Young Turk (44 page)

The year 1958 had trampled on intellectuals and writers; 1959, we knew, would be worse. So we hoped for miracles and watched the calendar.

It was rumoured that Madam Ruj loved New Year’s Eve parties. Socialites always put her first on their guest lists. She attended as many parties as she could, osmosed from one to the other, even breakfasted with the diehards, at a famous tripery in Beyoğlu. (In a letter to Haydar, she had revealed that she actually hated these parties, but attended them because the general frenzy served as a litmus test for assessing marriageable men and women.)

This year, however, she had decided to forego them. The decision had alarmed Dan, leading him to think that her ‘swim’ might be imminent, a New Year’s resolution. He begged me to seduce her without delay.

I contacted her immediately. Much of my New Year’s holiday, I claimed, would be hard grind; consequently, I was in need of a morale-boosting drink with a dear friend. Dan, whom I would have asked to join us, I lied, was involved with cousins and relatives.

Mazal, rejecting the usual haunts as too boisterous – a reaction both Dan and I had counted on – invited me instead to dinner at her house on the island. She even suggested I should stay the night as boat services from the islands to the city, on New Year’s Eve, were severely reduced.

And so, bearing flowers, I went.

She had prepared a feast.

I sensed she was tense. (If she gets tense, Dan had said, it’s a good sign; it’ll mean she’s tantalized.)

She must have sensed my tension, too. (If she senses you are tense, Dan had said, that’s also a good sign; she’ll know you want her.)

We ate leisurely, savouring every morsel, but drank abstemiously. (If you both drink temperately, Dan had said, that’ll be the best sign; it’ll mean you want to be sober in order to have sex.)

And we talked. Surprisingly, very little about Haydar. Some about Dan. Mostly about aspects of modern poetry, the subject of my doctorate. To my delight, she had kept abreast of Turkish literature.

Then it was midnight.

We kissed, formally, to welcome 1959.

I had prepared a surprise for her. ‘I’ve written you a song.’ (One of your sexy songs, especially composed for her, Dan had assured me, should prove the clincher.)

She clapped her hands, delighted like a little girl. ‘Wonderful! Please play it!’

I picked up Haydar’s saz and sang:

forget

romantic love

forget

traditions

principles

friends

family

beau monde

the sea is libidinous

there is madness in our blood

so come

on this carnal night

let us

lose ourselves

in

each other’s

light

I put the saz away, wondering whether I had been too audacious.

She came over and kissed me, this time with some passion.

I responded with greater passion.

‘How long have you wanted me?’

I dissembled. ‘From the day we met.’

‘Dan told me. I didn’t believe him.’ She pointed to her bedroom. ‘Undress. Get into bed.’ She went into the bathroom.

I did as told.

She returned, naked.

She lit the candle on the dresser and switched off the light.

She lined up her lipstick, cigarette case and lighter on the bedside table.

I noticed her hands were shaking and her smile was strained.

I threw off the covers.

She stared at my erection – quite sadly – then folded into herself and collapsed.

Later, we talked.

She tried to reassure me that the debacle had nothing to do with me, that she had frozen many times before. I was a very attractive man, immensely kind and gentle. Most women would walk through fire for me. But, alas, whenever she dared be with a man, she crumbled.

It wasn’t as if she disliked sex. She was very keen on it. But at a safe distance. It had been so even with Haydar. Very intense, for example, after they had divorced. Which might also explain her difficulties with matrimony. Best to enjoy through other people’s marriages, as her great-aunt used to say. Better still, to imagine that the marriages she had arranged were her children. Why not? Hadn’t she created them in the first place?

Then she apologized again. She had used me. But, horrendous as that was, she could not have done so had I not been very dear to her. She had grown to love Dan and wanted to marry him. But she had not had the heart to subject him to the sort of fiasco I had just experienced. Yet she had kept hoping that if she could only conquer her paralysis, if she could just enjoy a man’s body naturally, she could then live with Dan happily ever after.

Thereafter we sat silently and held hands.

Then morning came and she asked me to leave.

Dan had been waiting for me at the pier. We took the first boat to Istanbul.

Though he was obviously relieved that Mazal and I had not made love, my account of the night perturbed him.

It was time, he decided, he had a heart-to-heart talk with her. Time to expunge the past and start the future. They would certainly marry – even if they never ever touched. They would be together. Loving. That’s all that mattered.

He returned to Büyükada on the next boat.

But he was too late.

Mazal had left.

