Selim was getting ready to recount a new dream when the door opened and Murat walked in. The clock on the wall chimed nine times, which meant that it was ten o’clock. He was soaked to the bone. He cursed whoever up there was responsible for the rain, went to the counter, poured himself a glass of water and drank it before sitting. He grouched that the human body never felt ready to eat and drink till it had a glass or two of cold water. Murat was a professional storyteller. He had none of the offhand geniality that makes storytellers in general easy to get along with. He was sardonic, earthily cynical, and seemed to be impenetrable even in moments of relaxation and laughter. One of the things that brought Murat and Tomas together occasionally was their liking for Hikmet’s11 poetry.
Murat’s repertoire consisted of stories of crime and love, tales about the Ottoman harem, legends, scandals, social gossip and, occasionally, political or historical episodes. From the deep furrows in his forehead, Tomas could tell that he was not in the mood for storytelling that night.
Murat was ageless. His face was divided in two by a thin, jet-black Clark Gable moustache, the upper and lower halves each contributing to the mesmerizing effect he had on his audience – the upper with a pair of emerald green eyes and the lower with his colourful tales that streamed from his mouth.
He always sat at the small counter. From there he could survey his entire audience. And as he was a very large man, he made the counter look even smaller. He ordered half a bottle of rakι and drank it straight, in little sips, keeping it a long time in his mouth before swallowing. Tonight the agitated way he sipped it was a sure indication that he would opt for politics.
‘The Great Lion had a sensational change of heart,’ he said, and stopped to see if everybody had heard him. He repeated, this time even louder, ‘The Great Lion had a sensational change of heart, absolutely metamorphic, like a virgin bride after her nuptial night.’ He stopped again. Yes, they were all listening. ‘The Caliphate was abolished on the third day of the third month of the year 1924.’
He stopped to take another sip. ‘On that day the Kurds stopped being Kurds. They could be morons or geniuses, criminals or saints, Anatolians or Mediterraneans, handicapped or able-bodied, as long as they gave up calling themselves Kurds or Kurdish, and identified themselves as Turks and spoke Turkish. Ever since, that day has been known as the “Day of Lost Identity”, the day of displacement, repression, assimilation.’
The room stirred. People shifted in their seats. The cigarette smoke, suspended over their heads like an intangible awning, grew thicker. Some downed their drinks in single gulps.
The drink had heartened Tomas to enjoy such an unorthodox topic. Everybody loved the Great Lion, including him; the whole country idolized him. Tomas wondered why Murat had chosen to narrate the Sheikh’s12 story instead of another more recent, more sensational, and equally hushed-up, the Dersim Kurdish uprising?13
Murat, his right hand leaning on the counter with his left holding his chin – a rather uncomfortable position for drinking and storytelling – carried on, ignoring the rumble, ‘The Great Lion was ingenious and very good-looking. He idolized women, adored rakι and, above all, worshipped his people and his country. As the days went by and the Lion’s country espoused a brand new unity, abolishing religious schools, courts and, of course, the Caliphate, which had already been removed.’
Süleyman, the piano tuner of the Istanbul Symphony Orchestra and a part-time cab driver, leaped up and blared, ‘Murat Bey, tell us a mystery story; it might be of more interest.’
Then up stood Selim, the clown. ‘I’m getting depressed, Murat Bey. I’m leaving.’ With that he walked out, slamming the door behind him.
‘My story is more interesting than any heart-stopping mystery, my friends.’ Murat was unperturbed. ‘Do you remember the story of those angry mice that attacked their master? Because he fed them lung day in and day out, with no variety? Well, every story has a lesson for everybody. Let’s drink to that.’
He raised his glass, but no one bothered to join him. Instead, some stood up and left. Barba Yorgo was showing signs of uneasiness: blinking, chewing the cigarette between his lips, rubbing his hands on his blue apron. Normally, he didn’t have time to listen to Murat’s accounts, but that evening he was all ears, listening intently.
‘Well, well, well, you don’t seem to appreciate my story tonight, but I must tell you the rest. An unfinished story is like a fuck without an orgasm.’
