by Sevgi Soysal
Just behind Yıldırım Beyazıt, in the neighborhood of Hacı Doğan, she had seen how Huriyegil and Nazangil had pulled no punches in attempting to protect their baby dolls made of old socks from the envious evil eyes of the other children. Yet hardly a day would pass before the babydolls had been deprived of limbs, having been subjected to vicious tug-o-wars: “’At is mah babydoll!” The rule for any child that grows up in Hacı Doğan is this: Once you get your hands on something, you snap it up and run as fast and as far as you can. Just like a street dog that’s found a bone and wants to gnaw on it in peace, far from the other canines. For one, in such a neighborhood, it was impossible for a child to own anything that was unusual for the neighborhood; and second of all, if such a thing were to come to pass, it wouldn’t spell out good news for the kid. It would end in them falling prey to attacks upon property—“Give ’at here!”—and being pummeled by other children and, finally, being deprived of her possession, such that the child wouldn’t know whether to cry at the loss of an irrecoverable windfall or at her physical pain. One day Aysel’s family’s neighbor, a porter named Rüstem, had given his son a real ball, though how he got his hands on it no one knows (the neighbors claimed he stole it). Imagine it, in a neighborhood where even paper to make balls (the kids there played with paper balls) was hard to come by (after all, newspaper was something valuable and adults wouldn’t let kids anywhere near paper), a real, genuine ball! When he got home the following evening, he found his son with a busted brow and a gash in his head, and then proceeded to beat the crap out of him because he’d surrendered his ball.
Aysel had learned as a young child the tremendous difficulties that came with possessing something. Anyone incapable of getting the best of at least a dozen people like herself had no right to possess anything. Getting a beating was a law enforced daily, and just as was the case with any daily matter, a beating too would come to a resolution depending upon the attending results. And then there was the police station, a place that did not alter the results of the beating, but certainly had everything in the world to do with beating. For some reason, though the beater and the beaten never switched places, there were those who had taken it upon themselves as a duty to intervene in this whole beating business by adding a helping hand into the mix. She was afraid of the police—because the police could rescue neither the rag doll nor the ball from being shred to pieces, but they would beat up whoever was beating and being beaten. She could not fathom why her elders, who harbored no qualms when it came to breaking each other’s teeth and chins and smashing each other’s faces in, simply could not deal with the police. As soon as the police showed up, they’d abandon their fights and turn into meek little lambs, and then tagging along after the police officer who was usually much punier than them, their eyes red and their noses runny, they’d go to that place called the station, and there they would silently take their beating. Numerous local punks known for pulling knives in response to so much as a dirty look would not make even the slightest attempt at self-defense at the police station. As soon as they set foot in the station, they instantly became putty, automatically opening up their palms so that the police might smack them. From this state of affairs Aysel had arrived at the conclusion that the police hailed from a neighborhood full of punks much more powerful, more remorseless and burlier than the roughnecks in her neighborhood. The roughnecks in her own neighborhood were afraid of the roughnecks from that other neighborhood. Not the police themselves, but the other neighborhood’s roughnecks. In Aysel’s neighborhood, everything had to pass through the police, the station; it was the sole path to officialdom. Births, marriages, mistresses and their “sponsors,” mother-in-law-daughter-in-law quibbles, debts and dues. Every night one of her neighbors would beat his wife. And the wife would step out the front door and yell “Police!” And then the husband would creep up behind her and shove a trash can over her head to keep her from being heard. The police would come and take them both to the station. After a while, having given their depositions, they’d return. The same incident would then be repeated a few days later. Aysel could not figure out why on earth the woman continued to yell, “Police!” when every single time she suffered the same beating and had the same trash can shoved over her head. As but a young child Aysel had come to realize that the police did not exist in order to change situations. Especially not troublesome situations! The police station was somewhere within the orbit of trouble and those who got caught up in trouble inevitably found themselves caught up in the same orbit. Trouble was everywhere. Trouble existed all the time and at every moment. You had to be on alert at all moments in order to keep both trouble and the police at a distance, and you had to put trouble on someone else before it had a chance to get its claws into you. A listless person could never shake off trouble because the bird of trouble always alighted on the heads of the stagnant. Aysel saw as a child that trouble existed in human form. As your mother, your father, your sibling, your friend. You had to fend off each and every one of them, giving as good as you got, and the police were just one of the indispensable spectators of this clash.
