Swords of Ice

by Latife Tekin

  A proud man, Halilhan couldn’t bear to confess that his life with the Volvo had got mixed up with fear, pain and passion. Yet, he was in fact aware of his fatal attraction to the Volvo and of the confusing haze of his fantasy life.

  After falling out with Gogi, for eleven evenings in a row Halilhan forgot to get out of his car when he pulled up in front of his house. Sitting at the wheel, gripping its furry cover with his hands, he would only sniff at the air and listen to the song, ‘If we part tonight, my love, we’ll never again meet!’

  Far off, in the factory yard, the squash plants sprouted their first leaves.

  After his troubles had blocked up his nose, bewitching it so badly that he lost his sense of smell, Halilhan decided to let bygones be bygones. He showed up on Gogi’s doorstep to announce desperately, ‘The Volvo has taken hold of my soul.’ Then he confessed his secret: ‘I can’t control the steering wheel any more, she just goes wherever she likes, not where I want to go.’ Halilhan asked Gogi to keep an eye out for any suspicious moves the Volvo made, then pushed him into the passenger seat and headed off deep into the city’s streets. For friendship’s sake, Gogi swore to watch the Volvo, even though he wasn’t truly convinced by Halilhan’s feverish whispering on and on about how he’d lost the freedom to choose where to go and when to stop.

  About ten nights earlier, when Halilhan was on his way home, the Volvo had turned suddenly into a side street, headed down dark alleys, and of her own free will parked at the door of a night club called ‘Bella’. Sensing something inside him turn to liquid and start to run, Halilhan darted into the club. He remembered turning to look at one of the dancers in the Brazilian revue and burying his eyes instantly in hers. Shot through the heart, he dropped down into an empty armchair to nurse his new wound. The Brazilian had wavy black hair and long slender legs. Dressed in a skirt embroidered with peacock-like birds that trailed behind her but bared her thighs entirely, she blasted into his blood stream and stormed through his veins. Even the most desolate cells in his body still sizzled with pain.

  For six nights, no less, the Volvo stepped on it as soon as she heard Halilhan’s rapid heartbeat, and whisked him at top speed to the ‘Bella’ before the revue took to the stage. As if he were following orders, Halilhan poured bowls of rose petals over the dancing woman. At last, one evening the dancer leaned over his table, said in tickling Turkish, ‘I love you, Halilhan,’ and then disappeared behind the footlights forever.

  Clutched by the pain of his great loss, Halilhan dreamed one night of fighting a Brazilian army commanded by a major and bringing them all to their knees. After waking up howling, he wrote with trembling fingers a poem that began, ‘All through the night I pleaded for your nights.’

  Just then the squash leaves in the factory yard swelled into a green foam.

  The Volvo’s strange behaviour had driven Halilhan to invest a veritable fortune in rose petals. He’d earned this money by plastering unimaginable metres of burning steam pipes with a mixture of fibre glass and perlite mud, and then lining them with layers of plastic – a made-up procedure that he’d sold to the teknik personel of a big company as a special type of insulation.

  Gogi, still in disbelief, heard his friend out. At the same time he noted that there was really nothing odd about the Volvo’s behaviour, apart from certain small quirks such as a slight impatience with the traffic police and a partiality for roads that ran down to the coast. As Halilhan tearfully recited his poem to Gogi, he felt as if he’d torn up all the roses filling a great, wide pasture and cast them to the four winds – and all for the sake of love. He often awoke at odd hours of the night, climbed into his car whilst still wearing his pyjamas, and sat staring through the Volvo’s windshield with his green eyes, as warm and smooth as two pebbles, fixed on the stars and the night clouds.

  Gogi blanched slightly upon hearing that for the last few days the Volvo had been tipping her nose up and down to greet every fair-haired woman they met on the road. On a closer inspection, he marvelled to see the Volvo even slowing down out of respect for some yellowish leaves lying on the road. And his face lost all its colour when the Volvo suddenly braked beside a blonde woman who stood waiting at a bus stop, with an ugly and glum-looking cat cuddled to her chest.

