Bliss: A Novel

  İrfan’s friends laughed politely and went back to telling their jokes about the Kurds.

  Light is carnal in Ionia … Though Istanbul was not Ionia, it shared the same culture. The dynamic potential of this society and the basic motive that determined its behavior was suppressed sexuality. Singers whose lyrics had sexual undertones and who stressed their own sexual identity achieved popularity. Was it a coincidence that most of the leading singers were gay? Even in his day, Naima, the great seventeenth-century Ottoman chronicler, had written about young men who seduced older men by performing erotic dances in women’s garb.

  Recently, in a public survey, a gay singer and a man who had undergone a change of sex were chosen as singers of the year. The historical chronicles and manuscripts over which İrfan pored revealed widespread male homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire. Many a pasha and gentleman of note had visited the baths to be massaged and bathed by male attendants. Some texts even described the rules for such encounters.

  İrfan’s researches aimed at decoding the sexual behavior of Turkish society. He published articles that, as always, were mercilessly attacked by his professional colleagues. In the university, easily compared to a scorpion’s nest, everyone was the enemy of another. Many university academicians who were İrfan’s opponents were perpetually hostile. They would never get tired of accusing him of using others’ ideas in his articles. They were claiming that the subjects he delved into had been discussed earlier in depth by others. As a sociologist who had not majored in history, how did he dare to repeat such stereotyped ideas and call it a scientific approach! In Turkey one had to make liberal use of the word “science” in order to defend his views. Personal ideas not explained “scientifically” were considered not of value, unless one had a certain title in front of his name such as professor, doctor, or associate professor. As a result, Turkey had an abundance of professors, since anybody who spent a number of years teaching at a university automatically received the title.

  İrfan featured this glut of professors in one of his television programs. He referred to ignorant professors who could not even use their own language well. This stirred up a hornet’s nest, and his detractors responded vehemently, deriding him as a faker and a freeloader, who lived off his wife’s fortune.

  Sometimes, sitting alone in his office at the university, İrfan wondered how he had managed to acquire so many enemies. It was hard to comprehend such hatred, but at the end of these sessions of self-pity he always reached the same conclusion—there was no need to take things personally. In this country, everyone detested each other. Soldiers despised civilians; air force officers disdained their counterparts in the army; political science graduates had no time for those who had received their diplomas in law; businessmen loathed politicians, and vice versa; pundits of the media gained kudos by bringing down idols. Where else were newspaper columns filled with profanity and invective? The intellectuals themselves were a breed apart. They fostered animosity, and their conversations were full of mockery, spite, and malice.

  Until recently, İrfan had not minded all this. He felt that to live in such an atmosphere was quite natural. Success inevitably aroused jealousy, but now the local scene stifled him. He no longer enjoyed going to clubs, and he was disenchanted with the lifestyle of Istanbul’s so-called elite. He began to feel helpless, like a driver in a skid, seeing himself as a useless prattler, worthless and cowardly. The ways he used to defeat his opponents he once thought so successful, those barbs accusing them of being worthless, weak, arrogant, cheap, or unprincipled, weapons that had been his armor against them, he now cast at himself. They were right. He began to see himself as no better than the people he had so heartily despised.

  İrfan used to enjoy attending international conferences and seminars, but now he felt isolated at such meetings and withdrew to a secluded corner to watch the others. He would manage to carry on a conversation with Western academicians, but when the topic turned to the philosophies of the ancient Greeks or Romans, he would fall silent. He lacked a common background. It was no better with Arab intellectuals; he did not belong to the Eastern world either. The philosophical and scientific terminology of Latin, Greek, and Arabic were not internalized in his being. He was the victim of a shallow, groundless culture that mocked concepts that could not be expressed in single words or clichés.

  İrfan thought he was, like most other Turkish intellectuals, a trapeze flyer, swinging between the Eastern and the Western cultures. He, like many others, suffered the vacuum that was created after an “Eastern” society of hundreds of years suddenly became “Western” in the twenties when the Arabic alphabet was abolished and replaced by the Latin alphabet. He was a trapeze artist who had let go of the fly bar of the East yet floated in the void, unable to land in the catch trap of the West.

