by Ahmet Altan
They put us into the cages again.
There was silence in the lockup.
Some, like me, had seen their loved ones outside the hospital, but some had not. We were longing for those we had seen, while those others were longing for those they could not see.
Nothing disturbed our silence until dinner.
Everyone took refuge in his own loneliness.
In the evening, the policemen distributed cans of stuffed vine leaves.
As we ate we began talking.
We had reburied ourselves in the muddy world of the cage and had settled there.
I asked the young teacher who had been in the lockup for four weeks, “Haven’t they interrogated you yet?”
Two weeks before, they had taken him for interrogation at dawn and had told him this: “Everyone is trying to save his own backside. You go away now and think a while. Give us some names. Save your backside.”
“I can’t give them any names. I can’t harm anyone,” he said.
When I woke up briefly in the night, I saw him leaning against the wall reading the Qur’an.
The following day they took us to see the doctor again.
This time I was prepared for seeing my loved ones.
They were prepared for me too.
They smiled, and I waved to them with joy.
A somewhat overweight female doctor was on duty.
“Been assaulted?”
“No.”
“I will examine you.”
“No assault.”
“I have to examine you.”
We went behind the curtain. I saw myself in the mirror. I had a face. I existed.
“Pull down your trousers,” said the doctor.
I felt like saying “You first,” but I managed to restrain myself.
I pulled down my trousers.
The woman was looking at my legs and I was looking at her; we were just standing there.
That unforgettable scene in Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday came to my mind.
Doc goes to visit Suzy, who has moved into an empty boiler in a vacant lot. As he crawls into the boiler on all fours, holding flowers in one hand, he thinks to himself, “A man who can do this with dignity need never again fear anything.”
A man who can stand with dignity before a woman with his trousers around his knees need never again fear anything.
Then she said, “You can pull up your trousers.”
As I was leaving I asked the doctor what her area of specialism was.
I’ll file her response under “unforgettable.”
“Gynecology.”
The Teacher
Suddenly snow began to fall. Everything turned white. The road ahead of us disappeared and we couldn’t tell where the road ended and the fields began. The snow hitting the windows of the minibus accumulated so fast we had difficulty seeing outside. The driver said, “I am turning back. If we stick around here any longer, the road home will be closed too and we’ll be stranded.”
“You go back. I’ll walk to the village,” I said as the minibus maneuvered to turn round. I got out of the vehicle.
So began the most surprising story of happiness I have ever heard.
The air and the light in our cage never changed. Each minute was the same as the last. It was as if a tributary of the river of time had hit a dam and formed a lake. We sat at the bottom of that motionless pool.
In the depths of that turbid mass of water we were as worthless as an empty cigarette packet or the coins a passing drunk takes out of his pocket and tosses away while crossing a bridge.
We couldn’t tell in which direction time flowed. Sometimes it flowed toward the past, toward our memories. Sometimes it flowed toward the future and our worries. But more often it stagnated in this strange-smelling gloom.
We knew each element of that smell: the smell of stone, the smell of iron, the smell of oppressive heat, the smell of human skin, the smell of unclean toilets, the smell of waste paper, the smell of the absence of light.
But the sour and nervous smell that was the combination of them all put together was an unknown and depressing stench for all of us.
Inactivity fatigued us.
The only way to move was with the voice – by talking and telling.
Anyone on earth who finds a listener has a story to tell. What is difficult to find is not the story, but the listener. I was the listener in that cage.
With that eerie, unreliable instinct possessed by writers, I listened to everything they told me and recorded it in my memory in order to sift through it all later.
The tellers perhaps thought that what they were saying would soon be forgotten. They didn’t know the ease with which writers commit the sin of not forgetting.
The colonels had a rich repertoire of stories. They were talkative. The young teacher, however, didn’t talk much. He either listened to the others or read the Qur’an.
After the police had told him to go away, to think things over and give them a few names, they left him to himself in the cage.
As happened with so many others in those cells, his mind ebbed and flowed: should he save himself by becoming an informant and shopping his acquaintances, or should he avoid sullying himself with such baseness but pay the price of purity and be sentenced to rot in prison?
Every now and then he said, “I cannot give them anyone’s names, I cannot be that vile,” but he couldn’t bring himself to say to the police, “I have nothing else to tell you.”
He was struggling with the bitter consequences of this inner agitation.
When he spoke with us, he would only talk about his time in that snowed-in Kurdish village, a time he described as “the happiest years of my life.”
Suddenly snow began to fall…
His adventures had started when he had been given a teaching post in the Southeast in a pro-government village controlled by local guards.
He had rented a house in the nearby town with a couple of friends who were also teachers. He went to the village in the morning and returned at night.
