A Strangeness in My Mind

1. Mevlut and Rayiha Get Married

Only Death Can Tear Us Apart

Süleyman. When do you think Mevlut realized that girl he was running away with was not the beautiful Samiha whose eyes he’d stared into at my brother’s wedding, but her less beautiful older sister Rayiha? Was it at the moment he met her in the dark of her garden in the village, or did he only see her face later, as they made their way together across rivers and over hills? Did he already know by the time he sat down next to me in the van? That’s why I asked him “Is something the matter?” and “Cat got your tongue?” But Mevlut gave nothing away.

—

When they got off the train and joined the crowds taking the ferry from Haydarpaşa to Karaköy, Mevlut’s mind wasn’t on weddings and marriage contracts but on the fact that soon he would finally be alone in a room with Rayiha. It was perhaps a bit childish of her to be so interested in the commotion on Galata Bridge and the white smoke from the ferries, but he could think of nothing except how they were shortly going to walk into a house with no one else there.

When Mevlut took out his keys — tucked safe in his pocket like something precious — and unlocked the door to the apartment in Tarlabaşı, he felt as if the house had become a different place in the three days it had taken him to make the round trip to the village: on early June mornings, the apartment would feel almost cool, but it was stiflingly hot now in high summer, and the old linoleum floors, heating up under the sunlight, emitted a smell of cheap plastic mixed with beeswax and hemp. You could hear the din of the people and traffic of Beyoğlu and Tarlabaşı drifting in from outside. Mevlut had always liked that sound.

—

Rayiha. “Our house is lovely,” I said. “But it needs airing.” I couldn’t manage to turn the handle and open the window, so Mevlut rushed over to show me how to work the bolt. I immediately sensed that once we’d given the house a thorough scrubbing and swept away the cobwebs, it would be cleansed of all of Mevlut’s disappointments, his fears, and the demons in his mind. We went out to buy some soap, a plastic bucket, and a mop, and the moment we walked out the door, the tension of being alone inside the house was lifted, and we relaxed. We spent the afternoon window-shopping, looking for things on store shelves from Tarlabaşı to Balıkpazarı, and buying whatever we needed. We bought sponges for the kitchen, scrubbing brushes, and cleaning liquid, and as soon as we got home, we cleaned the house from top to bottom. We got so involved in what we were doing that we forgot to be embarrassed about being alone at home together.

By evening time, I was soaked through with sweat. Mevlut showed me how to light the gas boiler with a match, how to regulate the butane supply, and which one was the hot water tap. We had to stand on a chair to insert a lit match into a black hole in the boiler and turn it on. Mevlut suggested I crack open the little frosted-glass window that opened onto the dark inner courtyard of the building.

“If you leave it open just so, you’ll let the dirty air out, and no one will see you…,” he whispered. “I’ll be gone for an hour.”

—

Rayiha was still in the same outfit she’d been wearing when they had run away from the village, and Mevlut had figured out that she wouldn’t be comfortable taking her clothes off and bathing if he was in the house. He sat in a coffeehouse just off İstiklal Avenue. On winter evenings, this place would be full of doormen, lottery-ticket sellers, drivers, and tired street vendors, but now it was empty. He looked at the cup of tea that had been placed in front of him and thought of Rayiha bathing. Where had he gotten the idea that she had fair skin? From looking at her neck! Why had he said “an hour” when he’d left? Time was moving very slowly. He looked at a lonely tea leaf at the bottom of his glass.

Not wanting to go back home before an hour had passed, he had a beer and took the long way back through the backstreets of Tarlabaşı: it pleased him to be a part of these streets where kids cursed at one another as they played football, mothers sat outside small three-story houses with big trays on their laps, picking stones out of rice, and everyone knew everyone else.

Mevlut haggled for watermelons with a man sitting under the shade of a black cloth gazebo in an empty clearing, tapping a number of watermelons with his fingers to try to guess how red they were inside. There was an ant walking on a watermelon. Whenever Mevlut turned the fruit over in his hands, the ant would end up upside down, but it would never fall; it would just run around until it was back on top of the watermelon. He had the vendor weigh the watermelon, taking care not to knock the patient ant off. He walked back into the house without a sound and put the watermelon in the kitchen.

—

Rayiha. Once I had bathed and put on some fresh, clean clothes, I lay down on the bed with my back to the door and fell asleep without covering my hair.

—

Mevlut went up to her quietly. For a long time, he looked at Rayiha lying on the bed, knowing that he would never forget this moment. Her body and feet looked delicate and pretty under her clothes. Her shoulders and her arms stirred gently every time she breathed. For a moment, Mevlut felt that she was only pretending to be asleep. He lay down quietly and cautiously on the other side of the double bed, without changing his clothes.

His heart was beating fast. If they started having sex now — and he wasn’t even sure how to go about doing that — he would be taking advantage of her trust.

Rayiha had put her trust in Mevlut, she had surrendered her life into his hands, and she had taken off her headscarf and shown him her long, beautiful hair before they were married — before they’d even had sex. As he looked at her long, flowing locks, Mevlut sensed that this trust and surrender would be enough to bind him to Rayiha and understood just how much he was going to love her. He wasn’t alone in the world. He watched Rayiha breathing in and out, and his happiness seemed boundless. She had even appreciated his letters.

They fell asleep in their clothes. Late at night, they embraced in the dark, but they did not make love. Mevlut could tell that it must be easier to engage in sexual activities at night. But he would have liked his first time with Rayiha to be in the light of day, when he could look into her eyes. Come morning, however, every time they did look into each other’s eyes from up close, they got embarrassed and found other things to keep them busy.

—

Rayiha. The next morning, I took Mevlut shopping again. I picked a plastic tablecloth that looked like waxcloth, a duvet cover with blue flowers, a plastic breadbasket that looked like it was made of wicker, and a plastic lemon press. Mevlut soon tired of my browsing the stores looking at slippers, teacups, jars, and saltshakers just for fun, without buying anything. We went back home. We sat on the edge of the bed.

“No one knows we’re here, right?” I said.

Mevlut’s boyish face gave me such a look in response that I said, “There’s food on the stove,” and ran off to the kitchen. In the afternoon, when the sun warmed up the small apartment, I felt tired and went to lie down on the bed.

—

When Mevlut went to lie down next to her, they hugged and kissed for the very first time. His desire intensified when he saw the look of childlike guilt on clever Rayiha’s face. But every time his desires announced themselves in fleshly form, they were both overcome with embarrassment. Mevlut put his hand inside Rayiha’s dress and touched her left breast for a moment, and his head spun.

She pushed him away. He got up, his pride bruised.

“Don’t worry, I’m not angry!” he said as he walked out the door with decision. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

In one of the streets behind the Ağa Mosque, there was a Kurdish scrap-metal dealer who had graduated from a religious institute in Ankara. He charged a small fee to perform quick religious wedding ceremonies for couples who’d already had their civil ceremonies but wanted to be on the safe side; men who had wives back in their villages but had fallen in love with someone else in Istanbul and had no one else to turn to; and conservative teenagers who kept their meetings a secret from their fathers and older brothers, let things get too far, and then couldn’t live with the guilt. The scrap dealer claimed he was a Hanafi because only Sunnis of the Hanafi school were allowed to marry young people without their parents’ permission.

Mevlut found this man among old radiators, stove lids, and rusty engine parts in the back room of his shop, dozing with his head under a copy of the Istanbul daily Akşam.

“Sir, I would like to get married according to the laws of our faith.”

“I understand, but what’s the rush?” said the learned man. “You’re too poor and too young to take a second wife.”

“I ran away with a girl!” said Mevlut.

“With her agreement, of course?”

“We’re in love.”

“The world’s full of philanderers who like to kidnap girls and rape them, claiming all the while that it’s love. These villains sometimes even manage to persuade the girls’ helpless families to let them marry their daughters…”

“It’s not like that at all,” said Mevlut. “We are getting married by mutual consent and hopefully with love.”

“Love is a disease,” said the scholar. “And marriage is the only cure, you’re right. But it is a cure you may regret, for it is like having to take awful quinine for the rest of your life even after your typhoid fever is cured.”

“I won’t regret it,” said Mevlut.

“Then what’s the rush? Haven’t you consummated yet?”

“Only after we’re properly married,” said Mevlut.

“Either she’s really ugly, or you’re a real innocent. What’s your name? You’re a good-looking lad, sit down and have some tea.”

Mevlut drank the tea served by a pale assistant with big green eyes, trying to cut the small talk short, but the man was determined to raise his price by telling him how bad business was. There were still some young men and women who decided to get married after they’d kissed and fondled each other, and then went home to their separate families and did not say a word to their parents at the dinner table, but their numbers, too, were sadly dwindling.

“I don’t have much money!” said Mevlut.

“Is that why you ran away with the girl? Good-looking boys like you can turn out to be real rakes sometimes, and as soon as they’ve quenched their thirst they’ll say talaq and get rid of the girl. I’ve known many a lovely but ingenuous girl to kill herself or end up in a brothel over someone like you.”

“We’re going to have a civil ceremony, too, as soon as she turns eighteen,” said Mevlut, feeling guilty.

“All right. I will do a good deed and marry you tomorrow. Where shall I come?”

“Could we just do it here without bringing the girl in?” said Mevlut, looking around at the dusty junk shop.

“I don’t charge for the ceremony itself, but I do for the room.”

—

Rayiha. After Mevlut left the house, I went out and bought two kilos of slightly overripe but cheap strawberries from a street vendor, and sugar from the grocery store, and before Mevlut got back, I’d washed the strawberries and started making jam. When he came home, he breathed in the sweet strawberry fumes happily but didn’t try to approach me.

In the evening, he took me to see a double feature at the Tulip Cinema. During the break between the first movie starring Hülya Koçyiğit and the second starring Türkân Şoray, the air in the theater so humid that the seats felt wet, he told me that we would be getting married tomorrow, and I cried a bit. I still paid attention to the second movie, though. I was so happy.

Once the movie was over, Mevlut said, “Until your father gives us his blessing or you turn eighteen, let’s at least make sure we’re married in the eyes of God so no one can split us up…I know this scrap-metal dealer. The ceremony will be in his shop. He said there’s no need for you to come…All you have to do is give someone permission to act on your behalf.”

“No, I want to be there for the ceremony,” I said with a frown. But then I smiled so Mevlut wouldn’t worry.

—

Back home, Mevlut and Rayiha acted like two strangers forced to share a hotel room in a provincial town, hiding from each other as they changed into their nightgown and pajamas. Avoiding each other’s gaze, they switched the lights off and carefully lay down side by side on the bed making sure to leave some space between them, Rayiha with her back to Mevlut again. He felt a mixture of joy and fear, and just as he was thinking this excitement would keep him up all night, he fell asleep.

He woke up in the middle of the night to find that he had buried himself in the thick strawberry scent of Rayiha’s skin and the aroma of children’s cookies coming from her neck. They’d both been sweating in the heat and fallen prey to ravenous mosquitoes. Their bodies embraced of their own accord. With his eyes on the dark blue sky and the neon lights outside, Mevlut felt briefly as if they were floating away somewhere outside the world, in a childhood place where gravity did not exist, when Rayiha said, “We’re not married yet,” and pushed him away.

From a waiter he used to know at the Karlıova Restaurant, Mevlut had found out that Ferhat was back from military service. The next morning, one of the two dishwasher boys from Mardin led him to where Ferhat was staying, a second-rate rooming house for bachelors in Tarlabaşı. He was living here with waiters ten years younger than he was, and Kurdish and Alevi kids from Tunceli and Bingöl just out of middle school who’d started working as dishwashers. Mevlut didn’t think this stinking, stuffy place was good enough for Ferhat and felt sorry for him, so he was relieved when he learned that Ferhat still spent plenty of time at his parents’ house. Mevlut could see that Ferhat was a sort of older brother to the kids in the dormitory, and that there were other things going on here, too — cigarette smuggling, which had become nearly impossible in the aftermath of the coup; trade in a drug that was known as grass; and a feeling of political outrage and solidarity — but he didn’t ask too many questions. The things he’d witnessed and experienced in the military, and the stories he’d heard from acquaintances imprisoned and tortured in Diyarbakır, had all left an indelible impression on Ferhat and made him even more political.

“You need to get married,” said Mevlut.

“I need to find a city girl and make her fall for me,” said Ferhat, “or I need to run away with a girl from the village. I don’t have enough money to get married.”

“I ran away with a girl,” said Mevlut. “So should you. Then we can start a business together, open a shop, and get rich.”

Mevlut told Ferhat a rather embellished version of the story of how he’d run away with Rayiha. Neither Süleyman nor his van featured in it. Mevlut said that he had walked hand in hand with his lover through the mud and the mountains for a whole day, all the way to Akşehir train station, while her father chased after them.

“Is Rayiha as beautiful as our letters said she was?” asked an eager Ferhat.

“She’s even prettier and smarter,” said Mevlut. “But the girl’s family, the Vurals, Korkut, Süleyman, they won’t give up the chase even in Istanbul.”

“Damned fascists,” said Ferhat, and agreed straightaway to act as a witness at their wedding.

—

Rayiha. I wore my floral-print dress with the long skirt and a clean pair of jeans. I also wore the purple headscarf I’d bought in the backstreets of Beyoğlu. We met up with Ferhat in the Black Sea Café on İstiklal Avenue. He was a tall, polite man with a high forehead. He gave us each a glass of sour-cherry juice. “Congratulations, yenge, you picked the right man,” he said. “He’s a bit of a weirdo, but he’s got a heart of gold.”

Once we’d all gathered at his shop, the scrap-metal dealer found another witness from the grocer’s next door. He opened a drawer and took out a frayed notebook covered in Ottoman script. He flipped it open and carefully took down everyone’s names and our fathers’ names, too. We all knew these records had no official value, yet it was impressive to see this man earnestly writing everything down in Arabic letters.

“How much did you spend on her bride price? How much will you pay if you split up?” asked the scrap-metal dealer.

“What bride price?” said Ferhat. “He ran away with the girl.”

“How much will you pay her if you divorce her?”

“Only death can tear us apart,” said Mevlut.

The other witness said, “Just put down ten Sultan Reshad gold bullion coins for one, and seven State Mint gold coins for the other.”

“That’s too much,” said Ferhat.

“It seems I shall not be able to perform this ceremony in full respect of Sharia law,” said the scrap-metal dealer, going over to the set of scales in the front room of the shop. “Any physical intimacy that might occur without there being a religious union in place is to be considered fornication. Anyway, the girl is too young.”

“I’m not too young, I’m seventeen!” I said, showing them the identification card I took from my father’s cupboard.

Ferhat took the scrap-metal dealer to one side and put some money in his pocket.

“Now, repeat after me,” said the scrap-metal dealer.

Mevlut and I looked into each other’s eyes and recited a long series of words in Arabic.

“Dear God! Bless this union!” said the scrap-metal dealer as he concluded the ceremony. “May there be companionship, understanding, and love between these two forsaken souls of yours, and please, O Lord, allow their marriage to stand the test of time, and protect Mevlut and Rayiha from hatred, discord, and separation.”

2. Mevlut Sells Ice Cream

The Happiest Days of His Life

AS SOON AS they got home, they made straight for the bed. Now that they were married, they could relax; the thing both had craved so much, been so curious about while never getting to do it, was now a duty everyone expected them to perform. They were shy about seeing each other naked (even with some parts remaining covered) and touching each other’s bodies where they burned hottest — on their arms, their chests — but the sense that it was all unavoidable relieved their shame somewhat. “Yes, this is really embarrassing,” their eyes were saying. “But unfortunately, it must be done.”

—

Rayiha. I only wish the room had been dark! I didn’t like feeling so self-conscious every time we looked into each other’s eyes. The faded curtains couldn’t block out the bright summer afternoon light. I had to push Mevlut away once or twice when he got too greedy and rough. But part of me liked it when he was forceful, and I just let myself go. I saw Mevlut’s thing twice, and it scared me a little. I cradled my pure and handsome Mevlut’s head like a baby, so that the huge thing down there wouldn’t catch my eye.

—

Contrary to what they’d always heard from their friends, Mevlut and Rayiha had learned in religion class back in the village that there was nothing lascivious about physical intimacy between husband and wife, but they still felt uncomfortable whenever they looked into each other’s eyes. They realized soon enough, however, that their shyness was bound to abate, and that they would come to see sex as a normal human activity, perhaps even a sign of maturity.

“I’m so thirsty,” said Mevlut, feeling as if he were about to suffocate.

It was almost as if the whole house — the walls, the windows, and the ceiling — were sweating with them.

“There’s a glass by the water pitcher,” said Rayiha, burrowing under the bedsheets.

Mevlut could sense from the look in her eyes that she was seeing the world from outside her own body. He felt the same as he poured water into the glass on the table — as if he had stepped outside himself and now existed purely as a soul. Handing his wife her glass of water, he realized that even though there was something obscene and shameless about sex, it also had a divine, spiritual side to it. They stole a few glances at each other’s bodies while they were drinking their water, feeling almost resigned, shy, and amazed at what life could be.

Mevlut saw light pouring out into the room from Rayiha’s milk-white skin. He briefly considered that he might be responsible for those pink and light purple marks on her body. Once they were back under the covers, they embraced in the comfort of knowing that everything was fine. Tender words tumbled unrehearsed from Mevlut’s mouth.

“My darling,” he told her. “My sweetheart, you’re so lovely…”

His mother and sisters used to say these things to him when he was little, but where they would say them in their normal voices, he was whispering them fervently into Rayiha’s ear like secrets. He called out to her in the restless voice of a traveler afraid of getting lost in the woods. They made love until morning, falling in and out of sleep, and getting up to drink water in the dark without ever switching the lights on. The best thing about being married was that you could have sex whenever and as often as you wanted.

In the morning, when they saw stains the color of sour cherries on the sheets, Mevlut and Rayiha felt a bit embarrassed, but also pleased — though they hid this satisfaction from each other — for here was the expected proof of Rayiha’s virginity. They never spoke of it openly, but all through that summer, whenever they were busy preparing sour-cherry ice cream for Mevlut to sell in the evenings, he would always remember that other smudge of cherry hue.

—

Rayiha. We both keep the fast during Ramadan — Mevlut started the year he finished primary school and stayed behind in the village, while I began even earlier, when I was just ten years old. When we were little, Samiha and I were napping until it was time to break the fast one day when my sister Vediha felt faint with hunger and keeled over like a minaret in an earthquake, and the trays she was carrying came tumbling down with her. That’s how we learned that whenever we felt too weak to stand from all that fasting, we should sit down on the floor immediately. Even when we didn’t feel faint, sometimes just for fun we would pretend that the world was spinning and sway backward and forward a little before throwing ourselves on the floor in fits of laughter. Anyone who keeps the fast, even kids, knows that there should not be any physical contact between husbands and wives during fasting hours. But three days after we got married, it was already Ramadan, and Mevlut and I began to question what we thought we knew.

Sir, does a kiss on the hand void the fast? It does not! What about a kiss on the shoulder? Probably not. What about kissing the neck of your lawfully wedded wife? Her cheek? The council for religious affairs says that a chaste kiss is fine as long as you aren’t planning to take things any further. The scrap-metal dealer who married us says that even a kiss on the mouth won’t void the fast provided there is no transfer of saliva. Mevlut trusted him and thought that, since he was the one who’d married us, he alone could decide the matter. In our faith, things can be interpreted in many different ways. Vediha once told me that on long, hot summer days, boys keeping the fast will disappear into the woods and hide in dried-up riverbeds where they shamelessly play with themselves and justify it by saying that “the imam states you mustn’t touch your spouse, not that you mustn’t touch yourself…” Maybe there isn’t anything in the holy book that forbids sex during Ramadan either.

You’ve probably figured it out by now: during the long, hot days of Ramadan, Mevlut and I couldn’t control our urges and started having sex. If it’s a sin, let it be on my head. I love my beautiful Mevlut so very much. We weren’t doing anyone any harm! Of those who would call us sinners, I’d like to ask one question: when thousands of young people are married off to each other in a hurry just before Ramadan and are having sex for the first time in their lives, what do you think they get up to at home during the long and dizzying hours of fasting?

—

Hızır had gone back to his village near Sivas for Ramadan, leaving Mevlut his three-wheeled ice-cream cart, some ladles, and a wooden cooler. Every summer, many street vendors like Hızır would arrange for someone to take over their carts and customers so that they wouldn’t lose any regulars while they were away in their villages.

Hızır wasn’t charging Mevlut much rent for the equipment because he trusted him to be honest and diligent. He had invited Mevlut over to his house on a gloomy backstreet of the Dolapdere neighborhood, where his tiny and rather rotund wife befriended Rayiha immediately and joined her husband in teaching them how to make the ice cream, how to knead the mixture with a continual heartfelt motion until it was the right consistency, and how to add a little citric acid to lemon juice and a little food coloring to sour-cherry juice. Hızır said that ice cream was not only a treat for children but also for adults who thought they were still children. As much as the flavor of the ice cream itself, the key to success lay in the ice-cream vendor’s exuberance and sense of humor. Hızır had sat Mevlut down and shown him a map he himself had drawn with great care, marking out which streets Mevlut should pass through and which spots would be most crowded at what times, so he could focus his efforts accordingly. Mevlut memorized the map and would visualize it every evening as he pushed his ice-cream cart from upper Tarlabaşı down to İstiklal Avenue and Sıraselviler.

There was a sign on the little white ice-cream cart that said

HIZIR’S ICE CREAM

Strawberry, Sour Cherry, Lemon, Chocolate, Cream

in red letters. Sometimes Mevlut would run out of a flavor toward the end of the evening, around the time he really began to miss Rayiha. “I don’t have any sour cherry,” he would tell a customer, who might try to get clever with him: “Then why did you write ‘sour cherry’ on your cart?” Mevlut’s initial urge would be to answer back, “I didn’t write it myself, did I?” but then he would think of Rayiha, and, feeling happy, he wouldn’t respond at all. He left behind the old bell he had inherited from his father and went out with a jollier and noisier one Hızır had given him, swinging it about until it swayed like a handkerchief fluttering on a clothesline in a storm, and he cried “Ice creeeam” in the melody Hızır himself had taught him. But the kids who would come running after him at the sound of the bell would shout, “Ice-cream man, ice-cream man, you’re not Hızır!”

“Hızır’s gone to a wedding in the village, I’m his little brother,” Mevlut would tell these children who emerged from the darkness like little imps, popping out from street corners, house windows, tree trunks, and mosque courtyards where they played hide-and-seek.

Mevlut was reluctant to leave the cart unattended, and it was difficult for him to enter homes and kitchens, so most families who wanted ice cream would send someone down to the street to fetch it. Big families would send servants carrying huge trays inlaid with silver or mother-of-pearl or use a rope to dangle a basket carrying as many as a dozen narrow-waisted little teacups and a piece of paper with detailed instructions on the flavors desired, and Mevlut soon discovered that filling these orders by the light of a streetlamp was as delicate and difficult a task as a pharmacist’s job. Sometimes there would be new customers rounding the corner before he’d finished, and even the children, who buzzed around him like flies on a plate of jam and never stopped talking, would grow impatient and agitated. Sometimes, when there wasn’t a soul on the street or around his ice-cream cart — during special nighttime Ramadan prayers, for example — a large family would send down a servant with a tray, and everyone in the house, starting with the children, their uncles watching football on TV, their happy guests, gossipy aunts, spoiled little girls, and finally the shy and irritable little boys, would shout down from the fifth floor for all the world to hear exactly how much sour cherry and how much cream they wanted and which flavor should go inside the cone and which one on top, with an impertinence that surprised even Mevlut. Sometimes people would insist he come upstairs, and he would stand by a crowded family dinner table or by the doors of a rich family’s chaotic kitchen, witnessing little children doing joyful cartwheels on the carpet. Some families, hearing the sound of the bell, would conclude that it must be Hızır down there, and the uncles and aunties would lean out the first-floor window, saying, “Hızır Efendi, how are you, you’re looking good!” even as they stared straight into Mevlut’s face; and far from correcting them, he would answer “Thank you, I have just returned from a wedding in the village…Ramadan has been particularly bountiful this year” in a manner designed to please, though always followed by a twinge of guilt.

What he felt most guilty about during Ramadan was his failing to resist temptation with Rayiha during fasting hours. Like her, he was smart enough to know that these were the happiest days of his life, and this happiness was too great for regret to dampen it, so he understood that his guilt sprang from a deeper source: the heart of someone who had been admitted to paradise by accident, without really deserving it.

At around ten thirty, before he was even halfway through the route Hızır had drawn, he would start to miss Rayiha enormously. What was she doing at home right now? Two weeks after the start of Ramadan, in whatever bit of the afternoon remained after making ice cream and having sex, they went to the movies a couple of times in the backstreets of Beyoğlu, to one of those cinemas that showed three comedy films starring people like Kemal Sunal and Fatma Girik, all for the price of a large ice-cream cone. Maybe if Mevlut were to buy her a secondhand television, Rayiha wouldn’t get bored waiting for him at home.

His last stop every night was a stairway that looked out on the tens of thousands of lit windows in Istanbul. This was the spot where Mevlut would one day get mugged by the father-and-son duo described at the start of our book, and as he stood here watching the oil tankers crossing the Bosphorus in the dark, and the lit-up Ramadan decorations hanging between minarets, Mevlut would think how lucky he was to have a home in Istanbul and a sweet girl like Rayiha waiting for him to return. He would pick out the brightest looking from among the kids that swooped around him like hungry seagulls tailing a fishing boat and tell him, “Go on, show me how much money you’ve got in your pockets.” This child and a few more like him would each get a cone piled high with ice cream, even though their small change was hardly enough to pay for it, and so, having used up the remaining ice cream in his tub, Mevlut would head home. He would ignore kids who had no money at all and pleaded, “Uncle Hızır, at least give us an empty cone!” or those who mimicked him for a laugh. He knew that the moment he gave a kid free ice cream, he wouldn’t be able to sell him or any of the other kids anything the next day.

—

Rayiha. I would know Mevlut was back by the sound of him pulling the cart into the back garden, and while he was busy chaining the front wheel to the almond tree, I would pick up the tubs (“Not a drop left, well done!” I’d say every time), the rags that needed washing, and the ice-cream scoops, taking them all upstairs. As soon as he stepped into the house, Mevlut would remove his apron and fling it to the floor. Some people handle the money they earn with the same veneration they would show a piece of paper with our Prophet’s name on it, holding it aloft like the source of life itself, so it was nice to see Mevlut casting off the apron with its pockets stuffed full of money in his eagerness to return to our bliss. I would kiss him.

On summer mornings, he would go out looking for strawberries, sour cherries, melons, and other ingredients for the ice cream, trying the Albanian fruit seller or else going to Balıkpazarı, and as I put on my shoes and my headscarf, Mevlut would say “Come along!” as if taking me along were his idea. After Ramadan, Mevlut started selling ice cream in the afternoons too.

Whenever I noticed Mevlut growing weary or bored in my presence, I would stand back a little as he caught up with his friends in barbershops, carpenter’s workshops, and garages. Sometimes he would say, “Wait over here for a minute, will you,” and go into a store, leaving me behind. I could keep myself entertained just by looking through an open door at workers in a factory that made plastic bowls. Mevlut would relax as we moved farther away from home. He would tell me about the awful backstreet cinemas we saw on the way, and another restaurant where he used to work with Ferhat, but he would feel uneasy whenever he spotted a familiar face among the crowds in Taksim and Galatasaray. Was it because he was the villain who’d seduced a woman, and I was the stupid girl who’d fallen for his tricks? “Let’s go home now,” he’d say, fuming from five steps ahead, and I would run to catch up with him, wondering how he could suddenly be so furious about something so small. (I spent my whole life trying to figure out why Mevlut would lose his temper all of a sudden.) He would soften as soon as we started to sort the fruit, and while we washed and juiced it, he’d plant kisses on my neck and my cheek, telling me he knew where the sweetest cherries and strawberries really were, which made me blush and laugh. The room was never dark no matter how tight we shut the curtains, but we would still pretend that it was and that we couldn’t see each other as we MADE LOVE.

3. Mevlut and Rayiha’s Wedding

Only Desperate Yogurt Sellers Bother with Boza

Abdurrahman Efendi. It’s tough when your daughter elopes: if you’re not up in arms the second you find out, firing bullets left and right, you’ll have the gossips whispering “Her father knew” behind your back. It was only four years ago that a lovely girl was kidnapped in broad daylight by three armed bandits while she was working the fields. Her father went to the judge and had him send the gendarmes after them, he tortured himself for days wondering what horrible things they must be doing to his daughter, but he still couldn’t avoid that slander: “Her father knew.” I asked Samiha over and over again to tell me who’d taken Rayiha, I even told her she had a slap coming if she wasn’t careful, but she didn’t believe me, of course — my daughters know I couldn’t even bear to twist their ears — and I didn’t get a thing out of her.

To head off any gossip in the village, I went down to the magistrate in Beyşehir. “But you didn’t even manage to keep hold of your daughter’s identity card,” he said. “It’s clear to me that the girl ran away because she wanted to. She’s under eighteen, though, so I can press charges. I can send the gendarmes after them. But then if your anger fades and you decide to forgive your son-in-law so they can be married properly, you’ll still have this court case to deal with. Go and think it over at the coffeehouse for a bit, and if you’re still determined to pursue the matter, I’ll be here.”

On my way to the coffeehouse, I stopped at the Broken Ladle for some lentil soup, and when I overheard the people at the next table talking about an imminent cockfighting match at the Animal Welfare Club, I followed them out of the diner. So I ended up going back to the village before I could decide what to do. A month later, just after Ramadan, there was some news from Vediha: Rayiha was in Istanbul, she was well, she was pregnant, and the man she had run away with was Mevlut, her husband Korkut’s cousin. Vediha had seen this fool Mevlut and knew that he was completely penniless. I said, “I will never forgive them,” but Vediha could already tell that I would.

—

Vediha. Rayiha came over to our place one afternoon sometime after the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, but she didn’t tell Mevlut. She said that she was very happy with him and that she was pregnant. She hugged me and cried. She told me how lonely she’d been feeling, how scared she was of everything, and how she wanted to live the way we used to do back in the village, with all her sisters and a family buzzing around her, among the trees and the chickens, in other words in a house with a garden like ours in Duttepe — not in some shabby, cramped apartment. What my dear Rayiha really wanted was for our father to stop thinking “There cannot be a wedding for a girl who runs away” and just forgive her, allowing her a civil ceremony and a wedding reception, too. Might I be able to coax everyone gently into agreement, placating Korkut and my father-in-law, Hasan, without hurting my father’s feelings, and sorting this all out before the baby in her belly grew too big? “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “But first you must swear one more time that you will never tell Dad or anyone else that it was Süleyman and I who delivered Mevlut’s letters.” Rayiha, who is an optimist by nature, swore without any hesitation. “I’m sure everyone’s secretly glad I ran away and got married, because it’s Samiha’s turn now,” she said.

—

Korkut. I went down to Gümüşdere, and after a brief negotiation, I convinced my weeping crooked-necked father-in-law to “forgive” Rayiha. I was a bit irritated at first because he was acting as if I’d been involved in the elopement (later I interpreted this tone of his as a sign that Vediha and my brother, Süleyman, must have had a hand in the matter), but really, he was pleased that Rayiha was married — he was just annoyed to have let Mevlut snatch his daughter away for free. To smooth his ruffled feathers, I promised that I would help him repair the broken wall around his garden and that I would tell Mevlut and Rayiha to go to the village to kiss his hand and beg for forgiveness, and later, I sent him two thousand liras with Vediha.

—

Mevlut became anxious when he found out that Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman would forgive them only on the condition that they went back to the village to pay their respects to him. Such a visit would inevitably entail coming face-to-face with the beautiful Samiha, who had been the intended recipient of all his letters, and he was sure he wouldn’t be able to hide his embarrassment when he saw her and his face turned crimson. Mevlut spent the fourteen-hour bus ride from Istanbul to Beyşehir wide awake, brooding over this prospect, while Rayiha slept like a baby beside him. The hardest part was having to hide his unease from Rayiha, who was so glad that everything had been resolved in the best way possible and overjoyed to be seeing her father and sister again. Mevlut feared that even allowing himself to think about it too much would lead Rayiha to sense the truth. In practice this meant that he thought about it even more, which, just as with his fear of dogs, only made things worse. Rayiha could sense that there was something eating away at her husband. They were having a cup of tea at the Mountain View way station, where their bus had stopped for a quick break in the middle of the night, when she finally asked him, “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“There’s a strangeness in my mind,” said Mevlut. “No matter what I do, I feel completely alone in this world.” “You will never feel that way again now that I’m with you,” said Rayiha with maternal feeling. As Rayiha snuggled up to him, Mevlut watched her dreamlike reflection in the window of the teahouse, and he knew that he would never forget this moment.

—

They spent two days in Cennetpınar, Mevlut’s village. His mother made up their best bed for Rayiha and brought out some candied walnut wrap, Mevlut’s favorite. She kept kissing her daughter-in-law, showing Mevlut Rayiha’s hands, her arms, even her ears, and saying, “Isn’t she just lovely?” Mevlut basked in the maternal affection he’d missed ever since moving to Istanbul at the age of twelve, but at the same time he felt a sense of resentment and superiority he couldn’t quite explain.

—

Rayiha. In the fifty days I’d been away from my village, my home, our garden, I’d missed them all so much, even the old village road and the trees and the chickens, that now I felt I had to go off on my own for a while. In the very room in which I’d switched the lights on and off to signal Mevlut the night we ran away, my husband now went like a naughty schoolboy up to my father asking his forgiveness. I will never forget how happy I was to see him kiss my dear father’s hand. Afterward, I walked in with a tray and served the coffee, smiling charmingly at everyone, as if they were guests come to look at a potential match for their son, and I was the girl who hadn’t managed to find a husband yet. Mevlut was so nervous that he downed his boiling coffee like lemonade, without even blowing on it first, and tears sprang from his eyes. They were talking about mundane things, until Mevlut got upset when he realized that I would be staying behind with my father and Samiha and not coming back to Istanbul until the wedding, just like a real bride.

—

Mevlut was annoyed that Rayiha hadn’t warned him about her plans to stay in the village for a while. He was walking back toward his village in a huff, having instinctively cut his visit short, and deep down, he was very pleased not to have seen Samiha in the house at all. Rayiha had mentioned her sister, but for whatever reason, Samiha hadn’t shown her face; he was glad for the temporary reprieve from that humiliation, knowing nonetheless that the matter hadn’t been resolved, only postponed until the wedding in Istanbul. Did the fact that Samiha hadn’t been home mean that she, too, had hidden away in embarrassment and that she wanted to forget all this?

