Istanbul Noir

by Mustafa Ziyalan

  Just then, the early afternoon sun, shining from above Kumkapı, way over across the Bosphorus, struck our faces— the trees were up to their tricks again. We crossed the street. Eight-person dolmues had largely become a thing of the past, but I insisted that we wouldn’t board anything but. All right, buddy, the steward at the dolmu stand told me, just hold on. So it seemed they hadn’t yet become completely obsolete. It wasn’t long until it arrived. A yellow, beat-up old thing. It was something like this, right? I asked Nazlı. Yes, Daddy. I latched onto her hand, and onto that moment when she boarded an eight-person dolmu from Kadıköy to Moda, to see her grandmother. Her hand was cold. My heart beat unevenly, and with a wrenching at my gut, I told her that I felt chilly. There was a crisp nip in the air that winter. Warm me up, Daddy, she said jokingly, and then kissed me on the cheek. We settled into the very back seat. You sit by the window, Daddy, she told me. No, you sit by the window, I said, and look outside, so I can see outside and watch the sun shining off of you at the same time. Oh, you’re such a romantic, Daddy! she said. And then with a roguish smile: He’s just like you!

  Nazlı was still smiling, there in her plaid pleated skirt and red plush coat. And the time sped by, as the dolmu swayed its way toward Moda.

  The dolmu took the coastal road for a while before veering inland. I just sat there, Nazlı’s hand in mine. Again I felt that I loved her too much to share her with anyone else. Whatever it was that I had felt toward the rotund little baby in the nurse’s arms at that very first moment, that’s what Nazlı was. A miracle. Inhaling the scent of my twelve-year-old girl, I would whisper in her ear, telling her that she wasn’t alone. And she, she would laugh. Always. She knew that her grandma had baked a fabulous cake to go with the tea, over which the two of them would chat about politics and whatnot. As my mother’s first grandchild, Nazlı had a special place in her grandma’s life, and she milked it for all it was worth. Both of them were fully aware of this, and neither had any complaints.

  How wonderful that you’re with me, Nazlı, I said, out of the blue. The dolmu was making its way up Moda Boulevard, past the flower shop and the toy store. I got a few strange looks from the people around me. But Nazlı was there, with me; I could see the tiny veins on her neck, her hazel eyes gleaming from beneath full brows.

  I didn’t need any more memories of those eyes reflecting off the windows of the passing cars. I needed Nazlı, only Nazlı. My daughter; she was twelve years old.

  I’m so glad you’re with me, Nazlı!

  For those sitting near me, I was just some guy mumbling to himself, one passenger out of eight sitting in a dolmu headed toward Moda. A father searching for the past in a heap of odd recollections. To think that it had happened just two years ago. And now there I was, a man left with nothing but a few pathetic memories, all his miracles wrenched away, especially …

  Earth to Daddy, Nazlı might have said. Don’t mind me, I would have replied. The dolmu was passing by the Kadıköy Girls’ School just then. Back when I was in my early teens, we used to come here a lot after school, to pick up girls. I was going to tell Nazlı that, but then I changed my mind and sank a little further into the dolmu’s threadbare seats.

  I had a girl on my mind, a girl from two years ago. It was a winter day, and late afternoon was turning into early evening. She was running late to her afternoon tea. The light was different then; twilight was already setting in. I wasn’t with the girl on that day. It was another man who sat next to her. The same man, with his dark face and skittish eyes, that I would later grow sick and tired of seeing, first in the newspapers, in sketches based upon witness testimonies, then in photos, and finally in the flesh. But on that day, at that hour, he was still just a traveler en route to Moda, sitting next to a girl. Another man among men. Except he wasn’t. In gray police files he was known as the “Ümraniye psycho,” a man who raped children in secluded corners of the city, then killed them and carved his signature, deeply, into their tender young necks. But still, he looked like anyone else: he was ordinary, common, his eyes dull and distant.

