Beyond Exile (1)

1

 I still remember the day Naci[1] Zara's file landed in my super-secure inbox like it happened yesterday. Behind my back was a hard pillow adorned with Tibetan sky patterns; on the coffee table, where I stretched out my swollen legs, laid the golden pits of the plums I'd just devoured with my bated breath; on the other side of the sofa was our kitten, Hundun, engaged in a relentless struggle with its own tail; on the radio was a voice from the nineties, singing "Bù zhǐshì péngyǒu[2]" and in my womb was my son who would never be born. Outside, heavy July rain was pummeling the city's concrete streets. Selfless grandmothers and grandfathers, sworn to be hand fans for their grandchildren, had escaped to the scooter parks beneath the buildings as if the elixir of youth had been suddenly injected into their legs. The green garden at the center of the complex, which was becoming more dilapidated with each drop falling from the sky, was left to the patience of African snails and our native, squishy earthworms. Water splashing against the metal roof of the outbuilding housing of the security guards sparkled and rippled beyond the garden's boundaries. The two long metal poles we used to hang laundry swayed from the balcony ceiling like a cradle, clashing against each other. The sky grumbled like an old lady snarling at a street vendor who tried to cheat her. Mosquitoes sought warm, humid new spaces in defiance of the suddenly foul weather, and smoke-colored clouds sparkled momentarily across the sky like mischievous children who couldn't give up their firecrackers on festival days.

What happened? Are you bored already? Did my descriptions weigh heavily on the minds of the most impatient generation that history has ever known, the relentless children who aren't used to challenges, who expect action every ten seconds, who, when they don't find what they're looking for, move on to the next entertainment with a flick of their finger? Did I exaggerate a simple rain? What could be more natural, more ordinary, and, some might say, more despicable and devastating than the torrential rain in Shenzhen in July, the flooding, and even the traffic chaos? But what can I do? If nature itself exaggerates without limits, if it's always chasing one madness after another, if even its simplest form can shake already-settled souls, is it my fault? I am responsible for recording what unfolds before my eyes, the sounds and sights that shake my heartstrings, with such anxiety and tremors that I feel as if I'll never experience them again. I so desire that you too will tremble within. May this unique moment I've experienced transcend time and space, causing a tornado in the hearts of those who, thousands of years later, have never even heard of Shenzen, and stirring a movement in their bodies. May these images, coursing through my consciousness like a virus, live on in other consciousnesses nestled on the inaccessible fringes of the universe and history, becoming immortal, remaining ever-living. Since my body cannot survive this mortal life, may my consciousness, clinging to life in the minds of others like a pearl clinging to an oyster, remain there, always speaking, murmuring, sparking forth curses at the most unexpected times, like the blade of an axe striking a stone, seeking and creating paths to immortality, adorning and polishing what exists, and enhancing its power. May people, when they read my writing, feel a wetness on their heels, a cool relief on their shoulders, a faint itch on their lips, and a spring breeze on their bare chests. Let them hear the sound of rain in their ears, enough to make even the numbest lovers long for love. Wouldn't that be good? Besides, does literature have any other mission than this? I should focus on it, hone and develop my talents in that area, push my boundaries when the time and place come, and even surpass them! If Naci were here now, he'd agree with me. Perhaps the act of writing could be accomplished with fewer words, with less effort. I don't know. After all, I'm a rookie, just starting out, a novice in this field! An apprentice who will never become a master, a slave with no ambition for ownership, a dreamer who prefers flowing stream to a calm lake. You could call mine a kind of midlife crisis, the final straw brought to me by boredom and material comfort. Paper cutting[3], calligraphy, or dancing with my peers in the park aren't for me! I'm just trying. Maybe after I write my first and last story, I'll lose my enthusiasm and get rid of this problem. Until that day comes, I can't save any effort. Besides, isn't it common for beginners to overdo things, exaggerate, and mess up? If you don't like it, suppose that you haven’t read this paragraph. I won't interrupt again, I promise.

I'd risen from my seat, swaying like a well-fed bear cub, and had securely closed the door and window to prevent the water from the balcony into the living room. Just in case, I'd spread a few of my husband's old clothes on this side of the threshold. The profound silence that then filled the house, the sudden cessation of the hum from outside, giving way to a motionless solitude, had at first surprised me, then brought me some relief. Yes, I was alone; now, like Clark Kent entering a phone booth as a reporter and emerging as Superman, or Dr. Jekyll evolving into Mr. Hyde at night, I too could transform, allowing my inner spy to possess the soon-to-be-mother housewife. I wouldn't have to attend to anything else for at least two and a half hours. The meat I'd taken out of the freezer for dinner was thawing on the kitchen counter, and the vegetables I'd bought from the grocery store at the entrance to the complex were being disinfected in soda water. My husband wouldn't be home for three hours. This meant I could pore over the file to my heart's content, memorize every detail of my new assignment, and even find information online about some topics I wasn't familiar with. And half an hour before my husband arrived home, I'd slip into the kitchen and return to my loving, hardworking, beautiful, and charming self.

