by Ayfer Tunç
Fidan heard the wolves, their howls now growing frenzied. And then the force pulling her was gone. When she looked back, she saw the wolves surrounding Eşber.
But she had no desire to contemplate who would win this game that she’d witnessed for the first time.
MIKAIL’S HEART STOPPED
Mikail’s heart just stopped. His heart stopped suddenly at the end of a cold, weary night of reckoning while trying to hide, not his crying, but his crying from the pain of defeat. It stopped in the house where brackish water seeped through the walls and where he lived in tragic taciturnity and poverty with his two small children, whose missing teeth remained as such from lack of care, and his wife, from whose lips poured anguished curses.
I know precisely the moment his heart stopped. For, at the exact moment when Mikail’s heart stopped I awoke in fright from a sweaty and almost unconscious sleep, stabbed in the heart not by his resentful knife, dulled from always being held in his palm, but by his resentful eyes. I knew this from learning the time of death that spread immediately through the weary neighbour -hood of the town that lived like a diseased lung taking groaning, deep breaths. I looked at Semiramis sleeping beside me exhaling hot breaths redolent of alcohol, unaware of this deep wound I’d received.
‘Mikail’s heart has stopped,’ I whispered. Then I repeated this sinister sentence, unwilling to even believe it myself: ‘Mikail’s heart has stopped!’ Semiramis didn’t hear; she drew up her bare legs to her flabby stomach. I huddled up in her wide, comfortable bed and became insignificant. I couldn’t go back to sleep again.
From that day on I lost sleep. You could say I lost peace of mind. I wanted to sleep, to roll in sleep’s deep, delicious nothing -ness and at least forget for one night that mental anguish. But no. The moments I slept were so brief that they were only enough for me to forget Mikail’s old-fashioned moustache extending like a spindly lament, dividing his lifeless face grown rapidly old in pursuit of a deadly obsession. I could not banish his doleful eyes from my mind, those eyes that had taken on the helplessness of a sacrificial animal, and that had long ago ceased being angry with me.
Even though I’d succeeded in forgetting Mikail for brief moments, I just couldn’t escape from his spirit which seemed to be virtually living with me. In every mirror I always saw Mikail’s touching face. I told this pale ghost that my only crime was to be caught up in a strange eddy, accidentally finding myself in the most seething part of a life to which I was in fact a stranger. But still I tossed and turned in my bed in anguish, asking myself why I couldn’t have an uninterrupted, tranquil sleep.
I answered at once: Because I’m guilty. I stole something. For me it was something worthless and even vulgar. But I stole it.
First I left Semiramis to be rid of this pain no one knew about, but that made my heart seep blood. As I packed my suitcase (my constant companion through years of roaming in search of a peaceful, quiet place under a bed) the unkempt heads of women stretching out from wretched apartments on the dreary street talked in most heart-wrenching words about Mikail’s house a few streets away where his sallow-faced, poor relatives went in and out, and his thin wife held her two children by the hand during the lonely and exceedingly simple funeral, crying nonstop, ‘What am I going to do now?’ They said this wretched death was Mikail’s destiny as their eyes sought Semiramis at the window. As I packed slowly, a deep ache in my heart, Semiramis kept her silence, knowing that asking me to stay would be no use. Even if we had not spoken about it, she was aware of the strange battle between us.
Semiramis is very much to blame for this silent hostility. You could even say that it was her devilish smile, that first night I saw Mikail, that had provoked me to take sides in this pathetic quarrel. But this could also be an excuse I found for myself. It is also possible that Semiramis had done what was right by her own judgement. I might have been the only one in the wrong. If I’d known the night I first saw Mikail, as I looked arrogantly down at him in his ridiculous outfit and with his old-fashioned moustache, that one day he would hurt me in this way, I would never have stayed in this world of dark people. Their exaggerated cheerfulness was woven with genuine sorrows, to which I knew full well I didn’t belong, but I just couldn’t leave because I so relished the state of pretentious foreignness. I should have left at one of the times when, though it was just the right time to go, I was not able to because I was carried away in the pleasure of laziness.
