Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (16 page)

‘When your creepy-crawly mother threw us out of our place, my father's business was ruined. When he died of a heart attack, my uncle made my mother marry an elderly widower. I never heard from my little sister again after that bastard sent her to the south to become another octogenarian's second wife. Then the week I came back from my military service the stingy scoundrel kicked me out of the house. As if prison in Istanbul wasn't enough, I moved from prison to prison in Anatolia. What I never got from school and family, I got from a heavy-duty convict from Diyasrbakır who took me under his wing. I was released after an amnesty and then I started to make more money than the president.

‘When I came back to Istanbul from my final underworld mission abroad, I learned that the angel Azrael had already taken the lives of my stepfather and your creepy mother,' he ended.

I had to lean against the police booth, retracting every time he prodded my throat with the flick-knife. I felt waves of fire spread through my body as he slapped me repeatedly across the face. My eyes were glued to the memorial stones in the Ottoman cemetery opposite. I thought his eyes grew bigger in the moonlight and were as eerie as my revengeful mother's. I was even more frightened when he said, ‘You haven't committed a crime that requires me to kill you. I don't know if this is a reward or a punishment but just to torment your mother's soul, I'm going to rape you right here, Jewish bastard!'

What wouldn't I have given for a gun in my hand! At the command ‘Give over!' it was as if a blessed hand pressed the button of an anti-fly spray twice and Seydo collapsed like a clumsy sack. I remembered from the novels of Erje Ayden the poetic sound of a gun with a silencer. As the sound of rhythmic footsteps retreated, running through the cemetery and splitting the silence of the night, I crumpled up like a helpless kitten. My body was trembling and I felt my heart would stop. Noticing Seydo's still erect tool sticking out of his open zipper I began to vomit.

As soon as I recovered I picked myself up and tried to run to the jeep, but I could only walk by clinging to the chalky wall of the cemetery. It wouldn't have surprised me if my mother had made an agreement with a gang of trigger-happy gunmen to keep me under surveillance even after she died. I wondered how often I would be mugged and what part of my body would suffer in reprisal for her lunacies.

On my safe return home my heart began to revive, as if I had lived through the joyful shock of an unexpected release from an endless prison sentence. When I kissed İfakat's cheek at midnight as she was washing up, she asked, ‘So have you proposed to İz?' I took one and a half sleeping pills when I went to bed and hoped to God I'd forget everything I'd suffered in the last two hours and that this would be the very last page in my anthology of nightmares.

I leapt up with the morning ezan and after a long thoughtful shower I dressed in my darkest suit and made for the seaside cemetery. At every step my heart beat faster. It was startling not to see Seydo's body on the slope down to the police box; if I hadn't seen my own vomit strewn with apricot skins, I could have sworn that I had dreamt last night. I shivered with relief and walked towards the market, tracing the bare tombstones of those Ottoman soldiers, doctors and higher civil servants who died young. I knew I'd come on our neighbourhood pretzel seller at the lonely park gate, reading a tabloid aloud.

‘If you don't ask me anything about dervishes, I'll buy two pretzel-rolls.'

But I was a bit ashamed when he replied, as he arranged his wares, ‘Did they send you to America to end up talking like that after ten years? Who can we ask, Mr Arda, if not you?'

I went to my office with unusual zeal. While I'd been fighting for my life my unmonitored email address was contacted at least twice. The first was from the repulsive Selçuk Altun:

Dear Arda
,

I hope it's a good sign, but last night I dreamt you were lying face-down by a graveyard, crying for help. Before I could reach you, you got up and thanked a shadow, ran off and jumped into the Bosphorus ... I send you my best wishes and hope we can meet soon to talk. Love to Ä°z
...

