Dying is Easier than Loving, page 1
ALSO BY
AHMET ALTAN
Like a Sword Wound
Love in the Days of Rebellion
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2015 by Ahmet Altan
First publication 2022 by Europa Editions
Translation by Brendan Freely
Original Title: Ölmek Kolaydır Sevmekten
Translation copyright © 2022 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Art direction by Emanuele Ragnisco
instagram.com/emanueleragnisco
Cover image: John Singer Sargent,
Nonchaloir (Repose), 1911, oil on canvas.
ISBN 9781609458300
Ahmet Altan
DYING IS EASIER
THAN LOVING
Book Three of the Ottoman Quartet
Translated from the Turkish
by Brendan Freely
DYING IS EASIER
THAN LOVING
I’m going to tell you a great secret
Close the doors
It’s easier to die than to love
That’s why I take such pains to go on living
My love.
—LOUIS ARAGON
INDEX OF CHARACTERS
Osman
A middle aged man who lives alone in modern-day Turkey except for his frequent visitors from a century ago, who bring along their personal versions of a family history that only the dead can remember and tell.
Sheikh Yusuf Effendi
Osman’s great grandfather. The leader of a prominent tekke—a monastery of dervishes—in the late 19th century Istanbul, whose wisdom is sought by people from all corners of the vast Ottoman land.
Hasan Effendi
A former commissioned officer of the Imperial Navy; both a loyal disciple and son-in law of Sheik Yusuf Effendi.
Mihrişah Sultan
An Ottoman princess related to the Khedive of Egypt and the estranged wife of the late Reşit Pasha, personal physician of the Ottoman Sultan.
Hüseyin Hikmet Bey
The only child of Mihrişah Sultan and the late Reşit Pasha. Trained as a lawyer in Paris and formerly married to Mehpare Hanım, he is now Dilevser’s husband.
Mehpare Hanım
The daughter of an Ottoman Customs Director and a two-time divorcee, who has a daughter from her first husband Sheikh Yusuf Efendi and a son from her second husband Hüseyin Hikmet Bey. She now lives alone in Istanbul.
Nizam
The only child of Mehpare Hanım and Hüseyin Hikmet Bey, he spent most of his life in Paris but now is back in Istanbul.
Rukiye
The daughter of Mehpare Hanım and Sheikh Yusuf Effendi, she is married to Tevfik Bey.
Tevfik Bey
A clerk at the Grand Vizier’s Office.
Ragıp Bey
Osman’s grandfather. An officer in the Ottoman Army, childhood friend of Hasan Effendi and married to Hatice Hanım, one of Sheik Yusuf Effendi’s daughters.
Cevat Bey
Ragıp Bey’s older brother and a leading member of the Committee for Union and Progress.
Dilara Hanım
Poland-born and well-travelled widow of an affluent Ottoman Pasha, she now resides alone in Istanbul.
Dilevser
Dilara Hanım’s daughter and Hikmet Bey’s second wife.
Anya
A Russian pianist who plays at a gaming den in Istanbul.
Monsieur Gavril
The owner of the gaming den where Anya works.
Efronia
An Armenian nurse who tends patients at the French Hospital in Istanbul.
Stéphane Lausanne
A journalist who has come to Istanbul to cover the Balkan War for the newspaper Le Matin.
Major Rasim
Hüseyin Hikmet Bey’s friend and a member of the Committee for Union and Progress that had overthrown Abdulhamid, he had been commander of the military unit assigned to guard the former sultan during his years in exile.
Abdulhamid
Sultan Abdulhamid II ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909, until his dethroning by a military coup. A major figure in the first two volumes of the Ottoman Quartet, Abdulhamid has spent years in exile in Salonica and is now back in Istanbul.
1
Why would a person carry around a letter his whole life if he was never going to read it?
Osman sought the answer to this question as he wandered through this old mansion where the curtains were closed and the shutters were lowered, listening to the endless winds, the sounds that changed with the season and the day, and speaking to his dead, an extended family that had scattered over the course of a century, mixing themselves up in all of those wars, uprisings, coups, murders and anguished loves.
He kept repeating the same question to himself again and again as he wandered from room to room and hall to hall in this wooden mansion that groaned liked an aged invalid, wearing an old nightdress that had belonged to his grandfather and that he’d found in one of the old chests with rusty hinges.
He never went outside, never looked out the window, never set the decorative wall clocks that had long since stopped, he knew the time only from the sound of the wind; when it rang like little bells it was spring, when it howled it was winter, when it became irritable it meant autumn had arrived, and when it turned into a whisper it was summertime.
He’d almost entirely cut off his relationship with the present. One of the family’s faithful retainers stopped by once a week, saw to all of Osman’s and the house’s needs, put away the food and then left without seeing the owner of the house.
