Dying is Easier than Loving, page 44
Mihrişah Sultan could see that Sheikh Efendi was caught between his anger and his belief, that he was suffocating from carrying alone the weight of the decision he would make at the intersection where the emotions he called weakness and the path he knew was right separated. The men who had killed his son-in-law had taken over the entire empire, it was impossible to punish these murderers even though it was clearly known who the murderers were, the people were shouting “long life” to the murderers and remembering them with love. He was faced with such clear injustice and unfairness that he was having difficulty convincing himself and those around him to accept it. He thought that Rukiye’s eyes were constantly asking him “Why? Why were we subjected to an injustice like this, why did God find me deserving of this pain, is this God’s justice?”
Everyone knew that with a single command he could right the broken scales of “justice,” that he could reckon with this murder in kind, as he’d said to Sultan he was frightened by this “power,” he had power but he couldn’t use this power. “This is a test,” he kept telling himself, “this is a test.”
He retreated to his room and prayed for hours, “God grant me the strength to pass this test with honor, help this miserable creature whose soul is made wretched by weakness, God keep me from making the wrong decision and taking the wrong path, I take shelter in you, protect me from my own weakness.”
When Mihrişah Sultan saw the pain the Sheikh was suffering and the helplessness he was experiencing, she grasped that she had been unfairly self-indulgent.
“This unexpected anguish has shaken all of us, sometimes we talk nonsense . . . Forgive me for what I said, consider it the impertinence of a grieving woman. What you said is true, punishing the murderers is not our duty, we have to look for ways to ease our girl’s torment, we have to think about the child that is going to be born . . . That’s our duty.”
Sheikh Efendi looked at Mihrişah Sultan, the white, lace scarf covering her head, her dark blue dress, the star-shaped, diamond clasp that held up her hair, and the blue of the Golden Horn that was reflected here and there on her face among the dark green shadows gave her the look of someone out of a fairy tale.
They looked at each other in silence for a few seconds, it was a silence filled with words that hadn’t been uttered, couldn’t be uttered and wouldn’t be uttered. During that silence they said so much more to each other than they could have said in a conversation, they heard every word that hadn’t been uttered, they felt every emotion that passed within them. Their silence was like a magical elixir, as they drank it they felt enveloped by an intoxication that was full of emotions and shadows. They grasped body and soul that at no time and under no circumstances would the two of them be as close to each other, and tell each other as much as they did during that brief moment of silence.
A seagull took off from the Golden Horn and flapped its wings as it passed among the trees.
Sheikh Efendi sighed, they started walking again, they didn’t speak, they didn’t want to break the silence, they wanted to extend this brief period of time because it might never be possible to repeat it.
During that brief moment, they intensely felt the clash between the limitlessness of emotions and the limits of life. The almost drunken lightheadedness they were experiencing came from witnessing the small universe in which only the two of them were present being created by a violent clash and then beginning to slowly disappear. All of their emotions were created anew, had been brought to life with a bright fire that filled their entire beings. They’d seen everything, they’d heard everything.
Later Mihrişah Sultan told Osman, “Never in my life had I experienced what I experienced in that brief moment, I also learned that time is insignificant, it’s not important how long you live, it’s important what you live, I understood this. Sometimes a single second can be as long as a life.”
After they’d walked a bit further and reached the shore of the Golden Horn, Mihrişah Sultan said:
“There’s a matter I would like to speak to you about.”
“Please.”
“If you’ll permit it, I would like to take Rukiye to Paris after the child is born. I think it would be good for her to get away from a country that’s being governed by her husband’s murderers, to get away from injustice and desperation. Let her spend some time there raising her child, finding consolation, calm down . . . I don’t know what you say to this, do you find it suitable?”
“It’s a good idea . . . I think you should bring Nizam too . . . He shouldn’t stay here.”
When Mihrişah Sultan heard this she looked at Sheikh Efendi in alarm, and the Sheikh felt the need to explain.
“He’s very angry too . . . He’s suffering a great deal of torment. I think it would be good for him to get away from here.”
They didn’t speak of anything else as they walked side by side back to the tekke.
29
Some nights Anya no longer went to the gambling den, she stayed home. She was trying to become accustomed to life and emotions like a baby just learning to walk, sometimes she stumbled, sometimes she fell, sometimes she wept, sometimes she retreated into silence.
“I don’t know,” she said to Nizam, “I don’t know if you’ve done something good or something bad by drawing me back into life . . .”
“I didn’t draw you back into life,” said Nizam, “You weren’t going to be able to pretend to be dead anymore, perhaps I might have helped a chick trying to get out of its egg to break the shell.”
