There must be some kind of demonstration happening in Kızılay, I can smell the tear gas from here. My eyes are burning, and it’s getting harder and harder to breathe. Everyone around me is coughing and choking, running this way and that. Should I make a run for it, too? I’d better cross over and take the back streets.
Ow! Something hard has just hit me in the head, probably cracked my skull open. I’m on the ground and feel like I’m suffocating. Is this the end of the road for me? Perhaps it is, I tell myself, but why am I dying? Why now? And who’s killing me? I suppose I’ll have to leave those questions to the living. I’ve fallen flat on my face, so my nose is probably broken, too. I’m sitting in the middle of the road, watching all that is going on around me, and it’s almost too real to be true. My nose is bleeding; I can taste the blood in my mouth. There are women being dragged by the hair, young protesters trying to yell out slogans as they’re beaten with batons, people throwing stones, others wielding signs to fend off the blows, tanks, water cannons, sirens, sirens…
I find myself in an ambulance, wearing an oxygen mask. There are other wounded people in here, too. They’re all standing up though; it’s only me who’s on a stretcher. There are three paramedics or maybe one of them’s a doctor. One of the paramedics is a young man with slicked-back hair, not what I’d call handsome. But I bet he squanders all his money on his looks. Probably doesn’t have a car, but he’s got plenty of hair gel. The female paramedic isn’t as flashy. All the time she’s taking care of us, she rants on about the bastards who did this. She’s obviously a union member; her face is angry, but her eyes are full of kindness. Every now and then she asks me if I’m all right. I nod to say that I am. She doesn’t own a car, but she’s married, so maybe her husband has one. The doctor is a woman, younger than either of the paramedics. They keep trying to get her attention. “Doctor, Doctor!” But she’s in such a panic that she’s forgotten she is even a doctor. I’d say she’s single, doesn’t have a car, either. That union member, though, now she’s got a cool head; she’s the real boss here.
We’ve arrived, I think. The ambulance door opens and they whisk me to the emergency department. The two guys wheeling me in on the stretcher seem calm and collected. They’re not from our neighborhood, but they’re definitely from our side of the tracks. They’re both bachelors; one of them might even own a secondhand motorcycle. They must have done this a thousand times already; they could probably do it with their eyes closed. From the way they call out, ordering everyone out of their way, you’d think they were hotshot surgeons or something. They’re probably the bosses around here. The emergency department is packed, full of people moaning in pain and screaming. The two “surgeons” lift me up just like that and place me on a bed, then they grab the empty stretcher and take off again.
I lie there for a while, waiting. I touch the back of my head, figure my brains must have oozed out of my skull. But when I look at my hand, expecting to see a glob of bloody brains on it, there’s nothing. I check again, feeling around carefully this time. Turns out my head wasn’t split open after all; there’s a good-sized bump on it, though, about as big as my fist.
A bunch of medics in white coats flock to my side. They dart around so quickly that I can’t tell one from the other. They’re all young, unmarried, medical-student types. Not one of them has a car.
“Ma’am, this patient’s taken a blow to the head and she may have a broken nose,” one of them says. The doctor they call “ma’am” leans over to get a closer look at me. Our eyes meet.
“Sevgi Hanım!” I cry.
She gives me a blank look. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?” My face must be a real mess, otherwise she would have recognized me.
“It’s me, Nazan,” I cry.
“My God, Nazan! What happened to you?”
I shrug my shoulders as if to say, “Don’t ask me.”
“Okay, I see,” she says. “Take her on over to radiology.”
They bring me back after I’ve had my X-rays done. Sevgi Hanım stands next to me while she looks them over. “Well, at least there’s nothing serious—nothing broken, no fractures, no internal bleeding. You’re going to have to spend the night here, though, and we’ll take another X-ray tomorrow. They’re going to dress your wounds now and put you on an IV; it’ll help with the pain,” she says.
“But my mother,” I reply, “I need to call my mother.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll let her know,” she says. Just then a group of police officers show up, all holding walkie-talkies.
“Which ones were brought in from the demonstration?” they ask.
No one answers.
The police chief gets angry. “Who’s in charge here?” he shouts.
