Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (10 page)

I was startled to realize how eager I was to meet the Bayley family. The nearer I got to the address in Sloane Avenue, with its rows of brick buildings, the more apprehensive I became. At the door of the big two-storey edifice, in front of which a Rover was parked, I nervously examined the select champagne and the silver frame I was carrying. I quickly removed my finger from the buzzer when I heard from within a loving dialogue between Dalga and her half-English, half-Turkish son. I shut my eyes tight as the ache in my forehead began to throb with Adrian's giggles. Maybe afraid of falling in love with Dalga again, or of identifying with her husband, I left the packages at the door and began to run down the street.

As I reached King's Road I noticed a plaque on the wall: ‘George Seferis (1901–1971), Nobel Prize winner, Greek poet and Ambassador, lived here.' I felt as happy as if I had bumped into a fellow countryman, but embarrassed when I recalled the chauvinist politician from Urla, the poet's home town in Turkey, who had tried to rename Seferis Street. My father, may he rest in peace, had always said, ‘If Oktay Rifat had been a Greek poet he would have won the Nobel Prize a long time ago.'

God bless human beings who remain indoors for the sake of Christmas! I enjoyed walking through the deserted streets till I reached Sloane Square tube station. There were only two of us waiting for the train. In a situation like this I usually acknowledge the other person, and encouraged by his sad face I asked the young chap with the antique accordion, ‘Are you Romanian?' He replied, ‘Are you Russian?' After we had both identified ourselves I gave Pavel from Prague a £20 note and said, ‘Play me your favourite piece.'

Hesitantly he announced Dvořák's ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me', and began to sing in a high voice. When I realized the depth of love and yearning in those melancholy lines, of which I understood not a word, my heart grew sad. For the first time listening to a song, I felt I must close my eyes. Maybe because I didn't know how to laugh, I knew I wasn't going to cry. The damned train arrived before the song ended and Pavel and I got into the same carriage. I gave him another twenty and asked him to keep on playing the same piece till we reached Piccadilly Circus. Through this old melody which lasts only three minutes, I realized what had been missing from my whole life.

With a lighter heart, I got off at Piccadilly Circus. I wasn't surprised when I lost my footing and slipped and fell at the bottom of endless stairs. As I fell to the ground I was embarrassed to hear screams. I landed on my left palm and knee and closed my eyes to avoid seeing the crowd around me but when I heard a friendly woman asking, ‘Are you all right?', my pain seemed to increase. Dragging my left foot and blowing on my hand, I reached a bench at the end of the platform, sat down and began to cry. I threw my sodden tissue towards the noisy mice on the tracks before heading for the main exit. I thought I was able to walk better in spite of the pain in my knee, and just as my uncle would have advised, I kept my shoulders back, my head up, and looked fifty metres ahead. I was almost free of the hazy veil over my eyes. When my grey blurred surroundings began to appear in their true colours, it seemed as if my chemistry had changed. I headed for my room with hope. The more I walked the better I felt. I multiplied two six-figure numbers in my head and checked the result with a calculator. (Unfortunately I wasn't wrong.) I took refuge in
Any Human Heart
, but lost interest when the narrator met the Prince of Wales, who abdicated for love of the woman he eventually married. Wasn't my father's book that I had found amongst ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me' an autobiography of the confused king? I felt uneasy as I realized the meaningless connection and rushed out. You probably thought I would go to the Down Down and plant a £5 note on Tiffany. But turning into a deserted New Bond Street, where I used to die of boredom walking with my mother, I was about to take a momentous decision: I was going to find my father's killer!

‘Allah loves those who have been cleansed.'
Tevbe:108

‘The man who was so good he forgot his own name.'

‘Don't tell me who you are. I want to worship you.'

‘We are hypocrites because we cannot forget the things we have acquired.'

‘Is it not sadder to be renewed than to disappear?'

‘Words used once a lifetime. Which ones?'

‘Eternity as a comet ...'

‘All that is written is out of date before the ink is dry.'

On my three-hundredth visit to Gürsel Hodja he greeted me with, ‘Choose seven aphorisms of Elias Canetti, translate them into Turkish, write your own paraphrase of each, and bring them to our next meeting.' (Yours truly struggled hard with the lines above.) He wanted me, God bless him, to invent comic and epic stories from his depressing sketches. (That was how your humble servant realized that writing is harder than pulling the trigger.)

I noticed he was trying to give me guidance without undermining my knowledge. My Hodja wanted to think that every meeting had some influence on me, otherwise I wouldn't come. While time was erasing my impetuous tendencies, my secret cells were coming to life. If I glimpsed an erotic poster from the corner of my eye I would dream I was descending into the vaults of the unclean. One evening, tired of reading, I found myself unable to turn away at the last minute from the front door of a brothel, God be praised!

