Bliss: A Novel (31 page)

“No. Nothing happens when you turn on an ordinary light. They only get disturbed when a spotlight is turned on them. Noise bothers them, too. When you catch some with a net, that also affects them. The rest get white spots on their skin, then they die.”

“What sensitive fish.”

“Yes. We’re new here, and we’ve learned all this just recently. If you’re here tomorrow morning, I can show the fish to you.”

İrfan introduced himself, and they shook hands. The young man’s name was Cemal. İrfan felt an extraordinary power in Cemal’s coarse hand. He offered him a drink, but Cemal said he did not drink alcohol. Then he said, “I should go back now. The girl is alone in the hut, and she’s afraid of snakes and centipedes.”

That night, İrfan was too busy thinking about his strange encounter and the frightened fish to add a new sentence to his book. He drank half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and passed out.

Next morning, the razorlike sharpness of the sunbeams woke him up. He looked around and saw that the spell of the previous night had worn away. Together with the night, the ghosts of Homer had stolen away from the cove.

İrfan looked at the breathtaking aquamarine water and the green hills covered with thick pine forests that descended to the sea. Near the shore he could see the buoys of the fish farm. The sensitive fish, protected from the light, must have fallen asleep. The cove was so peaceful and so lovely that he decided to stay for a few days to work on his book.

He took out some sheets of paper, bit the end of his pencil, and thought for hours. Over and over again, he read what he had written the day before and added a few new sentences: “Ibrahim’s fate had been determined centuries before; after his people in eastern Anatolia had been converted to Christianity and become members of a heretical sect, they were oppressed for centuries by the Orthodox Church. Fleeing their home, they adopted a Muslim identity, only to be persecuted by Christians at the end of the twentieth century. This is a story of the dangers of remaining unreconciled with the dominant power.”

The new lines were not as striking as the first sentences he had written the day before, but the most important thing was that he was writing. He felt that he deserved a drink of cool white wine in the midday sun before he took his nap.

İrfan’s nap lasted until late afternoon. When he woke up, he perceived though a groggy haze Cemal rowing toward the boat. Cemal looked like an interesting young man. He seemed friendly, but also gave the impression that he could be dangerous. He had come to pick up the “teacher” if he still wished to visit the fish farm. İrfan realized that with his unkempt black hair and gray beard, he had acquired the image of a revered elder in the young man’s eyes. Cemal said he could show him around the place and would be happy to share a modest dinner with the professor in his hut. Pleased to be welcomed with such warmth, İrfan accepted the invitation.

As they rowed toward the shore, Cemal showed him the buoys, the underwater cages, and the fish. “There must be millions in there,” İrfan thought, observing that the fish did not have enough space to swim without touching each other. İrfan looked away from this fish prison and glanced at the shore. A tiny hut stood there under age-old olive trees. Beside it, sacks of fish feed were stacked on top of each other. Later, Cemal told him that the feed was made from the bones of anchovies. When they landed, the fishy smell pervading the air was immediately noticeable.

A young girl with big green eyes, a childlike face, and a cotton scarf wrapped around her head came out of the hut. She greeted the professor shyly with a slight inclination of her head. She seemed to be fifteen at most. In America, even caressing a girl this age would land you in jail labeled as a pervert. But in Anatolian villages, older men would climb on top of little girls without anyone opposing it. “So this guy is with this little girl,” thought the professor scornfully, but he smiled and merely remarked, “Good evening!”

As darkness fell, Cemal jumped into the rowboat and went to cull some fish from the cages. The young man rowed the boat, as tense and balanced as a tiger. He plunged the net into the water carefully, but the professor wondered if he would still frighten the fish no matter how careful he was.

Meanwhile, the girl prepared dinner without looking at İrfan. Taking a few tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers from a fisherman’s basket hanging from a beam under the ceiling, the girl began to slice them.

Cemal returned to the hut and cleaned the fish he had caught, scraping off the scales, slitting them open, and ripping out the innards while they were still alive. Two wild cats suddenly appeared from nowhere and grabbed the remains at lightning speed. There were probably many animals in the forest. Cemal had said yesterday that the girl was afraid of snakes and centipedes. İrfan glanced around him apprehensively.

When it was completely dark, Cemal lit a small lamp, provoking a riot of flies, mosquitoes, sand flies, and moths that flew in and began to flutter around the brilliant light. İrfan was caught in a mist of flying bugs. Mosquitoes attacked his neck, arms, and legs. He scratched himself until his skin bled.

He began to slap himself everywhere, and asked Cemal, “How can you survive here, for God’s sake? These damned things are going to kill me!”

Watching the professor jump up from his seat, slap himself, and curse, the girl could not help giggling. “They usually come to me,” she said, “but tonight they seem to like you more.”

When İrfan realized that the mosquitoes would not stop coming, he and Cemal got into Cemal’s boat and rowed out to the sailboat. İrfan took all the insect repellents he could find and they returned to the hut. He rubbed the medicine on himself and gave some to the girl.

Only then did the girl fry the fish and serve it with the salad. İrfan regretted that he had not brought some wine along, but he did not plan to spend too much time in this wretched hut. He wanted to return to his boat as soon as he finished his meal. He planned to listen to Erik Satie’s
Gnossienne
, which he now preferred to Jean-Pierre Rampal’s flute. The sad tune of the piano in the first melody enchanted him. He wanted to listen to those tunes and feel as if it was only to hear them that he had been born. While he listened, the velvety Jack Daniel’s would slip down his throat in the sterile atmosphere of his Plexiglas-and-chromium vessel.

He followed his plan, but he could not get the girl’s big, shining, green eyes out of his mind. “Such strange eyes,” he thought, “childish and innocent, yet desirous and devious.”

The elusive glance of those eyes embraced everything.

