Songs My Mother Never Taught Me

by Selcuk Altun

  As soon as he picked up the phone Chief Commissioner Kasnak belched, then was silent as though waiting for me to say ‘I beg your pardon.’ I let him know I wished to enrol at the shooting range for practice at the end of June, and ‘yes’, I wanted a receipt and ‘no’, I hadn’t given up the search for my father’s killer.

  (I myself don’t know what I’m escaping from, and I’m hiding from myself just what I’m looking for.)

  I knew how touched the waiters at İskele would be when they saw me there with a woman, but I didn’t expect them to be so attentive in their efforts to impress my girlfriend. With the help of white wine I began to tell my story, curious to know what her attitude would be towards me. I poured out my inner life in detail, but for the time being, from all those pages that resembled a detective story, I omitted completely the paragraph about losing my first love to my father. I relaxed as I talked, and İz listened wide-eyed.

  I remember her saying, ‘Life doesn’t differentiate between the real and the imaginary, it’s the children who pay the penalty for conflict between two intelligent human beings.’

  As I was paying the bill I noticed Jale giggling with her snobbish friends three tables away. (Are your ears ringing, Adil Kasnak, my future Hodja?) İz noticed my expression changing.

  ‘What’s up, have they multiplied the bill instead of adding it up?’ she quipped.

  ‘In this case the problem’s beyond mathematics; you won’t believe it but just a few steps away is my former fiancée ...’

  ‘Hmm, a cinematic situation ... I can help you in two ways. I can either pray or hold your hand so you won’t be humiliated when we pass their table.’

  ‘I certainly need both,’ I said and clutching her left hand, headed for the exit with a silent prayer, aware of the mural of fish still grinning after fifteen years. Thanks to the spring chill I clung more tightly to İz’s hand and we walked along Çengelköy like awkward lovers until we reached Hayrullah dozing in his ancient vehicle.

  Unused to guests, İfakat brought coffee at the wrong moment; and when she took İz on a hasty tour of the mansion, she was as nervous as an officer taking his superiors round on a dormitory inspection. Our guest’s only remark was, ‘Would it be disrespectful if I said the place had the atmosphere of a haunted house or a chic collection of objets d’art?’

  In the library I quickly withdrew my hand as it stretched towards the collection of my father’s musical compositions. (Fearing she might fall in love with his soul I took refuge by pulling out instead the CD of Renée Fleming where I had first discovered ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’.)

  She read aloud a note my father had made in a book called A Hittite Glossary.1 ‘If I can’t write about something from this library I’ll go mad,’ she said.

  From her shoulder bag, embroidered with birds, she produced a notebook and I began to watch my energetic guest as she listed rare handwritten books and books from the earliest period of the printing press. Her face hadn’t that blinding beauty that turns heads but was illuminated by an inner light. And her strong personality and mischievous manner were enough to cast a spell over me.

  Collecting the material for the article she was planning to write, she delighted me by informing me that she would like to return on Monday morning with a photographer.

  She wanted to go home sooner than I expected.

  ‘It was a really interesting evening and I didn’t feel in the least awkward at being alone with a man,’ she said as she left.

  I recalled that when Hayrullah had invited her to enter his cab, suspicious of an interloper, I hadn’t even asked her she lived.

  ‘Arda, something tells me this nice girl is going to bring some colour to the place,’ İfakat said after she’d left.

  I just managed to refrain from replying, ‘Don’t you know there’s no happiness for me in this world?’

  Still, I went to bed with a book called Conversations with the Mediterranean Medlar Tree, in which Hikmet Birand had poured his heart out describing a rare tree:

  On the peak of Mt Çal behind Dikmen grows an old Mediterranean medlar tree. A tree where the vows of so many simple longings hang on dry branches along with the faded red and green prayer rags. I love that tree.

  I was overwhelmed by the desert wind that blew through the words. (And to marry İz on Mt Çal with Hikmet Birand and the medlar tree as witnesses, and leap awake with the midday ezan floating from the city mosques.) I didn’t get up until I’d finished the book. I was curious to know in what year we had lost this pastoral writer. I must find Selçuk Altun again. He had given the book to my father as a present the month he was killed.

  ‘Since you’re consulting me instead of the internet, you obviously want to know much more about Hikmet Birand than the date of his death in 1972,’ he said sardonically. ‘He was a close friend of the celebrated critic Nurullah Ataç and also my wife’s great-uncle.’

