by Ahmet Altan
Hikmet Bey didn’t even notice her expression, he just strode toward the stairs and said, “Come.”
Without rushing, but also taking care not to fall too far behind Hikmet Bey, she climbed the stairs in her pointed, high-heeled slippers, which left her pink heels uncovered, as if she was gliding, after she entered the bedroom she closed the door slowly and, without looking up, started to unbutton her satin-covered, lilac-colored buttons one by one; she knew this would make Hikmet Bey suffer, and she did it every time with the sense that she was taking feminine revenge.
That day Hikmet Bey couldn’t show his usual patience, he grabbed the collar of the dress and when he pulled it almost angrily, the small buttons fell with a tiny pattering and scattered about the room like lilacs; the dress fell to her feet in elegant folds, the girl freed herself from the folds of the dress around her feet as if she was stepping out of water and pushed the dress aside with her toes.
Because she was obeying Hikmet Bey’s wishes and wore nothing under her dress, her body, which Hikmet Bey had likened to Carrara marble, appeared like a snow-white fountain gushing from the ground in the bronze, phosphorescent light that filtered through the closed curtains.
Hikmet Bey also pulled off his own clothes as if he was fighting, ripping and tearing at them, grabbed the girl by the wrist, and roughly pulled her into the bed.
He made love hurriedly, greedily, sorrowfully, as if there was someone he was pursuing and trying to capture, he bit the young girl’s neck and breasts, hurting her, he mauled the magnificent body in his bed heedlessly without feeling any desire, without even hoping to feel pleasure.
She was still wearing her high-heeled slippers, as Hikmet Bey held her legs behind her knees, they rose and waved like wildflowers on a windy hill every time he moved.
Hediye didn’t close her eyes as she did everything that he asked of her, she looked directly at Hikmet Bey’s face, but Hikmet Bey, who treated the young girl as if she was part of the bed, a nightgown, a bedcover, a soft quilt, wasn’t even aware of the eyes watching him.
After a time Hediye eased Hikmet Bey with her body as she surrendered tamely like white bubbles riding the waves, with soft touches and light kisses; they slowed down, when they started to make love again, maneuvering quietly and carefully like a ship approaching a harbor, Hikmet Bey was now aware of the woman he was with, of her body and her beauty, achieved the satisfaction of his full and patient lust, sensed the dark and spicy smell of pleasure.
The world closed them in like a door, they were alone together in a private darkness that enveloped them; like two lovers, they made love playfully, kissed at length, whispered dirty words to nourish each other’s lust.
Then they moved on to games that Hikmet Bey never told anyone about, not even Osman, and which Hediye knew Hikmet Bey could play only with her, that she was certain the man she loved could only share with her, and which she therefore anticipated every time with desire and longing.
It was possible to see that Hikmet Bey, whose mother had referred to him as “the most innocent of the innocent,” played games like this to forget his melancholic soul, searching in the deepest darkness into which he could dive, but Osman, who continued to believe in Hikmet Bey’s innocence despite the strange lovemaking he was engaged in, thought that these games had been discovered in order to overcome the flames of lust that Mehpare Hanım had left behind, to extinguish that fire with another fire, to go beyond the unforgettable pleasures he’d experienced with his former wife and to find virgin fields of lust that belonged to him alone.
But neither was he certain about these ideas, once when he was gossiping about Hikmet Bey with Mehpare Hanım, Osman said, “Perhaps he was simply a randy and amoral man,” and Mehpare Hanım, whose beauty even death had not been able to erase, smiled coquettishly to show that she agreed. Once, too, not bothering to rein in his recklessness, Osman said about Hikmet Bey that “perhaps he was secretly insane,” but the other dead showed that they disagreed by turning and giving him strange looks; nevertheless, Osman always entertained suspicions of Hikmet Bey’s insanity, the symptoms of which emerged under very special circumstances.
In a way that proved Osman right, the games he played in bed with Hediye, games it was impossible for him to speak of, constituted something similar to insanity. They left behind the reality of the world and time through whispers, acts, and touches, in bed they did what they could never do in real life, that it would never occur to them to do, and within the part of life and time that they fit into bed they tore apart and destroyed the most sacred taboos and created a dark home in which they could lose themselves completely.
There wasn’t a single reality that dared follow them wherever they went; it was a long undressing full of delights, they began with their clothes, then they shed the realities of daily life, time, their identities, personalities, memories, morals, and finally their most sacred values, burned them all, and passed to another world without leaving any trace. The world into which they passed was so dark and unmarked, now even they themselves couldn’t catch them, they shed themselves and everyone else, their completely liberated bodies were buried in the lust devil’s paradise that smelled of human flesh, incense, and amber, they wandered recklessly on the edge of insanity, kissing at length, biting savagely, and touching frantically.
For Hikmet Bey, lovemaking was an uprising, an insurrection, a revolution that completely burned down this universe and established its own, that turned life upside down like an ailanthus, in which the counterfeit was real and the real was counterfeit, in which he was purified, in which he was freed from all his sins in order to commit new sins; compared with the seduction of forming a new universe, all other sins, even the worst sins, seemed insignificant to him when he made love, he didn’t complain about sinking into and emerging from these sins, on the contrary, he derived a godlike pleasure from this devil worship that only the master of a universe could experience, a satisfaction that spread to every particle of his being.
