Two Green Otters

Erkorkmaz

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How It All Happened

And therefore, being satisfied that something was to be done, and that that time was no wise proper for any serious matter, I resolved to make some sport with the praise of folly.

—Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, The Praise of Folly

I don’t really like the idea of putting a person’s private life on display, exhibiting it for all to see. I’ve always been against that kind of thing. But, in the end, principles are made to be broken and replaced by the new ones we create.

Nilsu Baran figured out I was living right under her nose after all those years and finally came to see me. She brought me an immaculate stack of freshly-printed pages, all meticulously organized as if she’d just printed them from her computer.

This is the story of my life, but what I’d like is for you to write it as a novel. Please take a look. If you have the time and think it might work, then go for it. I’m not the kind of person who would normally write about her own life. Anyway, I’m not even a writer.

She had long hair and, at that particular moment, a slightly stubborn look on her face. It occurred to me that she couldn’t have been more than thirty as she stood there, poised, fashionable and sincere but a little nervous. I thought, How much life experience could a thirty- year-old woman have? What kind of novel could come of it? I drove that somewhat old-fashioned thought from my mind. In any case, you’ll see just how off the mark that thought really was.

I’d always thought that one day I’d write a novel using diary entries from an ornate manuscript bound in leather and penned in India ink, the author of which had long since departed this world. And like so many other famous writers, I’d add my own flourishes to the text. But what I had was first-rate material, a pristine stack of pages. Did I really deserve it?

She added, I thought it over and decided you’d be the best person to write my life story. You see, I think that was what won me over: the idea of being known, understood, trusted and admired. All the indications were there. Who could resist? So I took the pages and read them, only changing the names of a few people and places and playing with the chronology of some events. I wanted to soften the biographical tone and stretch the narrative beyond the boundaries of our lives, letting the freshness of what lay beyond seep into the pages. Above all, I didn’t want the reader to recognize any characters and get hung up on who they were as people.

So, the rest is all Nilsu Baran.

As for exhibitionism, well, haven’t writers always practiced that art?

Part One

How beautiful the way childhood innocently falls into the flow of time. That is what we have lost!

—Nilgün Marmara, Daktilo’ya Çekilmiş Şiirler ( Typeset Poems)

June 1978

It didn’t happen in a day. It took all summer for everything to fall apart.

My mom ran away with a handsome painter and my dad left home the day after that, taking only a few things with him. The only living beings left in the flat were myself, my brother Cem, our cat Elvis, and all our potted plants, of which we had many.

And then there was our grandmother who lived in the apartment across from us.

Summer vacation had already started.

I was fourteen and obsessed with the physical and emotional changes happening to me. I wasn’t really bothered at first by the exodus that had occurred, or anything that had happened before that.

Maybe I thought that my mom and dad were just putting on some kind of show out of sheer stubbornness.

I knew I was becoming an attractive young woman by the way I was turning heads. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the attention I got from my relatives, teachers and parents, but it was just that being the sweet and pretty girl left me with an empty feeling. Confused by so many emotions I couldn’t name at the time, I only really understood the way I was feeling after I met him—which would happen soon enough.

The silence at home was most palpable at night. In those years my life had settled into a regular pattern: school during the day, tea with Grandma when I got home around five, and then dinner with Mom and Dad in the evening. That was the only time I’d ever really see them. Did these patterns come about naturally? Or did I deliberately entangle myself in them for some reason? I didn’t know at the time. I guess back then I didn’t know anything about personal choice, responsibility, desire or temptation.

Ever since I was in middle school my dad always worked a lot and I couldn’t spend much time with him after dinner. As soon as he finished eating he’d dash off to his lab like he was trying to get away from us, and he only came home to sleep. In the summer my brother Cem and I would stage little surprise visits to his lab, which was just two streets away, and bring him ice cream. We’d find him sitting in his armchair in the little room at the back of the lab which he’d set up as his personal office. The lab took up two apartments at the front of the ground floor of the building. Holding a mug of coffee (he consumed a massive amount of caffeine), he’d be poring over medical, agricultural and tech magazines, reading with the voraciousness of a hungry wolf, or he’d be carrying out biochemical experiments on a small table. He would light up with joy when he saw us and with a playful look—a bit like a naughty child—he’d try to trick us into not noticing the heavy rings under his eyes. Back then he was convinced he could hide them from us, but children are much more perceptive and mature than we ever assume. And by then I was already a young woman, even though my dad hadn’t noticed yet.

