Last month, when I was talking with Izzy in the hospital during Elif’s uncle Bilgin’s angioplasty operation, at one point he turned to me, his face serious, and said, “You can travel the world, live all over, it’s great, but don’t keep living here. Turkey is in deep, deep shit. You know that.” He said that the religious party will win in the February elections, that there’ll be another army coup, that inflation would only get worse, that there were basically no human rights and services. He’s right of course, but being rich here, living in Suadiye, really has its advantages. In America, I had no health care, and here it’s a snap for me to afford great medical treatment. I got bronchitis, and they gave me drugs and I paid around $10. I’ve been getting everything done I could never take care of in the states – moles on back and leg removed; got creams for my chronic dermatitis around my nose. I asked him how much he was spending at the hospital, and he whistled. “You wouldn’t believe it. I know it’s intensive care and they’re watching him round the clock, but last year we were in here also and it came to over 500 million lira a day, totalling seven thousand dollars for the two weeks.” I told him about my surgery in 1990, how I was in the hospital for a day and how my bill was eleven thousand, and he categorically refused to believe it. “No, you must have gotten that wrong,” he said.
But no matter what your financial status, in a country with a breakdown in services, all sorts of cool things can happen. Last night we took the boat to Dilek’s house and there was a mutiny. The boat was absolutely packed with people, and when it stopped at Burgazada, a very small island, which it only goes to two or three times a day, the announcement came on the loudspeaker, “Next stop, Kadikoy!” This meant that the boat that we were on, carrying hundreds of people to Bostanci, where Dilek lives, was going to bypass it altogether. Perhaps the captain was misinformed, perhaps he wanted to go home to his wife and kids. But a hundred people on the boat got together and held up schedules to show that the boat was supposed to go to Bostanci. A few tourists were on the boat, very confused. People were all very friendly, but the captain got on the loudspeaker again to confirm it: “Direct boat to Kadikoy.” But at some point, several people went to the captain, and convinced him that he was outvoted a hundred to one, and the captain decided that it would be best to take us to Bostanci. (I should also mention that there was a monkey on the boat. He was on a very long, loose leash, and spent the trip attacking every single passenger in the vicinity. I watched them move to another seat, one by one, and the monkey’s owner, a Russian woman, giggled each time it happened.)
Everything here is contingency planning and bricolage. For example, say you’re working on a construction site and your buddy gets buried in a dirt-slide. You can’t call “911” (here, “110”) because it’ll take hours for help to come, and you know that the human brain can only survive without oxygen for about 5 minutes. (Sixty if you’re watching Baywatch.) What do you do? You jump in a Caterpillar tractor and dig him out! I just saw it happen on TV. It was pretty exciting when the big machine came up with paydirt, in the form of the buried man’s head, although the driver looked pretty upset at having decapitated his friend. OK, here’s another one: say you’re riding in an elevator, and it hasn’t been inspected, well, ever, and it plunges you five stories to your death. What’s the quickest way to the morgue? Hours pass. The ambulance doesn’t come. Not to worry – someone on the block will personally drive your carcass to the hospital themselves – people here are really nice. OK, let’s suppose you’re a 16-year-old girl and the hospital tells you you have bone cancer and they amputate your leg, and then they say oops, you never had bone cancer! You can sue, and if you have a good lawyer, you may win 10 grand! Hopa! OK, now let’s say you’re on the street and you have no legs, just stumps at the knees. Now you can’t afford a wheelchair, and sitting on a cardboard mat like in America won’t do – in Istanbul you’ve got to get around, to move, move, move! Your best bet would be to do as the locals do – tie pieces of rubber tire to your stumps, and you’re off! OK, now suppose you’re a leper and can’t play accordion very well for money because your fingers are falling off. Well, on second thought…
Elif’s uncle Bilgin went for angioplasty. Bilgin’s already had open-heart surgery several years ago, and he wasn’t too happy to find out that he needed this surgery, but he was extremely lucky: not that the surgery was routine, but in the nature of his complaint – because if he had almost any other life-threatening illness, he, being dirt-poor, would have ended up in the government’s public hospital, which is quite squalorous. The only machines for his type of problem are at the private American Hospital, so the government had to send him there – and it’s clean, quiet, and modern.
When he was admitted, they held him for three hours for some tests before the surgery, and we were allowed to stay with him. There was another man in the room with him, in his 50’s, who was having chest pains and who had also once been through a painful open-heart surgery. He and his family were miserable, and I cheered them up by playing the game of “Let’s compare chest wounds” – I came in last with my lone stab wound, but it was all great fun – Bilgin had three wounds, and the guy had a really impressive zipper scar. Turns out he used to weigh 130 kilograms and he’s about my height! Then the doctor came in and gave his family the news that this time the man’s arteries were clogged in five places and lots of painful surgery and an extended hospital stay would be needed. They all broke out crying and the clowning was over. I left the room, quietly.
Bilgin’s surgery lasted about an hour, and while we waited outside for the operation, we met a guy named Izzy (really Izzet), dressed in black from head to toe, around my age. His sister’s a fashion designer queen (her husband is Turkey’s version of Howard Stern) and she was all decked out in her own designs – godawful black leather pants, half-meter-high black plastic boots – you get the idea. Izzy helps run his father’s textiles business, which has branches in a half-dozen European countries. They were at the hospital for two weeks for their father’s health problems – his father’s been bedridden for three years and his lungs are failing. Izzy looked completely drained and had only gone home a couple of times during the period to shower. But he perked up at hearing me ask Elif in English what a word in the Turkish newspaper meant, and we spent the day talking about movies, Turkey, and Judaism (he’s Sephardic).
