Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [85]
Once it was dark out and we’d turned the house lights on, we’d sometimes hear gunshots coming from down by the streams that flowed toward Kâıthane. When the sounds drew closer, to just a few streets over, I’d switch off the lights and sit my mother down on the floor.
The following day there would be another funeral, this time in Gültepe, or Yahya Kemal, or Çeliktepe. Again left fists would be raised and marches would be sung, or a crowd proclaiming Allahuekber would rain curses down upon the Communists.
One morning about two months after my brother’s death, I went to wake my mother up and I found her dead.
We buried her next to my brother. I stood before their graves and looked at the people around me, all of them poor, all of them hopeless, all of them angry, and all of them sick of what was happening—whatever it was.
There was no way I could stay in the house alone. How could an eleven-year-old boy live on his own in a rickety shanty?
We emptied out the house, gave our stuff to the neighbors. All I had left was a bird cage and a pair of canaries flitting around inside it. My father didn’t want the birds; he thought they brought bad luck. I placed the cage on my lap and sat in the center of the living room. My father gave in. We walked from the steep hill of Yahya Kemal to the Gültepe bus stop, the first stop of the line. There wasn’t a bus yet, so we waited. The bus eventually came, and we got on.
While everyone else was going back to their shanties after work, I was headed for a new home, an apartment. I was leaving behind the place where I had been born, the graves of my brother and mother, for another neighborhood, another street, another life, the home of a woman and her daughter, neither of whom I knew. My father was carrying two small plastic sacks and my school bag, and I was carrying a cage with two canaries flapping around like crazy, frightened by all the noise.
The bus arrived at the Neyir stop, which lies at the intersection leading to Büyükdere Avenue. Some people called this the factory stop; some just called it Neyir after the textile factory on the corner.
We were listening to the news broadcast on the bus driver’s transistor radio. It was more like the newscaster was reading a list of names: those who’d died, those who’d been arrested; the prime minister, ministers of state, soldiers, the president …
I started looking out the window to escape the gloomy atmosphere of the bus; the workers were leaving the pharmaceutical, ceramic, lightbulb, and textile factories on the east side of Büyükdere Avenue and heading home. Behind the green hills of the west side were the villas of the rich and famous, and huge construction sites of apartment blocks in the making.
It was at that moment, at that corner, that I began crying.
For the first time in my life, I felt that something was changing, but I wasn’t sure what. I’d started sobbing when my father peered at me with a look of fear on his face that I’d never seen before.
“What’s wrong, Sadık?” he asked.
I couldn’t tell him; I didn’t know. It could hardly be a coincidence that the avenue dividing the rich from the poor, the luxurious apartment blocks from the shanties, the city from the village, had been named Büyükdere—the “large brook.” But I didn’t really know what that meant, so I banished all my confused thoughts to the dark recesses of my mind.
I was on the thirty-fifth floor of the skyscraper, facing the avenue. Between the city and me was a two-way mirror, separating the accused from the witness. But which of us was which, I couldn’t tell.
To my left was the factory stop, where I cried as a child, in its new guise: a main thoroughfare clogged with traffic, despite six lanes and an underpass at the intersection. And on my right, a mesmerizing Bosphorus view, enough to drive one to obsession.
Some spirit was whispering my brother’s last words, which were stuck in my child’s mind like a rusty knife. Back then Büyükdere Avenue was still long, but it didn’t have much traffic; you could amble across it, from one side to the other.