THE EDGE

For the last few months, I've been sharing my bed with knives. Some are short and thin, made for skinning animals, some are thick and long, like the kind that the butchers use to split bones, some are efficient and heavy, some are small and simple, but all of them, each and every one of them, are incredibly sharp, captivatingly attractive, brilliantly shiny, and hard to believe but they are also infinitely affectionate. I love sleeping with them, feeling them caress my skin all night long. As my naked body rolls over them, I shiver from head to toe, I tremble like a teenager boy who is about to make love for the first time in his life, my heart opens to all the songs of the earth like a fig cracking and splitting in autumn, or like a mango welcoming June with a large tear on its bright gold skin. I love this quivering, this vexation, this tremble, and the vibration that comes with it.

Living alone, when I'm with my knives, I at least escape the feeling of loneliness. I'm grateful to them for allowing me to deceive myself. Knives have also taught me that there's no difference between sensing something and thinking you're sensing it; their shiny steel faces, the compassionate arms they hide behind those facades, their handles that give confidence in the palm of your hand, the tiny claws at the end of the handle that imitate swords, their envious magnificence that appears where the light hits and reflects… The fact that they can only harm me when I want them to actually elevates my soul, caresses me when I need to be caressed the most; puts an end to my resentment towards myself, like a lover who solves our prolonged, tangled problems by pressing her skin to mine and curing all the wounds at the most unexpected moment.

I feel dangerous these days, so I avoid going out, looking at people's faces, and I try my best not to talk to anyone outside. I live at home, surrounded by books and DVDs of my favorite TV series that will take days to watch; or I don't live, I get lost, I hide in the plain sight. Still, like every secret, I need to be torn apart just a little, or I'll vanish into the unknown, along with my hidden truth. I'm like a child lost in the woods who, when he realizes it, isn't bothered in the slightest, quite the opposite, his self-confidence skyrockets with his solitude. Books, in fact, draw me in like labyrinths; they say, "Come, let me cover your shivering body," "Come, disappear into my chest and confess your fragility" "Come, become someone else under my arm," "Never miss the life you left behind again." The series, which I watch thirty episodes in a row and fall asleep to, promise me a second self: a life unlived, an unreachable happiness, the triumph of the good, the endless struggle of the oppressed, the ruthless control of the oppressors. I feed on the pleasure I derive from this artificiality. Days go by, and sometimes I haven't said a word within the walls of my home. Silence melts me like the flame melts a candle; I'm one of those corners that the blazing flame can never fully illuminate. I have neither the strength nor the will to demand more.

I'm also experiencing the joy of having money but being womanless. Being self-sufficient, not needing anyone, having full control of everything, being fully aware of all the ropes that used to pull me and push me in the past. Ohhh, how blessed I am, what a charm! Like those Hindu deities, being able to destroy and rebuild the world I live in whenever I want, perhaps gives me a sense of divine grandeur. "I created this life," I tell myself. "I can burn and destroy." I'm consumed by my own justice, my own fascist ruler. My knives and me! I know it's a wild and cruel arena outside, a world in which power trumps effort. Not being able to stand this is isolating me, weighing me down like a sponge absorbing water. I can't support myself walking the streets or trying to explain my troubles to someone. "What's the need?" I ask afterward, why all the strain, all the pressure, all the twists and turns to please others. That's why I lock myself in my house and live out my own justice, instead of going out and being a despot, harming others in the short term and hurting myself in the long.

I know well that when injustice rules a place, those who subject you to justice are wronging you. I've lived it; I'm experienced in this matter. The rest is infiltration, colonizing evil brokers, their armies sneak in every crevice, their institutions acting like gangs and thugs! Injustice spreads like cancer, once it creates its own vicious cycle. When those seeking justice realize that injustice is more valued, they easily switch sides, saying, "Why are they getting it, but I'm not?" and attempt to establish their own justice. Knowing you can't change corrupted souls is the worst. This truth is like an apple plucked from its branch starting to rot; the opposite is unthinkable, undeniable, and untenable. Like a river that can't flow in reverse, it allows only the observer to watch it, leaving you with two options: take to the streets and fight, or lock yourself away at home and punish your own being, satisfying your desires with the cheapest methods you can find. My knives masterfully accomplish the latter.

