Young Turk (23 page)

So she had decided to leave things as they were. And go back to Abdülkerim. To live a sort of life – with fewer and fewer memories, if lucky; and if not, by returning to that inner sanctum where she kept herself locked up with the ghosts of Efraim and İshak.

In the end, it was I who offered a solution. I suggested that we all go with her. That way she would not have to face her ordeal on her own; she would feel more confident.

Both my father and my uncle thought it a sensible suggestion, but they were unable to comply. My uncle had to get back to work. My father had to take me to Paris, where my mother and our relatives were waiting. We were due to return to Turkey soon and we needed to devote all our time to the family.

I proposed a compromise: my father and uncle could leave and I would accompany Saadet. I would rejoin the family when her crisis was over – all being well, in a day or so.

We argued for a while. I suddenly realized that I had developed the will to stand up for myself. So I prevailed. I even obtained the satisfaction of having my father, who normally just kissed and hugged me, shake my hand.

An hour later, Saadet, having equally failed to convince me to leave with my father, emerged from the toilet. She gazed at me for a long time, then kissed my hand. I felt I had become not only a son to her, but also a guardian.

The moment we entered the ward, the patients grew distressed. Some screamed abuse and tried to chase us out. Others begged us to claim them as brothers, fathers, sons. Yet others, exposing their genitals, importuned us.

The doctor pointed at an emaciated figure on a bed at the far end.

Earlier, he had told us to brace ourselves. We would meet a person who was very frail and immensely disturbed, whose eyes, in so far as it could be ascertained, had turned permanently inward. In all likelihood, it was that inner world – miasmic or paradisal, unfathomable as yet – that somehow had kept him alive.

He further warned us that the patient rambled much of the time – with varying degrees of coherence. Continuous and dissociated monologues were symptomatic of his condition.

Saadet moved – shuffled – in that direction.

I followed – just as nervously.

I stared at the patient. He was talking solemnly, in Turkish, towards points ahead of him, as if giving a lecture. I tried to understand what he was saying. In vain. He kept jumbling up the words. Yet his body was completely still. But for the cacophony of his voice, he lay like an animal playing dead.

Saadet mumbled, ‘He’s so thin ...’

The doctor sighed. ‘He won’t eat. He hoards his food. We have to feed him intravenously.’

‘Hoards his food?’

‘Many from the camps do. A hidden crust meant surviving another day.’

Saadet faltered and held on to the doctor. ‘Oh, God ...’

The patient caught Saadet’s movement and cast a furtive look in our direction. About to avert his gaze, he stopped; then he turned to look at us again. This time, he focused – first on Saadet, then on me. I felt unsteady, thinking he had recognized her. Also, it suddenly occurred to me that he might think I was İshak. Then he blinked as if to brush our presence off his eyes and went back to his rambling.

Saadet reached his bed.

He did not look at her, but fixed his gaze on the window facing him. By doing so, he presented a full view of his face – as if he wanted her to recognize him.

I managed to catch something of his gibberish. He was listing the ingredients he needed for preparing Circassian chicken.

Saadet stifled a cry. ‘That’s his favourite dish.’

Inexplicably, I felt shocked. ‘What?’

Saadet turned to the doctor and nodded sorrowfully. ‘It’s him. It’s Efraim.’

The doctor was elated. ‘Are you sure?’

‘His mouth ...’

Whatever Efraim’s condition, she had said, while showing me some photographs she had brought along, she would recognize him by his mouth. Nothing could change the full lips gently curving towards the ears and seemingly about to laugh or say something loving.

She wept silently, as if directing the tears into her inner self. ‘The mouth – it’s him. Not the rest. The rest is not him at all.’

That was her anguish reacting. Because I could see, despite the flow of words, despite his opaque, unseeing eyes, that this Efraim still possessed something of the aura of the athletic, debonair Efraim of the photographs. Like an olive tree seen through a smudged lens, he was lustreless, but recognizable.

I felt miserable. I had hoped he would have proved to be someone else. Then Saadet could have gone back to Turkey less troubled. And I could have had a second mother, one less formal, more affectionate, more intimate.

Tentatively, Saadet embraced Efraim. ‘Dear heart ... It’s me! Saadet ...’

Efraim, still staring at the window, shuddered as if a current was going through him. He spoke faster, raising his voice; the words became lost within each other.

Saadet held on to him. ‘It’s me, Efraim ... It’s me, my heart ...’

Efraim’s words became an incomprehensible screech. He still lay inert with his fixed gaze. A lifeless Pinocchio except for wildly fluttering, fleshless cheeks.

Saadet turned to the doctor and me. ‘Leave me with him ...’

That evening, we ate at a small bistro near the hospital. We hardly touched our food and much of the time – except when she thanked me for ‘being family’, for ‘saving her sanity, indeed, her soul’ – Saadet remained silent. I kept wanting to engage her, ask what she intended to do, but managed to hold my tongue.

Then, on the way back to our
pension
, she stopped in front of a farm outhouse that had been converted into a cottage. ‘Pretty place, wouldn’t you say?’

I shrugged. ‘Yes.’

‘My new home. I rented it this afternoon.’

I was stunned. ‘What?’

