SCENT OF SKIN

a novel by
ERCAN AKBAY

 1
THE LAST REFUGE

She tries to straighten her messy grey hair using the long bony fingers of her hands which are gnarled with age. “Second degree murder… twenty-four to thirty years of sentence…” she says in a voice as full of determination and conviction as ever.
Her manners remind me what a tough lawyer she was once.
“If there is extreme provocation involved, and I’m certain that in this case there is, then you’ll only do a third of the sentence…”
Then she focuses upon my face with a cross expression.
The terrifying jail scenes my mother just invoked in my mind are enough to leave me breathless with fear before the event. I moan out of a primal instinct. “At least ten years,” I say. “That’s if there are extenuating circumstances…”
I look away from her and cast down my guilty eyes in shame, and my lips curl down all by themselves. We are seated across from each other at the kitchen table where the plastic placemats with their red flowery designs form shadows on the walls under the faint light from the scones, shadows which only serve to bring on another engulfing wave of anxiety.
When I realize that the darkness enveloping the glass-walled veranda outside is turning pitch-black, I sneak a glance at my watch; it is half past ten. I slowly turn my gaze to the ceiling and sigh deeply. I am overwhelmed by despair.
Nearly six months after my last visit —which had been an obligatory one— I am back in the house in Silivri where my mother has been living on her own for a long time now. I took refuge here after driving all the way at full speed in my dingy cheap rental with my eye constantly on the rear-view mirror just like a criminal on the run…
When she fully grasps the gravity of my situation, the cool-headed lawyer turns into a compassionate mother. Her almond shaped black eyes that are in contrast with her light ash-coloured hair and her white skin now grow huge with concern.
“Why did you kill her, son?” she asks me. “I don’t believe you did this… that you killed that woman… you couldn’t even hurt a fly. You couldn’t possibly have done something like that.”
I cannot find the courage in me to put into words all the reasons that made me so blind as to commit this heinous crime. I can only say, “She was a whore,” shaking my head… The words tumble out of my mouth. “She was a worthless whore.”
Then I swallow. I don’t feel like telling her the details of how I tried to break up with her countless times and yet simply could not do it, and how I ruined my life for her. Admitting all these facts even to myself make me feel ashamed…
My mother’s mind remains sharp as ever despite her seventy-three years, and she understands my helplessness perfectly. She leans towards me from her seat and tousles my curly hair as if I were still her precious little boy. “Let’s you and I have a glass of raki together,” she says.
In one fluid motion, she grabs the large bottle of Yeni Raki sitting in an ice bucket right next to us and pours from it into the two small glasses that stand on a piece of cloth on the kitchen counter. “Tell me right from the beginning…” she says as she pours. “Then we’ll make a plan. There’s no trouble in life that doesn’t have a cure of its own… except for death…”
Mine doesn’t have a cure, though. I am aware that the cops can enter through that door any minute now and take me away. I should put an end to this before worrying my mother any further. “I can’t tell you everything,” I say, “because even I don’t know how and why certain things happened the way they did.”
Her face wrinkles up as if she is upset with me. She frowns. Like an old warrior suddenly remembering her own past glory, she pushes down both hands on the handles of her chair and rises up to the occasion. “We’ll dig it all out,” she says. “You’ll see what a relief it will be to tell me everything. We’ll prepare you a strong defence, and you’ll unburden yourself in the process.”
“Alright,” I murmur obediently. “Why don’t we go out into the garden? We’ll continue this there.”
We gather our stuff and go out. My mother stays on the veranda while I go on, walking into the garden. The cool autumn breeze hits me in the face and pulls me back into reality.
I am a wasted man. I can see this clearly. At the age of forty-six, without ever tasting happiness again, I will rot in prison till the day I die…
And this is the naked truth…
I breathe in the lovely scents of the flowers adorning this garden under the quiet evening skies of Silivri. I wander around a little, trying to calm myself down.
My mother is laying a tablecloth on the table in the veranda, preparing small dishes of appetizers. As she goes back and forth between the veranda and the kitchen, she smiles at me affectionately.
“So she doesn’t feel uncomfortable about being the mother of a murderer,” I think silently, and begin to question myself:
Was I the cause of all this trouble? Yes, I was, but I had done all I could. Eda knew that very well. She just pretended not to know. “You haven’t divorced your wife and you haven’t kept any of your promises to me,” she kept telling me.
She said that she didn’t want to be any man’s mistress, that she certainly didn’t deserve it.
And yet, recently, I’d stayed away from my home and family for months, and lived with her in her house. To be able to do more, I would have to be relentless and knock down all the defences I’d built over the last twenty years. I hadn’t had the guts for that.
And now I am ready to do anything to turn back the clock. Anything at all…
How could I have lost my mind… how could I have been so demented… how could I have killed her? I was passionately in love with her, yes, madly in love, madly… my God, have I gone completely insane?
I start to get furious all over again. I am blacking out, I am angry enough to foam at the mouth. “Love my ass! That greedy selfish bitch got exactly what she deserved! This is the price she pays for trying to trick me at every single turn…”
Ah, I should have erased her off completely instead of running after her like a fool… that should have been my ‘correct’ behaviour… But I… what had I done instead?
