Bliss: A Novel (36 page)

In the cabin next door, Cemal heard Meryem moan and sob a few times before falling silent. His ears were sharp. He lay motionless on his bed as if he were on the mountains, listening for every sound.

He should not have let the girl go alone with the professor; he should have taken steps to prevent it. A strange man and a girl from his family should not have been permitted to go anywhere alone together. In their village, this could have been a reason for murder. Circumstances had changed so much in the last few weeks that when something unfamiliar or unexpected happened, he did not know what to do. He could no longer tell right from wrong. In the village, Meryem would not have been allowed to dress like this, but on the boat, she looked very outlandish in her village clothing. He even wore shorts himself.

Cemal was amazed how clothes could change a person. In his commando uniform, with his equipment and weapons, he had felt like the ruler of the world. In these funny shorts, he was an incompetent boy. Besides, he had no money, no job, no home, nor anywhere to go. He was like a refugee on the professor’s boat.

After Meryem and İrfan had left, he had gone to the professor’s cabin. The old man had the biggest cabin, of course. There was a strange painting on the wall, depicting flying men wearing peaked felt hats. Next to it, the professor had placed a poem which spoke of coming back to life if you did not like being dead. It did not appeal to him. Cemal’s favorite poem was one he had learned during his army days and had never forgotten: “A flag is a flag only when there is blood on it / A country is a country only if you die for it!” When they shouted this in unison, his heart had swelled with pride. The poem this man had pasted up was utter rubbish. “In your dreams!” said Cemal. “I’d like to see you come back if a Kalashnikov bullet smashed your head. Death is no child’s game.”

He had rummaged through the drawers in the cabin. In the first two, there were underwear, a notebook, and a lot of pens. In the third drawer, he found money—American dollars. He did not count the notes, but there were obviously a great number.

Holding the money in his hands, Cemal had sat down on the bed and begun to think.

When the girl and the professor returned in the dinghy, why shouldn’t he strangle them both and throw the bodies into the sea? Nobody knew that they had anchored in this isolated bay. It would take only a few minutes to get rid of them. Then he would take the money and leave in the dinghy. No one would find him or be able to accuse him.

Cemal got carried away with his planning. He could just as easily get rid of them before they boarded the sailboat. As the dinghy approached, he could hit them over the head with something or give them a lethal blow to the throat with the side of his hand, as he had learned to do in his commando days.

He put the money in his pocket and went on deck. The green dollars warmed his pocket. He felt happy and secure. With this money he would be able to start a business and become respectable like Selahattin. Or maybe he would go back to Istanbul and open a kebab restaurant with Yakup. He could bring Emine to the big city, where they would get married. Going back to the village did not appeal to him, because he would have to give the money to his father.

As soon as he had remembered his father, his blood went cold. The thought of his father’s black-bearded face, which had always stood between Cemal and sin, made him shiver. He had nearly committed a sin. He had forgotten that God, who saw everything, even a black ant on a black stone, was watching him. Hurriedly, he had returned to the professor’s cabin and put the dollars back in the drawer.

Now as he lay in bed listening to Meryem’s sobs, he was annoyed. Since leaving the army, he had become a nobody. In the village, they had patted his shoulder, praising him as a hero, but he had broken his bonds with the past after leaving there. In Istanbul and here, by the Aegean, nobody paid attention to him or respected him as a veteran soldier.

However, in the mountains, he and his comrades had been told that they were fighting to prevent the breakup of their country and were making the greatest sacrifice in doing so. Soldiers who died or were wounded in the service of their country would live eternally in the nation’s memory. They were fighting for the honor of the red flag with its star and crescent. Here, no one seemed to care about such things.

Who did the professor, that poor excuse for a man, think he was? It was obvious that, old as he was, he felt no shame in lusting after Meryem. No wonder he flattered her by saying how smart she was and how she grasped things faster than Cemal. None of it was true. How could an ignorant little girl be better than a trained and seasoned commando? He would love to take both of them to the mountains and see how long they survived. Neither the girl nor that old sinner of a drunkard would last long there. Cemal did everything better than Meryem, but since the old man had eyes for no one but her, it was she he went on praising.

