Bliss: A Novel

by O. Z. Livaneli

  Long live the spirit of rebellion! Long live revolution! Long live Kropotkin! Long live Bakunin! And long live Khomeini!

  Lost in these thoughts, İrfan said to himself, “It’s none of your business, idiot! Just because you were born in this part of the world at this particular time, why should you make everything your problem? If you had lived in the fourteenth century in China, other problems would have meant the end of the world to you, and you would still have been wrong. In many years from now, that hill in the distance will still be there, but you will be gone. This sea will still be here, but you will be gone. Even that ruined house over there will remain, but you won’t. Stop it, for God’s sake! Stop this nonsense!”

  İrfan threw away every one of the newspapers and opened another bottle of cold beer.

  He had been on the Aegean for a long time, but he had only been to a single Greek island, Kos. He had docked his boat in the harbor, presented his passport and visa, and had officially entered Greece. Then, for the first time in weeks, he had spent a whole evening on land.

  First, he had a dinner of octopus, red mullet, horta, and fava, at a famous restaurant, and then he went to a small music hall where some local musicians were playing the rembetiko. The music was intoxicating, and the women and men were indefatigable, dancing to the zeybekiko and the kasapiko till long after midnight. The professor realized how intoxicated he was only after he went out into the fresh air. He did not know whether it was the ouzo or the tipsy atmosphere of the music hall that had made him drunk. As he staggered along the deserted streets, he felt as if he were a penniless rembetiko musician, living in the time of the ascetic saints of music, Markos Vamvakaris and Tsitsanis.

  Hundreds of thousands of Anatolian Greeks, who had had to immigrate to Greece from Izmir, the professor’s hometown, had created this mysterious music. This drunken music burned like acid, was as uncontrollable as the sea breeze, and as grief-stricken as the deepest part of the Aegean. Perhaps he found himself in tune with it because it came from a neighboring land.

  In the marina, the professor had found his boat with difficulty. He had thrown himself on the bed in his clothes and slept until afternoon. He had woken up with a stabbing headache though he still felt drowned in the sound of the bouzouki and the brittle rembetiko music.

  The professor felt he must go to those desolate coves again to regain his equilibrium. He longed for the solitude he had earlier complained of. In the deserted coves, a resinous scent wafting toward the sea in the serenity of the night would remind him of the pines’ existence. Then he would light the kerosene lamp and sit silently in the deathlike darkness that surrounded him while cold shivers ran up and down his spine. Afraid to make the slightest sound, he abandoned himself to the will of nature.

  During the day, the professor would amuse himself by casting a line and enjoying fishing. He usually caught at least one of whatever fish were to be found in the channels between the islands but, no matter how hard he tried, he was not able to catch the colorful lambuka which were always swimming around the boat. In some places, they called the lambuka “dolphin.” The people of the Far East called this fish “mahi-mahi,” and the Aegean people called it “the naked fish.” As if intending to drive him crazy, the lambuka would appear every afternoon at the same time, taunting him. One day, another fisherman noticed his lack of success and told him to use a trotline. “Throw out the trotline and let one of them get hooked on it, but don’t pull the line in. Soon you’ll see that all the others will come.”

  It happened just as the fisherman had said. When a fish seized the bait, the others enthusiastically tried to get themselves hooked as well. “Exactly like humans,” thought the professor.

  One morning, he forced himself to write the first sentence of the book he had been struggling to begin. He had done all that research over the years, and now that he had his notes with him, he could begin. The first sentence went: “That day in the marketplace of Srebrenitza, Ibrahim, a ten-year-old Bosnian boy, was killed by a bullet from the rifle of a Serbian sharpshooter. He died without knowing that he shared the same fate as his Christian ancestors, who, centuries earlier, had lived thousands of kilometers away in Samosata.”

  Then he added: “This was the fate of the Bogomil.”

  After that he could not think of another word or idea to write down. He read the first sentence over and over again, enjoying it more each time. A book that started with that sentence would surely attract attention, but how would he write the rest of it? Thousands of words had to flow to be able to write a book, but it seemed that he did not have the talent to be a writer.

