No Man's Land (73 page)

I no longer hope to fill this notebook. When a man is rich, he hates to write just as much as he hates to read. Nevertheless I won't throw it out, so that it remains as a remembrance. Indeed to forget one's former poverty would not be very dignified. I will put it away in my library.

My Semiha…

How exacting she is! She simply can't decide how the dining room should go. She's been going at it all morning with the decorator from Psalti. Let me go and see what they're up to.

*

2nd of February 1917

Six months on, my poor true notebook! How eagerly I take you into my hands; I'm in a painful turmoil. I can't but speak of it, I'm like a criminal whose sin is poised in his mouth because it won't fit into his heart. The other day I was invited to Cerrapasha for dinner at the house of one of the nouveau riche. They played us string music
à la Turca
. We ate and drank until midnight. I could not sleep. I left my house early in the morning. The cold was vicious. I could not find a carriage. I went down the hill to Aksaray. Again, there were no carriages. I looked up from the corner of the Valide Mosque where I used to attend Friday prayers with my dad when I was small. It seemed the echo of something forgotten… The whole of it a ruin… I could see the Tulip Mosque, the back of the Hasanpasha Building. I was awash with regret. I walked along slowly. We lived on the street that went down from Laleli to Yenikapi in a big house with a garden, cellars and a pool. That was twenty-five or twenty-six years ago… We had a neighbour opposite. Mrs Guzin. Her daughters' voices were so thick… Just like a bugle. Remembering the days of my childhood on this morning transported me back to childhood itself; to have found the plot of land where we had lived amid the fire-scorched earth! What was I to do! Nothing! I wondered if the pool still remained. I stepped in amongst the ruins. There was nobody around. Broken halves of chimneys and hearths were sleeping in the degradation of an unmarked grave. Within the limits of the house I had been looking for this debris was all the denser. I looked and saw four bedraggled people wandering around. They were bending to look inside the hearths. I was curious. What did they hope to find? I followed. I reached them and asked what they searched for.

–We're looking for corpses! they said.

–The corpses of what?

The short, old fellow with the hoary beard gave a reply.

–The corpses of people.

–The corpses of people, you say?

–Yes…

He paused, understanding me to be surprised. He looked at me from head to toe. Then he shook his head.

–Well, well, well! he said. So you, Sir, don't have any idea about this either? We're with the municipality. We come here every day to collect those who die of hunger. We put them into that cart over there. We take them away, we bury them.

–So there are those who die of hunger… I said, turning to ice. It was as if my heart had stopped. I had been cut off at the knees. The old man opened his mouth. How poor Muslims have been broken by hunger in the last few years, he began to wail with the fever of a mournful preacher who has been thrown into the fire. He railed about those who were forced to sell and eat everything out from under their feet and over their heads, about how in the end those poor souls without no one to cling to had fallen into the ramshackle pits which lay all around them like helpless, lonely, hungry, thirsty, shivering dogs.

–If these traitors don't stop this unholy scourge, there will be no more Muslims left in the world! he said.

– Who are these traitors? I asked.

–But who should they be? They are those who feed the people sand and call it bread! Those whose food is of the ground and not from it! They strip away at the destitute to enrich themselves. Those flying past in their automobiles!

– …

Then he stood for a moment. His friends were not as agitated as he was. He lifted hands and head up to the sky:

–When we will see these people hanged, oh God?! he cried, taking a deep, painful and dark breath. I let out not a sound. Yes, it was we who were killing people with hunger! Those showing us the way, those helping us out, those stealing alongside us! In Kagithane Shem and I had discovered a rich ‘lode of flour'. For three months, we had been selling the fine dust we found there to the central food distribution centre. There they pool it all together quite knowingly and add some chaff and send it out to the bakeries. I followed after the men searching for the dead as if I had been magnetised. They had found two so far. I looked. I was poisoned to the core. The corpses were half-naked. Their leather skin had dried on the bone. There was no meat on them at all. One was a woman. Her blond hair had matted. So much had I chewed at my lips that I felt warm drops of blood start to drip down my chin. I felt that the corpse's cavernous blue eyes were looking straight at me. It was as if I'd snapped. I lost it. I began to run like a madman. I don't know how I reached Beyazit, but there I hailed a cab. I got home. I passed out. The doctor and everyone turned up. When I came to, I told Semiha what I'd seen. She was deeply distressed and burst into tears. Now I'm confined to my bed. I've become a fanatical anarchist. I'm going to kill this Topal, this man whose armed gang is causing this nation to die of hunger, and I'm going to kill all those in league with this low-life. Yes, the government intend to ruin this nation! I no longer hold any doubts about it! Who ever doubts this is a donkey! Topal, the whole rotten syndicate, that treacherous, son-of-a-dog evil organisation, they have wrapped themselves around this nation like a seven-headed monster! They sap at our blood, our marrow, our bones. I must put an end to him. Killing just one of them is more noble than killing a thousand enemy soldiers in the trenches – indeed far more noble…

*

19th of March

I did not kill them. If it lives through this, the nation shall put an end to them! It will string them up on the gallows! Killing them is not the due of any one man! The traitors have the power of a seven-headed, nine-souled dragon! It is a fearful organisation! But I did kill myself! I killed the profiteer in me… I sold every last thing I had.

