by Selcuk Altun
I never expected him to cut me short like a Red Indian chief raising his hand.
‘Do you hear what you’re saying, Arda? What American university taught you to right one wrong with another? You’re young and because your pain is fresh, your reaction is over the top. It is partly because well-brought-up young people like you don’t get involved in politics and don’t undertake public duties that the system remains underdeveloped. God forbid I would ever abuse my God-given gift and turn a weapon against any other servant of His. I wouldn’t even shoot a goldfinch after what happened to me. While you rail against the injustice of the system you should not ignore the divine justice of Almighty God. There is no escape from His justice. And finally, how can you be sure that the fugitive Kutsi is not serving his divine sentence at this very moment?’
His reply, which was more terse than I expected, made me even angrier. ‘You were the only one left who didn’t talk in God’s name, Cahid Çiftçi,’ I said. ‘This country, supposedly in His name, has suffered enough from those who take advantage of the people’s innocence. I will not rest in peace until Kutsi is buried in pain as deep as İz’s. Besides, who can say that my attempt to punish him is not divine fate?’
I left without a farewell. We both knew that we probably wouldn’t be seeing each other again.
I bought İz’s favourite comics and offbeat magazines, chocolate-covered chestnuts and Sezen Aksu’s two latest CDs before boarding the delayed plane.
İz’s good spirits partially came back when her face healed faster than Dr Rohatgi had expected. Zuhâl and Zafer came for a surprise visit, and the second time I came back from a visit to Istanbul I brought back İfakat for a week. My uncle, on a vigorous masturbation tour of the pre-Christian nude sculptures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum and the Louvre, stayed with us while in London. From October İz started to socialize with ease. We had pleasant trips as far as Inverness with Nurse Serap and her computer expert husband. On my third trip to Istanbul I wrote a note to Kutsi Serhamza, immediately regretting it and beginning to fear my lack of self-confidence:
YOU WILL PAY YOUR PENALTY IN EXCESS!
YOURS PERMANENTLY
DEMON ...
İz’s face had completely healed by mid-December. We chose to disregard the side-effects (partial loss of vision in her left eye and lack of movement of her eyebrows and forehead). On our last visit I invited Dr Rohatgi to Istanbul and gave him a silver cigarette-holder bearing the seal of Sultan Abdülhamit II. As he wished us goodbye he said, ‘I know that you’re wondering why I reject plastic surgery for my own ugly face. My dear Harvardite, it’s because I dreamt that if a surgeon’s hand touched my face I’d lose my gift.’ I was reminded of Cahid Hodja’s maxim that he would refuse to make use of his sharpshooting talent on any other human.
I wanted to embarrass Selçuk Altun as soon as I returned. I purchased a rare signed copy of a Graham Greene book, A Gun for Sale, from his favourite secondhand bookseller. (First I was going to whet his appetite by showing him the book, then I’d decide whether to give it to him or not.) Three days before our reunion with Istanbul, I took all the one and two pence coins collected in a kitchen jar to the slovenly girl who was breastfeeding her baby in Piccadilly Circus tube station.
‘How many bottles of milk do you think I can get with these?’ she chided.
It was clear from Zuhâl’s tone of voice when she phoned in the early hours of the following morning that she had some shocking news.
‘While I was wondering how to tell you one piece of news, I heard another I must tell you,’ she said. ‘The day before yesterday, while the treacherous shop owner and his family were picnicking in the Belgrade Forest, their shop and home above it were completely burned down. Yesterday evening when Kutsi was on his way to the Black Sea coast in his Mercedes, a lorry without a licence-plate smashed into him from the side and rolled him into a ditch. The poor bastard broke his neck and is now in a wheelchair! Arda, I thought such coincidences could only happen in films and novels ...’
In a panic, not knowing what to say, I called the shooting range. When I told Kasnak that I must speak to my Hodja, he said, ‘You’re going to have to commit suicide, my boy.’ (Cahid Çiftçi had killed himself two weeks before.) Realizing we were returning to Istanbul at the weekend, he politely requested a bottle of Napoleon cognac.