At the end of an extraordinary adventure in which his body and soul were turned upside down, whatever he shed while making love could be replaced quickly, he returned to his former self, regained his sense of sin and shame, the morality of respect for the sacred; this was what made him so innocent, or “insane” according to Osman, that he could emerge from the most frightful sins without even a scratch on his soul, that he inhabited two different universes and had two different souls without damaging himself.
A sane person couldn’t experience this, or if he did, there would be a wound in his depths from which he could never recover, but Hikmet Bey had no such wound; the wounds he did have were not the result of his own actions but of the actions of others.
When they returned wearily to life, breathing irregularly, and once again perceived their surroundings, the world, life, the light coming in through the window faded, that phosphorescent light was replaced by a broken redness.
Hikmet Bey embraced Hediye gratefully and lovingly whispered the sentence he uttered each time they finished making love, and which he believed sincerely.
“Hediye, you’re the only truth I have.”
Even though Hediye was only allowed to be pampered in bed, she snuggled against Hikmet Bey without getting pampered, feeling the deep love she felt for her master, perhaps her reward was these loving embraces and caresses after lovemaking rather than the maddening lovemaking itself; at those moments she could suppress, even if only a little, the resentment that of late had become part of her and that she was never allowed to express, she could forget, briefly, the wounds of her grave defeat in a struggle in which she didn’t have the right to make any moves.
Much later, when Hikmet Bey was experiencing the deep regret of not having considered that Hediye also had feelings, of not having been interested in her feelings, of not noticing the horrible desperation that grew daily like a pitch-black pearl in the woman next to him, he said to Osman, “Perh
aps the truest love is the love of a slave.”
This small woman, who in dark cellars, slave markets, and harem rooms had lost her pride, identity, personality, desires, the right to be pampered, the desire to see the reflection of her existence on life, who had been taught through the curses, threats, and insults of slave merchants, odalisques, and eunuchs how to be oppressed, how not to exist, how not to be recognized, who had learned that not doing what she wanted but doing what she was told was a virtue; ever since Dilevser had started visiting the mansion, she had suffered only because the man she loved had become distant from her, and felt it soon might be possible that he would never touch her again, but she didn’t make it a matter of pride, never carried the shadow of being defeated, abandoned, seeing someone else chosen instead of her, that combined with the suffering of love, she carried this terrible sorrow alone and in silence.
Apart from the resentment in her eyes, which no one condescended to see, no sign of her pain was reflected to other people; if someone were to look into her eyes carefully, they would see that the silent loneliness and resentment was heavier and more traumatic than any of the other pains that had been spoken of.
She was from the class of people for whom suffering could even be considered insolence, she was a concubine, a slave, but she still could have found a comrade, a friend with whom to share the loneliness that deepened with her suffering, to console her and lighten the burden of her pain; there were a lot of people who were prepared to listen to her, if for no other reason than to have something to gossip about, but she possessed an inborn nobility that even the slave markets, the eunuchs who beat her couldn’t take away, couldn’t erase from her soul.
She found any kind of complaining unbecoming, sometimes when she felt very suffocated, when her loneliness and hopelessness became too heavy to carry, she withdrew to her room without letting anyone notice, leaned against the window, and looked out, at the garden, the trees, the coolness of the window on her forehead allowed her to forget her thoughts for a few minutes, and she accepted this brief moment without any thoughts as a gift from God; she couldn’t even seek consolation, her greatest wish was to have a little time, just a few minutes, without thinking, because she was unable to free herself from her thoughts, her sorrow even haunted her dreams, she woke several times during the night, always with the same pain, and with the thought that Hikmet Bey loved that girl.
Her love for Hikmet Bey was the only thing she had in life; it wasn’t that Hikmet Bey loved another woman that made her so desolate, but that another woman coming to this house could result in her being sent away, what made her so sad was the horror of knowing she would lose forever the only thing she possessed.
They had taken everything from her, they’d left her almost nothing that belonged to her, she’d given it all up without too much sadness, now she was preparing herself to give Hikmet Bey up, she felt this was inevitable; she wouldn’t resist, but she wouldn’t give up her pain, perhaps for the first time she would keep something that belonged to her, that pain; because she knew that this pain would be the only memory of Hikmet Bey that would remain with her.
She also learned the degree to which pain isolated a person.
She couldn’t bear seeing anyone, she looked at people with a distant gaze, as if she was looking at a wall, she didn’t take part in any conversation; everyone except Hikmet Bey distressed her soul, their existence disturbed her; she would wait silently outside the library for Hikmet Bey to come home, or if he was at home, to emerge from the library.
She felt something akin to happiness when Hikmet Bey embraced her after making love, she nestled against him gently for fear of interrupting these moments, she didn’t even move as she wished he would utter that magical sentence.
“Hediye, you are the only truth in my life.”
