by Latife Tekin
Gogi, Hazmi and Mesut felt all torn up by arrows of hopeless guilt.
If the destitute didn’t imagine money as a treasure that was buried seven caves away in a valley that could never be reached, would they – either in the spirit of honesty or thievery – go on tracking it through the city, as if they were enacting a ritual?
Because the only life they could put together was one that lay outside reality, they found themselves thrust into a formless land of cloud, where their whole lives were only an imaginary journey, with no hope of using up this world owned by others.
Crazy about scenes where the last traces of darkness merged with the first glimmers of light, they safeguarded themselves by living in seher, the land of exile that always verged on daybreak.
The world, as it was seen through the eye of nothingness, dissolved into the mists of silence.
The human treasury of highly detailed thinking
Almighty Allah, who could only remain in heaven by moving at the speed of light (or so Gogi’s investigations had determined) got tired and descended to earth to be at one with all things.
Having been self-existent in heaven for hundreds and hundreds of years, in response to the survival of the poor in seher, that place of exile verging on daybreak, Allah had at last turned away from them and dropped down to split into thousands of pieces of touchable matter.
The All-Compassionate One’s descent whipped up fierce winds that swept the poverty-stricken into desperation. They were left dazed by the neat blow they’d been dealt in this world they’d never once held a claim to, while everyone else latched onto ‘a piece of God’ and flaunted it to others. Sad and mystified, the poor reflected on Allah’s new pozisyon, and for a long time no feeling other than confusion appeared on their faces.
As it happened, Gogi’s luck suffered a jolt from one particularly devout girl who was revolting against that bombshell of a blow they had been dealt and was struggling to push Allah back into heaven.
More precisely, Rübeysa had no sooner got wind of this girl of fathomless insight and immense kültür than her heart lightened at the thought that she could set her up with Gogi. But Halilhan, seeing how hazy the situation remained and knowing this was a matter of the heart, wasn’t in favour of building up Gogi’s hopes. He reckoned it would be risky to alert Gogi to the situation before the girl answered them directly. Given that he and Gogi shared the same taste in beauty, Halilhan thought the best course of action would be for him to meet the girl first and decide whether he liked her. However he rated the girl, he was sure that Gogi would accept his judgment wholeheartedly.
Yet, no matter how mild-mannered their approach to the girl, she avoided a face-to-face encounter with Halilhan. This ruffled his feathers no end, and yet he felt obliged to defer to her spiritual standing rather than confront her rudely in the middle of the street, which in Halilhan’s view would be far too improper. So they kept up their pressure on the girl’s married sister, who finally talked the girl into writing a letter that they could pass on to Gogi. The girl penned her letter looking at a sample in That magazine and slipped it neatly into a stamped envelope.
‘I wouldn’t be this thrilled if I were getting married myself!’ said Halilhan, getting more and more excited as he awaited the girl’s letter. High on the thought of certain taktiks he could pass on to Gogi, and imagining the blush rising on his friend’s cheeks, Halilhan decided not to spill the good news until he’d got Gogi tipsy by plying him with a kadillak or two.
While Ese Sunteriler’s face was being reflected by crumpled shadows on the canvas, the man himself was moving his spit-charged tongue along the sole of his slipper. First he pressed the sole onto the castor sugar sprinkled on the newspaper that lay around his feet, then he sucked on it with a hissing sound.
Gogi, who was still in the dark about his one true friend’s exciting plan to turn his feelings upside-down was absorbed in thinking about how to solve the problem of raising capital for Teknojen. He’d shouldered a great responsibility when he proposed to revive the company, and now he was agonising earnestly over how to fit himself into his professional role. He found himself establishing respectful relations with men he wouldn’t ordinarily nod to in greeting. And even whilst he and the others waited for a reply to the business proposal worth a million, in reality they were no better off than beggars. They needed an office for Teknojen, no matter how dark or cavernous, and Gogi hoped the company wouldn’t sink to a state where they’d have to offer up twenty-five percent of its shares to anyone willing to buy a stake for a few grand. He’d thought of asking Halilhan to sell the Volvo but rejected the idea instantly. Instead, he was hot on the trail of a man who was said to have returned from an Arab country with a fistful of money. Gogi hung around the man’s place day and night even as his merciful heart cringed at the very thought of doing such a thing.
When Halilhan read the letter that the girl had put together from That Magazine, his face turned ashen. The heading at the top of the first page read: ‘My requirements from the man that I marry.’ This was followed by a number of items (in each one the future husband was addressed with the polite form of ‘you’). Without a word of greeting she got right down to the gist of the matter, so that Halilhan felt a slight chill of fear at the girl’s courage.
1. I don’t require any furniture or gold from you. If you don’t have money, you can buy straw mats, but you will have to accept what I bring with me and you will not ask for the kind of dowry offered by girls given to showing off.
2. If you plan to provide household furniture, I don’t want anything expensive or fancy. I was not born to be a servant to objects. Objects should serve my needs. Therefore we must have only what we need, and no money should be wasted.
