Part 4 (2/2)

The temple-house belonged, not to Ethel's mother and father or any other Jewish family member, but to her personally. Whereas the band of students around her stayed at either their parents' insipid-looking homes, worn-out bachelor pads or in overcrowded dormitories where one could only be by oneself inside the wardrobes, the c.u.n.t was the owner of a villa in which she lived all by herself. Though this alone sufficed to make the situation rather surreal, in addition her house was a dream world and just as dreams flirt shamelessly with the art of exaggeration, Ethel too was susceptible to overkill. With its garden overlooking the Bosphorus (every square of which was totally covered up with jonquils and jasmines, that in warm winds released delicately sweet smells at night overflowing with the scent of pleasure); its small but cute pool in which Ethel floated lanterns of all colours at night; its high quality drinks, tasty food and furnis.h.i.+ngs each more interesting than the next; its vast collection of records and rich library; not forgetting the premium quality cigars constantly being pa.s.sed around; this place was almost like a miniature version of the world during the Tulip Period of the Ottoman Empire the excess of which the contemporary historians had attacked with clubs and defaced with extravagant praise.

However, if you ask my opinion, it was not only the wealth that stunned the guests who came here; not the ostentation or the luxury either. What was even more striking was the 'endlessness' of it all. The dwindling cigarette boxes were immediately replenished, the collection of records was so vast you could not count them all, the library did not lose its splendour even though the borrowed books were never returned, and in spite of our eating in h.o.a.rds, the kitchen cupboards never emptied out, the stock of delicatessen never diminished. We liked to joke among us that when the ground was broken for the villa, the venerated Saint Hizir happened to be one of the workers and had blessed this place: 'Let it multiply but never lessen, let it overflow but never spill.' Even the magical cave of the forty thieves, with its jars of gold, chests br.i.m.m.i.n.g with jewellery, bolts of satin and barrels of honey and b.u.t.ter could not rival Ethel's temple-house.

As much as the house was prosperous, so was our host generous. Ethel watched closely the things her cherished guests enjoyed. Her offers increased in accordance with how much she valued someone. For instance, was there someone among us who liked whisky? As soon as she learned about it, Ethel would fill up the drink chest with the highest quality whiskies. If another person liked puzzles, Ethel would order an acquaintance going abroad to bring puzzles each more challenging. Most of our time, however, we dedicated ourselves not to such games but to wearing ourselves out with various gatherings or 'get-togethers'. We would burrow ourselves in the comfortable sofas in the living room, eat, drink, smoke and 'sa.s.s' about this or that person, but mostly about each other. We would quickly free ourselves of our past, focus on who we were now, reveal our dreams and constantly debate with each other. Our host did not at all care about the content of our conversations. In fact, as individuals, I don't think she cared much about us at all. She liked the environment she provided for us...and she also liked fireworks. For each guest plunged into this place was like a firework speeding through the night's darkness. He would first glide with shaky, staggering steps and, when convinced he had risen high enough and adjusted to the environment, would burst with a magnificent bang and light the place up by scattering the colourful rays he had hitherto hidden. As we found our voices, became encouraged and burst out with explosions of our own, Ethel provided every comfort by constantly serving us. The genie in the lamp, the houris of heaven, even Peter Pan's fairy...none would have served their masters with as much devotion. Ultimately, sooner or later, all these guest-masters ended up falling in love with their host. Yet this also brought their downfall. Those who had the freedom to swim as they pleased in this vast sea, often moved so far away from land as to suddenly realize, upon looking back, that they had lost sight of the land. Ethel was no longer at their side; she had lost interest in them just when they had miserably fallen for her. The only drawback of being a guest at this house was the ease with which one overlooked the fact that both the guest status and also the visit were temporary. Hence each departing guest, just like the infinite replenishment of the materials of the temple-house, was quickly replaced with another. Saint Hizir's prayer for abundance was valid for Ethel's 'brains' as well: they constantly multiplied and never lessened.