  I swore never to call this arrogant man again.

  Opening the old door to the balcony, I cast a quick eye over the garden, to see if it was ready for İz’s inspection next morning. May was here but again I forgot to welcome the carpet of spring growth. (At one time in my life the strange garden my mother watered even when it rained had been my confidante.) I’d go down to the garden as a slight breeze wafted the mysterious smell of the wild olive tree to my nostrils, branch by branch, like breaking waves driven to land by an offshore breeze. According to my father the overbearing Japanese persimmon tree was by itself enough to destroy a garden. My father found the atmosphere of this well-kept garden artificial, so we used to walk to Alemdağ Avenue to absorb the spring.

  I drank a glass of grapefruit juice from the breakfast table and went down to the neighbouring avenue. I passed the market’s resident pretzel-seller, with a word, ‘If you don’t ask how many lira to the dollar I’ll buy a pretzel-roll,’ and turned into Alemdağ. (At the first bite my pretzel fell to the ground and I imagined my mother scolding me from heaven.) Should I walk faster? Every step took me back twelve years, month by month, square by square. The denser the traffic the more and more exotic became the aroma of the wild olive trees that poured into the avenue. My father loved the clumps of shameless weeds and nameless flowers multiplying in the old wall’s embrace, and saw their function as ‘a healer in the tunnel of time’. I dived into a garden of debris, a dodgy inheritance whose owner had fled to Buenos Aires. Behind the garden was a graffitied wall, left over from the ’60s: my father would say, ‘It’s not funny but I feel like laughing.’

  I sheltered in the shade of a dwarf plum tree by a dry well which had frightened me in my childhood, and at the sound of the afternoon ezan I dozed off.

  Long live Kuzguncuk! I had always thought it was a quiet district that had sheltered Ottoman refugees fleeing from the Balkans. If my father had gone along İcadiye Street, which leads headlong down to the sea, he might have said, ‘The market has a rural atmosphere with its boxy stalls radiating from a central hub.’ I had no difficulty in finding Bereketli Street that led into the Avenue, and as I walked among the attractive wooden houses I was as excited as though I’d got lost in the midst of a miniature city. I had a bunch of flowers in my hand – I didn’t know what kind – and a packet of almond paste bought specially by İfakat. Climbing upstairs to the third floor of the apartment block called İnşirah, I knew I was about to learn the meaning of that name.

  And, wearing kitchen gloves, İz opened the door and said, ‘Welcome to the building of inner comfort.’ The geometrically patterned kilim, a non-figurative sketch and a map signed Heritiers de Homann on the wall seemed to demonstrate the way two people who share a house can live in awkward togetherness. Zuhâl, who wore John Lennon spectacles and edited the ‘city-life’ section of a competing newspaper, had proudly hung the antique map that included her birthplace Tirebolu (Tripoli) on the wall. While the hosts were preparing savoury pancakes in the kitchen, her swarthy boyfriend, Zafer, with oily hair dangling from both sides of a head that seemed too small for h
is square-shaped body, was shooting a line about his degrees in economics and sociology from a minor university in Florida. I was warming to this fellow who taught sociology in a state university, but mainly supported himself with the rent he collected from two shops inherited from his aunt.

  I’m used to being stared at sometimes like a panda in a zoo, because of my Viking-like features. Uneasy with the three soulmates who watched me as though they were counting my every bite, I eventually dropped my wineglass. I noticed İz was pleased when she found some way to console me. Zafer was busy announcing that his bookworm girlfriend hadn’t read anything after Dostoevsky, much to Zuhâl’s delicious embarrassment. (I recalled my father’s sympathy for the repulsive Selçuk Altun’s refusal to read any novel before Kafka.) Just before the male and female Z’s left for a ‘get well’ visit to the latter’s aunt, the former leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘We’re going to get along just fine, brother-in-law.’

  I wonder why this gave me an erection.

  At the end of a noisy folk song tape, İz brought in the draft of an article she’d prepared on my father and his library. After twice reading the fourth paragraph about his ability to multiply five-digit numbers in his head at the speed of a computer, I couldn’t resist multiplying two six-digit numbers in my head, three times in a row, refereed by a minute Citizen calculator. She was far more surprised than I expected. Galvanized by Dalga’s cheers from the upper stands in the clouds, I leant over towards İz’s lips.