He’d been living in this vague murkiness for a long time. He’d found his dead in this mansion, he’d begun speaking with them and had passed to a different life in which time and place had been lost. The dead told him their stories, sometimes lying, sometimes putting a spin on things, sometimes making mistakes, sometimes getting the dates mixed up, sometimes shaken by the confessions that came from the heart, recreating a past life here.
Osman had flowed into the past through a crack in time, after he’d done so the crack had closed and he’d remained in the past. For those who live in the present, time always flows in the same direction, towards the future, but behind Osman’s magical crack it stretched in every direction but didn’t flow anywhere, sometimes it moved forward and sometimes backward.
He lived surrounded by fog in an elastic, slack and disordered time, listening to his dead, speaking to them, gossiping, asking curious questions in a struggle to solve their mysteries.
Every question that got stuck in his mind seemed like the most important question in the world, he would fall in pursuit of that question in the belief that when he found the answer he would have solved the mystery of life.
He’d recently learned that it was not one but three unopened letters that Ragıp Bey carried close to his chest. Dilara Hanım had written him three letters in a row and had not received a reply to any of them.
Those letters had travelled from one front line to another, from one city to another, growing tattered and yellowed in the inner pocket of Ragıp Bey’s jacket.
For Ragıp Bey, who didn’t value possessions and cared nothing for goods and property, those three letters were the most valuable things he owned.
What is it that makes a letter valuable, Osman kept asking himself.
He couldn’t say “the contents” because Ragıp Bey, who’d carried those letters in his breast pocket from the moment he’d received them, had never once opened the envelopes and didn’t know what was written in them.
If he said, “the person who wrote the letter,” Ragıp Bey said that he didn’t ever again even want to meet the woman who wrote the letters.
Ragıp Bey hadn’t opened the letters, he didn’t want to see Dilara Hanım again, but during the Balkan War, when a village house in Çatalca just beyond the emplacements was hit by Bulgarian cannon fire and started burning, and he barely managed to scramble out alive, he realized that the jacket with the letters in it was still inside, he shook off the sergeant who has holding him back, crawled in through the flames and rescued the jacket and the letters.
Remaining on the thin line between life and death without touching either side, his clouded mind wandering among the fragile waves of time, he’d heard so much about that war from his dead, he’d seen scenes from the war on the broad, empty walls of the halls so many times, had watched them so many times.
He never forgot the way Ragıp Bey stood above the trenches on that strange, rainy day.
As the clouds mingled together in restless confusion it began to rain, and as it fell to the ground rent by the spooky and inauspicious phosphorescent lavender, orange, purple and green glow, the thousands of dead and the piles of mud in which they were buried began to change color from moment to moment.
A powerful light was emanating from the drops.
The trenches, the piles of mud in front of the trenches, the cannon carriages, the shell casings next to the carr
As the colors of the sky changed, the trenches and craters filled with rainwater, dead horses, broken wheels, one or two empty shacks with thatched roofs, the lone trees that stood here and there and the naked plain that stretched as far as the eye could see were all undulating with them like a soft cover, seen from a distance it gave one the feeling that the entire plain was moving in an incomprehensible and unnerving harmony.
The bodies of the soldiers, twisted in their grey, military cloaks, hunch-backed, their legs drawn up to their bellies from their final agony, became a part of this motion with the changing of the colors and were moving with the plain.
The infantrymen were watching the sky in terror, they were trying to hide in the trenches as if to protect themselves from the assault of this roaring of colors they’d never seen before, they believed that these gushing colors that tore the sky were an omen, but they feared it was a bad omen.
Ragıp Bey, who was standing alone above the trench watching the sky and the plain, seemed to grow larger and taller with every color that struck him, he was the only person on the entire plain who was standing up and as his fur cap, hair, moustache and uniform were painted in the fiery colors reflected by the clouds, he looked like a flaming torch. He could have been struck by a bullet or torn apart by shrapnel at any moment, but the tranquility on his face as rainwater streamed down it from his fur cap made one think that he’d forgotten he was on a battlefield.
As he later told Osman, “In fact in those days I’d forgotten about death, and about life as well.”
Not being given the absolute love he’d yearned for from the woman he loved, his belief that there was something lacking in Dilara Hanım’s love, had torn from him the feeling of happiness that he’d always desired, that he yearned for with a strange bashfulness, that he’d always dreamed about and that he’d believed he was certain to find one day, he’d lost his trust in people, and indeed in life. There was nothing left of what the future had promised him, as he told Osman, “Life and people are always a little incomplete, I have neither the power to complete what’s missing, in life and in people, nor the tolerance to consent to accept them with their imperfections.”
