“Do you mean the Decameron?”
“Yes, that’s the one. I couldn’t remember it because it has such a strange title.”
“The book itself is strange too,” I said. “A group of men and women flee the city to escape from a plague epidemic, and take refuge in a cottage. They wait for the epidemic to pass. If the route to escaping death was to flee the city, the route to passing time was to converse. For ten days they sat by the fire every evening and told stories. Decameron means ‘ten days’ in the language of the ancient Istanbul dwellers, that’s where the book gets its title. They told erotic stories, romantic stories, and scandalous stories, and they laughed a lot. They diluted their fear of the plague with stories that didn’t take life too seriously. The story of the princess who ran away to the desert was one of them.”
“I knew about the stories that were told over a thousand and one nights, but I’d never heard of the stories that were told over ten days. I wonder why my father never mentioned them. Perhaps he had too many other stories to tell.”
“Maybe he did tell them, but just didn’t say where they came from.”
“Who knows?” said Uncle Küheylan, pausing as though trying to remember all the stories stored in his memory, then he asked, “Was Istanbul the city in the Decameron where the plague broke out?”
“Uncle Küheylan, you know that every city is Istanbul for us. If a child stays out after dark and loses his way in the narrow streets, that place is Istanbul. The city of the young man who ventures out to find his lifelong sweetheart, that of the hunter who sets out in search of the fleece of the black fox, that of the ship dragged through the storm, of the prince who wants to hold the whole world in the palm of his hand, like a diamond, of the last rebel who has sworn he will never come to heel, of the young girl who runs away from home to pursue her dream of becoming a singer, the city where millionaires, thieves, and poets go is Istanbul. Every story is about here.”
“You talk like my father, Doctor. He used to say that in Istanbul it’s the same underground as it is aboveground, in both of them the bird of time glides like a dark shadow, without flapping its wings. My father knew the secret of this place, but he demonstrated it with stories instead of revealing it openly. Istanbul wasn’t a part of something, it was the whole where all the parts came together. That’s what he tried to tell us. Maybe he discovered that secret in a place like this, somewhere underground.”
“Now we’re discovering the things your father found out too.”
“But the people in the Decameron are better off than us. They fled the city and escaped death. Whereas we are in the depths of the city, tossed into the darkness. What wouldn’t we give to be with the people telling stories in the Decameron instead of in here, isn’t that right? They went there of their own free will, but we were brought us here against ours. Even worse, they got further away from death, but we’re getting closer. If our Istanbul is the same city as the one in the Decameron, I think each story’s fate flows in a different direction, don’t you agree?”
“You’re right, Uncle Küheylan,” I said.
Before I could continue we heard the grating of the iron gate. We tensed automatically. We looked at each other, then turned our eyes toward the grille. We strained to hear what they were saying outside. We waited for their voices to reach the corridor. We knew that the feeling we had had for the past two days every time they had opened the iron gate, wondering whether they had come to take one of us away or to bring us food, was not curiosity, but anxiety. They had brought today’s ration a few hours ago. Now they would either change guards, or collect a file and go back. I racked my brain to try and think of another possibility that wouldn’t affect us, or destroy our peace of mind in the cell. We were content with the way things were here. As long as we weren’t taken away to be tortured, we were happy to sit huddled together, to chat, and to drift off into a light sleep, like rabbits. We didn’t measure our happiness against that of the world aboveground. The world up above was a distant, old memory. In the cell the only measurement we could go by was pain. For us the absence of pain meant happiness. We would settle for that. If they would only let us be, we would live happily like this.
Uncle Küheylan said, “This will pass too.” He was speaking to Demirtay, not to me.
The student Demirtay had turned visibly pale and had focused his attention outside, straining to understand the voices in the corridor. What we heard was not the guards’ everyday conversation, but the voices of a big group all talking at once. Sometimes they spoke in whispers, sometimes they burst out laughing. Our two-day holiday was clearly over. Where would they start with us, with the opposite cells, or with the rear corridor?
“It will pass, won’t it?” said Demirtay, his voice feeble.
“Of course it will,” said Uncle Küheylan. “Hasn’t it always? Why should this time be any different?”
“Every time they took me away to be tortured I felt prepared. But during this two-day break my flesh has relaxed, I’ve grown used to being left in peace. Now it’s going to hurt even more.”
