Read Online Songs My Mother Never Taught Me by Selcuk Altun - Free Book Online Page B

growing friendship. Rezzan was found dead in her bed on the morning of 10 November, on the same day, sixty-seven years ago, that her secret enemy, Atatürk, passed away, and I was startled to note she was being buried in a plot opposite the gravestone of my first guilt-ridden victim. It fell to me to let my Hodja know he had lost his mother. What a disturbing duty that was, by God. He tried not to laugh.
    Before the forty days of mourning that followed Rezzan’s death were up, her daughter Emel made peace with her feeble husband Lemi. They and their Down’s syndrome son, whose existence I’d not heard of before, settled in my basement. Renan, the eternal idler, began to drop by to see his nephew. Emel had undoubtedly given up drinking. She didn’t scold Lemi as often as I expected and went to work every day, but only at noon. The boorish Lemi had retired as a public library official (I’d never seen him holding a book) and seemed to be devoting his time to their silent son. The whimsical youngster, who did not look his seventeen years, compared me to tough guy Sylvester Stallone, for heaven’s sake! While his steely eyes, so like his uncle’s, were closed in his strange noonday nap, his father could go out on the balcony with his rakı and lute. I enjoyed listening to him humming those songs with their plaintive melodies. An early part of his repertoire, which I had never heard before, was a sad unfamiliar song, which began, ‘My lute became a stringed instrument, my heart became inflamed.’ After a sip of rakı he would sigh deeply and whisper obscenities to the sea. And I was glad he was a man with no moustache.

    News came of the death of the landlord of a landmark building on Eşrefsaat Street.
    While the widow of the deceased married his young partner and before they had put up the sign ‘For Rent’, I moved in. I furnished my new place with Gürsel Hodja’s books.
    A couple of Canadian teachers, retired from some lycée or other, rented my old apartment. I told Emel that I would meet the expenses of the Hodja’s care, and that the rent from the flat could go towards her son’s schooling.
    She embraced me joyfully and asked me to take all her brother’s books from the library to my new home. I knew that Gürsel wouldn’t be impressed when moved into the hospital’s most luxurious room.
    I had moved his books into boxes with fastidious care. Next to an autobiographical
Harem Life
was the diary of poor Sim Yetkin, the previous tenant, a lady no one remembered because she had committed suicide.
    An assistant editor responsible for features in a weekly magazine, she had taken her own life at thirty. Again and again I read through the personal and courageous notes of this strange writer, who fell into a depression because she could not write poetry to her heart’s content. I had read and been moved by the collected works of the popular – and suicidal – female poets. I refrained from telling my Hodja how impressed I was by lines that duelled with death at every turn. I chose extracts from the diary’s beginning as, word by word, it circled nearer to her death, and I entered it for a short story competition in a monthly literary review, under the pseudonym, Sima Etkin, with the title, ‘I Want to Write When I Read / I Read When I Cannot Write.’ I knew we would win. Exploring the area round the Maiden’s Tower, I may have heard behind me her shrill scream mingled with prayers, swallowed up by the sea. I wasn’t surprised to hear from Bereket Market’s shop assistant that ‘the fat lady with spectacles who read a book even while she was buying cheese’ had thrown herself into the sea in front of the Maiden’s Tower.

    After his mother’s death, Gürsel Hodja was freed of any guilt except for his thought-crime. I counted the days till Saturday, when I could stay with him for three hours if I