by Moris Farhi
Standing at the top of the stairs, as if ready to run away, he whispered harshly, ‘Don’t go to Nâzιm’s place today.’
I became alarmed. ‘Why?’
‘Stay in – all day. I’ll explain later.’ And he rushed off.
He rang soon afterwards. And several times during the day. Each time, he repeated that I was to stay in. As time went on, his tension increased; on a couple of occasions, I thought he was going to break down.
Around midnight, he rang again. This time he sounded relieved and close to tears. ‘All’s well.’
‘What’s been going on?’
‘Stay put. Pretend you’re ill. I’ll come over when the time’s right.’
He came over on Thursday 21 June.
I received him in a state of shock. I had just read in Cumhuriyet that Nâzιm Hikmet had escaped to Bucharest, Romania.
I waved the newspaper at him. ‘Is this true?’
He couldn’t stop smiling. ‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘Never mind how.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know exactly. But, in case we’re questioned, he was still here two days ago. He left home that morning to go to Ankara to appeal against his call-up.’
‘His escape – was it a sudden whim?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Sure, it matters! Didn’t he trust us?’
‘Of course he did. But there might have been an emergency. Or suddenly he saw the perfect opportunity ...’
‘We had a foolproof plan!’
‘His wasn’t bad either, was it? He grabbed his chance! Can you blame him? He’s safe! That’s what matters!’
I nodded, then started laughing. ‘Yes! That’s what matters!’
He took me by the arm. ‘Time for a celebration! Let’s get the gang!’
I followed happily, feeling weightless and unco-ordinated. ‘In a way – it’s a relief! I couldn’t stop worrying. We – I – might have botched it!’
‘We wouldn’t have botched it. But there might have been mayhem. Now we should be spared that ...’
Nâzιm Hikmet arrived in Moscow on 29 June 1951, to a tumultuous welcome.
I was spared the mayhem. So were the other decoys. But not şιk Ahmet.
The authorities reacted to Hikmet’s escape with fury. First, by ministerial decree, they divested him of his citizenship. Then, raiding the homes of his close friends and supporters, they destroyed everything in print, every scrap of paper that might have contained a fragment of his work. No one knows how much of Hikmet’s writing was thus lost for ever.
Eventually, some of these friends and supporters managed to flee the country and settle abroad. Many others were arrested, tried and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Some, like şιk Ahmet, were also harshly treated.
Hikmet’s wife, Münevver, and his young son, Memed, who could not have accompanied him without jeopardizing his escape, were put under even closer surveillance and had their passports confiscated. (This harassment continued for some ten years; in the end, they, too, were smuggled out of Turkey by friends. They were given refuge in Poland.)
As I mentioned, we, the decoys, were spared the mayhem. True, all the decoys, myself included, were taken in for questioning. Though they never discovered that I had acted as Hikmet’s impersonator, I still qualified as a suspect for having distributed his works. After all, Hikmet’s surveillants had photographed us regularly. But, miraculously, our age saved us. We were classified as confused, impressionable youths who had been proselytized by the USSR’s universal Fifth Column of ‘megalomaniac intellectuals, vainglorious writers and subversive ethnic minorities’. We were admonished to come to our senses. And for good measure, we were marked down, as and when we would be called up for military service, for the Turkish expeditionary force to Korea. Out there, in that God-forsaken place, we would see for ourselves the shit that was the communist dream.
I resumed ‘normal life’. The fact that I could do so convinced me that Fate had her eye on me. Apart from şιk Ahmet’s ongoing trial, life spared me from worries.
Moreover, I was left with a priceless possession: one of Hikmet’s shirts. A day or so before his escape, I had spilled some coffee on it and had taken it home to be washed. After his escape, it became too dangerous to take it back.
I still have the shirt, made of cheesecloth in Şile, Istanbul’s resort on the Black Sea. I wear it, when I dabble in poetry, in the hope that grains of Hikmet’s genius will osmose into me. Writers will do anything for art: some will imitate, others will try primitive magic.