Oh, my naive husband, oh, the kindest, the nicest, most gentleman in the world, who never had the slightest doubt about his wife's work... I could never blame you for seeing everyone around you as "the inside is the same as the outside"! On the contrary, I often blamed myself for not being like you, for keeping a secret from you my entire life, and for luckily avoiding detection despite the small mistakes I made. And it wasn't just you who were unaware of my second life. My family, your family, our mutual friends... Everyone knew me as a smart, hard-working, and enterprising woman who made small profits from home, buying goods from wholesale stores on Nan Hai Boulevard and selling them nationwide, and running a small shop with a small assistant. My name is Lai Zi Ran[4], I am a trader who deals in wholesale buying of clothes and exporting some, and at home I am a diligent housewife who has created a perfect life with her husband!

Frankly, most of the time, I couldn't believe I could carry a second identity in my soul like heavy remorse. I often thought, "Let me climb this hill, I am going to let go of my burden, and flap my wings to find my freedom," but the hills never ended, nor did the weight of the burden on me ease. Oddly enough, for years, I followed the people I sometimes saw on television living two separate lives— men with two families in two different cities, unaware of each other; serial killers who raised three children on the money they earned as accountants while murdering dozens of innocents; financial advisors who, claiming to make a fortune for their friends, actually work as motorcycle mechanics and collect money from people; pyramid scheme scammers who advertise Bitcoin with lavish performances in giant halls, only to swindle billions of dollars and vanish a few years later—with an envy I couldn't even admit to myself. How was it that they didn't feel a pang of conscience? How did this immense secret they carried within them not take over their bodies, leak out like black vinegar seeping from cracks, and ruin everything? I'll never know the answer to that question. Perhaps what made me different was that, like a teacher, a nurse, or a soldier, I was led to believe that I was working for the welfare of my people. I wasn't a seductive woman who cheated on her husband, a vagrant who gambled secretly and squandered her family's fortune, or a scoundrel who spent every penny she could on drugs. My duty was sacred, my goal was clear, and my heart was pure. There were times when I couldn't believe this last one, but isn't it, as you Turks say, "Even a judge’s daughter can have those little issues!"? Besides, is the past a scrapbook so we can find and erase the things we don't like? Every sentence you delete from a previous page can cause the next pages to burn down. Therefore, I owe nothing to anyone. From now on, I can write as I wish, listening to all the voices within me, embracing all the colors, without shame or embarrassment, and believing with all my heart that, even if there is a small possibility, one day Naci will read these pages.

First, I went through the security checkpoints, which included three separate passwords, facial recognition, and fingerprints. So much so that if I mistyped a single letter while typing these passwords, the system would lock me out for two hours. If I made a similar mistake on my second try, I'd find myself answering to the Head of the Shenzhen Provincial Intelligence Bureau. Fortunately, I'm not clumsy; and if I were, why would they give me this job? I'm cautious, curious, and suspicious. The first thing I look at when I enter a room is where the exits are. Walking down the street, I know every camera, dead-end street, and pedestrian walkway by heart. When I talk to people, I look them in the eye, focusing not on what they say but on what they don't, probing their souls as deeply as if I were examining a historical scroll from the Tang Dynasty I'd stumbled upon in the archives. Just as I'm a good cook, I'm also a good tracker. I can stalk my target for hours without ever getting bored. So much so that sometimes, when I'm out shopping with my husband or a close friend, I feel the nagging annoyance of not following someone. I sweat all over, my mind is confused, and I wait for a sign from the sky, like a castaway in the middle of a vast ocean, unsure which way to swim. Indeed, following someone is easy; you don't use your mind, you don't make decisions, you don't face any dilemmas. The only difference from a guided missile is that your goal isn't to destroy your target; on the contrary, it's to follow, to obtain the information you need, and to ensure your target is alive. The lies I tell are so consistent, so convincing, that even I occasionally send myself notes to remind myself which story I'm telling and for what purpose, so they don't interfere with reality. The notebook I keep as a diary is a coded record of which lie I told, and to whom, on which date. As a spy, my greatest fear is that someone will treat me like a spy. Ours is a profession that, when identified, self-destructs. In the back of our minds, we have our second identity, those secrets we keep hidden from everyone. Meanwhile, with a childlike enthusiasm, we keep the spoiled self-consciousness of, "I wish I could tell everyone I was a spy, so they'd be stunned, gasp in utter amazement, and their mouths would drop open." The gravity of our walking secrets, even from those closest to us, saddens us like the spoiled children of rich families who aren't allowed to show off their newly purchased, expensive toys to their friends. It irritates the tranquil, subterranean pools deep within our souls even when the time and place are the most inappropriate.

One way or another, we were human too, after all, each of us made of flesh and bone, impatience and weakness, loyalty and betrayal, and even chatter, when necessary, born from a mother and made by a father. How I longed, though; on one of those winter nights, as I hugged my husband tightly, gently caressed his chest with my free thumb, and placed my warm tongue in the orbit of his earlobe, to say, "I'm going to tell you a secret, but don't get angry and don't tell anyone, okay? It'll stay between us until the day I die." In the early years, I even imagined his responses in my head and wrote a few scenarios.

- I'm going to tell you a secret, but don't get angry and don't tell anyone, okay? It'll stay between us until we die.

- I'm very sleepy, you can tell me tomorrow morning.

- Why are you so boring like this? I am going to sleep.

