Because the rap group and the poetry and lyrics I wrote for them are embedded in a love story. My story. Wreckage of love. “Warning! Hard-hat area only.” I’m not saying that for nothing. That was the name of a song I wrote for the group. Being with one lover yet thinking about another . . . Who does that kind of thing? Well, it happened. You fear that which has been buried ever so deeply. That’s how that love story was. So deeply buried. I mentioned it earlier but couldn’t summon the courage to go on. Here goes:
He was a student at the German High School. I fell madly in love with him. He was into music. Rap. Which, of course, wasn’t in line with his social standing. Rap happens in other places. Public housing. The ghetto. The farthest corners of the city, where not even the Metrobus goes. This guy and his friends—all well-fed students at the German High School—were excited about rapping. Rappers through and through, like those who break-dance. There’s no need to drag it out. These kinds of things work themselves out. All you’ve got to do is shout, out, shout, out, work it all out. Those were some of the lyrics I wrote. What, did you expect something else?
He was the leader of the group. Good-looking. But spoiled. He didn’t have a heart of gold like Yunus, who held me that day at sunset among the domes as he watched the reddening sky. This guy was bad. He paid a lot of attention to me at first and flirted with me, with the sole intent of seducing me in the end. We’d write to each other on WhatsApp, make love on Snapchat. Supposedly, we were writing a song. He was into obscene things. He read them to me. Wrote them. Said them. Explained them. One time he even pulled out his tool on Snapchat and showed it to me, and made me lick the screen. It was an obscene attack. On Snapchat. In that virtual world there are secret rooms just for lovers. You had to choose a time frame between one and ten seconds. I always chose ten seconds. During that time—he saw it, he saw it, he didn’t see it—I felt as though I could hear the sound of the image destroying itself.
“Tell me about that Snapperchat business.” My aunt asked me that. She was from that generation that would say to Superman, “Sümerbank, save me!” Okay, maybe she didn’t get the bank called Sümerbank confused with Superman, but still. You get the idea.
“It’s a program you put on your phone. You use it to send videos, pics, and chat and stuff. If you send a video, it erases itself after twenty-four hours. If you send it to someone you’re connected to, you have to choose between one- and ten-second videos.”
“And then they die?” She asked that with such emotion that I knew she’d never have the heart to send a snap.
But we were living on Snapchat. Loving there, making love there.
Single-bite loves. Get her, man. Catch her. Like an animal. It’s all a bite.
“I want something harder, something more aggressive,” he said to me.
“It just doesn’t work. Bourgeois guys trying to act like they’re from the slums. How could they ever be rappers?”
As you may have guessed, that was Pembe and Derin speaking as one.
Baby, what are you doing? Just chill at home.
But I was happy. Those promises of love made me happy, as did writing lyrics for rap songs. And he wrote to me too. Oh, did he write to me. At first—supposedly that’s what we were supposed to be doing, writing—the idea was to show me the ropes.
“Has a guy ever stroked your pussy? Fingered you, going real deep? Played with your asshole?”
I was in a state of shock. No one had ever said anything so obscene to me before. I got angry. I replied, “It’s a good thing we’re not having this conversation face to face.”
Later, we started hanging out. There wasn’t any romanticism or sweetness. He had brown hair, which he meticulously worked to make it look messy, seemingly crusty eyes, and a chronically open mouth. I think his nose was always stuffed up. Actually, he had tiny skin tags around the inner part of his eyes, which is why they looked crusty. Once I tried to pluck one off, and hurt the hell out of him. He was the kind of person who is constantly irritable and speaks too loudly for no reason at all. There weren’t any drugs involved in any of this. Maybe once in a while, but not often. If they did get some drugs, they’d go to this place they used as a studio. Sudden. Hard. Yes, that’s how it happened. It was exciting, but I was scared at the same time. I was nervous because it was going to be my first time. I wanted to do it on a bed. That didn’t happen. Then he disappeared from my life at the speed of light. The last mental image I have of him is him wiping off his schlong with a tissue. It was a little bloody, and for some reason that disgusted him. As if his schlong had been injured or something. He scowled. Yes, Grandma, I said “schlong”! Schlong.
