Istanbul, Istanbul

by Burhan Sonmez

  “They lied to us. That fire we see before us was not named by the first person who used it. Later generations named it and said humanity had discovered fire. What existed existed already, how could anyone discover it? They didn’t say anything about the first person creating fire rather than discovering it. As long as fire burned and went out of its own accord, it was nothing. One day someone roasted his meat on it and heated his cave with it. That wasn’t discovering fire, it was creating it. They kept the truth from us.”

  “Bravo, Traveler!”

  “Well done, Traveler! Keep talking, never mind if we don’t know what you’re on about.”

  “Drink wine, so your lips don’t go dry.”

  The Architect Adaza was drunk, but he recalled the words he had heard from me perfectly. The sentences he was stringing together here were the words I had spoken in my barbershop to pass the time while I was cutting hair.

  “We are city victims,” he continued. “We’re either poor or unhappy, and quite often we’re both. We’re conditioned to hope. For the sake of hope we tolerate evil. But if we’re not masters of today, what guarantee is there for tomorrow? Hope is the lie of preachers, politicians, and the rich. They deceive us with words and cover up the truth.”

  The drunks replied with the same zeal.

  “Down with hope! Long live wine!”

  “Good on you!”

  “Hope is the opium of the people!”

  Adaza interrupted the shouting and whistling with a question. “My brothers, is this city dead or alive?”

  I think he was reminiscing about his university years, he spoke as though he were addressing young insurgents. He was delving into his magician’s hat and producing the words he had been stashing away for years. He missed his revolutionary era and regretted abandoning it for fear of the police. Once, when he was drunk, he opened his heart to me. “You may abandon the past, but the past will never abandon you,” he had said.

  The layabouts were bickering amongst themselves.

  “This city is dead and alive.”

  “If anyone says it’s alive I’ll smash a bottle over his head.”

  “Dead!”

  Adaza was excited. As he spoke he stood on the tips of his toes, then lowered himself back down again.

  “My homeless brothers! You, the poor defeated! The heartbroken!” he said. As he spoke his voice became more confident. “We did not create this city, we found ourselves in it. And we’re not the ones who killed it either. There’s no way out, our predecessors burned the boats. Like the first people who created fire, who will be the first to create the new city, who will give it life?”

  “Speak, Traveler, let rip.”

  “Tell us about the moon, too.”

  “And about the stars.”

  They all raised their heads in unison. I walked two paces away from my tree and raised my head likewise. The stars were so endless that none but the homeless and drunks could ever have the time to contemplate them. Here there were no city lights, the sky glittered with starlight. The stars in this enormous city that dentists, bakers, and housewives never looked at, had congregated in the shade of the city wall and were palpitating in space as though they might fall out of the sky at any moment.

  “What a long night!”

  “We need more wine!”

  “Traveler, recite us a starry poem.”

  Recite a poem? This time I couldn’t just sit back and take his terrible poems. With heavy footsteps I approached the drunks gathered around the fire.

  When the Architect Adaza saw me he hesitated, then he took a swig from the bottle he was holding. He drank as though he had discovered the secret he had been searching for, as though he had finally found happiness after so many years spent in vain. He laughed.

  “Here,” he said, “is the man I was telling you about, Kamo the Barber.”

  Everyone turned and looked at me. The closer I got the more ugly they seemed, and the more scars I saw on their faces. They had taken over the area, like rats in a rubbish dump, and admitted the Architect Adaza into their circle. Adaza was happy, his drunken mouth drooping. On another such evening, when he had looked as happy as now, and when Istanbul had grown dark early, we had gone to a tavern together. After two double rakıs he announced that he was going to recite his latest poem. He had stood on his chair and made everyone in the room repeat the verses he read out loud. It was unbearable. Listening to that bad poetry weighed on my heart.

  The Architect Adaza, speaking by the fire in the shade of the city wall, a bottle of wine in one hand, managed to stay upright with the aid of his long staff, which he clutched with the other.

