by Selcuk Altun
If I didn’t call her twice a day in my first year her partially suppressed anger would find me out at the oddest hours to extract a verbal report. To stop her flying over at once and picking a quarrel with my tutors, I had to make 90 per cent grades. Unfortunately, the summer I passed into the second year she was appointed Project Consultant at Harvard. We were to spend an intimate spell of two terms in a pile of bricks called a villa overlooking the River Charles in the campus city of Cambridge. In the remaining years that seemed to last for ever, while guest lecturer Ada Ergenekon was teaching comparative literature in her pretentious English, I was overwhelmed by depression.
I’d even prepared myself for the possibility of an American stepfather, as a way of escaping her irritating attentions. But, as she declared to the media world, ‘she could think only of her one and only Arda.’ She made provocative use of dress, speech and body language to keep the men around her under control. I was furious when she flirted subconsciously with friends who came to see me. And with her artificial sincerity, subtlety and powerful mind games she was constantly trying to wear down my poor girlfriends.
My mother held various trading companies under the umbrella of the Taragano Financial Services, of which she was one of three partners. My grandfather, chairman of the board of directors, was uneasy with Uncle Salvador, his assistant, who was behaving honestly and failing to increase corporate profits. He would tickle my nose with his amber rosary beads and say, ‘Finish your schooling, for goodness sake, then we’ll make a killing and share it between us.’
My great-great-grandfather had risen into the wealthy class through his black-market profiteering on basic foodstuffs. As for my grandfather, on the eve of the military intervention of 12 September 1980, he’d been involved in smuggling gold and then turned his hand to fictitious exports and pilfered government tax returns, thereby making a profit of $150,000,000 in the process, only to regret that ‘we missed the big one!’
My mother’s shares were transferred to my name after I graduated with honours from Harvard, but I knew she wouldn’t allow me to move to the high-rise flat my grandfather had given me. She’d also rebuked my uncle for buying me a sports car.
My world darkened that summer night I heard of Iris Murdoch’s terminal illness while I was driving along the Bosphorus. My mother later reported that ‘the minibus that hit your Ferrari from behind flew into the sea at Yeniköy and the pervert driver with his Slav slut are now feeding the fish.’ I remember my inner organs shifting at the moment of impact. As I was gradually sliding down that dark tunnel perhaps I smiled at the consoling thought that sooner or later my mother would drag me out into the light. I had severe head injuries and was subsequently admitted for surgery and diagnosed with acute subdural haematosis. Despite a successful operation, and because of the possibility of chronic bleeding, I was flown to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, USA, in an ambulance plane brought from Switzerland. It seems a second operation was performed to prevent blood accumulating between the brain cells. For seven months I wrestled with visual and speech difficulties, partial memory loss and, most embarrassing of all, incontinence. I recall only half-seeing my mother and being unable to remember if my name came from a river or a lake. If she wasn’t beside me when I woke, I’d hear her crying in the next room and start to worry. A doctor of Tartar origin conveyed to me in his broken Turkish that if it hadn’t been for my mother not only would a quick recovery be out of the question, but I’d probably have remained partially disabled. During my convalescence I’d longed in vain to be rid of my cerebral talents. I vowed, as we boarded the New York–Istanbul flight, that I would never ever again upset my saintly mother.
As the noon ezan ended and before her ghost entered the scene, I had to throw the cigar butt that had fallen on the floor into the Ottoman ashtray. My mother’s soul was even capable of arriving uninvited while I was wrestling with whatever old bottle of booze was at hand. Then I could wonder if she’d put the Tartar doctor up to that last compliment.
I can’t just invent a shower of autumn rain as in trashy novels and then drop off to sleep. Instead, I’ll doze off humming a passage from Küçük İskender’s Rock Manifesto2...
