Silent House (32 page)

I understood and I was frightened; I continued listening to what he said as he pounded on the door frame begging tearfully, and I remained silent. A little later, he went into his room weeping, and I was astonished to hear so soon afterward that deep, peaceful, drunken snoring of his, and I stayed up thinking until dawn. It was snowing. I was staring out the window. The next morning at breakfast he told me exactly what I had already guessed.

That woman was serving us, when suddenly, just as the dwarf does now, she went off, down to the kitchen, as if she’d had her fill of serving, and Selâhattin whispered, You call them bastards, but they’re human beings like any others, he said in a voice so incredibly soft and polite, as if he were telling me some secret or pleading with me for something: The poor boys, they’re shivering in that shack, and they’re so little, one of them is just two, the other barely three, Fatma, I’ve made my decision, I’m going to settle them with their mother here in this house! That little room is too small now. I’ll put them in the room next door. Don’t forget, in the end they’re my children. Please don’t oppose this with your foolish beliefs! I listened and I said nothing. When I came down for lunch he said it again, this time in a loud, forceful voice, and he added: I can no longer have them sleeping on
the floor wrapped in those rags for blankets … Tomorrow when I go do the monthly shopping in Gebze … So, I thought, he’s going to Gebze tomorrow! Then in the afternoon I thought: Maybe at dinner he’ll say that we’re all going to sit together at the table from now on. Because doesn’t he say that we’re all equal? But he didn’t say it. He drank his
raki
, reminded me that he would be going to Gebze in the morning, and without pause rose from the table and went off. I ran upstairs right away and from the back room watched him from behind: March off, Satan, swaying over the snow sparkling in the moonlight toward the sinful light of the shack, tomorrow you’ll see! I stared at the snowy garden with one eye on that dim light, so ugly, of the shack’s lamp until he returned. When he did, this time he came to my room and said: Don’t put too much faith in the fact that for the past two years the law would have required a court case for me to divorce you and that I couldn’t have taken a second wife even if I’d wanted to! There’s nothing left between us but that ridiculous contract called marriage, Fatma! Anyway, according to the conditions of that agreement, when we made it under Ottoman law, I could have divorced you anytime with just two words, or taken another wife as well, but I simply didn’t feel the need. Do you understand? He went on talking some more, and I listened, until he said once more that he was going to Gebze in the morning and went off to bed.

But enough, Fatma, don’t think anymore! I felt myself perspiring under the quilt. Then it occurred to me: Could the dwarf be telling them? Did you know that your grandmother used to come at us with that cane in her hand …!

I pulled the quilt over my head, but I still heard the noise from the beach, and I said to myself, Now I realize how nice those lonely winter nights were, when I had the silence of the night all to myself, when everything was stone still, I pressed my ear into the soft darkness of the pillow, I imagined that deep lonely silence of the world, as though it were coming from outside of time, the world was making itself known to me from under the pillow: Selâhattin went to Gebze the next day. The day of judgment seemed so far off back then! I was
all by myself in the house. How far away they were, the bodies that didn’t decay even in the tomb! As I’d decided, I picked up my cane, went downstairs and out into the snowy garden. Making tracks in the melting snow I walked quickly over to the nest of sin that devil called the shack. They were still far off, the bats, the rattlesnakes, the skeletons, so far away! I got to the shack, knocked at the door, waited a little, and the wretched simple woman, the foolish servant, opened the door. I pushed my way in, So these are your bastards, she even tried to restrain my hand! Please don’t,
hanimefendi
, please don’t, what wrong have the children done? Hit me instead of them,
hanimefendi
, what sin have they committed? Oh God, children, run, run! They couldn’t run away! Rotten little bastards! They couldn’t run away and I hit them and—What? You dare to raise your hand to me? So I hit their mother, too, and when she tried to hit me back I hit her even more, and in the end, Selâhattin, it was that woman you said was so hardworking and sturdy, she was the one who crumbled, not I! Then I looked around inside that disgusting nest of sin that you planted at the foot of the garden as I listened to the sounds of your bastards crying. Wooden spoons, tin knives, the chipped and broken dishes from my mother’s sets, and look, Fatma, all those things that you thought were lost are here and in fine shape, the trunks serving as tables, rags, cloth remnants, stovepipes, bedding mats laid on the floor, newspaper stuffed under the door and window frames, oh God, what sickening piles of stained rags, heaps of paper, burnt matches, a broken table, scraps of wood in emptied tin cans, overturned old chairs, clothespins, empty
raki
and wine bottles, bits of broken glass on the floor, dear God, and those bastards continuing to wail, I was sickened, and when Selâhattin returned that evening he shed a few tears, and ten days later he bundled them off to the village far away.

Fine, Fatma, as you wish, but what you did was inhuman, you broke the little one’s leg, I don’t know what you did to the big one, he’s bruised all over and acts like he’s suffered a stroke. I’ll put up with all of this but only for the sake of my encyclopedia, sending
them off this way, I’ve found a poor old man who is willing to adopt them in exchange for a goodly sum. I’ll have to call Avram the jeweler again soon, well, what can we do, the price of our sins, okay, fine, fine, don’t start that again, you’ve committed no sins, for the price of my sins, then, only from now on don’t ask me why I drink so much, leave me in peace, you go work in your empty kitchen, I’m going upstairs to write the entry on infinity and clocks now, before you bring out any more of my demons, go lock yourself in your room, get into your cold bed, lie there all night like a little owl, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep.

