A Strangeness in My Mind

1. Mevlut in the Village

If This World Could Speak, What Would It Say?

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND Mevlut’s decision, his devotion to Rayiha, and his fear of dogs, we must look back at his childhood. He was born in 1957 in the village of Cennetpınar in the Beyşehir district of Konya and never set foot outside the village until he turned twelve. In the autumn of 1968, having finished primary school, he expected to join his father at work in Istanbul while also continuing his studies, just like all the other children in his position, but it turned out his father didn’t want him there, so he had to remain in the village, where he became a shepherd for a while. For the rest of his life, Mevlut would wonder why his father had insisted that he should stay in the village that year; he would never find a satisfactory explanation. His friends, his uncle’s sons Korkut and Süleyman, had already left for Istanbul, so this was to prove a sad and lonely winter for Mevlut. He had just under a dozen sheep that he escorted up and down the river. He spent his days gazing at the pale lake in the distance, the buses and the trucks driving by, the birds and the poplar trees.

Sometimes, he noticed the leaves on a poplar quivering in the breeze and thought that the tree was sending him a message. Some leaves showed him their darker surface while others their dried, paler side, until, suddenly, a gentle wind would come along, turning the dark leaves over to show their yellow underside and revealing the darker face of the yellowed leaves.

His favorite pastime was to collect twigs, dry them, and use them to build bonfires. Once the fire really got going, Mevlut’s dog Kâmil would bounce around it a couple of times, and when he saw Mevlut sitting down to warm his hands over the flames, the dog, too, would sit down nearby and stare into the fire, motionless, just like Mevlut.

All the dogs in the village recognized Mevlut, they never barked at him even when he crept out in the middle of the darkest, quietest night, and this made him feel that this village was a place where he truly belonged. The local dogs barked only at those who came from outside the village, anyone who was a threat or a foreigner. But sometimes a dog would bark at someone local, like Mevlut’s cousin Süleyman, who was his best friend. “You must be having some pretty nasty thoughts, Süleyman!” the others would tease.

—

Süleyman. Actually, the village dogs never barked at me. We’ve moved to Istanbul now, and I’m sad that Mevlut had to stay behind in the village, I miss him…But the dogs in the village treated me the same way they treated Mevlut. I just thought I should make that clear.

—

Every now and then, Mevlut and his dog Kâmil climbed one of the hills, leaving the herd to graze down below. From his vantage point looking over the fields stretched out beneath him, Mevlut would yearn to live, to be happy, to be someone in the universe. There were times when he would dream of his father coming on a bus to take him away to Istanbul. The plains below, where the animals grazed, ended in a steep rock face at a bend in the stream. Sometimes you could spot the smoke from a fire at the opposite edge of the plain. Mevlut knew that the fire must have been lit by shepherd boys from the neighboring village of Gümüşdere, who, like him, hadn’t been able to go to Istanbul to continue their studies. From atop Mevlut and Kâmil’s hill you could see, when it was windy and the sky was clear, and especially in the mornings, the little houses of Gümüşdere and the sweet little white mosque with its slender minaret.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. I will take the liberty to quickly interrupt here, as I actually live in the abovementioned village of Gümüşdere. In the 1950s, most of us who lived in Cennetpınar, Gümüşdere, and the three neighboring villages were all very poor. During winter, we would become indebted to the grocer and could just barely make it through to spring. Come springtime, some of the men would go to Istanbul to work on construction sites. Some of us couldn’t even afford the bus ticket to Istanbul, so the Blind Grocer would buy it for us and write it down at the very top of his account book. Back in 1954, a tall, wide-shouldered giant from our village of Gümüşdere, a man named Yusuf, went to Istanbul to work as a builder. Then he became, by pure coincidence, a yogurt seller and made a lot of money selling yogurt street by street. He first brought over his brothers and his cousins to help him in Istanbul, where they all lived in bachelors’ apartments. Until then, the people of Gümüşdere hadn’t known the first thing about yogurt. But soon, most of us were going to Istanbul to pursue this opportunity. I first went there when I was twenty-two, after completing my compulsory military service. (Owing to various disciplinary mishaps, this took me four years; I kept getting caught trying to run away, I got beaten up a lot and spent a great deal of time in jail, but let it be known that no one loves our army and our honorable officers more than I do!) At the time, our soldiers hadn’t yet decided to hang the prime minister Adnan Menderes; he was still driving around Istanbul in his Cadillac, and whenever he came across any remaining historic homes and mansions, he had them demolished to make way for wide avenues. Business was good for street vendors plying their trade among the rubble, but I just couldn’t manage that whole yogurt-selling thing. Our people here tend to be tough and strong, big boned and with wide shoulders. But me, I’m a bit on the skinny side, as you will see for yourself should we ever meet one day, God willing. I got crushed under that wooden pole all day, with a thirty-kilo tray of yogurt tied at each end. To top it all, like most yogurt sellers I also went out in the evenings to try to make a little more money by selling boza. You can try all you want to cushion the weight of the pole, but a novice yogurt seller will inevitably get calluses on his neck and shoulders. At the beginning, I was pleased to see that I wasn’t getting any, because my skin is as smooth as velvet, but then I realized that the damned stick was doing much worse; it was damaging my spine, so off I went to the hospital. I spent about a month in hospital queues before the doctor told me I had to stop shouldering loads immediately. But obviously I had to earn a living, so instead of giving up the stick, I gave up the doctor. And that’s how my neck began to get crooked, and I came to be known among friends no longer as Little Miss Abdy but as Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman, which was rather heartbreaking. In Istanbul I avoided those who came from my village, but I used to see this Mevlut’s hot-tempered dad, Mustafa, and his uncle Hasan all the time, selling yogurt on the streets. That was also when I got hooked on rakı, which helped me forget about my neck. After a while I gave up on my dreams of buying a house, a little place in some slum, some real-estate property. I stopped trying to save more money and just tried to enjoy myself instead. I bought some land in Gümüşdere with the money I’d made in Istanbul, and I married the poorest orphan girl in the village. The lesson I learned during my time in the city is that in order to make it there, you need to have at least three sons that you can bring over from the village to slave away for you. I thought I’d have three strapping boys before going back to Istanbul, and this time I’d be able to build myself a home on the first empty hill I came across and go on to conquer the city from there. But I ended up with no sons and three daughters. So two years ago I came back to the village for good, and I love my girls very much. Let me introduce them to you now:

Vediha. I wanted my first strapping boy to be serious and hardworking and had decided to call him Vedii. Unfortunately, I had a daughter. So I called her Vediha, the female version of Vedii.

Rayiha. She loves to sit on her father’s lap and has a lovely smell, too, as her name suggests.

Samiha. She’s a clever little thing, always crying and complaining; she’s not even three yet and already thundering about the house.

—

Mevlut would sit down in Cennetpınar in the evenings with his mother, Atiye, and his two older sisters, who both doted on him, to write to their father, Mustafa Efendi, in Istanbul, asking for shoes, batteries, plastic clothes pegs, and soap, among other things. Their father was illiterate, so he rarely replied, ignoring most of their requests or else claiming, “You could buy those things cheaper from the blind village grocer.” Mevlut’s mother could sometimes be heard complaining in response: “We didn’t ask you to bring these things because the Blind Grocer doesn’t have them, Mustafa, but because we haven’t got them at home!” The letters Mevlut wrote to his father ended up instilling in the boy a particular understanding of what it meant to ask for something in writing. There were three elements to consider when WRITING A LETTER TO ASK SOMETHING OF SOMEONE WHO IS FAR AWAY:

1. What you truly want, which you can never really know anyway

2. What you are prepared to say openly, which usually helps you gain a slightly better understanding of what you truly want

3. The letter itself, which though imbued with the essence of items 1 and 2 is really an enchanted text with a much-greater significance

—

Mustafa Efendi. When I came back from Istanbul at the end of May, I brought the girls their flowery purple and green dress fabrics; for their mother, a pair of closed slippers and the Pe-Re-Ja — brand cologne Mevlut had written down in his letter; and for Mevlut, the toy he’d asked for. I was a bit hurt by his halfhearted thanks for the present. “He wanted a water pistol like the village headman’s son…,” said his mother while his sisters smirked. The next day, I went to the Blind Grocer with Mevlut, and we went through each item on our account. Every now and then I lost my temper: “What the hell is this Çamlıca gum?” I’d bellow, but Mevlut kept his eyes down, as he was the one who had been buying it. “No more gum for this one!” I told the Blind Grocer. “Mevlut should go to school in Istanbul next winter anyway!” said the Blind Grocer, that know-it-all. “He’s got a good head for num bers and sums. Maybe he’ll be the one to finally go to college from our village.”

—

The news that Mevlut’s father had fallen out with Uncle Hasan in Istanbul over the past winter quickly reached the village…Last December, during the coldest days of the month, Uncle Hasan and his two sons, Korkut and Süleyman, had left the house they lived in with Mevlut’s father in Kültepe and moved into a new one they had all built together on Duttepe, the hill opposite Kültepe, leaving Mevlut’s father behind. Uncle Hasan’s wife, Safiye, who was both Mevlut’s maternal aunt and his paternal uncle’s wife, had quickly followed, coming from the village into this new home in Istanbul to look after her husband and sons. These developments meant that Mevlut could now join his father in the autumn so that Mustafa Efendi would not be left alone in Istanbul.

—

Süleyman. My father and Uncle Mustafa are brothers, but our surnames are different. When Atatürk decreed that everyone should take a surname, the census officer from Beyşehir came to our village on the back of a donkey, toting his reams of records, to write down the surnames everyone had chosen for themselves. On the last day of the whole operation, it was our grandfather’s turn. He was a very devout and pious man who had never gone anywhere farther than Beyşehir. He took his time thinking and finally went for “Aktaş.” His two sons were arguing in their father’s presence as usual. “Put me down as Karataş,” demanded Uncle Mustafa, who was a little boy at the time, but neither my grandfather nor the census officer paid him any heed. Still, my uncle Mustafa is very stubborn and prickly, and many years later, before Mevlut was enrolled in middle school, he went down to the judge to have his surname changed, and from then on they became Karataş, “Blackstone,” while we remained Aktaş, “Whitestone.” My cousin Mevlut Karataş is really looking forward to starting school in Istanbul this autumn. But of the kids from around our village who have been sent to Istanbul on this pretext, not a single one has graduated from high school yet. There are almost a hundred villages and towns around where we come from, and so far only one boy has ever made it to college. That bespectacled mousy creature eventually went off to America, and no one has ever heard from him again. Many years later, someone saw his picture in the newspapers, but because he had changed his name, no one was even sure whether this was our bespectacled rodent or not. If you ask me, that bastard must have converted to Christianity by now.

—

One evening toward the end of that summer, Mevlut’s father brought out a rusty saw Mevlut remembered from his childhood. He led his son to the old oak tree. Slowly and deliberately, they sawed off a branch that was about as thick as an arm. It was a long and slightly curved branch. Using a bread knife and then a pocketknife, Mevlut’s father trimmed the twigs off one by one.

“This will be the pole you use when you work as a street vendor!” he said. He took some matches from the kitchen and asked Mevlut to light a fire. He charred and blackened the knots on the rod, turning it slowly over the fire until it had dried up. “It’s not enough to do it once. You have to leave it out in the sunshine all through the summer and dry it over the fire again. Eventually, it will become as hard as stone and as smooth as silk. Go on, have a look and see if it sits well on your shoulders.”

Mevlut placed the stick across his shoulders. He felt its toughness and warmth with a shiver.

At the end of summer, they went to Istanbul, taking a small sack of homemade soup powder, some dried red chilies, bags of bulgur and flatbread, and baskets of walnuts. His father would give the bulgur and walnuts as gifts to the doormen in some of the more prestigious buildings so that they would treat him well and let him take the elevator. They also took a broken flashlight that was to be fixed in Istanbul, a kettle that his father particularly liked and would bring back with him to the village, some straw mats for the dirt floor at home, and other paraphernalia. Plastic bags and baskets bursting with their belongings kept popping out of the corners into which they’d stuffed them during their one-and-a-half-day train ride. Mevlut immersed himself in the world he could see beyond the carriage window, even as he thought of the mother and the sisters he was already missing, and had to jump up every so often to chase after the hard-boiled eggs that kept falling out of their bags and rolling into the middle of the carriage.

The world beyond the train window contained more people, wheat fields, poplars, oxen, bridges, donkeys, houses, mosques, tractors, signs, letters, stars, and transmission towers than Mevlut had seen in the first twelve years of his life. The transmission towers looked as if they were coming straight at him, which sometimes made his head spin until he fell asleep with his head on his father’s shoulder, and woke up to find that the yellow fields and the sunny abundance of wheat had been replaced by purplish rocks all around, so that later, in his dreams, he would see Istanbul as a city built out of these purple rocks.

Then his eyes would fall upon a green river and green trees, and he would feel his soul changing color. If this world could speak, what would it say? Sometimes, it seemed to Mevlut that the train wasn’t moving at all but that an entire universe was filing past the window. Each time they passed a station, he would get excited and shout the name out to his father—“Hamam…İhsaniye…Döğer…”—and when the thick blue cigarette smoke in the compartment made his eyes water, he went outside to the toilet, stumbling like a drunk before he could force the door open with some difficulty, and watched the railroad tracks and the gravel go by under the toilet hole. The clacking of the train’s wheels could scarcely be heard through the hole. On the way back to his seat, Mevlut would first walk through to the very end of the train, looking into each compartment to observe the traveling multitudes, the women sleeping, the children crying, the people playing cards, eating spiced sausages that made entire compartments smell of garlic, and performing their daily prayers.

“What are you up to, why are you always going to the toilet?” his father asked. “Is the water running?”

“It isn’t.”

Children selling snacks would board the train at some stations, and while eating the wrap his mother had dutifully packed for him, Mevlut would examine the raisins, roasted chickpeas, biscuits, bread, cheese, almonds, and chewing gum these children sold before the train pulled into the next town. Sometimes shepherds would spot the train from afar and run down after it with their dogs, and as the train sped past, these boys would yell for “newspaprrrrsss” with which to roll cigarettes filled with smuggled tobacco, and hearing this Mevlut would feel a strange sense of superiority. When the Istanbul train stopped in the middle of the grasslands, Mevlut would remember just how quiet a place the world really was. In that quiet time, during those waits that felt like they might never end, Mevlut would look out the window to see women picking tomatoes from a small garden of a village house, hens walking along the train tracks, two donkeys scratching each other next to an electric water pump, and, just a bit farther, a bearded man dozing on the heath.

“When are we going to move?” he asked during one of these interminable stops.

“Be patient, son, Istanbul isn’t going anywhere.”

“Oooh, look, we’re moving again!”

“It’s not us, it’s just the train next to us,” said his father, laughing.

In the village school that Mevlut had attended for five years, a map of Turkey, with a flag on it and a portrait of Atatürk, used to hang right behind where the teacher stood, and throughout the journey, Mevlut tried to keep track of where they might be on that map. He fell asleep before the train entered Izmit and didn’t wake up again until they arrived in Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa station.

The many bundles, bags, and baskets they were carrying were so heavy that it took them a full hour to make their way down the stairs of Haydarpaşa train station and catch a ferry to Karaköy. That was the first time Mevlut saw the sea, in the evening twilight. The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep. There was a sweet smell of seaweed in the cool breeze. The European side of the city was sparkling with lights. It wasn’t his first sight of the sea but of these lights that Mevlut would never forget for the rest of his life. Once they got to the other side, the local buses wouldn’t let them on with all their luggage, so they walked for four hours all the way home to the edge of Zincirlikuyu.

2. Home

The Hills at the End of the City

HOME WAS a gecekondu, a slum house. This was the word Mevlut’s father used to refer to this place whenever he got angry about its crudeness and poverty, but on those rare occasions when he wasn’t angry, he preferred to use the word “home,” with a tenderness akin to what Mevlut felt toward the house. This tenderness fostered the illusion that the place might hold traces of the eternal home that would one day be theirs in this world, but it was difficult to truly believe this. The gecekondu consisted of a single fairly large room. There was also a toilet next to it, which was a hole in the ground. At night, the sound of dogs fighting and howling in distant neighborhoods could be heard through the small unglazed window in the toilet.

When they arrived that first night, a man and a woman were already in the house, and Mevlut thought for a moment that they’d walked into the wrong building. Eventually it became clear that they were the lodgers Mevlut’s father had taken in for the summer. Mevlut’s father started arguing with them, but then he gave up and made a bed in another dark corner of the room, where father and son ended up sleeping side by side.

When Mevlut woke up toward noon the next day, there was no one home. He thought of how his father, his uncle, and eventually his cousins, too, had all lived in this house together only recently. Thinking back on the stories Korkut and Süleyman had told him over the summer, Mevlut tried to picture them in this room, but the place felt eerily abandoned. There was an old table, four chairs, two beds (one with bedsprings and one without), two cupboards, two windows, and a stove. After six winters working in this city, this was the extent of his father’s possessions. After arguing with his father last year, Mevlut’s uncle and cousins had moved out to a different house, taking their beds, their furniture, and the rest of their belongings. Mevlut couldn’t find a single thing that had been theirs. Looking inside a cupboard, he was pleased to see one or two things his father had brought over from the village, the woolen socks his mother had knit for him, his long johns, and a pair of scissors — now rusty — that Mevlut had once seen his sisters using back home.

The house had a dirt floor. Mevlut saw that, before leaving for the day, his father had laid out one of the straw mats they had carried from the village. His uncle and cousins must have taken the old one with them when they left last year.

The rough old table on which his father had left a fresh loaf of bread that morning was of hardwood and plywood both. Mevlut would put empty matchboxes and wooden shims under its one short leg to keep it steady, but every now and then the table would wobble, spilling soup or tea over them and making his father angry. He got angry about lots of things. Many times during the years they would spend together in this house after 1969 his father vowed to “fix the table,” but he never did.

Even when they were in a rush, sitting down and having dinner with his father in the evening made Mevlut happy, especially during his first few years in Istanbul. But because they soon had to go out to sell boza — either his father on his own or with Mevlut by his side — these dinners were nowhere near as fun as the lively, joyful meals they used to have back in the village, sitting on the floor, with his sisters and his mother. In his father’s gestures, Mevlut could always sense an eagerness to get to work as soon as possible. No sooner had he swallowed his last morsel than Mustafa Efendi would light up a cigarette, and before even half finishing it, he would say, “Let’s go.”

When he got back from school and before setting out again to sell boza, Mevlut liked to make soup, either on the stove or, if it wasn’t lit, on their little butane cooktop. Into a pot of boiling water, he would throw a spoonful of margarine and whatever was left in the fridge, such as carrots, celery, and potatoes, as well as a handful of the chilies and bulgur they’d brought from the village, and then he would stand back and listen to the pot bubbling away as he watched the infernal tumult inside. The little bits of potato and carrot whirled around madly like creatures burning in the fires of hell — you could almost hear them wailing in agony from inside the pot — and then there would be sudden unexpected surges, as in volcanic craters, and the carrots and celery would rise up close to Mevlut’s nose. He loved watching the potatoes turn yellow as they cooked and the carrots give their color off to the soup, and listening to the changing sounds the soup made as it bubbled away. He likened the ceaseless motion in the pot to the orbits of the planets, which he had learned about in geography class at his new school, the Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, and this made him think that he, too, was spinning around in this universe, just like these little particles in the soup. The hot steam from the pot smelled good, and it was nice to warm himself over it.

“The soup is delicious, my boy!” his father said every time. “I wonder if we should make you a cook’s apprentice?” On evenings when he didn’t go out to sell boza with his father but stayed at home to do his homework, as soon as his father had gone Mevlut would clear the table, take out his geography textbook, and start to memorize all of the city and country names, getting lost in sleepy daydreams as he looked at pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Buddhist temples in China. On days when he went to school in the morning and helped his father carry around the heavy yogurt trays in the afternoon, he collapsed on the bed and fell asleep as soon as they’d had their dinner. His father would wake him before going out again.

“Put your pajamas on and get under the blanket before you go to sleep, son. Otherwise you’ll freeze when the stove goes off.”

“Wait for me, Dad, I’m coming, too,” Mevlut would say without really waking up, as if talking in his sleep.

When he was left alone in the house at night, and set his mind to his geography homework, try as he might Mevlut could never ignore altogether the noise of the wind howling through the window, the relentless scurrying about of mice and of imps, the sounds outside of footsteps and of wailing dogs. These city dogs were more restless, more desperate, than the dogs back in the village. There were frequent power cuts so Mevlut couldn’t even do his homework, and in the darkness the flames and the crackling from the stove seemed bigger and louder, and he became convinced that there was an eye watching him closely from the shadows in a corner of the room. If he took his eyes off his geography book, the owner of the eye would realize that Mevlut had seen it and would certainly pounce on him, so there were times when Mevlut couldn’t even bring himself to get up and go to bed, and slept with his head resting on his books.

“Why didn’t you turn off the stove and get into bed, son?” his father would say when he came back in the middle of the night feeling tired and irritable.

The streets were freezing cold, so his father didn’t mind that the house was warm, but at the same time he didn’t like to see so much wood used up in the stove. As he was reluctant to admit to this, he would say, at most, “Turn off the stove if you’re going to sleep.”

His father either got their firewood from Uncle Hasan’s little shop or else chopped it himself with a neighbor’s ax. Before winter arrived, Mevlut’s father taught him how to light the stove using dry twigs and bits of newspaper, and where to find these sticks and scraps in the nearby hills.

In the first months after they’d arrived in the city, on returning from his yogurt rounds, Mevlut’s father would take him farther up Kültepe, the hill on which they lived. Their house was at the edge of the city, on the lower part of a balding, muddy hill dotted with mulberry trees, and with a fig tree here and there. At the bottom, the hill was bound by traces of a narrow little creek, which wended its way around and through the other hills, from Ortaköy to the Bosphorus. The women of the families who had migrated here in the midfifties from impoverished villages around Ordu, Gümüşhane, Kastamonu, and Erzincan used to grow corn and wash their laundry all along the creek, just as they had done back home, and in summer their children would swim in its shallow waters. Back then, the creek was known by its old Ottoman name Buzludere, “Icy Creek,” but the waste generated over fifteen years by more than eighty thousand Anatolian migrant settlers on the surrounding hills, and by a multitude of factories, small and large, soon caused the river to be known as Bokludere, “Dung Creek.” By the time Mevlut arrived in Istanbul, neither name was used anymore, as the river had long been forgotten, absorbed by the growing city and mostly buried under layers of concrete from its source to its mouth.

At the top of Kültepe, “Ash Hill,” Mevlut’s father showed him the remains of an old waste-incineration plant whose ashes had given the hill its name. From here, you could see the slums that were rapidly taking over the surrounding hills (Duttepe, Kuştepe, Esentepe, Gültepe, Harmantepe, Seyrantepe, Oktepe, et cetera), the city’s biggest cemetery (Zincirlikuyu), factories of all shapes and sizes, garages, workshops, depots, medicine and lightbulb manufacturers, and, in the distance, the ghostly silhouette of the city with its tall buildings and its minarets. The city itself and its neighborhoods — where Mevlut and his father sold yogurt in the mornings and boza in the evenings, and where Mevlut went to school — were only mysterious smudges on the horizon.

Farther out still, you could see the blue hills on the Asian side of the city. The Bosphorus was nestled between these hills, and although invisible from Kültepe, whenever Mevlut climbed up the hill during his first months in the city, he always thought he could glimpse its blue waters between the mountains. Atop each hill that sloped down to the sea was one of those enormous transmission towers carrying a key power line into the city. The wind made strange noises when it blew against these gigantic steel constructions, and on humid days, the buzz of the cables scared Mevlut and his friends. On the barbed wire surrounding the tower was a picture of a skull warning DANGER OF DEATH, the sign pockmarked with bullet holes.

When he first used to come up here to gather sticks and paper, Mevlut would look out at the view below and assume that the danger came not from the electricity but from the city itself. People said that it was forbidden and bad luck to get too close to the enormous towers, but most of the neighborhood got its electricity from illicit cables expertly hooked into this main line.

—

Mustafa Efendi. So that he would understand the hardship we’ve endured, I told my son how all the hills around here, except for ours and Duttepe, still lacked power. I told him that when his uncle and I first came here six years ago, there was no electricity anywhere, no water supply or any sewage drains either. I showed him those places on the other hills where Ottoman sultans used to hunt and where soldiers took their target practice, the greenhouses where the Albanians grew strawberries and flowers, the dairy farm run by those who lived in Kâğıthane, and the white graveyard, where the bodies of soldiers who died in the typhus epidemic during the Balkan War of 1912 were covered with lime; I told him just so he wouldn’t be fooled by the bright lights of Istanbul into thinking that life was somehow easy. I didn’t want to crush his spirit entirely, though, so I also showed him the Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, where we would soon have him enrolled, the dirt field laid out for the Duttepe football team, the Derya Cinema with its feeble projector, which had just opened this summer among the mulberry trees, and the site of the Duttepe Mosque, which had been under construction for four years now, sponsored by the baker and contractor Hadji Hamit Vural and his men, all from Rize, with their matching oversize chins to prove it. On the slopes to the right of the mosque, I pointed out the house his uncle Hasan had finished building last year on the plot we had marked out together four years ago with a wall of whitewashed stones. “When your uncle and I arrived here six years ago, all of these hills were empty!” I said. I explained that for the poor souls who’d come here from far away the priority was to find a job and settle down in the city, and in order to get to the city ahead of everyone else in the mornings, they all tried to build their homes as close as possible to the roads at the foot of the hills, so that you could almost see the neighborhoods growing from the bottom of each hill toward the top.

3. The Enterprising Individual Who Builds a House on Empty Land

Oh, My Boy, Istanbul Is a Little Scary, Isn’t It?

LYING IN BED at night during his first months in Istanbul, Mevlut would listen closely to the sounds of the city drifting in from afar. He would wake up with a start on some quiet nights to the faint sound of dogs barking in the distance, and when he realized that his father wasn’t back yet, he would bury his head under the blanket and try to go back to sleep. When it seemed that Mevlut’s nighttime fear of dogs was getting out of hand, his father took him to a holy man in a wooden house in Kasımpaşa who said a few prayers and breathed a blessing over Mevlut. Mevlut would remember it all many years later.

He discovered in a dream one night that the vice principal of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, the so-called Skeleton, looked just like the skull on the DANGER OF DEATH sign on the electric transmission tower. (Mevlut and his father had met Skeleton when they had gone to present Mevlut’s primary-school certificate from the village so that they could enroll him.) Mevlut didn’t dare look up from his math homework lest he should come face-to-face with the demon that he believed was always watching him from the darkness outside the window. That was why sometimes, when he wanted to go to sleep, he couldn’t even work up the courage to get up and go to bed.

Mevlut got to know Kültepe, Duttepe, and the neighborhoods of the surrounding hills through Süleyman, who had become very famil iar with the whole area in the year he’d already spent there. Mevlut saw many gecekondu homes, some of whose foundations had only just been laid, some with the walls only half built, and others awaiting the finishing touches. Most of them were occupied by men only. The majority of those who had come to Kültepe and Duttepe from Konya, Kastamonu, and Gümüşhane these past five years had either left their wives and children behind, as Mevlut’s father had done, or were single men with no prospects for marriage, no gainful employment, or any property whatsoever back in their village. They left their doors open sometimes, and Mevlut would see as many as six or seven single men in one room, all sleeping like logs, and in those moments he could really feel the sullen presence of the dogs that lurked about. The dogs must have been able to detect the thick smell of stale breath, sweat, and sleeping bodies. Unmarried men were aggressive, unfriendly, and always scowling, so Mevlut was mostly afraid of them.

On the main road in the center of Duttepe down below, where bus routes would one day terminate, there was a grocer whom Mevlut’s father called a swindler; a shop that sold sacks of cement, used car doors, old tiles, stovepipes, scraps of tin, and plastic tarpaulins; and a coffeehouse where unemployed men loitered all day. Uncle Hasan also had a little shop in the middle of the road that led up the hill. In his free time, Mevlut used to go there and make paper bags out of old newspapers with his cousins Korkut and Süleyman.

—

Süleyman. Mevlut wasted a year back in the village because of my uncle Mustafa’s temper, so he ended up in the year behind me at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School. When he first arrived in Istanbul my cousin was a fish out of water, and whenever I saw him standing all alone in the school yard during recess, I made sure to keep him company. We are all very fond of Mevlut and don’t let his father’s behavior affect how we treat him. One night before the start of the school year they came to our house in Duttepe. As soon as he saw my mother, Mevlut gave her a hug that showed how much he missed his own mother and his sisters.

“Oh, my boy, Istanbul is a little scary, isn’t it?” said my mom, hug ging him back. “But don’t be afraid, we’re always here for you, see?” She kissed his hair as his own mother used to do. “Now tell me, am I going to be your Safiye Yenge here in Istanbul, or will it be Safiye Teyze?”

My mom was both Mevlut’s uncle’s wife — his yenge—and his mother’s older sister, his teyze. During the summer, when Mevlut was likely to be influenced by our fathers’ constant bickering, he tended to call her Yenge, but during winter, when Uncle Mustafa was in Istanbul, Mevlut called my mom Teyze with all the sweetness and charm he had in common with his mother and sisters.

“You’re always Teyze to me,” said Mevlut now, with feeling.

“Your father won’t like that!” said my mom.

“Safiye, please look after him as much as you can,” said Uncle Mustafa. “He’s like an orphan here, he cries every night.”

Mevlut was embarrassed.

“We’re sending him to school,” Uncle Mustafa went on. “But it’s a bit pricey, what with all the textbooks and exercise books and so on. And he needs a blazer.”

“What’s your school number?” asked my brother Korkut.

“Ten nineteen.”

My brother went to the next room to rummage in the trunk and brought back the old school blazer we had both used in the past. He beat the dust off and smoothed down the creases and helped Mevlut into it like a tailor waiting on a customer.

“It really suits you, ten nineteen,” said Korkut.

“I’ll say! No need at all for a new blazer, I think,” said Uncle Mustafa.

“It’s a bit big for you, but it’s better that way,” said Korkut. “A tight blazer can give you trouble during a fight.”

“Mevlut isn’t going to school to get into fights,” said Uncle Mustafa.

“If he can help it,” said Korkut. “Sometimes you get these donkey-faced monsters for teachers who pick on you so much that it’s hard to stop yourself.”

—

Korkut. I didn’t like the way Uncle Mustafa said “Mevlut doesn’t get into fights”; I could tell he was patronizing me. I stopped going to school three years ago, back when Uncle Mustafa and my father were still living in the house they built together in Kültepe. On one of my last days of school, to make sure I would never be tempted to go back, I gave that donkey-faced show-off of a chemistry teacher Fevzi the lesson he deserved: two slaps and three punches in front of the entire class. He had it coming ever since the year before when he asked me what Pb₂(SO₄) was, and I said, “Pebbles,” and he started mocking me, as if he could bring me down in front of everyone; he also made me fail the year for no reason. It may well have “Atatürk” in the name, but I have no respect for a school where you can go to class and beat your teacher up at will.

—

Süleyman. “The blazer’s got a hole in the lining of the left pocket, but don’t get it sewn up,” I told a bewildered Mevlut. “You can hide cheat notes in there,” I said. “This blazer wasn’t of much benefit in school, but it really comes in handy when you’re out selling boza in the evenings. No one can resist a boy out on the cold streets at night in his school uniform. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still a schoolboy, son?’ they say, and then they start stuffing your pockets with chocolates, woolen socks, and money. When you get home, all you have to do is turn your pockets inside out, and it’s all yours. Whatever you do, make sure you don’t tell them you’ve left school. Tell them you want to be a doctor.”

“Mevlut isn’t going to leave school anyway!” said his father. “He really is going to be a doctor. Aren’t you?”

—

Mevlut realized that their kindness was tinged with pity, and he couldn’t fully enjoy its fruits. The house in Duttepe, into which his uncle’s family had moved last year, having built it with the help of his father, was a lot cleaner and brighter than the gecekondu Mevlut and his father occupied in Kültepe. His aunt and uncle, who used to eat on the floor back in the village, now sat at a table covered with a flowery plastic tablecloth. Their floor was not of dirt; it was of cement. The house smelled of cologne, and the clean, ironed curtains made Mevlut wish he belonged there. They already had three rooms, and Mevlut could tell that the Aktaş family, who had sold everything they had in the village — including their cattle, their house, and their garden — would live a happy life here, an outcome, Mevlut felt ashamed and resentful to admit, his father hadn’t yet managed, nor even seemed inclined to try for.

—

Mustafa Efendi. I know you go to see your uncle’s family in secret, I would tell Mevlut, you go to your uncle Hasan’s shop to fold up newspapers, you sit and eat at their table, you play with Süleyman, but don’t forget that they cheated us, I would warn him. It is a terrible feeling for a man to know that his son would rather be in the company of the crooks who tried to trick his father and take what was rightfully his! And don’t get so agitated about that blazer. It’s yours by rights! Don’t you ever forget that if you stay close to the same people who so shamelessly grabbed the land your father helped them claim, they will lose all respect for you, do you understand, Mevlut?

—

Six years ago and three years after the military coup of 27 May 1960, while Mevlut was back in the village learning how to read and write, his father and his uncle Hasan came to Istanbul to find a job and start earning some money, and they moved into a rented house in Duttepe. Mevlut’s father and uncle lived together there for two years, but when the landlord raised the rent, they left and went across to Kültepe (which was only just beginning to fill up), where they hauled hollow bricks, cement, and sheets of scrap metal to build the house where Mevlut and his father now lived. His father and Uncle Hasan got on very well in those early days in Istanbul. They learned the secrets of the yogurt trade together, and at the beginning — as they would later laughingly recall — these two towering men would go out together on their sales rounds. Eventually, they learned to split up to cover more ground, but in order to prevent either from getting jealous of how much the other brought in, they always pooled their daily earnings. Their natural closeness was also helped by the fact that their wives back in the village were sisters. Mevlut smiled when he recalled how happy his mother and his aunt were whenever they went to the village post office to pick up their money order. In those years, Mevlut’s father and Uncle Hasan used to spend Sundays idling in the parks and teahouses and on the beaches of Istanbul; they would shave twice a week sharing a shaver and razor; and when they came back to the village at the start of summer, they would bring their wives and kids the same presents.

In 1965, the year they moved into the unregistered house they had built in Kültepe, the two brothers claimed two empty lots, one in Kültepe itself and the other in Duttepe, with the help of Uncle Hasan’s eldest son Korkut, who had just joined them from the village. The 1965 elections were approaching, and there was a sense of leniency in the air, with rumors that the Justice Party would declare an amnesty on unregistered property after the elections, and with this in mind they set out to build a new house on the land in Duttepe.

In those days, no one in either Duttepe or Kültepe formally held title to their land. The enterprising individual who built a house on an empty lot would plant a few poplars and willow trees and lay the first few bricks of a wall to mark out his property, after which he would go to the neighborhood councilman and pay him something to draw up a document certifying that said individual had built the house in question and planted those trees himself. Just like the genuine title deeds issued by the State Land Registry, these documents included a crude plan of the house, which the councilman himself would draw with a pencil and ruler. He would jot down some additional notations in his childish scrawl — the adjacent plots belonging to this or that person, a nearby fountain, the location of the wall (which in fact might have consisted of no more than a rock or two here and there), and the poplar trees — and if you gave him some extra money, he would add a couple of words to widen the imaginary boundaries of the plot, before finally affixing his seal underneath it all.

