Now is the TIme to Visit Egypt

Hamid, the camel, is waiting for you

Can you imagine the Pyramids without tourists?

There weren’t any. 

When we first arrived there was a group of maybe twenty-five Korean Christians.  All in identical red t-shirts with some slogan like “Asians for Jesus” written on them.  Baseball caps.  Comfy athletic shoes. Cameras hanging around their necks.

But they were leaving as we were arriving.  And there was just me and my friend Daniela and a few Egyptians on camels and horses trotting around the site. Girls squealing as the camels snorted. An occasional Frenchman or German walking along snapping photos. Egyptian hawkers selling red green blue silver pyramid momentos. .Papyrus paintings of Isis and Horos.

 

And silence.  The hiss of wind in our ears.  The pyramids rising out of the little block of desert allocated to them.  The suburban sprawl of Giza, now a part of Cairo, creeping like runaway weeds, spreading their vines to the very border of this antiquity.

And Hamid, the decked-out camel, jaws circling first to the right and then to the left, patiently stands in his festive blanket and dangling pom-poms in front of one of the most historic sights on earth, indifferent to it all.

 ***

Cairo was Cairo.  A massive, polluted, over-crowded, traffic disaster.  Life post-revolution the same as life pre-revolution.  Touts touted, taxi-drivers sat in unmoving traffic, the Metro delivered its passengers throughout the city, people shoved their way into the already packed cars.  The ladies of the “ladies only” car adjusted their head scarves. Big-eyed children held their mothers' hands and stared at the strange faces of the tourists.

People hussled to their jobs.  Waited in lines to buy hot rounds of pita bread fresh out of the oven. Lived their lives.                         

                    ***

But something had changed.

People’s attitudes.

“Welcome to Egypt!” they sang out, smiling.  At Tahrir Square hawkers sold the new red, black, and white flags everywhere. Pins.  Momentos of 25^th February when Mubarak fled.  

“We are very proud and happy,” they told me.  Person after person giving a thumbs up sign and saying, “Revolution.”

“It’s going to be good,” said Mohammed, our waiter at a restaurant on the West Bank of Luxor.  “We are free now.  Things are going to improve.  We had our first election in thirty years.  The military here is good.  Not like the police.  The military helps the people.”

In Luxor, Daniela and I sit in spotlights of sunshine, leaning against the massive papyrus-shaped stone pillars in the Great Hypostyle Hall in the Amun Temple at Karnak.  For ten minutes we sit in complete silence.  No one else in sight.  Finally one German couple walks slowly through the pillar forest snapping photos.

And in the dim light of the Sacred Barque Sanctuary, six “new-agers” stand in a circle around the sacred relic.  Their arms at their sides, bent at a forty-five degree angle at their elbows, fingers spread wide, they create an “energy circle” and eyes closed, absorb the ancient mystic rays.     

But what is happening in Egypt is not mystic.  As day after day a country dependent on tourism for 11% of its national income awaits the return of the tourist, the new-found glow of power and joy may soon turn to scowls and empty bellies.

And what was frightening was the information given to me by a Spanish journalist friend who lives in Cairo.

“Fifteen thousand people arrested by the military during the protests have not been released,” Eva said.  “The people think the military is on their side, but two top military officials were reported as saying: ‘We’ll make them (the people) miss Mubarak.’”

In the English language Egyptian Gazette, an article tells me that police security guards have returned to the campus of Alexandria University.  Another article relates that all “strikes have been banned under the new Emergency Act.”

“It’s all temporary,” the new Prime Minister says, smiling and reassuring.

Meanwhile leaders of the revolution attempt to go from protesters to politicians: creating “parties,” establishing platforms, discussing reforms. The “Islamic Brotherhood compaignes among the poor and uneducated. And the military tightens its controls over the people.

What happens next in Egypt cannot be predicted. 

But for sure, if the tourists don’t return, the entire

population will suffer.

The blue Nile continues its path through the desert and palmeries.  White egrets swoop.  Single-sailed feluccas glide gracefully into the sunset.  And the people of Egypt await a new dawn of prosperity and freedom.         

My Flat Mates

My Flat Mates

I live with a Turkish couple in an old conservative neighborhood called Tepebasi, where the women all cover their heads.  The rents here are cheap and it’s a real neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else, gossips about everyone else, but also will go to great lengths to help everyone else.  I’m the Yabanci (foreigner).  In the summer, the old lady from across the street is always asking me when I’m going to sit on the yellow traffic barrier with her and eat sunflower seeds and pass the time

.

