The Book with Twelve Tales Read online

  Suddenly a fire engine shot out of the players’ tunnel and burst onto the pitch. The watermelons stood up and howled. Its bells clanged. It hurtled round the pitch in figuresofeight. The dust swirled and danced. Fikri Dikmen snorted happily. Men in flapping shalvars hung onto the fire engine. They jumped wildly and furiously up and down the handles and footles of the hurtling machine. The watermelons danced. Then the hose came on. The crowd screamed with delight. The men in flapping shalvars fell off the back and got watered. Fikri Dikmen started to choke. I jumped up and down. This is brilliant! said Fikri Dikmen.

  The crowd honked with excitement. The row in front of us put their arms round each other’s shoulders and danced in a big long line. Fikri Dikmen swayed. My ears went red. The fire engine swayed and slewed under the sun. Someone behind us collapsed with laughter haha. Then the fire engine shot back down the tunnel. Then the wet men. Fikri Dikmen coughed. Tears spilled out of his eyes. Oh oh, he said. We gasped. Dust floated into our mouths. The sun sparkled it.

  85 Diyarbakirspor vs Erzurumspor part 2

  I caught my breath somewhere. Suddenly hundreds of policemen of a kind I hadn’t seen before marched out of the tunnel. The ground went bomp bomp bomp bomp. They wore bottlegreen helmets. The watermelons booed and spat. The police waved their shields, truncheons and pistols. The little bald redandgreen hugely moustached man beside me shouted bastards bastards and threw his packet of plain biscuits at them. Then he jumped up and down on a carton of cherryjuice until it bled.

  The teams ran on. Rolls of toiletpaper unwound in the blue sky and fluttered down over the stadium. Green and red bunting shot out of the terraces like flak from a trench. Watermelons and men in shalvars danced greenly and redly along the concrete. We bounced. We tangled ourselves in red and green and toiletpaper fluttered down and joined us all together whitely. This is brilliant! said Fikri Dikmen. We were beside ourselves with happiness.

  Across the pitch, under the scoreboard sponsored by the White Bank, the desperately faithful fans, holding above them a long long banner that said Born for Diyarbakirspor, Die for Diyarbakirspor, hurtled, demented, in all directions, banging their drums, blowing their zornas, and pogoing from side to side in an ecstasy brought on with more delicious madness by shaking their heads like balloons on sticks.

  Erzurumspor scored first. There was a terrible silence in the Atatürk Stadium. The sun spun quietly. The clouds paused. Fikri Dikmen went whiter. The watermelons sagged. The linesman who had not flagged the bastard scorer offside rushed from the pitch and down the tunnel on little wings of dust. He was replaced by a man in a luminous yellow shellsuit.

  A minute before halftime, Diyarbakirspor struck back. Mehmet Itch let fly a shot so furious it knocked the Erzurum goalkeeper flat into the ground. The watermelons battered and boffed together in slow motion with anticipatory kisses and howls. The goalkeeper lay completely still, while the ball left him at great speed and smacked into the post. We gasped. Our heads moved together. Right. The ball was pushed slowly flat against the post, then it decompressed and shot into the back of the net. Left.

  The stadium erupted. Drums and zornas thumped and squealed. The sky was splashed red and green like a gigantic automatic painting. The row in front of us did a selection of southeastern folkdances. Confetti, blown out of cardboard tubes, whirled into the air. The sun was silently taken aback, and retreated above the stadium. The confetti twinkled down onto the hot concrete terraces, our hair, shoulders and down our shoes. The goal, to the furious delight of everyone who was still conscious, then folded neatly sideways and collapsed onto the Erzurum goalkeeper, who was left like a fish in a net in a sea of dust.

  The teams trotted away down the tunnel.

  Halftime.

  86 Diyarbakirspor vs Erzurumspor part 3

  An ambulance hurtled out onto the pitch. The goalkeeper lay still, netted and dusted. The ambulance drove round and round the edge of the pitch, trailing bunting, flags and toiletpaper and swirled about with confetti, blowing its horn and its siren. The fanatics under the White Bank scoreboard hooted and jeered. The ambulance turned on all its lights, skidded across the centre circle, and disappeared down the tunnel.

  We waited, agog.

  The Erzurum trainer sprinted on. He rushed at the goalkeeper. Bastard bastard, yelled the little bald redandgreen hugely moustached man beside me. The trainer pulled the goalkeeper free by his armpits. The dust swarmed. Oh have a cigarette, said Fikri Dikmen. I took it without looking. A fat man with a hammer and two boys dressed as small watermelons pulled the goal back up, banged it and bowed.

