by Sevgi Soysal
Şükran’s face had grown red from the chain of swiftly changing thoughts running through her mind. She wasn’t that used to thinking, actually. Seeing her crimson cheeks, Ahmet got excited. Truth is, Şükran’s not such a bad catch. Those nice firm tits. I ruined it with all that stuff about my sister.
“Şükran?”
“Yes?”
“Do you want to go to a movie tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“We could see Love Story. Tickets are hard to come by, but as you know, I’ve got a friend who works at the ticket booth.”
Şükran looked at Ahmet again, and again she melted. If he asked her now, she wouldn’t be able to say no. She went limp. A warmth spread down to her stomach, and then all through her body. My legs. I let the hair grow out on them because I was going to get a wax. My leg hair is so long. It’s disgusting. If Ahmet sees them, he’ll never look at me again. Günseli joked that we’d have to tie a bow on them before long. She’d been wearing pants so that no one could see her legs in that state. Her first time, with those legs … Never in a thousand years. She paused for a moment, pretending to study the cardboard boxes.
“I don’t know, maybe. Actually, I was going to visit Meral but … Give me a call, just ring me at work, okay?”
Ahmet brushed the dirt off of Şükran. The touch of his hands made Şükran quiver once again. Ahmet stopped. Now? He paused. Seeing the toppled boxes, he recalled what had happened just a little while ago. Şükran looked at the boxes too. She recalled Ahmet’s slap. She was overcome with rage. “You’ll see. I’m not giving it up to you. I’ll make you beg and plead, get down on your knees, kiss my hand. And still I won’t give it up. You’ll have to walk over coals to get me.” Tossing her hair back, she marched off. She was glad now that she hadn’t slept with him.
They walked past Çetin without a word. Afraid that Çetin would understand what a failure he was, Ahmet put on a confident air and grabbed Şükran’s hand as they walked past him. Çetin didn’t pay any attention to Ahmet. He could already tell from the look on Şükran’s face what had happened, or rather, what hadn’t happened.
They walked out onto the boulevard, wading through the crowd that was waiting for The Big Store to open for the afternoon hours. Ahmet bumped into a middle-aged woman determined to be the first to scramble her way in as soon as the store opened. Thinking only of the warmth of Şükran’s hand, Ahmet walked.
* In this dialogue, the words and phrases in italics appear in English in the original Turkish text.
Hatice Hanım defends her rights
Hatice Uzgören, who became furious after Ahmet bumped into her just as she was preparing to barge her way through the crowd gathered in front of the Big Store, hissed between tightly stretched, nearly invisible lips: “Goddamn you, ya twerp.” Ahmet marched right past Hatice Hanım, thinking only of Şükran’s tits.
The truth is, Hatice Hanım wasn’t swearing only at Ahmet. For her, Ahmet was just one of a mass of young people who were nothing more than walking specimens of boorishness, mischief-making, impertinence and ineptitude, transcending comprehension or definition. It was always these guys, the beginning and end of all things troublesome, these so-called youth who, being rotten to the core themselves, sought to spoil everything, who bumped into people on the street and marched right by without even so much as an apology, who smoked on the dolmuş, who crossed one leg over the other before the very eyes of their elders, who prostituted themselves, unabashedly holding hands in public, who let their hair grow long like the sons of infidels and grew moustaches like measly porters, who laughed raucously, who wore tight pants that revealed their every attribute, and who then with the veins in their necks swelling disparaged everything right and good and manly. These were the so-called youth of today. It wasn’t as if this was the first time Hatice Hanım had ever encountered a member of the youth, of course! She had seen her fair share of real, genuine youth: Good through and through they were, quiet and reserved, never venturing to touch even the hand of their fiancee in front of their mothers or cross their legs in front of their elders.
But those youth didn’t exist anymore. Instead, these rascals had sprouted up in their place. It was impossible to find decent white cheese at The Big Store anymore. And the taxi drivers too had grown rude, just like the youth. And day-wage cleaning women had upped their daily wages. The doormen no longer wore themselves ragged to take care of your every need; they stopped by once in the morning and once in the evening, and that with barely feigned reluctance. Taxes were constantly on the rise. Being a property owner increasingly became a burden. Because of whom? Soot rained down on the balconies, housework was never-ending, and these guys incessantly bumped into people without so much as an apology, as if their other crimes weren’t enough as it was. There was no such thing as a decent neighbor anymore—all of the local businessmen had turned into crooks, and you couldn’t find any meat at the butcher’s. They were all incorrigible culprits of the same crime, claiming to go to university while they constantly yelled out slogans in the city squares, constantly engaged in shameless dancing at discotheques, constantly flooring the gas pedals of their fathers’ cars in front of patisseries, constantly trying to teach their elders a lesson, their voices brazen, their arms in motion. And so making do with an exclamation of “Goddamn you!” directed toward all of these criminals deserving of punishment, she began to storm her way through the crowd. Confident in her right to be at the very front, she shoved all others aside. Hatice Hanım was always in a hurry because she always had an important job to do, like washing the dishes and getting them put away as soon as possible. That’s why she never let anyone at the breakfast table swallow a single bite in peace, and why she always whisked away the glasses before anyone was actually done drinking their tea. The house had to be cleaned as soon as possible, for she had to leave and go to the open-air market and get the best oranges for the best price before anyone else. Many a moon ago she had been a teacher at one of Yenişehir’s elementary schools. Now she was retired. Back then too she was always in a hurry. During breaks between lessons she’d go grab Gülsüm or Fatma from their homes in the gecekondu neighborhood of Deliller Hill, drag them to her house located right next to the school, and have them wipe down the stone pavement at the entrance. Later, she kept one of them, Fikriye, bound to her for years. In the mornings, she’d shake Fikriye to wake her up and oversee her to make sure that the house was cleaned as quickly as possible before anyone woke up.
