from Dawn (Şafak) by Sevgi Soysal

Raid

The sun in Adana never cools. Nights in autumn are balmy, almost suffocating. A sense of impatience stretches out as far as the plains, letting you know that the rain is approaching. The shining sun and the seasonal rains are for now the only thing readily shared by the city center of Adana, with its villas, heavenly gardens, and its cosy yet luxurious apartments, and by Far-side, the slums on the other side of town. The neighborhoods at the edge of the city have no other signs of plentifulness; no orange or palm trees, none of those beautiful southern flowers, or thick-leafed decorative plants. Just the suffocating air, which spreads out thick over the narrow, crooked streets of the Istiklal neighborhood and right into the houses. The rain is close.

Night began in the neighborhood whose only abundance is to be found amongst its busy rooms: in the spoons reaching out in unison into the pot on the floor, in the loaves of bread broken off in large chunks, in the large bites of food flavored with plenty of  red radishes, green peppers, parsley and onion, and in the makeshift beds lined out on the floor, in the guard whistles and fights that start in the coffeehouses and end up in the streets. The neighborhood is used to all the fighting, the guard whistles, the straight razors cutting up fallen women’s faces, to nights of passion that begin with a round of raki in the lover’s home and end with a man’s beating, nights in which the busiest stop is the police station. The locals are even used to the regularly timed raids of  police looking for drug stashes and contraband of things like cigarettes.

   

No one is surprised by the flashing blue lamp on the police car as it makes its way forward, scanning its surroundings. The Arab workers, who are tired of seeing the inside of a police station, just close their doors. The car moves forward, house by house. Stealthily, trying to make out a certain address among the identical houses, trying to draw as little attention to itself as is possible in a neighborhood like this.      

The rickety door to the house suddenly flew open due to an aggressive kick from the outside. Oya, who was perched on the edge of the wooden bedstead, which looked like a divan with its calico pillows and quilt, finally had an explanation for why she had felt so uneasy all night. It was as though there was no one else there, not Hüseyin, nor Mustafa, nor the owner of the house Ali from Maraş, nor any of the others, not even Gülşah, who had just placed the large, round metal tray of food before the  guests. As though it was just Oya sitting there, a last minute guest. With the sudden opening of the door, all the doors she hadn’t managed to open for herself all night suddenly closed.  Everything around her, the wooden door which opened with a kick, the civil police who flooded inside, the house under siege, the people in that house, all began to spin away from her in circles around the center which she was used to thinking of as “I”.

As had often happened in the last few years, reality’s ugly face startled Oya. In truth reality’s face was neither ugly nor beautiful, she knew you couldn’t describe truth like this. But for someone who was more used to beauty, that is to say for a person who had been taught to have a  an odd  understanding of beauty, even though ugliness and beauty were a whole, she was unable to avoid  closing one of her eyes and trying to separate out beauty. Or maybe it was the basic cowardice in her personality, which was unreservedly daring for those things which she found beautiful and chic, and brave because she found bravery to be beautiful, but which displayed absolutely no bravery in the face of ugliness, or to be ugly when the occasion required it, or to confront the face of reality that could be ugly -- this cowardice in her personality was what startled her. Even after all the experiences she’d had, this is how Oya would explain the feeling of panic in the unexpected moment when the door suddenly opened.

This wasn’t exactly the right time to split hairs about these kinds of things. The house was being raided, just like a lot of other houses in Adana in those days. Oya should have realized, whether she wanted to or not, that she was just one of many people in these houses being raided who felt fear, shock, anger or any one of a number of similar feelings. This force was being brought down on others as well, on others she didn’t even know well. Even if she didn’t properly know the owner of the house, or Hüseyin, or Mustafa, or Ekrem, or Zekeriya, or Gülşah and Ziynet, in that instant they were all experiencing the raid together. Having to resemble each other, to share similar circumstances.

 

The host, Ali from Maraş, was slow to notice that the house was being raided. If he had been quicker, he would have broken off in the middle of the question he posed to his nephew Mustafa:  “Well, what will come of this, my boy, huh?”. But, he didn’t and finished his question as if he didn’t see the three civil police officers pacing in the room, glaring at the people in it. Fortunately Ali came to when Hüseyin, out of shock, foolishly attempted to empty his glass of raki back into the bottle. As soon as Ali really saw the police, he stood up.

Hüseyin and Mustafa, Ali’s nephews. They were two children who’d escaped the fate  of their family line, all workers and day laborers who left Maraş and came to Adana hoping to get their share of some of the abundance to be found in the Çukorova valley. That’s how Hüseyin, now a lawyer, spoke about himself and the teacher Mustafa. Actually, he secretly distinguished Mustafa and himself from the others.  If Mustafa hadn’t suddenly landed in  Adana, it probably wouldn’t have crossed Hüseyin’s  mind to go to his uncle’s house. Because Ali, who had worked for years in the Yuregir factory and also for a long time in the Aegean Industrial Textile factory,  had some unresolved  related to his retirement pension.. Ali was waiting for his nephew to take care of these issues.  Hüseyin was sick of not having a magic wand for all of his relatives who were always asking him questions and waiting for him to find solutions to all of their problems. And he was upset that he hadn’t been able to solve  Ali’s problem. Because he was a native of Maraş before everything else, before being someone who was educated, before being a lawyer… and that’s why he still felt obliged to take  care of his uncle’s problem. But the task was by no means easy, for Hüseyin had just finished his probationary period and he hadn’t yet gotten the  office he’d opened with two of his friends in good running order. The three partners, who were on the lookout for a few cases that would bring in cash, somehow weren’t able to free themselves of those acquaintances and relatives who came  to their office to drink tea and coffee. It was Hüseyin’s relatives who came more than anyone else’s. They all wanted to have a word with a lawyer. This meant  volunteer work, which was a far cry from the kind of profitable work Hüseyin and his partners had dreamed of. But all these people from Maraş, for whom the bounty of Çukurova’s wide-open plains seemed only to lie in increasing their  numbers,  expected more from these lawyers than just finding clever ways to get the doors of the prisons in which they sometimes fell to open. Hüseyin also had to see to all the other kinds of drudgery, like having to record new births and marriages, and write  various petitions  and letters they requested.. They never came alone. They always brought one of their  friends or neighbors with them, which always gave them the chance to brag about having a relative who was a lawyer. None of this was new or surprising for Hüseyin. He understood that this was partly the reason, if not the entire reason, why he had been sent to school. He had no intention of breaking this link which had kept him so tightly bound to his relatives since his childhood. There were as many benefits as there were responsibilities related to having this kind of familial network. He’d worked up the courage to practice law  in Adana due to this network: his relatives from Maraş, who worked in the various cotton gin factories on the outskirts of town knew lots of people, and the cases they would give to Hüseyin had to do with their problematic relationships with the government,  their bosses, their insurance policies, the  unions, and with other relationships that brought trouble. They would all bring their cases to their relative Hüseyin. But, these were dreams for the future. Right  now Hüseyin and his three partners still couldn’t even cover the office rent. Even the cost of  the tea and coffee his relatives drank when they came into the office, muddying the rug thathadn’t even been paid off yet with their muddy galoshes, began to bother him. With all this going on, he hadn’t had the time to tackle the problem  with Ali’s pension. As much as Hüseyin, who clung tightly to his connection to his relatives, was sometimes annoyed by them, he felt sheepish for having  failed to help out his uncle, the very person who who helped him out so many times. That night as he’d come to dinner at Ali’s house, he’d felt anxious thinking about how he would be able to avoid the issue. But the door was busted  open before Ali having the chance to ask Hüseyin about what was bothering him.

Uncle Ali was a sharp man. He had taught himself how to read. He was sure to read the daily newspaper and listen to the news every single day. He wasn’t a stranger to the problems between the leftists and the right-wingers either. He was intending to mention the subject to Mustafa, whom he trusted more, when the door flung open. Yet, when Hüseyin  saw Ali begin to bite his lips, which he was in the habit of doing every time he was about to ask something serious, he assumed he was going to breach the subject of  his pension. Did he empty his glass of raki back into the bottle out of shock at the house being raided, or because he was so flustered thinking that Ali was going to  to ask about his pension? It wasn’t clear.

