Many and Many a Year Ago

by Selcuk Altun

  To keep my father from taking half my earnings, I didn’t tell him about my second job. My tips accumulated at Hayri Abi’s until they grew into a fund sufficient enough to buy a good radio.

  The summer I qualified as a seventh-grader I went back to work at Cisum. Everything was as I had left it. By the next month I had a little three-band radio with headphones. I had never known a happier moment in my life. I decided not to hide the radio from my father. He was as pleased to hear my lie about how I’d bought it secondhand from the neighborhood grocer’s delivery boy as the father of a son who’s scored his first goal in a football match. At night I used to pray to Aslı not to be upset with me, before falling asleep listening to familiar tunes on unfamiliar stations.

  That summer I developed the ability to solve the tabloid crossword puzzles in half an hour and gravitated toward classical jazz. When Hayri Abi proclaimed, “You’ve got gourmet musical taste,” it was the most meaningful “Bravo” of the first fourteen of my twenty-eight years. “Music is to feel, not to understand,” he’d say. “The structures of genuine music conceal within themselves poetry, narratives, and images that can’t be put down on paper.” Perhaps these weren’t his own words, I’m not sure.

  Even if they wouldn’t let me deal with customers, I still wanted to go back to Cisum the summer after I graduated from secondary school, because Hayri Abi had told me that he was going to “orientate me” in classical music. Maybe what added to my excitement was this exotic-sounding word “orientate.” On those nights when we watched videos of symphonies conducted by famous maestros, my father assumed I was working overtime. I closed my eyes as those surly men in penguin suits let the oboe or viola perform solo. Maybe my images failed to reach the heights of dream, but in my foggy way I was inventing plots like those of The Thousand and One Nights. Opening my eyes again, I would feel calmer, but those ruthless conductors who could hush twenty wind instruments or start thirty violins whining with a single gesture still frightened me.

  Then I’d head home on city buses filled with workers returning from the night shift. I wondered whether to reflect on the fact that those poor souls would die without ever hearing the name Vivaldi was just something to bolster my ego. I was never satisfied with the Bach overtures I tried to whistle on the walk home from the bus stop. It came as no surprise that, while I was lost in my fantasies of directing the Berlin Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Aslı abandoned me.

  Hayri Abi had gradually grown more nervous. Though I wasn’t making deliveries anymore, he still gave me $5 tips, which I was slightly reluctant to accept. At the beginning of August Aunt Ikbal sent me to England to attend a three-week language course. When Hayri Abi heard that I was going to Bournemouth he said, “That’s like going to Siirt instead of Istanbul to learn Turkish.” If the school administrators hadn’t taken us to London on our first weekend I would never have realized that I was abroad. I complained to my father that the plane home hadn’t produced any “authentic” music, but he just replied, “Beautiful melodies can only be felt by airplane pilots and Rumi’s grandchildren.”

  I went directly to Cisum to distribute ballpoint pens with “London” and “Bournemouth” printed on them. Then I planned to see Hayri Abi and give him the CD of Vladimir Horowitz’s latest concert. The shop was silent. Aret, who was talking on the phone, lifted his artificial arm and beckoned me over. He wore an irritatingly cynical expression on his face as he dug out of his drawer the third page of a yellowing newspaper and showed it to me. “Gang Selling Drugs to Youth Nabbed,” said the headline. When I saw this, and the name Hayri Tamer just below, it was as if the notes of “Sleeping Beauty” had turned into arrows to pierce my brain one by one. I was afraid to close my eyes for fear I wouldn’t be able to open them again. I ran out of the shop because I didn’t want them to see me burst into tears. I remember walking without stopping until I reached home. That night in my dreams I saw myself conducting, with great difficulty, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in “Swan Lake.” I suspected Aslı was laughing and crying at the same time.

