by Moris Farhi
‘You could have – if I was asleep.’
‘But you weren’t. You said we got into a fight. You said that’s when I hit you.’
‘I often fall asleep when I fight.’
Normally I would have laughed. It’s always courteous to admire wit. But how can you when you’re shaking with fear? I tried another tack. ‘Don’t you think it’s beneath you – and beneath your he-men brothers – to beat the shit out of a weakling like me?’
‘No. It’ll be good fun. Besides, you’re not a weakling.’ He pointed at the strip of plaster on his forehead. ‘You hurt me.’
‘I didn’t touch you. I didn’t even know you until you stopped me and pretended you wanted to ask me something.’
‘I did ask you something. Or rather brother Hasan did. He asked you why you hit me.’
‘And I told him you’ve got the wrong man.’
‘With due respect, we don’t believe you.’
Finally, I tried my best ploy in circumstances like these. ‘How about if we all go to the cinema? There’s a good film. Gary Cooper. I’ll buy the tickets.’
‘We’ve seen it.’
‘Something you haven’t seen then?’
‘We’ve seen all the films.’
‘All right – the music hall? Lots of women with bare legs ...?’
‘You want us to masturbate? And walk around the rest of the day in a defiled state?’
‘No! No! You could – just watch.’
‘And get frustrated?’
‘Isn’t there any way I can change your mind?’
‘Look, stop all your clever stuff! We’ll rough you up a bit, then let you go. You’ll be good as new in three days. If you fight back, you’ll be in hospital for a month.’
I sighed. Three days compared to a month wasn’t too bad. But it was still three days too many. More to the point, I’d had a bellyful of these arbitrary beatings. Layabouts picking on passers-by to prove – to whom? to themselves? – that they were brave and strong. I didn’t have the stomach for such foolery any more. Either battle fatigue or undergraduate years in England had softened me. I just wanted to cultivate my garden peacefully.
I looked back disconsolately towards the café where Melek was waiting for me. It was three in the afternoon, the hottest hour of the hottest month. Everybody was indoors snoring with the shutters down. Which was why Melek and I could meet and not be seen by members of our respective families – or worse, by gossip-mongers – who were already outraged by our love affair. A Muslim girl going out with a Jew! And that wasn’t all: we had both moved out of the parental home and shared flats with friends – not the done thing, though we were both over twenty and I had already spent some years living alone in England. Indisputably, such independence turned us, in the minds of the elders, into the sort of degenerates whose every thought was tumescent with sex. (But then, that’s how it should be!) Consequently both set of parents, suspecting – rightly, of course – that whenever we could we would run off to the hills to do what nature urged us to do, had a network of spies on surveillance duty. (Most of the time, we managed to avoid these spooks. After all, we had been suckled on Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.)
I sighed again. Not only had these villains who were bored out of their minds confiscated our blissful hours but they had also spoiled the next three days – providing, of course, they kept their word and didn’t do a hospital job on me. I took another look at Faruk and his brothers; they seemed the sort who would keep their word. But then, appearances ...
I would have to run for it. It wouldn’t be very manly or like Ronald Colman, but there was nothing else I could do. I was an adequate runner and pretty fast. And I had noted that there were bulges of good living around the bellies of my abductors; they were bound to struggle for breath after 100 metres or so. Whereas I had plenty of stamina – as Melek was my witness.
I would have to move when they least expected it. When they became complacent. That would be when they turned chivalrous and offered each other the honour of hitting me first.
They led me into a narrow alleyway that was secluded and shaded. This is where it would happen. I braced myself to sprint away.
A voice roared from the shadows. ‘Fuck off, you louts!’
I recognized the fortissimo. Ergun, the local part-time policeman. He was pissing into a drain and we had disturbed him.
He could be my deliverance. I shouted, ‘Sorry, Ergun! Didn’t see you! It’s Davut! Hello, anyway!’
I heard Faruk and his mates greet Ergun also.
