How much longer can I keep after this fool? What the hell am I chasing him for anyway? He might pull a knife, or maybe a screwdriver; in any case, something sharp, whatever he used to open the car door. All ties have been severed between my brain and my legs; my thoughts don’t slow me down; I just keep running, pacing myself like a long-distance pro. I never would’ve thought I’d be able to run so fast for so long. The benefits of not smoking. As I run I feel this sense of spaciousness, a kind of freshness within; I can almost catch a whiff of mint. Maybe after I catch up I’ll just run right past him, make it to the finish line first. The more I run, the lighter I feel. Maybe all the sweating is ridding my body of toxins? My heart is racing, and my head’s throbbing just as fast, but my legs couldn’t care less, it’s like they have a mind of their own.
We’re sprinting downhill; if we’d been going uphill, there’s no way I could catch up. Here the streets are even darker. He’s at most three yards ahead of me. But I can’t catch up—we must be running at the same speed. He slows down each time he turns around to look back at me, but it’s not enough for me to catch up. He must know these parts well; he never takes a dead end. My legs have started to shake; it’s a not unpleasant feeling. I’ll be sore tomorrow, but for now it feels good.
I don’t understand how it happened. He was trying to jump over a wall just a couple of feet high when his foot got caught and he fell. First I heard a thump, then I heard a moan.
Oh God! The boy’s face is covered in blood. He must’ve hit his head. I feel sick to my stomach. We’re unable to speak. We’re breathless. He’s looking me hard in the face. But his expression is not one of anger, nor of a desire for mercy. He’s just looking. Finally, looking at him looking at me, I come to. A hospital, a doctor … I take out my cell phone and call for an ambulance. “Where are you?” asks the voice on the other end. I don’t know. I ask the other guy. He mumbles something, Cinema, I think. That’s when I realize where I am.
“You know that old cinema? … We’re over around there.” I give the person my phone number.
The boy on the ground groans, trying to drag himself. He’d probably ignore the cuts and bruises and keep on running, if only he could find the strength. “Don’t move,” I tell him. I sound like the police on TV, yet all I’m really saying is the only thing I know about first aid, right or wrong. He has to keep his head still.
He says something like, Let me go. From the frantic beat of my heart, the puffing of my chest, I can’t quite make out his words.
“The ambulance,” I say, my voice coming out like a whisper, “is on its way.”
It isn’t long before the ambulance shows up. Thank goodness. We make our way back through the same streets he and I have just run, siren blaring. I sit next to the driver. He doesn’t ask any questions, and I don’t say a word. We pull up to the emergency room. They put the boy on a stretcher and take him in. Nobody says a word to me. Should I just get out of here? Now they’re going to ask me all kinds of questions. Still, I can’t bring myself to leave. I’m so worried about the boy. What if they notice me leaving, what’ll I say? There’s a handful of people waiting in front of the emergency room. A couple of people rush out of the emergency room and over to the glass-partitioned area on the side. I’ve finally caught my breath, but my legs are still shaking. Should I go over and sit in that glass-partitioned area too? But I can’t move. I just watch instead. There’s a reception window; that must be where they do all the registering and signing in and stuff. And there are chairs for people waiting on the other side. One person’s stretched out asleep, and there’s a group of people talking. In the far corner, some bum’s leaning back against the radiator; he’s holding his grimy head in his hands. He’s probably a regular here at night, just moved in; nobody cares.
A middle-aged policeman exits the emergency room. Is he heading toward me or what?
“Which one of you brought in the injured kid?” he yells out.
I walk up to him. I ask him how the boy’s doing.
“Fine,” he says, and I notice he’s holding a small notebook. He’s going to ask me something now. How will I answer? Should I tell him the truth? If I tell him I just stumbled upon the boy, he’s going to ask what business I had over there at that time of night. Basically, I’m screwed no matter what. Best to ask him some questions first.
