Noontime in Yenisehir

by Sevgi Soysal

  His son and daughter were going to study at university. But they gave no sign of hope for the future either. They didn’t show Necip Bey a modicum of respect, let alone instill in him any confidence for the future. His daughter answered none of his questions, and his son let his hair grow out, grew odd mustaches, and had a poster of Fidel Castro in his room. He did it all to spite Necip Bey, purely out of spite. Yet Necip Bey was a liberal man, that’s how he thought of himself; he never neglected to read the Swiss newspaper in the mornings. He insisted that he knew what communism was, and who communists were. It was an old-fashioned worker’s religion; at one point it raised a ruckus in Europe, but the Europeans took the necessary precautions, and by keeping those greedy laborers sated, they rescued their jaundiced minds from the darkness of that dogmatism. And now some particularly spoiled youths had rediscovered this fashion, but it didn’t matter, because once they inherited their fathers’ money, or began working, they would certainly forget all about that youthful craze. But then what was going on with his son? In Turkey, his son said, the state of the laborer was different …

  What was it to him? Was he not the grandson of İzzeddin Efendi, a member of the gentry of Salonica? So let the laborers worry about their cause themselves. None of that stuff would work in this country anyway. The people are ignorant. At this rate, with his mind, he’ll never make anything of himself. In the end, he’ll be worse off than a mere laborer. So be it … Necip Bey grew furious. All of them, all of them stole my property, they made me sell it all. An insurrection had long ago been carried out against Necip Bey, its perpetrators unknown. Of course, my big brother and those other bloodsuckers have left me with nothing. If I still had that old inheritance, I bet you our little lord wouldn’t be neglecting his lessons because of a bunch of nonsensical ideas and growing a mustache that made him look like one of those Bulgarian sharecroppers on the family farm back in Pişona. Recalling what had happened the other evening when he walked into his son’s room sent a shiver down his spine.

  Seeing, upon rising in the middle of the night to get a drink of water, that the light in his son’s room was still on, Necip Bey grew angry. The electric bills were astronomical enough as it were. He marched into his son’s room. Actually, he was not in the habit of entering his son’s room because he was not fond of being the recipient of rude rebukes. Right, oh yes, and so when he entered the room, he found his son playing with a gun.

  Necip Bey’s face went sallow. All his life he had been terrified of guns. Fearing that his son would sense the fear in his voice, he decided not to get on his case about the lights.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “What’s it to you? I didn’t use your money to buy it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’s it to me?’ Am I not your father?”

  “Is someone denying that? But that’s between you and me, the gun has nothing to do with it.”

  “Where do you get the money to buy these things? First finish your studies and start earning money, and then you can do whatever you damn well please. To think of all the expense I’ve gone to for the sake of putting you through—”

  “So don’t. Who told you to put me through school?”

  “I’m not like you, I have a conscience. I know that if you don’t finish school, you’ll go hungry.”

  “Oh yeah, right, we’re not getting an inheritance like you did.”

  “Have you no shame? Why, when I was just eleven years old—”

  “You came to Istanbul dressed up as a shepherd so you could study. Then you moved into Teşvikiye Palas with your big brother. Then, with a suitcase full of clothes made of English fabric, you took the luxury coach of the Orient Express to Switzerland to study. And you didn’t study.”

  This was just too much. The blood rushed straight to Necip Bey’s head.

  “Get out, get out I tell you.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  His son got up ever so slowly. And as he did so, the barrel of the gun turned to point straight at his father. Seeing Necip Bey turn white as a sheet, the boy laughed.

  “You cowardly Jew you!”

