Many and Many a Year Ago (2 page)

I liked the fat boy named Nafiz who sat next to me in English lessons. During the breaks he would copy my homework, contributing his own mistakes, in return for which he let me listen to his radio on headphones. When we graduated from primary school he wangled an apprenticeship for me at his uncle's music store. My father was okay with me working as long as he could confiscate half my salary. I woke up happy on those calm summer mornings and ran to the bus stop at the edge of Z.

Cisum Music specialized in classical and world music and had six sleepwalkers for employees. My job was to stand in for whoever was taking his annual vacation. In almost no time I became the mascot of the store. That first season I did everything except wait on customers. I recorded the immortal music of many world-famous musicians, starting with Elvis Presley. Aret, our classical-music man who sported an artificial arm, used to laugh at how I pronounced Engelbert Humperdinck. The real prize of my job, however, was to spend time with the cassette player, which we were forbidden to turn off during business hours. Aret was the first to notice my passion for music. He would say, if Tchaikovsky or Wagner was playing, “Don't turn up your nose, kid. Unless you
get
these guys, you'll never be an authentic music lover.”

It upset me when the boss found fault with everyone's work. “Even the composers on the album covers frown when he shows up,” said Aret. Summoned to the boss's office one day, I was afraid I'd be fired before I could even ask him what the word “authentic” meant. But I wasn't fired. What's more, I got my July salary five days early, and he gave me the good news that I was welcome to work at Cisum the following summer and even during school breaks.

“Kemal, my young friend,” he said, “if you want to earn a few tips in dollars and hear a bit of music played now and then, why don't you drop by my pal Hayri Abi's place this evening?”

It was rumored that our building had been inherited by my boss's elderly Greek wife. I'd been to the second floor many times because we used it as a storeroom. The third floor had a door with a plaque on it in French that nobody could decode; nor did they know why the door was always locked. Whenever various coquettish girls fluttered their way up to “my pal Hayri Abi” on the fourth floor, our boss would veer off up after them. I could never understand why a chorus of giggles then filled the shop.

After sorting out the pop CDs that were squeezed in with the Mozarts, I confronted the heavy door of the Ispilandit Apartments and managed, on my second attempt, to push it half open. Immediately a wave of melancholy music pulled at me like a magnet. Magical violins seemed to be dueling with one other, producing a melody that cascaded down the stairs like a waterfall. I could feel it ease the musty smell catching at my throat. This was how, with my hand moving dubiously toward the doorbell, I met the meaning of my life—baroque music—moments before meeting the hero of my youth, Hayri Abi.

In the five seconds it took him to turn down the volume and unlock the steel door, I had an inkling of the unusual messenger work I was about to be assigned. The imperious long-haired creature that appeared before me was in his thirties. I thought I'd seen his type in the cowboy movies. The only clothing he had on was a pair of red and blue shorts. He brought me apricot juice and I felt that he appreciateed the way I looked around the room in amazement. Even in the movies I'd never seen a room like this, with its gray walls and red floor. I would have been impressed by the stereo, which looked like the skyscrapers you see in cartoons, if it hadn't been for the black guitar on the glass table. When I caught my first glimpse of that noble instrument I realized that what I
really
wanted was to be a musician. But while I could always save up to buy a radio, to buy a guitar I would need a really solid reason.

He had me sit on the bamboo divan. I was to call him “Abi”—“older brother”—and think of him as such. He dropped a tape of Chris Rea in the cassette player. I didn't like it a lot when Hayri Abi began whispering to me about my responsibilities because it sounded like he was giving me orders. But when he called me “Kemo” on my way out, I felt as honored as a bodyguard who has just been given his code name.

