Snapping Point E-Book

Aslı Biçen

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 545

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'But for that slender connection with the mainland, Andalıç would have been a regular island,' says Aslı Biçen in the opening chapter of this deliciously multi-layered novel. And it would have been an ordinarystory about love and loss,if it weren't for theearthquake thatunexpectedly sets the landmass afloat on the Aegean, kindling a series of increasingly oppressive measures by the authorities;ostensibly to keep public order. As Andalıç drifts between Greece and Turkey, things get from bad to worse, until eventuallyour heroes,Cemal and Jülide, join the growing resistance, and even nature lends a helping hand, offering a secret underground system that plays its part in ousting the tyranny.What starts as the realistic tale of a charming provincial town develops into a richly detailed political novel in a fantastic setting. Biçen's dreamy language weaves a flowing style that transports the reader into every nook and cranny of Andalıç and the crystal-clearwaters of the Aegean;her metaphors are imaginative, her observations insightful, and her descriptions melodious.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Imprint

Translator's Notes

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The Author

The Translator

Snapping Point

A novel by Aslı Biçen

Translated from the Turkish by Feyza Howell

First publisahed in 2021 by Istros BooksLondon, United Kingdom www.istrosbooks.com

Copyright © Aslı Biçen 2021

First published as İnceldiği Yerden(Metis, 2008)

The right of Aslı Biçen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Translation © Feyza Howell, 2021

Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak | www.frontispis.hr

ISBN:978-1-912545-95-7 (Print version)978-1-912545-96-4 (eBook version)

The publication of this book has been funded with the support of the TEDA programme of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey.

Translator’s Notes

Main characters, in order of appearance

Cemal (ce-MAL) Grocer who has been looking for his father for twenty years

Halil(ha-LİL) Cemal’s cousin; teacher at the local lycée

Erkan(er-KAN) A lycée student keen on football; Jülide’s irksome boyfriend

Saliha(sa-li-HA) Cemal’s fiancée; held a good job in Izmir, but came back home after having a breakdown

Raziye(ra-zi-YE) ‘Auntie’; the neighbourhood gossip

Saime(sa-i-ME) Saliha’s younger sister; lycée student and Jülide’s best friend

Melahat(me-la-HAT) Cemal’s father’s second wife

Cemile(ce-mi-LE) Melahat’s daughter by Cemal’s father; a bar girl

Zaim(za-İM) Cemile’s pimp

Yasemin(ya-seh-MİN) Halil’s wife

Kadir(ka-DİR) Saliha and Saime’s father

Hafize(ha-fi-ZE) Saliha and Saime’s mother

Jülide(jü-li-DE) An orphaned lycée student discovering her supernatural powers; Saime’s best friend

Seher(se-HER) Jülide’s maternal grandmother; venerated coffee cup reader

Muzaffer(mu-zaf-FER) Intrepid journalist and printer; Halil’s close friend

Hakkı(hak-KI) ‘Baba’; rescues Cemal in Istanbul

Rahmi(rah-Mİ) Muzaffer’s assistant at the printing press

Zeliha(ze-li-HA) Rahmi’s secret lover

Abdurrahman(ab-dur-rah-MAN) Zeliha’s husband; Commissioner of Police

Given names are accented on the final syllable as above, so ce-MAL, sa-li-HA, etc.

Honorifics follow the first name: bey (sir), hanım (lady), yenge (aunt by marriage), abi (big brother), and abla (big sister), for instance.

A Brief Note on Pronunciation

Turkish is phonetic, with a single sound assigned to most letters.

The consonants pronounced differently from English are:

The vowels are equally straightforward:

1

A lacklustre glow to the right of the road heralded daybreak, rising between a pair of barren hills flung together carelessly like stunted teeth, as if somehow mislaid on the plain. Having traversed the length of the night and consumed not the miles but the hours, the coach was on its triumphant advance towards the final few minutes. The sun cast the morning from the V of the hills onto the fields nearest the road with the impatience of a catapulted stone, faster and brighter as than when setting. A nebulous wave rippled the crisp green knee-high wheat, which resembled an underwater scene in the subdued light.

With even the most resilient of the passengers having succumbed to an exhausted sleep or a groggy headache after countless hours of shuddering, the dream-heavy coach dipped into, and rose back out of, a deep pothole. Cemal, who had been asleep for hours with the ease of a seasoned long-distance traveller, banged his head on the rock-hard windowpane. His eyes opened sightlessly. The intense gold of the morning sun blended with a fresh green seeped into blank pupils. A fin seemed to rise amongst the timid shoots of wheat before a dolphin slipped back into the involuntary caress of those green leaves, vanishing as soon as Cemal’s eyelids dropped, down into the soft, infinitely enveloping ultramarine with a few flicks of its tail. Cemal set off after that perfect creature, drifting effortlessly in the dolphin’s wake until he sighted the powerful tail again. At long last, he caught up with the curling body, a body that descended to the shimmering white sands at the bottom of the sea and hung upside down, perfectly still.

Cemal’s face felt the light eddies created by the dolphin’s gentle movements. He beheld a scene to delight the senses, now that he had caught up with this quick animal, unable to survive in water without air, or in air without water. Flawless beauty tossed into a flawed exigency. Yet as he silently commended the miracle, which was millions of years in the making, he noticed a dark spot below the left flipper: man-made, a later addition, encircled by cables, it was an ominous object.

A bomb.

A primitive terror constricted his heart. Oblivious to the danger, the dolphin was raising sand clouds as it nuzzled the seabed in a likely search for food, unaware of the black full stop placed on freedom. Inimitable and serene, the dolphin continued to root through the sand, as Cemal’s hand reached for the smooth, slippery skin; an unfamiliar vitality under his fingertips. Get that black thing out, get it out, but how, where to grab? A practically solid urgency, tangible, staunching the waters. Water that staunches the urgency. Water that weighs one down, makes one clumsy, and renders even the most skilful of fingers inept. Water that drags a couple of inches higher than needed, ever higher; water that makes you miss by a hair’s breadth, water that tricks. Nimble and determined, and unlike Cemal, the dolphin was expert at this game: far too swift and lithe over the sand.

