Lady Life, page 1
PRAISE FOR
I WILL NEVER SEE THE WORLD AGAIN
“Urgent…brilliant…a timeless testament to the art and power of writing amid Orwellian repression.”
—Washington Post
“Remarkable…Altan’s talent as a writer allowed him to communicate his experience in rich, haunting detail…Despite the oppressive, cruel darkness at the core of Altan’s memoir, his words shine like bioluminescent creatures patrolling the abyss…brilliant.”
—NPR
“The title of Mr. Altan’s book is the statement of a brutal fact, rather than a cry of despair. There is not a smidgen of self-pity in the memoir’s 212 pages. What emerges is this: You cannot jail my mind, and you cannot shut me up.”
—New York Times
“[I Will Never See the World Again] speaks for itself with such clarity, certainty, and wisdom that only one thing needs to be said: read it. And then read it again…a radiant celebration of the inner resources of human beings…Its account of the creative process is sublime, among the most perfectly expressed analyses of that perpetually elusive phenomenon. And it is a triumph of the spirit.”
—The Guardian
“An inspiring testament to the human spirit. Through solitary days and aching bones, Altan shows us that dreams can escape the confines of a concrete cell and spread without limits.”
—Newsweek
“I hope that everyone who can read, whatever their politics, reads Ahmet Altan’s response to his imprisonment. Repressive regimes hope that if they lock up writers they are also locking up ideas. This will always fail.”
—Neil Gaiman
“From the bowels of Erdoğan’s prison system emerge these meditations on the vicissitudes of justice, products of a richly stocked mind, engrossing, sometimes profound, and remarkable for their equanimity.”
—J. M. Coetzee
“Remember the name Ahmet Altan! Add him to the great voices writing from prison across the centuries—Boethius, Cervantes, Gramsci, Soyinka, Solzhenitsyn—and be moved to tears and indignation by his story.”
—Ariel Dorfman
ALSO BY AHMET ALTAN
Fiction
Endgame
Like a Sword Wound
Love in the Days of Rebellion
Dying Is Easier Than Loving
Nonfiction
I Will Never See the World Again
First published in Turkish in 2021 as Hayat Hanım
by Everest Yayınları, Istanbul
Copyright © Ahmet Altan, 2021
English translation copyright © Other Press, 2023
Title-page art: Shutterstock / Essl
E. M. Cioran excerpt on this page from The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard. Copyright © 1976 by Seaver Books (NY: Arcade Books, 1998). Theodor Adorno excerpt from “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (NY: Columbia University Press, 1992). Poetry extract on this page from “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938) by W. H. Auden, published in Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940).
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text designer: Patrice Sheridan
This book was set in Arno Pro and DalyText by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Altan, Ahmet, author. | Çongar, Yasemin, 1966- translator.
Title: Lady life / Ahmet Altan; translated from the Turkish by Yasemin Çongar.
Other titles: Hayat hanım. English
Description: New York : Other Press, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022042478 (print) | LCCN 2022042479 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781635422887 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635422894 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Bildungsromans. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PL248.A525 H3913 2023 (print) | LCC PL248.A525 (ebook) | DDC 894/.3533—dc23/eng/20220907
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042478
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042479
Ebook ISBN 9781635422894
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Ahmet Altan
Title Page
Copyright
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
About the Author and Translator
1
Lives were changing overnight. Everything was so rotten that people’s roots in the past could no longer hold their present-day existence firmly in place. Like ducks in a shooting gallery, everyone lived with the possibility of being knocked over and disappearing with a single shot.
My own life changed overnight. Or rather, my father’s life. As a result of events that didn’t make much sense to me, a major country announced that it would be stopping the import of tomatoes, and just like that thousands of acres of land turned into a scarlet-colored dump. My father, with the foolhardiness one sometimes sees in people who resent their work, had invested all his money in a single crop, and so one sentence was enough to knock him over and drive him bankrupt. In the morning of a troubled night my father had a stroke.
We had fallen so hard that we couldn’t even find the time to mourn him. As if suffering from a severe case of vertigo, we were able to see everything around us, including his death, but were unable to make any sense of it. A life we had thought would never change crumbled with a terrifying ease. We were free-falling in an unfamiliar void, and I didn’t know what I was falling toward. That I would find out later.
We were left with the money in my mother’s bank account and the one-acre flower greenhouse my father had bought for her amusement. “I will find a way to keep you at school, but gone are the days of luxury,” she said. Studying literature on that vast, luminous campus had in fact become a luxury, but she wouldn’t even hear of me dropping out.
