Songs My Mother Never Taught Me Read online

  SELÇUK ALTUN

  SONGS MY MOTHER NEVER TAUGHT ME

  Translated from Turkish by

  Ruth Christie and Selçuk Berilgen

  TELEGRAM

  eISBN: 978-1-84659-110-5

  First published in Turkish as Annemin Öğretmediği Şarkılar

  by Sel Yayincilik, Istanbul, Turkey

  First English translation published by Telegram, 2008

  This eBook edition published 2011

  Copyright © Selçuk Altun, 2008 and 2011

  English translation copyright © Ruth Christie, 2008 and 2011

  The right of Selçuk Altun to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full cip record for this book is available from the British Library.

  A full cip record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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  A

  My mother, the most fearless woman I’d ever known, had succumbed to cancer. After seven weeks in the hospital so charmingly named after Florence Nightingale, she died. Her final words before entering Intensive Care had been, ‘They say the best döner kebab house in Istanbul is on the street to the right of this building. Go and try it, Arda ...’

  To anyone reading the script on my parents’ headstone, which was on the plot next to the poet Oktay Rifat, they might have seemed like father and daughter:

  Prof. Dr. Mürsel Kemal Ergenekon (1928–1991)

  Prof. Dr. Ada Ergenekon (1950–2003)

  I waited seven days before breaking up with Jale, queen of dilemmas, who compared herself to the film star Julia Roberts and was a sociology student at an American university with an absurd name. Liberated from this wealthy girl I’d got engaged to merely to please my mother, I was savouring belated pride like a high-school student heading to a brothel for the first time.

  In the Ottoman mansion where I’ve lived as its heir, guest, prisoner, and now master, I enjoy the excitement of not knowing how many days or years I’ll remain. For İfakat’s sake – the tireless servant of a tired old building who’d swallow a stale prostate pill so it wouldn’t be wasted – I haven’t taken refuge in my apartment at the top of a skyscraper in central but quiet Şişli. As the shutters’ futile struggle with the south wind ends, the morning ezan begins. I wait patiently in the drawing room, surrounded by bronze statuettes. When the prayer ends the wind will assail again. My left hand enjoys shaking cigar ash onto the silk carpet, and I realize I’ve forgotten what kind of drink is in my right. At the funeral service attended by the élite of the city I had murmured lines from Küçük İskender’s Rock Manifesto,1 and now I can hum that cruel tirade until I pass out in the dim morning hours. Today I am twenty-seven years old. And the only gift I desire is the ecstasy of being liberated from my mother and my fiancée.

  1 Smear me with eczema, Mother! O Mother, sell me a sedative! Buy me a treasure map! Hire me a warning siren; give me back my umbilical cord, Mother; warm me milk and menstrual blood and cook me rakı; bring me up dissolute; offer me so many hormones and enzymes! Bite me, Bitch-Mother! Be the bass-guitarist to the Iron Maiden. Go and train in guerrilla warfare and take to the mountains! Start a firing squad for shooting rows of children! Grow up, Mother, and leave my penis in peace! With it I’ll ensure credit from the sperm banks!

  B

  According to Ebu Musa el-Eş’ari, Our Lord the Prophet has announced:

  ‘On the Day of Judgement Muslims will come laden with sins and Allah will still forgive them.’

  Today your humble servant Bedirhan Öztürk is thirty-seven years old! Instead of buying myself a birthday present I’ve come to a crucial decision. God willing, I’m going to break away from the business I’ve undertaken so patiently for the last twelve years.

  Please don’t let the fact that I’m a hired killer alarm you. My mission was limited to those who’d committed deadly crimes, particularly against our religion, and dared to hide in the cracks of our system of justice and security. God knows I haven’t taken more than two lives a year.

  And in a country where it is claimed that for every 100 lira paid in tax 225 lira are lost through tax evasion, I donate a fortieth of my income to the orphans and the fatherless.

  When I first took up with the trade I was warned that it was hard to enter the world of bullets but even harder to get out. A revolting individual (who goes by the name of Baybora) would pass on the Head Executioner’s orders to me.

  ‘Don’t even think about early retirement! You’d have to take out the Boss first,’ he’d threaten.

  I’ve never even heard our Master’s voice, let alone seen his face.

  But retirement will come to pass, by the grace of God! Listening reverently to the evening ezan and eating my blessed pomegranate, I’ll say my prayers and go to sleep, if you’ll allow me. I’m sure you’ve already begun to realize that your humble servant is no ordinary gun-toting operator.

  A

  How often my mother had boasted that there couldn’t be any mansion more elevated than ours, or with a better view of Istanbul. I used to trace the panoramic mosaic of the city, square by square, and the strategic points that seemed to be waiting their turn for a march past of history. Despite the barricade of mist, a Byzantine residue, I would flirt with the towers of Topkapı Palace, and when a lazy breeze drifted over the stone wall it would carry a fresh smell of garden herbs into the drawing room and die away in a sigh.

  She said she chose Çamlıca, which draws the morning ezan from the 3,000 city mosques like a magnet, because ‘there’s no neighbourhood left that hasn’t lost its flavour’. She made her father buy her a wedding present of the Ottoman mansion with its symmetrical façade and ornate carvings.

