Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (23 page)

Deserted Eşrefsaat was as innocent as a Fellini film-set waiting eagerly for morning. As I turned into Parlak Street I wondered if Asım would know when he returned to his master's house that he had planned this suicide.

‘He's an Orphan Now' were the words written over the boot of the taxi I hailed in Şemsi Paşa Avenue. Between the two thick volumes I took gently from the plastic bag I found a goodbye note:

Dear Arda
,

Well done! I hope your dreams never become nightmares because of me
.

We were both the victims of marriages that began with love but ended in hatred. Because of this earth there cannot be a heaven. There is no escape from alternate states of heaven and hell, birth and death
.

It was not possible to ask my nervy Gürsel Ergene Hodja to solve the problem of how to transport to heaven those who have finished their punishment in hell. I wish I could remember who told me there was a great library in purgatory for the gang of philosophers, poets and writers
...

Your fellow conspirator
,

B
.

If Gürsel Ergene was the angry man whose photograph resembled my father, should I have been afraid because his name rhymed with Mürsel? I very much wanted to plunge into Bedirhan's diary before I went home if only the driver with the bushy moustache wouldn't turn round to look. I knew I would find İfakat in the sitting room dozing in front of a film. I entered my office and hid the diary among the rare books on Istanbul – to study closely at the first opportunity. I checked the magazine and barrel of the automatic gun and crammed it into the bottom of my briefcase, intending to get rid of it. It didn't contain a single bullet ...

Having just commited the second murder in Eşrefsaat, I was shattered by news of my uncle's death. On my way to collect his body, İz spoke to me on the phone, ‘I want to let you know that last night I dreamt you were attacked by a half-black, half-white man waving a scimitar and you killed him with a gun your mother handed to you at the last minute.'

Adil Kasnak came with me. Reading Bedirhan's diary, I was comforted by this massive man sitting next to me who, whenever he wasn't muttering, was snoring heavily. I didn't cry for my uncle whom I'd never seen weep even for his own mother's death. My last relative, who never thought evil of anyone in his whole life, had met his unusual death a little sooner than he expected. On the way back to Istanbul, his co-traveller Gun told me that he was following a snow leopard and her two cubs when he slipped and fell into a crevasse twenty metres deep. When they took him from the morgue I realized I hadn't ever seen him with his eyes closed. He looked as if he was waiting to see the end of his dream. He seemed at ease, like a civil servant on his way home with his pay, dozing off on a public bus. I couldn't help thinking that if grandfather had seen the hundreds who attended his funeral, from businessman to kebab-house owner, from tour guide to betting-shop runner, he would most certainly have been annoyed. For the first time in my life, I felt proud of a family member as I held back my tears and saw humanity grieving for Salvador Taragano, the man who had left me almost all his wealth while he was still alive.

I knew I would get caught up in Bedirhan's diary and finish it on the Istanbul–Katmandu–Istanbul trip. I read all the way through this wasted life. Although a painful inner world had been concealed under a blanket of external dilemmas, nevertheless he had managed to enjoy travelling to exotic climates. The possibility that his grandfather had shot mine, Baki's dollar-oriented death trade, and the fact that the address of a pervert who ended up as victim instead of hunter had been given to enter a competition in which Bedirhan used the diary of a suicidal writer looked as meaningless as a cartoon without a caption. It was as if the joy of finding his future Angel of Death when we first met was concealed by his line, ‘I've found A.' (I never recalled meeting him on my visits to Dalga.) I guessed he had sold the remainder of his books at nominal prices to secondhand book dealers he didn't know.

Reading between the lines, it was clear he had consigned the wellbeing of eccentric Gürsel Ergene to me. I went to the hospital wondering if I would meet a devil in disguise, only to learn that he had committed suicide the same day as Bedirhan.

‘May he rest in peace, he seems to have suffocated himself with a paper bag he made out of pages torn from his diary,' said the hard-boiled nurse. I told İz everything that happened, apart from Bedirhan's unloaded gun. When I gulped and said, ‘You have listened to secrets a man would tell only to his wife, so now you must marry me,' she caressed my cheeks with both hands and said, ‘Not a bad idea, Arda. I'm pregnant.'

At first I was embarrassed like a young boy whose circumcised penis is on show for the first time in a women's Turkish bath! Then I sensed the explosion of fireworks in every cell in my body cells. I embraced İz but and then made for the ridges of Çamlıca. I was thankful for the abundance of smells in the deserted streets and for the existence of an earth I had begun to sense again. Following a tumbling wind I turned into peaceful Huzur Street. I leaned back against an old weeping willow, my hands behind me, as the sound of the mosques in the background arose for the noon ezan. Very slowly I closed my eyes. I watched my life go by like a film, but from the end back to the beginning. Even when a playful thought occurred to me, I didn't open my eyes. I had to ask Selçuk Altun – I was going to give him Bedirhan's diary after censoring it – to find me a good classical guitar teacher. Cahid Hodja, may he rest in heaven, used to say, ‘Your hand suits a gun, you'd make a good musician.'

I thought that only film stars shed tears with their eyes shut.

 

1
   Sam Peckinpah's
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
.

2
   The Arabic formula
bismillah
!, meaning ‘in the name of God the Compassionate, our Saviour', used particularly before starting a major project.

3
   A method of presenting a word or a phenomenon by assigning numbers to the Arabic alphabet.

4
   
Eyüp Sultan Loti Coffee House and Surroundings
(1966), M. Mes'ud Koman.

5
   (Formerly) the Grand Mufti, or head of the Islamic hierarchy responsible for all religious matters.

6
   On it was a statue of the Emperor Markianos (451–457). There was a rumour that it could tell if girls who walked past were virgins or not. It was even reported that the statue broke when Justinian II played the same trick on his sister-in-law.

7
   Eunuch.

8
   Energetic.

9
   Adonis / İlhan Berk / Yves Bonnefoy / Eugenio de Andrade / Louise Glück / Geoffrey Hill / Philippe Jacottet / Mario Luzi / W.S. Mervin / Wislawa Szymborska.