Streets, avenues, alleys, roads, I do not mean just any street like the yellow lines that run in between the orange squares and polygones that form the lettered streets on the city plan of some unknown town, but I mean the cobbled street, with the pothole at the end, in the old city with the blue street name sign reading Osman in faded, white letters, hidden behind the branches of an old chestnut providing shadow for a group of old men playing backgammon, with the ornamental lighting crossing overhead during national celebrations, forming decorative constellations of imaginary stars at holidays commemorating formative dates in the country’s history, with colored, striped sails hovering above, tightened between the antenna poles and street lanterns, broad red and yellow lanes, keeping the space in which shoppers scurry from store to store, cool on a hot, arid Friday afternoon, streets with the aluminum kebab cart parked on the curb, smoking lines of lamb sticks damping under a brightly yellow parasol, the pink faces of mannequins with their fiercely blue eyes and blackened eye lashes, with their chins pointing at the sky. Street corners, not the wholesome idea of street corners anywhere in the world, where similar but separate events take place, not the shared abstractions of any street corner, but that one, single street corner in every color of detail that makes it recognizable by its own fragments, apart from any other, at which you need only the unique smell of roasted chestnuts, like the street corner across from the bridge with the entrance steps leading to the mosque. And shops, not shops in general, not the type of shop every always goes to for their daily shopping, not any shop you will find in any other city, but this one shop in particular, where I always go to buy my grocery shopping, lettuce, a piece of feta and some tomatoes for a salad, the shop with one out of many, that specific owner with his thick, straw mustache and his glancing eyes that always express a continuous joy or pride perhaps, and a smile of recognition even though he doesn’t know my first name, with the wooden crates of fruits stapled on convenient wheel-able carts, that every early morning roll out, rattling, coming to a stop in front of the display window that reads supermarket in red, stocky, western style fonts with a yellow lining, the shop that sells the dried figs that I love, with the dairy cooler in the back of the store humming, buzzing absently, where I go and pull a plastic bag out of its carton box and scoop my favorite kalamata olives out of their tin can with a blue plastic spoon, Ibrahim’s grocery store. I can tell the tale of a city only by the particular details that I happen observe, but only then can I keep the city alive.

When I was a child, by my own memory, I was no older than nine years old, when I was still without a notion of consequences of ideas, but only knew the facts of my own world, uncle Meli moved into the attic apartment. He was a man sweet as honey, who had lived abroad where he was tormented by the bitter memories of home. It was only one of many events in my childhood that I only later in life understood to have been defining moments in the lives of the otherwise undefining characters of my family. As a child these events were nothing more than just natural, simply bound to happen as they happened, fully part of the natural cycle of the seasons, some rich of the smell of blossom, others dry and arid. As an adult man, when I was established and well respected by some, but despised by others, my thoughts often returned, escaped to this simplicity of the obvious world. My friends were professors at the university or critics working at the newspaper, and our discussions were drenched in academic analysis, full of the kind of sophistication that elevates doubt to self-consciousness, where hesitation is praised for its swiftness of reflection. All this mature uncertainty seemed meaningless compared to the childish belief in the absolute importance of my family’s grand sagas, of uncle Meli moving in, of grandfather’s tears as he reminisced of his childhood, of grandmother’s voice singing through the house, of the excitement penetrating the rooms on Friday’s after morning prayers, that same excitement that now uneventfully takes place outside, all is subdued, muffled by the ruffling of the maid cleaning the bedroom, the thrill of rowing out on to the Bosphorus, the same water that now is plowed through by the horizontal silhouettes of oil tankers from the black sea. As a child I knew only my family, and only my friends who lived around the corner and with whom I went to school knew me by name. I was free and the world belonged to me. It is a remote world that I try to recreate in the greatest detail, because every little detail that is missing is shattering my childhood and throws me back into the whirling winds of the present, with its hostile voices that deny the evidence of my world, with the passing footsteps of time that do not stop at my doorstep to listen what I am up to, with the missing details of forgetfulness.

