Chapter 9 Istanbul Another House: Chihag

Sometimes Mom and Dad disappear together.So in the winter of 1957 my brother was sent to live with his aunt and uncle two floors above for a while.As for me—another aunt came to Nishantashi one evening and took me to her house in Chihag.She tried to make sure I wasn't upset - as soon as we got into the car (a "1956 Chevrolet", popular in 1960s Istanbul) she said, "I've asked Sedin to bring you yoghurt tonight." I don't remember being interested in yoghurt, but in that they had a wagonman.When we arrived at their apartment building (my grandfather built it and I would later live in an apartment in it), I was disappointed to find that there was neither an elevator nor heating, and that the apartment was small.To make matters worse, the next day I gloomily tried to get myself used to my new home, only to be terrified again: After I was settled for a nap in my pajamas like a pampered good child, I called out like I did at home. Maid: "A Min'e, come and pick me up, and help me get dressed!" She was severely reprimanded.Perhaps that's why during my stay there, I tried to look older than my age and put on a bit of air.I was having dinner one night with my aunt, my uncle Rado (the poet and publisher of photocopies of Merlin), and my twelve-year-old cousin Mehmet, while my disturbing double was hanging from the As I gazed down at the white framed reproduction on the wall, I casually mentioned that Prime Minister Adnan Mandalays was my uncle.What I said was not respected as I hoped it would be, and everyone at the table laughed, which made me feel deeply wronged.Because I truly believe that the Prime Minister is my uncle.

But I only believe it in some secret corner of my mind.My uncle Ozhan and Prime Minister Adnan both have five-letter names with the same two letters at the end; the prime minister has just gone to America, and my uncle has lived in America for many years; I see their pictures every day (the prime minister published in the newspaper photos of my uncle are all over my grandmother’s living room), and in some photos they look alike—it’s no surprise that the illusion took root in me.Later, my awareness of this psychological mechanism did not save me from many other plausible beliefs, ideas, prejudices and aesthetic preferences.For example, I truly believe that two people with similar names must also have similar personalities, that an unfamiliar word (whether it is Turkish or a foreign language) must be similar in meaning to a word with a similar spelling, and that a woman with dimples must have someone I knew in the past. Something about the other woman with dimples, all fat people are the same, all poor people belong to some group I know nothing about, there must be some connection between peas and Brazil - not only because the Turkish Brazil is called Brezilya, and peas are called bezelye, also because the Brazilian flag looks like it has a big pea on it: I have seen many Americans also imagine a connection between Turkey and turkey.I still have in my mind the connection between my uncle and the Prime Minister, a link once established that is hard to break, so when I think of a distant relative I once saw in a restaurant eating scrambled eggs with spinach (one of the great childhood delights, no matter I run into relatives and acquaintances wherever I go in town), and a part of me believes that this relative is still eating scrambled eggs with spinach at the same restaurant half a century later.

The ability to soothe and beautify life with fantasy served me well in this room where I was not valued and where I didn't feel like I belonged, and it wasn't long before I embarked on a bold new experiment.Every morning, after my cousin went to the German secondary school, I would open one of his big, thick and beautiful books (I think it was the Brookhouse version of the encyclopedia), sit at the desk, and copy the lines .Since I don't know German, let alone read, I did this without understanding the meaning, which can be said to be a description of the article in front of me.I draw the exact image of each line and sentence.After finishing something with a difficult Gothic letter (g or k), I rest my eyes the same way a miniaturist does after drawing the thousands of leaves of a large sycamore tree piece by piece: Pass the gaps between apartment buildings, open spaces and streets leading to the sea, and watch the boats plying the Bosphorus.

The first thing I know in Cihag (where our family will be moving as our fortune dwindles) is that Istanbul is not a lot of monotonous life inside walls—an apartment jungle that doesn’t care about neighbors’ weddings and funerals—but An archipelago of neighbours, everyone knows each other.When I look out of the window, I see not only the Bosphorus and the slow-moving ships on the familiar waterway, but also the gardens between the houses, the old houses that have not been demolished, and playing between the crumbling walls of the old houses. child.Like many houses facing the Bosphorus, the front of the buildings is a steep and rugged cobbled lane leading down to the sea.In the snowy evening, I stood by the window with my aunt and cousin, and watched with the neighbors in the neighborhood as the noisy and happy children slid down the alley on sleds, chairs and planks.

