A Strangeness in My Mind

The Form of a City

I Can Only Meditate When I’m Walking

THEY NOW ALL LIVED spread out across the twelve floors and sixty-eight apartments of a single building in Kültepe. Mevlut and Samiha’s first-floor apartment was the only one on the northern façade, the side without a view. Uncle Hasan and Aunt Safiye were on the ground floor; Korkut and Vediha on the ninth; while Süleyman and Melahat were on the top floor. They would run into one another sometimes, either at the entrance, where the chain-smoking doorman stood and told off the children playing football in the street, or in the elevator, where, after exchanging a few jokes and pleasantries, they would act as if it were completely normal for them to be living all together in a twelve-story building. In truth, though, they all felt uneasy with the situation.

While he was generally happy, Süleyman felt his situation to be the most abject of all. His real desire had been for an apartment with city views on an upper floor of the thirty-story skyscraper that Hadji Hamit Vural had lovingly built in Duttepe during the last years of his life — not one here in Block D. Ninety-year-old Hadji Hamit had been accommodating—“Of course, your brother and father should come and live in my tower, too!”—but after his sudden death two years ago (which drew the minister for Public Works and Housing to his funeral), Vural Holdings’ board of directors had decided there was no room for Korkut and Süleyman in the building. The brothers would spend the whole of 2010 analyzing what had gone wrong, finally arriving at two explanations: The first had to do with an end-of-year staff meeting where Korkut, bemoaning the company’s enormous outlay for bribes to government officials in exchange for construction permits, had imprudently asked, “Can we really not get them for less?” Hadji Hamit’s sons, it was suspected, had taken offense at his implication—“You’re not bribing any ministers, you’re just pocketing the money yourselves”—though Korkut had meant nothing of the kind. The second explanation put the whole matter down to Korkut’s hand in the failed coup attempt in Baku, an episode that had since been rehashed exhaustively, earning him the reputation of one who organized military coups. Such a reputation would have been appreciated by previous nationalist and conservative governments, but it wasn’t very popular with the current Islamist regime.

In fact, as they would later find out, the reason for the exclusion was their own father’s having told Vural Holdings, “I won’t sign away my land unless we all get to live under the same roof.” Convincing Uncle Hasan and Aunt Safiye to leave their forty-year-old four-story house for an apartment had been a challenge for Korkut and Süleyman, and they’d succeeded only by pointing out how extensively the earthquake had bent and twisted the upper floors of the old house.

On the morning of the Feast of the Sacrifice in 2012, Mevlut could find neither Süleyman nor Korkut nor their sons in the throng gathered to pray in the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque. Back when they’d lived on separate hills and in different neighborhoods, the cousins had always made sure to find one another so that after praying they could elbow their way through the crowd and over the carpets together to kiss Hadji Hamit Vural’s hand.

They all had mobile phones now, yet nobody had called Mevlut, and so even amid that ocean of men spilling out of the mosque courtyard and into the street and the square outside, he felt completely alone. He spotted some faces of Duttepe and Kültepe folk he recognized from his middle- and high-school years, as well as some of the shopkeepers and car owners who were his neighbors in Block D, but while he managed to catch their eye in greeting, the crowd was so pushy, rude, and impatient that he felt as if he’d come to pray in someone else’s neighborhood. Did any of the young men gathered here know that Hadji Hamit Vural — whom the preacher had mentioned but four or five names down from Atatürk himself as one of those men “whose tireless work had made this beautiful nation and given us the chance to live as we do”—had come to Rayiha and Mevlut’s wedding many years ago and presented the groom with a wristwatch?

When Mevlut came back from the mosque, Samiha wasn’t home. She must have gone upstairs to see Vediha, in number 9. Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman had come to Kültepe for the holidays and had been staying up there for the past week. There were plenty of spare rooms in that apartment (all on the side without a view), and so far Korkut and his father-in-law had managed to avoid each other, while Vediha and Samiha spent most of their days watching TV with their father. Süleyman must have put his family in the car early that morning and gone to pay his own father-in-law in Üskudar a holiday visit. That was what Mevlut had assumed when he hadn’t seen Süleyman’s Ford Mondeo.

Mevlut’s first-floor apartment looked out onto the twelve-story building’s parking area, which gave him plenty of insight into the lives of the building’s retired couples, raucous young strivers, married couples whose jobs he couldn’t figure out, the university-educated grandchildren of old yogurt sellers, and kids of all ages endlessly playing football among the parked cars. Süleyman’s sons, sixteen-year-old Hasan and fourteen-year-old Kâzım, were the rowdiest of them all. If the ball sailed out of the confines of the lot and down the hill, these lazy young things wouldn’t even run after it but rather cry out “Ball! Ball! Ball!” in the hope that someone coming up the hill might pick it up; this would infuriate Mevlut, who’d walked his whole life just to make a living.

