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  Mehpare Hanım and Hüseyin Hikmet Bey wandered amid all of the music and entertainment like sleepwalkers; they moved from here to there according to the movement of the crowd without realizing where they were going or what they were doing. Their thoughts were on the nuptial chamber they would soon enter. Even though Hikmet Bey had thrown himself enthusiastically into the wedding preparations, he lost interest in the wedding as soon as it started, he could think of nothing but what would happen when he was left alone with the bride; he remembered the nights he’d spent with prostitutes in Paris, but he didn’t think he could experience these things with his wife; Mehpare Hanım couldn’t be as uninhibited as they were, and he couldn’t treat his wife the way he’d treated them; he wanted to make love to her as he had to them but he told himself it couldn’t be so.

  Towards midnight, the guests started leaving one by one in the long boats that approached the waterfront mansion, and in carriages that formed a line in front of the mansion; beds were made for guests who had come from afar; they were provided with candles, fruit in case they got hungry in the night, and ice water in lidded jugs in case they got thirsty.

  Because Hüseyin Hikmet Bey had told all of his friends and the members of the household that he didn’t want to adhere to the tradition of the groom being pushed into the bridal chamber with blows to his back, no one had the courage to tell him to go to his room. The bride, however, was told by her aunt-in-law, with the categorical authority that old women have, “My girl, it is time to go to your room.”

  One corner of the mosquito net, which hung from the ceiling and spread out over the bed like a tent, had been raised and Mehpare Hanım sat on that side of the bed and waited for the groom. For the first time in a year she would be touched by a man’s hand, which could move on its own like an animal, sometimes caressing, sometimes squeezing, and as she thought about what would happen her face grew red with excitement. When she looked out the window, she saw Hikmet Bey smoking alone on the quay of the waterfront mansion; for a long time, in the comfort of not being seen, she watched the man she knew would soon make love to her, his shadow grew thinner and longer in the light that came from behind him and fell on the quay. When Hikmet Bey put out his cigarette and walked towards the building Mehpare Hanım went back and sat on the corner of the bed.

  When Hikmet Bey entered the room he gave Mehpare Hanım a quick look, then took off his fez, put it on the console, moved his hands through his hair, and walked over to the bride. The bride’s veil covered her face. He took a long black velvet box from his pocket; removing the diamond necklace that flowed like water, he put it around Mehpare Hanım’s neck, his fingers numb with the thrill of being so close to such beauty.

  The flames of the thousands of lanterns burning in the small wood, multiplied by their reflections on the sea, spread into the room and painted red the walls, the bed, the mosquito net, Mehpare Hanım’s wedding dress, and Hikmet Bey’s forehead, now cold with excitement, and this redness moved in waves with the waves of the sea. The bridal veil covered Mehpare Hanım’s face like a curling fire. It was as if the redness that enveloped the small wood, the sea, the waterfront mansion, the room, and the wedding dress flowed within them; they felt themselves to be part of the fire.

  In this redness, Hikmet Bey’s pale lips moved, seeming paler than they were, but he didn’t seem to be talking, and she didn’t seem to be listening either. The voice that emerged was like a sound echoing within their own bodies, far from the world, from the next world.

  —May I, madam?

  Mehpare Hanım leaned her head forward a bit, and Hikmet Bey’s cold hands reached out, took the corner of the bridal veil, lifted it, and a pair of eyes shone in the redness. At that moment Hikmet Bey thought, with great calmness but with deadly certainty, that he couldn’t live without being able to see those eyes. Round and large, those two eyes had become life itself; at that moment if someone had asked Hikmet Bey, “What is life?” he would have said, “Two lights.”

  His memory suddenly vanished, everything that had been there was replaced by a pair of eyes; someone who entered into Hikmet Bey’s memory would have seen two mysterious lights in every corner of this dark labyrinth; a couple of honey-colored lights, strangely large, strangely round, and perhaps beside these droplets of light a pinch of redness.

