Swords of Ice

by Latife Tekin

  There was no better home than Mesut’s for summoning spirits. Whenever Aynina got bored, she drew letters and numbers on the backs of the wall mirrors, calendar leaves and pictures. Her nature was as different from other women’s as night was from day, and she produced countless more spirit-conjuring diagrams, some decorated with hearts and flowers, than embroidered cloths for coffee tables.

  When Gogi pointed out that their only choice was to use politics as a front, the ragged men started going on and on about an underground café in one of the business districts of the city where all the clients dressed alike. They spoke of interesting scenes there, like psychotic episodes staged by the poor.

  The spirit they’d called up soared high above all the local brands, settling on a white Peugeot for Hazmi and a Casio Equaliser for Mesut. While Mesut fidgeted about, bewildered, Hazmi’s face turned red with joy as he read aloud once more, syllable by syllable, what the spirit had just written down for them. While he had no reason to doubt what he’d just read, his flushed face embarrassed him. ‘Man, who’d ever swallow such a pack of lies!’ he said, challenging the spirit and rewarding it with nothing but a scolding. ‘Prove it!’ he bullied the spirit. ‘You’d better tell the truth or I’ll keep you a prisoner inside this cup,’ he threatened. ‘And I’ll build a wall around you,’ the spirit replied. Hazmi was so frightened by this that his heart started beating like crazy, somersaulting down to his belly. All his courage drained away, he didn’t even dare to walk home alone. In the wake of the change worked upon him, he spent the night at Mesut’s and fell into a burning fever. His brother took him by the hand and led him to the toilet, where he broke out in a heavy sweat.

  If politics was going to be a stepping stone (known to be in a spot like that dreadful valley of the forty thieves, an arena with primeval birds glowering over it), or provide a shortcut for rooting out the money, then the advice offered to them as a garanti was to pledge themselves to the smallest active party. By now well aware of the times they were living in, the poor stepped into that deadly valley after concluding that they would be better off in a small chafing dish than in a big frying pan. ‘The regular parties,’ they said, ‘the giant ones, hold the gates open to their own interest and shut our kind out.’

  At the first semi-formal preliminary meeting of Teknojen, Halilhan presented to his brothers the following speech:

  ‘Brothers, I’ve raised myself to new heights right before your very eyes. And I have an idea that I know quite a bit about life’s vital matters. In terms of delivering a “sermon” or something, on such matters, I don’t think even a hodja would be as good as me. But I don’t know how to serve up a sermon properly, so I probably won’t make my mark as a hodja.

  But I do believe in what I’m going to say now.

  First, you get your hands on thirty or forty thousand nails, then you get a sheet of wall panelling. Oh, it can be anything, really, a tree, a piece of wood, a sheet of panelling. Then you hammer thousands of nails into it.

  After that, you get an endless ball of string. Twist it around and around all those nails, letting your hand just wander around, tying all those thousands of nails together. There’ll come a moment, a point you’ll reach, where you’ve lost track of the order you followed while weaving all that string around those nails.

  Where you’ve lost it!

  But there’s a network. Think of it however you like. Picture it as a spider’s web, any kind of web in fact. That’s just how I see a human relationship – I’m also talking here about the divine relationship, of course. As a man who trusts his own feelings, I can say that the same thing goes for a father-son relationship.

  Life’s been so finely calibrated down to the last millisecond! Believe it or not, boys, I swear to you, everything’s been figured out so exactly you can’t be led astray by even a single second!

  I keep thinking of my own life being split up into seconds. This one, I say, is given up to goodness, that one’s evil, that one’s longing, this one’s luck, that one’s sex. You can call this splitting-up whatever you like, but the point is – I swear to you now – you can’t live your life any other way. That’s what I mean, boys.

  You can’t be thrown off track by a single millisecond!’

  The smaller political parties were like fish that live under great pressure near the ocean’s floor. They operated at a level of life where there was likely to be a constant flow of money. And since strings of fate bound all the party members together, they had each others’ backing and could sight the cash and nail it down much more easily.

