by Moris Farhi
My exile started when I was twelve, seven years before my actual expatriation.
On 31 December 1947 we – the academy’s first-year students – had been offered the traditional end-of-semester treat: a jovial afternoon in the Emirgân çayhane, for centuries one of Istanbul’s favourite tea-houses by the Bosporus, as guests of our quixotic professor of literature, şιk Ahmet.
One objective of this outing was to welcome the New Year with readings of sublime poetry; another was to obtain from us, students on the threshold of adulthood, the pledge to pursue Atatürk’s cherished dream of transforming Turkey into one of the world’s most advanced nations. For, as we had been instructed often enough, the Father of the Turks, having restored a terminally sick country to resurgent health, had spawned us, in the last years of his life, as his successors; it was our duty to consolidate his miracle.
The third objective was şιk Ahmet’s improvisation on the second. On this day, every student would select his future profession, then take an oath that he would never renege on his decision. Moreover, he would make his choice not in the expectation of financial rewards but because that particular career would provide one of the many skills the country needed for its development. Only through such unselfish dedication would we be able to reclaim the paradise the latter Ottoman sultans had so heinously despoiled.
It was one of those translucent winter days when Istanbul unseals her occult colours. Snow and sun either conjoined passionately or chased each other flirtatiously; and the windows of the ancient wooden mansions along the Bosporus turned into mirrors to reflect them. The breeze wore the city’s unique fragrance of sea, pine, honey and rose-water. The giant plane tree that canopied the tables of the tea-house susurrated its timeless wisdom. And şιk Ahmet, zestfully smoking a chain of cigarettes, strutted at his charming best.
The tea flowed like a stream, as tea always does everywhere in Turkey. Mezes and the speciality of the house, aubergines prepared in ninety-nine different ways, arrived on a succession of vast copper trays. (According to Turkish folklore, mankind’s limit for aubergine recipes is ninety-nine; it is presumed that there are at least another ninety-nine, but these are only known to Allah.) Important subjects such as sport, girls, puberty, masturbation, wet dreams and the myriad mysteries of the vagina that awaited us were freely aired.
When we were all happily languid and looked upon şιk Ahmet as to a prophet, he rose and addressed us. It was time, he said, that we – the chrysalises of the greatest nation on earth – emerged from the pupal stage and entered the future. Here and now, each one of us had to stand up, in alphabetical order, and declare the career he would pursue. There would be five minutes allowed for deliberation. Except for such professions as medicine, engineering and business administration, of which there was a great shortage in the country, nobody was allowed to pick an occupation that had already been chosen by one of his peers. Swapping, being the indulgence of irresolute people, was prohibited. No doubt, some boys at the tail end of the alphabetical order would be disappointed because the career they would have wanted would not be available to them. But that in itself would be an invaluable lesson, an introduction to life’s first axiom that human existence, even for the luckiest, is persistently unjust.
And so, one by one, my classmates declared their choices: careers from doctor to engineer, chemist to accountant, merchant to banker, geologist to metallurgist, soldier to aviator, hotelier to farmer were pronounced. When a boy floundered either because the profession he wanted had already been taken or because he could not think clearly, şιk Ahmet – or some of us – suggested alternatives.
I was the last. I stood up, tense and shaking. I had decided on my profession the moment şιk Ahmet had announced the outing. It had been an impulsive decision, aimed, I must admit, at impressing him. But it had taken hold of me and I had been praying that no one else would choose it.
şιk Ahmet turned to me. ‘And you, my young Jew, what will you be?’
I announced happily. ‘A professor, sir. Of humanities.’
‘A professor of humanities?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What decided you on this, Zeki?’
‘Sir?’
‘Hero-worship? A desire to emulate me?’
