A Strangeness in My Mind

1. The Brothers-in-Law Boza Shop

Doing the Nation Proud

NOW THAT our story has again reached the night of Wednesday, 30 March 1994, I would advise my readers to reacquaint themselves with part 2 of our novel. That night, Mevlut was attacked by stray dogs and robbed of the wristwatch Hadji Hamit Vural had given him as a wedding present twelve years before — two incidents that caused him great distress. The following morning, when he talked to Rayiha about it after Fatma and Fevziye had gone to school, he remained firm in his resolve to stop selling boza. There was no way he could walk the streets at night while he carried this fear of dogs in his heart.

He also wondered whether it was a coincidence that he’d been attacked by dogs and robbed the same night. If the dogs had attacked him after he’d been robbed, he might have reasoned: The robbers scared me, and the dogs attacked smelling my fear. But actually, the dogs had attacked him first, and he’d been robbed two hours later. As he tried to find a link between the two events, Mevlut kept thinking back to an article he’d read a long time ago in the middle-school library. The article, in an old issue of Mind and Matter, had been about the ability of dogs to read people’s minds. Realizing quickly that it would be very difficult to recall the specifics of the article, Mevlut put it out of his mind.

—

Rayiha. When Mevlut decided to stop selling boza because of the dogs, I went to see Vediha in Duttepe the first chance I got.

“They’re not too pleased with Mevlut after what happened at the Binbom Café; they won’t be helping him find another job anytime soon,” said Vediha.

“Mevlut isn’t too pleased with them either,” I said. “Anyway, it’s Ferhat’s help I’m thinking of. I heard he’s making good money at the electricity board. He could find something for Mevlut, too. But Mevlut will never go to him unless Ferhat offers.”

“Why’s that?”

“You know why…”

Vediha looked at me as if she understood.

“Please, Vediha, you’ll know just what to say to Samiha and Ferhat,” I said. “He and Mevlut used to be such good friends. If Ferhat’s so keen to show off his money, let him give his old friend a hand.”

“When we were little, you and Samiha used to gang up on me all the time,” said Vediha. “Now I’ve got to get you two talking again?”

“I don’t have any quarrel with Samiha,” I said. “The problem is the men are too proud.”

“They don’t call it pride, though, they say it’s honor,” said Vediha. “That’s when they get vicious.”

—

A week later, Rayiha told her husband that on Sunday they would be taking the girls over to Samiha and Ferhat’s place, where Samiha was going to make them some Beyşehir-style kebab.

“Beyşehir kebab is just a flatbread topped with walnuts as well as meat,” said Mevlut. “I haven’t had it in twenty years. Where’s this coming from?”

“You haven’t seen Ferhat in ten years, either!” said Rayiha.

Mevlut was still unemployed: ever since he’d been robbed, he’d been nursing a grudge against the world and feeling ever more vulnerable. In the mornings he wandered around the restaurants of Tarlabaşı and Beyoğlu in a bitter, halfhearted search for some job that might suit him. In the evenings, he stayed at home.

On that sunny Sunday morning they got on a bus in Taksim, the only other passengers a handful of people who were also going to see friends and relatives on the other side of the city. Rayiha relaxed when she heard Mevlut telling Fatma and Fevziye that his childhood friend, their uncle Ferhat, was a really funny man.

Thanks to the girls, the moment when Mevlut saw Samiha and Ferhat again — something he’d been dreading for ten years — passed without any awkwardness. The two old friends hugged each other, Ferhat picked Fevziye up, and they all headed out to see the plot he had marked with white stones more than fifteen years ago, as if they were there to inspect some land on which they planned to build a house.

The girls wouldn’t stop running around; they were thrilled with the forest at the edge of the city, the dreamy outline of Istanbul in the hazy distance, and the gardens full of dogs, clucking hens, and little chicks. Mevlut thought of how Fatma and Fevziye, born and bred in Tarlabaşı, had never in their lives been in a field that smelled of manure, a village hut, or even an orchard. It delighted him to notice their amazement at everything they came across — a tree, a well sweep, a watering hose, and even a weathered old donkey and the metal sheets and ironwork railings that the neighborhood people had pilfered from Istanbul’s historic ruins and used for the walls around their own gardens.

But Mevlut also knew that the real reason for his good mood was that he’d accomplished this friendly reunion without sacrificing his pride and come here without upsetting Rayiha. Now he regretted the silly grief of all those years over this business with the love letters. But he still made sure he was never alone with Samiha.

When Samiha came in with the Beyşehir kebab, Mevlut went to sit at the opposite end of the table. A deepening sense of inner contentment had temporarily eased his worries about work and money. Ferhat kept laughing and making jokes and topping up Mevlut’s rakı glass, and the more Mevlut drank, the more at ease he felt. But he remained vigilant and didn’t speak much for fear of saying something wrong.

When the rakı began to make his head swim, he started to worry and decided not to say another word. He listened to the conversation at the table but didn’t join in (the talk had turned to the TV quiz show the girls had switched on), and whenever he felt the urge to speak, he would talk silently to himself instead.

Yes, my letters were meant for Samiha, and of course I would have been struck by her eyes! he thought. He wasn’t looking in that direction now, but she really was exquisite, and her eyes were certainly beautiful enough to justify every single word he had written in his letters.

Still, it was a good thing Süleyman had tricked him into addressing them to Rayiha, even while thinking of Samiha all along. Mevlut knew he could have been happy only with Rayiha. God had made them for each other. He loved her so much; he would die without her. Beautiful girls like Samiha could be difficult and demanding and make you miserable in all sorts of irrational ways. Beautiful girls could only be happy if they married rich men. But a good girl like Rayiha would love her husband rich or poor. After working as a maid for all those years, Samiha was finally happy only now that Ferhat had begun to make a little money.

What would have happened if I’d put “Samiha” on my letters instead of “Rayiha”? thought Mevlut. Would Samiha ever have eloped with him?

Mevlut recognized — through a mixture of realism, jealousy, and inebriation — that she probably wouldn’t have.

“Don’t drink any more,” Rayiha whispered in his ear.

“I’m not,” he hissed. Samiha and Ferhat might get the wrong impression if they heard one of Rayiha’s unnecessary comments.

“Let him drink as much as he wants, Rayiha,” said Ferhat. “He’s finally decided to stop selling boza, he’s right to celebrate…”

“There are people out there who’ll mug a boza vendor on the street,” said Mevlut. “It’s not like I want to stop.” He suspected with some embarrassment that Rayiha must have explained everything already and that the point of this meal was to find him a job. “I wish I could sell boza for the rest of my life.”

“All right, Mevlut, let’s sell boza for the rest of our lives!” said Ferhat. “There’s a little shop on İmam Adnan Street. I was thinking we should make it a kebab place. But a boza shop is a better idea. The owner didn’t pay his debts, and now the shop’s ours for the taking.”

“Mevlut knows how to manage a café,” said Rayiha. “He’s got plenty of experience now.”

Mevlut didn’t like this pushy Rayiha who was so intent on setting up her husband with a job. But at that moment he lacked even the strength to sit there frowning at what other people were doing. He said nothing. He could sense that Rayiha, Samiha, and Ferhat had already decided everything. The truth was that he didn’t even mind. He would be managing a shop again. He could tell that it was better not to ask in his drunken state how on earth Ferhat had scraped together enough money to open a shop in Beyoğlu.

—

Ferhat. As soon as I got my college degree, an Alevi relative from Bingöl got me a job with the municipal electricity board. Then, when power distribution was privatized in 1991, the most hardworking and enterprising among us got their break. Some of the meter readers took the retirement package and left. Those who thought they could just keep going the way they had as government employees were quickly fired. But people who showed some initiative — people like me — were treated well.

The government had been working for years to bring electricity to every corner of Istanbul, from slums at the farthest outskirts, where only the poorest lived, to lawless dumps ruled by the worst kinds of thugs. The people of Istanbul had always found ways of tapping into power lines without paying. Having failed to make the cheats pay, the government handed the problem over to private companies. I worked at one of those companies. They had also passed a law adding a significant monthly interest charge to any unpaid bills, so that the same people who used to sneer at me when I came to read their meters and demand payment were now forced to pay up, whether they liked it or not.

The man from Samsun who’d been selling newspapers, cigarettes, and sandwiches from the shop on İmam Adnan Street was smart enough, but not a particularly skilled cheat. His shop was technically the property of an elderly Greek man who’d been sent off to Athens. The man from Samsun had taken over the abandoned shop without so much as a title deed or a contract, but he’d still managed to get a meter installed through a contact at city hall. Once that was done, he’d proceeded to hook a branch line into the main line, just upstream of the meter, and this source powered his sandwich toaster and two massive electric heaters that were powerful enough to let him turn the shop into a hammam. By the time I caught him, the overdue balance plus the interest (adjusted for inflation according to the new law) was so high that he would have had to sell his apartment in Kasımpaşa to pay it all off. So instead the shopkeeper from Samsun just disappeared, leaving everything behind.

—

The shop wasn’t half the size of the Binbom, with barely enough room inside for a single table for two. Rayiha would send the girls off to school in the morning and then, just as she had always done, she would add sugar to the boza mixture and wash the jugs at home, before heading out to buy a few things for the shop itself (a task she undertook with proprietary zeal). Mevlut would open it every morning at eleven, and since no one wanted boza so early in the day, he’d concentrate on making things neat and tidy, taking the glasses, jugs, and cinnamon shakers they’d bought and lining them up on the table that faced the street.

It was still cold when they decided to turn the place into a boza shop, and when they hastily opened five days later, there was plenty of interest. Buoyed by the initial success, Ferhat invested in the shop, refurbishing the fridge they were using as a window display, having the door and the exterior repainted (in creamy boza yellow, at Mevlut’s insistence), installing a light right over the door, and bringing a mirror in from home.

They also realized that the establishment needed a name. Mevlut felt it would be enough to put up a sign saying BOZA SHOP over the door. But a clever sign maker who had worked with some of the newest shops in Beyoğlu told them that this was not a name on which to build a thriving business. He inquired about their history and got them talking, and when he found out that they were married to sisters, he knew exactly what they should call the place:

THE BROTHERS-IN-LAW BOZA SHOP

In time, this was shortened simply to “Brothers-in-Law.” As they’d agreed during their long, rakı-soaked lunch in the Ghaazi Quarter, Ferhat would provide the overhead (a free shop in Beyoğlu, with no rent or electricity bills to pay) while Mevlut would put in the cost of daily operation (the boza he bought twice a week, sugar, roasted chickpeas, cinnamon) as well as his and Rayiha’s labor. The two childhood friends were to split the profits evenly.

—

Samiha. After all those years I’d worked as a maid, Ferhat didn’t want me toiling in Mevlut’s shop. “Why bother, you can’t sell boza out of a shop anyway,” he’d say, leaving me heartbroken. But he was himself intrigued by the shop when it first opened, and he would go over there most evenings to help Mevlut, getting home really late. I was curious, too, so I would go there myself without telling Ferhat. No one ever wanted to buy anything from two girls in headscarves, and pretty soon our shop became just like any one of Istanbul’s thousands of cafés, where the men stood at the front serving customers and handling the cash, and women in headscarves sat at the back looking after the kitchen and washing the dishes. The only difference was that we sold boza.

Ten days after the launch of Brothers-in-Law, Ferhat started renting an apartment in Çukurcuma, with central heating, and we finally moved out of the Ghaazi Quarter. All around us were junk shops, furniture repairmen, hospitals, and pharmacies. From the window I could see part of Sıraselviler Street and the crowds flowing to and from Taksim. In the afternoons, when I got bored at home, I headed over to Brothers-in-Law. Rayiha always left at five to make sure the girls weren’t home alone after dark and to start making dinner, so I, too, would leave to avoid being alone with Mevlut. The few times I did stay in the shop after Rayiha had left, Mevlut always stood with his back to me, only looking in the mirror every now and then. So I looked in the other mirror on our side of the shop and never said a word to him at all. Ferhat would drop in later, knowing he’d find me there; he’d eventually gotten used to the idea of my being in the shop. It was fun being there with Ferhat, running around trying to keep up with orders. It was the first time the two of us had ever worked together. Ferhat would comment on every single person who came in for a glass of boza, like the idiot over there who blew over the top of his glass thinking boza was a hot drink. Or that other guy who was the sales manager at a shoe shop on the main street; Ferhat himself had installed its meter. One customer got a free refill just because he seemed to enjoy the first glass so much, and then Ferhat got him talking about his days in military service.

—

Within two months, they’d all realized that Brothers-in-Law wouldn’t turn much of a profit, but no one said a thing. At best, they might sell three times as much boza as Mevlut had been able to on the street on a cold winter night back when business was good. But Mevlut and Rayiha’s share of the net proceeds would barely cover half a month’s living expenses for a childless couple — and even that was only due to operating rent-free and without having to budget for bribes to city hall and the tax office, thanks to Ferhat’s contacts. Yet in such a lively neighborhood — just one street down from İstiklal Avenue — they could have sold anything else they put on the counter.

Mevlut never lost hope. Many people seeing the sign on the door stepped in to have a glass, most of them warmly telling Mevlut what a good idea this shop was. He could happily talk to any customer — mothers bringing their children in for a first taste of boza, drunks, proselytizing know-it-alls, and oddballs skeptical of anything and everything.

“Boza is meant to be had at night, boza seller, what are you doing here so early in the day?” “Do you make this at home?” “You charge too much, your glasses are too small, and there should be more roasted chickpeas in this.” (Mevlut soon learned that if people had spared him their criticism when he’d been just a poor street vendor, they certainly weren’t holding back now that he had his own shop.) “Hats off to you, you’re doing the nation proud.” “Boza seller, I’ve just had half a bottle of Club Rakı, now tell me, what happens if I drink this, and what happens if I don’t?” “Excuse me, am I supposed to drink boza before dinner, or is it meant for after a meal, like a dessert?” “Did you know, brother, that the word boza comes from the English word ‘booze’?” “Do you deliver?” “Aren’t you that yogurt seller’s son, Mustafa Efendi? I remember when you used to work with your father. Well done!” “We used to have a boza seller in our neighborhood, but he’s stopped coming by.” “But if you start selling boza in shops, what will happen to the boza sellers on the street?” “Boza seller, give us a shout of ‘Boo-zaa’ so that the kids can see and learn.”

When he was in a good mood, Mevlut could never disappoint his curious clientele, especially when they brought their children along; “Boo-zaa,” he’d call, smiling. Customers who told him “You are doing something very important here” and launched into lectures on the value of tradition and the Ottoman era mostly never came back. Mevlut could scarcely believe the sheer number of suspicious people who wanted to see for themselves that the glasses had been cleaned properly or who asked aggressively whether the boza was made using only natural ingredients. What didn’t surprise him was the people who’d never had boza before who said “eughh” right after their first sip, or who complained that it was too sour or too sweet and didn’t finish their glass. “The boza I buy at night from my street vendor is more authentic,” some would say with great disdain. There were also those who said, “I thought this was meant to be a hot drink,” and left their glass untouched.

A month after they’d opened, Ferhat started coming by to help out every other evening. His father’s village had been among those evacuated during the army’s assault on Kurdish guerrillas in the east, and his paternal grandmother, who spoke no Turkish, had come to Istanbul. Ferhat recounted his efforts to communicate with her in his broken Kurdish. The Kurds who’d moved to Istanbul after their villages were burned by the Turkish army had been settling in certain streets and setting up local gangs. It was rumored that the new mayor from the religious party was going to shut down the restaurants and bars that served alcohol and put tables out on the pavement. As summer approached, Mevlut and Ferhat began to sell ice cream, too.

—

Rayiha. We brought a mirror of our own to the shop, just like Ferhat and Samiha. On some afternoons, I noticed that Mevlut wasn’t really looking out at the street but at our mirror next to the shopwindow. I became suspicious. I waited until he left one day, and I sat in the spot where he usually did, and looking in the mirror, I could see Samiha’s face and her eyes right behind me. I had a vision of the two of them looking at each other through the mirror, hiding their glances from me, and I became jealous.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s no need for Samiha even to come to the shop in the afternoon when I’m there with Mevlut. Ferhat’s pockets are bulging with all the cash he takes from the people who don’t pay their electric bills, so why is Samiha so interested in working when they don’t even need the money anymore? Late in the afternoon, when it’s time for me to go home to the girls, Samiha leaves with me, but sometimes she’s too busy with something: four times now she’s stayed behind in the shop after I’ve left, alone with Mevlut.

The one thing that keeps Samiha busier than the shop, though, is their new house in Cihangir. I thought I’d take the girls over there for a visit one evening. She wasn’t home, so we went to the shop — I couldn’t help myself. Mevlut was there, but Samiha wasn’t. “What are you doing here so late?” he said. “How many times do I have to tell you not to bring the children here?” This wasn’t the kind, sweet Mevlut I used to know; this was the voice of a mean man. I was so hurt that I didn’t go to the shop at all for three days. Of course this meant that Samiha couldn’t go either, and soon she came to visit me. “What’s wrong? I was worried!” she said. She seemed sincere. “I’m sick,” I said, ashamed of my jealousy. “No, you’re not. Ferhat is mean to me, too, you know,” she said — not because she was trying to get me to talk, but because my smart little sister had figured out a long time ago that, for girls like us, the worst trouble always started with our husbands. I wish we didn’t have this shop now; I wish it could just be me and Mevlut alone again.

—

Around the middle of October, they started selling boza once more. Mevlut thought it would be best to get rid of the sandwiches, biscuits, chocolates, and other summer offerings and concen trate only on the boza, cinnamon, and toasted chickpeas, but as usual he was being overly optimistic, and they didn’t listen anyway. Once or twice a week, he would leave the shop to Ferhat in the evening and go out to deliver boza to his regular customers. The war in the east meant that there were explosions all over Istanbul, protest marches, and newspaper offices bombed in the night, but people still thronged to Beyoğlu.

At the end of November, a devout key cutter across the road told Mevlut that a newspaper called the Righteous Path had written something about their shop. Mevlut rushed to the kiosk on İstiklal Avenue. Back in the shop, he sat down with Rayiha and examined every inch of the paper.

There was a column under the heading “Three New Shops,” which started off with praise for Brothers-in-Law, followed by some words on a new kebab-wrap shop in Nişantaşı and a place in Karaköy selling rosewater and milk-soaked Ramadan pastry and aşure, the traditional pudding of fruits and nuts: keeping our ancient traditions alive, rather than discarding them to imitate the West, was a sacred duty, like honoring our ancestors; if, as a civilization, we wanted to preserve our national character, our ideals, and our beliefs, we had to learn, first and foremost, how to remain true to our traditional food and drink.

As soon as Ferhat came in that evening, Mevlut was very excited to show him the newspaper. He claimed it had brought in loads of new customers.

“Oh, drop it,” said Ferhat. “No one reading the Righteous Path is going to come to our shop. They haven’t even included our address. I can’t believe we’re being used as propaganda for some disgusting Islamist rag.”

Mevlut hadn’t realized that the Righteous Path was a religious newspaper, or that the column was a piece of Islamist propaganda.

When he realized that his friend wasn’t following what he was saying, Ferhat lost his patience. He picked up the newspaper. “Just look at these headlines: The Holy Hamza and the Battle of Uhud…Fate, Intent, and Free Will in Islam…Why the Hajj is a Religious Duty…”

So was it wrong to talk about these things? The Holy Guide spoke beautifully on all these subjects, and Mevlut had always enjoyed his talks. Thank God he’d never told Ferhat about visiting with the Holy Guide. His friend might have branded Mevlut a “disgusting Islamist,” too.

Ferhat continued to rage his way through the pages of the Righteous Path: “ ‘What did Fahrettin Pasha do to the spy and sexual deviant Lawrence?’ ‘The Freemasons, the CIA, and the Reds.’ ‘English human rights activist is found out to be a Jew!’ ”

Thank God Mevlut had never told the Holy Guide that his business partner was an Alevi. The Holy Guide thought Mevlut worked with a normal Sunni Turk, and whenever their conversations touched upon Alevis, the Shias in Iran, and the caliph Ali, Mevlut always changed the subject immediately lest he have to hear the Holy Guide say anything bad about them.

“ ‘Full-color annotated Koran with protective dust jacket for just thirty coupons from the Righteous Path,’ ” read Ferhat. “You know, if these people take power, the first thing they’ll do is ban the street vendors, just the way they did in Iran. They might even hang one or two like you.”

“No way,” said Mevlut. “Boza’s alcoholic, but do you see anyone bothering me about it?”

“That’s because there’s barely any alcohol in it,” said Ferhat.

“Oh, of course, boza’s worthless next to your Club Rakı,” said Mevlut.

“Wait, so you have a problem with rakı now? If it’s a sin to touch alcohol, it doesn’t matter how much there is in your drink. We would have to close this shop down.”

Mevlut felt the hint of a threat. After all, it was thanks to Ferhat’s money that they had this shop in the first place.

“I bet you even voted for these Islamists.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mevlut lied.

“Oh, do whatever you want with your vote,” said Ferhat in a condescending tone.

There followed a period of mutual resentment. For a while, Ferhat stopped coming by in the evenings. This meant Mevlut couldn’t leave the shop to deliver boza to his old customers and that, during quiet spells when no one came by, he got bored. He never used to get bored when he sold boza out in the city at night, not even in the emptiest street where no one ever opened any windows or bought any boza. Walking fueled his imagination and reminded him that there was another realm within our world, hidden away behind the walls of a mosque, in a collapsing wooden mansion, or inside a cemetery.

The Righteous Path had published a picture of this world as it existed in Mevlut’s mind. The image illustrated a series of articles entitled “The Other Realm.” When he was alone in the shop at night, Mevlut would pick up the newspaper that had written about Brothers-in-Law and open it up to the page with this picture.

Why were the gravestones keeling over? Why were they all different, some of them sloped sideways in sorrow? What was that whiteness coming down from above like a divine light? Why did old things and cypress trees always make Mevlut feel so good?

2. In the Little Shop with Two Women

Other Meters and Other Families

Rayiha. Samiha is still as beautiful as ever. In the mornings, some men get disrespectful and try to touch her fingers while she’s handing them their change. So now we’ve started putting people’s money down on the glass counter rather than giving it to them directly. I’m usually the one who prepares the ayran, as well as the boza, but when I look after the cash register no one ever bothers me. A whole morning can go by without a single person coming in to sit down. Sometimes we get an old lady who sits as close to the electric heater as she can and asks for a tea. That’s how we started serving tea, too. There was also this very beautiful lady who went out shopping in Beyoğlu every day and came in sometimes. “You two are sisters, aren’t you?” she used to ask, smiling at us. “You look alike. So tell me, who’s got the good husband, and who’s got the bad one?”

Once, this brute with a face like a criminal came in with a cigarette in his hand, asking for boza early in the morning, and after he’d downed three glasses, he kept staring at Samiha saying, “Is there alcohol in boza, or is something else making my head spin?” It really is difficult to run the shop without a man there. But Samiha never told Ferhat, and I didn’t tell Mevlut either.

Sometimes Samiha would drop everything and say, “I’m off, you’ll look after that woman at the table and take care of the empty glasses, won’t you?” As if she owned the place and I was just some waitress…Did she even realize that she was trying to sound like one of those wealthy ladies whose homes she used to clean? Sometimes I’d go to their house in Firuzağa and find that Ferhat had already left a while ago. “Let’s go to the cinema, Rayiha,” Samiha would say. Or we would watch TV. Sometimes she sat at her new dressing table and did her makeup while I watched. “Come and put some on,” she’d say, laughing at me in the mirror. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Mevlut.” What did she mean by that? Did she talk to Mevlut when I wasn’t in the shop, and was it me they spoke about? I was so touchy, so jealous, and always close to tears.

—

Süleyman. I was walking down İmam Adnan Street one evening when a shop on the left caught my eye, and when I took a closer look, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

—

Some evenings, Ferhat would come by the shop drunk. “What a team we used to be, eh?” he’d tell Mevlut. “All those posters we put up, all those battles we fought!” It all seemed a bit much to Mevlut, who preferred to think back on their Kısmet-selling days rather than the political battles they’d witnessed. Still, it was far more flattering to be featured in youthful memories his friend had already hallowed in myth than to be accused of voting for the Islamists, so Mevlut didn’t bother to correct Ferhat.

They could spend hours chatting idly about Islamists who were heading off to join the war in Bosnia, the female prime minister Tansu Çiller, or the bomb that had gone off next to the Christmas tree in the Marmara Hotel’s cake shop (the police accused the Islamists one day and the Kurds the next). Sometimes, even during what should have been the rush, they would get no customers at all for more than half an hour at a time, and they would distract themselves with long discussions on matters they knew nothing about — did TV presenters learn what they were meant to say by heart, or did they also cheat like lip-synching singers? Were the police who attacked the protesters in Taksim carrying real guns, or fakes just for show?

Mevlut had framed the article about the shop (as well as the picture of “The Other Realm” in the same edition) and put it up on the wall, copying what he’d seen in other Beyoğlu cafés. (His dream was one day to decorate the walls with framed foreign banknotes given to them by tourists, as they did in the kebab shops on the main street, but sadly not a single tourist had come in since they’d opened.) Was Ferhat upset when he saw the Righteous Path article on the wall, and was that why he didn’t come by so much anymore? Mevlut realized that he was beginning to consider Ferhat his boss; it made him resent both his friend and his own meekness.

Sometimes Mevlut wondered whether Ferhat had only opened the shop to appease him. In moments of weakness, he told himself, He did it because he felt guilty about running away with the girl I wanted to marry. But when he was angry with Ferhat, he thought, Forget kindness! That one’s nothing but a capitalist now. I’m the one who taught him that boza could be a good investment.

For two snowy, windy weeks at the end of January 1995, Ferhat didn’t show up at the shop at all. When he finally came in one evening as he was passing by, Mevlut said, “Sales are strong right now,” but Ferhat wasn’t even listening.

“Mevlut, you know how sometimes I don’t come to the shop at all? Well, don’t tell Samiha about it, if you know what I mean…”

“What? Sit down for a minute, will you.”

“I don’t have time. Don’t tell Rayiha anything either…Sisters can’t ever keep secrets from each other…” He left, carrying the bag he used when he went to read people’s meters.

“At your service!” Mevlut shouted after him, though Ferhat, who didn’t even have time to sit down and catch up with his old friend anymore, missed the sarcasm. Mevlut’s father used to say those words only to his wealthiest, most influential customers. But Mevlut had never told anyone “at your service” in his life. Ferhat was so busy with his philanderings and mafia friends that he probably didn’t have time to reflect on such subtleties anymore.

When he went back home and saw his daughters fast asleep and Rayiha watching TV with the volume turned low, Mevlut understood the real reason that he was angry at Ferhat: he was leaving his virtuous and beautiful wife behind to go gallivanting around in the city. The Holy Guide was right; rakı and wine were no doubt to blame. Istanbul was crawling with Ukrainian women smuggling contraband in their suitcases, African immigrants, and shady operators who sucked people dry; the city had become a hotbed of corruption and bribery, and the government only stood by and watched.

Mevlut knew, now, why Samiha remained so melancholy even after her husband had suddenly started making so much money. He’d been secretly watching her in the mirror, and he’d seen how sad she was.

—

Ferhat. Mevlut reads the Righteous Path and may well think I’m a cruel, stupid oaf for stepping out on the clever beauty I have at home. But he’s wrong. I’m no womanizer.

I’ve fallen in love. The woman I’m in love with has disappeared, but I will find her someday, here in Istanbul. But first, I should tell you a little bit more about the kinds of jobs and opportunities that just fell in the path of meter inspectors like me after the power grid was privatized, so you can have a better understanding of my love story and the choices I’ve made.

—

Süleyman. I still go down to Beyoğlu all the time, but for work — not to drown my sorrows the way I used to. The heartache’s gone now. I got over that maid a long time ago, and I’m fine now. In fact, I’m sampling the pleasures of being in love with an artist, a singer, a mature woman.

—

Ferhat. When electricity bill collection went private, I made sure never to target those people who hooked up illegal connections and bypassed the meter purely because they were too poor and desperate to do otherwise. Instead, I went after the shameless rich. So I steered clear of back alleys and remote, derelict neighborhoods where unemployed men huddled for warmth with their wives and hungry children, people who either stole some power for their electric heater, or risked freezing to death on winter nights.

But when I found people living in eight-room houses right on the Bosphorus, with maids, cooks, and drivers, but still not paying their bills, I cut their power off. There was a man with an apartment in one of these eighty-year-old buildings where rich people used to live a long time ago, and he’d packed sixty poor girls in there to sew zippers until dawn; when I caught him stealing power, too, I showed no mercy. I inspected the ovens of an expensive restaurant that overlooked the whole city, the looms of a textile baron who exported record quantities of curtain fabrics, and the cranes of a contractor from the Black Sea coast who boasted of how far he’d come from the village, now that he was building fourteen-story buildings, and when I found them each bypassing a meter, I didn’t hesitate. I put their lights out, and I took their money. There were lots of young idealists like me at Seven Hills Electric Ltd., ready to take from the rich and look the other way when the poor couldn’t pay. I learned a lot from them.

—

Süleyman. I’ve been talking to nightclub owners who are serious about music, so the world can discover Mahinur’s talent. The Sunshine Club is the best of the lot. Every now and then, though, I still can’t help taking a little walk past the two boza bozos’ little shop. It’s not to indulge my wounded heart or anything like that; it’s just for a laugh, of course…

—

Ferhat. Spoiled rich people don’t pay their bills because they don’t care, though sometimes the bill gets lost in the mail. Weighed down with penalties, which are adjusted for inflation, their debt grows exponentially. The quickest way to teach these people a lesson is to just cut their power off without even knocking on their door to warn them first. Back when the government still distributed electricity and sent its own inspectors to collect payments and warn delinquents they’d be cut off, the rich and powerful would just say “Oh dear, it seems I forgot to pay!” and just shrug off the threats. In the unlikely event that an honest inspector did manage to get someone’s electricity turned off, those bastards would run to the electricity board’s headquarters in Taksim, and instead of paying up, they’d call some politician they happened to know and have the poor inspector canned on the spot. But all those rich housewives started to fear us once it wasn’t the state anymore but a gang of ruthless capitalists — kind of like their husbands — running the utility. My bosses are from Central Anatolia — Kayseri, in fact — and they couldn’t care less about the sophisticated airs and crocodile tears of Istanbul’s pampered class. Before, inspectors didn’t even have the authority to cut someone’s power off. Now, if I really want to screw them, I cut them off on a Friday evening, just before the weekend. Two days in the dark and they learn pretty quick how to keep up their payments. Last year, the Feast of the Sacrifice fell close to New Year’s Eve, so with this long ten-day holiday coming up, I thought I’d take the chance to teach one of these rich delinquents a lesson.

At four o’clock, I descended into the basement of a block of expensive apartments in Gümüşsuyu. The rusty meters for all twelve apartments were churning away like old washing machines, down at the dark end of a narrow, dusty corridor. I asked the doorman, “Is anyone home in number eleven?”

“The lady is,” said the doorman. “Hey, what are you doing, don’t cut them off!”

I ignored him. It takes me less than two minutes to pull out the screwdriver, a pair of wire cutters, and the special key wrench from my toolbox and cut someone’s power off. Number 11’s meter stopped ticking.

“Go upstairs in about ten minutes or so,” I told the doorman. “Tell them I’ll be in the neighborhood and that you know where to find me if they want to see me. I’ll be at the coffeehouse at the foot of the hill.”

Fifteen minutes later, the doorman came to the coffeehouse and told me that Madam was very upset and that she was waiting for me at home. “Tell her I’m busy with other meters and other families, but I’ll try to come by later,” I said. I wondered if I should wait until it got dark. In winter, when night falls very early, it’s easier for these people to picture what it might be like to spend ten days in the dark. Some of them go to stay in hotels. Would you care to hear the story of the guy who was too cheap to pay his bill but wound up taking his wife, her hats, and his four children to stay at the Hilton for several months while they waited stubbornly for their connections to come to their assistance?

“Sir, the lady is very concerned. She’s expecting people tonight.”

People always worry when their power gets cut. Wives call their husbands, some get aggressive, others take a milder approach, and while there’re those who’ll just cut to the chase and offer you a bribe, some people don’t even know that’s how to fix their problem. Most of these people still address us as government clerks, not realizing that we were all forced to give up our government jobs after privatization. But even our stupidest countrymen eventually figure out how to offer a bribe: “Perhaps I could pay the fine to you in cash now, and maybe you can switch our electricity back on?” When you reject their offer, some of them raise it; others think it will help to start threatening you: “Do you know who I am!” And then there are those who are so confused that they have no idea what to do next. I’ve heard people say that when an inspector goes to one of the rougher neighborhoods and threatens to turn off the power, women sometimes offer to have sex with him. It’s never happened to me, though; I wouldn’t believe that nonsense if I were you.

People in poor neighborhoods can recognize an inspector immediately from the bag he carries and the way he walks down the street. First they’ll send out a few kids — the same ones who usually go after strangers and thieves — to throw stones at him and yell “Get out of here!” to scare him off. The neighborhood lunatic will then threaten to kill him. Some drunk may be on hand to provide a little more intimidation: “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” If the inspector looks like he’s walking toward where the illegal branch connections meet the main cables high in the air, neighborhood thugs and stray dogs will try to change his mind. Gangs of political militants will harangue him with their speeches. Should he ever manage to find what he’s looking for, like some poor woman who can’t afford to pay her bills, there will be children playing in her garden, ready to carry word to the neighborhood coffeehouse in the blink of an eye. Any inspector who dares to walk into a house and shut the front door behind him so that he ends up alone with a woman will be lucky to get out of that neighborhood alive.

