A Portrait of the City

(I am doing little scetches around the city at the moment, word sketches--taking a break from the heavy political stuff)

 

Here, every day, the giant sits outside his cafe puffing on his nargile with his right hand and mashing buttons on his cell phone with his left. He has a shaved head and a black goatee and wears heavy metal concert shirts that hug his bulky body. Tattoos peek out from under both sleeves, and it so tight that every fold and mound of flesh is clearly outlined under the T’s. One would not call him movie-star muscular—he has bulk that is more bar-bouncer frightening than inspiring, and though not quite fat, aggressive lumps and masses of flesh push the limits of that tortured shirt until at the shoulders, pectorals, belly, and sides it seemed ready to burst. Over his head hangs a banner that proudly advertises—ALCOHOL FREE EFES BEER SERVED HERE--though he himself does not look particularly alcohol free.  He is friends with the couple who run the pink painted yoga studio on the other side of the alleyway. They lean out the window from time to time to shout down at him—requests for linden tea or a simple greeting. She is a frail girl with pale river-nymph skin and a bird-song voice.  Her boyfriend is a lean serious faced twenty-something with curly hair that pours out of his scalp like a jungle vine.

The giant’s brother—nearly alike in hair style, body shape and fashion choices, manages the ALCOHOL FULL bar next door. The two brothers rarely speak. The brother’s bar is set into the four floors of a narrow Pre-Republic home (most likely Greek), with the usual cluster of tables out front in the street. Portraits of famous leftists cover every inch of the walls—reverent photos of Che Guevara, Deniz Geçmiş, Nazım Hikmet, Hrant Dink, and Lech Walesa. The shelves of the bar itself are lined with bottles he has collected from the eskici over the years—a Moldavian Brandy from the Soviet Years, an empty rakı bottle from the 40s, a jug of cheap wine from the U.S., unopened bottles of British Champagne.  He has asked, but the eskici never tells him the secret of his finds. Where in the world does a collector of street junk come up with these extinct varieties of alcohol in a country rapidly clamping down on imbibing of all sorts?

Maside Bar in Kadıköy

The skinny eskici can often be found leaning against the wall of the bar as customers from all four floors swarm down to pick through his stuff. He wears the blue vest that all Kadıköy eskicis wear and a white baseball cap with faded lettering.  Smoking under the grapevines, he simply smiles with pride at the frenzy his finds produce and answer every excited inquiry into prices with an outpuff of smoke and a soft-spoken, ‘Well, that all depends…’. He could simply wait here for an hour and make over a hundred lira. When other eskicis pass—with carts full of metal wire and a tire, or a single box of old magazines and a broken electric kettle—they gaze at him with defeated envy. His cart is a mountain of useful junk, every day, a traveling bazaar, an ambulatory version of the best garage sales in the US. He has vintage clothes that would go for a bundle back in the thrift shops of Boston—old furs, seventies bell bottoms, tacky blouses, big hats with feathers, scarlet shoes with gold roses on the toes, tube tops. He has costume jewelry, old disco records, gaudily painted dishes, rhinestone purses, road atlases in Russian and Turkish of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and various other countries that don’t quite exist anymore.

The Everyday Morning Walk to Catch My Ride

Thrown against the curb in a sprawl of gray and white feathers was a seagull. Its head turned toward me as I approached, the eyes like glass, but no, not like glass--alive, but reflecting a mind that was utterly alien. A cat batted the tips of its wings, a small little thing. This was just a prelude. There would be others—the streets swarmed with them--and one would certainly kill it. The bird bore the cat, seemingly indifferent, tilting its head up at me as I passed. There was no sign of blood, or injury, or fear. Its feathers were as white and clean as milk. Its beak curved and yellow and as flawless as newly minted plastic.


The sky was a powdery blue and pink--all the warm luxury of summer mornings here. The man at the cheese shop was sweeping the sidewalk. I nodded as I passed.

There is a rhythm to my walk—this white-frocked owner of this cheese shop, the rhythm swishes of his broom, the fat young man waiting for his service bus, the ruins of the Byzantine tower, the smells of poğaca wafting from the bakery, the blue minibus at the light, the doting mother and her little boy waiting for their own service, who wore jackets no matter how hot the weather, the smoking taxi drivers at the four way.