As for me, I was the exception. From the beginning till the end, I was the only constant visitor of the temple-house; a type of honorary member. I was ambitious, more than was necessary according to some. My report card was filled with 'As' for a couple of solid reasons. For one thing, I was tall (three stars), then wide-shouldered (three stars). I will not be as modest as to say I was 'considered handsome' for I was always the most handsome in the places I frequented (four stars) and I was extremely impatient and 'difficult' (five stars). Unlike the others, I had choices. I certainly enjoyed being here but could have left at any moment. I could have gone and not returned. Ethel was too well aware of this. That is why I was so dear to her. The seed of discord in the middle of heaven. My presence enchanted Ethel and disquieted her guests. Little did I care. Being considered a threat by other males was old news to me. If I had cared about these types of looks, I would have done so much earlier: back when walking the distressed corridor of an eleven year old. With a plate filled with wedding cake in one hand and only underwear on my wiry body, I had almost collided by the kitchen door with my stepfather, I was so relaxed and hungry with the warmth of the wedding night. Until that moment, the poor man had always seen me as the older son of the woman he was going to marry, a boy who had problems but was in essence hungry for love and needy of compa.s.sion. I should not do him wrong, he wanted to be a father to me: a talented sonny bestowed by G.o.d to a childless, fifty year old man. Yet on the morning of his wedding night when we unexpectedly met in the hall, with my facial features inherited from my father, my half-nakedness that revealed I was about to leave childhood and my tremendous appet.i.te revealed by my filling up my plate (signalling also that I would be getting bigger very quickly), I must have seemed far from being the 'sonny' he envisioned. An apprehensive gleam flickered and faded in his pupils. The bad thing was that my mother also realized this, and did so without losing any time. It was as if she had found the remnants of that look when she swept the floors the following day. This did not bode well for anyone because my mother was one of those women who took the tensions that ricocheted among the men in her family, established fickle and knotty alliances and always turned them to her advantage until the last drop; one of those whom, without knowing his name, made Bismarck's soul rejoice... She turned her older son against her younger one, the younger one against her late husband, her late husband against her new husband and her new husband against her two sons...

Hence I was rather used to unvoiced maliciousness. I did not care about the looks of others. I was Ethel's favourite and Ays.h.i.+n's lover. I was fond of hanging around the temple-house but that was all. I had other alternatives and more important things to do. As I said, I was ambitious, very ambitious. Not wasting a moment after graduation, I started the doctorate in England and finished it here in Istanbul, in a field that signified nothing to my family: political philosophy. Ays.h.i.+n too had pa.s.sed, on her second try, the sociology a.s.sistants.h.i.+p examination. We looked good together. Ethel barely caught up with us. When she finally managed to graduate, she made brazen oaths about never entering through the gates of the university ever again and then burnt her diploma with a ceremony at a party she threw in her temple-house. Then, while Ays.h.i.+n and I gradually built a decent life for ourselves, Ethel destroyed hers with startling speed. First she stopped living as a clan. Then she left that villa and moved into a penthouse that, when compared to its predecessor, was very s.p.a.cious and cute but was undistinguished. She no longer gathered everyone in her house, spent most of her time not by drawing attention in large crowds but instead by putting up with the whims of her lovers in crowds of two, and though she devoted all her money, love and energy to them, was still not loved the way she wanted. We heard that her congregation was not happy with her behavior, but Ethel was not happy with them either. She grumbled behind their backs at every opportunity even though she knew it would eventually reach their ears.

'Since you have read more books than I did and chose to become social scientists, could you please solve this little puzzle for me? If you observe a wide range of countries all around the world, from the most democratic to the most oppressive, you'll find in all of them quite a number of writers, painters and the like among the Jews. It's as if whatever the circ.u.mstances, they somehow find a way to develop their brains. With the exception of one country! In Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Europe, Russia...just keep on counting...in all these countries... Only in Turkey something went wrong with the Jews. For whatever reason, in Turkey they didn't feel the need to use their brains as much.'

