She put my hand over her mouth and licked the palm with her huge tongue, like a dog. Then she reached up and ran her fingers through my hair. Beneath my hand, I could feel her smiling. I blinked as many times as I could, trying to take photos of her with my eyes.
“I don’t miss the circus, but there’s one thing I’d like to have done. I wasn’t allowed. My sister was, but I wasn’t. My father said it wasn’t for me; I should stick to undressing myself on that swing.”
We stayed there, lying on that roof, for a long time. She talked and talked, chattering away into her puke-soaked collar, and I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to herself—telling herself her own story to reassure herself that she was still alive.
“My sister’s taller than me, altogether bigger in all directions, and she used to make herself taller still by walking around in these heels, teetering on tippy toes and waggling her bum. In the shows she’d wear these see-through jumpsuits embroidered with rhinestones and when she stood in the ring with her back to a target, arms outstretched, legs splayed, she gleamed like a jellyfish, a big fat jellyfish. My father threw knives at her. Sometimes there were paint bombs on the wall behind her. When the knives hit the bombs, they burst and red paint spurted all over my sister’s costume. The audience screamed, they wanted more—encore! encore!—and some people fainted. I liked it. I stood behind the curtain, looking into their panicked faces as they sat there, openmouthed and quivering, as if they were all about to come at once. When one of those paint bombs burst, the big top always smelled of sperm. But I was never allowed to have knives thrown at me. My mother said: ‘What do you want that for? Do you want your father to hit you with a knife?’ And I said, ‘He never hits my sister,’ and she said: ‘Yes, but he loves her, doesn’t he?’
“My father loved my sister in many different ways. I wanted him to love me too. I thought, why her, why not me? Was I too thin, too stupid? Was my bum too small? I never really found out why I wasn’t allowed to do the things my sister did and why my mother put up with all that. I never asked her.”
It was about then, up there on the roof, that I made up my mind to marry her. I bought a chain for her waist in the Balık Pasajı, and when I put it around her, she laughed as if I was tickling her.
“Are you proposing to me?” she asked.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m old enough to be your mother.”
And from then on, I considered us engaged.
I told Aglaja’s pretty Ukrainian friend—the one from the club. I was never sure whether there was anything going on between them, but I was never asked to join them. Katarina she was called, or Katyusha. I teased her by singing that military song, “Vykhodila na bereg Katyusha”—“Katyusha Went Down to the Riverbank”—and she wasn’t amused. She danced in the club where Aglaja sometimes played. Aglaja didn’t like performing there; she only did it because of the accordion. She liked playing and singing and being listened to; she had other ways of getting money, she said.
Katyusha did this hot-pants number in the club. I only saw it once—fell asleep on the red sofa. We’d been in Gezi Park together—carried Aglaja out between us. I thought I could talk to her, but when I said, “Aglaja and I are engaged,” I was afraid she’d scratch my eyes out. She completely lost it if I hugged Aglaja; we didn’t kiss in public, but an arm around Aglaja was enough to make Katyusha tense her buttocks—I could see it was. She’s scared I’m going to run off with Aglaja and take her to Germany, I thought jokingly, and when it dawned on me that that was exactly what I wanted, I caught a plane and flew back alone.
I’d saved money for the first time in my life, because I wanted to buy Aglaja an accordion. That way, I thought, she’d never have to play to panting old men again; she could practice at home every day and would soon be good enough to give her own concerts. We’d go on tour together, and every night after the performances I’d massage her hands and feet. I badly wanted to buy her an instrument of her own and asked around in the shops by Galata Bridge, but the things were expensive and I had too much respect to steal one; it didn’t seem right. So I began to save. And as it turned out, I was glad I’d saved that money for an accordion, even if I did end up buying a plane ticket instead.
* * *
—
Aglaja had a lot of men and I could handle that. I’d watch her leaning on the bar, pretending she didn’t know that every man in the place was staring at her. Some of them went up to her and put their hands straight on her bare back, and when that happened, she smiled. Her childhood in the circus showed clearly in her body language; everything her sphinxlike face concealed came out in the way she moved. The muscles in her neck relaxed, her head fell forward a little, her red curls flew into her face, and I knew she’d go off with whoever it was.
On those evenings, I walked around the city, stopping here and there to drink tea. I’d think about writing to my mother or Ali, but never get around to it. I’d sit outside the mosque in Cihangir and try to get rid of the images of Aglaja with other men by drawing her in one of those notebooks my mother had thrust on me. I drew Aglaja the way I imagined her: on top of the men, underneath the men, in front of the men, behind the men.
Suddenly a long beard was hanging over my sketches; I looked up. The guy attached to the beard invited me, in German, to a game of tavla and I joined him at a table. He talked; I scanned his beard for leftovers and stared at his monobrow. “Like to get involved?” he asked suddenly. I hadn’t been listening. He began to tell me about his money-making venture. He worked for this agency, organizing women who made clothes for H&M—but not directly for H&M; the factory gets this order from, say, Germany—thirty thousand T-shirts in a certain size and a certain color, printed with a certain logo—and it accepts the order, although the managers know that such a large quantity isn’t feasible in the given time; they call a subsidiary company and pass on part of the order, say twenty thousand T-shirts, to them—and then the subsidiary company in turn outsources forty percent of their order to another, even smaller company, and so it goes on. Right at the end of the chain are men like him who are all day on the phone, coordinating calls. “Like to get involved?” he asked again.