I first saw Mikail on a terrifically hot summer’s night, when not a leaf moved and all the windows of the city were wide open.
This bizarre district was groaning with heat, yet Semiramis was loyally bound to it because it had welcomed her to its festering bosom in her times of poverty when she had lived through thousands of heartaches and humiliation. The smell of blood that flowed from the broken noses of women beaten every night and the echo of the normally accepted violence of strong against weak accepted was absent for once. It was as though a break had been taken from the brutal and sinful nightlife of the district. The street dogs were silent and the street urchins had stretched out full length on the stones warmed up during the day. Even the flies were not flying.
We had stretched out on the sofa in the sitting room whose high ceilings gave at least a little feeling of airiness, and were drinking beer with vodka. I’d laid my head on Semiramis’s ample bosom that had now gone really soft. She messed my hair with fingers adorned with tasteless, but expensive rings as she told me why she had changed her name from Semra into Semiramis. And as I listened to her I was thinking that we were by no means, and would never be, made of the same stuff. This thought really cheered me. I felt like a daring criminal wandering around boldly in places that didn’t belong to me.
Semiramis’ old photographs and the self-confidence that she possessed even now that she was past her prime, attested to the fact that she was once very beautiful. But she had become a drunk, as was deemed necessary for a music hall partner. She confidently told me how she succeeded in having her say in her own world because she was cleverer than the women who could only exist in this world of nights as long as their bodies were fresh. And all the time she was planning to hold me in her hand by offering lust, femininity and an endless wallowing in irresponsible nothingness: a place well beyond the understanding of those who pay their bills on time, live in good, strong houses, and consider themselves very proper.
Many men had entered her life. Although she had loved none, she’d succeeded in getting something useful from each one. Good advice from some, as much money as she could comfortably spend from others, a few items of jewellery that they were willing to sacrifice to prolong a sickly obsession a little longer from yet others, and a few sweet memories from others still. From some, she even learnt something. An elderly, well educated man, ugly and grumpy but sweet-smelling, whose mistress she was when she’d freshly set out in pursuit of the splendour that she now inhabited and enjoyed, said precisely this to her: ‘The Semiramises wreck the clumsy, happy-looking homes that the Semras strived to make.’
Whether he was a lunatic who’d made her learn this sentence by heart out of a wish to engrave such witticisms in the heads of his mistresses, or whether it was Semiramis’s own slight revulsion to Semras’ provincial docility that made her want to learn it by heart, I don’t know. But just as Semiramis, the deliberate femme fatale, uttered this sentence, the bell rang at length with pathetic insistence. That devilish smile, rarely to be found on the face of Semras better suited to compassion, appeared briefly on Semiramis’s face. I stared at her wondering why she wouldn’t open the door. ‘That’s Mikail,’ she said, ‘He’ll keep ringing and then go away.’
A man who imploringly rang the bell of a door that didn’t open, and then went away. Mikail. Semiramis got up lazily and defying the heat, sauntered to the bathroom in fluid movements of her still attractive body clad in the black underwear that drove the men she knew to a vulgar pleasure. I sensed she took great delight in not opening the door to Mikail. I heard
her step into the shower. The sound of the water comforted my spirit. Remembering her brief, devilish smile, I wanted to see Mikail; the man who had to go because the door that at one time probably opened wide, opened no longer.
This door had been opened to me although I’d not promised anything, and I could keep it open for as long as I wanted. Not that his mattered to me in the slightest. Semiramis was a clever, but common woman. An old coquette, whom I could leave whenever I wanted and, even if she did cry after me, had been through the mill enough to forget me quickly. My reason for not going was not that Semiramis surrendered to me with all her being, but because of my own laziness to look for a new place, an abode, a different world. I was one of the lost children. I’d surrendered myself to the sickly feelings of defeat and my sense of being lost without a future.