He would tell us all about his new projects and experiments: making batteries from bacterial waste, developing new uses for enzymes heated at different temperatures, or coming up with elaborate bio- technical procedures that used solar energy to transform chemical energy through photosynthesis... And the list went on. I don’t remember much of it now, but what I do know is that at the time he explained each minute detail with conviction and unbounded enthusiasm, confident that we would understand what he was saying. Cem and I, swept up by the force of his enthusiasm, would leave the lab in high spirits. He knew he’d never be interested in examining patients, so he had specialized in biochemistry and opened his lab where he did his research. That was how he provided for us. He didn’t care if the neighbors thought he was some kind of mad scientist.

About a week or so after Mom and Dad left home, I started to feel the oppressiveness of evening, the darker shades of night and the strange way it sighed. It was as if a siren warning of a nuclear attack, a pandemic or some other mortal threat had been sounded and sonic waves reverberated through the apartment.

Before that, our place had been filled with Mom’s complaints about how she was still a young woman and how she should be having more fun, and she’d go on and on about how she was fed up with it all. But now the apartment felt like it was completely empty.

Dad’s enthusiasm about his work and the same old jokes he loved to tell (he’d always laugh before reaching the punchline) had once filled our home with energy. It was depressing now that he was gone.

Even Elvis was unhappy; I could tell because he’d lost his appetite. Grandma was usually a calm and measured woman, but now she was nervous and impatient.

Cem was glum too, and he cut off contact with most of the outside world. He’d turned twelve that summer and had just finished middle school, and he was about to start English prep classes before high school got started.

Mom called two weeks after she left. She said she was down south on the Mediterranean coast. Lightheartedly she chatted about this and that, and she invited me and Cem to come down and stay with her in Marmaris for the summer. Until then we’d always gone on vacation together. I was stunned into silence. Those were the days before cell phones, and landlines still crackled and hissed. But I could hear the excitement in her voice, and it burned its way into my heart. She told us a few times how much she missed us, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she missed Dad or not. Then she told me about how wonderful her villa was and how the sea was crystal clear. I guessed that the villa she kept going on about belonged to her new boyfriend, the painter.

In the end I said that I’d ask Dad and Grandma about it and get back to her. I was curt and cold, and my words caught in my throat. For the first time in my life I felt like my mom had become someone else. That day I understood that she was, in fact, becoming her own person.

I felt empty, alone and alienated, not to mention abandoned and a little angry.

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July 1988

That was the year the Green Party was established in Turkey.

The party announced that among their fifty-one founding members there were two musicians, seven secretaries, two housewives, a pharmacist, a pedagogue, a dietician, an architect, a journalist, seven doctors, three industrialists, seven engineers, three retired admirals, three lawyers, two veterinarians and six people who worked freelance.

Professor Celal Ertuğ, the party’s president-elect said, I sincerely hope that this new party will have a positive effect on the political landscape of Turkey.

Teoman was one of the founding members, but it was never really clear if he was one of the engineers or one of the six freelancers. Maybe they threw him in with the musicians and the artists. But for him it wouldn’t have mattered which group he was put into. The important thing was that the members weren’t too seriously involved in their professional lives and could dedicate all their energy to the organization. Soon enough the party was being referred to as utopian. Teoman wasn’t entirely sure which was more important—being utopian or being a good organizer—but both tendencies had long since become ingrained in his personality. Ever since Teoman was a kid he’d had a knack for getting people together in clubs. And because of that passion he was always getting into trouble. The first thing he’d do when he started attending a new school—he was always changing schools because of his dad’s job—was set up some kind of club. Even before he started primary school, he’d put together a Soda-pop Club with some other kids and they’d go around collecting bottle caps. In primary school he started a stamp collecting club (which drove the post office workers out of their minds) known as the Young Philatelists. When he was in middle school he discovered that he had a passion for astronomy. Once his mom went to Istanbul to visit some family and brought back an astronomy set she’d picked up for just twenty lira with the coupons Teoman had been saving up from the American Cosmos toy series. Young Teoman was beside himself with joy. The set had four lenses, photographic chemicals and telescopic binoculars, everything he needed to make a telescope and start snapping pictures. Soon enough he launched a Star Lovers Club. At the time his family was living near Konya and their pious neighbors felt compelled to warn the civil servant’s son against sharing his startling visions of the sky with the other boys at school.

Next he organized a Philosophy Club, which was later deemed to be dangerous and was subsequently shut down. He’d discovered literature and philosophy in his early years as a student. Like many people in those days, by the time he got to university he was deeply involved in politics. He was actually born in 1950, but he considered himself to be part of the generation of ‘48. When he was a university student he proved himself as the leader of one of the most progressive student groups, and he also became a member of the Human Rights Group and Amnesty International. In the meantime he assembled an Oğuz Atay literary fan club, but it didn’t catch on. And of course it was Teoman who brought together the neighborhood cat lovers.

