Bliss: A Novel (18 page)

Now and then, he saw Turkish naval ships on maneuvers. They would come sailing in line formation menacingly close to the Greek islands, their missiles primed and ready. If İrfan passed too near the ships, the officers and sailors on board would threaten him with icy stares. The soft splash of the water under his boat as it peacefully glided along in the gentle wind was sometimes broken, too, by the deafening roar of Turkish and Greek fighter jets overhead or the scream of a plane playfully diving headlong toward the sea before straightening out at the last minute. Sometimes it was a khaki-colored helicopter that noisily patrolled the sky.

İrfan was fed up with assault boats, warships, fighter aircraft, and the hostile atmosphere. He felt neither Turkish nor Greek. He was just a human being who wanted to enjoy the sea. The neighboring states playing their games of power disturbed his peace—just as they disturbed the goats grazing on the nearby shores.

İrfan knew that if other Turks perceived his thoughts, he would be burned at the stake. “How can a child of the Turkish nation think like that?” they would exclaim. “Don’t you love your country? Do you have Greek blood in your veins? This nation has raised and educated you, and now you are stabbing it in the heart.”

“What have I done to be born in such a country?” İrfan often wondered. He had no strong feelings about patriotism, religion, or ideologies. It was a long time since he had upheld anything he would have designated as a “value.”

After the Republican revolution in the twenties and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the new secular government had excluded religious education from the national curriculum program at schools. Most children educated during this Kemalist era had little interest in religion, but their national consciousness had been well-developed. For some reason, İrfan had no affiliations with either.

When he was in high school, the leftist movement had been in vogue. The world was affected by the young generation during 1968. The student unions, which were set up after the students occupied the university campuses, later turned into left-wing organizations. İrfan’s lack of belief in anything had prevented him from becoming a leftist, even though not being one was considered quite peculiar in those days. Demonstrations, protests, proclamations, and clashes with the police were commonplace. He forced himself to find a place within one of the movements, but his efforts never came to anything. He found the left as fanatic as the right or the advocates of religious parties.

Much later, a student in one of his university classes had risen from her chair and started to ask him a question by saying, “In 1968, did your generation…”

İrfan immediately cut her off, replying, “I was more interested in 69 than ’68.”

With the rest of the class, he had laughed, as the girl sat down blushing with embarrassment.

İrfan felt about as close to Islam as he felt to Turkish patriotism. On national holidays, when poems such as the one starting with “Your eyes were green, Lieutenant!” were recited, he used to run away to smoke a cigarette. He had never recited the ritual prayers for
namaz
or fasted during Ramadan.

Once, he and Hidayet had decided to perform
namaz
on the first morning of the Feast of Sacrifice, saying that their only aim was to have some fun. The time of prayer was set for three minutes past six in the morning, and thinking that the mosque would be very crowded later, İrfan and Hidayet went there the night before. They took off their shoes, entered, and sat at the very front of the building. A few old men, absorbed in worship, were the only others there. İrfan and Hidayet began to chat quietly. As time passed, more worshippers began to arrive, filling first the front, then the space behind until the place was filled with hundreds of people.

The imam
,
in his turban and black robe, rose to address the congregation, droning on about good morals, religion, the Prophet, Atatürk, and the heroic Turkish army. The boys, who had been sitting there for hours, were beginning to lose patience. They had hoped the prayers would start and end quickly so they could leave.

Finally, the imam took his place to lead the prayer, and it was then that İrfan and Hidayet realized that they were sitting right behind him. The muezzin called the faithful to prayer, and the imam started the ritual. “God is almighty,” he said in a loud voice, placing both hands behind his ears. İrfan and Hidayet imitated his action.

Before coming to the mosque, they had asked their friends about the rules of the ritual. They had been told that after the imam intoned “God is almighty” for the second time, they had to bow their heads and put their palms on their knees, while at the third “God is almighty,” they were supposed to prostrate themselves.