In 1954, in my final year at college, şιk Ahmet’s trial came to an end. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
On the first occasion when he was allowed visitors, I went to see him.
It was the end of February and freezing cold – so cold, in fact, that for the first time in some 200 years, the Bosporus had frozen over – yet I found him sitting on a bench in the prison quadrangle, chain-smoking as ever.
He had shrunk to a fraction of his normal size. Except for the eyes, where thunder and lightning conducted business as usual, that once ramrod, heroic body had been reduced to ungainly bones, lumpy flesh and loose skin.
‘What have they done to you, sir?’
‘Nothing. Nothing ...’
‘How could they?’
He pointed at the parcels I had brought. ‘Cigarettes and books?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thanks. Have you been writing, my lovely Jew?’
‘A few poems.’
‘Recite them.’
‘Here? Now?’
‘Yes.’
I recited a couple.
‘Not bad. You’re getting better.’
Listening to his trembling voice, I felt like crying.
‘What’s the good of that?’
He looked up at me sharply. ‘You’re going to be a writer! You’re getting there ...’
‘But look at what they’ve done to you!’
‘To hell with that.’
‘I might end up here, too!’
‘Occupational hazard. So what?’
‘I don’t think I can take it, sir.’
‘Sure, you can.’
‘I’ve been offered a scholarship. Oxford or Cambridge.’
He looked up, quite tremulously. ‘Sensible of Oxford or Cambridge.’
‘I’m thinking of taking it up.’
He forced a smile. ‘Absolutely right! Grab it.’
I forced myself to look into his eyes. ‘I – I might not ... come back. I can’t write with the fear of prison behind me ...’
He unleashed his fury. ‘You think you can write in exile?’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re rooted here, you bastard! That’s why! You’re a Turk! Not an Englishman!’
‘I’m a Jew – remember?’
‘So what? You’re still a Turk – through and through! You’ve proved that with every breath you’ve taken!’
‘But prison ... I’m terrified ...’
‘So was Nâzιm.’
‘He escaped.’
şιk Ahmet pulled me closer to him. ‘Listen to me, you creep! He escaped because otherwise he would have died. But in Russia, cut off from his beloved Turkey, he’s dying another death. A worse death! His spirit is dying. All that great poetry that won’t see the light of day! Don’t you understand, Zeki? Your country is your soil! Her traditions, her peoples are the seeds and the rain you need! Without them you are barren earth where nothing germinates. And the writer in you dies! That means you also die! A slow, merciless death!’
‘If Turkey treats her great men the way they treat you, then Turkey doesn’t deserve them.’
‘Oh, she deserves them, my young Jew! She certainly deserves them! What she doesn’t deserve is our power-mad fascists, our reactionaries and our religious fanatics! But they come and go! Who remembers them afterwards? They disappear – without a trace!’
I nodded.
&nb
sp; ‘Now read me some more of your poems ...’
‘I haven’t got any more.’
‘Then go and write some!’
I saw şιk Ahmet a few more times. On each occasion he asked me for my poems, but I had none to recite. He asked me why I wasn’t writing. I lied, telling him that I was working hard for my final exams. He smiled as if he believed me. But he didn’t hide his disappointment.
A few days before I left for Oxford, I visited him for the last time. We hugged, quite desperately. We both knew that I might not come back, that I might be yet another member of my generation who would renege on his word and abandon his country, that I might well be starting my exile.
No, not my exile. My death. My spiritual death safe from fear in a safe corner of the world.
As I was about to leave, he gave me a folded piece of paper. ‘I’ve written a poem. For you.’
Surprised, I started unfolding the paper.
He waved me away. ‘Read it on the plane.’