  I didn’t have the heart to give up the radio that I’d acquired with my tips from Hayri Abi, so I sentenced myself not to listen to music for a month. My relations with certain people in the neighborhood seemed about to cool off. I knew they were irritated by my trip to England. If they happened to hear that I’d started listening to classical music too, I might have been in for the “gay treatment.” So as not to be excommunicated I decided to be one of them until school started up again.

  I’d forgotten that I’d sat the entrance exam to H. High School on the Asian side of the city, a state-run boarding school, but in early September the news came that I’d won a scholarship. Even my mother rejoiced. The first time I walked into the building I thought it was like a jail, then a dead whale.

  “Starting high school is the second step to manhood,” my father declared (the first being circumcision).

  I shared my dormitory room with forty boys who came from districts of the city that I’d never heard of, as well as from neighboring towns. The first night, as though it would identify the traitors amongst us, we all asked each other what our fathers did. When my turn came, even I could barely hear myself whisper that he was a municipal bureaucrat. I was studious and disciplined and could never get along with the country yokels who thought that being in a boarding school was synonymous with being on holiday. On a scale from “Gnat” to “Bastard,” the nickname they chose for me—“Çakır,” “Blue” (because of the color of my eyes, I suppose)—didn’t bother me. My mature attitude in comparison to my classmates’ was put down to my military ancestry by my weary and ignorant-of-Mozart teachers.

  I began preparing for university entrance exams in tenth grade. In order to get an Air Force Academy interview one had to come within the top ten percent of the million or so who took the exam. This I was reminded of repeatedly on weekends when I was home. I was pleased with how my ambition soared whenever my classmates, who were looking for the easiest possible schools, made fun of my hard work. Elgar’s concertos offered me moral support as I struggled with science. With the exam looming, my father, who had managed to procure a list of questions asked by interviewers over the past five years, warned me continually to keep my eyes healthy. He had heard, I don’t know where, that they were the most important item on the health checklist. “Work hard but don’t let anything happen to your eyes!” he’d say.

  As it happened, I was in the upper two percent and sailed through the physical and psychological exams without a hitch. When the interview results came in I was duly accepted by the Air Force Academy as their second-best candidate.

  I thought it was a joke, at first, when they told me I’d be sharing a room with four other guys. My roommates were from the countryside, sons of government officials. You couldn’t say that we had much in common other than having had English prep classes. I didn’t really expect them to defer to me as their leader simply because I was the tallest, or came from Istanbul, but I enjoyed their panic when they discovered my passion for classical music. Weekends when I came home my father would finger the white braid on my jacket respectfully, and before I changed clothes we would stroll through the market together. It was embarrassing watching him walk two steps ahead of me, nose in the air, hands behind his back thumbing his prayer beads. But I couldn’t help smiling at the disheveled greetings accorded us by the shopkeepers who thought that not jumping to their feet would be disrespectful to the Armed Forces.

  The military-school way of life soon became mine. Like the works of Bach, the system was shored up by mathematical principles. I soon learnt that the friend of a person with goals was “discipline.” Only six of the 250 students were girls, and those of us who didn’t fall in love with Gülay were considered perverts. I flirted for a while with Asu, a second-year student at the nearby sports academy. She was surprised when I broke up with her for saying “Yo dude” all the time. After a while civilian life began to look strange to me. The
lumpen who obeyed traffic laws whenever it suited them and had no idea how to navigate shopping malls infuriated me—especially those whose boom-boxes constantly blared. My belief was that by choosing to be an officer and taking refuge in classical music, I had rescued myself from the city’s chaos and superficiality.

  I graduated from the Air Force Academy third in my class, with the rank of lieutenant. Although civilians asked us all the same question—“With so much flying, aren’t you afraid of dying?”—only half of the graduating class actually qualified as pilots. My loyalty to the most magnificent mode of transport ever invented by man—the airplane—began on my first day of training. At my first Air Force base—my overture, so to speak—I discovered that seductive symphony which is improvised by the sounds of airplanes taking off and landing. Planes are like purebred race horses when they’re above the clouds, powerful and skittish. The excitement that stirred me when I accepted my diploma from the President’s hand was nothing compared to what I felt on being authorized to “take solo command of the cockpit.”