All of it; my fondness for knives and my belief that this affection was my salvation, started with a fight with my boss at work. We had argued about something trivial, but the words he said hit me hard. He barked at me like a rabid dog, hurled harsh insults at me, the likes of which I had never heard from anyone in my life, from my mother to my father, from my most bitter enemies to the closest friends -who know all my soft spots-, as if dumping a bucket full of spit and pus all over my head. For some reason I couldn't make my voice heard, I couldn't open my mouth and say a few words to the man's face. Like a piece of ice that shrinks as it melts; no, no, best of all, like a big toe curling inward when it's cold, I too shrank further, taking refuge in the folds of my stomach. The more he spoke, the hatred inside me turned darker, looking for an opportunity to explode and drown the whole world in filth. Despite this, I kept calm; I didn't lose that damned silence, that famous respectful stance that was eating me up, ruining my life, the source of my unhappiness and despair. Even being right and coming out on top felt unfair at that moment for some reason, an unbecoming snobbery, a false shadow of a world that didn't belong to me. As if I defended myself and crushed the boss, I would also be saddened and devastated by the brutality I'd displayed. I call this "the unbearable lightness of being a victim" now. Back then, this sinister malady didn't yet have a name, it had no title, but it had taken root in my cells like a seed. It was simply waiting for the opportunity to emerge and invade my soul along with my body.

I went home that evening with a heavy stone in my stomach. A weight that had taken over not only my stomach but also my mind. The crushing feeling of humiliation made my hands and feet tremble. I felt like my skin was being torn from my body, ripped from one place and carried to another. It was as if the boiling water had blistered my softened skin, causing a mass of skin to pile up around my feet, layer upon layer overlapping like a drawn curtain. It was limp, like the folds on the necks of very fat people. The ends of my arms and legs were becoming numb. I was filled with sediment, dregs with which to build sand and mud castles. A little feminine, a little lustful, a little enthusiastic, but mostly guilty.

I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water to calm my nerves. For some reason, I too have this faith in water. I suppose we believe the lubrication stemming from the water will release the lump in our throats and push it down. I drank the water in one breath, scraping my teeth against the glass, savoring the soft slickness of the glass with my tongue and lips. As I was putting the glass back in its place, somehow the back of my hand —the feet of the table were already shaking like a cumbersome washing machine placed on a rough surface— hit the knife on the edge of the table, and before I could even react, the falling knife stabbed into my foot. I let out a deep cry of pain, or rather, the thought of pain. But the knife hadn't actually penetrated my foot; it had lodged itself between my big toe and the toe next to it, peeling a tiny bit of skin and drawing a single drop of blood. There was no serious injury that would cause any pain. I slowly pulled the knife out and retrieved it from the parquet floor. I wiped the blood from my foot with a napkin and went into the living room. The knife, licking through my skin, had sent a strange tickling sensation through me. Deep down, I longed for the same experience to happen again. Let the knife fall again, pass between two other fingers, and make me enjoy the same sweet pain. A fabricated belief arose within me that a firm but unbreaking touch could be a healing tool. It would be harsh, it would happen suddenly; it would strike me without warning, without my permission, without my will or decision. It would strike, but it wouldn't be life-threatening. I was searching for something like a slightly-bitten nipple during lovemaking, like the tongue between the threatening teeth of a lover during a kiss, something I hesitated to seek at other times. Pain would lead to pleasure. I wanted it to happen so I could wait for the next one, dream of the next saccharine pain and find happiness.

I took the knife and ran it over my skin. Just as we can marvel at the tickling power of a feather despite its weakness, we should also marvel at the caressing power of a knife despite all its harshness! I lightly ran the knife over my arms, legs, and face. Sometimes I brought the sharp edge to my nose and ears, sometimes I rubbed the blunt side against my fingers. The pleasure intensified, a cold but sincere threat. This knife could be a friend whose sincerity I could trust, stimulating me gently and harshly, scratching my skin when the time came, stroking my back with its blunt side when it was time. Like a kitten, it was testing me, testing my trust in it and whether I would reciprocate that trust. I played with the knife until late, thinking about my—possible—relationship with it. When I fell asleep and lay down in bed, I realized it had become a refugee in my mind. It had nowhere to go, and it couldn't get away from me. Then I realized, I didn’t have a choice anymore. I got up, picked up the knife again, and placed it on the bed. I wasn't as frightened as I had been at first, but there was still a vast abyss at the edge of my bed. A thorny trap was around me, restricting the confines of the bed and keeping my mind alert! I had turned my world into a voluntary prison camp surrounded by electrified fences.