  As the woman slid into the back seat, the Volvo’s valves seemed to chime, ‘Oh, just let me wiggle and jiggle and die for you!’ – so loud you might think they’d shoot right through the bonnet at any moment.

  That was just what Spring had been waiting for. In the factory yard the squash plants exploded into mustard-yellow buds.

  Once they’d snatched the woman away from the bus stop, the Volvo raced away from the city and turned down a network of empty roads shaded by huge plane trees. Reaching out to adjust the mirror, Halilhan said, smiling, ‘Madam, these are the very trees that looked upon Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bey the Conqueror!’ As the Volvo’s rubber eagle swung to one side with its wings beating against the window, he asked, ‘How would you like us to shoot off here, like Fatih Bey?’ Gogi slouched down in his seat to hide his head shamefully. Glancing at the woman in the mirror, Halilhan went on: ‘My dear lady, you should be wearing one of those fancy Leyla pins in your hair, ah, how becoming that would be.’ A smothered laugh made its way through Gogi’s embarrassment.

  But the mustard-yellow buds on the squash plants were still hiding their heads, their mouths clamped tightly against the sun.

  After they’d stopped beneath the oak trees in a hidden corner of the woods, Halilhan raised his brow and winked at Gogi so he would leave the Volvo. Then he reached out to the meowing cat the woman still held pressed to her chest. Stroking its fur, he said, ‘You know what? I’m the biggest cat lover in this country. Do you really not have a name? That’s what I heard from the nightingales!’ ‘Her name’s Sunsun,’ murmured the woman. ‘She doesn’t understand your language, Halilhan Bey, she only knows English. She’s an Asian cat, and I got her in Switzerland.’

  Juli (the blonde’s father was English) explained that Sunsun had a Chinese father and an Indian mother, and since she herself was an alcoholic and incapable of taking care of Sunsun, she’d decided to give her away to a zoo, but unable to bear seeing the cat unhappy there, had taken her back… She’d once been a very famous dressmaker but with her drinking all her threads and needles had fallen out with the silks in her life. Juli’s face was veiled with such sorrow that the squash flower buds in the factory yard faded almost to nothing before they could open out to the sun.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Halilhan, ‘you’ll always be the needle-woman to me.’ As he took her hands into his and squeezed them tightly, whispers of ‘Sunsun, Sunsun…’ filled the Volvo.

  Seleep pusi, pusi!

  Halilhan tried to shake off the whispers of distraction before Gogi came back, and when he saw his friend he was laughing. He showed him what he had written with oak leaves on the windscreen: ‘Needle-woman, I love you.’

  Gogi suddenly felt sure that the Volvo didn’t intend to lead Halilhan to the men in charge of the country’s ekonomi. One by one, she’d snip the strings connecting his heart to his mind, and in less than a year his heart would be wailing to the tune of ‘Love lost itself inside me!’ As Gogi was still stunned, however, by the Volvo’s unique qualities, he hadn’t the heart to reveal his true thoughts to Halilhan. ‘Now you’ll hear something unbelievable, Gogi,’ said Halilhan. ‘The lady’s eyes are so very, very much like my mother’s! I could never have possibly imagined that after all these years I’d come upon a look with that same colour…’

  The invisible signs of love that were radiating from Juli had a restorative effect on the Volvo. She shot like an arrow at every turn in the road as Halilhan cried out, ‘I know I’m married but I still want to marry you!’ On their wild dash toward the city, Juli, overcome by Halilhan’s sincerity, started to weep.

  Wind, speed, and love boosted their passion, which cried out for a ritual. With the Volvo in charge, they soared all the way to the other end of the
city, to the cemetery where Sitile Sunteriler lay. Halilhan explained that in the summer, when everybody else went out to open-air tea gardens, he preferred to come and rest there beside his mother’s grave. Then, putting his head on Juli’s shoulder, he let his tears flow.

