Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

Since coming to Istanbul, Ali had often heard how dangerous Tarlabaşı was for a young woman—or, indeed, anyone: “All those Roma and Kurds and transvestites—there are bad people around, you know.”

  “Yes, I know, there are bad people around. But not in Tarlabaşı.”

  “Sleep here, kuşum. I’ll fetch you a blanket.”

  And on the whole Ali stayed; even the red spots on her wrists and under her chin couldn’t stop her.

  Some people looked for old Istanbul in the mosques or on the steamers that plied the water between Europe and Asia; they bought themselves plastic souvenirs at the bazaars to take home to San Francisco or Moscow or Riyadh and display in their glass-fronted cabinets alongside their chunks of the Berlin Wall. Ali found her Istanbul on Uncle Cemal’s rust-brown sofa whose upholstery was ridden with bed bugs that began to suck her blood at about four in the morning and went on until about five. She woke at eight with itchy red spots spreading over her lower arms and face, and when she asked Cemal, he blamed the water. “Those old pipes—I must do something about them. The water runs brown, I know.” There were no bed bugs in his flat—impossible.

  She sprayed her entire flat in Aynalı Çeșme with some noxious substance from the pharmacist’s, then sat on her balcony and smoked, hoping she wouldn’t finish the Veteranyi book she was reading until all the bugs were dead. When she was sure not a single one had survived the attack and she wouldn’t be getting any more red spots, she went back to Uncle Cemal’s, slept on his sofa again and returned to Aynalı Çeşme with a new load of little creatures in her hair and clothes.

  * * *

  —

  Today Ali didn’t care about anything. She buried herself in the sofa cushions, trying to dig herself as deep as she could, urging the bed bugs to suck every last drop of blood out of her body until there was nothing left of her. She wanted them to eat her up and carry her all over town, little bit by little bit. That way she could stay here on the sofa, not having to do anything or go anywhere, and eventually disappear between the cushions like a crumbly cookie. Ali’s eyes were wide open and so dry that they ached. Now and then she blinked to flush away the film of dust, but it was no good; the dust came back—falling from the ceiling, seeping out of the air-conditioning, swirling out of her mouth in little puffs of cloud.

  Anton wasn’t going to get in touch. He probably wasn’t even in the city. People were predicting imminent disaster in Turkey. Yılmaz Güney was long dead—and Uncle Cemal pranced about his desk and told her the story he always told her, the one about the public prosecutor who’d insulted Yılmaz Güney’s wife and been shot in the eye for it by Güney. He, Cemal, had been there when it happened. No, he hadn’t, but he’d represented Güney in court, back in the days when he was a famous lawyer. He’d represented Öcalan too—no, he’d hoped he would, but it hadn’t come to anything and now Öcalan had gone quiet—not a word for six months, although he’d been such a vociferous prophet of the resistance. Maybe he’d died in prison, and then you could expect civil war here at any moment—well, really it had already begun, but it would come to the cities, and then it would spread all over the world, but Cemal wasn’t going to give up, not even if the whole world was at war. All this he told Ali, or rather himself, as he dusted furiously; it seemed to be about more than a bit of grime. Ali hardly listened, watching him move frenziedly about the flat like a child’s top, spinning on the tiles and knocking against the table legs. Cemal’s womanly body made her laugh. If he hadn’t been going so fast, she’d have liked to put her arms around him, but she couldn’t, so she let him talk. He talked endlessly about himself—ever-changing versions of his biography.

  He’d been born seventy or seventy-two years ago in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu, an area that was built on sand and would slip down between the tectonic plates at the next earthquake—his ninety-year-old mother still lived there. Cemal had been the second-youngest of eight brothers and sisters; they’d all lived in one room under a corrugated iron roof, all slept side by side on the floor, all washed in the same bathwater. He’d had second go in the water, then the next oldest child and so on—their father had washed last of all, in a gray-brown soup. Cemal never saw where his mother washed.

