Young Turk Read online

  MORIS FARHI

  YOUNG TURK

  TELEGRAM

  eISBN: 978-1-84659-115-0

  First published in 2004 by Saqi Books

  This eBook edition published 2012

  Copyright © Moris Farhi 2004 and 2012

  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.

  TELEGRAM

  26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH

  www.telegrambooks.com

  For NINA

  who was with me before I met her

  and to my beloved friend

  ASHER FRED MAYER

  9 May 1934–8 May 2004

  In memory of:

  Anthony Masters (14 December 1940–4 April 2003)

  Tomasz Mirkowicz (9 July 1953–7 May 2003)

  Acknowledgments

  With gratitude to my family for their love: Ceki, Viviane, Deborah, Yael Farhi; Marcelle Farhi; Nicole Farhi; Rachel Sievers and Hamish MacGillivray; Eric, Danièle, Sara, Nathaniel Gould; Phil, Rachel, Samuel, Joshua, Kezia, Joseph Gould; Jessica Gould; Emmanuel, Yael & Noam Gould; Guy and Rebecca Granot; Silvio (Jacques) Hull.

  With gratitude to Barry Proner whose insights into the mysteries still sustain me.

  With gratitude to my friends and mentors for their guidance: Ian Davidson; Peter Day; Anthony Dinner; Tamar Fox; Mai Ghoussoub; Saime Göksu-Timms; Robin Lloyd-Jones; David Mayall; Christopher New; Saliha Paker; Maureen Rissik; Bernice Rubens; Anthony Rudolf; Hazem Saghie; Evelyn Toynton; Vedat Türkali; Enis Üser.

  With gratitude to my kindred spirits for their unflinching support: Tricia Barnett; Selim and Nadia Baruh; Erol, Eti, David Baruh; Anthea Davidson; Rio, Karen and Liam Fanning; Kağan, Yaprak and Temmuz Güner; Jennifer Kavanagh; Michael and Diana Lazarus; Julian and Karen Lewis; Robina Masters; Elizabeth Mayer; Faith Miles; Richard and Ceinwen Morgan; Christa New; Adem and Pιrιl Öner; Kerim Paker; Lucy Popescu; Paul and Gabriele Preston; Nick, Maggie and Rosa Rankin; Paula Rego; Christopher and Bridget Robbie; Hazel Robinson; Elon Salmon; Nick, Jeanine, Isabella and William Sawyer; Edward Timms; Diana Tyler; Paul and Cindy Williams.

  With gratitude to my alter egos in distant lands for their solidarity: Ergun and Rengin Avunduk; Attila Çelikiz; Ayşem Çelikiz; José Çiprut; Rajko Djuric; Ahmad Ebrahimi; Bensiyon Eskenazi; Agop and Brigitte Hacikyan; Bracha Hadar; Ziv Lewis; Bill and Sue Mansill; Julita Mirkowicz; Barιş Pirhasan; Donné Raffat; Ilan Stavans; Martin Tucker; Deniz Türkali; Andrew Graham-Yooll.

  With gratitude to new comrades for their faith: Petra Eggers; Nina Kossman; Semra Eren-Nijar, Indirjit and Ilayda Nijar; Zbigniew and Maria Kanski; Sharon Olinka; Ros Schwartz; Osman Streater; Ateş Wise; Jessica Woollard.

  With gratitude to my guardian angels at Saqi Books for their dedication: Mitch Albert; Sarah al-Hamad; André and Salwa Gaspard; Jana Gough; Anna Wilson.

  Contents

  A Note on Pronunciation

  1. Rιfat: In the Beginning

  2. Musa: Lentils in Paradise

  3. Robbie: A Tale of Two Cities

  4. Selma: Half-Turk

  5. Bilâl: The Sky-Blue Monkey

  6. Yusuf: And His Fruit Was Sweet to My Taste

  7. Havva: A Wrestling Man

  8. Mustafa: Rose-Petal Jam

  9. Attila: Cracked Vessels from the Same Ruin

  10. Zeki: When a Writer Is Killed

  11. Aslan: Madam Ruj

  12. Davut: He Who Returns Never Left

  13. şιk Ahmet: Go Like Water, Come Like Water

  References

  A Note on Pronunciation

  All Turkish letters are pronounced as in English except for the following:

  c pronounced j as in jam

  ç pronounced ch as in child

  ğ not pronounced; lengthens the preceding vowel

  ι akin to the pronunciation of u in radium

  ö pronounced ö as in the German König

  ş akin to the sh in shark

  ü pronounced u as in the French tu

  1: Rιfat

  In the Beginning

  In the beginning, there is Death.

