by Sevgi Soysal
Compare those girls to the daughter of the owner of the pension where he stayed while studying in Lausanne—apples and oranges! Every time they ran into one other, she would bow and curtsy, never failing to bid him a good morning or a good evening, which she conveyed with smiling lips. She played the piano, went to concerts, played sports. Even though she was the daughter of a pension-owner, she was a very respectable, very ladylike, very well-mannered girl. Sometimes, when he got upset at something or other, Necip Bey would think, “If only I had married her …”
And now, he and his wife were going to court. His wife didn’t want to get a divorce. Not because she loved Necip Bey, of course, but because she intended to get her hands on the apartment building, because she didn’t want to be denied the alimony she’d been granted by the court. Otherwise, if only he could be certain that he wouldn’t be put to shame in the eyes of his friends, Necip Bey would get her good … The divorce case spiraled out of control. His wife went around shamelessly sharing this and that detail about Necip Bey with their friends, gathering witnesses to back up her case. And all of those so-called friends, rather than talking some sense into her, only riled her up that much more. But then, of course, his wife had bestowed upon them a topic which would serve as a source for endless gossip during their card games at the club. And now all of them were prepared to perjure themselves. The judge meanwhile just sat back and enjoyed the show. He made sure the trial dragged on and on. If it were up to him, he would have had every socialite in the city take the witness stand, and he nearly did. The peasant ass. Necip Bey’s wife maintained that she put up with all kinds of bullshit from Necip Bey, but hadn’t divorced him for the sake of the children. She didn’t even have the decency to refrain from telling stories of Necip Bey’s perversions, right there in court. The judge meanwhile drew out the questioning, relishing every moment. “And just what else would he do, ma’am?”
“Your honor, honorable sir, I’m too embarrassed to say. He had very odd desires, sir.”
“Like what?”
“It’s an improper thing to say, but I will say it here sir, so that the truth can be known. I apologize in advance, but, you see, he used to take chocolate and spread it on my sexual organ …”
Just like that, shameless as could be. Yet all the while daring to act the lady …
Now Carla, she was different. One night, when he caught her on the stairs and kissed her, she simply sighed shyly. And then, one day, when it happened just like that, she calmly and silently put her clothes back on, and she didn’t say a word about it to anyone, nor did she have any expectations of Necip Bey. And she continued to conduct herself with utmost respect towards the renters. When he was in Lausanne, every morning Necip Bey would leave the rooming house and go to one of the cafes looking out onto the lake. Those who were studying at the same university during that time say that in all the four years Necip Bey was in Lausanne, he never even set foot on campus, but instead spent all of his days sitting at the cafe. Necip Bey is greatly angered by such claims, because his French is excellent.
As for Hatice Hanım’s daughter, she would neither become a degenerate in the full sense of the word like Necip Bey’s wife, nor was she capable of becoming a full-fledged homemaker like Carla. Later Carla married; she kept a spotless house, and children whom she brought up impeccably. That daughter of Hatice Hanım, even if she did get an education, should she actually manage to land a job, she would be nothing but the embodiment of tactlessness, harping about this and that, talking her superiors’ heads off: “It’s time I got promoted,” or “I still haven’t used up all my vacation time.” Not only would she always be late for work, but there would never be anything for her to do at work anyway and so she would spend her days knitting or gabbing, and never tire of either. Why am I so obsessed with Hatice Hanım today? The whole lot of them can just stew in their own juices. It’s not like I don’t have enough concerns of my own.
Necip Bey’s rather upset today. The money he got from the parcel of land he sold in Istanbul has run out now too. And business isn’t good either at the store on Sakarya Avenue, where Singer sewing machines are sold, for which Necip Bey put up the capital, and his friend from the French school, Hüseyin, puts up the labor. Hüseyin told him that he needed to find more money. It’s always money, money, money. What, am I a money factory or something? I was wrong to trust him, just like all the others. But Hüseyin’s persistent. “C’mon, I know you’ve got something stashed away somewhere. You say you don’t but then the next thing you know, another apartment building or shop of yours magically turns up.” And it was true that the property İzzeddin Bey had left back in Salonica had, during the population exchange, thanks to his sister’s husband, a talented lawyer whose close acquaintances included some highly useful high-ranking statesmen, proven so bountiful, so fertile, that no matter how much property they sold, there was always more to sell. While his father was still alive, Necip Bey’s older brother had secretly taken the Reşat gold coins from his mother’s chest and gone off to Vienna. When Necip Bey’s brother left, their mother locked herself up in a room, wrapped her head in a mourning scarf, and didn’t talk to her husband for four days. Her son’s departure had devastated the poor woman. Besides, the fact that the Reşat gold coins had left, the act of leaving itself was a bad thing. Equivalent to dying. Staying was good, especially staying at home. If you asked Habibe Hanım, if only her husband İzzeddin Bey had granted his oldest son the capital he had asked for and allowed him to start a business, then neither the gold coins in the chest nor his son would have left home. After his son left for Vienna, the enraged father told everyone that he had renounced his good-for-nothing son. But for the mother, her poor son was in some strange foreign land. Whether he went off to Vienna or off to fight in Yemen, it was all the same to her, so long as he wasn’t at home by her side. Bad things happened everywhere; in Yemen he might be stabbed in the back by a treacherous Arab, in Vienna he could be robbed by bargirls. Woe was she, no longer would she be able to boil mint and lemon when her little boy’s stomach ached—and her little boy’s stomach often did ache, especially on the mornings after he’d spent the night slumming around the taverns of Salonica. She would no longer be able to surreptitiously feed her little boy the best piece of baklava on the tray, stored in the coolest corner of the refrigerator, when he got up from his midday nap. She didn’t leave her bed, she spent all her time worrying about her son, and in her heart the hatred she felt for her husband planted firm roots. Some time later, Necip Bey’s big brother wrote a letter from Vienna, where he had arrived after stirring up such tempests in the family. He was engaged in the commerce of snails. And he would grow filthy rich doing so. Vienna was incredibly beautiful, it was a full-fledged city, and compared to it, Salonica was but a village. He would buy a villa there, once he’d gotten rich. He was going to bring his mommy dearest over and give her the best days of her life, ah, it was these words that really made Habibe Hanım shed a flood of tears. And, ultimately, her son wanted capital for the big business venture he was about to embark upon. After the letter arrived, Habibe Hanım didn’t speak to anyone, no one at all, for several days. She had a son who would talk to her, a big son brave as a lion, in the grand city of Vienna. Her husband could rail on about him as he pleased, but just what, she begged, had he ever done for her, his wife? Where had he ever taken her? How many months had he spent in Athens, and in Istanbul, without ever once taking his wife along? Was it not he who, according to what she had heard from a variety of sources, may God forgive them for their lies, took his Greek mistress along on one of his trips? What’s more, he hadn’t even tried to win his wife over on his returns, hadn’t even brought her a single gift. Sure, he had looked after his children and his home, but then it’s not like he could neglect these most basic of duties, right? Habibe Hanım inherited a farm from her father. That was another reason why she held her head high and stood her own ground against her husband. Ah, her son, her little boy, he often asked his mother for mon
ey, but many, many times he had bought her gifts of embroidered lace handkerchiefs. Stubbornly dwelling upon such thoughts, and stubbornly believing in the righteousness of her ways, she refused to back down. Finally, her husband, unable to stand the look on his wife’s face or her incessant nagging any longer, sent to his son in Vienna the capital he had asked for, swearing it would be the last time.
Necip Bey let out a sigh. If only that had been the end of it. But had his brother not taken all of his mother’s jewelry and sold it, piece by piece, as well? His mother preferred to remain blind to this fact; she was always in awe of her biggest boy. The more Necip Bey thinks about it, the greater the wave of discontent within him billows, urging him to insurrection. For if his brother hadn’t sold that jewelry for peanuts, or blown that first or that last bit of capital in Vienna, Necip Bey would be much better off now. Necip Bey always measured his current situation in terms of his brother’s mistakes and misguided passions and that was an appropriate measure. According to him, what he possessed or did not possess today was a result of his older brother’s successful and unsuccessful endeavors. Had the inheritance from his father not dwindled away because of his big brother’s profligate commerce, or rather, the masking of his debauchery under the guise of commerce? Necip Bey didn’t know the details of the snail trade in Vienna. What he did know was that much later, on another of his journeys, his big brother had told one of his nephews that he stayed in the royal suite of one of the most luxurious hotels in Vienna, and then proceeded to show the suite to said awestruck nephew.
