There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  At times I would witness Turks uttering food requests so specific, they’d have made the most demanding New Yorker blush: “I’d like a plate of plain, peeled cucumbers, actually. Is that possible? But I’d like them cut in a special way; first lengthwise and then cut in half,” one friend said to a waitress, who smiled and brought back exactly that. In a dinner gathering of twenty people, another friend told a waiter that her stomach had been a bit upset all week. “Could you ask the kitchen to prepare a bowl of plain pasta, no oil, but with some yogurt on top? And there should be some herbs, maybe mint, if possible.” As for the grocery deliveries deposited into baskets on ropes, if somebody took an aerial shot of Istanbul at just the right hour of a Sunday morning, the streets of every neighborhood would be dotted with round wicker containers moving up and down at various heights.

  Around the corner from my new house was a pickle seller, or turşucu: in his window sat jars of pickled carrots, tomatoes, artichokes, pumpkin, eggplant—anything that could fit in a jar could be pickled. Across from the turşucu was a ciğerci, or offal butcher, displaying a skein of kidneys hung above neat piles of liver and brain. We waved at the ciğerci as we walked by.

  The neighborhood, Çukurcuma, was popular among expats, but many locals considered it blighted and dangerous, in much the same way that longtime Manhattanites had trouble accepting that the formerly crime-ridden borough of Brooklyn had become a desirable place to live. In Istanbul, the elite preferred gated communities far from the city center, or neighborhoods along the Bosphorus coast, such as Bebek, where see-and-be-seen nightspots and twee boutiques could make a person think they were in Beverly Hills. My neighborhood did have sketchy spots, like an alley nearby where homeless teenagers sniffed glue from plastic bags late at night and a tucked-away hamam that was rumored to be more brothel than bathhouse. But there were also antique shops and booksellers, boho-chic restaurants, and the ateliers of artisans young and old making pottery and leather goods. And along the steep cobblestone lane where I lived, at least twenty cats of all colors and sizes lounged indifferently.

  I don’t even like cats, but I was entranced by this stray-animal orgy—and it was an orgy, I would soon learn, when night after night the felines screamed sounds not meant to be heard in this life. Like the clocks that appeared to melt over branches and tables in Dalí’s painting, the cats of Istanbul draped their torsos over warm car hoods; they hid behind tires, staged complex turf wars on single-file, high stone walls, and guarded doorways, entering and exiting apartment buildings as they pleased. Such a scene would be considered a major pest management problem in much of the West. And Istanbul tried so hard in some ways to be Western. The Atatürk International Airport, for starters, was a monument to European efficiency; it was aggressively modern, with so many moving walkways that if they were laid end to end, they might transport a person all the way to Brussels. But it was the cats of Istanbul that revealed the city’s gentle chaos.

  In the days to come, as I explored the city center, I discovered that these cats were everywhere, a wonderful absurdity, often twenty or thirty claiming a small block, and that Turks regarded them not as strays but as a communal obligation. Underneath the window of a ground-level flat, one would see a heap of last night’s dinner atop a leaf of newspaper; maybe leftover stew with lamb and vegetables, maybe just some noodles or bulgur pilaf. The cats came and went, considering the menu du jour with the caprice of spoiled children. Now and then one saw a bowl of dry cat food; it was not so unusual to purchase a bag to dole out to animals that one did not own.

  This collective sense of responsibility, it seemed, was the best thing about Turkey and also the most problematic, for the other side of a shared obligation is the shared weight of liability and even shame, surfacing sometimes over the most trivial matters but at other times, when the stakes were truly significant, hardening into a defensiveness that was impenetrable.

  * * *

  AFTER INTRODUCING ME to an old fellow across from the mosque who wore a prayer cap and sold fresh eggs and yogurt, Sinan took me to meet the simitçi. Simit is Turkey’s national snack. The classic simit is a ring of bread larger than a bagel and flatter, covered with sesame seeds. A simit vendor could be found every few paces from one end of Turkey to the other. Some pushed simit carts down the street as part of a municipal cooperative, and others carried trays of simit on their heads: the trays were twice the size of a large pizza pan, and the simit was piled as high as a wedding cake. When the simitçi encountered a customer, he would stop and squat slowly, until the tray on his head was low enough that the person could select a simit from the stack. The random passerby was entrusted to choose even at the risk of toppling the entire pile of simit onto the sidewalk.

  There is another kind of simit: dense, bite-sized butter biscuits, their surfaces tanned with egg and sprinkled with black seeds. These could be savory or sweet; tuzlu or tatlı. Sinan asked the woman at the simit shop for half a kilo of each kind, and after she gave him two brimming gray paper sacks, he handed them to me. I tried to give him money but he refused.

  “A welcome gift,” he said. “You’re still tired from traveling and need something to eat until you do your shopping.”

  Turks and their glorious hospitality; what it meant was that nearly every foreigner who set foot in Turkey fell in love with the place within minutes. In Islam, guests were considered messengers from the almighty; an unexpected visitor was called tanrı misafiri, a guest from God, and to treat them as anything less was a spiritual failure. Before I had spent time in Turkey, it drove me crazy when American friends or acquaintances made a trip there and returned with stories of the generosity they encountered. I didn’t want to hear it. It felt like a big con, designed to distract from abuses both current and historical. But I was quickly seduced, too, and that particular enchantment never really broke; it only stretched to accommodate new realizations.