I lean against the old apricot tree in the middle of the garden and watch the stars in the sky. There are no clouds. We are in the middle of November… the moon is crescent-shaped; it appears from behind the largest branch of the apricot tree as the breeze flutters through the leaves and it shows me its elderly face.
There is a scarlet stain right above it; that must be Mars…
“And that slavish planet is addicted to evil; he desires who doesn’t love him; he loves who doesn’t desire him. Why?”
I remember the apricot jam my late father produced with great care every summer. Until six-seven years ago he would make jars of jam here. Apricot, plum, quince… Quince comes last; summer is over, fall arrives, and only then does the quince tree offer its fruit.
I light a cigarette and continue to think about the good old days. At that moment, the forgotten cell phone in the inner pocket of my tobacco-coloured corduroy jacket begins to buzz; I push my hand inside and pull it out in haste and annoyance. The plastic cover of the phone burns my fingers like a large pebble stone left too long in the sun.
I see the name of my wife Buket on the phone screen. “It’s Buket calling, I won’t answer!” I yell out towards the house. “Soon she’ll call the landline as well. Don’t tell her I’m here, and you don’t know where I am, either. Got it?”
Before I finish my words, the landline inside the house begins to ring. Under the yellow light of the veranda, I see my mother walking towards the telephone with a vegetable knife in her hands. Turning towards the garden by a simple gesture on his face, she indicates clearly that she heard me.
I press my head down on my shoulders to avoid hearing their conversation and walk away even farther away. I sink into the faded red and blue striped cloth of the old chaise-lounge at the end of the flower bed overlooking the road and close my eyes. I feel awful.
My heart beats first too slow then too fast. I feel as if I cannot breathe.
After finishing her subdued conversation over the phone, my mother comes outside and asks me to sit at the table. In that short period of time she’s prepared some wonderful things. Fried peppers and eggplant, seasoned beans, meatballs… there is melon and cheese as well.
I sit down immediately and fill up my plate, getting aware that I haven’t had anything to eat in the last fifteen hours. With my mouth full, “I was almost starving,” I say.
“Bon appétit… Eat well,” says my mother. She takes a few bites herself and watches me. “You look to me like you’ve grown thinner, weaker lately.”
I don’t tell her that for a long while now I’ve turned into this wreck of a man, an incurable heavy drinker who’s lost everything he’s ever had. Instead, I make a crappy joke. “Well, I’m much weaker nowadays…weaker in character though, of course...”
My liver is a lot bigger than before, my belly sticks out; my legs and hips are thin as rails. The destructive effects of habitual drinking on an alcoholic man…
She raises her glass, we say cheers and drink. My throat burns with the wondrous aroma of raki.
“Feeling better now?”
I caress her cheek and laugh. What else can I do? What’s done is done; what does it matter if I’m feeling good or not? “Couldn’t be better,” I say.
“I love you very much, my darling boy. You’ll see; everything will be fine…”
After all, she’s got a mother’s heart…
I like what she says. For some reason, I feel like accepting my destiny and act accordingly. “So, have you read my fortune then, huh?” I ask her.
Rather seriously, “It’s possible that woman isn’t dead. Maybe you only thought she died…” she says. “The police aren’t looking for you, you know. Buket just told me.”
“Really?”
“I’m going to appeal to the bar association and ask to get my attorney’s license back,” she says. “I want to take you on as a client.  In that case, if that woman is dead I can defend you in court and even get you an acquittal. We can rest our argument on ‘beyond criminal intent’ or ‘self defence’… perhaps you can get away with a minor penalty.”
“How long has it been since you retired from practising law, mom?”
She thinks for a moment. “Eighteen years I guess…” she says. “I retired when I turned fifty-five. I couldn’t handle the pressure from your dad anymore, you know all that…”
As a typical half-witted male, my father had been jealous to death of my mother’s successful career, her intelligence and her beauty. He just couldn’t help himself.
“Haven’t the laws changed since then?” I ask sceptically.
With a proud gesture of her head she says, “Laws may change but the justice system and the notion of the law do not. You read the articles that have been altered and you learn...”
Knowing that I have my mother covering my back as an attorney relieves my pain considerably and allows a glimmer of hope to appear in my head.
And yet, because I don’t want her to feel obliged to take on so wearisome a task at her age, I tell her, “You may not have to do that. We’ll find a proper attorney, you’ll tell him how to make my defence, and that will the end of that...”
“Don’t interfere in my affairs,” she interrupts me roughly. “First let me fully understand what has happened, and then I shall decide which course to take.”
And before I sink myself deeper into raki, she makes a fabulous cup of Turkish coffee. The fragrant smell of coffee is soon all over the place.
When I’m finished, I shake the cup as it ought to be done, turn it around and place it face down on the saucer. I ask her to read my fortune like she promised.
My mother hasn’t read anyone’s fortune in years. She grew really tired of her neighbours’ ceaseless demands upon her. She  generally pretends not to know anything about such matters.
“Mom, how on earth did you become a fortune-teller, a lawyer and a housewife all at the same time?” I ask her.