3. I want my wedding to follow the rules of Islam.
4. I will never go anywhere without my husband’s permission. In return I expect my husband to be faithful to me.
5. I can’t imagine a husband hanging around in coffee houses until midnight. (You wouldn’t be that type, certainly, but in any case I wish to set down this condition.)
6. If I do anything wrong, as I surely will, I ask that you be the first to tell me, I don’t want somebody else to hear of it before I do.
7. I would like to go out for walks in quiet places without crowds, but not too often, with the condition that there will only be the two of us. This is not for fun but because every now and then people need quiet places to rest far from noisy cars. I have to benefit fully from a clear mind to best serve my cause. (This is not a precondition.)
8. I would like for my husband to share his troubles with me.
9. I may wear old dresses and old shoes, but no outerwear that would compromise my faith.
10. I would like for everything to work out sweetly between us. If it happens that if I’m accused of something in a row, and such things do happen, I shall defend myself. (In view of all my preconditions, I choose not to neglect my own duties.)
Ese Sunteriler was raving: ‘You’ve got to go marching through these skies out to the other side.’ There was no stopping him. As Aynina put the last touches on her painting, he called up all his strength and bellowed out, ‘It’s no good staying, it’s good to get going!’
Halilhan’s muscles, which had stiffened up from the emotional strain of waiting, softened and turned to cotton wool as he read the girl’s letter. He felt a breath of dread caressing him inside as his eyes took on a bemused look. He marvelled at this odd sort of electricity that connected him to the girl. The fierce sparks he felt building within hurt just as much as love did. If there was any way he could have imagined Gogi as the sort of man who could satisfy this girl, he wouldn’t be full of these feelings.
There were certain elements of his relationship with Jülide that made him feel disconnected, and that he didn’t want to confess to. The girl’s letter revealed certain facts that he’d carefully kept to himself, and, suddenly now, he saw that he was the victim of a deficiency in love. He considered Jülide
’s intimate relationship with drink, weighing up the material side of her addiction, and realised that he’d have to come up with huge sums of money somehow, just to keep their relationship going. If he didn’t, he’d feel ashamed and be driven from time to time to hide from the woman he loved.
After carrying the girl’s letter around in his breast pocket for a few days, Halilhan locked it up in the glove compartment of the Volvo. With all the best intentions, he sat quietly at the steering wheel and thought about replying on behalf of Gogi. Given Gogi’s acute natural shyness, he’d be lifting a great burden from his friend’s shoulders. In addition, Halilhan felt confident of his beautiful handwriting. He took pains over his work and was absolutely sure that he had a creative mind. While gazing off into emptiness, he mulled over countless sentences. ‘Are you aware, dear lady, of the fish of paradise, whose necks are bespeckled with beauty spots?’ Nothing came to his mind but such phrases as these, and he at last dropped the idea of writing the letter, opting instead to pass the matter on to Gogi. He was afraid that he’d lapse into sentimentality and give the impression that Gogi lacked manners.
Finally Gogi’s relationship with the man he had been stalking was beginning to take shape, and a few grand in cash capital dropped out of the blue. The man consented to join the firm with a ten percent share, a morale-boosting initiative that would pave the way to their future.
But when Gogi heard the news about the girl and the impending engagement, he immediately froze up. The knack he had of spawning ideas for Teknojen left him. And with this spirit of liveliness shaken out of him, his psikoloji took a turn for the worse.
Being ‘written to’ by some unknown girl was a horror not to be brushed off lightly by a man who knew that each breath he took contained thirty billion times a billion atoms, and that each atom he touched or inhaled with each breath originated in the depths of a long-forgotten star, which meant that humanity’s most basic element was stardust. The scientific view Gogi held of his psychic state wasn’t just normal for him but essential, because he was convinced that the truest answer to any couple’s compatibility – to love, that is – lay hidden in space. And this was a subject he knew very well. The girl’s meagre requirements aroused Gogi’s pity, and he was driven by a strong desire to expand her vision. He, too, bent over ‘That book of knowledge’ and let flow his pages.
Gogi’s reply to the girl
For thirty years I’ve been spinning in life’s whirlpool in search of my soul mate. If we consider our sun, you’ll be surprised to hear that more than half the stars in the sky are not left on their own in the way that it is. I, as a human, was still very small when I became aware of such pozisyons of reality. I know that, like a couple, such stars are paired to move around the same beauty. I can give you the example of two birds flying around the same fortress, or of two fish that constantly swim around that plant we call seaweed. Some pairs of stars are so big they share the fate of falling away from each other. Stars like these continue to live on but only affect each other in a minor way. And it’ll go on that way. Hoping that I’ll be forgiven and wishing that you won’t too much mind hearing this, I want to say that I wouldn’t want the wife of my dreams to be like that. If both of the pair are small, the stars will always stay close to each other. Some pairs of stars have come so close that when they revolve around the same thing, like birds or fish, their surfaces can even touch each other! Obviously, a steady friction starts up between them because of this. If one of the pair is moved to change, well, that upsets the other one too. I believe this happens because each influences the other all the time. With this type of togetherness even an exchange of mass is possible. With all my heart I believe this.