  After a fairly long silence, Halilhan’s tone of voice changed completely. ‘All of you aside,’ he said, ‘it’s our father that I keep alive in my dreams. Do you know that? No one could love Ese Sunteriler the way I do. No one could possibly describe him as clearly as I can. His eyes, brows and nose, the way he holds his spoon, lopsided, as if he were hoisting some great weight, how his hand trembles all the way down from the elbow when he lifts the spoon up to his mouth, all this, even his fear, I could sketch out in mid-air right this minute. The way I see it, our father is a worn-out rabbit in a field full of hunters. But if I really look at him from this angle, you’ll say, why didn’t you take on his care? Boys, I swear to you it’s because I didn’t want to drive you into indolence in this matter…’

  Gogi noted that Halilhan had got wound up and was afraid that he might burst into tears. ‘The past is a memory, the future’s a hope…’ he objected, trying to keep his bosom buddy from saying anything else. ‘It’s only because life’s such a secret that it seems so sweet, if we knew what was coming up tomorrow, it wouldn’t be the same,’ he said, treading softly, acting as a buffer between the three brothers. ‘This world that’s grown out of our memories, you know, it’s a sweet riot that’s just got to run its course. But we can’t let ourselves imagine Teknojen as something dry and barren…’ Gogi continued, with an attitude that he hoped would encourage discussion of the company’s internal affairs. But Halilhan rose to his feet with a deep sigh. In a tone that edged on raving, he murmured, ‘In my dreams I see a future where we’ll be designing our own trousers, wearing silk shirts, doing our own thing in a big way.’ He posed a few questions to the void: ‘Who are we, anyway? And the world, I mean, what is it? Aren’t we all made up of bones and desire?’

  Mesut and Hazmi glanced at each other suspiciously. Just as they’d imagined and feared, they were being subjected to a hard-sell here. The sentiments spewing forth from their elder brother’s mouth had hit home with them almost at once. In any case, they’d never been able to resist the syrupy, muddling tone of his voice and the clever music of his words. Like Cleopatra, Halilhan had a way of laying his brothers out in a close fight.

  When Halilhan heard that his brother Hazmi had pinned his hopes on a car, that Aynina was on the point of applying for a driver’s license, he felt his heart wrench. He decided to offer up some brotherly advice on the topic: ‘I may be able to park with milimetrik precision, and when it comes to vigour and estetik I may be a first-class driver, but I still haven’t managed to become one with my Volvo. I don’t want you to end up lost and confused. The vehicle will be more than you can handle. Gogi has witnessed the way I take flight over the trees. I tell you this frankly because I’ve got no reason to lie. I can even drive the Volvo across the waves for five kilometres before it sinks in the sea. I think I’m ready to try the same trick in the air. Sure, I’m well fitted out for such things structurally, but it’s too bad that I’ve lost control of my nerves and landed in a high-intensity conflict. And that’s how things stand with me now.’

  As Mesut, Hazmi and Gogi set out for home after laying their future on the line, the Volvo, the main character in their discussions about Teknojen, was lying low, bereft of all life spirit or breath, where Halilhan, with milimetrik accuracy, had parked her. Out of fuel, she was out of the action too.