My poor father had wanted me to become an agricultural engineer, but I insisted on majoring in literature. I suppose what determined my decision, as much as my fondness for the adventurous solitude within a fortress of novels, was my confidence that no choice could jeopardize my secure future life.
A week after my father’s funeral I took the bus back to the city where my university was. The next morning I applied for student aid. I was a good student. They agreed to give me a scholarship.
Even so, I would no longer be able to pay the rent on the spacious three-bedroom house I shared with a friend. I found a room for rent on a street of dive bars where my schoolmates and I used to hang out. The room was in a six-story building from the nineteenth century, with purple wisteria covering its facade and small balconies with ornamental black wrought-iron railings. A wooden elevator still stood in its antique cage, but it didn’t work. The place must have been built as a han;[1] now it was used as a boardinghouse they rented out room by room.
Before I moved in, I put aside a few things to wear and, in a senseless act of fury, as if I was taking revenge for what had happened to us, sold all my clothes and books, my mobile phone, and computer to junk dealers at a very cheap price.
In the room there was a bed with a brass headboard, an old-style wooden nightstand, a tiny round table with a crack right in its middle that stood next to the balcony, a chair, and a mirror on the wall near the door. There was a toilet and a shower; together, they were the size of a small closet. There was no kitchen. A large room on the second floor was used as the communal kitchen. A long table made of rough-cut wood stood in the center, with two long benches on either side. A Frigidaire, at least fifty years old, grunted and growled, and shook at times. A white-tiled countertop, a sink with nineteenth-century bronze faucets with porcelain handles bearing the words chaud and froid, a samovar that mysteriously always had tea on the boil, and a television set: these were the things we shared in our shared kitchen.
The room’s small balcony was very nice. I would take out the chair, sit, and survey the cobblestone street. After seven at night, it started filling up. By nine you couldn’t see the cobblestones anymore; a colorful crowd that breathed in and out as one surged and grew to cover the whole street. A cloud of anise, tobacco, and fried fish drifted up. There were sounds of laughter, whistles, joyful whoops. It was as if once you entered that scene, anything that happened outside was forgotten, and a transient bliss enveloped everyone. I watched from afar that fleeting vivacity in which I could no longer take part.
Tenants cooked their meals in the communal kitchen. They labeled their food before putting it in the fridge. No one touched anyone else’s. In this building of penniless students, cross-dressers, Africans who produced and sold counterfeit luxury goods, young day laborers from the provinces, bouncers, and busboys who worked in nearby restaurants, there was a puzzling sense of order and peace. There was no manager to be seen, but everyone felt secure. Everyone guessed that some of the residents were involved in shady dealings outside the building, but that darkness never seeped in.
I didn’t know how to cook. I didn’t have enough money to buy proper meat or vegetables anyway, and I was too lazy to try to prepare food. I usually bought half a loaf of bread and cheese from the corner grocery and ate it at mealtimes. I suppose I resembled the rest of the “new poor” in the exaggerated and ridiculously inept way I tried to live through what had just happened.
I usually went down to the kitchen to have tea with my “meal.” I had discovered that a bouncer with tattooed biceps who always went about in a black tank top cooked exotic dishes and served them to whoever was in the kitchen at the time. He made strange things like steak with pineapple and ginger-braised sea bass.
The building had an intelligence network as incomprehensible as its security system: everyone knew things about everyone else. I learned, without knowing how, that Gülsüm, the cross-dresser who lived next door to me, was in love with a married cook; the young man two doors down was called “Poet” by all the others; the portly black guy nicknamed “Mogambo” sold handbags during the day and worked as an escort at night; and one of the country boys had shot his cousin. It was as if the kitchen walls were whispering to keep us informed.
I greeted and exchanged a few words with everybody there, but befriended no one. The only person I enjoyed talking to was Tevhide. She was five, the only child in the building. With her short, roughly cut hair and deep-green eyes that looked at everything with curiosity, she shone like a drop of water.
The first time we met she gestured to me with her tiny finger to come closer and spoke into my ear as if she were sharing an astonishing secret. “Do you know,” she asked, “that there is a number called one thousand five hundred?” “Really?” I acted surprised. “I swear. My friend told me today.”
When I didn’t see Tevhide and her father in the kitchen I would usually eat my bread and cheese, drink a few glasses of tea, and then go back upstairs to my room. I watched the street from the balcony for a while, then read a dictionary of mythology that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to sell. An imagination spanning thousands of years that had given us gods worse than people, never-ending wars, romances, evils, envy and greed—it helped me forget the world in which I lived.
Fall, with its utter inevitability and glory, had been settling on the city. The weather was cooler, and classes had begun.
