by Selcuk Altun
My blood ran cold when I heard what she had to tell me.
Zazo, a drug addict gang leader, had broken into Marika’s home, where he had strangled and raped her. Apparently he was still at large, and nobody had blown the whistle, obeying some principle of thieves’ honour. I thought that life-and-death decisions taken in the blink of an eye belonged only in detective novels. But the moment I got my breath back, I made up my mind that I would avenge Marika’s death, assured that the people who hadn’t informed on this creep certainly wouldn’t inform on me.
My request for five-day leave was approved, and I was as delighted as a young artist granted time to complete a first commission. I learned that Zazo and two of his mates had taken over a building left empty due to an inheritance dispute. While the ground floor of the building with the ornate façade on Taksim Fırın Street was being used to store the loot, his two accomplices occupied the middle floor, and gang leader Zazo resided on the top floor. This experienced leader who delivered drugs to high schools was also involved in theft, and was a low-life pederast.
The gang members hung out at Dallas Teahouse on Turan Street, where vendors of music cassettes competed for trade through loudspeakers. The key to their house was left in an unlocked box at the main entrance for the use of friends, but was removed at night. One evening when the gang was intent on gambling, I borrowed the makeshift key to have a copy made, and asked a stammering street urchin, proud of his Werder Bremen shirt, to perform his good deed for the day by returning the key.
I stayed away for the next forty-eight hours.
On Saturday at midnight, with God’s permission, I intended to raid the gang’s headquarters. I could catch them off guard when they were flying high on hash after a rakı party.
Before slipping on my snow mask, in God’s name, I exchanged farewells and forgiveness with the Walther P–88 handgun. Amidst the squealing of mice I passed through the entrance, up to the middle floor, and approached the open door through which hoarse moans filtered. Zazo’s two henchmen lay semiconscious as they watched a porn film in the living room. Suddenly my stomach turned, and I sent two bullets each into the heads of those lost young men.
I climbed the stairs, tiptoeing, determined. In my left hand Walther, its barrel growing nervous, in my right a torch. I inhaled the rosemary-scented aroma of the barrel of my pistol. Long live communal living, the upstairs door was open too! As the moans from the dimly-lit room increased my hands began to shake. I slowly peeped inside, where a tender young curly-haired boy lay on a bed, knocked out and probably doped by paint thinner. His naked body looked like a bag of bones. Zazo hadn’t yet taken off his dirty underpants. He was like a vulture sniffing its victim, God forgive me!
I pointed the pistol at the bed, from three metres away, and screamed, ‘Enough! You inhuman bastard!’
Astonished, Zazo slowly turned. There was a knife wound on the right side of his young, handsome face. Squinting his green eyes, he said, ‘Who are you? What the hell do you want?’ as he struggled to get the upper hand.
‘I’m your Angel of Death, and I’m sending you to hell...’
As he reached for his knife under the pillow with his left hand, I shot the first bullet into the middle of his forehead. Then into his mouth, and ear-holes! Your humble servant then lost his head, and with the red flick-knife of this compulsive criminal, he cut off his balls and penis. After stuffing his balls into his mouth and the other organ into the appropriate orifice, to set an example, I slipped down to the quiet street with a sense of relief and, in a south-eastern Turkish accent, called the police from a phone-box on Tarlabaşı Street, thinking that at least I’d given that poor young boy a second chance.
Then I stole away to the Unkapanı Bridge behind the Pera Palas Hotel. Some people had already entrusted their fishing-lines to the waters of the Golden Horn and were waiting idly. I felt as uneasy as if I’d gotten off at the wrong bus stop amidst this crowd of fishermen. Twenty steps away from the last amateur fisherman, whose eyes were fixed on the dark waters, I dropped the knife and pistol into the silence of the Golden Horn, in God’s name.
Where the well-behaved Walther touched the surface, the water gleamed and was transformed into an almost infinite chain of circles.
I thought of how I’d set Marika’s soul free from suffering, and how her frail eighty-year-old body had been touched by a man for the first time after her death. (I’m proud to say I have never laid a finger on a woman’s body and have never masturbated except accidentally in sleep. I protect my self-respect from orgasms.)
