I spat out the blood in my mouth and screamed. Tears of rage pricked my eyes. I couldn’t believe that I had fallen into the trap so easily and been snared like a rabbit. I struggled, knocking over the kettle on the ground with my legs. Then I looked around to try and see who had informed on me. There was no shepherd and no sign of any wounded boy. The soldiers brought in a tall young man from the next room. Pointing at me they asked, “Is this him?” “Yes,” said the young man. I thought for a moment, and then remembered. I had picked him up from this house last year and taken him to the group he was to meet in the mountains. He also nodded to the question, “Was he the one who brought the materials from Istanbul?” “He knows Istanbul like the back of his hand,” he said, referring to me.
Istanbul? Where did he get that from? On the night we had met last year the young man and I had chatted on the way to the meeting place in the mountains. As usual I had raised the subject of Istanbul and tried to learn new things and see the city through someone else’s eyes. As he described the Golden Horn I added the bridges over it, as he talked about the shop windows in the wide streets, I mentioned the squares at the end of them. So he assumed I was the one who had made contact with our friends in Istanbul, or else when they forced him to give someone’s name, mine had been the first to enter his head. “Lies!” I cried, but the soldiers didn’t believe me. They beat me and made me bleed. For two weeks they demanded the names and addresses of my connections and spread out a map of Istanbul before me so I could show them neighborhoods and street names. They demanded to know my secrets in the city. I told them the ones I knew. I talked about Istanbul’s quays with their wooden buildings, its skyscrapers plated in glass, its gardens with judas trees. The best places to watch the sun set, I showed them the fast disappearing parks where, despite the crowds, you can still sit down at the end of the working day. I described the lights that flicker like fireflies in the distance at night. “The people from Istanbul are losing their faith in the city,” I said, “but I believe in Istanbul.”
Every city desired a conquest and every era created its own conqueror. I was a conqueror of fantasies. I believed in Istanbul and lived by fantasizing about her. As hopelessness spread like the plague, I knew they needed me there. They were waiting for me. I was ready to sacrifice my body so I could give life to Istanbul. Pain was the mirror of my love. When Christ raised the dead he did not give life to a corpse, he reminded a man who had forgotten that he was immortal of his immortality. I too had to remind an immortal city of her immortality. If necessary I would be crucified like Christ and gather all the world’s suffering on my body. Istanbul, whose beauty was being ravaged a little more each day, needed me.
The wolf that had accompanied me on the night I had walked in the snow, had combined its time with mine. My father, who told me stories at night, had joined his time with mine. I couldn’t forget either my father’s stories or the wolf. With these things in mind, I had a strong desire to come to Istanbul, and thus took the final step of my life. I told the soldiers, “If you take me to Istanbul I’ll show you the places you want to see and tell you the secrets you want to hear.” If I was going to suffer I wanted to suffer in Istanbul, if I was going to die I wanted to die in Istanbul.
This Istanbul cell where I had ended up did not seem alien to me. I felt at home here. The cell seemed endless to me. Beyond the walls were the sea and the streets, and then new walls. It was impossible to tell one from the other. Each wall led to a street, and each street led to a sea. One behind the other, they stretched out endlessly. Pain on one side became happiness on the other, tears on one side turned into laughter on the other. Sorrow, apprehension, and joy were as closely entwined as sleeping kittens, sometimes it was difficult to tell their names apart. Just as you were thinking death was near, living suddenly sprang to life. Infinity was as fleeting as an instant. Right now I was at that limit. I could sense the sea behind the wall I was leaning on, I knew the streets winding ahead of me. I listened to the voice inside me. Like everyone else, I was more attached to what I hadn’t seen than to what I had seen.
When Kamo the Barber started to cough I tore my gaze away from beyond the wall and forced it back inside. I realized I was cold. I looked at the Doctor and the Student. Their faces were shaded by darkness. Their breath smelled rank. They were as cold as I was. They hunched their shoulders and hid their hands in the hollow of their underarms.
Kamo the Barber, who had stopped coughing, raised his head from his knees. He examined us like a child who has woken up in the wrong room.
“Are you all right?” asked the Doctor.
Kamo didn’t answer. He leaned over and picked up the plastic water bottle by the door. He drank. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
I repeated the Doctor’s question “Are you all right, Kamo?”
If he was in pain he would never admit it. He stopped frowning and his features relaxed.
“Uncle Küheylan,” he said, “do you like wolves?”
Had he dreamt it? Was he asking about the wolf that had accompanied me on that snowy night, or the wolf that had eaten the young man in the hunters’ story?
“Yes,” I said.
He turned to face the light. Without blinking he focused on one spot. His face cheerful for once, he said, “If I were a wolf I would eat all of you.”