  Until evening, the professor contemplated the first sentence of his book, but then a sudden, strong wind began to rock the boat. Then he gave up. He had to cope with the much more vital problem of finding a tranquil cove to take refuge in. With an injured leg, he could not risk the danger of being caught in a storm on the open sea.

  He took out Heikell’s book, established his location, and discovered that there was, in fact, a nearby cove where he could spend the night. Perhaps it could not be called a cove, exactly, because, according to the map, the sea went inland like a twisting river. It would have been easier to enter it in daylight, but he had been absorbed by his book.

  When İrfan found the entrance to the cove, darkness had already descended. It was a moonless night, and visibility was nil. He moved very slowly, taking extra care, as the chart indicated some perilously shallow water. İrfan looked at the depth sounder and changed his direction when the numbers began to decrease. He did not want to run aground.

  As he went deeper inland, he felt as if he were moving up a real river, one that twisted and turned. He had turned on the spotlight, which allowed him to see a little of the coast and water in front of the boat.

  At least there was no wind here. After moving very slowly for a while, İrfan discerned a pyramidlike hill in the darkness, and he realized that he was approaching the end of the cove. This was a magical place, which did not look like any of the coves he had been to before. He was excited, yet he did not know why. He began to move toward the hill. Perhaps he would be able to cast anchor soon. Maybe he would not even need to tie the boat to a tree in such a serene cove. Nothing stirred; the air seemed solid and tangible.

  The professor scanned the shore, using the spotlight, and suddenly started with fright. In this deserted, lonely place, a man was shouting at him, “Turn off the light! Turn off the light!”

  The man’s tone was threatening, almost as if he was about to grab a gun and shoot if he was not obeyed. İrfan switched off the light and was left in complete darkness.

  Who was that man? Were there others with him? Why did he shout, telling him to turn off the light? Where was he?

  The professor cast anchor. The sound of the chain frightened him. “I wish I hadn’t come to this ill-omened cove,” he thought. What a sinister river! He felt as if he were on a spellbound shore, like the one that had caused Ulysses so much trouble.

  After he cast anchor, he sat silently in the dark. Would they be angry if he lit the kerosene lamp? With the help of a flashlight, the professor poured himself a glass of whisky and began to sip it as he looked at the dark hill that resembled the pyramid of Cheops. Not even the smallest light could be seen, and no sound broke the silence.

  A few minutes later, İrfan heard a splash as if someone was rowing toward him. “Peace be with you!” said a man’s voice.

  The professor was not sure which of that evening’s events was more surprising. Now, in the middle of the night, a stranger in a rowboat was hailing him with a religious greeting. The man was obviously not a sailor.

  İrfan aimed his flashlight at the stranger. He saw a tall young man, with a fine-boned, slender face, a striking contrast to his sturdy figure. İrfan invited him aboard, and the young man jumped onto the deck.

  “Sorry,” he said. “There’s a fish farm here for sea bass and gilt-head breams. If a strong light shines on them, they get scared and might
kill themselves by swimming into each other. We’ve been warned to protect them from lights.”

  İrfan relaxed a little and asked where exactly the fish farm was.

  The young man pointed to the left bank. “We live there, too—in a hut on the shore. You can’t see it now, because the light is behind a tree.”

  “Doesn’t the light frighten the fish?” asked İrfan.

  “No. Nothing happens when you turn on an ordinary light. They only get disturbed when a spotlight is turned on them. Noise bothers them, too. When you catch some with a net, that also affects them. The rest get white spots on their skin, then they die.”

  “What sensitive fish.”

  “Yes. We’re new here, and we’ve learned all this just recently. If you’re here tomorrow morning, I can show the fish to you.”

  İrfan introduced himself, and they shook hands. The young man’s name was Cemal. İrfan felt an extraordinary power in Cemal’s coarse hand. He offered him a drink, but Cemal said he did not drink alcohol. Then he said, “I should go back now. The girl is alone in the hut, and she’s afraid of snakes and centipedes.”

