. “Great. What now?”
“Give it some
time,” Pandeli said. He knew something. Then he told me of his intention to leave for Vienna soon. We kept our goodbyes brief. One never knew.
I was getting restless. I was about to swing by Dolapdere and look for a job. Then one day I read it in the papers: The Scalpel Slays Again! This time it had cut up a retired police chief who lived on Çıngıraklı Bostan Street. To shreds. And you didn’t have to look too closely to figure out that these were not your ordinary serial killings, not your ordinary serial killer. Some person was clearly rubbing out torturers.
I mailed copies of the newspaper articles to Pandeli in Vienna, just in case. The way he had told it, while looking at the photographs in the papers, he’d remembered some scalpels he had seen during his residency and developed a hunch as to who the killer might be. Then he sent Pamuk, not to do the deed himself, but to tip the killer off that he was in the know, to point the killer in the right direction: in the direction of the chief. Okay, that part I understood. According to this version of the story, the killer had been hanging out at the medical school at some point in the past. Yes, those scalpels were not something you’d forget. Still, how come no one else had remembered them and identified the killer? Was Pandeli the only one close enough to the killer back then to have the privilege of seeing his or her handmade tools? Could the killer be a woman? Was there more than one killer? Could Pandeli be one of them? Was he up to something in Greece too? I didn’t understand, I couldn’t understand. I was taking that old advice: Eat the grapes, but don’t ask about the vineyard. But who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll swing by Vienna and go to the trouble of looking the man up and asking him.
This time I swung by Pamuk’s coffeehouse in Tophane for a change. I drank his tea. I gave him the five grand. I left the Kırıkkale and the bullets with him.
“Haven’t you heard, my man?” he said. “Ours is the cool age of glockalization …”
Okay, if you say so.
I called Leyla Teyze at the number she had given me. I gave her the remaining money. I kissed her hand. It made her so happy. I didn’t know much about these things; I asked her to give the money to some organization dealing with human rights, helping inmates or torture victims. Any way she saw fit. That way that dirty, evil bundle of swiped cash would be put to good use.
I was done with Aksaray, with Istanbul. For the time being, at least. But where to now? I didn’t know if I actually had anywhere to return to. I still don’t.
I arrived in Brooklyn at an ungodly hour. But Tahir, my partner, was still working in the shop. We embraced.
“Sorry about your loss, bro,” he said. “I hope you had a chance to get rid of all those knots.”
Well, that’s not happening anytime soon, I wanted to tell him—my knots, brother, are here to stay. I tried to deal with death by becoming the Grim Reaper himself; I tried to deal with the monstrosities by becoming a monster myself. But what choice did I have? I’m not part of any political organization or gang or anything. I’m just here, just me, in Brooklyn. One horse, one gun. A retired Grim Reaper. That’s it.
As I said, my knots are here to stay.
And as for Aksaray, the “White Palace” of Istanbul …
I keep quiet.
Except every now and then, I let go: “You! Damn You! Fucking Black Palace, that’s what you are! Black Palace!”
SO VERY FAMILIAR
BY BEHÇET ÇELK
Fikirtepe
Whenever my gaze falls upon the apartment door, where we lingered as she prepared to go without even saying goodbye, I feel her eyes resting on me that one last time—they’re looking at me still. Frozen, frightened, confused, but determined. I must have looked confused too. I thought everything was going just fine, I thought for sure she’d come over and take me into her arms and we’d make love again. She pulled the door shut behind her quietly, and left.
Like her, I quietly pulled the door shut, and left. It’s around the same time of day that she left. I quickly make my way down the stairs, and then slow as I move through the garden of the apartment complex. I lower my head in polite response to the doorman’s greeting.
Are those guys talking about me behind my back? What does that guy do every night? Where’s he going like that? Is that what they say? So what if they do. Looked like the bastard had a grin on his face when he greeted me. He watched me intently, as if to say, I know where you’re headed, buddy. How would you know, you idiot? He probably thinks I’m out picking up chicks. If that were the case, I’d take the car. These guys think my car’s shit too. They gossip. He goes on foot ’cause he knows there’s no way he can pick up chicks with that lemon. That’s what they say. Goddamn know-it-alls. They can say whatever they want, like I give a shit! The parking lot here’s like a car show. Next to all those brand-new fancy vehicles, our car looks like scrap metal. Ours? Those idiot doormen must know by now that there is no “ours” anymore. Maybe they feel sorry for me. Or maybe, if they’ve had a spat with the old lady that day, they just feel jealous.
