“Memories of Kazleristan”
Excerpt from Ghosts of Istanbul
by Edward Mack
Sultan was haunted by three pashas.
The first, and oldest, had propped himself in shade at the corner of the building. “You don’t want to associate with the likes of them,” he said through a bristling mustache. Sultan’s great-grandfather's starched collar was undone and his stomach threatened to burst the buttons further down his shirt. A red fez perched jauntily on his head. The Fat Pasha moistened his lips, a habit that Sultan found repulsive. “Bad news,” he said. “Get you into trouble.”
Sultan checked the business card again. The address was a second-story apartment in Balat. He scratched the back of his neck, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and held his finger to the buzzer. But then he dropped it and skulked to the end of the block where he looked up at a woman smoking on a balcony.
“Why would you want to associate with them?” the third pasha snarled, his canine lips curling around yellowed fangs. The Wolf sat on his hind legs on the curb, ears laid flat. Danger lurked around Sultan’s father like a shadow. “Trash. Street scum. They don’t deserve to live in Istanbul. We should drive them back where they came from. Or, better yet—”
“Don’t be extremist,” the second pasha said, sitting on the wall above the Wolf with his long, skinny legs crossed neatly. The ghost of Sultan’s grandfather had parted his hair neatly to the side. He wore a jacket, going threadbare at the elbows, and a striped tie tucked into a snug waistcoat. A pocket watch hung from the waistcoat, which he flicked open, closed, open as he watched Sultan pace the street. “As long as they agree to disband this...whatever-it-is immediately and assimilate into proper Turkish culture—”
“Shut up!” Sultan said. “Just shut up, all of you.”
The pashas quieted for a moment before the Fat Pasha licked his lips again. “You should just stay away is all I’m saying.”
Sultan would have stayed away, but he had no choice. Word would have spread among his relatives by now that Sultan was a no-good delinquent; no one would take him in. And Sultan had never had time to make friends, besides maybe Derya. Even still, Sultan might have tried to get a job at another stall in the market. He could have talked to Mete, whom he hadn’t seen in years. He could probably even have convinced Derya to let him work at his father’s kebap shop. However, desperation took many forms and finances were merely one of the reasons that drove him to the apartment in Balat.
Nothing about the building bespoke anything special. Spring-pink paint was washed out into a dull patina of tinged concrete. Metal bars clung to the lower windows. Corner concrete crumbled. Sultan tried to fool himself that he didn’t know what he would find on the second story of the building, but he knew.
The dancer he had seen that morning flashed through Sultan’s mind. The one who had called him brother, invited him to dance, given him the card with the address. A face like looking in the mirror. A face that belonged to something, to somebodies.
“I’m telling you,” the Fat Pasha said again, “you should forget that side of you.” He pushed his fez to the back of his head so that it threatened to fall off at any moment, though Sultan knew it never would.
Although he couldn’t remember a time before the pashas, he sometimes dreamed of life without them. The freedom. The space. The lightness. There was nothing he could do, however, but tolerate them the best he could.
He glanced at the business card again. He had never heard of a Kazleri Federation of Istanbul but they must have been a decent sized organization if they were organizing dances like the one which he had seen that morning.
The Skinny Pasha frowned. “The Republic does not approve of unsanctioned cultural gatherings.”
“Damn the Republic!” Sultan hissed. “And damn you!”
The Skinny Pasha opened his mouth to respond but the Wolf cut him off.
“Kazleri, ha!” the Wolf snarled. “Better they all sink into the Bosphorus with their music and their dancing and their Kazleri. I shit on Kazleri.”
The Fat Pasha said nothing, only sucked on his lips ruminatively.
As though the Wolf’s cursing made up his mind for him, Sultan trotted down the street just in time to meet a young woman at the door to the apartment. Her blazingly scarlet hair was gathered in a bun at the crown of her head. She wore tight jeans and a white tank top that exposed brown shoulders where a large magpie perched, and was carrying a bag of take-out.
“Merhaba,” the woman said. Like Sultan, she must have recognized herself in his face. He wondered if she had been one of the dancers from that morning.
“Selamünaleyküm,” Sultan replied.
