Bliss: A Novel (14 page)

Meryem also wanted to hug Nermin, her friend from primary school. With a quick glance at her mother, Nermin kissed Meryem, and whispered, “Good-bye.”

The other women wished Meryem a safe journey, telling her how lucky she was to go to Istanbul. “Life must be good there,” they said. “If it weren’t, the other girls wouldn’t have stayed.” In spite of their words, their tone made her feel she was being deceived as though she were a child. A few of them giggled, and so did the men nearby.

Meryem, eager to kiss her father’s hand and say farewell, looked anxiously for him in the crowd, but he was not there. She did not have the courage to ask why.

In the distance, Cafer let out a shriek and waved his arms wildly at Meryem. “Don’t go!” he screamed, but a shower of stones sent him running.

After spending so many days alone in the barn, Meryem was frightened of this attention. She wanted the comfort of one warm, reassuring face before she left the village. Turning to Cemal, she pleaded, “I want to see Bibi before I go. She will be upset if I don’t say good-bye to her.”

Cemal did not answer but directed his steps toward Gülizar’s house. The crowd followed them.

Meryem knocked on the door, but nobody answered. She felt a dull ache in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps the old woman did not want to see her. She banged on the door, and the third time she knocked, Bibi finally opened it. Her eyes were red and swollen. Glancing at the crowd thronging the doorway, she hugged Meryem.

“I’m going to Istanbul, Bibi.”

“Yes, child,” the woman replied, her voice cracking. “I know.”

“Maybe you could come, too … later, I mean.”

“Maybe, my darling girl…”

Then a strange thing happened. Without any warning, she broke into a fit of weeping, hugging Meryem so tight the girl felt as if her ribs would crack.

Becoming calmer, she sobbed, “Forgive me.”

Meryem was stunned. She kissed the old woman’s wrinkled, bony hand. “Don’t cry, Bibi,” she said. “Please give me your blessing. You’ve done so much for me.”

“Forgive me,” Bibi answered. “Forgive this feeble old woman. I did try, but it was useless.”

Then she turned and shut the door.

The crowd followed Cemal and Meryem all the way to the bus stop, where three dilapidated minibuses waiting for passengers were standing outside the cemetery where Meryem’s mother was buried. “Please let me visit my mother’s grave,” Meryem begged Cemal.

He hesitated for a moment, but, looking at the passengers and seeing that the minibus was about to depart, he said sternly, “Get in.”

The passengers on the bus greeted Cemal, without even looking at Meryem. With a loud rumble, the vehicle set off, and the crowd waved. “Have a good trip,” some called out, laughing.

The minibus turned on to the main road and started toward the distant hill. Meryem felt faint. She had been in such a vehicle only once before. Then they had been on a trip to the public baths, with their bags and the bundles of food they had prepared. That time she was nauseated and this time it was the same. Clutching her ancient bag to her chest, she rolled herself up into a ball and gritted her teeth. She only had to endure the feeling of nausea until they reached the top of the hill. Once there, she would see Istanbul, and the journey would be over.

Curled up in her seat, Meryem began to think about something that had always puzzled her—the other girls who had gone to Istanbul. If it was only just over the hill, why had they not come back at least for a visit? Even on foot it should not take too long to go there and come back. Meryem decided that she would be different. She would walk back home as soon as all the trouble was forgotten. This promise consoled her as the village faded in the distance, and she became filled with the excitement of actually being in that wonderful city that so far she had only seen in her dreams.

As they came toward the top of the hill, her excitement reached a crescendo, and she shut her eyes. She wanted to see the city all at once spread out before her as it had been in her dreams. When she opened her eyes, the dreamy smile on her face quickly changed to bewilderment. They had crossed the hill, but there was no city to be seen, just a vast plain stretching out toward a line of hazy purple mountains in the distance. Farmers, tractors, and villages could be seen among the cultivated fields, and the narrow road wound among them like a snake. Every now and then, the windows of a passing minibus reflected the sun, sending a flash of light into Meryem’s eyes. She was confused, but did not have the courage to ask Cemal where they were. Her childhood playmate had vanished, giving place to a strange, frightening, older man.

