Chapter 14 A Quiet House Chapter Fourteen

It was half past nine when I arrived in Gebze, the streets were hot, and the coolness of the morning had disappeared.I immediately walked into the county office, wrote an application and signed it.A staff member numbered it without even looking at it. I immediately imagined that a historian would find this application from the ruins three hundred years later, trying to find out what it meant.Historical research is a joyful job. I think it's a joyous job, but one that requires patience.In doing so, I took pride in my patience and went to work confidently.The case in which the owners of two small shops were killed in a scuffle immediately attracted my attention.The two fighters were worshiped and buried, long after that, and the families of the two dead men have been suing each other in court.Witnesses recounted in detail how the two stabbed each other to death with a dagger in the middle of the market on May 17, 998 in the Islamic calendar.Because I carried the booklet that converts the Islamic calendar into the Christian year with me this morning, I opened it to check it.It was March 24, 1590! That means it happened in winter.But what appeared before my eyes while transcribing was a scorching summer day.Maybe it was a sunny March day.The next thing I saw was a transcript of a story about a buyer returning to the seller an Arab slave with a scar on his foot that he had bought for six thousand silver coins.The buyer indignantly made a clear record of how he was deceived by the seller's words and how deep the slave's wounds were.Then I came across a record of a wealthy landowner who was opposed by the people of Istanbul, and learned from another court record that this man had been tried for breaking the law while patrolling the docks twenty years earlier.I tried my best to find out from the edict what this man named Budak had done in Gebze.I seem to have stopped tracking Plague and started tracking him.I sort of figured this out: once he registered a piece of land that didn't exist, showing that it did exist, and after paying two years of land taxes for the land out of his own pocket, he traded it for a vineyard , and then tripped the new owner of the non-existent land, thus getting rid of the matter entirely.In other words, the story I put on Buddak subjectively has not been overturned by the court records.I have taken great pains to make up this story, and some of its elements are corroborated by these records.It gave me great pleasure to see that my story was also confirmed by other records.Budak began making wine in another man's barn from grapes harvested from the vineyard, and also secretly set about buying and selling wine.Some of the men he had hired in the business sued him in court, for which he attacked them more viciously than they did in court.Then I learned that he had a small mosque built in Gebze.At this moment, I recalled with astonishment that some pages in the history teacher's book about some famous people in Gebze were about this man and that mosque.The Budak in his impression is completely different from the one in my impression: the book is written about a respectable, stable Ottoman whose photo can be included in a high school history textbook, and the Budak in my impression He is a treacherous and capable liar.I was wondering if I could at all come up with a new and more informative story that didn't contradict the record about Budak when Leza told me it was time for a lunch break.

I went out, and to escape the heat of the New Street, I walked down the aisles lined with nettle trees to the Old Market.Up, I have come to the mosque.The weather was very hot, and there was no one in the yard, and the sound of beating and beating came from the car hood repair shop not far away.I turned away, and since I didn't want to eat right away, I walked towards the café.Walking down an alley, one of the kids in a group yelled "Fatty" behind me, and I didn't turn around to see if the others were laughing.I went into the cafe and sat down. I ordered a cup of tea, lit a cigarette, and began to think about what kind of work historical research is.It should be a different job than writing an article, writing a series of events into a story.Maybe it's this: we look for the cause of a bunch of events, and then explain those events by other events, and we don't live long enough for us to explain these other events by other events.We had to leave it somewhere, and other people picked it up from where we left it, but they would start by saying that we explained some events by wrong events.I did the same thing when my doctoral dissertation and my dissertation for promotion to associate professor mentioned the works of my predecessors.I also believe I am correct.Everyone said the story was different, or that it should be explained by another story.They also knew this "other" and "new" story in advance.The only thing they did was go get it out of the archives.So we adorn our stories with annotations and document codes, and then present them to each other through postscripts, pompous meetings, and we all try to defend the stories we wrote, and try to prove our own by overturning other people's stories. The story is better.