Nevertheless, in the eight months he’d already spent in this apartment, Mevlut hadn’t once opened the window to scold the kids playing football for making too much noise. Six days a week, he would leave the house at ten thirty in the morning and go to the migrants’ association in Mecidiyeköy. He would sell boza most evenings from mid-October through mid-April in neighborhoods like Şişli, Nişantaşı, and Gümüşsuyu, working the city’s well-heeled old four- and five- story buildings. He had severed all ties with his former neighborhood of Tarlabaşı: it was now part of an urban redevelopment zone created to encourage the construction of new boutique hotels, big shopping malls, and tourist attractions; most of its century-old Greek homes had been vacated.

While his morning tea was brewing, Mevlut watched a sheep being sacrificed in the parking lot (though he couldn’t see Süleyman’s rams) and leafed through the Holy Guide’s posthumous book Conversations. He’d first found out about this volume — the back cover had a lovely photograph of the Holy Guide as a young man — six months ago from an edition of the Righteous Path he’d spotted in a grocer’s window, and thereafter he made sure not to miss a single one of the twenty coupons he would need to get it. Mevlut believed he was partly responsible for the chapter entitled “The Intentions of Our Heart and Our Words.” He opened the book to those pages sometimes and studied them intently.

In the past, once the holiday prayers were over, Mevlut, his father, his uncle, and his cousins would always walk back to Duttepe together, laughing and conversing along the way, and have the breakfast of stuffed pastries and tea Aunt Safiye would have prepared for the assembled family. Now that they all lived in separate apartments, there no longer was anyplace they could all casually gather as they had done in the room beside the kitchen in the old house. Aunt Safiye had tried to keep the spirit of those days alive by inviting the whole family over for lunch, but Süleyman was going to see Melahat’s family, and his kids — who, once their holiday pocket money was secured, usually tired of their grandparents — weren’t there either.

When Korkut failed to show up as well that holiday morning, Aunt Safiye launched into a long rant about the greedy contractors and politicians she believed to be at the root of all these evils and who had led her darling boys astray. “I must have told them a thousand times, ‘Wait until we’re dead before you knock the house down, and then you can build all the towers you want,’ but they wouldn’t listen. They kept saying, ‘This place will come down in the next earthquake, Ma, you’re going to be so comfortable in the new apartments with all the conveniences,’ so by the end I just gave up. You don’t want to feel like you’re clipping their wings. I never fell for any of it, though. ‘You’ll have trees and gardens in your backyard,’ they swore, ‘you’ll be able to stick your arm out the window and pick plums and mulberries right off the branches.’ Well, we’ve got no plums and no mulberries; no chicks or hens; no soil and no garden. We can’t live without our leaves and bugs and grass, my child. That’s why your uncle Hasan has fallen ill. We don’t even get cats and dogs here, with all the construction work. Even on holidays like today, the only people who knock on our door are kids asking for pocket money, and that’s it, no one else, not even for dinner. My beloved house on the other hill, my home for forty years, has been demolished, and in its place they’ve put that huge tower, and it’s all I can do not to cry when I look at it, my darling Mevlut. I made your chicken. Here, have some more potatoes, I know how much you like them.”

Samiha leaped at the chance to tell them all the stories she’d heard of people who’d become utterly miserable ever since moving into the tall ugly buildings that had replaced their old gecekondu homes. It was no doubt hugely satisfying to bad-mouth Korkut and Süleyman right to their mother’s face for the way they’d thrown themselves at the Vurals and their government-backed high-rise projects. She talked about all the families who’d left behind their gardens and the homes they’d built and lived in for forty years (just like the Aktaşes), all the difficulties they were obliged to endure after having agreed to move into the new high-rises, either for the money or because they’d been pushed into it — for lack of a valid title deed or on account of their neighborhood’s having been declared a seismic hazard zone. She talked about the housewives who got depressed and ended up in the hospital; the people left out on the street because the construction was running behind schedule; those who couldn’t pay off their debts to the contractor; those who’d drawn a less-than-appealing flat in the lottery and now regretted ever consenting to the deal in the first place; and all the folk who missed their trees and their gardens. She railed against the way the old liquor factory, football stadium, and municipal administration buildings (formerly horse stables) had all been heartlessly demolished and all the mulberry trees cut down. But she didn’t mention how she used to meet Ferhat in secret under those same mulberry trees thirty years ago.

“But, Samiha, poor people don’t want to live in dirty, freezing hovels anymore, with nothing but a stove to keep them warm; they all want somewhere clean, modern, and comfortable to call home!” said Vediha, defending her husband and Süleyman. Mevlut wasn’t surprised: the two sisters met up at least twice a day for idle chats in one apartment or the other, and Vediha often said how happy she was to be living in Block D. Now that she’d moved into a separate apartment with her husband, she was finally free of having to cook for the entire family every day and refill their cups of tea, no longer responsible for patching their clothes, mending their seams, and making sure they took their pills — no longer forced to be “everyone’s maid,” as she’d sometimes resentfully put it. (Mevlut’s theory was that being relieved of these chores was why Vediha had gained so much weight in recent years.) She did get lonely from time to time, with both her sons married now and Korkut still coming home late, but she had no complaints about living in the high-rise. When she wasn’t busy chewing the fat with Samiha, she went to Şişli to see her grandchildren. After much effort, extensive research, and several fruitless attempts, she’d managed to get Bozkurt married to the daughter of a plumber who’d come to Istanbul from Gümüşdere. This daughter-in-law, a middle-school graduate, was affable and charmingly loquacious, and whenever she had errands to run, she would leave the two daughters she’d borne in quick succession with their grandmother. Turan’s firstborn was a year old by then, and occasionally they would all get together at his house in Şişli. When Vediha went to Şişli to see her grandchildren, Samiha would join her, too, sometimes.

