Many and Many a Year Ago

by Selcuk Altun

  SELÇUK ALTUN

  MANY AND MANY A YEAR AGO

  Translated from Turkish by

  Clifford and Selhan Endres

  TELEGRAM

  eISBN: 978-1-84659-109-9

  First published in Turkish as Senelerce Senelerce Ev veldi

  by Sel Yayıncılık, Istanbul, Turkey

  First English edition published by Telegram, 2009

  This eBook edition published 2011

  Copyright © Selçuk Altun, 2009 and 2011

  Translation copyright © Clifford and Selhan Endres, 2009 and 2011

  The right of Selçuk Altun to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  TELEGRAM

  26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH

  www.telegrambooks.com

  What is to come will not cause us to mourn for what is gone, says my inner voice. Should I trust it? Does eluding death mean losing the will to live? Is it a reward or punishment? My inner voice warned me once too about my passion for music. It was when I was five and lost in a solo on that unearthly flute, the ney. Turning to my aunt, I said, “It’s Allah Baba talking, isn’t it?”

  I

  Our neighborhood clung fiercely to the slope of Z. Cemetery. Maybe that’s how we managed to dodge the city’s wrathful whimsies. Out of respect for the cemetery’s silhouette the crooked and careless but god-fearing buildings stood a mere three stories high. In return Z.’s resident winds refrained from harassing the L. neighborhood. Our bazaar consisted of little shops lining two sides of the sorry street, which was prone to flooding. The residents sighed for the lack of a bank or a bar whenever they saw one in one of those cowboy movies. The pharmacist considered himself the street’s VIP, priding himself on living in a shanty house in neighboring Ç. As he faded away in the evenings on his motorbike, the factory workers spilled out of the coffeehouses to be replaced by the night shift of gravediggers. In that labyrinth of streets I knew so well I scarcely remember the echo of laughter. It was as if despair were a local disease. I even dreaded the gaze of the babies who crawled around outside their houses, and wondered whether a dream of being rescued from this pit could persist.

  While the luckless L. was squeezed from on high by that high-society cemetery, a garbage dump nibbled away at it from below. It was on muddy Selvili Street, running between Z. and the main street, that I squandered my childhood. At the head of the street, on the top floor of Zevk Apartments, lived Aunt Ikbal, a retired matron, and her husband, Celal. She was the neighborhood’s needle-jabber, my father’s sweet-and-sour older sister, while her husband was its leader elect.

  We lived on the middle floor of this woeful building. My aunt had been the go-between for my father, whom she called Humpty Hasan Ali, and my mother. When I heard that I’d come to earth in dire straits during the fifth year of their marriage, I thought it only right to apologize.

  “If it hadn’t been for me,” my aunt liked to say, “your name would have been Saint Yashar, my dear Kemal.”

  My earliest childhood memory is of watching my father marching on the spot in front of the mirror while he shaved, while at the same time mimicking the sound of every instrument he could muster. At first I was embarrassed by his diva performances, but soon I’d memorized the essence of every instrument, from tuba to trumpet. He would break into a high-pitched whine as he washed his face and with that the show would come to an end. I’d walk away glowing with the satisfaction of having watched a clown and a magician at work. Before I was born, my father had played the tuba as a sergeant-major in the local Air Force band. He retired when he became paralyzed in his right arm. I could hardly believe the respect that people paid him as we walked through the bazaar, almost as if he were an imam. Despite the fact that he was a tall fellow, they never tagged him with the usual nicknames. I was disconcerted, in fact, at how well he wore the mantle of Assistant Cemetery Director of Z.

  My mother was a fragile woman due to her orphanage upbringing. It infuriated me when people referred to her as “Servet the exotic beauty.” Before her marriage she’d interned as a nurse at the hospital where my aunt worked. It was only after two miscarriages that she managed to deliver, and because of her poor health she had to quit her job. I was at first annoyed by the way she continued to defer to my aunt as if she were still the boss. When she’d finished her housework she’d sit in front of the TV and, if there was nothing on worth watching, start knitting. She seldom interfered in my affairs, yet observed my aunt’s and father’s excessive fondness for me with some anxiety. The warmth of her distant smile was always enough for me.

  The middle floor, with its boring curtain-washing rituals, was ours. The other two floors belonged to my aunt, who constantly looked for opportunities to say, “We had to work three jobs and were indebted to the mafia just to have a roof over our heads.” In my childhood nightmares the building grew angry with me before collapsing, leaving us homeless in the middle of winter. My retired uncle’s office was in an alcove on the ground floor; every so often its door would open softly and benevolently. To the left of that, where the curtains remained resolutely shut, was the cubicle where my aunt administered injections and meted out pills to the neighbors. She ceremoniously handed over half of what she earned to my father to be put towards my education fund. This transaction, performed always in my presence, embarrassed me to the point where sometimes I had to fight off imaginary cramps. My aunt’s son had died in childbirth, and she had disowned her daughter Iclal for marrying an Alevi classmate while a student at the College of Education, so I grew up as a nephew who meant more to her than a son.