Cemal was flailing, trembling with that elemental terror peculiar to dreams. Then he spotted a black button in the white sand cloud raised by the dolphin. He knew at once that nothing would be spared once the button was pressed, and what’s more, that the dolphin was trained to press the button, that it was nothing but an instrument of death. Cemal looked around to see what it was about to exterminate, but there was nothing… other than himself, that is. His heart sank as the dolphin coiled back before heading for the button…

Cemal’s eyes popped open, this time really seeing, whilst his heart was still pounding and a faint ache lay on his forehead. A line of spindly pines slid past the rattling windowpanes and sliced the sunlight, which slipped away from the branches and slapped into Cemal’s eyes as if reflected from water. Remembering the dolphin, his insides constricted at the fickle underwater colours of the wheat field stretching from the last tree all the way up to the hills. A perfunctory breeze had cleaved through the shoots, dividing the field like a dorsal fin cutting through water.

Still shaking, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. All the rickety, tiny, stifling towns he passed swarmed into his mind with a strange sense of restriction. Concrete boxes, never completed beyond the ground floor for some reason, gave rise to a deep ache in a tender spot behind his eye. Places confined by rigid borders, squashed into a minute or two of the coach’s movement, catching the eye and the heart in sharp focus.

Just then the coach dipped into another pothole on the crest of the final hill before their arrival and Cemal’s eyes opened wide once again. The hourglass figure of sleepy Andalıç rising from the ever vigilant sea greeted him: this was the place he had once thought of as the entire world, before all the other roads, the strange places and unfamiliar people had encroached on the last two decades of his life. That playful, vivacious blue, whose name altered with every tint and shade, spread out inside him; the sea, whose absence rendered any place dead. He wondered how anyone could live without the sea, in landlocked places. He began to breathe easily once again; was there less air away from the sea?

But for that slender connection with the mainland making it a peninsula, Andalıç would have been an ordinary island. As if it had rolled down between the flat, low hills in the background, with the umbilical cord still attached.

With their night-time nets gathered, fishing vessels were returning to the small harbour to the south over the water that had yet to find its right colour. The wrinkles on the face of the old sea raced to the shore, gently swaying the still sleeping town under a blanket of morning mist.

Andalıç started at the water and rose all the way to the sky: old stone houses with tiles bleached by the seasons, cobblestone streets rising up to the hill, the odd tree squeezed into a minuscule garden, a few sad dogs, but most of all, cats. Andalıç was one of the very few towns that the morning sun would have been proud to display amongst all others flanking the country’s roads like so many glum notes.

But for that eyesore that was the gigantic concrete block at the top of the hill, erected by the Council on green land, financed by doubling the costs of various services, placing collection tins everywhere and extracting donations from the residents. The Care Home. A boundary blocking the peninsula’s flow from the waters up to the skies.

Cemal looked away from Andalıç towards the greyish infinity where the horizon might yet appear. The open vista shrank as the coach descended and the olive groves flanking the road spread their oddly synthetic, dusty grey over the carriageway. The sky appeared to be changing into a more familiar azure. The coach turned left over the funnel stretching towards the peninsula, down between the thinning olive trees, and then it was driving over the water. Covering the mile-long narrow isthmus in a tired wobble, it turned right immediately upon reaching Andalıç and made for the coach station to the north of the peninsula. It went through the entrance, executed a three-point turn and came to a halt with that contented metallic sigh peculiar to old coaches.

This was the final stop, the moment Cemal had been looking forward to throughout the endless journey, and his anticipation deflated at once. He may have got used to sleeping on coaches, but that did not guarantee rest. After a bleary descent, a stretch, and putting on his wrinkled jacket, he gave his eyes a little bit of time off. It was up to his feet now: they could go anywhere on this peninsula unaided.

He set off, watchful of any unexpected traps for his feet, and watching the jumble of images in his mind:

The tiny, bright green, round hill, all but a mound spotted on his way out, but failed to see again this time, despite having carved its location in memory. Unique, perfect, magical. One of those things spotted once by a single eye and lost forever.

The elderly newsagent, a scarf covering her hair, porn magazines dispersed amongst the offerings of her kiosk.

Accident victims at the side of the road, watching the coach with an idiotic smile, weepily grateful for their lucky escape.

And storks everywhere, nesting atop all manners of high objects, striding through fields and circling the skies.

Suddenly he heard a loud call from behind his back:

‘Hey, Cemal!’

Turning round, he spotted Hasan, who’d drawn his taxi up by the coach station and was walking to catch up. Cemal went over, an old sense of intimacy flooding over him, an intimacy forged by scabby knees, unripe plums, Uncle Nafiz’s slaps, slashed footballs, neighbourhood ladies’ shrill scolding, shoes with split toes, and bleached summer hair stiff with salt.

‘What’s new, Hasan?’

‘Same same. You’re the one with the news. No luck again, hah?’

‘No abi. He’d have been here with me if I had.’

‘Not even a single word?’

‘Not a thing. I’m more annoyed at myself than anything. I keep going away and returning like an idiot.’

‘Why are you annoyed? Anyone else would do the same!’

‘Would you? For twenty years?’

‘It’s your dad we’re talking about. Easier said than done.’

‘Stupidity, more like.’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘I really am sick of it now. That, I guess, is something too. What if I’d left it another twenty years?’

‘Are you giving up?’

‘Something like that. Yes. Anyway, need to get away, I’m exhausted. I’ve been on the road for, what, thirty hours.’

‘Well, you get to see places, right? OK, OK, don’t give me that look!’

‘Bye!’

‘Bye!’

Cemal started walking back the way the coach had come, towards the isthmus, and turned by the olive oil factory into a hilly street beneath the looming Care Home. The only building visible at the end of nearly all Andalıç’s uphill streets. Dropping his gaze, he began a slow ascent across uneven cobblestones, polished into a shiny, dark grey by years of footsteps.

The sun was right at his back, casting an even slimmer shadow of his spare figure onto the slope. The street remained ever the same for him, despite the minute changes over the years. New concrete houses erected over old gardens, an abandoned mansion that grew derelict where it stood, walls repainted to cover the dirt and the flaking paint: immutable even in the midst of all this change. The permanent façades that grant the required constancy to the mortal river flowing between their banks.

The uniformity of the vernacular architecture compounded that sense of constancy. A storeroom-like ground floor with a loo tucked into a corner, a low-ceiling mezzanine for the winter months and a top floor with high ceilings.

