Snow (30 page)

When the military took over in 1980, all left-wing plays were banned, and it was not long afterward that it was decided to commission a big new television drama about Atatürk in honor of the hundredth anniversary of his birth. In the past, no one had thought a Turk was equal to the challenge of playing this blond, blue-eyed, westward-looking national hero; the predominant view was that great national films called for great international stars like Laurence Olivier, Curt Jurgens, or Charlton Heston. But this time
Hürriyet,
the biggest Turkish newspaper, entered the fray to promote the view that for once a Turk be allowed to play the role. It even went so far as to provide ballots that readers could cut out and send in with their suggestions. Sunay was among those nominated by this popular jury; in fact, being still well known for his fine work during the democratic era, he was the clear front-runner from the very first day. He had, after all, been playing Jacobins for years. Turkish audiences had no doubt but that the handsome, majestic, confidence-inspiring Sunay would make an excellent Atatürk.

Sunay’s first mistake was to take this public vote seriously. He went straight to the papers and the television networks, making grand pronouncements to all who would listen. He had himself photographed relaxing at home with Funda Eser. He spoke openly about his domestic life, his daily routines, and his political views, remaking himself in Atatürk’s image: he was at pains to show that, like Atatürk, he was a secularist. He also dramatized the fact that they enjoyed the same pastimes and pleasures (raki, dancing, fine clothes, and good breeding). He took to posing with volumes of Atatürk’s classic work,
Orations,
and claiming that he was rereading his oeuvre from start to finish. (When one unsupportive columnist who entered the fray early on ridiculed him for reading not the original version of
Orations
but an abridged pure Turkish edition, Sunay took the original version out of the library and posed with it too, but all his efforts to get the new photograph published in this columnist’s paper proved fruitless.) Undaunted, Sunay continued to appear at grand open-ings, concerts, and important soccer matches, and wherever he went he answered the questions of every third-rate reporter about Atatürk and art, Atatürk and music, Atatürk and Turkish sport. With an eagerness to please rather unbecoming in a Jacobin, he even did interviews with the anti-Western religious newspapers. It was during one such interview that he said, in answer to a question that was in fact not unduly provocative, “Perhaps one day, when the public deems fit, I might be able to play the Prophet Muhammad.”

With this luckless remark, the trouble really began. The small Islamist periodicals went on the rampage. God forbid, they wrote, any mortal should presume to play the Great Prophet. The swarm of angry columnists who began with accusations of “showing disrespect for the Prophet” were soon accusing him of “taking active steps to discredit the Prophet.” When even the army proved reluctant to silence the political Islamists, it fell to Sunay himself to put out the fire. Hoping to assuage their fears, he took to carrying around a copy of the Koran and telling the conservative Islamists how much he loved this book, which in so many ways was really rather modern. But this only created an opportunity for Kemalist columnists who had taken offense at his preening as “the people’s choice” for the role of Atatürk: Never once, they wrote, had Atatürk tried to curry favor with religious fanatics. The newspapers supporting the military coup kept running the picture of Sunay in a spiritual pose with a copy of the Koran, the caption underneath reading, “A man fit to play Atatürk.” 

The Islamist press lashed back, running pictures of Sunay drinking raki with captions like “He’s a raki drinker, just like Atatürk!” and “Is this man fit to play the Great Prophet?” This sort of war would flare up between the Islamist press and the secular press every couple of months, but now Sunay was the focus.

For a week, you couldn’t open a paper without seeing Sunay. One picture had him guzzling beer in a commercial he’d made years earlier, others showed him getting a beating in a film he’d made in his youth, defiantly raising his fist before a flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle and watching his wife kiss the male leads in various plays.

There was page after page of innuendo: claims that his wife was a lesbian, that he was still as much a Communist as ever, and that he and Funda had done dubbing for contraband porn films. And for the right money, Atatürk was not the only role he could play. After all, it was East German funding that had made it possible for him to perform Brecht; and after the coup, Sunay had insulted the state by telling “women from a Swedish association that torture was endemic to Turkey.” 