‘I’m staying here.’

I yelped. ‘No! Why?!’

She held my hand. ‘Because Efraim is my husband.’

‘So is Abdülkerim.’

‘Not any more.’

‘Did you talk to him – to Abdülkerim? Did he say that?’

‘Abdülkerim is a good man. He will understand. Efraim is my life. My fate. I can live again.’ She took a small box from her pocket and handed it to me. ‘My wedding ring. Can you give it to Abdülkerim – when you get back?’

I took the box hesitantly. ‘But Efraim is ...’

Saadet caressed my cheek. ‘In some impenetrable world? Yes, he is ... Then again, maybe not – entirely ... Sometimes I can see him, behind his ramblings – playing hide-and-seek, as we used to ... So I’ll try and catch him ...’ She held my hands. ‘Also, sometimes, I feel my son is there with him – in his being ... Which strikes me as reasonable ... I mean, İshak is dead – killed during the death march. I made enough sense of Efraim’s monologues to know that. But he has kept İshak alive – inside his sunken world ... I imagine that’s how he survived ... That’s how I’d like to think he survived – by keeping our son alive. For himself as well as for me.’

I tried to respond like an adult, to look as if I understood her reasoning. Instead I wailed, ‘What about me?’

‘You, young Odysseus, believe it or not, put life into my son ... There he was, barely alive, inside Efraim ... I took him from Efraim. Put him inside me. But you, you breathed life into him. You gave İshak your face, your mind, your deep feelings ... I feel as if I’m betraying İshak by saying this, but every time I think of him, I’ll think of you. Every time I try to picture him, it will be your face I’ll see ...’

I wanted to cry, but controlled myself. ‘If you ever need me ...’

She embraced me. ‘I know, my Yusuf ... I know, my dear, dear Yusuf ...’

There was nothing more to say. Or rather there was, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

Saadet smiled, held my hand. ‘There’s something else on your mind.’

I nodded.

‘What is it?’

‘If ... If Efraim ...’

Saadet’s eyes clouded. ‘Dies?’

‘Or doesn’t recover?’

She looked at the night sky. ‘I’ll thank God for having given me such a man. Like you Jews at Passover, I’ll say,
Dayyenu
– it’s enough ...’

Mahmut the Simurg knows everything. He is the storyteller who goes round the neighbourhoods during the day and performs as our fire-eater at night. He says every happening has a cause and a consequence and the cause always starts in the celestial bodies. If, for instance, a flea lands on the Dog Star, its weight, though minimal, still affects the star’s pull on us and alters the course of our lives.

I imagine that’s how my life and the lives of those around me changed when the comet that passed by recently breathed upon the earth.

I felt the beginnings of this change the night we went to Sulukule looking for the drunkard Babacιk, my father, had been asked to help. But no doubt, as Mahmut the Simurg would say, it had started before that with a death because there can be no beginning without Death.

Babacιk led the way. Mama Meryem and I followed.

Sulukule is one of Istanbul’s poorest neighbourhoods. A maze of narrow streets nuzzles the Byzantine ruins. Every pothole is a pool of sewage. In the rubbish heaps that are everywhere, anything edible – even rotting food – is instantly snatched by hungry mouths. The houses lean on each other for support and many doorways lead to cheap drinking houses. I overheard Hacι Turgut – he’s the one who asked Babacιk to help the mysterious drunkard – say that men come to these places to kill themselves – either with raki or by surrendering what little money they have to opium-smoking belly-dancers who pick up the coins with their privates.

Not a place for Mama Meryem, who looks and is as Italian as Anna Magnani, and a slip of a girl like me. But not even a gang would dare molest us with Babacιk at our side.

Here and there Babacιk paused to scrutinize some drops of fluid on the cobblestones. When we looked puzzled, he explained. ‘Drunkards are like wounded animals. You can track them by their bleeding. Only they don’t bleed blood – they bleed the sap of their soul.’

We nodded. When Babacιk speaks, we all prick up our ears.

‘What colour is the soul’s sap, Babacιk? Red too?’

Mama Meryem smiled. She likes it when I ask questions because she never does. Babacιk is head of the family and Mama Meryem observes the conventions. Whereas I – I’m a foundling. I’m not expected to behave like everybody else. I can be the urchin I am.

‘Depends who’s bleeding.’

Babacιk likes me being an urchin because urchins, he thinks, are smart or they would have perished when their poor, misguided begetters abandoned them. So he always answers my questions. Yet he distrusts words. Words are mirages, he says. They delude people, particularly the young, and fog their minds. He believes people should be judged only by what they do.

I make him sound severe. But he’s as gentle as a butterfly. The only person in the world who takes people as they are. That’s why the whole troupe loves him. Why they come to relax around our tent before a performance. Sure, they also love him because he makes everybody laugh, but that’s because those who can make the world laugh have souls that glow. That’s a gift from Allah. We circus people know that. Babacιk – he’s the giant clown who tumbles all over the ring – can make even
jinns
piss in their pants. (You may think my nickname for him, ‘little father’, is funny, too. Well, when I was a toddler and couldn’t tell the difference between big and small, I once called him that. He found it very amusing. So I stuck to it.)