  Twenty-four hours after the incident, the Moda muhtar at the time gave a press conference in a corner of the apartment-building courtyard where the girl’s body had been found, describing the incident as “the degenerates’ invasion of Moda” and avoiding other questions posed by the press; it was just too close to election time.

  The girl was so young. Her breasts had just budded the previous spring. She had a few pimples, but her face was still that of a child, her dimples still those of a baby.

  When the eight-person dolmu had taken off two years earlier, the girl had felt a slight tingle on her right leg. At first she assumed that it had something to do with the way the space between the seat rails was sucking her in. Sitting on a seat of shriveled, gray animal hide, a piece of skin wrinkled and bitter, she stretched her leg down to feel for the floor beneath her plaid skirt. The tingle, however, continued. Sliding back and forth on the seat, her skin on the skin of the seat, it seemed to her that the tingling was about to pass. But soon it was replaced by another discomfort. A heaviness. As if something had been added to her leg. A third skin. At that moment, she could not fathom why on earth the third skin might be there. Her head was, at best, in the clouds. That’s what her grandmother would have said, and then chuckled.

  Her grandmother must have been waiting for her then, with the tea brewing. There would be meaty pide to go with the tea, and her grandmother’s scrumptious lemon cake.

  Maybe the weather was to blame. They hadn’t yet had a proper winter that year. Or maybe it was Moda’s fault. Moda was so wonderful, so beautiful and dreamlike, and in her mind’s eye it would forever remain that way. Or so the girl hoped. One thing was for sure: Within this idyllic landscape, there was no such thing as a stranger. For her, at that time, a stranger—or el as her grandma would say, using the more old-fashioned word, incidentally the same word for “hand”— was something far away and unknown, foreign and distant, far in the future. Like growing pains. Like blood. Like pus. Like death even. All of it unbelievably distant and strange. And that was how it was supposed to be. But next to her the breathing grew grunting and putrid.

  There was a girl on my mind, a girl who was gradually fading away. She was alone.

  What’s wrong with you today, Dad?

  It’s Nazlı. My beautiful daughter. My beautiful twelve-year-old daughter.

  Nothing, I’m fine!

  Again I get the strange looks, pleading for the ride to be over as soon as possible, so that they can finally be rid of me.

  My hand is in Nazlı’s. Hers the hand of a child.

  There was a girl on the man’s mind. Her heart beat so quickly, like the hearts of all children.

  It would take awhile for the girl to grow certain that the heaviness belonged to a living hand; by then, the dolmu had made the second turn inland, away from the Marmara shore. The hand continued. It slid, slowly, a little further. Gradually making its way down the twelve-year-old right leg, the hand was clammy with sweat by the time the dolmu passed the rundown police station. And the girl was sweating too. Not a good day to be wearing such a heavy coat! Not a good day to be running late! Sweat trickled down the girl’s legs; she was unable to move. The hand paused, before suddenly starting up again, gliding along the girl’s young skin. To the very depths. On the right side of her neck the girl sensed a drawn breath, a breath grown hoary, aged before its time. She herself breathed quickly, sharply, through her nose, her nostrils gaping like two big eyes on her face. Someone, a passenger, asked to be let off on Moda Boulevard, where the toy store and the flower shop would open up a couple of years later. The girl felt weighted down, pinned to her spot by the heaviness of the door to her left—a door that could not be opened. First she would try to rest her head against the bottom of the window. How could she possibly shut her ears to the sound of the man’s breathing? The stench of his breath mingled with the diesel fumes, singeing her nostrils. Her child’s body sank lower into t
he seat of the dolmu, as she sought to understand the route of the hand sliding up her thigh.

  The huge iron gate of the Kadıköy Girls’ School, Kolombo Kabob, Ali’s Ice Cream, gaunt trees at the top of the hill leaning against dim streetlamps. And then the fork in the road, and the dolmu’s waddling veer to the left.

  The girl sat straight up. Stiffly. Waiting. The hand had to be removed from her body. Immediately. She struggled to think about what she should do in a situation like this. The nap of her red coat scorched her neck, and her face flushed red from the heat.

