Waiting for the fear, p.19
Waiting for the Fear, page 19
Anyway, let’s return to you, Father. You never went to war, and you never displayed heroism in the traditional sense of the word. This, dear Father, is why you never profited in your lifetime from any symbolic rewards, like medals, nor did you secure any material ones—say a building, bathhouse, or farm. You devoted your life to politics, but you didn’t know politics, which is why you failed at politics even during peacetime. In this regard, the strongest criticism I can level on you is this: You completely failed to present yourself to the people. You never handed out your personal card at any of the city’s inns where people from your home province would stay. You didn’t check in on the work your constituents in government circles were doing. All you did was go around your electoral district during the Ramadan fast so you could be seen abstaining from your cigarettes. Although you were full of yourself, you didn’t know your faults and you paid no attention to your strengths. You were stern, insensitive, and selfish, which gave you the character of a bad-tempered child. And I use the word “child” because you never went so far as to “procure a benefit” from your bad habits. If you ask me, you were always quick to weigh in with some childish, or rather childlike, idea, regardless of the topic, a behavior that “generated negative repercussions” within the household and which I’d often complain about. That’s why I “emerged as a rebellious son.” I developed my tastes during the years we spent together as a reaction against you. For instance, you’d call classical Turkish music “toadified warbling,” and since your only reaction to Western music was “Shut that off” I came to love both genres as if it were a duty. Your other cultural pronouncements were just as stark. In short, you drew sharp lines that divided everything around you into two (and I should admit that in this respect I’m no different): the world consisted only of ugliness and beauty, people were either stupid or smart, and anyone who didn’t hold his head up high was nothing but a sycophant, while you’d accuse people of snobbery if they weren’t as polite as you. We—Mother and I—would disagree with you, but before I knew it I’d adopted the same cruel classification system of yours, which never gave the middle way a chance. What’s more—and for me this may be the worst part—I think I take a secret pleasure from it, which I can’t stand; it might anger you to hear this, dear Father, but I’ve inherited from my mother what fragment of romantic emotions I actually possess. I notice these despicable contrasts of mine especially after I put down a book, sitting there staring steadily into space in a way that you could never understand. In one respect, Father, your job was easy. There were quite a few things you ignored as you methodically went about your work. You didn’t go to the cinema. You never read any novels. You abstained from artichokes in olive oil. You didn’t dream of going to a foreign country. You never bought anyone a present. The only plant you grew at home was asparagus, and you only ever listened to Turkish folk music. But despite your simple tastes, you’d occasionally surprise me with your tenderness. For instance, you’d sing this one very moving Turkish lullaby:
The Black Sea waves toss and toss
While the ships heave out to sail
with the same pleasure as you would the folk song
Yekte yavrum yekte
Pastırmalar yükte
and I would try to pull off the latter of these two with a playful sensibility I only later acquired: same as how I’ve just dissembled my simple emotions or whatever by writing “or whatever.”
And now you’re dead, Father. You lived indistinctly in a world whose boundaries you distinctly defined, and if you ask me, you died an indistinct death. At this point it’s impossible to change you, Father; which is why I also believe it’s impossible to change myself. It seems that most of the time when I gaze off into space I do so because I’ve exhausted myself concocting all these hopeless embellishments that might hide our fundamental similarities. You see, I’m no different from those you’ve characterized as snobs, as if I too were covering up my secret phoniness with well-bred and polite behavior. But I’m not as consistent as you were, and I’m often so overcome with doubt that I’ll start ironing my pants and washing the stains from my shirts.