Feeling as if I had been punched twice on the chin, I went to see İz packing her suitcase to the accompaniment of Sezen Aksu songs. I dramatically delivered Zuhâl’s news. She bowed her head, perhaps to avoid seeing me lie, and asked, ‘Were these things done under your orders, Arda?’ (I realized her tone of voice was not accusing.) As I delicately caressed her face, fresher than a baby’s, I’ll never forget saying, ‘If Cahid Hodja hadn’t passed away two weeks ago, my answer might not have been “no’’.’
1 It is thought-provoking to consider Shakespeare as the planet’s most important writer of the last 450 years, when he was influenced by Homer who lived 2,300 years earlier ...
2 In nearby Adapazarı in the second week of July, millions of white butterflies reproduce in the white poplars, deposit their larvae and set off on their last flight over the river Sakarya to die. A dense cloud like falling snow covers the Sakarya Bridge and holds up the traffic.
3 What are we doing, Mustafa, what is our business here?
On this planet, in this contemptible system, in these lands without character
why are we living still in misery?
Why are we struggling still, Mustafa?
The police either beat us up or collude!
If it’s the state we mean ...
There are people the state reckons far more important than us.
B
The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full.
Sunday After the War by Henry Miller
Is it only an ugly fool who makes friends with mirrors? I consulted mine three times a day. When I heard what they said behind my back in Tarlabaşı – ‘Can this ugly fellow be the son of such a handsome man as the actor Kadir İnanır?’ – I thought I was suffering yet another of God’s wrathful blows.
According to mankind’s almanac, if a year of a dog’s life is equivalent to 7½ years of a man’s, doesn’t that make me 300?
I reflected that if I had a twenty-year prison sentence for every life I’d taken, I’d lose count of what my total sentence should be.
Even without Gürsel Hodja’s help I would have realised that books were treacherous friends. (But never let them spot your weakness.) I put aside forty of the least harmful and burned the rest as punishment.
I also realised that unless I confessed to the Hodja that I was a hit man, I would gradually be overcome by feelings of guilt. He refused to listen.
‘I don’t think you can tell me anything about yourself that I don’t already know,’ he said. ‘The most mysterious part of the heaven or hell business is our lack of precise knowledge of the rules of entry. A naive murderer who has fallen into a trap goes to heaven; an honest bureaucrat who plunges his country into millions-of-dollars’-worth of damage can go to hell, because of an unintentional but serious mistake,’ the holy man declared.
Did your faithful servant ever mention to you the final entry in a diary he kept?
The only good luck I ever had in my life was friendship with the wisest man in the city, who hid away among the permanently sick inhabitants of a hospital to escape from the chaos of the shallow life around him.
According to the Old Testament, blessed Noah’s grandfather Methuselah lived for 969 years. And according to Isaac B. Singer, on the eve of the Flood he might have been feeling bored with life.
There’s an excuse for murder, but no consolation for boredom ...
A
Is death male or female?
Ölüm (Death) by Muammer Gaddafi, 1996
When
İz said she was moving in with me I thought she was joking. İfakat, hoping for some light and harmony in our home, accepted the situation as God’s will.
I don’t remember a more satisfying meal than the one we ate together on New Year’s Eve, which consisted of gherkins, raw meatballs, take-away kebabs and Ottoman desserts. (Before retiring at midnight we watched a thought-provoking film which I chose at random from my father’s collection.)1 Two days later, İz began working as the public relations advisor at our firm. If my father had seen the striking essays she wrote in the provocative periodicals, he would have said, ‘Squirrel, kneel to your mother if you must, but don’t let go of this marvellous girl.’
Despite the six zeros dropped from the Turkish lira, our companies were doing well and there were no comic messages from Uncle, who was busy exploring Californian landmarks which cropped up in William Saroyan’s stories. Every morning I awoke feeling uneasy at my growing respect for İz. Suddenly I shivered at the words of the narrator of the book I was reading: ‘My wife and children are in the next room. I am in good health and have enough money. Oh God, I’m most unhappy.’
(I must have been missing my guardian angel, appointed by my mother to protect me after her death.)
İz was glued to the television when she wasn’t at work: cartoons and the Olympic Games in Athens. I saw she wanted to be left alone and was happy to slip down to the nearest cinema.