She laughs. “Well, I wasn’t born in Istanbul with a silver spoon in my mouth like your father was,” repeating the same old story. “Before I came here to law school, I went to a girls’ school in Izmir. There we learned how best to serve our husbands…”
It was true that my mother —who had been born as the daughter of a timber merchant whose fortunes were forever changing— had known both riches and poverty when she was growing up, and she had developed a surprising number of skills as a result: Cooking, sewing, embroidery, fortune-telling, you name it, she had it… here was a woman who had not neglected her household duties even for a single day during all the years she worked as an attorney.
She slides the cup in front of me towards her and touches it gently with her finger. “Hmmm, it’s cooled off, then,” she says.
She separates the prettily painted cup from the saucer and shakes it, turning it slowly in the air. Her gaze locks upon a corner of the complicated design inside made by the coffee grounds.
She tells me she sees very strange things there. “Like I told you before, that woman is not dead,” she says.
I pretend to be delirious with joy, laughing and batting my eyes. “I killed her with my bare hands, and yet, she didn’t die,” I say and burst into loud laughter. “I threw a double six dices, what I got is double aces.”
My mother thinks I am making fun of her and becomes angry with me.
“Come on, mom,” I say to her. “I’m just losing my mind, that’s all! You never mind me, please carry on.” I lean towards to kiss her on the cheek.
“Well, that’s exactly how it appears here,” she continues. “She’s been hospitalized but she’ll survive.”
I listen to her words carefully.
“You’ll grow even more confused,” she says. “There are fish,” she says, “There’s an evil eye on you,” she says, “there are disturbing circumstances,” she says…
She draws a circle around the rim of the cup with her finger and after a slight pause, “Ooh, that’s bad,” she says. She raises her head and looks at me with worried eyes. “You will encounter troubles of a kind that I cannot even begin to recognize…”
When I don’t give any reaction, she continues to turn the cup and look closely into it. “Finally you’ll get over all of it and find peace,” she says. “Look, it’s as if the moon lights up your house… everything is shining and bright…”
I tell her that at this point the idea of more trouble fails to scare me. “If I make it out of this mess, I will never be beaten again. From then on I can handle just about anything…”
Suddenly my eyes tear up and I start to cry. “I am sorry, mom,” I say between sobs. “I have gone mad, as you can see… your son is no longer a sane individual…”
My mother puts the cup back on the table. “Don’t worry, you won’t go mad,” she says. She hands me a napkin so I can blow my nose, and waits for me to get my act together.
I go to the bathroom and return to the table afterwards. When I sit down at the table, she puts some more raki in my glass and prepares a plate of fruit for me. As I relax and begin to sit up, suddenly the tone of her voice changes. The self-assured, powerful attorney of criminal law is back in business. “Now tell me from the very beginning,” she orders me.  “Where and how did you meet her?”

2
AN UNUSUAL PERFORMANCE AT THE BAR

The bar was packed that night…
Well, when I say packed, I mean there were about a hundred and fifty people crammed into a space designed to hold only about a hundred.
Its floor boards had been carefully scrubbed and mopped up by soft soap, and scented by the inviting, exotic perfume of the joss-sticks, which had been lit specifically to overcome the awful stench of sewer that the southwest wind carried inside, the bar Jazzstop was ready from top to bottom for the most glamorous evening in its history.
Without paying the slightest regard to the capacity of the place, the invitation cards had been sent out to at least five hundred people, and —from the all-knowing critics to the celebrities of cinema and TV, plus to the crème de la crème of Istanbul society— a remarkable number of these elegant inscriptions were delivered to the most important addresses one by one by hand.
God knows, everyone had done their fair share in this particular part of the project. Except for one person: The individual who had singlehandedly produced, staged and paid for all the expenses of the unusual bar performance about to begin any minute, “Love is a Lie,” but who had avoided taking a visible part in any of the publicity regarding the event… namely myself.
The heavyweights of this light entertainment, who were the guests of our playwright and the distinguished art-culture critics from the media, were all seated at the tables that had been sparsely spread out in the bar space. As for the less privileged crowd whose number was far larger than the select few, they had to watch the performance standing above the banks mounted on the rear and right walls or pressed against the bar —except those lucky enough to have grabbed one of the high bar stools.
Jazzstop was one of the oldies of Pera. When the wall plasters began to disintegrate from damp and neglect, the rest had been peeled off intentionally to avoid paying the plasterer for a renovation, and the original foundation stones as well as the stamped or sealed antique bricks that were revealed as a result had been left exposed. The larger and curved bricks formed an arched ceiling whose steel girders were hung with stage lights, speakers and a film projector.
The floor composed of old boards,  which had initially been painted a dark brown colour to hide the deformation of decades, became even darker from the stamping of many feet, then was partly restored and left to its own devices. The main hall, illuminated by the red spotlights that were placed into the niches of the brick walls, had managed to blend in with this ancient dark wooden floor, making the present gloomy atmosphere even moodier.
Right beside the entrance of Jazzstop there was a small hall whose right side was used as a cloak-room. The heavily muscled, bald-headed large young man who stood in front of the bank of this cloak-room —although his real job was selling tickets to paying customers— was now checking out guests’ invitations in an offhand manner, as tonight’s gala was free of charge.
Inside, the wall across from the entrance was halfway covered with a long bar in front of which the elite guests had gathered, sipping drinks in various shapes and colours, making all sorts of inconsequential small talk.
