by Ahmet Altan
We waited there for over three hours.
Then the policemen came and took me to the prosecutor’s room. My lawyer joined us.
The prosecutor whom I was taken to see was the man who had first detained Mehmet and me on the charge that we had given “subliminal messages” on a TV show the night before the attempted military coup of July 15, 2016.
It was a small room.
The prosecutor started his interrogation. He didn’t ask me a single question about the military coup, the putschists or the “subliminal messages” we were said to have given.
Instead, his questions had to do with the newspaper we had founded ten years ago, the one I had edited for five years until my resignation in 2012.
At one point, he said, “We have established that the putschists are linked to this newspaper.”
“Where is the evidence for this?” I asked.
He uttered a sentence that he must have learned from Hollywood and been eager to use someday:
“I ask the questions here.”
“You ask the questions, but when you say you have established a fact, you must show the evidence for it.”
Of course, no such evidence was ever produced, neither that day nor later.
The prosecutor was extremely restless. He kept pacing the room. Every now and then, he would briefly return to his armchair before getting up again.
Halfway through the interrogation, his ear started bleeding. He stuffed it with a tissue in an effort to stop the bleeding, but kept on asking me questions about news stories published six and seven years ago.
He put the tissues stained with blood on his desk.
As the red tissues piled up in front of him he concluded the interrogation without having asked me a single question about the coup.
The policemen took me back downstairs. Mehmet was taken up for interrogation.
It was close to midnight.
I sat on the wooden bench and looked at the fuzzy television picture. It was a battle scene, two groups firing at each other. Then a girl and a lad ran away holding hands.
I had not understood from the prosecutor’s questions what we would be charged with.
Tired of sitting, I started pacing the cell from one wall to the other.
Two hours later, they brought Mehmet down.
We recommenced waiting.
Then, suddenly, a large group of policemen came and took us upstairs.
The prosecutor had referred us to the court with a request for our arrest.
This was a court with a single judge. The heat made him uncomfortable; he kept fidgeting with the high collars of his robe in an effort to cool himself down.
We had been detained on the charge of “giving subliminal messages,” but the allegation had changed quite suddenly. We were now referred to the court for allegedly having participated in the military coup.
When the hearing began, we said to the judge:
“We were detained on the charge of giving subliminal messages, but now that isn’t even mentioned. What happened to the ‘subliminal message’ charge?”
The response the judge gave, a cynical smile creeping over his face, deserves to be recorded in the annals of law:
“Our prosecutors like using words the meanings of which they don’t know.”
We had languished in a cage in the police lockup for twelve days because the prosecutor liked using a word the meaning of which he didn’t know. That is what the judge told us.
Then his questions began.
“Couldn’t you anticipate that those men would stage a coup?”
Then he added with a self-satisfied smile:
“I anticipated it.”
Our lawyers objected:
“Failing to anticipate a coup is not a crime. You can’t accuse our clients with this allegation.”
The judge stretched and said:
“I am not accusing them, dear, we are just chatting.”
Then came another odd question:
“You said the government was corrupt?”
The lawyers intervened again:
“The opposition leader also says the government is corrupt…Saying the government is corrupt doesn’t constitute the crime of putschism.”
The judge didn’t respond to that.
He turned to me:
“If only you had stuck to writing novels and kept your nose out of political affairs.”
We had been taken to court just before dawn on a request that we be sent to prison on charges of “putschism,” and the man before us was saying whatever came to mind. I was getting angry:
“You detained us for giving subliminal messages; then you changed the charge without explanation. You alleged that we were putschists. Even if all the judges and prosecutors in this courthouse got together, they wouldn’t be able to come up with a single piece of evidence for this.”
“I have crusaded against military coups my whole life,” Mehmet said, “and now you accuse me of staging a coup because I criticized the government. There is no evidence for this, there can’t be.”
The judge announced a recess, during which he would make his decision.
It’s almost morning, but it’s still dark outside.
We are waiting for the judge’s ruling.
Will we go home or to prison?
A man asking bizarre questions would decide for us.
We are tired and stressed.
We sit surrounded by a large group of policemen.
I’m looking out the window. The city is quiet. It is asleep. The streets are empty. The streetlights seem dimmed.
Then there is a spurt of activity.
The judge has made his decision.
They take us back to the courtroom.
The judge begins to read the ruling:
“That Ahmet Hüsrev Altan be released under judicial control…”
Just as I am about to rejoice I hear the rest of the decision:
“That Mehmet Hasan Altan be sent to prison…”
I feel a physical pain. It is as if they’ve plunged an iron bar through my liver. A sense of rage. A deep sense of despair.