A youngster emerged from the ancient freckled door of one of those modest houses whose only adornment was the authenticity of stone. It was Erkan, who chased a ball for the Andalıç Council Sports Club, and who looked up with a smile from the shoes he was wrestling with:

‘Good morning, Cemal Abi.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Where from this time?’

‘From Rize.’

‘Find him?’

‘I wish!’

‘Never mind. Sorry abi, but I’m late for training.’

‘You’re always on your way to training, whenever I see you. But the team always finish at the bottom. You’re like me, the lot of you. All training, no result.’

‘Noo, abi! Just you wait until next year. We’re ready to roar our way back. Our playmaker’s well up to speed now.’

‘We’ll see. Go on, off you go.’

‘Goodbye, abi!’

From personal experience, Cemal was skilled at spotting the taint of scepticism in voices. It hung from every single question he asked in every town he had visited for years. Something matt and rusty. It was the touch of that taint that turned the geraniums in some windowsills yellow and sickly, even as others flourished. It poisoned security. It bred on doubts, lifted them higher, always visible.

His head feeling heavier than usual, Cemal passed under the mulberry tree just in leaf, staring at its tiny, prickly, green, unripe fruit. Mulberry is charitable like a countryside fountain, generous with its bounty: but this one’s branches reaching out to the street had been lopped off to deter scrumpers. A few more steps took him to his grocery shop. He glanced through the window. Everything looked just as he’d left it, and immediately he heard Raziye call out from somewhere above and to the rear. She looked ready for the attack, curiosity colours nailed to her mast, not that Cemal took it personally. Her range of stares was not vast, dominated as it was by a single variety of curiosity, whether she was staring at a cat, a cloud, or the sea the size of a postage stamp in the distance.

‘Are you back, Cemal?’

‘I am, Auntie Raziye.’

‘What’d ya do son, did you find him?’

Cemal’s hopeful look caught an indistinct shadow weighing down the net curtain in another window. The inner voice chiding him since the morning stilled, everything stilled: the neighbourhood ‘auntie’ Raziye’s curiosity, the yowls of male cats and his own voice about to reply. For just a moment, an urgent attention blanketed them all.

‘No, I couldn’t find him this time either.’

Raziye attributed his momentary hesitation to sorrow.

‘Don’t worry. Never lose hope in Allah.’

‘True.’

‘Are you opening the shop?’

‘I’ll go home first. I’ll open up in half an hour or so.’

Despite the determination to keep his eyes on the street, he still hoped that the strange numbness he felt behind his head was caused by a gaze following him. Saliha’s gaze, smouldering even behind the curtains.

A sudden cool descended as he turned right, towards his own street hidden by the sun and Saliha. Two decisions uppermost in his mind. The street, too narrow for two vehicles to pass side by side, suddenly widened on the right past four small terraced houses towards the steep hill downwards, the coach station surrounded by four- and five-storey apartment blocks, the isthmus, land, and olive trees.

His family home perched on a rocky shelf. A fifty- or sixty-foot rock wall to the rear and a steep descent in front, leading all the way down to the coach station. The Care Home right above was invisible from the house. Its vista instead was the fragments of sea squeezed between the land and the peninsula, and the grey-green olive-clad hills all the way up to the horizon slashed by the mountains.

His mother’s portrait hanging in the sitting room greeted him as he entered the hall. Compared with the terrible yearning inside, this portrait held little capacity to evoke any feeling. All the same, Cemal was unable to stop his voice ringing like a stranger’s in the empty room:

‘This last one was for you, mum. No more. I couldn’t find him this time either. I don’t know why I’ve been looking for twenty years. We’d have found him if we were meant to. I’m done.’

He entered the tiny bathroom of black stone, the bathroom that looked as if a toilet pan and a washbasin had been placed over a shower tray. Removing all his clothes, he stuffed them into the laundry bag, washed with water from the instant heater, wrapped his towel around his waist and had a shave, careful not to bang his elbows on the walls. He picked a clean set of underwear, a pair of trousers and a shirt from the worm-eaten musty wardrobe in the bedroom. His mother’s floral frocks caught on his hands. He thought for the nth time I ought to give them to someone who might need them. And as quick as the thought itself, he put his nose between the hangers and sniffed deeply. The clothes of an old woman that continue to grow old in her wake.

The wavy mirror that hung on the wall like a fairground attraction had been his favourite childhood toy. He would squat and rise, altering his face beyond recognition, now extending his nose like Pinocchio, now making his lips large and flabby. This time it was his rather unfamiliar distorted nakedness that caught his eye. Perhaps it would be seen by someone else as well in the near future. With an embarrassed dip of the head, he dressed in a hurry, and instead of taking a rest, went out and shut the door.

The scent of his mother’s soap was soon wafted away by new moments, draining and unfamiliar, and a decision forced by a desperate fatigue. He reached the shop like a robot, opened the padlock and went in. A mélange of smells chafing at three days of imprisonment charged at the door, stroked him right and left, and shot out into the street. He dusted the shelves with flicks of his father’s 25-year-old goose feather duster, and gave a damp wipe to the counter with a greying cloth. After placing the loaves of bread in the cupboard, laying the newspapers out on the display case, and serving the pre-breakfast rush of customers, he strode over to the small room at the rear.

Taking out a perfectly rounded, smooth, hard, yet strangely soft grey-green stone from the pocket of the jacket hanging on the large rusty nail on the wall, he placed it on the narrow shelf behind the door. He then wrote Rize on a price sticker, which he affixed to the underside of the stone. One of those perfectly rounded stones he’d brought back from the Black Sea coast, the stones that had conceded all their indentations and protuberances to that crazed sea, become uniform in the face of its tremendous might, and rolled hither and thither, ever smaller like melting snowballs.

There were now twenty stones of varying sizes and shapes lined up on the shelf. Snow-white oval marbles, iron-rich knobs with red veins, rough grey rocks crammed with minute sparkles, and all bearing a sticker underneath with the name of a city: Konya, Mersin, Samsun, Eskişehir, Adana, Bursa, Manisa, Izmir… The stones that were weighing him down; orbiting an old loss like small celestial objects; reminders of decisions retracted each time he heard of an alleged sighting somewhere.

