“One night as I was closing up I saw three people attacking a man. It was Hayattin Hoca, my literature teacher from school. Grabbing my knife I rushed out to them and slashed their hands and faces. The attackers, caught unawares, retreated and disappeared into the darkness. Hayattin Hoca hugged me. We talked nonstop as we walked. We went into a tavern in Samatya. We told each other about ourselves. After Darüşşafaka Hayattin Hoca had changed schools twice, reduced his teaching hours and now spent more time on his political activities. He was worried about our country’s future. He had heard that I had gone to university to study French language and literature. But he hadn’t heard that I had dropped out in the second year because I had to work, it saddened him when I told him. When he asked if I was still interested in poetry I mumbled several verses from Baudelaire that I had memorized in his classes. He beamed at me proudly and reminded me of the time I had won first prize in the poetry reading competition. We clinked our glasses of rakı. Hayattin Hoca was happy to hear of my marriage, but he was still single. Apparently he had fallen in love with one of his students a few years previously but hadn’t declared himself, and once he heard that the girl had married after leaving school he had resigned himself to complete solitude. We drank until dawn. I recited poems from heart and he read out poems he had written for the girl he loved. I don’t know how I got home, it wasn’t until I had sobered up the next day that I remembered hearing Mahizer’s name in Hayattin Hoca’s poems.
“I didn’t go to Hayattin Hoca’s funeral a month later. He was shot in the head with a single bullet as he was leaving school. In his file they found a poem dedicated to me, about brave horse riders in a storm. A friend of his brought it to me. That night I clung to Mahizer and begged her not to leave me. Why would I leave you, my foolish husband, she said. I had brought home the box that I had kept for years in the soap drawer at the barbershop. I opened it and took out the scraps of paper with the poems that Mahizer had written me when we were engaged and asked her to read them to me. The scraps of paper smelled of rose and lavender. As Mahizer was reading the poems, I undid her blouse and sucked her breast. I wanted to suckle milk but I could taste the tears flowing down onto her chest. Three months passed. One night Mahizer cried again as she fired questions at me, her voice trembling. She asked who had shot Hayattin Hoca. He never took any liberties with me, she said. For several nights I had been talking in my sleep, saying he had deserved to die. Who else have I talked about? I asked. You mean there are more? asked Mahizer. I swore on my mother’s life. I had nothing to do with it, I said, words spoken in dreams don’t mean anything. I put on my coat and went out into the cold. What a delusion! My weary soul. Foolish old man. My soul that used to have wings of fire. It would take flight at the slightest impetus. Oh, gasping sick man, worthless workhorse. Is there anything in the world that won’t end in ashes? My soul, miserable, senile, bleeding wretch. Neither the zest of life nor love’s torrent can reach you now. Time skips a beat. As I breathe, I feel myself—my self—dissolving, losing my bearings. How did I reach the top of the well, how did I lift the stones and raise its cover, I wasn’t in my right mind. I leant down into the well and shouted. Mother! When you forced your breast into my mouth why did you give me tears instead of milk? Mother! When you clung to my puny body why did you feverishly repeat my dead father’s name instead of mine? I knew you were thinking of my father when you called me Kamil instead of Kamo. On your last night too you cried out Kamil. I knew the stone you were standing on was loose. You were bound to fall, mother! You said I was born thanks to my father, that I owed this life to him. Damn it! The dead were dead and gone! You didn’t understand how cruel the light was. The light only showed things from the outside. It stopped us from looking inward.”
Kamo the Barber said the last words as though he were mumbling to himself. First he bent his head forward, then tossed it back and banged it against the wall. “An epileptic fit,” said the Doctor, quickly laying Kamo down on the floor. He placed the piece of bread that we had been saving for our new cellmate, who could arrive at any moment, between Kamo’s teeth, to stop him from biting his tongue. I held his feet. Kamo had lost all control and was convulsing, his mouth foaming.
The cell door opened. The guard towering above us yelled, “What’s going on?”
“Our friend is having an epileptic fit,” said the Doctor. “We need something with a strong smell to bring him around, like cologne or an onion.”
The guard stepped inside, saying, “Tell me if your ass of a friend dies, so I can clear out the body.” But to be on the safe side he leaned over Kamo and checked his face. The guard stank of blood, mold, and damp. The reek of alcohol on his breath made it clear that he had been drinking before going on duty. He waited a while, then straightened up and spat on the floor.
As the guard was closing the door, I saw the face of the girl they had brought in today in the grille of the opposite cell. Her left eye was closed, her lower lip was split. It was her first day here but it was clear from the color of her wounds that they had been torturing her for a long time. Once the door had closed I crouched down onto the floor. Clinging to Kamo’s legs, I pressed my face down on the concrete so I could observe the guard’s feet from the crack under the door. The guard had returned to the girl and was waiting, motionless. I could tell because his feet weren’t moving. Hadn’t the girl left the grille, wasn’t she sitting in the darkness of her cell? The guard wasn’t swearing, he wasn’t banging on the girl’s door and threatening her, or bursting into her cell and throwing her against the wall. Meanwhile Kamo’s body relaxed and tensed alternately, he struggled to free his legs from my grip. He had stretched out his arms and was thrashing them against the cell walls. After a final convulsion Kamo’s spasms ceased and he stopped wheezing. The guard surveying the opposite cell left the girl alone and departed, his footsteps growing distant in the corridor. I stood up and looked out. When I saw the girl at the grille I nodded to her, but she didn’t move. After a while she went back inside, disappearing into the dark.