  ‘As soon as I saw Mürsel I was determined to have him as my lord and master,’ she would eagerly confide. ‘As he walked around the campus biting his lower lip, hands in the pockets of his crumpled trousers, even the left-wing girl students trembled. He played hard to get alright, but those condescending little smiles of his were enough to charm people, and despite his oily hair and his unseemly scratching at certain organs, even the women cleaners admired him ...’

  Unfortunately my mother was an attractive woman with her abundant blonde hair, eyes blue as the sea, her turned-up nose and her shapely figure. I thought that even the street dogs would stop and stare as she walked by. When we went to the market together I wanted my toy gun to zap all those shabby men whose eyes were glued to her.

  I mustn’t enter into the flirtatious details of how she brought her husband to the boil. But while my father was busy divorcing ‘the barren first wife whose teaching diploma no one had ever seen’ and whom he had married ‘under orders from his aunt’, I can just whisper how Tilda Taragano changed her name and religion to gain access to her lord and master.

  My mother’s father, Izak Taragano, was a Sephardic Jew. While studying law at the University of Geneva, he fell in love at first sight with Anna, a student who was taller tha
n him. For twenty-seven months he begged his mother for permission to marry the attractive girl who was a philosophy student from Stockholm and the daughter of a couple of Christian atheist academics. On 7 April 1947, the day when Henry Ford, founder of the motor industry died, my grandmother gave birth to a paralysed male child, and her neurotic mother-in-law grumbled, ‘The cold-eyed Viking dybbuk’.1

  My uncle Salvador dragged his left leg from the hip as he walked. I never saw such a saintly person.

  My mother and Princess Anne of Great Britain were ‘privileged’ to be born on 15 August 1950, under ‘the sign of Leo’. She was named Tilda, after the wife of the eminent writer Yaşar Kemal, my grandmother’s confidante. When she was little, my mother was headstrong and greedy, but pretty as a doll, and she became the family mascot, beloved by her father’s mother who called her ‘the dybbuk fawn’. She graduated from the American Girls’ College at Üsküdar, second in the whole school, and was steered in the direction of Brandeis, the favoured university of young Jewish girls, by Tilda Kemal. While my father was professor in the Mathematics department of Boğaziçi University, she was studying for her doctorate in the department of English Language and Literature. I was seven years old when they bought me a bicycle because I could rattle off the title of her thesis, ‘The Indirect Influence of Elias Canetti in the Novels of Iris Murdoch’. She was preparing this under the supervision of Professor Oya Başak, one of the rare academics she considered important. The family did not approve of her marriage to a professor who was old, a widower and a Muslim, but raised no objection, realizing it would fall on deaf ears.

  When I was still a baby crawling on all fours, my grandmother died of cancer. Whenever I look at her photograph on the birchwood coffee table in our drawing room I note with surprise how much she resembles my mother on her deathbed.

  After her death my grandfather and uncle found themselves within my mother’s orbit once again.

  My mother’s womb was torn at my birth and had to be removed. I thought she was subconsciously taking her revenge by imprisoning me in her palace of detention.

  (I felt proud if, in a dream, I said, ‘Hey, Mother, how come you never noticed how you shoved the son you worried about so much into such a vortex of distress?’) I was as shy and docile as a prince and heir apparent in exile. I was wealthy but captive in the midst of decisions and vetoes made in my name.

  My mother didn’t stop at deciding which toy I should play with and when; she forbade me to have friends. ‘I can be much funnier than them, Arda,’ she would say with feeling. And I was bewitched by the fantastic stories she whispered. The modulations of her magical voice, her artificial chuckle and threatening eye movements took over my life. On the two half-days she went to the university she was happy if I cried when she left. Apparently as the garden gate closed behind the huge Mercedes, I beat at İfakat’s huge breasts and bit her snow-white arms neurotically.

  When I was in the second year of my primary school the driver of the school minibus was sacked for scolding me. The following year a bad-tempered teacher who tried to punish me for an April Fool joke that he didn’t appreciate was banished to a distant village. In the preparatory class at Robert College a young thug pinched my cheek, jeering that I was prettier than a girl, and I knew that next day he would get a beating from Hayrullah our driver and his twin. Then Seydo the neighbourhood bully, who didn’t know what he was letting himself in for, bellowed after me, ‘Secret Jew’, and was thrashed to a pulp, his father’s dried-fruit store reduced to dust and ashes, and his family forced to leave Çamlıca.

  On Sunday evenings our family would trot off to a Bosphorus fish restaurant. While my mother chatted with the hoi polloi at the next table, I fed the resident cat seabass in Soy sauce, and I never let the evening pass without boasting that my mother could make me walk on water if I asked her.

