Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (8 page)

Was this how I came to be on good terms with my older sister? We drink together. At first we run down our gadabout mother. Then comes the moment when whatever she says is quite incomprehensible. When I start on my usual sermon, ‘The superficial Turk, Turkey becoming shallow ...', she passes out. And I pass out too as I whisper Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in her ear
...

Yesterday morning a bright light leapt from the mirror and, spiralling to a point, settled in my brain. The pleasant ache in my head turns into a spiritual and physical drugged condition which I will certainly make my friend
...

Forty years on I've managed nevertheless not to ‘suffer in silence'. With my mother and my students and the contemptible faculty of deans, I fight viciously and continuously. I'm certainly on the point of making peace with my loneliness. Am I releasing my pain before the dilemma increases? First I resisted the build-up of chaos, then I discovered why I couldn't escape from it. I'm dragged into depression, into the eye of the storm which Nietzsche and other philosophers reached. Masochistically I anticipate the arrival of the process and the last act. Waiting for my recovery, I take refuge in the aphorisms of Elias Canetti
.

It was another Saturday when the holiday spirit was missing. Rezzan and I set off together in the direction of centrally located Şişli. I was curious about the son who was said to be ‘depressed'. I entered the monastery-like La Paix Hospital praying, I don't know why. A nurse looking like a chronically ill patient showed us into a private visiting room and warned us in advance, ‘You can stay for an hour, but don't excite the Hodja, Rezzan.'

I was just settling into the flimsy chair when the door creaked open and Gürsel Ergene entered, in his pale tracksuit inscribed with a ‘Berkeley' logo in big letters. With a shudder I noticed that he resembled my first victim. Like a tiger just released from its cage, he looked shiftily round the room; he watched me and grinned while Rezzan paid him a string of stale compliments. He approached, dragging his slippers as he was informed that I was the well-heeled tenant who worked on a magazine and also dealt in secondhand books. Obstinately refusing to notice his mother, he watched me suspiciously, like a spoiled child who sees a panda for the first time. (I was beginning to regret the visit.) Then he said distinctly in a high-pitched voice, ‘You read my diary, so you thought you'd like to see what this nutty man was like, my tormented friend.'

‘Not at all, sir! ...' I began to sweat.

‘Although you're got up like Lennie in
Of Mice and Men
, you have the look of an executioner,' he said, and continued to peer into my face as though he was examining coffee grounds to tell a fortune.

Did I hang my head? I felt as if a soothsayer had counted the names of all my victims in turn.

‘The executioner is as much of a misunderstood volunteer as the philosopher or the poet,' he said, solemnly as a judge explaining his decision to acquit.

He sat before me, rocking to and fro. He was clearly pleased, behaving as though his mother wasn't there. He could read your humble servant like a wily psychologist. When he heard my view that the bigots and pseudo-intellectuals were insulting our religion, and heard moreover my attitude to wearing a turban and to revealing garments, he said, ‘You are a pure neo-Islamist,' and I was almost as pleased as on the day I got promoted to sergeant.

He bent conspiratorially towards my left ear and asked, ‘Would you like to hear an answer to any question in your mind now?', and I fell into his trap.

‘I've always been curious, sir, about how many different languages are spoken on our planet.'

‘Almost 6,000. After 100 years – 3,000 if the oil wells don't dry up first – eventually perhaps we'll whisper 500 languages. Now I have a two-part question, my tormented friend: would you rather catch your wife in bed with your cousin or catch her with your cousin's wife?'

I was beginning to pray ‘God give me strength!' and Gürsel Hodja to tremble and giggle. His mother summoned the duty nurse, who took his arm and led him away respectfully, asking, ‘Dear Hodja – shall I ask you a riddle you can't unravel, or a puzzle you can't answer?'

‘I've a bit of a headache,' Rezzan excused herself the following Saturday, and sneaked off to play bridge, so I took her son clean underwear and a spare tracksuit.

Gürsel Hodja sensed this might be the start of a long friendship and asked, ‘I wonder if you're going to make me better or am I going to drive you mad?'

I poured out my heart to him, telling him about everything except my victims and my connection with Mecruh. I hoped it would boost his morale. He made no comment, and I listened to sad anecdotes he had omitted from his diary. This time it broke my heart to hear how his mother, then his whole world, had wasted the life of this fragile, talented personality. I was ashamed of my own bitter complaints in the face of his. I was ashamed of the shallow system that had failed to recognize his originality.