Brown eyes flashed at him and brows furrowed. The magpie squawked. The woman turned away when the door buzzed and pushed inside.
“Wait!” Sultan said.
“What do you want?” the woman said.
The three pashas huddled close behind Sultan now, hissing in his ear. He batted them away and hoped the woman couldn’t hear them.
“I, uh, a man gave me this.” He held out the business card to her before remembering it was sweat dampened and half illegible. He snatched it back.
“From Mehmet?” The girl’s eyes narrowed again.
“I think so. He was dancing and he stopped me as I was on my way to work. Long hair. Crooked nose.”
She laughed, one short, sharp yip. “Yea, that’s Memo.” Finally, her eyes softened. “Ok, well, come on. I’m Aysu. This is my mother,” she indicated the magpie on her shoulder and pushed open the door.
“Sultan,” he replied as they climbed a winding, concrete stair, “and these are the pashas.”
Aysu’s mother chirped and ruffled her wings.
“Pashas?” Aysu asked, pausing to study them. The Fat Pasha caught his tongue just as it slipped out of his mouth, turning a lip moistening into a smile. The Skinny Pasha flipped his pocket watch open, studying the time. And the Wolf bared his teeth. “Really?” Aysu said.
Sultan shuffled his feet. “Two of them, actually. The fat one and the skinny one. The Wolf isn’t a real pasha. I just call him that because it’s easier.”
“I see.” She frowned at the ghosts and said something to the bird on her shoulder. “Well, come up but it would be better if the pashas stayed outside.”
Sultan looked at his feet. “I’m not sure they’ll like that.”
Aysu sighed as though she already knew the way this story was written. “Alright then, let’s go.”
As they tramped up the stairs, the Wolf muttered. “I would have been a pasha,” he said through tight jaws, “if that Kemal traitor hadn’t—”
“Yeter, baba. Enough,” Sultan said.
“He is always saying yeter. Yeter! Yeter!” the Fat Pasha said. “Maybe we should just call him Yeter!”
“Or coward,” suggested the Skinny Pasha.
“Or traitor,” said the third.
“Yeter, ya!”
“What’d you say?” the woman asked, pausing on the second-story landing.
“Nothing,” Sultan grumbled beneath his breath. He knew that ghosts could make themselves be heard by whomever they wished; he was glad this time the pashas had kept their comments between themselves. “Talking to the pashas.”
Aysu laid a hand on Sultan’s forearm. He looked down at it. Soft. Delicate. Unpainted nails. Trimmed. Soft.
“I wasn’t sure either,” the woman said, “the first time I came. My mother made me, or I never would have. I wasn’t going to come today either, but…” she gestured to the bird, who ruffled its wings and squawked. “And the börek was already bought.” She shook the take-out bag. “We missed most of the meet-up, but there might be a few stragglers left.”
Sultan pulled his arm away. “Everyone inside is Kazleri?”
She turned her back to him and buzzed. “Partly. Hardly anyone in Istanbul is full Kazleri.”
“Are you?”
She laughed, that sharp bark, and pushed into the apartment.
“Welcome!” a man wearing a long, white chokha boomed. Rifle cartridges were strapped across the chest of the coat, but it was otherwise unadorned. He took Aysu by the shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks with a laugh.
“Hi, George,” Aysu said with a smile.
“And you, beautiful,” George said, addressing the magpie, “how are you today?”
The magpie chirruped in delight.
“Wonderful, wonderful! And who is this strong young colt you’ve brought along?” Sultan felt like George’s gaze slipped in through his eyes and traveled right down his spine and into his toenails.
“Sultan?” George bellowed. “What a name, what a name.” Sultan thought he caught a hint of a head shake.
“Sultan has never been to a Kazleri meet-up before,” Aysu explained. “But he saw Mehmet dancing this morning.”
“A first-timer? Well then. You’re going to love it. So much to love. Did you happen to catch me dancing this morning? No, ah, well, there’s always another dance. Anyway, anyway, what have we here?” As George walked past to introduce himself to the three pashas, he clasped Sultan on the shoulder. Sultan froze and looked at the hand. It was there, on his shoulder, he could feel it.
