Maybe because he had a headache, the Doctor half-closed his eyes. He turned away from the light and tried not to look toward the grille, but he listened to me with interest.
“The next week the radio broke down. No matter how hard he tried, my father couldn’t make it work. The bored look he saw on our faces for the first time must have alarmed him because he said, don’t worry, I know that novel. Did he really know it? In the village he needed to know it and we needed to believe him. Before our very eyes he unraveled the story that the woman on the radio told the man. He clicked his fingers like a magician and, reflecting the shadow of the pregnant woman and the fairy onto the wall, bit by bit he brought the story of the hunters to life. He showed us the mountain hut and the chest inside the house. That night for the first time ever I craved a different kind of happiness. I dreamed that my father would take me too to Istanbul, with its golden lights. Afterward I asked my father if that story had a question. You tell me, said my father, what were the question and the answer in that story? Why did the woman in the novel tell the man that story?”
“Uncle Küheylan,” said the Doctor, “I like riddles. But here we don’t even know what the riddle is, let alone the answer.”
“My father said we had to work out the question and the answer. He said we had until the next evening.”
“And did you?”
“My mother did. She was the riddle expert in our house.”
“Give me time, I’ll also try and work out the answer by tomorrow.”
“No problem, Doctor, what’s more plentiful in here than time?”
Demirtay, who was sleeping with his head on his knees, sat up. He rubbed his eyes. It was obvious he was cold, he wrapped his two arms hard around his chest. Glancing at Kamo the Barber, who was sleeping, he said, “He can still sleep despite the cold, I envy him. I think I’m the one who feels the cold the most in here.”
“Couldn’t you sleep?” I said.
“No I couldn’t, Uncle Küheylan, I listened to your story. It was like watching a film. The scenes came to life before my eyes, the stormy night, the snow swirling in the wind, the hut with the light shining in the window. I think the question became clear at the end of the story. I mean, was there any way they could change the child’s destiny, despite everything?”
“If the question is that simple the answer should be simple too. Do you know the answer?” asked the Doctor.
“Yes I do, Doctor, I think they couldn’t change his destiny.”
“Why not? If they had put the boy into the chest by himself wouldn’t he have been saved?”
“In that case one of the hunters would have turned into a wolf, he would have torn the other two to pieces and then got inside the chest.”
The Doctor objected. “That way the other hunters would have had a chance to kill the wolf. The hunters didn’t just want to save the child, they wanted to meet the wolf head-on too. They cut their fingers, they shed their blood. They wanted to lure the wolf to the smell of blood, they wanted it to challenge them.”
Demirtay pondered as if he were solving a problem in an exam. “Give me some time too to come up with a better answer,” he said.
The Doctor turned to face me. “Uncle Küheylan, what was your mother’s answer? Did she also say you can’t change fate?”
“No, she thought something else.”
“I have an answer, do you want to hear it?”
“What’s the rush, Doctor? You asked me to give you until tomorrow.”
“While you were talking to Demirtay I was thinking. There wasn’t a question in the hunters’ story. And it wasn’t going to come from within the story, but from outside it. The woman in the novel was going to ask a question about herself. That’s the reason why she told the story, isn’t it?”
“You’re doing well, carry on.”
“The woman wanted to discover to what extent the man was prepared to sacrifice himself. She was going to ask him if he would get into the chest with her if he were the boy in the story. She didn’t want to solve the problem, she wanted to know if the man was strong enough to face up to it.”
“You have spoken like my mother, Doctor. Do you know the novel?”
“No, I don’t.”
“The novel had a happy ending,” I said. “According to my father, some love takes time to blossom. And that was the fate of this novel too.”
“The novel’s fate,” said the Doctor, as though to himself. He scratched a vertical line on the wall with his nail. “Is fate a line like this? Does it change or not? I’m going to ask Kamo when he wakes up. Uncle Küheylan, you should sleep too and rest a bit more.”
“I’m not sleepy. Kamo’s fast asleep. He might not have any cuts or scars on his face, but the interrogators pounded his head yesterday, they pushed him onto the floor and kicked him.”
