Noontime in Yenisehir

by Sevgi Soysal

  She raised her head and looked at Necip Bey. She had noticed when Necip Bey walked into the bank that the button had come off his golf pants, and she had barely been able to contain the laughter ignited by the few sparks of childhood still left inside her. Wearing a serious expression she had unknowingly acquired at a very young age, she looked into Necip Bey’s eyes questioningly.

  “How much, Sir?”

  She was certain that Necip Bey would be withdrawing money.

  “All of it!”

  Mehtap was both surprised and saddened by his response. She herself, despite her hardship, deposited a few liras into her account each month, skimping sometimes on socks, sometimes on money for the cinema, in order to do so. She had saved up little money thus far. But even though that money was multiplying very slowly, at an unbearably slow pace, she was determined never to withdraw even a single kurush, unless, God forbid, she should be forced to do so due to death or illness. Sometimes, in an impressive display of fortitude, she suppressed those whims that beset all of her peers; she hoped that once she had finished school and her wages had increased, she would make her bank account grow and get a mortgage for a home (she didn’t let her folks know that she was saving up), and surprise them with the apartment she bought; she would cry out, “Look, see, I didn’t betray you, all of my efforts were not in vain, look, the fairy-tale told in the light of that bulb was not a fairytale, it was possible, anything is possible if you just put enough effort into it.” But as her money accumulated ever so slowly, the amount necessary for the down payment on a mortgage increased in even greater increments, and what was worse, the prices of apartments skyrocketed. Yes, some things were changing, but whatever did change was always in the favor of that big-headed wolf.

  Mehtap looked at Necip Bey once again. This time, the hem dangling over his sock did not appear ridiculous to her; she found it pathetic. It was as if something else had been lost along with that button. The fact that Necip Bey was withdrawing the last of his money put an end to the fairytale that played out over and over again in her mind. The idea that saving money at the bank wouldn’t change anything began to take root inside her. If that weren’t the case, would Necip Bey, that worldly-wise, perfect gentleman, withdraw all of his money? She began to wonder whether money in the bank, whether there to be constantly withdrawn or constantly saved, was actually a powerless thing, something that could be given up with such indifference.

  “At least leave some of the money in the bank, so that you don’t have to open up a new account when you want to make a deposit.”

  Necip Bey looked at Mehtap with an expression of shock on his face. It was always this girl who attended to him at the bank. She was a very quiet, very serious girl. He had never before seen her speak without being spoken to. He studied her face carefully. He couldn’t attribute any meaning to the imploring look in her weary eyes, the blues of which had grown watery from staring at so many numbers. How could he possibly know that Mehtap was defending her own fairytale? Feeling that for the first time he was encountering someone who actually took an interest in the dwindling of his funds and who pitied him because of it, Necip Bey refrained from reprimanding her for her display of over-familiarity. Though he considered speaking with shop workers, clerks, petty civil servants and ticket sellers an unforgivable act of frivolity, he answered the girl sincerely:

  “I will not be opening another account.”

  “But why? Perhaps you will.”

  “No, not anymore. I have no more debts to collect. From now on, I only have debts to pay.”

  “But just a year ago you had a considerable amount of money in the bank—if only you’d taken out a mortgage rather than emptying your account?”

  “I own an apartment building already. But at this rate, I’m going to have to sell it too.”

  Mehtap’s eyes opened wide. Someone who owned an entire apartment building was speaking to her—she, who thought that owning a single apartment would change everything, who had gone to such great efforts, endured such great hardship to that very end—of hopelessness, did not see himself as having been rescued by virtue of the fact that he owned an apartment building, was nevertheless withdrawing his funds, and was saying that he was going to have to sell the apartment building. She was utterly baffled.

  “Okay, but, isn’t the income from the apartment building enough?”

  “Young lady, you mustn’t have the slightest clue as to how expensive things are these days. Besides, I’ve got two kids to put through school. My wife’s divorcing me and she wants alimony. This money is hardly enough for the promissory notes I have to pay. And if I can’t pay the promissory notes, I’ll have to sell the apartment building. Otherwise I’ll go bankrupt. What’s more, the apartment building is mortgaged. I can’t possibly meet the mortgage and tax payments with the rent and the income from the store.” And with that, he went silent. He realized that he had spoken much too much, that, like a common, petty man, he had shared his woes with just any random person. His face resentful and angry, thinking that this bank clerk must be among those responsible for the increasingly negative changes that kept occurring, enraged by this girl, just one of the countless examples of the sleepwalking hoard that did not mourn for the good old disappearing days of yore, he stormed out of the bank.