In reality, the land belonged to the national Treasury or to the forestry department, so the documents provided by the councilman did not guarantee ownership at all. A house built on unregistered land could be knocked down by the authorities at any moment. Sleeping for the first time in the homes they’d built with their own hands, people would often have nightmares about this potential disaster. But the value of the councilman’s document would prove itself when the government decided, as it tended to do every decade or so in election years, to issue title deeds for homes built overnight — for these deeds would be handed out in conformity with the documents drawn up by the local councilman. Furthermore, anyone who was able to procure a document from the councilman certifying ownership of a plot of land could then sell that plot to someone else. During periods when the flow of unemployed and homeless immigrants to the city was particularly heavy, the price of these documents would rise, with the increasingly valuable plots quickly split up and parceled out, and the political influence of the councilman, needless to say, also climbing in proportion to the influx of migrants.

Through all this feverish activity, the authorities could still send the gendarmes to a hastily built home and knock it down whenever they felt like it or found it politically expedient to do so. The key was to finish building the house and start living in it as soon as possible. If a house had occupants, it could not be demolished without a warrant, and this could take a long time to obtain. As soon as they had the chance, anyone who claimed a plot of land on a hill would, provided they had any sense, recruit their friends and family to help them put up four walls overnight and then move in immediately so that the demolition crews couldn’t touch them the next day. Mevlut liked to hear the stories of mothers and their children who had their first night’s sleep in Istanbul with the stars as their blankets and the sky as their ceiling, in homes with no real roof yet, and with even the walls and the windows not yet finished. Legend has it that the term gecekondu—“placed overnight”—was coined by a mason from Erzincan who in one night built about a dozen homes ready for people to move into; when he died at a ripe old age, thousands paid their respects at his grave in Duttepe cemetery.

The construction project undertaken by Mevlut’s father and uncle had also been inspired by the preelectoral mood of permissiveness, but it was abandoned when that same mood caused a sharp increase in the price of construction materials and scrap metal. Rumors of a coming amnesty on unregistered property had sparked a frenzy of unlicensed building on state-owned land and forests. Even those who’d never before thought about building an illegal home went off to a hill somewhere at the edge of the city and, with the help of the local councilman, bought some land from whatever organization controlled the area (gangs, really, some of which carried sticks, others armed with pistols, and others still with political affiliations) and built homes in the most isolated and absurdly remote locations. As for buildings in the city center, many had floors added on to them around this time without permits. The wide expanses of empty land on which Istanbul was spread quickly turned into one vast construction site. The newspapers of the homeowning bourgeoisie decried the unplanned urban sprawl, while the rest of the city basked in the joy of home building. The small factories that produced the substandard hollow bricks used to build the gecekondu homes, and the shops that sold other construction materials, were all working overtime, and you could see horse carts, vans, and minibuses carrying bricks, cement, sand, timber, metal, and glass around the dusty neighborhood roads and up the hill paths at all hours of the day, gleefully ringing their bells and blowing their horns. “I hammered away for days to build your uncle Hasan’s house,” Mevlut’s father would say to him whenever there was a religious holiday and father and son went to Duttepe to visit their relatives. “I just want to be sure you remember that. Not that I would want you to make enemies of your uncle and your cousins.”

—

Süleyman. That’s not true: Mevlut knows that the real reason why construction on the Kültepe house had to stop was that Uncle Mustafa kept sending all the money he made in Istanbul back to the village. As for what happened last year, my brother and I really wanted to work with Uncle Mustafa on the house, but my father understandably had had enough of my uncle’s mood swings, of his constantly picking fights and treating his own nephews so badly.

—

Mevlut would become very upset whenever his father told him that his cousins Korkut and Süleyman “would stab him in the back one day.” He couldn’t even enjoy going to see the Aktaş family for holidays and other special occasions, like the day the Duttepe football team made its debut or when the Vural family invited everyone to celebrate the construction of the mosque. He’d always relished those visits because he knew his aunt Safiye would feed him pastries, that he would get to see Süleyman and catch a glimpse of Korkut, and of course he’d enjoy the comforts of a clean and tidy home. At the same time he dreaded those barbed exchanges between his father and his uncle Hasan, which always filled him with a sense of impending doom.

The first few times they went to visit the Aktaş family, Mevlut’s father would take a good long look at the windows of the three-room house, and declare “this bit should have been painted green, the wall on that side needs replastering,” to remind Mevlut of the injustice they’d suffered and to ensure that everyone knew of the claim that Mustafa Efendi and his son Mevlut had on this house.

Later, Mevlut would overhear his father telling Uncle Hasan: “As soon as you get hold of some money, you’ll sink it all into some swamp or something!” “What, like this one?” his uncle Hasan would reply. “They’re already offering me one and a half times the initial value, but I won’t sell.” Instead of gently fizzling out, these arguments would typically escalate. Before Mevlut even got a chance to eat his stewed fruit and orange after dinner, his father would rise from the table and take hold of his hand, saying: “Come on, son, we’re leaving!” Once they were out in the dark night, he would add: “Didn’t I say that we shouldn’t have come at all? That’s it, we’re never coming again.”

On the way back from Uncle Hasan’s in Duttepe to their own place in Kültepe, Mevlut would see the city lights sparkling from afar, the velvety night, and the neon lamps of Istanbul. Sometimes, as he walked with his little hand in his father’s bigger one, a single star in the starry dark blue sky would catch Mevlut’s eye, and even as his father kept grumbling and muttering to himself, Mevlut imagined that they were walking toward it. Sometimes, you couldn’t see the city at all, but the pale orange-hued lights from the tens of thousands of tiny homes in the surrounding hills made the now-familiar landscape more resplendent than it really was. And sometimes, the lights from the nearby hills would disappear in the mist, and from within the thickening fog, Mevlut would hear the sound of dogs barking.

4. Mevlut Begins to Work as a Street Vendor

It’s Not Your Job to Act Superior

I’M SHAVING in honor of your first day of work, my boy,” his father said one morning just as Mevlut was waking up. “Lesson one: if you’re selling yogurt, and especially if you’re selling boza, you need to look neat. Some customers will look at your hands and your fingernails. Some of them will look at your shoes, trousers, and shirt. If you’re going inside a house, take your shoes off immediately, and make sure your socks don’t have holes in them and your feet don’t smell. But you’re a good lad, you’ve got a kind heart, and you always smell all nice and clean, don’t you?”

By clumsily imitating his father, Mevlut soon worked out how to hang yogurt trays on opposite ends of his pole so that the two sides balanced, how to slide slats between the trays to keep them separate, and how to cover each stack with a wooden lid.

The yogurt did not seem so heavy at first, because his father had taken some of his load, but as they advanced on the dirt road linking Kültepe to the city, Mevlut realized that a yogurt seller was essentially a porter. They would walk for half an hour along the dusty way full of trucks, horse carts, and buses. When they reached the paved road, he would concentrate on reading billboards, the headlines on newspapers displayed in grocery stores, and signs affixed to utility poles advertising circumcision services and cram schools. As they advanced farther into the city, they would see old wooden mansions that hadn’t yet burned down, military barracks dating back to the Ottoman era, dented shared taxis decorated with checkered livery, minivans blowing their musical horns and raising a cloud of dust in their wake, columns of soldiers marching by, kids playing football on the cobblestones, mothers pushing baby carriages, shopwindows teeming with shoes and boots in all colors, and policemen angrily blowing their whistles as they directed the traffic with their oversize white gloves.

Some cars, like the 1956 Dodge with its enormous and perfectly circular headlights, looked like old men staring with their eyes wide open; the radiator grille on the 1957 Plymouth suggested a man with his thick upper lip topped by a handlebar mustache; other cars (the 1961 Opel Rekord, for instance) looked like spiteful women whose mouths had turned to stone in the middle of an evil cackle, so that now you could see their countless tiny teeth. Mevlut likened the long-nosed trucks to big wolf dogs, and the Skoda-model public-transport buses, which huffed and puffed as they went, to bears walking on all fours.

There were enormous billboards that took up one whole side of a six- or seven-story building with images of beautiful women using Tamek tomato ketchup or Lux soap; the women, like those in European movies or in Mevlut’s schoolbooks, did not wear headscarves, and they would smile down at him until his father turned away from the square and into a shaded lane on the right, calling, “Yogurt sellerrr.” In the narrow street, Mevlut felt as if everyone was watching them. His father would call out again without ever slowing his pace, swinging his bell along the way (and though he never turned to look at his son, Mevlut could tell from his father’s determined expression that he was nonetheless thinking of him), and soon a window would open somewhere on an upper story. “Over here, yogurt seller, come on upstairs,” a man or a middle-aged lady in a headscarf would call out. Father and son would go inside and make their way up the stairs, through the vapors of frying oil, until they reached the door.

Mevlut became attuned to the lives in the thousands of kitchens he would see during his career as a street vendor, of the countless housewives, middle-aged women, children, little old ladies, grandpas, pensioners, housekeepers, the adopted and the orphaned that he would meet:

“Welcome, Mustafa Efendi, half a kilo right here, please.” “Ah, Mustafa Efendi! We’ve missed you! What have you been up to in that village all summer?” “Your yogurt better not be sour, yogurt seller. Go on then, put some in here. Your scales are honest, aren’t they?” “Who’s this beautiful boy, Mustafa Efendi, is it your son? God bless him!” “Oh dear, yogurt seller, I think they must have called you upstairs by mistake, we’ve got some yogurt from the shop already, there’s a huge bowl of it in the fridge.” “No one’s home, please make a note and we’ll pay you next time.” “No cream, Mustafa Efendi, the kids don’t like it.” “Mustafa, once my youngest daughter is all grown up, shall we marry her off to your boy here?” “What’s the holdup, yogurt seller? It’s taken you all day to climb two flights of stairs.” “Are you going to put it in the bowl, yogurt seller, or shall I give you this plate?” “It was cheaper the other day, yogurt seller…” “The building manager says street vendors aren’t allowed on the elevator, yogurt seller. Got it?” “Where do you get your yogurt from?” “Mustafa Efendi, make sure you pull the door shut behind you as you leave the building, our doorman’s run off.” “Mustafa Efendi, you will not drag this boy around on the streets with you like a porter, you will send him to school, okay? Otherwise I’m not buying your yogurt anymore.” “Yogurt seller, please drop off half a kilo every two days. Just send the boy upstairs.” “Don’t be scared, son, the dog doesn’t bite. All he wants is to have a sniff, see, he likes you.” “Have a seat, Mustafa, the wife and kids are out, no one’s home, there’s some rice with tomato sauce, I’ll heat it up for you if you’d like?” “Yogurt seller, we could barely hear you over the radio, shout a little louder next time when you go past, okay?” “These shoes don’t fit my boy anymore. Try them on, son.” “Mustafa Efendi, don’t let this boy grow up like an orphan. Bring his mother over from the village to look after you both.”

—

Mustafa Efendi. “God bless you, ma’am,” I’d say on my way out of the house, bowing all the way to the floor. “May God bless all that you touch, sister,” I would say so that Mevlut would learn that if you want to survive in this jungle, you have to make certain compromises, so that he would understand that if you want to be rich, you must be prepared to grovel. “Thank you, sir,” I would say with an elaborate show of obeisance. “Mevlut will wear these gloves all through winter. May God bless you. Go on, son, kiss the man’s hand…” But Mevlut wouldn’t kiss it; he would just stare straight ahead. Once we were back out in the street, I’d tell him “Look, son, you mustn’t be proud, you mustn’t turn your nose up at a bowl of soup or a pair of socks. This is our reward for the service we provide. We bring the world’s best yogurt all the way to their doorstep. And they give us something in return. That’s all it is.” A month would pass, and this time he might start sulking because a nice lady tried to give him a woolen skullcap, until, fearing my reaction, he would make as if to kiss her hand, only to be unable at the last moment to make himself do it. “Now listen here, it’s not your job to act superior,” I’d say. “When I tell you to kiss the customer’s hand, you have to kiss the customer’s hand. This one’s not just any old customer, she’s a kindly old lady. Not everyone is as nice as she is. There’s scum in this city who will buy yogurt on credit, then move houses without warning and just disappear without paying up. If you act all haughty when a good person tries to show you some kindness, you will never be rich. You should see how your uncle sucks up to Hadji Hamit Vural. Don’t let rich people make you feel ashamed. The only difference between us and them is that they got to Istanbul first and started making money before we did.”

—

Every weekday between five past eight in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon, Mevlut was at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School. When the last bell rang, he’d run off to join his father on the yogurt rounds, emerging through the crowd of street vendors amassed outside the school gates and the boys who’d been unable to settle their scores inside the classrooms and were now taking their blazers off for a fistfight. Mevlut would drop off his schoolbag full of books and notebooks at Fidan Restaurant, where his father was waiting for him, and the two would head out to sell yogurt side by side until dusk.

There were other places like Fidan dotting the city where his father made regular deliveries two or three times a week. Occasionally he would fall out with the proprietors, who were always trying to push his prices down, causing him to drop one restaurant and pick up another instead. Delivering to these places was a lot of hard work for not much profit, but his father couldn’t give them up entirely because he depended on their kitchens, their massive fridges, and their terraces or back gardens as storage spaces for his trays of yogurt and jugs of boza. These were alcohol-free restaurants that catered to local shopkeepers, serving home-cooked food, döner kebabs, and fruit stews, the owners and headwaiters all on good terms with Mevlut’s father. Sometimes, they would show father and son to a table at the back, give them a helping of meat and vegetable stew or rice with chickpeas, a bit of bread, and some yogurt, and sit down with them to chat. Mevlut was fascinated by these conversations: a man who sold raffle tickets and Marlboros, a retired policeman who knew everything that went on in Beyoğlu, and the apprentice at the photography studio next door might also join them at the table, and they would talk about the rising prices, sports betting, how the police were cracking down on those who sold cigarettes and foreign liquor on the black market, the latest political intrigues in Ankara, and the inspections being carried out by the municipal police on the streets of Istanbul. Listening to the stories of these mustachioed chain-smokers, Mevlut felt as if he were entering the secret world of the city. He heard how a carpenters’ neighborhood on the back edge of Tarlabaşı was gradually being settled by a branch of a Kurdish clan from Ağrı; how the authorities wanted to clear out the bookstalls that had taken over Taksim Square because of their links with left-wing organizations; how the gang that controlled the car-parking racket on the lower streets had entered into a full-blown turf war, complete with clubs and chains, against the gang of Black Sea coast immigrants that operated in Tarlabaşı.

Whenever they came across street fights, car crashes, pickpockets, or incidents of sexual harassment, people shouted, threats were made, curses were flung and knives pulled, and Mevlut’s father left the scene as fast as possible.

—

Mustafa Efendi. Watch out or they’ll call you in as a witness, I’d tell Mevlut. Once you’re in their books, you’re done for. Even worse: if you give them your address, they’ll send you a court summons. If you don’t show up, the police will come knocking at your door. They won’t just ask you why you didn’t appear in court, they’ll ask you what you do, how much tax you pay, where you’re registered, how much you make, and are you left wing or right wing.

—

Mevlut did not always understand why his father would suddenly turn into a side street and sink into a long silence only moments after having shouted “Yogurt seller” with all his might; why he pretended not to hear a customer who stood at a window calling out “Yogurt seller, yogurt seller, hey, I’m talking to you”; why he greeted and embraced the Erzurum lot so warmly but then called them bastards behind their backs; or why he might give a customer two kilos of yogurt for half the usual price. There were times, too, when with many customers still left to visit, many more homes waiting for them to pass by, his father would walk into a coffeehouse, leaving his pole and his precious cargo of yogurt outside the door, and slump into a chair with a cup of tea, just sitting there without moving a muscle. This, Mevlut could understand.

—

Mustafa Efendi. The yogurt seller spends his day walking. Neither the city buses nor those run by private companies will pick up a passenger carrying yogurt trays, and the yogurt seller can’t afford a taxi either. So you walk thirty kilometers every day carrying thirty, maybe forty kilos on your back. Our job is mostly heavy lifting.

—

Two or three times a week, Mevlut’s father would walk from Duttepe to Eminönü. This took two hours. A truckload of yogurt from a Thracian dairy farm was delivered to an empty lot near Sirkeci train station in Eminönü. The unloading of the truck, the pushing and shoving among the yogurt sellers and restaurant managers waiting to pick up their supply, the sorting out of payments and returns of the empty aluminum trays to the warehouse among the buckets of olives and cheese (Mevlut loved the smell of this place), the settling of accounts — it would all be over in a flurry, just like the recurring commotions on Galata Bridge, the whistling of ferries and trains and the grunting of buses. As this organized chaos unfolded, Mevlut’s father asked him to keep track of their transactions. It was such a simple job that Mevlut suspected his illiterate father of bringing him along only to introduce him to the business and make sure the people there knew who he was.

As soon as they were done stocking up, his father would shoulder just under sixty kilos of yogurt with determination, walking nonstop for forty minutes before, dripping with sweat, he would drop off a portion of his cargo at a restaurant at the back of Beyoğlu and the rest at a different one in Pangaltı, then return to Sirkeci to collect the second load, dropping it off either at one of those two places or at a third, these spots serving as bases from which he would “distribute” his yogurt to various neighborhoods, to streets and homes that he knew like the back of his hand. In early October, once the temperature dropped, Mustafa Efendi would start going through the same steps twice a week with the boza. To his pole he would tie the jugs of raw boza filled at the Vefa Boza Shop, dropping them off at one of the restaurants where he had friendly relations, and later taking them home to be sweetened with sugar and flavored with spices, ready for him to sell out on the streets from seven o’clock every evening. To save time, sometimes Mevlut and his father would mix the sugar and spices into the raw boza in the kitchens and back gardens of these restaurants. Mevlut was in awe of the way his father was always able to keep track of where exactly he had left the empty, half-empty, and full yogurt trays and boza jugs and how he could always work out which route would allow them to make the most sales while walking the shortest distance.

Mustafa Efendi was on first-name terms with many of his customers; he could remember their yogurt preferences (with cream or without) and how they liked their boza (sour or fresh). When, one day, they got caught in the rain and took shelter in a musty teahouse along the way, Mevlut was amazed that his father knew both the owner and the owner’s son; just as he was when they were walking down the street one day, lost in thought, and they crossed paths with a junk dealer on a horse cart who embraced his father like a long-lost friend; or when his father showed himself so hand in glove with the local constable only later to call him “a piece of shit.” Considering all the streets, buildings, and apartments they saw — so many doors, doorbells, garden gates, staircases, and elevators — how could his father possibly remember how everything worked, how to open and close things, which buttons to push, how each gate bolted shut? Mustafa Efendi was always giving his son tips: “This is the Jewish cemetery. You walk by quietly.” “Someone from Gümüşdere village works as a janitor in this bank; he’s a good man, just something to bear in mind.” “Don’t cross here, try farther up where the metal guardrails stop; the traffic’s less dangerous, and you won’t have to wait as long!”

“Let me show you something,” his father would say as they groped their way around a dark, dank stairwell in a block of apartments. “Ah, there it is! Go on, open it.” In the semidarkness, Mevlut would find a little compartment beside the door to an apartment and open it carefully, as if lifting the lid off Aladdin’s magic lamp. In the shadows inside there would be a bowl with a sheet of paper ripped from a school notebook. “Read what it says!” Mevlut would hold the note under the pale light of the stairwell lamp, handling it delicately, like some sort of treasure map, and he would read out in a whisper: “Half a kilo, with cream.”

Seeing how his son looked up to him as a man of wisdom who could speak the special language of the city, and how the boy couldn’t wait to learn the secrets of the city himself, was enough to put a proud spring in Mevlut’s father’s step. “You’ll learn it all soon enough…You will see everything without being seen. You will hear everything but pretend that you haven’t…You will walk for ten hours a day but feel like you haven’t walked at all. Are you tired, son, shall we sit down for a bit?”

“Yes, let’s sit down.”

They hadn’t been in the city even two months before it got cold enough to start selling boza in the evenings, and Mevlut began to feel the strain. After going to school in the mornings and walking fifteen kilometers in four hours to sell yogurt with his father in the afternoons, he would fall asleep as soon as they got home. Sometimes, when they stopped to rest in diners and teahouses, he would put his head down on the table for a quick nap, but his father would tell him to wake up, as this was the kind of thing you would expect to see in one of those disreputable twenty-four-hour coffeehouses, and it might not go down so well with the manager.

Mevlut’s father would wake him in the evenings, too, before he left to sell boza. (“Dad, I have a history test tomorrow, I have to study,” Mevlut might say.) Once or twice when he couldn’t get up in the morning, Mevlut told his father, “There’s no school today,” and his father was happy that they could go out together to sell yogurt that day and make a little more money. Some evenings, his father couldn’t bear to wake him, and he would pick up the jugs of boza himself and walk out pulling the door softly shut in his wake. Later, when Mevlut woke up all alone in the house, he would hear the familiar strange noises coming from outside, and he would feel remorseful, not just because he was afraid, but also because he missed his father’s companionship and the feeling of his hand inside his father’s. With all these thoughts weighing on his mind, he couldn’t even study, which only made him feel guiltier.

5. Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School

A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor

PERCHING ON a low, flat expanse at one end of the road linking Duttepe and the hills behind it to Istanbul, Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was situated in such a way that mothers hanging laundry up in their gardens, old ladies rolling out dough with their rolling pins, and unemployed men sitting in teahouses playing rummikub and card games in the neighborhoods along Dung Creek and in the profusion of gecekondu homes on the surrounding hills could all see the school’s orange building, its bust of Atatürk, and its students doing endless gym exercises (in their trousers, long-sleeved shirts, and rubber-soled shoes) in the big school yard, like so many colorful flecks in the distance, under the supervision of Blind Kerim, teacher of religion as well as gym. Every forty-five minutes, hundreds of students would pour out into the yard, released by a bell that wasn’t heard in the faraway hills, until another silent signal caused them all to disappear just as quickly. But every Monday morning, all twelve hundred students, both the middle school and the high school, would gather around the bust of Atatürk, their collective interpretation of the national anthem echoing mightily off the hills and heard in thousands of nearby homes.

The national anthem (“The Independence March”) was always preceded by an address from the principal, Mr. Fazıl, who would climb to the top of the stairs at the entrance of the school building to give a lecture on Atatürk, love of country, the nation, and the unforgettable military victories of the past (he was partial to engagements of bloody conquest, like the Battle of Mohács) and to encourage the students to follow Atatürk’s example. From the crowd, the school’s older, more rebellious elements called out derisive comments, which Mevlut initially struggled to understand, while other miscreants interrupted with strange if not downright rude heckles, so the vice principal, Skeleton, stood careful watch beside Mr. Fazıl, like a policeman. This strict surveillance meant that it would not be until a year and a half later, when he was fourteen and had begun to question the protocols of the school, that Mevlut finally got to know those serial dissenters, who farted impertinently even when surrounded by a large group and who were respected and admired by both the religious, right-wing students and the nationalist, left-wing students (the right-wing students being invariably religious, and the left-wing students invariably nationalist).

According to the principal, it was a depressing sign of the school’s and the nation’s prospects that twelve hundred students were unable to sing the national anthem together and in unison. The sight of them all singing to their own beat and, worse, of a number of “hopeless degenerates” who didn’t bother to sing at all drove Mr. Fazıl insane. Sometimes, by the time one side of the school yard had finished singing, the other side wouldn’t even be halfway through, so the principal, who yearned for them all to work together “like the fingers of a closed fist,” made the twelve hundred students sing the anthem over and over again, come rain or shine, until they got it right, while some of the boys, stubborn and determined to make mischief, flubbed the rhythm on purpose, causing fits of laughter and fights between the patriotic kids suffering the cold and the sneering, cynical defeatists.

Mevlut watched these fights from a distance, laughing at the boys’ insolent jokes while biting the insides of his plump cheeks to avoid detection by Skeleton. But then, slowly, the national flag would be raised, with its star and crescent moon, and Mevlut’s eyes would fill with guilty tears as he sang the anthem with genuine emotion. For the rest of his life, the sight of a Turkish flag being raised — even in movies — was enough to leave him misty eyed.

As the principal demanded, Mevlut wanted very much “to think of nothing else but his country, like Atatürk.” But in order to do this, he’d have to get through three years of middle school and three years of high school. No one from Mevlut’s family or from his entire village had ever performed such a feat, so this idea became ingrained in Mevlut’s mind from the very first days of school, assuming the same mythical contours as the flag, the country, and Atatürk — beautiful to imagine but difficult to reach. Most of the boys who came to the school from the new poor neighborhoods also helped their fathers in their work as street vendors or worked with local shopkeepers or were perhaps waiting in line to start an apprenticeship with a baker, an auto mechanic, a welder — knowing all along that they would drop out of school as soon as they got a little older.

Principal Fazıl was chiefly concerned with maintaining discipline, which required a proper harmony and order between, on the one hand, the children of respectable families, who in class always sat in the front rows, and, on the other hand, the throngs of poorer boys. He had developed his own brand of thinking on this subject and shared it every Monday during the flag-raising ceremony, distilled as a slogan: “A good education removes the barriers between rich and poor!” Mevlut wasn’t quite sure whether Principal Fazıl meant to say to his poorer students, “If you study hard and finish school, you, too, will be rich,” or whether he meant, “If you study hard and finish school, no one will notice how poor you are.”

In order to show the rest of the country what Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School had to offer, the principal wanted the school’s team to make a good showing at Istanbul Radio’s Quiz Competition for Secondary Schools. So he fielded a team of middle-class children from the better neighborhoods (the lazy and the resentful called them nerds) and spent most of his time having them memorize the birth and death dates of Ottoman sultans. At the flag-raising ceremonies, with the whole student body there, the principal bad-mouthed those who’d dropped out to work as repairmen and welders’ apprentices, cursing them as weak and worthless traitors to the cause of enlightenment and science; he also told off those like Mevlut, who went to school in the morning and sold yogurt in the afternoon; and he tried to lead those who’d become more concerned with getting ahead than with school back onto the right path, shouting: “Turkey will not be saved by cooked rice peddlers, hawkers, and kebab vendors, but by science!” Einstein, too, had grown up poor, and he’d even failed physics once, but he had never thought of giving up school to make a living — to his own benefit and that of his nation.

—

Skeleton. In truth, our Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was originally founded to serve the neighborhoods on the hills in and around Mecidiyeköy, to make sure that the children of civil servants, lawyers, and doctors, who lived there in modern and European-looking cooperative housing, received a proper state education. Sadly, over the past ten years the school has been overrun by hordes of Anatolian children, who live in the new neighborhoods that have sprung up illegally on the once-empty hills, making it almost impossible to run this lovely school properly. Even though many skip class to work as street vendors, or take a job and drop out, and a significant number of boys are expelled for stealing, battery, or threatening teachers, our classrooms remain overcrowded. There can be, I regret to say, as many as fifty-five students taking lessons in one of our modern classrooms built with thirty students in mind, three students may have to squeeze onto desks designed for two, and during recess, the boys cannot run or walk or play without crashing into one another like bumper cars. Every time the bell rings or a fight breaks out or there is any kind of sudden rush, there follows a stampede in which some students get crushed and the weaker ones faint, and there is nothing we can do but take them to the staff room, where we try to revive them with cologne. With all the overcrowding, it is of course more effective to have students learn by rote rather than try to explain things to them. Rote learning doesn’t just develop children’s memory, it teaches them to respect their elders. This is also the reasoning behind the education ministry’s textbooks. There are five regions in Turkey. A cow’s stomach has four parts. There were five reasons that the Ottoman State entered a period of decline.

—

For one and a half school years, between sixth and seventh grade, Mevlut worried constantly about where to sit in the classroom. The inner turmoil he endured while grappling with this question was as intense as the ancient philosophers’ worries over how to live a moral life. Within a month of starting school, Mevlut already knew that if he wanted to become “a scientist Atatürk would be proud of,” as the principal liked to say, he would have to befriend the boys from good families and nice neighborhoods, whose notebooks, neckties, and homework were always in good order. Out of the two-thirds of the student body who, like Mevlut, lived in a poor neighborhood, he had yet to meet anyone who did well in school. Once or twice in the school yard, he’d bumped into boys from other classes who took school seriously because they, too, had heard it said, “This one’s really clever, he should be sent to school,” but in the apocalyptically overcrowded school, he had never managed to communicate with these lost and lonely souls who, like the quiz team, were belittled by the rest as nerds. This was partly because the nerds themselves regarded Mevlut with some suspicion, as he, too, was from a poor neighborhood. He rightly suspected that their rosy worldview was fatally flawed: deep down, he felt that these “clever” boys, who thought they would become rich one day if only they could learn the sixth-grade geography textbook by heart, were, in fact, fools, and the last thing he wanted was to be anything like them.

Mevlut felt better when he got to make friends with and sit next to some of the wealthier boys, who took the front-row seat in class and always kept up with their homework. In order to be allowed to sit near the front, Mevlut had to maintain constant eye contact with the teachers; when they began a sentence and left it hanging — the logic being that the students might learn something by completing the thought — Mevlut tried to be the first to finish the sentence. When the teacher asked a question, even when he didn’t know the answer Mevlut always raised his hand with the optimistic manner of someone who did.

But these children among whom Mevlut strove to fit in, who lived in proper apartment blocks in the nicer neighborhoods, could also be strange and break your heart at any time. In his first year of middle school, Mevlut earned the privilege of sitting in the front row next to “the Groom,” but one day when they were outside in the snowy school yard the Groom was nearly trampled by swarms of boys playing football (with a ball made out of crumpled old newspapers bound in string, proper footballs being forbidden on school grounds), hurtling about, shouting, fighting, pushing and shoving in the dirt, and gambling (the wager being collectible footballer stickers, tiny pencils, or cigarettes split in three). In a fit of pique, the Groom turned to Mevlut and said, “This school has been taken over by peasants! My dad is going to transfer me.”

—

The Groom. They gave me this nickname during the first month of school because I take a lot of care over my tie and blazer, and some mornings I splash on some of my father’s aftershave (he’s a women’s doctor) before coming to class. The smell of aftershave is like a breath of fresh air in a classroom that stinks of dirt, stale breath, and sweat, and on days when I don’t wear it, people ask me, “Hey, Groom, no wedding today?” Contrary to what some people think, I’m no pushover. Once some clown was trying to mock me, leaning into my neck pretending he wanted to smell my aftershave, as if I were some sort of queer, so I gave him an uppercut that sent him flying, and that won the respect of all the back-row bullies. The only reason I’m here is because my father’s too cheap to pay for private school.

This is the sort of thing Mevlut and I were discussing in class one day when the biology teacher, Massive Melahat, said: “Ten nineteen, Mevlut Karataş, you’re talking too much, go to the back!”

“We weren’t talking, ma’am!” I said — not because I’m the brave white hat Mevlut thinks I am, but because I knew I was safe; Melahat wouldn’t dare send someone like me, a boy from a good family, all the way to the back rows.

—

Mevlut wasn’t too worried. He’d been sent to the back before, but his good behavior, his innocent, boyish face, and his readiness to raise his hand meant that he would always manage to creep back to the front. Teachers looking for ways to lower the noise level would sometimes move everyone around. On these occasions, the sweet-faced Mevlut would look into the teacher’s eyes with such fervent enthusiasm and deference that he would manage to get himself moved right to the front — but only until some misfortune forced him back.

Another time, the brave Groom tried again to protest the busty biology teacher Melahat’s decision to send Mevlut to the back rows yet again. “Please, ma’am, why not let him sit at the front; he loves your lessons.”

“Don’t you see he’s as tall as a tree?” was the cruel Melahat’s response. “Those at the back can’t see the board because of him.”

Mevlut was in fact older than most of the other boys in his class, because his father had needlessly kept him behind in the village for a whole year. Having to return to the back rows was always mortifying, and he soon came to imagine that there must be some sort of mysterious link between the size of his body and his newly acquired habit of masturbation. The back rows would greet Mevlut’s return to their ranks with applause and chants of “Mevlut, coming home!”

The back rows were the domain of the delinquents, the lazy, the stupid, the ones conditioned into hopelessness, the bulky thugs, the older boys, and those about to be kicked out of school anyway. Many who had been pushed to the back ended up finding a job and dropping out, but you would also find boys who aged there year after year as their search for employment proved fruitless. Some chose to sit there from the very beginning, knowing they were guilty from the outset or too stupid, too old, or too big for the front rows. But others, Mevlut among them, refused to accept that the back rows were their ugly fate and only grasped the painful truth after many empty efforts and much heartbreak, like some poor people who only realize at the end of their lives that they will never be rich. Most teachers, such as Ramses the history teacher (who really did look like a mummy), knew firsthand the futility of trying to teach anything to the back rows. Still others, like the young and timid English teacher Miss Nazlı—looking into her eyes from a front-row seat was pure bliss, and Mevlut fell slowly and unwittingly in love — were so afraid of antagonizing the back rows or of quarreling with any of the students there that they barely even glanced in that direction.

Not a single teacher, not even the principal, who was sometimes able to scare all twelve hundred boys into submission, would willingly challenge the back rows. For such tensions could escalate into out-and-out feuds, with not just the back rows but the entire class turning on the teacher. A particularly delicate matter likely to provoke everyone was when teachers mocked the students from the poor neighborhoods, their accents, their looks, their ignorance, and the pimples that blossomed daily on their faces like bright red hydrangeas. There were boys who would not stop making jokes, and whose stories were a lot more interesting than anything the teachers could come up with, and the teachers would try to silence and subdue them with the humiliating thwack of a ruler. There was a period when the young chemistry teacher, Show-Off Fevzi, whom everyone hated, was pelted with rice-grain bullets blown through empty ballpoint-pen tubes every time he turned toward the board to write down the formula for some lead oxide. His crime was to have mocked the accent and clothes of a student from the east (no one called them Kurds in those days), whom he had wanted to intimidate.

The back-row louts were always interrupting, purely for the pleasure of bullying a teacher they thought too meek, or perhaps simply because they felt like it:

“We’ve had enough of your rambling, ma’am, we’re really bored! Will you tell us about your trip to Europe?”

“Sir, did you really take a train on your own all the way to Spain?”

Like those people who will sit at open-air summer cinemas and talk throughout the show, the back rows provided a noisy running commentary on the goings-on at any given moment; they told their jokes and anecdotes, laughing so hard at their own wit that a teacher asking a question and the student in the front row trying to answer it often couldn’t hear each other. Whenever he was exiled to the back, Mevlut could barely keep up with the lesson. But his idea of perfect happiness was to be within earshot of the jokes from the back and able to listen to Miss Nazlı at the same time.

