Beyond Exile (5)

  

Published in February 2026

Previous chapter: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (4)        

The characters, institutions, and events in this novel are entirely fictional. They bear no relation to real persons, institutions, or events. Any similarities that may appear to exist are the result of coincidence.    

                                    5

The first thing marriage taught you was the unbearable lightness of ordinariness, and the opportunity that monotony offers a person to go deeper than usual. For the first time in your life, you were pondering the meaning of a cup's handle, gazing at a laundry rope with wonder, puzzling over the complex patterns on the bedsheets. It was as though you had stepped off a high-speed train and sat on a bicycle. The world and everything in it had slowed to the fullest extent, waiting for you to crouch over them and bring to light details that no one had ever mentioned before. Your mind was so calm, so quiet, so bright that you were looking at your surroundings to set the halted wheels turning again, to prove to yourself that you were still alive. And so, you began to acquaint yourself with the details of many things you had not previously noticed, both inside the house and in the street. Inside the house there was an order that came with living together, and a tangle of secrets that prevented this order from being disturbed. These unwritten agreements formed the unnamed pillars of the life you had built with Wang Chenxi. For instance, the pegs placed at the visible point of the line so the towels would not be swept off by the wind were always kept on the shelf under the flowerpots. The bottle opener hung from the magnet on the side of the fridge facing the kitchen counter; the cloth used to wipe the water that collected around the bathroom sink was hung over the shower screen; the dustpan you used when sweeping the floors was leaned not against the wall but against the shoe rack; the water dispenser's hot water button was turned on in the mornings and off in the evenings, just like the bedroom windows were closed and opened with the same rhythm. Socks, underwear, and shorts that you would have stuffed into a single drawer were kept in their own separate drawers and were not permitted to touch one another even when waiting to be washed. A shirt placed in the laundry basket would climb out and throw itself outside, make its way to the balcony, enter the washing machine, and within three days at the most return clean and ironed to its place in the wardrobe. Shopping bags were folded carefully and placed on the lowest shelf of the shoe rack; dry rubbish went into the box in the living room, wet rubbish into the box in the kitchen; if one of you was going to bed early in the evening the other is sufficed with the lamp by the balcony side of the living room; your phone charger stayed permanently plugged in in the bedroom, hers in the living room; in the bathroom pecking order you were given first place in the mornings and last in the evenings; the flat-bottomed spoon used to portion the steamed rice into bowls was always placed upright at the corner of the counter nearest the door; when cooking, large knives were not used unless absolutely necessary; when cutting something on the meat board the knife's tip was kept on the board at all times to minimize noise; garlic was peeled easily after being lightly crushed with the flat side of the knife; the long wire used to unblock the bathroom drain waited on the mirror above the sink; the blue tile-patterned mug you made your morning coffee was washed once a week; the sweaty clothes you took off when you came back from a run were hung on the balcony to air before being put in the machine; and of course the keys were hung on the hook by the entrance the moment you came in the door...

