We would raise our heads and stare at the ceiling. We tried to recall whether the Istanbul above also renewed herself. Were the market stalls, the mosque pigeons, the cries of children at the end of the school day, the same on both sides? Did the Bosphorus flow the same in all neighborhoods? Were all babies born with the same cry, did all old people expire with the same sigh? We were curious about death. Did death too repeat itself, was each death like all the others?
“Zinê Sevda is at the grille, she’s calling you,” said Demirtay.
“Both of us?”
“Yes, she wants to talk to you.”
I helped Uncle Küheylan get up. We walked two steps to the door. The light from the corridor made us blink. We smiled at Zinê Sevda, as delighted as if we had seen our own daughter.
“Are you all right?” wrote Uncle Küheylan.
“Yes,” said Zinê Sevda, and wrote the same question back. “Are you all right?”
“We’re fine, my child.”
Zinê Sevda’s closed left eye was puffed and swollen, the bruises on her face had multiplied. The gash on her lower lip had grown wider. Her neck was black with grime. Her greasy hair was stuck to her head. She looked at me, examining my face as though counting my injuries one by one.
“Doctor, how are you?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, “but you’ve just returned from interrogation, you need to sleep and rest.”
Without waiting for me to finish writing, Zinê Sevda raised her finger and wrote quickly, “When you’re talking to each other, do you share your secrets?”
“No,” I said.
Uncle Küheylan and Demirtay ratified my answer by shaking their heads.
“Are you sure?” said Zinê Sevda.
“What do you mean?”
What did she mean?
We passed the time left over from being tortured sleeping, talking, or being cold. We shared our dreams and built our own heaven here. Just as Istanbul keeps her secrets hidden, we too hid our secrets from each other.
“Doctor,” said Zinê Sevda. Her finger remained suspended in the air for some time, she seemed undecided about completing her sentence. “The interrogators know your secret.”
My secret?
I swallowed. I shut my dazed eyes tightly, then opened them again.
“How could they know?” I said.
“You told them yourself.”
“No, I didn’t spill a word while they were torturing me.”
“Not under torture, in the cell. They planted one of their men in your cell. You told him.”
“What are you talking about, my child?”
What was she talking about?
Zinê Sevda wrote patiently.
“While I lay unconscious in the interrogation room I woke up at one point. The interrogators had left me by the wall and were chatting. I heard what they were saying. Yesterday someone they were interrogating tore off his blindfold and grabbed the gun of one of the interrogators. He fired at random. He ran into corridors where he hadn’t been before and fired indiscriminately. He didn’t get far. They surrounded him. They shot him without a second thought. That was what the gunshots we were wondering about yesterday were.”
Zinê Sevda paused to see whether I was following her.
“I was blindfolded, Doctor,” she said. “I couldn’t see their faces. They thought I was unconscious. They were stirring their tea and smoking. Then they started talking about you. One of the men told them how he had talked to you and gained your trust. He revealed the information he got from you.”
The information he got from me?
“What information did he get from me?”
“You’re not the real Doctor . . .”
I stepped back from the grille. I walked away with leaden steps. I continued to the back wall of the cell. I stood motionless, like a child who wants to scream in his sleep but can’t get the sound out.
“They know,” I murmured to myself, “dear God, they know.”
I took tiny steps back to the door.
“One more thing,” said Zinê Sevda. “They mentioned someone called Mine Bade. Apparently you’re not the man she loves. Mine Bade loves a different doctor.”
I had no strength left to walk. I slumped to the ground. I ran my hands over my mouth, my forehead, my hair. My shirt felt tight. I ripped off the buttons one by one. Uncle Küheylan grabbed me by the wrists. He made me lean back against the wall. As I struggled to get free he tightened his grip on my wrists.
What was happening to me?
They said there are three things in life that are irreversible. What were they? Was a spilled secret one of them? I wanted to be able to turn the clocks back. I didn’t want to go back to last month or to last year, but all the way back to the earliest era. How lovely to live when human was not yet human, when there was no such thing as cruelty. There was no worry. Existence was not based on suffering. People were satisfied with looking and touching. The number of births was not registered, deaths occurred in the natural order. And there was no need for secrets.
“We are not informers,” said Demirtay, holding me by one wrist. His voice was feeble. “We can’t tell anyone else your secret because we don’t know it. Do we, Uncle Küheylan?”
“You . . .” I said.
“We didn’t tell anyone anything.”
“What could you tell them?” I said. “They caught me in place of my son. He’s the real Doctor. I never told you that. I went to my son’s meeting. When I fell into the police’s trap I adopted his identity.”