6. Middle School and Politics

There’s No School Tomorrow

Mustafa Efendi. The next autumn, Mevlut was already in seventh grade, and still he was embarrassed about having to shout “Yogurt seller!” on the streets, but at least he was now used to carrying the yogurt trays and boza jugs on a stick across his shoulders. In the afternoons, I would send him off on his own to carry empty trays from, say, a restaurant in the back alleys of Beyoğlu to the warehouse in Sirkeci, and then back to Beyoğlu again with fresh trays or a jug of raw boza from the Vefa shop to drop off at Rasim’s place, which stank of fried oil and onions, before returning to Kültepe. “Any more of this and we’ll finally have the first professor to come out of our village, by God!” I’d say if he happened to be up, sitting there all alone doing his schoolwork when I got back home. If he’d worked hard, he’d say “Dad, will you sit down with me for a minute?” and then, with his eyes turned toward the ceiling, he would begin to recite the facts he’d learned by heart. When he got stuck, he would turn his eyes back down to look at my face. “You won’t find the answers here, son, I don’t even know how to read,” I’d say. In his second year of middle school, he wasn’t tired of school yet, nor of working as a street vendor. Some evenings he’d say, “I’ll come out with you to sell boza, there’s no school tomorrow!” and I wouldn’t object. Other times he’d tell me, “I’ve got homework, I’ll go straight home after school.”

—

Like most students at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, Mevlut kept his after-school life a closely guarded secret; even the other boys who worked as street vendors didn’t know what he did after the last class. Sometimes he’d spot another student out on the street selling yogurt with his father, but he would always pretend not to have seen him, and when they met in class the next day, he would act as if nothing had happened. He would, however, keep a close watch on how the boy did in school, whether it showed that he worked as a street vendor, and he would wonder what the other boy would grow up to be, how his life would turn out. There was a kid from Höyük who did his rounds on a horse cart, pulling the horse along by its harness and collecting old newspapers, empty bottles, and scrap metal with his father. Mevlut first noticed him when they crossed paths in Tarlabaşı toward the end of the year. Later, he realized that this boy, who used to sit in class staring out the window with a dreamy expression, had disappeared four months into seventh grade, never to come back to school, though not once had anybody even mentioned him or the fact of his absence. In that moment, Mevlut also understood that his mind would soon forget all about this boy’s existence, just as it had that of all his other friends who had found a job or an apprenticeship and dropped out.

The young English teacher Miss Nazlı had a fair complexion, big green eyes, and an apron with printed green leaves. Mevlut realized that she came from another world, and he wanted to become class president just so he could be closer to her. Class presidents could employ kicks, slaps, and threats in order to subdue any delinquent who refused to listen and whom the teachers were too scared to punish themselves with a swipe of the ruler. This help was essential for teachers like Miss Nazlı, who would otherwise be defenseless against the clamor and indiscipline of the classroom, and many a volunteer from the back rows leaped at the chance to offer his services to female teachers by patrolling the other rows for disobedient scamps, ready to dole out a slap on the neck or a twist of the ear. To ensure that Miss Nazlı took note of their gallantry, these volunteers would preface any blow to the miscreant with a loud cry of “Oi! Pay attention to the lesson!” Or: “Stop being disrespectful to the teacher!” If Mevlut sensed that Miss Nazlı appreciated this assistance, even though she barely ever looked at the back rows, he would be gripped by a jealous fury. If only one day she should choose him as class president, Mevlut would not resort to brute force to silence the mob; the lazy good-for-nothings and the troublemakers would listen to him because he was from the poor neighborhoods. Unfortunately, owing to extracurricular political developments, Mevlut never got to realize his political dreams.

In March 1971, there was a military coup, and the long-standing prime minister Demirel stepped down, fearing for his life. Revolutionary groups were robbing banks and kidnapping foreign diplomats for ransom; the government kept declaring martial law and imposing curfews; the military police were searching people’s homes. Every wall in the city was plastered with photos of the most wanted; booksellers were banned from the streets. All of this was bad news for street vendors. Mevlut’s father railed against “those who have caused this anarchy.” Yet even after thousands had been locked up and tortured, things still didn’t go back to normal for street sellers and anyone working on the black market.

The army whitewashed all of Istanbul’s pavements, anything that seemed dirty or untidy (the whole city pretty much qualified), the trunks of huge plane trees, and walls dating back to the Ottoman era, turning the whole place into an army cantonment. Shared taxis were banned from stopping where they pleased to let passengers board or alight, and street vendors were barred from big squares and avenues, those nice parks where the water fountains actually worked, and from the ferries and trains. With journalists in tow, the police targeted famous gangsters, raiding their semisecret gambling dens and brothels and disrupting their trade in cigarettes and liquor smuggled in from Europe.

After the coup, Skeleton relieved any left-wing teachers of administrative roles and, in so doing, eliminated any chance of Miss Nazlı’s choosing Mevlut as class president. At times she wouldn’t even turn up for class, and it was rumored that her husband was wanted by the police. Everyone was affected by the radio and TV proclamations concerning order, discipline, and cleanliness. The school painted over the political slogans, the obscenities, and the assortment of illustrated filthy stories about the teachers (including a caricature of Skeleton and Massive Melahat copulating) that had previously adorned walls, toilet stalls, and assorted nooks around the campus. The hotheads who stood up to the teachers, the rabble-rousers who kept shouting political slogans, miring every lesson in propaganda and ideology, were ultimately subdued. To ensure that everyone now sang the national anthem in unison during the flag-raising ceremony, the principal and Skeleton placed one of those loudspeakers found in mosque minarets on either side of the bust of Atatürk, though the effect was only to add a new metallic voice to the tone-deaf choir. Besides, the loudspeakers were so loud that many of those who’d actually been trying to sing the anthem simply gave up. Ramses the history teacher now spent more time than ever on blood-soaked military triumphs, teaching that the color of the Turkish flag represented the color of blood and that the blood of the Turkish people was no ordinary blood.

—

Mohini. My real name is Ali Yalnız. “Mohini” is the fine name of the elephant that the Indian prime minister Pandit Nehru gave as a gift to Turkish children in the year 1950. To earn the nickname “Mohini” in Istanbul’s high schools, it wasn’t enough just to look and act like an elephant, big and heavy, older looking than you were, and ambling along unsteadily as I did. You also had to be poor and sensitive. As the prophet Abraham also said, elephants are very sensitive animals. For our school, the most horrifying political consequence of the 1971 military coup was that, after waging a heroic resistance against Skeleton and the other teachers, we were all forced to cut our long hair short. Many tears were shed over this catastrophe, not just by the rock- and pop-fan sons of doctors and civil servants, but also by kids who came from poor neighborhoods but had nice hair. The principal and Skeleton had been threatening some kind of action for ages during the Monday flag-raising ceremony, saying it was inappropriate for boys to wear their hair like women, just to imitate some degenerate European pop stars. But it wasn’t until soldiers came into the school after the coup that those tyrants got their wish. They say that the army captain who arrived by jeep that day had come to coordinate our relief efforts for the victims of the earthquake in eastern Turkey. But the opportunistic Skeleton took the chance to call in Duttepe’s best barber as well. Regrettably, I also panicked at the sight of the soldiers and allowed my hair to be cut. Afterward, I looked even uglier and hated myself even more for bowing to authority so passively, shuffling obediently into the barber’s chair.

—

Skeleton had sensed Mevlut’s presidential ambitions, and after the coup, he entrusted this model student with the task of assisting Mohini during the long recess. Mevlut was pleased, as this was an opportunity to be out in the empty corridors during class and to stand out from the crowd. Every day just before the long recess at 11:10, he and Mohini left the classroom and made their way through dark, dank corridors and stairwells, down to the basement. There, Mohini’s first stop was the high-school boys’ toilet next to the coal cellar (where Mevlut wouldn’t even dream of following), a foul, stinking pit, with a thick blue fog of cigarette smoke hanging over it, where he would go begging the older boys for cigarette stubs, and if he was lucky enough to get one, he would smoke it on the spot while Mevlut waited patiently at the door; “This is my sedative right here,” Mohini would say with a knowing look. Then they would go wait in line in the school kitchen for Mohini to be given a jug, which he would carry on his back all the way upstairs, though it was almost as big as he was, and finally place it gently over the classroom stove.

This big ugly jug held the smelly and scalding hot milk prepared down in the stinking kitchens from powdered milk that UNICEF distributed for free to schools in developing countries. Concentrating on his task like a good housewife, Mohini poured the milk into plastic cups of all sizes, which the students brought in from home, while the teacher on recess duty took out a blue box holding another UNICEF beneficence, the dreaded fish-oil capsules. He presented one of these carefully to each student, as some precious gemstone, before patrolling the rows to make sure that they were actually swallowing both malodorous kindnesses. Most of the boys threw the pills out the window toward the corner of the school yard where all the trash accumulated, which was also the designated gambling spot, or they would crush them on the floor for the simple pleasure of stinking up the classroom. Others loaded them into their hollowed ballpoint tubes and shot them at the blackboard. Wave after wave of fish-oil bombardment had left the blackboards of Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School with a slippery sheen and an unpleasant aroma that made visitors queasy. When one of these projectiles hit the portrait of Atatürk in classroom 9C upstairs, an alarmed Skeleton called in inspectors from the municipal police as well as the board of education to investigate, though the easygoing president of the board, who’d seen plenty over the years, ably defused the situation by explaining to the officers enforcing martial law that no insult to the founder of the Republic or any government dignitaries had been intended by anyone. At the time, any attempts to politicize the powdered-milk and fish-oil rituals would fail, but years later there would be many histories and memoirs written on the subject, with the Islamists, the nationalists, and the leftists united in claiming that the state, under pressure from Western powers, had conspired to force-feed them those reeking, poisonous pellets throughout their childhood.

In literature class, Mevlut loved reading Yahya Kemal’s verses about the Ottoman raiders rejoicing on their way to conquering the Balkans, sword in hand. When the teacher didn’t show up, they passed the hour by singing songs, and even the back rows’ most mischievous elements would temporarily assume a guise of cherubic innocence, and as he watched the rain falling outside (the thought of his father, out there selling yogurt, briefly crossing his mind), Mevlut felt as if he could have sat there singing in that cozy classroom forever and that, though he was far from his mother and his sisters, city life had much to recommend it over village life.

Within a few weeks of the military coup, the reign of martial law, curfews, and house searches had led to thousands of arrests, until eventually, as usual, the restrictions were relaxed, the street vendors felt comfortable coming out again, and so the roasted chickpeas, sesame rolls, gum-paste sweets, and cotton candy reappeared with their respective sellers by the gates of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School on the same spots they’d occupied before. On one of those hot days of spring, Mevlut, normally a stickler for the rules, felt momentarily envious of a boy roughly his age who was among those breaking the ban on hawking. The boy, whose face looked familiar, was carrying a cardboard box that said KISMET. Inside the box, Mevlut could see a large plastic football and some other toy prizes that looked rather interesting: miniature plastic soldiers, chewing gum, combs, collectible football stickers, handheld mirrors, and marbles.

“Don’t you know we’re not allowed to buy anything from street vendors?” he said, trying to look stern. “What’s that you’re selling?”

“God loves some people more. Those people end up rich. He loves some people a little less, and those people stay poor. You take a pin and scratch off one of these colored circles, and underneath you’ll find your gift and your fortune.”

“Did you make this yourself?” asked Mevlut. “Where do you get the prizes from?”

“They sell the whole game as a set, including the prizes, for thirty-two liras. There are one hundred holes, so if you go around letting people scratch them for sixty cents apiece, by the end you’ll have made sixty liras. There’s a lot of business to be done in the parks on the weekends. Want to have a go right now and find out if you’re going to be rich, or if you’re going to wind up as that poor wretch everyone looks down on? Go on, scratch one and have a look…I won’t charge you.”

“I’m not going to be poor, you’ll see.”

With a flourish, the boy produced a pin, which Mevlut took without hesitation. There were still many holes left to scratch on the box. He picked one carefully and scratched away.

“Tough luck! It’s empty,” said the boy.

“Let me see that,” said Mevlut, losing his temper. Under the colored aluminum foil he’d scratched away, he could see nothing — not a single word nor any gift. “Now what?”

“If it comes up empty, we give people one of these,” said the boy, handing Mevlut a piece of a wafer bar the size of a matchbox. “Maybe you’ve got no luck, but you know what they say: lucky at cards, unlucky at love. The key is to win when you lose. Got it?”

“Got it,” said Mevlut. “What’s your name and your registration number?”

“Three seventy-five, Ferhat Yılmaz. Are you going to report me to Skeleton?”

Mevlut waved his hand as if to say “obviously not,” and Ferhat made an “obviously not” face of his own, and they both knew straightaway that they would be the best of friends.

The first thing about Ferhat that struck Mevlut was that, though they were the same age, Ferhat was already well versed in the language and chemistry of the streets, the location of all the shops in town, and everyone’s secrets. Ferhat said that the cooperative running the school was crawling with crooks, that the history teacher Ramses was an idiot, and that most of the others were a bunch of jerks whose only thought was getting through the day in one piece so that they could collect their salaries at the end of the month.

One chilly day, Skeleton took the small army he had carefully assembled out of the school’s janitors and cleaners, the kitchen staff who prepared the powdered milk, and the guardian of the coal cellar and led an attack on the street vendors who camped outside the school walls. Mevlut and the others watched from the foot of the wall as the battle unfolded. Everyone was rooting for the street vendors, but power was on the side of the government and the school. A roasted-chickpea-and-sunflower-seed seller exchanged blows with Abdülvahap, who looked after the coal cellar. Skeleton threatened to call the police and the military command center. The whole scene etched itself into Mevlut’s memory as a demonstration of the state and the school administration’s general attitude toward street vendors.

The news that Miss Nazlı had left the school proved devastating for Mevlut. He felt empty and lost as he realized just how much time he spent thinking about her. He skipped school for three days and later explained his absence by saying his father was very sick. More and more, he enjoyed Ferhat’s jokes, his ready wit, and his optimism. They skipped school together and took to the streets selling Kısmet in Beşiktaş and Maçka Park. Ferhat taught him plenty of jokes and bits of wisdom involving one’s “intentions” and “kismet”—fate — insights that he later repeated to any yogurt and boza customers who had a soft spot for him. He began to tell his evening boza customers: “If you don’t make your intentions clear, you will never find your kismet here.”

Another of Ferhat’s achievements was his exchange of letters with some teenage girls in Europe. The girls were real. Ferhat even had photos in his pocket to prove it. He got their addresses from the section “Young People Looking for Pen Pals” in Milliyet newspaper’s youth magazine Hey, which the Groom would bring into class. Hey, which claimed to be Turkey’s first youth magazine, published the addresses of European girls only — never Turkish ones, as this would have offended conservative families. Ferhat had someone else write his letters for him, without ever revealing who this person was, and he never told the girls that he was a street vendor. Mevlut always wondered what he would put in a letter to a European girl, but he never worked it out. In class, the boys pored over the photos Ferhat had received from the European girls and either fell in love or tried to prove that the girls weren’t real, while some particularly jealous types ruined the photos by scribbling all over them.

One day, Mevlut read a magazine in the school library that would have a profound influence on his future career as a street vendor. The library at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was a place where students were made to sit still and behave when a teacher failed to show up for class. Whenever unsupervised kids were brought in, the librarian, Aysel, gave them copies of old magazines donated by the retired doctors and lawyers who lived in the upper neighborhoods nearby.

On Mevlut’s last visit to the library, Aysel went through her customary routine of handing out twenty- to thirty-year-old, discolored back issues of magazines like The Great Atatürk, Archaeology and Art, Mind and Matter, Our Beautiful Turkey, Medical World, and Knowledge Trove. Once she had made sure that there was one magazine for every two students to look at, she launched into her brief and famous speech about reading, to which Mevlut turned his full attention.

ONE MUST NEVER TALK WHEN READING was the famous and endlessly mocked first line and refrain of her speech. “You must read inside your head, without making a sound. Otherwise you will learn nothing from the writing on the page. When you get to the bottom of the page you are reading, do not turn the page straightaway, but wait until you are sure that your classmate has also finished reading the page. Once you have done that, you may turn the page, but without moistening your fingertips or creasing the paper. Do not write on the pages. Do not scribble, do not add any mustaches, glasses, or beards to the illustrations. A magazine is not just for looking at the pictures; you must read the text, too. Read the writing on every page first before you look at the pictures. When you have finished your magazine, raise your hand quietly, and I will come and give you a new one. But you will not have time to read a whole magazine anyway.” Librarian Aysel went quiet for a second and looked around to see whether her words had had any effect on Mevlut’s class, and then, like an Ottoman general ordering his impatient troops to attack and pillage, she pronounced her immortal last line:

“Now you may read.”

There was a murmur and the rustle of curious boys leafing through old, yellowed pages. Mevlut and Mohini had been given the June 1952 issue (only twenty years old) of Turkey’s first parapsychology magazine, Mind and Matter, to share. They were gently turning pages, without wetting the tips of their fingers, when they came face-to-face with the picture of a dog.

The title of the article was “Can Dogs Read People’s Minds?” The first time Mevlut read through the piece, he didn’t really understand much of it, but oddly, his heart started racing. He asked Mohini if he’d let him read it one more time before they turned the page. Years later, it wasn’t the ideas or the concepts explored in the piece that Mevlut would remember most vividly but the way he had felt as he was reading it. While reading the piece, he had sensed the way everything in the universe was connected. He had also realized that street dogs watched him at night from cemeteries and empty lots even more than he had ever known. The dog in the picture wasn’t one of those cute little European lapdogs you usually found in magazines but one of the mud-brown curs you saw on the streets of Istanbul; perhaps that was also why the article had made such an impression.

When they got their final report cards in the first week of June, Mevlut saw that he’d flunked English and had to take a makeup exam.

“Don’t tell your dad, he’ll kill you,” said Ferhat.

Mevlut agreed, but he also knew that his father would demand to see his middle-school diploma with his own eyes. He’d heard there was a chance that Miss Nazlı, who now worked at a different school in Istanbul, might come back to proctor the makeup exams. Mevlut spent that summer in the village cramming for the English exam so that he could finish middle school. The Cennetpınar primary school didn’t have an English-to-Turkish dictionary, and there was no one in the village who could help him. In July, he started to take lessons from the son of a man who had emigrated to Germany and had just come back to Gümüşdere village with a Ford Taunus and a TV set. Mevlut had to walk three hours each way just so that he could sit down with a book in the shade of a tree and practice his English for an hour with this boy, who went to a German middle school and spoke both Turkish and English with a German accent.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. The story of our dear, lucky Mevlut, who took English lessons from the son of that man who went to work in Germany, has once again brought him to our humble village of Gümüşdere, so I hope you will let me offer a quick update on the dark fate that has befallen the rest of us. When I first had the honor of meeting you in 1968, I had no idea how lucky I was, having my three beautiful daughters and their silent angel of a mother! After my third daughter, Samiha, was born, I tempted fate again. I just couldn’t get the thought of a son out of my head, and we couldn’t keep from trying for a fourth child. Indeed I had a son, whom I named Murat as soon as he was born. But not an hour after his birth, the Lord called him and his mother, too, covered as she was in blood, and so from one minute to the next, Murat, my heart’s desire, and my wife were both taken, gone to live with the angels in heaven, leaving me a widowed father of three orphaned girls. At first, my three daughters would get into their late mother’s bed next to me, sniffing in the last whiffs of her scent as they cried through the night. Ever since they were babies, I’ve pampered them like the daughters of the Chinese emperor. I bought them dresses from Beyşehir and Istanbul. To those cheapskates who say that I have squandered my money on drink, I would like to say that a man whose neck has gone crooked from selling yogurt on the streets can only entrust his future to his three beautiful daughters, each more precious than any earthly treasure. Now my little angels are old enough that they can speak for themselves better than I can. The eldest, Vediha, is ten, while Samiha, the youngest, is six.

—

Vediha. Why is it that the teacher looks at me the most during class? Why can’t I bring myself to tell anyone that I want to go to Istanbul to look at the sea and the ships? Why do I always have to be the one to clear the table, make the beds, and cook for my father? Why does it make me angry when I see my sisters talking and giggling together?

—

Rayiha. I’ve never seen the sea in my life. There are clouds that look like things. I want to grow up to be as old as my mom and get married as soon as possible. I don’t like sunchokes. Sometimes, I like to think that my departed little brother, Murat, and my mom are watching over us. I like to cry myself to sleep. Why does everyone call me “clever girl”? When the two boys look at their book under the plane tree, Samiha and I watch them from far away.

—

Samiha. There are two men under the pine tree. I am holding Rayiha’s hand. I never let go. Then we went home.

—

In late August, Mevlut and his father returned to Istanbul earlier than usual so that they would be on time for Mevlut’s makeup exam. At the end of summer, the house in Kültepe smelled of damp and earth, just as it had when Mevlut had first walked into it three years ago.

Three days later, he was in the biggest classroom in all of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School taking his exam, but there was no sign of Miss Nazlı. Mevlut’s heart broke. But still he did his best, answering the questions well. Two weeks later, when high school had begun, he went to Skeleton’s office.

“Well done, ten nineteen, here’s your middle-school diploma!”

All day long, Mevlut kept taking it out of his bag to have another look, and that evening he showed it to his father.

“Now you can become a policeman or a watchman,” said his father.

Mevlut would miss those years for the rest of his life. In middle school, he had learned that being Turkish was the best thing in the world and that city life was so much better than village life. They had sung in class all together, and after all the fighting and intimidation, even the very worst bullies and troublemakers sang with joyful innocence all over their faces; Mevlut would think back on that and smile.

7. The Elyazar Cinema

A Matter of Life and Death

ONE SUNDAY MORNING in November 1972, Mevlut and his father were planning their yogurt distribution routes for the week when it became clear to Mevlut that they would no longer be going out to sell yogurt together. The yogurt companies were growing and had started delivering their truckloads straight to shops and street vendors in Taksim and Şişli. The art of a good yogurt seller no longer lay in lugging around sixty kilos of product from Eminönü to Beyoğlu and Şişli, but in stocking up wherever the trucks dropped it off and distributing it as quickly as possible among the surrounding streets and homes. Mevlut and his father realized that their overall income would increase if they split up and followed different routes. Twice a week, one of them would also bring some boza home to sweeten with sugar, but that, too, they now sold separately, in different neighborhoods.

This new state of affairs filled Mevlut with a sense of freedom, but it was to prove a fleeting illusion. Getting along with the restaurant owners, the increasingly demanding housewives, the doormen, and the people at the places where he parked his yogurt trays and boza jugs took a lot more time and effort than he’d anticipated, and he often found himself skipping school.

Back when he used to stick to his father’s side, keeping accounts and adding weights to their scale, they’d had a customer called Tahir — Uncle Tahir to his friends — who hailed from the town of Torul. Now that he was working alone, Mevlut secretly relished the challenge of haggling with Uncle Tahir over the price of a kilo; it made him feel a lot more important than he ever did sitting in chemistry class staring blankly at the chalkboard. Two strong and capable young men from the village of İmrenler, nicknamed the Concrete Brothers, had begun to monopolize the diners and cafés in the Beyoğlu-Taksim area. To make sure he didn’t lose some long-standing customers from the streets of Feriköy and Harbiye, which he’d taken over from his father, Mevlut lowered his prices and made new friends. There was the boy from Erzincan whom Mevlut had gone to school with, who also lived in Duttepe and had just started working in a grilled-meatball restaurant that used up vast quantities of the yogurt drink ayran; meanwhile, Ferhat knew the Alevi Kurds from Maraş who owned the convenience store next door to that restaurant. In all this, Mevlut had begun to feel as if he’d grown up in the city.

At school, he had graduated to the basement toilet favored by the smokers and had begun to carry Bafra cigarettes to gain the acceptance of the regulars. They knew he earned his own money and had just started smoking, so he was expected to be the one always to have a pack at hand to distribute among the scroungers. Now that he was in high school, Mevlut realized that in middle school he had made too much of this same pack of braggarts who kept failing every year even though they had nothing to do but go to school, who worked no outside jobs, and passed the day trading gossip. The world out on the streets was in fact much bigger and more real than the world inside the school.

Anything he made working on the street was still passed straight on to his father, at least in theory. He did, actually, spend some on cigarettes, movies, sports gambling, and lottery tickets. He had no qualms hiding these expenses from his father, though he did feel guilty about the Elyazar Cinema.

The building that housed the Elyazar Cinema, in one of the small lanes between Galatasaray and Tünel, was built for an Armenian theater company (and used to be called the Odeon) in 1909, in the climate of freedom that reigned after the deposition of Abdul Hamid II; after the foundation of the Republic, it became a cinema (the Majestic) favored by the Greek community and Istanbul’s upper middle class; later, it took the name Elyazar, and for the past two years, like all of the cinemas in Beyoğlu, it had been screening adult films. In the dark (amid a strange confluence of human breath and eucalyptus), Mevlut would pick a seat off to one side, out of the way of the unemployed from the lower neighborhoods, the desolate old men and the hopeless loners, and there, hiding even from himself, shrinking and squirming in his seat, he would try to figure out the plot of the movie — not that it mattered.

Inserting sex clips into Turkish movies would be embarrassing for the half-famous film actors who lived in the area, so the Elyazar Cinema did not show any of those early Turkish blue films, in which the male actors (some of them very well known) appeared in their underpants. Most of the films shown were imports. Mevlut didn’t like how, in Italian films, the lustful female lead, her voice dubbed into Turkish, was made to seem so absurdly naïve and foolish. In German films, it made Mevlut uncomfortable to hear the protagonists cracking jokes throughout those “sex scenes” he’d waited for so eagerly, as if sex were something to be taken lightly. In French films, he would be amazed, if not furious, to see women jumping into bed with someone with practically no excuse. These women’s lines, and those of the men who tried to seduce them all, were always dubbed by the same handful of Turkish voice actors, so that sometimes it seemed to Mevlut that he was watching the same film over and over again. The scenes that the audience had come to see were never at the beginning. Thus, at the age of fifteen, Mevlut learned that sex was a kind of miracle that always kept you waiting.

The crowd that stood smoking and milling about in the lobby would hurry inside before the sex scenes began. “It’s starting!” the ushers would announce to these eager voyeurs just as the crucial scene approached. Mevlut couldn’t believe how comfortable with it they all seemed to be. As soon as he got his ticket, he would make his way through the crowd with his eyes fixed firmly on his shoes (“Have my laces come undone?”), never looking up.

When the erotic scenes began, the whole cinema would fall silent. Mevlut would feel his heart racing; slightly dizzy and sweating pro fusely, he would struggle to control himself. The “indecent” scenes were in fact cut from other films and spliced into these features at random, so Mevlut knew that the incredible things he was witnessing in that moment had nothing to do with the plot he had been trying to figure out just before. But his mind would still make connections between the sex scenes and the rest of the film, and if he allowed himself to believe for a second that the naked women whose lewd acts had just left him openmouthed were the same women in the house or at the office during the rest of the film, everything was somehow even more arousing, and as the front of his pants bulged, Mevlut would hunch over in growing shame. In all those times during high school when he went to the Elyazar Cinema on his own, he never put his hand in his pocket to play with himself, unlike some of the other patrons. It was said that there were elderly queers who came to this kind of place for the sole purpose of waiting for someone to undo his pants and jerk off to the film, whereupon they would pounce on his private parts. Mevlut himself had been accosted by these perverts—“So tell me, son, how old are you?” “Still a kid, aren’t you?”—but he’d played dumb, pretending he couldn’t hear. For the price of a single ticket you could spend the whole day in the Elyazar Cinema, watching the same two films over and over, and so sometimes Mevlut found it hard to leave.

—

Ferhat. In springtime, when the amusement parks and garden cafés opened, and the teahouses, children’s parks, bridges, and pavements on the Bosphorus began to fill up, Mevlut started to come with me to sell Kısmet on weekends. We really went at it for a couple of years and made a lot of money. We would go up to Mahmutpaşa together to buy the sets, and on the way back down the hill we’d already be making sales to kids out shopping with their parents; we would go on to the Spice Bazaar, Eminönü Square, and by the time we got over the bridge into Karaköy, we would be pleasantly surprised to find that half our colored circles had been scratched off by those trying their luck.

Mevlut could spot customers from afar before they even rose from their seats at the teahouse, and he approached everyone, young or old, with the same winning optimism and a surprising new pitch every time. “You know why you should try your luck? Because your socks and our gift comb are the same color,” he would say to some dopey kid who didn’t even know what color his socks were. “See, it said MIRROR under the twenty-seventh circle in Ferhat’s box, but my twenty-seventh circle hasn’t been scratched yet,” he would point out to a shrewd boy with spectacles who knew the game a bit and was hesitant to play. Some spring days, we would do such brisk business on the piers, the ferries, and in the parks that we’d run out of circles and head back to Kültepe. We went to the Bosphorus Bridge when it was opened in 1973, before it was closed to pedestrians following a bunch of suicides, and made good money over three sunny afternoons, but then it was “No vendors allowed,” and we couldn’t go back. “This is not a harmless game, this is gambling!” bearded old men would say as they turned us away from mosque courtyards; the same cinemas that were happy to let us see their sex films now told us “You’re too young to come in here”; and many times we were turned away from bars and nightclubs with the old “No vendors allowed.”

—

When they received their report cards in the first week of June, Mevlut learned that he had flunked the first year of high school completely. Under a section of the yellow card headed “Evaluation,” there was a handwritten note that said: “He has failed this year outright.” Mevlut read this sentence ten times. He had skipped too many classes, missed so many exams, and he’d even neglected to win over those teachers who would have pitied him for being a miserable yogurt seller and let him pass. Because he’d failed three classes, there was no point in studying over the summer. Ferhat hadn’t failed even one, Mevlut was disappointed to learn, but he had so many plans for his summer in Istanbul that he wasn’t even that upset.

“You’ve taken up smoking, too, haven’t you?” said his father when he found out that night.

“No, Father, I don’t smoke,” said Mevlut, with a pack of Bafras in his pocket.

“You smoke like a chimney, you jerk off all day like some horny soldier, and, to top it off, you’re lying to your father.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Damn you,” said his father, and he gave him a slap. Then he left, slamming the door behind him. Mevlut threw himself onto the bed.

He couldn’t get up for a long time. But he didn’t cry either. What really stung wasn’t that he’d failed the year, or that his father had slapped him…What had really broken his heart was how offhandedly his father had referred to Mevlut’s big secret, his habit of self-abuse, and called him a liar. He’d had no idea anyone knew what he was up to. This heartbreak set off such an explosion of anger inside him that he knew immediately he would not be going back to the village at all that summer. He alone would decide what would become of his life. He was going to do great things one day.

When his father prepared to head back to the village at the beginning of July, Mevlut explained once more that he did not want to lose their regular customers in Pangaltı and Feriköy. He was still handing over the money he earned, but things had changed. Mustafa Efendi used to say that they were saving money for the house they would build in the village, while Mevlut used to give his father a report of where he’d earned whatever he was handing over on a given day. Now, he no longer bothered; he just gave his father some money every few days, as if paying some sort of tax. And his father no longer spoke of a house they would build in the village. Mevlut understood that his father was now resigned to the fact that his son would never return to the village, that he would spend the rest of his life in Istanbul, like Korkut and Süleyman. In those moments when he felt most alone in the world, Mevlut would resent how his father could just never find a way to get rich in the city, or stop thinking about going back to the village one day. He wondered if his father could sense that this was how Mevlut felt.

The summer of 1973 was one of the happiest Mevlut had ever known. He made quite a bit of money with Ferhat, selling Kısmet on the city streets in the afternoons and evenings. He used some of it to buy German twenty-mark notes from a jeweler in Harbiye (Ferhat knew the man), and he stashed them under the foot of his mattress. This was how Mevlut first began to hide some of his earnings from his father. Most mornings, he stuck to Kültepe, rarely leaving the house since he no longer had to share it and often jerking off even as he vowed it would be the last time. Playing with himself at home made him feel guilty, but this never turned into miserable feelings of inadequacy, as it would in later years, since he didn’t for now have a girlfriend, or a wife to sleep with. No one could blame a sixteen-year-old high-school kid for not having a lover. Besides, even if they were to marry him off at that moment, Mevlut wasn’t entirely sure what he was meant to do with a girl.

—

Süleyman. One very hot day at the beginning of July, I thought I’d drop in to see Mevlut. I knocked on his door a few times, but no one answered. He couldn’t have gone out to sell yogurt at ten in the morning? I did a lap around the house, rapping on the windows. I picked up a stone and tapped on the glass. The dusty garden was a mess; the house was a wreck.

I ran back around when the door opened. “What happened? Where were you?”

“I fell asleep!” said Mevlut. But he looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept at all.

Thinking for a second that he had someone else in there, I felt strangely jealous. I stepped inside that tiny, stuffy room that reeked of sweat. The same table, the one bed, still just those same two shabby pieces of furniture…

“Mevlut, my father says we should go up to his shop. There’s a job. He said come and bring Mevlut.”

“What’s the job?”

“Nothing we can’t handle, I’m sure. Come on, let’s get going.”

But Mevlut stayed put. Maybe he’d become more withdrawn after flunking so royally. When I realized he wasn’t going to come, I got testy with him. “You should take a break from jerking off all the time, or you’ll go blind and lose your memory, you know?” I said.

He turned around and went back inside, slamming the door behind him, and after that he didn’t visit us in Duttepe for quite a while. Eventually, I had to go get him myself when my mother insisted. Those jerks who sit in the back at Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School like to make fun of the younger kids: “Nice bags under your eyes, and your hands are shaking, and look, even the pimples are out in force. Have you been up all night jerking off again, you pervert?” they’ll say, throwing in a slap or two for good measure. I know that some of the workers and followers that Hadji Hamit Vural boards near us at the gecekondu house for bachelors get so addicted to jerking off that they have to give up their jobs; they lose all their strength and end up being sent back to the village. I wonder if Mevlut knows, if he understands, that this is a matter of life and death. Doesn’t his friend Ferhat tell him that even Alevis are forbidden to jerk off? Maliki Sunnis aren’t allowed under any circumstances. At least Hanafi Sunnis like us can do it in some cases, but only to avoid a bigger sin, like adultery. Islam is a religion based on tolerance and logic, not punishment. You’re even allowed to eat pork if you’re starving. Masturbation is frowned on when it’s purely for pleasure, but knowing Mevlut, to that he would just say, “Is there some way that doesn’t involve pleasure, Süleyman?”—and go right back to his sinful ways. Can someone like Mevlut, so quick to go off the rails, ever succeed in Istanbul?

8. The Height of Duttepe Mosque

People Actually Live There?