For a while I tried to pursue him. He fled. Inspired by my mother, I lied to him. “I’m pregnant,” I said. He called me so we could talk. “Look,” he said, “that’s impossible. What’s your deal? What are you after?”
“You’ve gotten tangled up with the lowest of the low at the German High School, the worst lowlife!”
That’s what people were saying when they found out that I’d been hanging out with him. And I was telling everyone, as if someone would whisper the magic formula to me that would make everything right again. I was looking for a solution. Not for my fake pregnancy, of course. I wanted to hear the perfect advice that would save me from that sickness. Derin and Pembe said to me, “You’re starting to scare us. Pull yourself together.”
But the harder I tried to do that, the more I fell apart.
“What you described is sexual violence, if you ask me. That guy raped you.”
“But I know him, I love him . . .”
“You idiot! That doesn’t give him the right to do something to you that you didn’t want!”
“You still don’t understand what happened to you! Look, dumbass, you’re refusing to face the facts.”
So I was simultaneously dealing with heartbreak and with Derin’s and Pembe’s attempts at trying to parent me.
It seemed best to ask him to meet me somewhere outside, because I was afraid he’d attack me again.
The park where I practiced slacklining seemed like an ideal place. I’d lost my grandma just a few weeks earlier, so I’d decided to throw myself into slacklining, day and night. Focusing and trying to keep my balance was good for me. Those were things I’d never been able to do. It was the middle of April and the spring rains had come to Istanbul. There was a Judas tree in Maçka Park. It was in bloom at the time. The air smelled of soil and rain, and sometimes the sky opened up, but I went on, fully focused on keeping my balance on the line; in fact, I was trying to stay alive. The fun times came and went. Those were the times when I was with Derin and Pembe. We wounded youths would hang out in the park. On my slackline, I’d do the surfing move. To do that, you have to tie off the line loosely and then you act as though you’re riding a wave. Without falling off, of course. That move is called surfing.
He showed up at Maçka Park to talk.
He came up silently from around the back. I noticed that he was wearing rust-colored Converse. He was walking so quickly that for a moment I thought a wet dog was trotting up to me. His shoes squished in the wet grass. Squish, squish, squish. I was still on my slackline. He grabbed hold of my red raincoat and gave it a tug, sending me toppling to the ground.
I fell almost a meter.
Down on the ground, he beat me like you’d beat a man. He punched me in the face, he squeezed my throat, he headbutted me. When I got up, he kicked me in the stomach.
“If you are pregnant, that baby better die.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“If you are pregnant, that baby better die.”
I couldn’t shout.
“If you are pregnant, that baby better die.”
I was writhing in pain. It surprised me to find I couldn’t say a word out of fear. I was a sheer wreck. I was dying of pain. I’d peed myself. And I may have even crapped myself. A little. As a matter of fact, I had. Just like a baby. I’d shit myself out of fear. When I got up and the
world spun around me once with all its might, I noticed that my mouth was full of blood. I spit it out. It was as if I’d spit out the world. The remnants of what I’d thought was love, the novel I wanted to write but couldn’t, being humiliated, the things that weren’t going well at home, the things that weren’t going well at school, the things that weren’t well between me and my friends, my mourning for my grandmother . . . I sat down and cried. Pulling my knees up to my chest, I closed myself off like a cosmic egg and cried. I cried until my entire body shook with my sobs. I’d been hurt. So very, very much.
What came later hurt even more.
I didn’t tell anyone who had beat me up. I couldn’t bring myself to. I was embarrassed. “Two guys came up to me at the park and beat me,” I said. “They told me to give them all my money and my phone, but when they saw some people coming, they ran off.”
