Baksheesh (2 page)

 

As I said, I returned to the shop deep in thought at the disappointing prospect of never again finding a place to live where I'd feel happy. Pelin, my assistant, was sitting at her desk as usual. She'd had a sullen look on her face for three days, ever since a big row with her boyfriend that had involved some hurling of dishes. Whatever I did seemed to infuriate her, so I said nothing, to avoid upsetting her.

I made some herbal tea. We both thought it smelled disgusting. The idea that aroma matters less than colour simply isn't true. Never mind, herbal tea is good for you.

I sat down in the rocking chair with my cup of tea, rocking back and forth, my eyes fixed on a point above the shop window. Rocking back and forth and drinking tea, while Pelin sat at her desk, also drinking tea.

 

That was the situation at the shop when she appeared in the doorway.

 

She was wearing black trousers, a T-shirt and a pair of very smart thick-heeled shoes. They were undoubtedly very easy to walk in, unlike the shoes in fashion that year. When she turned around, I noticed she had “young at heart” written on the back of her T-shirt.

It was my friend Candan. She owned a large bookshop in Beyoğlu, and it was she who had suggested I took on Pelin, one of her former employees.

“What brings you here?” I asked. She hadn't set foot in the shop since my opening cocktail party four years earlier. But I didn't mention that.

“I'm looking for a book by Barbara Vine and I thought you might have it,” she said.

She was joking of course. The thought of Candan going out looking for a book was ridiculous. I laughed.

“You do know that Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell's pen name, don't you?”

No, it wasn't me who said that, it was Candan's former employee Pelin. She fell silent as soon as she saw my icy stare.

However, Candan just smiled and we exchanged a few polite pleasantries. Have I ever mentioned how much I love the coolheadedness of a true businesswoman?

We went out to the Café Geneviz, just on the other side of Kuledibi Square, so that we could be alone, away from that priggish Pelin, and have a decent cup of tea. We discussed everything under the sun before I got onto my house-hunting disaster. It's never easy explaining to a rich person that you're forced to move to avoid paying an extra 150 euros a month.

This is how it goes:

First, the friend listens to me without saying a word, probably worried about saying the wrong thing. Then, unable to hold out any longer, she blurts out:

“Why don't you buy an apartment?”

How? Where would I find the money to buy an apartment? I was moving because I couldn't afford a rent increase. Was she teasing me?

You can say anything about fiction, newspaper articles, people or politicians to friends with similar tastes, but money is a subject
that divides people. While one person is trying to manage by stretching every cent, another is giving their hairdresser a tip of 150 euros. The very sum that was causing me problems.

“Buy an apartment on the cheap,” Candan said, hastily changing tack when she saw the look on my face and sensed what it was that I was unable to put into words.

Despite everything, I didn't reproach her, but merely responded, “I don't want to move away from this area. I want an apartment close to my work.”

“Yes, I'm talking about a cheap way of buying an apartment round here. You know the building where I live in Cihangir? Well, it belongs to a minorities' charity that has a number of places to let or for sale in Kuledibi and Cihangir. Someone I know at this charity told me they have places to rent out near here and I've come to have a look at one of them.” Laughing, she took my arm and added, “Maybe I'll open a rival bookshop in Kuledibi.”

“Does this charity want to sell any apartments?” I asked, ignoring her previous remark.

“Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. As well as buildings to rent, the charity has apartments that are put up for sale once they're handed over to the Treasury.”

“Just a minute,” I said, “explain this slowly, in a way I can understand.”

She did.

The situation was this: if members of minorities emigrated from Turkey, leaving behind unoccupied immovable property, after a certain period of time that property could be deemed ownerless by a court ruling and turned over to the Treasury. The Treasury could then either let this ownerless property or sell it. It usually took the second of these options, meaning that the property could be sold off at public auction at considerably less than its market value, and that the proceeds of the sale could be registered as Treasury revenue. All you needed to know was
where these apartments were located and the dates of the auction. That meant finding someone at the National Real Estate Bureau, a process referred to as “finding a man”, and handing money over to him. Candan didn't yet know how much money, but claimed she could find someone working at the Bureau who would take me to see some apartments that were to be sold.

 

For the first time in a long while, I fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow that night.

 

I spent the weekend waiting impatiently for Monday to come, unable to enjoy either my Saturday morning rendezvous with Yılmaz or the sushi I ate with Selim on Sunday afternoon.

As I walked to the shop on Monday morning, I found myself carefully scrutinizing the buildings along the way with the eye of a buyer. To be honest, until then, I'd never taken any interest in the past residents of Çukurcuma, an area of junk shops trying to look like antique shops, or of Kuledibi, where cosmopolitan confusion reigned, or indeed in the people who had built the lovely old buildings.

All I knew was that Kuledibi had been a district where impoverished Jews lived until the 1950s and that, after the state of Israel was created, a lot of the Jews emigrated, and waves of people from Anatolia came to settle in the area, which was why most of the remaining Jews moved out of Kuledibi to other districts of Istanbul.

Apart from Neve Salom – Istanbul's largest synagogue – another smaller but more attractive synagogue and a small butcher's shop selling kosher meat, there was no longer any trace of the Kuledibi Jews who once lived there. There were, of course, the “ownerless” houses and shops that I had learnt about three days before.

