Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [3]
Some people here say that you’re a true Istanbulite when you start insisting that you’re leaving, but you never do. Others insist that there’s no such thing as a true Istanbulite—everyone comes from somewhere, but that somewhere is never Istanbul. These clichés are perhaps testimony to this city’s simultaneous push and pull, its allure—whether aesthetic, economic, mystical, inexplicable, or otherwise—and its tendency to either eradicate or repulse its own. It is a city of love and of hate, where passions ride high and often come crashing down with a vengeance.
Welcome to Istanbul Noir: Leave your shoes, and expectations, at the door.
Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler
Istanbul, Turkey
August 2008
PART I
LUST & VENGEANCE
THE TONGUE OF THE FLAMES
BY SMAL GÜZELSOY
Büyükada
How big a mistake can one possibly make? How much ruin can we possibly bring upon ourselves, our loved ones, or even strangers? Such questions would have sounded ridiculous to me when I was in my twenties. Back then, at most, you’d take a gun and empty two clips into people you didn’t know from a hole in the wall. Okay, let’s make that three clips. How many people can you kill at once? Or, for example, how deadly a bomb can you build on your own? That should be the true yardstick of how unhinged one is: How much havoc can you, as an individual, wreak upon the world? That was how I thought, and that was the reason, I imagine, why I was a guy who simply didn’t give a damn. I was so damn sure that the highest price I’d pay for any mistake couldn’t be more than my own life.
Now, as I do some soul-searching before boarding the ferry to the Princes’ Islands from Sirkeci, I see how much I’ve changed over the last twelve years. Without understanding, or even realizing it, I have become another person all together.
I was calm and certain, as if going through the motions I went through countless times every day. As if every day I’d put in a token and pass through the turnstiles, checking over and over again whether the safety was off on the .45 caliber Beretta in my coat pocket, caressing the bag containing the painful last moments of the twelve loved ones I had lost.
I had tweaked my plans to avenge those twelve as soon as I was released from prison in my mind so many times, that by now I wasn’t sure if I was living in reality, or only dreaming in the ward about the moment I’d confront the maniac responsible for their slaughter. But then, what did it matter! The truth is, there was only one clue to help me discern fantasy from reality: The setting for that scene of revenge in my dreams was a dark alley full of crime and vice, where thugs settled scores. I would imagine how he, with his graying hair, dreamy eyes, and the self-confidence of a comic book hero, would collapse at long last, his back against a wall, full of fear, finally aware that there was no escape from my wrath. The location would be a street of transvestites and pimps who knew well and good when to look the other way; when cornered in that street, Nigel’s faint smirk and wistful expression would transform into a look of utter horror. Clearly understanding the end I had planned for him, he’d be able to remain standing only as long as he was leaning firmly against a wall of obscene graffiti. Finally, he would concede defeat, falling to his knees in a dirty puddle of rain.
I had been fantasizing about dozens of variations of this scenario every night, like a child who never gets tired of listening to the same fairy tale over and over. I had no choice. Then I’d plan how and where to look for him. This part worried me most of all. It was possible that Nigel, knowing my release date, had already made his escape. Yet the note he’d attached to the Polaroid that he sent with the last book (which I now kept next to the Beretta) made me think that he was as prepared and eager for the second round as I was: