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| 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.
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