“Dinner is served.”
We raised our empty hands as though drinking a toast.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“May our worst day be like this one.”
For a moment our hands remained suspended in the air.
Uncle Küheylan repeated his words: “May our worst day be like this one.”
We all burst out laughing.
It was a good job we were on the Doctor’s balcony and not in a bar, otherwise our racket might have disturbed the people at the other tables.
Below us the sound of car horns mingled with the cry of seagulls; heedless of us, Istanbul went about her habitual ebb and flow. A group of young friends was drinking beer in a pavement terrace opposite us. One of them was playing the guitar, the others sang along with him, their voices too far away for us to hear. A woman on the top floor of the next building was talking on the telephone as she looked out of the window, straightening her hair with one hand. The curtains in most of the houses were not drawn. Children played around an old man as he sat in his armchair watching television. The sea grew darker as the sun set. The Eminönü–Üsküdar ferry was lit up and was setting sail with a thousand types of happiness and hope aboard.
“Zinê Sevda will be here soon,” said Uncle Küheylan. “She said she’d be late, she had some errands to do.”
We raised our glasses to her health.
“To Zinê Sevda, the mountain maiden.”
“To Zinê Sevda, the mountain maiden.”
The Maiden’s Tower was also lit up. It sparkled and swayed, like a mother-of-pearl necklace around Istanbul’s neck. It was close enough for us to reach out and touch. While we gazed at the Maiden’s Tower, each of us became engrossed in our own memories and succumbed to the melody of the song drifting gently out of the stereo.
“It’s obvious now,” said the Doctor, “why they haven’t tortured us, or taken anyone out of their cell for the past two days. It coincides with the clash in Belgrade Forest. It was a big one, covering a large area, and it lasted a long time. Our interrogators must have gone too. And left us in peace.”
Uncle Küheylan smiled. “While our suffering here is getting easier,” he said, “people somewhere else are dying. What a strange world! Now, as our suffering is about to begin again, let’s hope that those elsewhere are well.”
We raised our glasses.
“To others’ wellbeing.”
“To others’ wellbeing.”
We were drinking quite fast. We’d missed the taste of rakı.
Now I wanted to be as cheerful as the young friends on the opposite terrace, as happy as the woman at the window and as serene as the man in the armchair watching television. If I could leave this balcony and go downstairs, I’d go under the bridge, minding my own business. I would treat myself to a balık-ekmek sandwich. I would watch the boats on the Golden Horn. Then I would take a leisurely stroll up Yüksek Kaldırım to Beyoğlu and go into a cinema. Sometimes I chose cinemas instead of films. I would select them according to the building, the carvings, and the memories they evoked. No matter what film was showing, if it was in a cinema that touched my heart, I would enjoy it.
“Uncle Küheylan,” I said, “isn’t it time to answer my riddle? What do you say?”
“You’re right.”
I repeated the question the grandmother had asked me in the tiny gecekondu. “An old woman has a little girl with her. The old woman says, this is my daughter’s daughter and my husband’s sister. Tell me, how can that be?”
Uncle Küheylan helped himself to a piece of toasted bread and dipped it in the dish of hummus in front of him. He chewed slowly. He wiped his moustache with the back of his hand.
When he noticed me waiting eagerly, he said, “Be patient, Demirtay, I’ll tell you in good time. In our village there was a dark-skinned woman of about forty, who lived alone with her blonde daughter. Their neighbor was a strapping young man of twenty. The dark-skinned woman got intimate with the strapping young neighbor, they had many trysts in the hayloft and then they got married. Around that time the young neighbor’s father returned to the village. He had gone to Istanbul to work years before, and disappeared without a trace. Everyone thought he was either dead or had forgotten the village. The father was also around forty. And lonely. He got together with the neighbor’s young blonde daughter and started a new life with her. Before long they had a baby daughter. The dark-skinned woman, now a grandmother, was delighted, and spent all her time with her grandchild. As she sat in front of her house playing with her granddaughter, she cheerfully recited this rhyme to every passerby: My daughter’s daughter, my husband’s sis, there’s no other case quite like this. And even though people looked at her without knowing what she was talking about, she was telling the truth, wasn’t she?”