On that morning when the snowstorm began, he got off the minibus and started making his way through the snow.
He walked for hours, got lost a few times, even collapsed once at the bottom of a tree, feeling cold and exhausted. With one last effort, he continued to walk, and arrived in the village toward the evening almost frostbitten.
He went to the village headman’s house, rang the doorbell and made a declaration to the headman, who listened with an astounded look on his face. “From now on I will stay in the village.”
It was clear that earlier that day, at the very moment he said, “I’ll get off here and walk,” he had made a life-changing decision.
There are such turning points in people’s lives, moments that change their paths forever, but few people have a clear-eyed grasp of them.
The young teacher had etched into his memory all the details of the moment he had decided to change his life.
He had poured his heart and soul into that decision.
He never talked about his emotions in the moment he made that decision, nor how he felt about it after what came later.
All his feelings were locked behind the sentence “Those were the happiest years of my life,” and he didn’t allow anyone to see them.
His silence opened a vast, fertile field before me, one I could fill with my own thoughts, predictions and dreams.
When he decided to live in the village, when he said, “I’ll get off here,” he must have known that, by doing so, he would cut all ties with his life outside that mountain hamlet, that intense solitude and harsh conditions awaited him.
In that moment he walked away from life.
He walked away from all pleasures, all entertainment, all conversation with friends, from idly roaming the crowded city stre
ets, from seeing a shirt he liked in a shop window and buying it. Above all, in that moment he walked away from love and the possibility of finding a life partner, and he dedicated himself to something else entirely.
That was the moment he dedicated himself to other people.
He left his own self and dedicated his being to something else, just as a monk, a mahatma, a saint would.
In that lightless cage I could imagine myself in his place and feel what he must have felt at the moment he got out of the minibus.
I didn’t only feel what he felt, however. Like Süskind’s protagonist who steals others’ scents, I took the young teacher’s adventures and filled them with my own emotions to weave myself a dream cloak from his memories, a cloak in which I could wrap myself up and hide.
I was out in the snow. I was freezing. I could feel in every particle of my being an acute sense of exuberance that came from having cracked the shell around me with my own will, from sailing to a state without boundaries, leaving all worldly pleasures behind and being dispersed like snowflakes into infinity.
I had the dizzying experience of getting rid of my wings, those made of life and death, and flying wingless into infinity.
Leaving my body in the cage, I flew around like a snowflake smiling in a blizzard.
Becoming a snowflake had such a delicious, burning zest to it, a sense of bleeding and breaking as if one was giving birth to one’s new self.
My time in the midst of that whiteness was one of the happiest moments of my life. It was a borrowed happiness, but it was happiness.
I don’t know whether the young teacher really experienced that moment in this way or whether these were merely the fairy-tale journeys of my mind, relishing its dreamy escape from the oppressive feeling of being stuck in that cage. But that is what happened to me as I listened to him.
The shared life of what he had experienced and what I dreamed ended there.
I could feel the instant when he got out of the minibus: a person imploding with what felt like a “Big Bang” to create a new person, a new life, a new universe from within himself was not hard for me to empathize with.
I could feel in my own soul that moment of mystical contemplation.
I could easily slip away from the sticky heat of that dark cage and walk through the blizzard, feeling the snow on my face, the tingling in my fingers, the excitement mixed with fear. I could feel with a cramp in my stomach the eerie inner journey of leaving a life behind and jumping into the void in search of another life.
But I could neither feel nor understand the “happiness” of the three years that followed.
On that snowy night, the village headman asked the teacher at his door to come in and sit near the stove, fed him a meal and served him coffee.
After coffee the headman said, “There are no vacant houses in the village.”
Determined to live there, the teacher asked, “What should we do?”
The headman thought for a while.
“There is a room full of old furniture next to the mosque. If you wish, we can talk to the imam and you can stay there.”
“All right,” said the teacher.
As he was eager to settle in his new home as soon as possible, they took a torch with them and made their way to the mosque through the snow in the freezing cold and found the imam.
The imam, not wanting to offend the headman or the teacher who came at night to his door, came out, walked with them and unlocked the room.
It was a small room full of broken crates, coffin lids, caskets and torn old rugs, with no running water or electricity, and no glass visible on its frozen windows, just an opaque whiteness.
The imam went to his house and brought back a metal wood-burning stove. They lit it and the room got a bit warmer. The imam and the headman left.
The teacher put one of the torn rugs on the floor, wrapped himself in his coat and fell asleep among the coffins.
During his three years in this room with no toilet, no bath and no kitchen, he lived the happiest days of his life.
He cooked his meals on the wood-burning stove and did his laundry in a washtub that he found.
