Yeni Cami (New Mosque)

I’VE ALWAYS REMEMBERED YOU ON MOONLIT NIGHTS

Really, I should have written this ages ago. I put it off and put it off: I kept putting it off.
Why didn’t I write it then? I knew my father was dying. The angel of death was pursuing him, counting the days. I too was being pursued by a kind of vindictive angel — this song. Wherever I went it followed. I couldn’t believe my ears, I was scared, unknown powers were playing tricks on me. Perhaps I should have written about it there and then, but I was running away from that. That the song followed me wherever I went was strange enough but I didn’t want the affair to be further confused by the daemonic magic of the written word. If I could have written at the time I don’t know whether it would have turned out exactly as I imagined. A restraining hand from within kept holding me back. And, too, my grief was so fresh that to convert it right away into the written word seemed to me an unpleasant bit of utilitarianism. I was keeping my distance.
On many occasions later, whenever I set out to write about it I thought that many details had already escaped me, that the freshness of my feelings of that time was now lost and, more seriously, that I would be dissatisfied with my account of the wonder and panic I experienced then. The spirit of writing had fled, it seemed, with my father’s death.
Eleven years have passed since my father died in 1984. I hope I can write about it now.

* * *

On summer nights we went to bed in the courtyard. That stony town had a time-signal, the beginning of a calendar telling us when to take the beds out to the courtyard. The gradual build-up of hot weather, summer’s forerunner, started a delightful flurry in the heart of the house. All the running about was like a preparation for a kind of house-moving.
The first signal for the move was the summons to the wool carders to come to the house. The beds and quilts for summer are different: they use cotton mattresses in summer and woolen ones in winter. Winter quilts are heavy, summer ones light. In summer the wool mattresses were removed. Rugs and canvas were spread out on the stone floor of the yard, which had been frequently washed and scrubbed with household soap; and on these they threw the cotton contents of the mattresses, quilts, and pillows taken out of the linen closets. As they beat the cotton with thin wooden rods, it fluffed up and flew about the air like snow; then we idle children, grabbing our chance to have fun, got up and threw ourselves on the puffed-up mattresses, ignoring the loud screams and yells. The women would spend long hours covering the quilts, sitting on the ground, revolving themselves round the quilt along with the coffee-cups and ashtrays. In the middle of the quilt they were covering stood a white ball of cotton-yarn and as the thread got used up, they laughingly threw the ball to one another: it would be impossible to see their quilt-needle, their hands were so quick and skilful. They removed one quilt and spread another, and sitting round it, gossiped, sang songs, chuckled at the suggestive stories about beds and quilts, and boasted of the speed of their handiwork.
What I liked best on the quilt covers was the silver work. I thought its silvery light suited the stars, and those brilliant summer night skies, that deep sleep. When the moonlight caught the silver threads our sleep too seemed to have a different radiance. Some nights the moonlight was so brilliant it woke me. I would look, and the moon risen during the night would now be at its height, face to face with me and bending to smile at me. Then after a while I would pull the quilt over my head and bury myself in my bed and sleep. I still have in my cupboard a quilt-cover from those days, wine-colored and worked in silver. Although I was ultimately defeated, I must admit it was because of such refinements that I made considerable resistance to the quilt cover of modern times. Besides, many of my poems, my stories, and plays hold profound memory of those nights when the moon and I looked at one another. They are still under the influence of those moonlit nights…
Then the wooden divans, both big and little, were brought out to the courtyard. The boards on the old ones were repaired, washed, scrubbed and scraped; pigeon-droppings and the filth of time carried by the wind were cleared away, their surfaces made ready for mattresses. And if they were beyond repair, new ones were ordered from the carpenters. While the wooden divans were meant for one or two people, there were bigger, king-sized ones called taht for large families of many children. The taht is more splendid: for example, it has several little steps and four sides surrounded by wooden rails, not plain but decorated with carvings, and with thick wooden columns at its four corners. From these stretch white mosquito nets, protecting the sleepers from mosquitoes and intimate looks. Several mattresses are spread on these thrones. When people begin to find it difficult at night to sleep indoors, everyone starts to talk about going up on the roof, or sleeping in the courtyards. But they all expect someone else to make the first move and with this in mind begin to eye their neighbor and his roof. Next thing the roofs, the yards, the galleries are full of cotton quilts, starched pique covers, sparkling white sheets smelling of lavender, embroidered pillows, silvery quilt covers and snow-white mosquito-nets billowing with every breeze like sails in the cool breath of night. Sometimes the spring heat would incite us too soon by mistake and those who’d come out to sleep too early would shiver; but experienced people knew the right time for everything — when the plum-blossom flowered, when it was time to graft the almond-trees, the season for gathering incas plums — and naturally the beginning of summer.
In the center of Mardin city, in the spacious courtyard of our house just across from the Post Office, I woke up every morning to the cooing of doves and their wing-flutter in the deep red enveloping shadow of the Sehidiye Mosque’s minaret.
At night, before bed, I sat in the courtyard, leaning on the wooden rails, sunk dreaming in the distant lights of Syria visible opposite, communing with the stars, and falling asleep to the sound of records playing in the summer garden by the mosque. Sometimes on 78s, sometimes on 45s. The summer garden was known to the local people as the Park. Most summer nights my father was there with his friends, sitting with the intellectuals, the notables, of that provincial city, drinking and discussing politics and the state of the country. My mother and I waited for my father and I don’t know why, but there was a sadness in our waiting.
My mother would tell me to lie down and sleep but I would say I’d wait with her. The colored light bulbs of the summer garden were visible from our courtyard; they were arranged on wires stretching from the tree branches and with every passing breeze they shook gently, and this dreamy vision seen from our courtyard seemed as charming as a fairy tale. From the summer garden the loudspeaker carried the songs of the day to the neighborhood. Sevim Sengul sang I’ve Always Remembered You on Moonlit Nights. In those days Sevim Sengul was one of the two singers who always sang in place of the women in Turkish films (the other was Belkis Ozener). This song made me feel very sad, perhaps because it expressed exactly how I felt. I loved my father and the song and the waiting. Sometimes, not often, my father arrived before I went to bed. I liked falling asleep on his lap or pretending to, and when he said, ‘Take this child to bed, he’s asleep,’ I’d feign reluctance, burying myself deep in his arms with a sigh. But usually father would appear when I had long been lost in dreams, wrapped up in my silvery quilt and with Moonlit Nights mingling with my sleep. In time this song became for me a song of waiting and abandonment.
This was a song that I used to sing when father fell in love again with someone, neglected his home, came in late or not at all, or when he quarreled with mother. Years later, even when everything seemed fine and I wasn’t in love and wasn’t even waiting for anyone, on some summer nights when I felt sad I often sang this song and something ached inside me. I’ve Always Remembered You on Moonlit Nights.