On the way back to Istanbul the next day, on a bus that swayed in the night like an old spaceship, Mevlut slept deeply. He woke up when it stopped at the Mountain View way station again, sat at the same table where he’d had a cup of tea with Rayiha on their way to the village, and realized now how much he loved her. To spend a single day on his own was enough to understand that in just fifty days his love for Rayiha had already transcended anything he’d seen in the movies or heard of in fairy tales.

—

Samiha. We’re all so pleased that Rayiha has found a husband who loves her and is as cute as a little boy. I’ve come to Istanbul for the wedding with my father and Rayiha. It’s our second visit, and of course we’re staying with Vediha again. My sisters and I had a great time with all the other women at the henna ceremony the day before the wedding, and we laughed to the point of tears: Rayiha did an impression of my father telling people off, while Vediha pretended to be Korkut losing his temper in traffic and swearing at everyone around him. I imitated the suitors who came calling for me at home but didn’t know what to do with themselves, let alone where to put the box of sweets and the bottle of cologne they’d bought from Affan’s Haberdashers across the street from the Eşrefoğlu Mosque in Beyşehir. I was on the spot now that it was my turn to get married, after Rayiha. I didn’t like my father standing guard over me, or all the curious eyes watching us whenever someone opened the door to the henna party. I didn’t mind seeing my suitors’ soulful glances from afar, as if they’ve already fallen hopelessly in love (or even the way some would stroke their mustaches while they stared), only to turn away pretending they hadn’t been looking at all. But there were also those who thought it would be simpler to impress my father and not bother with me, and that made me furious.

—

Rayiha. Sitting on a chair in that crowd of noisy women, I was wearing the pink dress Mevlut had bought me in Aksaray, which his sisters had decorated with flowers and lace; Vediha had placed a veil over my head, and a gauze you couldn’t quite see through hung over my face, but through a gap in the veil, I could watch all the other girls enjoying their songs and games. The henna paste was lit up and waved over my head on a tray bearing coins and candles, and all the girls and women tried to make me feel sad, saying “Poor little Rayiha, you’re leaving your childhood home to live with strangers, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re a grown woman now, poor dear,” but I just couldn’t make myself cry. Every time Vediha and Samiha parted my veil to check whether I was weeping yet, I thought I might burst out laughing, and they would have to turn around and announce, “No, she isn’t crying yet,” which only encouraged the women sitting in a circle around me to resort to all sorts of provocative insinuations—“This one’s certainly ready, isn’t she! She’s not looking back.” Worrying that the more envious among them might mention my swollen belly, I thought of my mother’s death and the day we buried her, trying my best to squeeze some tears out, but still I couldn’t cry.

—

Ferhat. “Forget it!” I said when Mevlut invited me to his wedding, which got him upset, though I must admit I wouldn’t mind seeing the Şahika Wedding Hall again. I’ve been to so many left-wing gatherings in that big basement room. Socialist political parties and left-wing clubs used to hold their annual conferences and general meetings there. They’d start off with folk songs and “The Internationale,” but by the end there’d be fistfights and chairs flying, not because of any nationalists trying to break the meetings up with sticks, but because the rival pro-Soviet and pro-China factions among us could never get their fill of beating each other bloody. When Kültepe’s leftists lost the turf wars of 1977, all these places were taken over by state-sponsored right-wing organizations, and we never really set foot there again.

—

Mevlut hadn’t even told Ferhat that the Şahika Wedding Hall was run by one of the Vurals, without whom this party wouldn’t be happening. Ferhat found an excuse to needle him anyway.

“You’re pretty good at keeping left and right happy, aren’t you,” he said. “You’d make a good shopkeeper now, with all this bowing and scraping.”

“I wouldn’t mind being a good shopkeeper,” said Mevlut, sitting with Ferhat and offering him some vodka and lemonade underneath the table, before moving on to straight vodka. “One day,” he said, hugging his friend, “you and I are going to open the best shop in Turkey.”

The moment Mevlut told the marriage officiant “I do,” he felt he could put his life in Rayiha’s hands and trust in her intelligence. During the reception, he gladly went along with whatever his wife was doing — as he would do throughout their married life — knowing that life would be easier that way and that the child within his soul (not to be confused with the one inside Rayiha’s womb) would always be happy. So it was that half an hour later, after having greeted everyone else, he went up to Hadji Hamit Vural, who had taken over a table like a politician surrounded by his bodyguards, to kiss the great man’s hand, and then the hands of the men he’d brought with him (all eight of them).

As he sat with Rayiha on two shiny red velvet chairs reserved for the bride and groom and set right in the middle of the wedding hall, Mevlut looked around at the tables for the men (which took up more than half the room) and saw many familiar faces: most were former yogurt sellers of his father’s generation, their hunched backs long broken under the weight of the loads they’d carried for years. Ever since the decline of the yogurt business, the poorest and least successful among them had started working various jobs by day while selling boza at night, as Mevlut did. Some had built illegal homes on the outskirts of the city (these dwellings occasionally collapsed and had to be rebuilt from scratch), and as the value of their land had risen, they’d been able to relax at last and retire, or even go back to the village. Some had a place there with a distant view of Lake Beyşehir as well as their house in one of Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods. Those men sat puffing on their Marlboros. But those who’d believed the newspaper ads promoting the Workers’ Bank’s deposit schemes, and the things they’d learned in primary school, had banked every cent of their earnings over the years, only to see their savings turn to dust in the latest surge of inflation. Those who’d tried to avoid this fate by giving their money to the new self-styled bankers had also lost everything. So now their sons worked as street vendors, too, just like Mevlut, who understood as well as anyone there how men who had withered away selling goods on the street for a quarter century could still have nothing to show for it, like his father, not even a village house with a garden. His mother was sitting with all the other street vendors’ wives, tired, aging ladies who’d stayed behind in the village; Mevlut couldn’t bear to look their way.

The drums and the woodwinds started playing, and Mevlut joined the other men on the dance floor. While he hopped and skipped about, his eyes followed Rayiha’s purple headscarf as she greeted each and every single young woman and middle-aged lady on the women’s side of the hall. That was when he spotted Mohini, who had made it back from military service just in time for the wedding. It wouldn’t be long before the guests started pinning jewelry on the bride and groom, when a burst of energy surged through the sweltering wedding hall and the crowd lost any semblance of order, drunk on their plain lemonade, the noise, and the stuffy air. “I can’t deal with all these fascists unless I’m looking over to where the Vurals are sitting, and drinking to their health,” said Ferhat, passing his friend a glass of vodka and lemonade under the table as discreetly as possible. Mevlut thought he’d lost Rayiha for a moment, but then found her again and rushed to her side. She was coming out of the toilets flanked by two girls in headscarves the same color as hers.

“Mevlut, I can see how happy Rayiha is and I’m so glad for the both of you…,” said one of the girls. “I’m sorry I never got the chance to say congratulations in the village.”

“Didn’t you recognize her? That was my little sister, Samiha,” said Rayiha once they’d sat back down on their red velvet chairs. “She’s really the one with the beautiful eyes. She’s so happy here in Istanbul. There are so many suitors that my father and Vediha don’t know what to do with all the love letters she’s getting.”

—

Süleyman. At first I thought Mevlut had skillfully kept his emotions in check. But then I realized — no, he hadn’t even recognized Samiha, the beautiful girl he’d written all those letters to.

—

Mohini. Mevlut and Rayiha asked me to make a list of the presents they were given and to be a sort of emcee during the gift-giving ceremony. Every time I picked up the microphone and announced a new gift—“The venerable Mr. Vural, businessman and construction magnate from Rize, generous philanthropist and founder of the Duttepe Mosque, presents the groom with a Swiss wristwatch, made in China!”—there would be a ripple of applause, setting off lots of gossip and giggling, and the misers who thought they could get away with a small gift saw they were about to be humiliated in front of everyone and quickly whipped out a bigger banknote.

—

Süleyman. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Ferhat in the crowd. Five years ago, this scumbag and his Moscow-funded gang would have been ready to ambush my brother and his friends on a street corner somewhere; if we’d known Mevlut was going to find some excuse to have him at the wedding—“He’s my friend, he’s mellowed now!”—you can bet we wouldn’t have taken the trouble to deliver his letters, sort out his marriage, and even arrange his wedding reception…

But Comrade Ferhat looks rather disheartened. He was once the kind of guy who thought he knew everything, he’d stare you down spinning his prayer beads around like a key chain and acting like some Communist thug right out of prison, but those days are gone. Since the coup two years ago most of his comrades have been rotting away in jail or else tortured to the point that they’ve come out maimed. The smart ones ran off to Europe to avoid the torture. But since our comrade Ferhat can’t speak any other language but Kurdish, he has toned down his politics and stayed put, figuring that he wouldn’t get very far with the human rights crowd over there anyway. It’s just like my brother says: a clever Communist will forget about ideology as soon as he’s married and focus on making money; but a stupid Communist, like Ferhat, unable to make a living because of his ridiculous ideas, will make it his business to find paupers like Mevlut to “advise.”

Then there are those types the rest of us guys naturally disapprove of: like the rich guy who falls for a pretty girl and visits her family’s mansion to ask for her hand, but when he goes in and sees that she has a prettier and even younger sister, he turns to her father right then and there and tells him that actually he doesn’t want the girl he came for but the little one playing hopscotch in the corner. That guy, we can all agree, is a true scumbag; but at least we can understand where he’s coming from. How do you even explain someone like Mevlut, who wrote a girl weepy love letters for years and then said nothing when he saw that he’d run away in the dead of night not with the pretty girl he’d fallen for but with her sister?

—

Rayiha’s pure, childlike joy magnified Mevlut’s happiness. She seemed genuinely delighted when people pinned banknotes on her, showing none of the feigned amazement Mevlut had seen on other brides. Mohini was trying to amuse the crowd with his gift-by-gift commentary, remarking on the amounts of cash or gold and jewelry being given by various guests (“Fifty American dollars from the youngest of all yogurt-selling grandpas!”), and as at every wedding, the guests were applauding in a spirit halfway between irony and politeness.

While everyone was busy looking elsewhere, Mevlut secretly studied Rayiha. Her hands, her arms, and her ears all seemed beautiful to him, but so did her nose, her mouth, and her face. Rayiha’s only flaw right now was that she looked exhausted, but she still showed a friendly warmth that really suited her. She hadn’t found anyone to look after her plastic bag stuffed full of gifts, envelopes, and packages, so she’d leaned it against her chair. Her delicate little hand was resting on her lap. Mevlut remembered how he’d held it when they were running away together, and the first time he’d had a good look at it, in the train station in Akşehir. The day they’d run away together already felt like the distant past. In the last three months, they’d had so much sex, grown so close, and talked and laughed so much that Mevlut was amazed to realize there was no one he knew better than he knew Rayiha, and the men showing off their dance moves to the young women in the hall seemed to him like children who knew nothing about life. Mevlut felt he’d known Rayiha for years and slowly began to believe that his letters had been meant for someone like her — perhaps even for Rayiha herself.

4. Rice with Chickpeas

Food Tastes Better When It’s Got Some Dirt in It

WHEN THEY GOT HOME, Mevlut and Rayiha were not surprised to find that many of the envelopes people had made such a show of giving them were empty. Trusting neither the banks nor the bankers, Mevlut took most of the money they’d received and bought Rayiha some gold bangles. He also bought a secondhand black-and-white television in Dolapdere, so Rayiha wouldn’t get bored while she waited for him at home in the evenings. Sometimes they would hold hands as they watched TV together. Mevlut had started coming home early on Saturday evenings when Little House on the Prairie was on and on Sundays when it was time for Dallas, as there would be no one left out on the streets to buy his ice cream anyway.

When Hızır came back from the village at the start of October and took back his ice-cream cart, Mevlut was unemployed for a while. Ferhat had gone quiet after the wedding. Even if they happened to run into each other in a Tarlabaşı coffeehouse, they no longer had the conversations they had back in the day, when Ferhat used to tell him about a new business opportunity no one else had thought about, which would make the two of them “lots of money.” Mevlut went to the Beyoğlu restaurants where he’d worked in the past and spoke to the headwaiters and restaurant managers who spent their afternoons doing the books, or reading the newspaper and betting on football, but no one could offer him a job with the kind of salary he expected.

There were some new upscale restaurants opening in the city, but those places were looking for people with some form of “hospitality training” who spoke enough English to understand “yes” from “no”—not someone like Mevlut who’d come from the village ready to take any job that came his way and had learned as he went along. In November, he started working in a restaurant somewhere, but after a couple of weeks he’d already given his notice. Some self-important guy wearing a tie had complained that his spicy tomato salad wasn’t spicy enough, and Mevlut had snapped at him before remorsefully casting off his uniform. But it wasn’t a case of some sad and weary soul acting impulsively: these were the happiest days of his life. He was going to be a father soon, and he was planning to use all the wedding jewelry on a chickpea-rice business that would guarantee his son a future.

A waiter introduced Mevlut to a street vendor from Muş who’d sold rice with chickpeas for years but had recently suffered a stroke. The indisposed street vendor wanted to sell his cart and “his” spot behind the Kabataş pier for car ferries. Mevlut knew from experience that most street vendors hoping to sell their businesses tended to exaggerate their claims to certain spots. Whenever one of them managed to bribe and cajole the neighborhood constable into letting him park his cart somewhere for a few days, he’d forget that the corner wasn’t truly his property but belonged to the nation. Even so, after years spent walking the streets with a stick across his back, Mevlut had high hopes and began to entertain dreams of having his own place in Istanbul, like a real shop owner. He knew he was overpaying a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to haggle too much with the elderly half-paralyzed street vendor from Muş. Mevlut and Rayiha went to see the man and his stammering son in a poor neighborhood behind Ortaköy, in the rented apartment that they shared with cockroaches, mice, and a pressure cooker, and after two visits, they’d learned the trade. Mevlut went back again one day to collect the cart and push it all the way home. He bought a sack each of rice and chickpeas from a wholesaler in Sirkeci and stacked them between the kitchen and the television.

—

Rayiha. Just before going to bed, I would give the chickpeas a good soak and set the alarm for three in the morning, so I could get up and see that they’d softened properly before putting them in a pot on low heat. After I took the pot off the stove, Mevlut and I would embrace and go back to sleep with the comforting gurgle of the pot cooling in the background. In the morning, I would fry the rice a little in oil, just the way the man from Muş had taught us, and then leave it to simmer in water for a while. While Mevlut was out buying groceries, I would boil and then panfry the chicken. I’d set some of it aside, removing the bones and skin with my fingers, adding as much thyme and pepper as I liked, perhaps one or two cloves of garlic if I felt so inclined, and I would split the rest of the chicken into four pieces, placing them beside the rice.

—

Mevlut would come back home from his morning shopping with carrier nets full of fruit or tomatoes, breathe in the delicious smell of Rayiha’s cooking, and stroke his wife’s arm, her back, and her growing belly. Rayiha’s chicken satisfied all of Mevlut’s customers — the clerks who wore a shirt and tie or a skirt to their desk jobs at the banks and offices in Fındıklı, the rowdy students from the neighborhood’s schools and universities, the builders who worked at the construction sites nearby, and the drivers and passengers killing time as they waited for the ferry. He soon had his regulars — the big, friendly security guard at the local branch of Akbank, who was built like a barrel and always wore sunglasses; Mr. Nedim, who sold ferry tickets in a white uniform from his booth on the pier; the men and women who worked for the insurance company close by, who always seemed to be mocking Mevlut with their smiles — and Mevlut always found some topic of conversation with any customer, perhaps the penalty Fenerbahçe had been denied in their last match or the blind girl who knew all the answers yesterday on the TV quiz show. He won the municipal police over with his charm and lots of free plates piled high with chicken.

As an experienced street vendor who knew that chatting people up was part of the job, Mevlut never discussed politics. Just as in the days when he sold yogurt and boza, it wasn’t really the money that he cared about; what made him happy was seeing a customer come back again a few days later (which was rare) just because he’d enjoyed the rice and chicken, and be kind enough to tell him so (which was even rarer).

Most of Mevlut’s customers made it plain that the main attraction of his food was that it was cheap and close at hand, and some of them even said so outright. Occasionally, though, customers were kind enough to tell him, “Congratulations, rice vendor, your food’s delicious,” and this made Mevlut so happy that he would temporarily forget the harsh truth he kept trying to hide from himself as much as from Rayiha: he wasn’t clearing much at all from this rice business. If the street vendor from Muş had spent eight years in the same spot only to die in sickness and destitution, perhaps it hadn’t been his own fault after all.

—

Rayiha. Most days, Mevlut would bring back half the chickpeas, chicken thighs, and rice I’d cooked in the morning. These leftover drumsticks, small chicken halves, and bits of skin would have lost their shine by then, the fat around them would be discolored, but I would add them all to the pot again for the next day’s batch. I’d also put any leftover rice to simmer some more. It tasted even better after it had been cooked over a gentle flame for a second time. Mevlut wouldn’t say we were using leftovers; instead, he would call it seasoning, the way jail-block bosses and rich inmates would take the awful food served in prison and have it cooked again using their secret stash of good olive oil, spices, and pepper. He’d heard about this from a wealthy Kurd from Cizre who’d been in jail and now ran a parking lot. Mevlut would watch me cooking in the kitchen and take great pleasure in reminding me that food always tastes better when it’s got some dirt in it— a truth commonly acknowledged by anyone in Istanbul who makes a habit of consuming street food. I didn’t like this, and I would tell him there’s nothing “dirty” about food that’s been cooked again because it didn’t get eaten the first time around. But then he told me that those bits of skin that had been in and out of the pan a few times, and the chickpeas that had been boiled so many times that they’d softened into mush, were usually his customers’ favorites, and rather than go for the fresher, cleaner chunks of meat, they would pick out giblets that had been cooked a few times over, smothering them in mustard and ketchup before wolfing them down.

—

In October, Mevlut started selling boza again in the evenings. He’d walk for kilometers every night with all kinds of beautiful images and strange thoughts crossing his mind. During these walks, he discovered that the shadows of the trees in some neighborhoods moved even when there was no breeze at all, stray dogs got braver and cockier where streetlamps were broken or switched off, and the flyers for circumcision ceremonies and cram schools pasted on utility poles and in doorways were all written in rhyming couplets. Hearing the things the city told him at night and reading the language of the streets filled Mevlut with pride. But when he went back to his rice cart in the morning and stood in the cold with his hands in his pockets, the power of his imagination waned, he sensed that the world was hollow and meaningless, and he felt the urge to return to Rayiha as quickly as possible, afraid of the overwhelming loneliness growing inside him. What if she went into early labor while she was at home alone? Yet he would tell himself, Just a little longer, and start walking in restless circles around the big wheels and glass box of his rice cart or just shift his weight from his right foot to his left, glancing at his Swiss watch as he waited.

—

Rayiha. “He gave you that watch because it was in his interest to do so,” I would say whenever I noticed Mevlut looking at Hadji Hamit’s gift. “He did it so you’d feel like you owe him, not just you but your uncle and your cousins, too.” When Mevlut came back in the afternoon, I’d make him some herbal tea with leaves I picked from the tree in the courtyard of the Armenian church. He would check on the boza I’d already prepared for the evening, switch on the TV to the only program they were showing, a high-school geometry lesson, as he drank his sugary herbal tea, and then sleep through his own coughing fits until it was time for dinner. He spent seven years selling cooked rice, and during that time, I was always the one who prepared the chickpeas and the rice, who bought, boiled, and fried the chicken; I also added the sugar to the boza so it was ready for his evening rounds; and I spent my days washing all the dirty tools, spoons, jugs, and plates that needed washing. When I was pregnant, I also listened closely to the baby in my womb, taking care not to throw up in the rice from the stink of panfried chicken, and treasured the little corner with a cot and pillows for the baby. Mevlut had found a book called Islamic Names for Your Child in a junk shop. He would flip through the pages before dinner and read out some names for my consideration during the TV commercials — Nurullah, Abdullah, Sadullah, Fazlallah — and because I didn’t want to break his heart, I kept putting off telling him that our baby was a girl.

Vediha, Samiha, and I found out when we went to the Etfal Hospital in Şişli. I left the hospital fretting. “Who cares, for God’s sake!” Samiha said. “There are enough men roaming the streets of Istanbul already.”

5. Mevlut Becomes a Father

Do Not Get Out of the Van

Samiha. My father and I came to Istanbul for the wedding and ended up staying. Every morning when I wake up in that room in Vediha’s place, I look at the shadows of the water pitcher and the bottle of cologne on the table, and I get lost in thought: I had so many suitors in the village that my father thought I’d find an even better match in Istanbul…But I have yet to meet anyone here other than Süleyman…I don’t know what he and Korkut have promised my father. I do know they’re the ones who paid for his dentures. He puts them in a glass before he goes to sleep; when I’m in bed waiting for him to wake up, I always feel like taking those false teeth and throwing them out the window. I help Vediha with the housework all morning and do some knitting for the winter, and we watch TV together when the programs start in the afternoon. My father plays with Bozkurt and Turan in the mornings, but they like to pull on his beard and his hair, and he ends up arguing with his grandchildren. Once, my father and I went down to the Bosphorus with Vediha and Süleyman; another time we went to the cinema in Beyoğlu and for some milk pudding afterward.

Süleyman came up to me this morning, spinning his car keys on his finger like a string of prayer beads; he said he needed to cross the Bosphorus around noon to pick up six bags of cement and some steel from Üsküdar, he was going to drive over the Bosphorus Bridge, and I could go with him if I wanted. I asked my sister Vediha. “It’s up to you,” she said. “But for God’s sake be careful!” What did she mean? When we went to the Palace Cinema that time, my father and Vediha had no objections to Süleyman sitting right next to me, so when I felt his hand creeping up like a cautious crab to touch the side of my leg halfway through the movie, I tried to figure out whether it was on purpose or just a coincidence, but I couldn’t decide…Süleyman was being perfectly polite and considerate as we crossed the Bosphorus Bridge under the midday sun on this bright, freezing cold winter’s day. He said, “Samiha, would you like me to switch to the right lane so you can have a better view?” and took the Ford van so close to the edge of the bridge that for a moment, I felt we might fall onto the Russian ship with the red chimney passing by down below.

We crossed the Bosphorus Bridge and drove along this horrible, potholed road on the outskirts of Üsküdar, and that was the end of all the prettiness and the wonderful tourist spots: there were cement factories surrounded by barbed wire; workshops with smashed windows; derelict houses worse than anything we have back in the village; and thousands of rusty metal barrels, so many that I wondered whether they’d rained down from the sky.

We stopped in a flat stretch covered with ramshackle houses. If you ask me, it looked a lot like Duttepe (poor, in other words), only newer and uglier. “This is a branch of Aktaş Construction, we set it up with the Vurals,” said Süleyman as he got out of the car, and just as he was about to walk into an ugly building, he turned around and warned me menacingly: “Do not get out of the van!” Naturally, this made me really want to get out of the van. But there wasn’t a single woman around, so I stayed where I was, waiting in the front passenger seat.

By the time we got through the traffic on the way back, there wasn’t time for lunch, and Süleyman couldn’t drop me home either. When we got to the start of Duttepe, he spotted some friends of his and abruptly stopped the car. “Well, we’re in the neighborhood now, you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting up the hill,” he said. “Here, take this and buy my mother some bread on the way!”

I bought the bread and slowly made my way up to the Aktaş house, which was shaping up to be a real house made of concrete, and I started to think about how people say that the trouble with two strangers get ting married isn’t necessarily that the woman has to marry someone she doesn’t know but that she has to learn to love someone she doesn’t know…But I think it must be easier for a girl to marry someone she doesn’t know, because the more you get to know men, the harder it is to love them.

—

Rayiha. The unnamed baby girl in my belly had grown so big that I was having trouble sitting down. Mevlut was reading names out of his book one evening—“Hamdullah is one who gives thanks to Allah; Uybedullah is Allah’s servant; Seyfullah is the sword, the soldier of Allah”—when I decided to interrupt him: “Darling, isn’t there anything in that book about girls’ names?” He said, “Oh, look, there is, who would have thought?” like a man who finds out one day that his favorite diner has a “family room” on the second floor reserved for women. That man might peep through a crack in the door for a quick, bashful look at the women’s section, and in a similar way, Mevlut took a halfhearted glance at the back pages before returning to the boys’ names. Luckily, Vediha went and got me two more books from a nice shop in Şişli that sold toys as well. One of the two books had mostly nationalistic names from Central Asia, like Kurtcebe, Alparslan, or Atabeg, while the girls’ names lived in separate pages from the boys’, just as men and women lived separately in Ottoman palaces. In the Handbook of Modern Baby Names, however, the boys and girls sat in mixed groups, as they do in private high schools or at the wedding receptions of rich and Westernized families, but Mevlut laughed at the girls’ names — Simge, Suzan, Mine, Irem — and only took the boys’ names seriously: Tolga, Hakan, Kılıç.

In spite of all this, I wouldn’t want you to think that Mevlut regarded the birth of our daughter Fatma in April as some sort of tragedy, or that he was mean to me because I hadn’t been able to give him a son. It was, in fact, the very opposite. Mevlut was so happy to be a father that he kept telling everyone he’d wanted a girl all along, and he really believed it. There was a photographer called Şakir on our street who would take photos of people getting drunk on rakı and wine in the bars of Beyoğlu, which he developed in the darkroom in his old-fashioned studio; Mevlut brought him over to our house one day to take a picture of him holding the baby in his arms, looking like a giant as he grinned from ear to ear. Mevlut stuck the photo on his cart and gave out some free rice, telling his customers, “I’ve had a baby girl.” As soon as he came home in the evenings, he would sit Fatma on his lap, bring her left hand right up to his eyes, examine her perfectly formed hands up close like a watchmaker in his shop, and say, “Look, she’s got fingernails, too,” and then he would compare his fingers and mine with the baby’s and kiss us both with tears in his eyes, full of wonder at this miracle of God.

—

Mevlut was very happy, but there was also a strangeness in his soul of which Rayiha knew nothing. “God bless your beautiful baby!” his customers would say when they saw the photos on his cart (where they got soggy from the steam rising from the rice), and sometimes he wouldn’t tell them that the baby was a girl. It took him a long time to admit to himself that the true cause of his unhappiness was that he was jealous of the baby. At first he thought he was getting annoyed about being woken up several times in the middle of the night when Rayiha had to breast-feed Fatma. There was also the problem of the mosquitoes that kept getting under the baby’s mosquito net and sucking her blood, a subject of quarrels all summer. Eventually, though, Mevlut noticed that a strange feeling seized him whenever he saw Rayiha cooing to the baby and offering it one of her enormous breasts: it troubled him to see Rayiha looking at the child with the kind of love and adoration he felt should be for him alone. He couldn’t tell her, though, and began to resent her, too. Rayiha and the baby had become one, and Mevlut had been made to feel insignificant.

At home, he needed his wife to tell him how important he was all the time. But since Fatma had been born, Rayiha had stopped telling him, “You’ve done really well today, Mevlut; how clever of you to think of using the leftover fruit syrup to sweeten the boza, Mevlut; all the clerks in the government offices love you, Mevlut!” During Ramadan, no one sold food out on the streets, so Mevlut was at home during the day. He would have liked to have sex with Rayiha all morning to take his mind off his jealousy, but she didn’t like doing “those things” in front of the baby. “Last summer you were scared that God would see us, now you’re scared that the baby will see us!” Mevlut yelled at her one day. “Now get up and stir the ice cream.” Mevlut would delight in watching Rayiha, intoxicated with the joys of maternal and marital love, climb out of bed obediently and stir the ice cream using both hands to grip the long spoon handle, the veins in her graceful neck becoming more defined under the strain, and while he looked at her he would occasionally rock the baby’s crib by the bed.

—

Samiha. It’s been a while since we came to Istanbul. We’re still at my sister’s place in Duttepe, where I can hardly sleep because my father snores so much. Süleyman got me a woven golden bangle. I accepted the gift. My sister is saying there’ll be talk if we don’t go ahead with the engagement ceremony soon.

—

Rayiha. Mevlut seemed so jealous of me breast-feeding Fatma that first I got really upset, and then I stopped getting any milk. In November, I got pregnant again because I’d stopped breast-feeding Fatma. What will I do now? I cannot tell Mevlut about the new baby until I’m sure it’s a boy. But what if it isn’t? I couldn’t stand being home on my own; I thought I might go over to Vediha’s, and that way I’d see Samiha, too. At the Taksim post office, I found out what had happened and hurried back home in fear.

6. Samiha Runs Away

Blood Will Be Shed over This

Vediha. Samiha showed up at our bedroom door one afternoon wearing her headscarf and carrying her bag. She was shaking like a leaf. “What’s going on?” I said.

“I’m in love with someone else, I’m running away with him, the taxi’s already here.”

“What? Are you crazy? Don’t do this!”

She started crying but wouldn’t relent.

“Who is it? Where did you find this guy? Look, Süleyman is in love with you, don’t put Father and me in this situation,” I said. “Who elopes in a taxi anyway?”

My little sister, blinded by her love, was so worked up that she couldn’t even speak. She took me by the hand and led me to the room where she and Father were staying. She’d placed Süleyman’s gifts in a neat pile on the table — the bangle and the two headscarves, one of them decorated with purple flowers and the other with pictures of gazelles. She gestured toward them as if she’d been struck dumb.

“Samiha, Father will have a fit when he gets home,” I said. “You know he’s accepted gifts from Süleyman and taken money for the false teeth and a whole load of other things. Do you really want to put our dear father through this?” She looked at her feet and kept quiet. “Father and I would have to live with the shame for the rest of our lives,” I said.

“Rayiha ran away, too, but it was all right in the end.”

“Rayiha didn’t have any other suitors, and she hadn’t been promised to anyone,” I said. “But you’re not like Rayiha, you’re beautiful. And Father hadn’t taken anyone’s money in exchange for Rayiha’s hand. Blood will be shed over this.”

“I wasn’t aware I was promised to anyone,” she said. “Why would my father do that, why would he take people’s money without asking me first?”

We heard the taxi honking from the street. Samiha was moving toward the door. “If you run away, Korkut is going to beat me for weeks, you know that, don’t you, Samiha? He’ll cover my arms and legs in bruises, you know that, right?” I said.

—

Samiha. We hugged each other, and started crying…I felt so sorry for my sister, and I was so afraid…

—

Vediha. “Go back to the village first!” I said. “Then you can elope! If you do it now, they’ll blame it all on me; they’ll think I arranged it. You know they’ll kill me, Samiha. Who is this man anyway?”

—

Samiha. My sister was right. I said, “Let me just send the taxi away.” But somehow I picked my bag up on my way out anyway. I was walking through the garden and toward the gate when Vediha, who was watching from the window, saw the bag in my hand and started pleading, “Don’t go, Samiha, don’t go, my darling sister!” When I walked through the gate and reached the taxi, I didn’t know what to say or do. I was just thinking of telling them, “I’ve changed my mind, my sister’s crying,” when the taxi door opened and they pulled me inside. I didn’t even get the chance to turn around and look at my dear sister one last time.

—

Vediha. They forced Samiha into the car. I saw it all from the window. Help! I screamed. Hurry up, or they’re going to blame me! Those villains are abducting my sister, help!

—

Süleyman. I woke up from my afternoon nap and saw a car waiting at the back door…Bozkurt and Turan were playing in the garden…I heard Vediha screaming outside.

—

Vediha. How far could I possibly run in slippers…Stop the taxi, I yelled. Samiha, get out of that car!

—

Süleyman. I ran after them, but I couldn’t catch them! I was so enraged I could have exploded. I went back, jumped into my van, and sped off. By the time I’d passed our shop and reached the bottom of the hill, the black car had already rounded the corner toward Mecidiyeköy. But this is not over yet. Samiha is a virtuous girl, she’ll jump out of that taxi any moment now. She’s not gone, they haven’t taken her yet. She’ll come back. Don’t think there’s anything going on here. Don’t write about this, do not BLOW THIS OUT OF ALL PROPORTION by writing about it. Don’t ruin a good girl’s reputation. I could see the black car farther ahead, but I couldn’t catch it. I leaned over to the glove compartment, took out the Kırıkkale gun, and fired two shots into the air. But don’t write that down either, because it’s not true that she’s eloping. People will misunderstand!

—

Samiha. Actually, they’ve understood perfectly well. I eloped. I eloped out of my own free will. Everything you’ve heard is true. I can’t believe it either. I’m in love! Love made me do this, and I felt better when I heard the gunshots. Maybe because it meant there was no turning back now? We fired a couple of shots into the sky ourselves, just to make it clear that we weren’t unarmed, but once we got to Mecidiyeköy, the guns were put away. It turns out Süleyman was at home at that time of day, and now he’s chasing after us in his van, and it’s scary, but I know he can’t find us in this traffic. I’m so happy now. You saw for yourselves: no one can buy me…I’ve been so furious at them all!

—

Süleyman. I accelerated as soon as the traffic cleared up. But then — damn it! — a truck came out of nowhere, I swerved to the right, and, well, it was inevitable: I crashed into a wall! I’m feeling a little woozy now. Where am I? Better keep still, try to figure out what’s going on. Seems I’ve hit my head on something. Oh, that’s right! Samiha has run away. A bunch of nosy kids were already coming toward the van, enjoying the scene…I’d hit my head on the rearview mirror, and my forehead was bleeding, but I reversed the van and then sped off again after them.

—

Vediha. The children heard the gunshots and rushed joyfully out into the garden as if someone had set off firecrackers. Bozkurt, Turan, I yelled after them, go back inside and shut the door. They didn’t listen, so I smacked one and dragged the other inside by the arm. I thought I should call the police. But it was Süleyman who’d fired the shots; would it be wise to call? “What are you doing standing there, you idiots, call your father!” I said. I’d told them not to touch the phone without my permission; otherwise they would have played with it all the time. Bozkurt rang the number and told Korkut, “Dad, Aunt Samiha’s run away!”

I started crying, though part of me felt Samiha had done the right thing — just don’t tell anyone I said that. It’s true, poor Süleyman is hopelessly in love with her. But he is not the smartest guy in the world, or the handsomest. He’s already a little overweight. He has these long eyelashes, some girls might love them, but Samiha always found them stupid and girlish. The main problem, though, is that despite being in love with her, Süleyman kept doing all kinds of things he knew would get on Samiha’s nerves. Why are men mean to the women they fall in love with? Samiha can’t stand the way he struts around, trying to be macho, and he’s such a show-off, he thinks everyone wants his advice just because he happens to have some money in his pocket. I say to my little sister good for you, not giving yourself to a man you can’t love, but then I wonder if this other guy she’s run off with can be trusted. After all, taking a girl away in a taxi in the middle of the city in broad daylight isn’t the brightest idea. We’re in Istanbul, not the village; did he really have to come honking at the door like that?

