Beyond Exile (4)

 

Published in February 2026

Previous Chapter: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (3)

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.         

                                                       4

Well then, there you have it, my dear Naci. Besides having fun, we've got through the first ten years together. Isn’t that amazing how I am adorning my story with details that wouldn't even occur to you if you sat down to write your own memoirs? Well, one must look at the master one has chosen for oneself; our reputation comes from him, our respect goes to him, our pride derives from following — in every sense! — his footsteps... I have passed through your school of thought, and just as you like to show off when speaking of Orhan Pamuk by saying "There isn't a single book he's published that I haven't read," I take pride in myself by saying "Everything you have written and published, or kept somewhere, or even forgotten — I have read it all." Do you know what I am most curious about? How I would love to see the astonishment that will spread across your face when you read this text, the paranoid fear that will fill your chest, the drops that will blur your eyes, the hairs that will stand on and rise in revolt! Perhaps that too will happen — let us first finish, and when I press the final key let us see who has been flung where; then we can come back and look at this paragraph again...

What saved you from boxing was not, this time, a chain that caught around your foot and sent your body tumbling head first into a sewer pit. You were in such a wretched state that I could have reconciled myself even to your becoming a cannabis or gambling addict, on the sole condition that you never took so much as a single flick for the rest of your life or ever again looked at a picture of a naked woman. Fortunately, the mechanism that controls the wheels of the universe did not, this time, send you off in pursuit of some pointless madness or some worthless occupation. On the contrary — it had decided to give a little breathing room to that formless, soft dough that had been knocked about for years, hurled from wall to wall, pushed into one shape after another without knowing what it wanted; to fill its breath with a gentle breeze and restore stability; to let it taste the least thorny face of peace. And so, it placed Wang Laoshi[1] in your path as you were leaving a boxing match one evening. That day, the intimacy that began with an invitation of "Shall we have a coffee?" transformed into hours-long exchanges on WeChat, a mutual understanding from a distance, and small gifts left on each other's desks in the mornings. What struck you most was a long message she wrote to you in which she said: "We Chinese are not as lucky as you foreigners living in China. We don't need to make any special effort to get beaten. The rising cost of living and the difficulty of raising children land such a punch in our stomachs every morning that when we fall into bed and pass out in the evening, it's all we can do to come back to ourselves. The next morning, just when we think we've recovered, another punch, bent double in the fetal position again, another ache that will last all day. We are left alone with our fate in an endless cycle — unchanged since Camel Xiangzi[2] — which you understand, or can never understand... Have you read Lao She?" That day you felt close to her, and decided to make an effort to get to know her better. That day was also the day you decided never to set foot in the boxing gym again.

The relationship you formed with this potato-faced, elephant-legged, bottle-bottom-spectacled, brush-haired, stocky woman — thirty-five years old, previously married and divorced, living in a thirty-square-meter apartment with her seven-year-old son Xiao Ma — has no story of any great glory. You were already working at the same school as this woman, whose full name was Wang Chenxi (Rising Sun): she taught Chinese Language and Literature to the second-year high school students, you taught mathematics to the third and fourth years. You had also been made responsible for managing the other foreign teachers at the school — in your words, an unexpected promotion that amounted to a rare case of "absence of the men of quality." Inevitably there were times when you ended up at the same table at lunch and talked about this and that, when you invigilated each other's end-of-term exams, and when after the school's Chinese New Year parties you escaped from the crowd and sat at the two ends of a long sofa talking about literature and life. According to what you wrote in your journal you had at first used the words "the purest, the most tender-hearted, the most gaze-dropping, heart-wrenching woman in the world" about her. You had also inscribed the phrase "A 100% real woman" — whose meaning I could not understand for a long time. The conditions that attracted you in other women — sparkling eyes, flawless skin, long slender fingers, straight black hair, full lips — did not apply to her. Quite the opposite: the absence of these qualities in her pleased you, and on top of that the woman's being a typical Chinese made her interesting to you. The way she wore long light-colored skirts, never put anything on herself except shirts buttoned up to the neck, trotted down the corridors in low-heeled shoes like a high school girl, laughed uproariously at a simple joke of yours with a voice resembling a man's — and above all the way she displayed wise manners that gave the impression of having been carefully and finely crafted, of knowing how to keep a man — had drawn you in. You hadn't noticed, but I had long since mapped the transformation in you by tracing your changing tastes. The forty-year-old Naci Bey, vice-principal, who had begun going out with Wang Laoshi, was not the same person as young Naci the teacher who had first set foot in China at the age of twenty-eight. In fact even the Naci Bey who had fallen in love with Canary at thirty-three and normalized follies in her presence was a different person. You were aging, changing; your priorities were shifting from their places like the great plates beneath the earth's crust, slowly, heavily, slotting into new hollows in each other's places after violent earthquakes. The young warrior seeking adventure, ready to sacrifice a good night's sleep for a moment's pleasure, willing to travel thousands of kilometers for a few hours of company, was gone. In his place there was a Naci who waited for things to fall into his lap, who spent the after-class hours of his afternoons dreaming of warm evening meals, who shut himself in his room during his own hours and did not want to be disturbed — who preferred walking to running, who preferred a two-hour walk up Nanshan to an all-day climb up Wutongshan, and most importantly who instead of writing until exhaustion whenever the mood took him now wrote every day at the same hour, sitting on the same chair, looking at the same wall, drinking the same green tea, listening to the same French chanson music, writing the same amount. And this Naci was the happiest, most cheerful, most productive, most beautiful Naci that Chinese soil had ever seen. And that was why I was as happy as you were.

Why should I lie — after Canary and the dozens of fleeting fancies scattered between like chicken feed, for the first time I was not jealous of you for being with a woman. The fundamental reason for this ease of mine was that I knew you did not love Wang Laoshi. Yours was a partnership built on mutual interest. Small fish that feed by cleaning the teeth of sharks... A union kept from unravelling by Sunday morning encounters, once a week, slow as old freight trains pulling out of a platform, a passionless, desireless chug-chug coupling. I couldn't have objected to this either. She was not a woman to be jealous of — she was a woman to be respected and admired. After all, she knew at least as well as you did that you had savings accumulated — because you spent money on nothing — but had nothing else to speak of. Despite nearly twenty years of uninterrupted effort and half a dozen published books in literature, the thing you valued most in life, you had not managed to reach any point worth noting. The big publishers were still turning their noses up at your work. You kept struggling to find new publishers each time, and in the end were forced to work with publishers whose names were barely known. You were just as unknown and unrecognized a writer at thirty-nine as you had been as a university student. That famous grievance of yours — "I've been writing for twenty years but I can't find twenty readers" — was telling a lot, in terms of the value you assigned yourself in life. Wang Chenxi had placed an opportunity before you — to change course, to reconsider your priorities in life, to free yourself at least from the feelings of guilt and incompleteness gnawing at you. You would not miss this opportunity; like men who after a wayward youth settle down and begin to earn the respect of those around them once they are tied down, you would hold on to the thick wrist she extended. There was perhaps no passion, no desire, no pleasure in that wrist — but there was silence, stability, and peace. That this woman, who always preferred to be underneath in bed and to be dominated — at first you thought this was a sign of laziness, but later you decided it was a carefully and intelligently made choice — made almost every decision outside the bedroom pleased you. "Until today I have used my own head and gotten nowhere. Perhaps if I can act with the mind of someone who can observe me from the outside I can get on an even keel," you had written on a page of your journal. Around the same time, in a story you wrote, you had put into the mouth of one of the female characters: "If a man is the head, a woman is the neck — let the poor thing think he's thinking freely and making his own decisions; in the end it's the neck that decides which direction the head turns, what it looks at and what it doesn't." Thus, with the slowness of a blind person learning to read with their fingertips, you had accustomed yourself to the warm waters of the tropical sea into which you had fallen. This time you had somehow managed to overcome those giant waves that at every attempt had kicked you in the chest and sent you tumbling back to shore and had reached — for the time being at least — the calmest, most comfortable, most tranquil region of the ocean. Life was no longer, for you, a monster to be struggled against and defeated at all costs. You were like Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump — life, which you had hated for years, had sent you an envoy who would enable you to love it again. Just as that Vietnamese woman had filled the place of Dan's severed leg with her tenderness and love, Wang Chenxi — in the woman's garments she wore as the heir of a civilization thousands of years old, with almost no effort at all — would dress your wounds, inject fresh blood into your near-desiccated heart, and turn you into a sweet donkey galloping and leaping through boundless meadows under a blue sky.

