by Sevgi Soysal
In this respect, Ali’s composure was even more striking when he was debating with Doğan, who in contrast was in a constant state of gesticulation. They’d been debating there on the sidewalk for half an hour. Standing next to Ali, Doğan kicked and stomped like a race-horse chomping at the bit to kick off the race and desperate to reach the finish line as soon as possible. Ali listened to Doğan with a calm, thoughtful expression, giving ear with affectionate tolerance to his exaggerated sentences and the conclusions he reached thanks to his sharp intellect and vibrant imagination. Ali dug in his heels, defending his doubts about the finish line of the race that Doğan was so eager to commence and in which he strove so mightily to engage Ali as well; Ali drove Doğan crazy with his simple questions, squelching Doğan’s enthusiasm for the race. In the face of Ali’s obstinate realism, Doğan’s exuberance began to subside, and when the constant motion of his hands and arms, something which generally added more punch to his forceful elocution, eventually became devoid of meaning, suddenly no longer knowing what to do with his hands and arms anymore, he just stood there, looking like an adolescent boy who’d been given too much of a hard time.
Ever since he was a kid, Ali had been careful to calculate the firmness of his foothold. He’d take a good look around and, once convinced of the steadfastness of his position, he wasn’t easily dissuaded. When he was a kid, his father occasionally took him to the park. His father was unemployed then; whenever he went into the city to look for work, he took his son with him, but sometimes, rather than take him along to this or that office, he left him at a park. Ali would spend a while watching other kids climb up the stairs and glide down the slide, over and over. They would push and shove each other in a race to get to the top of the stairs first. Before trying to ascend the stairs, Ali considered whether he’d be able to make it up. He’d been taught not to attempt the impossible. He was a proud child, and he didn’t like to be rudely reminded when something didn’t belong to him—and he had learned at a very young age that many things did not. First Ali thought about whether or not the slide had an owner, as many things did. He’d never encountered a toy that did not have an owner, a toy that everyone could play with. Then, upon observing how all the kids in the park shoved each other around as they attacked the swings and slides, he decided that these particular playthings did not have an owner. First he began making his way up the stairs leading up to the slide, expecting all the while for someone to grab him by the ear, or slap him on the cheek. One day out of curiosity he’d climbed onto the top of one of the taxis that rarely drove through the neighborhood where he lived, and he was quickly met with a slap on the cheek from the taxi driver. His pride was so hurt that for the longest time he’d made a habit of not even turning to look at a taxi.
He ascended the first step. He tried it out, made it his own. Then, with slow determination, he ascended the second and the third steps too. The children behind him didn’t push, they didn’t dare, seeing the determination in his eyes when he turned to look at anyone trying to pass him, stopping them in their tracks with a mere glance. Finally, he reached the top. Now, knowing what the slide was, he was certain of his next move. Ali was just about to slide down when an impatient, impudent child bolted up the steps, trying to get ahead of him. With a swiftness that contrasted with his previous patient movements, he grabbed the kid by the armpits and pushed him off the steps. The child hit the ground, and blood flowed from a gash above his brow. In tears, he wailed. His mother ran to his side, and the attendant blew the whistle. In no time Ali was surrounded by angry-faced people yelling and screaming at him.
The park attendant latched roughly onto Ali’s ear. It wasn’t difficult for the attendant to discern that Ali didn’t have a family that would come running to his defense. He ripped Ali from the slide before Ali had had a chance to go down it. Ali made a beeline straight out of the park. His father returned to find him sitting on the sidewalk. His face was red, his eyes damp. But he wasn’t crying. He wasn’t in the habit of complaining. And so he didn’t tell his father about what had happened. If he wasn’t able to deal with something when it happened to him, he would wait until he had the strength to do so. He wanted to rely on his own strength. He never sprinted to the front, unless he was absolutely sure of himself. And when he did take to the front lines and met with defeat, he’d think long and hard and blame himself most of all.
“Why aren’t you playing in the park?”
“No reason … I don’t want to come to this park ever again.”
He didn’t respond to his father’s question as to why. He was thinking of the owners of the park who had emerged at the last minute.