  At 12,000 feet I felt I’d been spirited away from the world’s filth and had reached the outskirts of divine tranquility. There I touched eternity. There I could embrace the most meaningful of all music—absolute silence. I was pleased at how my flying skills improved with each flight training. My body would tremble with pleasure whenever I got the order to fly. When I was on the ground I envied those who were in the air. Yes, flying was a test for the body and a ritual for the soul.

  At twenty-five I was assigned to the strategic base B. I was the first of my cohort to be awarded the fiercest warplane the sky has yet known, the F-16. I was the youngest member of the team representing our country in the NATO Inter-Army Air Show. When our team was declared champion, and Kemal Kuray number one in the individual category, I felt for the rest of the team, all of whom held higher rank. At twenty-eight I aced the exam for staff officer. Soon I accepted it as normal when people around me singled me out as the future commander of the Air Force. At this time my father, and especially my aunt, wanted to marry me off. But I wiggled out of that by using my officer’s training as an excuse. I was happy during that period of my life, perhaps because women weren’t a part of it. I’d forgotten to fall in love ever since I hurt the feelings of a ghost.

  Now I was counting down the hours that remained for me in the Academy. On a summer morning with 1,551 hours to go, I drew the assignment to head to K. on a reconnaissance flight. North of Sivrihisar I was surprised to see the engine failure light come on. (I believed in my heart that F-16s were immortal.) The gauges showed that the engine was losing heat. I tried twice to restart it. Nothing happened. I began to lose altitude and notified the closest base of my coordinates. Three thousand feet from the ground I noted that the area was at least uninhabited. I was forced to abandon my plane in my parachute. In ninety seconds I would have the devastating experience of watching my noble F-16 crash to the ground and explode. I began to weep. I knew that even though I had survived I would always feel the pain of letting a heroic friend, given to me to safeguard, slip from my grasp. A mountain wind caught my parachute and my sweat dried. I could have aimed for the sharp gray rocks below, but I didn’t have it in me to challenge nature. “Dear God,” I begged, “please let me be a martyr next to the corpse of my plane.” I closed my eyes and while I prepared to watch twenty-eight years of my life unravel before me, I must have hit something jutting upward and lost consciousness.

  *

  I was flown to the nearest hospital by helicopter. After a considerable struggle I opened my eyes; my head hurt and I felt a strange lightness in the lower part of my body. I felt such emptiness that I couldn’t answer the doctors’ questions. I didn’t hear them say how many ribs I’d broken. As they prepared to operate on my right ankle, I remembered how my father had always told me to put my right shoe on first while pronouncing the name of God. I chuckled nervously, but it still hurt.

  I was under the care of two dutiful psychiatrists. They thought I was suffering from “post-traumatic stress” but I knew that it was more than that, that I was severely depressed. Despite the handfuls of pills I couldn’t forget that moment my plane exploded, and since I couldn’t come up with a good reason for its failing, I eased my soul by pleading guilty. It was difficult to keep from snapping at the psychiatrist, who was my superior in rank, so I focused on the spots floating around the ceiling instead, whistling Mendelssohn like a prayer. The first two nights my nightmares jolted me awake, and when I discovered that I couldn’t get out of bed I burst into tears.

  My family’s visits added to the strain. Maybe what I saw in my mother’s eyes was the compassion of parents who get over the fear of losing their children. My father and my aunt, on the other hand, were anxious and irritated. Like investors whose efforts have come to nothing, they could no longer swagger around L. as relatives of the future Commander. When my uncle began sermonizing, I had to tell them that my whole body was in pain and would they please leave and stay away until I called them back.