I’m telling you all this to lower your expectations now that you are about to hear my love story. Love in our parts is usually unrequited. A lady who lives in a house on the Bosphorus in Gümüşsuyu would never have noticed a meter inspector before. She will now, though — especially if he cuts her power off.

Leaving the coffeehouse, I headed back toward the building. I got into an elevator with wooden doors, a battered old golden cage, and as it groaned its way up toward number 11, I felt exhilarated.

—

Süleyman. One freezing afternoon toward the end of February, I finally went to the Brothers-in-Law, just like any other customer.

“Boza seller, is your boza sweet or sour?”

Mevlut recognized me immediately. “Ah, Süleyman!” he shouted. “Come on in.”

“Hope you’re well, ladies,” I said, with all the familiarity of an old friend who just happened to be passing by. Samiha was wearing a headscarf with pink leaves.

“Welcome, Süleyman,” said Rayiha, getting agitated at the prospect that I might start something.

“I hear you’re married now, Samiha, congratulations and best wishes.”

“Thank you, Süleyman.”

“That was ten years ago,” said Mevlut protectively. “It’s taken you this long to wish her well?”

So, Mr. Mevlut was happy in the little shop with two women beside him. Careful now, I wanted to say, you’d better look after this place properly, you wouldn’t want it to go bust like Binbom. But I held back and took a more diplomatic approach.

“Ten years ago, we were just a bunch of hot-blooded young men,” I said. “At that young and turbulent age, it’s easy to become obsessed with certain things, and ten years later you can’t even remember why they ever seemed so important. I would have wanted to bring you a wedding gift, but Vediha never gave me your address; she just told me you lived far out in the Ghaazi Quarter.”

“They’ve moved to Cihangir now,” said that idiot Mevlut. I wanted to say Çukurcuma, the rough part of the neighborhood, not Cihangir — but I didn’t. Otherwise they would have figured out that I had some men tailing Ferhat. “Thank you, your boza really is delicious,” I said, taking a sip from the glass they’d given me. “I’ll take some back for the others.” I had them fill a bottle up with a kilo’s worth. With this visit, I showed these long-lost friends — and even my fading love herself — that I was over my obsession. But my main purpose was to warn Mevlut. When he came to show me out, I gave him a hug and a message for his dear friend: “Tell him to watch himself.”

“What do you mean?” said Mevlut.

“He’ll know.”

3. Ferhat’s Electric Passion

Let’s Run Away from Here

Korkut. A one-room house was all that my late uncle Mustafa ever managed to build on the land he’d fenced off with my father in Kültepe back in 1965. Mevlut came down from the village to help him out, but it didn’t work, and they soon ran out of steam. We started with a two-room house on our land over in Duttepe. My father planted poplars in the garden like those he had back in the village; I bet you can see them all the way from Şişli now. When my mother left the village to join us in Duttepe, we added a nice little room one night in 1969, and then came another room, which I used when I wanted to listen to the horse races on the radio. In 1978, around the time I got married to Vediha, we added a guest room and another big room with its own toilet, and pretty soon our sprawling house was the size of a palace. Our royal gardens even had two mulberry trees and a fig tree that had started growing on their own. We made the wall around the garden taller. We also installed an iron gate.

The family business was thriving, thank God, so six years ago we decided to add a whole new floor to the house — everyone else on these hills was already doing it, and we (finally) had a title deed to fall back on. We built the flight of stairs that led to this second floor on the exterior of the house so that my mother wouldn’t have to worry constantly about where Vediha was going and whether her boys had come home. In the beginning, Mother, Father, and Süleyman were very eager to move upstairs where everything was new and there was a better view. But soon my parents came back down; there were too many stairs, and it was too big, too empty, too cold, and too lonely up there. At Vediha’s request, I fitted the upstairs bathroom with blue porcelain tiles as well as the latest and most expensive furniture, but still she wouldn’t stop badgering me: “Let’s move to the city.” I kept telling her “This is part of the city now, it counts as Istanbul,” but it was like talking to a brick wall. Some rich-kid bastards who went to high school in Şişli with Bozkurt and Turan had teased them about living in a gecekondu neighborhood. “My parents will never go to Şişli. They’ve got their garden with this lovely breeze, their grocery store, their chickens, and their trees,” I said. “Are we supposed to leave them here on their own?”

Vediha complains about all sorts of nonsense, including how I always come home late, when I come home at all, how I take off on work trips for ten days at a time, and the cross-eyed woman with dyed-blond hair who worked in our office in Şişli.

It’s true that sometimes I do disappear for ten days, or two weeks, though it has nothing to do with the construction business. Last time, it was Azerbaijan. Tarık and some other nationalist friends from our old Pan-Turkic movement were complaining, “The government has given us this sacred task, but we don’t have any money.” Word came from Ankara that they had to find sponsors for their coup among private businesses. How could I say no to these patriots who came to ask for my help? Russian communism is all washed up, but the Azeri president Aliyev is a member of the KGB and the Soviet Politburo. So while he’s supposedly a Turk, all he wants is for the Turks to follow Russia’s lead. We held secret meetings with some warlords in Baku. Abulfaz Elchibey was Azerbaijan’s first democratically elected president. He had won most of the votes of the glorious Azeri people (they’re all Turks, really, with some Russians and Persians thrown in), but he’d been deposed in a KGB-style coup and gone back to his village in a huff. He was sick of the traitors who’d handed victory over to the enemy in the war against Armenia; he was tired of the incompetents who surrounded him, and of the Russian spies who’d brought him down. He refused to meet us because he figured we were Russian agents, too, so Tarık and I passed the time in the bars and hotels of Baku. Before we got the chance to visit Elchibey’s village to pay our respects to this great man and tell him “We’ve got America on our side, Azerbaijan’s future lies with the West,” we had news that the plans for our Turkish-style coup had fallen through. Someone in Ankara had panicked and told Aliyev that we’d come to overthrow his government. We also found out that Elchibey was under house arrest and couldn’t even go out into his own back garden to feed the chickens, let alone join us to launch a coup. So we headed straight to the airport and back to Istanbul.

Here is what this adventure taught me: It’s true that the whole world is against the Turks, but the biggest enemies of the Turks are Turks themselves. Also, Baku girls hated the Russians, but they’d still learned all their loose ways from them — even though, at the end of the day, they still preferred Azeri men. If that’s how it is, miss, then I’m not sticking my neck out for you. Anyway, my willingness to join the cause had already strengthened my position with the government and the party. Meanwhile, Süleyman was taking my preoccupation as a chance to do whatever he wanted.

—

Aunt Safiye. Vediha and I couldn’t find him a suitable girl, so Süleyman picked one himself. He never comes home anymore. We’re very embarrassed and worried that something untoward will happen.

—

Rayiha. On cold winter evenings when the shop was busy, Ferhat would come by to help, and I would take the girls home with Samiha. They loved their aunt’s free-flowing gossip, her vast knowledge of all the film stars who appeared on TV, the details of who had eloped with whom, her advice about clothes, how she would tell them, “Do your hair this way” or “Clip it up like that,” and how she might see someone on-screen and exclaim, “Oh, I used to work in that man’s house; his wife would cry all the time.” When we got back home, they would practice trying to talk just like her, until one day I had enough and almost said, Don’t turn into your aunt — but I stopped myself, because I didn’t want to be jealous. What I really wanted to know, but couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone, was “When they are alone in the shop, do Samiha and Mevlut actually look at each other, or do they pretend their eyes have met by accident in the mirror?” Whenever I felt the poison of envy seeping into my heart, I took out my bundle of letters from Mevlut.

Yesterday, as I walked out of the boza shop, Mevlut gave me the sweetest smile, and a sneaking suspicion that he may have meant it for my sister began to eat away at my soul, so as soon as I got home I opened one of the letters: “There are no other eyes I would rather gaze upon, no face I would sooner smile at, nowhere else I would ever turn!” he’d written. There were other things, too: “Your eyes have captured me like a magnet draws metal, I am your prisoner, Rayiha, you are the only thing I see” and “Just one glance from you has made me your willing slave.”

Sometimes Mevlut would ask one of us, “Clear those dirty glasses,” the way a restaurant manager barks at his busboys. When he asked me, I got angry at him for giving me the dirty job instead of Samiha; but when he asked Samiha, I got annoyed that she was the one he’d thought of first.

Mevlut could tell that I was jealous. He tried to avoid being alone in the shop with Samiha or showing too much interest in her. If he’s being so careful, he must be hiding something! I thought, and got jealous anyway. Samiha went to a toy store one day and brought my girls a water gun, as if she were buying a gift for a pair of boys. When Mevlut came home in the evening, he joined in their game. The next day, when the girls went to school and Mevlut went to the shop, I looked around for the gun to throw it in the trash (they’d squirted it at me plenty, too), but I couldn’t find it — Fatma, I guessed, must have put it in her bag and taken it to school. That night, while she slept, I took it out and hid it away somewhere. Another time, Samiha came by with a singing doll that could blink, too. Obviously Fatma, who was almost twelve, would have no interest in playing with a doll, but I didn’t say anything. The girls mostly ignored it. Someone must have stashed it away somewhere.

The most painful thing, though, was that I kept wondering, Is Samiha alone with Mevlut in the shop right now? I knew it was wrong, but I just couldn’t get this thought out of my head, because Süleyman, who knew all the Beyoğlu gossip, had told Vediha how Ferhat was coming home really late at night and drowning his sorrows all over town, the way men do in films when they’ve had their heart broken.

—

Ferhat. The old elevator car, a gilded, mirrored cage, came to a halt. I still remember that day from a time that now seems as ancient as dreams, but love always feels like only yesterday. After I’ve cut people’s power off, I find it more satisfying to rap on the door instead of ringing the bell, like some hit man from an American movie.

A maid answered and said Madam’s daughter was in bed with a fever (this is everyone’s favorite lie), but the lady would be with me in a minute. I sat on the chair the maid offered me and looked out at the Bosphorus. I was just thinking that the elated sense of purpose I felt in my soul must have had something to do with the swirling, mournful view before me, but then the real reason came into the room like a ray of light, wearing black jeans and a white blouse.

“Good afternoon, officer. Ercan, our doorman, told me you wished to meet.”

“We are not government officers anymore,” I said.

“Are you not from the electricity board?”

“It’s all been privatized now, ma’am…”

“I see…”

“We wouldn’t have wanted it to be this way…,” I said, struggling to get the words out. “I had to cut your power off. There were some unpaid bills.”

“Thank you. Please do not worry. It’s not your fault. You just follow your orders, whether you work for the government or for a private company.”

I didn’t manage any answer to the harsh truth of these poisonous words. I was falling rapidly in love and couldn’t think of anything except how fast I was falling. I gathered all my remaining strength. “Unfortunately I’ve had to seal the meter downstairs,” I lied. “Had I known your daughter was ill, I would have never cut you off.”

“Never mind, officer, what’s done is done,” she said. She wore the strict, somber expression of those lady judges in Turkish melodramas. “Don’t worry, you were just doing your job.”

We were both quiet for a moment. She hadn’t said any of the things I had been expecting to hear as I made my way up on the elevator, so now I couldn’t remember any of the answers I’d prepared. I looked at my watch. “The ten-day national holiday will officially begin in twenty minutes.”

“Mr. Officer,” she said firmly, “I’m afraid I have never been able to bring myself to bribe anyone in my life, nor have I ever been able to tolerate those who do. I live to be an example to my daughter.”

“Be that as it may, ma’am,” I said, “it is important for people like you to understand that those officers you are so quick to look down on in fact treasure their pride more than you can imagine.”

I walked back to the door seething, because I knew that the woman I loved was never going to say “Stop.”

She took two steps toward me. It felt as if anything could happen between us, though I already knew, even then, that this love was hopeless.

But despair is what keeps love alive.

“Look at all these people, Mr. Officer,” she said, gesturing toward the city. “You know better than I do that these ten million souls are gathered here in Istanbul to earn their daily bread, chasing after their profits, collecting their bills and interest. But there is only one thing that can keep a person going among these monstrous multitudes, and that is love.”

She turned around and walked away before I had a chance to respond. In these old buildings, street vendors and meter inspectors aren’t allowed to use the ancient elevators to go down. So I took the stairs as I thought things through.

I went down to the airless basement, all the way to the end of the corridor. My hands stretched out to seal the meter, which I had already disconnected. But my nimble fingers did the opposite, and the next minute, the wires I had cut were spliced together again, and number 11’s meter whirred back to life.

“It was good that you gave them their power back,” said the doorman Ercan.

“Why?”

“Madam is with Sami from Sürmene, who has a lot of influence in Beyoğlu. He’s got eyes and ears everywhere…He would have given you trouble. These Black Sea people are a mafia.”

“There’s no sick daughter, is there?”

“What daughter? They’re not even married…This Sürmene man’s got a wife back in the village, grown children, too. His sons know about Madam, but they don’t say anything.”

—

Rayiha. One evening after dinner, I was watching TV with the girls at their aunt Samiha’s when Ferhat arrived and beamed at the sight of the four of us together. “Your daughters are getting bigger every day! Look at you, Fatma, you’re a young lady now,” he said. “Oh dear, it’s late, we should go home,” I told the girls, but he said “Don’t leave, Rayiha, stay a little longer. Mevlut is capable of sitting in that shop forever, waiting for some drunk to show up for a glass of boza.”

I didn’t like his making fun of Mevlut in front of the girls. “You’re right, Ferhat,” I said. “But it seems one person’s livelihood is another man’s joke. Come on, girls, let’s go.”

We got back late, and Mevlut was angry. “You will not take a single step on İstiklal Avenue, the girls aren’t allowed,” he said. “And you’re not to leave the house at all after dark.”

“Did you know the girls get meatballs, lamb cutlets, and roast chicken at their aunt’s?” I blurted out. Normally I would never have said such a thing, fearing Mevlut’s rage, but God must have put the words in my mouth.

Mevlut got offended and wouldn’t speak to me for three days. So I stopped taking the girls to Aunt Samiha’s, and we just sat at home in the evenings. Whenever I felt the prick of jealousy, I picked up my needlework, and instead of stitching birds cut out from magazines, I decorated fabrics with things from Mevlut’s letters: ruthless eyes that could capture you with a single glance, and looks that cut across your path like bandits. I had eyes dangling down from a tree like enormous fruits and jealous birds weaving in and out around them. I sprinkled the branches with hooded black eyes that looked like daffodils, embroidering an entire blanket with a tree whose hundreds of blossoming eyes peeped out from behind the leaves, like amulets guarding against bad luck. I cleared a path through the darkness in my heart. I made eyes that were like suns, with dark rays that leaped from each lash like arrows, tracing their jagged way through folds of cloth and the winding branches of a fig tree. But nothing could quench my anger!

“Mevlut won’t let us come over anymore, Samiha…Why don’t you come to us when he’s at the shop,” I said one day.

That’s how my sister began to visit us in the evenings with bags of meatballs and crispy minced-meat flatbreads. I soon began to wonder whether Samiha just came to see my daughters, or whether she was there for Mevlut, too.

—

Ferhat. Back on the street, I realized I had lost my confidence up in number 11. In the space of just twenty minutes, I had fallen in love and been duped. I should have just shut the power off and left. The doorman had called her Madam, though I knew from the electric bill that her name was Selvihan.

I began to daydream that my Selvihan was being held hostage by this mafia don, and I was going to rescue her. To fall in love with a woman, a guy like Süleyman needs to see her half naked in that corner of the Sunday paper aimed at sex-starved men and then pay to sleep with her a few times until he forms an attachment. For Mevlut, it’s important that he not know the girl at all, but that he catch just enough of a glimpse to fuel his fantasies. But for a guy like me, to fall in love with a woman, I need to feel as if I’ve squared off against her at the chessboard of life. My opening moves, I admit, were a bit amateurish. But I had a gambit in mind to capture this Selvihan. I knew a guy in our accounting and records department, an experienced, gregarious fellow who loved rakı, and with his help I began to comb through the most recent receipts and bank transfers for that account.

I remember spending many nights looking at my Samiha, beautiful as a rose in bloom, and thinking, Why would a man with a wife like that lose his head over some thug’s mistress locked up in some room with a view? Some evenings, over a glass of rakı, I would remind Samiha that, after all we’d been through, we had finally made it to the heart of the city, just as we’d always wanted.

“We even have money now,” I’d say. “We can do whatever we want. So what shall we do?”

“Let’s run away,” Samiha would say. “Let’s go somewhere no one can find us, somewhere no one even knows us.”

Hearing these words, I realized just how happy Samiha had been those first few months we’d spent all alone together in the Ghaazi Quarter. I’d kept in touch with some of my old friends, both from the Maoists and the pro-Soviet faction, and they were all just as sick and tired as we were of city life. If after years of suffering they’d managed to make a bit of money, they would say, “We’ll save up some more and then we’re leaving Istanbul and going away down south.” Like me, they fantasized about olive trees and vineyards and a farmhouse in a garden down in some Mediterranean town they’d never even been to. Samiha and I both imagined that if we were living on a farm in the south, she would finally get pregnant and we would have a baby.

In the mornings, I’d say, “We’ve been so patient, we’re making some money now, let’s grit our teeth just a while longer and salt away a little more. Then we’ll have enough to buy a big field in the south.”

“I get bored at home in the evenings,” Samiha would say. “Take me to the movies one night.”

One evening I got tired of talking to Mevlut in the shop, so I downed some rakı and went over to the apartment in Gümüşsuyu. I rang the doorman’s bell first, like a policeman who’s come to make an arrest.

“What’s the matter, boss? I thought it was the boza seller. Everything okay?” said Doorman Ercan when he saw me looking at the meters. “Oh, but those people in number eleven are gone now.”

He was right: number 11’s meter was still. For a moment, I felt as if the world had stopped turning.

I went to see the rakı-loving accountant at the Taksim offices: he introduced me to two ancient bookkeepers who looked after the archives and the old handwritten records of the agency that had been distributing electricity to Istanbul’s neighborhoods for over eighty years. The two wise old clerks — one of them was seventy, and the other sixty-five — had taken their retirement bonuses and left, only to return to their office of forty years, now under contract with the pri vate company and eager to teach a new generation of inspectors all the wondrously ingenious tricks that Istanbul residents had devised over eighty years to cheat the electric company and its men. Seeing that I was a young go-getter, they were especially eager to show me the ropes. They could still recall the details of every ploy, the lay of all the neighborhoods, even the women who answered the doors, and all their rumored romances. But for my purposes it wasn’t enough to look in the archives alone; I’d need to check the latest records, too. It would be only a matter of time before I knocked on a door somewhere in Istanbul and found Selvihan behind it. Everyone in this city has a heart, and an electric meter.

—

Rayiha. I’m pregnant again, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. At my age, and with two girls in the house already, it’s too embarrassing.

4. Child Is a Sacred Thing

Maybe You Would Be Happier If I Would Just Die and You Could Marry Samiha

MEVLUT WOULD NEVER forget the story Ferhat told him one night when they still had the Brothers-in-Law Boza Shop:

“During the worst days of the military dictatorship that followed the 1980 coup, with the people of Diyarbakır — a town with a large Kurdish population — cowed by the screams coming from the prison’s torture chambers, a man who looked like a government inspector came down to the city from Ankara. In the taxi from the airport to his hotel, the mysterious visitor asked the Kurdish driver what life in Diyarbakır was like. The driver told him that all the Kurds were very happy with the new military government, that they only had eyes for the Turkish flag and nothing else, and that city folk were very pleased now that the Kurdish separatist terrorists had all been thrown in jail. ‘I’m a lawyer,’ said the visitor from Ankara. ‘I’m here to defend those who’ve been tortured in prison and had dogs let loose on them for speaking Kurdish.’ On hearing this, the driver changed tack completely. He gave a detailed account of the tortures being inflicted on Kurds in prison, of people being thrown into the sewers alive and getting beaten to death. The lawyer from Ankara couldn’t help but interrupt. ‘But you were telling me the opposite just now,’ he said. ‘You’re right, Mr. Lawyer,’ said the driver from Diyarbakır. ‘What I told you earlier were my public views. What I’m telling you now are my private views.’ ”

Every time he thought about this story, Mevlut laughed as if hearing it for the first time, and he would have loved to talk more about it with his friend sometime when they were both in the shop looking after customers, but Ferhat was always busy or his mind was elsewhere. It could be that Ferhat had cut back his appearances at the shop because he found Mevlut’s moralistic musings irritating. Sometimes Mevlut would let slip some crack about rakı or womanizing or the responsibilities of married men, and Ferhat would snap back: “Did you read that in the Righteous Path?” Mevlut had tried to tell him that he’d only bought that paper once because of the nice piece they’d run about the shop, but Ferhat always brushed him off. He had also mocked the picture of “The Other Realm,” with its cypress trees, gravestones, and that divine light, which Mevlut had hung on the wall. Why was his friend so enamored of the kinds of things old men liked to think about, cemeteries and ancient relics?

As the Islamist parties gained more votes and followers, Mevlut saw Ferhat and many other leftists and Alevis becoming uneasy, and perhaps even starting to feel afraid. He himself had more or less seriously come to the conclusion that the first thing they would do in power would be to ban alcohol, and that would make everyone realize the importance of boza. Still, if anyone at the teahouse brought up the subject, he stayed out of it and, if pressed, offered only this prediction — which was enough to rile the anxious pro-Atatürk secularists.

Mevlut had also begun to think that another reason that Ferhat was making himself scarce must have to do with those letters Mevlut had written in the army. “If someone had written letters to my wife for three years, I wouldn’t want to see him every day either,” he told himself. On evenings when it became clear that Ferhat wouldn’t be showing up at all, Mevlut would remind himself that his friend was barely even at home anymore. (Left by herself, Samiha had started coming over to spend time with Rayiha and the girls.) On one such evening, Mevlut got so angry and restless that he decided to close up shop early and go home. When he got home, he found out Samiha had just left. She must have started wearing some sort of perfume, or perhaps the scent drifting up to Mevlut’s nose came from the new toys she’d bought for the girls.

When she saw him coming home so early, Rayiha didn’t seem as delighted as Mevlut had hoped. Instead, she flared up with jealousy. Twice she asked her husband what he was doing back so soon. Mevlut himself wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, but he found Rayiha’s suspicion unreasonable. At Brothers-in-Law, he had always taken such pains to avoid upsetting any of them (Samiha included): he tried to avoid being left alone with Samiha, and when there was work to be done, he always spoke to Rayiha with gentle familiarity, assuming with Samiha a more distant, formal manner, as he would have done with some employee at the Binbom Café. These precautions, however, had not sufficed, and Mevlut felt himself being dragged into a vicious circle: If he acted like there was no cause to be jealous, it would look like he was hiding something, getting up to no good right under Rayiha’s nose, which would only inflame her suspicion. If, however, he seemed too understanding about Rayiha’s feelings, it would be like admitting to a crime he hadn’t committed. Fortunately, when he got home that evening, the girls hadn’t gone to sleep yet, so Rayiha held back, and the tension blew over before their argument could escalate.

—

Rayiha. One afternoon, while working with our neighbor Reyhan on a bridal trousseau, I sheepishly told her a little bit about my feelings. She took my side, saying any wife whose husband spent time with a woman as beautiful as Samiha was bound to feel jealous. Of course this just made my jealousy worse. According to Reyhan, I should not keep my feelings bottled up inside until I burst but rather I should talk to Mevlut and remind him to be a little more considerate. I thought I’d bring it up with Mevlut after the girls left for school. But we ended up fighting. “So what?” said Mevlut. “I can’t come back to my own house at whatever time I please?”

To be honest, I take most things Reyhan tells me with a grain of salt, and I would certainly never count my dear little sister as one of those beautiful but childless women whose very existence is a threat to the natural order. The way Reyhan saw it, when Samiha played with the girls, she wasn’t just nursing the pangs of her childlessness; she was also indulging in the pain and pleasures of JEALOUSY. “A woman who is barren is a woman to be feared, Rayiha, for behind her silence lies a towering rage,” she said. “When she buys your daughters meatballs from the diner, she’s not as innocent as you think.” In my anger, I threw some of the things Reyhan had said back at Mevlut. “You shouldn’t talk about your sister like that,” he said.

So Samiha’s got my foolish Mevlut wrapped around her finger and ready to rush to her defense, has she? Well then: “She is BARREN!” I screamed, even louder than before. “If you’re going to take her side, I’ll be as nasty as I want.” Mevlut waved me off as if to say, You are despicable, and he curled his lip as if he were looking at some sort of bug.

He wrote all those letters to her only to marry me in the end, the freak! No, that I didn’t dare say out loud. I don’t know how, but as I was shouting at him I picked up a packet of Filiz tea and threw it at his head. “MAYBE YOU WOULD BE HAPPIER IF I WOULD JUST DIE AND YOU COULD MARRY SAMIHA,” I screamed. I would never leave my daughters to a stepmother, though. I can see just as well as you can that Samiha is trying to charm my daughters with her gifts, her stories, her beauty, and her money, but if I dared to mention it, everybody — and especially all of you reading this — would say the same thing: “What on earth do you mean, Rayiha? Can’t the girls have a little fun with their aunt?”

Mevlut tried to regain the upper hand: “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, KNOW YOUR PLACE!”

“I know my place and I know it well, and that’s why I’m not coming to the shop anymore,” I said. “It stinks in there.”

“What?”

“The Brothers-in-Law Boza Shop…IT STINKS. It makes my stomach turn.”

“Boza makes you sick?”

“I’ve had enough of your boza…”

Mevlut’s expression became so menacing that I got scared and cried out: “I’M PREGNANT.” I hadn’t planned on telling him; I was planning to go and have it scraped out of me the way Vediha does, but it was too late, I’d said it now, so I just went on.

“I have your baby in my belly, Mevlut; at this age and with Fatma and Fevziye around, it’s mortifying. You should have been more care ful,” I said, blaming him. I already wished I hadn’t told him, but at the same time I was pleased to see him mollified.

Oh yes, Mr. Mevlut, you sit in that shop fantasizing about your sister-in-law, with that smug, self-satisfied grin, but now everyone’s going to know what you’ve been up to with your wife after the girls go to school. They’re all going to say, “Mevlut doesn’t waste a chance, does he!” Never mind barren Samiha, who will be even more jealous now.

Sitting next to me on the edge of the bed, Mevlut put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me close. “I wonder if it’s a boy or a girl,” he said. “Of course you shouldn’t come to the shop in this state,” he said, sweet and caring. “I won’t go either. It’s only making us fight. Selling boza on the street at night is better, and there’s more money in it, Rayiha.”

We went back and forth for a while: “You go, no really, you go, I won’t go, you don’t go, of course you should go,” we said, and also “that’s not what I meant, it’s nobody’s fault,” and things like that.

“Samiha’s the one who’s in the wrong,” said Mevlut. “She shouldn’t come to the shop anymore. She’s changed, and so has Ferhat, they’re not like us anymore, just look at that perfume she wears…”

“What perfume?”

“Whatever it was, the whole house smelled of it when I came home last night,” he said, laughing.

“So that’s why you came home early yesterday, to catch a whiff of her!” I said, and started crying again.

—

Vediha. Poor Rayiha is pregnant again. She came to Duttepe one morning and said, “Oh, Vediha, it’s so embarrassing with the girls around, you have to help me, take me to the hospital.”

“Your daughters are old enough to be married, Rayiha. You’re almost thirty, Mevlut is nearly forty. What’s going on with you two, sweetheart? Haven’t you figured out by now when to do it and when not to?”

Rayiha gave me lots of intimate details she’d never bothered to mention before, and eventually she brought up Samiha, finding some excuse to criticize her. That’s how I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t Mevlut’s carelessness that had gotten her pregnant but Rayiha’s own trick — not that I would ever say such a thing to her.

“My dear Rayiha, children are a family’s delight, a woman’s consolation, and life’s greatest joy, so what’s the problem, just pop this one out, too,” I said. “I get so cross with Bozkurt and Turan sometimes; they’re so disrespectful. We both know how they’ve always tormented your girls. I’ve worn myself out giving them so many smacks over the years, but they are my reason for living; they keep me going. I would die if anything happened to them, God forbid. They’ve got beards to shave and pimples to squeeze now; they’re so grown up they won’t let their mother even touch them anymore, not even for a little kiss…If I could make another two, I’d have the little ones to sit on my lap now, I’d kiss them and hug them and I’d be happier, I wouldn’t mind so much when Korkut is awful. Now I wish I hadn’t had all those abortions…There’s plenty of women who’ve gone mad with regret over an abortion, but never in the history of the world has a woman ever regretted having a child. Do you regret giving birth to Fatma, Rayiha? Do you regret having Fevziye?”

Rayiha started crying. She said Mevlut wasn’t earning enough, he had failed as a manager, and now they were terrified that the boza shop was going to fail, too; if not for the needlework she did for those linen shops in Beyoğlu, they would be struggling to make it to the end of the month. She’d made her mind up, she wouldn’t have another child and expect God to feed it. The four of them barely had room to breathe in their one-room apartment as it was; there certainly wasn’t any space for another.

“My darling Rayiha,” I said, “your sister will always lend you a hand in times of trouble. But a child is a sacred thing; this is a big responsibility. Go home and think it over. I’ll call Samiha, and we’ll talk about it together next week.”

“Don’t call Samiha, I can’t stand her anyway. I don’t want her to know I’m carrying a baby. She’s barren; she’d get jealous. I’ve made my decision. I don’t need to think about it.”

I explained to Rayiha that three years after the coup in 1980, our dictator General Kenan Evren had done a good deed by allowing unmarried women less than ten weeks into a pregnancy to go to a hospital and get an abortion. This had mostly benefited those brave city girls who had sex before marriage. For married women to be able to take advantage of this new regulation, they had to get their husbands to sign a form confirming they agreed to the termination of the pregnancy. The men of Duttepe often refused to sign, saying they might as well keep the baby, it was a sin to do otherwise, and at least they’d have someone else to look after them in their old age, and so after many drawn-out arguments with their husbands, their wives would end up with a fourth or fifth child. Some caused themselves to miscarry using primitive methods they learned from one another. “Don’t you even think of doing anything like that if Mevlut doesn’t sign, Rayiha, you’ll regret it,” I told my sister.

As I also told Rayiha, there are men like Korkut who have no qualms at all about signing those forms. They find it more convenient than taking the necessary precautions, so they go ahead and knock up their wives, thinking, She can get an abortion anyway! After Evren’s law was introduced, Korkut got me pregnant three times. I had three abortions at the Etfal Hospital, though of course as soon as we started making a little more money, I wished I could take them back. But I did at least become familiar with the procedure.

“The first thing we do, Rayiha, is go to the councilman and get a certificate that confirms you’re married to Mevlut, then we’ll go to the hospital and get two doctors to sign the form that says you’re pregnant, and finally we’ll pick up a blank permission form for Mevlut to sign. Okay?”

—

Mevlut and Rayiha’s quarrel rumbled on, heated as ever, but now it wasn’t over jealousy but the more delicate question of whether Rayiha should keep the baby. They couldn’t bring it up at the shop, or when the girls were around, so their only chance was in the morning after the girls left for school. Their exchanges on this subject amounted not so much to discussions as a series of gestured misunderstandings: a long face, a scowl, a sniff of annoyance, a hateful glance, and a frown carried more weight than a sentence, so they each paid more attention to the other’s face than to the other’s words. Mevlut was very upset when he realized soon enough that in her growing restlessness and hostility, Rayiha was interpreting his indecision as a stalling tactic.

His indecision notwithstanding, he was thrilled at the prospect of a boy and had already started daydreaming about that possibility. He would call him Mevlidhan. He thought of how Babur had conquered India thanks to his three lionhearted boys and how Genghis Khan’s four loyal sons had made him the world’s most fearsome emperor. He kept telling Rayiha that his own father’s failures on first arriving in Istanbul had all been for want of a son beside him, and how, by the time Mevlut had come from the village to help, it had been too late. But every time Rayiha heard the words “too late,” all she could think of was the ten-week limit for having a legal abortion.

Those morning hours after the girls left for school, once the time of their joyous lovemaking, now were given over to endless bickering and recrimination. Only Rayiha’s tears could make Mevlut feel bad enough to relent for a moment and comfort her, to tell her “Everything is going to be fine,” at which point a confused Rayiha would say that perhaps it was indeed better for her to keep the baby, only to regret her words immediately.

Mevlut himself wondered — with increasing resentment — whether Rayiha’s determination to end her pregnancy was her answer to (and punishment for) his poverty and all his life’s failures. He almost felt that if he could only persuade her to keep the baby, it would show the world that they had everything they needed in life after all. It would even be clear that they were happier than Korkut and Vediha, who only had two children, and certainly poor Samiha and Ferhat, who had none at all. Happy people had lots of kids. Rich and unhappy people envied the poor for their children — just like these Europeans, who kept saying that Turkey should look into family planning.

One morning, Mevlut succumbed to Rayiha’s insistence and her tears and went to the local councilman for the certificate proving they were married. The councilman, who was also a real-estate broker, wasn’t in his office. Reluctant to return to Rayiha empty-handed, Mevlut wandered the streets of Tarlabaşı for a while: out of old habit from his days of unemployment, his eyes roamed around looking for a street vendor’s cart that was for sale, an acquaintance who might be looking for someone to work in his shop, or some furniture he could buy on the cheap. Over the past ten years, Tarlabaşı had filled with empty street vendors’ carts, some of which were left chained up on a corner even during the day. Mevlut thought of how, ever since he’d stopped selling boza at night, he had felt a tightness in his chest, and he’d lost some of the old urge to feel the chemistry of the streets on his skin.