Teoman threw himself full force into the Green Party. His name always came up whenever a new party, group or association was established. Some said he was a born leader, others said he was just another bureaucrat, and yet others said that he was simply a hard worker, but no one ever challenged him. He never seemed to care what other people said about him. Now, close to forty, he sincerely began to believe that Turks were incapable of organizing themselves, as he was fond of saying, a conclusion he’d arrived at after years of experience. Still, I don’t think he really believed it. Despite the toll the years had taken on him, in a kind of blind passion he dedicated all his time and energy to working on the new political party. That was Teoman’s chronic affliction, and who knows, maybe the new project was just another way to feed his habit and nothing more.

People who rail against marriage are usually the ones who ultimately buy into it. Likewise, the reason why Teoman felt such a burning need to join and create all those groups was in fact quite simple. Despite the urge he had to be so involved and to lead people, his private life was a complete mess. There was always a new job, new people to meet, a new scene to explore. He had two children from two different marriages. His first wife had cut herself off from the world, even though she’d once been an outgoing woman. And his second wife, a vibrant and hardworking woman, ended up being a housewife. If you consider the short but serious affair he had between his two marriages, the conclusion you’d have to draw is frightening: Was Teoman always changing or did he just change the women in his life? At the time, his second marriage was on the rocks. It saddened him to see his wife—once a passionate young journalist—become a stereotypical housewife who never left the home and was constantly redecorating and fussing over her young son. He began to wonder if he had snuffed out her hopes, dreams and career goals. Or perhaps he had tapped into the depths of a subtle system of education that quietly taught women to be docile and unengaged. I never figured it out. In fact, I was a little afraid of ever finding out.

Teoman thought it would be in bad taste for him to just pack up and leave his second wife; you see, he was always one for social graces and would never leave anyone in the lurch. So every night he’d go back home, even though there was nothing left for them to talk about or share, or, worst of all, to laugh about.

It was always like that. There’d be a bump in the road and suddenly his life would be in shambles.

It was obvious that two distinct parts of his personality would continue to clash: the revolutionary who was driven to pull people together and the fiercely independent anarchist who was bent on destroying everything he created. He always supported innovation and progress no matter what the cost. At least he could appreciate this side of his personality, even if he tended to tear it apart. Ten years earlier Teoman had started hanging out with Anatolian villagers who strummed the saz in their long underwear and sang folk songs. Now, with a decidedly urban style and a determined forward-looking worldly perspective, he played the guitar. Maybe this change had something to do with the fact that he’d joined the Green Party, or maybe it was an expression of his own personal glasnost or perestroika. When he’d played the saz and sang Turkish folk songs, he’d been doing his best to blend in with the villagers, but now he didn’t hide what he really liked; he never shied away from saying that he was much more into Yesterday and Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend.

Teoman always believed that flowers bring about revolutions and that flowers, hope and freedom have nothing to do with guns. He was a child at heart but his world had been turned upside down. While he was philanthropic and full of creative energy, he was also romantic and naive. On some days his mind was confused and dark, while on others the future seemed bright, even crystal clear.

Some said that he prevented certain people from expressing their ideas, people who believed that the world was nothing but monotonous and cruel. Was our world such a place because of those people, or was it just that way to begin with? It was hard to tell.

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That year a lot of my friends’ parents got divorced, and we picked on each other in a way that only children can do. We’d say, Yours aren’t divorced yet? That’s so uncool, and then we’d laugh. These days I often run into those old friends of mine and nobody laughs about it the way we used to.

Those parents who were leaving home at the time started up another trend: they’d move to undiscovered little towns and villages on the Mediterranean coast. Sevin, my mom’s friend from college, was the first in our family to get divorced. Her husband Semih, an electrical engineer, moved to Bodrum with a young actress and opened a restaurant. Everyone chided Semih for leaving, and Mom had to take care of Sevin. I felt bad for their daughter, İdil. But it wasn’t long before almost every family was going through the same tragic breakup. Everything happened so fast for the couples of that generation. Most of them had gotten married when they were quite young, and by the time they were thirty, they had grown kids who they paraded around. Today, I don’t have unbending opinions on the sanctity of family or relationships, but I’m pretty sure that kids who grow up without a strong family will end up having emotional issues.

Actually, there really isn’t much difference. Either your mom leaves or it’s your dad. And even if you’re already fourteen or fifteen, you still feel deceived and hurt, like you’ve been fooled somehow. Your mom seems happier and more alive than you’ve ever seen her. And your dad, though a little bewildered and absent-minded, has suddenly become a man who’s confident enough to make his own decisions. And there you are, the only one who’s restless and unhappy.

