by Latife Tekin
Rübeysa went into shock, weeping so hard that Halilhan had to fall on his knees before her to soothe the hurt and stop her tears. He heaped praise on each of her fingers: all ten were just like scented pencils! While there was nothing much else he could credit his wife with, her cooking was perfect! And, after all, she hadn’t killed herself or anything to upset him when she got wind of his affair with Juli.
The fact was that Rübeysa hadn’t done anything because she couldn’t think badly of Halilhan. Some hot, black dye seemed to have slowly seeped under her skin. Her eyes and face were darkened by defeat. Her heart, which had been hurled into hell, howled in its fiery winds. After thinking things through, she mixed her menstrual blood in her husband’s tea for six nights in a row. And whenever she heard frogs croaking she made herself stand up, planted a happy smile on her face, and started hopping and skipping about: two long steps and a short one, two long steps and a short one. In sour secrecy she reached out to the book of womanhood and in it found a few hopeful remedies for her condition, reading it all day and raving about it all night. It was inevitable that her blood would one day mix with her husband’s and flow into his heart. And to spite his whore, from that day on she would stay fit and fresh, living her life as sprightly as a frog.
As the squash flowers opened out and offered themselves to the sun, Rübeysa’s pain, which she had tried to mask with her female know-how started to rage even more fiercely. One afternoon, it spewed out of her soul with an awful sound and spread into her stomach. Her husband who had walked off a week ago, leaving her with only a few coins for food, hadn’t come back yet; consequently she and her family were now starving. While they were in this state, he, with Juli on his arm, was out visiting his sisters-in-law and keeping this a secret from his brothers. ‘Meet the wonderful woman I’m going to marry!’ he was telling them. As soon as Rübeysa heard about the visits Juli had paid, not only to Gülaydan but to her other sisters-in-law Aynina and Turcan, and how she’d spent long hours sewing for them, she took to her bed.
She must’ve spent her bout of fever dealing out some heavy curse on Juli, because one night, after Juli had knocked back two kadillaks (her term for the Altınbaş brand of rakı), she proved herself a liar capable of soaring wingless off the Sırat bridge. Her father hadn’t ever been to England, even in his dreams, and her name, Juli, was simply short for Jülide. But alas, Halilhan had gone soppy with love for her, the moment she brushed her lips sweetly along the brim of her glass and murmured, ‘If you don’t take a drink it’ll snow on our wedding day.’
For three nights Halilhan’s brain wrestled with his heart as he looked for some way to make peace between these two precious bodily parts. At last he found a solution. While stroking Jülide’s hair, he said, to ease his heart, ‘Who cares if your father’s English or not?’ But to get even with her for lying to him, he snatched her cat.
Halilhan and Gogi stood beside the Volvo, looking down into a fairly large plastic crate at their feet that contained the Chinese cat, and discussing her ‘weird genetik features’. Gradually they were joined by some of the ragged men who were circling the crate. Among them were Halilhan’s brothers Hazmi and Mesut Sunteriler. These fellows, with their backward somersaulting fantasies, were returning from their day out spent conning life – the life that others possessed. They knelt around the box, squinting curiously at the cat, until Hazmi Sunteriler reached in and picked up Sunsun. Giving her neck a squeeze, he said, ‘What’s up, you little freak? We could do some wheeling and dealing here, selling such pedigree cats!’ Then he threw Sunsun to the ground, thrust his left shoulder forward, and dove straight for Halilhan. With his quick leap he managed to deal his brother a nasty blow before the ragged men grabbed Hazmi by his arms that were twisted back from constant fighting. From childhood onwards, Hazmi had been filled with fury toward the world. ‘I’ll root out the money…’ he used to snort, ‘I’ll root out the money…!’ With his hot temper and dark moods, he walked around as rigid as the blade of a sword. His greatest grief in life was having a wife who worked.
Using all his strength to wrestle free, Hazmi threw himself backward and stood still, taking a break. If we’re really out to get a man, he can blast us with a hundred rounds and we’ll never go down!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll hang on till we’ve killed him.’