The pine covered mountain disappeared in a flighty cloud of thick mist, enclosing the surrounding bushes and schist rocks wildly in an apparently chaotic curling and drifting wind within seconds. Eye sight became impossible beyond a few meters, disintegrating the basic notion of direction, even when walking down the hardened channel of the asphalt road I had walked down a hundred times. The wind started singing and dancing around the house, knocking on the doors, trembling the glass panes in the window frames, slamming them out of their places, rattling the shutters and hinges, breaking off every obstacle on the house. The mountain spirit remained silent during this engorging prelude, but once hidden by the full cover of its breath, the air started to rumble and grumble like a ravenous lion. At ever increasing intervals, the lethargic drumming rhythm of loud bangs could be heard in the sky, falling down like meteores, as if the wind picked up the schist rocks that had broken off the mountain skeleton, and threw at the concrete boxes that caused it to itch, immediately dying out while lingering in the air all around, absorbed by the mist again, diluted in its void, the intestines of the mountain that had turned inside out. No lightning, the sky itself had been swallowed, imploded, vanished, never existed but in the fata morgana of a temporary breach, like a gap in the weather, a glitch of lucidness that allowed for only a day a view of the coastline and the horizon.

A man grabs the wooden case of a backgammon game from the pile of boxes on the corner table. He opens it on the small wooden table where his friend is seated, and sits down himself. They place the white and red stones in their respective corners, and throw the dice. His friend collects the dice and throws again, the pieces start to hit the board with loud splashes, followed by a short silence. The conversation falls silent but for the mocking comments that accompany each move. On the small table inside the taverna two little children play cards. In the kitchen a woman pulls up her socks and straightens her dress. She picks up a booklet of cross word puzzles and a pencil. Stares at the list of hints, at the grid of randomly placed, checkered black and white squares and puts the pencil’s end to her lips. With a sharp reflex her hand jumps to the paper and scribbles a word down, and she crosses the hint out with a firm stripe. At each side of a narrow, fold-able table four black men sit down to play domino, their feet pointing outward at the table’s legs forming an uninterrupted eight pointed star from tow to crotch. A snake pattern of white plastic squared stones emerges on the table, under the nervous rattling of stones being shuffled in their hands. Loud voices shout over another, followed by a deep, billowing laughter. How light must they look upon life, how meaningless does their existence become, to play games and avoid any serious effort to pursue a higher dream. They fill their lives with rolling dice and forming meaningless patterns of endless silliness in these children’s games; Life must bore them utterly, they must bore life. How are you doing? Good, good, but they bore me. How is he? What is he doing now? He’s winning, losing maybe. Playing poker, smashing a card with a dull echo on the table as if he battles on life and death, with an expressionless stale face. There is the pride to remain stoic, what stoicism has become, to not flex a muscle, to hide the inner excitement, the crunching disappointment at the randomness of the hand being dealt, to vein control over chance in life. But it is a philosophy without sophism. I find it impossible to withhold my boredom, it gusts out, to not express remaining absolutely unstirred by this silliness. To live life to gamble on a lucky lot to fall into your hands.

One day I will write a novel with ordinary protagonists and common antagonists, with a neighbor of whom we only are informed about the shape of his face but come to know nothing else, and where the only events take place on or around the corner near home or inside the living room of an apartment on the second floor, and the twists out of which the plot is constructed form a straight red thread around which the characters with their simple tics and predictable habits are build, the only actions that the characters undertake consist of the collection of their waste in their trash bin in the kitchen or the bathroom or bringing their garbage to the general red or yellow dumpster on the street corner, meeting one another casually on their way to post a bill payment or while washing their hands in the public bathroom, listening to the flushing of water from the toilet cell next to them staring at the shuffling of two pair of unknown brown leather shoes, a man reflecting on his laundry spinning in the laundromat, looking at a woman folding her colored knickers on the plastic table top, the heroine taking her clothes off before taking a bath, in the morning the day starts with a shower of lukewarm water on a cloudy day, a line of people waiting for a stranger rummaging in his purse for the exact change at the grocery store, while the fingers of the cashier run over the where the drawer of the cash register, then the plot seems to unravel, tension is building when the ATM is out of order and the protagonist has to walk half a mile for the nearest bank office in order to withdraw cash, where one sits in an office with beige desks and white walls all day watching the price of stock going up and going down again, where the main topic of conversation is the weather of that day and the coming weekend, where the critical dialog takes place during a flighty meeting where a shallow greeting is exchanged without any feelings attached, while someone walks through a red light and a car beeps its horn while everyone goes their own way, except for one blurred face staring out of the window from the third floor, drawing nobody’s attention at all, with a preface thanking this and that unknown person, and finally culminating in an ending at the last line of the last page with the words ‘to be continued’ and three single dots.