I couldn't sleep soundly that night, torn between fear and hope until the sun filtered through my window, but when I woke up the next morning, I was no less refreshed than I had been the morning before. I was the same, and determined about one thing. I dressed immediately and set off. I went to my office and handed in my resignation letter. I collected my receivables from accounting department and headed out into the street. The sun was now warming me differently; people looked at me differently, even children were playing their games differently. The awareness that all these differences were mere shifts in perception prevented me from being deceived. First, I went to a park, sat, and watched the pigeons. Then I walked to the market. I bought dozens of knives from a shop that sold all kinds of knives. I returned home with dozens of knives, ranging in size, color, and purpose, from short fruit knives to cleavers, from utility knives to switchblades, from Swiss army knives to machetes. I locked myself in and pulled the latch like I was hiding a hostage in my own house. I took all the knives I'd bought, one by one, out of my bag. I arranged them neatly on the table. I went to the kitchen and added the other knives in the drawer to my new purchases. The sight was exciting. I wouldn't have to leave the house for a long time. I would create my own punishment, my own entertainment, and blend it with my own justice.

I laid one of the machetes lengthwise on the bed and lay down beside her. She was so peaceful, so serene, even I envied her, her gleaming body rivaling even the most beautiful women in the world. The gray of the steel that began where his thick wooden handle ended symbolized not power but clarity. “Don’t come near me,” she would say. “The moment you step away from yourself, you’ll fall into the hands of the sharp blades of knives,” she would warn. “What are you looking for in us when the abyss itself lies deep within your soul?” she would ask. Driven by the midday heat, I drifted slowly to sleep, practically suffocating. When I woke, there was a small scratch under my elbow. I ignored it. I turned on the television and watched the news, wanting to know what had happened in the world while I was serving my sentence. I went into the kitchen and prepared a delicious meal from the ingredients in the cupboard. I spent the night doing the dishes and laundry. That night, I slept with a long butcher knife, made for slaughtering cattle during the religious festival of Eid al-Adha. Once again, I felt a sense of fulfillment, a strange sense of saintliness, an unsupported belief that my head had reached the heavens. I drifted off to sleep, imagining the deeds that knife would have done, the blood it would have shed, if I hadn't taken it, into the twilight between sleep and wakefulness.

When I woke up next morning, I had a deep cut on my foot. Yet, I'd mistaken the pain for a dream. Even in my dreams, I'd questioned whether what I'd seen was a dream, but for some reason, I couldn't react, couldn't move. The bed, which had absorbed my troubles, my insomnia, and my panic for years, had now sucked my blood, my very soul. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I washed my foot and wrapped it in clean clothes. Then I went to the emergency room at the nearest hospital. The nurses closed the wound with eleven stitches, gave me two bottles of antibiotics, and sent me home. They didn't ask what caused the cuts on my foot. Even if they had, I wouldn't have answered. Was it because I didn't want to answer? Or because I wasn't sure I knew the answer? Besides, if I had, would they have understood that my life had recently become a punishment seeking its guilt?

Maybe I should have stopped the knife fantasy right there. I should have ceased it immediately. I knew my hesitation was pointless. It was impossible to give up knives. Sleeping without them, a night without them, would be the worst thing I could do to myself. That night, I slept with two knives. I put one on my right, the other on my left. Lying on my back next to them, I listened to my heartbeat as I waited for sleep to come. How was it that this heart, thumping so hard, went unnoticed at other times? And yet, it was so close to us, so within us, so active! Or are we the ones living far away from it? Despite the noise coming out of my chest, I slept peacefully. By morning, I was completely fine; I couldn't find a single scratch on my body.

So, I was learning to live among the thorns, to breed my demons and walk on the ground they vomited up, without a single drop getting stained on my trousers. In short, what I'd never learned in my entire life: knowing my limits, not encroaching on others' boundaries, and of course, educating myself, bending and twisting, being flexible, slowing down… Intoxicated by this success, I increased the number of knives to three, four, and sometimes five. While I sometimes suffered deep cuts and scratches, they were never life-threatening. My foot healed in the meantime. I was proud to have carved out a place for myself in the silent, harsh world of knives. For they showed no mercy, no contempt or insult. The knives were like a stern mother, slapping and retreating, locking me in a dark room and setting me free, in the end always leaving me with profound lessons to learn.

A month has passed, and during that month, I've only left the house three times. I order the ingredients for cooking from the supermarket downstairs, and an apprentice brings them up to my door. I do my own laundry and dishes. I've also turned off my phone so no one will bother me. The money in my pocket will last at least six more months. I don't know what I'll do after that. I'll probably find a job and work. I'll do as I'm told, I won't say anything, I won't object, I won't complain. After all, I have knives waiting for me at home! As long as they're there and they make me happy in bed, life is good for me, too.