He sat down for a cup of tea and talked about religion and the new mayor for a bit with the Kurdish scrap-metal dealer who’d married him and Rayiha in a religious ceremony thirteen years ago and had also given them all that guidance about sexual contact during Ramadan. There were even more bars with sidewalk tables out on the streets of Beyoğlu now. He asked the scrap-metal dealer about abortions. “It says in the Koran that it’s a big sin,” said the dealer, embarking on a detailed explanation, but Mevlut didn’t take him too seriously. If it really was such a horrible sin, why would so many people be having abortions all the time?

But there was something else the dealer had spoken of that stayed with Mevlut: how the souls of babies taken from their mothers’ wombs before birth climbed trees in heaven, hopping from branch to branch like orphaned birds, skipping restlessly like tiny white sparrows. He never mentioned this conversation to Rayiha, fearing she wouldn’t believe that the councilman hadn’t been in his office.

When he went back four days later, the councilman told him that his wife’s identity card had expired and that if Rayiha expected to obtain any sort of service from the government (Mevlut hadn’t specified what sort of service she was seeking), she would have to get a new identity card, just like everyone else. This kind of thing always scared Mevlut. His late father’s biggest lesson had been to steer clear of government records and their keepers. Mevlut had never paid the state any taxes. In return, they had taken his white rice cart and destroyed it.

Having convinced herself that her husband would eventually sign the permission form she needed for an abortion, Rayiha felt bad about having abandoned him at the shop, and so at the beginning of April, she started returning to Brothers-in-Law. One afternoon there, she threw up and tried to hide it from Mevlut, without success. Mevlut cleaned up his wife’s vomit before any customers could notice. In these final days of her life, Rayiha never came back there again.

It had been decided that in the afternoon, when they were done with school, Fatma and Fevziye would stop by Brothers-in-Law to wash glasses and help tidy up. Rayiha struggled to explain to them why she herself couldn’t go to help their father. But the fewer the people who knew about the baby — her daughters included — the simpler it would be to get rid of it.

Mevlut directed his daughters like cooks and nurses supporting frontline troops. Fatma would come in one day, and Fevziye the next. Mevlut made them wash the glasses and clean up, but he was too protective a father to let them serve customers and take payment, or even talk to anyone at all. They could confide in him, and they would have their usual long conversations about what they did in school, impersonators and comedians they liked on TV, their favorite scenes in some movie, or the latest episode of a show.

Fatma was smart, quiet, and sensible. She knew how much food and clothes cost and what every shop sold; she was aware of what people came to Brothers-in-Law, what condition the street was in, the doorman who sold illicit things through the beggar on the corner, her mother alone at home, and even what lay ahead for her father’s business. She was full of a protective love for him, which Mevlut could feel deeply. As he often proudly told Rayiha, if his store were ever a success one day (and if Fatma were a boy), Mevlut would comfortably leave it in her twelve-year-old hands.

At almost eleven years of age, Fevziye was still a child: she hated cleaning, wiping, drying, or any other task that required effort; she always found ways to cut corners if forced to perform the duties she so readily shirked. Mevlut often felt he should tell her off, but when he tried to be stern with her, he found it so hard to keep a straight face that he knew it would be no use. Mevlut loved talking to her about the customers who came in.

Some would barely take a sip of their boza before declaring with a few unpleasant remarks that they didn’t like it and then demand a partial refund. Such a tiny incident might give Mevlut and Fevziye a subject of conversation for two or three days. They would listen closely to the conversation between the two men who were going to fix the bastard who’d sent them a bad check; the pair of friends who’d just placed a bet on some horse with the bookie down the street; or that group of three who’d just come into the shop to wait out the rain after coming out of the movies. Mevlut loved to pick up a customer’s forgotten or discarded newspaper and have one of his clever girls, whichever happened to be there, read aloud to their father from a page chosen at random, as if he (like their illiterate grandfather Mustafa, whom they’d never met) couldn’t have read it for himself, and he would smile with satisfaction as he listened and gazed out the window. Sometimes he would interrupt them—“See what I mean?”—drawing their attention to some little lesson about life, ethics, and responsibility, which the article illustrated.

Sometimes one of the girls would give her father an embarrassed account of whatever was troubling her at that particular moment (the geography teacher who had it in for her, or how she needed new shoes because the ones she had were coming apart, or how she didn’t want to wear that old overcoat anymore because the other girls were making fun of it), and when Mevlut realized that there was nothing he could do to solve the problem, he would say, “Don’t worry, this too shall pass,” and conclude with the following aphorism: “As long as you keep your heart pure, you will always get what you want in the end.” One night he overheard them laughing over his devotion to that particular gem, but he couldn’t get angry at being the butt of their jokes, such was his pleasure at yet another demonstration of their cleverness and wit.

Every evening, Mevlut was willing to leave the shop unattended for a few minutes to take his daughter by the hand — whichever one had come to help him that day — and leap with her over the immense crowds and across İstiklal Avenue to the Tarlabaşı side, tell her, “Now go straight home, no dawdling,” and watch as she disappeared from view, before he hurried back to Brothers-in-Law.

One evening it was Fatma he’d dropped off, and he returned to find Ferhat inside, smoking a cigarette. “The people who’ve been giving us this old Greek shop have joined our enemies,” said Ferhat. “Property values and rents around here are going up, my dear Mevlut. You could sell anything you like here — socks, kebabs, underwear, apples — and still make ten times what we’re making.”

“We don’t make anything anyway…”

“Exactly. I’m dropping the shop.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have to close it.”

“What if I were to stay?” Mevlut asked timidly.

“You’ll get a visit from the gang who rents out all the Greek properties. They’ll charge you whatever they feel like…And if you don’t pay it, they’ll make you regret it…”

“Why didn’t they do that to you?”

“I took care of their electricity and kept all these old abandoned houses hooked to the grid so they’d be of some use. If you clear out right away, you won’t lose all this stuff. Take it all out, sell it off, do whatever you want with it.”

Mevlut closed up shop right away, bought a small bottle of rakı from the grocer’s, and went home to have dinner with Rayiha and the girls. It had been years since the four of them had last sat at the dinner table together: he cracked jokes and laughed along with them as they watched TV, and then, with the air of someone with some excellent news, he announced that he would again be selling boza on the street at night; that, after careful consideration, he and Ferhat had decided to close the shop; and that he was drinking rakı now because he was taking a holiday for the evening. Had Rayiha not said, “God help us all,” no one would have had the feeling of having heard some bad news. His wife’s words irked Mevlut.

“Don’t bring God into this while I’m having rakı. Everything will be fine.”

The next day, Fatma and Fevziye helped him carry all the kitchen utensils back home from the shop. Mevlut was outraged when a junk dealer in Çukurcuma offered him a pittance for the desk, the table, and the chairs, so he looked up a carpenter he knew, but it turned out that whatever wood could be salvaged from the battered old furniture was worth even less than what the junk dealer had offered. He took the smaller of the two mirrors home. As for the heavy one with the silver frame that Ferhat had bought, he got Fatma and Fevziye each to take one end and carry it over to their aunt’s house. He took the framed clipping from the Righteous Path and the picture of the graveyard with the tombstones, the cypress trees, and the radiant light, and hung them side by side on the wall behind their television. Looking at the picture of “The Other Realm” comforted Mevlut.

5. Mevlut Becomes a Parking Lot Guard

Guilt and Astonishment

AFTER HIS FAILURE at the Binbom Café, Mevlut knew he couldn’t ask the Aktaş family to find him another job. Though angry with Ferhat, he would have been prepared to set hard feelings aside and let Ferhat ease his conscience by helping his friend — but Rayiha wouldn’t hear of it: she blamed Ferhat for closing the shop and kept saying that he was a bad person.

In the evenings, Mevlut sold boza, and in the mornings he would canvass his acquaintances in the city, looking for something. When headwaiters and restaurant managers he’d known for years offered him positions as a line manager or cashier, he acted as if he would give their proposals due consideration, but in truth he was after a job that would let him work less and earn more (like Ferhat), leaving him enough time and energy to sell boza in the evening.

One day in mid-April he heard from Mohini, who had been trying to help his friend ever since the closing of Brothers-in-Law. Mohini told Mevlut that the Groom, their old middle-school classmate, would be expecting to see him at the Pangaltı offices of his advertising agency.

When Mevlut arrived, wearing his best suit, the Groom greeted him with a formal handshake, and the two old friends didn’t even exchange a hug. Nevertheless, the Groom presented him to his pretty, smiling secretary (They must be lovers, thought Mevlut) as “a very worthy and special person, and exceptionally bright,” and “a great friend.” The secretary giggled at the idea of her wealthy bourgeois employer being friends of any kind with this man, who was evidently poor and wholly inept. So it was not altogether surprising when it was proposed that he run the tea stall under the stairs on the fourth floor; but Mevlut instinctively wanted to be nowhere near the Groom, let alone serve his besuited underlings tea all day, so he declined immediately. He quickly agreed, however, to the alternative assignment of looking after the company parking area in the back courtyard, which the Groom pointed out from the window.

You entered the courtyard parking area by way of the street that ran behind the building; Mevlut’s job was to bar unauthorized vehicles and to guard the place against those gangs commonly referred to as the “parking mafia.”

In the past fifteen years, these gangs of five or six friends hailing from the same village, a mix of mafia thugs and ordinary delinquents with connections in the police force, had spread all over the city like prickly burrs. Spotting some road, street corner, or empty lot, any place in the center of Istanbul where parking wasn’t forbidden, they would stake a claim of ownership — with knives and guns if need be — demanding payment from anyone who wanted to park there and punishing those who balked by smashing their quarter lights, puncturing their tires, or taking a key to the paint of the new car they’d imported from Europe at great expense. During the six weeks Mevlut spent as a parking lot guard, he witnessed a huge number of arguments, swearing matches, and fistfights involving people who refused to pay up: some thought the fee was outrageously high; others said, “Who the hell are you, where did you come from, why should I pay you for the right to park in front of the house I’ve been living in for forty years?” Some looked for other excuses: “If I pay, will you give me a receipt?” By dint of levelheaded diplomacy and shrewd evasion, Mevlut was able to stay out of these disputes while enforcing from the very beginning a clear border between the advertising agency’s space and the street where the gang ran its racket.

In spite of their violent inclinations, their brazen, menacing ways, and their well-publicized inclination to damage people’s cars, Istanbul’s legions of car-park gangs provided the city’s heedless rich with an invaluable service. Whenever traffic was at a complete standstill, wherever it seemed impossible to find a spot, drivers could stop on a pavement or even in the middle of the road and entrust their car to these gangs’ “valets,” who would park and look after it as long as needed, cleaning the windows and even washing the whole car for an additional fee. When some of the younger, more audacious gang members slipped by Mevlut to park some car in the area he was supposed to guard, he would look away, as the Groom had made clear that he didn’t want “any trouble.” This made the job easier. Mevlut would stop street traffic with the assurance of a cop when the Groom or one of his employees arrived in the morning and again when they left in the evening; he would offer encouraging parking counsel—“Just a little to the left now” or “You’ve got loads of room”—hold the car door open for VIPs (with the Groom, this was always done in a spirit of camaraderie), and provide updates for those who asked him whether so-and-so had arrived or left already. The Groom’s intercession had procured Mevlut a chair, which was placed where the pavement merged into the courtyard, a point some people called the courtyard gate, though there was no gate there at all. Mevlut would spend most of his time sitting on this wooden chair to watch the traffic on the backstreet, the two doormen who stood talking to each other from outside their respective buildings, the beggar who every now and then came off the main road where he paraded his mangled leg, the industrious apprentice to that grocer from Samsun, the ordinary passersby, the windows on the surrounding buildings, and the stray cats and dogs. He would also chat with the local parking gang’s most junior member (whom colleagues sneeringly called “the valet”).

The extraordinary thing about Kemal, the valet from Zonguldak, was that even though he wasn’t particularly clever and talked too much, Mevlut found every single thing he said interesting. The key to his appeal was his free-flowing candor about the most intimate aspects of his everyday life — including his sexual proclivities, the eggs and sausages he’d had for dinner yesterday, the way his mother did the laundry or fought with his father back in the village, and how he’d felt watching a love scene on TV the night before. These personal anecdotes often came with a side helping of unsolicited opinions on poli tics, business, and local goings-on: half the men who worked in that advertising agency were faggots, and half the women were dykes; the whole of Pangaltı used to belong to the Armenians, and one day, they were going to use the Americans to demand it all back; the mayor of Istanbul was secretly a stockholder in the company that built those “caterpillar” buses they imported from Hungary.

Mevlut always sensed a hint of menace in the valet’s bravado: that rich bastard who’d parked his Mercedes on their turf without even bothering to give the poor soul there to guard it some small change for his troubles, hadn’t he considered that he might just come back to find his car gone, and no one doing anything about it? Or those cheapskates who refused to pay the parking fee (which was less than a pack of Marlboros anyway) and threatened to call the police on his gang — didn’t they understand that half the fee went to the police anyway? The same know-it-all jerks ready to lay into a humble valet had no inkling that in the three hours since they’d dropped it off, their new BMW had had its battery, pricey gearbox, and air-conditioning system replaced with junk. And that was nothing: a gang from the Black Sea town of Ünye, working with a shady garage down in Dolapdere, had once managed in half a day to replace the entire engine on a 1995 Mercedes with one from some old wreck, doing such a flawless job that the returning owner left the valet an especially large tip for having cleaned the car for him. But there was nothing for Mevlut to worry about; the gang had no designs on any cars under his care. In turn, Mevlut always let young Kemal park a few cars in the company lot, provided there were spots to spare, though he did keep the Groom upstairs apprised of all these arrangements.

Sometimes, the courtyard, the parking lot, the pavements, and the empty street would be suffused with a vast stillness and silence (as far as such a thing was possible in Istanbul), and Mevlut would realize that apart from being close to Rayiha and his daughters, his favorite thing in the world was watching people go by on the street, inventing stories inspired by the things he saw (just as he did when he watched television), and then talking to someone about it all. The Groom didn’t pay him much, but at least he was near where there was life and not stuck in an office, so he couldn’t complain. He could even go home shortly after six, once the office was closed and all the cars were gone. Then at night, when the parking lot became the gang’s turf until the next morning, Mevlut had time to go out and sell boza.

One month after starting at the parking lot, Mevlut was watching a door-to-door shoeshine polishing the shoes people were sending downstairs when he suddenly remembered that the ten first weeks of Rayiha’s pregnancy, during which she had the right to have an abortion, had already passed. Mevlut believed wholeheartedly that their inability to come to a decision on this matter had as much to do with his wife’s mixed feelings as with his own reluctance. Even in a government hospital, an abortion was always a dangerous thing. But a baby would bring joy to the house and strengthen the bonds of their family. Rayiha still hadn’t told Fatma and Fevziye that she was pregnant. When she did, she would know she had done the right thing from the pleasure of seeing her grown-up daughters welcome the new baby so tenderly.

He got lost in contemplation of his wife waiting for him back home. Thinking of how fond he was of her, how much he loved her, he nearly cried. It was only two o’clock; the girls wouldn’t be back from school yet. Mevlut felt as free as he used to feel in his high-school days; he asked young Kemal from Zonguldak to look after the lot, and he practically ran back home to Tarlabaşı. He longed to be at home alone with Rayiha as in those beautiful, blissful early years of their marriage, when they never used to argue. But there was also something weighing on his conscience, as if he’d forgotten something very important. Maybe that was why he was in such a hurry.

The moment he walked in, he knew that it was God who’d made him run back home in such haste. Rayiha had done something primitive, something from the village, to try to cause a miscarriage, but it had gone wrong, and now the blood loss and pain had left her barely conscious.

He pulled her up, lifted her into his arms, and rushed out with her to find a taxi. He knew with each step that he would remember every single one of these moments until the day he died. He prayed repeatedly for their happiness to remain intact, for her pain to go away. He caressed his wife’s hair soaked with sweat; he gazed in terror at her face, which was white as a sheet. On the way to the emergency room five minutes away, he saw that she was wearing the same expression of guilt and astonishment that she’d worn the night they’d run away together.

By the time they went through the hospital door, Rayiha had bled to death. She was thirty years old.

6. After Rayiha

People Can’t Get Cross with You If You’re Crying

Abdurrahman Efendi. We have a telephone in our village guesthouse now. “Quick, your daughter’s on the line from Istanbul!” they said. I made it just in time: it was Vediha, who said that my darling Rayiha had ended up in the hospital after a miscarriage. I had two drinks on an empty stomach just before boarding the bus in Beyşehir, and that’s when I knew in my heart that we were cursed, that I might drown in despair, for this was how my orphaned girls had lost their mother. Crying is some relief, at least.

—

Vediha. I know now that my darling angel Rayiha, may she rest in peace, gave me and Mevlut each a lie. She told me that he didn’t want her to keep the baby, which wasn’t true. She told Mevlut that the baby was a girl, which she couldn’t have known for sure. But our grief is so great that I don’t think anyone has the strength to talk about these things right now.

—

Süleyman. I was worried that Mevlut would think I wasn’t upset enough. But in fact as soon as I saw him looking so lost and desolate, I started crying. When I did, Mevlut started crying, too, and so did my mother. Eventually I felt as if I was crying not because Rayiha had died but because everyone else was crying. When we were little, whenever he caught anyone crying, Korkut would tell him to “stop sniveling like a girl,” but of course this time he had to keep quiet. He found me watching TV in the guest room on my own. “Cry all you want,” he said, “but someday Mevlut will find a way to be happy again, you’ll see.”

—

Korkut. I went to the hospital with Süleyman to pick up Rayiha’s body. They told us, “The best place to have her washed is at the bathhouse of the Barbaros Mosque in Beşiktaş, they have people there who specialize in handling female corpses, they’ll do it with proper sponges and soap, they’ll use the best shrouds and towels, and rosewater, too. You’d better tip them upfront, though.” So that’s where we went, smoking cigarettes in the courtyard of the mosque while we waited for Rayiha to be washed. Mevlut came with us when we went to the offices of the Cemetery of the Industrial Quarter. But he’d forgotten his identity card, so we had to go back to Tarlabaşı. At home, he couldn’t find his card, and he collapsed on the bed in a crying heap, but then he got up to look for it again and finally he found it. We went back to the cemetery. You wouldn’t believe the traffic.

—

Aunt Safiye. I was cooking halva, the special kind that’s made of flour and butter after someone dies. My tears were falling into the pot, disappearing among the little clumps of flour and sugar, and with each tear that vanished, I felt like another memory was gone. Would we run out of butane gas? Should I have put a bit more meat in the vegetable stew? Whenever people got tired of crying, they came into the kitchen and lifted the lid off a pot to stare quietly at its contents. As if crying for a long time meant you could come over and see what was cooking.

—

Samiha. Poor Fatma and Fevziye spent the night at my place. Vediha, who was also there, said “Bring them over to ours.” That’s how I went back to the Aktaş family home in Duttepe for the first time since running away eleven years ago to avoid marrying Süleyman. “Watch out for Süleyman!” said Ferhat, but Süleyman wasn’t even around. To think that eleven years ago, everyone — myself included — had thought I was going to marry him! I was curious to see the room where we used to stay with my father: it looked smaller now, but it still smelled of beeswax. They had added two floors to the house. This whole situation makes me really uncomfortable, but right now we’re all thinking of Rayiha. I started crying again. People can’t get cross with you if you’re crying, or ask you any questions either.

—

Aunt Safiye. Mevlut’s girls Fatma and Fevziye, and later Vediha, too, would come into the kitchen whenever they got tired of crying and stare into the pots and the fridge as they would at the TV. Later, Samiha arrived, too. I’ve always had a soft spot for that girl. I have nothing against her, even though she led Süleyman on and charmed him with her beauty only to ditch him in the end.

—

Vediha. Thank God women aren’t allowed to attend funerals. I don’t think I could take it. After the men went off to the mosque, all the women in the house, Mevlut’s daughters included, started crying. The sobs would begin on one side of the room, and when they stopped, the other side would pick up. I didn’t wait for the men to come back from the funeral — I didn’t even wait until evening, in fact — I just went straight into the kitchen and brought out the pudding. The crying stopped for that. Fatma and Fevziye looked out the window as they ate, and we saw Turan and Bozkurt’s black-and-white football in the back garden. As soon as we were done with dessert, the tears started flowing again, but there’s only so much crying you can do before you’re too exhausted to go on.

—

Hadji Hamit Vural. The young wife of Aktaş’s nephew has already left this world and gone to meet her maker. The mosque courtyard was thronging with elderly yogurt sellers from Konya. Most of these people have sold me the empty land they grabbed in the 1960s and 1970s. Now they’re all wishing they’d waited a little longer and made more money on it. They’re complaining that Hadji Hamit took their land for next to nothing. There isn’t a single one among them saying, I’m grateful to Hadji Hamit, we fenced off some public land on this godforsaken mountain one day, and even though we had no legal right to it, he still bought it off us with truckloads of money. If they’d donated even a tiny fraction of that cash to the mosque’s maintenance fund, I wouldn’t have to draw from my own pockets today to repair the leaking gutters, replace the lead sheets on the dome, and set up a proper classroom for Koran lessons. But never mind, I’m used to these people by now; I still smile at them with affection, and I’m happy to offer my hand to anyone who wants to kiss it with respect. The husband of the deceased was in a terrible state. I asked what this Mevlut had done after his time as a yogurt seller; what I heard saddened me. Men are as different as the fingers of a hand. Some become rich; some become wise; some go to hell; some go to heaven. Someone reminded me that I’d been to his wedding years ago and even given the groom a watch. I saw that someone had dumped empty boxes next to the steps leading up to the mosque courtyard; I said, “Is the mosque your private storeroom now?” Really, they’ve got to take care of that. The crowd began to gather together as the imam arrived. Our Holy Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, once proclaimed that “it is best to stand in the back row during a funeral prayer.” I do love to watch the members of the congregation turn their faces to the right, and then again to the left, and that is why I try never to miss a funeral prayer. O Lord, I prayed, please send this woman to heaven if she was a good person, and please forgive her if she was a sinner — what was her name again? The imam said it just a moment ago. What a slight little thing this Rayiha must have been when she lived; her coffin rested on my shoulder for a moment, and it felt as light as a feather.

—

Süleyman. Korkut told me to keep an eye on poor Mevlut, so I never left his side. He would have almost fallen in again while shoveling earth into the grave if I hadn’t grabbed him from behind. At one point he ran out of strength and he couldn’t stand anymore. I helped him to another gravestone. He didn’t move until Rayiha’s coffin was buried and everyone had left.

—

If it had been up to him, Mevlut would never have left the spot where Süleyman had found him in the cemetery. He sensed that Rayiha needed his help. There had been too many people, and he’d forgotten some of the prayers he was meant to say, but he was sure that as soon as everyone was gone, the words would come rolling off his tongue, and he’d be able to give Rayiha what she needed. Mevlut knew that reciting prayers during the burial of the deceased and their soul’s ascent from the graveyard was meant to comfort them. The sight of all those different gravestones, the cypresses in the background, all the other trees and weeds, and the way the light shone down from the sky reminded Mevlut of the picture he’d found in the Righteous Path and cut out and framed with Rayiha for the wall of Brothers-in-Law. The similarity made him feel as if he’d already lived through this moment. He’d experienced this illusion before when out selling boza at night, and he’d always welcomed it as a pleasant trick his mind played on him.

Mevlut’s mind responded to Rayiha’s death in three distinct ways, all of which could feel like delusions in one moment, and reality the next:

The most persistent response was to refuse to believe that Rayiha had passed away. Even though his wife had died in his arms, Mevlut’s mind would often indulge in fantasies wherein no such thing had ever happened: Rayiha was in the other room, she’d just said something, in fact, though Mevlut hadn’t heard; she was going to walk in now; life would go on as usual.

The second response was anger at everyone and everything. He was angry at the taxi driver who’d been too slow getting Rayiha to hospital and the government clerks who had taken such a long time to issue her a new identity card, he was angry at the neighborhood councilman, the doctors, those who had abandoned him, the people who made everything so expensive, the terrorists, and the politicians. Most of all, he was angry at Rayiha: for leaving him all alone; for not giving birth to Mevlidhan; for refusing to be a mother.

His mind’s third response was to help Rayiha on her journey to the hereafter. He wanted to be of some use to her in the afterlife at least. Rayiha was so lonely now, down in that tomb. Her torment would be eased if Mevlut brought the girls to the cemetery to say a few prayers. Mevlut would start praying by Rayiha’s grave, and he would get all the words mixed up (he didn’t know what most of them meant anyway) or skip some altogether, but he would console himself with the thought that what really mattered was the intention behind the prayer.

In the first few months, Mevlut and his two daughters would follow their visits to Rayiha’s grave with a trip to Duttepe to see the Aktaş family. Aunt Safiye and Vediha would bring out food for the orphaned girls and give them some of the chocolates and cookies that they always made sure to have on hand on those days, and all four of them would sit and watch movies on TV.

On two of these visits to Duttepe, they saw Samiha there, too. Now that she was no longer scared of Süleyman, Mevlut understood why she would come back to the house she’d escaped all those years ago to be with Ferhat: Samiha endured the strain for the sake of seeing her nieces, so that she could console them and find her own consolation in their presence.

They were in Duttepe again one day when Vediha told Mevlut that if he was planning to take the girls to the village in Beyşehir that summer, she might come along, too. The old school in Cennetpınar, she explained, had been converted into a guesthouse, and Korkut regularly sent donations to the village development association. It was the first Mevlut had ever heard of this organization, though it was to grow increasingly influential as time went by. He thought that at least if he went to the village he wouldn’t spend too much money.

On the bus to Beyşehir with Fatma and Fevziye, Mevlut considered the possibility that he might never come back to Istanbul. But within three days he’d understood that the thought of staying in the village forever had been a meaningless fantasy stemming from his pain over losing Rayiha. The village was a dead end, and they could no longer be anything more than guests there. He did want to go back to the city. His life, his fury, his happiness, Rayiha — everything revolved around Istanbul.

Their grandmother and their aunts’ affection distracted his girls from their grief for a while, but they quickly exhausted any amusements country life had to offer. The village was still very poor. Any boys their age soon made Fatma and Fevziye uncomfortable with their attentions and their pranks. At night, the girls would sleep in the same room as their grandmother; they would talk to her and listen to her stories about village legends, historic disagreements, and ongoing feuds and rivalries between this person and that; it was fun, but sometimes it would scare them, too, and then they would remember that they had lost their mother. During that visit to the village, Mevlut realized that deep down he had always resented his mother for not having come to Istanbul and having left him and his father alone in the city. Had his mother and his sisters joined them there, perhaps Rayiha would have never come to the point where she saw no other option but to try to get rid of the baby by herself.

But it was soothing to hear his mother say “My poor Mevlut” and to be kissed and cuddled as if he were still a child. These tender moments would always make him feel like going to hide in a corner somewhere, but then he would find one last excuse to go back to his mother. His mother’s affection seemed to be laced with an anguish over not only Rayiha’s death but also Mevlut’s difficulties in Istanbul and his continuing dependence on his cousins for support. Unlike his father, Mevlut had never in twenty-five years been able to send any money back to his mother; that made him feel ashamed.

Throughout that summer, Mevlut found more pleasure in the companionship of his crooked-necked father-in-law — whom he went to see three times a week, walking over to Gümüşdere village with his daughters — than he did in spending time with his mother and sisters. Whenever they visited at lunchtime, Abdurrahman Efendi would slip Mevlut some rakı in one of those shatterproof glasses, making sure Fatma and Fevziye didn’t notice, and when his granddaughters were out dawdling in one of the many gardens nearby, he would tell his son-in-law allusive, allegorical tales. They had both seen their wives die young before they could give birth to a new child (a boy). They were both going to devote the rest of their lives to their daughters. They both knew that for each of them looking at any one of his daughters was always going to be a painful reminder of her mother.

During their last days in the countryside, Mevlut took his daughters to their mother’s village more frequently. When they walked along the tree-lined road over the barren hills, all three of them liked to stop every now and then to take in the view below, the outlines of little towns in the distance and the mosques with their slender minarets. They would look for long, silent minutes at smudges of green in the rocky soil, bright yellow fields lit up by the sun piercing through the clouds, the narrow line of the lake in the distance, and graveyards planted with cypress trees. Somewhere far away, there would be dogs barking. On the bus back to Istanbul, Mevlut realized that the landscapes of the village would always remind him of Rayiha.

7. A History of Electric Consumption

Süleyman Gets into a Tight Spot

Ferhat. I spent the summer of 1995 out on the streets and in the records office of Seven Hills Electric looking for traces of Selvihan, my electric lover. I’ve lost count of how many cigarettes and cups of tea I had sitting with those two dogged bookkeepers in that room with endless shelves of cardboard binders bound with metal rings and secured with padlocks, and all those faded envelopes and folders heaving with eighty-year-old bundles of grimy paper. Seven Hills Electric may have changed names a few times, but its dusty archives provided a full history of the production and distribution of electric power in Istanbul, starting in 1914 with the Silahtar power station. Those two elderly clerks believed that only by studying this history and learning all of the tricks people had come up with over the years to cheat the government, and only by truly understanding the ins and outs of how they used and paid for their electricity, could an inspector ever hope to get them to pay their bills.

Halfway through the summer, we realized that Seven Hills Electric’s new owners, who hailed from the Anatolian heartland, might not agree. They were trying to sell the archives for scrap to dealers who bought paper by the kilo — or, failing that, to have the whole lot incinerated. “They’ll have to burn us with it!” said the older of the two clerks in response to these rumors, while the other railed that if there was anything worse than capitalism, it was these new-money hicks from Anatolia. They soon resolved that they might do better getting me to appeal to our new owners from Kayseri and make them understand that the archives were a crucial and irreplaceable tool for the collection of bills; maybe that would save this vast treasure trove of human ingenuity from destruction.

We started from the oldest records, whole folders of thick, fragrant white paper predating the foundation of the Republic and the abandonment of Arabic script for the Latin alphabet in 1928, and bearing handwritten notes in Ottoman Turkish and French. We moved on to the records for the 1930s, showing which new neighborhoods had been connected to the grid and where consumption was highest, and here my pair of historians informed me that in those days Istanbul still had a very large non-Muslim population. They leafed through the yellowing sheets of one-hundred-, five-hundred-, and nine-hundred-page logbooks in which previous clerks had taken detailed notes on the far-flung households they had visited and the ingenious stratagems for thievery they had discovered, this by way of explaining to me how a new system introduced in the 1950s had given each inspector a specific set of neighborhoods to oversee, just as local Ottoman governors used to do, and how this had allowed them to maintain a surveillance of people’s lives, like policemen.

These frayed and torn logs followed a color code: white for households, purple for shops, and red for factories. Purple and red were usually the worst offenders, but if “the young inspector Mr. Ferhat” took a closer look at the “elucidations” sections on each sheet and kept up with those old government inspectors’ heroic efforts to record what they saw, he would notice that, after the 1970s, the city’s poorer neighborhoods — Zeytinburnu, Taşlıtarla, and Duttepe and its environs — had all become fertile breeding grounds for electricity theft. The electricity board’s employees had filled these “elucidation” boxes — which became the “comments” section in later versions of the logbooks — with their insights on their customers, the meters they inspected, and the various schemes of power theft they discovered, all spelled out in a variety of now-indecipherable hands, using purple pens and ballpoints that only worked if you wet the tip with your tongue. My intuition told me that all of this knowledge was bringing me closer to Selvihan.

Notes like “New fridge” or “Noted second electric stove” helped meter inspectors to estimate how many kilowatt-hours a household should have consumed in a particular period. The two clerks believed that based on these records, you could clearly deduce the date on which any given home acquired a fridge, an iron, a washing machine, an electric stove, or any other household appliance. Other remarks—“Gone back to the village,” “Away at a wedding for two months,” “Gone to their summerhouse,” “Two people staying over from their hometown”—offered an account of movements to and from the city as they might affect energy consumption. But whenever I found any meter readings for a nightclub, a kebab restaurant, or Turkish classical-music bar owned by Sami from Sürmene, I would focus on those and ignore all the other elucidations. So the two elderly clerks would call my attention to even-more-intriguing notes: “Fix bill to nail over doorknob.” “Follow wall next to neighborhood water fountain — meter behind fig tree.” “Tall bespectacled man is mad. Avoid.” “Beware of dog in garden. His name is Count. Will not attack if called by name.” “Lights on top floor of nightclub have second set of wires running from outside the building.”

Whoever had written that last comment was, in my guides’ opinion, a hero, a brave soul truly dedicated to his job. If they discovered a nightclub or a secret gambling den (I’d heard that Sami from Sürmene was involved in that racket, too) artfully stealing power, most inspectors would avoid taking official note of it; that way, when they were offered money to look the other way, they wouldn’t have to kick back to their superiors. Whenever I came across this kind of tip-off, I would head out for a surprise inspection of the café, restaurant, or nightclub that corresponded to that particular meter, fantasizing all the while of how close I was to taking down Sami from Sürmene and rescuing my beloved Selvihan from his clutches.

—

Mahinur Meryem. I was almost forty years old when I became pregnant with Süleyman’s child. At that age, a woman on her own has to think about her future and how she will live for the rest of her life. We’d been together for ten years. I may have been naïve enough to believe all Süleyman’s lies and excuses, but I guess my body knew what was necessary better than I did.