“Demirtay, the pain doesn’t change. It’s exactly the same as it was in the beginning. They’ve taken us time and again. We’ll go again, and again we’ll come back sure of ourselves.”
Fear always crept into our ribcages, gnawing at our hearts with its small rats’ teeth. We doubted ourselves all the time. Would we be able to withstand the vertiginous fire of pain, that horror that was just on the threshold of madness? As the electric shocks shot through our flesh we lost the ability to think, but yet a sense we could not explain held us by the hand, keeping our will to live intact. Was there a world outside of here? Was there a future for us? As our bodies grew heavier we felt all of existence giving way to anxiety, we felt the Moon revolving around the Earth and the Earth revolving around the Sun in great agitation, accelerating as they revolved. The pain, which would become unstoppable, bent both time and our minds.
“Perhaps,” I said, “they won’t take anyone, maybe they’ll turn around and leave just as they came.”
I too had grown accustomed to the relaxation to which Demirtay had succumbed, I almost believed that I would never be taken away from here again. Perhaps they had forgotten about us, or else it was too much effort for them to descend so deep into the entrails of the city. We were animals who were occasionally thrown food, then left to their own devices. We fingered the damp on the walls, sniffed the air and snuggled up to one another. When they said come we came, when they said go we went. We strained our ears, listening to the sound of the footsteps echoing through the corridor and gradually getting closer as though hearing them for the first time.
“When we get back I’ll give you the answer to the question you asked me,” said Uncle Küheylan.
“Which question?” asked Demirtay, all curiosity.
“Have you forgotten your own riddle? Didn’t an old woman say the child beside her was her daughter’s daughter and her husband’s sister? I thought it over long and hard and I’ve worked out the answer. We’ll discuss it over the rakı banquet when we get back.”
Demirtay’s face lit up like that of a child eager to be fooled by lies. “All right. You work out that question, then I have another one for you. We won’t leave the rakı table until daybreak. Okay?”
“Of course, Demirtay. It’s an honor to drink with you.”
The door opened. Light streamed in, like a southern wave striking the shore. We raised our hands to protect our faces, blinking our dazzled eyes.
“All you morons, on your feet!”
Slowly, we stood up on the bare concrete.
With one sweep of the hand they grabbed first Demirtay, then Uncle Küheylan by the arm. “You stay here,” they barked at me.
Was I staying? I was torn between feeling elated and grieving for my departed companions. I looked at the Student Demirtay’s thin shoulders and Uncle Küheylan’s confident stride. They were heading toward pain I would not endure. Alongside the grief that caused
me was the relief of knowing that my own body would not be crushed, that my face would not be turned into a bloody mess. Pain was inescapable, but this time it had bypassed me and taken others. I knew our instincts led us to think of ourselves first, to look out for our own injuries. We had learned that in the first year of university. But there were other sides to people too. We endured pain for the sake of those we loved, and braved the torture in here.
“You get up as well, asshole!”
They were talking to Kamo the Barber. Kamo, who had been inconspicuously slumped against the wall for the past two days, sleeping continually like an aged tortoise, raised his head, grunting. He eyed the interrogators in the doorway. Making no attempt to get up, he fixed his gaze on them.
“I’m talking to you, dickhead!” The interrogator’s voice was menacing.
Kamo the Barber stayed where he was, as though he were an inseparable part of the wall. His back was glued to the tiles, his feet nailed to the ground. He couldn’t remember how long he had been sitting there. He sighed, looking irritated. He twitched. He held onto the wall with one hand. Believing now that they would take him away too, he stood up, looking neither anxious nor relaxed, but with an air of total indifference. He had dreamt countless times that they had taken him away to be tortured, but each time had opened his eyes in the cell. Why had he waited while everyone else was suffering, why had he slept in the cell while everyone else went through the iron gate? He questioned himself, and because his body was not lacerated with pain, he flew into a rage. He was hoping that physical pain would ease the pain in his heart. For days he had been waiting with that hope.
Kamo walked to the door, passed between the interrogators and strode out into the corridor. No one had to drag him. This was an invitation he had been eagerly awaiting for days. He didn’t care what lay at the end of the corridor he was headed toward, behind the iron gate he would cross, at the core of the fate that was about to befall him.
