Silent House (21 page)

No, I’m not listening to you, Selâhattin, but you’re not speaking for me anyway: When they understand that nothing comes from the hand of God, then they’ll see that everything is in their own hands; when they see that fear and valor, crime and punishment, idleness and action, good and evil are all in their own hands, well, what’s going to happen, Fatma? He said this and suddenly got up and started pacing the floor and lecturing, as though he were at his desk instead of sitting behind all those emptied bottles on the dining table: Then they’ll be as I was in my early years, frozen with fear, they won’t believe their own thoughts, frightened to death at what passes through their own minds, then realizing that other people could be thinking the same things, they’ll feel guilt followed by fear, imagining that at any time they could be strangled by their neighbor and, at that very moment, they’ll hate me for having brought them to that point, but by then having no other recourse, desperate to free themselves from this terror, they’ll come running to me, yes, they’ll come to me, to my books, to my forty-eight-volume encyclopedia,
they’ll understand that henceforth the only real religion, the one true divinity, is to be found in these books of mine! Yes, why should I, Dr. Selâhattin, not take my rightful place in the twentieth century as the new God of all the Muslims? Because henceforth, science is our God, are you listening, Fatma?

No, because now I think that even to listen was a sin, because I had finished eating the potatoes and meatballs that Recep cooked for us and those tasteless leeks, and I’d put some of the dessert we call Noah’s pudding in my bowl and gone off to the unheated little adjoining room. I sat there, with my legs clenched together against the cold, and slowly ate my dessert in little spoonfuls of pomegranate seeds, beans, chickpeas, dried figs, corn, dried black currants, with a little rosewater spread over it all, how nice, how lovely!

I’m not sleepy. I get up from the edge of my bed. I wouldn’t mind a little pudding now. I go to the table and sit down: there’s a bottle of cologne on it, not glass, but still transparent. When I first saw it yesterday at noon, I thought it was glass, but as soon as I touched it I realized it wasn’t, and I was annoyed: What’s this, I said, it’s not even a glass bottle? Grandma, you can’t find them anymore, said Nilgün, spreading it on my wrists, without even listening to my objections. You all might feel revived by something that comes from a plastic bottle, but not me. I didn’t say that because they wouldn’t understand. Your souls are all stillborn plastic! But if I’d said that they’d have probably laughed.

They laugh anyway, to pass the time and relieve their unease: These old people are so strange, they laugh, how are you, Grandmother, they laugh; do you know what a television is, they laugh, why don’t you come down and sit with us, they laugh, what a nifty sewing machine, they laugh, it even has a pedal, they laugh, why do you take your cane into the bed with you when you lie down, they laugh, shall we take you for a ride in the car, Grandmother, they laugh; the embroidery on your nightie is so pretty, they laugh, why didn’t you vote in the elections, they laugh, why are you always rummaging through your closet, they laugh. If I say why are you always laughing
when you look at me, they laugh, again, laugh and say, we’re not laughing, Grandmother, then they laugh again. Maybe it’s because their father and grandfather spent their whole lives crying. It’s all so boring.

Should I wake the dwarf and ask him for some Noah’s pudding? If I tap on the floor with my cane, the sleeping runt will say, Madam, at
this
hour? And at this time of year? Put it out of your mind so you can have a nice sleep, tomorrow I’ll make you some … If you’re not going to take care of my needs, what are you here for? Get out! Then he’ll go right off and find them: I put up with so much from your grandmother, so much! My point exactly! Why else would you still be here? Why didn’t he clear out like his brother? Because, Madam, he is perfectly capable of saying, as you well know, Doğan Bey, God rest his soul, when he said, now, Recep, now, Ismail, take this money and use it as you see fit, I’ve had enough of feeling guilty about the sins of my mother and father, their crimes, take this money, Ismail, my dear brother, being clever, said, Fine and took it and built a house on that parcel on the top of the hill, the one we passed yesterday going to the cemetery, why do you pretend now that you don’t know, Madam, as though it wasn’t you who left one of us a cripple and the other a dwarf? Be still! I suddenly become afraid. He fools everybody. Everybody. My Doğan, because he was like an angel; what did you say to fool my baby and snatch that money from his hands, you wicked bastards; there’s nothing more for you, my son: If you want, go look in my box, it’s empty, thanks to your drunken father; Mother, please don’t talk like that about my father, the devil take your money and the jewels, money’s the source of all evil; give me the box and I’ll throw it in the sea, no, I’ll use it for something good, Mother, look, did you know I’m writing letters, I know the minister of agriculture, he was one class behind me at school, I’m preparing drafts of laws, I swear this time I’m really going to do something useful, Mother, okay, okay, keep the box, just don’t hector me about my drinking. I get up from the table, go to my closet, take out the key, and open it, breathing in the cupboard scent. I had put it in the second drawer;
and when I open the second drawer, there it is. I sniff it without opening it and when I open it I sniff the empty box again and I remember my childhood.

