by Ahmet Altan
The policemen were distributing cheese sandwiches fresh from the freezer and small plastic bottles of water.
The sandwiches were frozen.
Then they opened the gates of our cages.
At the end of the corridor of cells there was an iron door; when you pushed it open, two sinks appeared.
There was no mirror above them, only the wall.
Like everyone else, I am so used to seeing my own reflection first thing in the morning that I looked straight ahead, expecting to see my face.
It had disappeared.
In that instant I felt as if I had crashed into the wall.
Like everyone else, I looked around, searching for myself.
I wasn’t there.
It was as if I had been erased from life, tossed away.
Looking at that bare wall drove home what it means to see your own reflection. However many thousands of times mirrors appear as a literary metaphor, the reality is more significant than a metaphor could ever be.
The mirror shows you to you, it confirms your being. The distance between you and the mirror creates a field that belongs only to you, a field that surrounds you, is yours, somewhere no one else can trespass.
Without a mirror, that field also disappears.
It feels like everyone and everything is sticking to you, crowding you.
You can see your hands, your arms, your legs, your feet, but not your face.
Without a face, all those arms, hands, feet, legs resemble the body of a half-ape–half-bird found in the Madagascar forests.
When your face has disappeared, you can’t even be sure if those hands and feet really belong to you.
In the cages there was no mirror, no piece of reflecting glass, no shiny surface.
Whoever had designed that place had done so knowingly. He must have thought that the people in that building undergoing fierce interrogation would break more easily having lost their faces.
Like me, everyone was searching for their face.
Some stared into the plastic water bottles, but the plastic did not reflect the light.
By simply putting away the mirrors, they had erased us from life.
I thought of Narcissus and the pool in Oscar Wilde’s story.
When Narcissus died, the sweet waters that had filled the pool in which he used to look at himself every day turned to tears.
The tears said to the pool, We do not wonder that you should mourn…he…would lie on your banks and look down at you…in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.
But I loved Narcissus because…in the mirror of his eyes I saw my own beauty mirrored, answered the pool.
Even a pool wants to look at itself, yet our ties to our selves were broken.
Even washing one’s own face was difficult without a reflection. When you raised your cupped palms that were filled with water to splash your face, there was a worry that you might miss altogether.
Under the sinks there was a large plastic barrel spilling over with used, crumpled pieces of dirty paper which were also scattered around on the floor.
Because it was a religious holiday, most of the cleaners were on leave, so empty paper towel rolls were not replaced with new ones, the floors were not cleaned and everywhere was filthy.
There were two toilets near the sink.
I had never seen a toilet like that.
It had wooden swinging doors like the bars in old Westerns. The top and the bottom parts of the door were not there.
There was a shower stall near the toilets. It too had swinging doors.
There was no place to hang your clothes.
When you took a shower, you were supposed to hang your clothes and towel over the swinging doors.
The floor was covered in thick gunk.
I was finally beginning to stink, so I gave in and took a shower. Because I didn’t dare to step barefoot on the floor, I washed myself with my socks on. Later, I discovered the difficulty of putting on dry clothes while wearing wet socks.
After we had washed our hands and faces we went back to our cages. We ate our frozen sandwiches and drank our bottles of water.
My cagemates and I began to talk.
All of the colonels in the lockup were sailors and all were classmates who had graduated the same year from the Navy War College.
The funny thing was that these men were not the coup plotters but the officers who had been appointed to replace those who had been arrested.
Then one of their classmates had pointed the finger at them.
It seems there was a huge epidemic of double-crossing in the armed forces in those days, with officers informing on each other without mercy.
When a friend of this group of officers had ratted on them, the police had rounded up all of the navy colonels who had graduated in the same year.
Most of them were staff colonels.
They were well educated; they all had PhDs, in a variety of subjects, and promising careers.
They were confused and uneasy but, being childhood friends, they turned our corridor into a military school dorm; they picked on each other, joked and laughed as their hands curled around the iron bars.
We were settling into a strange zone of laughter and agony as one by one their souls crystallized under pressure. In just an hour, the reticent, the joker, the neurotic, the thick-skinned and the ambitious all made an appearance.
Apparently, the one with the most brilliant career among them was the staff colonel who slept across the room from me. He had served abroad, traveled the world, finished first in all his missions and maneuvers, and just as he was waiting to be made general, found himself barefoot in a police holding cell.
He had nurtured big dreams, but all that changed in one night with the handcuffs they put around his wrists.
All the officers there had taken the same slap in the face, experienced the same jolt, but the one who lost most was the staff colonel because he had had the biggest dreams.
He grieved both for his hospitalized daughter and his future that was fast disappearing.