Outside, there was a curious and industrious scientist rediscovering China from scratch as if he has stumbled by chance into an untouched rainforest, dizzy with the variety of animals and plants he was seeing for the first time in his life— his tongue tied, his eyes leaping from their sockets in astonishment, almost like a painter giving each of the fifty shades of red a different fruit name. Your ability to speak Chinese had progressed slightly because you were frequently obliged to talk with Xiao Ma, and the child refused to speak English with you despite all your insistence; emboldened by this, you had become somewhat less reluctant to communicate with people in the street, to make yourself understood, or to listen to their troubles. Besides, since Wang Chenxi had taken responsibility for the housework and it was now if not legally then by custom forbidden for you to chase women, your free time had increased considerably. You had practically blended in with the grandmothers who lined up in front of the grocery shops early in the mornings with wheeled shopping bags to get the freshest vegetables, and with the shirtless, toothless, carefree — but not smokeless — grandfathers who sat under the century-old sandalwood tree playing mahjong. Ordinariness was for the first time not bothering you; on the contrary, being able to melt and disappear into crowds, not being pointed at by anyone, not wasting your life inside a small soap bubble or a narrow echo chamber — all of this made you proud. This new temperament you had forcibly installed in yourself was reinforcing the thought that the choice you had made was the right one, giving you occasion to congratulate yourself. After years of struggle, you had finally arrived in China — because previously there had been a Naci Bey who read Turkish books and wrote Turkish stories at home, who taught the universal language of mathematics at the school where he worked and spent most of his time speaking English with foreign teachers. China had been nothing but the name you gave to the dead streets you had to pass between home and school. But the ease and ordinariness that came with marriage — Well, it's not so bad, is it, after all it's the homeland of your wife and your one and only spy who watches you every second! — had led you to perceive the colors, the sounds, the smells, and with a little more effort even the souls of these streets you passed through. The elderly women who, when walking toward you on the pavement, looked you up and down as though they were about to devour you; the young men who, on seeing your enormous Black Sea nose, murmured something as they passed to make it clear they could speak English; the plump women whose breasts bounced up and down as their scooters passed over patches in the road; the shy young girls who, noticing you walking toward them with quick and determined steps, dropped their gaze and cast the shadow of their lashes under their eyes; the young mothers in the Four Seas park after lunch who, when you suddenly appeared before them, immediately drew their children toward their own bodies and began stroking the heads of their bewildered little ones; the exhausted waiters at the Hong Kong restaurant who got angry but couldn't show their anger when they heard you asking for a picture menu instead of scanning the QR code on the table; the tired but genuine smiles of the cleaning women who had come to Shenzhen to work from small towns in Guangdong province; the construction workers who spread out cardboard in a shady spot after lunch and dozed on it; the men who while using the urinal kept slapping their own bums with their free hand; the kitchen assistants who used alaçinko[1] toilets without any difficulty, even smoking and playing games on their phones; the gossipy women who, sitting with their backs to you at the opposite table, kept tugging at their blouses and skirts with the spinsterish anxiety of wondering whether you were looking at them, whether something had come undone, whether their underwear was showing — yet at the same time never tired of fussing with their hair and faces; the thousands of white-collar workers who left their office buildings in the evenings almost always at the same time, like bees escaping from a hive that had been pumped full of smoke; the middle-aged life gurus who in the name of exercise spent their mornings slapping their calves and bellies; the barber who pressed a VIP card into your hand and promised you ten haircuts for a lump sum — who, after your second haircut, closed his shop and vanished without a trace; the grandmothers who took their grandchildren out to the complex garden for fresh air but, the weather being too hot, found their salvation in sheltering in the supermarket with the air conditioning always running; the elderly uncles who wanted to join the dancing aunties' groups in the parks but, too embarrassed, performed their quiet solo dances in the corners where the light fell least; the bald-headed men who, overcome by the heat, walked with their t-shirts folded up from below to expose their enormous bellies to all and sundry — and many more details you could not see in your previous life when the familiar orientalist arrogance drew curtains before your eyes — all of these you had begun to see, to hear, to smell, and to welcome with pleasure. Around this same time you went to the cheap restaurants where the workers in the area ate lunch and shared a table with them — I wonder if you ever asked yourself who the curious woman quietly spooning a bowl of soup at the opposite table was…— gave small gifts to the school janitors at Chinese New Year simply because it felt good for a moment; took part in a workshop organized to improve the working conditions of delivery couriers and gave a speech as a guest participant. In fact, the Chinese translation of this speech spread rapidly on social media, and just when you were saying "the attention and interest I have been waiting for all these years is apparently going to find me from an unexpected direction", it was deleted from all platforms simultaneously with the press of a single finger, because a few political references in the text had caused discomfort in certain quarters. — even I couldn't prevent this, I'm afraid! —