—

Samiha. Everything I see on our drive through Istanbul just amazes me: the crowds, the people dodging buses as they run to the other side of the road, the girls in skirts, the horse-drawn carts, the parks, the big old apartment buildings; I love it all. Süleyman knew how much I liked driving around the city in his van (he knew because I kept asking him to take me), but he rarely took me, and do you know why? (In fact, I’ve given it a lot of thought.) Because although he wanted to be close to me, he couldn’t respect a girl who got too friendly with a boy before she was married to him. But I’m the kind of girl who only marries the man she loves — is that clear? I didn’t think about money, I only followed my heart, and now I’m ready to face the consequences of what I’ve done.

—

Süleyman. Before I’d even reached Mecidiyeköy, they’d already passed Şişli. I went back home and parked the van, trying to keep calm. I’d never thought anyone would dare to take my betrothed away in broad daylight, right in the heart of Istanbul, so I still couldn’t believe what I’d seen. No one would ever do something this crazy; everyone knows it’s the kind of thing that people get killed for.

—

Samiha. Duttepe is neither “the heart of Istanbul” nor, as you know, did I promise Süleyman anything. It’s true that someone might end up getting killed, but that’s exactly why we’re running so far away, and besides, everyone has to die someday. Istanbul never ends. Now that the coast is clear, we’ve stopped in a café to enjoy the salty yogurt drink ayran from carton bottles. My darling’s mustache is all white from it. I’ll never tell you his name, and you will never find us, so don’t even bother asking.

—

Süleyman. When I got home, Vediha cleaned the wound on my forehead with a cotton ball. I went out to the garden and fired two shots at the mulberry tree with the Kırıkkale. The strange silence began soon after that. I couldn’t stop thinking that Samiha would surely come back home as if nothing had happened. That evening, everyone was in the house. Someone had switched the TV off as if we’d had a death in the family, and I realized that what really pained me was the silence. My brother kept smoking. Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman was drunk; Vediha was crying. I went out into the garden at midnight, and as I looked down from Duttepe to the city lights spread out below, I swore to God that I would avenge what had happened. Samiha is standing at a window somewhere among the millions of lights down there. Knowing that she doesn’t love me hurts so much that I’d rather think she was taken against her will, which in turn makes me think of how I want to kill those bastards. Our ancestors used to torture criminals before they executed them — it’s in times like these that one truly understands the importance of tradition.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. What is it like to be a father whose daughters keep running away? I’m a little embarrassed, but I’m also proud that my daughters don’t settle for the husbands someone else picks out for them but bravely go with the men they choose for themselves. Though, if they’d had a mother to confide in, they would have done the right thing, and no one would have run away…In a marriage, trust is more important than love, as we all know. I worry about what they’ll do to poor Vediha after I go back to the village. But my eldest is smarter than she looks, and perhaps she’ll find a way to avoid getting punished for this.

—

Süleyman. I fell in love with Samiha even more after she ran away. Before she eloped, I loved her because she was beautiful and clever and because everyone admired her. That was understandable. Now, I love her because she left me and ran away. This is even more understandable, but the pain is unbearable. I spend mornings at our shop, daydreaming about her coming back and thinking that if I were to rush home right now I would find her there and we would get married and have a huge wedding reception.

—

Korkut. I made a few insinuations about how hard it would be to run away with a girl unless you had someone helping you inside the house, but Vediha didn’t take the bait. All she did was cry and say, “This city is huge, how was I supposed to know?” One day it was just me and Abdurrahman Efendi in the house. “Some fathers take a man’s money and anything else they can get, and then when a better match shows up, they secretly sell their daughter to the richer man and then pretend the girl eloped. Please don’t get me wrong, Abdurrahman Efendi, you’re a respectable man, but how could Samiha not think about this when she ran away?” I asked. “I’ll be the first to make her pay for this,” he said. Later, he decided that he was offended by what I’d said and stopped coming home for dinner. That’s when I told Vediha: “I don’t know which of you helped her, but you will not leave this house until I find out where Samiha went and with whom.” “It’s fine, you never let me go outside the neighborhood anyway, so now I just won’t even bother leaving the house,” she said. “Can I at least go out in the garden?”

—

Süleyman. One night I put Abdurrahman Efendi in the van and drove down to the Bosphorus, telling him we needed to talk. We went to the Tarator Seafood Restaurant in Sarıyer and sat in a corner away from the fish tank. Our fried mussels hadn’t arrived yet, and we were already on our second glass of rakı, all on an empty stomach, when I said, “Abdurrahman Efendi, you’ve lived much longer than I have, and I’m sure you will know the answer to my question. What does a man live for?” Abdurrahman Efendi had sensed a while ago that our conversation tonight could potentially head into dangerous territory, so he spent a long time trying to find the most harmless answer he could think of. “For love, my son!” he said. “What else?” He thought again and said, “For friendship.” “And?” “For happiness. For God and country…” “A man lives for his honor, Father!” I interrupted.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. What I didn’t say is that, actually, I live for my daughters. I tried to humor this angry young man because part of me felt he wasn’t entirely wrong, but more than that, I felt sorry for him. We had so much to drink that I began to see all my forgotten memories floating around like submarines inside the distant fish tank. Toward the end of the night, I gathered up the courage to say, “Süleyman, my son, I know how hurt and angry you are, and I completely understand. We’re hurt and angry, too, because Samiha’s actions have put us in a very difficult position. But there’s no reason to drag honor and wounded pride into this! Your dignity hasn’t been compromised in any way. You weren’t married or even engaged to Samiha. Yes, I wish we’d had the two of you tie the knot before you got to know each other. I’m absolutely sure you would have been happy that way. But it’s not right for you to turn this into a matter of honor now. Everyone knows that all these big proclamations about honor are really just excuses invented to let people kill each other with a clear conscience. Are you going to kill my daughter?”

Süleyman bristled. “I’m sorry, Father, but shouldn’t I at least have the right to go after the bastard who ran away with Samiha and punish him for what he did? That bastard humiliated me, didn’t he?” “Don’t take things the wrong way.” “Do I or do I not have the right?” “Calm down, son.” “When you come from the village and toil away for years trying to build a life for yourself in this dump of a city, and then a swindler comes along and tricks and sucks you dry, it’s really very difficult to stay calm.” “Believe me, son, if it was up to me I would pick Samiha up by the scruff of her neck and bring her home myself. I’m sure she knows she’s made a mistake. For all we know, maybe while we’ve been busy drinking, she’s on her way back home with her bag in hand and her tail between her legs.” “Who’s to say my brother and I would take her back?” “You won’t take my daughter back if she returns?” “I have to think about my honor.” “But what if no one’s laid a finger on her…”

We sat there drinking until the bar closed at midnight. I’m not sure how it happened, but at some point Süleyman got up and apologized, respectfully kissing my hand while I promised him that I wouldn’t tell anyone what we’d talked about. I even said, “I won’t tell Samiha.” Süleyman started crying. He said my frown and my gestures reminded him of Samiha. “Fathers resemble their daughters,” I said with pride.

“I made a mistake, I kept showing off, I didn’t try to be friends with her,” said Süleyman. “But she has a sharp tongue on her. It’s hard talking to girls; no one ever taught us how to do it properly. I just talked to her as I would talk to a man, only without swearing. It didn’t work.”

Süleyman went to wash his face before we headed home, and when he came back, he’d really sobered up. On the way home, the traffic police in İstinye pulled us over to search the car, and we had to give them a hefty bribe to let us go.

7. A Second Daughter

It Was as If His Life Were Happening to Someone Else

MEVLUT REMAINED a stranger to these events until much later. He hadn’t lost any of his early enthusiasm for his work: he was as optimistic as “the entrepreneur who believes in the idea,” beloved hero of books like How to Be a Successful Businessman. He was convinced that he could still make more money, if only he installed some brighter lighting inside the glass case of his three-wheeled cart, made deals with the ayran, tea, and Coke vendors that kept popping up and disappearing all around him, and tried harder to have truly heartfelt and sincere conversations with his customers. Mevlut did everything he could think of to build a regular clientele in the Kabataş-Fındıklı area. He didn’t mind so much when the corporate clerks who had their lunch standing up at his cart ignored his efforts, but he was furious when the smaller businesses he worked with asked him for receipts. He used his network of doormen, janitors, security guards, and tea servers who worked inside company buildings to try to build a rapport with accountants and managers. One night, Rayiha told him that she was pregnant again and that it was going to be another girl.

“How do you know it’s a girl? Did the three of you go to the hospital again?”

“Not all three of us, Samiha wasn’t there. She eloped with someone else so she wouldn’t have to marry Süleyman.”

“What?”

Rayiha told him what she knew.

That night, Mevlut was roaming around Feriköy like a sleepwalker, crying “Bozaaa,” when his feet led him to a cemetery. The moon was out; the cypress trees and the gravestones alternated between a silver gleam and a thick blackness. Mevlut took a paved road through the middle of the cemetery, feeling as if he’d picked a path in a dream. But the person walking in the cemetery wasn’t him, and it was as if his life, too, were happening to someone else.

The farther he walked, the farther downhill the cemetery went, unfurling like a carpet, and Mevlut found himself on an ever-steepening slope. Who was the man Samiha had run away with? Was she going to turn to him one day and tell him, “Mevlut wrote me love letters about my eyes for years, and then he married my sister”? Did Samiha even know about all that?

—

Rayiha. “Last time you went through all the boys’ names, and we ended up having a girl,” I told Mevlut as I gave him the handbook of Islamic names. “Maybe if you try reading all the girls’ names, we’ll have a boy this time. You can check whether any of the girls’ names have ‘Allah’ in them!” “A girl’s name can’t have ‘Allah’ in it!” said Mevlut. According to the Koran, the most that girls could hope for was to be named for one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives. “Maybe if we keep eating rice every day, we’ll turn Chinese,” I teased. Mevlut laughed with me, picked up the baby, and covered her face with kisses. He didn’t even notice that his prickly mustache was making Fatma cry until I told him so.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. My daughters’ late mother was called Fevziye. I suggested the name for their second daughter. You’ll be surprised to hear that even though all three of her daughters are in Istanbul now, and two of them rebelled and ran away from home, Fevziye, may she rest in peace, did not have a very adventurous life: she got married to me, the first man who asked for her hand, at the age of fifteen and lived peacefully to the age of twenty-three, without ever setting foot outside Gümüşdere village. I am on my way back there now, having accepted the painful truth that I’ve failed yet again to make it in Istanbul, and as I sit on this bus, looking mournfully out the window, I keep thinking how I wish I’d been like Fevziye and never left the village at all.

—

Vediha. My husband barely talks to me, he never comes home, and he sneers at everything I say. Korkut’s and Süleyman’s silences and all their subtle insinuations wore my father down until the poor man packed his bags and went back to the village. I cried a lot, secretly. In the space of just a month, my father and Samiha’s room has emptied completely. I go in there sometimes to look at my father’s bed on one side and Samiha’s on the other, and I weep, completely mortified about what happened. Every time I look outside the window, I try to picture where Samiha went and whom she might be with. Good for you, Samiha, I’m glad you ran away.

—

Süleyman. It’s been fifty-one days since Samiha ran away; and still there is no news. The whole time, I’ve been drinking rakı nonstop. Never at the dinner table, though, as I don’t want my brother getting angry; I either drink quietly in my room, as if taking a dose of medicine, or out in Beyoğlu. Sometimes I drive around in the van just to get my mind off things.

I go to the market on Thursdays when we need to stock up on nails, paint, or plaster for the shop, and once the van gets sucked into the bustle of shopkeepers and enters that sea of human activity, it can take hours to get out. Every now and then I drive into a random street somewhere on a hill behind Üsküdar, past houses built out of hollow bricks, concrete walls, a mosque, a factory, a square; I keep going and see a bank, a restaurant, a bus stop; but no sign of Samiha. Still, the feeling that she might be around here somewhere grows inside me, and as I sit at the steering wheel, I almost feel as if I’m racing around in my own dream.

—

Mevlut and Rayiha’s second daughter, Fevziye, was born in August 1984, comfortably and without generating any extra hospital bills. Mevlut was so happy that he wrote THE TWO GIRLS’ RICE on his cart. Apart from the chaos of two babies crying in unison through the night, chronic lack of sleep, and the meddlesome Vediha, who kept coming over to help out, Mevlut had nothing to complain about.

“Let this rice project go, Mr. Bridegroom, join the family business and give Rayiha a better life,” Vediha said one day.

“We’re doing very well,” said Mevlut. Rayiha looked at her sister as if to say, That’s not true, which irked Mevlut, and once Vediha had left, he started grumbling. “Who does she think she is, intruding on our private life like that?” he said, and briefly considered forbidding Rayiha from visiting her sister’s home in Duttepe, though he didn’t insist, as he knew it wouldn’t be right to demand such a thing.

8. Capitalism and Tradition

Mevlut’s Blissful Family Life

TOWARD THE END of February 1985, as a long, cold, unpropitious workday drew to a close, Mevlut was gathering his plates and glasses to leave Kabataş and go home when Süleyman pulled up in his van. “Everyone’s already brought you gifts and good-luck charms for the new baby, except for me,” he said. “Come and sit in the car, let’s talk for a bit. How’s work? Aren’t you cold out there?”

Climbing into the front seat, Mevlut was reminded of how often the doe-eyed Samiha had sat in this very same place before she’d run away and disappeared a year ago, how much time she had spent driving around Istanbul with Süleyman.

“I’ve been selling cooked rice for two years and in all this time I’ve never sat in a customer’s car,” he said. “It’s too high up here, it’s making me dizzy, I should get down.”

“Sit, sit, we have so much to talk about!” said Süleyman, grabbing Mevlut’s hand as it made for the door handle. He gave his childhood friend a lovelorn, disheartened look.

Mevlut saw that his cousin’s eyes were telling him: “We’re even now!” He pitied Süleyman, and in that moment he grasped the truth he’d been trying to ignore for two years: Süleyman had laid the trap that had tricked Mevlut into thinking that the girl with glimmering eyes was called Rayiha, not Samiha. If Süleyman had managed to marry Samiha as planned, they would have gone on pretending that no such trap had been set, and everyone would have been happy…

“You and your brother are doing great, Süleyman, but the rest of us just can’t seem to find our way to prosperity. I hear the Vurals have already sold more than half the new apartments they’re building even though the foundations aren’t even finished yet.”

“Yes, we’re doing all right, thank God,” said Süleyman. “But we also want you to do well. My brother feels the same way.”

“So what’s the job you’re offering? Will I end up running a teahouse in the Vurals’ offices?”

“Would you like to do that?”

“There’s a customer coming,” said Mevlut, getting out of the vehicle. There was no customer, but he turned his back on Süleyman’s van and busied himself with a portion anyway. He scooped some rice onto a plate, flattening the mound with the back of a spoon. He turned off the butane stove in the three-wheeled cart and was pleased to notice that Süleyman had followed him out of the van.

“Look, if you don’t want to talk, that’s fine, but let me give the baby her gift,” said Süleyman. “At least I’ll get to see her.”

“If you don’t know the way to my place, you’d better follow me,” said Mevlut, and he began to push his cart.

“Why don’t we load the cart into the back of my van?” said Süleyman.

“Don’t underestimate this cart, it’s like a restaurant on three wheels. The kitchen unit and the stove are very delicate, and they weigh a ton.”

He was climbing Kazancı Hill (which typically took him twenty minutes) toward Taksim, panting behind his cart as he did on his journey home between four and five o’clock every day, when Süleyman caught up with him.

“Mevlut, let’s tie it to the bumper, and I’ll slowly tow you along.”

He seemed sincere and friendly enough, but Mevlut kept going as if he hadn’t heard. A few yards later, he pushed his restaurant on wheels to one side of the road and put the brakes on. “Go up to Taksim and wait for me at the Tarlabaşı bus stop.”

Süleyman accelerated, disappearing over the hill, and Mevlut began to fret about what he would think when he saw the state of the house and realized how poor they were. In truth, he’d been enjoying Süleyman’s solicitude. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the notion that he might be able to use his cousin to get closer to the Vurals and perhaps provide a better life for Rayiha and the kids.

He chained his cart to the tree in the back garden. “Where are you!” he called out to Rayiha, who was taking longer than usual to come down and help him. They met upstairs in the kitchen, his arms loaded with rice cart paraphernalia. “Süleyman’s gotten the baby a gift, he’s on his way now! For goodness’ sake tidy up a little and make this place look decent!” said Mevlut.

“Why?” said Rayiha. “Let him see exactly how we live.”

“We’re all right,” said Mevlut. He was smiling now, cheered by the sight of his daughters. “But we shouldn’t give him any reason to talk. It stinks in here, let’s get some fresh air in.”

“Don’t open the window. The girls will catch a cold,” said Rayiha. “Should I be ashamed of the way we smell? Doesn’t their house in Duttepe smell exactly like this?”

“It doesn’t. They’ve got that huge garden, they’ve got electricity and running water, it’s all like clockwork. But we’re much happier here. Is the boza ready? At least put these dishcloths away.”

“Sorry, but when you’ve got two babies to look after, it’s a little hard to keep up with the boza, the rice, the chicken, the dishes, the laundry, and everything else that needs doing.”

“Korkut and Süleyman want to offer me a job.”

“What job is that?”

“We’re going to be business partners. We’re going to run the Vurals’ company teahouse.”

“I think the job is an excuse and Süleyman just thinks he can get us to tell him who Samiha ran away with. If they think you’re so great, why did it take them so long to come up with this job for you?”

—

Süleyman. I would have rather spared Mevlut the grief of knowing I’d watched him standing there in Kabataş getting buffeted by the wind as he glumly waited for customers. I knew I wouldn’t be able to find parking in Taksim, what with all the traffic, so I parked the van on a side street and watched dejectedly as Mevlut tried and mostly failed to push his rice cart up the hill.

I drove around Tarlabaşı for a bit. The general who became mayor after the coup in 1980 flew into a rage one day and kicked all the carpenters and the mechanics out of the neighborhood, driving them away to the outer edges of the city. He also shut down the bachelor dormitories, where the dishwashers who work in the restaurants of Beyoğlu used to sleep, claiming that these places were breeding grounds for germs. As a result, these streets emptied out. The Vurals came here at the time looking for places to take over on the cheap for development later on, but they gave up when they discovered that most of the buildings in the area are owned by the Greeks who were deported to Athens overnight in 1964. The mafia here is stronger and more vicious than the gangs who run Duttepe. In the last five years, this whole place has been overrun by drifters and castaways, and there are so many poor rural migrants, Kurds, Gypsies, and foreigners who have settled on these streets that the neighborhood is worse than Duttepe was fifteen years ago. Only another coup could clean this place up now.

Once I got to their house, I handed the doll I’d brought for the baby to Rayiha. The single room they lived in was a dizzying mess: diapers, plates, chairs, piles of laundry, sacks of chickpeas, bags of sugar, the butane stove, boxes of baby food, cartons of detergent, pots and pans, milk bottles, plastic cans, mattresses, and duvets had all merged into one big monochrome blur, like clothes spinning inside a washing machine.

“Mevlut, I never believed Vediha Yenge when she told me, but now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes…You know this beautiful, happy family life you’ve got here with Rayiha Yenge and the girls? It makes me so happy for you that I can’t think of anything I’d rather see.”

“Why didn’t you believe Vediha when she told you?”

“Seeing what you’ve got here, this blissful family life, it makes me want to get married right away.”

“Why didn’t you believe her, Süleyman?”

Rayiha served them tea. “No girl seems to be good enough for you, Süleyman,” she teased. “Go on, have a seat.”

“It’s the girls who don’t think I’m good enough,” I said. I didn’t sit.

“My sister tells me, ‘All these pretty girls are in love with Süleyman, but Süleyman doesn’t like any of them.’ ”

“Oh, sure, Vediha is so helpful. Does she always come and tell you everything afterward? Who is this pretty girl who’s supposed to be in love with me?”

“Vediha means well.”

“I know, but seriously, that girl wasn’t right for me. She supported the wrong team, Fenerbahçe,” I quipped, laughing along with them, and surprised at my own quick wit.

“What about the tall one?”

“Good God, is there anything you don’t know? She was too modern, Rayiha, she wasn’t right for me.”

“Süleyman, if you were to meet a girl you liked who was beautiful and respectable but didn’t wear a headscarf, would that be reason enough for you not to marry her?”

“Where on earth are you getting all these ideas from, Rayiha?” Mevlut called from the other side of the room, where he was busy checking the consistency of the boza. “Is it the television?”

“You make me sound like I’m really stuck up and I think no one’s good enough for me. But you should know that I almost agreed to marry a maid, the daughter of Kasım from Kastamonu.”

Rayiha frowned. “I could be a maid,” she said proudly. “What’s wrong with that, as long as you’ve got your dignity?”

“Do you think I’d give you permission for something like that?” said Mevlut.

Rayiha smiled. “At home I’m already the cleaning lady, the maid, the head chef of a three-wheeled restaurant, and the cook in a boza shop.” She turned to Mevlut. “Now give me an employment contract and make sure it’s notarized, or else I’ll go on strike. The law says I can.”

“Who cares what the law says or doesn’t say? The government can’t interfere in our home!” said a defiant Mevlut.

“Rayiha, if you know about all these things, then you must also know that other thing I really want to know,” I ventured.

“We have no idea where Samiha went or whom she went with, Süleyman. Don’t waste your breath trying to get us to tell you. I heard Korkut was really horrible to my poor dad just because he thought he knew something…”

—

“Mevlut, let’s go to the Canopy Restaurant around the corner and talk for a bit,” said Süleyman.

“Don’t let Mevlut drink too much, all right? He’ll say anything after he’s had a glass. He’s not like me.”

“I know how much to drink!” said Mevlut. He was getting annoyed at the indulgent and overfamiliar tone his wife was using with Süleyman, and she hadn’t even covered her head properly. Clearly Rayiha was spending a lot more time than she let on at the house in Duttepe, basking in the comforts over there. “Don’t soak any more chickpeas tonight,” Mevlut commanded as he was walking out.

“You’ve brought back all the rice I gave you this morning anyway,” Rayiha shot back.

At first Süleyman couldn’t remember where he’d parked his van. His face lit up when they found it just a few steps farther on.

“You shouldn’t park here, the neighborhood kids will steal the side-view mirrors,” said Mevlut. “They’ll even take the Ford logo…They sell them to the spare-parts dealers up the hill or wear them as necklaces. If it had been a Mercedes, they would have ripped the sign out long ago.”

“I doubt this neighborhood has ever seen a Mercedes.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it, if I were you. All the brightest, most creative Greeks and Assyrians used to live here. Craftsmen are the lifeblood of Istanbul.”

The Canopy Restaurant was an old Greek place situated just three streets up toward Beyoğlu, but Mevlut and Rayiha had never been there. It was still early, so the restaurant was empty. They sat down, and Süleyman ordered two rakı doubles (without even bothering to ask Mevlut) and some starters (white cheese, fried mussels) and got straight to the point.

“It’s time to put our fathers’ property dispute behind us. My brother sends his regards…We have a serious job opportunity we want to talk to you about.”

“What’s the job?”

Süleyman responded by raising his glass of rakı for a toast. Mevlut reciprocated, but he only had a small sip before putting his glass back down on the table.

“What, you’re not drinking?”

“I can’t let my boza customers see me drunk. They’ll be expecting me soon.”

“Not to mention that you have no faith in me, you think if you get drunk I’ll make you tell me things, right?” said Süleyman. “And yet, have I ever told anyone your big secret?”

Mevlut’s heart thumped in his chest. “What’s my big secret supposed to be?”

“My dear Mevlut, it seems you trust me so blindly that you’re forgetting things. Believe me, I’ve forgotten, too, and I haven’t told anyone either. But let me refresh your memory so you’ll remember that I’m on your side: when you fell in love at Korkut’s wedding, did I or did I not offer you my guidance and help?”

“Of course you did…”

“I went all the way from Istanbul to Akşehir in my van just so you could elope with the girl, didn’t I?”

“I’m grateful, Süleyman…I’m so happy now, and it’s all because of you.”

“Are you actually happy, though?…Sometimes our heart wants one thing, but we end up with another instead…Yet we still claim that we’re happy.”

“Why would anyone say they’re happy unless they really were?”

“Out of shame…and because accepting the truth would make them even more miserable. But none of this applies to you. You’re more than happy with Rayiha…Now it’s your turn to help me find happiness.”

“I’ll help you the way you helped me.”

“Where is Samiha?…Do you think she’ll come back to me?…Tell me the truth, Mevlut.”

“Get that girl out of your head,” said Mevlut after a brief silence.

“Do things ever get out of our heads just because we tell them to? No, they get stuck even deeper. You and my brother married her sis ters, so you’re fine. But I failed to get the third sister. Now the more I tell myself I should forget Samiha, the more I think about her. I can’t stop thinking about her eyes, the way she walks and talks, how beautiful she is. What can I do? The only other thing I think about is the person who has brought this humiliation upon me.”

“Who is that?”

“The son of a bitch who took my Samiha away from me in broad daylight. Who was it? Tell me the truth, Mevlut. I’ll have my revenge on that bastard.” Süleyman raised his glass as a sort of peace offering, and Mevlut reluctantly downed his own rakı, too.

“Aaaah…just what we needed,” said Süleyman. “Isn’t that so?”

“If I didn’t have to work tonight, I’d have another…,” said Mevlut.

“Mevlut, you’ve been calling me a nationalist and a pathetic little fascist for years, and now you’re the one who is so worried about sin that he’s scared of rakı. What happened to that Communist friend of yours who got you hooked on wine…What was that Kurd called again?”

“Enough of these old stories, Süleyman, tell me about this new job.”

“What sort of job would you like?”

“There is no job, is there…You only came here to try to get me to tell you who took Samiha.”

“You know those Arçelik three-wheelers, you should sell your rice from one of those,” said Süleyman callously. “You can buy them on monthly installments. Mevlut, if you had some cash to spend, what kind of shop would you open, and where would you put it?”

Mevlut knew he shouldn’t take the question seriously, but he couldn’t help himself. “I’d open a boza shop in Beyoğlu.”

“But is there enough demand for boza?”

“I am sure that anyone who tries boza once is bound to come back for more, as long as it has been prepared and served properly,” said Mevlut eagerly. “I’m talking to you as a capitalist, here…Boza’s got a real future.”

“Does Comrade Ferhat give you these capitalist tips?”

“Just because people don’t drink that much boza today doesn’t mean they won’t tomorrow. Have you ever heard that true story about the two footwear entrepreneurs who went to India? One of them said, ‘People here walk around barefoot, they won’t buy any shoes,’ and went back home.”

“Don’t they have their own capitalists over there?”

“The other one said, ‘There’s half a billion barefoot people here, it’s a huge market.’ So he persevered, and eventually he got rich selling shoes in India. Whatever money I lose selling chickpea rice during the day, I more than make up for with my evening boza sales…”

“You’ve become a real capitalist,” said Süleyman. “But let me remind you that the reason boza was so popular in Ottoman times was that they used to drink it instead of alcohol. Boza is one thing; shoes for barefoot Indians are another…We no longer need to fool ourselves into believing that boza is alcohol-free. Alcohol’s legal now anyway.”

“No, drinking boza doesn’t mean you’re fooling yourself. Everyone loves it,” said Mevlut, getting agitated. “If you’re selling it from a clean shop with a modern look…What job is your brother offering me?”

“Korkut can’t decide whether he should stay with his old friends from the Grey Wolves or run as a candidate of the Motherland Party,” said Süleyman. “Now tell me why you said earlier that I should get Samiha out of my head.”

“Because it’s done now, she’s run away with someone else…,” Mevlut mumbled. “There’s nothing more painful than love.” He sighed.

“You might not want to help me, but there are others who will. Now look at this one here.” Süleyman took a battered old black-and-white photograph out of his pocket and handed it to Mevlut.

The photograph showed a woman singing into a microphone, with darkness and too much makeup around her eyes and a world-weary expression. She was dressed conservatively. She wasn’t very pretty.

“Süleyman, this woman is at least fifteen years older than we are!”

“Only three or four years older, in fact. If you met her, you’d see she doesn’t look a day older than twenty-five. She’s a very good person, very understanding. I see her a couple of times a week. You won’t tell Rayiha or Vediha, of course, and least of all Korkut. You and I share lots of secrets, don’t we?”

“But weren’t you meant to settle down with a suitable girl? Isn’t Vediha supposed to find you a good girl to marry? Who is this singer woman?”

“I’m still a bachelor, I’m not married yet. Don’t get jealous now.”

“Why would I be jealous?” said Mevlut. He got up. “It’s boza time for me.” He’d figured out by then that there wasn’t any business to set up with Korkut and that Süleyman had come here purely to pump Mevlut for information about Samiha’s whereabouts, just as Rayiha had predicted.

“Come on, sit down, stay at least a few minutes more. How many cups do you think you’ll sell tonight?”

“I’m going out with two jugs filled halfway. I’m sure I’ll sell out by the end of the evening.”

“All right then, I’ll buy a whole jug’s worth off you. How many cups would that make? You’ll give me a discount, of course.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I’m buying it off you so you’ll stay here with me, keep me company, and not go out freezing on the streets.”

“I don’t need your charity.”

“But I really need your friendship.”

“All right then, you can pay me for a third of a jug,” said Mevlut, sitting back down. “I won’t make a profit off you. That’ll cover the costs. Don’t tell Rayiha I stayed here drinking with you. What will you do with the boza?”

“What will I do with it?” said Süleyman, pondering an answer. “I don’t know…I’ll give it away to someone…or I guess I could just get rid of it.”

“Where?”

“What do you mean where? It belongs to me, doesn’t it? It can go down the toilet hole.”

“Shame on you, Süleyman…”

“What’s the matter? Aren’t you a capitalist? I’m paying you for it.”

“Süleyman, you aren’t worth a single penny of the money you make here in Istanbul.”

“As if boza is holy or something.”

“Yes, boza is holy.”

“Oh, fuck off, boza is just something someone invented so Muslims could drink alcohol; it’s booze in disguise — everyone knows that.”

“No,” said Mevlut, his heart beating fast. “There is no alcohol in boza.” He was relieved to feel an expression of utter calm coming over his face.

“Are you joking?”

In the sixteen years he’d spent selling boza, Mevlut had told this lie to two different types of people:

1. Conservative customers who wanted to drink boza and also wanted to believe that they were not committing a sin. The clever ones knew that there was alcohol in boza, but acted as if the mixture that Mevlut sold was a special invention, like sugar-free Coke, and if there was alcohol in it, then Mevlut was a liar, and the sin was his.

2. Secular, Westernized customers who wanted to drink boza and also wanted to enlighten the country bumpkin who sold it to them. The clever ones understood that Mevlut knew there was alcohol in boza, but they wanted to shame the cunning religious peasant who lied to them just to make more money.

“No, I’m not joking. Boza is holy,” said Mevlut.

“I’m a Muslim,” said Süleyman. “Only things that obey the rules of my faith can be holy.”

“Just because something isn’t strictly Islamic doesn’t mean it can’t be holy. Old things we’ve inherited from our ancestors can be holy, too,” said Mevlut. “When I’m out at night on the gloomy, empty streets, I sometimes come across a mossy old wall. A wonderful joy rises up inside me. I walk into the cemetery, and even though I can’t read the Arabic script on the gravestones, I still feel as good as I would if I’d prayed.”

“Come off it, Mevlut, you’re probably scared of the dogs in the cemetery.”

“I’m not scared of stray dogs. They know who I am. What did my late father say to people who claimed there was alcohol in boza?”

“What did he say?”

“He’d tell them ‘Sir, if there was alcohol in it, I wouldn’t be selling it,’ ” said Mevlut, imitating his father.

“They didn’t know that it contained alcohol,” said Süleyman. “Any way, if boza really were as blessed as holy water, people would be drinking it all day and you’d be rich by now.”

“It’s not like it can only be holy if everyone is drinking it. Very few people actually read the Koran. But in all of Istanbul, there is always at least one person reading it at any given time, and millions of people can feel better just by thinking of that person. It’s enough for people to know that boza was our ancestors’ favorite drink. That’s what the boza seller’s call reminds them of, and it makes them feel good to hear it.”

“Why do they feel good?”

“I don’t know,” said Mevlut. “But thank God they do, because that’s why they drink boza.”

“So that means you’re like a symbol of something bigger, Mevlut.”

“Yes, exactly,” said Mevlut with pride.

“But you’re still willing to sell me your boza without a profit. The only thing you don’t want is for it to go down the toilet. You’re right, wasting food is a sin, so we should distribute it among the poor, but I don’t know if people will want to drink something that’s got alcohol in it.”

“If you’re going to start insulting boza after all the years you’ve spent lecturing me about patriotism and boasting about what a good fascist you are, then you’re on the wrong track, Süleyman…”

“There you go, the moment they see you succeed, they get jealous and tell you you’re wrong.”

“I’m not jealous of you. It’s clear that you’re spending time with the wrong woman, Süleyman…”

“You know full well that it makes no difference whether it’s the right woman or the wrong woman or any other woman.”

“I got married, and thankfully I’m very happy,” said Mevlut, rising from his seat. “You find yourself a good girl, too, and get married as soon as possible. Good night.”

“I won’t get married until I’ve killed the bastard who took Samiha,” Süleyman yelled after him. “You go tell that Kurd.”

Mevlut made his way home as if walking in his sleep. Rayiha had brought the boza jugs down. He could have tied them to his stick and gone out. Instead he went up the stairs and into the house.

Rayiha was breast-feeding Fevziye. “Did he make you drink?” she whispered, trying not to startle the baby.

Mevlut could feel the force of the rakı inside his head.

“I didn’t drink at all. He just kept asking who Samiha had run off with and where did she go. Who’s the Kurd he keeps mentioning?”

“What did you say?”

“What could I have said? I don’t know anything.”

“Samiha ran away with Ferhat!” said Rayiha.

“What?…Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Süleyman’s lost his mind,” said Rayiha. “You should hear the things he says back home in Duttepe…If he finds out who took Samiha, he’ll kill him.”

“No way…he’s all talk,” said Mevlut. “He’s a loudmouth, but Süleyman wouldn’t kill anyone.”

“But why are you so tense, what’s making you so angry?”

“I’m not tense and I’m not angry,” he shouted. He went out, slamming the door behind him. He heard the baby start to cry.

Mevlut was fully aware that it would take countless nights of walking on dark streets before he could even begin to accept what he’d just found out. That night he walked from the backstreets of Feriköy all the way to Kasımpaşa, even though he had no customers there.

