Silent House (31 page)

Thank goodness that no one, except maybe his dwarf, would ever read those disgusting lies, that description of hell that my poor devil-led fool of a husband had laid out with such joy. I was the only one to know the horror.

Seven months after Selâhattin discovered he was going to die and three months after he passed, my Doğan was in Kemah; it was in the middle of winter; I was all alone in the house with the dwarf: it was snowing that night, and I shivered at the thought of how the snow was sticking on his grave, and I felt a great need to get warm. I’d been sitting by myself in the room where I’d gone to escape the reeking wine fumes coming out of his mouth; the pale irritating light of the lamp hardly made me feel any better, and as the snow was hitting the window, I found I couldn’t even cry. I went upstairs. Thinking it might be warmer in there, I went into his room, where I was never allowed while he was alive, the room from which I used to hear his footsteps endlessly, the pacing back and forth. I slowly pushed open the door and there, shamelessly scattered everywhere, obnoxiously strewn about, on the tables, the armchairs, in the pigeonholes of the desk, the drawers, atop the books, and stuffed inside them, all over the floor and the windowsills, were endless piles of papers, covered with writing. I opened the door of the big ugly stove and began to stuff them inside. I waited a little after throwing in the match before adding more papers, writings, newspapers; the stove swallowed them all up so nicely, Selâhattin, together with your sins!
As your sins went up in smoke I felt myself warming up. “The work to which I’ve devoted my entire life: my beloved sin!” Well, what did the devil write? In the course of ripping up those papers and burning them, I was able to make some things out: Republic—the form of government we require … there are various kinds of republics … in his book on the subject De Passet tells us … 1342 … the newspaper brings word that it was established in Ankara this week … Fine … But we must on no account allow it to become like these people … Compare Darwin’s theory with the Koran and explain the superiority of science with simple analogies that even the idiots would understand … An earthquake is a geological phenomenon, the shaking of the earth’s crust … Woman is the fulfillment of man … Women can be divided into two groups … The first is natural women, those who enjoy the pleasures and joys that nature has given to them, relaxed, without problems, without worries, who usually come from the people, from the lower class … like Rousseau’s wife, whom he never married … a servant, who gave Rousseau six children … The second kind of woman: ill tempered, authoritarian, supposedly refined, who insists on persuading you to accept her preconceived notions, cold women with no empathy, like Marie Antoinette … This second kind is so lacking in empathy that many scientists and philosophers sought understanding and the warmth of love among women of the lower orders … Rousseau’s maid, Goethe’s baker’s daughter, or Marx’s household servant … He had a child by her also … Engels adopted it. Why be ashamed?… There are many more examples … And so, great men saw their lives poisoned by problems they never deserved, all on account of their cold unloving wives, and they exhausted themselves with nothing to show for it, never finishing their books … And those children that the law and society consider bastards are a separate grief!… I wonder if one could make a zeppelin in the exact shape of a stork with no screw propeller in the rear … The airplane is a weapon of war now … A twenty-two-year-old man called Lindbergh was able to fly across the Atlantic Ocean last week … All of the sultans were idiots … But
Resat the puppet of the Unionists was the biggest idiot of all … The fact that the lizards in our garden lose their tails in accordance with Darwin’s theory without having read any Darwin should not be seen as a miracle but as a triumph of human thought!…

As I kept reading and throwing things into the mouth of the stove in disgust, I was getting nicely warm. I have no idea how much I had read, how much I’d thrown into the fire, when the door opened. It was the dwarf, only seventeen at the time but already bold enough to say: What are you doing, Madam, this isn’t right. You be quiet! Please don’t burn them. I said be quiet! Isn’t what you’re doing wrong? When he still wouldn’t be quiet, I reached for my cane. Then he was silent. Are there any other papers you have hidden? Tell the truth, dwarf, is this all there is? He was silent. So that means you have hidden things, you’re not his son, dwarf, you’re his bastard, and you have no right to anything, do you understand, bring them quickly without another word! All right, then, where’s my cane? As I walked toward him, the little sneak ran clattering down the stairs. He called up from below: I don’t have anything, Madam, I swear, I didn’t hide a thing! Fine! I let it go for the moment. Then in the middle of the night I burst in on him, got him out of bed, and sent him out while I looked in every nook and cranny of his strange-smelling room, even the tiny padding of the little child’s bed he used. It was true, he had nothing.