- Don't forget, I will ask you tomorrow morning.

- I already forgot!

Or

- I'm going to tell you a secret, but don't get angry and don't tell anyone, okay? It'll stay between us until we die.

-Don't tell me, let me guess. You're not actually a young woman. You've been under the knife seven times and gotten to this point with tons of plastic surgery...

- Don't make me laugh, I've already eaten too much watermelon, I'm going to pee in my pants!

- So I knew?

Or

- I'm going to tell you a secret, but don't get angry and don't tell anyone, okay? It'll stay between us until we die.

- Let me say it before you do, but don’t be angry. Promise?

- What? Do you have a secret too?

- Of course there is, do you promise?

- Well, yeah I promise! What else can I say?

- I have a mistress, and she is five months pregnant…

- You animal. Is this a joke?

- If it's a girl, we'll name her Zı Ran... Ha ha ha... Stop, don't hit my arm!

When you carry a secret inside you like a bitter poison for years, this is the pickle-like result. When I was alone, I always ended up talking to my secret, not to myself. Lying on my back on sleepless nights, watching the dance of light on the ceiling, irritated by those who slipped through the crowds at train stations and took my turn in the queue, but finding it unnecessary to fight, seeing other strangers who looked like you in parks and tagging along just for the fun of it, pacing the rough pavements of misty streets right behind your shadow at night, and most of all, watching you helplessly from afar, drunk as hell, throwing up in the bushes by the roadside—you never learned not to mix wine and beer!—unable to approach you from behind, unable to pat your back with my warm hands warmed in my pockets, unable to lean in and whisper, “It’s over, it’s over, you’ve threw it all out!”…

And here's your file before me. Your great-grandfather emigrated from Sivas to Giresun in the early twentieth century, your registry is in Görele, not far from the Black Sea, but you're an Istanbul native, born and raised there. You studied mathematics at a reputable university and speak fluent English. You're about to start teaching at one of Shenzhen's most prestigious high schools. Wow, wow, wow! You'd better stick to that. You also write. Essays, poems, short stories, and so on. So, you're a class of people who know how to hide things, and you claim to be able to see the world through other people's eyes. This means, our job is both easy and difficult! Their investigation into you hasn't yielded a satisfactory answer to the question of whether you're a nationalist, a conservative, a democrat, or anarchist. They haven't been able to definitively determine what you believe in or oppose, whether you hold negative views about our country and will work to spread them, or which side you believe is right on TTXT[5]. You had the potential to poison the young minds of our high school students, and you might even use your job as a cover to achieve other ends. Therefore, every step you took was monitored, all your correspondence and conversations were reviewed with a spy program installed on your phone, and when you left your phone somewhere, physical surveillance was needed to record who you met with, who you befriended, and what you argued about. My previous assignments had included tracking a businessman from Siirt, a retired officer from Erzurum, a journalist from Kayseri, and finally, an actor from Yozgat. Except for the last one, all of them were monotonous, lacking in excitement and depth, and I almost had to get myself caught just to get over with it. Their only interesting aspect was that, when combined, they created a striking pattern. It was as if with each assignment, I was moving a little further west, a little further away from China. That was the question I asked myself the day I came across your file. I wondered if my next assignment would be a sunflower oil merchant from Edirne? No, if I had a next assignment, perhaps I would have had the opportunity to test this prediction and ultimately accept or reject my hypothesis, but you were my last. A long, long assignment that lasted almost 18 years, as deep as the oceans, as high as the Himalayas, as hot as the inside of volcanoes, and painful as the toothaches of the winter nights.

Ahh, Naci, you were 28 when I met you. Just like you said to that advertising woman you met at the bar, you were the perfect age. Since it couldn't be 6 or 496! That day, I thought to myself, "What kind of dorky flirtation techniques does this guy have?" That they actually worked was a whole other mystery for a woman like me, who, despite the intervention of others, had finally married her high school sweetheart. That's where I first saw you in person. I was sitting in the corner behind the door, drinking lemon-soda, and you were sitting at the bar with your Canadian friend—the baby-faced guy who'd resorted to Traditional Chinese Medicine because his hair was falling out—making plans to bike to Beijing. You had jet-black, thick, and curly hair. Your beardless and mustache-free face exuded the innocence and joy of a university student. You were five years younger than me. With your smile, your movements, your restless body, you weren't much different from a middle schooler who'd just finished his homework and thrown himself onto the basketball court. The three or four chairs between us were filling and emptying. When the music stopped, I could hear every word you spoke, and at other times, I read your thin lips. You traced your fingers over the map like a commander preparing for conquest, excitedly saying things like, "If we go together, we can stay in double-bed hotel rooms; we can make the trip cheaper," to your friend. You'd finished your fifth beer and was about to order your sixth when that girl appeared next to you, fixated on the crooked map you'd drawn on napkin paper. Her excuse was to refill her beer, but her true intentions were clear. "See me, talk to me, hunt me so I can be a gazelle you'll find hard to capture, and you can be proud of yourself," she said with the uninterpretable language of a female body desperate for attention. Inwardly, I prayed to the gods I didn't believe in, urging you to stay away from that woman and avoid falling into this trap. But my prayers didn't come true, probably because I didn't have enough faith or because the gods didn't find me sincere enough. But in the end, I got what I wanted. You had lunch with the girl twice and gone to the movies once. The food was fine, but what was that ridiculous movie? I know you passed out in the 14th minute and woke up in the final scene from the activity signals on your phone. For all I know, your potential lover, who devoured a huge bag of popcorn on her own, must have been stumped too. You hadn't seen each other again after that. You were a little upset. Not because she wasn't responding to your messages, but because you'd become so attached to a relationship that was clearly destined to fail. For days, you'd written short self-criticisms in your notebook, along the lines of, "Why am I like this? Why can't I resist sweet poisons?" Blaming yourself for your weak willpower, you'd had minor breakdowns. But I'd known this from the start, so I’d have struggled less. Thankfully, the breakup didn’t shake you too much. And I didn't know back then that it wasn't the endings of such superficial relationships that would truly shake you. In relationships, as in so many other things, there were vast differences between us. These were differences that needed to be understood, not overcome. It would be unfair to expect an old-world devout like me, who would pick the second, if not the first, flower she saw in a garden, put it in her hair, and then close her eyes to all the other plants in the garden, to understand you at that first glance. But I didn't give up, don't worry. I didn't give up, I didn't tire, I didn't complain. I struggled and struggled, trying to find my way in the middle of a desert where the sand dunes were constantly shifting, and to reach the oasis that would cool me down, even if it were late.

