I don’t know why, but encountering a face from the past whose affection grows as it becomes more distant made me happy. I was joyful. And with all my strength I was squeezing the warm hand in my hands. He was on the upper deck of the ferry. There were no empty seats on the couches. The ferry frequently blew its whistle at the barges passing in front of it. Everyone seemed to be in a causeless distress. No women were visible anywhere. Old men were reading their newspapers while dozing and briefly saying something to those beside them, fat men were listening carefully to the noise of the wheels while smoking their cigarettes, stylish young men in the latest fashion clothes were standing perfectly straight so as not to drop their monocles and showing their colorful, openwork socks from their pressed trousers pulled up so their knees wouldn’t wrinkle. But all of them seemed to have aged, tired, grown senile. They were souring their hairless, shaven faces as if their stomachs hurt; they were wrinkling their eyebrows and lips from the wind.
We were leaning against the white-painted railings. My friend said, “Do you have some sorrow? When I came up here, I saw you. You were so lost in thought that you didn’t notice I approached you. What’s wrong, dear fellow?”
“Nothing, nothing… I was daydreaming.”
“What kind of daydream?”
I answered with a laugh: “A wave of love…”
“Are you still a bachelor?”
“I am a bachelor!”
The old cheerfulness in my friend’s blue eyes suddenly faded. Just as one looks at a poor soul who has fallen to bed with third-degree tuberculosis with melancholy and resignation without bothering to give consolation and courage, he looked at me like that for a moment, as if with pity. Then he pulled his hand away from the railing. And put it in his pocket. He turned a bit. And fixed his eyes, which had become serious, on mine.
“You’re still a bachelor and daydreaming about love, eh?” he said, “if that’s the case, my dear, don’t be offended, you’re a vagrant… We haven’t met since we left school. Without asking, let me tell you what’s happened to you. Judging by the fact that you’re still having waves of love, you haven’t understood life, you haven’t noticed the clear and obvious truth. And since you’ve remained so foreign to the truth, you’re not happy and you won’t be able to be happy until you die.”
“Which truth?” I smiled.
“Which truth?” he said, “Social truth… If you could sense this truth, you would never occupy yourself with love.”
Not understanding and still smiling, I looked at him as if to say “But why?”
He continued: “Everywhere there is a distinct environment, a social conscience that, contrary to all sciences, logics, knowledges, reasonings, philosophies, imposes its judgment in the most absolute and tyrannical manner. In our environment too, in the Turks’ environment, love is strictly forbidden. As forbidden as an infernal machine, a bomb, a box of dynamite… Once a Turk reaches fourteen years of age, he cannot see the face of any woman other than his mother, his older sister, his younger sister, and finally his aunt on his mother’s or father’s side. So whom will he love! No one… How can I explain to you the power, the terror of this environment, this social conscience! I’ve forgotten his name, I don’t know which philosopher, when talking about God’s effect on people, His relationship with people, His morals, says, ‘He is nothing but the social environment…’ I find this statement somewhat true. The God who rules the old world with ancient sacred books and today’s new world tortures unbelievers, those who oppose Him, in every place, in every era, for different reasons and in different ways. The power that once burned Galileo today doesn’t care about the millions of schoolchildren who learn that great and terrible offense of Galileo’s as a lesson. The bullets that pierced Ferrer’s head in Spain, if they could explode in France, probably no one would remain there except old and senile women and priests. So this philosopher too, seeing that our God always uses the environment, always uses the social conscience of the environment to enforce the eternal law, makes that judgment. This eternal, irresistible law changes not for every place, every continent, every country, but even for every city, every village.