  Mehtap watched Necip Bey as he left. It’s a good thing he’s not coming back to the bank, she thought. He was someone who constantly withdrew his money from the bank, who constantly whittled away at a hope, who made cracks in the hope that one day everything would suddenly change thanks to the money in the bank, who rendered the fairytale unbelievable, who sided with betrayal. She didn’t like this man who tried to prove that the days when her father toiled endlessly at the riverside only to return home with arms burnt by the welding machine, the days when her father never wandered around the house in his pajamas and always woke up before sunrise, the days when Mehtap and her brother spent all night painting portraits of Mevlana, were better, lovelier days that would never return. She hated him. After Necip Bey left, she ordered herself a tea. The office boy, completely taken aback, looked at Mehtap with an expression of disbelief. Mehtap had never ever drunk tea at the bank.

  Once Necip Bey had left the bank, deeming hunger to be at least partly to blame for the increasing unbearableness of the thoughts that plagued him, he decided to get something to eat. He had an ulcer. When people with ulcers get hungry, they see the world as a darker place. For Necip Bey, the world was already a dark place. Still, he was hungry. He decided to get something to eat at Piknik. He always had something light for lunch. For him, maintaining a stylish appearance in this dark world was of utmost importance. How many people still championed beauty?

  Grilled meat with grapefruit juice, followed by a bitter coffee. It angered him the way Turkish women grew fat. They did so because they did not know how to eat properly, and they were primitive. He entered Piknik. Now, I’ll stop by the store after lunch, drop off the money, then go back home and take my midday nap. In the early evening I’ll go to the club and play a round of tennis. And then I’ll have a shower. And then some whiskey on ice. The darkness within him was allayed, just a little bit. Ultimately, he wasn’t responsible for what was happening. He was not responsible for how expensive things were, how merchants were a bunch of cheats, how rare honorable behavior had become in dealings of commerce, how his wife and kids splurged, how his big brother had spent all the gold in the basement of their house in Salonica, how people became more and more rude, more and more inconsiderate, more and more impolite with each passing day, or how the world got progressively worse, becoming an ever more regressive, uninhabitable place. Nor was he responsible for the fact that this country could never catch up with Europe, or for the way it teemed with beggars. He had never taken an interest in politics. He had never borne any responsibility for the governing of this land. Besides, he hated politics. Politics was a lowly job. It was a job for greedy middle class people. He looked around for an empty seat. There
was a seat next to a young man and woman. Before ever so slowly and politely pulling out the chair, he asked permission from his neighbors at the table. The male of the neighbors, surprised by this unnecessary gesture, motioned nonchalantly with his head. How rude! Necip Bey nearly stomped off to find another place to sit, so offended was he. But upon seeing that all of the other tables were full, he decided against it. He hung his umbrella on the back of the chair. Curling one of his long fingers, he summoned a waiter. The waiter came running. Necip Bey grew very angry at people who ran on the job. For a waiter to run was a sign of carelessness, rudeness and ineptitude. The waiter was standing next to Necip Bey, pen and paper in hand, waiting impatiently for the words to come out of Necip Bey’s mouth, when he said something to the other waiters: “Memet, the French fries go over there!” Necip Bey was enraged that the waiter was not paying attention to him. “Son, shouldn’t you be serving me?” The waiter, having understood that this man was going to be a handful, was about to go take care of things that needed his more urgent attention when … Necip Bey grabbed the waiter by the arm, stopping him. The waiter, dumbfounded, stopped. Another crackpot, he thought. Necip was determined to educate the waiter, slowly but surely. Although he himself was responsible for none of them, he always tried to correct faults whenever he encountered them, wanted for others to benefit from his knowledge and ideas, and gave all and sundry a lesson whenever he deemed it necessary; he was a citizen cognizant of his responsibilities, just like Europeans, like the Swiss. In Switzerland, a child never sat down on the tram, even if it was completely empty; if a child did attempt to sit on a tram with empty seats, an elderly passenger would be sure to reprimand him before the ticket-seller did. But then if only everybody did their duty as citizens, if only everyone learned not to shake the dust out of their rugs from the windows, if only everyone paid their taxes … He turned towards the waiter. And he did not let go of the waiter’s arm until the waiter turned to look at him. The waiter, forced to direct his bewildered, distressed gaze at Necip Bey, waited.

  “Look son, listen to me carefully, because if you bring me anything I did not order, I will send it back,” Necip Bey said, before releasing the waiter’s arm so that the latter could take down his order. “Now, I want a completely fat-free sirloin steak. But don’t let them leave it on the grill too long and dry it out. It should be medium rare. And with it, boiled potatoes …”

  Look at this idiot, does he think he’s at Washington Restaurant or something? the waiter, by now incensed, thought to himself,

  “Sir, we don’t have boiled potatoes. We have French fries, or mashed potatoes …”

  “Son, do you not boil the potatoes before you mash them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weeelll then, why are you making this so difficult? Your job is to satisfy the customer!”

