The Lamppost Diary

by Agop J. Hacikyan

  Diran’s voice was heard again: ‘Digin Lucie, which do you want: normal or double cream?’

  ‘Mama, tell me what will happen if ...?’

  ‘Wait a minute, Tomas.’ She needed a moment to decide. ‘Normal!’ she yelled.

  ‘What’s normal, Mama?’

  ‘Just shut up; I’m talking to Diran.’

  ‘Oh!’

  She turned again to Tomas to continue their discussion in among the sausages, pickles, dried mackerel and caviar ...

  ‘Listen to me, Tomas. Boys who play with their boubouligs turn into idiots.’

  Tomas was troubled. ‘Idiots?’

  ‘Not exactly idiots.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  No, he didn’t know what she meant. He wasn’t sure if she was lying again. Regardless, he would go on playing with it, but not too much and not so frequently. He didn’t want to become a total idiot ... a semi-idiot with a joyful bouboul was preferable to a perfect idiot.

  ‘Your father will tell you more. Now let’s go home.’

  Diran’s voice reached them again: ‘I put everything next to the cash register, Digin Lucie.’

  ‘Thank you, Diran.’

  Mama grabbed Tomas by the shoulders and cautioned, ‘Don’t touch it when it’s up, do you understand? And from now on I won’t take you to the hammam.’

  That was a hard blow for a hardening bouboul.

  ‘Why not, Mama?’

  ‘Because I don’t want you to run around among my naked friends with that swollen thing dangling between your legs. The hammam administration will tell me to send you with your father in the evening, after the women have gone.’

  Diran’s voice seemed to confirm her decision: ‘Yes, it’s a very good idea, Digin Lucie.’ He was punching the cash register.

  ‘You mean to send him with his father?’

  ‘To send who with his father?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Diran, my mind is all over the place.’

  ‘I was just saying that it’s a good idea to buy while we still have the things you want. You never can tell what might happen next with this bloody war. Today we’re short of gas and flour; tomorrow it may be oil and sugar. You never can tell.’

  ‘You’re right, Diran, you never can tell. Surprise after surprise, every day. Yes, it’s a very good idea.’

  Tomas was delighted. He had been waiting to become a man since the day he was born!

  And mother was relieved that their ‘talk’ was over.

  ‘Listen, Mama, there’s something else I want to ask you.’

  ‘You’ve asked enough for one day. Shut up and let’s go home!’

  Mother rushed out of the shop without even saying goodbye to Diran, with Tomas following meekly behind.

  *

  That same evening, after dinner, Tomas went to his room to finish his arithmetic homework. Before getting down to division and multiplication, he thought of testing his escalating masculinity. He could picture his little friend Anya in the nude, but he quickly abandoned that idea as her breasts were too small. For a moment he thought of Anya’s mother, Nelli, who was a tall blonde with blue eyes, rosy complexion, short hair and fulsome breasts, but she was too much of a mother. Then there was Noni, who he preferred in a two-piece bathing suit. Best of all, though, were the women at the Turkish bath, with epic breasts and buttocks of all shapes and sizes. Then he recalled the gypsy bath attendants, the tellâks, with their shrivelled breasts hanging from their chests like empty brown pouches. He shut his eyes to make them go away. He had worked out that he could masturbate every three and a half days without risking his sanity. The half-day complicated the situation; why not then every three days, he thought. He was preparing his penis for its test flight when he heard Papa’s footsteps in the hallway.

  The door opened and Papa walked in. Tomas didn’t have to guess the reason for this unscheduled visit: Mama must have told him about their conversation in the shop. The fact that he was on the verge of manhood had to be consecrated by the mother, the father and the Holy Ghost. It was like asking for parental blessings before marriage.

  ‘How was school, son?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Have you finished your homework?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I’ll let you finish it.’

  Tomas relaxed.

  ‘What did you do after school?’

  Frustration flashed in Tomas’s eyes. The test flight would have to be suspended indefinitely due to foul weather conditions.

  ‘I went shopping with Mama.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Diran’s.’

  ‘Crowded?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What did you buy?’

  ‘The usual stuff.’

  Tomas was not at all in the mood for small talk.

  ‘Mama says there are mice in the shop.’