As I expected, Süleyman didn’t take the news well. At first he accused me of making it up to force him to marry me. But as we got drunk and screamed at each other in that apartment in Cihangir, he began to realize that I really was carrying his baby, and he got scared. He got very drunk and wrecked the place, which was very upsetting, but I could also see that he was pleased. After that, we argued every time he visited, though I kept trying to appease him. His threats and his drinking only got worse, though. He even threatened to stop supporting my singing career.

“Forget the music, Süleyman, I would die for this baby,” I would tell him sometimes.

Those words would soften him, and he would become gentle again. But even when he didn’t, we would still have violent sex after every fight.

“How can you make love to a woman that way and then just leave?” I would say.

Süleyman would look down in embarrassment. But sometimes, on his way out, he would say that if I kept hectoring him, I would never see him again.

“Then this is our farewell, Süleyman,” I would say, closing the door with tears in my eyes. He started coming by every day of the week after that, and meanwhile the baby kept growing in my womb. That didn’t stop him from trying to slap me a couple of times.

“Go on, Süleyman, hit me,” I said. “Maybe you’ll be able to get rid of me the way you people got rid of Rayiha.”

Sometimes he looked so helpless that I would feel sorry for him. He would sit there — QUIETLY and POLITELY — agonizing about his life like a merchant whose fleet has just sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea and knocking back rakı like it was water, and I would tell him how happy we were going to be, how looking into his soul I saw a diamond in the rough, and how rare it was to find the kind of closeness and understanding we shared.

“You’ve been bullied by your brother long enough, but if you could get away from him, Süleyman, you’d be a new man. We have nothing to fear from anyone.”

This whole thing would get us talking about whether I would ever start wearing a headscarf. “I’ll think about it,” I’d say. “But there are some things I can do, and some things I just can’t.”

“Me too,” Süleyman would say dejectedly. “So you tell me what you feel you can do.”

“Sometimes women agree to have a religious wedding on top of the civil ceremony, just to spare their well-meaning husbands any headaches…I can do that. But first your family has to come to the house in Üsküdar and formally ask my parents for my hand.”

—

In the autumn of 1995, Mevlut returned to Istanbul and his job at the advertising agency parking lot. The Groom — who understood entirely that Mevlut had to return to his village after the death of his wife — gave him back all his duties, which had been assigned to the doorman in his absence. Mevlut saw that in the three months he’d been away, Kemal from Zonguldak’s gang had expanded its territory, shifting its borders with the help of two flowerpots and a few loose curbstones. More worrying, they had adopted an aggressive new tone toward Mevlut. But he didn’t mind. After Rayiha’s death, he was constantly angry at everyone and everything, but for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to feel that way about this young man from Zonguldak with his new navy blazer.

At night, he still went out to sell boza, and he devoted the rest of his energy to his daughters. But his attentions never got beyond a few very basic questions: “Have you done your homework?” “Are you hungry?” “Are you okay?” He was aware that they spent even more time at their aunt Samiha’s now and that they didn’t really want to talk to him about their visits. So when the doorbell rang one morning after Fatma and Fevziye had left for school, and he opened the door to find Ferhat behind it, he thought for a moment that his friend must want to talk about his girls.

“You can’t live in this neighborhood anymore unless you’ve got a gun,” said Ferhat. “Drugs, prostitutes, transvestites, all kinds of gangs…We’ve got to find you and the girls a new place somewhere…”

“We’re happy here; this is Rayiha’s home.”

Ferhat said there was something very important he wanted to talk about and took Mevlut to one of the new cafés on Taksim Square. They watched the crowds pouring into Beyoğlu and talked for a long time. Eventually, Mevlut understood that his friend was offering him a job as a sort of electricity inspector’s apprentice.

“But do you have any private doubts about this?”

“In this case, what I’m saying and what I feel privately are identical,” said Ferhat. “This job will make you happy, it’ll make the girls happy, and it’ll even make Rayiha happy, worried as she must be about you all, up there in heaven. You’re going to be making good money.”

In fact, the salary Mevlut would draw from Seven Hills Electric wasn’t very high, but working as Ferhat’s so-called assistant, chasing after past-due bills, would still pay more than looking after the Groom’s parking lot. But he sensed that to arrive at this “good money” would involve taking a cut from what he was able to collect from customers.

“These new owners from Kayseri know full well that their employees will take advantage where they can,” said Ferhat. “Just bring your middle-school diploma, proof of address, your identity card, and six passport photos, and we can get you started within three days. We’ll do a few rounds together to start, and I’ll teach you everything you need to know. You’re an honest, fair-minded man, Mevlut, and that’s why we really want you to join us.”

“May God acknowledge your good deeds,” said Mevlut, and as he paced around the parking lot later, he thought of how Ferhat hadn’t even noticed the sarcasm in those words. Three days later, he phoned the number Ferhat had given him.

“For the first time in your life, you’ve made the right decision,” said Ferhat.

In two days, they met at the bus stop in Kurtuluş. Mevlut had worn his best blazer and a pair of unstained trousers. Ferhat had brought a bag that had once belonged to one of the two elderly bookkeepers. “You’ll need one of these inspector’s bags,” he said. “They scare people.”

They went into a street on the outer edges of Kurtuluş. Mevlut still came to this neighborhood to sell boza sometimes. At night, neon lamps and the light from TV sets gave this street a more modern air, but in its unassuming daytime guise, it looked just as it had twenty-five years ago when he was in middle school. They spent the whole morning in that neighborhood, inspecting almost two hundred fifty electric meters from the same logbook.

The first thing they would do upon entering a building was check the meters downstairs near the doorman’s quarters. “Number seven’s got a load of unpaid bills; they’ve had two warnings in the past five months and still haven’t paid, but look: their meter is spinning away,” Ferhat would say, in the tone of one trying to instill learning. He’d take the logbook from his bag, squinting every now and then as he leafed through it. “Number six filed a complaint about two supposed overcharges from around this time last year. Looks like we never cut their power off. And yet their meter’s completely still. Huh. Let’s have a look.”

They’d climb up to the third floor, through the smell of mold, onions, and frying oil, and ring the doorbell of number 7. Before anyone could answer, Ferhat would call out “Electric company!” like an unforgiving inquisitor. An electricity inspector at the door would throw the household into a panic, and there was something about Ferhat’s manner that could break into a family’s private world even as he silently rebuked them for it. Mevlut had learned these nuances in his own way, during all the years he’d spent delivering yogurt door to door. Perhaps, then, it wasn’t just his honesty that had led Ferhat to seek his help but also his experience navigating the intimate world of private households — in particular, his ability to talk to women without making them feel harassed.

The door to a home with an unpaid bill might open, but it could also stay shut. In that case, Mevlut would do as Ferhat showed him, checking to see whether he could hear any sounds coming from inside. If the approaching footsteps they’d heard just after they rang the bell suddenly stopped after they called out “Electric company!” it meant, of course, that there was someone inside unwilling to settle their debt. Usually, though, the door would open, and they would be faced with a housewife, a mother, a middle-aged auntie trying to tie up her headscarf, a woman with a child in her arms, a ghostly old grandpa, an angry idler, a woman in pink dishwashing gloves, or a very old lady who could barely see.

“Electric company!” Ferhat would again say officiously through the open door. “You have unpaid bills!”

Some would reply immediately: “Come back tomorrow, inspector, I don’t have any change” or “We don’t have any money today!” Others would say, “What do you mean, son, we pay our bills at the bank every month.” Others still would insist, “We paid it only yesterday” or “We send our doorman to the bank with the money every month.”

“I don’t know about that, but it says on here that you have overdue charges,” Ferhat would say. “It’s all automated now; the computer does everything. We’re required to cut your power off if you refuse to pay.”

Ferhat would glance at Mevlut, as proud to show off his authority as he was pleased to be showing Mevlut the ropes of the job and a glimpse of its vast opportunities. Sometimes he would walk away mysteriously saying nothing at all, leaving the residents to appeal to Mevlut. A few hours on the job, and he’d already learned to recognize those worried looks that said, Now what? Is he really going to cut us off?

If he decided to be lenient, Ferhat would usually deliver the news himself to the anxious customer at the door. “I’ll let you off this time, but remember, it’s all been privatized now, you won’t get away with it again!” he’d say. Or “When I cut it off, you’re going to have to pay an extra fee to have it reconnected again, so you’d best think about that, too.” Sometimes his verdict would be “I won’t cut you off today, seeing as there’s a pregnant woman in the house, but it’s the last time!” “If you’re not going to pay for your electricity, you might at least try not to use so much!” he might say, to which the relieved person at the door would respond, “God bless you!” Sometimes Ferhat would point to the runny-nosed little kid in the doorway, saying, “I’ll leave your lights on this time, for this one’s sake. But child or no child, I won’t be so generous next time.”

Occasionally, a little boy would open the door and say there was no one home. Some children became extremely nervous when they were put up to this, while others were as brash as adults, having already absorbed the notion that to lie well was a form of cleverness. Having listened for sounds inside the house before ringing the doorbell, Ferhat always knew when a child was lying, but often he would play along to spare the boy’s feelings.

“All right, kid,” he’d say like a kindly uncle. “Tell your folks when they’re back tonight that you’ve got electric bills to pay, all right? Now tell me, what’s your name?”

“Talat!”

“Good boy, Talat! Now close the door so the devil doesn’t get you.”

But all this was an act Ferhat put on for Mevlut’s first day, to make the job seem easier and more pleasant than it really was. They would have drunks telling them, “Our only debt is to God, inspector”; people screaming, “The government’s turned to usury now, you’re fleecing us, you bastards”; octogenarians in dentures saying, “Those bribes you take will land you in the pits of hell” before slamming the door in their faces; and smart-aleck layabouts asking, “How do I know you’re really from the electric company?” but Ferhat never took the bait, not even batting an eyelid in that torrent of lies—“My mother’s on her deathbed,” “Our father’s gone to do his military service!” “We’ve just moved in, those bills must be the previous tenants’.” As they walked out of a building, he would carefully explain to Mevlut the truth behind each of the excuses they’d just heard: the man who complained “You’re fleecing us!” always claimed he’d been forced to bribe a different team of inspectors every week. The old man with the dentures wasn’t even religious; Ferhat had seen him plenty of times in the bar on Kurtuluş Square…

“We’re not here to torment these people, only to make them pay for what they’ve used,” said Ferhat in a coffeehouse later on. “There’s nothing to be gained by leaving a bunch of poor men, women, and children without power if they just don’t have the money. Your job is to figure out who really can’t afford it, who could pay some of their bill, who could easily pay the whole thing but is just making excuses, who’s a crook, and who’s being sincere. The bosses have given me the power to rule on these cases like a judge; it’s my job to make the necessary evaluations. Your job, too, obviously…Do you understand?”

“I understand,” said Mevlut.

“Now, my dear Mevlut, there are two things that are strictly forbidden: If you haven’t gone and checked a meter yourself, you never make up a number to write down and pretend you have. If they catch you, you’re finished. The other thing — though I’m sure I don’t need to tell you of all people — is that we can’t even have a hint of harassing or ogling the women or anything like that. The company’s got its reputation to protect; they wouldn’t think twice about what to do…Now, how about I take you to the Springtime Club to celebrate the new job?”

“I’m going out to sell boza tonight.”

“Even tonight? You’re going to make loads of money now.”

“I’m going to sell boza every night,” said Mevlut.

Ferhat leaned forward and smiled, as if to say he understood.

8. Mevlut in the Farthest Neighborhoods

Dogs Will Bark at Anyone Who Doesn’t Belong Among Us

Uncle Hasan. When I found out that Süleyman got an older woman — a singer, no less — pregnant, and now he was going to marry her, I said nothing. We were already very sad for Mevlut. When I see the calamities suffered by those around me, I tell Safiye how glad I am to have never wanted anything more than my little grocery store. Just to sit in my shop folding newspapers into pint baskets every day, that’s enough to make me happy.

—

Vediha. Maybe this was for the best, I thought. Otherwise who knows if Süleyman would have ever managed to get married. It was just me and Korkut who went to the house in Üsküdar with him to ask Miss Melahat’s father for her hand. Süleyman wore his finest. It struck me that he’d never made such an effort for any of the girls we’d gone to see together. He kissed the hand of his future father-in-law — a retired government clerk — with real deference. Süleyman must really love this Melahat. I can’t say I understand why, though, and I would love to know. When she finally made her appearance, she looked dignified and stylish enough, a forty-year-old woman serving us coffee like a teenage girl meeting her suitor. I liked that she didn’t treat the whole thing as a joke and that she was courteous and respectful. She got her self a cup of coffee, too. Then she passed around a pack of Samsuns. She handed one to her father — she had only just made her peace with him, Süleyman had said — and then she lit one up herself and blew smoke right out into the middle of the little room. We all went quiet. In that moment, I saw that far from feeling embarrassed to be forced into marrying this woman he’d gotten pregnant, Süleyman was proud of her. As the smoke from Miss Melahat’s cigarette swirled about the room like a blue mist, Süleyman could not have looked more smug if he’d blown that smoke in Korkut’s face himself, and I was confused.

—

Korkut. Of course they were in no position to impose any conditions. These were humble, well-intentioned people of modest means. Unfortunately, however, they were not well versed in matters of religion. The people of Duttepe love to gossip. We thought it would be best to avoid Mecidiyeköy and have the wedding somewhere farther away, so we arranged with Süleyman a small but perfectly presentable wedding hall in Aksaray. Once that was done, I said, “Let’s go have an afternoon drink, just me and you, brother to brother, man to man,” and we went to a restaurant in Kumkapı. “Süleyman,” I said after the second round, “as your brother, I am now going to ask you a very important question. We like this lady. But a man’s honor counts more than anything else. Are you absolutely certain that Miss Melahat will fit in with our way of life?”

“Don’t worry,” he said at first, but then he asked, “What exactly do you mean about honor?”

—

Ferhat. While they were busy getting Süleyman married off, I went on a reconnaissance mission to the Sunshine Club, pretending to be an ordinary customer. That’s another perk of the job: you get to have a couple of drinks while you look around for evidence they might be stealing electricity, what tricks they might be using, and see the faces of those conceited club owners totally unaware they’re about to get their comeuppance. All the ladies were taking up their positions in various corners of the room, and we settled down for a long night. At the table, we had Demir from Dersim, two contractors, one former left-wing militant, and another hardworking young inspector like me.

Nightclubs like these each have their own peculiar scent, a mixture of panfried meat, rakı, mildew, perfume, and stale breath, and over many years without a single window even cracked open, these elements ferment like wine and seep right into the carpets and the curtains. You get used to this smell eventually, until you miss it when it’s not there, and if you catch a whiff of it again one night after a long time absent, your heart speeds up and it’s like you’ve fallen in love. That night we listened dutifully to Lady Blue, the velvety voice of Turkish classical music. We watched the comedy duo Ali and Veli do impressions of the latest TV commercials and various politicians, and the belly dancer Mesrure, who is “famous in Europe, too.” There were many old songs that night, a melancholy atmosphere at the Sunshine Club, and behind every lyric and every note, there was Selvihan.

I met Mevlut again somewhere in Beşiktaş two days later to continue his training. “Our first lesson today is highly theoretical,” I said. “See that restaurant over there? I’ve been there before; let’s go and have a look. Don’t worry, no rakı, we’re working after all. Nothing to upset your friends at the Righteous Path.”

“I don’t read the Righteous Path,” said Mevlut once we’d sat down in the half-empty restaurant. “I just cut out that piece on Brothers-in-Law and that one picture.”

“Now listen to me, Mevlut,” I said, getting annoyed at his innocence. “The key to this job is reading people…You’ve always got to be alert, so no one can pull the wool over your eyes. These people who start whimpering as soon as they see me, ‘Oh, it’s the inspector!’ It’s all an act, they’re testing me…You need to be able to spot that. You also need to know how to hold back and play the nice guy if that’s what’s called for. In other cases, if necessary, you need to get angry and be able cut some poor widow’s wires…You may have to behave as if you were one of the Turkish government’s proud civil servants, impossible to bribe. Though, of course, I’m not a civil servant, and you won’t be either. The money you collect isn’t a bribe, just what you and Seven Hills Electric have coming to you. I’m going to show you all the ins and outs. There are guys with millions in the bank earning interest and bundles of dollars under their mattresses, but the minute they see some poor inspector at the door, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Eventually, they start believing their own sob stories, and, believe me, they cry harder than you ever cried even for your wife. They end up convincing you, too; they wear you down. While you’re trying to read what’s in their eyes and searching for the truth on their children’s faces, they’re watching the way you walk and talk and looking into your soul trying to figure out whether to pay up and, if so, how much and, if not, what excuse will get rid of you. These two- and three-story buildings in the backstreets are now mostly occupied by petty clerks, street vendors, waiters, cashiers, and university students, and unlike the bigger buildings, they don’t have full-time doormen anymore. Usually, the owners and tenants of these places will have had serious disagreements about how to split the costs of diesel or coal and how high to turn the boiler, and because of that, their central heating tends to be turned off altogether. So they’re all trying to keep warm as best they can, and most of them will try to get an illegal connection to the grid so they can run an electric heater for free. You’ve got to size them up and not give anything away. If they see that boyish face and realize that you’re too compassionate to cut them off, they won’t give up a cent. Maybe they think with inflation so high, they’re better off holding out and keeping that money earning interest for a little longer. Be sure you don’t let them think you’re too proud to take a bit of change some old lady might offer you. On the other hand, you don’t want them thinking you’re so greedy you’ll swoop down on any pathetic sum they propose. You follow me? Now tell me, how does the heating work here in this restaurant?”

“It works fine,” said Mevlut.

“That’s not what I’m asking. How is the heating being provided? Is the restaurant using stoves or radiators?”

“Radiators!”

“Let’s check and see, shall we?” I said.

Mevlut touched the radiator grille right next to him and realized that it wasn’t very warm. “So that means there must be a stove somewhere,” he said.

“Good. Now, where’s the stove? Can you see it anywhere? You can’t. That’s because they’ve got electric stoves going. They keep them hidden because they’ve got them hooked up to the mains directly, bypassing the meter. They turn the radiator on a little, too, but only so no one will notice what’s going on. I had a look on the way in and saw that their meters are ticking very slowly. That means there must be other rooms, ovens, and fridges in this building, all using stolen electricity.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Mevlut like a wide-eyed child.

I found the restaurant’s meter number in the purple logbook and showed it to Mevlut. “Read what it says in the comments.”

“ ‘Meter next to the door…,’ ” read Mevlut. “ ‘Cable for ice-cream machine is—’ ”

“Okay, so this place must sell ice cream in the summer. More than half the ice-cream machines in Istanbul during the summer aren’t connected to any meter. It seems the honest clerk who was here last time suspected something, but the technicians never found the illegal connection. Or maybe they did, but the giant at the cash desk gave them each a ten-thousand-lira bill to keep them sweet. Some places are so clever about where they tap the line that they think they’ll never get caught, so when you come in, they don’t even give you a little gift to say hello. Hey, waiter, over here, the radiator’s not working, and we’re a little cold.”

“I’ll talk to my manager,” said the waiter.

“He may or may not be in on it,” I told Mevlut. “Put yourself in the manager’s shoes. If his waiter knows they’re stealing electricity, he might report it. That makes it very hard to fire him, or even tell him off for slacking or hogging all the tips. That’s why the best thing to do is to call in an electrician who specializes in unmetered circuits and hand the whole place over to him one night when no one’s around. These guys can disguise an illegal line so beautifully that sometimes you just have to step back and admire the genius. In the end, our job is like a game of chess with these guys. They’re clever at hiding it; you have to be more clever and find it.”

“I’ve had the heaters switched on, sorry for that,” said the manager, walking into the room behind his fat belly.

“He didn’t even bother to say ‘radiator,’ ” Mevlut whispered. “What do we do now? Are we going to cut their power?”

“No, my friend. Lesson number two: you figure out what the trick is and make a mental note of it. Then you wait for the right moment to come back and take their money. We’re in no rush today.”

“You’re as sly as a fox, aren’t you, Ferhat?”

“But I still need a lamb like you, I need your gentleness and your honesty,” I said to encourage Mevlut. “Your sincerity and your innocence are great assets to this company, to the world in fact.”

“All right, but I don’t think I can deal with all these big managers and high-level crooks,” said Mevlut. “I better stick to the gecekondu homes, the poorer neighborhoods.”

—

Mevlut spent that winter and the spring of 1996 combing through logbooks and neighborhoods and learning at Ferhat’s side, but also venturing out on his own two or three times a week to poor quarters and backstreets in the city center, armed with only old meter readings to hunt for illegal hookups all by himself. The city center was falling apart: the broken and abandoned old buildings in which he’d lived as a waiter working in Beyoğlu nearly twenty years ago were now nests of electric thievery. Ferhat told Mevlut to stay away from that kind of place — both for his own safety and because he knew his friend would never be able to extract any money there. So Mevlut ended up in Kurtuluş, Feriköy, Beşiktaş, Şişli, Mecidiyeköy, and sometimes over on the other side of the Golden Horn, in Çarşamba, Karagümrük, and Edirnekapı—the Holy Guide’s streets and neighborhoods — collecting payments from families and housewives like one of those polite government clerks who once used to come calling.

Working as a boza vendor, he’d become used to accepting little gifts on top of what he was owed — a pair of woolen socks, perhaps, or even some extra cash from people who told him “Keep the change!” and this had never troubled his conscience or wounded his pride. In a similar way, a tip for not cutting off someone’s power seemed a just reward for a service he was offering, and he had no qualms at all about pocketing the money. He knew these neighborhoods and their people well. (No one recognized Mevlut, though; they could never make the connection between the boza vendor who walked down the street once a week or once every other week in the winter and the inspector who came officially knocking on their door. Perhaps it was that the good people who bought boza at night were completely different from the bad people who stole electricity.) It seemed that the street dogs were always growling at Mevlut in these neighborhoods close to the city center. He began to keep his evening boza rounds brief.

He couldn’t have gone to Kültepe or Duttepe to collect money where everyone knew him, but he did take his logbooks and head over to those other hills that had followed the same course from destitution to development: Kuştepe, Harmantepe, Gültepe, and Oktepe. They could hardly be termed “poor neighborhoods” anymore. The single-story hollow-brick buildings that had once covered these hills had all been knocked down in the past twenty-five years, and now these places were all considered part of the city itself, like Zeytinburnu, Gaziosmanpaşa, and Ümraniye. Each neighborhood had its own center — usually the bus stop where one had caught the first regular service to the city some twenty-five years ago, and which would now be flanked by a mosque, a new statue of Atatürk, and a muddy little park. This would also be the spot where the neighborhood’s main street began, a long road that seemed to stretch all the way to the end of the world, with five- and six-story concrete blocks on either side. The buildings brought an assortment of kebab shops, grocery stores, and banks, all on street level. Here, too, there were families, mothers, children, grandfathers, and grocers who’d set their sights on free electricity (though in fact Mevlut couldn’t find that many), and their manner was no different from what you might find in any ordinary neighborhood in the center of Istanbul: the same tricks, the same lies, the same basic innocence…They may have been more apprehensive of Mevlut in these places, but they also showed him a lot more warmth than anywhere else.

The ancient cemeteries that would pop up in the older parts of the city, filled with strange and mysterious crumbling gravestones topped with all sorts of emblems and sculpted turbans, didn’t exist in these new neighborhoods. The newer and more modern cemeteries, devoid of cypress trees or any other vegetation, were usually situated well out side the new quarters and surrounded by tall concrete walls, just like factories, military bases, and hospitals. In the absence of graveyards, the stray dogs who stalked Mevlut on his morning inspections would spend the night sleeping in the dirty little park across from the statue of Atatürk.

Mevlut always approached the city’s newest and poorest neighborhoods with the best of intentions, yet he found that the most belligerent dogs of all lived here. He spent many miserable hours in these areas, most of which had only recently been assigned their own meters and logbooks. Often he hadn’t even heard their names before, and getting there could involve a two-hour bus ride below the city center and away from the main highways. Once off the bus, Mevlut would exercise all of his “good intentions” to ignore the wires that people had hooked up — not even bothering to hide them — to the big cables that carried electricity between cities, and he would turn a blind eye to the clumsy circuits powering the kebab stall across from the bus stop. He could sense that each of these neighborhoods had its own leaders and chiefs, and that he was being watched. My job is just to look at the official meters, he wanted to say in his most determined, proper, and righteous tone. You have nothing to fear from me. But the dogs attacked him, and Mevlut got scared.

These new homes and gardens on the edge of the city had been built with newer and better materials than the poor neighborhoods of Mevlut’s childhood. Hollow bricks had been replaced by alternatives of higher quality, plastic had been used instead of scrap metal, and gutters and pipes had all been made out of PVC. The houses were constantly growing with the addition of new rooms, just as gecekondu homes always had done, and this meant that the electricity meter would get swallowed up inside a room somewhere, so that if you wanted to take a reading or cut the power, you had no choice but to knock on the door. That would be the cue for the local strays to begin circling the inspector. In some new neighborhoods, a power line might have been brought in and affixed to a pole, a chunk of concrete, a wall, or even a grand old plane tree in the little local square, and sometimes this was where you found people’s meters, not inside their homes. These electri cal hubs, which weren’t so different from those Ottoman-era fountains that used to supply a neighborhood with water, would also be under the constant supervision of small packs of two or three stray dogs.

Mevlut was standing on the porch of a house with a garden one day when he was attacked by a black dog. He checked the notes of his predecessor in the logbook and called out the dog’s name, but Blackie paid him no heed. He barked at Mevlut and forced him to retreat. A month later, Mevlut only managed to get away from a raging guard dog because the dog’s chain wasn’t long enough. Whenever he came under attack like this, he always thought of Rayiha. These things were happening only because she wasn’t there anymore.

Mevlut was in the same neighborhood again one day, looking for a spot in the park to sit down with his bag on his lap while he waited for the bus, when—woof woof woof—a dog approached him. A second and third dog came up behind the first. They were the color of mud. Mevlut saw a black dog in the distance, as indistinct as a distant memory. They all started barking at the same time. Would he be able to ward them off with his inspector’s briefcase? He had never been so afraid of dogs in his life.

One Tuesday evening, he went to the Holy Guide’s lodge in Çarşamba. He left some boza in the kitchen. The Holy Guide was much livelier than usual and free of the usual crowd of hangers-on. When he realized that he had the Guide’s attention, Mevlut quickly explained how he’d first begun to fear dogs twenty-seven years ago. In 1969, around the time Mevlut had first begun to work as a street vendor, his father had taken him to see a holy man in a wooden house in the backstreets of Kasımpaşa in order to address this fear. That holy man had had a white beard and an enormous belly, and, compared with the Guide, he was old-fashioned and unsophisticated. He had given Mevlut some rock candy and told him that dogs were deaf, dumb, and blind creatures. Then he’d opened his palms up as if to pray, instructing Mevlut to do the same, and in his small stove-heated room, he had made Mevlut repeat the following words nine times: “SUMMOON, BUKMOON, OOMYOON FE HOOM LAH YARJOON.”

The next time he was attacked by strays, Mevlut had to put his fear to one side and repeat that verse three times. That was the first thing that people had to do when they became afraid of dogs, demons, and the devil: they had to banish the thought from their minds. “Don’t be scared, just pretend you haven’t seen them,” his father would say when he saw Mevlut getting agitated by the shadowy dogs on the dark streets where they sold boza together at night. “Say the verse quick, son!” he would whisper. But even when he concentrated as hard as he could, Mevlut would never remember the verse. His father would lose his temper and tell him off.

When he finished recounting these episodes from his past, Mevlut cautiously asked the Holy Guide: Can a person really banish a fear or a thought from his mind by the force of his own will alone? By now, Mevlut’s experience was that trying to forget about something only made him think about it more. (In his youth, for example, the more he’d tried to get Neriman off his mind, the more he’d wanted to stalk her — but of course he didn’t mention this to the Holy Guide.) Wanting to forget something, having THE INTENTION TO FORGET something, was clearly not an efficient way of forgetting at all. In fact what you intended to forget tended to stick even more firmly in your mind. These were the questions he’d never had the chance to ask the holy man in Kasımpaşa, and now, twenty-seven years later, he was pleased to find that he had the courage to put them to the Holy Guide of the spiritual retreat in Çarşamba, who was a much more modern holy man anyway.

“The ability to forget depends on the PURITY of the believer’s HEART, the SINCERITY of his INTENTIONS, and the STRENGTH of his WILL,” said the Holy Guide. He’d liked Mevlut’s question and had graced it with a weighty response worthy of the “conversations.”

Feeling encouraged, Mevlut guiltily told the story of how as a little boy, on a snowy, moonlit night when the streets shone pure and white like a cinema screen, he’d watched a pack of dogs move in a flash to trap a cat under a car. He and his late father had walked past in silence, acting as if they hadn’t seen anything, pretending not to hear the cat’s dying wails either. In the time that had since gone by, the city had grown perhaps tenfold. Even though he’d forgotten all the prayers and verses he was supposed to say, Mevlut hadn’t been scared of dogs at all for twenty-five years. But in the last two years, he’d begun to fear them again. The dogs could tell, and that was why they barked at him and tried to corner him. What should he do?

“IT IS NOT ABOUT PRAYERS OR VERSES, BUT ABOUT YOUR HEART’S INTENT,” said the Holy Guide. “Boza seller, have you been doing anything recently that may have disturbed people’s lives?”

“I have not,” said Mevlut. He didn’t mention that he’d become embroiled in the electricity business.

“Perhaps you have and you don’t realize it,” said the Holy Guide. “Dogs can sense when a person doesn’t belong among us. This is their God-given gift. That is why people who want to copy the Europeans are always afraid of dogs. Mahmud II butchered the Janissaries, the backbone of the Ottoman Empire, and thus allowed the West to trample upon us; he also slaughtered the street dogs of Istanbul and exiled all those he couldn’t kill to Hayırsızada, the Wretched Island. The people of Istanbul organized a petition to bring the dogs back. During the armistice following World War I, when the city was under foreign occupation, the street dogs were massacred once more for the comfort of the English and the French. But again, the good people of Istanbul asked for their dogs to be returned. With this wealth of experience in their blood, all our dogs now have a very keen sense of who is their friend and who is their foe.”

9. Bringing Down a Nightclub

Is It Right?

Ferhat. Don’t worry about Mevlut: another six months passed, and by the winter of 1997, he’d already gotten the hang of being a meter inspector. He was earning decent money, too. How much? Even he didn’t know. But every evening, he gave me a full account of what he’d collected that day, just the way he used to do with his father when they were selling yogurt together. He sold his boza at night, and generally stayed out of trouble.

The one who went looking for it was me, actually. As far as I could tell, Selvihan was still seeing Sami from Sürmene, putting any hope of being with her further and further out of reach and making me more and more desperate. I would often spend all night looking for her in the archives and around the city, but at least I always came home in the end — even if it was almost dawn.

I was at the Moonlight Club with some friends one night when one of the owners came and joined our table. These live music clubs swallow vast amounts of electricity, so the managers usually try to get in good with their local inspector. Whenever we go to these places, we can always expect nice discounts and plates of appetizers and fruit and panfried prawns on the house. Tables of assorted scroungers, bureaucrats, and gangsters are a common sight in any self-respecting nightclub, and, usually, all that’s expected of these “guests” is that they sit quietly, without sending flowers to any of the girls or requesting any songs. That night, however, our table became the center of attention, because the owner’s right-hand man, a certain Mr. Mustache (so named for the thin line of hair over his upper lip), kept inviting the singers to sit at our table and encouraging us to ask for whatever we wanted to hear.

Afterward, this Mr. Mustache asked if we could meet in a coffeehouse in Taksim one morning; I assumed it was to do with the usual stuff, making sure I neglected to notice some illegal wiring at the Moonlight and maybe one or two other things they were doing without a permit. Instead, he had a much bigger and more serious agenda: he wanted to “bring down” the Sunshine Club.

There was now a whole new breed of gangsters who specialized in “bringing down” bars, nightclubs, and even high-end restaurants. They exploited the havoc that privatization had brought upon the eighty-year-old game of electricity theft. With their help, a nightclub owner might conspire with electric company inspectors to plunge a rival club into darkness and have it hit with huge bills, thanks to penalties rising at twice the rate of inflation. If it all worked according to plan, the rival club would have to shut down for a couple of weeks, and if it couldn’t settle its account, it would go bankrupt and disappear altogether. In the last six months, I’d heard of a number of bars and clubs in Beyoğlu, two hotels in Aksaray and Taksim (electricity theft is very common in small hotels, too), and a big kebab shop on İstiklal Avenue being brought down this way.

But bigger businesses all had contacts in the police and the district attorney’s office, and they could count on the protection of mafia gangs, too. Even if some principled and meticulous inspector came along and exposed all their unmetered connections and back charges, cut their power, and put a seal on their meter, these big fish wouldn’t care; they’d just reconnect the lines with their own hands and pick up where they’d left off. They might even take the trouble to arrange for the brave inspector to get beaten to a pulp in the dead of night. To bring down one of these big guys, a rival business would have to have the public prosecutor, the mafia, and maybe even the police on its side, so that once the plan went into action, it could be sure that the damage would be permanent. That day, Mr. Mustache revealed that bringing down the Sunshine Club was part of a larger scheme on the part of those Cizre Kurds who were backing the Moonlight: they were out to get Sami from Sürmene.