Until recently, the three brothers had been working together in solidarity and doing just fine. Having the same longings and feeling their poverty in more or less the same degree, they’d thrashed out some interesting arguments among themselves, producing a detailed plan on what they had to do to ensure an abundant and never-ending supply of money. ‘Do we three add up to a race?’ or ‘Is poverty a profession or a matter of karakter?’ They set themselves questions like these and tried to answer them from real life pratik. They lacked the capital in cash but had examined their situation from a number of different angles and expected all the best results. But Halilhan had come up with a way to glean extra profits for himself from their considerable capacity for labour. Just as he was soaring angelically to the peak of purest energy, he’d turned his mind into Satan’s own. ‘I’m involved in some business research, so you’ll need to set aside a bit more money for me,’ he had claimed, setting himself to scheming and employing a whole host of mind games and sly ruses to realise his secret dream of buying a car. Halilhan’s brain was in the clutches of his passion, which, like a fantastic vulture, kicked and flapped its invisible wings until it had beaten Mesut and Hazmi to the ground. Before they could even ask themselves, ‘What’s gone wrong with us here?’ Halilhan had skipped out with their joint savings and in a flash converted his sense of poverty into a car while Hazmi and Mesut, who were equals in the business, failed miserably.
If you asked Halilhan, he’d say they lacked imagination!
And now, up to his neck in the grief caused by the sequestration order and other legal manoeuvrings that Halilhan had heaped on them, Hazmi was kicking and struggling to get back to the fight. He finally slipped through the ragged men’s hands and landed a punch squarely on Halilhan’s face as he screamed, ‘You will not sit on our money, you bastard!’
The ragged men had a hard time separating Halilhan and Hazmi, who sounded like eagles beating their wings as they fought fiercely, almost dutifully.
Even more than Hazmi, who delivered the blows, Halilhan resented Mesut for dancing around them and backing his opponent. As he pulled up his shirt-tail to wipe away the blood running from his nose down to his chin, out of breath, he hissed at Mesut, ‘Now take your brother and beat it, and I hope he shits in your mouth!’ Then, turning to face Gogi, he added, ‘Well, now you’ve seen it: our free democratic brotherhood!’
Unable to look into Halilhan’s blood-covered face, Gogi cradled Sunsun in his arms timidly. After a moment he dragged Halilhan over to the public fountain and made him sit on the stone step facing it. There, he stroked his friend’s shoulders and tried to boost his morale, which had hit rock bottom: ‘Ömer Hayyam, İmam Gazzali and Hasan Sabbah were among twelve important men all supposedly educated at the same school, but one became a wino and another picked up a wicked addiction to opium. So maybe you brothers all grew up in the same home, but to think you could share the same character, well, that’s just not how life works…’
Yes, but stacking this desolate feeling on top of feeling hurt… it was too much. When Brigitte Bardot got wild about animals, Halilhan hadn’t been able to believe it. This problem of piling-up feeling-upon-feeling made some people want to stop living, much less keep making movies. ‘Jealousy drives people to create an imaginary werewolf in the family,’ Halilhan told Gogi. ‘I’m certain of this.’
When they finally looked up from their soul-searching by the fountain, it was already halfway into the night.
In the factory yard, the bitter-mustard squash flowers had filled out, blooming as fully as they ever would and shining as gloriously as a full moon.
‘Tomorrow I’ll scrounge a few lira from somewhere and treat the
Volvo to a full tank,’ said Halilhan as he and Gogi parted. Once he’d crawled into bed and pushed Rübeysa over to one side, he dropped off to sleep, still determined to track down and lay his hands on some hard cash the very next day.
Halilhan woke up around dawn when the crows perched on the roof facing his bedroom window began to caw, thus bearing out his dream. ‘Crow-song brings good luck. I’m sure to hit it big today,’ he told himself as he donned his bright blue suit like a Jedi knight and picked up his James Bond brief case. Praying, he sped downhill with four wheels under him and four wings all-aflutter in his heart.
He was back within the hour, after plucking off all the full blown blooms from the squash plants in the factory yard.
‘Rübeysa, get a move on,’ he said. ‘Cook me up some dolmas!’