Mevlut came to feel aggrieved at Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman’s rapport with his two daughters. Was he jealous of their friendship and closeness? Or was it the way Samiha would laugh when she relayed to her husband some biting remark that Crooked Neck had let slip when he was drunk? (“It’s a huge mystery to me how not one, but two of my daughters could find no one they liked more than Mevlut in all of Istanbul,” he’d said one time.) Or was it that his eternal father-in-law, now in his eighties, had started drinking rakı at noon every day and was slowly getting Vediha into the same habit, having already corrupted Samiha?

Apart from the usual stuffed pastries, Aunt Safiye had also made french fries for her grandchildren, who hadn’t turned up, so Vediha was eating them all herself. Mevlut was almost certain that Abdurrahman Efendi had had his midday drink upstairs at number 9 a while ago before coming downstairs for lunch, and he was beginning to wonder whether Vediha might have had a few herself. When he left for the clubhouse to wish everyone a good holiday, he pictured Samiha having another drink with her father upstairs afterward. As he exchanged holiday greetings with his fellow Beyşehir migrants and shooed the kids who came knocking on the door asking for holiday money (“This is an office!”), Mevlut thought of Samiha at home sipping her rakı while she waited for him.

Ever since their second year of marriage, Mevlut and Samiha had been playing a little game. It was their way of facing the question that had informed their whole life: to whom did he write the letters? In their early days together they discussed the matter so thoroughly as to come to a sort of understanding: after their first meeting at the Villa Pudding Shop, Mevlut had conceded that he had written the letters to Samiha. His private and public views on the subject conformed easily enough. He had seen Samiha at Korkut’s wedding and been captivated by her eyes. But someone had tricked him, and he’d wound up marrying Rayiha instead, but he’d never regretted it, for he’d been immensely happy with Rayiha. Mevlut was never willing to spurn the joyful years he’d spent with his first wife or insult her memory, and Samiha understood his position.

What they couldn’t agree on, however, emerged whenever Samiha had a glass of rakı, opened one of his letters, and asked him what he’d meant when he’d likened her eyes to “bandits cutting across his path” or some such phrase. Samiha believed that this kind of question did not violate the spirit of their entente, since Mevlut had admittedly been referring to her and should therefore be able to explain his meaning. That much Mevlut accepted, but he refused all the same to enter into the frame of mind he’d been in back then.

Samiha would say, “You don’t have to get into that mood again, but at least tell me how you felt when you were writing those things to me.”

Mevlut would sip on his rakı and try to explain to his wife, as truthfully as he could, the way he’d felt as a twenty-three-year-old writing that letter, but after a point he would find himself unable to continue. One day, Samiha lost her patience with Mevlut’s reticence and said, “You can’t even bring yourself to tell me today how you used to feel back then.”

“That’s because I’m not the person I was when I wrote those letters,” Mevlut responded.

After a silence it quickly became clear that what had made Mevlut into a different person was not merely the passage of time and the streaks of gray in his hair, but also the love he’d felt for Rayiha. Samiha realized that she would not be able to force Mevlut into romantic declarations; and sensing his wife’s resignation Mevlut began to feel guilty about it. Such had been the beginnings of the game they still played today, these humorous exchanges that had now become a convivial ritual of sorts. At a propitious moment, either one of them — not just Samiha — would read out a few sentences from one of those faded, thirty-year-old letters, and Mevlut would explain why and how he’d written what he had.

The essence of the situation was that Mevlut would never get too sentimental when he offered these explanations, that he could talk about the young man who’d written those letters like some other person altogether. In this way, they were able to explore the subject to the satisfaction of Samiha’s pride — he had indeed been in love with her as a young man — without slighting the memory of Rayiha. He would read these excerpts from the letters in a spirit of good humor and of earnest inquiry, for they were, after all, mementos from his life’s most intense and exhilarating years, and they helped him discover new aspects of the past he shared with Samiha.

When he came back home from the clubhouse at dusk that day, he found Samiha sipping tea at the dinner table. She had one of Mevlut’s letters in front of her. He realized that she must have decided she’d had too much rakı and switched to tea instead, and that made him glad.

Why had Mevlut compared Samiha’s eyes to a daffodil in one of the letters he’d sent from the army base in Kars? This was around the time that Turgut Pasha had taken him under his wing; Mevlut confessed that he’d gotten some help and advice from a high-school literature teacher who was also doing his military service. Daffodils had tradi tionally been used to represent the eye in Ottoman literature: women used to cover up even more back then, and since men could only ever see their eyes, both court and folk literature fixated on them. Mevlut got carried away telling his wife all that he’d learned from the teacher, adding as well some intricate new thoughts of his own. When you were lured in by a pair of eyes and a face as beautiful as that, you stopped being you; in fact, you no longer even knew what you were doing. “I wasn’t myself back then,” Mevlut allowed.