“Is he conscious?” I say, surprised at my own ingenuity in coming up with that one.
“Yes, yes he is. Let’s go see him.”
There are patients waiting on stretchers in the hallway, with friends and relatives standing or sitting next to them. I can hear moaning and weeping coming from the rooms, their doors open. A tired nurse carrying IV fluids walks by. Another is telling one patient’s relative something, as if she holds the key to the world’s most important secret.
The room we walk into is a grid of curtains. I spot the boy’s feet in the first partition. Without realizing it, it seems I’ve memorized his shoes, his pants. When the policeman opens the curtain, the boy sees me too. His eyes fill with fear when he sees the two of us together.
“He says he fell. Is that true?”
“I think so. I didn’t see him fall. I ran out of cigarettes and was looking for someplace open. That’s when I saw this boy lying on the ground.”
I’m thinking I’ve provided unnecessary detail when the policeman lets out a yawn and turns to peer at the boy, who shakes his bandaged head yes, without looking at me. For the first time, I get a good look at his face, there in the fluorescent light. At first I thought the mark on his face was a bandage, but upon closer inspection I see it’s a bruise the size of a quarter. It’s so very familiar. Something from that very last look in front of the door, always there before my eyes—and on her lily-white neck.
THE BLOODY HORN
BY NAN ÇETN
Fener
I had opened the window and was looking into the distance, into the blue horizon and the dark, peaceful waters of the Golden Horn. I contemplated this view from high up in my room in Pera Palace. And the view, it howled in warning.
For years I have wondered, in vain, at exactly what point in my life I had gotten off track. How a perfectly orderly life could become so disjointed along the way. Was it because the gates of the past had been suddenly crashed open, in a single violent thrust? I had been scared to death of making a mistake. Fener—complete with its temples of three different religions, its narrow streets, my family, and the house where my destiny was shaped—had always been alive in my memory. If I handled it right, I could fit my whole life into Fener. I was born and raised there. I fell in love there. I left Fener when I was fifteen and returned at the age of forty-five. Istanbul was a city of echoes, where everything—everything—resonated with an acute vitality: a historic building, an ornate arch, an ancient tree, streets, bridges, palaces … Wherever I looked, deep-seated passions seemed to surface, to come to life, the passions of a fisherman, a woman, a stranger, a thug true to his code. No matter how hard I tried to escape the feeling of belonging, I could not wrestle myself free of the dizzying, blinding nostalgia and longing that held me in their grasp; my memory was digging up details I had never permitted myself to utter, and my mind, on the cusp of a leap, needed to embellish them.
I really used to hate memories. But now my tears were trickling down, hanging from my chin like raindrops from a gutter. I was in Fener, a place that saddens, much like a museum that no one visits. I stood there, just stood there, in front of the Yıldırım Boulevard house where I was born and raised. Some mute color, some shifty darkness had fallen upon me. The building no longer possessed even a shred of the glamour I knew from my childhood; it was but a skeleton of itself. The familiarity of the place failed to return my past to me; alas, it was all lost to time.
All of a sudden I felt so much like a stranger, I had to breathe hard not to cry; I pulled myself together and thought of my family. I wasn’t supposed to return to Istanbul, not after all the hell my family had been through. But it
was as if I had been unable to tell just what was happening, trapped there in a silent darkness; it induced amnesia, it was indifferent to the past. I had hit the road in a hurry and found myself in Istanbul in no time. Strangely enough.
A long time ago, one morning, contrary to habit, I had woken up before my parents. I didn’t dare wake them, so I munched on some food and left. I walked along the shore of the Golden Horn. If I had to describe that walk, I think it best to put it in terms of music. I heard sounds, sometimes sharp, sometimes soft as silk, something between a song and a lament, like the melody of the haziness I was feeling around me for the first time. Yet it was a crystal clear morning, with the sky reflecting on the Golden Horn like a tree shaping its own shadow. But then, it is a difficult business, conveying the feelings that Istanbul evokes.
Without a doubt, though, I had heard that strange melody. Then the noise of cars and fishing boats ruined it all, and I headed back. That morning, a few minutes after coming home, I found my father and mother in bed, completely still, their eyes fixed on the ceiling.
My memories aren’t that clear at this point. The bedroom was a pool of gelatinous blood, that I remember very well. Yes, a sea of frozen blood, thawing, trickling, thinning. Even a heart of stone could cease to beat in a place saturated with fear, and though I stood very close, I could not bring myself to touch the bodies. I don’t know which I was more afraid of, death itself or the stain it would leave; it was as if I was frozen right there.
Before he was killed, my father had left home late every night for a week. Sometimes he would just pace up and down the street, sometimes he would disappear from view as soon as he was out the door. It wasn’t disturbing; in fact, it was rather exciting. I became a bit obsessed with his whereabouts, and so I decided to follow him one night. I left after him. I was like a jinn in human form, burning with curiosity. Where was my father going? Who was he going to meet? He turned toward the Bulgarian church, which looked like a present forgotten there on the shore, wrapped in shiny paper. I went after him, the breeze striking my face as I turned each corner. My father was walking briskly, his head down. Suddenly, he turned around and saw me. He couldn’t have heard my footsteps, I was walking so gently.
“Son … are you following me?”
I stopped dead in my tracks, my head spinning at the shock of having been caught. I was looking at the gate in front of that silvery church, the marble steps winding up to the entrance, at the dark waters a little further ahead and the flood of city lights reflected upon them. Gradually, everything became blurry; everything except for my father’s eyes, which shone in the dark. His face was close to mine.
“You should be in bed at this hour,” he said, “let’s go home.”
He was so enigmatic, the way he terminated so many of his relationships so quickly, and how he gave everybody such a hard time with his stoic stubbornness. In those days, a kind of mental connection was forming between my father and me. From the outside, one would have thought that we were just a father and son who got on well, communicating by normal verbal means. But the truth was, ours was a silent pact, arrived at somewhere deep down, as if we shared some profound secret.
I spent my whole day in Fener wandering around amongst ruins and run-down buildings. The impression left by the building in which I grew up was quite painful. Still, I had been able to shake off the listlessness and melancholia, to overcome my lack of courage. Yet there seemed to be a kind of denial at the core of the word “life,” such that it wouldn’t tolerate any middle-of-the-road options. How can I put it? The shell of that word was too tough, impenetrable; it was keeping me out. A language beyond words, an unsound logic had created such a very private, impermeable realm, even the waves of all the past that I could possibly imagine whirling about me were for naught.
The nightlife of the neighborhood was about to begin. Once darkness had finally descended upon the city, in each and every sound I heard, I began discerning melodies, which I recalled very clearly from my past, and which made Fener that much more real to me. They weren’t only sounds I had heard before, but other sounds too, the imagined voices of people I knew only in name, voices of people who lived centuries ago, and the voice of death, still alive in my mind. They would not be denied, would not be suppressed. It was a world of sounds, a different world, existing in the depths of words, moans, whispers, and silences, a world that did not reciprocate the passion of he who listened and observed with feeling.
Such was my strange emotional state when I arrived in front of the Fener Greek Archdiocese. Perhaps it, too, was infected with the same irrationality. The guard at the door looked me square in the face. I sensed a familiarity hidden in that strange expression.
“Are you trying to find someone?” he asked.
It was a momentary thing, a lie I would never own up to. “Yes,” I said, “did you see a tall guy with white hair in a suit and a woman with red hair?”
“No,” he replied, “we aren’t receiving visitors to the Archdiocese right now. There’s no one inside.”
The important thing was that I was feeling happy at that moment, and that happiness could be made possible only by means of a lie. Of course, I did what it took to keep the lie from getting out of hand; I turned and walked toward the sea. It was hard to ignore the lie; it was love embracing me generously, and truth seeping into the dark paradise of sadness, through a secret hole.