Aysel didn’t have many relatives who weren’t trouble. Her father had violated her older sister, and from that union Aysel was born. That is to say, first her father was trouble for her sister, and then he got Aysel in trouble by being the cause of her birth. The mother of her mother then kicked her pregnant daughter out of the house. Aysel’s mother/sister began working at a fifth rate pavyon. This allowed her to take care of her daughter, upon whom, by means of her pinching and cursing and pushing and shoving, she released all of the hatred she harbored for this world. Aysel would have to spend hours begging, crying and pulling at her mother/sister’s skirts for a mere morsel of bread. Aysel would cry until her mother/sister first smacked her for crying, before finally handing over a few cents so she could go buy bread. Her mother/sister was rarely to be found at home. Meals were never cooked there, and even salt was nonexistent. Aysel envied the salt the neighbor kids would put on their bread. Her stomach, it could be said, had never experienced the pleasure of a hot meal in all her life. On the extremely rare occasions when her mother/sister was at home, she would sometimes send Aysel out to get watermelon, cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes or halva. Other than these occasional delicacies, bread served as her sole source of sustenance. And on the rare occasions when her mother/sister did buy such foodstuffs, she wouldn’t give any to Aysel straight away; only after Aysel had yanked on her skirts sufficiently, crying, “Sissy, gimme!” would she bestow upon Aysel some of the foodstuffs she had sent Aysel out to buy.
She had just turned eleven years old. Her sister came home with two men. Aysel hadn’t yet gotten her period. One of the men gave Aysel a piece of chocolate. It was the first time in her life that she’d ever had chocolate. She gobbled it up so quickly that she was only able to taste the chocolate after she had finished it. It wasn’t until after there was no chocolate left to eat that she understood chocolate was a wonderful thing, and so she desired more chocolate. The man did not give her any more chocolate, but he did hurt her, a lot. Aysel toughed it out, in the hopes of getting more chocolate. She knew good and well that nothing could be had in this world without toughing it out, and that everything came with a price. And so then she asked the man for another piece of chocolate, thinking that she had earned it. And the man said to her, “Come with me tomorrow, and I’ll buy you all kinds of chocolate.” Heaven only knew just how much more he would hurt Aysel, but then her sister hurt her too, beating her all the time like she did. Plus she starved her, and she never ever bought her chocolate. The next day she went off with the man. The man sold her to some people. And without buying her even the smallest piece of chocolate. This time, he let the men he sold her to hurt her. Aysel was not in the least surprised at this. But still she whined and begged for several days, thinking that maybe, just maybe the man would get her some chocolate. Finally the man lost his patience and slapped her smack in the middle of her face. This too came as no surpr
ise to Aysel. This was the system as she knew it from her mother/sister, the only system Aysel knew, and so of course it would continue. Finally, the man sold her off once and for all. Then some other men took her to Antakya. They locked her up in a hotel room. They never opened the door to her room, they slipped her some food now and then, and occasionally sent a man inside to be with her. Aysel asked each and every one of the men for chocolate. Most of them never came back. After some time, Aysel got the sense to ask for chocolate to begin with. If the men who entered her room failed to deliver chocolate, she’d resist. She was agile and able to handle the men, who were usually drunk. But then one of the men who had locked her up in the hotel came and beat Aysel until her face was a bloody mess. Aysel sat in her room crying for three full days. She thought of her absolutely positively miserable childhood in Hacı Doğan. How she wandered the streets on an empty stomach, the neighborhood brawls … But she hadn’t been out of that room for months. Her stomach was full now. At first, she found this state of incarcerated satiation preferable to her days of wandering the streets hungry. But then when the men who beat her up because she had demanded chocolate left Aysel hungry for three days in an attempt to starve some sense into her, she began to feel her lack of freedom the same way she had felt the lack of chocolate. And so she wised up, and became determined not to give up something she had tasted, but rather to resist until she got it. On the fourth day, a taxi driver who had visited her before came bearing chocolate this time, because Aysel had insisted upon it the last time he was there. Aysel was reaping the rewards of her resistance. She thought that perhaps there were things she could do to obtain freedom as well. She begged the man to get her out of there. Begging was one of the things she knew best, for she had honed this particular skill in the course of groveling before her sister for a morsel of bread.