  The teams trotted out.

  87 Diyarbakirspor vs Erzurumspor part 4

  Mehmet Itch waved and bowed in all directions. The watermelons waved back. The whistle blew. The Erzurum team attacked him furiously. He disappeared redly and greenly. The fanatics under the White Bank scoreboard clawed at their fence. Some swarmed over. They thundered dustily towards the fight. The Diyarbakirspor trainer ran on with his medicine bag. They all met boff in the middle. Dust shot up in plumes and twists. A photographer so fat he had to walk sideways under a white panamahat edged into the dust and raised his camera.

  The bottlegreen police charged. The sun withdrew further, a bit nervously.

  In half an hour the game restarted. The bottlegreen police stood round the pitch. Fikri Dikmen clattered his beads furiously. The watermelons waited fatly in red and green suspense. The scoreboard side was seething like a surfeit of salmon trying to jump up a waterfall. Mehmet Itch sat on the sideline, unhurt. The referee blew the whistle.

  Then Diyarbakir scored.

  Pistachio husks and sunflower seeds darkened the sun. Which rolled behind a long thin cloud. The drums thumped like rejoicing hearts. Fikri Dikmen said, Oh! Brilliant! We grabbed each other and jumped up and down. The watermelons went ballistic, pinging off each other like billiardballs.

  And in the last minute the Erzurum no. 9 kicked the ball out of the Diyarbakir goalkeeper’s hands, from where it ran out behind the goalline, recollected it with his feet and, pretending that he was about to score, scored.

  The world waited.

  The referee yelled, disallowed! and disappeared down the players’ tunnel, followed by the remaining linesman.

  A riot ensued.

  The man in the luminous yellow shellsuit did not make the tunnel. He was punched in the mouth by a man in a white suit. I watched in slow motion. The police advanced and battered people furiously with their truncheons. The little bald redandgreen hugely moustached man beside me hurled his shoes into the dusty arena. A party of sweating men in dark suits stood in the VIP box and wobbled with laughter.

  88 A dream of breathing

  I wandered home through Republic Park. The big high swooping blue vague monument looked down at the little crowd as it dispersed, like a giraffe inspecting dungbeetles.

  That night I dreamed. A religious dispute. People that breathed through their noses shouted mutely at people who breathed through their mouths. They were all dressed in yellow dust.

  89 Two nurses

  I hurried up Ali Emiri 4. It was a warm, dull day and the streets were puddled with last night’s rain. The city walls were perfectly black. I stood in a puddle as the day got warmer and warmer. By conjoining the disparate phenomena of the world, by giving life to the inanimate and wroughtness to the living, similes, like waterdrops gathering into rainfall in a cloud, are things of weight, gravity and earth. I smiled at the shallow cloudiness of the sky. I hurried towards the Weekday Health Centre.

  The nurse was waiting with another, who had a clipboard with a piece of grey paper clipped on it. She smiled at me with dazzling white teeth. I bowed. The nurse slit open the cellophane on a new box of syringes with her fingernail. Card please, said the other nurse. I gave her the pink Rabies Record Card. The fridge burbled and flickered. I’d miss it. She drew a line. No need to come back, she said smilingly. The dogs are all quite healthy. She smiled again. Her whiteness shone in the grey room. The
watertaps dripped silver drops. I smiled back.

  I climbed into the couch. The swooping steel tubing squeaked and sighed. Oh, the last time. The nurse didn’t say left left left. The other nurse watched her, and came nearer in a blur of white light and hovered over us. I shut my eyes. An injection is an injection is an injection. I opened them. The little window blurred white. The nurse waved the syringe. The other nurse smiled. The needle went in where it should, delivered its serum to the right places, and withdrew steelily. That’s it, said the other nurse. She clipped the pink card on her clipboard. Get well soon, she said whitely.

  I climbed out of the couch. I bowed at the nurse and shook her big hand. Her pearls popped with light. Her hair whirled. Thanks, I said. You’re welcome, she said.

  I was delivered out into the dullness of day. Perhaps they were all better too. The girl with her head wound round with bandages. The prisoner who smelt of mud. The little boy from Siirt with his foot tied up in a sheet. I raced home.

