Old familiar streets

The pavements were the same, the ice was the same, the dreary white color of the sky was the same. The only thing that was not the same, perhaps, was my mood, because two years ago I was going through this rigmarole to fulfill official requirements in the same way as everybody else. Ipso facto there was nothing much to be complaining about. Besides, the procedure was new to me and so at least vaguely interesting.

This time, however, I was repeating what I'd done before merely because somewhere along the line something had gone wrong necessitating the production of yet more paperwork. In summer I might have found this only mildly irritating. During a particularly cold snap, however, there were few things I wanted to do less than go back over old ground again, in this case quite literally.

As I slipped and slithered my way along those pavements a vivid image flashed into my head of the notary public's office as I remembered it from the last visit. An overheated room overfull of people shuffling wads of important-looking paper. Clerks behind the desk thumping down stamps, then sweeping up the lira charged for so doing. That was not an office that had had the benefit of a government makeover like the one recently given to the Nüfüs Dairesi. Instead it was a dark, Dickensian sort of place, the sort of place where you could quite easily imagine a notice over the door: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.”

Worse than that, I remembered the stairwell. One of the mysteries for me of Turkey is why ground that will be walked on by thousands is so often laid with material that is intrinsically slippery and that turns into a skating rink at the first sign of cold. That stairwell was like that, so treacherous that I remember clinging to the handrail for grim death as I eased my way down the steps.

Déjà vu? I was just wondering what the Turkish for that might be (“önceden yaşadım duygusu,” since you're asking), when suddenly a light flashed on in my head and it occurred to me that I was not obliged to return to the same notary. Instead I could spice things up a bit by exploring the alternatives.

“First floor you'll be needing,” the lottery ticket seller huddled in the doorway told me, which was a great relief since that meant only one potentially icy flight of stairs to climb. This time I found myself in a considerably smaller office where a considerably more dismissive clerk glowered at my paperwork, told me it was all wrong and only reluctantly agreed to turn a page and inspect it more closely.

Reluctantly, he shuffled my papers along the desk. Reluctantly, I handed over the requisite payment. Outside the pavements were just as icy, my mood just as bad.

Two years ago I made that trip back and forth over and again throughout the winter. Fingers crossed that that will be enough déjà vu for this year.

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.