    Oya noticed that nothing happened to the raki in the bottle. For some reason, she noticed this detail even though there was so much happening at once. Hüseyin drank his raki straight, without adding any water to it, or putting in any ice. He claimed  that all the best raki makers came from the Southwest. “Should raki be drunk with water? How long do you think refrigerators have existed around here? You think our grandfathers popped ice into their drinks? They didn’t like to water down their words, or their drinks.” That’s what Hüseyin always said. But that evening his stomach was hurting. He had  an ulcer on his tongue, dried out like a sick animal. But he’d ignored this, and drunk his raki without water. When the door was kicked in, he quickly emptied his raki back into the bottle.  That’s why it didn’t cloud up the raki still in the bottle.

At that same instant, Mustafa wanted to grab the bottle of raki from Hüseyin’s hand, and to hurl it straight at the heads of the ugly-faced policemen barging into the room. It seemed to him like  Hüseyin was emptying the raki back into the bottle just so that he  couldn’t throw it at those men’s heads. Our Uncle Ali’s house is being raided, its just like you to mes around pouring out your glass like that. I’ve barely had time to get started and now there’s trouble in the air?  Don’t I have a right to be mad?  

Mustafa was a math teacher. He was just in his first year of teaching in Urfa when he was arrested under the auspices of the martial law in Diyarbakir and sent to Istanbul. His detention in Selimiye lasted exactly fourteen  months. Then, just two days ago, , the jail term he’d expected to to last for years suddenly came to an end and he was set free by the prosecutor’s office. It was only then that he learned he was going to be released and tried under article 296 of the Turkish penal code.  Yet, during  the year or so in which he’d beendetained, he’d imagined that he could be charged with any crime they desired, even  with founding a secret organization which was in violation of the constitution; and in the end it was article 296 that they settled on. Mustafa didn’t know whether to be saddened or to be pleased by this. His release occurred, just as his arrest had, when he least expected it; and he’d been surprised by both.  On top of this, when he was set free he didn’t have any money to travel home, nor were those close to him informed . But thanks to his friends in jail, who - as always - perceived his predicament and collected money without him having to ask for it, he was saved from having to spend his first day in Istanbul as a beggar. As soon as he got out, he bought a bus ticket for Adana, and spent the time waiting for the bus pacing around the streets of Istanbul. As he walked, he realized after a while that he was humming the songs that his friends had sung in jail. And he noticed that he was pacing like he used to in those days when he had paced back and forth and hummed marches to himself in order to avoid thinking, to add depth to his pointless circling, to not get stumped by the days which passed identically, by the endless repetition, to jealously guard the rich inner self that was inside a despised and spurned shell.  Singing aloud wasn’t permitted. This humming had been a defense, actually.  It was a form of armor put on to prevent one’s personality from fraying, just like that of a body washed and powdered every day.  But now? Now there were no walls to contain his pacing.   He could open up, spread out, and go as far  as he pleased. But how? What was it he had tried to protect, to not let be crushed, to keep on its feet during those fourteen months? What made him feel so confused when they told him “Alright, you’re free”?

Yes, he had protected himself for fourteen months in order be able to begin again, or so he thought. He was out in the open now. First I have keep cool, he thought to himself. All of his friends had already scattered. He needed to pull himself together, pull himself together and then what? He tried to think, then again numbed his mind by walking and  and humming songs to himself. “They turn iron into dust, they sprinkle ash onto blind eyes blind eyes…they corrupt love, the blood flows…”  In the middle of the song, he suddenly thought of his wife. He was astonished that he hadn’t thought of her once since getting out. When he was inside he had thought about her so often. What if Güler already knows that I am free? Yes, what if she knows? The question felt awful as it resonated inside him. He didn’t even know at that moment whether or not his wife was in Urfa. They hadn’t been able to write each other for a month.  After there had been a revolt in the prison, Mustafa’s ward had been prohibited from exchanging mailor receiving visitors as punishment. They hadn’t been able to send or receive letters or see loved ones. Was this the right time to be set free?  But now that he had been set free? He had to be ready to confront anything that would come his way in the outside world, even more ready, more ready.

He’d sat in Sebil cafe and had a coffee, and watched the passing ferries for a while. He was going to go straight to Adana and stay one, and if necessary two nights with relatives. Once he had learned about Güler’s situation he would continue on to Urfa. What was Güler’s situation? He was embarrassed by the anxiety he felt inside and by his inability to shake his pessimism.   The sparkling image of Güler that he’d managed to hold onto even in the days when he was being tortured didn’t  keep him from feeling doubts now. In Güler’s last letter, she had written that she was thinking of leaving Urfa together with her daughter, who’d been born while  Mustafa was still on the inside. Güler didn’t get along very well with Mustafa’s relatives from Maraş. That hadn’t been too important when Mustafa was on the outside, or even during fights or idle days. They’d been able to  overcome those kinds of personal differences back then.

He’d met Güler in Istanbul studying in the College of Natural Sciences. She was also in the movement.  Or at least she wasn’t outside of it --that’s how it seemed. She acted like she was one of the guys, and in turn the guys respected and trusted her, thought of her as a friendly girl. The only things he remembered from those days now were her big black eyes and her bony hands. What else? She came from a poor family, but not as poor as Mustafa’s. Her mother was a basic bank teller. She didn’t have a father, he had died when she was young. Most of Mustafa’s relatives were working class, mostly day-laborers and such, but at least there were plenty of them. They helped each other out a lot, and in the end they were able to put Hüseyin and Mustafa through school. Because of this, she considered herself to have grown up more alone, and with less security than Mustafa, even though her mother was technically a civil servant. Güler’s mother had gone through all kinds of difficulties to put her through school up to that point. Now she wanted to see that it had been worth it all.

Güler wasn’t able to graduate from her university. She married Mustafa. With a degree in higher mathematics, Mustafa was barely able to find a high school teaching job in Urfa. Güler’s mom didn’t want to live with her daughter and him in Urfa. Güler wasn’t happy with being in Urfa either. She had met some of Mustafa’s seemingly endless line of relatives while they were still in Istanbul. At that time she liked them, or seemed to. They weren’t my mother, saying ‘Come on, give that back’ without looking a person  in the eye*. They helped each other, but not out of the hope of being rewarded down the line, they did so merely just to survive. There were really so many hands that reached out to help educate Mustafa.  But Ali did more than anyone. In those days, Güler had said at that time that that kind of self-sacrifice made her cry. Mustafa didn’t cry. He’d learned at  an early age what it really meant to be blood relatives. You helped out someone when they were in school, or in the army, or if they were stuck up on their roof. When the time came, a family needed to know how to move like a single limb. You have to  care for all  the limbs of the body so it doesn’t die.. In short, that’s what it took to live, to be able to survive.

After moving to Urfa, having relatives from Maraş  constantly show up, not being sure when they would come  or when they would leave, Güler couldn’t say she still liked them as much as beforeMaraş. They arrived before she was even able to set up their household, when they didn’t even have a good pot, spoons, knives, - things the people from Maraş didn’t seem to care about at all. What the people from Maraş cared about was not how the table was set, but rather, how Güler served her husband. They want me to get down and use my hair as a broom, to be your slave, that’s what they wanted. One day when she was really angry, she had even said, ‘You used them.  They want me to be used, to be exploited just like that.. Yes, that had slipped out of her mouth.

Those words, after all this time, still scorched Mustafa’s heart like a flame on the morning he was released from prison.  How could Güler had spoken like that?  Actually, this had been his fault; all Güler had wanted was for him to back her up against the relatives from Maraş. Or rather, she’d expected  support from him in preserving the old Güler, to be able to continue being herself in spite of them;but she hadn’t found it in him. In truth, Güler hadn’t resembled what they expected in a bride; but she hadn’t been able to get them to accept her as she was either. They discounted her and didn’t think much of her.