At some point during the evening, he lost his way and climbed down several steep roads, and when he came across a small graveyard squeezed between two wooden houses, he went in to have a cigarette among the gravestones. One dating all the way back to Ottoman times, and surmounted by a large sculpted turban, filled him with awe. He had to put Samiha and Ferhat out of his mind. On his long walk that night, he convinced himself that he wouldn’t dwell on the news. In any case, whenever he went home and lay down to sleep with Rayiha in his arms, he forgot all his troubles. Besides, the things that troubled him in this world were all just specters of the strangeness in his mind. Even the dogs in the cemetery had been nice to him that night.

9. The Ghaazi Quarter

We’re Going to Hide in Here

Samiha. Yes, I eloped with Ferhat. I’ve kept quiet for two years now, just to make sure no one finds out where we are. But I’ve got so much to tell.

Süleyman was really in love with me. It’s true that love can make a fool of any man. He was acting so strange — especially in the days just before I ran away — and whenever he spoke to me, his mouth would go dry from nervousness. No matter how hard he tried, he could never figure out how to say all the sweet things I would have liked to hear. He used to play pranks on me like a naughty kid taunting his little brother, and even though he liked taking me for drives, every time we got in the van he would still say, “Let’s hope no one sees us” or “We’re wasting so much gas.”

I left behind all the presents Süleyman had given me, though I can’t see my father returning his false teeth or any of the other gifts, either…he must be so angry at me. To tell the truth, I’m pretty angry too about how they all decided Süleyman was good enough for me without even bothering to ask what I thought.

Ferhat says he first saw me at Rayiha and Mevlut’s wedding. I hadn’t even noticed him. But he couldn’t forget me; that’s what he said when he stopped me out in Duttepe one day to declare face-to-face that he was in love and intended to marry me.

So many boys had wanted to marry me but couldn’t even work up the courage to come near me, so I liked the boldness of his approach: he told me he was a university student who worked in the restaurant industry (he didn’t say he was a waiter). He used to call me at home in Duttepe, though I’ve no idea where he got our number. If Süleyman and Korkut had found out, they would have beaten him bloody and broken his bones, but Ferhat didn’t care, he would call me anyway and try to arrange a meeting. When Vediha was home, I wouldn’t pick up. “Hello…Hello? Hello, hello!” my sister would say, with one eye on me. “No one’s speaking…Must be that guy again. Be careful, Samiha, this city is full of perverts looking for a good time.” I wouldn’t respond. But Vediha understood perfectly well that I would prefer a fun-loving rascal over a fat, lazy rich boy any day.

When my father and Vediha weren’t home, I’d be the one to pick up the phone, since Bozkurt and Turan weren’t allowed to touch it anyway. Ferhat wouldn’t say much. There was a place behind the Ali Sami Yen football stadium where he used to wait for me under a mulberry tree. There were some old stables there where homeless people lived. There was a little shop where Ferhat would buy me a bottle of Fruko orange soda, and we would check under the cap to see whether we’d won anything. I never once asked him how much he made in the restaurant industry, whether he had any savings, or where we would live. That’s the way I fall in love.

Once I got into the taxi, we didn’t head straight for the Ghaazi Quarter. First we turned back toward Taksim Square, where we figured we could lose Süleyman in the bustle, in case he was still following us; from there we went down to Kabataş, where I admired the simple deep blue of the sea, and as we drove over Galata Bridge I was entranced at the sight of all the ships with their passengers and all those cars around us. At one point, I felt like crying at the thought of being separated from my father and my sister and going to a place I didn’t know, but at the same time I felt in my heart that this whole city was now mine and that I was starting a very happy life.

“Ferhat, will you take me out with you? Are we going to go and see things together?” I asked him.

“Whatever you want, my darling,” he said. “But we’ve got to get home first.”

“You couldn’t have made a better decision, miss, trust me,” said his friend, the taxi driver who was helping us. “The guns didn’t scare you, did they?”

“She doesn’t get scared!” said Ferhat.

We passed Gaziosmanpaşa, formerly known as Taşlıtarla—“Stony Field.” As we drove uphill on a dusty dirt road, the world seemed to grow older with every house, chimney, and tree that passed. I saw single-story houses that hadn’t even been finished but already looked old; pitifully empty lots; walls built out of hollow bricks, scrap metal, and bits of wood; and dogs that barked at anyone. The roads were unpaved, the gardens were big, the houses few and far between; this place was like a village, yet everything, down to the last door and window, had once been in one of those old Istanbul homes before someone ripped it out and brought it here. People here were always in a hurry, as if this neighborhood were just a temporary place to stay until they could move into the actual Istanbul home they were going to buy one day. I saw women like me wearing skirts over faded blue trousers; old ladies in baggy trousers and headscarves wound tight around their faces; I saw straight, loose trousers that looked like stovepipes, long skirts, and women in overcoats.

The house Ferhat was renting, a single room with two windows, stood halfway up the slope. From the window at the back, you could see a plot of land far away that Ferhat had marked out with stones he had limewashed, so that on summer nights when the moon was big, we could see his plot from our bed, glowing in the dark like a ghost. “The land is calling to us,” Ferhat would whisper, and then he’d start telling me about the house we would build there as soon as we’d saved enough. He would ask me how many rooms the house should have and whether the kitchen should face uphill or downhill, and I’d tell him what I thought.

The first night after I’d run away, we got into bed with our clothes still on and did not make love. If I share these intimate details with you, dear readers, it is because I hope that my story might serve as an example to you all. I liked it when Ferhat stroked my hair while I cried in the night. For a week, we slept that way, with our clothes still on and without ever making love. One night I saw a seagull outside the window, and because we were so far from the sea, I thought this had to be a sign of God’s forgiveness. Ferhat realized that I was ready to give myself to him now; I could tell from the look in his eyes that he knew.

He had never tried to force me into doing anything I didn’t want to do, which made me love and respect him even more. Nevertheless, I told him, “We better have a civil wedding as soon as I turn eighteen, or I’ll kill you.”

“With a gun or with poison?”

“That’s my business,” I said.

He kissed me the way they do in the movies. I had never kissed a man on the lips, so I got confused and forgot what I was saying.

“How much longer until you turn eighteen?”

I proudly produced my identity card from my suitcase and worked out that there were seven months and twelve days to go.

“If you’re seventeen and still haven’t got a husband, you might as well call yourself a spinster,” said Ferhat. “Even if we were to make love now, God would feel sorry for you and wouldn’t count it as a sin.”

“I don’t know about that…but if God forgives us, it’ll be because we have to hide out here, with no one to rely on except each other.”

“Not true,” said Ferhat. “I have a family; I have relatives and friends all over this hill. We’re not alone.” At that word—“alone”—I burst into tears. Ferhat stroked my hair to comfort me, just as my father used to do when I was little. I don’t know why, but that made me cry even harder.

We made love feeling deeply self-conscious, though I would never have wanted it to happen that way. I was a little lost at first, but I got used to my new life fairly quickly. I wondered what my sisters and my father might be saying about me. Ferhat would leave just before noon, taking a dusty old minibus like the ones we used to have back in the village, all the way to the fully licensed New Bounty Restaurant in Gaziosmanpaşa, where he worked as a waiter. In the mornings he watched university lectures on TV, and I, too, would watch the professor as Ferhat followed the lesson.

“I can’t concentrate if you sit right next to me while I’m watching,” Ferhat would say. But when I didn’t sit next to him, he would start to wonder where I’d gone to in our tiny house — was I outside feeding bread crumbs to the chickens? — and he still couldn’t concentrate.

I won’t tell you how we made love or what I did to make sure I didn’t get pregnant until we were married, but whenever I was in the city, I would go to Rayiha and Mevlut’s house in Tarlabaşı without informing Ferhat, and I would tell my sister everything. Mevlut was out selling rice from his cart, so he was never home. Vediha came along, too, sometimes. We would play with the children while Rayiha prepared the boza and the chicken, and we’d watch TV as Vediha offered pearls of wisdom to her little sisters.

“Do not trust men,” she would say at the beginning of every lesson. I noticed she’d started smoking. “Samiha, you can’t get pregnant until you and Ferhat have had a civil wedding. If he won’t marry you once you’ve turned eighteen, don’t waste another second on that bastard. You always have your room waiting for you in Duttepe. Rayiha, not a word to Mevlut or Süleyman that the three of us meet up in here. Have a cigarette, dear. It’ll calm your nerves. Süleyman’s still furious. We can’t find him a suitable girl, he doesn’t like any of them, he’s still stuck on you, and — God help us — he’s still charging around saying he’ll murder Ferhat.”

“Vediha, Samiha, I’m going out for half an hour or so. Look after the babies for a bit, will you?” Rayiha would say. “I haven’t left the house in three days.”

When I first went to live there, the Ghaazi Quarter looked like a different place every time I saw it. I met a young woman who wore jeans like me and who’d also run away with someone to avoid a marriage she didn’t want; she wore her headscarf loose, too. There was a Kurdish woman who loved to talk about how she had come from Malatya and how the police and the gendarmes were after her, and when we’d walk back home together from the fountain carrying our jerricans full of water, she would tell me about the pain in her kidneys, the scorpions in her woodshed, and how even in her dreams she was always walking uphill.

The Ghaazi Quarter was just one steep hillside populated by people of every conceivable city, country, trade (though most were unem ployed), race, tribe, and tongue. There was a forest behind the hill, and below the forest was a dam with a green reservoir that supplied water to the whole city. If you made sure to get along with the Alevis, the Kurds, and later with the fanatics of the Tariqi sect and their sheikh, too, your home was unlikely to get demolished, and word of this spread fast so that now all sorts of people lived on this hill. But no one ever said where they were really from. I took Ferhat’s advice and gave a different answer every time anyone asked.

Ferhat went to Gaziosmanpaşa every day, avoiding Istanbul for fear of running into Süleyman (of course, he had no idea about my trips to the city, so please don’t mention them); he told me he was saving, though he didn’t even have a bank account. After he left, I would keep myself busy sweeping the dirt floor (it took a month before I realized that the more I swept the floor, the higher the ceiling got), shifting the tiles and the tin sheets on the roof, which would leak even when it wasn’t raining, and trying to block out the wind, which even on calm, cloudless days with no trace of a breeze outside would still find its way through the chipped bricks and uneven stones, upsetting the nervous lizards on our walls. Some nights, instead of the wind blowing we would hear the howling of wolves, and the roof wouldn’t leak water but slush and rusty nails. On winter evenings, the seagulls would come to perch and warm their orange feet and backsides on the stovepipe coming out of the window, and when their squawking drowned out the voices of American gangsters and policemen on TV, I would get scared to be home alone and think wistfully of my father, who had returned to the village.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. My darling daughter, my beautiful Samiha. I can sense that you’ve been talking about me all the way from this table in the village coffeehouse where I am dozing in front of the television, I know you’re all right and have no complaints about that bastard who ran off with you, and I wish you every happiness, my dear. Forget about money. Marry whoever you want to marry, my child, even an Alevi is fine, just as long as you bring your husband to the village so you can both kiss my hand. I wonder where you are…I wonder if my feelings and my words are reaching you in return…

—

Ferhat. As soon as I realized that Samiha was scared of being home alone while I worked late at the New Bounty Restaurant, I told her she could go watch TV in the evenings with our neighbors from the town of Sivas. Haydar was an Alevi who worked as a doorman in a new apartment block in Gaziosmanpaşa, where his wife, Zeliha, scrubbed the stairs five days a week and also helped out a baker’s wife on an upper-floor apartment with the cooking and the dishes. Samiha noticed how Haydar and Zeliha always left the house together in the morning and took the bus home together every evening, keeping each other company all day. We were walking up the slope to our house one night, an icy wind from the Black Sea rattling our bones, when Samiha told me that there were other tenants in that building where Haydar’s wife worked looking for maids to come in for the day.

Once we got home, I put my foot down. “I’d rather go hungry than have you working as a maid!” I said.

I was holding a rusty old wheel rim, which I added to the pile of old doors, scrap metal, wire, tin drums, bricks, and smooth rocks I was collecting for the house I would build one day on the plot I had marked out with phosphorescent stones.

—

People in the Ghaazi Quarter had started to help one another build houses out of the doors, chimneys, and hollow bricks they’d amassed when the leftists, Alevis, and Kurds took over the neighborhood six years earlier. Before then, the quarter had been ruled by Nazmi the Laz from the eastern Black Sea coast. In 1972, Nazmi the Laz and two of his men (who also hailed from Rize) opened a shop at the foot of this hill, which was empty back then except for nettles and shrubs. He sold overpriced tiles, hollow bricks, cement, and other construction materials to poor migrants from Eastern Anatolia who came here hoping to build an unlicensed home on an empty patch of public land. He was like a friend to his customers, offering them advice and tea (later, he would open a teahouse next door), and his shop soon became a meeting point for those flocking to Istanbul from every corner of the Anatolian peninsula — especially from Sivas, Kars, and Tokat — migrants yearning for four walls and a ceiling.

Nazmi the Laz would take his famous horse-drawn cart with rubber tires and do the rounds of Istanbul’s demolition crews, collecting wooden doors, newel posts, window frames, cracked bits of marble and paving, metal railings, and old roof tiles, which he displayed all around his shops and his teahouse. He would demand exorbitant prices for these rusty, rotten furnishings, just as he did for the cement and the bricks he sold in his shop. But if you were willing to pay and to hire Nazmi’s horse cart to deliver the materials to your construction site, you could count on Nazmi and his men to keep an eye on the land you’d seized and the house you were building on it.

Those not prepared to pay Nazmi, or who thought it was shrewder to go elsewhere for the building materials—“I know where I can get it all a lot cheaper,” they’d say — were likely to see their ramshackle homes damaged overnight without a witness in sight, if not completely demolished, with the blessing of the Gaziosmanpaşa police. Once the demolition crews and the police were gone, Nazmi the Laz would pay a condolence call on those penny-wise fools weeping over the rubble of their ruined homes: he would say how he was friends with the captain at the Gaziosmanpaşa police station, they played cards together in the coffeehouse every evening, and had he only known this was going to happen, he could have done something.

In fact, Nazmi the Laz had connections in the nationalist party then in power. From around 1978 onward, when those who’d built on government land using the materials bought from Nazmi started to fight over one another’s land, Nazmi the Laz set up his so-called office to keep a record of all these transactions, just like an official land registry. He also issued documents resembling proper title deeds to anyone who paid him for the right to claim a plot of empty land. To make these documents look as legitimate as he could, he followed the practice of the state’s official deeds by affixing a photograph of the owner (he’d recently installed a small coin-operated photo booth for his clients’ convenience) as well as including the name of the previous owner (he was always proud to name himself), and noting the precise location and dimensions of the plot, before finally sealing the whole thing with a red stamp he’d ordered from a stationery shop in Gaziosmanpaşa.

“When the government’s giving out land here one day, they’re going to look at my records and the title deeds I’ve been handing out,” Nazmi would boast. Sometimes he would address the unemployed men playing rummikub in his teahouse with a little speech on how happy he was to serve his countrymen — who’d left the poorest villages of Sivas and come all the way to Istanbul without a single thing to call their own — by turning them into landowners overnight, and to those who asked, “When are we going to get electricity here, Nazmi?” he would say that they were working on it, hinting that in the event the Ghaazi Quarter was declared a municipality, he would stand for local elections under the banner of the ruling party.

One day, a tall, pale man with a dreamy look in his eyes appeared on the empty hills behind the neighborhood, on land that Nazmi had yet to parcel out. His name was Ali. He never came down to Nazmi the Laz’s shop and teahouse; he kept to himself, avoiding neighborhood gossip, living alone on that isolated plot at the farthest edge of the city, where he settled down with his cheap bricks, pots and pans, gas lamps, and mattresses. Nazmi the Laz sent two of his truculent mustachioed henchmen to remind Ali that someone owned that land.

“This land belongs neither to Nazmi the Laz, nor to Hamdi the Turk, nor Kadir the Kurd, nor the state,” Ali told them. “Everything — the whole universe and this nation, too — belongs to Allah. We are nothing more than His mortal subjects passing through this temporary existence!”

One night, Nazmi the Laz’s men showed this reckless Ali just how right he was — with a bullet to his head. They buried him near the reservoir, keeping things neat and tidy so as not to give the city newspapers an excuse to write about their favorite topic: how the people who lived in the poor neighborhoods were polluting the beautiful green waters of the reservoir that served as Istanbul’s water supply. But the neighborhood dogs, who spent their winters warring with the wolves that came down looking for food, soon found the body. Instead of seizing Nazmi the Laz’s mustachioed men, the police arrested and tortured a family from Sivas who lived in the house closest to the lake. They ignored the many anonymous tips that Nazmi the Laz was behind it all and pressed on, applying their usual expert torture methods to the people from the lake, first whipping their feet and then setting up simple circuits to administer electric shocks.

When a Kurd from Bingöl died of a heart attack under questioning, the whole neighborhood rose up in protest and raided Nazmi the Laz’s teahouse. Nazmi was away, enjoying a wedding at his village near Rize. Taken by surprise, his armed men panicked and ran away, doing no more than firing a few futile shots in the air. Leftist, Marxist, and Maoist youths from various neighborhoods and universities around the city heard what was happening in the Ghaazi Quarter and came to lead this “spontaneous uprising of the people.”

—

Ferhat. Within two days, Nazmi the Laz’s offices were taken over and university students seized the land registry, and soon the news spread all over Turkey, especially among the Kurds and the Alevis, that anyone who came to the Ghaazi Quarter and announced that they were “poor and left wing” (or “godless,” according to the nationalist papers) would be given some land. That’s how, six years ago, I got my plot, which is still marked out with phosphorescent rocks. I didn’t settle there at the time, because, like everyone else, I believed that Nazmi the Laz would surely return one day to get his revenge and get his land back with the help of the state. Besides, Beyoğlu, where Mevlut and I were working as waiters, was so far from the Ghaazi Quarter that it took half the day just getting there and back by bus.

We are still living in fear of Süleyman’s rage. Nobody wanted to get involved to help us make peace with the Aktaş family (I resented Mevlut, Rayiha, and Vediha for this). So Samiha and I ended up having a quiet, simple wedding in the Ghaazi Quarter. No one pinned any gold or hundred-dollar bills on us the way they did on Mevlut and Rayiha. I was sad not to have been able to invite Mevlut, to have had to get married without my best friend there, but at the same time it made me furious to see how close he was with the Aktaş bunch and how he was willing to mingle with fascists just because he imagined he could get something out of it.

10. Getting Rid of City Dust

My God, Where Is All This Filth Coming From?

Samiha. Ferhat is so worried about what people will say that he’s skipping the best parts of our story, supposedly because they’re “private.” We did have a very small wedding, but it was wonderful. We borrowed a white dress for me from the Pure Princess Bridal Shop on the second floor of the blue building in Gaziosmanpaşa. I didn’t put a foot wrong all evening and refused to let anything bring me down — not the ugly, envious biddies around me saying “Poor dear, what a waste for such a pretty girl!” or those who kept their mouths shut but looked at me as if to say, You’re so beautiful, why marry some penniless waiter? I could never be anyone’s slave, harem girl, or prisoner…Look at me and you’ll know what freedom looks like. That night, Ferhat got so drunk on all the rakı he’d been sneaking under the table that I ended up having to get him home. But I held my head up and proudly faced the crowd of jealous women and admiring men (including the unemployed ones who’d only come for the free lemonade and tea biscuits).

Two months later, Haydar and his wife, Zeliha, had talked me into working as a housemaid in Gaziosmanpaşa. Haydar would sometimes have a drink with Ferhat, and he and his wife had come to our wedding. So when they suggested that I start working, they meant well. Ferhat initially resisted the idea, not wanting to be the kind of man who sends the girl he’s just eloped with off to work as a maid only two months after marrying her. But one rainy morning, we all took the minibus to Gaziosmanpaşa together. Ferhat came along to meet the doorman at the Civan Apartment, the building where Zeliha and many of her relatives worked. We went down to the basement, where we sat — three women and three men — drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in the doorman’s quarters, which were smaller than the room we lived in, lacking even a window. Afterward, Zeliha took me to apartment number 5, where I was supposed to start work. As we walked up the stairs, I felt shy to be entering a stranger’s home and scared of being away from Ferhat. We’d been inseparable ever since we’d run off. At first, Ferhat would come with me every morning and spend afternoons smoking downstairs in the doorman’s place until I was done, and at four o’clock, when I emerged from apartment number 5 and found him downstairs in that stuffy basement, he would walk me right up to the minibus or else leave me with Zeliha to make sure I got on, before rushing off to make his shift at the Bounty Restaurant. But within three weeks, I had already started making my own way to work in the mornings, and by the time winter came around, I was coming back home alone in the evenings, too.

—

Ferhat. I’m just going to interrupt for one minute because I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression: I’m a hardworking man of honor who knows his responsibilities, and if it were up to me, I would never allow my wife to work. But Samiha kept saying how bored she was at home and how much she wanted to work. She cried a lot, too, though she won’t tell you that. Besides, Haydar and Zeliha are like family now, and the people at the Civan Apartment are like brothers and sisters to them. When Samiha told me, “I can get there by myself, you stay at home and keep up with your college courses on TV!” I decided to let her. But then I felt even worse every time I couldn’t understand the accounting lessons or couldn’t post my homework assignments to Ankara on time. There’s this mathematics professor on right now who’s got so many white hairs sprouting out of his enormous nose and ears that you can make them out on TV. I can barely follow what he’s doing with all those numbers he’s writing on the blackboard. The only reason I put up with this torture is because Samiha believes — more than I do — that everything will be different once I manage to earn a degree and find a job as a government clerk.

—

Samiha. My first “employer,” the lady in apartment number 5, was a troubled, short-tempered type. “You look nothing alike,” she said, eyeing us suspiciously. We’d agreed that I would gain her trust by saying I was a relative of Zeliha’s on her father’s side. Mrs. Nalan did believe that I meant well, but at first she couldn’t quite trust me to get rid of all the dust properly. Until four years ago, she’d done the cleaning herself, as she didn’t really have that much money to spare. But then her firstborn son died of cancer while still in middle school, and Mrs. Nalan had been waging a ruthless war on dust and germs ever since.

“Did you wipe under the fridge and inside the white lamp?” she would ask, even when she had just seen me doing exactly that. She worried that the dust would infect her second son with cancer, too, and as it came time for him to get home from school, I would become increasingly agitated, dusting with more determination and running back and forth to the window to shake out the duster, furious as a pilgrim stoning the devil. “Well done, Samiha, well done!” Mrs. Nalan would say to spur me on. She would stand there talking on the phone while pointing out some speck I’d missed. “My God, where is all this filth coming from!” she’d complain. She’d wag her finger at me, and I’d feel as guilty as if I’d brought it all with me from the poor neighborhood I lived in, but even so, I loved her.

Within two months, Mrs. Nalan trusted me to come in three times a week. By now she had started leaving me home alone, armed with soaps, buckets, and rags, while she went out to do her shopping or to play rummy with the same friends she was always on the phone with. Sometimes she’d sneak back in without warning, pretending to have forgotten something, and when she saw me still hard at work cleaning, she’d be pleased and say, “Well done, God bless you!” Sometimes, she would pick up the photo of her dead son that stood on top of the TV next to the china dog and cry as she wiped the silver frame over and over again, so I would set down my dusting cloth and try to console her.

Zeliha came to visit me one day just after Mrs. Nalan had gone out. “Have you gone crazy?” she said when she saw me working as hard as ever; she sat down to watch TV while I worked. From then on, Zeliha started coming over whenever the lady she worked for wasn’t home (sometimes Zeliha’s lady and Mrs. Nalan would leave together). While I dusted, she would talk about what was happening on TV and rummage through the fridge for a snack, telling me that the spinach wasn’t bad, but the yogurt had gone sour (it was the kind that you bought from the grocery store in a glass bowl). When she started looking through Mrs. Nalan’s drawers, commenting on her underwear, her bras, her handkerchiefs, as well as other things we weren’t even sure what to call, I couldn’t resist joining in for a laugh. Among the silk headscarves and foulards right at the back of one drawer, there was a triangular amulet charmed to bring wealth and good fortune. Tucked away in another corner, among old identity cards, tax returns, and photographs, we found a carved wooden box that smelled wonderful, though we had no idea what it was for. Hidden among the medicine bottles and cough syrups in the drawer on Mrs. Nalan’s husband’s side of the bed, Zeliha found a strange bottle with a liquid the color of tobacco. The bottle was pink, with a picture of an Arab lady with big lips on the label, and our favorite thing about it was the smell (perhaps it was some sort of medicine, or perhaps Zeliha was right that it was poison), but we were too scared to ever pour any of its contents out. A month later, while exploring the secrets of the house on my own (I liked finding pictures of Mrs. Nalan’s dead son and his old homework assignments), I noticed that the bottle had disappeared from its usual place.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Nalan said she needed to talk to me. She told me that Zeliha had been fired in deference to her husband’s wishes (though I wasn’t entirely sure whose husband she was referring to), and regrettably, although she was absolutely sure that I was innocent, this meant I couldn’t work there anymore either. I hadn’t fully grasped what was going on yet, but when I saw that she was crying, I started crying, too.

“Don’t cry, my dear, we’ve arranged something wonderful for you!” she said with the upbeat tone of a fortune-telling Gypsy saying, Your future looks very bright! A wealthy, distinguished family in Şişli was looking for a hardworking, honest, and trustworthy maid like me. Mrs. Nalan was going to send me there, and I was to go straightaway without making a fuss.

I didn’t mind, but Ferhat wasn’t happy with this new job because the house was so far away. I had to wake up even earlier now to catch the first minibus to Gaziosmanpaşa while it was still dark outside. In Gaziosmanpaşa, I had to wait another half hour for the bus to Taksim. This leg of the trip took well over an hour, and the bus was usually so full that everyone waiting to board would elbow one another out of the way to get on first and grab an empty seat. Looking out of the window of the bus, I’d watch the people going to work, the street vendors pushing their carts to their chosen neighborhoods, the boats on the Golden Horn, and — my favorites — all the children going to school. As we drove past I would try to make out the big newspaper headlines in shopwindows, the posters on the walls, and the enormous billboards. I would absentmindedly read the rhyming couplets of wisdom people had stuck on the back of their cars and their trucks, and I would start to feel as if the city were talking to me. It was nice to think that Ferhat had spent his childhood in Karaköy, right in the middle of the city, and when I got home I would ask him to tell me about those days. But he got back late in the evenings, and we saw less and less of each other.

In Taksim, where I had to change buses again, I would buy a sesame roll from one of the men in front of the post office and either eat it on the bus as I looked out the window or put it in my plastic handbag and have it later at the house where I worked, with a cup of tea. Sometimes the lady I worked for would tell me, “Have some breakfast if you haven’t eaten already.” So I would help myself to cheese and olives from the fridge. But sometimes she wouldn’t say anything at all. Around noon, I would start making grilled meatballs for her lunch, and she would tell me, “Throw in three more for you, Samiha.” She would take five meatballs on her plate but only eat four; I’d eat her leftover meatball in the kitchen, and so we’d end up having four each.

But Madam (that’s what I used to call her — I never used her name) would not sit at the table with me, and I wasn’t allowed to eat when she did. She wanted me near enough to hear her when she said, “Where’s the salt?” or “Clear this away now,” so I would stand in the doorway to the dining room watching her eat, but she wouldn’t talk to me. She kept asking me the same question and always forgot the answer: “Where are you from?” When I told her Beyşehir, she would say, “Where’s that? I’ve never been,” so eventually I started saying I was from Konya. “Ah, yes, Konya! I’m going to go one day and visit Rumi’s grave,” she’d reply. When I went to work in two other homes, one in Şişli and the other in Nişantaşı, I said I was from Konya again, and though the people there also immediately mentioned Rumi, they didn’t want me performing any daily prayer rituals. Anyway, Zeliha had already taught me to say no if ever anyone asked, “Do you pray?”

I’d started going to these other houses on Madam’s recommendation, and the families there didn’t like me using the same bathroom as they did. These were old houses with small servants’ bathrooms that I would sometimes have to share with a cat or a dog and where I’d also leave my handbag and my coat. Madam had a cat who stole food from the kitchen and never left her lap, and sometimes, when the cat and I were home alone, I’d give it a swipe and confess to Ferhat when I got home in the evening.

There was a period when Madam fell ill, and I had to spend a few nights in Şişli to look after her, because I knew that she would find someone else if I didn’t. I was given a small, clean room that shared a wall with the next building; there was no window, but the bedsheets smelled lovely, and I liked it there. I got used to it eventually. The road to and from Şişli could take four to five hours a day, so on some evenings I would stay over at Madam’s, serve her breakfast in the morning, and then go to work in a different house. But I was always dying to get back to Ferhat and the Ghaazi Quarter, and a single day away was enough to make me miss our home and all our things. Every now and then I liked to get off work early in the afternoon and wander around the city for a while before getting on the bus or before changing at Taksim, but I also worried that someone from Duttepe might see me on the street and tell Süleyman.

When the ladies I worked for went out during the day, they’d tell me, “Samiha, when you’re done, don’t waste your time on prayers and TV, go straight home.” I worked so hard sometimes that I could have wiped the whole city clean, but then my mind would wander and I’d slow down. Right at the back of the bottom drawer in the wardrobe with all of Sir’s shirts and vests, I found a foreign magazine with pictures of men and women in poses so dirty that even just having seen them I felt dirty, too. Inside Madam’s medicine cabinet, on the left-hand side, there was a strange box that smelled of almonds, and under the comb inside the box, there was a foreign banknote. I liked leafing through family albums, discovering old photographs of weddings, school days, and summer holidays tucked away in drawers, and seeing what the people I worked for used to be like when they were young.

Every home I worked in would have a pile of dusty old newspapers, empty bottles, and unopened boxes stashed away and forgotten in a corner somewhere, and I would always be told not to touch this pile — almost as if there were something sacred about it. Every house had a corner that I was meant to stay away from, and when no one was home, I would indulge my curiosity and have a look, taking care not to touch any of the fresh banknotes, gold coins, strange-smelling soaps, and decorative boxes they would leave out on purpose just to test me. Madam’s son had a collection of plastic toy soldiers that he would deploy in line formation on his bed or on the carpet. As he had one line fight another, I enjoyed watching him get so lost in his game that he forgot everything else, and sometimes when I was alone in the house I would sit down and play with the soldiers myself. Many families bought newspapers just to collect the coupons that came with them, and once a week I’d be tasked with cutting them all out. Once a month, when it was time to collect the enameled teapots, illustrated cookbooks, floral pillowcases, lemon squeezers, and musical pens that you could get if you had enough coupons, they would send me to stand in line for half a day at the nearest newsstand. There was one electric kitchen appliance that Madam — who spent the whole day gossiping on the phone — kept stored away with her winter woolens in a wardrobe that smelled of mothballs, and although, just like the gifts she got with the coupons, she never used it, not even for guests, she still kept this machine carefully stored away because it was, after all, a European import. Sometimes I would look through the receipts, newspaper clippings, and flyers that I might find tucked inside envelopes right at the bottom of a cupboard, or at the girls’ dresses and underwear and the writing in their notebooks, and it was as if I were about to find something I’d been seeking for a long time. Sometimes I felt as if those letters and those scribbles were meant for me and that I was in those photographs, too. Or I would feel it was my fault that Madam’s son had taken his mother’s red lipstick and hidden it in his room, and I became at once deeply attached to and yet somehow resentful of these people who were laying their private world open for me to see.

Sometimes, halfway through the day, I would already begin to miss Ferhat, our home, and the phosphorescent outline of our land we could see from the bed. Two years after I’d started working as a maid, as my overnight stays became more frequent, I began to resent Ferhat for failing to pull me away, once and for all, from these other families’ lives that were fast becoming my own, from their cruel sons and spoiled daughters, from the grocers’ boys and the doormen’s sons who chased after me because I was pretty, and from the tiny servants’ room where, if the heating was on, I would wake up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat.

—

Ferhat. A year after I went to work at the Bounty Restaurant, they started putting me in charge of the cash register. This was partly because of those university courses Samiha was always encouraging me to take — even if they were only correspondence courses and on TV. But in the evenings, when the restaurant was noisy and full, and a pleasant smell of rakı and soup hung in the air, the manager’s brother would sit at the desk and handle everything himself…The owner, whose main restaurant was in Aksaray (ours was a sister branch), had one rule that was repeated to the cooks and dishwashers, and to us waiters and busboys, on a monthly basis: every single plate of french fries, tomato salad, grilled meatballs, and chicken-topped rice, every small beer and shot of rakı, every bowl of lentil soup, kidney-bean stew, and leek with lamb, had to be noted down by the cashier before it was served.

With its four big windows (the lace curtains always drawn) on Atatürk Street, and its crowd of eager regulars (teetotaling local shop keepers having their stews at lunchtime and, in the evening, groups of men sipping rakı in moderation), the Bounty Restaurant was a veritable institution, so busy it wasn’t easy sometimes to follow the manager’s commandment. Even at lunchtime, when I got to sit at the cashier’s desk, I couldn’t always keep up with where the waiters were taking their plates of chicken-and-vegetable stew, celery roots in olive oil, fava-bean spread, and oven-baked mackerel. The waiters would queue up at my table to have each portion noted down (while impatient customers shouted, “That’s mine and it’s getting cold!”), until, sometimes, there was no choice but to set the rule aside for a few minutes, letting the waiters deliver their orders first and report them to me later, when things had calmed down a little: “Ferhat, stuffed peppers and fried pastry rolls for table seventeen, two chicken blancmanges for sixteen.” But the queuing problem remained, since the waiters would now try to shout over one another instead of waiting their turns: “A salad for number six, two yogurts for number two.” Some would call out the order as they hurried past with piles of dishes, and the cashier wouldn’t always have time to write it all down, or else he would forget, or, like me, he’d make something up on the spot or just give up entirely, the way I did when I just couldn’t follow a class I was watching on TV. The waiters didn’t mind at all if some portions went unrecorded; they knew that when customers thought they’d gotten something for free, they’d leave a better tip. As for the manager, his rule had less to do with money than with having some basis to answer drunken customers shouting, “We only ordered one plate of panfried mussels, I tell you!” and arguing over the bill.

I may not have manned the register during the dinner shift, but while I was serving, I got to know all the little tricks of a dishonest waiter. One of the simplest was one that I used myself from time to time: you find an appreciative customer, and you serve him a larger portion of his order (six meatballs instead of four, for example); but you tell him you’re only charging him for the smaller portion, and he is so delighted he adds the difference to your tip. In theory, all tips were supposed to be pooled and then split equally among the staff (though the manager himself would first take a cut), but in practice every waiter would hide part of what he received in some trouser pocket or in his white apron. No one ever said anything about it: getting caught would mean getting fired, and in any case, everyone did it, so no waiter would ever question what was in another waiter’s apron.