The household would wake up to a salvo of commands:
“Fill the bucket!”
“That’s enough!”
“Don’t let it overflow!”
“Turn off the faucet!”
“Turn it off good I said!”
“Wring the towel!”
“Wring it good! Now mop over there too! But don’t get the carpet fringe soggy!”
Most mornings Hatice Hanım’s husband, who had always worked in the same division of the Finance Ministry, would leap in fright from the bed which quaked as Fikriye mopped beneath it. If you were in a hurry, it meant you were on to something, and knowing what was being sold when at Sümerbank was a natural outcome of this state of vigilance, this hurriedness. Yes, she was fast on her feet. She despised hesitation. She herself searched store after store in Ulus trying to find a faucet to match the one that had broken at home so as not to get cheated by any of the faucet dealers. She cashed in the savings bonds of everyone in the family on the very day they matured.
And now, like always, she was hasty and determined to have her own way. She had to reach the lower floor immediately. If it had arrived, she just had to reach that cheap, delicious, usually-out-of-stock white cheese before others got to it first and snatched it all up. Hatice Hanım had to marry her daughter off before everyone else to the son of a good family who had received a better education than everyone else, who had done his military service and was more than capable of putting bread on the table and then some; for her son, she
had to secure the most ladylike, the most virginal of the candidates who showed up when it was her turn for the regular get-togethers of the neighbor women. Because she deserved it, and that was that, she deserved it.
Determined not to let someone else seize the rights she had gone to such lengths to earn, she dashed into the store before anyone else. The escalator glided downwards at its normal pace. The same faces rushing to get the same Vita butter, the same Lüx biscuits at the same price, glided down according to a meaningless arithmetic like oranges, apples, and bananas sliced for the purpose of becoming bar snacks. Hatice Hanım looked at the meat in the window display.
“Don’t you have any ground meat, son?”
“We do.”
“I said ground veal.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Why not?”
“We’re out.”
“The store just opened, son, how can you be out?”
“We didn’t get any today.”
“Is that so? And why not?”
Her voice grew louder and louder. She became increasingly stern, and a terrifying shade of red spread from her lips to her neck, and then up to her ears. The salesman was not afraid. Yet Hatice Hanım was accustomed to scaring people. Even on the bus, a simple glare from her was enough to frighten the other passengers into surrendering their seats. Her voice rang out in the school hallways, echoing as it crashed against the windows and the walls; the echoing spread fear, piercing the not-yet encrusted hearts of young babes and intruding upon the indolent slumber of the janitors. The number of those who were frightened gradually decreased. And it was always because of those who were not frightened, always because of them, that there was no ground veal.
“Now you look here, who’s your manager? You need to give your customers proper answers! I asked you why there wasn’t any ground veal! When will you have it?”
It was imperative that he cower. It was every bit as important as the ground veal that he cower. It was imperative that he abandon all the other customers and cower before Hatice Hanım, hanging his head, which was incapable of finding ground veal, in shame like a slave aware of his crime. Yet the salesman had turned his back to Hatice Hanım and was weighing chicken for a customer who had come along after she did. Hatice Hanım looked around, left and right, searching for whistles, police whistles, police chiefs, fists, nightsticks and even prison sentences; he wasn’t afraid, the salesman; the heart of the salesman did not explode like popcorn, like the hearts of elementary school students who, half out of fear and half out of not having done their homework, were incapable of providing the right answers.