Izzy has strongly ambivalent feelings about his father – Izzy’s sister told Sumru that the two are inseparable and that he’s crazy, absolutely crazy about his dad. But to Elif and I he showed a great deal of anger at his father for his illness, which he says was self-inflicted (by stress and smoking). Elif offered up the comment that without his stress and smoking he wouldn’t have been him, wouldn’t have started or ran the business, and that this was his life, but Izzy would have none of it, saying that even though you can’t live forever, spending your last ten years being a horrible burden on your family is incredibly selfish.
Izzy tells me some interesting things about Turkish Jews. First, they don’t intermarry. And second, the father of the bride has to pay a dowry to the groom’s family (exactly the opposite of the Moslem tradition here) where he has to cough up tens of thousands of dollars, a job, a car, whatever the groom’s family wants to get him to marry her. (Finally: just compensation for living with a woman.) Another reason Izzy’s father has such health problems – Izzy’s sister just got married and her father, being famously wealthy, had to cough it up, baby!
Izzy also talked about the OJ Simpson trial and about there being a day of reckoning where it would all be straightened out. I talked about the fruitful results of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology (the Barcuchba revolt; the Essine Cave of Horrors), about the film Crimes and Misdemeanors, about Baptist presidents going to bed with El Salvadorian butchers, about heroic current leaders eviscerating welfare, about an interview I just read with an unrepentant, wealthy doctor of Auschwitz named Munch (who wrote a book about how he was satisfied doing his job of testing diseases on Jews and sending them to the chambers, and how Jews today are dick-sucking pigs cornering the world’s resources, and how happy and healthy he feels being an 87-year-old author). I’m equivocal about many things, but not about the existence of earth’s moral center.
Izzy shocked me when we talked about my favorite show, Baywatch (he didn’t understand why it was the world’s most-watched show), and he said, “Why are the women in the show always running? It’s like they’re afraid of being chased by niggers or something!” I told him that the word was generally considered unacceptable, and about its role in the OJ trial, but I didn’t want to bug him too much about his being a racist, with his father was dying in the other room.
Elif’s aunt Sumru was blown away that I was talking with Izzy, because she recognized him and his sister from the newspapers, and Sumru was asking me if I’ve heard of his family, and do I know how impossibly rich and famous they are, etc. – all while her own husband’s being cut open. (Even Izzy was into the name game: we went downstairs to drink tea while his own father was in intensive care, and we passed the owner of the hospital’s sister; Izzy went on and on about how incredibly rich and famous she was, being a member of the Koc family, and owning half of Turkey, etc. etc.) What I found most impressive is how much information about my family Sumru had stashed in that noggin of hers – in one breath, she mentioned Penn, Wharton, Sikorsky, music business, mechanical engineer, Connecticut. What a memory! What powerful symbols! What currency!
Tonight’s nighttime festivites were much more animated than those of the morning. This time, instead of being organized by the city’s ruling religious party, the pro-Ataturk march was organized by the Kadikoy district on the Asian side of Istanbul. The Kadikoy mayorship is from the CHP (Ataturk-left) party, and their walk was promoted as “Let’s walk for the bright future of the Turkish Republic,” which meant, “Let’s walk for Ataturk’s thoughts and secularism.”
For no reason, I felt not merely entertained, but at home in a crowd of tens of thousands of people screaming “Turkey will STAY SECULAR!” We walked for several kilometers, and it was a big difference from last year; when we visited Elif’s parents, I remember when Elif and I got caught accidentally walking in the midst of a religious-fascist coalition protest march to make the middle schools start three years earlier so the children could get more Islamic (and less secular) education, with thousands of skullcapped men shouting “Allah is great!” This felt like a march on Washington – we were packed like sardines on Bagdat Caddesi, holding candles, waving flags, carrying framed Ataturk pictures, screaming “We will not go under Koranic Law!” and “Stand shoulder-to-shoulder against religious people!” and “Hooray for the Red and White!” and shouting to the people cheering us on from their balconies: “How’s the weather up there? Come down and join us!” Such a huge turnout. There were even fireworks.
I saw a very sad sight at the parade, however. A poor gypsy boy was sitting on the sidewalk, crying. All over the sidewalk was a broken bottle of shoeshine polish, glass and ink everywhere. It was a pathetic sight, this boy, already down on his luck, now deprived of his sole means of income. I asked Dilek what we should do for him, and she said, “Nothing. Last week I saw the exact same boy with the same broken bottle routine, and I gave him 500,000 lira.”
*******
On the boat back to Heybeliada, my head was spinning from what people on the street were saying: they were telling us that they hoped the military would come to forcibly impose a new democracy on the country, one that would rid the country of all remaining traces of Islamic rule in the cities. I asked Elif, “Do you know how odd that sounds, wishing for the military to come impose a secular democracy on a people?”
