What kind of a delusion was that? She placed the word love on the same level as all the other words, without attaching any more weight to it. I groaned with the pangs of my conscience. Oh, that old, interminable conscience! As I reread the letter I asked myself: After all this suffering, would I have any power over time? Would I be able to conquer my blind and deaf destiny? I was broken. I was lonely. Nightmares plagued my sleep. Ah, my defeated heart! Ah, that old, interminable conscience! Who could endure such terror? Who could go on resisting life’s cruelty for so long? Mahizer was asking me for the right to be forgotten, when I needed the right not to forget. I couldn’t get her face out of my mind for a single moment. Otherwise I would not be me. I would become soulless. I would become a dead man rejected by the grave. Oh, that old and interminable conscience that plunges its poisoned arrows into my soul! If I took Mahizer out of myself all that would remain of me would be a corpse. A corpse gnawed by maggots.
Mahizer had collected all the poems that we used to read each other and dissolved them into her letter. She was like an orphaned child. She was groaning with affliction. She said she was trapped inside a room and was asking me to open the door, to rescue her. “Open the door!” she said. “Open it and set me free! You go your way, I’ll go mine!” She was struggling. She was banging on the door with her small fists. Bang! Bang! “Open the door!” She said I had the key that would save her, but I didn’t know what to do. I forgot where I was. I could hear the distant sound of dogs barking getting gradually closer. I could make out howling in the darkness and recognized the distinct sound of the white dog. I was cold. My chest hurt. Voices echoed inside my head. Bang! Bang!
“Open the door! Guard! Open the door!”
Unwillingly, I slowly realized that the voice coming from somewhere very deep was Uncle Küheylan’s.
“Open the door! My friend is dying! Help us!”
Bang! Bang!
I half-opened my good eye and looked into the darkness. I saw that Uncle Küheylan was standing bolt upright, pounding on the cell door. I couldn’t call out to him. I couldn’t move my finger. I wheezed as I struggled to breathe. I groaned.
Uncle Küheylan came and leaned over me.
“You’re alive,” he said, “my wonderful Barber, you’re alive.”
He straightened my neck, which was hanging limply. He picked up the cloth on the floor and wet my lips. He wiped my forehead. As he stroked my hair he talked, his words full of optimism. He said we would leave here one day and explore Istanbul together. Beautiful dreams were either for heartbroken lovers or those at death’s door. As Uncle Küheylan held my hand he could see I was near the end. He realized that the time I had wasted aboveground was running out in here too.
I heard the sound of the iron bolt. The cell door opened. The guard’s huge bulk appeared before the light.
“What are you shouting about, halfwit!” he barked.
“My friend is seriously ill, he needs help,” said Uncle Küheylan, speaking more gently.
“He can drop dead, that way he’ll be free and so will we.”
“At least give him some water, a painkiller . . .”
“You’ll need that painkiller yourself in a minute, moron. They’re asking for you in the interrogation room. Come on, get up!”
I saw the shadow of the white dog next to the guard’s huge feet. It had padded in gracefully from the corridor. It stood in the light like pure marble. Its neck was wide. Its ears were erect. Its fur flowed down to its tail, like a warm blanket. Its wolf-like eyes pierced through me, like in the old days.
Oblivious of the white dog, the guard grabbed Uncle Küheylan by the collar and dragged him outside. He bolted the door on me. He left the two of us alone.
The strength drained from me. My eye closed. I wanted to drift off into an endless sleep.
The white dog approached slowly, from its breath I could feel it lying down beside me, accompanying me. Its warm body reclined against mine. It wound its long tail around my legs. Our breathing was synchronized, our chests rose and fell together. It waited until I was warm. If we had time it would have lain like that for hours. But there was no time. It raised its head. It came closer. It licked my face. It ran its moist, pink tongue up and down my body as though it were caressing its baby. From my eye to my ear, from my chest to my wrist, one by one it healed all my wounds. It eased my pain. In this excruciating world, when a person closed his eyes he should at least be able to breathe without pain. Otherwise what would be the point of living. The white dog shifted its weighty body. It leaned more heavily on my shoulder. Sticking out its sleek tongue, it also licked away all the fears that had been building up since my childhood. It soothed me. It relieved me of every burden. I felt weightless. I felt as though I were floating in warm, calm water. If only life were as kind as the white dog. If only life had shown me another path when I had lost my way.