MEVLUT FELT MORE at ease selling Kısmet out on the streets with Ferhat than he ever did at the Aktaş house talking with Süleyman. With Ferhat, he could discuss anything that crossed his mind; Ferhat would say something just as funny and wise in return, and they would have a good laugh. He did visit the Aktaş family when he got scared of being alone on summer evenings, but Süleyman and Korkut would sneer at everything he said and use it against him, so he would say as little as possible. “Stop bothering my darling Mevlut, you rascals, leave him alone,” Aunt Safiye would say. Mevlut never let himself forget that if he was to survive in the city, he had to make sure to get along with his uncle Hasan and also with Süleyman and Korkut. After four years in Istanbul, his dreams now were of setting up a business of his own, so he wouldn’t have to depend on anyone, relatives or otherwise. He was going to do it with Ferhat. “If it wasn’t for you, I would never have thought of coming all the way here,” said Ferhat one day as they counted the day’s earnings. They had taken a train (dodging the conductor’s call for tickets while they made their sales) from Sirkeci to the Veliefendi Race Course, where among all those people who’d come to bet on the horses, they had sold out of their colored circles in just two hours. This was also how they came up with the idea of going to football stadiums for the opening ceremonies that clubs organized for the start of the season, going to summer sports tournaments, and setting up shop at the Sports and Exhibition Hall when there was a basketball game on. Whenever they made money off some new idea, their thoughts would turn immediately to the business they were going to set up together one day. Their biggest dream was to run a restaurant in Beyoğlu, or at the very least a café. Every time Mevlut came up with a new moneymaking scheme, Ferhat would say “You’ve got a real capitalist instinct!” and Mevlut would feel proud of himself, even though he knew it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

The summer of 1973 saw the opening of a second summer cinema in Duttepe. The movies were projected onto the side of an old two-story gecekondu building. Mevlut would go there occasionally, with his box of Kısmet, and run into Süleyman or Ferhat, all of them looking for a way to sneak in without paying. But when the Derya had first opened, Mevlut used to go regularly, even buying a ticket. He would make a healthy profit while watching Türkân Şoray on the big screen, but he soon grew indifferent to the place. Those in the neighborhood all knew him and couldn’t feign much awe at his pronouncements on fate and fortune.

In November, once the Duttepe Mosque, with its machine-loomed carpets, had opened its doors to the public, the old men of the neighborhood began accusing Mevlut of encouraging gambling, so he took his box elsewhere. The God-fearing elders and pensioners of Duttepe had given up their little makeshift prayer rooms in favor of the new mosque, to which they flocked five times a day. Friday prayers were conducted for a devout and enthusiastic crowd worthy of Judgment Day.

The formal inauguration of the mosque took place on the morning of the Feast of the Sacrifice in 1974. Having bathed, laid out his clean clothes, and ironed his white school shirt the night before, Mevlut woke up early with his father. The mosque and the raised arcades outside were already full half an hour before the scheduled time, with thousands of men swarming in from the surrounding hills. Mevlut and his father had trouble squeezing through, but Mustafa Efendi was determined to witness this historic moment from a front-row seat. They managed to elbow their way to the front, saying, “Sorry, brother, we’ve got a message to pass on.”

—

Mustafa Efendi. We were praying in the front, with Hadji Hamit Vural, the man who built the mosque, sitting just two rows ahead of us. That man and the lackeys he brings in from his village act like they own this neighborhood, but I thanked God for him that morning, and I thought to myself, God bless you. The murmur that rose from those gathered, their joyful whispering, it all cheered me up in an instant. Sharing in one another’s fervor as we prayed together, feeling the presence of that quiet but earnest army of believers that had emerged through the darkness to come here, I felt as good as if I’d spent weeks reading the Koran. “God is greaaat,” I said reverently, and then again “Gooood is great” to a different melody. “Dear God,” the imam said in his affecting sermon, “please look after this nation, this congregation, and all of those who are busy at work, day and night, come rain or shine.” He said, “Dear God, please watch over those who come here from the distant villages of our dear Anatolia and work as street vendors to earn their daily bread,” and also “Help them succeed and forgive their sins.” My eyes were tearing up as the preacher continued—“Dear God, bless our government with authority, our army with strength, and our policemen with patience”—and I said “Amen!” along with everyone else. After the sermon, while all the men in the congregation were wishing one another a happy holiday, I threw ten liras into the collection box. I grabbed Mevlut’s arm and took him over to kiss Hadji Hamit Vural’s hand. His uncle Hasan, Süleyman, and Korkut were already in the queue waiting to do the same. Mevlut greeted his cousins first and then paid his respects to his uncle Hasan, who gave him fifty liras. There was a whole host of Hadji Hamit Vural’s men hanging about and so many people waiting to see him that half an hour passed before our turn came. We ended up keeping Safiye Yenge waiting, back home in Duttepe, where she was busy making us filled pastries. It was a rather nice holiday lunch, after all. But I couldn’t stop myself from saying, if only once: “I’m not the only one who has a right to this house, Mevlut does, too.” Hasan pretended not to hear. The kids had finished their food by then, and they ran out to the garden, expecting their father and uncle to hunker down for one of their usual property disputes, but we managed to get through at least that holiday without any arguments.

—

Hadji Hamit Vural. The mosque made everyone happy in the end. All the wretched and lost souls of Duttepe and Kültepe stood in line on that holy day to kiss my hand (though it would have been good to see the Alevis, too). I gave each of them a crisp new one-hundred-lira note from the bundles we’d picked up at the bank just for the Feast of the Sacrifice. With tears in my eyes, I thanked Almighty God for blessing me with such a day. My late father used to wander the mountains near the city of Rize in the 1930s, going from village to village on the back of a donkey selling all sorts of bits and bobs he would buy from the city. I was just about to take over from him when the Second World War broke out and I was drafted into the army. They took us to the Dardanelles. We never went to war, but we spent four years guarding the strait and the military outposts. The quartermaster, a man from Samsun, said to me, “Hamit, it would be a waste to send you back to your village, you’re too bright. Come to Istanbul, I’ll find you a job.” May he rest in peace. It was thanks to him that I got to be a grocer’s apprentice in Feriköy after the war, back when these apprenticeships didn’t yet exist and home deliveries were unheard of. I would buy a basketful of bread from the baker and take it around on the back of a donkey, until eventually I realized that I could do this job myself and opened a grocery store in Kasımpaşa next to the Piyale Paşa Primary School, after which I went and built up some empty lots and sold them off at a profit. I opened a little bakery in Kağıthane. There was plenty of labor in the city back then, though not much experience. You can’t really trust any old villager.

I began bringing men over from our own village, starting with my relatives. There were some huts in Duttepe back then, and that’s where I put up those young men — all of them very well behaved and always respectful — and before long we were taking over more empty land, and business was booming, thank God. But all of these unmarried men, how were they going to remember to say their daily prayers and be thankful to God, so that they would feel at peace and do their jobs properly? On my first pilgrimage to Mecca, I prayed to God and to our Blessed Prophet and racked my brains for a solution. I thought I might as well do it myself and started putting some money aside from the bakery and the construction projects to buy steel and cement. We went to the mayor and asked for some land; we went to our wealthy neighbors and asked for donations. Some were generous, God bless their souls, but others said, What, in Duttepe? People actually live there? And so I made a promise to myself that I would build a mosque at the top of Duttepe, so tall that it would be visible from the mayor’s residence in Nişantaşı and from any apartment block in Taksim, so they could see for themselves all of the people who did indeed live in the hills of Duttepe (Mulberry), Kültepe (Ash), Gültepe (Rose), Harmantepe (Harvest).

After the foundations were laid and covered up, I stood there at the door every Friday at prayers, collecting donations. The poor would say, “Let the rich pay for it!” The rich would say, “He buys the cement from his own shop,” and give nothing. So I gave everything out of my own pocket. Whenever we had two or three idle builders on one of our construction sites, or some leftover steel, I sent them all to the mosque. The ill-wishers said, “Hadji Hamit, your dome is too big and too ambitious; when the wooden supports come off God will bring the whole thing down on your head, and then you’ll understand how proud you’ve been.” I stood right under the dome when the supports came off. It did not fall. I gave thanks to God. I climbed to the top of the dome and cried. My head spun. It was like being an ant on top of a great ball: all you can see at first from the top of the dome is a circle around you, but then you discover a whole universe at your feet. From up there, when you can’t see where the dome ends, the line between death and the universe blurs, and it frightens you. Still, there were dissenters who would go down to the city and come back saying, “We couldn’t see your dome, where is it?” So I poured all my energy into the minarets. Three years went by, and they said, “Do you think you’re some sort of sultan, building two minarets with three balconies?” Every time I walked up the narrow staircase with the master builder, we would go a little higher, and up at the top I would get dizzy and black out. They said to me, “Duttepe is no more than a village; who ever heard of a village mosque with two minarets with three balconies each?”

So I said, If Duttepe is a village, then let the Hadji Hamit Vural Duttepe Mosque be the greatest village mosque in Turkey. They didn’t even know what to say. Another year went by, and now they all came knocking on my door, eating my salt, and telling me how well the mosque had turned out, and all the while begging for votes in the elections: “Duttepe isn’t a village, Duttepe is part of Istanbul, we’ve upgraded you to a municipality now, so you’d better let us have your votes,” they said, “Hadji Hamit, tell your men to vote for us.” Yes, it’s true that these were my men. But that’s why they will never trust you, they will vote for whomever I tell them to vote for…

9. Neriman

What Makes the City a City

ONE EARLY EVENING in March 1974, Mevlut had just stashed his yogurt paraphernalia in a cupboard under the stairs at a friend’s and was on his way from Pangaltı to Şişli, when, outside the Site Cinema, he saw an attractive woman who looked vaguely familiar, and without really thinking about it, he began to follow her. Mevlut knew there were some — his classmates and other boys of Mevlut’s age in Duttepe, for instance — who got a kick out of following women on the street. He never took these stalkers’ stories seriously, either because they were coarse and he disapproved or because they seemed completely improbable (“This chick kept turning around like she wanted me to follow her”). He did, however, keep a close eye on his own feelings when he followed the woman that day. He was enjoying it, and worried that he might do it again.

She went into an apartment block in the backstreets of Osmanbey. Mevlut recalled delivering yogurt to this building, and perhaps this was how he’d seen her face before, but he had no regular customers in there. He made no effort to find out on what floor or in which apartment the woman lived. Still, he would pass by the spot where he’d first noticed her whenever he had the chance. He saw her again in the distance around noon on a day when he was carrying a relatively light load, and he ended up following her with the pole across his back all the way to Elmadağ, where she walked into the office of British Airways.

That was where the woman worked. Mevlut decided to call her Neriman. Neriman was a brave and righteous woman who had sacrificed her life to defend her honor and chastity in a TV film.

Clearly, Neriman wasn’t English. Her job was to find customers for the English airline in Turkey. Sometimes she could be found at a table on the ground floor, selling tickets to those who walked in. Mevlut liked that she took her job seriously. But some days she wasn’t there at all. When Mevlut couldn’t see her in the office, he felt sad, and he didn’t like waiting for her either. Sometimes he felt there was a special sin, a secret he shared with Neriman. He had already discovered that his guilt only seemed to strengthen her pull on him.

Neriman was quite tall. Mevlut could pick out her chestnut hair even when it was nothing but a tiny blur in the distant crowd. Neriman didn’t walk particularly fast, but she was as lively and determined as a high-school girl. Mevlut guessed she must be about ten years older than he was. Even when she walked way ahead of him, Mevlut could still guess what went on in Neriman’s mind. She’s going to turn right now, he would think to himself, and that’s what Neriman would do, turning into a side street to get to her house in Osmanbey. Mevlut felt strangely empowered knowing where she lived, where she worked, that she had bought a lighter from a corner shop (which meant she was a smoker), that she didn’t wear those black shoes every day, and that she slowed down every time she walked past Ace Cinema to look at the movie posters and stills.

Three months after their first meeting, Mevlut began to wish that Neriman would find out that he was following her and all the things he knew about her. During those three months, Mevlut had followed Neriman on the streets only seven times. It wasn’t a huge number, but of course Neriman wouldn’t be happy if she found out; perhaps she would even think he was some sort of pervert. Mevlut could accept that such a reaction would not be unwarranted. If someone in the village were to follow his sisters as he followed Neriman, he would want to beat the bastard up.

But Istanbul was not a village. In the city, that guy you thought was stalking that woman he didn’t know could turn out to be someone like Mevlut, who carried important thoughts in his head and was destined to make it big someday. In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.

As Neriman walked among the crowd, there were two reasons that Mevlut sometimes liked to slow his pace and let the distance between them grow:

1. Being able to spot the chestnut dot that was Neriman in a crowd and always knowing how to predict her movements, no matter how far she was, gave Mevlut the impression that they shared a very special spiritual intimacy.

2. All the buildings, stores, shopwindows, people, advertisements, and movie posters that came between them seemed like pieces of the life he shared with Neriman. As the number of steps between them multiplied, it was as if they also had more memories to share.

In his head, he would picture her being harassed on the street or dropping her handkerchief or a pickpocket trying to grab her dark blue bag. He would rush to the scene immediately to save her or at least present her with the handkerchief she’d dropped. All the bystanders would say what a gallant young man he was, while Neriman would thank him and catch on to his interest in her.

Once, a young man selling American cigarettes on the street (most of these youths were from Adana) went a little too far in trying to get Neriman’s attention. She turned around and said something. (Mevlut imagined it might be “Leave me alone!”) But the pushy young man would not give up. Mevlut sped up. Suddenly Neriman turned back, gave the youth some money, and quickly grabbed a pack of red Marlboros and put it in her pocket.

Mevlut thought he could say something like “You better watch it next time” when he walked past the man, acting like he was Neriman’s protector. But it wasn’t worth the trouble with these brutes. He wasn’t sure he liked seeing Neriman buying contraband cigarettes on the street anyway.

At the start of summer, when he was finally done with the first year of high school, Mevlut was following Neriman when he witnessed an incident that would weigh on his mind for months. Two men standing on the pavement in Osmanbey called out to her. Neriman went on her way, pretending she hadn’t heard them, and they began to follow her. Mevlut was just about to catch up with them when…Neriman turned and looked at the men, smiled in recognition, and started to chat with them animatedly, waving her arms about with the joy of running into long-lost friends. When the two men left Neriman and walked past Mevlut, talking and chuckling, he tried to eavesdrop on their conversation but couldn’t hear them say anything bad about Neriman. All he heard was something like “It’s harder in the second period,” but he wasn’t sure he’d heard properly, nor whether they were even talking about Neriman. Who were these two men? As they crossed paths, he felt the urge to tell them, “Gentlemen, I know that lady better than you do.”

Sometimes he would be cross with Neriman because they hadn’t met in so long, and he would start looking for another Neriman among the women on the street. He found a few likely candidates here and there when he was out walking without his yogurt vendor’s shoulder pole and followed them all the way home. One time he jumped on a bus at the Ömer Hayyam stop and went all the way to Laleli on the other side of the Golden Horn. He liked that these new women took him away to other neighborhoods, and he enjoyed finding out about their lives and daydreaming about them, but he could never seem to get attached to any of them. His fantasies weren’t so different from the things he’d heard from his classmates and other wasters who went around stalking women. Mevlut hadn’t jerked off to Neriman even once. His affection and respect for her were founded on the purity of his feelings for her.

He didn’t go to school much that year. Unless they were twisted enough to want to make enemies of their students, teachers would not want to fail a student twice for the same year, because that would get the kid kicked out of school. Trusting in this principle, Mevlut arranged for his name to be left out during roll calls and otherwise ignored school entirely. He passed the year and decided to sell Kısmet with Ferhat over the summer. Mevlut was even happier once his father went to the village and he had the house to himself, and meanwhile he was making lots of money with Ferhat.

One morning, Süleyman came knocking on the door, and this time Mevlut answered straightaway. “There’s a war on,” said his cousin. “We’re conquering Cyprus.” Mevlut followed him to his uncle’s house in Duttepe. Everyone was hunched around the television watching military marches, and every time the TV showed a tank or an airplane, Korkut would jump in to say what model it was, C-160 or M47. Then they showed the same picture of Prime Minister Ecevit over and over again, saying “May God bless this endeavor, for our nation, for all Cypriots, and for humanity.” Korkut used to call Ecevit a Communist, but all was forgiven now. Whenever President Makarios of Cyprus or one of the Greek generals came up on the screen, they would swear at him and dissolve into giggles. They walked down to the Duttepe bus stop and went into the coffeehouses. Everywhere you looked people were happy and excited, watching the same images of fighter planes, tanks, and flags, Atatürk and the army generals. Regular announcements on TV kept urging anyone who had dodged their compulsory military service to report to the draft office immediately, and Korkut never failed to say, “I was going to go anyway.”

The country was, as ever, already under martial law, but now there were also new blackout regulations for Istanbul. Uncle Hasan was worried about blackout patrols and possible fines, so Mevlut and Süleyman helped him dim the lights in his shop. They cut up some cheap, thick dark blue paper into pieces roughly the size of a glass of water, which they then carefully slipped over the naked bulbs like little hats. Can you see it from outside? Pull the curtain; the Greek planes might not see this, but the patrols will, they snickered. That night, Mevlut felt like a real Turk from Central Asia, like the ones in the history books.

But as soon as he got back to Kültepe, his mood changed. Greece is a lot smaller than Turkey, and it would never attack us, and even if it did, it wouldn’t bomb Kültepe, he reasoned as he started now to think about his place in the universe. He hadn’t lit any lamps at home. Just as when he had first moved to Istanbul, he couldn’t see the masses living on the other hills, but he could sense their presence in the darkness. The same hills that had been half empty five years ago had filled up with houses now, and even on the empty hills farther out you could see the first transmission towers and mosque minarets. All those places and all of Istanbul were dark now, and Mevlut could see the stars in the summer sky. He lay down on the dirt and watched them for a long time, thinking of Neriman. Had she also blacked out the lamps in her home as he had? Mevlut felt that his feet would be taking him to Neriman’s streets again, more than they ever had before.

10. The Consequences of Sticking Communist Posters on Mosques

God Save the Turks

MEVLUT COULD SEE that tensions between Duttepe and Kültepe were on the rise, and he was aware of a number of disputes escalating into all-out blood feuds, but he never anticipated the fierce war that would erupt between the two hills like something out of the movies. After all, at first sight there wasn’t much setting the two hills apart, nothing that could conceivably lead to such deep-seated enmity and bloody battle:

· On both hills, the first gecekondu homes had been built in the mid-fifties, out of hollow bricks, mud, and tin. These homes had been occupied by migrant settlers from the poor villages of Anatolia.

· Half of the male population on both hills slept in the same blue-striped pajamas (though with some minor variation in the width of the stripes) while the other half wore no pajamas at all and slept in a shirt, sweater vest, or pullover and under that an old undershirt, sleeveless or long sleeved depending on the season.

· Ninety-seven percent of the women on both hills covered their heads when they went out on the streets, just as their mothers used to do. They had all been born to village life, but now that they were in the city, they discovered that the “street” here was something else entirely, and so even in the summer they wore a loose-fitting coat of faded dark blue or brown whenever they went out.

· Most people on both hills thought of their house not as their home for life but rather as a refuge in which to rest their weary heads until they got rich and returned to the village or as a place to stay while they waited for their chance to move into an apartment in the city.

· With astonishing consistency, the people of Kültepe and Duttepe all saw the same figures in their dreams at regular intervals:

Boys: the female primary-school teacher

Girls: Atatürk

Men: the Holy Prophet Muhammad

Women: a tall, anonymous Western film star

Old men: an angel drinking milk

Old women: a young postman bringing good news

· Afterward, they would revel in the thought of having been entrusted with an important message, seeing themselves as extraordinary individuals, though they rarely shared the contents of these dreams with anyone else.

· Electricity came in 1966, tap water in 1970, and asphalt roads in 1973 to both Kültepe and Duttepe within days of each other, so that neither had cause to resent the other for having been favored.

· By the mid-1970s, every other house in Kültepe and Duttepe had a black-and-white television set with a grainy picture (father-and-son teams would constantly be at work on their homemade TV aerials to improve it), and during important broadcasts, such as football matches, the Eurovision song contest, and Turkish movies, families with no television went to their neighbors’, and on both hills it was for the women to serve tea to the assembled audience.

· Both hills got their bread from Hadji Hamit Vural’s bakery.

· The five most commonly eaten foods on both hills were, in order: (1) underweight bread, (2) tomatoes (in summer and autumn), (3) potatoes, (4) onions, and (5) oranges.

Yet there were those who argued that these data were as deceptive as Hadji Hamit’s underweight bread, because the future of a society was not determined by the traits its members shared but rested entirely on their differences. Some fundamental differences had cropped up between Duttepe and Kültepe over the course of twenty years:

· The top of Duttepe was now dominated by Hadji Hamit Vural’s mosque. On hot summer days when the light filtered through its fine high windows, the mosque would be nice and cool inside; you would feel grateful to God for having created such a place and wrestle all your rebellious thoughts into submission. As for Kültepe, it was still topped by the giant, rusty transmission tower, with its sign picturing a skull, which Mevlut had seen on his first day in Istanbul.

· Ninety-nine percent of the people of Duttepe and Kültepe fasted, in theory, during the month of Ramadan. But in Kültepe, those who did so in practice were no more than seventy percent, because Kültepe was home to a high proportion of Alevis — Alawites — who had come in the 1960s from in and around Bingöl, Dersim, Sivas, and Erzincan. The Alevis of Kültepe did not use the mosque in Duttepe.

· There were many more Kurds in Kültepe than in Duttepe, but even the Kurds themselves didn’t like this term being bandied about too freely, so the knowledge of their presence remained, for the time being, strictly within the bounds of people’s private thoughts, lying dormant in a corner of their minds like a secret language spoken only at home.

· One of the back tables at the Motherland Coffeehouse in Duttepe had been taken over by young nationalists, the “Idealists” who called themselves Grey Wolves after an ancient Turkic myth. Their ideals involved liberating the Turks of Central Asia (in Samarkand, Tashkent, Bukhara, Xinjiang) from the hegemony of the Russian and Chinese Communist governments. They were ready to do anything, even to kill, for this cause.

· One of the back tables at the Homeland Coffeehouse in Kültepe had been taken over by young men who called themselves leftist-socialists. Their vision involved creating a free society modeled on Russia or China. They were ready to do anything, even to die, for this cause.

After scraping through sophomore year on his second try, Mevlut stopped going to class entirely. He didn’t even show up for exams. His father was aware of the situation, and Mevlut no longer even bothered claiming there was an exam tomorrow and pretending to study.

One night, he felt like a cigarette. He left the house on a whim to go over to Ferhat’s place. A young man was standing with Ferhat in the back garden, pouring something into a bucket and stirring. “Caustic soda,” explained Ferhat. “If you add flour to it, it’ll turn into glue. We’re going to put some posters up. Come along, if you want.” He turned to the other young man. “Ali, meet Mevlut. Mevlut’s a good guy, he’s one of us.”

Mevlut shook hands with the tall Ali, who offered him a cigarette; it was a Bafra. Mevlut decided to join them. He thought to himself that he was embarking on this dangerous mission because he was a truly valiant young man.

Slowly, they made their way through the alleys, under cover of darkness. Whenever he saw an appropriate spot, Ferhat would stop, put down his bucket, and with the brush spread the sticky, corrosive liquid evenly over the chosen surface or wall. While he was at it, Ali would unroll one of the posters he was carrying under his arm, plastering it over the wet surface in a quick and practiced motion. As Ali ran his hands over the poster to ensure that it stuck, Ferhat would use the brush for a quick sweep over the poster, taking special care over the corners.

Mevlut was the lookout. They all held their breath when a family on its way back from watching TV at the neighbors’ almost walked right into them, the mother and father laughing at their son’s saying, “I don’t want to go to bed yet!”

This poster work was not so different from going out to sell things on the street at night. First you mixed certain liquids and powders at home like a wizard, and then you headed out into the darkness. But while, as a street vendor, you went out of your way to be heard, calling out or ringing your bell, when you were putting posters up you had to keep as quiet as the night itself.

They went a roundabout way in order to avoid the coffeehouses, the shopping street, and Hadji Hamit’s bakery down below. Once they got to Duttepe, Ferhat lowered his voice to a whisper, and Mevlut felt like a guerrilla fighter sneaking into enemy territory. Now Ferhat was lookout while Mevlut carried the bucket and brushed glue over the walls. It started to rain, the streets emptied out, and Mevlut caught an eerie scent of death.

The sound of distant gunfire came echoing through the nearby hills. They stopped where they were, exchanging glances. For the first time that night, Mevlut read the writing on their posters, giving it his full attention: HÜSEYIN ALKAN’S KILLERS WILL BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE. There was a sort of decorative border underneath, made out of hammer-and-sickle signs and red flags. Mevlut wasn’t sure who Hüseyin Alkan was, but he knew he must have been an Alevi like Ferhat and Ali, just as he knew that Alevis preferred to be called leftists, and he felt a sort of guilt mixed with a sense of superiority about not being one of them himself.

As the rain got heavier, the streets grew quieter and the dogs stopped barking. They sheltered under the overhang of a building while Ferhat whispered an explanation: Hüseyin Alkan had been on his way back from the coffeehouse two weeks ago when he was shot dead by the Grey Wolves of Duttepe. They got to the street where his uncle Hasan lived. There was the house he’d been to hundreds of times since he’d come to Istanbul, and where he’d spent many happy hours in the company of Süleyman, Korkut, and Aunt Safiye; seeing it now through the eyes of an angry, poster-wielding left-wing militant, he saw his father’s point. His uncle and his cousins, the entire Aktaş family, had built this house with Mevlut’s father and then wrenched it away from him without a second thought.

There was no one around. Mevlut slathered glue over the most prominent spot at the back of the house. Ali put two posters up. The dog in the garden recognized Mevlut’s scent, so he only wagged his tail. They stuck posters onto the back and side walls of the house, too.

“That’s enough, they’ll see us,” muttered Ferhat. Mevlut’s fury had scared him. The liberating thrill of the forbidden had gone to Mevlut’s head. The caustic soda was burning the tips of his fingers and the back of his hands, and he was getting wet in the rain, but none of that bothered him. They went all the way up to the top of the hill, putting up posters on all the empty streets along the way.

The wall of the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque that gave onto the square said POST NO BILLS in massive letters. But the warning was covered over with advertisements for soap and laundry powders, posters of ultranationalist associations and the Grey Wolves that said GOD SAVE THE TURKS, and signs announcing Koran classes. Mevlut spread glue over all this with great gusto, and soon they had covered the whole wall with their own posters. There was no one around, so they even did the walls of the mosque courtyard from the inside.

They heard a noise. It was just a door slamming in the breeze, but at first they mistook it for gunfire and started running. Mevlut could feel the liquid in the bucket dousing him, but he ran anyway. They got out of Duttepe, but they were so embarrassed for being scared that they kept working away on the other hills until they ran out of posters. By the end of the night, their hands burned and in places were even bleeding from the caustic soda.

—

Süleyman. As my brother always says: an Alevi who dares to put Communist posters up on a mosque must be ready to meet his maker. Alevis are a harmless, quiet, hardworking lot at heart, but some scoundrels in Kültepe are trying to sow the seeds of discord between us with the backing of the Communists. These Marxist-Leninists first targeted the bachelors that the Vurals brought in from villages near their hometown of Rize, trying to recruit them to the cause of communism and trade unions. Obviously the bachelors from Rize hadn’t come to Istanbul for such nonsense but to make a living; they had no intention of ending up in some labor camp in Siberia or Manchuria. They are a sensible bunch, and they rejected the advances of these godless Alevi Communists. Meanwhile, the Vurals reported the Communist Alevis to the police. That’s how all these plainclothes policemen and government agents ended up in our coffeehouses, smoking cigarettes (like all government workers, their brand is Yeni Harman) and watching TV all day. Of course, what lies beneath all this is some old land in Duttepe that the heretical Alevi Kurds claimed years ago and that the Vurals later seized and started building on. That old land in Duttepe, and the land in Kültepe that has houses all over it now, the whole lot of it belongs to them, they say! Is that so? If you don’t have a title deed, my friend, the neighborhood councilman’s word is law. Incidentally, the councilman — Rıza from Rize — is on our side. In any case, if you truly believed you were in the right, your conscience would be clear, and if your conscience were clear, you wouldn’t be sneaking around our streets in the middle of the night putting up Communist propaganda and promoting godlessness on the walls of a mosque, would you?

—

Korkut. When I came from the village to join my father here twelve years ago, Duttepe was half empty, and the other hills were even emptier. The people who ended up taking advantage of all that land weren’t just folk like us who had no roof over their heads and no other place in Istanbul to call home, but even people who had proper jobs and lives down in the city. New factories and workshops were cropping up daily, like the drug-manufacturing plant on the main road and the lightbulb factory, and they all needed free, empty lots to build dormitories for their cheap labor, so whenever anyone turned up and took over some of the vacant public land, no one objected. The news quickly spread that there was land here for the taking, and quite a few office clerks, teachers, and even shop owners who were based in the city center were shrewd enough to come to our hills and grab some land, thinking they might make a profit off it someday. But how are you going to take ownership of the land if you don’t have a title deed to prove it’s yours? The safest way is to build a house on it, preferably when the authorities are looking the other way, and move in overnight, but if that’s not possible, then you have to at least be prepared to pick up a gun and stand guard over your plot. Or you find an armed guard for your land. In that case you must also treat that guard as a friend, share your meals with him and keep him company, so that he will put his heart into looking after your land, and when the time comes for the government to start handing out title deeds, no one else can come along and use your man to tell the government “Actually, sir, this land is mine and I have witnesses to prove it.” Our esteemed Hadji Hamit Vural of Rize really knew what he was doing. Those young men he brought over from his village, he gave them jobs on his construction sites and in his bakeries, he fed them (though technically, I suppose they were baking their own bread), and he deployed them like soldiers to stand guard over his construction sites and his land. But it takes more than just a bunch of Rızas from the Rize countryside to make an army. To make sure they learned the ropes properly, we gave our friends from the village free membership in our club and in the Altaylı Karate and Taekwondo School, so that they would understand what it means to be a Turk, where Central Asia, the cradle of the Turkic races, is located, who Bruce Lee is, and the significance of the blue belt. We picked appropriate, clean family films and held educational screenings in our clubhouse in Mecidiyeköy, all to keep these boys who broke their backs every day in bakeries and on construction sites out of the clutches of Beyoğlu’s nightclub whores and also of the pro-Moscow leftist organizations. There were boys who really believed in our cause, tearing up whenever they looked at the map that showed all the Turks in Central Asia that had yet to be freed, and I made sure to recruit these first-rate fellows for the club. As a result of our efforts, the political influence and the patriotic militia of the Grey Wolves in Mecidiyeköy grew bigger and stronger and naturally spread to the other hills. By the time the Communists realized they’d lost their hold over our hill, it was too late. The first to notice was the father of that sneak Ferhat, whom Mevlut loves to hang out with. That greedy miser didn’t waste a minute building his house here and moving the entire family over from Karaköy, just so that he could stake a better claim on the land. Then he started bringing his Kurdish-Alevi comrades over from their village near Bingöl so that they could help him keep an eye on all the other land he’d taken over in Kültepe. This Hüseyin Alkan who got killed was also from that village, but I have no idea who killed him. Whenever one of these Communist troublemakers gets killed, his friends all march together at his funeral, shouting political slogans and putting up posters, and once the funeral is over, they like to go on a little glass-breaking rampage. (Secretly, they all love a good funeral, because it lets them indulge their destructive impulses.) But once they realize that it could be their turn next, they come to their senses and either just slink off quietly or renounce communism altogether. That is how you freely spread your beliefs.

—

Ferhat. Hüseyin, who gave his life for our cause, was a really nice person. It was my dad who brought him over from the village and put him in one of the houses we built in Kültepe. I’m sure it must have been one of Vural’s thugs who shot him in the back of the neck that night. It didn’t help that the police closed their investigation by blaming us. I have a feeling the Grey Wolves are going to attack Kültepe soon, backed by the Vurals, and try to get rid of us once and for all, but I can’t tell Mevlut (he’s thick enough to pass it along to the Vural camp). I can’t even mention it to our guys. Half the Alevi youth is pro-Moscow, and the other half are Maoists, and they beat each other up so often over their differences, there’s really no point warning them of the danger of losing Kültepe. The sad truth is that I don’t really believe in the struggle I’m supposed to believe in. I’m hoping to take the leap and set up my own business soon. I also really want to go to college. But like most Alevis, I’m left-wing and secular and hate the Grey Wolves and the counterinsurgents out to kill us. Even though I know we are never going to win, I still go to the funerals; I raise my fist and shout slogans along with everyone else. My dad sees the danger in all this and sometimes he says, “I wonder if we should sell the house and move out of Kültepe,” but he can’t bring himself to do it because he’s the one who brought everyone here in the first place.

—

Korkut. I could tell by the number of posters stuck to our house that this wasn’t just the work of a political organization; it had to be someone who knows us personally. When Uncle Mustafa came by two days later and mentioned that Mevlut was never home, especially at night, and that he barely went to school anymore, that’s when I really got suspicious. Uncle Mustafa was checking to see whether Süleyman would let anything slip, about him and Mevlut getting in trouble together. But I just knew it was that bastard Ferhat who was corrupting Mevlut. I told Süleyman to trick Mevlut into coming over for roast chicken two days later.

—

Aunt Safiye. Both my sons want to be friends with Mevlut, especially Süleyman, but they can’t stop themselves from winding him up. Mevlut’s father hasn’t managed to save enough money to sort out their house back in the village, and they don’t have enough to improve the one-room shack in Kültepe either. Sometimes I think I should go over to Kültepe for a day and bring a woman’s touch to that pigsty they’ve been living in all these years, but then I fear I just couldn’t bear it. Because of his father’s insistence on leaving the rest of the family behind in the village, Mevlut has been like an orphan in Istanbul all his life since primary school. At first, when they’d just moved here, he used to come to me whenever he missed his mum. I would sit him on my lap, stroke his hair, kiss his cheeks, and tell him how clever he was. Korkut and Süleyman were jealous, but I didn’t care. He still has that innocent look about him, and I’ve got the same urge to sit him on my knees again and cuddle him a bit, I can tell he still needs it, even though he’s so grown up now, his face is covered in pimples, and he’s shy with Korkut and Süleyman. I’ve stopped asking him about school — it only takes one look at him to understand the confusion inside his head. As soon as he came in that evening, I took him to the kitchen and kissed him on the cheeks before Korkut and Süleyman saw us. “You’ve grown so tall, but stand up straight, don’t be ashamed of your height,” I said. “That’s not it, Auntie, it’s the stick I use to carry the yogurt, it’s bending my back, but I’m going to give it up soon,” he said…The way he wolfed that chicken down at dinner, I fell to pieces. Korkut talked about how the Communists would try to sweet-talk kindhearted innocents over to their side, but Mevlut kept quiet. “Stop trying to scare the poor orphan, you rascals,” I told Korkut and Süleyman in the kitchen.

“Stay out of this, Mom, we’ve got our reasons,” said Korkut.

“Nonsense, you just like taunting him…Who could possibly sus pect my darling Mevlut? I am sure he has nothing to do with these evil people.”

“Mevlut is going to come out with us tonight to write on the walls and prove he’s not working with the Maoists,” said Korkut as he returned to the table. “Isn’t that so, Mevlut?”

—

There were three of them again, and again one of them was carrying a large bucket, but this time it was full of black paint rather than glue. Whenever they found a suitable place, Korkut would write on the wall with his brush. Mevlut would hold the paint bucket for him while trying to guess what Korkut was writing. GOD SAVE THE TURKS, one slogan he already knew, was his favorite. He’d seen it all over the city. He liked it because it seemed a harmless plea, and it was a reminder of what he’d learned in history class: that he was part of one big Turkish family spanning the whole world. Some of the other slogans, though, were rather sinister. When Korkut wrote DUTTEPE IS WHERE COMMUNISTS COME TO DIE, Mevlut sensed that it referred to Ferhat and his friends and hoped that these sentiments would not get beyond mere posturing.