“But none of that’s in the letter,” said Samiha.

Caught up in the glow of these youthful memories, Mevlut recalled the importance of that letter in particular. For a moment, he wasn’t just remembering the passionate young man who’d written love letters but also envisioning the beautiful girl he’d meant them for. When he’d been composing his missives, Samiha’s face had only ever appeared to him in vague outline. As he thought back to the past, though, he could see the figure of a young woman, almost a child, whose gentle features appeared to him now with exceptional clarity. This girl, whose image was enough to quicken Mevlut’s heart, wasn’t Samiha, but Rayiha.

He worried that his wife might realize he was thinking of her sister, so he improvised a few comments on the language of the heart and the role of INTENTIONS and accidents of fate — of KISMET — in our lives. When Samiha read about the “mysterious looks” and “captivating eyes,” Mevlut would sometimes remember how these words had inspired the patterns Rayiha had embroidered on the curtains she’d prepared for bridal trousseaus. Samiha knew about Mevlut’s conversations with the late Holy Guide, and sometimes she would argue that her first meeting with Mevlut had been a matter not just of fate but of intent, too. This was a story Samiha often told when they played their game of the letters. As twilight began to fall on that day of the Feast of the Sacrifice, Samiha developed a convincing new finale.

According to Samiha, the first time they had ever met was not during Korkut’s wedding in the summer of 1978 but a whole six years before, in the summer of 1972, after Mevlut had failed English in his last year of middle school (Mevlut had never told Samiha about Miss Nazlı) and been forced to take a makeup exam. That summer, Mevlut had walked from Cennetpınar to Gümüşdere and back every day in order to be tutored in English by the son of a man who’d emigrated to Germany with his family. As the two boys — Mevlut and the man’s son — sat reading English textbooks under the plane tree on those summer afternoons, Rayiha and Samiha watched them from afar: it was strange to see anyone reading in the village. Samiha had already discovered, back then, that her older sister was interested in Mevlut, the boy who read under the plane tree. Many years later, when she found out from Vediha that Mevlut had been writing love letters addressed to her sister, she did not tell Rayiha that they were really all about Samiha’s own eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell Rayiha the truth?” asked Mevlut guardedly.

Every time he heard Samiha say that she had known from the start how Mevlut had actually been writing his letters to her, it made him uncomfortable. The reason was that he believed Samiha might be telling the truth. If so, it would imply that even if Mevlut had put her name on the top instead of Rayiha’s, Samiha would still never have replied, because she hadn’t reciprocated his feelings at all. Especially in those moments when she sensed that her husband didn’t love her as much as he’d loved Rayiha, Samiha would recite this version, so painful for Mevlut to hear. It was as if to say: “You might love me less now, but back then, I was the one who loved you less.” They were quiet for a long time.

“Why didn’t I tell her?” said Samiha finally. “Only because I genuinely wanted my sister to marry you and be happy, as did everyone else.”

“Then you did the right thing,” said Mevlut. “Rayiha was happy with me.”

The conversation had taken a troubling turn, and husband and wife stopped talking, though neither of them left the table. From where they sat, they could see and hear cars coming in and out of the parking lot as darkness fell, and children playing football in the empty corner near the metal dumpsters.

“It’ll be better in Çukurcuma,” said Samiha.

“I hope so,” said Mevlut.

They had decided to leave Block D and Kültepe and move into one of the apartments in Çukurcuma that Samiha had inherited from Ferhat, but they hadn’t told anyone about it yet. For years, the rent they’d earned from those apartments had gone into paying off the flat in which they currently lived. As soon as those debts were cleared, and they had both become joint owners of the place, Samiha had expressed the wish to leave Block D. Mevlut knew that what bothered her wasn’t so much the feel and the dreariness of the apartment itself; her real motivation for moving was to get farther away from the Aktaş family.

Mevlut had worked out that it wouldn’t be too difficult going to live in Çukurcuma. Getting from Taksim to Mecidiyeköy was easy now thanks to the new subway system. He could also sell quite a lot of boza in Cihangir in the evenings. People who lived in the old buildings of those neighborhoods would still listen for and hail a boza seller walking past.

It was completely dark outside when Mevlut recognized the headlamps of Süleyman’s car entering the parking lot. Wordlessly, they sat and watched Melahat, the two sons, and Süleyman talking and then arguing as they got out of the car with their bags and walked into the building.

“Mevlut and Samiha aren’t home,” said Süleyman, looking at the darkened window as they entered.

“They’ll be back, don’t worry,” said Melahat.

Süleyman had invited the whole family upstairs for dinner. Samiha hadn’t wanted to go at first, but Mevlut had persuaded his wife to come: “We’re going to leave this place soon anyway, let’s not hurt anyone’s feelings.” He was taking more care with each passing day that his wife do nothing that might sour his relations with the Aktaş family, Fevziye, and Mr. Sadullah. The older he got, the more afraid he was of being alone in the city.