  İrfan’s nights were full of fear and weeping, and he felt he was losing control over the self he knew. He had to lose his identity, find a way to alter his destiny, and overcome the fear of death, a fear that had been sown in him and grew stronger day by day. He could not accomplish these things as long as his life revolved around that house, the coffin that symbolized his destiny, and his office at the university. İrfan could no longer play the role of either husband or professor. Like Sleeping Endymion, he would be obliged to determine his own fate, yet his destiny should not be one that resulted in an eternal sleep.

  İrfan remembered his surprise upon reading that Dostoevsky had once approached his worst enemy, Turgenev, saying that he wanted to confess something to him. Turgenev was taken aback by this unexpected confidence.

  “I once seduced a nine-year-old girl in a bathtub,” Dostoevsky declared, then turned to leave.

  Astonished, Turgenev asked, “Why tell me this?”

  “So you realize how much I despise you,” Dostoevsky replied, without looking back.

  Only a courageous man could do that, and İrfan wished he could pay similar visits to his enemies, but he had no interesting stories or even lies to tell. His “successful life” was utterly insignificant. He was shit, and his friends were, too. The places he frequented were shit, as well. Istanbul itself was a rubbish heap, with its restaurants, its streets patrolled by wild dogs, its hills of refuse, those potential explosions of methane gas picked over by beggars and seagulls alike, its nightlife where children were exploited as prostitutes, and transvestites in high-heeled shoes held knives to the throats of taxi drivers. It was full of ignorance and filth. İrfan even felt that the waters of the Bosphorus, not just those of the Golden Horn, had begun to stink. And in the restaurants of these fetid areas, his alleged friends thought they had become members of the elite just because they paid hundreds of dollars for a bill that included carpaccio, pesto, sashimi, or other dishes with foreign names. He could bear neither his surroundings nor his life of imitation anymore, yet he had no idea how to communicate this, especially to his wife, whom, in fact, he loved sincerely.

  He already knew Aysel’s response, “If you’re depressed, let’s go on holiday,” she would say, or, “We can find new places to eat.” A short, easy way of dealing with the problem. Nothing and no one was worth anything anymore.

  Once again, İrfan remembered Hidayet, who had sailed off to see Cavafy’s city. When İrfan’s family had sent him to university in Istanbul, Hidayet’s refusal to follow the same path, putting out to sea instead, was now a precious memory.

  “Why should I go to Istanbul and study?” Hidayet had asked.

  The two of them were sitting in a small waterfront café at the former Customs House in Izmir, drinking cold beer and watching the setting sun paint the waters of the gulf wine red, just as Homer had described.

  “That’s not the life for me,” Hidayet continued. “Predetermined, limited, inactive. I expect more from life than that.”

  “What more do you expect?” asked İrfan.

  “I’ve no idea; and that’s the best part—not to know what life will bring you!”

  A few days later, Hidayet, i
n his homemade boat with its makeshift sail, had become just a faint outline on the horizon. The wind might have carried him to Crete, perhaps, or to some unknown shore; or, perhaps, he had been lost at sea.

  İrfan began to miss Hidayet with increasing nostalgia.

  CEMAL’S SECRET

  Someone unfamiliar with the terrain would probably not have noticed the village in the distance. Only by coming very close could one discern the single-story houses built on the slopes of the mountain, as drab as their barren surroundings. That day not a tree, brook, or even a fountain was visible under the blanket of snow.

  When Cemal’s unit entered the village, there was no sign of life. The low roofs of the houses were heaped with snow. No smoke curled from the chimneys, and the sound of neither man nor animal broke the silence.

  Cemal was used to such sights. Caught between the PKK and the army, the Kurdish villagers retreated into their homes, trying to avoid both of them.

