Silent House (20 page)

“What are you thinking?” I said.

“Oh! Nothing!”

We danced a little more. I guess we both felt uncomfortable about the tension between us, because it was as if we were clinging to each other more to block it out than out of any enjoyment. But all these thoughts I had were just suspicions. A little later, the music that had turned out to be sappy more than sad ended, and a fast beat brought a new crowd fired up for fun onto the dance floor. Ceylan continued with them, but I sat down, and watching the fast dancers in the flashing colored lights, I thought: Look at them contorting themselves like stupid chickens! They’re only doing it because that’s what everybody does, not because it actually gives them any pleasure! When I dance, I know the stuff I’m doing is ridiculous, and it annoys me, so I tell myself that’s the price I have to pay, unfortunately, to make this girl like me, then I think: It’s okay, I’m joining in with these fools, but at the same time I’m not, so in the end I get the credit for being like them while at the same time I manage to be myself. There aren’t a lot of people who can pull that off! Eventually, I got up and joined their silly dance, so no one would say I was sitting here all by myself playing the silent withdrawn teenage loner.

When we finally got up to go, Vedat and I pretended to pick
up the check or at least pay our share, but as we expected, Fikret wouldn’t hear of it. Outside I saw that the others were tapping on the glass of Turgay’s BMW and laughing: Hülya and Turan were asleep in each other’s arms in the car! Zeynep let out a happy laugh full of admiration, as though she had special access to the love force.

“Well, they never even got out of the car!” she said.

I marveled that a boy and a girl my own age could wrap themselves in each other’s arms and fall asleep like real lovers.

As we got on the Ankara road, Turgay’s BMW stopped at the watermelon peddler on the corner. Turgay got out and said something to the guy under the gas lamp. The watermelon guy turned and looked at the three cars that were waiting. A little later Turgay called over to Fikret in his car:

“He says he doesn’t have any.”

“It’s our fault,” said Fikret. “We came with too many people.”

“He won’t sell us any?” said Gülnur. “What am I going to do now?”

“If you’re willing to drink alcohol, we can get it somewhere.”

“No way, I don’t want to drink. Let’s go to a pharmacy.”

“What do you expect to get there? What do the others want to do?” asked Fikret.

Turgay went to the other car. He came back a little later. “They say we should get drinks,” he said. He took a few steps, then stopped to say, “You know, they still haven’t filled up the embankments.”

“I gotcha,” said Fikret.

We took to the road. Before we got to Maltepe they picked out a car with German plates and suitcases piled on the roof so that its rear was practically dragging along the road.

“And it’s a Mercedes!” shouted Fikret. “Okay, guys!”

Fikret signaled to Turgay with his side lights, then slowed down and got behind him. We watched as Turgay’s BMW first made to pass the Mercedes, but then instead of speeding up as a passing car would, stayed to its left, forcing the other driver toward the edge of
the road until the Mercedes lurched side to side a little and, then, like it or not, had to let one of its wheels roll onto the shoulder, just to avoid hitting Turgay’s BMW. Everybody laughed, saying the Mercedes was going like a crippled dog. Then Turgay hit the gas and took off, and when the Mercedes had righted itself, he called out to Fikret:

“Okay, your turn!”

“Not yet. Let him catch his breath.”

There was only the driver in the Mercedes, some worker coming back from Germany, I figured. I didn’t want to think about it beyond that.

“Absolutely do not look at him, guys!” said Fikret to us.

First he passed the Mercedes the way Turgay had done, then little by little moved over to the right. As the Mercedes started to blow his horn like crazy, the girls giggled, though they were probably a little afraid. When Fikret moved a little more to the right, and the guy from Germany’s wheel lurched over the edge again, they burst out laughing.

“Did you see that guy’s face?”

A little later, after we had zoomed on after Turgay, Vedat’s car must have done the same maneuver, because we heard the Mercedes’s hopeless angry horn sounding. We all met up at the next gas station, and they turned off their lights and hid. When the guy from Germany slowly passed by, they stomped their feet, laughing uncontrollably.