When they had dragged Kamo the Barber into the cell yesterday, thumping and beating him, we were both half-dead. We were in too much pain to sleep. I was more concerned about Zinê Sevda in the opposite cell than about Kamo. I wondered why she had stepped forward and let them batter her. She had knelt in the middle of the corridor and held out her arms to me. She had stayed there despite the beating, not backing down. When Kamo the Barber had tried to defend her by grabbing the interrogator’s hand, Zinê Sevda had been as surprised as everyone else.
“No,” said Kamo, “I didn’t grab the interrogator’s hand, he attacked me because I accidentally touched him.”
I remember it clearly. I was bleeding all over. Although I could barely move my legs, which felt like lead, I could still make out the prisoners lined up on either side of the corridor. I could still hear. Zinê Sevda was kneeling opposite me, holding out her arms to me. Kamo the Barber had grabbed the torturer’s wrist and flung him against the wall. The air had turned blue with screams and swearing. They had beaten Zinê Sevda and attacked Kamo. I couldn’t move my tongue. Wheezing sounds came from my throat.
“You’re mistaken, Uncle Küheylan, I didn’t help the girl. What would that have changed? Everyone has to deal with their own pain. I have my own problems, I can’t go poking my nose in anyone else’s pain. No one can ease anyone else’s pain in this world. I know that. I didn’t attack the torturer, and I didn’t defend that girl. Think what you want, I don’t care.”
Did he regret his compassion? Did caring about others make him uneasy? Some people shied away from loneliness, while others shied toward it. And Kamo the Barber was looking for somewhere in this tiny cell where he could take refuge. He barely spoke, kept his head bowed, and studied the ends of his feet. His gaze wandered like an ant on the floor, climbed up the walls, looked for a hole to crawl into, a crack to hide in, then finally alighted on the ends of his feet again. “Time’s a bitch!” he mumbled to himself. As he bowed his head to sleep he repeated the same words, like a mantra. “Time’s a bitch!”
Our movements slowed down in this cell buried so far underground, our bodies became more and more heavy. Our minds, which had grown used to the pace in the world aboveground, faltered as they tried to adapt to the conditions here. Our own voices sounded alien to us. The tiniest sound made our ears ring. Our wasted fingers twitched in the dark, as though they didn’t belong to us. The most difficult thing for us wasn’t being able to recognize others, but being able to recognize ourselves. What was this nightmare we were living? Whose was this body that was submitting to pain, and how much more could it take? Time, stretching before us with its putrid stench, was our worst enemy here; it buried itself in our flesh like a plow that works the fields, drawing blood, and then more blood.
Did Kamo the Barber mean the time outside, instead of the time in here? Was time the bitch in the world above, which was accessible by an invisible ladder? In that place there were no train stations, crowded ferries, or boulevards where everyone bumped into each other as they walked. There were no lampposts, bridges, or towers either. Everything consisted of a great meaning. One part of that meaning was haste, the other part was agitat
ion. Every tiny thing was a reflection of that greater meaning. Drawn curtains, leaving the workplace at the end of the working day, and the squares where lovers arranged to meet, were all reflections of it. If it rained, and washed and cleansed the city’s dirt for days, it would still be that meaning that emerged with the first ray of sunshine. Time that ticked on in maternity hospitals, in back streets and in late night bars, toyed with the city’s pace. People forgot the sun, the moon, and the stars and lived only with times. Time for work, time for school, time for an appointment, time to eat, time to go out. When it was finally time to sleep, people had no more strength or desire left to think about the world. They let themselves go in the darkness. They were dragged along by a single meaning, a meaning that was hidden in every single thing. What was that meaning and where was it taking us? People created small pleasures for themselves to stop their minds from clouding over with such questions, and chased after them relentlessly. They ran away from life’s hardships, slept peacefully, and thus lightened their minds’ burden. And their hearts’. They believed that. Until a wall inside them came crashing down and their hearts were crushed. When they realized that the thing beating under the rubble was not their heart, but time, they grew afraid. They were left with no choice. Whether one denied it or not, that bitch time came and seeped into a person’s skin, and the city’s veins.
