Читать книгу Endgame - Ahmet Altan - Страница 15

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Hamiyet believed that Jesus was buried in the church on the top of the hill. She said some nights you could see a flash of light over the hill and supposedly lightning never struck the church. Once a fire ravaged the olive groves along the hillside but went out just ten metres from the church. Then there was a terrible flood but the waters split in two just before the church and streamed past on both sides.

‘Sometimes they come to dig over there. And whoever tries ends up dead. Have you heard about it?’

‘Are there any stories in this town that don’t have to do with death?’

She flashed a coy smile.

‘Of course, but I couldn’t tell you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because …’

‘I wouldn’t understand?’

‘Oh, you’d understand … That’s for sure.’

Sometimes I think that the world is made up of cages built for two, and when a man and a woman are inside they slip on identities entirely different than the masks they wear outside. From the outside, Hamiyet was a woman who spoke to the furniture and believed in all kinds of superstition, a woman who danced to the beat of her own drum. But when the two of us were alone together she was flirtatious. It seemed so natural. She flirted with such flare. She was a master. Though she was openly seductive, she always was careful to protect herself with double-entendre. I suppose she felt she could let go with me because I wasn’t from town; she didn’t have to follow the local codes. I caught myself watching her with desire.

I had come to know a secret she’d kept hidden from the world, and this changed my perception of her and the way she flirted. I was one of three people who knew who she was, or rather what she was, and what she had done.

But she would never discover this.

Knowing someone’s secret gives you an upper hand; a kind of voodoo doll. I knew the subtext of everything she said, and was able to manipulate her if I wanted. But she had no idea I was doing it. Hamiyet fascinated me.

And I flirted with her too.

I wondered whether I could ever manipulate her into feeling close enough to me to share her secret. The covert sexual games we played served my plan. And I enjoyed them.

I have always enjoyed such games.

Everything was a game for me.

What is life if we don’t play it like a game? Nothing but an overwhelming stretch of anxiety and boredom.

But now, sitting on this bench, I can see that making life a game is the easy way out. And still the players want to be taken seriously. But there is a power that makes this desire a reality, and this night has shown me this power.

It has crushed me, ripped me into pieces.

The dreams have voices.

I hear the voices of the dreaming town, how loudly they moan and wail. Imprisoned sounds, ever encaged in dream, forever jangling in their jails. Voices that can somehow never emerge are condemned to resonate within. They must be filled with voices. How can they live with so many voices, stand so many unrelenting voices?

How do these people, who in their dreams unleash such a cacophony of sound, bounding through unimaginable adventures, wake up to lead such mundane lives?

There’s so much more I wanted to learn about the people here. But I suppose I’m out of time.

That weekend, full of the same curiosity, I went to Mustafa’s farm. I was curious to see how these people in a town steeped in marijuana and death really lived, how they had become so intimate with death, how they had turned death into a game, just as I’d turned life into a game.

I was playing with life to amuse myself.

Were they playing with death for the same reason?

The fine sand on the beach, untouched for years, piled into little dunes and studded with the tips of shrubs and glittering with seashells, was like a desert that stretched as far as the eye could see. And so it was surprising to see the deep blue sea just beyond it.

Mustafa’s home stood on top of the rocks at the end of the beach. I suppose it had once been a Byzantine fort. Now it looked more like a palace that overlooked the sea. At the back there was a large garden and in the front a broad terrace made of granite that stretched out over the beach. It blended well with the castle walls.

Tables had been arranged in the back garden. I was surprised to see that they weren’t using the terrace. It seemed like hardly anyone in town was even interested in the sea – maybe because the water wasn’t for sale.

When I stepped into the garden, I was horrified to see most of the men dressed in tracksuits. Were they on their way to the gym? They looked like beached seals. I wished they were wearing their daunting, dark suits. They looked far less comical in those. Lambs were roasting on spits at the end of the garden.

Mustafa was quick to find me. He was wearing pressed black trousers and a blue shirt. He’d taken off his jacket and tie.

‘I’m glad you came. Let me introduce you.’

It was like we were old friends.

Wading through the crowd, I asked, ‘Zuhal didn’t come?’

‘Something came up,’ he said.

I’ve always enjoyed knowing other people’s secrets. And when they don’t know that I know. They hide them behind walls, never imagining that someone may have scaled them. But then I suppose I suffer the same fate. I am unaware of the intruders. Our secrets intersect like ripples on the still waters of a pool.