Twelve months after you began going out with Wang Laoshi — that is, on the first anniversary of your relationship — you proposed to her. She accepted on the condition that you would not have a wedding, that you would teach mathematics to her son — you had already started the lessons — and that you would move to a larger apartment farther from the school. And so, your marital adventure began. Both of you left your cramped and damp apartments in Nanshan and took a three-bedroom flat in a new building in Futian. What followed was the official registration, a pleasant dinner with a few close friends, and a lovemaking session that fired like a silenced pistol — so as not to wake the child in the other room — and dragged on as unnecessarily as the evening news. I have a copy of the photograph placed at the head of your bedroom. Two hands touching as they hold the red marriage certificate, a pair of cheerful faces looking into the camera with a breezy smile, her hair braided on both sides, and on your head a moss-green comrade's cap reminiscent of the 1970s... So ordinary, so unremarkable — you had presented this experience as a simple act as going to the corner shop in the morning to buy freshly fried yóutiáo[3] and soy milk and heading home. Even the way you informed your mother of the situation had become legendary for being a single-line message. "Mum, I got married. The bride is sweet as can be, a very capable Chinese woman. When I come in the summer you'll meet her." Your mother's reply had come three days later. "May it be for the best." You had not been surprised by this late and calm reply, because around that time your father's lung and heart conditions had flared up and they were going from one hospital to the other. In the Sunday evening phone calls you held with your mother once a week, she would say "What will I do if he dies, my son. Your sister is in Eskişehir with her children, you're in China. How am I to live alone in this house? Won't these ash-grey walls, these old pieces of furniture, these soot-bottomed pots I cook in every day close in on me? All right, he was never a good father to you or a good husband to me. But still, he gave me you; he didn't leave and go; he didn't exclude your sister as another man's child; he protected and watched over us; he didn't run away and disappear like other people's good-for-nothing husbands — now if he dies on me after all these years, what will I do all alone?" — and she could not hold back her tears; and despite the radish-sized lumps knotting your throat and the insincerity seeping into your voice, you had said "He won't die, Mum, don't worry. When I come in the summer we'll look after him together. He'll live at least another ten years." Yet your father would die three months after your marriage; you would rush to make it to the funeral; you would hire a Turkmen woman — her name was Muhabbet — to stay with your mother, to keep her company and look after the cleaning, and then turn back to your new family. From what I could gather from your writings you had felt almost no grief at your father's death. In a story you wrote as soon as you returned from Türkiye you had a woman who has lost her father say "We have lost the father we never had!" In fact in almost none of the works you had written up to that day had the father figure appeared as a warm, compassionate, responsible, or hardworking character. In my monthly reports, when covering this subject, I had opened a special page for your father's death and written at length — part truth, part imagination — about your broken relationship with him. Despite my elaborate writing, nothing in your life seemed to have changed. You were as distant and cold on the subject as a driver who, after sending his crashed car to the repair shop, waits for the insurance money to come through — not at all like a man who has lost his father. After all, you now had a wife you were obliged to look after, a child whose affection and attention you would not withhold even if he was not yours — a moral obligation at the very least — and an elderly, lonely mother who rang your phone whenever she grew tired of Muhabbet. You had been promoted in an instant from a stray meteor to a sun around which planets revolved. And so, as you entered your twelfth year in China, there was a Naci the teacher who had been kneaded by entirely different dynamics, who had to some degree rescued his consciousness from the mud and grime that had clung to his trouser legs over the passing years, who surveyed his surroundings with the appetite of a child who, waking from a prolonged feverish illness, immediately cries out "I'm starving!"

---

[1] Teacher Wang. it is common in China to address colleagues by their surname and professional title.

[2] The classic novel by Lao She, published in 1936, depicting the tragic life of a Beijing rickshaw puller. One of the foundational works of modern Chinese literature.

[3] A long, golden, lightly salted fried dough stick, a staple of Chinese breakfasts, typically eaten with soy milk or rice porridge.

Beyond Exile (3)

  

Published in February 2026

Previous Chapter: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (2)      

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.                          

                                                             3

It was in your sixth year that the true adventure began — the half-mad escapade, shining like a winter sun without ever truly giving warmth, would bring you closer to marriage than you had ever come, yet from which you would ultimately turn back at the altar. You had found a Spanish girl who matched you in height, in temperament, in spirit. Though she wasn't entirely Spanish either — she was from the Canary Islands. She had come to Shenzhen to do a master's degree and was for now learning Chinese. Do you remember how her curly hair would leap out from behind her ears every so often, and how it would drive you wild with delight? That small, shadowed hollow where her shoulder ended and her neck began — what an abundant spring it was, one you could never tire of looking at, one that with her every movement sent you tumbling to the threshold of entirely new universes of pleasure. When she gazed at you with those raw hazelnut-green eyes, when her olive-colored skin — through which light seemed to pass effortlessly— touched yours, when the golden-yellow quince-down on her arms caught your eye at the most unexpected moments, you ceased to be yourself and surrendered your stricken body to the warm river of divine pleasures at some unknown point beyond time and space. But most of all when, after cracking salty sunflower seeds until her tongue had gone as red as hot iron in a furnace, she slipped it into your mouth and let you suck it — Damn slutty Europeans, they really know their business! — your mind would shatter into pieces, the wiring in your brain would short-circuit, and you would enter a festival mode of infinite breadth, like a chronic beggar who has chanced upon a wealthy house he knows he hasn't deserved knocking at its door. Canary had become your excuse to visit other cities in China — some of them for the second time. You went to Xi'an, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xiamen, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Chengdu with her. You saw those cities through your own eyes and also through hers. You tasted the food of those places with your own tongue and also with hers. The passionate devotion between you was not merely a meeting of minds — your bodies too were as impatient, as urgent, and as unstoppable with each other as the opposite poles of a magnet. The first year you spent together was as reckless and fiery as punching holes in social norms, expanding the existing holes to preposterous dimensions. Kisses in the middle of the street in broad daylight, near-final physical intimacies in the park, quick encounters in a deserted corner of a car park, making love after midnight on the beach at Dameixia on a stretch of sand half-sheltered by rocks, to the accompaniment of waves that gently kissed the shore — it was unclear who was imitating whom! These were behaviors you would not have considered becoming in yourself before you knew Canary, things you would have disapproved of in others. For someone so shy, so conservative, so accustomed to shaping his every move according to the answer to the question "what will people say?" — what you were experiencing was a revolution. She had not accepted you as you were; from the first day she had set about kneading the dough she had been handed and giving it a new consistency and shape. And it was precisely for this reason that you had become attached to her with a firm chain unlike anything that had bound you to anyone before. The moment those chains would begin to frighten you would come much later — when the fire had lost its heat and you had entered the phase of making do with the warmth of embers.