Below Byzantium’s Pantokrator Church, that stubborn survivor, I got into a taxi reeking of cigarettes and sweat, and headed for Aksaray. The moustachioed folk-song-killer on the radio was bellowing, If you meet with death / I’ll be consumed with longing. It must have been nerves, God forgive me, but I remember laughing to myself!
1 A genuine Turk, from öz (real) and Türk (Turk).
A
The chorus of 3,000 mosques reciting the afternoon ezan ended, and a mysterious impulse led me to my father’s room, which I had seldom entered in the past. Now, after his death, I was free to come and go as I pleased. The uncomfortable thought that I might upset my mother, who buried the loss of her husband deep in her heart, lasted until her death.
İfakat had said of the gloomy room, ‘Only a president would have a larger room than this.’ In the only corner of the room not occupied by books there was a colossal TV set facing a burgundy-coloured leather armchair. From here my father would busy himself talking in numbers, solving equations, even as he watched documentaries or cartoons. Across from his desk, surrounded by a library of 20,000 books, was a conical aquarium. I knew that this glass environment, with its dozen playful, colourful fish, would be destroyed after my father’s death.
My father was the son of an officer with roots in Kırklareli who, the very month he was promoted to captain in the gendarmerie, was treacherously killed on the south-east frontier by a smuggler. My father’s widowed mother married her cousin, and he was left to be brought up by his aunt. She was a teacher of Turkish, who never married after her fiancé drowned at the Florya beach. (According to İfakat, my mother had always mistreated his aunt, who died of grief.)
He graduated with top grades from Darüşşafaka High School (selected by an exam for orphans), won a bursary to Berkeley, studied mathematics, and remained there until he became a professor. He never returned to America after he was summoned by his aunt to get married in Istanbul.
Don’t assume I was always under my mother’s thumb. It seems I was a hyperactive child. Caressing me affectionately, my father would call me ‘Squirrel’, and if he took an interest in me, I would be as delighted as if I had been praised at school. I couldn’t decide if I was being allowed to share his trips to unmapped slum neighbourhoods or to forgotten Byzantine and Ottoman monuments as a kind of reward. I hesitated to ask the reason for his passion and I felt embarrassed as I watched him caressing and whispering to old stone Ottoman basins. When spring came to Çamlıca, I recall hopping off the narrow pavements and walking down the street that passed by our mansion to the market square, till we eventually reached the last mansion on Alemdağ Street. If he walked ahead, hands behind his back, I’d run after him in a panic.
I have always accepted the quiet nature of Çamlıca’s slopes, forgotten in the time tunnel of the last forty years. The visual resistance to time lingers on in several dwellings, and in their gardens, visible beyond tired old walls and abandoned mansions where remnants of chimneys or thresholds still survive. Life goes on as usual in these mansions, behind closed, lace curtains, and in gardens without the sound of children’s voices. I would watch the drama of the local residents in their drab outfits, appearing suddenly in the deserted main road from nameless side streets.
The market consisted of two-storey miniature shops at the crossroads.
‘There’s no smaller market’, said my father, ‘even in the exile towns of Anatolia.’
He
liked the claustrophobic stationery shop opposite the Çamlıca Sports Headquarters, which acted as a licensed Lotto outlet and newspaper distributor, and dealt in PVC coating and dry-cleaning. The polite owner would timidly watch the Hodja studying the numerical distribution of the Lotto coupons. On our last visit, my father pointed at the tax plate hung next to the window and giggled, ‘Did you know this shop pays more tax than your grandfather, Squirrel?’
If Vecihi, the veteran calligrapher with the prosthetic arm, was back from the mosque, we would drop by his derelict shop in Kısıklı Street. My father knew this white-bearded man was from Giresun, in the Black Sea region, but he called him fellow townsman, and if Vecihi was in a bad mood, he would sit him down to play backgammon and, just to console him, defeat him by just one game, 5–4.
There would also be uproarious backgammon sessions with his bibliophile student, Cemail, his mate and confidant from high-school days, now retired as personnel director of a foreign pharmaceutical firm, but who had not yet given up his wooden house in modest Eyüp. With my own eyes I saw him play chess with the ventriloquist, who never revealed in which mosque he worked as muezzin, and with the çiğ köfte1 chef, who had two wives.
