I awoke one morning, my dreams pierced by shrill ringing, to find that some jerk was holding down my doorbell. Opening my eyes, I imagined that some disaster must have occurred, like a fire raging through the building, or one of my neighbors found dead, or, I don’t know, somebody bringing me some terrible news. I clambered out of bed and beelined to the buzzer to silence whoever had the gall to ring my doorbell at this hour. My heart was beating in my throat.

But the person at the door was in no rush at all. Where the doorbell had whipped me into a frenzy, the footsteps up the stairs of the apartment building echoed with a languid flip-flop sound up the empty stairwell. All I had on was a tank top and underwear. The chain still latched on the door, I peeked through the narrow opening, staring at the landing and waiting. Before me emerged a woman with unbelievably dark lips and a face hardly bigger than a spoon, her headscarf bound tightly over her hair. When she saw me she bared her teeth, as if to smile, or to bite.

“Got anything for me to tin, my darling?”

“You,” I said, “have sooome nerve, lady! Scaring me half to death first thing in the morning!”

She thrust her hand into the gap between the door and the jamb. “Fraidy-cat, are we, missy? Now, now, nothing to fear, all I did was ring your bell.”

She leaned her other hand on the door and bent over as if to give her back a rest.

It was impossible for me to close the door.

“Would you please get your hand out of there?”

“Course I will,” she replied, unperturbed, “you think I’m here to rob you? Say, now, you got something in need of tinning?”

“What on earth are you talking about? Tinning? Get your hand out of there, or I’ll smash it.”

She leaned heavy on the door. “I need money for bread, missy, don’t you got anything to tin in the house? Cezves, steel skillets, teapots, trays, pots and pans?”

 “Lady, I’m not decent, please just leave me alone.”

The woman just stared back at the tip of my nose before lifting her leg and sticking her foot in the door, forming her body into the shape of an enormous, lopsided K. “Go get yourself decent then, sister, I’m waiting right here.”

“Lord, what a pest you are! I’m going to scream, that’ll cause quite the commotion among the neighbors.”

“Scream, little lady, scream away, scream your heart out at this poor little almswoman just looking for some bread money.”

Since I wasn’t about to crush the woman’s hand or foot in the door, I had no choice but to retreat. “Have it your way, then, stand there all day for all I care!”

The tinker woman began clucking her rote sales pitch. “Look at you, doe-eyed beauty, you’re young, you’re gorgeous, may God keep the evil eye from you. Let me shine your pots good as new and you’ll be praying for me to return, just wait and see. Polish ‘em up nice, those steel pans of yours, fix their broken handles. If it’s missing lids or broken screws you got, I can replace those too.”

I left the woman chattering through the gap of the chained door and found myself pacing around my flat. But I couldn’t think of anything that would get her out of my hair. “I told you, I don’t want anything! Go away, go try your next mark!”

“Well, well, well, aren’t you just stubborn as a mule! I’m gonna polish your pots and pans something nice, all for nothing more than a little change to buy me some bread. My daughter’s sick, my man’s out of work, my son’s doing his military service, and my littlest one’s still running round in my skirts. You think I’d come all the way here from Kuştepe just for the fun of it? Open the door, baby girl, it’s a good deed to give work to the poor.”

“Look here, auntie, I already told you I don’t want anything!”

“My my, then! You, big as a cow, calling me auntie?”

My eyes began to well up with tears. I reflexively covered my face with my hands. “Look, sister, I have to leave, I’ve got business to attend to,” I lied, for some reason. “Please stop insisting.”

“Go tend your business, then,” she replied, the smile on her face almost scornful. “I’ll bring you your pans by dark, once I get ‘em all shining good as new.”

No, I began to realize, there was no escaping this woman. Why did I tell her I was leaving? It wasn’t out of the question that she might be a thief. Maybe this was how she cased people’s houses. In the meantime, my cat Püskül, bless her, was getting anxious. She made to slip through the crack in the door and I tried to grab her by the tail.