You had told no one, but I know you found Canary on a reasonably reputable dating site. The reader who has followed the story carefully up to this point will already have understood that nothing is surprising in this. I was following not only you but everyone and everything that came into contact with your life. I called them Naci's derivatives, and I regarded these second-order Nacis who had received their share of you as equations to be solved. I knew that the woman who struck up a "where did you get that coffee?" conversation with you in the lift for no reason at all was a recently divorced widow with two little children; that the masseuse woman on the card you picked up from the ground and put in your pocket was working illegally in China — she was deported thanks to me; that the physics teacher from Guangzhou who brought you a mug decorated with kangaroo pictures from Australia had bought it not at a flea market in Melbourne but at an ordinary shop near her home; that the upstairs neighbor who kicked your bicycle and broke the phone holder had his scooter chain snap in three places two days later — one might call this karma; and that the Russian brute who got into a verbal fight with you at The Glass Cage and tried to beat you up had an envelope delivered to his home two days after the incident, full of photographs of him with his mistress... A person who knew all this knew where your one and only sweetheart had been found, who her people were, her previous relationships, her family's financial situation — there is no rule that says a girl won't be a gold digger just because you're not rich; they'll take everything down to your marrow and vanish without a trace — where her siblings were studying and what she was hiding from whom, all before you went on your first date with her. I knew all of this, approved of her the way a grandmother approves of her grandchild's friend, and watched in silence.

Canary was beautiful, intelligent, and chronically lonely just like you — what else would she be doing on a dating site? Being alone for a long time and not talking to anyone didn't bother her. In places where she felt safe she loved to laugh and to make others laugh; she knew the measure of both humor and seriousness, and would not waste her breath on empty words just for the sake of saying something when silence was called for. When she spoke her intelligence sparkled like a diamond, dimming all the other sources of light around her. This was what had affected you the most. A clever woman finding you attractive, listening to you when the occasion called for it, and at other times challenging you with the role of a teacher and showing you how things really were — you liked all of this. Because she was closely interested in philosophy, art, and especially politics, you always had something to talk about. She even assigned you homework sometimes. After saying "Next week we're going to discuss Afghanistan. Read the texts I've sent you. All right? We can't understand the world without understanding Afghanistan, let alone China" — she would kiss you on the cheek and then immediately disappear, hopping and skipping, into the city's bright avenues, like a smooth thin stone that after skipping countless times across the surface of the water plunges at last into the dark waters of the lake through the shimmer of phosphorescence — and this pleased you, stroked your pride, and made you ask yourself "What have I done to deserve such a perfect woman?" You had a well-balanced relationship — passionate in the right measure, calm in the right measure, sincere and warm in the right measure. So much so that for the first time in your life you had told your mother you had a girlfriend. How happy the poor woman was — she had said over the phone "Infidel or not, it doesn't matter, bring her here and we'll have the wedding!" Then she had started calling you every day. I knitted a sweater for my daughter-in-law; what did you eat with my daughter-in-law today; where are you going with my daughter-in-law this weekend; send me a photo so your aunt can see her too — she would pester you constantly with one absurd pretext after another. Things had reached such a point that you were no longer answering two out of every three of her calls. Despite your mother's hopes, Canary's happiness, and the expectations of the close friends to whom you had introduced yourselves as a couple, after a relationship that lasted one year, six months, and twenty-three days; you separated through a stormy fight. The night Canary wiped her saliva and tears on the cushions of your sofa, and you drank until dawn at Insomnia and passed out under the table — I lay awake with a joy I could barely contain, as though a baby ready to be born was moving in my belly. And that night I understood, with the inevitable bewilderment of a prisoner who wakes to find shackles placed on his feet while he slept, from that point on in my life I would no longer be free — that from that day forward I would always "live compelled to you," would "keep your name fixed in my mind like a nail," and of course would "always warm my insides with you"[1]...

At the root of your fight were two main causes. The first was your habit, never got tiring of it wherever you went and with Canary present too, of singing the praises of a life without children. The girl was of course not saying let's get married tomorrow and as soon as we're married let's produce three bouncing babies. She considered it pointless, even blather, to discuss this when there wasn't yet an egg let alone a nest; that was all. When the time came it could be thought about, discussed between you, and decided. When the time came, that is — or if the time came! But you had settled the matter in your head. It was not the difficulty of raising a child, the expense of it, the weight of the responsibility, that frightened you. It was the possibility that the child that would come might not resemble you. In the social gatherings you attended together you would always voice this, repeating the same things over and over like a parrot with a tongue but no faculty of judgment: what if the child grows up to develop a passion for football, what if he listens to pop songs, what if he doesn't like mathematics, thinks cheap literature is a treasure, turns out to be a boor who doesn't follow the rules of grammar... What if he prefers streets without cats to streets with cats, what if he gets mired in drugs, what if he's stupid, what if he doesn't like reading books, what if God forbid he turns out to be a dimwit obsessed with postmodern art. What if he becomes a fake leftist in a green parka with a slogan always on his lips whose real aim is to get every girl he finds into bed; what if he becomes a counterfeit conservative of unknown convictions with worry beads in one hand, untaxed rental income in his accounts, and the fantasy of the neighbor's newly pubescent daughter forever in his heart; what if he becomes a wretch who blames everyone else for all the defeats of his life, a schemer who resorts to underhanded tricks when he can't get what he wants... Your tactless, grinning remarks — as unnecessary as Turkish coffee without its foam on top— had so suffocated the girl that she had taken to mentioning the subject in her messages to her friends and had begun to voice the possibility that separation was also an option. The last straw was the sudden resurgence of a jealousy crises in you whose existence even I had not previously been aware of. Messages you saw on her phone, which you understood from them being in Spanish had come from a man, had somehow taken hold of your mind, and without listening to a single one of the girl's explanations you had begun to storm and rage. No matter how much the girl said "wait, let me explain, would you just listen for a moment?" — it was no use. You laid into her relentlessly, like an opportunist — and this opportunism will appear before us once more at the end of our story — for whom the long-awaited excuse had finally come to him of its own accord. So much so that even I was surprised when I first witnessed it, wondering at the source of this fury and stubbornness in you. What then — had you been hiding a narrow-minded, jealous, and cruel man inside you all these years, ready to spring up the moment conditions allowed? Canary might have thought so, but I had always been trained to check what lay behind the scenes, to concern myself not with appearances but with the hidden truth behind them.

I thought about it for a long time, focused on the texts you had written before the separation, on the events that had unfolded at the school where you worked, on the subjects you discussed with the handful of friends you corresponded with outside of Canary. And finally, with the great joy and pride of a stubborn detective solving a skillfully committed crime, I arrived at the following conclusion. You never touched on this subject in your journal, but in a short story you had written and finished a few months before the separation you had grazed obliquely, in veiled fashion, the storm brewing inside you. There was a man in the story who wanted to become a Buddhist monk and distance himself from all expectations of life. With your characteristic cunning, on the day the man decides to withdraw from the world after reading a few books on Buddhism, you arrange for a puppy to cross his path. On a cold and rainy day, thrown outside, its black eyes shining like a candle behind frosted glass under the pale street lamp, making itself known from among the bushes with a whimpering sound because it couldn't even manage to bark properly — the man who takes this wretched little dog home goes on, after that day, to live the three most beautiful, most happy, most peaceful years of his life. After these magnificent three years, one day out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, he begins to claim that this relationship of mutual love and loyalty between himself and the dog actually constitutes an obstacle before the great goals he has set for himself — that the dog is distracting him with a false happiness, preventing him, through the genuine friendship it offers, from seeing the true face of life filled with sorrow and grief — and starts looking for ways to be rid of the dog. After a few clumsy attempts, using the excuse that he has developed an allergy to dog hair that makes breathing difficult and that the doctor has told him to get rid of it — ignoring the dog's devoted and moist gaze — he gives the dog away to the first man who responds to the notice he posts online. You cannot know how frightened I was when I first read the story, thinking you were going to kill this beautiful dog just as you had killed that bird!