I'm very upset.I scolded the young man who hadn't served me tea yet.Then, just to comfort myself, I thought again: you are asking for trouble, and your ideas about what historians do are just a story, and another person can say without hesitation that historians Doing it is something else entirely.In fact they say the same thing: they say that by studying the past they figure out what to do today, that they create ideologies that give people an idea of ​​what is right or wrong in relation to the world and to ourselves.I think they should also say that they give people relief, they give people entertainment.I have always believed that the most remarkable aspect of history is its entertainment.But my colleagues would mask this entertainment, trying to distinguish themselves from their children, so as not to spoil their tie-wearing seriousness.Finally my tea came and I added some sugar to it and watched how it melted.After another cigarette I went to the restaurant.

I also used to have lunch in this restaurant two years ago, it is a quiet, hot and pleasant place.The glass is foggy and hot, and the dishes behind the glass are fried meat eggplant, stew and stuffed skins, and various other kinds of eggplant foods are soaked in the same dark color. Waiting for customers to patronize.The mound of half-wilted meatballs sticking out of the oily back reminded me of a buffalo burrowing into mud in the summer heat.I worked up an appetite and sat down after ordering an eggplant ragout, a side of rice and a plate of risotto.When asked by the waiter in socks and flip-flops, I said I wanted a beer.

I ate it up, happily finished my lunch with bread and soup, and my beer.Then I suddenly remembered my wife and felt very painful.It hurts my heart to think that my wife is about to have a baby with her new husband.I knew she was going to do this, I could feel it, but I still didn't want to know it clearly.For the first few months of our marriage, we were very careful about birth control.Since Thelma is resistant to drugs and instruments, we'll be careful with this so as to make it all a bummer.Later, our attention on this aspect gradually dispersed.A year later, we mentioned children once, so we discussed that we should have a child.This time we started trying to get pregnant very carefully, but she couldn't get pregnant no matter what.Then one day Thelma came up to me and said we should go see a doctor anyway, and to encourage me, she said she would go first herself.I disagree, I said I wouldn't let the brutes people call doctors get involved in things like that.I don't know if Thelma ever went to the doctor, maybe she didn't tell me, but I didn't think much about it because we separated soon after.

The waiter took away the empty plates.I asked him what dessert he had and he said Kadayev and brought it.I asked for another beer, beer would be good with Kadayev, wouldn't I, I asked the waiter, I laughed.He didn't smile, and I sat and thought. This time I thought of my parents.Still living in Kemah in the East.At that time, there was neither Ni Erjun nor Mai Ting.My mother is in good health and can take care of housework by herself.We live in a two-story stone house, the stairs are cold, I dare not come out of the room at night, and I dare not get up when I am hungry and go downstairs to the kitchen alone, I can't sleep, thinking Looking at the food in the kitchen, while bearing the punishment for being gluttonous.The stone house also had a small balcony from which on cold cloudless winter nights a white plain could be seen between the mountains.When it was colder, we could hear the howling of wolves. People said that the wolves would come to the town at night, and that the beasts would be hungry and knock on the door.It is also said that if someone knocks at the door, you must ask who will open it.This happened one night when Dad opened the door with a gun in his hand.Once in the spring, too, he went after a chicken-eating fox with a gun in his hand, but it was always his crunching, not the fox's, that we heard.Mother said the eagle would steal the chicks like the fox.Then it occurred to me that I had never seen such a hawk, and it bothered me.After a while, I realized that it was already past the time to go back to the archives, so I stood up.

My mood brightened as soon as I stepped among the musty papers to resume my research.I started looking around at random.Yusuf, the debtor, asked for the donkey back as collateral after paying off the debt, but on the way back he found the donkey was lame on the right hind leg and filed a complaint, so he could take Hussain to court up.I laughed when I saw this case.Since I had three beers and was only slightly drunk, I knew I was laughing, but watching the same thing again I laughed anyway.Later, I didn't care if I had watched it before, I just watched whatever I got in my hand.I don't copy anything from my notebook anymore.I happily read sheet after sheet, page after page, smiling all the time.After a while, I seemed to get excited, as if I was listening to a piece of music I liked after the incident was successfully concluded.On the one hand, I was thinking about some messy stuff about myself and my life, and on the other hand, I was trying to keep my attention on the other stories that were passing me by.The head of a religious foundation had a dispute with a miller over the mill's income. They went to court, and the court compiled a bunch of data about the miller's income and expenditure.The clerk of the teaching judge also dutifully copied down these statistical data, just like I copied them into a notebook.These figures took up a whole page, and they showed the mill's monthly income, quarterly income, the amount of wheat and barley ground, and the previous year's income, and I looked at it with a childish cheerfulness when I finished copying it. I checked the list in my hand and felt very excited.