1 A mischievous wandering djinn in Jewish folklore which takes over a human soul until driven out by prayer.
2 While I weep in my room, take a shower in blood, Mother! Warm me up milk and menstrual blood! Please don’t be startled if I howl to the full moon, don’t be angry with my friend the devil for staying over now and then, don’t be angry with him having an orgasm and yelling, ‘666 666’ as he urinates in the toilet ... you sing and dance, Mother, while others are being murdered! Clean my weapons, oil them! Don’t even try to understand why I masturbate till dawn! We are alone, all of us alone. I know it’s very funny, but now it’s time for you too to learn this, Mother!
B
Our Lord the Prophet read the following prayer for Hasan and Hüseyin, his grandsons:
‘Lord God! I seek refuge in nurturing words, against all humankind, djinns, devils, all harmful things and the evil eye.’
Buhari: Tecrid-i sarih, 1348
I confess I’m the poet who wrote the following graffiti on the wall: ‘How can I yearn for tears when I haven’t been given a taste for laughter?’ and: ‘Show me the poor soul who has never been victimized first by his own family!’
My master Baki, may he dwell in paradise, uttered the words, ‘How can the Four Sacred Books fit into a single volume if they’re not more poetically precise than Hamlet?’ In the first twenty-five years of my life – shall I see a second? – spent struggling to survive, I couldn’t even enjoy my unhappiness to the full. If your humble servant is not to upset you with episodes from his naive youth, he must get down to the nitty-gritty of the psychological make-up of his soul.
As my ancestors were a mixture of Kurdish Yazidi and Arab Christian, who lived at N. on the Syrian border, it’s clear why they took the surname ‘Öztürk’.1 My great-grandfather wasn’t from a noble tribe and was saved from poverty by smuggling live animals and imperishable foodstuffs. He had a folk song composed in his honour after he happened to shoot a famous army captain in self-defence. On the eve of the holy Kurban festival, while he was out foraging, news arrived that he’d been blown to bits in a minefield.
They say that my grandfather, a janitor in the Public Registry Office, was overjoyed when eventually a son, Vahit, was born after four daughters. Vahit attended primary school for six years and middle school for five and, returning from military service, ran away to Istanbul with Piraye, a student from the teachers’ training college. She was the only daughter of a director from Urla who had come to N. as a left-wing exile and womanizer, and when he disowned his daughter and banished his future in-laws to the Bulgarian border, the town was rife with rumours. My namesake grandfather died of a heart attack and his family scattered.
It seemed to me I came into the world at the age of four in Tarlabaşı, the very navel of Istanbul, and didn’t mind if the crazy taxi-drivers and street vendors underestimated our kaleidoscopic streets. I saw hopeless women relaxing at their ramshackle windows, scolding their kids in heavily accented Turkish or Kurdish. If no quarrelsome voices arose from the rotting front of a building it was blacklisted as ‘eccentric’. We sheltered in resigned companionship, the common denominator of absolute poverty.
My father would return home at dusk and I’d prepare to shut my ears to the inevitable row. He beat my mother until she took refuge in my room, embracing me and crying, ‘My poor son’, but somehow her sobs and trembling failed to move me.
My father was head bouncer at the notorious Wo-Manhattan Night Club. My mother shot him and his gypsy dancer mistress, and then committed suicide, leaving me to the care of seventy-year-old Marika Anadolyadis on the ground floor.
My mother had dubbed Marika the original Queen of Tarlabaşı, as she emerged into İstiklal Street wearing her violent redskin warpaint and her gear that was thirty years out of date. In her flat, which resembled
a warehouse of museum pieces, she distracted me by reading detective stories.
Our lumpen neighbourhood spokesman grew irritated with this funny woman who was cinema-obsessed and always reading to the accompaniment of classical music. Declaring that ‘this hunchback dwarf will ruin my adopted nephew’, he decided that I must be taken away from her. I remember hugging Marika and crying for one last time in my dark cellar that reeked of detergent. Through the intervention of my late father’s tough patron I was placed in the Kasımpaşa Education Institute for Orphans and put in the fourth year of the primary school. The arrival of your humble servant was the most momentous event in the history of this public institution that housed orphans and the poor. I was shunned as though I had murdered my parents.