One of the things that made you happy about not just marriage but marriage to Wang Chenxi specifically was that Wang Chenxi had come under the sacred marital roof with her eight-year-old child. Thanks to Xiao Ma, you felt as though you had started marriage in its tenth year. As though you had thrown your small body into the ocean's calm waters without initially battling the waves! In a marriage whose first ten years had been spent with passion, love, excitement, and wandering, you had at last reached tranquil waters, and you had clung with both hands to the situation you found yourself in, as though the only qualities you had ever sought in a woman were patience, tenderness, and attentiveness. After getting married, Wang Chenxi had found a part-time job and changed schools. This way she could devote more time both to her son and to the home and didn't pressure you to share in the housework. You were only called to duty on occasions when your height and strong wrists were required. So much so that sometimes you couldn't help asking yourself, "Did this woman marry me just to reach the boxes on the high shelves, to have bags she couldn't carry carried, and jars she couldn't open opened?" In more serious moments you would think that the real reason for this marriage was the desire for Xiao Ma to grow up with a father figure around him. His biological father had died in a traffic accident two years after the divorce, and naturally Wang Chenxi did not want her son to feel his father's absence. You yourself, meanwhile, had taken a long time to get used to having a child wandering around the house who got whatever he wanted. Setting aside your half-joking reply to your mother when she asked "When are you going to have a child?" — "There's already a ready-made one, Mum, what do we need another one for!" — you had not the faintest idea how one was supposed to behave around a child in real terms. After all, he was not a sapling that had grown slowly in your own light, your own water, your own soil — he was a fully grown tree that had appeared beside you when you woke from a deep sleep. You could give him lessons, play tennis with him, take him to the cinema or the theatre. But was that what was expected of a father — didn't you need to do more? The soul that had never known a father's true love was unsteady on this question. Eating ice cream together, going for walks in the park, climbing Nanshan together, spending hours in toy shops, reading books to him, playing table tennis inside the house, teaching him chess, dozing off together on the sofa while watching cartoons — and most importantly, feeling pride at his successes and suffering at his failures... Could you do these too?

Xiao Ma was not of exceptional intelligence, but you still struggled for a long time to bring out the great mathematician — Euler? Gauss? Erdös? — hiding inside the child, whose arrival Plato had announced thousands of years ago. Despite all his complaints, protests, and reluctance, you explained lessons to him without pause, prepared tests for him, designed mathematical games suited to his level, and revised topics before his school exams. Many nights you lost sleep asking yourself why this child doesn't understand, what is missing, why is he this slow, what am I doing wrong. During the days, you had long conversations with the other mathematics teachers about different methods of instruction and motivation techniques. It still came to nothing — you couldn't advance a single step! When you finally accepted defeat, both of you were exhausted, retreated to your corners like half-dead boxers, waiting for the referee to suddenly end the match. Fortunately, the first person to accept that this wasn't working, that Xiao Ma could not go anywhere with mathematics or in mathematics, was his mother — and you were relieved of the ambiguous responsibility of having made such a decision without so much as moving a lip. With the acceptance of defeat, Xiao Ma decided to advance in drawing on his iPad — work he had a real feeling for and from which he was producing pieces of extraordinary beauties that even surprised you. It had not been easy for you to accept this, but in the end, when Wang Chenxi said "It's clear that my son's relationship with colors and drawings is quite similar to your relationship with numbers and words. Wouldn't it be better to respect this and leave the child to himself, to support him for the choice he's made?" — you had lowered your sails entirely, suppressed your disappointment with your progressive intellectual identity, and withdrawn your despot mathematician's hands — along with the secret Plato you kept alive inside yourself — from the child's future. Though you struggled at first with this withdrawal, it didn't take long to find your balance, and seizing the opportunity you returned — silently and with slow steps, like a pasha who retreats to the center because he couldn't even take the small roadside fort — to that beloved sublime solitude of yours that you had taken a break from out of respect for the first few years of marriage, returning, in your words, "like a seal crawling forward on its belly." You had managed by hook or by crook to find the defeat you needed, rubbed it on your face and hands like a sacred stone, hung it on a high point on your wall -like a sacred text-, and begun to wait for the sweet fruits this bitter experience would yield. From this point on, it wouldn’t be so difficult for you.

