by Selcuk Altun
Before the forty days of mourning that followed Rezzan’s death were up, her daughter Emel made peace with her feeble husband Lemi. They and their Down’s syndrome son, whose existence I’d not heard of before, settled in my basement. Renan, the eternal idler, began to drop by to see his nephew. Emel had undoubtedly given up drinking. She didn’t scold Lemi as often as I expected and went to work every day, but only at noon. The boorish Lemi had retired as a public library official (I’d never seen him holding a book) and seemed to be devoting his time to their silent son. The whimsical youngster, who did not look his seventeen years, compared me to tough guy Sylvester Stallone, for heaven’s sake! While his steely eyes, so like his uncle’s, were closed in his strange noonday nap, his father could go out on the balcony with his rakı and lute. I enjoyed listening to him humming those songs with their plaintive melodies. An early part of his repertoire, which I had never heard before, was a sad unfamiliar song, which began, ‘My lute became a stringed instrument, my heart became inflamed.’ After a sip of rakı he would sigh deeply and whisper obscenities to the sea. And I was glad he was a man with no moustache.
News came of the death of the landlord of a landmark building on Eşrefsaat Street.
While the widow of the deceased married his young partner and before they had put up the sign ‘For Rent’, I moved in. I furnished my new place with Gürsel Hodja’s books.
A couple of Canadian teachers, retired from some lycée or other, rented my old apartment. I told Emel that I would meet the expenses of the Hodja’s care, and that the rent from the flat could go towards her son’s schooling.
She embraced me joyfully and asked me to take all her brother’s books from the library to my new home. I knew that Gürsel wouldn’t be impressed when moved into the hospital’s most luxurious room.
I had moved his books into boxes with fastidious care. Next to an autobiographical Harem Life was the diary of poor Sim Yetkin, the previous tenant, a lady no one remembered because she had committed suicide.
An assistant editor responsible for features in a weekly magazine, she had taken her own life at thirty. Again and again I read through the personal and courageous notes of this strange writer, who fell into a depression because she could not write poetry to her heart’s content. I had read and been moved by the collected works of the popular – and suicidal – female poets. I refrained from telling my Hodja how impressed I was by lines that duelled with death at every turn. I chose extracts from the diary’s beginning as, word by word, it circled nearer to her death, and I entered it for a short story competition in a monthly literary review, under the pseudonym, Sima Etkin, with the title, ‘I Want to Write When I Read / I Read When I Cannot Write.’ I knew we would win. Exploring the area round the Maiden’s Tower, I may have heard behind me her shrill scream mingled with prayers, swallowed up by the sea. I wasn’t surprised to hear from Bereket Market’s shop assistant that ‘the fat lady with spectacles who read a book even while she was buying cheese’ had thrown herself into the sea in front of the Maiden’s Tower.
After his mother’s death, Gürsel Hodja was freed of any guilt except for his thought-crime. I counted the days till Saturday, when I could stay with him for three hours if I wished. I did his washing with pleasure, and while choosing a sweatshirt for him I’d live through the stress of imagining Rezzan’s criticism.
Released from his shackles, he was like a learned orator and a living encyclopedia of the social sciences. I listened with patience and respect, and my self-confidence increased every time we parted as though I had won a further diploma. He was as healthy psychologically as yours truly. I gradually decided he was less restless than any other city-dweller, including his doctor, and believed that Gürsel Ergene, the master philosopher, had seen the whole city turn into an insane asylum and had taken refuge in an obscure hospital for the good of his soul.
A
I no longer felt like searching for Dalga street by street. Through Selçuk Altun I managed to obtain the phone numbers of two of her confidantes, İdil and Serap. I felt uncomfortable at the chilly response of these one-time volleyball players, whom I remember screaming and leaping up to smash the ball. They told me about Dalga, how she left for England, then came back and stopped seeing her friends. Her mother married and moved to Toulouse and probably her grandfather was dead.