Mevlut had been in Istanbul for forty-three years. For the first thirty-five, every year that went by seemed to strengthen his bond with the city. Lately, however, he’d begun to feel increasingly alienated from it. Was it because of that unstoppable, swelling flood, the millions of new people coming to Istanbul and bringing new houses, skyscrapers, and shopping malls with them? He began to see buildings that had been under construction when he’d first arrived in 1969 already being demolished, and not just ramshackle houses in poor neighborhoods, but even proper buildings in Taksim and Şişli that had stood for over forty years. It was as if the people who lived in these old buildings had run out of the time they’d been allotted in the city. As those old people disappeared along with the buildings they’d made, new people moved into new buildings — taller, more terrifying, and more concrete than ever before. Whenever he looked at these new thirty- and forty-story towers, Mevlut felt that he had nothing to do with any of the new people who lived in them.

At the same time, he liked looking at them, the tall buildings that had mushroomed all over the city, not just on the outlying hills. When he saw a new tower for the first time, he didn’t automatically recoil in disgust, like his wealthy customers who sneered at anything modern, but he was filled with an appreciative fascination. What might the world look like from the top of such a tall building? That was another reason that Mevlut wanted to go to Süleyman’s dinner as soon as possible: so he could enjoy the magnificent view from that apartment for a little longer.

But owing to Samiha’s stubbornness, they arrived at the top floor later than everyone else. Mevlut got a seat facing not the view but only a glass-paned cabinet that a van had delivered to Melahat three months ago. The children had already eaten and left. Apart from Korkut and Vediha, and Süleyman and Melahat, the only other person at the table was Abdurrahman Efendi, who wasn’t saying a word. Aunt Safiye hadn’t come, blaming Uncle Hasan’s illness. Korkut and Süleyman had taken their father to a number of specialists trying to figure out what was wrong with him, and he kept having more tests. By now, Uncle Hasan was sick of doctors; he didn’t want to be examined or even to get out of bed or leave his room. He detested the twelve-story building he lived in; he’d never wanted it to be built in the first place, so when he did get to go outside, he didn’t want to go to any hospitals, only to his grocery store, which he thought and worried about constantly. Mevlut had worked out that the empty land behind the store, which still looked exactly as it had forty years ago, could be used to build an eight-story block with five apartments on each floor. (Uncle Hasan had fenced that land off himself forty-five years ago.)

They watched the news on TV (the president had come to the Sü leymaniye Mosque in Istanbul for the holiday prayers) and didn’t talk to one another at all while they ate. Uncle Hasan may have been downstairs, but still the rakı bottle hadn’t been put out on the dinner table. So Korkut and Süleyman went to the kitchen every now and then to top up their glasses.

Mevlut felt like some rakı, too. He wasn’t like those people who prayed more and drank more as they got older; he still didn’t drink too much. But the things Samiha had said earlier when they’d been sitting downstairs in the dark had broken his heart, and he knew that he’d feel better after a drink.

Ever thoughtful, Melahat followed him into the kitchen. “The rakı’s in the fridge,” she said. Samiha came in behind them, looking slightly embarrassed. “I’d like some, too…,” she said with a laugh.

“Don’t use that glass, here, take this, and would you like some more ice?” said Melahat, and as always, Mevlut found himself admiring her courtesy and solicitude. Right in the middle of the open fridge, Mevlut saw a green plastic bowl full of bright red hunks of meat.

“Süleyman, bless him, had two rams slaughtered,” said Melahat. “We’ve been distributing the meat to the poor, but there is still so much left. It won’t fit in our fridge. We’ve put a bowl into Vediha’s fridge and one in my mother-in-law’s, and still there’s another big one out on the balcony. Would you mind if we put it in your fridge for a while?”

Süleyman had bought the two rams three weeks ago and tied them up in a corner of the parking lot close to Mevlut’s window, and although initially he’d taken care of them and fed them hay, he’d soon forgotten all about them, just as Mevlut had. Sometimes a stray ball kicked by one of the children would hit one of the animals, and the brainless tethered rams would butt their heads and kick up a cloud of dust as the kids laughed. Once, before both animals had ended up in plastic washbasins to be distributed among the poor and the four refrigerators, Mevlut had gone to the parking lot and looked one of the rams straight in the eyes, remembering with sorrow the twenty thousand sheep at the bottom of the Bosphorus.

“Of course you can put it in our fridge,” said Samiha. The rakı had mellowed her, but Mevlut could tell from her face that she didn’t like this idea at all.

“Fresh meat smells awful,” said Melahat. “Süleyman was going to give it away at the office, but…do you have any idea who might need it in the neighborhood?”

Mevlut gave the matter some serious thought: over on the opposite end of Kültepe and on the other hills all around, a new class of strange people had moved into the old gecekondu homes left empty when the exciting prospect of new high-rises had caused their various owners to sue one another or the state over the stipulations in the paperwork issued by the neighborhood councilman. But the newest destitute multitudes mostly lived in the farthest reaches of Istanbul, farther out than the second ring road around the city, where even Mevlut had never set foot. These people came to the city center wheeling enormous sacks along and scavenging in bins. The city had grown so big and sprawling that it was impossible to drive to and from these neighborhoods in a day, let alone walk. What amazed Mevlut even more were the strange new buildings that had begun to rise from these quarters like phantoms, so tall that you could see them from the opposite shore of the Bosphorus. Mevlut loved to watch these buildings from afar.