Tomas looked up at Murat, whose face had turned exceptionally crimson. He reminded him of a bull being driven to the bullring. No one could stop him.
‘The Kurdish nationalist intellectuals, army officers and volunteers joined forces like brothers and launched the first great Kurdish rebellion, led by Sheikh Saïd. That was a couple of years after the declaration of the Republic.’ He halted suddenly. The door was flung open and the barefoot ten-year-old newsboy rushed in. He dashed from table to table selling the evening paper and announcing the latest news.
‘Communist students arrested ... Professor of thermodynamite (thermodynamics) shot in class ... Jealous husband stabs wife thirty-eight times ... Sophia divorced ... High school students caught smoking American cigarettes ... Temperature 22° Celsius ... Cloudy ... Slushy ... Easterly ... Houdini ... Mussolini ...’
The boy’s name was Sevgili (Darling).
All the patrons bought Darling’s papers to shut him up and make him leave. Barba returned to the kitchen to drain the fried mussels on the evening paper. The patrons ate communist mussels and discussed dynamite professors while Murat continued.
‘The rebellion was curtailed by a huge military force, so huge that it could have invaded the whole of Asia. The leaders were caught and hanged, like tiny mackerel hung out to dry and later to be served as delicacies. Severe reprisals took place in all the districts that had participated in the uprising. The Kurdish nationalists say that military operations resulted in the pillaging of hundreds of villages, the destruction of thousands of houses, and deaths.’ The size of these casualties seemed to trouble Murat. He raised his arms in an expression of awe.
‘The Sheikh Saïd Rebellion! Who knows anything about it today? It was silenced like a dismantled bomb, even though it never posed any threat to the country.’
What Murat had recounted was not a story. He smiled and waited for some response.
There was none.
Barba was troubled. He went back to the kitchen, came out with a plate of arugula salad and pieces of fried lamb brain and placed it in front of Murat, who was quietly sipping his drink.
‘On the house,’ Barba said, forcing a smile. ‘I could also tell the story of my own people, but people don’t seem to appreciate it.’ He was thinking of the Smyrna massacres.14
Murat said nothing. He put a huge piece of fried brain in his mouth and chewed it for a long time before swallowing.
‘Barba, you’ve done it again,’ he said, looking at him appreciatively.
Barba patted Murat on the shoulder and went to put another record on the gramophone. The tedious female voice whined and whimpered, accompanied by the sizzling sound of frying pans in the kitchen.
Galip the lexicographer, a harmless soul, was sitting at his usual table in the far corner of the room, busy writing his Dictionary of Noises on yellow scrap paper in mustard-coloured ink. The sheets were speckled with flies and perforated by cigarette ash.
He was a fat little man with a sweet round face. When he walked, which wasn’t very often, he dragged one leg after him and carried his head bent to one side. Despite his reasonably comfortable life, he seemed incapacitated with unhappiness. In addition to his own modest fortune, his family members were the beneficiaries of a predisposition to tuberculosis, inherited from his wife’s side, from the coast of the Black Sea. The ailment had claimed his six-year-old son, the youngest of his seven children, then his wife Aysu, whose death coincided with Galip’s sudden preoccupation with noise. People related that his acoustic inquisitiveness was simply a react
ion to years of listening to an intrusive miscellany of ailing coughs.
Each of his seven children was named Albert because of his extraordinary esteem for Einstein. He had initially thought of giving them different names: Quantum, Molecule, Gravity, Relativity, and so on, but he had been afraid of discriminating. They had to be equals, regardless of gender or age – and as he was a master of sounds he could easily intonate and accentuate the name Albert in seven different ways, and, if needs be, use their family name to distinguish between the boys and the girls.
For days on end Galip sat in various taverns, soup kitchens and tearooms like one of the jobless, with an air of immense and forlorn patience, listening to noises, a tuning fork in hand, tracing their origins and meanings.
An extract from the foreword:
As the Tavern Edition of Galip’s New Dictionary of Noises is being finalized to go to press, the author-editor is including systematically in the proofs the dates of recently deceased noises, eminent new noises, noises resulting from recent technological advances, and such other changes and additions as last-minute developments make necessary.
Cookoolikoo n. 1. the shrill sound made by a Turkish rooster at five in the morning to accompany the chant of the muezzin.
Cock-a-doodle-doo n. [onomatopoeic] 1. sound made by an Anglo-Saxon rooster.
Cocorico n. 1. le chant du coq, made by a French rooster.
Quiri, quiri, quiri, quiri n. sings the Spanish rooster, and the cluck hen answers Cara, cara, cara, cara, and the baby chicks reply pio, pio, pio, pio.
‘How come they sing differently when they don’t know how to speak the local languages?’ Galip mumbled.
*
In his letter to Anya the following day, Tomas told her how impatient he was to leave the country, not only because he wished to be with her but because he was fed up with the pride of lions that could pounce unexpectedly on the herd at any time. The Great Lion and his cubs were continually on the move: approaching night and day, softly, weightlessly, flexing their exquisite muscles. The Great Lion, with a single gesture of his big paws, a slight movement of his head, could bring the ranks of his pride into action, while the affectionate females caressed him and offered themselves to him. Tomas left the letter unfinished.
*
Tomas wished that his good friend Zahrad,15 the post-surrealist poet, had been there that evening. He used to join them occasionally. He had studied medicine for a while, but upon discovering a striking resemblance between the skeletons in his anatomy classes and himself, he had decided to switch from medical to lyrical autopsy.
It was a few days after Murat’s account of the Lion. People were moving joyfully in the streets. It was National Sovereignty and Children’s Day. Tomas and his friends were at Barba’s. Out of nowhere, Bebo, the Night Fighter, surged in.
‘I’ve got bad news,’ he said. ‘Zahrad has killed Gigo.’
It took some time for Tomas to take in the magnitude of the news. He felt a wave of melancholy wash over him. It was a true poetic death. Premeditated! Tomas and his friends were oblivious to the bulldozers outside. A man puked in front of the British Consulate. That evening Barba Yorgo, Tomas and his friends went to the Holy Trinity Armenian Church to pray for Gigo’s soul.
Barba held one of his black frying pans with a vigil candle stuck to it. It was a heartbreaking scene: the Gigo poem was placed in an urn that wafted below the crucifix suspended over the raised altar. Everybody lit a candle, one by one, and beseeched the Madonna to intercede for Gigo, uttering in unison:
Damnation. Redemption.
Poetic revelation ...
He lay enough under the skies
Now let him sleep under the earth
May God rest his shoes.
*
A week later Tomas read the following in the weekend Cumhuriyet (Republic):
Murat Tokay, 43, a Kurdish intellectual, revolutionary and unemployed storyteller and Political Science dropout from the University of Ankara, has been arrested in Bakιrköy, Istanbul while visiting a friend at the Psychiatric Hospital. He will appear before the court on charges of denigrating Turkishness and the Turkish national identity in an emotional speech at Yorgo Oresti’s tavern in Çiçek Pasajι. Murat Tokay has for some time been under investigation for his clandestine activities, trying to incite the Kurds to revolt. According to reliable sources, Kurds throughout the country plan to converge on Ankara to protest at Tokay’s arrest. Police have shut down Yorgo Oresti’s tavern for an indefinite period. The owner was using the tavern as a cover for anti-government activities.
23
That evening, lying on his bed, Tomas realized he would never be able to put aside enough money to join Anya in America. How could he realize his plan on the miserly sum he made from translating? It was hardly enough to get by and continue studying at the university. Under the circumstances, there was not much to do except try to forget Anya, look for some funds and accomplish his dream – to publish a literary magazine which he would call New Signatures.
*
One windy morning Tomas went to see Mr Shato at his shop in the Grand Bazaar. Despite his modest education, Shato had a reasonable appreciation of the arts: he loved literature but hated any work longer than a hundred pages; he adored classical music but loathed operas, concertos and symphonies; he idolized the visual arts, especially painting, but despised everything contemporary, including the artists.