I squirmed. It was obvious I worshipped him. We all did. But I had additional reasons. Firstly, he was one of the people who had saved my mother and myself from starvation at the time of the Varlιk, the nefarious Wealth Tax imposed on the minorities. Secondly, he was a champion of every just cause; indeed, in some quarters he was known as ‘the great democrat’. Thirdly, he knew all there was to know about world literature. Fourthly, wanting to impart this knowledge to the whole country, he taught right through the educational spectrum from university to primary school. Fifthly, he was so manly that all the women, even girls our age, were attracted to him.
‘Well, Zeki?’
‘I – I ... Maybe, sir ...’
‘Waste of time. You can’t be like me!’
‘I know, sir. But I’d like to try, sir ...’
‘And should you succeed, what would that make you?’
‘A noble person, sir.’
‘No, sir! You’d be an imitation.’
‘Oh.’
‘Is that what you think you should offer our country?
A mimetic chimpanzee? A suicidal parrot?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then think again. What are you good at?’
‘Not much, sir. Running, maybe. I have good lungs.’
‘Running is hardly a career. An Olympic medal, at the most. What about literature?’
‘That’s why I want to be a teacher, sir. I love literature, sir.’
‘You’re good at it, I’ll grant you. You can tell what’s prose and what’s poetry. You have a feel for language and you write good essays. I wager you’ll be my best student yet! For a Jew, that’s phenomenal!’
‘Is it, sir?’
‘You also have an oversize dome – plenty of space there for words.’
I blushed. I’d taken a lot of teasing from my peers about my large head. Then I’d come to realize that though tall and thin, I was not necessarily weak. So one day I’d stood up to a bully and gone on to beat the shit out him; I had never looked back. I retorted angrily, ‘I can’t help the size of my head, sir. I was born that way.’
şιk Ahmet grinned. ‘And for a very good reason. You have a writer’s head. And that’s what you should be! A writer.’
‘Me, sir? A writer?’
‘It’s in your bones! Can’t you sense it?’
‘I don’t know, sir ...’
‘Damn it, boy! Don’t be a dunce! Touch your feelings!’
‘I – I don’t know how, sir.’
‘Don’t be coy with me!’
‘I’m not, sir.’
‘Now, repeat after me: I’m a writer. I know it in my bones. Come on!’
‘I’m a writer. I know it in my bones.’
‘And that’s what I’ll be. Novelist. Poet. Playwright.
Essayist.’
‘Oh.’
‘Let’s hear it!’
‘That’s what I’ll be. Novelist ... Poet ... Playwright ... Essayist ...’
şιk Ahmet clapped his hands. ‘That’s settled, then!’ He shouted at the waiter. ‘Bring this boy some raki! Bring several bottles! We have cause for celebration.’
I stared at my friends, quite dumbstruck, as they cheered and applauded. Somewhere in my mind, I wondered whether they were acclaiming my choice or the prospect of getting drunk.
şιk Ahmet took to the floor and started dancing. Then he started reciting Nâzιm Hikmet:
Imagine TARANTA-BABU
How sublime life is
To understand it like reading a masterly book
To hear it like a love song
To live
In wonderment like a child
Oh, how sublime living is
TARANTA-BABU ...2
Later, şιk Ahmet, inebriated
yet solemn, came and sat beside me and replenished my glass. ‘How goes it, my young Jew?’
Drunk and emboldened by the raki, I quipped, ‘Oh, how sublime living is ...’
‘You like the poem?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Know what it’s about?’
‘Denounces fascism, sir. Written when Italy was preparing to invade Abyssinia. Composed as letters from an Ethiopian student in Rome to his wife, back home.’
‘A Hikmet aficionado!’
‘Aficionado’ was that year’s catchword. şιk Ahmet had borrowed it from Hemingway, whose rakish masculinity, he maintained, made him the most Turkish of foreign writers.
I nodded proudly. ‘I’ve only read what’s around, sir. Most of his works are banned.’
‘So is Taranta-Babu.’
‘My father has a copy, sir. He got it when it was first published.’
‘Your father ... Of course ... Vitali Behar, the lawyer. The one who defends the defenceless – right? I must meet him.’
‘Actually, you saved his life, sir.’