This story, whose depth I had failed to grasp on a first reading, came back to life for me like dry soil finding water again after repeated readings once you and Canary had separated — it opened my eyes, untangled the knots in my understanding. It turned out there had been a great prison behind it all, made up of fears and anxieties, and I hadn't seen it. You are someone who is afraid of attachment, who shrinks from being sought by others, who is terrified of being pointed at, who quickly tires of and begins to hate the things that bind you — even when those things have introduced your body and your mind to unparalleled pleasures you have never before tasted. When the time comes to free yourself from these objects of captivity that you have turned into objects of resentment, you manufacture all manner of excuses, prepare the ground for those excuses to come to light, and when the ground is ripe you don't miss the opportunity and deliver the final blow. A clumsy lover in your place would have retreated to the cliché "You deserve a better man than me." Since you did not stoop to such flippancy, you came up with a far more intricate, far more convoluted plan — you outwitted, with your cunning and guile, the woman whose intelligence you admired. Much later, when this incident came back to my mind, I also thought that the problem in you was not only an inability to attach. Just as the man in the story blamed the dog, you showed a tendency to blame everything that provided you with comfort. In the bluntest of terms, it was a case of comfort getting on your nerves. This was a subject you returned to frequently in your journal. For you, the writer — man or woman — was a being who had a quarrel with the world, whose fist was always clenched, who could not be happy even when they wanted to, who moved through their brain among scorpions, half-mystical and half-real, half-worldly and half-otherworldly, like Pegasus. That the stories you wrote while you were with Canary were all feeble, inconsequential things — and I was not the only one who noticed. You too knew very well that what you were writing fell far, far short of your real talent.

Your body was ablaze but in the recesses of your consciousness an ice age was underway. To melt these glaciers you needed to bring yourself to your senses with controlled pain, to inject by shock treatment whatever portion of the world's sorrow was yours into your veins, to return — before long — to the bed of nails you had prepared for yourself, without prolonging your small escapes beyond what was necessary. In the end, you were a 21st century dervish who could not stop fixating on things, who when he could not find something to fixate on fixated on not being able to find something to fixate on, and who flogged his own bare back with the guilt created by the sterility of this cycle. Isn't that so — am I wrong, Naci Bey? If I'm wrong, say I'm wrong! You can't, can you? You never will. By the way, while it occurs to me — let me also say this. You were not afraid of a possible child failing to resemble you — on the contrary, you were afraid of the child resembling you. I deduced this too from the story with the dog. Ah, those stories of yours! If your journals reported from the ten percent of the iceberg above the surface, the stories broke off pieces from the ninety percent below and, after dressing them up beyond recognition, hurled them to the surface of the water. The real Naci who carried and bore the real weight, existing quietly at a depth no human eye could reach, was there — swimming stealthily in those dark waters. Nobody knew this; I knew. I, who was as close to you as your own subconscious... The main character in that story was noticing that the dog's habits were coming to resemble his own more and more, and this disturbed him deeply. You too were anxious that a child you might have would, like you, turn its back on reality and live in a world of fantasy; you were worried that it might be unable to form direct, honest, and sincere relationships with people; you were terrified it might prefer narrow lichen-covered pavements to wide avenues, dark mold-smelling rooms to airy well-lit homes, the bleak world of books to the buzzing world outside. That was why you didn't want a child — the possibility that the work produced might turn out to be a freak of nature frightened you, robbed you of sleep...

Despite having arrived at all these conclusions, I could not nourish the slightest ill feeling toward you inside me. These were actions your mind and the other defense mechanisms you had developed against life had made you commit. But was there not, behind these actions, a cowardly child — needy of love and attention, incapable of contributing anything to the world beyond writing — this too a deficiency if you think about it carefully! — who had convinced himself that even by writing he was good for nothing, a child of weak will? You only wanted to be loved and admired, but from a distance, like polar bears — preferably through binoculars... The beautiful things you and Canary had shared coming to an end so suddenly had of course saddened you — what habit, when torn from our constitution, fails to leave a bleeding wound behind it? You were aware of the inevitability of pain, but if the last resort for a throbbing rotten tooth is to pull it, there isn't much you can do about it. The thought of putting the extracted tooth back in its place would itself have been a piece of dreaming. You tried, actually — a few times you said let's start over, let's rebuild our love without repeating the mistakes we made in the past, let's return to those beautiful days. But you couldn't manage it. Even if you repair a shattered vase with the finest glue in the world, it is still a broken vase. This you knew, Canary knew, and of course I knew too. The question was not whether the vase would be as good as before once repaired — the question was that both of you were certain the vase would fall and shatter again. The thing your mother said when she heard of the separation — "A bum unused to clothing won't keep its knickers on" — was probably the most apt summary of the situation. Who can know a son better than his mother? Except perhaps the spy who carries him in her mind as though he were her own son, who worries for him, who rejoices when the occasion calls for it and grieves when it calls for that, who follows his every step like a shadow...

Yes, Naci, my dear teacher! You were an olive-eyed, snow-white polar bear with a muddled head and a warm heart, and I was your documentarian — positioned hundreds of meters ahead of you inside a well-designed, sturdy camouflage, using every technological means available, watching your every movement and extracting meaning from those movements. Despite all those warnings of leave the natural world to its own chaos, don't interfere, don't disturb the balance — hasn't it been seen that a wildlife observer develops compassion for the animals he or she observes, becomes emotionally attached to them, even on occasion crosses the line and shows them favoritism, protects and watches over them against others, and on generous days leaves food here and there? It has been seen, of course! Hasn't it?

