Silent House (13 page)

W
e were sitting on Ceylan’s dock; I was about to dive into the water, but, damn it, still listening to everything they were saying.

“What should we do tonight?” said Gülnur.

“Let’s do something different,” said Fafa.

“Yeah! Let’s go to Suadiye.”

“What’s there?” said Turgay.

“Music!” shouted Gülnur.

“There’s music here too.”

I dove in and thought about how next year at this time I would be in New York, I thought about my poor mother and father in the grave, and I imagined the freedom along the city’s avenues, the blacks who would play jazz for me on the street corners, those subway stations where no one pays any attention to anyone else, the endless labyrinth of the tunnels under the streets, and it lifted my spirits, but then I thought about how if I couldn’t get the money on account of my brother and sister I wouldn’t be able to go, and I got peeved, but
now at least I’m thinking about you, Ceylan: the way you sit on the dock, the way you stretch out your legs, and about how I love you and how I’m going to make you love me.

I poked my head up out of the water and looked back. I had gone really far from the shore, and I was overcome by a strange fear: they were there, but I was in a scary liquid that had no beginning or end, full of salt and seaweed. All of a sudden I panicked and swam as though a shark were chasing me. I bounded out of the water and went over and sat beside Ceylan.

Just to say something, I said, “The water’s really nice.”

“But you came right out,” said Ceylan.

I turned and listened to Fikret, who was explaining one of the problems that only special people have: in this case, how his father had suffered a heart attack this winter and all the responsibility had fallen on Fikret, even though he’s only eighteen, until his older brother could come back from Germany, how he had managed all the work and the men and everything. When he said that his father might die at any moment, just trying to prove that very soon he might be even more important, I said that my father had died a long time ago and we had gone to his grave this morning.

“Hey, guys! You’re getting me all depressed,” said Ceylan. She got up and walked away.

“Let’s do something!”

Fafa lifted her head up from a magazine, “What?”

“We could go over around Hisar!” said Zeynep.

“We were just there yesterday,” said Vedat.

“Let’s go fishing then,” said Ceylan.

Turan was trying to open a tube of suntan lotion.

“It’s a little hot,” said Fikret.

“I’m going crazy!” said Ceylan, annoyed and hopeless.

“Can’t do anything with you people!” said Gülnur.

Ceylan asked, “Well, how about it?”

Nobody said anything.

After a long silence, the cap from Turan’s tube of sun cream fell down and rolled over like a marble before stopping next to Ceylan’s foot. Ceylan kicked it, and it fell into the sea.

“It’s not mine, it’s Hülya’s,” said Turan.

“I’ll buy her a new one,” said Ceylan, coming over to sit by me.

I thought about whether I loved Ceylan or not; I believed I did: vacant, foolish thoughts under the stupefying sun. Turan had gotten up and was staring at the sea from where the cap had fallen in.

“No!” said Ceylan as she jumped to her feet. “You will not go after that, Turan!”

“Okay, then you get it.”

“I’ll get it,” I said. “I just got out of the water.” I got up and went over.

“You’re a good kid, Metin,” said Ceylan.

“Get it then,” said Turan, pointing as though he were giving an order.

“Maybe I’m not going to get it,” I said. “The water’s cold.” Fafa laughed as I turned around and sat down again.

“Hülya,” said Turan, “I’ll get you a new tube.”

“No, I said I would,” said Ceylan.

“It was finished anyway,” said Hülya.

“I’ll get it anyway. What kind was it?” said Ceylan. Then, without waiting for an answer, she said in a begging voice, “Come on, guys, let’s do something.”

At that point Mehmet said that Mary wanted to go across to the island and at once everyone felt that sense of inferiority, the need to please the European, and so we piled into the boats. Ceylan and I got into the same one.

Then she ran to the house and came back with two bottles and shouted: “Gin!”

When somebody else yelled out “Music,” Cuneyt ran off, too, and brought that awful stereo and the speakers from the house. The motors roared to life and the boats flew off, and the bows heaved
upward before settling down to an even keel. Half a minute later in the middle of the open sea I was thinking: If something breaks or gets scratched or worn out, they don’t even care, their boats do forty miles an hour and I’m a bundle of nerves, but, Ceylan, I still love you.

The boats pulled up to the island as though they would crash on the rocks, but the pilots suddenly cut the speed, turned, and stopped. You couldn’t see anything but the top of the lighthouse on the other side of the island. A gray dog came out from somewhere, then a black one and another gray one; they ran down to the shore and jumped on the rocks, barking right at us. The bottle of gin was passing from hand to hand, since we had nothing to drink it with; they gave it to me, and I drank from the mouth of the bottle, too.

“The dogs are rabid!” said Gülnur.

“Floor it, Fikret, let’s see what they do!” said Ceylan.

When Fikret gave it gas, the dogs turned just as the boats had done and began a crazy run around the island. Everybody in the boats was shouting, singing songs, to provoke the dogs, and the more they were provoked, the wilder they became, they yelped and howled and barked, and I was thinking, this is not the brightest idea for entertainment I have ever seen, but it was still more fun than my aunt’s hot, deadly house, better than the small dusty rooms with lace crochet spread on top of the radios.

“Music! Turn it all the way up and let’s see what they do!”

With the music blaring we went around the little island two more times. We were going for a third circuit when something in the wake of the boat caught my eye: Ceylan’s happy face suddenly appeared, bobbing away far off in the foamy water. I jumped in without thinking, as if diving into a scary dream.