Is my aunt the kind of woman to sit idly by? The first thing she did was go to the park and talk to the security guard there. He said, “She should’ve come straight to us.”
“Why didn’t you report it to the security guard?”
“I don’t know. I was scared. It didn’t occur to me . . .”
Then there was the footage from those security cameras that watch us all, but the two men I described didn’t appear in any of it. There weren’t any cameras around the area where I was beaten. All the existing footage showed was the people coming and going along the main walkway, including my guy. After all that, I couldn’t believe I was still calling him “my guy.” Shit for brains! Screw this brain of mine.
They didn’t even ask, “Could it be this one?”
“If there’s no footage of them, where did they enter the park, then?” The security officer was in no mood to deal with my aunt. He said, “Ma’am, if you want a more thorough investigation, go to the public prosecutor.”
That was a mistake. There’s nothing my aunt hates more than being called “ma’am”!
“Let’s just drop it,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m over it.”
As if!
I didn’t tell Derin or Pembe either. Whenever you keep a secret like that, it starts rotting inside you. Putrefying. Stinking.
Unable to stomach what he’d done to me, I resorted to threats: “I’ll take those obscene messages you sent me and—”
“I didn’t write those things, you idiot. They’re from some letters that James Joyce wrote to his wife!” And then he hung up in my face.
I surmised that he couldn’t close his mouth not because he always had a stuffy nose, but because he was so filled with arrogance that it had to get out somehow. That’s just how it was. That and nothing more.
I told myself it was a good thing that I was remembering all those things. At least that way I drained off some of the pus within me.
Little by little, the lead dome we were leaning against started to cool off. The sun was sinking, and Yunus was silently gazing at the horizon. His silence, his innocence, his hand resting on my shoulder, his head leaning against mine—they were all so soft, so full of compassion, that I couldn’t stop myself from starting to weep. It wasn’t, however, the brutality of my own past that was making me cry. I was sad because I had been blind to the suffering of the person beside me.
Yunus asked, “Are you daydreaming too?”
I wiped away my tears. When he noticed that I’d been crying, he was surprised.
“You’re sitting there, silently crying . . .”
He took me in his arms and hugged me tightly.
“Why are you crying? Don’t cry. We come into the world alone, and we leave the world alone. Keep that in your thoughts, think about it, and don’t cry. People are always alone. Even if they have someone in their lives who loves them.”
20
FOLLOW
The sun slowly withdrew from the scene.
“Don’t use sentences like that in your writing,” my aunt said.
As I was working on my novel, I would read parts of it to my aunt. She would be lying down with her feet propped up, cigarette in hand. Silently she would listen as I read. Then she’d say, “Leave your computer here, and I’ll do some editing on your memoirs.”
That’s about all my aunt did to help me out. But do you know what Derin said to me one day? “This novel—” She paused. I knew that she and Pembe had talked about something, because Derin mentioned her in the course of the conversation.
“We just wondered if maybe your aunt is writing the novel.”
A lie.
“Since she’s unemployed and all . . . To give herself something to do . . . Like, you write a sentence, and then she writes a hundred . . . Something like that?”
What a question! What slander!
Night was slowly settling over us.
Yunus had come prepared. Two cans of beer. A few packets of nuts. Snack cheese. He’d stolen all of it from the hotel, stuffing his pockets. A tiny bottle of whiskey, a tiny bottle of gin. Other drinks too. They were all in tiny bottles.
“If we drink now, how will we get back?”
“We’ll fly!”
We laughed.
I didn’t know his story. Everything around me, including Yunus, was always incomplete. Only half there.
We ate and drank everything he’d brought. First the stars spun, and then our heads. We were lying on our backs, laughing. The brakes had gone out, and our laughter was unstoppable.
“This is the most secret place in the world,” Yunus said. “No one could ever find us. No one can see us.”
“Only the birds can see us.”
“And they’ve got no tongues to wag.”
We started laughing again.