I’m still lying here and I still can’t sleep. When night comes and I’m all alone, then I’ll breathe in the scent of these things, taste them, touch them with my hand, and I’ll think: The water, the pitcher, the keys, the handkerchief, the peach, the cologne, the plate, the table, the clock … They all sit there, just like me, all around me in the quiet emptiness, they creak, they rattle, in the silence of the night, they seem to be purifying themselves of sin, of guilt. It’s then, at night, that time is truly time, and all the objects come closer to me, just as I come closer to myself.

I
n my dream, an old man in a cape was twirling around me and shouting, “Faruk, Faruk!” I gathered he was going to tell me the secret of history, but he was dragging things out to the point that I couldn’t bear the anticipation anymore, and I woke up drenched in sweat. I could hear the noise from the beach now, the sounds of the cars and motorboats coming from over by the garden gate. The long afternoon nap had done no good: I was still exhausted.

I went downstairs and into the kitchen, and as I grabbed hold of the refrigerator door handle in my habitual way, I felt that same sense of anticipation, as if something would happen in my life, something, whatever it was, that would make me forget about the archives, those stories, and history. Opening the door, I looked into the fridge’s gleaming interior as if peering into a jeweler’s window: the sight of the pitchers, bottles in different colors, tomatoes, eggs, cherries, somehow beguiled me and made me forget my cares. But they also seemed to say: No, you can’t be distracted by us anymore; you must find consolation by renouncing the pleasures of the world
and cutting yourself off from it. And I wondered: Should I be like my grandfather, like my father, and abandon everything and shut myself up here, go every day to Gebze and sit at the desk devoting myself to a single work, a composition of millions of words, with no beginning and no end? Should I do all that not to change the world but merely to describe how things are?

The cool wind had picked up. The clouds had drawn closer, too. There was going to be a
lodos
, the strong southerly wind. Seeing Recep’s closed shutters, I concluded he must be asleep in his room. Nilgün was sitting over by the chicken coop with her sandals off, pressing her bare feet against the earth. I wandered around in the garden for a bit, playing with the well and the pump a little, like a bored child, remembering my adolescence. When I started thinking about my wife again, I went upstairs, turned into my room, and randomly opened a volume of Evliya Çelebi’s travels, reading whatever caught my eye.

He was telling of a trip through Western Anatolia in the mid-seventeenth century: he described Akhisar, the town of Marmara, then a small village, and the hot springs of the town. The waters of the hot spring coated a person’s skin like wax and were supposed to be good for leprosy if one drank of them for forty days. Then I read how he’d had one of the pools repaired and cleaned, bathing in it with great pleasure. I reread this part and rather envied Evliya for being able to enjoy himself with no feeling of guilt or sin; I wished I could put myself in his place. He had the date of restoration inscribed on one of the columns around the pool. Later, he went through Gediz on horseback. He wrote of all these things without pause, in an easy and assured rhythm, with the relentless enthusiasm of a drummer striking his instrument in the
mehter
military band. I closed the book and thought about how he was able to do this, how he could match so nicely what he’d done with what he wrote and how he managed to see himself from the outside, as though looking at someone else. If I tried to do the same thing, for example, and tell my friend these things in a letter, it wouldn’t be nearly as clear or as genial: I’d be intruding
myself into things; my confused and guilty mind would cast a veil over the naked reality of everything. What I’d wind up doing and what I’d intended, the things as they are and my judgments of them, they would all get mixed up together, and no matter how painstakingly I pressed my nose against the surfaces of things, I’d never be able to establish as direct and true a relationship as Evliya had.

I opened the book and read some more, about the city of Turgutlu, the city of Nif, and Ulucakli and a nice evening spent there: “We pitched our tents alongside an excellent spring, got ourselves a nice fat lamb, and without a worry or a care, we made kebabs and ate them.” And so: pleasure and good cheer rendered as plain and simple as the natural world. The world is a place to be described and experienced as it is, usually with equanimity, occasionally with gusto or as something bittersweet; but it’s not a place for finding fault or cause for anger while you’re in it.

Maybe sly Evliya was only fooling his readers. Maybe he was actually someone not unlike me except he knew how to write well, an able liar: maybe he sees the trees and birds, houses and walls, no differently than I do, but he can
trick you with his literary skill. I couldn’t convince myself one way or the other, but after reading a little more, I decided this was no case of skill alone but rather of intuition and an open mind. Evliya’s awareness of the world, the trees, houses, and people, was utterly different from ours. Then I wondered how this could be, how could Evliya’s mind have developed this way. After I drink a lot and feel really sorry for myself, thinking about my wife, I sometimes call out desperately for someone or something, as if trapped in a nightmare that I can’t wake up from and escape. It was with that sort of despair that I was now asking my question: Can’t I be like him, can’t I make my thoughts, the structure of my brain, like his? Couldn’t I portray the world from start to finish with the same clarity as he does?

I closed the book and tossed it aside. I cheered myself by saying there was no reason I couldn’t do it, or at least devote my life to this ideal with real determination. I could start as he did by describing
the world and history from whatever point I first encountered each particular part of it. It would just be a matter of lining up the facts, as he does when he tells who had so many
akçe
in Manisa, so many fiefs, so many
timar
holdings, so many troops. All these details are just sitting in the archives anyway, waiting for me. I could transcribe those documents with the same ease that Evliya talked about buildings, traditions, and customs. And I could present them without inserting my own judgments at all, just as he does. I’d add only telling details, as when he tells us some mosque was covered with tiles or with lead. That way, my history would be nothing more than a seamless picture of things, just like Evliya’s voluminous travels. Secure in this knowledge, I could interrupt my endless succession of facts once in a while, as he does, to acknowledge that there are other things in the world and so I’d write at the head of a page