“The most precious perfume is beauty… A song-filled conversation whose joy is broken up with sadness… Men of mystery and the severed nipple of an aging beauty; the scar inflicted by a pimp, the pain inflicted by a friend…”
“Hello, darling I was just about to call you, really I was… Ha-hah-haaa…”
“What about the surreal insurmountable youthful trip-hop poses of decaying bodies? The virtue of frozen eras when immortality was searched for and never found and the indecent haste of a front-page scandal…”
“I don’t believe it… I was just thinking the same thing!”
In the bars of Pera, most people drink beer, and a few drink raki. In the taverns the opposite is true. In accordance with the old customs that have been inherited from the music-halls of bygone eras, in both venues wine and whiskey drinkers pay an unfairly exorbitant amount of money.
Tonight there was no question of paying anything at Jazzstop, let alone unfairly, so even those who normally drank beer and raki were sipping fashionable cocktails like mojitos and margaritas free of charge.
Except for me…
I was drinking tap beer and trying to act like an ordinary guy, an outsider who was there to observe the action.
As the performance is about to start, lights are turned off inside the already dimly lit bar, the par 56 and par 57 spotlights facing the stage are lit, and as the cinema screen to the right of the bar begins to fill with images a jazz trio appears on the stage. The guitarist, sax player and contrabass player are accompanying the short film.
Our boys are playing “Harlem Nocturnes.”
On the screen we see a man inside a car on a rainy night. We hear thunder and the violently increasing sound of the rain in the background. He shifts a gear. We don’t see the face of this man who is holding a cigarette with a large tip. The incandescent tip shines in the dark and blends in with the amorphous traces of the deformed road lights in the heavy fog. As the wipers sway back and forth, the credits appear on the car window and stick on the glass like blood stains, then they’re erased by the pendulous motion of the wipers.
They appear, are read and disappear.
As soon as the credits are over, the spotlights focus on handsome Isko, the guy with the short hair who plays the bartender. He is standing inside the crescent-shaped new bar we have built as an extension to Jazzstop’s existing seven-meter long bar. For a few seconds we watch the green-shirted Isko drying a few glasses.
Next, the female lead of the performance, Gamze, enters through the actual entrance of the bar, sashaying in her red dress and checking out the scene. As soon as she sees Isko, she stops in her tracks as if she cannot believe her eyes, and trying to suppress her rage, she approaches the bar slowly but self-assuredly and perches herself on the high stool.
The young bespectacled guest sitting and drinking beer to the left of the annexed bar where the performance was taking place was very happy to see the gorgeous actress right next to him. He directed his gaze to her cleavage and got himself ready to hit on her in the true lowlife style of a horny leery male specimen.
Our director Mehmet Bilen had discovered Yasemin, who was playing Gamze, through a casting agency. She was a fair-skinned, tallish girl with a lovely face. She was also very talented.
Isko, who has been pretending to ignore Gamze’s arrival, finally turns towards her as if he’s felt her eyes boring into his back, he is ready for her now, he smiles as soon as he turns around and says, “Hi, Gamze, welcome!”
As they exchange greetings, we understand that once upon a time Gamze and Isko were involved in certain ‘mysterious’ events together.
What a surprise…
“You can’t forget him, can you?” says Isko. “He was an interesting man.”
He expects a response from Gamze. He doesn’t get one. Gamze keeps looking at him obnoxiously and frowns. Isko looks away from her. “It seems like you don’t feel like saying anything, but you came here to talk,” he says…
“No,” says Gamze angrily, “Actually I came to listen. You too loved Ralph, didn’t you?”
Since Gamze’s absconded ex-boyfriend is a man, at this point in the performance we realize that Isko is —how else to explain it— gay, that is, he too was in love with Ralph.
At any rate, the gay bartender Isko makes a perfectly coquettish turn and with an elegant gesture he places one of the glasses he has been wiping on the counter behind the bar. “Yes, I loved him, but in a different way... You can’t understand that,” he says and then he lifts up his own glass. “Come on; let’s drink to our red-haired sax player.”
The stage lights are turned on with a bang, the jazz trio plays ‘Black Orpheus’ and there we see the much-wanted, red-haired Ralph in flesh and blood, playing his saxophone…
When the music ends, the film starts on the screen along with the applause. Ralph steps off the stage and into the film, goes over to the table of Gamze and Nermin who have come to hear him play at the club, and then with a startled expression he says, “I am sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
Gamze’s friend Nermin intervenes and asks, “No problem, wouldn’t you like to sit down?”
Ralph with the red toupee says, “You look so much like her…”
It is as if he is a cartoon character: ‘Captain Toupee’…
Introductions and so on and so forth over, the talk deepens. Gamze asks him when he came to Turkey. From Ralph’s answer we deduce that two years ago our revered hero followed the woman he was in love with to Istanbul and he is still searching for her.
The lights illuminate the bar again. The flashback is over and everyone is back in real life.
Isko asks Gamze if her relationship with Ralph began that night at the bar where he himself worked as a bartender, Gamze answers him half-heartedly, and finally she tells the audience —with the visual aid of the films— the story of Ralph’s weirdness from the very beginning of their relationship.
Such was the context of the play “Love is a Lie.” That’s to say, the storyline was made up of a series of quite complicated events.