‘You have a beautiful home.’

There was a mixture of joy and pride in his expression, even child-like innocence. ‘We worked really hard,’ he said. ‘But I suppose everything came out all right.’

‘How did you get permission to build here?’

‘I’m the mayor. I give the permission,’ he said, laughing. ‘Why do you think people want to become mayor in the first place?’

‘To get their hands on historical forts?’

‘Of course.’

‘The government doesn’t object?’

‘By government you mean someone they send here, some random committee. They say the same thing I say. And they’re happy with what they get in return. Isn’t that better than everyone being unhappy?’

‘Everyone’s happy?’

‘Of course they’re happy.’

‘The other day they killed a man right in front of me. He didn’t seem very happy.’

He turned and fixed his eyes on mine, his face darkening and the muscles in his jaw contracting. Then suddenly the features softened, changed, and a grisly smile emerged.

‘But you’re happy,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t you.’

‘It could have been me?’

‘It could have been anyone.’

‘Even you?’

‘Possibly, but my blood would cover this entire town.’

This time his smile was for real.

‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘How many novelists get the chance to witness something like that? I’m sure you’ll capture the scene beautifully in your next book. Come on then, people are dying to meet you.’

‘To meet me?’

‘Certainly … You’ll be the first writer they’ve ever met.’

He led me through the crowd.

Some of the guests had actually ordered my books from the city, but most of them confessed they hadn’t read them yet.

Most of the young guests had studied at universities in America but they reintegrated into the town’s social fabric. It was like the education they had received abroad had been washed out by what they’d learned in childhood. As for the older generation, few had finished secondary school. They were in good spirits, laughing and joking with each other in various groups, as comfortable as their gym clothes, and their local accent had a light and lovely lilt.

Raci Bey was a short and portly fellow who had a monopoly on wine production in the district; he also owned several olive oil factories. ‘Cooking lamb is no walk in the park. Mustafa will have us dying of hunger soon enough and then he’ll get his hands on our land,’ he said and burst out laughing.

Raci’s wife was different. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. She had a sharp face and there was a faintly ironic smile that lingered at the corners of her mouth. Something about that and the angles on her face was strangely arousing. I couldn’t quite work out why.

Her name was Kamile Hanım and she was an honest, shrewd, authoritarian woman; I suppose the authority came from her quick wit and loquacity.

‘Are you the writer?’ she said, as if asking a vet if this was the ailing cow.

I laughed and said that I was.

‘Can you make enough money as a writer?’

‘Some do, but I don’t.’

‘You drive an RV. How is that if you don’t make any money?’

Her daughter interrupted: ‘Come on, mother, why in the world do you care about his RV?’ She was a tall blonde.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, calmly. ‘I came across some buried treasure.’

‘Listen to that,’ said Kamile Hanım, laughing. ‘Quick on his feet.’

Everyone in the town said they had come into their money the same way; whenever I asked it was always the same answer, ‘The guy’s dad found buried treasure.’

Kamile Hanım had got my drift.

‘Well, you should at least register your treasure at our Chamber of Commerce,’ she countered. ‘That’s where the people who find treasure go. Are you married?’

Embarrassed again, her daughter said, ‘Mother, please.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said, again in a conciliatory tone.

‘I was married … But I lost my wife in a car accident.’

‘How terrible. I’m sorry to hear that … And you never married again? I’m sure she would have wanted you to remarry.’

‘She would have, but it hasn’t happened.’

‘I can find you someone here … I arrange most of the marriages around here.’

‘Oh, mother,’ her daughter said again.

Kamile Hanım was quick to respond: ‘She’s the only one I couldn’t find a match for. Her husband left her because she’s a whiner and now no one wants her. Enough of this Oh mother, oh mother, leave me alone.’

Her daughter blushed bright red and said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to her. She can be so rude sometimes.’

As she stomped away, Kamile turned to me and said, ‘The little minx is ashamed of me. She’s busy trying to fix my life when she should be busy fixing her own. So what do you write about? Love and romance and all that? Someone said you depict women well.’

‘Love and romance and all that,’ I said and smiled.

‘I was a big reader when I was a kid. Reşat Nuri and Kerime Nadir’s books. They always made me cry. Why do you writers have to make people cry? You should make us laugh too. Then when the kids came, and with all the problems at home, I wasn’t able to read any more.’

She glanced around the garden then conspiratorially flashed me a womanly smile and said: ‘Now, tell me. Have you been with many women? Is that how you know them so well?’