He placed the Rize stone at the very end, a full stop on the right.

A loss, an absence. An absence that set him off to tramp along roads, gather stones, suffer heartbreak, one that gives him hope, makes him break his word, and transforms despair into an obsessive search. A void. A well he keeps throwing stones into, listening for the noise, a well that keeps its secrets to itself: how deep is it? Does it hold water? Stones that existed before anything else, stones inside everything, and stones that will survive everything. That know the void and nothingness and…

‘Cemal!’

A soft voice. As soft as every hesitation. Damaged by cigarettes, perhaps, and perhaps other things too.

Cemal put his head round the door and greeted her with the head-to-toe smile, which was known only to Saliha.

‘I’m at the back; come over.’

They sat down on the narrow sofa by the door to the tiny back garden.

Saliha’s gaze wandered to the shelf of stones behind the frosted glass.

‘You couldn’t find him?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Perhaps now…’

‘I’ve given up, I’m dropping it.’

‘Best thing, really. Are you tired?’

‘A little. Your mother not around?’

‘She’s gone to my aunt’s. Dad’s at the coffee shop.’

He watched a few strands of Saliha’s dark blonde cropped hair moving gently in the faint morning breeze. He’d told her about his first decision. Now for the second. He sought strength in the showy conical calla lilies, with their huge leaves like elephants’ ears.

Saliha had always been a bit of a tomboy, his closest playmate. Later, as her body filled out into a more feminine shape, their friendship had dwindled lest ‘people talked’. But the idea of love had occurred to Cemal in the final year of lycée, as he felt the mutual understanding in their gazes whenever they met, however seldom, and the important things they discovered during their short conversations. Then Saliha went to Izmir for a degree, and Cemal’s love contracted into an ache at the top of his nose, often felt when alone, an ache that one would freeze in the hope of numbing it. Saliha finished university, joined a bank in Izmir, was promoted, and then promoted again, intending to stay there till eternity, and Cemal, unfamiliar with other loves, forgot all about romance.

Saliha was an old friend who only came back on holidays, activating a cherished war wound that ached from time to time. But one day she came back for good. Her goods arrived next. Yes, she’d had a good job, yes, she’d had a good salary, could have had her pick of men, but whatever happened, happened, and she couldn’t stand it any more, she ran away. Spoilt, it was said, just had it too good. That’s what comes from too much education. She sat in one room for months, blowing through the net curtains the smoke from the endless packs of cigarettes her sister Saime fetched. For months, all that Cemal could see of her was the ghost of a languid white hand that flicked ash out of the window every now and again. ‘It’s nerves’ was the only talk in town. Saliha waited, at the dark threshold into insanity, baulking at the abyss emerging under her feet.

What Cemal had was a heart … and a shop window to reach out to her. That window was a dusty mess, which had remained roughly in the same arrangement his father had always used. First, he cleared it out; threw out a shedload of junk: drinks bottles placed as décor, faded boxes of a chewing gum last manufactured in the 1980s, the old, broken clock, and a plastic doll. He picked a bright red to refresh the frame and the rust-spotted iron door. When all that was done and the glass had been polished to a high shine, he stood, at a loss what to do next. What does one put in a grocery shop window? Something sufficiently eloquent eluded him, so he stretched an old white bed sheet over the space. And the first reaction came on the very same day. Saliha’s right hand and a single eye to the side of the partially drawn curtain. A question: ‘Are you going away?’

He was racking his brains for a suitable response as he paced on the rug when he tripped on the tassels, revealing the corner of a poster: a reproduction he’d purchased in Ankara years ago, but never found the right place for. Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Stars like suns, and the moon. The sky in whirlpools. The golden river behind a dark cypress spread out over the night. Into the cobalt night. The cool that flows down the waterfall hills to the town below.

And so he hung the poster on the white sheet the following day. Saliha drew the curtain to see the feeble light seeping into the mind of another melancholic soul, a light seeping through a tear in his night. Her hair was long and messy. She’d put on a good deal of weight. Eyes shrunk and narrowed by relentless introspection. Her lips were pale, and the two lines running down to the corners of her mouth, dark. Cemal placed a stool outside the shop and began to suck a lollipop with relish. A sugary hope spread from the root of his tongue to his ears and the back of his head.

In the afternoon, he sent Saliha one of those lollipops with Saime who’d come to buy cigarettes. He was rewarded the following morning when Saime extended the bread money wound round the lollipop stick.

As the void in his mind began to fill, he removed the white sheet. The poster, now carefully rolled, went with Saime when she came for another pack of cigarettes. Into the window went a huge glass jar filled to the brim with colourful marbles to evoke their childhood games. Transparent and lustrous. He picked a large marble with yellow, green and orange waves. He played with it for an entire day, every time he stepped outside, turning it in his hand, tossing it and catching it again. The marble then found itself in Saime’s pocket on her way back from school, and then, that ghost of a hand that appeared outside that window perpetually enveloped in cigarette smoke started moving that marble up and down the length of the sill. The marble magnified Cemal’s joy into something infinite before withdrawing in the nook of Saliha’s palm.

He ultimately succeeded in drawing Saliha’s spirit outside, with tulle-finned red fishes in a globe aquarium, along with a yo-yo he’d played with all day and sent to her using the same method, chocolates, tiny rubber balls in a myriad of colours, rabbit-shaped balloons, and his own hopeful, yet brittle expectation, sitting on the wicker stool. She left the house one morning, her hair long, her face pale, her body heavy. But instead of making straight for the grocery shop, she went down the hill towards the blue of the sea. She entered the shop a few hours later, her hair cut short, and the sweet rosiness of the sun on her face. She bought twenty cigarettes, then handed him an old, faded spinning top she pulled out of her bag. It was the old top he’d given her in Year Two, his own initials still visible.

Brief chats came next, no longer than five or ten minutes. A little longer whenever he could wangle it. Letters that began as brief notes of a few lines, dictated by the shortages of the time, then grew to pages and pages. The need to understand and to explain, the need to know; that need that grows the more it’s satisfied…

Saliha’s voice brought him back to the present:

‘You’re not listening.’

‘Saliha…’

How could one get ready, prepare for something like this?

‘Will you marry me?’

Silence.

Cemal waited, a relentless fear growing blacker, growing larger and rising in clouds.