  And Mehpare Hanım looked at the man in front of her with a love rooted in lust, in a yearning for male flesh; somehow the desires of the flesh manifested themselves as emotion. Mehpare Hanım’s emotions had a more carnal and lustful source than those of the man she was with, but she interpreted and expressed her feelings shyly. These feelings couldn’t open up within her because of the inhibitions her upbringing had instilled in her; her enthusiasm couldn’t explode and emerge. So Mehpare Hanım loved this man with a love that seemed very pure to her; strangely, her soul didn’t let her see the dark and red bubbling at the source of her love; the depths of her soul and her desires were closed even to herself, it was not possible for her to journey into the depths of her being, these roads had been closed since her childhood.

  But as usual the darker soul will capture the lighter one, and lightness could not avoid captivity; destiny declared that the darkness was master forever and they would have no choice but to submit to this destiny. They didn’t know it at the time, but this is how it would be; Osman, sitting among the objects in his dusty room, everything tinted the color of flame, watching his great grandmother make love to her second husband, derived an almost malevolent joy from this knowledge.

  In a writhing redness that deadened their consciousness, they undressed slowly without being aware of doing so. Mehpare Hanım’s hair was red on her shoulders. Her body was bright white like a water fairy bathing in moonlight; her rounded breasts, her belly, her well-shaped legs were shiny like a drop of star that had fallen to earth from a constellation. Hikmet Bey touched this whiteness almost hesitantly, not believing it was real, as if he was touching a mermaid that had suddenly emerged from the sea. Mehpare Hanım was motionless; for a time Hikmet Bey tried to know this body, this droplet of star, with shy caresses; with every touch the fairy girl became more alive, more of a woman, and Hikmet Bey became more aware of his manhood. Their legs entangled, their chests touched, then Hikmet Bey’s lips slipped down from her neck, the shyness melted with each kiss, and more of it left the bed. Mehpare Hanım touched Hikmet Bey’s body with her well-shaped fingers; they suddenly went mad; Hikmet Bey started speaking in French, he was talking obscenely, Mehpare Hanım felt as if she understood this language she didn’t know.

  When Hikmet Bey’s tongue touched her between the legs, she became very rigid for a moment; she had never seen or heard of such a thing, not even in her wildest dreams; this was something she had never known, never thought of. At first she was thrilled, then embarrassment covered the desire, then the embarrassment and thrill tore apart; moaning frightfully as she never had before she lost herself completely, and sank her teeth into Hikmet Bey’s back.

  Mehpare Hanım began a journey into her actual self.

  As for Osman, he felt a terrible anger and, murmuring, “Whore,” he heard Hasan Efendi’s voice saying, “I told you so.”

  Still, they watched that lovemaking together until the end, burning with jealousy.

  III

  He’d long since lost track of time, for him time was not a river that always flowed in the same direction; it was a large lake in which the past, the present, and even the future accumulated. He dove into this lake, living with his past, with his dead, going deeper every day, moving towards the past and further from the present. Now he was in depths he didn’t remember, where time had changed from a flowing river to a still lake; sometimes, when he encountered people and scenes in this lake that he didn’t want to encounter, he dove further towards the bottom with all of his strength.

  His only connection to life was the empty tuna fish cans that had accumulated in the kitchen. With the empty cans, ants appeared; they travelled to the cans in herds from unseen holes, leaving millions of footprints that looked like pinheads in the thick layer of dust that covered the kitchen counter. When he woke in the morning, he saw that the insides of the cans had become pitch black, and that an extension of this wriggling blackness emerged from one side of the cans and returned from the other. The wriggling blackness and the sheer number of the ants frightened him, but he neither threw away the cans nor drove away the ants.

  In any event, for a time he gave up taking precautions against anything that frightened him. He was frightened but he didn’t do anything about it, fear was a natural part of him; he didn’t think about getting rid of either the fear or its cause; he simply looked at what frightened him and shuddered. Sometimes he sat in the kitchen and watched the ants for hours, and the crowded and wriggling blackness disgusted him. The crowd of ants was like a black hole that grew deeper by bounds, it grew deeper as he looked at it and it reminded him of another black hole he didn’t want to remember at all; perhaps that blackness was the place where time stopped.