  Aynina’s rebellion against having to care for Ese Sunteriler had naturally caused a stir, even though Hali
lhan objected to seeing their father used as a trump card. Hazmi’s wife Turcan sent word to Aynina, saying, ‘I would if I could, but I’ve got to go to work, don’t I, honey? My kids are already in a sorry state, so I can’t handle that kind of extra load.’ Aynina already had her eye set on Rübeysa, so she didn’t pick a fight with Turcan, whom she disliked because of a certain coarseness she found in her character. Turcan was the type who put her working life on parade then boasted about how worn out she was. All she ever talked about was how the German families whose houses she cleaned would pester her constantly and work her half to death. When it came to Rübeysa, her response was pointed: ‘My husband’s got no love in his heart for me,’ she said, ‘so why should I make a place in my home for his father?’ After his betrayal, she felt that she had a right to be as conniving as she liked. Having lost all her hope in Halilhan, she’d started going from door-to-door to make some money by scare-chasing. Even if casting spells to loosen up the tongues of children muted by fear wasn’t a secure profession, it still promised something to line the pockets of the angel of good cheer who led the ritual. Actually, Aynina knew she couldn’t count on the others to look after Ese Sunteriler, but she was willing to be devilish all the same and ruin their peace of mind. She had no real hope of moving their hearts or ridding them of malice, but their lack of human feeling drove her crazy. So to spite them she decided she would paint her father-in-law. She would blight the consciences of her sisters-in-law by hanging Ese Sunteriler’s portrait on the wall.

  The ragged men reported back to Gogi that their brothers in destitution who lounged about in the underground café carried black brief cases as glossy as newly combed wet hair. Every morning each would spread out a single newspaper in their briefcase. As if flaunting weapons against life, they’d flash their identical green ties, their watches equipped with digital calculators, their rings with white stone settings, and their blue packs of Marlboros: accessories whose use they’d mastered in the conduct of business. Faces swollen with anger they’d hand businessmen their cards – representing bogus companies.

  Halilhan’s driving days had been broken off cruelly by those strips of paper that the greater part of humanity had been conditioned to perceive as ‘money’, (which, if the truth be told, was nothing more than forests and trees reduced to their lowest grade, and, in terms of value, maybe even the most worm-ridden of all wood). For a thinking man (like Halilhan) to witness nature’s bitter conspiracy, the inevitable net result was to fall into a pit of depression. His second bit of bad luck was that his heart, unable to reach Jülide, had grown weak from all that beating and shrunk down to a fiery pinpoint buried deep below his left nipple. It was a galling condition easily described by those disposed to love.

  Halilhan’s sense of duty forced him to hide his bleeding heart, at least from his children, so he swore he’d throw himself into the TV soaps and guffaw like a lout.

  Nevertheless, the relentless weight of loneliness finally broke him down. In desperate need of sanctuary, he threw himself onto the streets and took off at a run toward his mother’s grave. He remembered how quickly he’d pulled himself together and found comfort on days when he stopped by to see his mother with a lady friend. Turning into an ever-roving saint of love and picking up a woman at the holy men’s shrines had never been a problem for him. Unfortunately, just now he lacked the means and strength to make it even as far as those shrines. On foot he could only fail. When he at last reached Sitile Sunteriler’s grave, he said to his mother in a voice that was cracking: ‘You asked me for my dream, so here it is.’ Then he erupted in an incredible storm of tears.

  But just at the peak point where even suicide became a psikolojik option, Halilhan gave himself a good shake-up and came up with a key initiative to revive Teknojen. No matter if his brothers thought they were tough and flaunted their manliness, their attitude toward life lacked firepower. They only knew how to work hard, they were of a submissive type. Whilst they relished diving into a job that had been set up for them – eager to start it and get it done – when the time came for them to move into business circles, their ability for diyalog and organizasyon was way too weak. In that department, in fact, they scored a flat zero. And as for Gogi, he was devoted but just getting warmed up, still only a pot full of promises with the lid on. During their discussions, when he bet that the moon showering humanity with its light each night was, essentially, the earth’s fourth moon, and that space was filled with rotting bits of the sun, he acted as an antidote to despair and brought relief by stressing mortality. No one could deny that to revive Teknojen they needed someone with so much heart to pump up their courage. All in all, Halilhan was quite pleased with Gogi’s position. But if the truth be told, in one respect Gogi was not a whit different from his brothers: he lacked the guts to go after real results. After considering these differences in character, Halilhan felt sad that it fell to him to play the weasel in the group. (Given all the dirty wheeling and dealing in the business world, his ethics were bound to suffer radical damage.) Yet he had no other choice. Without further ado, he had to forge ahead on a finely tuned intelligence-gathering mission.

