To feel the greatest joy, the greatest delight, the greatest pleasure and excitement that many years could not contain, to dream the greatest, most unattainable dreams, within twelve short hours… it shakes a person so! The generation after us probably will never feel such a fervor, such an ecstasy beyond nature and endurance throughout their entire lives! That first day, that first day when freedom was declared, what was it, oh Lord! As if in one second the whole world suddenly changed. Deserted streets filled with a colorful and dense crowd. Squares closed off. The mouths of mutes who never spoke to each other opened. A dozen orators at every street corner… Men like madmen with badges on their collars and whips in their hands, running and speaking on carriages, on horseback! Then flags, flags, flags… Bands that never stopped, procession parades that never ended! Embraces, hugs, kisses, storms of applause! And above all this, a cry that never ceased: “Long live freedom!” Then again, from women, children, old people, young people, soldiers, a mixed, overflowing, surging rush! Where to? Nobody knows. I too was a particle in this lively and roaring torrent… I can’t remember now how far I walked, where I passed through. But my soul was attuned to the people’s fervor. Like everyone else, I had lost myself. The sun set, it grew dark. I wasn’t aware of being hungry, thirsty. Finally, past midnight. The crowd thinned a bit. The noise seemed to subside a little. My feet, without my knowledge, took me toward my home. At that time I was living in Pangaltı. I went inside. I went up to my room. I stretched out on the sofa. I was in no condition to undress, to go to bed. I was in no condition to lie down and stay on the sofa either. I was very tired. But my nerves, my muscles were tense. An unknown force was overflowing from within me. I was sitting calmly. But my thoughts wouldn’t stop, storms were breaking out in my mind. I got up. I went to the open window.
I smelled the cool darkness of the night. I was suffocating. The unknown force within me—I couldn’t tell what it was—was about to explode. I couldn’t sit, couldn’t lie down, couldn’t sleep. I understood this. And I said, “I might as well go out again…”
Like a sleepwalking person, I descended the stairs without seeing. I opened the door. The street was deserted. Dogs were sleeping. I stopped. I raised my head. Drowsy and blue, the trembling stars were like a living dome, enormous and enameled, built upon the night. I started walking down the boulevard. At this moment my mind was another existence, another realm outside my body. My thoughts were working without my knowledge. My aspirations, accumulated for years inside that iron and fire fortress the former regime had drawn around personality, were now free! Which aspiration would I turn into reality? These aspirations were not one, not a thousand, perhaps a hundred thousand… Programs were passing through my mind like a storm cloud. I felt within myself the existence of a power to actualize all these aspirations from potential to action. I started walking briskly. My chest was swelling, my heart was beating. I noticed. A cane in my hand… I must have taken it when leaving the house. I was brandishing this cane like a legendary hero who had gone alone against an army. My ears were ringing, I could still hear the echoes of the day’s speeches, applause, band noise. Suddenly, involuntarily, with a violent and unknown fervor boiling beyond my logic and consciousness, I shouted at the top of my voice, “Long live freedom! Long live freedom!” I couldn’t control myself. I turned. I brought down the cane brandishing in my hand with all my strength on the gas lamp to my left. The end of the cane, broken in two, flew off. It fell forward. Suddenly I woke up. I felt ashamed of my immoderation, my childish excess.
“I wonder if anyone saw?” I cast a glance around me. Behind me, a white-bearded, tall old man… He was smiling, his bright, very bright, extraordinarily bright eyes fixed on me. I felt embarrassed. I wanted to escape, to get away.
The old man said, “Stop, young man!” There was such a strange quality in his voice… it was impossible not to obey. I stopped. The piece of my cane remaining in my hand fell to the ground. Who was this? With his long, loose black overcoat, his white hair and white beard appearing brighter under the light at night, he truly resembled a very distant phantom, a specter.
“What is it?” I looked into his blazing eyes. With a calm, marble, cold smile he asked: “Are you drunk?”
“No.”
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“Then why did you hit the lamp?”
“…”
“Why did you break your cane?”
I stuttered: “Just… because…”
“Just because? What does that mean? You’re not drunk, you’re in your right mind! Man is a thinking being. Man is one who knows what he does.”
“Hey…” I wanted to pass by, shrugging my shoulder. I didn’t have time to listen to a senile man I didn’t know. Suddenly, with his height that seemed to be growing even more, he approached me. He touched my left shoulder.
“No, don’t run away,” he said. I was confused. I looked at his face again.