  What an idiotic way to broach the subject of erections!

  ‘I didn’t see any.’

  ‘They come out at night.’

  ‘Diran covers everything before closing the shop.’

  ‘I’m sure he does.’

  The conversation grew more inept with each word. His father had carefully planned his inaugural lecture on ‘The Facts of Life’ but he was finding it extremely difficult to begin.

  ‘How is arithmetic?’

  ‘I’m doing it.’

  ‘Is it hard?’

  God! Tomas retorted in despair, ‘No, Papa, it’s not hard. It’s my bouboul that’s getting hard. I know you came to talk about that.’ He was amazed at himself.

  His father sighed with relief. ‘Is that what you want to talk about?’

  Tomas didn’t reply.

  ‘Mama told me everything.’ His voice climbed a pitch higher.

  Silence again.

  ‘I’m glad you talked to her.’

  Tomas’s mother had had a big smile on her face. His father, on the contrary, wore a sombre expression, as if discussing the symptoms of gonorrhoea or some other equally serious venereal disease. Tomas’s bouboul turned into a bouboulig and shrank back into its soft self.

  ‘You’re growing up, Tomas. What’s happening is natural for any developing boy. I want to talk about something else.’ He paused for a long while to formulate what he was going to say next. ‘The same thing happened to me when I was your age.’

  Tomas was interested to know one thing only: if he would become a total idiot or only a partial one.

  ‘Yes, it happened to me ... also,’ his father stammered. ‘I was going to explain these things, but I didn’t think you were going to reach puberty at such an early age.’

  The words puberty and at such an early age delighted Tomas. Despite the fact that the days were still progressing slowly, like the vintage steamboats that shuttled between the Asiatic and the European shores of the Bosporus, a miracle had at last happened: he had aged before his time. Bewildering, but so very pleasant.

  ‘Soon you’ll also have wet dreams.’

  Wet dreams? Tomas had heard of them from the boys in higher grades. They had even asked him if he had had any. He was offended. He had never wet his bed.

  His father continued, ‘You’ll dream about beautiful things – girls, I mean – and you’ll wake up wet. If you feel a creamy fluid flow from your bouboul don’t panic. That’s what we call a wet dream.’

  Wetness, hardness, creamy ... it was normal. It was part of growing up. But Tomas wanted him to talk about becoming an idiot.

  ‘Promise to tell me when you have your first wet dream.’

  Tomas didn’t have to promise. He would announce it not only to his father but to the entire country, from the Aegean to the Russian border.

  ‘Hardening of your thing is natural,’ his father added, ‘but don’t play with it.’

  Tomas thought his father would elaborate, but, unfortunately, with that he opened the door and left.

  8

  In spite of the perpetual war, par
ental lies, woeful realities and jolting sexual discoveries, there were some pleasant moments in Tomas’s life. The school gym teacher, a devoted instructor and an ex-champion discus thrower, was convinced that Tomas had a great future in long distance running. He pushed him to train regularly on the modest school track. Tomas had already proved his athletic prowess at the school field days which took place right before the summer holidays. He wasn’t terribly sure whether he preferred running or reading, though. Running round and round the football pitch or a vacant lot was terribly boring. But running in the open fields was another matter: it gave him a soaring sensation, as if he were a bird. He read ardently in two languages: more in Armenian than in Turkish. Robinson Crusoe was the first novel that he savoured immensely. Translated into Armenian, every story gave him the impression that the hero, the villain, and the rest of the people were Armenians with strange names. He read Gulliver’s Travels three times. He laughed every time he saw the word Yahoo; it reminded him of yahu, a common Turkish interjection expressing impatience, among other things.

  He was also fond of detective stories, published weekly in the Turkish newspapers or separately as eight- or ten-page pull-outs. Sherlock Holmes, with his deerstalker hat, calabash pipe and lightning conclusions captured Tomas’s imagination. There was also Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief constantly pursued by Inspector Ganimard yet never caught. An abridged version of The Damsel with Green Eyes was his favourite, and when Papa discovered the book in Tomas’s bedroom and confiscated it without explanation, Tomas had a sudden preference for Lupin over all other detectives, including Nat Pinkerton, the most popular and most famous detective published in Turkish in those days.

