Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (13 page)

‘I
strongly
recommend that you make friends with a gun. An academic makes a poor fighter but a good marksman. If you've picked up the slightest scientific knowledge from your father, within four months in our shooting range you might even be able to reach the level of one of our high-calibre marksmen. Then you'll find you've gained in self-confidence and learned eventually how to shoot without thinking, like a Zen philosopher. Finally, my son, guns are less dangerous to have as friends than women.

‘We charge $240 a month for three sessions a week. If you don't ask for a receipt you'll get a 10 per cent discount and won't have to pay VAT.'

I took his visiting card with its crumpled corners, wondering if he'd used it to pick his teeth, and muttered that I would call him at the earliest opportunity. In front of Altunizade Mosque I took a taxi home, where I consulted a map of the city. It includes 48,000 streets and thoroughfares, and it didn't surprise me to find that Eşrefsaat, the address for the competition I had happened to choose from the telephone directory, was the street next to the mosque where my father was shot. Was this disaster or salvation approaching like a slow pestilence? I was shaken but not at all afraid. For therapy, I read W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot.

I felt almost guilty when I woke up without depression. Remembering it was already Thursday morning, I cut my nails. According to İfakat, cutting your nails on Monday meant you'd suffer torments, on Tuesday that your child would die, on Wednesday that bad news was in the offing, and to cut nails at night shortens life. I don't believe in superstitions, touch wood, but suppose İfakat was right for once? I enjoyed the old chauffeur Hayrullah's surprise when I summoned him to visit our main office. Apart from the meetings of the Board of Directors, which I attend on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I am not involved in the daily business of administration. Today I had a personal meeting with two bankers from Harvard (concerning the world logistics of putting three Ukrainian ballerinas on the stage). Then I made a telephone call to İz Bozok. My heart beat faster when I heard her warbling voice, ‘You've stirred my journalist's instincts. I was going to ring you tomorrow anyway.' Plucking up courage, I invited her to İskele, our family restaurant, for Saturday evening and began to laugh when she answered, ‘Afterwards will you show me your father's books instead of his stamp collection?' I thought to myself that if Dalga heard her she would comment, ‘My dear Arda, this girl will certainly give in to you at the first opportunity.'

As soon as he picked up the phone Chief Commissioner Kasnak belched, then was silent as though waiting for me to say ‘I beg your pardon.' I let him know I wished to enrol at the shooting range for practice at the end of June, and ‘yes', I wanted a receipt and ‘no', I hadn't given up the search for my father's killer.

(I myself don't know what I'm escaping from, and I'm hiding from myself just what I'm looking for.)

I knew how touched the waiters at Ä°skele would be when they saw me there with a woman, but I didn't expect them to be so attentive in their efforts to impress my girlfriend. With the help of white wine I began to tell my story, curious to know what her attitude would be towards me. I poured out my
inner
life in detail, but for the time being, from all those pages that resembled a detective story, I omitted completely the paragraph about losing my first love to my father. I relaxed as I talked, and Ä°z listened wide-eyed.

I remember her saying, ‘Life doesn't differentiate between the real and the imaginary, it's the children who pay the penalty for conflict between two intelligent human beings.'

As I was paying the bill I noticed Jale giggling with her snobbish friends three tables away. (Are your ears ringing, Adil Kasnak, my future Hodja?) Ä°z noticed my expression changing.

‘What's up, have they multiplied the bill instead of adding it up?' she quipped.

‘In this case the problem's beyond mathematics; you won't believe it but just a few steps away is my former fiancée ...'

‘Hmm, a cinematic situation ... I can help you in two ways. I can either pray or hold your hand so you won't be humiliated when we pass their table.'

‘I certainly need both,' I said and clutching her left hand, headed for the exit with a silent prayer, aware of the mural of fish still grinning after fifteen years. Thanks to the spring chill I clung more tightly to İz's hand and we walked along Çengelköy like awkward lovers until we reached Hayrullah dozing in his ancient vehicle.

Unused to guests, İfakat brought coffee at the wrong moment; and when she took İz on a hasty tour of the mansion, she was as nervous as an officer taking his superiors round on a dormitory inspection. Our guest's only remark was, ‘Would it be disrespectful if I said the place had the atmosphere of a haunted house or a chic collection of
objets d'art
?'

In the library I quickly withdrew my hand as it stretched towards the collection of my father's musical compositions. (Fearing she might fall in love with his soul I took refuge by pulling out instead the CD of Renée Fleming where I had first discovered ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me'.)

She read aloud a note my father had made in a book called
A Hittite Glossary
.
¹
‘If I can't write about something from this library I'll go mad,' she said.

From her shoulder bag, embroidered with birds, she produced a notebook and I began to watch my energetic guest as she listed rare handwritten books and books from the earliest period of the printing press. Her face hadn't that blinding beauty that turns heads but was illuminated by an inner light. And her strong personality and mischievous manner were enough to cast a spell over me.