Actually it’s wrong to say I live with a “Turkish” couple.  The woman, Nefle (which means four-leaf-clover) is not Turkish, but hails from the south, an area on the border with Syria called “Antakya,” or the “Hatay.” Her people are Arabic.  And they are Shi’a Muslims, while Turks are Sunni.  

Photos of her family hang on the wall of the apartment.  Her father, an Iman or reverend, is shown in a long white beard hanging down his chest, a white skull cap, and a severe expression.  Her mother, who I met when she came to Istanbul for the wedding of Nefle’s youngest brother, wears a white scarf with little embroidered balls dangling over her forehead.  The mother doesn’t smile.  After a lifetime in which celebration was considered “sin,” a lifetime of being continually commanded by her husband, “There’s work to do, woman!” she gazes out of sad blue eyes. 

Nefle tells me women are like donkeys in Antakia.  Only there to serve men.  Men come first in the South.  “It’s in the Koran,” they say.  They sit twirling their prayer beads, shouting to their wives, “I’m thirsty.  Where’s my tea?  I’m hungry.  Where’s my food?”  The women wait on the men and eat the leftovers. 

Nefle comes from a family of nine siblings.  Every morning she awoke to the yells of her father:  “Get up you lazy good-for-nothings!  There’s work to be done in the garden!”

Meanwhile her mother retreated further and further into a land in which no tyrants ordered her around.  When she retreated too far, they sent her at different intervals to the “special” hospital.

Nefle kneading dough for manti

Nefle was lucky.  One of her older brothers, a documentary film maker, moved to Istanbul and the family allowed her to come and visit.  She was initiated into the bohemian life of Istanbul.  She never moved back.  Because she loved to cook, knew how to make the regional specialties of her area, she found work cooking at the restaurant of some crazy Black Sea sisters.  It was there she met Mustapha.

A one hundred and eighty degree opposite of Nefle’s father, Mustapha was a shy, soft-spoken, modern Turk who believed in equality of sexes.  Mustapha’s mother left his mean-spirited father (a rash and uncommon act in those days) and Mustapha’s father refused to allow him to ever see her.  The father put the young child in the care of his Aunt and Uncle who treated him more like an indentured servant than a son.  When he came of age, Mustapha ran off and joined the Merchant Marines.  For ten years he sailed the seas and worked in the steaming hulls of ships.  Spending docked time in Angola, China, New Orleans, he savored new experiences and glimpses of other worlds and cultures. And as sailors tend to do, drank himself senseless at every port.

Mustapha once told me: “Outside of Nefle, I have never loved another woman.”  He said this when I asked for an example of how to use the Turkish word disharda (outside.)

An unusual couple, they cook together, clean together, opened a restaurant and ran it together until the stress became too great.

Now Musti (as his close friends call him) plays the part of Gepetto in the children’s play Pinochio, and tours all over Turkey. Nefle makes manti Turkish ravioli and sells it to various restaurants.  At home, Musti and I watch Slavas Snow Show, clowns from Poland, whose video he found, and then for days afterward we go around repeating their miming and comic routines. Sometimes he asks if I want to watch a Beckett play he’s downloaded from the internet.  Nefle and I bellydance to classic Turkish music, and we all stoop and peer into the spinning washing machine, then turn to each other and say: “Wow!” Repeating this several times until we tire of the game.   

first snow

March 8.

Today was the coldest day of the winter and the first snow.  Icy wind whipped across the Golden Horn. Tiny specks of snow swooshed past my window blowing sideways, to the left.  The wind changed. The snow flurries changed direction and hurled themselves to the right.  Then a lull.  An updraft.  Suddenly the flakes began to drift upwards, toward the gray-white sky, riding some unseen current.

Tell me, do snowflakes float upwards in other places, or is it only in the mad chaos of Istanbul that the world goes topsy turvy and snow flies up instead of falling down?

I leave the house in my long black coat, hood tied tight, scarf wrapped snugly around my neck.

 Fierce gusts of wind wrench umbrellas inside out.  They lie discarded on the slushy ground like the skeleton remains of prehistoric flying reptiles.  Ragged wings flapping in the wind.

