Swords of Ice

by Latife Tekin

  Keriman looked dejected. She needed some simple way to explain why she was there. There was this thing called ‘honour’, wasn’t there? So why hadn’t she fled the moment she’d got up? It was because she was broke that she was doomed to stay at Gogi’s. She set her mind to lighten up some by talking and releasing the elektrik charge that had built up in her. And she did just that. In a word, she’d been depressed for quite some time. There were no jobs, and her husband had abandoned her. Keriman’s upbringing hadn’t allowed her to shout after him, ‘What d’you think you’re doing, deserting your wife and child, you scoundrel?’ Halilhan cut in, ‘What a pity, I’d like to do that too, but such luck has never smiled on me! Just ask Gogi, when I look at my wife’s face I see worms crawling there, but I also see seventy thousand ties binding me to her. You can’t be human without some loss or sacrifice. Since I know this well, I’ve never had a chance to gain my freedom. Ask my wife who she’d rather see dead, her husband or her father, and she’ll shoot back, “My husband.” Gogi can tell you how hard I’ve had to struggle with my wife.’

  Keriman had waited until she was sure her husband wouldn’t return. On reaching the point where her strength was sapped utterly from starvation, she’d picked up her little boy and sought refuge in her uncle’s bachelor pad. After her brothers had refused to help her, she had concluded that this city was a bog of bad luck full of cold-hearted relatives. As for her uncle, those in the neighbourhood had dubbed him ‘Auntie Fatma’, a scruffy nutcase who was half-woman, half-man. Although he viewed the rules of the world as though it were a dream, he hadn’t lost touch with that trait we call ‘conscience’. Then, when her energy had suddenly run out and the glow left her face, Keriman hung her head for a while before blurting out, ‘Apparently such people are called “trannies”.’

  While describing her uncle’s karakter, Keriman had squirmed about so innocently that Gogi and Halilhan had to blush. They had to get cracking and do something for the poor girl. If Gogi weren’t a bachelor, Keriman could have stayed on there with him, but at this point it wouldn’t do any good to stir up gossip. So the two men sat in silence, communicating through glances, until at last Halilhan leapt up, wildly excited, and said, ‘Let’s make this lady our secretary and sit her down by the phone.’ Teknojen was in need of some female support anyway if it ever wanted to carve out a place for itself in the business world. And here was the remedy, sitting right in front of them in all her despair. They could drop their plans for launching a newspaper advertising campaign.

  Thrilled by the warm feelings budding between him and Keriman, Halilhan started spouting forth things like, ‘After love, sympathy is the heart’s truest sentiment. I believe in you. I think you’re great.’ He thought nothing could stop them now from spinning through the turnstile of the business world. But if Keriman expected to make good, she’d better steer clear of alcohol. To Halilhan’s mind it upset her kontrol mekanizma. Last night’s experience had convinced him of that. His face swelled with a mocking laugh that he let loose like a razor-sharp arrow – alcohol affected her in such a way that if he ever felt like attempting a little friendly rape the road would be wide open!

  ‘Fear not, Halilhan Bey,’ said Keriman, ‘there’s plenty of red light to make up for it…’ (Red light was her name for tea.)

  They went on chatting and laughing until the topic of Halilhan and the cemetery arose. Women he was close to but who were still strangers to the family had to pay a few sentimental visits…in short, to the two female landmarks in his life… Like it or not, Keriman would have to adapt herself to the family’s romantik rules. She must accept that Halilhan’s sentiments for his mother Sitile Sunteriler and his sister Gülaydan ran deep…and so on and so forth… Annoyed by all this talk, Gogi squinted sorrowfully.

  Gogi had, as a matter of fact, begun to feel distanced from the sort of life that Halilhan dreamed of. He’d turned cold on the Teknojen project and had made up his mind to drop the koordinatör position. What he now wanted most of all was to give himself over to studying the concepts of time and enerji. He’d find a way to caress the universe with docile feelings and thereby establish a quiet life for himself. To keep control over his inner enerji, he’d try to mingle with those kinds of people who free themselves from their bodies and fly over the earth. While he still loved and idolised Halilhan, Gogi was scared by his chameleon-like nature. Halilhan had shattered the bond of trust between them by making fun of his emotional sufferings.