And please if one day you encounter me, don't try to give me lectures on life or shortcuts to happiness. I learned enough and I am already happy. Let me stay like this.

 

2013, Istanbul 

Beyond Exile (1)

Published in February 2026

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.

 

                                                        1

I remember like yesterday, the day Naci Zara's file dropped into my ultra-secure message box. Behind my back, a firm cushion decorated with Tibetan patterns; on the coffee table where I'd stretched out my swollen legs, the golden pits of the damsons I'd just devoured, wincing with each bite; in the other corner of the couch, our kitten Hundun[1] locked in a relentless battle with its own tail; on the radio, a voice left over from the nineties singing bù zhǐshì péngyǒu[2]; and in my belly, my son who would never be born. Outside, a fierce July rain had set about its heedless business of softening the city's concrete surfaces with blow after blow. Altruistic grandmothers and grandfathers who had sworn to fan their grandchildren, their legs suddenly infused with an elixir of youth, had fled to the scooter parks beneath the buildings, and the green garden in the middle of the housing complex — growing a little more ruined with every drop that fell from the sky — had been left to the patient vigil of the invasive African snails and the sluggish earthworms native to our city. Water droplets striking and bouncing off the metal roof of the security guards' outbuilding scattered shimmering, iridescent flashes and spilled in waves beyond the garden's borders. The two long metal rods we used for hanging laundry swung back and forth like a cradle and knocked against each other; the sky grumbled like an old woman snapping at a street vendor who had dared to drive a stake into her ground; mosquitoes, despite the suddenly soupy air, searched for new warm and humid quarters to spite it; and smoke-colored clouds struck momentary sparks in the middle of the sky, like mischievous children who can't give up firecrackers on a festival day…

What's the matter? Did you get bored already? Was my description too heavy for your impatient 21st-century mind — unaccustomed to difficulty, expecting action every ten seconds, swiping on to the next entertainment with a flick of a finger when you don't find what you hoped for? Did I exaggerate a simple rain? What could be more natural, more ordinary, and to some more contemptible and maddening than a torrential downpour in Shenzhen in July, floodwaters sweeping everything away, traffic thrown into complete chaos! But what can I do? If nature itself exaggerates without limits, if it endlessly chases brand-new follies, if even in its plainest form it can shake sluggish souls awake — is that my fault? I am responsible for recording what unfolds before my eyes, the sounds and images that pluck at my heartstrings, with an anxiety and a shiver as though I might never experience them again. How I wish your insides would tremble too. May this singular moment I have lived transcend time and place, and thousands of years from now stir a flutter in the hearts, a movement in the bodies, of people who have never even heard the name Shenzhen. May these images — roaming my consciousness like a vagrant virus — take up residence in other consciousnesses stationed on the unreachable shores of the universe and of history, and there become immortal, remain forever alive. Since my body cannot be what endures from this mortal life, let it be my consciousness that clings to life in the minds of others like a pearl clinging to its shell — speaking there always, murmuring, throwing off sparks that mingle with curses at the most unexpected moments like an axe blade striking stone, seeking out the paths of immortality, creating them, adorning what already exists, polishing it, brightening it, adding its strength to theirs. May people, as they read what I have written, feel a dampness at their heels, a cool relief across their shoulders, a faint itch on their lips, a spring-filled breeze against their bare chests. May they hear at their ears the patter of rain that would stir desire even in the most dormant of lovers. Would that be so bad? And besides, does literature have any other mission — one I should focus on, sharpen my talents for, improve myself toward, and when the time and place demand it, push against the customary boundaries, leap right over them, and turn up my nose at the conventions before which everyone stands at stiff, obedient attention? If Naci were beside me now, he would agree. Perhaps writing is something that can be done with fewer words, with less straining. I don't know. After all, I am a novice who has only just begun to write — a complete apprentice in this business! An apprentice who will never become a master, a servant with no eye on becoming a lord, a dreamer who prefers a rushing stream to a still pond. One might call it a kind of midlife crisis — the final destination to which boredom and material comfort have delivered me. Paper cutting[3], calligraphy, or group dancing in the park with my peers — none of that is for me! I'm giving this a try; perhaps after writing my first and last story my enthusiasm will wane and I'll be rid of this affliction. Until that day comes, there is no economizing on effort for me. Besides, isn't it common enough among beginners to go overboard, to wring something dry, and then smear that wrung-out mess all over themselves? It happens all the time — and splendidly so. If you didn't like it, consider this paragraph unread. And I, for my part, will not interrupt again, will not break the thread of the story for no good reason.

