They had blocked off all the access points to the top of the wall.
I reached out for my red rope.
He motioned for me to stop. “I can’t go up there,” he said. “But you can come down here.”
The red strap dangled and coiled in the gap between us like a snake.
If I could choose a time in which to be stuck for the rest of my life, it would have to be one of my birthday parties, when we celebrated with karaoke. Even my mother had fun that night. As if she wanted to create the crowning moment of the night, she sang Britney’s “(Hit Me) Baby One More Time.” That’s it! We could pursue our desires, forget, and live—if we were given a second chance.
But it was my aunt whose performance set the party on fire. In tribute to my grandma, she sang, “You Wanna Be Americano,” shaking her hips and narrowing her eyes like Sophia Loren.
While speaking American, how do you know if someone loves you?
While making love in the moonlight . . .
My aunt, who had graduated from the Italian High School, then went on to sing Nina Zilli’s “50 Mila.” I’ve never really understood how such melancholy lyrics can be rendered in such an upbeat way. Perhaps it’s the nature of the Italian language. A bit like ours in that sense. Even its sorrow is sanguine. And just like one of the lines from the song, I didn’t want Yunus to see me fall.
While the red of that strap swinging in the empty space between me and Yunus may have reminded me of the red cable of the microphone that no one wanted to share at that unforgettably wild karaoke party, I wasn’t even really there.
I was here.
34
IT’S OVER
As usual, Yunus was wearing his blue jacket and a pair of jeans. Under his jacket he had on a bright-green T-shirt. His shoes looked new, and his backpack, which was nice but obviously a knockoff, was slung over his shoulder. He looked more clean-cut and healthier compared with the days when he was wearing his hotel uniform. Maybe that was because he wasn’t in the tree but beneath it, on the ground where he belonged. I don’t know. I’d seen him wearing his regular clothes before, but somehow this time was different.
He was clean shaven, which made the scars on his face stand out more, and his hair seemed a bit shorter than before. Wondrous scents were rising from him all the way up to my nostrils: lavender, cinnamon, lemon, tea. Even though he was insisting yet again that I descend from my tree, it was so good to see him that I couldn’t help but smile. And not just any smile—a huge grin spread across my face. Like that developer of ours, I may have been flashing all thirty-two of my teeth.
“I’m not joking around. All of the paths that once led me to you have been blocked off.”
As I looked down at him, my hair came undone and part of it fell over my face.
“You look so beautiful from here . . .” It was Yunus who said that.
“And you from here.”
“That’s just how it seems to you.”
He pulled a long envelope out of his jacket pocket.
“What do you think I’ve got in here?”
As he answered his own question, he waved the envelope in my direction. “Train tickets.”
“To where?”
“You’re coming with me.”
He held up a plastic bag I hadn’t noticed in his other hand.
“Look, I even got you some new shoes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re coming with me, that’s why.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to get on the train and go.”
“If we’re going by train, why did you buy shoes? It’s not like we’ll be walking . . .”
This time it was Yunus’s turn to grin.
The day’s last rays of light were skimming across the ground. The day was dying. A few of those weakening beams of light were shining directly into his eyes, which was why one of them was squinted shut. And when he did that, his jaw also went slightly askew. As he stood there under the tree, he tried to escape from the sun’s last light, but his efforts were in vain, so he gave up trying to resist. His face, illuminated by the setting sun, looked even more beautiful and handsome, awry as he looked up at me against the incoming light. Handsome: that was how I’d always thought of him. Can someone be so beautiful at heart and so physically attractive as well?
“What are you thinking about?”
“You.”
Was it a lie? As you are my witness, all my thoughts were of him.
“Come. It’s time to come down now.”
“Yunus, why don’t you believe me when I say that I’m not going to come down? Do you think I’m doing this out of sheer obstinacy and nothing else? Is that how it looks from down there? Can’t you see that, like a corpse, I’ve shed all my desires?”
Sullenly, he turned his face away, and now the side of his head and his ear were the target of the cinnamon-red light. He quickly glanced around, afraid that we’d get caught. Afraid that I’d get caught, that someone would realize I was up there . . .
“Have you solved those problems you were dealing with?”
“Those things don’t matter anymore. As soon as you solve one problem, another one comes along. No one’s looking out for us. We’re all alone.”
“True, but what makes you say that just now?”
“On my way here, a TV reporter was stopping young men to ask them about the kinds of problems they’re facing in their lives. A few young guys—obviously addicted to huffing paint thinner—grabbed the microphone, and they said those things. They explained it all better than anyone else. They got straight to the point.”
“Did the reporter ask you any questions?”
“He came running up to me.”