  90 At the Great Mosque

  I walked through the city smiling. I hurried to the Great Mosque. A wooden foldopen stall lit by a paraffin lamp opened its books in the porch. A man in a little white hat sat in front of the pair of high dark studded cracked wooden doors selling perfume in coloured bottles. The light from the paraffin lamp made them dance. I hurried inside. A blind man sitting on a folding chair on the uneven stones of the courtyard sang loudly. Lights from lanterns and electric chandeliers twinkled out from the rooms all round the yard. Water splashed at a fountain of taps. Under one chandelier I saw a man sitting on a carpet, all in white, bowed with his eyes closed in front of a microphone. I sat on the uneven stones. I didn’t think of anything. What use was that? What could you do? There was no understanding it. If God lived in the hill. Or if he didn’t.

  I hurried out. Halfway out the door, near the red and green and yellow and blue bottles of the perfumeseller, I gave up the structure of my soul to the random events it had always tried to make sense of. It just got so heavy.

  91 And the reward was beauty

  I ran up the steps on the city walls at Mardin Gate. I stood on top. The whole world, seen from this high, was bushy and green. The Dijle ran, silvergrey, through the bluegreen orchard trees and the yellowgreen fields on the far bank. I walked up to the very edge. I looked down. The university, the river, fields, orchards, groves of straight slender aspens and the mountains. I smiled. Donkeys grazed on the banks of earth that sloped gently up to the feet of the city walls. In one completely black field crouched a woman pricking out seedlings in the company of a white dog. I cried.

  Suddenly, a horse and cart clattered out of the city, through the city walls by the gate under my feet and shot out the other side onto the Mardin road. A man completely white with flour thrashed the horse pell-mell away down the road. He stood unshakably upright on the tray of the cart, yanking the reins here and there and bellowing. The horse threw up puffs of white dust. I gasped. They thundered away into the evening.

  I have never seen anything as good as that again.

  Usually, I thought, a bit of me would try to go with them. But a bit of them is still with me. That’s good.

  92 A man asleep

  I sighed. Then I saw a man lying right on the edge of the wall-tower a few feet away from me. He was fast asleep. A long stick lay beside him. His boots turned up broken at the toes. Someone lit a tilley lamp in the teahouse under the city walls. The man was snoring lightly. Then a long line of white horses carrying bricks clopped out through Mardin Gate and down the hill away from Diyarbakir. I heard the little bells on their bridles. The road to.

  93 A bunch of flowers and some other presents

  The shoeshine boy did my shoes a kind of plastic grey. I paid him anyway. Fikri Dikmen took me to the Golden Flowershop by Republic Park. The big high swooping blue vague monument didn’t do anything but look blue. And swooping. And. I bought fourteen red roses. The manager wrapped them in purple cellophane and hung them round with curly ribbons of pink silk. She smiled. I bowed. We hurried to the Weekday Health Centre. Roses and ribbons in the morning. Then I didn’t feel silly. What use was that? Have a cigarette, said Fikri Dikmen. We hurried past the wiry tree. It stuck up twistedly. Two squiggles of smoke got pulled along behind us and drifted round the trunk. The big yellow crane creaked noddingly on the first floor. We hurried down the crumbly concrete steps.

  I gave the flowers to the nurse. The other nurse smiled dazzlingly. They curtseyed. I bowed. Thank you very much, I said. You’re welcome, said the nurse. The fridge burbled.

  I climbed into the couch. I don’t know. In slow motion, as if she were putting everything into a last performance, the nurse injected my stomach for the last time. While the other nurse drew another line across my pink Rabies Record Card further down. Had I already. 2ccs. She yanked out the needle with a kind of coy ferocity. Like a. I couldn’t care less what happened in between.

  We hurried back to Ali Emiri 4. The sun nuzzled against a misty whiteness in the air. We rounded the top of the street. A man with no legs sat on the pavement. A little wooden sledge tied under him by his stumps. His hands were all balled up in leather mittens wound round and round with bits of rag and sacking. He held his face up to the nuzzling sun and panted. In the morning, with the whole day ahead of him, I pitied him. We stopped. His olive eyes opened. Fikri Dikmen gave him two cigarettes. I gave him a handful of notes. He pushed the notes into his torn dusty darkblue coat. Fikri Dikmen lit his cigarette. The sun breathed on the misty whiteness and it cleared a bit. He swung his body into Ali Emiri 4 and ran on his fists through the dust. A horse and cart clattered round him. He bowled away down the road towards the city walls, punching the gravel. A squiggle of smoke pursued him. The city walls shone like tar in the new sun.

