Three - Mee(4)

  If I had cause for complaint, it was my inability to see through walls. When looking out the sindow, I hated seeing nothing of the building next door, nothing of the street below, and only the narrowest strip of sky. At the smelly butcher shop across from us (I'd forget about the smell, only to remember it the moment I stepped into the cool street), it vexed me to be too short to see the butcher pick up one of his knives (each of them as big as my leg) to chop meat on the wooden block; I hated not being able to inspect counters, tabletops, or the insides of ice-cream freezers. When there was a small traffic accident in the street, drawing policemen on horse-back, an adult would stand in front of me and I'd miss half the action. At the soccer matches to which my father took me from an early age, every time our team found itself in jeopardy, all the rows ahead of us would stand up, occluding my view of the decisive goals. But in truth, my eyes were never on the ball; they were on the cheese bread and cheese toasts and foil-covered chocolates my father bought for my brother and me. Worst of all was leaving the stadium, finding myself imprisoned by the legs of men jostling toward the exits, a dark airlessforest of wrinkled trousers and muddy shoes. Apart from beautiful ladies like my mother, I cannor say I was vey fond of adults in Istanbul, finding them in the main ugly, hairy, and coarse. They were too clumsy, too heavy, and too realistic. It could be they had once known something of a hidden second world, but they seemed to have lost their capacity for amazement and forgotten how to dream, which disability I took to coincide with the sprouting of objectionable hair on their knuckles and on their necks, in their noses, and in their ears. And so while I enjoyed their kind smiles and--even more--their presents, their incessant kisses meant enduring the abrasions of their bears and whiskers, the stink of their perfume, and their smoker's breath. I thought of men as part of some lower and more vulgar race and was thankful most of them belonged to the streets outside.