Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (14 page)

I'm used to being stared at sometimes like a panda in a zoo, because of my Viking-like features. Uneasy with the three soulmates who watched me as though they were counting my every bite, I eventually dropped my wineglass. I noticed İz was pleased when she found some way to console me. Zafer was busy announcing that his bookworm girlfriend hadn't read anything after Dostoevsky, much to Zuhâl's delicious embarrassment. (I recalled my father's sympathy for the repulsive Selçuk Altun's refusal to read any novel before Kafka.) Just before the male and female Z's left for a ‘get well' visit to the latter's aunt, the former leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘We're going to get along just fine, brother-in-law.'

I wonder why this gave me an erection.

At the end of a noisy folk song tape, Ä°z brought in the draft of an article she'd prepared on my father and his library. After twice reading the fourth paragraph about his ability to multiply five-digit numbers in his head at the speed of a computer, I couldn't resist multiplying two six-digit numbers in my head, three times in a row, refereed by a minute Citizen calculator. She was far more surprised than I expected. Galvanized by Dalga's cheers from the upper stands in the clouds, I leant over towards Ä°z's lips.

On the title page of Melina Mercouri's autobiography, my father had jotted down, ‘Beware the day when a nostalgic chorus line, an old aphorism or a line of lyrical poetry fails to ignite the joy of life.' I had scratched out the note and added, when mother was taken to hospital, ‘No problem, if you have Ada Ergenekon as the chief firefighter in your life!' Before calling İz, who never wasted words, I had to take time to prepare myself for a salvo of sharp comments. We used to either meet three or four times a week or speak on the phone twice a day. In our marathons through the back streets of medieval Beyoğlu and Üsküdar, how genuinely she loved those sunbaked urchins. I thought she bought lottery tickets just to be able to say to the itinerant vendors who usually sought out the shadiest corners of local parks, ‘Can I pay when I win?' We would eat at makeshift diners and rundown hotel restaurants, giggling all the time. Anyone watching us might have thought I was urging this strange girl to talk non-stop as therapy. (God forbid!) On the contrary, when she spoke I felt myself relax. I would listen to her, hungry like someone who has endured a decade of solitude and longing on a desert island, or passionately, like someone listening to a rhapsody of new delights. She was amused at my embarrassment when she leaned over to ask for a cigarette from the next table, or when she was served her Turkish coffee in a tea glass. When I dared to look into her dark eyes my heart warmed, but I was always aware of feeling that that might cause the light in her eyes to fade.

Although I was only seven months younger, I was pleased at first that she acted as if she was my older sister. I realized that she was trying to look out for me, assuming I found it hard to deal with life's difficulties. (It wasn't easy to shake off my paranoid suspicion I was being tested by this guardian angel, who was rather like a happy medium between my mother and Dalga, both of whom I had lost.) When we went out to eat with her friends she watched me from the corner of her eye while she was talking to others and I would feel uneasy. Ä°z had an interesting group of friends who regarded her as leader. Most of them were getting by with jobs that didn't interest them in order to pursue their real passions which no one respected. I knew I would be accused by the Harvard crowd of being a turncoat, mixing with a bunch that consisted of a poet (translator), a painter (teacher of foreign languages), an art historian (tourist guide), an assistant theatre director (film dubbing work), an industrial designer (proofreader) and those who found themselves working in the media sector without an education in communications.

In the shady cafés and piss-stinking jazz bars of Beyoğlu and Bağdat Street, İz made fun of the pseudo-intellectuals who sneered at the simple mistakes made by others. I had sympathy for the identical twins Beste and Güfte, flute and cello honours graduates from the conservatoire. Although they often teased me, I derived great pleasure from observing the ongoing exchange of insults between the two chubby girls who edited competing magazines. On the thirteenth of every month we all met for dinner at the fashionable Ottoman restaurant Hünkâr, in Nişantaş. Everyone had to show up unless they had a good excuse. The Ügümü brothers assumed that the group of twenty friends was the country's élite media team, and respectfully allocated the top floor of the restaurant to the nihilist bunch.

The incident happened on the second Hünkâr campaign. Apparently I had incurred a penalty for failing to acknowledge the 775th anniversary of the Ulucami monument in Divriği:

‘He should at least sing a folksong halfway through ...'

‘What if I recite a poem of Küçük İskender's?'

‘He should spend a night with Beste and Güfte in the same bed ...'

‘What if I paid for all your dinners for a whole year?'

‘He should tell us an impromptu story,' Azmi the art critic and sculptor proposed. I was astonished to hear İz supporting the suggestion but saying, ‘And please, no happy ending.' When our eyes met, I felt she sensed the secret I was keeping from her, almost as if she wanted me to reveal it in code. When she saw me hesitating, she stroked my hair and commanded, ‘Finish your drink and then please start, dear Arda.'

As I finished my drink I recalled Küçük İskender's quip, ‘I have to plan and commit a murder within an hour and it has been troubling me for minutes.' I began with a prayer.

‘Once upon a time there was a wealthy lady called Adalet Ergin who lived in Istanbul, where heaven and hell mingle. By the beloved Bosphorus, in the waterside mansion she inherited from her first husband who died of a heart attack, she lived happily with her second husband Rasim, her eighteen-year-old daughter Deniz from her first marriage, and her eleven-year-old son Aras from the second. The handsome Rasim had once been the finance director of the cotton-thread factory in the suburb of Haramidere. It had been left to his wife by her first husband. (The children don't know that the fiancée from whom he had separated to marry his Adalet had committed suicide. He took his wife's family name and rose to become vice-chairman of the firm's board of directors.)

