by Ahmet Altan
Ragıp Bey realized that his wife was determined and that she wasn’t going to change her mind. If he didn’t think he would be embarrassed before Sheikh Efendi he would have been very happy about this decision; to be freed from a relationship full of hate would, at the same time mean being able to live with Dilara Hanım freely and comfortably, without pangs of conscience, without being obliged to go to the mansion every other day.
His wife sat in the armchair by the window holding the baby all night long. Ragıp Bey lay on the bed in his clothes, he had a restless sleep that was interrupted often, sometimes by dreams of starting a new life with Dilara Hanım and sometimes by thoughts about what he would say to Sheikh Efendi.
The next morning they left the mansion without having breakfast, without offering any explanation despite his mother’s questioning glances, Hatice Hanım didn’t look back even once, they rode all the way to the tekke in silence.
When they arrived at the tekke he sent his wife to the harem and went directly to Sheikh Efendi. When he saw Ragıp Bey there at that hour, Yusuf Efendi realized he was going to receive bad news.
He said, “Welcome, I hope all is well.”
“I’m afraid things are not well, Your Excellency.”
The Sheikh waited for him to continue.
“I don’t know how to tell you.”
“Tell it as it is, that’s the easiest way.”
“Hatice Hanım wants a divorce, she wants to live here from now on.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sheikh Efendi stroked his beard.
“What do you have to say about this?”
“Your Excellency, how can I leave your daughter, how would I be able to look you in the face, but nothing I said would change her mind, perhaps you could talk to her.”
Sheikh Efendi took Ragıp Bey by the arm.
“Let’s go out into the garden.”
They went out into the garden together and strolled among the rosebushes as they always did. The Sheikh spoke suddenly.
“Let’s leave it as it is. I know Hatice, if she’s made this decision, there’s no way to change her mind. Perhaps this was a mistake from the start.”
Ragıp Bey had expected to hear bitterness in Sheikh Efendi’s voice, but there wasn’t any, he only said what he thought.
“But what will people say?”
“What is it to us, can a marriage be for the sake of other people? Even if you manage to deceive others you can’t deceive yourself. It’s better for this to end before it’s too late, I think that Hatice has made the right decision.”
Ragıp Bey sighed. The Sheikh held his arm in a friendly manner.
“Look, if you have any concerns about me, be at ease, you weren’t my son-in-law when I met you; I accepted you as a friend, just as I saw you as a friend then, I will see you as a friend in the same way. You have no fault in this, and neither does Hatice. In matters of the heart, nothing can be forced, Ragıp Bey. We don’t look for sin where others find it, for us sin is to harm what the Creator created and therefore to harm yourself. I know you never treated my daughter badly, not even for a single day, you always treated her respectfully, this is enough for me, anything beyond this is your problem. In my opinion, you should let it go, you’re young. Live a life that’s better suited to you. There’s no need for you to suffer, trust me.”
Ragıp Bey knew that Sheikh Efendi was aware of Dilara Hanım, yet in spite of this he still treated him in a friendly and understanding manner, and this made him feel even more ashamed.
“I couldn’t be the son-in-law you deserved, my Sheikh. I know you forgive me, in your great heart there’s no room for anger or bitterness, but I can’t forgive myself.”
“Ragıp Bey, you’re wearing yourself out for nothing, this isn’t something to forgive, it happens to everyone, it’s a sin to spend your life with someone you don’t feel close to, you can’t control destiny, if this is your destiny, this is what you’ll live. Go and establish a life that suits you.”
Ragıp Bey bowed and kissed Sheikh Efendi’s hand.
“Don’t forget to keep me in your prayers, I can’t repay you for the good things you’ve done for me, but wherever I am, whatever the time, however it happens, a single command from you will be enough, I’ll come no matter what it takes.”
“I know,” said Sheikh Efendi, “I know you. And don’t hesitate if you need anything, just send word.”
