Young Turk (2 page)

But not so my parents. My parents were genuine converts – Muslim through and through. People could tell that just by their pietistic names: Kenan ‘reserved’ (my father), Mukaddes ‘sacred’ (my mother).

‘Well, they’re wrong. We may have Dönme roots, but we’re true Muslims.’

Gül shrugged and laughed. ‘Not that it matters. Atatürk says we’re all equal.’

‘Yes.’

She pointed at her vagina. ‘Seen enough?’

‘No ...’

She pulled up her panties. ‘Yes, you have!’

Ruefully I dropped my
camise
. I realized I had fallen in love with her. And I imagined that having seen each other’s genitals, we could consider ourselves married – well, unofficially. I became instantly jealous. ‘Why did you show yourself to Bilâl?’

She laughed. ‘Because I love him.’

‘Does that mean now you also love me?’

‘You’re too young.’

‘So is Bilâl.’

‘He’s Jewish.’

I wished I were Jewish, too. ‘Is it because I’m fat?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Just too young. I’d better go. Good luck.’

‘Thanks.’

At the door, she blew me a kiss. ‘If you’d been Jewish you’d be laughing. You’d have been done already.’

That annoyed me. I wanted to protest. But she had gone.

So I wrote to her, explaining the many reasons that made circumcision so important for a Muslim. That it is the most momentous initiation in a boy’s life and must be revered as such. That unlike Jewish boys who get chopped off when they don’t know who they are or what they are – not to mention that getting cut when only eight days old makes it all too easy for them – we Muslims experience circumcision when we approach puberty, when we already have some idea of what the world is like and what we can expect from it. That whereas Jewish boys have to wait until their bar mitzvahs, when they are thirteen, before they can be considered men, we attain manhood the moment we shed our foreskin. That undertaking circumcision when we are old enough to understand the significance of the rite impels us to attain the Prophet Muhammet’s perfection even though that objective is unattainable because the Prophet Muhammet, Blessed be His Name, was born perfect and was thus the only man born circumcised. That circumcision is one of the five cleansers that give us mental and moral probity; consequently, unless circumcised, we cannot pray in a mosque or perform the Haj or even marry.

Writing the letter eased my fears. When I set out for the park where the communal circumcisions and the ensuing festivities would take place, I strutted as if my silly
camise
and hat were the uniform of Mehmetcik, our indigenous soldier considered indomitable even by Tommy, his British counterpart. To keep my spirit bubbling, I envisaged Gül’s downy vagina smiling at me, like two halves of a sunny peach. And I remembered the softness of her hand on my penis. My penis which, to date, could do no more than urinate and harden always at unwanted moments was, lest I forget, bigger than both Naim’s and Bilâl’s!

And as I lined up with my brothers-in-rite outside the circumciser’s tent and received the blessing of Cemil Ağa, the rich man of the neighbourhood who was defraying the cost of the festivity as his charitable duty for the year, I shamed myself by producing an erection that no youngster of my age was supposed to have.

Gül, as I have already mentioned, was a
Pîr
.

I discovered this the following summer.

We were playing football on the beach in Suadiye. (Gül was not allowed to swim. Her eyes were allergic to the iodine in the sea.)

Bilâl’s mother, Ester, was swimming on her own; she was far out, halfway to Burgaz, the second of the Princes’ Islands. Gül’s mother Lisa, Ester’s close friend, was stretched out under a parasol, reading a book. (My mother, Mukaddes, the third member of this set of Graces, had won a bursary for a midwifery course and was away in Ankara.)

Normally, Ester, Lisa and my mother swam together. Before marriage and children, they had swum to all four Princes’ Islands. On a number of occasions, they had even tried to swim the length of the Bosporus, but had had to give up each time because of the shipping to and from the Black Sea. But Lisa, having been vaccinated against smallpox, had been told not to swim for a few days. (Bilâl was God knows where. Naim and he were too independent to be seen with their mothers.)

Gül was running circles round me with the ball when she suddenly stopped and pointed to the horizon. ‘Ester’s in trouble!’

I looked at where she was pointing. Ester – or rather her red swimming cap – was a dot on the sea.

Gül ran to the edge of the water. ‘It’s pulling her down!’

‘What’s pulling her down?’

Gül waded in and, gesticulating wildly, screeched high-pitched sounds like a dog being tortured. ‘Somebody save her!’

As Lisa jumped up, I threw off my sandals. ‘I’ll go! I’m a fast swimmer!’

I dived in. Ester was too far out and I had no chance of saving her, but I had to try. I swam furiously.

Then I saw another swimmer in the distance change course and strike out towards Ester.

I heard Gül shout. ‘Someone’s gone to help. She’ll be safe now.’

The other swimmer reached Ester.

After a while, I joined them.

The other swimmer turned out to be Deniz, a relative on my father’s side. One of my dream women. When she got married – I was barely four at the time – I had thrown a monstrous tantrum, calling her husband a donkey and begging her to divorce him and marry me. Deniz, sweet and good-hearted, had gently fended me off. Thereafter, I had locked her in my mind and imagined enjoying untold things with her.

Ester was suffering from stomach cramps. Women’s problems, Gül told me later.

Deniz and I took turns to drag her back. It was hard work, but it had its rewards. As we toiled to control Ester, who kept flailing as if determined to drown us all, I frequently brushed against Deniz’s big breasts.

On the beach, Ester, still contorted, hugged us. ‘How did you know I was in trouble?’

Lisa pointed at Gül, who had picked up the ball and was practising some fancy footwork. ‘She saw you.’

Deniz nodded. ‘Yes, I heard Gül shout! That’s what made me turn round and see Ester.’