* * *

So I lent this song to Beauty Spot Meryem, a famous society prostitute and my heroine in the film-script I wrote for The Rumpled Bed. I lent it to the unhappy childhood in which her past was locked. In the film this was the song she sang to entertain her dissolute father and the ‘loose women’ he brought home, the song she sang as a little girl, leaning against a wall ashamed and miserable, and could never in all her life forget — I’ve Always Remembered You on Moonlit Nights.
One evening years later, the now famous Meryem is suddenly wrenched by the tormenting memory of this song, far away in Side. She has escaped there with handsome young Ismail, having fallen madly in love with him at the restaurant where he worked as a waiter. Let us trace the rest of the story from the script:


Sunset.
The wide balcony of the guesthouse room where they are staying. On the table an evening meal carefully laid for two. Vines trailing from the bright whitewashed balcony. Bougainvilleas, oleanders… Side in the distance… Meryem and Ismail are seated at opposite sides of the table, looking at each other.

Meryem:  “Isn’t it a lovely evening?”

Ismail looks indifferently at the scenery and nods. Meryem serves and they start to eat in easy silence. Some distant sounds, voices of passers-by, laughter. They chink glasses and drink a toast in red wine. The camera takes a close-up of two wineglasses left on the table. Gleaming.

Change of scene:
Time has passed: the food finished. They are gazing lovingly at each other. Meryem lays the young man’s hand to her cheek, kisses and caresses it. She looks at him for a long time.

Meryem:  “What are you thinking?”
Ismail:  “No-o-thing!”
Meryem:  “Whenever I ask what you’re thinking you say ‘Nothing’.”
Ismail:  “Because I’m not thinking of anything!”

Silence. A little later Meryem smells something and sniffs. She frowns slightly and drops Ismail’s hand and looks towards the courtyard, trying to place the smell. Then she leans back. We return to the black-and-white images of the short, striking camera-shots. A close-up frames a piece of meat cooking on a barbecue-grill. Again a close-up of Meryem’s face now. Again focus on black-and-white images gradually widens. This time not only the grill but Meryem’s mother turning over the meat enter the picture. The present again: Meryem’s face drawn, tense. Again the grill, the fire, her mother. A tear falling from Meryem’s eye. Close-up of Ismail’s surprised, anxious face.

Ismail:  “You’re crying. What’s wrong, Meryem? Has something happened?”
Meryem:  “There’s nothing wrong. I smelt meat cooking. There must be people cooking meat in the courtyard.”
Ismail:  “Eh, so what?”