‘We’ve talked of everything Cemal, but never this sort of thing. Never even said we love each other.’

For one moment, Cemal felt all sense of equality, self-confidence and courage roll down his spine on droplets of sweat. He was silent. With a kindly, curious look at his evasive eyes, Saliha cooled her turmoil by staring at the white cones of the flowers in the garden. She broke the anxious silence, her eyes vacant, in a low, deadpan voice.

‘I never wanted to marry.’

Cemal gave a sad sigh.

‘I mean, when I was little, all that girls ever talked about was marriage and having kids and that. And I never really cared for any of it. We’ve never discussed it, Cemal.’ She hesitated for a moment, seemed to be reaching out for his hand, but changed her mind halfway through and held her own neck instead. ‘I have had other relationships before. Now, when you say marriage, I mean, … I don’t know what your expectations are.’

So the hesitation wasn’t over him! Bright sunshiny joy returned, but alongside another emotion which at first, he couldn’t name. Hurt.

‘What expectations could I possibly have, Saliha? If I were that keen, would I have waited until I was thirty-eight? All I want is to live with you from now on.’

‘Are you sure? Are you sure the past isn’t going to be a problem for you?’

Cemal gave her a reproachful look. ‘Don’t you know me?’

‘I do, but this is different. When it comes to certain things, men…’

‘I’m not a man Saliha, I’m in love with you.’

The word love could have held a chill, by the way Saliha wrapped her arms around her own shoulders. She looked at Cemal’s excitement, whilst on her own face lay a worry too transparent to be discernible. It was the first time she’d seen him come close to losing his temper.

‘Are we getting married?’

She didn’t dare drag it out any longer. ‘Yes.’

‘I’m coming with Halil Abi to ask for your hand this evening then. Tell your parents.’

As soon as he spoke, the broad grin that looked capable of defying anything all day long vanished instantly. ‘What if they refuse?’

‘We’ll just have to elope then, won’t we? You’ve asked me first, in any case. And I’ve accepted. No getting out of it now… Cemal, PUH-leeze: I’m thirty-seven now; they’ll probably dance with delight. My father might grouch a bit, but that would be par for the course anyway.’

‘Good… good.’

That Saliha’s consent wasn’t the only one he’d need was a little unnerving. Then he looked into her eyes, looked and wanted to keep looking always. His self-control vanished. He touched her for the first time. Holding both her hands, he kissed the palms one by one. They hugged tight enough to hurt, as if standing before the steps of a train about to depart. Their faces came closer and closer…

‘Oi, Cemal!’ came a voice.

Cemal leapt to his feet, blushing with an unfamiliar sensation of guilt. An equally blushing Saliha was tidying herself up.

‘We’re here Halil Abi, round the back!’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and Saliha.’

‘Bad timing, hah?’

If he’d been more friendly with Saliha, Halil would have wound them up a bit more: but a blush was good sport. Laughter stemming from his bushy moustache rang round the tiny room. Since the only place to sit was the sofa, Saliha stood up to leave once the greetings were done.

‘You sit, Saliha, I’m just going to ask Cemal about his father, and then scoot.’

‘No Halil Abi; I’ve got to go. And Cemal’s got something to tell you, in any case.’

‘Expect the unexpected, I see! So, no news of your dad, but better news otherwise, hah? Well, well; let’s hope for the best.’

Halil elbowed the foolishly grinning Cemal in the ribs as Saliha left.

‘At long last, lad; you were going to seed.’

Cemal’s tongue failed in his slackened mouth before he gathered himself:

‘You made her blush, though, Halil Abi! Shame.’

‘Of course she will! Standard practice. If this isn’t the time to blush, what is? That’s the bliss of it, enjoy it whilst it lasts. Sooo: when’re we going to ask for her hand then?’

‘This evening.’

‘God bless: no time to lose, hah?’

‘Please, abi. Who’s got time to lose?’

‘I guess you’re right. I’d go now if you said, “Let’s go.” I wish my auntie was with us now…’

The sobriety that clouded Cemal’s face earned him a slap on the back.

‘That’s life, lad, nothing for it. So, no news of our uncle then?’

‘I couldn’t find him this time either, abi.’

‘Stop now, lad, stop. Enough. From pillar to post.’

‘I’m not going any more. I’m dropping it now.’

‘That’s my boy. He’d have come back, the bastard, if he wanted to. And if he’d died, we’d have heard.’

Cemal’s thoughts wandered briefly. Nothing could have been further from his mind than the grocery shop until his eighteenth year. True, he was disappointed when university fell through, but his mind was on big cities. Places with endless chances and opportunities. Change. Movement. But when his father left one day with nothing more than the clothes on his back, slamming the door after a row with his mother, everything he left behind fell to Cemal’s lot: his mother, of course, and the shop too. And all that time of dreaming, If I saved a little, I could do this, if I saved a little more, I could go here, whilst squeezing only a subsistence from this antiquated shop…

‘Don’t be so thin-skinned, lad.’ Cemal’s absorption had been misinterpreted. ‘I didn’t really mean to call him a bastard. I was angry. I had a lot of time for my uncle, but he was as bloody-minded as a mule!’

‘No, no, that wasn’t it.’

‘What then?’

‘Nothing. You know how sometimes you don’t get a choice. Like your career and stuff…’

‘Yeah, and I was going to become a philosopher. Ended up as the lycée teacher. But I’m not moaning like you.’

‘Yes, but at least you got out. You studied in Ankara. You saw everything.’

‘What is everything?’

‘I don’t know; things you can’t get here.’

‘Just you marry Saliha, then I’ll ask you about everything. Look at the state of you! You cheer me up, mate, whether I want to or not!’

Cemal laughed bashfully.

‘We’ll take my wife and go this evening. You go order some flowers and that. And a box of chocolates. And if they won’t give the girl, we’ll help you elope.’

‘Why do you say that, abi? Something you know?’

Halil was really enjoying Cemal’s terror.

‘Just winding you up!’

Cemal pounced and the cousins scuffled like schoolboys. With ten years between them, Halil was Cemal’s closest friend ever since he’d known himself; always there, his elder brother and confidant. Someone who would always be around even if the entire world came crumbling down.