Finally, a high-ranking officer summoned Sunay to command headquarters to inform him rather curtly that in the view of the entire army he should withdraw from the race. This was not the same good-hearted officer who had invited several uppity Istanbul journalists to Ankara to scold them for criticizing the army’s involvement in politics, only to offer them chocolates afterward, but another less jovial officer from the same public relations branch. He didn’t soften one bit when he saw Sunay quaking with remorse and fear; rather, he ridiculed Sunay for propounding his own political views in the guise of the “man chosen to be Atatürk” and alluded to Sunay’s short visit two days earlier to the town of his birth, during which he had played the “people’s politician.” (Cheered on by convoys of cars and crowds of tobacco manufacturers and unemployed men, Sunay had climbed up to the statue of Atatürk in the town’s main square and inspired even more applause by squeezing Atatürk’s hand; when a reporter from a popular magazine then asked him whether he thought he might leave the stage one day to enter politics, Sunay answered, “If the people want me.”) The prime minister’s office announced that the Atatürk film was to be postponed indefinitely.

Sunay was experienced enough to endure this defeat; his undoing came with what followed. During his monthlong Atatürk campaign he’d done so much television that people had come to associate his voice with Atatürk, and that meant no one would give him dubbing work. The television advertisers who had once been so happy to have him play the rea-sonable father with a knack for buying only the best and healthiest products turned their backs on him; they thought their viewers would find it strange to see a failed Atatürk brandishing a brush and holding a can of paint or explaining why he was so satisfied with his bank. But the very worst were those who believe everything they read in the papers, because now they believed with a passion that Sunay might be both an enemy of Atatürk and an enemy of religion: Some even believed he said nothing when his wife kissed other men. Or if they didn’t believe it, there was still a lot of muttering about no smoke without fire.

The chief effect of all these reversals was the dwindling in number of those coming to see them perform. Quite a few people stopped Sunay in the street to say, “I expected better of you!” A young religious high school student, convinced Sunay had stuck his tongue out at the Prophet (and wanting badly to get in the papers), stormed into the theater waving a knife and spat in the face of several people. All this happened in the space of five days; Sunay and Funda then disappeared.

The gossip got even wilder. One rumor had it that they’d joined the Brechtian Berliner Ensemble, ostensibly to teach drama though really they were learning how to be terrorists. According to another account, the French Ministry of Culture had given them a grant and refuge at the French Mental Hospital in ¸

Si¸sli. In fact, they had decamped to the house of Funda Eser’s artist mother on the shores of the Black Sea.

A year later, they finally found work as activity directors at an undistinguished hotel in Antalya. They spent mornings playing volleyball in the sand with German grocers and Dutch office workers; in the afternoon they dressed up as the shadow-theater characters Karagöz and Hacivat and performed in butchered German for the amusement of the children; in the evenings they sailed onstage dressed as a sultan and the belly-dancing darling of his harem. This was the beginning of Funda Eser’s belly-dancing career, which she would continue to develop during their tours of the provinces over the next ten years. For three months Sunay managed to play the clown, until a Swiss barber crossed the line, interrupting their act with his jokes about Turks with harems and fezzes, which continued the next morning on the beach, where he began to flirt with Funda. Sunay beat him up, in full view of a shocked and terrified crowd of tourists.

After that, it seems the couple worked as freelance emcees, dancers, and theatrical entertainers at weddings and dance halls throughout the Antalya area. Even when he was introducing cheap singers, fire-eating jugglers, and third-class comedians, Sunay would make short speeches about Atatürk, the Republic, and the institution of marriage. Funda Eser would do a belly dance, and then the couple, now assuming an austere and highly disciplined air, would do something like the murder of Ban-quo, stopping after eight or ten minutes for a round of applause. It was during these evenings that the seeds were planted for the touring theater group they would later take all over Anatolia.

* * *

While having his blood pressure checked, Sunay had one of his bodyguards bring over a walkie-talkie; after issuing a few orders into it and reading a message a factotum had abruptly pushed in front of him, his face crumpled with revulsion. “They’re all denouncing each other,” he said. He went on to say that during his years of touring the remote towns of Anatolia, he had come to the conclusion that all the men in the country were paralyzed by depression.

