Istanbul, Istanbul

by Burhan Sonmez

  When was a man completed? My wife said that after she had given birth she had felt things that she could never have imagined. “I feel complete, it’s as though all the loose pieces inside me have fallen into place,” she had said. An air of serenity I had never witnessed before settled on her face. I had looked at her with envy, wondering about her satisfaction with the world. What kind of a completeness was it? How could I attain that feeling? Was it enough to perform acts of kindness for others, or to pass for my son? Would taking my son’s suffering on my own shoulders join up all the pieces inside me, elevate me to satiety? I asked myself the question that I often thought as I sat alone facing the Istanbul Sea, as I lay my head on my pillow at night, and as I wended my weary way to work in the mornings: When was a man completed?

  One day my son too would ask himself the same question.

  “My son,” I said, “I have admitted you here under another patient’s name. No one knows your real identity. You’re safe.”

  7TH DAY

  Told by the Student Demirtay

  THE POCKET WATCH

  “When the director of Beyazıt Library, Şerafat Bey, arrived at work that morning, he realized that there was no one waiting at the door. Every morning there were always a couple of bibliophiles there, but this morning he was alone. Walking toward the lateral wall of the building that had been converted from a mosque stable into a library, he opened the parcel of liver he was carrying. He crouched down and placed the finely chopped pieces of liver onto the cobblestones. He watched the cats gather, then turned his attention to the pigeons under the plane tree. He took a paper bag filled with wheat out of his briefcase and scattered a handful around the tree. Here the cats and the pigeons got on well together, they didn’t bother one another. As the director stood up and was walking toward the door he saw the two early-bird bibliophiles approaching. He wished them good morning and reminded them that they were ten minutes late that day. The two bibliophiles consulted their wristwatches and said they were on time. The director took his pocket watch out of his waistcoat pocket. He compared it with that of the bibliophiles. Theirs was slow. The director gave them an indulgent smile, but when, throughout the day, he saw that they were not the only ones, that everyone’s watches, inside and outside the library, were ten minutes out, he realized that there was something going on. Time’s gracious hand was changing in Istanbul. School bells, cinema performances, and boat trips were all ten minutes out, and no one was aware of the discrepancy. The children selling newspapers in the mornings at the tops of their voices announced no such news. Every day the director opened the library according to his own watch, and asked himself the same question: Why were all the clocks suddenly slow? It’s actually a long story but I’ll be brief. In one part of the world a war was ending, while in another a new one was brewing. Despite the smell of spring, the air in Istanbul was oppressive. Mariners set out to sea with a serene expression, women forgot their washing on the line for days. The director, Şerafat Bey, couldn’t bear the fact that everyone’s watches were slow and that his regulars were arriving late, and resolved that he had to do something. Once he had fed the cats and the pigeons in the mornings and worked in the library until midday, he started to delegate tasks to his assistants and spend the rest of the day visiting the other libraries in the city. Whispers circulated around the reading rooms. The presenter on the state radio read the news and the muezzin in the mosque called the faithful to prayer ten minutes late. While the time in Istanbul was undergoing a complete change, now the only watch that appeared to be wrong was his. He didn’t know that he was in danger, that he was being watched by men with black rosettes. He couldn’t even begin to estimate the consequences of the tardy radio and calls to prayer. I should at least save the libraries, he thought. He told the librarians the correct time and the truth that only he seemed able to perceive. He also told them that the cats and pigeons that had lived side by side in Beyazıt for years had changed, that the cats had grown peevish and that the pigeons flapped their wings nervously. We must appropriate time, and remind future generations of the truth, he said. As long as his pocket watch continued to work nonstop, as long as someone wound it up every day and made it go, time was on their side. He believed that sincerely. One morning, completely by chance, Şerafat Bey dodged a car that was coming straight for him; at lunchtime at the last moment he returned the poisoned sherbet that a street vendor held out to him on the grounds that the glass was dirty, but when he arrived home in the evening and was entering the garden, he could not evade the knife that someone aimed at his back in the darkness. The neighbors rushed over upon hearing his wife’s screams, they called a doctor. Realizing he had reached the end of the road, Şerafat Bey took his watch out of his pocket and handed it to his wife for safekeeping. His wife looked at the pocket watch with the red ruby encrusted cover and said sadly: What can be the meaning of yours being the only watch that’s right when everyone else’s is wrong? Şerafat Bey gazed at his wife tenderly and motioned to her to draw near. As she bent over, under the curious scrutiny of the neighbors, he whispered something in her ear, then he closed his eyes, never to open them again. The next day they washed his slight body and, following the funeral prayers, performed ten minutes late, bore him to the graveyard. They covered him with damp earth. The neighbors shed tears, raised their voices in lament and, in between wails, they sidled up to Şerafat Bey’s wife and asked what her husband had whispered to her before he died. His wife replied tearfully, shaking her head from side to side. I didn’t hear my husband’s words, she said, I’m a bit deaf, you see.”