When Ragıp Bey left the tekke, the sun was already high and the heat had set in. There was a bluish mist drifting over the Golden Horn, the smell of roses mingled with the smell of the salty sea.
Talking with Sheikh Efendi had put him at ease, a heavy burden had been lifted from his shoulders. He wondered how Dilara Hanım would react to this news, how they would live from then on. He would finally be able to be with the woman he loved without any problems, perhaps for the first time he could establish a life with someone he loved.
He got into a carriage and lit a cigarette, as he told the driver the address of the mansion in Nişantaşı even he himself could hear the joy echoing in his voice.
The whole way he impatiently exhorted the driver to go faster, he wanted to arrive at the mansion at once, to tell Dilara Hanım what had happened, to celebrate that joy together, to embrace her. There would be no shadows, no doubt, no sense of guilt, no lies between them; the marriage that he thought had created the missing sentence had finally ended, and now there was a chance for both of them to complete the sentence.
He found Dilara Hanım having her morning coffee in the living room. When she saw Ragıp Bey, her beautiful face was lit up with joy.
“Welcome, what are you doing here at this time of day?”
Ragıp Bey embraced Dilara Hanım tightly
“I wanted to see you.”
Dilara Hanım stepped back and looked at Ragıp Bey.
“What happened, there’s something strange about you . . . I hope nothing’s wrong?”
“It’s good news, Dilara Hanım, it’s good news. This morning Hatice Hanım went back to her father, she told me she wanted a divorce. I spoke with Sheikh Efendi, he forgave me.”
There was a pensive expression on Dilara Hanım’s face. She said, “I’m sorry.”
Ragıp Bey was truly surprised.
“Are you sorry? Why?”
“But the end of a marriage is always sad, isn’t it?”
Ragıp Bey looked at Dilara Hanım’s face, squinting his eyes as if searching for a secret meaning, a hidden thought that he could only see if he looked carefully; Dilara Hanım didn’t reveal the slightest sign of joy.
At that moment he realized that the missing sentence would never be completed, that the missing sentence would diminish his life too, that the pain would never cease. That missing thing was nourished less by the form of their relationship than by deeper, less visible places; he sensed this with sorrow.
He didn’t say anything more about the subject, he made small talk, and as soon as he finished his coffee he left the mansion as if he was fleeing.
That day, right away, he submitted a petition to the ministry of war asking to be reassigned to a unit in Macedonia.
He knew the loneliness and the pain he would experience there on long, desolate winter nights, he already felt the infinite sorrow, but he could not stay here, in the city where Dilara Hanım lived, he couldn’t stand to see the traces of that missing sentence that darkened his life wherever he looked. He knew only one way to heal a wound, he’d learned this on the front lines, and that was to cauterize it. Even though it was extremely painful at first, this was the only way to keep the wound from being infected and penetrating and crippling the body. He made this decision and cauterized his flesh, there was nothing left to do but clench his teeth and wait for the pain to pass.
A week later, without saying goodbye to anyone, just
kissing his mother’s hand, he left Istanbul. On his way to his unit he listened to the sound of the wheels of the train as it passed through steppes devoid of people, forgotten villages, he realized that the pain of cauterizing a wound was greater than he’d imagined, and he prayed to a power he didn’t know for time to pass quickly and to be able to forget.
23
September arrived with its crystal lights that flowed like clear water and it matured all of the feelings and sharpened internal reckonings, after a summer spent in tense frivolity, the city prepared to wrap itself in the melancholy of this extraordinary season that had not yet lost its cheerfulness.
Hikmet Bey began playing the piano again with a sudden enthusiasm whose source he couldn’t understand, he spent his days at the piano, playing with mad desire; he thought nothing when he played, he forgot everything, it was as if he expected his disordered feelings to be filtered through that forgetting, for each of them to settle in him after being distilled in a still made of crystal light by the sounds of ivory.