Everyone battles the wind, heads bent against the frenzied attack of snow.  The red tram gleams-- a spark of brilliant color on the bleak street.

this time a story

well some people have asked me when i'm going to add a new post to my blog.
but i've been completely caught up with writing a longer thing (not really sure what to call it, but it's now 150 pages of writing about the year i spent in fez, morocco)
so, i thought for those of you hungering for something new, i'd just copy and post a story of mine that appears in the anthology Mambo Poa.
happy reading.

                                                                                          The Guest

“They’re political,” said Ayse, my modern Turkish friend as she sipped her red wine and knocked the ash of her cigarette into the metal ashtray for emphasis.

Three Turkish women and myself, an American, sat at a stylish outdoor cafe in the westernized area of Beyoglu, Istanbul.  Turkish pop music blasted out the speakers, the ‘boom boom boom’ of the bass driving our conversation.  We were surrounded by tables of young Turks--males and females seated together drinking beer and wine, smoking cigarettes, dressed in fashionable jeans and t-shirts, discussing films, music, and politics.

“But I don’t see why a young woman should be denied a university education just because her religion dictates that she cover her head with a scarf,” I said.

 

The mention of allowing “covered” girls entrance to university in Turkey sent my secular Turkish friends into vitriolic spasms.

“It’s not about religion, Diana.  You don’t know these people, said Esra.  She leaned forward, pushed her face close to mine.  “They just want power.  The men all want women to be like donkeys.  These girls don’t want to be covered.  Their families force them.”

“You’ll see, Diana, no woman wants this for herself,” said Elif, waving her cigarette like a conductor urging his orchestra to its dramatic climax.

But power hungry, religious fanaticism was not my experience of my English student Nagihan and her family.  I had been to their home in a traditional area in the north of Istanbul twice.  My only fear on those visits was that I would be fed to death.  Dish after dish was pushed at me.  My small helpings elicited the typical Turkish tongue clucking.  My departure was an occasion for gift-giving.  The mother filling my arms with crocheted washcloths, embroidered doilies, hand-picked hazel nuts from their village in the Northeast of Turkey.  They begged me to stay the night and have breakfast with them in the morning.  They were solicitous of my every need.

On my second dinner with them, Nagihan, her sisters, cousins, aunt and mother plied me with invitations to join them at their summer retreat—their family home in the mountains above the Black Sea in the far northeastern corner of Turkey. I hesitated in accepting their request wondering if two weeks isolated with them in a remote mountain village was the way I wanted to spend my summer break.  It would be far more intense then an evening over a meal.  Would my independent feminist beliefs collide with their ways of life? 

The offer was an opportunity I couldn’t reject, a chance to see the real Turkey outside of Istanbul.  I had left the U.S. one year before to teach English abroad, filled with the desire to see how other cultures lived, to learn other ways of interacting.  A bit apprehensive, but open to sharing a new experience, I agreed to join them.

The nineteen hour bus ride from Istanbul to Trabzon seemed never-ending.  It was me and four traditional girls, their heads covered with scarves, layered in clothing from neck to wrist to toe.  Our entourage included Nagihan, one of her sisters, (one was already in the mountains with their mother) and two of Nagihan’s cousins: Esra and Emine.  The only flesh that could be seen on them was the pale oval of their faces peering out from their headscarves, and their white hands.  By their religious beliefs these were the only parts of a “mature” girl that were allowed to be glimpsed by men.  The rest lay in wait for the eyes of the future husband, and only he. As if to make up for their sequestered bodies, the girls sported a wardrobe of color.  Orange sweatshirts, red jackets, pink pullovers, purple skirts.  They looked like a busload of flowers. Munching chips and cookies, they laughed uproariously at my packed lunch of raw carrots, apples and nuts, offering all their treats to me.  Everything they had they shared seamlessly.  Their giving was as unconscious as a stream flowing into a river.  There was no “mine,” only “ours.”

As an American brought up in the land of “mine,” I marveled at their lack of ownership needs.

At every bus stop, while I walked laps around the parking lot trying to get blood circulating through my legs, the girls went to the mescit to pray.  Five times a day, regardless of where they were, these girls performed their ablutions, put on a fresh scarf, when possible a clean skirt, and performed namaz—the Muslim prayers.  They went to prayers as fluidly as they shared every bag of chips, every t-shirt, every article of clothing, every scrap of food.  They set their clocks and watches for first prayer at dawn’s light and never skipped a single one.

