Swords of Ice

by Latife Tekin

  Taking a defensive line and trying to shift all the blame onto fate, Halilhan said, ‘The poor guy lives his whole life through me, his character grew out of loneliness, so what else can he do?’ If he wasn’t mistaken, Halihan continued, Gogi was feeling far too anxious these days. He must often dream about death since he couldn’t find the girl he hoped to marry. In fact, several times he’d mentioned death, in terms so seriously teknik that Halilhan had got the shivers.

  When Rübeysa heard about Gogi’s fantasies about death, especially the upward-spiralling kind, she couldn’t help but burst into tears. Now she was having black thoughts herself and wondered how on earth they would ever find a ‘cultured’ girl for Gogi, who’d lost tufts of his hair but yet, in his own right had stayed a man true to his heart?

  Gogi with all his innocence knocked on Hazmi’s door, hoping to clear up the misunderstanding between Halilhan and his brothers. Wounded by mistrust, Hazmi greeted him with fierce looks. When Gogi launched into the matter at hand, stating, ‘We’ve come up with a good organizasyon plan,’ Hazmi, who was already riled because of Gogi’s surprise visit, started pulling toothpicks out of his shirt pocket. Nervously, he stuck them, one by one, between his teeth, until his mouth was aiming seven arrows at Gogi. (Hazmi was known to do really weird things before uttering his thoughts. Rebuking such childish ways, Halilhan used to say, ‘Like the Russians, our brother is nuts about jimnastik.’) Not knowing Hazmi very well, Gogi couldn’t get a quick fix on the meaning of the arrows and, a little intimidated, dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘It so happens,’ he said, ‘that a distant relative of mine is at this time heading a nationwide commission. This man would make a number-one business advisor and could come up with some solid connections.’ Hazmi started to pace around the house, holding his hands tightly behind his back as if his wrists were bound. His lips flared out like tulips from the toothpicks. Then, baring his heart to Gogi, he said, ‘That person who has set such a shoddy example as an elder brother – he may have already filled you in on some of my more offbeat habits’.’ He added, ‘I never sit with my back to the door when I go into a coffee house, drinking hole or nightclub!’ Just once he’d turned his back to a kovboy and been taken to the cleaners.

  I imagine that a secret cheque was bestowed on our lives when we met this unearthly cat

  Faced with this brother of Halilhan’s who must have hundreds of bits of crushed toothpicks circulating through his system, Gogi was going to have a hard time putting his idea of a company into action. To get Hazmi’s attention, he went straight to the point and hammered out the role money played in life. Hazmi took his wife Turcan by the arm and stood her up beside the table where she’d been sitting with one hand covering her face, her eyes fixed on her knees. Okay, so if life was a monster fed by money, then he, Hazmi, was the sword of Shah Ismail! As Turcan nodded to underscore her husband’s claim, Hazmi bounded suddenly toward Gogi with a gleeful shout: ‘Anyway, I never have to pay anything for stuff like leather jackets, watches, shoes, belts, a keyrings or lighter fuel!’

  To stress how important unity and togetherness were, Gogi went on to share with Hazmi the tale of the lone sheep stalked by wolves. Then, turning the emotional tenor of his speech up a notch, he touched on such concerns as the dependence of one soul on another and the sublime sense of brotherly sharing. What would happen if those who supported him in the market today turned against him tomorrow? ‘If I concentrate hard enough, I can split open a hundred-storey building right down the middle with a single look!’ declared Hazmi, having the last say whether Gogi liked it or not. But he intended to consider Gogi’s proposition after going to bed, ponder it awhile, and subject it to some scrutiny. ‘That creature,’ he murmured, ‘that flesh-draped pile of bones we call our elder brother, he’s acting like somebody else, aping the movements of some stranger, but I can’t tell who. He’s turned out to be keen on prostitutes and has fallen into the habit of picking up women then bringing them in to kiss my wife’s hand. Not even an ultimatom from me has kept him away from that kind of woman. I’m hearing from all sides about how he’s turned our mother’s grave into a scandalous scene, but can I do anything about it? Before we start up any business dealings, somebody’s got to investigate what’s behind all this showing off…’ Having learned his lesson, Gogi left Hazmi’s place looking downcast.