The submarine colonel, on the other hand, was a happy, carefree sort of chap. Though clever, he did not want to become a staff officer; that wasn’t his ambition.
“How is life in a submarine?” I asked him.
He laughed and said, “Worse than here.”
He was used to getting lost in enclosed spaces.
As the days passed, the subject of food began to dominate the conversation.
We were starving. In the mornings, they gave us a frozen sandwich, at noon, tinned peas, and at dinner, stuffed vine leaves, also tinned.
We were given no tea, no coffee, no cigarettes and no other food.
During the twelve days I stayed there we ate cheese sandwiches, tinned peas and stuffed vine leaves.
Truly, this was a slimming diet: I lost fifteen pounds in twelve days; others, depending on the time they had spent there, lost twenty, even thirty pounds.
We dreamed of food.
One day when the policemen opened the gates of the cages for us to walk up and down in the corridor, as we started pacing in a single row, I said, “Let’s each name the dish we miss most.”
The names of dishes began exploding in a cascade of fireworks. “Adana kebab,” “İskender kebab,” “white bean stew,” “fish and arugula,” “lahmadjun,” “pastrami,” “dumplings.”
It was as if we were devouring the names we recited – we shouted with such a huge appetite that it seemed we were living out some sort of food orgy. The name of each dish was followed by a “wow” of appreciation and desire.
After such joyful moments, a dead weight would descend on us. The cable of energy that fed a protective shield of childish games, jokes, teasing and happy memories was cut and reality seeped in:
We w
ere locked up in cages. Our futures did not look all that bright.
“But we didn’t do anything,” the staff colonel across from me said in a murmur. He was on vacation in Antalya with his family on the night of the coup, he told us once again.
The submarine colonel responded in a tone of indifference, “These guys would send us to prison first, then expel us from the military.”
The staff colonel objected:
“Why would they expel us? What did we do?”
These men had been in the military before they had even become adults, and the possibility of expulsion sent shivers down their spines.
I usually kept out of their conversations. I either read the musings of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on evil or daydreamed.
I repeated to myself the best-known, the most commonplace truth of life with utter respect for the cliché: “Time passes, everything changes.”
I remembered words from Elias Canetti: When you touch time with the tips of your fingers, it laughs all at once and scatters like dust.
Time did not laugh here.
It did not laugh even when I touched it with my fingertips.
But it was true that it turned into dust. I could feel it in my mouth, in my nose, in my throat. I chewed and swallowed each speck of dust.
Each speck of dust I swallowed confirmed the cliché: “Time passes.”
During one of those dead hours we heard a policeman shout:
“Get ready! You are going to the doctor’s.”
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“They’re taking us to the doctor’s so they can prove we weren’t tortured,” the young teacher said.
I was going to go out into the sun, into the light.
All at once, I became uneasy.
I didn’t want to go into the sun, into the light. The idea of leaving the cage frightened me.
Like a crab buried in mud, I had buried myself in the cage, in my daydreams and in time. I had made myself a nest there, away from the world.
Once I was out in the sun, in the light, in life again, this “nest” would be destroyed. I didn’t know if I would find the strength to rebuild it when I returned.
I would have stayed put in that cage if I could have done, but I had to move. I stood up with everyone else.
My linen trousers, without the cord around the waist, kept slipping down and exposing me. This was not an outfit in which I could socialize.
One of the colonels saw my dilemma.
“Let’s make you a belt,” he said.
“How would you manage to do that?”
He peeled the label off a plastic water bottle and, by twisting the paper, turned it into a short piece of string, which he put through the belt loops of my trousers and tied at the front.
The trousers stayed around my waist.
We exited the cells, walking between two rows of uniformed policemen, and made our way toward a bus with steel mesh covering its windows.
Perhaps no other scenario could make a person look more like a wretched criminal than being made to walk in a ragged human chain of wrinkled trousers, dirty undershirts, misshapen slippers, unkempt hair and untrimmed beards.
In the mayhem of this human effluent trying to adjust an agitated mess of strides to orders barked by the police, in the confusion brought about by failing to get used to this new situation and thus not knowing who you were, all the visible characteristics that made you you – your expressions, your gestures, your voice, your walk – were disappearing.
I could see how pitiful all of us looked in the midst of that grayish slurry.
We got on the bus. It grunted its way forward, passed through the rows of parked cars and left the Security Department’s yard, turned right and stopped in front of the hospital, which was just around the corner.
There was a tiny square near the hospital. A small crowd waited there under the scorching sun.
At once I saw in that crowd the faces I loved and missed.
