by Ahmet Altan
As for Rukiye, she stubbornly refused to talk about her father.
Once, when Mihrişah Sultan told Rukiye that she should get to know her father better, Rukiye reacted almost angrily and said, “I don’t want to talk about him, with your permission, let’s not get into this subject at all.”
“Pride,” said Mihrişah Sultan, “is a feeling that belongs to the masses, what a noblewoman needs is not pride mixed with ridiculousness but a dignity that adds nobility to everything, even to behavior that seems to arise from lack of pride. You can do whatever you want, you can talk to whoever you want to talk to, as long as you do it with dignity . . . You can talk about your father too, you don’t have to be so sensitive that it hurts your pride.”
As was her wont, Rukiye gave a brief response to this long statement.
“I don’t want to talk about my father.”
“Because he doesn’t reach out to you?”
“Isn’t that reason enough?”
“Sheikh Efendi must have his own reasons.”
Rukiye didn’t answer; in fact she did want to talk about her father, she wanted to hear rumors about him, but she’d decided to go see her father and believed she shouldn’t talk about him until she met him, she didn’t want anything to influence her until she came face to face with him.
In any event, at the time a man other than her father occupied almost all of her thoughts and dreams, the interest in her that had recently been shown by an older man who couldn’t resist the secret temptations had stirred her soul.
Her frightening honesty, the decisiveness so rarely seen in a young girl, her desire to see everything as clearly as possible, and her well-grounded tenacity had been shaken by this vague breeze of attention. If she’d been a bit more playful, if she’d been a more flirtatious girl, she wouldn’t have been shaken like this, she wouldn’t have been so moved the first time someone paid attention to her, but the curiosity that led her to want to bring every feeling and every word out into the open made her pursue and be swept up by this vagueness. Like a medium trying to find a lost soul, she thought about him constantly, trying to find signs in his every word and act, she wasn’t interested in anything except him.
Life, consisting of thousands of sounds and images, was now filtered through Tevfik Bey like light rays focused into a single beam while passing through a prism, now war, soldiers, the Sultan, politics, fear, and worry only became real when Tevfik Bey spoke of them, otherwise they became scattered and didn’t attract her attention.
When Tevfik Bey came to the waterfront mansion that night and said, “They’ll make a move tonight,” she was interested only in the way the man with the beautiful face said this.
Rukiye didn’t worry about the news he brought because his kind voice and his sandy moustache softened even the most frightening subject. She didn’t worry about anything that was defined and known.
With a curiosity that attempted to conceal her lack of interest, Mihrişah Sultan asked if he was sure.
“An officer friend told me, and I think the information is correct.”
“This time they’ll dethrone the old geezer.”
“But your ladyship, in his letter to the minister of war, Mahmut Şevket Pasha gave assurances that His Excellency the Caliph would not be touched.”
Mihrişah Sultan said, “As if,” like all Ottoman nobles who looked down on the masses.
“Turks love to make promises they can’t keep, they like to make promises but they’re not strong enough to keep their promises.”
“But Mahmut Şevket Pasha isn’t like that.”
“They’re all like that, Tevfik Bey, you’ll see that he won’t keep his promise, they’ll dethrone the Sultan.”
“Won’t they be wary of how the people will react?”
“Did anyone ever hesitate because of how the people might react . . . The Caliph won’t get off the hook this time, he’ll be lucky to escape with his life, that’s all.”
After Tevfik Bey left, Mihrişah Sultan ordered that the doors be bolted and the lights extinguished and had the lights in the living room dimmed as much as possible; for different reasons, neither of them felt sleepy. When Mihrişah Sultan saw that Rukiye hadn’t gone to bed and had shrunk into an armchair by the window, she asked:
“Aren’t you going to bed?”
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Are you frightened?”
“No, not when I’m with you.”
Mihrişah Sultan spoke as if she was grumbling to herself.
“I wonder if I should have sent you to your father, you would have been safer there”
Rukiye looked Mihrişah Sultan squarely in the face.
“I wouldn’t have gone even if you had sent me, I prefer to stay with you.”
“I know that you wouldn’t have gone.”
Mihrişah was more moved than she would have guessed that the girl had said she didn’t want to leave her even at such a dangerous time; seeing her shrink like a little girl made her more sentimental, and she asked with an unaccustomed directness:
“Are you in love, Rukiye?”
“I don’t know.”
“That means yes.”
“I really don’t know, I’m just a bit confused.”
“That also means yes. I’m worried that you might get badly hurt.”
This time Rukiye was truly curious.
“Why?”
“If you knew the reason, I wouldn’t worry about you being badly hurt, you’d be hurt anyway but it wouldn’t be that frightening. You’ll learn the reason, but will you be happy to learn the reason?”
Rukiye’s honey-colored eyes were wide open as she looked at her with such serious curiosity that Mihrişah Sultan was truly frightened for this young girl; like a child breaking a watch to see what was inside, Rukiye was capable of breaking her life to see how it worked; her instinct to want to understand every detail, every feeling, every act would always make her impatient and meddlesome, she would occasionally tinker with the parts of life that should be hidden, that should not be seen, of which we shouldn’t even be aware. She would never be able to look at a clock just to learn the time, she would always be curious about how it worked.
