Young Turk (40 page)

He came over on Thursday 21 June.

I received him in a state of shock. I had just read in
Cumhuriyet
that Nâzιm Hikmet had escaped to Bucharest, Romania.

I waved the newspaper at him. ‘Is this true?’

He couldn’t stop smiling. ‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Never mind how.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know exactly. But, in case we’re questioned, he was still here two days ago. He left home that morning to go to Ankara to appeal against his call-up.’

‘His escape – was it a sudden whim?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Sure, it matters! Didn’t he trust us?’

‘Of course he did. But there might have been an emergency. Or suddenly he saw the perfect opportunity ...’

‘We had a foolproof plan!’

‘His wasn’t bad either, was it? He grabbed his chance! Can you blame him? He’s safe! That’s what matters!’

I nodded, then started laughing. ‘Yes! That’s what matters!’

He took me by the arm. ‘Time for a celebration! Let’s get the gang!’

I followed happily, feeling weightless and unco-ordinated. ‘In a way – it’s a relief! I couldn’t stop worrying. We – I – might have botched it!’

‘We wouldn’t have botched it. But there might have been mayhem. Now we should be spared that ...’

Nâzιm Hikmet arrived in Moscow on 29 June 1951, to a tumultuous welcome.

I was spared the mayhem. So were the other decoys. But not Âşιk Ahmet.

The authorities reacted to Hikmet’s escape with fury. First, by ministerial decree, they divested him of his citizenship. Then, raiding the homes of his close friends and supporters, they destroyed everything in print, every scrap of paper that might have contained a fragment of his work. No one knows how much of Hikmet’s writing was thus lost for ever.

Eventually, some of these friends and supporters managed to flee the country and settle abroad. Many others were arrested, tried and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Some, like Âşιk Ahmet, were also harshly treated.

Hikmet’s wife, Münevver, and his young son, Memed, who could not have accompanied him without jeopardizing his escape, were put under even closer surveillance and had their passports confiscated. (This harassment continued for some ten years; in the end, they, too, were smuggled out of Turkey by friends. They were given refuge in Poland.)

As I mentioned, we, the decoys, were spared the mayhem. True, all the decoys, myself included, were taken in for questioning. Though they never discovered that I had acted as Hikmet’s impersonator, I still qualified as a suspect for having distributed his works. After all, Hikmet’s surveillants had photographed us regularly. But, miraculously, our age saved us. We were classified as confused, impressionable youths who had been proselytized by the USSR’s universal Fifth Column of ‘megalomaniac intellectuals, vainglorious writers and subversive ethnic minorities’. We were admonished to come to our senses. And for good measure, we were marked down, as and when we would be called up for military service, for the Turkish expeditionary force to Korea. Out there, in that God-forsaken place, we would see for ourselves the shit that was the communist dream.

I resumed ‘normal life’. The fact that I could do so convinced me that Fate had her eye on me. Apart from Âşιk Ahmet’s ongoing trial, life spared me from worries.

Moreover, I was left with a priceless possession: one of Hikmet’s shirts. A day or so before his escape, I had spilled some coffee on it and had taken it home to be washed. After his escape, it became too dangerous to take it back.

I still have the shirt, made of cheesecloth in Şile, Istanbul’s resort on the Black Sea. I wear it, when I dabble in poetry, in the hope that grains of Hikmet’s genius will osmose into me. Writers will do anything for art: some will imitate, others will try primitive magic.

In 1954, in my final year at college, Âşιk Ahmet’s trial came to an end. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

On the first occasion when he was allowed visitors, I went to see him.

It was the end of February and freezing cold – so cold, in fact, that for the first time in some 200 years, the Bosporus had frozen over – yet I found him sitting on a bench in the prison quadrangle, chain-smoking as ever.

He had shrunk to a fraction of his normal size. Except for the eyes, where thunder and lightning conducted business as usual, that once ramrod, heroic body had been reduced to ungainly bones, lumpy flesh and loose skin.

‘What have they done to you, sir?’

‘Nothing. Nothing ...’

‘How could they?’

He pointed at the parcels I had brought. ‘Cigarettes and books?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks. Have you been writing, my lovely Jew?’

‘A few poems.’

‘Recite them.’

‘Here? Now?’

‘Yes.’

I recited a couple.

‘Not bad. You’re getting better.’

Listening to his trembling voice, I felt like crying.

‘What’s the good of that?’

He looked up at me sharply. ‘You’re going to be a writer! You’re getting there ...’

‘But look at what they’ve done to you!’

‘To hell with that.’

‘I might end up here, too!’

‘Occupational hazard. So what?’

‘I don’t think I can take it, sir.’

‘Sure, you can.’

‘I’ve been offered a scholarship. Oxford or Cambridge.’

He looked up, quite tremulously. ‘Sensible of Oxford or Cambridge.’

‘I’m thinking of taking it up.’

He forced a smile. ‘Absolutely right! Grab it.’

I forced myself to look into his eyes. ‘I – I might not ... come back. I can’t write with the fear of prison behind me ...’

He unleashed his fury. ‘You think you can write in exile?’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re rooted here, you bastard! That’s why! You’re a Turk! Not an Englishman!’

‘I’m a Jew – remember?’

‘So what? You’re still a Turk – through and through! You’ve proved that with every breath you’ve taken!’

‘But prison ... I’m terrified ...’

‘So was Nâzιm.’

‘He escaped.’

Âşιk Ahmet pulled me closer to him. ‘Listen to me, you creep! He escaped because otherwise he would have died. But in Russia, cut off from his beloved Turkey, he’s dying another death. A worse death! His spirit is dying. All that great poetry that won’t see the light of day! Don’t you understand, Zeki? Your country is your soil! Her traditions, her peoples are the seeds and the rain you need! Without them you are barren earth where nothing germinates. And the writer in you dies! That means you also die! A slow, merciless death!’

‘If Turkey treats her great men the way they treat you, then Turkey doesn’t deserve them.’

‘Oh, she deserves them, my young Jew! She certainly deserves them! What she doesn’t deserve is our power-mad fascists, our reactionaries and our religious fanatics! But they come and go! Who remembers them afterwards? They disappear – without a trace!’

I nodded.

‘Now read me some more of your poems ...’

‘I haven’t got any more.’

‘Then go and write some!’

I saw Âşιk Ahmet a few more times. On each occasion he asked me for my poems, but I had none to recite. He asked me why I wasn’t writing. I lied, telling him that I was working hard for my final exams. He smiled as if he believed me. But he didn’t hide his disappointment.

A few days before I left for Oxford, I visited him for the last time. We hugged, quite desperately. We both knew that I might not come back, that I might be yet another member of my generation who would renege on his word and abandon his country, that I might well be starting my exile.

No, not my exile. My death. My spiritual death safe from fear in a safe corner of the world.

As I was about to leave, he gave me a folded piece of paper. ‘I’ve written a poem. For you.’

Surprised, I started unfolding the paper.

He waved me away. ‘Read it on the plane.’

I read it outside the gaol:

when a writer is killed

language

loses one of its words

when all writers are killed

there will be

no words left

no language

only

dictators

racists

nationalists

whores of war

false prophets

only

the worship of death