Every 15 years, it seems as if Turkey has a coup. Last year, the army brought down the government simply by issuing a memorandum. Here’s how it happened, as far as I can make out:
In 1980, Turkey was leaning socialist, which America found displeasing. Economic incentives were offered to not fall as a Soviet domino, martial law was declared after internal violence, and finally in September 1980, there was a military coup, in which the army razed socialist communities in the north and imprisoned and murdered their leaders. Over the ensuing period, the Mafia strengthened immensely; at first, the government hired them to kill off Armenian terrorists who were bombing Turkish embassies worldwide until the Armenians got their own country after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Years later, Tan?u Çiller came to power, an American-style Yale-educated technocrat who quite impressively amassed a $50 million personal fortune during her brief term. And for years, to pursue Turkey’s war against socialism, Islamic education and development had been tolerated, encouraged, and funded until economic reforms took hold. (How naïve outsiders can seem when they rue a country’s politics “turning fundamentalist,” as if it were the people’s own stupidity, fecklessness, or poor taste which allowed it to happen.) Because of this, and partly as a reaction to Çiller and the Mafia’s corruption, Erbakan’s Islamic Refah party came to power in a multiparty election with a mere 21% of the vote.
The Refah party shut down the casinos, which were overrun by Mafia and where there often were gunfights. Tourism (especially from Britain and Israel) plummeted, and the economy worsened. Erbakan moved too quickly, encouraged even more Islamic education, and started to take the country too close to Islamic law for the army’s comfort. This finally caused the army, last year, to threaten another coup and even a treason trial of Erbakan – after which (given the fact that in 1960, Prime Minister Menderes was executed by the military after being on the wrong end of such a treason trial), the Prime Minister hastily stepped down. The current national government is transitional, and elections are slated for February of next year.
Since last year’s “coup by memorandum,” the country remains divided. All over Turkey last month, I saw Istanbullians, Anatolians, Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs with very different lifestyles and visions of what the future of Turkey should be. And much of the east seemed occupied. Dilek’s office has a huge array of Ataturk photos – not as callow hero-worship, but, rather, as a symbol for modernism and all that it entails (secular law and freedoms, a modern constitution, women’s rights, democracy, etc.). In many places here, hanging the country’s own flag is a political statement wrought with meaning, saying not just “country,” but “I support modern Turkey,” which is to say “all people who want an exclusively religious country on my land should drop dead.” Last night, in the religious Fatih section of Istanbul, every home and store with a Turkish flag hanging on it had their windows broken.
Meanwhile, a significant percentage of Turks would welcome love to live a country with no alcohol, no work on Fridays, and a fixed ancient document of law interpreted by religious heads instead of judges and legislators. Which is why Istanbul’s official daytime celebration of the anniversary of the public was subdued, with Mayor Tayyip Erdogan making gesticulations of benediction like an Imam. Ankara’s mayor is in hot water for ripping down posters promoting the 75th Anniversary celebrations. Ararat’s mayor (oops – the TV just reports as I write this: “Ex-Mayor-Under-Arrest”) joined in on the fun, appearing on TV calling Ataturk a drunk who was a traitor of Islam, and said that since Jews fought for their own land (terrorism implied) couldn’t religious Turks, well…
But the question is: With the country so divided, for whom would this forcibly-imposed secular democracy be forcibly imposed? And what would another one now bring?
Elif told me stories about how, as a child in 1980, she hid under a desk when they shot up her classroom during the violence leading up to that September’s coup, and how happy her family was when the military intervention began. I found it fascinating. I wanted to learn more about what it means for a country to take anti-democratic measures in an attempt to preserve a democratic system. I wanted to understand the effect of the military’s involvement in the political process. And the idea of a military-patrolled democracy seemed so crazy that it would be the great subject for a documentary film.
Could we make a movie about it together? Could we? I asked Elif with nervous excitement on a boat on the Marmara Sea, just as I did on a boat on the Bosphorus when we decided to get engaged three years ago. And like before, her answer was yes.
All week, the whole country’s been gearing up for October 29th, the 75th Anniversary of the Turkish Republic. On the navy base on our island Heybeliada, they’ve been doing drills and practicing their drums – rat-a-tat! How exciting! Soldiers marching and shouting “Country before everything!”
We went to Aksaray for the morning parade. It was scheduled for 10AM and started promptly at noon. Walking there, I found my English to be more helpful here than my Turkish. (This is often the case here. Once, when we were riding on a train to see Elif’s father, Elif had told me that that the ride would be crowded and miserable, but instead it was surprisingly nice – because we had accidentally boarded the private, first-class train. The conductor came over, angrily telling us our tickets were no good, and I asked Elif, innocently, in English, “What’s the problem, what’s happening?” And the conductor suddenly turned to me and smiled and apologized all over, saying welcome to Turkey, you are our guests here, you don’t have to pay anything.) Now, walking to the parade this morning, as we got close to the bandstand, we were all going to be stopped and frisked for bombs, and I asked Elif, in English, why the man was going to check our bags, and the soldier let us all through without searching us.
