Songs My Mother Never Taught Me

by Selcuk Altun

  Out of respect for his concentration, I whispered, ‘If you don’t ask the reason why, and if you find anything of Cahid Hodja’s left at the shooting range, two bottles of the best cognac for you.’

  When I first saw the name Bedirhan Öztürk on the second page of the Ottoman–Turkish dictionary brought by the swaggering Kasnak, I was startled by the way the names Arda, Bedirhan and Cahid were insinuated alphabetically into it. On page 22 appeared the street name that Bedirhan Cahid called Eşrefsaat, describing it as ‘with God’s permission, my dwelling and my grave’. I realized that when I entered the poetry competition Eşrefsaat was the street in Üsküdar which I’d chosen as an address from the directory – not knowing that was where my father had been shot.

  Failing to see an additional hint on page 222, I felt that the virtual noose around me was tightening for the very last time.

  On the evening of 12 June, when İz went off for a four-day trip to Cappadocia with her girlfriends, I took a taxi to Eşrefsaat Street. I intended to check out the location of Bedirhan Cahid’s lair then go straight home. Since he had concealed the number of his door, he must have thought I could spot it by some particular feature that would identify him. (Wouldn’t it be better if he noticed I couldn’t finish the last round? Even if he yelled that he was ready with a written confession I was far from sure that I wanted him to be punished.)

  I imagined the meeting between my father and his killer with two souls. To escape this image, I focused on the neighbouring two-storey wooden building painted red. From the ground floor of this dark building, a dim light emitted a sudden spark that branded my brain and soul. A huge black handkerchief was held over my face: once again I was embarking on a journey through a dark tunnel as in a hypnotic trance, yet I had no fear though I had lost my mother and my guardian angel.

  When I came round I knew I was a prisoner in that mysterious house. Struggling to see the time in the light by the bed where I’d lain, I realized my hands were handcuffed. (For a moment I felt proud to be so important.) I must have been out for forty minutes or so. I could hear Bedirhan Cahid upbraiding a young man called Asım in the next room, with the terrifying bark of a brutal army sergeant. Dismissing his assistant with a voice like a firecracker, he began to walk firmly towards the claustrophobic room. I regretted I hadn’t closed my eyes before he put on the light. I knew at once he wouldn’t speak and I wasn’t surprised when I saw he wasn’t lame. In the spacious drawing room into which he dragged me the furnishings were packed randomly as though at the last minute. I wondered at the empty shelves and the absence of books. In the huge photograph that had not yet been removed from the wall I had to look twice at the angry man in the Berkeley t-shirt. Was the hit man secretly smiling at my close interest in the portrait of a man who resembled my father? My attention was drawn to two green velvet armchairs face to face in the middle of the room. Without removing my handcuffs he sat me down on the chair with a view of the sea and squatted in front of me, a plastic bag in his hand.

  ‘I’ll try and come to the point, and please God, I won’t bore you. Don’t worry if you don’t get a chance to speak, a more important duty is in store for you.

  ‘A poor, lonely outsider, I’d just come back from army service and cleaned up a gang of thugs who had robbed and raped my 80-year-old adopted grandmother. My first duty as a hired killer was to obey your mother’s orders to punish your paedophile father. When the pervert (whom you know) gave me the job, to whet my appetite he claimed your late father was a snobbish, arrogant enemy of religion who lived off his wife’s money. For twelve years I put up with being used as a killing-machine in similar scenarios. I had no doubt that my future victims, even though they were supposed to be enemies of religion, were also at the very least sex-maniacs, blackmailers or tax-evaders.

  ‘How much my satisfaction in hunting human prey increased by making you run from one clue to another! I was being paid good money to punish these sinners and had no need to put up with anyone else’s whims.

  ‘I slept peacefully in my cocoon spun from books and beliefs. If I hadn’t gotten to know the philosopher hiding inside the eccentric garment you see in that picture on the wall, I could have gone on rotting away.