  Uncle Küheylan repeated the last sentence for me. “I’m a bit deaf, you see.”

  We all laughed together.

  We were not subjected to pain in the cell, but we were suspended on the border of pain. Wasn’t it the same aboveground? There, in the midst of the skyscrapers, the suburbs, the blaring car horns, and the unemployment epidemic, any misfortune could have befallen us, we were prone to fall prey to any affliction. While this vast city was draping our bodies in artificial furs and keeping us warm, she was liable to suddenly push us away and flush us down the toilet, like an unwanted fetus. This risk whipped our appetite into action, making us live each day with intensified desire. We believed we had almost reached heaven, and that hell was beneath our feet. That’s why pleasure in the city was abundant, while fear was continuous. We got carried away by the fervor of our laughter. Every emotion came larger than life, we lived it purely for our own ends, and then it was consumed, leaving a cloying stench on our skin. The more we saw of this, the more ardently we yearned to change Istanbul.

  After days of resistance, now my watch too was slow, like that of the Istanbul dwellers in the story; during interrogation I asked myself more questions than the interrogators did. I was a man, not a machine, and my flesh and bones had almost reached their endurance limit. Would it hurt anyone if I talked, I wondered, desperately searching for a way to evade pain. What would happen if I provided a couple of details to make the interrogators stop? What would be the harm in giving them a name, or an address? The person I would name would have long since gone into hiding, the address I would show them would have been evacuated from day one. I would weigh all this up and try to persuade myself. I could just give them trivial information, I wouldn’t put anyone in danger. I would fool the interrogators and spare myself a lot of pain. Was that impossible? As these thoughts gnawed at me, I didn’t know how the words had got into my mind. The electric shocks that shot through my body turned first into pain, then desperation, and finally, into innocent words that roamed around my brain. I was approaching a borderline and I had no idea what lay on the other side of it.

  What should I do, what should I cling to? I wanted to consult the Doctor, but, apart from giving me hope, there wasn’t much he could do. He couldn’t cure my weakness, he couldn’t resolve the doubts in my mind. A bloody wall was rising right under my nose. I could see nothing else. I was as lonely as the librarian Şerafat Bey, wh
o, despite what every other clock said, believed his was the only watch in Istanbul with the right time. The expression “great dreams lead to great disappointment” sprang to my mind. I felt sad that I was accepting defeat for the first time in my life, I was grieved because I hadn’t been able to withstand the torment inflicted by the city.

  “You told me that story before, but the ending was different,” said the Doctor.

  “Just as you can’t bathe in the same river twice,” I said, “neither can you tell the same story twice in Istanbul.”

  Life was short and stories were long. We too wanted to become a story, to blend into the river known as life and flow with it. Telling stories was a way of manifesting that desire.

  Uncle Küheylan joined in, saying, “That pocket watch is one of the things about Istanbul that fascinates me. According to my father, the rubies on its cover shone like stars in the dark. Anyone who looked at it once searched the sky for nights on end, and only believed the pocket watch was right once they had found the stars that looked like the rubies.”

  “There was a library I used to go to when I was a child, the clock was always ten minutes fast,” said the Doctor. “In those days there were a lot of stories about the ruby encrusted watch, but they all ended differently. Just like Demirtay changes all his stories, the watch stories changed too. I didn’t give it much thought when I was a child, but now I’m beginning to wonder about that pocket watch too.”

  “As though we’ve got nothing else to worry about in this cell . . .” I mumbled to myself.

  Uncle Küheylan, who was sitting next to me, turned and looked at me. “Do we have other worries, Demirtay?” he asked. He was as serious as if he wasn’t sitting on bloodied concrete, but all snug in front of a fire in his local coffeehouse.

  I wanted to laugh at his self-assuredness. Instead I told them about the dead woman I had seen in the interrogation room yesterday. At one point the interrogators untied my hands and feet, made me get off the table they had strapped me to and removed my blindfold. There was a woman lying against the wall. She was naked. Her body was covered in knife slashes. It was obvious that she was dead, her lips and chest made no movement to indicate that she was breathing. One of the interrogators walked up to her and landed a kick on her stomach. Then another. And another. Then he stood on her fingers and began to crush them. As he crushed her fingers the interrogator looked at me, wanting to see me shudder, curious to know what I would say. He amused himself by swaying his head right and left, in time with the crunching sound of the woman’s broken fingers. There was a watch beside the woman’s hand. Its face was broken. Realizing I was looking at the watch, the interrogator directed his gaze at it too. He became absorbed in it for some time, as though he didn’t know what it was for. Then, with his bloody, mud-caked boots, he stood on the watch. Slowly he moved his heel. He crushed the hour and minute hand, the springs and the wheels. His body rocked backward and forward, as his head moved around in circles. A drunken expression settled on his face. It wasn’t just an ordinary watch, he had the past and the present, yesterday and tomorrow under his feet. Who could stop him? This transcended the pleasure of driving fast cars, drinking in garish nightclubs, and sleeping in hotel rooms with a lingering scent of women. He was destroying time, holding death in the palm of his hand. Blood, flesh, and bones were on his side. There was no stopping him. As the hour and minute hands crunched under his feet, beads of sweat sprouted on his forehead, the veins on his temples bulged. Like the mighty pharaohs, he thought he was more on the level of the gods than of people. For him there were no sins, nor punishments. He ruled over the suffering of others, and over their last breath.