  If they didn’t hide their true lives elsewhere, the sorrow on their faces wouldn’t be so real.

  Gogi’s soul mate didn’t fail to notice his friend’s apathy. ‘The Volvo’s all smashed up, Gogi,’ Halilhan remarked softly. Then he took wing with pleas and entreaties: ‘She must be sprawled out there like a dying jackdaw. Probably no one even cares enough to throw a stone at her. And here I am feeling on edge, needing a little understanding more than ever. Teknojen and I couldn’t exist without you, you know that.’ He drew in his breath deeply, paused, and continued: ‘I want you to put off making any judgments about me.

  Fine, but then why did Halilhan keep bringing up Sitile Sunteriler like she was some kind of magic eraser? Even if their life was based on imitation, did he have to translate everything one to one? Yet Gogi kept quiet, not trusting himself to argue with Halilhan. However, having just resolved to keep his mouth shut, he couldn’t help but mutter a few rambling sentences when Keriman went out to the toilet. He thought it wrong for Halilhan to use his mother to further his seks life, launching his relationships with women by serving up as an appetiser a person he should consider sacred.

  It scared Halilhan to see Gogi trembling and blanching from head to toe as he spoke. Was there some unsettled account between them…? No, impossible! What, then, had got his dear buddy so agitated against him? To cut the matter short and soften the tone, Halilhan remarked, ‘I’ve looked for my mother’s eyes in all women, Gogi.’

  This sort of lustreless mood didn’t fit their relationship…

  The Volvo was even more of a wreck than Halilhan had thought. You’d hardly believe how bad she looked. Upon seeing his car lying mangled, looking worse than a run-over dog, Halilhan was stricken with such horror that he could only try and hold himself together by grasping futilely at the air. As he dragged himself uncertainly, he drew a deep breath of relief at having escaped the Volvo with his life.

  O Volvo! Volvo! The dekor that had prompted Halilhan to turn his life into a showpiece… Now that it lay shattered to bits, he was left defenceless against the world. His eyes flashed such anger that Keriman was driven at once to flee from his side. One of the poor and dispossessed herself, she knew very well how useless it was for her to hang around any longer. And, if the truth be told, at that particular moment Halilhan hadn’t a single gram of sympathy left in his heart for this woman who’d brought him bad luck. He didn’t even care enough to turn and look which way she’d gone.

  The front panel including the breastplate had crumpled inward, turning the Volvo’s mouth into one big cavity. Of her nose that had once nodded when he pushed down gently on the brake pedal, there remained only a puff of air. Her wheels stuck out, as if squinting in a cross-eyed way through flat tyres like moron balloons. The axle-rod was missing entirely.

  As Halilhan roamed about distractedly inhaling drizzle from the snow, memories of his life with the Volvo filled his brain. As he recalled how he’d savoured the experience of switching the fog lights on and off all around the city, his heart told him with a twitch that perhaps his car hadn’t lost her spirit after all. His eyes turned starry at the way they’d waltzed light as a feather along the asphalt. Oh! Sweet grava…a delicious music poured into his ear. At that moment he felt too weak to go on with life if he couldn’t skip along over the trees like he used to. He couldn’t live without the Volvo. He’d borrowed her from the life that others possessed and used her as a screen to cover his journey into nothingness.

  So what if her roof was puckered-up like the cheek
of a corpse, and the teeth in her once happily chattering gearbox had been stripped right down to the half-moon grin of her driveshaft? He still couldn’t bring himself to proclaim her ‘an old flame forever snuffed out.’

  The rift between life itself and our own lives remains cloaked in those moments when, trembling in time together, they pass over to the moon’s other side!