“Was I mistaken?” Meryem thought to herself. “Maybe Istanbul is actually beyond those far-off purple mountains.”

A SAILBOAT ON THE OPEN SEA

This Benetau sailboat had nothing in common with the craft İrfan and Hidayet had sailed as teenagers. Their boat had started out life as a dilapidated two-and-a-half-meter-long rowboat, and they had worked hard for many days to make it into a sailboat, fashioning a makeshift mast and a cotton sail out of odds and ends. The result looked more like a toy than a boat, but it was on that boat that they had learned everything about sailing—how to handle the helm and rudder and how to read the winds, the stars, and the movement of the sea.

They had learned everything about sailing by themselves, as if learning to walk for the first time. Once you got used to doing it, you never forgot.

İrfan was able to determine the direction of the prevailing wind by the prickling of his neck, the roll of the waves, the vegetation along the coast, the seabirds, and the smell of the air. He sailed in the comfortable security of his childhood knowledge. The Benetau was a large three-cabined boat with all kinds of technological innovations including a sliding keel, making it easy to maneuver. The rental company in Ayvalık had been eager to offer the best boat available to such an honored client and was overjoyed when the professor was prepared to hire it for the entire spring and summer.

İrfan could have rented a boat in some other, nearer coastal town, but he had chosen Ayvalık. He wanted to start his journey from the spot where Hidayet had sailed out to sea so many years before.

The boat had been in need of some last-minute adjustments. Had he stayed in the town overnight, he would have had time to load provisions and make a few other arrangements. However, İrfan had been adamant in deciding to weigh anchor as soon as possible. Feeling as if his life depended on heading for the open sea that very night, he could not postpone his departure for a single day.

Early that morning, when he had woken up in his old bed in his mother’s house, he had known that he would spend that night at sea. As soon as he got up, his feet instinctively searched for his slippers. One of his mother’s inflexible rules was that you did not step on a stone floor with bare feet. With the passing years, his mother’s authority had dwindled, but İrfan was conscious that he still adhered to certain habits she had instilled in him.

İrfan started the engine, weighed anchor, and left the harbor. Tiny whitecaps dotted the green Aegean Sea. Islands stood out in the distance. İrfan unfurled the sails and stopped the engine, letting the boat glide with the comforting tailwind. An occasional rub from a rope, the whistle of the wind, and the cries of seagulls were the only sounds he heard. He submitted himself to the will of the sea, as the noise of the town slowly faded behind him.

Although the young men working for the boat-rental company had fallen over themselves to help him, the professor had set out to sea with only two bags of supplies they had managed to get to him at the last minute. İrfan believed that at sea he could solve any problem. Hidayet had thought the same. Their small boat had capsized many times, and the sailcloth had often ripped, but they had always saved themselves, enjoying every moment of their adventures.

İrfan considered that it was the Greeks who more often had such strong feelings for the sea. They were the real seamen. Even though the Turks had lived on the Anatolian peninsula for a thousand years, they remained a steppe people, never becoming skilled seamen. But the spirit of Xenophon’s soldiers, who, after fleeing from the Persians, shouted
“Thalassa, Thalassa!”
upon reaching the Black Sea, must have somehow made an impression on the Turks now living on the Aegean coast. That
“Thalassa”
represented a belief: “We have arrived at the water, with which we are familiar. Now that we have reached the safety of the sea, we will surely find our way.”

İrfan had a similar belief to comfort him. Surrounded by phosphorescence, salt, fish, wind, the sun, and Homer’s wine-dark sea, he would be able to solve all his problems. Those who had not seen the Aegean in all its moods could not understand why Homer had called it the “wine-dark sea.” İrfan was now sailing at full speed over that same sea, which he would swear was wine-colored in the afternoon light. He could now try to escape from thoughts of the city, civilization, and all the rules that had oppressed him and follow his initial plan of finding a deserted island on which to spend the night.

The boat that was to effect the professor’s escape seemed to İrfan like a boat from some mythological fantasy, its sails filled with a wind from the Cyclades sent by Zeus, the king of the gods, to save the soul of its passenger.