After Canary left you couldn't find yourself for a while. I thought you would lose control like a motorcycle with a blown rear tire and crash into a roadside tree and be written off — but you, like a bicycle with a slowly deflating front tire, wobbled on but continued your journey. You got back on your feet far more quickly than I had expected — but it was most likely precisely for this reason, because you got up too quickly, that your head began to spin, you began to see your surroundings in a blur, and like the hapless who reach for any branch when they fall, you began to look for hope in the thorniest of branches. I expected you to fill the void left by Canary with one-night stands, death-defying escapades, or weekends spent drunk. Instead, in a move that surprised even me, you became obsessed with pornography. For a long time I could not understand what a man who in his first seven years in China had not watched a single pornographic film found in videos that were all beginnings and endings known in advance, all identical to each other, artificial and contrived — their artificiality derivable not so much from the actors' incompetence as from their not even deigning to pretend. I didn't want to understand it, frankly! I accepted the situation as one of men's perennial weaknesses. A few months and it'll pass, I thought — but this time I was wrong. Like a sparrow that has dived in through an open window, every time you tried to leave you would collide with one wall or another, injuring your wing, your beak, your feet, and gradually losing hope that any way out existed. What were you looking for? The eyes of Canary that shone transparent as glass in the mornings yet toward evening, perhaps under the weight of all the concrete masses she had seen, darkened to a deeper shade? Or her hands, soft as a cat's belly; her honey-colored elbows; her long thin fingers; the trace of a smallpox vaccination she wore on her thin arms like a battle scar; the tortoise tattoo positioned where her back ended and her buttocks began, that seemed to cry out "slow down, mister!"... Your adventure, which began with simple romantic videos, was gradually increasing in intensity, hardening, becoming steeped in violence and pain, taking on a form that would come close to dragging human dignity through the mud. You were spending almost all the time left over from the school where you worked in front of the computer, before one wretched film after another. While eating, while drinking beer at home — you had even stopped going out to bars with friends — on sleepless nights while trying to sleep, your eyes were always on the screen. Accompanied by the guilt that was piling up inside you and becoming increasingly sticky, you would sink further into the armchair where you sat, shrinking like a drying mushroom, growing smaller and smaller and embedding yourself into the depths of the fabric. So much so that I could no longer recognize you. You were not this kind of person, my dear Naci — you were a wise figure, loved and respected by those around you, whose knowledge and refinement were heeded even if you were not understood at the level you deserved. Did this vile, this wretched, this degrading situation suit you in the least? Like a wretch sinking into quicksand in the desert, the more you struggled the deeper you sank into that bottomless silent pit. As you stared with a glazed mind at the simulated expressions of pleasure on the faces on the screen, as you fixed your gaze with the eyes of a derelict building's windows on those noisy coupling scenes, as you filled the final moments of the daily quota each time with films featuring, by different routes, large-breasted, narrow-hipped, blonde European women — what were you dreaming of, I wonder? What kinds of satisfaction that I could never understand were you reaching? What missing part were you deluding yourself into thinking you were completing with what incompatible piece?

Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Just as I had almost given up on you and was about to switch to minimum-effort mode in following you, you went with a teacher friend's invitation to a boxing gym near your home. That day you took your first step on the road to being rid of the curse of pornography. It turned out yours was a salvation story — or a story of failing to be saved — in the manner of one who, having fallen into the sea, clings to a snake. What do I know about the thousands of different methods men store in their arsenals to cover up their weaknesses, to punish themselves, worst of all to turn the life they're living into a cesspit? Why don't you solve your problems by being silent and crying, the way we women do! But no — you have to fight, have to thrash about inside it, have to bare your teeth at a life that doesn't give a damn about your obsessions. And in the end, you will spend your lives crushed under a pride that you let no one else trample but which tramples you!

Boxing had made you notice one of life's greatest paradoxes. You can only forget one pain with a greater pain; only by living for a long time near the uppermost level of suffering your body can bear, you learn to control pain, to have authority over it. Teaching pain who is slave and who is master comes not from running away from it but from confronting it, taking it inside you and growing accustomed to living with it while in every circumstance not allowing it to take possession of your body. However much you tried to embellish it with such grand-sounding words, what you were doing would amount to nothing more than a form of masochism. Naci the teacher, who while watching pornography had liked to look down sadistic slopes, was continuing — once again surprising everyone, the Provincial Intelligence Director had even reacted with an "Oh my goodness!" — to pass the time with the most unlikely solutions. You were the individually reduced proof of Adorno's phrase "Extremes meet." It was a situation like socialists who promise equality and fascists who promise peace meeting in dictatorship once they have seized power. You didn't have much to do with the middle ground. Those who were middling — the ordinary — you either looked down on or didn't see at all. Your business was always with the extremes — you either shivered at the peaks of pleasure or burned in the depths of pain.

At first you had loved the pain the punching bag left in your fingers, wrists, arms, and shoulders. For someone whose idea of sport was running and hiking, and who knew what knee and back pain were, this had been a sudden and dramatic leap. Even when you came home late at night without the strength to write two sentences in your journal, passing out on the living room couch with the beers you'd drunk on an empty stomach — you never neglected to leave yourself voice notes on your phone! Happiness was hidden in exhaustion, apparently — because the tired person doesn't ask themselves whether they are happy or not! The nobility of life lay in the courage to punish oneself. Everyone could punish others, judge others. What mattered — what would elevate a person above the average — was the attitude one would adopt in the face of pain. A person who could not manage to torture their own body and mind would be of not a pinhead's worth of use to those around them, to their country, to the world. Of course, your love of boxing did not remain at the level of punching bags. After six months of intensive training, pushed on by the Serbian coach, you found yourself one day in the middle of the ring. The man was of course going to goad you into competing. He was doing it so you would come to the gym more, pay him more money, and as you took part in matches he could pocket tens of thousands of yuan in extra income. How did you not see through this game, ah my naive and sentimental writer! Let alone the man making money from this bothering you — you are Turkish; how did you believe a Serb would work for your good, how did you fall for it, how did you get taken in? The strange thing was that in nearly two years of matches you had managed to win almost none of them. And still you didn't stop. Your mouth and nose got bent out of shape in those matches, a tooth broke, an eyebrow split, your lip burst in three separate places, your shoulders turned purple with bruising... And yet each time you left the ring happier, more hopeful, more cheerful. Being beaten, losing yourself in the succession of blows, sometimes holding your loosely clenched fists up to protect your face or throwing a couple of punches into the air just to look as though you were fighting — all of this was more than enough for you. You had not managed to make anyone happy through writing or through loving, but you could make hundreds of spectators and your trainer happy by taking a beating. Your opponent was happy, those who had bet their money on your opponent were happy, the gym owner was happy... Only the few adventurers who had placed their money on you in hopes of a win, intoxicated by the prospect of ten-to-one odds, were losing. And they were wretches who resembled you, and they deserved to lose!

Did you know I came to a few of those matches? I was the woman sitting quietly at the back, feeling every blow that landed on your body in her own belly, chest, and temples. Each time I had left before being able to see the end of the match. Each time making wishes that this would be the last, making my way through the crowd, stepping on people's feet and bumping their shoulders, apologizing, please forgive me, let this be the last, I won't come again...

In the end, after this pointless beating phase lasting slightly more than two years, you emerged a wiser man — one who had come to his senses, covered the surface of his pain with hard shells, and matured. At least you convinced yourself you had arrived at such a state — or, as was always your way, you gave up boxing because some new divine voice happened to cross your path and you followed it instead. You were now thirty-eight; your thoughts had been refined along with your body, and your fundamental thoughts about life had taken their place in the ground as unshakeable principles. You could not spend another ten years taking beatings. Besides, the memory of Canary by now was like the image of a bird forgotten in the middle of a city destroyed by an earthquake, its status — alive or dead — unclear. It had become just any canary, covered in dust, having lost its colors, singing the melodies of songs you could no longer understand when it sang. And so, it would always remain from that point on.

---

[1] These three phrases are from Attila İlhan’s famous poem “I am compelled to you”

Next Chapter: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (4)

Beyond Exile (2)

 

Published in February 2026

The first chapter can be read here: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (1)

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.