This is how the snail trade panned out: İzzeddin Efendi learned from a Jewish friend of his who had gone to Austria on business that the capital he had sent his son had been spent in a mad spree with a Viennese woman, and so this time, he disinherited his eldest son for good. Necip Bey was fixated on this whole disinheritance issue. And how could he not be? Because when his father died a short time after this incident, his mother appeared to have forgotten all about the disinheritance, and so continued selling this and that for the sake of her eldest son, finding him capital again and again.
Before the population exchange, Necip Bey had come to Istanbul, dressed as a shepherd, to study. His big brother had moved to Istanbul much earlier and started an import company together with several easternized Europeans. Before Necip Bey left for Salonica, his mother had taken him down to the basement and showed him the gold hidden there inside a huge earthenware jar. “Look, son,” she said, “this is the last of the gold. If your big brother tries to take it from me, stop him!” Necip Bey left for Istanbul, shocked at his mother’s expression of distrust towards his big brother, and with the jingle of a jar full of gold in his ears. And his departure, well, that was a whole other story now, wasn’t it! Necip Bey’s life essentially consisted of stories of his better, brighter past. While wandering the streets of Salonica, he encountered a group of Albanians gathered around a mosque, and when he heard they were going to Istanbul—and think about it, I was just eleven at the time—he ran home and dressed up as a shepherd before returning to join their ranks. The issue of how much gold the Albanians demanded to transport him, and consequently of how much of his mommy dearest’s gold he parted with, is always left out of the story. Necip Bey tells this story to his children as an example of what a person can achieve when he really puts his mind to it. As soon as he and the Albanians arrived in Istanbul, he went and found his big brother.
His big brother lived in an apartment he rented in Teşvikiye Palas in Nişantaşı. He had the apartment decorated by one of Istanbul’s famous Italian decorators. The place was like an antique shop. The walls were covered in luxurious wallpaper. It was an odd bachelor’s pad with stylish furnishings that besieged one like a hostile force. But then, it would be wrong to call it a bachelor’s pad, for it also boasted the constant fixture of his big brother’s big-breasted Greek mistress who, ignoring the surrounding luxury, spent all day in the kitchen frying mezes and dousing them in olive oil. She was a joyous, spirited woman; Necip Bey liked her. It was around this time that his big brother took a fancy to the shipping business. Later, he sent his Greek mistress packing, in order to appear sympathetic to his Armenian shipping partner who had a spinster sister living at home. The Greek mistress left one day, crying a river and planting wet kiss after wet kiss on Necip Bey’s cheeks. Necip Bey felt sad after she left, for just as her departure marked the end of decent meals, soon the possessions in the apartment, which grew increasingly unkempt, began to be confiscated. And thus did the shipping business come to an end.
Necip Bey strolled along, these thoughts running through his head for the umpteenth time, until he found himself in front of Piknik. Whipping himself into a state of consternation over the thought of all the money his big brother had squandered was a daily task of his. He definitely needed to withdraw some money from the bank today. His business partner had spelled things out pretty clearly. If he didn’t put up more money, the store would go under. But after he withdrew the money, his account would be empty. And for Necip Bey, that was something akin to death. He viewed the future with suspicion. He watched the faces of passersby with an expression of anger, as if they were the ones depleting all the money at the bank with their unnecessary expenses. God only knew how many chocolate bars and ice cream cones their snotty-nosed kids were wolfing down each day, or the amount of money their ostentatious wives were throwing around in an attempt to show off to all and sundry. Together they conspired to consume Necip Bey’s inheritance, paving his future with dark dangers by frittering away all the money at the bank. It was just as these thoughts were passing through his mind that the button on the hem of the left leg of his stylish trousers came off, allowing the hem to unravel until it hung down over his Swiss wool athletic socks.