I started carrying bags whose contents I knew nothing about to the well-to-do districts of the city every other day, sometimes twice a day. I received a “Bravo” and $5 from Hayri Abi when I brought back the sealed envelopes handed to me by those tense young folk who seemed to relax a bit on seeing me. I memorized the addresses on the lists he gave me and then tore them up. I didn't take the usual taxis. I paid no heed to Aret when he said, “That pimp is making you deliver sex videos.” Hayri Abi laughed and said, “It's just because Aret can't jerk off. Eros took revenge on him by tearing off his right arm.” When he wasn't yelling into the phone in various languages, I would wait impatiently for him to ask, “How about a little concert, Kemo?” The way he played left-handed guitar was amazing, but his repertoire never changed. “I'm going to sing for you the best ten love songs in the world,” he would say. Then he'd close his eyes while he played—“Over the Rainbow”, “Moon River”, “Autumn Leaves” … I often thought of asking Aslı why love songs were all so sad, but I always forgot, maybe because L. was there like a bogeyman to greet me every evening after work.

To keep my father from taking half my earnings, I didn't tell him about my second job. My tips accumulated at Hayri Abi's until they grew into a fund sufficient enough to buy a good radio.

The summer I qualified as a seventh-grader I went back to work at Cisum. Everything was as I had left it. By the next month I had a little three-band radio with headphones. I had never known a happier moment in my life. I decided not to hide the radio from my father. He was as pleased to hear my lie about how I'd bought it secondhand from the neighborhood grocer's delivery boy as the father of a son who's scored his first goal in a football match. At night I used to pray to Aslı not to be upset with me, before falling asleep listening to familiar tunes on unfamiliar stations.

That summer I developed the ability to solve the tabloid crossword puzzles in half an hour and gravitated toward classical jazz. When Hayri Abi proclaimed, “You've got gourmet musical taste,” it was the most meaningful “Bravo” of the first fourteen of my twenty-eight years. “Music is to feel, not to understand,” he'd say. “The structures of genuine music conceal within themselves poetry, narratives, and images that can't be put down on paper.” Perhaps these weren't his own words, I'm not sure.

Even if they wouldn't let me deal with customers, I still wanted to go back to Cisum the summer after I graduated from secondary school, because Hayri Abi had told me that he was going to “orientate me” in classical music. Maybe what added to my excitement was this exotic-sounding word “orientate.” On those nights when we watched videos of symphonies conducted by famous maestros, my father assumed I was working overtime. I closed my eyes as those surly men in penguin suits let the oboe or viola perform solo. Maybe my images failed to reach the heights of dream, but in my foggy way I was inventing plots like those of
The Thousand and One Nights
. Opening my eyes again, I would feel calmer, but those ruthless conductors who could hush twenty wind instruments or start thirty violins whining with a single gesture still frightened me.

Then I'd head home on city buses filled with workers returning from the night shift. I wondered whether to reflect on the fact that those poor souls would die without ever hearing the name Vivaldi was just something to bolster my ego. I was never satisfied with the Bach overtures I tried to whistle on the walk home from the bus stop. It came as no surprise that, while I was lost in my fantasies of directing the Berlin Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Aslı abandoned me.

Hayri Abi had gradually grown more nervous. Though I wasn't making deliveries anymore, he still gave me $5 tips, which I was slightly reluctant to accept. At the beginning of August Aunt Ikbal sent me to England to attend a three-week language course. When Hayri Abi heard that I was going to Bournemouth he said, “That's like going to Siirt instead of Istanbul to learn Turkish.” If the school administrators hadn't taken us to London on our first weekend I would never have realized that I was abroad. I complained to my father that the plane home hadn't produced any “authentic” music, but he just replied, “Beautiful melodies can only be felt by airplane pilots and Rumi's grandchildren.”

I went directly to Cisum to distribute ballpoint pens with “London” and “Bournemouth” printed on them. Then I planned to see Hayri Abi and give him the CD of Vladimir Horowitz's latest concert. The shop was silent. Aret, who was talking on the phone, lifted his artificial arm and beckoned me over. He wore an irritatingly cynical expression on his face as he dug out of his drawer the third page of a yellowing newspaper and showed it to me. “Gang Selling Drugs to Youth Nabbed,” said the headline. When I saw this, and the name Hayri Tamer just below, it was as if the notes of “Sleeping Beauty” had turned into arrows to pierce my brain one by one. I was afraid to close my eyes for fear I wouldn't be able to open them again. I ran out of the shop because I didn't want them to see me burst into tears. I remember walking without stopping until I reached home. That night in my dreams I saw myself conducting, with great difficulty, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in “Swan Lake.” I suspected Aslı was laughing and crying at the same time.