'You're mistaken,' objected Ays.h.i.+n frowning. 'Many of my friends are Jews.'

Ethel giggled ruthlessly. She never forgave such mistakes. I however was split in two. One part of me had relished the naivety Ays.h.i.+n had displayed in defending Jews in front of her Jewish friend this must be the part of me in love with her. My other half had looked at Ays.h.i.+n with the anger I felt toward those who tried to roll up the qualities they acquired thanks to their family trees, the exceptional family structures they were born into, the elite schools they attended and the things life had bestowed upon them which they then tried to pa.s.s as merits they themselves had developed this must be the part that made her fall in love with me.

Yet Ays.h.i.+n must not have been aware of either Ethel's solid reaction or my bifurcated one, for she plunged into her a.s.sertion full force: 'They all entered good university departments. Many of them received very wonderful grants and they've now risen to quite good positions.'

'And I tell you this,' Ethel had said, clicking her fingernails again. 'You talk about occupation, I, talent. You mention career, I genius. Economists, academics, lawyers, surgeons...I beg you, please put these aside and move on. I'm talking about something else. Why don't the bohemian, bibulous poets or hedonists, the perverse or even better gory film producers and such emerge from among them? Why don't my people make music? And on those rare occasions that they do, why is that that they always sweetly sing the syrupy traditional songs of our Sephardim grandmothers and can't come up with something totally wicked, like a protest song?'

'My people' was the final stage: against Ays.h.i.+n's insignificant defense, Ethel's regal attack. Whenever the location of a group is debated between someone belonging to that group and someone not, the patent right always comes smack onto the agenda: the end of the road, the dry well of all debates, the last curtain...when everyone withdraws to where they ultimately belong, the married to their family-homes, the peasants to their village-homes... At that point I lit a cigarette, having drawn both of them into my own vicinity, and sat back. It did not make a difference to me. Both of them were, at the same time, my women.

Men committing adultery find quality significant: they enjoy receiving from another woman love that is in essence different from what they receive from their wives. Yet women committing adultery find quant.i.ty significant: they enjoy receiving from another man love that is more than that which they receive from their husbands. Cheating on Ays.h.i.+n with Ethel flattered my vanity. Those days, I very much enjoyed observing their differences. As to whether Ays.h.i.+n cheated on me or not, I never attempted to find out.

'Okay, but these are so for a reason,' Ays.h.i.+n had spoken up, by no means intending to give up. Then she had gotten down to business and commenced with a detailed explanation. Trying to employ objective expressions, she had talked about the shaky psychology of being a minority, the constant insecurity generated by the crisis of belonging and the domination nurtured not by concrete threats but by abstract tenets. She did so neither to be a smart aleck, nor to display her interest in talking big. She talked like that because this was the only language of debate she knew. Yet debating in an academic language is like going to bed with a woman who does not put a drop of drink into her mouth. You can rest a.s.sured that she will remain standing until the end of the night, never go overboard and never lose it. Yet you have to accept upfront that you would not be able to relax around her, let out wild yells, hit bottom, pa.s.s out in each others arms; in short, that you would not have any fun whatsoever.

'What you say is nice but totally useless,' Ethel had remarked, girding up the swords she had just sharpened. 'If gloomy writers, slovenly producers or socially undesirable painters had emerged from among the Jews in Turkey, do you know what explanation the generations succeeding us, say fifty or a hundred years later, would've given? Exactly the same ones you used just now. They would've said, ”Yes, so and so was a great artist or thinker. What made him so great, what separated him from all the rest?” Then they would've started to count the reasons you gave: the psychology of being a minority, alienation from the language, insecurity, being unprotected and so on. Thus everything you now see as an obstacle would have become a cause for difference, for privilege even. This is how these things operate. If a lame man can't dance, we say, ”Of course he can't dance, he's lame!” but if the same man is an expert dancer, then we say, ”Of course he has to be better than others, for he's lame!” '

Ays.h.i.+n had flinched, as if avoiding a pushy salesman, shaking to one side then the other both her head and hands. I knew that motion too well. It meant, 'Thanks, but I'm not buying that nonsense.' During our three and a half years of marriage, she would conclude almost all our arguments with the same gesture.