It’s freezing cold, but at least I can breathe once I’m outside. I can’t stand it inside anymore. It’s like the walls are collapsing on top of me; television, movies, newspapers, it all makes me sick to my stomach. Forget about sleeping, if I could only breathe I wouldn’t set foot outside. I’m managing all right, even if I do wander around like a ghoul every night. But how long can I possibly keep it up? And I’ve actually come to like going to work. Files, correspondence, meetings all fill up the day. I’m fine when I’m at work, but once I get home …
There must be a minibus coming. I can hear it wheezing up the hill. When the weary driver sees me in the distance, he’ll be counting his blessings—Got me a passenger for the last trip of the night. He’ll understand soon enough that he’s got me pegged wrong. He’ll honk, though, regardless of the late hour. I should walk away from the avenue and go look at that shop window, so he understands that I’m not waiting for a ride. Ugly shit they’re selling. And they cost a fortune. I’m sure some folks come in here and try to bargain them down a few liras. We sure did. But I didn’t try to cut a deal on the bedroom furniture. If only I’d known! I sleep in the living room now. Can’t sleep in the bedroom. It’s just one silent scream. But what do you know, same thing goes for the living room.
I should cross the road and head downhill toward the university. It’s calmer over there. The minibus route’s like a border. They’re still going strong on the right side of the road, even at this hour of the night. The left side is nothing but slumber. The buildings on the right are ten, fifteen stories high, but the ones on the left max out at four or five, and usually aren’t more than one or two. It’s a wonder the contractors haven’t ripped into this place yet. They’ve already started tearing down the ten-story buildings on the right side and putting up bigger and better ones. Actually, this stretch would bring a pretty penny. Either the city won’t let them build that high yet, or the plots are too small, divided up into too many units. But anyway.
Are there more streetlamps on the right, or are they just brighter? It’s pitch black on the other side of the avenue. Maybe it’s the lights in the shop windows that make it so shiny there; here the stores are completely closed down—the metal shutters, the padlocks, the lights, the signs, all tucked in for the night. Shopkeepers probably figure there’s no need to keep the place lit up, since there’s nobody out here after dark.
A few nights ago there were some young guys hanging out at one of these corners, sitting on a low wall cracking sunflower seeds. Maybe they were drinking beer too. I walked by them without a glance. At first I was afraid; what if they start picking on me, say something, come after me … But the closer I got, the less scared I felt. In fact, I almost wanted them to try and pick a fight. As I walked past them, I felt the blood rush through my veins, from just below my knees down to my toes (warmed my cold feet up); it was like the stuff wanted to burst out of my body, but it was trapped. When they saw me they went silent and stared. Without even glancing at their faces, I saw
that they were looking at me. I just stared ahead and walked right past them, without even seeing the darkness (though, actually, there was a good bit of light shining down from the streetlamp in front of the wall where they were parked). If I run into them tonight, I’m going to turn around and look at them. Let’s see if they have something to say. But tonight I am leaving later than usual. Even they are back home in bed by now, I bet. Their fathers probably grumbled about them being out so late and their mothers probably got their beds ready for them while asking what they’d been up to, as if they didn’t know their boys were out bumming around on the streets all day.
If I told somebody I spent my nights wandering around these streets, they’d probably think I was nuts. But who would I tell? The other day Ertürk asked me what I did in the evenings. “Nothing,” I said. He didn’t press me. “We should go drinking sometime,” he suggested. “Sure,” I replied. But then we never made plans for a specific date or anything. He probably didn’t know what else to say after that. What if I got carried away and lost it, or even worse, what if I got weepy? “We should go drinking sometime.” That sure took the weight off his conscience. But that’s fine with me, it’s not like I really want a drinking buddy or anything. I like things the way they are. Walking these streets. Exercise, for the hell of it—for what it, and this body, are worth.
I spot a figure over by one of the cars parked on the left side of the street. Why would anyone be out at this time of night? Unless he’s just hitting the streets for no reason at all, like me. He must be headed for the hospital or the police station, can’t be anything but bad news at this hour.
Just as I begin thinking I should turn right to put some distance between myself and the shadowy figure, a car alarm goes off. I’m not the only one startled by it. The shadow starts to run. And I after him.
I have to catch him. I can. I will. He’s fast too. I’ve started to catch up, but I can feel the energy draining out of me. So what happens when I catch him? The question doesn’t slow me down. What am I going to do, beat him up? Turn him in? I think of something Semih told me. He said for days after his cassette player was stolen from his car, he found his car repulsive. That’s what he said. “It was like the car had been defiled, I just couldn’t stomach getting into it.” I wonder if that’s the guy who broke into Semih’s car? Well, it was him or someone like him—those pricks are all alike. How many times have I told him, “Rent a place in an apartment complex like ours, the streets aren’t safe. You spent all that money on the car, you shouldn’t just leave it out on the street.”
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