  “They showed me that woman too,” said Uncle Küheylan. “I think it was after your interrogation. The watch on the floor was smashed to pieces, there were bits of metal everywhere.”

  “That’s the second dead body I’ve seen since I’ve been here,” I said.

  Was there any point in that woman’s watch being right once she was dead? That’s what I wanted to ask. Or, what was the point of our suffering in here while aboveground everyone was going about their life unaware of our existence? When the first humans set out to build the Tower of Babel, God confused their languages so they were unable to understand each other and stopped them building the tower. What good did it do? Enraged, humans conquered not just the earth but the sky as well. They built not one but a thousand towers, boring through the sky repeatedly. As their buildings grew taller, humans realized God had been annihilated, and no longer sought Him. By building cities more intricate than ants’ trails, they brought every language and every race together in the same place. They lived as though they would never die. If there was a need for a new God, humans were the only candidate for the post. The mightier they grew, the longer their shadow got, and, as they gazed upon their shadow, they forgot what kindness was. They knew not what they did. They replaced kindness with right, and right with gain or loss calculations. They erased the first fire, the first word, and the first kiss from their memory. All that remained to remind humans of kindness was pain. And they tried to relieve that with drugs. We thought more about kindness here because we endured pain, that was the scale by which we measured our worth. But I wondered, as long as everyone aboveground in the city was indifferent to us, what was the point of our suffering underground?

  “Demirtay,” said the Doctor, “let’s not talk about death, let’s talk about how people up there are living life to the full. Istanbul remains splendid, despite our absence, she’s still lively and buzzing. Isn’t that nice to know?”

  I didn’t reply.

  Uncle Küheylan scrutinized both of us. When he realized we were waiting for him, he spoke, his voice serene.

  “In our house we used to have a wall rug with a picture of a deer on it. I’ll tell you about it. One day my father pointed at it and asked: Could you love a real deer as much as you love the one on this rug? I found it odd that he should pronounce the words real and deer together. I was sitting by the window. It was night. Outside there were stars, beneath the stars were mountains, and behind the mountains were deer. My father looked at me as though he could see the stars, the mountains, and the deer in my face and told us the story of a melancholy young man in Istanbul. This melancholy young man saw a picture of a woman and fell in love, fantasizing about it night and day. One day he happened to meet the woman in the picture, but, after a single glance he turned away, not deigning to cast her a second look. I love the woman in the picture, he said, I don’t feel anything for the real woman. It wasn’t the woman’s existence that stoked the young man’s heart, but his fantasies of her. Was it love that was strange, or people? My father said that Istanbul dwellers lived with this mentality too. Istanbul dwellers liked the paintings of Istanbul that they hung on their walls much more than the streets they walked in every day, the rainy rooftops, and the teahouses on the beach. They would drink rakı, recount legends, recite poetry, then they would gaze at the paintings on their walls and sigh. They thought they lived in a different city. Outside, the waters of the Bosphorus flowed in between breaking on the shores, ships set sail on the waves, seagulls spread their wings from the Asian to the European side. Under bridges children built fires and bet each other that they could tell the make of a car by the sound of its engine, night workers listened to reproachful Arabesque songs. In houses, coffeehouses, and workplaces, Istanbul’s visible face beamed out of the front of the paintings on the walls, while its invisible face remained on the back. Everyone stared at the paintings as though bewitched, and then wended their way sorrowfully to bed. They divided time in two, just as they divided sleep and wakefulness.”

  Uncle Küheylan carried so many words around in his head that he had more stories than there were streets in the city.

  “This is how the Istanbul dwellers divided time,” he said, holding out his hands on either side of him. “They thought the real Istanbul was a city of the past. This tired city had been bursting with energy in the pa
st, had had a glorious sultanate, but had now drifted off to sleep. And perhaps she would never again awake from that deep sleep. Like magnificent mansions, magnificent stories were also buried under the rubble. Istanbul dwellers who believed that worshipped the past and read novels that spoke of old times. Was there any other time but today’s? Wasn’t this the city where time from all eras convened? Or was that resource beyond our reach? They preferred to forget questions like those that crossed their minds. They did not look near, they looked far. They endured grief for the sake of forgetting, but didn’t realize that they were also forgetting the present. Living and dying was the same thing for them, whereas the past was infinite. They were hopelessly in love with bygone eras, but they scorned the city where they opened their eyes every morning. They heaped concrete upon concrete and built domes that mimicked one another. They demolished, they smashed, then, when they returned home exhausted, they went to sleep with a pretty painting of Istanbul above their heads.”