Were we supposed to laugh or shudder?
“You’re hungry. We have a bit of bread left. Shall I give it to you?”
“I’d still eat you.”
He was talking without looking away from the light. Whatever he had dreamt, he was determined to eat us.
“Why?” I asked.
“Does there have to be a reason for everything, Uncle Küheylan? If it makes you feel better, I’ll tell you why. You tell stories set in the cold. You make it snow, you have the hunters get caught in a storm. You make this drafty cell even more drafty, you turn the concrete we sit on into ice. When I’m really cold you give me no choice but to be a wolf. I want to rip you to pieces and eat you.”
Could he smell the blood that clung to every inch of our body, which had dried on our hair, our faces, our necks? As his fangs itched, did he crave our battered flesh? I smiled to myself. Turning toward the light, I focused my gaze on one spot, like him. If everyone has a dark abyss inside them, Kamo was waiting at the edge of his. He stared into an infinite void, seeing only darkness, even in the light. That was why he was so disparaging of pain. The world and living seemed frivolous to him. He ate little bread and drank little water. He hoarded words in his memory, preferring to stay silent most of the time. He liked the dark and sleeping. He would close his eyes and withdraw into himself, as though abandoning himself to a buzzing inside his head. When he looked at our faces he would immediately notice the light clinging to our skin and pity us. Our condition made him sad. Maybe he asked himself the same questions all the time: Was fate like a line etched onto a wall? Could it never be removed, couldn’t fate ever change?
“Uncle Küheylan, are you okay?” asked the Doctor, touching my arm. “You drifted off . . .”
Did I? I didn’t know what was going through my head either.
“Ah, I was thinking about Istanbul. The Istanbul up above.”
“Istanbul?”
Whenever I forgot what I had been thinking about, or whenever I wanted to change the subject, Istanbul was the first word that came into my head.
“When I get out of here,” I said, “the first thing I’m going to do is go for a stroll on Galata Bridge. I’m going to stand next to the people fishing and watch the Bosphorus. Then I’m going to look for the person who’s my double and who leads a different life here.”
“Your double?” said the Doctor.
“What do you mean, a different life?” added the Student Demirtay.
“If I had been born in the city what kind of life would I have had?” I said. “There’s an answer to that question because my double lives here. You say you always tell stories that you already know. This is
a story that you don’t know.”
They eyed me with interest.
“What don’t we know?” they asked.
“You know me as well as you know Istanbul, as well as you know pain. There are gaps in all three.”
“Then tell us, we want to know it all.”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “In our tiny village my father used to show us the sky at night, he would tell us that we lived a life there. There was a mirror-like reflection of our life up there. A double of every one of us lived there. I used to get out of bed in the middle of the night and gaze out of my window at the sky. I used to wonder what the child who was my double was doing. I would observe the sky more whenever my father left us to go to the city. I used to think that the Istanbul stories he told us when he came back belonged to our other life. Maybe Istanbul was the city in the sky where the people who were our reflections lived. My father would go there to see our doubles. He loved a child who looked like me and told her stories about the village. The child in Istanbul lived as though she were me, and because she did the things I dreamed about doing, this is what occurred to me one day: If I had a reflection in Istanbul, then I must be her village equivalent. She wanted to know about me too. Once I realized that, I started living for that child too. I tried to do the things that she couldn’t do in the city, I caught fish in the river, I picked sloes in the mountains. I bandaged the wounds of injured animals and carried heavy bags for old ladies. Thinking that everyone lives for someone else as well, I was twice as responsible. I remembered that when I laughed a lot she was crying, that when I cried she was laughing. We completed each other. I was a boy and she was a girl. Now I’ll tell you that girl’s story. Would you like that?”
“Yes, tell us.”
“Let’s have a cup of tea first, we’re parched.”
I bent over. I raised my hand as though holding a teapot, and filled our invisible tea glasses. Holding the glasses with my fingertips, like I would if they were very hot, I handed one to each of them. Then I passed them the sugar. The tea was strong and fragrant. I stirred it slowly. They did the same. When the Student Demirtay stirred his a bit too quickly I signaled to him to slow down. The clinking of the spoon against the glass might travel down the corridor and reach the guards. Demirtay smiled. Life had discovered that smile, that tea, and these stories in here.