I had risen from where I sat, swaying like a well-fed bear cub, shut the windows and doors tight so the water pooling on the balcony wouldn't seep into the living room, and for good measure spread a few of my husband's old clothes along the threshold. Afterward, the deep silence that flooded into the apartment — the outside roar cutting off all at once and giving way to a motionless solitude — first unsettled me a little, then, to some extent, relieved me. Yes, I was alone; now, like Clark Kent stepping into a phone booth as a reporter and stepping out as Superman, or like Dr. Jekyll who by night becomes Mr. Hyde, I too could transform — I could let the spy inside me take over the housewife who was soon to become a mother. For at least two and a half hours I would not need to concern myself with anything else. The meat I had taken out of the freezer for dinner was thawing on the kitchen counter; the vegetables I had bought from the greengrocer at the entrance to the complex were being rid of their germs in soda water. My husband had three hours before he came home. Which meant I could examine the file to my heart's content, memorize every detail of my new assignment, and even look up online anything I didn't know. Half an hour before he came home, I would go into the kitchen and slip back into my identity as a warm, hardworking, beautiful, and charming wife.

Ah, my guileless husband — ah, the kindest, gentlest, most good-hearted man in the world, who doesn't harbor the slightest suspicion about what his wife does for a living... I could never blame you for seeing everyone around you as "what you see is what you get," just as you yourself are! On the contrary, there were many times I blamed myself — for not being able to be like you, for having kept a great secret from you my entire life, for having managed, despite the minor slips I made along the way, to avoid being caught by some stroke of enormous luck. And it wasn't only you who knew nothing of my second life. My family, your family, our mutual friends — everyone knew me as a smart, hardworking, enterprising woman who made small profits through modest transactions from home, who bought goods from the wholesale shops along Nanhai Boulevard and sold them to different parts of the country, who ran a small shop with the help of a young assistant. My name is Lai Zı Ran — outside, a shrewd merchant who keeps tabs on wholesale trade; at home, a capable housewife who has built a perfect life with her one and only husband.

To be frank, I was often astounded at being able to carry a second identity in my soul like a heavy guilty conscience. Many times, I told myself: climb this hill, and you'll set down your burden, spread your wings, and find your freedom — but neither did the hills to be climbed run out, nor did the weight of my load diminish. The strange thing is, sometimes on television I followed people living two entirely separate lives — men with two different families in two different cities, each unaware of the other; serial killers who raised three children on the money they made as accountants while murdering dozens of innocents; financial advisors whose real job was motorcycle repair but who collected money from people promising to make them rich; pyramid schemers who advertised Bitcoin in grand halls with glittering shows and then, a few years later, pocketed billions and vanished — I followed them for years with an envy I could barely admit even to myself. How did they feel no remorse? How did this enormous secret they carried inside them not to take over their bodies and seep outside like black vinegar through a crack? I will never know the answer to that question. Perhaps what set me apart from them was that much like a teacher, a nurse, or a soldier, I had been made to believe I was working for the welfare of my people. I was not a scheming woman cheating on her husband, a wastrel secretly gambling away his family's fortune, a wretch spending every penny he got his hands on drugs. My mission was sacred, my goal clear, my heart clean. There were times I couldn't believe that last part — but as you Turks say, even a judge's daughter has her flaws! Besides, is the past a ledger we can leaf through and erase the parts we don't like? It doesn't work that way. Every sentence you delete from earlier pages can cause all the pages that follow to go up in flames. So, I owe no one anything. From here on I can write freely — listening to every voice within me, embracing every color, without shame, without tiring — and with my whole heart believing in the dream that one day, however small the chance, Naci too will read what I have written.

