February building blues

...The construction continues, unabated

Now they’ve torn down the house directly across from us. That’s the newest structure to be razed on our street, just one more in the epic fury of home building that grips our neighborhood here in Istanbul. The pit where the house once stood, and where our neighbors lived until recently, is now barricaded on street level with corrugated sheet metal, over which we can see from the second floor of our house. This morning when I looked, the rump end of a large orange front hoe emerged from the pit, parked overnight at a tilt, as though its driver had stopped in mid-dig to go home and sleep. As for the house next to it, ie diagonal to us, it was torn down two years ago, but remains far from finished, with groups of men arriving every morning to work on it…we’ve become so accustomed to seeing the faces of this group of construction workers that we know all of them by sight now, and they us. When I come back from the market with bags loaded in my trunk, or with my daughter from school, one of the men always hurries gallantly to make a parking space for my large car, shifting around the traffic cones and barriers put there to make room for the endless stream of trucks and cement mixers that arrive through the day.

A natural camaraderie develops in Istanbul when you share the same street with the same group of people, even if they aren’t your neighbors. So much so that it’s hard to imagine that the people who wind up moving into the house diagonal from us will ever be as friendly with us as the workers who have brought it into being. In many ways, we are all one now: resigned, if not enthusiastic about, to being joint stakeholders in the mud and grit that run rivulets down the middle of our once (and future) peaceful street. Every now and again, I lose my temper, and gesticulate angrily from my car about how the road is blocked, or how I can’t find a parking space, or some other irritating infraction on the part of those involved in this Ayn Rand-ian level of construction fury. When I do, (though I am mostly preternaturally calm), it’s always met with polite embarrassment by these construction guys, as though they too are counting the days until we regain our serenity. One factor which helps keep the peace on our street, whose residents mostly never get their cars washed nowadays, as it is a lost cause, is that the foreman of the building site will, every month or so, order a large water tank trunk to come and hose our street down. One of the construction workers holds onto the enormous hose attached to the tank of the truck, and vigilantly sprays down the accumulated mud and grit with enormous force, until the street between us is left black and sparkling. It generally takes less than a couple of hours for it to revert, but never mind, I guess it’s the thought that counts, though I can’t even imagine what water conservation bureaus (which don’t really exist here, so it is irrelevant) would have to say about this act of construction bella figura.

A running joke in our neighborhood is that the new owner of the house diagonal to us is high-level mafia, and that this mysterious pleasure-dome he has ordered built for himself boasts a special car elevator for his fleet of armored vehicles. There’s even been talk of a helipad on the property. So far there is no proof of this, though my eagle-eyed next door neighbor has pointed out on more than one occasion to me that only someone “very afraid of being shot at” would build a house this big with no windows looking onto the street. One reason it’s difficult to know is that the construction crew has draped the entire structure in a dark green kind of netting that obscures all details large and small from prying neighborly eyes. At this point, it kind of looks like a giant blocky monument on the verge of being unveiled. Who knows? There is a lot money in Istanbul, so we will all see, together.

For now, the misery of our battered and mud-filled street parallels the general misery delivered by the month of February, and in this way, it is actually more drearily poetic than annoying. But as the days get longer and the weather warms up, the construction that surrounds us will translate into layers of dust that creep through windows and into our living and bedrooms, making people sigh with exasperation as they try to keep clean houses. Strangely enough, I don’t mind any of it as much as I might have years ago; either I’ve picked up the patience that comes hand in hand with living in this geography of rapid change, or my eyes have finally learned to see the spark of future promise inherent in a messy present. The only thing that never changes is change, nowhere more true than here, in this city of three layers.