I asked them why they had picked me for this major operation.

“Our guys tell us that you’ve already got your eye on Sami from Sürmene,” said Mr. Mustache. “They’ve seen you sniffing around at the Sunshine Club…”

“Cezmi from Cizre’s got eyes all over the place, hasn’t he?” I said. “But this is dangerous. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Don’t worry. Politicians aren’t the only ones who’ve become civilized these days, Beyoğlu gangs are, too. They’re not shooting each other in the street over little disagreements anymore.”

—

Samiha. “This cannot go on,” I told Ferhat the other morning. “You stay out until dawn, and the only time I get to see you, you’re asleep. Keep it up, and I’m going to leave you.”

“You can’t! I would die! You’re my reason for doing it, my reason for living,” he said. “We’ve been through hell, me and you, but we’ve almost made it, finally. I just have this one last big job. Let me get it done, and then I’ll buy you not one but two whole farms down south.”

As usual, I believed him more or less, but only up to a point; the rest of the way, I just pretended to. It’s been two years since Rayiha died; how quickly the time has gone by. Now I’m a year older than she was then, and still I don’t have a child, or a real husband. When I couldn’t hold it in anymore, I told Vediha everything.

“First of all, Samiha, Ferhat is a good husband!” she said. “Most men are bad-tempered, pigheaded boors. Ferhat isn’t like that. Most men are stingy, especially when it comes to their wives. But all over this lovely place of yours I can see money’s been spent. Most men beat their wives, too. You’ve never mentioned anything like that. I know he loves you. You’d be insane to leave him. Ferhat is a good person, deep down. You can’t just leave a house and a husband like that. Where would you go anyway? Come on now, let’s go to the movies.”

My sister may know everything, but she sure can’t see why a person would need to stand up for herself.

When I brought it up with Ferhat again and told him I really was going to leave this time, he just scoffed: “I might be about to take down Sami from Sürmene and his empire, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”

The most upsetting thing, though, was when I found out that apparently Mevlut had been giving his daughters a hard time about their visits: “Why are you always going over to your aunt’s?” I won’t tell you which one of the girls gave her father away. But I found out that he doesn’t like the idea of their coming here and learning how to put makeup on, wear lipstick, and dress themselves.

“He should be ashamed of himself!” said Vediha. “He’s still brooding about those stupid letters. You should tell Ferhat. Isn’t he Mevlut’s boss now?”

I didn’t tell Ferhat a thing. Once I’d made my decision, I went over every detail in my head, again and again. And then I began to wait.

—

Ferhat. There are two ways to bring down a big nightclub, an expensive restaurant, or a small hotel: (1) You worm your way in and find out where all the illegal cables are, under the pretext of showing the owners even newer and smarter ways to connect to the mains. Then you make a deal with their enemies and arrange for a raid. (2) You find the expert electrician who’d rigged their illegal hookups in the first place and try to get it out of him: which walls are hiding which cables, whether this and that circuit is real or a red herring, et cetera. The second way is definitely more dangerous, because the expert in question (usually a former government clerk) might figure he can do better for himself by going straight to the owners he did the job for and telling them all about the little rat who’s so interested in their wiring. Where there’s a lot of money to be made, there’s also a lot of blood to be spilled. You couldn’t make any bricks or tiles without electricity, could you?

My two elderly clerks in the records office of Seven Hills Electric warned me about the dangers I might face. They also told me that the meter readings for the Sunshine Club, as well as most of the homes, cafés, and offices in the area, were all handled by an older inspector, a guy so strict that he’d come to be known as the Admiral. This man had flourished with all the new fines he could slap on people, and his work had caught my two clerks’ eye. From the inspectors’ office, we obtained the Admiral’s most recent meter readings for the Sunshine Club. Using these records and all the old ones in the archives, the old clerks got busy working out the various methods by which the Sunshine Club had stolen most of its power during forty years in business. Where had they hidden the cables? How had they bypassed the meter? Could we trust the notes we’d found? I hung on their every word.

“It wouldn’t take much to bring this place crashing down. Allah help us!” said one of the clerks, excitedly. They were both so energized they forgot I was even there. Nightclub wars were the worst kind of trouble: back in the day, when rival establishments and their gangs declared war on each other, they would kidnap each other’s singers and belly dancers and hold them hostage, shooting them in the kneecaps eventually. Another common ploy was for a gang to go into a rival nightclub as ordinary customers, politely request a song, and start a brawl when it wasn’t played. With contacts in the press, you could arrange for everyone to hear about these fights, which sometimes ended in murder, and soon enough customers would stop coming to that nightclub, leading its owners to send their own guys over to the other place to do the same to them, and on and on with more gunfire and more bloodshed. I loved those old clerks’ stories.

After studying the situation for another week, I met with the owners of the Moonlight Club again. I said I could provide them with all the necessary schematics.

“Excellent. Don’t give them to anyone else,” said Mr. Mustache. “We’ve got a plan. Where do you live? I’ll send our guys over to explain everything. You never know, it’s always safer to talk at home.”

When he said “home,” my first thought was Samiha. I wanted to run back that evening and tell her how close we were to the end of our long road. I was going to burst in and say, “We’re bringing down the Sunshine Club.” Samiha was going to be so happy: not only would we finally be rich, but we’d be sticking it to those exploitative fat cats. But when I did eventually make it home, it was already quite late, and I fell asleep on the living room couch. When I woke up in the morning, I saw that Samiha was gone.

—

The Holy Guide hadn’t taught Mevlut any magic words to chase the dogs away. Was there any truth to his pronouncement that they took against those who didn’t belong to this land? If that was really the reason that dogs barked at people, they should never have barked at Mevlut, who even in the newest and most remote neighborhoods never once felt himself a stranger as he wandered among the city’s concrete buildings, grocery stores, and laundry lines, its posters for cram schools and banks, and its bus stops, speaking to old men who always wanted to pay their bills some other day and kids with snot running from their noses. In fact, the dogs had toned down their growling somewhat since Mevlut’s latest visit to the Holy Guide in February 1997. He felt there were two reasons for this welcome development.

First: the street dogs had begun to lose their grip on these outlying areas. These places didn’t have any ancient cemeteries like the one in the picture Mevlut had cut out from the Righteous Path, and so during the day the strays had nowhere to shelter as a pack while they waited for nightfall. On top of this, the municipal authorities had equipped these neighborhoods with huge and heavy-wheeled dumpsters resembling mining trolleys. The dogs weren’t strong enough to tip over these little fortresses to scavenge for food.

The other reason Mevlut was now less afraid of dogs had to do with his greater magnanimity toward the poor souls who lived in these deprived neighborhoods and couldn’t pay their bills. He didn’t strut around these places like some high-handed bureaucratic zealot determined to eradicate every last illicit connection. If he turned up at a house outside the city and found a few pathetic cables hooked up to a high-voltage main nearby, he would give a range of meaningful looks (perhaps even asking some pointed questions) making clear to whoever was home — be it a retired old man, a middle-aged Kurdish lady who’d fled the war, some unemployed and irascible father, or an angry mother — that he knew exactly what they were up to. But when they proceeded to deny it, affecting all the sincerity they could, he would, in turn, affect to believe every word. They would thus feel they’d out smarted the inspector and start denying every other little misdeed Mevlut had spotted: there was no circuit bypassing the meter; nothing had been wedged under the rotor disk either; this was certainly not the sort of household where people tampered with the display dials to make the reading lower. But when confronted with these further denials, Mevlut would make it very clear that he didn’t believe any of it. And so it was that he was able to infiltrate the city’s roughest and most isolated parts, identify the most blatant instances of electricity theft, and come out with a decent amount of money to hand to Ferhat at the end of the day — all without angering the majority of the locals or the dogs, ever alert to the presence of a hostile intruder. “Mevlut, you’ve somehow managed to bridge the gulf between what people think in private and what they say in public,” said Ferhat one day when Mevlut told him he’d started getting along with the stray dogs again. “You’ve got this whole nation figured out. I’ve got a favor to ask of you now, but it has to do with my private life, not my public life.”

Ferhat told him that his wife had left their house and gone to stay with Vediha and the Aktaş family, refusing to come home. In fact, Mevlut knew more: their mutual father-in-law, Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman, unable to hide his glee at the news that Samiha had left her husband, had jumped on the first bus from the village to come and be near his daughter and support her in this difficult time. Of this Mevlut said nothing.

“I’ve made mistakes, too,” said Ferhat. “But that’s all going to change. I will take her to the movies. But first she has to come home. Of course, we can’t have you speaking to Samiha directly. But Vediha can be the one to talk to her.”

In the days that followed, Mevlut would often wonder why it would have been wrong for him to speak to Samiha himself. But at the time, he didn’t object.

“Vediha is a clever woman,” said Ferhat. “Out of all the Aktaş and Karataş lot, she’s the smartest. She can persuade Samiha. Go tell her that…”

Ferhat told Mevlut about a big scheme he was part of, though, as a precaution, he didn’t name any of the places, gangs, or people involved. He wanted Mevlut to pass it all on to Vediha, so that Vediha could then tell Samiha. It really was true that he was neglecting his wife because of work.

“Oh, and Samiha was also upset about something else,” said Ferhat. “She said you don’t want Fatma and Fevziye coming over to our place in the afternoon to spend time with their aunt. Is that true?”

“That’s a lie,” lied Mevlut.

“Well, anyway, you tell Samiha that I can’t live without her,” said Ferhat self-importantly.

Mevlut was unconvinced, and he thought sorrowfully of how, throughout the whole conversation, they had only shared their public views. Twenty-six years ago, they had become friends while selling Kısmet owing to the hopeful belief that they could reveal all their private thoughts to each other.

Now, the two friends went their separate ways, like two inspectors who’d just concluded a routine bit of business. It was to be the last time they would ever see each other.

—

Vediha. With all the time and effort I’ve spent since marrying into this family twenty years ago — settling arguments, covering for flaws, and mending fences — is it right that I should be held responsible whenever something bad happens? After all those times I told Samiha “Whatever you do, don’t leave your house and your husband,” is it right that I should be blamed when my sister decides to pack her bags and come live with us in Duttepe? After I spent four years sifting through Istanbul for a nice and decent girl for Süleyman, is it my fault if he ends up marrying some old lounge singer? If my poor father decides to come to Istanbul to be with his daughters and spends more than a month living up on the third floor with Samiha, do I deserve the dirty looks from my father-in-law and husband? When Süleyman can’t even be bothered to come visit his parents anymore, is it right that he should get away with saying “Samiha is there” as his excuse and put me and my poor little sister in such an awkward position? After all the times I said, “Let’s move to Şişli, we’ve got enough money now,” and Korkut ignored me, is it right for Süleyman and his wife to go and live there themselves, as if to rub it in? In fact, is it right that Süleyman and his wife haven’t even invited me and Korkut to their new house yet? And what about Melahat’s being so condescending about how Duttepe’s roads are still not paved and we don’t even have a hairdresser in the neighborhood? Or when she’s telling my fortune and says, “Men have bullied you and pushed you around all your life, haven’t they” as if she’s so much better than I am? Should a new mother be relying so entirely on her maid that she forgets all about her baby in the other room and spends three hours prattling on with her guests, getting drunk, and trying to sing? Is it fair that my poor little sister and I shouldn’t be allowed to go to the cinema in Şişli? Or that Korkut should categorically forbid me to go out, or to leave the neighborhood if he does happen to let me leave the house? Is it reasonable that I should be the one who’s been taking my father-in-law’s lunch over to his shop every single day for the past twenty years? That I should hurry to make sure his food doesn’t get cold only for him to say “Not this again” or “What on earth is this,” regardless of whether I’ve made his favorite meat-and-bean stew or tried something different with okra in it? Is it right for Korkut to tell Samiha what she can and can’t do and order her around like his wife, just because she’s living with us now? Or for Korkut to tell me off in front of his mother and father? Or talk down to his wife in front of the children? Is it right for all of them to come to me with their problems, but then always turn around and say, “You don’t understand”? Does it seem fair that I should never get the remote when we’re watching TV together in the evenings? Should Bozkurt and Turan be as rude to me as their father is? Or swear like sailors in front of their mother? Is it right for their father to spoil them so much? When we’re watching TV together, is it right for them to say “A snack, Mom!” every five minutes without even turning to look at me? After all that their mother does for them, is it right that they never even bother to say thanks? Would it be wrong to object to how they respond “Yeah, sure, whatever you want, Mom” or “Are you insane?” to everything I say? Is it proper for them to keep those disgusting magazines in their room? Is it right for their father to come home so late every other evening? Or that he’s hired some scrawny, surly blonde with too much makeup on and gives her all this attention because “She’s good for business”? Should the boys turn their noses up at everything I cook? Is it fine for them to ask for fries every day even though their faces are covered in pimples? Is it okay to do their homework while they watch TV? After I’ve spent hours making them dumplings, just because I love them both so much, is it right that they just gobble them up with nothing to say except “Not enough meat in them”? And that they pour Coca-Cola into their grandfather’s ear when he falls asleep in front of the TV? Is it right for them to copy their father and call anyone they don’t like a “faggot” or a “Jew”? When I say, “Go and get some bread from your granddad’s shop,” is it right for them to argue every time about whether it’s Turan’s or Bozkurt’s turn to go? Whenever I ask them to do anything, is it reasonable for them to say “I’ve got homework to do” even though they never really do their homework? Is it right for them to answer back “It’s my room, I can do what I want!” every time I ask them to be careful with something? If once in a blue moon we decide to take the car and go somewhere together as a family, is it acceptable for them to say, “We’ve got a football match in the neighborhood”? Is it right for them to refer to their uncle Mevlut as “the boza seller” and be so mean to his daughters all the time, even though they’re so infatuated with their cousins? How about when they take their father’s tone with me and say, “You say you’re on a diet, but then you stuff your face with pastries all day”? Or that they make fun of me as he does for watching my soap operas in the afternoon? Is it right for them to say, “We’ve got our tutoring sessions to prepare for the university entrance exams,” but then go to the movies instead? When they fail the entire school year, is it appropriate for them to call the teacher a nutcase instead of admitting their own deficiencies? Should they be taking the car when they don’t even have a driver’s license yet? If they happen to see their aunt Samiha out on her own in Şişli, must they inform their father as soon as he comes home in the evening? Is it right for Korkut to tell me “You’ll do as I say, or else!” in front of them? Or to squeeze my wrist hard enough to hurt and bruise? Is it right for them to shoot seagulls and pigeons with their air gun? That they should never help me clear the table after dinner, not even once? After all my lectures on how important it is that they do their homework, is it appropriate for their father to tell that old story yet again of how he beat up the donkey-faced chemistry teacher in front of the whole class? When they have a test, shouldn’t they try studying instead of making cheat sheets? Is it right for my mother-in-law, Safiye, to say, “You’re no angel yourself, Vediha!” every time I complain about any of these things? After all their pronouncements on God, the nation, and morality, is it right that all they should ever think about is how they can make more money?

10. Mevlut at the Police Station

I’ve Spent All My Life on These Streets

Ferhat. Like most restaurants, cafés, and hotels that steal electricity, the Sunshine Club had a number of what might be thought of as “overt violations.” These were minor connections, installed on the cheap for the sole purpose of giving the inspectors something to find on their raids (most of which were prearranged anyway) while leaving the major channels of electricity theft alone. Mr. Mustache could see I was itching to infiltrate the backstage and basement areas, where the club’s singers and hostesses congregated, in order to discover the motherlode of stolen power, and he warned me to be careful: even if we did get the public prosecutor and the police on our side, it didn’t take a genius to guess that Sami from Sürmene would launch a fierce counterattack to save face. Someone could easily get shot and killed in the process. I shouldn’t show my face around there so much. I also needed to be careful with the Admiral. He’d been the Sunshine Club’s meter inspector long enough that he had to be playing both sides.

I stopped going to the Sunshine Club. But I no longer had Samiha waiting for me at home, and I missed the smell of nightclubs, so I started going to other places instead. I ran into the Admiral one night at the Twilight. They gave us one of their private tables. The Twilight Club can be a scary place; the decor is truly sinister, the toilets always make weird noises, and all the bouncers’ eyes are full of malice, but that night, the seasoned inspector Admiral was very kind and friendly with his younger colleague. He did catch me entirely off guard, however, when he started talking about what a kind and decent guy Sami from Sürmene was.

“If you got to know him personally, if you witnessed his family life and knew what he wants to achieve for Beyoğlu and for this whole country, you wouldn’t believe all these lies people tell about him; in fact, you would never think ill of him again,” said the Admiral.

“I don’t have anything against Mr. Sami or anyone else,” I said.

I had the feeling that what I’d just said would somehow get passed on to Selvihan. I was also knocking back I don’t know how many drinks, since that comment about Sami from Sürmene’s “family life” had really thrown me. Why had Samiha lost faith in our family life? Didn’t she get the message I’d sent with Mevlut for her to come home? “A person should NEVER reveal his true intentions in life,” said the Admiral. DON’T GET MIXED UP IN THESE NIGHTCLUB AND GANG WARS, DON’T GET INVOLVED IN ANY RAIDS. For some reason, this called to mind how Mevlut never gets involved in anything. I was just thinking to myself what a good friend he is, and why wouldn’t Samiha come home, things in that vein, when I noticed that Inspector Admiral seemed to know all the waiters at the Twilight Club by name. They were talking in whispers. Please don’t hide anything from me; that way, I won’t hide anything from you either. WHAT MAKES CITY LIFE MEANINGFUL IS THE THINGS WE HIDE. I was born in this city; I’ve spent all my life on these streets.

I realized at some point that Inspector Admiral was gone. Had we just argued about why Fenerbahçe wouldn’t win the league championship this year? There will always come an hour in the night when the club empties out, until, somewhere in the background, only music from a cassette is playing. In this city of ten million souls, you’ll feel you are one of a precious few who aren’t yet sleeping but are, instead, delighting in their loneliness. On your way out, you bump into someone just like you, and you think, I wouldn’t mind talking some more, I’ve got so many stories to tell. Hey, friend, do you have a light? Here, have a cigarette. You don’t smoke Samsuns? I don’t like American cigarettes, they make you cough and give you cancer. Next thing you know, I’m walking through the deserted city with this man, thinking that if I were to see him again the next day, I probably wouldn’t even recognize him. By morning, the pavements in front of all the shops, cafés, and diners along these streets will be full of bottles broken by people like me the night before, and all sorts of other trash and filth, and the shopkeepers who have to clean it all up will curse us as they sweep. Look, all I want is a real conversation, a friend I can be honest with, someone I can talk to about anything: Do you mind if I talk to you? I’ve been toiling away all my life, but the one thing I haven’t done is pay enough attention to what was happening at home. What’s that? I said HOME. It’s important. No, let me finish…You’re right, my friend, but we won’t find anywhere that’s still serving at this hour, not even around here. No, they’ll all have closed already, but it’s fine, let’s give it a go, who am I to disappoint you. The city’s more beautiful at night, you know: the people of the night always tell the truth. What? Don’t be scared, the dogs won’t bite. Aren’t you from Istanbul? Did you just say Selvihan? No, never heard of it; it must be the last club to close before the morning prayers: Let’s go in if you want, we can sing along to some of the old songs from back home. Where are you from, anyway? Oh no, even this place is closed. My whole life’s gone by on these streets. Even in Cihangir, there’s nowhere to get a drink at this hour. They’re going to get rid of all the brothels and the transvestites soon. No, that’ll also be closed now. This guy gives you some pretty nasty looks sometimes: If my friends saw him, they’d say, Ferhat, where do you find these people. Forgive me for asking, but are you married? Now, don’t get me wrong…Everyone’s got a right to his own private life…You say you’re from the Black Sea coast, but do you have any ships? When it gets to a certain time of night, everyone tends to begin their sentences with “Forgive me” or “Don’t get me wrong.” But why don’t they just stop saying things that could be taken wrong instead? Why would you smoke American cigarettes instead of our wonderful Samsuns? Well, here we are, my hovel’s up on the second floor. My wife’s left me. I’m going to sleep on the couch until she comes back home. Say, I’ve got some rakı in the fridge, let’s have another glass and call it a night, I’ve got to be up early to meet some old bookkeepers and read all about your bygone days. Don’t get me wrong; ultimately, I’m happy. I’ve been in this city my whole life, and I still can’t let go.

—

Now that he was earning enough to make it comfortably to the end of the month, Mevlut had started leaving the house much later at night than he used to — well after the end of the evening news — and coming home before eleven. He was earning enough as a meter inspector that, for the first time in twenty-five years, subsistence did not feel like such a struggle. The numbers of those longtime regulars to whom he had to deliver boza two or three times a week had dwindled. Mevlut and his daughters would laugh together in front of the TV as they ate what the girls had cooked for dinner, and if he got back home before they went to sleep, he’d sit and watch TV with them some more.

Mevlut accounted to Ferhat for every last penny he collected on his rounds. Ferhat, who’d recently begun to mock his friend whenever he spoke to him, had asked one day:

“Mevlut, what would you do if you won the lottery?”

“I’d just sit at home with my daughters and watch TV, nothing more!” Mevlut had said, smiling.

Ferhat had given him a look halfway between amazement and scorn, as if to say, “How innocent can you get?” It was the way crooks and swindlers and people who thought they were smarter than him had looked at Mevlut his whole life. But Ferhat had never been one of them; he used to understand Mevlut. It had broken Mevlut’s heart to see Ferhat looking at him that way after he’d been so thoroughly respectful of Mevlut’s honesty for so many years.

Sometimes when he was out selling boza in distant neighborhoods, Mevlut thought how Ferhat probably agreed with all those who thought that there must be something “not quite right” with Mevlut that he should still be bothering with boza. Maybe Samiha thought that, too. But in the end she’d left Ferhat. No woman had ever left Mevlut.

He got home one night in November to find a police car parked outside, and his mind went straight to Ferhat. It didn’t occur to him that the police might have come for him. When he walked into the building and saw the officer standing on the stairs, the door to his apartment thrown open, and the fear on Fatma’s and Fevziye’s faces, his immediate reaction was to think that it wasn’t him the police were after, that this must all have to do with some scheme of Ferhat’s.

“We just need to take your father’s statement tonight,” said the officer, trying to comfort the girls, who were crying as they watched their father go.

But Mevlut knew that in any police case, whether it involved drugs, politics, or just an ordinary murder, such reassurances were always misleading. Sometimes, people who were taken away for questioning didn’t come home for years. The police station was only five minutes away; they would never have sent a car if all they’d wanted to do was take him there for a statement.

As the police car drove through the night, Mevlut told himself over and over again that he was innocent. Ferhat may have done something wrong, though. Mevlut had cooperated with him. Maybe that meant he was guilty — at least in his intentions. A feeling of contrition surged through him like a wave of nausea.

Once they got to the police station, it became clear that they weren’t going to take his statement right away. He’d anticipated this, but he still couldn’t help feeling disappointed. They threw Mevlut in a spacious cell. There was some light from an old lamp in the corridor, but the back of the cell was dark. Mevlut guessed that there were two other people in there. The first man was asleep. The second was drunk and seemed to be quietly complaining about something. Like the first man, Mevlut curled up on the cold floor in a corner of the cell and rested his ear against his shoulder so he wouldn’t have to hear the second man’s voice.

The thought of Fatma’s and Fevziye’s scared and tearful expressions as he’d left the house dampened his spirits. The best thing to do now was to wallow in his misery until he fell asleep, just as he used to do as a child. What would Rayiha say if she could see her husband right now? She’d say, “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from Ferhat?” He thought about the way she used to push her hair back like a little girl, her flashes of anger, and the mischievous smile she would give him every time she found a clever way to make things simpler in the kitchen. How they used to laugh, sometimes! Had Rayiha been alive now, Mevlut would have been less apprehensive about what was going to happen. They were definitely going to beat him up when they questioned him in the morning; they might even whip his feet or give him electric shocks. Ferhat had told him so many stories about how evil the police were. Now he was at their mercy. It’ll be all right! he told himself, trying to calm down. He’d been scared of getting beaten during military service, too, but it had all been fine in the end. He didn’t sleep all night. When he heard the morning call to prayer, he understood what a privilege it was to be free to go out into the street and the flow of city life.

When they took him to the interrogation room, he felt sick with exhaustion and worry. What should he do if they hit him or whipped his feet to try to extract information? Mevlut’s left-wing friends had told him countless stories of brave men who’d died while heroically enduring all sorts of tortures; he would have liked to emulate them, but what was the secret he was supposed to hide? Ferhat must have been using Mevlut’s name in some dirty business. Getting involved in the electricity racket had been a huge mistake.

“Do you think you’re at home?” said a man in plain clothes. “You don’t sit down until I say so.”

“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

“We’ll decide whether you’ve done anything wrong, but first let’s see if you know how to tell the truth.”

“I will tell the truth,” said Mevlut, with courage and conviction. They seemed impressed with his words.

They asked him what he’d been doing two nights ago. He said he’d gone out to sell boza, just as he did every night, and told them which streets and neighborhoods he’d been to and which apartments he’d entered at what time.

At one point, the questioning had slowed down. Mevlut looked through the open door and saw Süleyman walk past, led along by a policeman. What was he doing here? Before he could sort his thoughts out, the police told him that Ferhat had been murdered in his home two nights ago. They watched Mevlut’s face closely to see how he reacted. They asked about Ferhat’s work as an electricity inspector. Mevlut didn’t say anything that might get either Ferhat or Süleyman in trouble. His friend was dead.

“There was some bad blood between this Süleyman Aktaş and Fer hat Yılmaz, right?” they kept saying. Mevlut explained how all that was history; Süleyman was happily married now, he’d had a child, and he would have never done anything like that. They reminded him that Ferhat’s wife had left him and taken refuge in Süleyman’s house. Mevlut said it wasn’t Süleyman’s doing, and he never went to that house anymore anyway. He’d heard about all this from Vediha. Mevlut never stopped defending both his friends’ innocence. Who could have killed Ferhat? Did Mevlut suspect anyone? He didn’t. Did Mevlut bear any ill will toward Ferhat? Had they ever had any disagreements over money or women? He didn’t, and they hadn’t. Would he have expected Ferhat to be murdered? He wouldn’t.

Sometimes the police forgot he was there and started talking about other things, catching up with a colleague who’d opened the door, or teasing each other about the football results. Mevlut took all this to mean that he probably wasn’t in too much trouble.

At one point he thought he heard someone say: “Three men running after the same girl!” They all laughed at that, as if none of it had anything to do with Mevlut. Could Süleyman have told the police about the letters? Mevlut began to lose hope.

When they sent him back to the cell after the interrogation, the guilt he’d been feeling turned into panic: they were going to beat him up until he told them all about the letters and how Süleyman had tricked him. For a moment, he felt so ashamed that he wanted to die. But soon he realized he was probably exaggerating. Yes, it was certainly true that all three of them had fallen in love with Samiha. Mevlut also knew that if he told the police, Those letters were actually meant for Rayiha, they would probably just laugh at him and move on.

In the afternoon, while he was busy rehearsing all these explanations, they let him go. Outside, he began to grieve over Ferhat. It felt like a major part of his life and memories had been wiped out. But the urge to go home and hug his daughters was so strong that by the time he got on the bus to Taksim, he was euphoric.

The girls weren’t home, and in its empty state, the house depressed him. Fatma and Fevziye had left without doing the dishes: he felt a rising melancholy, and he was oddly even a little afraid at the sight of the same boza utensils he’d been using for thirty years, Rayiha’s basil plant on the windowsill, and the big cockroaches that had gathered enough courage in just two days to start scuttling about like they owned the place. It was as if the room had turned into someplace else overnight, and everything inside it had very slightly changed shape.

He hurried outside: he was sure that his daughters would be in Duttepe with their aunts. Everyone there would blame Mevlut now because of how close he’d been with Ferhat. What should he say when he offered Samiha his condolences? He thought about all these things as he looked out the window on the bus to Mecidiyeköy.

The Aktaş family home in Duttepe was as crowded as it usually was after holiday prayers: Süleyman had been released at around the same time as Mevlut. There was a moment when Mevlut found himself sitting across from Süleyman’s wife, Melahat, but they both looked at the TV and didn’t say a word to each other. Mevlut mused that people were too harsh about this woman, who seemed innocuous after all. All he wanted to do was to take his girls and go back home to Tarlabaşı without anyone blaming him or telling him off for anything. Even these people’s relief at Süleyman’s release felt like a reproach. Thank God this house had four floors now and three TVs that were always on. Mevlut never left the ground floor; this meant he didn’t get to see a tearful Samiha and express his condolences. She’d been widowed, too, now. Perhaps she knew something like this would eventually happen to Ferhat and had been smart enough to leave him.

Ferhat’s Alevi relatives, his colleagues from the electric company, and a few old friends from Beyoğlu all came to his funeral, but not Samiha. Once they’d left the cemetery, Mevlut and Mohini didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. An ashen sky hung over Istanbul. Neither of them particularly liked drinking. They ended up going to the movies, and afterward Mevlut went straight home to wait for his daughters.

He didn’t talk to the girls about their uncle Ferhat’s funeral at all. Fatma and Fevziye acted as if they believed that their jokey uncle had been murdered because he’d done something wrong, and they didn’t ask any questions. What had Samiha been telling them, what sorts of things had she been teaching them? Every time he looked at his girls, Mevlut worried about their future and wanted them to think of Ferhat exactly as the Aktaş family thought of him. He knew Ferhat wouldn’t have appreciated this, and he felt bad. But Mevlut’s private views on the subject were irrelevant compared with the need to protect his daughters’ future. Now that Ferhat was dead, the only people he could count on in the struggle to survive in Istanbul were Korkut and Süleyman.

From the very beginning, Mevlut told Korkut exactly what he’d told the police: he had no knowledge of Ferhat’s high-stakes electricity machinations. In any case, the job no longer suited Mevlut; he was going to resign immediately. He had some money saved up. When he went to the big Seven Hills Electric headquarters in Taksim to hand in his notice, he found he’d already been let go. After all the depredations that had come with privatization, the company’s new owners were particularly concerned with avoiding criticism and the appearance of any irregularities. Mevlut winced when he heard some inspectors he knew already talking about Ferhat as someone who had sullied the good name of all electric inspectors. If another inspector had been killed or beaten up trying to track down illicit circuits, these same men would have spoken of him as a hero who had done the profession proud.

The cause and method of Ferhat’s murder remained uncertain for several months. At first, the police hinted there might be some kind of homosexual motive behind the murder. Even Korkut and Süleyman were enraged at this theory. The reasoning was that the killer hadn’t forced his way inside Ferhat’s apartment, so he was clearly someone Ferhat knew, and they’d apparently even had a glass of rakı together. They had taken Samiha’s statement and seemed to believe her account of having been estranged from her husband recently, and how she’d been living with her sister and her sister’s husband; she was never considered a suspect, and in fact the police took her back to the house to determine whether anything had been stolen. They arrested two burglars who habitually operated in Çukurcuma and Cihangir and roughed them up a little. The details of the investigation changed every day, and Mevlut could only keep up thanks to Korkut’s political connections.

There were nine million people living in Istanbul now, and ordinary crimes of passion, drunkenness, or fury weren’t considered news anymore unless there was also a half-naked woman or a celebrity involved. Ferhat’s murder didn’t even make the papers. The newspaper moguls who’d been enjoying a share of the profits since the electricity business had been privatized would have prevented any negative publicity. Six months later, a monthly journal to which Ferhat’s old left-wing militant friends often contributed published a piece no one read on the electricity mafia, with a list of names including “Ferhat Yılmaz.” According to the author, Ferhat was a well-meaning inspector who’d been caught in the crossfire of criminal gangs fighting over the spoils of the electricity racket.

Mevlut had never heard of this journal before, but two months after the issue with the piece on Ferhat was first published, Süleyman brought him a copy, watched him read the article, and never said a word about it again. He had just had a second baby boy; the construction business was doing well, and he was happy with the way his life was going.

“You know how much we all love you, right?” said Süleyman. “Fatma and Fevziye tell us you haven’t been able to find the kind of job you deserve.”

“I’m doing all right, thank God,” said Mevlut. “I don’t understand why the girls would complain.”

Ferhat’s property was divided over the eight months that followed his death. With the help of a lawyer the Aktaş family had hired for her, Samiha took possession of two small places around Çukurcuma and Tophane that her husband had rushed to buy on the cheap with money he’d saved during his years as a meter inspector. The tiny, ill-proportioned, and shabby apartments were refurbished and repainted by the Vurals’ construction company and then rented out. Mevlut kept up with all the particulars of life in Duttepe through Fatma and Fevziye, who went to see their aunts every weekend, staying overnight on Saturdays, and told their father about everything, from the food they ate to the films they went to see, the games their aunts played, and the rows between Korkut and Vediha. After these visits, Fatma and Fevziye would come home to Tarlabaşı thrilled to show their father the new sweaters, jeans, bags, and other gifts they’d been given. Their aunt Samiha was also paying for the evening classes Fatma had already begun to take in preparation for her university entrance exams, and she was giving both her nieces some extra pocket money, too. Fatma wanted to study hospitality management. Her determination always moved Mevlut to tears.

“You know how much Korkut cares about politics,” said Süleyman. “I’m convinced that one day he will be rewarded for all the good he’s done for this country. We’ve left the village behind, but now we’re creating an association to bring together all the people who’ve come to Istanbul from back home in Beyşehir and make sure we have their support. We’ve got some other wealthy people getting involved from Duttepe, Kültepe, Nohut, and Yören.”