Is it because I can't swim that I respect the sea? If there was no threat of rain or whiff of snow, I walked to the wharf and on the crossing between Üsküdar and Beşiktaş my eagerness to meet my Hodja grew stronger. Ottoman postcards of the old ferry-boats still conveyed the grave forgotten dignity of our forefathers, and journeys of fifteen minutes began and ended with the splendour of a transatlantic crossing. On my last visit to Gürsel Hodja, while I was concentrating on a newspaper article by Taha Kıvanç, I was distracted by a large book left on the bench to my right. The title of the work was
The People's King
, and it examined King Edward VIII's wish to abdicate for love of the American widow he wanted to marry.

‘Since he was king and wanted to marry a widow, why didn't he trust to the people's support?' – this was the question I wanted to put to the Hodja.

According to the name-plate, the book on the ferry belonged to Selçuk Altun, whose novels Taha Kıvanç had recommended. The man whose works I swore I'd never read was said to be on the board of directors of a private bank.

Head louse Baybora's latest announcement was as follows: ‘Chief gunslinger, we'll meet in the Park of the Turkish Women's Union at two o'clock tomorrow to bring about justice and take $100,000 and her prayers from a tearful but wealthy lady.'

After this final episode your humble servant swore that he would bump off this creep Baybora. (I ground my teeth every time I heard his voice.) As there is no word for ‘resign' in our line of business, to break free I had to reach the boss glorified by the title ‘Executioner'– if he actually existed. Undoubtedly I was being taken for a ride! I never came across crimes like mine in the news. Instead of a gang, there were perhaps two crooks who took yours truly for a fool. Besides, I had lost my enthusiasm for the job, though not my discipline. After every episode the Hodja would greet me with, ‘You're looking shifty again, like someone who has just cheated on his mate.'

Baybora chose the lonely hours of shady local parks to meet and confer. In the stunted little park of peaceful Acıbadem there was a sculpture of two young children and their sad, lovelorn mother. I was tracing the signature of the work when the louse suddenly appeared with a sneer: ‘I'm not surprised you're looking at a statue with hidden thighs and breasts.' He handed me a dossier as though he was awarding me a prize but I had no wish to examine it.

On this occasion I did not submit to the dossier's information with a respectful prayer. As soon as I saw the photograph of my next victim Soner Ä°lkin, I grew nervous. The doomed wretch, who seemed to be in his forties, had an arrogant bearing, as though he'd been his own sculptor. This would be the last time, please God, that my left hand looked for trouble.

I was expecting the parasite to be married to a wealthy businesswoman older than himself, but I was not expecting him to have seduced his wife's two daughters, one by her first husband, and married, the other by her second husband, and a schoolgirl. The pervert was on the board of his wife's export firm. Despite warnings, he couldn't resist withdrawing massive advances from the company funds, losing money on the stock exchange and gambling. He used his trade secrets for blackmail, and for his divorce he demanded half the company's main assets. His wife's detective reported that her dissolute husband was with a couple of Ukrainian prostitutes on a yacht anchored at Göcek Bay in the Mediterranean.

I was sure that ‘trade secrets' included falsification of documents, unregistered documents, tax evasion. (Once again I was thankful that I had nothing to do with the stinking business world.)

I flew to Dalaman and booked into the Seren Guesthouse, its entrance hall resonant with sad laments. Next morning my package was delivered to me, stamped ‘special tourist material'. Hidden between a prayer rug and decorative saddlebags were the dismantled parts of a telescopic rifle (SV99) and as I prayed and reassembled the piece, I was as happy as if I'd met one of my army friends.

I made lonely Göcek, twenty minutes away by minibus, my base. On the eve of the town's tourist season it had retreated into a spring siesta. I was amazed that the miniature main road wasn't filled with commotion. The gigantic yacht
Sürtük
was moored between Göcek Island and the strip of shore that belonged to the Forestry Commission. I kept watch for seventy-two hours, and from the grove of irregular pine trees that reached the summit my eye followed inch by inch the agent of sin. Every time my hand made a move towards the heavy field-glasses I saw the bow of the boat shaking. I won't go into details about the lecherous behaviour of sinister Soner and the voluptuous prostitutes in the gunwale (I felt some sympathy for the one without sunglasses, because she took every opportunity to read a book).

The shameless Soner was videoing the naked love scenes between the two helpless girls as I clutched the SV99 with the silencer.

My left eye covered the telescopic sight. The rifle, your humble servant and the ground had all merged into one. With a silent prayer I marked the target, and as my arms seemed to lengthen and reach inside the yacht, I emptied the magazine into the head and chest of the dishonourable wretch. The prostitutes threw themselves screaming into the sea and I ran zigzagging to the shore, where I dismantled the gun and, as the pieces sank into the dark sea, leapt into the copse. Running to the town square, I remembered that the son-in-law of a media mogul had been shot in the same place last year. (I wondered if my fellow assassin had disappeared in the same way.)