by Sevgi Soysal
Güngör paid the bill. He and his fiance got up. As he got up, he knocked Necip Bey’s umbrella off his chair. Pretending not to notice, he didn’t deign to pick it up. They left Piknik. Güngör walked over to the opposite street where he had parked his car. Melahat trailed behind. She was annoyed at how Güngör marched ahead. Güngör thought he was always ahead of everything, and he liked it that way. The first to get the profit, the first to calculate the exchange rates, always the first, always ahead of the game; and so why shouldn’t he be ahead of a woman? If she’s got any sense, she’ll come after me. He noticed that the street was crowded. There were fire trucks. It annoyed him. Now it would be difficult to get his car out of its parking place. Güngör had one goal at that point, and it was to reach his car. He was going to get into his car and go to Ulus to meet with the lawyer. The crowd and the fire trucks that were blocking his way to this goal only angered him. No matter what it was that had caused all of these people to gather here and these fire trucks to clog up the street, it only angered him. His sole goal, at this moment, was to rip through the circle of fire trucks and crowds created by this event and reach his car. No matter what had happened, whether it be a war or an insurrection, for Güngör it was just something that was blocking the path to his car with its crowd of people and its fire trucks, something that was making him late for his appointment with the lawyer. Güngör’s strength should eradicate the extensions of this event which were obstructing him from reaching his goal, his strength should bore a path right through them. He walked towards his parked car with determined steps. He parted the crowd. A whistle blew. A traffic cop pushed Güngör back roughly. Blood rushed to Güngör’s head. A traffic cop, equating him with the crowd that had nothing to do with him, a crowd that had gathered here for who knows what stupid reason, had pushed him back, coming between him and his goal—the son of a bitch!
Melahat was pleased that the traffic cop had stopped Güngör, who had marched ahead without waiting for her. The existence of things like this, which could stop him, make him wait, made Melahat happy, they comforted her. But in the wake of this brief moment of bliss, it occurred to her that, as a result of missing his appointment with his lawyer, Güngör may not be able to get a divorce, and perhaps he then wouldn’t be able to marry her either, and her face fell.
Paying no heed to the crowd or the fire trucks, Güngör fixed his gaze upon his car. Stubbornly he looked at his car, and only at his car. A hand touched him on the shoulder. He turned around, still pissed off by the traffic cop’s touch of a few moments earlier, prepared to give hell to another impediment who was just as arrogant and presumptuous as the traffic police.
Recognizing the slightly balding head, sweaty hand and tiny, shifty eyes of Prof. Salih Bey, he quickly pulled himself together.
“You trying to get your car out of here too, Güngör Bey?”
“Yes, of course. Why else would I be waiting here?”
“It’s awful, and I think we’re going to be waiting here for a while yet.”
Güngör was angry at the way Prof. Salih Bey just accepted this whole waiting business. When he first saw this familiar face, he had had hoped they’d be able to join forces against the traffic police and march right over to their cars. He knew Prof. Salih Bey from his store. Güngör had acquired the purchasing permit that the professor had received after staying in America for two years. According to Güngör, Salih Bey’s home was the epitome of tasteless decoration. Still, he couldn’t really fathom why Salih Bey would sell his purchasing permit rather than use it himself, but then that was Salih Bey’s business, a man was only worthy of what he aspired to desire. When Güngör went to Salih Bey’s house to talk about the purchasing permit, Salih Bey explained that the furnishings in the house were from Mevhibe Hanım’s father and therefore held sentimental value and so on and so forth, thus probably trying to explain why he wasn’t using the permit to purchase things himself. Well, anyway, Güngör Bey knew that Salih Bey used the money he got for the permit to buy a new car.
“Are you going to Ulus as well?”
