Silent House Read online

  I thought about the university corridors, the city traffic, white short-sleeved shirts, the hot, humid summer, lunches in the heavy air … Back home, I’d find water dripping from taps, though I’d taken care to shut them tight, the rooms would smell of dust and books, and in the metal fridge, a pale, petrified stick of margarine with a taste of plastic would still be waiting. The empty room, it seemed, would still be empty! I had the urge to drink, to sleep. Then I thought: This sort of thing happens to the best of us! I got up and crept in quietly to see Nilgün sleeping. Recep came in.

  “Take her to the hospital, Faruk Bey!” he said.

  “Let’s not wake her up!” I said.

  “Not wake her up?” He shrugged his shoulders and went down to the kitchen. I went out again and sat down by the chicken coop where the chickens had come out to take in the sun. Finally, Metin got up, still sleepy, but his eyes wide with curiosity. Nilgün told him what happened, and he told her how they took twelve thousand liras from him last night. When I asked what he was doing out there all by himself at that hour, he fell silent.

  “Say, you didn’t happen to see my notebook in the car, did you? I can’t find it anywhere,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t see it!”

  He was curious about how we’d managed to get the car into the repair shop. I said that it started right up after Recep and I pushed it for a bit, but he seemed not to believe it, and so he ran off and asked Recep. When Recep said the same thing, Metin cursed his luck. He asked whether anybody had gone to the police. But I, gesturing to the effect that there was a bit much going on for us to file a police report, told him nobody had gone and went inside to repeat the warning to Nilgün about hemorrhaging and the possibility of death, though without using that word, wishing only to do my duty and impress upon her a sense of urgency without causing panic.

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital now,” she said. “Maybe after dinner.”

  Since Grandmother hadn’t come down, I was able to relax and drink during the meal and generally ignore Recep’s efforts to make us feel irresponsible. By the end of the meal, I even had an irksome thought: If Nilgün hadn’t called Hasan a fascist maniac maybe none of this would have happened. Then as I was sitting there, my mind drifted to something I’d once read about in the paper: somewhere on the Bosphorus, probably Tarabya, one of those municipal buses, full of passengers, had fallen into the sea at midnight. I felt, at that moment, as if I were in that bus, as if we had all fallen to the bottom of the sea, and because the lights inside the bus still worked, everybody was looking at the windows in panic, as the shadow of death, which seemed oddly alluring somehow, poured in through them.

  After dinner, I asked Nilgün about the hospital again, but she said that she wouldn’t go. So I went up to my room, lay down on my bed, and opened Evliya Çelebi’s travels. I must have fallen asleep reading.

  When I woke up a full three hours later, it felt as if an invisible elephant was kneeling on me, pinning down my arms and legs. It seemed that if I just closed my eyes I would go right back to sleep, but I resisted the beautiful dreamy feeling and got up. I stood stupidly in the middle of the room for a while: What is the thing we call time? I went back downstairs.

  Nilgün had woken up, too. “I always wanted to be sick this way,” she said. “So I could lie in bed and read whatever I want without any guilt.”

  She was reading Fathers and Sons for the second time. The intensity of a bookworm who wants to shut out all of life’s little distractions. She seemed content, and I didn’t have the heart to invoke the specter of death again.

  I went upstairs and wandered the rooms vacantly, looking for my notebook. I kept trying to remember whether I had managed to jot down in it some ideas about the plague that had occurred to me. I went down to the garden and out to the street. There wasn’t a trace of yesterday’s activity on the main avenue or on the beach. The sand was wet, the sun was not warm, and the Marmara was still, dirty, and colorless. Folded up, the pale umbrellas had a melancholy look. I walked to the coffeehouse at the head of the breakwater, among the parked cars that would keep emitting all the heat they’d absorbed from the sun until the very end of the day. I saw an old friend from the neighborhood: he was all grown up and married; he even had his wife and kids with him. We chatted a bit.

  When they ran into Recep on Monday night, the old friend Sitri had told his wife that I was one of the oldest fixtures around here. He asked about Selma, but I didn’t tell him that we had split up. Then he reminisced about our youthful escapades: how we went out in rowboats and drank until dawn, things like that. He asked me who else was around from the old gang, what were they up to, and filled me in on what he knew. He had seen Sevket and Orhan’s mother, who said they would be coming next week. Sevket had gotten married; Orhan’s supposedly writing a novel. He asked if I had any kids, moved on to how things were at the university, and then got to the political violence: apparently, they had attacked a girl here this morning, though there didn’t seem to be a suspect. In broad daylight, with everybody standing around. Finally saying we should get together in Istanbul, he pulled out a business card from his pocket and held it out to me. As I read it, he deflated the claim printed on the card: Well, not really a factory, he said, it’s more of a workshop (they made plastic basins, buckets, baskets).