And today the gull.

Death was settling around that bird like snow. It fell slowly, and covered more with each passing second.  The animal waited with the same momentum that had made it circle our rooftops in search of food and fucking. What the hell is the magic word that animated this thing that soon would be a pile of bloody meat, and then bones, and then nothing?

Karabaş Otu

We weave among the weeds, among puffs of pollen yellow and white. A path cuts through the underbrush. In the brush, we gather lavender flowers. Their soapy smell soaks the air and our fingers and our shirts.


‘It’s not regular lavender,’ she says. ‘It’s called ‘Black Headed Lavender’. You boil it to make blue tea, which, everyone on the island tells me is, great for memory.’

The path ends on the red cliffs. There is a red rock stairway in the cliffwall and we zig zag sliding down, back and forth among the thistle and juniper and brine. A green peninsula of grass and rocks just out into the sea back toward the other islands and Istanbul. There’s no garbage yet because the season hasn’t started. We are alone.

A boat teeters against the white sinking sun, the shape of the sail blotted out by light. I take off my shirt, and for the first time in months, feel the touch of ultraviolet on my chest. Every cell tingles and unfolds itself to the sun. She sits beside me. I rest my head on her shoulder—the wool fibers of the sweater hot from the same light that heats the rocks.

‘This is Martha’s Beach. There was a family that used to live in that stone house there, just inside that copse of cedar or pine or whatever. The mother was Lebanese-Armenian, and everyone kind of made fun of her for being Armenian. And she was different in other ways, too. They said she would go swimming here in the nude, do different crazy things. And so they made fun of her, you know, for like a long time until one day, she went out into the water and drowned herself.’

‘And now it’s Martha’s beach.’

‘Now it’s Martha’s Beach forever.’

The shore crackles with waves on white stone streaked with sharp stripes of rust orange. We call out ‘Martha! Martha!’ A seagull sits motionless on a rock in a puddle of light.

‘I wouldn’t say that too loud,’ she says. ‘Martha’s children still live in the house.’

The stone cottage is surrounded by garbage—plastic chips bags, a blue pipe, an armless doll with the eyes burnt white by the sun and sea. Two teenagers are camping beneath a clearing in the pines. They poke sticks in the water and wave as we pass. The boy has a long scruffy dark beard, the girl puffs and puffs of tight curly hair. They wear black concert T-Shirts.

‘In the summer, all sorts of people stay here. They build rock shelters in the trees or wood huts.’

‘And the kids don’t mind?’

‘Those guys?’

‘No. Martha’s kids.’

The path that leads up to the road is guarded by a pony-sized white dog. He is not looking at us, but sniffing the wind, his ears down and his eyes half closed. He belongs here. As we pass, he moves in front of us and leads us up another flight of stone stairs that are now wearing away and crumbling. We slide over pine straw and gravel—hang on to shrubs as we move up. The dog looks back when we struggle.

At the top, he turns back and starts the return descent. Between twig and branch and trunk and shrub, you can see an orange plasmal glitter—the kids have started a fire in the beach.

The wind is cold up here on the hill. It swirls down past the houses, runs along the empty streets and loses itself in the wall of trees that hide the paths to Martha’s Beach. We follow the road down toward houses, past an old monastery, past the almond trees and their pink blossoms and the caretaker’s shack with gourds hanging on strings.

The sun is setting—the city across the water is being swallowed in a pink smog. The sun is spinning down into the horizon and everything is filled with the sound of wind moving through it as if the breaths of the island itself were withdrawing back down into the way we came, into the rock and weed and stone and sea.

I pull her close to me and bury my face in her black hair. She smells of heat and cut lavender and gathering bees. There once was a whole field of lavender, on the opposite side of the world. The girls were just eight then—it was before almost everything. And the swaying purple reached all the way to the low green hills and there was ice cream and a horse for the tourists and a woman in yellow shading her eyes and old friends laughing as they sank deep deep into the flowers and remained there, waiting all this while.