  According to intelligence reports, guerrillas had been in the village the night before. They had already left, but Cemal’s unit was under orders to evacuate the buildings and torch them. The village would no longer offer shelter for the PKK.

  Cemal had heard that thousands of villages, as well as acres of forests that might provide refuge, had been set ablaze. He had personally taken part in burning twenty villages, and it no longer seemed out of the ordinary.

  Forced out of their houses at gunpoint, the villagers were interrogated in the school, which had been transformed into a makeshift command post. As usual, they offered little information. While the women wept, the men who did not cooperate with the authorities were made to strip and stand naked or forced to walk barefoot over jagged stones. Deaf to their pleas, the captain ordered the village emptied in a half hour. The command to surrender their firearms was met by stubborn silence. The soldiers knew that no weapon would be handed over. Villagers never disclosed where their guns lay buried.

  Cemal was convinced that the most important things for these people were their guns, their mules, and their testicles. They guarded their firearms closely, protected their mules, so essential for their livelihood, and whenever beaten, they always begged, “Please don’t hit my balls!” Having learned Kurdish from Memo, Cemal was the only member of the unit who could understand and follow most of the conversations.

  The weeping women were now piling a few sticks of furniture out in the snow, children were carrying hastily tied bundles through the doorways, and the men were still pleading helplessly. The captain told them to go wherever they wished. Many would probably end up in Diyarbakır, though some might journey to Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, Adana, or Mersin. Their destination was of little importance to the military, whose aim was to clear the area of safe havens for the PKK.

  * * *

  Cemal remembered the voice on the wireless. Memo’s voice. Feeling strangely close to him, Cemal wondered if perhaps his friend had spent the previous night in this village. At the same time, he was conscious of the distance between them. The war resembled the plays they had performed on the anniversary of their liberation from the Russians, but the thought of bullets whizzing overhead in battle made Cemal shudder. This was no make-believe.

  At the beginning of his military service, Cemal’s mind had often wandered back to the days when he and Memo picked melons in the fields, cooled them in the stream, fried fish in an old can, and opened a bottle of rakı with their friends. He had recalled their fantasies about the innocent bride, the sins he committed in his sleep, and the resulting shame. These were the shared secrets of youth. Ambushes, Kalashnikovs, land mines, and the bloody pieces of a friend stuffed in a plastic bag had erased them, one by one, from his memory.

  Every year, on the anniversary of the liberation, Memo had always played a Turkish soldier, Cemal a Russian. Now the roles were reversed. Cemal wore a Turkish uniform, and Memo was the enemy dressed in the garb of the PKK.

  Over the intercom, Cemal would overhear Memo’s conversations in Kurdish with other guerrillas and listen to him calling on the Turkish soldiers to surrender. For a long time he did not utter a word about this to anyone in his unit. It was not easy to be indifferent to that voice on the radio, and finally, one day he had shared his secret with Selahattin, his bunkmate.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Selahattin had responded at once. “You’ll get nothing but trouble.”

  Respecting his friend’s knowledge and experience, Cemal had taken his advice.

  Selahattin was from Rize on the Black Sea coast, as was obvious from his prominent nose, a hereditary feature common to most Black Sea people. Most of Cemal’s comrades were from the west, Thrace, the Aegean, or the Black Sea. There were only a few easterners like himself. Selahattin often spoke about his family, who had moved to Istanbul, and Cemal enjoyed the tales of his family’s shop in the wholesale fish market, his uncles’ boat at Sarıyer, and their fish farms on the Aegean coast.

  Selahattin was a devout Muslim, and he and Cemal prayed and fasted together. He treated Cemal, the son of a sheikh, with special esteem, and constantly asked him about his father. Although Selahattin, a member of the Ushaki sect, was deeply religious and had studied the Quran for eight years, he had never heard of the Cemaliye sect, of which Cemal’s father was spiritual leader. Cemal told him as much as he understood of his father’s teachings, related in a language that mixed Turkish with Arabic and Persian, which described how the Cemaliye sect was founded on the principle that the face of God made itself manifest in everything throughout the world. Selahattin did not find his explanation very convincing, and he started to wonder if Cemal’s father was a false sheikh, like so many others in Anatolia.