“Yes, the bathroom in our apartment … You know how those old buildings are … They fall apart just like that. The bathroom is a disaster. The ceramic tiles are broken. And no matter how much you have the sinks scrubbed, they still resemble anything but a sink. My wife’s on a rampage. We spend a fortune on cleaning women. When we were in America, we weren’t able to hire a cleaning woman, but still, my wife kept saying how easy it was to keep the bathroom clean. The other day, we had a Belgian professor over for dinner, and when the man asked to use the toilet, my wife became extremely anxious. And rightly so. When you go to the bathroom in Europe, it gives you this feeling of relief. It’s almost fancier than the living room or the guest room. When we went there for the most recent European Council, well, believe you me, the bathrooms were so nice, you could just stay inside them forever … You think, at the end of the day heck it’s just a bathroom, but the truth is, it’s not, it really has a huge impact on the health and digestion system. So, I’m going to look at bathrooms, sinks and ceramic tiles and stuff. We’re going to completely redo our bathroom. They made the bathrooms so small in these old apartments though, when you renovate, the stuff hardly fits. And so we’re going to knock out a wall and expand it towards the hallway. My wife wants ceramic tiles with flower patterns. You had them in your apartment. Did you get them here in Ankara?”
“No, mine came from Italy. They’re all European. But now they make imitations in Istanbul. I don’t know whether they have them in Ankara though.”
“I guess it’s best we have a look in Ulus, and then, if necessary, we can order some from Istanbul.”
Prof. Salih Bey obeys the rules
Prof. Salih Bey was distressed. If only he’d been able to take care of this before lunch. They were eating late these days because his son and daughter came home late. And when he got back from the university and saw that they hadn’t yet arrived, he’d decided to go to Ulus and have a look around. But now he couldn’t get to his car. They lived in an apartment building that looked out onto this street. Or rather, the building belonged to them. He wouldn’t be able to take care of the ceramic tile business that afternoon, but at least he could get some ideas. This year he’d taken on as few lessons as possible so as not to neglect the office. He would need money this year. Salih Bey was a penologist. His office was in Ulus. He also made money as an expert witness. These little jobs didn’t bring him a lot of money individually, but they added up. He thought he might collect debts due to him in Ulus while he was at it. Whenever he found himself having to lay out a pretty penny, reaping the money he had earned gave him that little bit of extra confidence. Though he was better off now than he had been in the past, and though he owned an apartment building, a car and land, and though his office did good business, Prof. Salih Bey still wasn’t able to look at the future with full and complete confidence. This lack of security was something that had been with him since childhood.
He had grown up in one of the narrow streets of Samanpazarı. His father had a tiny, fly-ridden shop where he sold a bunch of odds and ends, from sticky apricot roll-ups to shop ledgers. A tiny shop on a street corner. Still, it did decent business because it was the only shop in the neighborhood. The shop’s most frequent customers were neighborhood kids who walked in and bought themselves gum and colorful roasted chickpeas. Neighborhood residents considered buying actual food from the corner shop to be nothing less than imbecility and profligacy. They got their seasonal food supplied in bulk, wholesale, from the fruit and vegetable market. And many of them got their foodstuff from relatives back in the villages. The people who lived on this narrow street of Samanpazarı had the practice of getting everything as cheap as possible down to a science. Housewives competed with each other in this field. On summer days they’d gather in one another’s houses, make noodles and the ingredients for tarhana soup, and dry out fruit rolls. They’d string up eggplant, peppers and okra and hang them on the wa
lls, they’d buy tomatoes by the oke when they were at their cheapest and make tomato paste under the sun. The baskets of plums and cherries that came from their relatives back in the villages would be turned into jam. There was very little they had to buy from the corner store. Rice, flour and soap arrived at their homes in huge sacks, not in the paper bags of the corner store. From the corner store they would buy, when in dire need, a little sugar, cigarettes, cheese, and sucuk. And once in a blue moon, a bottle of rakı. Most of the men who lived on this street were coppersmiths, welders or small-time merchants. When those men wanted to toss back a few after a hard day’s work, they didn’t drink at home, they drank cheap wine at the Armenian winemakers’ places over at Hergele Square.
