Bozuk Page 4

  When Madeleine was a little girl, she was obsessed with neon. That makes sense. Her father, whom I have accompanied on several transitions, was in the movie business. Little Madeleine would stand outside the Odeon Theatre, marvelling at the marquee. She thought her dad was Reddy Kilowatt, Master of the Electric Universe. Close, Mad, close. He understood the real import of moving pictures.

  Then the lights went out. She’s been groping in the dark for most of her life, looking for that tiny bulb that would give her hope, not realizing that it was in her all the time. My job is to help turn Madeleine on. She is ready. That will help her. The name Iman means faith. She knows what she is looking for in this earthquake zone we call Turkey.

  APPLE TEA

  I’ve learned two important things about tea. The first came from the Poet Laureate of England; those pesky metal teapots don’t leak if you open the lid before pouring. If you are wondering how I met him, he was a client. And he stiffed me, but I was glad to discover the bit about teapots. That was worth a free hour on my table.

  The second revelation was that adding cream eliminates the liver’s nauseous response to drinking on an empty stomach. The Turks put sugar in their tea and that also avoids the bad reaction.

  I gave the British Poet Laureate a special massage on one of his fishing trips to British Columbia. Later, when I asked him to sign my book at his reading, he ignored me. I have great sympathy for the invisibles of this life. I wonder if the literary world would be interested in knowing that the poet shouted his sister’s name when he came in my hand?

  My stranger’s name is Güzel. I have already looked in my Turkish phrase book and confirmed that the word does indeed mean “beautiful.”

  “Did you just make this up, or am I imagining you?”

  “Both,” my enigmatic new friend smiles. I smile back because I have heard that showing teeth releases endorphins. My heart is behaving like a cat in heat, rolling all over my chest. The French say hunger is the best sauce and I am as ravenous as the cats that come to the Kadıköy kitapçı at teatime.

  “What is your last name?” I ask, knowing I’ll forget it right away because Turkish names are so different from ours.

  “Melek.”

  “Which means?” Everything, I now know, has meaning in Turkey.

  “Angel.” He smiles.

  “You’re teasing me.”

  “Not at all. And I am going to give you flying lessons.” He laughs.

  Surprisingly, because I have introduced myself as Mad, maybe a joke, he knows my full name, Madeleine Turka. I don’t suppose my parents ever thought I’d be shortened to “Mad Turk,” but there it is. Here I am. When Güzel tells me it was Ataturk who insisted all of his countrymen take a surname, I realize it was the Italians who called my first Tuscan ancestor “Turka,” the Turk.

  “Touristic restaurants charge several times as much as Turkish,” he says on the short walk to the old flower-selling district, taking my elbow and steering me past cafés with menus in English and Turkish in the windows and the Starbucks near the gallery on İstiklal Caddesi. I ask him to walk slowly because my calves are screaming. Once again I am stiff and lurching like a toddler with pleated thighs after climbing the Galata Hill to Beyoğlu yesterday.

  “You should take the Tünel,” he laughs, explaining about the train that carries passengers up and down the hill for a cost of less than one lira. I don’t tell him that I know about the train but believe walking up hills is good for my figure.

  Now we are sitting in a small restaurant with benches covered with carpets in the Cicek Pasajı, known as the Flower Passage. I am stirring my çay with a small spoon and having a histamine reaction to Güzel’s chocolate-brown eyes, an addiction that must be in my DNA. If I look into them, my knees will melt and I won’t be able to get up and leave if, or when, he makes a lunge for my purse or my bosom. Isn’t that a contradiction? Didn’t I just think that I was willing to take off my clothes and jump right into those muddy pools? Welcome to my world of contradictions!

  “Here, the çay is one lira. You’d pay five in those other places.”

  “In Victoria we all pay tourist prices.”

  “Victoria is an English name.”

  “We were a colony.” The absurdity has just struck me, the endangered lives of bees.

  “Turks don’t care much for the English.” Güzel looks away for the first time.

  “They brought pederast clergymen and smallpox to Canada.”

  “Small pox? We have a British small pox story too. Who do you suppose invented the cure?”

  “Wasn’t it Jenner?”

  “No, it was Turkish dairymen who discovered their workers were immune. The wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, Lady Montagu, her own beauty stolen by the disease, had her son inoculated and took the discovery back to England. You English have a long history of stealing ideas and antiquities.”

  “I’m not English and not American. I’m Canadian.” I don’t tell him that my father might have been Turkish. What if it isn’t true? What if my father’s family had been English ex-pats taking a fanciful name and living the good life at the end of the Silk Road, promenading on the backs of ordinary Turks? I just took my mother’s word for this provenance. There is little documentation for either side of the family, no scrapbooks or home movies. My mother was not sentimental that way, but she was intuitive.

  “Do you dislike tourists?” he asks.

  “We co-exist. Many people make their living from tourism.”

  “We are business people too.”

  “The customer is always right,” I say, repeating the only proverb to come out of our capitalist society; and he shakes his head from side to side, which, in Turkey, means agreement. The problem is that tourists and customers can turn into colonizers. It is safer to be wary.

  “What business are you in?”