First, I passed through the security stages: three separate passwords, facial recognition, and a fingerprint. If I pressed so much as one wrong key while entering these passwords, the system would lock me out for two hours. If I repeated a similar mistake on a second attempt, I would find myself standing before the Head of Intelligence for Shenzhen Province, giving account of myself. Fortunately, I am not a clumsy person — and besides, if I were, why would they have given me this job? I am careful, curious, and skeptical. The first thing I look for when I enter a room is where the exits are. When walking down a street I know by heart where the cameras are, where the dead ends are, where the pedestrian roads closed to vehicles are. When speaking with people I look into their eyes and proceeding from what they cannot say rather than what they do, I examine their souls with the thoroughness of a scholar studying a historic Tang Dynasty scroll retrieved from the archives. As skilled as I am at cooking, I am equally skilled at tracking. I can follow a target for hours without getting bored. So much so that sometimes, when I go out shopping with my husband or a close friend and am not following anyone, I acutely feel its discomfort. I break into a sweat all over, my mind goes foggy, and like a castaway in the middle of a boundless ocean who doesn't know which way to swim, I wait for a sign to come to me from the sky. After all, following someone is easy — you don't use your mind, you make no decisions, you are caught in no dilemmas. The only difference between you and a guided missile is that your purpose is not to destroy the target but to track it, to obtain whatever information you need, and to ensure the target remains alive. The lies I tell are so consistent, so convincing, that to keep them from getting mixed up with reality I occasionally send myself notes, reminding myself which story I constructed and for what purpose. The journal I keep is in fact a coded record of which lie I told to whom and on what date. My greatest fear as a spy is being treated like one by someone else. Ours is a profession that self-destructs when named by anyone. In one corner of our minds we carry our second identity, those secrets we hide from everyone. And at the same time, with a childlike eagerness, we forever keep alive in the most fragile corners of our minds the indulgence of wishing: "If only I could tell the people around me that I'm a spy, just to see them struck dumb, to hear a long, slow ohhhh, to see their mouths fall open." The fact that even those closest to us don't know we are walking vessels of secrets grieves us like spoiled children of wealthy families who are not allowed to show off their expensive new toys to their friends, and at moments and places where it is entirely inappropriate, it stirs the calm underground lakes in the depths of our souls into turbulence.

One way or another, we were human in the end — flesh and bone and impatience and weakness and loyalty and betrayal and even, when the occasion arose, gossip; each of us the born and bred child of a father and mother. How often I had longed to say it — on one of those winter nights when I held my husband tightly, tracing slow circles on his chest with my free thumb, my warm tongue settled in the orbit of his earlobe: "I'm going to tell you a secret, but you mustn't get angry and you mustn't tell anyone, all right? It stays between us until we die." In the early years I had even scripted his possible replies and written out a few scenarios in my head.

— I'm going to tell you a secret, but you mustn't get angry and you mustn't tell anyone, all right? It stays between us until we die.

— I'm very sleepy, please tell me in the morning.

— Oh, you can never be told anything worthwhile... I'm going to sleep.

— Don't forget, I'll ask you in the morning.

— Already forgotten!

Or:

— I'm going to tell you a secret, but you mustn't get angry and you mustn't tell anyone, all right? It stays between us until we die.

— Wait, don't tell me, let me guess. You're actually not a young woman. You've gone under the knife seven times and turned out like this thanks to a ton of successful plastic surgery...

— Don't make me laugh, I've eaten too much watermelon, I'll wet myself!

— So I'm right?

Or:

— I'm going to tell you a secret, but you mustn't get angry and you mustn't tell anyone, all right? It stays between us until we die.

— Let me go first, but no getting angry. Promise?

— What? You have a secret too?

— Of course I do

— Do you promise?

— Well, I promise! What else can I say!

— I have a mistress and she's five months pregnant...

— You animal. What kind of joke is that?

— If it's a girl we'll name her Zı Ran... Ha ha ha... Ouch! Stop pinching my arm!

This is what becomes of you when you carry a great secret inside you like a bitter poison for years — something this pickled comes out. When I was alone I always talked not to myself but to my secret. On sleepless nights lying on my back watching the play of light on the ceiling; at train stations, annoyed at the people who had pushed through the crowd to grab my place in line yet me finding it pointless to argue; in parks, spotting strangers who resembled you and falling into step behind them just for the fun of it; in the evenings walking the uneven pavements of foggy streets on your trail; and most of all when I saw you on the side of the road, dead drunk, retching into the bushes — you could never learn not to mix wine and beer! — watching helplessly from a distance, unable to slip quietly up behind you, unable to take out my hands from my warm pockets and rub them across your back, unable to lean close to your ear and say "It's over now, it's all out, all of it"...