Necip Bey stopped. He was very upset. He leaned over and searched for the button. It would be impossible to find an identical one. They were original Scottish buttons made of yellow metal and decorated with a coat of arms. He had gotten the pants themselves in Scotland too. Growing more and more aggravated by the moment, he looked around trying to find the button. At just that moment, someone walking down the boulevard stepped on the button, crushing it. Sweat poured out of Necip Bey’s forehead. Never again would he be able to go to Scotland, never again would he be able to sit in the cafes of Paris, never again would a new death bring to him new inheritances.
Once he withdrew the money from the bank, he wouldn’t have any money left, just one single apartment building, that was it. And the revenue from the store wouldn’t be enough for him. That spring he had renewed his membership at the tennis club. But that place always cost him a fortune. One had to have some money in his pockets for bridge following the tennis match. A little whiskey in the evening, quality brand filter cigarettes, those were necessities. If he didn’t have those, then the unfathomable fee he paid to gain entrance alone would be wasted. Plus he ate his lunch there on Sundays. If he could not do that, if he could no longer do even that much, then he might as well just die. For one, Necip Bey rightly deserved all of this, and, in fact, even more. He remembered the jar full of gold that his mother had shown him in the basement of their home in Salonica. The things one could do with that much gold. Necmi, a friend of his from the French high school—who, according to Necmi’s standards, was a poor child—was hardworking and ambitious. After he graduated from high school, he went on to study engineering at the Technical University, from which he later graduated. His father, who owned a wee bit of land in Anatolia and had settled in Üsküdar, had given him very little spending money. Necmi never took a bus or a taxi, never even drank a single cup of coffee at the coffeehouse, sold his books at the end of each school year, and always walked around in the same old clothes. It was this very same Necmi that Necip Bey had encountered the other day at the club. He’d gotten fat, grown a spare tire. He was so relaxed, so confident. That uneasy, sunken-cheeked, complex-ridden boy of yesteryear had been replaced by someone who laughed boisterously as he played chess, tre
ated those at the table to round after round of whiskey, and tipped the waiters heavily without even bothering to check the bill. It was as if all those coffees left undrunk, all that junk food left uneaten, all those trams left unboarded, all those cinemas left unvisited had just accumulated and accumulated until they became a rainbow under which Necmi passed to emerge a completely transformed guy. He greeted Necip Bey warmly, though it must be said, a bit dismissively. God only knows how he must have envied Necip Bey when they were in school. But then Necip Bey was certainly worthy of envy. His big brother, truth be told, used to give him a large allowance. And his clothing was tailored just for him by the fanciest, priciest tailor in Beyoğlu. Necmi Bey’s industriousness back then may have been due in part to his envy of Necip Bey. After the Greek mistress left, the home in Teşvikiye in a way became Necip Bey’s bachelor pad. To have a bachelor pad in Teşvikiye Palas at that age! On the weekends, when Necip Bey’s big brother was out of town on business, Necip Bey and his friends would amass at the place and make a point of drinking, and drinking lots. Necip Bey would use his pocket money to buy the most expensive mezes. Once, on a dare, he phoned Park Hotel and ordered a bottle of champagne to be delivered by a waiter. His friends still talk about it. But now, Necip Bey has become very stingy. Actually, that’s one reason why his wife turned her back on him—the way that he constantly insisted she account for this and that, his unbelievable miserliness, which was fostered by an overwhelming feeling of insecurity at the thought of the future, and which depressed him a little bit more with each passing day. He would have the maid dry out the grounds of a cup of Turkish coffee she’d prepared for one guest and boil it again, and he paid all of the expenses that needed to be paid at the last possible moment, including his children’s tuition. It was that French bread factory his big brother, the good-for-nothing piece of rubbish, established later that sent Necip Bey to his ruin. Once the apartment building was sold, that was it, there was nothing else, no more hope, certainly no hope of a new inheritance, the end.