“But really I feel sorry for the poor guy,” said Zeynep.

When they started reenacting their stunts and comparing notes to see who had riled up the guy from Germany most, I got fed up. I went to the station’s canteen and ordered a bottle of wine, which I got them to open.

“You from Istanbul?” asked the clerk.

The interior of the canteen was brightly lit, like a jewelry-shop window. I don’t know why but I felt like hanging around there a little, sitting and listening to the woman singing Turkish songs on
his little radio, just to forget everything. Conflicting thoughts about love, evil, affection, and success, were going through my head, all jumbled together.

“Yes, I’m from Istanbul.”

“Where are you all going like this?”

“We’re just driving around!”

The guy shook his tired, sleepy head, knowingly. “Haa! With the girls …”

I seemed to be getting ready to say some things that could have been important, and he seemed ready to listen seriously, but the others started honking the horns outside. I ran and got in. Hey, where were you, they said, we won’t be able to catch up because of you. I had thought the game was over, but it wasn’t, not yet. We went full speed, and after Pendik we saw it again: the Mercedes slowly climbing the hill like a truck running out of gas. This time Turgay took the lead, closing in from the left and as he pushed the Mercedes to the right; Vedat bore down on its other side, after which we got behind it, so close we almost touched its bumper. He was caught in a vise that he could only escape by going faster than us. Eventually he tried to speed up, but he just couldn’t break away. We kept up the chase, blasting our horns nonstop, our high beams right on the guy’s neck. Then we opened the windows and blasted the radios, waving our arms out the sides, beating on the doors, whooping and singing along with the music. Things only got noisier as the panicked Mercedes stuck between us started honking desperately, and we went past I have no idea how many houses and factories and various neighborhoods in this crazy formation. Finally, when the guy from Germany got the idea to slow down, so that trucks and buses were getting jammed up behind us, we had to give him a last cheer and let him go. As we passed I turned to look him in the face, which I could just make out in the haze of his bright headlights: he didn’t seem to see us anymore. And we’d made him forget about his life, his memories, and his future.

I didn’t want to think of him anymore either, and I drank some of my wine.

We shot past the Cennethisar exit without even slowing down. The others seemed intent on squeezing past an Anadol with a ridiculous old husband and wife inside, but a little later they changed their minds. As they passed by the houses of ill repute beyond the gas station Fikret hit the horn and flashed the lights, but no one asked him why. After we went a little farther, Ceylan said, “Look what I’m going to do!”

When I turned around I saw Ceylan’s bare legs sticking out the back window. Long and tanned, in the lights from the cars behind us, they looked poised and purposeful, like professional legs under the stage lights, sliding against each other as if probing for something in the air, as her feet, bare and pure white, twitched alertly against the wind. Gülnur pulled Ceylan by the shoulders and dragged her inside.

“You’re drunk!”

“I’m not the least bit drunk,” said Ceylan. She let out a happy laugh. “How much did I even drink! I’m just having so much fun!”

Then we were all quiet. We continued on that way for a long time, as though in a hurry to get from Istanbul to Ankara to carry out some important mission, on and on through the rundown holiday towns, past factories and olive and cherry groves, without saying a word and oblivious to the music still playing and for no reason blasting the horns as we passed trucks and buses, not even paying attention to them. I thought about Ceylan and how I could love her for the rest of my life just on account of what she had just done.

After we passed Hereke we stopped in a gas station, where we got some bad wine and sandwiches from the buffet. Eating on our feet, we mingled among the tired and timid passengers who had gotten off a bus. I saw Ceylan go over to the side of the road biting into her sandwich while her eyes followed the flow of vehicles, the way someone picnicking on a riverbank might absently watch the currents, and as I observed her I thought of my own future.