  On the title page of Melina Mercouri’s autobiography, my father had jotted down, ‘Beware the day when a nostalgic chorus line, an old aphorism or a line of lyrical poetry fails to ignite the joy of life.’ I had scratched out the note and added, when mother was taken to hospital, ‘No problem, if you have Ada Ergenekon as the chief firefighter in your life!’ Before calling İz, who never wasted words, I had to take time to prepare myself for a salvo of sharp comments. We used to either meet three or four times a week or speak on the phone twice a day. In our marathons through the back streets of medieval Beyoğlu and Üsküdar, how genuinely she loved those sunbaked urchins. I thought she bought lottery tickets just to be able to say to the itinerant vendors who usually sought out the shadiest corners of local parks, ‘Can I pay when I win?’ We would eat at makeshift diners and rundown hotel restaurants, giggling all the time. Anyone watching us might have thought I was urging this strange girl to talk non-stop as therapy. (God forbid!) On the contrary, when she spoke I felt myself relax. I would listen to her, hungry like someone who has endured a decade of solitude and longing on a desert island, or passionately, like someone listening to a rhapsody of new delights. She was amused at my embarrassment when she leaned over to ask for a cigarette from the next table, or when she was served her Turkish coffee in a tea glass. When I dared to look into her dark eyes my heart warmed, but I was always aware of feeling that that might cause the light in her eyes to fade.

  Although I was only seven months younger, I was pleased at first that she acted as if she was my older sister. I realized that she was trying to look out for me, assuming I found it hard to deal with life’s difficulties. (It wasn’t easy to shake off my paranoid suspicion I was being tested by this guardian angel, who was rather like a happy medium between my mother and Dalga, both of whom I had lost.) When we went out to eat with her friends she watched me from the corner of her eye while she was talking to others and I would feel uneasy. İz had an interesting group of friends who regarded her as leader. Most of them were getting by with jobs that didn’t interest them in order to pursue their real passions which no one respected. I knew I would be accused by the Harvard crowd of being a turncoat, mixing with a bunch that consisted of a poet (translator), a painter (teacher of foreign languages), an art historian (tourist guide), an assistant theatre director (film dubbing work), an industrial designer (proofreader) and those who found themselves working in the media sector without an education in communications.

  In the shady cafés and piss-stinking jazz bars of Beyoğlu and Bağdat Street, İz made fun of the pseudo-intellectuals who sneered at the simple mistakes made by others. I had sympathy for the identical twins Beste and Güfte, flute and cello honours graduates from the conservatoire. Although they often teased me, I derived great pleasure from observing the ongoing exchange of insults between the two chubby girls who edited competing magazines. On the thirteenth of every month we all met for dinner at the fashionable Ottoman restaurant Hünkâr, in Nişantaş. Everyone had to show up unless they had a good excuse. The Ügümü brothers assumed that the group of twenty friends was the country’s élite media team, and respectfully allocated the top floor of the restaurant to the nihilist bunch.

  The incident happened on the second Hünkâr campaign. Apparently I had incurred a penalty for failing to acknowledge the 775th anniversary of the Ulucami monument in Divriği:

  ‘He should at least sing a folksong halfway through ...’

  ‘What if I recite a poem of Küçük İskender’s?’

  ‘He should spend a night with Beste and Güfte in the same bed ...’

  ‘What if I paid for all your dinners for a whole year?’

  ‘He should tell us an impromptu story,’ Azmi the art critic and sculptor proposed. I was astonished to hear İz supporting the suggestion but saying, ‘And please, no happy ending.’ When our eyes met, I felt she sensed the secret I was keeping from her, almost as if she wanted me to reveal it in code. When she saw me hesitating, she stroked my hair and commanded, ‘Finish your drink and then please start, dear Arda.’

  As I finished my drink I recalled Küçük İskender’s quip, ‘I have to plan and commit a murder within an hour and it has been troubling me for minutes.’ I began with a prayer.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a wealthy lady called Adalet Ergin who lived in Istanbul, where heaven and hell mingle. By the beloved Bosphorus, in the waterside mansion she inherited from her first husband who died of a heart attack, she lived happily with her second husband Rasim, her eighteen-year-old daughter Deniz from her first marriage, and her eleven-year-old son Aras from the second. The handsome Rasim had once been the finance director of the cotton-thread factory in the suburb of Haramidere. It had been left to his wife by her first husband. (The children don’t know that the fiancée from whom he had separated to marry his Adalet had committed suicide. He took his wife’s family name and rose to become vice-chairman of the firm’s board of directors.)