Flat Number 8: The Blue Mistress.

Shooting up the stairs, the Blue Mistress unlocked the door of Flat Number 8 panting. She was very late. As if it weren't annoying enough that the visit to the beauty parlour had taken so long, she had also spent too much time afterwards shopping. Once inside the flat, she emptied the contents of the shopping bags onto the kitchen counter. The food could wait, her appearance could not. She dashed into the bathroom. While brus.h.i.+ng her teeth, she scrutinized the waves in her hair with discontent. This new style had seemed much nicer in the mirror down at the hairdresser than here in her bathroom. Being one of those women who sometimes envied curly hair and sometimes straight, but in each case only ever on others, her hair had all this time been oscillating, unable to lean in either direction. Now that chatterbox of a hairdresser had upset this delicate balance, making it far curlier and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g it far shorter than she had asked for. She stole another glance at the full-length mirror while taking her clothes off in the bedroom. Though her hips had somewhat widened lately, she was still fond of the way she looked. If only those cuts were not so visible... She applied a handful of foundation cream, the same colour as her skin, managing to conceal the scars once again.

The drawers opened one by one and she paused for a fleeting moment but did not have to ponder for long over which underwear to pick since it seemed to make no difference to the olive oil merchant. That had not been the case in the beginning. Back in those days, he wanted her to wear the naughtiest underwear possible, buying it personally as a 'present' to her. He always chose the same colour: a lucid, brilliant, infinite sky blue. The Blue Mistress liked this colour, she really did, except in panties or bras. When it came to the underwear in her gift packages, she felt uneasy about the incongruity between the docility of their colour and the licentiousness of the intention behind. A garter could be as desire-inducing a colour as cherry, as carnal as black or as deceptive as white; even violet in its flirtatiousness or pinkish in its hypocrisy...but it could not be a lucid, brilliant, infinite sky blue. Fusing that specific hue with those specific intentions was pretty much like diluting milk with water, or even worse, adding milk to rak. Not that it wasn't possible for a man to enjoy both, just as long as he refrained from drinking them simultaneously. Of lambs turning into wolves or wolves into lambs, she had seen plenty, but it was the ones trying to be both lamb and wolf at the same time who sp.a.w.ned the worst monstrosities while believing themselves to be innocuous in the meantime.

It was the half-lamb/half-wolf who had harmed her the most even more than those who liked to remind her of the unsurpa.s.sable border between women-to-marry and women-to-bed. Such men l.u.s.ted after what they vilified and vilified what they l.u.s.ted after. The Blue Mistress had once seen a hoodwinker on the street tricking the pa.s.sers-by with three tin cups on a cardboard box. As he changed the places of the cups, the bead hidden in one of them was displaced too. At the onset it was in the first cup: 'Be ashamed of your desires!' In a flash it moved into the second cup: 'Be ashamed of the woman you desire!' Then, in one move, there was the bead again, now under the third cup: 'Desire the woman who brings you shame!' That, in turn, meant that sooner or later these men would start to scorn the women they slept with.

In order not to repeat this vicious pattern, the olive oil merchant kept seasoning their affair with spices that would outweigh both the zest of desire and the tartness of shame. Always a prolific diary-keeper, the Blue Mistress had written down when she had first met him: 'If someone awakens in us a desire we'd rather not have, we try not to like that person. However, if that fails, we then seek something likeable in him, something good enough to make the desire for him less bothersome, more endurable.' It was akin to wearing a celestial glove, of lucid, brilliant, infinite sky blue, so as not to have to touch muck or mess while enjoying rummaging through the debris.