“I have things to do, dear…”
“At this hour, three hours past midnight… What could you have to do?…”
I couldn’t answer. What did this old man I didn’t know want from me? I felt a weight in my heart. But I couldn’t get angry. I stuttered again: “Let me go, I’ll leave.”
“No, come with me—you must come. Walk with me for half an hour. I see that you, poor young man, are in a great fervor. If you don’t rise up, you’ll roll into abysses. You won’t be able to feel the true happiness of life, the true pleasures. Come. Come with me…”
He started walking. I too was going beside him with an involuntary obedience, looking at his dignified profile that gave the feeling of a person belonging to another realm, his open forehead, his curved nose, his white and large beard that moved as he spoke.
“What do you do?”
“Writing.”
“Writing?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are a dagger! A dagger that uses itself, whose handle is in its own blade’s hand… If you wish, you can render the greatest service to people, teach them virtue, love, truth. If you wish, you can kill their virtues, disturb their peace, bring them all at each other’s throats, make them lose the happiness of their lives, the pleasures of their enjoyments! The key to the soul is in your hand. You can easily open it and pour inside either poison or a life-giving elixir if you wish!”
We were walking slowly. The avenue was deserted. Soldier patrols were roaming under the trees and carriages were passing. A warm breeze was blowing, the rebellious lights of the gas lamps, like butterflies of flame put in a glass cage, were fluttering, as if wanting to escape and fly. And all the shadows were shaking. We entered Taksim Garden. There was no one at the half-open gate or inside. Through the trees, the lit windows of the distant buffet were visible. We passed through the flower beds on the left side. The leaves of the large trees, darker than the night, were absorbing the blowing winds, and on the motionless branches deep and intimate whispers were conversing. The old man was saying things I couldn’t quite understand well.
I couldn’t grasp the meaning of the strange voice I heard.
“Let’s sit,” he said. We were at the edge of a bench at the very end. We sat down. I was thinking I had gotten caught up with this old man. In Üsküdar, Çamlıca, Kuzguncuk, there were scattered lights. The sea was calm. The North Star, like a newborn little moon cub, was scattering its purple rays, shining while slowly extinguishing the other stars around it. From hunger, fatigue, sleeplessness, my head had turned to granite. I was paying attention. One ear was ringing, the other was buzzing. The old man asked: “Hey young writer, tell me, here is freedom! What will you do?”
What would I do? I remembered in an instant. Not one, not a thousand, a hundred thousand aspirations…
“I will work for freedom,” I said.
“How? What aspect of freedom will you work for?”
I fell silent. I truly didn’t know what aspect I would work for.
“Don’t you have another idea?”
“No…”
He shook his head:
“Alas… I saw you, young man, don’t deny it. Your soul is full of ambition… You are the child of a society that hasn’t grasped its purpose! You’re so young! You don’t know the meaning of true life! Like every ignorant person, you only think of yourself, you don’t bring anything to mind except the worthless interests of your mortal self.”
“I don’t accept this judgment,” I said.
“You want to be rich!”
“…”
“You want fame and glory!”
“…”
“You want pleasure and entertainment!”
“…”
“You want beautiful women, palaces with golden furniture, sycophants prostrate at your feet!”
“…”
I was silent. I was confused almost like a criminal caught with the weapon in hand. My courage broke. The old man’s eyes, like an X-ray beam tearing through darkness, seemed to see inside my mind, the depth of my soul, its twilight; yes, I wanted these things. And the sudden opening of the door of freedom before me to go directly to these, to this paradise, was making me happy, driving me mad… And starting tomorrow, with my sword—that is, my pen—in hand, I would throw myself into the arena. For twelve hours, the ambition slowly being born and growing a thousand times every second, I couldn’t contain myself. But I didn’t consent to having this state thrown in my face.
“No,” I said, “I don’t have such ideas.”
“You don’t? Don’t deny it! I saw you, young man! You didn’t sleep tonight. You lay down in your bed. Sleep didn’t enter your eyes. An hour before morning you still couldn’t bear it. Your room suffocated you. You threw yourself outside. A volcano of ambition was blazing inside you. Although you weren’t drunk, although you weren’t mad, just like a drunk, just like a madman, you shouted to yourself: ‘Long live freedom!’ You couldn’t contain your momentum with this. You raised your cane, brought it down on the street lamp…”
…The old man, with a calm and irresistibly powerful voice, was telling everything I thought, repeating to me one by one my aspirations, desires, ambitions that I couldn’t confess to anyone, as if he were inside me. I was silent and listening. I was feeling the fear of an unconscious criminal who doesn’t know his fault but was caught while committing it. I no longer had the strength to deny what he said. Like a child who throws stones behind him while running away, I wanted to change the subject with impudence.
