So I moved out.
I went back to the flat in Çıkmazı Sokak and looked in on the boys. I saw the tinsel still hanging on the unrendered walls, I saw Barış’s sunken cheeks, and I decided to find myself a job. If I saved up, I thought, I could rent a place of my own. I started off as a shoe-shiner. You’d think shoe-shiners spend their days sitting on a corner somewhere, on the lookout for dirty leather shoes, but it’s not like that at all. You walk the whole city; you choose your customers and you have your fun with them, while they’re still peering at the crumpled city maps in their sweaty hands, unsuspecting. The trick goes like this: you walk around with your basket or box or whatever you have for your customers to put their feet on—some professionals have those lovely brass boxes with gilt studs and a special footrest, to make the tourists feel “like white men.” I wasn’t a professional, though, never have been, not in anything; all I had was a wooden box. So you walk past someone, preferably someone in leather shoes, and as you’re passing, you drop one of your brushes out of the shoe-shiner’s box you’re carrying tucked under your arm. Then you keep going, of course, as if you haven’t noticed anything. Someone always stops. Someone always feels sorry for the poor shoe-shiner who’s going on his way unawares, maybe unable to work anymore, unable to feed his family because of that lost brush. They pick up the brush and even run after you, calling out in all different languages: “Por favor espere! Attendez, s’il vous plaît! Warten Sie!” And they hand you the brush and you, with your shiny forehead and your shiny eyes, offer to polish their shoes to say thank you. You insist—“Insisto! J’insiste! Ich bestehe drauf!”—no, really you must, for your honor and your father’s honor; you must polish their shoes right now, polish them good and thorough—and as you work, you ply them with stories about your poor family in the village and your dying mother. I always wondered why people were prepared to buy these stories about my supposed family—from me, a Russian-Jewish guy from Germany. But at some point I realized that you can sell people any story. People want to hear stories. And then you get them to pay up. Family tragedies are particularly lucrative.
* * *
—
I thought about selling my passport—the only thing of value I possessed. The money wouldn’t take me to New Zealand, but it might get me to Greece. What would I do in Greece, though? The same as in Turkey. Then I thought I could travel farther east and join the guerrillas—there was war again in that part of the country. Then I thought I should find a rich woman and marry her. She’d take me in and I’d never have to worry about anything ever again. I’d have four hot showers a day and in between showers I’d massage her feet. A man of leisure.
I was toying with fantasies like these when İlay picked me up in a bar in Mis Sokak. There was just one thing he was keen to make clear: he was absolutely not gay. “No worries,” I said. “None of us are. Just lonely.”
His flat was in a factory building in Osmanbey. The floor below was full of sewing machines; an entire family—some twenty men and women—worked the pedals. The needles beat in time as I groaned into the sheet. İlay was always very quiet and had to hold my mouth shut because we usually fucked during the day; at night we were in the bars and hardly ever got home before morning. İlay didn’t want any trouble; he pressed his hand over my mouth as he pushed into me again and again, and I said through his fingers: “İlay, they’ll think it’s the seagulls screaming.”
Everything smelled damp: the building, the stairs, the front door that İlay pushed me against while he was trying to find his keys, İlay’s clothes, his skin, the stubble on his chin, the hair around his cock that was already white. I probably smelled damp too, after those autumn and winter months when the cold had us all in its grip, but I couldn’t smell it myself and by the time it was summer and we’d thawed again, I’d left İlay.
* * *
—
The evening we met, he ordered endless drinks. Feeling suddenly dizzy, I clutched hold of him and said: “I need something to eat.” He dragged me into Bambi Café on the corner of İstiklal, and when I bit into my dürüm and saw the eyes he was making at me, I couldn’t stop laughing. He looked like a fat tomcat with whiskers. When I woke up next to İlay the following morning, I couldn’t work out what kind of a place we were in. It was bitterly cold. Surely the point of a flat was that you woke up in the warmth? Large paintings stood at the windows, the canvases turned to face the backyard; light shimmered in different colors through the layers of paint, and there was a smell of paraffin. The man asleep beside me had a hairy back. He was breathing heavily through his open mouth, making sounds through his nose like a door that needs oiling.