  * * *

  After the village had been evacuated, the soldiers conducted a house-to-house search to make sure the dwellings were empty of all inhabitants. Then they poured gasoline over each building and set them all ablaze. As the flames rose, the grief-stricken women began to wail, and their screams soon filled the air. The fire was consuming their homes, their belongings, and their hearts. Holding fast to the halters of their mules, the men watched silently. Not tears, but hate filled their eyes.

  Months ago, Cemal would have felt their anguish, and perhaps even tried to console them, but his experiences in the mountains had numbed him. A few houses collapsing in flames paled in comparison to what he had witnessed. Just two weeks ago he had gazed at the corpses of two schoolteachers executed by the PKK. A band of guerrillas had stopped their minibus, ordered the couple out, and shot them on the spot. Cemal had been struck by how quickly their bodies, especially their faces, had turned black.

  During his broadcasts over the wireless, Memo declared that the guerrillas were the “rulers of the mountains and the night.” They certainly knew each crag and cave better than the soldiers. The local Kurds, as well as their animals, also liked them. Whenever Cemal and his comrades approached a village, they were immediately set upon by dogs and were often forced to kill one or two. Yet, when the PKK entered the same place, the dogs did not even growl. Cemal finally solved the mystery when he heard a Kurdish villager calling out to some dogs one day in a strange, guttural voice that silenced the animals. Even though he knew Kurdish, Cemal could not imitate that sound, and like the rest of his comrades, never learned to communicate with the dogs.

  The villagers also directed their mules with strange cries, like a foreign tongue. In this they were not always successful, perhaps because a mule has a mind of its own.

  Several days earlier, Cemal’s unit had been lying in a streambed. The terrain in front had been mined, and they saw an old man with his mule walking slowly toward the danger zone. If they warned him, they would disclose their position, but an explosion would attract even more attention.

  “Stop,” they shouted, “the area’s mined!”

  The man halted in his tracks, but despite his frantic calls, the mule did not. Desperate to save the animal, he chased after it. The mule had almost passed through the mines when the ground erupted un
der its feet. The explosion blew off its front legs, and Selahattin put the creature out of its misery with a shot from his rifle. The old man sat in the dirt beside the dead animal. His livelihood gone, he wept inconsolably.

  Cemal imagined Memo as being one of the snipers the guerrillas positioned on the high hills. Memo had always been a good shot, even as a child.

  Cemal no longer felt any warmth when he heard Memo’s voice, and each time someone in his unit was killed or wounded, he blamed his former friend. His anger soon deepened to hate. If he ever came face-to-face with Memo, he vowed he would shoot him without a second thought. He would avenge all those youths, dead, or missing an arm or a leg, and kill Memo or any enemy of his country and nation.

  Their faces reddened by anger as well as the heat of the flames, the villagers turned away from their burning homes. With their bundles on their backs and their mules and children in tow, they trudged slowly down the hillside.

  Near the edge of the village, an old man with a long white beard and sunken eyes was lying on a mattress in front of his house, untouched because of its distance from the other dwellings. Standing beside him was a small boy of nine or ten. These two were the last survivors of a family wiped out by the war.

  Tears staining his cheeks, the old man was pleading with the captain, “Please, commander, let us stay. I’m crippled … we have no place to go.”

  With little other choice, the captain relented, and Cemal saw the boy’s face light up. The boy knew nothing of the world beyond these hills and the routine of taking their few animals out to pasture. Leaving these mountains for some distant place would, for him, have meant losing all that was familiar and dear.

  Trying to avoid the glances of the other soldiers, Cemal quickly took a few coins from his pocket, placing them surreptitiously in the boy’s hand as he patted his head. He was careful to frown as he did so in order not to spoil the child with kindness. The boy looked up, smiling his gratitude.