Impoverished Anatolian families with lots of children now lived in Kuledibi, not forgetting, of course, the daytime population of chandelier wholesalers and electricians. Actually, if you looked carefully, a gradual change had started in recent years. The area was slowly taking on a new identity as people bought up the
houses and started restoring them. My bookstore had been the first shop to sell anything other than chandeliers, and now there were several bars, cafés and even a few expensive hotels in the neighbourhood. A Spanish woman had opened up a bar serving tapas daily and paella one day a month, and there was even a jazz club that drew in the intellectuals.

Towards noon, I called Candan in the hope that she might have found out the necessary information. Pelin had still not arrived at work and I was trying hard not to call her. One of the difficulties of working with young people is having to put up with the vagaries of their lives.

Candan, that wonderful woman, came up with a name and telephone number. Kasım Bey: 0 538 318 44 54. She told me to say that Varol from the Charities Commission sent his regards.

My heart was pounding as I dialled the number.

My conversation with Kasım Bey was short and to the point. Apparently it was not the done thing to discuss such matters over the phone. We agreed to meet at the Duvardibi Tea Garden in Sultanahmet after work. I put the phone down, realizing too late that we had not discussed how we would recognize each other. I wondered if I would be able to pick out a bribe-taking state employee by his appearance. It would be a good test for me, as one who claimed to have such in-depth knowledge of Turks.

 

Believe it or not, after the briefest hesitation, I made my way between the twenty or so tables in the tea garden directly to where Kasım Bey was sitting. This exercise undoubtedly showed I was a good observer of Turks. However, I cannot deny that there were certain external factors that helped me.

Several tables were taken by young couples who liked to spend romantic early evenings at this tea garden where the music, termed
arabesque
by Turks, sounded like the meowing of cats.

Other tables were occupied by Turkish families out for an evening stroll – two adults and at least four children.

Northern European tourists were sitting at the tables without any shade, exposing their arms and calves to the shimmering heat of the sun and gazing with endless interest at the dregs in the bottom of their coffee cups. I could have bet a hundred to one that eventually one of them, a German, would ask the waiter for a spoon and start eating the coffee grounds. Germans are the only people who never forget, even as grownups, the tale fed to them as children that anything edible we leave on a plate will cry.

Then there were four tables, each with a single man sitting at them. One was a handsome young man who was reading intently and could not possibly be Kasım Bey. That would have been too good to be true.

The man at the second table looked well past the age of retirement, for a civil servant.

The man at the third table could have been Kasım Bey.

So could the one at the fourth table.

Thinking of the question “Which part of a man do you look at first?” that frequently appears in women's magazines, I found myself looking at the men sitting at the third and fourth tables. Ah, but you're wrong – I was looking at their legs!

Kasım Bey was the one wearing brown sandals with white socks.

His shirt was dark blue and crisply ironed.

It was only when I stood next to him that I noticed he stank of sweat.

He got up and we shook hands.

 

That evening, I went out with Selim and a few of his lawyer friends and their wives with their streaked or dyed blonde hair. We went to an Italian restaurant in Zincirlikuyu, or maybe it was Esentepe. These wealthy, characterless districts of Istanbul
were very alike and had never really interested me. I'm sorry to say I could hardly tell where Zincirlikuyu started and Esentepe ended.

There were more waiters, head waiters and commis in the restaurant than there were customers. I counted, and there were exactly twenty people there. I caused a bit of unease around our table when I started talking about hidden unemployment figures and the social upheaval caused by unemployment. As I spoke, they gave each other sidelong glances, thinking I wouldn't notice; and then the bald, strangely sexy man sitting opposite interrupted to compliment me on my Turkish. It was nothing other than a crude attempt to change the subject and I found it maddening.

In revenge, I said, “Oh yes? You, too, speak very good Turkish.”

I have to confess it wasn't original – I pinched it from a novel.

I hate to think women are more stupid than men, but it's only men who laugh at my plagiarized jokes.

However, the splendid bald creature didn't succumb. Instead, he asked, “Where did you learn Turkish?”

“In Turkey,” I replied, deciding that my revenge was now sufficient, as I caught Selim narrowing his eyes in exasperation at me.

“I was born in Turkey,” I added.

My mother was a German Catholic and my father was a German Jew. They escaped from German fascism and settled in Turkey, where they stayed long after the war ended. I was born in Istanbul and spent the first seven years of my life here.

 

For the rest of the evening, they avoided unpleasant topics such as social upheaval, employment, tax rises or the forthcoming elections, preferring to laugh about things like the ridiculous cost of a horrid bottle of Chianti.

I wouldn't say I was anti-capitalist, but, apart from my friends and my lover, I really disliked rich people. Any reader thinking that such people probably disliked me too should note that the
splendid bald creature hung on my every word throughout the evening, right in front of both his wife and Selim.

As soon as we got into the car, Selim picked a fight as if it had been my fault. Or rather, I should say he was silent and tight-lipped. He wasn't the sort of person to row and he would certainly never start one. But his silence would drive me mad and make me say all sorts of things so it always ended up with me starting our arguments.

They'd go something like this:

“Aren't people strange? You know, what they talk about and so on.”

Selim remains silent.

“Any serious topic seems to be taboo.”