Young Turk (43 page)

Yes, she and Haydar had married.

Secretly. Soon after they had met at the wedding of one of Haydar’s army friends where both had been guests of honour: Madam Ruj because she had brokered the marriage – the bride, being a Karaite Jew, had come under her constituency – and Haydar because he had saved the bridegroom’s life by carrying his wounded body through the Chinese lines during the battle of Kunuri, despite being hit himself. (In military terms, Kunuri has become a legend: the Turkish contingent, surrounded while collecting shell-cases that could be sold as scrap, had had to break the encirclement with a bayonet charge. This astounding feat had left them with heavy casualties. The fact that the shell-cases were being collected for a fund for the families of fallen comrades had compounded the tragedy.)

The wedding had captured Istanbul’s imagination. Celâl, the bridegroom, had ended up a paraplegic; his bride, Sara – four years older and so plain as to be considered unmarriageable – had lived a reclusive life working in an old-people’s home. Yet, within days, the couple had fallen deeply in love. In a letter, Haydar had described the fairy-tale atmosphere thus: ‘This wedding is a portent for a better future, both for the country and the world. I now know Mazal is my destiny.’ (There is a haunting double entendre here.
Mazal
means ‘luck’ in Hebrew.)

And so they, too, had married. In Las Vegas, of all places. During Haydar’s tour of the United States, as a hero of the Korean war, to promulgate the importance of NATO. Haydar, who hated such jingoistic razzmatazz, would not have gone but for Madam Ruj’s categorical refusal to marry openly in Turkey.

The secrecy, I immediately assumed, had been to protect Madam Ruj’s career. For that was the time when Haydar’s campaigns for a world government were being severely censured; matchmaking and politics were hardly compatible bedfellows.

But Dan, reassuring me that the people, stirred by Haydar’s integrity, would have taken the couple to their hearts, divulged the real reason: her obsession with the need for celibacy.

The orphaned Mazal had been brought up by her great-aunt, the legendary matchmaker, Allegra. Groomed to follow in her guardian’s footsteps, Mazal had sought to emulate her. What better way to thank Allegra for all the years of nurturing? However, to achieve success, matchmakers needed to be unattached – like monks. That was the rule. Haydar, of course, had derided this perverse logic. If matchmakers really wanted to have an insight into their clients, he contended, they should do the opposite: throw themselves into the fray and experience the tribulations of connubiality. But Madam Ruj, forever intoning Allegra’s indoctrination, even years after the latter’s death, held that a knowledge of conjugality – be it in carnal matters or in the unabated monotony of cohabitation – distorted the matchmaker’s vision of the grand design, namely, a union made in heaven. Only celibacy perceived the original perfection. The fact that most marriages turned into wars of attrition was irrelevant. When unions made in heaven foundered on earth, the fault lay neither with heaven nor with the matchmaker; it lay with human frailty.

Yet, somehow, Haydar’s views on love and life had prevailed. Mazal had finally yielded to his ardour. But she had insisted not only on the secret ceremony in Las Vegas, but also on living apart – for some years, at least – and meeting clandestinely, as they had done since starting their affair.

Eventually, she had come to find even this arrangement a burden. Haydar’s growing desire for children, combined with her paranoia that someone would find out about her marriage, had compelled her, before a year had elapsed, to return to Las Vegas and divorce him.

However, despite that ‘unforgivable betrayal’ – so Haydar had remonstrated in numerous love letters – they had been unable to give each other up.

Naturally, at a great cost.

Haydar had grown increasingly desolate. Mazal’s unequivocal refusal to have children, in particular, had felt like an immutable sentence. Many of his letters had expressed the fantasy of running to some poor country and returning with a bunch of orphans. A short prison sentence, around this time, following his defence of Kurdish culture, had virtually broken him.

One letter, written shortly before the diagnosis of his cancer, had accused her, quite blatantly, of killing him – ‘slowly, but surely’.

I could not even begin to comprehend how Madam Ruj, who had loved Haydar so intensely – still did – could sacrifice their happiness in pursuit of an occupation that was not only parasitical, but anachronistic.

Dan, however, had no difficulty in understanding. The blame, he affirmed, lay with her great-aunt, Allegra. Why did this woman – by all accounts, a veritable beauty – take up a profession when, in her days, her contemporaries never even thought about working but waited to be snapped up for marriage? And why, of all pursuits, did she choose such a fatuous one as matchmaking? As for that evangelical rubbish about celibacy – what did it really signify? Matchmakers know better than anyone that reality lies in the opposite direction, that, in the main, marriages are made in hell! The reason they persevere valiantly is because they also know that living in solitude is worse than hell. So what prevented Allegra from electing the lesser evil? Why did she then go and infect Mazal with the same dread?

Well, obviously, Allegra had been quite disturbed. Maybe an abused child. Maybe simply a child who had suffered irreparable parental neglect. Maybe indoctrinated with hatred for men by a maltreated family member. Maybe even appointed the family breadwinner, therefore designated a male, therefore forbidden to marry.

A word here on the imprisonment – the fourth and last – that had virtually broken Haydar. By the mid-fifties, the Menderes government had plunged Turkey into political turmoil. Any criticism of its conduct – indeed, any controversial topic – incurred for the ‘offender’ immediate arrest, speedy trial and gaol. Under these circumstances, the dissemination of such liberal views as a world government or the advocacy of Kurdish rights was harshly repressed. Haydar had had the temerity to address both issues at a music festival after a Kurdish singer, trying to sing a song in Kurdish, had been bundled off the stage. Jumping on to the stage himself, Haydar had declared that as and when a world government came into being, all the suppressed languages, starting with Kurdish, would be resurrected as part of humanity’s cultural heritage.

