Silent House (7 page)

I had to push hard to force the door open. Something must have fallen behind it: a skull covered with dust stuck between the door and the trunk. I picked it up and blew on it, then trying to look cheerful I showed it to him.

“Do you remember this?”

“Sir?”

“I guess you never come in here.”

I left the dusty skull on a little table that was covered with papers.

I was playing with a glass pipe I had taken into my hand as a child would, before setting it down on one of the pans of a rusty pair of scales. Standing silent in the doorway, Recep looked fearfully at the things I was touching: hundreds of little vials, pieces of broken glass, trunks, pieces of bone thrown into a box, old newspapers, rusty scissors, tweezers, French books of anatomy and medicine, boxes full of paper, pictures of birds and airplanes tacked to a board, eyeglass
lenses, a circle divided into seven colors, chains, the sewing machine whose pedal I used to push pretending to be a driver when I was little, screwdrivers, bugs and lizards pinned to boards, hundreds of empty bottles with
MONOPOLIES ADMINISTRATION
written on them, all kinds of powders in labeled pharmacy bottles, and even mushrooms, in a flowerpot …

“Are those mushrooms, Faruk Bey?” said Recep.

“Yes, take them if you can use them.”

He didn’t enter, probably because he was afraid; so I went over and gave them to him. Then I found the brass sign indicating in the old Ottoman letters and in Ottoman time that Dr. Selâhattin accepted visitors every day from two to six and in the afternoon from eight to twelve. For a moment I felt like taking it back to Istanbul, not just because I thought it was charming but as a memento of him. Immediately, however, I was overcome by a strange disgust and fear of the past, and so I tossed the sign back on the heap of dusty things. After locking the door, I went over to the kitchen with Recep. On the staircase, Metin was carrying the bags upstairs, grumbling.

A
fter I’d brought Faruk and Nilgün’s suitcases upstairs, I stripped down, put my bathing suit on under my summer clothes, grabbed my wallet, for once full of money, went downstairs, and took off in the old broken-down Anadol, headed for Vedat’s. When I got there, there was no sign of life except for the maid working in the kitchen. So I went around to the back through the garden, and pushing a little on the window, I spotted old Vedat lying in his bed. I sprang like a cat into the room and smashed his head into the pillow.

“Hey, you stupid animal,” he shouted. “What’s the idea? You think this is a joke?”

Pleased with myself, I only smiled smugly as I sized up the room. Everything was the same as last year, even the gross picture of the naked woman on the wall.

“Come on,” I said. “Up and at ’em!”

“What are we going to do at this hour?”

“What does anybody do in the afternoon?”

“Nothing!”

“Isn’t anybody around?”

“Everybody’s around, and there are even a few new ones.”

“Where do you hang out?”

“At Ceylan’s. They just got here!”

“Okay. Come on. Let’s go over there.”

“Ceylan won’t be up yet.”

“Well, then, let’s go swimming someplace else,” I said. “I haven’t been even once so far this year, because I’ve been wasting all my time teaching English and math to the retarded sons of cloth manufacturers and iron merchants.”

“So you’re not interested in Ceylan?”

“Get up, let’s at least go to Turgay’s.”

“You know, they offered him a spot on the youth basketball team?”

“I don’t care, I gave up basketball.”

“Leaves you more time to brownnose your teachers, right?”

Looking at Vedat’s tanned, fit, relaxed body I thought: Yeah, I work hard at my classes, if I’m not first in class I get really frustrated, but I don’t care what you call it; my father doesn’t have a set of looms for me to take over in ten years, a thread factory, an iron depot and a foundry, or even a small contract in Libya, not even an import-export office, my poor dad; he resigned his post as a district administrator and he’s got nothing to show for it but a grave we visit once a year so Grandmother doesn’t cry in the house, we go so she can do her bawling there.

Vedat had no intention of stirring from the bed where he lay facedown, but at least he dragged his mouth over to the edge of the pillow to speak: he said that Mehmet had brought a nurse back with him from England, who was staying with his family now, although they slept in separate rooms and even though she was not a girl, as he called her, but actually a thirty-year-old woman, she got along well enough with the girls in our group.

“Turan, as you know, is doing his military duty.”

How was I supposed to know, I said to myself, I don’t spend the winters with Ankara and Istanbul society, I spend them going
between the dorm and my aunt’s house and trying to make a little money teaching mathematics, English, and poker to dopey rich kids like you. But I didn’t say anything, and Vedat continued, saying that Turan’s father felt his son wasn’t amounting to much and so, instead of pulling some strings, he decided the life of a private would straighten Turan out, but when I asked whether he had straightened out, Vedat said very seriously that he didn’t know, only that Turan had come home on a fifteen-day leave and started going after Hülya, at which point I was getting lost in my own thoughts, until Vedat, changing the subject, said, Oh yeah, there’s a new guy around, and I figured out right away that he was okay with Vedat, because he said this Fikret was “totally cool” and “our kind of guy,” not really explaining why until a little later he started to tell me about how much horsepower the guy’s fiberglass boat had, at which point I got really fed up and just stopped listening. When he realized this we were quiet for a while.

“What’s your sister doing?” he finally said.

“She’s become a typical leftie, always saying ‘I can’t believe how blind I was,’ just like the rest of them.”

“That’s a shame, sorry to hear it. Selcuk’s sister’s like that too,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Even worse, it looks like she’s in love with one of them! What about your sister?”