And yet it didn't work, Naci! I encountered nothing but mirages in the endless curves of the long, thin line you left behind. As I crawled on my knees, belly, and elbows in those curves, I always talked about you, I became one with your reunion. I made room for you even if only for your dreams in the rough caves of my womanhood, but you could never enter through that wide threshold. You managed to fit with your childish frame into the narrow tunnels of my mind, where no one else could fit, but you couldn't even take a step closer to my body, which shattered like glass every evening and was put back and glued together every morning. I always saw your silhouette on the wet sidewalks softened by the moonlight, but on the rough surfaces of the same sidewalks that resembled tree bark, you never saw me, you never noticed me; You never once shared with me the shy smile you generously distributed to those petite girls you met at your school, whose names you couldn't even be bothered to learn despite having worked on the same floor for years. The tide incident that occurred between us was just like my unborn child, the son I lost a few weeks before birth, never seeing his mother's face. I was close to you; you were even farther from yourself. I was the lively world, you the desolate, dark moon! I was the expectant mother who looked at her swollen belly like a pot and had rosy dreams, you, the blessed face whose arrival had been heralded. Yes, I had waited for him for months too, dreaming of the day he would look at me and smile, I longed for the moment he would call me "mom" with every cell in my body. Neither he could look at my face, nor you! Neither could he love me, nor you! From him, all I have left is a six- or seven-year-old friend, whose plump cheeks, red as tomatoes in the cold weather, never grew up, and whose eyes sparkled like wet tomatoes. From you, a desolate city, a cold planet, and a terrifying desert night where scorpions and snakes swarmed. You were both lame baby rabbits stranded on the opposite bank of the Yangtze River. Following you, I'd run downstream, brushing aside the twigs that crossed my path with hope and love, ignoring the thorns that tore and bled from my skin. Sometimes I was surprised by your closeness, occasionally filled with hope at the narrowing riverbed, but ultimately, I couldn't change the ill fate of my adventure, which ended in the East China Sea. Do you know what was most painful, Naci Hoca[6]? On sleepless nights, the silky face of that six- or seven-year-old boy meets the spots on your unshaven face, your eyes appear on his face, his lips on yours, my mind goes blank, and at the end of all this confusion, I find myself crying silently, my elbows on the cold railings of the balcony at three o’clock in the morning…

---

[1] Pronounced as “Naa-gee”. Turkish male name. It means “saved from hell, deserves heaven”.

[2] You are more than just a friend to me.

[3] 剪紙: jiǎnzhǐ: An artistic activity with roots dating back to the invention of paper. It plays an important role in decorating homes during holidays and special occasions. 

[4]It is read as "Lay Zı Ran." To prevent the reader from reading the "ı" sound as an "i" sound, it will be written as "Lai Zı Ran" in future sections.

[5]Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tiananmen

[6] Hoca: Teacher in Turkish. “Naci Hoca” sounds like “Naci Laoshi” in Chinese. 

The Ball of Wisdom

The gymnasium was a great, dark lung, inhaling the chirping songs of the children in the daytime and exhaling the silence of solitude at night. Behzat had come here for the clarity of the projectile motion, the clean arc of a free throw, the immutable satisfaction of a ball passing through a net, and solving some skirmishes in his life, if not all. Instead, he found this velvety obscurity hanging in the air. The janitor, a sullen and elusive man named Ercüment, was unreachable; his little basement office, behind the furnace room, was locked, and the phone rang into a void that seemed to swallow the sound whole.

