Silent House (12 page)

She didn’t stop at the beach but kept on going uphill. I could guess now who was waiting for her. Maybe you’ll get in his car, maybe he has a boat: wondering which one he was, I kept following you, because I knew you were no different from the others.

She vanished into the grocery store. There was a kid selling ice cream in front of the store; since I knew the little guy, I waited a bit at a distance so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea. I don’t like sucking up to rich people.

A little later Nilgün came out, but instead of continuing on, she
started walking the way she had come, straight toward me. I quickly turned and bent down, making as if to tie my shoelace. She came closer and closer with her package in hand, and when she looked at me, I was embarrassed.

“Hello,” I said as I got up.

“Hello, Hasan,” she said. “How are you?” She paused. “We saw you yesterday on the road. My brother recognized you. You’ve grown up, you’ve really changed. What are you doing?” She paused again. “You still live up above there, your uncle said, your father’s in the lottery.” She was quiet again. “Well, what are you up to, tell me, what year are you in?”

“Me?” I said. “I’m taking this year off,” I finally managed to say.

“What?”

“Are you going to the beach, Nilgün?”

“No,” she said, “I’m coming from the grocery. We took my grandmother to the cemetery. She was a little affected by the heat, I think. I got some cologne.”

“So you’re not going to the beach,” I said.

“It’s really crowded,” she said. “I’ll go early in the morning, when nobody’s there.”

We were silent for a bit. Then she smiled and I laughed and noticed how her face looked different from what I’d imagined looking at it from a distance. Also, I was sweating like a jerk. She said it was the heat. I was quiet. She took a step.

“Well, okay,” she said. “Say hello to your father, okay?”

She put out her hand and we shook. Her hand was soft and light. I was embarrassed because mine was sweaty.

“Bye!” I said.

I didn’t watch her go on her way. I walked off like someone who had something important to do.

A
fter we got back from the cemetery, Grandmother ate dinner with us downstairs, then began to feel unwell. Nilgün and I were laughing, and she gave us a really dirty look before her head slumped down on her chest. We took her by the arm, brought her upstairs to bed, and put some of the cologne Nilgün had bought on her wrists and temples. Then I went to my room to have my first after-dinner cigarette. After we realized that there was nothing seriously wrong with Grandmother, I got into the Anadol, which in the sun had gotten hot as an oven. Instead of the main road, I took the Darica road, which had been carefully asphalted very recently. I remembered some of the cherry and fig trees. Recep and I used to come around this as kids, supposedly to hunt crows, or just for a walk. That structure I was imagining had been a caravanserai must be farther down. There were new neighborhoods on the hills, and more being built. But I didn’t see anything new in Darica: just that ten-year-old statue of Atatürk!

In Gebze I went straight to the district office. The district administrator had changed. Two years ago there was a man at this table who
was tired of life; now there was a young fellow who gestured with his arms when he spoke. Winning him over hadn’t even required showing him, as I’d planned to, my thesis, recently published by the faculty, or informing him that I had already done research in the district archives many times before or that my late father had been a district administrator. No, he simply sent me off right away with a man whom he summoned. The man and I looked for Riza, whom I knew from my earlier visit, but as he had apparently stepped away to visit the dispensary, I decided to walk around in the market until he came back.

I followed a tight passage overhung with berry bushes, going downhill into the market. The streets were empty, except for a dog wandering on the pavement and a man mounting an Aygaz propane tank at the blacksmith’s. I turned without looking into the stationer’s window, before walking on, sheltering in the narrow shadows of the shop fronts until the mosque appeared. After backtracking a bit, I sat under the plane tree in the little square, had a tea to stay alert, and, trying to ignore the heat, half listened to the sound of the radio coming from the coffeehouse, pleased that no one was paying any attention to me.

When I got back to the district office Riza had returned and expressed pleasure to see me. While he sought out the key, I had to write out a request. We went downstairs together. When he opened the door, I instantly recalled the smell of mildew, dust, and damp. We chatted a little as he dusted the old table and chair before leaving me to my work.

There wasn’t actually very much in the Gebze archives. What there was dated from a short time that very few people knew or cared about, when the town had been the local seat. The great majority of documents from that period had been sent to Izmit, then called Iznikmit. Left behind were forgotten decrees, deed registries, court records, all in boxes and registers piled up on top of one another, collecting dust.

Thirty years ago, a devoted high school history teacher animated
by the bureaucratic nationalism peculiar to those years had tried to put the Ottoman documents in some kind of order but gave up. Two years ago, I decided to take up where he’d left off, but I was defeated in a week. To be an archivist requires an even more humble and generous spirit than to be a historian. In our day, those willing to get a little ink on their fingers and possessed of the necessary humility are few and far between. The devoted teacher had no such humility and immediately got the idea of doing a book to profit from his hours in the archives. In the days when I was fighting incessantly with Selma, I remember enjoying a beer while reading this book in which the teacher recounted his own life and that of his friends as well as those of the famous people and historic buildings of Gebze. When I mentioned this book to some of my colleagues on the faculty, they all gave the same response: No, it was impossible that documents for such an undertaking could exist in Gebze! I was silent while they proved to me that there couldn’t even be archives in Gebze.