At home you had a room of your own, Xiao Ma had a room of his own. Everything else belonged to your wife. Wang Chenxi entered your room once a week, put the laundry in the wardrobe, and left. Beyond that she touched nothing, didn't tidy your desk, didn't interfere with your computer, didn't close books or notebooks you left open. From the second year of your marriage, you began spending most of your time at home reading books, dozing, endlessly rewatching old episodes of Behzat Ç, Kanıt, or Galip Derviş[2], or writing texts that were coming to resemble short novels rather than stories. Coming home from school you would eat your meal, have a conversation with your wife — you called her lǎopó[3] when the two of you were alone and lǎomā[4] in front of the child, which made even me laugh — about troubles at school or the illnesses of her parents, then go to a nearby park with Xiao Ma to play badminton, come home and shower, help the child a little with his mathematics homework, and then shut yourself in your room until midnight with instructions not to come out. So much so that after a while these prolonged shutting-away sessions began to grate on Wang Chenxi's nerves, to make her restless. As a woman I must confess that I gave Wang Chenxi credit for this, my esteemed Naci Teacher. What woman wants her husband to shut himself in a room for hours and live as though his presence cannot be felt by the other inhabitants of the house, to creep into the bedroom on dancer's feet when sleep comes and slip between the sheets and duvet, and then in the morning to get dressed and go off to work as though he were staying in a hotel? You too had noticed that things couldn't go on like this, that the atmosphere was tense, that Wang Chenxi was breathing through her nose. This tension had even found its way into a story you wrote around that time. The story contained the half-angry, half-hurt words a girlfriend says to a man who is constantly shutting himself in his room to carve decorative objects from gemstones: "Women are like cats, my dear — if they know someone is behind a closed door, they hate that door. The door must be opened; the woman of the house must know what is being done inside; even if she doesn't approve of what's being done, she must be informed; she must make the person inside feel her presence. If you want to live alone, go and find yourself a new flat! If we're going to live together, these doors stay open. Otherwise, we'll meow at the door, we'll scratch it, we'll jump up and pull the handle down, and we won't be still till morning, and we won't let whoever's inside have peace either!" And so, before your wife had even raised the subject, you found an opportunity and produced a solution to the problem that hadn't yet come to the surface. You bought one of the iron bar gates designed to keep pets or babies out of certain rooms of the house and fitted it to your door. This way your connection to the outside world was not completely severed, and yet with the sense of security a closed door provides you could focus on your writing. Your study was now a two-layered enclosure whose boundaries were partly marked with dotted lines. It was a "let neither the skewer burn nor the kebab"[5] solution — which you would later water down with lines borrowed from Tanpınar: "Neither within this house am I / nor altogether outside of it. / In the unbreakable flow of / a whole and solid family."[6] You were hiding it even from yourself perhaps, but the goal you wanted to reach was nothing other than the desire to live in a great cage. Like Kafka's cage that has set out in search of a bird, throughout your writing life you had always been filled with the longing for a cage that would find you and, upon finding you, wrap itself around you. Now this dream had come true in the physical sense — the cage had found you; you had shut yourself behind white bars and made yourself a voluntary prisoner who could not leave his cage until the daily writing quota was filled. When Wang Chenxi or Xiao Ma called out to you, you could respond immediately; as they passed by the door of your room they could see you with a simple glance; from the sounds reaching your ears you could deduce what was being done in the other rooms of the house; when necessary you could quickly step out of your room and fulfill whatever duty was expected of you — place the water bottle on the dispenser, reattach the laundry wire that had come out of its place on the balcony ceiling, fit the oven into the lowest compartment of the kitchen cabinet, lift the sofa so she can sweep under it, hold the other end of the sheet so it can be stretched properly over the bed... — and when the task was done and no one would any longer feel your absence, you returned with heavy steps to your cage; in short, in your words, "like atoms forming covalent bonds, briefly opening a portion of your consciousness to shared use," you continued to live peacefully and fruitfully.