10TH DAY
Told by Uncle Küheylan
YELLOW LAUGHTER
“Send me three apples, bite one of them before you send it. As the ship’s elderly cartographer took the letters of his long-dead lover out of his little chest and read them he repeated the sentence he had just come across: Send me three apples, bite one of them before you send it. Doctor, have I told you this story before? Really? This time I’ll tell you a different version. Listen. The elderly cartographer had devoted his lifetime to roaming the world’s seas with the two fortunes he had inherited from his lover, one, loneliness, and the other, the small chest of letters. On each continent he drew new maps, on each island he added new names to the maps. On his final voyage, which he undertook as a gray-haired man, he planned to bid farewell to the sea and spend his remaining years on land. Much as he respected seamen who surrendered their souls to the waves, he dreamed of his own body being buried beside that of the sweetheart of his youth. He confided this to the compass master with whom he shared a cabin. For his part, the compass master didn’t care whether it was at sea or on land, but he wanted to die going by the right time. I go by the time on this watch, said the compass master, taking out his pocket watch and lovingly caressing its cover. The ruby encrustations on the cover concealed a sign that he had never been able to decipher. Either that, or he liked to believe that such a secret existed. It was a starry night. When a rough wave crashed into the side of the ship they heard something crack outside. The elderly cartographer and the compass master rushed out of the cabin and climbed up the steps to the deck. When they saw the sky studded with twinkling stars, they stopped and stared with an expression that was more like that of children fascinated by the sky than of old men who had spent their whole lives at sea. They gazed as the milky way flowed in slow motion. The elderly cartographer pointed at a spot where the stars curved like a river. Look, he said to the compass master, doesn’t that look like the patterns on your watch? They took out the pocket watch and compared. They saw that the red rubies on the cover were sparkling and that they were an exact reflection of the stars revolving in the curve in the sky. It’s right, continued the elderly cartographer, the time and the signs on your watch are right. Clouds gathered rapidly, the sky became overcast. The sails howled, while the ropes whistled like whips. The ship bound for the ocean was tossed about by the wind, like a leaf. As the rain pelted down, the ship was assailed by a whirlwind from all sides. They grew alarmed. Following the instructions that the captain barked between panic-stricken cries, they struggled to set the wheel back on track and adjust the sails. They scuttled right and left, loosening and tightening the ropes. For three days the deluge continued, unabating, the clouds did not clear. They were flung hither and thither on the waves, dragged, perhaps to the ocean, perhaps to a previously unnavigated sea. When, at the end of the third day the sea grew calm, the wind subsided and the stars reappeared in the sky, they believed the storm was over. They tried to work out where they were. They searched high and low for a piece of dry land where they could repair their torn sails and replace the drinking water that had poured out of
the smashed barrels. One by one the captain examined the maps spread out before him, he followed the stars. Eventually he observed that the shapes on one old map corresponded to the position of the stars. Placing his index finger on the sea at the corner of the map, he said, we’re here, adding: And there’s an island here that’s a day’s journey away, we can go there. The elderly cartographer and the compass master standing beside the captain looked at one another. They had their doubts about the azure blue island the captain was pointing at. Captain, they said, let’s not go so far off course, it looks like one of those false islands drawn by love-struck cartographers. In the past, certain cartographers would draw an island on a blank section of their map and name it after the woman they loved. That way they would leave an imprint of their love on the world. Stories of disillusionment after ships sailed to false islands found on maps were rife on the seas. Although the elderly cartographer and the compass master seemed to have their doubts about this island they did not make any forecasts. They both knew it was the elderly cartographer who had put that island on the map when he was a young man. They couldn’t say so openly for fear of the captain’s wrath, they were afraid of being tossed into the sea bound and gagged. The two friends went down into their cabin and spent the night talking. I first saw the girl I loved in the village market, said the elderly cartographer. I was an adolescent. I wrote her letters. I read the letters she sent me in secret, for fear her no good brothers would find out, over and over again. When I departed for my first ocean voyage I told her I would bring her back a present she would never forget. My aim was to make some money from whaling and upon my return take my beloved somewhere far away. My beloved was beautiful, she was slender, she was delicate. She fell ill while I was away and lay in bed burning with fever for days. Death eventually defeated her body, which was as fragile as glass. When I returned from my sea voyage I went to her grave. I dug a grave for myself adjacent to hers. For several nights I worked on the map I had with me. I drew the most beautiful of islands on a deserted coastline, colored it blue and named it after my beloved. As long as the world continued to revolve I would search for that nonexistent island named after my beloved. I set sail with that dream in my heart. Baring her chest to the waves, the white ship glided through the sea minus her sails, heading for the deserted coastline on the map. At dawn the elderly cartographer and the compass master went to sleep. They drifted off to the land of dreams. When, toward evening, they reached the waters where he had drawn the false island, they woke up to the lookout’s cries of land ahoy! Land ahoy? How could that be? The elderly cartographer couldn’t believe his ears. He hastened to the deck. Shrouded in mist, he beheld an azure blue city that stood resplendent with its city walls, its domes and its towers. Istanbul, he said, murmuring the name of his dead beloved, my beloved Istanbul! He stared with wonder and admiration at how the island that his own hand had once drawn on the map could have become real. His knees gave way, he crumpled to the ground. The compass master held him in his arms, the elderly cartographer gave him a weak but satisfied smile, indicating that he was sated with life. Can what I’m seeing be real, he said. Is what I see before me the totally nonexistent island I gave my beloved Istanbul? Seagulls glided from the shore toward the ship as a gentle breeze blew. The elderly cartographer expired there and, according to seamen’s tradition, his body was consigned to the waters’ immensity. As the years passed, the Istanbul dwellers, believing their own city was real but the mist-shrouded ship an illusion, told an endless number of stories about the captain, cartographer, and compass master of the white ship.”
I was alone in the cell, but I spoke imagining that the Doctor was sitting in front of me.