Doğan took offense at Ali’s accusation that he “spoke like a book.” They had been friends for two years. And both of them were avid readers. Except, because Doğan knew foreign languages, Ali urged him to read books written in them, asking him to then present him with a summary in Turkish. He asked so many questions that Doğan, afraid he wouldn’t be able to provide all the answers, labored over the foreign books until he knew he had it all down pat. Even though it was Ali who pressured him into reading the books, Doğan reveled in the pleasure of being able to tell Ali about them, to teach him things thanks to the books he had read, and Ali appeared perfectly content as a humble, patient listener. But now, this unexpected scolding about “talking like a book” had angered him. Yet he didn’t want Ali to see that it upset him, and he was more than a little miffed at his inability to suck it up. He blushed.
“What do you mean, ‘you talk like a book’?”
“Exactly what I said. You’re standing there trying to be a book, you’re trying to create a book with your words. Yet the truth is, you can’t write a new book by forming sentences about the books you’ve read.”
“Are you denying the existence of general truths? What I’ve just told you isn’t something I just made up, my sentences are based on truths …”
“But you’re drawing it out. And when you do that, you lose your footing in reality, in real phenomena …”
“So you’re denying the truth of my starting point?”
“What you call your starting point is not some random point you just pulled out of the air, it’s based on certain truths, certain realities. And unless you can prove the truth of the train of thought you produce, you sever yourself from the truth and the believability of that point …. You understand what I’m saying?”
“No, you’re just trying to make things difficult.”
“Expecting you to back up your statements is not ‘making things difficult.’ And books aren’t easy to write either.”
“Now what does that have to do with anything?”
“I mean, I’m not objecting to the book, I’m objecting to the ‘like’. Book sentences shouldn’t be rendered abstract. They haven’t been written as the result of abstractions; they’re the outcome of real events, situations, realities. You can only develop them based on reality and specific situations. Otherwise you’re turning concrete results into abstract starting points.”
Ali fell silent. He felt that he’d gotten caught up in sentences. He was always cautious to avoid the wiles of words and the boundless possibilities they offered. He tried to pull his thoughts together:
“Let’s say there’s a door here. A door that is the only door to a full room. The room is full, and those inside need to get out. First those inside try to push the door open, with all their might. Then they understand that the door’s locked. They try to think of other ways to open it. Once they understand that the door can only be opened with a key, they start looking for the key. If they find the key, they open the door. If they can’t find the key, then they continue trying to force it open, because the problem is not that they need to find the key, it’s that they need to open the door. Now what I’m opposed to is abstracting myself from the room, the door, the people who need to get out, by proclaiming that I have the key. Because the question that needs to be asked in this case is, which key belongs to which
door? That question must be answered. In order for the people inside to get out, if you get what I mean, the important thing, what makes the key important, is the fact that they’re locked up. You see?”
“So you’re belittling the key? But doesn’t that mean that you’re belittling theory? Without theory—”
“Did I say anything of the sort? What I mean to say is that the key is important for letting the people out. The objective is for them to get out, it’s that simple, for them to get the key, so that they can open the door. Otherwise, the fact that the key has the power to open the door is in and of itself useless. So I mean, now look, don’t get angry with me, but what you’ve just been doing is molding key after key and lining them up on a key ring. But where does the key ring hang? From the belts of the stewards whose job it is to keep the food in the cellar locked away from everyone else.”
“That’s taking things a little far, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t possibly claim that I had any such objective …”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I know that’s not your objective, that’s why I’m trying to warn you, to keep you from arriving at undesired conclusions.”
“Thanks …”
They remained silent for a while. The dense crowd on the sidewalk lurched forward, dragging Doğan and Ali along with it. Ali instinctively tried to keep others from bumping into Doğan. Doğan was touched by the effort.
“They’ve cordoned off the road. There’s something going on over there, but who knows what.”
“We’ll know soon.”
“We’ll be waiting here for a while though, I guess.”
“So it seems. But it’s probably nothing important. You know how our people are, always up for a spectacle.”