In these days of transition, the behavior of two different women could be seen one after the other, a Russian aristocrat and a gambling den pianist, neither had become completely real, and in their shadowy state they mixed together; when Anya saw the woman who cleaned the house and cooked the food make a mistake, she rebuked the woman in such a polite but decisive manner that Nizam was surprised by her natural authority; sometimes she turned and looked at Nizam in such a way that he could see a woman sitting at a sumptuous table at the Tsar’s palace with all of her acquaintances; sometimes she retreated into such a timid silence that she possessed all of the paleness and frozenness of death.
She didn’t speak at all about her past and Nizam didn’t ask her, this was an unspoken agreement between them, sometimes the emotions that were coming back to life revived a memory, in delight she would mention an incident from her past, then with a sadness greater than the delight she would fall silent. From some of the things Anya said during those brief moments of coming to life, he learned that Anya had played the piano for the Tsar’s family but that she was not a professional pianist, her father had recognized her talent when she was still a child and had hired the best teachers for her, but that he had never allowed her to perform in public.
Once Nizam asked her, “Have you ever wanted to play the piano before an audience and let everyone see how talented you are,” and had laughed out loud at the way Anya said, “For the people?”
Nizam knew that she came from an aristocratic family and that due to some incident she’d experienced she’d had to flee Russia and kill her soul; sometimes it dizzied Nizam that Anya possessed the memories, identities and habits of two different women at the same time, that they were so intertwined, and that sometimes they seemed to multiply like two mirrors facing each other. Sometimes it was as if he was dancing an endless waltz, he turned with the woman in his arms, and with each turn the woman changed, had a different face and a different appearance, he didn’t quite know who Anya was. The dark emptiness in Anya’s past drew him in, he wasn’t curious, there was no change in his selfish lack of curiosity, but he found excitement in the idea of bringing that dead darkness back to life, of witnessing that miracle. He wanted to bring Anya out of that darkness into the light, to help her regain her former identity. “I don’t know why I wanted this,” he said to Osman later, “I just wanted that . . . I don’t know, perhaps what I really wanted was to prove to myself that I could do this.”
On the nights when Anya didn’t go to the gambling den, they ate together, sometimes Anya would play the piano for Nizam for hours. It’s very difficult for a woman and a man to develop a conversation when one of their pasts can’t be touched upon, most of their conversations hit this wall, it was difficult to make any progress, then their common love for music took the place of this past, their relationship developed more through notes than through words.
Not being able to describe their feelings to themselves, not possessing a clear consciousness of their own feelings, came perhaps from this wordlessness, they lived as if they were listening to music, without describing, simply by sensing, they abandoned themselves to the relationship as if they were abandoning themselves to music.
They weren’t aware that they were living a love.
Nizam liked it when Anya sat at the piano and played in a manner he would not be able to hear anywhere else from anyone else, he thought that he was attached to that music, that he missed it; he was aware that it was a great privilege to be able to listen to that music, and he didn’t want to lose this; he wasn’t aware that through this music he was becoming increasingly integrated with Anya, that they were becoming inseparable.
Like Anya, he didn’t talk much about his family, he worried that this might upset Anya; like Nizam, Anya only had small clues about his family, she guessed that his family was very wealthy but she didn’t know where this wealth had come from. They were each always surprised by the other’s knowledge of music and literature, in fact this surprise, which had its source in a concealed disdain, increased their love and attachment. Like explorers in a mysterious and unmapped landscape, they admired and were surprised and delighted by everything they saw, and they walked with increasing excitement, not knowing what they would find in the end.
Nizam told Anya about his Paris days, at these times it became apparent that Anya loved Paris and knew the city well, but Nizam’s Paris went beyond the salons, restaurants, theaters, and music halls that Anya knew and turned in to the back streets and the darkness; Nizam told her about his adventures there in a manner that made Anya listen with her eyes wide open in amazement. Sometimes Anya squealed as she laughed aloud.
Tevfik Bey being shot was another turning point in their relationship, Anya became the only person to whom Nizam could show his true feelings without being guarded. He could talk about his anguish, his anger, and his desire for revenge with complete openness. Perhaps if he’d met her in a ballroom rather than at a gambling den he might not have been able to reveal himself with such ease, but the place where they’d met played a very important role in their relationship, even though they sensed each other’s true identities they didn’t know them fully, this gave them, and especially Nizam, an enormous freedom, they could wander naked in a land where no one knew them without caring much about what the people around them thought.
When Nizam talked about the pain Rukiye was suffering, Anya could see how much he loved his older sister and how he could love a person; the torment Nizam felt in the face of Rukiye’s pain cracked the compassion and tenderness concealed like a seed in a secret pouch, this led to his compassion and tenderness enveloping Anya as well, to his wanting to protect her.