Was that the kind of time that Kamo the Barber believed in? Was that why he bowed his head forward? He sighed and cursed. Underground, he still fell victim to the anxiety that existed aboveground. He was searching for a secluded place where he could be by himself. Young though he was, he believed he had reached the end of his life and looked not at the future but at the past. The torturers knew that too. “Old man!” they would say to me, “Do you have as many secrets as your cellmate, is your memory as deep as Kamo the Barber’s?”
As I bore pain, I too was curious about my memory’s limit. I didn’t think of what I knew but of what I didn’t know. The more I wanted to forget, the harder my memory tried to remember. Sometimes I shouted, sometimes I was silent. This is the furthest pain can go, I told myself each time. Then the pain intensified and I reached a new limit. What a strange feeling discovery was. People discovered pain too. As my flesh was being ripped and my bones crushed I would constantly make the acquaintance of new pain. The interrogators would mock me. “Who d’you think you are? Jesus on the cross?” My arms were stretched out on either side of me, I was tied to a heavy beam. I was suspended in the air. Under my feet was emptiness, above my arms infinity. I was the fixed point in the sky, the world and the stars revolved around me. I tried to get to know myself in the throes of pain. The interrogators would laugh. “We’ve spilt the blood of so many like you and fed it to the dogs. And we were the ones who crucified Christ and tortured Mansur Al-Hallaj to death. Our history is more glorious than yours. Do you know the anarchist Edward Jorris? He came to Istanbul to kill Sultan Abdülhamit. Abdülhamit always went to Yıldız Mosque for the Friday prayers and when he came out it always took him one minute and forty-two seconds to walk to his carriage. The anarchist Jorris calculated the time and prepared a bomb. But that Friday, Abdülhamit stopped to chat to Şeyhülislam on the way out of the mosque and missed being killed by the bomb. Twenty-six people died. They caught the anarchist. Do you know what we did? We hammered nails into his bones, we pulled his fingernails out one by one. We made him our slave. Who did anarchists think they were, when even Christ gave in to pain? Didn’t Christ reproach God in his last breath, crying out Father, why have you forgotten me? Everyone’s on their own when they’re suffering. You’ll squeal too.”
Blindfolded on the cross, I became oblivious. My ears would ring, I would forget where I was. I could hear the cry of a wolf in the distance. How many days, no, how many weeks ago was that? One night, as I was stumbling through knee-deep snow, I saw a wolf. The clouds hanging over Haymana Mountain had cleared and the stars had appeared one by one. There was a full moon. The wolf was standing high up, on the forest side, watching me. It was alone. In its eyes I could read the hunger suffered by all the wolves in the forest. Was I the only thing it had managed to find in the darkness? Hadn’t it been able to sniff out a deer or a rabbit? I took out my Browning from my coat pocket and clutched its cold hilt. I loaded it. I know, that place was the wolf’s home, the wolf’s mountain. I was just a passing traveler. I had to get to the village behind the mountain before daybreak.
I had learned that a young boy I knew was wounded and that he was recovering in a shepherd’s house in the village. I mustn’t delay, I had to get that boy out of the village before dawn. The snow was denser in some parts, making it more difficult to walk. My pace slowed down and I stumbled. I felt like I was carrying rocks on my back. Even my own body felt heavy, sweat ran down my neck.
I stopped when I reached a new plain. I tightened and retied my loose bootlaces. I brushed the snow off my coat. The wolf that was following me waited too. Its tail was covered in snow. It had a piercing stare. It stood on the slope without moving. Did it also find it difficult to walk in the snow? Judging from its wasted body, the winter would be a harsh one. It neither came closer nor moved away. There was a bullet shot’s distance between us. But I wasn’t going to harm it. I picked up the gun I had left on the snow while I was tying my bootlaces and put it in my pocket. I raised my empty hands in the air, showing them to the wolf.
The wolf turned its head toward the sky and started howling. It was ready to defeat every enemy or to die alone. The only thing it feared was hunger. The sound of the echo reached far and wide, resounding through the forest and the sky. There on top of the hill it looked like a rock that had been there for years, defying the harsh winds. There was no wolf stronger than this one, and no breath hungrier than that wolf’s. Everyone should know that, and bow their head to it. Its howl went on and on, reverberating in the snow, the forest and the night, and reaching the stars.