  94 The last day of April

  I dreamed in the night that Jem Murat told me fizzy lemonade gave him a sore throat. I slept late.

  A bright blue hot day. The twisted gates shone. Ali Emiri 4 ran past like a. Birds trilled pleasantly through the trelliswork. The greening rosegarden distilled its rosy smell in the hot earth. My window sparkled. I hurried out. The sun hugged me warmly.

  Nejati Bey was drinking tea in the Institute tearoom. He clacked his amber beads mournfully. The sun lit up the amber meniscus in his glass. It sparkled with sugar. I could hear Sevtap on the telephone saying yes yes over and over and over. The Director, I thought. Dr Ismail stumped in. He had just paid his fees. He smiled and frowned in a black and white checked jacket. I’ll come at, he said frowningly, seven. I agreed whatever. He smiled. Good, he said. His jacket came and went. Now it’s all over, he said frowningly. I bowed, surprised. Why? He’d said. Why him? Why not. He smiled. The sun explored his jacket in fits and starts. He left. Nejati Bey clacked his amber beads and looked at me sadly. He’s a fascist, he said swirling his golden tea.

  95 An evening out with Dr Ismail the army doctor

  Dr Ismail came at seven. We wandered expansively in the warm evening air to the Army Medical Department Teahouse. The night air backstroked round the trees, which undulated their leaves and swayed their branches gently. Fairylights, all plain, twinkled in the trees. Like. Tremblingly. We drank our tea while Dr Ismail gently and smilingly stroked a map of Turkey pinned to our table with his pipestem everywhere he had ever been on holiday. I purred. Come on, he said frowning. His jacket stroboscoped under the fairylights. We rose into the Pilmen Resaurant in a lift. We drank tea and looked out over the modest lights of Diyarbakir. Dr Ismail smiled and puffed. His jacket jazzed around in the redplush furniture. Then we wandered expansively down Ali Emiri Not 4 to the Officers’ Club. Its big marble box of floors was guarded by soldiers with machineguns and bayonets. We wandered in, pursued by Dr Ismail’s pipesmoke. We sat on shiny barstools and were given sodawater by a barman in a white jacket and shiny hair. Dr Ismail read me stories from the paper. A man had jumped off the city walls near Mardin Gate but had only broken his leg. There was a photo of him being led away handcu
ffed by the police. Arrested for his unwelcome declaration of private despair. The goal kings of the football league were photographed wearing crowns and erminetrimmed robes. Dr Ismail took out his pipe and buzzed in the sodawater. Listen to this, he said frowningly.

  96 Mehmet the two-headed baby

  Mehmet the two-headed baby had been born in a small village a few miles from Diyarbakir. His mother had disowned him straight away. She said he was a monster visited on her by evil spirits. The people in the village thought he was the devil. But his father had carried him in his arms to the State Hospital where Dr Shimshek was waiting. Dr Ismail paused and smiled. A mutual acquaintance, he said. Then he put his pipe back in and went on reading. A nurse said to the newspaper, everyone loves little Mehmet. In the days that followed a successful operation, removing one of the heads, was performed on little Mehmet, who was then adopted. Aren’t people kind? said Dr Ismail smiling. His jacket couldn’t make up its mind. Yes, I said, very. A lump in my throat. Now, said Dr Ismail frowningly, for a real drink. Cognac, he said smiling very much at the barman in the white jacket and shiny hair. Sorry sir, we haven’t got any. Dr Ismail frowned. Gin will do, he said.

  Then he had another one.

  97 An old man

  Dr Ismail puffed and checkered. A big TV screen showed a coloured picture of Trees near Malabadi Bridge for Ramadan. I stared. The screen got bigger. The trees were still and beautiful. The new green shoots shot out stilly. The screen started to curl around the room. The trees grew and grew without movement. Their roots burrowed in dark pebbly soil. It didn’t look so nourishing. I stood on a dark sandy pebbly bank. My shoes wobbled with little clatters. But the pebbles didn’t move. The trees, completely still, looked solicitous and then just treelike. Not making up their minds. Like Dr Ismail’s jacket. I walked amongst the slender trunks. They were flat as cardboard. The leaves bristled and fluttered stilly, coloured only on one side. What drove them to be trees? Why were they nothing but what they were made? I stepped carefully between two more. They looked beautiful and flat. I decided to dig in the ground. To see. I knelt on the pebbles and stuck my hand in the dirt. It felt like a flurry of paper. Or ashes. It shifted lifelessly. I burrowed in.