In that confusing time in Urfa, Güler withdrew and distanced herself a bit  from Mustafa. She was pregnant. At that time, Mustafa didn’t have any time to stop and think about those details. It was to the movement that he gave, that he wanted to give all of his time. Oh! how his heart, all of his thoughts, were wrapped up in what was happening in the movement. Oh! how all of those daily trivial matters quickly boiled down to nothing. In those days Mustafa hadn’t stopped, hadn’t wanted to stop and think about daily matters or  personal problems. Those were things that could be sorted out later. And Güler? Güler was supposed to stand firm and support him. And she had. Silently, completely abandoning the forthrightness that had allowed her to express all those harsh thoughts and her aggressive manner, for a while.  Except for the unpleasant words she’d uttered on that day, and on the last day, he couldn’t remember her ever having shared what she was thinking about, even if it was unfair to her. So what had beengoing on in Güler’s head at that time? He now realized that at the time he certainly didn’t know. He only remembered moments when Güler was preparing food, or when she was knitting silently, that’s all..  In those times he was satisfied with Güler. His friends thought fondly of her as their friend’s wife, too. Did she think of them that way as well? He hadn’t doubted that she felt that way, too.. But now, drinking a coffee in Sebil cafe, he was so full of doubts he could barely contain himself. Did she love me, did she trust me? Did she believe in me? Was she happy? Whatever kind of happiness that she would have hoped for at that time... In those days, it  had never once occurred to him that Güler might  figure out her own way to be happy, independently from him. But, of course,she was a smart, deliberate woman, wasn’t she? At least she had been when they’d gotten married.  

As Mustafa tried to swallow the bitter coffee grounds in his mouth, he thought to himself - in those days I only took from Güler, but I never gave anything back to her. Güler never asked for anything anyways. If she had asked, she wouldn’t have gotten a response. Why? For the sake  of the movement. Which meant that he hadn’t really trusted her. Sitting in Sebil cafe, drinking three coffees one after another, he knew that this reckoning was coming too late, but he couldn’t help it.

It was beyond him.  Güler was like a great big unresolved question. A Güler completely different from the Güler he’d thought of while in prison... When he was on the inside, he’d thought his wife’s integrity to be an undeniable source of support. Offered to him with the most loving, the most giving smile. But, the night before the morning he was taken away  Güler wasn’t  smiling. That night full of arguments. That night Güler had stood up to  Mustafa. Mustafa had said “Tomorrow I’ll be bringing some people here. They will stay with us for a few days, so be ready.” Güler had suddenly asked, “Who are they?” as if she were  merely asking “Would you like  another cup of tea?” Maybe it would have been better to just ignore the question, but it angered Mustafa, and he shouted at Güler, “Is this the time to act like an old nag?” That set Güler off, and she took on the stern attitude that she used to have, back at the university. “This is my house too, I won’t just let people come into my house if I don’t know who they are.  You better understand that!” she had said. In that moment Mustafa jumped out from his seat and took one of the photo-novels that Güler had recently been started reading and collecting - yes, Güler had gotten into reading photo-novels, that was Güler’s conscience for you - tore it up in little pieces and threw it at her. “Did you learn to be a stupid nag from these things?” Güler began to cry. “What am I supposed to do then? What other choice have you left me other than letting myself become a fool? All I have left is these stupid things!” She cried for a long time in bed. Mustafa tried to calm her down by stroking her. There in Sebil, while having the last sip of his third coffee, the thought crossed his mind that maybe he had comforted her knowing that he would need her the next day.

While numbly watching  the ferries come and go, Mustafa could hear Güler’s whining echoing in his head:  “I want to be involved.  Why aren’t you allowing me to be involved?  Pretty soon, I will run away from you, from your thoughts, from your behavior, like I am running away from a contagious disease , a strange, terrifying illness.” Mustafa mumbled to himself “if I had known how upset you really were...” All of a sudden Güler’s sobbing turning into yelling. “You’re as backward minded as your relatives from Maraş.  If you think like them you  will never amount to anything!” Yes, she had actually said “never amount to anything”. How couldit be that I never remembered this while I was in Selimiye? Well, what did I do? Maybe I swore at her at Güler or hit herGüler. He doesn’t want to remember that.

But in the morning Güler was completely different. As Mustafa was quickly drinking his tea before leaving, she asked him with the tone of conciliation that she had learnt through being married, “Shall I  cook bumbar, do you want some today?” Güler knew that Mustafa loved bumbar. But Güler, who was disgusted by the thought of filling intestines with meat, had until that day never offered to cook  them. Why had she offered, because she sensed with her female instinct that I felt confused that morning? Her attitude only made Mustafa more angry. “No…it’s not important what you cook these days; just be sure to buy plenty of supplies right away.”

At that moment the doorbell had rung. At a totally unexpected moment. My face must have turned yellow. He stood there totally dumbfounded, even though he was not supposed to be surprised by anything, especially the doorbell. His wife opened the door. And exactly four Thompson machine guns pressed up against the forehead of his pregnant wife. “Surrender!”

I knowingly sent my pregnant wife to answer the door. This is not a thought you could escape. His morning of freedom had begun with these bleak thoughts!

That night, he boarded the bus for Adana, in the morning, as soon as he arrived he caught his breath at Hüseyin’s office. He was tired.

Mustafa stomped his foot on the ground. It was actually on top of Hüseyin’s foot. When his foot was suddenly crushed, Hüseyin was taken aback, toppling the bottle of raki he was holding in his hand over onto the table. Mustafa’s anger lashed out at Hüseyin. That day in Hüseyin’s office, I answered all his idiotic questions, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask about Güler. Gotta act tough. All he ended up saying was that he would be going on to Urfa the next day. If Hüseyin was a man, he would have brought up the topic himself, he would have told him something about his wife. He just doesn’t care, the guy will talk your ear off any chance you give him: turns out we were wrong about this, about that, like a dog sitting pretty!      

  Of all the ways for spreading news, the family network was the fastest, and it was put to use, those relatives from Maraş who heard that Mustafa was in Adana quickly came and filled Hüseyin’s office: they went from house to house spreading the news.  If they had had their way they would keep him there for at least a month. They didn’t care about Güler, or about him getting back to teaching. They didn’t think anything of having a job. The Teachers Association had helped out his wife while he was in prison. When he was sentenced, even before that, they had kicked me out of my position. The help from the Teacher’s Association was good for Güler because she didn’t want to have to stay with his relatives in Maraş. I don’t need to be getting mad at Hüseyin, maybe he doesn’t know what Güler has been up to.

 Ali’s calling after him didn’t get Mustafa to turn around. Ali is just one person. I have a lot of work to attend to. In middle school, in Adana he had studied at his side.

Ali didn’t think of Mustafa separately from his own kids. He didn’t treat him like his child, but like his son, since he couldn’t send his daughter to school. Those pens, those erasers that Mustafa had carelessly lost at school, who knows at what costs had they been purchased? Mustafa thought about it afterwards. Ali had never slapped in the face for this. Saying there was someone studying in the house, he hadn’t sent his older daughter to school. At that time Mustafa found this to be normal. If anyone was going to go to school it would be a boy. If the son’s owner didn’t have enough strength, aunts, uncles, they helped the son to study, to get married, and during his military service. They would combine their efforts, especially for the sons. Because the sons were their hope, their only hope.

When Mustafa was studying he would tell Ali “when you grow up and become a man, your small son, I will send him to school”. At that time, Hasan was a baby.

In that dim cell in Selimiye, in those nights that descended too early, Ali was one his least favorite things to think about. Ali’s child had gone to school long after his school age had passed. Ali had helped Hasan through school, hadn't he said he would go through a thousand troubles to do it? He hadn’t paid back the debt, it became a nightmare, he couldn’t stay asleep with all of the cigarettes he was smoking one after another. He didn’t used to be like this, in the time before he was arrested. In those days, he could put aside thinking about the debt that he owed to Ali and his other relatives in Maraş. Put it aside if you wanted to call it that. Those were hopeful, faithful days. In those days, Mustafa didn’t think he was only in debt to Ali or his relatives in Maraş but rather to the entire crowd. It was a payment that would need to be made to the group. In this way it was a responsibility shared, like that of putting Ali’s son through school, it wasn’t something that could be limited and solved by just one person. What difference would it make to send Hasan to school by oneself. It was just one less heavy stone to be carried on Ali’s back. But the problem was still something to be carried on Ali’s back. On everyone’s back.

It was doubtful whether the nightmare that was Selimiye could be an escape from these types of thoughts. What was I doing at that time? What was I overcoming? I thought that I had devoted myself to people like Ali, but was I actually evading them? Was I fooling myself all the times I avoided minor responsibilities, pretending I had bigger causes to take on? What did I end up getting done? For my relatives from Maraş, even just for them? Couldn’t I even get them to believe in what I was doing? I couldn’t even get those people who’d done so much for me, expecting so much, to join the cause, to bring them with me. Where were the crowds, the masses? In the end what had I done then sit around with five or ten, alright let’s even say fifty, friends to talk, to get them involved, to get into trouble? At the interrogation why couldn’t we even look in each other’s faces. The faith they had in one another, the respect they showed, the fact that it had all been put to the test during those days when he was being interrogated made him wrestle with these thoughts. But later, in the cell block, he would forget, overcome them.