At first, he didn’t get a chance to take in the view from the dining room as much as he would have liked, because he had to listen to the story Süleyman was telling: two months ago, the apartments in the block that had belonged to Mevlut’s sisters and mother had been sold, and his sisters’ respective husbands, both men in their sixties who’d rarely left the village, had come to Istanbul for the occasion and stayed for five days on the ground floor with Aunt Safiye, who was both their wives’ maternal aunt and their paternal uncle’s wife. Süleyman had taken them around the city in his Ford, and now he was full of stories mocking their fascination with Istanbul’s skyscrapers, bridges, historic mosques, and shopping malls. The highlight of these stories was how these elderly uncles — seeking, like everyone else, to avoid paying taxes — had taken their payment for the apartments in bagfuls of dollars, rather than going through the bank, and had never let those bags out of their sight for the duration of the trip. Süleyman got up from the dinner table and did an imitation of the two old men hunched over their heavy bags of cash as they boarded the bus that would take them home. He said, “Oh, Mevlut, what would we do without you?” and when everyone turned to him and smiled, Mevlut’s mood turned sour.

There was something in their smiles that suggested they found Mevlut as naïve and childish as the two elderly uncles. It wasn’t that they still thought he belonged in the village; what amused them was that he’d been honest enough to refuse the opportunity to forge some paperwork and end up owning all of those apartments himself. His sisters’ husbands were diligent (they’d even brought Mevlut the title deed for his share of the small village plot he’d inherited from his father); they would not let anyone cheat them too easily. Mevlut thought dejectedly that if only he had followed Uncle Hasan’s suggestion three years ago and redrawn the councilman’s document, he would have owned his apartment outright and could have stopped working in his fifties.

Mevlut remained pensive for a time. He tried to convince himself not to mind too much about how Samiha had hurt him: compared with everyone else’s fat, blowsy old wives, his was still beautiful, bright, and full of life. They were all going to go to Kadırga tomorrow to see his grandchildren, too. He had even reconciled with Fatma. His life was better than anyone else’s. He should be happy. He was, wasn’t he? When Melahat brought in the pistachio baklava, he suddenly rose to his feet. “I want to have a look at this view, too,” he said, turning his chair to face the other way.

“Well, if you can see anything beyond the tower,” said Korkut.

“Oh no, we put you in the wrong seat,” said Süleyman.

Mevlut picked his chair up and went to sit out on the balcony. He felt dizzy for a moment, both from the height and the sheer expanse of the landscape before him. The tower Korkut had mentioned was the thirty-story one Hadji Hamit Vural had built during the last five years of his life, working on it day and night as he had done on the Duttepe Mosque and sparing no expense to make it as tall as he possibly could. Sadly, it was never to become one of Istanbul’s tallest buildings, as he would have wished. But like most of the city’s skyscrapers, it said TOWER in English on the front in enormous letters, despite having no British or American residents to show for it.

This was the third time Mevlut had gone out on this balcony to take in the view. On his previous two visits, he hadn’t noticed just how much HADJI HAMIT VURAL TOWER I blocked Süleyman’s view. Vural Holdings had made sure to sell all the apartments in Kültepe’s new twelve-story buildings first and only then to build Hadji Hamit’s tower in Duttepe, which ruined the Kültepe apartments’ views.

Mevlut realized that he was looking at the city from the same angle now as he had that time his father had taken him up the hill when he’d first arrived in Kültepe. From this spot forty years ago you would have seen factories everywhere and all the other hills fast filling up with poor neighborhoods, starting from the bottom and working their way to the top. All that Mevlut could see now was an ocean of apartment blocks of varying heights. The surrounding hills, once clearly marked out by their own transmission towers, had now been submerged, lost beneath thousands of buildings, just as the old creeks that used to run through the city had been forgotten, along with their names, as soon as they’d been asphalted over and covered in roads. Mevlut couldn’t summon more than a vague sense of each hill—“That must be Oktepe over there, and those, I guess, are the minarets of the mosque in Harmantepe”—and even that only with much thought and close attention.

What faced him now was a vast wall of windows. The city — powerful, untamed, frighteningly real — still felt unbreachable, even to him. The hundreds of thousands of windows lined up along this wall were like so many eyes watching him. They started out dark in the morning and changed color throughout the day; at night, they shone with a glow that seemed to turn the night overhanging the city into a sort of daytime. As a child, he had always liked looking at the city lights from afar. There was something magical about them. But he had never seen Istanbul from so far up. It was dreadful and dazzling at once. Istanbul could still make him flinch, but even now at fifty-five years of age, he still felt the urge to leap right into this forest of staring buildings.