The damn thing was hard to explain…
“So you’re saying didn’t Ralph tell you anything about me? You’re lying, Isko, that cannot be true!” yells Gamze to the bartender and she turns her head and entire body along with the bar stool on which she is perched.
At that moment Gamze’s breasts collided with the nose of the horny bastard who was just then lowering his head into his beer mug. His black-framed glasses flew off towards the real-life bartender of Jazzstop who was busy making drinks at the inside of the bar.
People were laughing and applauding…
Gamze was upset; she turned her head towards me and looked at me with a pissed-off expression. She seemed to be saying ‘You’re the producer, do something…’
For a moment there I felt guilty, but what on earth could I do there? If I attempted to go over there and talk to the boy, it would take at least ten minutes to get to that end of the bar from where I was. And even if I went, what was I going to say? Was I going to pat him on the back and say, “That isn’t nice, now, is it?”
Let’s say I did, and that jerk apologized to me. But where else was he going to go then? There were no empty bar seats for him to move to... Besides, he could also say to me, “But it’s not me who wanted to butt into her tits, man,” and he’d be perfectly right in this case…
And so, I thought of all this in an instant and I made a ‘forget about it, just carry on’ gesture to Gamze and winked at her. She nodded as if to say ‘alright, whatever’ in acceptance and continued to follow Isko’s lines.
“If you really must hear, I’ll tell you,” says Isko. “Ralph liked you a lot and thought you were intelligent.”
Gamze turns towards him and asks, “What about the other woman?”
Isn’t it true that in every woman’s life there is a real or imagined ‘other woman’? Actually, there should exist ‘other guys’ in the lives of men as well. So who the hell were all these guys sleeping with?
Gamze asks Isko if he ever compares her to that woman. In response, he says flirtatiously, “What’s up? Are you jealous of that woman?”
When Gamze answers the question with another question, “How can one be jealous of someone she’s never met?” a humming noise rises up from the crowd in the bar, there’s a smattering of applause.
Obviously people were really into the performance.
An argument started between the young couple sitting on the other side of Gamze. The toothy blonde was furiously interrogating her sheepish boyfriend about the ‘other woman’ in their lives.
“There’s nothing between us, believe me, Selma,” pleaded the fat boy. “We had a sandwich and some tea, that’s all.”
So she’s called Selma…
In a voice growing shriller by the minute, “I know very well what that sandwich means,” said the toothy girl. “You can’t fool me!”
He was completely bewildered now, “W-what does it mean, then? It’s just a stupid sandwich,” stuttered the fat boy.
I don’t know why he was so scared. There was nothing at all going on, and yet, there was always a conspiracy afoot. About whom? For what?
Gamze works herself up into utter misery, makes tight fists and says, “Yes, I think I am jealous of that woman. I think she must be quite perfect if she got under Ralph’s skin enough to make him leave me for her.”
A major TV network was filming the performance. Their crew was placed in the DJ booth which was claustrophobic enough as it was.
“Alright, so I was wrong,” says Isko. “Look, I am serious, I apologize.”
“I don’t know why I am sitting here talking to you,” yells Gamze and grabs her bag, attempting to climb down from the stool.
Isko reaches out from inside the bar and takes hold of Gamze’s arm. “Don’t go,” he pleads. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, believe me…”
When Isko and Gamze began a long-winded, redundant philosophical tirade on love, I began to grow bored along with the spectators in the bar. During rehearsals I had almost begged the director to shorten the play but I hadn’t succeeded.
“It would be disrespectful to our writer,” said Mehmet Bilen. So I hadn’t insisted any more and left things as they were. After all, I wasn’t a real producer; I just meant to play around a little and have some fun.
“Why did you stop? Why don’t you carry on with your story…” says Isko.
“Alright, I will, but first give me a fresh drink,” Gamze answers, pretending to be drunk.
“When Ralph told me he’d been a cop in Berlin, I asked him why he left his profession. He gave some evasive answers. I had a strong feeling it had something to do with his relationship with that woman.”
The boy standing next to me at the bar leaned into his girlfriend’s ear and said, “She should have been the cop in this story, huh?”
They giggled.
When the orchestra began to play I got myself another beer from the bar and tried to read the customers’ expressions as well as I could in the semi-darkness. It had been nearly an hour and yet we had only reached the end of the first act.
Should I be grateful for that?
When the final notes ended and on the screen it said ‘Intermission—10 Minutes’ the spectators were somehow visibly relieved and some of them hastily left the bar. As if escaping from something…
Our director Mehmet Bilen hurried over to me. He was a well-known film director in his mid-fifties, a dark, slim man of average height. “You were right,” he said. “Even I am bored; the play really is too long.”
I didn’t say anything. What was done was done, there’s never any use in crying over spilt milk.
He looked at me with an anxious expression. “So we’ll shorten it for the next performance.”
“That’ll be fine,” I said. What else was I going to say at that point?
When I saw that the orchestra members, the actors and the rest of the VIPs were all headed in my direction, I made a beeline for the restrooms. Once in there, I did my business, washed my hands and face, taking it really slowly to avoid any confrontations outside.
I began to think. I thought about the reasons behind my behaviour as a man who constantly got himself into trouble. Just take a look at what I went through to bring tonight’s performance to life; even I had lost count of all the energy and money I had spent over the last seven months.
