The Black Rose of Halfeti

by Nazli Eray

  “Welcome,” he said. He held out his hand to me.

  I reached out and shook his thin, bony hand.

  “Well, let me go then,” said the Dream Woman.

  “Don’t leave, stay a while,” I said. “Is the doctor ill? Why is he lying in bed?”

  “He’s sick,” said the Dream Woman. “His mind is confused. He confuses everything.”

  The doctor was silent. He was staring directly at me.

  “My letter,” he said. “Did you get my letter?”

  “I did,” I said.

  At that moment the bedroom door opened. His attendant, Müveddet, came inside.

  “Doctor Bey, what’s going on? Are you seeing ghosts?” she asked.

  “I’m not seeing ghosts. It’s all real. You go outside,” said the doctor.

  “I came to give you your medicine.”

  Müveddet filled a glass with water and gave the doctor his medicine. I realized that she didn’t see us.

  “Now just lie down nicely there, Doctor Bey,” she said. “Close your eyes and go to sleep. There’s still a long time till morning.”

  She went outside.

  The doctor turned to me.

  “I’ve fallen into their hands,” he said. “She’s an even simpler woman than the character Solfasol. Snoopy. A gossip . . .”

  He was quiet for a minute.

  “I want to say something,” he said. “There’s a home for Night People in Tunalı Hilmi Avenue. Come there. A woman runs it. It’s a proper, well-run place. I’m there now.”

  “I’ll try to find it,” I said.

  “I’m expecting you there, I’m expecting you!” said the doctor.

  He was excited.

  The Dream Woman gave me a little signal.

  “The light is blinking. Come on, we’re leaving,” she said.

  The two of us left together through the cockpit doorway with the dark grey velvet curtain.

  She looked at my feet.

  “Your shoes are very beautiful!” she said. “That old man is in love with you. What are you going to do?”

  “I really don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s hard.”

  “Yes.”

  The curtain had closed behind us. I felt like I had been suddenly picked up and tossed down into the middle of silk pillows.

  It must be nearly morning. I looked for the Dream Woman, but she was nowhere to be seen. The sound of the call to prayer filled my room. The call was coming from the Şehidiye Mosque.

  What I had seen must surely have been a dream. But I couldn’t actually figure out whether it was a dream or not. It seemed real. I had lived it. Slowly I buried my head in the pillow and fell into a deep sleep.

  THE BLACK ROSES OF HALFETI

  I was slowly opening my eyes. I felt the presence of someone else in my room. I opened my eyes and looked around.

  The Dream Woman was sitting at the foot of my bed.

  “Oh, I woke you up,” she said. “Forgive me. I tried not to make any noise, but you woke up. Those latticework shoes of yours with the thin straps are really nice. There are tiny little stones on them . . .”

  “Take them for yourself,” I said. “You like them. Take them”

  “No,” said the Dream Woman. “They look so chic on you. I’ll get the same ones . . . Do you know, these shoes would go well in dreams?”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “Every detail you see in a dream is important.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Even the smallest detail seen in a dream is important.”

  “Did we go into the old doctor’s dream last night?” I asked.

  “Was he a doctor? Yes, of course we did,” she said.

  “Were we really in the dream?”

  “We were,” she said. “How real can a dream be . . . Well, we were, insofar as a dream can be real.”

  “What did you think of that dream? It’s the first time for me, you know,” I said.

  “It was an ordinary dream,” she said. “I told you, remember, that I go in and out of a lot of dreams like that. In other words, it was nothing special.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “I’m leaving,” said the Dream Woman. “I’ll come again.”

  “Are you going to a dream?”

  “No. This is my time off. I want to take a walk around Mardin, see the markets,” she said. “We’ll see one another again. I’ll come to you.”

  She left the room. I stood up and collected myself.

  What interesting things had been happening to me ever since I set foot in Mardin. The black roses of Halfeti were vibrantly alive in the glass vase. My eyes sank into their velvet depths for a while. Suddenly I thought of the seer stone that King Darius had given me. I had forgotten it in my purse.

  I searched through the bag and found the smooth, gleaming stone. It was so beautiful.

  I slowly rotated it in my hand and looked at it.

  IZMIR

  “Your ankle is fine,” said the doctor.

  He was examining my ankle.

  “You can leave the hospital now. You can relax at home. With a cane, you’ll be able to walk. There’s still some time before the cast comes off,” he said.

  I was unable to react happily to the news. I didn’t know what to say. There was nowhere I could go with my leg in a cast in Izmir, no home where I could stay.

  I sat on my bed in that ward without saying anything.

  Mehdi the orderly said:

  “What happened? All of a sudden your thoughts carried you away.”

  I was used to the ward. I was able to relax comfortably in bed. Outside was unknown, an enigma for me. The only connection I had to life in Izmir was Dr. Ayhan. He had done everything he could for me, what more could I ask?

  I had to turn back and return, and if it were a dream, I had to wake up and come to myself.