  Taking the dolmu up to Moda meant going to Grandma’s, to safety. Her father would come later. Today was her first time taking the trip alone. Her father had a project he needed to finish up before he could leave work. The next stop, the girl repeated to herself. At the next stop, she would finally be able to wrest herself from the sinister hand. She was terrified of her eyes meeting those of the man sitting next to her and breathing so forlornly.

  An early twilight had descended by the time they finally arrived at the last stop. The door opened, and soon the auspicious sound of footsteps broke the evening silence. Two people, a couple of rare visitors to Kemal’s Tea Garden, were heading for the dolmues, and thus home, having had their fill of hot tea and heated conversation for the day. Rushing out of the dolmu, the girl wanted so badly to call out to them. Her eyes sought theirs—anything but the disconcerting gaze of the dolmu driver, his eyes seeping, damp from the diesel. But for some reason she could not call out; her voice got stuck in her throat.

  It was at precisely that moment that she felt it. The hand that had been stroking her right leg throughout the journey had transformed into something else, something humungous, and she sensed that it would pursue her, chasing her to her death. The hand was a person, it was a shadow, it was a nightmare. It had thick knuckles and pudgy palms. A limb marked by dirt and sweat, by the unknown and the groundless. It was a wordless organ; the rhythm of its breathing did all the talking. It was some thing—filled with rage toward the past that had spurned it, cold-blooded in the face of fear, eager to dismember.

  The hand, which had assumed myriad forms in the reflections and projections of shadow play with her father, now became something else altogether; growing heavy and awkward, it became another name. It was a complete stranger, so different from the shadows her father projected onto the wall, shadows that she likened to rabbits and wolves, dragons and flying dinosaurs. This hand was something completely different; it was the ghost of the wolf, the dragon, the flying dinosaur. It was a colorless jinn possessed by and emanating fear. It was a shadow merging with other dreadful shadows, growing giant and amorphous. It grew and grew. In it the girl could see ghouls with eyes, eyes that stirred as they looked into the deep, endless, pitch-black darkness. The girl felt it, the breathing of the hand, right next to her now, and in the very pulse beating in her neck.

  She should run, run away.

  And so the girl ran, but not toward her grandma’s, and not toward Kemal’s Tea Garden; she ran down the hill, past Koço, and toward the stairs. She then made her way, stumbling, along the shore, where the sand turned to gravel, and old caïques docked next to the new. She pushed on, into the heavy wind, until her lungs finally gave out. With all her might she struggled, resisting the vulgar hand as it breathlessly closed in upon her from behind. Panting, in a vindictive voice, the hand told her how much it enjoyed watching lonely young girls die lonely deaths on romantic shores in winter. A knife emerged and was pressed to her neck. Its possessor, the hand, grabbed her roughly and pulled her beneath it. It leaned toward her ear and then, wet and warm, so unlike a hand, so unlike a ghoul, stuck its tongue deep inside her ear. The pervert’s tongue slid around her eyes, into her nostrils, over her chin, her dimples, over her cheekbones, onto her neck. In her every joint she felt the other body weighing down upon hers as the hand nearly choked her. Her red coat, it ripped open as a deep silence seemed to descend upon the shore; there was no longer a body of a young girl to be concealed by the coat, the sweater, the lace-lined undershirt with its sewn-in training bra, or the panties with their matching lace; now, there was nothing but a body doused in its own blood. With its fingernails, the hand dug into her flesh, and with its knife, it sliced her open. The girl was barely conscious. She thought that now, finally, it must be over.

  She was wrong. At that moment, she met with another invasion altogether. It entered between her legs and jarred her entire body with a deep, searing pain. Againandagain-andagainandagain. The hand’s eyes pierced the darkness. It loosened its grip on the knife for just a few moments, allowing the girl one gasp for breath. In that instant, she felt that she saw death, and it became clear to her that she would have to fight to survive. With a final spurt of energy, she grabbed some sand and threw it into the hand’s eyes. The knife fell; the hand relaxed its grip. The girl knew that this was her chance. She thought of when she and her father used to play tag during the summer. Run, she said to herself, run away as far as you can.

