Young Turk

by Moris Farhi

  She drew my head to her chest. ‘Poor boy ...’

  I wept freely as if tears could express the anguish of being young and alone in a world that cared little for the weak or the innocent.

  The ship approached the quay. The port had been reduced to rubble. The passenger terminal, eyeless with its burnt windows, stood as if it were its own shadow. Another victim.

  I asked her the question that would not stop tormenting me. ‘Do wars ever end?’

  She stared at me; her eyes grew moist. She stroked my hair. ‘What a question!’

  I stopped crying. Her tenderness was a balm. ‘Do they?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Sometimes – for some people. For others, never.’ Her voice seemed to carry a mountain of sadness. Was she one of the latter?

  ‘I don’t think they ever do ...’

  Again her eyes moistened. ‘You may be right. But we need to hope.’ She stroked my cheek. ‘You’re on your own, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re stopping for the day. There’s an excursion. To the Acropolis. Want to come along?’

  At thirteen – the only youngster travelling alone – I had become the ship’s mascot. But Old Fuat, the purser in charge of third class and steerage, had told me that the crew would be too busy during the stopover to pay me much attention. Sure, they’d allow me to roam the first class, raid the kitchen that reputedly served food fit for sultans, but much of the time I would be alone. I was too unsettled to be by myself. And too distressed by the sunken ships.

  I had readily agreed to my parents’ suggestion that I was old enough to travel on my own – after all, I had just had my bar mitzvah and was, formally, a man. But I had not imagined that there would be such ruin everywhere and that I would feel so desolate. (The damage in Piraeus was insignificant compared to the devastation in Europe, Old Fuat had said.)

  ‘I don’t have much money.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll get you some cigarettes from the ship’s store. These days – in Europe – cigarettes are worth more than gold.’

  ‘Oh, I have enough for that.’

  ‘Good. Let’s go then. I’m Saadet.’

  She was about my mother’s age. But she was strongly built, like those Anatolian women who had carried ammunition on their shoulders in the War of Independence. However, unlike my mother, who saw the world as a wild mongrel that had to be trained and disciplined, she poured out kindness. Saadet means ‘happiness’ and she looked as if, given the chance, she could make the whole world happy, certainly every child in it.

  I took her hand. ‘Yusuf.’

  There were a lot of us on that excursion to the Acropolis. Propriety having consigned steerage passengers – even husbands and wives – to male and female dormitories, the outing enabled families to spend some time together.

  In 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, there were still numerous Turkish families anxious either to visit relatives who had survived the hostilities in Europe or to search for those listed as missing or displaced. Consequently, ships to Marseilles, via Naples and Piraeus, like ours, were packed to bursting. (The prevailing chaos in Europe, the newspapers pointedly reminded us, confirmed just how phenomenal our president’s statesmanship had been. By joining the war only at the very end of it, in February 1945 – despite years of intense pressure from the Allies – the sagacious leader, İsmet İnönü, Atatürk’s friend, comrade-in-arms, disciple and successor, had not only saved the country from destruction, but had also aligned Turkey as a founder member of the United Nations.)

  During the excursion, several boys asked me to join them.

  But I preferred to stay with Saadet. For one thing, she kept on telling me how impressed she was by my courage in travelling alone. She made me feel exceptional – indeed very much like a ‘young Odysseus’, as she called me. For another, when I told her that I was on my own only because my parents had been unable to find tickets that would have allowed us to travel together, she applauded me for accepting abandonment so unselfishly and letting them go ahead of me.

  (Much as I felt flattered at being called a young Odysseus, I resisted Saadet’s notion that my parents were insensitive to my needs. I certainly didn’t see myself as ‘abandoned’ – even if I felt like it. Surely there was nothing phenomenal about a young boy travelling alone! My father had already started work when he was my age. More to the point, despite my ‘delicate age’, as Saadet put it, I was pretty mature for my years. Everybody said so. Being an only child, I had spent all my puppy years in adult company: aunts, uncles, grandparents and their even older aunts, uncles and grandparents; I had heard – if not seen – a great deal about life. So no question about being ‘neglected’. I just didn’t like being separated from my parents – which is only natural for a loving boy.)