A stray remark from Süleyman (“My brother’s got the shooting iron”) on lookout duty alerted Mevlut to the fact that they were carrying a gun. If there was enough room on the wall, sometimes Korkut would write GODLESS before COMMUNIST. He usually failed to anticipate how many words and letters he needed, and some letters would end up small and crooked, which finally was what bothered Mevlut the most. (When the letters listing a street vendor’s wares on his cart or his sesame roll trolley were all squished up, Mevlut could tell the man had no future.) Eventually Mevlut could no longer refrain from pointing out to Korkut that he’d made the letter C too big. “You try it, then!” said Korkut, forcing the brush on him. Deep into the night, Mevlut covered up ads for circumcision services, walls that said DON’T BE A LITTER LOUT, and the Maoist posters he’d put up four nights before, with the slogan GOD SAVE THE TURKS!

They walked through the dark, thick forest of gecekondu homes, walls, gardens, shops, and suspicious dogs. Every time he stopped to write GOD SAVE THE TURKS, Mevlut could feel the depth of the surrounding darkness in which these words were a beacon, a signature appended onto the boundless night, transforming the neighborhood. That night, he discovered many things about Duttepe and Kültepe that he had previously overlooked while loafing around with Ferhat and Süleyman in the evenings: every inch of the neighborhood fountains was covered in political slogans and posters; the people who hung around smoking outside coffeehouses were actually armed watchmen; at night, everyone — families, passersby — fled the streets and took refuge in their own private world; in this night, pure and everlasting, like an old fairy tale, being Turkish felt infinitely better than being poor.

11. The War Between Duttepe and Kültepe

We Don’t Take Sides

ONE NIGHT toward the end of April, a round of gunfire from a passing taxi hit the people playing cards and watching television in the Homeland Coffeehouse at the entrance to Kültepe. Five hundred meters away, in their house on the other side of the hill, Mevlut and his father were having lentil soup in what was, for them, an uncharacteristically friendly atmosphere. They exchanged a look while they waited for the machine gun’s report to die down. When Mevlut got too close to the window, his father yelled, “Come back here!” Presently, they heard the metallic clatter of the machine gun again, now farther away, and so they went back to their soup.

“See?” said his father with a meaningful expression, as if this were proof of what he’d been saying all along.

The attack had targeted two coffeehouses, both frequented by leftists and Alevis. Two people had been killed in the coffeehouse at Kültepe and another in Oktepe, and almost twenty had been injured. The next day, Marxist groups calling themselves armed vanguards and the Alevi relatives of the victims rose up in protest. Mevlut joined Ferhat among the crowds, shouting out a slogan every now and then and marching through the neighborhood, though not in the front row. He didn’t clench his fist quite as forcefully as others in the crowd, nor did he know enough of the words to keep up with their chants, but he was certainly angry…There were no plainclothes policemen around, nor any of Hadji Hamit Vural’s men. As a result, it took just two days for all the streets and walls in Kültepe and Duttepe to be covered in Marxist and Maoist slogans. Amid the excitement of the protests, new posters were printed in the city, and fresh slogans were coined for the resistance movement.

On the third day, when the victims’ funeral was meant to take place, an army of mustachioed policemen wielding black batons arrived in a fleet of blue buses. There were also growing numbers of photojournalists who were assailed by children gesticulating wildly for their pictures to be taken, too. When the funeral procession reached Duttepe, the angry young men broke off from the rest of the crowd and, as expected, began to march.

Mevlut didn’t join them this time. His uncle Hasan’s house gave onto the mosque courtyard, and he could see his uncle, Korkut, Süleyman, and some of Vural’s men smoking and looking out the windows at the crowds down below. Mevlut wasn’t cowed by their presence, nor was he worried that they might punish or shun him. All the same, he felt awkward clenching his fist and shouting slogans when he knew they were watching. There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes.

A scuffle broke out when the police outside the mosque tried to block the advance of the marching funeral crowds. Some youths within the crowd threw stones, one shattering the window of a shop displaying posters of the Grey Wolves. The Fatih Real Estate Agency, run by Hadji Hamit’s family, and the small contractors’ offices next door were soon also damaged. Apart from desks, televisions, and typewriters, there wasn’t much of value in these places, where the Grey Wolves controlling Duttepe liked to come and pass the time watching TV and smoking cigarettes. But as a result of the attacks, the war of the Grey Wolves against the Marxists, or the right-wing idealists against the left-wing materialists, or Konya against Bingöl, was brought vividly to the whole neighborhood’s attention.

These rough and vicious early battles went on for more than three days, with Mevlut and other curious observers watching from a distance. He saw helmeted men drawing their batons and charging the crowd, shouting “Allah! Allah!” like Janissaries. He watched from a sheltered spot as tanklike armored vehicles shot water at the demonstrators. In the midst of all this, he would still go down to the city to drop some yogurt off with his loyal regulars in Feriköy and Şişli, and in the evenings he would go out selling boza. On one of these nights, he hid his student ID from the police, who had set up a security cordon between Duttepe and Kültepe, and deducing from the way he looked that he was only a poor street vendor, they let him through without trouble.

Filled with anger and a sense of solidarity, he went back to class. In just three days, the atmosphere at the school had become heavily politicized. Leftist students would raise their hands and brashly interrupt classes to give political lectures. Mevlut enjoyed the sense of freedom but did not himself say a single word.

Skeleton had instructed the teachers to make sure that the students who interrupted lessons about the Ottoman conquests and Atatürk’s reforms with diatribes against capitalism and American imperialism (“Yesterday, one of our comrades was shot,” they would begin) were silenced and their registration numbers noted down, but the teachers, who mostly wanted to stay out of trouble, didn’t much cooperate. Even the biology teacher, Massive Melahat, the most combative of them all, tried to humor those who interrupted her to condemn “the systematic exploitation” and to accuse her of trying to gloss over the class struggle by teaching them about tadpoles. Melahat had explained how difficult her life was, that she’d been working for thirty-two years and was really just hanging on until she reached retirement age, which moved Mevlut and made him quietly hope that the agitators would leave her alone. The older, bigger students in the back rows had interpreted the political crisis as an invitation to torment the weak; the know-it-alls, the richer kids, and the obsequious front-row nerds had all been bullied into obedience; the right-wing nationalist students had gone quiet, and some were avoiding school altogether. Whenever there was news from the students’ neighborhoods about a fresh skirmish, police raids, and torture, the militants would take to the corridors, striding up and down every floor of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School shouting slogans (“Down with fascism,” “Independence for Turkey,” “Free education”), and snatch the roll-call sheet from the class president and set it on fire with a cigarette. Then they’d either join the fray in Duttepe and Kültepe or go off to the cinema (provided they had enough money or knew someone at the box office to let them in).

This atmosphere of liberty and rebellion lasted only a week. Two months before, the unpopular physics teacher Fehmi had humiliated a student from Diyarbakır by imitating his provincial Turkish accent while the rest of the class, including Mevlut, looked on in anguish and fury. Now that students were bursting into his classroom demanding a formal apology, and others were announcing a student strike just as they were doing in the universities, Skeleton and the principal called in the police. The blue-uniformed policemen and the newly arrived undercover agents who guarded both entrances began to check IDs at the door, again just as they were doing in the universities. There was the same postapocalyptic atmosphere that usually follows earthquakes or big fires, and Mevlut couldn’t deny that he was enjoying it. He attended the classroom meetings, but whenever tensions escalated into brawls, he would stand to one side until they were over, and when a new student strike was announced, he would avoid school altogether and go out selling yogurt instead.

A week after the arrival of the police at school, a third-year high-school student from the Aktaş family’s street blocked Mevlut’s path to tell him that Korkut would be expecting him that night. Mevlut made his way to his uncle’s house in the late-night gloom, getting searched several times and having to present his ID to the police and to the lookouts that the various right- and left-wing crews had posted on the streets, and when he reached his destination he saw one of the school’s new “undercover” students eating bean stew at the same table where Mevlut had eaten roast chicken two months ago. His name was Tarık. Mevlut quickly figured out that Aunt Safiye didn’t like him but that Korkut trusted him and held him in high regard. Korkut told Mevlut to stay away from Ferhat “and all the other Communists.” As always, the Russians were after warm water ports, and in order to weaken Turkey, which was thwarting their dreams of empire, they were trying to pit Sunnis against Alevis, Turks against Kurds, and the rich against the poor by inflaming our destitute Kurd and Alevi compatriots against us. Thus it was strategically crucial that the Kurds and Alevis from Bingöl and Tunceli be driven out of Kültepe and all the other hills.

“Give Uncle Mustafa my regards,” said Korkut, with the bearing of Atatürk inspecting military maps before a final siege. “Make sure you stay indoors on Thursday. There is a danger the wheat might burn with the chaff.” Noticing Mevlut’s quizzical look, Süleyman revised his brother’s pronouncement: “There’s going to be an attack,” he said, seeming all the while pleased to be in the know about everything before it happened.

That night, Mevlut could barely sleep for the sound of gunfire.

The next day, he found out that the rumors had spread, and everyone at Atatürk Secondary, including the middle-school kids and even Mohini, knew that terrible things were going to happen on Thursday. The coffeehouses in Kültepe and on other hills with a large population of Alevis had been attacked again during the night, and two more people had been killed. Most coffeehouses and shops had lowered their shutters, and some didn’t open at all for the day. Mevlut heard reports that the doors of Alevi homes were going to be marked with crosses during the night, in preparation for Thursday’s raids. He wanted to get away from it all, just to go to the cinema and be left alone to masturbate in peace, but he also wanted to be there and witness everything.

The funeral processions on Wednesday were led by slogan-chanting left-wing organizations, and the crowds attacked the Vural bakery. When the police failed to intervene, the bakery workers from Rize defended themselves as best they could with blocks of firewood and peels before escaping through the back door and leaving all those delicious loaves of fresh bread behind. In the evening, Mevlut heard that the Alevis had targeted mosques, that the Grey Wolves’ offices in Mecidiyeköy had been bombed, and that people had been drinking alcohol in mosques, but he found all this too far-fetched to believe.

“Let’s go sell our boza in the city tonight,” said his father. “No one will bother a poor boza seller and his son, anyway. We don’t take sides.” They picked up their poles and their jugs and left the house, but the police surrounding the neighborhood weren’t letting anyone through. When Mevlut spotted the flashing blue lights in the distance, along with ambulances and fire engines, his heart beat faster. He basked in the attention; it made him, and everyone else in the neighborhood, feel important. Five years ago, the whole neighborhood could have come tumbling down, and still no police or firefighters, let alone any journalists, would have turned up. When they got back home, they stared in vain at the black-and-white TV. Of course there was no mention of any of this on the news. The TV (which they’d finally managed to save up for) was showing a panel discussion on the conquest of Istanbul. As ever, his father started complaining about “the anarchists” who caused trouble “and robbed poor street vendors of their livelihood,” distributing his curses evenly on the left and right.

At midnight, they were woken by the sound of running in the streets, people screaming and shouting slogans. They did not know who was out there. His father checked the bolt on the door and barricaded it with the table with the short leg, which Mevlut did his homework on in the evenings. They saw flames shooting up from the other side of Kültepe, their light hitting the low, dark clouds above, and the sky kindled with a strange brightness; the light that reflected back down onto the streets flickered as the flames quivered in the wind, and it was as if the whole world were quaking along with the shadows. They heard gunshots. Mevlut spotted a second fire. “Don’t stand so close to the window,” said his father.

“Dad, I heard they’re putting marks on the homes that need to be raided, shall we check?”

“Why? We’re not Alevis!”

“They might have put one by mistake,” said Mevlut, thinking that perhaps he should have been more careful showing his face around the neighborhood in the company of Ferhat and the other leftists. But he hid this worry from his father.

In a quiet moment, when the street was calmer and the shouts had died down, they opened the door to check. There was no mark. Mevlut wanted to inspect the walls, too, just to make sure. “Get back inside!” his father shouted. The white slum house in which Mevlut and his father had spent years together now looked like an orange ghost in the night. Father and son shut the door tight, but they didn’t sleep until dawn, when the sounds of gunfire ceased.

—

Korkut. To be honest, I didn’t believe that the Alevis had put a bomb in the mosque either, but lies spread fast. The patient, quiet, devout people of Duttepe had seen “with their own eyes” the Communist propaganda that had appeared on mosques and even in the farthest neighborhoods, and their anger was a force to be reckoned with. You can’t just come here from downtown in Karaköy, or maybe even from outside of Istanbul, from Sivas or Bingöl, and think you can take this land away from the people who actually live in Duttepe! Last night we saw who really owns these houses, who actually lives in them. It’s hard to stop a young nationalist whose faith has been insulted. Many homes were damaged.

—

Ferhat. The police did nothing, and if they did, it was only to join in the raids. Groups with scarves wrapped around their faces started to break into homes, vandalize property, and loot Alevi shops. Three houses, four shops, and the grocery store run by a family from Dersim were all burned to the ground. They retreated when our people started shooting at them from the roofs. But we think they’ll be back after sunrise.

—

“Come on, let’s go down to the city,” said Mevlut’s father in the morning.

“I’m staying,” said Mevlut.

“But, son, these people will never stop fighting, they’ll never tire of hacking away at each other — politics is just an excuse…Let’s just sell our yogurt and our boza. Please don’t get involved. Stay away from the Alevis, the leftists, the Kurds, and that Ferhat. We don’t want to get kicked out, too, while they’re busy rooting them out.”

Mevlut gave him his word that he would not set foot outside. He said he would sit and look after the house, but once his father had gone, he found it impossible to stay at home. He filled his pockets with pumpkin seeds, grabbed a small kitchen knife, and rushed off to the higher neighborhoods like a curious child running to the movies.

The streets were busy, and he saw men armed with sticks. He also saw girls chewing gum as they walked back from the grocery store with armfuls of bread and women scrubbing their laundry in the garden, as if nothing had happened. Those God-fearing citizens who hailed from Konya, Giresun, and Tokat did not support the Alevis, but neither did they wish to fight them.

“Don’t walk through there, mister,” said a little boy to a distracted Mevlut.

“They can shoot all the way here from Duttepe,” said the boy’s friend.

Looking as if he was trying to avoid some invisible rainfall, Mevlut worked out where the bullets were likely to hit and crossed to the other side of the street in a single move. The kids followed his movements closely, but they also laughed at him.

“Why aren’t you in school?” said Mevlut.

“School’s closed!” they shouted gleefully.

At the doorway of a house that had burned down, he saw a woman crying; she was bringing out a woven basket and a wet mattress, just like the kind Mevlut and his father had at home. A tall, thin young man and another who was decidedly chubbier stopped Mevlut as he was making his way up a steep slope, but they let him pass when an onlooker confirmed that Mevlut was from Kültepe.

The upper sections of the slope of Kültepe that faced Duttepe had been transformed into a military outpost. Slabs of concrete, steel doors, tin cans filled up with earth, rocks, tiles, and hollow bricks had been used to build crenellated fortifications that sometimes ran right up to people’s homes, only to emerge and fork out from the other side. The walls of Kültepe’s oldest houses were not bulletproof. Yet Mevlut had seen people shooting at the other hill even from these buildings.

Bullets were expensive, and people didn’t shoot too frequently. There would often be long spells of silence, and Mevlut and many others would use these unofficial cease-fires to move around the hill. Toward midday, he found Ferhat near the peak, standing on the roof of a new concrete building right next to the transmission tower that carried electricity into the city.

“The police will be here soon,” said Ferhat. “We don’t stand a chance. The fascists and the police have more weapons, and they have more people. And the press is on their side.”

This was Ferhat’s private view. In front of everyone else, he would say, “We will never let these sons of bitches in!” and would act as if he was about to start shooting any moment, even though he didn’t have a gun.

“Tomorrow the newspapers won’t talk about the massacre of Alevis in Kültepe,” said Ferhat. “They’ll write that the political uprisings were quashed and that the Communists set themselves on fire and committed suicide out of spite.”

“If it’s not going to end well, then why are we even fighting?” said Mevlut.

“Should we just hold our hands up and surrender?”

Mevlut was confused. He saw that Kültepe and the slopes of Duttepe were bursting with houses, streets, and walls and that, in the eight years he’d been in Istanbul, extra floors had been added to many rickety houses, some homes that had originally been built out of mud had been razed to the ground and rebuilt using hollow bricks or even concrete, houses and shops had been painted over, gardens had flourished and trees grown tall, and the slopes of both hills had been covered with ads for cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and soap. Some of these were even illuminated at night.

“The leftists and the rightists should each send their leader to the square down near the Vural bakery to fight it out honorably,” said Mevlut, only half in jest. “Whoever wins the battle can win the war.”

There was something reminiscent of old fairy tales in the fortifications that arose on both hills like castle bastions and in the way the warriors on each side were standing guard.

“Which side would you support in a fight like that, Mevlut?”

“I’d support the socialists,” said Mevlut. “I’m against capitalism.”

“But aren’t we supposed to set up shop in the future and become capitalists ourselves?” said Ferhat with a smile.

“I like how the Communists look out for the poor,” said Mevlut. “But why don’t they believe in God?”

When the yellow helicopter that had been hovering over Kültepe and Duttepe since ten o’clock in the morning returned, the people on both sides of the face-off between the hills went quiet. Everyone positioned at the top of the two hills could see the headphones on the soldier inside the helicopter’s clear cockpit. To see that a helicopter had been sent filled Ferhat and Mevlut with pride, just as it did everyone else on both hills. Kültepe was bedecked with red-and-yellow flags bearing the hammer and sickle, banners made out of cloth were suspended between buildings, and groups of youths hiding behind scarves over their mouths shouted slogans at the helicopter flying above.

The exchange of bullets lasted all day, but there were few injuries, and no one died. Just before sundown, the robotic sound of police loudspeakers informed everyone that a curfew had been imposed on both hills. It also announced that homes in Kültepe would be searched for weapons. A few armed stalwarts stayed on the fortifications preparing to fight the police, but Mevlut and Ferhat were unarmed, and they both went home.

When his father returned from a day spent selling yogurt without running into any trouble on his way back, Mevlut was amazed. Father and son sat down at the table, talking over their lentil soup.

Late at night, there was a power cut in Kültepe, and armored vehicles entered the dark neighborhoods with floodlights blazing, like clumsy but malevolent crabs. Marching behind them like Janissaries after chariots were policemen armed with guns and batons who rushed up the slopes and fanned out into the neighborhoods. There was the sound of heavy gunfire for a time, and then everything sank into a nervous silence. When Mevlut looked out of the window into the pitch-black night, he saw masked informants leading the soldiers to the homes that needed to be raided.

In the morning, their doorbell rang. Two soldiers were looking for weapons. Mevlut’s father explained that this was a yogurt seller’s house and that they had nothing to do with politics, and he welcomed them inside with a respectful bow, sitting them down at the table and offering some tea. The soldiers were both potato nosed, but they weren’t related. One of them was from Kayseri, the other from Tokat. They sat there for about half an hour, discussing the sad events they were witnessing and the danger that innocent bystanders might get caught up in the fray, and whether the Kayseri football team had any chance of get ting promoted this season. Mustafa Efendi asked them how long they had to go until they were discharged and whether their commander was nice or beat them for no reason.

While they had their tea, all the weapons, leftist literature, posters, and banners in Kültepe were confiscated. The vast majority of local university students and angry protesters were taken into custody. Most of them had barely slept for days, and as they were herded onto buses, they were subjected to a first round of beatings, followed by more systematic tortures: bastinadoes, electric shocks, and the like. Once their wounds had healed, their heads were shaved and they were photographed for the newspapers standing beside weapons, posters, and books. Their trials went on for years; in some cases, the prosecutors demanded the death penalty, while in others they asked for a life sentence. Some of these protesters spent ten years in jail, some only five, one or two broke out of prison, and others were acquitted. Some got involved in prison riots and hunger strikes, ending up blind or paralyzed as a result.

Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School had been closed down, and its reopening was delayed by the political tensions that followed the death of thirty-four left-wing demonstrators on International Workers’ Day in Taksim Square as well as a spate of political assassinations all over Istanbul. Mevlut grew even more distant from his classes. He was selling yogurt late into the evening on streets covered with political slogans, and at night he gave most of his earnings over to his father. When school opened again, he really didn’t feel like going back. No longer was he just the eldest in his class, he was now older than anyone else in all of the back rows.

When their report cards were issued in June 1977, Mevlut learned that he had failed to graduate from high school. He spent that summer in uncertainty and fear of loneliness. Ferhat and his family were leaving Kültepe, along with some other Alevis. Back in winter, before all this political upheaval, Ferhat and Mevlut had made plans to start their business — as street vendors — in July. But now Ferhat, busy with the logistics of the move and his Alevi relatives, was no longer so eager. In the middle of July, Mevlut returned to the village. He spent a lot of time with his mother, ignoring her talk of “getting you married.” He hadn’t done his compulsory military service yet, and he had no money, so marriage would mean a return to the village.

At the end of that summer, just before the start of the new term, he stopped by the school. It was a hot September morning, but the old school building was, as ever, cool and shaded. He told Skeleton that he wanted to postpone his registration for a year.

Skeleton had come to respect this student he had known for eight years. “Why would you do that; just grit your teeth for another year and you’ll be done with school,” he said, with surprising warmth. “We’ll all give you a hand, you’re the oldest student here…”

“I’m going to go to cram school next year to prepare for the university admissions exams,” said Mevlut. “This year, I’m going to work to save some money for cram school. I’ll finish high school next year.” He’d thought out every detail of this scenario on the train to Istanbul. “It’s possible.”

“Possible, yes, but by then you’ll be twenty-two,” said Skeleton, ever the heartless bureaucrat. “Never in this school’s history have we graduated anyone at the age of twenty-two.” But he saw the resignation on Mevlut’s face. “Well, good luck, then…I’ll defer your registration for a year. But first you’re going to need a document from the city health department.”

Mevlut didn’t even ask what document he needed. The moment he set foot outside, his heart told him that this would be his last visit to the school building. His mind, meanwhile, warned him not to get too sentimental about the smells of UNICEF milk that still drifted up from the kitchens; of the coal cellar that was no longer in use; of the basement toilet, which he’d been scared even to look at when he was a middle-school kid and where he’d spent his high-school years smoking scrounged cigarettes with all the other boys. He walked down the stairs without a single glance back at the staff room and library doors. Whenever he’d been to school recently, he had always thought, Why do I even bother coming, I’m never going to graduate anyway! Now, as he walked past the Atatürk statue for the last time, he told himself, I could have made it if I’d really wanted to.

He did not tell his father that he wasn’t going to school. He even hid the truth from himself. Since he didn’t go to the health depart ment to get the document he needed in order maintain the illusion that he might really go back to school, his true and private thoughts on the matter gradually adapted to the more official version of the facts. There were even times when he genuinely believed that he was saving money to go to cram school next year.

Other times, as soon as he was done delivering yogurt to a gradually shrinking roster of regular customers, he would drop off his stick, his scales, and his trays with someone he knew and run out into the city streets, to wherever his legs happened to take him.

He loved it as a place where all manner of wonderful things seemed to be going on at the same time, no matter where he looked. Mostly, these things tended to happen around Şişli, Harbiye, Taksim, and Beyoğlu. He would hop on a bus in the morning with no ticket, going as far into these neighborhoods as he could without getting caught, and then, with no load on his shoulders, he would walk freely into those same streets he couldn’t enter when he had yogurt to carry, savoring the joy of getting lost in the commotion and the noise of the city, looking in the shopwindows on his way. He liked the mannequin displays of women in long skirts next to cheerful children in two-piece suits, and he always looked closely at the trunkless mannequin legs in hosiers’ shops. He might get caught up in a fantasy his mind had invented on the spot and spend ten minutes following a woman with light brown hair walking on the other side of the road, until an impulse would lead him toward the first restaurant he came across, and he would enter it, asking for the first high-school classmate that popped into his head: “Is he around?” Sometimes they would put him off with a brusque “We don’t need a dishwasher!” before he could even get a word in. Back on the street, Neriman would cross his mind for a moment, but then he would follow his imagination again and start walking in the opposite direction, toward the backstreets of the Tünel area, or he might pay a visit to the Rüya Cinema, where he would linger in the narrow lobby looking at the posters and movie stills, until he could see whether Ferhat’s distant relative was there, checking tickets at the door.

All the happiness and beauty that life had to offer only revealed themselves when his mind drifted off into fantasies of a world far removed from his own. His guilt would flare up like a gentle ache in a corner of his soul whenever he went to the cinema and got caught up daydreaming. He would blame himself for wasting time, for missing the subtitles, for focusing only on the beautiful women in the film or on odd details that weren’t that important to the plot. Whenever he got an erection at the cinema, sometimes for good reason and sometimes for no reason at all, he would hunch over in his seat and work out that if he got home two hours before his father did in the evening, he would have plenty of time to masturbate without any worry of getting caught.

Sometimes, instead of going to the cinema, he would visit the barbershop in Tarlabaşı where Mohini worked as an apprentice, or drop by a coffeehouse favored by Alevis and left-wing chauffeurs to have a chat with the cashier boy he knew through Ferhat, watch people playing rummikub while keeping an eye on the television. He knew that he was just killing time, doing nothing at all, and heading down the wrong path anyway because of having dropped out of high school, but the truth was so painful that he preferred the comfort of other thoughts: he would start a business with Ferhat, they would be street vendors but different from all the others (he imagined stacking yogurt trays on a wheeled vehicle with a bell that chimed with every movement), or they could open a small tobacco store in the empty shop he’d just passed or maybe even a convenience store in place of that struggling shop that sold dress shirts and did dry cleaning…One day, he was going to make so much money that everyone would be amazed.

Even so, he could see for himself that it was getting harder to make a living by selling yogurt door to door, and families were growing accustomed to serving yogurt on their dinner tables in the same glass container the grocer sold it in.

“Mevlut, my boy, you know the only reason we still buy farm yogurt is so we can see your face every now and then,” said a kindly old lady. No one asked when he would finish high school anymore.

—

Mustafa Efendi. If they’d stopped at the glass bowls that came out in the 1960s, we would have found a way to deal with it. Those first bowls were thick and heavy and looked like clay pots, the deposit costs were high, and if they cracked or you chipped a corner somewhere, the store would refuse to refund the deposit for the empty container. Housewives would put these empty pots to good use: as cat-food bowls, ashtrays, storage jars for used cooking oil, bath bowls, and soap dishes. Having used the pots for all sorts of kitchen and household needs, people might suddenly think that they should return them to the shop and get their deposit back, and that’s how any one family’s makeshift bin or slimy dog bowl would get a quick rinse from a hose in some workshop in Kağıthane before landing on some other Istanbul family’s lovely, radiant dinner table, touted as the cleanest, healthiest new type of yogurt bowl. Sometimes, instead of using a clean plate as usual, customers would put one of these empty bowls on my scale pans so I could weigh my yogurt into it, and then I just couldn’t resist saying something. “Ma’am, you have to believe me when I say I’m telling you all this for your own good,” I’d begin. “But you should know that the hospitals in Çapa use these bowls to store urine, and on Heybeliada they use them as spittoons in the TB sanatorium…”

Eventually they brought out a lighter, cheaper version of these glass bowls. With this kind, there was no deposit for the grocer to refund, and they said, Just give them a rinse and use them as tumblers, and they even make nice gifts for housewives. They buried the cost in the price of the yogurt, of course. Still, thanks to my strong shoulders and to original Silivri yogurt, we were somehow keeping up, but only until the big dairy companies designed a fancy sticker with a picture of a cow on it and stuck it on their glass bowls, spelling out their brand name in great big letters, and advertising on the TV. Then they sent their Ford minivans, each sporting a picture of the same cow, down the narrow, winding streets to supply the grocery stores, and that destroyed our livelihoods. Thank goodness we still have boza to sell in the evenings and keep us going. If only Mevlut would stop messing around and start working a little harder, and hand over all the money he makes to his father, we’d have something to send back to the village for the winter.

12. How to Marry a Girl from the Village

My Daughter Is Not for Sale

Korkut. Six months after the war and all the fires last year, most of the Alevis in the neighborhood were gone. Some of them moved to other hills farther away, like Oktepe, while others went to live in the Ghaazi Quarter at the far outskirts of the city. I wish them all the best. Let’s hope they don’t start troubling our police and our gendarmes over there, too. If you find yourself on the path of a six-lane motorway built to modern international standards, speeding toward your unregistered chicken coop of a house at eighty kilometers an hour, you can claim all you want that “Revolution is the only solution!” but you’d only be fooling yourself.

Once that whole tangle of leftists was gone, the value of the deeds issued by the councilman increased overnight. Armed gangs and profiteers cropped up trying to claim new land. The same people who wouldn’t give old Hamit Vural a penny when he said, Let’s buy new carpets for the mosque, who said behind his back that he should pay for them himself, since he drove the Bingöl and Elazığ Alevis out and took their land, were themselves quick to snatch up land and title deeds according to the new development plans. Mr. Hamit also embarked on some new construction projects in Kültepe. He opened a new bread factory in Harmantepe and spared no expense building a dormitory with televisions, a prayer room, and a karate school for the bachelors he brought over from the village. When I got back from military service, I started working as an assistant on the construction site for this dormitory, and I managed the on-site supply store. On Saturdays, Mr. Hadji Hamit would share a meal of ayran, meat, rice, and salad with all these unmarried, patriotic young men in the dormitory cafeteria. I would like to thank him here for having so generously helped me to get married.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. I am struggling to find a suitable match for my eldest daughter, Vediha, who is already sixteen. Normally it is best for the women to sort these things out among themselves while they’re washing their laundry or out at the public baths or the market, or while visiting each other, but my orphan girls have no mother and no aunts to speak of, so it’s all been left up to your humble servant. When people found out that I took a bus all the way to Istanbul just for this purpose, they said all I was after was a rich husband for my beautiful darling Vediha and that I would take her whole bride price and spend it on rakı. The reason that they would envy a cripple like me and talk behind my back is simple: despite my crooked neck, I’m still a jolly fellow who takes joy in his daughters, lives life to the fullest, and can also enjoy an occasional drink. It’s just a jealous lie that I used to get drunk and beat my late wife, or that I only went to Istanbul so I could forget my crooked neck and throw some money at the girls in Beyoğlu. In Istanbul, I dropped by the coffeehouses where the yogurt sellers are usually found early in the day and saw some old friends who are still working, still selling yogurt in the morning and boza in the evening. Not that you can just come straight out and say, “I’m looking for a husband for my daughter!” You have to start with some small talk and let friendship do the rest, and if you end up in a bar at night, one bottle will lead to the next, and before you know it, everyone’s talking more freely. I may have boasted drunkenly about my darling Vediha during one of these conversations, passing around a photo we took at the Billur Photography Studio in Akşehir.

—

Uncle Hasan. Every now and then I looked at the photograph of the girl from Gümüşdere in my pocket. Very pretty. I showed it to Safiye in the kitchen one day. “What do you think, Safiye?” I said. “Might she be right for Korkut? She’s our Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman’s daughter. Her father came to Istanbul, all the way to my shop. We talked for a while. He used to be a hardworking man, but it turns out he wasn’t strong enough; he got crushed under that stick and had to go back to the village. Clearly he’s out of money. But Abdurrahman Efendi is a wily old fox.”

—

Aunt Safiye. My little Korkut is getting worn out from all this building work, the dormitory, that car, being a driver, and with his karate, too, and we would love to get him married, but he’s so tough, God bless him, and so proud as well. If I were to say to him, You’ve turned twenty-six, let me go to the village and find you a girl, he’d say, No, I’ll find one myself in the city. If I were to say, All right, do it yourself, look around in Istanbul for a girl you want to marry, he would just say that he wants a girl who is pure and obedient, and you don’t find any of those here in this city. So I took the photograph of Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman’s pretty daughter and stuck it somewhere by the radio. When he gets home, my beloved Korkut is too tired to do anything but watch TV and listen to the horse races on the radio.

—

Korkut. Nobody knows that I bet on the horse races, not even my mother. I don’t do it for the money; I just do it for fun. One night four years ago, we added a room to the house. I sit alone in that room listening to the horse races live on the radio. This time, while I was staring at the ceiling, a ray of light seemed to shine on the radio, and I felt that the girl in the photograph set there was looking at me, and that the way she was looking at me would be a consolation to me for the rest of my life. I was filled with gladness.

“Mom, who’s this girl whose picture is by the radio?” I asked in passing. “She’s from back home, from Gümüşdere!” she said. “Isn’t she an angel? Shall I arrange a match for you two?” “I don’t want a village girl,” I said. “Especially not the kind who gives out her photograph left and right.” “It’s not like that,” said my mom. “I heard her crooked-necked father refuses to show her picture to anyone, they say he’s jealous of his daughter and turns suitors away at the door. Your father pressed him for a picture because he knew that this shy girl was meant to be such a beauty.”

I believed this lie. Perhaps you know for sure that it was a lie, and you’re laughing at how easily I let myself be taken in. I’ll tell you one thing, though: people who make fun of everything can never truly fall in love, nor truly believe in God. That’s because they’re too proud. But just like believing in God, falling in love is such a sacred feeling that it leaves you with no room for any other passions.

Her name was Vediha. “I can’t get this girl out of my head,” I told my mother a week later. “I’ll go back to the village to watch her in secret and speak to her father.”

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. The suitor is just a hothead. He took me to a bar. Vediha is my daughter, my treasure, my bouquet of flowers, these people would never understand, they’ve scrounged up a little money here in Istanbul and now they’re getting above themselves. Some karate-chopping upstart makes a little money sucking up to Mr. Hadji Hamit from Rize and he’s driving a Ford so now he thinks he can have my daughter? I said several times MY DAUGHTER IS NOT FOR SALE. They were frowning at the next table when they heard me, but then they smiled as if it were a joke.

—

Vediha. I’m sixteen years old, I’m not a child anymore, and I know (as everyone does) that my father wants to marry me off, though I pretend I have no idea. Sometimes I dream that an evil man is following me…I finished Gümüşdere Primary School three years ago. If I’d gone to Istanbul, I would have graduated from high school by now, but there’s no middle school in our village, so no girl has ever gone that far.

—

Samiha. I’m twelve and just in my last year of primary school. Sometimes my sister Vediha picks me up after school. A man started fol lowing us one day on the way back home. We walked on in silence, and doing like my sister, I didn’t turn around to look. Instead of going straight home, we headed for the grocer’s, though we didn’t go in. We walked down dark streets, past houses with no windows, under the shivering plane tree, and through the neighborhood behind our house, and we got home late. But the man kept following us. My sister never even smiled. “He’s an idiot!” I said, fuming, as I stepped inside. “All boys are idiots.”