  She ran. As far as she could. She ran and ran, her coat in tatters, her undershirt ripped, her underwear in shreds, and her body bleeding and bleeding and bleeding, along the dark shore lined with burnt-out lamps. When she reached the steps leading up to Bomonti, she didn’t look back; she just told herself to run, run. You’re it—run! And she ran. As far as she could. Knowing that she would get caught. Her father always caught her; knowing that full and well.

  The girl always got caught. If it were her fate, she would know it. And she did.

  And so she would succumb to the hand when it found her this time; this time, she would not put up a fight. He would take her down to the furnace in an ordinary apartment building. Using a piece of the coat, the hand would gag her before tying her hands and feet together. Finally, the girl would feel the knife entering her throat, and with it, a searing pain. Her mouth stuffed full of red plush and soaked with her own red blood, she would emit a sobbing sound—the kind only children make at night in their sleep.

  Three hours after the girl was found, the old woman said to be her grandmother spoke her last sensible words: If this is what happens in the heart of Moda, then we are done for.

  Last stop, the driver would say.

  Go on, Nazlı, go straight to your grandma’s house, the man would say, his hand still inside that of his daughter.

  I’ll never leave you alone again, Nazlı, he would say to her.

  He would find his daughter, in her red coat, beautiful and untouchable.

  There was an aura of loneliness about the man who stepped out of the eight-person dolmu at the Moda stop. He walked downhill, toward the stairs, toward Koço, toward the sea. Meanwhile, not far away, a monotone silhouette of synthetic prosperity reflected upon the water; at the Moda Maritime Club, grandiose preparations for a wedding were underway.

  TURKISH PRONUNCIATION GUIDE & GLOSSARY

  a as in father

  c as in jam

  ç as in chicken

  e as in pet

  g as in goat

  (soft g) a silent letter that elongates the vowel preceding it, as in nation

  i as in piano

  j as in the “s” in treasure

  o as in goat

  ö as eu in the French fleur

  r somewhere between the English and the Spanish r (right and pero)

  as in ship

  u as in full

  ü as in the “ew” in few

  abi: colloquial for aabey.

  abla: older sister, ma’am.

  aa: man wielding clout, feudal lord.

  aabey: brother, older brother.

  Allahuekber: “God is great, God is almighty.”

  amca: uncle, used also as a term of endearment and respect.

  bayram: Islamic holiday, usually either Holiday of Sacrifice or Holiday of Sweets, as they are called in Turkish.

  Bey: Mr., used after the first name.

  börek: pastry, usually with some savory filling, which comes in baked or lasag
na-like varieties in different sizes.

  cacık: side dish, a kind of cold soup (akin to the Indian raita) made of yogurt, diced cucumbers, and sometimes garlic; tzatziki in Greek.

  cezve: Turkish coffee pot.

  dolmu: shared taxi, which usually operates between two fixed destinations, very possibly an invention of Istanbul.

  döner: dish of meat, a kind of kebab, roasted on a spit at a vertical grill, akin to a gyro or shawarma.

  falaka: torture by beating the soles of the feet.

  gılman: male servant in paradise.

  Hanım: Ms., or Mrs., used after the first name.

  huri: female servant in paradise.

  imam: religious (primarily prayer) leader of a congregation and/or mosque who may be a volunteer or an appointed civil servant.

  kaar: pale-yellow cheese akin to Italian caciovallo and Greek kasseri.

  Kelime-i ahadet: the Muslim creed of belief; professing it is a prerequisite for adopting the Muslim faith; it is recited in the face of death.

  kuru: Turkish penny; one-hundredth of a lira.

  lahmacun: circular, thin-crust pastry (akin to an individual pizza), usually with a meat topping.

  lira: Turkish currency.

  lodos: south or southwest wind.

  mantı: dish of boiled dumplings (akin to ravioli), usually served with yogurt.