* * *
—
Kato knocked both knees against the bottom of the table, spilling his çay. He cursed. Ali, a cigarette in one hand, his arms folded, and the fingers of his other hand digging into his ribs, watched indifferently as the brown liquid ran over the table toward him. He pushed his chair away from the table and looked on as Kato fetched napkins and mopped up; he watched the gray paper soaking up the tea and Kato trying to rub the splashes off his white trousers. Kato looked down at himself helplessly; then he looked at Ali, sat down, and reached for the half-empty glass.
“You can’t go,” he said, knocking back what was left of his tea. Black triangles of tea leaf clung to his lower lip.
“Oh yes, I can. Just watch me.”
“No, you can’t.”
“If you give me back my passport, I can.”
From the Molla Aşkı Teras you could look out over almost the whole of the European side of the city. Ali stared at the Bosporus Bridge, twinkling like a string of colored fairy lights. In the distance he could hear a helicopter, circling the city, and the ground was trembling from the muezzin’s call, which sounded closer than usual. “All for nothing? The whole trip?”
“Looks like it.”
“And us? Was that all for nothing too?”
“Can I have my passport back, please? Or have you already sold it?”
“You don’t care about us?”
“Not anymore.”
“You’re lying.”
“My passport—”
“You could still find Anton.”
“Now you’re lying. Nobody ever really believed that—least of all you.”
There was movement in the café. Chairs were pushed back; people gathered around the television, talking, their lighters clicking in sync. It was growing louder by the minute. The weekend buzz, Ali thought.
“And what if you’ve actually been looking for something else all this time?”
“What, like you?”
“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t know who you are.”
“You think I know who I am? You think you know?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I’d have to look in my passport, but you won’t let me have it.”
Phones rang, just the odd one at first, then a whole orchestra. People picked up, yelled into their handsets, spat on the floor, waved their arms around. A man cried out; Ali glanced at him.
“And the T? The injections?” Kato drew his attention back to the table.
“An experiment.”
“Everything’s a game for you.”
“What do you want to hear? That I suddenly know who I am and what it’s all about, now that I inject myself with the meaning of life in the form of testosterone?”
“If you leave, I’ll kill myself.”
Ali lit another cigarette and watched the crowd; it was heaving, like an anthill. Something was going on, but he couldn’t work out what.
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you don’t care about me anymore.”
Juddering backs and flailing arms blocked the television from view. He couldn’t see the screen—didn’t know what everyone was so keyed up about.
“I’m going. Keep the passport; I’ll get out of here somehow.” Ali stood up and headed for the television.
“God, you’re such a cunt,” Kato said, and began to cry.
Ali looked down at his twisted face, surprised by his sharp tone of voice. He sat down again, moved close to Kato and whispered: “Is there some kind of conspiracy, or is that just a standard phrase you all trot out? Someone once left those exact same words on my answering machine.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m already responsible for the suicide of one asshole who left my answering machine full of messages saying he’d kill himself if I didn’t spend the rest of my life holding his hand. I don’t need another asshole threatening me, okay? If you’re seriously planning to off yourself, do me a favor and don’t call me beforehand, please. That would be nice of you. I don’t think I could hack it a second time.”
Kato’s eyes were glassy; he wiped his tears away with the back of his hand and stared into space. Ali tried to keep his voice as low as possible; the pressure on his lungs was making him stutter.
“He fucked up my entire life, and before that he fucked up my mother’s life and the result was me and my brother, who then got to take the rap for the fact that they’d fucked each other up. But that wasn’t enough for him; he was determined to put the blame for his death on me before he did himself in, to make sure I’d never have the chance of a life of any kind. So spare me your suicide threats. What was it you said? You put it so nicely. Everything that could happen to me already has. Leave me alone now. I have to go.”