When the wolf had finished its howling, I started mine. Raising my head just like it had done, I screamed. My voice echoed and rippled. I held out my hands toward the stars. I too was here, under the same sky. I was ready to defeat every enemy or to die alone. I shouted until I was worn out. Then I stopped to catch my breath. As I rubbed a handful of snow into my hands I wondered whether I was a person who had come face to face with a wolf, or a wolf following a person. Which of us had just howled and put its seal on the night? My breath smelled of hunger. My neck was cold. Was this forest my home, or was I just a passing traveler?
I looked up at the sky. My father used to say that we had another life in the sky. Our world had a reflection, like a mirror. And each of us had a double living in the world in the sky. The people there slept during the day and woke up at night. They felt cold in the heat and got hot in the cold. They couldn’t see when it was light but could make out the furthest object in the dark. The men in this world were women there, while the women were men. They didn’t take life seriously, but attached great importance to dreams. They liked hugging strangers. They weren’t ashamed of being poor, but of being rich. For them laughing was crying, while crying was laughing. When someone died they sang songs and danced. When I was a child I often stared at the sky to try and catch a glimpse of my other self. I wondered what I was like in that other life. Now, as I contemplated the forest in the darkness, I wondered whether we had another world in the forest too. Who knows, maybe our lives had reflected onto the forest as well. That was why our voices echoed. That echo was the response from our other life. Each person also had an animal equivalent among the trees. Some were gazelles, some were snakes. Maybe I was a wolf. A savage, lonely, gaunt wolf. And now, exhausted by hunger, I was following an old man on a snowy night.
The dry frost had made the sky as clear as glass, the forest was bathed in navy blue light. I looked at the wolf on the top of the hill. Like me, it too had stopped to rest. Its breathing was more regular now. We mustn’t waste time, we needed to keep going. We started walking again. Leaving deep footprin
ts in the snow, we focused our gaze on the horizon. We knew another slope would appear behind every slope and that on each slope there would be a new wind blowing. We were used to solitude. Like the shooting stars in the sky, we were here today, gone tomorrow. That was why we enjoyed walking side by side with a stranger. Our shadows in the moonlight were all we needed to trust one another. Would we walk together on the return journey too? Would we walk together under the same sky again? When I got to the shepherd’s house I would take some meat and place it before the wolf on the way back. That was another reason why I was hurrying.
I passed Haymana Mountain without once stopping for a rest, the sweat pouring down my back, and reached the village before daybreak. When I saw the shepherd’s house at the village entrance I stopped and glanced around me. The village was sound asleep. Smoke floated out of the chimneys in thin streaks. The roofs were blanketed with snow. But there were too many footprints on the ground. In the snow the footprints of oxen, dogs, and the villagers were all mixed together. A dim light was burning in the shepherd’s window. He had left the gas lamp on. That was our signal. If the light wasn’t lit I would know that something had gone wrong. I turned and looked behind me. The wolf had stopped some way back and was watching me. Once it had picked up the dogs’ scent it hadn’t come any closer. It was waiting on the border of its own world. But the dogs were nowhere to be seen. They weren’t at the gate of the courtyard either. Either the cold had driven them into the barn, or they had gone down to the village. Examining the footprints in the snow carefully, I approached the house. I had a good look around, in case there were any footprints that looked like soldiers’ boots among the footprints of rubber soles. I didn’t see anything suspicious. I paused and sniffed the air. I scanned the opposite slope. How could I have known that the soldiers were lying in wait for me? How could I have guessed that they had been waiting to ambush me since last night? The only clue was the absence of the dogs. That didn’t arouse my suspicions. I trusted the light in the window. I had abandoned my mind to that light. I wanted to take the wounded boy away as soon as possible and be far away from there before daybreak. But no sooner had I entered the courtyard than I was at the end of my journey. When the soldiers hiding behind the wall pounced on me I didn’t have a chance to reach for the gun in my pocket. They flung me to the ground and beat me on the head with the butts of their rifles. They tied my hands and dragged me into the house.
Istanbul, Istanbul Page 8