  I stopped at the shop on the way home and picked up a bottle of raki. When I walked in, I said “Hospital?” to Nilgün before I sat down to drink. Nilgün replied with a stubborn, “Nope.” Recep heard her, too, but still looked accusingly at me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel I could ask him to make me a snack, which I went and made for myself in the kitchen. Then I sat down and tried to clear my head so that the words and images I’d been collecting could flow freely through my mind and possibly take shape so I could do some writing. When it got dark, and Recep brought Grandmother downstairs, I hid my bottle. Metin did not hesitate to put it back on the table and have a few himself. Grandmother was muttering her complaints softly, like prayers. Finally, Recep brought her back upstairs.

  “Let’s go back to Istanbul now, right away!” Metin said.

  “But weren’t you supposed to stay until the middle of the summer? What about all your friends?” said Nilgün.

  “I just can’t take it here anymore,” said Metin. “You stay if you want, Faruk. Just give me the car keys, and let me take Nilgün.”

  “You don’t have a license,” said Nilgün.

  “Don’t you understand? You’ve got to go,” said Metin. “What if something happens? Faruk’s not about to do anything. I can certainly drive.”

  “You’re as drunk as he is,” said Nilgün. “Let’s at least stay the night.”

  Having put Grandmother to bed, Recep came down and was clearing the table.

  “Well, if that’s the way you feel, I’m not just going to waste the evening,” Metin said. He went upstairs, and a little later he came down with his hair combed and wearing fresh clothes, and he left without a word to anyone. We could still smell his aftershave when he got to the garden gate.

  “What’s with him?” said Nilgün.

  I recited a slightly modified verse from Fuzuli in reply:

  He’s in love with a new rose, a truly lovely sight

  And every drop of red he has makes him want to fight

  There was a magical silence in the garden, deeper and darker than the silence after the rain. I got to my feet.

  “Yes, go for a little walk, Faruk, it’ll do you good,” said Nilgün.

  I hadn’t been thinking of that, but I went for a walk.

  As I went out the garden gate, I was thinking about my wife and also about how the Ottoman poets sought out the experience of pain. I wondered whether the classical poets just recited their poems spontaneously or spent hours and hours composing and correcting them. The streets were deserted in the Sunday-evening way, the coffeehouses and clubs were half empty, too; some of the colored lights hung in the trees had blown out, probably owing to the power
ful storm yesterday. The muddy tracks of bicycles that had gone in and out of puddles on the street corners left meaningless arcs on the sidewalk. I swayed along as far as the hotel, entering it through the revolving door, led like a dog who smells his way to the kitchen. Above the waiters’ padding on the silent carpets, I made out the source of the music and followed it downstairs. I opened a door: drunken tourists, men and women, at tables, with bottles in front of them, wearing fezzes and yelling at one another. It was one of those “Anatolian nights” prepared for foreign travelers on their last night in Turkey. A pathetic orchestra was churning out metallic-sounding tunes at high volume. The belly dancing had not yet begun. I took a table behind the crowd and ordered raki.

  Later I heard the clanging of the cymbals, I saw the tanned flesh of the belly dancer undulating at the edge of the spotlight making its way around the semidarkness, and the shimmering jewelry caught my eye: light seemed to beam out from her bottom and the tips of her breasts. I got excited.

  I was on my feet. The waiter brought a second glass. The dancer was playing at being the objectified Oriental woman. As the spotlight traveled around between the tables, I looked at the faces of the German women tourists; they weren’t astonished, though perhaps they wanted to be, smiling as what they had come for gradually materialized, and as they looked at the dancer, I could sense their satisfaction at thinking how they themselves weren’t “like that,” the comforting thought of imagining themselves equal to their men; I felt that they saw all of us as being “like that,” to be looked down on for their own reassurance, a feeling such as housewives enjoy when they order the servants around!

  I wanted to break up this unwholesome spectacle, but I knew I wasn’t going to do a thing: I was enjoying the feeling of defeat and mental confusion.

  The music grew harsher as a drum whose amplifier was hidden in some corner drowned out the other musicians; the dancer turned her back to the tables and shook her ass with the nervous energy of an overheated hand anxiously fanning itself. I realized that there was a kind of challenge meant by this when she brandished her breasts proudly under our noses, a feeling confirmed when the spotlight revealed an unexpected expression of triumph and confidence on her face. I was myself reassured: You see, it’s not so easy to cow us: we can still do some things; we’re still on our feet.

  At that moment, the dancer was all defiance, making those looks from the tourist women taking uneasy sips from their drinks every now and then, their anthropological scrutiny, seem completely ridiculous. Meanwhile, most of the male tourists in their fezzes had let themselves go; they were no longer looking at a woman “like that”; they were relaxed, disarmed of their superiority, humbled as they would be in the presence of a “respectable” woman.

