by Ahmet Altan
His wife, son and daughter would usually come together to visit him.
His daughter had such a pure, innocent look on her face that my children thought she resembled Mary, mother of Jesus, so we gave her the name “Meryem.”
We always referred to the young girl as Meryem.
The middle one went along with this.
After a visit I would ask him, “How is your wife, and how is Meryem?” and without thinking it odd, he would answer, “They’re fine.”
One day his wife came alone.
After the visit we went back to the cell.
His face was darkened with pain, his shoulders had slumped, and there were tears in his eyes.
“They arrested Meryem,” he said.
A moaning sound escaped my lips as if someone had hit me in the stomach with a stick. I saw the face of the youngest of the three of us turn yellow with sadness.
Arresting the twenty-year-old daughter of a prisoner…A ruthless hostility that defies all sense of decency.
I could see how grave his heartbreak was, how he burned inside.
“They will release Meryem soon,” I said, “and I promise you, when they do that, I will pray with you and give my devotions to God.”
He was such a pious man that hearing that a nonbeliever would bring himself to pray alongside him cheered him up even at his saddest moment.
He smiled.
“Really?”
“Really,” I said. “I promise.”
He had four very difficult months. He carried his pain with dignity.
After four months, they released Meryem.
Two pious men and a nonbeliever…We stood side by side and performed the prayer ritual together.
We thanked God in our cell for Meryem’s release.
The Novelist Who Wrote His Own Destiny
They sit on a bench six-and-a-half feet high, dressed in black robes with red collars.
In a few hours they will decide my destiny.
They don’t resemble the Fates who sever the thread of life. With their ties loosened, and with bored expressions, they look more like Gogol’s petty public servants.
Their chief, who sits in the middle, splays his right arm across the bench like a piece of wet laundry. He fiddles with his fingers and watches his fingers fiddle.
He has a long, narrow face and plucked, colorless eyebrows. Under swollen half-closed eyelids, his eyes are barely noticeable – they are nothing but a dead wetness.
He has a peculiar tic that becomes more pronounced when the defense speaks: a small node that rolls under his skin all the way from his chin to his eyes.
Every now and then he looks at his mobile phone to read his messages.
When one of the defendants on trial with us says he is about to undergo heart bypass surgery, the chief judge pulls the microphone with its red light toward himself and says in a mechanical voice, “The hospital told us there were no circumstances preventing your stay in prison.”
As our defense lawyers speak about the most crucial matters, he again pulls the microphone toward him and says in the same mechanical voice, “You have two minutes, wrap it up.”
It is as if the phrases uttered by the defendants and their lawyers strike him on the forehead, break apart and fall to the bench in pieces.
I remember what Elias Canetti said about such people: Being safe, at peace and in splendor and then to hear a person’s pleas while determined to turn a deaf ear…Could anything be more vile?
While the defendants and their lawyers speak, the chubby, skew-eyed judge to the chief’s right leans back in his chair and looks up at the ceiling. From the lines of pleasure that move across his face it’s clear he is daydreaming. When he is not daydreaming, he usually leans his head on his hand and sleeps.
The judge on the left busies himself with the computer in front of him, reading continuously.
Toward noon they tell us they will withdraw for deliberations in order, as they say, “to make a decision.”
We are surrounded by gendarmerie. At our side is a row of gendarmes, at our back another row. Behind them is another group. They are clad in RoboCop gear with armor-like black stab-vests and kneepads.
A gendarme takes each of us by the arm; we pass between two rows of gendarmes and go down the narrow stairs.
They put us in a tiled holding cell with iron bars at the front.
We are five men.
The sixth defendant, a woman, is separated from us and taken elsewhere.
The Supreme Court, on my brother’s appeal, had examined the evidence against us and ruled that “no one could be arrested based on such evidence.” This has made the journalists on trial with us optimistic and hopeful.
I am not as optimistic as they are.
We pace the lockup nervously from one end to the other. Our shadows skip over the lines between the tiles and try to catch us.
We feel with a sense of helplessness that we have all but lost our right to determine our own future.
The minutes go by, now faster, now slower, depending on the tempo of our conversations. When the minutes slow down they become razor sharp; we feel bloody cuts opening inside us but we hide them from each other.
Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat. “All of them wound; the last one kills.” It is a truth known since the ancient Romans. Yet the minutes that creep by in a holding cell while you are waiting to hear whether or not the sentence will be life in prison are more hurtful than all of their siblings.
As the minutes keep wounding me, I realize with some embarrassment that tiny hopes and dreams are meandering beneath my sober pessimism, glittering like diamond dust.
Beneath the strong voice saying, “They are the desperadoes of the law, capable of any sort of criminal act,” I hear a whisper saying, “No one can be that nonsensical.”