“Hey,” Sultan hissed to Aysu as soon as he shook off his shock. He sidled to where she stood by a buffet table littered with the remnants of a pot-luck lunch. She opened her tray of börek and placed it next to a serving platter that still held a couple loosely wrapped dolma. “Hey!” Sultan said again. “Is George, you know, a ghost?”
Aysu selected a piece of baklava from the table and popped it into her mouth. “Uh huh.”
Sultan could still feel George’s meaty hand on his shoulder. It burned him. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think.
“He’s a, he’s really a ghost?”
“I said yes.”
“But, but, then…” Some abstract part of his memory knew that ghosts could touch the physical, but it was so far away, so criss-crossed by the warning tape of tabu, that he never considered it an actual possibility. And then there was the other problem. “Where is his human?”
Swallowing, Aysu said, “I’m sure he’s around somewhere.”
“Who, Mehmet?” the booming voice asked, followed closely behind by George. “Oh, no, he had to run off. Something about his brother. Or maybe a girl. Yes, that’s what it was. That sweet Fatma, with the curly hair, you know—”
“George,” Aysu interrupted. Sultan saw a flush rise on her cheeks and then, unexpectedly, he felt a flush rise on his as well.
“Yes, yes, sorry,’ George said. “Anyway, I told him I’d look after things here. Welcome any stragglers. And a good thing I did too because here you are! It’s so good to see you again, Aysu. And to meet you too, Sultan, although,” his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, “I do have to say, your ghosts are not the friendliest.”
Sultan’s mind whirred too heavily for him to form an appropriate response. “But, how?” was all he could say, still stuck on the practicalities of Mehmet’s ghost with a little bit of Aysu thrown in for good measure. When she cocked her head at him, his mind caught up to the conversation. “I, uh, I mean sorry,” he said, reading her expression, so like the bird on her shoulder. “The pashas are shit. What can I do?”
George spread his arms. “No matter, no matter! A man is not made of his ghosts, just like a ghost is not made of his man. Now, Aysu, I want to talk to you.” The booming ghost led the woman away, his arm across her shoulder.
Sultan frowned at the buffet. How come his ghosts never left him alone? He would gladly let them run off and bother somebody else. This George though, he was something special. He seemed to have his own agency, like he didn’t need Mehmet around at all. He seemed almost separate from Mehmet in a way.
Sultan shivered. He hoped the pashas hadn’t said anything too insulting.
“It’s unnatural,” the Skinny Pasha insinuated in Sultan’s ear.
“Speak of the dog…” Sultan said to himself.
“You should wash that shoulder,” the Skinny Pasha said, pointing to where George had touched Sultan.
“You should really cut it off,” the Wolf suggested.
“I’m not going to cut off my shoulder,” Sultan said.
“We should not be here,” the Fat Pasha said. His normally jovial face had fallen into deep discomfort and his eyes moved constantly around the apartment as if he expected someone to sneak up on him. “Especially after this morning. Mixing up with types like this, you’re only asking for more trouble.”
“Leave me alone,” Sultan said.
“Filth,” the Wolf said.
Sultan collapsed into a chair in a corner. “Why am I here then, huh?” Sultan looked around, but barely saw anything. Across the room, George was chatting with Aysu, painting some grand picture with his hands. Two other people that Sultan hadn’t met yet smoked at a small table near the window. Ghosts haunted both of them. The apartment felt empty, too big for itself, the way any space does after a party: furniture shifted around, napkins with half-eaten mezes abandoned on side tables, cups of tea, an instrument case, an overflowing wastebasket.
And Sultan was alone with the pashas. He took his head in his hands. “Why, baba?”
The third pasha sat on his haunches and thrust out his chest. His tail switched across the floor. “You shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be here. These scum—”
“No. Why am I here at all? Why am I like this? Why am I Kazleri if you despise them so much?”
A scowl warped the Wolf’s face, as though the question disgusted him, or the memory did, or Sultan did.
The Skinny Pasha squatted in front of Sultan, bending so that the tight cuffs of his pressed trousers lifted up to reveal dark stockings. “You cannot blame your father,” he said. In a way, Sultan liked the second pasha best. His future was progress for all. Though Sultan did not always agree with the manner of achieving that future, it was undoubtedly better than the vision of the future the Wolf had.
