Queer, p.27
Queer, page 27
One day, Ümit didn’t come to the stop. Didn’t come running to jump in the vehicle.
The same the next day.
The one after too.
And the days after.
Efkar spent these days on the threshold of mania. It was as if he was losing something, losing infinitely. Losing it right at the moment he found it. Without even holding it in his hand, it slipped from his palms and faded into the endless distance. He thought he’d lost something that he would never be able to experience again. Didn’t know its name, address, identity; he was love-struck with someone he didn’t know a single thing about. And yet loved desperately. Maybe this was the only way love could be true. Loving at a distance without knowing what, without knowing how. Loving that distance. Ümit was a dove with white wings that flew up and behind Mount Kaf. The Warship was going to drive up that mountain. Before his eyes, the wall panels depicting Fatih’s conquest of Istanbul came alive, all the walls of the coffeehouses came alive too. And destroyed him. He had lost. There was nothing else left for him than to tie his hopes to the prospect of a chance encounter, one day someplace. As it was, he didn’t know anyone he might ask about Ümit, find out something. Unspeakable things came to mind. Leaving the country, dying, going somewhere else.
From now on, he thought, he would never be able to forget Ümit, till death. Even if they never saw each other again, at least once a day he would remember, and his inside would go dry. He would remember, with a wide, stark vacancy.
If only it had been one of those unforgettable street loves, a chance meeting of eyes, a sigh. As the years pass, the sheer beauty of this one moment would continue to grow. In our memory, it would have been that endless, unforgettable love.
But that’s not how it happened.
*
He’s drinking more than he used to.
More than before, he drinks.
Every morning he arrives at the last stop with the same wish—sometimes he comes early and sits waiting, then the next day he comes a little bit later, and waits, waits, waits.
And one morning he saw Ümit at the stop.
The waiting had ended.
He was crazy in joy, he couldn’t keep his heart in his chest. As soon as Ümit was sitting beside him, he stepped on the gas. All the other commuters were just left waiting at the curb.
“Where’ve you been all this time?” he said.
“I was sick.”
There was something in his voice that seemed to be scolding Ümit for bad behavior, but Ümit didn’t understand why, didn’t understand the reasons for his questions, just responded to them.
Empty, the taxi-bus rushed by the stops, right by lines of people waiting, right by the crowds. They all cursed after the taxi-bus as it sped off, hurled swear words at them.
“You’d think you’d let me know or something, no?”
Ümit couldn’t conceal being surprised, and looked at him with timid eyes. Let whom know? For what? Why?
So…
This was when Ümit knew, and felt beloved.
And couldn’t believe this miracle. Abruptly, right out of the middle of our hum-drum lives, a miracle falls. Out of the most brittle earth of our lives, a sudden sprig sprouts. WE AREN’T ALONE ANYMORE. NOW WE ARE NOT ALONE ON THIS EARTH. Love begins its magic—one after another, the stops left behind—oh the grand illusion of love. So, this taxi-bus driver I am madly in love with loves me too, he has worried about and agonized over me, and feels other feelings… Ümit cannot believe it. had always thought that love was never mutual, had always thought that way. Always believed this. The movies, the novels, the stories, and fairy tales—these would never happen in real life. Life was otherwise, entirely otherwise. All of them were just a game, a sleight of hand, a mirage, a spell. Love was impossible.
“All these days I went mad, I couldn’t sleep until morning, I was thinking about you every second. I was always with you. Every night I drank through the pain, until I choked and drooled. I thought you were dead. I thought you had left. I thought you had abandoned me and the Warship. How many days has it been now that no one has sat beside me.…”
“I was sick, I was bedridden,” said Ümit, just repeating the same words over and over, voice trembling, almost tearing up. So this was what they called love. Trembling all the way through one’s life, that was love. Something that we experience only in tiny fragments of time and cannot extend into infinity, that was the thing we called love. In our episodic lives and our episodic selves, this thing that we can only experience on and off. Our feelings, our passions had already withered away. Our integrity sliced to pieces, our passions shrunken, our beliefs and values vanished. We would never again love as we had before. Never again. Now everything is forgotten, time patches it back up. All the casual tasks and tangles of life shrink, retreat, and fade out in a sweltering confusion, love along with it. We were living in a dry season, hostages of our small lives.