Without nodding off, Cemal had waited for them to come back. If anything seemed strange, he would have come forward and broken İrfan’s neck, but everything had appeared normal. The professor and the girl had boarded the boat in silence and retreated to their cabins.

Cemal felt they had united in a conspiracy to make fun of him and put him down. They had both laughed when he first put on his shorts. Had Cemal, the great commando, the ruler of the mountains and of the night, become their clown?

He felt that his anger intensified. He would finally be able to fulfill his duty and kill the girl. First, the witnesses on the train and the commotion in Istanbul had confused and prevented him from doing anything, and later, the sick, forlorn look on the girl’s face had softened his heart. But he was a soldier; he should not have been affected by such things. Now the girl had joined the old man and was carrying on some funny business behind his back and, so, was coming closer to her death; she and that drunken old man, both.

*   *   *

The wind had changed direction during the night. The boat was rocking and the ropes were creaking. The professor lay in bed, covered with shame and sorrow, unable to assuage his guilt at having caused the girl such extreme shock. “It’s none of your business,” he tried to convince himself. “Her uncle raped her, then threw her out. None of it is your fault.” He tried to return to his old cynical, sarcastic self. “What a pervert the fellow is! Who knows how much pain he must have caused the poor thing.”

No matter how hard he tried, he could not forget the girl’s trembling shoulders and unspeakable torment. Why did he feel such pity for her? Was she the means to bring about the change he had been looking for, which was to make him into a new man? Was he becoming like one of those people whom he had always mocked for their credulity and sentimentality?

The man she called “uncle” was probably Cemal’s father, but İrfan did not think that Cemal was aware of the incident. He reflected on the girl’s fear of Cemal, the lack of communication between the two, and the icy tension between them.

Why were they traveling together? Had Cemal run off with the girl? If he had, why did he treat her so harshly? As if struck by lightning, the penny dropped and İrfan understood.

His heart began beating like a drum. It seemed a murder was about to take place on his boat! He could not believe it. He remembered all he had heard about crimes of honor and girls who were condemned to death by consensus of the family. He had read such stories in the newspapers, but he never would have imagined he would have a role in such an event. In the past, these killings used to take place only in remote parts of eastern Anatolia, where a girl might be murdered or forced to commit suicide simply because she had been seen talking to a young man alone in a poplar grove. In the last few years, traditions had also transported along with the people who migrated from the poor areas in the east to the big cities. Young girls were pushed off viaducts, shot, or strangled by the men of the family.

When he read such accounts, he wondered chiefly about the mothers of such girls. How could a woman consent to the death of her daughter, whom she had nursed and raised? Or did they have no choice?

Articles criticizing such crimes of honor were often published in the newspapers. If those who had committed them got caught, they were accused of homicide, and according to the Turkish Criminal Code, the sentence for this was capital punishment. Although judges frequently exercised their judicial discretion and modified the sentence, the general amnesties that were issued periodically allowed the murderers to go free. In short, the justice system tolerated and protected those who committed such “crimes of honor.”

İrfan’s friend Altan, a professor of anthropology in Paris, had told him about a case he had experienced in France. One day he had been invited to the Colmar court by a judge who wanted to ask his advice concerning the murder of a young girl. The daughter of a Turkish guest worker who lived in Colmar had become friends with a French youth. The family had wanted them to separate and had forbidden the girl to see him. When the young man protested, the family had come together and ordered the girl’s older brother and her nephew to kill her. The two young men strangled her near a highway. According to the coroner’s report, it had taken fifteen minutes for the girl to die. Now the whole family was on trial.

The judge, a woman, had believed that they should not be tried as if they were French, since they had different cultural traditions. According to Turkish tradition, honor crimes were not considered serious. It was for that reason that she had consulted with Altan, as a Turkish professor, to give her his opinion.

