MEN DON'T CRY
a novel by Ercan Akbay

1
THE SCHOOL

I started this school in 1970, when I was an eleven year old boy with a seemingly extraordinary mind for having passed the tests to enter the most prestigious colleges of the country. For the simple reason that the school was on the other side of the Bosphorus I was a boarding student. At that time, neither Istanbul’s first bridge had been built, nor did the population of the city has reached two millions yet.
My mother couldn’t hold back her tears as she spread the sheets on my new bed the first day. Yet I was calm; almost like I was eager to know of the truths to life as soon as I could and become a real man standing on his own two feet. I remember my new mates all begging to stop their parents leaving them, and crying out their eyes on that sunny Sunday. Knowing that all these wouldn’t change anything, I stood strong with a smile on my face, bidding farewell to my teary-eyed mother patting my head.
That day was the beginning of an exciting adventure for me; but I have to confess that being a boarder was a hard thing. Although there were many nice and funny sides to be away from home, you needed to spend at least a couple of years in the dormitories of this rough world to become a man who didn’t cry.
By the time we reached the age of fourteen, leaving behind all those obstacles, we’d all became pretty sophisticated. You become what you see; we had turned into potty-mouthed, heavy-smoking and wine drinking street dogs just like our senior brothers were; tough and handsome... The wine we swigged, of course, was nothing but a plastic-capped Dogkiller, and the smokes were ninety-kurush-a-pack non-filters.
Winter came early towards the end of 1973. It was only the middle of November when it snowed, making it difficult for the non-boarding students to get to school. For us boarders it meant nothing more than a change of scenery, caused by a big white blanket of snow in the yard of the old pine trees leading all the way to the shore. We were stuck inside studying in the cold study rooms under the bright, flickering fluorescent lights and going to bed early so that we could wake up before dawn the next morning. There weren’t things like TV or anything else to entertain us in the evenings. Some of the mornings, we would wake up an hour before the usual time and head down to the yard to play some soccer excitedly.
That was almost all the show we got…
Rarely done by the lower-class boys, though, there was another exciting thing to do; to escape from school at night time. The usual destination was an all-night teahouse by the sea, which offered nothing that could be of interest for children our age, except for a pool table and a black-and-white television. It was more a place for retired or jobless men who play cards and smoke water pipes aimlessly, but hell; the important thing was to escape over that fenced, long wall of school. It was hard to find anything more creative to do at the time. We weren’t old enough to go to brothels or whore-houses like the senior boys did.
To escape from the school for a boarding school kid was a maturity test for becoming a real bummer, and passing this test wasn’t an easy thing to do: the enemy had taken every kind of precaution there was. They were severely cautious during the time when we were to graduate from junior-high in March of 1974 they even chase the tomcats on the roof away.
But though they possessed all the boundless opportunities of the government, they knew nothing about the mind and abilities of the new generation, and yet they haven’t met the brains behind the gang Zorba…

2
THE GANG

“Tell me the name of the Italian delegate of the United Nations…”
I leaned both of my hands on his chest. “Fuck off, boy! Are you kidding me? Everybody’s onto the Japanese delegate now,” I said. Pushed him right down on the broken desk he’d stood up from. He was pinned to the desk.
You had to show some manners to a jerk that makes such old-fashioned jokes.
“Who’s the Japanese delegate?” he asked.
He was dying of curiosity. I whispered the name in his ear. His small eyes narrowed, and he burst out his laugh that resembled a girly shriek. The other pubescent freaks in the study room perked up their ears, and I started to laugh, too. On occasions like this, we used to laugh like a mad on purposely just so that they would say, ‘Hey, those guys are having a lot of fun’ and envy us.
Delegate jokes back then were the thing made-up names we invented out of Turkish words that sounded like the respective country’s language. As you might assume, there wasn’t one out of these names that wasn’t in some sort of dirty slang when pronounced.
In one of the classrooms of the old building that each held thirty people, twelve of us were studying. The front seats were always empty in this study hall. Then came the hard-working boys right behind the front row; they actually did what we all were supposed to do there. Lastly, the right corner of the back row was occupied by us, members of Zorba.
The fact that we had that name, it didn’t mean that we were bullies or anything; we weren’t. The Turkish word for ‘bully’, Zorba, happened to be made of the first letters of our names. As for the gang part, well, it’s not like we could call ourselves a soccer team or an orchestra, so we had to be a gang. It wasn’t very likely that we would carry out illegal business in a boarding school anyway. Our fields of interest were limited to gambling, sports or fight organizations, and artistic cultural activities like comic book publishing. From time to time, we did carry out activities that weren’t one of the usual, but exceptions didn’t count.