My son’s meeting was with Ali the Lighter. It was one of the last hot days of the season. The sun looked beautiful to me. I lavished affection on the Istanbul contained in Ragıp Paşa Library for the last time. I bent down to the ground in that courtyard. I dug a hole in the earth with my hands, plunged underground, tumbled down layer after layer, and, sauntering in the dark like a worm, eventually descended to this cell. I shed my skin and grew a new skin underneath it. In my loneliness I ate my own flesh, when I felt thirsty I drank my own blood. There was a classic love song my wife used to sing. I wrote the lyrics on the wall with my fingernail. Oh flower bud, open, I said, don’t imagine the world’s pleasures are here to stay. I closed my eyes. I spoke to the darkness. This was where the last judgment would be. All the living were dead, all the dead were living. I listened to the entreaties. One day the door opened. Ali the Lighter entered. He was wounded. His pockets were full of light. When his pain increased the drops of light leaked out and melted. He missed his dead friends, he talked of Mine Bade, he was saddened by my plight. He said Mine Bade loved me. There are two wounds in her chest, Doctor, he said. The bullet caused one, you caused the other. The bullet wound will heal, but what about the one you caused? How can Mine Bade ease her heartache? As Ali the Lighter spoke, the ceiling opened, stars rained down on us. In the distance I could hear the song my wife used to sing. I am the nightingale in your garden of joy, the song went, and you are its rose. My son was free, he loved a girl and the girl had set her heart on him. They would find each other, and before long they would both recover. Ali the Lighter must recover too, and throw off the burden of all that sadness. He must hold on to the light leaking out of his pocket. I wanted to help him. I opened my hand and shared part of my secret with him. Don’t worry, I said, that girl doesn’t love me, she loves my son. They’ll meet and help each other. Don’t worry, they’ll be better soon.
“Is that all?” asked Uncle Küheylan.
“What do you mean, is that all?”
“Is that all the interrogators know?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“They know my son’s outside. They’ll go after him.”
“Do they know where he is?”
“No.”
In here I was not myself. I was a father who had taken his son’s identity. So Ali the Lighter wasn’t Ali the Lighter either. He was a policeman who had been shot in the conflict in Belgrade Forest.
He had had treatment, put on a weary face, then come inside with me. He told me things he had found out from files and from the people they had caught as though they were his own secrets. He was wounded, I believed him. He was suffering, I believed him. I gave him water, I shared bread with him. Once he mentioned the girl my son loved, I believed him even more. I thought I would lighten his burden. I wanted to ease his pain. I gave him part of my secret, but I didn’t tell him where my son was.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I haven’t told anyone where my son is.”
“Of course you haven’t,” said Uncle Küheylan, seizing my shoulders. “Because you don’t know.”
“That’s right, I don’t know,” I said.
“You can’t tell them what you don’t know, can you?”
“True.”
“Because you don’t know.”
“Because I don’t know.”
“What are you afraid of then?”
“I couldn’t defend my secret, what if I can’t defend my resistance either . . .”
Until now I hadn’t realized that I had been happy in the cell. Though I endured pain, though I groaned and spat blood, I was happy. I was self sufficient. I loved my secret. Perhaps my veins would bleed dry, perhaps I would take my last breath in here. No one would know what I carried in my heart. As my body became one big wound, my son would recover outside. Even if I died, he would live. People recognized unhappiness, but weren’t always aware of happiness. I realized that now.
Uncle Küheylan held my neck up. He gave me water.
“Calm down, everything will be all right,” he said.
“It will, won’t it?”
“Doctor, don’t worry, it will all be fine from now on.”
“I might die. That would be good too.”
The season had turned to winter. It grew dark early. Feather-light snowflakes rained down on the rooftops. Shop windows glittered, in the Istanbul aboveground, the animated Beyoğlu crowds were spilling outside. Wherever one turned there were cinema posters, the aroma of food, and the sound of music. A tram originating from infinity and bound for infinity passed through the crowd. At the back of the tram a young man held hands with the girl he loved. It was my son. He whispered something I couldn’t hear but was itching to know in the girl’s ear. His face was ingenious, he smiled just as he had done as a child. The melody of a classical love song drifted in from outside. When my son heard it, he stuck his head out of the window and looked outside. Oh flower bud, open, said the song, open and prolong the pleasure of this fleeting moment. My son examined the crowds as though he were searching for someone he knew, he scrutinized the faces, then held the girl’s hand tighter still. A tram from infinity, flowing like light through the Beyoğlu crowds, was transporting my son to a new infinity.
At that moment the iron gate opened. Its grating echoed through the corridor.
“I might die,” I repeated.
“What do you mean, you might die?” said Uncle Küheylan.
“If I die there’ll be no one left who knows where my son is.”
“But Doctor, you don’t know where he is either!”
“It’s too late . . .”
“No it’s not!”
“It’s too late . . .”
Uncle Küheylan stared at me. He slapped me hard across the face. He paused. Then he slapped me again.