One must have a mind of (Istanbul) winter

There’s no snow, but it’s cold in Istanbul. And it’s 11:00 and though it is Friday, the streets are as quiet and deserted as 3 AM on a Tuesday. I love this about winter. The air is clear and crisp. All the stars are bristling above the buildings, the frosty air burns my lungs, but it also wakes me up. I feel very aware. There is the occasional lone figure wandering far ahead of me. Always a male, wrapped in heavy coats and sweaters and hats, bent against the wind, his hands shoved down in his pockets. But mostly I am alone. I walk the back streets of my neighborhood. There’s a green grocery sitting inside his shop. A string of naked lightbulbs hang over crates of radishes outside on the sidewalk...these are the only lights on the whole street and they glow like moons. The green grocer himself sits inside watching a small television. A space heater sits at his feet and the windows of his shop are completely fogged. Why is he even open at this hour?


Tonight Delal, her sister Zelal, her grandfather and I had shish kebab and went shopping. Tomorrow is the engagement ceremony and despite all the insistence that it’s all going to be very informal, we have spent a lot of time talking about exactly what we’re supposed to do. I have to buy gifts—earrings for her father and a book for her mother. I just typed that backward. The earrings are for her mother. Certain things must be said—my father should say them, but without a Ouija board, he can’t say a thing so a friend is going to say it in place of him. Someone must get chocolates (me). Her grandfather has suspicions that the wedding rings we have bought are actually silver and not white gold as we claim.

For weeks I have been tense about the looming wedding related shenanigans, but tonight, walking home, I just smiled and smiled. 
The streets are gorgeous when they are empty like this. Long swaths of quiet quiet shadow. A man sitting on his stoop in the dark—the orange light of his cigarette the only thing giving him away. A sudden lighted basement window in a tailor’s shop. The place is tiny—barely room for two men to stand inside. There is a Singer sewing machine on a table surrounded by scraps of cloth. A chair full of multi colored spools. It looks like someone has just left. Or like ghosts are still working here, or something else invisible.

The gypsy warren of houses are mostly empty—most of them will be down in the center of town this time of night. They’re houses are all pushed together around a central courtyard invisible from the road, all small, all leaning slightly, all patched with boards and pieces of scrap metal and painted a bright pink. There’s a bubble gum colored house at the front of the complex. All the windows are covered over in boards nailed haphazardly in overlapping X’s and crosses and then painted over in the cotton candy pink. The roof is make of a bushy vine pouring up and over the eaves. It looks like a hobbit house. A woman is hanging clothes in the courtyard. Most of the others are musicians. They will be in the restaurants drumming or singing or playing the zurna or tambur. Delal and I will have a band of them at our wedding. Gypsy music is the best. Drummer and fife.

There’s an alley way and a gigantic graffitti fork painted in luminous silver. Under it in yellow letters it says ‘Illegal Sanat’ (Illegal art). A cat jumps from the dumpster and pads away and then more silence and cold and shadow. I remember a Wallace Stephens poem I love...it’s about snow, but it could be just as easliy about this silence here now.

It begins ‘One must have a mind of winter’ (Which tonight I do) and ends like this.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

A Simple Description Then (in light of my last post)

Last night, around midnight, I was walking home from the bus stop down by the sea. You have to go straight up a very steep hill through one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kadıköy, called Yeldeğermeni (The Windmills). The waning moon shone between the buildings, luminous white but blurry from the coal smoke that hung in the air.

The coal stank.

The whole hillside used to be a cemetery in Roman times and I guessed that several feet down the tombs most likely still lay rotting beneath the soil.

I had to pass through an alleyway next to Kadıköy’s only remaining synagogue (This whole neighborhood used to be Jewish according to Delal’s grandfather and the Jewish museum, but now it was mostly Kurdish). The security lights switched on illuminating the yellow walls and the graffitti written there--Say no to the AK Party! Berk hearts Dilara—and the lone tree growing out of the brick walkway made a pool of shadow right in the center. The doors to the court yard are made of steel and always bolted and locked. There’s razor wire around the perimeter and cameras in the alleyway that seem to follow you as you walk, the red light on the lenses like something out of a Terminator movie. There was an old man in a suit with briefcase in hand standing at the other end of the alley (where a cornice has an engraving in Hebrew) being held steady by a woman with long frizzy hair. The man was drunk and bleary eyed and kept shouting ‘I love you! Do you know that? I love you so much!’ as the woman tried to shush him looking anxiously up and down the quiet streets. She kept putting her hand over his mouth, but he’d dart away and shout again ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’ until she laughed. (I thought of the Aziz Nesin story I translated a while back, the one where the old man goes around the world shouting ‘I love you, Tülsü’ to a woman he’s never met).