We got off the bus in a town called Of, just east of Trabzon, then walked down to the churning Black Sea.  At a clearing on the roadside we waited at a mini-bus stop while massive charcoal-colored clouds hovered over the sea threatening a downpour.  A wizened old woman draped in the traditional red and brown shawl bemoaned the recent floods.  The dolmush (little mini-bus) arrived and the driver leaped out opening his arms and shouting a welcome to my friends.  When introduced to me, he called out: “Welcome Diane Boodjee,” a respectful local term for a cousin.  We boarded the dolmush for the final lap of our journey.

As we left the coast and headed toward the mountains, the world turned more shades of green than found in a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons. A deep forest green etched with swaths of yellow-green verdure, blue-green depth, and purple-green accents.  A land of oxygen and rain, rolling hills, with mist-shaded mountains looming in the background.  A lawless land of rumored Black Sea wild men and women known for their irascible dispositions and famous twitching line dances. 

I was the first non-Turk to honor their village.  Men strained their necks to look at me, staring openly at this uncovered women, as we made our way through the two-cafe, two grocery-store town of Tashan.  We crossed a foot bridge and climbed a steep mountain path, rutted with mud puddles.

“There it is,” said Nagihan pointing to a crude two-story wood house sitting in the middle of rolling tea fields.

“Hos geldiniz!  Hos geldiniz!”  Welcome! Welcome! Sang out the cries from Nagihan’s mother, eldest sister and aunt, as they kissed both our cheeks, hugged us, and led us up the old stairs into the kilim-covered salon.

Immediately tiny tulip-shaped glasses of local black tea were distributed as sisters and cousins recounted the trip. Bowls of sunflower seeds were placed around the room and everyone sat leaning up against one another, stroking one another, playing with each other’s hair.

When I stood to take my glass to the kitchen, I was admonished by Nagihan’s mother.

“Misafir!” You are a guest.  As Muslims we are taught that every guest is special, to be treated as if she were the prophet himself visiting.  For three days you are Misafir, our esteemed guest and we cannot allow you to do any work.

The ban was removed for the hazel nut picking the next day.  After my pleading, I was allowed to accompany them and help with the harvesting.  At my request the girls dressed me in their clothes, and we all tromped through the woods in black rubber boots, long shapeless, elastic-waisted skirts, long-sleeved t-shirts--red, orange, purple, apricot, and pink, covered by sweatshirts of green, blue, tangerine, and scarlet.  A procession of exotic fruits plodded through the thick forest. And in order to feel a part of this group, I covered my head in a green cotton scarf, as much to keep the leaves and dust from the trees out of my hair as to be united with my hosts.

We yanked down tree branches, grabbed green-cocooned nuts and tossed them into our aprons.  When our aprons were full we emptied them into rough-hewn baskets, laughed and laughed, and finally picnicked in a meadow by a stream.

My Turkish was basic.   I had been living in Istanbul one year, teaching English.  Yet I understood Fatma’s tale.  Fatma, Nagihan’s mother, had lost her own mother as a young child.  She was handed over to an aunt and uncle, her father being unable to cope.  Fatma was a daughter of the Black Sea, of a people who came many decades ago from Georgia and the Circassus.  Her eyes were a pale sky-blue, her complexion peaches and cream.  And like so many Turkish women her shape was now that of an oblong bowling ball.  She leaned back on one elbow on the blanket on the ground, dipped her bread into yogurt, wiped her mouth on her shawl and told her story. 

“I was such a romantic.  Oh Diana, I dreamed of marrying a tall, handsome man, a romantic man.  I dreamed of how my life would be different once I was married and had my own home.  From the time I can remember, all I did was work.  I was like a slave to my aunt and uncle.  But I knew one day a wonderful man would come into my life and rescue me.”

“Then I met him.  The man my uncle had arranged for me to marry.  He was short.  Much shorter than me.  He was cold and mean, Diana.  I cried and cried.  What could I do.?”

The girls scooped up the remains of the four different kinds of cheese, the tomatoes and cucumbers, the bread and olives and jam that had been our lunch and placed them in bags.  They strolled in all their colors back toward the hazel nut trees.