The flat wasn’t a flat; it was İlay’s studio. There was paint all over the place and carefully cut-out clippings from lifestyle magazines spread in huge piles on a trestle table. Open tubes of glue lay here and there, and messes of toothpaste mixed with oils. I knelt down to look at the collages on the floor and realized I was still very dizzy. I stepped quickly into İlay’s slippers and glanced at his bookcase—almost nothing but Thomas Bernhard and Oğuz Atay. Oh dear, I thought, and looked around for the toilet, but there wasn’t one—only a small broom cupboard with a showerhead over a toilet bowl; the idea seemed to be that you had a shower sitting on the loo. There was cigarette ash in the basin and, in the rusty mirror on the wall above, I saw that the sleeping tomcat had left me with a purplish blue love bite on my neck—I hadn’t had one like that since I was fifteen.
I leaned my throbbing rakı head against the mirror and listened to myself breathe—thought my lungs were whistling until I realized that the cooing noises were coming from the wall. I put my ear to the damp wall; it felt moldy and something or someone was moving on the other side—something or someone small. Rats don’t coo, I thought, as I pulled the chain. A few days later, İlay explained that there were pigeons nesting in the hollow space between the walls, and after that I worried if I didn’t hear the cooing—knocked gingerly on the wall till I did, then cooed back and pulled the chain to say take care.
But that first morning, the flat seemed like fairyland to me. Nothing made any sense. I didn’t know what would happen when I went from one room to the next—would the rooms shrink and the ceilings grow lower? Would they suddenly taper off into nothingness or melt into thin air? It wasn’t just the rakı.
When I got back from the toilet, İlay had got up and switched on a patio heater, the kind they have outside cafés to warm the smokers, only his was in the middle of the room. I hadn’t noticed it in all the chaos. I hurried under the glowing coils and my hair fizzed as if I’d stuck my fingers in an electric socket. It was hard to breathe under there, but I soon warmed up; I could feel it in my cheeks.
İlay appeared with a pot of çay and scrambled eggs with pepperoni and tomatoes in a tiny brass-colored frying pan, and sat down opposite me in silence. I ate, hoovering the stuff up like a vacuum cleaner—I’d have liked to lick the pan—and İlay watched me, his legs crossed, a cigarette between his thick lips; I could have sworn he had whiskers growing out of the corners of his mouth. When I’d finished, he pushed me up against the bookcase, pulled down my trousers and set about devouring my cock with an almost frightening hunger. Thomas Bernhard looked on.
I spent hours lying on İlay’s bed, looking at the houses opposite. Every morning and every day at lunchtime, women leaned out of the windows and down over the backs of the houses, as if they were diving. They fussed over chewed-looking bathroom mats that were drying on the washing lines, and beat their rugs and blankets, sending white threads flying like the seeds of an enormous dandelion clock. One of the women threw a tied-up plastic bag onto the roof below every day, which burst as it landed, scattering dry bread onto the tiles. The seagulls came and pecked the roof clean.
Now and then a man climbed out onto the roof and shooed the birds away with a long pole. The gulls circled him, screeching, and he kept peering in at our window. Once I went to the win
dow naked, lit a cigarette and stared back. İlay dragged me away and pushed a canvas in front of the window; his pictures were his curtains—screens to stop prying eyes. I saw an ant run down his ear when he grabbed hold of me. The flat was full of ants; they crawled out of the leaves of the date palms, over the books and into my clothes and hair. Sometimes I thought they might make nests under my skin, crawl around in there, lay their eggs and breed. Every morning I combed them out of my hair; they fell on the little heaps of ash that İlay left in the basin.
İlay was almost always smoking. He smoked in bed and on the toilet. He smoked when he was reading aloud to me and while I was trying to wash myself, and he ashed wherever he happened to be standing. He smoked when he was making me menemen, chopping onions with a fag in the corner of his mouth, and if he cried, it was because the smoke got in his eyes. He smoked when he cut my hair. He even tried to keep smoking when I kissed him.