My evening station was near the entrance, and in addition to my tables, another duty of mine was to assist the manager. I wasn’t really the headwaiter, but I did help him to supervise. “Go and check on the stews for table four, they’re complaining,” he would say, and even though it was Hadi from Gümüşhane’s table, I’d go into the kitchen myself to look for the cook hiding in the cloud of smoke that rose from the meat and fat on the grill, and then I would go to table number 4 and tell them with a smile and a little joke that their stews were on their way, asking perhaps whether they might like them with garlic or would prefer them plain or otherwise trying to find out what football team they were for and talk about the match-fixing scandals, the corrupt referees, and the penalty we should have had on Sunday.

Whenever that idiot Hadi managed to upset a table, I’d go to the kitchen and grab a plate of fries or a huge pot of sizzling prawns, which were probably meant for some other table, and present it on the house to the table complaining that its order was taking forever or got screwed up. If there was a mixed-grill platter to spare, I might bring it to a table of drunks—“Here is the meat, finally,” I’d announce — never mind they’d never ordered it; they were having such a good time discussing politics, football, or the cost of living that they wouldn’t notice or care. In the later hours, I would appease quarrelsome diners, subdue tables that broke into song annoying everyone, resolve any disagreements over whether the window should be open or closed, remind the busboys to empty people’s ashtrays (“Go check on number ten, kid, get going…”), and flush out the waiters and dishwashers smoking in the kitchen, outside, or in the back storeroom, sending them to their stations with just a look.

Sometimes the manager of some law firm or architects’ firm would take his clerks out for lunch, women included, or a mother in a headscarf would treat her good-for-nothing sons to some meatballs and ayran, and we would sit them at the tables right by the door, reserved for families. Our manager, who had three portraits of Atatürk in civilian clothes up on the wall — one smiling and two looking stern — had a particular fixation with drawing more female customers to the Bounty Restaurant. His idea of success was for a woman to come in with a group of men and be able to have a pleasant evening — especially during the dinner shift, when rakı was served — without being subjected to innuendo and arguments all night, and to enjoy herself enough to come again, though in all the Bounty Restaurant’s checkered history, this had sadly never happened. The day after any night a woman had visited the restaurant, our furious and despairing boss would do his impression of the male customers from the night before, wide eyed and with their mouths hanging open, and tell us waiters that, next time a woman came in to eat, we shouldn’t panic and crowd around her but act instead as if it were perfectly normal for her to be there and shield her from the loud, foulmouthed men at the other tables and their sleazy looks. This last request was the hardest to fulfill.

Late at night, when it seemed the last drunk customers were never going to leave, the manager would tell me, “You can go now, you’ve got a long way home.” I’d spend the journey home thinking of Samiha, feeling guilty, and making up my mind that it wasn’t right for her to be working as a maid. I hated waking up in the mornings and realizing she’d already left for work, and I would curse my poverty and my ever having allowed her to work in the first place. In the afternoons, the dishwasher and the two busboys, who all shared an apartment, would laugh as they shelled beans and peeled potatoes while I sat at the table in the corner, trying to follow Learn Accounting on the public channel. Even when I could follow the lesson, the homework sheets that came in the post would stump me, and I would get up and walk out of the Bounty to wander around the streets of Taşlıtarla like a sleepwalker, feeling helpless and angry, and dream about hijacking a taxi at gunpoint like in the movies, going to find Samiha at the house where she worked in Şişli, and taking her away to our new home in some distant neighborhood. In my dreams, the house I was going to build on the land framed by the phosphorescent stones, using the money I’d saved up, already had twelve rooms and four doors. But at five o’clock in the evening, when every employee of the Bounty Restaurant, from the dishwasher to the headwaiter, gathered round a big pot in the middle of the long table at the back to eat their fill of meat and potato soup with fresh bread before donning their uniforms and beginning their shifts, I’d get bitter thinking how I was wasting away out here when I should have been running my own business in the city center.

On those evenings when Samiha was expected to come home, my kindly manager, seeing me itching to get out of the Bounty as early as possible, would say, “Take off that apron and go home, Mr. Bridegroom.” Samiha had been in the restaurant a few times, so the other waiters, the busboys, and the dishwashers had all seen how beautiful she was; they would laugh and jealously call me Mr. Bridegroom, and as I waited and waited for the bus to the Ghaazi Quarter (there was a new direct bus service to our neighborhood, but it wasn’t very regular), I would lament my failure to make the most of my good fortune, until, in my frustration, I began to fear that I was doing something wrong.

When it arrived, the bus to the Ghaazi Quarter was so slow and wasted so much time at each stop that I could barely keep my nervous legs still. At a stop near the end of the route, there would be a voice calling out from the darkness, trying desperately to catch the last bus to the end of the city—“Driver, driver, wait”—so the driver would light a cigarette, and the bus would wait, and in my impatience, I’d have to stand the rest of the way. When I finally got off at the last stop, I’d sprint up the hill to our house, forgetting how tired I was. The silence of the dark night, the pale light from the poor neighborhoods in the distance, and the stinking smoke of lignite fuel that rose from some of the chimneys around me soon became signs that I associated with Samiha waiting for me at home. It was Wednesday, so she had to be home. Maybe she’d already collapsed from exhaustion and gone to sleep, as she often did. She looked so pretty when she was sleepy. Or maybe she’d made me some chamomile tea, and she was watching TV while she waited for me. I’d think about her intelligence and her friendship and start running, believing that if I ran, then Samiha would definitely be home.

If she wasn’t home, I would quickly have some rakı to calm myself and ease the suffering, and then I would start blaming myself for everything. The next day, I’d get out of work even earlier, just as impatient as ever to be on my way home.

“I’m sorry,” Samiha would say when we saw each other. “Madam had guests last night…She really wanted me to stay over, and she gave me this!”

I’d take the money from her and put it away. “You’re not going to work anymore, you’re never leaving this house again,” I’d declare. “We’ll stay right here, together, until the day the world ends.”

The first few times this happened, Samiha said, “How will we eat?” Soon, though, she was laughing about it, telling me, “All right, I won’t go to work anymore.” But of course she still went to work every morning.

11. Girls Who Refuse to Meet Their Suitors

We Were Just Passing By

Süleyman. Yesterday evening I went to see Uncle Asım in Ümraniye. He is a friend of my father’s and a former yogurt seller. He’s a wise man, smart enough to have given up yogurt years ago and set up his own grocery store. Now he’s retired. Last night he showed me the poplars he planted in his garden and the enormous walnut tree that had been a tiny sapling when he’d first claimed this plot of land twenty years ago. The noise and the light that filtered into the garden from the tube factory next door made everything look strange and wonderful. We were both completely drunk on the rakı we’d been sipping all night. His wife was inside, already asleep.

“They’re offering me really good money for this land, but I know it’ll go higher, I’m already regretting the piece I did sell, it went too cheap,” said Uncle Asım. Fifteen years ago, he had a shop in Tophane and a rented apartment on Kazancı Hill. Three times last night, he told me how wise he had been to come here all the way from the city and claim some vacant land for himself on the off chance they’d eventually give him a title deed. Another thing he said three times was that his daughters are all married now, “thank God,” and their husbands are all good men — though not quite as good as I am. What he was really trying to say was “Son, why did you come knocking on my door tonight, all the way from across the Bosphorus in Duttepe, when I don’t even have a daughter left for you to marry?”

Like everything else, this reminded me of Samiha. It’s been two years since she ran away. I swear I’m going to find the scum who took her, that bastard Ferhat, and make him pay for this insult and the humiliation. Even now, there are times when I dream that Samiha’s coming back to me, but deep down I know it will never happen, so I stop indulging in the fantasy. If I’m free of these troubles now, I owe it to Melahat and Vediha. Vediha has really applied herself to finding me a wife.

—

Vediha. As a family, we decided that the best way to help Süleyman get over Samiha was to get him married. One night, he was at home, and he was drunk. “Süleyman,” I said, “you and Samiha went out for a while, you really got to know each other, and in the end it didn’t work out. Maybe it would make more sense for you to marry a girl you don’t know at all, someone you’ve only ever met once…Love can come after marriage.” “I guess you’re right,” he said, cheering up. “So have you got a new girl for me, then?” But then he began to get picky. “I can’t marry some village yogurt seller’s daughter.” “Your brother Korkut and your cousin Mevlut both married a yogurt seller’s daughter. What’s so terrible about us?” “It’s not like that, I don’t see you three that way.” “How do you see us?” “Don’t get me wrong…” “I’m not, Süleyman. But why do you think we’d marry you off to a village girl?” I asked him in my sternest voice. The truth is, Süleyman needs a strong woman to reprimand him every now and then; he even likes it.

“And I don’t want one of those eighteen-year-old high-school graduates either. They find something wrong in everything I say, and all they ever do is argue…Besides, these are the same girls who’ll insist we have to go out together before we get married, go to the movies maybe, as if we’d met at university instead of being introduced by matchmakers, and even then they’re always worried about getting caught by their parents, always trying to tell me what to do…It’s an uphill battle.”

I told Süleyman, Don’t worry, Istanbul is teeming with girls who want a good-looking, successful, intelligent man like him.

“But where are they?” he asked me earnestly.

“They’re at home with their mothers, Süleyman; they don’t go out much. You just listen to my advice, and I promise you I’ll show you all the sweetest and the prettiest ones, and then when you’ve found the most beautiful of them all, the one your heart desires, we’ll go and ask for her hand in marriage.”

“Thank you, Vediha, but to be honest, I’ve never really gone for the straitlaced types, who stay at home with their mothers and always do as they’re told.”

“But if you’re looking for a different kind of girl, then how come you never tried to win Samiha over with a sweet word or two?”

“I just couldn’t get the hang of it!” he said. “She would make fun of me every time I tried.”

“Süleyman, I’ll comb every inch of Istanbul if I have to, but I’ll find you a girl. But if you like her, you’ve got to treat her right, understood?”

“All right, but what if she gets spoiled?”

—

Süleyman. I’d take Vediha in the van, and we would go out to meet eligible girls. People with experience in this sort of thing said we should take my mother along, too, as this would give our delegation an air of formality, but I didn’t want to do that. My mother’s clothes and her manner are still too close to village ways. Vediha would wear blue jeans under her usual dress, a long, dark blue overcoat I never saw her wear anywhere else, and a headscarf that matched that blue exactly; you might have mistaken her for a lady doctor or judge who happened to be wearing a headscarf. Vediha loved being out of the house so much that as soon as I stepped on the gas and we went flying down the streets of Istanbul, she would practically forget our mission, taking in every inch of the city and talking nonstop, until I had to laugh.

“This bus route is run by a private company, not by the municipality, and that’s why it keeps the doors open while it’s moving,” I’d tell her as I tried to pass the bus crawling ahead of us letting passengers jump on and off.

“Careful we don’t run them over, these people are crazy,” she’d say, laughing. As we got closer to our destination, I’d grow silent. “Don’t worry, Süleyman,” she’d say. “She’s a nice girl, I like her. But if you don’t, then we’ll just get up and leave. You can drive your sister around for a bit on your way back.”

Vediha was always making new friends, thanks to her warmth and kindness, and through these connections, she would identify the eligible girls, and then the two of us would go to see them at home. Most had either come to Istanbul after finishing primary school in the village (like me), or else they’d gone to a school in a poor city neighborhood that was even worse than the village. Some of them were determined to finish high school; others could barely read and write. Most were too young, but once they reached high-school age, they really didn’t want to be still living with their parents in some tiny, run-down, stove-heated house that was always freezing. It was always nice to hear Vediha telling me that all these girls were sick of their parents and looking for a chance to get away from home, but a part of me knew that this wasn’t really true of every girl we met.

—

Vediha. Oh, Süleyman…the truth — though I never told him this— is that good girls don’t know how to think for themselves, and girls who think for themselves aren’t any good. There were other things I never told him, too. If you’re looking for a girl like Samiha, a girl with character, you’re not going to find her at home with her mother, waiting for a man to marry her. You expect a girl who has her own mind and her own personality to bow down to your every wish? That’s not going to happen. You want her to be pure and innocent, but also eager to fulfill all your wild desires (let’s not forget that I married his brother)? That’s never going to happen either. What you don’t realize, poor Süleyman, is that you need a girl who doesn’t wear a headscarf — though I assume you wouldn’t want a girl like that. But this was a sensitive subject, and I never brought it up. But I kept trying, because the surest way to get permission to leave the house was to tell Korkut I was going out to find Süleyman a wife. Soon enough, Süleyman came to accept the gap between his expectations and reality.

When families want to get their sons and daughters married off, the first place they look is back in the village, among their own rela tives, or down the street and around the neighborhood. Only a girl who can’t find a husband nearby — usually because everyone knows there’s something wrong with her — will ever say she wants to marry a stranger from some other part of town. Some try to dress this up as the beauty of a free spirit. But whenever I heard about one of these freedom-loving girls, I would always try to figure out what she was hiding. Naturally, these girls and their families had their own cause for suspicion (after all, hadn’t we also come a long way from home to find a match?), and they would give us a very close look, trying to work out what we had to hide. Anyway, I warned Süleyman, if a girl has got nothing obviously wrong with her but still can’t find a husband, it means she’s probably setting her sights too high.

—

Süleyman. There was this high-school girl who lived on the second floor of a new building in the backstreets of Aksaray. Not only was she wearing her school uniform (with her headscarf) when she greeted us, but she also spent the entire time poring over a notebook and math textbook at the dining table. Meanwhile, another girl, a distant relation, took on the role of the polite young woman who entertains the candidate’s guests, even though she has her own homework to do.

In a house somewhere behind Bakırköy, we went to see Behice, who during our brief visit got up from her chair five times to go to the window and peek out through the lace curtains at the kids playing football in the street. “Behice likes to look out the window,” said her mother, as if to make excuses for this behavior but also imply, as so many mothers did, that this particular quirk was further proof of what an excellent wife her daughter was bound to be.

In a house across from the Piyale Paşa Mosque in Kasımpaşa, two sisters — neither of them the girl we’d come to see — kept whispering and giggling between themselves, or biting their lips trying not to laugh even more. After we left the house, Vediha told me that our quarry — their frowning older sister — had in fact entered like a ghost while we were having our tea and almond biscuits, crossing the room so quietly that I didn’t even notice my potential wife come and go, let alone whether she was pretty or not. “A man mustn’t marry a girl he wouldn’t even notice,” Vediha wisely advised on our leisurely way home in the van. “I was wrong about her; she isn’t right for you.”

—

Vediha. Some women are born matchmakers, blessed with a God-given gift for making people happy. I’m not one of them. But when Samiha ran away after my father had already taken money from Korkut and Süleyman, I became a quick study, not only out of fear they might blame me for what happened but also because I felt so sorry for silly Süleyman. I also really loved getting out of the house and driving around in the van.

I’d start by saying that my husband had a younger brother who’d already finished his military service. Growing very serious, I would then launch into a somewhat embellished tale of just how clever, good-looking, respectful, and hardworking Süleyman was.

Süleyman asked me to make sure I told people that he came from a “religious” family. The girls’ fathers appreciated this, but I’m not sure it was much of a draw for the girls themselves. I would explain that having become wealthy since moving to the city, the family didn’t now want a village girl for their son. Sometimes I’d hint that they had enemies in the village, but this could scare some families off. Whenever I met someone new, I’d almost always mention that I was looking for a suitable girl and ask whether they knew any; but since Korkut’s patience with my being out of the house was limited, even for this purpose, I didn’t exactly have my pick of candidates. And half of those I did find still acted as if there is something embarrassing about an arranged marriage, which is ridiculous considering this is the way everyone gets married eventually.

People would always say they knew a girl who was exactly what I was looking for, but unfortunately she would never agree to an arranged marriage or even to a visit from a potential suitor. We soon realized that when visiting a prospect it was better not to reveal our purpose and just act as if we happened to be in the neighborhood — perhaps our mutual friend so-and-so had recommended we say hello if we were ever in the area. Or maybe we would say Süleyman needed to check on a site he was managing for his construction company…

Sometimes the drop-in approach depended on coming along with someone else paying a call at a particular house. This was essentially a form of mutual assistance between matchmakers, not unlike the way property brokers sometimes help each other out. The invited guest would explain our presence with some excuse made up on the spot — but not before having given the entire household a rather exuberant and exaggerated account of who we were. These small, old-fashioned apartments would invariably be packed with a crowd of inquisitive mothers, aunties, sisters, friends, and grandmothers. The expected guest would introduce us as the famous Aktaş family of Konya, owners of a thriving construction business for which Süleyman oversaw many projects; we’d called on her unexpectedly, and she’d decided to bring us along with her. The only one who even remotely believed these lies was Süleyman himself.

Still, no one ever asked, “If you really were just passing by, then why is Süleyman clean-shaven, wearing that syrupy cologne and sporting his best suit and tie?” For our part, we never asked, “If you really had no idea we were coming, why did you tidy up the house, bring out your best china, and reupholster all the sofas?” The lies were part of the ritual, and just because we were lying, it didn’t mean we weren’t sincere. We understood one another’s private motivations, while making sure to keep up public appearances. These empty words were just a prelude to the main act to come, anyway. In a few minutes, the girl and the boy were to meet. Would they like each other? More important, would this audience judge them to be a good match? As it all unfolded, everyone in the room would begin to remember when they had been the object of this kind of attention.

It wasn’t too long before the girl herself appeared, in her best clothes and perhaps even wearing her nicest headscarf, feeling mortified and trying to act nonchalant as she found somewhere to sit at the edge of the crowded room. There were usually so many hopeful young women of roughly the same age in the room that the mother and aunts, veterans of the field, would have to find some casual way of signaling the arrival of the shy girl we had actually come to see.

“Where were you, darling, were you doing your homework? We have guests, look.”

In four or five years’ worth of these visits and their disappointments, two of the five high-school girls Süleyman was interested in had used school as an excuse to reject us (“I’m afraid our daughter would like to finish her education”), so that Süleyman no longer liked hearing about girls who were supposedly “doing their homework.”

When mothers feigned surprise—“Oh, I see we have guests today!”—their daughters could sometimes come out with an embarrassing reply: “Yes, Mom, we know; you’ve been preparing all day!” I liked these spirited, honest girls, and so did Süleyman, but from the speed with which he was later able to put them out of his mind, I figured that he must have also been a little scared of the way they might treat him.

When we had to deal with girls who flatly refused to meet suitors, we would hide our true purpose. One time, a rude and unpleasant young thing really believed that we had come by simply to bring a gift to her father (who was a waiter) and paid no attention to us at all. With another girl, we had to pretend to be friends of her mother’s doctor. One day in spring, we went to an old wooden house in Edirnekapı, near the city walls. The girl we had come to see was playing dodgeball on the street with her friends and had no idea her mother was hosting a potential husband who had come to look her over. Her aunt leaned out of the window to lure her in: “Come up, darling, I’ve brought you some sesame-seed cookies!” She came straightaway, full of enchanting beauty. But she ignored us. She wolfed down two cookies with her eyes on the TV, and just as she was about to leave the room and go back downstairs to resume her game, her mother said, “Wait, sit down with our guests for a while.”

She sat down instinctively, but with one glance at me and at Süleyman’s tie, she lost her temper: “It’s matchmakers again! I told you I didn’t want any more men coming home, Mother!”

“Don’t talk to your mother like that…”

“Well, that’s what they’re here for, isn’t it? Who is this man?”

“Have some respect…They saw you, they liked you, and they’ve come all the way across the city just to talk to you. You know how bad the traffic is. Now, sit down.”

“What am I supposed to say to these people? Am I supposed to marry this fatty?”

She stormed out.

It was the spring of 1989, and this was to be the last of our house visits, which were already growing more infrequent. Now and again, Süleyman would still say, “Find me a wife, Vediha Yenge,” but by then we all knew about Mahinur Meryem, so I didn’t think he really meant it. He was still talking about how he would have his revenge on Samiha and Ferhat, so I wasn’t very happy with him anyway.

—

Mahinur Meryem. Some regulars at bars and nightclubs may have heard my name before, though they may not remember it. My father was a humble government clerk, an honest, hardworking, but hot-tempered man. I was a promising student at Taksim Secondary School for Girls when our team made the finals of Milliyet’s pop-song contest for high schools, and my name ended up in the newspapers. Celâl Salik wrote about me once in his column: “She has the silky voice of a star.” It is still the highest praise I’ve ever received in my singing career. I would like to thank the late Mr. Salik and those who are letting me use my stage name in this book.

My real name is Melahat. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, my singing career never took off after that initial success in high school. My father never understood my dreams, he often beat me, and when he saw I wouldn’t make it to college, he tried to get me married off. So when I was nineteen, I ran away from home and got married to a man of my own choosing. My first husband was like me: he loved music, though his father was a janitor at the Şişli town hall. Sadly, it didn’t work out, and neither did my second marriage nor any of the relationships that came after that, all ruined by my passion for singing, by poverty, and by the inability of men to keep their promises. I could write a book about all the men I’ve known, and then I would also end up on trial for insulting Turkishness. I haven’t told Süleyman too much about it. I won’t waste your time with it now.

Two years ago, I was singing in some horrible dump in the backstreets of Beyoğlu, stubbornly sticking to Turkish pop, but hardly anyone ever came, and I was always scheduled at the very end of the program. So I moved to another tiny bar, where the manager persuaded me that I could be very successful if I switched my repertoire to Turkish classical and folk songs, but again I wasn’t on until the very end of the night. It was at the Paris Pavilion that I first met Süleyman — another one of those pushy guys desperately trying to chat me up between numbers. The Paris was a haunt for lovesick men not coping well with their misery but who found some consolation in traditional Turkish music, the specialty of the house, despite the name. At first, I ignored him, of course. But soon enough, he’d softened me up with his lonely presence every night, the armfuls of flowers he sent me, his persistence, and his childlike innocence.

Süleyman now pays my rent for a fourth-floor apartment in Sormagir Street in Cihangir. After a couple of glasses of rakı in the evenings, he’ll say, “Come on, let’s go, I’ll take you for a drive in the van.” He doesn’t realize that there’s nothing romantic about his ride, but I don’t mind. A year ago, I stopped singing folk songs and performing in small nightclubs. If Süleyman is willing to help, I’d like to go back to singing pop. But it doesn’t even matter that much.

I do love driving around in Süleyman’s van at night. I’ll have a couple of drinks, too, and when we’re tipsy, we get along really well and can talk about anything. As soon as he’s able to shake off his fear of his brother and get away from his family, Süleyman turns into a kind of lovable, charming guy.

He’ll take me down a hill to the Bosphorus, swerving through narrow alleyways.

“Stop it, Süleyman, they’ll pull us over!” I’ll say.

“Don’t worry, they’re all our men,” he’ll say.

Sometimes, I’ll tell him what he wants to hear: “Oh, please stop, Süleyman, we’re going to fall off and die!” There was a period when we would have this exact exchange every evening.

“What are you scared of, Melahat, do you really think we’re going to fall off the road?”

“Süleyman, they’re building a new bridge over the Bosphorus, can you believe it?”

“What’s not to believe? When we first came from the village, these people thought we’d never be more than just a bunch of poor yogurt sellers,” he’d say, getting worked up. “Now those same guys are begging us to sell them our property and using their middlemen to try to get involved in projects. Shall I tell you why I’m so confident that there really is going to be a second bridge soon, exactly like the first?”

“Tell me, Süleyman.”

“Because now that Kültepe and Duttepe are all theirs, the Vurals have started buying up all the land around where the highway to the bridge is supposed to be. The government hasn’t even begun to seize land for the highway yet. But the land the Vurals bought in Ümraniye, Saray, and Çakmak is already worth ten times what they paid. We’re going to fly down this hill now. Don’t be scared, okay?”

I helped Süleyman forget about the yogurt seller’s daughter he was in love with. When we first met, he couldn’t think of anything but her. Without any trace of embarrassment, he’d tell me about how he and his sister-in-law were turning the city inside out trying to find him a wife. At first it was fine, because all my friends made fun of him anyway, and I knew that if only he could get married, I’d finally be rid of him. But now, I have to admit, I’d be sad if Süleyman were to get himself a wife. Still, I don’t mind when he goes to see potential brides. One night, he was very drunk, and he confessed that he could never muster any desire for a girl in a headscarf.

“Don’t worry, it’s a common problem, especially among married men,” I said, trying to comfort him. “It’s not you, it’s all those foreign women on TV and in the newspapers and magazines, so don’t obsess over it.”

As for my obsession, he never understood it. “Süleyman, I don’t like it when you talk to me like you’re giving me orders,” I’d say sometimes.

“Oh, I thought you liked it…,” he would say.

“I like your gun, but I don’t like you being so rough and cold with me.”

“Am I a rough man? Am I really that cold, Melahat?”

“I think you do have feelings, Süleyman, but like most Turkish men, you don’t know how to express them. Why do you never tell me the one thing I most want to hear?”

“Is it marriage you want? Will you start wearing a headscarf?”

“I don’t want to talk about that. Tell me that other thing you never mention.”

“Oh, I get it!”

“Well, if you get it, say it…It’s no big secret, you know…Everyone knows about us now…I know how much you love me, Süleyman.”

“If you already know, then why do you keep asking?”

“I’m not asking for anything. All I want is for you just to say it once…Why can’t you say ‘Melahat, I love you’?…Is it so difficult to pronounce those words? Will you lose a bet of some sort if you say it?”

“But, Melahat, when you do this it makes it even harder for me to say the words!”

12. In Tarlabaşı

The Happiest Man in the World

AT NIGHT, Mevlut and Rayiha slept in the same bed as their two daughters, Fatma and Fevziye. The house was cold, but it was nice and warm under the bedcovers. Sometimes the little ones were already asleep when Mevlut went out to sell boza in the evenings. He would come back late at night to find them asleep in exactly the same position as when he’d left. Rayiha would be sitting under the covers on the edge of the bed, watching TV with the heating turned off.

The girls had their own little bed next to the window, but they were scared of being alone, and even in the same room they would start crying if they were put there. Mevlut, who had the utmost respect for their feelings on this matter, would tell Rayiha, “Isn’t it incredible? They’re so little, but they’re already scared of loneliness.” The girls quickly got used to the big bed; there, they could have slept through anything. But when they slept in their own bed, they would wake up at the tiniest sound and start crying, which in turn would wake Mevlut and Rayiha, and the girls wouldn’t settle down until they could move to the big bed. Eventually Mevlut and Rayiha saw that sleeping all together in the same bed was better for everyone.

Mevlut had bought them an Arçelik gas stove, secondhand. It could turn the house into a sauna, but it used up too much gas. (Sometimes, to economize, Rayiha would warm their food up on it, too.) She bought the gas from a Kurd whose shop was three streets down in Dolapdere. As the conflict in eastern Turkey grew more violent, Mevlut watched the streets of Tarlabaşı fill up, one family at a time, with Kurdish migrants. These newcomers were tough people, nothing like easygoing Ferhat. Their villages had been evacuated and burned to the ground during the war. They were poor and never bought any boza, so Mevlut rarely went to their neighborhoods. He stopped going altogether when drug dealers and homeless, glue-sniffing young men began to frequent the area.

After Ferhat drove off in a taxi with Samiha in early 1984, Mevlut wouldn’t see him again for many years. This was very strange, considering how close they’d been in their childhood and youth, and every now and then Mevlut would offer Rayiha a mumbled explanation: “They live too far away.” Only rarely did he allow himself to think that the real reason for the distance between them was in all those letters Mevlut had written with Ferhat’s wife, Samiha, in mind.

It was also true that Istanbul’s relentless sprawl was driving them farther apart. The bus journey to and from the other’s house would have taken half a day. Mevlut missed Ferhat, even as the focus of his resentment toward him kept shifting. He wondered why Ferhat never got in touch. Whatever the reason, it was clearly an admission of guilt. When he found out how happy the newlyweds were in the Ghaazi Quarter and that Ferhat was working as a waiter in a restaurant in Gaziosmanpaşa, Mevlut felt a rush of jealousy.

Some nights, after two hours of selling boza, he pushed himself to go on for just a little bit longer by dreaming there in the empty streets about the happiness awaiting him at home. Just thinking of how their home and their bed smelled, the sounds Fatma and Fevziye made under the covers, the way his body and Rayiha’s touched as they slept, how their skin still burned at the contact, brought him close to tears of joy. All he ever wanted when he got home was to put on his pajamas and jump straight into the big, cozy bed. As they watched TV, he would tell Rayiha how much he’d made that night, how the streets had been, the things he’d seen in the houses where he’d made deliveries, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep before he’d given her a full account of his day and surrendered himself to her bright, loving eyes.

“They said there was too much sugar in it,” he’d whisper, eyes on the TV as he relayed any comments on that day’s batch. “Well, I didn’t have a choice, yesterday’s leftovers were really sour,” Rayiha would respond, defending, as always, the mixture she’d prepared. Or perhaps Mevlut might tell her how he’d spent all day worrying about a strange question someone had asked him when he’d gone all the way up to their kitchen to serve them. One night, an old lady had pointed to his apron and said, “Did you buy this yourself?” What had she meant? Was it the color of the apron? Or had she meant to imply that it was something a woman would usually wear?

At night, Mevlut watched the whole world transform into a mysterious realm of shadows, with the city’s own darkness cloaking the alleyways, and faraway streets rising like rugged cliffs through the gloom. The cars that chased each other on TV were just as strange as those dark backstreets in the night; who knew where those black mountains on the left side of the TV screen were, why that dog was running, why it was on TV, and why that woman was crying, all by herself?

—

Rayiha. Sometimes Mevlut would get out of bed in the middle of the night, light a cigarette, and smoke it as he watched the street outside through a gap in the curtains. I could see him in the light of the lamppost outside our house, and I would wonder what he was thinking and wish he’d come back to bed. Sometimes he’d get so lost in his own thoughts, I would get up myself, have a glass of water, and make sure the girls were tucked in properly. Only then would he come back, looking ashamed of himself somehow. “It’s nothing,” he’d tell me. “I’m just thinking.”

Mevlut loved summer evenings because he got to spend time with us. But let me tell you something he’ll never tell you: we made even less money in the summer than in winter. Mevlut would keep the windows open all day, oblivious to the flies that came into the house, the noise (“It’s quieter outside,” he’d say), and all the dust from the buildings they kept knocking down for the new road up the hill, and he would watch TV all day with an eye on the girls laughing and playing in the back garden, on the street, or up in a tree, listening from upstairs in case they started fighting and he had to break it up. Some evenings he would lose his temper for no reason, and if he was angry enough, he would walk out, slamming the door behind him (the girls got used to it eventually, but it always scared them a little); he’d go to the coffeehouse to play cards or sit down for a cigarette on the three narrow steps between the entrance to our building and the pavement. Sometimes I would follow him out and sit next to him, and the girls might come, too. Their friends would soon pop out from every corner, and while they played their games on the street and in the garden, I would sit there in the light of the streetlamp sifting the rice Mevlut would later sell down in Kabataş.

It was on these steps that I got to know Reyhan, the woman who lived across the street and two doors down. She stuck her head out of her bay window one day and said, “I think your streetlamp’s brighter than ours!” before picking up her embroidery and coming down to sit next to me. “I’m from Eastern Anatolia, but I’m not a Kurd,” she would say, as secretive about her hometown as she was about her age. She was at least fifteen years older than me, and she would admire my hands as I sifted the rice. “Look at those hands, smooth as a baby’s bottom! Look how quickly they move, like the wings of a dove,” she’d say. “You should take up needlework, trust me, you’d make more money than me and that angel you’ve got for a husband. I earn more than mine does on his policeman’s salary, and he really doesn’t like it…”

When she was fifteen, Reyhan’s father decided — without consulting anyone — to give her away to a felt merchant, so she had to go and live in Malatya with nothing but a small bundle of her possessions, never to see her parents or the rest of her family again. She was one of seven children in a desperately poor family, but she didn’t think this justified their selling her off the way they did, and sometimes she still argued with them as if they were right there in front of her. “There are parents who won’t let men so much as look at their daughters, never mind marrying them off to someone they don’t want,” she’d say, shaking her head but never taking her eyes off her needlework. She was also upset that her father had sold her to her first husband without the obligation of a civil wedding. She’d eloped with her second husband, though, and this time she’d insisted on a civil ceremony. “I wish I’d said no beatings, too.” She’d laugh. “Never forget how lucky you are to have Mevlut.”

Reyhan would feign disbelief that men like Mevlut — men who never hit their wives — existed, and she would argue that it must have had something to do with me. She always asked me to repeat the story of how I’d found my “angel husband”—how we’d seen and liked each other at a wedding, how Mevlut had used go-betweens to send me letters when he was away for military service. The policeman would hit her whenever he drank rakı, so on those evenings when the table was laid for a drinking session, she’d sit and wait for him to finish his first glass. Then, as soon as he started reminiscing about some interrogation he’d been involved in — which was usually the first sign of an imminent beating — she would get up, take her embroidery, and come over to see me. If I happened to be upstairs, I’d be alerted to her presence downstairs by the sound of her husband Necati’s cajoling: “Please come home, my darling Reyhan, I won’t have any more, I promise.” Sometimes I took the girls with me and joined her on the steps. “Let’s sit together for a while, he’ll fall asleep soon enough,” Reyhan would say. When Mevlut was out selling boza on winter evenings, she’d come and watch TV with me and the girls, telling them stories that made them laugh and nibbling on sunflower seeds all evening. She’d smile at Mevlut when he came home late at night and tell him, “God bless your domestic bliss!”

—

There were moments when Mevlut could sense that these were the happiest years of his life, but he usually kept this knowledge hidden away at the back of his mind. If he allowed himself to think about how happy he was, he might lose it all. In this life, there were plenty of things to get angry and complain about anyway, each enough to overshadow any momentary happiness: he couldn’t abide the way Reyhan was always in their house until late, sticking her nose in their business. He couldn’t stand it when Fatma and Fevziye started arguing while they watched TV, screaming and shouting at each other and then bursting into tears. He’d get furious when people told him to make sure to come the next day with ten glasses of boza for their guests only to pretend they weren’t home the following night, refusing to let Mevlut inside the building and leaving him to ring their doorbell out in the cold. He’d get livid at the sight of a mother from Kütahya sobbing on TV over the death of her son, killed in Hakkâri when Kurdish militants ambushed his military convoy. He couldn’t bear the crybabies who stopped buying cooked rice or boza from street vendors because Chernobyl had exploded and the wind had supposedly brought cancer clouds right over the city. He couldn’t stand it when he took such care to reattach the arm on his daughters’ plastic doll, using copper electric wires he’d carefully stripped, only for the girls to rip it back out again immediately. When the wind buffeted the TV aerial, he could tolerate the white spots that appeared on the screen like snowflakes, but he couldn’t take it when the whole screen got covered in shadows and the image turned blurry. He’d get enraged when the power was cut all over the neighborhood right in the middle of a program on folk songs. When the plot to assassinate President Özal was on the news, and the footage (which Mevlut had seen at least twenty times) of the would-be killer’s body writhing on the floor under a barrage of police bullets was interrupted by an advertisement for Hayat yogurt, Mevlut would lose his temper and tell Rayiha, “These bastards and their chemical yogurt have ruined street vendors.”

