The Accidental Activist

By now the whole world knows that Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç doesn’t want women laughing out loud in public.  He said so last Monday, the first day of the Bayram, or national holiday, marking the end of Ramadan.  Right away, Turkish women voted Arınç down with their pearly whites, flashing them in hilarity for selfies which they’ve posted on Snapchat.

In my own way, I, too, stood at the barricades.  Only two days after Arınç’ speech, I made a Turkish woman laugh.  Where Turkish culture’s concerned, I’m a tenderfoot, functionally mute when the conversation drifts away from ekmek, or baguettes, and çay, or tea.  The woman was laughing at me, which I’ll admit she had every right to do.   

It happened at Yenikapı, in front of the ticket window for the Istanbul Deniz Otobüs, or ferryboat.  I had spent three days in the city, visiting my girlfriend, Gülçin. Now I was preparing to re-cross the Sea of Marmara, back to Bursa, where I teach English.  In truth, it hadn’t been much of a vacation.  Instead of visiting the Hagia Sophia or the Galata Tower, or sampling the hip charms of Kadıköy, Gülçin and I had mostly hung around her air-unconditioned apartment, doing our best not to melt.  Money, as we’ll see presently, was tight.

 The ancient capital, seat of caesars and sultans, sprawls across 2,000 square miles like a concrete Maja Desnuda.  This makes it a cab driver’s paradise.  Back in March, on my first trip to my Gülçin’s house – located, as far as I can tell, halfway between the ferryboat landing and the Bulgarian border – my fare had come to a reasonable 90 Turkish lira, or $41.  This time, however, my driver soaked me 239 lira – an increase of nearly 300%.  The black shock of seeing those numbers blinking back from the meter made me forget my duffel.  The driver drove off with it, leaving me to blow another 500 lira at the Marmara Park shopping mall, replacing jeans, t-shirts, and socks.  (I never did figure out where to buy boxer briefs.) 

 Gülçin and her relatives agreed the man had probably jacked up the fare on purpose and, on finding unexpected plunder in his trunk, invoked the law of finders-keepers.  As any traveler knows, this is standard operating procedure.  But Turkey is a country where wild rumors – grim or hopeful, depending on your party preference – are shared like Willy Wonka memes.  If the reigning government’s not about to turn the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, it’s getting ready to abrogate the Lausanne Agreement.  I’d lived in the country only four months, but on this point cultural osmosis had had its way with me.  I found it impossible to smother the suspicion the driver had acted from some political motive.

As we sped away from the dock along Kennedy Cadde, I had noted hundreds of billboards touting Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for president.  Erdoğan is already prime minister and chairman of the Justice and Development Party – under either hat, he is Bülent Arınç’s boss.  Erdoğan's opponents fear that adding the presidency to his portfolio will complete his transformation from politician into strongman.  They may have a point.  Citywide Pop Art project seems pretty far down the road to equestrian statue.

Pointing to a bank of posters, I observed to the driver: “Tayyip – everywhere!”  Calling the PM by his middle name is a habit I picked up from Gülçin, a member of the opposition center-left Republican Party. I hadn’t worked out whether this kind of familiarity normally conveys affection, as in “Dubya,” or contempt, as in “Slick Willie” or “Barry Hussein.”  But I thought it sounded jaunty and knowing. At the beginning of the ride, the driver had bummed me a Parliament, which seemed like permission to show off.

Now he retorted: “Erdoğan!  President!”  Reverent and approving, the two words sounded like a parry in pidgin and made me shut my trap for the rest of the drive.  Ever after, I wondered whether inflating my fare and impounding my luggage could have been an Erdoğan loyalist’s act of sabotage against a cheeky Westerner.

Three days later, the return trip to Yenikapı came to an all-time low 73 lira.  I should have been overjoyed, but I wasn’t.  The bargain only confirmed my suspicion that on my earlier trip I’d been taken, literally, for a ride, and the confirmation put me in a poisonous mood.  All budget expats knows this mood well.  It dawns with the realization that the hardiness and adaptability we’ve claimed for ourselves is an alibi; that in our heart of hearts we’d rather be at Club Med, having our boots expertly licked.  The mood transcends politics, but politics, being one more source of strangeness, can feed it.  Worst of all, this mood has a way of demanding expression.   

The waiting room at the ferryboat landing wasn’t especially crowded.  The lines at the ticket windows were only a few people deep.  Most of the travelers seemed to be Turkish – sedate mothers and fathers with bouncing children in tow.  Together they made a low, contented hum.  Under other circumstances, it might have soothed me.  In my present state, the mellow domesticity reminded me that I was a foreigner, awkwardly transplanted into someone else’s incomprehensible normal.

The ticket agent was a woman in her early 20s, wearing hijab.  Briskly, she printed out my ticket and demanded: “Yirmi dokuz lira.”  Twenty-nine lira, or $13.58, is no great imposition by any standards.  But it also happened to be nearly twice what I’d paid to ride the same ferry in the opposite direction.  That was the match to the powder.  I went Five Easy Pieces, lashing the agent with the umbrage earned by the crooked driver and – now that I think about it – by the sales clerk at Mavi Jeans.

She opened her mouth and blinked when I called the price a travesty.  When I called it exploitative, she cocked her head like a curious beagle.  This is not what communications experts call mirroring, so I groped for the words in Turkish.  How “korsan,” or “pirate,” made its way into my working vocabulary, I had no idea.  But surely it had to express the thought “This is highway robbery” better than “ekmek.”

Pointing fiercely through the glass, I snapped, “Korsan!”  The agent’s eyes narrowed with delight and a laugh escaped her.  It was a most unpirate-like laugh – practically a titter – and she quickly covered her mouth and tried to look serious.  All of it, her laugh and her determined reversion to gravity, so charmed me that I took my ticket and stomped off to the büfe, where I picked a fight over marked-up Biskrem cookies.

Maybe by now, in the best Turkish tradition, the agent’s told all her friends that the foreigner she served last Wednesday was acting from his own political motive, making her laugh on purpose in the hope of subverting her religious observance or her party’s social agenda.  For the record, I wasn’t – I was melting down like a Snickers bar.  But where’s the glory in that?