A little ways down I stopped and turned around to watch them, but pretended to be looking into a shop window. The window was dark of course, it was midnight, but I found myself staring at a picture of Mohammed Ali in a poster sized photograph shaking hands with a Turkish guy dressed in seventies style clothes. ‘Cassius Clay and Master Ertaş’ it said in sprawling penmanship. This was a martial arts studio—I discovered as I backed up and saw all the Chinese characters on the sign—where master Ertaş taught judo, karate,boxing and Tae Kwon Do. And this meeting with Mr. Ali was his claim to fame. I peered into the window—trophies, karate uniforms, a poster of Bruce Lee. And then my breath fogged the glass.

Sunday Morning

I've been doing these Sunday vignettes occasionally, so here goes.

Delal and I crossed the water to Europe.  We had brunch in the fish market--a very fresh plate of fried hamsi--and then took a tour of the Jewish museum near Tunel.  It was a pretty interesting display of stuff--I saw the Torah for the first time, and the Holy of Holies where the Ark resides.  It also had a display on the Jews of Istanbul--apparently, my neighborhood used to be a Jewish one.  There's an old synagogue I jog by sometimes circled by walls and razor wire.


FRIED HAMSI!!!

Anyway, after all this was done we went to the seaside where a red faced old man had set up a tea stall.  We sat down at a plastic table and relaxed in the first sun we've seen in about two weeks.  The Golden Horn was blue.  The sky was blue.  Something Delal pointed out:  The scene before us was built on layers of stillness and movement.  The ferries were darting frantically past each other, rolling in the waves.  The Sultan's palace stuck out over the tree tops behind on the other side, looking the way it has looked for centuries.  A line of fisherman sat rigidly still along the water.  Between us and them, hundreds of pedestrians passed almost as quickly as the ferries.  A group of old men sat around a table, barely moving.  Occasionally raising a hand and circling it in the air to illustrate a point.  A fight broke out between some other men on the corner--one had apparently ran off with the other's shoes during prayers at a nearby mosque.  We sat and sipped tea and talked until it was time to cross the water back home.



Here is a tree at the Sultan's Palace....

Two Sketches

Lights

The lights.  There are no street lights in my neighborhood, and the dark is big.  Chunks of shadowed street between the black shapes of buildings, a black sky, black hulks of dilapidated houses crushed between apartment blocks.  There are figures, a group of kids on the corner eating sunflower seeds, but all featureless, shades in the summer night heat.  There is a man walking toward me.  I smell the cologne on him before I see him.  And me, lost in shadow.

The lights on the buildings seem to take on significance, they reflect back strange and alien and make me more isolated.  The strange blinking red light on the second floor of one building, the line of orange glowing door bells on the entrance to another, the flickering blue of televisions, the bare white light illuminating bedrooms with people hanging out the window.  It's eerie, these pools of illumination.

Chris

Chris is a young Englishman I occasionally hang out with here in Kadikoy.  Everyone says he looks like Harry Potter, but he's more the love child of Harry Potter and Peter Parker--Tobey McGuire's Peter Parker.  Beardless, whiskerless, round glasses, big innocent eyes.  He looks like a startled elf.  Chris has a reputation for being perpetually perky.  He is never unhappy, never grumpy, never complains.

We are having a beer and talking about odd jobs we'd had as students.  I exaggerate, of course, and turn my interview with the funeral parlor back in '99 into a full fledged summer job.  I describe body pick-ups in the middle of the night, cremations, embalmings.  Chris asks me, "Why would you take a job like that?"  "I'm afraid of death," I tell him.  "And I thought it would be a good way to face it."

This is true enough.  That is why I applied.  He crinkles up his Tobey McGuire face--something about his skin always looks a little too tightly fit over the bones, like it might tear if he strains it--"Why would anyone be afraid of death?"

"It's a pretty common fear, I think," I answer.

"You think so?" he asks.