  I felt a strange contentment. The body of the dancer, past her prime but full of action, got me all excited. It was as though we were all waking up from sleep. As I beheld the tanned flesh around her sweaty navel, I felt that I could do just about anything, and I murmured: Let me go right back home, take Nilgün to the hospital, and then give myself over to history without so much fuss about it. There was no reason I couldn’t if I would only believe that stories had their truth, flesh-and-blood experiences that actually happened.

  The dancer, as though wanting to prolong the belittling she had begun, made her way through the crowd, and taking by the hand certain ones who’d caught her eye, drew them out onto the dance floor. My God! She was forcing them to belly dance! The German men at first were jiggling slowly back and forth, their arms making incompetent little gestures, shooting flustered looks to their friends, but somehow never losing the conviction that they had the right to enjoy themselves.

  Eventually, the dancer did what I most dreaded. She masterfully selected the stupidest and seemingly most pliant German and began to strip him. As the fat German removed his shirt, smiling at his friends, clumsily playing along with his version of a belly dance, I lowered my head, unable to take it anymore. At that moment, I wished my whole consciousness could be erased. I wanted to escape from my own awareness, to wander freely in a world outside my mind, but understanding now that I would always be two people, I realized that I’d never be able to let go.

  28

  Grandmother Receives Visitors in the Night

  It’s well after midnight, but I can still hear them moving about: what could they be doing down there, why don’t they go to sleep and leave me the silent night? I get out of bed, walk over to the window, and look down: Recep’s light is still on, lighting up the garden: what are you doing there, dwarf? It’s frightening! He’s so sneaky, that one: every once in a while I catch him giving me a look, and I realize he notices everything about me, watching the smallest gesture, how I move my hands and my arms, I know he’s plotting something in that big head of his. It’s as if they now want to poison my nights too, pollute even my thoughts—it’s frightening just to think of it! I remember one night when Selâhattin had come to my room, so I couldn’t bury myself in my own thoughts, in the innocence of my childhood, and purify myself of the daily filth; it terrifies me still to think of it, I shiver as if feeling a chill: he told me that he had discovered death. Thinking about it again now, I become even more afraid and pull back from the darkness of the window; reeling in my shadow that fell in the garden, I quickly go back to my bed, get under my quilt, and remember:

  It was four months before he died: a north wind blowing outside whistled through the cracks in the window. I had gone to my room, stretched out in bed, but between the endless creaking of Selâhattin’s footsteps back and forth in his room and the storm slapping the shutter open and closed, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Then I heard footsteps approaching, and I was scared! When the door suddenly opened, my heart came into my mouth, as I realized that he had, for the first time in years, come to my room! He stood there for a while, planted on the threshold: “I can’t sleep, Fatma!” As though he weren’t drunk, as though I hadn’t seen how much he had at dinner! But I didn’t say anything. He came in swaying, his eyes blazing like fire. “I can’t sleep, Fatma, because I’ve made a terrible discovery. Tonight you’ll listen to me. I won’t give you permission to take your knitting and go into the other room. I’ve discovered something so horrifying I have to tell someone!” The dwarf is downstairs, Selâhattin, I thought, and he loves to listen to you, but I didn’t say anything, because his face looked very strange, and he suddenly whispered: “I’ve discovered death, Fatma, nobody here is aware of it, I’m the first to find it in the East! Just a short while ago, tonight.” He paused for a minute, as though truly frightened of his discovery, but he wasn’t slurring his words. “Listen, Fatma! After so many months’ delay, I finally finished with the letter O, and naturally having reached the letter O, I eventually had to write the article about olüm, death, as you know.” I knew only because he’d spoken of nothing else at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “But I just couldn’t write it, I’d been pacing up and down in my room for days and asking myself, Why aren’t you writing? Because I was simply going to take it like the other articles from existing articles in other languages, thinking, of course, I had nothing to add to what they thought and wrote, but still I was inexplicably unable to begin writing this article …” He laughed for a bit. “Maybe I was paralyzed by the thought of my own death approaching and how I’m nearly seventy and still I haven’t been able to finish my encyclopedia—is that what you’re thinking?” I didn’t say anything. “No, Fatma, it’s not like that, I haven’t finished all the things I mean to do, but I am still young enough! What’s more, I feel myself completely revitalized by this discovery: there are so many things to be done in its wake that it wouldn’t be enough time even if I lived another hundred years!” He suddenly shouted: “Everything, every event, every life, has taken on a whole new meaning! After a whole week pacing up and down in my room without writing a single word, two hours ago, for the first time in the East, a pair of eyes opened to the fear of Nothingness, Fatma. I know you don’t understand but liste
n and you will.” I listened to him, not because I wanted to understand but because I couldn’t do anything else, and he had started walking up and down, as if he were in his own room. “For a week I’ve been pacing the floor of my room thinking about death and wondering why they give it so much space in their encyclopedias and books, even ignoring its prevalence in their works of art. In the West there are thousands of books simply about death. I was thinking, Why do they elevate such a simple subject, which I intended to deal with quite briefly in my encyclopedia. I expected to write something like this: ‘Death is the failure of an organism!’ Then, after a short medical explanation, I was going to discredit, one by one, all the notions about death in legends and sacred books, merrily showing once again how all these scriptures were cribbed from one another, and then describe the comical assortment of funeral ceremonies and traditions that had developed among the world’s different peoples. It might seem I wanted to keep things brief because of my anxiousness to finish the encyclopedia once and for all, but that’s not the real reason: I didn’t understand what death was until two hours ago, because, like a typical Easterner, I didn’t place any importance on it, Fatma. Two hours ago I noticed the thing that I had overlooked for so many years while looking at the photos of dead people in the newspaper. It’s an awful thing! Listen! I was reading that the Germans had proceeded to attack Kharkiv this time, but that isn’t important! Two hours ago, as I looked absently at the dead in the newspaper, with the same fearlessness I had acquired looking at cadavers at the medical faculty forty years ago, a sudden flash came into my head, a pure terror, like a sledgehammer coming down on my skull, and I thought: Nothingness! There is something called Nothingness, and these poor war dead now have fallen into its dark well. It’s a terrible feeling, Fatma: since there is no such thing as God and heaven and hell, there’s only one thing after death, only what we call Nothingness. Now, I don’t expect that you’ll understand right away. Nobody in the East is aware of this. And that’s why we’ve been oppressed for hundreds, thousands of years, but let me not get ahead of myself, I’ll explain it to you very slowly, just so I don’t have to bear the burden of this discovery all by myself tonight!” He was making nervous gestures with his arms and hands the way he had done when he was young. “Because in one instant I understood why: why we are the way we are and why they are the way they are. I understood why the East is the East and why the West is the West, I swear I understand, Fatma, please, I’m begging you, please listen carefully to me now, and you’ll understand, too.” He went on speaking to me as though he didn’t realize that I hadn’t listened to him for forty years. He talked as he did in the early days, with conviction and care, in the sweet, affectionate voice of a foolish old teacher trying to reason with a small child, but he only managed to sound agitated and sinful: “Now listen carefully, Fatma! Don’t get annoyed, okay? We say there is no God, how many times have I said this, because his existence cannot be proven by experiment; so, therefore, all religions predicated on the existence of God are no more than empty poetic babbling. It follows that the heaven and hell they babble about also don’t exist. You follow me, don’t you? If there’s no life after death, the lives of those who die disappear altogether. There remains of them absolutely nothing. Now, let’s look at this situation from the dead person’s point of view: where is the person who died, the person who was alive before death? I’m not talking about the body: where at this point is his awareness, feeling, his mind? Nowhere. It doesn’t exist. You see, Fatma, it’s where there isn’t anything, buried in what I call Nothingness; it neither sees nor is seen anymore. What a strange, horrifying thought! When I try to summon it my hair stands on end! You try it, too, Fatma, think of something with absolutely nothing inside, no sound, no color, no smell, no touch, nothing, something that had no individuality and no place of its own in the void, think of that, Fatma; you can’t possibly envision something that occupies no space in the air, remains invisible, and can’t be heard, can you? This is the thing that they call death. Are you afraid now, Fatma? While the corpses of our dead are rotting in the nauseating and icy silence of the earth, while the bodies of the war dead, with holes the size of my fist in them, their shattered skulls and brains splattered on the earth, their oozing eyes and their ripped bloody mouths decaying among the concrete ruins, what about their consciousness? Ah, that is buried in the bottomless depths of Nothingness; as they topple down an unfathomable abyss head over heels toward eternity, they are like blind men unaware of what is happening to them. And so I don’t want to die, when death comes to mind I want to fight, dear God, what an unnerving thing, to know you will just be lost in the darkness, never, ever to emerge and never to feel anything: we’ll all sink into Nothingness, Fatma. Aren’t you afraid, don’t you want to resist? I won’t leave you tonight until you’ve awakened that rebellious fear of death inside yourself! Listen: There is no heaven, there is no hell. No God, nobody watching and supporting or punishing and forgiving you; after death, you’ll descend into this lonely nothingness like a stone going to the bottom of a dark sea. As your corpse decays in the cold ground, your skull and your mouth will fill with earth just like a flowerpot, your flesh will break up into pieces and fall away like dried manure, your skeleton will become dust, like pieces of coal; you’ll enter this disgusting swamp that will make you decay down to the last strand of hair, with no right even to hope of coming back again, until you’ve completely disappeared, all alone in the pitiless icy mud of Nothingness, Fatma, do you understand?”