I read it outside the gaol:
when a writer is killed
language
loses one of its words
when all writers are killed
there will be
no words left
no language
only
dictators
racists
nationalists
whores of war
false prophets
only
the worship of death
(The details of Nâzιm Hikmet’s escape became known some twenty-five years later. In a simple but daring manoeuvre, one of his great admirers, Refik Erduran, had smuggled him in a powerful motorboat out of Istanbul into the Black Sea on Sunday 17 June 1951. There, they had intercepted a Romanian ship, the Plekhanov. Hikmet had promptly requested asylum. His request had been granted only after the Romanian authorities had received the USSR’s approval. Erduran, his saviour, had slipped back into Istanbul that same night.)
11: Aslan
Madam Ruj
Haydar Koyunlu’s interment should have been symbolic; more like a memorial. There should not have been any remains to bury. Haydar had converted to Buddhism. His body should have been left on a mountainside to be consumed by vultures and wild beasts or, failing that, cremated. But in Turkey, in the early fifties, organizing such rites was as unprecedented as finding a politician who loved his country more than his own ambition. So Haydar had the conventional Muslim funeral.
But since he had prepared his suicide in true platonic spirit, as a brave and laudable deed when life turns unacceptable, we, his friends, decided to honour his death with due celebration. We considered his failure to have his body dematerialized by the elements inconsequential. After all, he had often maintained that accomplishment belonged to the gods; whereas failure measured the man.
He had known about failure more than most people. He had been an indefatigable champion of lost causes. It was even suggested that the cancer that had killed him had been spawned by the tribulations of his last campaign, the imperative to abolish borders in order to create a world government. Except for some support from such fervent democrats as Professor Ahmet Poyraz, alias şιk Ahmet, his efforts had met with nothing but ridicule. Not surprisingly, the precept of abandoning national interests in favour of global welfare as the path to universal peace had proved anathema to Kemalists, irredentists and Islamists. Indeed, some of these factions made sure that Haydar was regularly arrested and, sometimes, imprisoned.
The obsequies, we agreed, would be a pluralistic affair. We were a motley crowd and, like Haydar, we had declared ourselves ‘citizens of the world’.
Immediately after the burial, at the suggestion of his Jewish friends, we declared a shivah. However, we didn’t sit and mourn for seven days. Instead, recalling the scene in The Iliad where old Priam goes to Achilles and, kissing the hands that had slain his son, obtains permission to arrange funeral games in honour of Hector, we devised contests in Haydar’s memory. In deference to his adopted religion, we called these the Karma Games. We would hold them over all Istanbul so that the world’s most beautiful city would also pay homage to him. To preside over the proceedings, we hired Zahir, the Afghan rug-dealer from the Grand Bazaar who, Haydar had once informed us, had been a shaman.
Buddhism and The Iliad might sound a strange duality, but it summed up Haydar perfectly. He had embraced Buddhism during the Korean war while serving in the Turkish expeditionary force. Having been an atheist all his adult life – and a virulent foe of all religious institutions – his submission to a faith, let alone Buddhism, had surprised all his friends. He himself, however, had been expecting such a reversal. Having believed in God – or rather, in a god infinitely more humane than the ones preached by our monotheisms – he had known all along that sooner or later he would bump into Him somewhere. That somewhere happened to be Korea. And he did not attain enlightenment just from witnessing the daily carnage that is the fare of all wars. He also acquired a greater insight about himself and thence about humanity, as he put it, ‘simply by reading The Iliad – the first anti-war novel’. He understood that, individually or collectively, we always have the choice between war and peace, but that being demented admirers of Ares rather than wise followers of Aphrodite, we always choose war. For who, in his right mind, would prefer making war to making love? Even Ares, in his moments of sanity, rushed to entwine limbs with Aphrodite.
Homer, whom Haydar had discovered in a military library, had been, he would quip, the first of the three Purple Hearts he had acquired in Korea. The second had been his conversion to Buddhism. And he had received the third, the actual US military medal, after the battle of Kunuri. (Since Turkey’s sole honour for valour, the İstiklâl Madalyasι, had been created by a special law in 1923 for those who had fought in the War of Independence, those who had distinguished themselves fighting in Korea had ended up receiving US decorations.)
