Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (7 page)

‘My child, I've nothing more to sell but my soul.'

Looking through an album of faded photographs, I hoped to hear more of her full life, but instead I heard only complaints about how she'd always been misunderstood. She told me of her dreams, while drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes, and gossiped about her bridge partners. She insisted she felt no sadness, except for the academic son she had abandoned in a corner of a murky hospital, and for the loss of her maternal pride.

I had to sort out my relationship with Emel and Renan, whom I had chosen to ignore. One night, after a trip to Lakeside Abant with her mother's quartet of bridge players, the drunk Emel, glass in hand, pounded on my door shouting, ‘I've come to see if your tool matches your height.' When she ignored my warning and tried to walk in, I slapped her twice. I think she ran home in tears, almost sober. I knew she wouldn't be able to look me in the eye when we met again. As for me, the fingertips of my right hand would tingle with embarrassment.

Renan never stopped teasing me. When he wasn't doing animal impressions, he was uttering offensive Kurdish-sounding words behind my back. One Saturday morning while heading for Zarathustra I went down to the front door, where he was exchanging racing tips with two other lazy fellows. He returned my desultory greeting by identifying your humble servant as a terrorist, and I flipped. Approaching in God's name, I started to squeeze his big nose with my index and middle fingers. I knew he would act like a cartoon character and start cackling like a hen.

‘What do you think you're doing, you ignorant peasant from the mountains?'

I squeezed tighter after every sentence, till he said, ‘Don't you know that I work with the Secret Service? You don't realize how many generals I know! Are you a pervert or what? Look, I'm begging you ...'

He was sweating profusely and snot was running down his red nose. Eventually I tossed the quivering, helpless man to the ground as he pleaded, ‘Don't hurt me, I'll eat your shit.' But I hadn't got over my rage; I landed a couple of heavy Ottoman blows on each of the young idlers as, stupefied, they watched the poor old man whose home and money they had freely abused. Then I rushed out into peaceful Şemsi Paşa Avenue, satisfied.

To make sure I was still under his thumb, Baybora would ring me once a month with a series of questions like, ‘Are you going regularly to the shooting range to practise? Are you keeping more than $20,000 in the bank?'

One day during the holy Kurban festival, fate brought us together at the Kanaat Lokanta Restaurant. I knew I was to be given notice of a second commission. A plastic file with a foreign brand name was squeezed into my hand under the table and my heart sank. If the Organization had deliberately chosen the postcard-sized photograph on the first page to annoy me, they were to be congratulated. I was nauseated by the unpleasant image of a thirty-year-old man with his thin, pointed moustache, grinning maliciously at his prey. Why does the Anatolian male insist on the moustache habit? If it is a symbol of manhood, why is it forbidden in the army and the police force? Whenever a disastrous crisis erupts in our country, there's always someone with an ugly moustache involved.

Hamit Özay, son-in-law to Hadji Mümin Cömert, the manufacturer of cotton thread. God knows how many million dollars he blackmailed Cömert into paying. (A gambling debt and a sexual addiction had brought him into the clutches of a debt-collector's gang.) If he couldn't get what he wanted, he had sworn to hand over evidence of illegal sales to the Department of Finance. They say that before the noon ezan he began to drown his sorrows in the rakı he hid in his room, a mischief-maker intended for the Ramadan fast ...

I imagine Baybora intended this last sentence to have a powerful effect on me.

‘Surely it doesn't suit our Holy Hadji not to give a receipt?' I asked.

‘Ah, my naive warrior, it's a speciality of the industry that includes our Holy Hadji's business. If your rivals sell off the record and you can't, you'll soon sink. The main problem here is the failure of government to bring about any dynamic tax changes. I don't know what kind of books you're reading, but I do know that thirty per cent of our national income is unregistered.'

In practical terms, apart from his continuous bag of tricks, you couldn't find fault with babbling Baybora on this point. When I examined the dossier drawn up with Hadji's collaboration it was clear to me that I was to catch the louse Hamit in the act and punish him. For ten days I pursued the wastrel son-in-law. Twice a week a pimp who serviced the houses brought along a young girl or a transvestite to his bachelor flat in secluded Ataşehir, and three hours later he came back in a car and took away the poor exhausted creatures. While I was exploring the soulless modern district I finished His Excellency Ibn Battuta's
Seyahatname
(Book of Travels). (Between 1325 and 1354 he had travelled through several Islamic countries but was most impressed by those under Ottoman rule, and praised Alanya above all cities.) As I was reciting the last page of his masterpiece under my breath, I remember a huge transvestite emerging from the flat and throwing himself into the waiting minibus.