‘Did I? How come?’
‘By feeding my mother and me during the Varlιk ... Father had been sent to Aşkale labour camp ...’
‘Hold on – is he the man who bought his son an encyclopaedia with his first earnings? When he came back from the camp?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you were the son?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘No wonder you turned out as you are. And he loves Hikmet.’
‘Jews know about fascism, sir.’
‘I remember something else. One of your family dying in the Spanish Civil War ...’
‘Father’s French cousin, sir. Yes.’
‘A family of lefties. All the more reason to meet him.
We’ll have a conference of lefties.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘On second thoughts, maybe he shouldn’t be seen with me. For some people, I’m even worse than a lefty ...’
‘Even worse, sir ...?’
‘Like a sewer-rat – meaning “pluralist”, therefore, ravisher of nationalism. Or socialist pig – meaning enemy of capitalism and all good things. And, of course, communist vermin – the maggot that’s trying to eat the country’s heart.’
‘How dare they, sir?’
‘When mindless people – opportunists, reactionaries, religious zealots – get to power, they try to hold on to it any way they can. And the best way they can do that is by feeding our paranoia. Like this anti-communist hysteria we’re now having. And we become the scapegoats ...’
‘But you’re a great patriot, sir. A war hero ...’
‘Yes, that’s a bit of luck. It deters some of them. On the other hand, I’m small fry. They want Turkey’s very soul. And they’ve got him. And they’ve put him in chains ...’
You mean Hikmet, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know him, sir?’
‘Met him a few times.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Orpheus reincarnated.’
‘I’d love to meet him ...’
‘One day – all being well. There’s a campaign for his release.’
‘In the meantime, I can’t read many of his works!’
‘You can if you join a samizdat network.’
‘How?’
‘I run one. We mimeograph all his banned works and distribute them where we can.’
‘Oh, I’d be very keen to join!’
‘I should warn you. You could get into trouble ...’
‘I realize that, sir.’
‘Is this raki-brave? Or are you naturally so?’
‘I don’t know, sir. Maybe both ...’
şιk Ahmet lit yet another cigarette, then offered me one.
‘I suppose I should have asked this before you took your decision, Zeki ...’
I took the cigarette.
He lit it for me. ‘If – when you become a writer – if they started banning your works ...?’
‘I can’t imagine them being interested in me, sir ...’
‘For much of the world, the freedom to write is a luxury. All the more so, if you care about humanity. If you defend freedom and democracy. If you criticize rulers, governments, institutions. If, like Hikmet, you preach equality, an end to wars, universal peace ... For some regimes these themes constitute grave crimes ...’
I looked at him in perturbation. ‘I see ...’
‘Being a Jew, I suspect you’d be writing in that vein. So you’d be branded a subversive. They’ll set the Furies on you. What then?’
‘I don’t know, sir ... What do you think, sir?’
‘The risk of persecution – and gaol – go with the writer’s job ...’
‘Then maybe I shouldn’t be a writer, sir ...’
‘And renege on your oath ...?’
‘But prison ...’
‘Can be very beneficial. Builds up a person in many ways.’ He replenished my glass. ‘What do you say?’
I gulped down my drink. ‘Do I have a choice, sir?’
To my great surprise – and I think, everybody else’s – he hugged me. ‘You devil Jew – God help you!’
That night I told my parents of my decision.
My mother, who was blessed with an artistic disposition – she was a very gifted miniaturist – immediately burst into tears. But then she burst into tears whatever the news, good or bad. (To my great embarrassment, I take after her.) When she eventually composed herself, she turned to my father – who had not said a word – and listed a million reasons why I should be a writer. ‘Doubt not,’ she told him, ‘our son will be a Tolstoy, a Rabelais, a Cervantes, a Shakespeare, maybe even a Homer or a Rûmi or, who knows, maybe even better than all of them.’
My father remained silent.
Later, when people dropped in for coffee, my choice became one of the subjects of conversation. I was doing my homework, but I sneaked out several times to eavesdrop.