Pride may be the last thing one would feel in this deep void he believes has swallowed his soul. All the same, I just couldn’t stop myself. I went to the window to see Mikail, or rather, to flaunt myself. He’d already come down the steps that he’d ascended just now in hopeful and confident steps. His head was bent and he was probably upset as he turned into the narrow street, his chest hardened with the bitterness it harboured. Did he lift his head and look at the window just as he was going because he thought that another man lived in this house that he could no longer enter, and he wanted to see the face that had taken his place? I don’t know. Our eyes met in the light of the street lamp.
I saw his black eyes. Despite the tense, harsh expression on his face, to me they looked very sad. He wore a light-weight black jacket and he had pulled the collar of his white shirt over the top. He looked at me for a few seconds, touched his moustache and in a few hasty paces, got into his Anadol estate he’d parked in front of the door. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was full to the brim with kitchenware. It was quite obvious he preferred to pretend not to see me. I was just looking without a single feeling of rivalry and passion, just out of a funny carefree drunkenness, to which I had abandoned myself-. My earlier pride had also gone. I was no different from a bored old woman, spying on the shadows of the neighbours’ windows that filtered light. Yet I was to understand at our second meeting that Mikail saw me as a rival.
There was a pathetic urgency in his manner, a resentment that he tried ineptly to conceal. He was ashamed as though the whole street knew that the door on which he had knocked hadn’t opened. It was as though, by pretending not to see me, he was acting nobly in his own way and giving Semiramis and me another chance. That’s why he wanted to leave the street as quickly as possible. He got into his car wishing to immediately forget the short eye contact between us. He turned the key, but the tired Anadol that had roamed the streets all day long just wouldn’t start. I felt the palms of his hands sweating and his deep humiliation because the car, in spite of his turning the key, time and again and making it tweet like a wounded bird, still refused to start.
Unable to start the car, he was forced to get out. Dripping with sweat, and with one hand on the steering wheel, he began to push the Anadol that could hardly move because of its load. The dispirited Anadol, happy with the front of the door where it was parked, and looking as if it would happily rest in eternal peace, eventually began to slide down the slope. Mikail ran in funny steps and got in. The Anadol growled a little with the intention of starting as it was about to disappear. The thundering noise of the old engine reverberated in the street and gradually moved out of sight. The street returned to the cloying silence of a little while before. I went inside. Remembering Mikail’s state and laughing, I lay back on Semiramis’s enormous bed. I must have gone to sleep…
Now when I think about it, after starting his wreck of an Anadol and reaching the main road, Mikail might have stopped the car, put his head on the vinyl-covered steering wheel and cried in frustration.
In this world of strange street credibility, where life was lived through primitive feelings and weird ceremonies, where even a little slip of the foot could flatten one’s honour in a trice, the situation into which Mikail had fallen was a heavy blow. If the Anadol, worn out from the bustle of life, had started at the first turn of the key, and Mikail been able to leave the street with a swanky start, perhaps this silent struggle between us would never have begun.
It was not the rivalry of love that destroyed him, but the little mishaps that befell him.
I slept and forgot all about him. I cast him completely out of my mind. And so when we met again a few days later in the street where Semiramis lived, I had difficulty in recognising him. Semiramis had got work in a coastal town and gone on tour with a few girls who worked in a music hall. I imagine she was expecting not to find me on her return. She had regarded this tour as a test of love and, because she didn’t want me to leave her, she’d filled the fridge with a great variety of food. That night we never slept at all, just drank non-stop. Towards morning she cried at length because one day I would leave her for sure. I made no attempt to comfort her. She was exhausted from drinking and lack of sleep. As soon as she got on the coach she passed out. Overflowing with an uncalled for feeling of freedom, I went to the parts of the city I’d not visited for a long time, dozing in tea gardens with my head resting on the tables. I stared at myself in still waters. I looked for some small joy inside myself. A new path. It was so hot I couldn’t find one.