I had used and abused the music studio I owned, my home, my equipment, my friends, my reputation and a great deal more for the sake of this project. And what about all the people who had involved in it, for my sake? Players, musicians, the director, the film crew, the technical team…
Why did I do it?
I don’t know. That was just me; an illusionist who asks you to choose a card from a pile and then pulls it out of a bowl of soup… And my tricks didn’t end there, I had dozens of others; they didn’t all have to do with cards; they were about life, about sex, about laughing, having fun… But there was one thing that made me different from all the other tricksters; my games were never meant to hurt or humiliate anyone.
Still, I now regretted some of the games I once played. Well, most of them, actually…
As I hung around the hall entrance trying to kill some more time, I ran into Didem, the aspiring painter who was really a housewife, as she walked over to the ladies’ room. She was obviously drunk; zigzagging her way over to me across the hall. “Heeey,” she said when she saw me. “This is such a wonderful performaance…”
“So you like it?” I asked her. “I am glad to hear that. People were looking bored, it seemed to me.”
She hugged and kissed me on a spot near my lips rather than my cheek…”Ooh no, it’s so goood,” she whispered in my ear.
She was a short, blonde woman with a plump face. The smell of booze on her breath was enough to ignite her with a single spark.
I suddenly remembered that I had flirted with Didem the first night we met on a boat trip. Towards the end of the evening we had kissed in a darkened spot at the front of the boat. I felt ashamed of myself.
Until that very evening she had been a shy housewife who had never slept with anyone except her husband. Since then eight or ten months had passed and Didem, who had two grown-up sons, was now completely changed. She was wearing sexy lacy underwear and everything.
I didn’t fully grasp her situation; she and her husband were separated, they weren’t divorced but they were living apart. Or something like that… I wasn’t paying much attention to her words.
As we continued our conversation by the door, she suddenly went crazy and glued her lips to mine. When she put her tongue in my mouth I entered my hands inside her t-shirt and fondled her small breasts.
She let out a low moan. “You’re so hot,” she told me.
I was completely turned on and lost all contact with the world outside. When I’m aroused I forget everything, I cannot think of anything other than sex.
“Come into the restroom with me,” she said, speaking barely coherently. She was lisping; her eyes were half-closed with lust fuelled by alcohol.
Didem was only three years younger than me; she was around forty-two. There were wrinkles around her eyes and her hips had grown even larger than before, but none of these things had a stopping power on my out-of-control libido.
When I pushed Didem inside the toilet door, she cooled off all of a sudden. “Are we going to do it in the john?” she asked me. She made a face like she was totally against the idea. “I can’t,” she said. She was acting as if she wasn’t the one who had dragged me into the restrooms in the first place.
“Why not?” I asked, trying to gain time. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t make love in here,” she said. She frowned and held her nose. “It stinks…”
When she saw that I had grown silent while considering a solution to this situation I found myself in, she attacked my lips again. She was the type of teaser who did that sort of thing whenever she understood I was ready to give up on her. And she thought I was too stupid to realize what she was up to.
There was only one stall inside. The door was firmly closed… I knocked just to make sure, from inside a woman muttered in an annoyed voice, “It’s full…”
Then I thought of the dressing room that Altay, Jazzstop’s manager, had assigned to us and I pulled Didem out of the restroom and into the room at the end of the hall.
Just as I was about to reach for the door, it opened, Isko and Gamze came out after having restored their stage make-up and were pretty surprised to see me with a dishevelled woman.
“The second act is about to begin,” said Isko.
“Aren’t you coming?” asked Gamze.
“You go ahead,” I said, and I pushed Didem inside with a practiced move, mumbling something to the effect of, “I’ll be right there… great performance, by the way.”
“Thanks,” they said in unison, and hurried away into the hall.
To be honest, I had lost some of my appetite for sex, this was quite inappropriate; the married-with-child producer of an avant-garde performance, the first of its kind in Turkey, is recklessly holed up with a drunken woman in the dressing room.
What a scandal!
I was upset with myself… I was uncomfortable too. But when I saw Didem taking off her t-shirt, I found myself locking the door with great urgency.
The dressing room was actually a six-seven meter square storage space. Inside there were stacked up dusty chairs, packing boxes in various sizes and a sofa with faded dark blue upholstery that sat in front of a dresser with a broken mirror. When I heard the music that announced the start of the second act, I reached over to Didem who had been lured into a bohemian life by yours truly and was now trying to unfasten her bra.
We did the deed on the sofa.
As we were getting ready to leave the room, “I’ll see you this weekend, right?” she asked me. “I am taking part in an exhibition in Taksim on Saturdaay…”
“I’ll come if I have time,” I said.
After all, I had gotten what I wanted from her, Didem no longer mattered; she had even become someone I needed to stay away from until next time.
Ah, such are the ways of men…
Mocking me, “What do you mean, ‘if I have time’?” she said with a threat in her voice, “I should think that you’ll be the one to buy one of my two paintings on display there. That’s the least you could do…”
“Aha,” I was able to say. “Sure I will.”
Well, everything in life comes with a price tag. You taste some forbidden fruit, and you don’t pay for it? No way in hell! I would end up with another shitty still-life that I’d put away and forget about. What can you do?