There really isn’t anyone left to remember you, Father. You don’t know this because you’re gone, but I must mention that a good portion of the otherwise useless crowd you surrounded yourself with has already passed into history. The textbooks are filled with people whose actions were no different from your own, but it’s their names and their petty and obscure experiences, which we both know so well, that have turned up in the history books. Now that you’re gone, I’d like to invent speeches and articles and fictional debates and attribute them to you, unfurling your name from them like a flag. Because if there was an election, nine out of ten people who knew you—I mean really knew you—would give you their vote, and that is something I know as well as my own name. You’ll see, Father; I plan to write this encyclopedia myself, if I can just get it started it’ll be perfect. It’s just that, in this country where no one really knows much about anything, I wonder if you couldn’t have used the old scissor method and taken a little of this and a little of that—from the works of foreign writers, of course—and left us with a text or two. I could have done the translation. And Mother could have read it back to you. (You should at least admit that the only texts you ever understood were the ones Mother read to you. And despite the ostensible antagonism between you two, she was probably the only person who understood your language.)
We never had a conventional father–son relationship. I didn’t ply you with questions like all curious children tend to do, nor did you feel the need to sit down and explain anything to me. That’s why I was ignorant of the reasons behind so many episodes and events, I didn’t know the first thing about the world. Or else I’d found out much too late. For example, you used to stand up from your meal before everyone else so you could go wash your hands, and I’d follow you to the bathroom, where you’d tell me, “I’m about to smoke,” and then push me out of the door, and it wasn’t until I started smoking myself that this mysterious behavior finally made sense. Then we began to smoke together, and one day you suddenly reprimanded your son for “smoking in front of his father with his legs crossed.” That’s how you always were, you did things too late. It wasn’t until after I got divorced and came to live with you that you’d tell me the most unsettling things; for instance, “You come home too late at night,” which is something you should have told me years ago. I was already married and divorced, Father, I even had a child, I mean in one respect I was in the same boat as you. Years ago, you used to leave Mother and me alone for days on end so that you could go off to the city on some business-related pretext. Well, that’s how I am now too, Father: I have a job that allows me, as we say, “to live the way I want,” and I walked away from my home.
I never ended up going back. I’ve even acted a bit extreme in certain situations, compared to you. Maybe I’m trying to “bring these thoughts to bear” so that it’ll be easier to carve out a place for myself in this world. Now there’s a thought you’d never considered. Although it’s not as if the place I’m carving out is anywhere near as big as yours was. Which is why I’ve gotten so anxious and irritable. Do you remember how we’d quarrel, and then I’d leave the house and slam the door? It’s because I always felt that you treated me unfairly. In fact, I don’t even think I deserved your complaints. I was a diligent student, but you’d grumble that “this kid won’t even open his books,” or you’d dress me in poorly stitched clothes that never fit, send me to schools I didn’t want to go to, and ignore my whimpering. Although I don’t want to dwell on how unfairly you treated me, maybe your death has caused me to feel such a profound sense of unfairness that I now blame the entire world for it. In this respect I’ve come to a place I don’t want to be in: I’m constantly slamming doors in the world’s face.
People used to say you were an “egoist”; now they say the same thing about me. You remember how after Mother died you began to live alone? That’s why I believe you know what loneliness is. I even resemble you in my loneliness, Father: I cook my own meals; I put on something similar to that dirty old bathrobe of yours and wander restlessly around the house scratching my scraggly beard and shutting off the lights; I’m constantly calculating how much money I have, but if I’m feeling good about myself I’ll walk around the market shopping for the best version of whatever it is I’m looking for. I’ve become more and more like you: I’ve even stopped liking people. I don’t look in the mirror very much, but when I talk about the things I’m interested in I can feel my forehead wrinkling up like yours. When someone I’m visiting doesn’t insist I stay for dinner, I resent it like you did—perhaps even more virulently. But unlike you, I don’t openly express my dislike of a badly cooked meal; what can I say, that temperament I took from Mother. Then again, I sometimes can’t help expressing a word or two of displeasure. What I want, Father, is for everyone to know that I no longer like anything. When I think about you, I realize I can’t keep my feelings bottled up inside me anymore and let my anger fester. So I shout out whatever comes to mind, like you used to do, and right in people’s faces. Still, if you saw the state that your former pushover of a son is in now, you wouldn’t be very proud of him; because judging by how my “interlocutors” react to what I say, my state is not the sort that would instill much pride, Father. It’s a state of vague revolt. I heard that as a child you’d come home, find your mother gone and rush out into the street to bang on the windows of whatever house she’d gone to visit. I wasn’t raised in the country like you were, but in a city in a flat, in which respect I’ve failed to fully live out my delayed childhood, so now I make my own kind of fuss whenever I feel abandoned, and I spoil everyone’s fun.
