The Destruction of the Pashas' Mansion: A Sad Tour of the Streets(4)

  The only other escape was to go out with my mother. Because it was not yet the custom to take children to parks or gardens for their daily fresh air, the day I went out with my mother was an event. "Tomorrow I'm going out with my mother!" I'd boast to my aunt's son, who was three rueas my hunior. After walking down the spiral staircase, we would pause before the little window facing the door through which the caretaker (when he was not in his basement apartment) coul see everyone coming and going. I would inspect mu clothes in the reflection, and my mother made sure all my buttons were buttoned; once I would exclaim in amazement, "The street!"

  Sun, fresh air, light. Our house was so dark sometimes that stepping out was like opening the curtains too abruptly on a summer's day; the light would hurt my eyes. Holding my mother's hand, I would gaze in fascination at the displays in the shops: through the streamy window of the florist, at the cyclamens that looked like red wolves; in the window of the shoe shop, at the barely visible wires that suspended the high-heeled shoes in midair; and at the laundry (just as streamy as the florist's) where my father sent his shirts to be starched and ironed. But it was from the windows of the stationery store--in which I noticed the same school notebooks my brother used--that I learned at early lesson: Our habits and possessions were not unique, and there were other people outside our apartment who lived lives very similiar to our own. My brother's primary school, which, I, too, would attend a year later, was right next door to Tesvikiye Mosque, where everyone had their funerals. All my brother's excited talk at home about my teacher, my teacher had led me to imagine that--just as every child had his own nanny--every pupil had his own teacher. And so when I walked into that school the following year to find thirty-two children pressed into one classroom with a single teacher, my disappointment was profound. The discovery that in effect I counted for nothing in the outside world made it only harder to part each day from my mother and the comforts of home. When my mother entered the local branch of the Bank of Commerce, I would refuse, without explaining, to accompany her up the six steps to the cashier: wooden steps with gaps between them into which I had convinced myself I might fall and disappear forever. "Why won't you come in? my mother would call down to me, as I pretended to be someone else. I'd imagine scenes in which my mother kept disappearing: Now I was in a palace, now at the foot of a well....If we walked as far as Osmanbey or Harbiye past the Mobile station on the corner, the winged horse on the sign covering the entire side of an apartment building would  

 

find its way into those belts and buttons; she also sold "eggs from the village," which she'd take out of a varnished chest one by one, like jewels. In her store was anaquarium where red fish would open their small but frightening mouths trying to bite my finger pressed against the glass, swimming up with a stupid determination that never failed to amuse me. Next, there was a samll tobacconist-cum-stationary-newspaper shop run by Yakup ann Vasil, so small and crowded that most days we'd give up the moment we entered. There was a coffee shop called the "Atab shop" (just as Arabs in Latin America were often known as Turks, the handful of blacks in Istanbul were known as Arabs); Its enormous belted coffee grindedr would begin to thunder like the washing machine at home, and as I moved away from it the "Arab" would smile indulgently at my fear.