What is virtue here is crime there, what is beneficial there is considered evil here; even the commands of sacred books that should remain unchanged in defiance of all laws of nature, physiology, and evolution are obeyed differently everywhere; Christianity, whose foundations are one, is different in Europe, different in America, different in Africa… Islam is the same! Different in India, different in Liverpool, different in Bukhara, different in Turkiye… Go to Arabia and Persia, completely different there… This is how our God’s eternal and irresistible law in Turkiye, that is, social conscience, strictly forbids us love. In Turkiye, no one can love. And no one will be able to love from now on… Because to love, one must first see. However, it’s impossible to talk, to understand, to love with a young girl to make a nest with her, to live happily until death; even to see her face just once… Those who resist this strict prohibition meet the fate of anarchists who’ve gone into action, nihilists, or unbelievers of old times. They fade away with a social and pitiful death. But the cunning ones, the skilled smugglers of forbidden love, never tire of their thefts, just like an old and brave tobacco smuggler, a Greek pickpocket. They always live with heart palpitations. On deserted roads at night, in suspicious corners of dark gardens, under wind, cold and dampness, they wait for hours and finally two meaningless words mixed with fear, a hurried and quick kiss whose taste is never felt… That’s all! Love tales, poems and stories that came to old literature from Persia, to new literature from France, have passed like an incurable syphilis into the entire being of these smugglers. They always seek an adventure. They want to introduce the customs of foreign environments contrary to an environment where women are seen in a very clear and obvious manner, forbidden with terror, for example the fantasy of love. They put themselves in place of the heroes of imaginary novels set in foreign and distant countries. Of course you read many poems in literary magazines. The subject: night and woman… However, in Turkiye neither exists. In the Turkish environment, after one o’clock Ottoman time, all curtains come down, streets become deserted at night. ‘The married to their homes, the villager to their village, the homeless to mouse holes’ they go.
Casinos, balls, theaters, etc… that is, the Beyoğlu side is not Turkish at all. There foreigners live their own environment, their own customs. Arm in arm with their women, they walk in public gardens, in restaurants, they talk, they have fun, they laugh. Turks who can’t find a mouse hole, in the known sense, also mix among them. They squat at the heads of tables. They look with longing at foreigners’ women, foreign beauties, foreign bosoms. Not to prolong it, the Turks have no night. Then again in these new poems, lakes are constantly described, which lakes!.. I don’t remember any lake in Istanbul except Terkos. I’m sure none of the poets have been there either. Especially around Terkos there’s no place to stay at night. The loves, the lovers described in hundreds of verses, in poems as long as yards, are also lies… The poet has a lover. But where! The poet is talking with his lover, kissing. But where! Ah, only in his imagination… In reality, to love and to be able to talk with a young girl for three or four minutes in today’s Turkish environment is as impossible as fish coming out of water to fly in the air and perching on the branches of slender poplars in gardens. In Istanbul and its vicinity, let alone walking arm in arm with a young Turkish girl at night, speaking words of love while listening to nightingales… even getting into a carriage in daylight with our mother who looks somewhat fresh, think how dangerous it is… In places of entertainment, ah in these poor, tragic and ridiculous places, love is also not possible. Women and men can never approach each other. There must be a few hundred steps between them, and besides the few hundred steps, several dozen policemen, as if these policemen have the authority of a heavenly king without deputies and senators to fulfill the desire of the social conscience of the environment and the famous seven-headed bigot and ignorance giant. Don’t let them see you saying a word to your sister on the street, scandal is ready. Immediately to the police station… Until you prove who you are and that the person you were talking to is your sister or your mother, if you don’t eat a few kilometers of beating, it means you were lucky. Do you know who wants this