On the first day of Haydar’s funeral games we ran the cross-country course from the Upper Bosporus to Belgrad Ormanι, a forest created in commemoration of Süleyman the Magnificent’s conquest of Belgrade in 1521.
On day two, we rode our bikes, against the clock, for ten circuits of Büyükada, the biggest of the Princes’ Islands.
On the third day, we raced dinghies from Florya to Yalova, some sixty kilometres across the Sea of Marmara.
The next day, we competed in a tug of war in Üsküdar, the first village on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus and a great favourite with Eartha Kitt.
The day after that, we shot arrows from one shore of the Golden Horn to the other.
On the sixth day, we wrestled at At Meydanι, the site of the Byzantine Hippodrome, near the Blue Mosque.
And on the last day, as the games’ crowning event, we swam across the Bosporus from Anadolu Hisarι, Yιldιrιm Beyazιt’s fort on the Asian side, to Rumeli Hisarι, Mehmet the Conqueror’s fortress on the European side – at barely 700 metres, the strait’s narrowest point. (Given the currents that charge through that narrow reach, this is a tougher undertaking than swimming the wider stretches.)
We reserved the evenings for prayers. Following Haydar’s conviction that every place of worship – provided that it did not have a minister officiating – revered Creation because it expressed man’s yearnings for the original, tender, motherly deity – the deity that phallus-oriented religions never understood – we shuttled between mosque, church and synagogue. Since, in those days, Istanbul lacked a stupa, we improvised a Buddhist ritual by burning oil and incense beneath the great architect Sinan’s aqueduct in Kâğιthane and chanting, under Zahir’s guidance, the mantra Om-Mani-Padme-Hum.
The nights were a mystical interlude. This is the time, a dervish had told us, when a being communes with his deity and, in so doing, recreates beauty. Beauty that is sometimes ephemeral, like the sudden nearness of the Milky Way, or solid, like the body of a loved one.
And at night I became Orpheus. I picked up my saz and mesmerized both the first and
the second coterie. No mean achievement, this. The first coterie was reserved for Haydar’s peers, men and women he had gathered, like a latter-day Socrates, from school, army and work. The second, to which I belonged, comprised the talebe, ‘students’, the initiates from whom no contribution other than blind loyalty was expected. Naturally, the paternalism in the Turkish character imposed strict boundaries between the coteries; but my virtuosity with stringed instruments had elevated me, a callow eighteen-year-old, to the company of adults twice my age.
Thus while the first coterie, recounting Haydar’s countless deeds, declared that he would most certainly reincarnate in some glorious form, I put the sentiments into words and music.
Then we wept.
The morning of the last game dawned ...
I had been at my most inspired throughout the night. I was also quite drunk. And I found myself straggling into Haydar’s cemetery, high above Rumeli Hisarι. I think I wanted to thank him with a special song I had written for him. For Haydar had not only repaired my saz when I had damaged it at a party, but had also imbued it with such mellifluous tones that he might well have been Stradivari reincarnated. (Repairing things – anything, from broken hearts to broken vessels, from mechanical failures to minds confounded by maths – had been yet another of Haydar’s miraculous gifts.)
As I approached his grave, I saw a woman kneeling by it ...
I thought I had taken a wrong path. Then I recognized her; she had been at the funeral: Mazal Levi, known as ‘Madam Ruj’, the famous – and, for someone in her profession, surprisingly young – matchmaker. (At the time, she had just turned thirty.)
Seeing me, she jumped up.
I mumbled. ‘I’m – sorry ... I’ve ... intruded ...’
She regained her composure. ‘It’s all right.’
‘I’m ... a friend of ... Haydar ...’
She wiped her tears with a handkerchief. ‘Me, too ...’