“For days on end, they sit in those teahouses; day after day they go there and do nothing,” he said. “You see hundreds of these jobless, luckless, hopeless, motionless poor creatures in every town; in the country as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands of them, if not millions. They’ve forgotten how to keep themselves tidy, they’ve lost the will to button up their stained jackets, they have so little energy they can hardly move their arms and legs, their powers of concentration are so weak they can’t follow a story to its conclusion, and they’ve even forgotten how to laugh at a joke, these poor brothers of mine.” Most of them were too unhappy to sleep; they took pleasure in knowing that the cigarettes they smoked were killing them; they began sentences, only to let their voices trail off as they remembered how pointless it was to carry on; they watched TV not because they liked or enjoyed the programs but because they couldn’t bear to hear about their fellows’ depression, and television helped to shut them out; what they really wanted was to die, but they didn’t think themselves worthy of suicide. During elections, it was out of a desire for self-punishment that they voted for the most wretched parties and the most loathsome candidates; it was, Sunay insisted, because the generals responsible for the military coup spoke with honest realism about the need for punishment that these men preferred them to politicians endlessly promising hope.

Funda Eser, who had come back into the room, added that there were also many unhappy women who’d all worn themselves out having too many children, curing tobacco, weaving carpets, and working for pitiful wages as nurses while their husbands were who-knows-where. These women who shouted and wailed at their children all day long were the ones who kept life going; if you took them away, it would be the end of the line for the millions of joyless, jobless, aimless men you now saw all over Anatolia. They all looked the same, these men, unshaven, their shirts dirty; without the women looking after them they would end up like the beggars who froze to death on street corners during cold snaps, or the drunks who staggered out of taverns to fall into open sewers, or the senile grandfathers sent to the grocery store in their pajamas and slippers to buy a loaf of bread, only to lose their way. These men were all too numerous, “as we’ve seen in the wretched city of Kars”; although they owed their lives to their women, the love they felt for their wives made them so ashamed they tortured them.

“I gave ten years to Anatolia because I wanted to help my unhappy friends out of their misery and despair,” said Sunay. There was no self-pity in his voice. “They accused us of being Communists, perverts, spies working for the West, and Jehovah’s Witnesses; they said I was a pimp and my wife a prostitute; time and time again they threw us into jail, beating and torturing us. They tried to rape us; they stoned us. But they learned to love my plays and the freedom and happiness my theatrical company brought them. So now, as I am handed the greatest opportunity of my life, I shall not weaken.”

Two men entered the room; as before, one of them handed Sunay a walkie-talkie. The channel was open and Ka could hear people talking; they’d surrounded one of the shanties in the Watergate district, and after someone inside fired at them, they’d gone in to find one of the Kurdish guerillas and a family. On the same frequency, a soldier was giving orders; his subordinates addressed him as “my commander.” A short while later, the same soldier addressed Sunay, first to give him advance notice of their plans and then to seek his views, now sounding more like an old school-mate than the leader of a revolution.

“There’s a little fellow who’s a brigade officer here in Kars,” Sunay said, when he noticed Ka’s interest. “During the Cold War, the military command had the very best forces massed farther inland, in Sarıkamı¸s, in anticipation of a Soviet incursion. At most the people here would be staging diversions during the first attack. These days, they’re mostly here to guard the border with Armenia.”

Sunay now told him how, the first night, after he and Ka had come in on the same bus from Erzurum, he’d gone into the Green Pastures Café and run into Colonel Osman Nuri Çolak, a friend for thirty-odd years. The man was an old classmate from the Kuleli Military Academy. In those days, he was the only other person in Kuleli who knew Pirandello’s name and could list Sartre’s plays.

“Unlike me, he couldn’t get himself expelled for lack of discipline, nor could he embrace the military wholeheartedly. This is why he never became a general staff officer. (There were people who whispered that he was too short to be a general anyway.) He’s an angry, troubled man, but not, I think, because of professional problems—it’s because his wife took their children and left him. He’s tired of being alone, bored with having nothing to do here, and worn out by the small-town gossip, although of course he’s the one who does most of the gossiping. Those unlicensed butchers I raided after declaring the revolution, the disgraceful stories about the Agricultural Bank loans and the Koran courses—he was the first to tell me about them; he was drinking a bit too much. He was overjoyed to see me but full of complaints about loneliness. And then, by way of apology but also with a note of boastfulness, he told me he was the highest-ranking officer in Kars that night, so he was going to have to get up early the next morning. The commander of his brigade had gone to Ankara with his wife to see doctors about her rheumatism, the deputy colonel had been called to an urgent meeting in Sarıkamı¸s, and the governor was in Erzurum. He was the one with all the power! And as the snow had not yet stopped, it was clear from the experience of years past that the roads would be closed for days. I saw at once that this was the opportunity I had been awaiting all my life, so I ordered my friend another double raki.”