  All creatures meet it at birth. Animals never forget the encounter. With very few exceptions, we humans always do, even though we haggle with it several times a day. This commerce is never conducted with the brain or the heart, as we might expect, but with the genitals. The tinglings we feel between our legs are not always caused by sexual desire or fear. Mostly, they document our negotiations with the Clattering Skeleton.

  These are facts. Straight from the mouth of Mahmut the Simurg. He is the Türkmen teller of tales from the circus who, true to his nickname, looks like a bird as large and dark as a rain-cloud. And though he accompanies himself on a kemençe that has only two strings instead of the usual four, he creates sounds that seem to come from other worlds. Those who have heard him sing the history of mankind in one thousand and one episodes will affirm that he is, as he avows, the only man of truth on this earth.

  Sometimes transactions between Death and its prey get violent. When Alexander the Great, emerging from Olympias’ womb, saw Death hovering about, he immediately unsheathed his sword and hurled himself at him. Death barely escaped. And he did not dare go near Alexander for thirty-three years; not until he had succeeded in bribing a Babylonian mosquito to poison the noble king.

  The phenomenal and often overlooked aspect of that story, Mahmut the Simurg stresses – overlooked even in the İskendernâme, Nizâmi’s incomparable paean to Alexander – is not that a newly born infant should have the courage to attack Death – after all, one expects such qualities from godlike heroes – but that every generation produces many ordinary individuals who are able to perceive the Keeper of the Dust. Those deathsayers with seven eyes, seven brains and the mettle to rescue Death’s victims – like Hercules, Atatürk and Churchill, to name but a few – are known as Pîr.

  (An elaboration: Death, as we all know, is an agent of Allah. But unlike Allah’s other servants, he is also a fiend. Thus, whenever he can, instead of garnering souls who have lived full lives and need to transfer to a better realm, instead of choosing miscreants who deserve to die, he grabs the young, the good, the gifted, even whole races. Often he snatches, long before their rightful time, people who are heartily loved by Allah Himself. In so doing, he humiliates the Almighty. And that is iniquity beyond iniquity. Does a garden let its plants perish? Sorry, Efendi, the roses have all died today; apologies, Hanιm, tulips will be extinct by tomorrow; alas, Ağa, lilacs were exterminated yesterday! Naturally, Allah had to intervene. So He created the Pîr.)

  As I said, Mahmut the Simurg knows all the truths. Thus when he sang his revelations about the Pîr, I realized our neighbour, Gül de Taranto, was one such.

  Gül, approaching thirteen, was four years older than I was. Her brother Naim, leader of the neighbourhood gang, was my age. Both Gül and I were shunned by this gang as being ‘of a different species’. Gül not just for being a girl, but also for being virtually an adult – she had started her bleeding. Even more unforgivably, unlike her delicate name which means ‘rose’, she was a tomboy: the song ‘There Are No Roses without Fire’ could well have been composed for her. She outshone every youngster
in the district at every sport, including boxing. Her gym teacher believed that if she put her mind to it, she could make the following year’s Olympics in Berlin. I, on the other hand, was fat – I had nearly died after contracting diphtheria a second time, and my mother, in an effort to build up my strength, had force-fed me as if I were a goose. Fat boys could never be gang material.

  As Mahmut the Simurg would say: misfits must live, too. So Gül and I ended up doing things together.

  It all started on the day of my circumcision.