She filled her lungs with air, she wanted to break out in one of the most terrifying screams she could recall, one similar to the scream she let out the day Fikriye ran away. Fikriye, who, while about to put some tea on to brew, let the top half of the teapot fall from her grasp, breaking it, and who then, before she was able to grow accustomed to the terrifying change created by the broken teapot, finding herself face to face with Hatice Hanım, threw the bottom half of the teapot aside and ran straight out of the house. With her screams Hatice Hanım first caused the household, and then the apartment building residents, and then the street, and then the stores at the corner to rise to the rescue, and it soon became clear that Fikriye had run off to a house in the neighborhood downhill with some help from the local bakkal. Thanks to the incessant screams that she never wearied of emitting, Hatice Hanım succeeded in taking the bakkal who had led Fikriye astray, the neighbor lady who had put the idea into the bakkal’s head and Fikriye, who had the nerve to try and abandon her post before she was fired, to the police station. Although Fikriye kissed her hand a dozen times and the chief pleaded with her, for some time she refused to take Fikriye back; finally, at least partially convinced that everyone was sufficiently frightened and terrified, that the bakkal would no longer try to sell her expired milk, that the neighbor lady had completely abandoned the idea of leading the Fikriye’s of the world astray, and that even if every bone in Fikriye’s body were to be broken she would not leave, she returned home, her head held high, a snotty nosed and red-eyed Fikriye trailing half a dozen yards behind her. Hatice Hanım always held her head high, always. Thank God! She always caught the criminals and always terrified them; she frightened the criminals, put them back on the right path, made decent human beings of them, showed them what was what. And now this impudent salesman was blatantly committing a crime right here, right now, against a customer who was always right and who, by right of turn and right of money, demanded only what was, indeed, her right, that is, against Hatice Hanım, and yet his crime was going unpunished. In her eyes, there was nothing more unbearable than this: to witness and suffer the fact that an offender engaged in constant misconduct should go unpunished. No one should hold back when it comes to such violations. Every citizen should do her part to ensure that these criminals be punished, that they never again be allowed to freely saunter about like this. They should not be permitted to jauntily stand in the way of the sour meatballs that she had decided to cook for dinner that evening, that is, the sour meatballs that absolutely had to be cooked. And she wasn’t going to make only sour meatballs from the ground veal. She was going to brown half of the ground veal and put it in the refrigerator and then make spinach with ground veal the following day. And she was going to separate the spinach leaves from the stalks and use the stalks to make spinach salad. Now how dare some insolent salesman indifferently turn his back upon all of these certainties?
She took a breath, she was going to scream; her breath would be enough to buoy her scream to the police, the chiefs, the courts. It was at that precise moment that she was startled by the voice of Colonel Zeki Bey’s wife.
“How are you, Hatice Hanım?”
“Praise be to God, we’re doing very well. We all kiss your hands. And how is the colonel, is he well?”
“Well, thank goodness he’s finally back on his feet. May God protect us from any worse catastrophe. It’s been just awful, just horrendous, my dear Hatice Hanım. God as my witness, this is the first time I’ve left the house.”
“Oh my, well, I’m happy to hear the worst is behind you. I was just thinking of you.”
“Is that so? Well, I know you’re more than a fair weather friend. I’ll be expecting you at our get-together tomorrow, Hatice Hanım dear.”
“But of course I’ll be there … What were you going to buy?”
“I thought I’d get some roast beef, the man of the house is on a special diet of course …”
“Well, let me tell you, they don’t know how to treat their customers here, not at all. Et-Balık is still your best bet. With this service, they make you sorry you ever shopped here, I tell you.”
She spoke these words loudly, peering at the salesman out of the corner of her eye, yet the salesman couldn’t care less. But of course this wasn’t the end of it, no siree, not for Hatice Hanım, and so she continued to stand there as Colonel Zeki Bey’s wife began telling the story of her husband’s illness from the very beginning for the umpteenth time. Hatice Hanım had no choice but to listen to her with a sympathetic expression on her face. A sympathetic face was never a good beginning for punishing criminals. She finally parted ways with Colonel Zeki Bey’s wife and began filling her metal shopping cart with the other items she had come for. However much laundry detergent was needed for a month’s worth of laundry, however much salt, sugar and soap would be consumed, however much Hatice Hanım would allow to be consumed, however much olive oil and flour would be used, is exactly how much she bought of each. Never overdoing it, never veering from the precise amount, knowing very well and never disobeying the laws she herself had made. Disobeying the law was the greatest of crimes in the eyes of Hatice Hanım, yet nevertheless, laws were disobeyed; the amount of money she paid for a month’s worth of soap powder increased each month; seeing as Hatice Hanım always used the same amount of soap powder and abided by this law with unwavering precision and great earnestness, t
here must have been others responsible for transgressing the law. Every time she walked out onto the street Hatice Hanım identified the transgressors and punished them in her own way, and she knew now that this salesman was one of those responsible for raising the price of soap powder; however, she reserved his punishment for later. Hatice Hanım never ever forgot; criminals were not forgotten, punishments were never forgotten, and forgetfulness was not reparative, it was not constructive. Forgiveness was unhealthy. Forgiving was like not using medicine to fight germs, like not applying tincture of iodine to a wound. According to Hatice Hanım, a civilized person neither forgave nor forgot; forgiving and forgetting were barbarian, primitive, it was due to the softness of hearts that this country failed to make any progress.