—

Rayiha. I’m thirteen years old, and I finished primary school last year. Vediha has plenty of suitors. The latest, supposedly, is from Istanbul. That’s what they’re saying, but really he’s the son of a yogurt seller from Cennetpınar. Vediha loves going to Istanbul, but I don’t want her to like this man, because then she’ll get married and leave. Once Vediha is married, it’ll be my turn next. I still have three years to go, but once I’m her age, I won’t have anyone running after me the way she has now — and even if I did, who cares, it’s not like I want any of them. Everyone always says, “You’re so clever, Rayiha.” Looking out the window with my crooked-necked father, I can see Vediha and Samiha coming home from school.

—

Korkut. I couldn’t take my adoring eyes off my beloved as she walked her little sister home from school. It was my first glimpse of her, and it filled my heart with a love far deeper than I had felt just seeing her photograph. Her straight back, her slender arms, were all so perfect, and I thanked the Lord for that. I knew that I would be unhappy if I didn’t get to marry her. So I got more and more worked up thinking about how that sly Crooked Neck would drive a hard bargain, until I rued the day I’d fallen in love.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. At the suitor’s insistence, we met again in Beyşehir. I thought to myself, If you’re so in love, then money should be no object. The fate and fortune of my darling Vediha, of all my daughters, are in my hands, so I was leery even as I went to the restaurant, and before I’d even had my first drink, I said once again, “I’m really sorry, young man, I understand you very well, but MY BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER IS ABSOLUTELY NOT FOR SALE.”

—

Korkut. That pigheaded Abdurrahman Efendi had already spouted a whole list of demands before he’d even finished his first drink. I wouldn’t be able to afford it even with my father and Süleyman’s help, even if we all pulled together, took out a loan, sold our house in Duttepe and the land we’d fenced off in Kültepe.

—

Süleyman. Back in Istanbul, my brother decided that the only hope of solving his romantic woes was to call upon Mr. Hadji Hamit, so we decided to put on a karate exhibition match for his first visit to the dormitory. The clean-shaven workers fought well in their spotless training uniforms. Mr. Hamit had us sit on either side of him during dinner. The venerable gentleman had been to Mecca two times — twice a hadji! — he had huge holdings of land and property, many men at his command, and he had founded our mosque, so that every time I looked at his white beard, I felt lucky to be sitting so close to him. He treated us like his own sons. He asked after our father. (“Why isn’t Hasan here?” he said, remembering Dad’s name.) He inquired about the condition of our house and about the latest room we’d built and the half floor we’d added with its own external staircase, and he even asked where that land was that my father and Uncle Mustafa had claimed and gone to register with the neighborhood councilman. He knew everything: he knew where all the land was, whose plot was next to or across from anyone else’s, he knew about the houses that had been built or left half finished, when people were arguing over a plot they owned jointly, he kept track of which buildings and shops had been built over the past year, down to the last wall and chimney, he knew exactly which street was the last street on any given hill to have electricity and running water, and he knew what route the ring road was going to take.

—

Hadji Hamit Vural. “Young man, I hear you’re lovesick and in a lot of pain, is it true?” I asked, and he turned his eyes away in shame: he was embarrassed not about being head over heels but about his friends discovering his hopeless romance and his being unable to sort it out by himself. I turned to his fat little brother. “God willing, we shall find a solution to your brother’s heartache,” I said. “But he has made a mistake that you must avoid. Tell me, what’s your name? All right, then, Süleyman, my son, if you’re going to love a girl as deeply as your brother here…you’ve got to make sure to start loving her after you’re married. If you’re in a rush, then maybe wait until you’re engaged, or perhaps until you’ve got an informal agreement…At least wait until the bride price has been decided. But if you fall in love before all that, like your brother, and you sit down to discuss the price with the girl’s father, then those cunning, crafty fathers will ask you for the moon. There are two kinds of love in our land. The first kind is when you fall in love with someone because you don’t know them at all. In fact, most couples would never fall in love if they got to know each other even a little bit before getting married. This is why our Blessed Prophet Muhammad did not think it was appropriate for there to be any contact between the boy and the girl before marriage. There is also the kind that happens when two people get married and fall in love after that, when they have a whole life to share between them, and that can only happen when you marry someone you don’t know.”

—

Süleyman. I said, “Sir, I would never fall in love with a girl I didn’t know.” “Did you say a girl you do know, or a girl you don’t know?” asked the radiant Mr. Hadji Hamit. “Leave the knowing to one side; the best kind of love is the love you feel for someone you haven’t even seen. Blind people know how to fall in love, you know.” Mr. Hamit laughed. Then his men laughed, too, though they didn’t really get it. Before we left, my brother and I kissed Mr. Hadji Hamit’s blessed hand with deference. My brother punched me hard on the shoulder when we were alone, saying, “We’ll see what kind of wife you find in this city.”

13. Mevlut’s Mustache

The Owner of Unregistered Land

NOT UNTIL much later, in May 1978, in a letter his elder sister had written to their father in Istanbul, did Mevlut discover that Korkut was about to marry a girl from the neighboring village of Gümüşdere. His sister had been writing her father for almost fifteen years, sometimes regularly, sometimes when the mood struck her. Mevlut would read the letters to his father in the same focused, serious voice he used to read out the newspaper. On finding out that the reason for Korkut’s visit was a girl from Gümüşdere, they both felt strangely jealous, and downright angry. Why hadn’t Korkut mentioned anything? Two days later, when father and son went over to visit the Aktaş family and learned all the details, it occurred to Mevlut that his life in Istanbul would be so much easier if only he, too, could count on a patron and protector as powerful as Hadji Hamit Vural.

—

Mustafa Efendi. Two weeks after our visit to the Aktaş family, during which we found out that Korkut was getting married with Hadji Hamit Vural’s support, I was at my older brother Hasan’s grocery store, chatting about trivial matters, when he suddenly put on a serious face and announced that it had been decided: the new ring road would pass through Kültepe, and the cadastral surveyors would therefore no longer be coming to that side of the hill (and even if they did, they would have no choice but to set those plots aside for the road, no matter how much you tried to bribe them), meaning that no one would be able to have the land around there registered officially in his name, and the government would be paying no one a single penny of compensation for the land it expropriated to build its six-lane highway.

“I realized our plot in Kültepe was going to go for nothing,” he said, “so I sold it to Hadji Hamit Vural, who is collecting all the land on that side of the hill. He’s a generous man, God bless him, and he paid me handsomely!”

“What! You mean you sold my land without even asking me?”

“It’s not your land, Mustafa. It’s our land. I went to claim it, and you gave me a hand. The councilman did things properly and wrote both our names under the date and signature on the piece of paper he gave us, just as he did with everyone else. He gave the document to me, and you didn’t seem to mind him doing that. But that piece of paper was going to be worthless in another year. Forget about a house, no one’s going to start anything on that side of the hill, because they know it’ll just get demolished. You must have noticed that not a single wall has been going up.”

“How much did you sell it for?”

He was saying “Now, why don’t you calm down a little and stop using that tone with your older brother…” when a woman walked into the shop and asked for some rice. I stormed out angrily while he was busy with his plastic scoop, putting rice from a sack into a paper bag. I could have killed him! I have nothing in this world except for my slum house and half of that land! I didn’t tell anyone. Not even Mevlut. The next day, I went back to the shop. Hasan was folding old newspapers into paper bags. “How much did you sell it for?” Again, he didn’t say. I could no longer sleep at night. A week later, when the shop was empty, he suddenly told me how much the land had gone for. What? He said I would get half, of course. But it was such a pittance that all I could say was: I DO NOT ACCEPT THAT SUM. “Well, I don’t exactly have it anymore,” said my brother, “we’re arranging Korkut’s wedding, aren’t we!” “Excuse me? Are you saying you’re marrying off your son with the money from my land?” “I told you poor Korkut is smitten!” he said. “Don’t get so mad, it’ll be Mevlut’s turn soon, Crooked Neck’s daughter has two sisters. Let’s get one married off to Mevlut. What’s that poor boy going to do?” “Don’t you worry about Mevlut,” I said. “He’s going to finish high school first and then do his military service. Anyway, if there was a suitable girl, you’d take her for your Süleyman.”

—

It was from Süleyman that Mevlut found out that the unregistered land his father and his uncle had claimed in Kültepe thirteen years ago had been sold. According to Süleyman, there was no such thing as “the owner of unregistered land” anyway. No one had built a home there, or even planted a single tree, and it would be impossible to stop the government’s six-lane road with a piece of paper obtained from a neighborhood councilman years ago. When his father brought the topic up two weeks later, Mevlut acted as if it were news to him. He understood his father’s fury, and he resented the Aktaş family for having sold their shared property without even asking, and when he considered that, on top of this, they had been so much more successful in Istanbul than Mevlut and his father had, he felt increasingly angry, as if he’d suffered a personal injustice. But he also knew that he couldn’t afford to cut his ties with his uncle and cousins, that without them he would be left all alone in the city.

“Now listen here, if you ever go to your uncle’s place again without my permission, if you meet up with Korkut and Süleyman again, it’ll have to be over my dead body,” said his father. “Understood?”

“Understood,” said Mevlut. “I swear I won’t.”

But as his oath kept him away from his aunt’s kitchen and stopped him from spending time with Süleyman, he regretted it almost immediately. Ferhat wasn’t around either, as he had left Kültepe with his family last year after high school. So after his father had gone back to the village, Mevlut spent part of the month of June wandering around teahouses and children’s playgrounds alone with his box of Kısmet. But the money he earned in a day was only slightly more than what he spent, and he found he couldn’t make even a quarter of what he used to pull in working with Ferhat.

At the beginning of July in 1978, Mevlut took a bus back to the village. At first, it was fun being with his mother and sisters as well as his father. But the whole village was busy preparing for Korkut’s wedding, and Mevlut found it unsettling. He walked around the hills with his aging dog, his old friend Kâmil. He remembered the smell of grass drying in the sun, the scent of acorns and cold streams weaving through the rocks. But he just couldn’t shake off the feeling of missing out on all the things happening in Istanbul and on the opportunity to get rich.

One afternoon he dug out the two banknotes he had hidden in a corner of the garden under the plane tree. He told his mother he was going back to Istanbul. “Your father won’t like it!” she said, but he ignored her. “There’s lots of work to do!” he said. He managed to take the minibus down to Beyşehir that day without running into his father. In town, he ate minced meat and eggplant at the cheap diner across from the Eşrefoğlu Mosque while he waited for the bus. At night, as the bus made its steady way toward Istanbul, he sensed that his life and his future were now entirely in his own hands, that he was a grown man standing on his own, and he was thrilled at the endless possibilities that lay ahead.

In Istanbul, he realized that his month away had already cost him some customers. It never used to be that way. Of course some families would always just draw their curtains shut and stay out of sight, while others would leave for the summer. (Some yogurt sellers followed their customers all the way to their summerhouses on the Princes’ Islands, in Erenköy, and in Suadiye.) Still, sales never used to suffer this much during the summer, because the cafés would buy yogurt to make ayran. But in that summer of 1978, Mevlut grasped the truth that selling yogurt on the streets was a dying craft. The number of yogurt vendors was obviously dwindling fast among both the hardworking, apron-clad men of his father’s generation and the eager young strivers of Mevlut’s, who were always looking for something else to do.

The increasing hardship of the yogurt seller’s life had turned his father into a man full of nothing but anger and hostility, but it did not affect Mevlut in the same way. Even on his lowest, loneliest days, he never lost the smile that his customers found so refreshing. The aunties and the doormen’s wives in the tall new apartment blocks with their NO STREET VENDORS signs, and the old shrews who usually took so much pleasure in pointing out “Street vendors are not allowed on the elevator,” always took pains to explain to Mevlut exactly how to open the elevator doors and what buttons he was supposed to press. There were many maids and doormen’s daughters who admired his boyish good looks from kitchens, stairwells, and apartment doors, though he had no idea how to go about even talking to them. To hide his ignorance even from himself, he became convinced that this was the way to “be respectful.” He had seen men his age in the movies who had no trouble at all talking to girls, and he would have liked to be more like them. But in truth, he wasn’t too fond of foreign films, in which you never quite knew who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. But whenever he touched himself, he still mostly fantasized about the foreign women from the movies and the Turkish magazines. He liked to indulge in these fantasies dispassionately as he lay in bed with the morning sun warming his half-naked body.

He liked being at home all by himself. It meant he was his own master, if only until his father came back. He tried moving the wobbly table with the short leg somewhere else, he stood on a chair and fixed that end of the curtain that drooped on its rail, he put the cutlery and the pots and pans he didn’t use back into the cupboard. He swept the floor and cleaned everything much more often than when his father was around. Still, he couldn’t ignore the thought that this one-room house was even smellier and messier than usual. Savoring his solitude and his own ripe smell, he felt himself captive to the same urge that had always drawn his father toward a moody loneliness, the very same feeling that roiled his own blood. He was now twenty-one years old.

He stopped by the coffeehouses in Kültepe and Duttepe. He felt like hanging out with the familiar faces from the neighborhood and the youths who loafed around watching TV, so he went a few times to the place where day laborers congregated in the mornings. At eight o’clock every morning, they would gather in an empty lot at the entrance to Mecidiyeköy, offering their labor. They were mostly unskilled workers who, having been put to work somewhere immediately upon arriving from the village, had then been let go to save their employers the insurance costs; now they would take any job they could get while they stayed with their relatives on one of the nearby hills. Young men living the shame of unemployment and foolish hotheads who couldn’t hold any job, they all came here in the morning to smoke their cigarettes as they waited for the foremen who came with their vans from all over the city. Among the young men who whiled away the hours in the coffeehouses, there were some who occasionally went out to the ends of the city for day jobs and boasted about the money they made, but it took Mevlut only half a day to make as much.

At the end of one of those days, when he felt particularly alone and demoralized, he left his trays, his stick, and all of his other equipment at a restaurant and went to look for Ferhat. It took Mevlut two hours, packed like a sardine in a red public-transport bus that reeked of sweat, to get to Gaziosmanpaşa on the outskirts of the city. Out of curiosity, he looked inside the fridges that served as window displays for convenience stores, and he saw that the yogurt companies had conquered these neighborhoods, too. In a grocery store in a backstreet, he saw a fridge with yogurt in a tray, ready to be sold by the kilo.

He got on a minibus, and by the time he reached the Ghaazi Quarter outside the city, it was already getting dark. He walked to the mosque at the other end of the neighborhood, on a road that consisted entirely of an almost-vertical slope. The forest behind the hill was supposed to be an unspoiled, verdant marker of Istanbul’s outer limits, but it seemed the city’s newest migrants had been nibbling away at bits of the woodland, undeterred by all the barbed-wire fencing. The neighborhood was covered in revolutionary slogans, hammer-and-sickle signs, and red-star stencils; the whole place seemed much poorer to Mevlut than Kültepe or Duttepe. In a daze, but with a vague fear always at the back of his mind, he wandered the streets, in and out of the most crowded coffeehouses, hoping to see the familiar face of one of the Alevis who had been forced out of Kültepe. He asked around for Ferhat but found nothing, nor did he see anyone he knew. The streets of the Ghaazi Quarter after dark, without even a lamppost to illuminate them, seemed to him more dismal than any distant Anatolian town.

He got back home and masturbated all night. He would do it once and then, after he’d ejaculated and wound down, the shame and guilt would set in, and he would swear: never again. Some time would pass before he would begin to worry about breaking his oath, and therefore committing a sin. It would seem to him only prudent to do it quickly once more, to get it out of his system at last, and then renounce the wicked habit until the end of his days. That’s how he would end up masturbating again two hours later.

Sometimes his mind went places he really wished it wouldn’t. He questioned the existence of God, he thought about the most obscene words he knew, and sometimes he visualized an explosion, like something from the movies, which would shatter the whole world into pieces. Was it really him thinking all these horrifying thoughts?

Ever since he’d stopped going to school, he’d been shaving only once a week. He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself. Then he didn’t shave at all for two weeks. He decided to start again when his stubbly face began to scare some of his loyal customers, who valued cleanliness as much as a layer of cream on their yogurt. Inside the house, it was no longer as dark as it used to be. (He couldn’t remember why it used to be that way.) But he still went outside with his shaving mirror as his father did. Once he had shaved off his beard, he finally accepted the truth he had been dimly aware of for some time. Wiping the foam from his face and his neck, he looked in the mirror: yes, he had a mustache now.

Mevlut didn’t like himself too much with a mustache. He didn’t think he looked “nice.” That baby-faced boy everyone thought was so cute had disappeared, replaced by one of the millions of men he saw out on the streets every day. All those customers who thought he was so charming, the old ladies who still asked whether he was in school, and the housemaids who gave him longing looks from under their headscarves, would they still like him now? His mustache took the shape of everyone else’s, even though he hadn’t touched it at all. It was heartbreaking to think that he was no longer the person his aunt used to cuddle on her lap; he realized that this was the start of something from which there could be no turning back, but at the same time he felt a greater strength in this new self.

Whenever he masturbated, there was something at the back of his mind that he had always forbidden himself to think about but that now, sadly, he could no longer keep back there: he was twenty-one years old and he had never slept with a woman. A pretty girl with a headscarf and good morals, the kind he would like for a wife, would never sleep with him before they got married; and he would never want to marry a woman willing to have sex with him before the wedding.

His priority wasn’t marriage anyway, but finding a kind woman he could hold and kiss, a woman he could have sex with. In his mind, he saw all these things as being separate from marriage, but apart from marriage, he found himself unable to obtain sexual contact. He could have tried to start something with one of the girls who showed some interest (they might go to the park or to the cinema, or have a soft drink somewhere), made her believe he intended to marry her (this would probably be the hard part), and then slept with her. But only a selfish brute would do that sort of thing, not Mevlut. Not to mention that he might end up getting shot by the tearful girl’s older brothers or her father. The only girls who would sleep with a boy casually and without their families finding out were those who didn’t wear headscarves, and Mevlut knew that no girl born and bred in the city would ever be interested in him (no matter how rakish he looked with a mustache). The last resort was to go to one of the brothels in Karaköy. Mevlut never did.

One night toward the end of summer, a day after he’d happened to walk past Uncle Hasan’s shop, Mevlut heard a knock at his door and was really pleased to see Süleyman standing outside. He embraced his cousin warmly and noticed that Süleyman had also grown a mustache.

—

Süleyman. Mevlut called me his brother and gave me such a big hug that I ended up with tears in my eyes. We laughed about how we’d both grown mustaches unbeknownst to each other.

“You’ve styled yours like the leftists!” I said.

“What?”

“Oh come on, you know what I’m talking about, it’s the leftists who cut the tips into triangles like that. Did you copy Ferhat?”

“I didn’t copy anyone. I just cut it the way I felt like, I wasn’t going for any particular shape…Anyway, that means you’ve cut yours like a Grey Wolf.”

We took the mirror from the shelf and examined each other’s facial hair.

“Mevlut, don’t come to the wedding in the village,” I said, “but there’s going to be a wedding reception for Korkut two weeks from now at the Şahika Wedding Hall in Mecidiyeköy, and you’re coming to that. Uncle Mustafa is being difficult, he’s tearing the family apart, but you don’t need to be like him. Look at how the Kurds and the Alevis always watch out for each other. They band together and build each other houses, nonstop. When one of them finds work somewhere, the first thing he does is bring over anyone from the clan still left in his village.”

“Isn’t that how the rest of us got here, though?” said Mevlut. “You lot are turning a profit, but no matter how hard we work, my father and I still can’t seem to save enough to enjoy any of the opportunities Istanbul has to offer. And now our land is gone.”

“We haven’t forgotten your share in the land, Mevlut. Hadji Hamit Vural is a just, generous man. Otherwise my brother Korkut would never have been able to find the money he needed to get married. Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman Efendi has another two beautiful daughters. We’ll take the older one of the two for you; I hear she’s very pretty. Otherwise, who is going to find you a wife, look after you, and protect you? Being alone in this big city is unbearable.”

“I’ll find myself a girl to marry, I don’t need anyone’s help,” Mevlut said stubbornly.

14. Mevlut Falls in Love

Only God Could Have Ordained This Chance Encounter

AT THE END of August, Mevlut went to Korkut and Vediha’s wedding party. Even he wasn’t exactly sure why he’d changed his mind. The morning of the wedding, he wore a suit he had bought at a discount from a tailor his father knew. He also put on the faded blue tie his father wore on religious holidays and whenever he had to go to a government office. With some money he’d put aside, he bought twenty German marks from a jeweler in Şişli.

The Şahika Wedding Hall was on the sloping road from Duttepe to Mecidiyeköy. It was often used by municipal authorities and labor unions for circumcision parties or to host the wedding receptions of foremen as well as laborers, typically with the support of their employers. During those summers when they had worked together as street vendors, Mevlut and Ferhat had snuck inside two or three times toward the end of a party to cadge a free lemonade and a few biscuits; and yet this place, which he had so often passed, had not left much of an impression on Mevlut. When he walked downstairs into the hall, the place was so packed, the little orchestra was so loud, the subterranean atmosphere so hot and stuffy that, for a moment, Mevlut had trouble breathing.

—

Süleyman. Me, my brother, and all the rest of us were so happy when we saw that Mevlut had come. My brother, looking sharp in his off-white cream suit and a purple dress shirt, could not have been nicer to Mevlut, introducing him to everyone before bringing him over to our table, where all the young men were sitting. “Don’t be fooled by this baby face,” he said. “He’s the toughest guy in our family.”

“Well, my dear Mevlut, now that you’ve got a mustache, plain lemonade just won’t cut it,” I said. I showed him the bottle under the table and filled his glass up with vodka. “Have you ever had genuine Russian Communist vodka?” “I haven’t even tried Turkish vodka yet,” said Mevlut. “If this stuff is even stronger than rakı, it’ll go straight to my head.” “It won’t, it’ll just make you relax, and maybe you’ll even find the courage to look around and see if anyone catches your eye.” “I do look around!” said Mevlut. But he didn’t. When the first sip of vodka and lemonade touched his tongue, he recoiled as if he’d been burned, but then he pulled himself together. “Süleyman, I wanted to pin a twenty-mark note on Korkut, but I’m not sure it’s enough?” “Where on earth do you find these marks, if the police catch you they’ll lock you up,” I said, just to scare him. “Everyone does it, though. You’re a fool if you keep your savings in Turkish liras; with all this inflation it’ll be worth half as much by the end of the day,” he said. I turned to the rest of the table. “Mevlut here might look all innocent,” I said. “But he’s the craftiest, most tightfisted street vendor I’ve ever seen. For a scrooge like you to pin twenty marks on the groom…it’s a big deal…But enough with this yogurt business, Mevlut. Our fathers were yogurt sellers, too, but we’ve all got different jobs now.” “I plan to set up my own business one day, don’t you worry. Then you’re all going to wonder why you didn’t come up with it yourselves.” “Go on, then, tell us what you’re going to do.” “Mevlut, you should come and be my business partner!” said Hidayet the Boxer. (This was his nickname because he had a nose like a boxer’s and because, once he knew he would be kicked out of school anyway, he knocked out the chemistry teacher Show-Off Fevzi with a single punch, just like my brother.) “I haven’t got some grocery store or kebab joint like this bunch. I’ve got a real shop, it sells building materials,” said Hidayet. “It’s not even yours, it’s your brother-in-law’s,” I said. “We can all manage that much.” “Guys, the girls are looking this way.” “Where?” “The girls at the bride’s table.” “Hey, don’t all stare like that,” I said. “Those girls are my family now.” “We’re not,” said Hidayet the Boxer, still staring. “Those girls are too young anyway. We’re not child molesters.” “Careful, guys, Hadji Hamit is here.” “So what?” “Are we supposed to stand up and sing the national anthem?” “Hide the vodka, don’t even try to have it with your lemonade, he doesn’t miss a trick. He hates this sort of thing, and he’ll make us pay for it later.”

—

Mevlut was looking at the girls sitting with the bride at the far table when Hadji Hamit Vural came in with his men. All heads turned as soon as he walked in, and he was immediately surrounded by people wanting to kiss his hand.

Mevlut would also have liked to marry a pretty girl like Vediha once he turned twenty-five. This would only be possible after making lots of money and gaining the protection of someone like Hadji Hamit. He understood that, for this to happen, he would have to go and do his military service, work very hard, and leave the yogurt to find a proper occupation or run a shop.

Eventually, emboldened by the alcohol, the rising noise levels, and the increasingly lively atmosphere inside the hall, he started staring at the bride’s table directly. He also felt that God was with him and that his fortunes might be about to lift.

Many years later, Mevlut would still be able to replay those moments — the conversation around him and what he saw at the table where the pretty girls sat (occasionally obscured by people standing in his line of sight) — like scenes from a movie. But it was a movie in which the dialogue and the photography were not always entirely clear:

“They’re not that young, you know,” said a voice at the table. “They’re all old enough to get married.”

“Even the one with the blue headscarf?” “Guys, please don’t look straight at them like that,” said Süleyman. “Half these girls are going back to the village, the other half will stay in the city.” “We don’t even know where they live…” “Some of them live in Gültepe, some in Kuştepe.” “You’re definitely taking us there…” “Which one would you want to write letters to?” “None of them,” said an honest young man Mevlut didn’t know. “They’re sitting so far that I can’t even tell them apart.” “All the more reason to write them letters, since they’re so far away.”

“Our Vediha’s ID card says she’s sixteen, but actually she’s seventeen,” said Süleyman. “Her sisters are fifteen and sixteen. Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman Efendi had them registered late, so they would have more time to sit at home and entertain their father.”

“What’s that youngest one called?”

“Yes, she’s the prettiest.”

“Her sister’s nothing special.”

“One of them is Samiha; the other one is Rayiha,” said Süleyman.

Mevlut flushed with surprise at his own quickening heartbeat.

“The other three girls are also from their village…” “The one with the blue headscarf isn’t bad at all…” “None of these girls is younger than fourteen.” “They’re children,” said the Boxer. “If I were their father, I wouldn’t let them wear headscarves yet.”

“In our village, you put on your headscarf once you’re done with primary school,” said Mevlut, unable to contain his excitement.

“The youngest finished primary school this year.”

“Which one’s that, the one with the white headscarf?” asked Mevlut.

“She’s the pretty one, the younger one.”

“I would never get married to a village girl,” said Hidayet the Boxer.

“And a city girl would never get married to you.”

“Why?” said Hidayet, somewhat offended. “How many city girls do you even know?”

“Loooads.”

“You do realize, don’t you, that customers who come into your shop don’t count as girls you know?”

Mevlut ate some sweet biscuits with another glass of vodka and lemonade, which smelled like mothballs. When it was time to give the bride and groom their gifts and jewelry, he was able to take a good long look at the incredible beauty of Korkut’s wife, Vediha Yenge. Her younger sister Rayiha, sitting at the girls’ table, was just as beautiful; as he kept looking at that busy table, staring at Rayiha, he noticed a desire stirring inside him as strong as the will to live, but at the same time he felt ashamed and afraid that he would turn out to be a failure.

Mevlut pinned his twenty marks onto Korkut’s lapel with a safety pin Süleyman had given him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look up at his sister-in-law’s beautiful face, and his own shyness embarrassed him.

On the way back to the table, he took an unplanned detour: he went up to congratulate Abdurrahman Efendi, sitting with the other Gümüşdere villagers. He was now very close to the girls’ table, but he didn’t look in that direction. Abdurrahman Efendi was dressed up in a white dress shirt with a high collar to hide his crooked neck, as well as a tasteful jacket. By now he was used to the antics of young street vendors and yogurt sellers who were dazzled by his daughters. Like a sultan, he held his hand out to Mevlut, who gamely kissed it. Had his beautiful daughter been watching this exchange?

For a second, Mevlut lost concentration and glanced at the girls’ table. His heart started beating madly; he was afraid, but he was happy, too. At the same time, he felt a little disappointed. There were now a couple of empty chairs at the table. In truth, Mevlut hadn’t been able to get a proper look at any of the girls from where he had been sitting. So as he was walking back he kept his eyes on their table, trying to figure out who exactly was missing, when…

They almost crashed into each other. She was the prettiest among the girls. She must have been the youngest, too; there was a childlike quality to her.

They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. She had a very honest, open face, and girlish dark eyes. She walked off to her father’s table.

Even in his confusion, Mevlut could see the hand of fate — kismet — at work. Only God could have ordained this chance encounter. He was having trouble thinking straight, and he kept looking toward the crooked-necked father’s table, trying to catch another glimpse of her, but there were too many people. He had already walked off too far. But though he couldn’t see her face, he felt her in his soul every time she moved, every time the blue blur of her headscarf fluttered in the distance. All he wanted to do was to tell everyone about that pretty girl, their miraculous meeting, and the moment her dark eyes looked into his.

At some point before the party started winding down, Süleyman mentioned that “Abdurrahman Efendi and his daughters Samiha and Rayiha are staying with us for another week before they return to the village.”

Over the next few days, Mevlut thought constantly about the girl with the dark eyes and the childlike face and about what Süleyman had said. Why had he mentioned this to Mevlut? What would happen if Mevlut revived his old habits and went over to knock on the Aktaş door out of the blue? Would he get to see that girl again? Had she also noticed Mevlut? He definitely needed an excuse to visit them, otherwise Süleyman would realize that he had come to see her, and he might hide her away from him. He might even make fun of Mevlut, or put a stop to it all by saying that she was still a child. If Mevlut admitted his infatuation to Süleyman, Süleyman would probably say that he was in love with her, too — that he’d fallen in love with her first, in fact — and not let Mevlut anywhere near her. Mevlut spent the whole week selling yogurt and failing to find a reasonable excuse to visit the Aktaş family, no matter how hard he looked for one.

When the migrating storks had come back over Istanbul on their way to Europe, August had come to an end, and the first two weeks of September had passed, Mevlut did not go to school, nor did he exchange any of the German marks he kept hidden under his mattress to pay for one of the cram schools he had said a year ago that he would be attending now. He hadn’t even gone to the city health department to get the document Skeleton had told him to get last year in order to defer his school enrollment. All this meant that his academic career, which for all practical purposes had ended two years ago, could no longer survive even as a dream. The gendarmes from the draft office were bound to turn up at his village soon.

Mevlut didn’t think his father would be willing to lie to them in order to delay his son’s military service. Rather, he would probably say “Let him do his service, he can get married afterward!” Of course his father didn’t even have enough money to find a wife for his son. But Mevlut wanted to marry this girl he had found, and as soon as possible. He had made a mistake, he had been weak, he should have come up with an excuse to go over to the Aktaş home and see Vediha’s sisters, whose names all rhymed. In those moments when he most regret ted the way he’d handled the matter, he comforted himself with some impeccable logic: if he had gone over there and seen Rayiha, she might have shown no interest in him at all, leaving Mevlut heartbroken and empty-handed. But even just thinking about Rayiha as he walked the streets with his yogurt seller’s yoke across his shoulders was enough to lighten his burden.

—

Süleyman. My brother got me a job in Hadji Hamit Vural’s building-supply business three months ago. Now I’m the one who gets to drive around in the company Ford van. The other day, at around ten in the morning, I bought a pack of cigarettes from a grocery in Mecidiyeköy run by some folk from Malatya (I don’t buy cigarettes from our family shop, because my dad doesn’t approve of me smoking), and I was just about to pull out when who should knock on the right-hand-side window: Mevlut! He had his stick across his back and was off to the city to sell yogurt, poor guy. “Jump in!” I said. He put his stick and his trays in the back and quickly hopped in. I gave him a cigarette and lit it with the car lighter. Mevlut had never seen me at the wheel before; he could hardly believe his eyes. Here we were, gliding along at sixty — I could see him marveling at the speedometer, too — along the same potholed street on which he’d normally be carrying thirty kilos of yogurt on his back at maybe four kilometers an hour. We talked about this and that, but he seemed to be somewhere else, and finally he asked about Abdurrahman Efendi and his daughters.

“They’ve gone back to the village,” I said.

“What were Vediha’s sisters called?”

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason…”

“Don’t be annoyed, Mevlut, Vediha is my brother’s wife now. And the girls are my brother’s sisters-in-law…They’re part of the family now…”

“Am I not part of the family, too?”

“Of course you are…That’s why you’re going to tell me everything.”

“I will…but you have to swear you won’t tell anyone else.”

“I swear to God, and I swear on my country and on my flag that I will keep your secret.”

“I’m in love with Rayiha,” said Mevlut. “The one with the dark eyes, the youngest one, that one’s Rayiha, isn’t she? We met when I was going over to her father’s table. Did you see us? We almost ran into each other. I looked right into her eyes from up close. At first I thought I’d forget. But I can’t.”

“What can’t you forget?”

“Her eyes…The way she looked at me…Did you see how our paths crossed at the wedding?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think it was just a coincidence?”

“Sounds like you’ve fallen for Rayiha, my friend. We’re going to have to pretend I know nothing about this.”

“Isn’t she beautiful, though? If I were to write her a letter, would you give it to her?”

“But they’re not in Duttepe anymore. I told you they went back to the village…” Mevlut looked so sad that I said, “I’ll do what I can for you. But what if we get caught?” He gave me such an imploring look that it melted my heart. I said, “All right, fine, let’s see what we can do.”

Once we got to Harbiye, he took his stick and his trays and cheerfully hopped off. Believe me, it breaks my heart to think there’s still someone in our family who has to sell yogurt on the streets.

15. Mevlut Leaves Home

If You Saw Her on the Street Tomorrow, Would You Recognize Her?

Mustafa Efendi. When I heard that Mevlut had gone to Korkut’s wedding in Istanbul, I couldn’t believe my ears. For my own son to do this to our family! I’m on my way to Istanbul now, my head keeps bumping against the cold window every time the bus rocks, and I keep wishing I had never gone to that city in the first place, that I’d never ventured outside the village at all.

—

One evening at the start of October 1978, just before the weather turned cold and the boza season began, Mevlut walked into the house to find his father sitting in the dark. The lights were on in most of the other houses, so it hadn’t occurred to Mevlut that there could be anyone inside. When it was clear there was, at first he put his fear down to the thought that this might be a thief. But then his racing heart reminded him that he was afraid because his father knew he had gone to the wedding. It would have been impossible for the news not to reach Mustafa Efendi, since everyone who had gone to the wedding — and indeed the whole village — was more or less related. His father was probably even angrier knowing that Mevlut was aware of this, that he had gone to the wedding knowing full well that his father would find out.

It had been two months since they’d last seen each other. Father and son hadn’t spent this much time apart since Mevlut had first come to Istanbul nine years ago. But despite all his father’s moods and their countless little arguments, or perhaps because of them, Mevlut felt that they had become friends — companions, even. But he’d also had enough of his father’s punishing silences and furious outbursts.

“Come here!”

Mevlut approached, half expecting his father to slap him. But he didn’t. Instead, he gestured to the table. Only then in the half darkness did Mevlut spot his bundles of German twenty-mark notes. How had his father found them inside the mattress?

“Who gave you these?”

“I earned it myself.”

“How did you make all this money?” His father put all his savings into a bank account and stood by as an eighty percent inflation rate against the thirty-three percent interest paid by the bank ground his money into dust. And still, unable to admit that his small holdings were disappearing into thin air, he refused to learn how to invest in foreign currency.

“It’s not that much,” said Mevlut. “Just one thousand six hundred eighty marks. Some of it is from last year. I saved it all up by selling yogurt.”

“And you hid the money from me. Are you lying to me? Have you been getting involved in anything you shouldn’t be getting involved in?”