“That’s not fair,” I said, amazed that he had got it so quickly.
“Why? Isn’t that the right answer?”
“I hate to say you’ve got it right, but it’s not fair. You guessed right first time.”
Uncle Küheylan and the Doctor laughed like old men who have been together all their lives. They clinked glasses and took a sip from their rakı.
“I didn’t get it right first time. I’ve been thinking about it for two days, it was only after I had gone over forty different possibilities that I came up with the answer.”
“Is that story you told true, or did you make it up?”
“What kind of a question is that, Demirtay? Weren’t you the one who just said that everything that happened in the past and that we tell in words becomes a story? Well the reverse is also true. Every story we tell here occurred in the past and is totally true.”
He was right. There was a truth about my riddle that was keeping it rooted in reality: In the house in Hisarüstü, the grandmother was looking out for my return, waiting for me to bring her the answer to the riddle. I had promised her. I was going to return safe and sound. I was not going to get swept away in the Istanbul current. I would help the needy, walk alone in the crowd, and I would not get carried away by the head-spinning allure of bright lights on billboards. I might meet Yasemin Abla at a secret meeting point. I might sit beside her one auspicious night and listen to her reciting poems. I would believe the words in those eternal poems. Outside the moon would rise, the sky would glow, and the stars would bloom yellow, pink, and red.
“Demirtay, what was the other question?”
“Which question?”
“Remember you said yesterday that if we guessed this riddle you’d ask us another one.”
I was hopeful when I had left grandmother’s gecekondu. I intended to solve her riddle and then ask her one of my own when I went to see her. I wanted to answer her questions with other questions, stay in touch with her, and go and visit her often. But I didn’t run fast enough, I fell victim to fate and they threw me into this cell. Instead of in the gecekondu looking out on Istanbul from the top of a hill, I was going to ask the riddle I had saved for grandmother in this cell.
“There’s a young girl with a man,” I said. “When people asked who she was he said, she’s my wife and my daughter and my sister. How is that possible?”
“This looks like a tough one.”
“Did you think I would ask you something easy?”
“You say his wife, and his daughter, and his sister, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“I can see you’re out to make me sweat.”
“Dig deep in your memory, you never know, those people might well be from your village.”
“Let me think,” said Uncle Küheylan, laughing. “If I can’t work it out I’ll ask the Doctor for help. What do you say, Doctor, will you help me?”
“Of course.”
“It’s up to you,” I said, “you can ask whoever you like to help you. I don’t care if it’s the Doctor, or Kamo the Barber . . .”
All three of us stopped and looked at each other and we all raised our rakı glasses in unison.<
br />
“To Kamo the Barber.”
“To Kamo the Barber.”
“To his safe return.”
While for the first few days we hoped to get out of here and blend into the Istanbul current aboveground that swallowed up people, as time passed our expectations turned inward and shrank, until eventually they fit into this cell. Now the best we hoped for was that those who were taken away to be tortured would return in one piece, without losing their minds or their souls. That’s how we were awaiting Kamo the Barber, whom they had taken away yesterday. We told stories, drank rakı, and listened to songs. We turned our heads and gazed at the undulating lights on the sea. We strove to forget about our wounds. When we heard a noise that sounded like the entrance door of the floor below was opening, we stopped and looked at one another. That was the cursed sound of the iron gate. It was close. The grating of the gate reminded us that we were not on the Doctor’s balcony, but in this underground cell.