All the money I had got through killing my nation with hunger I distributed to the soup kitchens, to the poor houses and to the community. I did everything anonymously. We left the apartment and all its trappings. Semiha and I took our little Orhan with us, and we rented a teeny-tiny house in Üsküdar's Chavushdere, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Now we're so very happy… Thank goodness I never left my post at the school! I've started teaching lessons again. My friends think I'm bankrupt. I went to Acem again. He likes my translations! Now he's prepared to give me twelve kurush a page! In the evenings, I dictate and Semiha writes it down. I'm able to earn fifty lira a month. For a tightly-managed household, this is more than enough… But the last ten months are always in my mind, like a terrible nightmare. I cannot forget it. I cannot forget those I killed from hunger. I can't forget the stare of the women's corpse as it lay amid the scorched earth. I can't forget that for ten months I've been living off blood, tears and pus, that I've been living at the expense of the innocents piled up having died from lack of milk and sugar. A dark shadow haunts my soul at every moment. You too were involved in bloody robbery. You too, you too. Constant rows of gallows appears before my eyes. If I were to hang from one of these! I do not think that the stinging pain in my conscience will be extinguished. Even after I die, I am sure this torment will turn me in my grave!…

Ömer Seyfettin
was born in Gönen in 1884 and died in Istanbul in 1920. He was a fervent nationalist, and his work is much praised for simplifying the Turkish language by eliminating the Persian and Arabic words and phrases that were common at the time. The son of a military official, he spent his early life travelling around the coast of the Marmara Sea. He graduated from a military veterinary academy in 1896, and fought in the 1903 conflicts in Macedonia. Captured and made prisoner of war in the Balkan War of 1913, he did not fight in the First World War but his literary output during the war was prodigious. The Turkish forces were engaged on four different territorial fronts as well as in internal battle with their Ottoman sovereigns, who would eventually be supplanted by the military politicians with whom Seyfettin shared his reformist vision. ‘Why didn't he get rich?', first published in
Büyük Mecmua
, issue 3, 20 March 1919, is not a tale of heroism, but of corruption and inequality. Seyfettin was disillusioned by the war and by the poverty he saw around him. An important thing to remember about the Turkish experience of the Great War is that it was not the first terrible war fought in the last years of the empire, and it would not be the last. The Turkish War of Independence of 1918–19 was aimed at pushing back the colonial advances of the victorious allies. In the republic that emerged from the war Ömer Seyfettin's stories are still taught, and his language is now its language.

*
Topal Pasha was the military's chief of logistics, and a symbol of mismanagement during the war years.

*
An island just off Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara where many wealthy Istanbul residents spent, and still spend, their summers.

JAMES HANLEY

I SURRENDER, CAMERADE

from
The German Prisoner

‘E
LSTON!'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh! you're awake. I say, we must have slept a hell of a time. My watch has stopped too. This blasted fog hasn't risen yet, either. We'd better move.'

‘What's that you say?'

‘What's up now? Got the bloody shakes again?' asked O'Garra.

‘Listen,' said Elston.

Somewhere ahead they could hear the movement of some form or other.

‘Let's find out,' said O'Garra, and jumped to his feet.

‘No need now,' said Elston. ‘Here it comes. Look!'

They both looked up at once. Right on top of them stood a young German soldier. His hands were stuck high in the air. He was weaponless. His clothes hung in shreds and his face was covered with mud. He looked tired and utterly weary. He said in a plaintive kind of voice:

‘Camerade. Camerade.'

‘Camerade, you bastard,' said Elston, ‘keep your hands up there.'

And O'Garra asked: ‘Who are you? Where do you come from? Can you speak English? Open your soddin' mouth!'

‘Camerade. Camerade.'

‘You speak English, Camerade?'

‘Yes… a little.'

‘Your name,' demanded Elston. ‘What regiment are you? Where are we now? No tricks. If you do anything, you'll get your bottom kicked. Now then – where have you come from, and what the hell do you want?'

‘My name it is Otto Reiburg. My home it is München. I am Bavarian. I surrender, Camerade.'

‘That's all,' growled Elston.

‘I am lost, is it,' replied the German.

He was a youth, about eighteen years of age, tall, with a form as graceful as a young sapling, in spite of the ill-fitting uniform and unkempt appearance. His hair, which stuck out in great tufts from beneath his forage cap, was as fair as ripe corn. He had blue eyes, and finely moulded features.

‘So are we,' said Elston. ‘We are lost too. Is it foggy where you came from? It looks to me as if we'll never get out of this hole, only by stirring ourselves together and making a bolt for it.'

‘That's impossible,' said O'Garra. ‘True, we can move. But what use is that? And perhaps this sod is leading us into a trap. Why not finish the bugger off, anyhow?'

The two men looked at the young German, and smiled. But the youth seemed to have sensed something sinister in that smile. He began to move off. Elston immediately jumped up. Catching the young German by the shoulder he flung him to the bottom of the hole, saying:

‘If you try that on again I'll cut the bollocks out of you. Why should you not suffer as well as us? Do you understand what I am saying? Shit on you,' and he spat savagely into the German's face.