  It was that word, the word “Jew” that reverberated in his head like a bolt of lightning. Had he searched far and wide, never would he have been able to find a word capable of angering him more. His son had used the word only in jest, had not chosen it especially but only randomly, to make fun of his father’s cowardice, but for a moment Necip Bey was devastated. Once he had come to Istanbul dressed as a shepherd and started studying, after learning that he was from Salonica, all of his friends had asked him at least once, with more than a hint of insult, “Are you a dönme?” And so to prove that he wasn’t, and indeed he really wasn’t, Necip Bey went to such great lengths that he always got the feeling that the other person never believed him, and that all of his efforts only served to reinforce the other person’s belief that he was Jewish. And he was never able to shake off that feeling. When he was studying in Lausanne, the Nazis were having their golden age in Germany, anti-Semitism was popular in Switzerland, and all manner of people frequently began to assume that Necip Bey, with his dark skin and rather Roman nose, was Jewish. Even Carla told him about how one day her friends had asked her, “Why are you running around with that Jew?” With time, this feeling had assumed the form of a downright complex. He hated Jews.

  But one day, his wife said to him, “It’s obvious that you’re not a dönme because you’re lazy as a sloth and you fail at everything you do …”

  When his son attacked him with that epithet, the blood suddenly rushed to his head. He marched straight over to his son and slapped him twice, hard. His son, shaken by the unexpected slaps, fell backward, bashing his head against the corner of the chair. As Necip Bey watched the blood flow from the gash on his son’s head, his son looked at him with perfectly round eyes that grew deeper and deeper, resembling a well, a well that wanted to pull his father in and drown him. And that look drove Necip Bey even madder.

  “You swine!”

  “That’s right, with a snob like you for a father, what else could I possibly be!”

  “Shut up or I’ll hit you again.”

  “Do it, go for it. It’ll be the only action you’ve ever taken in your life. But don’t make do with just hitting me, take that gun and shoot me, if you’ve got what it takes. But you can’t. You’d shit yourself. Look, I’m telling this to your face. Do you know what I think about when I play with that gun? I think about ridding the earth of parasites like you!”

  Necip Bey’s face had gone from yellow to red …

  “Get out … Get out, you ungrateful wretch!”

  “I’m not leaving. C’mon, kick me out if you can. Hit me, if you can. But no, you can’t, because you’re scared shitless. If someone held a gun like this at you, you’d shit right in your golf pants.”

  Necip Bey didn’t listen to the last of his son’s words. He saw himself punching his son and pulling his hair. His son didn’t fight back, but he yelled. The echo of his son’s voice grew louder and louder in his ears: “That’s right, you’re a shit-filled pair of golf pants!” He turned out the lights and left his son’s room. Despite all that had happened, he was still thinking of the electricity bill. As for kicking his son out, he didn’t dwell on it. Because if his son left, he would go to his mother’s, in which case the court would find his mother even more justified in her demand for alimony.

  When the button on his golf pants came off and the hem unraveled and fell over his sock, he got the feeling that there was something in his golf pants, something that was going to fall out. His son had gotten to be too much. Everyone had gotten to be too much since his inheritance started running out. Everyone had joined forces to destroy him, to devastate him in his weakest moment, to spend all of his money down to the very last dime. The gold that his big brother had spent on only God knows what appeared before his eyes. Forgetting that he and his sister had always gotten by on what remained of the inherita
nce, he believed that all of his woes were due to the fact that his big brother had gotten away with that gold. Whose fault was it then, if not his brother’s? He walked into the bank, angrier than ever at his brother.

  Mehtap’s nightmare

  Mehtap wore her long, light brown hair in a single braid that ran down the back of her neck. She saw Necip Bey as he was coming into the bank. She knew him well. He was a frequent customer. Yet he had rarely been seen depositing money. Necip Bey always withdrew money. Mehtap was very surprised by this. For her, a bank was a place to deposit money, accumulate money, invest for a better future. How was it that Necip Bey, rather than multiplying his money at the bank, constantly withdrew it, making it dwindle further and further? Ponder it as she may, the matter remained cloaked in mystery in Mehtap’s mind.

  Mehtap was from an immigrant family hailing from Caucasia. She was a reserved, hardworking, tall, blue-eyed girl. The bank’s management was satisfied with her performance, and the customers even more so. She grew up in Konya. Her father was a master welder who had worked for years as a public servant on the railway.