Turkish film industry - at that time produced 700 films per year, ranking second in the world, only Second only to India - the base camp is located on Yeshir Street in Beyoglu, only ten minutes away.Because most of the actors live in Chihag, the area is full of "uncles" who reprise the same role in every movie they do, and "aunties" who are tired and heavily made up.When children recognize actors who are only seen in movies that are not uncommon (such as Ozzy always playing the old fat card player who specializes in seducing young and clueless maids), they chase them in the street. .At the top of the steep alley, on rainy days, cars skid on the wet cobblestone road, and trucks have to struggle to climb up; on sunny days, a van suddenly appears, actors, lighting engineers and "camera crew" swarm out, and the filming is completed in ten minutes After the love scene, it floats away again.Years later, I happened to see one of these black-and-white films on TV, only to realize that the real subject of the film wasn't the love affair in the foreground, but the Bosphorus flickering in the distance.

Looking out at the Bosphorus through the gaps between Chihag's apartment buildings, I knew something else about neighborhood life: there had to be some stronghold (often a store) that gathered, interpreted, and evaluated the gossip of the street.In Chihag, this base camp was the grocery store on the ground floor of our apartment building.The owner, Li Ge, is Greek (like most people who live in the apartment upstairs), and if you want to buy anything from him, you just hang a basket from the top floor and shout down what you want to buy.Later, our family moved into the same building, and my mother felt that it was disgraceful to have to yell at the owner of the shop downstairs every time she bought bread or eggs. sent down in a much prettier basket.When the aunt's mischievous son opened the window, it was usually to spit on the roof of the car struggling to climb the alley roof, or to throw the nail and the firecracker skillfully attached to the string.To this day, whenever I look out at the street from a high window, I still wonder what it's like to spit at pedestrians.

My uncle Rado tried to become a poet in the early years, but his hopes failed, and later he worked as a magazine and became an editor.When I lived with him, he was editing Life, Turkey's most popular weekly magazine at the time, but as a five-year-old I wasn't interested in that or in the many poets and writers my uncle befriended who would later shape my view of Istanbul.His circle of friends includes Yahya, Tampina, and Tugku.Tugeku created exaggerated, Dickensian children's stories that vividly and vividly described the scenes of life on the streets of the slums.What excited me at the age of five was the hundreds of children's books published by my uncle and given to me as gifts after I learned to read—the abbreviated version of "Arabian Nights", the "Falcon Brothers" series, "Discovery and Invention" encyclopedia".

Once a week my aunt took me back to Nishantashi to see my brother and he would tell me how happy he was at the Pamuk apartment, eating anchovies for breakfast, laughing and playing in the evenings, and participating in family activities that I missed so much: playing soccer with my uncle , take my uncle's "Dodge" for a Sunday drive to the Bosphorus, listening to sports broadcasts and our favorite radio dramas.He detailed it all as exaggeratedly as possible.Then Sefket would say, "Don't go, you should stay here from now on." When it was time to go back to Chihag, it was always hard to part with my brother, even reluctant to say goodbye to the locked sad door of the apartment.One time I tried to avoid the moment of leaving by clinging to the radiator in the foyer and I cried even louder as they tried to wrestle my hand away.Ashamed as I was, I clung to it—I felt like a comic book hero clinging to a solitary branch on the edge of a cliff.

Maybe it's because I'm attached to the house? Fifty years later, I do return to the same building.But the rooms in the house or the good things in the house don't matter to me.Then as now, home was the center of my inner world—a vehicle of escape, both positively and negatively.Instead of learning to face the difficulties at hand, whether it was my parents' arguments, my father's bankruptcy, our family's never-ending property disputes, or our dwindling wealth, I entertained myself with mind games in which I diverted my focus and deceived myself , completely forgetting what bothers me, or wrapping myself in a fog of mystery.

We may call this chaotic, hazy state melancholy, or by its Turkish name hüzun, a kind of collective rather than individual melancholy. Instead of providing clarity, hüzün obscures reality, comforts us, and softens the landscape like water droplets that condense on a window when a teapot steams from a winter day.Foggy windows make me feel hüzün, and I still like to get up and go to such windows and write on them with my fingertips.When I write and draw on the steamy window, my inner "hüzun" dissipates and I feel relaxed; after I finish writing and drawing, I can erase everything with the back of my hand and look out the window.But the landscape itself can only provoke its own hüzün.It's time to take a closer look at the feeling that the city of Istanbul is destined to carry.