One-Another Orhan(3)

  I was born in the middle of the night on June 7, 1952, in a small private hospital in Moda. Its corridors, I'm told, were peaceful that night, and so was the world. Aside from the Strambolini volcano's having suddenly begun to spew flames and ash two days earlier, relatively little seems to have been hapening on our planet. The newspapers were full of small news: a few stories about the Turkish troops fighting in Korea; a few rumors spread by Americans stocking fears that the North Koreans might be preparing to use biological weapons. In the hours before I was born, my mother had been avidly floowing a local story: Two days earlier, the caretakers and "heroic" residents of the Konya Student Center had seen a man in a terrifying mask trying to enter a house in Longa through the bathroom window; they'd chased him through the streets to a lumberyard, where, after cursing the police, the hardened criminal had committed suicide; a seller of dry goods identified the corpse as a gangster who the year before had entered his shop in broad daylight and robbed him at gumpoint.

  When she was reading the latest on this drama, mu mother was alone in her room, or so she told me with a mixture of regret, and annoyance many years later. After taking her to the hospital, my father had grown restless and, when my mother's labor failed to progress, he'd gone out to meet with friends. The only person with her in the delivery room was mu aunt, who'd mamaged to climb over the hospital's garden wall in the middle of the night. When my mother first set eyes on me, she found me thinner and more fragile than my brother had been  

 

  I feel compelled to add or so I've been told. In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we've seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we "remember" our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant  tale of some other person. It's a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams, but we pay a heavy price for it. once imprinted in our minds, other people's reports of what we've done end up mattering more than what ourselves remember. And just as we learn about our lives from others, so too do we let others shape our understanding of the city in which we live.

  At times when I accept as my own the stories I've heard about my city and myself, I'm tempted to say, once upon a time I used to paint. I hear I was born in Istanbul, and I understand that I was a somewhat curious child. Then, when I was twenty-two, I seem to have begun writing novels without knowing why." I'd have liked to write my entire story this way--as if my life were something that happened to someone else, as if it were a dream in which I felt my voice fading and my will succumbibg to enchantment. Beautiful thought it is, I find the language of epic unconvincing, for I cannot accept that the myths we tell about our first lives prepare us for the brighter, more authentic second lives thay are meant to begin when we awake. Because--for people like me, at least--that second life is none other than the book in your hand. So pay close attention, dear reader. Let me be straight with you, and in return let me ask for your compassion.