At another time these emotions might have surprised or indeed have frightened Nizam, he wasn’t accustomed to nurturing feelings like this for a woman, but the tenderness he felt for Rukiye, and the genuine sadness he felt in sharing her anguish, showed him that what he felt for Anya was a natural emotion.
During those anguished days, Anya wrapped him in an almost motherly tenderness, she listened to what he said, eased his anger, consoled him and played the piano for him. They were experiencing a reality without even grasping that they were aware of this reality; contrary to what people thought, genuine love was not demonstrative. They didn’t feel the need for great words or great gestures, they flowed like a babbling brook in the valleys at the peaks of unreachable mountains; thunder and lightning only occurred when that love was broken somewhere.
Nizam walked more willingly and less anxiously within this musical vagueness they’d created, Anya came step by step, feeling her way timidly; Nizam was falling in love but he wasn’t even aware of this, Anya saw better than he did what they were beginning to experience, she was more doubtful than Nizam.
“If I didn’t play the piano you wouldn’t come here like this,” she said to him once.
“Are you saying I love you for your piano?” Nizam asked with a laugh.
“I’m saying it’s possible.”
“I don’t know,” said Nizam, “I’ve never thought of you and the piano as separate entities . . . But I would have liked it if you only played for me . . . For you to play for people who don’t understand is unfair to you.”
“I only really play for you.”
The jealousy in Nizam made itself evident through the piano, the excuse it chose to come out into the open was convincing, and Nizam was certain that this feeling was not jealousy.
He didn’t know that at first jealousy poisons and numbs its victims like a poisonous spider, then slowly melts and swallows them; he couldn’t name the feeling because he’d never felt jealousy about anyone before. He believed that destiny had been unfair to Anya in response to her talent.
Just as mentioning the past had been forbidden by an unspoken agreement between them, so too had talking about emotions had been forbidden, they didn’t know how they had decided this but they never spoke about their feelings.
They feared their emotions, for different reasons they had decided not to involve themselves with emotions and to live a life in which everything flowed on the surface and that didn’t descend into the depths, and they weren’t prepared for the possibility that this could change; one had been crippled by what she’d lived through and the other was crippled by a selfishness that imprisoned him within a cold loneliness, they were almost certain that healing these deformities would bring them a lot of pain.
This emotional silence was reflected in great explosions of enthusiasm when they made love, they knew the freedom of experiencing every kind of emotion when they made love. The bed was like an oasis in a desert from which feelings had disappeared, they weren’t aware that they’d come closer there, that they’d become inseparable.
In that shelter where the emotions hidden behind their bodies were allowed to emerge, they expressed all of their feelings with their bodies. This physical language was more effective and lasting than words, they perceived each other’s emotions through the warmth of each other’s bodies, this led them to engrave those feelings within them with the private warmth of a body.
Their relationship experienced a strange contradiction, as they rejected the naturalness of their emotions and fled, their relationship’s roots grew deeper like those of trees growing in arid soil, they were establishing themselves healthily, they were becoming more difficult to pull out, they were gaining a more natural structure by another route.
Words had been replaced by the sound of music and the great battlements of their bodies, love was growing in an unaccustomed place in an unaccustomed manner, they chose not to be aware of it as they abandoned themselves to this love.
Mihrişah Sultan sensed what was going on because she knew Nizam very well, when she expressed her desire to meet Anya in a very firm manner, Nizam remained obliged to tell Anya.
“Mihrişah Sultan wants to meet you.”
Anya had turned her back to get something from the table, he could see that her shoulders had tensed, that her body had become pointed and sharp like a large thorn. In a cold tone Anya asked,
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but she wants to meet you.”
“There’s no need for this.”
“Mihrişah Sultan has made up her mind.”
“Tell her that I don’t want to impose on her.”
Nizam laughed,
“You don’t know Mihrişah Sultan . . . Can someone in Russia whom the Tsarina wants to meet say there’s no need?”
“She’s a tsarina?”
“That’s Mihrişah Sultan for you . . . If you don’t go to meet her, she’s going to come to the gambling den to meet you. Once she’s made up her mind, there’s no power on earth that can stop her.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“You can be certain that I’m not, you’ll understand when you meet her.”
“I don’t want to meet another tsarina, Nizam . . . I don’t want to see tsars and tsarinas anymore. I’m not ready for this. I have a simple life and I don’t want to move outside that life.”
“There’s no reason to be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid . . . I just don’t want to.”
“Fine, if you don’t want to I won’t insist . . . Mihrişah Sultan will come to see you.”
“How is she going to come?”
“She’ll come to the gambling den with her entire entourage . . . She’s made her decision, no one can change her mind . . . I don’t know the reason but she wants to meet you, it’s impossible to prevent this.”