In the first days his fingers had difficulty responding to his demands like traitors attempting to conceal a truth, sometimes they struck the keys more weakly than necessary, sometimes more heavily than they should, they couldn’t keep up with the measure, the sweet-souled sounds were broken by unpracticed cracks, then the sound started to flow like light.
He stopped playing the piano only to speak with Dilevser and to make love to Hediye, the traces left on his soul by this lovemaking and these conversations were reflected in the music he played.
That he returned to the piano, which had become a symbol of the extraordinary love he’d experienced with Mehpare Hanım and the scars of which he always carried, for the first time since he’d separated from her, that he dared to do this seemed to him like a sign of many changes, and of an ending and a beginning.
Sometimes Dilevser didn’t leave after their conversation, she stayed, sat in a corner, and listened to him play the piano. Hediye, who spent every minute, day and night, waiting outside the library door, tried to fathom her master’s mood from the sound of the piano, when he played sad pieces, she became saddened as well, and when he played enthusiastic pieces her heart ached.
It fell upon Hikmet Bey to play the role of the father at Rukiye’s wedding. Even though Mehpare Hanım was invited, she didn’t come and made the excuse that she was ill, because of the coldness of the invitation and the difficulty of her position, she’d wanted Rukiye to come see her before the wedding, but her daughter didn’t go.
Although Sheikh Efendi didn’t come, his presence was felt throughout, traces of him were everywhere, from the waterfront mansion he’d prepared for the young bride and groom in just a week to the helpers he sent to the mansion to work there permanently and to shoulder the preparations for the wedding, to the gifts for the bride from various tekkes and zawiyas, from the ulema and even from the palace. Mihrişah Sultan and Tevfik Bey’s family played significant roles as well, but next to the sacred harmony of Sheikh Efendi’s power their presence was drab.
Mihrişah Sultan prepared a wedding in the garden of the waterfront mansion that would be remembered for years, she cut no corners, she even managed to have a wedding dress brought from Paris even though there was so little time.
Despite all of the splendor, the melancholy shadow of the deaths, whose pain was still fresh, cast a shadow on the wedding, which wasn’t as cheerful as weddings usually are. Rukiye didn’t pay any attention to the concealed malaise of the wedding, perhaps she didn’t even notice; what she realized was that she was wrapped in the love and security she’d been looking for since childhood; she felt that Sheikh Efendi, her husband, Mihrişah Sultan, Hikmet Bey, and her brother Nizam, who’d come from Paris for the wedding, all loved her, and she had no fear that she might lose this love. She grasped what Sheikh Efendi had meant when he told her about peace. The only thing that bothered her, though she didn’t say this to anyone, not even to herself, was that Mehpare Hanım wasn’t there, or rather that she’d become the kind of mother who couldn’t attend her daughter’s wedding.
That night Hikmet Bey did everything in his power to make Rukiye happy, he took an interest in all the guests, he felt what it was like to be a father whose daughter had become a bride and noticed that he’d come to another turning point in his life, that he was a bit further removed from his youth and its freedom, that life had become a bit heavier.
He felt this the day before the wedding, when he and Nizam met at his mansion for the first time in ages.
When Nizam came in, he stood restlessly and walked toward his son, who was a young man now and looked at him anxiously to see the expression on his face.
His son smiled cheerfully like a person who’d never known sadness and never would, put out his hand, and said, “Bonjour, Papa.” When he saw the light and love in his face, he embraced his son instead of shaking hands, pulling him and pressing him to his chest. Nizam was not accustomed to displays of affection, he awkwardly submitted to his father’s embrace, but he wanted it to end as soon as possible.
Hikmet Bey said, “You’ve grown up.”
When he said this he felt as if his voice resembled his father’s voice, that it was almost exactly the same. They ate together, they made small talk, Nizam told his father about Paris, told him many amusing stories and jokes. As Hikmet Bey listened to his son, he realized sadly that though he would always love him, they would never have a deep relationship, that they were from two different ages, two different centuries. They would not have big fights, they wouldn’t have differences of opinion, they would love each other only as father and son; they would have neither a friendship nor an enmity that would leave a trace.