“Hey, hey! Don’t let the cat out!”

Püskül rubbed against the foot she was using to hold the door ajar, and upon seeing the cat, the woman raised her voice as if scolding a child. “Ah-ah-ah! Get back in there with your mommy!”

Püskül bristled in deep indignation and then, her pride injured, made her way to her usual corner in the back room.

“You live with that filthy animal and yet you mean to chase off this poor old lady at your door? For shame, for shame.”

“Enough already, please!” I made my way back to the door with an air of authority that wasn’t at all persuasive, even to myself. “Good grief, you stupid, horrible woman! Are you insane?”

Her voice softened into a plea. “Goodness me! I’m hungry, dearie, I’m hungry, you think I’d go on like this if I wasn’t hungry? By my own eyes, all I had to feed my little one today was a slice of bread covered in sugar. If I can earn a few kuruş today I’ll bring him cherries and pasta tonight.” She squeezed her fists as she spoke.

“And now you’re begging, eh? I can’t stand begging.”

“Good gracious, little girl, never scorn a beggar! It’ll come back to haunt you. If that tongue of yours falls out of your mouth, don’t say Gülayşe didn’t warn you! Beggars are angels, you know. God tests his subjects by sending them angels dressed as beggars.”

“Oh wow,” I said sarcastically. “Isn’t that something! So you’re an angel then?”

“Heavens, no! I’m just your run-of-the-mill tinker. Give me a cezve at least, I need my first deal of the day.”

“Fine! But just a cezve, okay? If it means I’ll be rid of you.”

“Okay, baby, okay, I don’t know why you’re so upset with me.”

I dashed into the bedroom and put on the first skirt I could get my hands on. From there I moved to the kitchen, cursing under my breath. I found myself beginning to speak more and more like the tinker woman. “With a mouth like that,” I said to myself, “maşallah, lady, there’s nothing you can’t conquer!”

“What did you say, dearie? I can’t hear you.” In addition to her hand and foot, she was sticking her nose into my business as well.

I unlatched the chain and swung the door open as if to confront her head-on. “Take this cezve, then, and here’s some money to cover it. I don’t want the cezve back, don’t bring it back, sell it or use it, I don’t care, I just never want to lay eyes on you again!”

A brazen smile spread across her face as the woman snatched the cezve from my hands and sat herself down cross-legged in the doorway. “What would I want with this cezve of yours? I got a better one at home. Come on, bring me your pans. Long as they’re not copper, but do give me the steel ones, may as well do ‘em all while I’m at it.”

My mouth hung agape. The woman’s legs were inside my flat now, and I struggled to keep myself from attacking her. I had never regretted anything more than opening that door. I clenched my fists tight.

“Let me bring you the kettle, then.”

“Bring it, yes! Of course, the kettle! I’ll make it good as new.”

I grabbed the kettle from the stove and returned to the doorway, tossing it into her lap. “There you go. Are we done, is that good?”

She looked back at me mockingly. “Don’t you got pans for me?”

“No!”

“You’re a grown woman, didn’t your mama give you your dowry?”

I began clawing at my throat. “Good lord, lady, I thought we had an agreement. You know, just the cezve…”

“Hurry up and bring them all to me already, my goodness, I’m sick and tired of how stubborn you are.”

I had no choice at this point but to go back to the kitchen. “Lord, please watch the cat, don’t let it out!”

“Don’t worry, I’m watching the door!”

I returned with three different-sized saucepans for Gülayşe.

“And what about your skillet, your frying pan, your silver tray?”

I had truly run out of words to say, so I began grabbing whatever was in my kitchen and piling it on the woman. Throwing it at her, really. In the end, Gülayşe was pleased. She nested the pots and pans inside one another and slowly stood up. Standing there with cookery hanging from her arms, she looked like a scarecrow cobbled together out of metal.

“Alrighty then, I’ll bring ‘em back tonight, when you coming home?”

“I’ve changed my mind, I’m not leaving the house today, just polish these up and bring them back to me as soon as possible.”