I offered the Doctor the cigarette I had painstakingly rolled with my crushed fingers. I took out my matches and lit first his, then my own.
“The Istanbul dwellers thought they were real, they didn’t know that they lived on the white ship’s map,” I said. I took a long drag of my cigarette and blew the smoke up into the air. “What do you say, Doctor? How do you fancy drawing an island on a map and then getting a job on a whaling boat and setting sail for the boundless ocean?”
Ever since my childhood my secret island had also been Istanbul. On the winter night when my father told me the story of the elderly cartographer I took my map out of my schoolbag and drew an island on it, I dreamed happy dreams about it and loved it dearly. It was an era when I felt that people chose to see rather than understand. Everywhere the world was changing. People forgot how to love without seeing. They had no island to dream about, they didn’t know what they were looking for. They couldn’t comprehend how I could have loved this city for so many years from a distance; having deleted the idea of conquest from their memory they couldn’t understand me. Every conquest clung to a dream and advanced along its own path. Jesus’ path was different from Alexander the Great’s. While Alexander conquered the city, Jesus wanted to conquer the people in the city. My dream was to conquer both the city and the people in it and save them both at the same time. Istanbul needed it.
Everyone talked of Istanbul’s beauty, but no one managed to live there happily. Uncertainty, selfishness, and violence masked the city’s beauty. The city was the manifestation of the beauty and integrity that people sought in the world. God had long been insufficient for that. In the city people strove to fashion a nature and wanted to find themselves inside it. Hadn’t God done the same thing? Hadn’t He created the earth, the sky, and people in order to discover His own significance? Eras passed. Things changed. Chaos started to push God out. If an “in” was needed in order for Him to be pushed out, people were building it in the city. People who were spreading their own nature were building a new time unawares. Melancholy too was born there. It was not the melancholy of people, but of God, who could not adapt to the new times. The thing He had feared since the Tower of Babel was coming to pass.
The members of a tribe beyond the seas slashed their children’s faces and disfigured them so they wouldn’t be abducted by the enemy and sold into slavery. That way the children remained free. In their language, ugliness and freedom meant the same thing, beauty and slavery were expressed with the same word. The Istanbul dwellers too lived in fear of losing their city and did everything in their power to destroy her beauty. Above and below ground they were plunged in suffering, they clung to evil. They called disfiguring the city freedom. They could not see that evil’s ultimate aim was to destroy beauty. But Istanbul could sense it. She made a stand against people’s foolishness. That great city resisted all by herself, struggling to defend her beauty.
Good was moralistic. Right was calculating. Whereas beauty was infinite. Beauty was in a word, a face, in the carvings on a wall soaked by the rain. It was in someone’s daydreams even in the absence of an image, and in an unknown meaning. Ever since people, tired of discovering the wilderness, have started creating their own nature in the city, they have devoted their lives to glass, steel, electricity. They have acquired a taste for creation. They looked in the mirror and said to themselves, I’m not a discoverer of nature, I’m a creator of the city. They did away with the conflict between people and nature and joined the spiritual and the material. They brought all times and places together. When they contemplated the city, they saw not only the past but also the future. Then they grew weary of rushing around. They grew pessimistic. They became hopeless. They were swept away by the ugliness in beauty, the poverty in wealth. They were exhausted. Could they see that the beauty in the city was in the throes of death? In that case they would have to devote their lives to that beauty once again. Could they sense that life in the city was becoming worthless? They would have to make it worthwhile again. Was passion ending, were there no more secrets? They needed to surround the city with passion, and, instead of battering it, conquer it anew.
I told the Doctor all this, whilst gazing at the blank wall in front of me. I raised the make-believe cigarette between my fingers to my lips. I took a drag. When the ash fell on the floor,
despite all my precautions, I sighed. I tried to pick it up with my fingertips. The ash disintegrated into tiny specks. I felt annoyed again.
My annoyance had started when I had returned from being interrogated to find Kamo the Barber wasn’t in the cell. When I asked the guard what had happened to him he hadn’t replied but had slammed the door in my face. The Doctor and the Student Demirtay weren’t here either. I hadn’t seen them for two days. I wondered if they had come to the cell while I was being interrogated. Had they had a rest and got some sleep? I couldn’t see any signs of them. The empty water bottle was still in the same place. I felt the walls and the door with my hands, but didn’t notice any fresh blood stains. The opposite cell was empty too. I had lain on the floor and thrown a button under her door but Zinê Sevda had not responded, and although I had stood waiting at the cell door on my only good leg for several minutes, she had not come to the grille.
I heard a loud crack in the distance. The explosion, which came from beyond the walls, beyond the corridor, beyond the iron gates, sounded like a Browning. When I heard the same crack a second time I knew my guess had been right. I stirred from where I was sitting. Holding on to the walls, I managed to stand up. Dragging my wounded leg like a sack full of rocks, I limped to the door. I gripped the bars of the grille. I looked out in the hope of seeing something. The corridor was empty. There were no signs of rippling shadows in the white light, or a breath. Which direction were the gunshots coming from? More to the point, who were they coming from?
Istanbul, Istanbul Page 21
