Yasemın Aydinoğlu - Istanbul Noir

I imagine the credits artfully rolling up from the mist announcing my latest contribution to the vast library of reality porn on that slagheap of American culture, the Internet. The Spirit of Philosophical Vitriol, a.k.a. Dirty Dicks and the Chicks That Love Them: Volume 6 .

Sa ğ malcılar

“I will flog the piss out of you, you hear me, you mother-fuckerrr!” he bellowed above me. I thought my ear-drums would burst. I was begging, dying, my knees trembling. The bones, the joints of my hands, had turned to putty.

“Brother, I swear to God, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t!”

They were yanking my head back by the hair on the scruff of my neck and dunking it into the bucket. I couldn’t count how many they were. Each time I held my breath as long as I could. I let it out bit by bit, but it was no use. I couldn’t take it anymore. I inhaled some water through my nose. The salt singed my nostrils, scorched my throat. My eyes burned. They were dunking my head into something, something heavier than water, oilier than water, saltier than water, but what was it? It was like seawater, like tears, what they were trying to drown me in. This time he pushed me hard, harder, into the water, by the back of my neck. I struggled, I cried. You could drown in a fucking spoonful of water. What the hell did I know? What the hell was I doing here?

A crackling sound exploded in my ear. Suddenly, I woke up. I was in the prison ward. The music broadcast had started. Orhan Gencebay buzzed through the speakers: “May I be damned if I’ve forgotten you, if I’ve found another lover.” A dream? It was all a fucking dream, goddamn it. I touched my face, felt the tears still there. My balls and my chin ached from the spasms, from the crying. I’d never been so happy to wake up in this ward. I headed straight for the toilet upstairs, cutting a path through the pungent scent of urine. I didn’t want to let on that I’d had a bad dream. Sixty of us all living together in the same room; sixty people under the constant surveillance of fifty-nine. Somebody’s bound to catch on to your soft spot. My biggest fear, ever since I was a kid, was for someone to be able to read my mind.

But then I really shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve got a penchant for finding myself in the craziest situations. I remember the day I arrived here, for example. They unloaded us from the van, I raised my head, and, Goddamn it, Ahmet! I say to myself. You just stepped in a pile of shit! Now lift your fucking foot . The walls of Sağmalcılar Prison lay before me. Surrounded by white houses, the place sticks out like a bruise on the skin of a pale lady. Shit had gotten real serious real fast. And to think that dude I jumped with a knife was only packing a hundred bucks. Asshole! Hardly compensation for the price I’d have to pay. Made an absolute fool out of me. And if things keep up like this, I’ll be a disgrace until the day I die. But there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, and always failed to do: Never ever trust your feelings and the reasons behind them. ’Cause they change so damn quickly, leaving you with nothing to do but lick your wounds.

The music stopped all of a sudden. They announced Sinan’s name. The same Sinan I’d just killed in my dream, and then got all choked up about swearing to my interrogators that it wasn’t me. He’s trying to get transferred out of here, but he keeps turning up empty-handed. You can’t just go wherever you want whenever you damn well feel like it, now, can you? As soon as he heard his name announced, Sinan made a dash for the hallway. With a noisy rattle of the keys the door opened, and out Sinan went. Then Orhan Abi picked up where he’d left off, crooning away.

I waited for him to return to the cell. I was sure he’d get rejected. The aftershocks of my dream slowly wore off. I’d never been so frightened by a dream since I was a kid. It’d been on my mind for a long time. I had asked, but Sinan’s lips were sealed.

“You think killing someone’s gonna earn you stripes or something?” he had said to me once. He talked with a whistle through his broken front tooth.

I said nothing.

“Don’t ask me then, go ask your master,” he said.

“The master’s situation’s different,” I said.

“What about it? Self-defense or not, you deal with the consequences.”

The man he called my “master” was a prisoner we worked with in the carpentry shop. Sinan didn’t like him, not at all. He was respected by the other men, like he was some kind of ward ağa or something. Two plainclothes flatfoots tried to rape his wife one night when they were coming back from Kumkapı, and he butchered the guys right on the spot. He got a king’s reception when he arrived at the prison.

Sinan was back before he’d even left. He walked into the courtyard without a word, paced a line all morning. He took it real hard every time his transfer petition got rejected. And this time, too, just like when any little thing happened to him, he felt his whole world was crumbling around him.

I went and sat next to him at lunch. I scrunched up and started eating.

“Use a fork,” he said.

“I’m gonna eat with my hands,” I said.

“Use a fork. You can’t eat like that, you’ll upset your stomach,” he said.

He always told me what to do. Whenever I spoke, he interrupted me and corrected my accent. He told me who I could and couldn’t speak to. And he rubbed my peasant roots in my face every chance he got. As if he were carving out his own little kingdom there between those walls. I continued eating. You shovel in rotten, raw meat with your bare hands, and then you savor every damn morsel, don’t you? So why use a fork just ’cause it’s cooked? I was about to say. But I didn’t.

“Don’t tell me what to do. Gets on my nerves,” was all I said.

“You a hood now, are you?” he said. “Since when?”

To him, I could fall right into the class of degenerates and scum at any given moment. I looked him in the face. I should hate him. He had a china chin, delicate as a woman’s. The veins on his forehead grew even bluer when he was sad. Tore me up inside. I kept doing my damnedest to be his equal. I started eating with a fork. It wasn’t difficult, I simply didn’t enjoy it.

“They’re going to kill me if I stay here,” he said.

“Nobody’s gonna do shit to anybody,” I said.

“Müfit’s got men in here. I gotta scat, and quick.”

“No bird flies out of here without the ward ağa knowin’ about it,” I said.

The ward ağa was a man in his thirties who’d been catapulted to his superior rank as soon as he set foot in here, because he’d killed seven men in a parking lot brawl. He was the man who kept tabs on comers and goers. Next to him, the guards were mere escorts.

The “Müfit! Müfit!” he whined about was the son of the man he’d killed. From what he told me, all hell had broken loose over some broad. Sinan’s childhood sweetheart. He had no idea how he slayed that man, the fat sixty-some-year-old daddy who planted himself in their way the night they tried to elope. Both men were certain of their love for Funda. I can’t imagine Sinan slapping a punching bag, he’s so damn puny. And this Müfit guy told the apartment-building doorman to let Funda know he was on Sinan’s ass. Is there really a doorman at the apartment building where Funda lives? Who knows? Hard to separate the bull from the shit when it comes to these stories. Regardless, Sinan thought he was now in the lion’s mouth. And he’d started acting extra strange the past few weeks. He couldn’t sleep at night, even started praying. He started speaking real fast, like he was mumbling prayers or something. He couldn’t sit still. And when he got like that, he’d get more annoyed with me than ever. Yet for years I’d been closer to him than anybody, Funda even.