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Embracing the Infidel
By Behzad Yaghmaian Random House
Behzad Yaghmaian
All right reserved. ISBN: 055380393X
Chapter One
Shadi and Nima
Shadi had been a schoolteacher in Iran before the government banned her from teaching in 1981. Now it was September 2002, and she and her son, Nima, were seeking permission to enter Europe. In the meantime, they lived at the end of an unpaved alley in Aksaray, a poor but developing neighborhood in Istanbul.
Most Iranians-migrants and tourists-knew of Aksaray before arriving in Istanbul. There are Iranian travel agencies, restaurants and cabarets, and real estate agents along its main streets, and it is famous for its bargain shopping. It is also home to many other migrants, including Bangladeshis, Afghans, and Africans. In some ways, Aksaray was a migrant city within the larger metropolis of Istanbul. For Shadi, its attraction was the relatively cheap rents.
When Shadi arrived in Istanbul, Aksaray was going through many changes. Two separate worlds were emerging. In the trendy part of the neighborhood, billboards advertised new fashions in clothing and displayed oversized photos of glamorous models. In renovated buildings, storefront boutiques sold popular Turkish and foreign clothing-Mavi and Levi's jeans, Nike sneakers. Other shops specialized in textile products and leather for markets in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and other countries in Eastern Europe. Their names resonated with imitations of famous brands from New York City: Proud Sportswear, Juris Collection, Murat Collection, Ronaldo Sport Collection, Lisa Collection, Joan Jeans, Premier Life, Bonny Jeans. Merchandise was priced in both dollars and euros.
This was the facade of Aksaray. Away from the main road, the boutiques were replaced by auto repair shops, small corner stores, men selling fresh produce from horse-drawn carts. This was the old Aksaray: run-down buildings with narrow dark stairways, back alleys, abandoned building lots. It was home to Roma, Kurds, and poor Turks living on the margins of society: street vendors, manual laborers working at incomes below a living wage, and those who hustled many long hours and dwelled in overcrowded tenements.
Aksaray had an unusually high number of hotels and hostels. In the 1980s, many migrants and their smugglers used such hotels for negotiations and deal making. Crossing the borders in the Turkish southeast, the migrants came straight to Aksaray. They checked into already designated hotels, sat in the lobby, and sipped tea with other hotel guests. In less than a few days, they found a smuggler, made the deal, and left Istanbul for their destination in Europe. Traveling was easier in those days. Border control was less strict. Europe was more receptive to migrants and asylum seekers.
"The job was easy," an Iranian-born British citizen told me. "You didn't have to do any searching. Everything was ready. Most people in the lobby were migrants themselves. They knew the routes and their prices, reliable smugglers, everything you needed to know." He spent one week in Aksaray in 1986. Soon he was on the road to Britain. In fall 2002 he returned to Turkey for a short visit. "Everything started here for me. I owe a lot to Aksaray."
All that changed in the 1990s. Trying to win the support of the European Union in its bid for EU membership and hoping to stop the influx of migrants through its eastern borders, Turkey imposed stricter border controls. Making travel plans became more difficult. Migrants and the smugglers were more secretive. The Aksaray hotels lost their old role. Then a new population of migrants arrived, with less money and different travel networks and arrangements. Aksaray became flooded with poor working men and women, unemployed urban youth, and villagers from the Middle East and North Africa.
Leaving Aksaray now took longer. Some migrants succeeded. They reached Greece and moved forward. For others, Aksaray became a morass of prostitution, drugs, and human trafficking. "Aksaray is like a swamp: once in it, you cannot escape it," an Iranian smuggler once told me.
On my first visit to Aksaray, I walked aimlessly, watched the passersby, and tried my best to avoid hustlers of all types. "Salam, agha," a Turkish man greeted me in Persian. He stood in front of a restaurant, and his job was to get people inside. "Hello, sir. Come in for a good meal. We have kebabs and soup." A block or two away, a young man dressed in a blue polyester suit walked behind me. "Khanoom-haye ziba, beautiful women," he said in bad Persian. I turned a corner to escape him. Walking toward the McDonald's on the main street of Aksaray, I noticed a tall, skinny African bouncing around like a star soccer player, kicking an imaginary ball in the air. He bought a pack of cigarettes from a corner store, turned into an alley, and disappeared from sight.