He remembered feeling calm on that morning in Urfa when he was arrested and sent away, because they hadn’t charged him yet with a specific crime. They couldn’t find anyone in the house. But in that moment the thing that calmed down Mustafa wasn’t that his friends hadn’t been caught, but that he hadn’t been caught in the act. These feelings, during long nights, was what shook him out of believing that he was an important man who didn’t need to pay back his personal debt to Ali. When they weren’t able to find anyone in the house, he had hoped that they wouldn’t send him away. “Major, you can see that the tip-off was wrong, can I get back to work Major? My wife is pregnant major…” Yes, he especially didn’t want to think about why he had used the phrase “my wife is pregnant”. Güler had given a look at Mustafa. Silently. Güler said nothing to the major. Not “please, go ahead” or anything else. Nothing. Whereas he spoke without having any real reason to. All the while, hiding his hatred  towards this repression… to the point that he seemed respectful. With the hope that he would be let go. The major didn’t respond. When I opened the door for my wife he looked at me with contempt. Who knows what he may have been thinking, but in that situation that could have easily turned dangerous, not stopping him from opening the door for his wife was not something that could be forgiven*. And after that the phrase “my wife is pregnant.” Mustafa had examined all of these moments on those first nights like they were a bad, low, killer disease.  

And now as the door was kicked in, with Abdullah’s dirty-mustachioed face, with Ali asking “what the hell is going on here?” with Hüseyin stupidly pouring his Raki back into the bottle, one after another, at the same time as all of these unpleasant things were transpiring, the police were rushing headlong into the room. Güler’s mouth had stood open, like the last bead of a rosary stuck in the middle of the thread. Before being sent away in a military vehicle, Güler had said “don’t worry” and then asked with a smile “do you have any money?”. what a terrible morning that had been. Mustafa thought about how Güler had acted on that morning for months, he admired her, praised her actions. He had to praise it in those times, some things had to be praised.

When Mustafa had stepped on Hüseyin’s foot, he winced and quickly drew it back. Winced like hearing long fingernails scraping on the wall, followed by that hair raising, unsettling feeling. Who had informed on who? Everybody on everyone else. It was a humiliation shared instantly by everyone, and good that it was. At each interrogation it had been even more of a humiliation, but they had all fallen into it together. This is why they were all exposing one another. “They know, somehow or other, they know, they said so, somehow or other, I might have said something, but it’s over with now, I said something, we all said something.” The nudity, the electricity, the sound of gunfire he heard as well the things he thought along with all of this, none of that pain remained. Bloody, filthy pajamas. Lying down with chains on his feet. It was doubtful whether or not there was anything left for them to confess to or not. There was nothing left. Fear. The desire to be rescued. From these filthy pajamas, from the sounds of chains, from the nights of screaming, the whir of electricity, from the nakedness, from the disgusting meat, from being doused with buckets of water. From crying. To be saved from his newly working metabolism.

Salvation from this was a garden full of apricot trees. In this garden, he was sleeping in the shade of a tree whose flowers had just opened. No more of himself, or of Güler, or his friends, neither the words he spoke, or anymore of the terrible blows. Sleeping was like being an empty sack.

Later, now when even others believed that he was an empty sack, he was put under arrest and sent to Selimiye. He was pleased to have been arrested. A revolutionary who was pleased at having been arrested? No, in those times I wasn’t a true revolutionary. I wasn’t anything at all. I was a sack that had succeeded in completely emptying itself.

There were people dying. I hadn't died yet, but there were others who had, I mean to say I had learnt about death. But torture? That was something that hadn’t been learnt Mustafa thought to himself. But was necessary to know in order to be able to transform into an empty sack. We thought about everything, about  death, but not about torture when we had to, the one thing that couldn’t be disregarded. But we disregarded it; and in the end we became an empty sack. In the days of interrogation, which were spent half awake half asleep, the only thought he could gather together were crumbs. There was such an emptiness to it that he threw away the parts of his life that had come before. The Mustafa from before that they had all ratted on. Before he was like a rosary whose thread had snapped. It was hard to gather that rosary back together. Mustafa wasn’t able to save its pieces. When he had been arrested, for him it simply meant the end of being tortured, the end of his frightening emptying, during the interrogation he had tried to understand the way they had all behaved. They ratted me out. They knew about all of the things I had done. I talked about it too. I said too much. Where did the treachery even begin? He was trying to figure it all out,  where the mistakes began and ended, from his own perspective. He couldn’t make sense of it. He couldn’t find a coherent and useful solution with a clear beginning and an end. But he still had to. For later. If nothing else, he had to string together his thoughts, like threading a rosary. Ali would be there strung at its end, just like Güler was now. When he thought about Ali he came to a realization. It was he himself who had informed on Ali, and on his relatives from Maraş. At first he had informed on them, then on all those around them. Turning Ali into another person in the crowd, was I giving myself more responsibility than to him? Saying “Somehow they know”, giving myself away, I had actually given them away, all of them. There was the crime, there was the mistake. Not anyone of us, not to mention anyone else, had the right to inform on themselves. We didn’t know this, or that is to say we didn't figure it out. I wasn’t the only one being burnt, not the only one in trouble. After arriving at this judgement, Mustafa felt strengthened like all of those who are able to understand the dimensions of their own defeat. How beautiful are beginnings!    

He began his days with the vision of Güler’s face he remembered from the day he had been sent off. He didn’t think at all of the woman reading a picture novel, bored Güler, too cold or too hot, setting the table with a plate of vegetables. The days of his imprisonment were the most peaceful for him. He wasn’t afraid, he was resilient. He thought that she was advancing, developing. He didn’t let himself relent. Reading, morning and afternoon pacing, he didn’t neglect doing exercises, he ate little, and argued often. These were days dedicated to his health and his improvement.    

That’s how it was, so why was he so shocked when they let him out. Did he need more time in order to improve himself? He felt like a sick man discharged from the hospital before having fully healed. He knew on that morning of his freedom that he hadn’t fully regained his strength or healed, and the memory Güler formed in his mind along with completely new doubts.

In thinking about whether or not Güler was in Urfa, about his teaching position, and that this would all be coming up soon, he was late in meeting Ali. Ali should have realized he was going to be meeting someone whose mind was brimming with all of the events that had just happened, he was after all a person who worried deeply about the future. Now was the time for Mustafa to figure everything out, to put everything in order. If Ali asked him his question at the wrong moment, it would set Mustafa off. Those in the wrong are quick to anger.

“What I’ll say is, as long as you don’t come make a claim for it, nothing is going to happen!” If making Ali guilty feel guilty by saying this slightly true, slightly false statement wasn’t enough, he used the formal “siz” to set himself apart. But before he had time to think about it, the door was kicked open and they were under siege.

(25)

Ali’s wife Gülşah and her sister-in-law Ziynet were still taking care of getting everything ready for the dinner table. The newlywed Ziynet was fully grown but still living at her sister’s husbands house. She wasn’t actually paying any attention to the food being set out for the guests, nor to her sister’s rushing about. Her heart was beating like a bird’s.  Zekeriya had come back that morning from Iskenderun with news about work. He was going to work in a mechanic’s shop, and at the first opportunity they would set off for Iskenderun. Ziynet would be saved from living in her sister’s house. But throughout that whole day, as her sister had been running around trying to get ready for all of the guests, she hadn’t had a chance to express her joy. As for Zekeriya, that morning when he had seen the craziness going on in the house, like every man who knows better, he had taken his dusty shoes outside and took a breather there*. He wasn’t sharing in Ziynet’s longing. Just a moment before Ziynet had wanted all of the guests to leave, and she was now silently casting an angry glance at her husband, who was wolfing down food as the other men spoke.