Craning their necks and squinting hard, they tried to see between the shadows of the steel mesh whether I was on the bus or not.
I was overjoyed at the sight of them.
To appreciate what a joy it is to see your loved ones, even at such a distance, you need to sit with a paper belt around your waist in a police bus with steel mesh across its windows.
We love and get used to loving.
It is sometimes only possible to understand how great the love is that lies beneath that habit when the habit is broken in such a loutish way.
I was waving with excitement so that they would see me. Their seeing me at that moment was the most important thing in my life; I was thrashing about, but they couldn’t pick me out from among the shadows on the bus.
I couldn’t move as much as I wanted to as the policemen were constantly ready to step in.
My loved ones couldn’t see me.
At that moment, nothing in life was more important than being seen by them.
One of the colonels sitting in the front said, “Move forward, it looks like your family is here,” and gave me his seat.
Regardless of any differences in their ideas, convictions and beliefs, there is always a solidarity between people who meet in such dire circumstances. Everyone helped one another. We stuck to each other like a flock of starlings that had encountered predatory birds.
I went to the front.
I waved.
They saw me.
First, they smiled and waved happily.
Then I saw ripples move upward from my daughter’s kneecaps, and then those waves burst from her eyes in the form of tears.
She was trying to contain herself but couldn’t. Her whole body was shaking.
My son held her and pressed her to his chest.
I looked at them.
I knew the deep wounds that opened inside me at that moment would never heal.
I knew all too well what they must have felt when they saw their father on a bus covered with steel mesh in the middle of a miserable crowd.
After they had arrested my father, my brother Mehmet and I went to his hearing in a military court.
In the courtroom inside the Selimiye Barracks the two of us were the only audience. By coincidence, we both wore dark blue suits that day.
The following morning a right-wing newspaper printed a large photograph of us on its front page implying that there was a “hidden message” in our donning the same color suits.
Everything changes on earth, but stupidity and meanness never change.
My father was in the defendant’s chair. Two gendarmes were standing at either side.
Then my father stood to deliver his defense. He spoke with a strong, impressive voice that resonated along the stone-walled corridors of the military barracks. The courtroom began to fill up gradually as officers left their rooms and came to listen to my father.
The chief judge wanted to shut my father up. My father wouldn’t shut up.
The judge shouted: “Make him sit down.” Two gendarmes pushed down on my father’s shoulders and pressed him into his seat.
I never forgot the helplessness and anger I felt at that moment. My hatred of despots and putschists would never go away.
Seeing my children’s pain now, I not only understood how they felt but also felt again the same helplessness and anger that had overtaken me years ago as I watched my father.
To try and calm their distress, I smiled and signaled that I was fine. In reality, I was wondering how I looked. I was worried that if I appeared overly tired and unkempt it would add to their distress.
They made us get off the bus in and enter the hospital in single file.
A receptionist sat before a computer and asked everyone for their ID numbers and names.
When it was my turn, she asked me my ID number.<
br />
“I don’t know,” I said.
I heard behind me the scornful voice of the young policeman with an ostentatious hairstyle: “Look at him, the big-name writer, he doesn’t even know his ID number!”
I had become an absolute “nobody” in the eyes of a young police officer because I didn’t know my ID number.
That is how they had taught him to live: first of all, memorize your number.
When I entered the doctor’s room, he greeted me. “How are you, Ahmet Bey?” he asked.
“I am fine, thank you.”
The doctor pointed toward a curtained door at the back of the examination room.
“There is a mirror back there, you can look if you’d like.”
Clearly he knew the importance of mirrors, the impact of one’s face disappearing.
I immediately opened the curtain and looked in the mirror that hung above the sink. My face was there, looking at me. I had found my missing piece. I was complete. I had left the body of the half-ape–half-bird creature and become human again.
I didn’t look as exhausted as I had feared.
That made me rather happy.
My loved ones would not have to feel even more distress.
“Have they assaulted or tortured you?” asked the young doctor.
“No.”
“Do you have any other complaints?”
“Sometimes I have difficulty swallowing at night.”
“Let me write you a prescription.”
“Are you an ear, nose and throat specialist?”
“No, I am an orthopedist.”
“Then how do you know about throat medicine?”
“I have the same problem, that’s how.”
After everyone had been examined by the doctor, they took us back to the bus again in a single line. As I was getting on the bus I turned and waved: “I am fine.”
The bus moved and we entered the Security Department’s yard.
Our loved ones were grasping the bars of the wrought-iron fence surrounding the yard as the bus left them behind.
They became further and further away. They looked so small.
I was looking at them through the steel mesh on the bus windows. As we moved further away, the stinging pain inside me worsened.