Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [75]
“You should be in bed at this hour,” he said, “let’s go home.”
He was so enigmatic, the way he terminated so many of his relationships so quickly, and how he gave everybody such a hard time with his stoic stubbornness. In those days, a kind of mental connection was forming between my father and me. From the outside, one would have thought that we were just a father and son who got on well, communicating by normal verbal means. But the truth was, ours was a silent pact, arrived at somewhere deep down, as if we shared some profound secret.
I spent my whole day in Fener wandering around amongst ruins and run-down buildings. The impression left by the building in which I grew up was quite painful. Still, I had been able to shake off the listlessness and melancholia, to overcome my lack of courage. Yet there seemed to be a kind of denial at the core of the word “life,” such that it wouldn’t tolerate any middle-of-the-road options. How can I put it? The shell of that word was too tough, impenetrable; it was keeping me out. A language beyond words, an unsound logic had created such a very private, impermeable realm, even the waves of all the past that I could possibly imagine whirling about me were for naught.
The nightlife of the neighborhood was about to begin. Once darkness had finally descended upon the city, in each and every sound I heard, I began discerning melodies, which I recalled very clearly from my past, and which made Fener that much more real to me. They weren’t only sounds I had heard before, but other sounds too, the imagined voices of people I knew only in name, voices of people who lived centuries ago, and the voice of death, still alive in my mind. They would not be denied, would not be suppressed. It was a world of sounds, a different world, existing in the depths of words, moans, whispers, and silences, a world that did not reciprocate the passion of he who listened and observed with feeling.
Such was my strange emotional state when I arrived in front of the Fener Greek Archdiocese. Perhaps it, too, was infected with the same irrationality. The guard at the door looked me square in the face. I sensed a familiarity hidden in that strange expression.
“Are you trying to find someone?” he asked.
It was a momentary thing, a lie I would never own up to. “Yes,” I said, “did you see a tall guy with white hair in a suit and a woman with red hair?”
“No,” he replied, “we aren’t receiving visitors to the Archdiocese right now. There’s no one inside.”
The important thing was that I was feeling happy at that moment, and that happiness could be made possible only by means of a lie. Of course, I did what it took to keep the lie from getting out of hand; I turned and walked toward the sea. It was hard to ignore the lie; it was love embracing me generously, and truth seeping into the dark paradise of sadness, through a secret hole.
I returned to my hotel after wandering for a while by the shore. The next morning, I was enjoying the happiness of the seventh day, the day after creation. Solitude, the feeling of security because you are out of the reach, too far away to tend to the intrusions of daily life … It was a pleasure. I was having dinner in Fener, in a restaurant with a view of the Golden Horn. The people at the next table and I were putting on an ostentatious show of mutual respect. What an undeniable blessing these Fener evenings are, we were saying, the world at our command. Dinner took a long time; by the time we finished, the night had engulfed the entire city. We complicated even the simplest of things, especially the simple ones, with our labyrinthine words.
Some men of Fener are night owls; there is no shortage of people coming and going, right up to the moment when the restaurant door is padlocked. As the night wore on, I found myself sitting together with the people from the next table, deep in conversation. We were just