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| 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.”