“We could go back to Piknik, if you like.”
“No, no. I’m curious now to find out what’s happening over there.”
“We can ask.”
“No need, everyone’ll just tell you something different anyway. Let me try to make my way up to the front.”
“No, wait, it looks like the crowd’s dispersing.”
For a while they just stood there, considering what to do next. Ali was clearly lost in thought about something. Then he turned to Doğan:
“Do you believe a person could stab himself in the stomach, just like that?”
“Now where did that come from?”
“There’s a guy in our neighborhood. He had an ulcer. He was in horrible pain.
“The ulcer was at an advanced stage, but he didn’t have the money for surgery. One day, we heard these piercing screams coming from his house. Later, his wife said that the pain had become so awful, so dreadful that he stood in front of the mirror, looked at himself, and said, ‘Lord, if it weren’t for this stomach, I wouldn’t be in such pain,’ and so he grabbed his wife’s tailoring scissors from her hand and drove them into his stomach, to cut his stomach out. And that’s exactly what he did …”
“And? Did he die?”
“Of course he did. But the important thing is that the man had decided that the pain was definitely coming from his stomach. And that the pain had gotten so bad that he would try to gouge his stomach out. That whatever it was that determined his thoughts, and his pain, had concentrated in his stomach …”
Ali stopped speaking. Doğan was looking elsewhere. Such was his habit. He rather preferred speaking himself, in monologues. When he spoke, he did so well, and he sounded knowledgeable, and in fact, he was more animated, effective, and colorful than Ali was when he spoke. Ali liked listening to Doğan. But now, the fact that Doğan wasn’t listening to him upset him. The truth was, Ali rarely spoke. And he was used to Doğan’s habit of not listening. His eyes would suddenly veer off into a different direction, he would cease listening to whoever was addressing him, and just like that his attention would be rapt with the new thing he was looking at. He was interested in so many things that their very multitude made Ali uneasy, and he would grow saddened by the thought that the topics which were the foundation of his friendships, including this friendship, were only a few of the numerous topics that interested Doğan.
Doğan had a very multifaceted personality. It was as if because he wanted so desperately to extend beyond that clock of his mother’s that always rotated in the same direction that he himself extended in every direction in the hopes of escaping that circle via any crevice possible. It was because of his desire to overflow beyond the confines of that tedious, suffocating circle that he burst out in every which direction. He had fostered curiosity in all sorts of things ever since he was a child. When he was around ten years old he took an interest in silkworms and got so caught up in this curiosity that his room became chock full of the cardboard boxes he kept them in. He would watch the larvae for hours on end, and read anything and everything about them that he could get his hands on. One day he considered trying to stop the silkworms from becoming butterflies and leaving their cocoons, and to obtain silk from them instead. He learned how to do it. But then, foreseeing the inevitable consequences of trying to manufacture silk at home, his mother put a stop to things. He wasn’t able to obtain any silk, and the foul smell given off by the dead larva in their cocoons permeated the house. And then one day, for some reason or another, the silkworms ceased to be of interest to him. The silkworms’ boxes lingered in his room for some time. Later, when his mother disposed of them, Doğan didn’t even notice. And ships, he liked ships too; he used to collect pictures of them. But then that curiosity later gave way to a fondness for postage stamps.