love prohibition more than our environment’s religion, traditions, customs, clergy, elders, reactionaries, the government’s police? Women, Turkish women… These are the most terrible enemies of love and beauty! Their men, who see no woman’s face from their tribe outside, they don’t show a face to look at even in their homes. The most terrible police outside is at home. For example, they’ll hire a maid, right? They find the ugliest one. Pockmarked, large-mouthed, thick-lipped, crooked-toothed, bent-nosed, a horrible thing… They have a special skill, a special genius for making this girl who walks in front of you every day, bringing your meals, even uglier. They make her wear very loose clothes so her strong and protruding buttocks aren’t visible. They tie her hair with a very tight scarf under the pretext of ‘it’s spreading everywhere.’ They turn the poor thing into a genuine orangutan. They don’t delay in giving warnings: ‘You won’t look at the master’s face, you won’t talk in his presence, if he asks something you won’t answer, you won’t enter his presence with your arms bare, without stockings, etc…’ While speaking against a maid, they say, ‘hardworking, clean, quick girl but, her mouth and nose are in the right place…’ For them, having one’s mouth and nose in the right place is the most unforgivable crime. Since it’s absolutely impossible to meet and love with young girls, the issue of “marriage” is also a mine in their hands. They operate it as they wish. Their first job is to get an ugly girl for their sons or their brothers. They go as “matchmakers” to homes they don’t know. And many men still don’t know that these matchmaker ladies look for an ugly one rather than a beautiful one… And they definitely find one. If they get a beautiful girl, it drives them crazy to think that their brothers or their sons will love her, will listen to her words, and then their own shoes will be thrown on the roof. They are terrified of beauty. That’s why ninety percent of the girls who can’t find a husband in Istanbul, who remain at home, are the most beautiful, most attractive, most lovable. These poor beautiful Turkish girls are not liked by matchmaker ladies.
‘Oh, sister, very beautiful but, like the devil very smart… We want to get our son a girl, not a jinn,’ they say. To some they find faults like too European, too skinny, too shrewd. Their aim is chubby, whitish, silent, docile, stupid, ignorant girls who resemble a wet chicken. When they come across such a girl, they exclaim “Ah, here’s an angel!” and they start to describe her to their sons, their brothers with exaggerations… The poor man believes that fate has sent him a fairy, and on the wedding night when he lifts the thick veil, he can see nothing across from him but a confused, clean, white and shapeless pile of flesh that cannot answer the question ‘What is your name, madam?’ These women, who deprive their men from seeing beauty, from love, from loving, by not missing any opportunity, do the same cruelty to their own sex. If an adventure happens to a woman they know by chance, for example if her “love letter” is caught, or if she divorces her husband and goes to another, they all become angry with her and excommunicate her with horror. Years pass, when they see that woman on the street, they change their path, some try to spit in her face, the most merciful ones pity her a bit, ‘Ah, poor thing, it went bad, it was her destiny,’ they say. Mothers who know very well how dangerous a lie the saying ‘a woman’s first duty is to be beautiful’ is in our environment, prevent their daughters from beauty, from coquetry, from adornment, from freedom as much as they can. This is the unchanging model of the advice that these mothers whisper in their daughters’ ears when going out to the street: ‘My daughter! Lower your veil. Put your hands inside your chador. Don’t raise your head like that. They’ll call you loose. Look ahead. Don’t walk bouncing like European women. Slowly, slowly… Don’t stick out your chest, they’ll follow us. They’ll call you lustful… Your reputation will be ruined. You’ll stay at home, etc. and etc…’ Then, every family that knows and meets each other is as if mutual inspectors of each other. God forbid a small love adventure happens in a family. Scandal, gossip suddenly rises to the skies, mocks the heroes. All their acquaintances suddenly become angry with mothers who don’t care, who turn a blind eye to their sons’ and daughters’ secret meetings, their correspondence, ‘ah, woman at this age she’s growing horns…’ they say, they are disgusted with her.