“I don’t understand politics,” said Mevlut.

“Mevlut, we’re forty now, we can understand anything,” said Süleyman. “This isn’t about politics anyway. We’re just going to organize some events; we’ve already been hosting day trips and group meals. Now there’s going to be a clubhouse, too. You would just make tea all day, as if you were running a café, and chat with people from back home. We’ve raised some money to rent a place out in Mecidiyeköy. You’d be in charge of opening up in the mornings and closing up in the evenings. You’d make at least three times what some poor street vendor would make. Korkut will guarantee it. You can leave at six and still have time to sell your boza at night. See, we’ve thought about that, too.”

“Give me a couple of days to think it over.”

“No, you’ve got to decide right now,” said Süleyman, but he relented when he saw Mevlut’s pensive look.

Mevlut would have much preferred a job closer to the streets, the crowds, and Beyoğlu. Joking with his customers, ringing their doorbells, walking up and down the endless sloping streets: these were the things he knew and loved, not being cooped up somewhere. But he was painfully aware of how much he still depended on Süleyman and Korkut for support. By now he had spent all the money he’d put away as a meter inspector. His time at the electric company had also cost him a few boza customers, since he hadn’t been able to do as much work in the evenings. Some nights it felt as if not a single curtain would be pulled open as he walked by, not a single customer beckoning him to come upstairs. At night, he could sense the weight of the concrete, the hardness, and the horrors of the city around him. The dogs weren’t menacing anymore. Those wheeled metal dumpsters had made it all the way into the city center by now, to all the places Mevlut loved — Beyoğlu, Şişli, Cihangir, as everywhere else — followed by a new category of poor people who foraged in them. These streets — after the twenty-nine years he’d spent ambling along them — had become part of Mevlut’s soul, but now they were changing again very fast. There were too many words and letters, too many people, too much noise. Mevlut could sense a growing interest in the past, but he didn’t expect this would do much for boza. There was also a new class of tougher, angrier hawkers. They were always trying to cheat people, always shouting, and constantly undercutting one another…These newcomers were as clumsy as they were rapacious. The older generation of street vendors had been swallowed up in the tumult of the city…

So this was how Mevlut warmed to the idea of socializing with people from his hometown and decided to accept the job. He would even have time to sell boza at night. The clubhouse’s small offices were on the ground floor. There was a roasted-chestnut vendor stationed right outside the door. In his first few months on the job, Mevlut watched him from the window and learned all the tricks of that trade and also spotted the things the man was doing wrong. Sometimes Mevlut would find an excuse to go out and talk to him (“Is the doorman in?” or “Where can I find a glazier around here?”). Occasionally, he let the man leave his roasted-chestnut stall inside the building (a practice that would soon be forbidden), and they would head off to the mosque together for Friday prayers.

11. What Our Heart Intends and What Our Words Intend

Fatma Continues Her Studies

MEVLUT SOON FOUND a pleasing balance between his rather undemanding job running the clubhouse and his boza rounds in the evenings. He often got to leave before six, handing the “venue” over to whoever was hosting that evening’s event. There were several other people who also had the keys to the building. Sometimes the entire local contingent of migrants from villages like Göçük or Nohut would book the place for the whole evening, and Mevlut would hurry home (coming back the next morning to find the offices and the kitchen in a state of grubby disarray). Once he’d had an early dinner with his daughters and checked whether Fatma — now in her second year of high school — was working hard enough to make it to college (yes, she definitely wasn’t pretending), he would go out to sell boza in a happy mood.

Throughout the autumn of 1998, Mevlut paid frequent visits to the Holy Guide. A new, eager, and more assertive crowd had begun to assemble at his lodge. Mevlut didn’t like them much, and he could sense that the feeling was mutual and that they found his presence incongruous. Bearded believers, backstreet hicks who never wore neckties, devotees, and acolytes of various kinds thronged to the Holy Guide in growing numbers, so that Mevlut hardly ever got the chance to talk to him anymore. Plagued by a series of illnesses that left him suffering chronic exhaustion, the Holy Guide no longer gave callig raphy classes, which meant that those gossipy students who used to come had stopped showing up; at least they’d brought some vitality and good cheer to the place. Nowadays, the Holy Guide sat on his armchair by the window with people crowding around him awaiting their turn to speak, nodding gravely at some disclosure or other (about the Holy Guide’s health? the latest political developments? or something Mevlut didn’t know about?) in their eagerness to express heartfelt sorrow. Now, whenever Mevlut entered the Holy Guide’s retreat, he, too, would put on the same sorrowful look and start talking in whispers. His first visits to this place had been very different: “Look who’s here, the boza seller with the face of an angel,” they’d say back then; “It’s Manager Mevlut!” they’d tease him; and someone would always comment on how much emotion they’d heard in his voice as he’d walked by on the street. Today, people just drank the boza he gave them for free, without even realizing that Mevlut was a boza seller.

One evening, he finally managed to catch the Holy Guide’s eye and was blessed with the chance to speak to him for a few minutes. By the time it was all over and he was walking out of the lodge, he realized that it hadn’t been the happiest of conversations. Yet he’d been so intensely aware of the envy and resentment that everyone else had felt at this exchange that he was elated. That night’s talk had been both the most meaningful of Mevlut’s “conversations” with the Holy Guide, and the most heartbreaking.

Mevlut had just about written off this particular visit when the Holy Guide, who’d been talking quietly to those around him, turned formally toward the audience amassed inside the spacious room and asked, “Who is wearing a wristwatch with a leather strap, and who is wearing one with a plastic strap?” The Holy Guide liked to challenge his disciples with questions, riddles, and religious conundrums. As usual, they all took turns trying dutifully to answer his question, when he spotted Mevlut:

“Ah, it’s our boza seller with the blessed name!” he said, praising Mevlut and summoning him to his side.

As Mevlut bent down to kiss his hand — covered in brown spots that seemed to grow in size and number with every visit — the man beside the Holy Guide rose to yield his seat to Mevlut. When Mevlut sat down, the Holy Guide looked him straight in the eyes and, leaning in much closer than Mevlut had expected, used some archaic phrases to ask him how he was doing. The words he used were as beautiful as the calligraphy he’d put up on the walls.

Mevlut immediately thought of Samiha and cursed the devil for playing tricks on his mind while everyone was looking. He had long been considering how to explain to the Holy Guide about the letters he’d written to Rayiha when he’d actually had Samiha in mind. Just how much thought he must have devoted to this problem became clear to him when he found himself suddenly able to recall years’ worth of intricate reasoning. First he would invoke the notion of intent in Islam. He would then ask the Holy Guide to explain the subtle distinction between a person’s private and public intentions. Here was his chance to analyze the defining strangeness of his life through the eyes of this holiest of men; perhaps what he learned that night might finally free him from all the doubts that still weighed on his soul.

But their conversation took a completely different turn. Before Mevlut could say anything at all, the Holy Guide asked another question.

“Have you been performing your daily prayers?”

This was a question he usually reserved for immodest attention seekers, people who talked too much, and newcomers. He’d never asked Mevlut before. Perhaps that was because he knew Mevlut was just a penniless boza seller.

Mevlut already knew how the question was meant to be answered because he’d heard it answered before: the chosen guest was supposed to give a truthful account of how many times he’d prayed and given alms over the past few days, while admitting with regret that he still hadn’t done enough to fulfill his duties as a believer. The Holy Guide would then pardon any shortcomings and provide his supplicant with some words of comfort: “What matters is that you meant well.” But the devil must have been at it again, or perhaps Mevlut simply realized that the whole truth might not go down so well; in any event, he managed only a faltering response. He said that what mattered in the eyes of God was the heart’s intent, the very words Mevlut had often heard the Holy Guide himself say. But the moment they left his mouth, he knew that there was something unseemly about his repeating them like that.

“It does not matter whether your heart intends to pray; the most important thing is to truly pray,” said the Holy Guide. His tone was gentle, but those who knew him recognized it straightaway as the Holy Guide’s manner of scolding.

Mevlut’s boyishly handsome face went red.

“It is true that any act is judged according to the intent that lies behind it,” the Holy Guide went on. “THE IMPORT OF A CONTRACT LIES IN THAT WHICH IT MEANS AND INTENDS TO ACHIEVE.”

Mevlut sat motionless, his eyes downcast. “THE KEY IS EMOTION, NOT MOTION,” said the Holy Guide. Was he making fun of Mevlut for sitting so perfectly still? A couple of people laughed.

Mevlut said he’d attended midday prayers every day that week. This wasn’t true. He could tell that everyone knew it.

Perhaps because of Mevlut’s evident embarrassment, the Holy Guide now elevated the tone of the conversation. “Intentions come in two forms,” he said: “THAT WHICH OUR HEART INTENDS and THAT WHICH OUR WORDS INTEND.” Mevlut heard this very clearly and made sure to memorize it. The intentions of the heart were crucial. In fact, as the Holy Guide always said, they were fundamental to our whole understanding of Islam. (If our heart’s intent is what matters most, did that mean that the most important thing about Mevlut’s letters was that he’d meant them for Samiha?) But our faith taught that the intentions behind our words also had to be true. Our Holy Prophet had expressed his intentions through words as well. The Hanafi school of Sunni teaching may have considered it sufficient for the heart’s intentions to be pure, but as the holy Ibn Zerhani (Mevlut wasn’t sure he was remembering that name correctly now) had once declared, when it comes to city life, WHAT OUR WORDS INTEND WILL REFLECT WHAT OUR HEART INTENDS.

Or had the holy Ibn Zerhani actually said that they “should” reflect each other? Mevlut hadn’t really heard that part properly, because at that moment a car had started honking out on the street. The Holy Guide stopped talking. He glanced at Mevlut, looking right into his soul: he saw Mevlut’s embarrassment, his reverence for the teacher, and his wish to leave that room as soon as possible. “A MAN WHO HAS NO INTENTION OF PRAYING WILL NEVER HEAR THE CALL TO PRAYER; WE ONLY HEAR WHAT WE WANT TO HEAR, AND SEE WHAT WE WANT TO SEE,” he said. He’d addressed the whole room with a placid expression, and again, a few people had laughed.

Mevlut would spend the following days dwelling dejectedly over those words. Whom did the Holy Guide mean by “a man who has no intention of praying”? Had he been talking about Mevlut, who didn’t pray often enough and lied about it, too? Had he meant some rowdy rich man honking his car horn in the middle of the night? Perhaps it had been a reference to the wicked, pusillanimous multitudes who always meant one thing but then ended up doing the very opposite? And what had the people in the room been laughing at?

Thoughts about the intentions of our hearts and the intentions of our words continued to weigh on Mevlut’s mind. He could see that the distinction corresponded to Ferhat’s theory about the difference between private and public views, but thinking about “intentions” gave the whole matter a more humane dimension. The pairing of hearts and words seemed more meaningful to Mevlut than that of private and public opinions — perhaps because it was more serious, too.

One afternoon, Mevlut was standing outside the clubhouse watching the chestnut vendor and talking to a retired, elderly yogurt seller with some property to his name when the old man said, “We shall see what fate has in store — KISMET.” That word stuck in Mevlut’s mind like a billboard slogan.

He’d been hiding it away in a corner of his mind along with his memories of Ferhat, but now it was back, keeping him company on his nightly walks. The leaves on the trees twitched and spoke to him. It all made sense now: KISMET was the force that bridged the gap between what our heart intended and what our words intended. A person could wish for one thing and speak of another, and their fate, their kismet, was the thing that could bring the two together. Even the seagull over there who wanted to land on that pile of trash had started off with only the intention to do so, which it had then put into words of a sort through a series of squawks, but whether the wishes harbored in its heart and expressed in its calls could ever be realized depended on a set of factors that were governed by KISMET — things like wind speed, luck, and timing. The happiness he’d found with Rayiha had been a gift of KISMET, and he must remember to respect that. The Holy Guide’s words had upset him a little; but he was glad he’d gone to see him.

For the next two years, Mevlut worried about whether his elder daughter would be able to finish high school and go to college. He couldn’t help Fatma with her studies; he couldn’t even keep track of whether she was doing her homework properly. Yet he followed her progress in his heart, and every time he saw Fatma fall into a sullen silence, leaf listlessly through her textbooks and scowl at her homework, march around in anger, or just sit there quietly sometimes and stare out the window, he was reminded of his own anxious high-school self. But his daughter was anchored much more firmly to the world of the city. She was, he found, both sensible and beautiful.

When her sister wasn’t around, Mevlut liked to take Fatma out to buy books and school supplies, or even just to talk over a plate of shredded-chicken blancmange among the crowded tables of the famous Villa Pudding Shop. Unlike other girls, Fatma was never insolent, moody, or reckless in her relationship with her father. Mevlut very rarely told her off — not that she ever did anything deserving reprimand anyway. He could sometimes see that there was a sort of rage behind her determination and confidence. They always joked together, and Mevlut would tease her for the way she narrowed her eyes when she read, washed her hands a thousand times a day, and threw everything into her handbag haphazardly, but he never took the mocking too far. He truly respected her.

Whenever he caught a glimpse of the chaos inside his daughter’s handbag, Mevlut would realize that she’d forged a much stronger and deeper connection with the city, its people, and its institutions than he’d ever had himself, and that she must talk about all sorts of things with the many different kinds of people Mevlut had only ever encountered as a street vendor. There were so many things in that handbag: identification cards, scraps of paper, hairpins, small purses, books, notepads, entry passes, parcels, chewing gum, chocolates…Sometimes, the bag would emit a scent Mevlut had never smelled anywhere else in his life. It wasn’t the smell of her books, which he did sometimes pick up and sniff in front of her, half in earnest; yet it was a bookish smell. It reminded Mevlut of cookies, the gum his daughter chewed when her father wasn’t around, and an artificial scent of vanilla he couldn’t quite place: the combination made him feel as if she could easily start living a completely different life if she wanted to. Mevlut really wanted Fatma to graduate from high school and go to college, but occasionally he also caught himself wondering whom she would end up marrying. It wasn’t something he liked to think about; he sensed that his daughter was going to fly away from this house, gladly leaving behind the life she’d led here.

Every now and then in those early weeks of 1999, Mevlut said to his daughter, “I can come and pick you up after cram school.” The classes Fatma was taking in Şişli to prepare for the college entrance exams sometimes ended at around the same time Mevlut was done with his day’s work at the clubhouse in Mecidiyeköy; but Fatma never wanted her father to come. It wasn’t that she came home late; Mevlut knew her class timetable well. Fatma and Fevziye cooked his dinner every evening with the same pots and pans their mother had used for years.

That year, Fatma and Fevziye insisted that their father get a telephone installed in the house. The prices had gone down; everyone was having a phone line hooked up nowadays, and once you sent in your application, you usually got connected within three months. Mevlut kept putting it off, worried about the extra expense and the idea of his daughters spending their days glued to the phone. He was especially wary at the prospect of Samiha calling them every day and telling them what to do. When his daughters told him they were “going to Duttepe,” Mevlut knew that often they just went to Şişli instead and spent the day at the cinema, in cake shops, and browsing shopping malls with their aunt Samiha. Their aunt Vediha would come along, too, sometimes, without telling Korkut.

Mevlut did not attempt to sell ice cream during the summer of 1999. A traditional ice-cream vendor with a three-wheeled cart could hardly move around Şişli and the city center anymore, let alone make decent sales. Nowadays those were only to be had in the older neighborhoods, where children played football in the street on summer afternoons, but Mevlut’s growing responsibilities at the migrants’ association always kept him busy during those hours.

One evening in June, after Fatma had successfully completed her second year of high school, Süleyman came by the clubhouse on his own. He took Mevlut to a new place in Osmanbey and asked him to do something that made our hero deeply uncomfortable.

—

Süleyman. Bozkurt was nineteen by the time he finally managed to finish high school. That was only because Korkut forked out the cash to get him enrolled in one of those private schools at which you can basically buy your child a diploma. He hasn’t done well enough on the college entrance exams this year (or last year) to earn a place at a decent university, and now he’s really losing his way. Apparently he crashed his car twice and even spent a night in jail following a drunken brawl. So his father decided to send him off to do his military service at the age of twenty. The boy rebelled and became so depressed that he stopped eating properly. Bozkurt told his mother that he is in love with Fatma. But he didn’t actually ask them to arrange a match or anything like that. When Fatma and Fevziye came to Duttepe this spring, they got into another argument with Bozkurt and Turan. The girls got offended, and they haven’t been back to Duttepe since. (Mevlut has no idea.) Not seeing Fatma anymore was making Bozkurt heartsick. So Korkut said, “Let’s get them engaged before we send him off to the army, otherwise he’s going to get swallowed up by Istanbul.” Korkut mentioned these plans only to Vediha; we didn’t tell Samiha a thing. His father and I spoke to Bozkurt. “I’ll marry her,” he said, looking away. Now it’s fallen to me to make the two sides meet.

“Fatma’s still in school,” said Mevlut. “Do we even know whether she likes him? Will she even listen to what I say?”

“I’ve only been beaten up by the police once in my life, Mevlut,” I said. “And that was your fault.” I didn’t add anything more to that.

—

Mevlut felt it was significant that Süleyman hadn’t brought up all the help the Aktaş family had given him over the years. Instead he’d focused on how the police had beaten him up after Ferhat’s murder. In the time they’d both spent in jail, for some reason the police had only beaten Süleyman and left Mevlut safe and sound. He still smiled every time he thought about it. All of Korkut’s influence had not been enough to protect Süleyman from that beating.

How much did he really owe the Aktaş family? There were also all those old land and property disputes to consider. He waited a long time before raising the subject with Fatma. But he did keep thinking about it, amazed that his daughter was already old enough to get married, and that Korkut and Süleyman had thought it appropriate to make this proposal. His father and his uncle had married two sisters; the next generation’s cousins had done the same and married two sisters, too. If the third generation all started marrying each other now, their children were bound to be born cross-eyed, stammering idiots.

The bigger question, though, was the prospect of imminent loneliness. During those summer evenings, Mevlut would watch TV with his daughters for hours and then go out for long walks after they went to sleep. The shadows leaves cast in the light of the streetlamps, the interminable walls, the neon lights in shopwindows, and the words in billboard advertisements would all speak to him.

He was watching TV with Fatma one evening while Fevziye was at the grocery store when their conversation somehow made its way to the house in Duttepe. “Why have you stopped visiting your aunts?” asked Mevlut.

“We see them both often enough,” said Fatma. “But we don’t go to Duttepe much anymore. Only when Bozkurt and Turan aren’t around. I can’t stand them.”

“What did they say to you?”

“Oh, childish things…Brainless Bozkurt!”

“I heard he’s very upset about your argument. He’s stopped eating, and he says—”

“Dad, he’s nuts,” said Fatma, judiciously interrupting her father so that he would drop the subject.

Mevlut saw the anger in his daughter’s eyes. “Then you shouldn’t bother going to Duttepe at all,” he said, gladly taking his daughter’s side.

They never mentioned it again. Mevlut didn’t know how to deliver the news of this formal rejection without hurting anyone’s feelings, so he didn’t call Süleyman. But one sweltering evening in the middle of August, Süleyman came by the clubhouse while Mevlut was busy serving some factory-made ice cream he’d just bought from the grocery store to a threesome from the village of İmrenler who were trying to organize a Bosphorus cruise.

“Fatma isn’t interested, she says no,” Mevlut told Süleyman as soon as they were alone. “Anyway, she wants to continue her studies; I can’t pull her out of school, can I? She’s doing a lot better than Bozkurt ever did,” he added, seized by the urge to rub it in a little.

“I told you he’s going to do his military service, didn’t I…,” said Süleyman. “Well, never mind…Though you could have said something. If I hadn’t come by and asked, you wouldn’t even have bothered to give us an answer.”

“I thought I’d wait in case Fatma changed her mind.”

Mevlut could see that Süleyman wasn’t angry about the rejection; in fact, it seemed to make sense to him. But Süleyman was worried about what Korkut would say. Mevlut worried about it, too, for a time, but he didn’t want Fatma to get married until she had graduated from college. Now, father and daughter had at least another five or six blissful years of companionship ahead of them. Whenever he had a conversation with Fatma, Mevlut always felt reassured in the knowledge that he was talking to someone he could trust to be intelligent, just as he had always trusted Rayiha.

He woke up sometime after midnight five days later to find the bed, the room, and the whole world shaking. The ground was making terrifying noises, and he could hear glasses and ashtrays shattering to pieces, the jangle of the neighbor’s windows breaking, and the sound of screaming all around. His daughters leaped into his bed and huddled up with their father. The earthquake lasted much longer than Mevlut had expected. When it stopped, the power was out, and Fevziye was crying.

“Take some clothes and let’s go outside,” said Mevlut.

The whole world had woken up and gone out into the gloomy streets. All of Tarlabaşı seemed to be talking at once out there in the dark. The drunks were complaining, many people were crying, and some particularly angry people were shouting their displeasure. Mevlut and his girls had managed to put on some clothes, but other families had rushed out of their homes in nothing but their underwear and nightshirts, some wearing slippers, others barefoot. These people kept trying to go back inside for proper clothes, to fetch some money, and lock the door, only to run back out screaming as another aftershock hit.

The huge, raucous crowd amassing on the pavements and in the streets showed Mevlut and his daughters just how many people could squeeze into one of those small apartments in Tarlabaşı’s two- and three-story blocks. Intoxicated by the shock, they walked around the neighborhood for an hour among grandfathers in pajamas, old ladies in long skirts, and children in briefs, bathing shorts, and slippers. They realized toward dawn that the aftershocks, which were already growing weaker and less frequent, were not going to destroy their building, so they went home and back to sleep. A week later, TV channels and tabloids were telling about another earthquake that was about to raze the entire city to the ground, and many people chose to spend the night in Taksim Square, out on the streets, and in the parks. Mevlut and his daughters went out to gape at these frightened thrill-seekers, but when it got late, they went home and slept peacefully through the night.

—

Süleyman. When the earthquake hit, we were at home in our new seventh-floor apartment in Şişli. Everything shook for a long time. The kitchen cupboard came right off the wall. I grabbed Melahat and the kids and took the stairs with only matches to guide us in the dark, and we walked through a sea of people for an hour all the way to our house in Duttepe, carrying the children in our arms.

—

Korkut. The house stretched and swayed like a spring. In the darkness after the quake, Bozkurt went back inside to pick up everyone’s bedding and mattresses. We were just settling down in the garden, making our beds wherever we could when…Süleyman arrived with his wife and kids. “Your building in Şişli is brand-new and made of concrete; it must be a lot more solid than our thirty-year-old hovel. Why did you come here?” I asked. “I don’t know,” said Süleyman. In the morning, we saw that our house was all twisted up, with the third and fourth floors curving down toward the street like one of those old wooden houses with bay windows.

—

Vediha. I was serving dinner two nights later when the table started shaking and the kids yelled, “Earthquake!” I managed to fling myself out of the house and into the garden, almost taking a spill down the stairs in the process. But then I realized that there hadn’t been another earthquake; it was just Bozkurt and Turan shaking the table to play a trick on me. They were watching me from the window and laughing. I had to laugh, too. I went back upstairs. “Now listen to me, you try that again and I’ll give you a good slap, just like your father does, I don’t care how old you are,” I said. Three days later, when Bozkurt played the same prank, I fell for it again; but then I gave him the smack I’d promised. Now he won’t speak to his mother anymore. My son is suffering from unrequited love, and soon he’s going to go off to do his military service; I worry about him.

—

Samiha. When Süleyman turned up on the night of the earthquake with his wife and kids in tow, I realized just how much I hated him. I went upstairs to my room on the now-crooked third floor and didn’t come down again until he and his unruly brood had gone back home. They spent two nights in the garden making a constant racket before finally returning to Şişli. They came back again a few times in September—“There’s going to be another earthquake tonight!”—to sleep in the garden, and on those days I didn’t even bother to come down.

The latest thing Süleyman had done to make me furious was letting Korkut talk him into asking for Fatma’s hand for Bozkurt. They didn’t tell me anything, figuring I’d try to stop them. Stupidity is no excuse for evil. I realized they must have done something foolish when I noticed that Fatma and Fevziye only came to Duttepe when Bozkurt wasn’t there. Vediha told me everything eventually. Of course I was proud of Fatma for saying no. I would drop the girls off at cram school every Saturday and Sunday and then take them out to the movies with Vediha in the evening.

That winter, I did everything I could to ensure Fatma did well on her university entrance exams. Vediha couldn’t help but resent Fatma for having rejected her son just as he was about to leave to join the army; the more she tried to mask her feelings, the more obvious they became. So I started meeting with the girls in pudding shops, bakeries, and the McDonald’s. I would take them to shopping malls: we would walk around and look in all the shops without buying anything, just staring at the windows in silence and walking under the bright lights feeling that something new was about to happen in our lives, and when we got tired, we would say, “Let’s do one more floor and then go downstairs for some kebab.”

Fatma and Fevziye spent New Year’s Eve 2000 watching TV and waiting for their father to come back from selling boza. Mevlut came home at eleven; he watched TV with them; they ate roast chicken and potatoes. They usually never spoke to me about their father, but Fatma did tell me about that night.

Fatma took her university entrance exams at the beginning of June. I waited for her outside the door. Everyone’s mothers, fathers, and brothers sat on a long, low wall across from the columns that flanked the entrance to this old building. I gazed toward Dolmabahçe Palace and smoked a cigarette. When she came out of the exam, Fatma looked just as tired as everyone else, but she seemed more optimistic, too.

—

Mevlut felt proud when his daughter graduated from high school without needing to take a single makeup exam and then was accepted into college to study hospitality management. Some fathers would put their children’s high-school graduation pictures up on the clubhouse bulletin board. Mevlut fantasized about doing the same. But of course no father would ever display the graduation photos of an all-girls’ school. Still, news of Mevlut’s daughter’s academic success soon spread among the former yogurt sellers and the Beyşehir people involved with the migrants’ association. Süleyman dropped in especially to congratulate Mevlut; he spoke about how a man’s greatest asset in this city was a child with an education.

On her first day of classes, toward the end of September, Mevlut took his daughter all the way to the front door of the university. This was the first public hotel management school in Istanbul: they concentrated as much on the management and economics of the hospitality industry as they did on the practicalities of serving guests. The school, a division of Istanbul University, was in Laleli, in a converted inn. Mevlut daydreamed about selling boza in these beautiful old neighborhoods. Once, on his way back from the Holy Guide’s place, he walked for an hour all the way from Çarşamba to his daughter’s school. Those parts of the city were still quiet at night.

In January 2001, four months after starting classes, Fatma told her father about a boy she was seeing. He was in the same program, but he was two years older. His intentions were serious. He was from Izmir. (Mevlut felt his heart stop for a moment.) They both wanted the same thing in life: to get a university degree and start working in the tourism industry.

Mevlut couldn’t believe how quickly his daughter had reached this stage of her life. Then again, Fatma would still get married later than any other girl in the family. “You’re too late now, at your age your mother and your aunts already had two children each!” said Mevlut, suffering even as he teased her.

“That’s why I’m going to get married straightaway,” said Fatma. In her quick rejoinder, Mevlut saw all her determination to get out of the house as soon as possible.

In February, they came from Izmir to Istanbul to ask for Fatma’s hand. Mevlut found a night when the clubhouse was free and booked it for the engagement party, borrowing some extra chairs from the coffeehouse across the road. Apart from Korkut and his sons, all their acquaintances from Duttepe came to the party. Mevlut knew that none of these people, including Samiha, would go to the actual wedding, which was to take place in Izmir at the beginning of the summer. The engagement party was the first time he saw Samiha within the con fines of the clubhouse: unlike all the other women there, her headscarf and overcoat weren’t faded or tan colored; they were new, dark blue, and tied loose. Mevlut wondered whether perhaps she wanted not to wear a headscarf anymore. Fatma didn’t always wear hers, and she had to take it off every time she went to the university. Mevlut couldn’t tell if his daughter was pleased about this or not. It was mostly between Fatma and her university friends.

None of the people who’d come from Izmir wore headscarves. In the days leading up to the engagement, Mevlut saw just how much his daughter longed to become part of this family. At home, Fatma would hug him and kiss him and weep over how she was about to leave the house in which she’d spent her childhood, but a few minutes later, Mevlut would catch her deep in daydreams about all the little pleasures of her new life with her husband. That was how Mevlut discovered that his daughter and his future son-in-law had applied to transfer to the hospitality management faculty of the university in Izmir. Two months later, they found out that their application had been accepted. Thus, in the space of just three months, it was decided that after they got married at the beginning of summer, Fatma and Burhan (for that was the unappealing name of Mevlut’s future son-in-law, who was stiff as a poker and always wore a perfectly blank expression) would move into an apartment in Izmir belonging to the groom’s family and become residents of that city.

Of Fatma’s family in Istanbul, only Mevlut and Fevziye went down to Izmir for the wedding. Mevlut liked Izmir; it was like a smaller, warmer version of Istanbul, with palm trees. All the poorer neighborhoods were right in the middle of the bay. At the wedding, he watched Fatma hold her husband close while they danced — just as in the movies — and felt embarrassed, but also somewhat moved. On the bus back to Istanbul, Mevlut and Fevziye didn’t say a word to each other. The feeling of his younger daughter’s head resting on his shoulder as she fell asleep during the overnight journey and the scent of her hair made Mevlut happy. In just six months, his elder daughter, the girl he’d cherished for all these years, and dreamed of keeping close to him for the rest of his life, had gone far beyond her father’s reach.

12. Fevziye Runs Away

Let Them Both Kiss My Hand

ON SEPTEMBER 11, Mevlut and Fevziye spent the day watching TV footage of the planes crashing into those skyscrapers in America, and the buildings collapsing in a cloud of fire and smoke, like something out of the movies. Except for a quiet comment from Mevlut—“The Americans will want their revenge now!”—they never mentioned these events again.

They had become good friends after Fatma got married and left. Fevziye loved talking, telling jokes, and imitating other people, and she liked to make her father laugh by inventing ridiculous stories. She’d inherited her mother’s talent for spotting the amusingly absurd side to everything. She could parrot the sound of their neighbor whistling through his front teeth as he spoke, or a door creaking open, or her father huffing and puffing as he clambered up the stairs, and when she slept at night, she curled up in an S shape, just as her mother used to do.

When he got home from the clubhouse one evening five days after the collapse of the Twin Towers, Mevlut found the TV switched off, no food on the dining table, and no Fevziye either. At first, it didn’t occur to him that his daughter might have run away, so he just fumed at the thought that his seventeen-year-old was still out after dark, doing nothing useful. Fevziye had failed both mathematics and English in her penultimate year of high school; all summer, Mevlut hadn’t once seen her sit down and study. As he looked out the window at the dark street, waiting for his daughter to come home, his anger slowly turned into worry.

He’d noticed with a pang that Fevziye’s handbag and many of her clothes and other possessions weren’t in their usual places. He was debating with himself whether to go over to Duttepe to inquire with the Aktaş family when the doorbell rang, giving him a brief flash of hope that it might be Fevziye.

But it was Süleyman. He told Mevlut straightaway that Fevziye had run away with someone, that the boy was “suitable” and from a good family, and that his father owned three taxis, which he rented out. The boy’s father had called in the afternoon, and Süleyman had gone to see them. Perhaps they would have called Mevlut first if he’d had a telephone at home. In any case, Fevziye was fine.

“If she was fine, then why did she run away?” said Mevlut. “To embarrass her father and disgrace herself?”

“Why did you run away with Rayiha?” said Süleyman. “Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman would have said yes if you’d just asked for her.”

On hearing these words, Mevlut began to suspect that Fevziye’s escape might have been a form of emulation. After all, his daughter had done exactly what her mother and father had done. “Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman would have never let me marry his daughter,” he said, thinking back proudly to the night he ran away with Rayiha. “I will not accept this taxi driver who’s run away with my girl. Fevziye had promised me she’d finish high school and go to college.”

“She missed both of her makeup exams,” said Süleyman. “She has failed the year. She was probably too scared to tell you. But Vediha knows all about how you’ve always told the poor girl you’d never forgive her if she doesn’t finish high school, and how you’ve been pushing her to go to college like her sister.”

When he realized that what he’d thought were private matters between him and his daughter had clearly been discussed not just in the Aktaş family, but among complete strangers, too — a taxi driver and his family — and that he’d gained a reputation for being an irascible and dictatorial father, Mevlut became indignant.

“Fevziye is no daughter of mine,” he sniffed, but he regretted the words immediately. Süleyman hadn’t even left yet, and already Mevlut started to be overcome by the same sense of helplessness any father whose daughter has eloped is bound to feel: If he didn’t forgive his daughter straightaway and pretend to like and approve of the groom (a driver? he could never have imagined it!), the news that his daughter had run off to live with a man she wasn’t married to would quickly spread, and Mevlut’s honor would be stained. But if he was too quick to forgive the irresponsible bastard who’d taken his daughter, then everyone would say that Mevlut himself had been in on it or that he’d taken a significant sum of money to allow his daughter to get married to the man. He knew that unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life lonely and cantankerous — much as his own father had done — he had no choice but to take the second option without delay.

“Süleyman, I can’t live without my daughters. I will forgive Fevziye. But first let her come here with this man she means to marry. Let them both kiss my hand and show their respect. I may have run away with Rayiha, too, but at least afterward I went all the way to the village to Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman’s doorstep to pay my respects.”

“I’m sure your taxi driver son-in-law will have as much respect for you as you did for Crooked Neck,” Süleyman said with a smirk.

