Morning in Kadıköy

My window in the tiny Kadıköy apartment looks out onto the wall of the neighboring building, just three feet away across a small deck of sloppily placed tar paper. From the bedroom looking out, it becomes an abstract painting, a tableau in random geometric shapes by Piet Mondrian maybe. The square of the red plastic whatever in the bottom corner is a statement somehow, a bright contrast to the dirty beige of the rest of the canvas, a beige broken up with subtle gradations from the way the chipping plaster catches the sideways sunlight differently and from the darker mildew stains, but otherwise a uniform color in stark opposition to that corner of red. The line of the pipes on the left of the frame breaks the plane of the piece, and even offers one more splotch of color to break the beige, a curlicue of rust-brown wire that binds the pipe to the cement protrusion behind it.

I like the abstractions of these urban windows. When we visit the Lake House in Florida, we wake up to windows displaying a more bucolic scene, like Realist nature studies by English Romantics, Constable perhaps. He was known for “skying”--his study of clouds at various times of the day, and he would have loved the galleons of storms that sail through that Floridian blue, framed by the dense vegetation that crowds both sides of the main window in the master bedroom.

But this Kadıköy abstraction is a thing to be meditated on. It offers a mental landscape without shape at first, something airy and anonymous, something that, if stared at long enough, begins to hum, charged as it is with the energy of a centuries old city, a buzz of tangled wires carrying stories and historical catastrophes and languages still striking against one another.

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.