Our first letter, Ziya, was the class rep. We used to call him the ‘Division Clerk.’ He knew a lot about official requests and bureaucracy and he covered up for guys who cut class. He was the only serious and hard-working student among us, one of the members of ‘absolute necessity’ for every gang of representation, so that we did not clash with the inner-laws of the system. A pimpled, white skinned boy with brown wavy hair, Ziya was a guard at our class soccer team, a largely built guy but fast runner.
That short, blond, blue-eyed member of the gang, Oguz, who was twitchy as Jerry Lewis, was a non-stop talker. He cursed and talked dirty all day long, telling jokes and selling Disney and Lucky Luke stickers that stuck with the help of some water. He was known as the ‘central distributor’ of the school for trading of goods like these. Since he was ultra-hyperactive, there wasn’t any crime or incident he wasn’t involved in, including gambling organizations. His cheeks were raw from the continuous slaps he’d gotten from study hall surveillants.
Renan, the so-called ‘intellectual’ of the gang, was a dark, scrubby haired thick guy with drowsily looking eyelids. Although the only stuff he read was trash novels, he considered himself well-informed on every subject. Whenever there was a fight, he would carefully take off his big black-rimmed glasses, hand them to someone trustworthy, and roll up his sleeves. The owner of the grocery store across from the school was his brother-in-law, so he was in charge of transporting the illegal goods we imported from there and clearing them through customs into our dorms. He was an irreplaceable asset to the gang if only for this reason. He could only be a substitute player for the soccer team because of his eye-glasses.
As for me, I had nothing special about me other than self-confidence, a cool, calm and collected personality, and a talent for creative planning. I was a skinny, pale kid with curly brown hair. I read a lot but hadn’t started to wear glasses at the time. On the soccer team, I was positioned for the ‘strategic missions’ in the forward field.
Ayhan was the star of the gang, a tall, muscled, dark-haired guy who had blossomed into a handsome young man a little earlier than us. Captain and striker of the soccer team, a good writer and cartoonist, and a clever, good-hearted guy with lots of common sense. The shy expression on his face in his first day of school was why nobody gave any attention to him but me. That same day, we became some sort of Siamese twins.
He was my best friend, right from the heart.
The last year of junior high, we were all around fourteen years old and there wasn’t any other group of boarders living a worse life than us. We had embraced gambling, wickedness and generally being punks; every kind of nuisance there was, early on in our lives, and they had become things we wouldn’t give up.
See, its not the way you think; it wasn’t like I was the leader of the gang. There could be no leader of Zorba; we took pride in our leader-free, anti-authority institution. Procedures for any event were settled by the gang member who knew the most about the particular event.
Since Ayhan was the earliest to reach physical maturity among us, he used to solve any problems that needed physical power. He was also the chief editor of our magazine. I was the creative power of the gang, I would design the working and operational plans of our various businesses and bring them to the table. The gang had a pluralist voting system going on, and there were two of us who used to carry out the forgery and smuggling decisions: Ziya and Renan. The organization of any kind of gambling, sales and marketing, or collection was meticulously carried out by Oguz .
As boarders in the same class, twelve of us in total, we slept in two side by side dorms each holding six of us. The gang consisted of the permanent holders of five beds in dorm number 13.
The sixth member, the one who ran our errands, was our slave.
People who think that slaver societies have vanished in modern times are ignorant and know nothing about how schools are run. An oppressive and primitive regime lived on with all its cruelty in our school. The weak and unarmed boys were given hell in the dorms and study halls, they were the subject of all mean jokes and torment, and they were forced to do all the dirty errand jobs.
That night, during the dinner break between the two study halls, Ayhan was giving evening instructions to the Arab, our dorm slave. “Arab, boy… Quick, go grab the bottle of wine from our common locker and hide it under the bed. And don’t get caught. Cover it with a track suit so nobody sees it.”
“What was the number of the locker it was in?”
Ayhan got angry at him and shouted, “Twenty-six. Still can’t learn one simple locker number? Do we have to beat you every night, you stupid bastard?”
The Arab was famous for his out of focus, silly questions and making the gang angry by asking them. We were suspicious that he did this on purpose.
“Just asking, mate,” he murmured, bending down his thick eyebrows. “Is the key in the mopboard next to the locker?”
The number of lockers that our gang had used to hide things were never voiced out loud and the rumor around was that the lockers actually belonged to the upper class boys instead.