Turkish security, however much in earnest, is not perfect. Today, the TV reports that a guy just hijacked a plane headed to Ankara from Adana. The plane left at 7:30 and was supposed to land in Ankara at 8:30, but somehow he snuck a hand grenade and a gun on the plane (perhaps he spoke English at the airport?) The plane landed at 9:30 and they told him he was in Sofya, Bulgaria, and he demanded to be taken to Lausanne. But the wily Turks tricked him – they didn’t land in Sofya at all, but actually in Ankara, after having shut off all of the lights at the Ataturk airport and ordering the village mosques not to broadcast evening prayers. Then, after seven hours of negotiations, they brought in some Turks without moustaches to talk with him as if they were Bulgarians. By 3 AM, negotiations were breaking down, and they managed quietly to open a rear exit of the plane while the hijacker was in the cockpit. One at a time, they replaced rear-seating passengers with plainclothes sharpshooters, and before sun-up, when he would have discovered he was in Ankara and not Bulgaria, they blew his head off. I watched much of this unfold live, except for the finale. My favorite part was when the Turkish news station we’re watching got the cell phone number of one of the plane’s passengers from a family member, and the reporters talked with him live on TV while the hijacker was in the cockpit. The passenger was whispering into the phone what was going on, and the conversation ended quite abruptly when the passenger said, “He’s looking at me, I have to go, don’t ever call this phone number again!”
But back to this morning’s parade. There were a respectable number of tanks, planes, and helicopters, but not much in the way of folkloric dancers or cultural marchers – strangely subdued for a country’s – demisesquicentennial? The reason was obvious when the parade’s organizer, Istanbul’s mayor Erdogan, passed by us on his float, touching his hands to his head and heart repeatedly in a religious love-bestowing gesture – our current mayor clearly has no interest in promoting celebrations of modern Turkey’s democratic standing, Kemalist principles, etc. The festivities were enlivened considerably when an insane old guy waving the Turkish flag started walking with the tanks. Wherever he passed, the crowd would let out a huge cheer. If anyone else in the crowd would have stepped into the street, they’d have been shot, but this old guy – who would stop him?
On the way back from the morning parade, on a bridge, I saw lots of people crowded around a Jandarme looking to the ground. I went there, asking what was up, and Elif said “They’re just looking at the Jandarme’s gun.” But I saw something different: there, in the corner, was a crying 6-year-old boy, who had gotten separated from his mother. Dilek had the clearest head of all – she suggested they take the boy to the police station before something would happen to him. One woman had a different idea, however, and grabbed the boy’s arm and said she would bring him to the cops. The soldier was fine with that, as were the villagers present, but we would have none of it – who was this woman? What did she want with the boy? We summoned the police, and they came, and everyone was smiling, how cute, a lost boy, and the mystery woman again said she’d bring the child into the station downtown, and the cops were fine with that and seemed happy to be free to go off and do other things. We were screaming to the cops to take the boy in yourselves, and the cops said, OK, we will take him, but the woman started walking away with the boy, and Elif and the woman are playing tug-of-war with the boy’s arm, and in the argument I saw the woman push Dilek hard in the chest. So, with a crowd of people, two cops, and a soldier present, I instantly did exactly what I was required to do in a situation when someone pushes my mother-in-law in the chest: I stood up to my full five-foot-six-inches, pointed my finger in the woman’s face, and shouted in a loud, deep voice: “Hey!” And the two men behind me did exactly what they were required to do in the situation: they grabbed my arms. Now nobody thought it would come to blows, but the cops were now forced to lift the boy up in the air and carry him themselves off to the police station.
One thing bothered me all day: after this crazy woman had tried to abduct a boy and then pushed Elif’s mother in the chest, why did Dilek, a tough cookie, did not do anything, thus forcing me to intervene? Elif gave me the answer: Dilek had shoved the woman first, naturally.
Last week we saw a Turkish opera, of course at the Ataturk Cultural Center, called “King Midas’s Ears.” It tells the touching story of how Midas judged a musical contest between Apollo and Pan, picked Pan as the better musician, and was punished by Apollo making Midas’ ears grow huge. In Act I, everybody makes fun of Midas for having big ears. In Act II, he begins to pride himself on his huge ears, so Apollo takes them away, so everyone makes fun of Midas for having small ears. I think you can see why Turkish opera composers won’t exactly overthrow the Italian masters anytime soon. But as I type this, I can recall clearly the music of every single Turkish march we sung tonight on Bagdat Street. It’s not terribly surprising, I suppose, that Turkey’s marches would be considerably better than their operas.
Now one would think that, except in a Marx Brothers film, a night at the opera would be a nice quiet affair. But not this time. Because in front of the opera house, in a nice, wealthy, European area of Istanbul, there was a huge line of riot police. They obviously weren’t there because of the Pan-Apollo controversy – they were there because inside, at a fundraiser in the downstairs hall, was Turkey’s President Demirel. Only once in my entire time here have I ever left Heybeliada without my Turkish ID, and it had to be this night, but thankfully, I wasn’t questioned as I entered the theater. (I was only ever asked for ID in the east when we drove through Kurdistan.) We saw a 6-year-old gypsy girl selling little packs of tissues. We asked her about her family, and she said her father left them and she needed money. (Elif is quick to report that that was a gypsy family, and that would never happen with a Turkish man, because it’s dishonorable.) She said she needed shoes, and we asked how she could afford new shoes selling tissues at 50,000 lira (15 cents) a pop? Her face beamed, and she smiled and said with perfect confidence, “I’m going to sell lots and lots of them!” As the Jews say: “Volume…”
Sara is one of our family now, and she continues to grow as the island’s leaves thin out around us. The tangerines in our garden are coming out and the olive, cherry, and walnut trees have stopped providing us with bounty. There will be no more grapes, roses, or lion’s head flowers in our garden for quite some time. Meow Meow, who at the beginning of the summer “liberated” herself from being an indoor cat by leaping from our balcony 25 feet down to the garden below, now prefers to sleep by us on the couch, to purr and dream. Fewer enemy horses pass by to make her dive for cover. The island’s population is thinning out as well; the cell phone-wielding summer vacationers and most street barkers have left. Now it’s just the villagers, fishermen, navy soldiers, fayton drivers, some shopkeepers, and the Zerzevatci (“…ZVATCI!”) who comes by every once in a while to sell fruit on his horse and cart. They are starting to sell boza, the fermented millet winter drink often served with cinnamon, down by the docks. Our balcony, which used to be home to the Sunday parades of covered-headed women with makeup and macho men holding hands, now sits in view of the cleaning woman beating her rugs at the historic President Inonu mansion across the street. She waves to us like a fellow survivor. An evergreen. Our house doesn’t come with heat and I don’t know how well our space-heater will hold up.