Then I looked again with conviction: a steamer carrying wheat had disappeared after passing the Black Mosul dock for the last time.Just like it has never been to Istanbul, and no one has come out to report any information.I concluded that the ship was somewhere in Tuzla, where the ship sank with its cargo on a reef where no one on board could swim.Then I saw such a case record that Dursun's son Abdullah gave four linings to the dyers Qadri and Mehmet, wanted them to dye, and now wants to get it back.But I didn't copy it down, I don't understand why Abdullah wants the lining back.On August 19, 991 in the Islamic calendar (September 7, 1583), Ibrahim Sufu, a peddler who sold pickled vegetables in Gebze, sold three pickled cucumbers for one silver coin. He was sued and the court ruled record.On the third day after this incident, the beef sold by the butcher Mahmud was found to be underpaid by 140 drachmas (1 drachma is approximately 3.148 grams) for 13 silver coins, which is also included in For the record, I also copied it in the notebook.I wonder how those at the Academy will feel if they find and read my book later.It is impossible for them to say that I made up all of this, so they will only feel uneasy.If only I could find a good story, then they'd be completely taken aback.In fact, my Budak, the wine trader who later made his fortune through some scheming, has been enhanced by such a story.I set out to find a powerful name for this story, which I've embellished with notes and file coding: "A hoax archetype of the upper class: Great Gebze Budak!" Not bad! If it wasn't just about Bu Dak, but Budak Pasha would probably be better off.Did he later become a pasha? I might write an article about how he became a pasha, and start with an overview of the first half of the sixteenth century.But thinking about the tiresome details of the article lost my interest, and for a moment I thought I was going to cry.I'd say it's because of the beer, but it's over the top.What can I do, I'm still reading.

I saw a warrant for the arrest of Mehmet's son Tahir, a cavalryman who had started out as a bandit.I saw an order not to allow livestock from surrounding villages to trample the vineyards exclusive to Atheim Pasha, and an order to take the necessary steps in the matter of Nuraitin, who was supposed to have died of the plague, but It was also suggested that he was beaten to death with a stick by his father-in-law, but I did not copy it down.Then I copied a long market price statistics table into the notebook as it is.Then I saw Omer's son Pier Ahmet promise before the trustee Sheikh Fethullah that he would pay his debt to Mehmet, the bathroom owner, within eight days.Then I read about Musa's son Herzl who smelled like wine in his mouth.Then, I wanted to laugh, but that required some more beer.I looked at their court records carefully for a long time, thinking nothing, copying nothing, and even though I was sure I hadn't found anything, I still seemed to be looking for something, as if I was following some kind of trace Read carefully, and I like to do it.Eventually my eyes got tired and I stopped and looked at the sunlit basement windows.All kinds of thoughts and images kept coming to me from all directions:

Why did I become a history guy? I wondered for a while when I was seventeen, but that was all.Mom died in the spring, and Dad resigned as county sheriff before he could retire and moved to Fort Paradise.I spent the summer at Paradise Fortress flipping through my dad's books and thinking about what I'd read as I wandered the gardens and the sea.When people ask, I tell them I'm going to be a doctor, and yes, my grandpa was a doctor too.That being said, I was admitted to majoring in history in the fall.How many people have chosen history as their career voluntarily like me? I was suddenly angry: Thelma used to say that my pride in my stupidity was an integral part of my personality, but she was very happy. Glad I'm a history guy.My dad probably didn't like it, he drank as soon as he knew I was admitted to majoring in history.Grandma also reprimanded Dad, not letting him drink.When I think of grandma, I think of Jia and Ni Erjun. I look at my watch, it's almost five o'clock.I can't feel the alcohol anymore.After a while, I lost all interest in watching it, so I got up and drove home without waiting for Leza.On the way, I thought, I would go and chat with Ni Erjun who was sitting in the hut reading a book.If Mr. Nier doesn't give you face, I'll look at Averia Celebi by the bedside, look at it, forget it, then I'll drink some wine, and then it's time for dinner, I can eat, I can Have some more wine.