"Yes!  It's been motivating people throughout history, or rather, terrifying the shit out of them throughout history.  I mean, it's been an issue for everybody, man.  The ancient Greek philosophers talked about it--the Stoics, the Epicureans.  From Heidegger to the Buddhists to my friend from high school, every philosopher in the world, real and armchair, addresses it.  Hell, it's not just people who fear it.  Try to crush a bug.  It runs!  It doesn't want to die.  Death fear is everywhere, man."

Cats are yowling around us.  It's fish street and the vendors are closing up shop.  Srays are prowling around for heads and entrails.

"Maybe," Chris says.  "I just take comfort in knowing that we all go to the same place in the end.  I think it's nice.  Think about it.  We are all traveling together toward the same end, no one is exempt.  It's rather elegant."

In addition to cat yowls, his words are punctuated by the Turkish pop song on the loudspeakers and the gypsy girl down the sidewalk, playing on her drums and singing folksongs.

"I'm sure it is," I say, "But you gotta understand that a lot of people don't feel that way, and they're in the majority."

"You really think so?"

"Okay, it's a part of life and all that crap, and we all are journeying to the same end, but there's a lot of suffering to get there, often, and I don't like seeing my loved ones go through that.  Or myself.  It's just scary.  Jesus!"

"Maybe it's the unknown," he concedes.  "People are afraid because they don't know what's coming after?"

"Yes," I say.  "The unknown.  Okay, let's say, you're completely wrong.  You're Catholic, but the Jews or the Muslims are right or whatever and so you're going to burn in hell because you cast your lot in with the wrong crowd.  Oops, right?  How were you to know?  But now you're forever in hell.  Just burning and screaming, your skin popping and melting and cracking in the heat forever and ever and ever and ever.  Eternal pain.  You hurt so much you think of nothing else but the pain.  Isn't that scary?"  Ahh, the Baptist in me comes out.  We know hell better than anybody, I think.

He pauses, shrugs, pushes up his glasses.  "If I go to hell, I'll just make the best of it, I guess."

I sit back, "Make the best of it?"

"Yeah," he says in his long, drawn-out British vowels.  He grins, shrugs, takes a swig of beer.  "You know, you're there.  You can't do anything about it.  You might as well look on the bright side.  You could be on a deeper level getting sodomized by a demon or something, someone with a burning sword.  So sit back and thank God you're only burning."

Word Photographs of an Evening Walk in Kadikoy--my house to town

The sun has winked out of the sky, and all the bright light--it's all sunset pinks and cool blues now, and boys' voices shout up from the street--a pair moving down either side calling out to each other.  The sandy slide of a ball skiffed across the pavement.  They've all bought ice cream, lemon pops, and they make their way down the narrow sidewalk tossing rocks, kicking plastic bottles, and stopping to pick up bits of shiny metal which they investigate--all the while licking at their lemon pops, dark yellow tongues--before discarding with a backward toss.  At one point, they stop to watch a cat take a shit.  One of the them squats down to get a better look.  The cat turns its back to them, its ears flattening in annoyance.  A group of teenage boys pile into a car blasting bass from giant speakers in the back.  A girl in a black tank top walks fast toward the main road, ogled from the right by a kid smoking on his stoop and waved at from the left by the middle aged man who runs the convenience store on the corner.  Old men play backgammon on tables on the sidewalk--the stones click on the board.  The neighborhood twilight has life, movement, light, sound.  It's like my old Florida neighborhood--the heat in the day breaking, we kids playing kickball in the street, neighbors shouting to each other as they water their lawns.  I barely remember being a kid--the feeling of it--but I ghosts of feeling move through me sometime, seizures of sensation, like when I see the one boy's tank top, dusty and bright blue, the iron-on letter flaking off, and then look down at his bare black feet.  More than memory is triggered.  I blink and I am there, eight again, wearing the same thing.  He shouts, "Abi, bak!"  Look man.  And his friend laughs.  The whoosh of traffic on the main road.  The beep of horns.  The sudden burst of the ezan.  Allah Akbar!

Turn down the alleyway, cross the parking lot, the right lane.

