Many and Many a Year Ago by Selcuk Altun

answer would be. Bored by the view of the Martı Restaurant and the murky sea from my third-floor room, I wandered out to the bazaar. The olive-oil aroma, sadly, had gone. But I knew that strolling along these quiet dark streets would relax me. As I entered a café with a TV blaring, an analogy between myself and a dung-beetle rose to mind. The only customers were two old men practically glued to their table, gawking and grinning at the TV with the night-shift waiter.
    â€œAyvalık only wakes up after the schools shut down for the summer,” said the horse-headed waiter when he brought me my sage tea. The old codgers stirred slightly during the commercials.
    â€œIf anybody knew this fellow—at least if he had a government job—it would be Muhtar Celal. He’ll be dropping by the coffeehouse next to the Port Authority as soon as he finishes his breakfast,” said the swarthier of the two men, who gave a sniff of his nose after each round of his prayer beads.
    I stopped for breakfast at a café under an arbor of grapevines and was surprised by the friendly reaction of the waiter when I ordered a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich. The people meandering along the labyrinthine streets seemed to be moving two beats slower than normal. I wondered whether they would speed up when the tourist season began. Muhtar Celal appeared to be in his seventies and wore a woolen vest over his short-sleeved shirt. I had a fleeting urge to ask how he filled his days once he finished his morning newspaper. He observed that people had been calling him “Muhtar” ever since the day he ran for the councillor’s office and lost. No, he wasn’t aware of the existence of a person called Haluk Batumlu. There was, however, someone called Haluk Erçelik the French teacher, who had lived on Marshal Çakmak Avenue. But he didn’t know where this Haluk came from exactly, nor where he went when he left.
    I stood up with the pleasant feeling of having done my best, and walked happily off to buy a bus ticket to Istanbul. But as I neared the station, which looked more like a rodeo arena, my inner voice, that devil’s advocate, whispered: Is it possible that Haluk Batumlu changed his last name to cut his ties with the past?
    The pounding in my head intensified as I called Ali Uzel.
    â€œProfessor, if a fanatic Stalinist wanted to change his last name, what would you advise him?”
    â€œIn Russian, Stalin means ‘made of steel’,” he said. “Permit me to call to your attention the resemblance between ‘Stalin’ and ‘steel’ in English. If I were a Turkish Stalinist, I think I would choose a surname like ‘Çelik’ or ‘Özçelik.’ You know, ‘steel’ or ‘real steel.’”
    Or “Erçelik”—“true steel.”
    â€œAre you okay?” he asked, as I hung up. I was up to my neck again in the Haluk Batumlu case. I chuckled nervously to myself as, instead of asking for a ticket at the window, I requested directions to Marshal Çakmak Avenue.
    The streets that ran up the hill past a store selling books, stationery and real estate to the old Greek neighborhood had various sacred and epic names attached to them. The mortar smeared on the limestone buildings looked like poorly applied suntan lotion. The zigzag streets designed for bicycles and horse carts reminded me of Balat, except for the lack of screaming children. I was happily distracted from my search by the pleasant sight of bougainvillea vines and pomegranate branches draped over the stone walls. As for the women sulking at their windows, it was as if they had all turned down their radios so as not to miss the command, “Come on, get up, we’re going back!”, when it came.
    At the ground-floor window of a ruined building on Marshal Çakmak Avenue sat a smiling middle-aged man whose body, below his chest and shoulders, remained hidden. When I