No Man's Land (72 page)

It was in this spirit that we grew up.

And future generations will tell a strange tale:

‘Once upon a time, there was a small and ancient nation, which lived in the lands extending from Lake Van to the Mediterranean Sea and from Baghdad to Byzantium. This ancient nation was made up of farmers, poor craftsmen, intellectuals, merchants, landlords, bankers, high government officials, dustmen, servants, slaves and so on. These people were ardently loved by their wealthy compatriots beyond the limits of their country. They were likewise ardently loved by ministers of Western countries, because of their black and beautiful eyes and because they spread culture throughout the dark East.

‘Moved by their ardent love, the wealthy compatriots and the Western ministers pushed these people into fighting their neighbours – neighbours who differed from them in religion, in blood and in culture, and who possessed swords and armour, an army, a navy, and superior numbers.

‘And once upon a time, there was a great war. The whole world was enveloped by the smoke of gunpowder, and there flowed rivers of blood. The ministers and the wealthy compatriots shouted into these people's ears: “The hour of freedom has come! Strike your neighbour! Strike his crescent with your cross!” The black and beautiful eyes of this ancient nation sparkled with the desire of freedom. An unequal fight began; they struck; and were struck. And of these ancient people there remained a mere fragment, in memory of a nightmare.

‘Whereupon, with supreme and sublime cynicism, the ministers and the wealthy compatriots laughed at the bones and the ashes…

‘And three apples fell from heaven: one for the story-teller, one for the listener, and one for the eavesdropper…'

Vahan Totovents
was an Armenian writer born in Mezre (modern Turkey), a small town on the Euphrates, in 1889. He served as a volunteer on the Caucasian front during the war. He went to war to see his country liberated.

After the war, he went to live in Yerevan in Soviet Armenia. In the 1930s he was accused of producing works lacking in proletarian content and exiled to Siberia. Little is known of his last years in exile. Totovents died in 1937. This extract is taken from his
Scenes from an Armenian Childhood
, written and first published in 1930 (filmed as
A Piece of Sky
by Henrik Malyan in 1980). The touch is light but the message is clear: children's games are not innocent.

ÖMER SEYFETTIN

WHY DIDN'T HE GET RICH?

translated by Izzy Finkel

‘A few pages from the diary of a teacher.'

7th of January

T
HEY SAY THAT A NATION
without a history is a happy one. I'll add that a person without recollections is a happy one, too. Since I taught history for five years, I found it necessary to cast my eye over a fair number of books. No sooner had I left school than I ordered the works of the historians Rambaud and Lavisse. The commerce in used books to which I'd gradually become accustomed since then had filled up my library quite a bit. Now I suddenly find myself having read all of these books. It did not escape my notice; this thing we call history is the bearer of misfortunes! It makes no mention of felicities, or else it skims past them superficially. Even in the most joyful and most fortunate of periods it is expert at discovering some calamity, perfidy, anguish, or poison! This sorrowful tendency within the record of man that is history is found also in man himself. Each misfortune, affliction or grief leaves a deep mark like a scar on our souls. Our delights and our joys, our happy days melt away and are forgotten with the very weightlessness of a dream. Just this morning, in the corner of my drawer I found a notebook I had begun to scribble in ten years ago. I looked over what I had written. There was nothing there to afford me peace of mind! I had recorded at length how my darling mother who died of cancer gradually ebbed away, and how we'd suffered terrible burdens as the poor thing was dragged off beyond redemption, moaning and wailing into perdition… What terrible remedy is time! Now I cannot feel one scintilla of those burdens. Then I went abroad! There were but two lines about this! Then I got married! There is no mention of that at all. I had a child. I hadn't written about that either. Involuntarily I sniffed in these pages, which for some reason had yellowed without ever seeing the sun. The bitter, narcotic smell of an ailing autumn! From these old leaves, amongst these old books, from these old forgotten notebooks, ah! The smell of mourning.