A metallic sound echoed from the loudspeakers at the Council’s appointed news time. The cousins calmed down a little, although routine funeral announcements rarely merited more than half an ear. They were still panting and laughing when they were stopped in their tracks by the name. The announcement was repeated as the two men stared at each other blankly:

MUHTAR UMMAN, SON TO THE DEPARTED HASAN UMMAN, HUSBAND TO MELAHAT UMMAN AND FATHER TO CEMAL UMMAN, HAS MET HIS MAKER. HIS FUNERAL WILL FOLLOW AFTERNOON PRAYERS AT WALNUT TREE MOSQUE AND THE INTERMENT WILL TAKE PLACE AT ANDALıÇ CEMETERY. FOR THE ATTENTION OF HIS KITH AND KIN.

As though waking from a shared dream, Cemal and Halil staggered outside. Gripping the windowsill wide-eyed, Saliha was looking to them for confirmation. Cemal nodded at her, sat down on the stool and covered his face with his hands.

It felt like a fine wire had been drawn out of him. Unknown towns inexplicably familiar, small, dirty hotels that compounded the sense of loss, that miserable hope that sent him down paths he secretly knew he’d return from empty-handed, unfamiliar faces that looked like they were on their way to somewhere nasty, to tend a sick person, or a death in the family in all those late night waits in coach stations, a constant sense of unease in his own home, the short, sharp breath his mother drew in like a needle each time the doorbell rang, searching for a person whose everything you’ve long since forgotten, searching, searching.

‘Don’t do that, Cemal; pull yourself together now.’

‘What does this mean, Halil Abi? Was he here all this time? Under my very nose. Is it possible? For me not to have seen him once in twenty years – in a town of twenty thousand?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Keep calm; we’ll soon find out. We can find out from whoever it was that placed the announcement.’

The sweet scent of lavender that had always stirred him drew his head upright. So he’d always find her now, whenever he collapsed.

‘Can you give me another day, Saliha? Would it be all right if we came tomorrow?’

‘Take your time. Whenever you want. See to the funeral first.’

‘I can’t believe it. Can’t believe it. But we’ve all heard it, all of us. How is it possible?’

2

Having tailed Cemal from the beginning of one night to the conclusion of the next, and skimmed the fluff of Anatolia’s parched, barren wastes, the north-easterly spent the midday hours heaping heat over Andalıç. The lifeless soil, all memory of springtime rains gone, turned into dust, sneaking unseen through open windows and doors left ajar, to darken dusters and numb housewives’ minds with the tedium of routine.

Invisible motes of dust settled on Cemal’s eyelashes too, as he enjoyed a half hour’s nap on the sofa at the rear whilst Halil minded the shop, whilst the wind slipped into Cemal’s ears to uplift his sleep…

… And he finds himself in an ancient coach. Juddering and rattling interminably. Hens, legs lashed together, cluck clucking. Bags, sacks, bundles, packs falling on his head at every bend in the road, and on his shoulders if he ducks. Ancient women, hennaed dark, scrawny hands covering their mouths with muslin scarves. Yellowing, tiny old black moist eyes sunk into skins like cracked earth. Ten old women with black cloaks flung over baggy floral flannel trousers. Scraggy hennaed braids hanging over bellies and dangling over trousers. The relentless steppe in the background, always the same part of the steppe, and always that one single tree…

They’re all staring at Cemal, those women. Ten antique women, all juddering in the same way, at the same time, and straightening cloaks slipping over their heads all at the same time with the hands not covering their mouths, again, all at the same time. Never taking their eyes off him, not even for a moment…

That single tree ever present, near or far on the stony horizon, as the coach rattle rattles on…

Impossible to tell when it draws to a halt, rattling increasingly louder, the relentlessly ageing coach rattles into a station. A deserted station of steppe-coloured, steppe-soil bricks, its boundaries gradually melting into the ground with each rain. All at once the coach halts, bang in the centre of the adobe walls, hollows and crevices. Cemal has to run the gauntlet of the ritualistic swaying of the old women, who are oblivious to the fact that the coach has stopped…

Another coach slowly pulls out of the station behind the women still swaying by the window panes that no longer rattle. Backing out, revealing every passenger as a passport photo, one by one. Like a life-size photo album. And then the last photo in the album, right behind the driver, is his father. Face intent. Set off on this trip just to stare at Cemal just like this, just then, just when he was about to set off, just when he was about to slip through his fingers…

Cemal scrambles to get off the coach, to catch up with him, leaping over the tripping evil stares of every single crone. An obstacle race. Never taking his eyes off his father’s stare that has lassoed him by the throat. Trying to keep his feet off those evil stares. But it’s too late when he reaches the rear door at long last. By the time he’s down, there’s no sign of the coach, or of his father…

The only coach travelling in that direction is the one he’s in. Complete with the women, bundles, and hens. The stop over, the road again, the steppe again, the same tree again, yet another station identical to the previous one. Tormented between the obstacles of the women and his father’s lasso again. And once again, from the top… until he wakes up with a start.

Cemal was waiting in the deep shadow of the gigantic eponymous tree in the Walnut Tree Mosque courtyard, unable to answer a single one of the endless questions of the curious crowd, who had all heard the announcement. He had just finished telling Halil about his dream when the ezan rang out. The congregation went inside. The two cousins remained by the coffin. Hands clasped in front, like footballers lined up for a free kick. Looking guilty. Hands are really tricky when you face a dead body: you can’t cross them or press them to your sides. The quick are all guilty before the dead. Even if they were to accuse the dead. His desire to see his father one last time had been blocked by the bitterness fermenting inside for years. For years and years, he had been pursuing the question ‘why’ under that sour dough, the inexorable weight of pointless abandonment. He looked up: the dove rising over the walnut tree sounded like a wind-up toy. Its wings met in front of the breast bone and then behind its back, alternating constantly.

The answer to the question ‘why’ now lay lifeless inside the coffin. The question that had bleached the horizons of his mind for twenty years, at every twist of his mother’s face, every time he unlocked the shop, every time he acknowledged that the futures he had designed for himself had fizzled out.

‘We never knew why he left.’

Halil, who had been posing his own questions to the devotional silence settling over the courtyard, was startled.

‘And that would’ve changed what, exactly?’

‘I would’ve known for sure. I would not have looked for him non-stop. I would have known where he was and why he’d gone away. I wouldn’t have spent every moment waiting for him to come back. I might have made a completely different life for myself.’

