…His relatives called him “eccentric,” those who knew him from afar called him “mad.” He was past forty-five. He still hadn’t married. In summer he would always wander the countryside, watching the sunrise and sunset with an importance peculiar to lunatics. In winter he would never go outside from his house in Acıbadem where he lived alone, would pace up and down in his room, listening to the sounds of that incomprehensible storm inside his head that appeared very noble, very refined with his white hair shining like a silver crown. He had received a very good education. If he wanted, he could work and earn money. However, he had given up everything, like Epicurus of old, contenting himself only with providing “natural and necessary” needs, giving no importance at all to life’s almost everything—the “natural and unnecessary,” “unnatural and unnecessary” needs. He had a small income inherited from his father. It was enough for bread, water, fire, and clothing. No one came to his house except a few childhood and school friends. He would receive them under the large plane tree in his garden, which had turned into a wild forest area with hemlocks and wild grasses, offering them bitter cups from the poison of his despair.
To those who said, “Get married, this despair will leave you!” he would smile: “I will not accept the crime of bringing a slave into the world.” Because he spoke very little, even his closest friends couldn’t understand him well. They would say, “Philosopher, pessimist, dervish, nervous, etc…” But no, he… was simply a man without hope! After leaving school he had started reading, the more he read the more he lost hope, the more he read and thought the more he contemplated suicide; but science and thought—the result of strong education—dominated him.
“There’s no need to hurry. Since our fate is like this… One should withdraw to a corner and wait for death…” he had said. So, he was always waiting for that death! Because he didn’t look at himself as a “human being.” To be human, one absolutely had to be within a society, a nationality… He thought: He had no nationality; he had no society. He only had a vague religion whose warmth he couldn’t feel, whose language and prayer he understood nothing of. He felt no sublimity in its temple, saw no deep eternity before it, didn’t immerse himself in the infinities of a divine ideal in its heaven, remained on the black earth like an animal, like an individual.
Like an animal…
However, he wanted to be a human with his nationality, with his religion, with the sublimity of his temple, with the eternity of his society, with the infinity of his ideal—a moral and spiritual human: His environment was a desert, a wasteland, a void that suddenly melted desires and inclinations. There was no “beautiful, good, and sublime.” As art, nightmares were made from formless geometric lines, as literature meaningless and abstract compositions in Arabic and Persian were being made, nationality was being denied, the past was being caricatured, the future was being imagined as smoke.
“What will happen, what will happen?” as he pressed his head in his palms, an unseen darkness, a nightmare, would answer him with an infernal language whose words were composed of owl howls.
“Tomorrow the Russians will come, will take Istanbul. The English and French will plunder Anatolia. Your name will be erased from history…”
Yes, this was certain. Who could doubt this? Could a nation that didn’t know its own name, didn’t write its own language, thought its enemies were brothers, survive? Was this possible? Tomorrow this poor nation that didn’t know its own name, didn’t write its own language, thought its enemy was its brother, would become captive like the people of India in the hands of the Russians, French, English, would serve them like animals, would be deprived of civilization—that is, of humanity and morality. And he himself was a candidate to become such a slave… While thinking these things, his nerves would shake, he would have a terrible fit, would rebel against tomorrow’s fate of “slavery and animalism,” would tear up hemlocks, crush thorns, finally would throw himself into the countryside like a madman. The sight of those going to have fun in carriages, the riders always appearing from the side while passing, the cyclists would touch him:
“Ah, herds of slaves!” he would grumble. Yes, all of these were animals. Not human. If they were human, how could they carelessly and happily have fun, wander, raise dust, laugh, play in the face of such imminent and certain slavery? How could they love, how could they marry, how could they raise a houseful of children? They had no idea. Of the disaster, they had no idea of anything.
…Again on a summer day, while sulking under the plane tree in his garden like a paralyzed old man waiting for death, his despair was shaken. He thought a sun was rising. Constitutional government had been declared. But before five or ten months passed, his despair became worse than before. Learning from the Duma’s debates that the Russians gave three hundred thousand rubles every year to certain men in Istanbul to incite sedition, seeing the shakiness of a nation that couldn’t govern itself, he was going even more mad. He couldn’t look at setting and rising suns anymore. He thought he was seeing the attack of Russian armies with their savage Cossacks, was trembling as if he had suddenly rolled into an abyss he didn’t see while running with eyes closed. Birds were crying, flowers were fading, leaves were falling, horizons were darkening. He was discouraged. Raising his hand toward his environment:
“Wake up! Know yourselves. Don’t live purposeless, unorganized, uncivilized like animals. Become a nation…” he couldn’t dare to say, couldn’t feel this power in himself. Besides, what effect could words have anymore? Bankruptcy had actually begun and was approaching its end. Trade, wealth, money, happiness had completely passed into the hands of foreigners. Capitulations were an execution machine, an institution of usurpation that slowly killed a nation. No one saw the truth, no one could determine at least the direction of retreat to escape the approaching disaster.