The peak point where suicide may become an option
Rübeysa had finished all her preparations for embroidering a sütel for her daughter who, as she saw it, was fit to sit on a throne like Princess Diana’s. So she went up like a lit gas canister when her husband asked Gogi over to share the dolmas and to pay him back for his affectionate support the day before. Inviting a stranger into the house in the midst of the sütel needlework was asking for bad luck, Rübeysa shouted, slamming the pot of dolmas down in Halilhan’s face and retreating to the bedroom with her daughter.
Halilhan stood beside the pot for a few minutes, yelling back at his wife with no idea what he was saying. In the end, however, he laid all the blame on Rübeysa for schooling their daughter in her demonic feminine ways. With no outlet to vent his fury, he paced about for a while before running up to the bedroom door and planting a mighty kick on it.
The sütel – a needlepoint canvas with numbers stitched on to it, showing the days in a month when contraception might be needed – topped Rübeysa’s list for her daughter’s dowry chest. She planned to stitch twenty blue birds with five red carnations on each side of a square of cambric with delicately hemmed edges, so that her daughter, with eyes just like those of Princess Soraya, would lift it out of her trunk and hug it to her chest every time she remembered her mother’s wise words: ‘You’ll be really stuck if you have a baby.’
Could his wife’s fiercely ambitious nature have pushed Halilhan into this amorous attachment to Jülide? Pausing at the bedroom door for a moment, he bent his ear to his heart. When no answer arose, he limped off, tail between his legs, to knead his foot with both hands. He held the door open for Gogi, who – being a bachelor and also the only person alive to have really studied Halilhan’s character – was always careful not to drop by too often. Halilhan greeted him with a hearty hug and said, ‘Sunsun’s unbelievably ugly face marks a turn in our lives! She’s got to be the break point cat!’
As they relaxed, stretching out after their scrumptious meal of dolmas, Halilhan set about praising his wife to Gogi. After making it to paradise one day, he’d whisper in the ear of the angels who came to bless him with a hundred women, ‘You go ahead and pick out ninety-nine for me – I’ll choose the hundredth one as my cook!’ Then he’d mention Rübeysa’s name. But Gogi bowed his head rather uncomfortably (he had the habit of blushing slightly in embarrassment whenever a man brought up his wife). So to please his friend Halilhan left off chatting with the angels and tossed out a word or two toward the great emptiness of space.
Gogi’s efforts to respond to Halilhan’s sentiments, steeped as they were in Volvo-induced süper explanations, allowed the two friends to passionately share a sense of elevation fed by the same spring.
As far as potansiyel went, human beings were the most difficult of all the myriad creatures to understand, having souls coated in a layer of nerves as thin as the thread from a spider web and longer than twenty-seven kilometres. Twenty-two billion stations were spread out over their brains. When they faced any sort of impact, these stations tried to connect with each other, operating just like waves that rippled out coquettishly when a pebble was dropped in the water. So sensitive was this system of waves that even a bird flying in the sky could affect it greatly. Gogi believed as well that a person walking against the wind could set a major event into motion. ‘Human beings are as boundlessly related to the world as the world is to space,’ he liked to say.
Once they’d fallen into conversation in the middle of the room, Halilhan and Gogi took on a solitary manner that scorned perceiving human beings in a simple way. Their common pursuit of a fantezi life added a ritualistic air to their relationship. After offering his commentary on the imaginative engagement of the human brain and soul as each now stood in terms of space-related matters, Gogi announced a decision that he’d recently arrived at to make his friend happy. He intended to act as an impartial arbitrator who would tread carefully between Halilhan and his brothers, and thereby lend a helping hand to the project Halilhan was dreaming of. A close-knit group of four, they’d resurrect Teknojen (the company once formed and bankrupted by the Sunteriler brothers). Halilhan was glad to hear that Gogi volunteered to act in a position of such heavy responsibility as that of koordinatör. ‘I haven’t been able to get my brothers involved in company business. It would count in your book as an incredibly good deed if you could get them into it more than only skin deep,’ he said. And, for his own part, to make his friend’s business dealings easier, he handed over full authority to Gogi along with a detailed summary of his brothers’ character traits.