“Don’t be lazy! You always pick much less than our neighbors.”  Fatma called after her daughters and nieces, laughing as she teased them.

“Don’t worry Anne (mother), we won’t shame you.” They all laughed. Laughs like calliopes and wind chimes filled the air as they disappeared into the forest.

Fatma turned back to me, patted my hand, pulled a stray leaf from a strand of my hair that had escaped from under my scarf.

“I was taken to my husband’s family’s house.”  The house we stay in now, here in this village.  His mother woke me up at sunrise.  From sunrise to sunset I worked like a donkey.  I cleared fields and carried wood on my back.  I cut tea, pulled hazel nuts.  I cooked and cleaned.  At night I cried my self to sleep wondering what my life would have been like if my mother hadn’t died when I was so young.”

Tears filled Fatma’s heavenly-blue eyes and ran down her cheeks.  She wiped them with the corner of her blue and gold scarf.  “Finally my husband went to Istanbul with his brother and opened a restaurant.  Later he sent for me and I came.  Then I had my three daughters and my son, my little pasha,” Fatma’s face lit up as she talked about her son, the light of every Turkish women’s eye.  “I was so happy that at last I had my own family.  I was the head of my own home.”

The leaves in the altar of branches above us rustled like whispers of gossiping sisters.  A cool breeze blew off the stream that one month ago was a raging river of flood water.

I blinked away my own tears as Fatma continued.  “But he was never romantic.  I tried so many times, so many things.  I dyed my hair and had it cut and put on new earrings. When he came home I smiled at him and put his favorite dish in front of him and all he did was push me aside so he could watch some TV show.  I bought him a wedding ring for our anniversary and he threw it on the floor saying ‘What am I going to do with this? I work in a restaurant cooking. I don’t want anything on my fingers.’”

Fatma heaved her bulk up off the blanket.  When we stood she pulled me to her in a bear hug, then kissed my cheeks.  We folded the picnic blanket and walked through the woods together, joining the others.

When all the nuts had been harvested we sat on the roof—a circle of twelve women, family and neighbors—shucking the brown nuts from their rough green husks.  My thumb and fingers became torn and inflamed, my city hands unused to such harsh work.  The younger girls kept an endless supply of tea flowing as we sat shelling nuts, laughing, chatting, seated cross-legged in our circle of womanhood.  The sweat ran down our faces and necks.  I had abandoned my head scarf in the stifling heat, taken off my outer covering as I sat on the roof, but they sat uncomplaining, scarved, covered in two layers of clothing so as not to reveal any part of their bodies.

Every neighbor in the small village of ten families invited me to their home for tea and sunflower seeds and homemade pastries.  Every family greeted me with smiles and kisses on both cheeks, hospitality like I had never known.  They showed me their prize cows and green beans growing like weeds up the trellises on the sides of their old wooden houses.

And when one day I told Nagihan that I needed to take a walk by myself, nobody said one word against it, although I knew that no woman of this region would ever do such a thing.  They honored my differences, my need for independence, and never tried to persuade me to be like them—to cover my head, or only walk arm and arm in the company of other females.

After three days I was no longer on the ban of helping and had become one of the family.  In the morning, I would ask Fatma along with her daughters: “This morning what is my job?”  Then together we would prepare the breakfast and sit around the wooden table on the floor, knees overlapping, eating from common dishes and bowls.  We’d clean the house, mend torn items, cut tea, gather firewood in the forest, and heat water on the wood stove for bathing.  In the evenings we’d sit out on the terrace looking over rolling hills of ever-deepening hues of green.

Finally it was time for me to go.  “Gitme!  Gitme!” Don’t go.  Don’t go. They begged. Then one by one, sisters, cousins, mother, aunts, neighbors, came with gifts for me.  Nothing came from a store.  There was no store in the area.  They came with their own items for me: scarves with edgings of hand-crocheted flowers; a skirt I had admired on one of them; a scarlet t-shirt I had complimented; a silver bracelet; a pair of earrings; and finally the little girl I had taught a paddy-cake, hand-clapping game, handed me her beloved stuffed bear.  Tears poured out of my eyes and theirs.

“Bak bak!  Look look!” Fatma said.  A deep smile of approval warmed her face as tears flooded her eyes.  “She’s crying too.  That’s good.  You will come back next summer.”

Nagihan, her sisters and cousins walked me down the mountain and waited with me at the dolmush stop in Tashan.