Disappointed at my failure, but pleased I had tried, I withdrew to the house. I was reading through all the poetry books in the library and at the same time translating Eugenio Montale in the evenings. (According to my father, poetry was the highest form of literature. The pleasure of interpreting had to be experienced, for every line had its sense of balance and form.) I went to bed with the morning ezan and even with the aid of a sleeping pill found it hard to sleep. Just as my eyes were closing I would be startled by the synchronized drips from all the taps in the house. Then a pair of feet would descend from on high and, with heavy steps, survey the rooms inch by inch, eventually slipping into my bedroom. Was it my mother’s ghost? If I happened to be reading Küçük İskender I’d hide the book in the commode drawer before she started to fume with anger ...
My Atatürk-loving grandfather was found dead in his bed on the morning of 11 November. As the founder of the Turkish Republic had passed away on 10 November, my naive uncle Salvador had whispered in my ear, ‘I wish he had died the day before.’
The first primrose setting fire to the New Year set my head spinning, and I couldn’t remember why I had come to distant Levent Market. I called the eternally lazy driver Hayrullah, and went home. Once I had taken my sedative pill, İfakat handed me an envelope. The sender of the blue envelope from London was Dalga Bayley.
Dear Arda,
I hear you’ve been looking for me – that gives me courage.
I must see you. I’m not ready to come back to Istanbul. (And I may never come back!)
If you’re prepared to hear the worst possible scenario and you think you’ll be able to look me in the face afterwards, then please come ...
D
I was expecting freedom after my mother’s death but I seemed to have become the prisoner of a sinister void. ‘Is there any news that can possibly increase this boredom of mine?’ I wondered, as I jotted down Dalga’s address and phone number. I was expecting this disastrous and incomprehensible news to be an antidote to my struggle in the void.
At the airport I hid when I saw one of my mother’s arrogant friends. I had had enough of reproaches for being still unmarried. The London flight was full of the English going home for Christmas. To avoid unnecessary conversations, I took refuge in Goldberg Pasha, by the writer Erje Ayden, who had remained in New York for the past forty-seven years without a passport. As the plane took off, I glanced at the beloved old city of Istanbul from high above. Apart from the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, what I saw didn’t even have the charm of a bedouin village. I was startled to recall that, according to research done by the municipality, sixty-nine per cent of the population lived below the breadline. I preferred to concentrate on the superficial stewardesses pacing back and forth, as if the plane would plummet to earth without them.
I met Dalga in the lobby of the family hotel Le Meridien in Piccadilly. She looked more haggard than I expected but was still smart and attractive. It was strange to see she still walked like a tomboy, ready to leap up and smash a volleyball if it appeared on the horizon. Considering what she had written in her note, I was prepared for a semi-formal embrace, though I would have loved to feel the scent of her body once again.
She suggested going up to my room. She threw her suede coat on the bed and took a bottle of whisky from the minibar. We sat opposite each other, wondering, suspicious. She made me talk but I doubt if she took anything in. I was beginning to feel ill-at-ease seeing her own increasing embarrassment. On her fourth attempt to light the cigarette she’d taken from her crumpled packet of Dunhill, she started on her tirade:
‘I’m going to get straight to the point and you mustn’t ask any
questions. I have a knife in my bag in case you get disgusted and assault me.
‘Arda, from the time I was fifteen until he died, I was your father’s lover. He had this Sean Connery look that made every woman’s heart beat faster. His voice was particularly attractive. My mother, even my distressed auntie, admired him. Like a part-time Lolita I managed to seduce him by entering his room under the pretext of studying. In his room we’d be content with foreplay but we had passionate get-togethers in the houses of his bachelor friends. He was happy with my admiration and I was happy when he made me feel important by sharing his troubles. Every time we met I felt I’d grown up a year.