As for the famous high society in Turkiye shown in some new novels… This realm is entirely a product of fantasy. Among the Turks, in the past and now, there is no privileged class. True, the families of bigger officials, pashas left over from the old era, and those who are somewhat wealthy try to make an artificial high society and supposedly westernize, Frenchify, by sacrificing their principles. But the result? The entire environment becomes hostile to them. When such a family appears in a neighborhood where women are seen by male relatives outside the prohibited degrees of marriage, first ‘They’re bad!…’ label is attached. Then the boycott begins. With the sounds of hatred and aggression rising around such decadent families, all their happiness is extinguished. They are forced to leave their places, their lands, to retreat to mansions in the countryside, in remote and deserted corners, to secluded waterside residences. Yes, like the lakes, nights, loves in new poems, the existence of women in new novels who go out to their male relatives outside prohibited degrees of marriage, to their husbands’ friends is a lie. It’s made up. These novels are nothing but shadows, repetitions, translations, imitations of Western novels. Let a Turkish family in Istanbul be shown to me where women appear to foreign men and men outside prohibited degrees of marriage, I’m ready now to give my five years’ earnings. The Europeanized families described in these novels are as contrary to genuine Turkishness as the special plays of our famous artists Kel Hasan and Abdi whose authors are unknown. Just as the servant constantly popping up next to the ladies in those theaters, the wet nurses squeezing their breasts saying “oh cream” is impossible in reality among Turkish families, and just as these scandals are extremely made-up things, the women in new novels who shake hands with foreign men, who are in front of their husbands open, bare, without covering and without chador, even some décolleté, who talk with foreign men, are also such crude, improper, completely opposite to reality, cold and false fantasies.
Not to prolong it, now answer me. In such an environment where love is forbidden by its religion, traditions, customs, laws, government, police, family organization, even its women, where men and women outside prohibited degrees of marriage are never shown to each other, what is the stubbornness of seeking love, loving, if not vagrancy? Isn’t opposing the social conscience of such an environment more insane, more mad than being an anarchist against the most powerful and great governments? I was very distressed to see that you, whom I thought very intelligent, are still occupied with this impossible fantasy. Ah poor friend, by now you should have won the lottery, should have been content with the pile of flesh, the field of flesh that fell to your lot, should have raised little soldiers for the army… And only thus could you be happy. Yet you’re still having waves of love, running toward an endless desert of despair, toward a hell abyss full of lava, toward a distant, deceptive, artificial mirage hiding volcanoes spewing fire behind it… If you knew how much I pitied you.”
The ferry had arrived at Kadıköy. While listening to my friend, I had risen on my heels, lightly sat on the railing. I straightened up. My right foot had gone terribly numb. I couldn’t step on the ground.
“Wait a bit, dear fellow,” I said, “my foot has gone numb. We’ll get off last.”
He was laughing, saying, “Not your foot, apparently your brain has gone numb.”
The ferry had tilted toward the dock. People were getting off from above and below. The sun had disappeared under thick clouds, the weather had taken on a dark iron color, had become melancholy like a resentful and pale eye full of moisture inside, ready to cry. I was watching those getting off. I was thinking about what my friend had said, turning my sweet wave of half an hour ago into a terrible storm, what the end could be of a tribe, a society that divides its members in two, deprives them of love and loving, imprisons their mothers, their wives, their daughters, never waking from the dreamless and granite sleep it has fallen into for centuries; I was likening the silent and soundless exits of those passing quickly with fearful attention on narrow planks to the hurried escape of a timid animal herd. Among these there were no females. Young and old, old, young, rich, poor, all were male. Rubbing my knee with my hand, I said “There were no women on the ferry.”
My friend laughed again and answered: “Be patient… It’s forbidden for them to mix with men. They’ll get off last…”
The ferry had completely emptied. We were still on top of the funnel, at the white railing. The numbness in my leg hadn’t passed. Limping beside my friend, I began to walk toward the dock.
Now the women too, under their tightly covered dark black chadors, as if carrying very heavy and secret chains of slavery and oppression wrapped in cotton so their clanking wouldn’t be heard, like cursed, expelled from life, sick and mute phantoms, were getting off slowly, swaying, trembling, and bowing their heads forward, trying to see under their thick and black veils the ground they were stepping on so as not to fall, not to touch anything, not to bump into each other, not to take a wrong step…