As he talked about those days, a twinkle that resembled the light of a comet flowing back through time toward the past appeared.
Even in our dim cage, the light of happiness could be seen on the teacher’s face.
The young man who lay alone wrapped in his coat on a torn rug he had placed on ice-cold stone floors had found happiness there, and he was now embracing those memories in an effort not to turn into an informant in this police lockup where he was spending perhaps the most difficult days of his life.
I thought hard, trying to solve the mystery of his unprecedented happiness of three years.
What was it that gave happiness to this young man as he spent three years of his life without love, without the companionship of a woman, all by himself in a room that he shared with coffins in an isolated hamlet on a snowy mountain?
Was it the sensation I imagined it to have been?
Had the young teacher managed to feel that sense of ecstasy moment after moment for years, like a monk, a saint, while I could only conjure up a single moment of it now?
Or was it only because his days in the village seemed so secure, given the darkness of his present misfortune, that he now remembered that time as a period of “happiness”?
Or perhaps it was the affection and trust of the people in that village that had made him happy?
Had he filled the void created by the lack of a woman’s love with the affection of an entire village?
The warmth of a woman didn’t exist in this story of happiness. In its place was a wider, broader, and therefore less intense and less heated, reliable kind of affection.
Was it this communal affection that was to him unforgettable?
Could a village’s affection make a man as unforgettably happy as a woman’s love?
I couldn’t find the answer to any of these questions among the teacher’s memories.
During those days we spent together in the cage, he didn’t talk about his life either before or after his time in the village.
I knew nothing about his life except for his time in that village. It was as if the only period he could remember from his past was those three years. Nothing else had left so deep a mark on him.
Whenever he drew open the curtains of his life, we always saw the same village stage set; the light of his memory did not illuminate any other scene.
When he wasn’t talking about the village, he was either reading the Qur’an or praying, or else he would mutter as if talking to himself: “I cannot give away anyone’s names, I cannot be that vile.”
Sometimes when I woke up at night I saw him praying.
This young man’s story of happiness brought to my mind what Brodsky said in his book about Venice. The smell of frozen seaweed was synonymous with happiness for Brodsky.
A smell completely unknown to me made him think of “absolute happiness.”
The smell of frozen seaweed, an isolated village, a walk in the snow, walking away from life…All those could lead to happiness.
How could Brodsky and the village teacher, two people entirely unlike each other, roam around in different depths of life, take dissimilar paths and arrive at the same word, “happiness”?
I wanted to understand this.
In a cage that objectified unhappiness, I was thinking about what happiness was. Like a blind alchemist searching for the spell that turns copper into gold, I was trying to find the secret that turned “frozen seaweed” and “coffin lids” into joy.
I knew copper, I knew gold, and I could see copper turning into gold before my very eyes. There had been times when I too had turned copper into gold, though I was unable to identify the magical formula.
Like a fortune-teller lookin
g at his crystal ball in the dark, I was looking at the word I held in my hands: happiness. How brilliant and charming it was. And how strongly it resisted my efforts to wheedle out its secret. Each time I laid my eyes on it, it looked different.
Copper turns into gold, I said at last, but everyone has his own method of transforming copper – there is no general formula for it; the formula is inside each alchemist, hidden in his very soul, in his own past.
The young teacher struggling with himself in that cage taught me this.
I didn’t give him back the moment I had borrowed from him, that moment of stepping out of the minibus in the snow. It stayed with me. It became mine.
During many nights when the heat that crawled among the sharp shadows of the iron bars dug its teeth into my flesh like a furry crocodile, I got out of the vehicle and walked in the snow. I was cold with happiness.
I made gold from copper, not knowing how I had done it.
Then one morning they took away the young teacher and put him in prison.
He had not given them any names.
The Cemetery of Pink Folders
It’s almost morning but still dark outside. My brother Mehmet and I are on the seventh floor of the courthouse, waiting in a corridor that shines with fluorescent lights and mica that remind me of the coffee shops in rural America. We are surrounded by a dozen or so policemen.
We’ve both lost weight. Our faces bear the marks of a lack of good nutrition and sleep.
Yesterday evening we were taken out of the cages at the police lockup where we have been kept for twelve days and brought to the courthouse. They first put us in a waiting room on the ground floor of the building with iron bars around it and wooden benches against its walls.
We sat on the benches. There was another defendant with us, a man we were meeting for the first time in our lives but with whom we would be put on trial.
A television mounted on the wall opposite us was playing a Turkish soap opera. The quality of the picture was very bad and there was a lot of static. On a notice-board near the TV set was a warning: “No one is to touch the television except for the television attendant.”