If you looked long enough at the landscape of the city, however, you would soon start to notice movement at the foot of each building, the signs of activity across the various hills. The pharmaceutical and light bulb factories and other industrial works that had existed forty years ago had been razed, replaced by this assortment of frightening towers. Beyond the concrete curtain formed by all the tall new buildings, you could still make out traces of old Istanbul, just as you would have when Mevlut first came to this spot. Here and there, high gleaming towers had already cropped up, even in those neighborhoods. But what really struck him was the sea of skyscrapers and tall buildings rising even farther beyond those limits. Some were so far away that Mevlut couldn’t be sure whether they were on the Asian side of the city or on this one.

Each of these buildings shone as brightly as the Süleymaniye Mosque, and at night, their radiance formed a halo over the city, honey gold or mustard yellow. On nights when the clouds gathered low, they would reflect the city’s lemon-colored light, like strange lamps illuminating it from overhead. Amid this tangle of lights, it was difficult to distinguish the Bosphorus unless some ship’s spotlights, like the navigation lights of faraway planes, briefly flickered in the distance. Mevlut sensed that the light and darkness inside his mind looked like the nighttime landscape of the city. Maybe this was why he’d been going out into the streets to sell boza in the evening for the past forty years, no matter how little he earned from it.

So this is how Mevlut came to understand the truth that a part of him had known all along: walking around the city at night made him feel as if he were wandering around inside his own head. That was why whenever he spoke to the walls, advertisements, shadows, and strange and mysterious shapes he couldn’t see in the night, he always felt as if he were talking to himself.

“What is it, what are you staring at?” said Süleyman, coming out onto the balcony. “Are you looking for something?”

“I’m just looking.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? But I hear you’re going to leave us and go to Çukurcuma.”

When he went back inside, he saw that Samiha had taken her father by the arm and was walking him toward the door. Over the past few years, senility had crept up his crooked neck, and he didn’t talk much anymore, instead sitting quietly with his daughters like a well-behaved child as soon as he’d had a couple of drinks. Mevlut was surprised he was still able to take the bus from the village and come to Istanbul on his own.

“My father isn’t feeling too well, we should go now,” said Samiha.

“I’m coming,” said Mevlut.

His wife and father-in-law had already walked out.

“So, Mevlut, I hear you’re abandoning us,” said Korkut.

“Everyone wants boza on a cold holiday evening,” said Mevlut.

“I don’t mean tonight. I mean that you’re going to leave this place and move to Çukurcuma.” When Mevlut didn’t respond, Korkut said, “You don’t really have it in you to go away and leave us.”

“Oh, I do,” said Mevlut.

In the elevator, with music playing constantly in the background, his father-in-law’s weary, quiet demeanor saddened Mevlut, but mostly he was upset with Samiha. Downstairs in their apartment, he picked up his boza gear without saying a word to her and headed out into the streets full of joy and fervor.

Half an hour later, he’d reached the backstreets of Feriköy, feeling optimistic that the streets were going to tell him wonderful things that night. Samiha had broken his heart by reminding him that there had been a time when she hadn’t loved him. In moments like this, when he felt distressed, and all of his life’s failures and inadequacies seemed to surge inside him like a wave of regret, Mevlut’s mind would automatically turn to Rayiha.

“Boo-zaa,” he cried toward the empty streets.

Whenever he dreamed of her lately, the problem he had to solve was always the same: Rayiha was waiting for him in a palatial old wooden mansion, but no matter how many turns he took and how many doors he opened, he couldn’t seem to find the door to the house where she was staying, and he just kept going around in circles. He would realize that the street he had just passed had changed again, and if he wanted to find the door he was looking for, he would have to walk along the new street, too, and so he would resume his long, measureless journey. On some nights, when he found himself selling boza in some far-off street, he couldn’t quite make out whether this was a scene from that dream or whether he was in fact on that street at that moment.

“Boo-zaa.”

As a child and a teenager, Mevlut had already understood that the cryptic things he noticed while walking on the street were figments of his own mind. Back then, he had knowingly dreamed all these things up himself. But in later years, he began to feel that there was another power placing these thoughts and dreams inside his mind. In the past few years, Mevlut had stopped seeing any difference at all between his fantasies and the things he saw on the street at night: it seemed as if they were all cut from the same cloth. It was a pleasant sensation, intensified by the glass of rakı he’d just had over at Süleyman’s.

The idea that Rayiha was waiting for him in a wooden mansion somewhere along these streets could be a figment of his imagination, but equally it could be true. The eye that had been watching him from above even as he walked along Istanbul’s farthest streets for the past forty years might actually be there, or it might simply have been a momentary fantasy that Mevlut had ended up believing forever. It might just be his imagination that the distant skyscrapers he’d seen from Süleyman’s balcony looked like the gravestones in the picture from the Righteous Path—just as he had been given to feel that time had started running faster ever since a man and his son had robbed him of his wristwatch eighteen years ago…

Mevlut knew that every time he called out “Boo-zaa,” his emotions really did spread to the people inside the homes he passed, but at the same time he also realized that this was no more than a charming fantasy. It could be true that there was another realm hidden within this one and that he might be able to walk and ponder his way into it if he allowed his secret other self to emerge. For the moment, he refused to choose between the two realms. His public views were correct, and so were his private ones; the intentions of the heart and the intentions of words were equally important…This meant that all the words that had leaped out at him from advertisements, posters, newspapers displayed in grocery stores, and messages painted on walls may have been telling Mevlut the truth all along. The city had been sending him these symbols and signs for forty years. He felt the urge to respond to the things it had been telling him, just as he used to do as a child. It was his turn to talk now. What would he like to say to the city?