  He had worked on the railway for thirty years, during which time he would leave for a welding job on the construction of a bridge in some far-off mountainous region to return home only weeks later. He spoke of endless toiling in snowy, isolated places inhabited by roaming wolves, and returned with arms burnt from welding and a body depleted of strength. Mehtap and her mother and older brother would spend days, sometimes weeks, waiting for him, usually half-starved to death. Mehtap’s mother was enlightened enough to busy her children, who had not yet started school, by teaching them the alphabet. She would try to make up for their feelings of destitution by telling them stories. She had raised her children to be content. When, every once in a blue moon, she fried slices of stale bread dipped in egg, the kids would celebrate: “Mom’s making bread fish!” When still just a small child, after she began to understand the meanings of words, Mehtap made up her mind to do something for her parents who, though good people, never seemed to have experienced a truly good day in their lives. She became hard working so that she could put a smile on the faces of these two good people and hoped that by working, by working hard, at school and then later on too, she would be able to change their doomed fate. Her family didn’t have the means to put her through school. But Mehtap had to study; if she didn’t, the dreadful nightmare she’d had as child would come true. The nightmare went like this: while welding in the snow on the shore of a frozen river, her father is attacked by a pack of wolves whose eyes are shinier than the sparks of the welding machine. Her father uses the welding machine to try and stave off the wolves. But one of the wolves, clearly the alpha, whose head is much bigger than those of the others but whose body is the size of a normal wolf’s and who has flames coming out of his mouth, swallows up her father together with the welding machine. And then, from between his pointy teeth he spits out her father’s skinny bones, which still have bloody pieces of flesh on them. Then, the other wolves pounce on the remains still clinging to the bones. Finally, the alpha of the pack spits out the welding machine. The sparks of the welding machine, which continues running next to the stripped-bare bones of her father, melts the ice of the river, and the overflowing waters of the river turn into a sea. And in that sea, her father’s bones, together with watermelon rinds and pieces of straw, gradually drift away. It was this part of the dream that hit Mehtap hardest of all. Her throat knotted up when her father was being ripped to pieces, of course, but when her father’s bones drifted away, as if never to return, that’s when she was overcome by an incurable feeling of melancholy and she would wake up crying. The tears wouldn’t stop flowing for hours. That day, she swore to herself that one day she would rescue her father from that job. In middle school, she studied at a vocational school of commerce; she had heard that those who graduated from this school found work more easily, and it wasn’t long before she had already begun making money whenever she had time left over from her studies. She and her older brother had struck up a deal with one of the shops across from the Mevlana Museum. At night they reproduced portraits of Mevlana on the bottoms of copper bowls. They got fifty kurush for each one. As soon as she had saved up enough money, she bought her father a first-rate Bursa knife. Perhaps so that he could protect himself against the wolves. After graduating from vocational school, she had gone to Ankara to pursue more academic studies. Meanwhile, her older brother had gotten married and started a family and ultimately, in a way, had broken the pact that the two siblings had made to change the fates of their parents. Now, he had to worry about putting bread on the table for his own family. There were others he had to make happy now. If he were going to change anything, he should change it for his own wife and kids. That’s why Mehtap was so upset with her brother. For the longest time she could barely bring herself to look him in the face. Once she had finished vocational school, Mehtap found a job at a bank in Ankara. One of the teachers at her school, observing her industrious manner and seeing the predicament she was in, had asked a friend to give her a job. Now, she had a day job. She had brought her parents over to live with her. Her father was retired. Yet even with his pension and Mehtap’s salary combined, they barely got by. The landlord was going to increase the rent once again. They lived in Yenimahalle in a cheaply built apartment, where the faucets and everything else were in a constant state of disrepair, where water leaked through the walls of the kitchen, an apartment which didn’t have a radiator and also didn’t qualify for coal from the government. Even their home back in Konya had been better than this, almost. At least it had a backyard with two apricot, one mulberry, and three cherry trees.

