Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (5 page)

My favourite soup kitchen is by the Lütfullah Gate in the left wing of the Grand Bazaar. Over the arched entrance is engraved the year when space was allotted for more than 4,400 shops. I was upset at being unable to subtract 1461 from 1991 to figure out its age. I can send a bullet through the eye of a needle while at the same time dealing with a couple of roughnecks, but I've no head for mathematics. As a result I'd shied away from the secondhand book business.

Coming out of the soup kitchen, and struggling with a broken toothpick in my mouth, I was addressed by a stout man with a face like a self-satisfied turkey.

‘I hope you enjoyed your meal, Commando Bedirhan!' he said. With his bureaucrat's air, this fifty-year-old pain in the neck was grabbing the opportunity to thrust his forged business card under my nose: ‘Ali Hadi Bora – Retired Chief Inspector'. I was taken aback when he continued, ‘Don't worry, Commando. If you just listen to me for ten minutes, I have a terrific offer for you.' Taking my arm, he pushed me into the first empty coffee house, and took it upon himself to order two sage teas.

‘You did good work in Tarlabaşı, congratulations! Because you handed out retribution to those killer-robots, prayers for you will never cease. Your dossier is reckoned to be closed. According to the tabloids, “The rival gangs have settled old scores.” Because of insensitivity, fear, the legal vacuum and bureaucracy, in Istanbul particularly, so many hoodlums like Zazo who've damaged the social order are obstructing the state's good works.

‘To be frank, I'm a member of an organization called Mecruh, whose dream is to eliminate microbes like him.
Mecruh
means “hurt” or “injured” in Arabic. In exchange for a fee from injured clients we assist justice by restoring their rights. We are incredibly powerful, consisting of élite members. If you join as our hitman, you will achieve material and spiritual prosperity. You will usually be required to do one job a year, and your salary will begin at $100,000, with a down payment of 20 per cent. If all goes well, you'll be a millionaire in ten years. Let me add, while I remember, that Mecruh never sheds any innocent blood for money.

‘You are strong, a true marksman, you keep your mouth shut, you don't chase after sex and you're on your own. Commando, you must have been sent from heaven to do this work. I'll balance your passion for books with personal training. (If you join us I'll be your contact.) We will never use the Tarlabaşı incident against you. But if we wish, we can get rid of you for crimes you've never even committed, my dear veteran of Hakkâri.

‘We offer you a job which is well paid, exciting and beneficial to society. There's $5,000 in the envelope I'm putting in your pocket. Consider it a gift. You'll be on leave on Thursday next week. We can meet then at the same time in this pissy coffee house. Think about it. If you don't come back here in seven days, the money in your pocket is as much yours as your mother's white milk.

‘I know you're about to buy a book from the secondhand book-market and then rush off to the Şafak Cinema in Çemberlitaş. But don't forget, Commando, there are pleasures more profound.'

I insisted on two things: the hideous, grotesque Baybora must persuade me of the victim's guilt and must never again address me as ‘Commando' in his insolent way.

My first job was to punish a professor of mathematics, a pretentious follower of the West who insulted our religion in his speech and writings, and cheated on his wife, the Jewish convert to Islam, whose money funded his opulent lifestyle. (The dossier prepared by the organization included – as if it were necessary – his ability to multiply five-digit numbers in his head with the speed of a computer.) In the photographs taken secretly for the dossier, the professor's attitude to other people seemed rude and belittling. If he had asked me at any time to solve an arithmetic problem, I would have been ashamed and embarrassed. My trigger finger began to twitch.

I was going to lay an ambush for him in a lonely street in Üsküdar where, God forgive him, he used to meet his lover. Baybora, for the first and last time, had poked his crow's beak into this business on the pretext of assisting my training. Respectfully, I passed the endless walls of the Karacaahmet Cemetery till I reached shady Eşrefsaat Street. It seemed that in pursuit of his intrigues, at 3 o'clock on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the immoral professor would turn from Rumi Paşa Mosque into neighbouring Çeşme-i Cedit Street. Before my reconnaissance expeditions into a district which had still preserved its sacred Ottoman origins, including even street names, I had taken ten days' leave without pay, and step by step I had traced the journey of the wretched 60-year-old to his love nest. The vulgar womanizer would swagger along, and I was sure that as he got out of the taxi he never even raised his head to glance at the elegant 500-year-old mosque opposite. I couldn't help wondering how much daily profit a Çadırcılar trader would need to make to buy his cap with the earflaps, his leather jacket and suede boots.

In the mosque courtyard I patiently traced, stone by stone, the geometrical tomb of Rumi Mehmet Paşa, Grand Vizier from 1466 to 1469. Clumps of couch grass had invaded the slope of the family tombs. But between the sunken mosque walls and the cornerstones of the street the sloping building site seemed more level. A vigorous blanket of mallow-like weeds spread 150 metres around the young plantation. The space between the mosque wall and the neglected building to the east of the site, which autumn rains had turned into a sea of mud, was separated by a barbed-wire fence. I'm indebted to the heroic street cats for the idea of climbing over that rusty fence two metres high to the street below.