But now, Ümit’s voice was trembling, unable to endure this much delight and joy. Being loved brought on the trembling. In fact, in the years after, happiness would never become any more digestible. There was always something in happiness that made Ümit unhappy.
“Where are we going?” said Ümit.
“To the end of the line,” said Efkar, looking both at Ümit and the road, gauging both of them—at the road for Ümit’s sake, at Ümit for the sake of the road.
“If it’s true you love me back, we’ll go to the end of the line,” he said. Love’s magic bound their eyes. All the past years added up to nothing.
“OK, in that case, till death,” said Ümit.
“Till death,” said Efkar.
They put their hands in each other’s. Tears wetted Ümit’s cheeks, who wasn’t even aware that tears were falling.
“What is this?” asked Efkar.
“These are the tears of love,” said Ümit.
They passed by all the stops, looked out at all the people standing in line. No one would understand them. No one would believe this passion. They would be left alone, totally alone. Ümit knew this the best.
The Warship climbed up the slopes of Çankaya, there was a little beveled hill at the top, they climbed that, and then the slope ended. Having climbed the highest hills, now a wide ocean captivated their gaze. An immense, blue-black sea, all of love’s illusions; all of the murmurs of the sun, the light, the salt, and the water, the phosphorescence, other climates, other feelings. Warship slowly descended to this sea. Into the ocean. They were alone, totally alone. In happy lunacy.
Had love really broken away and left our lives behind? Or was this just something returning from the distant past? Was it so for all people? Ümit thought about his mother, Mrs. Güzide. His brother Ömer had had a brief crush, it lasted three years. Just as they were about to get married, Güzide, the mother, came between them and separated them. I never thought they would separate. They never thought they would either. My mother didn’t know the girl’s family. She thought their family was some good-for-nothing family. In her eyes, a bride whose family one didn’t know, whose past one wasn’t clear about, was the source of all evils. She was one of those women who made their own lives by running the lives of others, especially their children’s. And she had been looking for a girl for her son for a long time. In fact, there was this girl named Sevil who came around at one point; she was from the same town as herself. My brother Ömer resisted for a long time. He wasn’t having any of it. He loved this girl very much, he wrote her love poems, he shed tears for her, he got drunk on her. If this all wasn’t real, then what was it for? What was real in our lives? Afterward they ran away together to Adana. My mother Mrs. Güzide ran after them, and separated her son from the girl. She stormed in with all of the rights of a mother: “don’t forget all the milk I have fed you”s, “all of my slaving for you”s, “was all that toiling in vain”s, and separating her son from the girl and brought him back. They came down into Ankara in the dark of dawn; throughout the trip on the bus they didn’t say a word to each other. When they came into the house, my mother bore the air of a victorious commandant, back from the war. Like she had saved her son from the edge of the abyss and had carried out her parental offices successfully, had once again demonstrated her motherhood. Her face tired, self-deprecating, worn, and happy. I’ve never hated my mother more than I did on that morning. The girl had surrendered to him there in Adana. My brother was never to come to terms with this, I think. That she submitted to him there, that they didn’t wait for the wedding. Obviously eloping had said it all for the girl. Whereas for my brother… he was still Mrs. Güzide’s son.