The moment I hit the water I had a sinking feeling. It was as though Ceylan and I were going to die here and no one in the boats would notice. When I lifted my head from the water and looked, I was flabbergasted. One of the boats had stopped, gone over to Ceylan, and they were lifting her out. After they’d pulled Ceylan out, they came over to get me.

“Who pushed you?” said Fikret.

“Nobody pushed him,” said Gülnur. “He jumped in.”

“Well, then who pushed me?” said Ceylan.

I was trying to pull myself onboard, gripping the oar that Turgay held out to me, but just as I was about to get in the boat, he let go of the oar and I fell into the water again. When I lifted my head out of the water no one was paying any attention to me, but I managed to get back in the boat, completely out of breath.

“Goddamn you, none of you know how to have fun,” said Gülnur.

“We’ll throw you to the dogs!” said Fikret.

“If you know, teach us,” said Turgay.

“Idiots!” shouted Gülnur.

A dog who was watching them jumped onto the nearest rock and howled.

“Crazy!” said Ceylan, looking back at the dog that looked mesmerized as it flashed its sharp gleaming white teeth. “Get a little closer to the dog, Fikret.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“What are you looking at?” Fikret slowly drew closer to the dog. “Is it a male or a female?” He stopped the motor.

“It’s bad luck!” shouted Ceylan, in a weird way.

Suddenly I wanted to throw my arms around her, but instead I just looked at her, wondering what it would take to make her love me. I was becoming increasingly convinced that I was just a no-good lowlife, but at the same time I was feeling pretty good about myself, empty pride being the best antidote for worthlessness, to the point that I wanted to do something to make everyone pay attention to me, though unfortunately I couldn’t find either the courage or an excuse to do anything. It was like a straitjacket of poverty they had put on me. A few were dancing around and shouting while in the bow of the other boat two of them were wrestling, each trying to throw the other into the water. Then that boat came near and they started throwing buckets of water at us. We threw water back
at them, and there was some dueling with the oars as swords for a while, causing some in our boat to fall in the water. By then the gin bottles were empty. So Fikret grabbed one of them and threw it at the dog, but he missed and the bottle smashed on the rocks.

“What’s going on?” shouted Ceylan.

“It’s okay, now, it’s okay, we’re going back,” said Fikret.

He started up the motor, but by the time we’d collected the ones who had fallen into the water, the other boat had caught up, and they threw another bucket of water on us.

“Okay, wise guys,” said Fikret, “let’s see what you can do, come on, we’ll race!”

Side by side, the two boats went at the same speed for a while, but then Gülnur gave a shout, and it became obvious that the other boat was going to pass us, which made Fikret curse and order everybody toward the prow so we could gain speed. When the others passed us anyway and started to do a victory dance, Fikret balled up a towel and threw it at them. Of course he missed, but we turned right around and got there in time, but since nobody bothered to reach out and grab it, we rolled like an iron right over it, and the towel disappeared. The other boat, with everybody still howling, started chasing the car ferry that goes from Yalova to Darica and, when they caught up with it, circled it twice, shouting taunts at the crew, before coming back toward us for a game of bumper cars. When our two boats started to cruise among the swimming heads near the beach without cutting speed, I got nervous, and as the swimmers shouted and tried to get out of the way, I murmured, “What if there’s an accident?”

“What are you, a teacher?” shouted Fafa. “You’re a high school teacher, huh?”

“Is he a teacher?” said Gülnur.

“I hate teachers!” said Fafa.

“Me too!” said Cuneyt.

“He didn’t drink anything,” said Turan. “That’s the problem. Too many multiplication tables.”

“I drank more than you did,” I said pathetically, but since I noticed Ceylan wasn’t looking I didn’t care.

Later, after we’d returned to Ceylan’s dock and tied up, I saw a woman about forty-five wearing a robe on the dock: it was her mother.

“You kids are soaking wet,” she said. “What were you up to? Baby, where’s your towel?”

“I lost it, Mom,” said Ceylan.

“How did you do that? You’ll catch an awful cold,” her mother said.

Ceylan made some gesture to say she didn’t care and then said, “Oh, Mom, this is Metin. They live in that old house. The strange silent house.”

“Which old house?” said her mother.

We shook hands, she asked what my father did, I explained the situation and also told her that I was going to go to America for university studies.

“We’re going to buy a house in America,” Ceylan’s mother said. “Who can say what’s going to happen here. Where’s the best place in America?”

I gave her some geographic information, I spoke about the climatic conditions, the population, and cited some statistics, but I couldn’t tell whether she was listening because she wasn’t looking at me. Then as we were talking a little about the street killings and the leftist gangs and the nationalist thugs in Turkey, Ceylan interrupted.

“Mom, has he got you trapped now listening to his boring knowledge?”

“You’re so rude!” said her mother. But then she went off without listening to the rest of what I had to say.

I went over and stretched out on a chaise longue and watched Ceylan and the others diving in and getting out and diving in again. When everyone was reclining on the chairs and on the concrete, giving in to that unbelievable torpor under the sun, I fantasized about
a clock left out there on the pier among our idle naked legs: as it exposes its face to the motionless sun it mixes up its hands until it has to confess that it can no longer measure time, and the thoughts of the clock are no different from the thoughts of someone who has no thoughts at all trying to understand what his thoughts are.