5TH DAY
Told by the Student Demirtay
THE NIGHT LIGHTS
“It was during the war. War stories are long but I’ll be brief. A military unit was weak with exhaustion after a series of conflicts that had gone on for days. They had run out of supplies and lost contact with the hinterland. They searched for a place where they could retreat; after walking for hours in the darkness they eventually arrived at a plateau. They drank water from a pool and gathered blackberries from the bushes. They couldn’t risk shooting a deer, the sound of the gunshots would give away their hideout. After a short nap they climbed up a steep hill. They traveled by night and slept in the shelter of the rocks by day. They lit no fires, they ate any snakes or lizards they managed to hunt raw. If he could have been certain they wouldn’t kill him, there was more than one amongst them who would have surrendered to the enemy for the sake of one meal a day. Had their entire army been routed? Who could they make contact with, and how? They couldn’t find any signals, they couldn’t enter into any villages and ask. The entire area was under enemy command. It’s actually a long story, but I’ll be brief. Growing fewer in number by the day, three days later they reached the top of a new mountain and lay down exhausted in the sunshine, and slept. When evening came and they found water and washed, they started to feel a bit more like their old selves, and tried to work out where they were. One soldier with a gold tooth pointed to the valley down below and said his native village was there. They stood in the darkness like lost children, gulping as they looked at where he was pointing. The lights in the village flickered like fireflies. The soldier with the gold tooth said he could go to his village and return with food. The commander objected. He might get caught and killed by the enemy. The soldier with the gold tooth said, we’re on the point of death anyway. If I succeed I won’t just come back with food, I can bring news of our boys, as well as information about the enemy. Everyone supported him. The soldier took his leave of his comrades, descended into the valley and vanished in the darkness. The sky changed color three times, going from dark blue to flaming red. Toward daybreak the soldier with the gold tooth appeared from between the rocks, with two holdalls on his back. In answer to his comrades’ eager questions he said sit down, I’ve got things to tell you. He unloaded the holdalls from his back. The village is teeming with the enemy, he began. They don’t know my village as well as I do, I managed to slip past without anyone seeing me and made it to my house. I knocked on the door. My wife opened the door; at the sight of me she would have shrieked, but I covered her mouth and calmed her down. Okay, so what happened next? The soldier with the gold tooth who asked this question delved into his holdall and took out a slab of cheese. Okay, he said, whoever guesses what happened next will get this cheese. The soldiers, whose breath stank from days of hunger, answered eagerly. You asked about enemy numbers, said one. You asked where our soldiers are, said another. Just as it started to look as if the questions would go on forever, a soldier from Istanbul sitting at the back raised his hand, you shagged your wife on the spot, he said. Laughing, the soldier with the gold tooth tossed him the cheese. The soldiers exclaimed in surprise and laughed out loud. The soldier with the gold tooth took a pie out of the holdall. I’ll give this to whoever guesses what happened after that, he said. This time you really did ask about our soldiers, said one. You asked after your children, said another. The soldier from Istanbul sitting at the back raised his hand again. That type always sat at the back, whether it was in the army or at school. You shagged your wife again, he said. Laughing, the soldier with the gold tooth gave him the pie as well. He took a fried chicken out of the holdall and waved it in the air. I’ll give this chicken to whoever guesses what I did after that, he said. You shagged her again! called out all the soldiers in unison, as though it was their early morning drill. The soldier with the gold tooth couldn’t stop laughing. No, he said, after that I took my boots off.”
I repeated the last sentence. “No, I took my boots off.”
Covering my mouth, I started laughing fitfully. The Doctor and Uncle Küheylan laughed too, while their shoulders went up and down. We laughed soundlessly, but the walls shook with the impact of our convulsing bodies. We were like naughty children hiding in a secret nook and laughing where the grownups couldn’t see them. Our mouths spread wide, we looked on happily. Knowing what would make someone laugh was one way of knowing them. We knew Kamo the Barber, on the other hand, by what wouldn’t make him laugh. His face was dour. He gazed at us blankly, oblivious to what we found so funny.
Once we had settled down a bit I said, “We’ve laughed so much, I wonder if something terrible is about to happen to us.”
“Something terrible?” said the Doctor. “Something terrible happen to us, here?”
We started laughing again. Only when people were either drunk or laughing did they forget about the future and shrug their shoulders at life. Just as time comes to a standstill when a person is suffering, it also comes to a standstill when he laughs. The past and the present are wiped away, only the infinity known as that instant remains.
Tired by our laughter, we slowed down. We wiped tears from our eyes.
“I knew that story about the soldiers,” said Uncle Küheylan, “but there wasn’t anyone from Istanbul in the story I knew, it was set in Russia.”
The Doctor replied for me. “All stories become the property of Istanbul in here,” he said.
“You don’t just stop at telling stories you already know, you change them and mold them into whatever shape you want.”
“Didn’t your father do the same thing, Uncle Küheylan? Didn’t he fling the Istanbul sailors in
to the oceans in pursuit of white whales, didn’t he bring the hunters in the wolf story all the way to Istanbul?”
Istanbul, Istanbul Page 9