“Your wish is my command! Give me two hours and I’ll be back!” she chirped in departure. The stairwell of the apartment building echoed once more in her descent, this time with clatters and clangs.

***

Over the course of the following two hours, my fear of Gülayşe grew worse and worse, to the point that I was almost paralyzed by panic. I sat in my chair and just stared blankly at the wall. I couldn’t make any sense of what was happening to me today. I couldn’t read a book or check my email. I didn’t even know how much I was supposed to pay her. Time moved so much more slowly than usual. As those two long hours came to an end, I began pacing from room to room, listening for any noise at the door. Who knows how many kilometers I walked inside my flat. And yet, Gülayşe didn’t come. At two and a half hours, she still hadn’t arrived. After three hours and fifteen minutes, I looked at my barren kitchen. I didn’t even have a pan to crack an egg into. I had been robbed in plain sight. Nobody would believe me, and besides, I would never be able to bring myself to tell a soul what had happened today.

That’s when I remembered seeing a woman like her a few weeks ago, polishing a steel pan with a leather-bound grindstone by the entrance to Abbas Ağa Park. If Gülayşe wasn’t a thief, then surely that’s where she’d set up shop. I rushed out of my flat and ran through the park, combing it high and low. There were couples walking their dogs, mothers setting their children loose on the playground, guys scrimmaging on the football field. But there was no trace of the tinker woman. I asked one of the old women sitting on the benches whether she had seen a tinker and she just stared back at me, perplexed. “A what? Oh, sweetie, you think there’s still tinkers in this day and age?”

“No, no, Nezahat dear,” the woman seated next to her interjected. “There are Gypsies,” she said, speaking the word under her breath as if to mask her scorn, “who pass through sometimes, doing that kind of thing.” She turned to me. “Go take a look around Four-Faced Fountain,” she instructed, clicking her tongue. Four-Faced Fountain was at the very top of the steep slope behind my apartment building. I left the two old women to their debate over the continued existence of tinkers and made a run for the fountain.

In the summer heat I was drenched in sweat. The air was so sweltering that the street cats couldn’t even muster the energy to dig through the dumpsters. Out of luck once again, I didn’t find a single soul around the Four-Faced Fountain. In my insistent and unchecked madness, I looked down alleyways, around the parking lots of apartment buildings, in the elementary school’s courtyard, and up and down fire escapes. There wasn’t a single nook I didn’t invade in the massive neighborhood, no empty cranny I overlooked. My knees were trembling with exhaustion.

The issue wasn’t actually the kitchenware I had given up with my own two hands. The issue wasn’t even Gülayşe, who had hounded me till I caved to her demands. The issue was me, myself. Because what I felt, making my way along the narrow streets of Yıldız Neighborhood that I had never before ventured down, was that I had given up my sense of self. I was bearing witness, thanks to that hag Gülayşe, to the process of my own will scaling over like the thick bottom of an overworn kettle; I watched with my own eyes as my resolve, indeed my very soul, retreated from me. I tried to understand this new state of myself, a self suddenly imprinted by Gülayşe, a self that had indeed never before existed. I was looking now for something I could prove it with, some other person who had, like me, been enthralled by Gülayşe.

Isn’t it always the case, though, that when we make contact with another being its trace remains on our flesh? For it is a trace we remember not with our minds, but with our hands when they open doors, with our teeth when they bite into things. The mind goes numb and suddenly the body remembers.

That’s how it was for me. It’s not that I was reshaping myself according to new emotions, but that a singular emotion had cast me in its mold, turned me into an empty vessel, both stiff and fragile. What I mean to say is that my frenzied search for Gülayşe and my pursuit of the traces of my vanishing ego were in that instant the very same thing.