  That night, İrfan was too busy thinking about his strange encounter and the frightened fish to add a new sentence to his book. He drank half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and passed out.

  Next morning, the razorlike sharpness of the sunbeams woke him up. He looked around and saw that the spell of the previous night had worn away. Together with the night, the ghosts of Homer had stolen away from the cove.

  İrfan looked at the breathtaking aquamarine water and the green hills covered with thick pine forests that descended to the sea. Near the shore he could see the buoys of the fish farm. The sensitive fish, protected from the light, must have fallen asleep. The cove was so peaceful and so lovely that he decided to stay for a few days to work on his book.

  He took out some sheets of paper, bit the end of his pencil, and thought for hours. Over and over again, he read what he had written the day before and added a few new sentences: “Ibrahim’s fate had been determined centuries before; after his people in eastern Anatolia had been converted to Christianity and become members of a heretical sect, they were oppressed for centuries by the Orthodox Church. Fleeing their home, they adopted a Muslim identity, only to be persecuted by Christians at the end of the twentieth century. This is a story of the dangers of remaining unreconciled with the dominant power.”

  The new lines were not as striking as the first sentences he had written the day before, but the most important thing was that he was writing. He felt that he deserved a drink of cool white wine in the midday sun before he took his nap.

  İrfan’s nap lasted until late afternoon. When he woke up, he perceived though a groggy haze Cemal rowing toward the boat. Cemal looked like an interesting young man. He seemed friendly, but also gave the impression that he could be dangerous. He had come to pick up the “teacher” if he still wished to visit the fish farm. İrfan realized that with his unkempt black hair and gray beard, he had acquired the image of a revered elder in the young man’s eyes. Cemal said he could show him around the place and would be happy to share a modest dinner with the professor in his hut. Pleased to be welcomed with such warmth, İrfan accepted the invitation.

  As they rowed toward the shore, Cemal showed him the buoys, the underwater cages, and the fish. “There must be millions in there,” İrfan thought, observing that the fish did not have enough space to swim without touching each other. İrfan looked away from this fish prison and glanced at the shore. A tiny hut stood there under age-old olive trees. Beside it, sacks of fish feed were stacked on top of each other. Later, Cemal told him that the feed was made from the bones of anchovies. When they landed, the fishy smell pervading the air was immediately noticeable.

  A young girl with big green eyes, a childlike face, and a cotton scarf wrapped around her head came out of the hut. She greeted the professor shyly with a slight inclination of her head. She seemed to be fifteen at most. In America, even caressing a girl this age would land you in jail labeled as a pervert. But in Anatolian villages, older men would climb on top of little girls without anyone opposing it. “So this guy is with this little girl,” thought the professor scornfully, but he smiled and merely remarked, “Good evening!”

  As darkness fell, Cemal jumped into the rowboat and went to cull some fish from the cages. The young man rowed the boat, as tense and balanced as a tiger. He plunged the net into the water carefully, but the professor wondered if he would still frighten the fish no matter how careful he was.

  Meanwhile, the girl prepared dinner without looking at İrfan. Taking a few tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers from a fisherman’s basket hanging from a beam under the ceiling, the girl began to slice them.

  Cemal returned to the hut and cleaned the fish he had caught, scraping off the scales, slitting them open, and ripping out the innards while they were still alive. Two wild cats suddenly appeared from nowhere and grabbed the remains at lightning speed. There were probably many animals in the forest. Cemal had said yesterday that the girl was afraid of snakes and centipedes. İrfan glanced around him apprehensively.

  When it was completely dark, Cemal lit a small lamp, provoking a riot of flies, mosquitoes, sand flies, and moths that flew in and began to flutter around the brilliant light. İrfan was caught in a mist of flying bugs. Mosquitoes attacked his neck, arms, and legs. He scratched himself until his skin bled.

  He began to slap himself everywhere, and asked Cemal, “How can you survive here, for God’s sake? These damned things are going to kill me!”

