CHAPTER TWO

My Father

I came home late that night. They told me my father had died. With the first stab of pain came an image from childhood: my father's thin legs in shorts.

At two in the morning I went to his house to see him for the last time. "He's in the room at the back," they said. I went inside. When I returned to Valikonagı Avenue many hours later, just before dawn, the streets of Nisantası were empty and cold, and the dimly lit shop windows I had been passing for fifty years seemed distant and alien.

In the morning, sleepless and as if in a dream, I spoke on the phone, received visitors, and immersed myself in the funeral arrangements; and it was while I was receiving notes, requests, and prayers, settling small disputes, and writing the death announcement that I came to feel I understood why it is that, in all deaths, the rituals become more important than the deceased.

In the evening we went to Edirnekapı Cemetery to prepare the burial. When my elder brother and my cousin went into the cemetery's small administrative building, I found myself alone with the driver in the front seat of the taxi. That was when the driver told me he knew who I was.

"My father died," I told him. Without forethought, and much to my surprise, I began to tell him about my father. I told him that he had been a very good man and, more important, that I had loved him. The sun was about to set. The cemetery was empty and silent. The gray buildings towering over it had lost their everyday bleakness; they radiated a strange light. While I spoke, a cold wind we could not hear set plane trees and cypresses swaying, and this image engraved itself on my memory, like my father's thin legs.

When it became clear that the wait would be much longer still, the driver, who by now had told me that we shared a name, gave me two firm but compassionate slaps on the back and left. What I'd said to him, I said to no one else. But a week later, this thing inside me merged with my memories and my sorrow. If I didn't set it down in words, it would grow and cause me immense pain.

When I'd told the driver, "My father never once scowled at me, never even scolded me, never hit me," I'd been speaking without much thought. I'd omitted to mention his greatest acts of kindness. When I was a child, my father would look with heartfelt admiration at every picture I drew; when I asked his opinion, he would examine every scribbled sentence as if it were a masterpiece; he would laugh uproariously at my most tasteless and insipid jokes. Without the confidence he gave me, it would have been much more difficult to become a writer, to choose this as my profession. His trust in us, and his easy way of convincing my brother and me that we were brilliant and unique, came from a confidence in his own intellect. In his childishly innocent way, he sincerely believed that we were bound to be as brilliant, mature, and quick-witted as he, simply by virtue of being his sons.

He was quick-witted: He could, at a moment's notice, recite a poem by Cenap Sahabettin, take pi to the fifteenth digit, or offer up a brilliantly knowing guess about how a film we were watching together would end. He was not very modest, relishing stories about how clever he was. He enjoyed telling us how, for example, when he was in middle school, still in short pants, his math teacher had called him into a class with the oldest boys in the lycée, and how-after little Gündüz had gone to the blackboard and solved the problem that had stumped these boys three years older than he and the teacher had commended him with a "Well done"-the little boy then turned to the others and said, "So there!" In the face of his example, I found myself caught between envy and a longing to be more like him.

I can speak in the same way about his good looks. Everyone was always saying that I resembled him, except he was formed more handsomely. Like the fortune left to him by his father (my grandfather) that he had never, despite his many business failures, quite managed to exhaust, his good looks allowed a life of fun and ease, so that even in the worst days, he remained naïvely optimistic, afloat on good intentions and an unrivaled, unshakable sense of self-worth. For him, life was not something to be earned but to be enjoyed. The world was not a battlefield but a playing field, a playground, and as he grew older he came to feel slightly annoyed that the fortune, brains, and good looks he had enjoyed so fully in his youth had not magnified his fame or power as much as he might have wished. But, as in all instances, he did not waste time worrying about it. He could shrug off frustration with the same childish ease as he dispensed with any person, problem, or possession that brought him trouble. So even though his life went downhill after he reached thirty, leading to a long succession of disappointments, I never much heard him complain. When he was an old man, he had dinner with a renowned critic who, when next we met, exclaimed with some resentment, "Your father has no complexes whatsoever!"

His Peter Pan optimism delivered him from fury and obsession. Although he had read many books, dreamed of becoming a poet, and had, in his time, translated quite a few of Valéry's poems, I believe he was too comfortable in his skin, and too assured about the future, ever to be gripped by the essential passions of literary creativity. In youth he had a good library, and later he was happy for me to plunder it. But he didn't read the books as I did, voraciously and dizzy with excitement; he read them for pleasure, to divert his thoughts, and mostly he left off reading them midway. Where other fathers might speak in hushed tones of generals and religious leaders, my father would tell me about walking through the streets of Paris and seeing Sartre and Camus (more his kind of writer), and these stories made a big impression on me. Years later, when I met Erdal Inönü (a friend of my father's from childhood and the son of Turkey's second president, who was Atatürk's successor) at a gallery opening, he told me with a smile about a dinner at the presidential residence in Ankara that my father, then twenty, had attended; when Ismet Pasha brought the subject around to literature, my father asked, "Why don't we have any world-famous authors?" Eighteen years after my first novel was published, my father somewhat bashfully gave me a small suitcase. I know very well why finding inside it his journals, poems, notes, and literary writings made me uneasy: It was the record-the evidence-of an inner life. We don't want our fathers to be individuals, we want them to conform to our ideal of them.

I loved it when he took me to films, and I loved listening to him discuss the films we'd seen with others; I loved the jokes he made about the idiotic, the evil, and the soulless, just as I loved hearing him talk about a new kind of fruit, a city he'd visited, the latest news, or the latest book; but most of all I loved it when he caressed me. I loved it when he took me out for a ride, because together, in the car, I felt at least for a while that I wouldn't lose him. When he was driving, we couldn't look each other in the eye so he could speak to me as a friend, touching upon the most difficult and delicate questions. After a time, he'd pause to tell a few jokes, fiddle with the radio, and speak about whatever music reached our ears.

But what I loved most was being close to him, touching him, being at his side. When I was a lycée student, and even in my first years at university, during the deepest depression of my life, I would, in spite of myself, long for him to come to the house and sit down with me and my mother and say a few things to lift our spirits. When I was a small child, I loved to climb onto his lap or lie down next to him, smell his smell, and touch him. I remember how, on Heybeliada, when I was very small, he taught me how to swim: As I was sinking to the bottom, thrashing wildly, he would grab hold of me and I would rejoice, not just because I could breathe again but because I could wrap my arms around him and, not wishing to sink back to the bottom, cry, "Father, don't leave me!"

But he did leave us. He'd go far away, to other countries, other places, corners of the world unknown to us. When he was stretched out on the sofa reading, sometimes his eyes would slip away from the page and his thoughts would wander. That was when I'd know that, inside the man I knew as my father, there was another I could not reach, and guessing that he was daydreaming of another life, I'd grow uneasy. "I feel like a bullet that's been fired for no reason," he'd say sometimes. For some reason this would make me angry. Quite a few other things made me angry. I don't know who was in the right. Perhaps by then I too was longing to escape. But still I loved it when he put on his tape of Brahms's First Symphony, passionately conducting an imaginary orchestra with his imaginary baton. It would annoy me when, after a lifetime of seeking pleasure and running away from trouble, he would lament the fact that self-indulgence offered no meaning beyond itself and seek to blame others. In my twenties, there were times when I said to myself, "Please don't let me turn out like him." There were other times when I was troubled by my failure to be as happy, comfortable, carefree, and handsome as he was.

Much later, when I'd put all that behind me, when anger and...