‘Maybe. Or maybe, you’d be living just like you are now. Thought you weren’t gonna let it get to you?’

‘Easier said than done. There hasn’t been a single corner of the land I’ve not been to over the past twenty years, just looking for him. And then hey, presto: here he is. Except I’m still none the wiser. He’s dead.’

Afternoon prayers over, the congregation filed out in ones and twos and stood at the ready. The imam had been called to the hospital on an emergency, so an elder led the funeral prayers. Cemal and Halil shouldered the coffin from the front, and two other men took up the rear as they carried it to the hearse. It felt so light. Cemal recalled his father’s rather small stature, as well as the waistcoat he wore all year round, the chain hanging from the fob pocket, and the way he hid his gappy smile behind his hand… For the first time in a long time, his father was not a missing but a real person who had actually participated in a period of his life. Then he regretted not having made any effort to see his father one last time. At the point of the customary response, ‘We knew him to be good,’ Cemal had not forgiven his father, but decided he would anyway, since the dead man was so light.

The hearse set off. A few relations only seen at weddings and funerals joined them in Halil’s VW Beetle. The cemetery was near the western tip of the peninsula, on a hillside a little beyond the coach station. So Cemal had finally found his father on this trip, and lost him for ever. The mid-afternoon sun on his legs inflamed a new numbness inside; it was vexing, not to feel any sadness at all. Just when he had given up the effort to right the wrong he had faced, even that decision had been snatched from him; he was baffled, utterly confused. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the dazzle of the sea, and his dry eyelashes blinked against his salty palm.

They arrived at the cemetery gate after a drive in the busy traffic of the only artery of the small town, passing between grave faces that had spotted the sad load of the vehicle in front. This feather-light man was carried to a freshly-dug grave. The coffin lid was opened to the sound of prayer. Seeking comfort in the thought of touching his father for one last time, Cemal bent down and froze, a profound shock slapping everyone present before bouncing back to him.

The coffin was empty.

A missing man. A man who managed to stay missing even in death. A man who repudiated him once again just when something definite had been attained, a man who repudiated him for all time. A missing person who mocked those thousands of kilometres that had been traversed as he reappeared at Go, whence he promptly evaporated. A father who denied his son even the simplest consolation at the point where all strain came to an end. Always running away, getting away, and never getting caught…

The ground liquefied under Cemal’s feet. Anger slashed the long silence. In the darkening blue of the afternoon, the cypresses, woodpeckers’ taps, iris petals hanging like heavy drops, shocked exclamations, laughter, Cemal’s hands, his fingers growing longer into a tangle, the sweat enslaving his forehead and neck in rivulets, the sharp collar of his shirt, the familiar ache in his left shoulder blade, names filling tombstones, eyes, eyes, eyes: they all rushed over him, like an attack, like the still shocking outcome of an accident watched in slow motion. Cemal tried to walk away from time slowing down in a strange brush with the quagmire of dry reality.

His father wears a blue apron. His hand goes to his left pocket so often that the stitching in the corner is frayed. He puts his hand in the pocket. Takes out the change and extends it to the waiting hand. That’s the 20-lira pocket. The tenners are in the other one. The coins are mixed in the drawer. You have to riffle through them one by one as if you were picking over rice. His rough hands, the wrinkles darkened, slice some cheese. The left index finger’s nail is black; it’s obviously going to fall out. He wraps the cheese in waxed paper and then in a sheet of newsprint. He wipes his hands on a greying, damp towel. Inside the front door, extending his jacket to his wife, four fingers curled like a hook. The dip between his right index finger and the middle finger is stained yellow; he rolls in thin cigarette paper the damp tobacco taken from the case. But the mouth where the cigarette goes is missing, the face is missing, the voice is missing. Empty, blank, no head, no self.

On opening his eyes, his locked jaw aching, Cemal saw the rippling sea ahead and felt Halil’s concern from behind. He had yet to figure out how to escape from this ominous film. His brain, which distorted what his eyes saw into a misty blur, remained out of reach.

He saw himself entering the Council building with Halil, who consulted the girl in charge of announcements, grabbed him by the arm and led him outside. They went back to the mosque, faces on the street sticking to them like burr. Halil exchanged a few words with the elder who had led the funeral prayers, then placed Cemal back in the passenger seat of the Beetle and took him to the hospital. They found the imam. As the other two were talking, Cemal realised he was able to recognise words again. The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle settled into place and completed the picture called meaning.

His father really had been in Andalıç. He really had died in Andalıç. His funeral really had been held at Walnut Tree Mosque and he had been buried in Andalıç cemetery. But at noon, not mid-afternoon, as was incorrectly announced. Washed as his wife’s… his wife’s… The dressing trolley was pushed down the hospital corridor, squeaking in protest at the pain awaiting it. Washed as his wife’s tears streamed. His father’s wife. His still living wife. The wife that wasn’t Cemal’s mother.

‘Cemal… get a grip, son!’

‘What?’

‘Stop that blank stare. Are you even listening?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘So, what did I say, then?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘There’s nothing weird. Just a misunderstanding. The imam led your father’s funeral prayers at noon, and your father was buried. Then the imam went to the hospital to see his ailing mother, who’d taken a turn for the worse. And the others there didn’t know we were standing by an empty coffin, so they thought there was a funeral.’

‘What was the coffin doing there?’

‘Search me; it must have been forgotten. Now, pull yourself together.’

‘Abi, did my father have a wife?’

‘Yes, Cemal, he did. I’ve got the address. Somewhere called Martyrs Street. Seems that anyone who takes it into his head can just go and rename streets nowadays. I’ve lived here all my life, never heard of this street. Never mind. I’m sure we’ll find it.’

‘Abi, what are we gonna do now?’

‘Didn’t you want to know what was going on? We’ll go and ask. Come on, let’s go.’

‘OK.’

Their footsteps echo on the afternoon-silent stairs. There was something missing in the warmth of the sunlight spilling through the windows. A horde of sorrows steamrolled over all that is wholesome in the external world.

‘No, no. I’d better go on my own.’

‘You don’t look like you could cope.’

‘Let’s have a cuppa on the seafront. I’ll feel better then.’

‘Why don’t you want me to come along?’