“No. Thanks.”
“You work-shy?”
“I’m not here for that kind of thing,” I said.
“Ah, you’re one of them.”
“One of what?”
“One of those Germans. If you said in Germany ten years ago, ‘I live in Istanbul,’ you got these looks. Germans immediately started to treat you better because they thought you came from the Third World and had nothing to eat, and electricity only on the weekend. Everyone was suddenly nice to you and offered you extra helpings of liver dumplings. Not everyone, of course; some screwed you straight off; they were at least honest. And now you guys come along and cozy up here in our city as if it was the Mecca of the good life. Of course—you’re young and good-looking and rich and the city seems made for you. You don’t go to the doctor here; you don’t know what it’s like to grow old in this place. You loll around on sofas, drinking your coffee in the international chains that you know from all over Europe, and you sun yourselves on the terraces with our girls until the end of November. And then you go back and rave about the food here.”
“Wow,” I said, getting up and giving him my hand. “Great story, thanks, I must write that one down.” And I headed off to Fındıklı for a walk.
* * *
—
It was on one of those nights that I met Mervan. Mervan’s German passport had been annulled by his father just before his eighteenth birthday; he’d been told they were flying over for a cousin’s wedding—only had a few smart shirts in his suitcase, and then got to Atatürk Airport to discover he no longer had a German passport; he was Turkish forever now, or, strictly speaking, Armenian—“long story,” he said as he pulled down my trousers. He couldn’t go back, had to do military se
rvice and then found himself trapped here. He missed Germany; he missed the food and the language and most of all, he missed his little sister. I almost lost it and hit him when he said that. He’d like to write to her, he said—maybe I could take the letter with me and give it to her. He wasn’t sure it would get to her if he posted it; he was worried his father might confiscate it. I said I didn’t know when I was going back—I didn’t even know if I was going at all. But if I did, he could give me the letter—and secretly I thought I’d confiscate it myself, open it and read it, to find out what you write in a letter like that.
I introduced him to Aglaja. They liked each other and spent a few days together. Then Mervan was gone and with him Aglaja’s TV and the jewelry out of the socks in her cupboard.
“The jewelry wasn’t worth much,” she said, “but it’s a bummer about the television.”
I was seething with anger. I spent an entire week walking the streets looking for him; I came close to praying that I’d run into him.
* * *
—
And that was pretty much how I met Nour, who was waiting for his mother to arrive from Syria. Nour had no hair although he was only in his early twenties, but he had eyes as big as plane leaves to make up for it. He spent his days stealing furniture for the flat he’d found for him and his mum, and I helped him. You wouldn’t believe how much you can walk off with from a café without anyone saying anything. I even got hold of a samovar for him—a real Russian one, electric.
The flat was shabby; there was no hot water and the floor remained sticky even after Nour had scrubbed it five times—but the only thing that really bothered him was the lack of heating. “We’ll get you electric heaters,” I said, running my hand over his cold bald head.
The flat was on the top floor, under the roof, and the roof was made of tin; you could hear the seagulls walking around up there, like pattering rain. Nour liked the noise, because seagulls’ feet overhead meant there was water nearby—you could even see a sliver of it, if you leaned far enough out of the window, a tiny sliver of blue.
Nour nearly fell out. He waved me over.
“Can you see the Bosporus Bridge?” he asked me, twining out of the window like a climbing plant.
“Nour, you can’t see the bridge from here.”
“Yes, you can, look over there at those flashing lights.”
I often dropped in on Nour, but never asked him back to our place. He got very shy when Aglaja was around—shook hands at arm’s length and looked past her with his plane-leaf eyes.
They caught Nour for some petty offense and he fought them, presumably because it reminded him of things that had been done to him before he came to Istanbul. He couldn’t cope with being manhandled by the police—went pretty ballistic, by the sound of things, tried to knock or kick something out of someone’s hand, though you can never know afterward what happened, who smashed in whose what. Certainly nobody seemed to know. All anyone could tell us was: he was gone—really gone, not carted off to one of those camps where they usually send people like him. They’d whisked him straight back to Syria.
When he didn’t show up for some days, Aglaja and I went around to his flat. I’d guessed something was up when he didn’t open his door and I couldn’t find him anywhere. I was worried. I don’t think I could string two words together without mentioning him, and eventually Aglaja said: “Then let’s go and break his door down.” As it turned out, we didn’t have to; the door was open when we arrived, and sitting on the chair under the light bulb was an old woman with folded hands. She looked at us; she had the same enormous eyes as Nour. I glanced at Aglaja, who’d frozen and was staring fixedly in the direction of the woman. She wasn’t looking at her; she was looking through her, and I knew: any second now there’ll be foam at her mouth.