As you know, this final part of things is full of very complicated feelings for men. If you are aroused enough, you’ll do anything to convince the woman to have sex with you and you do not have a single inhibition or scruple inside of you to stop this flow. Eyes go blind, the brain locks in on the target and at the end, and under the woman’s guidance, you reach satisfaction.
Okay, fine. The seed is sown. What’s next?
Returning to reality after sex is as painful to me as it is for a junkie to come down after a high… I want to remain at the peak; I want this to be my whole job, my career and my hobby. Let me take a shower, let the women come and go, let there be books magazines newspapers next to my bed, a fruit bowl on the floor; bananas and pineapples, a flat screen showing comedies on the wall.
“Darling,” I say, “could you bring me some coffee when you return?” The climate is tropical, warm…
“Alright, darling…”
“Afterwards let’s swim in the ocean,” I tell her.
My girlfriend is a young brunette wearing a sheer silk baby-doll nightie. She comes in carrying my coffee. “Would you like a massage?” she asks.
This is a new girl, you see. The previous one has just left…
“What man wouldn’t want such a life,” I can hear you asking. However, this fantasy that we men love is the last thing women expect from men… There are other priorities; you need to support your family, give your wife children, and be the master of your household. Other men can live out those sexual fantasies, they don’t really matter anyway.
At the end of such escapades most men feel guilty, you know that as well; ‘Damn, I cheated on my lovely wife, why oh why’ etc… As for the devil that puts us up to it, ‘I am one hell of a guy,’ he brags and retreats into a corner for a nap. The guilty-conscience part of things does not concern the devil in the least.
“I have to go back inside,” I told Didem, “join us when you’re ready,” as I left the dressing room.
I stopped at the restroom and checked myself out, then took a piss for disinfection and thoroughly wiped myself off. I was pleased to hear the heavy sound of applause from the salon. I smiled and advanced through the corridor into the bar.
When I reached the column that separates the corridor from the salon, I stopped and surveyed the general atmosphere of the hall. I studied people’s reactions. It all looked almost too normal to be normal.
I was distracted by one of the two young women at the end of the bar. This one, slim and long-necked and dark-haired, was standing and looking towards the stage lights with a sardonic expression on her bee-stung lips. Her profile awakened a strange feeling in me. As far as I could see through the crowd, she was wearing a short, light blue knit top that left her midriff bare and ordinary tight jeans that hugged her shapely thighs and her legs that seemed longer than her upper body.
Without having the slightest idea who she was, “That’s her,” I said to myself. A longish, high-bridged nose, short, wavy dark hair, lips as thick as an African’s…
I narrowed my eyes and scrutinized her face more closely. When the performance left the stage and went back to the bar, she was more in the clear, her big shiny eyes under the bow-shaped eyebrows opened large, slowly she turned towards me and our eyes met.
Making my way through the crowd, I advanced towards the back of the bar to the left where the girl was standing. When I reached the empty spot right behind her, the bartender did me a favour and handed me a beer right away. On the house…
The interesting girl leaned and whispered into the ear of her seated friend. When she laughed and threw her head back, her foot got caught in the iron leg of the bar stool in front of her and she stumbled backwards, falling right into my arms. I caught her under her armpits to stop her from dropping to the floor and staggered forward under her weight.
When I bent my knees to hold her, the back of her neck rubbed against my face and touched my nose and lips. At this first touch I could smell the apple shampoo from her hair along with the scent of a well-known perfume.
For about a second we stood close together. I became a little faint as the scent of her skin rose from her swan-like neck and reached the sensory receptors in my brain. I was frozen to the spot.
It was a scent that blended the faint but sweet smell of the sweat from her apocrine glands with amber, the indispensable ingredient of all the best perfumes. The sweat didn’t smell like ‘sweat,’ it just smelled ‘wet.’ It was neither sweet nor bitter, it was intoxicating and dizzying; it was both uniquely gorgeous and completely hers and hers only, like a love potion that enslaved me through the nose… It made everything around me seem unreal and directed all my senses unto itself.
My heart was beginning to tighten in my chest with a strange feeling of excitement. When she turned around in confusion we were face to face. And our bodies touched one another, she gave me a bright smile, “Oh, I am so sorry!” she said and after thanking me for saving her from falling, she went back to her place by the side of her friend.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said in a voice that no one could hear.
She leaned unto the bar, took her beer from where she had left it, and continued to watch the performance.
As I gazed at her and at the people on the stage in a good mood, I suddenly began to feel terrible. I clutched my fluttering heart and retreated about a meter to the large column at the back to the right. I leaned against it, but my dizziness didn’t pass, not even after taking several deep breaths. After a few minutes, I was totally out of breath; my pulse was racing and my ears were ringing.
When my knees went weak and my legs began to tremble, I nearly collapsed on the floor before I barely made it to the seat of the column which served as a chair. I considered shouting for help; I opened my mouth but no sound came out. I thought I was having a heart attack.
When I took another deep breath, it seemed as if I once again smelled the scent of the girl who had just fallen on me, and in front of my firmly closed eyes, there appeared images which were stranger than anything I had ever experienced before, as I tried to tear my shirt open for some more air.

3
WHY?