  But everything seemed real and concrete in this slice of time in which I was so strangely stuck. This Izmir, this hospital ward, this young doctor were just about as real as any number of parts of the life that I led in Ankara. I really couldn’t figure out what to do at all. I was imprisoned in a slice of time belonging to the doctor’s youth. I couldn’t get out of this world. I couldn’t say anything to anyone. I couldn’t use my cell phone. It didn’t work. I had tried it a few times.

  Mehdi said:

  “I’ll get you ready to go really quickly. You don’t have anything with you, anyway.”

  “Please let me leave before it gets dark,” I said.

  The doctor was scrutinizing me.

  “Where are you going to go?” he asked.

  “I don’t have any place to go in this city.”

  “You had said that . . .”

  “Maybe I’ll stay in a pension until my foot gets straightened out.”

  “Something like that is impossible here,” said the doctor. “A single woman can’t stay alone in a pension!”

  I was left speechless. I couldn’t focus on anything.

  “I’ll talk to my mother,” said the doctor. “I have an elderly mother. Maybe she can take you in as a guest for a few days. I think there’s an extra room in the house. Let me talk to her. They should release you downstairs.”

  I looked with gratitude at the doctor’s eyes. He took such interest in a patient. He didn’t know who I was, where I came from, what I was doing in Izmir, anything at all.

  Just like that, like the man who fell to earth, I had fallen into Izmir one early evening in 1949.

  I thought to myself, “Dr. Ayhan’s world. I’ll be able to recognize him very well. But what good will that do? I don’t live in 1949 Izmir! These aren’t the years of my life.”

  It was a crazy thing, this 1949 Izmir, and young, handsome Dr. Ayhan there in front of me.

  “Well, since I can’t get out of this world, I might as well live it to the full,” I said.

  Suddenly I realized that I had been talking out loud. The dumpy attendant Mehdi was staring at me very closely.

  �
��You can’t leave this world,” he said. “I realized that. I realized that you don’t belong to this world, to these years. It was clear from the lighter you gave me. It’s like you came from a space ship. From a flying saucer,” he said. “The other day some villagers on the Narlıdere road saw a flying saucer. It was full of light. It dazzled their eyes and they fell down on the ground in fear. It’s like you came out from inside that and came around here . . .”

  “Help me get out of the bed,” I said. “I have to walk around on my foot. How do we get released from here?”

  “I’ll bring the release paper to you,” said Mehdi. “You just sit here and wait for me. It’ll take a while. Forms and things . . . Stretch out on the bed. Don’t let your ankle get swollen.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I stretched out on the bed.

  KING DARIUS

  Someone tapped on my door. I woke up, and sat up amid the silk pillows. The sun had been shining for some time. The inside of my room at the Zinciriye Hotel was brightly lit. A bright, clear light was filtering through the thin embroidered curtains. Someone knocked gently at the door again.

  “I’m coming!” I called out. I slipped something on and opened the door of my room.

  Alop the slave was waiting outside the door.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I woke you up.”

  “No problem. I had to wake up. I must have been tired . . .”

  Alop the slave said:

  “King Darius is overcome with excitement. That’s why he sent me to you so early. They’re going to get something at the palace this morning. You’re supposed to know all about it.”

  I immediately remembered.

  “Television!” I said. “King Darius wanted a television. Let’s go and get it right away. You wait for me outside. I’ll get dressed and come out.”

  Alop put a handful of gold coins in my hand.

  “King Darius sent these,” he said. “For expenses.”

  I looked at the coins he had stuck in my hand. They were pure gold coins. They had King Darius’s portrait in relief on them.

  “This is so much money!” I shouted. “What we’re going to get doesn’t cost this much.”

  “That’s okay, just take them,” said the slave. “After all, King Darius already sent them.”

  I took the gold coins and put them in a pocket of my purse.

  “Wait for me.”

  A little later Alop the slave and I were in a shop that sold electronic equipment, in the center of the city.

  The shop owner said:

  “Ma’am. You want something that’s the latest model. You know, one of those thin ones. They haven’t come to Mardin yet. But we have very nice models. We’ll give you a good price. If you want a console, I can give you a discount on it. If you want it mounted on the wall, we have a service that does that.”

  “Oh, this is nice,” I said. “How large is it?”

  “It’s a 104-centimeter screen.”

  “Do you have one a little larger?”

  “Here, this is 122 centimeters,” said the man.

  “There’s not going to be any problem, is there? It’s going to a very important place . . .”

  “Please, ma’am,” said the shopkeeper. “This is Mardin Arçelik here . . . There won’t be any problem. We’ll bring it right over and set it up, set up the antenna. You give me the address. We’re including the console, aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The console with the glass.”

  I paused for a minute.

  “It’s going to the ruins of Dara,” I said.

  “Fine. I’m sending it right away. I’ll send two men with it.”

  Alop the slave said:

  “I’ll go with them and show them the way.”

  I paid the money and bought the 122-centimeter plasma TV and the console.

  “I’ll put it in the van in a few minutes,” said the shopkeeper. “The men will do the settings and connect it right up.”

  Alop the slave said:

  “I’ll keep an eye on them.”

  “Learn everything very well,” I said to Alop the slave. “How the remotes work, where you press the buttons. Learn everything. The color settings . . .”