I stood by the McDonald's and stared at a police wagon parked by a police station only a few feet from the fast-food place. The van was packed with young men; some looked Pakistani or Bangladeshi, others Iranian. Earlier in the week I had read about the arrest of clandestine migrants in Istanbul. The men in the station wagon were perhaps the latest catch in that operation.
Busy restaurants, hotels, and confectionaries surrounded the McDonald's and the police station. From early morning until late at night, men and women crowded the street and the shops, which provided a feeling of security to the migrants living in the safe houses of Aksaray. The McDonald's was used as a meeting place by migrants and their contacts. In a strange way, its proximity to the police station protected it from the police. This arrangement was a common practice throughout Europe. Smugglers set up meetings between clients and their hired hands in McDonald's restaurants in London, Rome, and other capitals. Istanbul followed the rule. The fast-food chain, especially in crowded neighborhoods, seemed immune to police raid.
Arrests in Aksaray were common, however, and quiet back streets were the usual sites. Often the police had no real interest in detaining the arrested migrants; rather, they were out in the streets in search of extra income. Fifty million Turkish liras (TL) was the price they demanded. Those without money were robbed of their mobile phone, watch, or other valuables. Occasionally some were taken into custody.
I first met Shadi and Nima in the office of the Istanbul Interparish Migrants Program (IIMP). Helen Bartlett, the organization's director, had asked me to help with Persian interpretation every Wednesday.
It was minutes past noon, and I was translating a testimony written in Persian when I heard a knock. Opening the door, I saw Shadi and Nima, smiling, looking excited. They were clean and nicely dressed. Nima wore a blue shirt and a pair of trendy jeans. He looked like a shy teenager. Shadi had a motherly face. "Salam," they greeted me in Persian. I replied in Persian and introduced myself.
I invited Shadi and Nima into the office, thinking they wished to see the director. They declined. "We heard about you from other Iranians, agha Behzad, and came here to welcome you," Shadi said. Word was out that an Iranian writer from America was working for the IIMP, and the Iranian migrants were intrigued. Some saw in me their only chance to leave Turkey and find their way to America. I could get them a visa to America, they thought. Others were comforted by having someone who understood their language and patiently listened to their stories.
"Will you give us the honor of visiting our kolbeh, our humble home?" Nima asked. I accepted without hesitating, and we exchanged phone numbers.
I had to climb three flights of narrow stairs to reach the rooftop where they lived in a rickety shack. I looked up and saw her waiting to greet me, a lit candle in her hand. "Welcome to our home," she said.
The main room of Shadi's apartment was devoid of furniture. She had spread old blankets on the floor for people to sit on. A few other folded blankets and bedsheets, along with two pillows, were piled neatly in a corner, and a pair of blue jeans, a shirt, and two towels hung on the wall by the door. The room's blue walls were streaked with yellowish water stains. Layers of plastic covered a hole in the ceiling. A piece of thick blue cloth separated the room from a four-foot-long space that Shadi called her kitchen, though it had no stove, sink, or refrigerator. She cooked her meals on a single gas burner in the living room. The kitchen space was used as a closet and a place to change in privacy.
At the other end of the kitchen was a room with broken pipes, a broken toilet, a sink with a hole not connected to a pipe, and a large container of water. There was an electric immersion heater inside the container, which they used to heat water for showering. This was considered the bathroom. Electricity was free; the owner illegally brought it to the building. "We're lucky, we don't have to pay."
Shadi was neatly dressed in brown corduroys and a striped shirt over a white turtleneck. A middle-aged woman with short graying hair, she set about boiling water for tea in a cooking pot on the gas burner. "We've just moved here," she said. "This is really not the way we usually live."
The next time I phoned Shadi and Nima, we agreed to meet in the evening at the McDonald's on Aksaray Avenue and then walk together to their apartment. I showed up at the McDonald's at seven but had to wait nearly fifteen minutes until I saw Shadi and Nima running toward me, waving to get my attention.
"Sorry we're late," Shadi said, catching her breath. "We're coming from work. We walked for one hour, all the way from Taksim Square." The last time we'd met, both Shadi and Nima had been unemployed. I congratulated them on the job.