Shato’s antique shop hung suspended out of time in a murky corner of the old bazaar. It was one of a kind: a nest of dust and noise, a pawn shop, a mortgage bureau, a tea room, a novel, a short story, a vision ... The shop was a collector’s dream, a heap of bric-a-brac, some of it costly, some cheap, and a landmark of ambiguity. Everything one could possibly need was there: carpets, kilims, jewellery, costumes, weapons – some still soaked in blood – china, grizzly bears, miniatures, paramours ... and extraordinary hospitality. The patrons were composed of wealthy business people, gamblers, whores, go-betweens, housewives, mistresses and sons of bitches.
Avedis, Shato’s long-time assistant, opened the shop at eight thirty sharp every morning. He was a lame, one-eyed, middle-aged refugee from Bulgaria. He spoke nine languages, and with tourists whose language he didn’t know he gesticulated better than any professional pantomime artist. The shop didn’t close until the outer gates of the bazaar were locked at eight o’clock in the evening. It wasn’t that Shato was greedy; he just considered it bad luck to close while the outer gates remained open.
Shato was a shrewd businessman, an Armenian from Mardin.16 His parents had been massacred during the 1915 displacements. He had been saved by a couple of Swiss missionaries and sent to an Armenian orphanage in Geneva. In the early thirties a prosperous Armenian merchant from Istanbul named Saro Simonian visited the orphanage during a business trip. He was impressed by Shato’s intelligence. As he had no children himself, Simonian decided to adopt him and take him to Istanbul. The twelve-year-old boy was more than eager to leave the orphanage for a better life. Following a few short formalities and a handsome donation to the orphanage, the merchant and his adopted son left for Istanbul.
After their return home, the merchant made Shato work in his meat-packing plant instead of sending him to school, despite his wife Sophia’s objections. Shato, now nicknamed Sheytan or Satan, because of his exceptional alertness and ambition, toiled from morning till night six days a week, packing sausages and salamis. Three years later, completely ignoring the boy’s burning desire to go to school, Simonian made Sheytan supervisor at the abattoir.
The boy’s adoptive mother secretly planned his departure. And one good day Shato abandoned his job, his home and his parents and fled to Izmir. Sophia had taken care of every detail to ensure him, at last, the life he deserved. He would live with Sophia’s cousin, Alice, a widow with two sons in the carpet business. Shato would work in their shop part-time and study under the tutelage of Madame Esther, an Armenian Catholic who made a modest living by tutoring the children of wea
lthy families. Unfortunately, the Izmir massacres of 1922 had made a huge dent in her earnings as the majority of Greek and Armenian families had either been massacred or fled the city.
Shato’s move to Izmir remained a secret for about a month. Sophia insisted that the boy had disappeared because of her husband’s harsh treatment. The husband, in the meantime, hired a private investigator to track him down. Soon the boy was found, but he refused to return to Istanbul. Saro Simonian’s threats, legal actions and exhaustive attempts to bring Shato back stopped suddenly when his wife decided to sell her shares in the meat-packing business.
Shato stayed with Alice until he was nineteen. When, after the death of his adoptive father, he returned to Istanbul with his young bride and four-month-old daughter, he was already an experienced antique dealer. His marriage to Madame Esther’s youngest daughter was the result of a sexual mishap, and their persistent carnal gluttony produced four more daughters.
Shato’s reputation as a patron of the arts spread faster than a pandemic. Before he knew it, he found himself helping writers, musicians, actors, photographers, magicians, jugglers and acrobats, funding their projects or subsidizing their travel costs. The moment he discovered that his donations weren’t being used honestly, however, his beneficence dwindled.
*
Tomas walked up and down the length of the jewellers’ market four times (because four meant creation according to divinatory art), collecting his thoughts and rehearsing what he would say to Shato before entering the shop.
Mr Shato greeted him politely, thinking he was a client.
‘How can I help you?’
The Lamppost Diary Page 16