Sevgi Hanım steps forward. “I am.”
The chief asks again which of us were brought in from the demonstration.
“We have no way of knowing,” she answers, adding, “Our job is to treat people. It makes no difference to us who they are.”
The chief glares at her. “Collect all their IDs,” he orders the other officers.
Sevgi Hanım tries to stop them. “Would you please leave,” she says. “We need to finish treating these patients. Let us get on with our job, then you can come back and do yours.”
“Take down the doctor’s name, too,” the chief orders menacingly.
Sevgi Hanım comes and stands by my bed. When one of the officers asks to see my identity card, she tells him, “She’s my cleaning lady, she fell off a ladder while cleaning.” The officer seems convinced; he’s very young, with a look of poverty in his eyes, and almost certainly doesn’t have a car.
The chief yells out from the other side of the room, “Take her ID, too!” He obviously grew up poor, but thanks to his car—probably a Ford Mondeo, secondhand—he’s managed to pull ahead, though only just. Sevgi Hanım starts to object. The chief cuts her off. “There’s nothing to worry about, ma’am. If what you say is true, there won’t be any problem now, will there?” But his tone implies otherwise.
Sevgi Hanım turns back to face me. “Everything’s going to be fine, give them your ID. I’ll call Murat; he has some lawyer friends and they’ll take care of you.” As she speaks, I remember what I saw Murat doing in the BMW. I forget all about myself and start feeling sorry for Sevgi Hanım. They gather up our identity cards and take off, leaving two officers behind to keep watch at the entrance. I’m in less pain now, thanks to the IV and the painkillers. They’ve bandaged my nose; I can feel swelling around my eyes. I scraped the skin off my knees when I fell and they sting like hell.
A few hours later the chief and his men come back and take nine patients into custody, including me. Sevgi Hanım tries to stop them, but it’s no use. I get a window seat in the police van, and off we go. The guy driving the Audi Q7 next to us is clearly living off Daddy’s money. He has the music turned up full blast and is tapping along on the steering wheel. He’s probably studying at a private university. By next year he’ll grow tired of the SUV and ask for a Mercedes CLX, and Daddy will probably get it for him, too. But, hey, the guy deserves it; after all, he isn’t from our neighborhood.
The light just turned green.
I spend a hellish night alone in a cell at the station. Even though I’m dead tired, I hardly get a wink of sleep. In the morning they inform me that my lawyer has arrived. Murat Bey’s sent him. I tell him everything.
“All right,” he says. “Don’t worry, we’ll do whatever we can. I’ll try to keep you out of prison while we await trial.”
The lawyer is married and has never in his life set foot in our neighborhood. He obviously drives a Volvo S70.
“What do you mean, trial? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Of course you haven’t, but the thing is, your photo is on the front page of all the papers,” he says, taking a newspaper out of his leather briefcase. The headline reads VANDALS! and beneath it is a photo of me sitti
ng in the middle of the road, my face covered in blood.
“But I didn’t do anything!” I say. By now I’m starting to get scared. The lawyer reminds me of my right to remain silent and advises me to keep quiet at the police station but to tell the public prosecutor everything. He says we’ll talk more if I’m detained, then shakes my hand and turns to leave. “Please let my mother know I’m okay!” I call out after him. He lifts his hand as if to say “All right.” A policewoman takes me by the arm and leads me back to my cell. She’s from our neighborhood; maybe her mother cleaned houses to put her through school, too. She’s not married yet and right now she can only dream of owning a car.
Two days later they take us out of our cells. They tell us, “You’re due in court.” There are four other women besides me. I sit by the window in the police van. It fills up and off we go. As we make our way from Ulus to Sıhhiye, I find myself staring at the woman behind the wheel of the white Ford Focus right next to us. Definitely a rep for some pharmaceutical company. Well dressed, with a miniskirt and sunglasses that scream “I come from a different part of town!” It’s a company car. This woman’s single, too. She looks happy, but if you ask me, it’s a mask to hide the drama going on underneath. She knows that happiness, like the car she’s driving, doesn’t belong to her; it’s all company property, on temporary loan.
The light just turned green.