  I was sitting in my room, dressed in the ceremonial white satin camise and hat, fighting my fear of the impending cut and wondering whether I would survive the assault on my ‘key to heaven’, as Mahmut the Simurg describes the penis. Suddenly, to my surprise, Gül – not her brother Naim, as I might have expected – popped in to wish me well. Then, after the briefest of pleasantries, she asked me, very businesslike, if I would show her my still-capped organ. In return, she was prepared to show me her mysterious crevice – a sight no one, apart from her brother Naim, some members of her family and Naim’s lieutenant, Bilâl, had seen. She wanted to compare my ‘thing’ with those of Naim and Bilâl, both of which, in accordance with Jewish custom, had been decapitated eight days after birth.

  Naturally, I agreed enthusiastically – ignoring, wisely I think, Mahmut the Simurg’s warning that the vagina has enslaved more men than all the tyrants of history put together.

  So I pulled up my camise and she lowered her panties.

  Hesitantly, my heart pounding, I examined her cleft, even touched it.

  She, on the other hand, scrutinized me casually, as if I were a medical specimen. (She had once confided to my mother, who was a nurse, that she intended to become a doctor when she grew up.) ‘They say circumcised cocks are superior to uncircumcised ones. And that, therefore, Christian women are always disadvantaged. Is that true?’

  I pretended to know. ‘Definitely.’

  She studied my penis fastidiously. ‘Not as good-looking as circumcised ones.’

  ‘It will be. After today.’

  ‘But it’s bigger than Naim’s. Bigger than Bilâl’s, too.’

  My spirits rose. I might have been fat and not gang material, but I was better endowed. In the male world, even at our age, that meant I was somebody. ‘Oh, yes ...’

  ‘Is it because you’re Muslim and they’re Jewish?’

  ‘Probably ...’

  ‘Though I’ve heard you’re not a real Muslim.’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘Aren’t you Dönme?’

  Dönme literally means ‘turned’. As a people, it refers to the followers of Sabetay Zevi, the seventeenth-century Jewish sage who had declared himself the awaited messiah. Zevi was arrested by Sultan Mehmet IV, the Hunter, for fomenting unrest and was asked to prove his messiahship by surviving the arrows that would be shot at him by three of the realm’s best archers. Zevi, sensibly refusing to submit to the test, had hastily converted to Islam. His followers, interpreting this conversion as a step towards the fulfilment of the messianic prophecy, had also converted en masse. However, throughout the ensuing centuries, they had remained true to their faith and practised their Jewish rites secretly.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Everybody who knows your family.’

  ‘They’ve no proof ...’

  ‘They put two and two together ...’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You have lots of Jewish friends. Most of your relatives go away on Jewish holidays. And your grandparents never stop criticizing Jews – which is what many Dönme do to hide their Jewishness.’

  I blushed. She was right. My grandparents, particularly my grandmother, appeared so intolerant of Jews that people accused them of anti-semitism. And, true enough, they were secret Jews who always went away mysteriously on High Holidays to an undisclosed location. And they painstakingly hid every trace of their Jewishness, particularly their Hebrew books, from all eyes, including mine.

  But not so my parents. My parents were genuine converts – Muslim through and through. People could tell that just by their pietistic names: Kenan ‘reserved’ (my father), Mukaddes ‘sacred’ (my mother).

  ‘Well, they’re wrong. We may have Dönme roots, but we’re true Muslims.’

  Gül shrugged and laughed. ‘Not that it matters. Atatürk says we’re all equal.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She pointed at her vagina. ‘Seen enough?’

  ‘No ...’

  She pulled up her panties. ‘Yes, you have!’

  Ruefully I dropped my camise. I realized I had fallen in love with her. And I imagined that having seen each other’s genitals, we could consider ourselves married – well, unofficially. I became instantly jealous. ‘Why did you show yourself to Bilâl?’

  She laughed. ‘Because I love him.’

  ‘Does that mean now you also love me?’

  ‘You’re too young.’

  ‘So is Bilâl.’

  ‘He’s Jewish.’

  I wished I were Jewish, too. ‘Is it because I’m fat?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Just too young. I’d better go. Good luck.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  At the door, she blew me a kiss. ‘If you’d been Jewish you’d be laughing. You’d have been done already.’

  That annoyed me. I wanted to protest. But she had gone.