“I swear I—”

“I remember your swearing on my life that you wouldn’t go to that wedding.”

Mevlut bowed his head and sensed that his father was about to slap him. “I’m twenty-one now, you shouldn’t hit me anymore.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” said his father. He slapped Mevlut.

Mevlut lifted his elbows to protect his face, so the slap hit his arm instead. His father got hurt and, losing his temper, gave Mevlut two quick punches to the shoulder, with single-minded force. “Get out of my house, you wretch!” he yelled.

Mevlut took two steps backward in shock, reeling from the pain of the second blow. He fell backward onto the bed and curled up into a ball just as he used to do as a child. He turned his back to his father, shaking a little. His father thought he was crying, and Mevlut didn’t disabuse him of that thought.

Mevlut wanted to take his things and leave immediately (he played out the scene in his head and imagined that his father would regret the things he’d said and try to stop him from leaving), but he was also scared of setting out on a path from which there was no turning back. If he was going to leave this house, he shouldn’t do it right now, in anger, but wait until he’d regained his composure in the morning. Now, Rayiha was the only bright spot left in his life. He needed to be alone somewhere and think about the letter he was going to write to her.

Mevlut remained motionless where he lay on the bed. If he got up, he thought, he might get into another fight with his father. If that happened and he ended up on the receiving end of more slaps and punches, it would be impossible for him not to leave the house.

From the bed, Mevlut could hear his father pacing in the single room that constituted their house, pouring himself some water and a glass of rakı, and lighting a cigarette. Throughout the nine years he had spent here, and especially while still in middle school, as he drifted in and out of sleep Mevlut had always found it reassuring and comforting to hear the little sounds of his father’s presence, his muttering to himself, inhaling and exhaling, the persistent cough he suffered when selling boza in wintertime, even the way he snored at night. He no longer felt the same way about his father.

Mevlut fell asleep in his clothes. When he was younger, he’d always liked drifting off to sleep on the bed in his clothes whenever his father beat him and made him cry, and in later years, too, whenever he came home exhausted after a day spent working, and still had his homework to do.

When he woke up in the morning, his father wasn’t home. Mevlut put his socks, shirts, shaving kit, pajamas, sweater vest, and slippers into the little suitcase he carried whenever he went back to the village. He was surprised to see that it was still half empty after he’d put in all of the things he wanted to take. He wrapped up the bundles of German marks on the table in some newspaper, putting them inside a plas tic bag that said LIFE, and placed them in the suitcase. As he walked out of the house, he felt neither fear nor guilt in his heart — only freedom.

He went straight to the Ghaazi Quarter to see Ferhat. This time, unlike his first visit to the neighborhood a year ago, he had only to ask a couple of people before quickly finding Ferhat’s place.

—

Ferhat. Mevlut never managed to finish high school, but I did, thank God. I didn’t do very well in the university placement exams, though. After we moved here, I briefly looked after the parking garage of a candy factory where some of my relatives worked in the accounts department, but there was a hooligan from Ordu there who bullied me. At some point I also got involved in a political organization with some of my friends from the neighborhood. It wasn’t really my thing. I felt guilty knowing that but still staying with them, out of respect and fear. It’s a good thing Mevlut came along with some money. We could both tell that the Ghaazi Quarter was no good for us, just like Kültepe. We thought that if we managed to get a foothold in the city center before we had to go off on military service, maybe somewhere near Karaköy and Taksim, there would be more work for us to do and more money to earn, and instead of wasting so much time on roads and buses, we would be among the throngs on the city pavements, where there is business to be done.

—

Karlıova Restaurant was a small, old Greek tavern off Nevizade Street, at the Tarlabaşı end of Beyoğlu. The original owner left the city in 1964 when Prime Minister Ismet Pasha kicked the Greeks out of Istanbul overnight, and the restaurant was taken over by a waiter from Bingöl named Kadri Karlıovalı, who served stews during the day to the tailors, jewelers, and shopkeepers of Beyoğlu and rakı and meze by night to middle-class drinkers out to enjoy themselves or on their way to the cinema; now, after fifteen years, he was on the brink of bankruptcy. The restaurant wasn’t just in trouble because the sex films had taken over the cinemas and the political terror had taken over the streets, so that the middle-class crowds were scared away from Beyoğlu. The irascible, penny-pinching Karlıovalı had accused a very young dishwasher of stealing and threatened to fire both the boy and a middle-aged waiter who had spoken up in his defense, leading four other already disgruntled employees to pick up and leave in solidarity. The owner used to buy yogurt from Mevlut’s father, and Ferhat’s family knew him as well, so the two friends decided to help this weary old man to sort things out at the restaurant before they went to do their military service. They had sensed an opportunity.

They moved into an old apartment the owner had set aside to board his dishwashers and busboys (who were all still children) and for the young waiters; now, with all the staff having gone, the place was almost completely empty. The apartment was in a three-story Greek building in Tarlabaşı built eighty years ago as a single-family house. But after the events of the sixth and seventh of September 1955, when nearby Greek Orthodox churches were burned down and Jewish, Greek, and Armenian shops were looted, the social fabric of the neighborhood had begun to fray, and the building, following the same trend, was split into several apartments separated by drywall. The landlord, who held official title to the building, now lived in Athens and couldn’t come to Istanbul too easily, so the rents were collected by a man from Sürmene, whom Mevlut never saw.

Two other dishwashers, aged fourteen and sixteen, both from the southeastern town of Mardin and both with primary-school diplomas, shared a bunk bed in one room of the apartment. Mevlut and Ferhat got rid of the other bunk beds, and each picked one of the other rooms, which they decorated according to their tastes with whatever they could find lying around. This was the first time in his life that Mevlut had ever lived apart from his family, or even had a room of his own. He bought a rickety old coffee table from a junk shop in Çukurcuma and took a chair from the restaurant, with the owner’s permission. After the restaurant closed at around midnight, they would set up a rakı table with the dishwasher boys (cheese, Coca-Cola, roasted chickpeas, ice, and plenty of cigarettes) and spend a good two or three hours merrily drinking. The boys told them that the argument at the restaurant hadn’t really been started by a dishwasher stealing something but by the discovery of the relationship between the owner and that dishwasher boy, over which the waiters who slept on the bunk beds in the apartment had risen up in furious protest. They asked the dishwasher boys to repeat the story several times, and pretty soon, they began to nurture a secret resentment against their elderly boss from Bingöl.

The two boys from Mardin had their hearts set on selling stuffed mussels. All the stuffed-mussel vendors in Istanbul and Turkey were from Mardin. The boys kept going on about how Mardin had cornered the stuffed-mussel business even though it was an inland city, and clearly this must mean people from Mardin were all exceptionally cunning and clever.

“Oh, come on, kid, all the sesame roll vendors are from Tokat, but I’ve never heard anyone say this was proof that people from Tokat are so brilliant!” Ferhat would say whenever he got fed up with the boys’ exuberant devotion to Mardin. “But you can’t compare stuffed mussels with sesame rolls,” the boys would reply. “All bakers are from Rize, and they’re always boasting about it, too,” Mevlut would say, just to give another example. These two boys, who were six or seven years younger than Mevlut, had come to Istanbul straight after primary school, and they had a rowdy liveliness that captivated Mevlut no less than their dubious stories and gossip about the restaurant owner and the older waiters; Mevlut often found himself swallowing anything they told him about the streets, Istanbul, and Turkey:

The journalist Celâl Salik was so harsh in his criticisms of the government because of the conflict between America and Russia and because the owner of his newspaper Milliyet was a Jew…The fat man next to the Ağa Mosque who sold soap bubbles to kids, and was known to all of Istanbul by the way he said “flying balloon,” was of course a plainclothes policeman, but his main purpose was to act as a cover for two more undercovers at the other end of the street, one disguised as a shoeshine and the other as a pan-fried liver vendor…Whenever customers at the Sultan’s Pudding Place next to the Palace Cinema left any chicken-topped rice or chicken soup on their plates, the waiters wouldn’t throw away the leftovers but rather just collect them in metal bowls, rinse them in hot water, and then serve them back to customers as fresh soup, rice toppings, or shredded-chicken blancmange…The Sürmene gang, who managed the houses officially registered to Greek families who’d run away to Athens, tended to rent most of them out to brothel keepers, who had very good relations with the Beyoğlu police station anyway…The CIA was going to fly Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran on a private jet to clamp down on the popular unrest that had just begun over there…There was going to be a military coup soon and General Tayyar Pasha would be declared president of the Republic.

“What a load of nonsense,” said Ferhat one night.

“No, no, one of our people from Mardin was at the brothel at number sixty-six Sıraselviler Street when the general came in, and that’s how I heard.”

“Our Tayyar Pasha is a big shot now, he’s the commander of the Istanbul detachment, why should he even need to go to a brothel? The pimps would be happy to bring the most perfect example of the kind of woman he wants right to his doorstep.”

“Maybe the pasha is scared of his wife, because our friend from Mardin saw him with his very own eyes at number sixty-six…You don’t believe us, you turn your nose up at people from Mardin, but if you were to go there one day, breathe its air, drink its water, and let us look after you, you would never want to leave again.”

Ferhat would lose his patience sometimes and say, “If Mardin is such a wonderful place, why did you come all the way to Istanbul?” at which the dishwasher boys would laugh as if he’d made a joke.

“We’re from a village near Mardin, actually. We didn’t even pass through the city on our way here,” one of them earnestly confessed. “No one except people from Mardin will help us out, here in Istanbul…so I suppose this is our way of saying thanks.”

Sometimes Ferhat would start berating these sweet dishwasher boys: “You’re Kurds, but still you have no class consciousness to speak of,” he would scold them. “Now go to your room and sleep,” he’d say, and off they would go.

—

Ferhat. If you’ve been following this story closely, you will have understood by now that it is difficult to get mad at Mevlut, but I did. His father came to the restaurant one day when he wasn’t there, and when I asked what had happened, Mustafa Efendi told me that Mevlut had gone to Korkut’s wedding. When I found out he’d been mingling with those Vurals, who have the blood of so many of our young men on their hands, I didn’t think I could get over it. I didn’t want to argue with him in front of all the waiters and the customers, so I dashed home before he arrived. When he got home and I saw the innocent look on his face, half my anger evaporated. “I hear you pinned some money on Korkut at his wedding,” I said.

“Oh, I see, my father must have come by the restaurant,” said Mevlut, looking up from the boza he was mixing for the evening. “Did the old man look troubled? Why do you suppose he wanted you to know that I went to that wedding?”

“He’s all alone now. He wants you to come back home.”

“He wants me to fight with you and end up alone and friendless in Istanbul, just like him. Should I go?”

“Don’t go.”

“Whenever there’s politics involved, everything somehow ends up being my fault,” said Mevlut. “I can’t get my head around it right now. I’ve fallen for someone. I think about her all the time.”

“Who?”

After a brief silence, Mevlut said: “I’ll tell you in the evening.”

—

But Mevlut had to work all day before he could meet up with Ferhat again at the apartment and talk over a glass of rakı in the evening. On a typical winter’s day in 1979, Mevlut would first go to Tepebaşı to pick up the raw boza that the Vefa Boza Shop’s vans had been delivering direct to the vendors’ neighborhoods for the past two years; then he’d head back home to add sugar and prepare the mixture he would sell in the evening, all the while thinking about the letter he was going to write to Rayiha; and then from noon until three he would be at the Karlıova Restaurant, waiting tables. From three to six o’clock, he delivered yogurt with cream to his best customers and to three restaurants like the Karlıova before going home to nap for a bit while thinking about Rayiha and his letter, and then heading back to the Karlıova Restaurant at seven.

After a three-hour shift at the Karlıova Restaurant, having worked right up until the time when all the drunks, the hotheads, and the generally disagreeable would start picking fights, Mevlut would take off his waiter’s apron and go out into the cold and dark streets to sell boza. He didn’t mind the extra work at the end of the day because he knew that his boza-loving customers were expecting him.

While the demand for yogurt sellers’ services was mostly declining, there was a growing interest in buying boza from nighttime street vendors. The frequent skirmishes between nationalist and Communist militants had something to do with it. Families now too scared to go outside, even on a Saturday, preferred an evening spent gazing out the window at the boza seller on the pavement, waiting for him to arrive, listening to the feeling in his voice, and drinking his boza as they remembered the good old days. Selling yogurt was tough now, but longtime street vendors from Beyşehir were still making good money thanks to boza. Mevlut had heard from the Vefa Boza Shop itself that boza sellers had begun to appear in neighborhoods like Balat, Kasımpaşa, and Gaziosmanpaşa, where they had rarely ventured before. At night, the city was left to poster-plastering armed gangs, stray dogs, foragers rummaging through trash cans, and of course to boza sellers; after a day in the ceaseless din of the restaurant and in the hubbub of Beyoğlu, walking down a dark and silent sloping street in the back of Feriköy felt to Mevlut like a homecoming, a return to a familiar universe. Sometimes the bare branches on a tree would twitch when there was no wind, and the political slogans covering every inch of a dried-up marble fountain, of which not even the tap remained intact, would seem to him at once familiar and as eerie as the hoot of an owl in the cemetery behind the little mosque. “Bozaaa,” Mevlut would cry out toward the eternal past. Sometimes, when he happened to look into a little house through a pair of open curtains, he would dream about living in just such a place with Rayiha someday and picture all the happiness that lay ahead.

—

Ferhat. “This girl — did you say her name was Rayiha? — if she’s really only fourteen as you say, then she’s too young,” I said.

“But we’re not getting married right away,” said Mevlut. “First I’m going to do my military service…By the time I’m back, she’ll be old enough.”

“Why should a girl you don’t even know, and a pretty one, too, wait until you’re back from the army?”

“I’ve thought about that, and I have two answers,” said Mevlut. “First, I don’t believe it was just luck that made us look into each other’s eyes at the wedding. She must have wanted it, too. Why else would she pick the moment I was standing there to walk from her table to her father’s? Even if it was really just a coincidence, I’m sure Rayiha must also think that the way our eyes met had a special significance.”

“How did you look into each other’s eyes?”

“You know how you meet someone’s gaze and you know you’re going to spend the rest of your life with them…”

“You should write that down,” I said. “How did she look at you?”

“She didn’t lower her eyes in shame the way girls usually do when they see a boy…She looked straight and proud into my eyes.”

“How did you look at her? Show me.”

Mevlut pretended I was Rayiha and gave me such a fervent, heartfelt look that I was moved.

“Ferhat, you’d write a better letter than I ever could. Even the European girls used to be impressed with your letters.”

“Fine, but first you have to tell me what you see in this girl. What is it about her that you love?”

“Don’t call Rayiha ‘this girl.’ I love everything about her.”

“Okay, so tell me one of these things…”

“Her dark eyes…We were very close when we looked at each other.”

“I’ll put that in…What else…Do you know anything else about her?”

“I don’t know anything else about her because we’re not married yet…,” said Mevlut, smiling.

“If you saw her on the street tomorrow, would you recognize her?”

“Not from afar. But I would recognize her eyes immediately. Everyone knows how pretty she is anyway.”

“If everyone knows how pretty this girl is, then”—I was going to say, They won’t let you have her, but instead all I said was—“you’re in trouble.”

“I would do anything for her.”

“Yet here I am writing your letter for you.”

“Will you be nice and write this letter for me?”

“I’ll write it. But you know one letter’s not going to be enough.”

“Shall I bring pen and paper?”

“Wait, let’s talk first and figure out what we’re going to say.”

We had to cut our conversation short when the dishwasher kids from Mardin walked in.

16. How to Write a Love Letter

Your Eyes Are Like Ensorcelled Arrows

IT TOOK THEM a long time to write that first letter. They started in February 1979, when the famous Milliyet columnist Celâl Salik was shot dead on the street in Nişantaşı, and Ayatollah Khomeini flew into Tehran as the Shah of Iran fled his country. The dishwasher boys from Mardin had long predicted these events, and emboldened by their prescience, they joined Mevlut and Ferhat’s evening confabulations on the love letter.

It was only Mevlut’s inveterate optimism that allowed everyone to contribute so freely. He smiled and didn’t mind too much when they teased him about his feelings. Even when they purposely made useless suggestions—“You should send her a lollipop” or “Don’t say that you’re a waiter, tell her you work in the catering industry” or “Write about how your uncle took your land”—he took it in stride, smiling benevolently before returning to the solemn task at hand.

Following months of endless debate, they decided that these letters should be based not on Mevlut’s notions about women but rather on what he knew about Rayiha in particular. Since the only aspect of Rayiha known to Mevlut was her eyes, logic dictated that they should be the focus of the letters.

“I walk down the dark streets at night, and suddenly I see those eyes before me,” said Mevlut one evening. Ferhat thought this was a very good sentence, so he included it in their draft version, changing “those eyes” to “your eyes.” At first he had suggested that they shouldn’t write about walking down the streets at night, as this might give away the fact that Mevlut was a boza seller, but Mevlut had ignored him. After all, Rayiha was going to find that out eventually.

After much deliberation, Ferhat wrote down the second sentence: “Your eyes are like ensorcelled arrows that pierce my heart and take me captive.” “Ensorcelled” seemed too pretentious a word, but one of the boys from Mardin allowed that “people use it where we come from,” which thereby validated the choice. It had taken them two weeks to agree on these two sentences. Mevlut would recite them to himself while out in the evening selling boza, wondering impatiently what the third sentence should be.

“I am your prisoner, I can think of nothing else but you ever since your eyes worked their way into my heart.” Mevlut and Ferhat both agreed at once on the importance of this sentence, which would help Rayiha understand why the look they had shared had ensnared Mevlut.

On one of the evenings devoted to the third poetic sentence, Mahmut, the more confident and hopeful of the two dishwashers from Mardin, asked Mevlut: “Do you really think about this girl all day?” When Mevlut didn’t immediately respond, Mahmut explained apologetically: “After all, what can you think about a girl you’ve only seen for a second?”

“That’s the point, you dimwit!” said Ferhat, losing his temper a little in defending Mevlut. “He thinks about her eyes…”

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, I fully support and respect my brother Mevlut’s feelings. But it seems to me — and please forgive me for saying it — that you can fall more deeply in love with a girl once you truly get to know her.”

“What do you mean?” said Ferhat.

“We know this guy from Mardin who works up in the Eczacıbaşı medicine factory. There’s this girl his age he sees every day on the packaging line. She wears the same blue apron as all the other girls in the department. Our friend from Mardin and this girl spend eight hours a day facing each other, and the job demands they do some talking, too. Our guy starts off with these strange feelings, his body feels funny, he ends up in the infirmary. At the beginning, he doesn’t even realize he’s fallen in love with this girl. I guess you could say he couldn’t accept it. Apparently there was nothing special about the girl, not her eyes nor any other part. But he fell madly in love with her just because he saw her and talked to her every day. Can you believe it?”

“What happened next?” asked Mevlut.

“They married the girl off to someone else. When our friend went back to Mardin, he killed himself.”

For a moment, Mevlut worried he might meet with the same fate. How much had Rayiha really intended to make eye contact with him? On nights when he didn’t drink any rakı, Mevlut had the honesty to admit that there had been an element of chance in their encounter. But in those moments when he felt most profoundly in love, he would claim that such an exalted emotion was only possible because God had willed it so. As for Ferhat, he was strongly of the opinion that Mevlut’s letter should imply that some part of Rayiha had wanted them to share that brief glance. So they ended up with the following sentence: “You must have meant your ruthless deeds, or else you would not have barred my path with your meaningful looks and like a bandit stolen my heart away.”

It was easy enough to refer to Rayiha in the main body of the letter, but they had some trouble figuring out how Mevlut should address her at the start. Ferhat came in one evening with a book called Examples of Beautiful Love Letters and How to Write Them. To make sure they took it seriously, he read a selection of possible forms of address out loud, but Mevlut always found reason to object. He couldn’t address Rayiha as “Ma’am.” Both “Dear Ma’am” and “Little Lady” sounded equally strange. (Still, the word “little” definitely worked.) As for things like “My beloved,” “My beauty,” “My heart’s companion,” “My angel,” or “My one and only,” Mevlut found them too forward. (The book was full of counsel against assuming too much familiarity in the early letters.) That night, Mevlut took the book from Ferhat and began to read it very closely. “Lingering Lady, “Demon Damsel,” and “Miss Mystery” were among some of the openers he liked, but he worried they might be misinterpreted. Weeks went by, and they had almost finished all nineteen sentences of their letter before they finally agreed that “Languid Eyes” would be a decent form of address.

When he saw how the book had inspired Mevlut, Ferhat went to look for others. He went to rummage the storerooms of the old bookshops on Babıali Street, the ones that regularly sent books to the countryside on popular topics ranging from folk poetry to the life stories of famous wrestlers, Islam and sex, what to do on your wedding night, the tale of Layla and Majnun, and the Islamic interpretation of dreams, and he emerged with six more guides to writing love letters. Mevlut examined the pictures of blue-eyed women, fair haired and light skinned with red lipstick and red nail polish, and flanked by men in ties, and he found these couples who graced the covers of these paperbacks reminiscent of American movies; he would cut the folded pages open carefully with a kitchen knife, breathing in their pleasant scent, and whenever he had some time alone before going out to sell yogurt in the mornings or after coming back from selling boza at night, he would pore over the sample letters and the authors’ advice to the lovelorn and smitten.

The books were organized the same way: the letters were categorized according to various occasions that lovers might face, such as the first encounter, an exchange of glances, a chance meeting, a rendezvous, moments of happiness, longing, and arguments. As he rifled through to the end of each book in search of appropriate phrases and expressions he could use, Mevlut found that all love stories progressed through the same stages. He and Rayiha had only just begun. Some of the books also included typical responses from the girls. Mevlut pictured all sorts of people — suffering from lovesickness, playing hard to get, dealing with heartbreak — and as he discovered these lives unfolding like the pages of a novel, he considered his own situation compared with theirs.

He became interested in the subject of love stories that went badly and ended in a breakup. These books taught Mevlut that “when a romance did not end in marriage,” the two parties could ask each other for their love letters to be returned.

“If things end badly with Rayiha, God forbid, and she asks me to return her letters, then I will,” he resolved one night after his second glass of rakı. “But I would never ask her to return mine; Rayiha can keep them until the day the world ends.”

The Western couple on one cover looked like movie stars in the throes of a heated and highly emotional argument, with a bundle of letters bound with pink ribbon resting on a table in the foreground. Mevlut vowed to write Rayiha enough letters for such a bundle, two hundred at least. He realized that the paper he chose for his letters, the way they smelled, the envelope they came in, and of course any gifts he might send along with his missives would be key in winning her over. They talked about these things until the sun came up. They spent many sleepless nights throughout that melancholy autumn studying which perfume bought from which store would be best to spray on their letters, carrying out tests with some of the cheaper scents.

They had just about decided that the most meaningful gift that could accompany the letter was a nazar amulet, to protect against the evil eye, when an altogether different sort of letter arrived to trouble Mevlut. It came in a rough government-issue manila envelope and had passed through a number of hands before Süleyman finally brought it to Mevlut one evening, by which time many people already knew its contents. Now that he no longer had any ties with the Atatürk Secondary School, the authorities had gone looking for him in the village to register him for mandatory military service.

When the Beyoğlu police station had sent its plainclothes policeman to the restaurant to ask for Mevlut, he was busy with Ferhat in Sultanhamam and the Grand Bazaar looking for an eye bead and a handkerchief for Rayiha, and even though the restaurant workers were taken by surprise, they still had the wherewithal to say what people in Istanbul usually did in these circumstances: “Oh, him? He’s gone back to the village!”

“It’ll take about two months for them to send gendarmes to the village and find out you’re not there either,” said Kadri the Kurd. “Anyone your age who’s trying to dodge the draft is either an upper-class rich kid who can’t live without his creature comforts or someone who’s worked out some get-rich-quick scheme at the age of twenty and can’t give it up just when the dough’s started rolling in. How old are you, Mevlut?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Well, you’re a big boy now. Go and do your military service. This restaurant’s sliding. It’s not like you two are making that much money here. Are you scared of the beatings? Don’t be, there might be a few smacks now and then, but the army is a just place. They won’t beat a sweet-faced boy too much if you do as they say.”

Mevlut decided he would do his military service right away. He went down to the Beyoğlu draft office in Dolmabahçe and was showing his letter to the officer there when another officer whose rank he wasn’t sure of told him off for standing at attention in the wrong spot. This scared Mevlut, but he didn’t panic. Back out on the street, he sensed that life would go back to normal as soon as he finished his military service.

His father, he thought, would welcome his decision to get it done without further delay. He went to Kültepe to see him. They kissed and made up. Emptied as it had been, home seemed even more desolate and miserable than he remembered. Still, in that moment, Mevlut became aware of just how attached he was to this room where he’d spent ten years of his life. He opened the kitchen cupboard; the heavy old pot on the shelf, the rusty candlestick, and the blunt cutlery pulled on his heartstrings. In the wet night, the dried-up caulk in the window frame looking out to Duttepe smelled like an ancient memory. But he was wary of spending the night here with his father.

“Do you still go over to your uncle’s place?” his father said.

“No, I never see them,” said Mevlut, aware that his father knew this wasn’t true. There was a time when he would never have been able to blurt out such an obvious lie about such a delicate matter but instead would have devised an answer that wouldn’t hurt his father’s feelings too much while also being technically true. At the door, he did as he would normally do only on religious holidays: he respectfully kissed his father’s hand.

“The army might make a man out of you yet!” said Mustafa Efendi as he was seeing off his son.

Why such a derisive, dispiriting remark right at the very end of their meeting? The combined effect of his father’s words and the smoke from lignite coal fires made Mevlut’s eyes water as he made his way down to the Kültepe bus stop.

Three weeks later, he went to the draft office in Beşiktaş and found out that he was to undergo his basic training in Burdur. He forgot for a moment where Burdur was and panicked.

“Don’t worry, there are four buses from Istanbul to Burdur every evening from the Harem bus terminal on the Asian side,” said the quieter of the two boys from Mardin that night, and he began to list all the companies that provided this service. “Gazanfer Bilge is the best of the lot,” he said, continuing, “Isn’t it nice? You’re off to join the army, but you’ve got your lover in your heart and her eyes on your mind. Military service is a breeze when you’ve got a girl to write letters to…How do I know? There’s this friend of ours from Mardin…”

17. Mevlut’s Army Days

Do You Think You’re at Home?

IN ALMOST TWO YEARS of military service, Mevlut learned so much about how to go undetected in provincial towns, among other men, and within large groups that he ended up believing the old saying that only the army could make “men” out of boys and started spouting his own version: “You’re not a real man until you’ve done your military service.” The military taught him the physicality and fragility of his own body and manhood.

Before he became a man, Mevlut never used to distinguish his body from his mind and soul, thinking of all three together as “me.” But in the army he would discover that he was not necessarily the sole master of his own body and that, in fact, it might be worth surrendering it to his commanders if to do so at least allowed him to save his soul and keep his thoughts and dreams to himself. During the infamous first physical that created exemptions for hapless fellows who didn’t even know that their health was poor (tubercular street vendors, nearsighted laborers, and half-deaf quilters) and for rich guys shrewd enough to bribe the doctors, one elderly physician, noticing Mevlut’s embarrassment, told him gently, “Go on, son, take your clothes off. This is the military, we’re all men here.”

Trusting the kind doctor, Mevlut did so, thinking he’d be examined straightaway, but instead they put him in a queue with a whole host of down-and-outs, standing in their underwear, carrying their things, since no one was allowed to leave anything anywhere lest it be stolen. Like worshippers entering a mosque, the men in the queue had also taken off their shoes, and they were holding them, sole to sole, with their shirts and trousers neatly folded on top and, on top of the clothes, the medical forms the doctors were supposed to stamp and sign.

After two hours of standing in the cold corridor in a queue that wouldn’t budge, Mevlut found out that the doctor hadn’t arrived yet. It wasn’t even clear what sort of checkup this was going to be; some said it was an eye test, so that anyone able to feign shortsightedness convincingly could hope to weasel out of serving; others announced menacingly that when the doctor arrived, he wouldn’t be checking their eyes but their asses so that all the queers would be weeded out. Terrorized at the prospect of anyone running his eye or, worse still, his finger over that most intimate place and, by some mistake, being singled out as a queer (this second worry would recur throughout his army days), Mevlut forgot his own nudity and started to talk to the other undressed men in the queue. Most, he discovered, had likewise come originally from a village and were now living in poorer city neighborhoods, and every single one, down to the dumbest wretch of them all, proudly declared that he had someone “pulling strings” for him. He thought of Hadji Hamit Vural, who had no idea Mevlut had even been conscripted, and soon he, too, was boasting of some pretty solid backing that would allow him to coast through military service.

This was how from the start he learned that, by frequent mention of friends in high places, he could protect himself from the cruelty and spite of other recruits. He was just telling one guy, who also happened to have a mustache (Good thing I let mine grow, Mevlut kept thinking), that Hadji Hamit Vural knew absolutely everyone, and what a fair and generous philanthropist he was, when a commander yelled at them all to “Be quiet!” They trembled into submission. “This isn’t the beauty parlor, ladies. No more tittering. Have some dignity. This is the army. Giggling is for girls.”

As he drifted in and out of sleep on the bus to Burdur, Mevlut kept thinking back to that moment in the hospital. Some of the men had used their shoes and clothes to cover their nakedness as the commander walked past, while others who had seemed to cower before him couldn’t contain their laughter as soon as he was gone. Mevlut felt he could get along with both types, but if this was what the whole army was like, he feared he might end up left out and lonely.

But until boot camp was over and he had sworn his oath of enlistment, he didn’t even have a spare moment to worry about loneliness and belonging. His unit would go on long runs every day, singing folk songs as they went. They had to tackle obstacle courses, perform gymnastics like those Blind Kerim used to teach in high school, and learn how to salute properly by practicing hundreds of times a day on other soldiers, real or imagined.

Before reporting for military service, Mevlut had long imagined the beatings doled out by officers, but after just three days on the army base, they’d become a routine, unremarkable sight. Some fool got slapped for wearing his cap the wrong way even after the sergeant had warned them about it many times; another idiot failed to keep his fingers straight when he saluted, and down came a smack on him; someone else fidgeted for the thousandth time during a drill, got an earful of humiliating insults from the commander, and was told to drop to the floor and do a hundred push-ups while the rest of the squad laughed at him.

They were having tea one afternoon when Emre Şaşmaz from Antalya said, “Man, I can’t believe how many stupid, ignorant people there are in this country.” He had a shop that sold car parts, and Mevlut respected him because he seemed like a serious guy. “I still don’t understand how they can be so dumb. Even a beating doesn’t straighten them out.”

“I think the real question is whether they get beaten up all the time because they’re so dumb, or if they’re so dumb because they get beaten up all the time,” pronounced Ahmet, who had a haberdashery in Ankara. Mevlut, who’d ended up by chance in the same squad as these two distinguished characters, figured you at least had to own a shop before you could make sweeping statements about stupid people. The unhinged captain of the fourth company had it in for a private from Diyarbakır (in the army, you weren’t allowed to use the words “Kurd” or “Alevi”) and treated him so viciously that the poor fellow hanged himself with his own belt while in solitary confinement. Mevlut resented the two shopkeepers for their relative indifference to this suicide and for calling the private an idiot for having taken the commander so seriously. Like most privates, Mevlut also thought about suicide every now and then, but he, again like most, was able to laugh it off. One day shortly thereafter, the two shopkeepers, Emre and Ahmet, were walking out of the canteen in high spirits when they had the misfortune of catching the lieutenant colonel in a bad mood. Mevlut watched from afar with quiet satisfaction as the colonel gave them two slaps each on their clean-shaven cheeks for holding their caps wrong.

“As soon as I’ve finished my military service, I’m going to find that asshole colonel and stuff him back down the hole he crawled out of,” said Ahmet from Ankara as they drank their tea that evening.

“I don’t really care, man, there’s no logic in the army anyway,” said Emre from Antalya.

Mevlut respected Emre for being flexible and confident enough to put the slap out of his mind, though the view that there is no logic in the army was not his own but a favorite slogan among the commanders. If anyone dared to question the logic of an order, they’d shout: “I can withdraw your pass for two weekends in a row just because I feel like it or make you crawl through the mud and wish you’d never been born.” They would always make good on their promises.

A few days later, on receiving his first slap, Mevlut realized that a beating wasn’t as bad as he had thought. His squad had been sent out to clean up some trash, for lack of anything better to do, and they had picked up all the matchsticks, cigarette butts, and dried leaves they could find. They had just scattered for a cigarette break when an enormous commander (Mevlut still hadn’t learned how to tell rank by the insignia on the collars) appeared out of nowhere, yelling “What the hell is this?” He got the squad to line up and then gave each of the ten privates a smack with his huge hand. It certainly stung, but Mevlut was relieved to suffer the thing he had so feared — his first beating — without too much damage. The tall Nazmi from Nazilli had been the first in line, so he’d really felt the force of the blow, and afterward he looked like he could have killed someone. Mevlut tried to be comforting. “Don’t worry about it, my friend,” he said. “Look at me, I don’t mind, it’s over already.”

“You don’t mind because he didn’t hit you as hard,” said Nazmi in anger. “Your face is as pretty as a girl’s, that’s why.”

Mevlut thought he might be right.

Someone else said, “The army doesn’t care if you’re pretty or plain, handsome or ugly. They’ll beat you all the same.”

“Don’t kid yourselves, guys. If you’re from Eastern Anatolia, if you’ve got dark skin and that darkness in your eyes, you will get beaten up more.”

Mevlut didn’t join this debate. He had managed to preserve his pride by reasoning that the slap hadn’t been brought on by any mistake of his.

Two days later, he was walking around with his shirt unbuttoned, lost in thought (how long had it been since Süleyman had delivered the letter? he wondered), when a lieutenant spotted him in this “undisciplined” state. He gave Mevlut two quick slaps with the palm of his hand, and then the back, calling him an idiot, too. “Do you think you’re at home or something? What’s your unit?” He went on his way without even waiting for Mevlut’s answer.

Mevlut would receive plenty more slaps and blows in his twenty months of military service, but this would always be the one that hurt the most — because the lieutenant was right. Yes, he had indeed been busy thinking about Rayiha, and in that moment he hadn’t given a thought to the tilt of his cap, his salute, or the way he walked.

That night, Mevlut got into bed before everyone else, pulling the covers over his head and musing bleakly about his life. He would have liked to be at the house in Tarlabaşı with Ferhat and the kids from Mardin right now, but ultimately that wasn’t really home. It was as if the lieutenant had meant exactly this when he’d said, “Do you think you’re at home?” The only place he could think of as home was the house in Kültepe, where he imagined his father would have fallen asleep in front of the television just then, but that place wasn’t even registered in their name yet.

In the mornings, he would open at random to a page from the letter-writing handbooks he kept hidden under the sweaters at the bottom of his cupboard and hide behind the closet skimming through them so he might have something to keep his mind busy for the rest of the day, during pointless drills and interminable hikes where he would use what he had learned to mentally compose future letters to Rayiha. He would memorize the words, like those political prisoners who sit in cells with no pen or paper and write poetry in their heads, and whenever he had a weekend pass, he would write it all down and post the results off to Duttepe. Happiness was sitting down at a forgotten desk in the intercity bus terminal writing letters to Rayiha, instead of going to the coffeehouses and the cinemas frequented by the other privates, and sometimes Mevlut felt like a poet.