  The winter sun started shooting tiny arrows like pine needles into Halilhan’s face. While he stood there trying to imagine a mechanic who might be good enough to fix up his car, the snow stopped falling. The wind had died down too, and the water that had swallowed up the Volvo’s rear right tyre was now lying as smooth as a satin sheet. For a minute he lost himself in thought, pondering whether nature itself was capable of suffering.

  Never mind if they had to bag up his car piece by piece, Halilhan couldn’t begrudge the expense. At this point, he believed, to think about money would be tantamount to treason. So without further ado he made his decision. He’d have his grava put back together at once, no matter how much money she swallowed up in the process. But this couldn’t be done by just any mechanic. In view of the kritik nature of the situation, which in Halilhan’s mind was a matter of life and death, he needed more than a master craftsman – he needed someone clever enough to turn the Volvo back into an aircraft.

  The girl’s note to Gogi

  I have another suitor. He’s a cabinet maker. May Allah’s compassion be with you as you pursue your heart’s dreams. Such is fate, words are in vain. I beg that you will soon allow my conscience to be clear.

  This farewell that fell as light as a rabbit’s paw was quickly buried by snowflakes. Against that silky whiteness were contrasted Gogi’s black movements. With his hands and feet seeming to change size and his body taking on the inward-bent form of eternal loneliness, he stood frozen, facing the satellite neighbourhood of those people who lived at one with their belongings.

  Pride and love! Focal points lighting up the boundless expanse we know as the soul… Gogi’s mind was having all kinds of trouble dealing with the anodes and cathodes inside his head. He’d have to signal at once with the atoms of his instinct to forget in order to bring them under his control. While Halilhan made his way to the scrapyard to scrounge for parts, Gogi locked himself up in isolation in his house to get his research underway.

  Orgon enerji was the means by which he planned to banish the girl from his brain. As a first step, to bolster his will power, he left the lights on day and night. Then he fastened his sight on the bulb and tried to extinguish it with eye-power. Finally, focusing his attention wholly on himself, he made a bow to That ‘book of knowledge’ and pored over the diagrams illustrating an extraordinary invention called ‘The Energy Box’. For two whole weeks he grappled with mathematics to fix the koordinats of the box, prodding with pitiful passion the think tank housed in his skull. After settling on galvanised sheet iron as his main material, he laboured for seven days to build seven safe-boxes of different depths and sizes. Fuelling his project with blood and sweat, he placed the boxes – each of them insulated with fibreglass – one inside the other, and shoved them back against the wall.

  Outside, the wind howled and crackled with a ravenous fury as Gogi dropped to the floor in exhaustion beside his crowning achievement. During his struggle with the pain in his heart, he longed so much to be on his own that he even kept his troubles from Halilhan, who never stopped calling and pleading with him. For fear of weakening his desire to forget the girl, he chose not to speak to anyone.

  Before entering the enerji box Gogi took a bath in boiling hot water followed by an ice cold shower. Then, stark naked and without drying himself, he sat down inside the box. In an instant, the elektrons in his thought-waves hit the box, creating sounds never heard before in nature.

  The box was so highly insulated that Gogi suddenly felt a shower of pins and needles strike his naked body that still glistened with droplets. The box suddenly became burning hot as if the air in it had been set on fire. Gogi kept his eyes wide open to keep from passing out.

  Driven by orgon enerji, Gogi conjured another box within that box, and inside it imprisoned the girl (gold and very tiny). Then, leaving all his love for the girl and his dreams of marriage locked up in the imagined box inside the real enerji box, he stepped out. The clock showed that only about an hour had passed since he’d entered the box naked. The effect was truly breathtaking!

  Justice of the supreme mekanizma!

  Gogi had totally forgotten the girl.

  The black full moon inside the poor

  The ragged men had crossed the last circle around the city. Gulping up the light reflected off the snow and breathing in time together, they’d leapt lightly off into nothingness. With deathless looks and trembling like wind through an emptiness, they were disappearing, defying any attempt to explain their worldly existence. Their showpiece lives, spun as they were from life’s far off reflections, were becoming veils for their vanishing. Reeling quickly away they pretended to be carrying on with a life that was nothing but the shadow of their experiences.

