I Will Never See the World Again

by Ahmet Altan

  Also by Ahmet Altan

  Endgame

  Like a Sword Wound

  First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2019

  Copyright © Ahmet Altan, 2019

  Translation copyright © Yasemin Çongar, 2019

  Foreword copyright © Philippe Sands, 2019

  The following essays have previously been published in slightly different forms: “The Novelist Who Wrote His Own Destiny” as “I Will Never See This World Again” in the New York Times on February 28, 2018; “The Writer’s Paradox” in the winter 2017 issue of the Author, the journal of the Society of Authors in the UK.

  The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Altan, Ahmet, author. | Çongar, Yasemin, 1966- translator. | Sands, Philippe, 1960- writer of foreword.

  Title: I will never see the world again : the memoir of an imprisoned writer / Ahmet Altan ; translated from the Turkish by Yasemin Çongar ; foreword Philippe Sands.

  Description: New York : Other Press, 2019. | “First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2019.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019017340 | ISBN 9781590519929 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635420005 (Ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Altan, Ahmet—Trials, litigation, etc. | Journalism—Turkey | Political crimes and offenses—Turkey. | Turkey—Politics and government—1980-Classification: LCC PL248.A525 A6 2019 | DDC 894/.358303 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019017340

  Ebook ISBN 9781635420005

  v5.4

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Ahmet Altan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by Philippe Sands

  Translator’s Note

  A Single Sentence

  The First Night in the Cage

  The Mirror and the Doctor

  The Teacher

  The Cemetery of Pink Folders

  Cheating

  Encounter with Time

  Voyage Around My Cell

  The Dream

  Serial Killer

  Meryem

  The Novelist Who Wrote His Own Destiny

  The Reckoning

  The Judge’s Concern

  Wood Sprites

  The Notice

  Handcuffs

  The Bird

  The Writer’s Paradox

  FOREWORD

  I first met Ahmet Altan in the spring of 2014, at a gathering in Istanbul. The city has long been special to me, as the place where I fell in love thirty years ago, drinking mint tea at a small cafe by the Ortaköy Mosque in the shadow of the Bosphorus Bridge, with the woman I would marry. That spring, Ahmet delivered the first Mehmet Ali Birand Lecture, a now annual event organized by press freedom group P24 to honor the memory of a renowned Turkish journalist. I appreciated Ahmet’s lecture, and immediately liked him. He spoke with passion and courage, intelligence and humor on the writer’s place in a decent society. Soon we became friends and were often in touch, seeing each other in London and Istanbul.

  Four years after Ahmet and I met, in the spring of 2018, I was invited to give the same annual lecture in the same building: the splendid nineteenth-century pile that is the Swedish Consulate General in Beyoğlu on the European side of Istanbul. Ahmet was invited but not able to attend; by then he had been in prison for 590 days. His crime? To speak a few innocuous words on a television program in the aftermath of the failed 2016 coup, which were interpreted as treasonous by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government.

  President Erdoğan’s crackdown had left Turkey languishing near the bottom of the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. The situation was bad and likely to get worse, even if there was a sense that President Erdoğan’s position was not entirely secure in forthcoming elections. The economy was suffering; tourists were staying away. The atmosphere at the Swedish consulate on that spring night in 2018 was one of grim resolve.

  My lecture was attended by writers and journalists yet to be arrested. Murat Sabuncu, the editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet newspaper who had been sentenced in April 2018 to seven-and-a-half years on terror charges but released on bail pending appeal, introduced the proceedings. His speech was an impassioned salute to the many journalists who had been arrested.

  I dedicated my lecture to Ahmet. “We know how words are apt to be interpreted in different ways,” I said, explaining a point of connection between lawyer and writer, “and we know too that that is their beauty and their danger.” The dangerous words spoken by “my dear, absent friend” caused a judge to rule that Ahmet, who was sixty-eight at the time, would spend the rest of his life in prison. “We will never be pardoned and we will die in a prison cell,” Ahmet wrote in the New York Times, after being sentenced, from his prison cell.

  The following day was spent with Yasemin Çongar, who runs P24 and is Ahmet’s close friend. We traveled together to the maximum-security prison at Silivri, a two-hour drive from Istanbul. This was where Ahmet was incarcerated, along with his younger brother Mehmet, an economist fired from his position at Istanbul University, where he had taught for thirty years. Yasemin has not been allowed to visit Ahmet – she is permitted ten minutes on the telephone every fortnight – and nor had any foreigner. I was the first allowed in to see Ahmet, because I was acting as a lawyer for the Altan brothers at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

  The facility was huge and forbidding, holding 11,000 prisoners. Accompanied by a Turkish lawyer, I passed through at least eight security checks and was taken by minibus to Block 9. I was not subjected to the full body search, but was required to have my eyes scanned, to be integrated into “the system.” One of the guards was friendly and wanted to talk soccer. We had a short, happy conversation about Arsene Wenger, Mesut Özil (who, much to my sadness, would soon be photographed handing over an Arsenal shirt to President Erdoğan), and what it meant to be Turkish. He had worked there for four years and never encountered a foreigner. “You are the first,” he said with a smile.