  Whenever her father returned from one of his exhausting trips, her mother would set a table out in the yard, dish out the money for a bottle of Yeni Rakı, and fry some liver and peel some cucumbers, which she would serve along with white cheese and melon. If it were winter, she would celebrate by smoking pastrami on the heater. The heater kept the old, thick-walled house plenty warm, and her father, once sufficiently pie-eyed, would fantasize about his retirement, telling his loved ones about the days to come when they would all be able to relax and enjoy themselves. The fairytale her father told during the summer, in the faux fairytale atmosphere created by a bulb hung from the apricot tree, about how, once he was retired and his children had made lives of their own they would have “their own home” and “their own garden,” how they would get up after daybreak, read the newspaper in bed, and eat meat and fruit every day, was a lovely fairytale indeed. Mehtap and her brother would get carried away themselves and say how when their father was retired, they would work lots and earn money, they would save a whole lot of money, and with the whole lot of money they saved they would buy themselves a one-story home with a yard, and then their father would never wake up early—never had he slept through sunrise, and when the kids got up, not once did they ever find their father at home, having tea and reading the newspaper. “I’ll bring the newspaper to you in bed,” Mehtap would say. “You can keep your pajamas on all day if you like.” Her father would talk about the dahlias he would plant in the front yard of “their own house” and her mother would demand without question that roses be planted in the front yard too. She loved roses. Roses articulated a woman’s unordinary desires. And then, she wanted pine trees in the front yard; pine trees were the trees of dreams, the trees of rich, distant countries. In a page that had fallen out of a foreign magazine, they had seen a Christmas tree: A glowing, colorful pine tree covered in decorations, with a happy family sitting next to it, surrounded by gifts. Ever since that day, for Mehtap’s mother, the pine tree had become the symbol of a warm, carefree family life.

  Yes, but now, well, her father was retired, and Mehtap was working. Despite the fact that she gave almost all of her money to her family, setting aside for herself only money for transportation and what she needed for clothing, they still were far from comfortable. Even though her father was in no position to be drinkin
g Yeni Rakı any more often than usual, he had started drinking it every night. Only now, when he drank it wasn’t pleasant; he didn’t even tell that old “a home of our own” fairytale anymore. Mehtap, in seeking the reason for their plight, thought she had discovered it in her brother’s marriage. Just when the prince was about to unite with his lover, a witch emerged, playing the part of the giant who broke the spell. Maybe if her brother’s income were added to theirs … But her mother defended her brother, saying that of course he was going to marry, he had long ago reached the age at which that was the thing to do. “You’ll get married too one day,” her mother said. “You’ll get married too and leave us,” her father said, “and then, either you won’t work because you’ll have children, or you’ll have to help your husband. Why should some man, some stranger, look after your mother and father? It’s best I go ahead and find myself a job now.” Mehtap didn’t want to hear a word of this betrayal, which was portrayed as likely, inevitable even. But somewhere deep in her heart, she felt that there was truth to these words, and she resented the unknown enemy who was forcing her to turn her back on her most beautiful beliefs. She grew heavy-hearted because she was unable to change anything, even though she worked all day and took evening classes at the academy in the hopes of eventually earning a better wage, even though she squandered no money, and even though she pushed herself—hard, as if trying to squeeze glasses full of lemonade out of a shriveled summer lemon. Her father became set on the fact that he absolutely positively had to find a private sector job, repeating over and over, “What are we going to do when you leave? The older I get, the harder it’ll be for me to find work. It’s best I find a job now.” Was it all in vain? Had they spent their nights painting those portraits of Mevlana in vain? Had she and her brother sworn to each other and made a pact in vain? Would the fairytale told so many times under the light of that bulb in the backyard of their rundown house in Konya never come true? Were all of those dreams, which seemed so reachable, real and so very humane, in truth only supernatural, like the fairytales with the giants and the fairies, with Mount Qaf and flying carpets, and the wood-chopping girl who marries the sultan’s youngest son? Mehtap felt distraught. She felt very distraught. That morning, her father had started working again for a private sector company. He made less than he had working on the railway, and in exchange for even more hours of toil. Someone, perhaps her older brother, perhaps someone else, but certainly someone had betrayed them. There was someone out there who had stomped all over Mehtap’s childhood, all over her beliefs and efforts, and unleashed that old wolf of her nightmares upon her father, without even batting an eye.