“Ah Diana Boodjee, welcome,” said the dolmush driver. 

Nagihan and I hugged and kissed.  Sisters and cousins and I hugged and kissed. Tears streaming down my cheeks I entered the dolmush and headed back to Istanbul.

                       *                                     *                                     *                                    

Emails from friends in America awaited me.  “Weren’t you afraid as a western woman traveling in the east of Turkey?”

My answer: “As a guest in that area the only thing I feared was being loved to death.”

requiem for a neighborhood

Requiem for a Neighborhood

Asmalimescit was my “hood.’ The one place on earth where I felt I belonged.  For the first time in my life I had a neighborhood, an area, a scene where I knew everybody and everybody knew me.  And just like me, everyone was mad.  But in a good way, (for the most part).  Mad, as in crazy.  Mad as in inspired with manic energy and given to bursts of spontaneous creativity and rants of far-flung ideologies.

It was a neighborhood of writers and painters and sculptors, film-makers and actors.  The hang-out for the disenfranchised, manic marauders and world-weary.  The meeting place of the blessed alcoholic geniuses, the cosmic-brained and the acutely sensitive.  They found this place and clung together in a cocoon of frenzied aliveness, flights of philosophy, table-pounding diatribes, while I danced on the sidewalks and washed my hair in the downpour of August rains. 

And it was all good.   

Asmalimescit was a neighborhood where no two chairs matched at the one or two cafes in the area.  Where everything was second-hand.  Where people shared what little they had.  Where you could order your tea or meal and pay the next day when you had money.  A place where whoever had a pack of cigarettes, left them on the table for anyone else to smoke.    

Yusef was always there.  His shock of silver-gray hair standing out from his head like a lion’s mane.  Stroking his kink of silver-gray beard and launching into parodies of foreign languages: hunched over, hands twisting and writhing like an old Ottoman Fagan, issuing phlegm-throated approximations of Arabic.  Or raising his arms and voice and yelling to the heavens: “Mama Mia!  Mama Mia!” as soon as he saw me.  Leaping to his feet, hugging me, swirling me around, dancing about on the cobblestone’s like a possessed Sufi fool spouting fake Italian.

Peyote Hasan.  The number 1 coolest dude that ever was, ever will be, roaming the dirty gray streets of Taksim.  With his wrap-around dark sunglasses, his stoop-shouldered slouch, and loping gate.  He was Mr.  Cool.  Mr. Number 1 Hipster. No one even a close second.  And we called his outside table at Ella Café his “office.”  He called me “Baby,” he called every female “Baby,” and it came as natural to his tongue as saliva at your first bite.  His longer than normal skinny arms spread out, flailing this way and that accentuating his story.  “Did I ever tell you how I lost the fuckin sheep?  Yeah, back when I was just a little kid in Iran and they sent me out to watch the sheep.  And I don’t know, I musta fell asleep or something and I woke up and the sheep were gone.  I mean, can you dig it, baby?  I lost the whole fuckin herd of sheep.” He’d sit, his legs crossed, one dangling over the other sucking down cans of Efes beer and laughing laughing laughing.  Bigger than life.  Cooler than cool.  Actor.  Entrepreneur.  Irreverent, irascible, and irrepressible.  Now nothing more than skin stretched over bones.  No food, only beer poured down this throat.  Office closed.

The street painter Erdem, his studio a table outside Badehane Bar.  In all weather, painting his abstract renderings of Istanbul’s old buildings.  Reading tarot cards and laughing his pursed-lip laugh.  Fighting a loosing battle with diabetes.

Musicians leaning against the flaking orange-painted bathtub on the corner of Sofyali and Jurnal Sokak, wailing on their saxes.  Singers joining in the chorus of well-known Turkish song, their voices carrying up to my third-floor window.  The straggly tree in the bathtub fighting for its life.

And what is Asmalimescit now?  One big nightclub.  A bar-to-bar, disco-bass-pounding scene where the wannabees hang to see the other wannabees and be seen by the other wannabees in all the glitzy shi shi slick metal-topped bars with their back lit liquor shelves and huge gas jet heaters warming up the outdoors as Istanbul’s elite sit outside on a winter’s night, smoking their cigarettes and sipping their over-priced mohitos.