The man promised to get Aysel out of there. Of course that would cost her too, but she had to get out of that room. She would die, simply die, if she didn’t get out. One evening the driver came to her window and told Aysel to grab onto a sheet and let herself down. Aysel fearlessly performed exactly as told—death was everywhere, so why should she fear it? She had already seen countless dead bodies as a child. Once a man had been stabbed to death right before her very eyes. The man had been spying on the lavatories, and word had spread through the neighborhood that there was a peeping tom in their midst. And so one day a laborer decided to stay home from work and catch the guy in the act. When the laborer’s wife entered the lavatory, he cornered the approaching peeping tom and stabbed him then and there. The police came and arrested the attacker. Meanwhile everyone in the neighborhood had walked up and spit in the face of the peeping tom. Aysel could not fathom why the police had taken away a laborer for killing a man into whose face everyone spit. Moreover, the laborer’s son suffered from tuberculosis, and died a short time after his father was arrested. And so all of this had awoken within Aysel the idea that it was best to stay away from the police. While in Antakya, not once did the idea of going to the police even cross her mind. If the police had shown up in her room, she would have resisted, without even asking for chocolate, let alone complaining about the conditions she was being held in.
They got in the driver’s taxi around midnight and took off. Towards Ankara. On their way there the men who had locked Aysel up began trailing them. They even fired some shots at them from behind. The driver put the pedal to the metal. Meanwhile, Aysel belted out tune after tune at the top of her lungs. She had memorized the songs she could hear rising from the gazino during her stay at the hotel. Once the taxi driver had managed to lose the guys who were pursuing them—he knew the streets like the back of his hand, that’s why he had dared to run off with Aysel like this in the first place—he pulled over and stopped the car. He mixed some marijuana with a little tobacco and rolled a joint. And then he turned to Aysel and asked, “So do you sing?”
“Of course I do, why shouldn’t I?”
“You got your docs?”
“What docs, hm?”
The driver wrinkled his forehead and thought for a few moments.
“Do you have your papers, from the census bureau?”
“What kinda papers you mean, hm?”
“Every person’s gotta have papers. Otherwise, they’re not considered a real person.”
“In that case, what are they considered, hm?”
“Would you quit saying ‘hm’ all the time? They’re not considered nothing, you see. The police’ll take you in if you don’t have papers.”
“Well, ya don’t say! So you mean those papers are ‘lose the police papers.’”
“Well, whatever you wanna call them, if you don’t have them, then you can’t sing, and you can’t get a job. You’ll go hungry.”
“And so I can’t get me chockylit either, hm?”
“What are you talking about, chockylit! I just told you, you’ll go hungry!”
Aysel began to weep. Everywhere she went she encountered this specter of hunger. And now she was going to go hungry because she didn’t have her papers. How was she supposed to find these so-called papers? She thought of her older sister.
“Why don’t you ask my sister if I’ve got papers?”
“You got a sister?” the man asked suspiciously. Aysel had understood, in her infinite astuteness, that the driver didn’t much care for the idea of her having relatives.
“Who else you got?”