I’ve trained myself not to be satisfied even with this kind of relationship because in the heavens there are pairs that are more beautiful. I adore stars that are paired up as white dwarf and red giant. I’ve spent about five years now imagining a mass of gas that’s broken loose from a red giant and goes flowing down, like a waterfall, onto a white dwarf. It’s this fantasy that has made the idea of marriage so spellbinding for me. Even in a coffee house, when people talk about love, I can visualise that kind of movement right before my eyes. Naturally, the white dwarf will grow ten thousand times brighter and become a dazzling wonder.
I understand that womankind, being ignorant about hydrogen, is pining away for lack of this sort of imaginativeness.
In point of fact, Gogi wasn’t a critical man. He’d withdrawn into his own world because everyone he knew viewed life so simplistically. It had never occurred to him when he set down his words about stars on paper that he might hurt the girl’s feelings or shame her. His only desire was to make her understand how his imagination viewed the topic of marriage. He had been irritated by the list of the girl’s requirements regarding family conflict. And when it came to her ideas about wearing old clothes, they’d strangely alienated his heart.
Gogi spent a whole month labouring over the letter while Halilhan, who was more highly skilled at writing, lent a hand at composing it and making corrections. A hallmark of their heart-to-heart friendship was that whenever they worked together neither felt bound by any sense of secrecy. Halilhan set himself to do all he possibly could to help Gogi settle a marriage as brilliant as the one he’d dreamed of. Inconspicuous yet all-powerful principles such as these stood as the very cornerstones of their friendship.
But first they had business to attend to.
His affair with Jülide had led Halilhan to conclude that no loving relationship or, for that matter, no happy marriage, could last long without money. Knowing how ignorant his friend was of love’s inner workings, Halilhan naturally advised Gogi that he should be with a woman. Yet he wanted him to taste these precious feelings without worrying about being broke. On the other hand, Halilhan himself was totally devoid of any material resources and had for some time viewed the world as a barren waste.
The moment Gogi secured the money he’d wheedled out of his man and handed it over, Halilhan leapt into the Volvo, took the wheel, and sped off toward the city. Just then he was overcome by a greater awareness of the degree to which humankind was enslaved by money. Never in his life would he forget how, at this moment, cruising along in the Volvo, his legs trembled and his left arm became weak from trying to hold them still. A heavy, nervous sweat gushed from his pores, which seemed to be spewing forth the poison left behind by all those days he had been robbed of driving the Volvo. For a moment he felt as if he was suffocating; then he shot off like a bird freed from its cage. As they raced along, the Volvo went mad, thrilled by the drizzling rain and charged with a lover’s energy. They got themselves lost chasing after women down side streets, kept making wrong turns, braking, shuddering, nodding greetings to everyone. Then, disappointed by their failure, they struck out for the highway and made a beeline for Halilhan’s favourite minaret. Full to the brim with memories of the spot, he felt utter delight while watching the clouds graze the minaret’s side. Loosening up, Halilhan smiled and murmured some confessions to the Volvo. His was a nature that only a lüks life could satisfy. Nothing, not even two-times-two-equals four, was more certain than this. Someday, he announced, possibly in less than a year, he could even dream of owning a plane. What he wanted most was to live a kalite life, and to attain that he was settled on taking a risk, on doing cartwheels by the hundreds in full sight of everyone.
In his mind he could see the city spread out before his eyes. The splendid view, the shape it had taken, with hundreds of thousands of factories scattered all around its four sides. And every one of them pleading for the work Halilhan and his company would offer: repairs, painting, varnishing, steam pipes, boilers, blimp tanks, pipe channels, chimneys, billions and billions of acid tanks… The people who ran the businesses weren’t fools. They knew equipment of that type had to be overhauled every year.
This city they lived in spread out before Halilhan in all its beauty, like a landscape of luck. He was impatient to report to his brothers the ho
pe that radiated from those snapshots he’d spliced together in his imagination, views of the city that had most affected him on different occasions.
At the third Teknojen meeting (which included their distracted-looking new partner who had entrusted them with his money in the hope that his children would reap from this venture a means of securing their daily bread), Halilhan launched into the discussion by saying, ‘The fact is that what our whole business is about is business. Without a doubt, it’s the pursuit of business.’ If they did a ten-minute A-to-Z analiz of the logic of the market, they’d see clearly that the one dimension they couldn’t afford to ignore was the trust the company’s name inspired. The word Teknojen had to be etched into the ears of the whole administrative personel in Turkey. Halilhan could set no higher goal for his brothers and Gogi than to do top-kalite work on their first job contract. For instance, they had to be super-honest, that is, use all rather than only half of the materials their bid proposed. Their first objective would be to obtain a ‘certificate’ of ‘completion of work’ from a firm placed in the country’s main artery.
In addition, those guys would have to take photos of the work Teknojen had done for their firm and publish them in their publicity prospektüs.
It was impossible for Teknojen to grow by taking on just any old odd job. In order to achieve a level of teknoloji that no other company in the city could compete with, they had to forget about klasik materials and use blenkot, a rokvel product, or fayreglas. The most important thing was for them to find out before anyone else what new materials were being imported into the country. In today’s world, people who lacked the foresight to assess the fresh possibilities being introduced by teknoloji would never have a chance to quickly bag a golden elephant.