  I think the real reason I became attached to Saadet was that she was a troubled person. As I was. And as my mother was. But she was not unapproachable – ‘armoured’, my father would say – like my mother. I only had to look at the way her hands trembled – when she lit a cigarette, for instance – to know that beneath her docility she was, like me, often in tears. And, no doubt, when she had found me crying on deck, she had seen that we were of the same mould. Perhaps like a son might be. Saadet had married late – in her forties. And since she had not mentioned having children, I assumed she was childless.

  A word about my melancholy. My parents, teachers, even some friends attributed it either to puberty or to some sort of fin de siècle romanticism I had contracted from poetry. (I was passionate about poetry. Still am.) But those were explanations that they had expediently contrived to avert their own eyes from the truth which was right in front of them, visible even to the blind. And it was this: all the beauty, joy and happiness this world offers constitute a mirage. The real landscape is worms and maggots, slaughter and destruction. Like the unknown grave of Bilâl who perished in Greece and whom his friends – particularly my cousin, Can – still mourn bitterly.

  Actually, Saadet did not hide the fact that she was troubled. She was on a journey of uncertainty, to a destination where, in all likelihood, bitter disappointment awaited her. She was going to find out whether the Displaced Persons agencies had located an old friend, a Jew, she had known in Paris before the war. She would not allow herself to be hopeful, though she did feel encouraged by the fact that my father’s relatives, also Jewish, had managed to survive the war and were all waiting for me to join them to celebrate properly.

  Saadet seemed to know everything. She had toured Europe extensively before the war with the friend she had been trying to locate. Whenever she told me something, she did so unaffectedly as if we were the same age. Declaring the Acropolis to be one of the wonders of the world, she made me see, better than any teacher, the differences between the classical columns. How the Doric, ‘virile, severe and absolute, like indefectible power’, conveyed ancient Athens’ prominence through the Parthenon’s majesty. How the Ionic, ‘delicate, feminine and sensuous’, provided an enticing welcome to the Erechtheum, Athena’s temple. She so fired my imagination that, at the Propylaea, the entrance to the Acropolis, where both Doric and Ionic columns complemented each other, I decided to become an architect.

  Late that night, I woke up shaking. I was being tossed about violently. But for the wall on one side and the bunk-barrier on the other, I would have been thrown out of my berth.

  I managed to look around. My fellow passengers were also struggling to keep to their beds.

  I thought we were about to sink. I decided to go up on deck so that I could jump clear. I was well built and a powerful swimmer. I would stand a chance of being rescued.

  I tried to get up. But a heavy pulse was hammering in my head. I started vomiting. I wailed. ‘Mother ... Mother ...’

  Old Fuat heard me and rushed over. ‘It’s all right ... It’s all right ...’

  ‘Are we going to sink?’

  Old Fuat had adopted me because I reminded him
of his young grandson, who, he said, had my dark complexion – supposedly a sign of hardiness. He chuckled and ruffled my hair. ‘We’ll pitch about for some hours. In this stretch of the Mediterranean the mermaids are hungry for men. They try to catch us with undercurrents and swells.’

  I looked at my bunk in disgust. ‘I’ve been sick.’

  ‘I’ll clear it up.’

  I started vomiting again. ‘I can’t hold my head up.’

  ‘Go up on deck. You’ll feel better. Fresh air.’

  ‘I was trying to ...’

  ‘I’ll help you.’ He handed me my sweater. ‘Windy up there.’

  I suddenly remembered. At night the deck was off limits to youngsters. Not because it was dangerous, but because its secluded corners offered some privacy to husbands and wives who had to sleep apart. ‘But the deck is out of bounds ...’

  Old Fuat smiled. ‘There won’t be any lovers tonight – believe me.’

  He dragged me out. Most of the people in the dormitory were vomiting. The stench made me retch even more. I began to bring up bile.

  Old Fuat left me at the steps. ‘Go on. I’ll see you later.’

  I climbed up, panting and dribbling like a dog.