  I met first with Mehmet, who was genial and gentle and had twinkly eyes and a full Karl Marx beard. He was thrilled to talk in French, surprising me with ideas about globalization and the English Luddite movement, on which he had ample time to write. He shared a cell with two other men, one of whom was a former student. Mehmet was perplexed by his situation, and the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. A life sentence, he said, is “like living without clocks, in endless time.” (Three months later, in the summer of 2018, Mehmet was released.)

  Mehmet left. I waited, then Ahmet arrived in our glass-paneled cell. He looked fit. “Weights!” he chortled. We spent most of our thirty minutes roaring with laughter. “No,” he said, Turkey had not hit rock bottom yet. “We are a nation of bungee jumpers, and just before we hit the ground we somehow manage to bounce up again.” We talked about food, politics, the quality of the grass in m
y garden in London, and my neighbor, the English magistrate who signed the arrest warrant for Senator Pinochet back in the autumn of 1998. Ahmet marveled again at the idea of justice being dispensed by a judge who was independent. “A miracle,” he said.

  What did he want his readers to know? I asked. We talked of the judge who sentenced him, a man of “swollen eyelids.” Ahmet knew I had a special interest in judges, especially those of the less independent kind. Later I would learn that the name of the man who sentenced Ahmet to life imprisonment for no good reason was Judge Kemal Selçuk Yalçin.

  “Did you ever catch his eye?” I inquired.

  “Just once: I am the powerful one now, his eyes said, and the power I can exercise will crush you,” Ahmet said.

  We talked too about his prison memoir, I Will Never See the World Again, the remarkable volume which, by a miracle, you hold now in your hands and are about to read. “A rite of passage for any writer to spend time in prison,” Ahmet told me. “And you, you will never be a real writer!” We roared with laughter again.

  It was quite something to spend a little time with a man sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, on trumped-up charges, and who was still able to laugh about it. And something else to leave the prison cell at Silivri with an unexpected feeling of elation, motivated by the sheer towering greatness of Ahmet Altan and the human spirit.

  Philippe Sands

  London

  September 27, 2018

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The essays in this book reached me one by one over a period of seven months between November 2017 and May 2018. They arrived among the personal notes Ahmet had given to our lawyers during their visits to him at Silivri Prison.

  Each piece was handwritten on white sheets of paper in blue ink. I would read each piece, read it once again, then immediately type it out on my computer fighting hard not to be overwhelmed with emotion. Once I had the text on the screen before me, I began translating. Typing and then immediately translating each essay in one sitting immersed me in what Ahmet was experiencing, and allowed me to feel his courage and strength at a time when I wasn’t allowed to see him.

  In the book, Ahmet quotes widely from other authors. In most cases he does so from memory, since in prison he doesn’t have access to these texts. Wherever his quotes aren’t verbatim, I have remained loyal to Ahmet’s memory – to the way his mind has reshaped these sentences in a cell years and miles away from his encounter with them. These recollected quotes are italicized and not sourced. As for quotes from the books Ahmet actually read in prison, these sources are cited on the page.

  A Single Sentence

  I woke up. The doorbell was ringing. I looked at the digital clock by my side, the numbers were blinking 05:42.

  “It’s the police,” I said.

  Like all dissidents in this country, I went to bed expecting the ring of the doorbell at dawn.

  I knew one day they would come for me. Now they had.

  I had even prepared a set of clothes in an overnight bag so that I would be ready for the police raid and what would follow.

  A pair of loose black linen trousers tied with a band inside the waist so there would be no need for a belt, black ankle socks, comfortable soft trainers, a light cotton T-shirt and a dark-colored shirt to be worn over it.

  I put on my “raid uniform” and went to the door.

  Through the peephole I could see six policemen on the landing, sporting the vests worn by counterterrorism teams during house raids, the acronym “TEM” stamped in large letters on their chests.

  I opened the door.

  “These are search and arrest orders,” they said as they entered, leaving the door open.

  They told me there was a second arrest order for my brother Mehmet Altan, who lived in the same building. A team had waited at his door, but no one had answered.

  When I asked which number apartment they had gone to, it turned out they had rung the wrong bell.

  I phoned Mehmet.

  “We have guests,” I said. “Open the door.”

  As I hung up, one of the policemen reached for my phone. “I’ll have that,” he said, and took it.

  The six spread out into the apartment and began their search.