‘She may not be able to talk as freely if you’re there. Don’t know. Actually, it’s more like… some things, you need to do alone.’

‘I’ll walk you to the door, but you’re on your own beyond that. Who knows, the house could suddenly vanish too!’

Halil was dragging him by the wrist. Chair, table, tea garden. The sea below wrinkling in a tail wind. The resiny smell of the stone pines to the rear of the peninsula, warmed all day long. Bitter tea catching in his throat as it goes down. He rubbed his head in one big sweep from the forehead to the neck. Kept his hand there briefly, on the cool of his sweat. His fingers were scorching.

He had always been weak before his father. Before those powerful, callous hands. Not physically, perhaps, but always weak. Weak with something that held him back, something he was taught. His father was scared of nothing. Just when Cemal was shaping up into a presence no longer daunted by those hands, his father had slammed the door one evening, leaving his son alone with rebellion and resolve for a confrontation, and did so with derisory indifference. Left without defeat. Without closing the accounts. No chance of a reckoning now. Cemal stopped thinking, alarmed at the sense of injustice bubbling up like a swamp. Watching the capricious ripples of the sea, he conjured up his customary composure. To quell, to forget, to bury.

They left the tea garden and turned into one of the countless climbs of Andalıç. They set off for the street they must have always known, but estranged by its name, asking passers-by and staring at road signs in their own hometown. Since every route to his father had sent him back empty handed, Cemal had no doubt that it did not exist. Maybe they were given the wrong address. Watched by houses jealously protecting their inhabitants behind complicit curtains drawn over someone who didn’t want to be found, they were looking for an unfamiliar house where answers and explanations awaited. Cemal stared at the sign that said Martyrs Street. He would have kept staring if Halil had not exclaimed, ‘Here we are!’ Trying to decipher the numbers on rusty plates or written directly on the walls, they spotted the house tucked into a ramshackle dead end to the right. The old yellow paint showed through the whitewash in patches; flecks of paint clinging to the woodwork suggested they once were blue. A plastic doorbell was tacked, askew, to the door of the metal porch.

‘You can go now, Halil Abi.’

‘OK, if that’s what you want. I want a detailed report later, though, down to the last comma. I’ll die of curiosity otherwise!’

‘All right.’

Watching Halil’s departing back, Cemal hesitated for quite a while at the door. Then looked at the crooked doorbell like it was a dangerous object. Yet this was the only address he had come up with after all that searching. The address that would solve enigmas. A tentative finger reached out. Pressed the round plastic button, but the bell didn’t ring. His bent index finger was reaching the glass pane when he heard voices. Pulling himself together, he took a couple of steps back. The door inside the porch opened, and four or five middle-aged, headscarved women spilled out with ‘My condolences.’

As they went away, casting him curious glances, Cemal was left at the open door, facing a red-eyed woman of forty or forty-five in a dark dress wearing a muslin kerchief. Something in his face must have rung a bell; her cautious expression relaxed visibly. She took a couple of steps back, feeble hope glinting in dense grief.

‘You’re Cemal, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come in.’

3

Cemal perched on the edge of the sagging sofa. On a valanced cover that looked dirty even if it was not, a floral pattern in greens and beiges, its flowers unlike any flower. His father’s wife placed a plate of helva, made without nuts or cinnamon, on the small Formica table next to him. His father’s helva.

Walking through the door, Cemal spotted his father’s face bang at eye level, the face that had evaded his memory all this time, the face that made him take an instinctive step back the way he would from a door absently slammed on his face. His father’s disembodied head – minus the irretrievably lost mimics – now fitted atop that light, hazy body in Cemal’s mind. All that this vacant passport photo face could do was to cover for the memory, which freezes moments without any detail, and which alters as time flows. It was a far cry from representing the vibrancy of the man.

It was the colour version of the photo printed in the missing ads all those years ago. A few more wrinkles, a few more grey hairs. The eyes retreated in an effort to hide their guilt. The stiff lips a little thinner. As Cemal’s eyes digested the face of the elusive stranger, the forgotten man transformed from a human being into a quest, as his hands unwittingly reached out to the helva. The bland, soggy pudding grew harder in his throat, resisted going down. He recalled his mother’s delicious flaking helva, rich with yummy butter and nuts. He took a deep breath in preparation to speak, the helva went the wrong way and he started coughing. The rusty, creaking sofa joined in an increasingly choking duet. His watering eyes detected a glass of water held out towards him.

‘Bless you,’ said the woman.

It was impossible to look her in the eye, this woman who had no rights over him, who had stolen all his rights: not only his father, his mother’s joy and his own life, but also his inner peace. An unaccustomed anger swelled inside, like something that had been just a duty, accepted, suppressed all these years, like something that would overflow rooms and houses.

‘How dare you take that word into your mouth?’ he croaked, still coarse from the cough. He had never, ever, in all his life, been quite this confrontational. Staring at the threadbare patches of the carpet, he tried to pull himself together. Compose his mind in turmoil since the cemetery.

‘Now, look here, Melahat Hanım. You have no idea what it’s like to be searching for your father for twenty years.’ They stared at each other, wondering where he had heard the name. Neither recalled the funeral announcement. A spooky silence fell. The grief in Melahat’s eyes was crushed by something more urgent, an accusation or an obligation to defend. She stammered.

‘Cemal… Cemal Bey. It’s hard, I mean. But I…’ She either had to start at the beginning of a very long tale, or stay silent.

‘I’m only here because I was curious about certain things. I’d been looking for my father everywhere for twenty years. Was he alive, was he dead…’? The account gave way to anger. ‘How long have you been here for, for God’s sake?’

Melahat was caught off guard once again, as is standard in every interrogation. ‘We… not long… A couple of weeks…’

‘Where the bloody hell were you before?’

‘Eskişehir…’

‘A-ha, Eskişehir! Eskişehir, eh; I must’ve passed through it a thousand times if I…’

Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath.

‘And anyway, how the heck are you my father’s wife? My father never divorced my mum.’ The funeral announcement was recalled by both at the same time. Cemal’s voice was beginning to get back to normal as it crashed around the room.

‘I mean, like… his wife… after your mother’s death…’

‘It’s only been a year, just over.’ Cemal glanced at his father’s photo. ‘How did he know about mum’s death? We never heard a peep from him.’