  ‘When my employer noticed I was waking up I eliminated him before he could lay a hand on me. Unless I swore to take no more lives from then on I wasn’t ever going to free myself from my inner distress. As a cheap serial killer I certainly deserved to be punished. I was drowning in a whirlpool of despair deeper than the pangs of conscience.

  ‘I was disgusted by a system which used religion principally as a means to political and financial ends, was insensitive to history and tradition, and was subject to recurrent socio-economic failures. As my anger with the books responsible for my loneliness gradually increased, I lost all hope.

  ‘In the shooting club I’d sneaked into for masochistic reasons, I had a lucky break. You arrived! I identified with you as soon as I saw the sad loneliness in your face. I thanked my destiny for sending me this innocent young man whose father I’d shot. I was honoured by your interest in me, and when I heard you were also the victim of an unhappy marriage, my heart broke. But I thought I saw a light at the end of the tunnel for you. When I decided to take you under my wing my life was to recover some temporary meaning.

  ‘On the course once, when I saw how uneasy you were, I left you alone in the room and slipped into the dressing room. It wasn’t the first time I opened your locker, but rummaging in the pocket of your jacket I found a note threatening you, and I kept close to you for seventy-two hours. While you were asleep in your bed my assistant Asım and I took turns at the bend of the road opposite your main gate to keep watch from his car. I also realized that for the first time I didn’t mind breaking my oath when I shot the wretched man who attacked you on the edge of the Ottoman cemetery. I think I punished the scum guilty of İz’s traffic accident as you would have wished. Otherwise they would never be brought to justice.

  ‘If you’d said, “I want them dead,” your word would have been law, Arda!

  ‘I don’t know how many I’ve gunned down. I’m ashamed to have turned into an incorrigible killing-machine. I refuse to take refuge in a system of justice which fails to recognize its own famous sultan’s tomb or the gravestones of its veteran pashas. Suicide’s not an option for a fighting warrior, but you, Arda, can put an end to this misery!

  ‘When I unlock your handcuffs and put the old Webley in your hand, you must aim for my heart. In films they count to ten but I’ll wait till twenty. When I say twenty pull the trigger and put the gun in my right hand. For a convincing scenario there’s even a suicide note in my shirt pocket. If you think firing one bullet is too much for your father’s sick assassin, may I ask this favour: in one go get rid of your desire for revenge and save your own life at one and the same time?

  ‘Otherwise, even if I regretted it later, I have a duty to perform according to the rules of my world. When you aim the Webley at my heart, I’ll direct my gun at yours. If I’m alive, Arda, you can’t live! I don’t want to live with the fear of a future raid on my humble home. I have two dozen witnesses in hell who can swear I’m not bluffing when there’s a gun in my hand. One last word: if you don’t pull the trigger, someone else surely will...’

  He undid my handcuffs with an apologetic expression and put a thin beige glove on my right hand. Then he gave me the Webley, which took a single bullet. He turned on his portable radio and found a station playing mournful music. His eyes shone as his left hand took a revolver from his plastic bag. He pulled his armchair over until we were knee to knee and smiled wryly as he guided my gun-barrel to touch his heart. As his gun-barrel touched my heart my hair stood on end. Before he began to count, he said, ‘If you’re lucky there’s one more clue. I’ve put my diary in your bag.’

  Now numbers began to drop from his lips like prayers. When he reached ‘FIVE’ I started to sweat.

  – SIX

  (I was curious to know when I’d beg
in to see my whole life pass before my eyes like a film-strip.)

  – SEVEN

  (Might my father’s ghost be watching this postmodern duel which would be ended by numbers?)

  – EIGHT

  (I remembered the centenary of Elias Canetti, that authentic Ottoman maker of aphorisms.)

  – NI-I-NE

  (Paul Cezanne declared, ‘The painter must observe like a dog, with eyes fixed and forbidding.’)

  – TENN...

  (As my fear of coming face to face with Bedirhan Cahid subsided, I stopped sweating.)

  – ELEVEN

  (It seemed he too was pleased with this position.)