It was springtime in Istanbul. I was a girl of fourteen, and the following afternoon we were to be going out. Ah, tell me, where will you be going? We’re going to Sukru Pasha’s, Father. You know his daughters, Türkân, Sükran, and Nigân, I have so much fun with them, we’re always laughing; they play the piano, they can imitate anybody, they read poems to me and sometimes even translated foreign novels: I really like them. Fine, then, but it’s really late now, so come on, let me see you go off to bed, Fatma. Okay, I’ll go, I’ll fall asleep thinking about going there tomorrow. My father closed the door, and the gust of air in its wake brought his scent to me, I thought of those things in my bed, and in the morning I awakened to discover a beautiful day from my bedside, as sweet as the scent from my box, but suddenly I was disgusted: Enough, you stupid box; I know how life is. Life pierced you and seared every corner, dear God, it tore you to pieces, you foolish girl! All of a sudden I got so angry that I almost threw the box out, but I held myself back; then how would I mark the time? Put it away, put it away, for surely a rainy day will come. This time I put it in the third drawer, I closed the closet, have I locked it, I check again, yes, I have. Then I go and lie down, staring at the ceiling. The ceiling is green. I know why I can’t sleep. Because the car that comes after the last car still hasn’t come. But the green paint is peeling. When he comes, I’ll hear his footsteps and know he’s gone to bed. The yellow shows through underneath. When I could believe that the whole world was mine, then I could go off into a sound sleep right under the yellow that’s showing through the green. But now I can’t sleep, I think of the colors, the day that he unraveled the mystery of the colors.

The secret of paints and colors is very simple, Fatma, said Selâhattin one day. He had turned Doğan’s bicycle upside down on the dining table and on the back wheel had arranged a ring of seven colors to show me. Do you see, Fatma, there are seven, but let’s see what
happens to your seven colors as we spin the wheel. I looked on in astonishment and a little alarm as he gleefully started turning the pedal, and the seven colors started melting into one another, until the wheel turned white. At the evening meal, he proclaimed with pride that principle he would shortly discard: Fatma, I only write what I see with my own eyes, that’s my rule; nothing I cannot confirm experimentally goes into my encyclopedia! But later he would forget how often he’d said these words, because he’d made the decision that life is short and his encyclopedia was long, and in the years just before he finally discovered death he would say: No one person has time to try everything, Fatma, it seems that the laboratory I set up in the laundry room was nothing but a youthful fancy, anyone who takes the whole treasury of knowledge that the Westerners produced and tries to reconfirm it in experiments is either a fool or an egoist, he would say, as though he knew that I thought, Well, you’re both, Selâhattin. Then he would berate himself as if to fire up his spirits: Even the great Diderot couldn’t finish his encyclopedia in seventeen years, Fatma, because he was an egoist, what need was there to argue with Voltaire and Rousseau, you idiot, they were at least as great as you, and if one can’t accept that great men can think of things and discover them before he does, nothing will ever be completely finished. I’m a modest person, I accept that the Europeans found everything before we did and investigated it all down to the smallest detail. Isn’t it ridiculous to look for and discover the same things all over again? To understand that a cubic centimeter of gold weighs 19.3 grams and that everything, people included, can be bought and sold, I don’t need to use a scale and weigh it again or fill my pockets with gold and go bargain with the scoundrels of Istanbul, Fatma! Truths are truly discovered but once; the sky is blue in France, too, fig trees in New York bear fruit in August as well, and when the chicks come out of the eggs in our hatchery, I swear, Fatma, they come out the same day in China, and if steam drives an engine in London, it drives it here likewise; just as people everywhere are the same and equal, a republic is always the best government, and science is the basis of everything.