Later, at the Artisan School of Printing, also for orphans, I knew that my tragic fame would leak out at registration time and that within forty-eight hours the whole school would be full of rumours. I learned not to take offence at the feigned compassion of the teachers. I wasn’t popular in the dormitory on account of my great love of books and my taciturn nature. But at the beginning of every year I had a period of peace after I made a public demonstration of beating up the first unwary fellow who wasn’t deterred by my bulk.
The teachers at the school were as poor and unhappy as the children. Many collapsed with exhaustion after the extra work they took on to make ends meet. Books became my only friends, and I read every one in the school library. For this I was regarded as eccentric. I dreamt of becoming a secondhand bookseller who enjoyed the aroma of the books and was consumed, sentence by sentence, sucked into the whirlpool. The job that would threaten my solitude least was perhaps that of a lighthouse keeper. (Was it because of my parents’ tragedy, three generations of wasted lives, that I was unable to read novels or poetry? In my bookshop there would only be detective stories and books on religion, history and travel.)
Marika visited me, sometimes twice a month, proudly presenting her retirement card at the door, as Head of the Archives from the Bank of Salonika. After a chat in a secluded kebab house we’d race to catch up with the latest detective film. On winter nights, when those back in the dormitory were cursing and blinding to keep themselves warm, I’d be reciting belated prayers for Marika, this disabled woman who’d fired my passion for reading.
Our literature teacher was a learned Tartar, God bless him! He worked in the secondhand book business at weekends, and arranged work for me at the Enderun Book Conservation Workshop on Huzur Street, noble Çamlıca’s arterial road. In the middle of a lonely hill adorned with uncut stones, a willow tree still stood, perhaps a sole survivor of an earthquake. I was nervous at first, working in the basement of the building in the shadow of that magnificent tree.
Baki Kutay, highly regarded in the book world as a restorer of antiquarian books, was a retired marine colonel. He was white-haired, white-bearded and, like many craftsmen, a silent scholar. If I succeeded in a trial period with him I was to undertake an apprenticeship in Enderun until my compulsory military service. My master didn’t inquire into my past and made no move to encourage an interest in his craft.
At first I was afraid of this manly ex-sailor who lived with his ill-bred daughter Hale on the second floor of an old wooden building left him by his mother. Hale resembled Princess Caroline of Monaco but had no right arm, probably from birth. On the top floor of the building smeared with pest-resistant paint lived his granddaughter Dalga, a high-school student, and his sly daughter-in-law Sıla. Naval Lieutenant Nazım, Sıla’s husband, had been killed during military manoeuvres. Dalga’s name (Wave) made me smile when I first heard it, but later it spoke to me of depth. She was one of those unhappy people who are nevertheless a source of love. This tall enterprising girl was surely sent into the world to play volleyball. As I was leaving for military service she asked, God forgive me, ‘Bedo, how old must men be before high-school girls can fall in love with them?’
The spacious first-floor drawing room had the atmosphere of a minimalist studio, despite the posters in Arabic script on the walls. My master worked reverently accompanied by instrumental music. He concentrated as though performing a life-or-death operation on these rare books, conversing, even flirting with them from time to time. The works he decided to save were given a dossier number, then restored, photographed and put away. If his clients were lost in admiration he was pleased but compliments annoyed him. For every hour spent on restoration he charged a fee of $50, adding fifty per cent for the materials he used. Clients from Europe and America, knowing there was no question of bargaining, were wary of arguing with him.
I didn’t blame him for not trying to teach me his craft. For the apprentice secondhand bookseller ‘book conservation’ didn’t always lead to the book trade and he was pleased to welcome any routine work I managed to handle. I respected my master Baki’s pride and his genuine talent for eloquence and was glad he found no fault with my passion for detective stories.