  The night was mournfully dark; the ship’s lights failed to dent it. There must have been thick cloud cover; I couldn’t see any stars. Panic seized me. My head was spinning and I could barely keep my balance. In a desperate effort to steady myself, I tried to focus on the ship’s funnel. But that proved all the more frightening. It emphasized how severely the ship dipped and rose, not just from prow to stern, but also from port to starboard.

  Despite my terror, the oscillation captivated me. The sea, luminous with spume where the bows hit the swell, beckoned me. Water and sky became an infinity. I felt I was the only person left on earth.

  Infinity opened up. It spoke to me. It said I would be welcome in its depths. I had a place there.

  I edged forward. I no longer cared that I was the last person on earth. And no longer feared. I had a place. My very own place. In a universe that had opened up just for me. An important place. There, I would heal the universe. Within it, I would unite earth, water and sky. Shelter children and families, the dispossessed and the privileged, the missing and the living.

  I walked towards the Infinity. I trod a spongy seabed as if the waters had parted as when Moses divided the Red Sea to save the Israelites from the Egyptians.

  I ascended to the deck’s pinnacle. I saw the stern of the ship break surface. I took a deep breath and waited for it to plummet and lay me on the water. I seized the sky. I prepared to join it with the sea.

  Someone pulled me down by my legs.

  I fell and hurt my arm. I howled.

  ‘Are you mad?’

  I looked up, disorientated. I was spread-eagled on the deck. Saadet was kneeling by my side and shaking me.

  I stared at her, confused. ‘Why ...?’

  ‘You were going to jump!’

  She made no sense. ‘No, I wasn’t!’

  ‘You were on the top rail ...’

  I laughed, but remembered being high up and watching the ship’s stern rise out of the water. ‘Not to jump!’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I ... I was ... drawn to it ...’

  ‘Drawn to it?’

  ‘I was on my way to ... I had a place ...’

  ‘You have a place here. Home. Parents. Friends.’

  ‘This was different ... This was my place ... My place ... My very own ... Where I held everything together ...’

  She calmed down. ‘You were suffering from vertigo ...’

  ‘It was wonderful ...’

  She nodded. ‘Still dizzy?’

  I had forgotten about my head. It didn’t feel too heavy. ‘Not much.’

  ‘Still feeling sick?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Take some deep breaths. Old Fuat recommends fresh air ...’

  ‘Did he send you?’

  ‘He said you weren’t feeling well.’ She sat on the deck and pulled my head on to her lap. ‘Rest a while ...’

  Her thighs felt strong, yet soft. I became excited. Not the sort of vapid excitement I got when Mother’s friends clasped me to their breasts, but a deeper one. An excitement I shouldn’t have enjoyed? The forbidden excitement?

  I felt I had done something wrong. I tried to straighten up. ‘I’d better go to the dorm ...’

  ‘Not tonight ...’

  ‘I can’t sleep here ...’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s cold ...’

  ‘I brought a blanket.’

  ‘You’ll need that ...’

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  I spent that night and all next day on deck. Whenever I went to the toilet or to wash, I became bilious. The deck was the only place where I felt relatively well.

  To the relief of Old Fuat, who had countless sick people to attend to, Saadet stayed by my side much of the time. She made sure I took in some liquid and kept me clean. Often, but particularly when she stroked my forehead to make me sleep, the deep excitement swelled up in me. I suppressed it as best I could. I didn’t want to offend her, particularly as I couldn’t tell whether her touch – always tentative – was because she didn’t want to get too close to me – my mother was like that – or because she didn’t want to encourage my desires.

  The night before we reached Naples, the sea calmed down. My stomach settled. The world retrieved its colours. Couples started coming up on to the deck again. Those of us who had taken refuge there were urged to return to our dormitories.

  I felt sad leaving Saadet. As we made our way to the hold, I clung to her hand.

  Suddenly, someone shouted, ‘Hey, you! Enough! Enough!’

  I turned round. It was Mueller Hanιm, the elderly woman who kept picking arguments with people. She was neither highborn nor Turkish, but had insisted on being called Hanιm, ‘Lady’, instead of the prosaic Bayan, ‘Madam’, as if, Old Fuat had remarked, the title would lighten her evident anguish.