In fact, I can’t help smiling whenever I think about you now, Father. I want to live as if I were you. I want someone like my mother here at home, so I too can go to the kitchen and call out, “There’s something boiling here, Muazzez,” and hear her say, “If there’s something boiling, then lower the heat, Cemil Bey,” and then I’ll walk back out of the kitchen without lifting a finger. It’s possible that today I still don’t know the kind of person you were; more precisely, I heard some things today that I know you weren’t aware of, and I’m curious if knowing them might have changed you. I wonder: Did you have a subconscious, Father? It seems to me that that sort of thing wasn’t invented until after your time, as if the Ottomans were completely incapable of such a notion. When I picture you in your fez and frock coat I can’t quite square that image with the idea of “existential dread.” Indeed, we’re pretentious strivers too; after all, that worm only had to get inside us once, Father, which is why we make some matters worse. I wonder how you would react if I explained all this to you now, or what you would think if you could read my work? Would you say it’s all “crazy nonsense”? I don’t think your generation had these difficulties, Father; if you knew that your thoughts about food and puzzle-solving and health-related newspaper articles and the flies getting the windows dirty and the European music you had to listen to on the radio because of me and the monthly budgeting and the ingredients or whatever one needs to buy for tomorrow’s Noah’s pudding and all your other unrelated thoughts occurred to you according to this chaotic succession of ideas we call “stream of consciousness,” I don’t think you would have dozed off so soundly in that high-backed armchair after dinner. Would it make you nervous to hear that irreparable aberrations are now occurring in the fundamental structure of matter, or that certain laws of nature no longer repeat themselves like they used to? I myself am not overly familiar with the innovations related to “the study of the mind,” Father. (For instance, even though you were “egotistical,” you were unaware of your own “ego.”) And if you’d read about it somewhere and asked me, “Son, do you have an Oedipus complex?” I don’t think I would have known how to respond. You remember how, when I’d get angry with you, or when I felt inexplicably troubled by something I couldn’t describe, I’d go off and drink until morning? Well, no one does that anymore. They go to a doctor instead, because it’s related to this thing you’ve never heard of, the subconscious. I’m really just like you, Father: But since alcohol isn’t good for me anymore, I simply roost in my armchair like an owl.