He should have left, so he did the right thing once and all. The quarrel with Esra spread on his skin like a fine, irritating dust. Her voice, tight with a practical despair he could never emulate: “The tuition, Behzat. It’s due tomorrow. My father has offered. It’s simple.” And his own, choked with a principle that felt, even to him, like a kind of absolute misery: “We are not taking a loan from your father. Never did in the past, not now, and not in the future… The bank will call about the credit application next week. Can we not just wait?” But waiting, to Esra, was a luxury she could not afford. The child must be paid for. She grinned as if she knew a lot more than Behzat did, the past transactions, hidden accounts…

Dark? Yes, Esra's eyes were even darker when she fiercely fought. This is why he did not leave the equally dark gym. He needed a distraction, something to keep his mind occupied. He had the ball, a familiar orange planet in his hands, like a wobbly jellyfish filling his sweaty palms. A high, triangle-shaped window and the full moon provided the only light, a weak, ecclesiastical silver that pooled on the hardwood floor, making of the court a ghost of a court, the free-throw line a faint chalky smudge, the backboard a darker slab of darkness. The hoop was an invisible idea, a circular absence he had to believe in, a Platonic rationalism. If not the perfect circle, this was the resemblance of that idealized circle, the one that lives in the world of ideas, same as the way he was the resemblance of a perfect marriage, a perfect husband, a perfect father… Until tonight.

The first shot was a betrayal. It left his fingers with the memory of a thousand practiced motions, but sailed wide, a clumsy satellite missing its orbit entirely, thudding dully against the padded wall. The sound was obscene in the quiet. And the miss conjured another failure: their wedding day. A borrowed car from her brother, a sleek, mocking thing that smelled of someone else’s cigars. A petty, hot argument over a scratch on the door, a scratch that was there before, or was it? The memory was a poorly developed photograph. He saw the guests later, leaving the dance hall, like the red lanterns carried away into the summer night, winking out one by one like dying stars, leaving him and Esra alone in a sudden, terrifying expanse of matrimony.

He retrieved the ball. The second shot was a thought made leather. As he released it, the image came unbidden: his uncle’s grave. A plain, grey stone in a town he had not visited in fifteen years. He had sent money to his grandfather for it, a guilt-offering mailed in a plain envelope. The uncle had lived alone, died alone, a man of extremist political affiliations whom the family discussed in hushed, dismissive tones. Behzat had wanted to visit him, once, but the pressure of their collective judgment—Why would you? He's troubled, Behzat. It's none of your business—had held him fast, an insect pinned in amber. The ball, this time, whispered against the rim. A tremor. A nearness. It did not go in, but the universe had acknowledged his aim.

The third shot was a ritual. He bounced the ball, once, twice, syncing its rhythm to the drum in his chest. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. In the dark, he felt acutely alive, a heartbeat propelling a sphere toward an unseen truth. He was describing an elephant in a dark room, each touch, each shot, a revelation of a part—a leg, a trunk, the curve of a tusk. He was getting closer. The ball left his hands. It struck the iron hook with a clean, metallic clang and sprang back to him, a perfect, obedient return. He caught it, a shock of pure relief coursing through him. Order.

The fourth shot was rage. It flew from him, worse than the first, a wild thing hurled into the darkness behind the backboard. “Damn it!” The curse exploded in the sacred silence. “All because of her. Why couldn’t she wait? A week. Just a week.” The shame was a hot flush. Borrowing from the wife's father! It was an ancient, humiliating transaction, a subtraction of his own stature. He was the provider who could not provide, the mathematician whose sums never added up to security.

He slowly walked to the errant planet. He began to bounce it again, a steady, penitent rhythm. And then, a deepening. A cloud, a soft, black felt, slid over the moon. The silver pool vanished. The world was extinguished. He was standing at the free-throw line in a pitch-black universe, holding a ball, aiming at nothing. He stared into the abyss where the hoop had to be, where the laws of physics insisted it still was. He saw nothing.

In that nothingness, his daughter’s face appeared. Not as she was now, but younger, confused over a simple equation, her brow furrowed not in concentration but in a kind of sorrow or shame. She doesn’t enjoy math. Why? What did I do wrong? And an answer, not his own, echoed in the vault of his skull: Nothing. Your child is not your child. You borrowed her from the future.” The words hung there. He did not question them. In the absolute dark, all statements were truths. He raised the ball, a gesture of faith. He did not aim; he simply released it toward the void, a surrender. It left his hands.

And then, a sound. A sound so soft, so perfect, it was almost not a sound at all but the ghost of one: a swift, clean swish. The net, sucking the ball through its hoop. A hole in the universe is accepting its offering. He stood frozen. Had he? It was impossible to know. The darkness revealed nothing. It could have been a trick of the air, an auditory hallucination born of desire. There was no proof. There would never be proof. He remembered his math classes where he was the master of truth. “Every theorem we mention in this class must be proven or must not be used at all…” A slow smile touched his lips in the blackness. “The wisdom of uncertainty,” he told the empty gym.

He waited. The cloud passed. The moon, that bright, nonchalant ball, returned. He found the ball and continued playing. "If darkness was the problem, inside the ball was even darker, so what?..." he whispered to himself, as if he needed to be convinced. For an hour or so, he played. Until the darkness ceased to be an opponent and became his only friend. Until his muscles ached with an honest fatigue. Until he realized that the basketball didn't have any intention of saving his marriage!  Until he missed Esra with a sharp, almost metaphysical yearning. Until he was profoundly, simply, crazily thirsty. Then he went home.