But the morning service on the first day of the Feast of Sacrifice was performed differently.

İrfan and Hidayet bowed their heads when they heard the second “God is almighty,” then realized that neither the imam nor the congregation was doing the same. Among the hundreds of worshippers, they were the only two bending forward. They wanted to burst out laughing. The silence and solemnity of the situation affected their nerves, which were stretched to their full extent after a sleepless night, and they had to struggle to maintain their self-control.

When they heard “God is almighty” for the third time, they quickly prostrated themselves on the floor. Touching their foreheads to the ground, they closed their eyes. They had a strange feeling that something was wrong. When they looked up, they saw that everyone else in the mosque was standing up. They immediately got to their feet, but the urge to laugh was now stronger than ever.

When the imam once more declared, “God is almighty,” İrfan and Hidayet thought they had to stay on their feet, but to their surprise, the congregation bent down. The two boys were the only ones left standing. Unable to suppress their laughter any longer, they started to run toward the exit, tripping over prostrating worshippers along the way, some of whom lost their balance and toppled over without realizing what had happened. İrfan and Hidayet finally got out the door, grabbed their shoes, and ran off down the street, laughing uproariously.

This was İrfan’s first and last religious experience. To eschew religious practices was quite normal in the Kemalist Republican circles to which he belonged. In the secular Republic, where imams and muezzins were forbidden to wear religious garb outside places of worship, religion was not taught at school. Thus, İrfan never developed a sense of piety.

Perhaps this was the reason for his uneasiness at academic meetings in foreign countries. He did not classify the scholars he met there as Christian or Jewish, yet he had quickly realized that they regarded him as a Muslim, as part of a collective identity, even if this was not true. In the Turkish Republic, unless someone was Jewish, Armenian, or Greek, the word Muslim was automatically printed in the section indicating religion on the ID card, though many people were unconscious of this.

At the age of seven, he and Hidayet had experienced the terror of circumcision together. After being dressed in festival white clothes and soothed by a thousand promises of entertainment, the shock of seeing the tip of one’s penis being pulled forward from the foreskin, which was then cut with a sharp razor, was nothing in comparison to the pain of dressing the wound afterward. Modern methods had simplified this procedure, but when he was a child, the circumcised organ had been wrapped in gauze. After a while, the blood on the gauze dried hard, and when it was pulled away in order to dust the scar with penicillin, the pain was intense enough to cause a scream. When İrfan saw his penis, bloody, wounded, and purple, he had thought that he would never be able to show it to anyone ever again.

Most Turks believed that circumcision was good for one and promoted cleanliness, but İrfan had a different view. He thought that the dilemma of both worshipping women and being hostile to them at the same time experienced by that species of humanity known as “the Turkish male” was a direct result of the early trauma they experienced at an early age in the ritual of being circumcised.

Many Turkish men believed that circumcision protected them against AIDS. Few took precautions when sleeping with the many Russian girls who first came to towns on the Black Sea coast. Some ridiculous beliefs developed. For example, Black Sea men sometimes squeezed lemon juice between the legs of the Russian girls to disinfect them before making love. Of course, lemon juice could kill AIDS. There was no need for other precautions as long as one had lemons. The men of these regions were not frightened of sexual diseases.

When electricity first came to Anatolian villages, many men who were warned against the danger of live electric wires had mockingly said, “What has a plucky man to fear from a few strands of wire?” Taking hold of the live wires, they had courageously held on as the current raced through them, making their teeth chatter and their bodies vibrate until they became victims of their own foolhardiness. Similarly, for Turkish men to show any fear of AIDS did not suit the image they had of themselves.