As night descended, the wind dropped, and the sea became calm. The purple-brown waters slowly darkened, and İrfan, filled with an indescribable content in the face of all this beauty, realized that the island where he wanted to spend the night was still quite far away. “Who cares?” he thought. He would spend the night on the boat.

The depth finder showed about nineteen yards of water under the keel. When the anchor found bottom, the boat began to turn, performing a barely discernible waltz. İrfan furled the sails and started to enjoy his first Aegean night—or rather, the first night of his new life.

It was quite dark when İrfan opened his bag of provisions and took out some cheese, bread, tomatoes, and a bottle of white wine. He set the table in the stern with the greatest of care. He even found wineglasses though he did not need them. He preferred to tip back his head and drink from the bottle: He and Hidayet had emptied many a bottle of cheap wine together in this way, paying for it by spending the next few days in bed.

İrfan was a free man now, bound by no one else’s rules. He had abandoned all codes of human behavior and chosen to be alone to find his metanoia. He felt proud of having done what everyone dreams of, but few have the courage to do, and he was as free as the gulls circling above the boat. Alone in the middle of the Aegean Sea, he raised his bottle in a toast to his new life, one full of adventures as yet unknown.

The professor had finally altered his life. He would not collapse and die among the expensive armchairs and beds. No ambulance would rush him through his neighborhood streets to a hospital. He was free of a computerized life full of bank accounts, classification systems, tax records, cholesterol measurements, and calorie counts. He had time to make up for the life he had wasted in conforming to social rules, in being sober-minded, and in suppressing the storm in his soul.

He remembered a time long ago, when he had been drinking beer with Hidayet at the old Customs Pier in Izmir, and his friend had asked him what he would do after high school.

“Go to university, of course,” İrfan had replied. “I’ve passed the exam, and I’ve been given a full scholarship. I’m going to Istanbul.”

“And after that?”

“A job, a wife, money—a life!”

“You’re trying to be just like your father.”

Hidayet’s words wounded İrfan. To be like his gaunt father, the chain smoker, who seemed to shrink farther into his brown uniform with each passing day, was the last thing he wanted.

“No, I’m not,” he objected. “I’ll have money, fame, and power.”

“You know best, skipper.”

Hidayet’s tone indicated that their paths would part. “I’m leaving soon,” he continued. “All I want is to put out to sea, without knowing beforehand what life has in store for me.”

With the money he had saved by working at the shipyard, Hidayet had found an abandoned wreck, which he had converted into a seven-meter sailing boat using planks and lumber from other scrapped vessels. It was beautiful and sailed perfectly.

İrfan now raised his glass to Hidayet, the Aegean Sea, and to his own recent decision. “I’m following in your footsteps, my friend—finally, after thirty years.”

Darkness enveloped the boat. It was a moonless night, the wind was still, and the sky more full of stars than he had seen for years.

İrfan guarded himself from thinking of Aysel, Istanbul, his wife’s brother, the university, or his television program. Before confronting his past, he needed to feel he was a completely different person. The process of becoming a new man had to be gone through first.

The night was well advanced when İrfan finished the bottle of wine. He felt like singing a joyful song, but began shaking like a leaf instead. An unexpected wave of terror gripped him, unprepared as he was for the forceful blow of the same icy wind that had often chilled his heart.

İrfan grabbed the mast and began to weep, without realizing what he was doing. The boat seemed strange and alien, reminding him of a coffin. On that dark sea, in that darkened boat, surrounded by the darkness of night, the total blackness of death held sway all around him. He was losing his mind. What could he do on this death trap in the middle of the sea? There was no one to hear his cry for help in the middle of the impenetrable darkness, no one to save him.

“Pull yourself together, İrfan!” he screamed aloud. The sound of his cry muffled by the darkness terrified him. He turned off all the lamps, since they only accentuated the darkness. Panic-stricken, he reached for his tranquilizers and, shaking them into his hand, gulped down a couple, almost choking himself with the water he drank so hastily.

“You wanted this!” he told himself. “This is what you planned, what you intended to do! So why are you frightened?”