People had begun to leave the café in a rush; some of them knocked over plastic chairs on their way out and didn’t stop to pick them up. When Ali reached the television, only an old man was left standing there, smoking; he held a tesbih in his hand and was pressing it between finger and thumb, bead by bead. Ali stared at the screen and tried to make sense of things. The presenter was reading a text, her face white as a sheet. Ali’s Turkish wasn’t good enough to understand the words, but it was good enough to understand that the woman was being forced to read them. Uniformed men stood in the background. Ali glanced at the old man next to him. His lips were moving soundlessly. Then he looked at Ali and said, “Darbe,” his eyes resting on the stubble above Ali’s upper lip.
The silence roared in his ears. A phone started to ring. It was only then that Ali realized there was no one else in the café; even Kato was gone. It was another moment before he realized that the phone was his own. He took the call.
“Where are you?” Elyas yelled.
“In Balat,” said Ali. “Where are you?”
“In Berlin.”
Ali’s mind was awhirl. He didn’t ask why Elyas was calling from Berlin. He knew he ought to say, “I’m fine, don’t worry,” so he spoke the words mechanically and waited for Elyas to explain why he’d had to say them—what was going on. Elyas asked: “Are you by yourself?”
And when Ali didn’t reply, he said calmly: “I’ll walk you through town.”
* * *
—
People were pouring out of the houses, pushing their way down the streets, avoiding eye contact, muttering, hurrying to get to the shops and greengrocers, jostling and snapping at each other. In a crowd of people outside a baker’s shop, a young couple were arguing. The woman was saying it was embarrassing, stocking up in the shops at two in the morning; the man shouted: “If the old folks are doing it, they’ll have their reasons.”
Ali pushed his way through the crowd, getting caught on people’s bags. His phone slipped out of his hand and he crawled about among sandals and slippers on his hands and knees, feeling for it under old women’s skirts. When he found it, Elyas was still there.
“You mustn’t do that. If you drop me like that, I don’t know what’s going on with you.”
“I don’t know either.”
A muezzin set up a wail, then the next began; they interrupted one another, yelling.
“I can’t understand what they’re singing, but it isn’t God is great.”
“I can’t hear. It’s too early for morning prayers.”
“They sing when they feel like it, anyway. They did away with time long ago. Do you know, there’s a muezzin in Tarlabaşı I always imagine as a kind of Elvis. An Elvis look-alike with glittery silver sunglasses. A bit like you in that picture from the photo booth. Do you remember—those photos of us after that party, where you got me out of a fight? I still have mine. Do you still have yours?”
Elyas said nothing. He was probably staring at the news; Ali could hear the hum of the television and Elyas breathing fast.
“Have I ever said thank you to you, by the way? Do you realize that I’ve known you for longer than anyone else in the world? You’re the only person I’ve known this long. Except Anton. And Valya.” Ali felt a sudden urge to laugh. “I’ve just thought of that time you pulled my dad off me—do you remember? His friend had ratted on me—told him he’d seen me carrying on with a girl on the street, and he burst in and went straight for me and you pushed him out of the flat. You’ve always protected me. You’re always there, aren’t you? You’re always there for me and I don’t notice. I don’t go with you when you come to pick me up, don’t listen to you when you’re worried about me, but you always get me out of these situations I land myself in. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Elyas said nothing. Ali could hear voices coming from the TV in the living room—the room Elyas had offered Ali, the room he’d got ready for Ali, mending the door handle and vacuuming the floor, so that he’d feel happy, instead of lying on the mattress every night, catching dust balls, and then running off and getting lost in a country with no solid ground.
“Where are you now?” Elyas clearly hadn’t been listening.
“I’m walking along the promenade in Fatih; there’s almost no one here. Something’s on fire over on the Asian side.”
“The army’s cordoned off the bridges, but it doesn’t matter; you can take one of the little ones over the Golden Horn and then go up the side streets to Cihangir. You must get to Cemal’s. Do you know the way?”
A helicopter was circling the water. The rotor blades felt like an axe in Ali’s head and the connection kept cutting out; he caught only snatches. Cihangir, he heard, and Cemal’s. Howls echoed through the streets like the cry of a pack of dogs.