This island’s feline permanent residents outside are beginning to sound desperate, and we hear them fighting at night. Those lucky enough to live at the bottom of the island near where the boats arrive still get fed by the fishermen, but the cats higher up rely on the good graces of the few humans left up here. I reflect on how spoiled our cats are, how they don’t know how good they have it. And I realize just how lucky I am too, and that I feel a real kinship not only with the Ladino-speaking Shlomos at the synagogue, but also with the Arabs coming out of the mosque who look just like them, and with the Greek villagers attending church every Sunday, and with the Kurds and the easterners at the Carsamba Pazari, and with the Turkish fishermen and fayton-drivers. Inside the island’s Greek Orthodox monastery, poor Turkish Moslems desperate for divine intervention fall on their knees before the icons and receiving their blessings from bearded priests. It was as if the terrible “relocation” of the 1920’s never happened, or the Islamic revolution weren’t taking place all around the world right now; as if, removed from the technology and speed of modern living, different peoples could coexist while preserving their respective traditions. And as I waited for the next amplified call-to-prayer, and listened for the increasingly-intermittent cries of the Zerzevatci, and went down to check out the fishermen’s catch and buy fresh bread, what I wanted to do most of all was to stop time, to preserve this season, and to spot the glorious nasal cartilage of an endangered Shlomo, to save the island from foreign companies like Nestle coming to Heybeliada to put strawberries in the yoghurt, and to luxuriate, for a moment, in the thick golden kaymak cream at the top.
The Prince’s Islands are is overrun by cats, but Heybeliada‘s are the most beautiful. When we first arrived, we kept my cat Meow Meow inside away from potential “friends,” and for a week she sat on the balcony and looked at the garden below – and then one day she looked at us, looked down from the balcony – and leapt down 25 feet into the garden. So now she’s a happy outdoor cat once again after having endured two years in Manhattan indoor captivity. She always startles when the faytons with horses as they pass by too closely. She goes out as she pleases until 4PM (she usually only stays out for an hour) and comes home to sleep by us and purr her head off. (Oddly, for over 22 hours in a cat carrier during the whole journey here, unable to eat, drink, or piss for 22 hours, she never cried once, so we didn’t have to give her the Ace Primizone tranquilizing pills – she just slept in our laps on the plane.)
Many of island’s cats have become my companions and are especially appreciative of our gifts of leftovers from dinner which we hand out every evening. I’ve given them all names. There’s Mino?, who engages in group love with us when we call her name but has zero interest in food. Shlomo Kedi is an immensely fat longhair calico (owned by the oddly-named Jewish doctor Shlomo Abuvaf) who lies on their windowsill and allows herself to be pet without granting you any reaction whatsoever. Ugly The Cat, the landlord’s gray cat, always sports a broken jaw, a ripped eye, a scar on the right side of its face, and walks with a limp – yet every night it persists in picking fights with other cats, who, after beating Ugly up, hiss to it in some kind of Turkish cat dialect, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” My favorite street cat is The Bad Cat. You can see him, gray and scraggly, eyes a little too close together, smoking a cigarette, walking to an upright bass accompaniment on the soundtrack. He approaches Ugly Cat and my Meow Meow and just keeps on coming, no matter what they do. He doesn’t fight, but nothing deters him. Meow Meow protects her turf by making herself appear psychotic. Generally, she only commits physical violence on people, but if another cat goes near or corners her, she puffs up her fur, crouches, her eyes dilate, and she growls and screams bloody murder. It’s a spectacular show. Ugly The Cat believes it. I believe it. The security guards at the Amsterdam airport believed it. There’s only one living thing that I’ve seen not buying her psycho act, and that, of course, is The Bad Cat. Sometimes when Meow Meow gets too crazy and howls and hisses and looks like she’s going to go into a seizure, I throw water on The Bad Cat, but that doesn’t help – he holds his ground. Of late, though, The Bad Cat has started to hang out elsewhere: the last time I saw him, he was down by the sea stealing fish from the fishermen, and what looks like his child now haunts our garden. His offspring is a bit of a pansy, standing on his paws like a squirrel and begging for food, and when another cat comes, he turns tail and runs.