It was more pleasurable to work in a place that the experts said didn’t exist than to scrounge with my jealous colleagues in the archives of the prime minister’s office. I enjoyed the smell and feel of the yellowed, mildewed, wrinkled pieces of paper. As I read them, I felt as though I could see the people who had written them and those whose lives were somehow affected by these documents. Perhaps I had come to the archives just for this pleasure, and not to follow the trail of the plague that I thought I had picked up last year. As one reads through the faded piles of papers, they gradually begin to separate from one another. Just as, after a long sea journey, an all-oppressing fog suddenly lifts to reveal with astonishing clarity every tree, stone, and bird on a stretch of shore, so, too, as I read on, from individual pages, the millions of lives and stories jumbled together suddenly took discrete form in my mind. Then I became
quite happy, deciding that this is history, this colorful vital thing that is coming alive in my mind. If I had to say what it is more exactly, I couldn’t. A little later, anyway, it disappears, leaving only a strange taste behind.

While reading a court record I thought, Maybe I can recapture this sensation by transcribing what I’m reading. I started to write in my notebook. Someone named Celal claims that Mehmet has cussed at him: “You son of a bitch!” But Mehmet denied it before the judge. Celal, who testifies, “He did say it,” has two witnesses, Hasan and Kasim. The judge calls Mehmet to deny it under oath, but Mehmet can’t. The date was erased, I couldn’t write it down. Then I read of somebody called Hamza who appointed a certain Abdi as his executor, and I wrote that down. I also made a note that a Russian slave named Dimitri had been caught. The owner was one Veli Bey from Tuzla, and they decided to return Dimitri to him. I read about what happened to the shepherd Yusuf who was imprisoned after losing a cow. He had neither sold nor slaughtered the cow. He just lost it. His brother Ramazan posted bail and Yusuf was released. Then I read a decree. For some reason, it was ordered that some ships laden with wheat should go directly to Istanbul without docking in Gebze, Tuzla, or Eskihisar. Someone called Ibrahim had said, “If I don’t go to Istanbul, let my wife be considered a divorced woman,” and when he didn’t go to Istanbul, it was so argued. Ibrahim later attested that he hadn’t gone to Istanbul but that he would, though he hadn’t specified a time in his oath. Looking over the amounts in
akçe
in the ledger entries, I tried to figure out some of the rents that had been paid to the comptroller, but I couldn’t determine an exact figure. At the same time, I copied down in my notebook the annual income from a large number of mills, orchards, gardens, and olive groves, feeling I could actually see them, though I was probably just fooling myself.

When I went outside for a cigarette in the corridor, I realized that instead of following up on the plague that I had come across last year, I could actually pursue any story I wanted. What kind of story it should be? From the window at the end of the corridor, I could see the wall of a house behind the district office building; a truck standing in front of the wall made you wonder what was going on in there. I snuffed my cigarette butt in the sand of the red fire bucket and went back inside.

A complaint had been lodged by someone named Ethem against a certain Kasim. While Ethem was not at home, Kasim had gone to his house and spoken roughly with his family. Kasim did not deny having gone but said he had just been by to eat
gözleme
and take his portion of oil. Another pair was involved in a case because one had yanked the other’s beard. I wrote down the names of two women, Kevser and Kezban, who were engaging in prostitution; the plaintiffs wanted them removed from the neighborhood. Then I read Ali’s testimony that Kevser had engaged in this kind of activity before. A certain Satilmis was owed a debt of twenty-two gold pieces by Kalender, but Kalender denied the debt.

I wrote down these things as well: A boy named Muharrem had left home to go read the Koran, when his father, Resul, caught him with a young man, also named Resul. Claiming that Resul had seduced his son, the father demanded an investigation. Resul said that Muharrem had come to him of his own will, that the two had gone together to the mill, whereupon Muharrem had gone off to gather figs and lost himself in the gardens. After I put the date in my notebook, I thought about what it must have been like, some four hundred years ago, to be the figs in a boy’s fancy or to be Resul imagining the boy imagining the figs. Then I read and wrote down the orders to capture a cavalry soldier who had turned to banditry, to close all taverns immediately and bring wine drinkers to justice: thefts, business disagreements, outlaws, marriages, and divorces … What use could these stories be? I was so engrossed I didn’t even think about going out into the corridor to smoke a cigarette. Ignoring the fact that the stories had to have some use, I was copying a huge mass of figures and words related to meat when my eye happened on an investigation of a dead body found in the stone quarries. The workers were interrogated, pressed one by one to explain what they had been doing that day. For the first time I felt I could really envision that twenty-third of Recep 1028 (which the West had lived as the sixth of July 1619), and I was quite pleased. I thought a cigarette might complement my good mood, but I held myself back and copied everything I had
read exactly into my notebook. By the time I was done, the sun was lower in the sky and now visible at the edge of the basement window. I would have gladly agreed to spend my whole life in that cool basement if only three square meals could be brought at appropriate intervals, as well as a pack of cigarettes and in the evening a little
raki
left by the door. There were enough stories among those pieces of paper to last a lifetime, and these stories would lift the fog obscuring the patch of earth I had alighted on. Just the thought swelled my confidence in myself and in my work. Then like a good and responsible student, I counted up the number of pages I had written: exactly nine! I decided that I deserved to go home and have a drink.