Young Turk (14 page)

Our world has fallen into quicksand. We can’t even scream because there’s mud in our mouths. Even so I keep looking at the wind in case it blows a green leaf my way.

Next week Handan will play a solo in her father’s concert. You can imagine how excited she is. I’ll be there to support her.

Here’s the best of the latest gossip.

Aşer’s aunt, aged seventy-five, has threatened to divorce her new husband (her third), aged eighty-nine, if he refuses to give up his five paramours and the seven other women who claim to be his odalisques. Though all the latter live in an old-people’s home where no male, not even a tomcat, is allowed to set foot, Aşer’s aunt really believes their claims. Her husband might be eighty-nine, she says, but he eats a lot of figs and consequently has the virility of ten rams.

Love is lovely.

10 March 1943

Listen to this.

We have a new Jewish boy in our class. Alev Moris. He’s from Bursa. He lost his mother some years back. When the
Varlιk
dispatched his father and two older brothers to Aşkale, he came here, to Istanbul, to live with his aunt. A harmless, timid boy deeply marked by his mother’s death – like Rιfat. But, unlike Rιfat, not sporty. However, he reads a lot and knows all sorts of things.

The other day, Metin, the history master, confusing us with another class, started the lesson with the Age of Discoveries – a period we’ll be studying next term. When we pointed this out he, being the shit he is, got angry. He started mocking our ignorance and offered a lira to anybody who could say anything meaningful about how the Age of Discoveries had affected the world. Naturally, knowing that nothing we said would be ‘meaningful’ to him, we kept quiet. But, Alev, being a newcomer, took him seriously and launched into an amazing monologue. Starting with the navigational advances made by Muslim mathematicians, he spoke about how the need for a sea route for the spice trade drove Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Magellan on to their historic voyages; then, describing how the lust for wealth and power had spawned the evils of colonialism and imperialism, he pronounced both the First and the Second World Wars as continuations of these pursuits.

This response – which left us gaping – inflamed Metin’s anger. ‘What’s your name?’ he shouted. Alev told him. Metin snarled, ‘Moris? Moris? What sort of a name is that? All Turkish names have a meaning. Alev means “flame”. My name, Metin, means “stalwart”. What does Moris mean?’ Well, as you know, Moris comes from the French Maurice, and is an affectation among educated Jews for Moses. So we thought Alev was cooked.

Not in the least. He thought for a few moments then spoke slowly, as if Metin were a dimwit. ‘The surname is Moriz, sir. Written with a “z”. Not Moris with an “s”. It was misspelled by the registrar of births, sir. As you know,
mor
means “purple”,
iz
means “track”. Combined, it means “purple track”. This refers to the time when we Turks were trapped in a maze of mountains in Central Asia, sir. We were facing death by hunger and thirst when out of nowhere a grey wolf appeared. It laid down a track – a phosphorescent one so that it would be visible even at night, which is why it was purple – and led us to safety. As you know, sir, today many European politicians call Atatürk “the grey wolf”. That’s because he, too, led us out of the wilderness.’

Metin was left speechless.

God help Alev. But what courage! What imagination! What an example for the timorous like me.

Love.

16 March 1943

Yesterday, at assembly, we were told Alev had been expelled for misconduct.

Metin is a slug! Why don’t you come back and step on him?

Love is hope.

24 March 1943

Handan’s concert was a great success. They’re already planning others.

I had never imagined the
kanun
was such a magical instrument. It has a sound like twenty string instruments played at once. I can appreciate the music now because Handan and her father have been instructing me on some famous compositions, on how they create moods and trances as pathways to love and God. Üstat Vedat defines this music as Sufism in sound. For him it’s the preferred path, as opposed to poetry or whirling, for ascending the seven heavens and witnessing the Godhead. (I’m not sure I understand all that, but it has really taken hold of me.)

We have no news of my father. Is he well? Will he survive Aşkale? Mother says I should stop grieving. If anything had happened to him, we’d have heard; bad news always finds a cruel cloud to carry it. This from a woman who chains herself to the window to watch the street. I’m not that brave.

When Üstat Vedat and Handan see how little we Jews know about Turkish music, they become downhearted. ‘If your people listened to classical Turkish music like they listen to Bach or Mozart,’ Üstat Vedat said the other day, ‘they’d soon see that Turkish composers are the equal of their European counterparts.’ I’m sure he’s right. Which makes me think Turks may have some justification in calling us ‘half-Turks’. Surely we have the duty to immerse ourselves in our country’s culture.

So that’s what I’ve decided to do. I’ll even try and learn an instrument. The
ney
, Üstat Vedat suggested. That’s the reed flute. He thinks, since I can play the harmonica a bit, I should have good breath and good co-ordination.

Apropos of ‘half-Turk’. At Handan’s concert, I sat next to Ahmet Bey, the professor, and told him about Alev’s misadventure with Metin and his subsequent expulsion. Ahmet Bey was furious. He said Metin was a disgrace to his profession and he’ll make sure the turd doesn’t get away with this sort of fascist behaviour.

Love you.

10 April 1943

It was Rιfat’s birthday yesterday. I wanted to give him a present. He’s been such a solid, reassuring presence. He won’t let anybody else deliver our food. It’s as if Mother and I have become his wards. And whenever he sees me at school – which is almost every day – he offers me his lunch. I refuse, of course, even when I’m hungry. After all, he wrestles and needs nourishment.

Since I didn’t have any money to buy him a present, I gave him a kiss instead. I hope you don’t mind.

I kiss you, too.

24 April 1943

Yesterday, my class paraded in the Children’s Festival. The mayor called us ‘magnificent representatives of the nation’. In our hands, he said, Turkey’s future was assured.

I felt like asking him: what about the Jews’ future? Is it assured in your hands? If not – where can we run to? The Nazis are making sure there’s nowhere we can escape to!

Love.

16 May 1943

Twenty-four years ago yesterday, Atatürk secretly slipped out of Istanbul. On the 19th he stepped ashore in Samsun and launched the War of Independence.

I mention this as a link to yesterday’s events.

When Rιfat delivered the food, Ahmet Bey came with him. He told me he had confronted Metin and had threatened to chase him out of the educational system if he ever again discriminated against non-Muslims. Apparently, Metin got really scared. Illiberal elements in the government may hate Ahmet Bey, but he’s one of the country’s leading educationalists and very influential. Since he’s also a war hero, he’s someone to whom even fanatic nationalists defer.

Anyway, Metin has not only promised to mend his ways, but will also arrange Alev’s readmission.

In the course of this conversation, Ahmet Bey also explained the ideologies behind such terms as ‘Turkishness’, ‘Turkification’, ‘full Turks’, ‘half-Turks’ and ‘Kemalism’.

I’m summarizing what he said not only because it explains the present situation but also because we need to understand it for the future. As they say, ‘understanding begets solutions’.

Though Turkification started as a reformist movement by the Young Turks in the last decades of the Ottoman empire, it acquired special importance when the Turkish Republic rose from its ashes. The founders of this new Turkey, proposing, almost in Marxist terms, a democratic people’s state devoted to state socialism, decided that, in order to achieve this objective, the people needed a fresh identity that would shed its imperial past. An identity that would be Turkish rather than the motley of nations –
millets
– that existed before. Particularly as, following the carnage of eight years of war, the atrocities suffered by the Armenians at the hands of the Ottomans in 1915-17 and the 1923–25 population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, the ratio of non-Muslims to Muslims had fallen from one in five to one in forty. The sociologist Ziya Gökalp duly provided a new concept. He stated that a nation must be defined not by race, political system or geographical boundaries, but by a shared language, culture and traditions. What makes us human, he declared, is not our body, but our soul. (Yes, I say. Yes!) This is a definition that can embrace everybody in the land – including us, Jews.

But then certain conservative elements, noting that such Muslim minorities as Albanians, Bosnians, Circassians, Kurds and Lazes continued to preserve their own languages and cultures, decided that these diversities were a threat to Turkish nationalism. (Some traditionalists even claimed that equality for minorities contravened the principles of Islamic law.) Consequently, they expediently restructured Gökalp’s definition by adding Islam as a further essential component for Turkishness. These Muslim minorities were told that they were, in reality, Turks who, over the centuries, had forgotten their Turkishness; now that they were back in the fold, they would remember their true identity and embrace it. (This would be funny if it weren’t so insulting.)