“Like I said, my sister, and my mom, they’re one and the same.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean, you little tramp?”
“It means my mom and my sister are the same, oki?”
“Girl, don’t go pushing my buttons. Now what the hell is that supposed to mean!”
“Nothing, it don’t mean nothing … My dad attacked my sister, and I was born a bastard …” She told her story the same way the kids in the neighborhood told it. The taxi driver listened, shaking his head, and then told her, “I’ll talk with your sister once we get to Ankara.”
Once they got to Ankara, the taxi driver locked her up at his place, telling her, “I’m going to your sister’s.” When he got back, he was wearing a long face.
“You don’t have no papers or nothing.”
“So whadda we do now?”
“Everything’ll be fine, as long as the police don’t find out.”
Thanks to her keenly developed intuition, Aysel immediately understood that the driver feared the police just as much as she did. Whoever best conceals their fear and transforms it into the appearance of toughness, wins. And so that’s exactly what Aysel did.
“Brother, if you lock me up again, I’ll run straight to the police.”
“And I’ll rip you a new one,” the driver said. But he didn’t lock Aysel up again.
She began singing at the gazino at Gölbaşı, drinking with the patrons there, and occasionally going off with the ones her bosses approved of. She was thirteen years old. She had learned every trick you could turn in bed, every cuss word imaginable, how to smoke dope and how to drink. She had no ID. One night, the police raided the gazino. They took Aysel in. She was sent for an examination. Then upstairs to detention. They didn’t know what to do with her because she didn’t have her papers. She spent some time in prison. She wasn’t sentenced. They had x-rays of her taken, in order to determine her age—according to the x-ray, she was fifteen years old—then they released her, and again, she didn’t have any papers.
Aysel had been heading to Kızılay that day to get papers from the barber Hüsnü. From one of her regular johns, a person of high standing, she had learned that Hüsnü, one of the best barbers in Kızılay—and who also happened to be the neighborhood muhtar at the time—sold identity papers. She had siphoned off a bit of the money she was supposed to hand over to Hüseyin so that she could afford the identity papers. She was still living with Hüseyin. But he didn’t wear the britches like he used to. She didn’t let him get away with so much as a pinch on the ass anymore. He occ
asionally got angry, sometimes drank too much, but he was no longer able to beat Aysel like he once did. When they threw Aysel in the slammer, they’d roughed him up good at the police station too for pimping her out. But they hadn’t been able to prove anything. Yet after that beating, Hüseyin was a wreck because Aysel was in prison. It seems he’d developed a fondness for the money Aysel brought in. And so he had no intention of letting her go.
Aysel had looked scornfully at the face of the man who was sad because his revenue had been cut off. Hüseyin was no longer the man who ran off with her in a grand escape, raining gunfire upon his pursuers as they sped out of Antakya. Yet this incident had for a long time continued to have a certain hold on Aysel. And Hüseyin himself told the story frequently, always with a proudly puffed up chest. But now, Aysel had learned the ins and outs of the male species, that they too could get their feelings hurt and that they too had a price. Aysel supplied Hüseyin with plenty of money for his marijuana-lined cigarettes. And in that respect, she was his master. It was thanks to Aysel that he’d been able to soup up his lemon of a car. He was completely smitten. He was a completely different person with Aysel. And Aysel was no longer the child he drove to tears as she begged for a piece of chocolate. She was a person who knew how to play with men’s nerve endings. That was her job. The male body was to her what a car engine was to Hüseyin. She knew good and well exactly when and how it worked. “No man can so much as lay a finger on me if I don’t want him to,” she would say. “A single word from my lips is all it takes.” Men had bought her, and they continued to buy her, but now she sold herself knowingly, and named her own price.
At the police station, on the night that they made Aysel stay because she didn’t have any papers, one of the policemen started to put the moves on her. He pressed himself up against her while taking her fingerprints.
“Hey, back off!” Aysel had said.