A little later I saw Fikret walk slowly over to Ceylan in the darkness. He offered her a cigarette and lit it. They started to talk: they weren’t very far, but the noise of the traffic made it hard to hear what they were saying, and I was really curious. A little later this strange curiosity turned into a strange fear. I realized right away that I had to go over to them to beat the fear: but in the darkness, just like in dreams, I had this awful feeling of inferiority and shyness. But this loser feeling, like everything else, didn’t last for long. A little later we got back into the cars and went off into the night without thinking about anything.

16

Grandmother Listens to the Night

W
hen all that horrible hullabaloo lets up, when all that noise coming from the beach, the motorboats, the wailing kids, the drunken cursing, the songs, radios, and televisions, quiet down, and the last car goes screaming past, I slowly get up from my bed and stand just behind my shutters listening to the outdoors: nobody’s there, they’re all exhausted and have gone to sleep. Only the wind, occasionally the lapping waters of the sea, a rustling in the trees; sometimes there’s a cricket nearby, a confused crow, or maybe a dog barking for no reason. So I slowly push the shutters open and listen to them, I listen to the silence for a long time. Then I think about how I’ve lived for ninety years, and I am horrified. A breeze coming up from the bushes where my shadow falls seems to be chilling my legs, and I take fright; should I go back and wrap myself in the warm darkness of my quilt? But I stay there a bit longer to feel the promise of the silence; I wait and wait, as though something is going to happen, as though someone has promised to come, as though the world could show me something new, but at last I close the shutters and go back to sit on the edge of my bed and listen to the clock tick past one
twenty in the morning, and I think: Selâhattin was wrong about this, too: there’s never anything new, nothing at all!

Every day is a new world, Fatma, he would say each morning. I wake before the sun comes up and I think how the sun will rise in a little while and everything will be brand-new and I myself will be renewed seeing new things I’ve never seen before, reading and learning until I look in a different way at all that I’d known, and I get so excited, Fatma, that I just want to leap out of bed and run to the garden to see how the sun will appear, how all the plants and insects will quiver and change at its appearance, then I want to run straight upstairs and write down everything I’ve seen, Fatma, why don’t you feel like that, why don’t you say something, what are you thinking? Look, look, Fatma, do you see the caterpillar, see what he does, one day he’ll be a butterfly and take flight! Oh, a person should write down nothing but what he has seen and experienced, and then maybe I, too, could become a true man of science, like the Europeans, like Darwin, what an incredible fellow, but alas in the languor of the East a person can accomplish nothing. But why not? After all, I have eyes to observe and hands to perform experiments and, thank God, a mind that works better than anyone else’s in this country, yes, Fatma, have you seen how the peaches bloom, if you ask me why they give off such a lovely scent, well, I have to wonder what is smell, what makes us sense it, Fatma, have you seen how the fig tree grows uncontrollably, I wonder how the ants signal one another, Fatma, have you ever noticed how the sea rises before the south wind blows and lowers again before the north wind comes, one must notice everything, observe it all, because only that way can science advance, only that way can we develop our minds; otherwise, we are no better than all those people who waste their hours sitting in the corners of cafés, who say
oh!
when the sky begins to thunder, then run mad with delight, like the devil fleeing two steps at a time, to get to their garden and stretch out on their backs and stare at the darkening clouds until they find themselves soaked to the bone.… I
guessed that he was going to write about the clouds and that he was merely looking for his excuse to do so, because he used to say: When people realize that everything has its own reason for being, then they won’t have room left in their heads for God, because the reason for flowers blooming and the chickens laying eggs and the sky thundering and rain falling isn’t a divine command as they think, but what I describe in my encyclopedia. Then they’ll realize that things are made by other things and absolutely nothing exists by the hand of God. They will see that even if he’s there, that God, our science has taken out of his hands everything that he could possibly do, forcing him to content himself as a spectator. Tell me, Fatma, would you consider any being capable only of watching what goes on in this world to be a God? Yes, you are silent, and by your silence you attest that you, too, understand that there is no God anymore. One day, when they read my work, and they, too, realize this truth, what do you suppose will happen, are you listening to me?