When Nour’s mother and I had sorted Aglaja out and she was lying curled up on the bed, breathing peacefully, we made tea in the Russian samovar and sat down on the floor to drink it. Nour hadn’t got around to stealing a second chair, I thought. But there was no need for that second chair now.
* * *
—
Since Nour’s deportation I could no longer handle seeing Aglaja with other men. I could no longer handle anything. This wasn’t clear to me until the day I saw some guy pinch her ass and found myself pouncing on him and knocking his teeth in. I thought: I’m going to smash his face into the ground till you can stick it to the windshield like a transfer image. I hadn’t planned it that way; it just came over me.
Then, some other guys pulled me off him and made a transfer image out of my face, and Aglaja jumped up and down hysterically, and at that moment I knew: I want children with this woman; I want to marry her right away and make babies and there’s an end to it. I want these affairs to stop; I want things to slow down a bit. The men were dancing a ballet around me, I could hear a rattle in my lungs and I thought: I want a family of my own; I want this woman to be my family.
I imagined the whole “Mum, this is Aglaja, Aglaja, this is Mum” spiel. Pictured the two women sizing one another up, was sure that Mum wouldn’t be able to resist Aglaja and that all would be well, just as long as Ali didn’t bite my head off. But if I liked Aglaja, maybe Ali would like her too. I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to suck this woman’s toes, I thought, as I spewed blood and half a tooth onto Aglaja’s feet.
Aglaja was so angry with me, she said she’d never speak to me again. I loved the way she said that and I laid her on the sofa and tried to put my head between her legs, though it was all swollen and ached like hell. She pushed me away and said she meant it. I said, I meant it too; I wanted her. She asked what that was supposed to mean and I asked when we were going to get married at last.
“I don’t want other men to be allowed to fuck you; I want to be your husband and make babies with you and make love to you and go back to Germany with you. Let’s get married; we’ll move to a little village somewhere in the south and grow our own vegetables and grass and get fat, and have children who’ll run around the house naked and jump on our fat bellies in the mornings, and I’ll be a good father—at least I think I will—I think I can. I know the whole point about fathers is that they’re supposed to be assholes, but maybe I’m an exception. I think so, I hope so.”
I was expecting her to laugh in my face—to push me away again, so that I’d have to go crawling back to her. I wasn’t expecting her to say: “But Anton, I have no idea who you are.”
So I sat next to her and told her. I told her all I knew—all about me and my family, my grandparents and great-grandparents, Russia and Germany, İlay and a whole lot of others. But mainly I told her about my old man, and that was a mistake. I could feel my head swelling and swelling as if it was going to burst; I had tears in my eyes and bile in my mouth; I was carried away by what I was saying—that had never happened to me before. But something was at stake here—a woman, my woman, my wife—so I made an effort not to miss anything out.
When I’d finished, she looked at me, completely still except for her little toes on the sofa. Then she said: “My father had backs growing all over his body.”
I stared at her. Something ripped inside my head; I felt as if my guts were hanging out of my mouth, and drew my eyebrows together, hoping that would keep my head in one piece. Aglaja’s face was a blank. I usually found her expressions—the childish metaphors with which she spoke of her father and her family—sweet and forgivable, but just then, after spreading out all my life before her, I couldn’t take it. She went on talking; I couldn’t listen properly—only caught snatches of what she was saying: she’d always wanted to go back to her family, but the police hadn’t let her; they were sharpening kings who had pencil-sharpening competitions and wrote down her parents’ crimes in their notebooks just like me—always noting everything down, as if it itched. Her mother, she said, had promised to pick her up from her aunt’s some time, but she’d never come; Aglaj
a was still waiting for her—still waiting for her to call.
I tried not to move. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did.
I had told her things I’d never previously confessed, even to myself, and it had made my jaw ache. I didn’t like doing it—didn’t do it because everything suddenly came pouring out of me. No, I did it because I thought I had to, if I wanted her to stay with me—and now she was telling me a story of her own: her father had said that her mother only married him to get to the West, and so she, Aglaja, was determined not to do the same.
She was disgusted by me. She’d got me all wrong, but it was too late. I clutched my head; she was looking at me the way I’d looked at İlay that day in the shisha café. And she was right. The stories really were disgusting. You shouldn’t tell stories like that; you should tell some other stories—the truth doesn’t matter; nothing’s true anyway—nothing. How can people even begin to talk about themselves?
She looked at me with her sphinx’s eyes and I’d like to have skinned myself alive, but instead I started throwing things. I hurled the new TV I’d bought her at the wall, tore her cushions to shreds, overturned the table. Something broke and I know I shouldn’t have hit her, but all this talking-about-myself had done something to me—something bad. I felt as if I was pedaling in too low a gear, as if there was no ground beneath my feet, no windows, no walls—as if everything I might have clung to was gone. The things Aglaja had told me about her family were pounding in my ears—those stupid fucking stories, I hadn’t believed a word of them, except that her father had screwed her sister and she still wanted to be his friend.
Staring into her blank face as she lay there on the floor, I had only one thought: It makes me feel humanly again must be the most stupid remark in the history of the world.
Beside Myself Page 29