“She was a virgin,” said my brother. “I saw the blood on the sheets.” “She was playing a game with you,” said my mother. “She wiped the blood on the sheets herself.” For days, the topic of conversation was whether the virgin was a virgin or not. They talked about this question for days. My brother was ambivalent. My mother: “If she was a virgin, they would have called in the authorities. They would have charged you.” They didn’t call in the authorities. They didn’t charge him with anything. This bolstered my mother’s and my brother’s doubts. But the girl must have sensed that she had lost something much more important than her virginity. My brother and my mother never understood this. With all the fights about whether she was a virgin or not, their fugitive love in Adana became polluted and stayed that way in the bleak dinner hours we spent in our rooms, darkened by thick curtains and cracking whitewashed walls. My brother’s defence got weaker in time, maybe he also believed in the end that the girl was not a virgin, or maybe he was secretly expecting her to sue. Not another word was heard from the girl. For a while she was never mentioned, I was the only one who didn’t forget her, just me. Then my brother married Sevil. They have three children. He comes and goes from the company he works at, briefcase in hand, ironed slacks, polished shoes, the same expression on his face, always. The love poems he wrote, the tears he shed, the running away together, being madly in love, where are they now? My mother just says, “He’s matured now.” “He’s concerned with his children and family.” On holidays they come to kiss the elders’ hands, and I just watch it all from afar. All of their behaviors, all of their styles seem to have something untrue about them. They’re interested in nothing but their kids, how’s business, daily questions and such. They spend their lives shuttling between all these details. Is my brother happy? I don’t know. I can’t read anything from his face anymore. The bright expression his face used to have, the rebel eyes, they’ve lost something. His face and gaze have flattened. No passion, no joy, no happiness, no rage. As if all the noble feelings, all the passions have been expelled from his heart. His is a smooth, empty face. Now he’s just someone, anyone for me. Before, love had beautified him, just as rage beautified him. He was exuberant, sharp, enchanting and very young. Love had made him something new. Did he love Sevil? What did they share with each other? What did they talk about at night? My mother Mrs. Güzide was happy, her son had married the girl of her wishes. There were grandchildren, young bucks, and she knew the bride’s family, knew the father and mother-in-law, knew their past. Her son was happy too, apparently—may God not spoil the sweetness of their mouths. There is nothing wayward about them, someday they will witness their own children make happy marriages. This is how life goes. But how much I had loved that other girl. Even though I didn’t know her, know anything about her, oh how I loved her. Love for me always took the form of a rebellion, I only understood this many years later. Way back then, in Ömer and that girl’s love affair, and how that love infuriated my mother and father, disturbed everything in our midst, I saw all of the meanings of life, all of the light of a new world. The world was in our hands; it would be made anew. Then my brother left the girl behind. My mother went and had a spell cast on them, or that’s what my older sister said. That’s what it’s about, those spells, my sister kept insisting. For her, the whole world, the things whose meanings she could not understand, the secrets she could not interpret, all of it was a spell. My brother ditched the girl. If I leave you, I won’t be able to live, I’ll die, he had said. And then they parted. Then he was forced to get engaged. And he lived. Then he was forced to get married. He didn’t die. I can’t go back on my mother’s word, he said. And he didn’t go back on it. My brother ditched that girl. He got engaged, got married. I could never make peace with that. A few years later, when he was in a car accident and I went to see him I understood that I would never make peace with it. I didn’t pity him, he was just a stranger to me, I was even unsure whether I loved him anymore. My brother had taken away my capacity for empathy. I thought about all this while sitting watching him at his sick bed, helpless. He had betrayed his love, love in general, life, his life. He had hacked it all to pieces, not rebelled. Which meant love was merely a phase, or a problem of conformity. In this, the mothers and fathers in Turkish films were right. Love stings for a few months, or perhaps for a few years at the most, and then ceases. This one would also pass. Everything passed. Especially now, especially now. Love, quite simply, went out of circulation. The grand loves, the noble loves, the irremediable catastrophes, they only live on in songs. Where you live, where you work, your circle of friends are all bound to the values that envelop you, the boundaries of your life. (In my brother’s change of heart, I experienced the rage of seeing my own future, and the future of love in general.) According to all of this, love only consisted of choosing someone and living with them. Now no one climbs mountains for love’s sake, swims rivers, travels from land to land. Mejnun depleted all the deserts, no deserts are left for us in the world. The mirages are gone, and the oases dried up with them. If not this, then the other thing, if not that then this, if not that, then that other thing. IT DOESN’T MATTER. IT DOESN’T MATTER. No one but that. Only that. That to the end. You. You. You. You. No one says these anymore.
No one is anyone’s You anymore.
Not anymore.
*
Coincidences usually determine everything. Small lives, little feelings, we roam to and fro on the narrow acreage of small hearts. We submitted to petty sensitivities, one-night stands, to marriages of convenience, fake loves, struggles to live what we learn from films and novels, the forged love adventures, the summer loves, the dark street meetings, we have lowered our life and expectations. We trample upon our noble instincts, our merits, our passions, our deep pains, our capacities, our selves.
Back then I didn’t know this.