I was unexpectedly moved by a documentary film called My Father, the Architect, in which Nathaniel Kahn tries to discover his father Louis Kahn’s face. It is a desert-like surface of craters caused by an accident he’d suffered as a baby in Estonia. When I suggested that İz might be interested in Kahn’s character (he was ugly, warped and conceited) and in his disagreements with his contemporaries, all she said was, without moving her eyes from the television screen, ‘I can’t take an interest in anything more demanding than the trampoline finals.’
A second letter arrived at my office:
02.04.2005
My friend Arda Ergenekon,
Are you prepared to find out who murdered your father? You won’t detest him more than I do.
As life is a three-act play, I propose to give you six clues in succession. (If you fluff your lines you don’t get a second chance.)
If you reach the sixth stage, we’ll destroy him together.
The first clue will be ready on 12.04.05; the second on 22.04.05.
Go with the prayer besmele2 to the Kariye Museum and find two numbers in the middle courtyard ...
Apart from the late Cahid Hodja, the only people who knew I had begun to search for my father’s killer were my simple-hearted uncle, the repulsive Selçuk Altun, İz and Adil Kasnak.
With a shudder I realized from the parentheses scattered randomly throughout his rapidly written novels that the letter, with its paranoid-like tone, belonged to Selçuk Altun. (It was time to tackle this psychopath; I didn’t care if he thought me a halfwit and a lazy loafer.)
The Kariye Museum
I remembered journeys my father and I made to see the Valens Aqueduct and the chaotic wonders of the shop windows in Zeynel Abidin’s music store. Then we would go on to Horhor where, according to my father, ‘they stopped turning the pages of the calendar thirty years ago’ and eat spiced meat pittas in a deserted pitta house.
I thought my father was joking when he said that during her intrigues a Byzantine empress had had an underground tunnel dug, three kilometres long, between the then royal Sultanahmet Mosque and Horhor. Passing along that route 1,000 years later, I felt as uneasy as though I was entering a foreign country. I imagined even Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Istanbul, would have been startled to see such a parade of veiled pedestrians.
I thought the ugly buildings around the Kariye Museum, which has survived with its simple charm for 1,500 years, increased its appeal. The monument, which has been a church, then a mosque and most recently a museum, is known to charge foreign tourists three times the normal rate. At the entrance to the old-fashioned lavatory in the courtyard with its squat columns was a shoeblack’s box, and inside Cappadocia souvenirs were being sold to the accompaniment of arabesque music. As though all the different kinds of glass in the windows overlooking the museum’s dreary courtyard were not ugly enough, pages of tabloid newspaper were stuffed into broken panes. In the front section, ill-concealed by lofty trees, a disgusting plastic pipe of dirty water descended from roof to ground level. I was horrified – it was like throwing acid in the face of a beauty queen. I felt ashamed on behalf of dignified Kariye’s nameless architects and its Byzantine and Ottoman guardians.
I knew the museum would not be busy on the eve of the season. The section of mosques and churches set aside for prayer is called sahin in Arabic. I wanted to look – perhaps for the last time – at the rare frescoes and mosaics in the old Kariye Church/Mosque. My father had said the thematic frescoes on the ceilings were ‘Byzantium’s most astounding visual works’. (He thought that Turkish artists after Nazmi Ziya had never begun to approach the profundity of the fresco called The Assyrian Massacre.) Tired of watching the hippy girl examining the frescoes in the outer narthex through her binoculars, and a chic Spanish couple quarrelling along from the tombs, I moved to the middle of the prayer-space. At the entrance to the observation area was a barricade of two-dozen female tourists, and I wasn’t surprised when they yawned at the guide’s silly spiel in bad English. I wondered wryly if I were a vulgar woman-hunter, which of these cellulite monuments would I choose?
I began to suspect that Selçuk Altun with his warped mind was going to offer clues that made fun of my father’s passion for history and mathematics. I was summoned to the museum on 12 April to find two numbers, by a letter dated 2 April, in which words were fundamentally linked to numbers. I thought I might spot them as a pair or as two opposite points. When I eventually saw two giant icons in the wings of the motionless dome, I experienced the sheer relief of having completed an exam.