“Who are you?” I said.
“An eighty-year-old old man!”
“What is your name?”
“What will you do with my name? I am nothing, a nothing fallen into the depths of a spiritual ecstasy… Walking in this ecstasy, I saw you. I pitied the empty fervor of an ignorant person who doesn’t understand true real life. That’s why I stopped you. I brought you here. Yes, poor young man, you are ignorant!”
“What do you know?”
“If you weren’t ignorant, would you rejoice this much, lose yourself?”
“But this declared freedom?…”
“Freedom! Freedom! Is this a path that will lead you to happiness? Do you hope you can be happy without the nation being happy? However, history has piled up thousands of unsolved problems on our country. The place you live in is an ocean of ‘problems’! Fifteen days from now, doubtless these noises, these demonstrations will end. Enemies who can’t tolerate our strengthening will begin their secret attacks. Three, four years won’t pass, at least three states will pounce on us…”
“Are we in the Middle Ages? Can such things still happen?”
“You’ll see. Later, probably because of us, a world war will break out. The whole world will get mixed up with each other. The greatest states will rush to crush us with their armies, their navies, to erase us from history. If we are not alert… What will awaken us are our writers, our poets, our literati…”
He turned toward me from within the darkness. With a very excited, very trembling voice, leaving deep echoes in my soul, with an intensity that enveloped my whole body, he added:
“Hey young writer! Come, you be a hero! Don’t think of yourself. Leave empty pride, self-interest. Awaken your nation. Your nation doesn’t yet know its own name, doesn’t know its own language. Time has moved on, it has slept, remained behind! The hidden enemies it thought were friends, that it embraced, have plundered all its wealth, all its happiness! Your nation is a slave in its own homeland, a captive, a watchman, a pauper… Give it science, wealth, happiness, feeling, ideals!… I saw you, I saw how you hit the street lamp. Give this intensity of yours, this fervor of yours to your nation, which is an immortal and eternal existence! However, alas, you’re not even thinking about such things…”
“I am thinking.”
“No, you’re not thinking. You’re a fool for fame and glory! But you know that fame and glory are like shadows. If one goes toward it, it flees! If one flees from it, it follows…”
…As if in an obscure dream, I was watching the ritual of a holiness whose heat I didn’t feel. The old man was explaining to me the philosophy of sacrifice, humility, disinterestedness. While listening, my truly tense and excited nerves were finding peace. My pride was being demolished, my ambition was being extinguished. A lightning was flashing in my mind. Yes, what was I, as he said? An individual… How long could I live? Sixty, seventy, ninety, come on, a hundred years… But an eternal life was destined for the nation, which was part of humanity! To live the soul of this life, its ideal, its sacred inclination was humanity. Weren’t organic pleasures, enjoyment, joy, lust, nothing but a series of mortal fatigues that immediately turned to sorrow after lasting a while? As I listened to this old man, I seemed to feel a supernatural pleasure. The wind was blowing cooler, faster, and the awake branches, with their leaf tongues, as if wanting to reveal secret mysteries, were raising their whispers. The poor old man was saying what he would do if he were young, and he was explaining the pleasure of finding fault within the nation, its grandeur, with a harmony, a poetry, a music that I will never forget as long as I live. He was counting, pouring out the torments of animalism, ideals, the hell of ambition, and now my eyes were closing from fatigue. On the opposite shore, the hems of night were turning navy blue. I couldn’t leave, abandoning his voice sweet like a divine lullaby, the pleasure arising from this voice’s nerve-caressing melody. And I fell into the delusion that beside me sat a prophet tribe of unknown religion, filtered from ancient centuries…Finally, my eyes had closed, I had slept.
When I woke up, I saw that all the stars had been extinguished. A transparent and crimson dawn smoke had turned the opposite hills pink. I looked to my right. The old man wasn’t there. Like phantoms that disappear with the sun’s first rays, he seemed to have been erased, flown away, gone. I got up. I was cold. I left the deserted garden. With distracted and vagrant steps I came to my house. I lay down in my bed. But I couldn’t sleep.
In my soul, a luminous storm of another fervor I had never felt until that moment had begun to roar.