“We could stand up to the biggest disasters in the world here.”
“Exactly.”
“If there was an earthquake, we’d ride it out. If there was a storm, we’d fly off. If there was a flood, we’d swim.”
Yunus propped himself up on his elbows. His face was as dark as the night.
“No floods. Anything else would be fine, but no floods. Because my mom was washed away by a flood. No one expected that could ever happen. It was the furthest thing from our thoughts.”
Now he was openly saying what he’d only hinted at before. When we say that someone we loved “died,” that person dies again. For years, Yunus had been struggling with that. That little boy who missed his mother so much that it made him tremble inside didn’t know what it meant to grow up. Even though he’d grown into a man, his facial hair grew in, and he fell in love, he was still the same boy who’d lost his mother. Dead children never grow up, and the dead never age, and the same holds true for the people who are left behind. Physically, the world keeps turning. But your inner world—the realm you carry within, your internal life—stops at the moment you lose someone you love.
“Your mother . . . I thought she was still alive, just living somewhere far away.”
“Her love is alive. Here. In my heart. In my mind. It’s always there, even though she’s gone. Dead. But it was the way she died that caused me more grief than anything. I’ve never gotten over it.”
I stammered, “What happened?”
“She was a worker at the textile factory. She got on the service bus. It was morning. Early. It suddenly started raining. Do you remember that storm?”
I pursed my lips. There had been so many, which one could it have been?
“The highway flooded. Cars started floating like rafts. Like boats. Her service bus was stuck in the middle of it. In İkitelli. Then the flood washed them away. They couldn’t get out.”
“How old were you when she died?”
“I was twelve. I thought I was grown up. But I was still a little kid inside.”
“Sometimes you say that you won’t do certain things because your mom would be upset . . . As if she was still alive.”
“That’s because some feelings of love stay with us for the rest of our lives. Even if we lose that person. They will only die when we die.”
Yun
us lay back down. Snuggling up closer to him, I put my head on his chest. I could hear the beating of his heart. We fell silent. Some birds that had made Gülhane their home trilled. Nightingales. I heard two other birds. They seemed to be bickering, but I couldn’t tell what they were by the sound of their squawks. As we embraced, our breath gently licked our skin. Like children, we stroked each other’s faces. Every line of each other’s features. Nose, lips, cheeks, chin, neck, earlobes, ears. One of my arms was thrown over him.
“Is this where your missing kidney used to be?”
Yunus paused for a moment. I think he was trying to figure out which side was which.
“No. The other side.”
Then he said something that made me laugh: “You reminded me of the existence of that kidney. With your kind permission, I need to pee.”
“With your kind permission . . .” I figured he’d heard that expression at the hotel. Bellboy Yunus’s vocabulary had become adorned with such little courteous expressions, and he was adorable when he said those things.
He got to his feet, and as he was looking for a place to pee on the roof like a magpie, he went on talking: “Maybe the only thing we need is to be able to sing the songs we want and laugh to our heart’s content in a peaceful home with the people we love.”
“Yes, it’s that simple,” I said. Then my heart suddenly skipped a beat and I called out, “Yunus, be careful! Don’t fall over the edge!”
He suddenly stopped in the darkness, right at the edge of the roof. Then he stepped behind one of the domes and started peeing. His stream of pee traced a crystalline arc in the darkness of night, tinkling against the lead and zinc alloy sheathing of the dome’s roof. That night, we laughed and laughed. We were buzzed. When I laughed, Yunus would do all sorts of silly things, as if he wanted to make the whole world laugh along with us. For example, he turned the tinkling of his pee on the roof of the dome into a rhythmic patter, and that cheery concert didn’t end until his bladder was drained. Tugging up his zipper, he walked back over to me and lay down. I wished that we could stay there forever. We, two afflicted youths, had found each other. I thought, If only we could spend all our days and nights in this corner of the world that had forgotten us.
The Girl in the Tree Page 24