9TH DAY
Told by Kamo the Barber
THE POEM OF ALL POEMS
“A sleepy passenger just descended from the overnight train met a thin man wearing a cap on the steps leading down to the sea in front of Haydarpaşa Station. The man was looking at a photograph he was holding in his bony fingers, and crying one moment and roaring with laughter the next. As he wept he bowed his head, but when he laughed he was like a madman. The train passenger put his small case down on the ground and went and sat beside the man. He called the simit seller and bought a simit each for himself and the man with the cap. He gazed at the domes aligned with garlands of clouds on the opposite shore. He talked about the fine weather, about how the smell of Istanbul varied according to the season. He read the names on the boats that sailed past in quick succession, endowing each name with a meaning. This was a city where the truth looked obvious, but was not. Steps that led down to the sea, steps that connected trains to boats, steps where people sat to look at photographs carried not one, but many forms of the truth. Everyone clung to a truth in a different part of the city. Was the sun on this side of Istanbul the same as the sun on the other side, there was no way of knowing. Did the wind here blow the same on the other side, no one could be certain. The train passenger and the man with the cap said let’s go. They decided to go and contemplate the sun and the wind on the opposite side. They took a ferry from the quay. They admired the ancient palaces, the barracks, and the towers as they drank tea on the rear deck. They thought that rather than being a city that drew history to herself, Istanbul was a city incapable of digging her way out of the entrails of history. It was that history that was sold on color postcards. When they got off the ferry and walked past the street vendors and the blind street singers, they immediately changed their minds. They concluded that postcards sold lies, not history. They jumped onto the commuter train at Sirkeci Station and went all the way to the last stop via neighborhoods inhabited by old people, taverns for early drinkers, and crumbling city walls. They gazed at the Istanbul where there were no more stops, and at the new color of the sky. They watched the dogs at the rubbish dump eating dead birds. They had return tokens. They boarded the same commuter train and the same ferry, traversed the railway tracks and the waves and returned to the steps at Haydarpaşa Station overlooking the sea. The sun was setting. Flocks of birds were flying toward the crimson sun, gliding past minarets and domes. Accepting the cigarette that the train passenger offered him, the man with the cap started talking, as though he had been awaiting this moment all day. Everything happened at around this time, he said. One evening my wife went out and never returned. They said she had run away, or was lost, or dead, but it made no difference to me. I made announcements, put up posters. I started off doing the rounds of police stations and hospitals, but then started frequenting taverns. I pronounced my wife’s name whilst drinking. I slept with prostitutes in an attempt to forget her. Like an exile in my own city, I counted the days, months, and seasons. Look, this is my wife’s photograph. I carry it everywhere. Her beauty is like drinking water from an emerald encrusted cup that refills itself with the same water each time. It’s infinite. It competes with the beauty of Istanbul. When I dream about our old days together I laugh with joy. But when I think about the future I realize I’ll never be able to see my wife again. This is the way I am, I’ve tumbled into a chasm. I laugh at the past in the photograph but cry about the future.”
Realizing that I could barely speak as I was nearing the end of my words, Uncle Küheylan helped me sit up. He made me lean against the wall. He reached over and picked up the water bottle that still had a couple of sips of water in it.
“Drink, it will make your throat feel better,” he said.
“Uncle Küheylan, I laugh at the past too, just like that thin man with the cap,” I said. “But I don’t cry about the future, I despise the future.”
“Kamo, you’re free to laugh at anything you want, and to despise whatever you like. As long as you don’t break down in the face of pain,” he said.
“I don’t care about pain,” I said, although my whole body was aching. Every bit of me hurt, from my toes to my groin, from my spine to my neck, from my temples to my chin. When I breathed, I felt as though my ribcage was being ripped apart, lights flickered on and off before my one open eye.
With great difficulty I took a sip of water from the plastic bottle and swallowed, my throat burning.
“Now it’s time for this,” said Uncle Küheylan, putting a piece of bread in my hand.
“That’s going to be hard,” I said, looking at the bread that looked rock-hard.
“Can’t you chew?”
“My teeth hurt, I’ve got cuts all over my gums.”
“Give it to me then, I’ll chew it for you.”
Uncle Küheylan took the bread back. He bit a piece off the end.
“How long have you been in here by yourself?” I asked, casting my eye around the cell as though examining a large plaza.
“Just before you came back they took the Doctor and the Student Demirtay away, and left me here by myself.”
“What’s the student doing? Hasn’t he gone mad, hasn’t he surrendered yet?”
“No, Kamo, they’re both resisting the pain.”
“Uncle Küheylan, I wonder how many people are left in these rows of cells who are still resisting. While they were interrogating me they showed me so many prisoners who had squealed, who were on their knees. They were pitiful. They were begging.”
“Sometimes the pleading in the cells is so loud it tears me apart. The ones who give in are our brothers too, Kamo. We can’t do anything for them except grieve.”
“Grieve? Perish the thought! Every time they took off my blindfold I thought they would bring me the Student. So I could see him in all his wretchedness, crying like all the others, begging the red-eyed torturers . . .”
“Stop thinking about all that now and eat this bread.”
Using his finger and thumb, Uncle Küheylan picked up the tiny morsels of the bread he had chewed and popped them into my mouth that I had opened wide, like a bird’s.
I began the laborious task of eating it. I felt it with my tongue. I placed it in my inside cheek. I swallowed my saliva to lubricate my throat. I picked up the bread with the tip of my tongue and forced it to slide down my throat. It felt like eating thorns. It burned my gullet as it slipped down.
“A bit more . . .” said Uncle Küheylan, holding out a small ball of squashed bread.
“No, I need a rest,” I said.
Istanbul, Istanbul Page 18