The Doctor leaned against the wall and stretched his legs. He placed Kamo’s head on his lap. “He’ll be able to sleep for a while in this position,” he said.
“Can he hear us?” I asked.
“Some patients can hear when they’re in this state, others can’t.”
“It’s not a good idea for him to tell us so much about himself, let’s warn him.”
“You’re right, he should stop.”
The Doctor looked at Kamo the Barber as though he were putting his own son, and not a patient, to sleep. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and smoothed his hair.
“How’s the girl in the opposite cell?” he asked.
“She has old scars all over her face, it’s obvious they’ve been torturing her for a long time,” I said.
I looked at Kamo the Barber’s tranquil visage. His customer was right to find him strange, how could a man like him love poetry? He was sleeping like a child exhausted from playing outside all day. Beneath his eyelids he was now leaning over his well, staring down into the darkness. He had held on to damp stones so many times he didn’t trust the stable ones, he descended with the aid of a rope he had lowered down into the well, and let himself go in the water. There Kamo is both north and south, he possesses the east and the west. His outside existence has been wiped clean, he has become a well in the well and water in the water.
“How long was I unconscious?” murmured Kamo, half opening his eyes.
“Half an hour,” said the Doctor.
“My throat’s dry.”
“Sit up slowly.”
Kamo sat up and leaned against the wall. He drank from the plastic water bottle the Doctor held out to him.
“How do you feel?” asked the Doctor.
“Shit, I feel tired but rested as well. I should have told you what I’ve got. It started in the spring right after my mother died. It didn’t last long, a few weeks later I was better. But they say the past comes back to haunt you. Af
ter Mahizer left me the fits started again.”
“Demirtay and I will take care of you here. I’m going to tell you something important, Kamo. It’s good to chat, but there are rules in these cells. We don’t know who is going to give in to the torture and confess all their secrets, or who is going to tell the interrogators whatever they hear in here. We can make small talk and share our troubles to pass the time, but we have to keep our secrets to ourselves. Do you understand?”
“Aren’t we ever going to tell each other the truth?” said Kamo. Gone was the tough man of a moment ago, in his place was this docile patient.
“Keep your secrets to yourself,” replied the Doctor. “We don’t know why they brought you here, and we don’t want to know.”
“Don’t you wonder what kind of a person I am?”
“Look, Kamo, if we were outside I wouldn’t want to meet you or be in the same place as you. But in here we’re at the mercy of pain, we’re constantly embracing death. We’re in no position to judge anyone. Let’s heal each other’s wounds. Let’s not forget that in here we’re the purest form of human there is, the suffering human.”
“You don’t know me,” said Kamo. “I haven’t told you anything yet.”
The Doctor and I looked at each other and waited in silence.
It was clear that Kamo the Barber selected each word carefully and weighed it cautiously before he spoke.
“My memory that I was just complaining about is like a greedy moneylender, it hoards every word. You, student kid, do you know that it was Confucius who was supposed to have said those words in that story you just told? In my barbershop, above the mirror, in line with the national flag, there was a poster of a half-naked woman. Those words were on the bottom of the poster. The girl was wearing a brightly colored skirt that she had pulled up. She was running as fast as her long legs could carry her, with her head turned shyly toward me and my waiting customers. In between her legs were the words ‘a woman with her skirt up can run faster than a man with his pants down.’ Sometimes my customers would stare at the girl’s beauty and think that couldn’t be true, fantasizing that if they ever got to be with her they would be so happy together they wouldn’t give a damn about anything else. When one day a writer customer of mine looked at the poster and sighed ‘Ah Sonya!’ we all heard him and thought that must be the young girl’s name. When it was his turn for a haircut the writer sat on the chair and launched into a long conversation. Eventually he started telling me about myself. He said I had a soul like the Russians. Seeing my surprise he repeated things I had said on his previous visits that he had retained.
“If I had been born in Russia I would either be a member of the Karamazov family, or live like an underground man, or be as wretched as Sonya’s father, Marmeladov. Everything the writer said about those Dostoyevsky characters was true of me. Dostoyevsky depicted them with the same mental condition, first Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, then in part one of Notes from Underground, and finally in the whole of The Brothers Karamazov. There wasn’t a big difference between them, but it was big enough to take them on incredible journeys during their lives. Sonya’s father Marmeladov was a broken man, he knew he was pitiful, and was full of self condemnation. He was a miserable wretch who was a victim of his fate. Sonya adored her miserable father. Ah Sonya, that beautiful, destitute prostitute! Who wouldn’t commit brutal murders for her sake if it meant being worthy of her love? As for the Underground Man, he revealed his own wretchedness so he could expose the wretchedness of others, and manifested it as wrath. His obsession with finding people like himself, with holding a mirror to their faces, led him to tear his soul to shreds. The Karamazovs’ journey on the other hand was another thing entirely. They were at odds with themselves, with others, and even with life itself. They neither felt desperate like Marmeladov, nor regarded their wretchedness as a tool for exposing others like the Underground Man. Their wretchedness was their inescapable destiny, a constantly suppurating wound. They strove not to accept life, but to dispute it, and, when they suffered, to spill their blood and smear it over the face of life. That life has opened up a new page for me too now. Damn you! Take that look off your face, stop staring at me like those people burning in hell. I have lent you my ear for three days, listened to your stories and heard your groans after you were tortured. Now you can lend me your ears.”