A line of roses down the median makes a stripe of red all the way down toward the peach and wine fire sky, the colors framed by the bushy green of mulberry trees that line the road and the neon sign of the Nautilus center.  The hunch back Gypsy woman--no more than four feet tall--sits and waits for the light to change so she can sell packs of tissue to stopped cars. She wears a turquoise sweater and an orange checked skirt, and nibbles sunflower seeds with a bored scowl as cars whizz past her.  She's respected around here.  Shopkeepers call her hanim and teyze (madam and auntie) when she passes.  She stops to chat with them sometimes.  She walks with a cane  because her back is bent nearly 90 degrees.  Huge black eyes like pools of dark tea.  Above her, a moon the color of luminous vanilla ice cream has just cleared the tops of the middle school on the corner.  It's brightening with darkening sky, whiter and whiter and whiter.  A screech of brakes, a cat meowing from the fence on the edge of the graveyard shadows.  The crinkle of a plastic as a man loaded down with shopping bags hops across the median and makes a dash for the other side.  The ezan is reaching a crescendo.  Haya 'alas-salaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

Left lane.  Down the sidewalk and turn right, over the bridge.

There's a pretty Gypsy girl in green with a lithe body and dusty skin.  Her face is an all-business scowl--she's collecting cardboard boxes from piles of garbage in the street.  She has a three-wheeled cart that she pulls around with a huge white muslin sack tied to the back.  The handles of the cart are so tall that when she lets go of it, they snap up above her head and she has to jump up to pull them back down.  She wears a long flowered skirt and has long messy black hair, streaked here and there with red.  She has long, skinny pale arms that work like pistons as she rapid-fire folds the boxes into shapes that will fit into her bag.  She is collecting from a load of trash next to the parking lot where my favorite old dog lives.  Old yellow.  He sits on the pavement all day and ignoring everything around him with sleepy eyes.  Blinking and blinking, wearily.  Sometimes, I'll scratch his head and he'll close his eyes all the way until I'm finished and then walk me home.  The ezan has stopped, the last echo dying away.  There's a chorus of car engines now, the quiet chug of a cab, the high whine of a moving trunk speeding toward the light, the rattle clatter of a minibus, the muffler burps of an old Subaru.  A motorcycle bounces over a grate and honks his horn.

Down past my old school, past the bakery and minibus road onto the pedestrian walk where cars go anyway

An old tree, leafless and rough skinned, writhes from the pedestrian road next to the tea shop.  A pile of bikes tangle against a light pole.  Three teenage girls pass by with a basketball, the thick shouldered one in the lead dribbles and walks fast, making the other two have to trot to keep up.  Light radiates out in a circle of white from the cafe.  It doesn't quite reach the tree.  A woman sits at a table outside, her feet kicked up on the chair opposite her.  A little boy charges up to her, too much momentum to stop himself and so she catches him and whirls him into the chair next to her.  "Mommy!" he cries.  He's got a Sesame Street shirt on and oversized shorts.  A man in a football jersey lopes up behind him, hands digging in his shorts pocket, and says, "Ahh, so you'd rather sit with Mommy!"  The sound of spoons stirring sugar into tea glasses.  Shopping cart wheels rattling across bricks.  A man jingles keys in his pockets.  Techno music thump thump thumping from a clothes shop across the street.

A little down

A little girl in pink--shorts, T-shirt, sandals all a bright bubble gum--reads in front of a rack of purses hanging outside a women's wear shop.  A glass case filled with more purses stands behind her, illuminated in bright naked bulbs.  She brushes a swath of black hair behind her ear and kicks at the ground as she reads.  Her father--a pot bellied man in a tight white T--closes up shop behind her.  One by one the lights blink out and she bends closer and closer to the page.  She sniffs and drags a finger across her nose.  There's a chorus of footfalls, a legion of shoes.  The clunk clunk of heavy boots, the pad of a child's sneakers racing across the cement, the shuffle of sandals, the lazy snap of flip flops, the rapid click of heels.