Forty minutes beforehand, I hid my grey cap and false beard in a nook to the right of the fence. I was concentrating on
The Syriacs in History
when the victim's taxi arrived. He deigned to get out of the shabby vehicle, muttering at the poor driver. Scrutinizing both ends of the deserted street I leapt into the bushes. Between us was a space of perhaps thirty metres. I drew Walther II, in the name of God, while the professor was putting on his hat, and fired six bullets into the chest and heart of the man who could multiply five-digit numbers in his head. Leaping over the wire fence, I landed first in neighbouring Parlak Street, then ran on into Şemsi Paşa Road. I jumped into an old taxi heading for the Unkapanı Bridge with ‘Old Chap, Business is Crap' written on the back window. At the spot where I'd chucked away Walther I, I committed Walther II to the blessed protection of the Golden Horn. Baybora had warned me, ‘Don't look at the newspapers for two weeks.' While I was failing mentally to convert into Turkish lira the $150,000 I would earn in exchange for those six bullets, I had come to the Valens Aqueduct erected in ad 373. Was it nerves? God forgive me, I remember I began to laugh ...

A pleasant autumn was approaching. As the evening ezan rose from mosque to mosque I stood up from the desk and went out onto the balcony. I don't know a more strategic point from which to observe the monumental trees. Beyond the field of red and white tulips that surrounds the pool begins the display of cedar, pistachio and chestnut trees and oleanders. The family's favourite plant was the absurd Japanese persimmon that sheltered under the wall. My father praised the apple-like fruit of the tree that loses its symmetrical leaves before winter. As the orange fruit of the bare plant gleamed in the dusk he would declare, ‘This is the painting by Nature that defeated René Magritte.'

As the ezan died away, the wind began to wander here and there. I was sheltering in the room where I could sit back comfortably at my father's desk. For the first time I noticed the pencil case of Armenian silverwork in the middle of the bulky wooden desk. Beside it was the bronze statue of Eros, a span high, which my mother, searching for a present for my father's sixtieth birthday, had asked Selçuk Altun to buy at a Sotheby's auction. It seemed I had failed to notice the sorrowful face of the naked object. Authentic icons were scattered throughout spaces on the bookshelves – silver vases made in Iran, a miniature yacht in a bottle, knick-knacks of half-naked naiads, grotesque porcelain figures, a giant bee imprisoned in an amber egg, three dried seahorses and a ruby globe scattering flaming light onto the shelf of dictionaries. As a first-time museum addict I would examine the date (19 June 1990) of the fall of the Berlin wall, and a heap of rubble, including early Byzantine coins. On a shelf containing the works of Aulus Gellius stood a glass cube engraved with one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's aphorisms. And above the science volumes, on a shelf that included a handwritten fifteenth-century work on geometry, a young shark, three and a half spans in length, stuffed with cotton, was waiting patiently, open-mouthed.

In the drawing room, before starting on the first bottle in the drinks cabinet, I made a quick, guilty search of the desk drawers. In the lower left drawer lay a forgotten copy of
A King's Story
, the autobiography of King Edward VIII, who abdicated in order to wed an American widow. Inside the front cover I caught sight of the cassette of a work by Dvořák, my father's favourite composer. Beneath ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me', the fourth section of Op. 55 – the
Gypsy Melodies
– were pencilled three question marks. (Suppose I hadn't been curious about the bulge in the book?) The colour photograph, postcard size, which fell to the floor had been taken under an arbour on my ninth birthday. On either side of my father, Dalga and I were putting on a smile for my mother's camera. I was shaken by painful feelings and quickly shrugged off the effect of the alcohol that had failed to anaesthetize my body. I imagined the tired pine needles flying skywards in a disciplined formation, and travelled back in hope to twenty years ago. Stroking the wings of Eros, I whispered Bufalino's poetic aphorism, ‘What sad days those were, the happiest of my life.'

Until her breasts began to appear, Dalga and I used to wrestle, no holds barred, pushing and shoving and horsing around. Unfortunately she was four years older than me. When I was ten I realized we were physically different, and at eleven I fell hopelessly in love. If the ancient doorbell rang – two short rings, one long – for the swimming pool, I enjoyed an additional pleasure. When we were sunbathing together I would make an excuse to go to my room, where I would masturbate as I stared intently through field-glasses at every inch of her long plump legs and her strong round hips.

In our neighbourhood, her silent mother Sıla, whom my mother called ‘the Francophone with half a talent', was my mother's close friend and bridge partner. She had lost her naval-officer husband in an accident while he was on duty, and she and her daughter had taken refuge with her father-in-law. İfakat kept asking if the little Georgian beauty was taking an interest in the assistant head of the lyceé where she taught French, although he was married and younger than herself.

My father didn't like Dalga's churlish grandfather, who busied himself with the restoration of old books, and declared, ‘The megalomaniac dotard's sweat stinks of glue and his soul of cellophane.' Her one-armed aunt Hale survived on tranquillizers accompanied by non-filter cigarettes, read long novels and wept copiously. It was five minutes' walk to our mansion and they were content that we didn't often visit their haunted house.

‘Dalga, take care not to let go of Arda's hand.' Of all my mother's orders, that was my favourite. We would go together hand-in-hand to the film or play or concert she had chosen. As Dalga's long slender fingers touched mine my heart trembled and flew off in a series of fantasies. Even though we were inseparable for six years, I gradually got fed up with people who thought we were brother and sister.

She would pull my hair like an older sister and declare, ‘I can't imagine any girl who wouldn't shag you for those blue eyes,' and I'd scan her charming face in a panic. When I stammered out that she looked like Cleopatra with her snow-white skin, her deep dark eyes, upturned nose and smooth hair, she would say, ‘Sod off!'