I don’t turn off that whisper; I become angry with myself, yet still I refrain from severing my thin link to hope.
Hope is so amiable, so warm and so attractive that no one who is freezing inside can abandon it. Nor does it help knowing that this is an idle, unnecessary weakness.
The pale flickering dreams fed by hope stir shyly in the shadowy folds of my mind: I leave the prison, a deep breath, the first embrace, words of joy, the smell of happiness and a wide sky above…
As I daydream about these things, somewhere three men are determining my destiny.
Perhaps they have already made their decision.
Suddenly, the layers of magma in the depths of my memory break with a strong quake, sentences surface like forgotten water flowers that have been floating on a secret underground river.
I remember a passage from my novel Like a Sword Wound. This is what I wrote about a character waiting in a room for the verdict after he was arrested:
The gap between the moment a person’s destiny changed and the moment the person realized this seemed to him to be the most tragic and frightening aspect of life. The future became clear, but the person continued to wait for another future with other expectations and dreams without realizing that the future had already been determined. The ignorance during that wait was horrible and to him was humanity’s greatest weakness.
The sentences I remember make me shiver.
I wrote years ago about the turmoil I am going through at this very moment.
I live now what I wrote in my novel.
I am a novelist living his novel.
A sentence resonates within me and makes me shudder with horror, like the chorus in a voodoo mass attended by sorcerers in masks: My life imitates my novel.
Years ago, as I was wandering in that unmarked, enigmatic and hazy territory where literature touches life I had met my own destiny but failed to recognize it; I wrote thinking it belonged to someone else.
The destiny I put down in my novel has become mine. I am now
under arrest like the hero I created years ago. I await the decision that will determine my future, just as he awaited his. I am unaware of my destiny, which has perhaps already been decided, just as he was unaware of his. I suffer the pathetic torment of profound helplessness, just as he did.
Like a cursed oracle, I foresaw my future years ago, not knowing that it was my own.
The witches of Macbeth roam inside me.
How many such witches, sorcerers, oracles reside within a writer?
What else that I wrote will come true?
What other sentences that I no longer remember have I cursed myself with?
I feel I am being dragged into the depths of a vertiginous, wuthering vortex in which novel and life are entangled, where what is real and what is written imitate one another and change places, each disguised as the other.
I am the oracle, the omen and the victim.
With my sentences, I kill the living and resurrect the dead.
Had I unleashed the wrath of the gods because, like all writers, I too have this power? Is that why I have been cursed? Is that why they made me write my own destiny?
Inside this vortex that has me turning and turning I am becoming the hero I created.
What kind of destiny had I chosen for my hero? What sort of ending did he have?
Suddenly, I hear the sound of heavy boots as the gendarmes come running. They line up in two rows. “Come on,” says a voice, “the decision has been made.”
The decision has been made.
At once I remember.
My hero was convicted, that was the destiny I chose for him.
I know now what they have decided for me without hearing the decision.
I too will be convicted because that is what I wrote.
Destiny won’t catch me unprepared, for I am the one who determined it.
They take us upstairs. We enter the courtroom and sit down.
The judges come in and put on the black robes they have left on their chairs.
Their chief, the one with dead, wet eyes, reads the decision:
“Life without parole.”
We will spend the rest of our lives alone in a cell that is thirteen feet long and ten feet wide. We will be taken out to see the sunlight for only one hour each day.
We will never be pardoned and we will die in prison.
That is the decision.
I am being convicted just like the hero of my novel.
I wrote my own future.
I hold out my hands and they handcuff me.
I will never see the world again; I will never see a sky unframed by the walls of a courtyard.
I am descending to Hades.
I walk into the darkness like a god who wrote his own destiny.
My hero and I disappear into the darkness together.
The Reckoning
The iron door shut behind me.
We heard the sounds, one after another, of latches, locks and levers.
My cellmates said they were sorry to hear what had happened. They had seen on the news that I had been sentenced to life without parole.
We had talked about it the night before, and deemed the judges mad enough to ignore the Supreme Court’s decision and give us the very harshest of sentences.
But it is one thing to wait at the bedside of a terminally ill patient knowing he will die, and another thing to see him die. Even the most hopeless periods of waiting harbor within them a flicker of hope.
Death extinguishes that final flicker. No matter how much you anticipate what will come, when that final hint of a flame goes out, it shakes you to the core.
You realize then that no one can ever be fully prepared for absolute hopelessness.
You remember Saramago’s words, There is no consolation, my sad friend, humans are inconsolable creatures, and ponder. He must have been talking about the moment when even the final fragment of hope dies away.
It is true that there is no consolation at such moments.