“Ah, if only a hero who grasped the truth would emerge…” he would moan. Like a burning wind coming from barren lands, stony grounds, ruins, wastelands, sometimes an ideal current would blow, gathering souls who wanted to be saved, loved freedom, knew morality as humanity. He too was caught by every current he felt from afar. He looked to the mouths of new guides. Some were saying, “You must know everything from Allah,” others wanted to supposedly invent a political unity by lowering the Turks, who had written such glorious pages in history, to the civilized levels and primitive mentalities of primitive and semi-savage tribes and peoples like Borneans, Fijians, Javanese, Sumatrans, etc… After the Tripoli war, the Balkan disaster that suddenly piled upon us laid him in bed. Now Turkiye’s European part was gone and what remained had been divided under the name of “zones of interest.” After this, he had no hope left. He shut himself in his mansion and waited for the Russians. Now the final step had been taken.
When the World War was declared, he writhed once more in his corner. Now this time it was truly the final hour! The Russians would hang their crosses on Hagia Sophia, a thousand-year Turkish history in this corner of Western Asia would close. He decided to kill himself so as not to see the enslavement of a nation that had lost its consciousness.
“But when the Russians enter…” he was saying. Ah, if the environment were human, he could accept death more easily than slavery.
British and French cannons were pounding Çanakkale.
Today or tomorrow…
The enemy was definitely expected. Migration to Anatolia was beginning and neighborhoods were slowly emptying. He too, like many others, was waiting for the enemy, saying, “Finally within a week…” Many of these weeks passed one after another. British and French battleships couldn’t pass Çanakkale. Those who had migrated returned.
He, confused by this miracle, came out of his mansion. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were filling the streets, squares, countryside. This order, this spirit, this army, this nation—where had they suddenly sprung from? He couldn’t understand…
A year passed, each day bringing news of another victory.
At Çanakkale, an enemy army of almost a million was melted, driven into the sea. Great battleships sank. The flags of the English, thought to be undefeatable, were brought down. Especially the Russians… They could do nothing but declare in speeches that they had entered this war only to capture Istanbul.
…As his despair passed, his eyes were opening, he was now seeing that he was within a living nation that felt itself, knew its ideal. Capitulations were being lifted, internal enemies were being cleaned out, efforts were being made to take away the weapons of “economics and exploitation” from the hands of traitors who, like poisonous parasites, swarmed over the nation’s structure and sucked its blood. This environment he had lost hope in was finally becoming a nation, and the idea of “division of labor” was awakening among the Turks.
…He had the hemlocks of the mansion removed. He had its debris cleaned. Neighbors who knew him as mad and eccentric were astonished at this transformation.
The mansion began to be repaired. The master of the mansion also began to wear clean and new clothes. They heard that this gentleman who had been closed and idle for fifteen, twenty years had become a translator at the foreign ministry.
He was approaching fifty. His hair was white as snow. But his nation’s sudden awakening, happiness, movement rejuvenated him. And he decided to marry. A nightingale had now perched on the plane tree where crows had roosted a year ago, and was singing.
One evening, neighbors saw lights bursting from the windows of the newly painted mansion. When they heard happy and cheerful laughter, spiritual musical harmonies, they understood there was a wedding!
When his despair passed, his whole life became a powerful spring. Only the white hairs on his head… They still remained. But these white hairs, like the sublime and pure snows on a high mountain, couldn’t block the “paths of aspiration.” Violets had grown in the places of hemlocks.
From the whole garden, a sweet scent was mixing with the secretly passing wind; carrying from this house’s happiness an ownerless and spiritual greeting to other happy family hearths.
On a cool morning, he was wandering distracted and somewhat unwell among the newly made flower beds. Suddenly a voice shouted from the mansion’s door: “Sir, good news!”
“Good news!”
“She’s delivered, good news!”
“A boy?”
“No, a girl… Like a ball of light!”
He quickly went inside. He rushed to his wife’s bedside; the pure and beautiful woman was lying calm and weak in her white bed with pink silk curtains, like an angel yellowed with the farewell color of the setting sun at evening time. When she saw him, she smiled. With a soft, barely audible, supernatural voice she said, “What shall we name her?”
“Mefkure…”
And trembling, he turned. He looked at his daughter wrapped in a thin white swaddle they extended to him. He forgot in an instant his past spent in suffering and sorrow, his white hair, everything. In the newly opened innocent and calm eyes of this newborn baby, a clear blue dawn of hope was shining. He felt his entire soul filling, igniting with the eternal lights of this infinite dawn. His eyes watered with joy. The lights filling his soul also covered his surroundings. Now in this storm of emotion he couldn’t see any definite form, he seemed only to hear his wife’s—which he thought was coming from his own soul—delicate, sweet, gentle voice.
“Mefkure…”
“Ah, what a beautiful name!”