To the end, where we empty into the main road

The Fountain of Lord Halid, 1794.  It's an old Ottoman fountain, cool white marble inscribed with flaking gold Arabic letters and floral flourishes.  The spigots have long run dry.  It has been graffitied all over.  Black letters right across its belly have all been scrawled out, save the words ederkken ("while doing") and lan (something like "hey, asshole").  There's a Wienerwald scooter parked in front--a plastic green box on the back with the white logo of a giant chicken.  To the side, the green ATM of Garanti Bank.  A girl stands on one leg in front of the screen, kind of pivoting left and right as she types a number into the console.  Beeps.  Her other leg lets her sandals almost fall, but she catches it with her toes.  Her purse hangs from her elbow.  The light from the screen illuminates her face and neck in a pale green.  A second Wienerwald cycle whizzes up and parks next to the first.  The driver wears a huge black helmet which he whisks off to replace immediately with a green cap.  He's tall and slumps as he walks, loping into the bright light of Wienerwald with his heat-sealed food bag swinging from his right hand.  He strides past a woman with dish-sponge blond hair, spooning pudding into her mouth.  Cell phone conversations.  Car horns.  The hum of the freezer of an ice cream vendor.  The electronic voice of radio news.

The sky is purple black now.  The moon a luminous ball of white over the stature of the bull.  (Everyone waits here, for lovers, for friends, for dates).  Venus hangs on the other side of the sky.   A cat stops to watch me write--a skinny black and white thing.  Its ears won't stop twitching.

Ögrenci Ürür, Kervan Yürür

WARNING:  NO ENGLISH HERE.  THIS IS THE DOG STORY FROM TWO MONTHS AGO

Fenerbahçe Lise'de öğretirken...

Sabahlarım

Jeff Gibbs

Zor ya! Erken kalkmak zor, benim için. Bu günlerde saat beş buçukta
ayaktayım ama ne zihnim ne bedenim uyanık. Penceremden baktığımda,
gökyüzü pembe ve altın ışıkla yanıyor, Jeff yüzü bembeyaz, gözlerim
kırmızı, yanıyor. Ben her saba böyleyim. Zorla giyinir, zorla çıkarım. İşyerime beni götüren bir servis var. Saat yediyi on gece kalkar. Her sabah ben geç kalıyorum ama benim yüzümden değil sanırım. Bir sabah benim cep telefonumun saatine göre saat yediyi beş geçiyordu. Ama servisteki saatine göre on iki geçiyordu.
'Hocam, geç kaldınız! Beklettiniz!' dedi şoför, gülerek. Saatim geri kaldığını sandım. Ertesi sabah beş dakika ileriye ayarladım ama yine 'Hocam, geç kaldınız! Beklettiniz!' diye söylendi, yine
servisteki beş dakika ilerideydi. Bir iki hafta böyle devam etti.

Sevgililer günü için hediye olarak sevgilimden bir kol saati aldım. Onu kendisi ayarlamıştı. Fakat,
ertesi gün servise gittiğimde, şoför

'Hocam, geç kaldınız ya' diyerek söylendi.

Şüphelendim. Gelecek sabah uydudan saati alan bilgisayarımın saatine göre hem kol saatimi hem de cep telefonumun saatimi ayarladım. Çıktım, gittim. Şoför, yine, gülerek,

'Hocam, geç kaldınız ya!'

Allah Allah! Tamam, dedim, kendi kendime. Bir deneme yapayım. Ertesi sabah,
ev arkadaşımın saatini de ödünç alıp taktım. Yani benim ayarlamadığım iki kol saatim
vardı. Ayrıca de cep telefonumunki vardı. Yoldayken her geçtiğim dükkanın duvar saatine bakarak benimkini kontrol ettim. Yolda yürüyen birine sorarak da kontrol ettim. Tam zamanındaydım. Hatta
biraz erkendim. Saatlerimin hepsi yediyi beş gece gösteriyordu. Kendimden emin olarak servise bindim. Şoför gülerek:

'Hocam ya. Geç kaldınız! Bekledim!' dedi yine.

'Ama' dedim. 'İmkansız ya. Ben uyduya göre saatlerimi kontrol ediyorum. Uyduya'.

'Ben yalnızca bir servis şoförüm ya! Uydu muydu, ne bileyim!'