Instantly thrown off the stage in his turn, he had been duly charged with accusing Turkey of oppressing its Kurdish minority when the whole world knew that no such minority existed since all who called themselves Kurds were in reality Turks who had forgotten their Turkishness and were now coming back into the fold.

Ironically, despite the fact that he had lost many members of his family during the Kurdish revolt of 1937, Haydar had chosen to renounce his Kurdishness – as demanded by the Turkification programmes – early on in his campaign for world government. He had done so, not because he had felt cowed by the authorities, but in the naive belief that the dream of Turkicizing the country had been a temporary aberration caused by the demise of the Ottoman empire and that, as and when Turkey recovered from that grief, it would duly reclaim the pluralism of the Ottomans – perhaps even serve as a prototype for world government. But he had soon realized that societies aspiring to be monolithic could not accommodate diversity and that, therefore, they would always set out to destroy heterogeneity. The corollary to that, he had further realized, was that should a society succeed in becoming a monolith, it would have sown the seeds of its own destruction. By renouncing intercourse with other racial, national and ethnic groups, it would have forbidden itself regeneration and new blood; it would have committed, as it were, suicide by collective onanism.

Thereafter Haydar had become an ardent supporter of Kurdish rights.

On one of those sunny autumn days when Büyükada, disburdened of summer folk and day-trippers, feels like a mythic realm, Dan and I, sitting on the balcony of Haydar’s shrine, were exploring the limits of raki’s milky way, a favourite pastime of the melancholic Turk. Madam Ruj, having donned her official mien – ‘the myrmidon look’, Haydar used to call it – had gone to meet a prospective client. I remember thinking, on starting our third bottle, that as long as she pursued her vacuous career, there would be no redemption for anybody, not even for me, the outsider who had soldered a wistful trio into an even more wistful quartet.

So we sat silently, bracing the wind in duffel coats, drinking, chain-smoking and watching sea and sky conceive that eternal cruel question: what if ...

As if on cue, Dan grew earnest. ‘Aslan, do you love Mazal?’

I nodded sentimentally. ‘I adore her!’

‘And desire her? As I do?’

‘Dan ...’

‘Answer me! Truthfully!’

‘She’s very attractive ... but ...’

‘That means you do. Good. Go for her!’

‘What?’

‘You’re somewhat younger, but that shouldn’t matter. She likes you. Admires you. Seduce her!’

‘Dan, you’re drunk ...’

‘I’m serious!’

I got angry. ‘What do you take me for? She’s your woman! Is that how you see me – someone who’d cuckold a friend?’

‘I could bear that. Besides, she’s not my woman ...’

‘She is – as far as I’m concerned!’

He held my hands. ‘You and I – we don’t count. She needs to be saved. You could save her ...’

‘Save her? From what?’

‘From herself. She wants to emulate Haydar. Only she wants to do it better. Disappear without trace.’

I scoffed. ‘What nonsense!’

‘I’m telling you!’

Suddenly I remembered my conversation with Mazal on the Büyükada boat. About going Haydar’s way. And the mention of inner demons. ‘How do you know?’

‘I know.’

I didn’t want to believe him. I wouldn’t. ‘How?’

‘I go through her things. I’m good at that. I leave no traces. I once served in Intelligence. She’s keeping a notebook, like Haydar did. Hides it in her bedroom. It’s all in there ...’

‘But why?’

‘Guilt, I imagine. You remember Haydar’s letter where he says she’s killing him?’

‘Yes ...’

‘Now she agrees with that.’

‘Rubbish! She told me several times: starting with VD, soldiers pick up all sorts of diseases overseas. Haydar was unlucky. He picked up cancer.’

‘She no longer believes that. It was a good palliative, she says. Now she’s convinced she caused his illness – broke his heart. She contends that if they’d stayed married, lived together like an ordinary couple and had children, he’d still be alive.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Sure, it is. But she’s come to believe it.’

‘And let’s not forget the treatment Haydar received in police stations and in gaol. People say it was the beatings that brought on his cancer.’

‘Yes, I heard that, too.’

‘Well, tell her that!’

‘I did. She won’t hear of it. She insists she killed Haydar. She wants to atone for it.’

‘Atone – how?’

‘Plans to swim out – also from Bodrum. A life for a life.’

I could no longer repudiate what deep down I knew was the truth.

My despondency reanimated him. ‘I’ve been thinking for months ... How to stop her? I’ve even consulted experts. But no one understands her as I do. There is a way – one only. She must love again. Must want a man again – sexually. I hoped to be that man. She won’t have me.’

‘And you think she’d have me?’

‘She might. Yes ...’

‘And if she does?’

‘We’d have saved her.’

‘And you? What would happen to you?’

‘Who cares?’

‘How would you feel towards me?’

‘Probably hate you for ever.’

‘Great!’

‘Fuck our sensitivities! Don’t you understand? This is our only chance to save her!’

‘It’s crazy ...’

‘Will you do it?’

‘I’m not convinced ...’

‘Will you do it?’

‘I’m writing a doctorate ... I’m away a lot ...’

‘Will you do it?’

I leaned back, too drunk to offer another objection.

He embraced me and wept, almost happily.