The Coats

The gate of the Sheldon Cooper High School was not made of iron, but a kind of sentient boundary. For Naci Zara, crossing its bleached-white gravel threshold each morning at 7:28 a.m. was a ritual of meticulous divestment. He did not simply walk through it; he was processed by it, a slow and deliberate shedding of selves, like a man carefully hanging his many coats on a series of invisible hooks in the air.

He left home as Naci, husband to Emel, father to a seven-year-old girl with sticky fingers, sparkly beads around her wrist, and a laugh like sudden, loud thunder. He had kissed them both, had smelled the warm, buttery scent of toast on Emel’s cheek, had felt the small, fierce weight of his daughter’s arms around his neck. This Naci, the man of the house, the man of a certain tender history, he left just there, at the gatepost. The ghost of his domestic self would wait patiently all day, a loyal dog, to be collected again at 4:45 p.m.

Parking his car under the usual banyan tree, a few steps onto the campus proper, on the asphalt path that cut through the militantly green lawn, he paused. Here, he shed his non-conformist political views. The carefully reasoned, quietly furious opinions he held on the morning’s news, the letters to the editor he composed in his mind during his commute—all of it was gently exhaled into the crisp air. The campus did not tolerate such messy, partisan colours. They bled into the perfect, abstract whiteness of the mathematical truth he was there to serve. They were variables for which this environment had no use. He felt them slip from his shoulders, a weightless, ideological cloak he would not need until he stepped back onto public pavement.

The main building swallowed him. The corridor was a long, polished throat of linoleum and lockers, smelling of lemon disinfectant and adolescent ennui. Here, walking with a measured pace that was neither hurried nor slow, he performed the most delicate operation. He unspooled his philosophical vexations. The dark, beautiful, and deeply controversial thoughts that visited him in the silent watches of the night—on the absurdity of consciousness, the elegant cruelty of natural selection, universe as a set of Markov chains, the godless, spinning rock they all clung to—these he carefully wound into a tight, invisible skein and placed on the window ledge near the fire extinguisher. They were too sharp, too potentially corrosive for the young minds he was approaching. A student might be cut on them. They were not part of the curriculum. His mind, now, was a clean, well-lit room, empty but for the furniture of instruction.

Finally, he reached the door to Room 217. On its pale green surface, a poster declared, “The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics!” He placed his hand on the cold metal handle. This was the final relinquishment. Here, he left his personal morality. His private convictions on friendship, loyalty, betrayal, love—the complex, often irrational algebra of human connection—had no place inside. He was not here to be a friend, a confessor, or a moral guide. He was here to demonstrate proof. To be fair was to be consistent. To be kind was to be clear. Emotion was an irrational number in the clean, rational equation of the classroom.

He opened the door.

The man who entered was not Naci. He was a mechanism of exquisite specificity.

He placed his worn leather satchel on the desk with a soft thud that silenced the room’s low hum. His eyes, pale and cool behind his spectacles, scanned the rows of faces. They were not children, not individuals with names and histories that might snag on his attention; they were a cohort, a set of thirty units awaiting data input.

“Open your homework to page 274,” he said, his voice a calibrated instrument, devoid of tremolo or vibrato. “Problem number twelve. A common point of error.”

The next ten minutes were a flawless execution of code. Homework check. Three students were queried. Their answers were parsed, their errors traced back to a single misapplied axiom, a faulty transposition. He did not chide. He identified the bug in the logic. He was a diagnostician. p implies q does not always guarantee q implies p. A common mistake done by the high schoolers. Right Jessica, we talked about this a few times in the last two months. A flicker of a smile, a pre-programmed social cue to indicate approbation without warmth.

Fifteen minutes for new material. He turned to the board. “Today, we ascend to a higher plane of abstraction. We leave the comfortable, familiar line of real numbers and enter the plane. We welcome the complex number.”

His chalk, a brittle white wand, began to dance. It defined the imaginary unit, *i*, the square root of -1. “A necessary fiction,” he stated, “a logical phantom that makes a larger, more beautiful system possible.” Ohh, life, a ghost from the window ledge in the corridor whispered in the deep recesses of his machinery, isn’t it more complex? Don’t we all require our fictions, our irrational bits, to become whole? Neither real numbers are truly real, nor the imaginary numbers can be imagined. Everything is misnamed, the swamp of political correctness sucks him into an oblivious terrain of mud... He stared at the ceiling, the mischievous thoughts were instantly quarantined and deleted. They were not in the lesson plan.

He wrote the general form: a + bi. “The real part,” he said, tapping *a*. “The imaginary part,” tapping bi. “Together, they form a complex whole. A coordinate. A point.” He plotted them, these strange hybrids, on the complex plane he drew with two swift, perfect lines. His voice was a calm, steady drone, explaining conjugation, addition, multiplication. He was a guide in a strange new country, pointing out the sights without ever betraying a sense of their wonder.

The final twenty-five minutes. Group work. This was a subroutine designed to foster collaboration, a directive from the administration. There were 19 students in the class, a classy prime number, ten plus nine or ten square minus nine square. He thought “either one group of 19 students or 19 groups of one student.” He almost grinned but restrained his urges, not in the plan, not in the plan. He partitioned the class into four groups of four and one group of three. He distributed a worksheet. “You will solve these. One member from each group will present a solution to a different problem.”