And Asmalimescit’s legends?  Where are they now?  Angel-faced Derya with the calliope laugh growing fatter and darker, skulking the back streets dressed all in black.  Smileless.  Her sister, Seckin, squatting on her haunches on Istiklal, her back leaning against a graying building,  Her hair gray kink, pointy nose and chin like a storybook witch.  She brandishes her stick and frightens passersby.  The black sea has summoned them home and reclaimed them.  Giresun’s rains washing clean their sins.

And Kebire, the Queen of Asmalimescit.  My roommate and best friend.  With her shiny earrings and sparkly strands of beads, her shrieks of wild laughter, her unlimited generosity, her huge energy bringing together people and music and events. Where is she now?  Fifty years old and a babysitter in Berlin.

And the others?

I watch their hunched backs recede as they slink down dawn’s backstreets, their shadows  gobbled up by evening’s neon promises.  
                                                  

from my window

From my window...

 Just opposite our apartment,  neighborhood life goes on as it has for years.  Below every window there’s a basket on a long string, rope coiled up and ready for when the fruit and vegetable sellers come by in their trucks.  Loud speakers blaring: “Potatoes, tomatoes, cucmbers, eggplant, onioooooooooooon!”   Windows open,  housewives look down.  Most of the heads of these women are covered in scarves.  They yell down, inquiring prices and freshness:  “1 kilo patates ne kadar?  Taze mi?”

The baskets gets lowered.  The vegetable man places his produce inside.  The women pull them hand over hand up to their second or third or fourth floor apartments.  They haul them inside, take out their purchases, then relower them with money.

The woman directly opposite spends her days in her window.  Arms folded or smoking a cigarette she surveys the world below.  Yells at children who scream too loud while playing hopscotch.  Yells greetings to the other women who occasionally venture our from their homes.  Yells instructions to postmen.  Smoking coughing spitting and yelling.  Her cat sitting next to her on the ledge of the window.

Summer evenings the women come out.  They sit on the yellow parking rail or on the outside steps of their apartments eating sunflower seeds.  The ground is littered with shells.  They pull them from a bag, gingerly place them between their teeth, snap the shell open, tongues hooking the little morcel of seed, fingers pulling the shell out and throwing it on the ground.  The night clicks clacks with the sound of the shell bursting open between their teeth.  Click click click click.  Like busy insects.  They sit click and clack and gossip like fishwives.  Talking about this one and that one.  How my roomate Nefle doesn’t wear a head scarf and works.  How me, a foreigner lives with her and her husband.  Gossip gossip gossip.  Buzz buzz buzz.  Click clack click clack throughout the humid istanbul night.

the man with the little head

there he was. standing in taksim square.  a man with a normal size body and a little head.  but such a nice little head.  short-cropped thick gray hair.  thick gray turkish mustache.  selling those little celephane packs of tissues.  a pleasant look on the face of his little head.  passers-by zooming by paying no attention to him.  the man with the little head just standing there.  celpack of tissues slighly extended in his hand. 

where do they come from?  these people.  here one day, another, and then gone.  not like the little old lady in the long brown coat and the brown and orange head scarf who has sat day after day for at least the last seven years (that's how long i've been seeing her).  seated on her little wooden stool.  a plain bathroom scale at her feet waiting for someone to come by and use her scale. i've never seen anyone use it to weigh themselves and  pay her for the service.  i only see her sitting there, hunched over, occasionally adjusting her headscarf, tucking a recalcitrant strand of hair back under her scarf.  pasty-skinned and patient as a buddhist monk she waits daily.

the changes she must have seen.  sitting day after day on istiklal caddesi.  watching the raging river of people spill past.  ebbing and flowing like a tide.  in winter bundled up head to foot in black.  umbrellas bent, pushed against the winds that hurl themselves off the golden horn and the bosphorus.  in summers of most recent years, scantily-clad girls in provocative european styles: short shorts and high boots, low-cut tops and plenty of eye-liner and lipstick.  In years past, men walking hand in hand like innocent young lovers, women arm in arm in twos and threes.  little ma and pop kebap shops now replaced with dazzling western restaurants.  mac donalds.  burger king.  kfc and three starbucks where the trendy walk past our little old lady who waits in vain, while the youth of istanbul sip double mochas, their knock-off prada sunglasses lying on the table next to their foamy drinks.   

and the man with the little head offers packs of tissues, then disappears into crazy gray night.