Altan told her that murder was the same in every culture and that the family’s origins should not influence her decisions. In the end, he realized that the judge wanted to send the family back to Turkey instead of having to have them taken care of in a French prison for twenty years. She might have thought that the family did not belong to the civilized world anyway, and it was better to let their own country deal with the matter. As a result of Altan’s insistence, the family had been found guilty. Yet Altan thought that the judge was not totally wrong, since he himself declared, “All over the Mediterranean, the concept of honor is still considered to lie between a woman’s thighs, and such murders are still seen as pardonable crimes.”

İrfan was furious with Cemal, Meryem’s designated executioner, and he vowed to keep an eye on the girl at all times. She would be under his protection from now on, and he would not let anyone destroy her young body and fresh spirit. He might even adopt her.

Yes, maybe he would do that.

The boat yawed in the wind. The ropes and the mast creaked, and the cabin rocked like a cradle, this way and that.

He wished he had his Colt revolver with him. He had been a fool not to bring it along.

He began to feel suffocated and stood up to go on deck.

The moon had set, and the sea was dark. The wind was wuthering, but the anchor had not dragged. The boat remained steady at its moorings. He would not have to get up at midnight to see to the boat.

Meryem heard a door open and someone go on deck, but she did not know which of the men it was. Was it the professor? Or was it Cemal?

A few minutes later, she heard a soft knock at her door. When she opened it, she was face-to-face with the professor. “I heard sounds and thought perhaps you weren’t asleep,” he whispered. Perhaps he was afraid of waking Cemal. “I can’t sleep either,” he said. “Let’s go on deck.”

Meryem followed him.

The cool wind outside gave Meryem goose bumps. İrfan found an anorak and covered her shoulders with it, pretending not to notice that she was wearing her old clothes.

“I’d never do you any harm, Meryem,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

The girl nodded.

“Can you trust me … like a father?”

Meryem nodded again, and İrfan breathed deeply.

“I was afraid that you’d misunderstood me. I couldn’t sleep,” he continued. “I want to tell you something. You’re away from that village now. No one can harm you here. They can’t touch you in any way.”

“What about Cemal?” Meryem whispered.

“He can’t touch you either.”

They remained in silence for a while. They could find nothing to say.

Meryem was unable to raise her head and look at him. She would always feel everlasting shame in front of him, now he knew her impossible secret.

İrfan picked the girl up gently and carried her to her cabin.

Before he closed the door, he did a strange thing: He pressed a light kiss on Meryem’s hand, in response to which Meryem kissed his.

Then shutting the door quietly, he returned to his cabin.

Cemal had heard them whispering without understanding a word of what they said. Wondering what had happened, he fixed his eyes on the ceiling and waited for dawn to break.

THE HOUSE THAT SMELLED OF ORANGE BLOSSOMS

After that night in the cove, Meryem lost her cheerfulness, and her health deteriorated. When they set sail in the morning, she felt cold and had found an anorak to wrap herself up in. She constantly felt nauseated and had to rush down to the toilet to throw up. Cemal did not understand why Meryem had fallen ill or why she was wearing her old clothes again. Observing her carefully, he saw that the girl, who for some days had been as cheerful as a sparrow, had now become upset by the motion of the sea. To relieve her nausea, the professor had given her some pills and a special bracelet to wear.

The atmosphere on the boat was extremely uncomfortable. No one spoke, and each person did what was to be done with a gloomy face. The hatred between İrfan and Cemal was palpable.

After thinking things over carefully, the professor decided that no good would come of sailing any farther. On the open sea, both he and Meryem were easy targets for Cemal, who was young and strong. He did not really think the boy wanted to get rid of them but, if he did, he could easily do so. The best thing to do was return to land, moor the boat somewhere, and find a place to live.

The more İrfan thought about it, the more he realized this was not a reasonable solution. Though he knew he should leave Cemal and Meryem at the nearest point on the coast and sail away alone, he could not abandon the lovely girl to die.