Love in the Days of Rebellion

by Ahmet Altan

  It was as if all the sounds that made a city a city had been silenced; there were no arguments, no shouting, no laughter, no shopkeepers bantering from one side of the street to the other, no women talking from their windows, no hodjas dispensing advice. Martial law had been declared and it was even forbidden to run in the streets, people avoided walking quickly lest they be thought to be running, everyone made a point of walking slowly. The city was so tense, if someone were to run, people would uncoil like springs and follow this person and flee the capital.

  The joy and enthusiasm at the proclamation of constitutional monarchy was long gone.

  Within a few days, Mahmut Şevket Pasha, who had come with the Movement Army to save Istanbul, gained control of the city and indeed of the government of the entire empire, got the new Sultan completely under his control, and started to run the country as if it was a military headquarters. He gave sharp, severe orders, and the atmosphere of oppression that he created with extraordinary courts, death sentences, gallows, and torture in police stations frightened even the Committee that had brought him to power.

  The people had become accustomed to the Sultan’s tyranny, which had grown slack due to disorder and corruption, but with this new and disciplined tyranny, they disappeared like a rabbit disappearing in a magician’s hat, but the Pasha, whose head stood a bit tilted on his neck and seemed longer than it was because of the rectangular beard that came down to his chest, with his sunken eyes and thick eyebrows, who was not showy, but an ordinary and stern commander, didn’t know the city or its people. This city, whose harbors smelled of saltpeter, whose waterfront mansions smelled of jasmine, whose forests smelled of pine, whose back streets smelled of mud, which had garbage dumps behind each of its beauties and in which you could find beauty behind every garbage dump, which looked different from each of its hills, which didn’t even have a climate and where depending on the wind you could experience both summer and winter on the same day, would emerge as death from the hat in which it had disappeared like a rabbit, and a few years later the Pasha would pay for his magnificent authority and he would be riddled with holes inside a carriage. He would not have enough time to realize that in this city, being victorious was as dangerous as being defeated.

  As Hikmet Bey approached Yıldız Palace along empty, restless streets, he saw a procession walking under the guard of a few soldiers, all of the palace servants who hadn’t fled because they had nowhere to go, eunuchs, footmen, cooks, gardeners, doormen were being brought in for questioning; even the Ethiopians’ faces were white with fear.

  As he moved through the streets he grew even more worried about his father, he hoped to find someone he knew at the palace and find out what was going on. The palace gates were open, the soldiers had withdrawn after the Sultan departed. He passed through the large main gate that the most important people in the nation, pashas, ministers, officers, spies, the Shayk-al Islam had passed through with a shudder and moved up the garden path paved with snow-white pebbles and reached the large chamber building, which had green Venetian blinds on its right side.

  He’d spent part of his youth in that building, now it was completely empty; the carpets were in disarray and armchairs and large vases had been knocked over. He walked down the corridors, looking into the rooms whose doors were open, and reached the large hall where the Sultan had learned he was being dethroned the previous evening; perhaps because of the cold, the great hall seemed to Hikmet Bey like a place no one had been for years. He’d been in this large hall twice before, but his knowledge of the palace ended where the hall ended, he’d never seen anything of the palace beyond that point. There was a small room behind the large hall; he walked timidly toward that room, waiting for someone to call out to him, to rebuke him, to tell him to turn back, this was a very small, dark room where the Sultan had rested occasionally, the little window looked onto the harem, on the round table in the middle of the room was a dark brown medicine bottle with a label that bore the vague instruction, “a glass to be taken occasionally,” there was another bottle next to it that looked like a liquor bottle.

  The door leading to the rear sections which contained the little secrets and human details of an emperor’s life that no one had even dared to be curious about was in the back of the room; the two strange bottles on the table gave the first confidential clues to a life that might turn out to be simpler than expected.

  Until he went into that little room, Hikmet Bey had a respectable reason, he was looking for traces of his father, but when he passed through the door at the far end this reason would no longer be valid, he would wander through those sections with a greedy curiosity; this would be an unscrupulous act, like deceiving a child to learn about his father’s life or using someone’s illness to hear their most deeply kept secrets. He hesitated briefly between good manners and curiosity, then his curiosity won out over his ethical concerns, he wasn’t strong enough to turn his back on the inside scoop of a glorious empire when it was right in front of him, even though his father wouldn’t consider this an act befitting an honorable man, he went through the door in the back.

  He entered a narrow, windowless corridor. His father had told him that because of his fear of being assassinated, the Sultan had constantly either had doors walled up or doors opened in walls, and had had the corridors built so narrow that only one person at a time could pass; from this corridor he reached the room where the Sultan had slept for the last time before leaving the palace.

  This room was also small and dark, the only window looked onto the inner courtyard, a velvet sofa that was also used as a bed stood against the wall, there was a disordered cotton quilt and five or six colorful silk cushions on the sofa, a wrinkled white nightshirt had been thrown onto an armchair next to the bed, by the head of the bed there was a little shelf for the Sultan to put the book he read at night, his coffee cup, and perhaps his gun, behind a folding lacquered screen in a corner was an alcove with a washbowl and a pitcher, and a Japanese painting hung over the bed.