Kamo gave us a contemptuous look, raised the water bottle to his lips again, and continued.
“I don’t know what lies ahead, will they release me, or take me away to be tortured like you? Pain turns the body into its slave, while fear does the same to the soul, and people will sell their souls to save their bodies. I’m not afraid. I’m still going to talk to the torturers and tell them the secrets I haven’t told you.
“I’ll tell them whatever they want to know, I’ll answer their questions by putting my whole soul in their hands. Just as tailors turn a jacket inside out and rip out the lining, I’ll rip out my liver and lay it open before them, I’ll tell them more than they want to know. At first they’ll be interested, they’ll write down everything I say in case it’s useful, but after a while the things I tell them will make them uneasy. They’ll realize that I’m telling them things about themselves that they don’t want to know. What people fear most in this life is themselves. They too will be afraid and will try to silence me, the men who tortured me to make me talk will hang me with my arms outstretched, give me electric shocks and soak me in my own blood to make me hold my tongue. They will be just as horrified by the truth as I am. I’ll tell them everything about myself and make them face up to the side of their own selves that they don’t want to see. They will stare in disbelief, like lepers who look into the mirror for the first time, they will retreat until they hit the wall, and because they can’t do anything to change themselves they will think the only solution is to smash the mirror, in other words, my face and my bones. But cutting out my tongue won’t do them any good, my groans will deafen them and imprison their minds in one single truth. Damn it, even in their own homes, they’ll wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and gulp down bottles of the strongest drink. But there’s no escape, the truth runs in your jugular vein. They either accept it or slit their wrists. They all have loving wives who will take them in their arms and comfort them, then light a cigarette and put it between their trembling fingers. They live in mortal fear of discovering their own truth. Now I know why they haven’t taken me away for interrogation these past three days. They’re afraid of me.”
Kamo the Barber was talking from the deepest pit, from the edge of the pit, from the darkest corner of that pit. He had hidden for too long, he had been crushed and was profoundly damaged. There was no way of knowing whether he had gone into hiding because he was damaged or if it was going into hiding that had damaged him. The darkness that was so dear to Kamo stifled me. When they blindfolded me and led me out of the iron gate they were taking me out of the world I knew. I appreciated the value of direction, I struggled to cling to the chaos of words in my mind. It wasn’t easy to think in the dark. Life was right beside me and I wanted to return to it.
Kamo was peering out of half-open, weary eyes. Even the tiny ray that was casting its light into the cell made him uneasy, perhaps that was why he wanted to sleep all the time.
“There was only one time when my mother didn’t tell me off for standing over the well,” he said. “That day she had dreamt of burning sticks. It was a sign that she would overcome something that was troubling her. Strange, the first time I ever dreamt of burning sticks was in this cell. What trouble could I have overcome while my past remained frozen?”
“This time will end too, just as the old days ended,” said the Doctor. “Your dream is telling you that you will get out of here and that you’ll be free again.”
“Free? Nothing has been the same for me since I lost Mahizer, there’s not a single stone inside me that’s not loose.”
“You’re tormenting yourself. Everyone goes through t
his kind of thing at some point.” The Doctor waited for a moment, before continuing. “You need to think positively in here, Kamo. Dream that we’re all outside. For instance, imagine we’re chatting on Ortaköy beach and contemplating the shore on the other side.”
The Doctor liked to take us out of here and transport us to the outside world. He taught me how to do that. It was better to dream about the outside world than to dwell on our troubles. Time, which stood still in the cell because our bodies were trapped, started ticking again once our minds went outside. Our minds were stronger than our bodies. The Doctor said that could be proven medically. In here we often dreamed about the world outside, for example we shared the happiness of people walking on the seashore. We waved to the people dancing to loud music on a boat near Ortaköy shore. We walked past lovers with their arms around each other. As the sun was setting on the horizon the Doctor bought a bag of green plums from a street vendor. Smiling, he offered me the first one.
Last week they pushed me into the cell, half-conscious. I was muttering incomprehensibly because my lips were dry. The Doctor, thinking I was asking for water, sat me up to try and give me water, and opened my eyes. “I don’t want water, I want green plums,” I said. We laughed about that for two days.
The Doctor asked Kamo if he too would like some green plums.
Kamo wasn’t impressed by the story. His mind didn’t work on the same plane as ours. “The past, Doctor,” he said, “our past . . .”
The Doctor brought down his hand that was poised in the air as though he were offering him a plum. “Our past is somewhere that’s too far away to reach. We should concentrate on tomorrow instead,” he said.
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