  ‘It seems Adalet was pleased that Deniz, encouraged by Rasim, had taken up basketball and risen to the national junior team, and that she had accepted her stepfather and was devoted to her brother. Aras was a very talented and sensitive child, who appeared to be the apple of his family’s eye. He never left his mother’s side from the moment he learned to stand up and grab her skirt. He would cry his eyes out if he couldn’t join Adalet in the toilet, and he couldn’t even listen to a story and take his afternoon nap unless his mother scratched his back. Once a week he would make her read the story of “The Little Match Girl” who froze to death on the street selling matches on Christmas night, and in tears he would say, “But Mother, surely the Little Match Girl went to heaven?” Neither of his parents nor any of his teachers ever had to raise their voice to this mature and well-behaved boy. It’s said that his mother sacked the Welsh nanny when she claimed, “Aras will have psychological problems in the future because he has never fully lived his childhood.” By the time he finished primary school he was listening to classical music, and his violin teacher swore he played Vivaldi almost like a virtuoso.

  ‘Aras began to enjoy accompanying his father to Deniz’s basketball matches, and also to Fenerbahçe football matches. The second big secret he kept from his mother was that he ate fried meatballs, traditional street food, before he entered the stadium. The first match he went to watch his sister play in, he felt hundreds of pairs of eyes feeding on her long and shapely legs. He cried when his father laughed at his suggestion that “Deniz should play in a tracksuit.” Adalet wa
s also not informed about the father and son’s monthly outings to the Golden Horn. As soon as they lowered their fancy fishing-rods off the Atatürk Bridge, Rasim began to tell his son about his dissolute adventures chasing after women. Aras would always listen eagerly to his father’s fantasy, in which he dressed up as a woman, entered a dormitory for girl students and made love to the three roommates till morning. Then they would walk to modest, quiet Kıztaşı and stop over at Rasim’s mother’s house. Aras could never understand why his mother had forbidden him to see the grandmother with the grey-blue eyes and her blind daughter, his aunt. Aunt Ruzin would move her hands slo...w...ly over his face and touch him as if wondering who he resembled. Rasim would pretend not to have heard her when his twin sister asked, “Aras, which is more painful, do you think, to lose your personality or lose your eyes?”

  ‘In his first year of primary school Aras gets roughed up by a boy two years older. Rasim raids the bully’s home, beats up his father and big brother and destroys the furniture in their living room. The neighbourhood hooligans avoid Aras, afraid of Deniz’s skill in karate, and Aras wonders if all his talents are a kind of punishment. Out of loneliness he takes refuge in books and music, and when asked what he’d like as an award for passing his primary exams with flying colours, he answers, “Permission to become a musician when I grow up, because my big sister will manage your business better than me.”

  ‘A supreme inconvenience was inflicted on millions of Istanbul citizens in the name of security, when the President of the USA and the heads of state of forty-five other countries assembled for NATO’s umpteenth summit meeting. The same night it ended was also the night drunk Rasim crashed his Jaguar into a battered old minibus. He got away with minor scratches and was able to bury the incident, while Adalet was to spend a considerable time in intensive care and Aras, neglected by his father and sister, fell into a depression. He looked out from his balcony over the restless waves of the Bosphorus and slipped away into periods of d...ee...p sleep holding Sara, his yellow-haired cat. A week after the accident, on the night when the Olympic torch passed through the city’s busy streets – closed to traffic right in the middle of the rush hour – his sister sent Aras with their driver Nurullah to see Spiderman 2. But Aras came back without seeing the second half of the film. On the way up to his room he heard moans from his mother’s bedroom and rushed in to see his father and stepsister making passionate love on his mother’s bed. He was shocked! Silently he ran to Nurullah’s house in the back garden and sobbed out what he had seen. Then he went up to his room. Shaking all over, clasping Sara, he threw himself into the relentless waters of the Bosphorus. The corpse of Aras still holding Sara tight hit the shore somewhere near the Bebek Mosque.