Sometimes, when a respectable guest showed up—and unexpected guests were rare in these homes—the man of the house would send one of the kids to the corner store for a bottle of rakı.
If the owner of a corner store in a neighborhood who was so prudent, who had to be so prudent, drew his profit from the neighborhood’s rare imprudence, then his profit would of course reflect that. And so Salih Bey’s father barely squeezed a living out of his store. Salih Bey was his father’s oldest son. That’s why his father so desperately wanted for him to get an education. He knew that this fly-ridden, sticky store wouldn’t be enough to put food on the table for the family that Salih would eventually have, or the siblings whom he might have to shoulder responsibility for as the big brother. Salih went to elementary school at a small school in Ulus. All of the other school children were like Salih, they were all pretty poor. But even back then, Salih held himself apart from the others, he wanted to be apart from them. He had gotten it in his head to be different from them. Salih was privileged in comparison to the other children in that he had more pistachios, roasted chickpeas and gum in his pockets than they did. But for him, even at that age, even this miniscule privilege was something to be developed and fostered. Based on his evaluation of what he heard and what he was told back then, he thought that he could achieve that development through hard work. To work, to increase the amount of gum, roasted chickpeas and marbles in his pockets so that he had much more than the other children, and then to fill the pockets of his school smock with money, and then to have better shoes than the others so that he could walker faster than them and without tripping in the mud in the winter. Maybe later, after working a whole lot, he’d be able to get on a bicycle and get away, get far, far away from this crowd of shorn-headed children with their black socks held up with white rubber bands.
He was very hard working. He always ranked at the top of his class. He’d bury his head in his schoolbooks at night until the wee hours. Besides, he didn’t feel confident unless he’d read over and recited his lessons at least five times, until he was absolutely certain he’d memorized them. True, he had very little confidence in himself, or in anything else for that matter. This was a trait he’d picked up from his father. If you asked his father, everyone was a thief. Everyone in the neighborhood pulled all kinds of numbers to get out of paying for the goods they’d purchased on credit. And so his father found myriad ways to secure from the neighborhood residents—who never volunteered to pay their debts themselves and who considered not shopping at the corner store a downright profitable endeavor—the payments that were his rightful due. He’d use thick paper when weighing items, water down the lamp oil, fix the scales. From his father Salih learned to survive by not trusting others.
He memorized his lessons well. Finally, in order to understand whether or not he had memorized them well enough, he’d hand his schoolbook to one of his siblings and ask them to read a random word from the middle of a page. If he failed to recite verbatim whatever came after that word, he’d go over the lesson another five times. He didn’t consider himself prepared for the lesson until he was one hundred percent confident that he had memorized it. If he were called to the board or had to take a test when he did not feel prepared, he’d tell his friends that he didn’t know the lesson and put a concerned expression on his face. Then, when he got a really good grade, his friends would be angry at him for his lack of honesty. Yet, from his own perspective, he was being honest because his goal was not just to pass, not simply to know the lesson well enough to get a good grade. Rather, he was striving to increase the mite of privilege that he possessed over his classmates. And since the only way to do that was to work, the only thing he had confidence in was work. Working was his everything, his passion, the air that he breathed. If he didn’t work hard enough, well, how hard was enough in order for him to achieve the daunting goal of separating himself from the rest? In order to know, he had to reap results, results which proved that the vague difference between him and the rest was growing. Yet so far, the only result he had achieved was to be first in his class. He still lived on a street that was just like the ones his friends lived on, he lived a similar domestic life, ate similar foods and wore similar black socks held up by similar white rubber bands.