Then my irrepressible uncle:

Arda, Arda, Arda
,

I wish I'd never found Sylvie's imaginary sister! Demi is a bisexual transvestite who's had the operation, but is still a friend to Turks. (She'll be my guest next summer.) You'd probably be angry if you read in one of my stories that her boyfriend and girlfriend were each other's cousins. I found Cornell Woolrich's 1930 book
, A Young Man's Heart,
in the secondhand bookshop run by her man Vin. I'm flying to San Francisco to follow up Helen M. Grady, owner of the book in 1931. An experimental novel in which Demi and Helen's paths will cross
...

he went on bullshitting. The unruly Salvador's attempts to carry out research for his writings were always unsuccessful, while I, unbeknownst to him, lived real detective stories.

In the restful restaurant of the mysterious Four Seasons Hotel, where I was meeting a babbling banker for dinner, I heard news that turned my blood to ice. Ä°z had been in some kind of a traffic accident and had been taken to the intensive care unit of a private hospital on the Asiatic side of the city. Was this the staging of the bloody final act in which I would lose her? (My whole being rose in torment.) I rushed to the Lokman Hospital. What if I were to lose Ä°z? Could I ever connect with life again?

I found Zuhâl in the soulless waiting room of the intensive care unit. She was still in shock. ‘We had just seen a Nicole Kidman film and were on our way home in İz's Suzuki. We noticed that a shop in İcadiye Street was open and we stopped for a soft drink. I got out first. Suddenly a Land Cruiser the size of a tank crashed into the jeep from the rear and threw her down just as she was loosening her safety belt. It was awful. I think I saw İz's head coming through the windscreen and then the giant jeep tore away with arabesque music pouring from the open windows. İz has had a cerebral haemorrhage and there are hundreds of tiny glass fragments stuck in her face ...' and she burst into tears again.

The doctor on duty, of the gold Rolex watch, then spoke, ‘Your friend has had a concussion of medium intensity. Once we've checked the level of blood-accumulation in the head we can operate, though we'll have to wait forty-eight hours before we do so. The operation should be a success, all being well. Unfortunately, though, her face is severely damaged. I know a lot of lacerated women who have seen their faces, and even though they've survived the haemorrhage, they scream, “Why did you save me?”'

My head was spinning. I was permitted to go in for just ten minutes. I hoped the room number in the intensive care unit wasn't a message. (285. The unlucky number on my middle-school certificate!) As soon as I saw İz under the respirator I shut my eyes and began to cry. Her face was covered by a mask of minced meat over her forehead and cheeks. Bits of glass protruded from every pore, and as though that wasn't enough, her nose and lips were torn, the fragments glittering on and off like a mocking smile. I thought I'd never seen such a terrifying face even in my worst nightmares. I looked at Dr Rolex, who was completing an inventory of the damage, ‘three teeth broken', and he immediately left the room. Was that the hint of a smile I saw as I tried to pull myself together and focus on İz? I remembered the traffic accident I had years ago; the bed where I lay limp as a scarecrow, how I had felt my pain stop at last and my body grow light as a caique floating on a whitish-grey river. Hoping the path of desolation would end in a moment of peace, I too might have tried to smile. During the convalescence I had described a dream to my mother, and she had interpreted the meaning behind it: ‘You seem to flirt with death, Arda; but I'm not going to hand over your life, not even to the Angel of Death, my fine son, before he takes mine.'

Apart from her bruised fingernails, painted yellow and blue in honour of the Fenerbahçe football team, my Beloved's hands were bandaged. As I pressed my lips to her right index finger I couldn't help noticing my heart warming and I was no longer disturbed by her tragic face. I remembered what Graham Greene had said to his old mistress Yvonne Cloetta, on the eve of his death, ‘I've just realized that true love emerges between two people when there's no longer any sex drive.' I bent close to her ear, ‘Listen, funny girl,' I said, ‘you'll come out of this hospital safe and sound. The best plastic surgeons on the planet are going to restore your face to its former self, God willing. Whatever happens I'll never leave you! Perhaps we'll marry, I really don't care if you can't go out amongst people for a while, or even ever. I could even be happy because you'll have more time for me. Anyway I don't like crowds, and you will discover the secret of silence ...'