Sometimes she dreamed this was true, even though she knew she was deceiving herself when she thought that, at those times a smile appeared on her beautiful face, then that smile disappeared and the resentment returned to her eyes, and remained there.
As it grew dark, Hikmet Bey realized he was hungry, he hadn’t eaten lunch.
Hediye wouldn’t let anyone else serve him, she rushed downstairs, prepared a tray under the mocking gazes of the servants, and brought it up to him.
Hikmet Bey had already dressed, Hediye knew that for Hikmet Bey to have dressed was a sign that their relationship had turned into something else, she felt her heart sink, but the expression on her face didn’t change. Even for Hikmet Bey to have his meal in the bedroom with her was something she was grateful for.
She placed the tray on the round table in the corner, pulled up a chair for Hikmet Bey, lit the lamps, and retreated into a corner.
Hikmet Bey sat hurriedly and started to eat greedily, praising the taste of the food. With the merciless selfishness of a master, he didn’t even notice that Hediye wasn’t eating, as his stomach became full, his mind drifted to other thoughts and there was a faraway look in his eyes.
At one point, though it wasn’t clear whether he was speaking to himself or to Hediye, he said, “They even shot the pigs.” Then he added:
“Is it time to leave this place?”
Hediye didn’t understand the part about pigs, but “leaving this place” made her heart jump, to leave this place, to be far from that ugly duck who came and leafed through the books every day, to move to other lands, was such a magnificent dream, but it was just a dream, she realized this immediately after she experienced that little wave of joy. But still, this didn’t stop her from thinking about how nice this would be, from adding this to the dreams she had when she was alone.
19
Ragıp Bey counted how many of them there were with an indifferent curiosity; he was a bit startled when he saw the first one, but after the tenth he was hardly aware of what he was counting, when he passed the last one in Eminönü, he’d counted forty-seven of them; what he was counting was executed mutineers hanging from gallows that had been erected from Sultanahmet to Eminönü, all in white shrouds, their death sentences written on large sheets of paper that had been pinned to their shrouds, their necks twisted and elongated, their bodies turning on the ends of the ropes in the wind.
These were the ones who had been found guilty in the first hearing, there were more of them to follow, Istanbul would become accustomed to these white-shrouded dead dangling on ropes hung from a tripod of logs, would even forget that these were dead people. Like Ragıp Bey, the city was at first be spooked by this and then grew accustomed to it.
The gallows and the dead became a part of Istanbul, turned into a kind of horrifying entertainment around which a few street children and idlers gathered and which old women passed muttering prayers.
Ragıp Bey didn’t feel even the slightest pity for these people who’d been hanged, he only felt the kind of disgust he felt when a leech or a worm touched his body, disgust at what they’d done and how they’d died, these dead meant nothing more than this to him; if he’d been the one who had to decide what was to be done with these mutineers, he wouldn’t have had the slightest hesitation to condemn them to death, the only difference was that he would have preferred for them to be shot, indeed he might even have done it himself.
When he passed the last corpse hanging from a gallows, he simply forgot them; for him they were not worth remembering; when he entered the tekke in Unkapanı, he felt a painful weariness in every part of his body.
Before setting out he’d thought he could go to Dilara Hanım on his first night back in Istanbul, but events hadn’t unfolded the way he’d expected, it took days for the officers to send the soldiers who’d surrendered to prison, to send the wounded to hospitals, to station units in various parts of Istanbul, to distribute new ammunition, to count the bullets and the food in the warehouses.
When everything was finally organized and leave was granted, he went to the ministry of war to report on his unit, then
hired a carriage, but he didn’t tell the driver to go to Dilara Hanım’s house, he gave the name of the tekke where his mother and wife were.
He could have gone directly to Dilara Hanım without seeing them, but he realized that if he did he would always be distressed and remorseful; despite his longing and his impatient desire, he decided to go to the tekke first so he could be at ease when he went to Dilara Hanım.
He found Sheikh Efendi wandering alone among the graves by the Golden Horn. The smells of seaweed, gunpowder, death, and everblooming roses mingled with each other. The Sheikh greeted Ragıp Bey as if he’d been expecting him.
“Welcome.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency.”
“You’ve been through some difficult times, how are you?”
“I’m fine, everything is going well, I might be a bit tired, but I’m used to that.”
They started to walk together along the shore of the Golden Horn. Occasionally Sheikh Efendi stood next to a grave, looked at the flowers that had been placed on the grave, brushed the dirt off the stones with his hands. Ragıp Bey was surprised to see that his hands were still clean after he touched the dirt.
“Soldiers are beating hodjas on the streets.”
Ragıp Bey made a face.
“I’ve heard that too, it bothered me a bit. But they need to realize that they have to stay out of sight for a while. The soldiers have just been in battle, they’ve seen the comrades next to them, their commanders get shot, it’s not easy for them to stay calm under these circumstances, they see the hodjas as responsible for this, of course when I say hodja I’m not talking about scholars like you, but some of the mullahs bit off more than they could chew, they caused soldiers to kill soldiers.”
Sheikh Efendi stroked his beard as he listened to Ragıp Bey.