As the evening traffic in front of the building eased off, I broke in with the help of a master key that fitted the main door of the apartment block. No lift, so I climbed up to the ninth floor, disgusted by the staircase that reeked of fish and meat. Not a sound from inside as I fingered the key of the flat. I was shocked that the crude curses I heard from a neighbouring household came from a woman. The flat was furnished as bleakly as a hotel room and the sitting-room walls were a shameful display of transvestite posters. For one moment, God forgive me, I thought that some of the male figures in their make-up were more attractive than the female fashion models. The pervert son-in-law had passed out in his bedroom wearing nothing but his underwear.

Even in his sleep he didn't look innocent. I pumped a single bullet into his heart and pushed Walther III into his right hand. According to the instructions from Baybora it must look like a suicide. Otherwise yours truly would have woken the victim and given him the chance to draw his gun. On the vulgar commode I noted a book entitled
Türkiye Benimle Gurur Duymasın
(Turkey Should Not Be Proud of Me). ‘Now Turkey won't even be ashamed of you,' I said and immediately regretted this stupid remark.

With God's help, I successfully achieved all seventeen of my ‘missions'. I never disposed of anyone as easily as the ungrateful son-in-law. Some wept and offered me bribes, some crouched at my feet or bit my hand, some spat in my face and drew a gun. I emptied my magazine into the belly of the last one. I almost faint when I recall the revolting stench of his intestines gushing out.

I counted every mission a sacred duty and was content to live a secret life of planning, spying, stalking and ambushing. I wasn't concerned with the way of life or speech of the appointed victims before their deaths. Did I find the moment when the bullet met the target, or when I smelled the tantalizing aroma of the gun-barrel, as stimulating as reading?

Sami Sakallı's friend, Cemil Nejat İlker, God bless him, thought I might starve when Zarathustra closed, and so arranged a part-time job for me with an agency that published magazines for private corporations. When I heard that I would be working as assistant editor and proofreader, I was as proud as on the day when I was promoted to sergeant.

I waited till I'd finished the last lap of the English-language course I'd been patiently attending before rummaging through my predecessor's library. On the top shelf, among philosophy and psychology books, were some heavy documents, one of which I dropped on the floor. It was Gürsel Ergene's private notebook. This Venetian-bound volume revealed how he had finished his schooling at St Joseph's Lycée and gone to the US, what he suffered at university and later on. I read of his poetic anger at his disillusionment, his stubborn, shattered dreams of an honest world. And I was curious about a man who sought any excuse to hurt himself, and in particular his mother.

The following are extracts from the period that concluded with his banishment to a hospital, to be treated for his illness:

I wanted an academic career in the field of contemporary literature. I wanted to translate, to explore neglected writers and poets, to write essays and critical papers. When she failed to make her useless husband into a minister, my mother intended to make sure I would become a philosopher. Her command was absolute. I went to America to read philosophy and I was to return to Turkey when I had finished my doctorate
...

Our fashionable philosopher of the moment was Wittgenstein, the anti-philosopher. Let's see if another such brilliant star will appear, finely balanced between genius and madness
...

Finally my mother and I came to an agreement. I would return to Istanbul when I became an associate professor, and she would allow me to marry Betsy
...

Betsy, an associate professor of social psychology, never cared for Istanbul, Üsküdar, or my mother, nor for the pittance she would earn for part-time jobs, or for the insensitivity of academics
...

After our engagement Betsy would say, ‘I'll go to the ends of the earth with you,' but she despised the suburban Istanbul dweller who couldn't even carry a shopping basket in the supermarket. And, according to my mother, Betsy was happy to ignore the city's advantages and was flirting with a married banker whom she had met on her runs in Yıldız Park. When her suggestion of returning to California was rejected, divorce became inevitable
...

My older sister was jealous of my mother's interest in me during my childhood, and later, in her adolescence, of my academic success. Her suppressed feelings, developed over twenty-five years, revealed themselves under the influence of alcohol. If I'd had a bigger salary I'd have moved away long ago from this mouldy ruin of a city
...

On the eve of returning to Istanbul I had prepared myself for the very worst. I must have felt ashamed of my powers of imagination, which had underestimated the magnitude of ‘the worst'; hyperinflation had turned a shallow leaderless country into a tribe of nomads. From the ashes of Constantinople, the great city that ignited the Renaissance, had risen a modern village haunted by ghosts of the past. Moustachioed peasants had seized control of the government. A mob ignorant of literature or art (there is no equivalent word for ‘Philistine' in Turkish – a great pity!) were indifferent to the rampant corruption. Academic life was strangled by a mass of insensitivities. My colleagues were bored and poor. They think that with my degree from Berkeley I'm crazy not to go abroad (or in the midst of chaos am I struggling to face a punishment I deserve?)
...

The academic faculties are divided primarily into two factions, left and right: the time is surely coming when they'll unite to criticize me. My promotion is delayed and the article I wrote for the college magazine is irresponsibly censored. Sycophantic deans ignorant of any other language are sent abroad to symposia. Students turn up to class occasionally and instead of admiring the most serious and learned, are content with irresponsible teachers who hand everyone a pass ... !