Young Turk (13 page)

Had you heard this story before?

Love to you.

20 January 1943

Today is the deadline for the
Varlιk
. My father came home with just one doughnut. In the morning he had finalized the sale of his business and had paid whatever he had received – peanuts; that’s what’s happening: people are having to sell for peanuts – to the tax office. Since all our goods are waiting to be auctioned, the doughnut, he said, was all we had – and that only because İbrahim, our street vendor, had given it to him. Then he and Mother gave the doughnut to me. I insisted we must share it. They forced me to eat half of it. The other half is for tomorrow – also for me.

I never imagined food could taste so bitter.

During the night, I heard my father cry. He kept wishing he were dead. Then, after he went to sleep, Mother started crying ...

Why aren’t you here? I need you! I need to be strong for Mother and Father. I need you to give me hope.

22 January 1943

Yesterday most of the Jewish men followed the old routine and went to work. Or rather, they went to the shops and offices where they used to work before they’d either sold them or where they’d been made redundant. They walked the streets in the freezing cold, shared the few cigarettes they had and watched the trams go by. Then when they would normally have finished work, they returned home.

Today they’re staying in, waiting for the bailiffs or the police. No one we know has been able to pay his tax in full. So everything they own will be sold. Crowds have already gathered in prosperous neighbourhoods. Vultures! You can see them drooling. Some are acquaintances who were friendly only yesterday. Who’d have thought there’d be so many scavengers? Soon, many of them will get rich. People are now confirming what my father said from the very beginning: that the
Varlιk’
s real objective is the transfer of non-Muslim wealth – what there is of it – to ethnic Turks.

In a few days the deportations to the labour camp will begin. To Aşkale, in the east, near Erzurum. A place where apparently it’s harsh winter nine months of the year. Father thinks he’s bound to be sent there. Mother and I are tearing out our hair. That would kill him.

I’m meeting Handan this afternoon. She’s invited me to tea. She must have sensed how scared and miserable I am.

By the way, yesterday, our street – the non-Muslims in our street – received their first food parcels. Donated by Muslim neighbours, Masons and ‘people who wish to remain anonymous’. Üstat Vedat, Kenan Bey and Ahmet Bey were personally in charge. That’s the real Turkey, the real Turkish spirit. They’re the real Turks, the true Muslims!

Love you.

26 January 1943

The bailiffs didn’t come. We have to wait our turn.

As for my afternoon with Handan ... Wonderful and terrible. Wonderful because she’s the most open-hearted person there is. Terrible because ...

I wasn’t going to talk about it, but I must ...

You see, at some point we started talking about Gül. Handan loved Gül and still misses her a lot. In the end, she got so upset she couldn’t talk any more. So she gave me her diary to read.

The diary has a section about you that made me very unhappy. So I told her about us and how we had never dared declare our love. Then I asked to borrow the diary because I wanted to re-read the section referring to you and decide what to do. Being an angel, she agreed. I’ll copy the section for you. That’s like betraying a secret, so don’t you go and tell Handan. But then how could you? You’re not ...

No! I won’t believe it!

Here’s the section:

The day Gül was found frozen to death on a park bench as if she’d been a homeless person sleeping rough, my father told me he’d taught me everything he knew about the
kanun,
that henceforth I had to play with my own heart instead of his which, though adequate, was getting barnacled, and that if my heart was as good as he and my mother believed it to be, I would surely surpass him before long. To hear from the greatest virtuoso of our time that I, barely eighteen, had mastered an instrument which, for centuries, had been kept out of women’s reach, was like being told Allah was walking by my side.

I became so ecstatic, I forgot I was the daughter of pious parents who expected decorum from their only child and retorted that I would celebrate their faith in me by playing one of Neyzen Yusuf Pa
ş
a’s most difficult compositions. To my great joy, Father offered to accompany me on the oud. Mother, whose singing is compared to that of the bulbul, our people’s favourite songbird, declared that she, too, would join us. (I always thought my parents would have preferred a son instead of me to carry on their musical traditions. Are they changing their minds?)

It was at that moment that Rιfat came looking for Gül.