I stopped at the hardware store, and the stationery shop, and the realtor, and the deli, and the greengrocer, to ask each of them if they had seen a tiny woman with her arms full of pots and pans. They scowled silently back at me in reply. They threw the meaninglessness of my question back in my face, and as if that weren’t enough, I had also given them reason to imagine, as they gawked back at me, “a tiny woman with her arms full of pots and pans.” Whereas when Püskül got lost last year, each of those shopkeepers had been so keen to listen to me. I asked them if they had seen a black-and-white cat with a slightly crooked neck and eyes wide like an owl’s, and they had all, almost reflexively, crooked their necks and widened their eyes, had all become cats themselves in the process. That’s not what was happening now, of course. There was but one Gülayşe here, one woman burdened by so much iron and steel, one woman whose sandals flipped and flopped as she walked, and that woman was me alone. I had come to embody the menace that had totally devoured my entire sense of self.

When I got home and drank some water I thanked my lucky stars for the existence of glass. Until I manage to buy myself a new set of steel cookware, I thought to myself, I’ll cook with my glassware. In fact I actually ought not let any metal into the house; I can cook everything in glass. That would be much wiser. Eventually I realized I was being ridiculous and told myself that the best thing to do was listen to music, which would help me pretend to myself that I wasn’t still waiting for her.

Half an hour later, my doorbell rang at length. I was involuntarily flooded with joy and rage. The bell rang and rang and rang. I kept my composure as I thought about Gülayşe’s stubborn finger on the button. I stood up from my seat as slowly as possible, like one of those old people who can’t rush anything no matter how they try. First, I pulled the largest bill out of my wallet, because there was no price too high to pay for my penance. Then, I pressed the button on the buzzer and, standing by the door, I gulped as I set myself to waiting, once more, for Gülayşe. She was ascending, her clanging and clattering grew closer. My eye glared through the peephole. When she came into view, it looked like her headscarf had slipped slightly off her head. She was visibly surprised that the door wasn’t open, and I felt a jolt of pleasure. The apprehensive expression on her face made me wish her even more ill than I already did. She waited a few seconds. Me inside, her outside, each sizing the other up. When I still hadn’t opened the door, Gülayşe dropped the pans to the floor and began pounding her fist loudly.

“Open up, little lady! Come get your pans.”

I ran on tiptoe down the corridor and called out from afar. “No need to yell! I’m coming!”

I opened the door calmly. Gülayşe was enraged. “Where you been, sister? I came and went and came and went for hours carrying all this, my back’s killing me!”

“I went shopping at the market,” I stuttered.  

“Ah, but come now, you said you were staying home! Shame, you made me leave the kid all alone for this, ain’t had a bite to eat all day, and it’s all your fault.”

“Okay, enough with the sob story, I get it, just give me my pans.” The steel shone like a mirror, she had well and truly done a good job, and all the plastic handles split by the fire had been swapped out. Even the tarnished screws had been replaced.

“My Lord, I’m tired! I wore myself out for you, dear. These pans of yours were so much work, I can’t tell you how filthy they were.”

“Stop lying. They were all perfectly clean,” I retorted. “But you really have made them shine, I’ll give you that.” I extended the money to her like I was thrusting a knife. Gülayşe’s eyes went huge. She scratched her nose to conceal her excitement.

“Is that all? Hand to God, I’m worth more than that.”

“It’s all I’ve got. You can take it or leave it.”

Gülayşe practically tore the money out of my hand. “Fine then, let’s say I gave you a discount. Otherwise I’d never do all that work for so little.”

It was hard for me, but I stood there steely and stoic. “Thank you,” I said mockingly. “I’ll never forget your kindness.” I made to shut the door, but Gülayşe blocked it with her hand.

“My sweet girl, my doe-eyed girl, I’m starving, could you just give me some spare change for a cheese sandwich…”

“I gave you your money already! Use that to buy something.”

“But dearie, if I break the bill it loses its good fortune. Just give me a tiny little bite to eat, I can’t bear this hunger.” The pitiful way she knit her brow as she spoke disgusted me.

“You are,” I said, “the greediest, most impudent, most shameless woman I have ever met. Enough now, get out of here, shoo.”

“You calling me those names all because I asked for an itty-bitty bite to eat?”