Mehmet turns to me and smiles. He is happy because they are releasing me.
The policemen take us back to the ground floor.
A police car is waiting in the courtyard to take Mehmet to prison.
We hug.
Mehmet tries to console me:
“Don’t worry…It’s good that one of us will be outside.”
They put him in the car.
I look beyond it as it leaves.
I realize then that I hadn’t said a word to Mehmet as he left.
Two policemen approach me. They will take me from the court and release me.
They push back an iron door and we enter a corridor.
There I see something I’ve never seen before. Thousands of pink-colored folders have been thrown about on the floor like a bunch of dead turtles. These are files with names, betrayals, murders, separations, bankruptcies and fights stored within them. Lives lost in the depths of a courthouse. A secret cemetery of pink folders.
We make our way through the corridor, kicking and tossing the folders about. There is no end to the corridors, no end to the folders…We step on some of them and I feel a sense of unease; it is as if we’re stepping on people.
Then the corridors end.
We climb the stairs.
They open the main gate and let me leave.
It is dawn.
The cool morning air gives me a chill.
I take a deep breath.
I am free, angry and deeply sad.
I don’t yet know that my sadness will not last very long, that they will issue a “detention order” for me in the evening and I will be arrested.
&n
bsp; They will send me to the prison where they have sent my brother.
Cheating
I get into the police car with four officers from the Anti-Terrorism Branch. They are taking me to the prison.
When the car moves, one of the policemen says, “I read your novel Cheating.”
I am surprised: “You did?”
Among my books, it is the one that received the harshest reviews; provoked the most anger, the most vilification. Despite all this criticism, it sold more than half a million copies.
I don’t remember now exactly what it was that critics didn’t like in that book in which I told the story of a woman cheating on her husband.
The scene that I remember in relation to that novel is quite different from the story’s subject.
I live in a neighborhood where the old Ottoman pashas’ mansions with their sprawling grounds have been transformed into large flats with small front gardens in which one can still find bitter orange, pomegranate and plum trees as well as rose beds from the past. The grandchildren of those old pashas still reside in these apartment buildings.
The streets of this neighborhood are quiet and peaceful.
I used to take walks on those streets.
During one of my walks, shortly after Cheating had been published, I ran into three ladies chatting just outside a garden.
Three old ladies. One could tell from their simple elegance, from the brooches custom-made for them by jewelers from long ago and whose value only a trained eye would spot, from the single row of pearls around their necks, and from their neatly arranged silver hair and their proud grace that they had spent their youthful years in those mansions.
When they saw me, they turned toward me and blocked my way.
We stood facing one another.
A quizzical, sinful smile was on their faces.
They came closer.
Laughing gently, one of them said:
“How come you know about all that?”
Addressed to a novelist who has told the story of a two-timing woman, this question and the manner in which it was posed amounted to a certain confession, even a partnership in crime.
No charm on earth perhaps is rarer and more provocative than coquettishness wrapped in elegance.
For a few minutes, we savored that confession, then we parted.
I never forgot those ladies.
The question the policemen taking me to the prison asked repeatedly was quite different:
“Do women really cheat like that?”
There wouldn’t be many people whose answer to the question “who is more naïve – old ladies from the long-gone mansions or the cops of the Anti-Terrorism Branch?” would be “the cops.”
But I can definitely tell you that, when it comes to the subject of women, the police are the more naïve.
Encounter with Time
One counts everything in prison: the steps one takes round and round the little courtyard; the boiled eggs in the dimpled carton handed through the hole in the door every Tuesday, a whole week’s consumption; the cigarettes one smokes throughout the day; the stubborn weeds that grow at the side of the iron spout in the courtyard which lets the rainwater out; the short, sharp calls of the eagle owl that appears around midnight.
A prisoner counts everything. Except time. A prisoner discovers time.
On a warm September day, while a blue cut-glass sky, bright and carefree, watched indifferently what was going on down below, four police officers took me from the courthouse and brought me to a high-security prison sixty miles from the city.
They let me loose into a labyrinth of thick stone walls, dirty yellow in color, and dark brown iron bars. At the entrance to the prison my watch, my books, my cigarettes, my toothbrush – in fact, all my belongings except the clothes I was wearing – were taken away.
They put me in a space resembling the curtained photo booths in shopping malls. I undressed there. They searched all my clothes. They squeezed my shirt collar and sleeves and my trouser hems with their fingernails as if they were checking for lice.
They X-rayed my shoes and my jacket.
Later, as happens in all prison movies, I held my arms out front with my palms facing upward. They put a blanket, a set of blue sheets and a pillow over my arms.
