Three - Me(3)

  Keeping the second world secret made it easier for me to come and go. When I was sitting across from my grandmother, and a shaft of light came through her curtains--just like searchlights on the ships passing through the Bosphorus at night--I could, if I stared right into it and blinked, will myself to see a fleet of red spaceships floating past me. After that I could summon up the same armada whenever I liked, returning to the real world as someone else might leave a room and turn off the lights behind him (as throughout my childhood, people were always reminding me to do in the real world.)

  If I dreamed of changing places with the other Orhan in the other house, if I longed for a life beyond the museum's rooms, corridors, carpets (how I hated those carpets!) and beyond the company of positive men who loved mathematics and crossword puzzles, if I felt hemmed in by this gloomy, cluttered house that rejected (though my family would deny it later) any suggestion of spirituality, love, literature, or even mythology, if I was from time to time a refugee in the second world. it was not because I was unhappy. Far from it, especially in those years between the ages of four and six, when, as a bright well-behaved child I felt the love of nearly everyone I met, endlessly kissed and passed from lap to lap and offered treats no good boy could resist: the greengrocer's apple ("Don't eat it until it's washed," my mother would tell me), the raisens from the man in the coffee store ("Have them after lunch"), the sweets my aunt gave me when we met her in the street ("Say thank you").