After the establishment of the Soviet Union, thousands of White Russians had come to Istanbul; likewise, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, fair-skinned Russian girls flocked to Turkey. After the revolution, gentlemen had become used to drinking yellow vodka and eating chicken kievski at the Rejans Restaurant in Pera in the company of chic ladies with fur collars. They would finish the evening listening to the piano in one of the district’s stylish music halls. The more recent immigrants, slender blond Russian and Ukrainian girls with long legs and transparent skin, had made certain districts of the town their place of business, with the occasional trip to the Aegean or Mediterranean coasts as the sexual companions of Turkish businessmen. In the Black Sea region, the girls had lemon juice squeezed between their legs, but those who went to the Mediterranean were treated to the luxury of a holiday resort. They were luckier—at least those who did not have to share a bed with a short, plump man covered with thick black hair.

Some of the Russians managed to work their way into wealthier, more refined circles. One of İrfan’s friends had told him an interesting story. According to this tale, some businessmen, who regularly vacationed at expensive hotels in Bodrum and Türkbükü with their families, had developed a special form of recreation. When one of them was sunbathing on the beach with his family, a few of his close friends dressed only in their swimsuits would come near the shore in a speedboat and invite him for a tour of the bay. Completely at ease, the man would leave his wife and children on the beach and go off on his own. What could be more innocent than a boat ride with a group of friends dressed in nothing more than a pair of swimming trunks?

But rather than touring the bay, the speedboat would direct its course to a big yacht anchored behind a nearby island. The lovely Russian and Ukrainian girls on board, exclusively selected and brought from Istanbul, were available for ready cash. İrfan’s friend described the transparency of the girls’ complexions by saying that “the redness of a cherry could be seen as it passed down their throats.” The men who enjoyed the company of these girls preferred condoms to lemon juice. After a “tour” of an hour or so, the cheerful group would return to the beach, and the businessman would be reunited with his family—undoubtedly dreaming of the delights to be had on the following day.

After the polygamous Ottoman era, the change to monogamy over the next fifty or sixty years after the establishment of the Turkish Republic had not been easy. After the twenties, Turkish men were pushed to find other options, and, thanks to circumcision and lemon juice, AIDS held no terrors for them. In spite of that, they became a little worried when Western journalists wrote that circumcised men were only a little less prone to catch disease. Did that mean they were not invulnerable, after all?

İrfan caught a downwind and sailed south at full speed. He knew that the coastal conflict between the Turks and Greeks lessened in southern waters. The north was tense, but the south was viewed by both sides as a vacation spot. That was the place to head for.

One calm and peaceful afternoon, İrfan anchored his boat and watched the reflection of the sunlight on the sea. He gazed at the distant shores covered with ancient cypresses, the white buildings of Orthodox monasteries just visible on the islands, and, on the Turkish coast, miniature mosques, their tiny minarets piercing the sky. He could not help remembering the prayer of the great author Kazantzakis: “Dear God, please don’t let this harmony be ruined. I don’t ask you for anything else. Just don’t let this harmony be spoiled.”

What İrfan wished for was exactly the same.

As the days passed, he knew he had been right to change his life. He could feel himself becoming a free and different man, joy fluttering inside him. The night crises were diminishing. He kept taking his pills but was convinced he was sleeping better. In the dark of the night the boat no longer seemed like a coffin—at least not a closed one.

One day İrfan bought a big piece of cardboard and cut it in half. On one piece, he translated into free verse in English a poem by Robert Frost, whom he admired:

And I may return

If dissatisfied

With what I learn

From having died

On the second piece, he wrote in red felt tip a verse by Rumi: “Appear as you are or be as you appear!”

İrfan had not shaved for many days. His gray beard, which used to cover only his chin, had now spread across his entire face. With his shaggy hair and imposing physique, he felt like a mythological god. The more he freed himself from his bonds, the more relaxed he became. His heart beat at a slower pace.

If the day went well, and a big Mediterranean scad or bream seized his bait, İrfan would become the happiest man on earth. He would clean the fish immediately, and after pouring on some olive oil and lemon juice, eat it raw. The music that accompanied his meals was always the same. Jean-Pierre Rampal’s flute blended with the cries of the gulls to create a new melody.