At the end of the four-month boot camp, he had learned how to use a G3 infantry rifle, how to report to an officer (slightly better than everyone else), how to salute, how to stand at attention, how to obey orders (just as well as everyone else), how to scrape by, and how to lie and be two-faced (not as well as everyone else) when circumstances called for it.

There were some things he had trouble with, but he couldn’t decide whether to blame his own incompetence or his moral reservations. “Now listen here, I’m off, but I’ll be back in half an hour, and you will keep going during that time,” the commander would say. “Understood?”

“Yes, sir, understood!” the whole unit would shout.

But as soon as the commander disappeared around the corner of the yellow headquarters building, half the unit would stretch out on the floor and start smoking and prattling away. Of those still standing, half would now continue the drill, but only until they were sure the commander wasn’t suddenly coming back, while the other half (Mevlut among them) would only pretend to continue. There were a very few who kept faith with the drill and were pushed around and ridiculed by all the others, until they were forced to stop, so in the end no one actually carried on as ordered. Was all this really necessary?

In the third month of military service, Mevlut worked up the courage to put this philosophical and ethical question to the two shopkeepers over tea one evening.

“Mevlut, you really are an innocent, aren’t you?” said the one from Antalya.

“Either that or you’re pretending to be and tricking us all,” said the one from Ankara.

If I had a shop like they do, even a small one, I would have definitely finished high school and gone to college, and then I’d be doing my military service as an officer, thought Mevlut. He no longer had any respect for these shopkeepers, but he knew that if he broke with them now, he’d still be playing the “sweet-faced dumb kid who fetches the tea” for any new friends he might make. He would still be using his cap to pick up the kettle with the broken handle, as everyone else did.

In the lottery that decided where he would end up next, he drew the tank brigade stationed in Kars. Some guys were lucky enough to draw cities in the western part of the country, and even bases in Istanbul. These lots were rumored to be rigged. But Mevlut felt neither envy nor resentment, nor did he worry about having to spend sixteen months on the Russian border, in Turkey’s coldest and poorest city.

He got to Kars in a day, changing buses in Ankara, without even paying a visit to Istanbul first. In July 1980, Kars was an impoverished city of fifty thousand. As he made his way, suitcase in hand, from the bus station to the army barracks in the center of town, he noticed that the streets were covered in left-wing slogans, and he recognized some of the tags from those he had seen on the walls in Kültepe.

Mevlut found the army base calm and peaceful. The soldiers stationed in the city, with the exception of those attached to the secret services, did not get involved in the political fighting. Sometimes the gendarmes searched for leftist militants hiding out in farmers’ villages and on dairy farms that specialized in cheese, but those gendarmes were based elsewhere.

During musters one morning, less than a month after he’d arrived in the city, he told the commander that he worked as a waiter in civilian life. After that, he started working in the officers’ mess. This meant he no longer had to stand on guard duty in the cold or deal with senseless and arbitrary orders from the more irksome commanders. He now had plenty of time to sit at the little desk in the barracks or at one of the tables in the mess and write to Rayiha when no one was looking, filling up page after page while the radio played Anatolian folk songs and the singer Emel Sayın’s interpretation of the classic Nihavend-style song “That First Look That Fills the Heart Can Never Be Forgotten,” composed by Erol Sayan. Most of the privates who were assigned to work in headquarters or in the barracks, trying to look busy while they worked as “clerks,” “painters,” or “repairmen,” carried small transistor radios in hidden pockets. Mevlut wrote many love letters that year under the influence of his evolving musical tastes, drawing a range of expressions from Anatolian folk songs to describe Rayiha’s “coy glances,” “languid looks,” “doelike, ink-black, dreaming, teasing, piercing eyes,” and “enchanting gaze.”

The more he wrote, the more he felt as if he’d known Rayiha since way back when they were both children, that they had a shared spiritual history. He was creating an intimacy between them with every word and every sentence he wrote down, and he sensed that all the things he was imagining now would one day come true.

Toward the end of summer, he was arguing with a cook in the kitchens about an eggplant stew that had been served too cold and angered the major, when someone took his arm and pulled him to one side. For one alarming moment, Mevlut thought it was a giant.

“Oh my God! Mohini!”

They hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks.

“They say people lose weight in the military, they end up skin and bones, but you’ve become fat.”

“I’m a waiter at the officers’ club,” said Mevlut. “The scraps are pretty good.”

“I’m at the club’s hairdresser.”

Mohini had come to Kars two weeks before. After he had failed high school, his father had sent him to be a hairdresser’s apprentice, and so it was decided that this was what he would do for a living. Dyeing the hair of the officers’ wives blond was easy, as far as army assignments went. Yet Mohini was full of complaints, as Mevlut learned when they spent their off-duty day together at the teahouse across from the Asia Hotel, watching football.

—

Mohini. Actually, my job at the hairdresser’s wasn’t too difficult. My only worry was how to pay each woman attention exactly according to her husband’s rank; I had to make sure that I saved the best hairstyle for the base commander Turgut Pasha’s tubby little wife, paying her all the best compliments; the bony wife of Turgut Pasha’s second-in-command got a tiny bit less; and finally there were the lieutenant colonels’ wives, though even there I had to make sure to respect the order of seniority, and the whole thing was bringing me to a state of nervous collapse. One day, I told Mevlut, a young officer’s pretty wife had come in, and I let slip a compliment on her dark hair, and you should have seen how they all sneered, not least Turgut Pasha’s wife, and the horrible way they treated me.

The lieutenant colonel’s prudent wife would say, “What color did you dye Turgut Pasha’s wife’s hair? Make sure mine isn’t lighter than hers.” I heard everything — who was free for a game of rummy, whose turn it was to host the others, where they would gather to watch their soap operas, and what kind of cookies were being bought from which bakery. Sometimes I sang songs and performed magic tricks at their children’s birthday parties, I did the shopping for those ladies who didn’t like to step outside the grounds of the base, and I helped a commander’s daughter with her math homework.

“What the hell do you know about math, Mohini!” said Mevlut, interrupting rather rudely. “Or are you fucking the pasha’s daughter?”

“Shame on you, Mevlut…I see the army’s fouled both your mouth and your soul. All those privates who find some cushy job at an officer’s house near headquarters, or end up working as servants and footmen in a colonel’s home, getting yelled at every day, they all like to say ‘I’m screwing the colonel’s daughter’ as soon as they get back to their barracks at night, just to save what little is left of their dignity. Don’t tell me you believe those stories? Besides, Turgut Pasha doesn’t deserve such treatment. He is an honest military man, and he’s always shielding me from his wife’s malice and her moods. Are we clear?”

—

Since joining the military, these were the most sincere words Mevlut had heard a private utter, and he felt ashamed. “The colonel is a good man, after all,” he said. “I’m sorry. Come here and let me give you a hug so you won’t be mad.”

The moment he’d said these words, he saw the truth he’d been hiding even from himself: since Mevlut had last seen him in high school, Mohini had become more effeminate, revealing the existence of a secret homosexual he harbored inside of him. Was he even aware of it? Should Mevlut pretend he hadn’t noticed? They stood still for a moment, staring at each other wordlessly.

Turgut Pasha found out soon enough that the private who did his wife’s hair and the private who worked in the restaurant had been schoolmates. So Mevlut started going over to the pasha’s house for special assignments. He might be asked to paint the kitchen cupboards or to play horses and coachmen with the children (Kars still had horse-drawn carriages as taxis). The pasha had informed the captain of his company and the manager of the officers’ club that Mevlut would occasionally be needed at the pasha’s house to help organize parties, and this had the immediate effect of promoting him to “pasha’s favorite,” which everyone knew was the highest rank a private could reach. Mevlut took pleasure in watching word of his new standing spread among his unit first, and then to the rest of the garrison. Those who used to greet him with “What’s up, baby face,” who would ambush him with a goosing and treat him like a queer, were the first to back off. The lieutenants began to treat Mevlut with a certain regard, too, like some rich kid who’d ended up in Kars by mistake. Others asked him if he could please try to find out from the pasha’s wife the secret date of the upcoming exercises on the Russian border. No one ever even flicked his ear again.

18. The Military Coup

The Cemetery of the Industrial Quarter

THE MILITARY OPERATION whose secret date everyone wanted to know did not take place after all, because another military coup occurred on the night of 12 September. Mevlut realized that there was something extraordinary going on when he saw that the streets outside the base were deserted. The army had declared martial law and curfews throughout the country. He spent the day watching General Evren Pasha’s proclamations on TV. The total emptiness of the streets of Kars, which had so recently been full of villagers, shopkeepers, unemployed men, frightened citizens, and undercover policemen, seemed to Mevlut like a projection of his own strange mind. In the evening, Turgut Pasha gathered all base personnel together and explained that blinkered, selfish politicians who only cared about clinging to their seats had brought the country to the brink of collapse, but those bad days were over now, the Turkish army, the sole and true guardians of the nation, would not allow the country to go to the dogs, and they would punish all the terrorists and the seditious politicians. He talked at length about the flag, how it took its color from the blood of martyrs, and about Atatürk.

A week later, when it was announced on TV that Turgut Pasha would become mayor of Kars, Mevlut and Mohini started coming and going between the base and city hall, ten minutes away. The pasha spent his mornings at the base, planning operations against the Communists in light of the intelligence from his informants and the secret services, and after lunch he took his jeep to the city hall, then situated in an old Russian building. Sometimes he walked, flanked by his bodyguards, listening happily to grateful shopkeepers who told him what a good thing the coup had been, and letting people kiss his hand if they wanted to, and any letters that he received, he read himself as soon as he got back to headquarters. It was one of the pasha’s responsibilities, as mayor, base commander, and the man in charge of enforcing martial law in the district, to investigate any illegalities and allegations of corruption reported to him by post and to refer any suspects to the army prosecutor. Like the pasha, the prosecutor acted on the logic “They’ll be acquitted if they’re innocent!” and he was therefore quick to lock people up to intimidate them.

The military treated wealthy offenders relatively gently. Those who had committed political crimes, though, and Communists who were often labeled “terrorists” had the soles of their feet whipped. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, the cries of youths picked up during raids on impoverished neighborhoods and tortured for information could be heard all the way to the base, and Mevlut would cast his eyes down in guilt as he made his way toward the officers’ club.

During musters one morning early in the new year, the new lieutenant called out Mevlut’s name. Mevlut stood up and shouted, “Mevlut Karataş, Konya, at your orders.” He saluted and stood to attention.

“Come over here, Konya,” said the lieutenant.

This guy must not have heard I’ve got the pasha’s backing, thought Mevlut. He had never been to the city of Konya in his life, but that was the district to which Beyşehir belonged, so, as was the custom, everyone here called him Konya, which was rather irritating, though he didn’t show it on this occasion.

“My condolences, Konya, your father’s passed away in Istanbul,” said the new lieutenant. “Go back to your unit and get the captain to give you some leave.”

Mevlut got a week off. At the terminal, he had a glass of rakı while he waited for the bus to Istanbul. As the bus shuddered and swayed from side to side, an inexplicable heaviness dragged his eyelids shut, and in his dreams his father told him off for being late to the funeral, and numerous other failings.

His father had died in his sleep. The neighbors had discovered him after two days. The empty bed was in a mess, as if his father had left the house in a hurry. To Mevlut’s soldierly eyes, the place looked unkempt and pitiful. But he also found that unique scent he had never smelled anywhere else: the smell of his father, of Mevlut’s own body, of breath, dust, the stove, twenty years’ worth of soup dinners, dirty laundry, old furniture — the smell of their very lives. Mevlut had imagined he would remain in the room for hours, weeping and mourning his father, but the sorrow was so overwhelming that he threw himself out the door.

Mustafa Efendi’s funeral took place at Hadji Hamit Vural’s mosque in Duttepe two hours after Mevlut got to Kültepe, during the afternoon prayers. Mevlut had brought his civilian clothes, but he wasn’t wearing them yet. Those who tried to comfort him with sympathetic looks smiled to see him dressed like a private on a day pass.

Mevlut carried the coffin on his shoulder to the grave site. He threw spades of earth over his father’s body. He thought he was about to cry, his foot slipped and he almost fell into the grave. There were around forty people at the funeral. Süleyman hugged him, and they sat down on another grave. From the tombstones around him, Mevlut could tell that the Cemetery of the Industrial Quarter was a burial ground for migrants. It was growing fast, as it was where those who had settled the surrounding hills were buried when they died; and as Mevlut read the inscriptions around him distractedly, he realized that not a single person there had been born in Istanbul. Nearly all of them were originally from Sivas, Erzincan, Erzurum, and Gümüşhane.

There was an engraver at the gates with whom he agreed on a midsize headstone without even haggling. Borrowing from the inscriptions he had just been reading, he wrote something down on a piece of paper and gave it to the engraver: MUSTAFA KARATAş (1927–81). CENNETPINAR, BEYşEHIR. YOGURT AND BOZA SELLER. MAY HE REST IN PEACE.

He could tell that his army uniform made him look both sweet and somewhat distinguished. Back in the neighborhood, they headed out to Duttepe’s shopping district and went into shops and coffeehouses. Mevlut realized how attached he was to Kültepe, Duttepe, and all these people who were embracing him. But to his surprise, he also seemed to harbor against them a rage close to hatred — even against his uncle and cousins. He had to struggle to hold back a torrent of obscenities he felt like spewing on them all, just like the kind you might hear in the army.

At dinnertime, his aunt remarked to everyone at the table how good Mevlut looked in his uniform. How unfortunate that his mother hadn’t been able to make the trip from the village and see her son like this. In the few minutes he was left alone with Süleyman in the kitchen, Mevlut still didn’t ask after Rayiha, even though he was dying to know. He ate his chicken and potatoes in silence, watching TV with everyone else.

He thought about writing Rayiha a letter that night on the shaky table at home. But as soon as he was back in Kültepe and inside the house, this place seemed to him so desolate that he lay down on the bed and started crying. He wept for a very long time, unsure of whether it was on account of his father or of his own loneliness. He fell asleep in his uniform.

In the morning, he took it off and wore the civilian clothes he’d put in his suitcase almost a year ago. He went to the Karlıova Restaurant in Beyoğlu. They weren’t particularly welcoming. Ferhat had left for his military service after Mevlut, and most of the waiters were new; any old ones still there were preoccupied with customers. So Mevlut ended up leaving without getting the chance to savor the “Return to Karlıova” fantasy that had so often helped him pass the time on guard duty.

He went to the Elyazar Cinema ten minutes away. When he walked in this time, he felt no shame at the sight of the other men in the lobby. He walked through this crowd of men with his head held high and looking straight at them.

Once he sat down, he was pleased to have broken free of everyone’s gaze, happy to be left alone in the dark with the wanton women on the screen to become nothing more than another pair of leering eyes. He noticed immediately that the way the men in the military swore and the barrenness of their souls had changed the way he himself saw the women on-screen. He felt more vulgar but also more normal now. Whenever anyone made a loud, obscene joke about the movie, or answered an actor’s line with some innuendo, he laughed along with everyone else. When the lights came on between movies, Mevlut looked around and figured out that any men with really short hair must be soldiers in their day clothes, on leave as he was. He watched all three features from start to finish. He left at the sex and grape-eating scene, which he remembered from when he had first walked in halfway through the same German movie. He went home and masturbated until nightfall.

That night, worn out by guilt and loneliness, he went over to his uncle’s house in Duttepe.

“Don’t worry, everything’s fine,” said Süleyman when they were alone. “Rayiha loves your letters. Where did you learn to write such good letters? Will you help me write one, too, someday?”

“Is Rayiha going to reply to me?”

“She’d like to, but she won’t…Her father wouldn’t tolerate it. I got to see for myself how much they love their father the last time they were here, before the coup. They stayed in that new room we’ve just added.”

Süleyman opened the door to the room where Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman and his two daughters had stayed for a week when they’d last come from the village, switched on the lights, and gave Mevlut the tour, like a museum guide. Mevlut saw there were two beds in the room.

Süleyman understood what Mevlut was wondering about. “Their father slept in this bed, and the girls slept together in the other bed the first night, but they didn’t really fit. So we made Rayiha a bed on the floor.”

Mevlut shot a timid glance at the spot where Rayiha’s bed had been laid out. The floor in Süleyman’s house was tiled and carpeted.

He was pleased to find out that Vediha knew about the letters. She didn’t act too familiar or let on that she knew everything and had even helped deliver his letters, but she smiled at Mevlut sweetly every time she saw him. Mevlut interpreted this as a sign that she was on his side, and he was delighted.

Vediha Yenge really was amazingly beautiful. Mevlut played a little with her son Bozkurt (named after the legendary Grey Wolf that saved the Turks), who’d been born when Mevlut was working at the Karlıova Restaurant, and with her younger son, Turan, who arrived when Mevlut was in the military. Vediha had become even more radiant after the birth of her second child, more mature and attractive. Mevlut was moved by the tenderness she showed toward her two sons and was pleased when he sensed that she had a soft spot for him, too, or at least a sort of sisterly affection. He kept thinking how Rayiha was just as beautiful as Vediha, if not more so.

He spent most of his time in Istanbul writing new letters to Rayiha. Having been away for a year, he already felt estranged from the city. Istanbul had changed after the military coup. The political slogans had been wiped off the walls again, street vendors had been driven off the main roads and squares, the brothels in Beyoğlu had been shut down, and the delinquents who sold bootleg whiskey and American cigarettes on the streets had been rounded up. Even the traffic was better. You couldn’t stop wherever you wanted anymore. Mevlut thought some of the changes were good, but in a strange way, he felt like an outsider. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a job, he thought.

“I’m going to ask you something, but please don’t take it the wrong way,” he told Süleyman the next evening. His father was gone now, so he could easily go over to his uncle’s every night.

“I never misunderstand you, Mevlut,” said Süleyman. “You’re the one who’s always misunderstood my understanding.”

“Can you get me her photograph?”

“Rayiha’s? No.”

“Why?”

“She’s the sister of my brother’s wife.”

“If I had her photograph, I’d write her better letters.”

“Believe me, Mevlut, they couldn’t get any better.”

Süleyman helped him rent out the house in Kültepe to an acquaintance of the Vurals. He decided he could do without a contract when Süleyman said, “There’s no need, we know the guy, and you don’t want to pay taxes.” In any case, he wasn’t the only one who was entitled to a share of revenue from the house (which was still not registered in anyone’s name); his mother and sisters in the village also had a claim. He decided he didn’t want to get too involved in these matters.

He was putting his father’s clothes and shirts into a suitcase before renting the place out, when he caught a trace of his father’s smell and went to curl up on the bed. This time he didn’t cry. He felt angry and resentful toward the world. He also understood that when his military service was over, he was not coming back to Kültepe or this house. Yet when it came time to return to Kars, something jarred deep inside of him and rebelled at the thought. He did not want to wear his uniform, nor did he want to complete the remainder of his military service. He hated his commanders and all those army thugs. Alarmingly, he could now see why some people deserted. He put on his uniform and set off.

In his last few months in Kars, Mevlut wrote Rayiha forty-seven letters. He had plenty of time: he had been assigned to the detachment the base commander had taken with him to the town hall, where he managed the canteen and the small tearoom, acting as Turgut Pasha’s personal waiter when the pasha was there. But the pasha was too suspicious and picky to eat in the town hall, so it wasn’t a very difficult job: Mevlut brewed the pasha’s tea himself, prepared his coffee with one sugar and double foam, and personally served him water and soft drinks. The pasha bought a cookie from the bakery once, and another time he took a pastry from the canteen, and put both items in front of Mevlut, telling him what to look out for.

“Go on, have a taste…we don’t want city hall poisoning us.”

He wanted to write to Rayiha about his army days, but in the end he knew his letters would be read before they went out, so he confined himself to the usual poetic flights, invoking yet more piercing eyes and ensorcelled looks. Mevlut would keep composing letters until the last day of his military service, which never seemed to come, and when it finally did arrive, never seemed to pass.

19. Mevlut and Rayiha

Elopement Is a Tricky Business

MEVLUT FINISHED his military service on 17 March 1982 and took the first bus back to Istanbul. He rented a second-floor apartment with linoleum floors in an old Greek house in Tarlabaşı, two streets down from the Karlıova Restaurant’s dormitory, and he began working as a waiter in a nondescript restaurant. From a flea market in Çukurcuma he bought a table (one that didn’t wobble) and four chairs (two of which matched), and from junk dealers who sold their wares door to door he selected a worn old bed with an enormous wooden headboard carved with birds and leaves. He furnished this room dreaming all the while about the happy home he would one day share with Rayiha.

At his uncle’s house one evening at the start of April, Mevlut saw Abdurrahman Efendi. He was nestled at one end of the table with a bib around his neck, sipping his rakı and enjoying his grandsons, Bozkurt and Turan. Mevlut realized he must have come from the village on his own, without his daughters. Uncle Hasan wasn’t home; for the last few years, he had been leaving the house every night for evening prayers before going to his grocery store to watch TV and wait for customers. Mevlut greeted his future father-in-law respectfully. Abdurrahman returned the greeting but hadn’t really registered Mevlut’s presence.

Korkut and Abdurrahman Efendi were soon engaged in a vehement discussion of bankers. Mevlut heard them mention a number of names — the Pilgrim Banker, Banker Ali. With inflation at one hundred percent, your money would soon be worth less than the paper it was printed on — unless you took it out of the banks, which paid so little in the way of interest, and gave it over to these new bankers, most of whom seemed like they’d only just landed in the city and wouldn’t have looked out of place manning a village shop. They all promised very high annual interest rates, but could they really be trusted?

Finishing his third drink, Abdurrahman Efendi was boasting of how each of his daughters was a beauty and how he had made sure they all got a proper education back in the village. “Enough, Dad,” said Vediha as she went to put her sons to bed; Abdurrahman Efendi went with them.

“Go wait for me at the coffeehouse,” said Süleyman once they’d been left alone at the table.

Mevlut’s heart hammered in his chest.

“What’s all this about?” said Aunt Safiye. “Do whatever you want, but don’t get involved in politics. We should really be getting you two married off.”

From the TV at the coffeehouse Mevlut learned that Argentina and England were at war. Süleyman came in to find him admiring the English aircraft carriers and warships.

“Abdurrahman Efendi has come to Istanbul to take his money from one banker and give it to another who’s even worse…We can’t figure out whether any of it is true, or even if he’s really got any money. He’s also been talking about some ‘good news,’ ” said Süleyman.

“What good news?”

“Rayiha’s got a suitor,” said Süleyman. “One of these redneck bankers. Apparently he used to have a tea stall. It’s serious. That greedy Crooked Neck might well just hand his daughter over to the banker. He won’t listen to anyone. You need to run away with Rayiha, Mevlut.”

“Really? Oh, Süleyman, please help me run away with her.”

“Do you think running away with a girl is easy?” said Süleyman. “One little mistake, and before you know it, someone gets shot, there’s a blood feud, and then people kill one another over it for years for no good reason, and proudly say it’s all about honor. Are you willing to take the risk?”

“I have no choice,” said Mevlut.

“You don’t,” said Süleyman. “But you don’t want anyone to think you’re just cheap, either. What can you offer this girl when there are so many rich men ready to spend a fortune on her?”

They met again in the same place five days later, and while Süleyman watched the English taking over the Falklands, Mevlut produced a piece of paper from his pocket.

“Go on, take a look,” he crowed. “You can have it.”

“What’s this?” said Süleyman. “Oh, it’s the papers for your house. Let’s have a look. It’s got my father’s name on it, too. They had claimed the land together. Why did you bring it? Don’t be so eager to give this away just to show off. You’re going to need it if you want your share when they hand out title deeds for that side of Kültepe one day.”

“Give it to Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman…,” said Mevlut. “Tell her father no one can love his daughter like I do.”

“I will, but put that back in your pocket,” said Süleyman.

“It’s not just talk, I mean it,” said Mevlut.

The first thing Mevlut did the next morning when he woke up from his rakı hangover was to check inside his jacket pocket. He couldn’t decide whether to be glad or disappointed that he still had the piece of paper his father and his uncle Hasan had obtained from the local councilman fifteen years ago.

“You should be grateful that you have Vediha Yenge and the rest of us,” said Süleyman ten days later. “She’s gone all the way to the village for you. Now let’s see if you’ll get your way. Bring me another rakı, will you?”

Vediha took her two sons — three-year-old Bozkurt and two-year-old Turan — along with her to the village. Mevlut thought they would be back almost immediately, as the kids would quickly tire of a muddy village dwelling where the lights went out all the time and the water never ran, but he was wrong. Restless, he would go over to Duttepe twice a week, thinking Vediha Yenge must surely be back by now, but he would find no one but Aunt Safiye sitting alone in the gloomy house.

“Who would have thought it was that daughter-in-law of mine who was breathing life into this house,” said Aunt Safiye to Mevlut who was visiting late one night. “Ever since Vediha’s been gone, there’s been a few nights when Korkut hasn’t come home. Süleyman is out, too. I made lentil soup, shall I warm some up for you? We can watch television. Did you hear, Kastelli ran away, and all the bankers have gone bust. You haven’t given these bankers any of your money, have you?”

“I don’t have any money, Aunt Safiye.”

“Don’t worry…Don’t spend your life stressing about money, you’re bound to get your big break someday. Money doesn’t make happiness. Look at how much Korkut earns, and still he and Vediha are at each other’s throats every day…I feel sorry for Bozkurt and Turan, they’ve known nothing but arguments and fights all their life. Never mind…Hopefully this thing of yours will work out, God willing.”

“What thing?” said Mevlut, his heart speeding up as he turned away from the television, but Aunt Safiye said no more.

“I have some good news,” said Süleyman three days later. “Vediha Yenge is back from the village. Rayiha loves you very much, my dear Mevlut. It’s all thanks to your letters. She definitely doesn’t want the banker her father means for her to marry. The banker himself is officially bankrupt, but he bought gold and American dollars with his customers’ money and buried it all away somewhere. Once all this media attention dies down and the newspapers move on to the next story, he’s going to dig up the money from whatever garden he’s buried it in and live the good life with Rayiha while the greedy blockheads who gave him their cash have to deal with the courts. He’s promised the Crooked Neck a bundle. If her father gives his consent, he’s going to marry Rayiha in a civil ceremony and go to Germany until the storm blows over. Apparently that crook of a ruined banker — and former tea vendor — is hiding out learning German and wants Rayiha to learn enough herself to be able buy meat from the halal butcher in Germany.”

“That bastard,” said Mevlut. “If I don’t get to elope with Rayiha, I’ll kill him.”

“You won’t need to kill anyone. I’m going to take the van and we’re going to go to the village and take her away,” said Süleyman. “I’ll sort everything out for you.”

Mevlut hugged and kissed his cousin. That night, he was too exhilarated to sleep.

When they met again, Süleyman had planned everything: after Thursday’s evening prayers, Rayiha was going to take her belongings and come out to her back garden.

“Let’s get going,” said Mevlut.

“Sit back down, will you. It’s no more than a day’s drive by van.”

“It might rain, it’s flood season…And we have to make preparations in Beyşehir.”

“There’s no need for any preparations. As soon as it gets dark, you’ll find the girl in the Crooked Neck’s back garden as if you’d put her there yourself. I’ll drive you both to Akşehir and drop you off at the train station. You and Rayiha will take the train, and I’ll come back on my own so her father doesn’t suspect me.”

Just hearing Süleyman say “you and Rayiha” was enough to send Mevlut into raptures. He’d already taken a week off work, and extended his leave for another week, claiming “family matters.” When he asked for yet another week of unpaid leave, his boss grumbled. So Mevlut told him not to expect him back.

He could find another job in an ordinary restaurant like that anytime. He had also been thinking of entering the ice-cream business. He had met an ice-cream vendor who wanted to rent out his three-wheeled ice-cream cart and ice-cream churn from the month of Ramadan onward.

He tidied up the house a little and tried to put himself in Rayiha’s shoes to imagine what she would see when she walked through the door, what sorts of things she would notice. Should he buy a bedspread now or let her choose one? Every time he imagined Rayiha inside the house, he thought of how she would see him walking around in his underwear, and he both craved that intimacy and shied away from the thought.

—

Süleyman. I fooled them all — my brother, my mother, Vediha, and everyone else — telling them I was going to take the van and disappear for a couple of days. On the eve of our departure, our would-be groom was jumping for joy; I took him to one side to have a word.

“Now listen very carefully, my dear Mevlut, because I’m talking to you not as your best friend and your cousin right now but as a member of the girl’s family. Rayiha isn’t even eighteen yet. If her father loses it, if he decides ‘I can’t forgive someone who’s run away with my daughter’ and sends the gendarmes after you, you’re going to have to hide until she turns eighteen, and you won’t be able to marry her until then. Now I want you to give me your word of honor that, when the time comes, you are absolutely going to marry her.”

“You have my word,” said Mevlut. “I’m going to marry her in a religious ceremony, too.”

In the van the next morning, on our way to the village, Mevlut was in a great mood, joking around, looking at every passing factory and bridge, telling me “Faster, floor it!” and generally just babbling away. Then, he went quiet.

“What’s wrong, scared of running away with a girl all of a sudden? We’re just coming into Afyon. If we spend the night in the van, the police will get suspicious and they might take us to the police station, so I think we’d better go to that motel over there, all right? It’s on me.”

On the ground floor of the Nezahat Hotel, there was a restaurant that served alcohol. I was just draining my second drink as I sat there listening to Mevlut still going on about the tortures he saw in the military, when I finally snapped.

“Look, I’m Turkish and I won’t hear a word said against my army, got it?” I said. “Maybe all these tortures and beatings and locking up a hundred thousand people is a bit much, but I’m happy with the coup. I’m sure you’d agree that the whole country’s calmed right down, not just Istanbul, the streets are spotless, there’s no more arguing about left or right, no more assassinations, the traffic’s flowing smooth ever since the army put their foot down, the brothels have been shut down, and all the prostitutes, the Communists, the Marlboro sellers, the black-market traders, the mafia thugs, bootleggers, pimps, and street vendors have been swept away. Now don’t get all offended; there just isn’t any future for street vendors in this country, and you better accept it, my dear Mevlut. A man forks out a fortune on rent to open his nice fruit-and-vegetable shop in the best spot in the city, and along you come and sit on the pavement right on his doorstep to sell your potatoes and tomatoes from the village…Is that fair? The army’s just regulating things a little. If only he’d lived a little longer, Atatürk wouldn’t have stopped at the fez and the skullcap, he would have also banned street vendors all over the country, starting from Istanbul. I’m told they don’t have these things in Europe.”

“On the contrary,” said Mevlut. “When Atatürk was visiting from Ankara one day, he thought the streets of Istanbul were too quiet and—”

“Anyway, if the army were to stop using the stick for one moment, our people would either take the Communists’ bait or run to the Islamists. There’s also those Kurds who want to split this country up. Do you still see that Ferhat? What’s he up to?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s a real scumbag.”

“He’s my friend.”

“Fine then, I’m not taking you to Beyşehir, good luck eloping now.”

“Oh come on, Süleyman, don’t be that way,” said Mevlut, suddenly desperate.

“Here I am, serving you a real beauty on a silver platter. She’s all packed up and waiting for you in the garden. On top of that, I’m putting you in my van and personally driving you seven hundred kilometers to the village. I’m paying for the gas. Even the hotel you’re sleeping in tonight and the rakı you drink is on me. And still you won’t say ‘You’re right, Süleyman, Ferhat is a bastard,’ not even once. You won’t even pretend. You never say ‘You’re a good guy, Süleyman.’ If you think you’re so smart, if you still think you’re so much better than me the way you did when we were kids, then why come begging for our help?”

“Forgive me, Süleyman.”

“Say it again.”

“Forgive me, Süleyman.”

“I will forgive you, but first I need to hear what your excuse is.”

“My excuse is that I’m afraid, Süleyman.”

“But there’s nothing to be afraid of. When they realize Rayiha’s run away…they’re obviously going to head toward our village. You two are going to climb the hill. They might even fire a couple of rounds just for show. Don’t be scared, I’ll be waiting for you with the van on the other side. Rayiha will sit in the back so she doesn’t see me and recog nize me. She did see the van once back in Istanbul, but she’s a girl, they can’t tell cars apart. You won’t say a word about me, of course. What you should worry about is what you’ll do once you’ve run away and gotten back to Istanbul and you’re alone in the same room with her. You haven’t slept with a woman yet, have you, Mevlut?”

“I’m not worried about all that, Süleyman, I’m scared she’ll change her mind and decide she doesn’t want to run off with me after all.”

First thing the next morning, we scouted out the Akşehir train station. From there, we sidled up to our village through muddy mountain roads, but even though Mevlut wanted to see his mother, he worried all our plans would unravel if he drew too much attention to himself, so we didn’t even say hello. We took the roundabout route to Gümüşdere village and snuck up to Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman Efendi’s house, right up to the garden with the crumbling wall. We went back. I drove the van farther on and pulled over.

“There’s not long to go before sunset and the evening prayers,” I said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Good luck, Mevlut.”

“God bless you, Süleyman,” he said. “Pray for me.”

I got out of the van with him. We embraced…I was almost welling up myself, looking fondly at his back as he walked down the dirt path to the village, and in my heart I wished him a happy life. I drove to our meeting point thinking that he was soon going to realize his fate was different from what he had expected, and I wondered what he would do when he found out. If I didn’t truly want the best for Mevlut, if I really wanted to con him, as some may think, then when he gave me the papers to his house in Kültepe that night in Istanbul when he was drunk on rakı and wanted me to arrange a match with Rayiha, I wouldn’t have given them back to him, would I? I’m the one who found him a tenant for that house, and it’s all that Mevlut’s got in this world. I’m not counting his mother and sisters in the village. In theory, they’re also my late uncle Mustafa’s heirs, but that’s none of my business.

—

When Mevlut was back in middle school and about to take an important exam, he used to feel as if his heart were pumping flames up to his forehead and his face. A much more intense version of that feeling had taken over his entire body now as he walked to the village of Gümüşdere.

He chanced upon the cemetery on the hill just outside the village, walked in among the headstones, sat on the edge of a grave across from a moldy, old, but equally elaborate and mysterious headstone, and thought about his life. “God, please make Rayiha show up, please, God, make Rayiha show up,” he repeated. He wanted to pray and implore God, but he couldn’t seem to recall any of the prayers he knew. He said to himself, “If Rayiha shows up, I’ll learn the Holy Koran by heart and become a hafiz.” He prayed with insistence and vigor while feeling like a tiny, helpless speck in God’s universe. He’d heard that it could help to repeat prayers beseechingly.

Just after sundown, Mevlut approached the crumbling wall. The window at the back of Abdurrahman Efendi’s house was dark. He was ten minutes early. As he waited for the agreed sign, a light switching on and off, he felt that he was at the beginning of his life, just as he had thirteen years ago on the day he had arrived in Istanbul with his father.

The dogs barked and the window lit up and went dark again.