‘It seems Adalet was pleased that Deniz, encouraged by Rasim, had taken up basketball and risen to the national junior team, and that she had accepted her stepfather and was devoted to her brother. Aras was a very talented and sensitive child, who appeared to be the apple of his family's eye. He never left his mother's side from the moment he learned to stand up and grab her skirt. He would cry his eyes out if he couldn't join Adalet in the toilet, and he couldn't even listen to a story and take his afternoon nap unless his mother scratched his back. Once a week he would make her read the story of “The Little Match Girl” who froze to death on the street selling matches on Christmas night, and in tears he would say, “But Mother, surely the Little Match Girl went to heaven?” Neither of his parents nor any of his teachers ever had to raise their voice to this mature and well-behaved boy. It's said that his mother sacked the Welsh nanny when she claimed, “Aras will have psychological problems in the future because he has never fully lived his childhood.” By the time he finished primary school he was listening to classical music, and his violin teacher swore he played Vivaldi almost like a virtuoso.

‘Aras began to enjoy accompanying his father to Deniz's basketball matches, and also to Fenerbahçe football matches. The second big secret he kept from his mother was that he ate fried meatballs, traditional street food, before he entered the stadium. The first match he went to watch his sister play in, he felt hundreds of pairs of eyes feeding on her long and shapely legs. He cried when his father laughed at his suggestion that “Deniz should play in a tracksuit.” Adalet was also not informed about the father and son's monthly outings to the Golden Horn. As soon as they lowered their fancy fishing-rods off the Atatürk Bridge, Rasim began to tell his son about his dissolute adventures chasing after women. Aras would always listen eagerly to his father's fantasy, in which he dressed up as a woman, entered a dormitory for girl students and made love to the three roommates till morning. Then they would walk to modest, quiet Kıztaşı and stop over at Rasim's mother's house. Aras could never understand why his mother had forbidden him to see the grandmother with the grey-blue eyes and her blind daughter, his aunt. Aunt Ruzin would move her hands slo...w...ly over his face and touch him as if wondering who he resembled. Rasim would pretend not to have heard her when his twin sister asked, “Aras, which is more painful, do you think, to lose your personality or lose your eyes?”

‘In his first year of primary school Aras gets roughed up by a boy two years older. Rasim raids the bully's home, beats up his father and big brother and destroys the furniture in their living room. The neighbourhood hooligans avoid Aras, afraid of Deniz's skill in karate, and Aras wonders if all his talents are a kind of punishment. Out of loneliness he takes refuge in books and music, and when asked what he'd like as an award for passing his primary exams with flying colours, he answers, “Permission to become a musician when I grow up, because my big sister will manage your business better than me.”

‘A supreme inconvenience was inflicted on millions of Istanbul citizens in the name of security, when the President of the USA and the heads of state of forty-five other countries assembled for NATO's umpteenth summit meeting. The same night it ended was also the night drunk Rasim crashed his Jaguar into a battered old minibus. He got away with minor scratches and was able to bury the incident, while Adalet was to spend a considerable time in intensive care and Aras, neglected by his father and sister, fell into a depression. He looked out from his balcony over the restless waves of the Bosphorus and slipped away into periods of d...ee...p sleep holding Sara, his yellow-haired cat. A week after the accident, on the night when the Olympic torch passed through the city's busy streets – closed to traffic right in the middle of the rush hour – his sister sent Aras with their driver Nurullah to see
Spiderman 2
. But Aras came back without seeing the second half of the film. On the way up to his room he heard moans from his mother's bedroom and rushed in to see his father and stepsister making passionate love on his mother's bed. He was shocked! Silently he ran to Nurullah's house in the back garden and sobbed out what he had seen. Then he went up to his room. Shaking all over, clasping Sara, he threw himself into the relentless waters of the Bosphorus. The corpse of Aras still holding Sara tight hit the shore somewhere near the Bebek Mosque.

‘Two weeks later, Adalet was discharged from hospital, but broke down when she heard from Nurullah what had happened. Her hair turned white. First she threw Deniz out. She paid her daughter's university fees to study psychology in England, but cut her off and said she never wanted to see her again. Rasim refused to agree to a divorce. He insisted moreover that if he was denied an immediate payment of $10 million, he would turn over all the company's undeclared transactions to the Treasury. Nurullah shot Rasim through the heart with a single bullet from his own gun. The death report appeared as “suicide due to depression”.

‘Adalet, a resilient woman, was not altogether cut off from life. She gave herself to religion and charitable causes, but whenever she heard the sound of a violin she broke down completely, beating her breast and crying, “My son, my only son ... I'm suffering in this hell; I'm not worthy to be near you in paradise, my beloved son.”'

Three apples are said to fall from the sky: one for the story-teller, one for the listeners and the last for the one who understands ...

I knew that this invented tragedy would boost respect for me in the eyes of İz. We began to go on weekend trips together, spending many nights in desolate hotels in medieval towns, where I memorized every inch of her body. We visited towns hundreds of kilometres from Istanbul, where humanity prevails and where there are eating houses that offer delectable meals for the equivalent of $5. In the legendary national park of Kazdağı, many attractive villages of houses built with cut stone blocks were almost empty. While villagers crowded to Istanbul to look for work, the young generation in Istanbul had been taking over these monumental stone houses one by one. We had covered every inch of the tired old forests of dramatic Kazdağı. If I came face to face again with the pomegranate and almond trees, the mulberry and honeysuckle bushes protected by the pine forest, I would probably not recognize them, nor birds like the Bosphorus shearwater, the bee bird, the chaffinch, the black-headed bunting or, for that matter, the greenfinch. But I remember distinctly how we fell asleep in each other's arms among the poppies that surrounded the meadows. I don't think I'll ever again see the souvenir shops with their absurd signs, or the sulky tea-house waiters who refused tips.