Collecting the material for the article she was planning to write, she delighted me by informing me that she would like to return on Monday morning with a photographer.

She wanted to go home sooner than I expected.

‘It was a really interesting evening and I didn't feel in the least awkward at being alone with a man,' she said as she left.

I recalled that when Hayrullah had invited her to enter his cab, suspicious of an interloper, I hadn't even asked her she lived.

‘Arda, something tells me this nice girl is going to bring some colour to the place,' İfakat said after she'd left.

I just managed to refrain from replying, ‘Don't you know there's no happiness for me in this world?'

Still, I went to bed with a book called
Conversations with the Mediterranean Medlar Tree
, in which Hikmet Birand had poured his heart out describing a rare tree:

On the peak of Mt Çal behind Dikmen grows an old Mediterranean medlar tree. A tree where the vows of so many simple longings hang on dry branches along with the faded red and green prayer rags. I love that tree.

I was overwhelmed by the desert wind that blew through the words. (And to marry İz on Mt Çal with Hikmet Birand and the medlar tree as witnesses, and leap awake with the midday ezan floating from the city mosques.) I didn't get up until I'd finished the book. I was curious to know in what year we had lost this pastoral writer. I must find Selçuk Altun again. He had given the book to my father as a present the month he was killed.

‘Since you're consulting me instead of the internet, you obviously want to know much more about Hikmet Birand than the date of his death in 1972,' he said sardonically. ‘He was a close friend of the celebrated critic Nurullah Ataç and also my wife's great-uncle.'

I swore never to call this arrogant man again.

Opening the old door to the balcony, I cast a quick eye over the garden, to see if it was ready for İz's inspection next morning. May was here but again I forgot to welcome the carpet of spring growth. (At one time in my life the strange garden my mother watered even when it rained had been my confidante.) I'd go down to the garden as a slight breeze wafted the mysterious smell of the wild olive tree to my nostrils, branch by branch, like breaking waves driven to land by an offshore breeze. According to my father the overbearing Japanese persimmon tree was by itself enough to destroy a garden. My father found the atmosphere of this well-kept garden artificial, so we used to walk to Alemdağ Avenue to absorb the spring.

I drank a glass of grapefruit juice from the breakfast table and went down to the neighbouring avenue. I passed the market's resident pretzel-seller, with a word, ‘If you don't ask how many lira to the dollar I'll buy a pretzel-roll,' and turned into Alemdağ. (At the first bite my pretzel fell to the ground and I imagined my mother scolding me from heaven.) Should I walk faster? Every step took me back twelve years, month by month, square by square. The denser the traffic the more and more exotic became the aroma of the wild olive trees that poured into the avenue. My father loved the clumps of shameless weeds and nameless flowers multiplying in the old wall's embrace, and saw their function as ‘a healer in the tunnel of time'. I dived into a garden of debris, a dodgy inheritance whose owner had fled to Buenos Aires. Behind the garden was a graffitied wall, left over from the '60s: my father would say, ‘It's not funny but I feel like laughing.'

I sheltered in the shade of a dwarf plum tree by a dry well which had frightened me in my childhood, and at the sound of the afternoon ezan I dozed off.

Long live Kuzguncuk! I had always thought it was a quiet district that had sheltered Ottoman refugees fleeing from the Balkans. If my father had gone along İcadiye Street, which leads headlong down to the sea, he might have said, ‘The market has a rural atmosphere with its boxy stalls radiating from a central hub.' I had no difficulty in finding Bereketli Street that led into the Avenue, and as I walked among the attractive wooden houses I was as excited as though I'd got lost in the midst of a miniature city. I had a bunch of flowers in my hand – I didn't know what kind – and a packet of almond paste bought specially by İfakat. Climbing upstairs to the third floor of the apartment block called İnşirah, I knew I was about to learn the meaning of that name.

And, wearing kitchen gloves, İz opened the door and said, ‘Welcome to the building of
inner comfort
.' The geometrically patterned kilim, a non-figurative sketch and a map signed Heritiers de Homann on the wall seemed to demonstrate the way two people who share a house can live in awkward togetherness. Zuhâl, who wore John Lennon spectacles and edited the ‘city-life' section of a competing newspaper, had proudly hung the antique map that included her birthplace Tirebolu (Tripoli) on the wall. While the hosts were preparing savoury pancakes in the kitchen, her swarthy boyfriend, Zafer, with oily hair dangling from both sides of a head that seemed too small for his square-shaped body, was shooting a line about his degrees in economics and sociology from a minor university in Florida. I was warming to this fellow who taught sociology in a state university, but mainly supported himself with the rent he collected from two shops inherited from his aunt.