  Taking in the delights of the neighborhood with Sinan, I had nearly forgotten where I was—or rather, who I was. My reverie was interrupted by a thought: would Sinan be as kind to me if he knew that I was Armenian? I felt almost guilty not having told him, as though he had the right to know what he had gotten himself into by renting an apartment to me. This wasn’t just paranoia; if the label “Armenian journalist” would never have been neutral in Turkey, in the weeks after Hrant’s murder it evoked actual danger. Would my phone be tapped? Would my windows be watched? And if something went wrong, whose side would the landlord be on?

  * * *

  I DECIDED TO tell Ertan what I was paying in rent, but I rounded the number down by about 20 percent, wanting first to gauge his reaction.

  “Is that liras or dollars?” he asked.

  “Euros,” I admitted.

  “That is very, very expensive.”

  With the landlord I had worried about seeming like an Armenian cheapskate, but with Ertan I felt the burden of being American, as if I carelessly tossed money around everywhere I went. The truth was, I had arranged to rent the apartment before I’d even arrived, using a fancy online brokerage service, knowing full well I’d be paying too much, because it promised to be a more or less anonymous transaction. If there was one thing I needed at least the illusion of in order to feel comfortable taking up residence in Turkey, it was anonymity.

  “You should have asked me for help,” Ertan said, sounding irritated. “That is really too expensive.”

  I figured I might as well understand the full cost of my cautionary measures. “Would you say it’s grotesquely expensive?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he nodded, smiling appreciatively now. “Grotesquely.”

  Because Ertan translated literature for a living, he took pleasure in certain words I used in English, and I, in turn, took pleasure in introducing them to him. Both of us had an endless attention span for etymology and linguistics, which was a nice but inefficient point of compatibility for a journalist and her interpreter. One day he called me from his job at the publishing house to ask about the word
“whitewash.” We chatted for a good fifteen minutes as I explained the many different connotations. It could mean concealing the truth, I said, as in “Turkey whitewashes the story of what happened to the Armenians.” Or, in the American context, it could be a metaphor for issues of race relations, implying that white was somehow purifying, or that black culture was being undermined. Ertan listened patiently throughout my lecture, offering an “I see!” or “That’s very interesting!” now and then. Also, I concluded, it could simply refer to a kind of thin, white paint. I gave the example of a scene from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom whitewashed a fence. “How is it used in your text?” I finally asked.

  “It is used in reference to building materials. The people in a village are painting a wall in the traditional whitewashed style.”

  * * *

  DENIZ HAD TOLD us to meet him in an out-of-the-way pastry shop. As we waited, I asked Ertan to tell me more about his friend. I had been fortunate to find Ertan, but it seemed unlikely there would be too many more people like him: fluent in Turkish and English and comfortable talking about the Armenian genocide with strangers.

  “Deniz is very, very smart,” Ertan said. “He is much smarter than me, and his English is much better.”

  Just then, an olive-skinned fellow appeared at our table, grinning. It was a grin that looked mischievous, then and ever after, because his upper lip peaked higher on the left side when he smiled. He had thick black eyebrows, black eyes, and the soft black curls of a Middle Eastern cherub. Wire-rimmed glasses added a hint of gravitas. Deniz had arrived.

  “What’s up, dudes?” he said, shaking my hand. Deniz had completed part of his doctoral course work in New York, and could have just as easily been discussing Lacan in English. He delivered his favorite bits of American slang with an extra-heavy accent, intentionally making fun of himself for trying to sound colloquial. He sat down and placed a silver tobacco case on the table, opened it to reveal a jumble of brown shreds and white filters, and began to roll a cigarette. The three of us sat silently as he rolled and rerolled until it was just right.

  The purpose of our meeting was to discuss my plans for interviewing people about the Armenian issue: where I wanted to go, who I wanted to meet, and how we would divide the work. I suggested we go down the list so they could get a sense of my intentions, and then we could decide who would join me for each interview.

  The first few names I mentioned drew nods and sounds of recognition. A prominent human rights lawyer—“Yes, I know her very well, that will be no problem,” said Ertan; or a sociologist noted for his renegade views—“He is in my department at the university, I can ask him,” said Deniz. A few newspaper columnists, some activists, various community leaders. They added suggestions of their own, nodding approvingly at each other as I wrote down the names.

  I had organized my list into two categories: minority views and mainstream views. As I passed from the first list to the second, suddenly the affirmative murmurs from Ertan and Deniz ceased. I continued reading names. I thought I noticed a smile taking shape on Ertan’s face, and then—just after I said, “Yusuf Halaçoğlu, the president of the Turkish Historical Society”—Deniz burst into a high-pitched, nervous laugh.

  “What?” I said.

  “Why do you want to talk to those people?” Deniz asked, now giggling like a schoolgirl.

  “Don’t you think it would be fascinating to understand what goes on in their minds?” I said.

