Precarious Hope by Parla Ayse;

Author:Parla, Ayse; [Parla, Ayşe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

NOSTALGIA AS HOPE

“YOU NEVER WORRIED about still having your job the next day, about putting food on the table,” Bahtışen said over tea and simit (a savory staple of Istanbul) at a Simit Palace shop conveniently located near the police station. It was two in the afternoon, and we were done for the day because the queue number we had been given indicated that Bahtışen would not get a turn before the office closed that day. This meant that she would have to come back early the next morning to submit her application for a three-month resident permit to be granted as amnesty in 2009 for Bulgaristanlı migrants whose visas had expired and who were currently “illegal.” Bahtışen was already fretting about the negotiations she would have to engage in with her employer in order to get permission for a second day off.

Having migrated from Ruse six years ago, Bahtışen was working as a live-in nanny for two children, ages eight and ten. They were well mannered, and the job was a breeze compared to what she had done in the past. This was the fourth nanny position that she had had since coming to Istanbul. She had quit two of them within a week of starting—which meant forgoing any wages—because the conditions were unbearable. For the third job, she said, the conditions were decent and she had appreciated the respect shown toward her. “They recognize my worth,” she told me several times. But they had let her go anyway. “Unwillingly, very unwillingly,” she said with pride. They did not want to hire another nanny to cover the three months that she would have to be away in Bulgaria because of the ninety-day rule that had come into effect in 2007. At first, Bahtışen had overstayed her visa in order to keep her job, but after a brush with the police she was no longer willing to risk illegality. “Actually, once [the police] realized I was soydaş, they were willing to let me go,” she told me. But being stopped in the street like that and the intimidating, unwanted intimacy of the police officers until they marked her as soydaş made her shiver each time she recalled the encounter.

“Back in Bulgaria, you never felt this scared as a woman on your own,” she said. “Here I have to worry if I am giving the wrong impression with people in general. I have to worry if they will take me for, you know, a natasha. Not that there is anything wrong with Russian women. In fact, I get along best with them, but you know what I mean.” Furthermore, her husband back in Bulgaria was missing her too much. He said, “‘That is it. No more of this kaçak [clandestine] business. Please come back.’” But their daughter needed help with her university studies and their son was getting married. Bahtışen also went on to explain that she just isn’t herself when she doesn’t work: “Work is the mirror of the person. That is what we were taught, that is what we got used to.

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