Baksheesh Read Online Free

show the number of seconds remaining before they change. They count backwards: 20, 19, 18… 9, 8, 7… We’re living in a country where every second is of vital importance! The instant those pedestrian zeppelins – mostly housewives and bearded old men – see there are, say, seven seconds to go before the lights turn red, they start running like there’s no tomorrow, just to avoid waiting for the green light to come round again. What on earth do they expect to do with the fifty-one seconds they save?
    My driver was worse than the pedestrians. Taxi drivers are maniacs anyway. Even if they don’t start that way, they become first-rate maniacs within a year of driving in Istanbul.
    It was a good thing I hadn’t brought the car and took a taxi that morning. My argument with the driver calmed me down. Even his snidest comments wafted over me like a shiatsu massage. Or aromatherapy. A jacuzzi with a bouquet of oils added. Fifteen minutes in the warm waters of a jacuzzi, followed by scented oils kneaded into the muscles, creating fragrant smells and settling the nerves.
    I tipped the driver, something I would never normally do.
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    By about two o’clock, thanks to the cream I’d applied around my eyes, I looked like a new woman. I was sitting with Pelin, silently chain-smoking. It was a sluggish day. We had only sold three cheap paperbacks. I decided that unless some miracle occurred in the next half-hour, I’d phone Lale. The right side of my
head was numb with pain and I’d just taken a couple of aspirin. Having eaten nothing since the sea bass the previous evening, I realized my stomach was starting to rumble. And the aspirin had done nothing for my migraine.
    I desperately wanted to be the sort of woman who gets in a fluster over finding a place for her five-year-old daughter at the nursery of a well-established school like the German High School. I wanted to be making phone calls all over the place seeking out influential contacts. That was the kind of problem I wanted in my life: problems suitable for my age.
    I wanted to be one of the women with highlighted hair who complain about their snoring husbands, wear lamé ballet pumps, vote for social democratic parties and live in an apartment block with a swimming pool.
    I wanted to be aiming to lose a kilo in weight, just one kilo, to smoke those long, thin women’s cigarettes with flowers in the filters, to read Danielle Steele, to complain to my female friends that sex with my husband was over, and to cry as I listened to Mariah Carey.
    My mobile phone rang. Just once, then it stopped.
    With feverish, almost shameful excitement, as if hunting for treasure, I went into the mobile’s menu to see my unanswered calls. There was one number. Not Selim’s, because he kept his undisclosed and it never showed up on the screen. This was an actual number.
    Quivering and trembling, I called it.
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    My caller turned to be Kasım Bey. The bribe-taking civil servant from the National Real Estate Bureau.
    Love it or hate it, the telephone connects people to life. After speaking to Kasım, I felt better. We were to meet that evening at the same time and place as before. Just having an appointment with someone, anyone, made me feel better. I ate two toasted
cheese sandwiches, drank some tea and went to the chemist for migraine pills. I didn’t call Lale. She was depressed enough anyway, so I refrained from loading her with my problems. Now, once again, I could love my friends, enjoy luxury make-up products, revel in the fact that I wasn’t the mother of a five-year-old girl, and not feel obliged to smother myself all over with cream. I also loved the fact that I wasn’t married and had no problems in my sex life.
    I walked from Kuledibi to meet Kasım Bey in Sultanahmet, along streets cooled by downpours of rain a few days before. I adored Sultanahmet and Yerebatan Sarnıcı, the ancient underground