  Halilhan had also flashed Gogi a warning sign about his other brother, Mesut: all his affairs were in Aynina’s hands. Mesut’s elder by thirteen years and wedded to him only by the word of an imam, Aynina was the target of all sorts of rumours, but the most striking gossip was that spread by Halilhan. The intelligence he’d gathered indicated that Aynina’s parents, her whole family, in fact – elder brothers included – were top figures in a nationwide chain of brothels. Once they found they couldn’t turn Aynina into a whore, they’d given her a good beating and disowned her officially at the tender age of fourteen. Stripped of all family security, Aynina had found a home on the streets. She kept her mouth shut tight, so it wasn’t easy to guess what kind of struggles she’d gone through before offering Mesut a taste of her fatal sherbet. However, Halilhan, a man who was pretty well-schooled in the history of life, had come up with his own answers. ‘Albeit unwillingly,’ he’d judged, ‘she still must’ve inherited the character of her family’s profession.’ In step with the ekonomik model that prevailed in the country, Aynina must have worked herself physically to the point of exhaustion. In short, she must’ve been a whore, because how else could a woman have grown such a huge mass of muscle around her shinbones?

  Repulsed by Aynina’s purplish legs, Halilhan never ate at Mesut’s home. Yet as an elder brother who’d bowed his head to Mesut’s marriage, he saw himself as beyond criticism. The way he looked at it, Mesut had no sooner slipped from his mother’s womb than he was found to be emotionally flawed. It didn’t matter whether a doctor had used these words years ago or Halilhan himself had just come up with them, his brother apparently suffered from a condition known as ‘over-veined’. Surely no young man who was normal could bear to live with the hideous hen called Aynina.

  Yet Aynina had found a way to steal Halilhan’s thunder. ‘If anybody’s ever praised me to the heavens, it can only be Halilhan!’ she’d declared. ‘Whenever I lay out a bed for him and his broads, I’m very politely introduced. So my life winds its way between their legs. Need I say more?’ Aynina would rather have taken Rübeysa’s side, but her fear of Halilhan, with his malice and gossip, led her to put her whole home, bed and bathroom included, at his disposal.

  Gogi made his way over to Mesut’s place with his morale at a new low and feeling the full weight of his shyness with each footstep. He was afraid Hazmi might get to Aynina before he did and sway her opinion against him. When Halilhan’s name came up, Aynina snapped, ‘That crow’s job was to find a way for us to live, not starve us all to death!’ Then, taking Gogi by the arm, she led him up to the balcony-like ledge where Mesut sat. ‘He was supposed to pay his debts, not hand us over to the bailiffs, right?’ she fumed as the floor beneath them shook. While Gogi and Mesut were having their man-to-man talk, Aynina’s face seemed to light up slightly with hope, but when her husband started nodding to Gogi and saying, ‘Your ideas deserve respect,’ she cut through their conversation with a question that was loaded with emotion: ‘What about the care of my father-in-law?’

  Everything in the house, right up to the TV antennas, was smeared with Ese Sunteriler’s shit. If they cherished any hopes of reviving the subject of a partnership, then that stinking load they knew as Ese Sunteriler had to be put on their agenda and his care taken on by all three brothers. Aynina had been saddled with the job of taking both Mesut and his father to the barber’s for a haircut. Forget her husband: he was on the cards that fate had dealt her. On the other hand, her father-in-law wasn’t only a big man but also a heavy one. Even her nails throbbed with pain when she struggled to get him onto his feet to hoist him into the barber’s chair. It was obvious that Gülaydan, who cl
aimed to be his daughter, took more interest in the photos of her father as a young man than in the way he was now. She’d filched so many of them that not much was left of their family album. She made out that her father didn’t have a shit problem. Doubtlessly it was a lot easier to gaze down at his young and healthy face in the photos than to stand watch over his old bum now. Aynina would’ve liked that too. She’d sworn on her children’s lives that the next time her sister-in-law came over she’d set a mousetrap in the cupboard where the album was kept and nab her in the act. Trying to soften his wife’s words, Mesut interrupted Aynina to say, ‘In this day and age photos aren’t worth stealing, but our elder sister’s only an ignorant woman, so we’d best try to show her some understanding.’

  For three years following the death of Sitile Sunteriler, Ese Sunteriler had turned his wife’s gravestone into his own temple, timing his daily visits to the cemetery at odd hours and weeping to a different tempo each day. After her demise, his pain must have grown heavier by several kilos. Gogi remembered him walking about with difficulty, holding onto the walls for support, trying to spare everyone discomfort as he bore his burden of grief in the spirit of a noble-hearted gentleman.

