Love in the Days of Rebellion

by Ahmet Altan

  ALSO BY

  AHMET ALTAN

  Endgame

  Like a Sword Wound

  Europa Editions

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  New York NY 10001

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2001 by Ahmet Altan

  First publication 2020 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi

  Original Title: İsyan Günlerinde Aşk

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover image: Franz von Stuck, Mary von Stuck in a Red Armchair, 1916.

  Copyright © Mondadori Portfolio/Akg

  ISBN 9781609456368

  Ahmet Altan

  LOVE IN THE DAYS

  OF REBELLION

  Translated from the Turkish

  by Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi

  LOVE IN THE DAYS

  OF REBELLION

  INDEX OF CHARACTERS

  Osman

  A middle-aged man who lives alone in modern-day Turkey except for his frequent visitors from a century ago, who bring along their personal versions of a family history that only the dead can remember and tell.

  His Majesty the Sultan

  Sultan Abdulhamid II, born in 1842 and reigning since 1876, rules the Ottoman Empire from his palace on the Yıldız Hill overlooking the Bosphorus.

  Sheikh Yusuf Efendi

  Osman’s great grandfather. The leader of a prominent tekke—a monastery of dervishes—in late 19th century Istanbul, whose wisdom is sought by people from all corners of the vast Ottoman land.

  Reşit Pasha

  Personal physician and a confidant of His Majesty the Sultan.

  Mihrişah Sultan

  An Ottoman princess related to the Khedive of Egypt and the estranged wife of Reşit Pasha.

  Hüseyin Hikmet Bey

  The only child of Mihrişah Sultan and Reşit Pasha; trained as a lawyer in Paris he is now recovering from a self-inflicted wound at the French Hospital in Salonica.

  Mehpare Hanım

  The daughter of an Ottoman Customs Director and a two-time divorcee, who has a daughter from her first husband, Sheikh Yusuf Efendi and a son from her second husband, Hüseyin Hikmet Bey.

  Constantine

  Mehpare Hanım’s Greek lover with whom she has taken up residence in Salonica.

  Rukiye

  The daughter of Mehpare Hanım and Sheikh Yusuf Efendi.

  Nizam

  The son of Mehpare Hanım and Hüseyin Hikmet Bey.

  Hasan Efendi

  A former commissioned officer of the Imperial Navy; both a loyal disciple and son-in-law of Sheikh Yusuf Efendi.

  Binnaz Hanım

  Sheikh Yusuf Efendi’s daughter who married Hasan Efendi.

  Ragıp Bey

  Osman’s grandfather. An officer in the Ottoman Army, childhood friend of Hasan Efendi, and son-in-law of Sheik Yusuf Efendi.

  Cevat Bey

  Ragıp Bey’s brother and a leading member of the Committee for Union and Progress.

  Dilara Hanım

  Poland-born and well-travelled widow of an affluent Ottoman Pasha, she now resides in Istanbul alone with her teenage daughter.

  Dilevser

  Dilara Hanım’s daughter.

  1

  Some nights he woke to the footsteps of the ants crawling across the Persian carpet.

  These wasp-waisted ants with trembling joints and shiny black knuckles were the last creatures to walk across these carpets that had been woven centuries ago in dark, damp rooms in mountain villages and grown worn and faded, and even though no one heard them, their footsteps echoed in Osman’s tranquil soul, which had freed itself from time and the world, and made him tremble in fear.

  He struggled out of the bed in which his grandmother had once gone to the most obscure and isolated corners of lust to seek the keenest pleasures human flesh could taste, stepped on the wooden floor that had been worn out by constant cracking, waited a while as he fought to gather strength from this ragged firmness, then shuffled wearily out of the room.

  In his grandfather’s long nightshirt, which was worn out here and there and had long since lost its whiteness, he lit all the lamps in the living room and saw not the ants he’d expected but his dead, swaying restlessly in their transparent, slippery bodies.

  His dead were prisoners of time, they walked as if nothing could have stopped them during the time that had stretched before them when they were born and the moment death had intercepted them, they’d been trapped in time between birth and death. When they went backward they could go no further than their births and when they moved forward they couldn’t move past their deaths; now they had to wander forever between the moment of their birth and the moment of their death. Each time they told their unchanging life stories, which were frozen between two precise dates, they tried to change the unchangeable with the words by adding new details and events.

  They chose to tell their stories to their young relative Osman, who’d cut himself off from life while he was still alive but could not grasp hold of death, and who’d crippled himself by falling into a deep and dangerous timelessness where the past and the future mingled.

  Osman couldn’t remember when he’d begun speaking to his dead. As he tried, with the strange, dark intellect that didn’t help him find peace or achieve success, to drag himself through a life that was wracked with foppish whims and strange sexual fantasies, poisoning himself and those around him, he’d suddenly wearied and retreated to his grandfather’s old mansion.

  He didn’t know whether his dead had brought him here or whether he’d found them after he arrived. He escaped into the past with his dead and freed himself from indecision, pain, and frustration by wandering through the astounding tunnels of history. His small inheritance was enough to meet his daily needs, and he hid from his daily pain by observing the pain of the past.

