Komşularım

An image that has nothing to do with the blog entry. Though the balcony is relevant to the story, the cat is not.

As a teenager I well remember my younger sister laying on the living room floor, head propped upon elbows, watching the sitcom that would launch lots of people with dubious talent into the world of cinema, television and, principally, English pantomime. Neighbours. And what a show it was. Classy stuff.

Although I too lived an Australian suburban existence, I never remember the six marriages, eight deaths and fourteen divorces happening on Knightsbridge Avenue, Valley View, as they undoubtedly occurred each season on Ramsey Street. However, I do remember bubble skirts, ugly knitwear and Kylie Minogue before botox and her ever increasingly bizarre buffed forehead. Yep, I'm that old.

Anyway, the point I'm making here is that my neighbourhood didn't really resemble Channel 7's interpretation, and Cihangir, Istanbul is a little further still from the mind-numbingly catatonic pall that hung over my early years growing up in a city that remains memorable only for murdering and dismembering pubescent boys. Oh, and it's pleasant wine growing region.

I survived Valley View, grew up in a house and now I live in an apartment, the latter something I swore I'd never do many eons ago. I thought people who inhabited apartments spoke with harsh Irish accents and practised domestic violence instead of playing board games. We threw dice and moves our checkers, they coughed blood and hacked up molars onto a checked vinyl kitchen floor. Apartments were for people who smelled of boiled cabbage and in which everyone over the age of three smoked copiously, soaking the whole depressing dwelling in a scent of Marlboro that permeated even the deepest recesses of the obligatorily stolen, torn, faux-leather furniture. I think I might've been prejudiced.

Australia is so full of space that you have no option than to grow up abnormal. 6 billion people on the planet (a slight increase from the estimated 3.5 around the year I was born), and yet at twilight on a Sunday evening in Valley View I was actually spooked if I saw anyone on the street. The fact that a predatory group of child murderers was frantically scouring my city for victims may have made a notable impression on my teenage vision of my very suburban upbringing. I was the perfect age to be drugged, raped, decorated in barbed-wire and placed into several shallow roadside graves. I'm sure I equated man-on-street-whose-face-I-know-not with 'Oh, this might be quite bad for me. Don't take eat those boiled sweets'.

In any case, I was never really at risk as I've always preferred savoury foods, and thus little chance of me being led astray with humbugs or lemon sherbets. You can't really imagine a killer pedophile enticing a would-be victim with hot chips, and yet such a scenario could have led to my downfall. I think I've digressed.

So, Valley View was as quiet as most of Cihangir is not. My part of the neighbourhood even has it's own name, Purtelaş. I'm sure there's a story behind that name just like there isn't one behind Valley View. It's not even situated in a valley. My building faces the mosque, within whose gardens sits a Little-House-on-the-Prairie type dwelling housing the imam and a ragged collection of children. The cemented courtyard in front of the mosque is their playground and football field, in which impromptu afternoon matches are held between the calls to prayer. A bunch of sly looking street urchins usually join in the game, often asking me to move my motorcycle from the cemetery wall, which I refuse to do because it's not my motorcycle. During game practice I'm normally enjoying my cup of tea on the balcony, chatting with cats and real people in equal measure. Below me lives the extraordinarily youthful Perihan Hanım, doyen of the cul-de-sac, de-facto administrator of the apartment building and tormentor of the man who sells fresh breads from a wooden pallet on top of his head.

'Fresh bread, fresh bread...'. 'Why are you screaming like that? I'm trying to watch (insert appalling Turkish day-time soap opera title)'.

'I've been coming here for twenty years, every day, selling these breads'.

'And I've been asking you the same thing every day for twenty years'.

You get the idea. I'm too scared to buy his bread, but Perihan Hanım likes me and says 'You're a good boy. Don't leave Istanbul.' So I'm also kinda afraid to leave the city too.

The neighbour with whom I share the second floor is a fabulously glamorous and elegant dame, owner of a local art-house cinema. She is immaculate. She speaks a broken but charming English and oozes style. Her hair wavers between maroon and vermilion, always perfect. She makes me drink coffee that prevents me from sleeping for 36 hours. I seem to quaff a lot of her liqueurs, and always leave drunk.

The building that faces opposite is a five storey affair, housing as many generations of the same family and their radically insane Golden Retriever. Nazlı Hamın is 82 and the best evidence you can have that travelling is the way to spend your life. She's tramped through thirty-five countries. You know; Libya, Uzbekistan, Georgia. Places that travel guide publishers rarely get around to covering even at this point in the century. She keeps an eye on my flowers and tells me if I need to water them, how my cat behaved when I was out this morning, and why I shouldn't wear short in windy weather. All very helpful advice.

It often happens that English-breakfast tea time coincides with Perihan's admonishments, Pervin's coffee break and Nazli's balcony-sweeping hour. And so we chat. And it's a simple thing like neighbourly conversation that makes this city unleavable.

Everybody needs good neighbours. And I have them. They even offer me sweets and candies which I accept. I fear nothing here.