“Of course I can blame my father,” Sultan said. “He made me this way. He gave me this filth blood. He chose, not me.”
“No, my son. He had no choice. He was doing his patriotic duty.”
“Patriotic duty? What patriotic duty?”
“There is more than one way to assimilate. You are half blood. When you have a child, that child will be quarter blood. Soon, there will hardly be enough blood left to mention.”
“And then,” the Wolf dragged the nails of his forepaw across the floor as if crossing something out. “None.”
Sultan’s head weighed a thousand pounds. He felt like he would sink right through the floor, and the floor below that, down deep into the earth below the streets, the bowels of Istanbul, the city built upon bones stacked upon centuries of bones. “Oh, anne,” he moaned.
He had never known his mother. She left when he was young. Sultan was raised by his father’s mother, or what was left of her after her husband, the second pasha, passed over. His grandmother never spoke of Sultan’s mother, and he never asked.
He was asking now. “What happened to my mother?”
The Skinny Pasha stood and turned his back on Sultan. The Wolf eyed the ceiling, very much like he was sticking out his chin.
“Baba, what happened to anne?”
“I did my patriotic duty,” the Wolf said.
“You killed her.”
He spat. “Bah, we are not allowed to kill anymore. Though it would be no less than her kind deserves.”
“Her kind? My kind, baba. My kind.”
The first pasha put his large, be-fezzed head next to Sultan’s, pressing his temples next to that of his great-grandson. Of the three, the Fat Pasha was the most generous, the most feeling, but even then he was lecherous, avaricious, chauvinistic.
“You must forget that part of you,” he said, “this part. Pretend it does not exist. It is not part of you.”
“Slice it out.”
“Leave it behind.”
“Now let’s go before this place, these people, infect you anymore,” the Wolf said.
Sultan should have listened to the pashas. Just walked away, left it behind. He didn’t belong there. It was none of his business, after all, and thinking so was what had started the trouble. Why did he have to say something at work that morning? Why did he have to speak up? He could have just walked by, like every other day, and everything would have been the same as always. No, it wasn’t his fault. It was this part of him, this cancer, he knew now. He had to ignore it, force it away, slice it out. Be Turk, nothing more. Just Turk and life would go back to normal.
But it wasn’t that easy. He was Kazleri too, and how could he pretend otherwise?
Someone was shaking his shoulder. The woman, Aysu. A strand of scarlet hair had slipped out of her bun. “Hey, you ok?”
Sultan lifted his head. Other than Aysu, he was alone in the antechamber, alone with the pashas. The other guests were all sitting in the salon by the windows, chatting, waiting for something.
“Come on,” Aysu said, “I want you to meet everyone. And George is going to show a memory.”
“Slice it out,” the Wolf whispered, padding along behind them as Aysu took Sultan’s hand and led him into the next room. She introduced him to a dozen other people and their ghosts: Didems and Ömers and Meryems. The only one Sultan could remember was a green-eyed girl in a headscarf named Hilal. She had a thin nose and a narrow chin. Her ghost was a snake wrapped around her neck like a charm.
After introducing Sultan, Aysu sat him at her side and he could smell her skin: wind over water, wind that had travelled a long way.
George stood in the center of the room. He spoke in a language that Sultan didn’t recognize.
“Do you speak Kazleri?” Aysu whispered but Sultan raised his brows. “No matter, no one here really does. Just George. Still, it’s one of our goals, you know? Language preservation.”
Sultan wasn’t listening to Aysu though, as the ghost George has switched to Turkish. “I share because we need to remember. Remember a father, a mother. A family. A village. A life.”
“There is a spring in the center of the village, with water so cold it makes your teeth hurt.” As he speaks, a spring appears in the center of the room. It begins to bubble. A dirt path leads to it. Slowly, houses materialize, taking the places of the walls in the room. Soon, you are inside a village. A vague familiarity tugs at you, like you know the place, or have seen it in a photograph. But as a donkey pulls a cart laden with turnips down the path, you know it is a memory of a village that existed a hundred years before you were born. This is George’s village. This is Kazleristan.
The Fat Pasha leaned over Sultan’s shoulder. “See that house,” he whispered. “It looks just like the one I was born in.”