  When Hikmet Brey saw this simple, indeed scruffy room that was behind the magnificent splendor of the empire, he saw that the decorative Hassa regiment, carriages pulled by horses with silk harnesses, treasure chests full of emeralds and diamonds, velvet pouches full of gold that were given as rewards, uniforms that glittered with medals, all the betrayals, murders, uprisings, and executions were meaningless, he had the impression that it was all nonsensical theater. Had it all been for this, to sleep in a room like that?

  He started wandering through the abandoned palace with some distress, hoping to find something that showed the reality of the life they’d lived, the pain they’d suffered; the narrow corridors were crammed with old furniture; closets, bedside tables, consoles, and brass beds without mattresses were lined up next to each other, on top of them were dusty packages that had been tied with string, it was like a forgotten, murky, dust-smelling antique shop on a dead-end street; all of the rooms were too small for a palace, there were only two large halls in the entire palace.

  In one room he saw more than a thousand neckbands, fezzes, neckties, vests, incredible amounts of letter paper, and cheap American-made gilded wristwatches that had been thrown onto the floor. Someone had rifled through and disarranged all of these things, the drawers of the consoles in the corridor had been left open, shirts, socks, and underwear hung out of them, all of them grown old before they were even worn.

  In a room on the top floor there was a glass case full of gold-covered weapons, and there were two stiff, silk-lined waistcoats on the floor, the Sultan had probably worn these to stop bullets if he was attacked, some of the carpets on the floor were torn or had holes in them, none of the furniture matched, French, English, German, and Japanese-style furniture had been placed randomly side by side.

  In one room he saw the edge of a belt studded with emeralds and pearls hanging among the disordered furniture, this was the only thing of value he’d seen in the palace, strangel
y he saw no other jewelry, everything that was useless had been left lying around, anything of value that could be carried had disappeared overnight, had vanished like a breeze into unknown hands.

  The thing he found most interesting was that there was a piano in almost every room, some rooms even had three of them. In any event, the Sultan’s fondness for music had long been known. The soldiers who’d seized the palace had found mostly pianos and guns; there were thousands of loaded guns everywhere, in rooms, drawers, on coffee tables, in the baths, next to the heads of beds, all of them loaded and ready to be fired. For years the Sultan had been prepared for an attack, but he’d had to abandon his palace without using even one of them.

  On the lower floor he encountered a fairly large room with guns hanging on the walls, these guns were not inlaid, it was clear that the Sultan used that hall for target practice. At the far end of the room there were three dummies that he used for target practice.

  When Hikmet Bey took a close look at the dummies, his blood ran cold for a moment, the three dummies that the Sultan shot at bore an incredible resemblance to the Sultan himself; he’d had dummies that looked like him made or the people who had made them had made them to look like him and the Sultan spent a considerable amount of time shooting at dummies that looked like him. Did the Sultan not see the resemblance or did he derive a morbid pleasure from shooting at dummies that looked like him and watching them sway and fall to the floor?

  Perhaps for the first time, Hikmet Bey was curious about this man who was fond of music, carpentry, and guns and who shot at dummies of himself; what was the man they called Sultan like, how did he live in these bizarre, dingy, unkempt rooms, in some of which the paint was peeling from the window frames in places, what did it feel like for him to live in a palace that was like a covered bazaar? He was surprised by the friendship between this man and his father. He himself could never have been friends with someone who lived in a place like this.

  Didn’t it bother his father that the Sultan he called his only friend had such a bizarre, ugly, even shabby life or did it give him secret pleasure to compare it with his own mansion, with its carefully chosen furniture, well-illuminated rooms that were decorated in style, uplifting halls, well-maintained walls adorned with the most distinguished works of master calligraphers, his closets full of good clothes made by the best tailors, and his life, which was the opposite of the Sultan’s life and his palace, was this what made it possible for him to be friends with a man who had the power to destroy him at any moment and spend years by his side without being bothered by it? Did that palace give his father a secret, even devious sense of superiority, did the way the Sultan lived like an ignorant peasant with no taste even though he was an emperor from a six-hundred-year-old dynasty make it possible for Reşit Pasha to be so close to the Sultan?

  As he continued to wander around, his mind full of questions about the empire, the Sultan, and his father, he came across a dark, damp-smelling bath next to the carpentry workshop where the Sultan made various pieces of furniture; it was like an old magician’s alchemy laboratory, the carved marble shelves were full of bottles of healing water that nourished the hair, medicinal liquids that rejuvenated the skin, and creams that prevented wrinkles.