  The mirage the dispossessed have used for hundreds of years to shield themselves from your world – it’s your life!

  These men protected everything about themselves by dressing up in the echo of voices that didn’t belong to them. The sorrow on their faces wouldn’t be so real if they didn’t hide their true lives elsewhere.

  The rift between your life and ours remains cloaked in those moments when, trembling in time together, we cross over to the other side of the moon.

  A sad shuddering in the winter air pleaded for someone to sound out the silence of poverty. Gogi, as he watched the snow, was lured on by the hope of finding a way to repair the lost connection between the world and life on the other side of the moon. He’d definitely given up all thoughts of the Teknojen dream as his destiny. He wanted nothing more than to busy himself with finding out all that the enerji box had to offer. Gogi wouldn’t have been pained so much by the fading lustre of their love if Halilhan hadn’t put himself forward as the king of the ‘have-nots’, summing up his awareness of their worldly condition so aptly in the words, ‘Being is good, isn’t it, I mean, because of the fact of not being…?’

  In the junkyard, Halilhan felt as if his lagging existence had been worn down to nothing. As he dodged ignition rotors, spark plugs and coils of wire on his way to the area where Volvo parts were stacked, he suddenly felt crushed and started to weep.

  Countless dead gravas, cars ruined beyond hope of repair, had been abandoned there in the auto graveyard… These objects, these things they called otomobil – which he thought of as an investment for life – had been used with immense authority by nameless people who then simply cast them off, deserting them. How it grieved him to see that this thing he’d procured, caressed so lovingly and struggled in vain to be at one with, had long ago been simply worn away in the clutches of people he’d never even known.

  He got the dashboard he needed, and the grill, the lights, bonnet, the bumpers and the stabilising rods, but with his soul at zero point. His finely tuned inner workings had gone haywire in a way that was previously unknown to him.

  Only one refuge came to mind where he could go to renew the enerji sapped from him by his humiliation. Another graveyard. He’d intended to go there with some sweet lady, but as it happened he was now alone. Keriman had turned out to be a pill-popper. He couldn’t prove it, but as he saw it, the purple rings under her eyes clearly pointed to addiction. Otherwise, what excuse could there be for his feelings of repulsion when he approached the woman? The ground was too soaked for him to kneel down beside his dear mother and cry. If the truth be told, what he wanted most was not to break out sobbing but for his mother to simply watch over him and offer him a little affection. Verging on unconsciousness, he circled about the grave, and at the moment when he felt on the brink of utter ruin, he came up with an adage: ‘A hurt heart is only a shadowy kind of happiness.’ He had to come up with someth
ing to lift his spirits. In such times he had no choice but to stay optimistic.

  Late that afternoon he made his way over to Gogi’s. He didn’t usually call on his friend at home; the visit with Keriman had only occurred because of their desperate plight. He’d usually only gone to Gogi’s house for business meetings. Also because of the deathly gloom shrouding the history of the house, Halilhan had adopted a pasif attitude toward visiting Gogi. As friends they tended to meet outside, on the streets. By calling on Gogi out of the blue, to beg for help in healing his broken spirit, Halilhan felt somehow as if he was giving in to him. But just now his need for consolation was infinite.

  A person’s life didn’t begin midstream. Once you got strongly attached to somebody, it seemed you were bound at some point to become that person’s slave. In view of his emotional investment in Gogi, Halilhan sensed that if his buddy decided to back out of the life they’d planned together, he’d have a tough time going it alone.

  But even if it cost him a thousand sorrows, Halilhan would recharge his cells and get on with his life. Personally, he still had high hopes for Teknojen’s future. Only the force of his ideas would drive a fiercely aggressive business. His dependence on Gogi was essentially a moral one. It had always been that way… with him looking on Gogi as a high-quality observer of his life. In truth, he couldn’t see the sense of starting up something that his old pal didn’t care to witness.