Mevlut didn’t realize that Süleyman was making fun of him. He was confused, afraid of loneliness, and in need of being comforted. “There used to be such a thing as respect, once upon a time!” he heard himself saying, and Süleyman laughed at this, too.

Mevlut’s second son-in-law was called Erhan. He looked completely ordinary (short with a narrow forehead), and Mevlut couldn’t understand what his beautiful flower of a daughter — the same girl he’d cherished for so many years, and for whom he’d always had such high hopes — could possibly have seen in him. He must be very sly and very clever, thought Mevlut, feeling disappointed with his daughter for failing to see through all that.

He did, however, like the way Erhan bowed all the way down to the floor and kissed his hand apologetically.

“Fevziye must finish high school, she must not drop out of school,” said Mevlut. “Otherwise I will never forgive you.”

“That’s what we also think,” said Erhan. But as they talked, it became clear that it would be impossible for Fevziye to keep going to school and hide the fact that she was married.

Mevlut knew, though, that the real cause of his anxiety wasn’t the thought of his daughter not finishing high school or going to college but that he would soon be completely alone in the house and more generally in the world. His soul’s real anguish wasn’t his having failed to give his daughter a proper education but the sense that he was being abandoned.

In a private moment, Mevlut began to remonstrate with his daughter. “Why did you run away? Would I have said no if they’d come here and asked for your hand like civilized people?”

Mevlut could tell from the way Fevziye averted her eyes that she was thinking, Yes, of course you would have said no!

“We were so happy here, father and daughter,” said Mevlut. “Now I’ve got no one left.”

Fevziye hugged him; Mevlut struggled to hold back tears. Now, there would be no one waiting for him when he came home in the evenings from selling boza. When he had the dream of running through a dark cypress forest with dogs chasing him, and woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night, the sound of his daughters breathing in their sleep would no longer be there to comfort him.

His fear of loneliness led Mevlut to drive a hard bargain. In a moment of shared enthusiasm, he made his future son-in-law swear upon his honor that Fevziye would graduate from not only high school but college, too. Fevziye spent that night at home with Mevlut. He was glad that she had come to her senses before the whole matter could get out of hand, though he still couldn’t help but mention every now and then that she’d broken his heart by running away.

“You ran away with Mom, too!” said Fevziye.

“Your mother would have never done what you did,” said Mevlut.

“Yes, she would have,” said Fevziye.

His daughter’s willful, decisive response pleased Mevlut, but he also saw it as further proof that she’d been trying to do as her mother had done. On religious holidays, or whenever Fatma and her dither ing fool of a husband came to see them from Izmir, they would all go to Rayiha’s grave. If the visit ended up feeling more melancholy than usual, Mevlut would spend the whole way back home giving them an extended and embellished account of how he had run away with Rayiha, how they’d worked everything out down to the tiniest detail, how they had first met and exchanged glances at a wedding, and how he would never forget the way their mother had looked at him that night.

The next day, Erhan the taxi driver and his father — himself a retired driver — came by to return Fevziye’s suitcase. As soon as Mevlut saw the groom’s father, Mr. Sadullah, who was ten years older than him, he knew that he was going to like this man a lot more than he liked his son. Mr. Sadullah was a widower, too; he’d lost his wife to a heart attack three years ago. (The better to describe those events, Mr. Sadullah had sat at the only table inside Mevlut’s one-room house and reenacted the way she’d dropped her spoon halfway through a bowl of soup and died with her head resting on the table.)

Mr. Sadullah was from Düzce; his father had come to Istanbul during the Second World War and worked as an apprentice to an Armenian shoemaker on Gedikpaşa Hill, who would later make him his business partner. When the place was looted during the anti-Christian uprisings of September sixth and seventh, 1955, the Armenian owner left Istanbul, handing the shop over to Mr. Sadullah’s father, who had continued to run it on his own. But his “free-spirited” and “indolent” son stood his ground against his father’s insistence and his beatings, and instead of learning how to make shoes, he became “the best driver in Istanbul.” Mr. Sadullah would give Mevlut a knowing wink as he explained how being a driver back then, when all the cabs and shared taxis were American models, was probably the most glamorous job in the world, and from this Mevlut understood that the short, clever young man with a head shaped like an upturned bowl, the one who’d run away with his daughter, had inherited all his taste for a good time from his father.

Mevlut went to their three-story stone-built house in Kadırga to discuss the details of the wedding ceremony; he developed a close friendship with Mr. Sadullah, which would only grow stronger after the wedding, and in his forties he finally learned how to enjoy the kinds of conversations that friends normally had over dinner and a glass of rakı—even though he didn’t drink much himself.

Mr. Sadullah had three taxis, which he rented out to six drivers working twelve-hour shifts every day. Even more than the makes and models of his cars (two Turkish Murats, one a ’96 and the other ’98, and a 1958 Dodge, which Mr. Sadullah himself drove from time to time just for fun, keeping it in mint condition), he liked to talk about the ever-increasing cost of obtaining a prized taxi license in Istanbul. His son Erhan looked after one of the taxis himself and kept tabs on the other taxis, too, for his father, checking their odometers and taximeters. Mr. Sadullah would smile as he explained how his son didn’t really keep a close enough eye on the drivers, who were either dishonest (skimming from what they made in a day), unlucky (getting into accidents all the time), disrespectful (coming late for their shift and being rude), or downright foolish. But seeing it wasn’t worth his arguing with these people over a few pennies more, Mr. Sadullah left all that unpleasantness to his son. Mevlut inspected the attic room where Erhan and Fevziye would live after they got married, checking everything from the new cupboards to the trousseau and the double bed (“Erhan never came up here that time your daughter spent the night,” Mr. Sadullah had reassured him), and confirmed that he was satisfied.

Mevlut loved it when Mr. Sadullah showed him around all the places that had formed the backdrop of his life, reminiscing and telling old anecdotes in that charming way of his that only got sweeter when you let him go on uninterrupted. Mevlut soon learned where to find the Vale School (an Ottoman-era building that was much older than the Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School) in Cankurtaran, where the boarders beat and bullied the day students like Mr. Sadullah, the shoe shop that his father had brought to ruin in ten years (in its place there was now a café like the Binbom), and the adorable teahouse across from the park. He almost couldn’t believe it when he found out that there had been no park there three hundred years ago, just water in which hundreds of Ottoman galleons had moored, waiting for war. (There were pictures of these vessels on the walls inside the teahouse.) Mevlut began to feel that had he spent his own childhood and youth surrounded by these broken old fountains, derelict bathhouses, and dusty, filthy, ghost- and spider-ridden religious retreats built by bearded and beturbaned Ottoman leaders — that is, if his father hadn’t come from Cennetpınar to Kültepe but had gone straight to one of these neighborhoods across the Golden Horn instead, settling in old Istanbul like so many other lucky people who’d migrated to the city from the Anatolian countryside — he would have ended up a completely different person, and so would his daughters. He even felt a kind of remorse, as if going to live in Kültepe had been his own decision. But he didn’t know a single person who’d come to Istanbul from Cennetpınar in the 1960s and ’70s and settled in one of these neighborhoods. As he began to notice how much wealthier Istanbul was growing, he thought that he might be able to sell more boza if he tried coming to some of the backstreets in these historic quarters of the city.

Soon, Mr. Sadullah invited Mevlut to come over for dinner again. Mevlut didn’t have much time to spare between his work at the clubhouse and his evening boza rounds, and so to accommodate their burgeoning friendship, Mr. Sadullah offered to come by the clubhouse in his Dodge to pick Mevlut up and load his shoulder pole and jugs into the trunk, so that once they were done with dinner, he could drop him off wherever he wanted to sell his boza that night. The fathers-in-law grew even closer after this dinner, during which they discussed all the intricacies of the upcoming wedding celebrations.

The groom’s side would of course pay for the wedding, so when he found out that the party wasn’t going to take place in a wedding hall but in the basement floor of a hotel in Aksaray, Mevlut had no objections. He was, however, upset to hear that there would be alcohol served. He didn’t want there to be anything about this wedding that could make the people of Duttepe, and especially the Aktaş family, uncomfortable.

Mr. Sadullah set his mind at ease: guests would bring their own bottles of rakı and store them in the kitchen; those who wanted a drink would have to ask the waiters personally, and the requested glasses of iced rakı would be prepared upstairs and brought down without any fuss. Of course their own guests — his son’s taxi-driver friends, the neighborhood locals, the Kadırga football team and its board of directors — wouldn’t mind if there was no rakı served with the meal; but if there was, they would certainly drink some, and be happier for it. Most of them supported the secular Republican People’s Party anyway.

“So do I,” said Mevlut in a spirit of solidarity, but without much conviction.

The hotel in Aksaray was a new building. While excavating the foundation, the contractor had found the remains of a small Byzantine church, and since such a discovery would normally have put a stop to the building works, he’d had to pay out some hefty bribes across the municipality to make sure no one noticed the ruins, and to compensate himself for the cost, he’d dug an extra basement floor. On the night of the wedding, Mevlut counted twenty-two tables in the room, which soon filled to capacity and became submerged in layers of thick blue smoke from countless cigarettes. There were six tables for men only. That part of the wedding hall was full of the groom’s friends from the neighborhood and other taxi drivers. Most of these young drivers were unmarried. But even those who had wives had quite early on left them behind with the children in the part of the hall reserved for families and gone to join their friends at the bachelors’ tables, which they thought would be more fun. Mevlut could tell how much those tables must already be drinking just by the sheer number of waiters needed to ferry trays for rakı and ice back and forth between the kitchen and that end of the hall. But guests were openly drinking even at the mixed tables, where a few, like one particularly irascible old man, lost their patience with the sluggish waiters and decided to take matters into their own hands, going to the kitchen upstairs to pour their own drinks.

Mevlut and Fevziye had considered every single permutation of Aktaş family attendance. Bozkurt was away doing his military service and wouldn’t be there to make a drunken scene. Korkut, whose son had been rejected by the bride, might find an excuse not to come or bolt, saying, “There was too much drinking, it made me uncomfortable,” and so ruin the party for everyone else. But Fevziye, who kept up with all the Aktaş family news through her aunt Samiha, said that the outlook in Duttepe was not quite so negative. In fact the real danger wasn’t from Bozkurt or Korkut but Samiha herself, who was furious at Korkut and Süleyman.

Thank God Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman had come up from the village, as had Fatma and her stiff-as-a-poker husband from Izmir. Fevziye had arranged for them all to share a taxi with Samiha. Mevlut spent the early part of the celebration worrying about why that taxi was taking so long, when all the other guests from Duttepe had already arrived and brought their gifts. All but one of the five big tables set aside for the bride’s family were already full (their neighbor Reyhan and her husband were both looking very smart). Mevlut went upstairs to the kitchen to have a glass of rakı where no one would see him and lingered around the hotel entrance, waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival.

When he returned to the wedding hall, he saw that the fifth table was now completely full. When had they come in? He sat back down next to Mr. Sadullah at the groom’s table and continued to stare at the Aktaş family. Süleyman had brought both his sons, aged three and five; Melahat was very elegantly dressed; in his suit and tie, Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman looked so neat and courteous he might have been mistaken for a retired government officer. Every time his eyes caught the red stain in the middle of the table, Mevlut shivered and looked away.

—

Samiha. My darling Fevziye, in her beautiful wedding gown, sat next to her husband in the middle of the room, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, feeling her joy and excitement in my own heart. How wonderful it is to be young and happy. I was also very pleased to hear from my dear Fatma, seated beside me, that she was happy with her own husband in Izmir, that his family was supporting them, that they were both doing very well at the hotel school, that they’d spent the summer holidays apprenticing at a hotel on Kuşadası, and that their English was improving; it was great to see them both smiling all the time. When my darling Rayiha passed away, I cried for days, not just because I’d lost my beloved sister but also because these two sweet little girls had been orphaned at such a young age. I began to keep an eye on what they ate, what they wore, who their friends were in the neighborhood, and everything else, just as if they’d been my own daughters; I became a mother to these unlucky girls, though from a distance. Cowardly Mevlut didn’t want me in his house because he was scared there might be gossip and that Ferhat would misunderstand; that hurt my feelings and dampened my enthusiasm, but I never gave up. When I turned away from Fevziye to Fatma again, she said, “You look so regal in that purple dress, Auntie!” and I thought I might start to cry. I stood up and walked in the exact opposite direction from Mevlut’s table, went upstairs to the kitchen door, and after telling one of the waiters “My father’s still waiting for his drink,” I was immediately given a glass of rakı on the rocks. I retreated to the window and quickly gulped it down before hurrying back to my place at the table, between my father and Fatma.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi. Vediha came over to our table, told her father-in-law Hasan the grocer — who hadn’t said a word all night—“You must be getting bored, Father,” and took him by the arm over to his sons’ table. Let me be clear: the thing that hurts me most is that even when her actual father is right there, my darling Vediha calls this dull and distant man her “dear father” just because she’s married to his spiteful son. I went to sit at the table of the man who was in charge of the festivities and posed a riddle to everyone: “Do you know what Mr. Sadullah, Mr. Mevlut, and I all have in common?” They began to say that it was probably yogurt or our youth or our love of rakı…until I said, “Each of our wives died young and left us all alone in this world,” and burst into tears.

—

Samiha. Vediha and Süleyman stood on either side of my father and walked him back to our table, but all Mevlut did was sit and watch. Couldn’t he even bring himself to take his late wife’s father by the arm and maybe whisper a few words of comfort in his ear? But if he were to come anywhere near my table, people might gossip; they might remember that he’d actually written those letters to me and start talking about it again…I bet that’s what he’s afraid of. Oh, Mevlut, you coward. He keeps looking at me, but then pretending he didn’t. But I look right back at him, just the way I did at Korkut’s wedding twenty-three years ago, just, as he wrote in his letters, as if I wanted to take him prisoner with my ensorcelled eyes. I looked at him so I could cut across his path like a bandit and steal his heart away, so that he would be struck by the force of my gaze. I looked at him so that he could see his reflection in the mirror of my heart.

“My darling Samiha, you’re wasting your time staring over there,” said my father, by then completely drunk. “A man who writes letters to one girl but then marries her sister is no good for anyone.”

“I’m not looking that way,” I said, though I stubbornly kept looking anyway and saw that, every now and then, Mevlut looked at me, too, right until the very end of the evening.

13. Mevlut Alone

You Two Are Made for Each Other

LEFT ALONE in the house where he’d spent years living elbow to elbow with his wife and daughters, Mevlut began to feel depleted, almost as if he’d fallen ill, so that even getting out of bed in the mornings seemed like a chore. In the past, even on his darkest days, he’d always been able to count on his indomitable optimism — which some thought of as “innocence”—and on his knack for finding the easiest and least distressing way through any situation. He therefore saw his current malaise as a sign of a bigger problem, and even though he was only forty-five, he began to feel afraid of death.

When he was in the clubhouse or the neighborhood coffeehouse in the morning, chatting to one or two people he knew, he was able to keep his fear of loneliness at bay. (Ever since he’d been left on his own, he had grown even kinder and more tolerant toward anyone he met.) But when he walked in the street at night, he was scared.

Now that Rayiha had died and his daughters were both married, the streets of Istanbul seemed longer than ever before, like bottomless black wells. He might find himself in some remote neighborhood late at night, ringing his bell and crying “Boza” as he made his way, when the sudden realization that he had never before been on this street or in this neighborhood induced a strange and terrifying memory or that feeling that he used to have as a child or a young man whenever he went somewhere he wasn’t meant to go (and when the dogs barked): the feeling that he would be caught and punished, which he took to mean that he was, in truth, a bad person. Some nights, the city seemed transformed into a more mysterious, menacing place, and Mevlut couldn’t make out whether he felt this way because there was no one waiting for him at home or because these new streets had become imbued with signs and symbols he didn’t recognize: his fears were exacerbated by the silence of the new concrete walls, the insistent presence of a multitude of strange and ever-changing posters, and the way a street could suddenly twist on and on just as he thought it might be ending, almost as if to mock him. When he walked down a quiet street where no curtain twitched and no window opened, he would sometimes feel — though he knew, rationally, that it wasn’t true — as if he’d been there before, in a time as old as fables, and as he reveled in the sensation of meeting the present moment as if it were a memory, he would shout “Boo-zaa” and feel that he was really calling out to his own past. Sometimes his fear of dogs would return, reignited by his own imagination or by the barking of an actual dog standing beside the wall of a mosque, and suddenly it would hit him that he was completely alone in the world. (It was comforting, in these moments, to think of Samiha and her purple dress.) Or he might see on an empty street one night a pair of tall, thin men walk past, oblivious to his presence, and get the feeling that the words he’d just heard them say (about locks and keys and responsibilities) were clues to some message meant for him — only to find that the two short, fat men in black suits walking down a narrow street of a completely different neighborhood two nights later were saying exactly the same words.

It was as if the city’s old, mossy walls, its ancient fountains covered in beautiful script, and its wooden homes, twisting and rotting to the point of leaning on one another for support, had all been burned down and wrecked into nothingness, and the new streets, concrete houses, neon-lit shops, and apartment blocks taking their place had been built to seem even older, more intimidating and incomprehensible, than any place before. The city was no longer an enormous, familiar home but a faithless space in which anyone who got the chance added more concrete, more streets, courtyards, walls, pavements, and shops.

With the city growing inexorably out of his reach, and no one to come home to at the other end of each dark road, Mevlut began to feel the need for God more than ever before. He started performing midday prayers before he went to work at the clubhouse — not just on Fridays but whenever he felt the need to do so — either at the Şişli Mosque or at the Duttepe Mosque if he took a longer route or at any other mosque he happened to come across. He delighted in the silence that reigned in these places, the way the city’s constant humming filtered softly inside like the light that fell in embroidered patterns along the bottom edge of the dome, and the chance to spend half an hour in communion with old men who’d cut their ties with the world or men like him who simply had nobody left; it all made him feel as if he’d found a cure for his loneliness. At night, these emotions led him to places where he would never have set foot back when he was still a happy man, like deserted mosque courtyards or cemeteries tucked away deep in the heart of a neighborhood, where he could sit on the edge of a gravestone and smoke a cigarette. He would read dedications to people who had come and gone long ago and look reverently at ancient tombstones covered in Arabic script and surmounted with turbans carved in stone. He’d started whispering the name of God to himself more often, and occasionally he would ask him for deliverance from a lifetime of loneliness.

Sometimes he thought of the other men he knew who’d also lost their wives and found themselves alone at the age of forty-five but then got married again with the help of family and friends. At the migrants’ association, Mevlut had met Vahap, a man from the village of İmrenler who ran a plumbing supply shop in Şişli. When his wife and only son died in a bus accident on their way to a wedding in the village, Vahap’s relatives immediately arranged for him to marry someone else from there. When his wife died giving birth to their first child, Hamdi from Gümüşdere himself almost died of sadness, but his uncle and the rest of his family found him a new wife, a gregarious, carefree woman who’d slowly brought him back to life.

But no one offered to help Mevlut in this way nor even spoke in passing of any suitable women they might know who’d been widowed at a young age (it was also important that the woman in question not already have children of her own). The reason was that Mevlut’s entire family already thought that the right match for Mevlut was Samiha. “Like you, she’s alone, too,” Korkut had told him once. Or, perhaps, it was Mevlut himself — as he sometimes noticed — who wanted to believe that this was what everyone thought. He, too, accepted that Samiha was probably the right one for him and often got lost daydreaming about Fevziye’s wedding, when Samiha in that purple dress had stared at him from the other side of the room, though for a while he’d forbidden himself from even thinking about the possibility of marrying again: Mevlut felt that wishing he could be closer to Samiha, or just trying to catch her eye as he had done at his daughter’s wedding — let alone marrying her — would be enormously disrespectful to Rayiha’s memory. Sometimes he sensed that other people thought the same, and maybe that was why they always found it so difficult and awkward to talk to him about Samiha.

For a time, he thought that the best thing he could do was to get Samiha out of his head (I don’t think about her that often anyway, he told himself) and muse about some other woman instead. Korkut and the other founders and directors of the migrants’ association had banned rummikub and card games from the clubhouse in the hope of sparing theirs the same fate as most other migrants’ associations, which always eventually turned into ordinary coffeehouses, places where women didn’t feel comfortable coming in with their husbands. One way to attract more women and families was to organize dumpling nights. The women would get together at one another’s houses to prepare the dumplings and come to the event with their husbands, brothers, and children. On some of these evenings, Mevlut would be especially busy in the tea stall. A widow from Erenler came to one of these dumpling nights with her sister and her sister’s husband; she was tall, with good posture, and seemed healthy. Mevlut had looked her over a few times from the tea stall. Another one who’d caught his eye was the daughter of a family from İmrenler, a girl in her thirties who’d left her husband in Germany and returned to Istanbul: her thick black hair seemed set to burst out from underneath her headscarf. While taking her cup of tea, she’d looked straight at Mevlut with her coal-black eyes. Had she learned in Germany how to stare like that? All these women seemed so much more comfortable and direct in the way they took in Mevlut’s handsome, boyish face than Samiha had been all those years ago at Korkut’s wedding or more recently at Fevziye’s: one merry widow, a cheerful, chubby lady from Gümüşdere, had chatted playfully with him all through one of those dumpling nights and also while he’d served her tea at a picnic. Mevlut had admired her self-reliance and the way she’d just stood on the side smiling while the other guests danced at the end of the picnic.

Even though no alcohol was consumed, not even secretly, there seemed to be a state of collective intoxication by the end of these dumpling dinners and picnics, with men and women dancing together to their favorite Beyşehir folk songs. According to Süleyman, this was why Korkut didn’t let Vediha attend these events. But of course if she couldn’t come, neither could her inseparable companion in Duttepe, Samiha.

Certain issues had slowly begun to divide the migrants’ association into supporters of the secular Republican People’s Party on the one hand and the more conservative members on the other. These issues included how much women and families should be encouraged to participate in association activities; which folksinger to book for events; what to do about unemployed men playing cards in the clubhouse; whether or not to organize evening Koran readings; and the merits of offering scholarships to bright village kids admitted to college. This political back-and-forth would sometimes continue even after the adjournment of a club meeting, the end of a football match, or a day trip, and the men who relished these debates would end up going for a few drinks at a bar near the clubhouse. One night, Süleyman emerged from a group leaving the clubhouse, and putting his arm around Mevlut’s shoulders, he said, “Let’s go with them.”

Mevlut realized that the bar they went to was the same place where Süleyman had gone for a drink with Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman many years ago while deep in the throes of unrequited passion. They ate white cheese, melon, and panfried liver, drank rakı, and began to discuss the association’s activities as well as what all their acquaintances from the village were up to. (So-and-so had shut himself away in the house; another thought of nothing but gambling; and a third was running himself ragged going from hospital to hospital trying to care for his disabled son.)

The conversation soon moved on to politics. These rakı lovers might start accusing Mevlut of secretly being an Islamist sympathizer, but in truth they were equally likely to throw in some snide accusation: “We haven’t seen you at Friday prayers in a long time.” Mevlut would not engage with any of it. When Süleyman gleefully announced that “members of parliament and candidates standing for election will be visiting the clubhouse,” Mevlut was excited but, unlike the others, didn’t ask who these prospective visitors were or what party they belonged to. Somehow the discussion turned to whether all these Islamists were going to take over the country soon or whether there was nothing to worry about. There were even a few who claimed that the army would arrange a coup and bring this government down. It was all just like those debates that were constantly shown on TV.

By the end of the meal, Mevlut’s mind had already begun to drift. Süleyman, who’d been sitting across from him, moved to the empty chair at Mevlut’s side and started telling him about his sons, talking so softly that no one around them could hear. His elder son Hasan, who was six years old, had just begun primary school. His other son, Kâzım, was four, and since his brother had already taught him how to read at home, he was now reading the Lucky Luke comics. Süleyman’s secretive manner, excluding everyone else at the table, made Mevlut uncomfortable. He may have been whispering only in the interest of shielding his family bliss from jealous attention, but there were still many who hadn’t yet made their minds up about the truth surrounding Ferhat’s death. It may have been five years ago already, but Mevlut knew that — even in his own heart — the matter still hadn’t been laid to rest. If they saw the two cousins whispering like this, people might think Mevlut had conspired with Süleyman.

“There’s something important I need to talk to you about. But you’re not allowed to interrupt me,” said Süleyman.

“All right.”

“I’ve seen loads of women lose their husbands early on to street fights or car accidents and go on to marry again so they wouldn’t be alone. If these women have no children, and if they’re still young and attractive, they’ll have plenty of suitors, too. Now there’s this woman I know — I think you know her name — who’s just like that: beautiful and smart and young. She knows how to stand up for herself, too, and she has real character. There’s already someone she’s been thinking about, and she only has eyes for him.”

Mevlut liked the idea that Samiha was waiting for him — at least in Süleyman’s version of the story. There was no one else left at the dinner table now. Mevlut ordered another glass of rakı.

“The man this woman has in mind is a young widower, too, having lost his wife to an unfortunate accident,” Süleyman continued. “He is honest, trustworthy, sweet-faced, and even tempered.” Mevlut was enjoying this praise. “He’s got two daughters from his first marriage, but he’s all alone now because they’ve both married and left the nest.”

Mevlut wasn’t sure when he was supposed to interrupt and say, I get it, you’re talking about me and Samiha! so Süleyman kept taking advantage of his indecision. “In fact, the man had once been in love with the woman. He’d written love letters to her for years…”

“So why didn’t they get married?” asked Mevlut.

“It doesn’t matter now…There was a misunderstanding. But now, twenty years later, they would make a great match.”

“Then why aren’t they getting married now?” said Mevlut, refusing to budge.

“That’s exactly what everyone else has been wondering…They’ve known each other for years now; he wrote the girl all those love letters…”

“I’ll tell you what really happened, and then you’ll know why they’re not getting married,” said Mevlut. “The man didn’t write all those letters to the woman you’re talking about but to her elder sister. He ran away with her, they got married, and they were happy.”

“Come on, Mevlut, do you have to be that way?”

“What way?”

“Our whole family and all of Duttepe, too, know by now that you meant those letters for Samiha, not Rayiha.”

“Pah!” said Mevlut, almost as if he meant to spit. “You’ve been spreading those lies for years trying to make trouble between me and Ferhat, and you made Rayiha unhappy. She believed you, the poor thing…”

“So what’s the truth, then?”

“The truth is…” For a moment, Mevlut was back in 1978, at Korkut’s wedding. “The truth is: I saw this girl at the wedding. I fell in love with her eyes. I wrote her letters for three years. Every time I wrote to her, I put her name right at the top of the letter.”

“Yes, you saw the girl with the beautiful eyes…But back then you didn’t even know her name,” said Süleyman, getting irritated. “So I gave you the wrong name.”

“But you’re my cousin, you’re my friend…Why would you do such a horrible thing to me?”

“I never thought of it as a horrible thing. When we were young, didn’t we play pranks on each other all the time?”

“So it was just a prank, then…”

“No,” said Süleyman. “I’ll be honest: I also believed that Rayiha was a better match for you, and that she would make you happier.”

“They won’t let anyone marry the third daughter until the second one’s settled,” said Mevlut. “You wanted Samiha yourself.”

“Fine, I tricked you,” said Süleyman. “I’m sorry. But it’s been twenty years now, and I’m trying to make amends, my dear Mevlut.”

“Why would I believe you, though?”

“Come on,” said Süleyman, sounding like a man wronged. “No joke this time, and definitely no lies.”

“But why would I trust you?”

“Why? Because when you wanted me to get you that girl, you tried to give me that piece of paper the neighborhood councilman issued for your house in Kültepe, the one that’s worth as much as a title deed, and I refused to take it. Remember?”

“I remember,” said Mevlut.

“Maybe you blame me…for what happened to Ferhat.” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word “dead.” “But you’re wrong…I was angry at Ferhat, very angry…But that was it. To wish someone the worst, to feel that in your heart, is one thing; but to actually kill him or have him killed is another.”

“Which is the bigger crime, do you think?” asked Mevlut. “On doomsday, will the Lord judge us for our intentions or for our actions?”

“Both,” said Süleyman, without really thinking about it. But when he saw the serious look on Mevlut’s face, he added: “I may have had bad thoughts, but in practice, I’ve never done anything bad in my life. There are many people who start off meaning well and end up doing evil. But I hope you can see that I’ve come to you tonight with the best of intentions. I’m happy with Melahat. I want you to be happy with Samiha. When you’re happy, you want other people to be happy, too. And there’s another side to it. You two are made for each other. Anyone looking at your situation with Samiha from outside would say, ‘Someone should really get those two together!’ Think about it, you know two people who would be happy forever. Not helping them get together would be a sin. I’m trying to do a good deed here.”

“I wrote those letters to Rayiha,” said Mevlut resolutely.

“Whatever you say,” said Süleyman.

14. ew Quarters, Old Faces

Is It the Same as This?

AFTER FEVZIYE’S WEDDING, Mr. Sadullah had begun picking Mevlut up in his Dodge once a week and taking him to one of those remote and fast-developing new neighborhoods of Istanbul, which they both wanted to explore. Once there, Mevlut would get his shoulder pole and jugs from the trunk, taking his boza around streets where he’d never sold anything before, while Mr. Sadullah wandered the neighborhood and idly smoked cigarettes in some coffeehouse until Mevlut had finished. Sometimes he would collect Mevlut at his house in Tarlabaşı or the clubhouse in Mecidiyeköy and take him over to his place in Kadırga so that they all might have dinner together and enjoy Fevziye’s cooking. (Mevlut had even started having the occasional glass of rakı now.) When the evening news drew to a close, Mevlut would venture with his boza out into old Istanbul, around Kadırga, Sultanahmet, Kumkapı, and Aksaray. Mr. Sadullah didn’t take Mevlut just to the neighborhoods beyond the old city walls but to the historic quarters, too — like Edirnekapı, Balat, Fatih, and Karagümrük — and on three of these occasions Mevlut dropped by the spiritual retreat in Çarşamba to distribute some free boza, though as soon as he realized that he wouldn’t have the chance to get any closer to the Holy Guide, he hurried back out to find Mr. Sadullah in the nearby coffeehouse, never telling him about the white-haired man and his school.

Mr. Sadullah was a seasoned rakı lover who had a full table of drink ing snacks laid for him at least two or three times a week; he had nothing against sacred old things or against religion, but if Mevlut were to tell him that he went to a religious retreat and regularly met with a holy man, Mr. Sadullah might suspect him of Islamist sympathies and start to feel uncomfortable — or, worse, afraid. Mevlut worried Mr. Sadullah’s feelings might also be hurt — just as he feared Ferhat’s could have been — to see that despite their blossoming friendship, and the growing ease with which they could discuss any topic imaginable, Mevlut still felt the need to commune with this old man to open up about his inner life and his spiritual misgivings.

Mevlut could see that his friendship with Mr. Sadullah was similar to his youthful bond with Ferhat. He liked telling Mr. Sadullah about the things that happened to him in the clubhouse, what he heard on the news, and what he was watching on TV. When Mr. Sadullah brought his friend home for dinner, and afterward shuttled him in the Dodge to faraway neighborhoods, Mevlut knew that he did it out of nothing but friendship, curiosity, and a wish to be helpful.

The neighborhoods beyond the old city walls had been described as being “outside the city” when Mevlut had first come to Istanbul, and now that thirty-three years had passed, they all looked alike: they were thick with tall, ugly apartment buildings six to eight stories high, with oversize windows, as well as crooked side streets, construction sites, billboards bigger than any you saw in the city center, coffeehouses full of men watching television, and metal dumpsters built like train carriages that kept hungry strays from the trash, until every corner of the city looked identical, with overhead pedestrian crossings bound by metal railings, barren squares and cemeteries, and main thoroughfares — uniformly the same all along the way — where no one ever bought any boza. Every neighborhood had its statue of Atatürk and a mosque overlooking its main square, and every main road had a branch of the Akbank and of the İş Bank, a couple of clothes shops, an Arçelik electric-appliance store, a shop where you could buy dried seeds to snack on, a Migros supermarket, a furniture store, a cake shop, a pharmacy, a newspaper kiosk, a restaurant, and a little arcade filled with an assortment of jewelers, glaziers, stationers, hosiers, lingerie stores, currency exchanges, and photocopiers, among others. Mevlut liked discovering the idiosyncrasies of each neighborhood through the eyes of Mr. Sadullah. “That area is packed with people from Sivas and Elazığ,” he’d say as they drove back home. “The ring road’s razed this sad little place to the ground, let’s not come here again,” he’d say. “Did you see how beautiful that grand old plane tree in the back alley was, and the teahouse across from it?” he’d say. “Some young men stopped me and demanded to know who I was, so let’s say one visit is enough,” he’d say. “There are so many cars here that there isn’t any room left for people,” he’d say. “It looks like this whole area is run by some religious sect, though I don’t know which one — did they buy any boza?” he’d say.

They never bought much. Even when they did, the people who lived in these new neighborhoods outside the city only ever called for Mevlut because they were amazed that there should be someone out there selling this stuff they’d only heard of in passing (if at all), because their children were curious, and because they thought there was no harm in having a taste. If he were to go back to the same street a week later, no one would ask for him again. But the city was growing so fast, spreading out and building wealth so determinedly, that even this much was enough for Mevlut, who had only himself to support now.

At Mevlut’s suggestion, Mr. Sadullah drove them to the Ghaazi Quarter one evening. Mevlut went to the house where Ferhat and Samiha had spent the first ten years of their married life and which he had visited once, eight years ago, with Rayiha and his daughters. The land Ferhat had marked out with phosphorescent stones was still free. After Ferhat’s death, all of this had become Samiha’s property. Everything was quiet. Mevlut didn’t yell, “Bo-zaa.” Nobody would buy boza around here.