Gülşah gave one more look at all of the food she had arranged on the table. Gumbo, salad, enormous radishes, parsley, bread, water, hard boiled eggs, sausage, everything was ready. Neither she nor Ziynet sat at the table. The kofte that Ziynet has grilled was placed in front of them. Some was given to Hasan as well. She didn’t set any aside for herself of for Ziynet. The men should eat before anyone else. Seeing the men chewing voraciously, their cheeks plump with food, Gülşah felt a sense of having done her job well. But as soon as this display was finally ready, the door was forced open. Gülşah was surprised. She stood staring at the door feeling guilty as though the kofte hadn’t been fully cooked, as though the table hadn’t been finished being prepared in time in front of the men, as though she was responsible for all of the hungry stares depending on her. All of the strange men who poured into the room when the door was forced open ruined the whole dinner and her work along with it. Accustomed to crashing around and doing everything violently, they went back and forth around the room without even noticing that the salt, bread, and water had been brought to the table. They kept trudging around until she realized that the disruption of order and end to the peacefulness in the house was not her doing.

Oya was sitting perched on the corner of the couch, almost pleased by the disruption of the peacefulness in the house. Until the moment the door was opened she was so uncomfortable, so unsettled by the mood in the room that the sudden change brought by the opening of the door seemed to bring with it a novelness that was comforting. Being the only woman at the table, she had begun to feel bothered by having Gülşah and Ziynet wait on her at the table, ashamed when the disparity between them became apparent.

But at least Ziynet and Gülşah found this to be normal. Oya seemed to be something different, something that was different from them. They were pleasant to her, but that’s as far as they went.

In their eyes Oya was neither a woman nor a man, but merely an extension of the men they were serving. She was never ashamed to behave like a man, she even enjoyed it, but Oya still had probably refrained from drinking raki that night for this reason. Until the moment the door was opened she hadn’t said a word. But hadn’t she come to meet and get to know some different kinds of people? What’s more, it was something she loved to do. But that evening, she was totally cut off from Ziynet and Gülşah, and she hadn’t joined in on any of the other conversations going on at the table either. To ignore them and turn her back would be seen as rude. It was annoying that the conversation at the table had ended up being stuck with half the room men and the other half women. She wanted to get up and go sit by Gülşah and Ziynet, later she had hoped that they would finally come sit at the table, but when she saw the way they were acting, the way they were smirking, she had decided not to. So when the door was opened, that was the uncomfortable position she found herself sitting in.

At the moment they were raided, the only person who sensed Gülşah’s look of surprise and guilt was Oya. But this was not enough to begin to form some kind of bond with her. In fact the opposite thing happened. Since one of them felt cheered up by the sudden arrival of the raid for personal reasons, and the other felt herself responsible for what was happening, it set them even farther apart.

Oya believed she was the reason the house was being raided. She was the cause. She was the one who had destroyed the moment of peacefulness in the house, who had caused all of Gülşah’s work to be in vain. She found it hard to get along with Gülşah after this.

She only had a little time left in Adana. Her exile was over. The time she felt she needed to spend in this place had ended. It was necessary to play it cool, and that’s what she had done. To  get out of there with as little damage as possible, from the disaster coming down on the others. There was both good and bad things about this time she had spent. She didn’t have to feel responsible for the distress she felt inside. She just had to bear it. Just doing this was enough to give a person the sense of having done something. Like protecting the body from an illness. As though her only responsibility was her own health. Now she had to just avoid finding any new microbes. All of this was, in a sense, reassuring, gave her a sense of consistency. The body is not suddenly defeated by several illnesses. And then what? All she had to do was endure it.

There wasn’t much she could do. She was being closely watched. Being monitored like this turned out to be a great excuse for her own selfish self-preservation. For days she hadn’t seen a single person at the hotel she was staying at; no one had come asking for her. Adana was a strange city. It was hard for new people to move there. Oya hadn’t seen a single person who was cared about her or who was bringing her news from the outside. They must have thought that she was suffering from some kind of stomach illness and on the point of death, and that their only obligation was to take of her after she was already dead.

Oya wasn’t against being treated like something dangerous. In fact, nobody was unhappy with having to avoid her. She knew there were other people in Adana who thought the same way, but she didn’t try to find them. She didn’t want to get anyone else into trouble, even if how much of a liability she was had been exaggerated. She would just get up and leave quietly. Those who were just trying to make it through this difficult time of repression would all be staying here. To find them, to find someone who shared the same ideas, she would have to hunt for them while being under surveillance. That is why she had teared up and thrown away two addresses that had been given to her already.

Oya was now thinking about what she was doing there standing next to Hüseyin who, out of shock at being raided by police, was emptying his raki back into the bottle. They had met by chance. They had just called Oya in to give a statement about a trial in progress happening in Ankara. While walking through the corridors of the courthouse in Adana, in a moment of distress she had been asked “are you Oya Ertem” by a young man who looked short standing in his lawyer’s robe, dark skinned, with a hooked nose. She hadn’t spoken to anyone in months, so why did she feel annoyed at having to talk to this man? Since it was Hüseyin who had brought Oya there that night, this run-in, which had ended with him being raided by police, was turning out to have been a bad one.

Hüseyin had introduced himself to her right away. Told her that he was originally from Maraş, that he had just finished studying law in Istanbul,  just finished his probationary period in Adana. He figured that Oya was here in some kind of self-imposed exile, but he tried to explain that he was nervous to come to her hotel. He was a former Workers Party member, he didn’t want to cause any problems for her. Oya laughed to herself, thinking “everyone is trying to avoid hurting others!” Hüseyin seemed good-hearted. Oya, who felt suffocated from so much loneliness needed to be able to believe somebody. So she convinced herself that their meeting made her feel at ease, and she told herself that she didn’t feel any suspicion towards Hüseyin. At that moment, she wasn’t thinking about the advice from his friends “you gotta be careful, as soon as you meet people they’ll be trying to get you to talk, Adana is crawling with police, be cool, don’t take the bait”. She thought, you know there’s no reason to trust Hüseyin. With his beard and his overly stylish tie, he looked more like a provincial playboy than an old party member. In the time from the day they had met until the evening of the dinner she hadn’t really gotten to know Hüseyin or his personality. What kind of man was this, this man emptying raki back into the bottle? She realized she hadn’t ever asked herself that question.

“Are you Oya Ertem?” “Yes”. And then she felt a little less lonely, that was it. It was a terrible kind of weakness that needed to be named. After this meeting, Hüseyin had called Oya every now and then. Most of the time just by phone. “How are you?” “I’m good.” “Do you need anything?” “no, thanks.” They hadn’t established a real friendship. Oya enjoyed having someone who called her. It was nice for Hüseyin to do that.

Oya spent days and days watching the ugly looking construction rising outside of her hotel window which didn’t even have a view of the sunset. The hotel was in a city in the Chukurova which didn’t have any other beautiful features other than its bountiful soil, its workers, and its shining sun. Later on, she would tightly close the curtains spend the rest of the night shut in. Endless hours. Trying not to feel sorry for herself. Trying to feel brave even though her heart was in pain. Directly across from the room in the construction site two civil police were waiting to look into her room every time the curtains were opened. Their strange assignment, a task that required an inexplicable amount of patience, in the end gave Oya a kind of strength. The situation of these two men who had to spend every day with their eyes peeled on the closed curtains of a hotel room, was similar to the hardship that Oya was going through spending days, months in that room. They had originally made her feel anxious, but Oya had gotten used to seeing those two faces. Sometimes between the space in the curtains, she would peek through to try and see  if the men were still on duty. As though their continuous watching was a companion to her in her loneliness. These two policemen had quite a ridiculous assignment. There was no reason for it. The front reception desk had all kinds of information in order to know if Oya was alone or not in her room, the men at the reception desk already took notes on every time she came and went, who called her, and knew the names of everyone who came to visit her. So much so that Oya thought that the money that she paid every month to stay in the hotel was turning straight into the salary for the hotel’s own policemen*, and thought about complaining to the manager of the hotel. They were being made to pay for the expenditures of her prison. There was nothing to be done. Like clockwork she would continue to pay the bill for the hotel. She wasn’t one to get in the way of police work. Being sent off hastily to Adana, she hadn’t been able to find a house. They were making people pay a full-year in advance for rent. On top of that, getting furnishings, buying this and that, she wasn’t in a position to go through all of that. There was nobody she knew who would come stay in the house anyways. Who would be allowed to stay with her under martial law anyways? There was no alternative to paying all of this money out of her own pocket and resigning herself to this hotel imprisonment. The manager had only let her stay in the hotel after having shown some reluctance. She wouldn’t be able to find another. The coming and going of the police was having an effect on the hotel. So she imagined that any minute they could have said sorry ma’am and shown him the door.