  “I’m a Hell’s Angel,” I answer.

  “What does that mean? You ride a motorcycle?”

  “No,” I laugh too loudly, and men in the café turn to look at us, a Turkish man and a Canadian woman. “I escort old ladies and gentlemen to the gates of Paradise.”

  “You said Hell.”

  “You can never be too sure what might be waiting on the other side of a door or who might be turned away, can you?”

  ‘When you have been in Turkey for a while you will really know the meaning of that.”

  I think I already do. The polite honking that characterizes Istanbul’s anarchistic traffic could be a dissembling metaphor for this diverse culture. The gun shops in the Galata tunnel are the other side of that conceit.

  “Perhaps it will be easier for me because I am used to living in the moment. I take care of the elderly, a sort of companion and practical nurse.” I smile when I say that because the practicality includes sexual services. I wonder if Güzel would be shocked if I were to tell him straight out.

  “ I give hand releases to my patients.” There. There it is, and he hardly reacts. “It relaxes them. They sleep better when they are happy.”

  “And you?”

  “I sleep well.”

  “No, I mean, does your work make you happy?”

  “Yes. I think of it as a vocation, strange as that sounds.”

  “You mean a holy vocation?”

  “Well yes, I guess it could be. I call it kindness.”

  “You do have a kind face,” he says. His, I notice, is closed. His expression, or non-expression, is resolute, passionate but inscrutable. A dark viscosity in his eyes and appetite in his full mouth and strong white teeth. His face is hungry but guarded.

  “I am kind. We are culturally kind, overly polite, just like the Turks.”

  “Sometimes we are too kind.”

  “Personally or politically?”

  “Kindness is a good thing until someone takes advantage. Sometimes a man will take advantage of a kind woman. The same thing happens between religions and countries. In the belief that they are acting out of kindness, doing the right
thing, people can behave very badly.”

  “Idealism is the mother of arrogance.”

  “The Americans are a good example with their exportation of ‘freedom.’”

  “What about the deep history here?” I realize that is a hostile question, but I ask it anyway because Güzel makes me feel careless enough to make the jump with him from sex to politics. “What about the Armenian Massacre?” I press.

  “That was before Ataturk.”

  “Everything starts with Ataturk then?”

  “Modern Turkey starts with Kemal. Whatever happened in the past is past. Isn’t it better for us to focus on living in peace in the present?”

  “What about admitting accountability and then moving on?”

  “That’s just it. Not everyone would agree. There would be arguments about how many died, and there would be arguments about reparations. We would have to bring up Armenian conspiracy with the Russians. The Russians, by the way, are not our friends. That discussion would never end and what would it solve? It wouldn’t change the past. We have real problems to solve in the present. That is what we should be thinking about.”

  Since we are experiencing the scorching evidence of global warming and potential fall out from the Arab Spring, I have to agree with him.

  The Turkish election will take place a few days after I leave at the end of May. Güzel tells me that the streets of every town along the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean and the Mediterranean, from Istanbul to Bodrum, are festooned with red banners bearing the image of the long dead Father of Turkey, just like Istanbul, which could be a ship coming into port with all its flags flying. Güzel says Ataturk rises from his grave every time it is necessary to protect his vision of a secular and inclusive nation. Now as before, the past wants to swallow the present.

  “Like Canada, we are a compromise, not a solution.”

  “You seem to know a lot about politics.”

  “It is my job.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t ask. What do you do?” I lean forward.

  “I am a journalist.”

  “Ahhh!” I say.

  I had assumed he was a tourist walker or a government agent.

  “What do you mean, ‘Ahhh?’”

  “I thought perhaps you’d been sent to me for a different reason. You are interviewing me. What does a foreigner make of the Turkish situation? I thought you found me attractive.”

  “I do. You are a beautiful woman. I am also curious. What do you think of Turkey?”

  “That’s good. Do you really want to hear what I think?” I read, it might have been in the Eyewitness guidebook, that there are several cardinal rules for tourist behaviour in Turkey. Dress modestly. Do not demean the memory of Ataturk. Do not blow your nose in public or put your feet on a table, however low. Do not go barefoot. Do not criticize Turkish customs.

  The Turkish lamb has teeth. It is in reality Aslan, the lion. The Turks, like the Syrians simmering next door, are a pluralistic society.

  “I think that in some ways Turkey is like Canada. Our countries are misunderstood by the world at large because they have no idea of our national character.”

  “Why is that?”

  “That is because we don’t tell them.”

  “Do you think a country should have secrets?” He smiles. I think Güzel smiles whenever the questions are hard. That might give him time to experience an endorphin rush and defuse his irritation.

  “How would we know if it did or it didn’t? No one tells the truth.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because it is my job to find it.”

  When I told people that I was coming to Turkey, they warned me about Byzantine politics and microbes. They said I would be lucky to leave with my life. The television news back home showed violent demonstrations in Ankara. All I have seen relating to the election in Istanbul are flags and trucks with recorded messages and rap songs urging the Turks to get out and vote for their candidates.