I liked him; he liked me. When he wasn’t reading, he was usually painting—lying on the floor, mixing paints with toothpaste and throwing scraps of paper at canvases. I asked if he wanted to paint me, but he said no. In the mornings he laid his head on my shoulder, stroked my chest and looked into my eyes. One day he asked if I felt like driving along the Aegean coast with him; it was warm up there, he said, much warmer and sunnier than in town, and he was fed up with sitting under his patio heater in Osmanbey, always staring at the same crumbling houses. “You need a good long view,” he said. “Anything else does your head in.”
He went to his gallerist to ask for an advance and spent it on a freezer bag full of grass and two tickets to Antalya, where we hired a car. Olympus, the mountain of the gods, was shut, and our car got stuck in the mud; the engine made sounds of distress, and we smoked joints until some hippie tourists came by and pulled us out.
It was already dark when we got to Kaş. We stood at the reception of a hotel that reminded me of my childhood; the woman at the desk looked like the greasy warder in the asylum home—same shirt, same mustache. She looked at us, rolling her eyes from İlay’s face to mine, and shook her head. İlay began to argue with her, and I began to understand the Turkish swearwords. I pulled İlay away by his sleeve before the woman could call the police; he cursed and spat on the ground. I heard crows overhead and looked up at the mauve sky. We decided to spend the night in the car and fucked as if it was our last day. In the morning we washed ourselves between the rocks in the bay and İlay read aloud to me while I rolled joints.
In Fethiye he laid me down on the pebbles of Ölüdeniz. That means “dead sea,” but it was the opposite of dead; it charged at me as if it wanted to carry me away. The sun tickled my belly like a small scuttling animal and for a moment it was quiet. Then we heard the whip of rods as the fishermen walked along the shore in their yellow rubber boots. They squinted in our direction, flicking their fishing lines through the air.
In Gümüşlük the streets looked as if they’d been blown clean, and the beer on sale in the bakkal was warm in the fridges. Boarded-up pharmacies were flanked by flashing cash machines. Signs promising We sell everything hung askew. In Ephesus, İlay pushed me in front of the Temple of Artemis, or what was left of it, and said: “Sing! Go on, sing something!” At first I only hummed, laughing and pushing little stones back and forth over the ground with my foot—then I began to sing, louder and louder, the only song I knew in Russian: “Pora, pora poraduemsya na svoyom veku.” It is time, it is time to rejoice in this time.
In Ayvalı we drank freshly squeezed pomegranate juice from paper cups that said Oktoberfest, and I tried on a Spider-Man suit and fooled around in the changing room, waving my blue-and-red-clad arms about and trying to climb the walls. İlay laughed and would have bought me the suit if I hadn’t dragged him out of the shop.
Later, we pulled over to the side of the road to look at flocks of sheep and have a piss. One of the parking bays was strewn with cuddly toys—donkeys and rabbits in plastic wrappers with bows on the side. I bent down to sniff them; the smell of detergent penetrated the plastic. I picked up a pink donkey and stared into its button eyes, but I wasn’t allowed to take it home. “Who knows what it all means,” İlay said.
In Çanakkale we stood in front of the wooden corpse of the Trojan horse, worn out from all the driving and talking and fucking. I felt wobbly; it was the same dizzy feeling as after the hours on the ferry. I glanced at İlay; he didn’t look at me, but his whiskers quivered. He said: “Anton. Stay. Okay?”
I said nothing. What could I say? I went back to staring at the horse.
We spent most of the rest of the journey back to Istanbul in silence. İlay made one attempt to start a conversation, but I wasn’t in the mood and answered in monosyllables, and suddenly he began to shout—I couldn’t treat him like this; he did everything for me—and I yelled back, telling him to let me out at the side of the road, right away. I opened the door although the car was still moving and he slammed on the brakes, his head a throbbing muscle.