The fact that while I was savouring the happiest moment of my life, my dearest friend, Gül, had shut her eyes for ever will always haunt me. (When I mentioned this to Rιfat as an example of life’s contrariness, he quoted Mahmut the Simurg, his storyteller hero. That it’s not Life that’s contrary, but Death, that Life always succours life, that every time a sapling is felled, Life plants a hundred acorns ...)

It’s three years since Gül died. She once told me that despite my religious upbringing – or because of it – I have a golden soul. That I know love is what clothes the living and the living are those who are about to die and, but for people like me, they would die unclothed – and nothing can be more humiliating than that. How true that is I don’t know. But, certainly, I will always clothe her with my love. Yet I can’t forgive her for abandoning me even though, these days, I have a better idea of the desperation that pushed her to shut her eyes.

These days I want to shut my eyes, too.

Did Gül see her own death? Did she see it as deliverance? Did it frighten her?

She wanted to save everybody. ‘But’, she would say, ‘Death tolerates no interference.’ Is that why she embraced it like a dutiful wife?

Now, all the deaths she foresaw are happening. Millions are dying everywhere in this Second World War. Millions of Jews are burning. And that nice boy, Bilâl – killed somewhere in Greece. (I never admitted this, but I think the vision that decided Gül to kill herself was Bilâl’s death. One day when we were watching Bilâl kick a ball around with her brother Naim, she turned to me and wailed, ‘How many deaths can a person survive?’)

Of course, it could also have been the fate of the Jews. Because a few days before she died, she said, ‘Even in Turkey, where they lived happily for centuries, my Jews will be persecuted.’

She meant the
Varlιk,
of course.

Well, I want to save the world, too. Her Jews are my Jews, our Jews, the Turks’ Jews. Persecution can be defeated.

It’s me again: Selma.

Are you alive or dead? Do I love a boy who, like a good Jew, is trying to save lives in order to save the world? Or is there something wrong with me, as Mother thinks, because I cling to the belief that you’re alive, that you’re my strength, the strength I need in order not to panic? (What Mother thinks doesn’t bother me. There’s something wrong with everybody, we all know that.)

But the question remains: am I in love with a ghost?

1 February 1943

Still no bailiffs. They’ll come on the sixth. They’re waiting for a member of parliament from Ankara who wants my father’s collection of Ottoman calligraphy. It’s quite valuable. Mostly antique. Written on parchment, cloth, tiles and ceramic plates. Passages from the Koran, sultans’ seals, verses from famous poems all expressed in wonderful geometric shapes. In fact, the MP has been trying to buy the collection for years. Now, he’s sure to get it for nothing. God only knows the bribes that must have greased the bailiffs’ hands. As Üstat Vedat says, the
Varlιk
has brought out the worst and the best in the Turks.

15 February 1943

Sorry I haven’t written for a while. I kept asking myself what is the sense in writing to someone who’s gone and died?

Is death prettier than I am?

I’m a decent person, I think. At least, I try to be good. I also have a nice body. I’m not being vain. That’s what girls in my class say. And boys are always eyeing me. (They hardly glance at Handan, who’s very pretty, but thin as a needle and flat-chested.)

You’ve never seen my body. Don’t you want to? Wouldn’t you like to touch me? Kiss me? Do I sound like a Jezebel? Sometimes after seeing a film – I don’t go to the cinema any more, we don’t have the money – I used to cry because I wanted to be touched and kissed like they do on the screen. Didn’t you feel like that too? Don’t you want to touch and kiss me?

Is death more attractive than I am?

I’m ranting again. You’re not dead.

It was your birthday the other day. So happy birthday! If you’d been here I would have given you a kiss.

The bailiffs came. Sure enough, Father’s collection went for less than a glass of water. Our home is empty now. Except for one mattress – mine. That’s where Mother and I sleep. They confiscated hers because the police came to take my father away just when the bailiffs were here and the bailiffs said my mother would no longer need a conjugal bed.

Father is in detention now – in a warehouse, we’ve been told – waiting for the train that will take him to Aşkale.

Bilâl – they’ve taken away my father
!

God knows what they’ll do to him!

Will he ever come back?

And if he doesn’t – what will I do? What will Mother do? What will happen to us?