  After finding solace at Sitile Sunteriler’s grave, they made for the tiled mosque that Halilhan liked so much. Turning up a hill and driving past factories and workshops, Halilhan could hardly wait to show Juli the minaret that he admired so greatly. In a flash they’d reached a construction site that looked like some kind of gigantic diagram. At the top of the hill, Halilhan switched off the ignition and said, ‘The sea looks like copper from here.’ Just at their feet, the city spread out like the colourfully marbled page of a book.

  When they got out of the Volvo at the minaret’s base, Halilhan shouted, ‘Look at that, Juli, a whole family of clouds has come out to greet us!’ Halilhan was convinced that the creators of this architecture so many years back had actually meant for it to foreshadow the construction of spacecraft in our day. On closer inspection, it was clear that the minaret’s tip equalled the Apollo’s nose: the middle was just like the fuselage, and the wide, lowermost part mirrored the rack of booster rockets. ‘You must be right, Halilhan Bey,’ Juli murmured. ‘They could just as well have dug deep wells and called them minarets. Instead, they pointed them toward the sky and made them taper off.’

  It was a marvel to Gogi how incredibly imaginative Halilhan could be at bending a technical topic to fit his heart’s desires, and how cleverly he adapted his private thoughts to the whispers of love. He hid behind the Volvo and watched as Halilhan and Juli walked around the mosque hand in hand. Should he be laughing at this? In Gogi’s twinkling eyes could be seen both his indecision and the sweet confusion in the air that arose from the mist of love.

  ‘Madam,’ said Halilhan, ‘I’ve often heard it said that a cat who looks at you the way a human being does brings bad luck. I therefore congratulate you for your boldness in stroking it.’

  They were now on the way back down, driving over to see Halilhan’s sister, Gülaydan – ready to hear her scream when she saw how closely Juli’s eyes resembled her mother’s.

  Sitile and Ese (Halilhan’s still-living father) Sunteriler had told their children very little about their past, other than mentioning a picnic that had taken place years ago in a distant town where they had met with a lot of people they didn’t really know. Dressed up in long robes, men and women had embraced each other, weeping, and knelt before three old men who wore tall, white hats. Halilhan’s mother and father had been accustomed to eating raw meat. Their birth places as well as the sources of their body fluids must have been very near each other, but Sitile and Ese had long since forgotten the paths that led to those origins. They had grown up under the wing of Sandal Aba, an unbelievably old woman, wandering with her from one sheepfold to another. Sandal Aba understood how animals talked and was a skilled physician whose reputation had spread to all four seasons. Sitile and Ese’s most vivid memories from their childhood were of those times when Sandal Aba operated on animals that lay stretched out on their backs with their feet tied to four posts. Sitile and Ese could still conjure up in their minds, as if they had only just been put aside, the scissors, knives and needles that Sandal Aba used to boil up in a huge cauldron. The animals, whose bowels had been cleared of sand and stones by Sandal Aba, and whose torn bellies were stitched up with her needle and thread, would find their tongue in the netherworld one day and give thanks to Sandal Aba. Only then would Sitile and Ese’s secrets at last shine forth in the light of day.

  Sandal the physician let them know that their ancestors had all fled this land and migrated to a country called ‘Universe Nebuda’. When he was about fifteen or sixteen, Halilhan had thought long and hard about this and thrilled at the idea that that land might be Canada. But he didn’t think it necessary to share his thoughts with his parents. The crucial point in the stories he’d been told – the part that struck fear in his heart – was that, because of love, hardly any people in his family line ever survived past the age of forty. They lived and died in delirious fantasies that Sandal Aba had described as ‘love fever’. It seemed that they had emigrated from a very hot country, bringing with them a purple-flowering herb peculiar to that climate called sitil (Halilhan was telling this story because Juli had asked him what the name ‘Sitile’ meant). The first time the sitil herbs flowered, the people built fires shaped like horse shoes in their courtyards. Their yearly repetition of this ritual, playing the tambourine and drinking sherbet for three days and nights in a row, triggered the belief, far and wide, that they worshipped the sitil herb. Once Sitile Sunteriler had seen, on a tea tray from a foreign country, the picture of a stately balcony with wide-mouthed marble pots in its corners decorated with sitil flowers. She recognised them instantly as the long-forgotten ones.