The tall, dark, white-haired Doctor is examining the Sick Man. When the cold stethoscope touches his chest, he shivers, looks out the window. The dark blue sky above them has a semi-liquid surface artificially illuminated by the reflection of some faint light; it resembles the dimly lit frosted glass ceiling of a shopping centre with some kind of dim lighting that originates from attached fixtures.
On the dirty surface of this cloudless motionless sky one can see neither the moon nor the stars.
There is despair in the eyes of the Sick Man. When the stethoscope is moved to his back, he seems to hear a noise from afar. It’s as if there is an old radio in his head playing a scratchy tune.
“The body you just left does not want to touch him…”
He wonders, is this his own voice?
“But just a kiss would be enough… Why?”
It’s not his voice.
In a whisper as low as a soft breeze, “I don’t know,” says the Doctor. He studies the tests reports in his hand. “It’s bad, really bad…” he murmurs.
The Sick Man is tall and thin with curly greying hair. He can barely make out his own eyes that look like bloodied holes under the swollen eyelids in his pale face. His ribs are sticking out; his wide shoulders look out of place on his bent back. He is naked except a pair of green and white boxers with a tennis-themed print.
Looking at the pitying expression in the doctor’s eyes, he realizes his case is a hopeless one, and it also dawns on him that he is going to die. His purplish lips curl up on their own.
“Is there no sign of recovery at all, Doc?” he asks.
The Doctor puts his hands inside the pockets of his white coat. To emphasize the terminal nature of the illness, he shrugs. “I think you probably have two years, at best,” he says in a low voice.
When he sees that the Sick Man keeps looking at him in silence, “Instead of burning away in this bloody hell here and now, you are going right to heaven,” he says. Then he adds. “This is not a proper life we’re living, anyway. I wish we’d all die and escape…”
“Why?” asks the Sick Man once again.
The Doctor is unable to comprehend him; he begins to explain a list of reasons as to why his illness has recurred.
A whole lot of nonsense…
But the Sick Man’s question is a much deeper one. One that is way too deep for The Doctor…
In his monotonous voice, “I am so sorry, as a physician it pains me to have to say there is nothing left for us to do,” the Doctor says.
Although he understands everything, the Sick Man cannot grasp the reality. He cannot believe these things; he doesn’t want to believe it. What about his family? What about those left behind?
What about his memories?
He recalls that only until last year he was strong as an ox. He never even had a cold. He was rich, he had a career, he was powerful, and he had a great reputation…
“We’re all long dead,” says the Doctor with a weary anger. “We died thirty-four years ago.” He then straightens his glasses. “Our bright blue world is ruined.”
A moan escapes the lips of The Sick Man. He hurts, it hurts like the devil. “I am still too young,” he says. “All my peers are still going strong, they’re all alive.”
The Doctor sighs. “You remember it too. Once upon a time there was the sun, there was fragrant air, there were seasons, there was the sky, and there was the sea; what a wonderful world it was. You remember?”
Ahh, the Sick Man remembers of course… Before the Great Disaster everything was incredibly beautiful. If he told it all, no one would believe him. “There must be some mistake,” he says quickly. “Are you sure there is no mistake, Doctor? I mean… the reports, the tests, the scans… Perhaps?”
As he tries to stagger into his clothes, the Doctor doesn’t answer him but only lends a helping hand. The Sick Man puts on his socks and shoes with trembling hands. He barely finds the strength to thank the Doctor. Then he feels something terrible burst inside of him and he starts to weep, leaning his head against the Doctor’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to die,” he says. “I mean, I have no idea where I would be going to…”
The Doctor is sorry for his desperate patient. “Please don’t cry,” he says. “Be brave. Think again, you’re going to a much better place. All your loved ones are there; your parents, friends, siblings…”
They stand together for a while, leaning against each other’s chests... The tears of the Sick Man leave long wet traces on the Doctor’s coat like the silvery stains of a snail.
Then he walks towards the door. He leaves. Without ever looking back…
He passes through corridors that smell of mildew. From the upper windows of the rooms to his right and left, cold faint lights are seeping out. He can hear groans escaping from beneath the doors… barely perceptible…
As he walks on, he finds himself in a new corridor, on a new landing, on a new staircase. When he reaches the reception room where the exit is, he sees hopeless people who look like skeletons holding reports, x-rays, files in their hands silently waiting around for their turn.
Pale thin wasted faces, blood-shot eyes all form a soundless choir, they sing without ever moving their lips.
Without ever opening their mouths…
“We want to live longer, we want to breathe,” they say.
When he goes out, there is no breeze to greet him. The Sick Man is now standing with his head down on his shoulders in a square leading off to numerous dark tunnels.
Trains come and go. Screaming brakes cut like a knife into the humming of the humongous underground factories and the ceaseless noise of the nuclear reactors. The disgruntled faces of the people in the square; they’re weary, tired, and sleep-deprived; they have accepted everything in desperation, it’s as if they are waiting to quietly slink away under a swamp… They watch the faded headlights of the huge masses of steel penetrate the greenish mist.
When the train stops at the square the doors open and the passengers fill up the compartments.
When the Sick Man enters the carriage filled with ancient seats, the doors close after him with a stammering hydraulic hiss. The train dives into a long tunnel, the lights of the square disappear.
“It’s too late,” says the Sick Man to himself. “You’re too late.”

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