*

Yes, if only I had not had such memories to write about. How empty are the eventless, regular, self-same days! But how free from pain… After the war broke out this emptiness, that is to say this contentment and peace, abruptly broke apart. I must have abandoned my habit, because for two years I didn't set down any of the things I'd experienced. To be living happily in the world of beliefs, in the world of opinions, to be living happily in the pursuit of knowledge, that spiritual pleasure which resembles no other delicacy – and suddenly to be thrust into the darkness of want! To crawl along a desert of famine without hope, under a maelstrom of hunger, and to witness those close to you meet their slow, uncomplaining deaths! How miserable I was that day! Whatever my wife had had, we sold. Not a linen bath towel remained. Our bedding, our bedsteads, the library my father had left me, even the pram of my poor child, my poor Orhan, went off to be pawned when its turn came. My monthly salary was fifteen lira… We even pawned the house that my mother had given me, the house that had guaranteed me an income of six lira. The bread rations we ate, the cracked wheat with olive oil we got from the school! I am in awe of my wife's fortitude. She managed to take care of both the house and the child. She is endlessly darning socks. She takes apart the old ones. She dresses me and her child.

–If only the fighting would stop! All this will be forgotten, she says.

But I do not see that this crisis has any hope of ending soon. What will become of us? From time to time I consider going abroad. But those coming from the outside say that their hunger is worse even than ours. Remembering the terror of tomorrow turns my mind upside down. I'm struck dumb. I still can't think of what to say. I can't collect my thoughts on paper.

*

14th of January

I ought not to have begun to write again in this inauspicious book! Yesterday Orhan fell ill. Our neighbour the doctor who came round to treat him as a favour told us to feed him only milk. Milk… A measure of it is half a lira! I piled all the books I own onto the back of a street porter. I sold them. Off they went. Sixty lira's worth of cash came into my hands. I bought charcoal with twenty of it. The cold was wretched.

*

30th of January

Turning it over in my mind, I realise that a life like this is no longer livable. That evening, when I was having my boots polished, I asked the shoe-shine boy how many pennies he received from his master each month.

–Twenty lira! he said. A gypsy child of sixteen! I'm the thirty-one-year-old scion of an ancient family! I was brought up in the most comfortable fashion. How can I, with a wife and with a child, get by on fifteen liras a month? A challenge? It's not even possible! For two years we've been selling and scrimping, topping that up with the fifteen liras to ward off death. But it can't go on like this. In a month's time I won't have anything left to sell. I need to find a job. Teaching would fail to feed not just a man but a chicken.

*

16th of February

I had been looking for work for fifteen days. At last I found something from a bookseller, translation for ten kurush a page. I can't describe how happy it made me… Each section brings in one hundred and sixty kurush. I get thirty lira for a three-hundred-page book.

*

7th of April

I have got into the habit of doing a regular ten pages of translation a night, for which four hours will suffice. And so it goes… It seems as if our life is improving. Orhan can drink his milk. Semiha and I will be able to acquire a pair of ration boots each. The fact is that working every night without break has ruined my eyesight. But we found a solution to this. Last week I bought some glasses from the eye doctor.

*

2nd of May

Yesterday I chanced upon a friend of mine, Shem, in Cenyo… The boy had bunked off from when we were in secondary school. I used to see him from time to time. He had become a businessman.

–I've got seventy-five thousand lira! he said, in just two months…

–You're joking, I laughed.

–You're welcome to ask any bank you want.

–But then how can that be?

–It's pretty easy if you can find your ‘angle of approach'!

An ambition was stirring inside me. Seventy-five thousand lira in two months… I remembered how I'd sweated for one single lira. Four hours every night by the light of a carbide lamp I'd bought from the Germans in the interests of economy. The man opposite me was quite stretched as if to burst from health. Jewels studded his plump fingers.

–So what's this ‘angle of approach' business then?

–It's easier than tapping up Topal!
^*

–Who's this Topal?