                                                     2

The evening I saw you at that bar, making plans for the bicycle trip that you would never take, was exactly six months after the day I was discharged from the hospital. This was the third baby I had lost. For the first time my baby had survived to the eighth month; for the first time I had allowed myself such hope; for the first time I had gone shopping for the baby who was about to be born. It was all false hope but nothing else. I was like a wild animal that had fallen from a tree and broken its leg, moaning helplessly for six months while waiting for death. My body had somehow healed with time — but my mind! I could only put it to sleep with sedatives, and the sound of a baby crying that echoed endlessly through the deep caves inside my head I could silence only, and only, by numbing my brain entirely. I had told myself that if I kept my mind occupied with something else, the swamp in my soul would dry up faster. After three separate sessions with the psychiatrist at the Provincial Intelligence Directorate, the green light had been given for me to continue my assignment where I had left off. Although in the beginning the excitement of watching you had dulled my pain, after a while I had come to understand that the wound in me was of the kind that could never heal. To those strawberry-colored pills that I swallowed three times a day and that turned my mind into the sole of an old shoe, I had simply added your presence — that was all. Now I spent every possible moment trailing you, reading what you wrote, looking at the photographs you took — including the ones you disliked and deleted — listening to the music you never get tired of, poring over with a mixture of astonishment and curiosity the texts you saved under password on your computer, reading the stories and poems you had written long before and trying to find their sources of inspiration, becoming the breath you drew, the water you drank, the view you lost yourself in, the morsel that slid down your throat. And I always asked myself the same question: where was your wound? Where were those wounds you mentioned at the beginning of the memoirs you would write years later — the wounds you believed every foreigner who came here carried — the wounds that did not heal, did not dry up, did not disappear, that kept their glowing embers smoldering deep down like a dormant volcano? Had you buried them so deep that even you could not find them? Or were you saving your secret for the woman in whose arms your frail body would be held, and at the point where your bellies touched, cherry trees bursting into spring blossom would shoot forth, and from the lips she pressed to yours the waters of life would spring — is that who you were saving it for, my esteemed Naci teacher?

Before coming to China, you had taught for five years in Istanbul. Then, with a sudden decision, you had chosen to come to the other end of the world, thousands of kilometers away. Even that was enough to tickle my curiosity! What was it that hurt you? Was your heart broken? Was it that short blonde woman to whom you had dedicated your first acrostic poems — the one who, on hearing your proposal, looked at you the way one looks at a bird with a broken wing and rejected you, then a month later went back to her ex-husband and had a child with him? Did your closest friend — Murat, Çetin, Yeliz, Serhat, Ömer — stab you in the back? Was it your father — that father you didn't love much but put up with for your mother's sake — who was the reason you traveled so far? Or was the resentment stirring inside you aimed at your older sister, who after getting married seemed to have retired from her roles as self-sacrificing, long-suffering, hardworking elder sister? The woman had married, had children, thrown herself into the worry of making ends meet — was she supposed to keep your spirits up as well? Or had you crossed the neighborhood's petty chieftain and been told you'd better not show your face around there any longer? I know about the police baton you took on your head in Taksim, the night you spent in detention during your student years, the way you wept snot and tears at the foot of the military museum wall in Harbiye under the effect of tear gas bombs — but these were not wounds; on the contrary, they were war medals you wore with pride, marks of honor you carried on your chest with pride. What I was looking for was something more insidious, more ancient — something that, the more it was investigated, would prove to rest on absolute deprivation or an undeniable knockout blow. It was hidden either in the misty mornings of your childhood or in the tender summer evenings of your early youth.

But what was it — this wound that kept you alive like an underground river fed by an endless source, neither rotting nor healing, clinging to life beneath a thin crust, breathing in and out — what kind of thing was it, where had it come from, why did it not disappear? For years I searched for the answer to this question. When I found you on deserted streets looking for a bin to throw your cigarette stub into; when you set off on your scooter after school, advancing along the avenues with kamikaze courage, flouting every traffic rule; when you paused while writing a story and glanced at that ever-growing, never-ending list of words — you had told your close friends many times that one of your greatest fears was dying before that list was finished — I always wanted to ask you this question. What was your trouble, Naci? Given that you sat at your computer until three in the morning with a class starting at eight the next day, writing with cigarette-yellowed fingertips, there had to be some trouble, some burden, some affliction that made you feel incomplete, some wild centipede lodged in a corner of your consciousness! Your inability to look new acquaintances in the eye; your tendency to tire quickly of everything you did; the way that even in new places you traveled to you felt oppressed and found yourself longing for your study room smelling of sweat, mold, and damp — those are your words; your fleeing from the bright, noisy festivities offered by cheerful crowds and taking refuge instead in the dark, gloomy, suffocating forests of solitude that books offered...

Did you know that the way I made sense of the sentence you voiced here and there, especially at the drinking table, "There are two driving forces in my life: sense of guilt and sense of incompleteness” changed considerably over the years. At first, I thought the guilt in you rested on a deep tear caused by friction against a hard surface — a tear that would accept no patching. Someone had certainly done something terrible to you, something perhaps not fit to be spoken of; at some time and in some place you had been rubbed against a surface rough as sandpaper and an irreparable rip had opened in the garments that were supposed to cover your intimate parts. Could it have been your stepfather's — your sister's father's — abandonment of your mother? Your real father accusing your sister, who was in primary school at the time, of stealing money from his wallet, and beating her until blood poured from her mouth and nose, on the stairs that smelled of yellow soap and whose automatic light went out every ten seconds— and you being unable to bear it and throwing your tiny frame between them and getting your share of your father's rage? The slap across the face you received from your primary school teacher in front of the whole class? The girl you liked in high school humiliating you in front of everyone, heaping insults on you, and giving you no chance but swallow it all like a bitter syrup without being able to open your mouth... It took me nearly ten years to understand that none of these was the answer. The remaining years were spent making myself accept that the guilt in you was not external but internal — and that therefore my curiosity was no different from the desire to find the bottom of a bottomless well. No, no one had done anything to you. Just as you threw yourself more deeply into the school's affairs just to escape the obligation of writing, you also, in the very same way, wanted to feel more indebted to the world so that you could write. Isn't that so? Because you were indebted and incomplete, you sat down at the desk — dreaming of repaying your debt and filling in the incompleteness you couldn't name — stringing words one after another, and after a while you ground to a halt. When the opening narrowed completely and the blockage turned to despair and hatred, you retreated to your most immediate and accessible comfort — the school's trivial affairs — voluntarily taking on tasks not directly assigned to you, putting your hand under every stone, working yourself to the bone. Because these were well-defined tasks, their boundaries marked in thick lines, tasks for which you could quickly receive approval from someone the moment they were done, or at worst constructive feedback. But writing was not like that and it never would be. How could it be easy to gather up the scraps useful to you from a boundless universe, build palaces from them, and on top of that make those palaces admired by others? To escape this difficulty, you hired out your body and mind, deceiving yourself with the excuse that you were too busy to find time to write. Yet after a while things returned to their natural cycle, as they say the nature of things demands. When you became excessively involved in the school's affairs and the same feelings of guilt and incompleteness wrapped around your heart like a spider's web once more, you plunged again into the world of characters made of words produced from the molasses of your brain. In a tidal process that would last until death, however much you wrote was to your benefit; the more novels, stories, poems, essays you could fit under your arm, the better for you. You were afraid of not being able to write, but you were more afraid of writing — because the more you wrote the better you knew yourself, the more you wrote the more complete you felt, and so inevitably what you thought you had hidden but could not began to resurface when you sat down before the computer. The more you wrote the more you realized how alone you were — in writing, and in lovemaking. You were alone in the arms of that Beijing girl too, moaning like a millstone making rounds; and you were alone while writing the story of the child who, taking revenge for the beatings he received from his father, killed a captured bird by torturing it... I couldn't sleep for a week after reading that story, do you know? Night after night the bird's screams entered my dreams, the feathers torn from its wings as it thrashed about, the blood dripping drop by drop from its beak onto its claws... You had constructed the scene so vividly, that at one point I couldn't help myself — I thought that you, exactly as you had written it, had screamed a bird to death. I couldn't sleep, but you could — because you were relieving yourself by writing, draining the poison inside you outward. What was an antidote for you became my poison, but of course you had no idea. What did you know about anything, really? Were you a small prince in love with his reflection on the surface of the lake, who had tied himself around the waist to the thin branches of the tree behind him so as not to fall in — and did you remain that way throughout all the years you lived here? When branches broke you found new ones, when trees dried up you discovered new trees, but whatever happened you did not allow your reflection on the lake's surface to be disturbed... Well then, what about us, Mr. Naci? What are we to do, we mortals living in what you call "the greatest of all cages"? Is there a prescription written for us too, a way out, at least a syrup to soothe the agony that wraps itself around our souls?