  “Kamo,” he said, “the traveler in that story wasn’t lying, he was demonstrating the lie. Wasn’t he? Words are the only path to the truth, that’s what the traveler was trying to explain.”

  “Mr. Architect,” I said, “Adaza, it’s time to go home.”

  The drunks around the fire stirred and sat up. They looked at each other and at Adaza.

  “Kamo,” continued the Architect Adaza, “we’re seeking the truth of the era when the first person did not give fire the name fire. What do we possess except poetry? Poets go beyond not just reality but fantasy too, and get close to the time before fire. They didn’t teach us that at university, they didn’t give us poetry to read. Every day they told us lies.”

  Instead of returning home to the warm embrace of his family, the Architect Adaza was dawdling over words that he would forget in a few minutes. He had a wife and two pretty daughters who loved him. Fools were lucky, they didn’t appreciate what they had. What more were they after? What more could they want, when they already had the happiness that everyone spent a lifetime searching for?

  The drunks were staring at me, wondering what I was going to do. They were unkempt, ugly, and emaciated. There was not one among them who was decently dressed and brushed. The Architect Adaza looked just like they did now. The man before me was no longer the person who regularly came into my shop for a shave, and who was careful not to cross his legs so that the trousers his wife had ironed wouldn’t crease.

  “Kamo,” he said, “you said clinging to a belief with your heart turns a person into the devil, do you remember? Look, I’m also clinging to a belief.”

  Yes, clinging to a belief turned a person into a devil. The person who regarded his own beliefs as superior looked down on others. He gathered all of life’s value in the palm of his hand and saw the source of goodness in himself. According to him, evil was a part of others, and was a stranger to his own heart. Sometimes I tested my customers with words like those. While they agreed with me wholeheartedly, or argued amongst themselves, I would take the opposite standpoint without anyone noticing, and argue against everything I had been saying. I would weigh up who was the most tenacious when it came to defending their beliefs.

  “Did I say that? I don’t remember,” I replied to Adaza.

  “Don’t underestimate him as a simple barber, Kamo goes to university. He knows more than the professors and he’s the one who understands my poetry the best.”

  Why hadn’t this man got run over by a car while he was drunk? His wife would have cried for a bit and then made a new life for herself, and found a better father for her children. People like him never learned, the foolishness they practiced at home persisted after they left home. I had known that since I was a small boy. No matter what you said they would fall into bad ways and get up to crafty tricks. While praising you and showering you with kindness, they aggrandized their bad poetry by burdening you with it. These types graduated from university, built cities, became heads of state, and talked about the justice in this country. And they wanted you to live according to their miserable beliefs.

  I accepted the bottle that the Architect Adaza offered me. I sat beside the fire, between two layabouts who moved up for me. I checked out the scene, examining each face one by one. They looked as happy, but just as weary, as if they had come here after surviving a sinking ship. They ha
d no past, they owed this moment to wine; they believed in fire, in city walls, and in the stars.

  Adaza sat beside me and placed his staff on the ground. As he gazed into the fire, tears welled up in his eyes. A couple of times he toppled forward. He became engrossed in the dancing flames that changed from yellow to blue, before suddenly disappearing. Like castaways who regret surviving a shipwreck, he was ready to return to the dark, to be buried at sea. There was no branch left in this world for him to cling to, and he was seeking no treasure. If he had the strength he would take the final step, or if someone were to push him gently from behind he would fall into the sea and lie still beneath the waves.

  Those who realized he had fallen silent shouted out, “Where’s the poem? Where is it?”

  One man who noticed that Adaza was not replying raised the bottle in his hand and said, “I’ll recite you a poem.” He was blind in one eye, the other eye burned with fire.

  “Go on,” they said.

  “I want there to be women in it.”

  “And stars.”

  “That’ll depend on the luck of the draw.”

  The one-eyed man took a swig of wine and said, “Before your carmine lips / I didn’t know what misery was.”