The classroom erupted into a low chatter. Mr. Zara did not sit. He paced the perimeter, a silent orbital satellite. He monitored progress. He listened for conceptual errors. His interventions were minimal, precise. “Check your sign in step three.” “Remember the multiplicative property.” He was processing their efforts, running a silent diagnostic on their understanding.

One by one, they came to the board. A boy with nervous hands solved the first problem. A girl with a determined set to her jaw conquered the second. Mr. Zara watched, his head tilted slightly. He was not assessing them; he was assessing the output. The solutions were either correct or incorrect. He offered a “Precisely” or a “Re-examine your distribution” with utter impartiality. There was no pride, no frustration, only validation or error-correction.

The bell rang, a sharp, electric shock that severed the room’s focus.

“The problems on page 281, numbers one through twenty-three, odd only,” he announced to the rustling of closing books and zipping bags. “Show all work.”

They flowed past him, a river of youth and noise and complication, spilling back into the world of friendships and politics and moral dilemmas. He stood by his desk, the empty shell of Mr. Zara, the lesson plan completed, the objectives met.

Then four more classes repeated the same way, he entered the room, delivered his plan and started breathing after each session.

When the last student of the last class had vanished, he turned and left the room. The process began in reverse. At the classroom door, he collected the waiting shard of his morality. In the corridor, he retrieved the spool of his dark, beautiful philosophy from the window ledge. On the asphalt path, he drew a deep breath and took up the mantle of his political convictions, feeling their familiar weight and texture. And finally, at the gate, he stepped back into the skin of Naci, husband and father. The ghost by the gatepost merged with him, infusing his limbs with a sudden, human fatigue and a faint, anticipatory warmth.

He walked to his car, a man once more, the intricate and often contradictory sum of all his parts. The complex number made whole again, if only until tomorrow.

THE HAPPIEST TEACHER ON EARTH

Every morning, he stopped under the banyan tree before the school gates and drew the cloak around him. It had no sheen, no swirling theatrics; from a distance, it looked like a drab raincoat—something a mischievous uncle might wear to a funeral. But once it was on, he vanished, as neat as a coin dropped into a magician’s fist. He walked the corridors this way, brushing past bulletin boards with their half-detached staples, the wilted posters promising spirit and teamwork. He floated down the stairs like a rumor. In the cafeteria, he slipped unnoticed between the clatter of trays, the smell of oil too long reheated, and the official smiles of administrators rehearsing the day’s slogans. Pilfering a few pieces of pastry under his cloak, he entered the lift and stood in the corner like a dried mushroom—shrunk, inconspicuous, not to be felt by anyone.

It was not fear that drove him under the cloak, but practicality. If they saw him, they would remember. The summonses would follow: the subcommittee on extracurriculars, the emergency task force on vertical alignment, and strategic roundtables with a mission but no vision. All so solemn, all so hollow. Minutes were taken and distributed as though they were scripture - no one reads them, but everyone knows they are important! Meetings for the sake of meetings, to solve the problems that did not exist before the meeting, to justify the big words “collaboration”, “cooperation”, “measurable”, “success” … He had sat through enough to know that the most urgent conclusions usually collapsed under the weight of their own vagueness. So, he chose absence, a small vanishing act, his one rebellion against the screws and bolts of the education factory.

At the classroom door, he shed the cloak and folded it into his bag. The students looked up, their chatter thinning into a hush that was alive, not dutiful. Here he was visible again, and happily so. He asked a question; hands rose, some like arrows, others half-afraid, half-hopeful. A wrong answer gave him the chance to discuss persistence. A halting attempt let him speak of kindness, which he always slipped in as though it were another principle of mathematics. They leaned toward him, not in reverence—thank God—but in the bright impatience of desiring to know more.

Time inside the classroom was its own animal: brisk, tender, fully alert. He could pause for silence, let it grow, watch them searching. An equation was solved, and suddenly the room tilted toward understanding, the way sunlight shifts across a desk in midafternoon. He almost laughed sometimes at the thought of explaining this to a committee —what box would they tick for joy? for the glimmer of a moral compass? The very notion of turning it into a “learning outcome” seemed like a private joke he shared with himself. Here, though, nothing was wasted. Not a question, not a mistake, not even the nervous laugh of a student caught unprepared. He saw in them the one kind of record worth keeping: the steady, imperfect progress of minds and hearts.

And then the day was done. He slipped the cloak back over his shoulders before stepping into the corridor again. Invisible once more, he moved past the lockers, the stairwell, the cafeteria with its after-lunch silence. Yet something in him glowed so brightly, so freely, that he felt almost visible — joy radiating through the seams of the fabric. He walked out of the gates quietly, the hidden man who had, for a few hours, been seen exactly as he wished.

----

Liang Pi Yiyememek

Yiyemediğim liang pi. Fotoğraf internetten. 