Having to spend the night out in the open in this strange, angry concrete city frightened Oya. She didn’t even like having to go out every evening to sign in at the police station. At a late hour in the night the police, bored from their guard shift, would call up the hotel: What sir? Has Oya Ertem escaped? And waking up to the sound of a phone ringing, Oya would spend the rest of the night unable to get back to sleep. And as the hotel returned to the loneliness of her former prison cell, she would be reassured by the friendly sounds of a phone ringing, of a door shutting, or the sound of shuffling feet. A waiter bringing coffee or tea, the occasional sound of someone bringing a letter, they would fill her heart with warmth. How many mistakes is a person willing to make for want of the warmth of another human, to be in the presence of a friend.   

She was avoiding those things. At night she wasn’t leaving to go out anywhere. After signing the book at the police station in Dortsular, she would head right back and shut herself up in her room. There was no other option. The two pairs of eyes tirelessly watching her room were waiting for her. Oya shouldn’t do anything. At that time in Adana the municipality had taken to raiding houses in the middle of the night and sending people away. No sense making it any easier for troublemakers. But it’s dangerous to be too careful sometimes. If a child never drinks ice water, and grows up with a towel on their back, when the chance presents itself they will one day find themselves with pneumonia*. Her actions on that night were a little bit like that.

When the telephone in the room rang, Oya was making tea using the little electric stove she kept hidden in the drawer. Waiting for tea, having the water boil, it all brought Oya an immense happiness. Tea was ready, it was finished; these were big changes. Like the arrival of the newspaper in the morning and the sunset in the evening, she embraced this single changing source of diversion in her otherwise cruel life. The sound of the telephone was another one of these big, lovely signs of a change in her situation.

“Miss Oya, I believe there is a gentleman waiting for you downstairs?”

She hung up the telephone without even asking “Who is he?”  That evening Oya was ready to make mistakes. It meant she was ready to explode. But before she could explode, things exploded around her, and the house was raided by the police.

Hüseyin was in front of the outside door to the hotel. When Oya saw Hüseyin she wasn’t too thrilled. Was he waiting for someone else? Who knows? It was her first time seeing Hüseyin. She was surprising to see that Hüseyin had come, and along with Mustafa, a person she had never met. After having met at the trial, Oya has dropped by Hüseyin’s office a few times, drank tea, and watched the unending stream of people from Maraş. They hadn’t spoken very much. (32) One or two times he had come by the hotel asking for her, and they had walked together to the police station. They had only once stopped to have a tea in one of the bakeries along Ataturk boulevard. They spoke about general things, the martial law, about Adana. She hadn’t spoken much about herself. If it had been some other place besides Adana, would there still have been so much cordiality? Hadn’t they taken a walk, drank tea together? Hadn’t she spent hours sitting at Hüseyin’s office?

But that evening, once it had gotten dark, and Hüseyin had showed up at the hotel accompanied by a stranger, she didn’t think it was strange or get anxious. Hüseyin knew that Oya never went out at night.

There was Hüseyin standing across from her, whose appearance never looked very reassuring. Oya couldn’t make out the tall man with the black moustachioed who was standing next to him in the dark.

“Mustafa...  he’s also from Maraş. He’s had a lot of troubles. Just yesterday she got out released from Selimiye.”

Yes, perfect, all we needed was someone who’s just gotten out of prison. But still, she didn’t think about going back to her room.

“He’ll be heading to Urfa tomorrow. Before being on the inside he was a mathematics teacher at a high school in Urfa. (ama biz komadik gitsin)*. Are there any teachers positions left? Eh… that’s as much as an innkeeper knows.”

Innkeeper was a term used for people who abbett in a crime. People on the inside used it. Hüseyin and Mustafa should have known this. And it was an unpleasant expression anyways. Oya looked at Mustafa to see whether or not he was upset. But in the twilight she couldn’t make anything out except for his dark moustache.

“I am Oya.”

“Adana’s famous female exile. Even the shoe-shiners know who you are.”  Hüseyin pointed at the shoe-shiner standing at the door of the hotel. Who was shining shoes at that hour? Oya felt anxious. The sense of easiness she had felt when had first met Hüseyin was gone.

“Sassy people from Adana are called weak, aren’t they?”*   

There was a silence. Even Oya was surprised by what had escaped her lips. Talking like that was being way too flippant in front of Hüseyin. She looked at Hüseyin’s Maxi topcoat which looked like it had just been bought. It looked funny on him. She had no intention of stopping to notice every detail of that evening. Whatever would be would be, nothing more. He was just another detail in all of the experiences in her life, a petit bourgeois character in the course of her life, nothing more.

Hüseyin spoke about Oya to Mustafa as though he had known her for a long time.

“Don’t get upset if Oya gets mad all of a sudden. She’s actually quite a cheerful person. It’s just that the only people that she jokes around with are artists she already knows well.”

Mustafa didn’t respond. Oya wondered if she could tell what Mustafa thought about her.

This was a thoroughly bad thing to wonder at the beginning of the evening.

Hüseyin couldn’t stop talking.

“What do you say to a nice homecooked dinner? Better than going to bed hungry at the hotel.”

Oya had mentioned to Hüseyin that she often went hungry at the hotel. There was no food at the hotel. Sometimes Oya would bring in some simit from outside and eat it alongside a cup of her secret tea, sometimes with yoghurt. She was afraid to bring in food from the outside. a restaurant, the cinema; she would have gone anywhere they had said. As long as it was someplace different. Hüseyin kept up with his inappropriate conversation:

“Tonight’s dinner will be hosted by some proletariat relatives of mine from KahramanMaraş, although they might be anarchists but that’s fine, my jailbird cousins…”

If it had been even one day earlier, she would have been turned off by the way Hüseyin was speaking, and have excused herself and gone back to her room. But that evening, she would put up with anything. It was as though she was one of those female leads “entwined in the nets of fate”  in one of those “soap operas” that housewives loved.

Hüseyin’s inappropriate way of talking spread to Oya. She suddenly turned to Mustafa and asked “Are you Alevi?”  

Mustafa didn’t respond. Oya immediately regretted the question. It was like asking Mustafa which faction he supported. Like asking “are you with the proletarian revolutionary enlightenment? or “are you with the front?” much worse than asking that. She was furious with Mustafa. He wouldn’t shut up about people from Maraş. He had been going on and on about how all of his relatives were Alevis.

“Alevis even welcome the people they despise with open arms.”

Hüseyin was the one responsible for Oya’s stupid question. Everything had started off stupidly and was going to keep on that way. Hüseyin wouldn’t shut up.

“They’ve made Adana Kofte. You’re coming aren’t you? You can’t easily find a meal like that.”

What a terrible invitation this was. But Oya, said “alright, I’ll come” as though Hüseyin hadn’t just brought out his family’s background like a bull out into the arena. She was like a voyeur, like someone watching people through a keyhole. They got into a taxi. “To the Istiklal district.”

Mustafa sat upfront with the driver. As she was in the habit of doing, Oya looked out the back window of the taxi and saw the ever present headlights, but she didn’t say anything.

It was silly to mention that they were being followed. Anytime they went anywhere it meant being followed. Hüseyin and Mustafa spoke together in the car.

“Ali broke it off with the People’s Party, don’t ask.”

“That mean you weren’t able to fool him into believing your ideas about the coalition?”

“Yeah, It’s Ecevit who’s saying it, that’s all he’s saying.”

“If he sees justice, all the better.”

Oya was curious why Mustafa thought this way, but she didn’t ask about it in the taxi. Hüseyin mentioned to her that he supported Aybar.

“In the end they’ll all change their affiliation.”

“If you had a party then you could be in charge.”

(35)  

“Who could possibly take charge right now. You all?”

“We’re trying to make that a possibility!”

Listening to this conversation in a place like Adana, especially in the back of a Taxi, made Oya feel especially suspicious. As they continued on the headlights kept following closer and she grew more anxious. Alright, we’ll show up, we’ll make an excuse and get back to the hotel, she thought to herself.

Suddenly Mustafa asked Hüseyin:

“You’ve joined the Unity Party right?”

“Yes, it’s the most socialist of the parties.”

“For God’s sake give me a break, I know you, what’s gotten into you?”

“The customers. You know that the customers in Adana are all Alevis.”

“Did you come here to mislead all of them?”

“Come on Mustafa, if you really want to talk about being misled...”

Mustafa was quiet. Oya didn’t like their conversation. But that didn’t matter. As soon as they got to the dinner she would say she was sorry and be out of there.