Ergun emerged out of the shade, buttoning his trousers and smiling. He looked amiable, not at all angry at having been disturbed in mid-piss. That was good news. I mean, I’d been a fine friend to him, helped him with his studies so that he would graduate to full-time policeman, advised him to wear French letters so as not to get the domestics – mostly village girls – pregnant and have their fathers come after him with knives. But a policeman is a policeman and that means their good mood can change in seconds, particularly on a hot day – or a rainy day, any day, actually. ‘I didn’t know you fuckers knew each other ...’
I grabbed my lifeline. ‘We don’t. We’ve just met.’
Faruk stared at Ergun. ‘You know him?’
‘Davut? My bosom pal! How did you meet?’
Faruk looked embarrassed. ‘We didn’t – actually – meet. Our paths crossed. And – well, we were going to rough him up a bit.’
‘What for?’
I shrugged with bravura. ‘For the fun of it.’
‘That’s stupid. They’d beat the shit out of you.’
I smiled. ‘What’s a bit of shit between friends?’
I had barely finished my sentence when Faruk lifted me off the ground and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘Apologies, Davut, dear heart. Any friend of Ergun’s is our brother.’
Then his other brothers kissed me.
Faruk herded us out of the alleyway. ‘Come on! We’ll bless this reunion. The raki’s on me.’
Ergun protested. ‘I’ve got to be on duty in a few minutes.’
Faruk grabbed his arm. ‘Fuck that. Tell your chief you bumped into some villains and went after them.’
‘What villains? Where?’
‘Right here. We’re villains, aren’t we?’
‘You’re small-time black marketeers pushing cigarettes – Bulgarian ones, at that. Hardly worth the sweat.’
‘We got hold of some whisky yesterday. From NATO. Real Scotch. We’ll give you a few bottles. That should keep your chief happy.’
Ergun nodded. ‘Now you’re talking.’
Faruk put his arm around mine. ‘No hard feelings, eh?’
‘None.’
‘Good man. You’re my brother for life.’
He led us to the café where Melek was still waiting for me.
She watched incredulously as I sat and drank with Ergun, Faruk and the rest. I tried to signal to her that I had to be with them for a while otherwise I’d be in trouble, and that she should wait a bit. She didn’t, of course. She often dismissed my point of view.
Ergun went to work after an hour or so – with four bottles of Scotch.
I went on drinking with my new brothers until late into the night. I grew to love them, all the more so after they listened attentively and sympathetically to the doctoral thesis I was working on about the contradictions in the Turkish character and how old-fashioned fascists were exploiting these in order to enslave Turkey’s noble soul. As we hugged and said goodnight – actually, good morning – they swore they would protect me through thick and thin – even spring me from gaol should I be imprisoned for offending Allah knows who with my scribbles.
Melek was irate when we met the next day. But her priorities were right and she waited until we had regained our secluded copse on the hills above Rumeli Hisarι and made love before telling me off for ignoring her the previous day. But by then her anger, which can be as unforgiving as the glacial winds of Hakkâri, had w
aned to a mere breeze. There is nothing better than sex to smooth male and female brows; indeed, to bring peace upon human beings. (I should also say that Melek and I had made love even more hungrily than usual. We had to get our ration for that day, then make up for the day we’d lost thanks to Faruk and his brothers, as well as stock up for the next day when we would be travelling to Bursa to pick up my old teacher, şιk Ahmet, who was being released from prison after having served yet another sentence for disseminating Nâzιm Hikmet’s work.)
Melek had grudgingly accepted that my inability to approach her the previous day was due to forces beyond my control, but she refused to be sympathetic. ‘You should have yelled bloody murder!’
‘There was no one about!’
‘I was there. I’d have created havoc.’
I hadn’t thought of that. ‘I didn’t want to involve you.’
‘Liar! You were enjoying it.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish! They were going to beat me up.’
‘Which would have made you the heroic victim. Everybody would have admired you. You love that!’