But when Rayiha said, “Take the girls out tomorrow morning so I can give the house a good cleaning,” Mevlut would forget about everything that upset him. Walking in the streets with Fevziye in his arms and Fatma’s tiny hand inside his own calloused palm made him feel like the happiest man in the world. It filled him with joy to come home after a day spent selling rice and doze off to the sound of his girls talking, to wake up and play games with them (guessing whose hand was on his back or playing tag), or to be approached on the street by a new customer—“I’ll have a glass, boza seller”—knowing he had all these little pleasures to look forward to.

During these years of unquestioning gratitude for all of life’s blessings, Mevlut was only dimly aware of the gentle passage of time, the death of some pine trees, the way some old timber houses seemed to disappear overnight, the construction of six- or seven-story buildings on those empty plots where kids used to play football and street vendors and the unemployed used to take afternoon naps, and the growing size of the billboards and posters on the streets, just as he barely registered the passing of seasons and the way leaves dried up and fell off trees. It was just the way the end of the boza season or the football championships always caught him by surprise and how he only realized on the last Sunday evening of the 1987 season that Antalyaspor would be relegated. Or the way he noticed the number of overhead pedestrian crossings that had cropped up in the city after the military coup of 1980, and the metal barriers that had been erected along pavements in order to direct people to these crossings, only when he tried and failed one day to cross Halaskargazi Road at street level. Mevlut had heard people in the coffeehouse and on TV talking about the mayor’s plans for a big new road from Taksim to Tepebaşı, which would connect Taksim and Şişhane via a route that was to run through Tarlabaşı, five streets up from theirs, but he’d never thought it might be true. Most of the news that Rayiha brought him from the neighborhood’s old-timers and gossiping women Mevlut already knew from what he heard on the streets and in the coffeehouse, and through his exchanges with the elderly Greek ladies who lived in moldy, gloomy, ancient apartments around the Çiçek Arcade, the fish market, and the British consulate.

Though no one likes to think or talk about it anymore, Tarlabaşı used to be a neighborhood populated by Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Assyrians. There used to be a stream — now covered in concrete and forgotten — that flowed from Taksim down to the Golden Horn, taking on a different name in each of the neighborhoods it crossed (Dolap Creek, Bilecik Creek, Bishop’s Crossing, Kasımpaşa Creek), and on one shoulder of the valley through which it flowed were the neighborhoods of Kurtuluş and Feriköy, where sixty years ago, in the early 1920s, you could find only Greeks and Armenians. The first blow against the non-Muslim population of Beyoğlu after the birth of the Turkish republic was the 1942 property tax, through which the government, having become increasingly open to German influence during World War II, imposed levies on Tarlabaşı’s Christian community that most of them would never be able to pay, and sent the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, and Jewish men who failed to do so to labor camps in Aşkale. Mevlut had heard countless stories of pharmacists, furniture makers, and Greek families who’d lived here for generations being sent to labor camps for their failure to pay the taxes and having to turn their shops over to their Turkish apprentices or hide out at home for months on end just to escape the authorities searching for people on the street. Most of the Greek population went over to Greece after the anti-Christian uprisings of the sixth and seventh of September 1955, during the war over Cyprus, when mobs armed with sticks and carrying flags looted and vandalized churches and shops, chased priests away, and raped women. Those who didn’t leave the country then had to do so overnight in 1964, by government decree.

These stories were usually traded in whispered tones by the neighborhood’s long-standing residents after a few drinks at the bar or by those who felt like complaining about the new settlers who’d come to live in the empty homes left behind by the departing Greeks. Mevlut heard people say, “The Greeks were better than these Kurds,” and Africans and impoverished migrants were also coming to Tarlabaşı now because the government was doing nothing to stop them; what on earth was next?

Yet when any of the Greek families who’d fled or been banished came back to Istanbul and Tarlabaşı to check on the old houses of which they were still the registered owners, they weren’t exactly well received. People were reluctant to tell them the truth—“Your homes have been settled by Anatolian paupers from Bitlis and Adana!”—so even the neighborhood’s most good-natured residents often shied away from meeting their old acquaintances. There were those who resented the visitors and treated them with open hostility, convinced that the Greek landlords had only come back to claim their rent; and also those who would meet with their old friends in the coffeehouse and embrace them with tears in their eyes as they remembered the good old days. But these emotional moments never lasted long. Mevlut had watched as some of the Greeks come to see their old homes were heckled and stoned by bands of children recruited by one of the many criminal gangs who operated in the area, working with the government and the police to take over the Greeks’ empty homes and rent them out to the poor migrants coming in from Eastern Anatolia. On witnessing this kind of scene, Mevlut’s first instinct, like everyone else’s, would be to intervene: “Stop that, kids, it’s not fair.” But he’d start to have second thoughts immediately; the kids would never listen to him anyway, and besides, his own landlord was among the people putting them up to it, so in the end he’d just walk away without saying anything, half ashamed and half furious, thinking, Well, the Greeks seized Cyprus, anyway, or pondering some other injustice he wasn’t entirely sure about.

The program of demolitions was announced as an effort to clean up and modernize the city, an approach that appealed to everyone. Criminals, Kurds, Gypsies, and thieves currently squatting in the neighborhood’s vacant buildings would get kicked out; drug dens, smugglers’ warehouses, brothels, bachelor dormitories, and ruined buildings that served as hubs of illegal activities would be demolished, and in their place would be a new six-lane highway taking you from Tepebaşı to Taksim in five minutes.

There was some protest from the Greek landlords, whose lawyers took the government to court over the property seizures, and from the architects’ union and a handful of university students battling to save these historic buildings, but their voices went largely unheard. The mayor had the press on his side, and in one particular instance, when the court warrant for the demolition of one of these old buildings took too long to arrive, he sat at the steering wheel of a bulldozer draped with a Turkish flag and brought down the house himself, cheered on by bystanders. The dust generated by these demolitions would find its way even into Mevlut’s house five streets down, seeping in through the cracks in the closed windows. The bulldozers were always surrounded by curious crowds of the unemployed, shop clerks, passersby, and children, the street vendors plying them with ayran, sesame rolls, and corn on the cob.

Mevlut was keen to keep his rice cart away from the dust. Throughout these demolition years, he never took his rice anywhere too noisy or crowded. What really struck him was the demolition of the big sixty- and seventy-year-old blocks at the Taksim end of the coming six-lane boulevard. When he’d first come to Istanbul, a light-skinned, fair-haired, kindhearted woman on an enormous billboard six or seven stories high had offered him Tamek tomato ketchup and Lux soap from one of these buildings facing Taksim Square. Mevlut had always liked the way she smiled at him — with silent yet insistent affection — and he made it a point to look up at her every time he came to Taksim Square.

He was very sorry to learn that the famous sandwich shop Crystal Café, which used to be housed in the same building as the woman with the fair hair, had been demolished along with the building itself. No other place in Istanbul had ever sold as much ayran. Mevlut had tried its signature dish twice (once on the house) — a spicy hamburger dipped in tomato sauce — and he’d also had some of their ayran to go with it. The Crystal got the yogurt for their ayran from the enormous Concrete Brothers of Cennetpınar’s neighboring village of İmrenler. Concrete Abdullah and Concrete Nurullah didn’t furnish yogurt only to the Crystal Café; they also did regular business with a whole host of restaurants and cafés in Taksim, Osmanbey, and Beyoğlu, all of them buying in great quantity, and up until the mid-1970s, when the big yogurt companies started to distribute their product in glass bowls and wooden barrels, the brothers made a fortune, taking over territory in Kültepe, Duttepe, and the Asian side of the city, until they were swept away in the space of two years, along with all the other yogurt vendors. Mevlut realized how much he’d envied the rich and capable Concrete Brothers — so much cleverer than he was, they didn’t even need to sell boza in the evenings to make ends meet — when he realized he was interpreting the demolition of the Crystal Café as some sort of punishment of them.

Mevlut had been in Istanbul for twenty years. It was sad to see the old face of the city as he had come to know it disappear before his eyes, erased by new roads, demolitions, buildings, billboards, shops, tunnels, and flyovers, but it was also gratifying to feel that someone out there was working to improve the city for his benefit. He didn’t see it as a place that had existed before his arrival and to which he’d come as an outsider. Instead, he liked to imagine that Istanbul was being built while he lived in it and to dream of how much cleaner, more beautiful, and more modern it would be in the future. He was fond of the people who lived in its historic buildings with fifty-year-old elevators, central heating, and high ceilings, built while he was still back in the village or before he’d even been born, and he never forgot that these were the people who had always treated him more kindly than anyone else. But these buildings inevitably reminded him that he was still a stranger here. Their doormen were condescending even if they didn’t mean to be, which always left him scared of making a mistake. But he liked old things: the feeling of walking into one of those cemeteries he discovered while selling boza in distant neighborhoods, the sight of a mosque wall covered in moss, and the unintelligible Ottoman writing on a broken fountain with its brass taps long dried up.

Sometimes he thought of how he broke his back every day even now just to scrape by with a rice business that wasn’t really profitable, while all around him everyone who’d come from somewhere else was getting rich, buying property, and building his own home on his own land, but in those moments he told himself that it would be ungrateful to want more than the happiness God had already given him. And once in a great while, he noticed the storks flying overhead and realized that the seasons were passing, another winter was over, and he was slowly getting older.

13. Süleyman Stirs Up Trouble

Isn’t That What Happened?

Rayiha. I used to take Fatma and Fevziye to Duttepe (just one ticket between them) so they could spend time with their aunt Vediha and have a place where they could run around and pick mulberries, but I can’t do that anymore. The last time I went, two months ago, I got cornered by Süleyman, who started asking me about Mevlut. I told him he was fine. But then, in that typical wisecracking way of his, he brought up Ferhat and Samiha.

“We haven’t seen them since they ran away, Süleyman, really,” I said, telling him the same old lie.

“You know, I think I believe you,” said Süleyman. “I doubt Mevlut would want anything to do with Ferhat and Samiha anymore. Do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Surely you must know, Rayiha. All those letters Mevlut wrote when he was in the military were meant for Samiha.”

“What?”

“I read some of them before I passed them on to Vediha to give to you. Those eyes Mevlut wrote about were not your eyes, Rayiha.”

He said it all with a smirk, as if this were all in good fun. So I played along, smiling back. Thank God I then had the presence of mind to say, “If Mevlut meant the letters for Samiha, why did you bring them to me?”

—

Süleyman. I had no intention of upsetting poor Rayiha. But in the end, isn’t the truth what matters most? She didn’t say another word to me, she just said good-bye to Vediha, took her girls, and left. Occasionally, when it was time for them to go, I’d put them all in my van and drive them up to the Mecidiyeköy bus stop myself, just to make sure they got back on time and Mevlut didn’t get annoyed because no one was there when he got home in the evening. The girls love the van. But that day, Rayiha didn’t even bother to say good-bye to me. When Mevlut gets home, I doubt she’ll ask him “Did you write those letters to Samiha?” She’ll cry about it for sure. But once she’s thought it over, she’ll realize that everything I told her is true.

—

Rayiha. I sat with Fevziye on my lap and Fatma beside me on the bus ride from Mecidiyeköy to Taksim. My daughters can always tell when their mother is sad or upset, even when I don’t say anything. As we walked home, I said with a frown, “Don’t tell your father we went to see your aunt Vediha, okay?” It came to me that maybe the reason that Mevlut doesn’t want me going to Duttepe is to keep me as far as possible from Süleyman’s insinuations. As soon as I saw Mevlut’s sweet, boyish face that evening, I knew Süleyman was lying. But the next morning, while the girls were out playing in the garden, I remembered the way Mevlut had looked at me in Akşehir train station the night we eloped, and I became uneasy again…Süleyman had been the one driving the van that day.

I took the letters out from where I kept them, and when I read through them again, I felt relieved: they sounded exactly the way Mevlut talks to me when we’re alone together. I felt guilty for having paid any mind to Süleyman’s lies. But then I remembered that Süleyman himself had brought me the letters, and that he’d used Vediha to convince me to run away with Mevlut, and I felt unsure. That was when I vowed never to go to Duttepe again.

—

Vediha. One afternoon, just after Mevlut would have left to sell his rice, I snuck out of the house and got on a bus to Tarlabaşı to see Rayiha. My little sister greeted me with tears of joy in her eyes. She was busy frying chicken with her hair pulled back like a chef’s, a huge fork in her hand and a cloud of smoke with the scent of cooking swirling around her as she yelled at the kids to stop making a mess. I gave the girls a hug and kiss before she sent them out to play in the garden. “They’ve both been sick, or else we would have been by,” she said. “Mevlut doesn’t even know about my visits.”

“But Rayiha, Korkut never lets me out of the house, and certainly nowhere near Beyoğlu. How are we ever going to see each other?”

“The girls are scared of your boys, now. Do you remember what Bozkurt and Turan did that time, when they tied poor Fatma to a tree and started shooting arrows at her? They split her eyebrow wide open.”

“Don’t you worry, Rayiha; I gave them quite a beating over it and made them swear they’ll never hurt the girls again. Anyway, Bozkurt and Turan aren’t back from school until after four. Tell me the truth, Rayiha, is that really why you haven’t been coming, or is it Mevlut who’s told you not to?”

“Actually, if you want to know, it’s not Mevlut’s fault. It’s Süleyman who’s to blame; he’s trying to cause trouble. He was saying that the letters Mevlut wrote me when he was in the army were really meant for Samiha.”

“Oh, Rayiha, you can’t let Süleyman get to you…”

Rayiha pulled out a bundle of letters from the bottom of her wicker sewing box and opened one of the yellowing envelopes at random. “ ‘My life, my soul, my one and only doe-eyed Miss Rayiha,’ ” she read, and she burst into tears.

—

Süleyman. I really can’t stand Mahinur when she starts mocking my family and saying we still belong in the village. As if she were a general’s daughter or a doctor’s wife or something, and not a government clerk’s nightclub-hostess daughter. Give her two glasses of rakı, and she’ll get going: “Were you some sort of shepherd, back home?” she’ll say, raising her eyebrows gravely as if it were a serious question.

“You’ve had too much to drink again,” I’ll tell her.

“Who, me? You drink plenty more than I do, and then you lose control. Hit me again and I’ll give you a taste of the fire iron.”

I went home. My mother and Vediha were watching Gorbachev and Bush kissing each other on TV. Korkut was out, and I was just thinking I might have another drink when Vediha ambushed me in the kitchen.

“Now listen to me, Süleyman,” she said. “If you cause Rayiha to stop coming to this house, I will never forgive you. She truly believes these lies and stupid jokes of yours, you’ve got the poor girl in tears.”

“Oh, fine, Vediha, I won’t say anything more to her. But why don’t we get our facts straight first, if we’re going to keep telling lies to spare people’s feelings.”

“Süleyman, let’s imagine for a minute that Mevlut really did see Samiha and fell in love with her, but then wrote his letters to Rayiha because he thought that was her name.”

“Well, that is exactly what happened…”

“No, what’s likelier is that you tricked him on purpose…”

“I just helped Mevlut get married.”

“Have it your way, but what good does it do to dredge it all up now? Apart from causing poor Rayiha a lot of pain?”

“Vediha, you’ve done your best to find me a wife. Now you have to face the truth.”

“None of the things you said actually happened,” said Vediha in a steely tone. “I will tell your brother, too. I’ll have no more of this. Understood?”

As you see, whenever she wants to intimidate me, Vediha refers to her husband as “your brother” instead of “Korkut.”

—

Rayiha. I can be making a warm compress to soothe Fatma’s earache, when I’ll drop what I’m doing and go pick out a letter from one of the bundles I keep in my sewing box and skim to find the part where Mevlut compares my eyes to “the melancholy mountains of Kars.” In the evening, while I’m listening to Reyhan’s chatter and to the girls wheezing and coughing in their sleep while I’m waiting for Mevlut to come home, I’ll get up as if in a dream and go back to where Mevlut wrote “I need no other gaze, no other sun in my life.” In the mornings, when I’m at the fish market with Fatma and Fevziye in Balıkpazarı, standing in that stench and watching Hamdi the poultry dealer plucking a chicken before he hacks it to pieces and smokes the skin, I’ll remember how Mevlut once called me his “darling who smells of roses and of heaven, true to her name,” and instantly feel better. When the south wind makes the city reek of sewage and seaweed, the sky looks the color of a rotten egg, and I feel a weight on my soul, I’ll go back to the letter in which he told me my eyes were “as dark as fathomless night and as clear as fresh spring water.”

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. There’s no pleasure in village life anymore, now that I’ve married my girls off, so I go to Istanbul whenever I get the chance. As the buses rattle along and I fall in and out of sleep, I always find myself wondering bitterly if I’m even wanted there at all. In Istanbul, I stay at Vediha’s and try my best to avoid grumpy Korkut and his grocer father, Hasan, who looks more like a ghost with every passing year. I’m a tired old man without a penny to my name, and I’ve never stayed in a hotel in my life. I think there’s something undignified about having to pay for a place to sleep at night.

It is not true that I took gifts and money from Süleyman and Korkut in exchange for letting Süleyman marry my daughter Samiha, nor does the fact that Samiha eloped mean that I must have been tricking them all along. Korkut did pay for my teeth, but I saw this generosity as a gift from Vediha’s husband, not as the bride price for my youngest daughter. Not to mention how insulting it is to suggest that a beauty like Samiha should be worth no more than a set of dentures.

Süleyman still won’t let it go, so I always try to stay away from him whenever I’m at the Aktaş home, but one night he caught me having a bite to eat in the kitchen. We hugged like father and son, which was unusual for us. His father had already gone to sleep, so we turned with great relish to the half a bottle of rakı Süleyman had hidden behind the potato basket. I’m not entirely sure what happened next, but just before the call to prayer at dawn, I heard Süleyman saying the same thing over and over again. “Father, you’re a straight-talking kind of man, so be honest with me now, isn’t that what happened?” he repeated. “Mevlut wrote those love letters for Samiha.”

“Süleyman, my son, it doesn’t really matter who was in love with whom when it all began. What matters is being happy after the wedding. That’s why when a girl and boy are engaged to be married, our Prophet says they shouldn’t be allowed to meet before the wedding and waste all the excitement of lovemaking beforehand, and it’s also why the Koran forbids women from going around with their heads uncovered…”

“Very true,” said Süleyman. Though I don’t think he really agreed with me; he just didn’t dare argue against anything that had to do with the Holy Prophet or the Koran.

“In our realm,” I continued, “girls and boys who are engaged don’t get to know each other at all until they’re married, so it doesn’t matter who was meant to receive their love letters. The letter is just a token; what really counts is what is in your heart.”

“So what you’re saying is that it doesn’t matter that Mevlut wrote letters meant for Samiha when his fate was to be with Rayiha?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Süleyman frowned. “God takes note of His creatures’ true intentions. The Lord favors a man who intends to fast during Ramadan over a man who fasts because he can’t find food to eat anyway. Because one of them means it, while the other one doesn’t.”

“Mevlut and Rayiha are good people in the eyes of Allah the Merciful. Don’t worry about them,” I said. “They will have God’s blessing. God loves happy people, who know how to make the best of the little they have. Would Mevlut and Rayiha be happy if He didn’t love them? And if they’re happy, then it’s not our place to say any more, is it, son?”

—

Süleyman. If Rayiha actually believed those letters were meant for her, why didn’t she tell Mevlut to ask her father for her hand? They could have been married immediately, without needing to elope. It’s not like she had other suitors. But it was always assumed that Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman would ask for a lot of money in exchange for his daughter’s hand…So Rayiha would have ended up a spinster, and her father wouldn’t have been able to move on to marrying off the next daughter, Samiha — the one who’s really pretty. It’s that simple. (Of course he ended up making no money from his youngest daughter either, but that’s beside the point.)

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. I left after a while and went to stay with my youngest daughter in the Ghaazi Quarter, all the way at the other end of the city. Süleyman still can’t get over what happened, so I told no one I was going to stay at Samiha and Ferhat’s, pretending instead that I was going back to the village. Vediha and I cried as we hugged each other good-bye, as if this time I might die when I went back to the village. I took my bag and boarded the bus from Mecidiyeköy to Taksim. Since we were not moving in the traffic at all, some of the passengers, fed up with being piled one on top of the other, yelled “Open the door, driver” every time we came to a standstill, but the driver refused: “We’re not at the stop yet.” I followed the ongoing argument without getting involved. We were also packed like sardines on the next bus I took, and by the time I got off at Gaziosmanpaşa, I felt I’d been completely flattened. I took a blue minibus from Gaziosmanpaşa and reached the Ghaazi Quarter at dusk.

This part of the city seemed colder and darker; the clouds here hung lower and looked more fearsome. I hurried up a hill; the whole neighborhood was really just one long slope. There was nobody around, and I could smell the forest and the lake at the edge of the city. A deep silence had descended from the mountains onto the ghostlike homes around me.

My darling daughter opened the door, and for some reason we both cried as we embraced. I knew straightaway that my Samiha was crying because she was lonely and unhappy. That evening, her husband, Ferhat, didn’t make it home until around midnight and fell straight into bed. They both work so hard that, by nighttime, they have neither the energy nor the heart to be together in this house in the middle of nowhere. Ferhat showed me his certificate from the University of Anatolia; he’d finally managed to get a college degree through a cor respondence course. Maybe they would be happy now. But by nightfall, I was too worried to sleep. This Ferhat can never make my beautiful, clever, darling, long-suffering Samiha happy. It’s not that they eloped, you see; what bothers me is that this man is making her work as a maid.

But Samiha refuses to admit that having to clean other people’s homes makes her unhappy. When her husband left for work in the morning (whatever it is that he does), Samiha acted as if she were perfectly happy with her life. She’d taken the day off to be with me. She fried two eggs for me. She took me to the window at the back and showed me her husband’s plot of land marked with phosphorescent stones. We went out into the little garden of their house on top of a hill, and all around us were more hills covered with poor neighborhoods of houses that looked like white boxes. The outline of the city itself was almost invisible in the distance, half hidden like a monstrous creature lying in a pool of mud, smothered in fog and factory fumes. “Dad, do you see those hills over there?” said Samiha, pointing at the poor neighborhoods all around us. She shivered. “When we first came here five years ago, all these hills were empty.” She started crying.

—

Rayiha. “You can tell your father that Grandpa Abdurrahman and Aunt Vediha came to see you, but you mustn’t tell him that Aunt Samiha was here, understood?” “Why?” asked Fatma in her usual inquisitive way. I frowned and shook my head a little as I usually do when I’m about to run out of patience and give them a slap, and after that they both kept quiet.

As soon as my father and Samiha arrived, one of the girls climbed onto Father’s chest, and the other went to sit on Samiha’s lap. Father stood Fatma on his knees and engaged her in a thumb-wrestling match and a game of rock-paper-scissors, giving her riddles to solve and showing her his little pocket mirror, the watch he carried on a chain, and his lighter that didn’t work. When Samiha hugged Fevziye so hard, showering her with kisses, I knew straightaway that only a big bustling home with three or four babies of her own could relieve the pain of the loneliness she carried inside. Every kiss came with an expression of wonder—“Look at that hand! And look at that mole!”—and every single time I couldn’t help but lean over and examine Fevziye’s hand or the mole on Fatma’s neck.

—

Vediha. “Why don’t you go take Aunt Samiha to see the talking tree in the back garden and the fairy courtyard of the Assyrian church,” I said, and off they went. I was just about to tell Rayiha that there was no reason to be afraid of Süleyman anymore, that Bozkurt and Turan had started behaving themselves, and that she should start bringing the girls over again, when my father said something that made us both really angry.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. I don’t know why they’re so angry at me. I can’t think of anything more natural than a father worrying about his daughters’ happiness. When Samiha went out in the garden with the girls, I told Rayiha and Vediha about their little sister’s lonely misery in that crumbling one-room house out on the other side of the city with nothing but cold, grief, and ghosts for company, and how I’d had my fill of the place after five days and decided to go back to the village.

“Between you and me, what your sister needs is a real husband that can make her happy.”

—

Rayiha. I don’t know what came over me, but all of a sudden I was so furious that I said some things bound to break my poor father’s heart, surprising even myself as the words came out of my mouth. “Don’t you dare wreck the girl’s marriage, Father,” I said. WE ARE NOT FOR SALE, I said. Yet part of me knew that my father was right, and I could see that poor Samiha no longer had the strength to mask her misery. There was also something else my mind kept going back to. We’d spent our childhood and adolescence hearing things like “Samiha is the prettiest and the most enchanting of you all, she’s the most beautiful girl in the world,” and now here she was, penniless, childless, and full of sadness, while Mevlut and I were happy; was this God’s way of testing people’s devotion, or was it divine justice?

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. Vediha went as far as to say, WHAT KIND OF FATHER ARE YOU. “What kind of father tries to break up a marriage just so he can sell his daughter off and cash in on her bride price?” That was so hurtful I thought it might be better to pretend I hadn’t heard it, but I couldn’t help myself. “Shame on you,” I said. “Everything I’ve endured, all the humiliation, it was all for the sake of finding you husbands who could provide for you, not so I could sell you off at a profit. A father who asks his daughter’s suitor for money is only trying to recover some of the expenses of raising her, sending her to school, putting clothes on her back, and bringing her up to be a good mother one day. This bride price doesn’t just tell us how much a man feels his future wife might be worth; it’s also the only money anyone in this country ever spends on sending their daughters to school. Do you understand now? Every single father in this country, down to the most open-minded of them all, will do whatever it takes to make sure he has a son instead of a daughter — whether it be a ritual sacrifice, a magic spell, or going into every mosque he can find and begging God for a baby boy. But unlike all these mean-spirited men, did I not rejoice at the birth of each and every one of my daughters? Have I ever laid a finger on any one of you? Have I ever shouted at you or said anything to cause you pain, have I ever raised my voice or let the slightest shadow of sorrow fall upon your beautiful faces? Now you tell me you don’t love your father? Well, then, I’m better off dead!”

—

Rayiha. Out in the garden, the girls were showing their aunt Samiha the enchanted dustbin, the train of worms that went through the broken flowerpot, and the tin palace that belonged to the weeping tin princess, who would give two shuddering cries every time you hit her. “If I really was this cruel man who kept his daughters locked in a cage, how were they able to get away with exchanging letters with some good-for-nothing scoundrel right under my nose?” said my father.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. It was hard for a proud father like me to bear the weight of the awful things being said. I asked for a glass of rakı before it was even time for the midafternoon prayers. I got up and opened the fridge, but Rayiha stopped me. “Mevlut doesn’t drink, Dad,” she said. “I can go buy you a bottle of Yeni Rakı, if you want.” She closed the fridge.

“You don’t need to be ashamed, my dear…Samiha’s fridge is even emptier.”

“All we have in ours are the leftovers from the rice and chicken Mevlut can’t sell,” said Rayiha. “We’ve also started putting our boza in there overnight; otherwise it goes off.”

I stumbled into an armchair in the corner, feeling as if some strange memory had popped into my head and darkened my vision. I must have fallen asleep, because in my dream I was riding a white horse among a flock of sheep, but just as I realized that the sheep were actually clouds, my nose began to hurt, growing as big as the horse’s nostrils, at which point I woke up. Fatma was grabbing my nose, pulling on it with all her might.

“What are you doing!” yelled Rayiha.

“Dad, let’s go to the shop and get you a bottle of rakı,” said my darling daughter Vediha.

“Fatma and Fevziye can come with us and show their grandpa the way to the shop.”

—

Samiha. Rayiha and I watched my father, bent in half and smaller than ever under his hunched back, holding hands with the girls on the way to the shop. They’d reached the end of the narrow alley and were just about to turn the corner onto the sloping road when they turned around and waved, sensing our presence at the window. Once they were gone, Rayiha and I sat facing each other without exchanging a word, thinking that we could still understand each other perfectly just as when we were little. Back then we used to tease Vediha, and if we got in trouble, we’d just stop talking and switch to winks and gestures. But in that moment I realized we couldn’t do it anymore; those days were behind us.

—

Rayiha. Samiha lit up a cigarette in my presence for the first time ever. She told me she’d picked up the habit from the wealthy people whose homes she cleaned, not from Ferhat. “Don’t you worry about Ferhat,” she said. “He’s got a degree now, he has contacts at the electricity board, and he’s got himself a job; soon we’ll be doing all right, so don’t worry about us. Don’t let Father anywhere near that Süleyman. I’m fine.”

“Do you know what that creep Süleyman told me the other day?” I said. I looked inside my sewing box and took out a bundle tied up with a ribbon. “You know these letters Mevlut sent me when he was in the army…Apparently they weren’t meant for me, but for you, Samiha.”

Before she could respond, I started pulling envelopes out and reciting passages at random. Back in the village, I used to read bits out for Samiha whenever Father wasn’t home. It would always make us smile. But I already knew we wouldn’t be smiling this time. When I read the part about my eyes, “black like melancholy suns,” I almost started crying, I suddenly had trouble swallowing, and I knew that telling Samiha about the lies Süleyman was spreading had been a mistake.

“Don’t be silly, Rayiha, how can that be?” she said, but at the same time she was looking at me as if what I’d said might even be true. I could sense that Samiha was flattered by the letters, as if Mevlut really had been talking about her. So I stopped reading. I missed my Mevlut. I realized just how angry Samiha was with me and with us all, far away in that distant neighborhood of hers. Mevlut would be home any minute, so I changed the subject.

—

Samiha. My heart sank when Rayiha mentioned her husband would be home soon, and later when Vediha looked at me and said, “Dad and I were just about to leave anyway.” It all made me really upset. I’m on the bus back to Gaziosmanpaşa now, sitting by the window and feeling low. I’m wiping my eyes with the hem of my headscarf. Earlier, I had the distinct impression that they wanted me to leave before Mevlut got back. All because Mevlut wrote those letters to me! How is that my fault? I couldn’t have said any of this openly, of course, since they would have just said what a pity it was that I felt this way and proceeded to voice their shared concern: “How can you even think that, Samiha, you know how much we love you!” They would have blamed my reaction on Ferhat’s money troubles, my having to work as a maid, and the fact that I still don’t have any children. To be honest, I don’t even mind; I love them all very much. But I did wonder once or twice whether Mevlut could really have meant those letters for me. I told myself, Samiha, stop, don’t think about it, it’s not right. Yet I continued to wonder — more than once or twice, actually. Women have no more control over their thoughts than over their dreams; and so these thoughts ramble through my head like nervous burglars in a pitch-black house.

I lay down in my tiny maid’s room in the plush home of the Şişli rich, and as the pigeons in the inner courtyard stood still on their perches and sighed in the darkness, I wondered what Ferhat would do if he ever found out. I even wondered if perhaps my sweet Rayiha had told me all this to make me feel better about my lot. One night, after a weary journey on a weary bus, I came home to find Ferhat slumped in front of the television, and I felt the urge to shake him awake before he drifted to sleep.

“Do you know what Rayiha told me the other day?” I said. “You know those letters Mevlut sent her…He’d meant them for me all along.”

“From the very beginning?” said Ferhat, without taking his eyes off the television.

“Yes, from the very beginning.”

“Mevlut didn’t write those first letters to Rayiha,” he said, now looking at me. “I wrote them.”

“What?”

“What would Mevlut know about love letters…He came to me before taking off for military service, he told me he was in love, so I wrote some letters for him.”

“Did you write them for me?”

“No. Mevlut asked me to write to Rayiha,” said Ferhat. “He told me all about how much he loved her.”

14. Mevlut Finds a New Spot

I’ll Go and Pick It Up First Thing Tomorrow Morning

IN THE WINTER of 1989, seven years into his life as a cooked-rice vendor, Mevlut began to clearly observe that the younger generations were growing increasingly suspicious of his presence. “If you don’t like my rice, you can have your money back,” he’d tell them. But so far none of these young workers had ever asked for a refund. His poorer, angrier, more loutish customers, and the loners who didn’t care what anyone thought, would often leave half their order uneaten and sometimes demand that Mevlut only charge them half the price, which request Mevlut would oblige. Then in a single, surreptitious move that he himself scarcely wanted to admit, he would put the uneaten portions of rice and chicken right back into their respective compartments in his cart and tip anything not fit to save into a box for the stray cats or to get rid of on the way home. He never told his wife about those customers who left half-eaten portions. Rayiha had been diligently cooking rice and chicken the same way for more than six years, so it couldn’t have been her fault. When he tried to understand why the new generation was nowhere near as taken with his rice as those he’d served in earlier days, he came up with several possibilities.

Among the younger generations there was now a regrettable misconception, fueled by newspapers and TV, that street food was “dirty.” Milk, yogurt, tomato paste, beef sausage, and canned vegetable companies kept bombarding people with advertisements about how “hygienic” their products were and how everything they sold was machine processed and “untouched by human hands,” to the point that sometimes Mevlut would find himself shouting back at the screen, “Oh, come on!”—scaring Fatma and Fevziye, who thought perhaps the TV was actually alive. Before they bought his rice, some customers would check the cleanliness of his plates, cups, and cutlery. Mevlut knew that these same people, so condescending and suspicious with him, would have no problem whatsoever eating from a big plate shared among friends and relatives. They didn’t care about cleanliness when they were with people they felt close to. This could only mean they didn’t trust Mevlut or consider him their equal.

In the past two years, he had also noticed that filling your stomach with a quick plate of rice for lunch carried the risk of making you “look poor.” Rice with chicken and chickpeas wasn’t even that filling, unless you had it as a snack between meals, as you might sesame rolls or biscuits. There was also nothing particularly strange or exotic about it, unlike, say, stuffed mussels, which contained raisins and cinnamon and had once been a pricey dish served only in certain bars and restaurants until the migrant community from Mardin turned them into a cheap street snack everyone could afford. (Mevlut had never tried them, though he’d always wondered what they tasted like.) Gone were the days when offices would place bulk orders with street vendors. The golden years of Ottoman-style street food — panfried liver, lamb’s head, and grilled meatballs — were all but forgotten, thanks to this new breed of office worker so fond of disposable plastic cutlery. Back then, you could start off with a street stall outside any big office building and end up with a proper grilled-meatball restaurant on the same corner, serving the same long-standing lunchtime clientele.