In your first years in China, you had a passion and enthusiasm for new things that surprised even me. You spent time with everyone you met, gathered information about them, took notes in the notebook you always carried with you. You were so full, so eager, so curious that you wrote piles of essays — with mischievous titles too — and had them published in the newspapers of the time in your first two years. In pieces published under titles that defied all logic — Mistresses and Square Mistresses, The First Emperor's Mercury Fever, Censorship Biting Its Own Tail, Solitude Without Lu Xun, Chinese Solutions to China-related Problems, China in the Magic Lamp, Yu Hua's Clichéd Palaces, The Prodigal Poet Xu Zhimo, Mo Yan or the Nobel Prize as Atonement, Tiny Powerful Waves: Wang Xiaobo, Can Lao She Make Tea?[1] — it was plain as day that you were drawn to Chinese literature and culture, to Chinese history, to the question of Chinese identity, that these subjects excited you. This passionate period, which lasted two, perhaps three years, gradually calmed; you grew accustomed to China and what it contained. The realization that every new face you met resembled the ones before, that every city you visited was as tedious as the ones you had already visited, that every entertainment you attended bore the same noisy, festive resemblance to the ones you had attended before, appeared in your heart like a festering wound. In place of the sharp wit and amusing pen of those early writings, there remained a dignified Naci who was no longer surprised by anything, who allowed life to pass by his side without leaving a mark. The chatty parrot who reacted to every movement, necessary or not, was gone; in its place had come an owl who on long winter nights could watch a snow-covered forest for hours without stirring a single feather. You were liked at the school where you worked, you formed relationships with women — brief ones — your friends held you in high regard, but you could not prevent the black hole inside you from sucking the joy from your soul and imprisoning it forever. So much so that by the end of your first five years you were filled to bursting with the desire to leave China, return to Türkiye, and continue with life from where you had left off — wherever that was. Yet five years was not as short a time as you imagined. Türkiye was supposed to be the film itself, China was a commercial break — but when you went to Türkiye during the summer holidays your mind was confused. The idea that Türkiye was the commercial break, that the real film was unfolding in China with all its aesthetics and action, pleased you, and this pleasure stroked even more deeply the soul that loved the status quo. What kind of life were you going back to, exactly? Every time you went, a brand-new country, tangled in an entirely different set of troubles, greeted you. Was it still Türkiye? Violence, ignorance, overconfidence, economic instability, corruption, injustice, a diseased mentality that yearned for the past rather than the future... In a piece you wrote many years later you used the phrase "ungrateful son" for Türkiye. He was a blood bond — one that could never find his own path, could never amount to anything, could never straighten his back and take his rightful place in the race, that blamed everyone else while allowing those around him who listened to the voice of reason and science to leave him behind — and yet, being a child, a motherland, was loved nonetheless. Throw it away and it cannot be thrown, sell it and it cannot be sold: a source of suffering to be endured, a flag you carry in your pocket at all times, a cluster of faces and names to be checked in from time to time... You looked at Türkiye the way a father looks at a son who, having reached the age of forty, has not managed to stitch a single seam in any area of life — with sorrow, with regret, and above all with disappointment. How much China had contributed to your arriving at these thoughts I cannot say, but in all likelihood if you had gone to a European country with a denser Turkish population instead of China, things would have been different. You yourself and the impulses that drove you to write would have been different, to begin with. We would have encountered an entirely different Naci had Naci the teacher chosen Germany rather than China. Besides, Türkiye's political and social inability to settle was not your only reason for the decision to stay. Deeper down, sometimes impossible to confess even to yourself, there was a far more powerful shackle pinning your feet to the ground, chaining you to this soil.

For all that you claimed otherwise at the drinking tables, and for all that you sometimes tried to approach the matter with a masochistic air in certain company in order to seem deep in thought, you loved being treated like a wàiguórén[2] who understands nothing about anything in this country. Walking along the streets and avenues with eyes swiveling every which way, you felt like an orchid that had accidentally sprung up in a lettuce field. Sometimes, even when you understood your interlocutor's simple sentences, you considered saying tīng bù dǒng[3] an excuse for escape; faced with a piece of writing someone showed you to read, you counted saying kàn bù dǒng[4] a skill — using your ignorance and laziness as a tool, a knowing feigned ignorance, precisely to make it clear you were not one of them, to thicken the line of demarcation between you and them. On days when you were in good spirits you called this inability to listen, speak, read, or write — which you named "the unbearable lightness of not knowing”, a state with liberating qualities too. Not being able to know what the people around you in a café or on a bus were talking about made you adept at easily focusing on other things. Despite the millions of Chinese around you, you lived behind a surface like a one-way car window through which light passed in only one direction. In your own small world, in the crowds you built inside your head, among people who behaved as though you were invisible, you were happy and at peace. Just as pre-adolescent children are excluded from adult gatherings, you too were not taken seriously, were overlooked, in settings where Chinese people spoke among themselves about important matters. You were, after all, different from us Chinese — you had a large nose, the thinnest of lips, hair curling in waves like the ancient Greek gods, wide bright eyes, thick eyebrows arched over those eyes like bows, long lashes that Chinese girls, on seeing them up close, tested with the tip of a fingernail to determine whether they were real or false. This capacity to be pointed at and quickly spotted in a crowd suited you. Even if you had no noteworthy quality, the mere fact of the land where you were born and raised made you extraordinary, a weed among cultivated plants, a black swan, someone who drew people's attention. Your walk, your posture, your gaze, your laugh, your wink, the way you cracked your knuckles, the way you held your chopsticks, the way you tossed boiled rice into your mouth, the way you bit off scalding noodles with your teeth and left the rest in the bowl, the way you held your cigarette between your fingers — all of it was just one notch different from us Chinese. And because it was different, it deserved attention. For someone as unremarkable as you — who did not hold a single positive thought about yourself (that expression is yours, not mine!) — could any more precious opportunity have fallen into your hands? Of course you grabbed it with both hands, tucked it into your bosom when the moment called for it and walked hand in hand with it — this lovely opportunity that had dropped unexpectedly into your lap. You were different from the person on the street; many of the events that affected them did not affect you. Changing laws were for them; rules, prohibitions, traditions and rituals to be followed, unemployment rates, the courage to sign a thirty-year bank loan to buy a house, children sent to weekend courses, the tens of kilometers of traffic that formed at city entrances during Chinese New Year — all for them. You were a forgotten guest whose comings and goings no one could remember, and you watched with delight the embarrassment of your hosts at the shortcomings of their hospitality. Whenever you were in a tight spot someone always helped you. You were an ignorant wretch who knew no language, could not read or write the local script, and if dropped somewhere a few kilometers away from your home that you had never been before could not even find your way back — and the local crowd around you was an auxiliary army assigned to help you. There always emerged some good-hearted, fine-souled person, proud to help a lǎowài[5], who would get your business done, interpret for you, or take your phone from your hand and sort out those labyrinthine procedures in seconds. And you exploited their good intentions to the fullest. You were no different from a sleepy cat taken into a space solely to be loved, whose every need was met in meticulous detail, whose food and water and clean litter were never left wanting, and whose only function — rare as it was — was to hunt the odd fly or insect of unclear provenance. Naturally you were pleased by being held in such high regard, by being rewarded for no particular reason, by having things handled automatically for you that back in your own country you would have struggled through a thousand difficulties to manage. This was why you smiled constantly, like a baby whose every need was met — "happy as a baby with a dry nappy." The zone your foreign friends called the "Expat Bubble" and which you, with your habitual urge to be original, called the "Oasis" — this liberated territory — naturally produced in a person a certain numbness, a deep state of idleness too. After all, China is a separate realm cut off from the real world — that is supposedly why they call it that! Here there is no pain, no grief, no worry, no anxiety... None of the problems that give the local population headaches, keep them up at night, cause them to develop cancer from anxiety — none of these exist for foreigners. What does exist? Comfort, joy, happiness, peace, love, friendships, the indiscretions committed with a drunken head, pleasures cheaply bought and quickly consumed. For you foreign guests this place can be perceived as an earthly paradise, a temporary resting place — and Shenzhen in particular, with its climate, its clean air, and the economic opportunities it offers, is exactly such a city. Real life is outside China: wars, deaths, economic crises, epidemics, social upheavals, redrawn borders, millions displaced and forced to migrate. People came to Shenzhen to take a break from life, to lean their backs against a tree and catch their breath, to stretch out somewhere shady and doze a little. And once they came, they did not want to leave again the safe garden they had stumbled upon. As a result of this ease, they turned into minds numbed by morphine, even into zombies with their brains rendered inert. You, being a congenitally troubled human being, had grasped the inevitability of this transformation within a few months of setting foot in China, and had decided you could not be like the others. You were not one of them, could not be — the feelings of incompleteness and guilt inside you prevented you from living in the moment, reminding you always that it was essential to cast anchor toward the future. You had taken upon yourself the lofty mission of understanding and writing about China, and you could not back down from it. This was a responsibility that came alongside pleasure, not a frivolous occupation to be brushed off with an "that'll do" or skimped on with a "just enough to show willing." You had exiled yourself for a great cause, and now you were searching for meanings beyond this exile — to soothe your soul, to convince yourself you had accomplished something. Not that the Expat Bubble didn't appeal to you either — of course it did. But how far, for what purpose, of what use to anyone would it be to live inside a bubble and look away from the life outside? Moreover, none of the figures you took as your models had lived inside a bubble. Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, Paul Bowles... Some had learned the language of the country they lived in, some had written novels in which characters from the local population played a central role. You too should be like them — you should conquer the fortress not from without but from within. This was why you had the desire to go beyond, to penetrate deeper than your exile, to pick up a giant mirror and walk the streets with it... And you managed it in the end — as best you could, as far as your tongue would turn, as much as the power of your pen allowed, as much as your limited means permitted.