She knew me well, Melek. Probably better than I knew myself. That would have been me – until recently. But not any more. Not since I’d fallen prey to fear. ‘Actually, I was petrified ...’
Studentship in drab, post-war England – where people kept out of each other’s way and no one hugged or kissed, let alone picked fights for fun – had softened me. Then while I was comparing the qualities of a chauvinistic, confrontational Turkey with the genteel pugnacity of England, fear, which must have been hibernating in my mind, began to stir. Thereafter, drifting here and there, stealthily feeding at sulphurous nooks and crannies, it had billowed. Now it was a massive obesity, a mound of rotting melons.
Melek opened her eyes wide, as if surprised. ‘Are you telling me you’re getting to be human at last?’
I smiled tentatively and nodded.
I had managed to focus on my fears only recently – to be precise, about six weeks earlier when, returning from London for the summer holidays, I had been grilled, for some two hours, first by customs officers then by plain-clothes policemen who, judging by their implacable expressions, could only have been agents of the dreaded MIT, the secret service. Though I had brought all sorts of fashionable gifts for friends and family – items that I had meticulously declared and for which I expected to pay a hefty duty – the customs officers had been more interested in the outline of my doctoral thesis and the two box-files that contained all my primary documentation. What made them look upon me as if I were a man with the heads of seven snakes was that I had actually sat down and written a sheaf of pages and annotated them with comments and references. The MIT agents were even more sophisticated; they asked what they thought were subtle questions on my political inclinations while anybody who cared to look into their eyes would have seen the phrase ‘this fellow is a communist’ flashing in neon lights from their irises. All of which meant I was worse than an alien from outer space.
Melek realized I had strayed into another dimension. Immediately she became maternal. She pulled me down on to her lap. ‘What’s wrong, my sugar?’
‘Nothing ...’
‘Come on ...’
‘I’m wondering how many times I can make you come in a day ... Fifty?’
‘You want to kill me?’
‘Forty, then ...’
She slapped me playfully. ‘Stop it! What’s bothering you ...?’
‘Nothing ...’
‘Something is, I can tell ...’
‘I suppose I’m scared ...’
‘Uh-huh ...’
‘Not a good feeling. Captain Marvel – scared ...’
‘Scared of what?’
I had told her about my episode with customs and MIT. And the baleful questioning that had ensued. How the senior agent had lectured me on the true nature of printed matter, which, until proven otherwise by vigilant minds like his, was dangerous for humanity, was, in effect, a deadly mine strategically placed to blow up both the ships of state and their defenders. How another agent had mused that texts in English, like my thesis – when completed – would most certainly spawn countless other dangers. (My assurances that I intended to translate it into Turkish had alarmed him even more.) And how calamity had finally struck when they had confiscated my outline after hearing that my thesis dealt with the contradictions in the Turkish character. That its specific premise was how the Turks’ innate nobility tempered with the best of Islamic teaching made them the most tolerant people in the world, while the plethora of complexes instilled by the worst of Islamic teaching could – and sometimes did – turn them into ogres. Of course, I should have lied and told them something simple and innocuous, but I am not a good liar. Besides, as Melek had remarked, it wouldn’t have helped because they would have confiscated my outline even if every page had contained only verses of the national anthem.
‘Scared of the authorities ...’
Melek kissed me on my forehead. ‘Fuck the authorities.’
‘It’s the irrational. The arbitrary decisions. The injustices power condones. Not just condones, but permits, encourages, perpetrates ... That’s what I fear ... It has become so much part of our daily life ...’
‘That’s how it has always been.’
‘I didn’t realize. Didn’t even stop and think ... And then ...’ I began to laugh. Amazing that something as stupid as escaping a beating had clarified existence for me. ‘Suddenly – wham! – it hit me ...’
Melek stroked my chest. ‘Sometimes it takes longer to see what’s in front of our eyes ...’
‘I don’t like being afraid ...’
‘Nothing you can do about that. The moment you put two thoughts together – you get fear ...’