One night we were walking, and right at the corner of our house, we saw a tiny kitten crying that we hadn’t noticed before, smaller than my palm, obviously abandoned by its family. We had to decide whether to bring it down to the fishermen or to take it in; the kitten looked like it was at death’s door, so we brought it in until we could decide what to do. It ate everything we gave it and played for awhile. But the next evening, it suddenly went totally limp and started crying. It stopped eating, crapped liquid, and started dying. Elif’s aunt Nebahat, who regularly converses with ghosts, was over at our house and began rubbing the cat to use her psychic vibrations to heal it. I checked the boat schedules to the mainland, there were no boats for an hour, and we didn’t think it would survive the trip to a vet. Now we were in need of something, and time was a factor: not the ideal situation one could be in in Turkey.
After borrowing a cell phone from our neighbors, we finally were able to get through to a vet the next island over, and he told us to tap its eye with our finger. We did and got no response. The vet said that was a bad sign but that he would not come; instead, he gave us the name of a cow doctor on Heybeliada whose office was closed but who still may come to help. Now, there are no cows on our island, but the navy employs one to test their food samples to see if their meat is healthy to eat. While we were on the phone with the Buyukada vet, the cat rolled back its eyes, gave a long moan, kicked its back legs twice, and died. And I actually was relieved by this, since after a bout of suffering, at least the kitten was out of its misery and off of this damned planet, home of such wonderful and complex organic organization which makes suffering and life-feeding-on-life the sine qua non of existence. I was sad that an animal which we had taken into our care had died on us. Elif hung up the phone. Our landlord was crying.
But then the kitten started breathing again thirty seconds later. The cat was just twitching, muscular spasms, like after you cut up a lobster or a chicken. I found this display of nature’s cruelty to be rather disgusting. We had no choice but to call the cow doctor whom the vet recommended. Elif told me to go get some yogurt at the bakkal (market) because once when a cat of hers was dying, she fed it garlic yogurt and it got better. Her aunt Nebahat agreed. I thought this was about the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, but since I had nothing to do at the house other than watch a dying cat twitch, I went. I put on some classical music and left, coming to some bizarre resolve that even for a cat, if your matter’s complex organization is about to break apart as you pass out of existence, you might as well experience this by listening to the complex organization of tones of Mozart. All of this was running through my head while I was walking to the bakkal to buy yogurt.
When I arrived at the bakkal, I found to my horror that my favorite yogurt, Mis, was bought out by Nestle, so it’s now Nestle Mis – and the label no longer proudly advertises “Full-fat!” – although, thankfully, it still tastes the same. (Are western fat-neuroses coming to Turkey?) When I got returned twenty minutes later, the cat was still unresponsive. The vet still hadn’t come yet. Our island really isn’t that big, and it shouldn’t have taken this long. I said to Elif that I don’t mind the lack of facilities or niceties of civilization here in Turkey (such as toilet seats), but I’m annoyed by the cavalier attitude here towards concepts of time and urgency. Were they ever to make a big-budget Turkish spy film (“Bond. Mustafa Bond.”), with a bomb about to go off in ninety seconds, the hero would probably go brew some tea first.
Eventually, the cow doctor shows up. He is a huge guy with massive hands and the largest head I’ve ever seen on a human being. He stands at our door, sees our kitten comatose on the chair, and proceeds to slowly untie his shoes. Of course: it’s impolite not to take off your shoes when entering a house in Turkey. We yell at him to stop. I shout “Gerek yok.” He shrugs and then slowly ties his shoes back up. He goes over to the cat and juggles it in the air, spinning it around his head like a seal with a ball at Sea World. He pokes its eyes. He mauls its belly. He smells its mouth. I just want to offer this bear some honey and get him to leave. He goes to the landlord and calls the vet at the other island, and he gets a list of four medicines to give the cat. Nobody knows what the problem is, but they all decide we should give it a liquid for diarrhea, a serum for parasites, a multivitamin, and a shot for diarrhea. This all sounds to me more like more torture, but the kitten’s survived this long, so I suppose we should do everything we can. But where can we buy cat medicine on this island at this hour?
At the eczane (pharmacy), of course, since for most ailments there is no cat medicine. The eczane is a lovely thing to behold; there’s one on every corner, and no matter where you go, there will be one one in the vicinity whose turn it is to remain open round-the-clock. So Elif and Nebahat stayed at the house and watched our comatose kitten; our older cat Meow Meow took off for parts unknown; and I left our house with the cow doctor to buy the drugs. I started walking fast, and he panted behind me, begging, “A little slower, please.” I slowed down and then started walking a little faster again. He looked guilty and then sped up. He took out a cigarette to smoke and offered me one. I declined, and then I changed my mind and accepted. I despise cigarettes, but at that moment, it fit the bill perfectly. Although the eczane was left open and unattended, the pharmacist was not in, of course. He was out on the street hanging out with some kids playing football. We all went inside and bought the medicine. He, of course, wanted to wrap each box in tissue paper.