  People thought him mad, and for his part he thought people stupid. Seeing the past lives of the dead so clearly reinforced this opinion. Perhaps this was the main reason he loved the dead who told him these stories.

  Whenever they saw Osman alone in that dusty old mansion, his beloved dead streaked toward him with an irresistible power like candle flames in a room where the windows had been left open and began speaking to him in weak, broken voices that resembled their transparent bodies.

  They all had terrifying secrets.

  To keep these secrets he clenched his fists passionately as if he was holding a fire in his palms, then, unable to bear the burning of what he had to conceal he became gripped by the need to reveal at least part of it by opening his fists.

  Among the secrets they revealed were murders, uprisings, betrayals, sinful loves, and painful longings; their narratives were full of conflicts, lies, and omissions because they tried to conceal these secrets even as they revealed them.

  Osman felt a sense of secret superiority when he witnessed the combination of their desire to reveal and their desire to conceal.

  They all began speaking at once as soon as they saw him.

  He’d learned to choose one, focus on that voice, and listen only to it amidst all the wailing narratives. This was a skill peculiar to those who have lost track of ti
me, and destiny, which grants something in exchange for everything it diminishes or diminishes something in exchange for anything it gives, had granted a gift that couldn’t be appreciated by anyone who hadn’t broken his bonds with time.

  That night when he woke in fear, he chose Hasan Efendi, the most entertaining of his dead; despite the fragility of death there was a grandiosity in Hasan Efendi’s voice that was reflected in what he was relating, the tremulous roar of the thousands who’d filled the square, a quaking terror of the future sensed under the shouts of joy. Osman followed the voice into a crowd of the long-forgotten dead who’d gathered under fluttering black banners.

  Hagia Sophia was surrounded by thousands of fezzes that rippled like a ruby-red sea. Reflections of the winter sun glinted on the long bayonets of the soldiers waiting to one side, on the brocaded uniforms of the Sultan’s guards, the white scarves of the Albanian guards, and on the shoulder-length keffiyeh of the Syrian Zühaf guards.

  After thirty-three years of tyranny, the crowd that had gathered to celebrate the opening of parliament couldn’t fit into the square and thousands had climbed onto the roofs, buttresses, pillars, minarets, and domes of Hagia Sophia, which for centuries had witnessed a long string of rulers from Byzantine to Ottoman times, riots, heads dangling from the branches of trees, executions, massacres, and coronations, and which, with quiet dignity, kept what it had seen to itself.

  As he glanced around and engraved the smallest details in his mind so he could tell his Sheikh about it in the evening, Hasan Efendi, in his green turban and long black robes, stood alone and as still as a statue at the very top of Hagia Sophia’s magnificent dome, just beneath a giant silver crescent, he seemed perhaps more impressive than the crowd itself as he stood alone at the very top like a black silhouette etched on the sky.

  At the edge of the square were the troops in khaki uniforms that had been brought to Istanbul after the Third Army in Salonika had revolted against the Sultan and Caliph of all Muslims especially to keep the mullahs loyal to the Caliph from stirring up trouble and shouting, “Sharia will be lost!” These soldiers, who were not satisfied with their cartridge belts and who’d filled their pockets with extra bullets, stood with a terrifying determination to persuade all who saw them to fall into step with the new order.

  Hasan Efendi, who was fiercely loyal to the Caliph and to sharia, and who’d never liked the reformers, told Osman later, with a sarcastic and almost mischievous grin that didn’t suit a dead man, “It was God’s doing, in less than four months these soldiers who’d been sent here to protect the abolition of sharia were rebelling and shouting for sharia, and hundreds of them were cornered in the streets of Istanbul and put to the sword by their own comrades.”

  The square was full of black banners, embroidered in silver thread with Koranic verses about the military, that served as a dark, proud reminder of how important both religion and the military were in this society.

  The square and all the streets leading to it were filled with people from the four corners of the empire, Thracian shepherds, seamen from the islands, Arabs from whom wafted the spicy smell of their mysterious peninsula, Jews who had migrated from sacred cities, Montenegrins with pistols in their cummerbunds, Bulgarians and Kurds, Kirgiz, Gypsies who sang and danced constantly, and Tatars with high cheekbones.

  Again and again the people in this mixed crowd took out their guns, restrictions on the sale of which had been lifted after the proclamation of “liberty,” and fired into the sky, the sounds of gunfire mixing with the liberty marches.

  As the crowd seethed, intoxicated by its own voice and zeal, there was a rumbling sound that was difficult to identify from a distance; people immediately understood what the rumble meant; it was the Sultan’s carriage, accompanied by mounted lancers.

  Those who saw the carriage began to frantically shout, “Long live the Sultan!” as if they hadn’t just been applauding constitutional monarchy and singing songs of liberty to celebrate the end of tyranny.