  However, once the wellspring of his tears had dried up, he fell into a marriage that Halilhan called ‘our father’s unstomachable-but-interesting affair.’ As a result of his mourning, their father had been turned into an exalted figure by those window-washing mistresses of house cleaning who slipped into the city every morning and streamed through its apartments. Inflated in their eyes to mythical proportions, he let himself be seduced by these marriage architects into a state of utter mindlessness.

  Before Halilhan could start a full investigation of the matter, the whispers and nudges of this group of women with a sentimental psikoloji had shoved their father into scandalous exile in a strange terrain.

  Unlike their father, whose outlook on life was genteel, the woman he married looked as threatening as a public notary. As much as they all wanted to steer clear of a stepmother crisis, they also felt obliged to show that they stood behind their father, so they stopped over with a box of cakes from the pastry shop. But the woman greeted them without even a smile, adopted a stubbornly formal attitude, and made them sign a paper certifying that their father had come to her with no dowry in hand.

  Getting maximum play out of her elevated position as ‘step-lady’ she had quickly turned Ese Sunteriler into her walking-stick. But the wood in Ese Sunteriler’s tree was also starting to rot. Not a day passed when they didn’t slip and fall down. When they ventured onto the streets they often got lost and tumbled together into pits and potholes. On one such occasion, Ese Sunteriler had so much trouble hauling his wife out of a manhole, even with the help of a passers by, that he cupped his chin in his hand and wept bitterly in a full blown rage against God. In short, with all their bruises and wounds, the lives of both husband and wife were held together only by bandages.

  When it became clear to Ese Sunteriler that this torture was unbearable, he broke away and returned home looking utterly worn out. Knowing how easily his father could become the victim of people’s pity, Halilhan started a rumour that the real reason Ese Sunteriler had left his wife was sexual incompatibility.

  While Gogi, with the best intentions in the world, threw himself enthusiastically into his mission as a koordinatör, the ragged men, acting as warriors, had burrowed deep into the city’s heart and wrenched off the money’s head before sundown.

  During the two hour talk with Mesut, Gogi had felt curiosity and admiration mingling with interest in this man who exhibited no personal traits that could be blamed on his ‘over-veined condition’. Far from suggesting an emotional void, Mesut’s look reflected a man who had no problem and had made his choice. By putting the management of his life entirely in Aynina’s hands, he could devote his whole existence to the manufacture of a device that operated ‘all on its own’. Unlike Hazmi, Mesut approached Gogi without any bias. Dragging out the chest where he kept, under lock and key, all the important pieces and diagrams of his invention, he threw back the top to let Gogi view its contents. Then he handed over a roll of cardboard and said, ‘My plan for the secret formula.’

  ‘Once this baby starts up, it won’t need any help to keep running,’ he said as he explained his special invention. Aynina had in the meantime quietly withdrawn to finish preparing her exhibit of twenty-one collage paintings, spread out on the kilim. People’s heads and bodies snipped from magazines…lost in pleasure in the rowing boats drawn and painted by Aynina… world-famous statesmen in pasted-on kimonos of deep-aubergine-purple or dried-rose-petal-red facing each other under the trees or on the lawns Aynina had taken great pains to render perfectly…an old woman and a young man, stark naked but for sticky black tape covering their private parts, puckering their lips as they sat on top of a whale. Aynina had also used red metal milk bottle tops to create bright and flashy domes which she’d placed among the minarets she’d drawn.

  After getting lost in the paintings, Gogi emerged at last from Mesut and Aynina’s place carrying a red vase with a slender waist and frilly mouth. He’d been foolish enough to turn towards the red vase on their table, take a deep breath and say how sweet the honeysuckle smelled. So Mesut and Aynina insisted that he could by no means leave them without taking along with him the vase and its bunch of honeysuckles. Gogi felt overwhelmed. While he was walking away in a cloud of fragrance like that surrounding a schmaltzy perfume vendor, the ragged men were bound for their homes with the shadows of blood on their faces.