  He remembered a dim, candlelit bar.

  A very handsome man was playing jazz on a piano in the corner; his hair was messy, he wore a scarf around his neck, his eyes were green and they were the kind of eyes that seem larger than they were. And then the man began singing and his handsomeness became a hideous ugliness. Osman couldn’t understand how this transformation had occurred. His face was alternately handsome and hideous; one moment it was handsome and the next it was hideous; it was like two opposite exteriors that revealed each other. Suddenly he saw the cause of the ugliness; the man had no teeth in his mouth, when he opened his well-shaped lips a dark well appeared behind them.

  Then for some reason the man came to their table, he seemed to be acquainted with someone at the table. There was an indefinable slipperiness in his movements. The conversation came around to the subject of what a perfect life would be like; the man listened silently with a godlike face, then he spoke in a deep voice, almost whispering:

  —There is no such thing as a perfect life . . . Life is never perfect; it’s always incomplete, imperfect, and evil, the only perfection is death, and just as everything imperfect flows towards perfection, life flows towards death, and only then reaches perfection.

  Then he talked about philosophy and philosophers in a disparaging manner.

  —Philosophy searches for perfection and can’t find it. All philosophers have the anger and comfort of knowing that they will not be able to find it; they experience the lust of searching for something that doesn’t exist. The arousing attraction of philosophy comes from its search for the nonexistent. They searched for thousands of years, they reached the doors of death, and they stopped, if the afterlife existed we would meet happy philosophers there; they would be happy and boring because they had found what they were searching for; then we wouldn’t listen to them, wouldn’t read them, we would pour scorn on them and get bored. We elevate them because they couldn’t find perfection; because it sanctifies us that they couldn’t find perfection, it elevates us. Our incompleteness matches the incompleteness of life.

  He changed the subject right in the middle of his monologue and started talking about a movie star; pushing back his hair with a sliding blow of his hand he swore about “that vulgar woman” in a brutal way that no one would have believed if they hadn’t heard him; he gossiped about everyone, swore about everyone; he used one after another the most brutal, most ruthless words without feeling a need to hide the pleasure he took in using them.

  Osman shuddered with terror when he heard those words and he wanted to leave the table just then out of a fear whose source he couldn’t find, but instead he found himself walking with the man in Beyoğlu in the early morning.

  The light in the shop windows began to fade and the mannequins that had been brought to life by the neon lights returned to their waxy color of death. Sometimes the man was silent for long stretches, and sometimes he talked at length.

  In a backstreet that smelled of dishwater the man suddenly stopped:

  —Why are you following me, don’t you have anything better to do?

  Osman didn’t leave the man despite his scorn.

  They went down to the basement of a damp-smelling building that seemed abandoned. The man pushed open a door that had no lock and entered. The room was a mess; shirts and trousers were strewn across the floor; in the middle there was a makeshift table made from orange crates. To one side there was a brass bed that was clean and neatly made and that didn’t fit with the miserable mess.

  They sat on stools at the table. The man closed his eyes, stayed still for a long time, then opened his eyes and looked into Osman’s eyes with the same sarcastic disdain, and smiled in a strange way.

  —Do you know why I don’t have any teeth?

  After making a statement that Osman could never repeat, he opened his mouth and the dark well appeared.

  He didn’t remember what they talked about or what they did afterwards.

  Then he found this dusty house, and the dead. Had the dead existed before, or did they appear after that night; did time stop there, in that hut; what had happened there: he couldn’t answer any of this.

  He couldn’t ask his dead these things; in any event they weren’t interested in him; the dead were only interested in themselves; they always talked about themselves, about their own lives. They stopped where they were, time passed them by; Osman understood this; if you stopped and time flowed it meant you were dying, if you moved and time stopped you went mad; every change was possible with a pause; all sharp changes occurred with a pause; if nothing stops, nothing changes; everything, all together, would flow without stopping and without changing.