  Dawn arrived. The sun rose behind the hills with its rays spreading purple, scarlet and lavender waves across the sky, resembling a white rose petal opening.

  A peaceful September morning was stirring, unaware of what was happening inside my home.

  While the policemen searched the apartment, I put the kettle on.

  “Would you like some tea?” I asked.

  They said they would not.

  “It is not a bribe,” I said, imitating my late father, “you can drink some.”

  Exactly forty-five years ago, on a morning just like this one, they had raided our house and arrested my father.

  My father asked the police if they would like some coffee. When they declined, he laughed and said, “It is not a bribe, you can drink some.”

  What I was experiencing was not déjà vu. Reality was repeating itself. This country moves through history too slowly for time to go forward, so it folds back on itself instead.

  Forty-five years had passed and time had returned to the same morning.

  During the space of that morning which lasted forty-five years, my father had died and I had grown old, but the dawn and the raid were unchanged.

  Mehmet appeared at the open door with the smile on his face I always find reassuring. He was surrounded by policemen.

  We said farewell. The police took Mehmet away.

  I poured myself tea. I put muesli in a bowl and poured milk over it. I sat in an armchair to drink my tea, eat my muesli and wait for the police to complete their search.

  The apartment was quiet.

  No sound could be heard other than the police as they moved things around.

  They filled thick plastic bags with the two decades-old laptops I had written some of my novels on and therefore could not bring myself to throw away, old-fashioned diskettes that had accumulated over the years and my current laptop.

  “Let’s go,” they said.

  I took the bag, to which I had added a change of underwear and a couple of books.

  We left the building. We got into the police car that was waiting at the gate.

  I sat with my bag on my lap. The door closed on me.

  It is said that the dead do not know that they are dead. According to Anatolian mythology, once the corpse is placed in the grave and covered with dirt and the funeral crowd has begun to disperse, the dead person also tries to get up and go home, only to realize when he hits his head on the coffin lid that he has died.

  When the door closed, my head hit the coffin lid.

  I could not open the door of that car and get out.

  I could not return home.

  Never again would I be able to kiss the woman I love, embrace my kids, meet with my friends, walk the streets. I would not have my room to write in, my machine to write with, my library to reach for. I would not be able to listen to a violin concerto or go on a trip or browse in bookstores or buy bread from a bakery or gaze on the sea or an orange tree or smell the scent of flowers, the grass, the rain, the earth. I would not be able to go to a cinema. I would not be able to eat eggs with sausage or drink a glass of wine or go to a restaurant and order fish. I would not be able to watch the sunrise. I would not be able to call anyone on the phone. No one would be able to call me on the phone. I would not be able to open a door by myself. I would not wake up again in a room with curtains.

  Even my name was about to change.

  Ahmet Altan would be erased and replaced with the name on the official certificate, Ahmet Hüsrev Altan.

  When they asked for my name, I would say “Ahmet Hüsrev Altan.” When they asked where I lived, I woul
d give them the number of a cell.

  From now on, others would decide what I did, where I stood, where I slept, what time I got up, what my name was.

  I would always be receiving orders: “stop,” “walk,” “enter,” “raise your arms,” “take off your shoes,” “don’t talk.”

  The police car was speeding along.

  It was the first day of a twelve-day religious holiday. Most people in the city, including the prosecutor who had ordered my arrest, had left on vacation.

  The streets were deserted.

  The policeman next to me lit a cigarette, then held the packet out to me.

  I shook my head no, smiling.

  “I only smoke,” I said, “when I am nervous.”

  Who knows where this sentence came from. Nowhere in my mind had I chosen to make such a declaration. It was a sentence that put an unbridgeable distance between itself and reality. It ignored reality, ridiculed it, even as I was being transformed into a pitiful bug who could not even open the door of the car he was in, who had lost his right to decide his own future, whose very name was being changed; a bug entangled in the web of a poisonous spider.

  It was as if someone inside me, a person whom I could not exactly call “I” but who nevertheless spoke with my voice, through my mouth, and who was therefore a part of me, said as he was being transported in a police car to an iron cage that he only smoked when he was “nervous.”

  That single sentence suddenly changed everything.

  It divided reality in two, like a Samurai sword that in a single movement cuts through a silk scarf thrown up in the air.

  On one side of this reality was a body made of flesh, bone, blood, muscle and nerve that was trapped. On the other side was a mind that did not care about that body and made fun of what would happen to it, a mind that looked from above at what was happening and at what was yet to happen, that believed itself untouchable and that was, therefore, untouchable.

  I was like Julius Caesar, who, as soon as he was informed that a large Gallic army was on its way to relieve the besieged occupants of Alesia, had two high walls built – one around the castle to prevent those inside from leaving, and one around his troops to prevent those outside from entering.