  – TWELVE

  (Remembering sentences from Küçük İskender’s manifesto, ‘Everyone Must Have a Corpse,’ I regretted that I never asked Selçuk Altun to introduce me.)

  – THIRTEEN

  ‘For the last few minutes I’ve been feeling uneasy that I’ve had to plan and carry out a crime of murder in one hour. If I’d begun to plan it long ago I would certainly have messed it up.’

  – FOURTEEN

  ‘As history is always under revision it’s more difficult to look out for the ideal moment. The perfect crime is committed by chance. It’s improvised.’

  – FIFTEE-EN...

  ‘A crime requires courage, strength, the right weapon and of course a live victim (if possible a human being).’

  – SIXTEEN!

  ‘It’s nearly midnight and now that I’m becoming a murderer I’m happy. An indescribable joy fills my heart.’

  – SEVENTEEN!

  ‘Now I can be proud to be among people. And if I can’t, even dreaming of it is a comfort.’

  – EIGHTEEN!

  (As Bedirhan began to frown I remembered the diary in the old plastic bag. My being was overwhelmed by the desire to possess it.)

  – NINETEE-EE-N!

  Suddenly I remembered my mother saying, ‘You have such a silly expression on your face, Arda, that Italians in Venice and Scotsmen in London will spot a victim and ask you for directions.’ I couldn’t bear her coming between us, accusing me of weakness and squealing like a child. Very slowly, as though I was stroking a thoroughbred’s rump, I pulled the trigger of the Webley as Cahid Hodja had ordered, and released it. As my mother’s ghost evaporated I came face to face with the corpse of my father’s killer. I thought I saw him laughing for the first time. I turned off his primitive radio. I thrust the old Webley into his right hand according to his instructions, and put the gun that fell from his hand into the plastic bag along with his diary. I was exhausted. For some reason I stood without moving behind the main door, the plastic bag in my hand. My mother used to say, ‘Don’t rush out of the shower till all the water’s run off you.’ (I knew I was about to be free of her ghost forever.)

  Deserted Eşrefsaat was as innocent as a Fellini film-set waiting eagerly for morning. As I turned into Parlak Street I wondered if Asım would know when he returned to his master’s house that he had planned this suicide.

  ‘He’s an Orphan Now’ were the words written over the boot of the taxi I hailed in Şemsi Paşa Avenue. Between the two thick volumes I took gently from the plastic bag I found a goodbye note:

  Dear Arda,

  Well done! I hope your dreams never become nightmares because of me.

  We were both the victims of marriages that began with love but ended in hatred. Because of this earth there cannot be a heaven. There is no escape from alternate states of heaven and hell, birth and death.

  It was not possible to ask my nervy Gürsel Ergene Hodja to solve the problem of how to transport to heaven those who have finished their punishment in hell. I wish I could remember who told me there was a great library in purgatory for the gang of philosophers, poets and writers ...

  Your fellow conspirator,

  B.

  If Gürsel Ergene was the angry man whose photograph resembled my father, should I have been afraid because his name rhymed with Mürsel? I very much wanted to plunge into Bedirhan’s diary before I went home if only the driver with the bushy moustache wouldn’t turn round to look. I knew I would find İfakat in the sitting room dozing in front of a film. I entered my office and hid the diary among the rare books on Istanbul – to study closely at the first opportunity. I checked the magazine and barrel of the automatic gun and crammed it into the bottom of my briefcase, intending to get rid of it. It didn’t contain a single bullet ...

  Having just commited the second murder in Eşrefsaat, I was shattered by news of my uncle’s death. On my way to collect his body, İz spoke to me on the phone, ‘I want to let you know that last night I dreamt you were attacked by a half-black, half-white man waving a scimitar and you killed him with a gun your mother handed to you at the last minute.’