  Cemal was the first in the family to study, the first to come home in a suit and be teased about it by his brothers and sisters. He represented important people in court and was often locked up himself, though it wasn’t clear when or under what circumstances; the stories varied. But they all ended the same way, with Cemal turning up at his mother’s after eight months in prison, finding her at the kitchen table in a veil (a woman who’d gone fifty years without a head scarf) and getting into such an argument with her about his life that he never went to visit her again. She didn’t meet either his first or his second wife—sometimes there was even mention of a third. Whether two or three, the end was always the same: they loved him, but he had to work.

  Sometimes Cemal would begin to speak about his father, but he never got farther than opening his broad cracked lips, taking a dry breath, running his tongue over the insides of his cheeks and moistening the corners of his mouth. That was as much as he could manage, and Ali didn’t probe.

  In recent years it had become increasingly rare for Cemal to leave the flat that was also his office and hammam and goodness knows what else. Why should he? Little Orhan from the shop downstairs brought him milk and cigarettes and meat, and the ivy at his window kept out the sun. Safe at home, Cemel could continue to believe in things; he didn’t have to know that his office was now surrounded by cafés hung with English-only signs and advertising free Wi-Fi—or that even Oğuz the greengrocer had moved away, his friend of forty-two years’ standing, who used to sell peaches as big as boxing gloves in the narrow doorway between Cemal’s and the butcher’s shop. Cemal didn’t know why Oğuz hadn’t been in touch for so long; he didn’t know that he now stood on Taksim Square selling brightly colored bird whistles to tourists. Nor did Cemal know that the Zurich Hotel had opened in the building next door and that the street was thronged with tourists buying samovars at Madame Coco’s on the corner—or that the shop downstairs where little Orhan helped his aged father wasn’t doing too well and would probably be the next to go, leaving another shop front that would soon be plastered with Wi-Fi symbols. Why would Cemal bother going out into that world as long as he had his old sofa and black-and-white floor tiles and turquoise-tiled walls?

  Cemal needed things he could believe in. He believed in the People’s Democratic Party, in Marx, and in young women who came laughing and crying to his flat once a month to ask for money. He believed in love and he believed that Ali would find Anton in a city of almost fifteen million inhabitants, without a sign from him, without even knowing whether he’d actually ever been there—because, of course, the fact that the postcard had been posted in Istanbul didn’t mean a thing.

  Cemal had been to police stations with Ali to hang up missing-persons posters of Anton. On one such occasion he’d run into an old friend he used to look out for in the schoolyard when this man was a little boy a few classes below him and a few heads shorter. During the hours of kissing and hugging and tea-drinking that followed this encounter, Cemal had kept pointing at Ali with the flat of his hand: “Like her, he looks like her!” His schoolmate looked her up and down—looked at the short brown curls she never combed, their matted ends sticking up in a kind of triangle, at the thin, bluish skin shimmering under her round eyes, at her dangling arms. He hugged Cemal again, kissed him on both cheeks and said it was hopeless, unless Fate or God decided it was to be. Then the two of them sighed and lit cigarettes. Ali lit up too without knowing what they were talking about, and Cemal tried to tell her that somehow or other it would all come right in the end.

  It was because of all that Cemal believed in—and because he’d picked her up from the floor of Atatürk Airport like a small child—that Ali knew she’d never leave him. The thought formed in her mind as Cemal stumble
d nervously and clumsily about the room, as if trying to impose order on the three pieces of furniture it contained.

  Ali thought Cemal was jittery because his rakı supplies were low, or because of the disaster that was about to strike Turkey and was very much on his mind. “Something’s about to happen in this country,” he’d say. “Nothing good.” But then you could always say that. Next he’d change his tune, claiming that however bad people might be, it was always worth talking to them; they were bound to disappoint you, but wasn’t that all the more reason to fight for them? Cemal was forever contradicting himself in his paeans to a better world—a world that would one day come, even if everything was going down the toilet just now. Cemal believed that people came back to you because they loved you.

  Recently a woman of Ali’s age had started leading him a dance. He insisted that she was serious about him—it was just that right now she needed money, time, rest, a change of scene, a change of pace. “She’s only young, you know.” Nothing Ali said could convince Cemal that though this young woman’s treatment of him went by many different names, love wasn’t one of them; Ali couldn’t shake his belief in something she didn’t even have words for. It was a mystery to her how Cemal could believe in any of it, but she was touched to see the old man blossom in his heartache, touched to catch him squinting surreptitiously at the green phone on his desk (an old one with a cord because Cemal was fond of all things old-fashioned; he thought it made an elderly balding man attractive), touched to see his heart race when the phone rang, and break when it wasn’t her, his girl, the reason he couldn’t sleep at night. It never was. But he was happy waiting all the same. It made him jittery. A good reason to be jittery, thought Ali—maybe the best.