 Öğlene doğru çıktım evden. Amacım yürüyerek parkın altındaki küçük lokantaya gidip liang pi yemekti. Sıcakta yenilecek en güzel yemeklerden birisidir; hafif acı, soğuk, süngerimsi tofu parçaları zahmetsizce akıp gidiyor boğazdan, salatalık, maydanoz ve kırmızı lahanalar ekşiliği arttırıyor. Sıcak demedim, nem demedim, neredeyse 3 km yürüdüm. Hedefe ulaşmamla en son bir ay önce ziyaret ettiğim lokantanın çehre değiştirdiğini fark etmem bir oldu. Tüm menü değişmiş, deniz ürünleri çorbası satan sıradan bir mekâna dönüşmüş. İçeriye bile girmedim o hayal kırıklığıyla. Sola sapıp yol boyunca yemek satan ufak lokantalara baktım. Kolay değil tabii etsiz bir yemek bulmak. Nihayet baozı satan bir yer buldum. İki tane tofulu-lahanalı baozı aldım. Sabah kahvaltısı da yemediğim için acıkmıştım. Baozılardan birisini hemen oracıkta indirdim mideme. Parka doğru yürüyordum ki Liang pi’ye benzeyen bir resim gördüm bir dükkânın önünde. Sordum, değilmiş. İçinde et var mı dedim, yok dedi. Tamam bana bir tane ver dedim. Dükkânın önündeki sadece anaokulu çocuklarının rahatlıkla oturabileceği büyüklükte bir sandalyeye ve sehpaya kuruldum. Kadın yemeğin adını söyledi ama aklımda kalmadı. Gerçi benim için fark etmez. Ben liang pi niyetine yedim. 10 Yuan’dı fiyatı. Rengi kırmızı değildi, içinde lahana yoktu ama onun dışında pek farklı değildi. Bir de su içtim yanında. Diğer baozıyı da yedim bu arada. Artık karnım doymuştu. Parka gittim, Tanpınar’ın mektuplarını okumaya devam ettim. “Fransızca ağzımda ikinci kelimede şişiyor, büyüyor. Suat İsmail’in kocaman eli, heceleri ağzımın içinde buluyor, ayırıyor. Sarhoş olunca daha rahat konuşuyorum.” demiş üstat Fransa’dan Adalet Cimcoz’a yazdığı bir mektupta. “Dünyada iki hasretim vardı. Biri Paris, diğeri güzel kadın. Burada ikisini de kaybettim.” diye de eklemiş daha sonra bizim müzmin huzursuz muharrirciğimiz.  Bir ara uykum geldi, yaşlı bir çiftin ayıplayan bakışlarına aldırmadan uzandım, hafiften sızdım suyun yanı başında. Uyanınca eve dönmeye karar verdim. Zaten belim ağrıyor, daha beter olmayayım durduk yerde. Dönüş yolunda tatil sonrası yapılan basmakalıp diyaloglardan birisini kurguladım kafamın içinde:

-          Nasıldı tatilin?

-          Istırap içinde!

-          Nasıl yani, bir yerlere gitmedin mi?

-          Yok, Shenzhen’da kaldım. Evin civarında uzun yürüyüşler ve balkonda uzun okumalar dışında bir şey yapmadım. Bir de klimalı odada öğleden sonra uykuları var.

-          Eeee, ne güzel işte! Neden ıstırap içinde diyorsun?

-          Yazamadığım için. Yazamadığım her gün, o günün boşa harcandığına dair bir suçluluk duygusunu getiriyor beraberinde. Ve bu duygu başka tüm zevklerin, eğlencelerin tadını kaçırıyor. Kendisine tevdi edilen asıl görevi yerine getiremeyip başkalarına yardım ederek onların teveccühünü kazanan memurun hissedeceği türden bir duygu. Kazılması gereken tünel dururken sahilde kumdan kaleler yapmak.   

-          Anlamadım, hem tevdi ne demek Alla’şkına?

-          …

-          Ben Osaka’daydım üç geceliğine. Çok güzeldi. Bambaşka bir dünya, sen de gitmelisin.

-          … 

Miskin Tanpınar

 Yine o boşluk, Tanpınar’ın mektuplarını okuyorum bu aralar. Hep kendinden şikâyetçi, kendisini hep miskin, başarısız ve değersiz görüyor. Benim bir sanatçıda olmazsa olmaz dediğim suçluluk, eksiklik ve borçluluk duyguları. Bazen kitabı bir kenara bırakıp “Ne kadar da birbirimize benziyoruz?” diyorum. Sonra da “Hadi oradan sünepe, haddini bil!” diye çemkiriyorum kendime. Tanpınar sefaletin dibini yaşamış, acıyı yaşamış, büyük değişimleri görmüş geçirmiş, içinde yaşadığı toplumla birlikte büyümüş, utanmış, yolunu yitirmiş; bunları kelimelere dökmüş zamanı gelince, kitaplar yazmış. Değerleri çok sonraları anlaşılsa da yazmış, yayımlamış, güzel dostluklar kurmuş, az çok bir itibar edinmiş edebiyat dünyasında. “Yemek olacağım yerde sofrada kaşık filan gibi bir şey oldum” sitemini ediyor bir de Ahmet Kutsi’ye yazdığı mektupların birinde. Ben o sofranın kurulduğu odaya bile alınmadım. Keyfim yerinde, altım kuru, karnım tok... Satıhta kaldım desem abartmış olurum, yüzünü Avrupa’ya dönmüş bir millete Asya’dan bağırdım. Sesimi duyuramadım.

Tanpınar'ın Mektupları, Zeynep Kerman, s 39