The banker Selçuk Altun, the son of a retired governor who was my father’s childhood friend, was allowed to go in and out of his room whenever he wished. My mother had accepted this temperamental bibliomaniac who was the same age as herself. I was never happy to see this unattractive man in our house. His three novels were published after my father’s death, and I sensed that one day he would exploit our secret drama, exposing it in one of his books.
My father played the ney2 in private, and played it well. Sometimes twice a week, he would embrace his silver-ringed instrument, reverently tilting his head to the left. Hiding by the door, I would hear the enchanted tunes he blew, and close my eyes in pleasure. During my journeys in the time tunnel, the deep sounds of the ezan and the smells of sesame pitta accompanied my pauses by tombs, fountains and mosque courtyards. If spring was over and the lazy balcony door left open, I feared that our garden would be invaded by silly kids, seduced by the magical music, just as in The Pied Piper of Hamelin. I recall our last conversation, and how I thought of becoming a guitarist when I grew up. He had said, ‘Become one, Squirrel, if you can make your instrument talk like Mark Knopfler.’ But when I entered my mother’s august presence to ask her permission, she said, ‘You will know what you’re going to be when you reach high school. But I can assure you, Arda, that your becoming a flea-ridden musician does not figure in my plans right now.’
My father, as well as being able to remember his identity, retirement, passport and credit card numbers, was a treasure-house of general knowledge. Early on he had noticed my stubborn refusal to enter the gravitational field of mathematics, but he would thank ‘Graph Theory’ for his own stock of knowledge. I am aware that it wouldn’t be satisfactory to summarize Graph Theory as ‘the ability to define the concepts of daily life that relate to mathematics, in the language of numbers’. (Maybe it would be more enlightening to give you the crazy example of how to take a mouse, a cat and a snake, all alive, across a river, using two rowboats, and pull this concept to shreds by mathematics.)
Thanks to his search for signs of his ‘divine concept’ in the grouping structure of aquarium fish or migrant birds in motion, or in the order of distribution of exits in a stadium, I gave up mathematics quite early on.
After retirement he wrote courageous essays in leading newspapers and magazines on serious topics: the shallowness of society, bad design in urban expansion, religious exploitation, public health, educational and cultural crises. Several controversial essays appeared in Turkey Should Not Be Proud of Me, his book of collected writings – ‘P. Mondrian: Murderer of Modern Painting’, ‘The Greatest Novelist on The Planet: John Fowles’, ‘The Only Philosopher to be Taken Seriously: Anti-Philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein’, were some of the titles I admired.
In his well-known essay, ‘Shantytown Man: The Rebel Shaped by Poverty’, he emphasized the fact that the same people who took over public property and used illegal electricity and water had also taken over the running of local government. According to him, the class that continued to grow in a superficial environment of frivolity and intimidation would, in ten years’ time, start to produce ministers and prime ministers.
He was a regular participant in interviews and television panels and always attacked those fundamentalist columnists and members of parliament in particular.
The name of the terrorist organization El Mekrub3 was first heard when they murdered my father as we were waiting for him to turn up at my fourteenth birthday party.
1 A meat rissole eaten raw.
2 A reed flute used in Mevlevi music.
3 In Arabic, ‘The Concerned’ / ‘The Caring’.
B
According to Enes, when Our Lord the Prophet set out for the Holy War, he announced:
‘My Lord God! You are my help and support. Thanks to you, we will think of remedies, thanks to you, we will attack, and thanks to you, we will do battle.’
Tirmizi
Even when I’m on leave from my humiliating work I view the minimum-wage earners scurrying in all directions with amazement.
My introduction to the psychopath, Baybora, occurred when I was taking a day off work. I was walking along Çadırcılar Street, heading for the Özlem Meat Restaurant, in a state of aimless contentment. (After dinner I was going to buy a book about Immortal Hızır from the Sahaflar book-market and then go to the cinema.) In Çadırcılar, where the dearest article of clothing is $15, the Moldavian girls must still be using their body language to bargain with shopkeepers. Once again I caught all those sex-starved men in the area stripping them with their eyes. I think that the pleasure I derive from reading Evliya Çelebi is comparable to the basic human sex drive.
My favourite soup kitchen is by the Lütfullah Gate in the left wing of the Grand Bazaar. Over the arched entrance is engraved the year when space was allotted for more than 4,400 shops. I was upset at being unable to subtract 1461 from 1991 to figure out its age. I can send a bullet through the eye of a needle while at the same time dealing with a couple of roughnecks, but I’ve no head for mathematics. As a result I’d shied away from the secondhand book business.