The interrogators did not depart immediately. Referring to someone waiting in the corridor, they said, “Bring that motherfucker and throw him in with the doctor.” They dragged a blood-spattered man by his hair and sent him reeling inside with a thump on his back. He landed on top of me and we both fell down together. I banged my head on the wall. I thought my arm that was trapped underneath us was broken. Once the door was closed and it was dark again, I came to my senses. I sat up. I looked at the man lying slumped beside me. He was groaning.
“Are you all right?” I said.
I helped him straighten up. He sat up with difficulty and leaned against the wall.
“My wound hurts,” he said.
“Where are you wounded?”
His hair, face, and neck were all caked in blood, but he clutched his left calf.
“On my leg. It’s a bullet wound.”
“A bullet wound?”
“Yes, they caught me two days ago in a clash. They removed the bullet in hospital then brought me here. They’ve been torturing me since the morning.”
When I stretched out my hand to touch his leg his face tensed, his body turned rigid. Patients didn’t like their wounds to be touched. While trying to make sense of this reaction that I had found strange during my first few years in the profession, I realized that it wasn’t just patients, but ordinary Istanbul dwellers too that winced at being touched. In the past, when there were contagious diseases like the plague or cholera, people still lived at close quarters with one another’s bodies. Times have changed, now, while diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart trouble, that people have to endure all alone were taking the place of contagious diseases, people were withdrawing into their shells, living contactless lives. Saying “I’m human” was a message that translated as, I’m moving away from others, putting a distance between myself and them. In these times when not just strangers, but even friends avoided one another’s bodies, I was aware that those who came to my consulting room felt like caged cats. That kind of anxiety couldn’t be attributed to fear of the disease alone. I thought the only thing that would make the population desert Istanbul would not be an outbreak of plague, but an outbreak of touching, that the inhabitants would fly into a panic at the prospect of being touched and look for somewhere to flee.
“Let me see to your wound, I’m a doctor.”
His trousers were torn and their seams ripped. I could see the wound on his calf. Someone had put a dressing on it and it was covered up with a bandage. I gently lifted the tape that was securing it. I turned his leg toward the light seeping in through the grille so I could get a look at the wound.
“It’s not bleeding. They haven’t taken the stitches out yet.”
As I replaced the dressing I noticed that the man now seemed more at ease, that he was watching my movements with a calm expression.
“I’m cold,” he said.
I touched his forehead. “You have a fever. That’s normal with a recent wound. Don’t worry, it’ll pass.”
“I hope so.”
I picked up the piece of bread and cheese beside the water bottle and passed them to him.
He paused, as though he had beheld something completely alien. He hesitated. After staring for a long time at the bread I placed in his palm, he bit it, and devoured it in two mouthfuls. His chest was heaving. He took the water bottle and drank greedily.
“My name’s Ali,” he said, “everyone knows me as Ali the Lighter.”
I remembered that name. In fact, it was fixed in my memory like a driven nail. I drew closer to his face to get a better look at him. I looked at his knit eyebrows and his furrowed forehead. I doubted he was even thirty years old, he looked older than my son.
“You can call me Doctor, that’s how everyone knows me,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you’re the doctor from Cerrahpaşa.”
“The very same.”
We knew each other’s names but had never met. The meeting we were supposed to have had a few weeks ago in one of Istanbul’s picturesque streets, or in a café on the beach had ended up being in this cell. Our right to life was not yet spent, we had not yet reached the end of the road then. He too eyed me with interest.
“I imagined you’d be a young student from the Cerrahpaşa Medicine Faculty,” he said.
Should I tell him the truth?
When my wife got pancreatic cancer she wanted to die straight away, rather than prolong her suffering. “Give me an injection and set me free. You be the one to take my last breath,” she had said. In the early days of our courtship, when we were two unpracticed lovers exploring Istanbul, according to the fashion of the time we made a wish on every quay and plucked the petals of a flower in every park. As we neared the end of the number of petals we wondered whether we would have an odd or even number of children. At that age people are so curious about the future. Where would we be living in ten years, what would we be doing in twenty years? We couldn’t even contemplate fifty years into the future, we only hoped that when we reached that age we would have had our fill of life. My wife reached the border of that country known as death early, and she wanted to cross to the other side without suffering. “My darling wife, if you’ll agree to us dying side by side I’ll inject us both with the same needle,” I said. She tried hard to smile as she responded. “You’ve got to live. You have to raise our son, watch his children grow up, and only then can you come and join me. Not before.”