And here is your file in front of me. Your great-grandfather emigrated from Sivas to Giresun at the beginning of the twentieth century; your official place of registration is Görele but you yourself are Istanbul born and bred. You studied mathematics at a good university, I see you speak fluent English. You are about to start teaching at one of Shenzhen's most prestigious high schools. Well, well, well! If only that were all. You also write. Essays, poems, stories, and so on. So you belong to the sort who knows how to keep things hidden, and you claim to be able to see the world through others' eyes as well. Our work is both very easy and very hard, I'd say. The investigation conducted on you could not arrive at a satisfactorily clear answer to the question of whether you are a nationalist, conservative, democrat, socialist, or anarchist. They could not fully determine what you believe in and what you oppose, whether you harbor negative views about our country and would work to spread them, or which side you consider to be in the right regarding the TTXT[4]. You have the potential to poison the impressionable minds of our young high school students, and there is also the possibility that you might use your position as a cover to pursue other ends. For these reasons, every step you take must be monitored; all your correspondence and conversations must be reviewed via the spyware installed on your phone; and on occasions when you set your phone down somewhere and go off, it must be recorded through physical surveillance who you meet, who you befriend, and who you quarrel with and over what. In previous assignments I had tailed a businessman from Siirt, a retired officer from Erzurum, a journalist from Kayseri, and most recently an actor whose father was from Yozgat and whose mother was German. With the exception of this last one, all of them were monotonous jobs, remote from excitement or depth — jobs I had nearly gotten myself caught on purpose just to have done with them. Their only interesting quality was that, taken together, they formed an intriguing pattern. It was as if with each assignment I was moving a little further west, drifting a little further from China. On the day your file came into my hands, that was the question I asked myself most. Would my next assignment be a sunflower merchant from Edirne? It was not to be — if there had been a next assignment perhaps I would have had the chance to test the prediction I had made and ultimately accept or reject my hypothesis, but you became my last assignment. A mission nearly 18 years long — as deep as oceans, as high as the Himalayas, as hot as the inside of a volcano, and as achingly drawn-out as the unrelenting toothache of a winter night.

Of course, during those 18 years you were not my only assignment. The whole Provincial Intelligence Directorate was hardly going to pay my salary just to have me follow one person. I had other targets too. I filed reports on a Turkmen horse trader for three years; I tracked an Uzbek businessman, who had run off with his Chinese mistress and built a new life in Singapore, for two. I gathered information from schools about young people from Türkiye who had come to Shenzhen to study, and when the occasion arose I spoke with their teachers, the directors of the dormitories where they stayed, and the friends they spent time with. I also had targets who were Azerbaijani, Cypriot, Kazakh. All of that happened — but none of these were interesting enough people to write two words about; they had no secrets, no ember burning inside them, what you saw was what you got. I could tell at a glance what they were after. When I thought about them or prepared reports on them, I was no different from the ticket inspectors on trains — relentlessly objective, stiffened to rigidity by a sense of duty, upright and unbending: a Lai Zı Ran who never leans. But you — your difference, I think, began here. Far from feeling guilt over my inability to be objective about you, I was glad that I would behave with partiality toward you. You were the one good student that an otherwise universally disliked teacher cherishes and keeps close at all times. Showing you favoritism, granting you special treatment, clearing the thorns from your path when the occasion arose and smoothing things over for you — all of this gave me pleasure, made me happy in the way of feeling one step closer to the purpose of my existence.