They were in another outlying neighborhood one evening when someone on the lower floors of a very tall building (fourteen floors high!) called out to ask him upstairs. A husband and wife and their two bespectacled sons observed Mevlut as he poured out four glasses of boza in the kitchen. They watched the toasted chickpeas and cinnamon being sprinkled over the glasses. The two kids took a sip straightaway.

Mevlut was just about to leave when the lady extracted a plastic bottle from the fridge. “Is it the same as this?” she asked.

That was the moment when Mevlut first came across bottled boza sold by a big company. Six months ago, he’d heard from an old street vendor who’d decided to retire that a biscuit manufacturer had bought out an old boza maker on the verge of bankruptcy with plans to bottle the boza and distribute it through grocery stores, but Mevlut had found this all to be utterly implausible. “No one would buy boza from a grocery store,” he’d said, just as, thirty years before, his father had laughed and said, “No one would buy yogurt from a grocery,” only to find himself without a job soon after. Mevlut couldn’t contain his curiosity: “May I have a taste?”

The children’s mother poured a little bit of the whitish bottled boza into a glass. With the whole family staring at him, Mevlut had a sip and made a face. “It’s not good,” he said, smiling. “It’s sour already, it’s gone off. You shouldn’t buy this stuff.”

“But this was made in a factory, by machines,” said the older of the two boys with glasses. “Do you make your boza at home by hand?”

Mevlut didn’t answer. He was so upset he didn’t even want to talk about it with Mr. Sadullah on the way back.

“What’s wrong, maestro?” said Mr. Sadullah. His “maestro” was often ironic (Mevlut could tell), but sometimes Mr. Sadullah used the word out of genuine respect for Mevlut’s talent and persistence (at those times Mevlut would always pretend he didn’t know).

“Never mind, these people don’t know what they’re doing, and anyway I heard it’s going to rain tomorrow,” said Mevlut, changing the subject. Mr. Sadullah could talk endearingly and instructively even about meteorological matters. Mevlut liked to listen to him and daydream as he sat in the front seat of the Dodge, watching hundreds, thousands of lights shining out of cars and windows; the depths of the dark, velvety Istanbul night; and the neon-colored minarets going past. Mevlut used to toil on foot through mud and rain, up and down these very same streets, and now here they were slipping right through with ease. Life, too, slipped by in much the same way, speeding up as it ran along the tracks laid out by time and fortune.

Mevlut knew that the hours he spent at Mr. Sadullah’s house would be the happiest of his whole week. He didn’t want to bring the problems and complications of his other life into the house at Kadırga. After the wedding, he watched as the baby in Fevziye’s belly grew week by week, just as he had done with the babies Rayiha had carried. He was very surprised when it turned out to be a boy; an ultrasound scan had told them it would be, but Mevlut had remained convinced that his grandchild was to be a girl, even wondering whether it would be appropriate to name her Rayiha. Throughout the summer that followed the baby’s birth in May 2002, Mevlut spent many hours playing with little İbrahim (named for his paternal great-grandfather, the shoemaker), helping Fevziye change the diapers (he would look at his grandson’s tiny penis with pride every time) and prepare his baby food.

He wished he could see his daughter (she looked so much like Rayiha) happy all the time. It bothered Mevlut to hear them asking her to set the table for a night of drinking when she’d only just given birth and to see her serving them without complaint while also keeping an eye on the baby in the other room. But Rayiha had always been expected to do exactly the same and somehow managed. Fevziye had left her father’s home and moved into Mr. Sadullah’s only to do the same things she’d done before. But at least this was Mevlut’s home, too. Mr. Sadullah always said so.

They were alone one day, and as Fevziye stared pensively at the plum tree in the neighbor’s garden, Mevlut said, “These are good people…Are you happy, dear?”

An old clock was ticking on the wall. Fevziye only smiled, as if her father had made a statement, not asked a question.

At one point during his next visit to the house in Kadırga, Mevlut felt that same sense of intimate understanding again. He wanted to ask Fevziye more about her happiness when something completely different came out of his mouth.

“I am so, so lonely,” said Mevlut.

“Aunt Samiha is lonely, too,” said Fevziye.

Mevlut told his daughter about Süleyman’s visit and the long conversation they’d had. He’d never spoken with Fevziye about the letters (had they been meant for her mother or for her aunt?), but he was sure that Samiha had told both his girls the whole story anyway. (What must his daughters have thought to find out that their father had actually meant to court their aunt?) Mevlut was relieved when Fevziye didn’t linger too long on the details of how Süleyman had tricked him all those years ago. She had to keep going back to check on İbrahim in the other room, and it took Mevlut a long time to tell her the whole story.

“So what did you say to Süleyman in the end?” asked Fevziye.

“I told him I wrote those letters to your mother,” said Mevlut. “But I’ve been thinking about it, and I wonder if that could have upset your aunt Samiha?”

“No, Dad, my aunt would never be angry at you for telling the truth. She understands.”

“Well, anyway, if you see her,” said Mevlut, “tell her your father says sorry.”

“I’ll tell her…,” said Fevziye, with a look that suggested there was much more than an apology at stake.

Samiha had forgiven Fevziye for having eloped without confiding in her aunt first. Mevlut was aware that she came to Kadırga sometimes to see the baby. They didn’t talk about it again that day, or on Mevlut’s next visit three days later. Fevziye’s warm readiness to act as go-between had filled him with hope, and he didn’t want to push things too much and end up doing something wrong.

He was also happy at the migrants’ association. Mevlut always enjoyed meeting the yogurt sellers and other street vendors of his generation and also his former classmates when they came to the clubhouse. Even people from poorer villages Mevlut had rarely heard of (Nohut, Yören, Çiftekavaklar) half a dozen kilometers from Cennetpınar had started coming by, eager to put up bulletin boards for their villages, with Mevlut’s permission. (He would regularly have to consolidate all the coach schedules, circumcision and wedding announcements, and village photographs that got pinned up on these boards.) More people were asking to book the clubhouse for henna nights, little engagement parties (the clubhouse was too small for actual weddings), dumpling dinners, Koran readings, and fast breaking during Ramadan. Under the leadership of a few rich men from the village of Göçük, others began to get more involved in association activities and to pay their membership dues on time.

The richest of all were the legendary Concrete Brothers, Abdullah and Nurullah, from İmrenler. They didn’t show up at the clubhouse too often, but they donated plenty of money. Korkut said they’d managed to send their sons to school in America. They had put most of what they’d made as the exclusive suppliers of yogurt to Beyoğlu’s big restaurants and cafés into buying land, and now they were rumored to be sitting on mountains of money.

Among others who’d invested their yogurt money in land, there were two families from Çiftekavaklar who’d learned all about the construction business just by building their own homes, to which they gradually added floors, until soon they had made a fortune building houses for new migrants they knew from the village using land they’d fenced off in Duttepe, Kültepe, and all the other hill neighborhoods. People from other villages nearby came to Istanbul and started off as laborers on these construction projects, eventually becoming master bricklayers, licensed builders, doormen, and watchmen. Some of Mevlut’s classmates who’d dropped out of school to take early apprenticeships were now repairmen, mechanics, and blacksmiths. They weren’t exactly rich, but they were still better off than Mevlut. Their main priority was to get their children through a decent school.

More than half the people who’d populated Mevlut’s childhood years had moved to neighborhoods far from Duttepe and rarely came by the clubhouse, but if they could find someone to give them a ride, they did sometimes show up for football matches and picnics. (That kid his age Mevlut used to see roaming the streets with his junk dealer father and their horse cart was, it turned out, from the village of Höyük and had remained very poor; Mevlut still didn’t know his name.) Some had aged prematurely over the years, put on weight, got bloated and hunched over, lost their hair, and seen their physiognomies so transformed (the faces ever more pear shaped, with shrinking eyes, and noses and ears that seemed only to grow), that either Mevlut didn’t recognize them, or they felt obliged to come up to him and humbly introduce themselves. He knew that most of these people weren’t any richer than he was, but he could also sense that they were happier because their wives were still alive. If only he could get married again, he might even end up happier than they were.

On his next visit to Kadırga, Mevlut took one look at his daughter’s face and knew immediately that she had news for him. Fevziye had met her aunt. Samiha hadn’t known about Süleyman’s visit to Mevlut three weeks ago. So when Fevziye passed on her father’s apology, her aunt had no idea what she was talking about. As soon as she understood, she became annoyed at both Mevlut and Fevziye. Samiha would never have asked Süleyman for help; nor had this matter ever even crossed her mind before.

Mevlut saw the concern and anxiety on the face of his daughter the messenger. “We made a mistake,” he said, sighing.

“Yes,” she said.

They didn’t speak of it again for a long time. As he was trying to figure out what he should do next, Mevlut also began to admit to himself that “home” was another problem he had to deal with. As well as feeling lonely in the house in Tarlabaşı, he had begun to feel like a stranger in the neighborhood. He could see now that the same streets on which he’d lived for the last twenty-four years were inexorably turning into foreign territory, and he knew the future did not lie in Tarlabaşı.

Back in the 1980s, when Tarlabaşı Avenue was being built, Mevlut had heard the neighborhood — with its crooked, narrow streets, and its crumbling, hundred-year-old brick buildings — described as a place of historic significance and of potentially enormous value, but he’d never believed any of it. At the time, there had only been a handful of left-wing architects and students saying these things in protest against the construction of the new six-lane avenue. But politicians and contractors soon began to follow suit: Tarlabaşı was a precious jewel that had to be preserved. It was rumored hotels, shopping malls, and skyscrapers were to be built in the area.

Mevlut had never truly felt that this was the right neighborhood for him, but over the past few years life on these streets had changed so much that the feeling had only intensified. After his daughters’ weddings, he had been cut off from the neighborhood’s female universe. The old carpenters, blacksmiths, repairmen, and shopkeepers trained by the Armenians and the Greeks had all left, as had those hardworking families ready to do any job to survive, and now the Assyrians were also gone, replaced by drug dealers, immigrants moving into abandoned apartments, homeless people, gangsters, and pimps. Every time he went to some other part of the city and people asked him how he could still be living in Tarlabaşı, Mevlut would claim that “all those people are in the upper quarters, on the Beyoğlu side.” One night a well-dressed young man had stopped Mevlut and frantically asked him, “Do you have any sugar, uncle?” Everyone knew that “sugar” was code for “drugs.” By now, even in the dead of night, Mevlut needed no more than a quick glance to spot the pushers who sometimes came all the way down to his street to evade the police raids, and the dealers who hid their product under the hubcaps of parked cars so as not to be caught with it, just as he could always recognize the brawny, bewigged transvestites who worked in the brothels near Beyoğlu.

In Tarlabaşı and Beyoğlu, this kind of hugely profitable vice had always been in the hands of organized crime, but now there were upstart gangs from Mardin and Diyarbakır gunning each other down in the streets for control of the market. Mevlut suspected that Ferhat had been the victim of some such struggle. He had once seen Cezmi from Cizre, the most renowned of these gangsters and thugs, passing through the neighborhood in a kind of victory procession, surrounded by private henchmen and noisy, awestruck children.

All these new people who hung their underwear and shirts out to dry between each other’s buildings, turning the whole neighborhood into one big Laundromat, made Mevlut feel that he no longer belonged here. There never used to be so many street stalls in Tarlabaşı, and he didn’t like these new street vendors either. He also suspected that these gangsterish types — his so-called landlords (who changed every five or six years) — might suddenly pull out and leave the house to real-estate brokers, property speculators, developers eager to build hotels, or to some other gang, as had happened elsewhere over the past two years. Either that, or he would soon find himself unable to keep up with the constant rent increases. After having been largely ignored for so many years, the whole neighborhood had suddenly become a magnet for all the misery and destructive appetite that the city could muster. There was an Iranian family who had settled into a second-floor apartment two buildings down from his; they had rented the place as somewhere to stay while they waited for the consulate to give them the visas they needed to emigrate permanently to America. When everyone had panicked and run out into the streets on the night of the earthquake three years ago, Mevlut had been astonished to discover that there were almost twenty people living in the Iranians’ tiny apartment. By now, he was getting used to the idea of Tarlabaşı as just a temporary stop on so many longer journeys.

Where would he go from here? He gave this a lot of thought, by means of either logical consideration or more impressionistic daydreaming. If he were to rent a place in Mr. Sadullah’s neighborhood of Kadırga, he’d be closer to Fevziye and wouldn’t feel so alone all the time. Would Samiha want to live in a place like that? Anyway, it wasn’t as if anyone had asked him to come. Besides, the rents there were too high, and it was too far from his job at the clubhouse in Mecidiyeköy. He started to think about a place closer to work. The ideal solution was, of course, the house in Kültepe where he’d spent his childhood with his father. For the first time, he thought of asking Süleyman to help him evict the current tenant so he could move back in himself. Every now and then he pictured himself and Samiha living there.

It was around this time that something happened that so delighted Mevlut he felt encouraged to go looking for Samiha again.

Mevlut had never played much football as a child in the village, never having really enjoyed the game or been very good at it. When he kicked the ball, it rarely went where he intended it to go, and no one ever picked him for their team. During his early years in Istanbul, he’d never had the time, the will, or the spare shoes he would have needed in order to join those who played on the streets and in empty lots, and he would only watch the matches on TV because everyone else did. So when he went to watch the finals of the migrants’ association tournament — which Korkut thought crucial in uniting all the villages — it was only because he knew that everyone else would be there, too.

There were stands for spectators on opposite sides of the wire-fenced playing field. He couldn’t have felt more pleased if he’d just made it to a wedding all his friends were going to, but still he picked a corner where no one else was sitting from which to watch the game.

It was between the villages of Gümüşdere and Çiftekavaklar. Çiftekavaklar’s youthful team was taking it very seriously, and even though some of the players were wearing trousers, at least they’d all pulled on matching shirts. Most of the Gümüşdere team, on the other hand, were grown men in the same clothes they usually wore to be comfortable at home. Mevlut recognized a hunchbacked, potbellied retired yogurt seller from his father’s generation (every time he kicked the ball, half the crowd in the stands would laugh and clap) and his son, who seemed determined to show off his skills; Mevlut had seen them before when they’d crossed paths selling yogurt in Duttepe and at all the weddings they’d attended (Korkut’s, Süleyman’s, and those of many other friends and their children and grandchildren). Like Mevlut, thirty-five years ago the man’s son had also come to Istanbul to sell yogurt and further his studies (he’d managed to graduate from high school); now he had two small vans that he used to distribute olives and cheese to grocery stores, as well as two sons and two daughters to applaud their father from the stands and a wife with dyed blond hair under her headscarf who kept getting up in the middle of the match to give her husband a tissue with which to wipe the sweat off his brow (and also, as Mevlut saw once the match was over, a late-model Murat, which could fit all six of them).

It didn’t take Mevlut long to understand why these artificial-grass fields that lit up the night with their floodlights had mushroomed all over the city, appearing in every empty lot, car park, or unclaimed parcel of land: some of the cheer may have been a little forced, but there was no doubt that these neighborhood matchups were hugely entertaining. The crowd loved to pretend they were at an actual football match like the ones on TV. Just as on TV, whenever a player committed a foul, they would shout at the referee to “send him off!” or give the other team a penalty. The crowd would roar in approval and hug one another at every goal, while the team that had just scored engaged in prolonged celebratory theatrics, just as they had seen real teams doing. All through the game, the crowd chanted slogans and intoned the names of their favorites.

Mevlut, too, had been engrossed in the match when suddenly he was astonished to hear his own name being called: the whole crowd had seen him — their clubhouse manager and tea brewer — and started clapping and chanting, “Mevlut…Mevlut…Mevlut…” He stood up to acknowledge them with a few awkward gestures, giving a slight bow as he’d seen real footballers do on TV. “Yeaaah!” they screamed. Their cries of “Mevlut!” went on for a while. The applause had been deafening. He sat back down in shock, almost on the verge of tears.

15. Mevlut and Samiha

I Wrote the Letters to You

SEEING HOW POPULAR he was at the migrants’ association’s football match had put Mevlut in a cheerful and optimistic mood. The next time he went to see Fevziye, he pressed his daughter and showed her a new determination.

“I should go to Duttepe and talk to your aunt myself. I should apologize to her for having hurt her over Süleyman’s nonsense. But I can’t do that at my uncle’s house. Does this aunt Samiha of yours ever go out?”

Fevziye told him that her aunt Samiha sometimes went down to the shops in Duttepe around midday.

“Are we doing the right thing?” said Mevlut. “Should I really go and speak to her? Do you want me to?”

“Yes, go, it would be a good thing.”

“It wouldn’t be disrespectful to your mother’s memory, would it?”

“Dad, you won’t survive on your own,” said Fevziye.

Mevlut started going to Duttepe and performing his midday prayers at the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque. There were very few young people there, unless it was a Friday. The mosque would usually fill up with men of his father’s generation — retired street vendors, master builders, repairmen — well before the start of prayers, and afterward they would all stroll down together to the covered passage under the mosque, headed for the coffeehouse. Some of them had beards and walking sticks and wore green skullcaps. Mevlut knew deep down that the only reason he had started coming here to pray was for the chance of running into Samiha at the shops afterward, so his mind would focus on these old men’s whispers, the silence inside the mosque, and the threadbare state of its carpets, and he would end up unable to inject any sincerity into his prayer. What did it mean when a believer who trusted as much as Mevlut did to the power and grace of God, and felt such a strong need to take comfort in Him, couldn’t even pray sincerely in a mosque? If a person couldn’t be true to himself in the presence of God, despite a purity of heart and intentions, what should he do? He thought of asking these questions of the Holy Guide; he even fantasized about what answers he might receive.

“God knows who you truly are,” the Holy Guide would say while everyone listened. “Since you know that He knows, you wish to be the same, inside and out.”

After prayers, he would leave the mosque and loiter in the square where Duttepe’s first coffeehouses, junk shop, grocery store, and bus stop had popped up thirty years ago. The area was no different now from anywhere else in Istanbul. There was concrete everywhere, and billboards, banks, and kebab shops. By now, Mevlut had been to Duttepe three times already and still hadn’t managed to run into Samiha. He was beginning to worry about how to break it to Fevziye when one day he saw Samiha standing in front of the Vurals’ bakery.

He stopped and turned around, heading straight back into the passage under the mosque. He was wrong. This woman wasn’t for him.

Mevlut went to the coffeehouse at the end of the passage, where everyone was watching TV; he left just as quickly as he’d come. If he went upstairs, through the back door and across the mosque courtyard, he should be able to get to the clubhouse without Samiha’s seeing him.

A heavy sense of regret spread rapidly through his soul. Would he have to spend the rest of his life alone? In any case, he didn’t want to go back. He went up the stairs to head out.

When he stepped into the courtyard of the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque, he came face-to-face with Samiha. For a moment, they just looked at each other, standing two feet apart as they’d done at Korkut’s wedding. These were most definitely the same eyes Mevlut had seen back then, the same dark eyes for which he’d written those letters, the reason that he’d studied all those handbooks and dictionaries. He felt close to the idea of Samiha, but as a real human being, she seemed a stranger.

“Mevlut, how come you won’t even visit us when you’re here, or at least let us know you’re around?” said Samiha boldly.

“I’ll come next time,” said Mevlut. “But there’s something else. Come to the Villa Pudding Shop tomorrow at noon.”

“Why?”

“We shouldn’t talk here, in front of everyone…people will gossip. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

They bade each other an awkward farewell from a respectable distance, but both their faces betrayed their satisfaction at having been able to arrange a meeting. As long as Mevlut didn’t say anything he didn’t mean to, or do anything to embarrass himself, the meeting at the pudding shop should go well. Mevlut had seen many married couples chatting over a shared meal at the Villa. Everyone would think they were husband and wife, too. There was nothing to worry about.

Yet he couldn’t sleep that night. Samiha may have still been beautiful, even now at thirty-six, but Mevlut felt as if he didn’t know her at all. He’d had very little contact with her throughout his life — save for occasional house visits, the glances they’d shared in the mirror at Brothers-in-Law (where Mevlut had always stood with his back to her), and their meetings at weddings and religious holidays — and he knew that he would never be as close to anyone as he had been to Rayiha. He and Rayiha had lived in each other’s pockets for thirteen years. Even when they were separated during the day, they were still together. That kind of intimacy only came with the passionate love of youth. So what was the point of going to see Samiha tomorrow?

In the morning, he gave his cheeks a thorough shave. He wore his newest white shirt and his best jacket. He walked into the pudding shop at a quarter to twelve. The Villa was a large establishment in Şişli Square, just beyond the bus and minibus stops, along the same row of buildings as the mosque, the Şişli Municipal Hall, and the courthouse. As well as shredded-chicken blancmange, other desserts, breakfast, and fried eggs, they also served lentil soup, cheese-stuffed pastries, rice with tomatoes, and, most important, kebabs. The inhabitants of Kültepe, Duttepe, and the other hills nearby — men, women, and children — would come inside while they waited for the next minibus or ran their errands in Şişli and sit there chatting as they looked at the picture of Atatürk on the wall and their own reflections in the mirror. The lunchtime crowd hadn’t arrived yet, so Mevlut managed to find a table away from prying eyes and in a quiet corner, just as he had hoped. His seat gave him a perfect view of the traffic in the pudding shop — the waiters darting back and forth, the cashier’s quick-fire movements — and he began to be excited at the prospect of watching Samiha walk through the door.

All of a sudden, he saw her standing in front of him. He blushed and knocked down a plastic water bottle but managed to rescue the situation with only a few drops spilled. They both giggled and ordered some kebab over rice.

They had never sat and faced each other quite so formally. For the first time, Mevlut got to look right into Samiha’s dark eyes for as long as he wanted. Samiha took out a cigarette from her handbag, lit it with a lighter, and blew the smoke to Mevlut’s right. He could picture her smoking cigarettes and perhaps even drinking alone in her room, but it was something else altogether to do it in a restaurant and in the company of a man. He felt his head spin, and at the same time a thought flashed through his mind that could have poisoned their relationship: Rayiha would never have done that.

Mevlut talked about Süleyman’s visit and the words he’d asked Fevziye to pass on, and he apologized for the misunderstanding. Once again, Süleyman had stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and caused trouble with his nonsense…

“That’s not exactly right,” said Samiha. She spoke about Süleyman’s bad intentions and his stupidity; she went on for so long that she even touched upon Ferhat’s murder. Mevlut told Samiha that he sensed her hatred for Süleyman, but perhaps it was time to leave all that in the past.

That comment irritated Samiha even more. She worked through her kebab and rice and put her fork down every now and then to light up another cigarette. Mevlut had never imagined her to be so volatile and so unhappy. Then he realized that she would be happier if they framed their plans to be together as a way of getting back at Süleyman.

“Did you really not recognize me when you saw me at the end of your wedding to Rayiha, or were you pretending?” asked Samiha.

“I pretended not to recognize you so that Rayiha wouldn’t get upset,” said Mevlut, thinking back to the wedding twenty years ago. He couldn’t tell whether Samiha believed his lie or not. They were quiet for a time, eating their food and listening to the buzz of the pudding shop getting crowded.

Samiha asked, “Did you write the letters to me or to my sister?”

“I wrote the letters to you,” said Mevlut.

He thought he caught a glimmer of satisfaction on her face. They didn’t speak for a long while. Samiha was still tense, but Mevlut felt that they’d done enough for their first meeting and said everything they needed to say: he began to talk vaguely about aging, loneliness, and the importance of having someone in your life.

Samiha was listening closely, but suddenly she interrupted him. “You wrote the letters to me, but for years you told everyone, ‘I wrote them to Rayiha.’ They all pretended to believe you even though they knew you’d meant them for me. Now they’re going to pretend they believe you when you say you wrote them to me.”

“I did write them to you,” said Mevlut. “We saw each other at Korkut’s wedding. I wrote to you about your eyes for three years. Süleyman tricked me, and that’s why I wrote Rayiha’s name on the letters instead of yours. But then I was happy with Rayiha; you know that. Now we can be happy, too.”

“I don’t care what other people think…But I would like to hear you say one more time, like you mean it, that you wrote the letters to me,” said Samiha. “Otherwise I won’t marry you.”

“I wrote the letters to you, and I wrote them with love,” said Mevlut. Even as he pronounced these words, he thought of how difficult it was to tell the truth and be sincere at the same time.

16. Home

We Were Doing Things Properly

Samiha. The house was an old gecekondu home. Mevlut hadn’t done a thing to it since he’d lived there with his father as a child. He told me all about it at great length during our second meeting at the Villa Pudding Shop. Whenever he mentioned this house I had yet to see, he called it “home” in the same loving way his father had done.

It was during our second time at the Villa that we decided to get married and live in the house in Kültepe. It would have been difficult for me to get rid of the tenants in Çukurcuma, and besides, we needed the income. Suddenly everything seemed to be about the house. Mevlut would tell me something sweet every now and then, but you don’t need to know about all that. We both loved Rayiha very much. We were doing things properly and moving slowly.

As long as we didn’t have to pay any rent ourselves, the monthly rent from the two houses in Çukurcuma that I’d inherited from Ferhat would be more than enough to live on. Mevlut had an income, too. That was another thing we discussed, this time over a plate of rice with chicken. Mevlut was relaxed and direct, though occasionally timid. But I did not see that as a flaw; on the contrary, I appreciated it.

Fevziye was the first to find out that we’d met. Her husband and Mr. Sadullah found out before the Aktaş family did. Mr. Sadullah took me, Mevlut, and Fevziye with İbrahim on her lap on a drive along the Bosphorus. On our way back, people thought we were a taxi cruising for fares and kept hailing us from the pavement or trying to jump in our path. Every single time, Mevlut would cheerfully shout from the front: “Can’t you see the taxi’s full?”

Mevlut wanted to call Süleyman immediately and ask him to kick out his own tenant in Kültepe, but I wanted to be the one to inform Duttepe of the news, so I asked him to wait. Vediha took it very well; my darling sister hugged me tight and kissed my cheeks. But she also got me angry straight after that by saying how everyone had wanted this to happen. I would have preferred to marry Mevlut because everyone was against it, not because everyone wanted it.

Mevlut would have wanted to visit the Aktaş family and give Süleyman and Korkut the news himself. But I warned him that if he made that kind of visit seem more important than it was, and turned it into something ceremonial, Süleyman and Korkut might think we were asking their permission to marry, and that would upset me.

“So what,” said Mevlut to these concerns. “Let them think whatever they want. We’ll just mind our own business.”

—

Mevlut called Süleyman to tell him the news, but he’d already found out from Vediha anyway. The aging tenant from Rize who was living in Mevlut’s house refused to leave immediately. Süleyman spoke to a lawyer who told them that if they tried going through the courts, it could take years to evict a tenant without a lease living in a house with no title deed to show. So the Vurals’ eldest son sent one of his guys — one renowned for his ruthless thuggish ways — to speak with the tenant from Rize, and he was able to obtain the tenant’s written agreement to vacate the premises within three months. On hearing that the wedding would take place three months later than planned, Mevlut showed both impatience and relief. Everything was moving so fast. He worried that it might all end in embarrassment and sometimes imagined that anyone learning that he would marry Samiha could only say “poor Rayiha” and look down on Mevlut. Of course such gossips wouldn’t be satisfied merely condemning Mevlut; they were also bound to bring up that old story, nearly forgotten in the wake of Rayiha’s death: “The man wrote to the younger sister, but got married to the older one instead.”

When Samiha mentioned marriage straightaway, speaking to him in reasoned, decisive tones, Mevlut understood that they would not be going out to cafés, the cinema, or even for lunch at an appropriate restaurant before they married. It was only when he found himself feeling disappointed that he realized how, in some part of his mind, he had been harboring such fantasies. At the same time, all the negotiations over the wedding, the precautions they were obliged to take to avoid the notice of the gossips, and all his uncertainty over what gestures were expected of him, how much he should spend, and what lies he could get away with were so exhausting that Mevlut began to think that arranged marriages were truly a blessed convenience.

He only got to see Samiha once every two weeks when she came over to Mr. Sadullah’s house in the afternoon. They wouldn’t speak much. Despite Fevziye’s efforts to bring her father and her aunt closer, Mevlut could see that he would never get to become friends with Samiha until they were married.

In September 2002, the tenant vacated the house in Kültepe, and Mevlut rejoiced at the pretext this gave him to improve his friendship with Samiha. Samiha took the narrow, winding road from Duttepe to Kültepe, and from there, they went to see Mevlut’s childhood home together.

The one-room gecekondu house, which he had so lovingly described to her in their meeting at the Villa Pudding Shop, was virtually a ruin. It still had an earthen floor, just as it had had thirty years ago. The toilet beside the room was still but a hole in the ground. Through a small window in the toilet you could hear the roar of trucks along the ring road at night. There was an electric stove next to the old woodstove. Mevlut couldn’t locate the illegal wiring, but he knew from experience that in a neighborhood like Kültepe, no one would buy an electric stove unless they could steal the electricity needed for it. The wobbly table with the short leg where he’d sat and studied as a child scared of demons was still there, as was the wooden bedstead. Mevlut even found the pots in which he’d made soup thirty years ago, and the coffeepot they’d always used. Just like him and his father, the tenants hadn’t bought a single thing for the house in years.

Yet the world around the house had changed completely. Once half empty, the hill was now covered in three- and four-story concrete buildings. The dirt roads — some of which had been new in 1969—were now all covered in asphalt. Some former gecekondu homes had been converted into multistory office buildings for lawyers and accountants or architects’ studios. Every rooftop was now covered with satellite dishes and billboards, transforming the view Mevlut used to see whenever he lifted his head from his middle-school homework to look out the window, though the poplars and the minarets of Hadji Hamit’s mosque were exactly the same.

Mevlut used the last of his savings to pave the floor of his gecekondu house (he, too, had started using this term), refurbish the roof and toilet, and have the walls painted. Süleyman sent a van from his construction company a couple of times to help, but Mevlut never mentioned that to Samiha. He was desperate to get along with everyone and didn’t want anyone to disapprove of his wedding.

He thought it suspicious that his daughter in Izmir had kept quiet all summer and hadn’t even come to Istanbul once, but he kept trying to put it out of his mind. When they started discussing the wedding arrangements, however, Fevziye couldn’t hide the truth from her father anymore: Fatma was against her father’s marrying her aunt after her mother’s death. She wouldn’t be coming to Istanbul for the wedding. She didn’t even want to speak to her father and her aunt Samiha on the phone.

As the summer grew hotter, Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman arrived in Istanbul, and Mevlut went to see him in Duttepe, where he was lodged on the third floor, which had itself gone crooked in the earthquake. Mevlut wanted to ask his permission to marry Samiha and to kiss his hand, just as he had done when he’d gone to their village to ask him for Rayiha’s hand twenty years ago. Perhaps Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman and Samiha, father and daughter, might go to Izmir to persuade Fatma to come to the wedding…But Fatma refused even to consider receiving such a visit, and that made Mevlut feel like writing her off. After all, she had turned her back on the family.

Finally, though, Mevlut couldn’t sustain any resentment against his daughter, because some part of him agreed with her. He could see that Samiha felt guilty, too. After all she had done to make sure Fatma got to go to college, and after all the care she’d lavished on her niece when Fatma’s mother died, Samiha felt as wounded as Mevlut did. And yet, when Mevlut said, “Let’s have the wedding far away from everyone,” Samiha proposed the very opposite.

“Let’s do it near Duttepe, let them all come and see for themselves…Let them gossip their hearts out…,” said Samiha. “That way, they’ll get bored of talking about it sooner.”

Mevlut admired Samiha’s reasoning, and her brave decision to wear a white gown at the age of thirty-six. They decided to have the wedding at the clubhouse, as it was close to Duttepe and wouldn’t cost them anything. The association’s offices weren’t very big, so all the guests came in, had their lemonades (and the glasses of rakı Mevlut arranged to have served on the sly), and gave their gifts, without lingering for long in the hot, humid, and overcrowded clubhouse.

Samiha had used her own money to rent the white gown, which she’d found with Vediha in a shop in Şişli. All through the wedding, Mevlut kept thinking that she looked stunning: surely any man who came face-to-face with such a beauty would write her love letters for three years.

Süleyman knew by now that he made Samiha uncomfortable: neither he nor the rest of the Aktaş family made their presence felt much at the wedding. He was drunk by the time he decided to leave, and he pulled Mevlut aside.

“Don’t forget I arranged both your marriages, my friend,” he said. “But I can’t figure out whether it was a good thing to do.”

“It was a great thing to do,” said Mevlut.

After the wedding, the bride and groom, Fevziye and her husband, and Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman piled into Mr. Sadullah’s Dodge and went to a restaurant in Büyükdere that served alcohol. Neither Mevlut, nor Samiha, who loved being in her wedding gown, drank anything. When they got home, they got into bed and made love with all the lights off. Mevlut had always known that sex with Samiha was never going to be awkward or difficult. They were both happier than they could have ever imagined.

In the months to follow, Mevlut would look out the window of his gecekondu home and, as his wife slept, stare pensively at Hadji Hamit’s mosque and all the other hills covered in apartment blocks, trying not to think of Rayiha. In those early months of his marriage, there were occasional moments when he felt he’d already lived that same moment before. He wasn’t sure, though, whether the illusion was on account of having just married again after so many years, or whether it had something to do with being back in his childhood home.