Perhaps it was because of the compassionate love she felt at that moment, perhaps because of her worries about the young girl’s future, perhaps because of the heavy burden of the uncertainty of what that night would bring, perhaps because of all these things, Mihrişah Sultan did something she rarely did.
“Come sit next to me, Rukiye.”
Mihrişah Sultan told the young girl about her own life, about the men she’d met, about her loves, about the duels that had been fought over her, her suffering, her anxieties and how she’d overcome them, which words meant what, all of these things as if she wanted to teach her everything that could be known about life in a single night, speaking in a soft voice, sometimes smiling, sometimes trying to conceal the slight roughening of her voice; the only thing she left out was Sheikh Efendi and the feelings she had for him.
They sat there not like a sheikh’s daughter and a noblewoman, but as two women who were sad and worried about each other for no apparent reason; Rukiye asked questions and Mihrişah Sultan answered her.
On that unhappy and anxious night, they experienced a strange and restless happiness in their own way. Mihrişah Sultan tasted the unaccustomed pleasure of a motherly love she hadn’t shown even to her own son and shuddered at the thought that this might be a sign of old age; for her part, Rukiye was disquieted by the thought that her love for Mihrişah Sultan rather than for her mother was a weakness that transformed her rebellious nature into obedience; but despite their disquiet, neither of them intended to give up the love they’d found, they were learning about the magnificent tranquility and the heavy price of powerful love.
As the gigantic tiled stove in the middle of the
living room began to cool and the black water of the Bosphorus began to turn blue with the breaking of the pale morning through the clouds, Mihrişah Sultan stood and said:
“Let’s go to bed, we’re not going to get much sleep in any case.”
As they were leaving the living room to go to their rooms, Rukiye took Mihrişah Sultan’s hand with a gratitude to which she wasn’t accustomed. “Your presence . . . ,” but she couldn’t finish what she wanted to say. Mihrişah Sultan caressed her face without saying anything; as she was making her way to her room she thought, “My presence is of no use whatsoever,” on the day when her greatest enemy would face a strange and certain defeat, she too began to feel a strange defeat, and exhaustion.
While they were going to bed, the main units of the Movement Army had arrived at the edge of Istanbul; as dawn broke, the vanguard received the order to attack.
Twenty cavalrymen and an artillery battery had been added to Ragıp Bey’s unit; with the cavalrymen in the lead and the artillery in the rear, they started to move toward Aksaray, their mission was to capture Babıali.
They arrived in Aksaray toward noon. They paused there to rest the horses and load the artillery.
The people who had sheltered in their homes in fear the previous night greeted the soldiers with applause and shouted, “Bravo, brave lads, welcome, courageous men.” As for the mutineering soldiers, they were nowhere to be seen.
As they struggled up the muddy hill at Laleli listening to the sound of the Hungarian artillery horses, who sounded as if they were suffering and whose neighing resembled the snarling of a monster, they kept an eye on the houses on either side and pushed the cannon carriages as they slipped on the muddy road.
When they reached the Mahmutpasha tomb there were still no mutineers to be seen; it was as if the hundreds of thousands of people who’d been shouting in the squares, the dozens of turbaned mullahs, the many soldiers whose bayonets glinted in the sun had been swallowed by the earth and disappeared, the city had changed its identity, now only the people who were applauding could be seen.
As they moved from the tomb toward Babıali, they lost the cavalrymen in the narrow streets, they’d moved off into other streets, when they were passing the Iranian Embassy the cavalrymen emerged from another street and rejoined them.
When they were forty yards from Babıali, about a hundred and fifty mutineers deployed behind the iron fence of the government building suddenly began to shoot.
Ragıp Bey shouted at his men to position themselves at the foot of the walls. The cavalrymen’s neighing horses bumped into each other as they tried to get out of range by retreating uphill.
The street was narrow and the soldiers had little room to maneuver against the well-positioned mutineers, it was difficult to take cover and shoot, if they advanced through the space between them they would suffer casualties.
Then Ragıp Bey gave the order for the cannon to be brought to the front.
The mutineers hidden in the ministry of public works just past Babıali and in the military club just below it began shooting as well.
The cannon, which were difficult to maneuver on the very slippery cobblestones, were aimed at Babıali and the ministry of public works and began firing; the windows in the buildings shattered from the sound of the cannon, the explosions echoed in the narrow street with a hellish cacophony.
The cannonballs brought down the iron fence in front of Babıali, opened a hole in the main gate, and the wall of a room to the right of the gates of the ministry of public works collapsed; the room, with its desk, chairs, coffee table and a sign on the wall reading “Ya Allah,” was naked like a picture hanging on the middle of the building. The cannonballs ripped the branches off trees on both sides of the street.
At that moment Ragıp Bey saw a grenade that had been thrown from the top floor of the military club, it drew an arc in the air like a disembodied fist and landed on the ammunition wagon waiting behind the cannon. The wagon exploded with such a terrifying sound that Ragıp Bey watched its aftermath without hearing a sound, in a horrifying silence.