  “Why do you think anything goes on in their minds?” he said, laughing more, now joined by Ertan, and finally by me, the three of us soon clutching our stomachs and rattling the cups on the small table between us.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “But the whole point of my project is to find a way to connect with people who don’t already think the same as me.”

  “Yes, you may be right,” Ertan said, getting serious again. “It is important for you to talk to people with different opinions. My parents live in Ankara. We can go there to interview Yusuf Halaçoğlu and we will stay at their house. It will be a good excuse to make my mother happy.”

  I continued on with the list of nationalists and known Armenian-haters, they snickered a few times and made some jokes, and then I reached the last name on my list.

  “Kemal Kerinçsiz.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “He’s that lawyer, you know, the one who—”

  “We know who he is,” said Ertan.

  Neither of them was smiling now. Kemal Kerinçsiz was the lawyer who brought charges against Hrant. He was the one who distorted Hrant’s comments and set off the smear campaign that led to his murder. More direct connections to the murder would surface later. He was also the head of the Great Union of Jurists, a group of lawyers who sought to revive the dream of a pan-Turkic empire that would stretch all the way to China.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ertan. “I cannot participate in that interview.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Are you afraid that you could get in trouble?”

  “I am not afraid,” Ertan said.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “It’s simple. I will not sit in the same room with that monster.”

  I looked at Deniz. He shook his head.

  * * *

  MY INTERPRETERS BELONGED to a tiny but vocal outer fringe of Turks, a cohort of activists, journalists, sociologists, historians, and lawyers who, for reasons much broader than the Armenian issue, had nonetheless taken up the Armenian issue, had accepted that Turkey needed to acknowledge what happened in 1915. Risking lawsuits and death threats, some of them freely called it genocide; others did not necessarily embrace the word, but pushed for more openness on the subject anyway.

  The genocide, however, was only a small piece of the picture: these people were committed to a larger vision of a democratic society. They favored greater cultural rights for Turkey’s Kurds, drastic changes to the way women were treated (even though Turkey’s secular elite liked to believe that Atatürk’s fascistic decrees for gender equality, like ordering police to rip the head scarves off old women, had settled the issue), and saw a society-wide need to acknowledge the hardships that minorities, including Greeks and Jews, had faced in Ottoman times and throughout the decades since. They considered the power of the military a fundamental problem, and the consequent obsession with national security—used as an excuse for all sorts of prohibitions—as the greatest symptom of this problem.

  These views would seem unsurprising to many Westerners, similar to the ideals of liberals in any society. But in Turkey, people like Ertan and Deniz were radicals. They needed to be understood as completely distinct from another type of liberal, a subset that confounded the assumptions of, say, an American journalist: this subset was popularly known as “White Turks.”

  For the first few months I spent in Turkey, I tried to flesh out the particulars of what it meant to be a White Turk, asking Ertan and Deniz small anthropological questions nearly every day. The label had nothing to do with skin tone. It described somebody who had all the superficial trappings of the West: stylish clothes, stylish interests (photography was a big one, along with yoga), and most likely an academic degree from somewhere in Europe or the United States—but despite these surface signs of being open-minded, believed strongly in Turkey’s staunchly nationalist, secularist old guard, also known as the Kemalist establishment, after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This old guard fetishized the goal of modernity—Atatürk’s great project for Turkey—but was often intolerant and even tyrannical in service of it. The Kemalist doctrine was inhospitable not only to ethnic minorities but also to excessively pious Muslims, whose head scarves and baggy pants the White Turk found embarrassing.

  The White Turk might have gay friends, and might like edgy contemporary art, but he would also do entirely un-edgy things now and then, like replace his Facebook photo with a Turkish flag or a favorite image of Atatürk gazing down upon the world. Baskın Oran, the Agos columnist, described White Turks as people who wer
e “appropriate citizens according to the State.” (At the time I was in Turkey, Oran’s summary still perfectly described the power dynamics there; but a sea change was taking shape. Before long, pious Muslims would have unprecedented power, while White Turks would be left feeling like underdogs.)

  Most Americans and Europeans would be captivated by the White Turks they met—how seamlessly they embodied that elusive East-West balance—until they made the mistake of bringing up one of three untouchable issues: Armenians, Kurds, or the fact that there was a picture of Atatürk in every store and office across the nation. Then their new friend’s fuse would blow and the complexities of the typology would reveal themselves.

  * * *

  DENIZ WAS AN Alevi Kurd from the province of Tunceli, formerly Dersim. Alevis were Muslim, but practiced a more liberal variant that was influenced by Sufism. Alevis could be Turkish or Kurdish; either way, they faced persecution from the mainstream Sunni Muslim community, which considered them heretics. If the two most problematic identities in Turkey at the dawn of the twenty-first century were Armenian and Kurdish, Alevi was in third place. As an Alevi Kurd, Deniz had two of the three categories covered, and to make it a hat trick, he also had an Armenian girlfriend, a woman from Istanbul who was completing her PhD abroad. This made me see him as something like a cousin. When he introduced me to his mother, a modest, elderly lady, she hugged me over and over and said to Deniz, “Are you sure she’s not from Dersim? She looks like one of ours.”