They had found work at a candle-making factory. This was their second day. They started work at half past eight in the morning and finished at half past six in the evening. To save money, they left home early to walk to work. "We work together. That's the best part," Shadi said. She decided to go on ahead, walking fast to reach home and start preparing the dinner, while Nima and I followed more leisurely. "I hope you aren't too hungry," she told me. "I'll make you a nice dinner, Nima's favorite."
Strolling with Nima, I asked about his new job. "It's good," he said casually. "It's a job."
A long street connected Aksaray Avenue to the alley where Nima and Shadi lived. A block past the police station, we turned right at the corner. We passed a restaurant or two, a corner store, and an Iranian nightclub in the basement of a hotel, with large pictures of belly dancers in the lobby windows. Then came garages and one auto parts shop after another. Halfway to Nima's home, a square of some sort-a space filled with waist-high grass-stood in the middle of the street. Across from the square, piles of trash surrounded an overflowing garbage bin. Cats jumped in and out of the bin.
Hurrying to escape the smell of garbage and auto grease, we passed a bus station, a large open space with buses destined for Bucharest and other cities in Romania. Men carried large bundles to the station. Blond men and women queued to board. Traders and store owners back in Romania, many came to Aksaray to buy leather jackets, blue jeans, and other textile products. A number were there for pleasure. Some came for work. Joining the Russians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, and others, they made up the sex workers of Istanbul's transnational sex industry.
Past the bus station, the street became quieter. The auto repair shops gave way to barbershops and more corner stores. At the store closest to their home, I bought yogurt, pickles, black olives, and bread. "Shadi loves these olives," Nima said. Finally we turned onto a half-dirt, half-paved alley full of foot-wide potholes. A crane stood in the middle of a construction site to our right. There were a dozen or so one-story houses and gecekondu-homes erected illegally overnight. Three women dressed in traditional Kurdish clothes-long swinging skirts and white head scarves with colorful flowers embroidered on their edges-sat on the steps of their home. Children played in the dirt of an abandoned building site on our left. Next door, a lone woman sat behind a closed window in her street-level room.
The building's front door was wide open. We walked up the narrow stairs in darkness, since the lightbulb had burned out. Our path was lit only by a dim ray coming out of the apartment on the second floor. The metal railing rattled when I grabbed it to walk up the stairs.
Night had fallen on Aksaray. I stood on the roof looking at the surrounding streets and alleys. There was no sign of the auto repair shops and boutiques. All I could see were half-finished gecekondu and decaying rooftops, tin roofing and clay shingles covered with blue and black plastic to prevent water leaks from the rain.
By the time we got there, Shadi had already begun her preparations. Sitting in a corner in front of the gas burner, cutting potatoes and adding them to the pot of frying onions, she asked about my work with the migrants. "I have a lot of stories to tell you myself," she said.
The fragrance of the frying onions and potatoes filled the small room. Sensing my hunger-my eyes were fixed on the pot-Shadi laid old newspapers on the floor; Nima placed the olives, bread, and the rest of the food we'd bought on the newspapers. Two plates were brought out from the space behind the blue curtain. A family-size bottle of Pepsi and two small glasses were added to the collection. "You start with this now. I know you're hungry. The food will be ready soon." Shadi added rice and water to the pot, covered it and lowered the fire, and joined her boy and me. The rice was soon ready, and tasted as good as it had smelled. Shadi kept placing more rice on my plate the minute she saw it empty. For more than two hours, we sat around the newspapers, ate, and told stories.
Shadi talked about Van, a city near Turkey's southeastern border, where she had lived for four years after leaving Iran. "Please forgive us for hosting you in this inadequate way. We are new here," she said. "In Van, I had a humble home with most of the things one needs." That night, Shadi and Nima told me about the journey that had brought them to Van.
Van is an impoverished city surrounded by barren hills, the snow-covered Taurus Mountains, the beautiful Van Lake, valleys, and farmland. Not long ago, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Van and many other towns and villages in southeastern Turkey were predominantly Armenian. In 1915 a large-scale organized effort was made to uproot the Armenians and drive them away from Turkey. Among other cities, Van was the site of what became known as the Armenian genocide. The city was depopulated.
Continues...
Excerpted from Embracing the Infidel by Behzad Yaghmaian
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