* * *
—
And then it was summer and İlay told me there were people dancing in the park in Osmanbey. “Let’s go and have a look,” he said and I said, “Yes, in a second,” and pulled him into bed. By the following morning there was tear gas in the flat, and noise out on the street. I poked my head out: people were banging pans and tin buckets and the roads were full of banners, so we went out and then straight back in again because we were coughing so much.
I knew the smell of tear gas from the home. A few boys and I had once got hold of some and thrown it in the ventilator. The whole building screamed and some granny on the third floor almost jumped out of the window.
I grabbed a scarf, wound it around my face and went back onto the street, followed by İlay. The pungent smell stung my nose. I never found out why people pressed half lemons to their temples or poured milk in their eyes. That was before everyone started running around in face masks—not that they were any use either. Something exploded like a geyser; thick white air shot into the sky and people ran every which way, wild-eyed, a startled pack of animals. An entire battalion of masked police rolled through the crowd, hitting everything that moved. People screamed; the smell of fear and sweat hung in the air, more bitter than acetone—and when the police charged at us, İlay ran away.
I saw his eyes widen, and then I saw him make a dash for it, arms flailing, and I realized how disgusting I found him—his moldy flat, the white hair around his cock, the heavy, stoned eyelids he could never properly open. I lay down on the ground and listened to the quake. I wouldn’t go home; it was summer; I could sleep in the park. And afterward, I’d have to see, but I didn’t really care where I slept. I wasn’t even sure there’d be an afterward, and didn’t mind if there wasn’t.
* * *
—
I saw İlay only once more after that. He asked me to meet him—cried until I said yes—so while the rest of the city was rehearsing revolution, he and I sat in a café full of shisha pipes and I told him I’d never forget the way he’d run off and left me in a crowd of people all trampling each other.
“I have asthma! I’d have died in the gas!” he shouted, and I realized how little I cared.
AGLAJA
You couldn’t miss Aglaja. In her black hat and black, sharply creased men’s suit trousers, which she wore with suspenders over a crumpled white shirt, she stood out in the crowd of short jeans, tight, garish T-shirts and long, flowing hair—a clown in a black-and-white photograph. Only her hair was red; she looked two-dimensional. When I saw her, I opened my mouth; there was so much I wanted to tell her. But before I could work out what, she’d dropped down dead. I didn’t know then that she wasn’t actually dead; she certainly looked it. There was blood running out of her ears; her head was tipped backward; her mouth hung open, and her tongue stuck out, twisted like plasticine.
Later, when demonstrators sprayed Aglaja’s portrait all along İstiklal, she was pictured as
a black-and-white silhouette with red birds flying out of her temples, but that’s not what she looked like here; she’d been hit on the head by a gas cartridge. This made her the symbol of the movement, but that wasn’t much use to her in the weeks she spent in a coma. Some of the graffiti images were still around in the streets off Taksim months later; I once passed one with her. She stopped and looked at it for a long time, and I had the feeling she was laughing.
* * *
—
The clouds of gas around us were orange. Aglaja’s hat had blown away, and her head, too, was farther away than it should have been. I picked her up and set off out of the park, but a girl with a shorn head and eyes that spat fire started to tug at me like a wild thing and curse at me in Ukrainian. I answered in Russian—told her to get out of the way—and soon we were talking Turkish to the staff of a hotel where we laid Aglaja on a sofa, the shaven-headed girl at her head, me at her legs. The lobby was full of tearstained faces and doctors—or at least people who were doctoring the tearstained faces. They were pouring a white liquid over their heads; it looked as if they were washing them with milk. If I hadn’t known that the people lying on the sofas and on the rugs and in the corridors had been beaten to the ground, I’d have thought they were making a music video. The skinhead was kneeling over Aglaja, talking to her—to her shattered marble face that was almost transparent. I saw the bluish threads trickling out of her ears and thought: She’s so beautiful. Then I thought: She’s dead. After that I didn’t think anything else, and went back to the park.
Beside Myself Page 27