  My mother always addressed her husband as ‘my Hodja’, a respectful form of address to a senior teacher. He was one of the twentieth century’s leading mathematicians, ‘unmatched in Graph Theory’ according to his former student and the bibliophile Professor Haluk Oral, whom I met after my father’s death. My father published in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory but his timidity (and fear of flying) led him to refuse offers of guest professorships and participations in international conferences. I think my mother devoted herself to publicizing my father’s genius. I was torn: should I be jealous of her exaggerated interest in my father or feel sorry for him? Every time she whispered in my ear, ‘You’re very fortunate to be the son of a genius,’ I would repeat my vow that I would never be a genius when I grew up. When my father became eligible for retirement and, thanks to his wife, rose to the ranks of the rich, he left his job immediately.

  ‘An all-out war against the socio-economic defect of shallowness that sticks to this country like tar,’ was the Hodja’s new mission. My mother whispered it distinctly in my ear, and promised me a prize of $100 for repeating it without a mistake. Reverently she said, ‘Arda, your father is a genius and a man of eminence. From now on, he will mobilize all his abilities for this grand project.’

  The structure of our nuclear family life was determined by the tempo of my father’s activities. It took order to the nth degree. I felt ill at ease every time he emerged from his soulless study to join us. As the creaky old door of the living room opened, my mother would jump up to push the velvet pouffe in front of his antique armchair. Baroque music was set up on the hi-fi and, while his drink was being prepared, he remained silent. Unnecessary or perhaps trivial subjects would be rejected and a new agenda respectfully anticipated.

  ‘Enigma’, the silent hairdresser, came to our mansion when our master’s hair grew too long. Fabrics chosen by my mother were made into suits and if the head tailor of Zegna’s was in town he would drop by for fittings. On holidays celebrating the Republic my mother and I took off for London and went to concerts and plays. She grumbled at having to shop in Harrods and in Bond Street boutiques for the husband who couldn’t or wouldn’t join us for fear of flying. If religious holidays coincided with spring our family took a trip to Venice. Walking rapidly through the time-warp streets of this solitary city, bridge after bridge, my father, if he wasn’t solving equations, would be composing theorems. We stayed at the Bauer Hotel, the secluded palace in St Mark’s Square; if Cimador, Dragonetti, Lorenzetti or Bottesini were being performed, we would stroll to the charming Church of San Vitale. (How is it I recall these marginal composers of classical music in whom my mother feigned an interest because my father had such a passion for them? Ever since I was seven I haven’t forgotten a single name I’ve read. My father’s cheap display of genius was due to his ability to multiply five-digit numbers in his head with the speed of a computer. I don’t know if anyone else can do this, but ever since I got the hang of the four basic operations of arithmetic, I’ve been able to tackle six-digit numbers. I concealed this meaningless gift of mine which would have been offensive to my father and would have roused my mother to an ecstasy of pride.)

  Thanks to my mother’s unfailing attentions, my father turned into a querulous gourmand. Favourite foods were specially ordered – fresh halloumi from Kyrenia, lean pastrami from Kayseri, mildly hot sausage from Afyon, hazelnuts double-roasted from Giresun and spicy chickpeas from Çorum. Tea and jam were procured from Fortnum & Mason in London, pastries and sauces from Fauchon in Paris. My mother had even learned how to serve a cheese omelette Café les Deux Magots style. If there was a special order of oven-cooked Sicilian pizza from Il Pomodoro (London), or extra-tender veal from Peter Luger (New York), they were met at the airport and ceremoniously rushed to the mansion like life-saving medicines.

  My father, who couldn’t ride a bicycle let alone drive a car, confessed that, ‘rather than fight a duel with a computer’, he preferred to just get on with his work longhand.

  He couldn’t swim or sunbathe by the pool. He was nervous of miniature dogs and sleepy cats and electronic instruments. It irked me when, tired of the TV
channel he was watching, and too lazy even to lean over to reach for the remote control, he’d shout to my mother, frantically busy in the kitchen. Sometimes I wondered if he even pulled the chain after relieving himself. I was sure that when they made love my mother was twice as exhausted. It seemed his mechanical inadequacy was ‘the sublime characteristic that separated his genius from the rest’.

  I was sure that even if my father had been twenty-eight instead of forty-eight at my birth, we would never have had a close relationship. He was not loving. A certain attitude to those around him seemed to indicate that you owed him respect for sharing the same time zone with you. His merciless wit would wound anyone who talked nonsense. He was tall, green-eyed, attractive and cynical. I liked to compare him to John le Carré, master of the Cold War spy thriller. If I was the nightingale in a gold cage, caught in the spiral of my mother’s house arrest, he was the rare exotic fish in an aquarium made for one.

  The Master, as his wife called him, was the only man who could gather under one roof fragmented Social Democrats and disgruntled right-wing intellectuals. He even had a plan to raise the level of prosperity in their unfortunate country to that of Spain within five years, and to become Prime Minister in the first general election.

  On the eve of my fourteenth birthday we received the news of my father’s death. After the first shock I had to prepare myself for what was to come.

  While I was busy concealing my potential genius my mother continued hissing like a snake for three years, ‘When my son finishes high school he’ll enrol in business studies at Harvard.’

  I was accepted by Harvard with the help of influential teachers at my school, references from famous friends of my father and my mother’s efforts, and I was happy for her. But when she had the tabloids print simplistic headlines like, ‘Harvard Chosen for Top Professor’s Son,’ she became, from that moment, the object of my disdain.