When my son grew up and turned into a young man I wanted him to get married as soon as possible, partly to fulfill his mother’s dream. But he left home, neglected the final year of his studies at the Medicine Faculty, joined one of the many revolutionary groups that were all over the city, and carved a different path for himself. There was constant news of clashes and deaths. I followed events in the newspapers. Whenever I saw names that were similar to his, or photos of faces that looked like his, my heart leapt to my mouth. Sometimes as I was boarding a ferry, or walking under a dark bridge, or strolling on the beach late at night when I hadn’t been able to
get to sleep, my son would suddenly appear beside me and hug me tightly. He had his mother’s smell. I would touch his fingers, look at his face that was getting thinner all the time, and try to capture the light in his sunken eyes. “Don’t worry about me father, I’m well. These days will pass.” But they didn’t pass. Time stretched endlessly ahead, and my anxiety and my longing increased at the same pace.
On a rainy autumn morning I had left the house early again and was on my way to my consulting room, which was a fifteen-minute walk away. My son came under my umbrella and linked arms with me. “Don’t stop, let’s keep walking,” he said. He was soaked, like a stray dog. He was shivering and coughing, covering his mouth with a handkerchief. He had not gone very far before his knees gave way; as he fell to the ground he tried to hold on to me. I hailed a cab and took him to the hospital. My son had tuberculosis. In a city where contagious diseases were on the decrease and people avoided touching one another, my son had fallen victim to tuberculosis, he was paying the price for his beliefs with his own body. My son, who would say during our discussions, “Father, good is contagious as well as evil,” was now a victim of a contagious disease, as though that were his just desert. The old city was dead and the new city was somehow refusing to be born. Howling sounds came from beneath the earth. There was a stench that even the rain could not wash away. Young children built a thousand dreams, they raced ahead like ships headed for the misty borders of the ocean, and finished washed up on the shore, their sails in tatters. When did this city ever love her children? To whom did she ever show compassion? One day when I was talking in this vein my son said, “Father, our mission is not to beg for love but to create it. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
My son, who gave his father lessons on life, was now lying shaking, delirious and beside himself in a sickbed. The sweat pouring from his forehead soaked his pillow. I sat beside him all day, listening to his breathing, checking his temperature. That night, when the hospital corridors had become deserted and only the distant sounds of the nurses’ footsteps remained, my son opened his eyes and whispered, “I have to get up, I have an appointment tomorrow.” Even if I had allowed it, he was talking about doing the impossible. “Father, it’s really important. My friends’ lives depend on it. I have to meet someone tomorrow.” As well as tuberculosis he had kidney and stomach problems. He was beyond the point where he could neglect his health. It was out of the question for him to get out of bed for a long time yet. “My son, don’t worry, if it’s that important I’ll go in your place,” I said. Unable to reply, he closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep. He had the same innocent expression as he had when he was a baby. No matter how much he grew up, that baby face that I would sneak into his room at night to watch by lamplight returned infallibly when he was asleep. I wanted him to wake up with that same expression, but when he opened his eyes at daybreak he gazed at me sorrowfully. He raised his bony fingers. “Father,” he rasped. “My son,” I said. I was ready to give up for him the life that my wife hadn’t wanted. I stroked his hair ravaged by tuberculosis, I held his hands ravaged by tuberculosis. Wheezing sounds came from his chest. “Father,” he said, “if it wasn’t important I would never let you go. You have to go to Ragıp Paşa Library in Laleli. There you’ll meet a girl. She’s the go between. Then you have to go to the real meeting place that she’ll indicate and meet someone called Ali the Lighter. Be vigilant of the time. Your meeting with Ali the Lighter is an hour before the time the girl will say. I’ve never met either of them. They’ll think you’re me. I’m known as the Doctor because I study in the Faculty of Medicine. So it won’t be all that different for you. If anything goes wrong and you get mixed up with the police, just tell them who you really are.”
Istanbul, Istanbul Page 13