Ah, Naci — when I first came to know you, you were 28 years old. Just as you told that advertising girl you met at the bar, you were at the most perfect age. Seeing as you couldn't be 6 or 496! That day I thought to myself: what absurdly clumsy ways this man has of flirting. That they worked was a separate mystery — for someone like me, a woman of the old world who, even if others had come between, eventually married to her high school sweetheart. You, I had seen for the first time in the flesh right there were making plans to cycle to Beijing.  I was sitting in the corner behind the door, drinking a lemon soda, while you sat at the bar with your Canadian friend — that baby-faced boy who'd turned to traditional Chinese medicine because his hair was falling out— You had jet-black, thick, curly hair. On your clean-shaven face was written the innocence and cheerfulness of a university student. You were five years younger than me. With your grin, your movements, your restless body, you were barely distinguishable from a middle schooler who finished his homework and thrown himself onto the basketball court. The distance of three or four chairs between us kept filling and emptying. When the music fell silent, I could hear every word you spoke; the rest of the time I read your lips — lips so thin I still cannot understand how they manage to function. Your fingers moved across the map like a commander preparing for conquest, and you were saying exciting things to your friend beside you like "If we go together, we can stay in twin-bed hotel rooms and keep costs down." You had finished your fifth beer and were about to order your sixth when that girl appeared at your side, her eyes fixed on the crooked little map the two of you had sketched on a napkin. Her excuse too was to refresh her beer, but her real intention was plain. "See me, speak to me, hunt me, so that I may be hard-won prey and you may be proud of yourself," said the body of a woman starved for attention, in a language that required little interpretation. I, meanwhile, was offering prayers in my heart to gods I didn't believe in — please keep him away from that woman, please don't let him fall into this trap. But my prayers didn't hold; most likely because there were no gods to hear my prayers, or because there were some, but they didn't find me sincere enough. Though in the end I got what I wanted. You had lunch with the girl twice, and gone to the cinema with her once. The lunch dates were one thing, but what on earth was that ridiculous film! I already know from the movement signals from your phone that you were out cold by the fourteenth minute and woke at the final scene. Given that I know this, your would-be sweetheart, who had consumed an enormous bag of popcorn all on her own, had surely figured it out too. And afterward you never met again. You were a little sad — not about the girl not replying to your messages but about having become so attached to a relationship that was doomed from the start. For days you wrote brief self-criticisms in your notebook along the lines of "Why am I like this, why can't I resist sweet poisons," blaming yourself for weakness of will and spiraling into small bouts of despair. I had known all along it would end this way, which is why I had thrashed about silently where I stood. Fortunately, this parting didn't shake you too deeply. Though at that time I didn't yet know that the things that would truly shake you were not the endings of shallow relationships like this. In matters of the heart as in so many others, there were mountains of difference between us. Not differences to be overcome, but differences to be understood. It would have been unfair to expect someone like me — an old-world soul who, if not the first flower in the garden then the second, plucked it and pinned it to her hair and thereafter closed her eyes to all other plant life — to understand you at a glance. But I did not give up, don't worry. I neither gave up nor grew tired nor complained. I kept struggling on, in the middle of a desert where the sand dunes were forever shifting, trying to find my bearings and reach, however late, the oasis that would cool my insides...

And still it came to nothing, Naci. Nothing but mirages awaited me in the endless curves of the long thin line you left behind. While I crawled along those curves on my knees, my belly, my elbows, I called out your name in delirium, I made your union my obsession. In the rough caverns of my womanhood, I made room even for your shadow — but you could never cross that wide threshold inside. Into the narrow passages of my mind, where no one else could fit, you managed to squeeze your childlike frame — yet you could not take a single step toward the body that shattered like glass each night and gathered itself back together with glue each morning. On the wet pavements softened by moonlight I always saw your silhouette — but on those same pavements, rough as tree bark, you never once saw me, never noticed I was there; you never shared with me even once the bashful smile you handed out freely to those small, slight girls at the school where you worked, girls whose names you never bothered to learn despite years of working on the same floor. It was just like the mother of my unborn child — of my son, lost a few weeks before birth — never being able to see his face, not even once. The tide that ebbed and flowed between us was just like that. I was close to you; you were far even from yourself. I was a world buzzing with life; you were a desolate, pitch-dark moon. I was the expectant mother gazing at a belly round as a pot and dreaming rose-colored dreams; you were the blessed arrival, heralded. Yes — I had waited for him too, for months; I had dreamed of the day he would look at me and smile; I had longed with every cell in my body for the moment he would call me "mother." Neither he could look at my face, nor could you. Neither he could love me, nor could you. What remained of him was a companion I carry with me always — a child of seven who never grows older, whose plump cheeks flush red as a tomato in the cold, whose eyes shine bright. What remained of you was a derelict city, a cold planet, and a terrifying desert night crawling with scorpions and snakes. You were both lame young rabbits left on the far bank of the Yangtze River. While following you I ran downstream along the river, pushing aside with the back of my hand the brambles and brush that rose up before me full of hope and longing, paying no heed to the thorns that tore my skin and drew blood, sometimes marveling at how close you both were to me, sometimes taking heart as the riverbed narrowed — but in the end I could not change the wretched fate of my adventure, which ended in the East China Sea. And do you know what hurt most, Naci, my dear teacher? On sleepless nights, the silky face of that seven year old merging with the stubble on your face; his eyes appearing in your face, your lips appearing in his; my mind leaving me entirely; and all that confusion ending with me finding myself standing at three in the morning, elbows resting on the cold iron of the balcony railing, weeping in silence...

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[1] Chaos, Muddled Confusion. In Chinese mythology, it is known as “being of primordial chaos, known for his six feet, four wings, and featureless face.”

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

[3] Jiǎnzhǐ is the traditional Chinese art of paper cutting. It involves cutting intricate designs from paper, often using scissors or a blade, and is typically used for decoration during festivals and celebrations, such as the Lunar New Year or weddings.

[4] Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tiananmen

The Second chapter can be read here: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (2) 

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 colors. 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.

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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.

-          …