I wish that instead of following the tradition of the Pharaohs, who sought eternal life after death, we had protected the warm, modest home of our national leader, the place where he had lived when he was filled with the hope of building a new country. This would have made life, rather than death, the symbol of this city. I also wish we had believed that many others like him could have grown up in all of these homes.
No, I don’t adore Ankara anymore. Besides, I haven’t been there for years.
I tell you, when you are a child, you see things differently.
Maybe it is not the city but my weary eyes that make me think even the spring sun has changed. Maybe that mist which seems to cover the people is not real but just a film over my eyes.
This is not the same city where I raced my bike, leaving our small house with a garden, nor the one where I sometimes slid on my school bag on the sloping streets that are now lined with giant buildings with glass façades and big hotels.
I wish I could have saved the images of Ankara of my childhood to revisit again and again, not allowing new images to replace them.
Unfortunately, this is how our memory works. As time goes by, memory blurs and become vague. Images, sounds, and voices are superimposed, replacing each other. No wonder when I spend my time at home, I catch myself humming some worthless refrain from one of the contemporary songs they keep playing on TV nowadays instead of the beautiful melodies of the past.
What can you do? It’s not only one’s own face in the mirror that grows old.
Those serene summer afternoons when Ayla and I played in the garden are somewhere just here.
Nobody told us back then that those days would grow distant when we tried to recall them, that memories would be lost quickly, and that we wouldn’t be able to replace them with anything as pure, beautiful, happy or comforting.
No, they never warned us.
I can hear my mother’s voice calling us for afternoon tea. The wonderful smell of the warm walnut pastries and apple cookies reach all the way here.
We will go in now, and the tranquil atmosphere of the dim hallway—something that is perhaps only found in old houses—will surround us. We will make ourselves comfortable on the armchairs covered with old, dirty upholstery and wait for our tea.
When was that? Ayla had come in with a book in her hand again. She had said, “Do you remember years ago when you showed me a poem in a magazine and said that the author would be a great poet one day?
“How can I remember that?” I replied. “Is he a great poet now?”
She laughed. “I don’t know. Find out for yourself. Here’s his new book. I enjoyed it very much.”
I read the book that night. Somewhere, it said, “Childhood is something like the sky / it does not go anywhere.”
It is true. Childhood does not go anywhere. It is always there.
Everywhere we go, it tags along, as if holding our hand.
Ayla has those pictures. I used to tell her, “Don’t show these photos to anyone. Anyone who sees them will not want to marry you!” Yet, she wouldn’t listen.
In the pictures, we both look like boys. Our hair is tousled. We have bruises everywhere. We are dressed in plaid pants or overalls, and we’re either climbing on something or jumping from a tree.
It’s strange, but most of those scars are still with me. Today, when I look at my knees, elbows, or feet, I say, yes this is the one that happened when I fell out of the tree while picking mulberries with Ayla, or this happened when I fell off my bike that morning. The traces of my own little history, like chapter headings.
If I had been told that I could stop at a certain moment in my life and stay there forever, I would have chosen one of two moments.
The first is when I was rocking in the swing hanging from the branches of a tree in the garden of my childhood.
The other is the day I first kissed the man I loved more than anyone in my whole life.
In those times, I didn’t realize that a feeling which finds you suddenly at some distinct point in your life in an unexplainable way stays with you forever.
During that most wonderful kiss of my life, I felt the same excitement and joy I had while rocking on a swing. Perhaps at that moment, I realized that I had found again what I had been seeking for years without even being aware of it.
In all those books, films, and songs we were told about love.
And in ancients scrolls, legends, tales, and drawings engraved on walls, too.
Even people who do not go through adventures that involve a mysterious feeling that drags you along were carried away by the excitement of love and felt as if they were in a totally different realm.
Some have even written books, carried out experiments, or tried to define this feeling through scientific equations.
Many strived to write the common language of falling in love.
In fact, it is quite simple: you are in love if you feel as if you’re rocking on a swing when you kiss someone.
You see, I am unable to arrange my thoughts and am struggling to tell you this without confusing you.
It is as though I’ve entered the attic of a haunted house, packed with old, dusty furniture. I rummage through everything I happen to come across, bewildered, like a small child who picks up something, opens and plays with it, only to immediately pick up something else—something that attracts his attention more.
A box, cast aside and forgotten; a broken wooden horse with its red paint scraped off; a wooden puppet (the one whose nose gets longer when he lies); a bunch of old letters—who knows what lines they contain—tightly bound by an old piece of ribbon; photographs of people whose names I can hardly remember; dusty books; dolls with missing legs; broken alarm clocks; tin boxes; cracked ceramic trinkets whose polish is worn away . . .
Isn’t this the oldest thing I remember from my childhood: my brother’s steel train set painted in red and green? I used to admire how smoke blew from the locomotive as it moved along the rails. At the station, a woman dressed in a coat and a hat and carrying a chic handbag, a man in uniform—the stationmaster perhaps—and a few passengers holding their suitcases were waiting. A door on the train opened, and someone got out. When the train left again, it switched to another track, leading to either a bridge or a tunnel. It was my brother, in his short brown overalls and suspenders that never stayed in their place, who did all of this by moving the rails spread across the floor and by pulling various levers. I was stretched out on our old Erzurum carpet with its intricate and colorful design, with my head between my hands and my elbows on the floor. I kept telling my brother, “Come on, let the whistle blow, let the smoke come out.”
The music begins when the crank of the old phonograph is turned, carrying me away as if I have suddenly come across an ex-love.
Did I say “ex-love?” I do not have an ex-love. I only have one love.
Among all of the pieces of furniture, I find a red bicycle with its paint scraped away and its metal parts rusted. I wipe off the dust and manage to ring the bell. I get on the bike and let myself loose in time. Suddenly, I am racing downhill at full speed.
On a matchless winter day.
In Ankara, when I was fourteen.
On a cool, happy morning of my carefree days.
The slope goes down to the road where our home is located. I used to climb all the way up, huffing and puffing, and then come down like the wind, scared and