But she didn’t. As soon as they arrived, she forgot her anxiety and suspicions as she stood among the crowds of children surrounding the house.

Ali had also come out in front of the door. He gave Mustafa a strong hug. He teared up. Oya felt warm inside. Everyone was being affectionate with each other. Ali has sunken cheeks, his breastbone pushed in, looked like the mix of both a young and an old man. He was playing with his tongue. His hands and his body were that of a worker; his face was bright.

Ali opened the wooden door to the house and brought all of the guests inside. A door that would seem inviting and lovely until the moment later when it would be kicked open.

(36)

At first Oya couldn’t tell Gülşah and Ziynet apart. It was crowded inside of the house. There was a large group of children, and several foreign men. Hanging from above the bedstead, she noticed a photo of Yilmaz Guney. First she saw Ziynet. Having been leaning over the grill, her face had turned pink. Her curly black hair had stuck in wires to her forehead. She had the large, very beautiful black eyes that you often saw with the women in this region. She was actually very beautiful, Oya thought, but she didn’t know how to show it. This was something only possible in the kind of environment Ziynet was living in. Being able to show off your beauty was something that had to be learnt.

The door was continuously being opened and closed. This was a door that they never felt the need to close or lock. The door opening constantly had children entering from outside, and other were leaving from the inside rooms. Oya couldn’t figure out which of the kids belonged to the house, and which ones belonged to the neighborhood. After making it to the bedstead, she stood standing speaking to the shifting stream of children. After a while she decided that it looked strange.

Then she sat there silently as Ziynet and Gülşah prepared the dinner table, not even looking at the surroundings. Maybe she also avoiding looking around so that Hüseyin wouldn’t come up to her. Besides, she couldn’t figure out what to talk about, what to do. She tried to observe some of the conversations between the people from Maraş.

“It’s nothing other than trying to turn back history.”

Mustafa was speaking about the People’s Party.

“Our union doesn’t think so.” said Ali. Then he spoke at length about the unions, and on those who were relying on the People’s Party.

But when the People’s Party was mentioned to Mustafa, he got excited like something had burst inside him. Oya got the sense that he was angry about something else and was using this subject as an excuse to let off steam.

(37).   

“History...industry...Capitalism...the wheels are spinning forward irrevocably.” The words buzzed in Oya’s brain. “The People’s Party will give the wheels over to the people.” said Mustafa. After saying all of this, he was suddenly quiet. His angry temperament dissipated. “Give up man. You’re talking about something completely different.”

For a moment, having forgotten her anxiety, Oya was looking intently at Mustafa. He had stunning, pit-black eyes. But there was also something wild, attractive in that face. Sharp lines in his face, with a flattened nose. She thought to herself “this is the face of someone who is either extremely confident, or extremely cowardly.” Either way, it was a face that had to be described as “extreme”.

Mustafa could sense that Oya was looking at him. It felt like she was looking critically at him. Oya was thinking about how he was contradictory, changeable, that there was something to him, either very positive, or very negative. She definitely sensed something; Mustafa’s uneasiness, the uneasiness of an animal about to shed its skin. Oya thought again about what Mustafa thought about her. Mustafa felt uneasy at being studied curiously by Oya. He aimed his anxiousness at Ali.

“ Why are you even asking us this? Do you need our permission or something? You won’t get any no’s from us. If you want to know where your rights are, it’s up to you to reach in the lion’s mouth and pull them out. That’s what I think.”

Even Hüseyin was shocked to see Mustafa get so upset and lash out like this. In the past, during their school years in Istanbul, he had gotten to know Mustafa’s anger intimately. But Mustafa had always been respectful towards Ali. He was the one always saying that they had to be “respectful and patient” in front of Ali. On top of that, there was a special type of love, of affection for Ali. Ali loved Mustafa back. He preferred him over Hüseyin. Hüseyin had become a lawyer, Mustafa a teacher. But Mustafa preferred Hüseyin, trusted him. To the point that in the elections of 69, listening to Hüseyin’s insistent advice to “don’t you dare vote” he hadn’t voted for the Worker’s Party. In those days Mustafa would never say “do whatever the hell you want!” His explanations would excite Ali’s tired heart. But they didn’t seem to make a difference*. Hüseyin would be flattened out by Mustafa’s rebuffs, thinking it wasn’t fair. He would go off, man if he would just shut up now! When Mustafa and Ali spoke, it made Hüseyin feel a little less guilty towards Ali about the whole pension issue. He thought that sharing with Mustafa could be painful sometimes, but that when they spoke the guilt that they shared lessened his pain. After lunch, there had been an uneasy mood in the office between them. Hüseyin remembered his old arguments with Mustafa, I’m in the right, he had come to say. But it was irrelevant, Mustafa had gone off.

He thought to himself, maybe he’s acting contrary like this because of my behavior this afternoon. But Mustafa was all speed, and sharpness. That’ how it seemed to Hüseyin. When Hüseyin was studying law in Istanbul, they had argued for hours on end in the coffeeshops and bars around Kumkapi. Most of the time, Mustafa would slam his fist on the table and end the conversation by saying “Stop bullshitting man, it’s like I said, got it?” He would accuse him of being a bore, and then stopped showing up at the coffeeshops and bars. When he would run into Hüseyin, he would also say “How are you chatterbox!” That year Hüseyin’s scholarship had been cut off, he would tell people that it was because he had been a member of a “Youth Socialist Organization”, but it was actually because he hadn’t taken the exams. Because he had spent his night drinking and carousing. That year Mustafa had helped Hüseyin out. Where had he found the money? “I’m working, I finished school” he had once said, but Hüseyin didn’t believe him. Later he heard that Mustafa had suddenly finished all of his exams. He had gotten a teaching job in Urfa and moved there, had gotten married too.

There were some things in his relationship with Mustafa that he couldn’t work out, or get over.

At one point, Mustafa had saved him from those who would do him harm. But also wasn’t it he himself who had gotten him involved with these people in the first place? Hadn’t he shown him books, shown him the way? But he had ended up surpassing him. Yes, Mustafa had saved him from those who would do him harm. Above that, those who would hurt him were on Mustafa’s team. He had brought him to the fountain and washed the blood from his nose. “Enough of these childish games Hüseyin” he had said.  “It’s long past the time to stop, not everyone makes it to the end.” These words now burned inside him like hot peppers. You didn’t stop and look what happened. When he asked Mustafa “do you even know anything about where you’re going”, Mustafa had said “Yeah, I know, Maraş, Siverek.”*, and had left Hüseyin in front of the running water of the fountain.

Later that afternoon, he had gotten angered Mustafa by saying “do you really know Maraş and Siverek.”

“You think you have the right to condemn me because I was arrested? Even if I was wrong I paid the price. You’re neither right nor wrong, it’s obvious, you’ve been holed up in this city like a mole. With you taking off like this you could get elected to parliament. What is this proof of? Proof of your cowardice!”

In order for Hüseyin to end this awkward conversation he had gotten into with Mustafa, he had gone on to talk about Adana’s importance, that it was the second large industrial city, as though Mustafa didn’t already know this, about the workers there, the unions, about the general situation and what could be done there. Mustafa looked at him as though to say “Come on, aren’t you done talking all this bullshit yet.” It’s as though he knows somehow I haven’t even set up the office yet. In this mood, the pain in his stomach grew sharper. He felt like his stomach was some different, foreign, enemy thing inside him. He wanted to dispel Mustafa’s fears.  

“There is nothing for you to do in your union. They’re the masters, the master’s in yellow workhats.”

(40)     

When he got upset he also lay into Ali*. Wasn’t it his turn to speak about the unions? What if the conversation turns to his pension? Ali wasn’t about to blame anyone, his guest glasses were all full, they had a pillow to sleep on, that’s all he cared about, seemed to be the only thing he mentioned. His hospitality, the thing he really got excited about  whenever he could. He spoke to his younger son:

“Go run and tell Uncle Ekremgil, he should come too.”

Oya thought to herself, this Ekrem guy has to be from Maraş.

As soon as he had entered the room, it was obvious that Ekrem was a completely different type of person. He wasn’t from Maraş, or an Alevi, he had his yellow hair combed back, with a dirty whiskery moustache. Oya couldn’t make out any connection between him and the other people in the room. Ali must have offered his table because he wanted to show off to his neighbors that he had a visitor who had recently come back from Germany. Oya learned from their conversation that Ekrem had worked for a while in factory in Germany, and then that afterwards he had found a way to make his way into the commerce business. Ekrem was travelling between Germany-Adana and selling things. He had his eyes on bigger prizes. He had plans on opening a shop in Germany. Ekrem was getting into the conversation going on between Mustafa, Ali, and Hüseyin.