A warden stood by me on either side. We started walking.
We passed by iron bars and iron bars and iron bars along long corridors, turned right and went up the stairs; we passed by iron bars and stopped before an iron door.
The writing on the door said “Ladies Infirmary.”
Was putting a male writer, notorious for his fixation on women as subject matter, in a women’s sickroom a mere coincidence? Or did the prison administration have a certain sense of humor? I couldn’t be sure.
They opened the door and pushed me in, then they closed the door behind me. I heard the iron bolt slip and fit into its sleeve with a deep sound, like fate being sealed.
It was a long hall. There were four undressed iron bedsteads. Stained mattresses had been thrown on the floor. Twelve of them. In the middle stood a white plastic table with an oil stain that was beeswax in color and almost finger-thick.
It was clear that this place had long been used as a storage room.
I took one of the mattresses off the floor and put it on the bedstead near the wall, spread a sheet over it, and placed the blanket and the pillow on top.
Behind the white table, I could see two dark brown doors.
This near black shade of brown was apparently the official color; everything in both the police lockup and the prison was painted with it.
I pushed one of the doors open.
A pitch-black, fidgeting, humming darkness moved behind the door.
I closed it immediately.
It was the bathroom. They had left scraps of food in the bin and the bathroom had filled with thousands of tiny filth flies.
Behind the other door was the toilet.
The barred window of the sickroom looked out to a little stone courtyard.
I lay down on the bed.
Silence. A deep, dark silence. There was neither sound nor movement. Life had suddenly stopped. It did not stir. It was cold and lifeless. Life was dead. It had died suddenly. I was alive, but life was dead.
I used to believe that I would die and life would go on, but life had died and I was left behind.
I had to blow a whiff of air into this dead life. Like God blowing the breath of life into dust to create humankind, I too had to create life from my own breath.
What was the breath that would give life to life? How was I supposed to do this? There was only one way to perform this miracle. To imagine.
As God looking at a pile of clay imagined the complexity we call humankind, I too would look at this dead life, so reminiscent of a pile of clay, and imagine another life.
I would blow my breath.
Like a Bedouin in an endless desert who knows where to find an oasis with plenty of water, I walked confidently toward my inner spring of imagination, the location of which I knew by heart.
Here, I came face-to-face with the terrible truth.
The water had dried, the oasis was gone.
I was not able to imagine. I could not imagine a single thing. My mind was petrified. Not even an image moved inside it. The magical images of the land of my imagination were glued on the walls of my mind like discolored frescos. They were not coming to life.
At that moment, I felt afraid. I was stuck in the corpse of a dead life. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t get away from it. I didn’t have a breath I could blow. I was in the middle of a void; the corpse of life was sucking in all the air around me.
Like Dante entering hell without Virgil at his side, I was slipping down from the circle of “dead life” to a lower circle where the punishment would be harsher.
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br /> In that circle, time, which had become heavier and slower with the death of life, was crawling toward me like a gargantuan reptile.
There was no clock making time faster by dividing it into seconds, minutes and hours. There was no movement, no thought, no image dividing time into pieces.
Time had become a single entity: a gargantuan reptile.
When one can’t separate the moments, they stick together and become swollen.
They surged and collapsed on me like a translucent mountain of jelly smothering my mind, my soul, my body, filling my mouth and nose, choking me.
Tempus absoluto. Absolute time, which Newton said was moving with an uninterrupted speed beyond anything humans could sense, had arrived, gliding in from the universe, and was casting itself over me in this dusty sickroom, leaving me with no room to escape.
Now I understood why human beings invented the clock, why they put clocks on the streets, the squares, the towers.
They did this not in order to know the time; they did it so that they could divide and escape from it.
As the mass of time that had collapsed on me in the midst of that inert, imageless void pressed on my lungs till I thought they might explode, I realized, through intuition more than reason, that I had to invent a new clock.
It took me eighteen steps to walk in zigzags from one end of the sickroom to the other.
If I walked without haste, every step would take a second; if I went back and forth ten times, a total of 180 seconds – in other words, three minutes – would have passed.
I found part of a newspaper page on the floor and tore it into ten small pieces.
At every 180 steps, I put one of those ten pieces on one corner of the table.
When ten pieces gathered at that corner, I calculated that half an hour had passed.
I had invented a newspaper clock.
I had been brought here after having been kept for twelve days in an airless, sunless underground cell at the police headquarters. I was tired. I was exhausted from walking from one corner of the sickroom to the other. But I couldn’t stop. For the clock to work, for time to be divided, I had to walk.