Inevitably, this revised definition left the non-Muslims as outsiders, as ‘non-Turks’ or ‘half-Turks’. At best, as ‘guests in the country’, at worst, as dangerous ‘others’. In the hands of reactionaries, fascists, xenophobes, Nazi-lovers, it superseded the liberal, all-embracing national identity and came to be known as Kemalism. (What an insult to Atatürk’s name!) And since Atatürk’s death it has supported the discrimination against Jews, Armenians and Greeks – all bona fide Turks. (Atatürk must be weeping in his cloud.)

Where the future lay, Ahmet Bey could not say. But he hoped that when Germany was defeated and Turkey moved into the Allies’ camp, there would be a return to the multi-ethnic national identity, the only identity that truly defined the Turk.

I wanted to ask him: we know history repeats itself. But does it ever repeat good events? Or only the disasters?

I desisted. Why should I feed my despair?

Love.

12 June 1943

Our benefactors gathered at Üstat Vedat’s last night to review the situation. I never realized how difficult it is – and has been – to keep us alive. Like a child, I just took the food and hardly worried about the sacrifices that had put it in my mouth. The fact is, our neighbours and benefactors are suffering as much as we are. As if that’s not bad enough, they also have the vultures to deal with. These criminals, many of them local, are constantly hovering about. They’re always trying to steal the food parcels. On occasions, they succeed. Though not when Rιfat’s around. They’re scared of Rιfat. They went for him once and ended up with bloody noses. Even more disgustingly, they threaten our benefactors or try to blackmail them for ‘aiding enemies’. Have you heard of anything more sinister?
Aiding enemies
! If anything, these attacks and thefts increase our friends’ resolve. But what will happen to us when they run out of resources – as they soon will?

Both Üstat Vedat and Ahmet Bey urged them – and us – to tighten our belts and somehow hold on. Apparently some of the Allies have condemned the
Varlιk
as discriminatory. There are rumours that American journalists are coming to investigate and that some people in the government are having second thoughts. Whether that includes Prime Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu is another matter. By all accounts, it was he who ordered the huge increases in the assessments.

These days, it’s difficult to imagine that only three years ago, around this time, the whole community was out in the park making rose-petal jam. Gypsies bringing in the petals they’d gathered in Thrace. Children unloading the carts. Husbands distributing the sugar – yes, sugar was available then – while grannies and grandpas stirred the cauldrons and wives filled the jars. Will those times ever return?

Which reminds me, the Gypsy children you boys used to play with bring us food, too, when they can. Often it’s crusts, but considering how poor they are that’s like giving us whole lambs. And they love Rιfat. A few years back, at the fair – actually Gül was with him – he wrestled with a bear. They’ve never forgotten that.

Next week, Handan will be playing in another concert. Rιfat and I are invited. (Handan and I have become very close. I think I’ve taken Gül’s place.)

Love.

25 June 1943

Amazing news! We, daughters, sons and wives of deportees, have become anglers and shrimpers. You can see us casting our lines or sifting sand all along the shore. And we’re not doing badly. We catch quite a few fish, mostly mackerel, and gather buckets of shrimps. (Shrimps aren’t kosher, as you know, so that’s for the non-observants like us.)

The idea came from Rιfat. He trains with Hacι Turgut – the famous wrestler, now retired – and he never stops talking about how wise this man is, how easily he solves life’s problem. One day, Hacι Turgut told him that people who live by the sea will never go hungry because they can always fish and shrimp. So Rιfat came to us and said why don’t we have a go, that anything we caught would most certainly make life easier for everybody.

That’s what we’re doing. And it’s easing the burden on our benefactors. We even have the pleasure of treating them to fresh fish.

So, from now on, I don’t have to suck pips or olive stones to fight off hunger. (I never told you this, but that’s what Mother and I do when we run out of food.)

(Nor did I tell you about my recurring nightmare in which lines of people – including my father – burn at the stake while people eating pumpkin seeds drive past in tram-loads and spit the husks at them.)