‘After the Holy Bible and the Koran, the most intelligent and worthwhile books are detective novels. The particular characteristic of the Holy Books is their immunity to misinterpretation. So many literary types owe their style to them,’ he would say.
With my first wages I immediately acquired a Koran, a Bible and a Pentateuch. Compared with the others I found the Koran, the last to be written, the most compassionate and tolerant. Respectfully, I limited myself to reading it line by line. I found that when my eyes recited the music of the sentences, peace and calm embraced my soul. Every reading meant the discovery of new spiritual strength. Absorbing it did not change my attitude but perhaps my self-confidence increased. I was determined to come to terms with myself but I couldn’t shake off my loneliness. I found a place for my own religion beyond that of the intellectuals and the religion-mongers, and I was attached to it by the coordinates of personal respect and love.
In the dark room next to the drawing room was a bookcase containing 2,000 handwritten rare and ancient manuscripts. I loved to breathe in the aroma of the manuscripts, none less than 250 years old. In my lino-floored bedroom between the Anatolian toilet and the library I read continuously, and on the evenings when my master was yelling at his daughter or daughter-in-law, I managed to avoid being dragged back to my rotten past by reciting Evliya Çelebi, the Ottoman travel writer.
Under his influence, and thanks to my education, physical size and increased self-confidence, I decided to do my military service as a commando. In mountainous Hakkâri I completed my service successfully, thank God, ending up with the rank of sergeant. I mustn’t go into the military details. A commando shouldn’t boast just because he’s doing his duty! Towards the end of my military service I received two sad letters. Because of a neglected hernia Baki Kutay could no longer use his right hand and had finished with book conservation. And Marika, whom I loved much more than my father, had died.
With the help of a letter of recommendation from my company commander, God bless him, I got a day job in a security firm as soon as I returned to Istanbul. The firm had transformed a crude four-storey building in the modest district of Aksaray into a dormitory for unmarried workmen. After those action-packed days in Hakkâri, I bored with keeping watch at the door of a business office.
I bought scented Turkish Delight and went to kiss Baki Kutay’s hand, but I noticed that my visit made him uncomfortable. He was drinking cognac and rereading The Secret History of the Mongols. I remember him saying, ‘We are living more comfortably now that I’m gradually selling off my books. But what makes me sad is that all the old important works are taking refuge in foreign collections.’
Every family member was well; Dalga was at school. Baki’s look intimated that I should go and not visit him again. As he said goodbye he addressed me by name for the first time. ‘Hey, Bedirhan!’, he said, ‘being a commando seems to have done you good.’
I headed for Tarlabaşı one last time to locate Marika’s grave. A few steps beyond the main street that November morning I found myself trav
elling back in time. It was as if the labyrinthine street theatre I had left behind some 4,000 days before had been waiting for this moment to start again – the overhanging laundry that shields the sky, half-naked children playing football with empty plastic bottles, lazy granddads strolling around in every season in the same cardigans, restless youths dashing to the coffee houses to play board games till closing time, barber-shops, experts in alopecia, the dried-fruit shop with a sideline in faxes, and the pedlar of old clothes and birds, the abandoned Greek mansions with piles of waste on the street, despite the signs, ‘Whoever dumps garbage here is a donkey,’ posters from previous elections of well-groomed local candidates alongside leaflets by practitioners of circumcision pinned up by hand on wooden doors darkened by time, pithy notes written in chalk for workers come to read the electricity or water meters, near-illiterate praise for the Diyarbakırspor football team inscribed on walls that have once again resisted that final demolition order, young girls letting off steam as they brusquely sweep the narrow streets leading off the main thoroughfare – all these were not scenes I wanted to see.
The plague of rot that, despite nature and urban man, had failed to corrode the worn buildings within, had nevertheless inundated the streets. My nostrils became clogged with dirt as I climbed Paşa Bakkal Street. I walked up the stairs of the building with ‘1894’ inscribed over the doorway, expecting to feel the whole street tremble. Semiha, who had been my mother and Marika’s friend, was sitting there knitting away furiously.