When we got back to the house, we tortured the kitten some more. Marcus Guernsey-cow, M.D. decided that we should administer the shots in two doses because the kitten was so small, but he kept missing and it was more like six shots. It reminded me of the scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre where the psychotic old grandfather is too feeble to properly hammer in his victim’s head, so he just lets it fall on the victim, over and over. We poured liters of liquid into the kitten’s mouth, all of which it drooled onto our chair. Its main reaction to the shots was further muscular spasm. Finally, the bear left, happy to receive $10 for his house call. We found a large cardboard box that once held Elif’s mother’s computer, and which she had given us to transport dishes to the island. We put some rags in the bottom and wedged the box behind the sofa in the living room. Finally, we laid the kitten in there, where it could die in a warm and safe place.
The next morning I was voted (by Elif) to be the one to see if it were still alive. I crept in, looked in the box, and there were only the rags inside. Then I looked up, and she was standing up on the chair, kneading it, saying, “Meow!” I have no idea how it jumped three feet straight out of the box in the middle of the night. We didn’t want to mess around, so we got dressed and brought it to a real vet on the Asian mainland, along with our older cat Meow Meow, because perhaps what the kitten had was contagious. The vet seemed more concerned with Meow Meow than the little one. “Boy is she fat!” he exclaimed. “Fat?” we asked. “No, obese!” he said. Then, he took one look at the kitten and pronounced, “Parasites.” We asked how he knew and he said from the stink of the thing. Then he took a second look, inside its mouth, and he whistled. “Do you know how old this thing is?” he asked. I said I figured about three weeks; it was the size of my hand, so I’d have guessed two weeks, but it had nice fur, so I allowed for three. He said, “Over two months, judging by its teeth.” So he administered parasite shots to both cats, and sent us home with a parasite liquid which we’d have to give them for three days, and prescribed megadoses of calcium and vitamin D supplements for the kitten, and lots of sunlight. When we got back to the island, we bought the medicines and found out to our dismay that the parasite liquid, meant for human infants, only came in a cherry flavor (rather than a tuna flavor or something). I developed a strange reaction to the potion: each time I administered it to Meow Meow, my arm suddenly broke out in bloody scratches.
All week, the little one’s been playful, alert, and doing all the kitten things, thumbing her nose at Meow Meow, who wants to kill her but can’t. The kitten even ate Meow’s diet food yesterday. We took her to Nebahat’s house for some more spirit-healing, and she enjoyed the trip in the boat and the minibus and loved Auntie’s home. Yesterday, we left Meow Meow at home and brought the kitten to the mainland to celebrate Elif’s mother Dilek’s birthday. But on the boat ride this time, her ears went back, and she completely wigged out, running around in circles in the cat carrier. When we were carrying her off the boat, the cat carrier was shaking violently. We brought her into the house, set her carrier and food in the corner, and the cat literally started running around in circles and climbing the walls. And then its eyes rolled back, it fell over, it kicked its back legs, and it went completely stiff. We called the vet again, and he said to bring it immediately, even if the shock of transporting it would kill it. We brought it. The kitten didn’t move, and its eyes were pointed in completely different directions. He looked at it and said, “Boy does it smell!” He looked at its belly and confidently pronounced, “Worms!” We asked, Worms and parasites? “Yes!” and he gave her another shot. Can Meow catch worms from her? “She had her shots already for that.” We asked, does it have rabies? “Absolutely not!” Kitten disease? “No!” Epilepsy? And he laughed a good laugh and sent us on our way.
We brought the cat back home, and it woke up later that evening and again seems frisky and perfectly normal, doing all the kitty things. We named it “Sara,” the Turkish word for Epilepsy. I’m worried about Meow Meow, and we’re keeping a close watch on her and keeping her away from the kitten, who has doubled in size within days, as if the food and vitamins had jump-started her kitty-growth program.
We saw a movie last week, the last film the island showed this season. We went primarily to visit Heybeliada’s only movie theater, and because I haven’t seen a movie in over three months except for 20 minutes of the new version of The Nutty Professor while at Elif’s father’s house in Antalya, a film which made me so ill I had to go to another room to lie down. Now Heybeliada was playing The Fifth Element, an entirely moronic and not even handsome-looking sci-if flick.
The film was shown outside, but not at a drive-in, of course, since no there are no cars on Heybeli – instead, projected onto an apartment building behind a market. Halfway through (and mid-sentence), they stopped the film for ten minutes so you could buy soda from the market owner. Instead of eating popcorn, people were chewing sunflower seeds and throwing the shells on the ground.
It was in English with Turkish subtitles, which meant lots of teenagers talking through the film (not like it mattered). Translation always provides interesting challenges, and the suffix-additive grammar and arabesque sentence-structure of Turkish are quite different than English. Near the end of the film, the Milla Jonovich character, a divine being, quickly reads almost the entire encyclopedia on computer, but she only gets up to the letter V. Bruce Willis, her love interest, tells her that there are a great deal of wonderful words beginning with V, such as Valor, Valentine, etc. At this point, the subtitle-writer was faced with a problem, because few Turkish words begin with V. Instead of making the obvious choice of changing it to “U” or “Ü,” which would have offered plenty of words to fit the context, he kept the “V” and chose a few Ottoman-based words like “vuslat” which Elif only knows from Turkish poetry. So when it came up, the audience, in unison, said aloud, “Huh?” before bursting into laughter.
Besides that, the real action happened offscreen. A wave of bats flew overhead. I thought, at first, that it was dirt on the projector, but when they flew over my head, I saw – bats. And later there was a glorious shooting star – right over the top of the screen. The whole audience applauded, whistled, and cheered – it made me glad to be alive.