“I’m scared,” Ali said into his dead phone. Elyas was gone; there was nothing at the other end of the line. Now he could say what he liked.
“If I survive this, I’ll go and see Mum; I want to talk to her. She knows nothing about me—and I know nothing about her. And I’ll go and see Emma and Danya and Shura and Etya—everyone who’s still alive. I have such a lot to ask them. They’re more or less strangers to me.”
Elyas’s voice cut in; he’d been talking all the time, translating the news for Ali: “Turkish armed forces have. The whole government. Of the state to. The constitutional. Order. Human rights and liberty. The state which. And public security. That have been damaged.”
Elyas translated slowly, dragging out the words, his voice distorted. The static between the choppy phrases was getting louder and louder, insinuating itself into Ali’s ear.
“What does it all mean?” Ali yelled. “What’s going on?”
Then his brain signalled: “Run!” He didn’t know whether Elyas had said the word or whether he’d only imagined it.
The static grew even louder; it sounded as if someone were scrunching up tinfoil in Ali’s ear. Elyas really was gone now.
The muddy green water of the Golden Horn seemed to be electrically charged; the boats were sparkling. He looked up at the metro bridge and saw people walking along the tracks. He kept out of their way; he didn’t know what the red T-shirts with the three white crescent moons signified—danger or rescue. He suddenly knew nothing. But the outlines of things were growing clearer and sharper, cutting into his skin—he could feel the city closing in like a tunnel. He took the underpass to the little park and came to Galata Bridge. The fishermen had got into a kind of scrum and were holding someone trapped in their midst. A knife flashed—or at least Ali thought that’s what he saw, but perhaps it was only the fishing lines. He ran past, without stopping to look.
The double doors of the hotel stood open; people were clustered around the television in the foyer. Ali ran down İstiklal, through a group of girls in shorts and red T-shirts; the polyester cloth of their flags hit Ali in the face. He passed cash machines, crowded as flypaper. Banknotes were flying through the air; the muezzins set up another wail.
A soldier with a rifle charged out of a side street into Ali, almost knocking his arm off; he was followed by two, four, seven men, armed with nothing but their hands. Ali stopped and watched them push the soldier up against the wall of a restaurant and set on him; he couldn’t have been older than eighteen—maybe only sixteen; he looked twelve. Then more people appeared, more and more, from all sides. Ali heard dogs barking. He had the feeling he was bleeding all over his body, but when he looked down at himself he seemed to be in one piece—just covered in dust, with a sore arm. Cihangir, he thought, and carried on running.
In the narrow doorway between Cemal’s and the empty butcher’s shop, an old woman was standing, staring fixedly in front of her. Ali hurried past her, then stopped to catch his breath, and when he went back and looked into the woman’s face, he recognized the fortune-teller who’d told him the African tale about truth. He looked around for the rabbit in the cage, but it wasn’t there. The woman reached out a hand to Ali, but he turned and ran up the stairs as fast as he could.
Cemal opened the door and smiled. He let Ali in, moving so gently that Ali almost asked him did he knew what was going on out there and why was he so calm, but the television was on, beaming images of charging crowds and keyed-up, pale faces speaking silently into microphones. Uncle Cemal seemed unperturbed. On a stool in the corner, Mustafa Bey was sitting in a crumpled suit, his head in his hands. He looked up when Ali came in and his eyes were red from crying. Ali said nothing. He looked uncomprehendingly at Mustafa with his chewed-up lips, and then into Cemal’s soft, still face. He sat down at the table and Cemal brought him a glass of rakı without a word. It was warm and smelled of aniseed. Cemal handed Mustafa a glass too. Mustafa gave a loud sob, took the rakı and went back to staring at the floor. He put the glass down without drinking from it and buried his face in his hands. Ali sipped his own rakı and glanced across at him. The helicopter blades were still beating against the inside of his forehead, but although he could hear them, he could no longer feel them as intensely. Something popped in his ears.
“Why’s he crying?”
