Heaven Upstairs, Hell Downstairs
In 1977, I was born into an ancient corner of Anatolia, where sons were heralded as strength, abundance, and future power. To announce our family's commercial prosperity, my grandfather and father built a two-story house of poured concrete in a district where every other dwelling was fashioned from warm, insulating mud-brick.
That concrete house was freezing in the harsh continental winters. But the physical chill was nothing compared to the emotional geography of its two floors.
The Two Worlds
On the upper floor lived my mother and my sisters. My mother was sincerity in human form. In forty-two years of living beside her, I never once heard her speak ill of another soul. Even when people wronged her, she would find a sliver of goodness to defend in them.
On the lower floor lived my father and his *kuma*—his second wife taken through religious ceremony.
In our culture, the word *kuma* carries centuries of grief, tears, and fractured domestic peace. My stepmother was a consummate narcissist whose tongue was an instrument of perpetual discord. The moment guests left, she would catalog their flaws. When my sisters visited on Bayram, she poisoned the air.
As a young boy running between the staircases, I would stop on the cold concrete steps and ask myself:
> *"Which one is the real world? Sincerity or malice? Peace or warfare?"*
The Escape into Conscious Solitude
When my father went bankrupt and fled to the Aegean with his second wife—leaving my mother and me alone in that cavernous, bankrupt concrete shell—the downstairs fell silent. But its echoes followed me for decades.
It took nearly forty years to dismantle the belief that life must always be a hostage negotiation between upper-floor innocence and lower-floor malice. Sometimes, the only way to find peace is to leave the house entirely.