“What did you do?”
“Basically told him to fuck off.”
“Why?”
“Because, before the paint-thinner guys got hold of the microphone, a decent-looking young man was angrily saying things like, ‘What we want is freedom, to be treated with respect, and for this tyranny to come to an end.’ The reporter pulled away the microphone and said, ‘Look, if you’ve got something nice to say, we’ll air it.’”
Yunus acted out the reporter cutting off the young man dedicated to freedom, being very even-tempered and cool. He even pretended he was holding a microphone: “‘Look, I’m warning you. Otherwise, what you say will just get cut out during editing anyways.’ I don’t get it . . . Is this a land of giants or a land of dwarves?”
Suddenly he stopped, seeming to realize that it would be best to change the subject, as he was on the tipping point.
“But that’s not what I came here to talk to you about. That shouldn’t be what we’re talking about at all. Look, I brought some shoes for you. Come down from there, and go with me. Our tickets are ready.”
“Where’s the train going?”
“To Ankara. There’s going to be a march for peace.”
“You go.”
He may not have even heard me. Hoping I could somehow flee from his insistence, I’d already stood up and started pacing from branch to branch. I heard Yunus heave a sigh of dismay. Even from high up in the tree, I could see from the corner of my eye his sadness and disappointment as his dream crumbled. He put the train tickets back in his pocket, but he seemed unsure of what to do with the bag containing the shoes.
“The train will arrive in Ankara on Saturday morning,” he said, “and the march will start in front of the train station.” After a pause, he added, “Lower the rope a bit more, and I’ll tie the bag to the end so you can pull it up.”
“I don’t need shoes. But thanks.”
He sighed again. After setting the bag down, he turned and started walking away. He was leaving. I thought about the possibility that I would never see him again. The last rays of light were following his lean silhouette, or maybe it just seemed like that to me. If there was light, it existed through our desire. I hadn’t died yet. I wasn’t as passionless as a corpse. That had been a lie.<
br />
I stopped on the strongest branch of the tree, my toes practically digging into the bark, and stood there, watching my lover walk away. My love was leaving.
I called out to him, “Hey, young man!”
He turned around and looked at me, probably buoyed by the hope that I would go with him after all. But I said, “You don’t even know my name!”
“The Girl in the Tree,” he said. “You are the Girl in the Tree . . . That girl I love so much. That girl whose story I know better than my own.”
He raised one hand and waved goodbye.
Goodbye, Girl in the Tree. Goodbye.
Goodbye, trees, wall, stork’s nest.
You might be thinking, “Well, you didn’t even tell us your name.” Very well, so that there aren’t any hurt feelings and no one is wronged: sit tight. I’m calling out to you, just as I called out to Yunus.
“My name is Deniz!”
There, is that better? For whatever it’s worth, if that’s anything at all.
“My name is Deniz!”
The more brazen who have slipped into your ranks, the finicky and fussy, the naysayers, the rapacious, may ask, “What about that middle name your grandma gave you, the rare one? Are you going to tell us what that one is?”
To them I’d say, “But now you’re breaking my heart.” As you can see, I’m sad and tears are welling up in my eyes.
When I called out to Yunus for the second time, telling him my name, he turned around again, holding up his hand as if a bird had landed on it but was still flapping its wings.
“Don’t ever forget me,” I said as I watched him walk away.
But in fact he was the one who mustn’t be forgotten, and he was leaving. He was about to disappear from sight.
In the last light of the dying day, he was about to disappear from sight.
Goodbye, my friend.
Farewell, my love.
I will never forget you.
Because people never forget those they love.
September 2015–August 2016
Istanbul
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © Manuel Citak
Şebnem İşigüzel was born in 1973. Her first book, Hanene ay doğacak (The Future Looks Bright), won the prestigious Yunus Nadi Literature Award for published collections of short stories in 1993. She has gone on to write eight novels and two more short story collections. The Girl in the Tree, published in Turkey in 2016, is her first novel to be translated into English.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © Berker Berki
Mark David Wyers completed his BA in literature at the University of Tampa and his MA in Turkish studies at the University of Arizona. From 2008 to 2013 he was the director of the academic writing center at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, during which time he drew upon his master’s thesis to write a historical book-length study titled “Wicked” Istanbul: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Republic. He has since dedicated himself to working on translations of Turkish novels, published examples of which include Boundless Solitude by Selim İleri, The King of Taksim Square by Emrah Serbes, The Pasha of Cuisine by Saygın Ersin, and The Peace Machine by Özgür Mumcu. His translations of Turkish short stories have been published in a number of anthologies and journals.
The Girl in the Tree Page 35