“Guys, Who has ever saved themselves while having their children cling onto the skirts? Any normal person, whether it’s in a fire, or in a flood, they will give up their own children to save themselves”

When pronouncing the word “themselves” Ekrem said it as “demseeeelves”  with the letter e drawn out.

“ You’ll get tired of saving yourself like that.”* said Ali, looking at Hasan.

“There’s strength in numbers” said Hüseyin.

“You think the riiiiich got rich by tightening their belts? The person saving the ship is the captain.*”

“All these ideals, the life of the worker, worker shmirker, I don’t even subscribe to Turkishness” said Erkem, grinning.

“Hey! There’s men at the door!”

Nobody was listening to Hasan’s words. The mood was tense.

Mustafa was looking resentfully at Ali. He was upset that Ekrem has been invited. Ali wasn’t mad at Erkem, he was just trying to take care of his guests. He didn’t want Mustafa or Hüseyin to be a burden on the guests. But both of them were happy to find someone they could attack, and they kept pushing him more and more. It was as though Ekrem has come just to be an annoyance to them. He was speaking less and less. It was being alleged that they had found the cunning fox who was devising a way to cheat workers out of their money*. Money that hadn’t been given over to anybody, the workers were chumps for giving over control of their money to the unions, they had it coming to them....

Even Hüseyin, who accused the unions of acting like feudal landlords, was being aggravated by this paperpusher union lawyer. Mustafa went on the attack.

“You don’t find anything scracthing around like that, you won’t be rich at all*.” he said to Ekrem.

He was sitting in the gap between the stone.

“Nah, I’ll write it there. I’ll bite my tongue for another year…”

“Bite Bite! What are you thinking man! You think the rich people in Adana get rich off of biting their tongues?* It’s the captain who saves the ship. Those rich people you long for, do you know how they go behind each other’s backs? In that way they’re just like us, they might turn on their relatives or their neighbors*, but they know how to join forces when they need to, especially against the working class.

While fidgeting with his wavy hair, which was plastered with pomade up off his narrow forehead, Ekrem asked Mustafa.

“What do you do for work?”

Oya was comparing Mustafa and Ekrem’s moustaches. Ekrem’s was narrow, close to his lips. Ekrem must have paid close attention everytime he shaved. She thought to herself “he’s one of those guys who knows that every girl in Germany is enamoured with him but who doesn’t bother with anything else other than fifth class whores.” Ekrem’s presence was unnerving. Ekrem was making the air in the room even more stuffy, something that had been bothering Oya since the beginning of the evening. He was gawking at Oya, as though he was thinking “what is going on here?” or even  “What is this woman doing sitting in the middle of all of these men” .

Oya stood out even more from Ziynet and Gülşah once Ekrem has arrived. Both Ziynet and Gülşah could have accepted from the beginning, known unconsciously that Oya was different, even that she was somehow superior. Oya wasn’t happy with this, but it was something she knew she could not easily change. Ali was welcoming of her knowing that she was Hüseyin’s guest. To Ali she was neither a man nor a woman, but merely an extension of Hüseyin. Oya found it normal to be not be thought of by her personality, or by her gender.

She didn’t care about what Hüseyin thought about her. She wasn’t interested in him. As a friend probably. And if not? It didn’t matter. She was only curious about what Mustafa thought about her, not because of what was going on at that moment, just in general. She could sense that there was something they both shared, even if he didn’t like her, even if he wasn’t happy with her being there, whatever the reason.

like everything else Ekrem had come up with a reason for why Oya looked so anxious, but it was completely different, and vulgar. He had been leering at Oya ever since she had entered the room. Leering at her with his dirty, stringy moustache. He thought of her as just another little opportunities for him in life. A woman sitting around drinking. It meant she was asking for it. His skills at sweet talking would make sure he didn’t miss his chance with her!

Neither Hüseyin or Mustafa were oblivious to the looks that Ekrem was giving Oya as he spoke down to them. Mustafa was getting angrier. Oya was even more annoyed because of what was happening. She had regretted a thousand times not turning back as soon as she got out of the taxi.

“What's going to happen mr. teacher?”

A fight was about to break out.

“Ali says you just got out of jail. Did you go to jail for being a teacher?”

“For the people. Teacher’s aren’t a class. Even when I was in jail the Teacher’s Union helped out my wife.”

Güler. The anger he felt towards Ekrem rendered his anxiety about her meaningless. Here I am with this asshole, this idiot, getting into pointless conversations. He didn’t even know where Güler was, or how she was.

The mood was broken up as Gülşah and Ziynet started spreading out the dinner trays on the table. Just a moment earlier Ali had given a look to the women, hoping that the food would be set out. He was not happy with the mood that had developed in the house.

He just wanted to serve his guests. As the night went on, he was sad that this was just hopeful wishing, and that it was slipping away. It seemed like he blamed his wife and her sister in the way he was looking at them.

In any case, the food was ready. The guests, the kofte, the salad, the okra, they brought it all in. Ali felt pleased again. He used this to interrupt Mustafa*.

“What will come of all of this?”

Mustafa no longer wanted to speak. But he couldn’t control his anger.

“As long as you don’t take power nothing will happen.”

For the first time Oya noticed Zekeriya eating silently at the corner of the table. At that moment, the door opened. Several different events happened all at once. She would think about Zekeriya later on.

Zekeriya was Ziynet’s husband. He had graduated from the Adana Mechanical Institute. While studying he had earned a Grey Wolves pin. As the door kept opening Zekeriya didn’t seem to pay much mind to it. Maybe it was the discipline he had learnt in internal security training that kept him from getting involved with people’s comings and goings. That whole night he hadn’t opened his mouth once. He had just once held his cup out to Ziynet to say “water!” He was a handsome young man with wheat colored skin, and bright eyes. Oya thought that she could have been smitten with Ziynet’s husband. Who knows, maybe Ziynet’s dowry was one of those that had been paraded around on the back of a truck up and down the streets of Adana. While Ziynet didn’t care about a lot of things, she had clapped her hands together playing on the back of the truck, sitting between the calico pillow cases she had sewed, the sateen quilts, and the cotton mattress. Her heartbeat rumbling along with the beat of the drums played by the kids on the truck. Oya loved these dowry trucks that passed in front of her hotel everyday. The boys and girls standing on the back of the truck, dancing to the sound of the drums, to her it represented the joyful face of poverty.

But she was wrong, the dowry trucks had nothing to do with poverty. There were wealthy daughters too among those driving around with their dowries through the neighborhoods. There were daughters whose families owned land in the surrounding villages, shop owners, or at least families who owned their own homes. Adanas’ middle class villagers. If you counted them alongside both the rich and poor in Adana, they all had money enough to deserve participating in weddings, leagues, or circumcisions. These people led a simple, modest life. Poverty was far from their lives, just like it was from Oya’s. Oya knew much better of this type of life than she did of those who led extravagant lives. These traditions weren’t for the streams of poor workers coming into Adana from the dried up wretched regions surrounding it. Ziynet hadn’t loaded her dowry on the back of a truck, nor made a tour of the city: she didn’t have a dowry chest to begin with. For years she had stocked away things in her older sister’s two room house, a few scarves made from calico, a pillow cover, the quilts she had cut out. She had also put garlands on some bedding. The lacework had sown, Ziynet put it all to the side. Besides this, the dowry was made up of gifts bought by her relatives in Maraş, one had given money for a quilt, another had given funds for a spring mattress. Little by little, they were able to afford their own home.

Ziynet was able to make do with the necessary but she wasn’t about to give up on all that she had dreamt for herself. What didn’t remain in her mind?* Zekeriya’s handsomeness wasn’t enough to give up on all of this. The quilt she had seen in the window of the quiltmakers shop in Kurukopru plaza, made from yellow sateen, with each patch lined with different glass beads! With the decorative flowers, the finely cut netting! The nylon tulle! The intricately worked, padded bed covering! She had her heart set on all of it. At least as much as she did on Zekeriya. What Ziynet wouldn’t have done to be able to decorate the bed her bed in these things as a new bride!