  “We’ll explain it to him, ma’am, don’t worry,” said the man.

  Alop the slave got into the front of the van that pulled up. The two young men crowded in beside him. They hit the gas in the van and went off.

  I was full of curiosity and excitement. I wondered how King Darius would feel when the television was set up and working.

  I thought: “Let’s not have him watch the regular television programs. I have to show King Darius some interesting things. He’ll probably be amazed. His visual world has been limited to only the natural world.”

  From there I descended into the market that went down underground. I was still thinking about that ring with the purple stone. If I could find it, I would buy it.

  WORLDS STILL THOUGHT TO EXIST

  The four old men in the reception room prepared for the Night People in an apartment in Tunalı Hilmi Avenue were deeply engrossed in conversation. The gramophone was turned off, and Mermaid Ephtalia’s voice was silenced. Everything was calm as the night continued outside. The few solitary people of the night were in the street, and the affairs of the night continued on in the darkness. A whistle like a watchman’s whistle sounded every now and then. The night had spread out over the city, with all its freedom and also with all its restrictions and repression, going on naturally with perhaps absolutely no awareness that it was the most mysterious thing in the world.

  The four old men in the night were each part of the night, and the approaching darkness, actually, but they didn’t know this; maybe they sensed it, maybe the strength they expended to be tied to life and escape from their beds, to experience the night and freedom came from this.

  Hıfzi Bey told them about old times. He told them about the days when some of the streets in Ankara were mud, the government office where he worked, the first time he saw his wife, and how excited he was when he got engaged.

  “You’re tied to your wife,” said Dr. Ayhan. “You love her.”

  Hıfzi Bey thought for a minute.

  “Habit,” he said. “A habit you get used to over the years. I’m used to her quiet, interior sobbing when her feelings are hurt, the way she snores when she sleeps on her back in the bedroom, the way she carefully waters a row of plants by the window, her fears, her worries; I’m used to all of them. I couldn’t change tracks when the time was right and make the effort to run off with my secretary, who was in love with me, and set up a love nest. I just stayed there, spineless, with no courage. But that girl was so pretty and she loved me so much.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “She vanished into my memories, what do you expect?” said Hıfzi Bey.

  “She left me. Abandoned me. I was destroyed. I went after her but I couldn’t do a thing. The one at home was continuously crying.

  “Between the two of them my life was poisoned. I have years I never lived; I want them back.”

  “You have years you never lived . . . That’s a terrible phrase,” said the doctor.

  “Yes, I have years I never lived,” said Hıfzi Bey. “I want them back! It’s as though I didn’t live for fifteen years. If they give those years back to me, I’d be sixty-nine years old. I’d be really young!”

  “I have years I haven’t lived too,” said Şevki Bey.

  Paying no attention to the fact that he was wearing a diaper, he threw one leg over the other as he sat in the armchair.

  “I have twenty years I never lived. I didn’t live for twenty years. Because I wasn’t aware how life flows by. If they give me back those twenty years, I’ll be sixty-two years old. I’ll be young!” he shouted.

  Mustafa Bey jumped in.

  “I have thirty years I haven’t lived, friends! At least thirty years. Years when I didn’t know what life was, when I didn’t comprehend that
a person’s days were numbered, when I just wasted my time . . . If they give me back those thirty years, I’d be around forty-eight now. Life would begin all over again for me. What an incredible thing!” he shouted. “I want my years back! Pay me back those years, give them to me!”

  The doctor said:

  “I have a lot of years I didn’t live too.

  “Maybe I’ve just started to live. Now I’m just thinking that I started to live when I fell in love with that woman. If they give me back my years, I’ll be a young man. A young doctor,” he said. “I’d be at the age I was years ago, when I worked in the Konak Maternity Hospital in Izmir. The world would lie before me!”

  The four old men were all excited.

  “I wonder if they can give us those years back?” they were asking. “It’s our right to get those years back. Where can we apply? Where can we learn whether or not we can get those years back?”

  The chubby blonde entered the room.

  “What’s going on? What’s happening?” she asked in curiosity. “What’s all this excitement? What are you discussing?”

  “We want the years we couldn’t live back,” said Şevki Bey. “The years we didn’t notice, the years we lived without realizing their value . . .”

  “Who’s going to give them back to you?” asked the woman. “Is there any such thing? Unlived years . . . what does that mean?”

  “Times that were just frittered away from our lives,” said the doctor. “Years we lived without realizing them, years we were living and breathing . . .”

  “Years taken out of our hands,” said Şevki Bey. “Years spent for nothing, in other words.”

  The blonde women was thinking it over.

  “Unlived years,” she murmured. “There are years like that in my life too . . . the years I took care of my sick mother . . . years I was married to a man I didn’t love . . .”

  “How many years were there, roughly?” asked Mustafa Bey. A little adding machine emerged from his pocket.

  The woman said:

  “How should I know? There were maybe twenty years altogether like that. That you could say were unlived. Years my husband beat me . . . bonds that took years away from my life . . . twenty, twenty-five years.”

  Mustafa Bey said:

  “Wait, let me calculate it. How old are you now?”

  “Fifty,” said the woman.