  But for Osman time had stopped and everything had changed; the dead, from time to time, one by one, sometimes in flocks, dragging other dead behind them, came from within motionless time with their fezzes, chadors, swords, nightgowns, grudges, angers, loves, pains, varicolored veils, high boots, coaches, lutes, drums, guns, wars, migrations, epidemics.

  Of his dead, the one who entertained him most was Hasan Efendi, and he looked forward to his arrival; he was a dragon-like man, frightening everyone who saw him, broad-shouldered, thick-necked, his hair close cropped, with a large head and a handlebar moustache; he’d spent his student days in brawls and fights in Beyoğlu and at nineteen he was commissioned as an officer in the Imperial Navy, which was docked in the Golden Horn at the time. There was nothing to do in the navy; because the Sultan was afraid that one day all of the ships would sail up to the palace and bombard it, they had all been docked in the Golden Horn and left to rot; the ships’ timbers turned black, the hulls decomposed, the metal was covered with seaweed, the cannons rusted, and most of them were stuck in the mud of the Golden Horn. In winter, wind whistled through the cabins, and they lit stoves to keep warm.

  The Admiralty had long since stopped paying the officers; the officers had built large coops and had started raising chickens, turkeys, and geese on the decks of the ships that blackened and deteriorated by the day; the only guard on the ships was near the coops to keep away thieves. The sailors woke every morning to the crowing of the roosters, and after half-heartedly pouring water they had hauled up from the Golden Horn over the decks, they went to the market to sell eggs; they haggled at the market; with their bare feet, large moustaches, dressed half in uniform and half in civilian clothes, they’d beat the merchant up if they couldn’t agree on a price or if the bargaining went on too long.

  Hasan Efendi reverted to his student habits when he realized there was no work to do on the ship; he set out with his officer friends, attending Beyoğlu debauches, getting involved in fights, collecting protection money from the brothels. Six months before Sheikh Efendi’s wedding, an older ship sergeant took Hasan Efendi to the tekke one night; the young officer was attending a ritual for the first time in his life, and he was charmed by the fervor and the chanting in unison, like an empty bucket held under a waterfall he was filled with the belief he witnessed, that night he suddenly became a religious man, and in spite of converting so suddenly he never gave up his faith and indeed grew more strict and conservative. He gave up the Beyoğlu debauches and started reading books about religious warfare, such as Hayber Castle, Kan Castle, The Battle of Karbala, by the light of a single candle, in a damp cabin that smelled of rotting wood, and he became deeply involved in what he read. He got into the habit of telling his friends about what he had read, on the deck in summer and in his cabin in winter; when he had told about what he had read so many times that his listeners knew it all by heart, he started making up his own stories, and as he became accustomed to making them up he began to believe in the authenticity of his own stories.

  Hasan Efendi was one of those who believed that Mehpare Hanım had brought misfortune to the family; this man who may never have seen Sheikh Efendi’s wife up close in his life had a fathomless rage towards that woman.

  “I was at the tekke during the wedding, I know all about the preparations. I had a companion, he worked in customs, an immigrant from Crete; he told me that Tevfik Bey’s father was a Greek priest. I dropped a hint about this to our sergeant at the tekke, to ask if we should tell this to Sheikh Efendi, but the sergeant said, ‘It’s not appropriate to tell him this, it’s just rumor, is it possible that the great Sheikh Efendi doesn’t know who he is getting?’; it’s clear he didn’t know, the marriage didn’t work out, but it is their offspring, I mean all of the female descendants of Mehpare Hanım became whores, as well as Sheikh Efendi’s daughter’s children, all of them . . . Later Mehpare Hanım married a man from the palace; all of the children she bore including the one from that man were whores or ne’er-do-wells, I mean think now of an army of whores descended from a great Sheikh; I say I wish that at the time I hadn’t listened to the sergeant and had told the Sheikh that these were the descendants of unbelievers.