Young Turk (11 page)

Weeks passed.

We visited Bilâl’s parents every day. We told them we were mourners, too, that Bilâl’s loss was equally unbearable for us because he was our brother in every sense of the word, except by parentage. I imagine we were insufferably insensitive. Yet Bilâl’s parents, particularly Pepo, clung to our company gratefully. As if wanting to know their son all over again, they asked endless questions about him. They laughed and cried at all the crazy, boyish things he had done and begged us to repeat his more outlandish capers. We recounted as best we could, often exaggerating details, invariably glorifying the deeds. They listened avidly. They no longer quarrelled; they even held hands dumbly. As Naim bitterly commented on one occasion, Bilâl had had to sacrifice his life to reconcile his parents.

During these weeks, my father – and the Turkish authorities – continued to investigate Bilâl’s fate through various channels. But all these efforts led to dead ends.

Then it was mid-November. And we, the British, were cock-a-hoop. Military analyses confirmed that, after El Alamein, Germany was no longer a threat in North Africa. The end of the Third Reich was near.

As if this were the news she had been waiting for, Ester started avoiding us. Did she, with her Jewish imagination, think that a wounded Germany would be even more ruthless towards its victims? Whenever we went to see her and Pepo, she decided either to go shopping or to drop in on a friend. Pepo, who had to receive us on his own, looked increasingly tense and apologetic.

Soon we started hearing that Ester was not going shopping or calling on friends, but was roaming through Istanbul. Sometimes she would undertake these rambles methodically, district by district, at other times, she would move about aimlessly. Inevitably, this mysterious behaviour spawned all sorts of rumours. Some said that she had a lover, others that she had several; still others, that she could no longer bear Pepo’s company; one or two implied that she was losing her mind. The grief of losing her son, the guilt from having lost him because he had tried to save his parents’ marriage by rescuing her family, would be unbearable for any person, they said.

Pepo sold his business to pay the
Varlιk Vergisi
, or Wealth Tax. He went to work as a caretaker in a textile factory, a job that kept him away from home at nights and much of the day. This appeared to satisfy Ester. She stopped roaming. However, she still avoided us.

Pepo continued to see us, almost daily, but in the afternoons, after school.

The year 1943 arrived.

Churchill, seeking to lure Turkey into the ranks of the Allies, met with President İnönü.

February brought news of the Red Army’s victory, after months of heroic resistance, at Stalingrad. Confronted by the Soviet counter-offensive and the merciless Russian winter, the Germans now faced a cataclysm similar to that suffered by Napoleon.

The economic situation deteriorated. Naim and Can, increasingly required to help their fathers, began to miss some of our meetings with Pepo. I strongly objected to their truancies, even accused them of betraying Bilâl’s memory.

Pepo explained the prevailing situation. Anti-semitism had finally seeped into Turkey. Some senior politicians, still nostalgic for the Turco-German alliance of the First World War, believed that a new alliance with Germany would repair history and restore the old Ottoman glory. So they had been easily captivated by Nazi ideology. Consequently, aided and abetted by lackeys and opportunists in important government departments, they were blaming the Jews for Turkey’s economic problems. Unscrupulous journalists were competing with each other to revive the hackneyed Christian lies about the Jews’ time-honoured pursuits of usury, speculation, exploitation and the conspiracy for world dominion. Cartoons inspired by that Nazi publication,
Der Stürmer
, and depicting the Jews as monstrously obese, long-nosed profiteers, counterpointed these slanders. As a result, since last November, the Turkish National Assembly had levied a discriminatory tax on all Jews – and, for good measure, on certain other minorities. Known as the
Varlιk Vergisi
, this tax was so inflated that few Jews could pay it. The penalties for non-payment were extremely severe. Consequently countless Jews were not only having all their possessions seized but were also being deported to labour camps where they would ‘work off their debts’. Pepo, who had sold his business in order to pay the tax, thought that sooner or later he, too, would be sent to a camp.

Then it was 12 February, Bilâl’s birthday. This year it was also to be his bar mitzvah, the day he would have joined his community as an adult.

We had arranged to meet Pepo in our usual
çayhane
. Instead, unexpectedly, Ester summoned us to their home.

She greeted us warmly, almost as affectionately as in the old days. But there was a strangeness to her. Despite her thick make-up, she had a neglected air. Her hair, which normally shone like ebony – and which Bilâl had inherited – had lost its lustre. And she was in an unstable mood: very excited one moment, in a trance the next. I remember feeling uneasy and looking at Pepo for reassurance. He seemed to be in a reverie, eyes fixed on his folded hands.

