Jiyan lies quietly beside him without touching him. She is tightly wrapped in the sheet, and her naked flesh does not touch his. Women cuddle up to a man after making love, especially the first time. As for men, they prefer the freedom of a satisfied body and enjoy being alone, withdrawing into themselves. Jiyan is like that now. I am the one who feels the need to touch her, embrace her and be tenderly caressed. A strange reversal of roles!
Jiyan gets up from the bed and goes to the adjoining bathroom dragging the white sheet she has wrapped herself in behind her. Ömer hastily gets dressed while she is in the bathroom. He wants to freeze and keep what they experienced as it is in his body, in his memory and in the centre of his feelings. Those moments should remain there. They should not flow into the present; otherwise the spell will be broken. He opens wide the decorated panels of the mirror and looks at his face. They say that satisfying love-making makes a woman more beautiful. It’s done me good, too. I don’t look at all old. He feels content in himself. The negative feelings inside him have vanished. If he weren’t embarrassed he could even whistle and sing songs.
Evening falls. It is evident from the light filtering into the room and gradually turning to a reddish-yellow that fades by the minute. The hum from the market gradually dies down. A distant call to prayer is heard. It mingles with the military’s more resonant orders for the flag ceremony and the marches. The cassette-seller opposite puts the Come to the Mountains, to the Mountains cassette in Kurdish that he plays every evening at this time in the cassette player and turns it up full volume. Ömer had thought that this town had no sound; now he begins to realize how the town lost its sound. Here the sounds are each other’s enemies, drowning each other and trying to silence one another. When the town’s own sound is silent, then only the noise of conflicting foreign sounds or nothingness remains.
When she came out of the bathroom and stood by my side, her raven hair was wet. It spread out in waves and curls on her forehead, face and shoulders. I feel the excitement of a teenager who has been united with the one he loves for the first time. There is not a sign of the annoyance, the lethargy or the regret felt after having slept with somebody on a whim or under the influence of alcohol — or sometimes with the laziness of not be able to say no, perhaps not to hurt the other person or their pride.
I watched Jiyan in front of the mirror trying to gather up her hair and attempting to wipe away any trace of love-making from her face and body. I did not know whether I should admire her ease and her naturalness, be amazed at it or be upset that what we had experienced should be for her such an everyday event. The water had washed from her all the traces, all the feelings of our love-making.
Was it nothing more than a sexual experience that an ardent young woman had had with a stranger who would pass briefly through her life, unimportant because it was fleeting, harmless and because he was a stranger?
When we spoke during the following days, you were to say, ‘We mustn’t forget how attractive Ömer Eren’s fame is. After all, all women like strong, famous and powerful men. You must admit that you took courage from your preconceived notions of the Orientalist to approach me. Weren’t women in the east females waiting ardently for their men, like courtesans? That east is not far away, even if it is only our east …’ Then you saw that I had become disgruntled and tried to correct yourself by saying, ‘But, still, what we experienced was a spring that appeared before me when I was in the desert without water. Thank you for wanting me and choosing me.’
You stubbornly insisted on using the formal ‘you’. When I asked why, you explained, ‘Perhaps it is a habit, a method of self-preservation.’ I learnt to say the familiar ‘you’ in Kurdish. I tried to understand, to hear to whom you said it. The old, the young, the worker, the tradesman, the mayor, the party leader, your own people were all ‘thou’; we, the others were all the formal ‘you’. The unacknowledged foreignness, the distance and lack of language that lies between the formal ‘you’ and me and that does not exist in the familiar ‘you’ and me came between us even when we were making love. When I said to you that it was not me but you, not us but your people that had created this, it seemed to me that the tone in which you said, ‘you’ became even harsher. I spoke of the couples I knew: Kurdish-Turkish, Laz-Circassian, Turkish-Armenian couples. In trivial, trite expressions I repeated the phrases that you knew by heart: differences in language, religion and race should not separate people, should not make people enemies, as though you did not know that. You said in a tone that was half mocking and half joking, ‘Now you sound like the fundamental principle of the constitution.’ Then you added, ‘But you know better than I that things don’t go according to the book.’ You were right, and I kept quiet. I spoke to you about another language: a new language that did not factionalize, did not separate the differences, that was purged of politics, power and conflict. You asked, ‘How can I create a new language without finding my own language first, without being myself?’ I did not have an answer. I was silent. I was angry with you because you made everything so complicated, I took out my frustration in love-making. Realizing that I would not be able to possess you, I tried to enslave your body. And I managed to do this to a certain extent: I whipped up your desire, I used your sexuality, I got you addicted to my body. The more I thought about it, the more I understood that this was a form of rape, and I was ashamed of myself. But I loved you. I loved you as I did my wife. I loved you deeply. She was a part of me, and I wanted you to be a part of me, too. I thought that we could meet in the language of love. I — we — did not succeed. Were our languages too different to unite in love, in passion?
Jiyan says, ‘It’s late. Please go now.’ She is stroking Ömer’s cheek. They are standing side by side in front of the mirror. They are like a picture in which the attractiveness of the young woman overshadows the man who has passed middle age. They resemble the keepsake photographs taken in front of a scenic backdrop of engaged couples who have come down to the town or new recruits who have come home for the weekend. Behind them there is the feeling of emptiness of the white wall, not a view of Istanbul or fairytale birds and flowers of paradise. Jiyan murmurs a folk song in her beautiful, deep voice: ‘Let them print our photos side by side …’ He remembers the song. Wasn’t it the story of two lovers who had been involved in some crime and had been caught by gendarmes?
Swiftly he shuts the panels of the mirror and embraces her. ‘What will happen if I don’t go?’
‘Nothing, of course, but there is a society meeting this evening. And I’m the speaker.’
‘And which separatist organization is it this time, my darling?’
‘This time it’s a harmless organization: a woman’s organization, closely linked to the state. Even the Governor’s wife supports its work. That’s why our women keep their distance, but they will come this evening because I’m the speaker.’