  Books took him to faraway exotic lands, where new people and events emerged on every page. Joy sprouted even from tragedy, and suddenly he was wide awake, yearning for more to read: Armenian poems, stories, novels, news, gory headlines ... as if they solidified his existence. He loved reading so much that he wanted to write stories. He had mentioned it to Anya shyly, a genuine desire buried deep in his heart. Anya gave him her books to read; she even swiped a couple of books from the school library and passed them on to him. It was an inexpensive way of giving expensive gifts.

  There were times when Tomas put his books aside and joined his friends to exchange news from the local Turkish press. The one with the most sensational scoop was named ‘Reporter of the Week’. These bits and pieces of news were always about the war: battles, fighter planes, armoured vehicles, submarines, U-boats and bombings. The war had put a damper on collecting pictures of star football players; instead, the boys looked for surplus sugar, coffee and bread coupons and sold them on the black market. Arif, a friend and Constable Nurettin’s son, had an exceptional talent for discovering lucrative channels for such things. He collected them mostly from people in homes for the elderly or from police canteens and then sold them back to them.

  Tomas’s favourite pastime, though, was going with friends to Joseph the herbalist’s after school. They went at least twice a week. Aram, Whistling Death, always chose to be the leader; Tomas, Flying Tiger, was second in command; Haig, Speedy Hellcat, had a quiet demeanour, but in his stillness he was capable of great mischief. He had a unique talent for encouraging others while staying out of it himself. Bebo, the maths whizz and the tamest of the four, was ironically nicknamed Night Fighter. They had found the names in a book that listed the names of the bombs being used in the war.

  These four were known as the mischief-makers. Their reputation as outlaws spread throughout the school. They were detained round the clock, forced to attend Mass at 7.30 every morning, barred from all extra-curricular activities, ordered to write out ridiculous lines like ‘From now on I shall behave like a human ...’ hundreds of times, or assigned to clean the kitchen floor after school. None of it made them any better behaved. Tomas was a late member of the pack but played a crucial role in spreading the notoriety of the group, even beyond the school grounds.

  *

  The purpose of dropping in on Joseph the herbalist was simply to drive the old shopkeeper to the point of a massive stroke, provoking him to run after them, showering curses on their mothers for letting their children run wild after school. When asked his nationality, Joseph would say he was an Armenian Catholic. The boys called him Uncle Jojo. His shop wasn’t much larger than a telephone booth, packed with jars of all sizes and filled with herbs and rare spices from all over the world; at least that’s what he claimed they were. He never seemed to leave the shop, except on those occasions when he grabbed his stick and raced after the boys. He was above average height, shortsighted and bald, with bushy hair growing from his ears and nostrils, and he was quite uncouth. Sometimes, depending on the time of day and the weather, he looked like a rickety cardboard cut-out of a human. Daily he stood among his strange jars, hemmed in by tiny drawers on the walls, dried plants hanging from the ceiling and an inaccurate copper scale that was placed on the floor, away from customers’ eyes. He dispensed his pulverized goods from behind a miniature counter, measuring out the contents of the moth-eaten drawers and brown vessels with a rusty spoon. A bunch of little sacks were consigned to dusty heights no longer touched. He conducted himself like a professional apothecary whose skills had been outmoded since the discovery of aspirin.

  The shop smelled of musty seaweed blended with saffron and ginger. Jojo had remedies for every ill: gout, jaundice, rashes, diarrhoea, premature ejaculation, forgetfulness, lunacy, tomfoolery, low libidos, failing marriages and broken hearts. From the decaying wooden façade of the shop no one could have guessed that it contained enough panaceas and alien nostrums to put the entire medical profession to shame.

  Uncle Jojo was immortal. Everlasting, like those dry leaves whose names he knew by heart. If he didn’t know the name of something he made one up, adding Latin and Greek suffixes – artimides, mophocles, tubicolis, argulus, corneilius, aghorimus, etcetera. He repeated these medical marvels gratis complimentaris, with a solemn air of erudition, whether you asked for them or not.

  His sales had doubled lately because of the war, for there was a dire shortage of imported European drugs so people were keen to try homemade remedies and Uncle Jojo’s extraordinary antidotes. Furthermore, a huge number of men, as a result of war-related anxiety and stress were suffering from fairly serious erectile dysfunction. The old herbalist’s pills were in great demand, even in government circles.