But that didn’t ease my fears entirely. He’d hidden something somewhere, there was some scrap of paper that had escaped my eye, and Doğan, very much his father’s son, would look and find it and have it printed, because he was always asking: Mother, where are those things my father wrote? I’m sorry, what was that, my dear? You know, he was writing for years, where are all those papers, Mother? I can’t hear you, my child. I’m talking about my father’s half-finished encyclopedia, Mother. I’m sorry, I can’t hear. Maybe it has some value, my father devoted his whole life to it, I really want to read those articles, Mother, please would you give it to me. I wish I could hear you better, my child. Maybe we can have it printed someplace, as my father had always wished, because, the anniversary of May 27 is coming
up, and they say the military is going to stage another coup. After this coup there’ll be another turn back to Kemalism, they say, at least we could get some pieces, the interesting parts of the encyclopedia, published. Why don’t you get them out from wherever they are and give them to me, Mother! Oh, these ears of mine! Where are those papers, for God’s sake, I look and look and I can’t find them, and the books are missing, too, there’s nothing but those weird instruments left in the laundry room! Oh, dear, can’t hear a thing! Mother, what have you done with the books and papers, you didn’t just throw them away? I was quiet. You couldn’t have just burned them, could you, tell me you didn’t? He started to cry. Eventually he found comfort in
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. I’ll be like my father, I’ll take up writing, too, there’s no choice, just look around you, everything is getting worse, something must be done about this dangerous decline, this mounting idiocy, they can’t all be so base or stupid, there must be some good ones among them, Mother. I know the minister of agriculture from school, we were in love with the same girl, but we were good friends, he was one class behind me, but we were together on the track team, we both threw shot put, he was very fat, but he had a heart of gold, anyway I’m writing him a long report. And General So-and-So, second in command of the general staff, he was a captain when I was the assistant district commissioner in Zile, he’s a good man, he only ever wanted to do some good for the country, I’ll send him a copy of that report, too, you have no idea, Mother, of the injustices taking place … Fine, but why are they your responsibility, son? If we see things and do nothing, we are as guilty ourselves, that’s why, Mother, I’m sitting down to write so at least I won’t bear that blame … You’re more pathetic than your father, and a worse coward!… I’m not, Mother, I’m not. If I were a coward, I’d join them, it’s my turn to be governor, but I’ve had it up to here, have you any idea what they do to those poor villagers? I’ve never cared to know, my son! They’ve got them up in those forsaken corners of the mountains where, as they say, even the birds don’t fly and the caravans don’t pass … It was my father who taught me that simply bothering to know about it doesn’t do a bit of good! They just
leave them up there, with no teacher and no doctor … What a shame that I wasn’t able to teach you what my dearly departed father taught me, Doğan! How once a year you could snatch the harvest from their hands at a cheap price … What a shame, son, that you didn’t take after me at all … They just leave them, Mother, leave them to their sad fate in that awful darkness and forget about them. He would go on and on, even after I’d stopped listening and gone off to my room where I’d sit and think: How strange, it’s as though some strange force had made them different from everyone else, for some reason not content simply to go back and forth in peace between work and hearth! Whatever being had made them this way must be enjoying a good laugh watching me in my torment!… It was three, but I still couldn’t sleep, I could hear the hubbub from the beach. Then my mind turned to the dwarf and I shuddered.

What if he’d written to Doğan from the village and stirred his pity. Or maybe his father had told Doğan. But at that point Selâhattin thought of nothing but his writing. In the summer after he finished university Doğan started to ask about them over and over again: Why did Recep and Ismail leave, Mother? Then one day he went off. When he came back a week later, he had them with him; they were no longer children: a dwarf and a cripple, dressed in rags! Why did you bring them here from their village, son, what business do they have in our house, I said. You know why I brought them, Mother, he said, and put them both in the room where the dwarf is now. The cripple left when he got his greedy hands on the money from the diamond that he forced Doğan to sell, but he didn’t go far: every year when we went to the cemetery they showed me his house on the hill road! I always wondered why the dwarf stayed. They said it was because he was ashamed, because he was afraid to go out among regular people. After Doğan left, I’d sometimes hear Selâhattin off in some corner talking to him: Tell me, son, Selâhattin would say, what was life like in the village, was it really hard for you, did they make you pray, tell me, do you believe in God, tell me, how did your mother die? She was such a good woman, she had the beauty of
our people, but, unfortunately, I had to finish this encyclopedia. The dwarf would be silent, and when I couldn’t bear it anymore, I’d run off to my room and try to forget, but I could never get it out of my mind: What a good woman, she had the beauty of our people, what a good woman she was!