Rightfully, Ayhan went crazy with rage. “Come here right now!” he called Arab down in front of himself, and gave him two slaps from where he sat. The sound that came out of the kid’s dark cheeks echoed off the classroom walls. At times like this, Arab’s jaw would clench shut and his face would freeze, but he never let a tear escape from his eyes.
“Please don’t hit me, mate…”
“You’ll get two slaps every day ’cause you’re spoiled, boy. Look at this fucking dog! If you go around shouting this dorm’s secrets ever again, I swear to God I’ll beat you all night long. Understood?”
“Understood...”
“Now get lost!”
I remember so well, in one of those moments Oguz  had entered the study hall. Because there was ‘jungle’ at dinner, the only thing he ate was some dessert and he was half-starved. This time it was him who called Arab to his side just as he was heading out. Arab could only say, “Yes?” with a distressed voice.
“Bring me toast and coke from the canteen on your way back. Make sure the toast’s well-pressed, as thin as a piece of paper,” he ordered carelessly.
“Sure, mate,” he said, waiting.
Sticking his hand in his pocket, Oguz grabbed a handful of coins left over from the daily gambling session. He took a few and handed them to Arab. “This should cover it.”
It was hard to survive boarding school life without knowing the unwritten rules well. If there was ‘jungle’ going on in the cafeteria, and if you didn’t have any money to buy food from the canteen, you would definitely starve. We lived under an order in which the strong and the fast left the weak hungry.
The ‘jungle law’ was a kind of a ‘marshal law’ declared by the authorities of the senior classes, for the times when we had something good on the dinner menu. For rare dishes like steak, lady-thigh meatballs, stuffed rice, and for sweets like shambaba cake or fruits like bananas, this declaration was made by our senior brothers who were the grand authority. Under jungle law, as soon as the dinner bell rang, there were exclamations of ‘Allah Allah!’ and a dash to the twelve-person dinner tables, where the quickest to reach them had the right to consume as much food as they could get.
I was a tiny, skinny boy who hadn’t physically matured yet. To survive among my peers, I had to be on the ball. When it was the jungle law, I found ways to sneak out before the bell rang and to use my wits to keep from going hungry. I got so cunning by the third year that when I needed a haircut, I would take a look at the barber’s apprentice, not the barber himself…
The barber can’t cut his own hair, but isn’t it obvious he would cut his helper’s?

3
THE STUDY HALL

Jungle law had been declared during dinner because of the special grilled meatballs, and after dinner three punks from the next class showed up in the study hall. Oguz immediately started quizzing me about who the Japanese delegate of the UN was. I acted like I didn’t know the answer. He was glad and tilted his head back like a samurai and yelled out the name of the Japanese guy, which was nothing but a heavy swearing. The assholes couldn’t stop laughing, so Oguz took the opportunity to sell them the NGA from the week before and got fifteen kurush out of them. As a matter of fact, fifteen bucks was only the price to read the magazine, two hours later it was collected because there was no other copy.
Our surveillance teacher got mad at us as he entered the room and saw the magazine and the commercial activity going on in class. We gathered ourselves and sat down on our chairs. It was eight-thirty. We have eaten our dinner, have had some fun, and now began to think about what in the world there was to do during the last hour long study session. I went over to sit next to Ayhan. We’d been publishing a weekly humor magazine called NGA. We’d draw sketches of filthy humor with a pencil and create that single copy which was then passed on to everyone.  It had gotten to be really popular. In the beginning, everyone had wondered about this underground magazine that was being published for nine straight weeks and its strange name. We put the meaning of the name on last week’s cover. We considered it very creative:
NGA (n., slang) the moan-like exclamation uttered by young men while jerking off.
We used to draw a film poster for the cover of each issue. This was very serious work, with the film’s amazing name in great big letters at the top along with the names of the made-up movie stars who were acting in it—these were all cartoon versions of people from school—then graphic sketch works scrawled under that. And that week’s film was A Streetbus Named Desire, starring Mike Fake, Growshot Hawshot and Jenifer Buttfucker, in which the players were passionately ‘rubbing up’ against each other inside a bus in as dirty a way as we could draw.
At the bottom there were notes about the guest stars and movie theater, like, ‘This film is playing to a closed house because the audience didn’t come,’ or, ‘Our refreshment counter offers delicious sodas that aren’t even flat,’ or, ‘This movie was shot in there: There Film Studios.”
That was more or less the format of NGA.
The cover for the last issue was done, and now we were working on a mini-series strip making fun of Star Trek, the most popular TV show of the year. Ayhan had his tongue sticking out and was drawing some pictures, and I was telling him all the funny ideas I had. The magazine had to be ready tomorrow.
