I tried to post this last night, but the internet connection had a fit of bad temper, so it’s a day late.
This is a story about something that happened five years ago today. I’m certain about the timing, because it happened on my twenty-third birthday, and this is my twenty-eighth. For once, I’m going to tell a story with the actual names of the people involved–it makes no sense without using one of them, so I’ll use them all–and one of these people has written a travelogue about that summer that’s already seen print, so we’re not very anonymous anyhow.
That summer, the last one I spent in İstanbul, I was halfway through my M.Phil program, and enrolled as a student in Boğaziçi University’s intensive Turkish language summer school. Midway through the course, Rahul and Niharika–two dear friends, neighbors and co-conspirators who lived across the street from me in Oxford, came to visit Turkey for two weeks, bringing along their lovely flatmate Sinead. Boğaziçi banned guests from the undeservedly named Superdorm, where I’d been staying, so I moved off-campus, and took a flat in the center of Beyoğlu, near Taksim Square. The flat was on Büyükparmakkapı street, just off İstiklal Caddesi, in a pink-colored building that dated to 1923, the year Mustafa Kemal had proclaimed the Turkish Republic. My landlady, a friend of my old Turkish teacher Selim, owned a bookshop/coffeeshop called Kitaplı Kahve on the second floor, and I lived above it, on the third. The street was full of türkü bars and a eurotrash club or two, nargileh cafes and bookstores, late-night büfes and the occasional locksmith, as well as a cobbler I still visit when my sandals need repairing. The greengrocer just around the corner at the back end makes a brief appearance in Fatih Akın’s film Duvara Karşı.
The two-room flat had indifferent plumbing and occasional mice, but the rooms were spacious, with extra beds and couches for my visitors, and faded movie posters from the glory days of Turkish cinema on the peeling yellow walls. (Rahul later wrote that “with its high ceilings and wooden floors and large windows…this is like one of those Parsi flats in Bombay that you could only hope to inherit. Although with a malfunctioning toilet, a shower behind a pile of bricks in a corner of the bedroom, curtain rails that fell off at the slightest tug and no magnificent rosewood furniture, this is a Parsi on welfare from the Panchayat…”) It is, to this day, the only apartment I’ve ever lived in alone.
My birthday fell during my friends’ visit, and we spent a lovely evening in Beyoğlu: dinner at Zencefil, fruit wine and cocktails at Limonlu Bahçe, and then Rahul and Sinead and I decided to go out dancing in one of the rooftop clubs in Pera–where you climb the stairs up six or seven floors of a narrow belle epoque building, past the lower floors of the club that are deceptively empty, and emerge out onto a crowded, lively terrace at the top of the city, with a view in every direction, an open-air dancefloor, and soft cushions lounging around the roof’s edge. Niharika, though, was tired, and went back to the flat early–taking the sole set of keys.
We stayed out later than expected, but didn’t think it would be a problem–she had a mobile phone, and in any case, the main door from the street into the building was usually left open all day and sometimes all night, so people could come and go from the cafe and the men’s social club on the lower floor; every flat had a heavy double-locked door of its own for safety, and I never particularly worried about strangers in the stairwell. But when we came back, around three, the door to the street was shut and locked–and Niharika was not answering the phone.
We sat down on the stoop for a moment or two to think, next to the tables spilled out onto the sidewalk by the işkembeci (tripe soup, a favored late-night anti-hangover food) joint next door. And then someone noticed that the lights were still on in the Emekçi Hareket Partisi office across the street, three floors up–and the door at the base of that building was still open. The bay window at the front of my flat looked out into a small flat opposite that served as the local headquarters of the Emekçi Hareket Partisi–the Workers’ Movement Party, one minor Marxist-Leninist organization among many on the Turkish left. I could always see straight into their front room–populated by attractive young party members with interesting haircuts, who spent their time chainsmoking, chatting, drinking tea and stacking innumerable political pamphlets–and they could see me sitting and reading at my window, although we’d never acknowledged each other’s presence.
With an enthusiasm fueled by desperation and alcohol, we climbed up the dark stairwell and knocked on their door, and I explained, in broken Turkish, our plight. The bemused (but kindly) leftists let us in, and we went straight to their front window, opened it, and started yelling over to mine. Then, fishing around for something to throw across and hit the window with, we started tossing coins from our pockets–this was before the currency reform, so mostly old 500,000 lira coins, some of them the heavy ones that had gone into circulation before the last round of inflation.
I should pause here and explain that Niharika’s name was frequently a source of confusion (to others) and amusement (to us) on the trip, because the last three syllables are pronounced identically to the Turkish work harika, an exclamatory adjective meaning (more or less) Wonderful! Awesome! Fantastic! As a result, when any one of us called her name out, people around often mistook it for an expression of excited approval about something.
So, then, imagine the spectacle we presented to the drinkers and işkembe diners in Büyükparmakkapı street that hot July night: at three in the morning, three foreigners–a tall, very brown Indian man, a short, very pale Irish/Scotswoman, and myself, intermediate enough in height and color to have passed for Turkish in the street (at least, before this incident)–throwing money from out of the window of the Workers’ Movement Party HQ down to the street below, all the while shouting Wonderful! over and over again, in tones of mild desperation.
We woke her up after a few minutes, thankfully, but I suspect the neighbors were talking about the deli yabanci kiz for the rest of the summer.