One day, while looking at the shop window of a newly opened haberdashery, he saw a child. The child, who held his father’s hand, had white socks. White socks were important; Salih had never worn white socks before in his life. Salih’s friends never wore white socks either. And the boy was holding a red ball; a squeaky clean, shiny red ball with a velvety surface. Salih on the other hand was holding two live chickens. The heads of the chickens hung down, and because of their screeching, everyone who passed by turned to look. His father had sent Salih over to his friend’s, who had a largish chicken coop behind his house on Çırıkçılar Slope, to fetch those chickens. And so Salih had picked up the chickens and was heading home, taking his time along the scenic route. It was obvious that there was a difference between the live chickens that he held and the red ball; this boy in white socks would never ever carry a live chicken. Salih moved closer to the boy in order to get a better view of his ball. The boy, frightened by the chickens, leapt aside. Clearly, he wasn’t used to being in close proximity to live chickens. Neither Salih nor his friends, however, were afraid of live chickens; in fact, when necessary, they even slaughtered them themselves. Salih, even if he was at the top of his class, was not afraid of these live chickens, and he also wore black socks. He didn’t know whether this kid was hardworking, but so long as Salih himself did not have white socks and a red velvet ball instead of black socks and live chickens, his own industriousness would be insufficient. Because his classmates didn’t know this, and because they never would know this, they thought he was dishonest and so they didn’t like him.
But he didn’t like them either. He didn’t like any of his classmates. He didn’t have time to like them, for one. To like them would mean to fall prey to their traps, in other words, to be like them, to continue to be like them. He never played games in the street. He didn’t have time for that either. He had to continue his work, which had not yet rendered sufficient results. The only thing he trusted was work, it was his only friend. Sometimes, he’d fall into step with his friends and take part in their games, but it wouldn’t be long before he’d come to his senses. He’d abandon his circle of friends and leave the game with a somber expression on his face, just like that. He would understand that his friends had set up a trap. They wanted to trap him there, hand in hand, inside their circles; they wanted to eliminate the faint difference between him and them by keeping him from working. They wanted him to remain spinning inside that static, impoverished circle with the black socks and the white rubber bands and the ball made of paper. These shorn-headed friends who pushed him into this trap with their very own filthy hands, he didn’t like any one of them. Actually, he didn’t like his mother, father or siblings either. To him, they too were people who obstructed his development, made it so hard for him to achieve his transformation. He showed the utmost respect to his parents; he was scared to death that they might keep him from studying, and since they made such tremendous sacrifices for someone who was ultimately going to abandon them for entirely different circles, the
y must be very good people, he thought. At night, in the fantasies he plotted in his cold bed, there was room neither for his mother, with her hands that reeked of onions and had grown raw and red from washing the laundry, nor for his father, who always wore his takke, counted the beads on his tespih, picked up olives with his bare hands, always burped after meals and then never neglected to express his gratitude to God with a “Yarabbi şükür!” Or his siblings who played outside the house naked, not even deigning to wear underwear. In his fantasies he imagined the kid with the red velvet ball and the kid’s father. Salih went with them to the park. For Salih, going to the park was a daily habit of other people. He didn’t like his mother and father. But he treated them with respect. He deemed it necessary to treat the other elders around him with respect too, so that none of them would stand in his way. Quarreling or arguing with them was only something that would stop his progress and make his life harder. Salih didn’t need any obstructions, any difficulties. The only difficulty that he recognized and made room for in his life was work. He put all of his effort into overcoming this difficulty, a difficulty which had to be defeated. Affection was a harmful thing that kept you from working, that got you off track, or at the very least distracted you. If he liked his mother too much, when she ran out of water in the middle of doing laundry, he would have to interrupt his studying to go to the well and fetch more water. If he liked his father too much, he would have to help him at the store, instead of studying. If he liked his sibling, he would have to get up from his schoolbooks and take him to pee. And a thousand and one other obstructions that would stand in his way. Affection would only bring with it new difficulties, it would increase the difference between him and the white-socked boy, it would arrest him in the circle of black-socked, lazy children. And so that’s why he didn’t like anybody. Later, when he worked and worked and became a completely different person, once he had moved up to a completely different street and a completely different house, his only friend, work, would pay him for his friendship, and then of course he could make other goals for himself and take a liking to this or that …