The star of the NGA version of Star Trek was Mesut the Donkey. He was the slave of dorm number 11, the one next to ours. A hilarious guy… He would try to rebel against the local authority, who were the dorm gang- he’d rat people out, he’d tell on them and cry in the principal’s office, but he still couldn’t get out of being a slave. In our comic strip, we drew him as someone from the planet of the donkey-heads, who was doing clown duty on the Starship Enterprise. Donkey was the anti-hero, who starred in replacement of pointy-eared Mr. Spock. He would mess around with the ship’s devices and break them, or some space meteor would hit him on the head, or he would fall over into a crater on a satellite of Jupiter. Pretty much every kind of thing used to happen to Mesut in this unique plot.
It wasn’t enough for us to be cruel and make all the slaves like the Arab and the Donkey suffer. We also thought we were entertaining everybody by insulting the slaves in our miserable little magazine. This one time, the Starship Enterprise was damaged while in orbit over Mesut’s planet. A crew of three -including Mesut- land on the planet with the research craft to explore and find argonium crystals to repair the ship’s engines.
“Boy,” I said to Ayhan, “now they should run into some male donkeys with giant penises. Mesut can speak their language, right, and explains the situation, asks them where to find the argonium crystals.”
Glaring at me with a serious face, “Yeah, and then what?” he asked me roughly. He was trying to tell whether I was serious or not.
“Then the donkeys throw the whole crew in jail because Mesut says a dumbfuckthing that pisses the donkeys off. They tie up Mesut and ask, ‘Mogambo or Death?’ When he says he prefers Mogambo, they shoot him in the ass with an injector made of donkey dick. After that...”
“Whoa there!” Ayhan cut me off, which wasn’t very polite, but he must have thought my idea was way too much. “Don’t be an idiot… The Donkey gets the magazine tomorrow and he’ll go straight to the principal’s office. Then we’ll be in deep shit.”
“So just because it’ll make dear Mr. Mesut the Donkey mad, we just don’t publish the magazine?? We’ll punch him in the mouth a couple times and he won’t be able to say anything,” I spitted out.
I was teasing Ayhan. He was the one who liked to get in fights to show off and act tough, and normally he would be the one to suggest this, but now I was acting like we had switched roles. We laughed a little and he reminded me of the infamous joke I shocked him with on his first day back from Izmir staying at our house.
Ayhan’s family was from Izmir. When his father, some high-level bureaucrat of the government, was assigned to Istanbul, Ayhan transferred on the second semester of prep year from Bornova High School to ours. He had some problems mingling in with us in the beginning, but he had a warm, honest and tough way about him that eventually won us over.
Despite our many opposite characteristics, I and Ayhan’s friendship was a real one. It was really different from the way it was with the other members of the gang. We were like brothers; each one made up for what was missing from the other and tried to make school life easier for each other. We had definitely learned that the most important thing someone needed at the school was his friends. A boy was torn away from all family ties and brought to a place ruled by completely different rules and relationships. The only way he could adapt to his new situation was with the help of the friends he found there. A friend was everything at boarding school. You shared your food and your money, you kept the wolves at bay, and you were there for him on his lonely nights.
Notebooks, textbooks and classes were secondary for a boarding student. Our real life was in the dorms, study halls, schoolyards, and hallways, where we had to learn to stand on our own two feet, and had to get on with our lives without mom and dad. Boarding students discovered how heavy the existence of authority was, how cruel the oppression of the upper classmen could be, how mercilessly you had to compete to survive, and how slimy social relations could be—and we learned. Nobody cared in this world if you were taunted, sad, bullied or crying; the weak were meant to be tormented, they were destined to the loneliness.
Our school had its first graduates in the early 60s, and our older brothers used to tell us that the rules were more strict back then, and to be thankful. In those years when there were no girls admitted to the school, I could easily imagine how the boys set up a tough, cruel and loveless system. It was an inhuman thing for such a system to become tradition, where guys even one year ahead had authority over and the right to beat up the younger ones. The guys all took up what they went through themselves, and they took the torment they went through once out of the younger ones.
Toward the end of study period, we were still working on NGA and the surveillant chewed us out a little for the noise we were making, so we had to shut up. A bit later, study period was over and we poured out into the halls of upstairs and went into the rooms where we would sleep. One life was over, a new one was beginning.
Sometimes for a polar bear to survive, a fish in the river will sacrifice itself. In a way, living was like this. There was a perfect balance between death and survival.
In fact, there was no difference between matter turning to nothing, and matter coming from nothing.