‘He complained that your mother’s character changed after your birth. “In front of other people she showed me the respect due to a scholar or a sheikh, but she exhausted me with her problems and with making love. If she saw me fearful and ready to break because of her malice, she’d suddenly turn into an angel to stop me from running away,” he said. “None of my scientific achievements made me as happy as becoming a father. If I took my baby son in my arms, she’d become as malevolent as a reptile. As Arda grew, her jealousy increased, and she began to abuse the poor boy whenever I got close to him. Sadly I became used to the idea of loving my son at a distance, hoping that distance would protect him, yet I couldn’t totally withdraw.” He thought you were smarter than him and that due to your dysfunctional family, you’d chosen to conceal your genius by maturing fast to escape an oppressive childhood. I think we both knew that sooner or later your mother would catch us. She learned about our relationship the summer of my last year at high school. Now all she had to do was provoke my enraged grandfather. When he heard of the latest disaster, my grandfather gave us a lump sum of money and kicked us out. “I don’t want to see your faces ever again, you low-life whores,” he said. We took refuge with my mother’s cousin, who lived alone in her tiny flat in the quiet district of Erenköy. While I put up with this hotbed of developments, I thought it strange that my mother was cross with me, as she herself was the mistress of a young married colleague.
‘Almost immediately after she broke free from her house arrest my mother started to blossom. She met an old flirt at a New Year’s party for her faculty friends and her fate took a turn for the better. They married quickly. Her new husband lived in Paris. After his aging first wife had died, he’d inherited a gourmet restaurant and a wine company. The day I got my half-term report, my mother left for Toulouse, I received an acceptance from the Psychology Department at King’s College, and my stepfather offered to support me financially.
‘The following week your father phoned to wish me a happy birthday and I thought my heart would stop. I was always in his mind, he told me, but he hadn’t called, imagining I’d be busy preparing for the university entrance exam. Once it was certain that I’d be leaving for London to become a student, we began to meet again. I was waiting for him in a desolate house in the next street when he was shot down before a mosque wall. I left for London five days later, and after the first shock I tried to reflect on what had happened. From what your mother said to the police, which was reflected in the press, it seems your father was being threatened by some fundamentalists. But that was a complete sham. I’d never heard a single word from Mürsel about any such threat, and he never hid anything from me. What about the name of this group who supposedly assassinated him? They had never been involved in any operation before. As for your father, who thought there was no problem in the world he couldn’t solve, except women, he had slipped up somewhere or other and aroused your mother’s suspicions. He kept on saying, “If this woman doesn’t kill me with her baleful looks, she’ll have it done by someone else.” The last couple of times we met he had the feeling we were being followed.
‘You can’t deny that your mother was cruel and vindictive. I think that when Mürsel had his last chance and blew it, she had him killed.
‘I can see you’re shaken, but I thought I’d no right to hide what I knew from you.’
Happy to be relieved of the load she’d been carrying so long, she grabbed another bottle from the minibar and making two attempts to light her cigarette, tried to gauge my reaction. I’d been shocked to hear of my father’s forbidden passion for my childhood love, but I was even more appalled at the possibility that my mother had had my father murdered. (Was I going to be buried under another wave of depression?) Then Dalga started on her farewell speech: ‘It took me two years to recover from a series of depressions; they all began with my guilty conscience. I went into intensive therapy and graduated from school a year late. Professor Tom Bayley, vice-dean of the department, had supported me during the crisis, and when Tom and his American wife eventually divorced, we married as soon as I graduated. My husband is 18 years older than I am, and reminds me a little of your dad; I have a son named Adrian who is now five years old. (I couldn’t find an English name closer to Arda.) How fond I was of you, Arda. In my dreams I would fly with you and Mürsel and descend on an island where we lived happily ever after. I knew you had mixed feelings about me. I knew you were peeping when I was taking a shower after sun-bathing, and to tantalize you even more I’d especially pose for you.
‘I wanted to see you after your mother’s death but I never felt strong enough. Only Serap knew my address and what had happened to me. I had warned her not to give away my secret, so she got rid of you. Then I began to believe in fate, perhaps to console myself after all that had happened. If you hadn’t called I’m sure we would never have met like this, or might have met at a less significant time.