  After rummaging about for a couple of days, he got his hands on a very important file from a leading firm that serviced Turkey nationwide – a thick packet with many pages describing the inner surface insulation of their waste-disposal facilities, all written in a special hi-tech language. Then it hit him: it was otomatik, they’d make more than millions!

  Since he didn’t know the orijinal brand names of the teknik materials, Halilhan found it somewhat difficult to decode the file. Unshaken by this challenge, he spent a whole week poring over several prospektüs. (He was in the habit of collecting these from the fairs for construction materials that he attended regularly to keep up with developments in his field). Finally he wrote a striking proposal that met all the conditions set forth in the file and was worthy of tendering to the top authorities in the country.

  Below you will find the technical description and details for the job of insulating 3 tanks (120 m2 each) totalling 360 m2, in your new disposal facilities with Ç.T.P acid-resistant plasticised steel. Indicating that the job will be done with no health risk to human beings. furthermore, as an example, all over Turkey, the world, this material has been used for years in water tanks for drinking known by the public as fiberglas. Ç.T.P. is a synthetic kompositör. a coating material. Application: a mixture of poliester. mixed with approximately 650 gr. of mek-kobalt. painted on smoothed surface with poliester. Before it dries up, a layer of Kortel pasted on it. Kortel is well-sated with poliester. On top of it EXTRA: 450 glass felt are pasted. felt is also well-sated. this time 300 felt are pasted in reverse order. when the felt. are well-sated a large amount of. once more. poliester.is painted. Kortel is pasted.. Waiting for the Kortel to dry for 1-2 days then it is painted with Jelkote to smoothe the surface. application. completed. The cost: is…TL per m2.

  The poor rivet their labour, setting up barriers, and splinter what they write. In the way they split up their writing, which excludes their existence, the whimpering of their lives, muted by constant defeat, stays hidden!

  At the second meeting called by Halilhan, on seeing that their brother had already taken the initiative, Gogi, Hazmi and Mesut were excessively moved. The fact that without thinking of personal gain he’d offered Teknojen this opportunity, even before they’d formed an official partnership, was like a soft light washing over them, healing those feelings of isolation that had plagued them. Gogi’s eyelids fluttered as he realised that he could hang onto his humanity in the working atmosphere they were all creating together. And Hazmi, apparently ashamed of his former cranky attitude, slowly stepped into the middle of the room to say, ‘We’d better get a little drunk to keep us from being rude to each other!’ Then he turned and discreetly slipped Mesut some pocket money, which made Halilhan’s tongue bloom with joyful violets. ‘Don’t cringe like a fledgling in its nest,’ he said. ‘Make tracks, man!’ With a laugh that
was almost bark-like, Mesut made for the door. In a wink he was back, arms loaded up with spirits he’d bought at the grocer’s.

  It was at about this point that the ragged men drifted into the underground café they had described to Gogi in those mock-heroic whispers of the poor. The happenings there had stirred their interest, and each came armed alike, with the usual gear. Faced with anyone who’d got his hands on the money, they whisked out their phony cards of fictitious companies. Like all the clients of the underground café, they hoped to break a thousand-year-old spell by throwing grass instead of meat to the lions that stood watch over the treasure.

  Ay, Aynina!… She’d mixed brown hues with pale yellow and a lot of white, and was now busy coating her canvas with tones like milky coffee. Finding no other means of settling down her model, Ese Sunteriler, she’d spread out a newspaper at his feet and sprinkled sugar on it. While the old tin can squinted like a cat eyeing his niblets, the whole company drank to the future that, in the words of Gogi, was simply ‘a hope’. After knocking back glass after glass of the kadillak, Halilhan – who when it came to holding his booze was good for about ten minutes – was overcome by a fever of irrepressible conceit. He claimed that it took an awesome intellect to perceive money as only something that grew out of wood. ‘I count myself as one of this country’s top twenty-five think-tanks!’ he roared.