In middle school, Doğan expressed interest in helping with the wall newspaper that his officious Turkish teacher had the students produce, largely for the purpose of showing off to the inspectors. He got good grades in Turkish, and at first his teacher pressed him to manage the newspaper. But then later he got so caught up in the whole thing that his curiosity about actual newspapers soon verged on obsession, and the next thing you knew he was wondering about their editorial directors, and seeing himself as one in the future. All those aspects of the regular newspapers that he liked he started copying in the school newspaper. First it was caricatures, and then comics, and then editorials, and then sports pages. The wall newspaper just got bigger and bigger. This state of affairs started to get on the Turkish teacher’s nerves. Finally, the teacher put restrictions on the topics that the newspaper could cover and the total number of pages it could contain. These restrictions put a damper on Doğan’s enthusiasm, and so he turned the wall newspaper over to someone else. Yet he nevertheless continued to foster his interest in newspapers for some time thereafter. His room was full of newspaper clippings. He cut out the articles he liked and pasted them onto the blank pages of a magazine of his own making, changing and updating the design at his will. This fixation of his began to make a bigger mess of his room than the silkworms had. His room became an utter wreck, with paste, paper and newspaper clippings everywhere. It was around then that he watched a documentary about missiles. He was simply bowled over by those missiles which traveled unfathomable distances at astounding speeds. And so on that day he became interested in physics. He forgot all about the home newspaper. The newspapers that he had collected in his room were abandoned in a stack in some corner. The dusty stack was eventually disposed of by his mother and the servant. Doğan of course hardly took notice. Physics was his new passion. He dreamed of becoming an atomic physicist and continued to feed his interest in missiles. He read all the relevant books and magazines he could get his hands on, never growing the least bit bored. And he got good grades at school too. He was on the honor list every year. Mevhibe Hanım bragged to the neighbor ladies whenever they gathered at her house that her son was going to become an atomic physicist. Doğan finished high school at the top of his class. He won a scholarship and went to Paris. In the two years that he spent in Paris, he grew bored of physics. One of the main reasons for this was that in France he felt that he lagged behind his classmates. He realized that he owed his superiority back home to the fact
that no one there took any particular interest in physics. In Paris, however, his knowledge did not render him exceptional in the least, for there was simply nothing extraordinary about harboring an interest in atomic physics in that city. Doğan’s friends at university were well ahead of him. In Paris, being a physicist was not something that mothers bragged about when the neighborhood ladies gathered at their homes. It wasn’t long before Doğan realized that he would only be successful if he devoted himself exclusively to his faculty lessons. Only if he confined himself to a narrow circle … But had he not spent years trying to climb out of a constricting circle? Had he not sought to overcome the tedious monotony that had oppressed and suffocated him for years via interests that he had fostered for this very reason? Finally, he stopped attending the faculty lessons and started spending all his time in the coffeehouses of Paris. There he met a slew of people who had perfected the art of being special. They spoke of poetry, politics, women, problems, of how life was ridiculous and something that shouldn’t be taken seriously, they made fun of everything, produced gossip of the highest level, and were depressed beyond repair. That was when he took an increasing interest in art. Actually, everyone at those coffeehouses was interested in art. He took an interest in film. He wrote to his family, telling them that he had given up on atomic physics and had decided to get a degree in cinema instead. Because he stopped attending lessons and taking exams, his scholarship was cut off. He asked his family for money. His father refused, telling him he had no money for such ventures. Mevhibe Hanım had money, but there was no way she would be sending him any of it; as soon as she heard of his exploits, she wrapped a piece of muslin around her head and locked herself up in the bedroom. So that son of hers that she’d been bragging about, the one who was going to become an atomic physicist, had decided to become a filmmaker, just another good-for-nothing bum, huh? If Doğan had asked for money to study atomic physics, Mevhibe Hanım would have coughed it up in a second, but she was a responsible mother, she couldn’t possibly promote her son’s adventures in bumhood with her own money. The grandson of no one less than the grand “MP beybaba” was to become a filmmaker. No, there was no way she could stomach that. How could a person possibly join the ranks of the riffraff of one’s own accord? A filmmaker or an acrobat; six of one, half a dozen of the other. There’s this memory from her childhood that Mevhibe frequently recalls. When Ankara was still a thinly populated city and Kavaklıdere and Çankaya were rural garden areas, Mevhibe Hanım’s family lived in Kocatepe. The hills behind their house were bare. One day, she heard a pack of children running uphill say that acrobats had erected a tent up there, and so she followed after them. The children sat down around the acrobats’ tent, which had been set up on a flat area at the top of the hill. Two acrobats walked back and forth across a rope tied taut between two poles. They did somersaults. A woman in garish makeup and a hideous costume, the lowest of lowlifes, sang a song. Then, after the short-lived performance, the acrobats began walking amongst the spectators, asking for money.