I was amazed. ‘How could you have heard her? You were too far out.’

‘I don’t know how. I just did.’

Gül dragged me away. ‘Come on – let’s play!’

Later, at siesta time, Gül and I took to our bikes. Defying the afternoon heat with strenuous activity was our way of demonstrating our toughness. We went across to the Golden Horn and, pretending we were competing in the Tour de France and climbing mountains like the Tourmalet, the Aubisque and the Izoard, rode furiously up and down the hills. Gül, being the faster rider, had long designated herself the
maillot jaune
and always wore a yellow jersey.

When we stopped to pick some figs from the trees lining the lane to the Greek patriarchate, I asked her. ‘How could Deniz have heard you? You weren’t even shouting!’

Gül thought for a long time. ‘Strange, isn’t it?’

‘Telepathic, I’d say.’

‘Maybe.’

‘What else?’

Gül pulled me closer to her. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘You know I can.’

‘Nobody must know.’

‘What is it?’

‘It is like telepathy, only stronger. I sense – see – things. Dangerous things. Just as they’re about to happen ...’

‘You’re kidding me ...’

‘I can see Death ... When he gets too near ...’

‘That’s impossible ...’

She looked annoyed. ‘I can! I’ve chased Death away many times. I chased him when he came for you ...’

‘For me?’

‘When you had diphtheria the second time.’

‘I had diphtheria the second time because they inoculated me at school before I’d recovered from the first!’

‘Well, he came for you – Death ... Stood around for three nights ...’

I remembered those nights. My windpipe was so blocked I could barely breathe. My mother had managed to procure an oxygen cylinder from the hospital – probably the only one in Istanbul in those days – but even that hadn’t helped. They had had to do a tracheotomy.

‘It was the tracheotomy that saved me.’

Gül smiled smugly. ‘That was my doing.’

I forced a laugh. ‘Oh, sure!’

‘I kept shouting at all the doctors I could think of! Inwardly – the way I shouted at Deniz this morning: Do something! Do something! Finally they performed the tracheotomy.’

I stared at her, expecting her to giggle and tell me she’d been teasing me.

She stared back defiantly. ‘You don’t believe me?’

I did. And I didn’t. I nodded uncertainly.

‘You’ll keep it a secret – you promised!’

I nodded again.

She rubbed her hands. ‘Right. Now, don’t think Death’s forgotten you. He’s around somewhere. So, time to get you really strong. Turn all that fat into muscle. Do you wrestle?’

‘No ...’

‘Best way. Let’s go!’

I gaped at her. ‘Wrestle with you?’

‘Why – scared I’d beat you?’

‘You’re a girl ...’

‘I won’t tell, don’t worry!’ We were near a plot of land awaiting builders. She dragged me there and drew a square on the earth. ‘This is the mat ...’

And as we grappled, as I locked my arms around her muscular thighs and felt her buttocks, firm like flexed biceps, I decided I would definitely marry her, too young or not. I even swore I would stop being unfaithful to her in my fantasies and no longer lust after dream women like Deniz – an impossibility, as I soon found out.

Much as I loved tumbling with her, I didn’t like losing to Gül every time we wrestled. So I joined the Fenerbahçe Youth Club and began some serious training after school.

I surprised everybody, most of all myself, by showing an aptitude for sport. After about a year’s weight training, I had converted most of my fat into muscle and was noticeably stronger, so much so, in fact, that I thought I might be asked to join Naim’s gang. I wasn’t. Prejudices die hard. Moreover, because of my association with Gül, I was seen as a girl’s man.

Another year on, I finally defeated Gül. After that, I never lost to her again.

Looking back, I should confess I felt I had triumphed far too soon and too easily. With hindsight, I attribute this to the fact that, getting more and more enmeshed in her deathsayer’s world, Gül was losing interest in ours.

I should also confess that, somewhere in my soul, I was aware of this dislocation. But I chose to think her detachment simply meant she no longer needed to worry about my health. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I also ignored Mahmut the Simurg’s cautionary tales about such oracles as Pythia and Cassandra, the Sibyl and the Sphinx. These seers, the teller of truths explained, succumbed sooner or later to a condition known as ‘
Pîr
’s palsy’, which is a darkening of the mind that afflicts the
Pîr
after too many sightings of Death. Gül, whom I had introduced to him, was an exceptional
Pîr,
he warned me, and might yield to this palsy sooner than most.

Even more unforgivably, I didn’t perceive the depth of Gül’s anguish when she first confided her fears to me.

It was a national holiday, 19 May, the day celebrating Atatürk’s arrival in Samsun in 1919 to launch the War of Independence. We had gone to the park where the fairground had set up shop. Though on that occasion we could have joined the gang – Naim was in bed with jaundice and Bilâl, his deputy, quite obviously had as soft a spot for Gül as she had for him – we didn’t. This time Gül, stuck even deeper in her inner world, insisted that we should be on our own.

So we went round the shooting galleries, chairoplanes, carousels, acrobats, jugglers and the rest. My efforts to brighten her mood failed dismally.

But when we reached the Gypsies, she became animated. Leading me by the hand, she started surveying the booths. Then she stopped in front of one and stared at its placard. Beneath a painting of herbs and crystal balls, the legend read:

* FATMA * HEALER * MEDIUM *

‘I need to go in there, Rιfat.’

I dragged her away. ‘Later.’

My attention had been drawn to the enclave of a bear-leader who was challenging the onlookers for a ‘brave heart’ who would have the mettle to wrestle with his mammoth bear called Yavru, ‘nursling’. Ten
kuruş
only – refundable if the challenger stayed on his feet for a minute.