  Gogi had no doubt that if the Teknojen Company was ever going to flourish, Mesut could single-handedly meet the company’s need for teknik expertise. He also felt full of brotherly love for Aynina despite Halilhan’s nasty propaganda. On top of everything else, he was set on taking over the duty of caring for Ese Sunteriler for a while if it was in the interest of Teknojen for him to do so. When his thoughts shifted to Ese Sunteriler, fleeting shadows of a new type of sadness passed over his face. This old tin can that the man had become, pushed and shoved every which way depending on his family’s whims, had fallen into a puerile state. As far as Gogi could make out, he was trying to strike up a diyalog with Mesut’s youngest daughter.

  The ragged men’s eyes still reflected breezy traces of the wheeling and dealing they’d done to bag the money. As they moved with quiet, fleeting steps after sundown, they could’ve easily been taken for guilt-ridden ghosts.

  The impudent toad in their pockets slipped into an exhausted slumber while the honeysuckle wilted, absorbing as it did all Gogi’s weary memories of Ese Sunteriler. At the entrance to the old neighbourhood, the men stopped and broke into talk of their troubles with others who looked as lost as they did.

  ‘With all the tracking we’ve done to hunt down the money, we’ve turned into train tracks,’ the men were saying. Many hours had been eaten up before they had managed to grab some cash by the throat and collar it. Given how things were going these days, their angles on life just weren’t sharp enough. They were so hard up they even had to butt their heads against religion. Only two days previous, their anger at having to go home empty-handed drove them to pick Allah’s pocket and fence the profit.

  This panic of the ragged men had truly moved Gogi, so he offered them his own story. Though wary of laying out his dreams for public interpretation, he nevertheless announced the plan to revive Teknojen. ‘An angle of at least sixty degrees has already arisen in terms of how things stood yesterday and how they are today. In business you’ve got to gather your intelligence in a sistematik way,’ he declared. The ragged men made it all too clear to anyone who saw them moving through the city that what they were chasing after didn’t really exist. In this monstrous world, Gogi concluded, where humans were turning into animals and animals into humans, the old patriarchal way of rooting out the money no longer worked. They had to conceal their weak points and without wasting any more time put their faith into planned action. Their best way out was to
cultivate political connections.

  In the meantime Hazmi had kept to himself, feeling his heart twitch nervously as he turned Gogi’s proposal over and over in his mind. He was absolutely sure that if somebody were to approach Halilhan with murder in his eye, that same person would end up bidding him goodbye with a kiss on the cheek. Hazmi was convinced that he had been led astray by his own weak inclination to think positively about Teknojen. The bizarre powers of persuasion employed by Halilhan never operated at less than one hundred percent; in a millisecond he could make a ‘U-turn’ and switch on the waterworks. Hazmi also saw clearly that Halilhan and Gogi would soon start treating him with sempati to tie up any of the business’s loose ends.

  Once he got caught in the crossfire of an emotional barrage, forget standing up against them, in the space of five minutes he was likely to change shape altogether and be left dumbstruck. For Gogi in particular, he had no hard feelings. He believed in Gogi because the fellow had risen to a certain level of kültür. When they dealt with business circles, Gogi’s role would be that of a genuine wild card. To them, he was worth his weight in gold, a man everybody would support. Maybe it was courting disaster to do business with his elder brother, but Gogi came close to his own way of looking at life.

  Any formal action they might take would be critical, so Hazmi arranged an off-the-cuff visit to Mesut and Aynina and sat down with them to talk. This was a good opportunity for them to quickly lay the foundations for the bargaining that would follow. Their elder brother had grown up on the tree of taking, not giving. The whole world knew that spirits like his were dead-set against any sort of unity. If you put a single drop of mercury into the palm of his hand it would shatter at once into forty bits. No one could discriminate more against others. ‘Rather than let ourselves be duped let’s summon up the spirits this very night,’ Hazmi suggested. ‘If we get the chance to latch onto a car, we should jump at big brother’s offer.’ The voice speaking from Hazmi was a stranger’s, it didn’t sound like him at all, and his breathing was irregular from panic and nerves. Mesut muttered, ‘I’ll save any thoughts of getting a car for later. If I have any luck at all coming up with some money, I’ll get myself a synthesiser!’ For some time now Aynina had been coaxing Mesut to study music, and Mesut now believed that if he could get some microphones and recording equipment, as well as a synthesiser to help him with his compositions, he could shift into the music market that had lately picked up steam. ‘I’ll make the world stand up and listen while my lyrics dance their way through love and romance!’ he exclaimed.