Every year, when it started getting colder and the boza season approached, Mevlut had gone to a wholesaler down in Sirkeci and bought a huge sack of dry chickpeas to last him until the next winter. That year, however, he didn’t have enough money saved up to buy his usual sack of chickpeas. His income from the rice had stayed the same, but it was no longer enough to cover the rising costs of food and clothing for his daughters. He was spending more and more money on needless things, the treats with Western-sounding names that irri tated him whenever he heard them on TV — TipiTip chewing gum, Golden chocolate bars, Super ice cream — as well as on an assortment of flower-shaped sweets, teddy bears that came with newspaper coupons, multicolored hair clips, toy watches, and pocket mirrors, which suffused him with pleasure at every purchase but left him feeling guilty, too, and somehow inadequate. If it hadn’t been for the boza he sold on winter evenings, the rent from his late father’s house in Kültepe, and the money Rayiha earned embroidering bedsheets for a handful of bridal trousseau shops Reyhan had told her about, Mevlut would have had trouble covering the rent on their own home and the gas he funneled into their stove on cold winter days.

The crowds in Kabataş always thinned out after lunch. Mevlut began to look for a new spot to park his cart from two to five in the afternoon. Far from reducing the distance that separated their house from İstiklal Avenue and Beyoğlu, the new Tarlabaşı Boulevard seemed to have pushed them even farther out and down the social ladder. The part of Tarlabaşı that had ended up on the other side of this road quickly filled up with nightclubs, bars, and other places where you could hear classical Turkish music while being served alcohol, so that soon all the families and the poor living there had to move out, as property prices rose, and the whole area became an extension of Istanbul’s biggest entertainment district. But none of this wealth had reached the streets on Mevlut’s side of the big road. Instead, the metal railings and concrete barriers running along the middle of the road and all along the sidewalks to prevent pedestrians from crossing over at street level had the effect of pushing Mevlut’s neighborhood farther toward Kasımpaşa and the deprived working-class quarters that rose among the ruins of the old shipyard.

There was no way Mevlut could push his cart over the concrete barriers and metal railings that ran the length of the six-lane road, nor could he use the overhead pedestrian crossings; and so the shortcut he had always taken to get home, cutting through the crowds on İstiklal Avenue on his way from Kabataş, was no longer available, leaving him no choice but to go the long way around through Talimhane. There were plans to limit İstiklal to foot traffic (leading to endless roadwork that had littered the whole street with potholes), except for a single tramline described in the newspapers as “nostalgic” (a word Mevlut didn’t like); as a result big foreign brands had opened shops lining the avenue, all of which made it harder for street vendors to come here. Beyoğlu’s police patrolled in their blue uniforms and dark glasses, swooping down on those selling sesame rolls, cassettes, stuffed mussels, meatballs, and almonds, the vendors who repaired lighters, sold grilled sausages, and made sandwiches all along the main avenue and on the side streets, too. One of them, who sold Albanian-style panfried liver and made no secret of his contacts at the Beyoğlu police station, had told Mevlut that any street vendors who could survive around İstiklal were either undercover agents or informants who reported to the police daily.

The crowds of Beyoğlu, flowing inexorably through the streets like the tributaries of a colossal river, had once again changed course and speed, as they so often did, with people starting to congregate at different corners and crossroads. Street vendors would rush to these new meeting hubs immediately, and even though the police chased them away, they’d be replaced in time by sandwich and kebab stalls, eventually to be succeeded by actual kebab restaurants and cigarette and newspaper stands, until finally neighborhood grocers would start selling kebab wraps and ice cream in front of their shops, and fruit-and-vegetable sellers would stay open all night with a constant stream of Turkish pop songs playing somewhere in the background. All these changes, small and large, brought to light a number of interesting new spots where Mevlut thought he might try to park his cart for a while.

He found a little gap on a street in Talimhane, between a stack of timber meant for a construction site and an old abandoned Greek house. For a time, this became the place where he would await afternoon customers. The offices of the electricity board were across the road, and the people queuing up there to pay their bills, reactivate their power, and apply for a meter soon discovered the cooked-rice seller nearby. Mevlut was just starting to think that he might sell more rice if he spent lunchtimes here instead of in Kabataş when the guard at the construction site — who’d been eating for free in exchange for looking the other way — told Mevlut to get lost because his bosses didn’t like having him around.

Two hundred meters down the road, he found another small gap right next to the ruins of the Gloria Theatre. This hundred-year-old wooden building, owned by an Armenian charity trust, had gone up in flames on a cold winter night in 1987. Mevlut reflected how it was only two years ago that he was out selling boza in Taksim when he’d seen the fire in the distance and stood watching it, along with the rest of the city. There had been widespread rumors of arson, as the grand old theater, known for its Western-music recitals, had staged a play that made fun of Islamists, but the allegations had never been proven. Mevlut had never heard the word “Islamist” before. A play that mocked Islamic sensibilities was, of course, not to be tolerated, but at the time he had felt that burning down an entire building was probably an overreaction. Now, as he stood there, freezing in the cold and waiting for customers that did not come, he thought about the soul of the night watchman, who’d been burned alive with the rest of the building; the oft-expressed superstition that anyone who’d ever enjoyed an evening in that theater was cursed to die young; and the fact that a long time ago this area and the whole of Taksim Square had been an Armenian cemetery. In light of all this, it seemed reasonable that no one should ever come to his hidden haven for a plate of chicken and rice. He held out for five days before deciding to look elsewhere for a place to park his white cart.

He sought a little corner for his restaurant on wheels in Talimhane, behind Elmadağ, in the alleyways that wound down in Dolapdere and around Harbiye. He still had regular nighttime boza customers in all these neighborhoods, but the daytime was a different world. Sometimes Mevlut would entrust his rice cart to the barbershop next to the burned-down theater so he could wander among the local car-parts dealers, grocery stores, cheap diners, estate agents, upholsterers, and electricians. In Kabataş, if he needed the toilet or felt like stretching his legs, he would usually leave his cart with a friend who sold stuffed mussels or with some other acquaintance, but he would always hurry back in case a customer showed up. Here, though, leaving his cart was like running away from it, a feeling straight out of a dream. Sometimes, he felt the guilty urge to abandon the cart entirely.

One day he saw Neriman walking ahead of him in Harbiye, and he was amazed to feel his heart speed up. It was a surprising emotion, like running into your younger self on the street. When the woman stopped to look in a shopwindow, Mevlut saw that it wasn’t Neriman at all. He realized that the thought of her must have been lurking somewhere in the back of his mind these past few days as he was going by Harbiye’s travel agencies, and suddenly, visions from fifteen years ago, when he yet had dreams of finishing high school, started coming to him through the fog of memory: of the streets of Istanbul, which had been so much emptier back then; of the joys of masturbating at home alone; of the overwhelming isolation that had endowed everything with meaning; the leaves that fell off chestnut and plane trees in autumn, littering the streets; the kindness people used to show a sweet little boy selling yogurt…It had all come with a burden of loneliness and sorrow that he’d carried in his heart and in his gut, but he had no memory of those feelings now, and so he remembered his life fifteen years ago as a perfectly happy time. He felt a curious sense of regret, as if he’d lived his life for nothing. Yet he was so content with Rayiha.

When he returned to the burned-down theater, his cart had disappeared. Mevlut couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a cloudy day in winter, with dusk falling earlier than usual. He went into the barbershop where the lights had already been switched on for the evening.

“The police took your cart,” said the barber. “I told them you were on your way back, but they wouldn’t listen.”

In all his years as a street vendor, it was the first time this had ever happened to Mevlut.

—

Ferhat. Mevlut lost his rice cart to the municipal police over on our side of town just around the time I started working as an inspector for the electricity board, which was based in Taksim in a building shaped like a matchbox, much like the Hilton Hotel. But we never ran into each other. Had I known that he was parking nearby, would I have gone to look for him? I don’t know. But this claim that Mevlut had written his love letters to my wife rather than his own made me realize that it was time to clarify my thoughts on the matter, both private and public.

I’ve always known that at Korkut’s wedding Mevlut got only a fleet ing look at Abdurrahman Efendi’s other daughters — so what’s it to me if he meant his letters for one or the other? I had no idea that he’d been dreaming of Samiha all along when he wound up eloping with Rayiha. He was too embarrassed ever to tell me. So, privately, I’m not bothered by any of it. But as a matter of appearances, what views we must take in public, it’s become tough for us to be friends now: Mevlut used to write love letters to the girl who ended up being my wife…and I courted and married the girl Mevlut loved and could never have. Regardless of what we may feel in private, in this country it’s difficult for two men in this “public” situation to refrain from immediately beating each other up when meeting by chance on the street, let alone to shake hands and be the friends they were before.

—

The day the local police confiscated his rice cart, Mevlut came home at the usual time. At first, Rayiha didn’t even notice that the cart wasn’t tied to the almond tree in the back garden. But by the look on her husband’s face, she knew that there had been some sort of calamity.

“It’s nothing,” said Mevlut. “I’ll go and pick it up first thing tomorrow morning.”

He told his daughters — who never quite understood what the adults said but still caught on to all that remained unsaid — that a screw had come off one of the wheels, and he’d left the cart with a friend who did repairs in the neighborhood next to theirs. He gave them each a piece of chewing gum with a picture on the wrapper. At dinnertime, they ate their fill of the fresh rice Rayiha had cooked and the chicken she’d fried for Mevlut to sell the next day.

“Let’s save the rest for your customers the day after tomorrow, then,” said Rayiha, gently returning the uneaten chicken to the pot, which she put in the fridge.

That night, as Mevlut was pouring out a few glasses of boza in the kitchen of one of his oldest customers, she told him, “Mevlut Efendi, we’ve been having rakı all evening, so we hadn’t really planned on buying boza. But there was so much emotion, so much melancholy, in your voice that we couldn’t help ourselves.”

“It’s the boza seller’s voice that sells his boza,” said Mevlut, repeating a line he’d told his customers thousands of times before.

“How is everything with you? Which one of your daughters was meant to start school soon?”

“I’m very well, thank God. My eldest will start primary school in autumn, God willing.”

“Well done. You’re not letting them get married until they’ve finished high school, right?” said the old woman as she shut the door after him.

“I’m sending both my daughters to college,” said Mevlut as the door was closing on him.

Neither this pleasant exchange, nor any conversation with his other regulars, all of whom happened to be especially kind to him that night, managed to get Mevlut’s mind off the agony of losing his cart. He wondered where it might be, whether it would be mistreated if it fell into the wrong hands, how it would fare in the rain, even whether the butane stove might be stolen. He couldn’t bear to think of it without him there to look after it.

The next day, a few other street vendors whose carts and stalls had been likewise confiscated were waiting inside the imposing if somewhat decrepit Ottoman-era wooden building of Beyoğlu’s municipal offices. A junk dealer Mevlut had met a few times in Tarlabaşı was surprised to hear of a rice cart having been towed away. It was rare for vendors of cooked rice, meatballs, corn on the cob, or roasted chestnuts, who sold their goods from the more advanced, glass-paned rigs with built-in butane or coal stoves, to suffer a police seizure, since these vendors wouldn’t have been occupying their spots in the first place without having furnished gifts and free food to the health inspectors, as Mevlut did.

Neither Mevlut nor any other street vendor managed to get his cart back that day. An elderly man who sold pizza topped with minced meat said, “They’ll have destroyed them all by now,” a possibility Mevlut couldn’t even bear to think about.

The municipality’s health and hygiene regulations did not deter street vendors, and any fines on the books had long been rendered negligible by inflation, so the local authorities would make an example of recidivist vendors by destroying their carts and taking their goods on grounds of public health. This could lead to arguments, fisticuffs, and even knife fights, and sometimes a street vendor would plant himself outside the town hall to stage a hunger strike or set himself on fire, though this was rather rare. A street vendor could usually hope to get his confiscated stall back only right before a scheduled election, when every vote counted, or else if he happened to have a contact inside the administration. After that first day at the municipal building, the seasoned minced-meat-pizza vendor told Mevlut he was going out to buy himself a new cart the next day.

Mevlut resented this man for having decided not to seek out a contact in the bureaucracy and for being realistic enough to accept that he would never get his property back. Anyway, Mevlut didn’t have the money to buy a new three-wheeler and fit it with a stove. Even if he could raise the cash, he didn’t believe he could make a living selling rice anymore. Yet he couldn’t help but muse that if only he could get his cart back, he’d be able to return to his old life, and like those sad women who can’t accept that their husbands have died in the war, he simply couldn’t fathom that his white cart might really have been destroyed. There was an image in his mind, like a faded photograph, of the cart waiting for him in some municipal storeroom, on a concrete floor cordoned off by barbed wire.

The next day, he went back to Beyoğlu city hall. When one of the clerks asked him, “Where was your cart taken from?” Mevlut found out that the burned-down theater was officially in the municipal jurisdiction of Şişli, not Beyoğlu, and this filled his heart with hope. The Vurals and Korkut would help him find a contact at the Şişli Municipality. That night, in his dreams, he saw his white cart with its three wheels.

15. The Holy Guide

I Am the Victim of a Grave Injustice

Rayiha. Two weeks passed without any news about the cart. Mevlut was out long past midnight selling boza, woke up late, and ran around the house in his pajamas until noon, playing hide-and-seek and rock-paper-scissors with Fatma and Fevziye. Even at six and five the two of them could tell that something bad had happened, since there was no chickpea rice or chicken cooking in the house, and the white three-wheeled cart they loved so much was no longer tied to the almond tree every evening but had disappeared entirely. They put all their energy into playing with their father, maybe trying to suppress their worries over the fact that he was home and not working, and when their shouting got too loud, I’d yell at Mevlut:

“Take them out to get some fresh air in Kasımpaşa Park.”

“Will you give Vediha a call,” Mevlut would mumble. “Maybe there’s some news.”

Finally one night Korkut called: “Tell Mevlut to go to Şişli city hall. There’s a guy from Rize who works on the second floor, he’s one of Vural’s guys, he’ll help Mevlut out.”

—

That night, Mevlut was too joyous to sleep. He got up early in the morning, shaved, put on his best suit, and walked all the way to Şişli. As soon as he was reunited with his white cart, he was going to give it a fresh coat of paint, add some new decorations, and never leave it unattended again.

The man from Rize who worked on the second floor of the municipal building was an important and busy person, constantly scolding the people queuing up to see him. He kept Mevlut waiting in a corner for half an hour before summoning him with a flick of his finger. He led the way down a dark stairway, through corridors that smelled of cheap floor cleanser, stuffy rooms full of clerks reading newspapers, and a canteen that gave the whole basement an aroma of cheap oil and dishwasher liquid, and finally they emerged into a courtyard.

It was a dark courtyard surrounded by dark buildings, with a number of carts piled up in a corner; Mevlut’s heart leaped at the sight. As he walked toward them, he saw in a different corner two government officers hacking another cart to bits with an ax while a third man sorted the wheels, the wood from the frames, the stoves, and the glass panels into separate piles.

“So, have you picked one yet?” said the man from Rize, coming over to stand next to him.

“My cart isn’t here,” said Mevlut.

“Didn’t you say they took your cart a month ago? We usually strip them the day after we take them. Yours would have been destroyed, too, I’m afraid. These are the ones the health inspectors impounded yesterday. Of course if they went out every day, there’d be a riot. But if we never did any roundups at all, we’d have half the country selling potatoes and tomatoes in Taksim Square tomorrow. That would be the end of Beyoğlu and any hope of nice clean streets…We don’t usually let people claim their carts; they’d just wind up back on the square the next day. You should pick one out of this bunch before it’s too late…”

Mevlut looked at the carts like a shopper examining the merchandise. He spotted one with a glass cabinet like his own cart had and a solid wooden frame with thick, sturdy wheels. It was missing its butane stove, which had probably been stolen. But this cart was neater and newer than his. He began to feel guilty.

“I want my own cart.”

“Look, my friend, you were selling things on the street where you weren’t supposed to. Your cart’s been confiscated and destroyed. That is unfortunate, but you know the right people, so you can have a new cart for free. Take it and sell bread out of it, don’t let your children go hungry.”

“I don’t want it,” said Mevlut.

On the neat little cart that had caught his eye, Mevlut noticed that the previous owner had taped a picture of the famous belly dancer Seher Şeniz right next to postcards of Atatürk and the Turkish flag. He didn’t like that.

“Are you sure you don’t want it?” said the man from Rize.

“I’m sure,” said Mevlut, backing away.

“Weird one, aren’t you…How do you know Hadji Hamit Vural?”

“I just do,” said Mevlut, trying to sound like a man of many mysteries.

“Well, if you’re close enough that he’s doing you favors, stop working as a street vendor and go ask him for a job. You’d make more in a month as a foreman on one of his construction sites than you do now in a year.”

Outside on the square, life was ticking along in its usual humdrum way. Mevlut saw buses clattering, women shopping, men refilling lighters, guys selling lottery tickets, kids bouncing around in school blazers, a street vendor selling tea and sandwiches from his three-wheeled cart, policemen, and gentlemen in suits and ties. He felt furious at them all, like a man who has lost the woman he loves and cannot stand seeing the rest of the world go about their lives as usual. That clerk from Rize had been so disrespectful and condescending, too.

He wandered the streets just as he used to do in high school, feeling at odds with the world, and eventually he went into a coffeehouse in a part of Kurtuluş he’d never seen before and there spent three hours sheltering from the cold and looking at the television. He smoked his way through a packet of Maltepes and thought about money. Rayiha would have to step up her needlework.

He got home later than usual. When they saw Mevlut’s face, Rayiha and the girls figured out that he hadn’t gotten his cart back, that it had disappeared — died, in fact. Mevlut didn’t have to tell them anything. The whole house went into mourning. Rayiha had cooked some rice and chicken, thinking Mevlut would be out making sales the next day; they sat and ate it in silence. I wish I’d taken that nice cart they were offering me! thought Mevlut. The owner of that cart was probably out there somewhere thinking equally dark thoughts.

There was a weight on his soul. He felt a huge wave of inescapable darkness approach, threatening to engulf him. He picked up his pole and his jugs of boza and went out on the street earlier than usual, before it got completely dark, before that wave could reach him: walking was a relief, and it always made him feel better heading briskly into the night crying “Boozaaa.”

In fact, ever since his cart had been seized, he’d taken to going out long before the evening news came on. He’d head straight down the new road toward Atatürk Bridge and onward across the Golden Horn, his quick steps full of worry, rage, or inspiration as he pressed ahead, ever on the lookout for new neighborhoods, new customers.

When he’d first arrived in Istanbul, he would come here with his father to buy boza from the Vefa Boza Shop. In those days, they hardly ever ventured off the main roads, and they never came after dark. Back then, the homes in this area had been two-story frame buildings with bay windows and unvarnished wood; people used to keep their curtains drawn tight, turn their lights off early, and never drink any boza, and after ten o’clock, the same packs of stray dogs that had ruled these streets since Ottoman times would take over again.

Mevlut crossed Atatürk Bridge and ended up in Zeyrek, powering through the backstreets on his way to Fatih, Çarşamba, and Karagümrük. The more he called out “Boo-zaaa,” the better he felt. Most of the old wooden houses he remembered from twenty years ago had disappeared, replaced by four- or five-story concrete blocks like those they’d built in Feriköy, Kasımpaşa, and Dolapdere. Occasionally, somebody in one of these new buildings would part the curtains and open the windows to greet Mevlut like a strange messenger from the past.

“We’ve got the Vefa Boza Shop just around the corner, but it’s never occurred to us to go. When we heard the emotion in your voice, we couldn’t resist. How much for a glass? Where are you from, anyway?”

Mevlut could see that big apartment buildings had been constructed over what had been empty land, all the graveyards had vanished, and enormous trash cans had cropped up in even the remotest of neighborhoods, replacing the piles of trash that used to grow on street corners — and yet, stray dogs still ruled these streets at night.

What he couldn’t understand was why these dogs were so hostile and even downright aggressive when he ran into them in darkened alleyways. Whenever they heard Mevlut’s footsteps and his voice crying “Boza,” they would get up from where they were napping, or cease rifling through people’s rubbish, and assemble together like soldiers in battle formation to watch his every move, and maybe even bare their teeth in a growl. Boza sellers didn’t normally come to these streets, which perhaps explained why the dogs were so intolerant of his presence.

One evening, Mevlut remembered that when he was little, his father had taken him to a house with linoleum floors somewhere in one of these neighborhoods to see an old dervish and ask him to say some special prayers to help Mevlut overcome his fear of dogs. His father had treated this visit to the spiritual sage like a doctor’s appointment. He couldn’t now recall where the bearded old dervish’s house had been — he’d probably died years ago — but Mevlut did remember how carefully his younger self had listened to his advice and how he’d shivered as the old man breathed his incantations over him, banishing the fear of dogs from his heart.

He understood that if he wanted to cultivate the families who lived in these historic neighborhoods, who tried to haggle over the price of his boza, asked him pointless questions about its alcohol content, and generally regarded Mevlut as some sort of strange creature, he would have to devote at least one or two nights a week to walking around this side of the Golden Horn.

In his mind, he kept seeing his rice cart. It was better looking and had more character than any other he’d ever seen out on the streets. He scarcely believed that anyone could be so callous as to hack it apart with an ax. Perhaps they’d given it away to someone else, taking pity on some other rice seller who, like Mevlut, knew the right people. Maybe this scrounger was also from Rize; people from Rize always looked out for one another.

That night, no one had summoned him upstairs; no one had bought any boza yet. The city here was like a distant memory — wooden homes, coal-fire smoke hanging over the streets, crumbling walls…Mevlut couldn’t figure out where he was or how he’d gotten there.

Finally, a young man opened a window on a three-story building. “Boza seller, boza seller…Come on up.”

They showed him into an apartment. As he was taking his shoes off, he sensed a gathering of people inside. There was a pleasant yellow light. But the place looked like a government office. Mevlut saw about half a dozen people sitting around two tables.

They were each concentrating on something they were writing, but they seemed kind enough. They looked at Mevlut and smiled as people always did when seeing a boza seller for the first time in many years.

“Welcome, brother boza seller, we are happy to see you,” said an old man with silver hair and a warm face, smiling gently at Mevlut.

The others looked like they might be his students. They were serious and respectful but also cheerful. Seated with them at the same table, the silver-haired man said, “There’s seven of us. We’ll each have a glass.”

Someone showed Mevlut into a little kitchen. Very carefully, he poured out seven glasses. “Anyone want chickpeas and cinnamon on theirs?” he asked, calling to the people in the other room.

When one student opened the fridge, Mevlut saw that there was no alcohol inside. He also realized that there weren’t any women or families here. The silver-haired man joined them in the kitchen. “How much do we owe you?” he said, and then leaned in to look into Mevlut’s eyes, without waiting for a response. “There was so much sorrow in your voice, boza seller, we felt it in our hearts all the way up here.”

“I am the victim of a grave injustice,” said Mevlut, seized by the urge to talk. “They took my rice cart, they may have destroyed it, or maybe they’ve given it to someone else. A clerk from Rize who works in the municipality of Şişli was rude to me, but it’s late now and I wouldn’t want to bother you with my troubles.”

“Tell me, tell me,” said the silver-haired man, his friendly eyes saying, I feel bad for you, and I genuinely want to hear what you have to say. Mevlut explained that his poor little rice cart was out there somewhere, wasting away in the hands of strangers. He didn’t mention his financial worries, but he could tell the man understood. What really bothered him, though, was how people like the clerk from Rize and other people of position (the silver-haired man referred to them ironically as “notables”) tended to belittle him, never giving him the respect he deserved. Soon, he and the old man were sitting down on two small chairs in the kitchen, facing each other.

“Man is the most precious fruit of the tree of life,” the silver-haired old man told a rapt Mevlut. When they spoke, other holy men always sounded as if they were saying solitary prayers; Mevlut liked how this one could look him in the eyes like a long-lost friend but still speak with all the wisdom of a scholar.

“Man is the greatest of all God’s creatures. Nothing can blemish the jewel that is your heart. You shall find your cart, if it be the Lord’s will…You shall find it, God willing.”

Mevlut was flattered that such an intelligent and important man was taking the time to talk to him while his students waited in the other room, but he also suspected with some distress that this interest might be out of pity.

“Your students are waiting, sir,” he said. “I shouldn’t take up any more of your time.”

“Let them wait,” said the silver-haired man. A few further comments made a deep impression on Mevlut. The most complicated knots would come undone at the Lord’s command. His might would remove all obstacles. Perhaps there were even prettier formulations to come, but Mevlut was getting visibly uncomfortable (and irritated at his own fidgeting, which betrayed his anxiety), so the man stood up, drawing some money out of his pocket.

“I can’t take this, sir.”

“I won’t accept that; it would not be God’s way.”

At the door, they each insisted on giving way to the other—“After you, no, I insist”—like a pair of perfect gentlemen. “Boza seller, please take this money now,” said the man. “I promise you I will not offer to pay you the next time you come around. We hold discussions here every Thursday evening.”

“God bless you,” said Mevlut, not knowing whether this was the right thing to say. Instinctively, he bent down to kiss the radiant old man’s huge, wrinkly hand. It was covered in liver spots.

He came home late that night knowing that this was one encounter he couldn’t share with Rayiha. Over the next few days, he would come close to telling her about this man whose face shone with a divine light and whose words had lodged themselves in Mevlut’s mind, and how it was thanks to him that Mevlut was able to bear the bitter disappointment of losing his cart, but he always held back. Rayiha might have teased him, and that would have broken his heart.

The yellow light Mevlut had seen in the silver-haired man’s house in Çarşamba had stayed with him. What else had he seen? There had been words written in a beautiful ancient script hanging up on the walls. And there was the deference of the students sitting solemnly around the table, which he liked.

Throughout the week that followed, whenever he went out to sell boza, he saw the ghost of his white cart all over Istanbul. One time he saw a man from Rize pulling a white cart uphill along a winding road in Tepebaşı, and he ran after him, only to realize his mistake before he’d even caught up: his white cart was much more elegant than this crude, stumpy contraption.

When, on Thursday night, he walked through the backstreets of Fatih and past the house in Çarşamba calling “Boo-zaa,” and they invited him to come in, he hurried upstairs. In that brief visit, he found out that the students called the silver-haired old man “sir,” while other visitors referred to him as “the Holy Guide”; that the students who sat at the table dipped feather quills in inkpots and wrote things down in oversize letters; and that these letters formed words in Arabic taken from the Holy Koran. There were a few other sacred-seeming old things in the house: Mevlut particularly liked an old-fashioned coffeepot; framed words written in the same script they were tracing out at the table; a turban shelf with mother-of-pearl details; a grandfather clock with an enormous case whose ticking drowned out everyone’s whispers; and framed photographs of Atatürk and a few other frowning, equally serious (but bearded) figures.

At the same table in the kitchen the Holy Guide asked Mevlut about his cart, and Mevlut replied that, though he was still as determined as ever in his search, he had yet to find it and that he’d still not found a morning job (he was careful not to linger on that particular matter for long, lest he give the impression of having come looking for a job or a handout). There was only time to mention one of the things Mevlut had been thinking about over the past two weeks: his long nightly walks weren’t just part of his job anymore; they were something he felt he needed to do. When he didn’t go out wandering the streets at night, his powers of thought and imagination flagged.

The Holy Guide reminded him that in Islam labor was a form of prayer. Mevlut’s visceral urge to walk until the day the world ended was surely a sign and a consequence of the ultimate truth that, in this universe, only God was on our side, and only to Him could we ever turn for help. Mevlut was unsettled by these words, which he took to mean that the strange thoughts that crossed his mind as he walked the streets were put there by God Himself.

When the Holy Guide tried to pay for the boza (there were nine students with him that Thursday evening), Mevlut reminded him of how they’d agreed that the boza would be on him this time.

“What’s your name?” asked the Holy Guide in an admiring tone.

“Mevlut.”

“What a blessed name!” They walked from the kitchen to the front door. “Are you a mevlidhan?” he asked, loud enough for his students to hear.

Mevlut made a face designed to convey that he was, unfortunately, unable to answer the question because he didn’t know what that meant. His candor and humility made the students smile.

The Holy Guide explained that, as everyone knows, a mevlit is a long poem written to celebrate the Holy Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Mevlidhan is the beautiful but less-well-known name given to those who compose the music accompanying these odes. Mevlut should name his future son Mevlidhan, a name that would bring the boy good fortune. He must be sure to come by every Thursday — he needn’t even announce himself by calling out “Boza” from the street anymore.

—

Süleyman. Vediha told me that after losing his cart and failing to get it back by using the Vurals’ contacts, Mevlut now wanted to raise the rent on his one-room house in Kültepe, which was still occupied by the tenant I’d found him. Either that or he wanted a few months’ rent in advance. He soon called me up to talk about it.

“Look,” I said, “your tenant is some poor soul from Rize, one of the Vurals’ men, one of us, basically; he’d leave the house in a minute if we told him to, no questions asked. He’s afraid of Mr. Hamit. And it’s not like his rent is low, he pays on time every month, cash in hand, and Vediha hands it on to you, no taxes, no excuses. What more do you want?”

“I’m sorry, Süleyman, but I don’t really trust anyone from Rize these days, so he can go.”

“What a ruthless landlord you are, the man’s married, he’s just had a kid, are we supposed to throw him out on the street?”

“Nobody took pity on me when I came to Istanbul, did they?” said Mevlut. “You know what I mean. All right, fine, don’t throw anyone out on the street just yet.”

“We took pity on you, we cared for you,” I said carefully.

—

The monthly rent Vediha channeled to Mevlut had been just enough to cover a week’s worth of his family’s expenses. But after the phone call with Süleyman, the rent Vediha brought for the month of March, plus the rent paid in advance for April and May, was higher than usual. Mevlut didn’t dwell too much on how easy it had been to raise the rent or on what part the Aktaş family, Süleyman and Korkut, might have played in accomplishing this. He used the money to buy a secondhand ice-cream cart, an ice bucket, metal vats, and a mixing machine, having decided to spend the summer of 1989 selling ice cream.

When Mevlut went to pick up the cart from a neighborhood down the hill, Fatma and Fevziye came along; as they pushed the cart back home, they were euphoric. When their neighbor Reyhan, misinterpreting the cause of all this merriment, leaned out of her window to cheer the return of Mevlut’s rice cart, no one had the heart to correct her. While Mevlut and the girls repaired the cart and gave it a fresh coat of paint in the back garden, the evening news showed crowds of protesters filling up Tiananmen Square in Beijing. At the beginning of June, Mevlut was awed by the bravery of the street vendor who had stood all alone before the tanks. What had he been selling before he stepped in the way of those tanks with a plastic bag in each hand? Probably rice like me, thought Mevlut. On TV he had seen how the Chinese cooked their rice, and it wasn’t with chickpeas and chicken as Rayiha did; they boiled it for a very long time. Mevlut was impressed with the protesters, though he felt it was important not to go too far protesting against the state, especially in poorer countries, where, if not for the state, there would be no one looking after poor people or street vendors. They were doing all right in China; the only problem was that Communists were, unfortunately, godless.

In the seven years that had passed since the summer Mevlut ran away with Rayiha, the major milk, chocolate, and sugar brands in the country had embarked on a fierce competition to place deep freezers in all the grocery stores, pastry shops, and sandwich and cigarette stalls in Istanbul. Starting in May every year, these shops would plant their freezers outside on the pavement so that people stopped buying ice cream from street vendors. Claiming that Mevlut was obstructing the way, the municipal police could seize and destroy his cart if he spent more than five minutes in the same spot, but they never said a word about the huge freezers from these big companies, which made it so difficult for people trying to walk by. On TV, there was a constant stream of commercials for these strange new ice-cream brands. In the narrow back alleys where Mevlut pushed his cart, children would come up to him and ask, “Do you have any Flinta, ice-cream man? Do you have a Rocket?”

If he was in a good mood, Mevlut would tell them, “This ice cream will fly farther than any of your Rockets.” That joke might even be good for a few more sales. But most evenings, he’d get home early and in a bad mood, and when Rayiha came downstairs to help him with the cart as she used to do seven years ago, he would snap at her: “Why are the girls still out so late playing by themselves?” Rayiha would go looking for them, and he would just leave the ice-cream cart behind and head upstairs to stare forlornly at the TV before going to bed. In one of these moments of dejection, he saw the giant waves of an ocean of his own dark thoughts roiling on the TV screen. He worried that unless he found a real job in the autumn, he would be unable to afford schoolbooks and clothes for the girls, food for the family, and gas for the stove.

16. The Binbom Café

Let Them Know What You’re Worth

TOWARD THE END of August, Rayiha told her husband that a former restaurant owner from Trabzon, a man close to the Vurals, was looking to hire someone like Mevlut. Mevlut was mortified to realize that his financial woes had once again been the subject of conversation at the Aktaş dinner table.

—

Rayiha. “They’re looking for someone who is honest and knows how food service and restaurants work, and that’s not easy to find in Istanbul these days,” I told Mevlut. “When you’re negotiating your salary, make sure you let them know what you’re worth. You owe it to your daughters,” I added, because Fatma would be starting primary school around the same time Mevlut was meant to start his new job. We both went to the ceremony they held on Fatma’s first day at Piyale Paşa Primary School. They made us stand in line all along the wall surrounding the playground. The principal explained that the school building used to be the private residence of a pasha who conquered some Mediterranean islands belonging to the French and the Italians around four hundred fifty years ago. The pasha attacked an enemy warship all by himself, and when he disappeared, everyone assumed he’d been taken prisoner, but in fact he’d managed to take the ship single-handedly. As for the children, they weren’t listening to the principal; they were either talking among themselves or clinging to their parents for fear of what was to come. As she walked into the school hand in hand with the other children, Fatma got scared and burst into tears. We waved to her until she disappeared into the building. It was a cool, cloudy day. On our way home up the hill, I saw tears and clouds of gloom in Mevlut’s eyes. He didn’t come home but went straight to the café where he was to be a “manager.” That same afternoon was the only time I would need to go to Kasımpaşa to fetch Fatma from school. She couldn’t stop talking about the teacher’s mustache and the window in her classroom. After that day, she made her way to school and back with the other neighborhood girls.

—

Rayiha called Mevlut a “manager” with equal amounts of affection and ridicule, though it wasn’t Mevlut who’d come up with the title but the owner of the café himself, Boss Tahsin from Trabzon. Just as he referred to his little café’s three workers as “employees” (“worker” wasn’t a nice word), he asked that they refrain from calling him “boss” and use “captain” instead, as would befit a true man of the Black Sea. All this achieved, however, was that his employees felt moved to call him “boss” even more often.

