Chapter 14 "Istanbul" No spitting

Since I knew how to read, the imaginary world in my head has added a bunch of letters.The words don't convey any meaning or tell any story, they just make sounds.Every word I see, whether it's a company name or poster on an ashtray, a news headline, an advertisement, a sign on the side of a store, restaurant or truck, a traffic sign, a bag of cinnamon on the dinner table, an oil can in the kitchen, Soap in the bathroom, my grandmother's cigarettes, her medicine pack... I read without thinking.Sometimes I repeat the words aloud, and it doesn't matter if I don't understand what they mean.It was as if there was a machine between the visual and cognitive parts of my brain, ready to convert letters into syllables and sounds.Like a radio in a coffee shop, so loud that no one can hear it, my machine sometimes works quietly without me knowing it.

Walking home from school, even if I am very tired, my eyes will search for words, and the machine in my head will say "to protect your wealth and future", "beck stop tram stop", "Api authentic Turkish salami", " Pamuk Apartments". As soon as I got home, I turned to the headlines in my grandmother's newspaper: "Cyprus dies or dies", "Turkey's first ballet school", "American man kisses Turkish girl in the street, nears execution by crowd", "Hula is banned in the street lock up". Sometimes the letters are arranged in weird ways, like going back to the magical time when you first learned the alphabet.The Governor's Mansion in Nishantashi is three minutes away from our house, and some of the provisions on the cement pavement around the mansion are one of them.When my mother and brother and I walked from Nishantashi to Taksim or Beyoglu, we would play hopscotch on the empty planks between the letters, saying the words in the order we saw them:

Prohibition of spitting This arcane provision encouraged me to defy and immediately spit on the ground, but the police station was just two steps in front of the Governor's mansion, so I just stared at it uneasily.Now I can start to worry about spitting phlegm from my throat and falling to the ground, even if I don't want to.But as far as I know, adults who spit are just like those stupid, timid, wayward children who are punished by teachers all the time.Yes, we have occasionally seen people spitting or coughing up a mouthful of phlegm simply because they didn't have a tissue, but that doesn't happen very often and it doesn't deserve such a stringent regulation, even outside the Governor's residence.Later, I learned about Chinese spittoons from books, and found that spitting is common all over the world, so I asked myself why they tried their best to discourage spitting in Istanbul. (Still, when the French writer Vion is mentioned, what comes to mind is not his best work, but a horrible book he wrote called "I Spit on Your Grave.")

Perhaps the real reason why the epigram on the Nishanta stone pavement is etched in my memory is that at the same time that the automatic reading machine was built into my head, my mother began to actively teach us the code of conduct in life outside, that is, how to deal with strangers .For example, she advised us not to buy from the filthy vendors in the back alleys, and not to order "kofter" (meatballs) in restaurants, because they used the worst, greasy, toughest meat.These warnings were all mixed up with the various notices printed in my head by the reading machine: "The meat in this store is kept in the refrigerator."Another day, my mother once again reminded us to keep our distance from strangers on the road, and the machine in my head said: "No entry under the age of 18".There is a notice at the back of the tram that reads "It is forbidden to hang from the railing, which is a hazard to safety", which also coincides with my mother's thoughts.Seeing what she said appeared in the official announcement, I was not puzzled, because she also said that people like us have never thought about hanging on the back of the tram to take a Bawang car.The same is true for the notice on the stern of the ferry in the urban area: "It is forbidden to approach the propeller, endangering safety".While a mother's "No Littering" admonition became official, the crooked, unofficial graffiti "Litterer's Mom" ​​confuses me.When everyone told me to only kiss my mother's and grandmother's hands, not anyone else's, I remembered the words on the can of anchovies: "not handmade". The signs “Don’t Climb” or “Do Not Touch” echoed the instructions my mother instilled in the streets, and there may be some connection between these injunctions and her injunction against pointing at us.But how can I understand that the "Do not drink the pool water" sign refers to a pool that is clearly not full of water, or that the "Do not trample on the grass" sign is placed in a park where there is only mud and no green grass?

To understand that the "civilizing mission" embodied in these notices made the city a jungle of announcements, threats, and condemnations, we have to look at the city's newspaper columnists and their "urban correspondent" predecessors.