  *

  Digin Lili, the sixty-year-old mother of two daughters and grandmother of four grandsons, was one of Jojo’s regulars. After visiting her family doctor for chronic arthritis she would go to Joseph’s shop to supplement the doctor’s prescription with herbal alternatives. Today she was there for another reason.

  ‘Joseph, I’d like a hundred grams of crushed white seashells.’

  ‘You’re in luck, Digin Lili: they’re very fresh. I crushed them only an hour ago.’ He grabbed a handful of shells from a jar and poured them back into the same jar from a height. ‘Listen, Digin Lili, listen: they’re speaking the language of the sea. They’re so fresh they can still walk. I also have oyster shells, mussel shells, dry turnip leaves, pickled adenoids, iodine blossoms, dehydrated cockroaches, bee venom ... Bee venom is good for your arthritis, Digin Lili, and dried bugs are good for ...’

  ‘Thank you, Joseph. Shells will do for today.’

  She wanted them to mix with the potting soil for planting carnations.

  ‘Did the catalpa leaves help, Digin Lili?’

  ‘Yes, they’re excellent for varicose veins, but they made me constipated.’

  ‘Ah, then you should use cabbage suppositories.’

  ‘Thank you, Joseph.’

  An hour later, Whistling Death and the rest of the gang arrived.

  ‘Get the hell out of here, all of you!’ Jojo shrieked, as though suffering a sudden attack of colic.

  ‘No, no, please listen, Uncle Jojo,’ Tomas pleaded. ‘Mama has a runny nose. She wants something to stop it.’

 
; Jojo calmed down. ‘Running a lot or running a little?’

  ‘I’ll go and ask her.’

  ‘Away with you, bum. Go ask her.’

  ‘I don’t have to ask: she told me.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘She told me it’s running like the bathroom tap.’

  ‘Don’t be funny!’

  ‘I’m not.’

  After a moment of reflection, assuming a pharmacological sobriety, the old man added, ‘Huh! Tell her to inhale boiled grape seeds. I’ll give you enough for two days.’

  ‘No, she’s allergic to grape seeds,’ Tomas replied. ‘She’d prefer fifty grams of good old drum powder!’

  ‘Prefer what?’

  ‘Drum powder.’

  ‘And eleven centimetres of minaret shadow!’ Aram added.

  ‘Add to it a litre of donkey farts!’ Bebo continued.

  The boys burst into rowdy laughter, hooting, howling and whistling.

  The old herbalist was beside himself. ‘Go tell your mothers to swallow donkey shit for giving birth to rats like you!’ In desperation he grabbed his cane and chased them half way up the street. But the boys were already hanging from a passing tram. Angry and weary, Uncle Jojo, master herbalist, continued to roar: ‘Bastards! Pumpkin heads! I’ll go see Father Matos. I’ll tell him to pickle you in acid ... flush you down the sewers. You don’t belong in school. You don’t deserve an education. I’ll teach you a lesson or two all right!’

  The herbalist returned to his shop, his face still flashing with rage. Madame Roubina, the arithmetic teacher’s wife, was at the shop, waiting for him.

  ‘Joseph, please give me something to get rid of my nightmares.’

  The poor woman had come to see him at a very inopportune time. Joseph didn’t want to see anybody. ‘Go and get rid of your husband first!’ he bellowed at the top of his voice. ‘That’ll put an end to your nightmares!’

  9

  Time didn’t heal Mama’s pain. She commemorated her daughter’s birthday in her own quiet fashion each year. She would repeat, over and over again, the prayer she had taught Emma to say before going to bed: ‘Almighty God, shield us all, tonight and every night, and take not your blessed angels away from us ...’ Then she would go and sit in the stillness of the living room, with a glass of water in her hand, and reminisce. One by one the scenes came back to her like paper flowers silently blooming in a waterless vase. Emma’s birth had been an accident. For some reason, Mama had refused to have a second child: rather unusual for an Armenian mother from the heart of Anatolia. She recalled the endless disputes with her in-laws about her daughter’s name: whether to call her Emma or a conventional Armenian name ...