In this period, as a reward for disciplined and stubborn work, you had begun producing more settled, more meaningful, more truly engaged pieces. The naïve exaggerations and the drunkenness of intellect of earlier years had been replaced by an enthusiastic writer whose heart was full of love for people, who had sworn to scrape away at the mold-and-damp-smelling depths of the human soul. No matter how ordinary a person might seem, everyone had a story worth telling, and every story deserved to become a narrative. All it took was a writer skilled enough with words, bold enough to venture into new discoveries with language, and willing to sit down at a desk. By now you had realized that imagination, creativity, and fiction were mere toys for those addicted to popular culture. What truly mattered was learning to see what everyone looked at but failed to notice—and for that, there was no remedy but to fix your gaze on the same point, insistently and tirelessly. Inspiration was for amateurs; what an artist truly needed was not inspiration, but a sense of imbalance and determination. In the long and lonely hours spent in your room, you had come to understand that people could not become artists unless they carried within them piles of dark wheat to be ground in the mill of their minds—stone wheels to crush that wheat, vast mechanisms to turn those wheels, and a powerful river to drive those mechanisms. A person wrote because they carried trouble, anxiety, a form of suffering that could not be captured in a simple composition—and the less they knew the source of that suffering, the better they could write.

For this reason, whether you liked it or not, your stories grew longer, your characters deeper, and the message you wanted to give was wandering along the faint yet curiosity-tickling borders of metaphysics. Although I was never certain of this last part as they usually contained pure truths that a person could not confess even to themselves but there was one thing I was sure of. Unlike before, you were no longer saying "Let me write a story so that all of humanity can see this ancient truth clearly through my story," triggered by some naïve thought. Instead, you placed under a magnifying glass, with all their irrationalities, the reasons why a woman who had suffered violence from her husband for forty years still could not leave him, and with long analyses spanning pages you wound the tangle of will and weakness that is called a human being onto a single reel. Around this same period you wrote, with the same meticulousness, the same sensitivity, and the same slowness: the delivery courier who worked day and night to buy a ring for the girl he loved and had a heart attack while resting on his scooter and died; the obsessive nurse who took revenge on sick children for the scoldings she received from doctors; the beautiful and shy university student who, reading chivalric romances until she herself turned into one, spent the rest of her life on the 17th Century French Literature shelf; the prosecutor who, realizing the member of parliament who had been having her followed step by step was in love with her, made him fall in love with her in disguise. In these same years you also turned your gaze inward and wrote the unusual stories of chronic writers: the self-help guru who threw his own book into open bags on public transport believing this would make him famous in a few years; the wretched novelist who, when the murder novel he had written was imitated by a real killer causing an actual person's death, sued the murderer for plagiarism; the writer who gave his protagonist his own name and published the novel under a pseudonym, then after becoming famous published further novels under his real name and failed... One of the strange — and there is another word you don't like; I'm using it out of spite this time! You are the one who, when I gave you my place in the supermarket queue, thanked me without looking at my face but by staring into empty space just because your wife was beside you! — aspects of all this was that you were now satisfied with what you wrote. You were no longer saying, as before, this part is lacking, that has a gap, it would have been better written this way. You had begun to genuinely like what you wrote. Sometimes this state of affairs worried and unnerved you — but even this justified anxiety could not disturb the turquoise Mediterranean waters of the happiness inside you. You worked furiously, produced enormously, examined everything minutely. On top of all this, in the most exceptional, most exalted, most untouchable corner of your heart, you carried a seed of hope that what you were producing would be received with interest and respect somewhere else in the world. One day this seed would germinate and grow, clinging with its thin tendrils to every corner it found like a vine, and in time it would flood you inside and out with poison. You were not yet aware of this, but I — I who read every sentence you wrote at least three times, I who watched you with curious eyes from behind sheer curtains like a prospective bride had felt with maternal instinct — motherhood itself was never granted to me, but the instinct never left me — that you had reached the end of the uphill climb and that the descent was about to begin.