  The Sultan’s physician Reşit Pasha looked at the Sultan and saw that since the day his own army had limited his powers when he’d believed his power was limitless and divine, he seemed older and less healthy than he really was, his face was pale and lined despite the blush they applied to his cheeks when he went out in public, so, to cheer him up he called out in a low voice to the Sultan, who was sitting with his head bowed as if he didn’t hear the crowd that was cheering him.

  “Your subjects are happy to see you, your majesty, look at how they’re cheering you.”

  The Sultan looked up slowly and gave his physician a slightly patronizing and resentful look.

  “Do you still believe in this kind of cheering, doctor? They also cheer the people who want to send us to our death.”

  As the Sultan feared an assassination attempt, his carriage raced through the crowd in the square and the streets at top speed, sparks flew from its wheels as it passed. When the carriage passed, the crowd parted like the Red Sea miraculously parted when Moses touched it with his staff, to make way for “The Caliph,” thus both showing their respect and saving themselves from the carriage that would clearly slow for nothing.

  There’d been fear of an attack, but the trip passed without incident, except that when they were near the old palace an old woman in black waved her feeble arms at the carriage and shouted, “Give me back my sons!” but no one could hear her over all the noise.

  When the horses, who were covered in lather from galloping without stop since they’d left the palace gates, stopped in front of the parliament building, the band that had been waiting played the Hamidiye March to greet the Sultan.

  The irritable cavalrymen encircled the carriage to keep the crowd at bay: surrounded by a crowd that was shouting, screaming, singing marches, and charged with a shared enthusiasm, the Sultan, with the rancorous resentment of those who have lost power suddenly, slowly got out of the carriage and walked to the large gate without looking at anyone.

  As he shuffled along, a power emanated from this slumped-shouldered man who was able to respond to the conflicting feelings of the crowd who needed to either hate or love someone and who satisfied their perpetually hungry emotional world with his presence; the six centuries of history he had inherited and the 1,003-year-old religion of which he was Caliph illuminated his presence, which was stained here and there, with a divine light, and the mere sight of him deeply affected people in a compelling manner.

  As he walked along that corridor, those in the parliament hall sensed the approaching Sultan’s presence as if they’d smelled a sharp scent in the air, the loud murmur of talking voices lowered decibel by decibel, and the Sultan entered a completely silent hall.

  Most members of parliament, looking too polished and conspicuous, like brand-new patent leather shoes, in their pitch-black frock coats and red fezzes, felt ill at ease and indeed even frightened in this hall; among the black frock coats, as if to prove this was an imperial parliament, were the Yemeni members in their green and purple keffiyeh, Arabian members who covered their heads with shawls that were tied back with black camel-hair bands, hodjas with white turbans, and members in military uniform.

  Landowners wearing medals and gilded, flamboyant clothes sat next to the podium, in front of them was the Shaykh al-Islam, dressed completely in white, and the ulema in their emerald green robes beside him. Next to the Muslim clergymen were gigantic, robust patriarchs with long beards and pitch-black robes, lined up like pitch-black sarcophagi brought up from a crypt.

  Everyone in the hall rose to their feet when the Sultan entered.

  The Sultan, in his loggia, stood leaning on the sword he’d placed against the floor and looked around the hall for a long time. Without moving a muscle in his face, the man who’d held all the power looked at those who held it now, intimidating them with his gaze, his stance, and his silence. After a member of parliament read the Sultan’s speech declaring constitu
tional monarchy, prayers were recited and at that moment the sound of cannon fire filled Hagia Sophia square. Artillery units on the Bosphorus and warships in the Marmara Sea had fired their cannon. The birth of constitutional monarchy was proclaimed to the empire and to the world with a one-hundred-and-one-gun salute.

  The Sultan left the hall as he’d arrived, shuffling slowly; he quietly climbed into the waiting carriage as if none of what was going on had anything to do with him and reclined on the soft cushions.

  In the carriage, the Sultan’s physician looked at his pale face and asked anxiously if he was tired. The condescending smile that the doctor knew so well appeared briefly on the Sultan’s face, then he answered tersely, “I’m fed up.”

  The Sultan didn’t speak until they’d reached the palace.

  That night the seven hills of Istanbul glowed like bundles of flames, all the lights were on in the palace and the mansions of the princes and pashas; those who in fact felt a deep sorrow feared being seen as avoiding the celebrations and participated in this fiery demonstration as prisoners of the terror that raised its head whenever this old city celebrated.

  The old city walls, illuminated by torches, mosques, churches, ships, and waterfront mansions fixed their fiery eyes on the sky, and the red lights of the city and the shadows of centuries-old temples were reflected on the Golden Horn, which pierced the city like a curved dagger, and on the Bosphorus.

  On that December night on which the cold of winter made itself felt, sheikh Yusuf Efendi, who’d been invited to the celebration but hadn’t attended, wrapped himself in his fur-lined robe and strolled through the tekke garden in Unkapanı, looking at the burning lights, listened without comment to Hasan Efendi describe the events without bothering to conceal his anger at the way the Sultan of the empire and the Caliph of the world had been treated, he spoke with an angry bitterness without actually expressing what he felt.