A CALL OF YOUNG BODIES

Ten days or so before the encounter in the secluded cove on the Aegean, Cemal had left the house with Selahattin, whom he believed to be the most truly good person he had ever met. As if his friend had not done enough by showing him hospitality and doing him favors, he had also found a place for him and Meryem to stay. He had even put some money in Cemal’s pocket without making him feel ashamed. “Don’t think I’m helping you,” Selahattin had said. “I’m just paying you your two weeks’ wages in advance.”

Then the two friends had driven to Rahmanlı to pick up Meryem. Selahattin returned Cemal’s thanks by saying, “We’re buddies. You saved my life so many times.”

Yakup was not home when they picked up Meryem, so Cemal could not say good-bye to his brother, but he knew that there was an unspoken agreement between them to remain silent. Yakup would never tell anyone that Cemal had not fulfilled his father’s command. In return, Cemal would not tell the villagers back home about the reality of “Yakup’s Istanbul.”

As they rode on the intercity bus, Cemal felt his gratitude to his friend. Without him, he and Meryem would have been left without shelter. Now Selahattin was sending them far away to a cove near
Çe
me
on the Aegean coast, where his family had a fish farm. The caretaker had asked for two weeks’ leave to look after a sick relative. During that time, Cemal and the girl could stay there safely. All he had to do was mount guard over the fish and feed them twice a day. The rest was in God’s hands. His duties were easy.

As the bus traveled along the well-cared-for roads of the verdant Aegean coast, Cemal realized that in the last week he had traveled more than he had ever done in his entire life. He had set out from the Iraq border and was now on his way to Grecian shores. He had traveled so far from Emine that he could no longer recall to mind her soft skin. He had Meryem to thank for all of this, but Cemal hated her even more than he had hated the terrorists on the mountains. No matter what Selahattin said, she was a sinner who deserved to die, and yet, he, Cemal, a veteran commando, was incapable of killing her. He simply could not bring himself to murder this little girl. Who was this girl sitting next to him—a prostitute, a sinner, a lousy creature, a girl under sentence of death? Or just a kid who did not know anything about the world?

In the state between sleep and wakefulness where he took refuge when he did not know what to do, Cemal became aware of the pungent smell of lemon cologne. The bus driver’s assistant, more child than man, was walking down the aisle, offering lemon cologne to the passengers. The husky voice of a folk singer was blasting out of the radio.

Cemal was starting to doze as the bus trundled along, when it occurred to him that he had not dreamed of the innocent bride recently. The fair-skinned young bride, who used to appear in his dreams every other night during those harsh days in the army and cause him to sin in his sleep, was gone. She had not appeared since the start of his journey. Cemal longed for her scent, her skin, her warmth, but it was no use. He could not summon at will a girl whom he had seen only in his dreams. She came only when she wanted to.

Cemal tried hard to keep his father out of his thoughts. Since he had not fulfilled his father’s commands, he could neither write him a letter nor telephone home to ask news of him. Only after he had solved the problem of what to do with the girl would he be able to contact him, yet he had no idea of how to go about finding a solution.

Meryem leaned against the window absentmindedly. She was exhausted from having so many emotions. She was drained of strength and fearful that she would become ill as she had on the train. Her monthly bleeding had stopped and, thanks to the sanitary napkins Seher had given her, the arrival of her next period was not a frightening thought anymore. She only wondered how she would find new pads. Seher had said they were sold in pharmacies, but how could Meryem buy them? She did not have any money. She wondered what Seher was doing now. Had her brother died, or was he still alive?

Only the rather elderly women on the bus had their heads covered; in fact, not only did the young girls have their hair loose, they also wore hip-hugging blue jeans. Their sleeveless pink, blue, or orange blouses were tight across their breasts, of which glimpses were revealed when they bent forward, yet they did not seem to mind. They wore earrings in their ears, bracelets on their wrists, and thin gold necklaces around their necks. Some of the pendants on the necklaces were shaped like hearts. Perhaps there were photos of their sweethearts inside. They talked, giggled, and laughed loudly, and a few of them even smoked when the bus stopped at a rest area.

Meryem felt miserable in the presence of these girls. Nazik had washed her blue cotton dress, but the blue flower print had faded even more. Although she had washed her black plastic shoes in the fountain in Rahmanlı, they were muddy, as was the long skirt wrapping itself around her legs.

Each time she looked at those black shoes, she remembered that cursed day she had been sent away from the village. Maybe because she always looked at the ground, she had not been able to take her eyes off her shoes. Her thick socks also looked awful, but none of these things disturbed her more than the scarf covering her head. Her headscarf had not bothered her in the village, but the village was in the middle of nowhere. Wearing a scarf here made Meryem feel foolish. The weather was getting warmer, and her feet were sweating in her woollen socks. She could not breathe in these clothes.

Cemal still did not talk to her even though he dragged her behind him like a puppy from one place to another. In the morning, he and another man had come to Rahmanlı to pick her up. Then they had gone to the bus terminal. After living in the village and walking only between her home and the poplar grove all her life, she had, in a single week, seen so many buses, garages, stations, boats, cars, and people that nothing astonished her anymore. All she wanted was to know where she was going.

When they first boarded the bus, she had thought that they were returning to the village, but after listening to the bus driver’s announcements and conversations between passengers, she realized that they were heading for a completely different place.

She did not know the geography of Turkey. She had no idea where the southeast was or the Black Sea region, or the Aegean. She was the girl who thought Istanbul was behind the hill outside the village. If she had considered the matter carefully, she would have realized that the big city could not be that close. But nobody had talked to her. She had always been pushed into her own solitary world of dreams. Her head had been full of fantasies:
eker
Baba’s miracles, Armenians flying in the air, and weeping nightingales perching on the strings whenever the Armenian musician Bogod played the zither.