  Adil Kasnak came with me. Reading Bedirhan’s diary, I was comforted by this massive man sitting next to me who, whenever he wasn’t muttering, was snoring heavily. I didn’t cry for my uncle whom I’d never seen weep even for his own mother’s death. My last relative, who never thought evil of anyone in his whole life, had met his unusual death a little sooner than he expected. On the way back to Istanbul, his co-traveller Gun told me that he was following a snow leopard and her two cubs when he slipped and fell into a crevasse twenty metres deep. When they took him from the morgue I realized I hadn’t ever seen him with his eyes closed. He looked as if he was waiting to see the end of his dream. He seemed at ease, like a civil servant on his way home with his pay, dozing off on a public bus. I couldn’t help thinking that if grandfather had seen the hundreds who attended his funeral, from businessman to kebab-house owner, from tour guide to betting-shop runner, he would most certainly have been annoyed. For the first time in my life, I felt proud of a family member as I held back my tears and saw humanity grieving for Salvador Taragano, the man who had left me almost all his wealth while he was still alive.

  I knew I would get caught up in Bedirhan’s diary and finish it on the Istanbul–Katmandu–Istanbul trip. I read all the way through this wasted life. Although a painful inner world had been concealed under a blanket of external dilemmas, nevertheless he had managed to enjoy travelling to exotic climates. The possibility that his grandfather had shot mine, Baki’s dollar-oriented death trade, and the fact that the address of a pervert who ended up as victim instead of hunter had been given to enter a competition in which Bedirhan used the diary of a suicidal writer looked as meaningless as a cartoon without a caption. It was as if the joy of finding his future Angel of Death when we first met was concealed by his line, ‘I’ve found A.’ (I never recalled meeting him on my visits to Dalga.) I guessed he had sold the remainder of his books at nominal prices to secondhand book dealers he didn’t know.

  Reading between the lines, it was clear he had consigned the wellbeing of eccentric Gürsel Ergene to me. I went to the hospital wondering if I would meet a devil in disguise, only to learn that he had committed suicide the same day as Bedirhan.

  ‘May he rest in peace, he seems to have suffocated himself with a paper bag he made out of pages torn from his diary,’ said the hard-boiled nurse. I told İz everything that happened, apart from Bedirhan’s unloaded gun. When I gulped and said, ‘You have listened to secrets a man would tell only to his wife, so now you must marry me,’ she caressed my cheeks with both hands and said, ‘Not a bad idea, Arda. I’m pregnant.’

  At first I was embarrassed like a young boy whose circumcised penis is on show for the first time in a women’s Turkish bath! Then I sensed the explosion of fireworks in every cell in my body cells. I embraced İz but and then made for the ridges of Çamlıca. I was thankful for the abundance of smells in the deserted streets and for the existence of an earth I had begun to sense again. Following a tumbling wind I turned into peaceful Huzur Street. I leaned back against an old weeping willow, my hands behind me, as the sound of the mosques in the background arose for the noon ezan. Very slowly I closed my eyes. I watched my life go by like a film, but from the end back to the beginning
. Even when a playful thought occurred to me, I didn’t open my eyes. I had to ask Selçuk Altun – I was going to give him Bedirhan’s diary after censoring it – to find me a good classical guitar teacher. Cahid Hodja, may he rest in heaven, used to say, ‘Your hand suits a gun, you’d make a good musician.’

  I thought that only film stars shed tears with their eyes shut.

  1 Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

  2 The Arabic formula bismillah!, meaning ‘in the name of God the Compassionate, our Saviour’, used particularly before starting a major project.

  3 A method of presenting a word or a phenomenon by assigning numbers to the Arabic alphabet.

  4 Eyüp Sultan Loti Coffee House and Surroundings (1966), M. Mes’ud Koman.

  5 (Formerly) the Grand Mufti, or head of the Islamic hierarchy responsible for all religious matters.

  6 On it was a statue of the Emperor Markianos (451–457). There was a rumour that it could tell if girls who walked past were virgins or not. It was even reported that the statue broke when Justinian II played the same trick on his sister-in-law.

  7 Eunuch.

  8 Energetic.

  9 Adonis / İlhan Berk / Yves Bonnefoy / Eugenio de Andrade / Louise Glück / Geoffrey Hill / Philippe Jacottet / Mario Luzi / W.S. Mervin / Wislawa Szymborska.