Last week we went to the mainland to meet a friend of Elif’s from high school named Nasl?. Her name means “someone who plays hard-to-get, saying no before actually giving in” – a very interesting name for a woman! However, what is even more interesting to me, given the fact that I am an extremely subtle and sophisticated person, is the fact that she has a huge nose – this lets me call her Nostril, which rhymes with her name, and therefore provides me with much amusement! In fact, I sometimes call her Nasal, which doesn’t really rhyme with Nasl? but it sounds just fine to me! What makes it even better is that the woman is actually insufferable – something of a party girl, giggling her head off, tossing her terrifying bleach-blonde hair. Now, if I were God, one of the first decrees I would pass would read: “Thou shalt not have blond hair if thou hast Mediterranean blood.”
A few days ago, Nasl? called announcing that her birthday is coming up and that she was going to have a party on a boat, so we said, of course we’ll come! Then, she called back and said that the boat was too expensive to rent, and that we’ll all meet in a loud smoky nightclub instead – wouldn’t that be great? But suddenly, Elif at the last minute felt too sick to come, so we couldn’t go! And as soon as she hung up telling the bad news to her friend she felt 100% better!
Now the reason I’m going into this story about Elif’s friend, Nosehair, is because of the following interesting tidbit which she mentioned about Elif’s ex-husband, Mehmet Gun, when we were together. He’s a brilliant artist and a was a thalidomide baby; they were married for three months back in 1993. Not only was his mother Elif’s vocal coach, but his father was the opera director – so after Elif got divorced, she left her singing career in the Turkish opera (after rocketing to stardom and get the lead in the Entfuhrung performed at Topkapi Sarayii) and came to America. The first thing Nasli told us is that he and Jacques Derrida have finally started their university in Paris, and he’s there teaching right now; the second thing we heard is that his new book, published in Turkish and German, is, according to Nasl?, about my wife. Elif wants no part of it – she’s sure it’s a combination of his art (I’ve been flipping through program books from his exhibits: extremely interesting stuff – lots of burnt objects, glasswork, engravings, writings, piranhas) and his art-philosophy (undigested Nietzsche), which are intertwined in his work. She doesn’t care whether the book is about her, or her philosophies of life, or their relationship, or if it’s an angry rant like Philip Roth’s book about his ex-wife, or if she’s barely in it at all. My German and Turkish aren’t quite at the point where I could get through such a book. But the voyeur in me (that is to say, me) is curious.
Our island has a Greek monastery and a mosque, both of which I’ve seen, but the synagogue’s always been closed whenever I’ve passed. That’s not unusual, as getting into a Jewish temple in Turkey isn’t particularly easy. Most are hidden, set back off the street – and even if you can find the buildings, you have to get past the iron gates which always seem to be padlocked, even when there would normally be a Saturday service. Last Sunday night was Rosh Hashannah, and we knew it just had to be open, so we gave it one last try – and it was. The people inside (about 35 of them) spoke Hebrew and Ladino, a Hebrew/Spanish dialect – no English or Turkish. They gave me a Yarmulke and a prayer book which was in Hebrew, with adjoining transliterations (the “Sh”’s transliterate well into Turkish, but they haven’t solved the guttural “H” problem). Since there was no translation, and since being able to pronounce Hebrew is a far cry from understanding it, I had no idea what was going on. There was a kadosh – I know this because they stood on their heels three times and held out their hands in a boon-bestowing gesture (but adding a unique hip twist that was more James Brown than Shalom Aleichim). As for the rest: I had no clue, because all the melodies were different from the songs and prayers I learned in my youth.
But despite or because of the language barrier, I loved it. There was no ostentation, no modern milquetoast neo-cultural quasi-spirituality, no moralistic platitudes offered up by a disinterested, overpaid rabbi, no selling tickets to high holy services to support a bloated staff and execrable Hebrew “school,” no fur-wearing zaftig princesses, no dark suit and hat-wearing fanatics – instead, it was just a few dozen of my “Uncle Abie” and his comrades, shlumpy old guys with noses hanging down to their ankles.
I loved that the leaders were casually-dressed, hanging out at the Bimah and then, without warning, pomp or circumstance, the rabbi shlumped up to the stand and then started the service by rapidly mumbling some Hebrew text. I loved how one of them checked up on me to see if I knew where we were in the text. I loved the fact that it looked like an abandoned classroom, with fans blowing, and buzzing fluorescent lighting, with fluorescent lights even surrounding the Torah. I loved the fact that the floor was tiled like bathroom tile, complete with a figure-ground Necker cube pattern that you could play with by squinting your eyes. And I loved that the seats and walls were completely devoid of “Dedicated to the memory of Solomon Schwartz, whose family gave money to the noble cause of making the room look pretty and support the board’s lifestyle.” All of these good vibes even made me enjoy the fact that the sexes were separated like in American Orthodox temples. Elif sat upstairs with the women, among about eight wives who were extremely friendly to her and asked her why they hadn’t seen her before.
My own personal convictions have led me to turn away from the religious beliefs of my ancestors, but for a brief instant, I felt at home here, as if among the elders of my childhood. They, their language, and perhaps their religion, are dying, and I felt as if I had unexpectedly happened upon an extinct species, or that I had the rare chance to visit a crumbling city before it sank into the sands.