In the end, I — both as the spy who followed your every step and as the loyal reader who absorbed and read your every sentence — was among those who found you right and successful. Foreigners — the crowd to which you also belonged — came to this country to heal. Some healed and returned; some realized they had never been ill; those in the minority, like you, lost hope of healing, decided "since we cannot heal, at least let us not grow worse," and chose to spend the rest of their lives here. What was actually lost was not hope — it was the realization of the impossibility of return, the discovery that in place of that beautiful country to which one might return, cold ashes now drifted. China, like a passionate love, erased the happy moments of the past; people forgot what had once made them happy and how. Gone was the innocent world of childhood, gone the dreamy evenings of adolescence, gone the ease and carelessness and idealism of student life. If reality had struck your head gradually and let you accustomed, it might not have shaken you so deeply, but when it scalds your soul like boiling water poured over you the moment you step off the plane, it leaves your timid constitution no choice but to flee.

By the end of your first five years, I had long since understood that you had no serious quarrel with China. You had no proper political connection, nor a firmly grounded worldview. You were not entirely spineless either — let me not be unjust. I cannot overlook that you always tried to stand on the side of the oppressed and of truth and supported from a distance those who worked toward this end. But still, your faith in literature overrode your desire to take sides. For you, it was not literature that imitated life, but life that imitated literature. That is — you constructed the people and events of real life inside your head just as one constructs characters within a novel, you factored in the possibility that even the villain might have a reason for being villainous, and as a result you found yourself excluded by the majority of those around you. In the end, you were a wretched "half-portion intellectual”[6] — lightweight enough to give everyone reason at the same time, the sort onto whom anyone who followed you even a little would pin the label of spineless, who refused to let go of neutrality despite the potential for elimination, and who was only capable of saying what he really thought — even at the cost of hurting those around him — when drunk. Your only concern was to write beautifully. Beautifully, originally, and compellingly. You always kept your distance from those who, in the name of delivering a message, pushed the poetry inherent in language itself into the background— a poetry that can only be brought to the surface through painstaking craft; from those who wrote stories or novels as though writing newspaper reports; you regarded them with suspicion and even accused them of doing harm to literature. You always looked with contempt — the look one might give a table laid with the most repellent dishes — at those who managed to publish their books with the country's most prestigious publishers despite carelessly constructed sentences; at those who warmed up commonplace expressions and hackneyed subjects and served them up again and again to the reader; at the talentless ones who had carved out a place for themselves in the literary world through the patronage of friends, family, and acquaintances. And yes, because of all these reasons I was calm and unsuspicious. What harm could come from a teacher whose favorite foreign writers were Proust, Durrell, Munro, Nabokov, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky — this last I will address separately later! A man who takes nearly ten days to write a half-page paragraph, who writes sentences and deletes them and, in the end, remains unsatisfied — no revolutionary can emerge from this hesitant mind. Those of us like me — whose profession is to suspect everyone — know this best.

Yes, you were harmless — but I was not, or more precisely I was not a spy as faithful to the rules of professional ethics as my employers believed. By chance I had found a piece of gem, and I did not want to lose it. For this reason, after the initial five-year period of surveillance and observation was over, let me confess that I deliberately and willingly drew a different portrait of Naci in my reports. The assignment I had been given was to prepare reports that, drawing on what you wrote, what you said, and your messages, summarized your views on China and mapped the changes in those views. And you made this job considerably easier for me. Why would I give up such an easy assignment, what if they took you from me and gave you to someone else? I, who over these five years had grown so accustomed to you, had drawn so close to you, had learned to see you not only when my eyes were open but even when they were closed... For this reason, at the end of every report, I added a sentence along the lines of: "Due to actions that arouse suspicion and statements that can be pulled in different directions, surveillance must continue with care." My superiors in turn appreciated my diligent and meticulous work, and without adding so much as a single note of objection to what I had written, agreed that I should continue. Moreover, your being Turkish, the fact that your country's politicians were governing the state with shortsighted, narrow-minded, and erratic decisions, and the fact that you are working in a position where you could influence young people — all of this made my job easier. I exploited all these factors to my advantage and continued for thirteen more years to follow you like a shadow, to plunge again and again into that bottomless well inside you, to be closer to you than your jugular vein. Besides, the real fun had only just begun in your sixth year.

Next chapter: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (3)

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[1] Most of these titles include sly puns that can be understood only in Turkish.

[2] foreigner, outsider; literally "person from outside the country."

[3] I can't understand what I'm hearing.

[4] I can't understand what I'm reading/seeing.

[5] Colloquial Chinese term for foreigner, roughly equivalent to "expat" but with a slightly more familiar, sometimes condescending tone.

[6] Famous Turkish song of 1980s, written and performed by the leftist singer Cem Karaca.