  He stopped and looked at his friends, to ensure they were listening to him. There was the sound of a dog barking in the distance. The man continued with his poem.

  “While your hair is splayed in the wind / Songs flow skyward / Your cool legs in the stream / Shimmered like silver fish / The day dawned, the sun set / You gathered up your hair / And left with the migrant birds / Behind you night’s door remains open and / You have abandoned me on the banks of the stream / Before your carmine lips / I didn’t know what misery was.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Was that about women?”

  “Or stars?”

  “Like you know anything about poetry!”

  The dogs’ barking grew louder, everyone turned and looked at where it was coming from. Several dogs were approaching from the gaps between the broken stones in the city wall, just one white dog remained aloof. The dogs ran, their shadows merging into one in the moonlight. They approached and nuzzled the drunks’ arms. They rolled around on the floor and roamed around. They sniffed out the bones the drunks had saved for them. The white dog waited in the distance.

  The one-eyed man took no notice of the dogs. He took a swig from the bottle in his hand, then rose to his feet. “I’ll just go and have a pee, then I’ll come back and recite you another poem,” he said. No one paid any attention to him.

  After taking a sip of wine, I too rose to my feet. I followed the one-eyed man who had stood up to go to the toilet. The city walls extended toward infinity in the moonlight. There was nothing on this side of the city save the city walls, the stars, and the fire. As the sky grew bigger and bigger, one of the drunks launched into a song with his shrill voice. “As the evening sun was sinking into the horizon / You went away and left me my beloved.”

  The one eyed man approached an alcove in the city walls and stopped. He was unsteady on his feet and struggled to undo his zipper. I caught up with him in a few steps. I pushed him into the alcove and put my hand over his mouth. My steel knife was at the ready; I waved it in the air several times before holding it against his throat. He couldn’t understand what was going on. He opened his eye wide and it glinted in the light of the full moon. There was more bafflement than fear on his face. Was this really happening, or was he asleep? He racked his brain, trying to recall first me, then where he was, then himself. If it weren’t for the barely audible song in the distance he would have imagined he had died long ago and woken up in his grave. He was short to start with and he shrank considerably. I crushed him under my weight and flung him against the wall. I brandished the knife in the air again. “Don’t scream, I’m going to ask you something,” I said. I withdrew my face and shifted the weight of my body from his. I removed my hand from his mouth but pointed the knife in my other hand at his eye. “I beg you, please don’t kill me, you can have all the stolen goods,” he said. He stank of wine and mold. I could hear his heart beating. “I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to tell me the truth,” I said. He nodded. “I swear,” he said. Instead of asking him why he still insisted on living, why he didn’t dig a grave in this rubbish dump and climb into it with his one eye and his filthy stench, I said, “Where did you learn that poem you just recited?” His eye lit up and then grew dull. “Did I do something wrong?” he stammered. “You did wrong by being born,” I said. “Answer me, where did you hear that poem?”

  He would have given a simple answer to that simple question, but the sharp edge of the knife pointing at his eye was tampering with his reason.

  “That was our primary school teacher’s poem,” he said.

  That was the extent of his life’s mystery, he had told me what I needed to know.

  “Where did you go to school, at Black Fountain Village?”

  His face lit up. “Yes, I’m from Black Fountain. Our teacher who came from Istanbul . . .”

  I didn’t give him a chance to finish his sentence. I grabbed him by the throat and pushed him against the wall. “Don’t you dare utter a single word about him,” I said. “Don’t talk about your teacher, talk about your village.”

  He held my wrist with his skinny fingers and looked at me imploringly. What had he got himself into, what had he done wrong? His veins were dilated, his brow was covered in sweat. Spit drooled from the edge of his mouth. Just as he was on the point of suffocation I loosened my grip and released his throat. I spoke for him. “The way to your village is through the mountains, via a steep road. There are always clouds hanging over it. You don’t grow trees in your fields, you breed livestock. You build your houses out of black stones. Your village is called Black Fountain, but you have no fountain, you draw your water from wells.”

