These are all very annoying of course, but not, if I am strictly honest with myself, the thing that irritates me the most. The thing I dislike most are my steps.Let me explain. We live in a wooden house with a set of marble steps leading from the front door down to the street. There is a smooth white piece of marble on either side of the steps, so smooth and so white that no young child in the neighborhood can resist sliding down it. Every time I sit down to work, I can rely on the prospect that a horde of children are just waiting to start playing outside my study window. The noise is a bit like tango night in the elephant cage.
Of course, it’s not so much the steps I dislike as the fact that I have to deal with the problem. Our Fatma, who actually has to clean the mud and chewing gum and piles of sunflower seeds off the steps, is in no doubt what to do. She swings open the front door and threatens, as the Turkish vernacular has it, “to break their legs.” I, on the other hand, try to take a more reasoned approach. I explain I am trying to work. “Wouldn’t you like to play somewhere else,” I ask, albeit with the nagging thought that since the nearest playground is about a kilometer away, they would probably break more than their legs if forced to cross the two major roads to get there.
Such reservations are unnecessary. Sometimes the children run away the moment I open the door, sometimes they fix me with that contemptuous stare which only a four-year-old can master. Either way, as soon as I have gone back inside they are back sliding down the steps.
We have been living in the house a while now, and four-year-olds have a habit of turning 10 and 11. They never seem to outgrow the steps. I can come home of a summer evening and even find a game of chess going on under our porch light or a small crowd of neighbor girls gathered on the steps for a gossip. They’re too old to shoo away and they’re not really causing any trouble, anyway. On the other hand, I am still too much of a curmudgeon to let their offense go unpunished so I simply say “good evening” with all the irony I can muster. Just occasionally this works and they pretend in an embarrassed fashion they have to be somewhere else, but mainly they smile back sweetly as I pick my way through them gingerly, door key in hand.
It has happened more than once that I see in the street a young girl wearing a scarf over her head -- the sort of Islamic head covering that causes staunch secularists to become shocked and angry. I do not so much foam at the mouth as register surprise that the very naughtiest of my step-sliders has now acquired pious garb.
My shock is not because I think that another young person has turned away from the founding Kemalist principles into accepting the opium of the masses but because she has started to dress like an adult. “She’s just a child,” I think to myself, and I am filled with a little remorse for having once tried to curtail that childhood myself by trying to stop the fun on my own threshold. “Come back! Sit on the steps,” I want to say, but I never do. So the next day, when the steps are still and untenanted, I am distracted from my computer screen by the unnatural silence.
How can I possibly like a country that forces me to reconsider the entire future of its young people before I even step outside my front door?
