ROSETTA_MAGAZINE_201303

128
Anyway, I thought long and hard and
understood that I have to separate my life
into two through you:
1. The period in which I was scared to
death of being like you.
2. The period in which I understood I was a
replica of you and tried to deal with it.
The first period was actually a time you
witnessed a quite a bit – perhaps it was a
time that you actually experienced in your
relationship with your own father. However,
father, I would like to talk about the second
period a bit. This may not be important to
you but I would be glad if you listened.
I had found a photograph of you when I
was sixteen. You remember that large
family album with the mosque figure on its
copper-plated cover? Well, this is a black
and white photograph towards the back
of the album and ripped from its gusset.
You are poised in front of the Lozan Gate
of the Izmir Fair. In the picture where you
are wearing your sunglasses your hair is
combed back with macassar oil and the
collar of your white trench coat is folded
up you are like a mixture of two people
with whom I spent every waking moment
and wished that my father could be like
them: Oğuz Atay and Albert Camus. When
I look at that photograph of yours which I
hadn’t seen until that day I feel a sense of
pride spread across my body, I clench my
teeth, look at the cigarette in your right
hand positioned in front of your heart. I
see myself walk towards you on the path
behind you in the photograph and decide at
once that from then on you are Albert Atay
to me and I must begin smoking right away.
I scrounge a cigarette from the Maltepe
packet from the inside pocket of your
jacket, make my way to the coal bunkers
behind the apartment and light it up. I don’t
cough like it is in the films; I smoke the
cigarette with confidence, puffing away like
a smoker of forty years.
You do understand why I am telling you
all this, don’t you my dear father? I had
understood in that moment that there was
no escape from being you. You were more
than the people I admired, you were more
real than Albert Atay, you were the man of
the house, you were the authority in the
next room, you were the joy at the dinner
table, you were the sneeze on the street
and you were the joke at the rakı table. You
were my genetic map. You were my father.
Whereas before I smoked that first
cigarette – not long before, perhaps a year
before – I wanted to bury not only you but
all fathers into the wild history of growth.
I had a great big project for this, too. I was
going to write such a book – I had a novel of
at least three hundred pages in my mind –
that all fathers were going to lose face and
be fucked up. The vision of you before my
eyes, still standing like a black and white
photograph, was the reason for this. On a
heart-choking Sunday you are lying down
on your bed and reading Agatha Christie
– I recall it was Ten Little Niggers – and
the lower part of your pyjama bottoms is
unshapely and pulled up towards your calf
and you are rubbing your sockless feet
against each other. In my novel, I was going
to question the middle-class morals based
on the striped pyjamas, a mutual passion
of the generation of incapacitated and
thus despotised, deficient fathers. I was
going to come up with such an ending that
I was going to send all the striped pyjamawearing
fathers to the uniform holes of
different hells to be scorched. I was going
to do this father, because I hated your
feet which you rubbed against each other,
your almost roar-like sneezing without
paying heed to the cringe worthy gazes of
those passing by on the street. I hated you
cleaning your throat on the municipality
bus, you barging in the room telling us your
military service stories filled with words of
brass bands and harmonicas as I listened
to the most rebellious rock bands with my
friends. I hated that you asked “What’s
the name of that son of a gun” when we
talked about my older sister’s boyfriends,
I hated your use of the words ‘in brief’, ‘in
summary’ and ‘for example’ in Ottoman
Turkish and that you began to tell the
stories you told a thousand times once
again after three singles of rakı. That’s why
I was going to write a novel that would hit
you like a ton of bricks. In order to keep
you away from certain quackeries and to
protect you from the collective laughter
of the mass known as people, first I had
to destroy you. If necessary I should have
been the one to spit in your face first. I
should have yelled, “The spit of your son is
better than shame and to put someone to
shame,” as I walked away from you without
even glancing back.
These are surely the boorish thoughts of
the first period; I hope you are not angry,
because even though you are dead I
wouldn’t want to upset you. Forget about
these things I said my dear father and
focus on the second period that begins with
the cigarette; a nicotine-fuelled beginning
which I explain to myself through a genetic
continuity. This second period is also the
129
period called “a copy of his father” when I
spoke everything fearlessly, just like you.
In fact I can cut it short and summarise the
situation with Oğuz Atay’s words: “My dear
father, it is no longer possible for me to
change you; therefore I don’t think it will be
possible for me to change myself.”
Oh, I am so sorry… Mouthiness, an
inheritance from you to me, is at work
again. After your death, you are surely
wondering about what our family is
experiencing, the everyday happenings or
in other words, as you used to say, reality
and not what happened in the world or
the things that my sponge-like brain is
spewing.
My mother is as you know, I do not wish
to go into detail but she does everything
widowed women do. My older sister is
doing rather well, in fact if you hadn’t died I
would have liked you to talk to her because
I feel that she would have been more
successful in keeping you alive than me.
When it comes to me…
Shortly after your death I was sacked. It
wasn’t like your stories of being fired. I
didn’t punch my bosses desk in anger, I
didn’t break the windows, I didn’t shout
“Eat my ass” as I banged the door and
walked out. I thanked them for allowing
me to take the files on my computer and
left. I didn’t tell anyone around me I was
unemployed for a long time. I thought that
I would feel ashamed, that I would become
a standing joke in people’s conversations
and feared that they would pity me more.
Father, I wish you hadn’t injected that
feeling of embarrassment in such a high