Mevlut couldn’t quite work this out yet, though he had already decided to announce it like a political slogan. Perhaps this message — which he intended to write on the city walls as he had done in his youth — should relate not to his public views but to his private world. Or maybe it should be something that was faithful to both: the most essential truth of all.

“Boo-zaa…”

“Boza seller, boza seller, wait…”

A window opened, and Mevlut smiled in surprise: a basket from the old days was descending rapidly before him.

“Boza seller, do you know how to use the basket?”

“Of course.”

Mevlut poured some boza into the glass bowl inside the basket, took his money, and was soon eagerly back on his way, still trying to figure out what thought he should share with the city.

In recent years, he had been fearful of old age, death, and being forgotten. He’d never hurt anyone on purpose, and he had always tried to be a good person; provided he didn’t succumb to a moment of weakness between now and the day he died, he believed he should make it to heaven. Recently, though, a fear that he may have wasted his life — which he’d never felt in his youth — had begun to gnaw at his soul, despite all the years he still had ahead of him with Samiha. He wasn’t sure what he could say to the city on this matter.

He walked all along the wall around the cemetery in Feriköy. In the past, the strangeness in his mind would have pushed him to go inside, even though he used to be so afraid of dead people and graveyards. Nowadays he was less scared of cemeteries and skeletons, but he was still reluctant to walk into one of these historic graveyards because they brought to mind his own death. But a childish impulse made him look over a slightly lower section of the wall and into the cemetery, where he saw a rustling that alarmed him.

A black dog, followed shortly by another, was heading deeper into the cemetery. Mevlut turned around and started walking briskly in the opposite direction. There was nothing to fear. It was a holiday, and the streets were full of well-dressed people of goodwill, smiling at him as he walked by. A man around his own age opened a window and called out to him and then came down with an empty pitcher into which Mevlut poured two kilos of boza, which cheered him up, and made him forget all about the dogs.

But ten minutes later, two streets down, the dogs cornered Mevlut. By the time he noticed them, he realized that two others from the pack were behind him, and that he wouldn’t be able to back off and slip away. His heart sped up, and he could not remember the prayers his father’s holy man had taught him, or the advice the Holy Guide had given him.

When Mevlut tiptoed past them, however, the dogs didn’t bare their teeth or growl at him, nor was their demeanor threatening in any way. None of them came to sniff at him. Most ignored him, in fact. Mevlut was profoundly relieved; he knew this was a good omen. He felt the need for a friend he could talk to. The dogs loved him now.

Three streets, one neighborhood, and many eager, hopeful, and kindhearted customers later, Mevlut was amazed to find that he was almost out of boza, when a third-floor window opened and a man called out, “Boza seller, come on up.”

Two minutes later, Mevlut was at their door with his boza jugs, on the third floor of this old building with no elevator. They showed him inside. There was that dense humidity that formed when people kept their windows mostly shut and their stoves and radiators turned low, and he detected a heavy dose of rakı fumes, too. Yet this was not a table of querulous drunks but a group of family and friends delighting in the festivities. He saw loving aunts, dignified fathers, gregarious mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, and an indefinite number of children. As their parents sat at the table and talked, the children kept running around, hiding underneath and shouting at one another. These people’s happiness pleased Mevlut. Human beings were made to be happy, honest, and open. He saw all this warmth in the orange light from the living room. He poured out five kilos of his best boza as a number of children observed him with interest. A gracious woman, around his own age, came into the kitchen from the living room. She was wearing lipstick and was without a headscarf, and her dark eyes were huge.

“Boza seller, how good that you came upstairs,” she said. “It was good to hear your voice from the street. I felt it right inside my heart. It’s a wonderful thing that you’re still selling boza. I’m glad you’re not just saying, ‘Who’d buy it anyway?’ and giving up.”

Mevlut was at the door. He slowed down on his way out. “I would never say that,” he said. “I sell boza because it’s what I want to do.”

“Don’t ever give up, boza seller. Don’t ever think there’s no point trying among all these towers and all this concrete.”

“I will sell boza until the day the world ends,” said Mevlut.

The woman gave him a lot more money than what he usually charged for five kilos. She gestured as if to say that she didn’t want any change, that this was a gift for the Feast of the Sacrifice. Mevlut slipped quietly through the door, went downstairs, and stopped in front of the main entrance to throw his stick across his shoulders and pick up his jugs.

“Boo-zaa,” he cried when he was back out on the street. As he walked toward the Golden Horn, down a road that felt as if it were descending into oblivion, he remembered the view he’d seen from Süleyman’s apartment. Now he knew what it was that he wanted to tell Istanbul and write on its walls. It was both his public and his private view; it was what his heart intended as much as what his words had always meant to say. He said it to himself:

“I have loved Rayiha more than anything in this world.”

2008–2014