One evening, while I was eating in the kitchen, someone whose name I didn’t know asked me if I wanted to work part-time after class. It didn’t pay much, but the job was easy. I said yes without blinking. I needed every penny. He gave me a card that read friendly casting. The next day I went to the address on it.
That was a year ago. I didn’t know then that life was so devoid of a hidden will, so subject to coincidence, that a single word, a mere suggestion, or a business card could change its course completely.
Skip Notes
1 A form of urban caravanserai in the Ottoman times, a han usually served as a hotel or a commercial compound for small businesses and wholesale shops. (Translator’s note)
2
We went down four floors; the man pushed a door and let me in. I entered a luminous darkness.
As I stood at the entrance and looked straight ahead at a large round hall with a vaulted ceiling, an enormous shower of lights exploded in my vision. I closed my eyes. I opened them again slowly. The people and the things in the room looked like supernatural creatures under the bright, aggressive beams of light coming from the spots hanging on the ceiling. On the wall, purple, lavender, and blue flashes danced a turbulent ballet, as if trying to compete with the biting whiteness of the spotlights. Straight under the vault was a raised platform, about a foot from the floor. Rows of tables arranged in the shape of a half moon were on either side of the platform. Surrounding the tables were chairs covered in satin, with huge bows attached to their backs. To the left of the platform sat an orchestra of musicians in pink shirts.
There was a black visor on top of each spotlight—the bright-white rays were absorbed as they hit those visors, gradually dimming. The light grew darker as it permeated down from the vaulted ceiling and more or less extinguished by the time it reached the walls. The bright center stage was surrounded by darkness. Between the platform and the walls were several rows of tables. People sat there in groups of three or four. I took a seat at one of the empty tables in the back.
All at once music began to play. A man on the platform gave a signal, and the people at the tables began to clap. Through an invisible door next to the dancing lights a woman in a red evening dress came out and burst into song. She was fat. Her dress had a plunging neckline and was rather snug around her body, revealing her breasts, a round belly, and full hips. But she wasn’t trying to conceal her heft—on the contrary, she wanted to draw attention to her curves.
All the singers that followed her were plump women in similarly tight evening dresses. The top of the turquoise dress of one was made with see-through lace, revealing her bra and her big, naked belly.
I had never seen so many fat and flirtatious women in one place. The aesthetic rules down here were different from those above. In the world up there, young women with small breasts, narrow hips, flat tummies, and long, thin legs were desirable, whereas here there was a taste for buxom women with wide hips, round bellies, broad and strong legs: these were mature women, curvaceous yet limber.
Images captured by cameras were shown on a large screen on the wall. The cameras didn’t only show the singers: they also focused on the audience from time to time and sometimes even closed in on a single person among them. Those sitting at the tables on the platform were clearly veteran spectators. They seemed to be familiar with the rules of the place. Once, the camera zoomed in on one of the women sitting at those tables. Her face came up on the screen. Her wavy ginger-gold hair, her eyes etched with crow’s-feet on the sides, her lips turned up at the corners were all remarkable. Yet her most striking feature was her expression. Her face had a teasing joviality about it, as if she were getting ready to crack a joke. She seemed on the brink of laughter. The face disappeared from the screen before I could look at it more.
She had attracted my attention at once. She, too, wore an evening dress with a plunging neckline. It was the color of honey, and it tightly embraced her plump body. When she got up to dance with others in the audience she did it smoothly, taking pleasure in what she was doing. Her bare shoulders shone under the lights. I was never good at guessing women’s ages. My mother used to say, “Asians all look the same to white people, and people of a certain age all look the same to the young.” She was right. Everyone above thirty sort of looked the same to me. Nonetheless, I guessed the woman in the honey-colored dress was between forty-five and fifty-five years old.
While most people there danced with exaggerated gestures so that the camera would turn to them, there was no pretension in the way she moved. She had gorgeous hips. Even though she shook and quivered with the most lustful moves she somehow seemed strangely untouchable. She was very attractive, but something about her, something I didn’t quite grasp, was warning me not to get too close. I had never thought before that older women could be attractive. I was surprised, shaken up.
The show lasted about two hours. Once I saw my own face on the screen. Singers I had never heard of sang songs I had never heard. Most of them had good voices. Some among them sounded even better than some celebrity singers. Yet because they either lacked stamina and ambition or made the wrong decision at some point or other along the way, they had apparently taken a turn from the road leading to the summit of their art and ended up on this TV channel that only people in the slums watched. Still, they had no qualms about this. On the contrary, they seemed satisfied with their underground fame, a glory confined to the fringes of the city.