In the spice basket of the olive oil merchant there wasn't the slightest trace of l.u.s.t. All sorts of other things were present there but for some reason during the past few years he had always fished out the same spice: compa.s.sion. He felt compa.s.sion toward the Blue Mistress: she was not the type of girl to live a life like this. Then there were times when he felt compa.s.sion toward himself: he was not the type of man to live a life like this. Too often he talked about Kader as if she were a wicked wh.o.r.e. As for the Blue Mistress, she regarded this l.u.s.t covered with compa.s.sion like a dirtied, mud-covered slice of jellied bread lying on the ground. She had no appet.i.te for it. At times like this, she likened her position to her hair. On the one side was the wife of the olive oil merchant, smooth and even like straight hair, on the other was this wh.o.r.e called Kader, b.u.mpy and imbalanced like hair with permanent wave. Then there she was, in the middle of the two, swaying toward either end...semi-wife, semi-wh.o.r.e...both blue and a mistress...

She knew how heartbreaking it had been for her parents when she had left home for good but still could not help but suspect they had also been relieved deep down. They were both nice people but the nets they repet.i.tively threw into the sea of parenthood rarely turned up anything decent. Though never at ease with their love and hardly able to bear their attention, this ingrat.i.tude of hers was hard for even her to handle. She could have gotten a better education if she had so wanted, could have at least graduated from high school, but after that 'incident', she had felt barely any desire to return to school. Before she knew it, the scar on her face had drawn a hair-thin boundary, first between her and her peers, then between her and the age that she lived in. She had to leave that house. If given a choice, the only place she would like to go was, undoubtedly, the universe that her grandfather inhabited...a grandfather whom she loved dearly, lost too early...After losing her dede, tracing the jumbled footprints of people from all walks of life in Istanbul, she had tried to track down those that belonged to the dervishes.

Hard as it was she had managed to find them scattered here and there on the two sides of the city and gathered, like moths attracted to light, around their own dedes. She had joined them. For two years, she had partic.i.p.ated every week without fail in the sermons of three separate religious orders in Istanbul, seeking solace in the resemblance between the words she heard from their sermons and those she had heard back in her childhood from her own dede, but it had not worked. It wasn't that the words were not reminiscent of those of her grandfather's, for they were. Nor was it that the people who uttered them were not sincere, for they were. Still, for some reason it just did not sound the same. Little by little she came to realize that in these meetings it wasn't the talks that she was really interested in but the chants that followed. She would sit side by side with the other disciples while the dede talked, but rather than be all ears like the rest, she would withdraw behind a solid deafness. Only when the chant started would she reopen the sealed gates of her ears. How profoundly she loved that moment, that true and total desertion of the body, again and again, sealed in the infiniteness of repet.i.tion. It wasn't the words articulated there but instead the beat of the drums and the notes of the underlying melody that took her away. However, no matter how far she swerved she could never quite shake that old feeling of incompleteness. After a while she had started to feel like a hypocrite. Why had she insisted on being one with those she felt so apart from? Every chant attended left her yet another mile away from the other disciples. Just as she had been unsuccessful in reciprocating the love of her parents, neither had she found peace next to those who constantly preached peace.

'I don't know how to be satisfied with what I have,' she had solemnly confessed to herself, 'because I'm not able to show grat.i.tude.' Surprisingly, rather than causing offence this confession had relieved her. She had been suffering from the malady of those who, while still children, realized how extraordinarily beautiful their childhood is; the malady of those who started life with the bar set high... Thereafter, all the people she met were destined to remain in the shadow of her dede while even the most pleasing things in her life would embody a harrowing sense of absence. Such incompleteness, however, was utterly unbeknownst to others, and therein resided the problem: the absolute wholeness of good. Those who unreservedly believed in their own goodness and the superiority of their morality were doomed to failure far more than the bad for they were so smug in their completeness. There were no leaky roofs in the edifices of their personalities, no crumbling floorboards, neither a hole to be filled, nor a notch to be fixed. The Blue Mistress had found them incomplete in their gorged fullness but being unable to express this, she had gradually recoiled from the good, distancing herself step by step from their learned codes and credo of goodness. It was thus that she had started to suspect somewhere in her innermost soul she was inclined to depravity and immorality. Before long, she had entirely cut her ties with all three religious orders. Be that as it may, moving away from the believers had not once shaken up her beliefs. Faith for her was not living in accordance with the unchangeable rules of a commanding G.o.d or joining the ranks of a conscientious community, but rather a sunny, dulcet childhood memory. And as her childhood memories with her dede were the best moments of her life, she had steadfastly, doggedly remained a devout believer. Even when not as full of faith as she had been in her childhood, her faith had still retained a childish side.