Beneath her authoritative confidence there was a flirtatiously mocking tone. Most of the other women in town spoke the same way. Hamiyet spoke this way, in a tone of voice steeped in sexuality. The unseen world I had discovered online was in fact run by women and, like water running underground, it was never clear when their sexuality would suddenly emerge, usually when they felt safe in the presence of a ‘stranger’.

Above ground the men were engaged in disputes over land, power struggles and murder while women ruled the town with their urgent, uncontrollable sexual desires.

‘I’ve known many women,’ I said.

‘Did they love you?’

‘They did.’

‘Did you love them?’

‘I did.’

She lowered her eyes and then looked at me.

I could swear that she was thinking about how I made love, how it would be if we made love.

In that moment she was far from everyone in the garden, looking off in the distance, her eyes now fixed on the horizon, her irises darkening.

‘You’re lucky,’ she said.

‘I was lucky,’ I said.

‘And were they lucky?’ she asked.

‘They were.’

Lightly touching my arm, she said, ‘I can imagine.’

I looked up to see a tall young man in his thirties standing beside us. ‘And this here is my son, Rahmi,’ Kamile Hanım grumbled. ‘Did Gülten send you here? Haven’t they got anything better to do than pester me? Mother this and mother that, following me around. What’s the problem now?’

‘Mother dear, why not leave the man for a little so that he can talk to the other guests?’ He seemed unmoved by his mother’s moods.

‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ she said. ‘Go on then and speak with those idiots. They’ll bore you to death, tell you all about their properties and what’s going to be renovated in town, the prices of land by the sea, treasure at the church … Now, Rahmi is going to pick you up and bring you to our house on Thursday. I’m making lamb stew … Don’t come with a full stomach and don’t you forget.’

‘How could I?’

Rahmi put his arm in mine and as he led me over to the other guests he asked, ‘Did she do your head in? Sometimes she can really go too far, but you should forgive her. Gülten told me about it. My sister, the one you just met.’

That evening I planned to ask everyone there about Zuhal and gather as much information as I could. I was sure these people would have some entertaining stories.

The garden was tastefully designed. There were olive, kumquat, lemon and tangerine trees with glistening ripe fruit, and enormous magnolias and oleander that were clearly not from the region. In the corners there were pergolas draped with honeysuckle and jasmine vines. The ample open space in front of the house (more of a castle or a château) was divided by two flowerbeds filled with tulips of all colours. Mustafa said that flowers for every season were planted there.

A broad, flowing staircase, also made of granite, led to the entrance of the stone house. There was a large veranda decorated with the capitals of columns salvaged from ancient ruins and the sun streamed in through large windows. At night, when all the lights were twinkling, you could see the palace from town. It looked like a giant lantern.

An air of intimidating magnificence lent by the black stone and the bright light that streamed in through the windows seemed to reflect Mustafa’s double nature; he had built a house in his own image.

Rahmi took me over to a group of men.

I always get the same feeling when I’m with a group of men. A man inhabits two extremely different worlds: he is either a savage or a child. There is nothing in between. He jumps from one extreme to the other, from childishness to savagery and back again. The savagery manifests itself in different ways – straightforward physical violence, wit, intrigue, curses and peacock-like displays – but the childishness is always the same: an exaggerated display of playfulness and pain, a feminine side.

During this festive roasting of the lambs, these men were like children in a bath tub, talking about football, women and the expensive prostitutes they knew in the big city as if they were playing with rubber ducks.

They were superficially respectful towards me, and distant, because in their eyes I wasn’t sufficiently childish or savage – and perhaps because I was a writer. In fact I was both. But I chose to hide these emotions behind a smile. I didn’t want them to see either.

True, I wasn’t one of them, and that wasn’t a problem. But if I tried to seem like one of them I would only lose whatever esteem they might allow me. I knew that sooner or later one of them would start talking about what I was really interested in. And indeed someone did.

With a polite smile on my face, I asked: ‘Where does the legend about that church come from? Who came up with the idea that Jesus is buried up there?’

Poor people in town believed that Jesus was buried at the church, but for the rich it was a different story altogether: they saw money where the poor saw Christ.

Hamdullah Bey, who owned a famous resort outside the big city, said: ‘Probably a Roman general came up with that story.’

Then each of them told me their version of the story, picking up where the last person left off. ‘There’s a deep, intricate maze under that church. A Roman general buried the pirate treasure up there, and to be sure no one would ever find it he built a church over it and spread the rumour that Christ had been buried there.’