With that explosion it was as if every building on the street, every wall, and every person, had melted to their smallest particles and filled his ears like pressurized water; the carriage, engulfed in sulfur-colored flames, rose to the sky like a giant twister, spreading the smell of gunpowder; among the pieces of wood, grapeshot, and bullets there were chunks of scarlet flesh with green cloth on them; two soldiers waiting in front of the wagon had exploded with the wagon and been torn apart.
When Ragıp Bey felt the heat of the flames on his body and looked at his left side, he saw that his jacket’s left sleeve had disappeared in the blink of an eye and that his arm, the hair on which had been burned off, was naked, he couldn’t figure out if the smell of burned flesh was from the soldiers who’d been blown apart or from his burned arm.
He couldn’t even hear his own voice when he shouted for the men to push the wagon down the hill. Five soldiers, moving in a strange, puppetlike manner, ran to the burning wagon and pushed it down.
The wagon careened down the hill, scattering yellow, blue, and purple sparks and trembling with exploding bullets, hit a wall, and continued burning there.
From the side of a printing works behind the military club, five to ten civilians began shooting in support of the mutineers; Ragıp Bey immediately deployed some of his men to lay down suppressing fire on the civilians.
There was a strong sense that the cannon fire had weakened the mutineers’ resistance. Ragıp Bey was so absorbed in the excitement of the skirmish, he focused solely on his men and on the enemy, it was as if he had shed his entire life from his being and become part of the battle.
This was what he liked most, perhaps the thing he was madly in love with; that magnificent moment of fighting when he forgot life and death, in which he had no worries, in which he was not even aware of himself, in which his thoughts were subordinated to his instincts, in which he ran with a careful and merciless desire like a predatory animal in pursuit of its prey, in which he erased everything but his target from his mind . . . He gave one order after another, moved his men from one corner to another, changed the positions of the cannon depending on the direction from which they were being fired at.
Just then they saw a bulky man with a black beard running toward them past the Iranian embassy and waving his arms; without thinking, a few of the soldiers turned around and mowed the running man down, he was covered with large red spots that looked like red chrysanthemums, he stopped where he was, knelt, raised his head to the sky, and looked, then collapsed on the muddy pavement. Ragıp Bey, who had seen many battles and fought in many skirmishes, would remember the way the man fell for years; even though in every battle the move that made the least sense had a logic of its own, there was no logic, no reason for this man to run toward them with his bare hands; he always wondered if the man had been coming to tell them something.
When the crossfire became less fierce, they saw Hafız Hakkı Bey and a few volunteers coming toward them from below, ignoring the bullets speeding past them to the right and left. Just as his men were about to open fire on them, Ragıp Bey recognized his old friend and stopped his men from firing. Hakkı Bey approached Ragıp Bey as if he was watching something very amusing.
“Hey, commander, you’re still alive.”
Then he turned to the men and teased them.
“How are you lion cubs doing, are you having fun?”
A little later the surviving mutineers began to surrender and to come out of the positions where they’d taken cover.
After Ragıp Bey delivered the dead and wounded soldiers to the medical units that had been following them, he headed toward Sultanahmet Square with the cannon battery. When they reached the large square he saw that a crowd had gathered and was shouting, “Death to the Sultan,” and applauding the Movement Army units and artillery batteries ent
ering the square; a week earlier these people had been shouting “Long live the Sultan, long live sharia,” in the same square.
Before he had the chance to position his units, which had just emerged from a skirmish, in a corner of the square he received word that the main attack was taking place at Taşkışla and an order to go there at once.
He took some Bulgarian guerillas with double bandoliers across their chests and Albanian volunteers with conical white caps and set out for Taşkışla. They made their way through the empty streets as quickly as possible and climbed up Yüksekkaldırım toward Beyoğlu; this time they were able to climb the hill faster because they had no cannon with them; in Beyoğlu, cadets from the military academy were patrolling and keeping order.
As they approached Taşkışla they saw Armenians from Tatavla pulling cannon from the Golden Horn to the top of the hill, Armenian women were tending to the wounded and distributing food to weary soldiers.
Major Muhtar Bey, commander of the unit that had surrounded the barracks, was lying dead on a corner in a pool of blood; he’d died from a wound he received during the fighting. By the Major’s head, the Armenian patriarch, in his long, black robe, long cowl, long white beard and a heavy crucifix hanging around his neck, prayed and beseeched according to his own faith for this Muslim to go to his God purified.
After Muhtar Bey died, Enver Bey took command. As Ragıp Bey joined the forces besieging the barracks, his experienced eyes noted that the siege had been badly planned; there weren’t enough men, because the terrain was rough the cannon were not well placed, there had been many casualties.
Most of the mullahs who’d been said to have stirred up this mutiny had disappeared, some of the soldiers who had joined the mutiny from Istanbul were dead or had surrendered.
The men who were defending the barracks were soldiers from Salonika who had in fact started the mutiny and they were good fighters; it was clear they had no intention of surrendering.