On one occasion, I heard my great-uncle, Lazar, trying to comfort my father by telling him that my so-called career choice was merely an adolescent fantasy, that it would soon fade into oblivion and that, within a few months, I would happily decide, like every good Jewish boy, to take up medicine or dentistry or accountancy or, best of all, commerce.
(Not a loveable person, my great-uncle Lazar. A book-keeper in a public company, he was an opinionated man with a violent temper and a veritable bully towards children. Indeed, he so disliked children that each time he heard the muezzin call the faithful to prayer, he was reminded to thank Elohim for making his wife barren – or so he boasted. However, according to the old folks’ gossip, this boast was self-protective; in effect, it was he who was sterile, since my poor, sweet great-aunt had given birth to a boy when she was a mere sap of a girl, during the War of Independence. Tragically, after her lover had been killed at the battle of İnönü, she had had to give the baby up for adoption.)
To my surprise, my father affirmed that he would be very proud to have his son become a writer. What concerned him was the sad reality that writers seldom made a decent living and were always at the mercy of self-aggrandizing publishers, reviewers, columnists, pundits, not to mention rulers and politicians. He would be more than happy to support me for as long as he lived, but who would take care of me after his death?
On hearing this, my mother, needless to say, burst into tears. (Actually, so did I!)
The next day, as I left for school, I caught special smiles on my parents’ faces. Obviously, in celebration of my choice, they had made each other exceptionally happy during the night. If there had been any thoughts in my mind of reneging on my literary career, those smiles banished them for ever.
Thus my fate was sealed. Unbeknown to my parents or to myself, my exile had begun.
Within weeks, I had read everything by Nâzιm Hikmet that was circulating clandestinely or had not been confiscated by the authorities. About the same time, I joined the ranks of the samizd
at mimeographers and earned many commendations from şιk Ahmet for spending countless weekends with a dilapidated Gestetner.
I also started trying to write poetry and published a couple of poems in the college magazine. Sadly, they turned out to be pathetic parodies of Hikmet’s verses – even I could tell that. Indeed, I might well have given up poetry then, had not şιk Ahmet pronounced that some of the metaphors had contained ‘sparks of originality’.
Within a year or so, I became the principal distributor of Hikmet’s poetry to all the secondary-school students along the Bosporus’ European shore. On two occasions, I was caught red-handed and arrested – denounced, according to şιk Ahmet, by some retrograde teachers from those schools. The first time, I ended up at the local police station and the duty officer released me with a caution. The second time, I was taken to the district station, where the chief of police decided that I needed to be taught a lesson. So I was roughed up a bit. The blows, threats and insults barely hurt, but the state of fear, which carries with it a taste like rotten meat, induced in me a paralysis that still afflicts me today. I was also warned that I now possessed a dossier, entirely allocated to my august little self, prominently placed in the ‘pending’ tray of the National Security Organization; a third offence would see me looking at the sun from behind bars.
Then, in no time at all, it was 1950.
May brought Adnan Menderes and his Democratic Party to power. Those of us who swaggered as Hikmet’s aficionados felt our spirits rise. There would be an amnesty; the gaols would be emptied; that was the convention after elections. And since, for some time, influential groups and student organizations had been campaigning for Hikmet’s release, we believed the new government would disregard its abhorrence of communism and free him forthwith. We held on to these expectations even when old-timers warned us that the growing paranoia against any leftist views, churned up by the US’s mighty propaganda machine – and pushed into a frenzy after the outbreak of the Korean war – was even more virulent than the one that had led to Hikmet’s imprisonment.
Matching this hysteria with fulminous ire, we mimeographed even more fervently.
July came. Reports that Turkey had been invited to join NATO began to fuel further anti-communist delirium. Those who cautioned that the price of admission to that ‘elite organization’ would be countless soldiers’ lives because Turkey would be coerced into participating in the Korean war were hounded and, in some cases, prosecuted and gaoled.