No, Selâhattin, she was just a sinful woman and a servant. She and her husband fled their village because of a blood feud and came to Gebze, and when he went to the military, leaving her in the care of a fisherman, and the fisherman’s boat overturned and he drowned, this one could be seen over there, by the ruins of the dock, wretched, snot nosed, ragged, living off who knows what. So when the cook from Gerede became high-handed with Selâhattin, saying things like You don’t believe in God, but God will show you, Selâhattin got rid of him and brought this disgusting wretch into the house. What can we do, Fatma, it’s become so difficult to find decent domestic help. I’ll have nothing to do with it, I said, but she learned the housework quickly, and when she made her first stuffed grape leaves Selâhattin said, What a capable woman, Fatma, and I could see right then and there what was going to happen and I was full of disgust, thinking, How strange that my mother should have brought me into this world just to witness other people’s crimes and sins.

On cold winter nights, when noxious fumes were rising up from the
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well of his mouth, Selâhattin, thinking I was asleep, would creep slowly downstairs, where, in the room that is now the dwarf’s, she would be waiting for him, my God such a shameful thing, he would walk back on tiptoe, but I would see him with loathing. Later in order to enjoy himself with her more comfortably and “in perfect freedom,” to use the expression he employed so frequently in the encyclopedia, he built that little shack by the chicken coop; when, in the middle of the night, he would wander out of his study completely drunk and stumble over there, I would sit in my room, with my knitting in my hand, motionless, and horrified to think of what they were doing.

Things he couldn’t make me do he was now forcing upon that
poor woman; to immerse her completely in sin he must have given her drink, before making her … God forbid, Fatma, don’t even think of it! Sometimes, when I slipped out into the room overlooking the chicken house and stared at the gloomy sinful lights of the shack, I would murmur to myself: There, at this very moment, maybe he’s kissing his bastards, telling them how there is no God, maybe they’re all laughing and maybe … Don’t think of that, Fatma, don’t think of it! Then I would go back to my room full of shame, take up the vest I was knitting for Doğan, and wait for Selâhattin’s return: I’d hear him come out of the shack an hour later, and a little after that he would be stumbling up the stairs, no longer even bothering to be quiet, I would open the door of my room a crack, and from that little opening I would follow him with devilish curiosity, fear, and loathing until he went back into his study.

Once, as he was tottering up the stairs, he paused for a moment: just then, I saw him look straight at the crack in the door and into my eyes, and I was so afraid, I wanted to shut the door and quietly return to my room, but it was too late, because Selâhattin started to shout: Why are you always poking your nose out from there, cowardly woman! Isn’t it enough you know where I’m going and what I’m doing, must you stand by the door every night? I wanted to shut the door and get away, but I couldn’t take my hand off the handle, as though I would somehow be party to the sin if I let go! He shouted some more: I’m not ashamed of anything, Fatma, not anything! I have moved beyond all the foolishness of the East, the guilt and the sins, Fatma, do you understand? You’re watching me for nothing: I am proud of the things that you are pleased to condemn and find revolting! Then, swaying back and forth, he went up a few more steps and yelled at the door I still held open a finger’s breadth: I’m proud, too, of that woman and of the children she bore me … She’s a hardworking woman, honest, honorable, direct, and beautiful! She doesn’t live simply to avoid guilt and sins as you do, and she has no intention of learning how to use a knife and fork to become refined! Hear what I’m going to say, listen to me carefully! His voice wasn’t
belittling now, it was persuasive, and I was listening, even as I held fast to the door handle between us: There’s nothing to be ashamed of here, Fatma, nothing disgusting, no need to accuse anyone, you see, we’re free! It’s only others who would limit our freedom! There’s no one here but us, Fatma, you know that, it’s as if we’re living on a desert island, like Robinson Crusoe, we’ve left that whole cursed thing called society behind in Istanbul, and we won’t return until the day I can overturn the whole East with my encyclopedia. Now hear me: at this moment I am coming from that shack, but what reason is there to hide it, you know that I was there with the serving woman’s children, my children, Recep and Ismail; I got them a stove from Gebze, but it hasn’t done any good, they’re freezing out there, Fatma, and I can no longer have them shivering in the cold just for the sake of your crazy notions of morality, are you listening to me?