Yet there was neither a house she wanted to return to and nor did she have enough money to continue on her way. It was during those days that she had started to get used to the attention of men as old as her father and managed to not remain indifferent to the attention she had got used to. These men who thought they had everything, discovered at one point the incompleteness embeded in their lives and thereafter became eagerly attracted to her as if she and only she could right that wrong. In any case, being a mistress was a good start in terms of getting away from the humdrum wholeness of the good. She was first blue, then a mistress, but there were also periods when she was thrown around in between the two. When the olive oil merchant rented Flat Number 8 of Bonbon Palace, she had finally stopped fluctuating between being blue and a mistress to become both. As soon as the man provided her with a house, his manner had drastically changed, becoming visibly coa.r.s.er. For he was that type. He was an LTCM of the SDEM section and the WCWL sub-section, and he naturally acted in accordance with that.

There lives on earth another type of creature whose world is as crowded as that of humans and that is at least as complex: bugs. They have succeeded in spreading everywhere and stay alive in spite of everything. They display a magnificent variation, even a particular type of bug can come in ten further varieties, sometimes even reaching thousands. It is a.s.sumed that the sum of all bug types is more than one million at present. In spite of this harrowing complexity, the scientific world does not stop cla.s.sifying them. It divides them into their upper categories, cla.s.ses, lower cla.s.ses; upper sections, sections and lower sections. A tree worm, for instance, belongs to the bug category, 'changeling sub-cla.s.s, sheath-winged upper-section, different-stomached section, plant-eater sub-section'. The overwhelming majority of the disappointments women experience in their relations.h.i.+ps with men originate in their unwillingness to accept that, like bugs, humans too come in types and therefore the men they are with also belong to a type with only one difference: a bug cannot leave its type and make the transition into another type. A horsefly, for instance, cannot at any stage of its life turn into a praying mantis. It stays the same. However, Adam's sons and Eve's daughters can indeed accomplish this transformation. The trademark of a human is the faculty to deviate from what it was originally, to betray its own type. Accordingly, the table of modern human types is less complex but much more convoluted than that of the primitive bug. Nevertheless, making the transition between categories is not easy. After all, in order to preserve their stability and maintain their existence, not only do all types make, without exception, their members exactly like each other but they fix them in that guise as well. The olive oil merchant belonged to upper category of the men's type, 'Long Term Complainers about Marriage', was on the 'Can't Quite End Marriage' team and also in the 'Want Change Without Loss' subsection: a harmful type whichever way you looked at it.

'You are my betrothed,' he had said as they silently drunk at the rak table they had, on their first night in this house, set together. He liked to drink and often drank at night. He was not one of those who made do with a fistful of appetizers, half a mould of cheese and a slice of melon. Instead he always insisted on having a table filled to the brim. It couldn't be ready-made either, everything had to be prepared at home from scratch. Chicken with ground walnuts was his favourite dish. That night, whilst using a piece of bread to wipe off the last crumbs of chicken with ground walnuts from his plate, he had remarked: 'Our religion permits it as well. As long as you are fair enough, you can have up to four women.' The Blue Mistress had t.i.ttered, a bristly, edgy sn.i.g.g.e.r. He had grimaced. She had left the table: unlike the olive oil merchant, she did know the mentioned verse of the Qur'an in its entirety.

Choosing a gauzy green

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