We see the child Meryem in a black-and-white shot, singing by the wall, her father at the table, the woman he’d brought home, and the sad face of her mother who is cooking the meat and serving them. A close-up of Meryem’s face as she sings with tears in her eyes — tears that no one noticed. This image is superimposed on Meryem’s tearful face as she is now; the child’s lips moving and the trembling lips of Meryem now. But soon hoarse murmurs emerge from these trembling lips and she begins to sing a lament that comes from the depths.

Meryem’s Song:
I’ve always remembered you on moonlit nights
I’ve burned in vain, hoping you’d come.

Meryem’s voice rises gradually as she sings, choking with sobs. The song ends. The sun has gone down. Ismail is shocked, motionless, not knowing what to do. It’s the first time he is seeing Meryem in such a state. Meryem touches her tear-washed face.

Meryem:  “I cried! I cried! I was able to cry at last. This is the first time in twenty years I’ve been able to sing that song — twenty years.”

Ismail has understood nothing. Meryem reaches for Ismail’s hand, presses it and brings it to her tightly closed lips. She has forgiven the memory of this song.


I too was involved in the Side shots of the film. Father was very ill at the time. We knew he was going to die. And when I couldn’t be in the Istanbul scenes I went for the episodes located in Side. Locations had been altered and several changes had been made in my scenario, with considerable loss of meaning and weight. The above scene was filmed on the terrace of a beach house instead of the guesthouse, and I was immediately behind the camera when the scene was shot. Mujde Ar, who was playing Meryem, had sung the song first into a little hand tape-recorder. Our eyes met as the song began and the camera started up. Mujde and I both began to cry at the same moment in this scene in which Meryem, swept back to the past by the smells of cooking, starts to weep as the song pours from her lips. Mujde knew the significance the song had for me; I had told her. By being behind the camera I had intended to strengthen the memory of the song, the spirit of the scene and Mujde’s acting. Everything was for the film. At night when the film crew were in the hotel lobby I told them many things that lay behind the film and its scenes and characters: my childhood memories, the significance of certain episodes, the history of the characters… Art was something of a ritual. It was important to bring out the meaning of the work, without any concern for my own feelings, and I saw no objection at all in revealing to others anything that might help to describe or explain it. And without minding afterwards how all this would be used, by whom, and for what purpose. That’s what I’ve always believed about art.
The Rumpled Bed was not the film I saw when I was writing. When I watched it one shivery winter’s day at the Sinepop in Istanbul a deep split fissured my heart.
In a very brief scene at the end of the film a waiter appears, comes to the table where the three key characters are sitting, takes their orders and departs; he is the last “new” character to appear. In a way he ends the film. Well, I played that waiter.