  As he was walking down the corridor that led to the back garden, he was startled by shouts of “Long live the Sultan,” from behind a door. He was both surprised and startled that there were people crazy enough to shout like this in the palace that day, he slowly opened the door from behind which the shouting was coming, in this foul-smelling room, where feathers of all colors floated in the air, thirty to forty parrots flapped their wings in panic, bumping into each other, flying in and out of cages whose doors had been left open and repeating the sentence they’d memorized, and which was now a serious crime, as they landed. Someone had put all these parrots in this room and left them there, the hungry animals pecked at each other and asked for help and food by repeating the only sentence they knew.

  He recoiled in horror at the misery of the hungry parrots and closed the door immediately.

  As he carefully picked his way among drawers that had been thrown on the floor, fallen underwear, closets that had been knocked over, he heard a loud, distant noise that sounded like moaning and he made his way toward it. There was a balcony that looked out over the inner courtyard, it was dark down below, there was a crowd packed so closely together they were almost a single being, kneeling down and moaning. When his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he realized these were hungry concubines in the cold palace where the electricity had been cut off; like the parrots, they too waited in hunger and fear, there was no one to give them food and no food to be given; the new government had contacted the Circassian villages and asked them to come get their daughters in the harem. After having spent years in the harem, these girls would return to the mountain villages and dusty towns where their families lived. They moaned as they waited in fear for their new lives.

  When he found a door and rushed outside, he felt as if he’d fled a dark, smoky room, the old furniture that had been tossed about, the untidy drawers, beds without mattresses, tattered carpets in the gloomy corridors filled his lungs like muddy water. He took a deep breath. The white pebbles on the garden path seemed so shiny and real, he instinctively picked up a few pebbles just to see if anything was real and concrete and squeezed them in his palm, their cold solidity gave him a sense of security, indeed even of joy, after all the strange things he’d seen. When he told Osman about that moment years later, it was as if he was still surprised. “Which one was reality, the splendor and pomp of the empire, the sultanate, and those who killed each other for the sultanate or those narrow corridors and old furniture that darkened the soul, which face of life is real, or do we have to accept that everything we call fake is in fact a part of reality, if the fake is an essential part of reality, why do we divide reality into the real and the fake?” At this point as he was speaking he stopped and thought for a moment, then said, “Do you know, this worn-out question, ‘what is life,’ that has become so boring and that no one asks for fear of being mocked, it is that, I’ve always admired people who can remain calm at the moment we discover there is still no answer to this question, that we threw it away without finding an answer to it and that the question is still meaningful and we feel that we desperately need an answer to this question, I have to admit I was unable to become one of those people, life terrified me, I was always surprised, I always felt my helplessness, even questions about the lives of others became a personal matter for me, I couldn’t escape them. I asked myself so many times who in fact that Sultan was, the man who’d sent thousands of people into exile and who shot at dummies that looked like him; in which face of that palace did my father’s best friend live, was it the splendid side or the miserable side?”

  He started walking down through the garden, past the flower beds that had been trampled the night before, the large trees, gazebos, small streams, there was not another person to be seen, even though the garden had been damaged by the coarseness of those who had captured the palace, it still had the splendor befitting an imperial palace garden. The sun warmed Hikmet Bey’s neck, informing him it would be a nice, bright spring day and helping him forget what he’d just experienced; just then he came across the wrecked chicken coops, these had been the cages where the peacocks were kept, they were empty, the wires had been bent, the cages that had been full of animals of all colors were now empty.

  A zebra emerged from the trees, Hikmet Bey had seen one of these striped creatures at the Paris zoo once when he was a child, but he was surprised to suddenly see one wandering free in the garden; when the animal noticed Hikmet Bey it turned and ran and disappeared into the trees.

  A bit further along he noticed something white that looked like a large rock, when he approached it he saw that it was a dead white pig, there was a red hole in its forehead that looked like a third eye, blood flowed from its small ears an
d dried on the grass.

  Someone had shot that pig in the forehead.

  Hikmet Bey could no longer walk, he turned back and ran out of the garden. Throughout his life he’d seen so many people die, so many people being killed, but the killing of that pig frightened him more than all those murders and deaths; he felt as if he was surrounded on all sides by a low savagery that was crippled by blind rage and was seized by the feeling that he was being pushed out of this life, out of this country.

  When he returned home in a panic and went to the library as if to seek shelter, he found Dilevser, who had no idea about life or what was going on outside, she was leafing through the books with her innocent white fingers. Hikmet Bey had told her she could use his library, and the young girl had begun to spend most of her time in that library.

  When the young girl looked at Hikmet Bey as he came in, she sensed there was something wrong about the state he was in.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” said Hikmet Bey.

  He realized he was still squeezing the pebbles in his hand and put them in his pocket with concealed embarrassment without allowing the girl to notice, there were ragged, red marks on the insides of his fingers.

  “I went to the palace this morning . . . ”

  The girl waited in silence for Hikmet Bey to continue.

  Hikmet Bey realized he wasn’t going to be able to tell the girl what he’d seen and how it had made him feel and stopped talking.