Sorry. No hysterics. I promised my father – no hysterics.

We’re fine. We’re all right.

Food parcels come regularly. Once a week. Incredibly generous. I think people take food out of their own mouths to give to us.

Rιfat has taken to delivering our allocation. He stays a bit and we talk about Gül and, of course, you. He’s very fond of you because you’re the only one in Naim’s gang who was nice to him. He’s grown into a hefty boy. He still wrestles. I tell him he should challenge Naim, who’s a weakling by comparison, and take over the gang. ‘I won’t impose myself on anybody,’ he says. A very decent boy.

School has turned into a pig. If I could, I’d stop going. But I promised Father I’d be top of my class and show those who call me ‘half-Turk’ that when it comes to following in Atatürk’s footsteps, I’m better than they are.

Were you around when these labels, ‘half-Turk’ or ‘half-citizen’, were coined for Jews and non-Muslims? Now we hear them all the time – at school, too. Not just from classmates – actually, except for a few bullies, my classmates are all right – but also from some of the teachers. The history master, Metin, for example.

Remember those caricatures that depict Jews as gigantic fat men with thick eyebrows and large hooked noses, carrying sacks of loot and mocking the poor? They started publishing them last year when you were still here. Well, this vomit, Metin, having heard that Father was going to Aşkale, showed me one of these and asked whether it looked like ‘the man who sired me’. Fortunately, Father had told us what these caricatures are based on. So I told Metin, ‘This is the sort of thing the Nazi paper,
Der Stürmer
, publishes to spread anti-semitism. Had Atatürk been alive, he would have smashed the hands that drew them!’ Metin smiled, but he was furious. I’m sure he’ll fail me next exam.

Imagine anti-semitism in Turkey ... I’m so scared, Bilâl!

The Germans have surrendered in Stalingrad. Will that change things? Might it save my father?

Love is hope. My love for you is my hope.

24 February 1943

Some of the boys visited your parents on your birthday and Can told me your mother had news of you. Apparently you saved her family and smuggled them out of Salonica into Skopje, where the Turkish community is hiding you all.

I want to shout, ‘My hero!’ But the boys aren’t totally convinced. They think someone’s trying to comfort your mother. I find it difficult to believe also, I don’t know why. Yes, I do know. It’s the
Varlιk
. We have become rudderless boats. There are no horizons left; no one can tell whether there’s land anywhere.

Please be alive. For my sake. They’ve taken my father away. My mother looks stricken with blight. I’m like an orphan!

Love.

27 February 1943

I’m having difficulty writing. It’s freezing. We have no heating. Mother and I go to bed wearing all our clothes.

I’ve heard some people – the neighbourhood rats – say, ‘Let’s burn the Jews! They’re fat enough! They’ll keep us warm!’

Burn the Jews, like they did during the Spanish Inquisition ... Like they say the Nazis are doing ...

I’ve even heard rumours that some municipalities here are preparing ‘burning sites’. Not true, of course – Üstat Vedat reassures us about that. Just shows how the
Varlιk
chews up the mind.

Talking about Nazis. Did you know some Turkish officers have taken German officers to certain schools so that they can praise Nazism, spread anti-semitism and justify the
Varlιk
?

Mother is sitting by the window, watching the street. Poor woman, what else can she do?

I’m going to bed. If I fall asleep before her, I won’t have to cry with her.

I want my father back!

Why aren’t you here, you pig! Why aren’t you here to keep me safe? And warm.

5 March 1943

I’m sorry to tell you your father, too, has been sent to Aşkale. They picked him up yesterday, as he was about to leave for work. Apparently he told the police they should let him work so that he can pay his tax. They laughed at him. ‘We don’t want undesirable elements taking our jobs. Only true Turks have the right to employment,’ they said.

Can you blame me for being afraid? ‘Undesirable elements’, ‘quasi-citizens’, ‘half-Turks’ have become today’s language. Even reputable journalists are at it. You should read some of the ‘unbiased’ articles on Jews – poison.

Naim’s father, too, has been sent to Aşkale. They came for him while the family were having lunch. On this occasion, the police had the decency to wait in another room so that they could finish eating (as if they could) and he could say goodbye.