  So I wrote to her, explaining the many reasons that made circumcision so important for a Muslim. That it is the most momentous initiation in a boy’s life and must be revered as such. That unlike Jewish boys who get chopped off when they don’t know who they are or what they are – not to mention that getting cut when only eight days old makes it all too easy for them – we Muslims experience circumcision when we approach puberty, when we already have some idea of what the world is like and what we can expect from it. That whereas Jewish boys have to wait until their bar mitzvahs, when they are thirteen, before they can be considered men, we attain manhood the moment we shed our foreskin. That undertaking circumcision when we are old enough to understand the significance of the rite impels us to attain the Prophet Muhammet’s perfection even though that objective is unattainable because the Prophet Muhammet, Blessed be His Name, was born perfect and was thus the only man born circumcised. That circumcision is one of the five cleansers that give us mental and moral probity; consequently, unless circumcised, we cannot pray in a mosque or perform the Haj or even marry.

  Writing the letter eased my fears. When I set out for the park where the communal circumcisions and the ensuing festivities would take place, I strutted as if my silly camise and hat were the uniform of Mehmetcik, our indigenous soldier considered indomitable even by Tommy, his British counterpart. To keep my spirit bubbling, I envisaged Gül’s downy vagina smiling at me, like two halves of a sunny peach. And I remembered the softness of her hand on my penis. My penis which, to date, could do no more than urinate and harden always at unwanted moments was, lest I forget, bigger than both Naim’s and Bilâl’s!

  And as I lined up with my brothers-in-rite outside the circumciser’s tent and received the blessing of Cemil Ağa, the rich man of the neighbourhood who was defraying the cost of the festivity as his charitable duty for the year, I shamed myself by producing an erection that no youngster of my age was supposed to have.

  Gül, as I have already mentioned, was a Pîr.

  I discovered this the following summer.

  We were playing football on the beach in Suadiye. (Gül was not allowed to swim. Her eyes were allergic to the iodine in the sea.)

  Bilâl’s mother, Ester, was swimming on her own; she was far out, halfway to Burgaz, the second of the Princes’ Islands. Gül’s mother Lisa, Ester’s close friend, was stretched out under a parasol, reading a book. (My mother, Mukaddes, the third member of this set of Graces, had won a bursary for a midwifery course and was away in Ankara.)

  Normally, Ester, Lisa and my mother swam together. Before marriage and children, they had swum to all four
Princes’ Islands. On a number of occasions, they had even tried to swim the length of the Bosporus, but had had to give up each time because of the shipping to and from the Black Sea. But Lisa, having been vaccinated against smallpox, had been told not to swim for a few days. (Bilâl was God knows where. Naim and he were too independent to be seen with their mothers.)

  Gül was running circles round me with the ball when she suddenly stopped and pointed to the horizon. ‘Ester’s in trouble!’

  I looked at where she was pointing. Ester – or rather her red swimming cap – was a dot on the sea.

  Gül ran to the edge of the water. ‘It’s pulling her down!’

  ‘What’s pulling her down?’

  Gül waded in and, gesticulating wildly, screeched high-pitched sounds like a dog being tortured. ‘Somebody save her!’

  As Lisa jumped up, I threw off my sandals. ‘I’ll go! I’m a fast swimmer!’

  I dived in. Ester was too far out and I had no chance of saving her, but I had to try. I swam furiously.

  Then I saw another swimmer in the distance change course and strike out towards Ester.

  I heard Gül shout. ‘Someone’s gone to help. She’ll be safe now.’

  The other swimmer reached Ester.

  After a while, I joined them.

  The other swimmer turned out to be Deniz, a relative on my father’s side. One of my dream women. When she got married – I was barely four at the time – I had thrown a monstrous tantrum, calling her husband a donkey and begging her to divorce him and marry me. Deniz, sweet and good-hearted, had gently fended me off. Thereafter, I had locked her in my mind and imagined enjoying untold things with her.

  Ester was suffering from stomach cramps. Women’s problems, Gül told me later.

  Deniz and I took turns to drag her back. It was hard work, but it had its rewards. As we toiled to control Ester, who kept flailing as if determined to drown us all, I frequently brushed against Deniz’s big breasts.