Well then, for whom are you writing, my dear teacher Naci? You write, you sketch, when the occasion calls for it you flare up and rage, when the occasion calls for it you soften into a representative of compassion, you pass judgment, you dispense wisdom — but doesn't one say to a man Quo Vadis, doesn't one ask a man, in the phrase you love so much, Fe eyne tezhebun?[7] Never mind understanding your trouble and your worry — but who is your interlocutor, at least tell your wretched follower who is about to burst with curiosity. The minority belonging to the elite group that lives in Türkiye and seeks the finest in literature — why would they read literary texts set in China, full of Chinese characters and place names that are hard to remember? Didn't Türkiye and the Turks have enough troubles of their own without troubling their heads over the problems of people living thousands of kilometers away? As for the Turks living in China — they had no ambition to read literary works in the first place. Most had come here to earn money; their connection to books was limited to acquiring information or studying; these straightforward people whose inner and outer voices were the same — why would they read your densely descriptive and internally conflicted works that you present with a claim to universality? One single option remained. That was to have your work translated into Chinese and ensure it was read in China. Unfortunately, your attempts in this direction had also come to nothing. A translator named Li Wei, a Tanpınar expert whom you had with great difficulty persuaded, had translated two of your stories from Turkish into Chinese with a quality surpassing even the finest — one of these had been published and you had received positive feedback from readers — but afterward, perhaps because he thought this work was not sustainable, he had begun not responding to your translation proposals, using the busyness of the games company where he worked as an excuse. And so, the way forward for this dream too had been blocked after a few promising steps. In the moments when you hit the depths of despair you felt like a Ferrari driver stuck behind coal trucks. In the other moments when you believed in the sublimity of art, its immortality, and the meaning it added to human dignity, you criticized yourself for that thought and were ashamed of yourself. When the time came, your writing would be read, focus on your writing, concentrate on producing original and beautiful work, keep away from the noise of the political agenda and the crocodile tears of journalists. As long as you don't compromise on quality, as long as you never stray from the path you know to be right and true. This is what you wrote in the notes in your journal. Whether you were waiting like the Man Waiting for the Rain to Stop or like Cinderella, you yourself didn't know. Fortunately, on one of those spring days when you had hit the bottom of your pessimism — the beautiful weather ruined you too, Naci Bey![8] — seated alone with your dear little wife, you had decided to spend the entire summer holiday in Türkiye. The holiday you had postponed for the previous two summers for various reasons would finally take place. It would be a new experience for you, a "different" one for her. After more than ten years in China, for the first time you would go back to your homeland not alone but with the wife you had brought from China and the stepson who resembled you in no way whatsoever. Could there be a greater excitement, a more frightening mystery, a more stressful adventure than this for a novice at life like you — one who had always swum in safe waters and never once in his life let himself go against the current?

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[1] Alaçinko — A term coined by Naci to refer to squat toilets in China, in contrast to Alaturka toilets—the colloquial Turkish name for squat toilets in Türkiye. The key difference is that some of the Chinese squat toilets have the hole positioned near the door side.

[2] Behzat Ç, Kanıt, Galip Derviş — popular Turkish crime and drama television series; Naci watches them to maintain his connection to Turkish culture while living abroad.

[3] Lǎopó — informal, affectionate Chinese term for wife, used between couples in private.

[4] Lǎomā — informal Chinese term meaning "old mum," used here as a playful nickname for Wang Chenxi in front of the child.

[5] A Turkish idiom meaning “everybody wins and no one gets harmed”

[6] Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) — one of the most celebrated Turkish poets and novelists. Tanpınar is a recurring reference point for Naci throughout the novel.

[7] Quo Vadis — Latin for "Where are you going?", according to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, the apostle Peter, fleeing persecution in Rome, sees a vision of Jesus walking toward the city. Peter asks, "Domine, quo vadis?" ("Lord, where are you going?"). Fe eyne tezhebun — Arabic, from the Quran (81:26), meaning "So where are you going?" The narrator pairs these two phrases — one from Western classical tradition, one from Islamic scripture — as a nod to Naci's literary and cultural range.

 

[8] Writer makes a reference to Orhan Veli Kanık’s poem “This beautiful weather ruined me.”