Arabesk

'We've got some people downstairs who claim they killed Ruya Urfa. They say they've got to see you, sir.'

Suleyman groaned. 'Crazies.'

'Well, yes, but, er, not obviously so, sir,' said Tepe. 'Not mad old women in rags or men who think they're Adnan Menderes.'

'Oh,' the doctor said with a smile, 'unusual crazies, eh?'

'Well, if you call two teenage girls wearing chadors unusual then, yes, they are, sir.' Turning back to Suleyman, he said, 'Shall you be coming to see them, Inspector, or shall I just get their parents to collect them?'

I am an addict for the sorrow that you bring I embrace the knife's edge of your disdain I am lost I am gone I am dead

Until your sweet return into my life happens once again.

As he looked at what he had just written, Çetin Ìkmen shook his head in disbelief. 'You know’ he said calling out to Fatma over the top of the tape he had been transcribing, 'I think the state should give the Ministry of Culture some sort of award for attempting to get this dross banned back in the eighties.'

'That's Tansu at her best!' his wife answered as she walked over to the stereo and made to turn up the volume. 'She sings of universal emotions, Çetin; of love and loss and-'

'Don't touch that dial!' he shouted. 'In fact, turn it down, will you? Makes me want to jump into a bottle of brandy and stay there. I don't think I can stand any more ungrarnmatical sorrow-filled insults to my intelligence.'

'All right, all right!' Fatma said as she laid the towel she had been using across the back of a chair and then turned the music down to almost silence.

'No wonder the suicide rate in dumps like Sivas keeps on going up. They listen to this stuff all the time out there. Being in the country is bad enough but with this going on day and night… I'd be slitting my throat within hours.'

Fatma, already wearied by the younger children, who were on vacation, and the housework, sat down beside her husband. 'Oh, you've been listening to Arabesk all your life without noticing,' she said. 'People play it everywhere. I play it I like it'

'You,' he replied, touching just the end of her nose with stern affection, 'should know better.'

'It's romantic.' She shrugged. "The stars themselves are romantic. Women like such things. Even Cicek will sing along to Arabesk at times, when she's not listening to those Western musicians. We are Turks, we like to imagine ourselves involved in grand passions like the singers. And then we like to have a good cry.'

'A rather sweeping generalisation there, Fatma,' her husband said with not a little amusement in his voice, 'confounded, of course, by people like myself who want to vomit when we hear it.'

'Oh, that's just you!'

'And Suleyman and Arto. I can't really even see Commissioner Ardiç. getting damp around the eyes just because some spoilt old plastic-surgery victim has been cast aside by a lover who is young enough to be her son. I may be wrong, but… It's just all "Oh, I can't live without you", "I think I want to die"; it's so unremittingly morbid! It's helpless too, which I don't like. I mean, have you seen that photograph of Tansu on the front page of Hurriyet?’

'No. I haven't really had time for reading.'

He reached over to the table and grabbed hold of one of the newspapers stacked behind a heap of ironing.

'Look at this,' he said as he spread the paper across his wife's knees. A large photograph of an anguished Tansu howling into a white-and-silver lace handkerchief screamed off the page. 'Poor Mrs Urfa lies dead on a slab, her baby, who is described but not shown, is missing and what do we get? A photograph of some adulterous old has-been who reckons that her poor Erol is so badly traumatised their love will never be as it was ever again. It's sick!'

'I agree we should see a photograph of the baby. If members of the public are to look for her they need that.' Fatma's face was set with the seriousness of the subject 'But people do like this romance thing with Tansu and Erol. I myself find it disgusting because he's so young. I would hate it if one of our sons became involved with an older woman. But bad as they are, Allah has punished them now and it is not for us to judge.'

Ìkmen, whose opinion of religion of whatever type placed such phenomena somewhere between folk tales and the astrology columns in newspapers, rolled his eyes with impatience.

'And also,' Fatma continued, 'you have to remember that Tansu, anyway, is not always helpless.'

'Oh, I know that, 'Ìkmen blustered on a laugh. 'She's reputed to have the most volcanic temper, be totally selfish-'

'No, I mean in her music,' Fatma said. 'There are some songs where the words are resentful rather than sad. They're often songs about her lover being stolen by another woman. They're really quite, well, I suppose you'd call them sort of tough.'

'A bit masculine, you mean?'

'No, her tone is much the same as in the others. But in songs like "I Want None of You" or "Hate Is My Only Friend" the words are very strong, very… ‘ She thought hard to find the right words, 'very sort of bitter, I suppose you'd say.'

'Expressing the collective frustrations of the lahmacun-eating classes?'

'Those are your words, not mine,' she said as she rose and picked up her towel once again. 'Anyway, I have things to wash. I haven't got time to sit about with you. Oh, and you might have a word with Bulent whenever he decides to come in.'

Ìkmen looked up and frowned.'Why?'

'He's lost his job.'

'At the Pudding Shop?' Ìkmen's face took on a thunderous look. 'Why this time?'

'He turned up drunk,' Fatma said with more than a little edge to her voice. 'I think you should speak to him, don't you?'

'I've never been drunk at work!' he roared as he followed Fatma's retreating figure with his eyes. 'I used to take a drink, but only what I could handle: I was never drunk! What was the boy thinking, I mean-'

'He doesn't care, Çetin,' Fatma called out from the kitchen. 'As long as he's having fun he doesn't care.'

'Well, I'll just have to make him care then, won't I? If he's wobbling around in public he could get arrested even!'

'I think that may be the object of the exercise, actually.' Fatma put her head round the door of the kitchen and sighed. 'I mean, what better way to get back at you, eh?'

'But why would he want to get back at me? Am I not a good father? Do I not listen to his ghastly adolescent ravings without complaint? Have I not always had a stable job in order to provide for my-'

'I think that's the problem.'

For a moment he just sat and stared at her, his mouth open and a little dry. 'You mean the job?'

'Well, it's a bit sort of with the establishment, isn't it? He's young. It's what they do, Q!etin.'

'Is it indeed?'

'Yes, and you're going to have to be very calm when you tell him off or he'll do it all the more. I don't know how you're going to achieve this, Çetin, but you're going to have to be very "modern" indeed.'

And then she was gone, leaving her husband even more desperate for a drink than he had been before.

Although they gave the outward appearance of being devout Muslims, Deniz and Gulsum Ertürk were in fact obsessed with only one thing – sex. That they didn't realise this was a tribute both to their youth and to the fact that the twins had been raised with only scant education in that area. All they knew was that ever since they had seen Erol Urfa for the first time three years before, they had been in love. They'd been fourteen when Erol's plaintive tones had entered their lives and ever since that moment he had dominated their every waking moment.

As much as they loved Erol, the sisters hated Tansu. One of their favourite games was to ascribe all her successes, both personal and professional, to witchcraft Deniz had once heard that some people in the far east of the country worshipped Shaitan and she had taken it into her head that Tansu might be one of them. These people, it was said, always avoided blue, a colour that Tansu with her shades of dramatic red, black and white seemed to shun.