Even though it was just the right time to go, I was seduced by the idea of going to bed yawning lazily in a room that was cool when the windows were wide open. Or perhaps my motive was sheer laziness, and this delicious laziness that I profoundly felt towards life was what made me drag my feet again towards Semiramis’s house. In any case, it was impossible to make even the simplest plan, let alone take a crucial decision, while groaning under the sticky, July heat.
As I walked in pensive steps I got distracted by the heads of women leaning out their windows, cracking black sunflower seeds and spitting the husks onto the street. From the opposite direction came the tired old Anadol, running with a groan, its loud noise filling the street. After Mikail parked his car in front of the door to the block of flats, got out and struck a smart pose, I recognised him by the moustache that had attracted my attention that first night I saw him. It was obvious that for this meeting he’d had the broken Anadol repaired, had dressed with care and even rehearsed the show that was to be exhibited to the neighbourhood. He’d coloured his hair and deliberately left a few strands of grey hair on the temples.
All of a sudden he spotted me. For a moment, he got very nervous, very upset. Then he pulled himself together. We were eye to eye. He put his hand to his pocket to take out his flick knife. But he couldn’t find his pocket. When I saw his white socks that the turn-ups of his trousers – shrunk from being washed so many times – couldn’t conceal and how this ruined his flashy stance, I couldn’t help but laugh. I walked towards the apartment without changing my step. At last he found his pocket, took out his flick knife and began to open and close it. There was a very short distance between us.
The knife that Mikail wanted to see in my heart failed to impress me in the slightest. It was as though my soul had voided. The gleam of this sharp steel had as little meaning for me as the tail of a cat crossing the street in a rush. In fact, I myself walked with a wish to add meaning to that knife and to feel it in my heart. I didn’t care about being one of the lost children. This feeling was so strong that even if that knife stuck in my heart I felt unreal enough to be able to wander around with it. And so I walked towards the knife. Not as an act against Mikail nor to have my name remembered in the world of heroism. The courage he derived from the knife wasn’t enough for him and I saw how his hands were shaking.
With only a few steps between me and the knife, a woman whose large, heavy earrings had slit her earlobes came out of the opposite block, dragging a runny-nosed girl who clutched her skirt. She approached Mikail, coming right between us and asked, ‘Have you got a set of coffee pots?’
A little mishap that Mikail had just not
reckoned on ruined the whole scene. A crowd of women surrounded the Anadol estate full of kitchenware for sale. Dozens of calloused, reddened, swollen women’s hands opened the boot of the car that was slightly ajar, and began to rummage through it.
All of a sudden he’d been dragged away from the film in which he starred, and was besieged by women asking the prices of the frying pans, pressure cookers and ladles they had grabbed, ready to bargain hard. It was impossible for him to disrupt this crowd of women driven wild by that obsession called shopping and continue the film. While he was trying to save his goods from the hands of the women, I entered the block, fully enjoying this ludicrous situation. I went upstairs and looked from the window.
He knew I was watching him. That’s why he never bothered to look like a simple salesman, sweet talking to sell his goods in order to earn a few pennies. He was so angry and so hurt that he roughly gathered all his goods and filled his car. Then he got into it, shaking with rage. Unable to understand the reason for this behaviour from a man from whom they’d been buying goods for a long time, the women dispersed to their homes, shouting abuse and even swearing at him.
The Anadol, that on our previous encounter had spited him by not starting, started this time by emitting appalling noises. He took no notice of the clanking of the boot door that was up in the air because he hadn’t shut it. As he shot through the street the children scattered in all directions; he scraped an electricity pole and hit a dustbin. When he emerged onto the main road, the dustbin he’d hit rolled, clanging down the street like a spectator rolling about laughing at the state into which he had fallen.