“Even then,” George continues, oblivious to the ghost’s comments, “even in my time, there wasn’t much left. The Ottomans were all-devouring. But there was some, yes, there was enough.”
George leads you down the paths, through the houses. You wait as a shepherd moves his flock across the path to a grassy hill nearby. You see steam rising from a stew cooking over an open fire and it feels so real that you can almost smell it.
“Look away,” the Wolf said.
“So much potential,” the Skinny Pasha said, “If they had just accepted their destiny and not resisted.” He shook his head.
Then you catch a flash of something different in the village: gunfire and screaming. The dance of flame leaping from rooftop to rooftop. People running, running with no direction. And soldiers in their felt greens, grabbing a woman, throwing her to the ground.
But just as suddenly as the horror has come, it disappears. Your heart is racing.
Sultan looked around the room, but no one else seemed to have seen what he had. Was that George’s memory? Or something else?
The big ghost leads you to the shoreline, where a great expanse of water spreads from horizon to horizon. Small boats fidget in the waves, coming, going, hauling, throwing. On shore, people clean catch, mend nets, paint hulls.
George didn’t seem to have noticed the fire or the soldiers either. It must have been one of the pashas then, injecting their own projections into the memory. Sultan set his jaw. He wouldn’t let them distract him. This was his past, a past he had never seen before.
“We are a water people,” George says, as he leads you along the shoreline. “Just like Istanbullus. It’s perhaps why we feel so at home here.”
Next to Sultan, a conversation flitted back and forth in hushed tones between Aysu and her mother. Aysu leaned over to whisper to Sultan, “My mother says you act like you’ve never seen a projection before. But I say that is impossible. You have three ghosts, surely they have shown you their memories.”
But Sultan slowly shook his head, still lost on the paths of George’s memory. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It is so real. Like a movie, but I am there, in the movie. I can almost smell it.”
Aysu nodded. “Yes, I know. But sometimes it’s best to let the past stay there.”
That was easy for her to say, she who had seen her past, could understand it. The best Sultan had ever gotten was a constant stream of deprecating comments and some half-remembered dreams. And now images of violence thrust into another’s memory. “I just wish I could understand,” he said.
The magpie chirruped and Aysu cocked her head. “Yes, I hadn’t thought of that,” she said before addressing Sultan. “There is a place where you could see more memories, if you want. I haven’t been there since I was in school, but I can’t imagine it’s changed very much. It hasn’t in a hundred years, anyway.”
It didn’t matter if it hadn’t changed in a thousand years. Sultan wanted to go. He needed to. He had to start finding answers, and if the pashas wouldn’t show him, he’d find another way.
“Where?”
“Yoros Kalesi,” Aysu said.
“The castle?” Sultan had heard of it of course. It was some out-of-the-way attraction at the bottom of top-20 lists. “I thought that place was just for tourists.”
“Sultan,” Aysu leveled her eyes at him, “we’re all tourists to the past.”
*
After he ran out of money on a vagabond at 18, Edward found work selling carpets in the Grand Bazaar in order to afford a flight home to the United States. He later returned to Turkey as a volunteer hand on farms in Tokat and Denizli, to teach as a Fulbright scholar at Erzincan University, and to search for the best çorbacısı in Istanbul. He prefers the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus.
“Ghosts of Kazleristan” is an excerpt from a manuscript which sees an Istanbul flooded with ghosts—pashas returned to ensure the succession of their lineage, mothers unable to let go of their daughters, and even long-dead soldiers reliving battles amidst the ruins of ancient castles. Such ghosts have been whispering secret agendas in Istanbul's ears for a century. Believing these hauntings to be at the root of a rising ultra-nationalism, junior lawyer Aysu sets out to banish ghosts from the city. At the same time, James, Ph.D. candidate in Ghost Studies, arrives in Istanbul, hoping to find a ghost of his own. However, both get caught in an ever-deepening societal division triggered after the young merchant Sultan defends a Kazleri man from a race-fueled attack. Aysu, James and Sultan carom down interweaving paths until they are forced to reform their identities—or collapse under their weight—in GHOSTS OF ISTANBUL.
*