–Come on… Where have you been? You've really no idea who Topal is? Good God! Whoever gets a piece of him becomes a millionaire! Today, all of Turkey is in his hands! Seventy five thousand million lira jumps into action at his behest.

He began at great length to explain the virtues, the talents and the capabilities of the chief of procurement. I listened in amazement. At last I explained that I knew not a soul in the War Ministry. He felt for me.

However:

–Don't be so crestfallen, he said, there's no need to tap up Topal directly. It's enough that you tap up a man of his man…

–Well then, I'm tapping you up! I said, laughing.

–Not so fast! he said, erupting into a cackle. There's seven shirts' separation between him and my man. But I do need someone I can trust to do a job. And I can slip about eighty lira into your pocket from the deal.

Eighty lira a day… I couldn't believe my ears. Any more and I would have planted kisses all over the hands of this nouveau riche. A weight was coming off my shoulders. The promise of riches suddenly overcomes a man, like a hit of ether.

–Come and see me the day after tomorrow! I'm on the second floor of the Ömer Abid building, he said.

I'm going to go to see him tomorrow. He will ensure I earn some cash. Income without capital! I would never have dared imagine it! I'm going to become swiftly rich, like so many of those others. Farewell to this penury! This decrepit black wooden house! Farewell, bedbug colony! I'm so excited that I'm rolling up my trousers before I have reached the stream. I haven't been able to continue with translation for two days! Dare I take these paper scraps to bookseller Acem and say, ‘Stuff your translations! Keep your money. May God do with you what he will!'? Semiha is suspicious of my state of mind.

–Something's the matter with you, something's the matter with you! she stands there saying. She asks why I'm not translating. I tell her my head hurts. Let them wait for me as long as they want at the school tomorrow! With what unknowable self-importance the poor director of assistant teachers will count up the hours of my absence, trying to collect enough to dock my pay. Gormless fellow.

*

15th of September

We returned from Büyükada
^*
two days ago, and today we moved into our apartment. I've managed to get this place for 750 a year. How very wonderful it is… A bathroom, heating, electric heating – it has it all. Six bedrooms, two salons. I spent exactly five thousand furnishing it. I'm going to put together my library again. Yes, this happy state breezes past like a dream. I can't even remember how I spent this summer… I haven't even officially left my post yet. I've left a proxy in my stead. I got a certificate from the doctor stating that I'm ill. I give my stand-in an extra ten lira to top up the wages I'm passing on. If I leave the school, there's a risk I'll be called up for military service. It sneaks up on you all of a sudden, and business can't rescue you. Shem got me 3000 lira in kickbacks in the first month. The truth is I am very grateful to him. He has turned me into a man. We deal in flour. There's nothing very lucrative about that. So we dabble in a bit of cereal as well. We hoard some sugar and the like. I smiled to myself as I read over the things I wrote only four months ago. I'll be damned! How did I put up with such squalor! Sweating in an airless school room for five hours, for half a lira a day! And what's more, to consider so explicit a degree of servitude to be a virtue! Thankfully I've abandoned the virtue of master worship. It is true that the milieu in which I now find myself is a bit coarse. In fact it displays not a whit of sophistication… Everyone's longing, philosophy, and intention is but this: Making money! No room for abstracts! No place for dreams! Market rigging gives enough food for thought! Avarice is the greatest asset… I daresay that in the space of a year I'll have overtaken Shem. Ah, why was there no one to guide me by the hand at the beginning of the war? We still count amongst the poorest today. They say there are men now who've earned ten million lira over the last two years. The Americans should get involved! When I was still in teaching, a friend of mine had me read a book. I remember its French name:
L'Alphabet des Richesses
! The man starts with one dollar on the way to getting rich. To make his million, he labours day and night for thirty years. Here if you're shrewd, you can make that million in liras without breaking into a sweat. All it takes is a little arrangement with Topal! If you could get the Balkan trains, the Anatolian line, to work for you for just a month…