  My grandfather, who died thanks to the lack of a doctor in a village close to Mount Ararat, was apparently an enlightened teacher. My aunt mourned her father for days, then was shaken from her grief by my father bursting into prayer at the cemetery one day when his arm miraculously healed. With his arm whole, his work tempo became frightening. He gave flute and mandolin lessons to the untalented children of neighborhoods that took two bus transfers to reach, besides offering gilt-work courses to the rich women of Moda on the other side of the Bosphorus. On Saturdays I would go with him and attend English classes in the building where he taught. As far as my father was concerned, even waiting tables was too good for somebody who didn’t have elementary English. I understood very well the importance of education to my surviving L., and therefore willingly accepted his fanatic supervision. I was subjected to culture-overload, assignment-checking and oral examinations. I did crossword puzzles, watched documentaries, and read the magazines my teachers recommended. In second grade I memorized the capital cities of innumerable countries—no matter if I confused the Swedes with the Swiss. By third grade I knew the Taklamakan Desert as well as the Bursa Plain; by fourth grade I could discern the Arabic and Persian words that so bedeviled Turkish.

  On being told my marks, Aunt Ikbal would remark, “Blue-eyed like your mother, tall like
your father, but smart like your aunt, my Kemal.”

  My father bought my underwear and administered my baths until I finished primary school. When the time came for the soapy torture of my hair and head, he would whisper, “Close your eyes and imagine you’re a pilot flying a fighter jet at twice the speed of sound.” For him there was no calling more noble than that of the military, no rank higher than a pilot’s. I’d keep my eyes carefully shut and visualize myself in one of those shark-like vehicles until the command came to open them again. He combed my hair with a comb dipped in lemon juice to make it shine. Each time it raked through my hair I felt the pressure of a new expectation: my son will become a fighter pilot; my smart Kemal will become an officer; Kemal Kuray, by the grace of God, will rise to the rank of general …

  *

  Isn’t it wonderfully ironic for a sign to proclaim that cemetery administration is the job of the Ministry of Health? My father shared his office, which was next to the ground-floor entrance of that soulless building, with two assistants. I never tired of sitting there watching people pass by. Most of the women workers covered their heads. Their shapeless garments and sullen faces were inseparable from the funereal setting. The men’s constant quarreling irritated me, but if I had a good reason not to go back home I could visit the gravediggers’ shed and drink tea. By and by I got used to the graves all lined up in orderly rows. Respectful of my marble environment, I wandered among them as if they were an exhibition of sculptures.

  The most colorful children of the neighborhood were the wildest ones. I was forbidden to go near them. And they never came near me, out of fear of my aunt. The most exciting activity of the group I finally managed to socialize with was playing five-a-side football for a Coke. One day, when they assigned me to the lowly position of goalie, I stormed off the field and, saying a Bismillah under my breath, that prayer to mark an auspicious beginning, I slipped into the cemetery through the back gate. I stopped to catch my breath at the top, feeling as satisfactorily thrilled as the older boys did when they were admitted to the amusement park. For a talented kid who talked to himself in the mirror and built cowboy towns out of old house slippers, inventing solitary games in a cemetery was easy.

  There I arranged quests to find, first, the most majestic cypress, then the most grandiose charitable monument, and finally, growing really excited, the most elegant tombstone and epitaph. Eliminating the losers one by one, I picked those that registered the longest and the shortest lives and bore the prettiest and the funniest names. I disliked graves that marked the birth date by the lunar calendar and the death date by the solar calendar more than those that flaunted unrhymed and unintelligible verse. I worried that—God forbid!—an infidel might see those dates and laugh at the idea of 650-year-old people. I can’t remember now why I abandoned my project to write to the children of famous businessmen and artists on the matter of their fathers’ untended graves.

  A marble block as white as a sugar cube attracted my attention one day. At the top left corner of a slab resembling a thin pillow was written, simply, “ASLI.” A tender but irresistible force seemed to embrace me, and I shivered. My head ached in a pleasant way. I felt tired. With a murmured Bismillah I sat down at the foot of Aslı’s grave. As I did, the ezan rose up from the city’s 3,000 mosques. I bowed my head until it was finished. When I plucked up the courage to face those four letters again my heart beat faster and I glowed inwardly. The size of the grave told me that it belonged to someone my own age. I stood up with the satisfaction of having found my first sweetheart.

  I knew that Aslı would enter my dreams that night in her long snow-white gown. I didn’t mind the halo of light obscuring her face like a veil. It would be enough for her to say, “Wait patiently for me, Kemal.” When I awoke in the morning to the ezan, an angel named Aslı had come into my life and I vowed to remain forever faithful to her, my sweetheart, the Aslı of my soul. We popular boys of the fourth grade were all in love with our teacher, Miss Nimet. I broke the happy news to them that I was now removed from the competition. I didn’t mind that they doubted the existence of their future sister-in-law Aslı, whom they would never be able to see in any case.

