Songs My Mother Never Taught Me Read Free Page B

youth, he must get down to the nitty-gritty of the psychological make-up of his soul.
    As my ancestors were a mixture of Kurdish Yazidi and Arab Christian, who lived at N. on the Syrian border, it’s clear why they took the surname ‘Öztürk’. 1 My great-grandfather wasn’t from a noble tribe and was saved from poverty by smuggling live animals and imperishable foodstuffs. He had a folk song composed in his honour after he happened to shoot a famous army captain in self-defence. On the eve of the holy Kurban festival, while he was out foraging, news arrived that he’d been blown to bits in a minefield.
    They say that my grandfather, a janitor in the Public Registry Office, was overjoyed when eventually a son, Vahit, was born after four daughters. Vahit attended primary school for six years and middle school for five and, returning from military service, ran away to Istanbul with Piraye, a student from the teachers’ training college. She was the only daughter of a director from Urla who had come to N. as a left-wing exile and womanizer, and when he disowned his daughter and banished his future in-laws to the Bulgarian border, the town was rife with rumours. My namesake grandfather died of a heart attack and his family scattered.
    It seemed to me I came into the world at the age of four in Tarlabaşı, the very navel of Istanbul, and didn’t mind if the crazy taxi-drivers and street vendors underestimated our kaleidoscopic streets. I saw hopeless women relaxing at their ramshackle windows, scolding their kids in heavily accented Turkish or Kurdish. If no quarrelsome voices arose from the rotting front of a building it was blacklisted as ‘eccentric’. We sheltered in resigned companionship, the common denominator of absolute poverty.
    My father would return home at dusk and I’d prepare to shut my ears to the inevitable row. He beat my mother until she took refuge in my room, embracing me and crying, ‘My poor son’, but somehow her sobs and trembling failed to move me.
    My father was head bouncer at the notorious Wo-Manhattan Night Club. My mother shot him and his gypsy dancer mistress, and then committed suicide, leaving me to the care of seventy-year-old Marika Anadolyadis on the ground floor.
    My mother had dubbed Marika the original Queen of Tarlabaşı, as she emerged into Ä°stiklal Street wearing her violent redskin warpaint and her gear that was thirty years out of date. In her flat, which resembled a warehouse of museum pieces, she distracted me by reading detective stories.
    Our lumpen neighbourhood spokesman grew irritated with this funny woman who was cinema-obsessed and always reading to the accompaniment of classical music. Declaring that ‘this hunchback dwarf will ruin my adopted nephew’, he decided that I must be taken away from her. I remember hugging Marika and crying for one last time in my dark cellar that reeked of detergent. Through the intervention of my late father’s tough patron I was placed in the Kasımpaşa Education Institute for Orphans and put in the fourth year of the primary school. The arrival of your humble servant was the most momentous event in the history of this public institution that housed orphans and the poor. I was shunned as though I had murdered my parents.
    Later, at the Artisan School of Printing, also for orphans, I knew that my tragic fame would leak out at registration time and that within forty-eight hours the whole school would be full of rumours. I learned not to take offence at the feigned compassion of the teachers. I wasn’t popular in the dormitory on account of my great love of books and my taciturn nature. But at the beginning of every year I had a period of peace after I made a public demonstration of beating up the first unwary fellow who wasn’t deterred by my bulk.
    The teachers at the school were as poor and unhappy as the children. Many collapsed with exhaustion after the