The public prosecutor asks short questions and I give short answers. He’s young and still has a whiff of poverty about him. I figure he’s married, probably owns a secondhand Nissan Almera. He’s always hated being poor and now wants to speed away from it all, as fast as he can. He looks me in the face only once. My lawyer says, “There’s no cause for detention,” or something like that. The prosecutor tells us to wait outside. We wait in the hall for a good four or five hours. Once everyone has had their turn, they separate me and fifteen or twenty others and tell us the prosecutor has asked that we be kept in custody until our trial.
“Custody? What do you mean, custody?”
The lawyer tries to console me. A short while later, we’re standing before a judge; he asks me the same questions and I give the same answers. The judge is married; he’s forgotten how it feels to be poor and probably drives a new Škoda Superb, a black one with leather seats.
We speed through the darkness toward Sincan Prison. They won’t let me sit next to the window in the police van, so I spend the entire trip sulking. The only sound comes from the police walkie-talkies. The women guards at the prison entrance tell us to take off our clothes so that they can search us. They’re all from our side of the tracks, and they know they’ll always be down on their luck. They can’t even begin to imagine owning a car. We aren’t the reason they’re poor, but they still treat us like we are.
I’ve been in prison for six months now. I share a cell with seven others, all from our neighborhood—feisty women who know a thing or two, if you catch my drift. My trial’s in two months. My mother comes to see me every week during visiting hours. She’s started cleaning houses again and says Sevgi Hanım sends her best. My mother cried on her first few visits, but she’s holding up better now. It was my birthday last week. My friends made me a car-shaped cake out of cookies; we had a good laugh over that.
I am my father’s daughter. The daughter of a man whose Mustang dreams were crushed beneath a rusty old city bus. A working woman who wound up in prison. I’ve never taken part in a demonstration, not once in my whole life. Being in here, I’ve come to see our neighborhood in a completely different light. And while I may not be in prison much longer, these six months have been enough for me to get to know myself. And there’s an important lesson I’ve learned in here: If you walk with courage and determination, sometimes you can move faster than a car.
My name is Nazan the Cleaning Lady—look out, Ankara, here I come!
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK
I slipped the noose around my neck and gave the stool a swift kick out from underneath me. As it tumbled across the floor, I stared expectantly at the ceiling, lost in thought, waiting for my life to flash before my eyes like a reel of film. A good ten minutes passed and nothing happened. Instead, each frame was filled with her smiling face. My life—made up of her and her alone, those same images running through my mind over and over again—was about to come to an end. Or at least it would have if I hadn’t been flat on the floor. It turns out you can’t hang yourself lying down. On discovering this, I was filled with a sudden desire to live. Having performed my suicide attempt for the day, I stood up, removed the noose from around my neck, and went into the kitchen to fry myself three eggs for breakfast. Then I shaved, dressed, and headed out of the house.
In the elevator I ran into Kadir, a retired mafia boss. “Good morning Kadir Amca,” I said politely, referring to him as “uncle.”
“And good morning to you, Musti,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Just fine, amca, I guess…” I mumbled. I actually felt like saying, “You know what, Kadir Amca? I just tried to kill myself.” I longed for him to console me, pat me on the head, show me some affection, a shred of compassion. But instead I held my tongue and looked at him like someone who had just tried to take his own life. I wanted him to pick up on it himself. He didn’t, and I was devastated.
After stepping out of the elevator, he turned back around and asked, “Something the matter with your eyes, son?”
“No, amca, not really.” I could barely hold back the tears.
“Then why the hell are you wearing sunglasses in the elevator, you idiot?” His response left me shattered, like a watermelon that’s fallen off a donkey, as the saying goes. Except I felt more like the damn donkey than the watermelon.
I drifted through the streets, reminding myself that I had a good reason for not going to work today: I’m unemployed. I’ve been out of a job for two months now. And by job I mean pizza delivery. I used to deliver pizzas. Well, I did for one day, to be exact. The moped they gave me was stolen on my first day and so they told me not to come back. I’d never had a job before. My dad, bless him, sent me money each month. But when I started working for the pizza place, I told him to stop sending me the money. I didn’t need it anymore. I was too ashamed to call him up the next day and tell him I’d been fired. My dad still thinks I’m a pizza delivery boy. Or, rather, he thinks I opened my own pizza place.