  Sit pusi, pusi ket!

  This was the first time that Gogi had witnessed Halilhan speak in depth about his family. Thanks to his boon companion, he gained in experience, now realising how one could be driven by love to lie so that his speech flowed like water. ‘Are we from the forus or the oklitus?’ asked Halilhan. ‘The person in our family who can answer this question best is Gülaydan,’ he replied to himself. And so, to tie up his story’s loose ends he had decided to pay a visit to his sister.

  ‘Take a good look! Whose eyes are these like?’ Halilhan shouted when he barged in on Gülaydan, trailed by a blonde lady somewhat past her prime, who was cuddling a cat with squinting, cornered eyes. Gülaydan stood as still as stone with one hand on the doorknob as her brother continued: ‘Here we are, and all hungry!’

  Halilhan had already let Juli in on the good news: Gülaydan was such a stickler for hygiene that if she could somehow manage it she’d have the coal delivered in starched sacks; she even washed ground meat in soapy water before cooking it. Juli had bristled at this news and stepped back from Gülaydan, waiting to screw up enough courage to go inside.

  In a tumult of feeling, both women tried to look away, but their eyes collided in blank space and each lost herself in the other’s gaze.

  Gülaydan searched Juli’s eyes for a few moments, but she saw no likeness there to anyone she knew. And it wasn’t only on this count that she dashed their hopes; when the subject came round to their lineage she defied her brother as well. She took the rest of the wind out of his sails by telling him in front of Juli, ‘We’re neither from the fos nor the oklinbus!’ Cold winds whipped this way and that until Gülaydan found out that Juli had once been a dressmaker. It was in the wake of a long argument, during which Halilhan happened to mention Juli’s profession, that relations between Gülaydan and Sunsun – whom Gülaydan had until then been eyeing contemptuously – took an affectionate turn. Before she went into the kitchen to fry them all some eggs, Gülaydan fetched a few bolts of cloth that she’d kept stored away for years in an old chest, and heaped them onto Juli’s lap. She asked Juli to cut out a dress for her, pyjamas for her son and daughter, and a shirt for her husband. Then, as she stood holding out pins to Juli for the first fitting of her dress, she whispered in her ear while nodding slyly in Halilhan’s direction, ‘Be careful, I’ll be judging you on how much of a woman you are!’

  The mustard-yellow blooms unfolded themselves in the sun while Halilhan began to brag about how the Volvo had seen an ‘enter-nas-yo-nal’ personality in him. Thanks to the Volvo, he’d fallen in love with a Brazilian dancer, met a blonde woman with an English father, and, for the first time ever, cuddled a Chinese cat. Anyone could see that the Volvo was gifted with a miraculous power for organ-i-zas-yon, and Halilhan felt he could devote the rest of his life to cracking the code that revealed how a car could take control over the soul of a human being. Yet, on the other hand, he had a son who was apprenticed to a construction company, a daughter who was growing up to rival the fairy tale Princess Snow White, another son he had high hopes would become a maestro, and a wife, he confessed to Juli, ‘w
hose lips he’d never kissed with any great thirst – a witch who was not a bit different from Kodin’s mother.’ And every one of them was bound to end up naked and starving if he didn’t hit on a way to zoom in on some banknotes, close enough to read the fine print.

  Juli offered him the compassion he’d spent so many years looking for in a woman. While he’d never gone into any detail on such matters with her, he knew she could read in his face the struggle of a man who meant well but who was suffering in the trap of wedlock. He’d broken out in a sweat upon confessing how he couldn’t kiss Rübeysa full on her lips. Juli was tender and understanding enough to say, ‘What you’re saying may be true, Halilhan Bey, but perhaps no one should know what you and your wife do in bed except you…’

  Despite the cosy atmosphere which encased him like cotton-wool once Juli lit up his life, Halilhan fell into a crisis. The anger he felt toward his wife drove him to talk behind her back as if he were the caretaker of a corpse. He told everyone that Rübeysa had inner plumbing that was made out of rubber because with every breath she slurped like she was eating hot soup. Only the children kept him from divorcing her.