Coming out of the soup kitchen, and struggling with a broken toothpick in my mouth, I was addressed by a stout man with a face like a self-satisfied turkey.
‘I hope you enjoyed your meal, Commando Bedirhan!’ he said. With his bureaucrat’s air, this fifty-year-old pain in the neck was grabbing the opportunity to thrust his forged business card under my nose: ‘Ali Hadi Bora – Retired Chief Inspector’. I was taken aback when he continued, ‘Don’t worry, Commando. If you just listen to me for ten minutes, I have a terrific offer for you.’ Taking my arm, he pushed me into the first empty coffee house, and took it upon himself to order two sage teas.
‘You did good work in Tarlabaşı, congratulations! Because you handed out retribution to those killer-robots, prayers for you will never cease. Your dossier is reckoned to be closed. According to the tabloids, “The rival gangs have settled old scores.” Because of insensitivity, fear, the legal vacuum and bureaucracy, in Istanbul particularly, so many hoodlums like Zazo who’ve damaged the social order are obstructing the state’s good works.
‘To be frank, I’m a member of an organization called Mecruh, whose dream is to eliminate microbes like him. Mecruh means “hurt” or “injured” in Arabic. In exchange for a fee from injured clients we assist justice by restoring their rights. We are incredibly powerful, consisting of élite members. If you join as our hitman, you will achieve material and spiritual prosperity. You will usually be required to do one job a year, and your salary will begin at $100,000, with a down payment of 20 per cent. If all goes well, you’ll be a millionaire in ten years. Let me add, while I remember, that Mecruh never sheds any innocent blood for money.
‘You are strong, a true mark
sman, you keep your mouth shut, you don’t chase after sex and you’re on your own. Commando, you must have been sent from heaven to do this work. I’ll balance your passion for books with personal training. (If you join us I’ll be your contact.) We will never use the Tarlabaşı incident against you. But if we wish, we can get rid of you for crimes you’ve never even committed, my dear veteran of Hakkâri.
‘We offer you a job which is well paid, exciting and beneficial to society. There’s $5,000 in the envelope I’m putting in your pocket. Consider it a gift. You’ll be on leave on Thursday next week. We can meet then at the same time in this pissy coffee house. Think about it. If you don’t come back here in seven days, the money in your pocket is as much yours as your mother’s white milk.
‘I know you’re about to buy a book from the secondhand book-market and then rush off to the Şafak Cinema in Çemberlitaş. But don’t forget, Commando, there are pleasures more profound.’
I insisted on two things: the hideous, grotesque Baybora must persuade me of the victim’s guilt and must never again address me as ‘Commando’ in his insolent way.
My first job was to punish a professor of mathematics, a pretentious follower of the West who insulted our religion in his speech and writings, and cheated on his wife, the Jewish convert to Islam, whose money funded his opulent lifestyle. (The dossier prepared by the organization included – as if it were necessary – his ability to multiply five-digit numbers in his head with the speed of a computer.) In the photographs taken secretly for the dossier, the professor’s attitude to other people seemed rude and belittling. If he had asked me at any time to solve an arithmetic problem, I would have been ashamed and embarrassed. My trigger finger began to twitch.
I was going to lay an ambush for him in a lonely street in Üsküdar where, God forgive him, he used to meet his lover. Baybora, for the first and last time, had poked his crow’s beak into this business on the pretext of assisting my training. Respectfully, I passed the endless walls of the Karacaahmet Cemetery till I reached shady Eşrefsaat Street. It seemed that in pursuit of his intrigues, at 3 o’clock on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the immoral professor would turn from Rumi Paşa Mosque into neighbouring Çeşme-i Cedit Street. Before my reconnaissance expeditions into a district which had still preserved its sacred Ottoman origins, including even street names, I had taken ten days’ leave without pay, and step by step I had traced the journey of the wretched 60-year-old to his love nest. The vulgar womanizer would swagger along, and I was sure that as he got out of the taxi he never even raised his head to glance at the elegant 500-year-old mosque opposite. I couldn’t help wondering how much daily profit a Çadırcılar trader would need to make to buy his cap with the earflaps, his leather jacket and suede boots.