  I held his chin and forced it up, I stared into his eye and continued.

  “The walls of your village are more dependable than you are. They don’t change, regardless of whether the sun is shining or whether it’s dark. And they remain standing for at least a hundred years. As for you, you smile at people during the day and hang severed chicken legs outside their doors at night. No one has ever known you to admit your faults, and you don’t know how to apologize. You rape your own relatives, then commit murder in the name of honor. The name of God is constantly on your lips. You’re first class at crying. You listen to laments and dream of the old days. The whole world could end and you couldn’t care less, as long as you don’t lose a single stone from the walls of your houses. You believe evil comes from elsewhere. The source of evil is either your neighbor or the strangers that come to the village. You can’t see that you harbor snakes in your own heart.”

  “You’re right,” he said, in a listless voice. “Look at what they did to me. The people from my own village, my relatives, gouged my eye out and threw me out of the village.”

  “Silence, I don’t want to hear about you. You have no story of your own, you only have a collective story. This is just one story and each of you is living a part of it.”

  He searched all over his body and took out the money hidden in the secret pockets of his torn clothing. He offered me the fistful of notes in his hand. “Take this, I’ll bring you money every day,” he said. I flung the knife, making blood squirt from his palm; the money scattered all over the floor. “Ahhh!” he sighed, pulling his hand away.

  “You’re cowards, you’re sly, and, whenever you can get away with it, you’re cruel. That was the way you finished off the teacher as well. While you were still sleeping he would get up and light the stove in the school’s only classroom. He would draw pictures on the blackboard. He would tell you about mountains that looked nothing like yours, and describe animals you’d never heard of. You didn’t care about the world being round, or about the sea occupying more of the earth than land does. But he would still usher you into the school yard in the evenin
gs and show you the Milky Way and the Northern Star. When you had gone home and the place became the dogs’ roaming territory, he would shut himself up in his small study and, in the light of his dim lamp, write the poems he would read to you. He wasn’t aware of the dark shadows lurking outside his window. It took time for him to realize what kind of people you were, what kind of lives you led in those houses with the doors locked so securely. Each house, each person, was a dark cave. It was hard for him to believe that. That’s why his last poems were full of disillusionment. Your village was Black Fountain, but you had no fountain, you too were a lie, just like your village. It was that lie that the teacher couldn’t bear.”

  He stared as though his one eye were about to pop out of his head. He bit his lips. He clung to my arm. He began to weep. He was like a rat caught in a trap. Who knows when he had last cried like that? It wasn’t his wrongdoings he was thinking of, it was my knife. I pushed him against the wall. I grabbed his collar.

  “Stop crying or I’ll slit your throat,” I said. “It’s too late for that now. You people are always late for everything. You should have cried years ago and begged the teacher for forgiveness. What did he ever do to you, apart from tell the truth to the old men sitting by the wall? As he spoke, you lost sleep, waking up in the middle of the night covered in sweat. You went out to the door in the dark and looked out into the distance, far into the distance. You smoked all through the night. You didn’t want to know the truth. You were content to live with lies, denying your wickedness. How happy you were with that snake in your hearts, you didn’t just betray the teacher, you betrayed the very mountain you lived on.”

  “Who are you, are you from our village?” he asked hesitantly.

  “Who are you more like, who are all of you?” I was really riled now. “Why didn’t you stop and have a look at yourselves even once? The teacher came to your village because he had had enough of Istanbul and wanted to get away from the city’s oppressiveness. Otherwise he would have lost his mind. Istanbul swelled up like a corpse and people turned into parasites that fed off that corpse. He had to escape from that nightmare and take refuge in this village. He had to spend his evenings translating French poetry, and find a new vein for his own poetry. But were the villagers any different? Weren’t people the same everywhere? The teacher realized too late that he had gone from one nightmare to another. The city was a lie and now the village was also a lie, he was trapped between two lies. Everywhere was rotting, there was nowhere left in the world to escape to.”