8TH DAY
Told by the Doctor
THE KNIFELIKE SKYSCRAPERS
“When a power cut prevented a plane from landing in Istanbul Airport and it was lost on the dark sea along with its four crew members and thirty-seven passengers, the Istanbul dwellers awoke the next morning feeling anxious. During the crossing to the European side on the seven-thirty ferry from Kadıköy, they still read their newspapers and sipped their tea, occasionally peering over at their neighbor’s newspaper in case theirs contained different news. Passengers with a window seat wiped condensation from the glass as though they might spot someone crying out for help in the waves, and sat with their noses glued to the window. Traversing the tunnel of time in which Haydarpaşa Station, Selimiye Barracks, and the Maiden’s Tower flowed on one side, and Sultanahmet Mosque, Hagia Sophia Church, and Topkapı Palace on the other, they arrived on the shore of concrete buildings and knifelike skyscrapers. Each day they went back and forth from one side to the other, feeling animated and hopeful. Different as their mood might be at home, on the ferry, train, and bus they made sure to don an expression appropriate to the day. On the third morning, as they sipped their tea and read their newspapers with the same solemnity, a long-haired youth played the guitar and sang a new style of rock song in tribute to the victims of the plane crash. The victims would have liked it. Just then they heard shouting on the deck. When they rushed out and all looked over to the other side at the same time, they saw a woman lying unconscious on the Sarayburnu rocks, where the cold waves had tossed her. She was the only survivor of the plane that had crashed into the sea. According to one of the next day’s newspapers, the woman’s legs were broken. According to all the other newspapers, she had a burst eardrum, or had lost her tongue, or had gone blind in one eye. The same photograph of the woman was splashed across the front pages of all the newspapers. She was lying in hospital surrounded by wires and drip bottles, and sitting beside her was a man in a suit and a felt hat. The headline under the photograph read, I’m over the moon that my wife was saved. In another newspaper the same man rejoiced to be reunited with his daughter. Yet another one said the good Lord has spared my sister. The ferry passengers shared the news they had read and discussed which might be the right version. Each passenger argued that their paper’s version was the right one, continuing the debate the next day. The only detail that all the papers coincided on was the woman and man’s names: Filiz Hanım and Jean Bey. Like a photo romance, the rest of the story was reported in daily installments, and the details were no longer on the level of mere national news but were now considered worthy of the nimble pens of the culture-literature writers. Each day new photographs were added to this ever longer and more convoluted saga, the lives of Filiz Hanım and Jean Bey were paraded before the public eye for all to see. Jean Bey, who was born and bred in some European country—France, according to some, and Switzerland according to others—came to Istanbul for a holiday in his youth, had a brief love affair with an—according to some, French, and, according to others, Swiss—singer who performed in a nightclub in Beyoğlu, visited all the sights, and returned to his country unaware that he had left behind a woman with child. He graduated from university, started work as a lecturer—he taught sociology, or biology, or physics—and married someone who taught in the same department. He was happy, hard working, and held in high esteem. When, five years—ten according to some—later, he divorced his wife for an undisclosed reason, he vowed he would never marry again. For years he lived alone and, until he fell in love with one of his students, remained true to his word. His student was Filiz Hanım, from Istanbul. They resolved to marry and invited Filiz Hanım’s mother to the wedding. When Filiz Hanım’s mother reached the wedding at the last moment, owing to the delayed departure of the planes from Istanbul, and walked into the hall where all the guests were gathered, Jean Bey almost expired with shock. The woman before him was the nightclub singer he had enjoyed a brief affair with years ago when he had visited Istanbul. They recognized each other, but behaved as though they hadn’t. The ferry passengers who read that Filiz Hanım was both Jean Bey’s wife and his daughter stared at one another in disbelief. They had not heard of such ill fate for many a year. The following day they learned in the latest installment of the saga that the story didn’t end there. When Jean Bey was still a tiny baby his mother had abandoned the family home, leaving him and his father to fend for themselves. Jean Bey’s father, who was seated at the top table in the wedding hall, couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw his daughter-in-law’s mother. It was his wife, the very same one who had walked out on them all those years ago. They too recognized one another, but behaved as though they had not. Filiz Hanım was not only Jean Bey’s wife and daughter, she was his sister too. As the ferry passengers read each word one by one, gulping at the end of every sentence, they exclaimed, well I never! Having grown up on a diet of black and white dramas, they believed everything they read. Although the newspaper reports were somewhat inconsistent, they found the truth in incoherence rather than coherence. One of the passengers raised his newspaper in the air, and spoke. It doesn’t just end there, he said. Okay, so Filiz Hanım is Jean Bey’s wife and daughter and sister, but my newspaper has added another bit of information. Filiz Hanım is Jean Bey’s aunt too. The ferry passengers protested, saying that was just too much. But, in the hope that they would be wrong and would hear still more amazing facts, they asked to hear the latest snippet of the story. Like everyone who loves gossip, they tried to appear both interested and detached, stirring their tea and looking nonchalantly out of the window. The ferry sailed through a hazy sea known as time, heading slowly toward the era of the knifelike skyscrapers on the far shore of the sea.”