When I left I kissed his hand respectfully. He was surprised and blushed bright red like an orator embarrassed by applause. He thrust a piece of paper into my pocket, asking me to bring him a list of books from his library next time and, as a footnote, a croissant from the Konak Cake Shop.

He began to address me as ‘Tiger' and his mother reduced her formal visits to once a month. I noticed he was in two minds about whether he should welcome or regret our growing friendship. Rezzan was found dead in her bed on the morning of 10 November, on the same day, sixty-seven years ago, that her secret enemy, Atatürk, passed away, and I was startled to note she was being buried in a plot opposite the gravestone of my first guilt-ridden victim. It fell to me to let my Hodja know he had lost his mother. What a disturbing duty that was, by God. He tried not to laugh.

Before the forty days of mourning that followed Rezzan's death were up, her daughter Emel made peace with her feeble husband Lemi. They and their Down's syndrome son, whose existence I'd not heard of before, settled in my basement. Renan, the eternal idler, began to drop by to see his nephew. Emel had undoubtedly given up drinking. She didn't scold Lemi as often as I expected and went to work every day, but only at noon. The boorish Lemi had retired as a public library official (I'd never seen him holding a book) and seemed to be devoting his time to their silent son. The whimsical youngster, who did not look his seventeen years, compared me to tough guy Sylvester Stallone, for heaven's sake! While his steely eyes, so like his uncle's, were closed in his strange noonday nap, his father could go out on the balcony with his rakı and lute. I enjoyed listening to him humming those songs with their plaintive melodies. An early part of his repertoire, which I had never heard before, was a sad unfamiliar song, which began, ‘My lute became a stringed instrument, my heart became inflamed.' After a sip of rakı he would sigh deeply and whisper obscenities to the sea. And I was glad he was a man with no moustache.

News came of the death of the landlord of a landmark building on Eşrefsaat Street.

While the widow of the deceased married his young partner and before they had put up the sign ‘For Rent', I moved in. I furnished my new place with Gürsel Hodja's books.

A couple of Canadian teachers, retired from some lycée or other, rented my old apartment. I told Emel that I would meet the expenses of the Hodja's care, and that the rent from the flat could go towards her son's schooling.

She embraced me joyfully and asked me to take all her brother's books from the library to my new home. I knew that Gürsel wouldn't be impressed when moved into the hospital's most luxurious room.

I had moved his books into boxes with fastidious care. Next to an autobiographical
Harem Life
was the diary of poor Sim Yetkin, the previous tenant, a lady no one remembered because she had committed suicide.

An assistant editor responsible for features in a weekly magazine, she had taken her own life at thirty. Again and again I read through the personal and courageous notes of this strange writer, who fell into a depression because she could not write poetry to her heart's content. I had read and been moved by the collected works of the popular – and suicidal – female poets. I refrained from telling my Hodja how impressed I was by lines that duelled with death at every turn. I chose extracts from the diary's beginning as, word by word, it circled nearer to her death, and I entered it for a short story competition in a monthly literary review, under the pseudonym, Sima Etkin, with the title, ‘I Want to Write When I Read / I Read When I Cannot Write.' I knew we would win. Exploring the area round the Maiden's Tower, I may have heard behind me her shrill scream mingled with prayers, swallowed up by the sea. I wasn't surprised to hear from Bereket Market's shop assistant that ‘the fat lady with spectacles who read a book even while she was buying cheese' had thrown herself into the sea in front of the Maiden's Tower.

After his mother's death, Gürsel Hodja was freed of any guilt except for his thought-crime. I counted the days till Saturday, when I could stay with him for three hours if I wished. I did his washing with pleasure, and while choosing a sweatshirt for him I'd live through the stress of imagining Rezzan's criticism.

Released from his shackles, he was like a learned orator and a living encyclopedia of the social sciences. I listened with patience and respect, and my self-confidence increased every time we parted as though I had won a further diploma. He was as healthy psychologically as yours truly. I gradually decided he was less restless than any other city-dweller, including his doctor, and believed that Gürsel Ergene, the master philosopher, had seen the whole city turn into an insane asylum and had taken refuge in an obscure hospital for the good of his soul.

I no longer felt like searching for Dalga street by street. Through Selçuk Altun I managed to obtain the phone numbers of two of her confidantes, İdil and Serap. I felt uncomfortable at the chilly response of these one-time volleyball players, whom I remember screaming and leaping up to smash the ball. They told me about Dalga, how she left for England, then came back and stopped seeing her friends. Her mother married and moved to Toulouse and probably her grandfather was dead.