In any event, despite his mother’s insistence, Nizam didn’t stay in Istanbul after the wedding and returned to Paris with Mihrişah Sultan.
That wedding night, perhaps because he was affected by the realization that he was a father whose daughter was getting married, perhaps because seeing that his son had grown up made him aware of the passage of time, Hikmet Bey experienced something else strange. When he raised his head and looked at his mother to say something, he saw something in Mihrişah Sultan’s face that had not been there a moment earlier, that strange and indefinable mist, like the thin and transparent mist that appears on the sea on summer days, that appears on the faces of women who are growing older. Nothing was different, the lines were the same, her beauty was there, but it was as if, with a shift in her facial expression, her muscles revealed that they were having difficulty carrying her lines.
To understand what had created this impression that she was getting older, he stared at his mother and examined all the lines of her face one by one, he saw nothing in the details that was different from before, but in the whole there was the shadow of old age, when Mihrişah Sultan noticed that her son, who was looking at her so carefully, had gone pale, she asked in an irritable rush if he was well.
“I’m fine, why do you ask?”
“You suddenly went pale.”
Hikmet Bey rushed to answer for fear that his mother might realize what he was thinking about.
“I’m fine, I just felt dizzy for a moment.”
After Mihrişah Sultan looked at her son carefully, she smiled that magnificent smile that contained so many meanings and said in a sad tone:
“I’m getting older, isn’t that it?”
“No, where did that come from?”
Mihrişah Sultan sighed, she knew that it would make her sadder to be consoled about this.
“I knew it would happen one day, in recent years I’ve expected it to come almost every day. Now it has come, it arrived suddenly. People think that things like this happen slowly, then they look and see that they’ve already happened . . .”
She stopped and leaned toward Hikmet Bey.
“But do you know, I’m not as sad as I thought I’d be, that is, I’ve become accus
tomed to the idea. But of course I’m not happy about it either.”
She smiled.
“No, no, don’t worry, I’m fine. Maybe, who knows, if you lose something you’ve been worrying about losing your whole life, maybe you relax. Whatever, we’ll see. What a lovely bride Rukiye is, isn’t she?”
They never spoke about this matter again, Hikmet Bey could see that they shouldn’t, that it would be kinder not to console his mother. But Hikmet Bey was more saddened than his mother that this beauty had grown old, the shadow of old age was like a tiny cloud appearing in a summer sky and signaling a downpour. All of his life, Mihrişah Sultan’s beauty had given him confidence, it had protected him as much as it could from Mehpare Hanım, when a shadow was cast on this beauty, he knew that he had lost one of his shelters.
After the wedding Mihrişah Sultan returned to Paris at once with Nizam, and Rukiye moved into her new waterfront mansion. Hikmet Bey felt a bit lonelier.
This loneliness grew steadily, enveloped almost all of his days. Just like someone in pitch-black darkness walking toward the only light he saw, he walked toward the only light he saw in this loneliness, toward Dilevser, now, instead of feeling a desire to be admired by her, he talked to her, shared his problems, sometimes he would get himself the same book she was reading so they could read it at the same time, to find the warmth of closeness in the chest that had been created by his former desire, to find friendship, and to share his thoughts and feelings. Perhaps because Dilevser had become accustomed to Hikmet Bey over time, perhaps because this time the man approached her with genuine desire and need, the young girl demolished the walls between them one by one, stopped sheltering behind her modesty, and revealed the frightful treasure she’d concealed so stubbornly, revealed the intelligence that almost terrified Hikmet Bey,
During every conversation they had, Hikmet Bey was surprised by how that fragile body and that calm voice carried what was perhaps the most magnificent intelligence he’d ever encountered, each time he was frightened that this intelligence would crush and destroy her. Then he was able to grasp why she read the way she did, with an almost frenzied need, he realized that she had to feed the intelligence she carried, it was like a hungry lion that she had to feed in order not to be torn apart by it.