‘Well, then who does it belong to?’

Silence.

Rahmi finally answered. The others assumed a serious and solemn air.

‘No one knows who owns it now. They say it once belonged to an Ottoman Pasha. But no one knows who has the deed now. It has to be someone in town, and whoever has it is afraid to come out and say so.’

‘Why’s that?’ I said, interrupting him.

‘There’s an enormous fortune up there, more than you could even begin to imagine. You could buy a country with that kind of money. It’s treasure collected from hundreds of pirate ships. They would never let just one person have that much money. That amount of money is dangerous. So the holder of the deed is afraid and keeps anonymous while he plots how to get away with the money. Or else …’

‘Or else …’ I said and waited for him to go on.

‘Or else the papers were lost when the Pasha died and the deed to the church went to a relative. Or who knows, maybe the butler, and then one of his children inherited the deed, but surely it was written in Ottoman and perhaps this person doesn’t even know what it means. Or it’s packed away in a chest in someone’s attic.’

‘Hasn’t anyone ever excavated the place?’

‘You would have to dig secretly, and that’s not easy. It’s full of mazes and deep wells. And it’s bad luck to dig in such a place. There were a few archeologists who got government permission but in the end they all died. And that’s the truth, my friend, they are all dead and gone.’

‘How did they die?’ I asked, astounded.

‘Traffic accident, drowned in the sea, shot over a dispute.’

‘But then how do you explain these deaths?’

‘I don’t. But I do know that the entire town keeps a close eye on that place, and probably not just people here. If someone even goes near the church there’s talk about it in no time.’

‘So it’s dangerous to go there?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t advise it. People are willing to let the treasure be, but no one wants anyone else to have it. People would blacklist anyone who went near the church.’

Then he warned me again, ‘Everyone in town keeps a close eye on the place,’ and for a moment they all turned and glared. That’s when I understood why no other outsider was living in town: everyone here was rife with paranoia that stemmed from a rumour going back a hundred years. They saw each other as treasure fiends and anyone new in town was only treated with hostility.

They were all looking for that deed and secretly conducting research and manoeuvering, gathering people from local gangs to act as spies, watching each other all the time. A newcomer in town was eventually forced out, and if he didn’t go, there was an accident.

The endless search had become a way of life. As Rahmi said, ‘Everyone is willing to let the treasure be, but no one is willing to let anyone else have it.’ In this town, even thinking this was tantamount to losing a grip on reality.

On this bench, I can see how the treasure drove everyone out of their minds, poisoned generations, and cut people off from the outside world. For them, outsiders were always enemies.

They were civil amongst themselves but when an outsider entered the mix they went mad.

It was a madhouse.

At first it frightened them to hear that I was a writer, and they doubted me, but when they found my books they came to the conclusion that I was naïve, like all other writers.

My books saved me from a freak accident; they kept me alive in this town; books no one else had ever read had kept me alive.

Looking at their faces from the base of the granite staircase, I could see just how dangerous it was for me to be speaking about the treasure, and I changed the subject. ‘Do you ever swim in the sea?’ I asked, and their faces softened, and they were children again.

‘Only the kids do,’ they said. ‘Older folk find it indecent.’

Olive Oil King Seyit Bey, who had dyed his hair but left streaks of white around his temples, said, ‘Sometimes we sneak in at night. Someone says it’s indecent to swim in the sea and like idiots we believe them. And we never challenge them. But I swear one day I’m going to strip down bollock-naked and plunge into the sea in broad daylight.’

Seyit Bey weighed at least a hundred and fifty kilos. Someone quipped, ‘There would be a tsunami. Anyone else could have a try but it’s off-limits for you.’

And they cracked up laughing.

For them the most mundane jokes were the funniest, the ones they used over and over again. They knew them all by heart. They had no interest in new and subtle jokes, and if you tried one they would hang their faces and then shoot you an angry look, no doubt thinking that you were making fun of them. But aggressive or personal jabs were fair game. The women had sat down at the head of the table and were talking and laughing. I knew that I shouldn’t sit with them. And although no one came over to speak with me, occasionally someone would look over in my direction. It really did take a long time for the lamb to roast.

But it was delicious.

I found Mustafa after we had finished and said goodbye. He walked me to the door.

‘Be careful on the roads,’ he called out to me as I left.

I had never imagined that such well-intentioned words could be so terribly frightening.