  I looked about wondering whom she was addressing.

  Saadet had also turned round. ‘Talking to me?’

  Mueller Hanιm mimicked Saadet. ‘Talking to me?’

  She was a German musician who had been given asylum in Turkey – and a teaching post in the Conservatoire – in the thirties, when Atatürk had opened our doors to the intellectuals hounded by the Nazis – so Old Fuat had informed us. She was not Jewish, but a Catholic who had opposed Hitler’s racist laws. She was returning to Germany, via Italy, to find out whether any relatives had survived. Like many people on a similar quest, she was not very hopeful.

  Saadet decided to ignore her and walked away.

  Mueller Hanιm screeched, ‘Don’t you turn your back on me! Pawing the boy for days! Have you no shame? Let go now!’

  Saadet faced her, flustered. ‘Now, just a minute ...’

  Mueller Hanιm strode over to us. ‘Up here like couples for conjugals! Smell of death still in the air – and all you think of is fornication! And with a child!’

  Incensed, Saadet slapped Mueller Hanιm. ‘You poisonous ...’

  Mueller Hanιm started hitting out. ‘You think copulation is the antidote to death? An affirmation of life? A lotus you eat to forget those brutally slaughtered?’

  Saadet tried to ward off Mueller Hanιm’s blows. ‘He’s poorly! All alone!’

  Some passengers rushed to separate them.

  Mueller Hanιm flailed uncontrollably. ‘You think life is worth something? It’s worth nothing! Nothing!’

  Some men pulled Mueller Hanιm away. A couple of others held Saadet.

  Mueller Hanιm went on shouting. ‘Forget life! Join the dead!’

  Saadet shouted back. ‘This boy needs looking after!’

  ‘He could be your son!’

  ‘Yes! He could be ...’

  ‘Then let him be! Go look after your own!’

  ‘I can’t!’

  ‘Evil, you are!
Like the rest!’

  Saadet’s voice broke as she retorted, ‘My son is dead!’

  Mueller Hanιm froze. She stared at Saadet in horror. ‘Dead?’ Her body appeared to drain away. She folded into herself. ‘Oh, God, no!’ Her legs splayed and she collapsed. ‘Sweet Jesus, no ...’ She grabbed Saadet’s arm. ‘Oh, I’m sorry ... Forgive me ... Please ...’

  Saadet, confused by Mueller Hanιm’s sudden disintegration, tried to extricate herself from her grip.

  But Mueller Hanιm clung to her arm. ‘Is that why ...? Are you going where ... your son ... How did he die ...? Where were you ...?’

  Saadet wailed, ‘Does it matter?’

  Mueller Hanιm sobbed. ‘I had a son, too ... I ran away ... I thought he’d be safe ... without a communist for a mother ... Is that what you did – run away also?’

  Tears began to run down Saadet’s face. ‘I was careless ...’

  Mueller Hanιm stared at her, puzzled. ‘Careless ...?’

  Saadet repeated the word bitterly. ‘Careless.’

  She turned to me. Hurriedly, she kissed me on the forehead. ‘Excursion tomorrow. See you in the morning.’

  Then she ran off.

  Mueller Hanιm, curling like a hedgehog, wept unrestrainedly.

  I walked away.

  I was shocked. Saadet had had a son. I felt jealous, though he was dead.

  He had died because she had been careless.

  That shocked me even more. How could a parent be careless?

  Naples harbour was an even larger cemetery for ships than Piraeus. The city itself, still in the throes of clearing up its bomb damage, was like a vast building site. Consequently, we could visit only a few of the sights. To assuage our frustration, the guide decided to take us to Pompeii.

  At first, Saadet did not want to go. She felt I would be all right because Old Fuat, having managed to take the day off, had joined the excursion and would look after me. But then, mindful of my disappointment, she came along.

  The areas where archaeological work had been interrupted because of the war had been cordoned off. Moreover, as there was still a shortage of qualified attendants, only some sectors were open to visitors. The same applied to the museum.