  Forty-eight hours later the colonel leading the Accident Investigation Team stopped in with his lieutenant. Despite the sensitive way in which they questioned me I could barely refrain from crying. What finally ended my nightmares was the report they filed concluding that the crash hadn’t been caused by pilot error. But my lack of interest in the outside world continued. I was susceptible to sudden headaches, and my right hand had developed a tremor.

  They said I would walk again in six weeks, and I did. My appetite returned and I started reading the newspapers. A week later the hospital chief paid me a visit. His tone was carefully optimistic as he told me that my recovery was underway and that my place at the Air Force Academy was being held for me. Flawlessly modulating the tone and dosage of command and advice, he informed me how helpful a period of desk work would be in regaining my concentration. I was sure they wouldn’t even let me get close to a helicopter if I failed to resolve my psychological problems.

  It was a good two months after the crash before they assigned me to a temporary job at Air Force headquarters. I went to Ankara full of misgivings, responsible for coordinating a top secret translation project on which ten hand-picked university graduates were working while performing their military service. The job had to be finished by the time their term of duty was up three months later. Though they’d all come from good universities in England and the U.S.A., they acted like high-school delinquents. I knew I wouldn’t be bored living with them in our military housing. Suat Altan, the most efficient and mysterious one, held diplomas in literature and computer science. While looking through the staff files I discovered he had been a technology consultant in New York. Like the old-time Indian chiefs, he said little but what he did say was meaningful. He had no trouble beating everybody else in chess and backgammon and sat in the corner reading tomes while the rest of the group sat around talking big. He seemed fragile, and maybe it was because of this and because of his mournful blue eyes that I felt sympathy for him. Twice I reprimanded the surly banking trainee, Mahmut, for harassing Suat; I even went so far as to dock his holidays when I caught him bullying the poor guy one day.

  I ran into Suat once on a bus to Istanbul, and after that we started traveling there together the odd weekend. On others, if we stayed in Ankara, I would take him to a concert or a play. His attitude seemed at once calculated and suspicious. Once, when I invited him to my usual kebab joint in Istanbul, he seemed startled and pretended he hadn’t heard me. He reminded me of those mysterious priests in Westerns to whom the Mexicans readily confess their sins. Three weeks before his mustering-out I summoned up, without quite knowing why, my life story for him. He listened attentively with his head bowed.

  As for him, I could tell all I knew in a few sentences. He was the son of a rich father and a Sephardic Jewish mother, and he’d obviously had a colorless but carefree childhood and youth. His superior intelligence ill-befitted his environment, and I was sure he bore a secret wound he was cavalier
ly disregarding.

  When the time came to say goodbye I embraced everybody on the team except Suat. He shook my hand distractedly and practically ran away as he murmured something like an apology.

  Later I heard that he beat the daylights out of Mahmut when they left our living quarters for the last time. According to the soldier who witnessed the incident, he used karate moves straight out of the movies to pound the big banking trainee into a condition fit for hospitalization.

  *

  My own monthly visits to the hospital nauseated me. Unable to deal with my deep-seated concentration problems, I broke into a sweat during the stress tests. I didn’t even bother mentioning my itching abdomen to my psychiatrist as I couldn’t even make him believe in my “phantom” headaches.

  I knew that I would be assigned more and more to less and less exciting jobs. For a while I tried to accept and understand this reality. Since I was without sin and a model individual, I believed that by God’s grace I would in the end be rescued from my psychological problems. Still, I could see in my doctor’s eyes that it wouldn’t be easy for me to lose the traces of my trauma and I was slowly losing hope. I could even say that my passion for flying was beginning to diminish, though of course, as the hottest pilot in the Air Force, I couldn’t stomach the idea of rotting away at a desk in some godforsaken corner of the country. I began looking for a way out. I had to find out, if I requested early retirement, if I could survive civilian life. I decided not to rush things, and meanwhile took comfort in Schoenberg’s musical labyrinth.