He could see I was annoyed and realized I didn’t like the subject.

“How’s your brother doing?”

“All he does is drink and get fat. He’s a hopeless slob! But he and my sister get along just fine. I don’t care, they can do whatever they want, but since one of them is so ideological that she hates money, and the other is such a slob he wouldn’t even lift a finger to earn any, I’m the one who has to deal with practical matters. That weird, awful house is still sitting on that plot of land for nothing.”

“Aren’t your grandmother and that, you know, the guy who works there, aren’t they living in the house?”

“They are. But why can’t they live in an apartment of a building we could build there. Then I wouldn’t have to spend the whole
winter telling rich retards about the length of the hypotenuse and its relation to the radius of a circle, know what I mean?”

“I see your point,” he said. Vedat seemed a little uncomfortable, and I was afraid that he would think I was some kind of enemy of the rich.

He got up from the bed he hadn’t budged from until now, naked except for a little bathing suit, a nice tan on his handsome, smooth body. He yawned in an easy way, no pains, no cares.

“Funda will want to come! But she’s still asleep.”

He went to wake up his sister. A little while later he came back and furiously lit a cigarette as though his life were completely full of problems and he couldn’t do without one.

“You still don’t smoke?”

“No.”

There was a silence. I thought about Funda sleepily scratching herself in her bed. We talked a little about stupid things, like whether the sea was hot or cold. Then Funda came in the door.

“Vedat, where are my sandals?”

Last year this Funda was a little girl, this year she had long, beautiful legs and a little bikini.

“Hello, Metin!”

“Hello.”

“How are things?… Vedat, I asked you, where are my sandals?”

The brother and sister immediately started to argue: One said he wasn’t the keeper of the other’s things, the other asked how her straw hat had turned up in his closet the other day, and so it continued, back and forth, until Funda left, slamming the door. When she came back a little later, it was as if nothing were wrong, but then they started up again over who would look for the car key in their mother’s room. Finally Vedat went.

“Well, Funda,” I said, tense just to be there, “what else is new?”

“What could be new! It’s totally boring!”

We pressed on, talking for a while: I asked what year she had just completed—freshman year: she was doing two years’ “prep,” no, not
in the German or Austrian high school, in the Italian one. So then I murmured these words to her: “Equipment electrique, Brevete type, Ansaldo San Giorgio Genova …” Funda asked me if I’d read them on some present someone brought me from Italy. I didn’t tell her that they were from the incomprehensible metal plates found above the doors on all the trolleys in Istanbul and that everyone in the city who used the trolleys wound up memorizing them to keep from dying of boredom; I got a feeling somehow that she would look down on me if I told her I rode the trolley. Then we were silent. I thought a little about the horrible creature they called their mother who slept until noon, reeked of creams and perfumes, who talked about playing cards to pass the time, and who passed the time by playing cards. Then Vedat came back, swinging the car keys on his finger.

We took the car that had been baking in the sun two hundred meters to Ceylan’s. I wanted to say something because I was afraid of seeming too excited.

“They changed this place a lot.”

We walked across the flagstones set a step apart in the lawn. A gardener was watering it in the heat. Finally I saw the girls, and trying to act natural, I said to Vedat and Funda, “Hey, do you ever play poker?”

“Huh?”

We came down the steps. The girls looked good lying there. Realizing they’d seen me, I thought with satisfaction: That money I won playing poker bought me the shirt from Ismet’s and these Levi’s I have over my bathing suit, and in my pants pocket I still have twelve thousand liras I earned in a month giving private lessons to idiots! Still trying to make conversation, I said:

“Do you play cards?”

“What cards?” Funda said to one of them, “Let me introduce you to Metin!”

But I already knew Zeynep.

“Hello, Zeynep, how’re things?”

“Good.”

“This is Fahrunnisa, but don’t call her that, or she’ll get mad. She goes by Fafa!”

Fafa was not a pretty girl anyway. We shook hands.

“And this is Ceylan!”

I shook Ceylan’s taut, light hand. I wanted to look somewhere else. I thought I might be in love, but it was a silly, childish thought. Looking at the sea I tried to believe that I wasn’t nervous but calm and, that way, to calm myself. The others forgot about me and started to talk among themselves.

“Waterskiing is hard, too.”

“If I could just get up on my feet.”

“Well, at least it’s not as dangerous as skiing on the snow.”

“Your bathing suit has to be snug.”

“It hurts your arms though.”

“When Fikret gets here we’ll give it a try.”

I was bored, I shuffled, I coughed.

“Would you sit down!” said Vedat.

I thought I was looking intriguingly serious.

“Sit!” said Ceylan.

She was pretty enough that I again thought that I could fall in love with her, then a little later, I thought I believed what I had thought.

“There’s a chaise longue over there,” said Ceylan, pointing with the tip of her nose.

Walking over to the chaise longue I saw it: horrifying furniture inside the open door of the concrete house; in American films, rich unhappy couples sit on furniture like this, drinking whiskey and shouting at each other as they argue about their troubled marriages. The smell of furniture, wealth, and luxury wafting out of the house seemed almost to challenge me—What are you doing here?—but I gave it some thought and I relaxed: I’m smarter than all of them! I looked at the gardener still watering the lawn, I picked up the chaise, went back with it, and sat down beside them listening to the chitchat while trying to decide whether I was in love or not.