  My hero was the Pied Piper. If I happened to hear the sound of a flute or a zither I would freeze as if bewitched. For some time I believed that if I observed the sky carefully I would actually see the notes fly by. So as not to waste the slightest fragment of music, I would close my eyes and put all the cells of my body on high alert. Baritones, sopranos, the peddlers’ cries, the ezan, the twittering of birds, the droning of bees, all moved me, even the rhythmical braying of donkeys. My childhood dream was to own a real transistor radio, but alas I had only toys and my imagination. If my father, who was also my homework inspector, ever let me touch his clunky radio, he would observe that “the best music is what a person himself composes.” And “no music is more profound than the sky-shattering roar of a plane flying at 15,000 feet at twice the speed of sound.” I found this nonsense poetic for quite a time.

  I liked the fat boy named Nafiz who sat next to me in English lessons. During the breaks he would copy my homework, contributing his own mistakes, in return for which he let me listen to his radio on headphones. When we graduated from primary school he wangled an apprenticeship for me at his uncle’s music store. My father was okay with me working as long as he could confiscate half my salary. I woke up happy on those calm summer mornings and ran to the bus stop at the edge of Z.

  Cisum Music specialized in classical and world music and had six sleepwalkers for employees. My job was to stand in for whoever was taking his annual vacation. In almost no time I became the mascot of the store. That first season I did everything except wait on customers. I recorded the immortal music of many world-famous musicians, starting with Elvis Presley. Aret, our classical-music man who sported an artificial arm, used to laugh at how I pronounced Engelbert Humperdinck. The real prize of my job, however, was to spend time with the cassette player, which we were forbidden to turn off during business hours. Aret was the first to notice my passion for music. He would say, if Tchaikovsky or Wagner was playing, “Don’t turn up your nose, kid. Unless you get these guys, you’ll never be an authentic music lover.”

  It upset me when the boss found fault with everyone’s work. “Even the composers on the album covers frown when he shows up,” said Aret. Summoned to the boss’s office one day, I was afraid I’d be fired before I could even ask him what the word “authentic” meant. But I wasn’t fired. What’s more, I got my July salary five days early, and he gave me the good news that I was welcome to work at Cisum the following summer and even during school breaks.

  “Kemal, my young friend,” he said, “if you want to earn a few tips in dollars and hear a bit of music played now and then, why don’t you drop by my pal Hayri Abi’s place this evening?”

  It was rumored that our building had been inherited by my boss’s elderly Greek wife. I’d been to the second floor many times because we used it as a storeroom. The third floor had a door with a plaque on it in French that nobody could decode; nor did they know why the door was always locked. Whenever various coquettish girls fluttered their way up to “my pal Hayri Abi” on the fourth floor, our boss would veer off up after them. I could never understand why a chorus of giggles then filled the shop.

  After sorting out the pop CDs that were squeezed in with the Mozarts, I confronted the heavy door of the Ispilandit Apartments and managed, on my second attempt, to push it half open. Immediately a wave of melancholy music pulled at me like a magnet. Magical violins seemed to be dueling with one other, producing a melody that cascaded down the stairs like a waterfall. I could feel it ease the musty smell catching at my throat. This was how, with my hand moving dubiously toward the doorbell, I met the meaning of my life—baroque music—moments before meeting the hero of my youth, Hayri Abi.

  In the five seconds it took him to turn down the volume and unlock the steel door, I had an inkling of the unusual messenger work I was abou
t to be assigned. The imperious long-haired creature that appeared before me was in his thirties. I thought I’d seen his type in the cowboy movies. The only clothing he had on was a pair of red and blue shorts. He brought me apricot juice and I felt that he appreciateed the way I looked around the room in amazement. Even in the movies I’d never seen a room like this, with its gray walls and red floor. I would have been impressed by the stereo, which looked like the skyscrapers you see in cartoons, if it hadn’t been for the black guitar on the glass table. When I caught my first glimpse of that noble instrument I realized that what I really wanted was to be a musician. But while I could always save up to buy a radio, to buy a guitar I would need a really solid reason.

  He had me sit on the bamboo divan. I was to call him “Abi”—“older brother”—and think of him as such. He dropped a tape of Chris Rea in the cassette player. I didn’t like it a lot when Hayri Abi began whispering to me about my responsibilities because it sounded like he was giving me orders. But when he called me “Kemo” on my way out, I felt as honored as a bodyguard who has just been given his code name.

  I started carrying bags whose contents I knew nothing about to the well-to-do districts of the city every other day, sometimes twice a day. I received a “Bravo” and $5 from Hayri Abi when I brought back the sealed envelopes handed to me by those tense young folk who seemed to relax a bit on seeing me. I memorized the addresses on the lists he gave me and then tore them up. I didn’t take the usual taxis. I paid no heed to Aret when he said, “That pimp is making you deliver sex videos.” Hayri Abi laughed and said, “It’s just because Aret can’t jerk off. Eros took revenge on him by tearing off his right arm.” When he wasn’t yelling into the phone in various languages, I would wait impatiently for him to ask, “How about a little concert, Kemo?” The way he played left-handed guitar was amazing, but his repertoire never changed. “I’m going to sing for you the best ten love songs in the world,” he would say. Then he’d close his eyes while he played—“Over the Rainbow”, “Moon River”, “Autumn Leaves” … I often thought of asking Aslı why love songs were all so sad, but I always forgot, maybe because L. was there like a bogeyman to greet me every evening after work.