‘Would you like some tea?’ my wife called through the door.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I still haven’t finished this one.’
‘You’ve left the light on,’ she said, as she shut the door behind her.
I got up and turned it off.
I went back over to the window, looking down at the street as I drank my tea. The shutters had stopped clanking by now, and the simit and salep vendors had drifted off, to make way for white-capped men selling lottery tickets.
‘Nothing has changed,’ I said to myself. I drank what was left of my tea and was heading into the kitchen when the doorbell rang. I opened the door; it was my son. He looked surprised. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You’ve washed all the soap off your face!’ I was more surprised than he was. I stood there stunned as he came in and took off his shoes.
‘Here are your Perma-Sharp razor blades,’ he said, holding out the box. ‘Sorry for taking so long, but the shop was closed. I had to go all the way to the other end of the street.’
‘Did you get a paper?’ asked my wife from the kitchen.
‘Yes,’ said my son. ‘You’ll never guess what it says.’
‘What does it say?’
‘A girl’s been kidnapped by a bear!’
Sincan, 13.3.1990–25.9.1993
GLOSSARY
ayran: a water and yoghurt drink similar to buttermilk.
Azrael: the Angel of Death in Islam.
bismillah: Arabic for ‘in the name of God’. The first word of many prayers and used as a stand-in for them.
divan saz: a seven-stringed lute-like instrument.
halay: a folk dance popular at weddings, in which the dancers link fingers or arms and dance in a line.
hamam: a Turkish bath; a large public bathhouse.
keşkek: a traditional wedding food made from beef or mutton and wheat.
Mecnun: a romantic figure from a Persian folk tale who went insane after learning that his love had been married off to another man.
menemen: a dish of scrambled eggs with tomatoes, peppers, spices and sometimes onion.
muhtar: the democratically elected headman responsible for the people of a village or neighbourhood.
rakı: an aniseed-flavoured drink similar to ouzo or arak, typically drunk with water and ice.
salep: an orchid-flavoured sweet, hot drink.
simit: a ring-shaped, crunchy type of bread.
tarhana: a soup made of wheat, yoghurt and vegetables.
watchman: a person tasked with preventing crime and keeping the civil peace in a village or neighbourhood.
yufka: a thin, unleavened bread.
Zulfiqar: the name of a legendary sword owned by the Caliph Ali.
zurna: a large wind instrument typically accompanied by a drum.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Hasan Ali Toptaş is one of Turkey’s top writers. His short story collections include The Identity of a Laugh, The Whispers of the Nobodies and Solitudes. His novels have won the Çankaya Literature Prize, the Culture Ministry Prize, the Yunus Nadi Novel Prize, the Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize, the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and the Turkish Writers’ Union Great Novel Prize. He now lives in Ankara. He has been translated into Dutch, French, Finnish, Swedish, German and Korean. Solitudes has been made into a play and Shadowless was made into a film in 2008.
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATORS
Maureen Freely is a novelist and journalist who contributes to the Guardian and the Independent. She translated Orhan Pamuk’s recent novels from Turkish into English. She grew up in Turkey and now lives in England.
John Angliss won the inaugural British Council’s Young Translators’ Prize for prose in 2012. He lives in Ankara.
Also available by Hasan Ali Toptaş
Reckless
Thirty years after completing his military service, Ziya flees one of Turkey’s great sprawling cities to seek a serene existence in a dream-like village. Kenan – an old friend from the army – is there to greet him. However, the village does not provide the total isolation Ziya yearns for and he is forced back through the tangled web of his memory in search of his lost family and the reason why Kenan feels so extravagantly in his debt. Reckless masterfully blurs the boundaries between memory and reality to create a gripping tale that introduces a major writer to English-language readers.
‘Reckless took me to a seemingly unfamiliar part of the planet and then showed me that there was nothing unfamiliar about it ... I am deeply grateful to Hasan Ali Toptaş for having told me this story and look forward to others from him’ Nadeem Aslam
‘Challenging, innovative, deeply humane’ Times Literary Supplement
‘An extraordinary writer ... A master of language and construction’ Hürriyet
Click here to order
First published in 1995 in Turkey as Golgesizler by Can Yayinlari, Istanbul
First published in Great Britain 2017
This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Hassan Ali Toptaş, 1995
English language translation © Maureen Freely and John Angliss 2017
Illustrations © Abigail Daker, 2017
Hassan Ali Toptaş has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
This book has been published with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey in the framework of the TEDA project.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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