The Applicant by Nazli Koca

Author:Nazli Koca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2023-02-10T19:18:00+00:00

November 30

Some days I can go as far as to say that I like my job. I can think of whatever I want while doing it. And sometimes I hate it for this, but I’m thankful that human interaction is at a minimum. Most of the time it’s me, my vacuum cleaner, and my music.

When I can’t help what I’m thinking, I listen to old Turkish songs and imagine myself in an old Turkish movie. Today, I couldn’t stop listening to Cem Karaca’s “Tamirci Çırağı.” A mechanic’s apprentice narrates a whole story in the song. He falls in love with a rich girl who drops off her car at their shop and says he’d read it in a novel once that a girl like her somehow fell for an apprentice like him. On the day she’s coming to pick up her car, the apprentice asks his master, Can I please not wear the overalls today? He combs his hair and waits breathlessly. The girl walks in the door and time stops for the apprentice. But when he opens the car’s door for her, she asks, eyebrows raised, Who’s this bum? She drives off, drowning the apprentice in her exhaust. The master pets the back of the drowning boy. Forget novels, he says. You’re a worker, stay a worker, put on those overalls.

If I’d met the Swede when I was seventeen, he’d be the mechanic’s apprentice in this story. He was training to become a Volvo salesman back then, and I was my father’s little rich girl. No one had told me these roles could be reversed in an instant. But I was undoubtedly the apprentice in the music video I directed in my mind today while I cleaned after cheap hostel boarders. The Swede was the rich girl, but instead of raising his eyebrows, he opened his car’s door for me to get in. I didn’t.

A memory I haven’t thought of in years just flashed into my mind: one afternoon during elementary school, our homeroom teacher told us that in Europe, you could see a lawyer marrying a garbage collector, because everyone, including garbage collectors, were educated there. There were no class inequalities when it came to survival and education. A garbage collector was a garbage collector because he chose to be. Was she right, or has her misguided fiction been writing my life in Berlin all this time? It is true that I’ve never felt a class divide here like I did in Turkey. But is that in fact because I am among the lowest now and, like the mechanic, I can’t even see the rich I cross paths with for what they are anymore? What does it matter? I make the same amount of money as my high school best friend who’s a lawyer in Turkey, and I get to live here, walk in parks with friends, wine bottles in our hands, wearing our invisibility cloaks. It’s easier to be who we are when no one’s looking. Yes,

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