‘Fear of ourselves?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think that’s my worst fear – myself. That I was born afraid. That I’ll be ruled by fear. Which, let’s face it, is not normal. şιk Ahmet isn’t afraid of himself. You’re not – of yourself ...’
‘I think if we were honest we’d all admit we are.’
‘But I wasn’t. I could have taken any amount of beating – until yesterday. And proudly act the heroic victim – as you put it. I can’t any more. I’ve lost the courage. Worse than that, I’ve lost the will. Whatever it is – I’ve lost it. Fear has taken its place.’
Melek smiled. ‘Welcome to adulthood.’ She ran her hand over my groin. ‘And there was me thinking that at the ripe old age of twenty-five you were already a mature man.’
‘Melek, you’re humouring me ...’
‘Yes.’
‘But I’m serious!’
She kissed me. ‘Best time to humour you.’
I responded. We kissed for a while. Then I held her close to me. ‘One last word on fear. The fear that makes people run. Turns them into deserters. That’s the bugger I fear most. I was ready to run yesterday ...’
‘Very sensible ...’
‘Melek, I’m trying to say something important.’
‘Then say it straight.’
‘I want to be someone who does good in this world. Who protests against everything that’s wrong. I want to be an Emile Zola and shout: J’accuse! I want to be a Hikmet and tell everyone on this planet that universal peace is possible ... But I don’t think I can be ...’
‘Sure you can.’
‘How?’
‘By being stoic. You’re a Turk. You know how to take things in your stride. Sunshine one day; hailstorm, the next. The Turk’s fate.’
‘What sort of a life is that?’
‘Now you’re asking too much.’
Melek could not understand my anguish. Only those who doubted their courage, or rather who knew that courage was deserting them, could understand. Melek’s courage never faltered.
I began kissing her again. I suddenly felt I had to make love to her, enough to last me a lifetime.
şιk Ahmet looked twice his age. He had lost a lot of we
ight. And of his robust silvery mane that had waved greetings to the world as he strode along, only a few strands remained. He was also unsteady on his feet – according to Agop, the result of spinal damage incurred from the systematic beatings political prisoners received. Imagine torturing one of the nation’s greatest sons! A hero of the War of Independence! One of Atatürk’s greatest reformers!
I had expected many of his students to come to Bursa and welcome him from prison. In the event, besides Melek and myself only Agop, Musa, Naim, Zeki and Mustafa came. The rest, fearing that MIT agents who would be keeping an eye on şιk Ahmet might decide to investigate them, too, had chosen to play safe. But who was I to judge them? Despite their fears, they had never stopped supporting our mentor, nor would they ever. And, of course, they had been right to be wary of MIT. I counted at least half a dozen men at the periphery of the prison gates watching us as we met şιk Ahmet; two others, in an unmarked car, photographed us quite blatantly.
Agop and Mustafa had wanted to bring their wives, but had desisted, thinking that the presence of a woman might upset şιk Ahmet. For the dear man’s beloved wife, Leylâ, had committed suicide a couple of years earlier by taking an overdose. Having seen him in hospital after he had been beaten almost to the point of death, she had not expected him to recover. Perversely, her suicide had saved his life. A note she had left behind had caused such a public furore that the authorities had been forced to stop torturing him. (Actually, the note is a paean to love. Describing şιk Ahmet as the ‘Loving Man’ par excellence and ‘Turkey’s greatest democrat’, she declared that dying as his wife – they had finally been able to marry when her son from her previous marriage had come of age – had always been the only death she had wanted.
I, on the other hand, reversing my friends’ logic, had brought Melek along. As an enlightened young intellectual, she was in many ways like Leylâ and I felt that her presence, mournful as it might make şιk Ahmet, would nonetheless provide him with happy echoes of the passionate love he and his wife had enjoyed. (I was even toying with the idea of telling him, at an opportune moment, that the secret copse where Melek and I ran to make love was the same place where, years ago, Mustafa and members of his dormitory had stumbled upon them.)