Mevlut soon realized that he’d been offered this job because Boss Tahsin didn’t trust his employees. He would have dinner at home with his family and then come down every evening to take over the cash register from his manager. He’d handle all payments himself for the next two hours, and then he’d close the café for the day. The twenty-four-hour diners on İstiklal Avenue were always crowded and lively, but anyone who came all the way down to the Binbom Café’s backstreets at night was either lost, drunk, or looking for cigarettes and alcohol.

It was Mevlut’s job to open the café at ten in the morning and man the till until around eight in the evening, as well as making sure that the café ran smoothly. The Binbom Café’s customers mostly worked in the surrounding backstreets — in photography studios, advertising agencies, cheap restaurants, and nightclubs featuring Turkish classical music — or just happened to be passing by. Despite being a tiny, nar row place far from the main street, the café didn’t do too badly. But the suspicious boss was convinced that his employees were cheating him.

It didn’t take Mevlut long to figure out that Boss Tahsin’s anxiety about his workers’ honesty was more than just the usual prejudice of a rich man who thinks that the poor folk he employs must all be out to get him. They were in fact up to a trick Mevlut had seen before and that the boss warned him to look out for: they used the quantities they were given of cheese, minced meat, pickles, beef sausages, and tomato paste to make more sandwiches than municipal guidelines allowed and the owner had instructed, and what they received for the extra sandwiches they pocketed. Captain Tahsin, however, had developed a countermeasure, which he proudly explained to Mevlut: every day, a man from Rize who owned the Tayfun Bakery and supplied all of Binbom’s sandwich bread and hamburger buns would call the Captain to tell him exactly how many loaves he’d delivered that day, which prevented the café staff from using bits of cheese and minced meat salvaged from other portions to make extra sandwiches and burgers. But the workers could as easily work their trick with things like orange, pomegranate, or apple juice, and since there was no helpful baker to count the glasses used, it was up to Manager Mevlut to keep a watchful eye.

Mevlut’s main responsibility, though, was to make sure that every single customer was issued a receipt from the cash register, that great innovation that had sprung up all over the city five years ago. The Captain believed that no matter how much they tried to scrimp on cheese, no matter how much sugary water they secretly used to top up half a glass of orange juice, there was no way his employees could cheat him if every customer received a receipt. To ensure this discipline, every now and then the Captain would send an anonymous friend of his down to the café. The undercover operative would have a bite to eat and ask for a discount on his order in exchange for forgoing a receipt, just as the rest of Istanbul seemed to be doing. If the manager at the till agreed, it meant he was pocketing the money himself, and he would be fired immediately — just like Mevlut’s predecessor.

Mevlut didn’t see the café’s employees as opportunists waiting for a chance to cheat their boss from Trabzon but rather as the earnest crew of this boat they were all sailing. He always worked with a smile and took genuine pleasure in praising his colleagues’ work—“Ah, you’ve toasted this sandwich to perfection” or “God, this kebab wrap looks nice and crispy!” In the evenings, Mevlut would report dutifully to his superior officer, brimming with pride in the place’s smooth operation, especially on good days.

Once he’d surrendered the bridge to his captain, he’d run back home to sip a bowl of Rayiha’s lentil or wheat soup, watching TV out of the corner of his eye as he did at the café all day. Since café workers were allowed as many sandwiches and kebab wraps as they liked for their own consumption, Mevlut was never hungry when he came home, nor did he expect much for dinner, and while he sipped his soup he loved to look at Fatma’s school textbooks and especially at the letters, numbers, and sentences she’d written in her tiny, beautiful hand all over the white pages of her notebook (the same notebooks that in his day were of cheap yellow paper). He still went out again toward the end of the evening news and stayed out selling boza until as late as eleven thirty.

Now that he was managing the café and had another source of income, Mevlut didn’t feel the pressing need to sell one more glass or to look for new customers on remote streets in the old neighborhoods across the Golden Horn, where the dogs bared their teeth and growled. One summer evening, he took his ice-cream cart and visited the Holy Guide and his students, who gave him a tray of tulip-shaped teacups to fill up with ice cream on the street, and after that day he knocked on their door whenever he felt the need to confide in someone, using boza as an excuse when winter came and the weather got cold. To make it clear that he wasn’t there for business but for the depth of their conversation, he insisted that the ice cream or the boza served on every third visit would be on him, describing this on one occasion as “an offering to the school.” The Holy Guide’s lectures were termed “conversations.”

It was almost a year after his first visit before Mevlut deduced that the apartment where the Holy Guide gave his students private instruction in the art of Ottoman calligraphy was also a secret lodge of his sect. One reason that it took Mevlut so long to catch on was that the visitors to the apartment that served as a spiritual center were all so quiet and secretive by nature — but, equally, a part of Mevlut just didn’t care to know what was going on. He was so pleased to be there and know that every Thursday evening the Holy Guide would take the time to talk to him and listen to his problems — even if it was just five minutes — that he tried to avoid thinking anything that might spoil his happiness. Someone had once invited Mevlut to the Tuesday Discussions, regularly attended by twenty to thirty people and at which the Holy Guide was said to speak with anyone who came knocking at his door, but Mevlut never went.

Sometimes he worried that by going to the lodge and getting involved with the sect, he might be doing something illegal, but he would tell himself, If these are bad people doing bad things against the state, they wouldn’t have a huge picture of Atatürk on the wall, would they? Soon, however, he realized that the Atatürk picture was only there for show — just like the poster of Atatürk wearing a hat that hung right at the entrance to the Communist hideout he and Ferhat used to frequent in high school — so that if the police ever raided the house, the pious students could say, “There must be some mistake, we all love Atatürk!” The only difference between the Communists and the political Islamists was that the Communists criticized Atatürk constantly (Mevlut disapproved of their foul language) even though they truly believed in him; these Islamists, on the other hand, had no use at all for Atatürk but never said a word against him. Mevlut preferred the latter approach, and so when some of the Holy Guide’s more insolent and outspoken college men claimed that “Atatürk destroyed our glorious five-hundred-year-old tradition of calligraphy when he tried to imitate the West with his alphabet revolution,” he pretended not to hear them.

Mevlut likewise disapproved of those conservative college guys who would use every fawning trick in the book to get the Holy Guide to notice them, only to start gossiping idly and discussing TV shows when he left the room. Mevlut saw no trace of a TV anywhere inside the Holy Guide’s apartment, and this worried him because it seemed to him proof that what was going on here was something dangerous, of which the government would not have approved. Those who attended the Holy Guide’s lessons could well find themselves in trouble come the next military coup when the army started rounding up all the Communists, Kurds, and Islamists. On the other hand the Holy Guide had never told Mevlut anything that could be construed as political propaganda or indoctrination.

—

Rayiha. With Mevlut running the café and Fatma going to primary school, I had a lot more time for my needlework. We didn’t have to worry about making ends meet anymore, so I worked because I felt like it, and because I liked earning my own money, too. Sometimes they gave us a picture or a page from a magazine showing us what design to embroider on which part of the curtain…But sometimes all they said was “You decide.” Whenever we had to decide, I could end up staring at the fabric for ages, asking myself, What shall I do, what shall I stitch on this? But I was just as likely to overflow with ideas for patterns, symbols, flowers, six-sided clouds, and deer bounding through fields, which I would apply to everything in sight — curtains, pillowcases, duvet covers, tablecloths, and napkins.

“Take a break, Rayiha, you’re getting lost in the work again,” Reyhan would say.

—

Two or three afternoons a week, Rayiha would take Fatma and Fevziye by the hand and bring them to the café. The girls didn’t see much of their father outside his one hour at home every evening with his bowl of soup. Mevlut would still be asleep when Fatma went to school in the morning, and both girls were usually in bed by the time he came home at midnight. Fatma and Fevziye would have loved to go to the café more often, but their father had forbidden them from coming on their own, and he insisted that they never let go of their mother’s hand while on the way. Technically, Rayiha wasn’t allowed in Beyoğlu either, and especially not on İstiklal Avenue: when they ran to cross the road, she and the girls would feel as if they were fleeing Beyoğlu’s crowds of men as much as dodging the traffic itself.

—

Rayiha. While I’ve got the chance, I’d like to be clear that it’s not true I never fed Mevlut anything but soup for dinner in the five years he spent running the café. I also made him scrambled eggs with parsley and green peppers, french fries, pastry rolls, and kidney-bean stew with plenty of sweet peppers and carrots. As you know, Mevlut loves a roast chicken with potatoes. Now that he wasn’t selling rice anymore, once a month I’d buy him and the girls chicken from Hamdi the poultry dealer; he still gave me a discount.

—

Although no one ever spoke about it at home, the real reason that Rayiha brought the girls to the Binbom Café was so they could eat their fill of kebab wraps and cheese-and-sausage sandwiches and drink ayran and orange juice to their hearts’ content.

In the beginning, Rayiha had always felt the need to explain these visits somehow: “We were just passing by and thought we’d say hello!” “Good idea,” one of the café workers might say. After the first few visits, the girls started to get their favorite things prepared and served up to them without even having to ask. Rayiha wouldn’t eat anything, and if a kind, smiling café worker took the initiative to make her a kebab or a grilled-cheese sandwich, she always refused it, claiming she’d already eaten. Mevlut was proud of his wife’s principled stance, and he never told her “It’s okay, have a bite” as his coworkers expected him to.

Later, when Mevlut found out that the Binbom Café’s employees were cheating Captain Tahsin, his daughters’ free kebab sandwiches started to weigh on his conscience.

17. The Café Employees’ Big Swindle

You Stay Out of It

AT THE START of 1990, Mevlut discovered the complex yet perfectly logical scheme by which the workers of the Binbom Café were circumventing the rules imposed by their boss from Trabzon to prevent them from cheating him. Every day, the café workers would draw from a common fund of their own money to buy bread and buns from a different bakery and stuff them meticulously with fillings bought from other shops, effectively preparing and selling their own food unbeknownst to the boss. Their hamburgers and kebab sandwiches were concealed like drugs in secret parcels delivered to nearby offices every day at lunchtime. Visiting every one of these offices himself with a little ledger in which he also wrote down comments people made on the food, a café worker named Vahit would collect the proceeds from these sales, bypassing Mevlut’s cash register. It had taken Mevlut a long time to discover this covert well-oiled machine, and another long winter was to pass before the café employees realized that he had found them out but wasn’t reporting them to the boss.

Mevlut was inclined to blame any wrongdoing at the café on the boss’s youngest employee, the Weasel (whose real name no one ever used). The Weasel had just come back from military service, and his job was to manage the café’s basement kitchen and storeroom, a filthy, fearsome cave measuring two by two and a half meters, where he prepared hamburger buns, tomato sauce, ayran, and french fries, among other things, and also perfunctorily washed — or, actually, rinsed — the café’s glasses and aluminum plates, these efforts interrupted by occasional forays upstairs during the rush times to help out with anything from toasting sandwiches to serving ayran. Mevlut had first spotted the other bakery’s bread down in the Weasel’s rat- and roach-infested kitchen.

Mevlut wasn’t fond of Vahit; he didn’t like the way he stared indecently at any decent-looking woman he saw. Yet, somewhat to Mevlut’s dismay, working together started to draw them closer over time. If there were no customers, they would while away the hours watching TV together, and at any emotional moment in whatever happened to be on-screen (there were five or six such moments a day), they would always glance toward each other with matching looks — and that, too, drew them closer. Eventually, Mevlut began to feel as if he’d known Vahit all his life. But when Mevlut realized Vahit’s role in the café employees’ illicit scheme, the intimacy of their shared reactions to the feelings emitting from the TV made Mevlut uneasy. Surely, he thought, genuine compassion was beyond a swindler like Vahit. As the manager, Mevlut even wondered whether this guilty employee had been using their shared responses to the TV as a way of getting into Mevlut’s good books.

Around the time he first noticed the signs of fraudulent activity at the café, Mevlut also began to feel as if the one eye (not both, strangely) with which he observed Vahit and the others had somehow detached itself from his body and had, of its own accord, begun to scrutinize Mevlut himself. When he felt trapped sometimes among the people whose lives revolved around this café, the eye would be watching him; he would feel fake. But then some Binbom customers ate their kebab sandwiches never looking away from their own reflections in the mirror.

When he was still selling cooked rice on the streets, Mevlut may have endured the cold standing on his feet, and he may have struggled to find customers for his ice cream, but at least in those days he had been free. He could let his mind wander, he could turn his back on the world whenever he wanted, and his body would move as his heart might will it. Now, he may as well have been chained to the shop. Dur ing the day, in those desperate moments when he took his eyes off the television and tried to daydream instead, he would console himself with the thought that he would see his daughters later and then go out to sell boza. He had customers he loved to see every evening, and there was the rest of the city, too. By now, he knew that every time he cried out “Boo-zaaa” with a particular sentiment, the people of Istanbul felt the very same emotion in their hearts, and that was why they asked him upstairs and bought his boza.

So it was that in the years he spent managing the Binbom Café, Mevlut became a more devoted and passionate boza seller than he’d ever been before. When he shouted “Boo-zaa” into half-lit streets, he wasn’t just calling out to a pair of closed curtains that concealed families going about their lives, or to some bare, unplastered wall, or to the demonic dogs whose invisible presence he could sense on darkened street corners; he was also reaching into the world inside his mind. Because every time he shouted “Boo-zaa,” he could feel the paintings in his mind emerging from his mouth like speech bubbles in a comic book before dissolving into the weary streets like clouds. Every word was an object, and every object was a picture. He sensed, now, that the streets on which he sold boza in the night and the universe in his mind were one and the same. Sometimes Mevlut thought he might be the only one to have ever discovered this remarkable truth, or perhaps it was a divine light that God had elected to bestow on him alone. When he came out of the café and went home in the evening feeling uneasy, and afterward walked into the night carrying his shoulder pole, he would discover the world within his soul reflected in the shadows of the city.

He was calling out “Boo-zaa” one night after yet another day of not knowing what to do about the conspiracy at the Binbom Café, when a pleasant orange light spilled out of a window that had just opened up in the darkness. A big black shadow asked him to come upstairs.

It was an old Greek building in the backstreets of Feriköy. Mevlut remembered having delivered yogurt to this apartment with his father one afternoon soon after first arriving in Istanbul (like so many street vendors, he had the city’s apartment blocks and the plaques identifying them emblazoned in his mind). The building was called the Savanora. It still smelled of dust, moisture, and frying oil. He walked through a door on the second floor and into a wide, brightly lit room: the old apartment had been turned into a textile factory. He saw about a dozen girls each sitting at a sewing machine. Some were still children, but most were around Rayiha’s age, and everything about them — from the way they tied their headscarves loose, to the serious, faraway expressions on their faces as they worked — seemed frighteningly familiar to Mevlut. The man with the kind face was the one who had appeared at the window earlier, their boss. “Boza seller, these hardworking young ladies are like daughters to me. We need to fulfill an order from England; they’re soldiering on until the minibus comes to take them home in the morning,” he said. “Will you be kind and give them your best boza and your freshest roasted chickpeas? Where are you from, anyway?” Mevlut looked closely at the stucco reliefs on the walls, the big mirror with a gilded frame, and the chandelier made of fake crystals — all left behind by the Greek families who’d lived here once. For many years, whenever he would think back to this room, he would become convinced that his memory was playing tricks on him, that he hadn’t seen that chandelier or that mirror. It had to be, for in his recollections, the girls at the sewing machines would all look exactly like his daughters, Fatma and Fevziye.

Fatma and Fevziye would wear their matching black school uniforms, fix each other’s white collar — a blend of synthetic fibers and cotton, which always looked freshly starched — to the button on the back of their aprons, put their hair up, pick up the backpacks Mevlut had bought them at a discount from a shop in Sultanhamam (a place he knew from his high-school days selling Kısmet with Ferhat), and leave for school at seven forty-five every morning, just as their father, still in his pajamas, was getting out of bed.

Once the girls left for school, Mevlut and Rayiha would make love for as long as they liked. After their second daughter, Fevziye, had grown up a bit, they’d almost never had the chance to be alone in the room as they used to be in their first year of marriage. They only had the house to themselves when the girls were with Reyhan or another neighbor or when Vediha or Samiha came by early in the morning and took them out. On a summer day, the girls could sometimes disap pear for hours, at play with their friends in a neighbor’s garden. When the warm weather presented Mevlut and Rayiha this opportunity, they would always exchange a pointed look the moment they were alone. “Where are they?” Mevlut would ask; Rayiha would say, “They must be busy playing in the neighbor’s garden,” to which Mevlut would respond, “You never know, they might come back,” and that would be enough to keep them from reprising those blissful early days of their marriage.

For the past six or seven years, their embraces in their one-room house had occurred only after midnight, when the girls were in their bed in the other corner of the room, immersed in the deepest phase of their sleep. If Rayiha was up waiting for Mevlut returning late from his boza rounds, and if she received him sweetly instead of just looking at the television, Mevlut would take it as an invitation and switch all the lights off as soon as he was sure that the girls were sound asleep. Husband and wife would make cautious love under the covers, trying their best to keep it brief — for by then Mevlut was always exhausted. Sometimes they would fall asleep for a few hours only to wake up, pajamas and nightgown intertwined, and make love in hushed haste, though with deep and genuine feeling. Still, all these obstacles meant that they were enjoying their conjugal right less frequently than ever before, which they accepted as a natural feature of married life.

But now they had more time, and working at the café Mevlut wasn’t as tired as he used to be. Soon enough, the enthusiasm of those early days of their marriage returned, and now they felt easier together, too, for they had come to know and trust each other, and they weren’t so shy anymore. Being at home alone brought them closer, and they began once more to experience that mutual reliance that can only exist between husband and wife, and to remember how lucky they were to have found each other.

Their happiness also helped Rayiha to stop dwelling on the doubts Süleyman had cast on the intended recipient of Mevlut’s letters, though she still couldn’t forget them entirely. She continued to have moments of uncertainty, but on those occasions she’d read a couple of letters from her bundle and take comfort from Mevlut’s beautiful words.

Mevlut was expected at the Binbom Café at ten in the morning, so once the girls left for school, husband and wife could indulge in their conjugal happiness for no more than an hour and a half, including the time they spent sipping their tea and coffee at their one and only table. (Mevlut’s breakfast would always be a toasted cheese-and-tomato sandwich at Binbom.) It was during these hours of blissful companionship that Mevlut began telling Rayiha about the treachery taking place at the Binbom Café.

—

Rayiha. “You stay out of it,” I told him. “Keep an eye on everything but pretend you’ve seen nothing.” “But the boss put me there to find out what was going on,” said Mevlut — and he was right. “The boss is Vural’s man…Won’t they think I’m a fool who can’t smell a rat even when it’s dangling under his nose?” “Mevlut, you know they’re all in it together. If you tell the boss, they’ll gang up on you and tell him you were the one cheating him all along. Then you’ll be the one who loses his job. It would only make you look bad with the Vurals.” I saw how Mevlut would panic every time I said this, and it made me sad.

18. Last Days at the Binbom Café

Twenty Thousand Sheep

ON THE NIGHT of 14 November 1991, a Lebanese merchant vessel sailing south and a ship from the Philippines carrying corn toward the Black Sea collided before the ancient fortress that stands on the narrowest stretch of the Bosphorus. The Lebanese ship sank, and five of her crew drowned. While watching TV with the others at the Binbom Café the next morning, Mevlut heard that the Lebanese ship had been carrying twenty thousand sheep.

The people of Istanbul found out about the accident when the sheep began to wash up against the piers along the Bosphorus and on the shores of Rumelihisarı, Kandilli, Bebek, Vaniköy, and Arnavutköy. Some of the poor creatures made it there alive, climbing out onto the city streets through the boathouses of old wooden mansions that hadn’t burned down yet, the jetties of modern restaurants that had replaced what used to be fishermen’s coffeehouses, and the gardens of homes where people had docked their boats for winter. The sheep were enraged and exhausted. Their cream-white pelts were clotted with mud and stained petrol green, their tired, spindly legs, which they could barely move, soaked in a rust-hued liquid resembling boza, and their eyes full of an ancient regret. Mevlut had been transfixed by those sheep eyes staring out from every inch of the café’s TV screen, and he’d felt all the force of that regret in his own soul.

Some of the sheep were rescued by people who, having heard about the accident, sailed out straightaway in the dead of night to help, and while a few of these animals found new homes in this way, most had died before morning. The roads, private docks, parks, and teahouses lining the Bosphorus filled up with the carcasses of drowned sheep, which made Mevlut and the rest of Istanbul want to run down and help.

Mevlut heard stories of how some sheep, having managed to get out into the city streets, inexplicably attacked people only to drop dead without warning, or walked into mosque courtyards, sacred tombs, and cemeteries, or how they were, in fact, harbingers of the apocalypse that was to come in the year 2000 and proof that the prophecies of the late columnist Celâl Salik, who’d been gunned down for his views, had been right all along. Thereafter, whenever Mevlut looked at the TV at the Binbom Café, he thought of the fate of those sheep, which he saw as signs of something deeper — just as those fishermen who kept finding dead sheep entangled in their nets every day, bloated like enormous balloons, came to see them as omens of misfortune.

What made everything worse, and turned the whole matter into the stuff of the city’s nightmares, were the reports that most of the twenty thousand sheep remained trapped inside the hull, still alive and waiting to be saved. Mevlut followed the interviews of divers who’d been sent down to the wreckage, but he just couldn’t picture what it must be like for the sheep sitting in darkness in the bowels of that ship. Was it actually dark in there, and did it smell bad, or was it like the world of dreams? The plight of the sheep reminded him of Jonah in the belly of the whale. What sins had the sheep committed to have ended up in that dark place? Was it more like heaven or hell in there? The Almighty God had sent Abraham a sheep to spare him from sacrificing his own son. Why had He sent twenty thousand sheep to Istanbul?

Beef and lamb were rare indulgences in Mevlut’s house. He stopped eating kebab sandwiches for a time. But he kept this new aversion to meat a secret from the world; it would never evolve into a serious moral stance, and it was forgotten entirely the day that the employees at the Binbom Café decided to share some crispy kebab leftovers.

Mevlut could feel how quickly time was passing; he felt himself aging every day spent trying to keep up with the treachery at the Bin bom Café, until, slowly, he knew he was turning into a different person. Finally, in the winter of 1993, after three years as manager, Mevlut realized that it was too late to alert the boss to his employees’ tricks. He’d tried once or twice to explain his moral quandary to the Holy Guide, but he’d never received a response that managed to ease his anxieties.

It only bewildered him all the more to see that, even when workers left the café for military service or a better job, or because they didn’t get along with anyone, the duplicity continued undaunted, burdening Mevlut’s conscience.

The person whom Mevlut should have denounced to the boss was the architect of the whole scheme, a man named Muharrem. Known as Chubby among the staff, he was the public face of the Binbom Café, a backstreet, poor man’s version of a cartoon hero created collectively by the men of the kebab and sandwich shops lining Taksim Square and İstiklal Avenue. He was in charge of roasting the döner kebab in the café window (meaning that he turned it on the spit once one side was cooked, made sure it didn’t burn, and when necessary cut it up for customers), and he wielded his long kebab knife the way a Maraş ice-cream vendor handled his spoon, twirling it with a flair designed to draw customers, especially tourists, off the street. Mevlut didn’t care for all this show. It wasn’t as if tourists ever came down this alley anyway.

Mevlut sometimes suspected that if Chubby Muharrem made all this effort for not much revenue at all, it was perhaps to hide from himself, as well as everyone else, his role as head crook. But having so rarely met anyone of genuine moral sentiment in all his days as a street vendor, he wondered whether in fact it might just be the opposite: Chubby Muharrem could have been perpetrating his expert surreptitious fraud without even considering it morally reprehensible. In the politically charged days after the bomb that killed the secular and leftist columnist Uğur Mumcu, Chubby discovered Mevlut was onto the scheme and explained that he viewed the whole arrangement as a way for the workers — underpaid and cruelly deprived of any benefits — to safeguard their own rights without bothering the boss. Mevlut was struck by the power of this leftist pronouncement, which engendered in him a new respect for Chubby. He may have been a criminal, but Mevlut could never betray him to the boss, the state, or the police.

In July, when Islamists attacked Alevis in Sivas and thirty-five people — including writers and poets — were burned alive inside the Madımak Hotel, Mevlut started missing his high-school friend again and longed to talk politics with him and to curse the villains of this world, as they used to do. Rayiha found out that Ferhat, who had been reading electric meters for the municipal government, had kept his job after the utility was privatized and was making plenty of money. Mevlut didn’t really want to believe that Ferhat could be doing so well, but sometimes, when the truth was unavoidable, he would console himself by remembering that the only way to make lots of money fast was to do wrong (just as they were doing at the Binbom Café), and he would judge Ferhat accordingly. Mevlut had seen so many youthful Communists turn into capitalists once they were married. They were usually even more obnoxious than committed Communists.

When autumn came, Vahit the ledger keeper began confiding to Mevlut the details of the employees’ scheme in tones somewhere between menacing and plaintive. He himself was innocent, he insisted. Mevlut must not betray him to the boss, but if he did, Vahit would have no choice but to do the same in return. Once he’d gotten that off his chest, Vahit looked at Mevlut as if to say “That’s life, huh!” just as he’d been doing recently during the most poignant scenes of all those TV reports on the destruction of Mostar Bridge in Bosnia. Vahit wanted to get married, which was another reason that he needed money. It wasn’t just the boss from Trabzon who was exploiting him, but Chubby and the others, too. His share of the profits from their fraud was small. In fact Chubby, “the real boss around here,” was much worse than the Captain. Unless Vahit started to get his due, he would go to the boss and tell him all about Chubby’s machinations.

All of this surprised Mevlut. In truth, Vahit was threatening to hit him where he was most vulnerable: his relationship with the Vurals. The extravagant praise the boss had heaped on his new manager, all to scare his other employees and make clear that Mevlut could not be bought, had backfired and might now be used against Mevlut. Some evenings, as the boss closed out the cash register, he would applaud Mevlut in front of everyone: Mevlut from Konya was an honest, ethical, and truly honorable man. He had all the innocence and sincerity of people from central Turkey. The boss spoke of heartland Turks as though he were the first to discover them in Istanbul. Once you managed to win these heartland Turks over, once they started believing in you, they would lay down their lives for you, if need be.

The Vurals cared deeply about their honor. Mevlut was one of their men, which meant that he would never cheat anybody and that he would have their backing when the time came to punish those who did cheat. From the way Vahit spoke, Mevlut got the impression that he believed the Black Sea Vurals to be the true owners of the Binbom Café, and the boss from Trabzon, like Mevlut himself, but another of their pawns. This didn’t surprise Mevlut: over his years in the streets of Istanbul, he’d met thousands of people, and he’d seen how they invariably believed that behind every drama and in every battle there was always someone else pulling the strings.

One cold winter day in February, Mevlut slept through the morning after his daughters had left for school. When he got to work, twenty minutes later than usual, he found the Binbom Café shuttered. The locks had been changed, so he couldn’t even get inside. The shop that sold nuts and sunflower seeds two doors down told him that there had been a big fight at the café last night, obliging the Beyoğlu police to step in. The boss from Trabzon had brought some men in to beat up the workers, and they’d all ended up at the police station. After the police more or less forced both sides to make peace, the boss had come back with a locksmith he’d found God knows where, changed the locks, and put up a sign in the window that said CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS.

That’s the official story, thought Mevlut. Meanwhile, in a part of his mind he kept thinking that he’d been fired for coming late to work that morning. Maybe the boss had discovered the workers’ scheme, or maybe he hadn’t. All he wanted to do was to go straight home to talk it all through with Rayiha, to share his distress at being unemployed again — if such was indeed the case — but he didn’t go home.

He spent the next few mornings wandering into coffeehouses he didn’t know and trying to figure out how to make ends meet. He was filled with a sense of guilt and impending doom, but there was a sort of joy there, too, which he quickly stopped trying to hide from him self. It was the same mix of freedom and fury he’d felt whenever he skipped school as a teenager. It had been a long time since he’d had the chance to walk the city aimlessly at noon, with no pressing business, and he went down to Kabataş, relishing the moment. Someone else had parked a cart for rice with chickpeas in the same spot he’d occupied for years. He saw the seller standing next to the big, ancient fountain, but he was reluctant to go any closer. He felt briefly as if he were watching his own life from a distance. Did this guy make much money? He was a slender man, just like Mevlut.

The park behind the fountain had finally been finished and opened to the public. Mevlut sat on a bench feeling the full weight of his predicament. His eyes roamed over the distant outline of Topkapı Palace in the mist, the enormous, gray ghosts of the city’s mosques, big ships with metallic hues gliding noiselessly past, and the seagulls with their incessant litany of scream and squabble. He felt a melancholy coming on, advancing with the irresistible determination of those huge ocean waves he’d seen on TV. Only Rayiha could console him. Mevlut knew he couldn’t live without her.

Twenty minutes later, he was at home in Tarlabaşı. Rayiha didn’t even ask, “Why are you back so early?” He pretended that he’d found some excuse to leave the café and come home to make love to her. (They’d done this before.) They forgot the world — including their daughters — for the next forty minutes.

Mevlut quickly found out that he didn’t need to bring the subject up at all, for Vediha had come by that morning and relayed all the news to Rayiha. She’d begun with a cutting “How can you still not have a telephone?” before recounting how one of the café’s workers had told the boss that he was being cheated by his employees. So Captain Tahsin had called in his friends from Trabzon to raid the shop and take back his property. An exchange of insults had led to a tussle between Chubby and the boss, landing them both in the police station, where they’d eventually shaken hands and called a truce. This informant had also claimed that Mevlut had been aware of these scoundrels’ tricks but that he’d taken money in exchange for his silence; the boss had believed this and complained to Hadji Hamit Vural about Mevlut.

Korkut and Süleyman told Hadji Hamit’s sons that Mevlut was an honest man who would never sink so low, and they refuted these slanders against the family’s honor. But the Aktaş family was also angry at Mevlut for causing this situation and jeopardizing their ties with the Vurals. Now Mevlut was getting angry at Rayiha for relaying all this bad news so sternly, without any hint of sympathy, almost as if she thought they had a point.

Rayiha noticed this immediately. “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way,” she said. “There are always plenty of people who want their curtains and their linens embroidered.”

What upset Mevlut most was that Fatma and Fevziye would no longer be able to have toasted cheese-and-sausage sandwiches and kebabs from the café in the afternoons. The staff had been so fond of them both, always so sweet to them. Chubby used to do funny impressions with his kebab knife to make them laugh. A week later, Mevlut heard through the grapevine that Chubby and Vahit were both very angry, calling him an opportunist who’d taken advantage of them by claiming a share of the spoils only to turn around and betray everyone to the boss. Mevlut didn’t respond to any of their accusations.

He caught himself longing once again to renew his friendship with Ferhat. Whenever Mevlut asked him something, Ferhat had always had an illuminating response, even if it hurt Mevlut’s feelings. Ferhat would have had the best advice on how to deal with the secret plots at the café. But Mevlut knew that this yearning amounted to an overly optimistic view about the nature of friendship. The streets had taught him that past the age of thirty a man was always a lone wolf. If he was lucky, he might have a female wolf like Rayiha beside him. Of course the only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves. The five years Mevlut had spent running the Binbom Café had kept him from the city, turning him into a man of sorrow.

After sending his daughters off to school in the morning, he would make love with Rayiha before going out to visit the local teahouses in search of a job. In the evenings he’d head out early to sell boza. He visited the congregation in Çarşamba twice. In five years, the Holy Guide had aged, now spending less time at the table than he did in his armchair beside the window. By the chair was the button by which he could buzz people into the building through the main entrance. A large side-view mirror from a truck had been screwed onto the wall of the three-story window so that the Holy Guide could see who was at the door without having to get up. On both of Mevlut’s visits, the Holy Guide had seen him in the mirror and let him in before he’d even had a chance to cry “Boo-zaa.” There were new students and new visitors now. They didn’t get the chance to talk much. On both visits, no one — not even the Holy Guide — noticed that Mevlut hadn’t charged for his boza, nor did he tell anyone that he no longer managed the café.

Why was it that on some nights he felt the urge to walk into a remote cemetery in some distant neighborhood and sit among the cypress trees in the moonlight? Why did a huge, black wave like the one on TV overtake him sometimes, so he found himself drowning in a swelling tide of sorrows? Even the packs of strays in Kurtuluş, Şişli, and Cihangir had started barking, growling, and baring their teeth at him, just like those other dogs in the neighborhoods across the Golden Horn. Why was Mevlut afraid of dogs again, to the degree that they noticed his fear and snarled at him? Perhaps the question was, why had all these dogs begun to growl at Mevlut, causing him to start fearing them in the first place?

It was election time again; the whole city was bedecked with political banners as swarms of cars blared folk songs and marches from loudspeakers, blocking traffic, and wearing everyone out. Back in Kültepe, people used to vote for whatever party promised new roads, electricity, water, and bus routes for the neighborhood. Hadji Hamit Vural was the one who negotiated for all these services, so he would decide what party this should be.

Mevlut had mostly ignored the elections, worried by the rumor “Once you’re registered to vote, the tax office starts knocking on your door.” There wasn’t any party he hated anyway, and the only demand he ever had of any candidate was “They should treat street vendors right.” But two elections ago, the military government had declared a curfew and sent soldiers to every home in the country, taking people’s names and threatening to jail anyone who didn’t vote. So this time Rayiha took their identity cards and went to have them both registered.

During the local elections in March 1994, the ballot boxes for their neighborhood were kept at Piyale Paşa Primary School, which the girls attended, so Mevlut took Rayiha, Fatma, and Fevziye and went down to vote in high spirits. There was a ballot box in Fatma’s classroom, and a large crowd, too. But Fevziye’s classroom was empty. They walked in and sat together in one of the rows. They laughed at Fevziye’s impression of her teacher and admired a picture she’d drawn, named MY HOUSE, which the teacher had liked well enough to hang in the corner: Fevziye had added two chimneys and a Turkish flag to the red roof of the house in the picture and drawn an almond tree in the background with the lost rice cart. She’d omitted the chains that had been used to secure the cart.

The next day, the newspapers wrote that the Islamist party had won the elections in Istanbul, and Mevlut thought, If they’re religious, they’ll get rid of the tables of drunks eating on the pavements of Beyoğlu, and then we’ll have an easier time getting through, and people will buy more boza. It was two days later that he was attacked by dogs and then robbed, losing his money and his Swiss watch; that’s when he decided to give up on selling boza.