So that’s how it was. My mother had become an irritable socialite, breathing nothing but the desire to be the most coveted lady in the room, shimmering in the crystal of someone’s tall cocktail glass, while my father deprived himself of the joy in his life as he drove himself into a lonely corner. My mom had her erratic sighs and my dad his chronic apathy, or maybe it was just the reverse: her chronic disinterest in everything and his erratic hopelessness.

Unfulfilled desires hung in the air, dreams, ifs, buts and if onlys, along with jokes and boredom but most of all barbed comments, the insinuations and accusations that always found their mark.

Fine, but once upon a time hadn’t they both loved the same song? Hadn’t they laughed at the same jokes and shared the same dreams? Hadn’t they made plans for the future together? Hadn’t there been times when they’d been good as a couple, when they’d looked into each other’s eyes and melted away when their bodies met?

Then again, I had to wonder: Had they ever really loved each other? How could two people who once loved one another lose it all? Now, I’d answer that in a way that’s very different from when I was fourteen, a time when I was so stunned and dejected.

These days I can see a little hope in every answer. They don’t love us, sis.

Normally Cem would call me by my name so whenever he said sis, I always knew there was something wrong.

Surely they had loved each other. When I was around fifteen, I was really into Björn Borg and I was so caught up with the idea of him that I believed with all my heart that we had a lot in common.

I felt that my mom and dad must have loved each other in the same way.

Now it’s surprising how much I built him up in my mind, and I can’t believe that I once thought that Björn Borg was good looking.

They don’t want us anymore, sis. Neither of us.

At first Cem felt more abandoned than me. But the fact of the matter was that our parents had left each other, not us. And we were in no danger, as long as they didn’t start to really hate each other. Children resemble their parents in one way or another, either in appearance or personality. My dad was gentler, calmer and more compromising than my mom who was emotional and short-tempered. She even enjoyed harboring a dislike for people and really knew how to hold a grudge.

I was in a dangerous position because ever since I was young everyone told me that I was just like my dad. My mom in particular always pointed that out, sometimes resentfully. I loved the fact that I was like him. It made me proud.

I couldn’t help but wonder: Is Mom nurturing a profound hatred for Dad?

They won’t forget about us, sis, will they?

No, Cem wasn’t in any real danger. He was like our mom. But children who are abandoned by their parents face bigger problems that I didn’t know about yet. Such kids never truly trust anyone, and they are incapable of committing themselves to others. Like me: I can never really trust anyone, I can never believe in love, and I’m always struggling to stay on my feet on a slippery floor in the dark.

Will they ever come back home, sis?

Everyone assumed that by the end of the summer Mom and Dad would make amends and settle back into their routine lives. That is, everyone except one person. Two years earlier, my parents had gone away on a summer trip together. They told us that they’d come back home, and that’s precisely what they did. So this time we assumed the same thing would happen. But she knew that no one would be coming back home again. She was the only one who knew it then. Nothing would be the same again. She knew that our lives would beturned upside down. And that she was Selen.

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Anarchy means the absence of rule. It comes from Greek, an arkhos. Dictionaries say that anarchy is in principle a social philosophy and a political movement which espouses the belief that people can live in harmony, respectful of each other’s rights, without an organized government. This implies that any system of government is harmful for the natural human condition.

The anarchist protests against authority and established order, but in society he’s treated like a terrorist. And if an anarchist shuns violence, he may never be recognized, as his claims and ideology are seen as being nothing more than luxuries. In the end, he’s cast out and subjected to collective torment.

Teoman always delighted in defining himself as an incurable rebel and a born anarchist, so the people in his circle always called him a rabble rouser.

For years he talked to everyone and anyone about the history and philosophy of anarchy. He talked and he talked, and he read extensively on the subject, which gave him both food for thought and fodder for his discussions.

He started with Godwin who declared in the eighteenth century that authority is contrary to human nature and he went from there to Proudhon’s famous query, "What is property?" He jumped to Bakunin on collectivism and dove headlong into the study of anarchic-syndicalization. He carefully examined these theories before absorbing them and then passing them on to others.

When he couldn’t excite people with his own ideas, he turned to those artists and philosophers who had incorporated anarchy into their thinking and their work. He became familiar with peace-loving anarchists like Picasso, Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, Max Stirner, Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi, and promoted their ideas.

For a while he carried around a copy of Huxley’s Brave New World wherever he went. He talked a lot about how he wanted to create a counterculture that was vibrant in every facet of life and could oppose the status quo. But he never managed to shake the negative labels. He was always referred to as divisive or a troublemaker. In the end, he decided not to discuss philosophy or semantics anymore.

He couldn’t stand violence. For him, even picking a flower was an act of murder. Despite all appearances, being a humanist who