As the awe-inspiring numbers revolved in my head, I approached the magnificent mosaics full of hope.
When the site became a mosque in the sixteenth century, the eyes of the Blessed Jesus were made null and void. (But in the right wing, one can sense the dim foreknowledge in the concerned eyes of the Virgin Mary fixed on her baby.)
Along the base of the mosaics, which were two metres above the floor, hung protective covers two handspans long. I wasn’t wrong in assuming that even a thief who was only partly alert would hide the clues under these covers, instead of right in the middle of the icons. I saw the numbers ‘38’ and ‘248’ carved with a knife at either end of the plastic protectors. Recalling the word besmele in the recent letter, I left the museum with the consolation that these two hastily carved numbers might convey some cruel textual message according to the alphanumerical cryptogram Ebced.3
I returned to the office in a taxi that said, ‘Overtake at your own risk’ on the boot. Until there was evidence, I knew I had to hide developments from İz, who wouldn’t allow the slightest criticism of Selçuk Altun. On the way I felt queasy at the idea of seeing eye-to-eye in the middle of a detective novel.
When I heard that Altun already possessed the book by Graham Greene which the author had signed with a dedication to his first mistress, Dorothy Glover, I decided to give the copy I brought from London to Professor Haluk Oral, a collector of signed books. With his help, I established that according to the basic Ebced, the fateful numbers ‘38’ and ‘248’ corresponded to ‘the Executioners’ Graveyard’.
Cellatlar, the Executioners’ Graveyard
Chasing after an insidious book he found in a secondhand bookshop, my uncle flew to Moscow to visit the eighty-one psychiatric hospitals of the Soviet Union period where intellectuals had been sent for ‘treatment’. Meanwhile, in an article entitled ‘Istanbul: City of the Good and Inconsiderate’, İz wrote about how in a kebab house two people would struggle hopelessly to prevent the other picking up the bill, then the same two would destroy t
hemselves in traffic, each refusing to give way. After Adil Kasnak, who became our Security Chief on 1 April, had read her article twice, he said, ‘If your girlfriend were to write about the four billion loaves of bread dumped every year in the garbage in a country where 7,000,000 people survive on $2 a day, would her readers disown her, my boy?’
I couldn’t find anything on the Cellatlar, the Executioners’ Graveyard in encyclopedias or on the internet. Before stress got the better of me, I rang Selçuk Altun. I knew he’d be helpful without giving much away. He directed me to the book-finder Nedret İşli, partner in a secondhand bookshop called Turkuaz. I warmed to Nedret and his colleague Puzant, who yelled at each other in the claustrophobic shop in a side street off Beyoğlu. (They weren’t unhappy despite the considerable difficulties they faced running a secondhand bookshop in a country with a reading handicap.) According to the pamphlet4 they had at hand, the graveyard was on a slope by the historic Pierre Loti Coffee House on the ridges of Eyüp Sultan district:
Over the graves were erected thick stones of human height. Even though these executioners only fulfilled state orders, they have always been universally detested, buried separately, and never admitted into public cemeteries.
Hayrullah was supposed to be from neighbouring Karagümrük, but in spite of my warnings, he took two wrong turnings before he found the Pierre Loti Coffee House. The historic coffee house was renamed Pierre Loti, after the eminent writer’s frequent visits there to observe the panoramic view of Istanbul and the Golden Horn. My father thought that the Ottomans had shown exaggerated hospitality to Pierre Loti, that bizarre individual who led several lives, and he named the sincere enthusiasm for foreigners, whether Balkan folk-dancing groups or visiting football referees, ‘the Pierre Loti syndrome’. In the coffee house, after coffee tasteless as İfakat’s and reluctantly served by an overdressed waiter, conscious of the early spring silence, I walked uncertainly towards the Ottoman cemetery, consulting the 1/2,000-scaled map at the back of the pamphlet. On the rough terrain where the Executioners’ Graveyard was said to be, there was a cemetery – perhaps a century old – of many gravestones that emphasized their Black Sea origins. The dark-skinned youth, who was walking with a spring in his step, seemed like a volunteer parking attendant and when I asked where the Executioners’ Graveyard was, answered, ‘By God, I don’t know, I just came from the East a month ago.’