Which means you must have passed your provincial nature down to me: I don’t like civilization. I hate the television. I think you would have hated it too if you were alive today. I want to return to your native village; I don’t mean I want to stand on the beach chatting up the fisherman like the nouveau-riche sea-goers do. Fishing isn’t for us, Father. What I want is to live in a little village like yours among vast fields (maybe with a tree here and there), and in a house made of mud brick and wooden beams. I asked an old architect I know to sketch up a plan of this house. (I have no faith left in the young, Father.) It’s difficult to explain, but I can tell you that my going there would be an act of revolt against a world that’s wronged me; and when people find me there, I’ll say, “I’ve seen all your ‘advancements’ and I’m ‘receding toward my origins,’ (that is, I’m reverting back to Cemil Bey),” and they won’t understand. You might compare this to actions taken by Ziya Paşa and Mehmet Akif. If Mother heard this, she would have wept. I don’t know how you would have reacted, but I don’t think you’d have “construed” all this as a revolt against you. Then again, you would have said it was books that made me this way. Once, when I was reading Lucian, you flipped through my book, read a section that made fun of the gods, and said, “That’s why this kid keeps challenging me. He doesn’t believe in God,” which I didn’t consider a very factual comment. You too came to believe in God—even though you never once admitted it—in your twilight years, Father. You started disappearing on Fridays and turning up at the mosque. I wonder if you’d experienced a similar “crisis of faith,” like in your youth. At any rate, you never acknowledged the change. It used to drive me crazy how you’d claim that you’d always been a “God-fearing man.” Maybe you would have interpreted my moving to the middle of nowhere as a reaction to an earlier time in my life, one when I didn’t subscribe to any faith. But it’s really because I “regard” myself as old-fashioned that I seek shelter in your childhood, Father. My actions have nothing to do with the kind of sensitivity you didn’t like in Mother. In other words, I know my place now, and it’s a mountain hut with a stone courtyard out front they call a “fold,” where I’ll deal with spiritual complexities unheard of during your time, where I’ll draw water from a well, where I’ll light my stove with the sticks I’ve loaded onto a donkey’s back. People “nowadays” call this an escape, Father; and it’s the bourgeoisie—those who believe they’ll never be able to solve society’s problems, which is to say the city-dwelling intellectuals that embrace the customs of daily urban life—that say so. Don’t pay them any attention, Father. You won’t learn anything about your son from them. You’ll also believe, like Mother did, that I’ll never do anything wrong, isn’t that right? You remember the time I invited some sullen-looking men to the house and how we quarreled over some of the books I was reading? Mother was so worried back then that something awful would happen to me, but when your pals warned her about my friends she still came to my defense. Now you’re both gone, and there’s no one left to defend me. So whenever I’m alone and getting to know my loneliness, I gaze steadily off into space to give this mud-brick house some more serious consideration. I’m nothing like those surly intellectuals, Father; I’m opposed to them and instead prefer to side with your sincerity, which I hope I still possess even though certain books have gotten me all mixed up. Still, I’m scared of ending up just like you, Father. What I mean is, will I ultimately die like you as well?
I end my letter here with a respectful kiss on your hands.
Your son
RAILWAY STORYTELLERS
A Dream
We were three storytellers living at a train station in a remote frontier town far from the country’s biggest cities. Our three huts stood side by side next to the station building. It was me, a young Jew, and a young woman. We peddled stories, but business wasn’t exactly booming because the train so rarely stopped at our station. And on the days when only the postal trains came through, we barely made any money at all. The people on the postal trains mostly bought apples, ayran, and dried-sausage sandwiches, especially the people who arrived in the afternoon, which was when we storytellers would be asleep, resting up for our nightly work. All our hopes rode on the express train, and the express train only came once a day in the middle of the night. The other peddlers would be asleep then, unable to drag themselves out of bed. Sometimes even we (the storytellers) would sleep through the night express. We’d been on good terms with the stationmaster, the station’s only official employee, but he often neglected to wake us up. We couldn’t really blame him: he was the switchman, the telegraph operator, the signaler, the ticket seller, and he also had to open and close the doors . . . All that work falling to one man. We tried to stay on his good side by giving him our stories for free, but he would still forget to wake us up. Most of the time, we had to wake ourselves up. This wasn’t very easy, obviously, considering we wrote stories all day. Sure, we slept in the afternoons, but inspiration typically came in the evenings, and it would have us by the collar until late into the night. The stationmaster sometimes mocked us for how we said this: “have us by the collar.” And then we’d momentarily forget how he could hardly keep up with everything, because he had no help, and excoriate the man: His room was right next to our huts, was it too much trouble to tell us when the night express arrived? After all, we were, in a sense, workers at the same workplace. What’s more, there were nights when we forgot to eat because we were so busy writing our stories by hand and then typing them out on the typewriter in the stationmaster’s room. I’d started telling stories first, so my friends let me be the first to type. But I usually gave my place to the young Jew. I loved this thin, sickly Jew very much.