  We are drowned out. A distraction has appeared in the form of a large family accompanied by musicians, all dancing attendance on a pre-adolescent boy dressed in a strangely comic military uniform, like a majorette’s, with a red satin cape and gold hat. The boy looks nervous as the family members take up several outdoor tables, which the waiters quickly cover with mezzes: olives, tomatoes, cucumber, cheese, bread, yogurt, and dolmades.

  “Is it his birthday? He doesn’t look all that thrilled.” I ask.

  “They are celebrating his Kitan, or circumcision.” I notice the word is close to kitap, for book, and kirtan, the Sikh dagger.

  “Poor little thing. Is his book opening or closing?”

  “Both. It’s a proud and painful day for him. He is a man. Manhood does not come easily.”

  “Nor does womanhood,” I add, watching the female relatives sweating in their shrouds.

  We stay quiet while the guests attach gold coins to the boy’s costume and others dance in the street. His table piles high with gifts. Today, clearly, he is a little prince, albeit one with sore genitals. I want to ask if they also circumcise the girls, but this time discretion banishes boldness and we observe, sipping our tea.

  “Would it be rude if I took his picture?” I whisper to Güzel, even though I already know it is rare for a Turk to refuse any request

  “You could ask,” is his enigmatic answer.

  The parents say yes and I shoot the little boy from above, the giant’s perspective. Do we all look so large to him that he dare not protest or is he comforted by all the bigness that surrounds him? Surely the adults will take care of him, even on this day, his first step to adulthood.

  When I check the photograph, I see a brave smile and fear in his eyes. Poor child, poor country, teetering between realities, past and present, East and West.

  At another table a man is feeding bits of meat to a small bird cradled in his hand. I am surprised by his tenderness. When I catch his eye, he smiles. When I raise my camera again, he looks away. I understand. I hate to pose. That’s why I am the one taking the pictures.

  When Güzel and I finish our second glass of tea, I insist on paying the waiter. I am going to concede to laziness and hop on the Tünel streetcar that will take me down a steep tunnel to the Galata Bridge.

  “How far is the fish market from the end of the bridge?”

  “Five hundred metres,” he answers without hesitating, pointing to the left. “Did you know that the game was named after our bridge? The British soldiers crossed it from their barracks to play a new game on the other side. They called it ‘bridge.’”

  “I don’t play,” I say, pinching myself. That is a lie. I play whist, abbreviated bridge, with my clients. The brain exercise helps to keep them mentally agile. I don’t want to end up playing card games and giving hand releases to beautiful Turkish men, especially not this one. Bridge is work, and I am not here to work.

  “Next time we will have apple tea.” Güzel opens the door and I think he is saying apple “tree” because my hearing is deteriorating, something I attribute to shouting at old men who are too vain to wear their hearing aids.

  I do hear the song my mother sang when she was four sheets to the wind, Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me. Was she afraid my father would transgress in heaven before she got there? She sang it as if her heart was breaking and I spun until I was dizzy on the kitchen floor. Was this how it felt to be drunk? If she saw me fall over, would she stop and pick me up? I saw little lights flitting in front of my face. Were they fireflies or angels?

  “Why did you come to my country, a woman alone?” Güzel asks, instead of shaking my hand when we part on the street. I had been wondering if he would take my offered hand or kiss me on both cheeks. There is unfinished business.

  “Ah,” I pause. “I came to find a reporter who would get the government’s attention.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” he smiles.

  “Because someone is lost.”

  “We are all lost, Mad
eleine.”

  “This is important.”

  “It’s always important.”

  “Do you know about Iman al-Obeidi?”

  “Of course. Why do you ask?”

  “ I ask because every other Turk I’ve run into has no idea who I am talking about and someone has to help her.”

  “I think a lot of people are trying. You know about the online petition?”

  “Of course, and I’m asking you to help make sure Erdoğan takes it seriously.”

  “ I am just one small man and there is more than one side to Erdoğan. The Kemalists are waiting for the other shoe to drop and you can be sure it will.”

  “But you have a voice.”

  “Is that why you found me?”

  “I thought it was the other way round.”

  Just as Güzel disappears into the crowd, my blues band entourage waves to me from the Olympiat restaurant on the fish wharf at Karakoy and I wander over. They are having mezzes and drinking foamy ayran from beaten copper cups with brass handles and glasses of çay.

  “No rakı this afternoon? ” I ask. “Too early,” Naomi replies. She’s been busy charming a pair of rakı salt and peppershakers out of a waiter who has the conflicted expression all Turkish boys take on the moment they meet her. I wonder what they think of the yabancı piliç with her direct gaze and short skirts? She is so different from the Turkish girls, so in charge of her sensuality, which she wears like a beautiful mask as impervious as a hajib.

  “Where are Kris and Doug?” I ask.

  “They’re recording at Baykus¸ Studio.”

  A woman who looks like Iman walks by, and I almost jump out of my chair.

  “Someone you know?” Hannah, the observant one, asks.

  “No, I keep seeing people who look like Iman al-Obeidi.”

  Rick, who must think I need distraction, pulls a plastic bag out of his pocket. “I stole this from the Blue Mosque. It’s a shoe bag, sacred Turkish comb plastic.” Sweet Papa Lowdown is a band of magpies. “Have you been yet?”