Olsun.  Bu servise (geç) binmek için, hep aynı yoldan geçiyorum. Oldukça büyük bir cadde. Öğleden sonra trafik o kadar yoğun ki, iğne atsan yere düşmez. Kaldırımda korna çalan arabalar sanki kıyamet gününden
kaçıyormuş gibi sabırsızlıkla bekliyorlar. Bu arada, İstanbullu için, her sorunun çözümü korna çalmaktır. Caddenin biri önünde dursa, korna çal. İşyerinde çok kötü gün görsen, korna çal. Arkadaşın vahim bir hastalık geçirse, korna çal. Oğlun, kızın sana kafa atsa, korna çal. Açsan, korna çal. Fazla yersen, korna çal. Hepsine korna korna korna! Bu yazımı sevmezsen de korna çal. Sevsen bile, korna çal. Derhal! Her yerde her zaman durmadan korna çalsın!

Neyse, benim çıktığım zaman, yani sabah altı buçukta, hiç trafik yok. Dakikada bir iki araba geçiyor. Bu bomboş yolda, her sabah aynı şeyi seyrediyorum. Bir köpek var, yolun tam ortasında. 'Tatlı ya!'
falan diyemiyorum. Hem uyuz hem kirli hem kulakları paramparça hem kuyruğu eğri büğrü. Sanki çok kanlı bir kavgadan yeni gelmiş gibi görünen bir it yani. Ama davranışı bambaşka. Bir asil aileden çıkıp
gelmiş gibi davranıyor. Yolun ortasındaki yeni dikilen kıpkırmızı çiçeklerin arasında oturuyor. Bacak bacak üstüne atıyor. Yok, daha doğrusu pati pati üstüne atıyor--bir pahalı Nişantaşındaki kahvehanede
capuccino içen bir hanım efendi gibi. Tam ışığın arkasında böyle bekliyor. Her gördüğü şeyi aşağılıyormuş gibi çevresine bakıyor. Bazen çok sıkılmış gibi esniyor.

Ötesinden bir araba gelip, kırmızı ışıkta duruyor. Köpek başını kaldırıp, 'sonunda garson geldi' diyen hanımefendi gibi arabaya bakıyor.

Işık yeşil yanınca, köpek beklemediğim bir hızla ayağa kalkıp, değişiyor. Bir anda tamamen çıldırmış gibi havlayıp hırlayarak arabayı kovalamaya koşuyor. Aynen kudurmuş köpek veya açlıktan ölmek üzere olan bir kurdun geyik gördüğü gibi arabayı saldırıyor. Araba ise, bu havlama karşısında birden duruyor. Şoför penceresini biraz açıp, 'Sus' diye bağırarak korna çalıyor (tabii ki). Hem de nasıl! Ama artık köpek hiç
umursamıyor. 'Benim işim bitti, arabayı durdurdum!' gibi duygusuyla, rahatlamış bir şekilde dönüp kendisini çiçeklerin arasındaki yerine atıyor. Yine pati pati üstüne atıyor, esneyerek beklemeye başlıyor, bir başka arabayı. Bir daha araba geldiğinde, bu süreç baştan başlıyor. Durdurulduğu araba ise, henüz gitmemiş oluyor. Köpeğe öfkeyle bakarak korna hala çalmaya devam ediyor.

Ben sadece on dakika seyrediyordum ama belki saatlerce devam ediyor bu işi, her sabah. Çok çalışkan bir hayvan, bu köpek. Keşke öğrencilerim ile değiştirebilirdim.

Öğrencilerim bu sokaktaki işe köpekten daha uygun olur. Sporcu oldukları için bayağı hızlı koşabilirler yani, arabayı kovalamakta üstlerine olmaz. Fakat tembel oldukları için 'Çok zor ya! Ne yapayım!'
diye yakınacaklardır. Olsun. Öyle yapsalar, arabalara rahatsız vermezler. Çiçeklerin arasında oturup, çiçekleri falan çiğneyebilirler, köpeğin yaptığı gibi. Ama o köpek ya! Sınıfta nasıl öğrenebilir. (Hiç değilse öğrencilerimden daha öğrenebilir) Tamam, evet, biliyorum. Köpek falan konuşamaz, ama eminim ki, ben köpeğin havlamalarını öğrencilerin havlamalarından daha anlayabilirdim! İngilizceleri kötü falan demek istemiyorum. ‘Havlamak’ deyince hiç benzetme yapmıyorum. Onlar aynen köpek gibi havlıyorlar. Bu sorunun çözümü nedir. Bilmem. Araba olsaydım korna çalardım ama sadece haykırabilirim. Yani yaz tatili bekliyorum.