* * *

My father grew terribly ill. When I came back from Side I very often went out at night, or rather drove myself into the streets and although I wasn’t used to it I drank a great deal and sometimes went overboard. One of those nights I visited a nightclub where a singer I knew was surprised and pleased to see me among the clientele, knowing I didn’t frequent nightclubs. She introduced me with a few compliments and announced she was going to sing a song for me. And like a sick joke accompanied by applause, destiny awarded me the song I’ve Always Remembered You on Moonlit Nights. My blood froze. I was terrified, shocked, hurt, churned-up. Perhaps it was just an unfortunate coincidence. It wasn’t something the singer could know, as she wasn’t a close friend. How could she have known that this subtle present of song she had given me would so upset me and poison my whole night? I was drunk, once more I broke down in uncontrollable tears. It was pathetic. After the program the singer came to my table, very distressed and, although there was no need, insisting she had had no idea and apologizing over and over. She had ruined my evening, she said. By no means, I answered, you sang beautifully, just like Sevim Sengul, probably I’m being pursued by malevolent demons, it’s no fault of yours at all!
From then on I was at peace nowhere. My father was dying from day to day, little by little. Every day for four months, dying a little more before our very eyes.
It was late at night. I was at the end of my tether. In Lower Ayranci, lived a dear friend of mine, a transvestite, with whom I loved to talk. I rang him. If you’re on your own and not with a client can I come? I asked. I’m in a terrible state. Get down here darling, he said, to hell with the clients! Fuck them all!
Fifteen minutes later I was with him. I’ll get a drink, he said, you look really shitty. What’s the matter, anyway? My father, I said. He understood. My God, he said, they fuck us up when they’re alive and the same when they’re dying!
Don’t make me laugh, Gigi, I said. We called him Gigi — He couldn’t pronounce his “R”s —
Never mind that — I’d give anything for that three-days-old beard of yours. You’re such a lovely guy. Now you, if you’d been butch for God’s sake, you’d have worn us all out, do you know that? he said. All those queens and gays and transvestites in Ankara are infatuated with you. But ironically your eyes are only on eighteen-year-old butch types.
Don’t make me laugh, Gigi, I said. How did we get to talk like this?
How!.. you haven’t come here to do a complete funeral service for your father: we’ll cheer ourselves up and we’ll feel better. But since you wish it let’s put on a Muslum cassette for you, it’ll pass for a prayer.
He pressed the play button — and the scene comes before my eyes like today — that tiny wall-papered living room of a typical transvestite’s basement-home on one of Lower Ayranci’s narrow streets, sparsely furnished, with its red light and wall-to-wall carpeting, with its telephone and video, its artificial flowers and many knick-knacks, suddenly resounding with the hoarse voice of Muslum Baba: I’ve Always Remembered you on Moonlit Nights.
I thought I was struck by demons. I firmly believed that mysterious powers were pursuing me, intending me to shed many more tears, and not satisfied with my grief, they had left me nowhere to run to and hide.
You’re in a really bad way, my dear, said Gigi. He rose before I could say a word and pressed the stop button on the cassette player. The room was enveloped in deathly silence.
I’ll do whatever you like, he said, shall I make soup, or get a drink, or fetch a nice boy? — Whatever you think is good for you, my love.
Ring for a taxi, Gigi, I said. It’s best I go home.
Next day I related all this to a doctor friend, in detail and at length.
I said, this song pursues me like fate, Murat, or else I’m going mad.
He spoke soothing words; he neither disbelieved my story, nor did he belittle my panic; he didn’t listen to my story as though someone was attempting to inflate his grief by creating a personal mythology from exaggerated coincidences. As much as I did, he believed my footsteps were dogged by unknowable, invisible powers.
When my father became ill he left Kiziltepe for Ankara and soon after came with his latest wife, to occupy the top-floor apartment of a high block of flats without lifts in Demetevler.
I’ll be dead in twenty-seven days, he said.
I’ll be dead in twenty-four days, he said.
Twenty-one days left, he said.
He mentioned no more days.
According to his calculations three days remained, but for some time he had lost consciousness. I went with my doctor friend to have him examined one last time.
For several days grief had prevented me from visiting him. I did not wish to see him reduced to the condition of a child, not recognizing anyone, soiling his underwear. My aunt told me he had very little time left. A few days. Come soon.
My friend the doctor and I reached the top of the stair, breathless.
We rang the bell, his wife opened the door with a wretched look on her face. We entered the drawing room. Father was in the next room, sitting on the divan, dangling one foot. We saw each other through the doorway, and when he looked at me, a light dawned in his eyes, a vague smile, he had recognized me, then he sank again into his darkness. He knew you, he knew you! they said. How could he not know his son? said the women neighbors in the drawing room. The radio was on in the kitchen and suddenly, deafeningly loud, the song that followed me like a curse exploded in my ears: I’ve Always Remembered You on Moonlit Nights! I couldn’t believe it; I thought I’d gone mad, I was having hallucinations, I was mixed up with demons. I ran sobbing to the kitchen, Murat behind me. Listen, Murat, I said. Listen to what’s playing, you hear it too, don’t you? You hear it!
Yes, I hear it, he said.
It’s that song, isn’t it? I said. It’s that song — I can’t be that crazy!
Yes, he said, it is that song, calm down.
What’s it all about? I said.
Demons, he said. Evil spirits.
Father died three days later as he predicted. I lost him there on that last day in a low-ceilinged flat in a many-storied building with no lifts, in the Demetevler Quarter that I had always hated, during that hellish heat of July in Ankara. I had him brought home to my own house, and laid him on my bed. I held his hands in mine till they were ice-cold. I kissed him, and I cried; crying not only for his death but for all the things in our lives that hadn’t been.
On Moonlit Nights left me alone. Later on when it sometimes turned up but at gradually longer intervals, I was able to hear it without running away whenever I met it; I could listen with apparent indifference and pass it by. It had taken what it wanted from me. But as I write this now at a later date, those silver quilt-covers, the lost courtyards of my childhood, the loudspeaker in Martin Park and the colored lights swinging in the wind, those dark starry nights when I waited for my father, and at the time when he grew ill, the feeling I was going crazy with those repeated coincidences — all this now suddenly wrenched my heart open afresh.
Perhaps you can’t be free of some demons till you write.
As for the demons of the written word — how long they pursue other people I’ve no idea.
A song, or occasions when a number of coincidences have taken complete possession of a life — perhaps that’s all there really is. The rest is a handful of tricks intended for our pitiful dreams, scattered throughout our lives, and as we gather them one by one, we die, we die, we die…

Murathan Mungan
“Mehtapli Gecelerde Hep Seni Andim,” Paranin Cinleri (1997)

translated by  Ruth Christie