  Watching the professor jump up from his seat, slap himself, and curse, the girl could not help giggling. “They usually come to me,” she said, “but tonight they seem to like you more.”

  When İrfan realized that the mosquitoes would not stop coming, he and Cemal got into Cemal’s boat and rowed out to the sailboat. İrfan took all the insect repellents he could find and they returned to the hut. He rubbed the medicine on himself and gave some to the girl.

  Only then did the girl fry the fish and serve it with the salad. İrfan regretted that he had not brought some wine along, but he did not plan to spend too much time in this wretched hut. He wanted to return to his boat as soon as he finished his meal. He planned to listen to Erik Satie’s Gnossienne, which he now preferred to Jean-Pierre Rampal’s flute. The sad tune of the piano in the first melody enchanted him. He wanted to listen to those tunes and feel as if it was only to hear them that he had been born. While he listened, the velvety Jack Daniel’s would slip down his throat in the sterile atmosphere of his Plexiglas-and-chromium vessel.

  He followed his plan, but he could not get the girl’s big, shining, green eyes out of his mind. “Such strange eyes,” he thought, “childish and innocent, yet desirous and devious.”

  The elusive glance of those eyes embraced everything.

  A CALL OF YOUNG BODIES

  Ten days or so before the encounter in the secluded cove on the Aegean, Cemal had left the house with Selahattin, whom he believed to be the most truly good person he had ever met. As if his friend had not done enough by showing him hospitality and doing him favors, he had also found a place for him and Meryem to stay. He had even put some money in Cemal’s pocket without making him feel ashamed. “Don’t think I’m helping you,” Selahattin had said. “I’m just paying you your two weeks’ wages in advance.”

  Then the two friends had driven to Rahmanlı to pick up Meryem. Selahattin returned Cemal’s thanks by saying, “We’re buddies. You saved my life so many times.”

  Yakup was not home when they picked up Meryem, so Cemal could not say good-bye to his brother, but he knew that there was an unspoken agreement between them to remain silent. Yakup would never tell anyone that Cemal had not fulfilled his father’s command. In return, Cemal would not tell the villagers back home about the reality of “Yakup’s Istanbul.”

  As they rode on the intercity bus, Cemal felt his gratitude to his friend. Without him, he and Meryem
would have been left without shelter. Now Selahattin was sending them far away to a cove near Çeme on the Aegean coast, where his family had a fish farm. The caretaker had asked for two weeks’ leave to look after a sick relative. During that time, Cemal and the girl could stay there safely. All he had to do was mount guard over the fish and feed them twice a day. The rest was in God’s hands. His duties were easy.

  As the bus traveled along the well-cared-for roads of the verdant Aegean coast, Cemal realized that in the last week he had traveled more than he had ever done in his entire life. He had set out from the Iraq border and was now on his way to Grecian shores. He had traveled so far from Emine that he could no longer recall to mind her soft skin. He had Meryem to thank for all of this, but Cemal hated her even more than he had hated the terrorists on the mountains. No matter what Selahattin said, she was a sinner who deserved to die, and yet, he, Cemal, a veteran commando, was incapable of killing her. He simply could not bring himself to murder this little girl. Who was this girl sitting next to him—a prostitute, a sinner, a lousy creature, a girl under sentence of death? Or just a kid who did not know anything about the world?

  In the state between sleep and wakefulness where he took refuge when he did not know what to do, Cemal became aware of the pungent smell of lemon cologne. The bus driver’s assistant, more child than man, was walking down the aisle, offering lemon cologne to the passengers. The husky voice of a folk singer was blasting out of the radio.

  Cemal was starting to doze as the bus trundled along, when it occurred to him that he had not dreamed of the innocent bride recently. The fair-skinned young bride, who used to appear in his dreams every other night during those harsh days in the army and cause him to sin in his sleep, was gone. She had not appeared since the start of his journey. Cemal longed for her scent, her skin, her warmth, but it was no use. He could not summon at will a girl whom he had seen only in his dreams. She came only when she wanted to.