I didn't have the heart to give up the radio that I'd acquired with my tips from Hayri Abi, so I sentenced myself not to listen to music for a month. My relations with certain people in the neighborhood seemed about to cool off. I knew they were irritated by my trip to England. If they happened to hear that I'd started listening to classical music too, I might have been in for the “gay treatment.” So as not to be excommunicated I decided to be one of them until school started up again.

I'd forgotten that I'd sat the entrance exam to H. High School on the Asian side of the city, a state-run boarding school, but in early September the news came that I'd won a scholarship. Even my mother rejoiced. The first time I walked into the building I thought it was like a jail, then a dead whale.

“Starting high school is the second step to manhood,” my father declared (the first being circumcision).

I shared my dormitory room with forty boys who came from districts of the city that I'd never heard of, as well as from neighboring towns. The first night, as though it would identify the traitors amongst us, we all asked each other what our fathers did. When my turn came, even
I
could barely hear myself whisper that he was a municipal bureaucrat. I was studious and disciplined and could never get along with the country yokels who thought that being in a boarding school was synonymous with being on holiday. On a scale from “Gnat” to “Bastard,” the nickname they chose for me—“Çakır,” “Blue” (because of the color of my eyes, I suppose)—didn't bother me. My mature attitude in comparison to my classmates' was put down to my military ancestry by my weary and ignorant-of-Mozart teachers.

I began preparing for university entrance exams in tenth grade. In order to get an Air Force Academy interview one had to come within the top ten percent of the million or so who took the exam. This I was reminded of repeatedly on weekends when I was home. I was pleased with how my ambition soared whenever my classmates, who were looking for the easiest possible schools, made fun of my hard work. Elgar's concertos offered me moral support as I struggled with science. With the exam looming, my father, who had managed to procure a list of questions asked by interviewers over the past five years, warned me continually to keep my eyes healthy. He had heard, I don't know where, that they were the most important item on the health checklist. “Work hard but don't let anything happen to your eyes!” he'd say.

As it happened, I was in the upper two percent and sailed through the physical and psychological exams without a hitch. When the interview results came in I was duly accepted by the Air Force Academy as their second-best candidate.

I thought it was a joke, at first, when they told me I'd be sharing a room with four other guys. My roommates were from the countryside, sons of government officials. You couldn't say that we had much in common other than having had English prep classes. I didn't really expect them to defer to me as their leader simply because I was the tallest, or came from Istanbul, but I enjoyed their panic when they discovered my passion for classical music. Weekends when I came home my father would finger the white braid on my jacket respectfully, and before I changed clothes we would stroll through the market together. It was embarrassing watching him walk two steps ahead of me, nose in the air, hands behind his back thumbing his prayer beads. But I couldn't help smiling at the disheveled greetings accorded us by the shopkeepers who thought that not jumping to their feet would be disrespectful to the Armed Forces.

The military-school way of life soon became mine. Like the works of Bach, the system was shored up by mathematical principles. I soon learnt that the friend of a person with goals was “discipline.” Only six of the 250 students were girls, and those of us who didn't fall in love with Gülay were considered perverts. I flirted for a while with Asu, a second-year student at the nearby sports academy. She was surprised when I broke up with her for saying “Yo dude” all the time. After a while civilian life began to look strange to me. The
lumpen
who obeyed traffic laws whenever it suited them and had no idea how to navigate shopping malls infuriated me—especially those whose boom-boxes constantly blared. My belief was that by choosing to be an officer and taking refuge in classical music, I had rescued myself from the city's chaos and superficiality.