  In the photograph that Cemal showed Ali almost every evening until she asked him to stop, the redheaded floozy hanging from Cemal’s shoulder had almost no nose, only a thin line with small dark nostrils and freckles all over, as if a strawberry had exploded in front of her face. Her crooked mouth smiled into the camera, shapeless and endless. Cemal, his hand around her waist, his chest swollen, looked grave. The woman’s red hair, static in the heat, stuck out every which way, most of it in Cemal’s face. Ali could understand that Cemal longed to plunge into that hair and said so—at which he changed the subject and talked about the elections in this country on the brink of civil war, and then about the lack of rakı in the house.

  * * *

  —

  Today he was jittery in a different way. Maybe it was the delayed time change, thought Ali, the suspension of time between the elections, which meant that you could rely on neither the moon nor the planets to tell you if it was night or day. For now, it was the president who decided what time it was. Maybe Cemal sensed that time was out of joint and that no amount of chewing tobacco could protect him. Maybe he sensed that nothing would ever come right again—not with Turkey and not with the redhead either. Cemal spat as if a gnat had flown into his mouth. Then the brief knowledge that he was beaten flashed across his face and spread like a blush—and when it had gone, he began to talk in a loud voice, pushing his chair back and forth from one wall to the other and grumbling at Ali:

  “You’re scared, kuşum. Scared to believe in goodness. Where will that leave you? How are you going to live?”

  “Good question.”

  Although the thirty-year-old slut was probably spending a dirty weekend with another man in Antalya and the elections were going to turn out exactly as everyone feared, Cemal was quivering with fighting spirit.

  “After the attack in Ankara, we’ll all be stronger—”

  That attack in Ankara. Ali saw the images of explosions repeating themselves; she saw the Breaking News ticker on the screen of her laptop, her phone flashing. She saw herself ringing her friends, talking to her mother who’d called to tell her to come home immediately. “Are you counting on staying there? What are your plans?” Her mother had tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “I’m in Istanbul, Mum, not Ankara,” Ali said. “I’ll find him, then I’ll come back.”

  And when the attacks reached Istanbul, she felt the explosion all the way in Tarlabaşı and didn’t go to the phone until the names of all the victims had been announced. She held her breath until she knew that Anton’s name wasn’t among them. Then she clenched her teeth, realizing that secretly she’d been hoping to hear his name. That way she’d have found him. Then, at least, her search would have been over. When her jaw relaxed and she could open her mouth again, Ali rang her mother, who made no effort to control herself this time, and nor did Ali.

  * * *

  —

  The third time Cemal bumped into the sofa Ali was lying on, as he dashed around the flat, she called after him: “Why are you so restless? Come and sit next to me and we’ll look at the pictures of Ara.”

  He refused. Ali sat up.

  “Your jewel. Tell me about your jewel.”

  “My jewel?”

  “The girl you’re so in love with.”

  “Leave me, kuşum.”

  Ali was about to leap to her feet and kiss Cemal’s temples to calm him, when a beige suit appeared in the doorway carrying a bottle of rakı.

  “Mustafa! Thank God! We’ve been waiting for you all evening.”

  Ali screwed up her eyes. The visitor’s suntanned face gave a fat grin and Uncle Cemal beamed.

  Mustafa Bey greeted her effusively and told her in dizzyingly fast German that he’d heard a lot about her.

  “What have you heard? There’s nothing to hear,” Ali replied, wondering whether to find some pretext—the bed bugs, the advanced hour, the dust in her eyes—for leaving immediately, but Cemal was beaming and she knew she couldn’t go now—not when he was putting out the little white meze dishes on the newspapers that covered the table. His voice cracked.

  “White cheese, olives—hang on, I’ve got green ones too—no, I haven’t—sit down, I’ll get water and ice—I said, sit down—here’s an ashtray—would you like pickled tomatoes too, or is that too sour?”