Once he’d seen Gogi off, Halilhan ran up to the bedroom with hopes of winning back Rübeysa’s heart. (Having run out of money for petrol, he intended to stay at home for a few days.) ‘You know what Gogi’s like…’ he began with a smile. ‘He was only kidding around.’ Then, stretching out the cheerful note in his voice even further, he added, ‘He wants you to find him a wife, that’s why he’s so friendly…’
Gogi’s home was an old, dark, timber-clad house leaning to one side in a little garden decorated with ancient gravestones. Going on thirty, he was always lost in thought in his collarless shirt which was buttoned all the way up, his worn-out corduroy trousers and his fake leather jacket. When his father, an imam, and his mother, a hymn-singer, fell silent and dead, side by side, poor Gogi, who was only about ten years old at the time, was left orphaned, confused and with no idea what to do, a bird left tottering, its wings lost.
Holes had gaped wide in Gogi’s soul as, breath by breath, he inhaled the stench of death that clouded his childhood. (Poisoned by the fumes from their coal stove, his parents had drifted off, leaving nothing behind but a handful of hair.)
Seleep, seleep my liddle cat…
Living in poverty indistinguishable from that experienced a hundred years before, Gogi had dragged his miserable carcass ceaselessly about, from charity foundation house to boarding school, always eyeing the world from behind a death-warped wash of olive-yellow light. Rumour had it that countless people had trodden over him and that he’d once stabbed a porter, but the truth remained shrouded in darkness.
When Gogi was about fifteen, he’d come back to the neighbourhood, and before the year was out he’d fallen into a silent depression that seemed even beyond ‘abnormal’. His face took on a strange, horrifying look of detachment as he shrank away from everything and everyone, falling into a condition of such apathy that you might think he’d never ‘heard thunder crash above him’. So when he became active in politics after returning from his military service, people sniggered. But Gogi had got over his emotional problems without acting improperly or harassing anyone, winning the respect of everyone around him, and when the inquisitive and knowledgeable sides of his character became known, he’d managed to make a normal place for himself as a shy man. However, in the eyes of the ragged men politics was a profession only fit for giants from the world beyond their own. Knowing by heart his history as a ‘sick man’, they just couldn’t see him tossing his hat into the politika ring.
In reality there had occurred in Gogi’s life only one event that might have been termed an ‘incident’. While working as a morgue attendant in
a big national hospital, he’d given in to an impulse sent out by a certain current racing through his brain, and propped up a corpse against the wall, thrusting a hose into its hand which spouted water at the other corpses.
A man who’d made a dead man shower the other dead!
Yet that very same day he’d wept his heart out over a young girl that had been brought to the morgue.
From the start Halilhan had known that by nature Gogi was very pasif towards women. When they were drinking one night, Gogi spilled out his story of lonely tears shed over the young girl in the morgue, and Halilhan wondered if he might have engaged in even stranger affairs of the heart with dead girls.
Because of the great respect he held for his friend, Halilhan had never worked up the courage to ask Gogi if his reason for shunning the world of living women was rooted in a fizik deficiency or a psikolojik condition. Once or twice he’d very subtly turned their conversation toward the subject of marriage, but he worried that if he pressed the matter too far he’d hurt his friend’s feelings. Each time Gogi had cut him short, saying, ‘She’s got to have kültür. It can’t be just anyone!’
Rübeysa had always approved of Gogi’s friendship with Halilhan. She liked to say, ‘I trust my husband with Gogi so much that if they took a forty-year-walk together I wouldn’t blink twice.’ But when word came her way that Gogi had been with Halilhan on the day he met Jülide, her mood toward him darkened. If Gogi hadn’t abused the trust he’d inspired in her with his innocent ways, Rübeysa, as a kind of in-law, would have naturally set to work on the plan she had in mind and, by way of introduction, spoken well of him, thus effectively ending his days as a bachelor. But the way matters now stood, with Gogi’s apparent eagerness to pimp for Halilhan, Rübeysa had no choice but to say, ‘Too bad, he shouldn’t have turned me away from my good intentions!’