Hurriedly, Ester served tea and cakes. For a while, brandishing a fixed smile, she watched us eat. Then, suddenly, with a flourish, she took out a letter from her handbag and waved it at us. ‘Bilâl is alive!’

I jumped up. We all did. We fired questions at her. Naim wept. Somehow Ester calmed us down. She kept on waving her letter. ‘From my sister. He saved them. Bilâl saved them.’ Then she placed the letter on the table. ‘You can read it yourselves ...’

This time we responded more coherently. One of us, noting that the letter had been written in Hellenic script, said we couldn’t read Greek. Someone else urged her to tell us what had happened. I kept asking, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ And wondering why Pepo kept silent.

She related the events impersonally: ‘Bilâl found my sister. Gave her the passports. They’re in Macedonia now. My father. Fortuna. The children. In Skopje. Safe there ...’

I shouted. We all did. Skopje had a large Turkish minority. Turkey and Germany were not at war. So Turkish subjects were indeed safe. ‘Is Bilâl with them? In Skopje?’

She stared at us, at first distractedly, then with an amiable smile. ‘Oh, no, no, no. He and Marko were coming back. Well, you know: Marko’s boat was spotted. So they had to separate. Bilâl was wise. He didn’t run to the border. He decided to hide. In a monastery. On Mount Athos.’

After a very long silence, one of us managed to ask, ‘How do you know?’

‘Bilâl sent word with a priest. To Fortuna.’ She pointed at the letter. ‘It’s all in there. Read it!’

We saw very little of Ester after that – just occasionally, in the street. She never acknowledged us. We felt that having told us about Bilâl she had decided that she had discharged her last obligation to his friends and could now expunge us from her life.

Oblivious to Pepo’s pain and embarrassment, we continued to pester him with the cruellest question: had Ester told us the truth?

He always gave the same answer: ‘You saw the letter...’

Then the Wealth Tax claimed Pepo. He was sent to Aşkale, an infamous labour camp in eastern Turkey, where, we later learned, some twenty middle-aged inmates, unable to withstand the heavy work and the atrocious conditions, died of heart attacks.

Pepo survived and returned to Istanbul in March 1944 after the Turkish government, finally acknowledging the iniquity of the Wealth Tax, had abolished it and pardoned all the defaulters. By then I had returned to Britain. But my last moment with him, as we embraced at Haydarpaşa railway station before he was herded on to the train to Aşkale, both of us trying to ignore the stench rising from the tattered soldier’s fatigue he had been issued, will stay with me for ever.

The sixth of June saw D-Day.

My father was transferred to European Command for the big push to Berlin. My mother, having been coaxed by a friend into helping out in a rehabilitation centre for disabled servicemen, started to return to a purposeful life. I went to Scotland, to my father’s old school, to continue my studies.

Like every Briton, I lived through the last years of the war vacillating between grief and joy, anguish and hope. But every day I sojourned, sometimes briefly, sometimes at length, in my adopted Turkey, in the company of Naim, Can and Bilâl, my soul mates.

And so, no sooner had we celebrated VE-Day than I began to seek ways of tracing Bilâl.

It was a horrendous time. Every day brought further monstrous details of the extent of Nazi atrocities committed against European Jewry. People began to use a leaden word,
genocide
, oratorically, as if they had just coined it. But I think they all felt – I am sure everybody did – that they lacked the imagination to conceive of what it really meant.

Months passed.

I kept drawing blanks.

Naim and Can, with whom I was in regular contact, fared no better with their inquiries in Turkey.

Ester bombarded with petitions the various authorities who dealt with Jewish survivors and displaced people. But none of her family had been traced. It seemed probable that if Fortuna and the rest had really found asylum in Skopje, they would have been deported to extermination camps despite their Turkish passports.

Given this grim prediction, all we could do was hope that Bilâl had found sanctuary at Mount Athos. But of course we knew, deep down, that, like Ester, we were indulging in make-believe.

Eventually, we decided to direct our inquiries to Greece. But that was easier said than done. The resistance groups, the communist-backed EAM-ELAS and the centrist-royalist EDES which, since the early forties, had carried out a guerrilla war against the Germans, had now turned against each other. And although British troops were trying to establish some sort of peace, chaos ruled.

Inevitably, we turned to my father for help. Since he had been very fond of Bilâl and, indeed, had admired his bravery, he promised to pull some strings.