I expected to be sentenced to life in prison, but I still feel the bewildering blow of hope dying away.
At such moments, a person encounters his real face, he sees who he really is.
He understands his need for something other than consolation. Something else, but what?
My cellmates had gone to bed. The lights had been turned off.
I sat in the dark.
The light of the corridor seeped in through the small square peephole slot in the iron door and fell near my feet like a yellow stain. The fierce beam of the searchlight outside reached the courtyard walls, reflecting a phantom light back into the cell, a light that did not illuminate anything but turned everything to transparent shadows.
I lit a cigarette. I looked at its lurid glare in the dark cell.
I could see that my life was about to go down like an old ship in a heavy storm – the cracked boards, creaking hinges, torn sail and wobbling mast all coming to pieces in the waves, to be buried in the watery depths.
I watched my life in the dark. The red glow of my cigarette pulsed like a lighthouse.
I thought: “What will I do? What am I supposed to do?”
I could have cursed the storm and got angry with those who had created it. I could have felt depressed about having fallen right into the eye of the storm. I could have complained about my fate.
None of that would calm the storm.
Indeed, I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about the storm.
Like Odysseus facing Poseidon’s fury, I had to use all my strength to survive, and for that I had to focus not on the storm but on what was within my capacity. I had to write my own Odyssey in this dark cell.
To save oneself from the monstrous waves, the sirens and the man-eating Cyclopses, one must resist and fight.
There was the storm and there was me.
We were going to fight.
Oddly, the vastness of the storm increased my desire to defeat it. The blows that obliterated all hope strengthened my instinct to cling more tightly to that hope.
My ship could crack, break and sink but I would keep fighting to the end.
I would prepare myself for the worst but I wouldn’t stop hoping for the best. I wouldn’t give in to fatigue and depression. I would never forget that my dream of reuniting with my Penelope could someday come true.
I lit another cigarette. The lurid glare glowed again.
I must confess that even from within a dark cell, the idea of fighting filled me with such exuberance that I was saying, “To the end,” with excitement.
I liked fighting more than I liked consolation.
Even though they had sentenced me to death in a cell I wasn’t dead yet. The last glimmer of hope was still there.
The decision to fight made the glimmer more alive.
A love of fighting was in my blood.
My great-grandfather’s nickname in the army was “Mad Hasan Pasha.” Legend has it that he truly deserved his moniker. He trained as an artilleryman in Germany, fought in the Balkan Wars, assumed the role of front artillery commander in Gallipoli and was in the Turkish Liberation War from beginning to end. He spent ten years of his life fighting one battle after another.
My great-grandfather was sentenced to death for helping rebels to defect to Anatolia during the War of Liberation. He escaped being hanged at the last minute.
My father was put on trial hundreds of times for his writing; he was in prison for years.
My brother is sentenced to life in prison.
But in my own personal Odyssey there is yet another trait that underlies this adventurous inheritance and gives it a tragic touch of irony. For my love of fighting conflicts with my fondness for comfort; I enjoy worldly pleasures, know we only live once and don’t have much regard for heroism and bravery.
Indeed, I find
bravery disgraceful in a writer.
A writer should be admired and praised for his writing alone. He should place himself before his readers bare of all but his writing. He should never entertain or deceive his readers by putting on shows of bravery.
At the conclusion of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a play I watched at a very young age, the protagonist has to sign a document to save his life and, at first, he refuses. Later he says to himself, If I don’t sign, they’ll think I am a brave person; I will have deceived people.
There are times that others think I am a brave person, and when that happens I feel embarrassed. “I have been deceiving people,” I think to myself.
I am not a brave person.
I am a person who likes being brave but, at the same time, I scorn bravery. I am the very embodiment of a contradiction.
Besides, a question that deepens this contradiction further has occupied my mind since my youth: which is more important, the writing or the writer?
What becomes a writer more – protecting his honor or giving up his honor for the sake of his writing?
Should he protect his honor by fighting, resisting, struggling while, in turn, limiting the space he can give to his writing?
Or should he give up his honor and the chance of helping the people who might need his pen, in order to dedicate his whole life to writing?
In this duel, I chose to protect my honor and, as a result, I feel a strange sense of shame.
“I should have been brave enough to choose the writing over the writer, but I didn’t have the courage,” I say.
I torment myself: “You chose the writer,” I say. “If you were a good writer, you would have chosen the writing.”
Then, in an effort to protect myself, I say: “I have to like the writer too. If I don’t like myself, how can I have the confidence to write?”
And then there is the woman I love, of course. I shouldn’t embarrass her.
That famous story comes to my mind – the one I heard many times when I was a child and then wrote about many times:
Paetus, a Roman commander, rebelled against the emperor, but was caught and sentenced to death.