‘By pouring out my heart I’ve darkened yours. How about joining us at eight o’clock tomorrow night for Christmas dinner, so we can share some cheerful stories for a change? You can meet my husband, my step-daughter Ethel and my son who thinks you’re his uncle. I’d understand if you decided we shouldn’t meet again, but you must know that I cherish your friendship, Arda ...’
I sat motionless when Dalga left the room. Eyes closed, I was wondering what my father’s killer was doing at that very moment. Instead of finishing off the row of drinks in the minibar, I (like mother, like son) swallowed a Valium and a half and escaped to bed.
I knew I would wake up depressed after a sleep that lasted only three hours. Suppose Dalga had asked, ‘Why did you try to call me after so many years?’ While thinking of an answer I realized I had an erection. (When my mother used to say, ‘Salvador sent these,’ as she handled the pornographic magazines in their plastic bags, I would notice how self-sacrificing she sounded. Whenever we came to London we stayed at this hotel in Piccadilly, which is almost next door to sleazy Soho. A tip from the reception-desk, and she would shoo me off to the nearest strip club, to be back in two hours.)
Instead of dining I finished off the crackers in the minibar. I dropped by Waterstone’s bookshop opposite the hotel and stayed in the gay and poetry sections until it closed. Somehow my feet led me to Soho just as quickly and nervously as they had done seven years before and I found the ‘Down Down Club’ as easily as if I had been there only seven days before. The corridor stank of urine. In a room reeking of vomit there were some twenty men – young Arabs and Japanese and older Englishmen. I was afraid to sit in the very front row next to the cylindrical stage, where five sulky-looking beauties were taking turns to dance. The young men rose from their seats and slid £5 notes into the girls’ garters and snatched kisses as a reward.
During the break some courageous punters bought drinks for the most popular girls, Tiffany, Paloma, Amanda, Venus and Pandora. Long-legged Tiffany, with her pierced blonde pubes, reminded me of the movie goddess Nicole Kidman. While she stripped to tunes sung by Tina Turner and Chris Rea, the £20 note I was holding was soaked with sweat. I got up to leave, cursing myself for not having the courage to advance a few steps and touch her. I knew I would be treated as a pervert by the bouncer when I left the sleazy dive early.
I dozed off reading Any Human Heart, William Boyd’s novel of a life, in diary form. Near morning I
woke with a start to hear drunken howls from the street. And I set out to contemplate the chilling problem of how one human being could be capable of spraying another with bullets.
I was startled to realize how eager I was to meet the Bayley family. The nearer I got to the address in Sloane Avenue, with its rows of brick buildings, the more apprehensive I became. At the door of the big two-storey edifice, in front of which a Rover was parked, I nervously examined the select champagne and the silver frame I was carrying. I quickly removed my finger from the buzzer when I heard from within a loving dialogue between Dalga and her half-English, half-Turkish son. I shut my eyes tight as the ache in my forehead began to throb with Adrian’s giggles. Maybe afraid of falling in love with Dalga again, or of identifying with her husband, I left the packages at the door and began to run down the street.
As I reached King’s Road I noticed a plaque on the wall: ‘George Seferis (1901–1971), Nobel Prize winner, Greek poet and Ambassador, lived here.’ I felt as happy as if I had bumped into a fellow countryman, but embarrassed when I recalled the chauvinist politician from Urla, the poet’s home town in Turkey, who had tried to rename Seferis Street. My father, may he rest in peace, had always said, ‘If Oktay Rifat had been a Greek poet he would have won the Nobel Prize a long time ago.’
God bless human beings who remain indoors for the sake of Christmas! I enjoyed walking through the deserted streets till I reached Sloane Square tube station. There were only two of us waiting for the train. In a situation like this I usually acknowledge the other person, and encouraged by his sad face I asked the young chap with the antique accordion, ‘Are you Romanian?’ He replied, ‘Are you Russian?’ After we had both identified ourselves I gave Pavel from Prague a £20 note and said, ‘Play me your favourite piece.’