  Ali pushed her feet into her sandals and watched Cemal’s face soften, bristle by bristle, growing more yielding and childlike with every word. She suddenly knew what he must have looked like as a young man—how proud and silly and gangling he must have been before he put on weight. She imagined him reaching for his air gun down by the water at Karaköy and shooting at the brightly colored balloons trembling on the surface of the water—that depressing tourist attraction where young men showed their girlfriends what they’d learned in their two years’ military service, apart from competitive masturbation. Cemal had promised to teach Ali to shoot. “First we’ll practice aiming at the balloons, then we’ll take it from there,” he’d said, laughing, and Ali couldn’t help laughing too. She’d have liked to throw her arms around his neck and bury her forehead in his shoulder, but she didn’t.

  Now she knitted her brow and had a good look at the man in the beige suit. He’d sat down at the table, still clutching the bottle of rakı, and was exchanging pleasantries with Cemal: I’m very well, thank you, how are you, that’s good, that’s what I like to hear, and how are you, I’m well too, thank you, that’s good, that’s what I like to hear, thank you.

  Cemal put three rakı glasses down on the newspaper and pulled Ali off the sofa. She stared at the earthenware ashtray that once, long ago, had contained yogurt from the islands, and was now covered in a film of damp ash. She didn’t want to look up. They drank to this and that, including “the life of Demirtaş” and Ali’s health. The small dish of olives stood on the chest of a singer who was opining on the war in the neighboring country. Ali saw the words refugees…and live here…In our…hungry and…off my blood.

  She silently filled in the gaps in her head, wishing she could return to the days when she hadn’t understood a word of Turkish. Or German for that matter. She wondered whether it wouldn’t be easier to be sitting stupid and monoglot in Russia,
singing love songs to the president. “Of course she’ll go with you—won’t you, Ali?” The words tore her away from the jukebox in her head which was playing the pop songs she’d be singing if she were in Russia. She glanced up.

  Mustafa Bey had big tobacco-colored teeth and, looking at him in the dim light and through the filter of her second rakı, she thought to herself that she had yet to meet a man in Aynalı Çeşme who didn’t wear one of those suits. They looked as if they’d been born in them—as if they’d slept and drunk and fucked and fought in them—gone up into the mountains in them to take up arms.

  “Where am I going?”

  Ali pictured Mustafa, sitting on a low stool, his chin resting on his knee, a tasbih in his hand. He’d drink only half his çay, then he’d stand up, wind the tasbih a few times around his fingers and get in his car, feeling under the seat to make sure the boys next door hadn’t nabbed his gun to impress the girls. Then he’d drive off, the wind ruffling the few hairs on his bald head.

  “Why don’t you come too, Uncle Cemal?”

  “What would I do there? You have fun, you young folk. It’s not my thing.”

  Ali looked at Mustafa and wondered whether Uncle Cemal could possibly be talking about him when he said “young folk”—and why he was sending her out of his flat into the unknown with a person with such big teeth. But then she saw Cemal’s broad smile and she nodded.

  * * *

  —

  It felt good to sit in a car and be driven through the city. That was something Ali never had to be talked into. She dropped onto the passenger seat, gathered herself into a knot, with only her head peeping out, pressed herself up against the window and things were all right.

  Elyas had often taken her for a drive—when she’d gone days without leaving her room again, digging her shoulder blades into the mattress on the floor and scanning the ceiling in silence. He’d throw his car keys onto her belly, as if to say: Get out and get in the car, and she’d claw her way up the door, crank down the window—that’s the kind of car Elyas had, the kind with a window crank and a tape player, and what else could you do with a car like that, it was asking to be driven—and when the window was as wide as it would go, she’d poke her head out and smoke. The cigarette smoke was sucked back into the car, past her ears to Elyas who’d be changing tapes and talking to himself. She’d begin to grow calmer; eventually she’d smile, and when she started to talk, Elyas knew they could head for home, stopping off at a gas station to round off the evening with a paper cup of espresso that stained their lips like squid ink, and a dirty end-of-the-night truck driver’s joke—though Mustafa Bey didn’t know any.