Cemal breathed out loudly through his nose; his eyes narrowed; and for the first time since Ali had stormed into his flat, he pulled a face, bunching up his features so that his eyebrows pressed down on his eyelids, his lashes melted to black bars and his lower lip pushed up his upper lip. He looked at Mustafa, huddled on the stool with his head in his hands, and then at Ali.
“The actual coup’s been underway for a long time,” he said, going to the television and turning on the sound.
Ali pulled her stool up to Cemal’s. Tanks were rolling over Atatürk airfield. He didn’t hear the news, though it was no longer on mute; he heard Cemal breathing through his open mouth. He thought he heard a clock ticking, but there was no clock in the room. He kept thinking something was walking over his feet. He squinted across at Cemal, at his curvaceous silhouette and the ash dropping from his cigarette to the floor. In the light from the television, the wrinkles in Cemal’s face looked like cracks.
Ali stared at him for a long time, feeling the urge to tell him everything he’d seen on the way to his flat—the crushed face of the twelve-year-old soldier, the flying banknotes, the flags. He wanted to ask Cemal the meaning of the three crescent moons and the queues outside the shops. Then he wondered whether he’d have to go back now—but he no longer had a passport. That was another thing he wanted to tell Cemal—that his passport had been stolen, that Kato—and he suddenly realized that his passport was no more use to him anyway. They’d had enough trouble recognizing him when he arrived in the country; now it would be impossible, even if he got shaved. His face was changed. Ali wondered if Cemal would go with him if he left, but as soon as the question had formed in his mind, he knew the answer. Cemal would never be persuaded to leave; he didn’t even go out of the flat if he could help it. He had family waiting for him in Germany, hoping he’d join them—forever, not just for a few weeks. But when it came to the question o
f leaving your country, Cemal was uncharacteristically calm: once you have a country, he’d explain, you can’t leave it; you drag it along with you wherever you go—so what was the point?
* * *
—
That made no sense to me at the time; I had no idea what it meant to “have” a country. I had no idea what it meant to live through a coup either. Cemal did; this was his third. I sat there next to this uncle of mine who wasn’t strictly speaking mine, my arms dangling at my sides, my head empty—no idea where I’d come from or where I was going. Nothing made any sense to me. Tanks were driving back and forth inside my head, then Leshchenko began to sing that song about tanks driving down to the riverbank—“Katyusha went down to the riverbank”—and I wondered where Kato was and whether he was all right.
I saw his face under the black wig and his gold-clad hip bones as he put his foot on my knee and swung himself up to the go-go pole. I saw him walk across the bar to me, as if he knew me. I saw him smoking on the pier with his head in my lap as we looked out over the Golden Horn at the boats full of people on their way to the bazaar to drink coffee at Mehmet Efendi’s. Then time went hurtling past me and I saw Kato standing in the bazaar, outside the coffee shop, watching the boys twisting paper bags with their fingers, too fast for the eye to see. I saw him between the stalls, months after all this—after us, after the unrest, later in the year when the days were cooler, maybe in October—saw him strolling around Kitap Bazaar, crouching to look at the old books with their thin covers—books he found beautiful, though he couldn’t read them. He’d trip over the tourists as they sat on the street, slurping their fruit juice, but he wouldn’t care. He’d ask to look at tavla boards in a little booth in the bazaar so that Uncle Cemal could teach him how to play, and he’d choose the one that smelled least of nail-polish remover, imagining Cemal’s happy face when he unwrapped it. He’d buy something sweet for Cemal, too, queue up at the kuruyemiş stall and ask for a hundred grams of sticky brown apricots—and it would be then, just as the fruit was being filled into a paper bag, that he’d see him: the man with a bird tattooed on his right forearm, a greenfinch with its wings stretched back. He’d be in front of him in the queue, carrying something suitcase-like in his left hand—small, almost square, and covered in a white cotton fabric. Kato would clutch the bag of apricots and catch his breath.
Beside Myself Page 31