After Selâhattin had said these things he gave up having the ironmonger and stove maker in Gebze fashion strange machines and implements, and he ceased begging me for things to sell to the jeweler; he no longer passed his time pouring buckets of water into the compound tubes made out of stovepipes to see how a fountain works, playing the madman trying to find his peace by staring into the pool in the courtyard of the asylum; he gave up flying kites that got bedraggled in the rain and fell from the sky in an effort to show where electricity came from; and he ceased playing with magnifying glasses, windowpanes, funnels, pipes with smoke coming out the end, colored bottles, and binoculars. I caused you a lot of expense with all that foolishness, Fatma, he would say, you were right telling me it was all childishness, I’m sorry, imagining that we could add something to science with an amateur laboratory in the laundry room wasn’t just a youthful fancy, but a juvenile idiocy stemming from my failure to understand the true grandeur of science, take that key, you and Recep, take those things, throw them in the sea, sell them if you can, do whatever you want. Yes, take those sketches as well, my insect specimens, the fish skeletons, those flowers and leaves I stupidly dried and pressed, those dead mice, bats, snakes, and frogs preserved in alcohol, pick those jars up, Fatma, oh God, what’s there to be disgusted by or afraid of now, good, good, call Recep, I just want to get rid of all this nonsense, there’s no room for my books anyway, it’s better this way, because to think that sitting here in the East we can succeed at finding and discussing anything new is just foolishness. Those people have found everything, there’s nothing left to add: it’s as they say: nothing new under the sun! Fatma, look, don’t you see, even that saying is nothing new, we learned that from them as well, the devil take it, do you understand, I don’t have enough time left, I realize forty-eight volumes won’t suffice, it would take fifty-four to gather all this material, but, on the other hand, I’m impatient for the masses to get their hands on this opus, it’s so exhausting to do serious comprehensive work, but I have no right
to condense it, Fatma, because, unfortunately, I can’t content myself with mediocrity, like those common fools who reveal only the tip of a corner, a little shred of reality in their skimpy one-hundred-page books, and then puff themselves up and preen about it for years on end; Fatma, look at those essays by Abdullah Cevdet, simple fellow, I mean, is that all there is to reality, never mind he misunderstood De Passet, never even read Bonnesance, and on top of everything misused the word
fraternité
, but how can you correct these people and if you do who would understand, the fools, you have to explain everything reductively if these bumpkins are to understand, that’s why I’m worn out, trying to insert proverbs and pithy sayings in my writings so that thickheaded brutes can follow them. Selâhattin was still carrying on in this way, when suddenly I heard the rumbling of the car, the one that always arrives after the last.

He stops in front of the garden gate. As the motor purrs, I hear the gate open: what kind of strange, awful music was that! Then they talk, and I listen.

“Tomorrow morning at Ceylan’s, okay?” one of them shouts.

“Okay,” Metin yells back.

Then the car starts up with painful screeches and grumbling and takes off. Metin comes into the garden, rattles the kitchen door as he enters the house, goes up the five steps to what Selâhattin called the dining room, and from there climbs the nineteen steps to the upstairs, and as he passes my door I think, Metin, Metin, let me call to him, come here, come, my darling, tell me, where were you, what’s going on outside, what’s out there in the world at this hour of night, come on, tell me, where did you go, what did you see, I’ll say, give me a little distraction, liven me up, amuse me, but he is already in his room. By the time I count five he’s undressed and thrown himself into bed with such force that the whole house shakes and, I swear, before I count five again, he’s asleep, three, four, five, so, now he’s fast asleep the way young people sleep, because when you’re young you have such good sleep, didn’t you, Fatma …

But I didn’t sleep like that when I was fifteen. I was always waiting for things, for carriage rides that rocked us back and forth, for pianos to play, for my cousins to come, then for those who’d come to go back, for us to eat and while we were eating to be allowed to leave the table, and I thought of that deeper waiting for an end to all the other waiting, and how no one would ever know what it was we were waiting for in that wait. Now that ninety years have gone by, I understand that all those memories and waits have filled my mind the way sparkling water from hundreds of little faucets might fill a marble pool, and when in the silence of a soft summer night I draw nearer to the coolness of the pool, I see my reflection in the water, and I notice that I’m filled with my own self, and I want to puff and blow my image from the pool, so that nothing might tarnish the surface of that water, so pure and sparkling. I was such a light, graceful little girl …