I took to the doctor who was to perform the operation. He looked just like Woody Allen when he frowned. I was surprised when he didn't ask for two thirds of his fee in dollars. The owner of the shop had been giving hell to his assistant on the pavement at the time of the accident, and had given the police the licence number of the runaway car. But when the young owner of the Land Cruiser, Kutsi Serhamza, turned out to be the nephew of some minister or other and the son of a building contractor, a prominent member of a religious sect, his testimony ‘disappeared'. Both İz's and Zuhâl's bosses were heavily in debt to public banks and the department for privatization, and had managed to prevent news of the accident appearing in the tabloid press. I was concentrating on İz's condition so couldn't react to the disgusting developments, but I recalled part of a poem by Küçük İskender called ‘Dulcinia's Journal'.
³

Ä°z's friendly father, who had left with his wife for the US to welcome the birth of their grandchild, came back alone for the operation. When he saw I had taken charge of the arrangements he slipped into the background. The operation was a success. As Ä°z's health insurance only covered 20 per cent of the hospital expenses, I paid the rest.

When, in spite of my warnings, İz looked at her face in the mirror she was overcome by screaming and tears. She was to be in the hospital another seventy-two hours, to prevent the risk of chronic bleeding. I took her mother, who made it to the hospital the next day, to İz's room while she was asleep and I was glad when she fainted without screaming. Whatever the repulsive Selçuk Altun said when he phoned her to send his best wishes, her eyes tried to laugh. Later, he gave me the London address of a skilled surgeon, an expert in such cases, but upset me by saying, ‘This arrogant man will perhaps accept a patient only in four months' time, but if your mother had been in charge she would have had İz on the operating table at the first opportunity.'

İz, the daughter of a retired and honest civil servant, hadn't even enough money to go on holiday. She objected when I proposed to pay for the plastic surgery, and I replied, ‘Listen, funny girl. I propose we get married as soon as your face is healed, with God's help. If you become my wife, I'll deduct what you owe me from your allowances, and if you end up with someone else, I'll invoice your moronic husband ...'

İz was immensely touched by my sensitivity during this time of strife. (So was I.) But now that she no longer looked at me lovingly, as if I was her little brother, I felt a lot less confident. The surgeon recommended two weeks' rest before travelling to London. The morning of her discharge from hospital, İz let her exhausted family know she would be staying with me until we left together for the UK. She scolded her mother when she reacted as if she were going to work in a brothel. While the tiresome woman was running from the room in tears, I remembered once again that I had never been able to say ‘no' to my mother, not even once.

İz was trembling when she walked out into the light of day, her face wrapped in a turquoise scarf that Zuhâl had brought. On the way home I realized stupid Hayrullah was staring at her through the rearview mirror and I cheerfully banged him on the neck with my bag. İfakat turned out to be more resilient than I thought. When she embraced İz and said, ‘May God swiftly take the life of whoever left your lovely face in this state,' was this a divine message? (Wouldn't any servant of God take this Kutsi demon's life for $50,000, or a chosen servant like Cahid, for $100,000? But first I had to soothe the pain of my İz of the beautiful soul ...)

One evening after the ezan İz had another fit of crying. Sending her to sleep with the aid of sleeping pills, I remained sleepless, and as though under a spell I began to read the first novel Selçuk Altun had signed for my mother. I thought the title
Loneliness Comes from the Road You Go Down
, borrowed from the poet Oktay Rifat, was a manoeuvre to increase the sales of the book. I didn't go to sleep until I had finished it. The following day I read his other two novels, both of them at one go. I knew now why my mother hadn't steered me towards these works which, I had to admit, were absorbing. Unfortunately this unattractive man, whom I had known since childhood, had – when in trouble – used me as a model for the protagonist and narrator in his novels. (I really can't say I have any more sympathy for him than for my father's murderer.)