I returned to my hotel after wandering for a while by the shore. The next morning, I was enjoying the happiness of the seventh day, the day after creation. Solitude, the feeling of security because you are out of the reach, too far away to tend to the intrusions of daily life … It was a pleasure. I was having dinner in Fener, in a restaurant with a view of the Golden Horn. The people at the next table and I were putting on an ostentatious show of mutual respect. What an undeniable blessing these Fener evenings are, we were saying, the world at our command. Dinner took a long time; by the time we finished, the night had engulfed the entire city. We complicated even the simplest of things, especially the simple ones, with our labyrinthine words.
Some men of Fener are night owls; there is no shortage of people coming and going, right up to the moment when the restaurant door is padlocked. As the night wore on, I found myself sitting together with the people from the next table, deep in conversation. We were just about to finish our second bottle of rakı and call it a night, when an old man appeared at the door. He stood there and briefly scanned the place before deciding to enter, then he walked straight to our table.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said with a smile. “Enjoying the fare, I hope!”
Three from our table knew him. They introduced us to each other. A smile broadened across his face and his attention focused on me like a beam. “Vasili, you say! You still speak Turkish like your mother tongue!”
The other men at the table were taken by surprise, and I was too. The man was alert, like a fox, and was obviously eager to hear my response. But I was petrified.
“You are that Vasili, aren’t you?” he said. “Son of Yorgo. I knew your father. Do you remember me?”
At that moment, I concentrated upon the calm, serene face of the man, where time, in all its destructiveness, was hiding. His wrinkled face did remind me of something, but it was as if my memory was being swept away by a strong current, a current stronger than life itself, and was struggling to gain a foothold.
“Sorry, can’t seem to place you,” I said.
Perhaps he had more to say, but he remained quiet. He stood up, extended his arms, and hugged me tightly. His eyes were wet when he sat down. Truth be told, what could I say to him at that hour of the night, with that buzz in my head? Yet it was a precious opportunity; this old man was the first acquaintance I had stumbled upon in my neighborhood, which had been so thoroughly appropriated and alienated by time. He didn’t know where to place his huge hands. The heart-breaking zeal of this chance encounter induced a growing sense of disquiet. There was something cruel there in the twili
ght zone of that dimly lit meyhane. My heart filled with an unidentifiable longing, my mind with myriad possibilities.
The busboys, who were no older than fifteen or sixteen, and the middle-aged, mustached waiters were circling us. We ordered another bottle of rakı. The old man (Cevat, that was his name), who had been born and raised in Fener, was talking about how drinking was the only curative he’d been able to find in this city, which so viciously laid waste to human life. He was a man with nine lives, who had managed to survive so many dangers, so many nights, so many miseries, so many adventures …
“Your father and I first met in front of the Red Church,” he said. “I enjoyed meeting new people when I was young, now I prefer solitude. We remained friends after we met, your father and I. I lived nearby, on Çimen Street, where I still live today. But everything is in the past now. Frankly, that devastating incident did away with it all, all the beautiful memories we had, everything.”
I dredged up the courage: “Do you know something?”
He remained silent for a long moment, staring at his plate, before he finally answered: “No, nothing at all. I want to forget all about it, the whole thing.”
I refrained from exalting my father, praising his goodness and generosity, but I did give in and let myself get carried away by the memories. I shared a few, though names largely escaped me. At first, my words contained nothing too far beyond the conditions that fate required. It was as if I was in two different times, two different places at once, and that made it difficult for me to speak. In spite of this, words began rolling off my tongue of their own accord; I just kept talking and talking. There are moments when one feels hopeless and does what he can to evade that feeling. But that wasn’t my only problem, for it was as if a wall had come tumbling down, and there I was inside the chamber of my childhood. I don’t think there could possibly be anything at once so mysterious and familiar as the eternal texture of childhood.
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