I paused. I squinted, like a traveler looking out into the distance. I looked around me. “The ferry sailed through a hazy sea known as time . . .”
The Student Demirtay, waiting eagerly to see how I would tie up the ends of the story, smiled.
“Doctor,” he said. “You’ve come to Uncle Küheylan’s aid. You’ve solved the riddle for him.”
It was clearly an effort for Demirtay to laugh. His pain was increasing progressively. He was semiconscious when they brought him back from interrogation today. He was mumbling incoherently and groaning. He couldn’t move his arms. His head hung down limply. When he stretched out on the concrete as though getting into bed, he took a deep breath and drifted off instantly. I removed my jacket and, instead of putting it under his head so he would sleep more comfortably, I covered him with it, to warm him up a bit. I smoothed his hair. I wiped the blood from his forehead and neck.
When, shortly afterward, they brought Uncle Küheylan in too, I felt as though I was on duty in accident and emergency. I had a steady stream of injured patients. Uncle Küheylan’s eyebrows were split. Once again his shirt and trousers were drenched in blood. The soles of his feet were a bloody mess. I made him lie down beside Demirtay. “May you wake up to a good morning,” I said, putting him to bed too. I spread my jacket across both their chests. I listene
d to their labored breathing. I observed the lines on their faces. I guarded over them until it was our cell’s turn to go to the toilet. I helped them go to the toilet at the top of the corridor. Although he made slow progress, Demirtay managed to walk, but Uncle Küheylan couldn’t stand on one of his legs. He could only walk by leaning on me.
“What’s wrong with that, Demirtay?” asked Uncle Küheylan. “Yesterday you asked both of us. The Doctor answered for me.”
“Was it too difficult for you?”
“When I had thought long and hard but still couldn’t come up with the answer, I asked the Doctor for help.”
“So, the answer to this riddle is in Istanbul, not in your village.”
“Yes, it’s here. Besides, you tell me, when it comes to riddles that convert lies into truths, which village can compete with Istanbul . . .”
“Was Istanbul like this in the old days too, Uncle Küheylan?” Demirtay seemed to be asking a rhetorical question. “Has this city always been insincere and deceitful?”
Nature did not lie. Day and night, birth and death, earthquakes and storms were all true. Istanbul learned the truth from nature, but lies she created herself. Hoodwinking, duplicity, and playing tricks with the memory were all her inventions. She made everyone worship her and invented drunks who believed they would find their old lovers in their arms when they woke up in the morning. She invented paupers who believed the wealthy had earned their money by honest means. She scattered hope far and wide. Naturally the brokenhearted would have their moment of glory. And the unemployed too would return home one day with bread and meat. To mask loneliness she created brightly lit shop windows. She created minds that, instead of settling for God’s absence, wanted to be God themselves. Istanbul, who intensified the scent of bodies, was like a lover who constantly made promises, yet stayed away. The best lies were hers. She created women and men who were desperate to believe her.
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