When he called last week, he said, “Son, I’ve been meaning to ask you: What is pizza, anyway?” He was up in the hills in Karlıova and the connection was terrible. In between the static I told him, “It’s a kind of siding material.”
“That’s nice,” he replied, before the line cut out. He called back a little later. “What’s siding?” he asked. I didn’t respond. And then the line went dead again.
I wandered along until I found myself in front of Berna’s place. Berna wouldn’t be at home at that time of day. She works at a bank, or for a bank, whichever it is. I met her at a stand in front of a supermarket.
“Can we interest you in a credit card, sir?” she asked. I told her no. She insisted, but again I declined. “All you need to do is let me photocopy your ID and we’ll take care of the rest.” I couldn’t bear to let her down a third time, so I agreed to it.
“Great!” she said and signed me up quick as a flash.
The badge on her chest read BERNA, that’s how I know her name. She knows mine, too, because she glanced at my ID while photocopying it. It’s been seven months, but I’m sure she hasn’t forgotten me. She gave me such a pretty smile. I went back to see her again the next day, followed her all the way home that time, but she didn’t notice me. When she didn’t show up outside the supermarket for the next few days, I went into the bank and asked where she was. They told me to take a number and wait my turn. When it was my turn, I repeated my question. They told me not to come back. And so I never did see Berna ever again. I waited by her house day and night, but I didn’t get a si
ngle glimpse. Her smile is with me still.
My dad thinks I’m studying civil engineering here in Istanbul. It’s been four years, so it’s about time for me to graduate. But since I never finished high school, they wouldn’t let me take the university entrance exam. Last year, my dad called to ask my advice about how to replace the earthen roof on our house.
“We haven’t reached that chapter yet,” I told him.
When Berna asked me my occupation, I said I was a civil engineer. I still carry that credit card with me. It was canceled when I failed to pay the first bill. I couldn’t bear to throw it away, so I had it laminated and put it in my wallet. The repo men came to seize my belongings last month.
“Are you Mustafa Bey?” they asked.
“How can I help you?” I replied. They took everything I owned and left. If only I’d been able to find Berna, I would have explained to her why I didn’t pay the bill. I’m so embarrassed I let the girl down.
The truth is, I’m not the kind of person you think I am. Before Berna, there was Nergis. She was the woman I loved, or at least wanted to love. She was Gıyasettin Bey’s daughter, and they lived in the apartment building across from mine. We once passed each other in the street and she gave me the prettiest smile. She was studying at the university, and I went there one day to visit her. I sat out front, waiting for her to finish a class. I thought about what I would say when I saw her. “Tell me, Nergis, in what way shall I love you?”
Shall I be your psycho stalker, carving your name across my chest with a razor blade? I’ll break the hand of every man whose hand you shake—you who have not once deigned to hold mine. I’ll be here every day, waiting for you outside these gates. I’ll grab you by the arm and say, “Come, let’s go somewhere, just the two of us.” I’ll smash my head into the face of anyone who tries to come between us. The more you tell me to leave you alone, the more I’ll make your life a living hell. I’ll camp out in front of your house late into the night. You’ll peer out the window, shivering with fear but also shimmering with pride. You’ll report me to the police. They’ll take me to the station. With every blow I receive, I’ll call out your name. Each blow will bring me closer to you. If I can’t have you, Nergis, no one can; you belong either to me or to the deep dark earth. Life itself will become your prison; you’ll lose all will to live. Then one day you’ll tell me, sobbing, “Please, just leave me alone, I don’t love you, I can’t, I’m afraid of you. You’re ruining my life, can’t you see?” It’s only then that I’ll finally grasp the bitter truth. With a razor blade I’ll carve my love into my wrists. I’ll leave behind a letter, and you’ll drown in your tears when you read it. Only then will you understand just how much I loved you. You’ll come to my grave bearing a bouquet of wildflowers. And on my headstone it will say: IS IT ME YOU’VE COME TO SEE, NERGIS?
Dawn Page 4