After my brother, my mother married off my other older brother Halil. As soon as he came back from the compulsory military service, they found a girl for him. And when Halil saw the girl, he liked her, then loved her, then they got along well, then they married. That’s all there was. Chaste, presentable, knows how to sew, diligent in household chores, what else could you ask of Allah? As soon as he was back from the army they got engaged. Having too much time between the engagement and the wedding wasn’t a good idea, they said, so they were married, and there was lemonade, biscuits, and an accordion at the wedding. Everything was glum, pathetic, and affected. (There’s something glum about any wedding though.) They rented my brother a black tux, and the bridal gown was rented, as was the wedding salon, their house, and their life and even themselves. But they didn’t notice these at all. Life was enough for them, so what was my problem? Especially back in those years, when I was so young. Why did it matter to me? They bought furniture sets for the dining room, bedroom, and living room, and put them on layaway. This is how they would live, on layaway. We all lived our lives like that. With the interest collecting. Military service on layaway, wedding on layaway, fatherhood on layaway, grandfatherhood on layaway, that’s how Halil would live and die. Everyone’s hair was quaffed, the children were constantly pacing around on the dancefloor; a fifth-class singer brandishing her blond hair, wagging her thighs in her slitted dress as she sang, mumbling a few things here and there, offering the newlyweds her best wishes for their happiness. The wedding director rolled out all the old drab wisecracks from the last wedding, trying to get a laugh with a few dated jokes, which was successful in the end. The sisters-in-law and bridesmaids in a line behind the bride, cheering her to step on the groom’s foot, the brothers-in-law cheering for the groom, trying to overpower them. All the same jests and drolls from the last wedding, always received with the same gushing attention. After which, a folk dance, some cheery Gypsy tune. Widowed sisters-in-law and girl cousins who still lived at home were asked to dance by the handsome boy cousins, and then some distant relative’s child, who used to be called Girl Jemil, does an oriental dance, and everyone applauds with a mix of melancholy, toleration, and admiration. The brothers-in-law and uncles who do not wish to sacrifice their masculinity to the fashionable dances of the day or the flirty dances do the Ankara Greeting or the Harmandalı instead, taking whatever opportunity they have to let their manly plumes convulse and shake… My mother was having one of the happiest nights of her life. She ran back and forth, shedding tears at seeing her children all grown and getting married; she greeted the guests, showed them to their seats, demonstrated she was a good host. Bracelets, rings, and broaches were pinned on the bride. I hate everyone and everything, I am forever in a fog of nausea. These sham lives had something in them that destroyed humanity, that depleted it, extinguished it, but how happy everyone was, how could they be so full of belief? Where does this credence come from, this faith in what they were experiencing? Now Halil is happy. His wife is pregnant with their second child, his father-in-law made him a partner in his business. Were they really happy? Or was this the happiness of unawareness? Do they think these tiny, sheltered lives were happiness? Yes, they all do. They all do think so. They believe in all this. Their whole life is assuming. They find consolation in what happens to other people on the dramas on television at night, nourishing themselves by nibbling on the adventures of others, they think they themselves are the special beloved that all the songs tell of. The aunties telling each other about what’s going on in the magazines and newspapers, about the artists’ lives, their latest scandals, their ignominious deeds, their exhibits, their latest clothes, their latest cars, they nibble on their latest fate. And then their children’s ailments, the radiator that doesn’t work. The only thing in their cheap lives that’s expensive is “the cost of living.” On the weekend, visits from the neighbors, the blouse bought at the discount store, and the skirt, the summers, the winters, the seasons, all of what life was. And then they become like my mother. Like their mothers. Is Halil happy? Is this everything he wanted from life? What did he say to himself when he got back from military service: “My ideal is a pretty girl, some kids, a good job, living and getting done with it…” Why don’t I believe it? What was it about this life that makes me not believe it? As soon as they married, he became a family guy, he goes to the cafes in the neighborhood with his friends, he got fat, greasy, ugly, he became just another man. Wasn’t there anything Halil experienced that shocked him? His heart remained whole. He didn’t suffer. People only live as much as their hearts do, there isn’t one life for all people. My revolt is shouldering all the hearts. Maybe this is what I never knew, never learned. People who never go to the cliff at the edge of the heart infuriate me. Maybe if they had another way of living, maybe if social relations were reorganized, people could really feel all the acreage of the heart, and could live according to it. Maybe someday, maybe in another period of time, people will really be free.