I went to the kitchen, slapped a slice of cheese between two slices of bread, and came back as fast as I could. Gülayşe looked back and forth between the sandwich and me. Between the sandwich and me. New claims were being born in her eyes. As I brandished the sandwich in her face, she slipped off her sandals and took a step inside.

“Can’t eat that sandwich dry, little lady. It’d taste better if you put on some tea. You’ve already done so much for me, let’s not stop just yet.”

Translator’s Note

To menace is to threaten or intimidate, but also to annoy or bother. A person can be a menace to society; a place can have an air of menace. In the United States at least, menacing is a criminal act that can mean stalking or threatening with a weapon. But “Menace,” this story by Sema Kaygusuz, is a story about wielding power, although I still wonder, even after translating the story, which character here is the real menace.

In “Menace,” Gülayşe the tinker “holds sway” over the unnamed protagonist, whose entire day—and indeed whole sense of self—is hijacked by Gülayşe. But this can only be so because of the class position, which is to say “the upper hand,” that the protagonist holds over Gülayşe and, crucially, her labor as well. I have never translated a more unlikable protagonist, someone whose sole personality trait is her mean-spiritedness, which she trains with laser focus on Gülayşe from the very beginning. Gülayşe’s powerlessness is compounded further by the casual racism of the women in the park, who assume that a tinker could only be a “Gypsy.” But the story ends on a note of, well, menace, as Gülayşe enters the protagonist’s home, having gotten the better of her.

So who, then, is the menace? We might get closer to an answer by way of the title to the Turkish original, “Musallat,” which does not really mean “menace.” The word is most commonly used to describe a nuisance or an annoyance, but crucially, it has additional supernatural overtones: to say a house is haunted, for instance, one would say it is musallat. The word is further complicated in Turkish by its derivation from Arabic, coming from the root s-l-ṭ (س-ل-ط). This root, which is also the root of the Arabic word “sultan,” connotes power or sovereignty; as a verb this root can mean “to overcome, surmount; to overpower, overwhelm; to prevail, gain the upper hand, get the better of, to be absolute master (of), rule, reign, hold sway (over).”

This story appears in Kaygusuz’s 2012 book The Melancholist (Karaduygun), which is less a collection of short stories than a kind of fictionalized narrative of Kaygusuz’s real-life friendship with Birhan Keskin, a prominent Turkish poet (and past WWB contributor). The Melancholist stitches this narrative together with a series of semi-unrelated short stories (like “Menace”) to paint a portrait of their intimacy and, in the words of one reviewer, “to make visible the afflictions of those who remain sensitive to an increasingly deaf world . . . [to] capture the inward fires, thoughts, and emotions of the melancholy.”

Given these themes, I hesitate to treat the story like a political allegory (all too often, we demand that works from lesser-translated languages serve as sociological synecdoche about their point of origin), because it is on its own a funny, troubling, and propulsive story about two very unpleasant people being unpleasant to one another. But in the narrative that leads into this story, Kaygusuz writes: “I am a doormat. As if all the racket from caterwauling politicians, cops spraying tear gas in people’s faces, racists, bankers, insurance brokers, and junta generals were not enough, I seem to find myself constantly forced to listen to the annoying complaints of repairmen knocking my house down around me, cab drivers losing their way on purpose, real estate agents cartwheeling for loose change, grocers foisting off yogurt past its best-by date, government bureaucrats who drag their feet for every last thing, and friends and relatives who look me in the eye as they wrench my heart out.” The world’s many cruelties and deliberate deceptions, its unrelenting and often vicious assaults on us, are inescapable; they weigh constantly on us, attenuating our sense of self, demanding we give in. The moment we cede ground to these cruelties, though, the world only demands more ground of us.

Gülayşe may not be a politician or a bureaucrat or a junta general or a cop, but to me, she is more than that; she is a supernatural force, the pure menace of sovereign power itself, which will use any guise and seek any pretext in order to achieve its ends. Once it has its foot in the door, there’s no telling what it might do.