After the Dilara Hanım “affair,” “incompleteness” became the word that defined Ragıp Bey’s life, it was as if this word could explain everything, make everything comprehensible. Even Osman, with his clouded mind, could grasp that this word was the key not to solving the meaning of life but on the contrary that it served this bellicose-souled man to lock the thick door with which he’d closed himself off from life.
He’d once thought that this soldier who’d spent his life on the shores of death had sought in life the absoluteness of death. He’d thought he’d wanted life to have that poignancy, that dark wholeness as well.
Much later, as they spoke, he’d realized that this word expressed a helplessness, an impasse, an inability to talk about what troubled him. Ragıp Bey had arrived at the opinion that the woman he loved didn’t love him with the same degree of strength and he assessed everything that happened in light of this opinion of whose truth no one was certain, and he’d begun to find life and people lacking.
It was as if his belief that he would never again find happiness had become an affliction that cut him off from the whole world and from people, he both looked down on people who were willing to live out a life that was incomplete and envied them for the ease with which they failed to see this incompleteness as an affliction.
In any event, in those days all of his emotions were battling one another as if they were enemies, his soul was a battlefield like the one he was looking at. Wherever he went and whatever he did, he always carried Dilara Hanım’s letters in his pocket, but he never once read them, he could neither part with them nor look at them.
He was like someone who loved a woman who had died, but the woman he loved was alive. He knew that if he went, if he knocked on her door, she would invite him in, he could reach the woman he loved whenever he wanted, but the woman he reached wouldn’t be the woman he loved and wanted.
He wanted the Dilara Hanım he’d created in his imagination, who his thoughts and feelings had made unique, who he’d set apart from all other people and kept in an unreachable place, someone with weakness that made her like the others wouldn’t be enough to fulfill his dreams and hopes.
Every time he looked at Dilara Hanım he would see a sign of incompleteness on her face, and when he saw this he wouldn’t be able to bear it; to accept not being loved as he wanted as a natural part of his life would cripple his entire life, his future and his existence, it would make him weak. Despite all his love, he felt that to accept Dilara Hanım’s inadequate love would destroy the last chance in his life for happiness, no matter how much he lived as if he’d given up on life, he had hope that one day he would find absolute love, absolute happiness and in order not to lose that, he was struggling to put up an almost instinctive resistance.
He wanted an ongoing dream, a hope that he could hold on to, he was unwilling to give the last hope of happiness he possessed even to the woman he loved in exchange for something that only resembled happiness.
He now knew that there was an obstacle between him and the woman he loved that couldn’t be overcome or removed. He loved the woman he’d created in his imagination with such a strong passion, the woman who was the source of this dream now seemed pitiful and lifeless in comparison to the dream. In those days Ragıp Bey was learning that losing an imaginary woman was more painful than losing a real woman; he could have found another woman to love, but it wasn’t always easy to create a dream out of a woman.
He was like a sculptor who’d found the best marble in the world and then made a bad statue from it, he didn’t like the statue but he’d also lost the marble. The marble he liked was hidden within the statue he didn’t like and every time he thought of the statue, he remembered the marble he’d lost and would never find again, he grieved for the times when he’d created that magnificent dream and Dilara Hanım had been a supreme and perfect woman for him. He was imprisoned in the past.
The clouds had slowly begun to regain their dominance of the sky, but the phosphorescent colors that shone through them like a volcano that had erupted in the depths of the universe continued to mix, gilding the edges of the clouds that were trying to obscure them; the rain, quickened by the sharpening October wind, seemed to be spouting from the ground to the sky, the edges of the plain had grown dark, but the center was illuminated like a forest fire.
For whatever reason, the Bulgarians had stopped their cannon fire two hours earlier, and the silence worried the soldiers, they suspected the Bulgarians were preparing a night attack. Ragıp Bey could sense that they were frightened, for so many years he’d been in and out of so many battles, so many times he’d walked towards death with the men, but for the first time he saw how daunted and timorous the army had become. They outnumbered the enemy’s units, but they didn’t possess the enemy’s desire to fight, they didn’t believe they were going to win this war, they trusted neither the officers, the generals, nor the Sultan.
Ragıp Bey thought angrily about how they’d lost the war, it was as if it was over before it had even begun.
When, after a boom, the soldiers saw a shell whooshing towards them as it tore through the rain they plastered themselves to the trenches, but Ragıp Bey didn’t move. The shell buried itself in the earth with a hollow sound about ten meters from the trenches, splattering mud as it did so. Ragıp Bey squinted his right eye and looked towards the Bulgarian trenches as if he was disgusted by the enemy artillery’s needless shot and inept targeting.
