Yasemın Aydinoğlu - Istanbul Noir

I have to catch him. I can. I will. He’s fast too. I’ve started to catch up, but I can feel the energy draining out of me. So what happens when I catch him? The question doesn’t slow me down. What am I going to do, beat him up? Turn him in? I think of something Semih told me. He said for days after his cassette player was stolen from his car, he found his car repulsive. That’s what he said. “It was like the car had been defiled, I just couldn’t stomach getting into it.” I wonder if that’s the guy who broke into Semih’s car? Well, it was him or someone like him — those pricks are all alike. How many times have I told him, “Rent a place in an apartment complex like ours, the streets aren’t safe. You spent all that money on the car, you shouldn’t just leave it out on the street.”

How much longer can I keep after this fool? What the hell am I chasing him for anyway? He might pull a knife, or maybe a screwdriver; in any case, something sharp, whatever he used to open the car door. All ties have been severed between my brain and my legs; my thoughts don’t slow me down; I just keep running, pacing myself like a long-distance pro. I never would’ve thought I’d be able to run so fast for so long. The benefits of not smoking. As I run I feel this sense of spaciousness, a kind of freshness within; I can almost catch a whiff of mint. Maybe after I catch up I’ll just run right past him, make it to the finish line first. The more I run, the lighter I feel. Maybe all the sweating is ridding my body of toxins? My heart is racing, and my head’s throbbing just as fast, but my legs couldn’t care less, it’s like they have a mind of their own.

We’re sprinting downhill; if we’d been going uphill, there’s no way I could catch up. Here the streets are even darker. He’s at most three yards ahead of me. But I can’t catch up — we must be running at the same speed. He slows down each time he turns around to look back at me, but it’s not enough for me to catch up. He must know these parts well; he never takes a dead end. My legs have started to shake; it’s a not unpleasant feeling. I’ll be sore tomorrow, but for now it feels good.

I don’t understand how it happened. He was trying to jump over a wall just a couple of feet high when his foot got caught and he fell. First I heard a thump, then I heard a moan.

Oh God! The boy’s face is covered in blood. He must’ve hit his head. I feel sick to my stomach. We’re unable to speak. We’re breathless. He’s looking me hard in the face. But his expression is not one of anger, nor of a desire for mercy. He’s just looking. Finally, looking at him looking at me, I come to. A hospital, a doctor... I take out my cell phone and call for an ambulance. “Where are you?” asks the voice on the other end. I don’t know. I ask the other guy. He mumbles something, Cinema, I think. That’s when I realize where I am.

“You know that old cinema?... We’re over around there.” I give the person my phone number.

The boy on the ground groans, trying to drag himself. He’d probably ignore the cuts and bruises and keep on running, if only he could find the strength. “Don’t move,” I tell him. I sound like the police on TV, yet all I’m really saying is the only thing I know about first aid, right or wrong. He has to keep his head still.

He says something like, Let me go . From the frantic beat of my heart, the puffing of my chest, I can’t quite make out his words.

“The ambulance,” I say, my voice coming out like a whisper, “is on its way.”

It isn’t long before the ambulance shows up. Thank goodness. We make our way back through the same streets he and I have just run, siren blaring. I sit next to the driver. He doesn’t ask any questions, and I don’t say a word. We pull up to the emergency room. They put the boy on a stretcher and take him in. Nobody says a word to me. Should I just get out of here? Now they’re going to ask me all kinds of questions. Still, I can’t bring myself to leave. I’m so worried about the boy. What if they notice me leaving, what’ll I say? There’s a handful of people waiting in front of the emergency room. A couple of people rush out of the emergency room and over to the glass-partitioned area on the side. I’ve finally caught my breath, but my legs are still shaking. Should I go over and sit in that glass-partitioned area too? But I can’t move. I just watch instead. There’s a reception window; that must be where they do all the registering and signing in and stuff. And there are chairs for people waiting on the other side. One person’s stretched out asleep, and there’s a group of people talking. In the far corner, some bum’s leaning back against the radiator; he’s holding his grimy head in his hands. He’s probably a regular here at night, just moved in; nobody cares.

A middle-aged policeman exits the emergency room. Is he heading toward me or what?

“Which one of you brought in the injured kid?” he yells out.

I walk up to him. I ask him how the boy’s doing.

“Fine,” he says, and I notice he’s holding a small notebook. He’s going to ask me something now. How will I answer? Should I tell him the truth? If I tell him I just stumbled upon the boy, he’s going to ask what business I had over there at that time of night. Basically, I’m screwed no matter what. Best to ask him some questions first.

“Is he conscious?” I say, surprised at my own ingenuity in coming up with that one.

“Yes, yes he is. Let’s go see him.”

There are patients waiting on stretchers in the hallway, with friends and relatives standing or sitting next to them. I can hear moaning and weeping coming from the rooms, their doors open. A tired nurse carrying IV fluids walks by. Another is telling one patient’s relative something, as if she holds the key to the world’s most important secret.

The room we walk into is a grid of curtains. I spot the boy’s feet in the first partition. Without realizing it, it seems I’ve memorized his shoes, his pants. When the policeman opens the curtain, the boy sees me too. His eyes fill with fear when he sees the two of us together.

“He says he fell. Is that true?”

“I think so. I didn’t see him fall. I ran out of cigarettes and was looking for someplace open. That’s when I saw this boy lying on the ground.”

I’m thinking I’ve provided unnecessary detail when the policeman lets out a yawn and turns to peer at the boy, who shakes his bandaged head yes, without looking at me. For the first time, I get a good look at his face, there in the fluorescent light. At first I thought the mark on his face was a bandage, but upon closer inspection I see it’s a bruise the size of a quarter. It’s so very familiar. Something from that very last look in front of the door, always there before my eyes — and on her lily-white neck.

Fener

I had opened the window and was looking into the distance, into the blue horizon and the dark, peaceful waters of the Golden Horn. I contemplated this view from high up in my room in Pera Palace. And the view, it howled in warning.

For years I have wondered, in vain, at exactly what point in my life I had gotten off track. How a perfectly orderly life could become so disjointed along the way. Was it because the gates of the past had been suddenly crashed open, in a single violent thrust? I had been scared to death of making a mistake. Fener — complete with its temples of three different religions, its narrow streets, my family, and the house where my destiny was shaped — had always been alive in my memory. If I handled it right, I could fit my whole life into Fener. I was born and raised there. I fell in love there. I left Fener when I was fifteen and returned at the age of forty-five. Istanbul was a city of echoes, where everything — everything — resonated with an acute vitality: a historic building, an ornate arch, an ancient tree, streets, bridges, palaces... Wherever I looked, deep-seated passions seemed to surface, to come to life, the passions of a fisherman, a woman, a stranger, a thug true to his code. No matter how hard I tried to escape the feeling of belonging, I could not wrestle myself free of the dizzying, blinding nostalgia and longing that held me in their grasp; my memory was digging up details I had never permitted myself to utter, and my mind, on the cusp of a leap, needed to embellish them.