We spent days scouring the bay of Bodrum.

To no avail.

She had disappeared without trace.

Then a rumour appeared – by all accounts, originating from the local fishermen ...

That every night from sunset until dawn, a mermaid with luminous black hair and a dolphin, rotund like a Buddha-figure, made love deliriously in the waters between Bodrum and the island of Kos.

I couldn’t decide whether I should shout for help or fall on to my knees and beg for mercy. There were four of them. Two on either side of me. I tried to walk between them, intrepidly, like a film hero being led to his execution – Ronald Colman, was it? But my legs shook and I could barely hold my urine.

True, I wasn’t going to my execution; but they were going to beat the shit out of me – that’s what they’d said – which was not much of a consolation.

I turned to Faruk, the fellow holding my right arm, the tallest of the four and the one with the strip of plaster on his forehead. It was he who had accused me of causing the wound on his head – actually, not a wound, but the sort of boil that afflicts men who don’t have regular sex and won’t masturbate. Not to mention the fact that, even if I’d wanted to hurt the turd, there was no way I could have reached his forehead since he was twice my height. Not to mention also that I’d never met him before, though I’d sometimes seen him in my reaches of the Bosporus. On this occasion he had approached me at the tram stop in Arnavutköy and, thinking that he wanted to ask directions, I had stopped to talk to him. ‘You sure you’re not mistaking me for someone else?’

‘Positive.’

He looked at the others: Nuri, Salih and Hasan – ‘brothers’ who had answered his call to help him fight this superman – me – who had beaten him so mercilessly. Nothing less than family honour was at stake.

They answered in unison. ‘No. You’re the man.’

I turned to Faruk again. ‘Would you at least agree that you’re much bigger than I am? That there’s no way I could have punched you on the forehead?’

‘You could have – if I was asleep.’

‘But you weren’t. You said we got into a fight. You said that’s when I hit you.’

‘I often fall asleep when I fight.’

Normally I would have laughed. It’s always courteous to admire wit. But how can you when you’re shaking with fear? I tried another tack. ‘Don’t you think it’s beneath you – and beneath your he-men brothers – to beat the shit out of a weakling like me?’

‘No. It’ll be good fun. Besides, you’re not a weakling.’ He pointed at the strip of plaster on his forehead. ‘You hurt me.’

‘I didn’t touch you. I didn’t even know you until you stopped me and pretended you wanted to ask me something.’

‘I did ask you something. Or rather brother Hasan did. He asked you why you hit me.’

‘And I told him you’ve got the wrong man.’

‘With due respect, we don’t believe you.’

Finally, I tried my best ploy in circumstances like these. ‘How about if we all go to the cinema? There’s a good film. Gary Cooper. I’ll buy the tickets.’

‘We’ve seen it.’

‘Something you haven’t seen then?’

‘We’ve seen all the films.’

‘All right – the music hall? Lots of women with bare legs ...?’

‘You want us to masturbate? And walk around the rest of the day in a defiled state?’

‘No! No! You could – just watch.’

‘And get frustrated?’

‘Isn’t there any way I can change your mind?’

‘Look, stop all your clever stuff! We’ll rough you up a bit, then let you go. You’ll be good as new in three days. If you fight back, you’ll be in hospital for a month.’

I sighed. Three days compared to a month wasn’t too bad. But it was still three days too many. More to the point, I’d had a bellyful of these arbitrary beatings. Layabouts picking on passers-by to prove – to whom? to themselves? – that they were brave and strong. I didn’t have the stomach for such foolery any more. Either battle fatigue or undergraduate years in England had softened me. I just wanted to cultivate my garden peacefully.

I looked back disconsolately towards the café where Melek was waiting for me. It was three in the afternoon, the hottest hour of the hottest month. Everybody was indoors snoring with the shutters down. Which was why Melek and I could meet and not be seen by members of our respective families – or worse, by gossip-mongers – who were already outraged by our love affair. A Muslim girl going out with a Jew! And that wasn’t all: we had both moved out of the parental home and shared flats with friends – not the done thing, though we were both over twenty and I had already spent some years living alone in England. Indisputably, such independence turned us, in the minds of the elders, into the sort of degenerates whose every thought was tumescent with sex. (But then, that’s how it should be!) Consequently both set of parents, suspecting – rightly, of course – that whenever we could we would run off to the hills to do what nature urged us to do, had a network of spies on surveillance duty. (Most of the time, we managed to avoid these spooks. After all, we had been suckled on Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.)