  And just who is going to satisfy us? thought the waiter. Guys like this aren’t only demanding, they’re stingy too; they don’t even leave a tip.

  “Now go to the kitchen … Ask for two boiled potatoes … Have them peeled real good … Then top them with a handful of parsley mixed with olive oil and lemon … Then put some boiled peas and carrots next to it … Rub a little butter into the carrots … Wait, hold on! Don’t get upset, son! Look, I want the order exactly as I have described it. And I want grapefruit juice too. Grapefruit juice, freshly squeezed …”

  Necip Bey did not even see the fire trucks that had entered the street across from him or the people rushing in that direction just then. The waiter did not even listen to Necip Bey’s last words. Instead, he ran over to the window to see what was going on.

  Güngör gets ahead by dyeing Easter eggs

  Güngör eavesdropped on Necip Bey’s conversation with the waiter. The jackass! He comes in for lunch but ends up ruining the meal, for him and for us, with all of his whining. I know his type. I get my fair share of them at my own store. Güngör recently opened a furniture store in Çankaya. In this store, he sells items for the home, which he brings over from Europe using “trousseau permits” that he buys from certain merchants. He is planning to open a branch of the store in Nişantaşı soon. That’s right, his store is doing so well that he is going to have to expand the business, which goes something like this: Certain merchants and members of parliament would get trousseau permits from the Department of Finance, claiming that they needed them because they were about to give their daughters’ hands away in marriage. And then Güngör would relieve them of the permits.

  Despite the middlemen, Güngör made a hefty profit because he got the merchandise on the cheap thanks to the permits and then sold it at greatly inflated prices. Not to guys like Necip Bey though, of course. Guys like him would come to the store and prattle on for hours about items they had seen in Europe. They would immediately convert prices to foreign currencies and give you a speech about what all one could buy for the same amount of money in this or that city; they would frown upon the quality of the wood, and find the polish tacky. Most importantly, however: they never ever bought anything. Never. Men of his sort never buy anything new. They never get rid of their old stuff, they’re simply too devoted to things of the past. No one has ever witnessed them getting new things, or refurnishing their apartments. These guys needed to be brought down a peg or two, so that they would sell the antiques they possessed yet did not deserve. In his home decoration displays, Güngör combined antiques with modern decor. And the result was very stylish indeed. He had seen examples of it often in foreign magazines. But no, guys of Necip Bey’s ilk simply did not cough up their antiques. Oh, but eventually they will, they’ll have to. What in the world is this man good for, other than having to sell his stuff? Sooner or later all of these guys, all the men of their ilk, will run out of the money left to them by their pasha grandpas because they aren’t creative. They don’t know how to make use of what they’ve got, or how to create anything new. Güngör, to the contrary, was a creative person. Thinking about himself, he swelled with pride. Did I not create everything while possessing nothing? Did I not get my start in business dyeing Easter eggs?

  “Haven’t I ever shown you the Easter eggs I used to dye?”

  Güngör’s fiancee gave him a puzzled look. She had dyed her hair bombshell blonde. And she had had it flattened to fall straight down to her shoulders. She wore sunglasses that covered half of her nose and nearly all of her narrow forehead. She had just had her nails done; she was inspecting her nails, or rather, the ring that Güngör had given her the day before. A new ring. For her, it was a source of one week’s worth of happiness. During this time (that is, until she saw something new in the shop windows to become infatuated with), rarely did she allow for anything to come between her and her latest prized possession. She looked at Güngör with astonishment. They would be married soon. Or rather, they were going to get married once Güngör got a divorce. Güngör was a perfectly likeable man. First of all, he was not stingy, and second of all, he took an interest in women’s clothing. That is to say, it was particularly important to him how the woman he was with dressed. He always said: “For the woman at my side to dress badly would be akin to my store doing poor business. Just as it is important to me what I put in my shop window, just as I place expensive antiques acquired from the covered bazaar in the shop window without batting an eye, if I am to link my arm in that of a woman without batting an eye, then I must take care to make sure that she too is decorated so as to attract interest and customers.”

  Güngör wanted to look into his fiancee’s eyes. But he couldn’t see them. Those glasses didn’t suit Melahat at all. Her forehead was too narrow, her nose too flat. They made her look like a dimwit, and rendered her already unimpressive profile flat as a board. They made her look like a Volkswagen or something. She hasn’t answered my question. But then I’m not asking her so that she will answer. I am warning her that she should listen.

  “Have I shown you my Easter eggs, Melahat?”

  “No.”

  Good. Yes, or no. The best
answers a woman can possibly give. In either case, the other person can guide the conversation in the direction he desires.

  “My first job was painting Easter eggs. Back then, we lived in a basement apartment on Meşrutiyet Avenue.”